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West's prisons can keep militant Islam out: study
7:02am EDT
By William Maclean, Security Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - Western prisons could root out militant Islamism among inmates by adopting the more imaginative approaches to prisoners used in parts of the Middle East and Asia, a British study suggests.
The provision of religious advice and helping prisoners cultivate non-extremist social networks are among measures proposed in the study of prisons in 15 countries.
Britain's chief prison inspector said last month the treatment of Muslim inmates by prison staff as potentially dangerous militants risked driving them into the hands of radical groups.
Prisons occupy a central place in the history of militant Islamist groups such as al Qaeda which see them as valued centers of learning, recruitment and indoctrination.
Creative programs can turn the tide, argues the study of prison militants in Afghanistan, Algeria, Britain, Egypt, France, Indonesia, Israel, Netherlands, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, the United States and Yemen.
For example in Singapore, alleged terrorists are systematically re-educated in prison, said the report by London's International Center for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR).
A team of trained religious advisers helps them go through the Koran, showing how critical passages need to be read in context, and how extremist notions about violence are often based on misreadings and misinterpretations, the report says.
Prisons can be "a place for reform as well as radicalization," Peter Neumann, study author and director of ICSR based at London University's King's College, told Reuters.
"Prisons can play a positive role in tackling problems of radicalization and terrorism in society as a whole."
"SECURITY FIRST" APPROACH
Most Western prison systems practiced a "security first" approach with radicalized inmates, Neumann said, arguing this amounted to "locking people away and making sure they don't cause any trouble." Opportunities for reform were missed.
In Saudi Arabia, officials spend heavily to reform and re-integrate former militants to try to ensure they can look forward to a meaningful and productive life after leaving prison, the report says. In some cases, this process has included buying them houses and cars, and even finding them wives.
"None of the de-radicalization programs in the Middle East and Southeast Asia is perfect," said Neumann.
"But they should serve as an inspiration for people in the West to think more creatively about what positive things could be done with radicals and terrorists in the state's custody."
Neumann said this approach would not work everywhere, because de-radicalization depended on a conducive environment.
Releasing people into hostile communities with no further supervision would not work because all good de-radicalization programs were based on follow-up and after-care, which in case of Afghanistan for example was difficult, he said.
The study's proposed measures include:
-- A mix of education, typically combining ideological and/or religious re-education with vocational training.
-- Appointing credible interlocutors, who can relate to prisoners' personal and psychological needs.
-- Sophisticated methods for locking prisoners into multiple commitments and obligations toward family and community.
(Editing by Andrew Dobbie)
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Monday, June 28, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Al Qaeda First Lady!
Saudi Arabian mother becomes the First Lady of al-Qaeda
Saudi Arabia is reviewing its terrorism strategy after the detection of a female run network that was fund raising for al-Qaeda.
By Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent
Published: 5:48PM BST 25 Jun 2010
Heila al-Qusayyer, the middle class mother now described as al-Qaeda's 'First Lady' was running a cell of 60 alleged militants. She is believed to have been the Arabian peninsula's principal fund-raiser for al-Qaeda.
Qusayyer holds a degree in geography and was married to a former executive from Aramco, the all-powerful state oil company, who gave up all his worldly possessions to become a radical preacher.
Related Articles
Amnesty criticises Saudi Arabia's 'shocking' human rights violations
Government warns of nuclear terror threat
Britain and US back 'Marshall Plan' for Pakistan
Terrorist Isa Ibrahim was a 'lone wolf' who radicalised himself
Afghanistan offensive 'shows signs of success' says Gordon Brown
Afghanistan: a war we cannot winCounter-terror officials have previously assumed that young men and boys are the principal agents of radical Islam.
Saudi security chiefs have since set up a specialist all-female unit at King Saud University, the country's oldest, to study the appeal of Islamist militancy to women and how best to tackle it.
"The story of this woman, who was involved in collecting money, with that money finding its way to al-Qaeda, has been like an alarm call to us," General Mansur al-Turki of the Saudi interior ministry told The Daily Telegraph.
There had been previous arrests of women terrorists, including some involved in bomb preparatio but such is the sensitivity towards the role of women, they were returned home.
The country's approach to suspects has become tougher across the board after Saeed al-Shehri, the deputy leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Until then alleged terrorist were mainly put through a controversial rehabilitation programme with an emphasis on education and psychology.
Shehri, a former Guantanamo Bay inmate who returned to Saudi Arabia and then fled to Yemen, specifically demanded the release of Heila al-Qusayyer, who had been arrested in February.
Based on confessions she is said to have made in custody, the authorities say she used the cover of Islamic charities to obtain donations of cash and jewellery that she passed on to al-Qaeda.
One payment was of 650,000 Saudi riyals (GBP120,000).
Saudi newspapers have picked over leaked details of her arrest, such as that when discovered she was alone with a male suspect - a violation of strict sharia laws banning the mixing of sexes.
Wafa al-Shehri, Shehri's wife, was a key intermediary, returning to Saudi Arabia to recruit women and girls. But Qusayyer is also said to have been intending to join Saeed al-Shehri and become his second wife.
Even so, consideration is paid to her right to privacy as a woman. There is no known photograph of her, even wearing the niqab or face-veil that is used by all conservative women in the kingdom.
She was divorced by her first husband, Abdulkareem al-Humaid, the former oil executive, after he was jailed, so that she could continue her mission by marrying again.
Gen Turki said that women were possibly easier prey than men, because they were more affected by issues such as poverty and unemployment known to be a breeding ground for militancy.
He said it was also clear that women's restricted lives under local customs and laws did not mean they were unable to mix with male militants.
"We must reassure the community about the issue of al-Qaeda approaching women," he said.
Saudi Arabia is reviewing its terrorism strategy after the detection of a female run network that was fund raising for al-Qaeda.
By Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent
Published: 5:48PM BST 25 Jun 2010
Heila al-Qusayyer, the middle class mother now described as al-Qaeda's 'First Lady' was running a cell of 60 alleged militants. She is believed to have been the Arabian peninsula's principal fund-raiser for al-Qaeda.
Qusayyer holds a degree in geography and was married to a former executive from Aramco, the all-powerful state oil company, who gave up all his worldly possessions to become a radical preacher.
Related Articles
Amnesty criticises Saudi Arabia's 'shocking' human rights violations
Government warns of nuclear terror threat
Britain and US back 'Marshall Plan' for Pakistan
Terrorist Isa Ibrahim was a 'lone wolf' who radicalised himself
Afghanistan offensive 'shows signs of success' says Gordon Brown
Afghanistan: a war we cannot winCounter-terror officials have previously assumed that young men and boys are the principal agents of radical Islam.
Saudi security chiefs have since set up a specialist all-female unit at King Saud University, the country's oldest, to study the appeal of Islamist militancy to women and how best to tackle it.
"The story of this woman, who was involved in collecting money, with that money finding its way to al-Qaeda, has been like an alarm call to us," General Mansur al-Turki of the Saudi interior ministry told The Daily Telegraph.
There had been previous arrests of women terrorists, including some involved in bomb preparatio but such is the sensitivity towards the role of women, they were returned home.
The country's approach to suspects has become tougher across the board after Saeed al-Shehri, the deputy leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Until then alleged terrorist were mainly put through a controversial rehabilitation programme with an emphasis on education and psychology.
Shehri, a former Guantanamo Bay inmate who returned to Saudi Arabia and then fled to Yemen, specifically demanded the release of Heila al-Qusayyer, who had been arrested in February.
Based on confessions she is said to have made in custody, the authorities say she used the cover of Islamic charities to obtain donations of cash and jewellery that she passed on to al-Qaeda.
One payment was of 650,000 Saudi riyals (GBP120,000).
Saudi newspapers have picked over leaked details of her arrest, such as that when discovered she was alone with a male suspect - a violation of strict sharia laws banning the mixing of sexes.
Wafa al-Shehri, Shehri's wife, was a key intermediary, returning to Saudi Arabia to recruit women and girls. But Qusayyer is also said to have been intending to join Saeed al-Shehri and become his second wife.
Even so, consideration is paid to her right to privacy as a woman. There is no known photograph of her, even wearing the niqab or face-veil that is used by all conservative women in the kingdom.
She was divorced by her first husband, Abdulkareem al-Humaid, the former oil executive, after he was jailed, so that she could continue her mission by marrying again.
Gen Turki said that women were possibly easier prey than men, because they were more affected by issues such as poverty and unemployment known to be a breeding ground for militancy.
He said it was also clear that women's restricted lives under local customs and laws did not mean they were unable to mix with male militants.
"We must reassure the community about the issue of al-Qaeda approaching women," he said.
Pakistan Monitors Websites for Blasphemy
Pakistan scans Google, other sites for blasphemy
By ASIF SHAHZAD (AP) – 47 minutes ago
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan will monitor seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, to block anti-Islamic links and content, an official said Friday. Seventeen lesser-known sites are being blocked outright for alleged blasphemous material.
The moves follow Pakistan's temporary ban imposed on Facebook in May that drew both praise and condemnation in a country that has long struggled to figure out how strict a version of Islam it should follow.
Both the Facebook ban and the move announced Friday were in response to court orders. The sites to be monitored include Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and its YouTube service, Amazon.com Inc. and MSN, Hotmail and Bing from Microsoft Corp., said Pakistan Telecommunication Authority spokesman Khurram Mehran.
"If any particular link with offensive content appears on these websites, the (link) shall be blocked immediately without disturbing the main website," Mehran said.
Google spokesman Scott Rubin said the company intends to monitor how Pakistan's new policies affect access to its services, which include the world's most popular search engine and the most widely watched video site, YouTube.
"Google and YouTube are platforms for free expression, and we try to allow as much ... content as possible on our services and still ensure that we enforce our policies," Rubin said.
Yahoo called Pakistan's actions disappointing. The company is "founded on the principle that access to information can improve people's lives," Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman said.
Microsoft and Amazon didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mehran said an example of one of the 17 sites being blocked include islamexposed.blogspot.com, which is a blog created through Google's Blogger service. That site features postings with headlines such as "Islam: The Ultimate Hypocrisy" and links to anti-Islam online petitions.
Mehran said that, under instructions from the Ministry of Information Technology, the authority had begun the process of barring and monitoring the various sites.
Facebook was not part of the latest petition ruled upon by the judge in the city of Bahawalpur, Mehran said.
It was not possible late Friday to obtain a copy of the judge's order. Attempts to get comments from the affected companies also were not immediately successful.
A top court ordered the ban on Facebook for about two weeks in May amid anger over a page that encouraged users to post images of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favorable ones, as blasphemous. YouTube also was briefly blocked at the time.
The Facebook ban was lifted after the social-networking company blocked that particular page in Pakistan, but officials said at the time that the government would keep blocking some other, unspecified sites that contain "sacrilegious material."
The Facebook controversy sparked a handful of protests across Pakistan, many by student members of radical Islamic groups. Some of the protesters carried signs advocating holy war against the website for allowing the page.
It also sparked a good deal of soul-searching, especially among commentators, who questioned why Pakistanis could not be entrusted to decide for themselves whether or not to look at a website.
Some observers noted that Pakistan had gone further than several other Muslim countries by banning Facebook, and said it showed the rise of conservative Islam in the country. Created in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims, Pakistan has swung away from moderate Sufi Islamic influences common to South Asia toward the more rigid version of the faith found in the Arab world.
It was not the first time that images of the prophet have sparked anger.
Pakistan and other Muslim countries saw large and sometimes violent protests in 2006 after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad, and again in 2008 when they were reprinted. Later the same year, a suspected al-Qaida suicide bomber attacked the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, killing six people.
Associated Press Writer Nahal Toosi in Islamabad and AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
By ASIF SHAHZAD (AP) – 47 minutes ago
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan will monitor seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, to block anti-Islamic links and content, an official said Friday. Seventeen lesser-known sites are being blocked outright for alleged blasphemous material.
The moves follow Pakistan's temporary ban imposed on Facebook in May that drew both praise and condemnation in a country that has long struggled to figure out how strict a version of Islam it should follow.
Both the Facebook ban and the move announced Friday were in response to court orders. The sites to be monitored include Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and its YouTube service, Amazon.com Inc. and MSN, Hotmail and Bing from Microsoft Corp., said Pakistan Telecommunication Authority spokesman Khurram Mehran.
"If any particular link with offensive content appears on these websites, the (link) shall be blocked immediately without disturbing the main website," Mehran said.
Google spokesman Scott Rubin said the company intends to monitor how Pakistan's new policies affect access to its services, which include the world's most popular search engine and the most widely watched video site, YouTube.
"Google and YouTube are platforms for free expression, and we try to allow as much ... content as possible on our services and still ensure that we enforce our policies," Rubin said.
Yahoo called Pakistan's actions disappointing. The company is "founded on the principle that access to information can improve people's lives," Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman said.
Microsoft and Amazon didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mehran said an example of one of the 17 sites being blocked include islamexposed.blogspot.com, which is a blog created through Google's Blogger service. That site features postings with headlines such as "Islam: The Ultimate Hypocrisy" and links to anti-Islam online petitions.
Mehran said that, under instructions from the Ministry of Information Technology, the authority had begun the process of barring and monitoring the various sites.
Facebook was not part of the latest petition ruled upon by the judge in the city of Bahawalpur, Mehran said.
It was not possible late Friday to obtain a copy of the judge's order. Attempts to get comments from the affected companies also were not immediately successful.
A top court ordered the ban on Facebook for about two weeks in May amid anger over a page that encouraged users to post images of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favorable ones, as blasphemous. YouTube also was briefly blocked at the time.
The Facebook ban was lifted after the social-networking company blocked that particular page in Pakistan, but officials said at the time that the government would keep blocking some other, unspecified sites that contain "sacrilegious material."
The Facebook controversy sparked a handful of protests across Pakistan, many by student members of radical Islamic groups. Some of the protesters carried signs advocating holy war against the website for allowing the page.
It also sparked a good deal of soul-searching, especially among commentators, who questioned why Pakistanis could not be entrusted to decide for themselves whether or not to look at a website.
Some observers noted that Pakistan had gone further than several other Muslim countries by banning Facebook, and said it showed the rise of conservative Islam in the country. Created in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims, Pakistan has swung away from moderate Sufi Islamic influences common to South Asia toward the more rigid version of the faith found in the Arab world.
It was not the first time that images of the prophet have sparked anger.
Pakistan and other Muslim countries saw large and sometimes violent protests in 2006 after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad, and again in 2008 when they were reprinted. Later the same year, a suspected al-Qaida suicide bomber attacked the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, killing six people.
Associated Press Writer Nahal Toosi in Islamabad and AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Pakistan Monitors Websites for Blasphemy
Pakistan scans Google, other sites for blasphemy
By ASIF SHAHZAD (AP) – 47 minutes ago
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan will monitor seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, to block anti-Islamic links and content, an official said Friday. Seventeen lesser-known sites are being blocked outright for alleged blasphemous material.
The moves follow Pakistan's temporary ban imposed on Facebook in May that drew both praise and condemnation in a country that has long struggled to figure out how strict a version of Islam it should follow.
Both the Facebook ban and the move announced Friday were in response to court orders. The sites to be monitored include Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and its YouTube service, Amazon.com Inc. and MSN, Hotmail and Bing from Microsoft Corp., said Pakistan Telecommunication Authority spokesman Khurram Mehran.
"If any particular link with offensive content appears on these websites, the (link) shall be blocked immediately without disturbing the main website," Mehran said.
Google spokesman Scott Rubin said the company intends to monitor how Pakistan's new policies affect access to its services, which include the world's most popular search engine and the most widely watched video site, YouTube.
"Google and YouTube are platforms for free expression, and we try to allow as much ... content as possible on our services and still ensure that we enforce our policies," Rubin said.
Yahoo called Pakistan's actions disappointing. The company is "founded on the principle that access to information can improve people's lives," Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman said.
Microsoft and Amazon didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mehran said an example of one of the 17 sites being blocked include islamexposed.blogspot.com, which is a blog created through Google's Blogger service. That site features postings with headlines such as "Islam: The Ultimate Hypocrisy" and links to anti-Islam online petitions.
Mehran said that, under instructions from the Ministry of Information Technology, the authority had begun the process of barring and monitoring the various sites.
Facebook was not part of the latest petition ruled upon by the judge in the city of Bahawalpur, Mehran said.
It was not possible late Friday to obtain a copy of the judge's order. Attempts to get comments from the affected companies also were not immediately successful.
A top court ordered the ban on Facebook for about two weeks in May amid anger over a page that encouraged users to post images of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favorable ones, as blasphemous. YouTube also was briefly blocked at the time.
The Facebook ban was lifted after the social-networking company blocked that particular page in Pakistan, but officials said at the time that the government would keep blocking some other, unspecified sites that contain "sacrilegious material."
The Facebook controversy sparked a handful of protests across Pakistan, many by student members of radical Islamic groups. Some of the protesters carried signs advocating holy war against the website for allowing the page.
It also sparked a good deal of soul-searching, especially among commentators, who questioned why Pakistanis could not be entrusted to decide for themselves whether or not to look at a website.
Some observers noted that Pakistan had gone further than several other Muslim countries by banning Facebook, and said it showed the rise of conservative Islam in the country. Created in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims, Pakistan has swung away from moderate Sufi Islamic influences common to South Asia toward the more rigid version of the faith found in the Arab world.
It was not the first time that images of the prophet have sparked anger.
Pakistan and other Muslim countries saw large and sometimes violent protests in 2006 after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad, and again in 2008 when they were reprinted. Later the same year, a suspected al-Qaida suicide bomber attacked the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, killing six people.
Associated Press Writer Nahal Toosi in Islamabad and AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
By ASIF SHAHZAD (AP) – 47 minutes ago
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan will monitor seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, to block anti-Islamic links and content, an official said Friday. Seventeen lesser-known sites are being blocked outright for alleged blasphemous material.
The moves follow Pakistan's temporary ban imposed on Facebook in May that drew both praise and condemnation in a country that has long struggled to figure out how strict a version of Islam it should follow.
Both the Facebook ban and the move announced Friday were in response to court orders. The sites to be monitored include Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and its YouTube service, Amazon.com Inc. and MSN, Hotmail and Bing from Microsoft Corp., said Pakistan Telecommunication Authority spokesman Khurram Mehran.
"If any particular link with offensive content appears on these websites, the (link) shall be blocked immediately without disturbing the main website," Mehran said.
Google spokesman Scott Rubin said the company intends to monitor how Pakistan's new policies affect access to its services, which include the world's most popular search engine and the most widely watched video site, YouTube.
"Google and YouTube are platforms for free expression, and we try to allow as much ... content as possible on our services and still ensure that we enforce our policies," Rubin said.
Yahoo called Pakistan's actions disappointing. The company is "founded on the principle that access to information can improve people's lives," Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman said.
Microsoft and Amazon didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mehran said an example of one of the 17 sites being blocked include islamexposed.blogspot.com, which is a blog created through Google's Blogger service. That site features postings with headlines such as "Islam: The Ultimate Hypocrisy" and links to anti-Islam online petitions.
Mehran said that, under instructions from the Ministry of Information Technology, the authority had begun the process of barring and monitoring the various sites.
Facebook was not part of the latest petition ruled upon by the judge in the city of Bahawalpur, Mehran said.
It was not possible late Friday to obtain a copy of the judge's order. Attempts to get comments from the affected companies also were not immediately successful.
A top court ordered the ban on Facebook for about two weeks in May amid anger over a page that encouraged users to post images of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favorable ones, as blasphemous. YouTube also was briefly blocked at the time.
The Facebook ban was lifted after the social-networking company blocked that particular page in Pakistan, but officials said at the time that the government would keep blocking some other, unspecified sites that contain "sacrilegious material."
The Facebook controversy sparked a handful of protests across Pakistan, many by student members of radical Islamic groups. Some of the protesters carried signs advocating holy war against the website for allowing the page.
It also sparked a good deal of soul-searching, especially among commentators, who questioned why Pakistanis could not be entrusted to decide for themselves whether or not to look at a website.
Some observers noted that Pakistan had gone further than several other Muslim countries by banning Facebook, and said it showed the rise of conservative Islam in the country. Created in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims, Pakistan has swung away from moderate Sufi Islamic influences common to South Asia toward the more rigid version of the faith found in the Arab world.
It was not the first time that images of the prophet have sparked anger.
Pakistan and other Muslim countries saw large and sometimes violent protests in 2006 after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad, and again in 2008 when they were reprinted. Later the same year, a suspected al-Qaida suicide bomber attacked the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, killing six people.
Associated Press Writer Nahal Toosi in Islamabad and AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
American Terrorists
Jihad Watch
US Misunderstanders of Islam get 10 years in Pakistani prison for jihad seeking
Pakistani authorities and experienced players of the double game keep up appearances for the gullible West. "US 'jihad seekers' awarded 10 years imprisonment by Pak court," from ANI, June 24 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Islamabad, June 24 (ANI): A Pakistani anti-terrorism court on Thursday awarded 10 years imprisonment to each of the five US terror suspects who were arrested from Punjab province's Sargodha District in December 2009.
Waqar Husain Khan, 22 (Virginia), Ahmed Abdullah Mani, 20 (Virginia), Ramay S Zamzam, 22 (Egypt), Iman Hasan Yamar, 17 (California), and Omar Farouk, 24 (Virginia) were arrested on charges of plotting terror attacks across Pakistan, The News reports.
The five 'jihad seekers' had visited a religious seminary linked to the outlawed Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in Hyderabad and were on their way to terror camps based in the volatile Waziristan region....
A religious seminary? Full of Misunderstanders of Islam? Why, it's...inexplicable, if you buy into the mainstream view of Islamic terrorism's relationship to Islam.
The jihad seekers had pleaded innocence, saying they were being 'set up' and tortured by the FBI and the Pakistani police in custody. (ANI)
Al-Qaeda advises its operatives always to claim torture when in non-Muslim custody.
Posted by Robert on June 24, 2010 8:24 AM | 6 Comments
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Categories: American jihadis, Pakistan, Pakistan's double game
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6 Comments
Hugh | June 24, 2010 8:36 AM | Reply
These people were, however, identified, in a story in The New York Times, as "Muslim-Americans." It was understood, then, by the writers of the story, that the important thing in their identity was not that two were from Pakistan, and one from Yemen, and two from Ethiopia, but that they were all Muslims, that Islam was their identity, Islam was what explained their behavior.
And if the government of Pakistan prosecuted them, it did so both because it knew the Americans were looking, and because those who run Pakistan -- the generals and zamindars -- don't like the threat by the Taliban and others like-minded of undoing the social and, above all, economic order in Pakistan, which threatens the ruling class.
Had these five "Muslim-Americans" (better: Muslims, for they had no American loyalty or identity worth speaking of) not threatened the interests of the Pakistani ruling class, but only constituted a threat to American soldiers or other Infidels, then they would probably never have been caught, charged, tried, sentenced.
ebonystone | June 24, 2010 9:00 AM | Reply
If they were "set up", it was by Islam, not the FBI. And if they were tortured, it was by the will of Allah -- oh most merciful. They don't even understand their own religion.
Alarmed Pig Farmer | June 24, 2010 9:25 AM | Reply
And if the government of Pakistan prosecuted them, it did so both because it knew the Americans were looking...
But let's be clear that our gubmint will silently look the other way when these Jihad war terrorists "escape" from whatever prison to which they're consigned.
*** 33:11 ***
Allah and His Messenger promised us nothing but delusion; they have promised only to deceive us.
Btw, ain't been watching the news much lately. Has Moammar found out where that TWA mass murderer bomber dude Gordo Brown turned loose is living?
winoceros replied to comment from Alarmed Pig Farmer | June 24, 2010 10:24 AM | Reply
He's living with Nicole and Ron's real killer, and Natalie's real killer. They took a house by the sea together.
duh_swami | June 24, 2010 12:42 PM | Reply
A Pakistani anti-terrorism court on Thursday awarded 10 years imprisonment to each of the five US terror suspects who...
'Awarded'?
PMK | June 24, 2010 5:29 PM | Reply
Is it asking too much for our government to deny them reentry? Are we supposed to believe they were there to attack Pakistan and weren't there for training to carry out attacks at home?
If we didn't let them come here we wouldn't have to fight them here and we wouldn't have to fight them over there either.
"Awarded"? It might sound ludicrous to us but we don't willingly strap on suicide vests, either. "Awarded" actually sounds right for them.
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US Misunderstanders of Islam get 10 years in Pakistani prison for jihad seeking
Pakistani authorities and experienced players of the double game keep up appearances for the gullible West. "US 'jihad seekers' awarded 10 years imprisonment by Pak court," from ANI, June 24 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Islamabad, June 24 (ANI): A Pakistani anti-terrorism court on Thursday awarded 10 years imprisonment to each of the five US terror suspects who were arrested from Punjab province's Sargodha District in December 2009.
Waqar Husain Khan, 22 (Virginia), Ahmed Abdullah Mani, 20 (Virginia), Ramay S Zamzam, 22 (Egypt), Iman Hasan Yamar, 17 (California), and Omar Farouk, 24 (Virginia) were arrested on charges of plotting terror attacks across Pakistan, The News reports.
The five 'jihad seekers' had visited a religious seminary linked to the outlawed Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in Hyderabad and were on their way to terror camps based in the volatile Waziristan region....
A religious seminary? Full of Misunderstanders of Islam? Why, it's...inexplicable, if you buy into the mainstream view of Islamic terrorism's relationship to Islam.
The jihad seekers had pleaded innocence, saying they were being 'set up' and tortured by the FBI and the Pakistani police in custody. (ANI)
Al-Qaeda advises its operatives always to claim torture when in non-Muslim custody.
Posted by Robert on June 24, 2010 8:24 AM | 6 Comments
Print this entry | Email this entry | Digg this | del.icio.us | Buzz up!
Categories: American jihadis, Pakistan, Pakistan's double game
« Previous Entry | Home Page | Next Entry »
6 Comments
Hugh | June 24, 2010 8:36 AM | Reply
These people were, however, identified, in a story in The New York Times, as "Muslim-Americans." It was understood, then, by the writers of the story, that the important thing in their identity was not that two were from Pakistan, and one from Yemen, and two from Ethiopia, but that they were all Muslims, that Islam was their identity, Islam was what explained their behavior.
And if the government of Pakistan prosecuted them, it did so both because it knew the Americans were looking, and because those who run Pakistan -- the generals and zamindars -- don't like the threat by the Taliban and others like-minded of undoing the social and, above all, economic order in Pakistan, which threatens the ruling class.
Had these five "Muslim-Americans" (better: Muslims, for they had no American loyalty or identity worth speaking of) not threatened the interests of the Pakistani ruling class, but only constituted a threat to American soldiers or other Infidels, then they would probably never have been caught, charged, tried, sentenced.
ebonystone | June 24, 2010 9:00 AM | Reply
If they were "set up", it was by Islam, not the FBI. And if they were tortured, it was by the will of Allah -- oh most merciful. They don't even understand their own religion.
Alarmed Pig Farmer | June 24, 2010 9:25 AM | Reply
And if the government of Pakistan prosecuted them, it did so both because it knew the Americans were looking...
But let's be clear that our gubmint will silently look the other way when these Jihad war terrorists "escape" from whatever prison to which they're consigned.
*** 33:11 ***
Allah and His Messenger promised us nothing but delusion; they have promised only to deceive us.
Btw, ain't been watching the news much lately. Has Moammar found out where that TWA mass murderer bomber dude Gordo Brown turned loose is living?
winoceros replied to comment from Alarmed Pig Farmer | June 24, 2010 10:24 AM | Reply
He's living with Nicole and Ron's real killer, and Natalie's real killer. They took a house by the sea together.
duh_swami | June 24, 2010 12:42 PM | Reply
A Pakistani anti-terrorism court on Thursday awarded 10 years imprisonment to each of the five US terror suspects who...
'Awarded'?
PMK | June 24, 2010 5:29 PM | Reply
Is it asking too much for our government to deny them reentry? Are we supposed to believe they were there to attack Pakistan and weren't there for training to carry out attacks at home?
If we didn't let them come here we wouldn't have to fight them here and we wouldn't have to fight them over there either.
"Awarded"? It might sound ludicrous to us but we don't willingly strap on suicide vests, either. "Awarded" actually sounds right for them.
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My Testimony- Audio
Download the MP3 audio:http://www.morainevalley.edu/library/eventpodcasts/3-30_2010_libraryevents.mp3
Obama Loses Popularity in Muslim World
latimes.com/news/politics/la-fg-obama-global-20100618,0,6949141.story
latimes.com
Obama's ratings ebb in Muslim world
Pew poll of global attitudes finds support strong in most nations, but slipping in Muslim countries, due in part to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
5:39 PM PDT, June 17, 2010
Reporting from Washington
advertisement
Confidence in President Obama among the world's Muslims is slipping, according to a poll of global attitudes that also found widespread concern that the United States remains a go-it-alone nation even under the new administration.
The survey, by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, found support for Obama strong in most nations, even as his rating at home has slipped. But in five of seven Muslim-majority nations that were polled, his popularity slid over the last year, winning approval ratings from about one-third or less of respondents.
The finding will probably be of concern to the White House, which has worked to improve the United States' image abroad, particularly in the Muslim world.
Obama's worst grades were for his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of 22 nations polled, in only three, France, Nigeria and Kenya, did the majority of respondents support his approach.
Obama administration officials have been concerned about damage to the White House's image in the Muslim world stemming from developments in the Gaza Strip, where Israel, a staunch U.S. ally, has imposed a blockade, citing the need to prevent Hamas militants from obtaining arms.
In Pakistan, the number of Muslims who approve of Obama fell from 13% to 8% over the last year. Among Muslims in Egypt, which receives billions in U.S. aid, support for Obama fell from 41% to 31%, and in Turkey, from 33% to 23%.
Many of those polled said the United States didn't give enough consideration to the views of other countries when making decisions on international issues. The median number who said the United States acts unilaterally was 63%, down slightly from the 67% who used the same description in 2007, when George W. Bush was president.
In most countries, especially wealthier ones, Obama won strong support for the way he has handled the international economic crisis. The exception was the United States, where respondents were almost evenly split.
In Western Europe, support for Obama remains strong. In Germany, 90% believe Obama will do the right thing in foreign affairs, compared to 65% of Americans.
Approval of the United States among Mexicans tumbled after Arizona enacted a law giving police increased powers to detain people suspected of being in the country illegally. Forty-four percent said after the bill's signing that they approved of the United States, compared with 62% before the signing.
The last year saw a slight increase in the number of Muslims who said that suicide bombing and other forms of violent extremism are justified to protect Islam from its enemies. In Egypt the figure rose to 20% from 15%, and in Jordan it was also 20%, up from 12%.
Still, these levels were below those at mid-decade, after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pew poll touches a sensitive issue for the Obama administration, which has attached great importance to opinion in the Muslim world, as the president demonstrated in his Cairo speech in the fifth month of his presidency.
But the high hopes sparked a year ago in the Arab and Muslim worlds have been replaced in many cases with growing disillusionment and anger toward Washington. A recent editorial in Cairo's Al Ahram Weekly said the Obama administration had sorely let down the region.
"Where are the promises that Obama made in Cairo last year? Is he really this powerless or is he duplicitous?" the editorial says. "Whatever the answer, the Arab and Muslims worlds need to acknowledge that we are ultimately responsible for finding answers to the crises that are piling up around us."
Obama and his top commander for the Middle East, Army Gen. David Petraeus, have suggested that Muslim unhappiness with the failure of Mideast peace efforts have compounded security concerns for U.S. forces in the region.
Philip J. Crowley, the chief State Department spokesman, said the second year dip in support might be similar to the traditional dip in midterm election results.
He said Obama's decision to add troops in Afghanistan was "difficult," and acknowledged that Muslims "have concerns about Gaza, a concern we share."
The administration should be getting a boost from its coming withdrawal from Iraq, though signs of that have not shown up yet, Crowley said. He noted that support from Muslims was still up from the Bush administration's departing numbers.
Shibley Telhami, a specialist on Arab opinion at the University of Maryland, said "it boils down to one issue — the Arab-Israeli conflict."
paul.richter@latimes.com
Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
latimes.com
Obama's ratings ebb in Muslim world
Pew poll of global attitudes finds support strong in most nations, but slipping in Muslim countries, due in part to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
5:39 PM PDT, June 17, 2010
Reporting from Washington
advertisement
Confidence in President Obama among the world's Muslims is slipping, according to a poll of global attitudes that also found widespread concern that the United States remains a go-it-alone nation even under the new administration.
The survey, by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, found support for Obama strong in most nations, even as his rating at home has slipped. But in five of seven Muslim-majority nations that were polled, his popularity slid over the last year, winning approval ratings from about one-third or less of respondents.
The finding will probably be of concern to the White House, which has worked to improve the United States' image abroad, particularly in the Muslim world.
Obama's worst grades were for his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of 22 nations polled, in only three, France, Nigeria and Kenya, did the majority of respondents support his approach.
Obama administration officials have been concerned about damage to the White House's image in the Muslim world stemming from developments in the Gaza Strip, where Israel, a staunch U.S. ally, has imposed a blockade, citing the need to prevent Hamas militants from obtaining arms.
In Pakistan, the number of Muslims who approve of Obama fell from 13% to 8% over the last year. Among Muslims in Egypt, which receives billions in U.S. aid, support for Obama fell from 41% to 31%, and in Turkey, from 33% to 23%.
Many of those polled said the United States didn't give enough consideration to the views of other countries when making decisions on international issues. The median number who said the United States acts unilaterally was 63%, down slightly from the 67% who used the same description in 2007, when George W. Bush was president.
In most countries, especially wealthier ones, Obama won strong support for the way he has handled the international economic crisis. The exception was the United States, where respondents were almost evenly split.
In Western Europe, support for Obama remains strong. In Germany, 90% believe Obama will do the right thing in foreign affairs, compared to 65% of Americans.
Approval of the United States among Mexicans tumbled after Arizona enacted a law giving police increased powers to detain people suspected of being in the country illegally. Forty-four percent said after the bill's signing that they approved of the United States, compared with 62% before the signing.
The last year saw a slight increase in the number of Muslims who said that suicide bombing and other forms of violent extremism are justified to protect Islam from its enemies. In Egypt the figure rose to 20% from 15%, and in Jordan it was also 20%, up from 12%.
Still, these levels were below those at mid-decade, after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pew poll touches a sensitive issue for the Obama administration, which has attached great importance to opinion in the Muslim world, as the president demonstrated in his Cairo speech in the fifth month of his presidency.
But the high hopes sparked a year ago in the Arab and Muslim worlds have been replaced in many cases with growing disillusionment and anger toward Washington. A recent editorial in Cairo's Al Ahram Weekly said the Obama administration had sorely let down the region.
"Where are the promises that Obama made in Cairo last year? Is he really this powerless or is he duplicitous?" the editorial says. "Whatever the answer, the Arab and Muslims worlds need to acknowledge that we are ultimately responsible for finding answers to the crises that are piling up around us."
Obama and his top commander for the Middle East, Army Gen. David Petraeus, have suggested that Muslim unhappiness with the failure of Mideast peace efforts have compounded security concerns for U.S. forces in the region.
Philip J. Crowley, the chief State Department spokesman, said the second year dip in support might be similar to the traditional dip in midterm election results.
He said Obama's decision to add troops in Afghanistan was "difficult," and acknowledged that Muslims "have concerns about Gaza, a concern we share."
The administration should be getting a boost from its coming withdrawal from Iraq, though signs of that have not shown up yet, Crowley said. He noted that support from Muslims was still up from the Bush administration's departing numbers.
Shibley Telhami, a specialist on Arab opinion at the University of Maryland, said "it boils down to one issue — the Arab-Israeli conflict."
paul.richter@latimes.com
Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Iran Hangs Sunni Insurgent
latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-iran-rigi-20100621,0,2936466.story
latimes.com
Iran hangs leader of outlawed Sunni militant group
Abdulmalak Rigi, head of the Jundallah militant group comprising minority ethnic Baluchis, was convicted in a number of bombings and attacks and found guilty of heresy and corruption on Earth.
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times
4:29 PM PDT, June 20, 2010
Reporting from Berlin
advertisement
Iran hanged the leader of an outlawed Islamic militant group Sunday after convicting him on charges of terrorism, murder and collaborating with Western intelligence services, including the CIA, state television reported.
Abdol-Majid Rigi, also known as Abdulmalak Rigi, was executed in Tehran's Evin Prison in the presence of the families of the victims of his alleged crimes, state television said. Among other charges, he was found guilty of heresy and corruption on Earth, capital offenses under Iran's Islamic law.
State television claimed the rebel leader acknowledged in court that his crimes contravened Islam and humanity and asked his collaborators not to repeat his mistakes. An official based in eastern Iran said he hoped security in the region would improve with Rigi's demise.
"The terrorist measures of Malak Rigi and his group had taken away the sense of security from people," Ali-Reza Azimi-Jahed, commander of the Revolutionary Guard in Sistan-Baluchistan province, told state television. "Now we witness an increase in the sense of security among people."
The execution marks a milestone in Iran's war against ethnic and religious militant groups on its eastern and western borders. For years, Rigi led a group called Jundallah, a militant Sunni Muslim group that drew support from Iran's struggling ethnic Baluchi minority, a community that straddles part of eastern Iran, western Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Baluchis are Sunni Muslim; Iran is 90% Shiite. Iran's Sunnis, which include Kurds and Arabs as well as Baluchis, say they are treated as second-class citizens, especially under the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom many view as a sectarian chauvinist.
Since 2002 or 2003, Jundallah has waged a guerrilla war against Iranian authorities along the untamed eastern frontier, slipping in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan as it launched attacks against Iranian officials and government targets.
In October, an alleged Jundallah bomber killed 31 people, including several higher-ups in the Revolutionary Guard, in an operation some analysts say scuttled a potential breakthrough between Iran and the West over Tehran's nuclear program.
Rigi was captured in February during a still murky operation. The commercial plane he was aboard, bound from the United Arab Emirates for Kyrgyzstan, was grounded by Iranian fighter jets in southern Iran.
Tehran authorities had said Rigi, who was 25 or 26, was on his way to a meeting with U.S. or Western officials who they alleged were giving him funding and weapons.
U.S. and other Western officials have strenuously denied supporting Rigi, whose group borrows religious and ideological traits from Al Qaeda.
daragahi@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
latimes.com
Iran hangs leader of outlawed Sunni militant group
Abdulmalak Rigi, head of the Jundallah militant group comprising minority ethnic Baluchis, was convicted in a number of bombings and attacks and found guilty of heresy and corruption on Earth.
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times
4:29 PM PDT, June 20, 2010
Reporting from Berlin
advertisement
Iran hanged the leader of an outlawed Islamic militant group Sunday after convicting him on charges of terrorism, murder and collaborating with Western intelligence services, including the CIA, state television reported.
Abdol-Majid Rigi, also known as Abdulmalak Rigi, was executed in Tehran's Evin Prison in the presence of the families of the victims of his alleged crimes, state television said. Among other charges, he was found guilty of heresy and corruption on Earth, capital offenses under Iran's Islamic law.
State television claimed the rebel leader acknowledged in court that his crimes contravened Islam and humanity and asked his collaborators not to repeat his mistakes. An official based in eastern Iran said he hoped security in the region would improve with Rigi's demise.
"The terrorist measures of Malak Rigi and his group had taken away the sense of security from people," Ali-Reza Azimi-Jahed, commander of the Revolutionary Guard in Sistan-Baluchistan province, told state television. "Now we witness an increase in the sense of security among people."
The execution marks a milestone in Iran's war against ethnic and religious militant groups on its eastern and western borders. For years, Rigi led a group called Jundallah, a militant Sunni Muslim group that drew support from Iran's struggling ethnic Baluchi minority, a community that straddles part of eastern Iran, western Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Baluchis are Sunni Muslim; Iran is 90% Shiite. Iran's Sunnis, which include Kurds and Arabs as well as Baluchis, say they are treated as second-class citizens, especially under the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom many view as a sectarian chauvinist.
Since 2002 or 2003, Jundallah has waged a guerrilla war against Iranian authorities along the untamed eastern frontier, slipping in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan as it launched attacks against Iranian officials and government targets.
In October, an alleged Jundallah bomber killed 31 people, including several higher-ups in the Revolutionary Guard, in an operation some analysts say scuttled a potential breakthrough between Iran and the West over Tehran's nuclear program.
Rigi was captured in February during a still murky operation. The commercial plane he was aboard, bound from the United Arab Emirates for Kyrgyzstan, was grounded by Iranian fighter jets in southern Iran.
Tehran authorities had said Rigi, who was 25 or 26, was on his way to a meeting with U.S. or Western officials who they alleged were giving him funding and weapons.
U.S. and other Western officials have strenuously denied supporting Rigi, whose group borrows religious and ideological traits from Al Qaeda.
daragahi@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
White House welcomes Shariah finance specialist
White House welcomes Shariah finance specialist
This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows.
To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=170617
Thursday, June 24, 2010
HOMELAND INSECURITY
WorldNetDaily Exclusive
White House welcomes
Shariah finance specialist
Obama selects Muslim expert
in Islamic transactions as fellow
Posted: June 25, 2010
12:00 am Eastern
By Chelsea Schilling
WorldNetDaily
Samar Ali (Photo: Vanderbilt Register)
The Obama administration has announced its appointment of 13 White House fellows – and the first person featured on its short list is a Muslim attorney who specializes in Shariah-compliant transactions.
"This year's White House fellows are comprised of some of the best and brightest leaders in our country," Michelle Obama said in the June 22 announcement. "I applaud their unyielding commitment to public service and dedication to serving their community."
White House fellows spend a year as full-time, paid assistants to senior White House staff, the vice president, Cabinet secretaries and senior administration officials.
Samar Ali of Waverly, Tenn., is the first name appearing on the White House list. She is an associate with the law firm Hogan Lovells – a firm that claims to have advised on more than 200 Islamic finance transactions with an aggregate deal value in excess of $40 billion.
What does Islam plan for America? Read "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America" and find out!
According to Ali's biography posted on the White House website, "She is responsible for counseling clients on mergers & acquisitions, cross-border transactions, Shari'a compliant transactions, project finance, and international business matters. During her time with Hogan Lovells, she has been a founding member of the firm's Abu Dhabi office."
Hogan Lovells lists Ali's experience "advising a Middle Eastern university in the potential establishment of a Foreign Aid Conventional and Shari'ah Compliant Student Loan Program and advising a Middle Eastern client in relation to a U.S. government subcontract matter."
"Our team members are at the forefront of developments in the Islamic finance industry," Hogan Lovells boasts. "We help set standards for the sector. We have also advised on numerous first-of-their-kind transactions, such as the first convertible Sukuk, the first equity-linked Sukuk, the first Sharia-compliant securitization, the first international Sukuk al-mudaraba and Sukuk al-musharaka, the first Sukuk buy-back, and the first Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) guaranteed Islamic project financing."
Ali also clerked for Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and Judge Edwin Cameron, now of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.
Promoting Islam and Shariah
The White House notes that Ali also led the YMCA Israeli-Palestinian Modern Voices for Progress Program and is a founding member of the first U.S. Delegation to the World Islamic Economic Forum. Ali was listed as a member of the British delegation to the World Islamic Economic Forum in 2009 and as a U.S. delegate in 2010.
Shariah Finance Watch blog noted, "[I]t was at the World Islamic Economic Forum where key leaders declared Shariah finance to be "dawa" (missionary) activity to promote Islam and Shariah."
In fact, the president of Indonesia, H. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, delivered a March 2, 2009, keynote address to Islamic leaders at the World Islamic Economic Forum in Jakarta during which he called for Islamic banks to do "missionary work in the Western world."
"Islamic banking should now be able to take a leadership position in the banking world," he said. "Islamic banks have been much less affected by the financial meltdown than the conventional banks – for the obvious reason that Shariah banks do not indulge in investing in toxic assets and in leveraged funds. They are geared to supporting the real economy."
He added, "Islamic bankers should therefore do some missionary work in the Western world to promote the concept of Shariah banking, for which many in the West are more than ready now."
'We didn't consider terrorists to be Muslims'
Ali received her law degree from Vanderbilt Law School and served as the first Arab-Muslim student body president at Vanderbilt. She has interned for the Islamic International Arab Bank in Amman, Jordan.
According to Vanderbilt Law School, Ali's mother immigrated to the U.S. from Syria, and her father is Palestinian. He left the West Bank town of Ramallah at age 17.
America.gov reported that Ali said her parents taught her to "never forget where we came from and to never forget where we are now."
"I will always be Arab and I will always be American and I will always be Muslim," she said.
Ali spoke out at a campus memorial service days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"In my opinion," she told the Washington File, "Al-Qaida is trying to ruin Islam's reputation and we are simply not going to let them win this fight. If someone has a political agenda, they need to call it what it is, and not disguise it in the name of a religion or use the religion to achieve their political goals. This is simply unacceptable."
While she said she grieved the loss of thousands of American lives, Ali told the File she grew concerned about whether Americans would assume that she, as a Muslim and Arab-American, approved of those attacks.
"Thus, I was worried that many of my fellow citizens, would not realize that just because my friends and I are Muslims and Arabs, did not mean that we were part of or even agreed with the terrorists who caused September 11," she said. "We didn't even consider the terrorists to be Muslims. I was worried that people would confuse Islam with Osama Bin Ladin and his agenda, that they would confuse his agenda as the agenda of all believers in Islam."
(Story continues below)
Creeping Shariah
Shariah already is moving into some elements of American society, with a lawsuit pending over U.S. government involvement in a financial institution that accommodates Shariah requirements in its business operations.
WND also reported in November 2008 that the Treasury Department sponsored and promoted a conference titled "Islamic Finance 101."
Islamic finance is a system of banking consistent with the principles of Shariah, or Islamic law. It is becoming increasingly popular, having reached $800 billion by mid-2007 and growing at more than 15 percent each year. Wall Street now features an Islamic mutual fund and an Islamic index. However, critics claim anti-American terrorists are often financially supported through U.S. investments – creating a system by which the nation funds its own enemy.
In his July 2008 essay, "Financial Jihad: What Americans Need to Know," Vice President Christopher Holton of the Center for Security Policy wrote, "America is losing the financial war on terror because Wall Street is embracing a subversive enemy ideology on one hand and providing corporate life support to state sponsors of terrorism on the other hand."
Holton referred to Islamic finance, or "Shariah-Compliant Finance" as a "modern-day Trojan horse" infiltrating the U.S. He said it poses a threat to the U.S. because it seeks to legitimize Shariah – a man-made medieval doctrine that regulates every aspect of life for Muslims – and could ultimately change American life and laws.
Some advocates claim Islamic finance is socially responsible because it bans investors from funding companies that sell or promote products such as alcohol, tobacco, pornography, gambling and even pork.
However, many Islamic financial institutions also require industry participants to adhere to tenets of Shariah law. According to Nasser Suleiman's "Corporate Governance in Islamic Banking, "First and foremost, an Islamic organization must serve God. It must develop a distinctive corporate culture, the main purpose of which is to create a collective morality and spirituality which, when combined with the production of goods and services, sustains growth and the advancement of the Islamic way of life."
Three nations that rule 100 percent by Shariah law – Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan – hold some of the most horrific human rights records in the world, Holton said.
"This strongly suggests that Americans should strenuously resist anything associated with Shariah."
Tenets of Shariah
In his essay, "Islamic Finance or Financing Islamism," Alex Alexiev outlined the following tenets of Shariah taken from "The Reliance of the Traveler: The Classic Manual of Sacred Law":
A woman is eligible for only half of the inheritance of a man
A virgin may be married against her will by her father or grandfather
A woman may not leave the house without her husband's permission
A Muslim man may marry four women, including Christians and Jews; a Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim
Beating an insubordinate wife is permissible
Female sexual mutilation is obligatory
Adultery [or the perception of adultery] is punished by death by stoning
Offensive, military jihad against non-Muslims is a religious obligation
Apostasy from Islam is punishable by death without trial
Lying to infidels in time of jihad is permissible
'Useful idiots'
Alexiev wrote that many Islamic financial institutions claim Shariah-Compliant Finance "derives its Islamic character from the strict observance of the ostensible Quranic prohibition of lending at interest, the imperative of almsgiving (zakat), avoidance of excessive uncertainty (gharar) and certain practices and products considered unlawful (haram) to Muslims …" However, he said, "[E]ven a casual examination of the reality of Islamic finance today reveals it to be a bogus concept practiced by deceptive ploys and disingenuous means by practitioners that are or should be aware of that, but remain predictably silent."
Shariah finance institutions have funded militant Islamism for more than 30 years. Alexiev cited Islamic Development Bank's hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to Hamas in support of suicide bombing. Bank Al-Taqwa and other banks and charities run by Saudi billionaires that have funded al-Qaida activities.
Additionally, Shariah law mandates that Muslims donate 2.5 percent of their annual incomes to charities – including jihadists. When 400 banks regularly contribute to such charities, potential financial sums can be virtually limitless.
If Western banks endorse Shariah, they will "end up becoming what Lenin called useful idiots or worse to the Islamists," Alexiev wrote. "And it is a very thin line between that and outright complicity in the Islamist agenda."
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Billboards announce: 'Shariah law is hate'
This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows.
To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=170617
Thursday, June 24, 2010
HOMELAND INSECURITY
WorldNetDaily Exclusive
White House welcomes
Shariah finance specialist
Obama selects Muslim expert
in Islamic transactions as fellow
Posted: June 25, 2010
12:00 am Eastern
By Chelsea Schilling
WorldNetDaily
Samar Ali (Photo: Vanderbilt Register)
The Obama administration has announced its appointment of 13 White House fellows – and the first person featured on its short list is a Muslim attorney who specializes in Shariah-compliant transactions.
"This year's White House fellows are comprised of some of the best and brightest leaders in our country," Michelle Obama said in the June 22 announcement. "I applaud their unyielding commitment to public service and dedication to serving their community."
White House fellows spend a year as full-time, paid assistants to senior White House staff, the vice president, Cabinet secretaries and senior administration officials.
Samar Ali of Waverly, Tenn., is the first name appearing on the White House list. She is an associate with the law firm Hogan Lovells – a firm that claims to have advised on more than 200 Islamic finance transactions with an aggregate deal value in excess of $40 billion.
What does Islam plan for America? Read "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America" and find out!
According to Ali's biography posted on the White House website, "She is responsible for counseling clients on mergers & acquisitions, cross-border transactions, Shari'a compliant transactions, project finance, and international business matters. During her time with Hogan Lovells, she has been a founding member of the firm's Abu Dhabi office."
Hogan Lovells lists Ali's experience "advising a Middle Eastern university in the potential establishment of a Foreign Aid Conventional and Shari'ah Compliant Student Loan Program and advising a Middle Eastern client in relation to a U.S. government subcontract matter."
"Our team members are at the forefront of developments in the Islamic finance industry," Hogan Lovells boasts. "We help set standards for the sector. We have also advised on numerous first-of-their-kind transactions, such as the first convertible Sukuk, the first equity-linked Sukuk, the first Sharia-compliant securitization, the first international Sukuk al-mudaraba and Sukuk al-musharaka, the first Sukuk buy-back, and the first Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) guaranteed Islamic project financing."
Ali also clerked for Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and Judge Edwin Cameron, now of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.
Promoting Islam and Shariah
The White House notes that Ali also led the YMCA Israeli-Palestinian Modern Voices for Progress Program and is a founding member of the first U.S. Delegation to the World Islamic Economic Forum. Ali was listed as a member of the British delegation to the World Islamic Economic Forum in 2009 and as a U.S. delegate in 2010.
Shariah Finance Watch blog noted, "[I]t was at the World Islamic Economic Forum where key leaders declared Shariah finance to be "dawa" (missionary) activity to promote Islam and Shariah."
In fact, the president of Indonesia, H. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, delivered a March 2, 2009, keynote address to Islamic leaders at the World Islamic Economic Forum in Jakarta during which he called for Islamic banks to do "missionary work in the Western world."
"Islamic banking should now be able to take a leadership position in the banking world," he said. "Islamic banks have been much less affected by the financial meltdown than the conventional banks – for the obvious reason that Shariah banks do not indulge in investing in toxic assets and in leveraged funds. They are geared to supporting the real economy."
He added, "Islamic bankers should therefore do some missionary work in the Western world to promote the concept of Shariah banking, for which many in the West are more than ready now."
'We didn't consider terrorists to be Muslims'
Ali received her law degree from Vanderbilt Law School and served as the first Arab-Muslim student body president at Vanderbilt. She has interned for the Islamic International Arab Bank in Amman, Jordan.
According to Vanderbilt Law School, Ali's mother immigrated to the U.S. from Syria, and her father is Palestinian. He left the West Bank town of Ramallah at age 17.
America.gov reported that Ali said her parents taught her to "never forget where we came from and to never forget where we are now."
"I will always be Arab and I will always be American and I will always be Muslim," she said.
Ali spoke out at a campus memorial service days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"In my opinion," she told the Washington File, "Al-Qaida is trying to ruin Islam's reputation and we are simply not going to let them win this fight. If someone has a political agenda, they need to call it what it is, and not disguise it in the name of a religion or use the religion to achieve their political goals. This is simply unacceptable."
While she said she grieved the loss of thousands of American lives, Ali told the File she grew concerned about whether Americans would assume that she, as a Muslim and Arab-American, approved of those attacks.
"Thus, I was worried that many of my fellow citizens, would not realize that just because my friends and I are Muslims and Arabs, did not mean that we were part of or even agreed with the terrorists who caused September 11," she said. "We didn't even consider the terrorists to be Muslims. I was worried that people would confuse Islam with Osama Bin Ladin and his agenda, that they would confuse his agenda as the agenda of all believers in Islam."
(Story continues below)
Creeping Shariah
Shariah already is moving into some elements of American society, with a lawsuit pending over U.S. government involvement in a financial institution that accommodates Shariah requirements in its business operations.
WND also reported in November 2008 that the Treasury Department sponsored and promoted a conference titled "Islamic Finance 101."
Islamic finance is a system of banking consistent with the principles of Shariah, or Islamic law. It is becoming increasingly popular, having reached $800 billion by mid-2007 and growing at more than 15 percent each year. Wall Street now features an Islamic mutual fund and an Islamic index. However, critics claim anti-American terrorists are often financially supported through U.S. investments – creating a system by which the nation funds its own enemy.
In his July 2008 essay, "Financial Jihad: What Americans Need to Know," Vice President Christopher Holton of the Center for Security Policy wrote, "America is losing the financial war on terror because Wall Street is embracing a subversive enemy ideology on one hand and providing corporate life support to state sponsors of terrorism on the other hand."
Holton referred to Islamic finance, or "Shariah-Compliant Finance" as a "modern-day Trojan horse" infiltrating the U.S. He said it poses a threat to the U.S. because it seeks to legitimize Shariah – a man-made medieval doctrine that regulates every aspect of life for Muslims – and could ultimately change American life and laws.
Some advocates claim Islamic finance is socially responsible because it bans investors from funding companies that sell or promote products such as alcohol, tobacco, pornography, gambling and even pork.
However, many Islamic financial institutions also require industry participants to adhere to tenets of Shariah law. According to Nasser Suleiman's "Corporate Governance in Islamic Banking, "First and foremost, an Islamic organization must serve God. It must develop a distinctive corporate culture, the main purpose of which is to create a collective morality and spirituality which, when combined with the production of goods and services, sustains growth and the advancement of the Islamic way of life."
Three nations that rule 100 percent by Shariah law – Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan – hold some of the most horrific human rights records in the world, Holton said.
"This strongly suggests that Americans should strenuously resist anything associated with Shariah."
Tenets of Shariah
In his essay, "Islamic Finance or Financing Islamism," Alex Alexiev outlined the following tenets of Shariah taken from "The Reliance of the Traveler: The Classic Manual of Sacred Law":
A woman is eligible for only half of the inheritance of a man
A virgin may be married against her will by her father or grandfather
A woman may not leave the house without her husband's permission
A Muslim man may marry four women, including Christians and Jews; a Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim
Beating an insubordinate wife is permissible
Female sexual mutilation is obligatory
Adultery [or the perception of adultery] is punished by death by stoning
Offensive, military jihad against non-Muslims is a religious obligation
Apostasy from Islam is punishable by death without trial
Lying to infidels in time of jihad is permissible
'Useful idiots'
Alexiev wrote that many Islamic financial institutions claim Shariah-Compliant Finance "derives its Islamic character from the strict observance of the ostensible Quranic prohibition of lending at interest, the imperative of almsgiving (zakat), avoidance of excessive uncertainty (gharar) and certain practices and products considered unlawful (haram) to Muslims …" However, he said, "[E]ven a casual examination of the reality of Islamic finance today reveals it to be a bogus concept practiced by deceptive ploys and disingenuous means by practitioners that are or should be aware of that, but remain predictably silent."
Shariah finance institutions have funded militant Islamism for more than 30 years. Alexiev cited Islamic Development Bank's hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to Hamas in support of suicide bombing. Bank Al-Taqwa and other banks and charities run by Saudi billionaires that have funded al-Qaida activities.
Additionally, Shariah law mandates that Muslims donate 2.5 percent of their annual incomes to charities – including jihadists. When 400 banks regularly contribute to such charities, potential financial sums can be virtually limitless.
If Western banks endorse Shariah, they will "end up becoming what Lenin called useful idiots or worse to the Islamists," Alexiev wrote. "And it is a very thin line between that and outright complicity in the Islamist agenda."
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Previous stories:
Shariah ban on November ballot
U.S. Marine fires back over Shariah loans
Shariah arrests 'depend on policeman's mood'
Islamic plan to criminalize Gospel message crumbling
Film exposes dark underbelly of Shariah law
Judge: Constitution still counts during crisis
Taxpayer billions support Shariah at AIG
U.S. lawmakers scold AIG over Shariah finance
Federal Reserve sued for funding Shariah products
Federal Reserve sued for funding Shariah products
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U.S. Treasury teaches 'Islamic Finance 101'
Brand new push in Congress to prevent Shariah invasion
Billboards announce: 'Shariah law is hate'
Obama's Islamic Envoy: Obama Is America’s “Educator-in-Chief on Islamâ€
Obama's Islamic Envoy: Obama Is America’s “Educator-in-Chief on Islamâ€
Obama’s Islamic Envoy: Obama Dropping References to Islamic Terrorism, Jihadism has Made Him America’s “Educator-in-Chief on Islam”…
More like “Panderer-in-Chief”…
(Weekly Standard)-Rashad Hussain, America’s special envoy to the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Saudi-based body formed in 1969 to “protect” Jerusalem from the Israelis, announced a new title this week for President Barack Obama. According to Hussain, Obama is America’s “Educator-in-Chief on Islam.”
Hussain so designated Obama in a keynote speech Wednesday, June 23, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The occasion was another “post-Cairo” conference, following on the event that welcomed Islamist ideologue Tariq Ramadan to Washington in April. Hussain also declared that Obama is “Educator-in-Chief” on the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which has produced diplomatic and political events around the capital for some years. Hussain affirmed with satisfaction that presidential iftar dinners, where the fast is broken after sundown, and which had formerly been limited to diplomats from Muslim countries, now welcomed American Muslims from throughout society.
In his remarks, Hussain also congratulated Obama for sending Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, to last year’s annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, a notorious front for Saudi-financed Muslim radicalism. Worse, Hussain has now divulged that the U.S. will support the OIC in the latter’s United Nations effort to criminalize “defamation of religion” – widely perceived as a measure to suppress criticism of Muslim practices that violate human rights. “The OIC and the Obama administration will work together in the UN on the issue of defamation of religion, especially in Europe,” said Hussain.
…As noted by Hussain, Obama has called for references to “Islamic terrorism” and “jihadism” to be expunged from the official vocabulary employed by his administration, and has pronounced last year’s Fort Hood massacre to be unrelated to Islam. As the president has assured the world, terrorism is anti-Islamic and the term “jihad” has been misused. Thus Obama presumes not only to act as “educator” on Islam to non-Muslim Americans, but to define the religion for its own adherents.
Rest here »
Obama’s Islamic Envoy: Obama Dropping References to Islamic Terrorism, Jihadism has Made Him America’s “Educator-in-Chief on Islam”…
More like “Panderer-in-Chief”…
(Weekly Standard)-Rashad Hussain, America’s special envoy to the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Saudi-based body formed in 1969 to “protect” Jerusalem from the Israelis, announced a new title this week for President Barack Obama. According to Hussain, Obama is America’s “Educator-in-Chief on Islam.”
Hussain so designated Obama in a keynote speech Wednesday, June 23, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The occasion was another “post-Cairo” conference, following on the event that welcomed Islamist ideologue Tariq Ramadan to Washington in April. Hussain also declared that Obama is “Educator-in-Chief” on the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which has produced diplomatic and political events around the capital for some years. Hussain affirmed with satisfaction that presidential iftar dinners, where the fast is broken after sundown, and which had formerly been limited to diplomats from Muslim countries, now welcomed American Muslims from throughout society.
In his remarks, Hussain also congratulated Obama for sending Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, to last year’s annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, a notorious front for Saudi-financed Muslim radicalism. Worse, Hussain has now divulged that the U.S. will support the OIC in the latter’s United Nations effort to criminalize “defamation of religion” – widely perceived as a measure to suppress criticism of Muslim practices that violate human rights. “The OIC and the Obama administration will work together in the UN on the issue of defamation of religion, especially in Europe,” said Hussain.
…As noted by Hussain, Obama has called for references to “Islamic terrorism” and “jihadism” to be expunged from the official vocabulary employed by his administration, and has pronounced last year’s Fort Hood massacre to be unrelated to Islam. As the president has assured the world, terrorism is anti-Islamic and the term “jihad” has been misused. Thus Obama presumes not only to act as “educator” on Islam to non-Muslim Americans, but to define the religion for its own adherents.
Rest here »
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Dearborn's Ban on Evangelism
The Arab American News
Evangelists challenge arrests at Arab festival, claim free speech rights
Friday, 06.25.2010, 12:40am
The group is alleging that their free speech rights were violated after their video cameras, which were used to record various conversations at the festival, were confiscated by police. They are requesting the return of their cameras and tapes.
DEARBORN — A total of four Christian evangelists who were reportedly attempting to convert patrons at Dearborn's Arab International Festival last week were arrested and jailed for disorderly conduct according to Dearborn Police.
Those arrested were Negeen Mayel of California, Nabeel Qureshi of Virginia, David Wood of New York, and Paul Rezkalla, a student at New York University.
The group is alleging that their free speech rights were violated after their video cameras, which were used to record various conversations at the festival, were confiscated by police. They are requesting the return of their cameras and tapes.
Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad told the Detroit Free Press that the missionaries were arrested in order to ensure security and to prevent festival patrons from being bothered.
Evangelists challenge arrests at Arab festival, claim free speech rights
Friday, 06.25.2010, 12:40am
The group is alleging that their free speech rights were violated after their video cameras, which were used to record various conversations at the festival, were confiscated by police. They are requesting the return of their cameras and tapes.
DEARBORN — A total of four Christian evangelists who were reportedly attempting to convert patrons at Dearborn's Arab International Festival last week were arrested and jailed for disorderly conduct according to Dearborn Police.
Those arrested were Negeen Mayel of California, Nabeel Qureshi of Virginia, David Wood of New York, and Paul Rezkalla, a student at New York University.
The group is alleging that their free speech rights were violated after their video cameras, which were used to record various conversations at the festival, were confiscated by police. They are requesting the return of their cameras and tapes.
Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad told the Detroit Free Press that the missionaries were arrested in order to ensure security and to prevent festival patrons from being bothered.
Christians in Palestine
http://www.middleeastmonitor.org.uk/resources/briefing-papers/1208-christian-muslim-relations-in-palestine
hursday, 24 June 2010 17:50 Silvia Nicolaou-Garcia
Briefing Paper - June 2010
An overview of the Christian presence in Palestine
The estimated number of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem is 51,710, making the percentage of the Palestinian Christians in the Occupied Territories two percent of the Palestinian population.i There is, in contrast, a higher percentage of Christians in Israel. The percentage of the Arab Christians in Israel - including Israeli Occupied Jerusalem - is 1.66, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. Bethlehem, which traces its roots to the very origin of the Christian faith, is the home to the highest percentage of Christians in Palestine (43.4%), followed by Ramallah (24.7%), then Jerusalem (17.9%).
Christianity has a long standing history in Palestine, and Palestinian Christians belong to several traditional communities of faith. The first are the traditions of the Eastern Orthodox churches, the second is made up of the Syrian, Coptic and Armenian Orthodox churches, and a third category consists of those churches belonging to the Catholic family of churches. There are also a small but increasing number of evangelical churches, including the Lutheran and Episcopal churches.
Over the past century, the percentage of Christian Palestinians has been in decline. The influx of Jewish immigrants since the late 1880s, the Nakba of 1948 and the expulsions of 1967 played a big role in diminishing the presence of Palestinian Christians. During the Deir Yassin Massacre of 1948, over a quarter of a million Palestinians, many of them Christian, were displaced or disappeared. Many of the 531 villages that were levelled in 1948 had a mix of Christian and Muslim inhabitants. To this day, millions of Palestinians have been expelled from their lands, and rendered homeless and as refugees. Of the remaining Palestinian Christians, most of them have emigrated at an increasing rate from 1990 onwards, because of lack of freedom and security and due to the deteriorating economic situation.
A relationship of trust in the face of Israeli adversity
Various Christian Zionist propaganda sources claim that the main problem for Palestinian Christians is their Muslim neighbours.ii The decline of Christian presence in Palestine is portrayed as the fault of Muslims and not of the illegal Israeli occupation.iii Christian Zionist tours to the Holy Land contribute towards the spread of this myth and frame the conflict in an anti-Muslim way in order to distract attention from Israel's continued violations of international law.
Even though the relationship between Palestinian Christians and Muslims is not always a rosy one, the above claims are far from true. Palestinian Christians are an indigenous, integral part of the Arab Palestinian culture and civilization in the political, historical and religious spheres. At the political level, Palestinian Christians have been fellow citizens in the common struggle against foreign or colonial invasion, regardless of its religious or ethnic identity. Many seats in the current Palestinian Legislative Council are held by Palestinian Christians. This amounts to more or less 8% of the seats, whereas Christians only make up 2% of the population of the West Bank and Gaza. Similarly, the Samaritans, who number three hundred and twenty persons, have one seat in the Council. Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter are observed, and Christians continue to be an integral part of the Arab Palestinian culture and civilization. A relationship of peaceful coexistance is also found on the personal level. People from both religions visit each other during religious festivals, and in Jerusalem schools run by Christian churches have a majority Muslim student population.
Palestinian Christians, like their Muslim counterparts, have experienced a long history of dispossession and have not been immune to Israeli policies of occupation and discrimination. Not only do they have to deal with the day to day hardships that come with occupation, but they are also dismayed by the fact that many of their fellow Christians in Europe and North America unquestionably support the Israeli regime. Western Christians (in particular American and Britain) have, for a variety of reasons, tended to show greater sympathy towards the state of Israel than towards the worsening condition of the Palestinian people. This alliance can be traced back as far as 1917, when the United Kingdom issued the Balfour Declaration and established Palestine as a "national home for the Jewish people". More recently the Nixon administration in 1973 provided Israel with a full replacement of all its tanks, planes and ammunition during the October War against Egypt and Syria.
However, Western Christian alliances with Israel go beyond a political alliance. Throughout the 20th Century there has been a significant influence of Christian theological attitudes toward Israel which has been devastating on the indigenous Palestinian Christian community. The rise of Evangelicalism and Christian fundamentalism has fermented the unquestionable support for the state of Israel. As was highlighted by the Pope earlier this month during his visit to Cyprus, "the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories is creating difficulties in everyday life….moreover; certain Christian fundamentalist theologies use Sacred Scripture to justify Israel's occupation of Palestine." A 46-page text published by the Vatican: The Catholic Church in the Middle East: Communion and Witness" stresses how this fundamentalist theology is making the situation for Christian Arabs even more sensitive.iv
Christian Zionist support for Israel is also manifested in the shape of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, encouraged particularly by the Israeli Government Tourist Office.v This support has an objectionable consequence on the indigenous Palestinian Christian communities. Many of the Western pilgrims appear not only ignorant of recent Middle Eastern history, but surprised to find an Arab Christian presence at all. Like their Muslim neighbours, they are subject to daily experiences of humiliation at checkpoints and roadblocks and prevented from making pilgrimage to their Holy places of worship. Palestinian Christians are routinely prohibited from travelling to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, where the church commemorates Jesus' crucifixion, burial, and resurrection from the dead, whilst Palestinian Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza strip are prevented from travelling to Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
In December 2009, a group of Palestinian Christians, including Archbishop Michel Sabbah, the retired Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem published "A Moment of Truth" , a call for help to the international community on behalf of the Palestinian Christians. They severely criticised "theologians in the West who try to attach a biblical and theological legitimacy to the Israeli infringement of our rights, urge for non violent resistance tools such as boycott and divestments and call for a stop on Israeli 'racism and apartheid'." In an interview with Sabbah earlier this year, he clearly spoke on behalf of all the Christian Churches in Palestine when stating that "Israeli Occupation is the Main cause of Instability in the Middle East".vi
Palestinian Christians and the Islamic resistance
Contrary to what is propagated in the media, the relationship between Christians and the Islamic resistance in Palestine is one of respect. Although tensions arise between the Christian minority and the rest of the population, these are not the result of a systematic discrimination against them, but are more due to the everyday anguish of the siege and occupation.
With regard to the Islamic resistance Movement (Hamas), Article 31 of its Charter specifically says, "Hamas is a humane movement which cares for human rights and is committed to the tolerance inherent in Islam as regards attitudes towards other religions…under the shadow of Islam it is possible for the members of the three religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism to coexist in safety and security".
An example of the coexistence is the situation of Palestinian Christians in Gaza, contrary to the Israeli propaganda (hasbara). School playgrounds are places where coexistence between Muslims and Christians takes place. The Holy Family School in Gaza City is part-funded by the Vatican. Father Emanuel Musallem explains how he is the priest of more than 4,000 Christians in Gaza. His school has more than 1,200 students, 1,000 of which are Muslim. Father Emanuel explains how many Hamas leaders are sending their children to this school, because he is not preaching "Christianity", he is rather "spreading the light of knowledge in his Palestinian nation". Father Emanuel declares himself first an Arab, then a Palestinian, and then a Christian.
On another level, Hamas has always demonstrated respect for Christmas religious festivities. In December 2003, they were the first to organize an assistance package and donations to families whose houses were damaged by the Israeli Defence Forces in Rafah. The movement went even further and on Christmas Eve 2003 when several officials dressed up as Santa Claus and distributed presents to Christian children in Bethlehem. Another example of the tolerance and respect between the two communities was when Declaration number 67 was issued by Hamas in 1990, cancelling a general strike which coincided with the religious Christmas holidays.
Another issue which is frequently discussed in the media is whether or not Hamas is encroaching upon women's rights in the Gaza strip. Calls to ban male hairdressers from cutting women's hair and a ruling stating that female lawyers had to cover their hair when acting in civil courts were denounced by many in the international community. However, even though, to some extent, the atmosphere in the region is more conservative, these measures were not approved of by the majority of the population and were therefore never implemented. Hana Afana, a 24 year old trainee maths teacher explains how Hamas is imposing a religious code, and how what is really worrying for the women in the region is the siege and the economic situation. Qualified professionals and graduates like her find themselves unable to find a job. According to Mona Ahmad al-Shawa, who runs the women's unit at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, basic human rights such as access to electricity, running water and medical treatment are what women want.
Muslims and Christians in Palestine are not just bonded at the playground or in the spiritual sphere. They share the sheer disappointment with the Oslo process and the rampant corruption of the Palestinian Authority, which has misappropriated billions of dollars worth of aid from the international community. Hamas winning the elections in the territories reflected the disillusionment of Palestinians, and was a natural reaction to their dissatisfaction. Often regarded as a military organization, the movement engages well beyond its military wing. It runs a network of social, educational, health and economic services, especially in Gaza. Christians in Bethlehem and Ramallah, tired of the PA's corruption and sex scandals, were not afraid to vote for Hamas.
Collaboration between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Israeli State - "The Holy Land is not for Sale or Lease"
The Palestinian Authority is, however, not the only one accused of corruption and scandalous transactions, and there seems to be internal strife between the different Palestinian Christian communities. The Greek Orthodox Church has been portrayed as collaborating with Israel since 1967, due to its involvement in land and political disputes. The Orthodox Church is the biggest private owner of land in Jerusalem and owns most of the land in the West Bank on which the Christian religious sites, including the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem where Christians believe Jesus was born, are built. Much of this land was donated to it by Orthodox Christian Palestinians in the late 1800s. Over the last few decades the church has increased land sales to the Israeli authorities or leased land to them for a period of 999 years. Examples of these transactions include the sale of St. John's property in the Christian quarter on 11th April 1990, the transfer of fifty dunams near Mar Elias monastery, and the sale of two hotels and twenty seven stores on Omar Bin Al-Khattab square near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The church's land sales have come against a background of corruption allegations. Nicholas Papadimas, a previous church treasurer in Jerusalem, was involved some of the sales before he fled the country and was charged in Greece with stealing church funds in a separate case. On being appointed as patriarch in 2005, Theophilos had promised to stop selling Palestinian land, but he was also involved in many shady undertakings with Israel. The current patriarch, Irineos, has also been accused of being behind secret land deals with two international Jewish investment groups.
Another source of tension comes from the fact that the Greek clergy do not allow Arab clergymen from rising in the church. This is the case of the prominent Palestinian Christian clergyman, Abdullah Hanaa. On the 13th of November 2009, Theofilos removed Abdullah from his position as the deputy head from the Orthodox Church. This resulted in widespread condemnation from the Palestinian Greek Orthodox Community, who demonstrated in their thousands in the streets of Ramallah.
The Israeli authorities have used the church's corruption and financial difficulties to their political advantage and applied additional political pressure to ensure that the choice of patriarchs is beneficial to Israel's land acquisition policies. One of the church's Jerusalem properties was purchased by Israel with the involvement of the Ateret Cohanim association which is dedicated to buying Arab property in Jerusalem and settling Jews there.
Both the Christian and Muslim Palestinian communities have suffered at the hands of the Occupation. Excavations near the gate of Maryam in the Western Wall of the Church of the Sepulchre in November 2009 are a recent example of this. Far from collaborating with the Israeli entity, the struggle against the occupation should unite not only the different Christian Churches, but also the Muslim community.
Conclusion
According to Hanna Massad, pastor of Gaza Baptist Church, "The last 5 years have been very difficult for all the Palestinians - Muslims and Christians". Gaza Baptist Church is one of only three churches serving the 4,000 Christians living among the Gaza Strip's 1.5 million inhabitants. Hanna explains how the siege united the community. Because of the lack of basic food, Christian charities have provided food for families, 99% of which are Muslim. During the 2009 bombings, "the church ceiling fell down up to 6 times".
The plight of the Palestinian Christian is very much connected to that of the Palestinian Muslim in that both, whether in the Occupied Territories or inside Israel itself, are experiencing daily injustices at the hands of oppressive and discriminatory policies imposed on them by the Israeli government. The conflict is therefore not between Muslims and Christians; nor between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Palestinian Christians; it is between Palestinians as a whole and Israel's occupation and apartheid establishment. It is indeed hard to be Palestinian Christian. But it is equally hard being a Palestinian Muslim.
It is hard simply being a Palestinian.
hursday, 24 June 2010 17:50 Silvia Nicolaou-Garcia
Briefing Paper - June 2010
An overview of the Christian presence in Palestine
The estimated number of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem is 51,710, making the percentage of the Palestinian Christians in the Occupied Territories two percent of the Palestinian population.i There is, in contrast, a higher percentage of Christians in Israel. The percentage of the Arab Christians in Israel - including Israeli Occupied Jerusalem - is 1.66, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. Bethlehem, which traces its roots to the very origin of the Christian faith, is the home to the highest percentage of Christians in Palestine (43.4%), followed by Ramallah (24.7%), then Jerusalem (17.9%).
Christianity has a long standing history in Palestine, and Palestinian Christians belong to several traditional communities of faith. The first are the traditions of the Eastern Orthodox churches, the second is made up of the Syrian, Coptic and Armenian Orthodox churches, and a third category consists of those churches belonging to the Catholic family of churches. There are also a small but increasing number of evangelical churches, including the Lutheran and Episcopal churches.
Over the past century, the percentage of Christian Palestinians has been in decline. The influx of Jewish immigrants since the late 1880s, the Nakba of 1948 and the expulsions of 1967 played a big role in diminishing the presence of Palestinian Christians. During the Deir Yassin Massacre of 1948, over a quarter of a million Palestinians, many of them Christian, were displaced or disappeared. Many of the 531 villages that were levelled in 1948 had a mix of Christian and Muslim inhabitants. To this day, millions of Palestinians have been expelled from their lands, and rendered homeless and as refugees. Of the remaining Palestinian Christians, most of them have emigrated at an increasing rate from 1990 onwards, because of lack of freedom and security and due to the deteriorating economic situation.
A relationship of trust in the face of Israeli adversity
Various Christian Zionist propaganda sources claim that the main problem for Palestinian Christians is their Muslim neighbours.ii The decline of Christian presence in Palestine is portrayed as the fault of Muslims and not of the illegal Israeli occupation.iii Christian Zionist tours to the Holy Land contribute towards the spread of this myth and frame the conflict in an anti-Muslim way in order to distract attention from Israel's continued violations of international law.
Even though the relationship between Palestinian Christians and Muslims is not always a rosy one, the above claims are far from true. Palestinian Christians are an indigenous, integral part of the Arab Palestinian culture and civilization in the political, historical and religious spheres. At the political level, Palestinian Christians have been fellow citizens in the common struggle against foreign or colonial invasion, regardless of its religious or ethnic identity. Many seats in the current Palestinian Legislative Council are held by Palestinian Christians. This amounts to more or less 8% of the seats, whereas Christians only make up 2% of the population of the West Bank and Gaza. Similarly, the Samaritans, who number three hundred and twenty persons, have one seat in the Council. Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter are observed, and Christians continue to be an integral part of the Arab Palestinian culture and civilization. A relationship of peaceful coexistance is also found on the personal level. People from both religions visit each other during religious festivals, and in Jerusalem schools run by Christian churches have a majority Muslim student population.
Palestinian Christians, like their Muslim counterparts, have experienced a long history of dispossession and have not been immune to Israeli policies of occupation and discrimination. Not only do they have to deal with the day to day hardships that come with occupation, but they are also dismayed by the fact that many of their fellow Christians in Europe and North America unquestionably support the Israeli regime. Western Christians (in particular American and Britain) have, for a variety of reasons, tended to show greater sympathy towards the state of Israel than towards the worsening condition of the Palestinian people. This alliance can be traced back as far as 1917, when the United Kingdom issued the Balfour Declaration and established Palestine as a "national home for the Jewish people". More recently the Nixon administration in 1973 provided Israel with a full replacement of all its tanks, planes and ammunition during the October War against Egypt and Syria.
However, Western Christian alliances with Israel go beyond a political alliance. Throughout the 20th Century there has been a significant influence of Christian theological attitudes toward Israel which has been devastating on the indigenous Palestinian Christian community. The rise of Evangelicalism and Christian fundamentalism has fermented the unquestionable support for the state of Israel. As was highlighted by the Pope earlier this month during his visit to Cyprus, "the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories is creating difficulties in everyday life….moreover; certain Christian fundamentalist theologies use Sacred Scripture to justify Israel's occupation of Palestine." A 46-page text published by the Vatican: The Catholic Church in the Middle East: Communion and Witness" stresses how this fundamentalist theology is making the situation for Christian Arabs even more sensitive.iv
Christian Zionist support for Israel is also manifested in the shape of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, encouraged particularly by the Israeli Government Tourist Office.v This support has an objectionable consequence on the indigenous Palestinian Christian communities. Many of the Western pilgrims appear not only ignorant of recent Middle Eastern history, but surprised to find an Arab Christian presence at all. Like their Muslim neighbours, they are subject to daily experiences of humiliation at checkpoints and roadblocks and prevented from making pilgrimage to their Holy places of worship. Palestinian Christians are routinely prohibited from travelling to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, where the church commemorates Jesus' crucifixion, burial, and resurrection from the dead, whilst Palestinian Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza strip are prevented from travelling to Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
In December 2009, a group of Palestinian Christians, including Archbishop Michel Sabbah, the retired Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem published "A Moment of Truth" , a call for help to the international community on behalf of the Palestinian Christians. They severely criticised "theologians in the West who try to attach a biblical and theological legitimacy to the Israeli infringement of our rights, urge for non violent resistance tools such as boycott and divestments and call for a stop on Israeli 'racism and apartheid'." In an interview with Sabbah earlier this year, he clearly spoke on behalf of all the Christian Churches in Palestine when stating that "Israeli Occupation is the Main cause of Instability in the Middle East".vi
Palestinian Christians and the Islamic resistance
Contrary to what is propagated in the media, the relationship between Christians and the Islamic resistance in Palestine is one of respect. Although tensions arise between the Christian minority and the rest of the population, these are not the result of a systematic discrimination against them, but are more due to the everyday anguish of the siege and occupation.
With regard to the Islamic resistance Movement (Hamas), Article 31 of its Charter specifically says, "Hamas is a humane movement which cares for human rights and is committed to the tolerance inherent in Islam as regards attitudes towards other religions…under the shadow of Islam it is possible for the members of the three religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism to coexist in safety and security".
An example of the coexistence is the situation of Palestinian Christians in Gaza, contrary to the Israeli propaganda (hasbara). School playgrounds are places where coexistence between Muslims and Christians takes place. The Holy Family School in Gaza City is part-funded by the Vatican. Father Emanuel Musallem explains how he is the priest of more than 4,000 Christians in Gaza. His school has more than 1,200 students, 1,000 of which are Muslim. Father Emanuel explains how many Hamas leaders are sending their children to this school, because he is not preaching "Christianity", he is rather "spreading the light of knowledge in his Palestinian nation". Father Emanuel declares himself first an Arab, then a Palestinian, and then a Christian.
On another level, Hamas has always demonstrated respect for Christmas religious festivities. In December 2003, they were the first to organize an assistance package and donations to families whose houses were damaged by the Israeli Defence Forces in Rafah. The movement went even further and on Christmas Eve 2003 when several officials dressed up as Santa Claus and distributed presents to Christian children in Bethlehem. Another example of the tolerance and respect between the two communities was when Declaration number 67 was issued by Hamas in 1990, cancelling a general strike which coincided with the religious Christmas holidays.
Another issue which is frequently discussed in the media is whether or not Hamas is encroaching upon women's rights in the Gaza strip. Calls to ban male hairdressers from cutting women's hair and a ruling stating that female lawyers had to cover their hair when acting in civil courts were denounced by many in the international community. However, even though, to some extent, the atmosphere in the region is more conservative, these measures were not approved of by the majority of the population and were therefore never implemented. Hana Afana, a 24 year old trainee maths teacher explains how Hamas is imposing a religious code, and how what is really worrying for the women in the region is the siege and the economic situation. Qualified professionals and graduates like her find themselves unable to find a job. According to Mona Ahmad al-Shawa, who runs the women's unit at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, basic human rights such as access to electricity, running water and medical treatment are what women want.
Muslims and Christians in Palestine are not just bonded at the playground or in the spiritual sphere. They share the sheer disappointment with the Oslo process and the rampant corruption of the Palestinian Authority, which has misappropriated billions of dollars worth of aid from the international community. Hamas winning the elections in the territories reflected the disillusionment of Palestinians, and was a natural reaction to their dissatisfaction. Often regarded as a military organization, the movement engages well beyond its military wing. It runs a network of social, educational, health and economic services, especially in Gaza. Christians in Bethlehem and Ramallah, tired of the PA's corruption and sex scandals, were not afraid to vote for Hamas.
Collaboration between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Israeli State - "The Holy Land is not for Sale or Lease"
The Palestinian Authority is, however, not the only one accused of corruption and scandalous transactions, and there seems to be internal strife between the different Palestinian Christian communities. The Greek Orthodox Church has been portrayed as collaborating with Israel since 1967, due to its involvement in land and political disputes. The Orthodox Church is the biggest private owner of land in Jerusalem and owns most of the land in the West Bank on which the Christian religious sites, including the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem where Christians believe Jesus was born, are built. Much of this land was donated to it by Orthodox Christian Palestinians in the late 1800s. Over the last few decades the church has increased land sales to the Israeli authorities or leased land to them for a period of 999 years. Examples of these transactions include the sale of St. John's property in the Christian quarter on 11th April 1990, the transfer of fifty dunams near Mar Elias monastery, and the sale of two hotels and twenty seven stores on Omar Bin Al-Khattab square near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The church's land sales have come against a background of corruption allegations. Nicholas Papadimas, a previous church treasurer in Jerusalem, was involved some of the sales before he fled the country and was charged in Greece with stealing church funds in a separate case. On being appointed as patriarch in 2005, Theophilos had promised to stop selling Palestinian land, but he was also involved in many shady undertakings with Israel. The current patriarch, Irineos, has also been accused of being behind secret land deals with two international Jewish investment groups.
Another source of tension comes from the fact that the Greek clergy do not allow Arab clergymen from rising in the church. This is the case of the prominent Palestinian Christian clergyman, Abdullah Hanaa. On the 13th of November 2009, Theofilos removed Abdullah from his position as the deputy head from the Orthodox Church. This resulted in widespread condemnation from the Palestinian Greek Orthodox Community, who demonstrated in their thousands in the streets of Ramallah.
The Israeli authorities have used the church's corruption and financial difficulties to their political advantage and applied additional political pressure to ensure that the choice of patriarchs is beneficial to Israel's land acquisition policies. One of the church's Jerusalem properties was purchased by Israel with the involvement of the Ateret Cohanim association which is dedicated to buying Arab property in Jerusalem and settling Jews there.
Both the Christian and Muslim Palestinian communities have suffered at the hands of the Occupation. Excavations near the gate of Maryam in the Western Wall of the Church of the Sepulchre in November 2009 are a recent example of this. Far from collaborating with the Israeli entity, the struggle against the occupation should unite not only the different Christian Churches, but also the Muslim community.
Conclusion
According to Hanna Massad, pastor of Gaza Baptist Church, "The last 5 years have been very difficult for all the Palestinians - Muslims and Christians". Gaza Baptist Church is one of only three churches serving the 4,000 Christians living among the Gaza Strip's 1.5 million inhabitants. Hanna explains how the siege united the community. Because of the lack of basic food, Christian charities have provided food for families, 99% of which are Muslim. During the 2009 bombings, "the church ceiling fell down up to 6 times".
The plight of the Palestinian Christian is very much connected to that of the Palestinian Muslim in that both, whether in the Occupied Territories or inside Israel itself, are experiencing daily injustices at the hands of oppressive and discriminatory policies imposed on them by the Israeli government. The conflict is therefore not between Muslims and Christians; nor between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Palestinian Christians; it is between Palestinians as a whole and Israel's occupation and apartheid establishment. It is indeed hard to be Palestinian Christian. But it is equally hard being a Palestinian Muslim.
It is hard simply being a Palestinian.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Why hard-line Islam is winning
Why hard-line Islam is winning
By Hans Rustad on Juni 22, 2010 12:08 EM | Permalink | Comments (1)
By Roy Brown
Since the Iranian revolution of 1979 Islam has become far more assertive world-wide. The Iranian revolution showed the Muslim world that Muslims could shake off the “yoke of western economic imperialism” and become the masters of their own fate. But more importantly, Saudi Arabia suddenly woke up to the threat on their doorstep and since the Iranian revolution has spent billions of dollars in promoting its own version of hard-line Islamism world wide.
The Saudi regime is kept in place through a bargain struck with the Wahabis, the dominant sect in Saudi Arabia. The deal is simple: the family can enjoy their jet-setting western life-style, but the quid pro quo is that they spend much of the nation’s oil wealth on promoting Islam – Wahabi Islam.
According to estimates we saw back in 2004, Saudi Arabia spent between 60 and 100 billion dollars on this project between 1980 and 2004 – a process that someone – quite accurately in my opinion – called “stealth jihad”. We believe the Saudi regime is still subsidizing hard-line Islamism to the tune of $8 to $10 billion annually.
First they poured money into the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (the OIC) which represents the 57 Islamic States, and has become the most influential power block at the United Nations where they have succeeded in silencing any criticism of human rights abuse in the Islamic world.
I shall come back to the influence of the OIC at the United Nations in a moment.
Since the early 1980s the Saudis have been supporting local and national Islamic organisations around the world. The support the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR in the United States and Canada, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Geneva Islamic information centre, home of the Ramadan brothers, and a myriad mosques and Islamic information centres around the world.
But most insidiously of all, they have been using their money and influence to replace liberal, moderate leadership in mosques by hard-line imams. Over half of the mosques in England are now controlled by the Deoband – a hard-line Islamist cult that originated in India. Over half the mosques in France are now controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and their sympathisers. I heard just this week in Geneva that over the past 20 years the Saudis have been quietly offering financial support to mosques in India provided they changed their imams to someone approved by them. I have no information on what has been happening in Scandinavia but I would be very surprised if things here were very different.
A new Islamic assertiveness
Right across Europe we are seeing worrying signs of a new Islamic assertiveness: condemnation by self-appointed Islamic leaders of every perceived insult to Islam, demands for special treatment for Muslims in schools, hospitals and the workplace, and for the acceptance of Shari’a law for the settlement of family disputes. But this phenomenon is not confined to Europe. It is part of a global campaign, orchestrated by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the OIC, for the world-wide acceptance and adoption of Islamic norms and values.
For the past 20 years, the OIC has been pushing for international recognition of a unique and special status for their particular hard-line interpretation of Islam.
Their first step was the adoption in 1990 of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam[1], a document which the OIC claims is “complementary” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[2] but which actually turns the Universal Declaration on its head, replacing individual rights by “rights” based exclusively on Shari’a law.
When I presented a paper at the UN Human Rights Council in March 2008 on behalf of IHEU, highlighting the incompatibility between the Cairo Declaration and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [3], I was stopped on a point of order by the Pakistani delegate who said that “any discussion of Shari’a law in this forum is insulting to our faith”. This extraordinary objection was actually upheld by the president of the Council [4]. If threats to the universality of human rights cannot be addressed in the world’s supreme human rights body, where can they be discussed?
The OIC have since announced plans for an Islamic Charter of Human Rights based on the Cairo Declaration, and a new international Islamic Human Rights body for which the OIC is seeking, and will probably obtain, UN recognition [5]. Should they succeed the UN will have accepted that the Universal Declaration no longer applies to more than one billion of our fellow human beings living in the Islamic States.
Resolutions in the Human Rights Council
But the ambitions of the OIC are not restricted to their own countries. Every year since 1999 they have introduced resolutions in the Human Rights Council and, since 2006 in the UN General Assembly, “Combating Defamation of Religion”, with the objective of restricting all negative comment about religion, Islam in particular. Every year these non-binding resolutions have been adopted by the Human Rights Council with a comfortable two to one majority, with only the liberal democracies among the 47 member states of the Council voting against. When this resolution was first introduced in the UN General Assembly it was adopted by a similarly impressive majority. Freedom of expression - and the idea that criticism of Islam should be permissible – is anathema to the Islamic States, and combating defamation of religion has been their weapon of choice in their fight against that freedom. But the western liberal democracies, and every child of the Enlightenment, understand that it is freedom of expression that underpins all our other human rights. Without freedom of expression, how are we to expose and challenge tyranny, corruption and intolerance in all its forms? One hopeful sign, however, is that support for these resolutions has been declining in the UN General Assembly every year since 2006, as a result, no doubt, of the massive negative publicity that the concept of defamation of religion has attracted from NGOs and western delegations [6].
In their latest moves this year, the OIC has begun pushing for additional “complementary” clauses in the legally binding Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, the CERD, that would extend protection to religions (for which read “Islam”) thereby making defamation of religion, or blasphemy, a criminal offence under international law.
And just two days ago they pushed through a change to the mandate to the special rapporteur on freedom of expression requiring that defender of freedom to report on abuses of that freedom – to report, in fact, on cases of Islamophoia!
They are winning
However unreasonable the demands of the hard-liners might seem, and how alien to our way of life and values, they are winning the war in the UN and in many western states as well. One of their key strategies has been to label any criticism of Islam or Islamic extremism as “Islamophobia”, and to equate it with racism. In this they were strongly supported by the former UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Doudou Diene, a Muslim from Senegal, who during his term of office succeeded in ignoring every manifestation of the endemic anti-Semitism in the Islamic world while focusing almost exclusively on Islamophobia, which he described as “the worst form of racism”. The OIC were, of course, delighted with his statements and have been quoting him endlessly ever since. So all-pervading has been the malign influence of this man that he is still travelling the world advising governments from South East Asia to Northern Europe on how best to counter this phenomenon.
Diene defined Islamophobia as an “irrational fear or hatred of Islam”, so no-one among the hundreds of advocates of freedom of expression that I know can be described as Islamophobic; their fears of radical Islam, far from being irrational, are well founded. But fear of being labeled Islamophobic – and of violent reprisals – seems to have infected governments and the media throughout the western world. We see writers, comedians, politicians, playwrights and film-makers happy to attack Christianity while steering well clear of Islam. The film 2012 released earlier this year is a good example. We can see the Vatican wiped out as the Earth faces extinction, but not the Kabaa in Mecca. Director Roland Emmerich and co-writer Harold Kloser admitted that they “didn’t want a fatwa on their heads because of a film”.
The future
To see what is in store should the Islamists succeed, we need look no further than Iran or Somalia today where, under Sharia law, young people are being executed for crimes committed while they were still children, men and women are being stoned to death for adultery, homosexuals are killed, and girls as young as eight or nine are being forcibly married off to middle-aged men.
The Islamists are skilful at playing the victimisation card. Yes, they are victims – but victims of an Islamic culture that segregates young Muslims from mainstream society, treats girls and young women as the property of their menfolk, and shows disdain and even contempt for the very values that have enabled them to come to Europe and to prosper.
I am certain that if western employers, the media and governments were prepared to stand up for our values, far from finding opposition from the Muslim community they would hear a collective sigh of relief, that they have indeed come to a country that is proud of its values and prepared to defend them. After all, didn’t the parents and grandparents of today’s young Islamic extremists actually come here in search of a better life, away from the perpetual poverty and intolerance of those states where Islam holds sway?
We must oppose every attempt by the Islamists to introduce Islamic values into our society. Those values are totally alien to the values of the Enlightenment on which our modern democratic societies have been built.
We must oppose attempts to create parallel systems of justice. We must fight every step of the way attempts to create Shari’a courts. All of us, whether Humanists, Christians, Hindus, Jews or especially Muslims, must reject Shari’a law because, as the Islamic scholar Hassan Mahmud has said: “Muslims are the first victims of Islamic law.” And, unless we are very, very careful we will be next.
Where are we heading?
Europe is facing immense demographic changes, and many people are worried about what this will mean for European culture and values in the future. I would recommend an article by Eric Kaufmann in the April addition of Prospect Magazine in which he reports on a research project that has produced the first rigorous projections of the religious composition of 16 European countries to the year 2030.
Even assuming European Muslim fertility declines to the level of the indigenous population by 2030 – which seems unlikely given the increasing influence of fundamentalism – then the Muslim population of Sweden will have reached about 14% by 2030, Austria 11% and France 9%. Since most of the immigrants will be living in our largest cities, we can see that many inner cities will have Muslim majority populations even before that date. And if the assumption about declining Muslim fertility rates is wrong, and the present decline in fertility should stop, we could see far higher proportions of Muslims in our populations by 2050.
But whether we like it or not, and whatever we do now, we are faced with the absolute inevitability of an increasingly Muslim population in Europe.
Misguided policies of uncontrolled immigration and multiculturalism have led to the creation of ghettos in our cities with large numbers of unemployed and effectively unemployable young people who fall easy prey to the rhetoric of the fundamentalists.
So what can we do about it?
I would like to start by making a few suggestions that seem to me to be vital and then I would like to ask you for your ideas about what we can reasonably do about it.
First, I would suggest that what we should not do is attempt to return to the imagined ideal of a Christian continent because of our fear of an Islamic takeover. Talk of our Christian heritage is nonsense. Our heritage is the heritage of the Enlightenment; it was the Enlightenment that led our escape from the tyranny and bondage of medieval Christianity. What we need, and the only system that will enable all Europeans to live together in peace and harmony, is Secularism – by which I mean complete state neutrality in matters of religion and belief.
We should start by adopting a policy of zero tolerance towards incitement to hatred and towards preachers of hate. This is crucially important because incitement to hatred has been shown to play on our human capacity to hate injustice, and to turn that hatred into violent action. The genocides of the Holocaust and Rwanda happened because ordinary people were inspired by their leaders to hate those who were perceived as acting unjustly towards them.
We should therefore have no hesitation in acting severely against anyone who incites hatred of any group. And this applies whether the group in question is Jews, Muslims, immigrants, atheists, homosexuals, Christians, or any other. In fact, our governments are obliged under Article 20 of the ICCPR to act in this way, but unfortunately few of them do so consistently; Islamist imams, for example, seem to have a free pass to preach hatred of the West and of Western values in many of Europe’s mosques.
No religion should be permitted to preach hate simply because such hatred appears in their holy texts. Religious belief cannot and must not be allowed to trump human rights or the law of the land.
We also need to make clear the distinction between – on the one hand - incitement to hatred, and on the other, criticism of religion, no matter how crude and vulgar the criticism. Incitement should be outlawed but criticism permitted as part of our precious commitment to freedom of expression. We must make absolutely clear the distinction between the believer and the belief. Believers should have all their human rights protected, but beliefs are fair game – and there is no human right not to be offended.
Harsh though it may seem on the poor and dispossessed, if we are to avoid major conflicts in the future, we do need to limit immigration to the numbers that can be absorbed and assimilated into our societies. We must do far more to help members of the immigrant communities learn the skills they will need to prosper here, but we must also recognize that the numbers we can absorb depends on their cost to society in education, healthcare, social services and, it must be said, security.
We should support Muslim dissidents, apostates and heretics, groups like the Islamic Reform Movement and the Councils of ex-Muslims which now exist in many European states. Last weekend I attended a conference in Oxford called “Critical Thinking for Islamic Reform”. There were about 60 people there, almost all of them believing Muslims, but all of them totally opposed to the hard-liners, Sharia law, the Muslim Brotherhood and the OIC. We hardly ever hear about these Muslims. I left the conference hugely encouraged. But unless reformers become the dominant voice of Islam in Europe we are heading for serious trouble. We must do what we can to help these dissidents.
We should not accept self-censorship. Every time an editor, out of fear, spikes an article or a cartoon that is mocking or critical of Islam or any other religion, we should publicise the fact, and that it was done out of fear, not respect.
We should oppose all attempts by organized religions to obtain special concessions from government. What we allow for Christianity, we cannit reasonably deny to Islam, Hinduism or any other religion.
We should oppose state funding for religious events, for faith schools, tax-breaks for supposedly charitable activities, or attempts to allow religious courts to adjudicate in matters of family law.
We should promote the teaching of critical thinking. I was pleased that when our two youngest children took the International Baccalaureate, one of the compulsory subjects was the “Theory of Knowledge”: that is, a combination of philosophy and critical thinking.
We should promote the teaching of ethics as rooted in an understanding of our shared humanity. All children should be taught comparative religion, including atheism and Humanism, as an antidote to indoctrination – which today runs unchecked in many schools in Europe. The teaching of ethics should be centred on the humanist ideal – shared by many religions – that we are entitled to be treated with dignity, allowed personal autonomy and have equal treatment before the law, and that we should treat others as we wish to be treated.
We need to promote the teaching of science for the non-scientist: an appreciation of the scientific method, of the discoveries of science, and how we know what we think we know. Respect for the scientific, evidence-based approach to life, politics, society and the world around us will go a long way towards the elimination of superstition and undue religious influence in public life.
We need to understand that the history of European civilisation is the history of of the struggle for freedom - and above all for freedom of the mind. We must not allow religion, this time in the guise of Islam, to erode any more of our hard earned freedom.
Thank you
speech, Free Press Society, Copenhagen, 20. of June 2010
Notes:
[1] http://www.religlaw.org/interdocs/docs/cairohrislam1990.htm
[2] http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
[3] http://www.iheu.org/node/3162
[4] http://www.iheu.org/node/3115
[5] http://www.islamtoday.com/showmenews.cfm?cat_id=38⊂_cat_id=2164
[6] http://www.iheu.org/united-nations-will-violate-human-rights-says-new-report-religious-freedoms
Roy W Brown is main representative at the UN Geneva for the International Humanist and Ethical Union
By Hans Rustad on Juni 22, 2010 12:08 EM | Permalink | Comments (1)
By Roy Brown
Since the Iranian revolution of 1979 Islam has become far more assertive world-wide. The Iranian revolution showed the Muslim world that Muslims could shake off the “yoke of western economic imperialism” and become the masters of their own fate. But more importantly, Saudi Arabia suddenly woke up to the threat on their doorstep and since the Iranian revolution has spent billions of dollars in promoting its own version of hard-line Islamism world wide.
The Saudi regime is kept in place through a bargain struck with the Wahabis, the dominant sect in Saudi Arabia. The deal is simple: the family can enjoy their jet-setting western life-style, but the quid pro quo is that they spend much of the nation’s oil wealth on promoting Islam – Wahabi Islam.
According to estimates we saw back in 2004, Saudi Arabia spent between 60 and 100 billion dollars on this project between 1980 and 2004 – a process that someone – quite accurately in my opinion – called “stealth jihad”. We believe the Saudi regime is still subsidizing hard-line Islamism to the tune of $8 to $10 billion annually.
First they poured money into the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (the OIC) which represents the 57 Islamic States, and has become the most influential power block at the United Nations where they have succeeded in silencing any criticism of human rights abuse in the Islamic world.
I shall come back to the influence of the OIC at the United Nations in a moment.
Since the early 1980s the Saudis have been supporting local and national Islamic organisations around the world. The support the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR in the United States and Canada, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Geneva Islamic information centre, home of the Ramadan brothers, and a myriad mosques and Islamic information centres around the world.
But most insidiously of all, they have been using their money and influence to replace liberal, moderate leadership in mosques by hard-line imams. Over half of the mosques in England are now controlled by the Deoband – a hard-line Islamist cult that originated in India. Over half the mosques in France are now controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and their sympathisers. I heard just this week in Geneva that over the past 20 years the Saudis have been quietly offering financial support to mosques in India provided they changed their imams to someone approved by them. I have no information on what has been happening in Scandinavia but I would be very surprised if things here were very different.
A new Islamic assertiveness
Right across Europe we are seeing worrying signs of a new Islamic assertiveness: condemnation by self-appointed Islamic leaders of every perceived insult to Islam, demands for special treatment for Muslims in schools, hospitals and the workplace, and for the acceptance of Shari’a law for the settlement of family disputes. But this phenomenon is not confined to Europe. It is part of a global campaign, orchestrated by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the OIC, for the world-wide acceptance and adoption of Islamic norms and values.
For the past 20 years, the OIC has been pushing for international recognition of a unique and special status for their particular hard-line interpretation of Islam.
Their first step was the adoption in 1990 of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam[1], a document which the OIC claims is “complementary” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[2] but which actually turns the Universal Declaration on its head, replacing individual rights by “rights” based exclusively on Shari’a law.
When I presented a paper at the UN Human Rights Council in March 2008 on behalf of IHEU, highlighting the incompatibility between the Cairo Declaration and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [3], I was stopped on a point of order by the Pakistani delegate who said that “any discussion of Shari’a law in this forum is insulting to our faith”. This extraordinary objection was actually upheld by the president of the Council [4]. If threats to the universality of human rights cannot be addressed in the world’s supreme human rights body, where can they be discussed?
The OIC have since announced plans for an Islamic Charter of Human Rights based on the Cairo Declaration, and a new international Islamic Human Rights body for which the OIC is seeking, and will probably obtain, UN recognition [5]. Should they succeed the UN will have accepted that the Universal Declaration no longer applies to more than one billion of our fellow human beings living in the Islamic States.
Resolutions in the Human Rights Council
But the ambitions of the OIC are not restricted to their own countries. Every year since 1999 they have introduced resolutions in the Human Rights Council and, since 2006 in the UN General Assembly, “Combating Defamation of Religion”, with the objective of restricting all negative comment about religion, Islam in particular. Every year these non-binding resolutions have been adopted by the Human Rights Council with a comfortable two to one majority, with only the liberal democracies among the 47 member states of the Council voting against. When this resolution was first introduced in the UN General Assembly it was adopted by a similarly impressive majority. Freedom of expression - and the idea that criticism of Islam should be permissible – is anathema to the Islamic States, and combating defamation of religion has been their weapon of choice in their fight against that freedom. But the western liberal democracies, and every child of the Enlightenment, understand that it is freedom of expression that underpins all our other human rights. Without freedom of expression, how are we to expose and challenge tyranny, corruption and intolerance in all its forms? One hopeful sign, however, is that support for these resolutions has been declining in the UN General Assembly every year since 2006, as a result, no doubt, of the massive negative publicity that the concept of defamation of religion has attracted from NGOs and western delegations [6].
In their latest moves this year, the OIC has begun pushing for additional “complementary” clauses in the legally binding Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, the CERD, that would extend protection to religions (for which read “Islam”) thereby making defamation of religion, or blasphemy, a criminal offence under international law.
And just two days ago they pushed through a change to the mandate to the special rapporteur on freedom of expression requiring that defender of freedom to report on abuses of that freedom – to report, in fact, on cases of Islamophoia!
They are winning
However unreasonable the demands of the hard-liners might seem, and how alien to our way of life and values, they are winning the war in the UN and in many western states as well. One of their key strategies has been to label any criticism of Islam or Islamic extremism as “Islamophobia”, and to equate it with racism. In this they were strongly supported by the former UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Doudou Diene, a Muslim from Senegal, who during his term of office succeeded in ignoring every manifestation of the endemic anti-Semitism in the Islamic world while focusing almost exclusively on Islamophobia, which he described as “the worst form of racism”. The OIC were, of course, delighted with his statements and have been quoting him endlessly ever since. So all-pervading has been the malign influence of this man that he is still travelling the world advising governments from South East Asia to Northern Europe on how best to counter this phenomenon.
Diene defined Islamophobia as an “irrational fear or hatred of Islam”, so no-one among the hundreds of advocates of freedom of expression that I know can be described as Islamophobic; their fears of radical Islam, far from being irrational, are well founded. But fear of being labeled Islamophobic – and of violent reprisals – seems to have infected governments and the media throughout the western world. We see writers, comedians, politicians, playwrights and film-makers happy to attack Christianity while steering well clear of Islam. The film 2012 released earlier this year is a good example. We can see the Vatican wiped out as the Earth faces extinction, but not the Kabaa in Mecca. Director Roland Emmerich and co-writer Harold Kloser admitted that they “didn’t want a fatwa on their heads because of a film”.
The future
To see what is in store should the Islamists succeed, we need look no further than Iran or Somalia today where, under Sharia law, young people are being executed for crimes committed while they were still children, men and women are being stoned to death for adultery, homosexuals are killed, and girls as young as eight or nine are being forcibly married off to middle-aged men.
The Islamists are skilful at playing the victimisation card. Yes, they are victims – but victims of an Islamic culture that segregates young Muslims from mainstream society, treats girls and young women as the property of their menfolk, and shows disdain and even contempt for the very values that have enabled them to come to Europe and to prosper.
I am certain that if western employers, the media and governments were prepared to stand up for our values, far from finding opposition from the Muslim community they would hear a collective sigh of relief, that they have indeed come to a country that is proud of its values and prepared to defend them. After all, didn’t the parents and grandparents of today’s young Islamic extremists actually come here in search of a better life, away from the perpetual poverty and intolerance of those states where Islam holds sway?
We must oppose every attempt by the Islamists to introduce Islamic values into our society. Those values are totally alien to the values of the Enlightenment on which our modern democratic societies have been built.
We must oppose attempts to create parallel systems of justice. We must fight every step of the way attempts to create Shari’a courts. All of us, whether Humanists, Christians, Hindus, Jews or especially Muslims, must reject Shari’a law because, as the Islamic scholar Hassan Mahmud has said: “Muslims are the first victims of Islamic law.” And, unless we are very, very careful we will be next.
Where are we heading?
Europe is facing immense demographic changes, and many people are worried about what this will mean for European culture and values in the future. I would recommend an article by Eric Kaufmann in the April addition of Prospect Magazine in which he reports on a research project that has produced the first rigorous projections of the religious composition of 16 European countries to the year 2030.
Even assuming European Muslim fertility declines to the level of the indigenous population by 2030 – which seems unlikely given the increasing influence of fundamentalism – then the Muslim population of Sweden will have reached about 14% by 2030, Austria 11% and France 9%. Since most of the immigrants will be living in our largest cities, we can see that many inner cities will have Muslim majority populations even before that date. And if the assumption about declining Muslim fertility rates is wrong, and the present decline in fertility should stop, we could see far higher proportions of Muslims in our populations by 2050.
But whether we like it or not, and whatever we do now, we are faced with the absolute inevitability of an increasingly Muslim population in Europe.
Misguided policies of uncontrolled immigration and multiculturalism have led to the creation of ghettos in our cities with large numbers of unemployed and effectively unemployable young people who fall easy prey to the rhetoric of the fundamentalists.
So what can we do about it?
I would like to start by making a few suggestions that seem to me to be vital and then I would like to ask you for your ideas about what we can reasonably do about it.
First, I would suggest that what we should not do is attempt to return to the imagined ideal of a Christian continent because of our fear of an Islamic takeover. Talk of our Christian heritage is nonsense. Our heritage is the heritage of the Enlightenment; it was the Enlightenment that led our escape from the tyranny and bondage of medieval Christianity. What we need, and the only system that will enable all Europeans to live together in peace and harmony, is Secularism – by which I mean complete state neutrality in matters of religion and belief.
We should start by adopting a policy of zero tolerance towards incitement to hatred and towards preachers of hate. This is crucially important because incitement to hatred has been shown to play on our human capacity to hate injustice, and to turn that hatred into violent action. The genocides of the Holocaust and Rwanda happened because ordinary people were inspired by their leaders to hate those who were perceived as acting unjustly towards them.
We should therefore have no hesitation in acting severely against anyone who incites hatred of any group. And this applies whether the group in question is Jews, Muslims, immigrants, atheists, homosexuals, Christians, or any other. In fact, our governments are obliged under Article 20 of the ICCPR to act in this way, but unfortunately few of them do so consistently; Islamist imams, for example, seem to have a free pass to preach hatred of the West and of Western values in many of Europe’s mosques.
No religion should be permitted to preach hate simply because such hatred appears in their holy texts. Religious belief cannot and must not be allowed to trump human rights or the law of the land.
We also need to make clear the distinction between – on the one hand - incitement to hatred, and on the other, criticism of religion, no matter how crude and vulgar the criticism. Incitement should be outlawed but criticism permitted as part of our precious commitment to freedom of expression. We must make absolutely clear the distinction between the believer and the belief. Believers should have all their human rights protected, but beliefs are fair game – and there is no human right not to be offended.
Harsh though it may seem on the poor and dispossessed, if we are to avoid major conflicts in the future, we do need to limit immigration to the numbers that can be absorbed and assimilated into our societies. We must do far more to help members of the immigrant communities learn the skills they will need to prosper here, but we must also recognize that the numbers we can absorb depends on their cost to society in education, healthcare, social services and, it must be said, security.
We should support Muslim dissidents, apostates and heretics, groups like the Islamic Reform Movement and the Councils of ex-Muslims which now exist in many European states. Last weekend I attended a conference in Oxford called “Critical Thinking for Islamic Reform”. There were about 60 people there, almost all of them believing Muslims, but all of them totally opposed to the hard-liners, Sharia law, the Muslim Brotherhood and the OIC. We hardly ever hear about these Muslims. I left the conference hugely encouraged. But unless reformers become the dominant voice of Islam in Europe we are heading for serious trouble. We must do what we can to help these dissidents.
We should not accept self-censorship. Every time an editor, out of fear, spikes an article or a cartoon that is mocking or critical of Islam or any other religion, we should publicise the fact, and that it was done out of fear, not respect.
We should oppose all attempts by organized religions to obtain special concessions from government. What we allow for Christianity, we cannit reasonably deny to Islam, Hinduism or any other religion.
We should oppose state funding for religious events, for faith schools, tax-breaks for supposedly charitable activities, or attempts to allow religious courts to adjudicate in matters of family law.
We should promote the teaching of critical thinking. I was pleased that when our two youngest children took the International Baccalaureate, one of the compulsory subjects was the “Theory of Knowledge”: that is, a combination of philosophy and critical thinking.
We should promote the teaching of ethics as rooted in an understanding of our shared humanity. All children should be taught comparative religion, including atheism and Humanism, as an antidote to indoctrination – which today runs unchecked in many schools in Europe. The teaching of ethics should be centred on the humanist ideal – shared by many religions – that we are entitled to be treated with dignity, allowed personal autonomy and have equal treatment before the law, and that we should treat others as we wish to be treated.
We need to promote the teaching of science for the non-scientist: an appreciation of the scientific method, of the discoveries of science, and how we know what we think we know. Respect for the scientific, evidence-based approach to life, politics, society and the world around us will go a long way towards the elimination of superstition and undue religious influence in public life.
We need to understand that the history of European civilisation is the history of of the struggle for freedom - and above all for freedom of the mind. We must not allow religion, this time in the guise of Islam, to erode any more of our hard earned freedom.
Thank you
speech, Free Press Society, Copenhagen, 20. of June 2010
Notes:
[1] http://www.religlaw.org/interdocs/docs/cairohrislam1990.htm
[2] http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
[3] http://www.iheu.org/node/3162
[4] http://www.iheu.org/node/3115
[5] http://www.islamtoday.com/showmenews.cfm?cat_id=38⊂_cat_id=2164
[6] http://www.iheu.org/united-nations-will-violate-human-rights-says-new-report-religious-freedoms
Roy W Brown is main representative at the UN Geneva for the International Humanist and Ethical Union
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/22/pan-arab-narrative-myth-lebanon
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/22/pan-arab-narrative-myth-lebanon
Pan-Arab narrative a myth in Lebanon
An apparently racially motivated attack on Sudanese immigrants in Beirut exposes the subtleties of intra-Arab discrimination
Nesrine Malik
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 June 2010 15.30 BST
larger | smaller
Anger towards Lebanon is brewing in Sudan and in Sudanese online forums. According to reports in the Arab media, a fundraising party held by Sudanese immigrants and asylum seekers in Beirut in aid of a child with cancer, was raided by Lebanese security apparently on the hunt for illegal residents.
Eyewitnesses report that although most of those attending produced valid residency cards, this did not spare them from being handcuffed, beaten and racially abused. According to Sudanese and Lebanese newspaper reports (in Arabic), the detainees were referred to as animals who "learned how to wear nice clothes" and "black pieces of coal", and lined up flat on their bellies. Some members of the police, seemingly ignorant of the fact that there are any Arabic-speaking black Arabs, asked some of the Sudanese how they spoke Arabic so fluently. The Sudanese responded that they were Arabs from Sudan. In disbelief, the officers thought that they were being mocked, and another round of beating started.
The Lebanese authorities have launched an investigation, but deny that there was any racial motivation to the raid. On the skin-colour and race spectrum, Sudan is possibly the most African of the Arab League nations. Lebanon on the other hand, or at least the image the country portrays in the media, is fair and Occidental, both in culture and race (Lebanese applicants at my university regularly ticked the "Caucasian" box on application forms). This incident highlights the unspoken, unsettling chasm between the two nations in terms of popular perceptions of different races in the Arab world. While mistreatment of migrant workers attracts coverage, the subtleties of intra-Arab discrimination rarely do.
Lebanon is no stranger to such controversy. Following a plane crash in the country earlier this year, it was reported that "even though there were nine nationalities aboard the Boeing 737 jet, which burst into flames and crashed into the sea minutes after taking off in a violent thunderstorm on Monday morning, the Lebanese, naturally enough, only concerned themselves with one".
The families of Ethiopian migrant workers were segregated into separate rooms and DNA testing and identification of dead bodies was prioritised for Lebanese citizens. Unfortunately, this, in addition to the well-publicised plight of foreign maids in the Lebanon and such insensitivity as manifested in the "Nubian monkey" affair, makes it hard to dismiss this episode as a one-off incident.
Ironically, in an unusual and unique phenomenon of Arab migration to Africa, the Lebanese remain the biggest non-African migrant minority in west Africa. This community goes back as far as the 19th century, spawning a racial sub-category of African-Lebanese mulattoes and amassing riches in Sierra Leone where it has dominated the diamond industry. In a typically colonialist fashion, this embracing of Africans does not seem to apply back home.
However, there is a public pan-Arab narrative to which all states adhere. Meetings of the Arab League are usually sessions elegising, praising and paying homage to the host country's leader and each other.
The meme is that Arabs are all brothers in race, language, history, and anybody who dares suggests otherwise is a turncoat agitator in the pay of the west. Hence, both the Sudanese and Lebanese governments are doing their best to downplay the affair. The Lebanese ambassador in Khartoum even went so far as to praise being black by saying that "priests wear black as a sign of respect and that the Kaaba in Mecca is covered in black silk". As if the slurs were some sort of compliment. The Sudanese ambassador in Lebanon condemned a call to boycott Lebanese products as "sabotage". This is not surprising as Sudan itself does not have a glowing record of treating its non-Arab citizens particularly well. In addition, most Sudanese residents in Lebanon fled from such conditions in Sudan, which does not predispose the Sudanese diplomatic mission to a very sympathetic stance.
Sadly, it is a region where few are innocent. Northern Sudan, which dominates the rest of the country politically and culturally, has since independence downplayed its African heritage and amplified its Arab and Muslim character, subscribing to the popular perception that Arabs are superior to Africans. Needless to say, according to statements on behalf of the Lebanese and Sudanese governments, this incident "will not affect the fraternal relations between the two nations".
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Pan-Arab narrative a myth in Lebanon
An apparently racially motivated attack on Sudanese immigrants in Beirut exposes the subtleties of intra-Arab discrimination
Nesrine Malik
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 June 2010 15.30 BST
larger | smaller
Anger towards Lebanon is brewing in Sudan and in Sudanese online forums. According to reports in the Arab media, a fundraising party held by Sudanese immigrants and asylum seekers in Beirut in aid of a child with cancer, was raided by Lebanese security apparently on the hunt for illegal residents.
Eyewitnesses report that although most of those attending produced valid residency cards, this did not spare them from being handcuffed, beaten and racially abused. According to Sudanese and Lebanese newspaper reports (in Arabic), the detainees were referred to as animals who "learned how to wear nice clothes" and "black pieces of coal", and lined up flat on their bellies. Some members of the police, seemingly ignorant of the fact that there are any Arabic-speaking black Arabs, asked some of the Sudanese how they spoke Arabic so fluently. The Sudanese responded that they were Arabs from Sudan. In disbelief, the officers thought that they were being mocked, and another round of beating started.
The Lebanese authorities have launched an investigation, but deny that there was any racial motivation to the raid. On the skin-colour and race spectrum, Sudan is possibly the most African of the Arab League nations. Lebanon on the other hand, or at least the image the country portrays in the media, is fair and Occidental, both in culture and race (Lebanese applicants at my university regularly ticked the "Caucasian" box on application forms). This incident highlights the unspoken, unsettling chasm between the two nations in terms of popular perceptions of different races in the Arab world. While mistreatment of migrant workers attracts coverage, the subtleties of intra-Arab discrimination rarely do.
Lebanon is no stranger to such controversy. Following a plane crash in the country earlier this year, it was reported that "even though there were nine nationalities aboard the Boeing 737 jet, which burst into flames and crashed into the sea minutes after taking off in a violent thunderstorm on Monday morning, the Lebanese, naturally enough, only concerned themselves with one".
The families of Ethiopian migrant workers were segregated into separate rooms and DNA testing and identification of dead bodies was prioritised for Lebanese citizens. Unfortunately, this, in addition to the well-publicised plight of foreign maids in the Lebanon and such insensitivity as manifested in the "Nubian monkey" affair, makes it hard to dismiss this episode as a one-off incident.
Ironically, in an unusual and unique phenomenon of Arab migration to Africa, the Lebanese remain the biggest non-African migrant minority in west Africa. This community goes back as far as the 19th century, spawning a racial sub-category of African-Lebanese mulattoes and amassing riches in Sierra Leone where it has dominated the diamond industry. In a typically colonialist fashion, this embracing of Africans does not seem to apply back home.
However, there is a public pan-Arab narrative to which all states adhere. Meetings of the Arab League are usually sessions elegising, praising and paying homage to the host country's leader and each other.
The meme is that Arabs are all brothers in race, language, history, and anybody who dares suggests otherwise is a turncoat agitator in the pay of the west. Hence, both the Sudanese and Lebanese governments are doing their best to downplay the affair. The Lebanese ambassador in Khartoum even went so far as to praise being black by saying that "priests wear black as a sign of respect and that the Kaaba in Mecca is covered in black silk". As if the slurs were some sort of compliment. The Sudanese ambassador in Lebanon condemned a call to boycott Lebanese products as "sabotage". This is not surprising as Sudan itself does not have a glowing record of treating its non-Arab citizens particularly well. In addition, most Sudanese residents in Lebanon fled from such conditions in Sudan, which does not predispose the Sudanese diplomatic mission to a very sympathetic stance.
Sadly, it is a region where few are innocent. Northern Sudan, which dominates the rest of the country politically and culturally, has since independence downplayed its African heritage and amplified its Arab and Muslim character, subscribing to the popular perception that Arabs are superior to Africans. Needless to say, according to statements on behalf of the Lebanese and Sudanese governments, this incident "will not affect the fraternal relations between the two nations".
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Anti-Islam ad belongs on buses, court is told
Posted: June 22, 2010
Anti-Islam ad belongs on
buses, court is told
BY NIRAJ WARIKOO
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
An Ann Arbor group announced Monday it has
filed a request with a federal court seeking to
require a metro Detroit bus agency to run ads
aimed at Muslims who want to leave Islam.
The Thomas More Law Center, a conservative
legal group, filed a motion for a temporary
restraining order on Thursday that asks a federal
judge to side with a New Hampshire-based
group that often criticizes Islam. The Thomas
More center had filed a lawsuit against SMART
last month on behalf of the American Freedom
Defense Initiative, Pamela Geller of New York
and Robert Spencer of New Hampshire. The
plaintiffs are critics of Islamic extremism.
A SMART spokeswoman did not give any
explanation as to why the bus agency refused to
run the ad.
Robert Muise, an attorney with the Thomas More
center, said the bus agency is a government
entity and so it violated the First Amendment by
not allowing the ad to run. He said that similar
ads have run on buses in Florida and New York.
The ads read: "Fatwa on your head? Is your
family or community threatening you? Leaving
Islam? Got Questions? Get Answers!"
Muise noted that SMART had run an ad earlier
this year by an atheist group that read: "Don't
Believe in God? You are not alone." Muise said
that decision shows there is a double standard in
SMART's policies. He said that SMART's own
policy says it may "not censor free speech" and
is "required to provide equal access to
advertising."
Local Muslim leaders support SMART's decision.
"They surely have the prerogative to deny
carrying anti-Muslim ads in a locality which has
one of the largest Muslim populations in North
America," said Dawud Walid, head of the
Michigan branch of the Council on American-
Islamic Relations.
Contact NIRAJ WARIKOO: 313-223-4792 or
warikoo@freepress.com
Advertisement
Anti-Islam ad belongs on
buses, court is told
BY NIRAJ WARIKOO
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
An Ann Arbor group announced Monday it has
filed a request with a federal court seeking to
require a metro Detroit bus agency to run ads
aimed at Muslims who want to leave Islam.
The Thomas More Law Center, a conservative
legal group, filed a motion for a temporary
restraining order on Thursday that asks a federal
judge to side with a New Hampshire-based
group that often criticizes Islam. The Thomas
More center had filed a lawsuit against SMART
last month on behalf of the American Freedom
Defense Initiative, Pamela Geller of New York
and Robert Spencer of New Hampshire. The
plaintiffs are critics of Islamic extremism.
A SMART spokeswoman did not give any
explanation as to why the bus agency refused to
run the ad.
Robert Muise, an attorney with the Thomas More
center, said the bus agency is a government
entity and so it violated the First Amendment by
not allowing the ad to run. He said that similar
ads have run on buses in Florida and New York.
The ads read: "Fatwa on your head? Is your
family or community threatening you? Leaving
Islam? Got Questions? Get Answers!"
Muise noted that SMART had run an ad earlier
this year by an atheist group that read: "Don't
Believe in God? You are not alone." Muise said
that decision shows there is a double standard in
SMART's policies. He said that SMART's own
policy says it may "not censor free speech" and
is "required to provide equal access to
advertising."
Local Muslim leaders support SMART's decision.
"They surely have the prerogative to deny
carrying anti-Muslim ads in a locality which has
one of the largest Muslim populations in North
America," said Dawud Walid, head of the
Michigan branch of the Council on American-
Islamic Relations.
Contact NIRAJ WARIKOO: 313-223-4792 or
warikoo@freepress.com
Advertisement
Monday, June 21, 2010
QURAN'S PROTOCOLS FOR TOTAL WARS
QURAN'S PROTOCOLS FOR TOTAL WARShare
Today at 10:38am
NOTES TO THE READER
1. The quotations listed by chapter and verse in this document are taken from the authorised translation of the QURAN sponsored, financed, and distributed world-wide by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Care has been taken not to quote any injunction or precept out of context. The verses are quoted in their traditional order, for ease of reference to the original Arabic as well as to other translations.
The translation helpfully uses square brackets, [for the identification of Jews and Christians, for instance] and explanatory parentheses; these have been retained in the quotations and no additional comments or notes have been inserted except where shown in italics. The grammar, spelling and punctuation of this translation have also been retained.
2. While reflecting on these excerpts, the reader has to bear in mind that, to the faithful, the Holy Book of Islam is the transcript of a tablet preserved in Heaven, eternal and immutable, the final expression of Allah's will; the speaker throughout is Allah. Hence the enormity of the practical implications of its teachings.
3. In recent years, much has been heard about 'Islam' as a religion of compassion and peace. With the exception of scholars and students of comparative religion, no one in the West has really taken the trouble to study or read the Quran from cover to cover; none of the Christian, Jewish or others, considered to be 'Unbelieving' religious authorities (Hindus, Buddhists, Animists, Atheists, etc), one has spoken to, has claimed to have any but the most superficial and fragmentary knowledge of its contents.
They certainly had no idea about the contemptuous anti-'Unbelievers', anti-Christian and anti-Jewish dogmas it contains. Most Jews, and certainly most Christians and other 'Unbelievers', have no idea that the Quran is a veritable, relentless tirade against all of them. As will be seen from the following pages, the Quran can only be described as a 'Gospel' of hate.
4. The proposed new UK legislation against incitement to religious hatred has been designed, we are told,
"to protect Muslims from religious hatred"; that is why it is being vociferously welcomed by the
Council of British Muslims.
The Quran does not only incite, but also preaches explicit hatred against Christians, Jews and all other non-Muhammadan Muslims (Unbelievers). Will the new legislation protect the majority of the people of this country from the hatred preached by the imams in Britain's over twelve hundred mosques every Friday?
5. It would be interesting to obtain a legal opinion as to whether the open incitement contained in these Quranic precepts, falls within the remit of the proposed legislation?
6. The tragic fact is, that most decent human beings, find it almost impossible to believe, that an alleged holy book, such as the Quran, could possibly contain so much hatred, anger, injustice and immorality.
The inability of ordinary decent people to comprehend, let alone accept the reality, of the totally depraved indifference that is shown by the Quran, towards all human life in general, but vis a vis the 'UNBELIEVERS' in particular, is beyond their imagining.
That is why, I have attempted to put together, most of the relevant warmongering, hatemongering and insulting verses of the Quran under one single heading.
Anyone who has studied the Quran, will know that none of them has been taken out of context, changed, perverted or tampered with. Those who have not read or studied Quran, can easily verify the veracity of the following verses by actually reading them.
In summation, in the year 622AD, the first warmongering verse was 'revealed', that which is called
'The Sword Verse'
9:" 5 But when the forbidden months are past then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them and seize them beleaguer them and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-Forgiving Most Merciful"
Muhammad in his Quran, declared total and eternal WAR, against all those who do not believe (UNBELIEVERS) in 'Allah AND in Muhammad as his messenger'.
Those who are not followers of the CULT of Muhammad, are given three choices:
1 Convert and be saved.
2 Submit, to eternal and utter humiliation for the peoples of the Book, such as the Jews, Christians and Zoroasterians.
3 Death, enslavement and forced conversion, to be inflicted upon: Hindus, Buddhists, Animists, Atheists and the like.
It is left to the reader, after investigating, comparing and contrasting the Quran, the Bible and other available references, to make up one's own mind
QUOTATIONS BY CHAPTER AND VERSE FROM
THE TRANSLATION OF THE QURAN
SANCTIONED BY THE HIGHEST RELIGIOUS MUSLIM AUTHORITIES
IN SAUDI ARABIA
------------------------------------------
Qur'an 2:39 "Those who disbelieve and reject Our revelations are the dwellers of the Fire, they shall abide therein forever."
Qur'an 2:59 "But the transgressors [the Jews] changed the word from that which had been told to them for another, so We sent upon the wrongdoers a punishment from the heaven because of their rebelling against Allah's obedience.
Qur'an 2:65 "And indeed you [Jews] knew those among you who transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath. We [Allah] said to them: "Be you monkeys, despised and rejected."
Qur'an 2:67 "And remember when Moses said to his people: 'Verily, Allah commands you that you slaughter a cow.' (The 'story' of the cow - which has no basis in the Bible - follows, which tells the faithful how the Jews attempted, unsuccessfully, to deceive and outwit Allah: 67-73)"
Qur'an 2:74 "Then after that your hearts [Jews] were hardened and became as stones or even worse in hardness. And indeed, there are stones out of which rivers gush forth and indeed, there are stones which split asunder so that water flows from them, and indeed, there are stones which fall down for fear of Allah. And Allah is not unaware of what you do."
Qur'an 2:77 "Know they [Jews] not that Allah knows what they conceal and what they reveal?"
Qur'an 2:80 "And they [Jews] say, 'Hell-fire shall not touch us but for a few hundred days.' Say (O Muhammad): Have you taken a covenant from Allah, so that Allah will not break his covenant? Or is it that you say of Allah what you know not?"
Qur'an 2:85: "Then do you [Jews] believe in a part of the Scripture and reject the rest? Then what is the recompense of those who do so among you, except disgrace in the life of this world, and on the Day of Resurrection they shall be consigned to the most grievous torment.
Qur'an 2:86 "Their torment [the Jews] shall not be lightened nor shall they be helped."
Qur'an 2:87 "And indeed, we gave Moses the Book and followed him up with a succession of Messengers ... Is it that whenever there came to you [Jews] a Messenger with what you yourselves desired not, you grew arrogant? Some, you disbelieved and some, you killed."
Qur'an 2:88 "And they [the Jews] say: 'Our hearts are wrapped' (i.e., do not hear or understand Allah's Word.) Nay, Allah has cursed them for their disbelief, so little is that which they believe."
Qur'an 2:89 "And when there came to them [the Jews], a Book (this Qur'an) from Allah confirming what is with them [the Torah and Gospel], although aforetime they had invoked Allah (for coming of Muhammad) in order to gain victory over those who disbelieved, then when there came to them that which they had recognised, they disbelieved in it. So let the Curse of Allah be on the disbelievers."
Qur'an 2:92 "And indeed Moses came to you [Jews] with clear proofs, yet you worshipped the calf after he left, and you were wrongdoers."
Qur'an 2:94 "Say to them [the Jews]: 'If the Home of the hereafter with Allah is indeed for you especially and not for others, of mankind, then long for death if you are truthful.'
Qur'an 2:95 "But they will never long for it because of what their hands have done. And Allah is All-Aware of the wrongdoers.
Qur'an 2:96 "And verily, you will find them [the Jews] the greediest of mankind for life and (even greedier) than those who ascribe partners to Allah. Everyone of them wishes that he could be given a life of a thousand years but the grant of such life will not save him even a little from (due) punishment. And Allah is All-Seer of what they do."
Qur'an 2:116 "And they [the Christians] say: 'Allah has begotten a son'. Glory be to Him! Nay, to Him belongs that is in the heavens and on earth, and all surrender with obedience to Him."
Qur'an 2:159 "Verily, those [the Jews and the Christians] who conceal the clear proofs, evidences and the guidance, which We have sent down, after We have made it clear for the people in the Book, they are the ones cursed by Allah and cursed by the cursers."
Qur'an 2:161 "Verily, those who disbelieve, and die while they are disbelievers, it is they on whom is the Curse of Allah and of the angels and of mankind, combined.
Qur'an 2:162 "They will abide therein [under the curse in Hell], their punishment will neither be lightened nor will they be reprieved."
Qur'an 2:191 "And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. Disbelief is worse than killing. And fight not with them at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there. But if they attack you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers."
Qur'an 3:10 "Verily, those who disbelieve, neither their properties nor their offspring will avail them whatsoever against Allah; and it is they who will be fuel of the Fire."
Qur'an 3:12 "Say to those who disbelieve: 'You will be defeated and gathered together to Hell, and worst indeed is that place to rest'."
Qur'an 3:56 "As to those who disbelieve, I [Allah] will punish them with a severe torment in this world and in the Hereafter, and they will have no helpers."
Qur'an 3:61 "Then whoever disputes with you concerning him [Jesus] after all the knowledge that has come to you [i.e. Jesus being a slave of Allah and having no share in Divinity] say: 'Come, let us call our sons and your sons, our women and your women, ourselves and yourselves - then we pray and invoke the Curse of Allah upon those who lie [who believe Jesus is the son of Allah]'."
Qur'an 3:69 "A party of the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) wish to lead you astray. But they shall not lead astray anyone except themselves, and they perceive not."
Qur'an 3:70 "O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]: Why do you disbelieve in the revelations of Allah while you yourselves bear witness to their truth?"
Qur'an 3:71 "O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]: Why do you mix truth with false thoughts and conceal the truth while you know?"
Qur'an 3:75 "Among the people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians] is he who, if entrusted with a great amount of wealth, will readily pay it back; and among them there is he who, if entrusted with a single silver coin, will not repay it unless you constantly stand demanding, because they say: 'There is no blame on us to betray and take the properties of the illiterates (Arabs).' But they tell a lie against Allah while they know it."
Qur'an 3:78 "And verily, among them [Jews and Christians] is a party who distort the Book with their tongues, so that you may think it is from the Book, but it is not from the Book, and they say: 'This is from Allah,' but it is not from Allah; and they speak a lie against Allah while they know it."
Qur'an 3:85 "And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers."
Qur'an 3:87 "They [disbelievers] are those whose recompense is that on them rests the Curse of Allah, of the angels, and of all mankind.
Qur'an 3:88 "They will abide in Hell. Neither will their torment be lightened, nor will it be delayed or postponed."
Qur'an 3:100 "O you who believe! If you obey a group of those who were given the Scripture [Jews and Christians], they would indeed render you disbelievers after you have believed!"
Qur'an 3:110 "You [Muslims] are the best of peoples ever raised up for mankind; you enjoin [the ordinances of Islam] and forbid all that Islam has forbidden and you believe in Allah. And had the people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians] believed, it would have been better for them; among them are some who have faith, but most of them are wrongdoers."
Qur'an 3:118 "O you who believe! Take not as your friends those outside your religion [Jews and Christians] since they will not fail to do their best to corrupt you. They desire to harm you severely. Hatred has already appeared from their mouths, but what their breasts conceal is far worse. Indeed We have made plain to you the revelations, if you understand."
Qur'an 3:119 "Lo! You are the ones who love them [Jews and Christians] but they love you not, and you believe in all the Scriptures while they disbelieve in your Book. And when they meet you, they say, 'We believe.' But when they are alone they bite the tips of their fingers at you in rage. Say: 'Perish in your rage.' Certainly, Allah knows all the secrets in the breasts."
Qur'an 3:151 "We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, because they [Christians] join others in worship with Allah, for which He had sent no authority; their abode will be the Fire and how evil is the abode of the wrong doers."
Qur'an 3:181 "Indeed, Allah has heard the statement of those [Jews] who say: 'Truly, Allah is poor and we are rich!' We shall record what they have said and their killing of the Prophets unjustly, and we shall say: 'Taste you the torment of the burning Fire'".
Qur'an 4:14 "And whosoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger and transgresses His limits, He will cast him into the Fire, to abide therein; and he shall have a disgraceful torment."
Qur'an 4:46 "Among those who are Jews, there are some who displace words from (their) right places and say: 'We hear your word and disobey.' ... But Allah has cursed them for their disbelief, so they believe not except a few."
Qur'an 4:47 "O you who have been given the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! Believe in what We have revealed confirming what is (already) with you, before we efface faces (by making them like the back of necks; without nose, mouth, eyes, etc.) and turn them hindwards, or curse them as We cursed the Sabbath-breakers. And the Commandment of Allah is always executed."
Qur'an 4:48 "Verily, Allah forgives not that partners [Jesus as son of God] should be set up with Him in worship, and whoever sets up partners with Allah in worship, he has indeed invented a tremendous sin."
Qur'an 4:50 "Look, how they [Christians] invent a lie against Allah, and enough is that as a manifest sin."
Qur'an 4:51 "Have you not seen those who were given a portion of the Scripture [the Bible]? They believe in false gods and idols and say to the disbelievers that they are better guided as regards the way than the believers (Muslims)."
Qur'an 4:52 "They [Jews and Christians] are those whom Allah has cursed, and he whom Allah curses, you will not find for him any helper."
Qur'an 4:55 "Of them [Jews and Christians] were some who believed in him (Muhammad - peace be upon him) and of them were some who averted their faces from him; and enough is Hell for burning them."
Qur'an 4:56 "Surely! Those who disbelieve in Our Revelations We shall burn them in Fire. As often as their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for other skins that they may taste the punishment. Truly, Allah is Ever Most Powerful, All-Wise."
Qur'an 4:74 "Let those believers who sell the life of this world for the Hereafter fight in the Cause of Allah, and whoso fights in the Cause of Allah and is killed or gets victory, We shall bestow on him a great reward."
Qur'an 4:76 "Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the Cause of Satan. So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble indeed is the plot of Satan."
Qur'an 4:82 "Do they not then consider the Qur'an carefully? Had it been from other than Allah, they would surely have found therein much contradictions."
Qur'an 4:84 "Then fight (O Muhammad) in the Cause of Allah and incite the believers (to fight along with you), it may be that Allah will restrain the evil might of the disbelievers. And Allah is Stronger in Might and Stronger in Punishing."
Qur'an 4:89 "They wish that you reject Faith, as they have rejected, and thus that you all become equal. So take not friends from them, till they emigrate in the Way of Allah. But if they turn back (from Islam) take hold of them and kill them wherever you find them, and take neither friends nor helpers from them."
Qur'an 4:93 "And whoever kills a believer [Muhammadan Muslim] intentionally, his recompense is Hell to abide therein, and the Wrath and the Curse of Allah are upon him, and a great punishment is prepared for him."
Qur'an 4:115 "And whoever contradicts and opposes the Messenger after the right path has been shown clearly to him, and follows other than the believers' way, We shall keep him in the path he has chosen, and burn him in Hell - what an evil destination."
Qur'an 4:153 "The people of the Scripture [Jews] ask you to cause a book to descend upon them from heaven. Indeed they asked Moses for even greater than that, when they said: 'Show us Allah in public,' but they were struck with thunder-clap and lightning for their wickedness. Then they worshipped the calf even after clear signs had come to them."
Qur'an 4:155 "Because of their breaking the covenant, and their rejecting the revelations of Allah, and of their killing the Prophets unjustly, and of their saying: 'Our hearts are wrapped' - nay, Allah has set a seal upon their hearts because of their disbelief, so they believe not but a little.
Qur'an 4:156 "And because of their disbelief and uttering against Mary a grave false charge;
Qur'an 4:157 "And because of their saying, 'We killed Messiah Jesus son of Mary, the messenger of Allah', - but they killed him not, nor crucified him but the resemblance of Jesus was put over another man, and those who differ therein are full of doubts. They have no knowledge, they follow nothing but conjecture. For surely; they killed him not."
Qur'an 4:160 "For the wrong-doing of the Jews, We made unlawful to them certain good foods which has [sic] been lawful to them, and for their hindering many from Allah's Way;
Qur'an 4:161 "And their taking of usury though they were forbidden from taking it and their devouring of men's substance wrongfully (bribery, etc.). And We have prepared for the disbelievers among them a painful torment."
Qur'an 4:171 "O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! Do not exceed the limits in your religion, nor say of Allah aught but the truth. The Messiah Jesus son of Mary was (no more than) a Messenger of Allah and His Word which He bestowed on Mary and a spirit created by Him; so believe in Allah and His Messenger. Say not: 'Three!' Cease! It is better for you. For Allah is one God, Far Exalted is He above having a son."
Qur'an 5:13 "So because of their [the Jews'] breach of their covenant, We cursed them and made their hearts grow hard. They change the words from their (right) places and have abandoned a good part of the Message that was sent to them and you will not cease to discover deceit in them, except a few of them."
Qur'an 5:14 "And from those who call themselves Christians, We took their covenant, but they have abandoned a good part of the Message that was sent to them. So We planted amongst them enmity and hatred till the Day of Resurrection, and Allah will inform them of what they used to do."
Qur'an 5:17 "Surely, in disbelief are they who say that Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary."
Qur'an 5:18 "And both the Jews and the Christians say: 'We are the children of Allah and His loved ones.' Say: 'Why then does He punish you for your sins?' Nay, you are but human beings of those He has created, He forgives whom He wills and He punishes whom He wills."
Qur'an 5:33 "The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and his Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on the opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter."
Qur'an 5:55 "O you who believe! Do your duty to Allah and fear Him. Seek the means of approach to Him, and go on a Jihad in His Cause as much as you can. So that you may be successful."
Qur'an 5:38 "Cut off the hand of the thief, male or female, as a recompense for that which they committed, a punishment by way of example from Allah. And Allah is All-Powerful, All-Wise."
Qur'an 5:41 "O Messenger! Let not those who hurry to fall into disbelief grieve you, of such who say: 'We believe' with their mouths but their hearts have no faith. And of the Jews are men who listen much and eagerly to lies - listen to others who have not come to you. They change the words from their places; they say, 'If you are given this, take it, but if you are not given this, then beware!' ... Those are the ones whose hearts Allah does not want to purify; for them there is a disgrace in this world, and in the Hereafter a great torment."
Qur'an 5:51 "O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians as your friends, they are but friends to one another. And if any amongst you takes them as friends, then surely he is one of them. Verily, Allah guides not those people who are wrongdoers."
Qur'an 5:57 "O you who believe! Take not for friends those who take your religion for a mockery and fun from among those who received the Scripture [Jews and Christians] before you, nor from among the disbelievers; and fear Allah if you indeed are true believers."
Qur'an 5:59 "Say: 'O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! Do you criticize us for no other reason than that we believe in Allah, and in the revelation which has been sent down to us and in that which has been sent down before us, and that most of you are rebellious and disobedient to Allah?'"
Qur'an 5:60 "Say (O Muhammad) to the people of the Scripture: 'Shall I inform you of something worse than that, regarding the recompense from Allah: those Jews who incurred the Curse of Allah and His Wrath, those of whom some He transformed into monkeys and swines, those who worshipped false deities; such are worse in rank and far more astray from the Right Path.'"
Qur'an 5:62 "And you see many of them [Jews] hurrying for sin and transgression, and eating illegal things [as bribes, usury, etc.]. Evil indeed is that which they have been doing.
Qur'an 5:63 "Why do not the rabbis and the religious learned men forbid them from uttering sinful words and from eating illegal things. Evil indeed is that which they have been performing."
Qur'an 5:64 "The Jews say: 'Allah's Hand is tied up.' Be their hands tied up and be they accursed for what they uttered. Nay, both His Hands are widely outstretched. He spends of His Bounty as He wills. Verily, the Revelation that has come to you from Allah increases in most of them their obstinate rebellion and disbelief. We have put enmity and hatred amongst them till the Day of Resurrection. Every time they kindled the fire of war Allah extinguished it; and they ever strive to make mischief on earth. And Allah does not like the mischief-makers."
Qur'an 5:66 "And if only they had acted according to the Torah and the Gospel, and what has now been sent down to them from their Lord (the Qur'an), they would surely have gotten provision from above them and from underneath their feet. There are from among them people who are on the right course, but many of them do evil deeds."
Qur'an 5:68 "Say (O Muhammad!): 'O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! You have nothing (as regards guidance) till you act according to the Torah and the Gospel and what has now been sent down to you from your Lord (the Qur'an).' Verily, that which has been sent down to you from your Lord increases in many of them their obstinate rebellion and disbelief. So be not sorrowful over the people who disbelieve."
Qur'an 5:69 "Surely, those who believe, those who are the Jews and the Sabians and the Christians, - whosoever believed in Allah in the Last Day, and worked righteousness, on them shall be no fear nor shall they grieve."
Qur'an 5:70 "Verily, We took the covenant of the Children of Israel and sent them Messengers. Whenever there came to them a Messenger with what they themselves desired not - a group of them they called liars , and others among them they killed."
Qur'an 5:72 "Surely, they have disbelieved who say: 'Allah is the Messiah son of Mary.' But the Messiah said: 'O Children of Israel! Worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord.' Verily, whosoever sets up partners in worship with Allah, then Allah has forbidden Paradise for him, and the Fire will be his abode. And for the wrongdoers there are no helpers."
Qur'an 5:73 "Surely, disbelievers are those who said: 'Allah is the third of the three.' But there is no God but One God. And if they cease not from what they say, verily a painful torment will befall the disbelievers among them."
Qur'an 5:74 "The Messiah son of Mary was no more than a Messenger; many were the messengers that passed away before him. His mother was a true believer. They both used to eat food. Look how We make the revelations clear to them, yet look how they are deluded away."
Qur'an 5:78 "Those among the Children of Israel who disbelieved were cursed by the tongue of David and Jesus son of Mary. That was because they disobeyed (Allah and the Messengers) and were ever transgressing beyond bounds."
Qur'an 5:79 "They used not to forbid one another from the wrongdoing which they committed. Vile indeed was what they used to do."
Qur'an 5:80 "You see many of them taking the disbelievers as their friends. Evil indeed is that which their ownselves have sent forward before them, for that reason Allah's Wrath fell upon them and in torment they will abide."
Qur'an 5:82 "Verily, you will find the strongest among men in enmity to the believers [Muhammadan Muslims] are the Jews and Pagans, and you will find the nearest in love to the believers those who say: 'We are Christians' that is because amongst them are priests and monks, and they are not proud."
Qur'an 5:83 "And when they [Christians] listen to what has been sent down to the Messenger, you see their eyes overflowing with tears because of the truth they have recognised. They say: 'Our Lord! We believe; so write us down among the witnesses.'"
Qur'an 5:86 "But those who disbelieved and belied Our revelations, they shall be the dwellers of the Fire."
Qur'an 5:115 "Allah said: 'I am going to send it down on to you, but if any of you after that disbelieves then I will punish him with a torment such as I have not inflicted on anyone among all mankind and jinns.'"
Qur'an 5:116 "And remember when Allah will say (on the Day of Resurrection): 'O Jesus son of Mary! Did you say unto men: 'Worship me and my mother as two gods besides Allah?' He will say: 'Glory be to You! It was not for me to say what I had no right to say. Had I said such a thing, You would surely have known it. You know what is in my inner-self though I do not know what is in Yours, truly, You, only You, are the All-Knower of all that is hidden and unseen.'"
Qur'an 5:117 " 'Never did I [Jesus] say to them aught except what You did command me to say: "Worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord." And I was a witness over them while I dwelt amongst them, but when You took me up, You were the Watcher over them and You are a Witness to all things.' [The translation adds: 'This is a great admonition and warning to the Christians of the whole world']."
Qur'an 5:118 "If You punish them [Christians], they are Your slaves, and if You forgive them, Verily You, only You are the All-Mighty, the All-Wise."
Qur'an 7:160 "And We divided them into twelve tribes as distinct nations. We directed Moses by inspiration, saying: 'Strike the stone with your stick,' and there gushed forth out of it twelve springs: each group knew its own place for water. We shaded them with the clouds and sent down upon them manna and quails, saying: 'Eat of the good things with which We have provided you.' They harmed Us not but they used to harm themselves."
Qur'an 7:161 "And remember when it was said to them: 'Dwell in this town [Jerusalem] and eat therefrom wherever (sic) you wish, and say, 'Forgive our sins'; and enter the gate prostrate. We shall forgive you your wrongdoings. We shall increase the reward for the good-doers.'
Qur'an 7:162 "But those among them who did wrong changed the word that had been told to them. So We sent on them a torment from heaven in return for their wrong-doings."
Qur'an 7:163 "And ask them about the town that was by the sea, when they transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath: 'When their fish came to them openly on the Sabbath day, and did not come to them on the day they had no Sabbath. Thus We made a trial of them for they used to rebel.'"
Qur'an 7:166 "So when they [the Jews] exceeded the limits of what they were prohibited, We said to them: 'Be you monkeys despised and rejected.'"
Qur'an 7:167 "And remember when your Lord declared that He would certainly keep on sending against them [the Jews] those who would afflict them with a humiliating torment till the Day of Resurrection."
Qur'an 7:168 "And We have broken them up [the Jews] into various separate groups on the earth, some of them are righteous and some are away from that. And we tried them with good and evil in order that they might turn to Allah's obedience.
Qur'an 7:169 "Then after them succeeded an evil generation, which inherited the Book, but they chose the goods of this low life saying: 'Everything will be forgiven to us.'"
Qur'an 8:7 Behold! Allah promised you one of the two (enemy) parties that it should be yours: ye wished that the one unarmed should be yours but Allah willed to justify the truth according to His words and to cut off the roots of the unbelievers.
Qur'an 8:12 "Remember when your Lord inspired the angels, saying: 'Verily, I am with you, so keep firm those who have believed. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who have disbelieved, so strike them over the necks, and smite over all their fingers and toes.
Qur'an 8:13 "This is because they defied and disobeyed Allah and His Messenger. And whoever defies and disobeys Allah and His Messenger, then verily, Allah is severe in punishment.
Qur'an 8:14 "This is the torment, so taste it, and surely for the disbelievers is the torment of the Fire."
Qur'an 8:39 "And fight them [the infidels] until there is no more disbelief, and the religion will all be for Allah Alone [the translation adds: 'in the whole of the world'.]"
Qur'an 8:50 "And if you could see when the angels take away the souls of those who disbelieve, they smite their faces and their backs, saying: 'Take the punishment of the blazing Fire.'"
Qur'an 8:55 "Verily, the worst of living creatures before Allah are those who disbelieve."
Qur'an 8:60 "And make ready against them all you can of power, including steeds of war to threaten the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others besides whom you may not know but whom Allah does know. And whatever you shall spend in the Cause of Allah shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly."
Qur'an 9:29 "Fight against those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth [i.e. Islam] among the people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians], until they pay their Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."
Qur'an 9:30 "And the Jews say: 'Ezra is the son of Allah', and the Christians say: 'Messiah is the son of Allah.' That is a saying from their mouths. They imitate the saying of the disbelievers of old. Allah's Curse on them, how they are deluded away from the truth!"
Qur'an 9:31 "They [Jews and Christians] took their rabbis and their monks to be their Lords besides Allah, and Messiah son of Mary, while they were commanded to worship none but one God. Praise and glory to Him, far is He from having the partners they associate with Him."
Qur'an 9:32 "They [Jews and Christians] want to extinguish Allah's Light with their mouths, but Allah will not allow except that His Light should be perfected even though the disbelievers hate it."
Qur'an 9:33 "It is He Who has sent His Messenger with guidance and the religion of truth [Muhammadan Islam] to make it superior over all religions even though the disbelievers hate it."
Qur'an 9:34 "O you who believe! Verily, there are many of the rabbis and the monks who devour the wealth of mankind in falsehood, and hinder them from the Way of Allah. And those who hoard up gold and silver and spend it not in the Way of Allah - announce unto them a painful torment."
Qur'an 9:35 "On the Day when that gold and silver will be heated in the Fire of Hell and with it will be branded their foreheads, their flanks, and their backs, and it will be said unto them: 'This is the treasure which you hoarded for yourselves. Now taste of what you used to hoard.'"
Qur'an 9:38 "O you who believe! What is the matter with you, that when you are asked to march forth in the Cause of Allah (i.e. Jihad) you cling heavily to the earth? Are you pleased with the life of this world rather than the Hereafter? But little is the enjoyment of the life of this world as compared with the Hereafter."
Qur'an 9:39 "If you march not forth (Jihad) He will punish you with a painful torment and will replace you by another people, and you cannot harm Him at all, and Allah is Able to do all things."
Qur'an 9:68 "Allah has promised the hypocrites, men and women, and the disbelievers the Fire of Hell, therein shall they abide. It will suffice them. Allah has cursed them, and for them is the lasting torment."
Qur'an 9: 73 O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the Hypocrites and be firm against them. Their abode is hell an evil refuge indeed.
Qur'an 9:111 "Verily, Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their properties for the price that theirs shall be the Paradise. They fight in Allah's Cause, so they kill and are killed ... Then rejoice in the bargain which you have concluded. That is the supreme success."
Qur'an 16: 27 Then on the Day of Judgment He will cover them with shame and say: "Where are My `partners' concerning whom ye used to dispute (with the godly)?" Those endued with knowledge will say: "This Day indeed are the Unbelievers covered with Shame and Misery
Qur'an 22:19 "As for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them, boiling water will be poured down over their heads;
Qur'an 22:20 "With it will melt what is within their bellies, as well as their skins.
Qur'an 22:21 "And for them are hooked rods of iron to punish them.
Qur'an 22:22 "Every time they seek to get away therefrom, from anguish, they will be driven back therein and it will be said to them: 'Taste the torment of burning!'"
Qur'an 33: 64 Verily Allah has cursed the Unbelievers and prepared for them a Blazing Fire
Qur'an 39:16 "They [the unbelievers] shall have coverings of Fire, above them and coverings of Fire beneath them; with this Allah does frighten His slaves: 'O My slaves, therefore fear Me!'"
Qur'an 39:20 "But those who fear Allah and keep their duty to their Lord, for them are built lofty rooms; one above another under which rivers flow. This is the promise of Allah: and Allah does not fail in His Promise."
Qur'an 39:23 "Allah has sent down the best statement, a Book, its parts resembling each other in goodness and truth, oft-repeated. The skins of those who fear their Lord shiver from it. Then their skin and their heart soften to the remembrance of Allah. That is the guidance of Allah. He guides therewith whom He pleases and whomever Allah sends astray, for Him there is no guide."
Qur'an 42: 26 And He listens to those who believe and do deeds of righteousness and gives them increase of His Bounty: but for the Unbelievers there is a terrible Penalty.
Qur'an 45:7 "Woe to every sinful liar, -
Qur'an 45:8 "Who hears the verses of Allah recited to him yet persists with pride as if he heard them not. So announce to him a painful torment!
Qur'an 45-9 "And when he learns something of Our Verses, he makes them a jest. For such there will be a humiliating torment.
Qur'an 45:10 "In front of them there is Hell, and that which they have earned will be of no profit to them ... theirs will be a great torment.
Qur'an 45:11 "This Qur'an is a guidance. And those who disbelieve in the revelations of their Lord, for them there is a painful torment."
Qur'an 46: 20 And on the Day that the Unbelievers will be placed before the Fire (it will be said to them): "Ye received your good things in the life of the world and ye took your pleasure out of them: but today shall ye be recompensed with a Penalty of humiliation: for that ye were arrogant on earth without just cause and that ye (ever) transgressed."
Qur'an 47:2 "But those who believe and do righteous good deeds, and believe in that which is sent down to Muhammad, for it is the truth from their Lord, He will expiate from them their sins, and will make good their state."
Qur'an 47:3 "That is because those who disbelieve follow falsehood, while those who believe follow the truth from their Lord. Thus does Allah set forth their parables for mankind."
Qur'an 47:4 "So, when you meet [in Jihad] those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly on them. Thereafter is the time either for generosity or ransom. Thus [you are ordered by Allah to continue in carrying out Jihad against the disbelievers till they embrace Islam] ... But those who are killed in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost."
Qur'an 47:8 "Those who disbelieve, for them is destruction, and Allah will make their deeds vain.
Qur'an 47:9 "That is because they hate that which Allah has sent down [this Qur'an], so He has made their deeds fruitless."
Qur'an 51:5 Those who resist Allah and His Apostle will be humbled to dust as were those before them: for We have already sent down clear Signs. And the Unbelievers (will have) a humiliating Penalty .
Qur'an 51:60 Woe then to the Unbelievers on account of that day of theirs which they have been promised!
Qur'an 60:13 O ye who believe! turn not (for friendship) to people on whom is the Wrath of Allah. Of the Hereafter they are already in despair just as the Unbelievers are in despair about those (buried) in graves.
Qur'an 66:9 O Prophet! strive hard against the Unbelievers and the Hypocrites and be firm against them. Their abode is Hell an evil refuge (indeed).
Today at 10:38am
NOTES TO THE READER
1. The quotations listed by chapter and verse in this document are taken from the authorised translation of the QURAN sponsored, financed, and distributed world-wide by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Care has been taken not to quote any injunction or precept out of context. The verses are quoted in their traditional order, for ease of reference to the original Arabic as well as to other translations.
The translation helpfully uses square brackets, [for the identification of Jews and Christians, for instance] and explanatory parentheses; these have been retained in the quotations and no additional comments or notes have been inserted except where shown in italics. The grammar, spelling and punctuation of this translation have also been retained.
2. While reflecting on these excerpts, the reader has to bear in mind that, to the faithful, the Holy Book of Islam is the transcript of a tablet preserved in Heaven, eternal and immutable, the final expression of Allah's will; the speaker throughout is Allah. Hence the enormity of the practical implications of its teachings.
3. In recent years, much has been heard about 'Islam' as a religion of compassion and peace. With the exception of scholars and students of comparative religion, no one in the West has really taken the trouble to study or read the Quran from cover to cover; none of the Christian, Jewish or others, considered to be 'Unbelieving' religious authorities (Hindus, Buddhists, Animists, Atheists, etc), one has spoken to, has claimed to have any but the most superficial and fragmentary knowledge of its contents.
They certainly had no idea about the contemptuous anti-'Unbelievers', anti-Christian and anti-Jewish dogmas it contains. Most Jews, and certainly most Christians and other 'Unbelievers', have no idea that the Quran is a veritable, relentless tirade against all of them. As will be seen from the following pages, the Quran can only be described as a 'Gospel' of hate.
4. The proposed new UK legislation against incitement to religious hatred has been designed, we are told,
"to protect Muslims from religious hatred"; that is why it is being vociferously welcomed by the
Council of British Muslims.
The Quran does not only incite, but also preaches explicit hatred against Christians, Jews and all other non-Muhammadan Muslims (Unbelievers). Will the new legislation protect the majority of the people of this country from the hatred preached by the imams in Britain's over twelve hundred mosques every Friday?
5. It would be interesting to obtain a legal opinion as to whether the open incitement contained in these Quranic precepts, falls within the remit of the proposed legislation?
6. The tragic fact is, that most decent human beings, find it almost impossible to believe, that an alleged holy book, such as the Quran, could possibly contain so much hatred, anger, injustice and immorality.
The inability of ordinary decent people to comprehend, let alone accept the reality, of the totally depraved indifference that is shown by the Quran, towards all human life in general, but vis a vis the 'UNBELIEVERS' in particular, is beyond their imagining.
That is why, I have attempted to put together, most of the relevant warmongering, hatemongering and insulting verses of the Quran under one single heading.
Anyone who has studied the Quran, will know that none of them has been taken out of context, changed, perverted or tampered with. Those who have not read or studied Quran, can easily verify the veracity of the following verses by actually reading them.
In summation, in the year 622AD, the first warmongering verse was 'revealed', that which is called
'The Sword Verse'
9:" 5 But when the forbidden months are past then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them and seize them beleaguer them and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-Forgiving Most Merciful"
Muhammad in his Quran, declared total and eternal WAR, against all those who do not believe (UNBELIEVERS) in 'Allah AND in Muhammad as his messenger'.
Those who are not followers of the CULT of Muhammad, are given three choices:
1 Convert and be saved.
2 Submit, to eternal and utter humiliation for the peoples of the Book, such as the Jews, Christians and Zoroasterians.
3 Death, enslavement and forced conversion, to be inflicted upon: Hindus, Buddhists, Animists, Atheists and the like.
It is left to the reader, after investigating, comparing and contrasting the Quran, the Bible and other available references, to make up one's own mind
QUOTATIONS BY CHAPTER AND VERSE FROM
THE TRANSLATION OF THE QURAN
SANCTIONED BY THE HIGHEST RELIGIOUS MUSLIM AUTHORITIES
IN SAUDI ARABIA
------------------------------------------
Qur'an 2:39 "Those who disbelieve and reject Our revelations are the dwellers of the Fire, they shall abide therein forever."
Qur'an 2:59 "But the transgressors [the Jews] changed the word from that which had been told to them for another, so We sent upon the wrongdoers a punishment from the heaven because of their rebelling against Allah's obedience.
Qur'an 2:65 "And indeed you [Jews] knew those among you who transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath. We [Allah] said to them: "Be you monkeys, despised and rejected."
Qur'an 2:67 "And remember when Moses said to his people: 'Verily, Allah commands you that you slaughter a cow.' (The 'story' of the cow - which has no basis in the Bible - follows, which tells the faithful how the Jews attempted, unsuccessfully, to deceive and outwit Allah: 67-73)"
Qur'an 2:74 "Then after that your hearts [Jews] were hardened and became as stones or even worse in hardness. And indeed, there are stones out of which rivers gush forth and indeed, there are stones which split asunder so that water flows from them, and indeed, there are stones which fall down for fear of Allah. And Allah is not unaware of what you do."
Qur'an 2:77 "Know they [Jews] not that Allah knows what they conceal and what they reveal?"
Qur'an 2:80 "And they [Jews] say, 'Hell-fire shall not touch us but for a few hundred days.' Say (O Muhammad): Have you taken a covenant from Allah, so that Allah will not break his covenant? Or is it that you say of Allah what you know not?"
Qur'an 2:85: "Then do you [Jews] believe in a part of the Scripture and reject the rest? Then what is the recompense of those who do so among you, except disgrace in the life of this world, and on the Day of Resurrection they shall be consigned to the most grievous torment.
Qur'an 2:86 "Their torment [the Jews] shall not be lightened nor shall they be helped."
Qur'an 2:87 "And indeed, we gave Moses the Book and followed him up with a succession of Messengers ... Is it that whenever there came to you [Jews] a Messenger with what you yourselves desired not, you grew arrogant? Some, you disbelieved and some, you killed."
Qur'an 2:88 "And they [the Jews] say: 'Our hearts are wrapped' (i.e., do not hear or understand Allah's Word.) Nay, Allah has cursed them for their disbelief, so little is that which they believe."
Qur'an 2:89 "And when there came to them [the Jews], a Book (this Qur'an) from Allah confirming what is with them [the Torah and Gospel], although aforetime they had invoked Allah (for coming of Muhammad) in order to gain victory over those who disbelieved, then when there came to them that which they had recognised, they disbelieved in it. So let the Curse of Allah be on the disbelievers."
Qur'an 2:92 "And indeed Moses came to you [Jews] with clear proofs, yet you worshipped the calf after he left, and you were wrongdoers."
Qur'an 2:94 "Say to them [the Jews]: 'If the Home of the hereafter with Allah is indeed for you especially and not for others, of mankind, then long for death if you are truthful.'
Qur'an 2:95 "But they will never long for it because of what their hands have done. And Allah is All-Aware of the wrongdoers.
Qur'an 2:96 "And verily, you will find them [the Jews] the greediest of mankind for life and (even greedier) than those who ascribe partners to Allah. Everyone of them wishes that he could be given a life of a thousand years but the grant of such life will not save him even a little from (due) punishment. And Allah is All-Seer of what they do."
Qur'an 2:116 "And they [the Christians] say: 'Allah has begotten a son'. Glory be to Him! Nay, to Him belongs that is in the heavens and on earth, and all surrender with obedience to Him."
Qur'an 2:159 "Verily, those [the Jews and the Christians] who conceal the clear proofs, evidences and the guidance, which We have sent down, after We have made it clear for the people in the Book, they are the ones cursed by Allah and cursed by the cursers."
Qur'an 2:161 "Verily, those who disbelieve, and die while they are disbelievers, it is they on whom is the Curse of Allah and of the angels and of mankind, combined.
Qur'an 2:162 "They will abide therein [under the curse in Hell], their punishment will neither be lightened nor will they be reprieved."
Qur'an 2:191 "And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. Disbelief is worse than killing. And fight not with them at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there. But if they attack you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers."
Qur'an 3:10 "Verily, those who disbelieve, neither their properties nor their offspring will avail them whatsoever against Allah; and it is they who will be fuel of the Fire."
Qur'an 3:12 "Say to those who disbelieve: 'You will be defeated and gathered together to Hell, and worst indeed is that place to rest'."
Qur'an 3:56 "As to those who disbelieve, I [Allah] will punish them with a severe torment in this world and in the Hereafter, and they will have no helpers."
Qur'an 3:61 "Then whoever disputes with you concerning him [Jesus] after all the knowledge that has come to you [i.e. Jesus being a slave of Allah and having no share in Divinity] say: 'Come, let us call our sons and your sons, our women and your women, ourselves and yourselves - then we pray and invoke the Curse of Allah upon those who lie [who believe Jesus is the son of Allah]'."
Qur'an 3:69 "A party of the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) wish to lead you astray. But they shall not lead astray anyone except themselves, and they perceive not."
Qur'an 3:70 "O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]: Why do you disbelieve in the revelations of Allah while you yourselves bear witness to their truth?"
Qur'an 3:71 "O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]: Why do you mix truth with false thoughts and conceal the truth while you know?"
Qur'an 3:75 "Among the people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians] is he who, if entrusted with a great amount of wealth, will readily pay it back; and among them there is he who, if entrusted with a single silver coin, will not repay it unless you constantly stand demanding, because they say: 'There is no blame on us to betray and take the properties of the illiterates (Arabs).' But they tell a lie against Allah while they know it."
Qur'an 3:78 "And verily, among them [Jews and Christians] is a party who distort the Book with their tongues, so that you may think it is from the Book, but it is not from the Book, and they say: 'This is from Allah,' but it is not from Allah; and they speak a lie against Allah while they know it."
Qur'an 3:85 "And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers."
Qur'an 3:87 "They [disbelievers] are those whose recompense is that on them rests the Curse of Allah, of the angels, and of all mankind.
Qur'an 3:88 "They will abide in Hell. Neither will their torment be lightened, nor will it be delayed or postponed."
Qur'an 3:100 "O you who believe! If you obey a group of those who were given the Scripture [Jews and Christians], they would indeed render you disbelievers after you have believed!"
Qur'an 3:110 "You [Muslims] are the best of peoples ever raised up for mankind; you enjoin [the ordinances of Islam] and forbid all that Islam has forbidden and you believe in Allah. And had the people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians] believed, it would have been better for them; among them are some who have faith, but most of them are wrongdoers."
Qur'an 3:118 "O you who believe! Take not as your friends those outside your religion [Jews and Christians] since they will not fail to do their best to corrupt you. They desire to harm you severely. Hatred has already appeared from their mouths, but what their breasts conceal is far worse. Indeed We have made plain to you the revelations, if you understand."
Qur'an 3:119 "Lo! You are the ones who love them [Jews and Christians] but they love you not, and you believe in all the Scriptures while they disbelieve in your Book. And when they meet you, they say, 'We believe.' But when they are alone they bite the tips of their fingers at you in rage. Say: 'Perish in your rage.' Certainly, Allah knows all the secrets in the breasts."
Qur'an 3:151 "We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, because they [Christians] join others in worship with Allah, for which He had sent no authority; their abode will be the Fire and how evil is the abode of the wrong doers."
Qur'an 3:181 "Indeed, Allah has heard the statement of those [Jews] who say: 'Truly, Allah is poor and we are rich!' We shall record what they have said and their killing of the Prophets unjustly, and we shall say: 'Taste you the torment of the burning Fire'".
Qur'an 4:14 "And whosoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger and transgresses His limits, He will cast him into the Fire, to abide therein; and he shall have a disgraceful torment."
Qur'an 4:46 "Among those who are Jews, there are some who displace words from (their) right places and say: 'We hear your word and disobey.' ... But Allah has cursed them for their disbelief, so they believe not except a few."
Qur'an 4:47 "O you who have been given the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! Believe in what We have revealed confirming what is (already) with you, before we efface faces (by making them like the back of necks; without nose, mouth, eyes, etc.) and turn them hindwards, or curse them as We cursed the Sabbath-breakers. And the Commandment of Allah is always executed."
Qur'an 4:48 "Verily, Allah forgives not that partners [Jesus as son of God] should be set up with Him in worship, and whoever sets up partners with Allah in worship, he has indeed invented a tremendous sin."
Qur'an 4:50 "Look, how they [Christians] invent a lie against Allah, and enough is that as a manifest sin."
Qur'an 4:51 "Have you not seen those who were given a portion of the Scripture [the Bible]? They believe in false gods and idols and say to the disbelievers that they are better guided as regards the way than the believers (Muslims)."
Qur'an 4:52 "They [Jews and Christians] are those whom Allah has cursed, and he whom Allah curses, you will not find for him any helper."
Qur'an 4:55 "Of them [Jews and Christians] were some who believed in him (Muhammad - peace be upon him) and of them were some who averted their faces from him; and enough is Hell for burning them."
Qur'an 4:56 "Surely! Those who disbelieve in Our Revelations We shall burn them in Fire. As often as their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for other skins that they may taste the punishment. Truly, Allah is Ever Most Powerful, All-Wise."
Qur'an 4:74 "Let those believers who sell the life of this world for the Hereafter fight in the Cause of Allah, and whoso fights in the Cause of Allah and is killed or gets victory, We shall bestow on him a great reward."
Qur'an 4:76 "Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the Cause of Satan. So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble indeed is the plot of Satan."
Qur'an 4:82 "Do they not then consider the Qur'an carefully? Had it been from other than Allah, they would surely have found therein much contradictions."
Qur'an 4:84 "Then fight (O Muhammad) in the Cause of Allah and incite the believers (to fight along with you), it may be that Allah will restrain the evil might of the disbelievers. And Allah is Stronger in Might and Stronger in Punishing."
Qur'an 4:89 "They wish that you reject Faith, as they have rejected, and thus that you all become equal. So take not friends from them, till they emigrate in the Way of Allah. But if they turn back (from Islam) take hold of them and kill them wherever you find them, and take neither friends nor helpers from them."
Qur'an 4:93 "And whoever kills a believer [Muhammadan Muslim] intentionally, his recompense is Hell to abide therein, and the Wrath and the Curse of Allah are upon him, and a great punishment is prepared for him."
Qur'an 4:115 "And whoever contradicts and opposes the Messenger after the right path has been shown clearly to him, and follows other than the believers' way, We shall keep him in the path he has chosen, and burn him in Hell - what an evil destination."
Qur'an 4:153 "The people of the Scripture [Jews] ask you to cause a book to descend upon them from heaven. Indeed they asked Moses for even greater than that, when they said: 'Show us Allah in public,' but they were struck with thunder-clap and lightning for their wickedness. Then they worshipped the calf even after clear signs had come to them."
Qur'an 4:155 "Because of their breaking the covenant, and their rejecting the revelations of Allah, and of their killing the Prophets unjustly, and of their saying: 'Our hearts are wrapped' - nay, Allah has set a seal upon their hearts because of their disbelief, so they believe not but a little.
Qur'an 4:156 "And because of their disbelief and uttering against Mary a grave false charge;
Qur'an 4:157 "And because of their saying, 'We killed Messiah Jesus son of Mary, the messenger of Allah', - but they killed him not, nor crucified him but the resemblance of Jesus was put over another man, and those who differ therein are full of doubts. They have no knowledge, they follow nothing but conjecture. For surely; they killed him not."
Qur'an 4:160 "For the wrong-doing of the Jews, We made unlawful to them certain good foods which has [sic] been lawful to them, and for their hindering many from Allah's Way;
Qur'an 4:161 "And their taking of usury though they were forbidden from taking it and their devouring of men's substance wrongfully (bribery, etc.). And We have prepared for the disbelievers among them a painful torment."
Qur'an 4:171 "O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! Do not exceed the limits in your religion, nor say of Allah aught but the truth. The Messiah Jesus son of Mary was (no more than) a Messenger of Allah and His Word which He bestowed on Mary and a spirit created by Him; so believe in Allah and His Messenger. Say not: 'Three!' Cease! It is better for you. For Allah is one God, Far Exalted is He above having a son."
Qur'an 5:13 "So because of their [the Jews'] breach of their covenant, We cursed them and made their hearts grow hard. They change the words from their (right) places and have abandoned a good part of the Message that was sent to them and you will not cease to discover deceit in them, except a few of them."
Qur'an 5:14 "And from those who call themselves Christians, We took their covenant, but they have abandoned a good part of the Message that was sent to them. So We planted amongst them enmity and hatred till the Day of Resurrection, and Allah will inform them of what they used to do."
Qur'an 5:17 "Surely, in disbelief are they who say that Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary."
Qur'an 5:18 "And both the Jews and the Christians say: 'We are the children of Allah and His loved ones.' Say: 'Why then does He punish you for your sins?' Nay, you are but human beings of those He has created, He forgives whom He wills and He punishes whom He wills."
Qur'an 5:33 "The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and his Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on the opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter."
Qur'an 5:55 "O you who believe! Do your duty to Allah and fear Him. Seek the means of approach to Him, and go on a Jihad in His Cause as much as you can. So that you may be successful."
Qur'an 5:38 "Cut off the hand of the thief, male or female, as a recompense for that which they committed, a punishment by way of example from Allah. And Allah is All-Powerful, All-Wise."
Qur'an 5:41 "O Messenger! Let not those who hurry to fall into disbelief grieve you, of such who say: 'We believe' with their mouths but their hearts have no faith. And of the Jews are men who listen much and eagerly to lies - listen to others who have not come to you. They change the words from their places; they say, 'If you are given this, take it, but if you are not given this, then beware!' ... Those are the ones whose hearts Allah does not want to purify; for them there is a disgrace in this world, and in the Hereafter a great torment."
Qur'an 5:51 "O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians as your friends, they are but friends to one another. And if any amongst you takes them as friends, then surely he is one of them. Verily, Allah guides not those people who are wrongdoers."
Qur'an 5:57 "O you who believe! Take not for friends those who take your religion for a mockery and fun from among those who received the Scripture [Jews and Christians] before you, nor from among the disbelievers; and fear Allah if you indeed are true believers."
Qur'an 5:59 "Say: 'O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! Do you criticize us for no other reason than that we believe in Allah, and in the revelation which has been sent down to us and in that which has been sent down before us, and that most of you are rebellious and disobedient to Allah?'"
Qur'an 5:60 "Say (O Muhammad) to the people of the Scripture: 'Shall I inform you of something worse than that, regarding the recompense from Allah: those Jews who incurred the Curse of Allah and His Wrath, those of whom some He transformed into monkeys and swines, those who worshipped false deities; such are worse in rank and far more astray from the Right Path.'"
Qur'an 5:62 "And you see many of them [Jews] hurrying for sin and transgression, and eating illegal things [as bribes, usury, etc.]. Evil indeed is that which they have been doing.
Qur'an 5:63 "Why do not the rabbis and the religious learned men forbid them from uttering sinful words and from eating illegal things. Evil indeed is that which they have been performing."
Qur'an 5:64 "The Jews say: 'Allah's Hand is tied up.' Be their hands tied up and be they accursed for what they uttered. Nay, both His Hands are widely outstretched. He spends of His Bounty as He wills. Verily, the Revelation that has come to you from Allah increases in most of them their obstinate rebellion and disbelief. We have put enmity and hatred amongst them till the Day of Resurrection. Every time they kindled the fire of war Allah extinguished it; and they ever strive to make mischief on earth. And Allah does not like the mischief-makers."
Qur'an 5:66 "And if only they had acted according to the Torah and the Gospel, and what has now been sent down to them from their Lord (the Qur'an), they would surely have gotten provision from above them and from underneath their feet. There are from among them people who are on the right course, but many of them do evil deeds."
Qur'an 5:68 "Say (O Muhammad!): 'O people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! You have nothing (as regards guidance) till you act according to the Torah and the Gospel and what has now been sent down to you from your Lord (the Qur'an).' Verily, that which has been sent down to you from your Lord increases in many of them their obstinate rebellion and disbelief. So be not sorrowful over the people who disbelieve."
Qur'an 5:69 "Surely, those who believe, those who are the Jews and the Sabians and the Christians, - whosoever believed in Allah in the Last Day, and worked righteousness, on them shall be no fear nor shall they grieve."
Qur'an 5:70 "Verily, We took the covenant of the Children of Israel and sent them Messengers. Whenever there came to them a Messenger with what they themselves desired not - a group of them they called liars , and others among them they killed."
Qur'an 5:72 "Surely, they have disbelieved who say: 'Allah is the Messiah son of Mary.' But the Messiah said: 'O Children of Israel! Worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord.' Verily, whosoever sets up partners in worship with Allah, then Allah has forbidden Paradise for him, and the Fire will be his abode. And for the wrongdoers there are no helpers."
Qur'an 5:73 "Surely, disbelievers are those who said: 'Allah is the third of the three.' But there is no God but One God. And if they cease not from what they say, verily a painful torment will befall the disbelievers among them."
Qur'an 5:74 "The Messiah son of Mary was no more than a Messenger; many were the messengers that passed away before him. His mother was a true believer. They both used to eat food. Look how We make the revelations clear to them, yet look how they are deluded away."
Qur'an 5:78 "Those among the Children of Israel who disbelieved were cursed by the tongue of David and Jesus son of Mary. That was because they disobeyed (Allah and the Messengers) and were ever transgressing beyond bounds."
Qur'an 5:79 "They used not to forbid one another from the wrongdoing which they committed. Vile indeed was what they used to do."
Qur'an 5:80 "You see many of them taking the disbelievers as their friends. Evil indeed is that which their ownselves have sent forward before them, for that reason Allah's Wrath fell upon them and in torment they will abide."
Qur'an 5:82 "Verily, you will find the strongest among men in enmity to the believers [Muhammadan Muslims] are the Jews and Pagans, and you will find the nearest in love to the believers those who say: 'We are Christians' that is because amongst them are priests and monks, and they are not proud."
Qur'an 5:83 "And when they [Christians] listen to what has been sent down to the Messenger, you see their eyes overflowing with tears because of the truth they have recognised. They say: 'Our Lord! We believe; so write us down among the witnesses.'"
Qur'an 5:86 "But those who disbelieved and belied Our revelations, they shall be the dwellers of the Fire."
Qur'an 5:115 "Allah said: 'I am going to send it down on to you, but if any of you after that disbelieves then I will punish him with a torment such as I have not inflicted on anyone among all mankind and jinns.'"
Qur'an 5:116 "And remember when Allah will say (on the Day of Resurrection): 'O Jesus son of Mary! Did you say unto men: 'Worship me and my mother as two gods besides Allah?' He will say: 'Glory be to You! It was not for me to say what I had no right to say. Had I said such a thing, You would surely have known it. You know what is in my inner-self though I do not know what is in Yours, truly, You, only You, are the All-Knower of all that is hidden and unseen.'"
Qur'an 5:117 " 'Never did I [Jesus] say to them aught except what You did command me to say: "Worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord." And I was a witness over them while I dwelt amongst them, but when You took me up, You were the Watcher over them and You are a Witness to all things.' [The translation adds: 'This is a great admonition and warning to the Christians of the whole world']."
Qur'an 5:118 "If You punish them [Christians], they are Your slaves, and if You forgive them, Verily You, only You are the All-Mighty, the All-Wise."
Qur'an 7:160 "And We divided them into twelve tribes as distinct nations. We directed Moses by inspiration, saying: 'Strike the stone with your stick,' and there gushed forth out of it twelve springs: each group knew its own place for water. We shaded them with the clouds and sent down upon them manna and quails, saying: 'Eat of the good things with which We have provided you.' They harmed Us not but they used to harm themselves."
Qur'an 7:161 "And remember when it was said to them: 'Dwell in this town [Jerusalem] and eat therefrom wherever (sic) you wish, and say, 'Forgive our sins'; and enter the gate prostrate. We shall forgive you your wrongdoings. We shall increase the reward for the good-doers.'
Qur'an 7:162 "But those among them who did wrong changed the word that had been told to them. So We sent on them a torment from heaven in return for their wrong-doings."
Qur'an 7:163 "And ask them about the town that was by the sea, when they transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath: 'When their fish came to them openly on the Sabbath day, and did not come to them on the day they had no Sabbath. Thus We made a trial of them for they used to rebel.'"
Qur'an 7:166 "So when they [the Jews] exceeded the limits of what they were prohibited, We said to them: 'Be you monkeys despised and rejected.'"
Qur'an 7:167 "And remember when your Lord declared that He would certainly keep on sending against them [the Jews] those who would afflict them with a humiliating torment till the Day of Resurrection."
Qur'an 7:168 "And We have broken them up [the Jews] into various separate groups on the earth, some of them are righteous and some are away from that. And we tried them with good and evil in order that they might turn to Allah's obedience.
Qur'an 7:169 "Then after them succeeded an evil generation, which inherited the Book, but they chose the goods of this low life saying: 'Everything will be forgiven to us.'"
Qur'an 8:7 Behold! Allah promised you one of the two (enemy) parties that it should be yours: ye wished that the one unarmed should be yours but Allah willed to justify the truth according to His words and to cut off the roots of the unbelievers.
Qur'an 8:12 "Remember when your Lord inspired the angels, saying: 'Verily, I am with you, so keep firm those who have believed. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who have disbelieved, so strike them over the necks, and smite over all their fingers and toes.
Qur'an 8:13 "This is because they defied and disobeyed Allah and His Messenger. And whoever defies and disobeys Allah and His Messenger, then verily, Allah is severe in punishment.
Qur'an 8:14 "This is the torment, so taste it, and surely for the disbelievers is the torment of the Fire."
Qur'an 8:39 "And fight them [the infidels] until there is no more disbelief, and the religion will all be for Allah Alone [the translation adds: 'in the whole of the world'.]"
Qur'an 8:50 "And if you could see when the angels take away the souls of those who disbelieve, they smite their faces and their backs, saying: 'Take the punishment of the blazing Fire.'"
Qur'an 8:55 "Verily, the worst of living creatures before Allah are those who disbelieve."
Qur'an 8:60 "And make ready against them all you can of power, including steeds of war to threaten the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others besides whom you may not know but whom Allah does know. And whatever you shall spend in the Cause of Allah shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly."
Qur'an 9:29 "Fight against those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth [i.e. Islam] among the people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians], until they pay their Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."
Qur'an 9:30 "And the Jews say: 'Ezra is the son of Allah', and the Christians say: 'Messiah is the son of Allah.' That is a saying from their mouths. They imitate the saying of the disbelievers of old. Allah's Curse on them, how they are deluded away from the truth!"
Qur'an 9:31 "They [Jews and Christians] took their rabbis and their monks to be their Lords besides Allah, and Messiah son of Mary, while they were commanded to worship none but one God. Praise and glory to Him, far is He from having the partners they associate with Him."
Qur'an 9:32 "They [Jews and Christians] want to extinguish Allah's Light with their mouths, but Allah will not allow except that His Light should be perfected even though the disbelievers hate it."
Qur'an 9:33 "It is He Who has sent His Messenger with guidance and the religion of truth [Muhammadan Islam] to make it superior over all religions even though the disbelievers hate it."
Qur'an 9:34 "O you who believe! Verily, there are many of the rabbis and the monks who devour the wealth of mankind in falsehood, and hinder them from the Way of Allah. And those who hoard up gold and silver and spend it not in the Way of Allah - announce unto them a painful torment."
Qur'an 9:35 "On the Day when that gold and silver will be heated in the Fire of Hell and with it will be branded their foreheads, their flanks, and their backs, and it will be said unto them: 'This is the treasure which you hoarded for yourselves. Now taste of what you used to hoard.'"
Qur'an 9:38 "O you who believe! What is the matter with you, that when you are asked to march forth in the Cause of Allah (i.e. Jihad) you cling heavily to the earth? Are you pleased with the life of this world rather than the Hereafter? But little is the enjoyment of the life of this world as compared with the Hereafter."
Qur'an 9:39 "If you march not forth (Jihad) He will punish you with a painful torment and will replace you by another people, and you cannot harm Him at all, and Allah is Able to do all things."
Qur'an 9:68 "Allah has promised the hypocrites, men and women, and the disbelievers the Fire of Hell, therein shall they abide. It will suffice them. Allah has cursed them, and for them is the lasting torment."
Qur'an 9: 73 O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the Hypocrites and be firm against them. Their abode is hell an evil refuge indeed.
Qur'an 9:111 "Verily, Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their properties for the price that theirs shall be the Paradise. They fight in Allah's Cause, so they kill and are killed ... Then rejoice in the bargain which you have concluded. That is the supreme success."
Qur'an 16: 27 Then on the Day of Judgment He will cover them with shame and say: "Where are My `partners' concerning whom ye used to dispute (with the godly)?" Those endued with knowledge will say: "This Day indeed are the Unbelievers covered with Shame and Misery
Qur'an 22:19 "As for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them, boiling water will be poured down over their heads;
Qur'an 22:20 "With it will melt what is within their bellies, as well as their skins.
Qur'an 22:21 "And for them are hooked rods of iron to punish them.
Qur'an 22:22 "Every time they seek to get away therefrom, from anguish, they will be driven back therein and it will be said to them: 'Taste the torment of burning!'"
Qur'an 33: 64 Verily Allah has cursed the Unbelievers and prepared for them a Blazing Fire
Qur'an 39:16 "They [the unbelievers] shall have coverings of Fire, above them and coverings of Fire beneath them; with this Allah does frighten His slaves: 'O My slaves, therefore fear Me!'"
Qur'an 39:20 "But those who fear Allah and keep their duty to their Lord, for them are built lofty rooms; one above another under which rivers flow. This is the promise of Allah: and Allah does not fail in His Promise."
Qur'an 39:23 "Allah has sent down the best statement, a Book, its parts resembling each other in goodness and truth, oft-repeated. The skins of those who fear their Lord shiver from it. Then their skin and their heart soften to the remembrance of Allah. That is the guidance of Allah. He guides therewith whom He pleases and whomever Allah sends astray, for Him there is no guide."
Qur'an 42: 26 And He listens to those who believe and do deeds of righteousness and gives them increase of His Bounty: but for the Unbelievers there is a terrible Penalty.
Qur'an 45:7 "Woe to every sinful liar, -
Qur'an 45:8 "Who hears the verses of Allah recited to him yet persists with pride as if he heard them not. So announce to him a painful torment!
Qur'an 45-9 "And when he learns something of Our Verses, he makes them a jest. For such there will be a humiliating torment.
Qur'an 45:10 "In front of them there is Hell, and that which they have earned will be of no profit to them ... theirs will be a great torment.
Qur'an 45:11 "This Qur'an is a guidance. And those who disbelieve in the revelations of their Lord, for them there is a painful torment."
Qur'an 46: 20 And on the Day that the Unbelievers will be placed before the Fire (it will be said to them): "Ye received your good things in the life of the world and ye took your pleasure out of them: but today shall ye be recompensed with a Penalty of humiliation: for that ye were arrogant on earth without just cause and that ye (ever) transgressed."
Qur'an 47:2 "But those who believe and do righteous good deeds, and believe in that which is sent down to Muhammad, for it is the truth from their Lord, He will expiate from them their sins, and will make good their state."
Qur'an 47:3 "That is because those who disbelieve follow falsehood, while those who believe follow the truth from their Lord. Thus does Allah set forth their parables for mankind."
Qur'an 47:4 "So, when you meet [in Jihad] those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly on them. Thereafter is the time either for generosity or ransom. Thus [you are ordered by Allah to continue in carrying out Jihad against the disbelievers till they embrace Islam] ... But those who are killed in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost."
Qur'an 47:8 "Those who disbelieve, for them is destruction, and Allah will make their deeds vain.
Qur'an 47:9 "That is because they hate that which Allah has sent down [this Qur'an], so He has made their deeds fruitless."
Qur'an 51:5 Those who resist Allah and His Apostle will be humbled to dust as were those before them: for We have already sent down clear Signs. And the Unbelievers (will have) a humiliating Penalty .
Qur'an 51:60 Woe then to the Unbelievers on account of that day of theirs which they have been promised!
Qur'an 60:13 O ye who believe! turn not (for friendship) to people on whom is the Wrath of Allah. Of the Hereafter they are already in despair just as the Unbelievers are in despair about those (buried) in graves.
Qur'an 66:9 O Prophet! strive hard against the Unbelievers and the Hypocrites and be firm against them. Their abode is Hell an evil refuge (indeed).
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