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Saturday, December 31, 2011

Hizballah Leader, Nasrallah reportedly worth $250 million


Hizballah honcho Nasrallah reportedly worth $250 million
"A fool and his money are soon partying" - Steven Wright

Hizballah is reportedly going broke, but Nasrallah is said to be livin' large. "Hezbollah's Nasrallah worth $250M?" by Doron Peskin for YNet News, December 29:

American intelligence officials estimate fortune of Shiite organization's leader, senior members totals some $2 billion, which are scattered in hundreds of bank accounts across the world
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is worth some $250 million, a Saudi newspaper reported recently, quoting American intelligence officials.
According to the report, the fortune of Nasrallah's deputy, Sheikh Naim Qassem, and other senior organization members amounts to as much as $2 billion.
The anonymous intelligence sources believe the funds have been deposited in hundreds of bank accounts across the world, including in Europe, using fabricated or fake names.
Two Western sources are quoted as saying that the Hezbollah leaders from time to time channel millions of dollars from their bank accounts or their wives' bank accounts to senior members of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, who are responsible for transferring money to the Shiite organization from the office of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
According to the report, Iranian parliament members are aware of this corruption, are unhappy with it but are avoiding discussing it.
Straw companies
A British security source who worked at the embassies in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon in the 1990s is quoted as saying that the West has figured out Hezbollah's money laundering method.
According to the source, the Shiite organization's common method is setting up straw companies in Arab or African countries, which sell cars or large amounts of goods.
See also: the recent identification of a ring of over 30 U.S. auto businesses implicated in funneling almost half a billion dollars to Hizballah.

The organizations also operate small cells of six to 10 people who specialize in stealing cellular phones, personal computers or credit cards, and open fake bank accounts using the victims' details.
According to the report, the Hezbollah members also specialize in stealing passports, which are used by the organization operatives to travel around the world for commerce purposes, among others.
By setting up companies, mainly in Eastern European countries and in Soviet republics in central Asia, Hezbollah provides all the financial needs of the organization members in Lebanon.
According to a recent report among many on the organization's financial situation, senior Iranian officials are furious over an internal report pointing to corruption among Hezbollah's highest ranks.
Another report says the Iranians were "amazed" to learn of the flamboyant life led by the organization members, mainly during their visits abroad.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Muslim Brotherhood to Protect Churches on Coptic Christmas




Egyptian Coptic Christians demonstrate outside the state radio and television building in central Cairo. (File photo)
AFP, CAIRO
Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood said on Wednesday it would protect churches during Coptic Christmas in January in a bid to prevent deadly attacks on Christian places of worship. “We have decided to form Muslim Brotherhood committees to protect the churches so that the hands of sin do not ruin the festivities like they did several times under the old regime,” the group said in a statement. It urged the ruling military council, which took power when a popular uprising ousted Hosni Mubarak in February, to help secure the churches. “We call on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the police to protect the churches in the same way they protected polling stations during the elections,” the Brotherhood said.

Last year, more than 20 people were killed in an apparent suicide bombing as hundreds of worshippers were leaving the al-Qidissin (The Saints) church in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria after a New Year’s eve mass.

In January 2010, six Copts were shot dead as they emerged from a Coptic Christmas Eve mass. A Muslim security guard was also killed in the shooting.

Coptic Christians, who make up around 10 percent of Egypt’s 82 million population, have been the target of frequent attacks and complain of systematic discrimination.

The Middle East’s largest Christian community has also become increasingly concerned about the rise of Islamists’ political influence since the uprising that toppled Mubarak.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, has so far emerged as the front-runner in the first post-revolution legislative elections.

The largest party belonging to the more hardline Salafi movements, al-Nour, has come a close runner-up in the first two rounds of polling.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Hizbollah's Hypocrisy and Double Standards


Hizbollah's Hypocrisy and Double Standards
Reading about Hezbollah and money laundering, I remembered an incident that took place a long time ago.

In 1985, I was buying a used car engine from a junkyard in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, when I had an interesting chat with the owner of the junkyard. He was a Shiite who supports Hezbollah.
While I was waiting for the engine to be loaded in my trunk, we sipped coffee and chatted aimlessly. One of the neighbors walked by and greeted us, and sat down for coffee. Then that neighbor's son was walking through. He had a large impressive beard. My father asked about the young man who had just walked by. His father just responded: "He works in terrorism."
Even though, n 1985, the word did not carry the full meaning it has today, we were shocked with the bluntness of that statement.
Seeing our jaws droop, the Shiite junk merchant added: "Suits the West and America well...they send us Hollywood stuff and pornography, we sell them hashish and deal with them through terrorism..etc."
My father protested:"So, you say it is OK to sell people Hashish!!!"
"Only to the West," responded the Shiite merchant.

















http://www.news9.com/story/16344803/money-laundering-probe-focuses-on-tulsa-car-dealership

Friday, December 23, 2011

Naked Breasts vs. Islam?



.
Naked Breasts vs. Islam?
Posted By Phyllis Chesler On December 23, 2011

What’s a poor girl to do?

Should she wear a burqa — or should she wear very short skirts and a low-cut blouse?

Should she wear a headscarf and a shapeless, floor-length garment — or should she pose naked for Playboy magazine?

Do either of these extremes exemplify free as opposed to forced choices? Is either clothing extreme an expression of independence, resistance, or individuality?

In the last year, three Muslim women have posed nude or nearly nude in the media.




In April, Sila Sahin [1], a Muslim Turkish-German actress living in Berlin, posed nude on the cover of Playboy magazine. She claimed, “I did it because (I) wanted to be free at last. These photographs are a liberation from the restrictions of my childhood.” As a result, her family has cut all ties with her. Sahin further intended her photos to draw attention to the normalized gender inequality in immigrant Turkish communities. One might ask whether she hoped to achieve this by objectifying herself in a Western media outlet that is inherently sexist?

I am not challenging her right to do so. I am wondering whether she has escaped one noose only to find herself about to be hung in another way.

More recently, in December Pakistani actress Veena Malik [2] posed nude (or nearly nude and was photoshopped) for FHM magazine in India. Again, she hoped to use her photos as a feminist platform to criticize gender bias in Islam. Why not pose in a t-shirt that says “Equal Rights for Women”? “Sexy” is nearly always sexist.

But in November, Egyptian blogger Aliaa Elmahdy posed topless on her Facebook page and blog. This photo was not sexualized and managed to remain tasteful. In an interview [3], Elmahdy said, “I am not shy of being a woman in a society where women are nothing but sex objects harassed on a daily basis by men who think nothing…about the importance of women.”

Facing grave danger since she currently lives in Egypt (Sahin lives in Germany, Malik in India as well as Pakistan), this young blogger has managed to draw attention to the increasing injustices women face in Egypt without demeaning herself along Western lines. But, again, there may be other ways to go about rebelling.



We live at a moment in history in which worldwide a woman’s “looks” are more essential to her survival than ever before. Today, incredibly, women are being judged, paid, employed, and married as a function of how good they look in a bikini and a mini skirt or whether they wear a burqa or a head scarf. Women are even killed when they violate dress codes in the Muslim world.

If feminist ideas have indeed progressed and seized the imagination of the world, then having to conform to either highly eroticized clothing or to the shroud-like burqa represents a new kind of backlash against women’s freedom. At the very least, it is certainly a giant step backward.

Neither the bikini nor the burqa liberates or protects women. Rapists, harassers, and stalkers continue to attack women whether they are half-naked, “naked-faced,” or fully veiled. In the 21st century, Egyptian male mobs numbering up to 1000 went on“wilding” [4] sprees. Recently, “wild” Egyptian men tore the clothing off working female journalists — both infidels and Muslims — and groped. One journalist, Mona Eltahawy [5], was sexually assaulted in police captivity; the men with guns also broke her arm.

Naked women abound. This does not mean they are powerful or free. Female prostitution and pornography as well as sex trafficking and female sexual slavery flourish in fundamentalist Muslim and non-Muslim countries and in heathen Western enclaves on both coasts of America and all across Europe. The number of women who are being repeatedly and publicly gang-raped in Africa has been steadily increasing. As of May 2011, two million women in the Congo have been raped [6].

Both clothing extremes denote a rather heartbreaking conformity and comprise a variety of health hazards. Both often affect a woman’s self-esteem in negative ways.

For example, I have mournful reservations about trendy-sexual clothing styles. I am concerned about the anxiety, eating disorders, drug addiction, and low self-esteem that often accompany girls and women who become obsessed with having an idealized, young, sexy, thin, and large-breasted appearance. Stylish but very high heels may be beautiful but women are falling in such shoes and breaking bones. They are also setting themselves up for later misery. In terms of surgery: girls and women at younger and younger ages are subjecting themselves to the knife so that they have more perfect facial features and bodies. At least $10 billion [7] was spent on plastic surgery in America in 2011.

Alright. So is the “solution” to cover up completely? Is this also a fitting spiritual or religious statement about the importance of spurning outward appearance, material or pagan values, and dedicating oneself to God? If so, then why aren’t their male counterparts doing the same thing? Where are all the face-veiled mullahs? Ironically, when such men cover their faces and heads, they most resemble ninja warriors — or shrouded women. But this is male battle gear. What battle is it that women are fighting as they “cover up”?

A burqa is a sensory deprivation and isolation chamber which effectively deprives the wearer of communicating freely and easily with others. This is the precise function of the burqa. It is a moveable prison. One’s ability to speak, hear, and be heard is compromised as is one’s peripheral vision, sense of smell, and ability to eat or shop in public.
Some women have described wearing a burqa as the equivalent of being buried alive or as a very claustrophobic experience. In addition, wearing a burqa may lead to certain Vitamin D deficiency diseases and to eye diseases. I believe such clothing is uniquely hazardous to a woman’s mental and physical health.

Thus, on the one hand, we have women who are being forced to cloak and veil against their will and women who are willing to risk their lives by demanding the right to dress as they choose.




Ironically, on the other hand, many girls and women in the West are literally dressing like prostitutes. They claim that their ability to do so is a “liberating” choice, one that expresses their power over men (or over other women), their individuality, and their freedom from parental or social control.

I do not question their legal right to dress as they wish; nor do I reject their claim that they really “feel” attractive and, therefore, powerful by dressing in fashionable and highly sexual ways. I, too, was once young, and I, too, prized being “attractive” as a way to defy family repression and vigilance.

In a sense, male fantasy, lust, and the desire to control women lurk behind both these forms of dress and undress. Ultimately, a burqa is a highly sexualized garment; the viewer knows that a naked woman is under it. A bikini leaves little to the imagination but has the same effect on male viewers. In both cases, a woman is viewed in terms of her sexual and reproductive availability.

What am I saying? The adoption of one extreme clothing option or another does not mean that a woman is free or powerful or that she has “freely” chosen to look or dress this way.

****

Check out more of Phyllis Chesler’s PJM articles on feminism, culture, freedom and Islam:

Why the West Is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy [8]
My Week With Marilyn: When Innocence Was Sexy [9]
No More Harems: The Hidden History of Muslim and Ex-Muslim Feminism [10]
And here’s a recent video of Phyllis discussing the Burqa on Canadian TV:


Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/naked-breasts-vs-islam/

URLs in this post:

[1] Sila Sahin: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1378455/Sila-Sahin-poses-Playboy-Muslim-model-upsets-family-nude-cover.html
[2] Veena Malik: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16030931
[3] interview: http://articles.cnn.com/2011-11-19/middleeast/world_meast_nude-blogger-aliaa-magda-elmahdy_1_egyptian-blogger-nude-photo-kareem-amer?_s=PM:MIDDLEEAST
[4] “wilding”: http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/941/war-crime-in-cairo
[5] Mona Eltahawy: http://english.ahram.org.eg/~/NewsContent/1/64/27523/Egypt/Politics-/Journalist-Mona-ElTahawy-beaten-and-sexually-assau.aspx
[6] two million women in the Congo have been raped: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/world/africa/12congo.html
[7] $10 billion: http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/10/10-billion-spent-on-cosmetic-procedures-despite-recession/
[8] Why the West Is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy: http://pjmedia.com/blog/why-the-west-is-best/
[9] My Week With Marilyn: When Innocence Was Sexy: http://pjmedia.com/blog/my-week-with-marilyn-when-innocence-was-sexy/
[10] No More Harems: The Hidden History of Muslim and Ex-Muslim Feminism: http://pjmedia.com/blog/no-more-harems-the-hidden-history-of-muslim-and-ex-muslim-feminism/
Copyright © 2011 Pajamas Media. All rights reserved.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Islam Will Be a Majority at the End of the Century


Islam Will Be a Majority at the End of the Century
Timothy Whiteman, Wilmington Political Buzz Examiner
December 22, 2011
The Israeli news service YNetNews.com is reporting of an alarming shift in demograpics on the European continent for the remainder of the century.

Sociology professor at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), and member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, Felice Dassetto has published a new book entitled "The Iris and the Crescent."

The author illustrates that Islam is well on it's way to becoming the most practiced belief sysytem in Europe, and will soon eclipse Christianity.

The Italian-born Dassetto asserts that Muslims will comprise the majority of the population of his adopted home of Brussels by 2030.

The book's title references the yellow iris flower which has historically symbolized the Brussels region of Belgium for centuries; and of course, the cresent of Islam.

Malaysia clamping down on conversions to Christianity, which may number in the "thousands"


Malaysia clamping down on conversions to Christianity, which may number in the "thousands"
Muhammad said, "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him" (Bukhari 9.84.57).

Freedom of Religion Update from Modern, Moderate Malaysia: "Hasan Ali says gathering proof of Christian proselytism," by Debra Chong for The Malaysian Insider, December 20 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 20 — Bent on proving Christians were converting Malay Muslims in Selangor, Datuk Hasan Ali said today his research unit has found 41 apostates in Petaling Jaya and will continue to collect more “profound” data to back his case.
The state executive councillor in charge of Islamic affairs told reporters the 41 apostates were mostly women aged between 30 and 60-years old who were from low-income households.

He postulated that the figure was likely only the tip of the iceberg, with the actual number being much bigger.

“It could be hundreds, maybe even thousands,” he said.

“No one has gathered information and made the statistics,” he added, saying he had set up two-and-half months ago a research unit he called “USA”, short for “Unit Selamatkan Akidah (Faith Rescue Unit)”, to collect the data and persuade the apostates to return to Islam.

“We are helping them, hoping they will come back to Islam,” he said.

The ex-PAS state commissioner appeared taken aback when challenged to prove his theory by a foreign news reporter who pointed out that the so-called apostates could have voluntarily embraced Christianity and were not induced to do so as alleged.

“Are you a Malaysian?” he asked. When she answered no, he explained that there were state laws against the propagation of religions other than Islam to Muslims.

When asked if he had pushed for the prosecution of Christian groups or individuals allegedly involved in proselytising their religion to Muslims, Hasan told reporters that he was researching for more “profound evidence”.

This latest disclosure, after a controversial August 3 raid by Selangor Islamic authorities (Jais) on the Damansara Utama Methodist Church (DUMC) in Petaling Jaya, risks further strain to already tense Christian-Muslim ties.

Christian leaders have consistently denied claims that they are attempting to convert Muslims, but relations between the two creeds with roots in the Middle East continue to smoulder in multi-religious, multi-cultural Malaysia where the religion of the federation is Islam as stated in the Federal Constitution.

Last month, Hasan told the Selangor Legislative Assembly that evangelical Christians are using high-tech devices such as solar-powered talking bibles to proselytise to Malay Muslims in the state.

Oh no! Not the solar-powered talking Bibles! Anything but that!

The lawmaker also said Jais is seeking to strengthen the enforcement of the Non-Islamic Religions (Control of Propagation Amongst Muslims) Enactment 1988 as well as the Syariah Criminal Offences Enactment 1995.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Middle East: We’re Going to Have a Revolution and We Can Do it the Hard Way or the Easy Way


Middle East: We’re Going to Have a Revolution and We Can Do it the Hard Way or the Easy Way
Posted By Barry Rubin On December 13, 2011

“Along the Paris streets the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the…Guillotine.” – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Do I have to draw you a picture of how Islamism is just pretending to be moderate and plans to fundamentally transform the society in countries like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Turkey? Well, I’ll let the most respected Muslim Brotherhood theologian, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, do it for me.

Let me underline that when Qaradawi answers a query, millions of people listen. Egyptian military officers and their families watch his show raptly and so do many others. And Qaradawi isn’t just talking for the sake of talking — he is teaching the revolutionary strategy of seizing all power for all time and imposing all of the Sharia on all of the people. Qaradawi is Lenin in a turban, as was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who did a little number on Iranian politics after the same people who are telling us now that the Brotherhood is moderate were telling us then that the Iranian Islamists were moderate.

If only government officials, journalists, and “experts” would read and comprehend things like this, they might understand what’s happening in the Middle East and how their policy is headed for disaster.

Qaradawi explains:

Gradualism is one of the laws of nature that Allah Almighty has created. It is also needed in applying the rulings of the Sharia to make a change in people’s life.

When used by Communists decades ago this approach was called the “salami tactic” — you go step by step to consolidate your power and go all the way. This is precisely what the “Turkish model” means. And, of course, the point of the exercise is to fool the dummy observers into thinking you are just great guys and very moderate. Incidentally, in this case the salami will be halal.

You invite them to dinner, butter them up, and then have them for dinner. If I were a cartoonist, I’d draw a picture of a man standing in front of a crowd, some of whom had their hands up. The caption would be: “Ok, that’s 23 votes for killing all the Jews first, and 17 for destroying America first.”

Qaradawi gives scriptural reasons for the gradualist approach:

The Prophet … stayed in Mecca for thirteen years struggling to shake the false beliefs the Meccan people had adopted. Then, for another ten years, Allah Almighty revealed to him … the laws that the Muslims would live by. Gradualism played an effective role in that regard. That was shown, for example, in prohibiting alcohol, riba (interest), and other vices [only gradually].

Of course, going step by step “does not mean that we are to be sluggish and delay achieving that aim for too long.” You have to maneuver strategically. That’s what the Muslim Brotherhood does so well and the one-track terrorist minds of al-Qaeda are incapable of doing.

Qaradawi explains:

Abolishing slavery then would have led to economic and social uprising, so, it was wise then to deal with such a problem in an indirect way (by, for instance, regarding setting a slave free as a good deed and making it an expiation for some sins). This implied a gradual abolishing of slavery.

So does imposing slavery.

You see, “Muslims have been socially, legislatively, and culturally invaded.” In other words, they have been influenced by Western notions such as nationalism, equality of religions and women, human-made laws, and so on, so they won’t abandon everything but Islamist-interpreted Islam overnight. They will resist. And so they must be lulled to sleep. And the same applies to the “invaders,” that is, the West so it doesn’t cause any trouble either.

And you need to build a mass base:

If we want to establish a real Muslim society, we should not imagine that such an end can be achieved by a mere decision issued to that effect by a king or a president or a council of leaders or a parliament.

To win that mass base the vanguard party — and here I deliberately use Marxist-Leninist terminology because the strategies are parallel — must be “preparing people ideologically, psychologically, morally, and socially to accept and adopt the application of the Sharia in all aspects of life. … Step by step, and through wise planning, organizing and determination, we can reach the last and long-awaited stage of applying all the teachings of Islam heart and soul.”

To get the point across, Qaradawi ends with a story:

Umar ibn Abdul-Aziz’s son, Abdul-Malik, who was a firm pious young man, said to his father one day, “O father! Why you do not implement the rulings firmly and immediately? By Allah, I would not care if all the world would furiously oppose us so long as we seek to establish the right [that Allah Almighty has enjoined].”

But the wise father said to his son, “Do not deal with matters hastily, son. Allah Almighty despised drinking alcohol twice in the Quran and did not declare it forbidden [until] the third time. I am afraid that if I enjoined the right on people at one stroke, they would give it up all at once, which might lead to sedition.” (See Al-Muafaqat by Ash-Shatibi, vol. 2, p. 94.)

Here, he is also preaching to the Salafists whom he regards as “firm pious” people but too headstrong in their youthful zeal. Qaradawi is the Lenin of Sunni Islam and there is no shortage of Stalins in the wing.

Speaking of the Salafists, how do they talk? Somewhat less subtly. Among the remarks made by party leaders at a rally in Giza, near the Sphinx and Pyramids:

– Democracy is heresy because it contradicts the principle of allegiance to the caliph to make the decisions. Gives a whole new meaning to “One man, one vote, one time,” doesn’t it?

– The Egyptian Bloc, the most truly liberal Egyptian party which has a lot of Christian support, is a nest of “Zionism” and “Freemasonry.” Uh-oh, they’re on the death list. Note: these are the two “covert” forces held responsible for abolishing the caliphate in 1924, the inspiration for the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood four years later. To say the least, Islamists have long memories as well as vivid imaginations.

– “We must obliterate the liberalism that was introduced by Sadat and Mubarak and reinstate the rule of Islam,” said Shaaban Darwish, a member of the party’s supreme committee. (Note: Sadat and Mubarak aren’t hated by Islamists because they were dictators; they were merely the wrong sort of dictator.)

– Darwish continued: “The liberals have corrupted political life in the last 60 years. All they want is to protect their interests with the Americans and the Arabs.” (When someone implies you are American puppet that’s equivalent to a “license to kill.”)

– “When we rule, we’ll bring in a lot of money,” so economic problems will disappear. Where will the money come from? Making the rich pay their “fair share” or just confiscating a lot of stuff. Islamism nowadays has its Bolshevist side.

– Party candidate Adel Azazy said Islamic laws in Saudi Arabia helped reduce the crime rate substantially. I guess having various parts chopped off really is a deterrent.

Qaradawi and the Brotherhood will try to be a restraining force not because they’re moderate, but because they’re smart. But the Salafists will make up the mobs that will attack embassies, kill secularists, burn down churches, and make sure that women dress like they want them to or else.

Will the Brotherhood crack down on these people, vigorously have them arrested, and defend those victims whom they despise? Of course not.

And so when the Tunisian government begins and the Egyptian parliament takes shape, we will be told that the lack of immediate head-chopping will mean that there is nothing to fear. But there will be enough violence, terrorism, and intimidation to show the contrary is true.

Incidentally, Senator John Kerry has just met with Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Cairo. They told him that they were moderate. He no doubt believed them. I seem to recall he also believed Syrian leaders when they told him the same thing, and if not for a revolt there Kerry would no doubt still be engaging the Syrian regime as it happily went about its work of torturing dissidents, subverting their neighbors, promoting anti-Americanism, and sponsoring terrorism.

And the New York Times tells us that the Muslim Brotherhood is really moderate because a columnist had dinner with a few of them and that we shouldn’t take the Salafist vote seriously because it is just a protest vote against the government. And if that isn’t enough, we get AP telling us that Hamas in the Gaza Strip is learning from the Brotherhood and is now becoming moderate, too!

There is no limit on the number of times people will fall for this “moderation trick.” It makes them feel better: There’s nothing to worry about and no need to do anything.

The New York Times, in its latest outpouring of praise for the moderates in the Muslim Brotherhood, states:

The Freedom and Justice Party has sought a middle approach. Its platform calls for Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court to rule on compliance with Shariah. But that stance is essentially without consequence because the court already had that power under Mr. Mubarak, and the judiciary is a bastion of liberalism whose views of Islamic law are highly flexible, to say the least.

What’s wrong with this?

Once you have an Islamist president, parliament, and Constitution they will be naming the judges!

And then the court will rule the way they want. Also the new Constitution might well give additional power to religious courts to make rulings.

This is the intellectual level of most reporting on Egypt. The Islamists say they will only go so far, and we are told not to worry. But of course after they get to that point they will keep going.

Here’s Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid, the man I think is just about the best political analyst in the Arab world, on this topic:

The Islamist party leaders hastened to embellish their image for the Western countries. … Of course, these speeches are public relations acts, and could only be believed by someone ignorant about the region or by the logic of the religious parties. [At most, these claims of moderation] expresses the opinion of few leaders only, because the majority of leaders and cadres of these groups consider cleansing the society as their first duty, and it would not be long before they topple the tolerant leaders.

There are thousands of examples of Western credulity toward dictators and extremists. Here’s one: the famous American liberal Lincoln Steffens interviewed Lenin in 1919:

[Lenin] had shown himself a liberal by instinct. He had defended liberty of speech, assembly, and the Russian press for some five to seven months after the October revolution which put him in power. … But the plottings of the Whites [counterrevolutionaries], the distracting debates and criticisms of the various shades of reds, the wild conspiracies and the violence of the anarchists against Bolshevik socialism, developed an extreme left in Lenin’s party which proposed to proceed directly to the terror which the people were ready for.

No doubt, when Muslim Brotherhood regimes become repressive and impose their program, we will be told: It’s the fault of the remnants of the Mubarak regime, Saudis, United States, Zionists, and the pressure from the Salafists to get tougher.

Article printed from Rubin Reports: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Hizbollah's Hypocrisy



In a speech last week, Mr. Nasrallah vowed to continue supporting the Syrian regime while commemorating the martyrdom of the venerated Shiite Imam Hussein ibn Ali during the battle of Karbala in the year 680.

But Mr. Nasrallah forgets that before his death Imam Hussein lamented that living under the tyranny of the Damascus-based Umayyad Caliphate was a great sorrow — a message that seems to have been lost on Hezbollah today.




December 13, 2011
Hezbollah’s Hypocritical Resistance
By LARBI SADIKI
Exeter, England

SINCE the mid-1980s, the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas have tirelessly pursued armed resistance against Israel in the name of liberating Palestine — often with enormous Arab popular support.

But when a so-called resistance movement fails to support a bottom-up popular revolt against a tyrant, its leaders expose themselves as hypocrites.

That is precisely what is happening to Hezbollah. Faced with the Syrian people’s uprising against President Bashar al-Assad and a democratic tsunami sweeping the Middle East, Hezbollah’s alignment with Mr. Assad is destroying its reputation across the Arab world.

The Syrian masses who once worshiped the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah today curse him when they parade in public squares. The posters of Mr. Assad and Mr. Nasrallah that once adorned car windows and walls throughout Syria are now regularly torched.

Until recently, Mr. Nasrallah, a Shiite, was a pan-Arab icon. His standing as Hezbollah’s chairman and commander of the 2006 war against Israel elevated him to new heights of popularity among Shiites and Sunnis alike, reminiscent of the former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s political stardom following the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956.

Not only did Mr. Nasrallah fight Israel next door; he defied pro-American Arab states, trained and protected Hamas in Lebanon, backed Moktada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia as it killed Americans in Iraq, and showed absolute loyalty to Iran. His fans were in the millions. The Arab multitude from Casablanca to Mecca saw him as a genuine hero who talked the talk and fought the good fight.

But when such a wildly popular resistance movement abandons the ideal, much less the practice, of liberation in support of tyranny, it loses credibility with the public.

Fighting Israel as a Syrian proxy is one thing, but opposing the Syrian people’s desire for democratic change is something else entirely.

The Assads are mortals who are today burdened by a moribund political system. Mr. Assad, his brother Maher and their henchmen have managed to trap themselves in a macabre machine of oppression that has left the stench of death in its wake, from Homs to Hama.

Now, Mr. Nasrallah has reason to worry. In one speech, he defensively denied that his troops partake in repressing Syrian protesters. In another, he ignored the Syrian uprising altogether.

Syrians, in Mr. Nasrallah’s eyes, apparently, do not deserve democracy because that would mean the downfall of Hezbollah’s patron in Damascus, not to mention the destruction of the “axis of resistance” that reaches from southern Beirut to Syria and Iran.

Hezbollah’s fellow “resistance” movement, Hamas, has been more politically savvy. It has adapted to the new political landscape, navigating the uncharted territory of the Syrian uprising by impressing onlookers by what it didn’t do and say rather than what it did or said.

Historically, the biggest threat to the Palestinian national movement has been getting bogged down in other countries’ internal conflicts — from Jordan in the 1970s to Lebanon in the 1980s — and Hamas is mindful of that history.

When the former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad brutally crushed an earlier rebellion by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama in 1982, Hamas did not even exist. But today, the group cannot afford to be seen as complicit in the face of Syria’s new killing fields.

While Hezbollah’s pro-Assad rhetoric and deeds scream “united we stand,” Hamas’s position on the Syrian uprising has been eloquent in its quiet dissidence. The former frets over supply lines for weapons from Iran if the Assad regime falls. The latter, buoyed by the recent success of fellow Sunni Islamist movements — from Tunisia to Egypt — sees a horizon beyond the Assads.

The Hamas leader Khaled Meshal’s cameos in Damascus are becoming increasingly rare and the skeleton staff left at Hamas’s Syrian politburo is simply to keep up appearances. Although it hasn’t severed ties with the Syrian regime, it has downsized its presence in the country, and many of its middle-ranking officials have left Damascus for good, opting to move to Gaza or even to Egypt, Jordan and Qatar — Sunni states where they are likely to find support.

Hamas has paid a price for its more principled stand on Syria: Its coffers have been drying up as Iranian handouts diminish. Its popularity, however, is likely to increase.

Meanwhile, resisting the Syrian people’s resistance has steadily darkened Hezbollah’s prospects as a popular movement throughout the region.

In a speech last week, Mr. Nasrallah vowed to continue supporting the Syrian regime while commemorating the martyrdom of the venerated Shiite Imam Hussein ibn Ali during the battle of Karbala in the year 680.

But Mr. Nasrallah forgets that before his death Imam Hussein lamented that living under the tyranny of the Damascus-based Umayyad Caliphate was a great sorrow — a message that seems to have been lost on Hezbollah today.

Blind to his present political predicament, Mr. Nasrallah has instead declared that Hezbollah will never allow the ouster of Mr. Assad.

Luckily for the Syrian people, that choice is not Mr. Nasrallah’s.

Larbi Sadiki, a senior lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Exeter, is the author of “Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections Without Democracy.”


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Monday, December 12, 2011

Shiite Source: Mary's Pregnancy with Jesus Was Nine Hours


According to the Shiite source Al Kafi (8, 332, 516), Abu Abdullah said: "Verily, Mary bore Jesus for nine hours, each hour of which was a month."

Islamic Extremism in America (from Jihad Watch)


Study Shows U.S. Mosques Repositories of Sharia, Jihad, and Muslim Brotherhood Literature and Preachers
In 1998, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi leader, visited 114 mosques in the United States. Then he gave testimony before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999, and asserted that 80% of American mosques taught the "extremist ideology."

Then there was the Center for Religious Freedom's 2005 study, and the Mapping Sharia Project's 2008 study. Each independently showed that upwards of 80% of mosques in America were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to impose Islamic rule.

And in the summer of 2011 came another study showing that only 19% of mosques in U.S. don't teach jihad violence and/or Islamic supremacism.

And now here is more on the latter study:

Study Shows U.S. Mosques Repositories of Sharia, Jihad, and Muslim Brotherhood Literature and Preachers
Peer-reviewed study most extensive empirical examination of U.S. mosques to date

December 12, 2011 – New York, New York: A leading international peer-reviewed journal specializing in the empirical study of terrorism has published a study that found that 80% of U.S. mosques provide their worshippers with jihad-style literature promoting the use of violence against non-believers and that the imams in those mosques expressly promote that literature.

The study also found that when a mosque imam or its worshippers were “sharia-adherent,” as measured by certain behaviors in conformity with Islamic law, the mosque was more likely to provide this violent literature and the imam was more likely to promote it.

The abstract for the study summarizes the research findings:

A random survey of 100 representative mosques in the U.S. was conducted to measure the correlation between Sharia adherence and dogma calling for violence against non-believers. Of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all. Mosques that presented as Sharia adherent were more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their non-Sharia-adherent counterparts. In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts. The leadership at Sharia-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshipper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-Sharia-adherent mosques. Fifty-eight percent of the mosques invited guest imams known to promote violent jihad. The leadership of mosques that featured violence-positive literature was more likely to invite guest imams who were known to promote violent jihad than was the leadership of mosques that did not feature violence-positive literature on mosque premises.

The study was published in December 2011 by Perspectives on Terrorism, a scholarly international journal of the Terrorism Research Initiative (TRI), a global initiative that seeks to support the international community of terrorism researchers and scholars through the facilitation of collaborative projects and cooperative initiatives. TRI was established in 2007 by scholars from several disciplines in order to provide the global research community with a common tool than can empower them and extend the impact of each participant's research activities.

The mosque study had previously been published by the Middle East Quarterly in September 2011, an academic peer-reviewed journal which specializes on Middle East regional issues. Because of the ground-breaking nature of the study, which brings a rigorous empirical methodology to the question of home-grown jihadists, MEQ granted permission to Perspectives on Terrorism to publish a more extensive analysis of the study’s conception, methodology, and results.

The study’s authors, Professor Mordechai Kedar of Bar Ilan University in Israel and David Yerushalmi, who serves as general counsel to the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., have both published widely on terrorism, Islamic law and its underlying doctrines of jihad and violence against unbelievers.

The study may be accessed here at the Mapping Sharia website.

The study may be accessed here at MEQ.

The study may be accessed here at Perspectives on Terrorism.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

According to the Prophet of Islam, Only Jesus and Mary were not not touched by Satan



"Anecdotally, one of Mohammad's followers asked him if he could carry his sin for him. Mohammad admitted that he could not for the reason that he had his own sin to carry. At the same time, Mohammad confessed that Jesus alone of those born on earth was exclusively born without being touched by the devil. Who then, can bear your sin, if not the sinless sin-bearer who came to die for you, that you need never die?"


Abu Huraira said, "I heard Allah's Apostle saying, 'There is none born among the off-spring of Adam, but Satan touches it. A child therefore, cries loudly at the time of birth because of the touch of Satan, EXCEPT MARY AND HER CHILD." Then Abu Huraira recited: "And I seek refuge with You for her and for her offspring from the outcast Satan" (3.36) (Sahih Al-Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 55, Number 641; see also Volume 4, Book 54, Number 506)

Prayers Needed


Dear Friends,
Please pray for this Iraqi young man (known as K2) who used to come to Salam. He is incarcerated at Dupage County prison. During the last visit , he stated that he does not believe in Christ anymore as Savior. Please pray that Christ would reveal Himself to him with power.
Thanks

Jesus Through the Quran and Shiite Narrations


"Jesus Through the Quran and Shiite Narrations"
This book by Mahdi Muntazir Qaim (means the one who is waiting for the Guided-one or "Shiite Savior") argues that in Islam, you could know God through Jesus, without edifying Jesus Christ....However, the author does not ask why the Quran, among all prophets, only calls Jesus the Word of Allah, and a Spirit from Allah!!

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Salam Arabic Fellowship: Salam Arabic Fellowship: Americans: Undecided Abou...

Salam Arabic Fellowship: Salam Arabic Fellowship: Americans: Undecided Abou...: Salam Arabic Fellowship: Americans: Undecided About God? : December 10, 2011 Americans: Undecided About God? By ERIC WEINER THE holidays ar...

Salam Arabic Fellowship: Americans: Undecided About God?


Salam Arabic Fellowship: Americans: Undecided About God?: December 10, 2011 Americans: Undecided About God? By ERIC WEINER THE holidays are upon us again — it sounds vaguely aggressive, as if th...

Americans: Undecided About God?




December 10, 2011
Americans: Undecided About God?
By ERIC WEINER
THE holidays are upon us again — it sounds vaguely aggressive, as if the holidays were some sort of mugger, or overly enthusiastic lover — and so it’s time to stick a thermometer deep in our souls and take our spiritual temperature (between trips to the mall, of course).

For some of us, the season affords an opportunity to reconnect with our religious heritage. For others, myself included, it’s a time to shake our heads over the sad state of our national conversation about God, and wish there were another way.

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us?

The rest of us, it turns out, constitute the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic. We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. The percentage is even higher among young people; at least a quarter are Nones.

Apparently, a growing number of Americans are running from organized religion, but by no means running from God. On average 93 percent of those surveyed say they believe in God or a higher power; this holds true for most Nones — just 7 percent of whom describe themselves as atheists, according to a survey by Trinity College.

Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism.

Why the rise of the Nones? David Campbell and Robert Putnam, of the University of Notre Dame and the Harvard Kennedy School, respectively, think politics is to blame. Their idea is that we’ve mixed politics and religion so completely that many simply opt out of both; apparently they are reluctant to claim a religious affiliation because they don’t want the political one that comes along with it.

We are more religiously polarized than ever. In my secular, urban and urbane world, God is rarely spoken of, except in mocking, derisive tones. It is acceptable to cite the latest academic study on, say, happiness or, even better, whip out a brain scan, but God? He is for suckers, and Republicans.

I used to be that way, too, until a health scare and the onset of middle age created a crisis of faith, and I ventured to the other side. I quickly discovered that I didn’t fit there, either. I am not a True Believer. I am a rationalist. I believe the Enlightenment was a very good thing, and don’t wish to return to an age of raw superstition.

We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.

Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)

By that measure, there is very little “good religion” out there. Put bluntly: God is not a lot of fun these days. Many of us don’t view religion so generously. All we see is an angry God. He is constantly judging and smiting, and so are his followers. No wonder so many Americans are enamored of the Dalai Lama. He laughs, often and well.

Precious few of our religious leaders laugh. They shout. God is not an exclamation point, though. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this.

Religion and politics, though often spoken about in the same breath, are, of course, fundamentally different. Politics is, by definition, a public activity. Though religion contains large public components, it is at core a personal affair. It is the relationship we have with ourselves or, as the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, “What the individual does with his solitariness.” There lies the problem: how to talk about the private nature of religion publicly.

What is the solution? The answer, I think, lies in the sort of entrepreneurial spirit that has long defined America, including religious America.

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

Eric Weiner is the author, most recently, of “Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine.”

Friday, December 9, 2011

Live Love



Live Love
I was in the middle of writing my sermon when a refugee family called, asking for mattresses. They said that they were sleeping on the floor...in this cold..I had to drive out to St. John Lutheran Church in Lombard, get the mattresses from the storage room, and then deliver them in Wheaton. Who could let a family sleep on the floor in this cold!! Matthew 25: 42

Live Love

Live Love
I was in the middle of writing my sermon when a refugee family called, asking for mattresses. They said that they were sleeping on the floor...in this cold..I had to drive out to St. John Lutheran Church in Lombard, get the mattresses from the storage room, and then deliver them in Wheaton. Who could let a family sleep on the floor in this cold!! Matthew 25: 42

Live Love

I was in the middle of writing my sermon when a refugee family called, asking for mattresses. They said that they were sleeping on the floor...in this cold..I had to drive out to St. John Lutheran Church in Lombard, get the mattresses from the storage room, and then deliver them in Wheaton. Who could let a family sleep on the floor in this cold!! Matthew 25: 42

Thursday, December 8, 2011

What we learned from the Assad interview - By David Kenner | The Middle East Channel

What we learned from the Assad interview - By David Kenner | The Middle East Channel

The Harvest is Ripe


The Harvest Is Ripe

Hussein, 20, an Iraqi refugee, was baptized last August. Last month, he shared with the church his conversion experience. Hussein said that he experienced real Christian love when an American Christian family invited all his family members (7) upon their arrival to America to a Thanksgiving dinner. Attending Salam for more than three years, Jesus Christ spoke to his heart and Hussein found in Him peace and power to overcome sin.

Muneer, 25, Iranian, who has been attending Salam for a year, was baptized early October.
Nasser, 29, another Iranian, arrived to Chicagoland a month ago. Even though he was called to faith in Christ in Turkey where he first sought refuge, he had nobody who could disciple him there, because of the language barrier.
It was a very emotional scene when Nasser first arrived at Salam, knelt down at the Altar and prayed to Jesus. This is something he had been yearning for since he left Turkey. We have been providing discipleship and support for this young man who has no family and no friends but Jesus, who has been using Salam to feed him.
Nasser was baptized on October 27th.

Salam thanks you for your partnership in God's mission, and we pray that our work for Christ's Kingdom will give more fruits.

In Christ,
Rev. Hicham Chehab
Missionary, Pastor

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Salam on Thanksgiving

Iraq, Iran refugees part of Hawthorn Woods dinner

By Bob Susnjara
Roughly 95 guests, including refugees from the Middle East, enjoyed turkey with all the trimmings as part of a fifth annual community Thanksgiving at St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Hawthorn Woods.

Church members Dean and Sue Stewart headed a kitchen team that prepared the spread free to anyone who wished to visit from noon to 2 p.m. Thursday.

Taking a break from his kitchen duties, Dean Stewart said the idea for the community Thanksgiving hatched after the couple's combined three siblings and their families moved to other states.

“We were kind of cooking a big meal for just a few people,” he said. “And then we found there were a number of other people in the same situation.”

Stewart said the inaugural community Thanksgiving attracted about 40 guests in 2007. He said 95 were expected Thursday in St. Matthew's basement, which has room for more.

Among Thursday's visitors were 20 refugees from Iraq and Iran who were brought to St. Matthew by the Rev. Hicham Chehab, pastor of Salam Arabic Fellowship in Lombard.

Chehab, who leads a weekly Arabic worship service at the Christian fellowship, said some in his group arrived in the United States only a month ago seeking political asylum. He briefed them on Thanksgiving before the holiday arrived.

“They are persecuted over there, so they feel they arrived to the land of freedom and they kind of enjoy it,” Chehab said. “We were driving from Wheaton, 55 minutes, looking around. They haven't seen such nature and beauty.”

St. Matthew's kitchen crew cranked out 252 pounds of turkey that received a salt brine and under-skin marinade, along with two kinds of sweet potatoes and other eats.

In addition, turkey tetrazzini was prepared for a contribution later in the day to St. Matthew Lutheran Church on 21st Street in Chicago, where the El Comedor Popular Soup Kitchen operates.

New church member Tony Crisara served as Stewart's sous chef and clearly enjoyed the homey atmosphere in Hawthorn Woods, which included football on television and a prayer from St. Matthew Senior Pastor Timothy Kinne.

“It's sweet,” Crisara said. “We are all one big family, not just individuals.”

Copyright © 2011 Paddock Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Allah: The God of Islam


Allah: The god of Islam

By Georges Houssney on February 2nd, 2010
At the moment a Muslim is born and again on his death bed, seven Arabic words are whispered into his ears: “La ilaha ilia Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah” which translates, “(There is) no god except Allah; Muhammad (is) Allah’s prophet.” This creed, which is the focal point of Islamic religion, is instilled into the mind of a Muslim from cradle to grave. It is repeated five times a day in the call to prayer. Muslims are also encouraged to repeat the name of Allah as many times as possible throughout the day.

Allah predates Islam

The word “Allah” predates Islam. Each Arab tribe had its own idol gods and goddesses, but a number of tribes also acknowledged the existence of an “unknown god” they called al-ilah, which literally means “the god.” He was considered to be the invisible, supreme deity; however, they did not have a unified concept of who he was. In due time, Allah became “…a universalization of the tribal god who was often referred to as al-ilah (the god). When the tribe encountered another tribe who had a god whom they also referred to as al-ilah, they both thought that they were referring to the same being, and so a universal idea of Allah grew among the Arabs.” (Nazir Ali, p. 26)

Allah and a great number of his 99 other names are commonly used in naming male Arabs today. This tradition was practiced in Arabia even before Islam. Muhammad’s own father bore the name Abd-Allah (slave of Allah). The fact that these names were commonly used among Arab idol worshipers before Islam attests to the fact that Allah was not the God of the Bible. Rather, he was a pagan deity known only to the Arabs of the Peninsula. Arabic poetry of the Jahilia (ignorance) period before Islam shows this clearly.

The Kaaba was known as beit-Allah or “the house of Allah.” Even though it housed 360 idol gods, the Kaaba was ultimately the house of Allah, the supreme pagan god. As lord of the Kaaba, he was not represented by a tangible statue like the 360 idols inside the Kaaba were. Would Jehovah, the God of the Bible, dwell in a house along with 360 idol gods and goddesses?

Arab prophets

Muhammad was not the first Arab to try to promote a monotheistic worship of Allah. Before him came other Arab prophets with similar messages. A man named Hud from the tribe of A’d in southern Yemen preached for several years, but had only a small following. Salih from the tribe of Thamud, close to the Gulf of Aqaba, preached against polytheism. His own people rejected his message and decided to keep their idols. Shua’yb from the Hijaz tribe was just one of several who tried to call the Arabs to believe in Allah and destroy all their other gods. One particular group called the Hanifs tried to promote the supremacy of Allah over other gods. Arabs rejected the message of such prophets and of the Hanifs, preferring their visible gods.

Muhammad — last Arab prophet

It is vital for the student of Islam to realize that Muhammad continued the legacy of his predecessors who had no awareness of Judaism and Christianity and made no claims to be associated with either. These Arab prophets promoted a strictly Arab cause and an Arab deity.

Muhammad was the last in a succession of prophets who had one common purpose, to unite the Arabs under one supreme deity. In fact, a close look at his religious experience, his message and his leadership style places him firmly within Arab tradition. His call to belief in Allah as the only deity is basically the same message that his Arab predecessors had preached.

However, Muhammad had a better chance of succeeding in his mission due to the wealth he had gained by marrying Khadija, the prominent position his Quraish tribe held in relationship to other Arab tribes and the influence of the Jews and Christians who contributed to his doctrinal development. Further, Arabs are infatuated with poetry to which they attribute demonic power. Because the Quran’s style of Arabic was poetical and attractive, Arabs thought of Muhammad as sophisticated, articulate and powerful.

Is Allah the God of Abraham?

Muslim tradition traces Allah to the monotheistic faith of Abraham. Muslims claim that Ishmael and his ousted mother, Hagar, settled in Mecca where Abraham visited them frequently. Abraham was believed to have introduced the belief in one God to the Arabian tribes.

However, there is absolutely no historical evidence to back up the claim that Abraham ever stepped into Arabia. In fact, the Bible dearly states in Genesis 21:8-21 that Hagar and Ishmael wandered in the desert of Beersheba. With little to eat and drink, they could only have traveled a short distance. Hagar and Ishmael settled in the desert of Paran, which is located in the north central region of the Sinai desert, about one thousand miles away from Mecca. Ishmael, who married an Egyptian like his mother, remained in the region with his twelve children, all of whom settled in the Sinai near the border of Egypt according to Genesis 25:18. Therefore, the claims that Abraham had built the Kaaba and that the well God provided for Hagar and Ishmael is Zamzam in Mecca are completely unsubstantiated. There is also no evidence that the monotheism of the Arabs had any roots in Abraham.

The religious practices of pre-Islamic Arabia were confined to the desert gods who were lifeless and impersonal meteorite stones. They could neither hear nor talk. Though he was recognized as the supreme deity, Allah was some kind of a mysterious god; invisible, aloof and unknowable. Certain tribes in Arabia were aware of his existence, but his attributes were unknown to them. Arabs knew little about Allah, and the little they attributed to him was derived from their pagan concept of deity. Allah was so vague and impersonal that, as a rule of thumb, anything said about a human being could not be said about him. He was better described by what he was not than by what he was. This made him more frightening and mysterious, and therefore less attractive.

Is Allah Jehovah?

Muhammad must have found it intriguing that both Jews and Christians considered Abraham the grandfather of their respective faiths. He saw in this common denominator a factor which could potentially unite all inhabitants of Arabia in spite of their various religious backgrounds. He claimed descent from Abraham through Ishmael. He chose the Arabic name “Allah” after considering other names like “Ar-Rahman” (Surah 2:163) and attributed to him pagan, Jewish and Christian characteristics. He hoped that this would be a drawing card in mobilizing support for his newly formulated religion.

However, it is critical to understand that whatever Muhammad imported from Judaism and Christianity into Islam was marginal, and that at its core his concept of God remained pagan. We see little evidence that the Judeo-Christian view of God has had a major impact on the overall worldview of Muhammad and his Muslim followers. This is evident in the writings of Muslim theologians throughout the centuries.

With this in mind, we can conclude that the Allah of Islam, though he has characteristics similar to the God of the Bible, was a pagan god used as a political tool to unite the Arabs under the ambitious leadership of Muhammad. A closer look at the Islamic worldview shows us that the pagan characteristics of Allah dominate the Muslim’s mindset. Any similarities between Allah of Islam and the Judeo-Christian God are marginal. For instance, at the core of Islamic doctrine is the belief that Allah is impersonal. All of his attributes stem from this concept. Antithetically, at the core of the Judeo-Christian faith is the belief that God is personal. All His attributes center around that belief. Here lies the great schism in the worldviews of Muslims and Christians.

Conclusion

The Islamic concept of Allah dominates the heart and mind of a Muslim, and therefore it is the greatest obstacle to a Muslim’s understanding of the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible. The Christian God is a personal, loving Father who has entered human history to reveal Himself to us and rescue us from our sinfulness. He has paid the price for our sin in order to free us, restore us to His image and give us assurance of eternal life.

Explaining this to a Muslim is like explaining the life of a bird to a fish confined to an aquarium. It goes against the grain of his whole religious and cultural system. Though offensive, it is the greatest news a Muslim can ever receive. We cannot adequately relate to Muslims, nor can we help a Muslim understand the God of the Bible, until we have grasped an accurate understanding of their concept of Allah in contrast to the God of the Bible.

Bibliography

Harris, R. Laird, Gleason Archer, and Bruce Waltke. Theobgical Wordbook of the Old Testament. Chicago: Moody Press, 1980.

Haykal, Muhammad Husain. Hayat Muhammad. Indianapolis: North American Trust, 1976.

Nazir Alt, Michael. Islam: A Christian Perspective. Exeter, England: Paternoster, 1983,

Otten, J. The Ahmadia Doctrine of God. Hyderabad, India: Henry Martin Institute, n.d.

Zwemer/ Samuel M. The Moslem Doctrine of God. New York: American Tract Society, 1905.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Blessed with a New Baptism


Abdul, 20, a Muslim refugee from Lebanon, arrived in America in 2006. He has been coming to Salam for four years.
Abdul says that he has experienced Christian love only in America, after he was abused in Lebanon, and started wondering if Jesus was really the Truth. Last summer, a sermon given at Salam titled "Who is Jesus?" tugged at Abdul's heart and he was called to baptism in August.
Abdul wants to follow Jesus, live a Christian life, and help at Salam. He is praying about whether to go to seminary, after he finished his college education. Please pray that God would use Abed for His Kingdom.

Monday, October 31, 2011



Every Christmas season, when I watch the Nativity scenes, I cannot but wonder about the amazing grace of God in sending His only Son to die for the sins of the world. God's Grace is really amazing. I am sure that Mary and Joseph, as they laid baby Jesus in a manger, after they were sent away at the local inn, did not imagine the blessings that God would shower on them. Three kings came and knelt at the manger, offering their treasures to baby Jesus and his family. Likewise, when one of us accepts the free gift of salvation through faith in Jesus, he/she cannot fathom the blessings God showers on us.

At Christmas, we, at Salam, pray that people from the Middle East will receive the most important gift of all—the love and hope of Jesus Christ. But we can't do it without your partnership and prayers. Would you consider giving a Christmas gift that would enable Salam become salt and light to the lost from the Middle East ?
Donations are tax-deductible if made payable to Salam Christian Fellowship.
Merry Christmas,
Hicham

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Salam's Interaction with Christians


Today Salam was visited by some Concordia students in River Forest, Chicago. It is important for Salam people to interact with some Christians, especially the young. This makes them feel welcome and part of the larger picture; the Church.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Road to 911 Movie


I will be showing =The Road to 911 at Fellowship of Faith Mchenry on 9/11, at 9 am.
The movie is 50 minutes. All are welcome.

6120 Mason Hill Road
McHenry, IL 60050
(815) 759-0739

Friday, August 26, 2011

Pray for Muslims on the "Night of Power"



Pray for Muslims on the "Night of Power"
Many Muslims will celebrate the Night of Power on the evening of August 26 this year (afternoon and evening in the US).

According to a Muslim tradition with some variations, Mohammed supposedly received his first revelation of the Koran in the night as the 27th day of Ramadan began. On that night Muslims will recite ritual prayers over and over again in hope that if Allah is willing he will forgive their sins. Some also hope that angels will come down from heaven and grant special requests. Some Muslims will recite a profession of faith as many as 100 times in one night, speaking in Arabic, a language they may not even understand. Others will be more reflective, evaluating their life and planning for the next year.

Muslims believe that whatever acts they perform on the Night of Power will achieve greater merit in the eyes of Allah than the same acts done for 1,000 months. They are desperately seeking Allah’s approval, blessing, and forgiveness. Although they believe the Night of Power gives their prayers a greater probability of being granted, they have no guarantee that Allah will answer them.

Because many Muslims will observe the Night of Power this evening, please make note to pray for them on this day. Pray that they will see the emptiness of their recitations and that they will see their spiritual need as they evaluate their lives. Pray that they will come to know the true God and Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

For God does speak—now one way, now another— though no one perceives it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn them from wrongdoing and keep them from pride, to preserve them from the pit, their lives from perishing by the sword. Job 33:14-18

Saturday, August 13, 2011

We need talking heads, the Lebanese way

We need talking heads, the Lebanese way

Guest Muslim pastor in W. Dundee: ‘God saved me from myself’



Article updated: 8/13/2011 1:07 AM
Guest Muslim pastor in W. Dundee: ‘God saved me from myself’

By
From the time he was a little boy growing up in Lebanon until he was 21, Hicham Chehab was consumed with hatred toward Christians.

Lebanon was a war-torn country divided between the Christians and Muslims, with many Muslims angered that the Christian minority treated them like second-class citizens.

So when a Christian militia group killed Chehab’s older brother in Lebanon 30 years ago, Chehab admits to hunting Christians down at night to avenge his death.

But all that changed when Chehab, formerly a Muslim extremist, took a cultural studies class at the American University of Beirut that required him to read selections from the Bible, including “The Sermon on the Mount.”

In one part of the sermon, Jesus instructs his followers, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”

Chehab, 51, knew the Quran chapter and verse, but wasn’t at all familiar with the Bible. He felt God was talking directly to him when he read that particular verse and he took it right to heart. God, he said, saved him from himself and taught him the power of forgiveness.

“When involved in something, you are kind of drowned in it,” Chehab said of his previous activities. “You don’t see the other side of the coin. I saw the other side of the coin reading the Bible.”

This weekend, Chehab brings his story to Bethlehem Lutheran Church in West Dundee as the guest pastor. He will discuss his past life and his transformation at the 5:30 p.m. Saturday service and again at 10 a.m. Sunday. A PowerPoint presentation on his fellowships in Lombard and Batavia follows the Sunday service at 11 a.m.

Christine Gross, a member at-large on Bethlehem’s church council, is responsible for been bringing guest pastors to the church once a month.

The 100-year-old church is in the midst of trying to redefine its focus and Chehab’s story should definitely give members something to think about.

“He brings something different to the pulpit and something different to our church,” Gross said. “He has a powerful, powerful message.”

Chehab went on to become a peacemaker of sorts, bridging the gap between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. He calls himself a Muslim follower of Jesus.

Chehab lives in Hanover Park. He runs his Salam fellowship out of Peace Lutheran Church in Lombard and Immanuel Lutheran Church in Batavia, helping refugees get on their feet, teaching them American customs and introducing them to God.

In West Dundee, he hopes the message of forgiveness shines through.

“I hated, I had a desire for vengeance and I was kind of ruining my own life,” Chehab said. “But I saw hope and forgiveness in the forgiveness that Christ gives, in peace.”

Copyright © \2011\ Paddock Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt


By FOUAD AJAMI

The late great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek would have seen the Arab Spring for the economic revolt it was right from the start. For generations the Arab populations had bartered away their political freedom for economic protection. They rose in rebellion when it dawned on them that the bargain had not worked, that the system of subsidies, and the promise of equality held out by the autocrats, had proven a colossal failure.

What Hayek would call the Arab world's "road to serfdom" began when the old order of merchants and landholders was upended in the 1950s and '60s by a political and military class that assumed supreme power. The officers and ideologues who came to rule Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria and Yemen were men contemptuous of the marketplace and of economic freedom. As a rule, they hailed from the underclass and had no regard for the sanctity of wealth and property. They had come to level the economic order, and they put the merchant classes, and those who were the mainstay of the free market, to flight.

It was in the 1950s that the foreign minorities who had figured prominently in the economic life of Egypt after the cotton boom of the 1860s, and who had drawn that country into the web of the world economy, would be sent packing. The Jews and the Greeks and the Italians would take with them their skills and habits. The military class, and the Fabian socialists around them, distrusted free trade and the marketplace and were determined to rule over them or without them.

The Egyptian way would help tilt the balance against the private sector in other Arab lands as well. In Iraq, the Jews of the country, on its soil for well over two millennia, were dispossessed and banished in 1950-51. They had mastered the retail trade and were the most active community in the commerce of Baghdad. Some Shiite merchants stepped into their role, but this was short-lived. Military officers and ideologues of the Baath Party from the "Sunni triangle"—men with little going for them save their lust for wealth and power—came into possession of the country and its oil wealth. They, like their counterparts in Egypt, were believers in central planning and "social equality." By the 1980s, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni thug born from crushing poverty, would come to think of the wealth of the country as his own.

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David Klein
In Libya, a deranged Moammar Gadhafi did Saddam one better. After his 1969 military coup, he demolished the private sector in 1973 and established what he called "Islamic Socialism." Gadhafi's so-called popular democracy basically nationalized the entire economy, rendering the Libyan people superfluous by denying them the skills and the social capital necessary for a viable life.

In his 1944 masterpiece, "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek wrote that in freedom-crushing totalitarian societies "the worst get on top." In words that described the Europe of his time but also capture the contemporary Arab condition, he wrote: "To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds; he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own."

This well describes the decades-long brutal dictatorship of Syria's Hafez al-Assad, and now his son Bashar's rule. It is said that Hafez began his dynasty with little more than a modest officer's salary. His dominion would beget a family of enormous wealth: The Makhloufs, the in-laws of the House of Assad, came to control crucial sectors of the Syrian economy.

The Alawites, the religious sect to which the Assad clan belongs, had been poor peasants and sharecroppers, but political and military power raised them to new heights. The merchants of Damascus and Aleppo, and the landholders in Homs and Hama, were forced to submit to the new order. They could make their peace with the economy of extortion, cut Alawite officers into long-established businesses, or be swept aside.

But a decade or so ago this ruling bargain—subsidies and economic redistribution in return for popular quiescence—began to unravel. The populations in Arab lands had swelled and it had become virtually impossible to guarantee jobs for the young and poorly educated. Economic nationalism, and the war on the marketplace, had betrayed the Arabs. They had the highest unemployment levels among developing nations, the highest jobless rate among the young, and the lowest rates of economic participation among women. The Arab political order was living on borrowed time, and on fear of official terror.

Attempts at "reform" were made. But in the arc of the Arab economies, the public sector of one regime became the private sector of the next. Sons, sons-in-law and nephews of the rulers made a seamless transition into the rigged marketplace when "privatization" was forced onto stagnant enterprises. Of course, this bore no resemblance to market-driven economics in a transparent system. This was crony capitalism of the worst kind, and it was recognized as such by Arab populations. Indeed, this economic plunder was what finally severed the bond between Hosni Mubarak and an Egyptian population known for its timeless patience and stoicism.

The sad truth of Arab social and economic development is that the free-market reforms and economic liberalization that remade East Asia and Latin America bypassed the Arab world. This is the great challenge of the Arab Spring and of the forces that brought it about. The marketplace has had few, if any, Arab defenders. If the tremendous upheaval at play in Arab lands is driven by a desire to capture state power—and the economic prerogatives that come with political power—the revolution will reproduce the failures of the past.

In Yemen, a schoolteacher named Amani Ali, worn out by the poverty and anarchy of that poorest of Arab states, recently gave voice to a sentiment that has been the autocrats' prop: "We don't want change," he said. "We don't want freedom. We want food and safety." True wisdom, and an end to their road to serfdom, will only come when the Arab people make the connection between economic and political liberty.

Mr. Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is co-chairman of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Professor Hired for Outreach to Muslims Delivers a Jolt Islamic Theologian's Theory: It's Likely the Prophet Muhammad Never Existed



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WORLD NEWSNOVEMBER 15, 2008
Professor Hired for Outreach to Muslims Delivers a Jolt
Islamic Theologian's Theory: It's Likely the Prophet Muhammad Never Existed
By ANDREW HIGGINS

MÜNSTER, Germany -- Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany's first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn't like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.

So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed.

Theology Without Muhammad

Read a translated excerpt from "Islamic Theology Without the Historic Muhammad -- Comments on the Challenges of the Historical-Critical Method for Islamic Thinking" by Professor Kalisch.

Muslims, not surprisingly, are outraged. Even Danish cartoonists who triggered global protests a couple of years ago didn't portray the Prophet as fictional. German police, worried about a violent backlash, told the professor to move his religious-studies center to more-secure premises.

"We had no idea he would have ideas like this," says Thomas Bauer, a fellow academic at Münster University who sat on a committee that appointed Prof. Kalisch. "I'm a more orthodox Muslim than he is, and I'm not a Muslim."

When Prof. Kalisch took up his theology chair four years ago, he was seen as proof that modern Western scholarship and Islamic ways can mingle -- and counter the influence of radical preachers in Germany. He was put in charge of a new program at Münster, one of Germany's oldest and most respected universities, to train teachers in state schools to teach Muslim pupils about their faith.

Muslim leaders cheered and joined an advisory board at his Center for Religious Studies. Politicians hailed the appointment as a sign of Germany's readiness to absorb some three million Muslims into mainstream society. But, says Andreas Pinkwart, a minister responsible for higher education in this north German region, "the results are disappointing."

Prof. Kalisch, who insists he's still a Muslim, says he knew he would get in trouble but wanted to subject Islam to the same scrutiny as Christianity and Judaism. German scholars of the 19th century, he notes, were among the first to raise questions about the historical accuracy of the Bible.

Many scholars of Islam question the accuracy of ancient sources on Muhammad's life. The earliest biography, of which no copies survive, dated from roughly a century after the generally accepted year of his death, 632, and is known only by references to it in much later texts. But only a few scholars have doubted Muhammad's existence. Most say his life is better documented than that of Jesus.


MUHAMMAD SVEN KALISH

"Of course Muhammad existed," says Tilman Nagel, a scholar in Göttingen and author of a new book, "Muhammad: Life and Legend." The Prophet differed from the flawless figure of Islamic tradition, Prof. Nagel says, but "it is quite astonishing to say that thousands and thousands of pages about him were all forged" and there was no such person.

All the same, Prof. Nagel has signed a petition in support of Prof. Kalisch, who has faced blistering criticism from Muslim groups and some secular German academics. "We are in Europe," Prof. Nagel says. "Education is about thinking, not just learning by heart."

Prof. Kalisch's religious studies center recently removed a sign and erased its address from its Web site. The professor, a burly 42-year-old, says he has received no specific threats but has been denounced as apostate, a capital offense in some readings of Islam.

"Maybe people are speculating that some idiot will come and cut off my head," he said during an interview in his study.

A few minutes later, an assistant arrived in a panic to say a suspicious-looking digital clock had been found lying in the hallway. Police, called to the scene, declared the clock harmless.

A convert to Islam at age 15, Prof. Kalisch says he was drawn to the faith because it seemed more rational than others. He embraced a branch of Shiite Islam noted for its skeptical bent. After working briefly as a lawyer, he began work in 2001 on a postdoctoral thesis in Islamic law in Hamburg, to go through the elaborate process required to become a professor in Germany.

The Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. that year appalled Mr. Kalisch but didn't dent his devotion. Indeed, after he arrived at Münster University in 2004, he struck some as too conservative. Sami Alrabaa, a scholar at a nearby college, recalls attending a lecture by Prof. Kalisch and being upset by his doctrinaire defense of Islamic law, known as Sharia.

In private, he was moving in a different direction. He devoured works questioning the existence of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Then "I said to myself: You've dealt with Christianity and Judaism but what about your own religion? Can you take it for granted that Muhammad existed?"

He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerged. He was struck, he says, by the fact that the first coins bearing Muhammad's name did not appear until the late 7th century -- six decades after the religion did.

He traded ideas with some scholars in Saarbrücken who in recent years have been pushing the idea of Muhammad's nonexistence. They claim that "Muhammad" wasn't the name of a person but a title, and that Islam began as a Christian heresy.

Prof. Kalisch didn't buy all of this. Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds and called Muhammad's existence "more probable than not." By early this year, though, his thinking had shifted. "The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable," he says.

He has doubts, too, about the Quran. "God doesn't write books," Prof. Kalisch says.

Some of his students voiced alarm at the direction of his teaching. "I began to wonder if he would one day say he doesn't exist himself," says one. A few boycotted his lectures. Others sang his praises.

Prof. Kalisch says he "never told students 'just believe what Kalisch thinks' " but seeks to teach them to think independently. Religions, he says, are "crutches" that help believers get to "the spiritual truth behind them." To him, what matters isn't whether Muhammad actually lived but the philosophy presented in his name.

This summer, the dispute hit the headlines. A Turkish-language German newspaper reported on it with gusto. Media in the Muslim world picked up on it.

Germany's Muslim Coordinating Council withdrew from the advisory board of Prof. Kalisch's center. Some Council members refused to address him by his adopted Muslim name, Muhammad, saying that he should now be known as Sven.

German academics split. Michael Marx, a Quran scholar at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, warned that Prof. Kalisch's views would discredit German scholarship and make it difficult for German scholars to work in Muslim lands. But Ursula Spuler-Stegemann, an Islamic studies scholar at the University of Marburg, set up a Web site called solidaritymuhammadkalisch.com and started an online petition of support.

Alarmed that a pioneering effort at Muslim outreach was only stoking antagonism, Münster University decided to douse the flames. Prof. Kalisch was told he could keep his professorship but must stop teaching Islam to future school teachers.

The professor says he's more determined than ever to keep probing his faith. He is finishing a book to explain his thoughts. It's in English instead of German because he wants to make a bigger impact. "I'm convinced that what I'm doing is necessary. There must be a free discussion of Islam," he says.

—Almut Schoenfeld in Berlin contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com

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