Muslim Heretics Conference

BY
TANVEER JAFRI

Terror or terrorism is one of the oldest disasters on the earth. It can be said that this system named terrorism is, for the centuries, here on this earth. But there have always been differences to define it. If you talk from the side of terrorists, you can hear different reasons of terrorism from every affected area of terrorism. If not going deep into, it can be understood, the affected victims of the society call it terrorism what the terrorists indulged in terrorism call it crusade, revenge or an offensive action to oppose. The worldwide terrorism has different reasons in different parts of the world. Somewhere the terrorism is to get freedom or somewhere to get sovereignty. At same place, these activities are being carried out to free the region from the opponents. At some places the basic reason of terrorism is poverty, starvation & unemployment. But at international level, the media mostly talks of, that is so said the ‘Islamic terrorism’.

There were terrorist activities even before the 9/11 terrorist attack on America. But the form of terrorism was different from the form of terrorism prevalent now-a-days. Before 9/11, America was known as the spectator of so said Islamic terrorism or at some places it was known that it worked as a helper to organize it. But the event of 9/11 forced America to think that even America can fall victim to own pet snake. So on this day, American President Bush declared to start a worldwide ‘war against terrorism’. After the event of 9/11, America took a vow to uproot the tree of terrorism from the world. Most of the Muslim countries of the world strongly oppose the thought of strong religionist terrorism & call it anti-Islamic. These Muslim countries openly favoured America against terrorism after 9/11. Even the terrorists accused the rulers of these Muslim countries, who opposed terrorism, as anti-Islamic or Pro-American. The terrorists felt that these countries were in favour of America & so they were their enemies. During this period, America tried to tell the world that it is not against the Islam or the Islamic teachings or the Muslims of the world. But it is against those people or of people having that thought, who talk of religious war & misuse name of the Islam & attack the innocent people of the world. But can this claim of America is right that its opponent is not the Islam or the Muslims but only the terrorists?

There is no doubt that sometime ago, Pope Benedict had called all the Islam Literati together & gave hints to establish religious harmony between the Islam & the Christianity. Not only this, Pope even gave a show of this harmony & tolerance by visiting an ancient mosque in Turkey. If there is any disaster in the Muslim countries, may it be from a military action or natural calamity, Pope has always given an appeal from the core of his heart that showed him as a true religious leader. He is in favour of not only Christianity but humanity. Despite all this, there are some events that compel the Muslim world to think a lot.

For example, on the last May 9, an American sergeant, in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, while giving training, fired aiming at Quraan Sharif. The fourth infantry division commander Jaffrey hamaud, beg pardon for this event in Iraq. Not only commander but American President George Bush also gets pardon for this event from the Iraq Prime Minister Noori-Al-Maliki. This was an inciting & painful incident by a commander. Before this lieutenant General William Jeri Boykin called the war being fought against terrorism by America as the spiritual war. He even called the Muslims, Satan. Boykin even said that their God was greater than that of their Allah. And even this American General said that his God was real while that of the Muslims, an idol. The hate spreading activities of the American army officers are not limited, but these are unlimited. In the torture camp being run by America at Guantanamo Bay, the American soldiers tore the Quraan Sharif to pieces & threw it into the toilet, which was an inciting action. After this, the Muslim prisoners in jail, where there may be some terrorists & some innocent prisoners & some accused, they were forced to see it. In another event, a training programme was run to fight terrorism on May1, in Pennsylvania in America. About 120 workers from 30 different government departments took part in it. During this training, an unreal copied structure of a mosque was formed. There, a heavy firing was done on this structure & a demonstration to control terrorism & to have escape from it was shown.

Does the above example prove that the army of George Bush or the American administration under his leadership is girding up their loins against terrorism only & not against the Muslim world or against the Islam? It may be that such inciting activities have not been given consent by Bush or Bush administration. But these anti-Islam messages compel the Muslim world to think that if America is fighting against terrorism or not. But its hateful activities against the Islam & the Muslims are continuing. Such incidents rouse the terrorists to openly oppose America.

So the need arises that just & transparent steps should be taken against terrorism. The terrorism should be limited as a culpable & inhuman action. The Quraan, the Mosques or the Islam has no links with the terrorism & neither there was. As the heavy bombing on the innocent people in Afghanistan & Iraq by the American army or the Bush administration can’t be called an inspiration from the Christ, in the same way, the accidents by terrorists can’t be called the Islamic terrorism or inspired by the Islam.

(About the Author)
Author Tanveer Jafri is a columnist based in India.He is related with hundreds of most popular daily news papers/portals in India and abroad. Jafri, Almost writes in the field of communal harmony, world peace, anti communalism, anti terrorism, national integration, national & international politics etc.He is a devoted social activist for world peace, unity, integrity & global brotherhood. Tanveer Jafri is also a member of Haryana Sahitya Academy & Haryana Urdu Academy (state govt. bodies in India). Thousands articles of the author have been published in different newspapers, websites & newsportals throughout the world. He is also a receipent of so many awards in the field of Communal Harmony & other social activities.
(Email : tanveerjafriamb@gmail.com )

» American Target- Terrorism or Islam? - Thaindian News

By Alyssa A. Lappen
© 2008 

Particularly since the late, lifelong Muslim Brother, Yasser Arafat, shifted anti-Israel jihad into fifth gear in September 2000, several Middle East and Islamic scholars have repeatedly asserted that 20th and 21st century Islamic anti-Semitism sprang solely from Nazi and European Christian influence.

Even now, Islamophiles like Bernard Lewis preach (as it were) that virulent Jew-hatred is not inherent to Islam – but rather, anti-Semitism migrated to the Middle East with European colonialism. The Quran uses “hard words … about the Jews,” even Lewis admits. Yet under Islamic rule, he claims they were “only rarely subject to persecution” and “their situation was never as bad as in Christendom at its worst. …”

Dr. Andrew G. Bostom’s extensive, scientific and largely unprecedented new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History,” definitively disproves such claims. (Full disclosure: I copy-edited several of these first-time English translations, and proofread many chapters.)

Publication of this landmark book informs self-respecting scholars, they can no longer shamelessly blame Christianity as the sole source of anti-Semitism – or more importantly, that Islam does not and never had its own innate brand of loathing for the Jewish people.

Islam detests non-Muslims generally – whom sharia laws institutionally oppress and tax as underclass “dhimmis” – but inveighs especially intense odium against Jews.

Indeed, Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, a sort of continuum from Bostom’s ground-breaking “Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims,” conclusively proves that profound Islamic hatred for the Jewish people originated with the religion’s founder, Muhammad. Moreover, his companions, successor “rightly guided” Caliphs and Islamic jurists over the next 1,400 years maintained that hateful overarching passion.

Bostom’s evidence is impossible to ignore, waive off or attribute to anti-Islamic bias. Most of the book’s double-columned 766 pages contain primary source material: excerpts from Islamic sacred texts, jurisprudence and historical accounts (by Muslims and non-Muslims alike) across the span of Islamic history.

The opening 171-page review (and 962 citations) breathtakingly maps the roots of Islamic anti-Semitism – within the religion’s unique theological and judicial traditions, and its historical record.

This alone should convince even skeptics that Islamic anti-Semitism began in the 7th century.

The Quran refers to Jews as apes and swine (2:65, 7:166, 5:60), themes that were repeatedly exploited in incitements to murder, including a 1066 “anti-Jewish ode containing the line, ‘Many a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape.’” Letters from the Cairo Geniza, from up to one millennium ago, further explode “the common assumption” that a unique Islamic strain of anti-Semitism was “absent” at that time (950-1250 C.E.). S.D. Goitein’s “A Mediterranean Society” reports two special words coined and much-used in the geniza era to describe Islamic hatred of Jews: “sin’úth, ‘hatred,’ [and] a Jew-baiter being called sóné, ‘a hater.’”

(Column continues below)

All other texts cited also refer to “stubborn malevolence” as the defining Jewish “worldly characteristic,” leading them to reject Muhammad and refuse “to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy, and even selfish personal interest.” These traits allegedly induce typical Jewish treachery: “sorcery, poisoning, assassination,” archetypes sanctioning “Muslim hatred toward the Jews, and the admonition to, at best, ’subject [them] to Muslim domination,’ as [contemptible, humiliated] dhimmis.”

Having whetted reader interest, Bostom (a scientist and physician recognized nationally for his medical research) leaves nothing open to doubt. In the next five sections – 252 more two-column pages – he unveils the anti-Semitic contents of the Quran and its interpretations (Part 2); Hadith (sayings and deeds of Muhammad, Part 3); Sira (early Muslim biographies of Muhammed, Part 4); and fatwas (religious rulings) and laws prescribed by Islam’s most “luminary” judges, both classical and pre-modern (Part 5) and modern (Part 6).

In Part 2, one 12-page chapter contains 55 anti-Semitic Quranic verses, each translated three times to avoid confusion or denial of their toxicity. For the “Children of Israel” the Quran mandates God’s anger, as expressed in their “abasement and poverty;” curses “by the tongue of David, and of Jesus, son of Mary;” and their hastening “about the earth to do corruption there.” The Jewish people, moreover, are accursed as liars, confounding the truth, murderers of their prophets, perverse creatures and thieves.

Haggai Ben-Shammai’s 1988 essay on Quranic literature and interpretations notes that they likewise cursed Jews through history, frequently citing the very passages Bostom quotes in the previous chapter. For example, that describing Jews as cursed disbelievers, “laden with God’s anger” and having “abasement and poverty pitched upon them.”

Bostom, in Part 3, continues exposing traditional Islamic enmity for Jews, with a brief collection of 45 accounts from the voluminous Hadith. These include some of its most odious passages, accepted “narrations,” as reported by three revered Islamic sources – Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim and Sunan Abu Dawud – characterizing Jews as the ultimate of thieves, murderers, liars, idolaters, accursed and fully worthy of God’s primordial anger.

Indeed, every Jew who does not convert to Islam, Muslim reports Muhammad as saying “shall be but one of the denizens of Hell-Fire.” (Book 1, no. 284)

A Jewish woman, Bukhari reports, murdered Muhammad when she “brought a poisoned (cooked) sheep for the Prophet who ate from it.” (Vol. 3, book 47,. no. 786) He also records Muhammad saying, Muslims “will fight the Jews ’til some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will (betray them) saying, ‘O ‘Abdullah (i.e. slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him’.” (Vol. 4, Book 52, no 176) The Hamas Charter prominently features the latter Bukhari tradition in Article 7 – and contains many more unadulterated Quranic passages and Hadiths too.

Next, Bostom features one of his collection’s crown jewels – a 1937 Georges Vajda essay on Jewish and Muslim relationships in the Hadith (translated from French for the first time). Vajda worked from hadiths reported by 12 accepted Islamic sources – including seven primary source volumes published from 1279 to 1333, in Cairo or Bulak, and two published from 1904 to 1915 in Leyden, Germany.

Vajda attributes discovery of the hadiths’ animating principle to Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher (the first non-Muslim permitted to study at Cairo’s al-Azhar). Cementing “prescriptions and recommendations regarding the customs of non-Muslims” is what “boils down to a single word: khálifúhum, meaning ‘do not like them.’” Vajda brilliantly excavates the remarkable effects of that dislike on daily Jewish life in Muslim lands through the centuries.

Based on hadiths, Jews were forced to wear ankle boots rather than sandals, mustaches rather than beards, and various other identifiers (including unmatched-colored shoes in Yemen, and yellow patches in 13th century Iran). Hadith encourages Muslims to curse rather than greet Jews, moreover, since Jews reportedly address others with “al-sám ‘alaykum [may poison be upon you], a word that is glossed by ‘death’ or ‘disgust, annoyance.’” Several hadiths accuse Jews of falsifying their holy Torah to erase Muhammad’s name. Significantly, the Hadith describes the Dajjâl – the Antichrist – as Jewish; its Islamic apocalyptic traditions also envision 70,000 saber-waving Jews vanquished beside the Dajjâl during Islam’s last bloody triumph over all non-Muslims and the establishment of a universal Islamic empire.

In Part 8, Bostom assembles 24 essays detailing the dire conditions and atrocities that Jews suffered under Muslim rule during many eras, in many regions. Part 9 concludes the book with nine documents and eyewitness accounts attesting to effects of the overwhelming hatred evidenced earlier.

U.S. legislators and policy makers – and journalists, Middle East and Islamic scholars – take note: As Stanford University’s Victor Davis Hanson observes, conclusions adduced from Bostom’s tome may surprise critics as much as this “vast literature of Middle Eastern Islamic antisemitism” confounds all attempts “to refute his carefully compiled corpus of evidence.”

Exposed: Innate Islamic loathing for Jews

Exclusive: Blasphemy: Islam, Christianity and the Law

Part One of Two

Adrian Morgan

Current Cases

Last week on Tuesday, May 13th, Human Rights Watch urged Saudi Arabia to revoke a death sentence. Sabri Bogday, a Turkish man who had a barbershop in the Saudi kingdom, had been given a death sentence in April this year. Mr Bogday was accused of blaspheming against Allah. The incident allegedly took place 14 months ago during an argument with his neighbor, an Egyptian who ran a tailor’s shop.

The Egyptian filed the complaint and then disappeared. Mr Bogday admitted charges of “swearing against Allah,” but was not given a chance to repent. Mr Bogday retains his Turkish citizenship, even though he has lived in the Saudi kingdom for 11 years. The Turkish government is trying to assist his attempts to have the death sentence removed.

In Afghanistan this weekend, on Sunday May 18th, an apprentice journalist appeared briefly in court. 23-year-old Parwiz Kambakhsh was sentenced to death in Mazar-i-Sharif in the north of Afghanistan on January 22nd this year for blasphemy. Mr Khambakhsh had downloaded an article from an Iranian website, and brought it into his journalism class.

This article questioned why a man is allowed under Islam to have four wives, but a woman is not allowed four husbands. Khambakhsh maintains that he only brought the article into class for the purposes of discussion. He was given only three minutes to prepare his defense when he was taken to court, and the trial took place in secret. On Sunday, an appeal court judge told him he had one week to prepare for his appeal against the death penalty. Khambakhsh told the judge: “I’m a Muslim and will never allow myself to insult my religion.”

Back in March 2006, the West was shocked when a court ruled that an Afghan man, Abdul Rahman, was sentenced to death by an Afghan court. Rahman had converted to Christianity. Apostasy, according to Judge Ansarullah Mawlawizadah, was “an attack on Islam.” 500 Muslim clerics demanded the death penalty for Rahman. He was smuggled out of the country and now lives in Italy.

Even the Afghanistan Senate approved the death sentence against 23-year-year old Parwiz Kambakhsh. The trainee journalist’s plight may be politically motivated - his brother Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi has written on the atrocities committed by a former leader in the Northern Alliance. This man is Haji Mohammed Mohaqeq. It appears that the harshness of Parwiz’s sentence may have been intended to silence his brother’s reports. Mohaqeq is head of Afghanistan’s Religious and Cultural Affairs Commission, and is based in Mazar-i-Sharif.

In Pakistan, harsh laws against blasphemy were introduced by the Islamist military dictator General Zia ul-Haq, who ruled the country from July 1977 until his death in a plane crash in August 1988. Anyone who is officially accused of any of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws is automatically taken into custody. These laws will be discussed in more depth later, but in practice they are frequently used to discriminate against non-Muslims.

People accused of blasphemy in Pakistan often become the victims of lynch-mobs. Last month, on April 8th a young Hindu was lynched to death by his co-workers after being accused of blaspheming against Mohammed, founder of Islam.

23-year-old Jagdeesh Kumar worked at a garment factory in Karachi, a port city in Sindh province. He was beaten to death while a contingent of police stood by and did nothing. It took days for a police report to be filed on the case, but arrests did not happen until weeks later. According to my friend, Pakistani Christian journalist Qaiser Felix, when the three workers who killed Jagdesh were arrested, they were “charged not with murder but with ‘failure to inform the police that blasphemy was underway.’” Qaiser wrote that Jagdeesh was the first Hindu to die as a result of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

On Friday last week, Compass Direct reported on the case of a Pakistani Christian, Dr. Robin Sardar. This man, a father of six, lives in Punjab Province, along with most of Pakistan’s small number of Christians. Dr. Sardar appears to have been falsely accused of blasphemy by a street vendor. The doctor argued with the vendor. The next day (May 5th), after the vendor had been reporting that Dr. Sardar had earlier blasphemed against Mohammed, a mob of Muslims arrived at his home, calling for his death. Police arrested Dr Sardar. His house now carries a sign outside it, bearing the words: “This is the house of a blasphemer.”

According to Dr. Sardar’s nephew, he had been friends with his accuser for years before the blasphemy accusation was made. A police report was filed. Since 1990, an amendment to the law means that anyone found guilty of blaspheming against Mohammed receives a mandatory death sentence. So far, no one has been executed for blasphemy in Pakistan, although at least 22 individuals have been lynched to death after being accused of the crime.

One activist based in Islamabad has said: “Not a single murderer who killed anyone for blasphemy has been punished for murder. In fact, such murderers get hero’s treatment in police stations. And those police officials who openly honour such murderers have never been tried for their illegal and reprehensible action.”

In Bangladesh this month, a Christian pastor based in Mymensingh district was “punished” by Muslim villagers for being open about his faith and ignoring the death threats that Muslims made against him. On May 2 the 13-year-old daughter of Pastor Motilal Das was gang-raped by five Muslim villagers.

These are just a few recent cases. What do such acts of brutality and laws that support intolerance say about these societies? Why is Islam the only faith to continue to condone the killing of apostates and blasphemers?

Christian Blasphemy

The Judeo-Christian heritage that underpins Western culture did originally uphold the death penalty to those who blasphemed. The justfication for such harshness can be found in Leviticus 24: 15-16, “The man that curseth His God, shall bear his sin: And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, dying let him die: all the multitude shall stone him, whether he be a native or a stranger. He that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, dying let him die.”

Even though Jews and Christians have abandoned the death penalty as the punishment for blaspheming, the passage in Leviticus was used by early Christians to kill or cruelly punish the blasphemer. The Christian Roman Emperor Constantius II, a son of Constantine, decreed in 341 that pagan worship should be punished by death. Emperor Justinian (527-565) outlawed blasphemy and swearing, on the grounds that these caused earthquakes, and a constitution from 538 gave city prefects permission to execute blasphemers.

In the late Medieval period, various Inquisitions led to persecution of heresies, including blasphemy. In Iceland in 1343, a Norwegian bishop ordered a nun to be burned to death for blasphemy and communicating with Satan. On August 3, 1546, French writer and printer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake for blaspheming against Christ.

Spanish theologian Michael Servetus questioned the Nicene Creed of the Trinity and was subsequently burned at the stake in Geneva in October 1553. Philosopher Giordano Bruno was a former Dominican monk, who became a philosopher. He supported Copernicus’ view that earth moved around the sun, and even suggested that stars were suns that might have planets circling them, and even life. Bruno taught in various European countries, but he died in his native Italy, accused of blasphemy. He was burned alive in the Campo di Fiori in Rome on February 17, 1600.

A contemporary of Bruno was a miller from the village of Friuli in Italy, called Domenico Scandella. He was also known as Menocchio. He maintained that Godo and angels were formed spontaneously from chaos, “as worms are produced from cheese.” For this he was tortured and tried by the Inquisition, and was burned alive in 1599 or 1600, at age 67.

In 1641, Massachusetts legislation punished blasphemy with death. Similar laws made blasphemy and idolatry into capital crimes in Connecticut and New Hampshire. In 1692, the Province of Massachusetts Bay issued statutes that again codified blasphemy as a capital offense. In 1695 the British government repealed the death penalty for witchcraft and blasphemy from the province’s legislation. Currently under Massachusetts general law (Chapter 272, Section 36) blasphemy is still a crime. The maximum punishment is a year in jail and/or a fine not exceeding $300. No one has been prosecuted for blasphemy in this state since the 1920s, but in 1977 the state’s legislature refused to repeal the law.

In both Catholic and Protestant countries in Western Europe, the burning of heretics and “witches” reached a peak in the mid 17th century. In Salem, Massachusetts, as had often happened in Europe, the prattling of children led to a pogrom against innocent adults. The burnings and hangings of innocent peasants, and even nuns, for the crimes of witchcraft and heresy had discredited religion. Such cases involved torture to secure confessions. Torturers and accusers often gained a share of their victims’ goods. As a result, such crimes would eventually disappear from statute books. Blasphemy in many countries became “downgraded” to a crime that could invoke only a jail sentence, and not the death penalty.

Britain retained its Blasphemy Act of 1697 for three centuries. In 1838, it was established that British blasphemy law only related to the Anglican faith. 1881, secularist publisher George William Foote started a magazine called “The Freethinker.” Articles in this periodical led to Foote being jailed for a year for blasphemy. His jail experiences were published as a book, and can be found at Project Gutenberg.

The last Briton to be jailed for blasphemy was John William Gott. On December 9, 1921, he was jailed for nine months, with hard labor, for writing that Christ’s entry into Jerusalem must have looked like “a circus clown on the back of two donkeys.” Gott died less than a year after his release, at age 56.

The last successful prosecution for blasphemy (blasphemous libel) in Britain took place in 1977 when Denis Lemon, a publisher of a gay newspaper,r was fined and given a nine month suspended prison sentence. Lemon had published a poem that described a centurion’s lust for the body of Christ.

The 1977 trial was the first to have taken place for 50 years. On February 14, 1989, British author Salman Rushdie was issued with a death fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini. Blasphemy was then regarded as something from a bygone era. When numerous British-based Muslims publicly demanded the death penalty for the author, it became clear that the story of blasphemy in the West had begun a new chapter.

Islamic Blasphemy versus Christian Blasphemy

The Salman Rushdie affair was a catalyst for British Muslims to become radicalized. Fanatical Islamism had been seen as something alien until that time. In 1970, for example, Muslims burned down a British Council library in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, after Times columnist Auberon Waugh called Muslim baggy trousers “Allah Catchers.” The Rushdie affair exposed how many British Muslims of Pakistani origin shared the fanaticism of their former countrymen. Their anger led to the formation of an activist group called the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs. One prominent figure in this group, Iqbal Sacranie, became first secretary general of the MuslimCouncil of Britain (MCB).

In 2005 Islamist activists from the MCB in 2005 had tried to have an Islamic blasphemy law introduced in Britain. When that failed, they successfully persuaded Tony Blair’s government to introduce the “Incitement to Religious Hatred Act”. This would have made a person eligible to seven years’ jail for insulting another religion, even if there had been no intention to stir up “religious hatred.” This antidemocratic bill was emasculated in the Upper House before it became law.

In February 2006, protests against cartoons published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten reached their peak. Muslims around the world demanded that non-Muslims should respect their sensitivities. Around 50 people died in riots. Where acts of Muslim terrorism had failed to elicit a great response, Muslim “blasphemy” galvanized people to protest. On October 26, 2006, a lawsuit brought by a coalition of Islamic groups was thrown out by a Copenhagen court. The suit complained that staff at Jyllands-Posten had “libeled” Muslims.

Earlier attempts to invoke Denmark’s blasphemy law (not used since the 1930s) were also thrown out of court. The Danish law states that anyone who “publicly offends or insults a religion that is recognized in the country” could receive a four month jail term. This law had not been invoked in decades. Danish judges refused to allow the Jyllands-Posten cartoons to be tried under this law, as they believed freedom of expression was more important than supporting a prohibition against blaspheming.

Two years after the first cartoon protests, Islamists were caught in Denmark. These plotted to kill Kurt Westergaard, one of the cartoonists. The cartoons were republished, and more protests ensued.

As pointed out by Dr. Andrew Bostom in February this year, the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) wanted the United Nations to uphold a universal ban on blasphemy of any kind.

The Secretary General of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, made a speech on February 15, 2008, to this end. It is not the first time that Ihsanoglu has argued for the UN to implement a universal ban on blasphemy. On Wednesday February 6, 2008, shortly before that speech was made, Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced his expectations that the Vatican should work with his Islamist regime to stamp out blasphemy against all religions.

In February 2006 at the height of the carton crisis, the OIC had argued for a universal blasphemy law. For many Muslims, arguing that their religion should be protected against abuse seems fair. For some Leftists and multiculturalists, who traditionally would have opposed Christian blasphemy laws, they argue for Islamic blasphemy laws out of a misguided sense of “justice”. In March 2006, Spain’s socialist government colluded with Pakistan to present a draft “universal blasphemy” resolution to the United Nations. Similar notions of cultural relativism inspired the socialists of Britain’s Labour government to introduce the “Incitement to Religious Hatred Act.”

In practice, no Muslims are hauled up in Western countries and accused of blasphemy against Christianity. And certainly, even if Muslims were found guilty of anti-Christian blasphemy, they would not serve more than a short jail sentence. Muslim countries have shown by example that Islamic blasphemy legislation is frequently applied to non-Muslims. In Pakistan, non-Muslims are deliberately targeted by Muslims, and often (falsely) accused of blasphemy.

In the Australian state of Victoria in 2001, governor Steve Bracks introduced a “universal blasphemy law.” This appalling piece of legislation, called the “Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001” has made a mockery of legislative principles of justice. The law was introduced to protect (appease?) Muslims and uphold a spirit of multiculturalism. The Act has failed almost every group in Victoria, and garnered extreme resentment.

In October, 2003 this law was used to persecute a Christian evangelical group called Catch The Fire Ministries led by two pastors, Danny Niallah and Daniel Scot. Mr. Scot had earlier fled from Pakistan, where he had been accused of blasphemy. The ministry was taken to court by the Islamic Council of Victoria, assisted by the Equal Opportunity Commission of Victoria. In one 2002 sermon, heard by three visiting “undercover” Muslims, Christianity had been compared against Islam, with Islam viewed unfavorably.

In December 2004, Judge Michael Higgins ruled that the pair had vilified Islam, in a way that was “hostile, demeaning and derogatory of all Muslim people, their god, Allah, the prophet Muhammad and in general Muslim religious beliefs and practices.” He ordered the pair to apologize for the comments.

The tribunal exposed the stupidity of the law. Daniel Scot wanted to mention the verses about Islam’s treatment of women during the trial. His opinions on these Koranic verses had led him to be placed on trial. He was told that he could only give the references for such verses, and not read the verses aloud. The verses themselves, the court ruled, constituted vilification.

On May 3, 2005 Daniel Scot announced that he would refuse to apologize for his comments about Islam. Danny Niallah agreed, saying: “Right from the beginning we have stated we will not apologize, we will go to prison for standing for the truth.”

The pair steadfastly refused to apologize for telling the truth as they saw it, even though they could have been jailed for three years. In December 2006, the Victorian Supreme Court upheld their appeal and struck off the ruling by Judge Michael Higgins. Any future prosecution of the matter would have to be presided over by a different judge.

The notion of Victorian state law trying to protect every religious group’s interests has inevitably led to absurdist situations. Former policeman, now transsexual practicing “Wiccan” (witch) Olivia Watts decided to run for local government in Casey, Victoria. Rob Wilson, a local councillor and Christian, led a campaign against Watts. The witch sued, using the 2001 law, and won the case. Awarded high costs in damages, the local taxpayers of Casey had to foot the bill. The state’s attorney general issued a statement, in which he said: “We govern for all Victorians - and that includes witches, magicians and sorcerers.”

The Victoria state law demonstrates how bizarre “egalitarian” blasphemy laws are in practice. As a libertarian, I abhor any blasphemy laws. Freedom of speech would be eroded if any blasphemy laws are enforced. Compromised versions of the law which try to outlaw any forms of blasphemy become tools of Leftists and so-called liberals to attack traditional views, and are inherently dangerous and socially divisive.

There is no comparison between Western laws of blasphemy and Islamic law on blasphemy. The latter is far more absolutist and creates appalling situations for those who are accused of blasphemy against Islam.

When Spiritual Worlds Collide

On May 6, 1998 in Pakistan, a native-born Catholic bishop shot himself dead. 66-year-old John Joseph, Bishop of Faisalabad in Punjab province, apparently killed himself in protest at Pakistan’s discriminatory blasphemy laws.

Exactly 12 years before, on May 6, 1986, pro-Islamist Islamist dictator General Zia ul-Haq had introduced the most pernicious of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. This addition to the penal code, Article 295-C, states: “Use of derogatory remarks, etc; in respect of the Holy Prophet. Whoever by words, either spoken or written or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.”

In its original form this law, included in the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1986, was draconian enough. However, on October 1990, the country’s supreme Islamic court, the Federal Shariat Court, made a ruling on Article 295-C. It stated that “the penalty for contempt of the Holy Prophet… is death and nothing else.” The court ordered the government to implement necessary changes to the law, adding: “in case this is not done by 30 April 1991 the words ‘or punishment for life’ in section 295-C, PPC, shall cease to have effect on that date.”

The blasphemy laws were introduced in stages. Zia ul-Haq worked closely with the Islamists of the Jamaat-e-Islami party. This party, founded by Syed Abul A’la Maududi, exploited the dictatorship of ul-Haq to exert a power they could never achieve through the ballot. For his part, ul-Haq exploited the Islamists to retain power. Most rural Muslims felt that introducing laws based on Islam were automatically “just”. Ul-Haq himself was a frequent worshipper at the radical Lal Masjid or “Red Mosque” in Islamabad.

Other laws introduced by ul-Haq’s administration were the notorious Hudood Ordinances. These laws removed the distinction between adultery and rape. A woman who reported that she had been raped put herself at great risk. Unless she could present four Muslim witnesses, she would be charged with adultery and jailed. The maximum penalty under these laws for adultery was “Hadd” - the death penalty. Many women were jailed for reporting rape incidents. As a result, rape incidents flourished. The Hudood laws were only removed in September 2006.

On May 6, 1996, Bishop John Joseph went to the city of Sawihal, and there addressed a group of people who had become victims of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws in the afternoon. In the evening he went to a sessions court in the city. It was here, on November 6th in the previous year Ayub Masih, one of his parishioners, had been shot at. On April 27, 1996, Masih had been given a death sentence for blasphemy.

At Bishop Joseph’s funeral, two days after his apparent suicide, a message from Pope John Paul was read at the service. This message expressed hope for justice. That justice never came.

Pakistan’s blasphemy laws - Sections 298-B and 298-B - deliberately discriminate against Ahmadis (also called Ahmadiyya or Qadiani). These are Muslims, but regarded by many other Muslims as heretics. The Ahmadi swear to “harm no one.” However, they believe that the man who founded their sect in 1889 - Mirza Ghulam Ahmad - is a prophet. For most Muslims, Mohammed is the last prophet. The Ahmadi’s “heresy” has led to them as being seen by Muslims as apostates at worst, non-Muslims at best. They are banned from attending the Haj pilgrimage in Mecca.

In Bangladesh, the Jamaat-e-Islami party has been involved in active campaigns to harass the Ahmadiyya. In Pakistan, the same party and other Islamists persuaded ul-Haq’s regime to legally discriminate against them. Under Pakistan’s blasphemy legislation, no Ahmadi can declare himself to be a Muslim. Anyone who does, or who tries to propagate his or her beliefs, can receive a three year jail term.

Article 298-C of the Pakistan Penal Code states: “Persons of Qadiani group, etc, calling himself a Muslim or preaching or propagating his faith. Any person of the Qadiani group or the Lahori group (who call themselves Ahmadis or any other name), who directly or indirectly, posses himself as a Muslim, or calls, or refers to, his faith as Islam, or preaches or propagates his faith, or invites others to accept his faith, by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation or in any manner whatsoever outrages the religious feelings of Muslims, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years and shall also be liable to fine.”

To date, more than 800 people have been punished under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. In Part Two, I will examine some of these cases, to demonstrate how they are used as a weapon to settle personal feuds and to persecute non-Muslim minorities. I will show how the Clash of Civilizations is causing Western societies to change their legislation on blasphemy, while Muslim countries resolutely refuse to soften their stance towards those who are seen to blaspheme against, or to insult Islam.

By BRIAN ROSS, AVNI PATEL and REHAB EL-BURI
May 22, 2008

Listen to excerpts from Rev. Rod Parsley’s “Silent No More” sermon.

Despite his call for the U.S. to win the “hearts and minds of the Islamic world,” Sen. John McCain recruited the support of an evangelical minister who describes Islam as “anti-Christ” and Mohammed as “the mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil.”

McCain sought the support of Pastor Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio at a critical time in his campaign in February, when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was continuing to draw substantial support from the Christian right.

At a campaign appearance in Cincinnati, McCain introduced Parsley as “one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide.”

Campaign aides positioned Parsley right behind McCain for photographers, apparently unconcerned about Parsley’s well-established denunciations of the Islamic faith in a book “Silent No More” and on DVDs of sermons about Islam.

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“Islam is an anti-Christ religion that intends through violence to conquer the world,” Parsley says on the DVDs reviewed by ABC News.

“America was founded with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed,” Parsley says, “and I believe Sept. 11, 2001 was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.”

Parsley’s views and his connection to the McCain campaign are now beginning to show up on Arab Web sites and newspapers.

Al Moheet, a regional Arabic Web site operating in Egypt, carries the story with a picture of McCain and the headline: “McCain’s Spiritual Adviser Calls for the Destruction of Islam.”

“If there is a McCain presidency, he will start with a serious handicap in the Arab world,” said former CIA intelligence officer John Kiriakou. “And the handicap is that it is already assumed in Muslim countries that they will not get a fair shake from a McCain administration,” said Kiriakou.

In a statement to ABC News about Parsley’s comments, McCain’s campaign said the senator “obviously strongly rejects such statements.” The campaign did not answer the question of whether it was aware of Parsley’s widely publicized statements prior to seeking his endorsement in February.

ABC News: McCain Pastor: Islam Is a ‘Conspiracy of Spiritual Evil’

The racism behind integration

Ziauddin Sardar

Published 22 May 2008

It’s not easy to be a Muslim in Europe. Most Muslims I know brush aside the gazes of suspicion to which they are subjected on the streets of Amsterdam and Oslo, in the suburbs of Paris and Frankfurt, and in airport lounges. But the systematic hatred of Muslims, designed to demonise communities, is something else. Not surprisingly, it makes many Muslims angry.

Consider the past couple of years. There has been Fitna, the film by the right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders, which projected the Quran as a text that justifies terrorism against all. Before that, in 2006, a university lecture by Pope Benedict XVI, purporting to represent the Prophet Muhammad as a violent bigot, received publicity. There was the Danish cartoons affair, followed by the less-known incident of the Swedish cartoon in which the Prophet was depicted with the body of a dog. And we must not forget ex-Muslim champions of western civilisation, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, running around Europe decrying Islam as “the new fascism”.

This may look like the work of a few individuals with a particular dislike of Islam. But according to Integration, Islamophobia and Civil Rights in Europe, a recent report from the Institute of Race Relations, it is not so random and sporadic. Liz Fekete, the author of the study, argues that an “assimilationist logic” is at work, leading to co-ordinated demonisation of Islam and Muslims.

It begins with the integration agenda. The med ia in the six European countries studied place integration within a framework that represents Muslims as an alien threat. Academics, writers, intellectuals and Muslim celebrities who favour assimilation, such as the Dutch Hirsi Ali and the Norwegian comedian Shabana Rehman, are then presented as “expert witnesses” in the integration debate. The process inflames Islamophobia, leading Muslims to be seen purely through the lens of demonised representations - to the neg lect of the social and economic causes of Muslim exclusion and marginalisation.

In most European countries, integration is simply a euphemism for assimilation, the report says. The driving force is the notion of a national culture. In Germany this expresses itself through blood-based citizenship and a Leitkultur (dominant culture) and in France through citizenship by birth and earth and by laïcité (secularism). Norway has the idea of likhet (sameness); the Netherlands has verzuiling (religious/cultural blocs). One expects the extreme right to embrace such notions, but the report finds centre-left parties also using these racist sentiments to strategise. They may be liberal about immigration but, when it comes to Muslims, they fall prey to an Islamophobia that is “nourished by a mixture of feminism and secularism”.

I think there is good reason for the spread of Islamophobia in Europe. It has less to do with the attacks of 11 September 2001 and 7 July 2005, and more to do with the fact that Muslims now openly challenge notions of European moral superiority. The integration debate is often couched in terms of superior European versus inferior Islamic values. Islamophobia in the guise of integration becomes a means of keeping those with lesser values in their place.

Chandra Muzaffar, a noted Malaysian political scientist, wrote recently that Islamophobia is a conscious drive by European powers to impose their hegemony over the Muslim world. “The motivating force is the control over oil and stra tegic sea lanes, the majority of which border Muslim countries.” To establish dominion, the European powers target Islam, which has often served as an ideological inspiration for resistance to western domination. To destroy the resistance, says Muzaffar, they must demonise Muslims, beginning with Muslims in Europe.

If Europe wants to change Muslims, here and in the rest of the world, I would say only this: change yourself.

New Statesman - The racism behind integration

By Janet I. Tu

Seattle Times religion reporter

Some local Muslim community members are upset about a training course for local law enforcement, saying it could promote stereotypes and ethnic and religious profiling.

The program, called “The Threat of Islamic Jihadists to the World” and conducted by a Miami-based company, began Thursday and continues today at the Port of Seattle.

It is billed as providing insight into the formative phases of Islam, the religion’s different branches, radical Islam and how to respond to terrorist acts.

But Arsalan Bukhari, president of the Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said the program appears to be linking an entire religion to terrorism.

“Most police officers don’t have a basic grounding in Islam, so before you teach them about Islam, how can you teach them about radical Islam?” he asked. “It just makes you nervous because when a law-enforcement person pulls someone over, when they see a Muslim person or someone who appears Muslim to them — all this information they just learned kicks in.”

Bukhari believes the need for police training on issues of profiling and bias was highlighted by an incident last summer in which the FBI launched an international search for two men who took photos below deck on a Washington state ferry. The FBI announced earlier this month that the men were tourists, not terrorists.

Bukhari said law-enforcement agencies need to learn about Islam, but not just in the context of terrorism.

But Solomon Bradman, CEO of Security Solutions International, which is conducting the program, said, “I can’t take the responsibility of my course linking their religion to terrorism. I think their religion got linked to terrorism a long time ago.”

The purpose of the course, Bradman said, is to teach officers how to protect people from terrorism. His company has provided training to hundreds of agencies, including the FBI, the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

The two-day program covers some of the history of Islam to provide an “understanding of the terror mind-set and reasons for global jihad,” Bradman said. It’s not intended to be an all-inclusive course on Islam.

There are other organizations, such as CAIR, that have worked with law-enforcement agencies to provide that broader training, he said.

It’s not unusual for police to get training in religious backgrounds when religious extremists are potentially causing violence, said Terri-Ann Betancourt, a spokeswoman for the Port of Seattle, which is providing the venue for the program.

Port Police Chief Colleen Wilson met with local CAIR representatives and offered to have them come in to do additional training. Bukhari said CAIR intends to do so.

Port and Seattle police officers also agreed to debrief after the program to see if there was “anything in the session that was discriminatory or would cause alarm,” Betancourt said. “If so, they would be happy to share that with other chiefs around the state.

“At this point, they haven’t heard anything from others who’ve attended that would cause anyone to believe the Muslim community should be concerned about this training,” Betancourt said

Local News | Does course on Islam give law enforcers wrong idea? | Seattle Times Newspaper

Not so long ago many prominent Jewish thinkers believed in a natural affinity between Judaism and Islam

In neoconservative circles it is widely accepted that Arabs are feverishly antisemitic. However, a new ideological battle is brewing among neocons between those who believe that Arabs imported antisemitism and those who argue that Islam is intrinsically antisemitic.

Andrew Bostom, the American neo-conservative scholar, has published a book which argues that Muslim societies have been anti-Jewish since the dawn of Islam. Other prominent neocon thinkers don’t go quite so far.

Bernard Lewis, the prominent Arabist whose polemics on Islam are crediting with helping provide the Bush administration with the ideological cover it needed to invade Iraq, asserts that: “European anti-semitism … was essentially alien to Islamic traditions, culture, and modes of thought. But to an astonishing degree, the ideas, the literature, even the crudest inventions of the Nazis and their predecessors have been internalised and Islamised.”

However, Lewis tends to gloss over the elephant in the room. Although a certain degree of “classic” antisemitism has entered the Arab world, I would say that the vast majority of the sentiments Lewis conveniently dismisses as irrational hatreds are, in fact, anti-Israeli, and not antisemitic in nature, and stem from sympathy at the plight of the Palestinians.

Likening Muslims and Arabs to the Nazis is, of course, a trademark of die-hard defenders of Israel. In his groundbreaking book, Orientalism, the late Edward Said described Lewis’s work as “aggressively ideological” and very close to being “propaganda”.

“So intent has Lewis become upon his project to debunk, to whittle down, to discredit the Arabs and Islam that even his energies as a scholar seem to have failed him,” wrote Said, who was a fierce opponent of what he viewed as Lewis’s pseudo-scholarship.

With accusations of antisemitism flying around, and against the poisonous backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it will probably surprise many to learn that not so long ago many prominent Jewish thinkers believed in a natural affinity between Judaism and Islam, and looked eastwards for their salvation.

Benjamin Disraeli, the first and only British prime minister of Jewish extraction, described Jews as “Mosaic Arabs”. A philosemite, he turned antisemitism on its head, arguing, for instance, that Jews should be emancipated, not because all humans were equal, but because of their superlative status.

A more colourful example of a sympathetic Jewish orientalist was Lev Nussimbaum (1905-1942). Born to an oil magnate in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan and the hub of global oil production at the time, he fled there following the Bolshevik revolution, but always carried around an idealised image of the Caucasus in his heart.

He moved to Constantinople, Paris, Weimar-era Berlin, the United States and fascist Italy, somehow managing to evade death at the hands of the Nazis by posing as a Muslim prince, after having converted to Islam. Under the pseudonyms Essad Bey and Kurban Said, he penned numerous best-selling novels, biographies and historical works, the best known of which is the Ali and Nino love story.

“He based his entire life and career on an urgent desire to explain the east to the west, all but rhapsodising on the superiority of the former to the latter,” Tom Reiss writes in his readable biography of Lev Nussimbaum entitled The Orientalist.

At around the same time as Nussimbaum was in Germany, a Polish Jew by the name of Leopold Weiss was wandering aimlessly there after abandoning university in Vienna. In 1926, while working as a foreign correspondent in mandate Palestine, he converted to Islam, describing his new faith as: “a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other”. Renaming himself Muhammad Asad, he eventually became Pakistan’s first ambassador to the UN.

This is perhaps unsurprising given that, prior to the Enlightenment, the Muslim world was the most tolerant and permissive place to be a Jew, despite occasional episodes of local oppression. The Enlightenment and liberalism had served the emancipation of European Jews well, despite its assimilationist pressures. However, Jews, no matter how well assimilated, were still regarded by many as outsiders.

“During the Enlightenment … Jews and Muslims had begun to merge in the European mind,” Reiss notes. “Many Jews of northern Europe saw in this redefinition of themselves as Asians an opportunity to escape their demeaning European image as insular, persecuted ghetto dwellers.”

When liberalism began to give way to “tribalism” and ideas of racial supremacy - which resulted in virulent antisemitism and pogroms culminating in the Nazi killing machine - Jews began to look to the security of their previous “golden ages” in Muslim Spain and the Ottoman Empire.

Zionism took shape in this increasingly stifling atmosphere and attempted to find a Jewish “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” by applying the “völkisch” ideal to Jews, most of whom had previously regarded themselves not as a single people, but as a global faith and cultural community.

Many Arabs mistakenly view Zionism as exclusively an “imperial” project. But it is at once a colonial project, an anti-imperial movement and a class struggle. Although Theodor Herzl saw Zionism “as a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”, so-called cultural Zionists and many early settlers in Palestine saw their “return home” as part of a wider pan-Asiatic project.

Eugen Hoeflich, an Austrian Jewish writer and journalist, naively wrote books calling for the unification of the Asiatic peoples of the world - Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Confucians - into a united front against the forces of European mechanisation, as if the world’s most populous continent, with its diverse cultures shared a common goal. This imagined Jewish orient, like classical European orientalism, viewed the east as some timeless monolith, but took pride in its supposed passivity, irrationality and emotionalism.

As a reflection of this romantic pride, the cultural Zionist Martin Buber (1878-1965), an advocate of Jewish “uniqueness”, wrote: “Within the Jews lies the whole force of Asiatic genius: the unification of the soul.” Despite this snobbery, Buber’s vision of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state based on “peace and brotherhood with the Arab people” strikes me as the best way out of this seemingly intractable conflict.

The ‘Mosaic Arabs’ | Comment is free

Exclusive: Islam 101: The Aims of Islam

Ron Marlar

To virtually all of us in the West, even to those at very high levels in our government who are charged with the responsibility of knowing, Islam is poorly known and therefore not understood. It is our contention that, until we fully understand Islam, we will not be able to address it properly.

To begin our understanding, we should know that Islam is much more than a religion; it is a doctrine of law that governs all areas of life, and there exists within Islam no Western concept of the separation of church and state. Islam believes in the integration of mosque and state while the West believes in the separation of church and state. Therefore, the form of government under which many Muslims live is a theocracy…far from a democracy, which is the form of government under which we thrive in the West.

This vast disparity in how we organize our societies would not be a problem for us if it were not for the fact that Islam seeks to dominate. Simply put, the aims of Islam, according to Islamic doctrine, are:

1. To take over the world for Allah by establishing a worldwide caliphate
2. To rule the land by Shar’ia law (Islamic law)
3. To subjugate or kill infidels who are defined as:

a) those not born Muslim,
b) those who have not submitted to Islamic faith belief or
c) those who have left Islamic faith belief, and

4. To take - exile - any survivors to a safe place.

Mohammed put forth these aims early in his founding of Islam. They are repeated often in the history of the several resurgences of Islam, and most recently, loudly and clearly by most prominent Islamic voices. No true, adherent Muslim denies these aims. Rather they live by them, perhaps closeted, even living quietly among us here in the U.S.

Editor’s note: For various reasons, others restate or misinterpret these aims thereby causing great confusion for the rest of us. They miss the simplicity of the aims as outlined above. They use adjectives such as “moderate” Muslims or “radical” Muslims to describe different varieties of Islam and Islamic believers.

Yet, for those who believe in the pure teachings of The Holy Qur’an, the Muslims whom we in the West deem to be “radical” are not at all radical. As an example, to the Qur’anic believer, Osama bin Laden can be seen as a “moderate” Muslim who believes in and follows the teachings of The Holy Qur’an. Indeed, bin Laden quotes The Holy Qur’an quite often to justify his actions.

To the same believer, the “radicals” or “extremists” are the very Muslims we in the West deem to be “moderate” - those who have interpreted the teachings of The Holy Qur’an to incorporate modernity. This allows them to live under other forms of law than Shar’ia (such as U.S. Constitutional law) and absolutely to reject violence and terror for reasoned debate to resolve disagreements, however serious or frivolous. To the adherent Muslim, however, these peaceful Muslims are apostates, and can be killed for their apostasy.

In quantifying into “moderates” and “radicals” what it means to be a Muslim, well-meaning people believe in their good motivations that they are being more fair and tolerant of diversity than those who stick to the simple basics, the heart, belly and soul of what it means to be a Muslim. But the truth is that when pushed, all adherent Muslims, regardless of variety or sect, cleave to Mohammed’s simply-stated and oft-repeated (by his followers) aims for Islam.

We are all well motivated. We all - most Muslims and non-Muslims alike - want to live in peace and to have certain things for ourselves, children, grandchildren and all that follow in our lines of heritage. But a critical piece of understanding the desire to live in peace is this: we want to live in peace, yes, but with our own views prevailing. What could be more desirable for a true believing Muslim than a worldwide caliphate? What could be more peaceful for the same believer than a world ruled by Shar’ia law, honoring Allah and his wishes for the world as derived and described by Mohammed and others in the Hadiths? In comparison and contrast, what could be more desirable for the rest of us than living freely, enjoying our human liberty, in a Democracy?

Since Mohammed was illiterate in any language, the Hadiths are writings dictated by Mohammed to those who could write, and especially after his passing, by thousands of Ayatollahs, Imams, Sheiks, Muslim holy men by any other name. The Hadiths describe, as interpretation of the Qur’an in part, how Muslims are to live life as Muslims: like Mohammed, originally as interpreted by Mohammed.

To take over the world for Allah, to establish a worldwide caliphate, is to proselytize to convert non-Muslims (infidels, or unbelievers) to Islam. But would Westerners want to convert? We are seeing and hearing of Shar’ia law as our awareness of Islam grows. It is the cutting off of hands of thieves; the elimination of homosexuals; the stoning to death, burying alive or beheading of women, even those who are so slack as to be raped, even by multiple men at one time.

Likewise we are learning of Muslim killing of infidels. We can see Islam in practice in Indonesia, the Philippines and the Netherlands against those who dare to publish cartoons of Mohammed and Islam. We know of the man in Afghanistan who declared he had left Islam to be a Christian. Heads of state had to intercede for this man’s life to be spared. He had to be declared insane for him to be allowed to leave Afghanistan for a non-Muslim state, but still hidden away from Muslims determined to kill him.

The fourth aim of Islam listed above - to take, or exile, any survivors to a safe place - appears confusing, especially given aims 1 - 3. But likely “survivors” are those who have converted to Islam, although not Arabs, and those who aid, abet, apologize for and support Islam knowingly or unknowingly. Among the ways they aid, abet, apologize for and support Islam are their being more “fair” to Muslims, tolerant of diversity, misinterpreting Mohammed’s original aims, missing the simplicity of his aims, using adjectives to describe different varieties of Islam and Islamic believers and interjecting only selected Muslim practices.

It is way past time to wake up people, to stop aiding, abetting, apologizing for and supporting Islam. The burden is on Muslims - the believers in and practitioners of Islamic faith belief and its aims - to explain themselves to the rest of the world.

Let’s listen carefully for Islamic leaders and followers to condemn Islamic terrorism, not to lead, participate in or sit by in silent celebrations of it. Let’s see if we can hear an Islamic leader or even our Muslim personal friends utterly condemn the events of 9/11/2001 as the barbaric acts they truly were, and also condemn 9/11’s perpetrators as the mass murderers they clearly were, at least as we view it in the West.

Since an adherent Muslim sees 9/11 not as a brutal attack of mass murder but rather as a way to advance Islam’s aims, we may well be listening for quite some time.

# #

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ron Marlar is a retired Air Force officer, college professor andseminary graduate, having studied Islam formallyat the post graduate level.Today, he enhances his ongoing learning of Islam by traveling frequently to the Middle Eastto meet with and research both Muslims and non-Muslims living there.

Family Security Matters » Publications » Exclusive: Islam 101: The Aims of Islam

Mind your (terror) language
By Khody Akhavi
WASHINGTON - From the people who brought you the “war on terror” and the “axis of evil” comes a new verbal tonic for combating that amorphous emotion.
Out with pejoratives like “Islamo-fascists”, “jihadis” and “mujahideen”, and in with “words that work”, that is according to a George W Bush administration memo that was leaked last month to the Associated Press.
The non-binding 14-point guide on counterterrorism communication, prepared by the US National Counterterrorism

Center (NCTC), urges US officials to drop language and terminology that may offend Arab and Muslim communities, to use terms such as “violent extremist” or “terrorist” instead of “jihadi”, and to shift the discussion away from the dualistic “clash of civilizations” or battle between “Islam and the West”, a paradigm that casts Islam as inherently violent.
“A mujahid, a holy warrior, is a positive characterization in the context of a just war. In Arabic, jihad means ’striving in the path of God’ and is used in many contexts beyond warfare. Calling our enemies jihadis and their movement a global jihad unintentionally legitimizes their actions,” according to the report. “We need to emphasize that terrorists misuse religion as a political tool to harm innocent civilians across the globe.”
Others points suggest using the word “totalitarian to describe our enemy” because, according to the report, the term is widely understood in the Muslim world. Keep the focus on the terrorist, not us, it says, and don’t ascribe “al-Qaeda and its affiliates motives or goals they have not articulated. Our audiences have more familiarity with the terrorist messages than we do and will immediately spot US government embellishment.”
Lastly, “Try to limit the number of non-English terms you use if you are speaking in English,” because “it’s not what you say, but what they hear.” In other words, mispronunciation could make a statement incomprehensible, such as in the example of “Qutbism”, which refers to author Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood member during the mid-1950s who penned the controversial book, Milestones, and whose ideas would inspire al-Qaeda.
The word Qutb in English is often mispronounced to mean “books”.
Talking tough on terror has been the main currency of the Republican Party, and the main project of neo-conservative pundits in Washington. But in the aftermath of the George W Bush administration’s failed Middle East policy, many officials, including the bullhorn-in-chief himself, have pushed to reform the public diplomacy machinery, and to correct the rhetorical missteps that unintentionally serve to legitimize groups who share al-Qaeda’s ideology.
The inspiration may have come from Bush confidante and hand-holder Karen Hughes, who acted as an advisor to the administration until she was appointed under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a position she left in November 2007.
Hughes had never been to the Middle East and had no expertise in the Muslim communities that were the main targets of the White House’s public diplomacy goals. But her year-long effort to change the US image abroad did yield the National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication, a 34-page document that calls for the US to mind its language.
“Avoid characterizing people of any faith as ‘moderate’ - this is a political word which, when extended to the world of faith, can imply these are less devout and faithful. The terms ‘mainstream’ or ‘majority’ are preferable,” according to Hughes’ report.
In the face of increased calls from analysts and officials within the intelligence community to focus on the very serious public diplomacy problem on its hands, the Bush administration appears to have taken Hughes’ advice to heart.
The president has used the phrase “Islamic terrorist” only once since the beginning of 2007 and has buried the “Islamo-fascist” neologism embraced by right-leaning US officials and terrorism analysts. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has also refrained from using the word “jihadi” in her public speeches since last September.
This January, the Pentagon decided to cut the contract of its “foremost” specialist on Islamic law and Islamic extremism, citing budgetary cuts, but Stephen Coughlin’s supporters said the jihad maven was unjustly fired because his message was too politically hot.
The recent developments appear to have caused a split among Republicans on how to define terrorism, and the recent disclosure has ruffled the feathers of members on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. This month, every Republican voted for an amendment to an intelligence bill that would ban the use of federal cash to produce documents that used the same terminology as the NCTC report. The amendment, authored by the panel’s ranking Republican, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, was defeated.
In response to the new NCTC recommendations, former House speaker Newt Gingrich warned last Friday that the US was crippled by “political correctness” as it tried to meet “the threats around the world”.
“If we cannot have an honest discussion about the nature of the threats against us, we cannot develop strategies to meet those threats,” he said. “It is simply suicidal to treat the al-Qaeda network as simply ‘an illegitimate political organization’, both terrorist and ‘criminal’, while ignoring the radical religious foundation underpinning this and other groups that constitute an Irreconcilable Wing of Islam.”
With the presidential election just beyond the horizon, it appears that Republican nominee John McCain will strive to create stark differences between himself and presumptive Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama. McCain pledges to continue waging war against “radical Islamic terrorism” and campaign aides say he won’t back down from using the language, even though a recent Homeland Security report, which shares many of the same views as the NCTC, calls for just the opposite.
For US-based Muslim advocacy groups, delinking religious identity from the slippery slope of terror talk is a welcome change.
“It is a good step that they at least take these terms into consideration,” Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on Islamic American Relations, told Inter Press Service. “What terms are used and what not are a matter of debate. At least, we should all be thinking about this.”

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

Five years after its formation, the body representing France’s five million Muslims is being torn apart by competing interests of various Islamic factions. The latest division surfaced this month, when the council’s president pulled out of upcoming elections for new members. Lisa Bryant has more on the problems facing Europe’s largest Muslim community.

Ever since it was coaxed into existence by the French government in 2003, the French Council for the Muslim Religion has been torn apart by infighting and, experts say, by competing foreign interests. Today, analysts like Olivier Roy say, the council has done very little for Islam in France - the country’s second-largest religion.

“The only thing this council has been able to achieve these last few years has been to decide on a common day to celebrate the Ramadan,” said Olivier Roy. “That is all. They do not want to take any decision concerning any concrete issue about the situation of Islam in France.”

The Muslim council was expected to fulfill a number of functions besides organizing Islamic holidays. Organizers hoped it would oversee mosque construction and imam training - and ensure a moderate Islam flourished in France, in sync with the country’s separation of religion and state.

Instead, its many critics say, it has mostly bickered. The newest disagreement concerns June elections for new council representatives. The current system allocates voting rights based on the size of prayer space in mosques and Muslim houses of worship.

Dalil Boubakeur, 10 Apr 2008

 

Critics argue that method will grant the Moroccan-based community an unfair advantage over the Algerian one - including the Great Mosque of Paris, which is backed by Algiers and whose rector Dalil Boubakeur is president of the council.

Earlier this month, Boubakeur announced he would boycott the June elections. Chems-Eddine Hafiz, lawyer for the Paris mosque and member of the Muslim council says the vote would unfairly sanction the mosque and its affiliates.

Hafiz says the Mosque does not represent a minority of Muslims in France, as some claim - that it in fact represents about six in 10 French Muslims. He says the council must set aside its divisions and concentrate on working for the country’s Islamic population.

Analyst Roy, of the National Center for Scientific Research, says France’s Muslim population is divided and no one group has a majority. He says behind the local power struggle is one between rival North African neighbors Morocco and Algeria, sources of a large chunk of Muslim immigration to France. Algeria, for example, supports the Paris mosque.

“The present problems do exist from the beginning,” he said. “The contradiction in the [French] government policy was on the one hand to advocate a French council representing French Muslims and on the other hand to subcontract to the Algerian and Moroccan governments the elections [for council seats].”

A third influential group in the council is the conservative Union of French Muslim Organizations, which is backed by the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood.

The upshot, says Muslim intellectual Malek Chebel, is that ordinary Muslims have no direct say in the council - and women and youths are particularly underrepresented.

Chebel, who was part of an advisory group for the council at its start, believes the panel should also represent intellectuals along with more secular Muslims who rarely, if ever, attend mosque. He says it should give French Muslims greater visibility and rights, and work to dispel stereotypes of Islam as a violent religion.

Sociologist Franck Fregosi, who recently published a book on Muslims in France, also believes the council should be more democratic.

“If we want to do something very important in the religious field it would be to ask Muslims as individuals to participate in their own mosque and elect their own delegates,” said Franck Fregosi. “And then we will have an organization that will be more democratic.”

What has changed, Fregosi says, is the attitude of the French government. In the past, it was a strong backer of the Paris mosque and its moderate brand of Islam. But today, he says, it has refrained from championing any one group for the upcoming vote - leaving it up to the Muslim community to decide just what kind of representation it wants, and how effective it will be.

VOA News - Analysts Says Muslim Group Fails to Make Progress In France