http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/putin-opts-out-of-g-8-summit-cancels-meeting-with-obama?f=must_reads WASHINGTON – Russian President Vladimir Putin is skipping a planned visit to the United States this month for an economic summit and a much-anticipated meeting with President Barack Obama, the White House announced Wednesday. The Russian leader told Obama by phone that he is unable to join the other leaders of the Group of […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/from-here-to-timbuktu
PLEASE READ AN UPDATE ABOUT SHARIA IN TIMBUKTU….RSK
Agatha Christie, DH Lawrence, and other authors have referenced Timbuktu. You may win final Jeopardy by knowing that it is not a mythical place. Founded by “The Blue People”, it sits on the Southern Edge of the Sahara Desert, in a region of Mali.
Babbles, Bangles and Beads, from the musical Kismet, would describe the opulence of 6th Century Timbuktu. World traders came to bazaars with everything from elephant tusks and crocodile skins to gold. By the 9th Century Timbuktu was considered the most powerful kingdom in West Africa.
King Musa I annexed Timbuktu when he was returning from Mecca on a pilgrimage in the 12th Century. Islam was solidified when the King constructed a royal palace and built the Muslim learning center Djinguereber Mosque in 1330. The great mosques, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, were built during that golden age. Under the Mali Empire and Askia Mohammad I’s rule, Timbuktu remained a world center of Islamic learning until the 17th century. Subsequently The Saadi ruler of Morocco, and numerous pashas, controlled the area; as trade flourished in gold, slaves, cloth, horses, and salt.
Europeans constantly failed in efforts to find the fabled city of Timbuktu, frequently dying in the perilous quest. The Paris Societe de Geographie offered a 10,000 franc prize to the first non Muslim to reach Timbuktu and return with information. In 1828 Rene Caillie, disguised as a Muslim, was able to claim the prize. In 1893 Timbuktu became part of the French Sudan. In World War II her legions fought under the command of General de Gaulle.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/international/timbuktu-s-schools-open-but-under
-sharia-code-1-2280581
Timbuktu’s schools open – but under sharia code
Schools have reopened in Timbuktu for the first time since an Islamic
faction last month seized control of the fabled tourist outpost, where they
are now working to impose sharia law.
Thousands of residents, including the majority of the city’s Christian
population, fled the city in early April, when disparate rebel factions
invaded the northern half of Mali and declared independence.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/what-should-be-done-with-the-9-11-plotters
PATRICK DUNLEAVY IS AUTHOR OF “THE FERTILE SOIL OF JIHAD:TERRORISM’S PRISON CONNECTION”… A MUST READ AND TERRIFYING BOOK ABOUT THE RADICAL IMAMS AND THEIR CONVERTS IN AMERICAN PRISONS…..RSK
After a prolonged delay and much political debate, legal proceedings against Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Hawsawi , the defendants accused of plotting the 9-11 attacks on the United States, began last week before a military tribunal held at Guantanamo.
Initial reports of the day’s proceedings lead us to expect an even longer trial than that of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker in the 9-11 attacks, whose case took almost five years to complete.
The day was filled with antics by the defendants and procedural posturing by the defense attorneys. A simple 15 minute process took about twelve hours to complete.
The defendants refused to speak or even use the electronic translation headphones provided, then they requested to pray. Meanwhile, one of them was placed in a restraint chair for disrupting the tribunal.
One of the defense attorneys, Cheryl Bormann, wearing a hijab and long black robe, requested that the judge order the women in the court to dress modestly out of respect for the defendants’ religious beliefs. One forgets that it is those very beliefs that led these defendants to conspire to kill thousands of innocent Americans on one September day, in the name of Allah.
We were provided with a brief description of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind behind the plot. He was described as having a long flowing grey beard with red streaks in it. This is traditional for conservative Islamic fundamentalist men who are forbidden by the Sunnah to dye their hair in its natural color but are allowed to use a henna extract following the custom of what many believe the prophet Muhammed did.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
“Environmentalism’s sham efficiency is in service to a sham crisis. The advantage of a sham crisis is that it can be unlimited in scope. The greater the crisis, the greater the scope of the powers that are necessary to combat it. A global crisis leads to global powers and global responsibility for all people. And with a sham crisis, the measures taken to avert it are as much of a sham as the crisis itself. They are not meant to resolve a crisis that does not exist, but to increase the power of the government.”
The modern West has some of the most inefficient governments in human history which are obsessed with making things more efficient. Along with the inefficiently efficient machine, we also have two crises. One real one and one imaginary. The crisis of government growth and the crisis of global warming. Governments insist that we must adopt austerity to cope with the imaginary crisis of global warming, while reform advocates demand that governments adopt austerity to cope with the tremendous piles of debt and unsustainable spending
It’s a basic power struggle over whether the government will starve the people or the people will starve the government. Like most political power struggles it begins with a crisis and a program for resolving it by transferring power. Depending on which crisis and which program wins the day, there will either be a massive transfer of power from the government to the people or an equally massive transfer from the people to the government.
Determining the locus of the crisis will also determine which way the power will shift. Are we the irresponsible ones for not biking to work or are they the irresponsible ones for running up a fifteen trillion dollar deficit? Are we the irresponsible ones for not skipping desert or are they the irresponsible ones for demanding totalitarian power over us? Are we destroying the planet or are they destroying the country?
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3056/amnesty-international-muslim-discrimination-europe
“Amnesty International omits, however, all instances of discrimination initiated by Muslims against Christians and others in Europe who have taken them in, and who may well feel dismayed by what might be seen as an escalating procession of Muslim demands, threats and attacks. Nowhere does it call on Muslims to accept responsibility – not only for problems brought about by the refusal of many of them to accept the values of the majority, but also for their efforts to displace these values with their own.”
A new report from Amnesty International lashes out at “widespread discrimination” against Muslims in Europe. The report directs particular ire at laws banning Muslim veils in public spaces, and excoriates European politicians for helping to “foster a climate of hostility and suspicion against people perceived as Muslim.”
Amnesty International omits, however, all instances of discrimination initiated by Muslims against Christians and others in Europe who have taken them in, and who may well feel dismayed by what might be seen as an escalating procession of Muslim demands, threats and attacks.
The report also fails to explain why growing numbers of Europeans are increasingly skeptical about Muslim immigration; it also fails to mention that in country after country, Europeans have been going out of their way to afford Muslims special benefits, rights, privileges and provisions that do not apply to native-born Europeans, and that are establishing the Muslim population as an entitled class in European society.
The 123-page study, “Choice and Prejudice: Discrimination Against Muslims in Europe,” says that “Muslims in Europe face discrimination in several areas of life because of their religion,” and this “blights their individual prospects, opportunities and self-esteem and can result in isolation, exclusion and stigmatization.”
It continues, “[D]iscrimination against Muslims in Europe is fuelled by stereotypes and negative views;” and calls on European politicians to “adopt a more rational approach” and stop portraying Islam “as a system of values which denies gender equality or a violent ideology.”
Amnesty International, perhaps welded to notions political correctness, also further fails to mention actions by Muslims themselves that might well have been responsible for fuelling the “stereotypes and negative views” that it accuses Europeans of having.
Consider Belgium, where radical Muslims have launched a propaganda and intimidation campaign aimed at turning the country into an Islamic state. Muslim neighborhoods in Brussels — the so-called capital of Europe — have already become “no-go” zones for Belgian police officers, who are often pelted with rocks by Muslim youths.
In Britain, hundreds of Muslim children every year are subjected to forced marriages. In England and Wales, more than 65,000 Muslim women and girls have been the victims of female genital mutilation, and another 24,000 girls under the age of 15 are believed to be at a high risk.
Also in Britain, tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants are practicing bigamy or polygamy, possibly at times to collect larger social welfare payments from the British state. At the same time, radical Muslims have launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities, including London, into independent Islamic “emirates” to be ruled by Islamic Sharia law.
In Denmark, Muslim criminal street gangs have taken over large parts of Danish towns and cities; in Copenhagen, some suburbs have also been transformed into “no-go” zones, off limits to non-Muslims. Meanwhile, over the past decade, the number of Muslim immigrants living on social welfare benefits in Denmark has increased almost ten-fold.
In France, where there are now more practicing Muslims than practicing Roman Catholics, there are 751 Sensitive Urban Zones , also off-limits to non-Muslims apparently because they are too dangerous; in these French “no-go” zones over which the French state has lost control, an estimated five million Muslims currently reside.
In Germany, thousands of Muslim women and children are the victims of forced marriage every year. At the same time, Islamic Sharia courts are operating in all major German cities, and German authorities say they are “powerless” to do anything about them.
In the Netherlands, nearly half of Moroccan immigrants in the country between the ages of 12 and 24 have been arrested, fined, charged or otherwise accused of committing a crime during the past five years. Further, as Islamic legal tradition holds that dogs are “unclean” animals,
a Dutch Muslim politician in The Hague, the third-largest city in Holland, has recently called for a ban on dogs in the city.
In Italy, Muslims have been commandeering the Piazza Venezia in Rome for public prayers; and in Bologna, Muslims have repeatedly threatened to bomb the San Petronio cathedral because it contains a 600-year-old fresco inspired by Dante’s Inferno that depicts Mohammed being tormented in Hell.
In Spain, a high school teacher in the city of La Línea de la Concepción was sued by the parents of a Muslim student who said the teacher “defamed Islam” by talking about Spanish ham in a geography class. And a discotheque in southern Spanish resort town of Águilas (Murcia) was forced to change its name and architectural design under duress after Islamists threatened to initiate “a great war between Spain and the people of Islam” if it did not.
Elsewhere in Spain, Muslim immigrants were accused of poisoning dozens of dogs in the city of Lérida, where 29,000 Muslims now make up around 20% of the city’s total population; again, according to local residents, as dogs are considered “unclean.” In the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia, Muslims have deployed “morals police” to ensure that practicing and non-practicing Muslims comply with Islamic Sharia law.
In Switzerland, an immigrant group based in Bern said it wants the emblematic white cross to be removed from the Swiss national flag because as a Christian symbol it “no longer corresponds to today’s multicultural Switzerland.” Further, leading Islamic groups in the country announced that they want to establish a “parallel parliament” so that all of the country’s Muslims can “speak with one voice.” Based in Basel, the new parliament would straightforwardly operate according to Islamic Sharia law.
These developments in Europe have been occurring during just the last eight years in addition to, of course, the bombing by Muslims of commuter trains in Spain in March 2004; the bombing of public transportation in London in July 2005; the attempted bombing of the Glasgow airport in June 2007; the attempted bombing of the Barcelona metro in January 2008; the attempted bombing of several US-bound airplanes, including that of the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in December 2009; mass riots caused by the reprinting of the “Mohammed Cartoons” in Denmark in 2005 and 2006; Muslim riots in Malmö, Sweden in December 2008 and in Strasbourg, France in June 2010; and Muslim threats to mobilize 10,000 demonstrators onto the streets of London to prevent a democratically elected member of a European government, MP Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, from entering Britain in February 2009; and Muslim attacks on German police in May 2012.
Muslims in Europe also murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in January 2004; tortured and murdered the French Jew, Ilam Halimi in January 2006; attacked the Swedish artist Lars Vilkes in July 2007; tried to murder the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in January 2010; killed French servicemen and Jews in March 2012; and attacked Spanish politician Josep Anglada in April 2012.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/99112/bernard-lewis-stubborn-hope
PROFESSOR LEWIS’ STUBBORN HOPE LED HIM TO DELIGHT IN THE “CAMP DAVID” DELUSION OF PEACE, IN THE OSLO CALAMITY, AND IN THE GAZA WITHDRAWAL….AH YES HIS ENGLISH IS SUPERB, HIS KNOWLEDGE AMAZING, BUT HIS POLITICAL SENSES AND HIS ABILITY TO HAVE LEARNED FROM HIS VAST KNOWLEDGE OF THE HISTORY OF ISLAM ARE TRULY PATHETIC….RSK
In Notes on a Century, the historian is still optimistic about a ‘great civilization’ in the Muslim world
Bernard Lewis beckons to us as if from the mists of legend. A poet-scholar, linguist, observer and sometime participant in the great events of the Middle East for seven decades, the London-born scholar belongs more to the world of T.E. Lawrence than to ours. At 95, his prose is translucent and his recollection luminous.
But Notes on a Century—his personal and professional memoir—makes for sad reading, for two reasons. The first is that we will not find another like Bernard Lewis; it is a valedictory essay not just for a remarkable man but for an epoch. No university today could train a poet capable of extracting the red thread of history from the obscure orthography of official archives, or a historian-diplomat who knows the songs of a dozen peoples in their own dialects. Part of the reason is ideological. The post-colonial-studies movement typified by the late Edward Said has ruined a field that once was called “Orientalism”—meaning simply a specialty in Near Eastern philology rather than Greek and Roman. Saudi and other Gulf State funding of Middle East studies programs, meanwhile, has made a critical stance toward Muslim culture an academic career-killer. Even without the ideological divide, though, our culture has grown too brittle to nurture another mind of Lewis’ depth.
The second, even sadder reason is the disappointment of Lewis’ hope for what he calls the “heirs of an old and great civilization.” For decades, Lewis balanced a clear-sighted critique of the failings of Muslim society with an underlying optimism about the future of the Arabs, Turks, and Persians. The backwardness of Muslim societies, he insisted, was a self-inflicted condition rather than the crime of Western colonialists. But he never lost faith that the West that defeated Hitler and overcame communism also could find a way to nurture modern institutions of civil society in Muslim countries. Lewis not only reported their history but also translated their poetry, befriended their men, and loved their women.
This optimism made Lewis an icon for American conservatives, and an enormous, if reluctant influence on American policy: Although he advised against the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Lewis is indelibly (if unfairly) linked with inflated neo-conservative expectations for Muslim democracy. But Lewis explicitly warned against a simple-minded rush to parliamentary forms in the Muslim world, hoping instead for a gradual expansion of existing consultative mechanisms into something that would approach democracy at some undermined date. But Lewis and the neo-conservatives shared an inherent optimism about the changing Muslim culture that informed the national mood after Sept. 11.
Lewis’ autobiography went to press just as the wave of optimism that attended the Arab Spring had begun to fade, and his lifelong optimism appears to be curling a bit around the edges, as a different and much darker picture than the one he imagined is emerging from Morocco to Afghanistan. His criticism of Muslim society was always tempered by respect and even affection. Part of his great popularity as a writer may be explained by the fact that his hopes resonated with characteristic American generosity and optimism. And so his disappointment also is ours.
***
http://www.daylife.com/photo/07m0aYE6cPcyU?__site=daylife
People with an Islamic flag, chanting “Allah u Akbar” (God is the greatest), march through a street in Skopje, Macedonia, during a protest on Friday, May 4, 2012. A large crowd protested Friday against the arrest three men identified as radical Islamists suspected with the murder of five Macedonian fishermen in mid April. Two other suspects remain at large. The fatal shooting of the fishermen near Skopje has fueled tension in the Balkan country between ethnic Macedonians and the ethnic Albanian minority.
http://www.letthemfight.blogspot.com/ People who ‘rise to the occasion’ are generally no different than the people from whom they emerge. If the people are focused on good character, sound leadership, selfless service, a sense of personal responsibility for the good of the nation, an understanding of good and responsible nationalistic spirit, then those who are chosen to […]
http://www.mererhetoric.com/2010/10/05/j-street-co-founder-daniel-levy-israel%E2%80%99s-creation-an-act-that-was-wrong/
Quite the few days that J Street had last week, what with all the admitting they’re foot soldiers in Soros’s anti-Israel army after lying about it for years and then trying to get ahead of the story by lying about it some more. Most of the criticism has focused on co-founder Jeremy Ben-Ami, who did not exactly fall on his sword and instead tried to hamfistedly change the subject. But it’s probably unfair to blame him for all of J Street’s failings, from rigging polls to being more anti-Israel than the Saudis to expressing fake confusion about Hamas’s intentions.
Per Eli Lake’s first story, Ben-Ami seems to have been the one who did most of the “misleading” about J Street’s fundraising, from furtively squirreling away Soros’s cash to opaquely raising 50% of the group’s 2008 money from a single foreign source.
But per Lake’s second article, when it came time to shuttle Goldstone around DC and peddle his endlessly inaccurate and venomously biased libels around the Hill, J Street delegated the task to one of the adults in the organization. It was J Street co-founder, advisory board member, and international socialite Daniel Levy “who accompanied the judge to several of the [10-12] parleys” with Congress. It was also Levy’s New America Foundation that hosted a high-caliber lunch for Goldstone with “a group of analysts and Middle East wonks.”
The Goldstone tour wasn’t the first time that Levy willingly served as a channel for de facto Hamas propaganda. He’s been a tireless advocate of pro-Hamas diplomacy, and sees the Iranian proxy as an integral part of Palestinian civil society. A few years ago Noah Pollak took him out to the woodshed for historical revisionism that seemed jarringly anti-Israel and borderline anti-Zionist.
If sometimes it seems like Levy doesn’t really think that the modern Jewish State deserves defending, it’s because he kind of doesn’t really think that the modern Jewish State deserves defending. You can be confident on that point because he said so himself – quite definitively – at last May’s Fifth Al Jazeera Forum. Levy was on a panel with Al-Quds Al-Arabi editor-in-chief Abdel Bari Atwan, NAF Strategic Program Director Steve Clemons, surreal Hamas apologist and one-stater Allister Sparks, and accused terrorist Basheer Nafi.
