EYEontheUN Expands Announcing the Launch of Human Rights Voices A new resource with 20,000 web pages Effective immediately EYEontheUN has been incorporated into a new website. www.HumanRightsVoices.org Human rights are the most powerful political currency of our time. The United Nations, which rose from the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust, was intended […]
The Portuguese Phoenix PORTO, Portugal—Most tourists visit this northern Portuguese city of Porto to enjoy a glass of the world-famous port wine and stroll through the picturesque historic quarters near the Douro River. They stay a day or two, then head south to Lisbon or the beaches. There is not much evidence of a Jewish […]
http://www.islam-watch.org/authors/65-khan/1257-assassinations-prophets-holy-tradition-takes-center-stage-in-the-muslim-world.html
Assassination, or secret killing, is the most dreaded weapon to demolish an opposition or to silence critics. Authoritarian, fascist and fanatic regimes have historical used assassination with great effectiveness. Today, from Tunisia to Bangladesh, assassinations by Islamist fanatics have been terrorizing their secular and progressive opponents.
In Islam, assassination was one of the violent tools that Prophet Muhammad used in its founding days. Here’s a brief list of the Prophet’s assassinations:
1) Abu Afak: He was famous poet, aged 120 years. He wrote a poem, condemning the Prophet’s murdering a man named al-Harith. Hearing of what Abu Afak has written, “The apostle said, ‘Who will deal with this rascal for me?’” And a disciple of Muhammad, named Salim b. Umayr, went forth and killed him at the dead of night. (Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, p. 675)
2) Asma binte Marwan: She was poetess and mother of five children. When Prophet Muhammad assassinated the heavily-aged fellow poet Abu Afaq, Asma wrote a poem, condemning the tribes of Medina that had invited such a violent person and his murderous gang to their otherwise tranquil city. Ibn Ishaq writes, “When the apostle heard what she had said, he said, ‘Who will rid me of Marwan’s daughter?’” A disciple of Muhammad, named Umayr, went to her house that very night and killed her. In the morning when informed Muhammad of his killing of Asma, he said, ‘You have helped God and His apostle, O Umayr.’ When Umayr went to Asma house, she was sleeping with her breast-feeding baby on her cheast. He carefully removed the baby and plunged the sword through her chest so violently that it got stuck into the wooden bed below. (ibid, p. 675-76)
3) Kab bin Ashraf: Kab was a Jewish Prophet and critic of Muhammad. When Kab heard that a large number of the Quraish died in Muhammad’s aggressively plotted Battle of Bad’r, he reacted, “Is this true? Did Muhammad actually kill these, whom these two men mention? These are the nobles of the Arabs and kingly men; by God, if Muhammad has slain these people, it were better to be dead than alive” (Ibn Ishaq, p. 365). He felt so devastated at the death of so many Meccan noblemen that Hasan bin Thabit, Muhammad’s poet, wrote, “Does Ka’b weep for him again and again / And live in humiliation hearing nothing?….” A Muslim woman, ridiculing Ka’b, wrote: “This slave shows great concern / Weeping over the slain untiringly…”
Ka’b not only expressed grief at the slain Meccans, he also wrote a poem urging them to take revenge on Muhammad (ibid). When Muhammad heard about it, records Sahih Bukhari (5:369), “Allah’s messenger said, ‘Who is willing to kill Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf who has hurt Allah and His apostle?’ Thereupon Maslama got up saying, ‘O Allah’s messenger! Would you like that I kill him?’” Maslama also said that he will have to lie and deceive in order to kill Ka’b. Muhammad gave him permission to do that. Then on one night, Maslama lured Ka’b out of his house, saying he wanted to discuss something with him. When Ka’b, disregarding his wife’s concern, came out, two armed Muslim associates of Maslama, who were hiding nearby, came out and fell upon Ka’b and murdered him. (see also Ibn Ishaq, p. 367-68)
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/#ixzz2Lub1XutN
Barack Obama has recently given us his view of the State of the Union. Like almost everything else he has ever said it was pure nonsense, intended only for consumption by his own low-information voter base. So please allow me to write a response. And since I know of two pieces of writing which, taken together, create a perfect essay on the prophesy and fulfillment of our time… the state of our Union… I will quote liberally from both.
The first is purely prophetic. It is from a May 23, 1857 letter written by British historian and social philosopher, T.B. Macaulay, to an American colleague, Henry S. Randall, author of The Life of Thomas Jefferson. The latter is a clear and unambiguous exposé of the current state of the union, taken from a November 13, 2012 article titled, Why Romney Didn’t Get Enough Votes to Win, by Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, of congregation B’nai Yeshurun, Teaneck, New Jersey.
In his 1857 letter to H.S. Randall, Lord Macaulay wrote, “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both…
“What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoilation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness… Happily, the danger was averted and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone, but civilization has been saved.
“You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land your labouring population will be far more at ease than the labouring population of the Old World. But the time will come when New England will be as thickly populated as Old England. Wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test.
“Distress everywhere makes the labourer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/terrorist-attack-bigger-than-77-thwarted-by-british-mi5-cops?f=puball Three suspects from Birmingham, England, were found guilty on Thursday of plotting a bombing campaign intended to be even larger than the 7/7 London attacks that occurred on May 7, 2005, in which 52 people were killed. Although the intended targets of the three Islamists remain unknown, it is clear to the police and […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/coming-to-a-theater-near-you-palestinian-propaganda This article appears at American Thinker. The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development (JF), a Palestinian-American non-profit organization, screened the film Where Should the Birds Fly on February 14, 2013, at the JF’s Palestine Center across from the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Filmed by Gaza Strip native Fida Qishta, who was present […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/inside-the-muslim-student-association-conference-part-1/
Last weekend I attended the 15th Annual Muslim Student Association (MSA) West Conference at the University of California campus in the beautiful seaside town of Santa Barbara. A thousand Muslim students flocked to the school for a packed three-day weekend of speaker sessions and workshops on spiritual tools, campus activism, and “institution building,” all with the supervision and support of the American branches of the subversive Muslim Brotherhood.
The MSA is a fifty-year-old Muslim Brotherhood affiliate with chapters on many hundreds of college campuses (check out this report on the MSA from Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism). The Brotherhood, as I’m sure all FrontPage Mag readers know, is devoted to the elimination of Western civilization. They don’t officially exist in the United States, but of course they have operated here for many decades in the guise of powerful, well-funded legacy groups, the most prominent of which were intimately involved in the MSA West Conference.
The thrust of the annual conference, as its welcome letter stated, was “to inspire, empower, and provide attendees with a tangible plan” – “action items… to improve their personal lives, their MSAs, and their communities at large” – and to link spirituality and activism: “Spirituality is the foundation, providing roots for activism; activism is actualized when produced by a sound spiritual community.” “We weren’t made to sit on the sidelines and not play an active role in society,” reads the description of a workshop led by Edina Lekovic, Communications Director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
Toward that end, the MSA hosted nearly 1000 Muslim students, according to its website, for the intense conference. I can attest to the fact that the 860-seat Campbell Hall auditorium, where the main sessions of the conference took place, was always almost entirely full for the main sessions, with more young women than young men in the strictly segregated audience. Speaking of the young women: by my estimate, more than 90% of them were wearing the hijab.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/terrorism-without-end/
The reason why the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is doomed can be summed up in a paragraph. The Arab populations left in political limbo when Israel recaptured in 1967 the territory that it had lost to Egypt and Jordan in 1948 exist only as a strategic weapon of disruption. They have been shaped into a population that is defined only by terrorism because that is the purpose that their sponsors put them to. There can be no constructive outcome of the conflict because you cannot negotiate with a weapon.
The trouble is not that Israel is unable to reach a settlement with the Palestinians; but that the Muslim countries funding and operating the terrorist groups that constitute the Palestinian political factions are unwilling to give up their weapon. Negotiating with the Palestinian Authority or Hamas is like trying to negotiate with a gun or bargain with an attack dog. There is nothing to be gained from such a futile task. The conflict will end only when those countries that are behind it will decide that it should end. And they have no reason to want it to end.
Palestinian terrorism is a strategic weapon of disruption that confines and unbalances Israel. At a cost of millions, the sponsors of that terror have inflicted billions in economic damage. And there is no reason for them to stop. Watching Israel and America try to reason with their attack dogs amuses them and allows them to expand their own influence by offering to act as mediators.
For that same reason, Islamic terrorism in general is also not going anywhere. What the Palestinians are to Israel, Muslim terrorists are to the West and the rest of the world. They are strategic weapons which are allowed to exist because they serve the purposes of their sponsors. Like most living weapons, they occasionally turn in the hands of their sponsors, but that only makes the task of directing them at the proper targets more urgent.
Terrorism can never be defeated by fighting terrorists. Combine massive wealth in some parts of the Middle East with staggering poverty in other parts and the supply of mercenaries is nearly endless. Syrian Jihadists are being paid $150 a month by Qatar; a good salary for an unskilled laborer in a region where life is cheap and every family has plenty of surplus sons and mouths to feed. A barrel of oil can buy the services of a killer for a month and Qatar pumps out millions of barrels a day.
Terrorism is cheap for the sponsors, profitable for the participants and hideously expensive for the targets. A soldier in a First World nation can cost six figures. For that same amount, a backward oil tyranny can field a hundred men. When those hundred men kill a soldier, then his nation will be heartbroken and question the costs of war. When those hundred men die, their mothers will ceremonially wail and cry out for more martyrs to avenge them. And the terror will go on.
Islam makes the process easier. Like Palestinian nationalism, it is a war machine whose ideas lubricate the recruitment, rampages and replenishment of fresh cannon fodder for the wars of the old rich men of the region.
That difference in attitude and ideology is at the heart of the power imbalance. As long as that imbalance exists, then a hundred poorly trained fighters who can hardly shoot without killing themselves will still edge the Army of One.
No Muslim country has been able to field an army that will match a Western nation in some time. The Israeli-Arab wars punishingly drove that lesson home as the tiny Jewish State managed to prevail even when it faced superior numbers and at times even superior technology and surprise attacks.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/341408 For years, most Americans’ vision of history has been shaped by the New Deal historians. Writing soon after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others celebrated his accomplishments and denigrated his opponents. They were gifted writers, and many of their books were bestsellers. They have persuaded many Americans — Barack Obama definitely included […]
http://news.yahoo.com/qatar-poet-remains-prison-offensive-verse-072500475.html
PLEASE REMEMBER TO PRONOUNCE THAT “MODERATE” KINGDOM’S NAME CORRECTLY….IT IS “GUTTER’…SERIOUSLY….ASK THE ISLAMODIPLOMATS WHO ARE SO ENCHANTED BY THE OILY EMIRATES….RSK
A poet jailed for a verse considered offensive to Qatar’s ruler harshly denounced the Gulf nation’s legal proceedings on Monday after an appeals court reduced his life sentence but still kept a 15-year prison term.
The rant in court — rare in the tightly controlled Gulf Arab states — underscored the free speech battles across the region as Western-backed authorities take strict measures against perceived political dissident in the wake of the Arab Spring.
From Kuwait to Oman, dozens of people have been arrested in the past year for social media posts deemed insulting to leaders or calling for political forms.
“Unjust,” shouted poet Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami in the heavily guarded courtroom in Qatar’s capita, Doha, after his appeal to drop the conviction was denied. The court, however, cut the life sentence handed down in November and imposed a 15-year term.
Al-Ajami faced specific charges from a poem posted online in 2010 that discussed the traits needed for a good leader — which apparently was seen by authorities as a challenge to Qatar’s emir and the ruling family.
