Canary In The Coal Mine

The OIC And The Caliphate

 

by Andrew C McCarthy  |  NationalReview.com  |  February 26, 2011

 

 

The Islamic agenda is not coexistence, but dominion.  

 

The Organization of the Islamic Conference is the closest thing in the modern world to a caliphate. It is composed of 57 members (56 sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority), joining voices and political heft to pursue the unitary interests of the ummah, the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. Not surprisingly, the OIC works cooperatively with the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most extensive and important Islamist organization, and one that sees itself as the vanguard of a vast, grass-roots movement — what the Brotherhood itself calls a “civilizational” movement.

Muslims are taught to think of themselves as a community, a single Muslim Nation. “I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously said of his own country in 1980, even as he consolidated his power there, even as he made Iran the point of his revolutionary spear. “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah.” Muslims were not interested in maintaining the Westphalian system of nation states. According to Khomeini, who was then regarded by East and West as Islam’s most consequential voice, any country, including his own, could be sacrificed in service of the doctrinal imperative that “Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

Because of that doctrinal imperative, the caliphate retains its powerful allure for believers. Nevertheless, though Islamists are on the march, it has somehow become fashionable to denigrate the notion that the global Islamic caliphate endures as a mainstream Islamic goal.

It was only a week ago that close to 2 million Muslims jammed Tahrir Square to celebrate the triumphant return to Egypt of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Khomeini-esque firebrand who pulls no punches about Islam’s goal to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” Yet, to take these threats seriously is now to be dismissed as a fringe lunatic, a Luddite too benighted to grasp that American principles reflect universally held truths — truths to which the ummah, deep down, is (so we are told) every bit as committed as we are.

The caliphate is an institution of imperial Islamic rule under sharia, Muslim law. Not content with empire, Islam anticipates global hegemony. Indeed, mainstream Islamic ideology declares that such hegemony is inevitable, holding to that belief every bit as sincerely as the End of History crowd holds to its conviction that its values are everyone’s values (and the Muslims are only slightly less willing to brook dissent). For Muslims, the failure of Allah’s creation to submit to the system He has prescribed is a blasphemy that cannot stand.

The caliphate is an ideal now, much like the competing ideal of a freedom said to be the yearning of every human heart. Unlike the latter ideal, the caliphate had, for centuries, a concrete existence. It was formally dissolved in 1924, a signal step in Kemal Atatürk’s purge of Islam from public life in Turkey. Atatürk, too, thought he had an early line on the End of History. One wonders what he’d make of Erdogan’s rising Islamist Turkey.

What really dissolved the Ottoman caliphate was not anything so contemporary as a “freedom agenda,” or a “battle for hearts and minds.” It was one of those quaint military wars, waged under the evidently outdated notion that Islamic enemies were not friends waiting to happen — that they had to be defeated, since they were not apt to be persuaded.

It was, I suppose, our misfortune in earlier times not to have had the keen minds up to the task of vanquishing “violent extremism” by winning a “war of ideas.” We had to make do with dullards like Winston Churchill, who actually thought — get this — that there was a difference worth observing between Islamic believers and Islamic doctrine.

“Individual Muslims,” Churchill wrote at the turn of the century, demonstrated many “splendid qualities.” That, however, did not mean Islam was splendid or that its principles were consonant with Western principles. To the contrary, Churchill opined, “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” Boxed in by rigid sharia, Islam could only “paralyse the social development of those who follow it.” Reason had evolved the West, but Islam had revoked reason’s license in the tenth century, closing its “gates of ijtihad” — its short-lived tradition of introspection. Yet, sharia’s rigidity did not render Islam “moribund.” Churchill recognized the power of the caliphate, of the hegemonic vision. “Mohammedanism,” he concluded, remained “a militant and proselytising faith.”

As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, Churchill’s views were not eccentric. A modern scholar of Islam, Andrew Bostom, recalls the insights of C. Snouck Hurgronje, among the world’s leading scholars of Islam during World War I. In 1916, even in the dark hours of Ottoman defeat, he marveled at the grip the concept of Islamic hegemony continued to hold on the Muslim masses:

It would be a gross mistake to imagine that the idea of universal conquest may be considered as obliterated. . . . The canonists and the vulgar still live in the illusion of the days of Islam’s greatness. The legists continue to ground their appreciation of every actual political condition on the law of the holy war, which war ought never be allowed to cease entirely until all mankind is reduced to the authority of Islam — the heathen by conversion, the adherents of acknowledged Scripture [i.e., Jews and Christians] by submission.

Muslims, of course, understood the implausibility of achieving such dominance in the near term. Still, Hurgronje elaborated, the faithful were “comforted and encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period of humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah bestowed victory upon his arms.” So even as the caliphate lay in ruins, the conviction that it would rise again remained a “fascinating influence” and “a central point of union against the unfaithful.”

Today, the OIC is Islam’s central point of union against the unfaithful. Those who insist that the 1,400-year-old dividing line between Muslims and non-Muslims is ephemeral, that all we need is a little more understanding of how alike we all really are, would do well to consider the OIC’s Cairo Declaration of 1990. It is the ummah’s “Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,” proclaimed precisely because Islamic states reject the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the United Nations under the guidance of progressives in the United States and the West. That is, the leaders of the Muslim world are adamant that Western principles are not universal.

They are quite right about that. The Cairo Declaration boasts that Allah has made the Islamic ummah “the best community . . . which gave humanity a universal and well-balanced civilization.” It is the “historical role” of the ummah to “civilize” the rest of the world — not the other way around.

The Declaration makes abundantly clear that this civilization is to be attained by adherence to sharia. “All rights and freedoms” recognized by Islam “are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah,” which “is the only source of reference for [their] explanation or clarification.” Though men and women are said by the Declaration to be equal in “human dignity,” sharia elucidates their very different rights and obligations — their basic inequality. Sharia expressly controls freedom of movement and claims of asylum. The Declaration further states that “there shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in Shari’ah” — a blatant reaffirmation of penalties deemed cruel and unusual in the West. And the right to free expression is permitted only insofar as it “would not be contrary to the principles of Shari’ah” — meaning that Islam may not be critically examined, nor will the ummah abide any dissemination of “information” that would “violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical Values, or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society, or weaken its faith.”

Americans were once proud to declare that their unalienable rights came from their Creator, the God of Judeo-Christian scripture. Today we sometimes seem embarrassed by this fundamental conceit of our founding. We prefer to trace our conceptions of liberty, equality, free will, freedom of conscience, due process, privacy, and proportional punishment to a humanist tradition, haughty enough to believe we can transcend the transcendent and arrive at a common humanity. But regardless of which source the West claims, the ummah rejects it and claims its own very different principles — including, to this day, the principle that it is the destiny of Islam not to coexist but to dominate.

We won’t have an effective strategy for dealing with the ummah, and for securing ourselves from its excesses, until we commit to understanding what it is rather than imagining what it could be.

 

 Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

 

Source:  http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/260786/oic-and-caliphate-andrew-c-mccarthy

Jewish Author of Holocaust Books Dies

 

by Danielle Kubes  |  ShalomLife.com  |  February 26, 2011

 

Czech journalist and author Arnost Lustiq succumbs to cancer at 84.

Jewish journalist Arnost Lustig (Pictured), who is most well-known for his fiction books about the Holocaust, died today from Cancer at 84-years-old, reports Reuters.

The author, born 1926 in Prague, survived concentration camps during World War Two. He was sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald among others, but managed to escape in 1945 when an American warplane accidentally attacked the train he was on that was headed toward Dacha.

"He survived concentration camps, but did not survive an insidious disease with which he fought until the last moments. Then it overwhelmed him," Marketa Malisova, from the Franz Kafka Publishers, told Ceskenoviny.

When the war ended he studied journalism in Prague and reported on the War of Independence from Israel in 1948, reports Ceskenoviny.

Twenty years later he emigrated to Israel and at a later date, America. He returned regularly to Prague once communism ended in 1989.

Among other awards, he was nominated for the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

His works include A Prayer For Katerina Horowitzowa, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974, Dita Saxova, Night and Hope, and Lovely Green Eyes.

 

Source:  http://www.shalomlife.com/eng/14744/Jewish_Author_of_Holocaust_Books_Dies_Today/

 

J'Accuse: The New York Times Promotes Muslim Brotherhood Lies, Covering Up For Nazi Collaborators

 

by Barry Rubin  |  RightSideNews.com  |  February 26, 2011

 

Recently, Tariq Ramadan, considered by the Western intelligentsia to be the very epitome of enlightened Islamism, wrote a New York Timesop-ed in which he was not only allowed--among other total lies--to deny that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and his grandfather, who then led the group, were  Nazi collaborators before, during, and even after World War Two. In fact, he dares claim--because he knows the mainstream media will not expose this lie--that the Muslim Brotherhood was an anti-fascist organization!

Here is my detailed discussion of Ramadan's lies

I wrote a short but detailed letter to the newspaper on this point at the urging of my readers but, not surprisingly, it went unpublished. Meanwhile, a student at an elite American college wrote me how this oped article was taught by his teacher as the absolute truth.

We have crossed the border into  "The Twilight Zone."

Dr. Wolfgang Schwanitz, probably the world's leading authority on Germany and the Middle East, and myself are writing a book entitled Germany, The Nazis, and the Making of the Modern Middle East that will be published by Yale University Press next year.

The book will revolutionize people’s understanding of this issue. But I’d like to present you with three draft paragraphs from the book—fully documented by German documents—on the particular issue of the Muslim Brotherhood and fascism.

Here’s the first one:

“The Islamists of the Brotherhood were well-financed by the Germans, both directly and through [Amin] al-Husaini [leader of the Palestinian Arabs and a collaborator with the Germans]. Wilhelm Stellbogen, director of the German News Bureau in Cairo, an Abwehr [German Military Intelligence] man, and acting press attaché, paid sums of 1,000 Egyptian pounds to them several times during 1939 alone. To put this sum into perspective, the Brothers high-priority fund-raising effort for Palestine netted only 500 pounds for that entire year. The mufti of Jerusalem, leader of the Palestine Arabs Amin al-Husaini who was in Berlin cooperating closely with Hitler, also supplied money through his contacts in Cairo like Auni Abd al-Hadi, Muhammad Ali Tahir, and Sabri Abd ad-Din.”

Al-Husaini, with the Brotherhood’s cooperation, planned to kill all Jews in the Middle East once the German army conquered the area. In preparation, he sent three of his men to an SS course to learn about mass extermination.

Here’s the second section:

“On the evening of July 7, 1942, [when it seemed as if the German army would soon conquer Cairo] the Voice of the Free Arabs [the station controlled by Amin al-Husaini, mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian Arabs] broadcast to Egypt the following message:

"Kill the Jews who took your valuables….According to Islam it is a duty to defend your lives. This can only be fulfilled by the liquidation of the Jews. This is your best chance to get rid of this dirty race. Kill the Jews! Set their possessions on fire! Demolish their shops! Liquidate those evil helpers of British imperialism! Your only hope for rescue is to annihilate the Jews before they do this to you."

The Muslim Brotherhood, along with the neo-fascist Young Egypt party, had been given German weapons which an Arab commando team in the German army had hidden in western Egypt. It was ready to spring into action to murder Egyptian Jews and deliver the country to the Nazis. But it was prevented from carrying out this plan by the British, who seized control of Egypt in a virtual military coup at this moment. In addition, on the very day this broadcast was made, the advance of General Erwin Rommel’s forces was stopped.

But the Nazi weapons were used eventually. After the war, the Brotherhood dug them up and used them to arm their forces sent to wipe out Israel in the 1948 war. One of those in the unit--as was demonstrated in my biography of Arafat--co-authored with Judith Colp Rubin--Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, was Arafat himself

The New York Times and other newspapers that printed Ramadan’s false account should publish the truth about the Muslim Brotherhood’s collaboration with the Nazis as well as its virulent and frequently expressed antisemitism that continues to this day.

The fact that Middle East experts, historians, and others have not deluged the Times with criticism for this travesty is astonishing.

 

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books, go to http://www.gloria-center.org.  You can read and subscribe to his blog at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.

 

Source:  http://www.rightsidenews.com/2011022612932/editorial/world-opinion-and-editorial/jaccuse-the-new-york-times-promotes-muslim-brotherhood-lies-covering-up-for-nazi-collaborators.html

IDF Retaliates for Sabbath Rocket Attacks

 

by Chana Ya'ar  |  IsraelNationalNews.com  |  February 26, 2011

 

The Israel Air Force was kept busy over the Sabbath retaliating for rocket attacks fired from Gaza at Jewish communities in southern Israel.

Overnight Friday, Israeli fighter pilots attacked two terror targets in central Gaza.

On Saturday, IAF aircraft targeted a terrorist tunnel and two terror activity sites in southern Gaza. The tunnel was intended to be used by terrorists to infiltrate into Israel and to carry out attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.

Arab terrorists in Gaza fired a Kassam rocket at the western Negev Friday night, which exploded in an open area. The Color Red rocket alert system sounded in several cities in the area.

Terrorists also fired a mortar at Israeli targets on Saturday afternoon. No one was injured and no damage was reported in either attack.

Since the beginning of January, more than 50 Kassam rockets, mortar shells and Katyusha Grad missiles have been fired at southern Israeli communities.

Since last Wednesday, four missiles exploded in Be'er Sheva and the Sdot Negev Regional Council district.

“The IDF will not tolerate any attempt to harm Israeli civilians or IDF soldier and will continue to respond harshly to terror,” said the IDF Spokesman in a statement.

“The IDF holds the Hamas terrorist organization solely responsible for maintaining the calm in the Gaza Strip and for any terrorists activity emanating from it.”

 

Source:  http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142535

Former CIA Agent Against U.S. Involvement in the Middle East

 

HarrisSchool.UChicago.edu  |  February 25, 2011

 

If you want to make sure your book is controversial, former CIA agent Michael Scheuer joked dryly, have it endorsed by Osama bin Laden.

 

Three years ago, bin Laden released a statement citing Scheuer’s 2004 book, Imperial Hubris, as an example of an accurate portrayal of Al-Qaeda's motivations. In more than two decades with CIA's counterterrorism operations, Scheuer accrued an inventory of knowledge about bin Laden, the subject of his newest book. But during a Feb 16 Harris School lecture, Scheuer did not focus on the infamous terrorist. Instead, he reserved his attention—and his brutal criticism—for U.S. political leaders.

Scheuer’s growing criticism of U.S. foreign policy, particularly of the CIA’s approach to bin Laden and the Iraq War, has strained his relationship with the agency. In 2004, he departed the CIA, writing that “there has not been adequate national debate over the nature of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and the force he leads and inspires.”

Scheuer became a junior officer with the CIA focusing on Afghanistan in 1986, after receiving his PhD from the University of Manitoba. In 1996, he was moved from his work with the Islamic Extremist Branch to head the Bin Laden Issue Station, a new counter terrorism unit formed to track the operations of the then-relatively unknown Al-Qaeda commander—it dissolved in 2006.

Scheuer, who now teaches at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies, shared his critical views as part of an ongoing series of lectures at the Harris School on counter terrorism. He stood distinctively apart from previous speakers, however, in his understanding of Al-Qaeda and his policy proposals.

Unlike Jonathan Fine, an Israeli terrorism expert who spoke at the Harris School on Jan. 25, Scheuer does not view Al-Qaeda as an irrational group driven by theology, but as an organization that acts rationally and is motivated by U.S. foreign policy. And he differed from the notion put forth by West Point officials last October that “Al-Qaeda has decentralized,” arguing instead that the gravest threat to the U.S. comes from the strategic, well-connected man at Al-Qaeda’s center.

Scheuer claimed there are two primary U.S. policies that motivate bin Laden: decades of American military presence in the Persian Gulf and the Muslim world and the ongoing U.S. support for Israel. This second claim cost Scheuer an earlier position at the Jamestown Foundation, and has brought him a fair amount of criticism.

He also criticized the U.S. government for continuing policies that, he said, undermine national security. "America's elite are addicted to interventionism," he said, arguing that the U.S. should stay "out of other people's religious wars."

He further cautioned the U.S. from intervening in the current unrest in several Arab countries. A few members of the audience challenged Scheuer, with concerns about the future of the Middle East without U.S. involvement.

 

Source:  http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/news/features/Scheuer.asp

Iran Opposition Websites Post Calls For New Protests

 

AFP  |  Google.com  |  February 26, 2011

 

TEHRAN — The websites of Iranian opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehi Karroubi have posted calls for new protests on Tuesday to demand their release from reported house arrest.

 

Mehdi Karroubi is under "complete house arrest", according to his website.

The call, posted on Kaleme.com and Sahamnews.org, was issued by the Coordination Council of the Green Path of Hope, an umbrella group backing the two leaders who steadfastly oppose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government.

"We invite everyone to protest on Tuesday... against the continued restrictions and house arrest imposed on the movement's leaders," the group said in a statement posted on the two websites.

It said the protests would be held in key squares and streets of Tehran and provincial cities.

The group, which called previous protests on February 14 and February 20, said that more demonstrations would be held on March 15 if Mousavi and Karroubi remained under house arrest beyond March 1.

The February 14 protests were deadly with two people killed when clashes erupted between demonstrators and security forces. But the February 20 protests in Tehran were quelled by a massive deployment of police.

The two protests, the first to be held since February last year, infuriated the authorities who accused Mousavi and Karroubi of treason and put them under "complete" house arrest, according to opposition websites.

Officials have also branded anyone who supports the two men as "anti-revolutionary."

Mousavi and Karroubi led a string of protests in Iran after Ahmadinejad's controversial re-election in June 2009, which they claim was rigged.

Their opposition to Ahmadinejad has shaken the Islamic regime and divided the nation's elite Shiite clergy.

 

Source:  http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jxuZGL8P18duqpe8hmu_6GcdDeZg?docId=CNG.29a2ebdaf178435a5e82e857cf4725de.141

Long Bread Lines and Barricades in Libya’s Capital

 

by *David D Kirkpatrick  |  NYTimes.com  |  February 26, 2011

 

A man carrying loaves of bread walks past improvised barricades set up by protesters in Tripoli. Moises Saman for The New York Times.

 

TRIPOLI, Libya — A bold play by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to prove that he was firmly in control of Libya appeared to backfire Saturday as foreign journalists he invited to the capital discovered blocks of the city in open revolt.

Witnesses described snipers and antiaircraft guns firing at unarmed civilians, and security forces were removing the dead and wounded from streets and hospitals, apparently in an effort to hide the mounting toll.

When government-picked drivers escorted journalists on tours of the city on Saturday morning, the evidence of the extent of the unrest was unmistakable. Workers were still hastily painting over graffiti calling Colonel Qaddafi a “bloodsucker” or demanding his ouster. Just off the tour route were long bread lines where residents said they were afraid to be seen talking to journalists.

And though government forces dominated the city center with heavily armed checkpoints and orange-suited cleanup crews, there were signs of defiance in other neighborhoods, where the streets were blocked by makeshift barricades of broken televisions, charred tree trunks and cinder blocks left over from protests and street fights the night before.

“I have seen more than 68, I think, people killed,” said a doctor at a neighborhood clinic in Tajoura who gave his name only as Hussein. “But the people who have died, they don’t leave them in the same place. We have seen them taking them in the Qaddafi cars, and nobody knows where they are taking the people who have died.” He added, “Even the ones with just a broken hand or something they are taking away.”

In some ways, the mixed results of Colonel Qaddafi’s theatrical gamble — opening the curtains to the world with great fanfare, even though the stage is in near-chaotic disarray — is an apt metaphor for the increasingly untenable situation in the country.

There were reports Saturday that thousands of armed rebels from other regions of the country were marching toward Tripoli. Those reports were not confirmed, but rebels have taken over and held the eastern half of the populous coast, including the strategic towns of Zawiyah and Misurata, not far from the capital and near important oil facilities.

After days of fighting, the rebels had also reportedly taken Sabratha, an important town near Tripoli known for its ancient ruins. But so far, they have been unable to take Surt, a coastal town on the main route to Tripoli that is a Qaddafi stronghold and traditional center of his tribe.

In Tripoli, home to nearly two million of Libya’s roughly six and a half million people, Colonel Qaddafi and his special militias have unleashed enough firepower that it may enable them to keep a firm grasp on the city for some time.

On Saturday, his plainclothes police and uniformed security forces appeared in control of most of the city’s largely deserted streets. There were unconfirmed reports that he was following through with threats in a speech this week to distribute weapons to his supporters, raising vexing questions about just how the standoff might end.

Britain closed its embassy in Tripoli on Saturday, the day after the United States took the same action, and a pair of British military transport planes swooped into the desert south of Benghazi and picked up more than 150 civilians, the Defense Ministry said.

Until Friday night, Colonel Qaddafi’s government had imposed a complete ban on foreign journalists. It had shut down most Internet access, confiscated cellphone chips and camera memory cards from those leaving the border, and done whatever it could to prevent unauthorized images of the unrest here from leaving the country.

But he reversed himself on Thursday when his son Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi said Libya would now welcome the foreign news media and officials began figuring out how to issue visas when many of its embassies abroad had already defected to the rebels.

In a midnight news conference for journalists assembled in the luxurious Rixos Hotel, where bread and other food was plentiful, the younger Mr. Qaddafi, dressed in a dark zip-up sweater, acknowledged for the first time the extent of the rebellion, confirming reports that rebels had control of Zawiyah and Misurata despite concerted attempts over the last two days to dislodge them.

But, contradicting rebel claims that their victory was at hand, the younger Mr. Qaddafi said the government was negotiating with the protesters and making great progress. (No protesters have acknowledged such talks.)

He promised journalists they would find the streets peaceful and support for the government strong. Do not confuse the sound of celebratory fireworks for bursts of gunfire around the streets of Tripoli, he told them.

The next morning, a driver took a group of foreign journalists to an area known as the Friday market, which appeared to have been the site of a riot the night before. The streets were strewn with debris, and piles of shattered glass had been collected in cardboard boxes.

A young man approached the journalists to deliver a passionate plea for unity and accolades to Colonel Qaddafi, then left in a white van full of police officers. Two small boys approached surreptitiously with bullet casings they presented as evidence of force used on protesters the night before.

But at another stop, in the neighborhood of Tajoura, journalists stumbled almost accidentally into a block cordoned off by makeshift barriers where dozens of residents were eager to talk about a week of what they said were peaceful protests crushed by Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces with overwhelming, deadly and random force.

A middle-age business owner, who identified himself only as Turki, said that the demonstrations there had begun last Sunday, when thousands of protesters inspired by the uprising in the east had marched toward the capital’s central Green Square. He said the police had dispersed the crowd with tear gas and then bullets, killing a man named Issa Hatey. He said neighbors had now renamed the area’s central traffic circle Issa Hatey Square in memory of their struggle.

He and several other residents said that over the past week neighbors had been besieged by pickup trucks full of armed men shooting randomly at the crowds, sometimes wounding people who were sitting peacefully in their homes or cars. At other times, several said, the security forces had employed rooftop snipers, antiaircraft guns mounted on trucks and buckshot, and they produced shells and casings that appeared to confirm their reports. Mr. Turki said that on one day he had seen about 50 to 60 heavily armed men who appeared to be mercenaries from nearby African countries.

The residents also said that they had seen security forces scooping up dead and wounded protesters and removing them from the streets, apparently to hide evidence of the violence. Because they believe security forces are also removing casualties from hospitals, they said, they have tried to hide their friends within the hospital and remove them after initial treatment.

After Friday Prayer, Mr. Turki and his friends said, a crowd of several thousand had gathered at Issa Hatey Square to march to Green Square. They raised what he called “the old-new flag,” the former tri-color flag of the Libyan monarchy that rebels have claimed as the flag of a free, post-Qaddafi Libya.

Two carloads of Libyan Army soldiers had joined them, he said, though they never used their weapons. The protesters were determined to remain peaceful, he said, because they knew that if they fought back with weapons Colonel Qaddafi would retaliate with even greater force.

But when they got to a neighborhood called Arada, they met an ambush led by snipers firing down from the roofs. Others had attacked with machine guns and antiaircraft guns. Several said they had been attacked by the personal militia of Colonel Qaddafi’s son Khamis Qaddafi, which is considered the most formidable battalion in the Libyan Army or other Qaddafi forces.

At least 15 people had died, he and others said.

A precise death toll has been impossible to verify. A Libyan envoy said Friday that hundreds had been killed in Tripoli.

Asked why he and his neighbors were rising up now, after living under Colonel Qaddafi for 42 years, Mr. Turki, 46, shrugged. “No one can tell the time,” he said. After forty years of pressure, “you explode.” Two funerals were taking place nearby for those who died on Friday, and he said they expected another big protest on Sunday.

A pickup truck of Qaddafi critics wheeled by just in time to carry the foreign journalists back to meet their official driver, and the official tour continued.

*Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya, and Sharon Otterman from Cairo.

 

Source:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/world/africa/27libya.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

Israeli Muslim Brotherhood Leader Arrested On Arson Charges

 

FamilySecurityMatters.org  |  February 26, 2011

 

Israeli Muslim Brotherhood Leader Arrested On Arson Charges.

 

Raed Salah

Israel media is reporting on the arrest of Israeli Muslim Brotherhood leader Raed Salah on suspicion of setting forest fires in the south of the country. According to one report:

 

Head of the Islamic Movement’s northern branch, Sheikh Raed Salah, is in hot water once again: Salah was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly damaging and setting fire to a Eucalyptus forest in Southern Israel two weeks ago. Jerusalem police, which arrested Salah on Highway 1, suspect he took part in the arson in protest of the Jewish National Fund project’s taking place in the area. Salah was released from the Ayalon Prison in Ramla last December after spending five months behind bars for attacking a policeman.

 

Last June, the Jerusalem Post carried an article titled “The Rise of Raed Salah” which profiled Salah. the leader of the Northern branch of the Islamic Movement, essentially the Israeli Muslim Brotherhood. The article begins:

 

Umm el-Fahm – the heartland of the Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch – was on the verge of full scale rioting in the hours after the Gaza flotilla incident.

 

False rumors saying that its head, Sheikh Raed Salah, had died aboard the Mavi Marmara led dozens of masked youths to hurl stones at border policemen in Umm El-Fahm on May 31.

 

“If it turns out Sheikh Salah is injured, there will be big problems here and across the Arab areas,” said Ibrahim Mahajane, a young resident of the town, as he looked at the disturbances unfolding. “Salah is our leader, not just here, but for all the Arabs in Israel.”

 

Salah later returned to a hero’s welcome in the Galilee town, and delivered a characteristically fiery speech in which he predicted that “Zionism would end in Turkey.”

 

Founded in 1971 by Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, the Islamic Movement has become a dominant force within the Arab community, pushing aside secular Arab nationalist movements and promoting Islamist doctrines.

 

In 1996, the movement split into two factions over the question of whether to participate in the general elections. The result was the creation of a more moderate Southern Branch, which is represented by Arab Knesset members. The Northern Branch, under Salah’s leadership, refuses to partake in Israeli democracy.

 

Read the rest here.

 

In May 2003, Salah was arrested along with other Northern Islamic Movement officials on suspicion of transferring funds to Hamas under the pretense of humanitarian aid. He was released after two years under the terms of a plea bargain. In August 2007, Salah was indicted for “inciting racism and violence” for calling for a “third Intifada,” or uprising, to defend the mosque and in 2008 Israeli security forces raided the offices of the Islamic Movement in northern Israel accusing it of aiding Hamas. In May of this year, Salah said that Israel has a ‘diabolical plan” to cause the Al–Aqsa Mosque to collapse “in a way that would appear as is happening as a result of natural causes, such an earthquake.” A previous post discussed his conviction in January for assaulting an Israeli policeman and participating in a violent demonstration.

 

Hamas Bans Men From Working In Women’s Hair Salons

 

MEMRI has translated a Jordanian news report indicating that the Gaza Hamas government has banned men from working in women’s hairdressing salons. According to the MEMRI translation:

 

In Gaza, Hamas Government Bans Men From Working In Women’s Hairdressing Salons The Hamas government has begun implementing its ban on men working in women’s hairdressing salons. Gaza Strip police have summoned five hairdressers and had them sign a document saying they would stop doing so, and would not enter salons that they manage, under threat of imprisonment and a NIS20,000 fine. The director of the Independent Human Rights Authority called the decision part of a series of decisions harming personal freedoms, pluralism, and the right to choose a profession.

 

Source: Maannews.net, February 22, 2011

 

An earlier post reported that Hamas had banned motorcycle riders from carrying women on the back seat.

 

The Hamas charter states that it “is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine” and an Israeli TV station has reported that in 2008, Muslim Brotherhood “representatives” traveled to Gaza from Egypt through the open border to meet with Hamas. An earlier media report indicated that shortly after Hamas took over the Gaza strip, Muslim Brotherhood representatives were present to review Hamas military formations. Last June, a Hamas journalist acknowledged the role that the “international Muslim Brotherhood” has played in providing funds for the purchase of weapons. The Global Muslim Brotherhood support Hamas through the Union of Good, a worldwide coalition of charities headed by Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi.

 

Source:  http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.8835/pub_detail.asp

Israeli Jets Hit Islamic Jihad Camps In Gaza

 

ADP  | Dawn.com  |  26th February 2011

 

GAZA CITY: Israeli war planes bombed two Islamic Jihad training camps in the Gaza Strip early Saturday, Palestinian sources said. There were no casualties reported.  

 

The air raids took place after tensions rose along the Gaza border this week following clashes and a rocket attack on the Israeli city of Beersheva that hit a house. –Photo by Reuters

 

The jets hit two sites, one in the southern town of Khan Yunis and another near Nusseirat in the centre of the Hamas-ruled strip, security officials said.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

The air raids took place after tensions rose along the Gaza border this week following clashes and a rocket attack on the Israeli city of Beersheva that hit a house, but caused no casualties.

It was the first rocket to strike Beersheva since the devastating 2008-2009 Gaza war, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to warn Gaza militants not to “test” Israel.

 

Source:  http://www.dawn.com/2011/02/26/israeli-jets-hit-islamic-jihad-camps-in-gaza.html

Would You Be Willing To 'Adopt A Terrorist'?

 

by Drew Zahn  |  WND.com  |  February 26, 2011

 

Website urges Christians to pick an enemy in need of prayer.  

 

A U.S. military chaplain who served in Iraq is calling Christians to take up the spiritual battle against radical Islam, inviting them to "adopt a terrorist for prayer."

"Where is the Christian response to terrorism?" writes former reserve chaplain Thomas Bruce on his organization's website, Adopt-a-Terrorist for Prayer. "If the struggle against violence done in the name of Islam is primarily spiritual, then defeating it requires a spiritual response."

 

 

 

Jamal Ahmed Mohammed al-Badawi, escaped terrorist available for 'adoption'.

The website continues, "The war on terrorism transcends flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12). It involves spiritual powers behind twisted ideologies. With prayer, we fight fire with water. We engage the actual enemy with a spiritual weapon forged by the completely opposite Spirit."

Founded in 2008, Adopt-a-Terrorist for Prayer features short biographies of individuals identified by the FBI and State Department as terrorists and terrorism sponsors. It even offers to send "adoption papers" to those who will agree to pray for the spiritual liberation, repentance and salvation of radical jihadists.

Quoting Jesus' words in Matthew 5:44 – "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" – Bruce told CNN his team created the website in hopes of transforming the war against terrorism.

"We've been fighting this for about 10 years with material means, and it hasn't really changed the nature of it," Bruce told religion reporter Katie Glaeser. "By bringing spiritual perspective to it, and as the Lord answers some of those prayers, it could and should hopefully have a profound change on the viciousness of the conflict we're in."

Bruce told CNN that his team's site also helps draw an important line of distinction between battling the radical Islamic ideology that fuels terrorism and demonizing the people enslaved to it.

"It's really important to service personnel to do their service for their country without dehumanizing the people who are trying to hurt their country," Bruce said.

"Even once someone is captured," he continued, "they might not be a threat nationally any longer but they still have value to God, and we'd still like to see them changed."

He explains further on the site: "When we hate, we are reactive victims. When we love we seize the initiative. Love for country helps soldiers to risk their lives. Love for children enables parents to discipline them without being intimidated. Love for us took Jesus to the cross. Love for enemies will give courage to face, overcome and transform them and the environment that breeds them.

Source:  http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=268273