Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood announces Jerusalem will fall

I hate to say I told you so, but ...
To all those who insisted, like my Muslim friend, that the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn't try to establish a theocracy in Egypt with shariah law, in effect another Iran: Would you like to reconsider?
This Washington Post article makes it abundantly clear that Egypt is heading towards a very dark place indeed.

CAIRO — At a campaign rally for the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate for president, a hardline cleric and TV preacher sang Mohammed Morsi’s praises before thousands massed in the stadium of an industrial city in Egypt’s Nile Delta.“We are seeing the dream of the Islamic Caliphate coming true at the hands of Mohammed Morsi,” the cleric, Safwat Hegazy, blared from his podium.

Hegazy then made a chilling announcement...

“The capital of the Caliphate and the United Arab States is Jerusalem, God willing,” he added, as thousands cheered and waved the Brotherhood’s green flag, chanting, “The people want to implement God’s law.”

Rapper Shahin Najafi sentenced to death...for a song.

Whenever I ask my Muslim friend his opinion about the myriad human rights abuses encouraged by the evil shariah law in Iran, his default position is always: "I don't know much about that"
Perhaps this (from the Guardian's excellent IRANBLOG INSIDE THE CRISIS) will help him and other wilfully ignorant Muslims to crystallise their views about the realities of life in a Muslim theocracy.
The latest blogpost tells the story of Shahin Najafi, a rapper who was foolhardy enough to criticise the immams and has recently released a song with references to Ali al-Hadi al-Naqi, the tenth of the 12 Shia Muslim Imams, a religious figure highly respected by millions in Iran.

The Germany-based rapper has now been sentenced to death for apostasy.

When asked for a religious ruling on the fate of Najafi and his "blasphemous music", clerics unanimously declared that such a person must be considered an apostate.
According to the semi-official Mehr news agency, Ayatollah Naser Makareme Shirazi, a pro-Iranian regime cleric based in the holy city of Qom with a great deal of influence among Muslims in the country, was the latest person to issue a fatwa in regards to Najafi.
"Any outrage against the infallible imams ... and obvious insult against them would make a Muslim an apostate," he said. [...]
Meanwhile, an Iranian religion website which runs on the regime-controlled .ir domain, Shia-Online.ir, has offered a $100,000 (£62,000) reward for anyone who kills Najafi.
"A (website) founder who lives in one of the Gulf Arab states has promised to pay the ($100,000) bounty on behalf of Shia-Online.ir to the killer of this abusive singer," the site said.

We shouldn't be surprised but...

...doesn't it make your blood boil with the sheer bloody evil lunacy of it all?
In today's Guardian...

Indonesia's atheists face battle for religious freedom. 

Alex Aan faces jail for posting 'God doesn't exist' on Facebook, renewing fears for atheists in the world's most populous Muslim country.

 

Activists say Alex Aan’s is the first case in which an atheist in Indonesia is being tried in relation to 'pancasila', which requires belief in one god. Photograph: Kate Hodal

"The truth is way too dangerous," says Aan quietly, his hands clasped together over his prison-issue blue jeans and button-down shirt. "I'm really worried about my future. And I'm only just now starting to think about how I'm going to deal with it."

"The truth is way too dangerous" 

That might just be a thought that will haunt us all.

Stephen Fry's latest video - a challenge to homophobes of every hue

In his latest video, released today as part of the excellent Proud2Be Project , Stephen Fry's gentle style belies an iron-hard determination to rid the world of homophobia.
How can Muslims seriously believe this good man is going to Hell?
With apologies to NTNON: "Allah's just like that, He hates gays..."

Taliban: "Give us your money, Muslims!"

The Taliban have launched an ambitious appeal to the umma (the world-wide Muslim community) for money to fund their "holy war" against the Western invaders.
"In the light of Islamic sharia, all Muslims everywhere are duty-bound to join the Jihad with money and soul," the militant group said.
The Taliban "are still waging legitimate Jihad single-handedly with mere help from common sincere Islam-loving masses and is in dire need of financial assistance from the Muslim brothers worldwide for its military and non-military expenditures," it added.
This got me wondering about British Muslims' view of the war in Afghanistan. Do they, like my Muslim friend and the poor deluded loon Yvonne Ridley, regard the Taliban as basically misunderstood and misrepresented good guys, fighting for the right to establish a pure Islamic state  (whilst at the same time acting as charity workers)? 
Here's how my Muslim friend interpreted the Taliban's abduction of Ridley and their blowing up of the Buddhas.

So who are the Taliban? Who is supporting them? Are they being manipulated?I met Yvonne Ridley some years ago, the intrepid Daily Express reporter who was captured by the Taliban. Yvonne's story is worth telling in detail, but the substance is that American agents encouraged the Taliban to murder her in order to make black propaganda for war. The Taliban warned her of this plot, and transported her under armed guard to the Pakistani border. A shortwhile before this, a UNESCO team had visited Khandahar with an offer of aid for restoration of the Bamiyan statues. In a country were several thousand children were dying every month from hunger and disease, the Taliban insisted that the money be used instead for food and medicine. When theUNESCO team refused, the Taliban decided to blow up the statues after many months of dithering on the issue. And so our televisions carried not the news of Yvonne Ridley's killing, but the sight of ancient Buddhist monuments being blown up.

So according to one Muslim at least, the Taliban were misrepresented by the (no doubt Zionist led) Western media. Their destruction of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which we in the West had been led to believe was done because the statues were "un-Islamic" were in fact destroyed because UNESCO refused to give money to starving children. Cuh- who'd have thought it, eh?


How far is this view of the Taliban as shaggy naive softies, cruelly manipulated by cynical western super-powers shared by the Muslim community, I wonder. To help answer this, I've asked the Muslim blogger, London Muslim, if he'd consider doing a post. I'll let you know his response (if any))


In the meantime, let's examine the Taliban.

Human Rights abuses. (click on the [] for links to references)

According to a 55-page report by the United Nations, the Taliban, while trying to consolidate control over northern and western Afghanistan, committed systematic massacres against civilians.^[] UN officials stated that there had been "15 massacres" between 1996 and 2001.^[] They also said, that "[t]hese have been highly systematic and they all lead back to the [Taliban] Ministry of Defense or to Mullah Omar himself."^[] "These are the same type of war crimes as were committed in Bosnia and should be prosecuted in international courts", one UN official was quoted as saying.^[] The documents also reveal the role of Arab and Pakistani support troops in these killings. Bin Laden's so-called 055 Brigade was responsible for mass-killings of Afghan civilians.^[] The report by the United Nations quotes "eyewitnesses in many villages describing Arab fighters carrying long knives used for slitting throats and skinning people".^[] The Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, in late 2011 stated that cruel behaviour under and by the Taliban had been "necessary".^[]

In 1998, the United Nations accused the Taliban of denying emergency food by the UN's World Food Programme to 160,000 hungry and starving people "for political and military reasons".^[] The UN said the Taliban were starving people for their military agenda and using humanitarian assistance as a weapon of war. Remember, these are the same Taliban who, according to my Muslim friend, destroyed the Buddhas only so as to convince the UN to give money to starving children

On August 8, 1998 the Taliban launched an attack on Mazar-i Sharif. Of 1500 defenders only 100 survived the engagement. Once in control the Taliban began to kill people indiscriminately. At first shooting people in the street, they soon began to target Hazaras. Women were raped, and thousands of people were locked in containers and left to suffocate. This ethnic cleansing left an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 dead.^[][] At this time ten Iranian diplomats and a journalist were killed. Iran assumed the Taliban had murdered them, and mobilized its army, deploying men along the border with Afghanistan. By the middle of September there were 250,000 Iranian personal stationed on the border. Pakistan mediated and the bodies were returned to Tehran towards the end of the month. The killings of the Diplomats had been carried out by Sipah-e-Sahaba a Pakistani Sunni group with close ties to the ISI.^[][] They burned orchards, crops and destroyed irrigation systems. And forced more than 100,000 people from their homes with hundreds of men, women and children still unaccounted for.^[]


History

The name comes from the Pashto word meaning student. This is significant since the Taliban has its origins in a clearly recognisable ethnic group - the Pashtun tribes. 
The Islamic State of Afghanistan was created in April 1992, after the fall of the Soviet-backed Najibullah government when several Afghan political parties agreed on a peace and power-sharing agreement called the Peshawar Accords.
One party however, Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami, refused to recognize the Accords and the resulting government and , according to a Human Rights Watch report, "launched attacks against government forces and Kabul generally. ... Shells and rockets fell everywhere". Gulbuddin Hekmatyar received operational, financial and military support from Pakistan whilst Iran and Saudi Arabia supported opposing militias. Soon a full scale war erupted.
In the midst of this chaos, in 1991, the Taliban (a movement originating from Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-run religious schools for Afghan refugees in Pakistan) developed in Afghanistan as a politico-religious force. In the beginning the Taliban were a small band of a few hundred - badly equipped and low on munitions. Within months however 15,000 students arrived from the madrassas in Pakistan.  In the course of 1994, the Taliban took control of 12 of 34 provinces not under central government control. They had become a force to be reckoned with...
In a bid to establish their rule over Afghanistan, the Taliban started shelling the capital in early 1995. In a 1995 report the UN reported:

This is the first time in several months that Kabul civilians have become the targets of rocket attacks and shelling aimed at residential areas in the city.

The Taliban's early victories in 1994 were followed by a series of defeats that resulted in heavy losses which led analysts to believe that the Taliban movement as such might have run its course. But Pakistan and Saudi started to offer their support, regarding the Taliban as useful agents in the area. In fact the Taliban were largely founded by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) According to Pakistani Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid, "between 1994 and 1999, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis trained and fought in Afghanistan" on the side of the Taliban.
With the huge military support of Pakistan and the financial support of Saudi, the Taliban entered Kabul on September 27, 1996, and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. But this was not an end to the fighting. 
In 2001 alone, according to several international sources, 28,000-30,000 Pakistani nationals, 14,000-15,000 Afghan Taliban and 2,000-3,000 Al Qaeda militants were fighting against anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan as a roughly 45,000 strong military force.
Of all the leaders trying to resist the Taliban, Ahmad Shah Massoud emerged as the one with enough support and international credibility to pose a threat. In fact he remained the only major anti-Taliban leader inside Afghanistan who was able to defend vast parts of his territory against the Taliban.
In the areas under his control Massoud set up democratic institutions and signed the Women's Rights Declaration. In the area of Massoud, women and girls did not have to wear the Afghan burqa. They were allowed to work and to go to school. In at least two known instances, Massoud personally intervened against cases of forced marriage.
In early 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Brussels asking the international community to provide humanitarian help to the people of Afghanistan.
He stated that the Taliban and Al Qaeda had introduced "a very wrong perception of Islam" and that without the support of Pakistan and Bin Laden the Taliban would not be able to sustain their military campaign for up to a year. On this visit to Europe he also warned that his intelligence had gathered information about a large-scale attack on U.S. soil being imminent. The president of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine, called him the "pole of liberty in Afghanistan"
On September 9 2011 Massoud was assassinated  by suicide bombers.


Now, please correct me if I'm being naive - but weren't the international community (rightly) criticised for not intervening quickly enough in the Balkans when thousands of Muslims were being massacred? 
The US is spending billions in Afghanistan trying to establish a stable government. It could cut and run but it hasn't. Could some guardianistas please explain?

Western Converts to Islam - Abdal Hakim Murad "explains"...

In an article in today's Times newspaper, Muslim convert and lecturer in Islamic studies, Abdal Hakim Murad (previously known as Tim Winter, older brother of Henry, the football writer) attempts to explain the growing number of conversions to Islam in Britain (100,000 in the past decade compared to 60,000 in the 90s according to Winter). (Actually, 75% of new converts to Islam leave the faith within five years. But that's another story...)

Using the doubtless heroic and selfless British aid worker and Muslim convert Khalil Dale (who was found beheaded in Pakistan this weekend...by Islamists) as a "living challenge to standard Islamophobic sentiment", Murad asks us to question our prejudices about Islam and to consider why so many people are converting.

Apparently he is  at a loss to explain, other than to suggest many "spiritual wanderers" find Christianity "too complex" because they are "bewildered by the concept of the Trinity". As disingenuous bollocks goes that surely takes the biscuit. They're only bewildered, matey-boy, because Muslim clerics delight in "explaining" to these "wanderers" the impossibility of God having a son, whilst the Qur'an bizarrely interprets the Trinity as God, Jesus and Mary.

"When asked who converts to Islam and why, I usually have no answer"


But back to the main issue. We have to ask ourselves this question: Is a high profile British convert to Islam, one who writes copiously on the issue of conversion, really unaware of the world-wide efforts of dawah sites such as iERA to con people into believing there are scientific proofs in the Qur'an?

All he needs do is ask ANY BRITISH OR AMERICAN convert (such as poor old "Yusuf Islam" aka hairy rock star Cat Stevens. I'd wager my house that 90% of them would at some stage mention embryology, mountains as pegs, the big bang theory or one of the many other so-called miracles that the bucailleists trot out. That's why, Abdul. Because of the bare-faced lies promulgated  by people like Yusuf Estes and spread in such emetic publications as The Man in the Red Underpants.

If you want us to accept Islam as a part of British culture and even as a "reconnection with aspects of Britishness that have been lost to globalisation" (whatever that may mean) then as a representative of British Islam you should be more honest in your analysis.

London Muslim's trouble with racists...

The Islamic blog, London Muslim, has been host for a while now to a vitriolic anti-Semitic racist commenter who calls himself Mr Black. Those of us poor atheists who value people’s rights and freedoms above the dictates of some ancient, violent, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, mythological construct of desert dwelling tribes, find the whole my God is better than your God thing a complete mystery – but even by religion’s standards the Islamic obsession with Jews is beyond the pale. I have posted elsewhere on how Islam is inherently antisemitic and seems to foster in many of its adherents a searing hatred of Jews, Judaism and thus modern-day Israel. This racist bigotry is, of course, all but ignored by an establishment hell-bent on pandering to an ever-growing Muslim electorate/market. 

London Muslim's obsession with the "Israelites" is a case in point. His readers all know that by "Israelites" he means Jews. But by using the term he can pretend he is making a political point as opposed to inciting distrust and hatred in the age-old fashion of all antisemites. LM is careful (usually) to avoid blatant references to Jews but he reads, approves (posts must be approved by LM before being published) and allows to be posted such virulent, hate-filled comments as would have warmed the hearts of the Eichmann et al.  Here are some choice comments by Mr Black which apparently London Muslim approved for publication: 

Any wonder why jews have a history of getting kicked out of one nation after another. "Monotheistic" religion my ass. Judasim is more like a criminal cult masquerading as a religion hellbent on drowning the world in economic, political and military slavery.Hypocritical lying murderous parasites the lot of them.
NEVER trust a white beast, EVER. Lock and load!
Zionism is incompatible with humanity which is why it and it's (sic) practitioners must be exterminated. Zionist kikes deserve nothing less.

There's plenty more of the same but you get the gist.

Not once has LM seen fit to distance himself from these comments. 


Update: Even LM's Muslim readers are expressing concern over the vile antisemitism expressed in the comments section: 

JasmineApr 28, 2012 05:10 AM @LM - LM, I'm going to file a complaint here. Please take some steps to restrict Mr Black and disallow the spouting of such vicious hatred and baiting. I am not happy for this kind of character to speak on behalf on "the muslims" . I am a Muslim and I find his conduct disgusting: I do not wish to be associated and I am unhappy that his voice & views are dominating this webspace and taking away the attention from valid points that you are raising and turning this all into some kind of mud-slinging, rage-enhancing, argument. The man is openly antagonistic, racist and is even using swearwords. As your blog is now drawing the attention of the press and you are being featured in news articles etc - I think the one thing you really don't need for your profile is any sign that you are happy to tolerate this kind of speech on your blog.

How does Lm respond to the concerns of his readers? By appealing to their liberal consciences and quoting Voltaire...

LMApr 28, 2012 11:56 AM Voltaire I think it was who said I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it. The moment you start to censor you end up on a slippery slope. Either you believe in freedom of speech or you don't which is why I have allowed disgusting hate filled comments about Muslims and Islam not because I agree with them but because it is a perfect illustration of the extremism that exists among all people of faith or no faith and all skin colours. Criminality and incitement of course is the one caveat where this blog will aim to draw the line which has happened on a number of occassion's including reluctantly closing down threads.

hmm....