International Analyst Network/Amil Imani: This is the time of the year that the air is filled with everything Christmas. There is something for everyone: gifts for family and friends, prayers at churches, and Christmas music everywhere. It puts me in a contemplative mood, particularly when I hear the delightful Christian refrain, peace on earth, goodwill to men. This is the gift I want. This is my Christmas. When there is peace on earth and all people dispense and receive good will. Yet, I am saddened to see the world as it is, particularly with what Islam is doing to it, which is the exact opposite of working for peace and extending goodwill to all people.
My contemplation takes me to the genesis of Islam. Something I have come to view as a scourge of humanity, and here are a few of my random thoughts about the founder of Islam: the person who launched a religion that has denied peace to mankind right from the start, the person who advanced a religion that began with war, continues with war, and aims to carry on with bloodletting to the end of time. All this makes me think and shake my head in bewilderment. . . . .
. . . . . Here is another problem. Even the chosen version of the Quran, if you can make any sense of it at all, reads like two different books. The early part is known as the Mecca Quran. This part is much about meekness, tolerance, kindness and so forth. This was the time that Muhammad’s wife Khadija—a monotheist Hanif, in contrast to polytheist idolater Muhammad—introduced her young troubled husband to her Christian uncle and exposed him to the teachings of Christianity that influenced his “revelation.”
During this early phase of his ministry, Muhammad spoke respectfully about the “people of the book,”—Christians and Jews, the people from whose book he liberally plagiarized to launch his monotheistic faith with the invaluable encouragements of his wife Khadija.
It was Khadija who convinced the young man that he was indeed chosen by Allah to be his spokesperson; that the jinn and angels communicated with him were parts of Allah’s plan for him.
Muhammad, during his Mecca years, was ridiculed for his confused sayings by his own tribe of Quraish. He was called shaeron majnoon—crazed poet. At this early stage he went by his birth name of Abulqasem. It was later that he took on the new name of Muhammad—Praiseworthy-One—to go better with his ministry.
Muhammad, having been judged as a hallucinating insane poet, was tormented by the Meccans in many ways. It got so bad, that after his wife’s death he left for Medina where a significant Jewish community provided a safer place for him to gather followers, build a powerbase, reveal his Medina Quran of intolerance and vilification, and launch his religion in full force and by brute force.
Once in Medina, Muhammad hit on a most powerful formula for success. He justified everything, on the spot, by saying that Allah wants it this way. And Allah was nothing to trifle with. He held the key to the most magnificent paradise as well as to the dreadful hell. The duty of a good Muslim became unquestioning obedience to everything that Muhammad said and wished. Muhammad became Allah’s gatekeeper to paradise and hell.
Muhammad’s formula worked magic with the Bedouins of Arabia who thrived on robberies and killings. His religion spread like a pandemic disease in no time at all. And here we are in the 21st century, at Christmas time, praying for peace and goodwill to men, while Muhammad’s men are working overtime to make sure that men see neither peace nor goodwill.
I would like to join the chorus of peace on earth and goodwill to men. Yet, deep in my soul, I find it my solemn duty to keep on sounding the alarm about the fire of Islam even at this poignant moment of Christmas.
Peace on earth and goodwill to men is a perennial prayer. It can be only when enough men and women of goodwill, with iron resolve arise and disempower the Islamist people of war and ill-will.
CFP, 21 Dec 09: There is of course a great deal of talk about reforming Islam these days, and just about anyone from Tariq Ramadan to the Saudi King, to people who actually see what is wrong with Islam and want to reform it, can legitimately claim the title of the reformer of Islam. But that is because the question of what exactly “Reforming Islam” means remains open.
To begin with “Reforming Islam” means one thing to Western audiences and another thing entirely to Muslims. To Westerners “Reforming Islam” means bringing it into compliance with civilized norms of conduct. To Muslims it means stripping away the corruption of later eras and returning it to the pure Islam of Mohammed.
The most successful reformers of Islam within the Muslim world are not Wafa Sultan, Ali Sina or Irshad Manji, but Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab who created Wahhabism, Hassan al Banna who founded the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden. And while that may seem insane or absurd from a Western perspective, after all three men inspired orgies of mass murder and horrifying brutality—they did indubitably try to bring Islam closer to its roots. The problem is that Islam’s roots are more rotten and darker than its branches.
From the Islamic perspective, reforming Islam requires a purer Islam. From the Western perspective, reforming Islam actually requires a less pure Islam that is capable of implementing such foreign to it ideas as tolerance and co-existence.
By contrast Muslims believe that whatever problems there are in Islam are the result of human corruption and innovations added to Islam over the centuries. A pure Islam is their final solution for ending the constant corruption in Muslim countries and creating a Caliphate run under Islamic law.
The question then comes down to just what is it about Islam that needs reforming. From the Western point of view, Islam’s expansiveness, aggression, violence and intolerance are what need reforming. From the Islamist point of view, they are the hallmarks of what a pure Islam should be, intolerant of any intellectual miscegenation and unwilling to accept anything less than absolute dominance in the name of Allah.
There is talk that Islam needs its own Martin Luther, but that is exactly what Islam does not need. Islam already had its own Martin Luther in the 18th century and the Salafist bloodshed that was unleashed then still echoes in the suicide bombings today. Nor does that kind of religious reform usher in peace, so much as more war. . . . .
FrontPage, 21 Dec 09: “Mum, don’t untie me. I want to die.”
These heart-rending words from beyond the grave helped last week to convict Britain’s latest “honor” murderer, Mehmet Goren, 49. The father of four brutally killed his 15-year-old daughter, Tulay, ten years ago for having fallen in love.
“You did all this simply because you regarded it as unacceptable that she, rather than you, should choose the man she wanted to marry,” the judge told the murderer, whom he described as having an “enigmatic smile.”
Instead of experiencing a schoolgirl’s joy for life, shortly before her death a bound and helpless Tulay was lying face down on her bedroom floor, her hands and feet having turned a black and blue color from the clothesline restraints her father had tied her with. It was in this terrible state of pain and suffering that Tulay addressed these pitiful words to her mother, Hanim Goren, who wanted to free her but was prevented by her husband.
Police believed Tulay was drugged, tortured and killed the following day. But first he had Tulay’s eight–year-old brother kiss his sister goodbye for the last time. The 15-year-old’s body has never been found. First buried in the family garden, it was later dug up and removed to an unknown site.
It was Tulay’s grieving mother, finally finding the courage to tell the truth ten years after her daughter’s 1999 disappearance, who delivered this devastating testimony during her husband’s ten-week trial in London. Nuray Gulen, Tulay’s older sister, also gave valuable testimony that ended in her father receiving a 22-year prison sentence, at one point shaking her fists and screaming at her him from the witness box in Turkish.
Tulay’s death followed a familiar pattern regarding honor murders. When her father discovered she was no longer a virgin (she had told a friend she may even be pregnant), he and her family’s male members regarded her as a “worthless commodity.” Tulay’s two uncles were also charged in her death but were acquitted, although they were part of the family council where the decision to kill her may have been made.
In Islamic cultures, a wife is often acquired like a piece of property by means of a contract after negotiations between two families, in which a “bride price” is paid to the bride’s family in the form of money, real estate or other gifts. In such cases, marriage is simply a commercial transaction. The bride, and sometimes the groom, often has no say in choice of partner, as they have never been allowed to establish an individual identity outside their families, clan or religion.
One of the conditions for such “arranged” marriages, however, is that the bride must be a virgin. The highest appellate court in Turkey emphasized this last month when it allowed a man to divorce his wife because she was, supposedly, not a virgin on their wedding night. A woman’s purity, the court ruled, is a prerequisite for marriage.
If a woman is not a virgin when she marries, or is discovered to have engaged in some other form of behavior regarded as improper, no matter how slight, with a male before, or after, marriage, she may then become the target of an “honor” murder. Only the blood from her death, the family believes, will cleanse its shame and restore its “honor” in the eyes of the community.
Other reasons exist for this depraved form of misogyny that has resulted in too many young women’s deaths. They range from the female victim living too Western a lifestyle (re: independent), to wanting a divorce, changing religion, leaving the home to escape family violence, to simply having a boyfriend. Staying a night away from home or moving out, Western European social workers say, is often a death sentence for these women. . . . .
ABC News, 20 Dec 09: The Chicago man charged with helping plot the terror attacks one year ago in Mumbai also photographed and conducted surveillance of a nuclear weapons fuel plant in Tromboy, India, according to Indian and U.S. law enforcement authorities.
The authorities say David Headley was sent to Tromboy, a northwest suburb of Mumbai, by his handlers in the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, an affiliate of al Qaeda.
The Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Tromboy is capable of producing 66 pounds of plutonium a year for four the country’s nuclear weapons, according to David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security.
“You would have had one helluva international crisis if they had taken control of the facility and caused some kind of accident with a serious release of radioactive material,” said Albright. . . . .
Vancouver Sun, 21 Dec 09: Two B.C. members of Parliament invoked the spirit of Christmas Sunday as they called for the government to back down and allow former KGB agent Mikhail Lennikov to stay in Canada.
“Christmas is the season of giving and forgiveness, the season of generosity,” said Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh at a news conference with NDP MP Don Davies and Lennikov at the church where Lennikov has taken sanctuary.
“In that spirit, I wanted to make sure that we remind the government that they have a chance … to be forgiving and giving and generous and allow Mikhail Lennikov to permanently stay in the country.”
Lennikov, 49, entered Canada on a student visa in 1997 and has lived here with his wife and son for more than a decade. He says he did a combination of clerical work and translation for the KGB from 1983 to 1988.
He took sanctuary at the First Lutheran Church in east Vancouver in June after immigration officials declared him a threat to national security and denied his application to stay in Canada.
His wife, Irina, and son, Dmitri, were given permission to stay in Canada on compassionate grounds. . . . .
