“The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.” -Marcus Aurelius
Officials in Seoul say North Korean soldiers fired two rounds toward a guard post, and South Korean soldiers immediately responded with three shots. The incident raises tension before next month’s G-20 summit in Seoul.
In a recently released audio tape, bin Laden threatens to kill French citizens in revenge for France’s law to ban Muslim veils that cover the face, and because France has troops in Afghanistan.
Sarkozy confirmed that France believes the tape is authentic and said the country would not back down from the new rule.
“Obviously, France doesn’t let anyone dictate its policies, and certainly not terrorists,” Sarkozy said at a European Union summit in Brussels.
Sarkozy said his country has made its choice and that it doesn’t want women in France “trapped behind pieces of fabric.”
France says that ensuring gender equality and women’s dignity _ and upholding a tradition of secularism _ are among the reasons France is outlawing fully covering Islamic veils, like niqabs, which hide all but the eyes. The measure has already become law but does not take effect until April. Many Muslims have expressed fears it will stigmatize them.
Asked by a reporter about French hostages being held by suspected Islamic militants, Sarkozy said France was working to secure their release.
“I didn’t need a message from Mr. bin Laden to know to be worried about them,” Sarkozy said.
Five French citizens and two Africans were kidnapped in Niger on Sept. 16, and an offshoot of bin Laden’s terror group called al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb has claimed responsibility. In another abduction, two French reporters and their Afghan guides were taken hostage in Afghanistan on Dec. 29.
Muslim students attending a Catholic primary school in Malawi tore up New Testaments that were being distributed by the Gideons International organization, which promotes the distribution of Bibles.
“Although the school’s director had made it absolutely clear that no New Testaments were to be given to the Muslim pupils and that in no way was any student obliged to take a copy of the book, there was a subsequent uproar on the part of some Muslim youths, who tore up the New Testaments, threw them, howling at their teachers, and then threw the torn-up pages out onto the streets,” Aid to the Church in Need reported.
“The behavior of the youths has been an indicator of a danger in our midst,” said Father Medrick Chimbwanya, the parish priest. “Normally, the primary school youth in Malawi would not have the courage to tear up any book in the presence of their teacher, let alone a holy book. My conclusion is that there must be some awful training given to these youths which if left unchecked, means that we may have dangerous militants in Malawi in the near future.”
28% of Malawi’s 13.2 million residents are Catholic, according to Vatican statistics; 52% are Protestant, and 13% are Muslim.
Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.
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This is a worthwhile clip. There is of course, a huge demonstration planned for Amsterdam on Saturday Oct 30 with some EDL members. This is an interview with the Dutch chapter, as well as a leader of the self labelled, ‘Anti Fascists’ where he is quite clear that it is them who typically initiates the violence.
Please read this post on the upcoming demo in The Netherlands:
This couple was mocked and ridiculed publicly instead of the beautiful wedding that had planned.
I would spend my tourist dollars in an infidel land I think.
Story below.
Here is a fine moment. Anjem twists and squirms with the best of them but is clearly bested here.
This film company is offering licences for people who want to show this at home theatres to 25 or less people for under USD $40.00
What a fantastic idea and a great use for your big screen TV. Invite 25 friends, charge them 10 bucks and provide egg rolls or sandwiches and show this movie. It is made by the same people who did Obsession, Radical Islam’s war with the West, and The Third Jihad, both ‘Must see’ movies. I hope lots and lots of you get in touch with them and get this licence and show this film. Talk about grass roots activism! Its the perfect spin off from Fred Litwin’s excellent organization, Free Thinking Film Society, which shows these kind of excellent films in Ottawa.
To contact them:
It’s about time. Warning: I have not yet read this report myself, I plan to this afternoon. But here it is in case anyone wants to download and critique it.
Eeyore
I. Introduction
Why we decided to produce this document
This document is an attempt to accomplish the following three objectives:
1. To draw public attention to the serious and worsening problem of Muslim crime, in the UK specifically, and throughout Western Europe more generally.
2. To draw attention to problematic aspects of the response of the UK authorities to Muslim crime.
3. To promote a public debate on the implications, short- and long-term, of Muslim crime for Britain and its people.
Who we hope will read this document
We hope that any and all interested parties will read this dossier. However, we particularly hope that people in the media, academia, the government, and the police force will engage with the serious issues it raises.
What do we mean by ‘Muslim crime’?
Muslim crime is simply crime committed by Muslims. That said, we have a particular concern with violent crime (up to and including terrorism), sexual crime, property crime, and organized crime as committed by Muslims. By the word Muslim, we simply mean all people of Muslim background and upbringing who have not explicitly renounced Islam, irrespective of how devout they are, or how observant of the requirements of their religion.1
Why focus on Muslim crime?
Of course, no single type of crime becomes any worse in and of itself simply by virtue of having been committed by a Muslim. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to be concerned about Muslim crime in its own right. These include the following:
1 The reasons for this definition will become clear later on, in Section V, which features a contribution from Dr. Nicolai Sennels, a psychologist from Denmark. To summarise here, the psychological attributes inculcated by Islam appear to be at least as significant in causing Muslim crime as conscious religious feeling on the part of Muslims.
4
1. Muslims appear to be overrepresented as the perpetrators of serious crime to an extent which is far from trivial (this claim will be justified in greater detail later).
2. Terrorism and terrorism-related offences, a crime category in which Muslims manifestly make up a massively disproportionate fraction of all convictions, impose enormous indirect costs on millions of people for long periods of time.
3. Muslims throughout the West have pronounced and undeniable separatist, supremacist, and subversive tendencies. This being the case, Muslim crime acquires a significance above and beyond that which might be expected, due to the possibility of it being — and being perceived as being — motivated by these tendencies. To rephrase, some crime is „just? crime, whereas other crime will be perceived as being part of an ongoing inter-group conflict, and therefore possess the potential to further provoke that conflict. How much Muslim crime (or white crime, or black crime, or any crime, for that matter) is actually motivated by inter-group conflict is, of course, an empirical question.
4. The rate of growth of the Muslim community in the UK is extremely rapid, in both absolute and relative terms. Unusually high crime rates amongst this population therefore take on a significance they would not otherwise have.
What qualifies us to talk about crime at all?
This document has not been produced by professional criminologists. However, it has been produced on the basis of a belief that:
1. Citizens engaged in the civic life of their country have both a right and an obligation to consider such key topics as crime and community cohesion.
2. Educated people of good will are perfectly well-positioned to draw some provisional conclusions on these subjects on the basis of their own carefully-considered interpretation of information available in the public domain.
We do not pretend to have all the answers to the questions we pose in this document. Indeed, it is precisely those areas where data are poor, understanding limited, or interpretation difficult that we hope will draw increased attention in the future from criminologists, police officers, and politicians, as they attempt to address the serious problems that now afflict this country.
Given that this document is not academic in nature, we have not felt the need to include all the sources for the facts and figures herein. The more important or contentious the claim in question, the more likely it will be to have a source. More general information may be unsourced. Those who are sceptical about any of our claims are invited to do their own research and make up their own minds. Either way, we are confident that the factual claims made in this document are accurate.
5
Why do we not discuss terrorism in this document?
With apologies to the Muslim Council of Britain for the hate crime no doubt implicit in our use of the term, Muslim terrorism has been a key public concern for so long now that we consider it to be a fairly well-worked seam. There is little we feel we can add to the discussion on terrorism, so we propose to largely ignore it in this document. We will reiterate, however, what we said above about how the indirect costs of terrorism (police budget, security services budget, airport security budgets, indirect costs through productivity losses, etc.) have not, to our knowledge, ever been calculated with any accuracy. This research should, in our opinion, be conducted so as to enable a better understanding of the costs of the presence of so many Muslims in our country.
Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has been charged with “hate speech” for telling the truth about Islam in Austria. The appeal “Elisabeth’s Voice” has been launched to aid her legal defense.
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Arab-Israelis use dust bins for protection as they clash with Israeli riot police in Umm Al-Fahm
Picture: AFP/GETTY
From The Telegraph U.K.
From The Telegraph U.K.
By Alex Spillius in Washington
Published: 10:26PM BST 27 Oct 2010
Farooque Ahmed, 34, of Ashburn, Virginia, was charged with trying to help people posing as al-Qaeda operatives planning to launch simultaneous bomb attacks on railway stations around Washington DC.
The public was never in danger because FBI agents were aware of Ahmed’s activities and monitored him throughout, the agency said. And the people that Ahmed thought were al-Qaeda operatives were actually individuals who “worked on behalf of the government in this matter,” according to a federal law enforcement official who requested anonymity.
The arrest appeared to have all the hallmarks of a sting operation, but the FBI refused to confirm this.
Ahmed faces 50 years in prison for charges of attempting to provide material support to a designated terrorist organisation, collecting information to assist in planning a terrorist attack on a transit facility, and attempting to provide material support to carry out multiple bombings to cause mass casualties.
According to the indictment, Ahmed took video footage of four northern Virginia subway stations, two of them near the Pentagon, and monitored the security at a hotel in Washington.
In a series of meetings at hotels in northern Virginia, Ahmed provided these videos and diagrams of two of the stations to someone he believed was part of a terrorist organisation, and also said he wanted to donate $10,000 (£6,300) to help the overseas fight and collect donations in a way that would not raise red flags.
U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride said in a statement that it was “chilling that a man from Ashburn is accused of casing rail stations with the goal of killing as many Metro (subway) riders as possible through simultaneous bomb attacks”.
Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the FBI Washington field office, declined to comment on how authorities first learned about Ahmed.
During a brief appearance in federal court in Alexandria on Wednesday, Ahmed did not enter a plea and was ordered to be held without bond. He told U.S. Magistrate Judge John Anderson he could not afford to hire a lawyer. Prosecutors said they planned to use some classified information as evidence in the case.
Since the September 11 attacks, the US authorities have worried about another attack on American soil.
Last week, a Jordanian national was sentenced to 24 years in prison for attempting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper. Earlier this month, Pakistani-born American Faisal Shahzad was sentenced to life in prison for trying to set off a car bomb in New York’s Times Square.
From the Ottawa Citizen
The leader of the Green Party of Canada wants a group of current and former party candidates to cancel a conference on peace in Ottawa Thursday tonight that features a roster of Iranian speakers.
“This is not a happy event,” Elizabeth May said in an interview Wednesday. “If they’re not aware that they’ve put together a conference which is unbalanced, then they’re not paying attention. I hope they’ll cancel.”
The conference on “just and sustainable peace” at the Government Conference Centre includes three academics from Tehran University, including keynote speaker Saeid Ameli, dean of the faculty of global studies.
Another panelist is Davood Ameri, director general of the Islamic World Peace Forum, an Tehran-based NGO whose website postings closely mirror the views of the Iranian regime.
Martin Rudner, former director of Carleton University’s Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies, said the event is “merely a floor show, a one-sided propaganda forum for an Iranian perspective on international affairs.
“It’s very one-sided,” he said. “There’s no other side.”
May stressed that the conference was not a sanctioned Green party event. “There’s no entity of the Green party involved. There’s not even a local riding association involved.”
If the Green party were to organize such a conference, May said, “we would not for a moment allow any potential for whitewashing of (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad or the Iranian regime.
“We’re right now in the midst of pressing Iran to stop barbaric practices and show trials,” she said. “This is hardly the time to be holding an event which in any way allows the Iranian regime to have any form of cover.”
One surprising attendee tonight will be RCMP Cst. Wayne Russett, aboriginal and ethnic liaison officer at A-Division in Ottawa.
“The RCMP’s role is to have a good understanding of the communities we serve, and that means listening to different points of view,” explained RCMP spokesman Marc Ménard.
“It doesn’t mean we’re promoting this, it doesn’t mean we’re speaking there,” he said. “It’s about sharing information and staying connected with the various communities we serve. That is all. Nothing more.”
The conference was organized by the “Ottawa Group of Four” — two current and two former Green candidates in Ottawa-area ridings.
The current candidates are Paul Maillet in Ottawa-Orléans and Qais Ghanem in Ottawa South. The other two, Akbar Manoussi and Sylvie Lemieux, ran in 2008.
Maillet said the four organized the event in an attempt to build “an alternative approach to conflict that doesn’t lead you down the path of violence.
“We were able to get some academics from the University of Tehran, and we thought that this was a good place to start.”
Maillet said the invitees were recruited by Manoussi, who attended a government-sponsored conference in Tehran in the past year.
“It was an art-of-the-possible thing. It would have been nice if we could have got Ahmadinejad or someone, but I think he’s booked,” he joked.
The objective is to ask panel members and attendees to do what they can to advance the cause of peace through non-violent means, Maillet said.
“There’s no naming and blaming,” he said. “It’s all about what you can do in your country. If we can save one life, do one small thing, we would consider it successful.”
Organizers understand that the event could become an Iranian propaganda exercise, Maillet acknowledged.
To prevent that, they plan to instruct participants to talk only about what they’re prepared to do as individuals to resolve conflict and promote peace.
“This is what we want from these people,” he said. “If they’re going to speak otherwise, then they’re going to be fair game.”
Though he said he wasn’t “100 per cent sure” the Iranian participants are aligned with the regime, Maillet agreed “they are under some constraints.
“If one spoke out against the regime, that probably would not be looked kindly upon,” he said, adding: “We’ll see what kind of courage they have.”
But Rudner said the Iranians “wouldn’t dare speak their minds. Their lives would be at risk.”
Just last week, Rudner said, the Ahmadinejad regime shut down every social science department in Iranian universities because they’re regarded as centres of Western influence.
“They’ve clamped down very strictly on freedom of thought, let alone freedom of expression,” he said. “I worry about four Iranians who cannot speak freely and, by definition, have to push an agenda.”
May said the organizers either allowed themselves to be manipulated or didn’t adequately consider the implications of their actions. “I can’t imagine what they were thinking.”
Their intentions “may have been good,” she said, noting that some other speakers are well-respected. “But the fatal failure is in having those particular supporters of the current Iranian regime without balance.”
But Maillet said he and his fellow organizers weren’t interested in having a “group hug.
“A professional peacekeeper does not choose to have conferences with his friends. He chooses to have dialogue and discussion with people with whom he has differences. That is the place you can make gains.”
However, said May, “You can’t have a dialogue if you don’t have balance. You can’t be naive about these things.”
Asked if the party might revoke Maillet and Ghanem’s nominations, May said there was “nothing at the moment” that suggested that would happen.
“If they’re duly nominated by their local riding association and if they recognize that they made a mistake and they didn’t have a balanced event, I don’t think we plan to punish them,” she said.
However, “if we have a candidate who puts forward unacceptable views or anti-Semitic views, they will not be a candidate. I can say that full stop. There’s a line you can’t cross.”
Mohammed is now the most popular name for baby boys ahead of Jack and Harry
Mohammed is now the most popular name for newborn boys in England and Wales ahead of Jack and Harry, it emerged today. The name, when 12 different spellings were included, was given to 7,549 youngsters in 2009, official statistics revealed. Oliver was the second most popular and it was given to 7,364 boys in England and Wales in 12 months.
NOTE: Remember what the two Lebanese ´Bishops said about how Islam treats the non-Muslim
Is it even thinkable that the Arabic countries of the Middle East, where fundamentalism is becoming more entrenched, will accept in the near future abandoning their theocratic regimes founded on the Koran and the Sharia, which constitute flagrant discrimination towards non-Muslims? To me this seems to be in the domain of utopia, for the centuries to come.
Muslim preaches at Oxford college chapel
7:00am Tuesday 26th October 2010
By Amanda Williams »
TWO religious leaders are claiming an historic first after an Islamic Imam preached at a Christian chapel.
For the first time in Pembroke College’s 500-year history, a Muslim, Dr Taj Hargey – from the Summertown Islamic Congregation in Oxford – was welcomed to deliver a sermon at its chapel.
The service was preceded by the Adhan, the Muslim call to prayer traditionally carried out by a man, which was read out by an 11-year-old girl from Marston.
The Rev Dr Andrew Teal, of Pembroke College, said he had been trying to get a Muslim Imam to deliver a service at the chapel for many years and he believed it was a first.
He said: “We wanted to do something which brought together Christianity and Islam, but not to create a third thing.
“I think what we are doing today is very unusual, certainly it’s the first time I have heard of it being done at the college.
“The two faiths are actually very close.
“Abraham is a key figure in both Islam and Christianity.
“But I think there’s been a reluctance in the past. I think people may have felt afraid to do something like this.
“I’d hoped for this to happen for a long time. We just needed the right man to do it.”
Christianity and Islam, as well as Judaism, are sometimes referred to as the Abrahamic religions because of the role that Abraham plays in each of the holy books.
All three faiths consider him father of the people of Israel.
During the service, in which Dr Hargey spoke of the links between Christianity and Islam, songs and Psalms from the Bible were read before a reading from the Holy Qur’an.
Dr Hargey, who is also chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, invited 11-year-old student Nadia Zamri, from Marston, to call the congregation to prayer.
More here. (if you can bear it)
A former spouse accused of killing an ethnic Pakistani woman (sitting in the middle behind the paper) will receive the verdict today. On the left is his translator, Riti Sandu, on the right his lawyer Heikki Lampela.
The handling of the case that happened less than a year ago in Lappeenranta, will come to an end today in the South Karelia, district court.
The last time the issue was discussed in the District Court was in April of last year. The convicted man was sent by a state at the time, to a mental facility for study.
It is a story in which the victim, a 34-year old Pakistani woman was living in Finland. The killer was the woman’s ex-spouse, who also was born in Pakistan. They had been married during the years 2005-2007.
In District Prosecutor Mark O. Ahonen’s view, it was very premeditated act of murder, a raw ritual slaughter.
According to Defense lawyer, Heikki Lampela, it was just an act of murder.
After the murder, the killer tried to escape from Finland, but the police arrested him at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport.
H/T Kumitonttu
