“The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.” -Marcus Aurelius
From Norman Tebbit, The Telegraph
“[I have been asked] why I continued to support the Conservative Party [prior to the May 6 election]. Well, think about it. Perhaps if I had defected to UKIP we would still have Brown as Prime Minister but no UKIP MPs. No, ‘pwrplan’, UKIP is a perfectly sensible party. It’s time may yet come.”
From The Times
William Hague condemned Iran’s plan to send aid boats to Gaza yesterday, warning that the move would deliberately aggravate an already tense situation.
“It is not helpful, and probably it is not designed to be helpful,” the British Foreign Secretary said after meeting Franco Frattini, his Italian counterpart.
He and Mr Frattini agreed that Europe wanted an international presence in any Israeli inquiry into the deadly storming of the boats. Such an inquiry must be “transparent, honest and complete,” Mr Frattini said.
When asked what form the international component could take because of Israeli opposition to a role by the United Nations, Mr Hague said: “The UN is not the only option, there are other organisations.”
He said that European co-operation on the Middle East and the question of UN sanctions against Iran were “part of using Europe’s collective weight in the world”.
Earlier, Mr Hague held talks in Paris with Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister. They agreed that an international inquiry was necessary to resolve the dispute over Israel’s raid on the Gaza aid flotilla.
France also proposed that the EU could help to defuse the situation by checking cargo on ships in the region.
From The Sydney Morning Herald
Britain has announced it is giving 19 million pounds Sterling (approximately 25 million US dollars) for refugees in Gaza and repeated calls for Israel to lift its blockade of the territory.
“The humanitarian situation in Gaza is both unacceptable and unsustainable,” International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell said announcing the funds on Sunday, which will help support schools and health clinics for Gazan refugees.
The money is part of a five-year, 100 million pound agreement signed with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in 2006.
In a June 3, 2010 article in the daily Al-Watan, Kuwaiti journalist ‘Abdallah Al-Hadlaq supported Israel’s decision to stop the Gaza flotilla, saying that the outcome of the Israeli navy’s operation was “in direct proportion to the violence” of the flotilla activists, and that the flotilla organizers are known to have ties with global and regional terror organizations.
The following are excerpts:[1]
“The Weapons had Clearly been Prepared in Advance… and the Soldiers had No Nhoice but to Respond”
“The Israeli navy gave repeated warnings to the ships [of the flotilla], which tried to break the blockade on the terroristic Hamas movement in Gaza, and also invited them to enter the Ashdod port and unload their cargo of ‘aid’ supplies, so it could be thoroughly examined by the security [forces] before being delivered by land to the Gaza Strip. When the flotilla failed to heed these warnings and requests, the Israeli navy had no choice but to take over the ships. [In doing so], the IDF troops encountered violent [opposition] that had been planned in advance: the flotilla participants assaulted them with firearms, metal pipes, knives and clubs, and grabbed the rifle of one of the soldiers. The weapons had clearly been prepared in advance… and the soldiers had no choice but to respond, including with live fire. Continue Reading →
By Tim Sumner, from 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America
The imam behind a proposed mosque near Ground Zero is a prominent member of a group that helped sponsor the pro-Palestinian activists who clashed violently with Israeli commandos at sea this week. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a key figure in Malaysian-based Perdana Global Peace Organization, according to its Website. Perdana is the single biggest donor ($366,000) so far to the Free Gaza Movement, a key organizer of the six-ship flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip Monday.
Nine passengers aboard the largest ship died in clashes with Israeli commandos, and a new confrontation loomed today, when another Free Gaza Movement ship was due to reach Gaza waters in defiance of Israel. Continue Reading →
From Douglas Murray, The Telegraph
I have just been forwarded an email from the UK government which suggests that the new administration does not merely feel blackmailed by Islamists but is also actively trying to placate them.
The Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) is jointly funded and run by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office and the department of Communities and Local Government. Founded in 2007, it officially forms part of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism. It is the main conduit for Government in dealing with the disparate mass that it thinks of as “the Muslim community”.
Late yesterday the RICU sent out this message to its email list:
Dear all,
Both the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary made statements in the House of Commons today regarding the Israeli Navy’s interception of the Aid Flotilla to Gaza, and the subsequent deaths of a number of passengers. The attached factsheet provides details of these statements and further background and facts surrounding this incident. Continue Reading →
From Vlaams Belang
(25.05.2010) In 2003, Vlaams Belang was the first party to introduce a law proposition regarding the ban on the burqa and other face covering garments. In April of this year, the ban was finally voted in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives.
Last Saturday, the Muslim organization “Muslim Rise” would have normally held a demonstration in Brussels against the burqa ban. However, they did not get the authorization for their protest march and instead organized a press conference in the presence of Anjem Choudary, the leader of ‘Islam4UK’, a fundamentalist group that is banned in the United Kingdom. “The burqa ban will lead to violence”, Choudary said, adding that “the flag of Islam has to fly everywhere in Europe”.
Vlaams Belang reacted to this provocation by holding a symbolic protest. About fifty female militants of our party protested against the Islamic oppression of women. Several women wore a burqa, which they symbolically threw in the garbage bin. The message is clear: Islam can damage your freedom.
By A. Millar, The Brussels Journal
Nearly a month into Britain’s new coalition government and perhaps the defining image of Prime Minister David Cameron shows him strolling casually along Westminster, without security, mingling with the crowd. At other times he has eschewed his motorcade, and sent away his police motorbike escort. We – and perhaps more especially those who despise Britain – are supposed to believe that he is a man of the people. He is like us, and we are like him. In the cold light of day, however, Cameron’s actions reveal only that he is disconnected from reality:
Lest we forget, Cameron is the leader of a wartime nation – a nation fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and facing terrorism at home.
Islamist terrorists have often stepped up their activity during the first twelve months of a new government, and there has already been some activity since the May 6 election. In what is now being treated as a terrorist attack, the Labour MP for East Ham, Stephen Timms, was stabbed by a Muslim woman, who had been “radicalized.” Since then, the names of four other MPs have been discovered on a terrorist hit list, and security for all MPs has been put under review. Continue Reading →
By Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, Palestinian Media Watch
A day before the confrontation with Israel a university lecturer revealed on Hamas TV that the Gaza flotilla’s commander had announced that the participants were planning to use “resistance,” the Palestinian euphemism for violence, against “the Zionists.” He added that the participants sought to die as Martyrs, even more than they wanted to reach Gaza.
The following are the words of Dr. Abd Al-Fatah Shayyeq Naaman, lecturer in Shari’ah law at a university in Yemen, now visiting Gaza:
“The [Gaza] flotilla commander said yesterday: ‘We will not allow the Zionists to get near us and we will use resistance against them.’
How will they wage resistance? They will resist with their fingernails. They are people who seek Martyrdom for Allah, as much as they want to reach Gaza, but the first [Martyrdom] is more desirable.”
[Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), May 30, 2010
By Walid Shoebat, at Pajamas Media
Is Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf — founder of the hugely controversial Ground Zero mosque — lying to the American public and his fellow New Yorkers?
We have uncovered extraordinary contradictions between what he says in English and what he says in Arabic that raise serious questions about his true intentions in the construction of the mosque.
On May 25, 2010, Abdul Rauf wrote an article for the New York Daily News insisting:
My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists. We are the people who want to embolden the vast majority of Muslims who hate terrorism to stand up to the radical rhetoric. Our purpose is to interweave America’s Muslim population into the mainstream society. [emphasis added]
Oh, really?
Only two months before, on March 24, 2010, Abdul Rauf is quoted in an article in Arabic for the website Rights4All entitled “The Most Prominent Imam in New York: ‘I Do Not Believe in Religious Dialogue.’”
Yes, you read that correctly and, yes, that is an accurate translation of Abdul Rauf. And Right4All is not an obscure blog, but the website of the media department of Cairo University, the leading educational institution of the Arabic-speaking world.
In the article, the imam said the following of the “religious dialogue” and “interweaving into the mainstream society” that he so solemnly seems to advocate in the Daily News and elsewhere:
This phrase is inaccurate. Religious dialogue as customarily understood is a set of events with discussions in large hotels that result in nothing. Religions do not dialogue and dialogue is not present in the attitudes of the followers, regardless of being Muslim or Christian. The image of Muslims in the West is complex which needs to be remedied.
But that was two months ago. More recently — in fact on May 26, one day after his Daily News column – Abdul Rauf appeared on the popular Islamic website Hadiyul-Islam with even more disturbing opinions. That’s the same website where, ironically enough, a fatwa was simultaneously being issued forbidding a Muslim to sell land to a Christian, because the Christian wanted to build a church on it.
In his interview on Hadiyul-Islam by Sa’da Abdul Maksoud, Abdul Rauf was asked his views on Shariah (Islamic religious law) and the Islamic state. He responded… Read More.
By Daniel Pipes
The 7/7 bombings in London, in which Islamists killed 52 and injured 700, prompted British authorities to work with Muslims to avoid future violence.
However, rather than turn to anti-Islamist Muslims who reject the triumphalist goal of applying Islamic law in Europe, they promoted non-violent Islamists, hoping these would persuade coreligionists to express their hatred of the West in lawful ways. This effort featured Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962), a prominent Islamist intellectual. For example, London’s Metropolitan Police partially funded a conference Ramadan addressed and Prime Minister Tony Blair appointed him to an official “working group on tackling extremism.”
Deploying an Islamist may have seemed like a original and clever idea but it was neither. Western governments have been allying without success with Islamists for decades. Indeed, they have been allying with Ramadan’s own family.
 Dwight Eisenhower (center) received a Muslim delegation. Said Ramadan stood at right, clasping paper
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In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower hosted a group of foreign Muslims that included Said Ramadan (1926-95), a leader of arguably the most influential Islamist organization of the twentieth century, the rabidly anti-West Muslim Brotherhood – and also Tariq’s father. The Eisenhower-Ramadan meeting took place in the context of sustained U.S. government efforts to rally Muslims against Soviet communism, in part by putting Said Ramadan on the CIA payroll. Talcott Seelye, an American diplomat who met with him about that time explains: “We thought of Islam as a counterweight to communism.” Continue Reading →
By By Magdi Abdelhadi, BBC News
There are now more Facebook users in the Arab world than newspaper readers, a survey suggests.
The research by Spot On Public Relations, a Dubai-based agency, says there are more than 15 million subscribers to the social network.
The total number of newspaper copies in Arabic, English and French is just under 14 million.
The findings seem to confirm the increasing popularity of the social interaction platforms in the region.
Spot On Public Relations, a marketing and communications agency, says the figures show that such platforms are beginning to define how Arabs discover and share information. Continue Reading →