The Reporting of Information of Events associated with Islam

Hugh Fitzgerald: Islam Is Not A Mystery

January 22, 2016 11:20 am By Hugh Fitzgerald 31 Comments




Islam is not a hieratic mystery, which only the initiated, a special priesthood, can possibly understand. It is, rather, sufficiently grasped by more than a billion people who, save for a handful, have been born into it, and have grown up in societies suffused with it, societies where it is impermissible to question Islam, to ponder whether its directives make moral or intellectual sense, and where any open display of questioning is punished, and any putative blasphemy or any open admission of apostasy, can result, in many cases, in a death sentence carried out not only by the Muslim state, but also by the informal meting out of Muslim justice by Believers who can, on their own, enforce Islamic law.

The written accounts upon which Islam rests are three: first, the Qur’an, believed by Muslims to be outside of history, exempt from any historical study (which can be punished), Uncreated and Immutable; second, the collections of stories of what Muhammad said and did (and these have been assigned levels of authenticity after careful study by the muhaddithin — Muslim scholars who centuries ago studied the chains of transmission, or isnad-chains, of each story, and on the basis of such study assigned ranks of “authenticity” to each Hadith); third, the Sira, that is, the biography of Muhammad, which of course overlaps the Hadith considerably (and may have been woven out of the Hadith, or vice-versa). Together the Hadith and the Sira constitute what is called the Sunnah, that is, the manners and customs of the earliest Muslims, that offer a gloss or guide to the meaning of the Qur’an, and to the way a Muslim should behave in every aspect of his life. Some believe, or claim to believe, that the Sunnah is more ferocious than the Qur’an, and responsible for the co-called “radicalisation” of Muslims. There are those who claim that the way out for Muslims is to somehow jettison both the Hadith and the Sira, and – as one young Turk, Mustafa Akyol, a self-consciously Brave Young Reformer, used to argue — Muslims need to keep only the Qur’an, that is, rely on “sola scriptura.” (Akyol is not alone in trying to assimilate terms taken from the history of Christianity and the Reformation, and misleadingly apply them to the case of Islam.) To this notion of doing away, in Islam, with any reliance on the Hadith and Sira, to getting a billion Sunnis (a word derived from the “Sunnah”) to accept this, one can only reply: Fat Chance.

These written works — Qur’an, Hadith, Sira, and commentaries on all three — are easily available. You can find them online, a click away, and can also find online hundreds or thousands of websites, in English and other European languages, as well as in the languages most associated with Islam and Muslims (Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, various forms of Bahasa) devoted to answering queries of all kinds, websites where ordinary Muslims ask questions of clerics — about all the matters of daily life, food, dress, personal hygiene, sexual behavior, family law. You, too, can eavesdrop on these. And you can find out, again by such eavesdropping, how Muslims are taught to regard, and to treat, Unbelievers, especially in the pronouncements on Infidels from high-ranking clerics, including the Sheik Al-Azhar, from Saudi clerics, from Iranian clerics, from Muslim clerics from all over the world. All of this is available. You might start online with the excellent translation services of Muslim material — including what political figures, clerics, diplomats, officials from the Muslim world are saying to their own people — to be found at www.MEMRI.org.
But how many people will take the time to avail themselves of such material, available in such plenty? Among those who keep reassuring us about Islam — Obama or Cameron or Merkel — how many of our leaders do you think have even once gone to MEMRI.org, or to Jihad Watch, or read a single one of the books by the Defectors from Islam? I kept hoping Obama might meet with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose personal testimony as to Islam, delivered with such relentless indignation, just might, I dreamed, have some effect on Obama. Such a meeting was not to be; it would have been politically incorrect. Still, I think it would be useful to ask aloud (perhaps some Republican candidate might do the asking): “Why, President Obama, could you not have met with Ayaan Hirsi Ali?” — even if we know the answer, and know we won’t be given it.

Aside from the distraction that the Internet provides, when we do start to look up Muslim websites, we find the very names off-puttingly foreign. If you are the kind of person who cannot make it through War and Peace because of all those Russian names and patronymics you cannot keep straight, then you might have some initial difficulty with reading about Islam – think just of such words as “Hadith” and “Sira,” or “dhimmi” and “jizyah,” and what barriers to mental entry they pose to so many. And there is also the question of the sheer surpassing boredom of it all, as the Total Belief-System of Islam, is, in its details, horribly uninteresting. Think only of having to read through a recital, before every hadith, of the relevant isnad-chain – the chain of oral transmission of the particular story, right back, if possible, to the time of Muhammad, with all the various human links on that chain, as A said to B said to C, solemnly imparted, when we all know, if we are non-Muslims, what a large amount of fantasy and make-believe goes into the claims for these isnad-chains and their solemn studiers.

But at least you can learn about how Hadith were winnowed by the muhaddithin (Hadith scholars), and which muhaddithin (Bukhari, Muslim) are regarded as most authoritative by Muslims, and why, and just how the study of the isnad-chains, and the assigning of rank of “authenticity” to each of the putative Hadith through such study, is accomplished. In learning about all this, there is difficulty, there is boredom, but there is no mystery.
And you have available, as well, the great non-Muslim scholars of Islam, those who began to subject Islam to the same kind of approach as, beginning in the latter part of the 19th century, was given by German and English Protestant historians to the study of Christianity, a study known as the Higher Criticism. That is, instead of accepting the Muslim narrative about Islam, Western scholars tried to study Islam as they would anything else, with the Qur’an and Hadith “put back into history.” Among those who studied and wrote in such uninhibited fashion were such scholars as C. Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, David Margoliouth, Georges Vajda, Arthur Jeffrey, Henri Lammens, Samuel Zwemer, St. Clair Tisdall, K. S. Lal. But this golden age of Western scholarship came to an end when Arab money bought up so many academic departments, or was responsible for the opening of “Centers for the Study of Islam” (think only John Esposito at Georgetown and his Saudi backers), where the Islamic narrative about Islam ruled the roost, and critical study of Islam in universities was no longer possible. Still, the work of those scholars of Islam from that Golden Century of Scholarship — from about 1870 to 1970 — is available not only in large libraries, but for sale in cheap Indian editions, and can also be found online.

You, an Unbeliever, now have easily available not only Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, but the most important Qur’anic commentators, jurisconsults, historians (Muslim and non-Muslim) of 1400 years of Muslim conquest of and interaction with many different non-Muslim peoples. There should be no mystery about Islam.
But mystery about Islam there still seems to be, all over the Western world. Why should this be so, and what are the consequences of the failure of so many in the West to learn about, or to know about, or to make sense of, the Total Belief-System of Islam, needs to be pondered.

Pakistan: Muslims screaming "Allahu akbar" storm university, murder at least 20 people
Muslims kill Christian girl: "Christian girls are only meant for one thing: the pleasure of Muslim men"

Filed Under: Featured, Hugh Fitzgerald, Qur'anTagged With: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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Anne Marie Waters |
activist
Anne Marie Waters

activist


A Message to Left-Wing Feminists

January 2016 / 12 | No Comments

I have no intention of launching an attack on Laurie Penny for her New Statesman article. What good would it do? All I want from her, and feminists who share her views, is that they read I write below and try to absorb it. This is important. It is a direct message to all feminists who support the massive and unprecedented immigration that Europe is experiencing now, and has experienced for the last couple of decades. It is not enough to dismiss us all as racists and bigots, this may make you feel more comfortable but it simply isn’t true. It isn’t bigotry or racism to observe and acknowledge reality, and there are some harsh realities that I wish you would take on board. I’m aware that as dyed-in-the-wool left-wingers, these realities will not sit well with you but they are real nonetheless.
Harsh reality number one – we are not “all equal”.

Leftists are absolutely wedded to the notion that we are all alike, that we all share the same values, and we all want harmony and justice. We don’t. Like it or not, there are a lot of people out there who want violence and misogyny, who want the right to marry off their daughters, or to mutilate their genitals. Some people are rapists, some are jihadists, and some take great pleasure from tearing the clothes from a woman in a public square on New Year’s Eve. This leftist naivety that causes you to sanctimoniously advocate for open borders on behalf of your fellow human being doesn’t take any account of the fact that the executioner is a fellow human being, the sharia oppressor is a human being, the mutilator is a human being. Not all human beings have good intentions, try to learn that and then use your common sense to determine who you want to have around you, and who you do not.
But here’s the one that leftists really don’t like – not all cultures are equal either. Some cultures are far superior to others, this is nowhere more evident than on the treatment of women. You rightly point out that sexual assault is a serious matter regardless of where it takes place, but the fact of the matter is that these attacks did not take place in Germany prior to now, and German men were not responsible for them. These were attacks carried out by immigrants in Germany, and most have come from Muslim-majority countries.

Rape rates are exploding all over Europe; Norway, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Germany, and especially Sweden. Most of these rapes are not being committed by native men, but by migrants, most of them from the Muslim world.
You said in your article that misogyny has no colour or creed. Colour yes, but creed? You must be joking! Doesn’t it ever occur to left-wing feminists that the treatment of women in the Islamic world is not only appalling by Western standards, but by any standards. When it comes to misogyny, the Islamic world is quite simply head and shoulders above the rest. Why do you think that is? What could it possibly be? Could it be because Islamic scripture teaches men that women are beneath them? That they can use violence against women that won’t submit?

Everywhere that Islam has influence, women suffer because of it. The severity varies certainly but I would argue that it varies depending upon how much influence Islam actually has.
Sharia law, a law based on Islam, is uniquely terrible to women. Her testimony is worth half of a man’s, she has little to no rights over her children, her husband is permitted to hit her if she is disobedient, and she has no unilateral right to divorce. You need to confront this reality, and realise that it is right here in Britain, and thriving. Even if you argue that sharia councils are a matter of choice, which they’re not, are you happy with the availability of that choice? Do you think treating women like that is something we should be able to choose to do? Or should it be disallowed on principle? Are you aware that sharia family law, as practiced in Britain, was declared by the House of Lords (in its legal capacity) as “wholly incompatible” with basic human rights, precisely because of its treatment of women? Why aren’t you, as a feminist, speaking out about that?
In no other culture in the world do the law books permit the stoning to death of women for adultery.

Another harsh reality is this: not all religions are the same. To argue that they are is to argue that the religion itself, its scripture and its practices, aren’t actually relevant. That is an absurd position. I will save you the trouble of “but the Bible…” and remind you of the centuries of secularisation that Western society has undergone, as well as moderation and reform within Christianity itself. Today, the Western world is not influenced in any significant way by Biblical literalism. The Islamic world, on the other hand, is enormously influenced by Quranic literalism, so much so that you can be executed (by law of the land) for questioning or criticising it. These are two different worlds feminists, and like it or not, they are not compatible.

Immigration is bringing Islamic norms, and Islamic attitudes towards women, to the West, and it is making free women less free, and safe women less safe. The reason what is happening in Europe is so shocking is not because European women are more important than other women, it’s because we’re seeing a reduction in the safety of previously safe women. We are seeing a reduction in the freedom of previously free women. We are turning back the clock on all of the achievements that have been made in the Western world. This is bad news for all women, regardless of where they live.

You appear to ignore and dismiss these achievements and speak as if things are as bad for women here as everywhere else. They’re not of course, but they soon could be, thanks to immigration from the Muslim world. Do you honestly think women’s position is no worse in Egypt or Somalia than it is in the UK? If you do, you simply cannot be taken seriously. If you won’t acknowledge and condemn the very worst treatment of women that exists in the world, why should I listen to you about anything related to feminism?

Last year, the film Suffragette was released. Personally, I found it somewhat disappointing in that it failed to sufficiently demonstrate the importance of a woman’s vote, and what her life was like beforehand. But I was far more disappointed to see the memory of these astonishing women smeared and slandered by leftists who attacked them as “racist” (what else?) The reason leftists are beginning to smear great Western achievements is the same reason left-wing feminists are more concerned about those of us protesting Muslim immigration than you are about rape, a deep-seated hatred of all things Western. Somewhere deep in the dark crevices of the soul, lefties believe that Europeans deserve to suffer: even moreso when those Europeans are white.

This despicable attack on the Suffragettes demonstrates a far wider and deeper sickness in the thinking of the “equality” obsessed left, and indeed a complete lack of understanding of what it was those women achieved. Thanks to the Suffragettes, women went from being property to owning property, and politicians began caring very much indeed what women were thinking. It was the greatest single achievement for women in modern history. And now their memory is tainted, thanks to the despicable Left.

The final harsh reality is this, and I’m glad I’m not the one who has to face it: you are contributing, quite significantly, to ensuring that 10,000s of women, who would not otherwise have faced sexual assault or rape, will now do so. Women will be raped because of your demand for open borders and your insistence that those of us who oppose them are racists or bigots. You won’t recognise the realities of life in any way, and are more than happy to allow rape in furtherance of your politics. You must be – you know it is happening and you still haven’t condemned the open borders that caused it.

I sincerely hope that at least some left-wing feminists wake up in 2016, and realise the enormity of the damage they are causing. I hope too that they grow up and stop focusing on ridiculous trivialities and realise just what danger they’re in. Stop attacking good men (I have many great men in my life, you should try it), families, decent conservatives, or sexy adverts, and start defending your civil rights; your right to vote, to protection from violence, to education, to marry who you choose, to petition for divorce, to rights over your children, to own property, to work…. The rights, in other words, the Suffragettes won for you and that every Islamist on the planet would happily take away.

It’s time for the harsh realities feminists. Women’s rights, actual civil rights, are in trouble in Europe. This is important and feminists are going to have to step up. But you don’t. Instead, you attack those of us who do. Shame on you.

Finally, a few words on Pegida. I understand that many will worry about walking with Pegida due to the undeserved reputation, but I would implore people to remember: those who allowed women to be sexually assaulted en masse, and covered it up, are the same people who call Pegida “far-right”.

These are the people who apparently did not have the resources to defend women from attack, but suddenly found troops and water cannons to stamp on democratic protest. This is where we are.
If a Government keeps its borders open to known dangers, while clamping down on those who protest, I know with whom I’ll be standing. It’s where a real feminist would stand, and I sincerely hope others will join me.

http://www.annemariewaters.org/a-message-to-left-wing-feminists/

Robert Fico: “A Multicultural Europe is Simply Not Feasible”

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Baron Bodissey

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“We will not on a voluntary basis make any supporting decisions which would allow the development of a Muslim community in Slovakia.”
— Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico


As regular readers know, Counterjihadists look to the countries of the former East Bloc in Central Europe for inspiration. The “Visegrad Four” — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary — are demonstrating the sort of leadership that has utterly failed in Western Europe when it comes to the issues of mass immigration and Islamization.

Czech President Miloš Zeman and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán are the superstars of the new “Islamophobic” Mitteleuropa. But Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia is no slouch.
Many thanks to Nash Montana for this translation from Tagesschau:

Fico Intensifies Anti-Refugee Rhetoric

The incidents in Cologne on New Year’s Eve have also influenced the refugee debate. Slovakian Prime Minister Fico now has declared that he will not let any more Muslims into his country. He sees the European Welcome Culture as an utter failure.

As a reaction to the incidents in Cologne, Slovakia has announced, that they will not take in any more Muslim refugees “The European multicultural society has failed”, explained Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister. His administration will not tolerate Muslim communities in Slovakia.
The Minister President feels confirmed in all his positions. He sees his hard-line stance about asylum and refugee policies as correct. After the Cologne incidents there is simply no alternative, Fico explains: “We do not want Slovakia to have to endure a similar predicament to Cologne’s. That someone who lives and thinks completely differently can just go and harass our women openly in public.”

A Multicultural Europe is not Conceivable

It borders on a lunatic fantasy that refugees with a different religion could be integrated easily. The European Welcome Culture has failed, the Social Democrat Fico says. “The Slovakian administration is convinced. The thought of a multicultural Europe is simply not feasible. It is fiction. It can’t be transformed into real life.”

He says there is a clear connection between the wave of refugees, the attacks in Paris and the violence in Cologne. That the EU has gravely underestimated the risk. He has, therefore, always been against and defended his position on the compulsory refugee quota coming out of Brussels. And it is this clear path that he will pursue in the future as well, and moreover, “We will not on a voluntary basis make any supporting decisions which would allow the development of a Muslim community in Slovakia.”

Only 169 Asylum Requests in Slovakia

In the past few weeks Slovakia received only 149 Syrian Christians from an Iraqi refugee camp voluntarily. Apart from that the small EU country has so far barely been affected by the refugee crisis.
In the whole of the year 2015 only 169 refugees applied for asylum. Eight of these applications were granted. Slovakia had filed a complaint at the European Court in Luxembourg against the compulsory refugee quota in the dispersal of refugees in Europe.
At the beginning of March Slovakians will vote for a new Parliament. According to poll studies, the Social-Democratic party of President Robert Fico can safely rely on reelection. And in mid-2016 Slovakia will take over the presidency of the Council of the European Union in Brussels.

This entry was posted in Counterjihad, Domestic terrorism, Enrichment, Europe, Immigration, News, PC/MC, Politics by Baron Bodissey. Bookmark the permalink.
http://gatesofvienna.net/2016/01/robert-fico-a-multicultural-europe-is-simply-not-feasible/
36 thoughts on “Robert Fico: “A Multicultural Europe is Simply Not Feasible””

 

Hugh Fitzgerald: The Task You Have Taken Upon Yourself

January 25, 2016 6:31 am By Hugh Fitzgerald 94 Comments


In the Western world, almost 15 years after the 9/11 attacks, and after many thousands of other terrorist attacks by Muslims, why are Western publics still so ill-informed about Islam?

One reason has to do with the way people now find out, not only about Islam, but about so much else. The Internet has helped foster the Age of Distraction, of Triviality, of Hectic Vacancy. We are all now victims of heedless ephemerality, which gets in the way not only of learning about Islam, but of learning about anything. Think of the passing parade of online stories, where the Insects of An Hour take up so much of our attention — how many billions of man-hours are spent clicking on sites that the whirligig of time proffers: something about Jennifer Aniston today, and something about Jennifer Lawrence tomorrow; an invitation to take a gander and gawk at the photographs showing us just how breathtakingly beautiful George Clooney’s house in Italy is, or that of John Krasinski and Emily Blunt in the Hollywood Hills. And surely you need to know what John Travolta tweeted yesterday, or Shaquille O’Neal the day before that, on the subject of racism at the Oscars. And then there are Dr. Oz’s miracle creams, which have done so much for Cher, and Demi Moore, and Meryl Streep – you mustn’t miss that. And then there are the indispensable lists, for which you click and click away: the fifty richest people in the world; the ten most livable cities for retirees in America; the fourteen favorite hobbies of Heisman Trophy winners; the six most tried-and-true recipes for pumpkin pie; and so on, and so idiotically forth. How much time do you have left to find out about Islam?

Along with Distraction, life throws up the obstacle of Boredom. Islam is a tremendous challenge for Unbelievers, not because it is objectively hard, but because it is simply not very interesting for those who do not share the fanatical faith. It takes great mental stamina for non-Muslims to engage with all the sacred rigmarole of Islam — just to follow the isnad-chain of a single hadith can be exhausting. And the plot and the dramatis personae of Islam are not attractive. Islam’s history is bloody, and one is not riveted, but repelled, by that bloody history. You can only take so much.

Another reason for the widespread refusal to recognize the nature of Islam is that so many of us – especially our leaders, those who are supposed to protect and instruct us — just don’t know what would follow from that recognition, that is, what would be demanded of them. Better to keep repeating the same vapid assurances, hoping that somehow things will work out. But just look at Europe today, or just look at the stories put up at Jihad Watch for the last week. What could you, Angela Merkel or David Cameron, do at this point? Can you publicly admit you have been so wrong for so long, and that you have put in danger the people you were elected to protect? You long ago committed yourself to a soothing narrative, in which Muslim behavior is disconnected from Islam itself. Whatever explains the mass-groping in Cologne or mass-gang-raping of girls in Rotherham, in your telling those attacks certainly had nothing to do with Islam. And whatever the Islamic State’s spokesmen insist on, about scrupulously following the dictates of the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad, we Infidels know better – again, we are told by our leaders, or tell ourselves, this all has nothing to do with Islam. Why, just the other day, Tom Foreman of CNN solemnly sought the historical antecedents of the Islamic State not in the earliest Muslim conquerors (whom ISIS forthrightly claims as its model) but in the Vikings and Vlad the Impaler. (David Wood’s evisceration – Robert Spencer’s mot juste — of Foreman can be found here.) You have every right to feel you are living through a Vast Absurdity.

If you keep your wits about you, and finally conclude that something is very wrong with how our leaders approach the subject of Islam, their public pronouncements after each new Muslim outrage either pollyannish or pusillanimous, you may well undertake on your own to study Islamic doctrine, and to find out how that doctrine explains the practice, as shown by the history of Islamic conquest, of many different non-Muslim peoples, in time over the past 1350 years, in space from the Iberian Peninsula to the East Indies. Don’t expect institutions of higher learning to help you; when it comes to Islam, they have been thoroughly corrupted, by money, or by the desire of professors not to offend but to parrot the party line.

But you keep at it. You read, you visit certain websites (as the one you are reading now). And if you do that, then the Jihad News of the day will not confuse you; you will be able to fit it into the larger history of Islam. And you will know why, when some high-ranking Christian cleric, as part of his Interfaith Outreach, offers this slippery solipsism — All religions are a force for good. Islam is a religion. Therefore, Islam is a force for good. — he is wrong, and you will be able to adduce the textual support for your conclusion. You might even begin to ask some delicate questions: who is to decide what is a “religion” and what distinguishes a “religion” from a “cult”– and is it possible that we call Islam a “religion” only because we don’t know what else to call it?

But then what? After you have achieved such knowledge, what forgiveness for those non-Muslims who continue to refuse to see Islam steadily and whole? You have a perfect right to be downcast, even despairing, at news of what is happening in Germany, in Sweden, in France, but you also have a duty – owed to yourself and to your own, imperiled, Western civilization — not to give in but to keep trying to inform and enlighten others. You have no Munich to point to, no single Grand Appeasement. Rather, there are a hundred sundry appeasements. It can be the Bishop of London calling on fellow clerics to “grow beards” in order to put Muslims at ease. It can be the prayer rooms in schools, halal food in prisons and schools, single-sex hours at the municipal pools. You can make your own list.

We are living in a time, because of Islam, of mass disorientation and topsy-turvydom. You have to keep your wits about you. You are suavely told that Europeans simply must not oppose Muslim migration. Why not? Why can’t we ask that question? What duty do we have to those whose entire history has been one of hostility toward, and conquest of, non-Muslims? And hasn’t the West already tried to be as accommodating as it can? Point out that there are already tens of millions of Muslims living in Europe, in lands they have been taught to regard as Dar al-Harb. They are there to take advantage of well-run and prosperous societies, to pocket all that they can – the free or subsidized housing, health care, education, and even family allowances – but not to jettison Islam. They are not there to “integrate” into non-Muslim societies, but instead are obligated to engage, using whatever means are available and effective, in the Jihad or struggle to ensure the ultimate triumph and dominance of Islam, and rule by Muslims.

Non-Muslims find this a fantastic goal, but a large part of the globe succumbed to Muslim rule in this way a long time ago. A million Muslims settled, last year, in Germany alone; millions more are on the way to Europe; among these migrants are many who, it has been reluctantly conceded by the authorities, have already been involved in attacks on non-Muslims; no Western politician of the mainstream dares to discuss the significance of the Muslim division of the world between Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam, and between Believer and Unbeliever; those in public life who call for a halt to Muslim migration – what is assuredly the most obvious measure of self-protection — are immediately demonized for that commonsensical suggestion and politically placed beyond the pale.

So share what you’ve learned; go to those mosque open-houses and spoil the proceedings with a Qur’anic quotation or two that will upset your hosts but which they will be unable to deny; call into those talk-shows with similar material, write those letters to the papers, engage in guerrilla warfare on the blogs. When you learned about Islam, you did not make the world any easier for yourself, just easier to comprehend. And in so learning about Islam, you should recognize that you now have a responsibility to share that knowledge with others, many of whom have shown they will be willfully resistant to it. But you have taken on this task. If not you — who?

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UK convert to Islam joins Islamic State, family blames "right-wing" media

 

Hugh Fitzgerald: Schengenland And Its Discontents

January 28, 2016 10:21 am By Hugh Fitzgerald 47 Comments


After World War II, under the leadership of the French statesmen Jean Monnet and others, European governments were determined to find ways to bind their countries together in ways that might prevent the 20th century catastrophes from being repeated. Their first effort, not unnaturally, was to create in 1951 the European Coal and Steel Community, as a way to bind the economies of the two historic enemies, France and Germany. That effort was enlarged, both in number of members – in addition to France and Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries were added – and in the scope of the economic activities that were regulated, in 1958, with the European Economic Community. Over time this was enlarged, in both size and scope, and metamorphosed in 1995 into the European Union. The E.U. now has a total of 28 members (including some in eastern Europe from the former Soviet bloc) and is a politico-economic union for which various supranational institutions have been created: the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, the European Central Bank among them. And what had started in 1951 as the Coal and Steel Community linking only France and Germany now has become a single market, with more than two dozen countries as members, and with standardised laws to regulate that market. Common policies on agriculture, fisheries, trade, have been adopted, and a single unit of currency — the euro — introduced as legal tender (in 19 of the 28 member states) in 1999.

Based on a recognition that the peoples of Europe constituted a single civilization, those who created these supra-national institutions and rules were aiming not only for the unhindered movement of goods, services, and capital, but also wanted to encourage the free movement of people within Europe. They wanted Europeans to be able to move around the Continent, to study, work, live anywhere within Europe. This ambitious last aim began to be met with the agreement signed at Schengen, initially by five members of the E.U,. in 1985, with many more joining subsequently. According to this agreement, border checks among the signatories would be gradually abolished. In 1990, the Schengen Agreement was revised further, and with many more members of the E.U. now as signatories, now also included both the abolition of internal border controls and a common visa policy. For the purposes of travel, external border controls were to be retained only for those people entering or exiting the Schengen area; there were no longer any controls on travel purely inside that area.

In 1985, or 1990, or even 1995, no one could have guessed the terrible problem that would arise quite soon, with Muslim migrants making their way to Europe by the hundreds of thousands and exploiting the Schengen system so that, once they had managed to smuggle themselves into Schengenland at some particularly vulnerable ill-guarded point – and Greece and Italy have both been accused by other European countries of having insufficient border controls — they could then move about Europe unimpeded, aiming to settle in the countries that offered the best benefits. This result is not at all what the Europeans who drafted the original Schengen Agreement had in mind. They thought they were merely making it easier for people from one European country to travel to, live in, study and work in, another European country. The very idea that in a decade or so the main – and unintended — beneficiaries of Schengenland would be people indifferent at best, murderously hostile at worst, to everything we associate with European civilization, could not even be imagined. The idea that masses of non-European “refugees” would be moving around Europe for one and only one goal, to find the country offering the most generous benefits — and the Europeans (see Sweden, for example) have built up elaborate social welfare states — was never foreseen.

This is what is happening in Europe today: the countries of northern Europe, to which the Muslim immigrants aspire because of the greater handouts that await them, are fed up with having to accommodate so many of those Muslim migrants, who have proven to be a great financial burden on the local taxpayers, and a source, too, of social upheaval (such as a staggering rise in the crime rate), and of greater physical insecurity for the indigenous non-Muslims. These northern lands want the removal of internal passport controls to continue, but believe it can work only if the European countries that border on the Muslim south (by sea or land) take their monitoring of those borders seriously, and have the resources to monitor them, because these are now the borders for all of Schengenland. Germany, Austria, and other “northern” members of Schengenland believe that because Italy and Greece are insufficiently able to control their southern borders (the Muslims arrive by sea to southern Italy and, by both sea and overland –mainly through Macedonia — to Greece), their own citizens suffer. The Muslim migrants keep coming: in defensive response, Germany, Austria, and other “northern” states are in essence moving the Schengenland border northward.

Schengenland was supposed to create a Europe-wide zone of free movement of peoples, erasing or effacing unnecessary obstacles such as passport controls at supposedly out-of-date national borders. Had those “peoples” remained “European,” it might have worked. But the squabbling, the chaos, the charges and countercharges among members over the protection of the Schengenland borders, and today’s news that even terminally tolerant Sweden plans to expel 80,000 “refugees” – all this constitutes not the only example of the damage that mass Muslim migration is doing to Europe. It’s just the only one this week.

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Hugh Fitzgerald: Israel and the Reconquista of Language

February 10, 2016 2:30 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 37 Comments


For quite some time, now, Israel has been out of the headlines. There’s been so much else going on in the Middle East and in the wonderful world of Islam. Among the dizzying vicissitudes, in Iraq and Syria we’ve had nonstop news about many different little wars, involving Sunnis and Shi’a, and regime supporters and regime overthrowers, and various endangered minorities (non-Muslim or non-Arab) – Christians and Alawites and Kurds and Yazidis in the mix, and everyone, including insufficiently-fanatical Sunnis, under attack by ISIS, while ISIS itself attracts hundreds of thousands of foreign volunteers to its not-inconsiderable caliphate carved out of northwestern Iraq and southeastern Syria, and that caliphate still stands, despite repeated hopeful predictions from Washington of its imminent demise. In Egypt, Mubarak was toppled and replaced by Muslim-Brotherhood Morsi, who in turn was toppled by a secularisant Al-Sisi, and during these ups and downs, Egypt’s Copts have endured levels of torment that varied directly with the level of Islam in the government. In Libya, Qaddafi was overthrown with Western help, but instead of becoming a peaceable kingdom, the country he once ruled with an iron fist then descended into a chaos of warfare among different factions and militias, some based on their city of origin (Misrata, Benghazi, Zintan), others distinguished according to tribe or politico-religious ideology, and to this tripolitanian tohu-va-bohu, with two different “Libyan governments” now sitting in Tobruk and Tripoli, can be added the Islamic State, which has just opened a branch office in Sirte.

The fact of so much other news driving Israel from the front pages does not mean that the war against Israel has disappeared. The Slow Jihadists of the Palestine Authority (quondam PLO) continue to be supported by the U.N, and by the E.U., while the Fast Jihadists of Hamas have both Iran and the Islamic State in their corner. Jews are still attacked — more than two dozen Jewish civilians have been stabbed to death in the last few months — and just the other day, Hamas promised a new campaign of putting bombs on Egged busses. But without minimizing this continued violence, the Arab threat Israelis now face is simply not at the same level as was that posed by the massed might of several Arab armies – the most important were always those of Egypt and Syria — that in 1973 and 1967 and 1948 made war on the Jews of Israel. Israel is not at the moment facing that kind of danger: the Syrian military has, after four years of civil war, simply deliquesced, and the Egyptian army is more interested in destroying Hamas tunnels than in going to war against Israel, for Al-Sisi’s men understandably have little appetite for sacrificing Egyptian men, money, and materiel yet again for an “Arab” cause.

While Israel has a breathing spell, it should work to improve its hasbara — public diplomacy, public relations, propaganda. It has to be more vigilant about the terms of the debate. The first phrase to go should be “Palestinian people.” Prior to the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, no Arab leader, diplomat, intellectual, anywhere used that phrase; they always spoke about “Arab refugees.” It only began to be employed after the military defeat in June 1967, when it became clear that the Arabs would, before attempting another military assault, have to soften up Israel, isolating it diplomatically, and making the world forget that the Arabs started that war, and the one in 1948, long before the “Palestinian people” came into existence. From 1967 on, Arab propagandists have been involved in the “construction-of-the-Palestinian-identity” project, creating a “people” by promoting a word from geographic adjective (“Palestinian”Arab) to ethnic noun (“Palestinian”). This sleight-of-word contributed mightily to the invention of the “Palestinian people” — a “people struggling for its legitimate rights” and doing it “in Palestine, where it lived since time immemorial.” To start with, in its counter-campaign, Israel should use every occasion to bring up Zuhair Mohsain’s admission to the Dutch newspaper “Trouw” in 1974 about the propagandistic value of this fictive “Palestinian people”:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.

And Netanyahu, who is sensitive to language, should make it known that from now on, the Israeli government will officially refer not to the “Palestinian people” (as it has so heedlessly done in the past) but only to the “Palestinian Arabs.” And that will remind the world that the “Palestinians” are just one part of the Arab people, the people more generously endowed than any other, possessing 22 states and 14 million square miles of territory. But Israel won’t achieve that desirable result unless its own leaders and diplomats and journalists agree among themselves to stop using the phrase “Palestinian people.” Make clear that that phrase is not neutral but highly tendentious.

Second, Israel should hold up the word “Occupied” — as used in the phrase “occupied West Bank” or “occupied territories” or still worse, “occupied Arab lands” — for inspection. For the word “occupied” is being used to suggest that Israel has no claim to the “West Bank” or Gaza other than the temporary one of being military occupant. One thinks in this regard of “Occupied Berlin,” “Occupied Vienna,” “Occupied Paris,” “Occupied Japan” – in these designations, the territory in question is under the control of an outside power or powers, that control has been won through military conquest, and the claim to that territory is understood to be temporary, based solely on that military occupation. But Israel’s claim to Gaza and the “West Bank” is not based on the fact of military occupation. These territories are properly thought of as unallocated parts of the Palestine Mandate, and the provisions of that League of Nations’ Mandate still apply. The Mandate for Palestine was created by the League of Nations for the sole and express purpose of creating the conditions for the establishment of the Jewish National Home; the territory assigned to that Mandate included Gaza and what would later be called the “West Bank.” The fact that the Jews did not end up in possession of Gaza and the “West Bank” at the end of the 1948-49 war did not change the legal status of those territories; Israel’s claim to them rests on the Mandate itself (and let’s not forget that there were other Mandates leading to the creation of Arab states, a British mandate for Iraq, a French mandate for Syria and Lebanon); that legal claim was not extinguished but remained, and Israel’s military conquest of those territories in the Six-Day War did not create a new claim, but did allow Israel, coming into possession by force of arms, to finally exercise that prior claim to those territories based on the Mandate. And when Israel voluntarily gave up its claim to Gaza – for reasons of intelligent self-interest – that had no bearing on Israel’s continued claim to the “West Bank.”

Instead of continuing to accept this use of the word “Occupied,” the Israeli government ought to make a fuss every time that word is used by others – foreign leaders or diplomats, U.N. personnel, BBC announcers and New York Times columnists – but a well-informed fuss, a fuss that will remind people of the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine, which undergird the Israeli claim to the territories it won in 1967. Eventually, by dint of repetition, some will begin to grasp the point being made, and others, who may still refuse to accept the point, at least will be forced to discuss the issue of what the word “occupied” means and why Israel has a point about its misapplication that cannot be easily dismissed. Force others to look at, to study, to discuss, the terms of the Mandate for Palestine. And that discussion will, for Israel, constitute at least a partial victory.

Third, and finally, the Israelis should make sure always to use the word “Jihad” to describe the war that has been made on them even before the Jewish state was declared in 1948. In the past, it may have made some sense not to use that word. Two major Muslim powers – Turkey and Iran, that is Kemalist Turkey, and Iran of the secularizing Shah — were unofficial allies of Israel. There was an intelligent capitalizing on anti-Arab feeling among both Turks and Persians. Why needlessly antagonize these regimes, the Israelis felt, or cause them trouble in maintaining their covert alliances with Israel, by reminding their Muslim subjects of the duty of “Jihad”? But the situation now is different. Turkey’s Kemalists are out and Erdogan’s real Muslims are in, and in Iran the Shah’s secularist ancien regime has been replaced by Khomeini’s epigones, fanatical Shi’ites all. There is nothing to be gained by not starkly presenting the war against Israel, truthfully, as a “Jihad.” And since some (not all, not even most, but some) Europeans have become sufficiently alarmed at their own situation, that is, the internal threat from their own burgeoning Muslim population, to have undertaken the study of Islam on their own (their governments being of no help in this matter), and have to recognize that a “Jihad” is being waged against them, too, anything that can be done to further the understanding of a commonality of interest and a sharing of the threat, between Europe and Israel, or among Europe, Israel, and the rest of the Infidel world, because they are all engaged in the same war of self-defense, against the same enemy, making war on them for the same reasons — can only be salutary.

This Reconquista of the lexical battlefield will be long and arduous. But for Israel, and for Infidels everywhere, there is no other choice. And now I’ve listed — correctly, I hope — a few places to start.

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Hugh Fitzgerald: Was Trump Right that the Iraq War Was “A Big Fat Mistake”?

February 15, 2016 11:29 am By Hugh Fitzgerald 211 Comments


TRUMP: Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? Now, you can take it any way you want, and it took — it took Jeb Bush, if you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, it took him five days…..
–at the Republican debate in Greenville, S.C. on February 13, 2016

Jeb Bush did not reply in Greenville to Trump’s pithy dismissal of the Iraq War. But he is on record as defending that war: “I’ll tell you, taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal,” he said last August.
Nor did Trump add any details in Greenville to justify his charge of a “big fat mistake.” So perhaps a review of what the war in Iraq was intended to accomplish, and what it did in fact accomplish, will help us decide whether it was “a pretty good deal” or “a big fat mistake.”
Many people at the time the war began were convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that was enough to justify going to war. But no evidence has yet been found to support that claim. Whatever threat Saddam Hussein posed in 2003 was not to the United States, not even to Kuwait (his clobbering in the Gulf War ended that dream), but only to his immediate neighbor, the hated enemy, with which Iraq had already fought an eight-year-long war, the Shi’a Republic of Iran. And Iran also happens to be America’s most dangerous enemy in the Middle East.

Many people in the Bush Administration felt at the time that Saddam Hussein surely must have had something to do with the 9/11 attacks, that is, with Al Qaeda. They appeared not to realize that Saddam Hussein was a secularizing Baathist, as antipathetic to Al Qaeda as Al Qaeda was to him. And no evidence appeared then, or has appeared since, to link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks.
Many who supported the war felt that once Saddam was out of the way, Iraq could with Yankee Knowhow be turned into some kind of Peaceable Kingdom, unified and prosperous and democratic, and then become a A Light Unto the Muslim Nations, with others following its example, so as to transform the Middle East and North Africa. These were people who thought that democracy could be transplanted, through purple-thumbed elections, without much fuss and practically overnight, to Iraq. They did not understand that democracy is a sensitive plant that requires a certain kind of ideological soil in which to flourish, from Locke and Montesquieu and many other political theorists. It requires in addition an Enlightenment that never appeared in the Muslim world, and an understanding that what constitutes a government’s legitimacy is whether or not that government reflects, through elections (and often imperfectly) the Will Expressed By the People. But there is no Muslim Locke, no Muslim Montesquieu, no Muslim Enlightenment. There is only the Qur’an, the Hadith, the Sira. And for Muslims, a ruler’s legitimacy is determined by the extent to which his rule reflects not the Will Expressed by the People, but the Will Expressed By Allah in the Qur’an. None of this was given a moment’s thought by those who were gung-ho for “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Nor did the Americans understand either the depth or the duration of the hostility between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, and why it could not be made to disappear (or why that would not be in America’s interest). The American effort to remove Saddam Hussein and his whole top tier of killers (the American military distributed decks of cards depicting the fifty-two most important members of the regime, for a wittily macabre game of Fifty-Two Pickup) was successful, and led to an inevitable transfer of power from the Sunni to the Shi’a Arabs, through those very elections the Americans hailed as an example of democracy at work. Since the Shi’a Arabs outnumbered the Sunni Arabs 3 to 1, voting en bloc ensured a Shi’a ascendancy. Now the Shi’a are solidly installed as the “democratically elected” rulers in Baghdad, and they will never voluntarily cede the power, political and economic (for whoever controls the Iraqi government also controls the oil revenues), that they obtained when Saddam’s regime was overthrown. Similarly, the Sunni Arabs will never reconcile themselves to the loss of their former power, but keep fighting to regain it.
Meanwhile the Kurds, who had suffered from attacks, including mass murder, during Saddam’s rule, had some relief when, from 2001 on, the Americans established a No-Fly-Zone for them in Northern Iraq, thus limiting Saddam’s power to hurt them. The Kurds having tasted, they then acquired a taste for, autonomy. And in Iraq today, the Kurds – who have been the most effective local fighters against the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq — have no intention of surrendering what autonomy they have gained. They may try to transform their quasi-autonomous region into an independent Kurdistan, possibly with military help from Syrian Kurds who have been battle-hardened by their own combat against the Islamic State. That, too, was never part of the American plan for Iraq.

Finally, there is the story of what happened to the Christians in Iraq as a result of the American invasion. In Iraq, the despotic Saddam Hussein had protected the local Christians from Muslim depredations. For the Christians were never a threat to Saddam Hussein, but were a small minority, threatened by the same “real Muslims” who threatened Saddam Hussein as a secularizing Arab. He knew that he need not worry about the Christians in Iraq, for they had no political power or ambitions; they simply wanted to lie low, to practice their faith, and not to be persecuted. Saddam Hussein did make use of them for his own domestic purposes: Christians, both Assyrians and Armenians, served as his household staff – drivers, cooks, laundresses, tasters. (When the Americans took over the Green Zone, they inherited this same Christian staff, but did not ask themselves why Saddam had relied on Christians). He used them, too, for propaganda purposes: the appointment of Tariq Aziz, a Christian, to such a prominent post as Foreign Minister was a way to signal to the world that Christians could rise high in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He could trust the Christians, for they knew he was their protector; Iraqi Christians have openly lamented the fall of Saddam Hussein (as, in Syria, the Christians are terrified of the possible toppling of Bashar al-Assad), to the puzzlement of their American “saviors” who assumed Iraqis all shared the American distaste for “despots.”

When Saddam fell, the position of the Christians worsened. Canon Andrew White of the Anglican Church in Baghdad was interviewed by Scott Pelley in 2007:
“You were here during Saddam’s reign. And now after. Which was better? Which was worse?” Pelley asked.
“The situation now is clearly worse” than under Saddam, White replied.
“There’s no comparison between Iraq now and then,” he told Pelley. “Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians. Probably ever in history. They’ve never known it like now.”
“Wait a minute, Christians have been here for 2,000 years,” Pelley remarked.
“Yes,” White said.

And this catastrophe for Iraq’s Christians was entirely predictable for those who understood why the Ba’athist Saddam Hussein, whatever he did to the Shi’ite Arabs or the Kurds, had no quarrel with the Christians, but was regarded by them as their Great Protector. With Saddam gone, the “real” Muslims – and not just those of the Islamic State — started to attack Christians with impunity. The Christian population in Iraq went from 1,500,000 in 2003, when the American invasion began, to less than one-third of that, 500,000, today. And it is still falling.

But perhaps, some diehards of democracy might argue, it is always good to get rid of a “despot” and to impose “democracy” (always thought to be a Good Thing, no matter what the mental and moral and historical conditions of the people to whom this “democracy” is to be brought). But in Iraq, what happened when the despot was no longer there? Instead of a Peaceable Kingdom, there has been one long descent into not one civil war, but into many little civil wars, with Sunnis against Shia, Shia against Sunnis, Shia and some Sunnis against other Sunnis of the Islamic State, Muslims against Christians, Sunnis against Yazidis, and tens of thousands of Muslim fanatics flooding into Iraq from outside to join that Islamic State. The city of Ramadi lies in ruins, and so does much of Anbar Province. The Islamic State holds a large part of northeastern Iraq, including Iraq’s second city of Mosul. The Christian population has diminished by 70% since 2003. The unity, prosperity, and Western-style democracy that were all confidently foretold for a Saddam-less Iraq are nowhere to be found. Instead, that Muslim state that poses the greatest danger to the Western world, the Islamic Republic of Iran, has only been strengthened by American intervention. Saddam Hussein, Iran’s greatest enemy, who fought an eight-year war with Iran, is gone, thanks to American intervention. And in Baghdad it is Shia who now rule, supported by Iranian-backed militias.

And what did that exercise in confused geopolitics and misplaced hopes cost us? 4,486 Americans died, and 32,223 were wounded, to bring about that Light Unto the Muslim Nations. The Iraq war cost American taxpayers more than 3 trillion dollars in direct costs, and with other costs, including long-term care for tens of thousands of severely wounded soldiers, and interest payments on amounts borrowed to conduct the war adding at least another 3 trillion — a total of 6 trillion dollars.
And for all this, what have we achieved? Iran has been strengthened. Iraq is no longer safe for Christians; two-thirds of them have left. Ancient monasteries and churches that were in Iraq for millennia, witnesses to one of the earliest Christian presences in the world, have been destroyed up and down the land. The Islamic State got its fanatical start in Baghdad, became ensconced in Iraq’s Anbar Province, from there extended its ferocious power into Syria, and now has branch offices in Libya, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Indonesia, where any day can be bombs away. That was not the “Light Unto the Muslim Nations” that the Bush Administration had in mind when back in 2003 it kicked off its excellent adventure in Iraq with the ballyhoo of Shock and Awe.

So you may have reason to prefer another candidate to Donald Trump. He may exaggerate, he may be wrong, about many things. But when he called the war in Iraq a “big fat mistake,” he was not exaggerating, and he was not wrong.

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Hugh Fitzgerald: On Not Forgetting Molly Norris

March 2, 2016 3:08 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 76 Comments



In Argentina, in the time of the right-wing generals, many Argentinians were made to “disappear” – that is, they were killed for their political views, often in such grisly ways as being thrown out of airplanes. They became known, in Spanish, as “los desaparecidos” (“the disappeared ones”). But there is another set of “los desaparecidos” — people who all over the advanced Western world, that world which prides itself on its protection of free speech — have been threatened with death because of what they dared to say or write about Islam, and have been forced to go into permanent hiding, changing their identities, “disappearing themselves.” It’s a sign of the times that there is no general outrage, no marches in support of those threatened with death for speaking their mind about Islam, no political leaders in the United States reminding us in public of this campaign of Muslim intimidation, that has destroyed the lives of those who were brave enough to speak out about Islam who had to “disappear themselves.”

Do you remember Molly Norris? She was the Seattle cartoonist who suggested, as a response to the death threats against Lars Vilks and Kurt Westergaard, two cartoonists who had dared to depict Muhammad, that there be an “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” as a lighthearted sign of solidarity with the threatened cartoonists. For her pains, she received death threats from Muslims, and she was advised by the FBI to change her identity, as reported by Mark Fefer in the Seattle Weekly:

The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program–except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab.

So Molly Norris no longer exists. But whatever name she now goes by, she can’t work as a cartoonist, because a cartoonist’s style is as recognizable as her handwriting – and in any case, what previous work, signed “Molly Norris,” could she submit in applying for jobs? Relatives and friends must worry about meeting with her, or communicating by phone or email, for they have to assume that Muslims determined to find Molly Norris will know who her relatives and friends were before she changed her identity and could conceivably be watching them, hoping they will lead to Molly Norris. She is “in effect, being put into a witness-protection program – except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab.”

How does she survive? With what handful of people does she allow herself to associate? What kind of life must Molly Norris be living if the government provides no support?
But most disturbing of all is how Molly Norris has been essentially abandoned to her fate, and has had both to “disappear herself” and to endure having “disappeared” from the American public’s consciousness. Which brings me to my main point.

Six Democrats and a dozen Republicans initially entered the political lists this primary season. Two Democrats remain; the dozen Republicans have been whittled down to five (of which three are viable). The candidates have raised all sorts of issues, about the economy, Obamacare, immigration, free trade, global warming, campaign finance laws, making America great, safe, whole (choose one) again. Islam has been mentioned, but always in the abstract. No one has mentioned the tragic situation of Molly Norris.

Imagine that if even one of the candidates were to talk about her, what good he might do. Let’s imagine what he might say:

We no longer have free speech in this country, because those who are most outspoken about Islam have been threatened with death. Many have been scared into silence, and others have had to change their lives.
Take the case of Molly Norris, forced to go into permanent hiding, and to change her identity, because she dared to suggest an “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” in solidarity with cartoonists in Europe threatened with death for having drawn what we now call MoToons. When she was threatened herself, the most that the American government would do for her was to suggest that she go into hiding. The government did not offer to support her, or to pay for her security: it was “a witness-protection program without the government picking up the tab.”

Now imagine that same candidate brings up the story of Molly Norris at every gathering, forcing the media to report to the broad public what he has to say about her monstrous situation, imprints her story on the public consciousness, causes people to bethink themselves about how our officials have behaved in their insensate determination not to fight but to give in to Muslim threats.

What if that candidate were to say: “If I am elected President, I will promptly provide round-the-clock protection for Molly Norris. And I will invite Molly Norris to the White House to discuss with me and others in my administration the freedom of speech. It will be up to her to decide if she wants to be photographed. Whether she does or not, I think the American public will be gripped by her own story – and we can then start an open and sober discussion, that has long been needed, about Islam, blasphemy laws, and respect for the American Constitution.”

This would not be an abstract denunciation of Islam but, rather, a concrete example of the meaning of Islam, bringing home to the American public the story of one American girl, Molly Norris, who in exercising her first-amendment rights to free speech earned a death threat from Muslims who have no interest in, or sympathy for, “free speech,” and who asserted, as they saw it, their superior rights to enforce, even through assassination and even in our country, Islamic laws against blasphemy.

And Molly Norris, who has been a “desaparecido” for more than five years, will triumphantly be allowed to “reappear” as herself. That will be good for her, good for the candidate who embraces her Case and her Cause, and good for our country that needs to be reminded – at a time of great confusion — of what the First Amendment was meant, whatever it cost, to protect.


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Jihad Watch

Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Jonathan Power and the “Expressio Unius…”

March 11, 2016 12:51 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 51 Comments



Jonathan Power, a well-known foreign-affairs columnist for the past 30 years, whose work now appears in 40 papers, has latterly become a prominent Defender of the Faith (that faith being Islam), and has just produced one more of those bizarre defenses of Islam that we long-suffering Infidels keep receiving, world without end.
In his latest piece, Power asks rhetorically “Is Islam Violent?” and attempts to convince readers that the only conceivable answer, in a world reeling from Muslim violence everywhere you turn, is the counterintuitive “No.”
In his very first paragraph, Power offers what is clearly meant to demonstrate that he recognizes that some examples of Muslim violence can be found, and he lists a few for us. It’s not a list, however, intended to suggest that “this is only a small sample” of Muslim violence, but rather, a disingenuous attempt to disarm potential critics. It’s what he leaves out that’s important.
Here’s that first paragraph:

Is Islam violent? ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In Pakistan, there is the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the attempted murderer of the schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai. Immigrant Moroccan men roughly pushing women and fondling them in the crowd in Cologne. Murderous bombs in Paris.


Let’s take those sentences and incomplete sentences, one by one.


“ISIS In Syria And Iraq”

This paragraph’s greatly abridged list of current examples of Muslim violence gives the false impression that only here and there – very much here and there – have Muslims engaged in violence. Given the Latest News, Power can hardly avoid mentioning ISIS. But why does he mention “ISIS In Syria and Iraq” and nowhere else? Why not do it full justice, and list as well its branch offices in Libya (centered on the city of Sirte), Nigeria (Boko Haram), the Philippines (where the Abu Sayyaf group has just pledged allegiance to the Islamic State), and many other groups in a dozen countries where Islamic State admirers have raised the Black Flag of Islam and sworn fealty to the Caliphate? And why does Power pass over in silence all the many horrific acts by ISIS, such as the mass beheadings (Shiites, Alawites, Christian Ethiopians). No details are given; Power simply presses fast forward in his attempt to rush through, paying no never mind to the scope, the size, the nature of the hyper-violent Islamic State and its archipelago of affiliates.
And Power fails to mention any of the Muslim terror groups other than the Islamic State, especially the most formidable of all, Al Qaeda. Its centers of operation are no longer located in distant Afghanistan and Pakistan, but with AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, headquartered in Yemen) and AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, which covers all of North Africa). These are active affiliates, training and sending out suicide bombers. Al Qaeda’s tentacles are indeed everywhere: Jabhat Nusra, or the Nusra Front, is the fighting unit of Al Qaeda in Syria, while other Al-Qaeda branches were responsible for the bombings in Mali last November, and for killing 30 people this January in Burkina Faso.

And it’s not only Al Qaeda and all of those who have willingly become part of its network, including the aforementioned Al-Shebaab in sub-Saharan Africa and a half-dozen groups in North Africa, Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis in Egypt, the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group and its offshoot, the Salafia Jehadia, in Morocco, that he has failed to mention. He also fails to mention still other Muslim groups known mainly for their violence – the Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood (which even the United Arab Emirates now recognizes as a terrorist group), Hezbollah, and Hamas — are nowhere to be seen. Jonathan Power, in an article purporting to persuade us that Islam is not violent, simply leave out all mention of every one of the many dozens of Muslim terrorist groups other than the Islamic State. Does he expect us, his readers, to collaborate in this blatant exercise in willful forgetfulness?

In summing up the menace of Muslim terror groups and groupuscules, do those five words — “IS in Syria and Iraq” – constitute in your mind a sufficient summary of the deeds of Muslim terrorists, from the London Underground to Luzon, or from San Bernardino to Bali? Or do they deliberately diminish the threat?
The whole seething world of violence that is central to Islam, stemming directly from passages in the Qur’an (Power, later in his piece, claims that in the entire Qur’an, only Qur’an 9:29 encourages violence!) and from the example of that central figure, Muhammad the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) and Model of Conduct (uswa hasana), has its outlet in attacks throughout the world, in both Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, by ordinary (i.e., not members of terrorist groups) Muslims against Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and, in Muslim lands, against Shi’a who are regarded by not a few Sunnis as no different from other Infidels. None of this is recognized in his summary. But his aim is to pooh-pooh the claim that violence is an important part of Islam. So he presents IS as limited to its original territory in Syria and Iraq.


“Immigrant Moroccan men roughly pushing women and fondling them in the crowd in Cologne.”

Why does Jonathan Power insist that the Cologne attacks – sexual assaults, including rape, and theft (not just “roughly pushing and fondling” women) — were being committed by “immigrant Moroccan men”? One can find online the information that 58 men were arrested for the Cologne crimes and that “the majority of the suspects were of Algerian (25 people), Tunisian (3) or Moroccan (21) origin and three were German citizens, according to Cologne public prosecutor Ulrich Bremer” (in an interview with Die Welt on February 6). Another three were “refugees” from Iraq (1) and Syria (2). So why does Power call them all “immigrant Moroccan men” in an article published on March 6? Oh, that’s because nearly two months before he wrote his article, and not repeated since, there appeared a grand total of two articles in the British press – checked – reporting some initial, tentative speculation that perhaps these criminals in Cologne were “a gang of Moroccans” trying to pass as Syrians:
The migrant rapists who sexually assaulted hundreds of women in Cologne were a gang of Moroccans who entered Germany illegally by posing as Syrian refugees, it has been claimed.
Now what kind of columnist relies on a phrase like “it has been claimed” and turns it into a guarantee of unassailable truth? What kind of columnist relies on a nearly two-month-old story (from January 13) to serve as the basis for a story he publishes on March 6 about the Cologne criminals, without having done any checking of his own, so that he never learned of the statement of the German prosecutor apportioning guilt among Muslims from several different countries? Why, the kind of columnist that Jonathan Power has become, or perhaps – for all I know – the kind that Jonathan Power has always been. All he had to do was google “Cologne Muslim criminals” just before writing Is Islam Violent?, and he would have been set straight. He had six weeks to do so. But he just couldn’t be bothered. And most importantly, charging “Moroccans” rather than “Muslims from a half-dozen different countries” fit Power’s desire to de-emphasize Islam as the possible prompt for such violent behavior.


“In Pakistan there is Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the attempted murderer of the schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai.”

Yes, there is indeed Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan. But why does Jonathan Power not deign to mention a single one of the many other Muslim groups located in Pakistan that are as violent, or even more so? No mention even of the much-publicized Sipah-e-sahaba, the Sunni fanatics who specialize in assassinating Shi’a professionals, and of whom Jonathan Power can scarcely be unaware. Or what about such groups as Tehreek-e-Taliban, Lashkar eJhangvi, Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Harkat-ul-Muhajideen, Jihad-al-Alami, Harkat-ul-Ansar, Lahkar e-Jhabvar – and dozens of others you can find here.
And then there is Power’s treatment of political assassinations by Muslims in Pakistan. He mentions exactly one attack, that on Malala Yousefzai, which she survived. But what of all the others who were attacked for offending Muslims and did not survive? Jonathan Powers would have been more honest had he written something like this:
Attacks on “moderate” Muslims or non-Muslim leaders are frequent and often successful in Pakistan, as in many other Muslim lands. The fact that Malala Yousefzai survived the attempt to kill her should not be mistaken for a diminished threat of violence in Muslim lands against Muslims deemed too “moderate” in their treatment of non-Muslims. Think of the killing of Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan’s Punjab region, who spoke out against the use of Muslim blasphemy laws against the country’s Christian minority, followed soon after by the killing of a Christian politician, Shahbaz Bhatti, murdered because he had supported Taseer and defended minorities. Think of Benazir Bhutto, killed by political rivals. And outside of Pakistan, think of the endemic violence in Muslim lands that political assassinations so often reflect. Leading figures in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, have all been killed in the last few decades.
But Power wants to reduce all that to the single story of Malala, who – inspiringly – lived to tell her tale. And thereby he minimizes both the frequency, and the severity, of that political violence.


“Murderous Bombs in Paris”

This last incomplete sentence of Jonathan Power’s first paragraph is not meant to remind us of all the other attacks in Europe by Muslim “migrants and refugees,” but rather to be mentally received as the single attack we won’t forget; we need not think about the others. It’s not the killings in Amsterdam of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, not the bombs in Madrid at the Atocha Station, not the bombs in the London Underground or the London buses, of which you are supposed to be put in mind. “Murderous Bombs in Paris” is meant only to put you in mind of one thing – “murderous bombs in Paris.”
What Power ought to have written in this last section might read something like this:

The bombs at the Bataclan nightclub, the bullets at Charlie Hebdo, the murders at the kosher market, all of these are only the latest examples of Muslim violence against Infidels in Europe. Madrid, London, Amsterdam, Brussels are other examples of that same violence directed at Infidels, whether the targets are inoffensive commuters (as at Atocha station in Madrid, or the buses and Underground in London), or individuals deemed guilty of “blasphemy” against Islam, such as moviemaker Theo van Gogh and the cartoonists of Charlie-Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten.
But for his purposes, that would never do.

Throughout this paragraph Power’s strategy is captured by the legal maxim “Expressio Unius Est Exclusio Alterius” – the “express mention of one or more things of a particular class may be regarded as impliedly excluding others.” He mentions “ISIS in Syria and Iraq” not to “stand for” other branches of ISIS or for other Muslim terrorist groups, but to exclude those groups. He mentions “Malala Yousefzai” and “Lashkar e-Taiba” to exclude, not to include, other victims of political violence and other terrorist groups in Pakistan. He mentions “bombs in Paris”— which means the Bataclan bombing – in order to leave out the gunfire at Charlie-Hebdo and the kosher market in Paris, and all of the Muslim terror attacks everywhere else in Europe.
It is difficult to understand what impels Jonathan Power to be so heedless of reality, so intent on convincing us, as he says later in his “Is Islam Violent?” piece, that “it is true, as [Karen Armstrong] says, that the Koran is mainly an advocate of non-violence. In nearly every passage it maintains that violence should only be used in self-defence” and “overwhelmingly, Muslims are a peaceful people, less prone to war than Christians and Jews.” In the topsy-turveydom created by Jonathan Power’s imagination, you not only have to hold onto your hats, but also have to hold onto what’s in those hats – that is, as you read him you’ve got to keep your wits about you. Jonathan Power, of course, hopes you won’t. And, of course, he’s not, alas, alone.

NPR touts Muhammad's example as means to counter "extremism"
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Jihad Watch

Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Hugh Fitzgerald: Apologists for Islam and History

March 19, 2016 7:46 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 60 Comments



Apologists for Islam are a varied bunch – some reveal ignorance, others deploy deliberate taqiyya – but all play fast and loose with history.
Here are three examples:


Karen Armstrong on the Expulsion of the Moors

In 1492, the year that is often said to inaugurate the modern era, three very important events happened in Spain. In January, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella conquered the city of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe; later, Muslims were given the choice of conversion to Christianity or exile. In March, the Jews of Spain were also forced to choose between baptism and deportation. Finally, in August, Christopher Columbus, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a protégé of Ferdinand and Isabella, crossed the Atlantic and discovered the West Indies. One of his objectives had been to find a new route to India, where Christians could establish a military base for another crusade against Islam. As they sailed into the new world, western people carried a complex burden of prejudice that was central to their identity.​

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In 1492, “the Catholic monarchs conquered Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe.” What then should we call all those lands in southern and eastern Europe that the Ottomans were at that very moment busy conquering and seizing, including Constantinople, the richest, most populous, most important city in all of Christendom for 800 years (taken by the Turks on a Tuesday – May 29, 1453), and the Balkans (including the then-vast Serbian lands)? And what are modern-day Albania, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria? The Ottomans continued to press northward and westward, later seizing much of Hungary and threatening Vienna twice. Were these not parts of Europe, and was not a good deal of Europe, including what had been its most important city for a millennium, Constantinople, firmly in Muslim hands before Granada fell – and after?
But it would not do to remind readers that while the Muslim invaders and conquerors of Spain lost their last “stronghold” in Granada, other Muslim invaders and conquerors were busy at the other end of Europe, seizing lands and subjugating the native populations to the devshirme (the forced levy of Christian children) as well as to the jizya (the tax on non-Muslims) and all the other disabilities that, wherever Muslims conquered, were imposed, as part of a clearly elaborated system, and not merely the whim a ruler, on all non-Muslims.
Now having begun with that year 1492, Armstrong has a bit of a problem. It was that year that Jews were forced to be baptized or to leave. But though Granada had fallen, nothing then happened to the Muslims. In fact, they were treated with the same gentleness that all the Mudejares (Spanish Muslims) who had been defeated, in successive campaigns, were always treated by the Christian victors. Henry Lea, the pioneering historian of the Inquisition, who was hardly looking for ways to exculpate Christianity, describes the generosity with which the defeated Muslims were treated in Granada, and after the prior victories:

It was the Jews against whom was directed the growing intolerance of the fifteenth century and, in the massacres that occurred, there appears to have been no hostility manifested against the Mudéjares. When Alfonso de Borja, Archbishop of Valencia (afterwards Calixtus III), supported by Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, urged their [the Mudejars] expulsion on Juan II of Aragon, although he appointed a term for their exile, he reconsidered the matter and left them undisturbed. So when, in 1480, Isabella ordered the expulsion from Andalusia of all Jews who refused baptism and when, in 1486, Ferdinand did the same in Aragon, they both respected the old capitulations and left the Mudéjares alone. The time-honored policy was followed in the conquest of Granada, and nothing could be more liberal than the terms conceded to the cities and districts that surrendered. The final capitulation of the city of Granada was a solemn agreement, signed November 25, 1491, in which Ferdinand and Isabella, for themselves, for their son the Infante Juan and for all their successors, received the Moors of all places that should come into the agreement as vassals and natural subjects under the royal protection, and as such to be honored and respected. Religion, property, freedom to trade, laws and customs were all guaranteed, and even renegades from Christianity among them were not to be maltreated, while Christian women marrying Moors were free to choose their religion. For three years, those desiring expatriation were to be transported to Barbary at the royal expense, and refugees in Barbary were allowed to return. When, after the execution of this agreement, the Moors, with not unnatural distrust, wanted further guarantees, the sovereigns made a solemn declaration in which they swore by God that all Moors should have full liberty to work on their lands, or to go wherever they desired through the kingdoms, and to maintain their mosques and religious observances as heretofore, while those who desired to emigrate to Barbary could sell their property and depart.​

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It was not until 1502, after difficulties ensued between Spanish authorities, including the famous Cardinal Ximenes (he of the Complutensian Polyglot), and the Muslims (Mudejares) that they were given the choice of expulsion or conversion. And a great many of them pretended to convert, and remained in Spain – far more Muslims were capable of engaging in dissimulation of their faith than were the hapless Jews, who were expelled, in 1492, virtually overnight. It was much later, not until the late 16^th century, under Philip II, that the last of the Muslims (“Moors”) in Spain were finally expelled, having before that risen in revolt more than once, and been subject to several incomplete expulsions.

Armstrong manages to smuggle in that first, rather ineffective expulsion of 1502: “later [i.e. in a different year altogether] Muslims were given the choice of Christianity or exile.” She does not add, and may not know, that Muslims in Spain after the fall of Granada in 1492 were not under any danger of expulsion, and it was only when they showed signs of refusing to integrate as asked (and it was assumed that over time they would share the Christian faith, though at first nothing was done to demand such a sign) that they were presented with the choice of expulsion or conversion. She may not know, either, that Muslims in a Spain now everywhere ruled by Christians, asked members of the ulema in North Africa (in present-day Morocco) to determine whether under Islamic law they might continue to live in Spain under non-Muslim rule. They were told that it was not licit, that it was important for them not to be ruled by non-Muslims, and that they must, therefore, return to the Muslim-ruled lands of North Africa. Such details provide a rather different slant on what Karen Armstrong offers – she takes the real tragedy, the overnight expulsion of the hapless and inoffensive Jews, and attempts to make the reader think that the Muslims were equally inoffensive, equally harmless, and also treated with equal ferocity, as the Jews. But they were not equally inoffensive, not equally harmless, and not treated with equal ferocity. The danger of a military uprising by the Mudejares, possibly helped by Muslims from North Africa, was real, while Jews never were militarily powerful enough to pose a similar threat.

First, in 1492, comes the fall of Granada. Then, second in time, and certainly in Karen Armstrong’s indignation, came the expulsion of the Jews: “In March, the Jews of Spain were also forced to choose between conversion and exile.” Note how that “also” is dropped in, as if the real event, the main event, was the nonexistent (in 1492) expulsion of the Moors, which she had taken care to slip into her discussion of the Fall of Granada, so that she could diminish the significance of the expulsion of the Jews with that afterthoughtish “also.”

But the Muslims were invaders and conquerors, who had been resisted for 700 years of the Reconquista, and when expelled, not all at once as were the Jews, they simple went across the Straits of Gibraltar from whence they had originally come, to live again among fellow Muslims, under Muslim rule. Armstrong never says that. Nor does she point out, as she would if she were trying to compare the quite different treatments of Jews and Muslims, that the Jews of Spain never invaded, never conquered, never represented a threat to the political or social order of Christian Spain. And when they were expelled, they were not to find refuge, like the Muslims, in lands ruled by coreligionists, but again, to be scattered, both to Ottoman domains and to Christian ones, to Salonika or Amsterdam, to be treated indifferently, or kindly, or with contumely, or worse.

Under Muslim rule, despite their sometimes horrendous treatment, as recorded by Maimonides in his “Epistle to the Yemen” (Maimonides fled Islamic Spain and reported to his coreligionists in the Yemen), the Jews managed to make important cultural contributions as translators (along with Christians), as physicians, and as poets (the name Judah Halevi comes to mind). They were perfectly willing to live in Spain under Christian rule. They posed no military or political threat, in contradistinction to the Muslims. They did nothing to deserve their expulsion. But Karen Armstrong has sympathy for the Jews only insofar as that sympathy can be transferred to the real objects of her pity, the Muslims, and she will do nothing to cause readers to recognize the difference in the two cases, that of the Jews one of clear mistreatment, that of the Muslims a matter of geopolitical prudence. It took a full decade for the Spanish rulers and clerics to realize that the Muslims, though conquered, were not, as had been hoped, eventually going to convert to the Christian faith, and the signs they gave of continued insubmission could only disturb the Christian monarchs. It had taken 500 years for the Reconquista. Why should the Spanish Christians, now that they had been militarily victorious everywhere on the Iberian Peninsula, need to worry that the Muslims might rise in revolt when they could remove the problem once and for all?

And such local Muslim revolts did take place in Spain in the sixteenth century, but it was not until the Morisco revolt of the Alpujarras in Granada in 1568 that official attitudes hardened. That war lasted until 1570; at the end of it, Grenadan Moriscos were relocated to the interior, and scattered among “Old Christians,” that is, people who were not descended from Jewish or Muslim converts to Islam, and, it was assumed, were the most trustworthy Christians of them all.

But still there were worries about the failure of hundreds of thousands of Moriscos to assimilate, and the fear that they might be in contact with Barbary pirates or the Ottomans (or even Protestants!) led the Spanish monarch in 1609 to order the expulsion of the last remaining Moriscos.


Both Jews and Moors were expelled from Spain, but not on the same date, and not at all in the same way. However determined Armstrong may be to convince us (most unconvincingly) that these were identical historical events, both prompted in her modish view by the demonization of “the Other” (a phenomenon which apparently results from the peculiar psychic deficiency of Christian Europe), they were not identical. The Moors were treated by Spanish officials much more leniently than the Jews, even though they were a greater geopolitical threat, with powerful coreligionists just across the Strait of Gibraltar in North Africa, than were the Jews, who posed no threat whatsoever. The phrase “the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors in 1492” does violence to the truth, but furthers Armstrong’s desire to win sympathy for Muslims.
Armstrong has been retelling, in her inimitable fashion, the story of European Christendom’s relations with Islam and with Muslims. In her retelling, the Muslims are innocent victims, and as innocent victims, likened misleadingly to the Jews. They are also the only people who provided, in that bright shining moment of European history known as Islamic Spain, the only real tolerance and humanity to be found anywhere in Europe before the modern era, a veritable paradise of convivencia. It is a tough job, but Karen Armstrong proves equal to the task. And her real theme is not history, but to make Europeans feel ashamed of themselves for showing any signs of wariness or suspicion about the millions of Muslims who now live in Europe, having come among the indigenous Infidels to settle, but not, pace Armstrong, to settle down.


Barack Obama on Jefferson’s “Iftar Dinner” and Muslims In America

“The first Muslim ambassador to the United States, from Tunisia, was hosted by President Jefferson, who arranged a sunset dinner for his guest because it was Ramadan — making it the first known iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago.” — Barack Obama, speaking on August 14, 2010, at the “Annual Iftar Dinner” at the White House


Really? Is that what happened? Was there a “first known Iftar at the White House” given by none other than President Thomas Jefferson for the “first Muslim ambassador to the United States”? That’s what Barack Obama and his dutiful speechwriters told the Muslims in attendance at what was billed as the “Annual Iftar Dinner,” knowing full well that the remarks would be published for all Americans to see. Apparently Obama, and those who helped write this speech for him, and others still who vetted it, found nothing wrong with attempting, as part of the administration’s policy of both trying to win Muslim hearts and Muslim minds and to convince Americans that Islam has always been part of America’s history, to misrepresent that history. For the dinner Jefferson gave was not intended to be an Iftar dinner, and his guest that evening was not “the first Muslim ambassador…. from Tunisia,” but in using such words, Obama was engaged in a little nunc pro tunc backdating, so that the Iftar dinner that he gave in 2010 could be presented as part of a supposed tradition of such presidential Iftar dinners, going all the way back to the time of Jefferson.
But before explaining what that “first Iftar dinner” really was, let’s go back to an earlier but even more egregious example of Obama’s rewriting: the speech he delivered in Cairo on June 4, 2009. In that speech, he described Islam and America sharing basic principles:

I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.​

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And then for his Muslim guests he segued into a flattering lesson in History. First he described Western Civ., which, he said, owed so much of its development to Islam:

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities — (applause) — it was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. (Applause.)​

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And Islam played — according to Obama — a significant role in American history, too:

I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President, John Adams, wrote, “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, they have served in our government, they have stood for civil rights, they have started businesses, they have taught at our universities, they’ve excelled in our sports arenas, they’ve won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson — kept in his personal library. (Applause.)​

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We could go through those paragraphs accompanied by such keen students of history as Gibbon, John Quincy Adams, Jacob Burckhardt, and Winston Churchill, all of whom had occasion to study and comment upon Islam, their remarks rebutting proleptically Obama’s vaporings with their much more informed and sober take on the faith — but that is for another occasion. We can note, however, that when Obama in his Cairo speech talks about “the light of learning” being held aloft at places like Al-Azhar, he misstates: some Greek texts were translated into Arabic and thereby “kept alive” instead of being lost to history, but the translators were mostly Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews, not Muslims, and the work of translation went on not at Al-Azhar but at the courts of Cordoba and Baghdad. The word “algebra” is certainly Arab, but algebra itself was a product of Sanskrit mathematicians. The printing press was not a Muslim invention, and its use was accepted in the Muslim East only long after it had been in use in Western Christendom. Indeed, in Islam itself the very notion of innovation, or bida, is frowned upon, and not only, as some Muslim apologists have claimed, in theological matters. And so on.

I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco.​

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The picture Obama paints by implication, of Muslims being deeply involved in the grand sweep of American history practically from the time of the Framers (at least he didn’t make the mistake of the State Department flunky who claimed Muslims accompanied Columbus on his voyages) is simply false. The first mosque in North America was a one-room affair in 1929; the second mosque was not built until 1934. The first Muslim to be elected to Congress was Keith Ellison, less than a decade ago. The Muslim appearance in America is very late. As for Morocco being the first country to recognize the United States in a treaty, Morocco also soon violated that very treaty and became the first country to go to war with the young Republic. That is something Obama’s advisers may not have told him.
When Obama quotes that single phrase from John Adams, made at the signing of the Treaty of Tripoli, a treaty designed to free American ships and seaman from the ever-present threat from the marauding Muslim corsairs in the Mediterranean that attacked Christian shipping at will (and when America became independent, it could no longer count on the Royal Navy to protect its ships), he wants us to think that our second president was approving of Islam. But that is to misinterpret his statement, clearly meant to be taken to have this meaning: we in the United States, have a priori nothing against Islam. Rhetoric designed to diplomatically please. But based on his subsequent experiences with the North African Muslims, including his experiences with them after various treaties were made and then broken, Adams came to a different and negative view of Islam, a view that was shared by all those Americans who, whether diplomats or seized seamen, had any direct dealings with Muslims. America’s first encounter with Muslims was that with the Barbary Pirates, from Morocco to Algiers to Tunis to Tripoli, and their behavior rendered Adams’s initial “the United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims” null and void. And it was not John Adams himself, but his son John Quincy Adams (our most learned President), who studied Islam in depth, and it was he to whom Obama ought to have turned to find out more about Islam. For he would have found, among other piercing and accurate remarks by J. Q. Adams, the following:

The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.​

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Isn’t it amazing that not a single American official — and not just Obama — has ever alluded to the study of Islam that one of our most illustrious presidents produced?

Again, Obama, with a jumble of Jefferson, Ellison, and Holy Koran:

And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson — kept in his personal library.​

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When Obama notes that Thomas Jefferson had a copy of the Qur’an in his “personal” library, he is subtly implying that Jefferson approved of its contents. Keith Ellison did much the same when he ostentatiously used that very copy of the Qur’an for his own swearing-in as the first Muslim Congressman. But Jefferson, a curious and cultivated man, with a large library, had a copy of the Qur’an for the same reason you or I might possess a copy, that is, simply to find out what was in it. And we might note in passing that it was not the “Holy Koran” that Jefferson possessed and Ellison borrowed, but an English translation by George Sale of the “Koran.” According to Muslims, the epithet “Holy” can only be attached to a Koran written and read in the original Arabic. White House, for the next time, take note.
There is not a single American statesman or traveler or diplomat in the days of the early Republic who had a good word for Islam once he had studied it, or had had dealings with Muslims or had travelled to their countries. Look high, look low, consult whatever records you want in the National Archives or the Library of Congress, and you will not find any such testimony. And the very idea that an American President would someday praise Islam to the skies in Obama’s fulsome manner would have astounded them all.

And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance.​

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Also sprach Obama. But Islam is based on an uncompromising division of humanity into Muslims and Non-Muslims, Believers and Unbelievers, and Unbelievers, at best, can be allowed to live in a Muslim polity — be “tolerated” — only if they accept a position of permanent and humiliating inferiority. It would be fascinating if Obama could name even one example of Islam demonstrating through words and deeds “the possibilities of religious tolerance.”
But let’s return to Obama’s assertion about Jefferson’s “Iftar Dinner,” or rather, to that dinner that Barack Obama would have us all believe was the first “Iftar Dinner” at the White House, way back in 1805.
Here is the background to that meal in 1805 which not Jefferson, but Obama, calls an “Iftar Dinner”:

In the Mediterranean, American ships, now deprived of the protection formerly offered by the Royal Navy, suffered constant depredations by Muslim corsairs, who were not so much pirates acting alone but were officially encouraged to prey on Christian shipping, and at times even recorded the areas of the Mediterranean where they planned to go in search of Christian prey. Under Jefferson, America took a more aggressive line:​

Soon after the Revolutionary War and the consequent loss of the British navy’s protection, American merchant vessels had become prey for Barbary corsairs. Jefferson was outraged by the demands of ransom for civilians captured from American vessels and the Barbary states’ expectation of annual tribute.​

The crisis with Tunis erupted when the USS Constitution captured Tunisian vessels attempting to run the American blockade of Tripoli. The bey of Tunis threatened war and sent Mellimelli [Sidi Soliman Mellimelli] to the United States to negotiate full restitution for the captured vessels and to barter for tribute.​

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Mellimelli was not, pace Obama, “the first Muslim ambassador to the United States” — there was no official exchange of ambassadors – but a temporary envoy with a single limited task: to get an agreement that would set free the Tunisian vessels and come to an agreement about future payment – if any — of tribute by, or to Tripoli. At the end of six months, that envoy was to return home.
The Muslim envoy made some unexpected personal demands in Washington:

Jefferson balked at paying tribute but accepted the expectation that the host government would cover all expenses for such an emissary. He arranged for Mellimelli and his 11 attendants to be housed at a Washington hotel, and rationalized that the sale of the four horses and other fine gifts sent by the bey of Tunis would cover costs. Mellimelli’s request for “concubines” as a part of his accommodations was left to Secretary of State James Madison. Jefferson assured one senator that obtaining peace with the Barbary powers was important enough to “pass unnoticed the irregular conduct of their ministers.​

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Some readers will no doubt be reminded by this request for “concubines” of how the State Department has supplied female companions to much more recent Arab visitors, including the late King Hussein of Jordan.
Mellimelli proved to be the exotic cynosure of all eyes, with his American hosts not really understanding some of his reactions, as his “surprise” at the “social freedom women enjoyed in America” and his belief that only Moses, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed were acceptable “prophets” to follow, for they lacked the understanding of Islam that would have explained such reactions:

Despite whispers regarding his conduct, Mellimelli received invitations to numerous dinners and balls, and according to one Washington hostess was “the lion of the season.” At the president’s New Year’s Day levee the Tunisian envoy provided “its most brilliant and splendid spectacle,” and added to his melodramatic image at a later dinner party hosted by the secretary of state. Upon learning that the Madisons were unhappy at being childless, Mellimelli flung his “magical” cloak around Dolley Madison and murmured an incantation that promised she would bear a male child. His conjuring, however, did not work.​

Differences in culture and customs stirred interest on both sides. Mellimelli’s generous use of scented rose oil was noted by many of those who met him, and guards had to be posted outside his lodgings to turn away the curious. For his part, the Tunisian was surprised at the social freedom women enjoyed in America and was especially intrigued by several delegations of Native Americans from the western territories then visiting Washington. Mellimelli inquired which prophet the Indians followed: Moses, Jesus Christ or Mohammed. When he was told none of them, that they worshiped “the Great Spirit” alone, he was reported to have pronounced them “vile hereticks.”​

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So that’s it. Sidi Soliman Mellimelli installed himself for six months at a Washington hotel, for which the American government apparently picked up the tab including, very likely, that for the requested “concubines.” He cut a dashing figure:

The curious were not to be disappointed by the appearance of the first Muslim envoy to the United States – a large figure with a full dark beard dressed in robes of richly embroidered fabrics and a turban of fine white muslin.​

Over the next six months, this exotic representative from a distant and unfamiliar culture would add spice to the Washington social season but also test the diplomatic abilities of President Jefferson.​

​

During the time Mellimelli was here, Ramadan occurred. And as it happens, during that Ramadan observed by Mellimelli, President Jefferson invited Sidi Soliman Mellimelli for dinner at the White House. The dinner was not meant to be an “Iftar dinner” but just a dinner, albeit at the White House; it was originally set for three thirty in the afternoon (our founding fathers dined early in the pre-Edison days of their existence). Mellimelli said he could not come at that appointed hour of three thirty p.m., but only after sundown.
Jefferson, a courteous man, simply moved the dinner forward by a few hours. He didn’t change the menu, he didn’t change anything else, he did not see himself as offering an “Iftar Dinner,” and there are no records to hint that he did. Barack Obama, 200 years later, is trying to rewrite American history, with some nunc-pro-tunc backdating, in order to flatter or please his Muslim guests. But he is misrepresenting American history to Americans, including schoolchildren who are now being subject to all kinds of Islamic propaganda, in newly-mandated textbooks, that so favorably depict Islam, and present it as so integral a part of American life.
Now there is a kind of coda to this dismal tale, and it is provided by the New York Times, which likes to put on airs and think of itself as “the newspaper of record,” whatever that means. The Times carried a front-page story on August 14, 2010, written by one Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and no doubt gone over by many vigilant editors. This story contains a predictably glowing account of Barack Obama’s remarks a few days before at the “Annual Iftar Dinner.” Here is the paragraph that caught my eye:

In hosting the iftar, Mr. Obama was following a White House tradition that, while sporadic, dates to Thomas Jefferson, who held a sunset dinner for the first Muslim ambassador to the United States. President George W. Bush hosted iftars annually.​

​

Question for Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and for her editors at The New York Times: You report that there is a “White House tradition that, while sporadic, dates to Thomas Jefferson.” I claim that you are wrong. I claim that there is no White House Tradition of Iftar Dinners. I claim that Thomas Jefferson, in moving forward by a few hours a dinner that changed in no other respect, for Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, did not think he was providing what he thought of as an “Iftar Dinner,” but simply a dinner, at a time his guest requested. And to describe as a “White House tradition” and the first of the “Annual Iftar Dinners” that, the New York Times tells us, has since Jefferson’s non-existent “Iftar Dinner,” have been observed “sporadically,” has absolutely no basis in fact.
When, then, was the next in this long, but “sporadic” series of Iftar dinners? I can find no record of any, for roughly the next two hundred years, until we come to the fall of the year 2001, that is, just after the deadliest attack on American civilians ever recorded, an attack carried out by a novemdectet of Muslims acting according to their orthodox understanding of the very same texts — Qur’an, Hadith, Sira — that all Muslims rely on for authority. It was President George W. Bush who decided that, to win Muslim “trust” or to end Muslim “mistrust” — I forget which — so that we could, non-Muslim and Muslim, collaborate on defeating those “violent extremists” who had “hijacked a great religion,” started this sporadic ball unsporadically rolling. And he did what he set out to do, by golly, he did. He hosted an Iftar Dinner just a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center, on the Pentagon, on a plane’s doomed pilots and passengers over a field in Pennsylvania.
And thus it is that, ever since 2001, we have had Iftar dinner after Iftar dinner. But it was not Jefferson or any other of our learned Presidents who started this “tradition” that has been observed only “sporadically” — unless we were to count as an “Iftar dinner” what was merely seen, by Jefferson, as a dinner given at a time convenient for his exotic guest.
George W. Bush, that profound student of history and of ideas, kept telling us, in those first few months after 9/11/2001, that as far as he was concerned, by gum, Islam was a religion of “peace and tolerance.” He and Obama agree on that. And just to prove it, by golly, he’d put on an Iftar Dinner with all the fixins. And that’s just what he did. And that’s how the long “tradition” that Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and her many vetting editors at the newspaper of comical record, The New York Times, referred to, began. It’s all of fourteen years old now, having survived and thrived through the differently-disastrous presidencies of Bush and of Obama.


Craig Considine on Religious Pluralism and Civic Rights in a “Muslim Nation”: An Analysis of Prophet Muhammad’s Covenants with Christians

According to The Daily Mail article about him, Craig Considine is a “professor,” but of what is not specified. This might lead an unsuspecting reader to conclude that his “professorship” must surely be in the field about which he now publishes in the popular press — to wit, the history of early Islam. How surprising, then, to discover that his doctoral thesis, completed just last year, is not about the history of early Islam, but about Pakistani immigrants in the West: “Family, Religion, and Identity in the Pakistani Diaspora: A Case Study of Young Pakistani Men in Dublin and Boston,” a subject having nothing whatever to do with covenants supposedly entered into by Muhammad with Christians before 632 A.D. And he turns out to be not a professor of Islamic studies, but a lean lecturer in sociology.
Considine promises readers of this “covenants with Christians” paper that he will “share….what I have learned about Muhammad and how his legacy informs my understanding of Islam. Muhammad’s beliefs on how to treat religious minorities make him a universal champion of human rights, particularly as it pertains to freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, and the right for[sic] minorities to have protection during times of strife.” In other words, we are about to discover a Muhammad-we-hardly-knew-ye kind of Muhammad, an interfaith-healing Muhammad, whose fondest desire is to protect freedom of religion and to be a “champion of human rights.”
And then begins his magical-mystery-tour through early Islam. Considine starts by assuming the historical truth of a document which Muhammad purportedly made with the Christian monks at Mount Sinai:

Muhammad initiated many legal covenants with Christians and Jews after establishing his Muslim community. For example, in one covenant with the Christian monks at Mount Sinai, Egypt, Muhammad called on Muslims to respect Christian judges and churches, and for no Muslim to fight against his Christian brother or sister. Through this agreement, Muhammad made it clear that Islam, as a political and philosophical way of life, respected and protected Christians.​

​

All very fine, were there sufficient evidence to support any of it, but as Robert Spencer showed in a devastating review, this “covenant” must surely be a forgery, very likely made by the monks themselves, in order to ensure their good treatment by Muslims on the invoked authority of Muhammad.

Here’s Spencer:

The document to which Considine is referring, the Achtiname, is of even more doubtful authenticity than everything else about Muhammad’s life. Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632; the Muslims conquered Egypt between 639 and 641. The document says of the Christians, “No one shall bear arms against them.” So were the conquerors transgressing against Muhammad’s command for, as Considine puts it, “no Muslim to fight against his Christian brother or sister”? Did Muhammad draw up this document because he foresaw the Muslim invasion of Egypt? There is no mention of this document in any remotely contemporary Islamic sources; among other anomalies, it bears a drawing of a mosque with a minaret, although minarets weren’t put on mosques until long after the time Muhammad is supposed to have lived, which is why Muslim hardliners consider them unacceptable innovation (bid’a).​

​

The Achtiname, in short, bears all the earmarks of being an early medieval Christian forgery, perhaps developed by the monks themselves in order to protect the monastery and Egyptian Christians from the depredations of zealous Muslims.​

​

Considine doesn’t mention any of the questions about the Achtiname’s authenticity. Instead, he just piles on more:

Similarly, in the Constitution of Medina, a key document which laid out a societal vision for Muslims, Muhammad also singled out Jews, who, he wrote, “shall maintain their own religion and the Muslim theirs… The close friends of Jews are as themselves.”​

​

Spencer:
Here again, both the Treaty of Maqnah and the Constitution of Medina are of doubtful authenticity. The Constitution is first mentioned in Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad, which was written over 125 years after the accepted date for Muhammad’s death. Unfortunately for Considine, Ibn Ishaq also details what happened to three Jewish tribes of Arabia after the Constitution of Medina: Muhammad exiled the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir, massacred the Banu Qurayza after they (understandably) made a pact with his enemies during the pagan Meccans’ siege of Medina, and then massacred the exiles at the Khaybar oasis, giving Muslims even today a bloodthirsty war chant: “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” Funny how we never hear Muslims chanting, “Relax, relax, O Jews, the Constitution of Medina will return.”

What responsibility did Considine have to his readers? He had at least to recognize that Western scholars of Islam have known for a long time about all four the covenants he dealt with in his paper (Spencer discussed three of them):

Considine said documents have been located in obscure monasteries around the world and books that have been out of print for centuries.​

​

It almost sounds as if he, Craig Considine, lecturer in sociology, had located them himself and been responsible for their recent unearthing.
Considine had a responsibility to present the arguments impugning the authenticity of the documents and to attempt to refute them. He does not have to accept the arguments, but surely he owes readers a duty to discuss thoroughly the issue of authenticity.He does do some of this, but not nearly enough. He surely knew what Spencer wrote, for example, about the problems with the dating of the Achtiname, a document which would have had to have been written before Muhammad’s death in 632 A.D., which makes provisions for the good treatment of Egypt’s Christians by Muslims. Such provisions would only be needed after a Muslim invasion, and the Muslim invasion of Egypt did not take place until 639. That’s only one example of hysteron-proteron, or cart-before-horseness, in Considine’s chronology.
He preens himself on his own learnedness, and presumes to pass judgment on the scholarship of others. Yet he writes about the historian and diplomat Paul Ricaut: “It is also worth pointing out that he [Ricaut] himself used the phrase ‘On dit’, which is Latin for ‘It is alleged'” — thereby unwittingly making us aware that he, Considine, is at home in neither Latin nor French, for “on dit” is not Latin, but one of the commonest of French phrases, meaning “it is said” (the Latin would be “dicitur”), rather than the doubt-casting “it is alleged.”
Considine’s paper is based almost entirely on one source, “The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad” by John Andrew Morrow, and like Morrow, Considine presents not so much an overlooked historical truth as a forlorn hope that Islam could be other than it is, based on these “covenants” of doubtful authenticity. The goal may be laudable – convincing Muslims to be kinder to non-Muslims, and for that both Considine and Morrow know you need to ground your appeal not on human decency but on Muhammad’s authority – but the evidence adduced for such covenants remains unconvincing. As Robert Hunt wrote in a review of Morrow’s book:

these documents [the covenants] represent not the aspirations of the Prophet Muhammad, but of those religious minorities who fell under the rule of his successors.​

​

And, continues Hunt, “what are the chances that any Muslim, including those who endorse this book [or Considine’s paper], will give these documents, completely unattested by proper isnad, the status of even the weakest hadith? None. So they will remain to the Muslim community historical curiosities with no religious authority whatsoever.”
At his website, Craig Considine tells the world about himself: “My passions include thinking, teaching, writing, speaking, traveling, and fostering peace.” Perhaps his thinking has been a bit too wishful, and that peace he fondly fosters too much a peace that passeth understanding.

Turkey: Islamic State jihad suicide bombing murders 5, including 2 Americans
Bosch Fawstin: Let Me Draw Muhammad For You For "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day"

 

​

Published on Oct 31, 2013
Richard Jomshof, representative for the social conservative nationalist party The Sweden Democrats holds a speech about Islam and its growing influence in Europe. I added subtitles so that people from other countries can hear what this debate sounds like in Sweden. Keep in mind that his views are considered "extreme" and "racist" by the politically correct establishment. Even though everything he says is true, in Sweden you will be called a racist, nazi, or right wing extremist as soon as you declare yourself even slightly critical of Islam. People have even lost their jobs when it has been revealed that they associate with the Sweden Democrats, even though they are the only ones taking the threat of Islamization seriously. What happened to democracy?

 

Why Pope Francis shouldn’t have washed and kissed the feet of Muslim migrants

March 31, 2016 6:21 pm By Robert Spencer 26 Comments
“When the Pope kneels before a Muslim, these are the thoughts that will come into the minds of many followers of Islam. For them, the Pope’s gesture will serve as confirmation of the age-old Islamic conception of Christianity as a second-rate religion. Although some Muslims may be moved by the Pope’s gesture and some may even be converted, it’s likely that a majority of Muslims will interpret it as a sign of weakness.” Indeed. And submission. But as the entire Catholic hierarchy and even the rank-and-file clergy appear to be in full submission mode, and determined to stigmatize those who call evil what it is, the Pope’s act was in line with the way the wind is blowing.

(Thanks to Urban Infidel for the photo.)
“The Problem with Multicultural Foot Washing,” by William Kilpatrick, Crisis, March 31, 2016:

During Holy Thursday Mass, Pope Francis washed the feet of migrants, three of whom were Muslims. Most Catholics understood this as a gesture of humility and brotherhood. That is how the Catholic press reported it—and that, undoubtedly, was the Pope’s intention.
Many Muslims, however, may see it differently—not as a gesture of brotherhood, but as one of submission and surrender. The word “Islam” means “submission,” and submission is what Islam expects of other faiths. Muslims consider Islam to be the supreme religion. To the extent that it tolerates the “People of the Book” (Christians and Jews), Islam tolerates them on the condition that they acknowledge its supremacy.
Historically, the People of the Book were expected to assume the status of dhimmis—second-class citizens with limited rights. The origin of this attitude can be found in several verses in the Koran, particularly 9:29, which says that the “People of the Book” are to be fought “until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
The conditions that govern the lives of dhimmis were further elaborated in the Pact of Omar (named after the second caliph, Omar bin al-Khattab). The two dozen or so stipulations include a prohibition on building new churches or repairing old ones, a prohibition on displaying crosses, and a demand that dhimmis give up their seats “to honor the Muslims.”
With the passage of time, the dhimmi requirements were expanded, but the general idea was to keep Christians in their place, and even humiliate them. Sometimes, when dhimmis paid the jizya, they were required to approach the tax official on all fours.

Unfortunately, the dhimmi laws are not a thing of the past. Churches are prohibited in Saudi Arabia, and Christian visitors to the Kingdom are not allowed to bring Bibles with them. In Pakistan and other Muslim countries, Christians are looked upon by many as inferior beings, fit only for menial jobs. In Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State has re-imposed the jizya tax, and Islamic State scholars cite the Koran and the Pact of Omar as justification for doing so.
When the Pope kneels before a Muslim, these are the thoughts that will come into the minds of many followers of Islam. For them, the Pope’s gesture will serve as confirmation of the age-old Islamic conception of Christianity as a second-rate religion. Although some Muslims may be moved by the Pope’s gesture and some may even be converted, it’s likely that a majority of Muslims will interpret it as a sign of weakness.
In assessing the impact of the novel foot-washing ceremony, the timing also needs to be taken into account. The Holy Thursday Mass came two days after the Brussels bombings, and at a time when Muslim persecution of Christians is escalating. If Christianity was anything other than a humiliated faith, Muslims would expect to see some kind of strong response or some gesture of resolve.
Islam claims to be the natural religion of mankind, and the natural response to aggression is resistance. As Osama bin Laden reminded us, “if a man sees a strong horse and a weak horse, he will by nature favor the strong horse.” Yet, in the face of worldwide attacks on Christians, Church leaders meekly call for more dialogue and indulge in “reaching-out” gestures.

These unfortunate interpretations of the foot-washing ceremony could have been avoided if Pope Francis had not sought to give it a multi-religious flavor. Apparently, he was hoping to make a statement about the Church’s inclusivity. But the statement may have backfired. That’s one of the dangers in politicizing the liturgy. Muslims who see the Pope’s gesture as one of submission before Islam are not going to be convinced of the wisdom of Christian charity, they are going to be convinced of the prudence of sticking with the strong-horse religion. They will be more, not less likely to throw in their lot with the militants. If the Catholic Church appears to be submitting to Islam, they will reason that the only safe course of action is to do the same….

"The notion that Moroccan-Belgians suffer from widespread exclusion, discrimination, and suppression is ridiculous"
Mississippi: Cheerleader converts to Islam, tries to join the Islamic State, pleads guilty to terror charge

Nostradamus: Quatrain 50 of Century 1


From the three water signs will be born a man
who will celebrate Thursday {ASCENSION THURSDAY - Day of Jupiter/Zeus/Thor} as his holiday.
His renown, praise, rule and power will grow
on land and sea, bringing trouble to the East.​

---

De l'aquatique triplicité naistra.
D'un qui fera le jeudi pour sa feste:
Son bruit, loz, regne, sa puissance croistra,
Par terre & mer aux Oriens tempeste.


The Three Watersigns of Pisces, Cancer and Scorpio form a Great Trine (120° apart) with ALL (forward or direct moving) planets beginning to focus in the sign of Pisces in the 12th house of the subconscious remembrance and the manifesting dreamstate.
A natal Neptune, ruler of Pisces is retrospect in house 7 of universal partnerships in Scorpio and opposite the first house of cosmic identity, ruled by Aries and Jupiter rising at the ascendant.
The Piscean ruler so is opposed to its own house of rulership.
Retrograde Pluto, as the natural ruler of Scorpio and so the 7th house then completes the Nostradamian quatrain of three watersigns in assigning the 'missing' watersign of Cancer as the universal motherhood (in 180° opposition Capricorn as the cosmic symbol for fatherhood) to Virgo as the 180° opposition of Pisces in a symbolic ('Virgin Birth' to Mary and relating a 9 month cosmic gestation or pregnancy to John the Baptist, son of Elizabeth and Zacharias, the former cousin to Mary, Mother of Jesus of Nazareth).

Luke 4:23-25 - King James Version (KJV)​

²³ And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.
²⁴ And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his own country.
²⁵ But I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land;

Gospel of Thomas (Lambdin):​

(86) Jesus said, "The foxes have their holes and the birds have their nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head and rest."



The Star of Bethlehem and Christian Mythology
​

Luke 1:1-37 - King James Version (KJV)​

1 Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,
² Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word;
³ It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus,
⁴ That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.
⁵ There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth.
⁶ And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.
⁷ And they had no child, because that Elisabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years.
⁸ And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest's office before God in the order of his course,
⁹ According to the custom of the priest's office, his lot was to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord.
¹⁰ And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense.
¹¹ And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense.
¹² And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.
¹³ But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.
¹⁴ And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth.
¹⁵ For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb.
¹⁶ And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God.
¹⁷ And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
¹⁸ And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.
¹⁹ And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.
²⁰ And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season.
²¹ And the people waited for Zacharias, and marvelled that he tarried so long in the temple.
²² And when he came out, he could not speak unto them: and they perceived that he had seen a vision in the temple: for he beckoned unto them, and remained speechless.
²³ And it came to pass, that, as soon as the days of his ministration were accomplished, he departed to his own house.
²⁴ And after those days his wife Elisabeth conceived, and hid herself five months, saying,
²⁵ Thus hath the Lord dealt with me in the days wherein he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.
²⁶ And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,
²⁷ To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.
²⁸ And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
²⁹ And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
³⁰ And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.
³¹ And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.
³² He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:
³³ And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
³⁴ Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?
³⁵ And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.
³⁶ And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.
³⁷ For with God nothing shall be impossible.

Matthew 2:1-10 - King James Version (KJV)​

¹ Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,
² Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.
³ When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.
⁴ And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.
⁵ And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet,
⁶ And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.
⁷ Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, enquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.
⁸ And he sent them to Bethlehem, and said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.
⁹ When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.
¹⁰ When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

​

The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi

"The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi has stunning new insight and approach, which finally gives a confident answer to a question that has fascinated all Christians through the ages. ... don't buy any other book on the Star of Bethlehem, because the old astronomical views are guaranteed to be irrelevant." — Prof. Bradley E. Schaefer, Yale University

Could the purchase of an ancient coin have led to an important clue about the Star of Bethlehem? The above illustration is a Roman coin from Antioch, Syria which shows the zodiacal sign, Aries the Ram. In trying to understand the meaning behind this coin, I found that Aries was the sign of the Jews. Realizing that this is where ancient stargazers would have watched for the Star of Bethlehem, I embarked on searching for the celestial event that signified the birth of the Messiah in Judea.

Superposed on the photograph of the coin is what I found: Jupiter underwent two occultations ("eclipses") by the Moon in Aries in 6 BC. Jupiter was the regal "star" that conferred kingships - a power that was amplified when Jupiter was in close conjunctions with the Moon. The second occultation on April 17 coincided precisely when Jupiter was "in the east," a condition mentioned twice in the biblical account about the Star of Bethlehem. In August of that year Jupiter became stationary and then "went before" through Aries where it became stationary again on December 19, 6 BC. This is when the regal planet "stood over." - a secondary royal portent also described in the Bible. In particular, there is confirmation from a Roman astrologer that the conditions of April 17, 6 BC were believed to herald the birth of a divine, immortal, and omnipotent person born under the sign of the Jews, which we now know was Aries the Ram. Furthermore, the coins of Antioch and ancient astrological documents show that there was indeed a Star of Bethlehem as reported in the biblical account of Matthew.

"The Star of Bethlehem is a fascinating contribution to the immense literature that attempts to come to terms with the Christmas star reported in Matthew's Gospel. In my opinion, this book is the most original and important contribution of the entire 20th century on the thorny question of how events recorded there should be interpreted." - Prof. Owen Gingerich, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi is published by Rutgers University Press. (ISBN: 0-8135-2701-5) In the book you will see why the star was not a comet or supernova. Nor was it the famous "triple conjunction." The practices and beliefs of astrologers during Herod's reign show why Jupiter and the planets in Aries the Ram on April 17, 6 BC signified a Messianic birth. You will also find confirmation by a Roman astrologer, Firmicus Maternus, that the conditions of that day when Jupiter was in the east were those for the birth of a "divine and immortal" person. The evidence is that Firmicus was a Christian convert, and I argue that he had the birth of Jesus in mind. The book also explains how astrologers interpreted Emperor Nero's horoscope to predict that he was to survive his overthrow and rise up in Judea - a story that evolved into tales about the antichrist. Finally, I explain the relationship of the coins of Antioch to the Star of Bethlehem and the census of Quirinius described in Luke.


"In support of an original interpretation of the Star, Molnar has assembled an impressive range of astrological and numismatic data, much of which will be new even to expert readers." - Prof. Virginia Trimble, University of California, Irvine and University of Maryland, and author of Visit to a Small Universe.

http://www.eclipse.net/~molnar/


New Theory on the Christmas Star
By PRISCILLA VAN TASSEL
Published: December 22, 1991
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/22/nyregion/new-theory-on-the-christmas-star.html

A RUTGERS astronomer thinks he may have stumbled onto the scientific explanation of the Christmas star. In an article appearing in next month's issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, the astronomer, Dr. Michael Molnar, manager of the physics instructional labs at Rutgers, argues that the star that led the Magi to Bethlehem was actually the moon eclipsing the planet Jupiter.
Since the issue reached the newsstands two weeks ago, Dr. Molnar's theory has provoked angry letters from some Christians and attracted attention from as far away as the British Broadcasting Corporation in London.
It is the most recent of dozens of theories that have been advanced over the years to explain the mystery of the star of Bethlehem.
Dr. Molnar said he had made his findings almost accidentally. A numismatics buff, he had been examining ancient Roman coins for evidence of celestial events when he came across a group of coins from Antioch, the capital of the Roman province of Syria, that dated to the early first century A.D. The coins bore the image of Aries, the ram of the zodiac, looking back at a star or a crescent and a star.

From additional research, Dr. Molnar learned that Aries was a symbol of Judea at the time and that ancient astrologers believed that a new king would be born when the moon passed in front of Jupiter.
"I asked myself that if astrologers during those times were looking to the sign of the zodiac as a clue of what was going on in Judea, could it be that the Magi, who were believed to be astrologers, were also looking to the same constellation for a sign indicating that a new king of Judea was born?" Dr. Molnar said.
The Bible mentions that the star seen by the Magi reappears and settles above Bethlehem. In a computerized search, Dr. Molnar was able to scan the skies of nearly 2,000 years ago to see if the moon had crossed Jupiter's path twice over a short period of time.
"My prediction was exactly fulfilled," Dr. Molnar said. "On March 20, 6 B.C., right at sunset, the moon eclipsed the planet Jupiter, and one month later, on April 17, the event occurred again, this time high in the sky at noon in the direction of Bethlehem as viewed from Jerusalem."
Dr. Molnar said that the occultations would not have been visible because of the bright sunlight, but that the Magi would have had the knowledge to track them anyway.
Astronomers have been offering scientific explanations for the Christmas star for centuries. In one of the oldest theories, dating to the 1600's, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler maintained that the star was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that occurred in 7 B.C.
Another theory has it that the light that guided the Magi came from a supernova, a star that undergoes a tremendous explosion. Others have suggested that it was merely a comet or the planet Venus. 'Certainly Plausible' Thesis
Roger Sinnott, who edited Dr. Molnar's piece for Sky & Telescope, said that the astronomical calculations Dr. Molnar made in his article had been checked for accuracy and that the eclipses had occurred as stated. While calling Dr. Molnar's thesis "certainly plausible," he said he was nevertheless partial to another explanation.
"I wrote an article, and I kind of like my own theories better," Mr. Sinnott said, referring to his account, first published in 1968, that said the Christmas star was in reality a very close conjunction of Jupiter and Venus.
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A speculative birth chart for Jesus: Apr 17, 6 BC​

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If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe me not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? John 3:12

Pictured here is the chart I use as the natal chart of Jesus of Nazareth, based on the date that Jupiter (royalty) arose as the Morning Star and was occulted by the Moon in Aries, sign of Israel and Palestine. Thanks to calendar changes being slightly off, we have "6 BC" instead of the year zero.

Since we know that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great (is he Jupiter in this chart being occulted by the Moon?), the year we call "6 BC" contained this rare occultation, "7 BC" is known to be when a Great Jupiter-Saturn conjunction occurred in Pisces--and since lambs are born in the Spring, not mid-winter--it's one reason I use this chart.

Moon and Jupiter conjoined at 12:08:22 pm in 9th house (Bethlehem) yet this Jupiter rising chart is the one I prefer with asteroid, Morya at MC (the Goal or Objective) and Morya having connection with death, and fate or destiny.

And as you see, there is a YOD pattern (Finger of God: special task or purpose; crisis) pointing to the rising Moon, Ascendant (Jesus Himself if we accept this chart as His birth chart), and by extension, pointing to Jupiter as well.

But can modern day midpoint pictures possibly apply to an event from such ancient days?

Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were there although not within people's consciousness, of course. Accordingly, our modern perspectives are naturally different--and time should bring insight, don't you think?

Click to enlarge the chart for a few scribbled notes, but I'll type in the midpoint pictures for the YOD (including Jupiter which certainly seems to apply to the situation.) The combo of Neptune-Pluto = unseen forces; the supernatural; other realms:

Neptune-Pluto = Moon: supernatural experiences; strange states of soul experiences; anxiety about being appreciated (well-founded!);

Neptune-Pluto = ASC: surrounded by an air of mysticism (a halo?!); placed in a peculiar environment (what a major culture shock--from heaven to earth!);

Neptune-Pluto = Jupiter: religiousness; in love with life; "Thank God"; universal love; love of humanity (I'll say!); high degree of perception; a peace-loving disposition.

Mercury trine Pluto creates a Grand Trine of sorts with MC; Mercury-Pluto = powerful words that persuade; creating or demanding new perspectives...

Mercury-Pluto = MC: great perception of any situation; leadership (why King Herod was so worried--sucky, cruel leaders should be); coping ability; keen powers of judgment; foresight.

Sun and Moon were in Balsamic phase of the prophet--a phase of partings and endings. His death was a sad parting, and He brought an end to the Age of Aries as well. People born during the Balsamic phase of the Moon (prior to a New Moon) are future-oriented folk who often arrive when something or someone is ending.

Progressive, futuristic, and rebellious Uranus is in sacrificial Pisces, sign of the Mystic, and love-filled Venus is also in Pisces, sign of her exaltation (universal love.) Jesus certainly disrupted things but from motives of pure Love, the Foundation of the Universe.

The birth of Christ marked the beginning of the Age of Pisces, sign of the Fish and the secret sign of Christianity in Roman times (used today) as the Age of Aries, the Ram, symbol of Israel and Palestine, passed away--Old Testament times into the New Testament era. On one level, His birth, life, and crucifixion on Earth symbolize death of the ego so that Man can be liberated and born again in Spirit (if he so chooses.)

The Magi, Persian astronomers/astrologers (probably from Babylonia), shared the Aramaic language with the Jews and so they knew of the Prophecy of the Messiah and would have been well able to predict His birth in time to make the journey to the Land of Judah while following the Star of Bethlehem.

The Star of Bethlehem has been thought to be the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn during the year 7 BC: in May, September, and October. This occurred in Pisces, and it is my belief that the Magi realized the significance of this Great Conjunction in Pisces--a King of Kings to be born in the East--and made their preparations for the journey to find the Babe...and to honor Him with gifts of gold (for a king), frankincense (for divinity), and myrrh (for death and healing.)

I write this post with the wonderful aroma of frankincense surrounding me. Try it if you haven't--it's lovely.

The unusual occurrence of Jupiter as Morning Star in Aries being occulted by the Moon--in April (Spring, when lambs are born, not Dec 25, a date chosen by the Catholic Church in Rome to coincide with the pagan Saturnalia festival and thus bringing goddess worhip into the fold bwo the church's elevation of Mary) is possibly the Star followed by the Magi.

My own thought is that the Great Jupiter-Saturn Conjunction/s may have been the Star itself, with the Moon-Jupiter-Evening Star phenomena as a timing device for the birth of the Prince of Peace.

Jupiter and Saturn Principles and Faith:

Jupiter represents the generous side of God (His staff), while Saturn represents God's disciplinarian side (His rod.) On one level, we may relate "Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me..." directly to the natural law of Jupiter (expansion) and Saturn (restriction) being the fly-wheel of the universe--the tension between them keeping the planets in their courses. Yin-yang, positive-negative...a constant comfort to me and I hope to you as well!

It's been a treat to give earthly halls of power--politics--the slip as I contemplate the heavenly things of true value. If you came to Stars Over Washington today expecting politics as usual, I assert that Stars are all around us, and the Star of Bethlehem, still shining brightly, may lead us yet to the golden stardust within each of us, and to greater truths than those generally found lurking about in the halls of our nation's capital--Saturnian Capitol Hill.

Posted by Jude Cowell at12:38:00 PM - Dec 24, 2007
http://www.starsoverwashington.com/2007/12/birth-chart-for-jesus-apr-17-6-bc.html

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Matthew 12:25-27 - King James Version (KJV)
25 And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand:
26 And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?
27 And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges.



Nostradamus: Century X, Quatrain 96

Religion du nom des mers vaincra,
Contre la secte fils Adaluncatif,
Secte obstinee deploree craindra,
Des deux blessex par Aleph & Aleph


The Religion of the name of the seas will overcome,
Against the sect of the son of Adaluncatif,
The obstinate lamented sect will fear
The two wounded by Aleph & Aleph.



PACIFICAP=48+16=64=ISRAEL=PETER=PACIFICA P=P+ACIFICA P=32+32=LIFECELL de Pacifica OmniScience La Paz of the Pacific de A&A=A&A*=A&Z=Alpha&Omega of the Witnesses for the LogosTwin JCCJ

"Aliph De Aliph"​

ABBA MELCHISEDEC=ADALUN CATIF=FADA LUNATIC=A DEBORAH DEATH=54+38=92
=ALPHA SUN=BRIDE LOVE=NOAH GABRIEL=38+54=6+86=92 = A DINAH BAAB IN ALL A
A Lunatic's House as a symbol for the deniers of the physical incarnation and existence and resurrection of the World Logos.
A place of self delusion for the 'Lamentable Obstinate Sect' of the 'AntiChrist of the Artiste' d'NABS and the scripture codes misinterpreters and Logos truth polluters and cosmic law defilers

The lunatic’s house - La maison du fada


La maison du fada: that’s the local name for Le Corbusier’s famous – or infamous –unité d’habitation, or cité radieuse, in Marseille’s suburbs​

John 14:1-3
¹Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
²In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
³And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.


1.Revelation 1:8
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

2.Revelation 1:11
Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.

3.Revelation 21:6
And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.

4.Revelation 22:13
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.


[5:59:00 PM-Saturday, July 13th, 2013 +10UCT] Emeth 141: Yes and the December 21st, nexus opened the 5D and 2013 will 'evolve' this is the way I see it. The 'Aleph and Aleph' means of course 'Alpha and Alpha' as an 'Old Beginning and a New Beginning as the 'End or Omega of the Old'. And the whole world should know by now what the 'abominable sect' is, despite the 'apologizers' of multiculturalism and 'peaceful coexistence'.
The 'reproducibility' of 'phenomenal outcomes' will become visible in time from 2013 onwards
[5:59:46 PM] Sirius 17: yes
[6:00:19 PM] Emeth 141: So the 'skeptics' percentage will diminish and become replaced by the 'attuners'. This is also called the 'Old Golden Age' renewal and such terms, often Nabs hijacked.
Before science of the Rennaissance, the 'beliefs' accomodated more of this, as you can discern in the human histories
[6:02:07 PM] Sirius 17: yes the Logos presence is what is behind it all, the counsel of 24 elders and the real throne of God
[6:02:21 PM] Emeth 141: Ergo the fables of Lemuria and Atlantis etc as the intersection between higher and lower D was less rigid as it became with the rennaissance
[6:02:32 PM] Sirius 17: true
[6:03:30 PM] Emeth 141: Ergo what is required is a 'New Religion' say called Omni-Science and inclusive of the 'Spirit' as the scalar part of the electromagnetic fundamental interaction
Nosey saw just this in his crystal balls:

96
The Religion of the name of the seas will win out
Against the sect of the son of Adaluncatif:
The stubborn, lamented sect will be afraid
Of the two wounded by A and A.​

[6:07:55 PM] Sirius 17: yeah i remember this quatrain
[6:09:14 PM] Emeth 141: The Indians claim it applies to them of course and this is what is pervasive on the net.
[6:10:01 PM] Emeth 141: The 'religion called after the seas' is PACIFIC or pace'=Peaceful in Spanish
This becomes a supersymmetric anagram. Like the LiaFaiL as the 'Irish Stone of Destiny' fulfilling the scriptures regarding the Davidic Throne, then 'hijacked' by the European aristocrats.
PaciFicaP is the anagram being 64=Peter=Israel=Zion
[6:11:39 PM] Sirius 17: oh nice
[6:11:42 PM] Emeth 141: So Cortes naming the Pacific is the thing Nosey 'saw'. Nothing to do with the Indian Ocean, except is is adjacent to ancient Lemuria or Mu lol
[6:12:24 PM] Sirius 17: i am still sharing all this with JT; he left his oovoo open
[6:12:40 PM] Emeth 141: But they are right in calling the 'obstinate sect' as being Islam as a Non-Sufi world religion
[6:12:51 PM] Sirius 17: no doubt
[6:13:09 PM] Emeth 141: So Nosey did address the 'rise and abuse of power of Islam'
[6:14:32 PM] Sirius 17: sweety James is home and wants me to go to the jaccuzi with him so i am going to call it a night and i shared all of this with JT though as he may find it interesting
[6:15:27 PM] Emeth 141: Oh good, I add this last part to his thread on spruz
[6:15:41 PM] Sirius 17: sure




Quatrain 96, Century X

The religion of the name of the seas triumphs, Against the fanatics of the Khalif's adalat,

The murderous creed of the false alefs, Between the Hindus and Christians will be caught. This prophecy need a little explication. In geography, one finds the Hindu Maha Sagar (the Indian Ocean in English). Hinduism is the only religion with a sea (an ocean, rather) named after it. The Moslem fanatics believe that the Shariat or Koranic law with its sexual licence is God-given or Khalif's adalat. The Koran itself opens with the letter alef (angel) in Arabic. Both Hindus and Christians have suffered at the hands of Moslems and seek revenge. Lebanon is a foretaste of things to come. The Nostradamian quatrain spells the doom of the murder-creed.

If this interpretation should sound far-fetched, consider yet another prophetic quatrain :

Quatrain 50, Century L

From the peninsula where three seas meet, Comes the ruler to whom Thursday is holy, His wisdom and might all nations will greet, To oppose him in Asia will be folly.

South India is the only peninsula in the entire globe where three seas meet a point and stretch away.
The great Hindu leader who will wipe out our enemies will hence be a south Indian who offers worship on Thursdays. It is easy to see why Nostradamus specifically mentions Thursday as the holy day. It is only Hindus who consider Thursday sacred. Moslems pray on Friday; Jews bow before God on Saturday; Christians bawl hymns on Sunday at church.
Nostradamus is making it clear here that the conqueror will be a Hindu from South India. He will bind Asia together under his rule. The Hindu leader, however, will not be a tyrant. He will be ruthless with the Moslem fanatics. But he will win over the communists by persuading them of the timeless varieties of Hinduism. Russia will become India's ally:


Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_nostradamus_told_India#ixzz2YuXqqeDp

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(32) Jesus said, "A city being built on a high mountain and fortified cannot fall, nor can it be hidden."
(48) Jesus said, "If two make peace with each other in this one house, they will say to the mountain, 'Move Away,' and it will move away."
(106) Jesus said, "When you make the two one, you will become the sons of man, and when you say, 'Mountain, move away,' it will move away." - Gospel of Thomas (Lambdin)

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Matthew 17:20
And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. (KJV)


Matthew 21:21
Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. (KJV)

Revelation 17:9
And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.

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