Dr. Zakir Naik, right, a televangelist from India, receiving an award from King Salman of Saudi Arabia on Sunday.Credit
King Faisal Foundation, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images BEIRUT,
Lebanon — He has publicly declared that “the Jews” control America,
that apostates can be killed, that the United States is the world’s
“biggest terrorist” and that the Sept. 11 attacks were an “inside job”
by President George W. Bush.
But last weekend, Dr. Zakir Naik, a prominent Muslim televangelist from India, appeared at an elaborate ceremony at a luxury hotel in Saudi Arabia, where the new monarch, King Salman, gave him one of the country’s highest honors.
The
award for “service to Islam” highlighted the conflicted position of
Saudi Arabia as an American ally that continues to back Islamists who
espouse hatred of the West.
Scrutiny
of Saudi Arabia’s role in shaping thought in the Muslim world has grown
with the rise of the Islamic State extremist group in Iraq and Syria,
which shares some aspects of the fundamentalist Islam propagated by the
Saudi state.
Saudi
officials reject any comparison to the Islamic State, noting that they
are on its hit list and that they have joined the American-led coalition
that is bombing the group.
But
despite longstanding ties between the United States and the Saudi royal
family, the gap between what the two countries consider appropriate
religious rhetoric was clear in the public celebration of Dr. Naik.
Reached
by phone in Saudi Arabia on Monday, Dr. Naik said he was proud to join
the “icons of the Muslim world” who had received the award. He remained
harshly critical of the United States.
“I
am absolutely against Muslims who kill, but what is the U.S. doing?”
Dr. Naik asked, saying that the United States had killed Afghan, Iraqi
and Palestinian Muslims. “Is the U.S. really bothered about human rights? No!”
Saudi
Arabia is not alone in seeing Dr. Naik as a vital spokesman for Islam.
In 2013, he was named the Islamic Personality of the Year by a religious
association in Dubai, an honor bestowed upon him
by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the prime minister of the
United Arab Emirates, which has also joined the coalition against the
Islamic State.
Dr. Naik, 49, was trained as a medical doctor but now heads the Mumbai-based Islamic Research Foundation, whose website says it seeks to spread “the proper presentation, understanding and appreciation of Islam.”
Dr.
Naik, a thin man with a wispy beard and a penchant for dark suits, has
made his name internationally through colloquial lectures about Islam,
the religion’s links to science and why he considers it superior to
other faiths.
Other
videos show him engaging with Christians, Hindus and atheists, some of
whom are said to be so persuaded by his arguments that they convert on the spot.
Thomas
Blom Hansen, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University who
studies religion in India and who met Dr. Naik in India in the late
1990s, said that the televangelist struck a chord with some upwardly
mobile Muslims who liked his combative way of defending their religion.
But, he said, Dr. Naik is not a jihadist directly calling for violence.
“He
is a conservative for sure, but is he someone who would endorse people
going to Syria, for example? That is not my view,” Dr. Hansen said.
A
journalist who covers Mumbai’s Muslims for a prominent Indian newspaper
said that Dr. Naik was controversial at home, where opinion is divided
on his puritanical views.
“He
promoted the supremacy of Islam, and when he is in dialogue with the
heads of other religions, he talks about how Islam is superior to all
other religions,” the journalist said, speaking on condition of
anonymity to avoid jeopardizing his sources.
The
Mumbai police have barred him from holding conferences in recent years
because he stirs controversy, the journalist said, and Indian satellite
providers have refused to broadcast his television channel, Peace TV.
Dr.
Naik often deflects when talking about Muslim violence. Asked by phone
about the Islamic State, he said he was against its actions if the media
had reported them correctly, although he said he had no way of knowing.
Years ago, he gave a similar answer about Osama bin Laden, saying he could not judge since he did not know the man. But Dr. Naik also said he supported him if he was fighting the United States.
“If
he is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, I am
with him,” he said. “Every Muslim should be a terrorist.”
Dr. Naik has also said that apostates who propagate other religions should be killed and that “the Jews” control the United States.
“The
Jews are a minority less than 5 percent in America, but they are
controlling the economy, they are controlling America,” he said.
As for Sept. 11, in one lecture,
Dr. Naik discussed conspiracy theories suggesting that the American
government had lied about the attacks. He concluded that by “the amount
of ample evidence, a fool will know this is an inside job.”
Citing online documentaries, he said: “If you see all this, it is a blatant, open secret that this attack on the twin towers was done by George Bush himself.”
When asked on Monday about the accusations, Dr. Naik said he had been misquoted. “People say Muslims have done it, and some others said Bush had done it,” he said. “But who knows who did it?”
In Saudi Arabia on Sunday, Dr. Naik was given the King Faisal International Prize for service to Islam by the King Faisal Foundation, a research institute in Riyadh. The award citation called Dr. Naik “one of the most renowned non-Arabic speaking promulgators of Islam.”
Saudi
watchers were unsurprised that the kingdom would honor a harsh critic
of its American allies, noting that many members of the Saudi religious
establishment hold similar views.
“If
you ask them their opinions about America, they would share lots of
Zakir Naik’s opinions,” said Stéphane Lacroix, an associate professor at
Sciences Po in Paris who studies Saudi Arabia. “But usually they don’t
talk about it.”
Dr. Naik’s positions have caused him trouble before. In 2010, both Canada and Britain denied him entry for speaking engagements.
Theresa
May, the British home secretary, said then that “numerous comments made
by Dr. Naik are evidence to me of his unacceptable behavior.”
On Monday, Dr. Naik blamed Christian missionaries who fear that letting him in will cause Christians to convert to Islam.
“I know, and that is why I haven’t even tried going to these countries,” he said. “People can hear me on the Internet.”
Suhasini Raj contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Neha Thirani Bagri from Mumbai, India.
After every terror attack the call rings out for the Muslim world to become
modern. But as Christopher de Bellaigue writes, Muslims have
strenuously engaged with all that is new for hundreds of years
A
spectator at Meydan racecourse in Dubai. Photograph: Frank
Sorge/racingfotos.com/Rex
A party of school-age swimmers takes to the waters of a municipal pool in
north London. Among her peers, one Muslim girl stands out – nine or 10 years of
age, brown face and eyes under a yellow cap, sliding gingerly into the water in
a cotton salwar kameez that prevents the male attendants, the boys in her
class, and other random males in the pool, like me, from seeing her
prepubescent body.
So far as I know, there is nothing in Islam that bars girls below
the age of menstruation from showing their legs and tummy in public, but in
more conservative households there is a strong distaste for the idea of even
partial undress in mixed company at any age. In less understanding
circumstances, this distaste could have led to the girl’s withdrawal from her
school’s weekly swimming outing – denying her a part of our holistic modern
curriculum. But in this case consultations have evidently taken place between
parents, school and pool management (has the salwar kameez been washed?),
leading to this civilised modus vivendi.
Back home, in Pakistan, or Bangladesh, the question would not have arisen
because such outings to the pool would almost certainly be single-sex affairs.
Silly me: this is home, where she was born, where she is part of, and
her life here will be one long variant on this trip to the swimming baths, a
negotiation between her expectations and the expectations that others have of
her. Ideas will be batted about, solutions proffered; change and adaptation
happen on both sides. It isn’t only among Muslims that values are in an
unsettled state – who would have thought that gay marriage would enter polite
acceptability as smokers are being shown the door? The girl in the yellow cap popped into my mind after the attacks in France
this January – which, like the copycat killings last week in Copenhagen,
prompted another round of discussions about Islam’s “place” in the modern
world. It was generally agreed that the Muslims must pull themselves together.
According to Hubert Védrine, a former French foreign minister, writing in Le
Monde on 13 January, the answer is the kind of Islam that is in tune with the
Enlightenment and sharply delineated from jihadism. “What a boost that would be
for an enlightened Islam,” he wrote, “what an example (while awaiting a genuine
reform of Islam), and what a beacon!” In the following day’s edition of the
same paper, three schoolteachers renewed their own vows to secular values. “We
have learned to do without God,” they wrote. “We have no master but knowledge …
we take it for granted that [Eugène Delacroix’s painting] Liberty
Leading the People and [Voltaire’s] Candide
are part of the heritage of humanity.” The challenge, they wrote, is to
inculcate this heritage in their pupils, those left “by the wayside of
republican values”.
Whenever jihadi groups carry out an atrocity, or – as is happening a lot
these days, western foreign policy failures lead to large areas of the world
coming under the sway of oafs who claim to be acting for God – the call goes up
for a Muslim Enlightenment. The imputation of Védrine, the French
schoolteachers, and thousands of other commentators is that various internal
deficiencies have excluded Islam from this indispensable cultural and
intellectual event, without which no culture can be considered modern. Such
views cut across political borders; they would find sympathy at the BBC as well
as in the editorial offices of the Sun. Islam needs to get with the programme.
Yet it cannot escape the attention of any westerner who has travelled to a
Muslim country that for the people there, the challenge of modernity is the
overwhelming fact of their lives; the double imperative of being modern and universal
on the one hand, and adhering to the emplaced identities of religion and
nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. To anyone
outside the west, it is self-evident that there is more than one way to be
modern – a truth easily observed in any developing country. Modernity is at the
best of times a tension, a dislocation and an agitation, producing – in a
phrase from Nietzsche that expresses a kaleidoscopic weirdness of perspective –
“a fateful simultaneity of spring and autumn.”
Nietzsche was referring to the west, where the questions that led to
modernity had been volunteered in the first place, during the Enlightenment,
the Industrial Revolution, and the race for empires, and where the cultural
necessity of providing an answer was never seriously doubted. But his words are
also relevant to the lands of Islam. The history of the Middle East over the
past two centuries is also a history of modernisation – of reforms, reactions,
innovations, false starts, discoveries and betrayals – and there is something
gloriously cack-handed and unreal about westerners demanding an “Enlightenment”
from people whose lives are coterminous with a strenuous, ceaseless engagement
with all that is new. The experience of modernity cannot be reduced to various
rites of passage through which the west has passed. Modernity is the shared
predicament of all who discover or are discovered by new values and technologies
– and a description of the pleasure and pain that follows.
I have retained the image of the young swimmer negotiating the waters in her
salwar kameez, steering between competing expectations, while I have been
researching a book about the earlier time when “modern ideas” first arrived in
the Middle East from the newly dominant west. Few people have thought to
qualify the word “modernity” using a culturally loaded adjective other than
“Muslim”; one doesn’t hear much about “Indian” modernity, or “Chinese” modernity,
even though the new ways of looking at the world have not entered these
cultures without difficulty. Nor do I think that many modern Muslims regard
their lives as substantially different or more complicated than those of
non-Muslims across the globe. Certainly, those in the 19th and early 20th
centuries who were the first bearers of new ideas were animated by a desire to
be part of a movement that represented not only certain cultures or
geographies, but all mankind.
Looking at the tableau before me, running from those early modernisers to
the blameless mermaid of north London, I have the impression of a long,
difficult, but very often joyful negotiation – the same negotiation in which
many more have prospered without being noticed, and in which a number, among
them the killers of Paris and Copenhagen, have catastrophically failed.
***
The reform of the Muslim world began in earnest at the turn of the 19th
century, when Europe penetrated the Middle East with all the brusqueness you
would expect from a rapidly developing civilisation whose constituent parts
were in a race for colonies, wealth and glory. The cultural heartlands of
Islam, by contrast, were lame, lachrymose, and chronically resistant to
novelty. Cairo’s school of Al-Azhar – the acknowledged citadel of Islamic
learning – suspected science, despised philosophy and hadn’t produced an
original thought in years. The paradigmatic idea was that society under the
prophet Muhammad had attained a perfection from which later generations were
condemned to live at an exponentially increasing remove.
The meeting of the two cultures (which, for obvious symbolic reasons, is
often dated to the Napoleonic invasions of Egypt) led to a realisation on the
part of Muslim rulers that only by adopting western practices and technologies
could they avoid political and economic oblivion. The extraordinarily rapid
process of change that this triggered has been summed up by the historian Juan Cole:
Napoleon
Bonaparte at the Great Mosque in Cairo, Egypt. Photograph: Musee des Beaux Arts Mulhouse/Dagli Orti“In the space of decades intellectuals forsook Ptolemaic for Copernican
astronomy … businessmen formed joint-stock companies (not originally allowed in
Islamic law), generals had their armies retrained in new drills and established
munitions factories, regional patriotism intensified and prepared the way for
nationalism, the population began growing exponentially under the impact of
cash cropping and the new medicine, steamboats suddenly plied the red Sea and
the Persian Gulf, and agrarian capitalism and the advent of factories led to
new kinds of class conflict.”
And so on. In the middle of the century the Ottoman Sultan declared equality
between his Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, the slave trade was outlawed and
the harem fell gradually into desuetude. The sheikhs and mullahs saw their old
prerogatives in the law and public morality arrogated by an expanding
government bureaucracy. Clerical opposition to dissection was overcome and
theatres of anatomy opened. Culture, too, was transformed, with a surge in
non-religious education, and the reform of the Arabic, Turkish and Persian languages
– the better to present modern poetry, novels and newspaper articles before the
potent new audience of “public opinion”. Compared to the western experience,
modernisation was drastically “telescoped”, as Cole puts it, with the
moveable-type printing press, dating back to the 15th century, and the
telegraph, which was invented in 1844, arriving almost simultaneously.
Political consciousness also rose. In the last decades of the 19th century,
Egypt, Iran and Turkey, the most populous and culturally influential centres of
the Middle East, all experienced movements in favour of representative
government – in Turkey and Iran, parliamentary rule came into effect a few
years after the turn of the new century, and in Egypt after the first world
war.
The story of Muslim modernisation has sometimes been depicted as the efforts
of a few potentates to enforce alien precepts on resistant populations.
Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s khedive, or viceroy, for most of the first half of the
19th century, and his near contemporary (and nominal sovereign), Sultan Mahmud
II, are the names to remember here, and there were indeed many instances of
popular opposition to what were depicted as godless innovations. In 1814, for
example, the Muslim notables of Piraeus were persuaded by a local divine not to
set up quarantine stations to protect themselves from an outbreak of the
plague. The pandemic was “from God”, he said; “to try and limit its progress is
to oppose Providence”. (The population was duly obliterated.) The Persian crown
prince Abbas Mirza, modernising his fiefdom of Tabriz, in north-west Iran,
drilled the soldiers of his new army behind high walls, for fear that they
would be spotted by their disapproving families.
The myth that modernisation had no natural constituency – to be contrasted
invidiously with the spontaneity of emergent modernity in the west – has been
exacerbated by some of its rankly insincere recent apologists. The Mubaraks
and Ben
Alis of this world paraded modernity like a codpiece; to look at
these self-described apostles of secularism and development, one might be forgiven
for thinking that modernisation in the Middle East has always been infertile,
and always will be.
But if we want to understand the relationship between ideas and change in
the Middle East, we must turn to an earlier moment, and to the figures who found
themselves mediating between the two. We are limited here by the historical
record – which preserves the accounts of a few distinguished figures – but
there is no reason to believe the hope and trepidation that they expressed were
not also felt by a great many of their lesser-known contemporaries. Societies
changed, as the dialectic of new and old continued, and people lost themselves
in the intensity of the transformation of which they were a part.
***
One of the earliest Middle Easterners to appreciate the unavoidable,
tentacular qualities of modernity was the Iranian Mirza Muhammad Saleh Shirazi.
He was one of five students who were sent to England by Crown Prince Abbas
Mirza in 1815 to study useful things and bring them home. The travelogue that Mirza
Saleh wrote is among the first books written in Persian about a Christian
country. Reading it one gets the sense of a worldview that is changing; even
Mirza Saleh’s writing alters as he acclimatises to Regency London, moving from
stiltedness to fluency, directness and utility. Here, in real time, is the
literary modernisation of the Middle East.
In the spring of 1817, Mirza Saleh made a trip to the west Country, which
forms the most exquisite section of his book. A sense of diligent journalism
permeates his writing as his coach quits London on the westward turnpike. In
comparison to the potholed and rutted dust roads of Iran, passable only on
horseback or on foot, his detailed description of this efficient mode of
transport must have struck his readers as a great novelty. At first he sits
inside the coach, with a Spaniard and several farmers for company (all equally
unintelligible); after nightfall he takes his place on top, where he remains
until Salisbury Cathedral comes ethereally into view at dawn.
And on to Exeter, where he is met by his host, Robert Abraham, and the two
set off for the latter’s home in the stannery town of Ashburton. Amid the tin
mines, Mirza Saleh exchanges European clothes for Iranian robes, which causes
the daughters of his host much amusement. Indeed, much of Mirza Saleh’s stay is
spent in the company of these and other Devonshire girls, “moon-faced” and
“sweet-natured”. (He seems to have censored himself, for in the descriptions he
provides of bucolic musical interludes overlooking the River Dart, mention of
cider is suspiciously absent – only tea.) Mirza Saleh is partial to young Sarah
Abraham, who displays “the utmost excellence, perspicacity, sagacity and
delicacy” as they converse on the road to Plymouth. For the people back home,
used to a strict segregation of the sexes, the outlandishness of such a
friendship would not need spelling out.
A
series of street portraits taken in the holy city of Qom, Iran by Magnum
photographer Paolo Pellegrin. In Plymouth, Mirza Saleh lavishes his ever-improving descriptive powers on
“the most secure port in England”, with its armouries and massive hospital. The
anchorage is so extensive a thousand warships could park there, protected by
ramparts bristling with cannon – and he explains dry docks and breakwaters for
the landlocked Tabrizis, whose only experience of the sea is as poetic
metaphor. Amid celebrations to mark George III’s birthday he ventures out
clutching the hand of Miss Sarah (again, a liberty he would not take with a
girl back home) is mobbed by 500 people, and flees. And when the time comes for
him to say farewell to the Abrahams, he asks, “of what importance are
differences of religion? … I wept for the members of this family, old and
young, such that I have never been so affected.”
Several hundred pages of British history and actuality are still to come.
Mirza Saleh traces events from the Roman invasions to the Napoleonic Wars, and
there is something thrilling about seeing the names of the Saxon Kings
transliterated into Persian for the first time. His account of contemporary
London takes in house design, domestic mores (not unreasonably, he is surprised
that when people enter houses, rather than take off their dirty shoes, they
remove their hats), and detailed descriptions of the prerogatives of the king
and parliament. Admiring but never cringing, fully aware that his exposition of
Britain’s partial democracy will prompt interest and perhaps envy in the Iran
of the divine right of kings, he reserves his greatest astonishment for the
ability of a single artisan, “a poor man, with a shop”, to postpone the
building of Regent Street by refusing to sell his freehold to make way for the
thoroughfare. “And suppose,” Mirza Saleh writes with pardonable hyperbole,
“that the whole army were to come down on his head, they cannot oblige him to
give it up … the prince himself cannot inflict the slightest financial or
physical harm on him.”
Mirza Saleh and his fellow students were a small sample of similar contingents
that were dispatched from Muslim countries to Europe over the course of the
19th century. In 1819 the five Iranians were recalled home, where Mirza Saleh
went on to become a teacher, diplomat and pioneering newspaper owner and
printer. (Among his productions was a Qur’an with a Persian translation between
the lines – he appreciated the importance of Tyndale’s translation of the Bible
into English). Of his former travelling companions, one rose to be chief
engineer to the (newly modernised) army, and translated a biography of Peter
the Great, while another, who had studied medicine in London, assumed the title
of royal doctor and designed Iran’s first polytechnic. The only artisan in the
party, the master craftsman Muhammad Ali, became head of the royal foundry; his
English wife introduced knives and forks into their household.
Thus change entered Iran and the wider region through the cerebral and the
banal, and if it was to stand a chance of popular success it would need the
endorsement of men of religion. In the absence of a central ecclesiastical
institution capable of bringing people – with the authority, say, of a papal
encyclical – over to a new understanding of things, the sheikhs and mullahs
would have to be guided by their own consciences.
***
Perhaps the most celebrated of the early modernising theologians was Egypt’s
Rifa’a al-Tahtawi. Rifa’a was the archetypal “new” sheikh; chloroformed at
al-Azhar and revived abroad (in his case, as a student in Paris in the late
1820s), he returned home to join the bureaucracy and trill the virtues of
civilisation – a word whose Arabic equivalent, tamaddun, from the word
meaning “city”, he did much to popularise.
The idea that the future will be better than the past is integral to any
understanding of progress, and Rifa’a adopted it unambiguously: his love of the
new was heartfelt and unapologetic; he ridiculed those who dismissed the modern
era. He promoted a reformed Arabic, published furiously (including the first
Arabic grammar for schools), and edited the country’s first newspaper. In 1836,
he set up a translation bureau that brought new and unfamiliar ideas rushing
into Egypt by rendering 2,000 European and Turkish works into Arabic, ranging
from Greek philosophy and ancient history to books about geography and
geometry.
The effect of these translations on the engineers, doctors, teachers and
military officers who read them can easily be imagined. For this new elite,
forerunners of the secular-minded middle classes that dominate public life even
now, learning about antiquity expanded the meaning of the instructive past. The
feats of the hitherto reviled non-Muslims presented an alternative story of
talent and achievement, occluding faith-based partitions and suggesting a more
equitable distribution of God’s favours than many Muslims had previously
entertained.
Rifa’a had been amazed by the malleability of the French language, geared to
utility more than embellishment, and he introduced similar principles into
Arabic as Mirza Saleh, through his travelogue, had done for Persian.
Translation is an expression of the universality of the intellect, but one
Middle Eastern language remained unable to receive the new ideas – arguably the
most important of them all, Ottoman Turkish. When writing in Ottoman Turkish it
was considered a fine thing to approach the subject in as ornamental and
long-winded a fashion as possible, executing puns, ransacking the Persian
classics and eschewing punctuation. Nine different calligraphic systems were in
use, getting to the point was considered facile and functionality was
ignorance.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s Turkish was made fit for purpose by a
curmudgeonly polymath named İbrahim Şinasi. The orphaned son of an artillery
captain, Şinasi grew up in the Tophane district of Istanbul (now much sought
after by foreigners), where he learned Arabic, Persian and French before going
to Paris on a scholarship. He returned with a shrewd realisation that the goals
of human progress and linguistic development are linked – and applied himself to
both.
In 1860 Şinasi co-founded the empire’s first independent Turkish-language
newspaper, and shortly afterwards he launched his own paper, the Tasvir-i
Efkâr, or Illustration of Opinion. The subjects he wrote about ranged from
foreign policy (he was a hawk) to literature and the importance of good
manners. Şinasi also pushed the idea, then in its infancy, of a national
identity. In Egypt Rifa’a al-Tahtawi was thinking along similar lines,
popularising the word watan, or nation, and translating the Marseillaise.
The outlines of the Middle Eastern nation states were coming into view.
One of the most fascinating of Şinasi’s editorials reveals his ability to
draw philosophical significance from apparently quite workaday subjects. The
government had announced a scheme to introduce street lighting to parts of
central Istanbul, opposed by kneejerk conservatives – just as the same
innovation had been opposed in London almost 200 years earlier. Şinasi, of
course, was enthusiastic, not only for practical reasons of reduced criminality
and enhanced commerce, but also because the illumination of the streets seemed
to presage the deeper and less extinguishable illumination of people’s minds.
“Who opposes street lighting,” he demanded, “if not those ruffians who profit
from the darkness of the night?” And then, in a barbed reference to the
intellectual monopolists whose feeble glow depended on surrounding gloom and
the ignorance of others: “A firefly only glows at night.”
Sultan Abdulaziz read impertinence and sedition into editorials of this
kind, and in January 1865 the government introduced censorship following the
example of Napoleon III. Within the month Şinasi had fled to Paris but the
press could not be controlled. Over the next 11 years the number of
publications available in Istanbul went from four to 72, with the most popular
papers selling as many as 24,000 per issue. It was a similar, if slower story
in Egypt, where the newspaper-reading public in 1881 has been put at 72,000;
Iran’s press revoultion was just as dramatic.
A
series of street portraits taken in the holy city of Qom, Iran by Magnum
photographer Paolo Pellegrin It was little wonder that governments across the Middle East viewed with
alarm the transformation of the public discourse and their diminishing ability
to regulate it. Relationships between people of different backgrounds were
being formed against the neutral backdrops of the university, the office and
the steamship. The rigid seclusion of the harem fell away and for men it was no
longer necessary to be a eunuch in order to enjoy the society of a woman who
was neither a prostitute nor your mother. Between the strata of the Ottoman
family a kind of pluralism inserted itself, with one modernist insisting that
his patriarchal father show respect for an “individual’s opinion”.
What if that individual was female? While decades would pass before most
Muslim women were acquainted with even the theory of their rights, change came
earlier for the upper classes in the cities. There, rising female literacy led
to employment in nursing and teaching, and the emergence of western-style
charities independent of the mosque. New women’s magazines showed the Paris
fashions and called for the prohibition of polygamy.
The career of the Turkish writer Fatma Aliye shows how a combination of new
institutions, technology and altered patterns of thought were changing society
with a convulsive force. Born in 1862, the daughter of an Ottoman grandee, she
might have seemed destined for a traditional life – and indeed, despite showing
exceptional intellectual promise and even learning French in secret (her mother
feared her exposure to impious notions), she went into purdah at 15 and was
married off at 19 to a man who disapproved of her vocation.
But Aliye continued to write and translate, eventually winning her husband’s
support, and what she produced in seclusion the new press enabled her to
diffuse among an expanding audience of literate women. Hers became a
distinctive voice in the Istanbul papers, where she promoted girls’ education
and kicked against the stock male denigration of women as “long on hair, short
on nous”.
What makes Aliye’s experience so instructive is the way in which she was
formed by modernisation and formed it back in turn. Among her best-known works
is an epistolary novel comprising letters by upper-class women speaking of
their lives and their loves, a conceit that would have been meaningless were it
not for the new institution of the imperial postal service. She was the sort of
woman who would engage in philosophical conversations with strange men while
crossing the Bosphorus on a steamer. Public transport was exercising its usual
levelling function, with hitherto segregated members of society thrown together
and their candour naturally heightened by the transience and anonymity of such
encounters. In her later years, she continued to exercise a degree of autonomy as a
Muslim woman that would have been unthinkable in her youth – travelling alone
to Europe to pursue her errant younger daughter Zubeyda, who (to her immense
chagrin) had become a Catholic nun and moved to France. Zubeyda later recalled
that her mother had been “haunted” by the question of the “equality of the
sexes in society and the struggle to achieve it”. In the Turkey of the 1860s,
when Aliye was a child, there had been little question of “equality of the
sexes”. There had been no “struggle”. Now there were both. The stories of Fatma Aliye, Mirza Saleh, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi and İbrahim
Şinasi are only few among many, but they reiterate what should already be
apparent, that Muslims had an energetic engagement with modernity more than a
century before television pundits began demanding one – an engagement, then as
now, defined by negotiation rather than conquest. It may be, as these examples
show, that there is not a “canon” into which they can be fitted – a neat
narrative of Muslim modernity to put alongside the western one we know so well,
thanks to M. Védrine and others. But then it could be argued that the idea of a
canon is somewhat déclassé, with contributions to the collective experience
being written, as the young swimmer in the council pool demonstrates, around us
all the time.
To suggest that the Muslim world’s experience of modernity has been severely
deranged by the repeated incursions of western imperialists and
post-imperialists is to restate one of the truisms of our age. When Britain and
France invade Egypt with the aim of protecting their loans (literally in the
case of Gladstone, with his heavy personal exposure to Egyptian government
bonds) and Sykes and Picot split the region into British and French zones under
cover of the first world war; when the western nations award land to Zionism
that isn’t theirs to give and when the region is thrust into a cold war not of
its making, with a harvest that includes Saddam, Mubarak and the Assads – with
all this happening in the space of a few decades it would be optimistic to
expect the reordering of cultures and societies to go without a hitch.
It is not surprising that many at the business end of this penetration have
been sceptical of the westerners’ claim to be acting in their best interests,
and that in time some of these Arabs, Turks and Iranians expanded their distaste
for the curled colonial lip into a more general critique of modern life. When
the radical Muslim Brother (and founder of modern Islamism) Sayyid Qutb went to
study in the United States in the late 1940s, his reaction to the west was
sharply dissimilar to that of Mirza Saleh 140 years earlier; what was revealed
to Qutb was less a model worthy of emulation than the seedy internal workings
of a system that he – an Egyptian chafing against a sybaritic monarch propped
up by Britain – knew all too well.
Few westerners have considered how bruising it is to be constantly
reacting to another’s invention, statement or action: always being told to
“catch up” or improve. This is the situation that so many Muslims have found
themselves in over the past two centuries. But this is the backstory that has
made Islam’s engagement with modern values more suspenseful, more despairing,
more suffused with the “simultaneity of spring and autumn”, than anywhere else
in the world.
In the light of adverse politics and history, the surprise is not that
modernity has been a tortuous experience for some Muslims, but that it has been
adopted so widely and with such success. (Many millions of Muslims live in
harmony with the modern values of personal sovereignty and human rights:
another self-evident truth in need of reiteration.) With immigration from the
Middle East and north Africa to Europe, the Mediterranean culture that ended
with the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain in 1492 has been revived. Our
world is even more interpenetrated than the communal gallimaufry of the Ottoman
empire. Talk of European values that exclude Islamic values will be barren for
as long as millions of Europeans regard Islam as an important element in their
lives. Talk of teaching them Voltaire is a joke as long as they cannot teach us
back. The much-touted choice facing the “Muslim community”, between modernity
and obscurantism, between “here” and “home”, is false. Here is home. Life is
modern. All we can do is negotiate.
This
is not to condone violence in any form; but to expose duplicity and
bigotry of Zionist controlled US media that under pathological obsession
with Islamophobia, is carrying on anti-Islamic propaganda, with fake
news and photo-shop pictures to build up a dubious case.
"My characterization of ISIS is that they have 14th century ethics and 21st century weapons," he said.
King
and others who have reached into the Middle Ages for an apt Islamic
State comparison may be going back further than they need to. The 19th
and 20th centuries work just as well.
For David Pilgrim, the
founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University,
the actions of ISIS and other extremist groups are familiar -- no
better, no worse than the historic stateside violence against
African-Americans.
"There's nothing you're going to see today
that's not going to have already occurred in the U.S.," he said. "If you
think of these groups that behead now -- first of all, beheading is
barbaric but it's no more or less barbaric than some of the lynchings
that occurred in the U.S."
The Ku Klux Klan was a domestic terror
organization from its beginning, said Pilgrim, who finds it offensive
when, after 9/11, some Americans would bemoan that terrorism had finally
breached U.S. borders.
"That is ignoring and trivializing -- if
not just summarily dismissing -- all the people, especially the peoples
of color in this country, who were lynched in this country; who had
their homes bombed in this country; who were victims of race riots," he
said.
Victims of lynching were often burned, castrated, shot, stabbed and, in some cases, beheaded. Bodies were then hung or dragged through towns for display.
Most of these atrocities occurred during the eras of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow -- but not all.
It
was 116 years after slavery and 40 years after Jim Crow when
19-year-old Michael Donald's body was found swinging gently from a
Mobile, Alabama, camphor tree in 1981. A perfect hangman's knot
containing 13 loops
held the noose wrapped around his neck, and a squad of Klansmen stood
on a porch across the street, looking on as the police gathered
evidence.
Lynchings like Donald's exemplify the terrorist methods
that have always been the "stock and trade" of the KKK, according to
Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
"Michael
Donald was sort of a classic case," he said. "It was real terrorism in
the sense that Michael Donald was a completely random victim. He was
completely unknown to his Klan murderers. He was simply abducted off the
street and murdered in order to frighten black people."
Donald's
lynching is often referred to as "America's last." His death falls
outside the terror lynchings that ran rampant during the Jim Crow era,
according to a report released by Alabama's Equal Justice Initiative earlier this month.
The
study found almost 3,960 African-Americans were lynched from 1877 to
1950 -- a number that supersedes previous estimates by at least 700. It
looked at lynchings in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas
and Virginia.
***
An "Instant Nigger" is 50 percent tar,
45 percent ignorance and 5 percent water, according to a flier thrown on
the campus of Murphy High School in Mobile by Klansmen in the early
1970s.
"I'll never forget it," said Ada Fields, a black Mobile
resident who attended the school. "It was a paper with a jar and a black
body -- totally black -- with big bug eyes looking out the jar."
Alabama
has a peculiar history with racially motivated terrorism -- arguably
more so than other states in the Deep South -- and the state's Klan
history complicates things a bit more. Since each cell of the Ku Klux
Klan has a different history, Potok said, it is difficult to discuss the
Klan as a single, monolithic group.
There were four eras of the
Klan -- and the first and third eras were, arguably, the most
characteristic of a terrorist organization.
Initial incarnations of the Klan used
intimidation and violence to oppose the extension of civil liberties to
blacks, maintain authority over black laborers and enforce their
beliefs of white supremacy during Reconstruction, the years after the
Civil War when the North occupied the South and briefly attempted to
introduce more equitable practices.
Third-era Klan groups arose
in response to the Brown v. Board of Education verdict, with membership
peaking at about 40,000 around 1965. These individual Klans were more
autonomous and often used the same terrorist methods as the first
incarnation in an attempt to impede the civil rights movement.
Henry
Hays and James Knowles, Donald's murderers, belonged to the United
Klans of America, a third-era KKK organization based in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, that, at its height, was considered the strongest and most
violent in the nation.
"The United Klans of America absolutely
gloried in violence. That was their main, and perhaps their only,
political tool," Potok said. "Violence and terrorism was a way of life
for the United Klans of America. The group thought that these tactics
would make it possible to reinstitute white supremacy."
Not only
was the UKA linked to Donald's killing, members were also held
responsible for the Mother's Day attack on Freedom Riders and the 16th
Street Baptist Church bombing -- an attack resulting in the deaths of
four young black girls. Both attacks occurred around Birmingham,
Alabama, in 1961 and 1963, respectively.
"It's like they were
born to have a genocide or something -- a black genocide," Fields said
of the Klan. "They hated blacks. They was gonna get 'em anyway. You
couldn't walk the street. If they could get you, they would hurt you."
However,
Donald's lynching wasn't part of a widespread attempt to make a
statement against a large civil rights movement -- it was revenge for a
particular incident. He was, as Potok said, a random sacrifice -- the
KKK's retribution for the death of a local white police officer whose
alleged killer, an African-American, had walked free.
It was
thought that the African-Americans who sat on the jury in the
cop-killing case had altered the verdict, and at a post-trial meeting,
Bennie Hays, the "Titan" of the UKA, reportedly said, "If a black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man."
A
Klan leader calling for the death of a black person was a retro concept
in 1981 -- one more aligned with the group's ideology during the civil
rights movement.
"If you go back to the '60s, the Klan often
planned murders and bombings and so on -- literally in rooms full of
men," Potok said of the outdated practice. "Now, it was true in the
Michael Donald case in the sense that the leader, Hays, essentially
organized the killing."
Hays, the leader's son, and Knowles took the Titan's message to heart. On March 21, 1981, they hopped into their car and drove around Mobile with plans to avenge the death of the white police officer.
Eventually,
Hays and Knowles spotted Donald as he walked home from buying a pack of
cigarettes. After asking him for directions, Hays and Knowles forced
Donald into their car at gunpoint and drove to a neighboring county.
According to The New York Times,
Donald begged for his life and tried to escape. But the pair chased him
down and, when they caught him, hit him with a tree limb more than 100
times. Once his body was still, a noose was slipped over his head, and
Hays shoved his boot into Donald's face. The rope was pulled and
Donald's throat was slit.
His body was left hanging to be discovered the next morning in a black area of Mobile, according to Fields.
"It
really touched home when they come and hanged a dead body -- a black,
young man's dead body -- in a black area. It just really bothered us
because they hung him right in our neighborhood," Fields said. "It took a
lot out of us."
In 1983, Knowles and Hays were convicted of murder and of violating Donald's civil rights.
Hays received the death penalty and was executed on June 6, 1997.
***
On June 7, 1998, three white men kidnapped African-American James Byrd,
chained him to the back of a pickup truck by his ankles and dragged him
almost 4 miles down a road near Jasper, Texas. Byrd died via
decapitation after hitting a culvert, though the autopsy report said he
was likely conscious for the majority of the ordeal.
Prosecutors, according to CNN,
said the attack was "one of the most vicious hate crimes in U.S.
history" and was intended to advertise a new white supremacist
organization. In 2009, President Barack Obama expanded
hate crime legislation due to the deaths of Byrd and Matthew Shepard, a
gay man who was kidnapped and beaten to death in Wyoming in 1998.
Pilgrim of the Jim Crow Museum, however, said Byrd's death was more than a hate crime -- it was a lynching.
A
lynching, per Pilgrim, involves an extrajudicial killing where the
death is used to make a statement against a certain group or individual.
Essentially, the killing has a purpose that transcends the actual death
of the victim regardless of whether it was executed publicly -- a
common misconception as to what defines a lynching.
Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said such crimes are often used as a warning.
"It's
not just that you're killing this person, for one reason or another.
It's that you're warning all the rest," Potok said. "It was message
crime. It was supposed to send a message to black people in Alabama, and
elsewhere, that if you do things like set black cop killers free, we
will kill you."
While current terror organizations abroad are
fighting to upset the existing conditions of their societies, the Klan
aimed to maintain the status quo being threatened by a rapidly growing
social movement.
The goal of first- and third-era Klan groups was
to return to a time when "men were men, women were women, and black
people knew their place," according to Potok.
"The radical right,
in general in the United States, was -- until the end of the civil
rights movement -- essentially restorationist," he said. "The Klan, and
most other groups of those years ... wanted to turn back the clock."
Knowles
testified in 1984 during a civil rights lawsuit filed against the Klan
by Beulah Mae Donald, Michael Donald's mother, that one of the purposes
of the killing was to "show Klan strength in Alabama."
Mobile's black community got the message loud and clear.
"They
come out and let us know they in full bloom ... How do you think that
made us feel? It was like they can do anything they wanna do," she said.
"They sent a message to us saying, 'Y'all think that it's gone away.
[That] we've left -- we still here.' Cause we didn't think they'd do
something like that."
Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. @MarwanBishara
Four
years ago, when the Arab Spring blossomed, the US, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
and the al-Qaeda network that dominated the Middle East during the
previous decade were forced into retreat and retrenchment.
US President Barack Obama took the backseat and only reacted to the
momentous changes in the region between 2011 and 2013. For
the Obama administration, the problem wasn't the positive change taking
shape, but rather the discomfort of losing control over events.
The ayatollahs, who repressed Iran's Green Revolution in 2009, became
more isolated with the outbreak of the Arab revolution against
dictatorship and autocracy.
Riyadh lost some of its most valuable allies like Hosni Mubarak of
Egypt as its Sunni nemesis, the Muslim Brotherhood, began to gain power.
And al-Qaeda & affiliates became ever more discredited and
isolated, leading many observers to predicted their demise.
Inside Story - Has the Arab Spring widened the Arab divide?
Even Israel's (false) pretensions of being the "only democracy" in
the region lost their effect, as its occupying regime was exposed to be
integral to the old order; a chronic violator of human rights.
The rebound
However, two years later, the seasons began to turn as
counter-revolutionary forces - the dark forces of the old Arab world -
began to organise and conspire against the young voices of freedom and
justice, whether in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya or elsewhere.
Washington, Tehran, as well as Tel Aviv and al-Qaeda took advantage of the ensuing chaos to advance their own agendas.
And a year later, they rebounded and began to dominate the region
once again under the pretext of the danger of the newly found Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant group and its affiliates.
Meanwhile, Daesh, ISIS, ISIL, IS - or whatever its name - broke away
from al-Qaeda to become the definitive regional, and even global threat.
Its pornographic barbarity provided a new bloodier banner for
al-Qaeda affiliates throughout the region, with a prime real estate
location to erect a whole new caliphate on Syrian and Iraqi soil. In the process, the rise of ISIL gave a whole new momentum to American and Iranian interventionism in the greater Middle East. ISIL replaced al-Qaeda as the new pretext for pre-emptive and revenge air strikes, redeployments, war, and occupation.
Thanks to ISIL, the main losers of the Arab Spring emerged as the new hegemons.
Moreover, ISIL became the alibi or the justification for all regional warmongers to carry any atrocities.
Regimes in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt exploited the scourge - or the
pretext - of terror to justify repressions and murder on a large scale. Revenge bombings and attacks became the new rule, as international law
took the backseat in the Middle East.
The question one must ask is not who's behind the rise and expansion
of ISIL, but rather what led to its rise and what helps it withstand the
international coalition's bombings and pressures.
Likewise, Israel exploited the world's preoccupation with ISIL to
attack the Gaza Strip, take over more Palestinian lands and deny
Palestinians their basic rights with no repercussions, even when it
turned its back to Washington.
This strange, even spectacular turn of events led many to question
the mystery surrounding ISIL. Who's behind it and why? Are those
benefitting from it, behind it?
Invisible hands behind ISIL?
Iran's first female vice president, Masoumeh Ebtekar, singled out the United States and the CIA
as the progenitor of ISIL. And Iran's former Iranian minister of
intelligence, Heydar Moslehi, went further by arguing that Mossad, MI6,
And CIA created ISIL, or Daesh.
Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir agreed. He told Euronews this week that America's CIA and Israel's Mossad are behind Boko Haram and ISIL.
"I said CIA and the Mossad stand behind these organisations. There is
no Muslim who would carry out such acts," he said. (Bashir also blames
the US and Israel for the ICC's 2013 warrants accusing him of
responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of
genocide.)
And so does Fidel Castro. He believes that Israel and certain American elements are behind ISIL.
Others believe the opposite; that it's actually Iran that's culpable. Former Syrian National Coalition President Ahmad Jarbainsisted that Iran is behind rise of ISIL.
Could "Quds Force be behind the ISIL in Iraq?" asked one observer.
And yet, more than a few argued that the Saudi Arabia stood behind ISIL. Then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, claimed in a statement last summer that the Saudis were supporting ISIL and "facilitating genocide".
A former US general, Wesley Clark, reckons it's all part of an
ongoing strategic conflict: "Our friends and allies funded ISIL to
destroy Hezbollah."
For Clark, radical Islam is not the issue per se, as it's been generally exploited for strategic ends. For example, according to him: "The United States used radical Islam to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. We begged the Saudis to put the money in; they did."
And the seasoned journalist, Patrick Cockburn, the author of "The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising", claimed
that Saudi Arabia "helped ISIL take over north Iraq". He cited British
intelligence sources that believe the Saudi plan goes back a decade.
Is "the enemy of my enemy my friend" or my enemy? Or could it be both, depending on the level of cynicism involved?
Clearly, those who highlight the savagery of ISIL seem to also be benefitting most from it.
Conspiracy or consequence?
Most of the claims about the responsibility for the rise and spread
of ISIL are either ideologically driven, or pure speculation.
It's not clear how any one of these prime suspects would be willing
or able to put an organisation like ISIL together. Money is not nearly
enough to sustain or explain its drive.
Even if ISIL proves day-in day-out to be at their service; providing
them with pretexts for any policy and every action, it doesn't prove
that any of these players are behind its rise.
In short, benefitting from ISIL's actions doesn't necessarily translate into creating it.
The question one must ask is not who's behind the rise and expansion of ISIL, but rather what led to its rise and what helps it withstand the international coalition's bombings and pressures.
Obama, as I explained
a few days ago, gave his own explanation for the rise of ISIL; one that
included dictatorship, sectarianism, alienation and marginalisation of
Arabs and Muslims.
Seasoned former UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, who served as special
envoy to Afghanistan and Syria, and was somewhat close to the Washington
circles, said
this week that there was "no doubt that the original sin which led to
the emergence of ISIL is the US-led invasion of Iraq. There was no
justification for the war in Iraq, and we all suffer the consequences".
To be clear, Brahimi later clarified:
"I don't mean the US created ISIL, but the conditions following the
invasion led al-Qaeda to come to Iraq and for ISIL to gain power."
To sum it all up, the US occupation of Iraq, the Iranian manipulation
of instability in Iraq and Syria, the cruelty and brutality of
dictators like Bashar al-Assad, and the sectarian cynicism that followed
are certainly to blame. But there's more… Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
The
traditional view of the 'Holocaust', is that Adolph Hitler had an
obsession with wiping out the Jews. But, if that were the case, why did
he sign this deal with the Zionist movement to move northern European
Jews (Khazars) to Israel? - see:
1933 - Zionists Sign a Deal with Hitler to Create Israel - The Transfer Agreement
So,
if the issues in the middle east basically boil down to western
interventionalism as Mr. Bishara seems to imply, then what is the real
point of this article, other than to point fingers? If he's pointing
fingers at the US, does that mean he would support military action
against the US in support of Boko Haram, Hezbollah, ISIS, Taliban,
al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood or any other fun clubs in the middle east
right now? Where is the leadership in the region calling for peace and
understanding of those whose views are different? The US intervention
and subsequent withdrawal certainly contributed to the power vacuum
conditions which gave the extremists a foothold, but where does the
bloodshed end? This holy war has existed in some form or another for
hundreds of years (long before the US actions). The unrest is nothing
new. The names and groups are. As with any conflict, there are
interests behind the front lines looking to profit politically,
economically, or otherwise from the fighting. That's why it's no
surprise that the US, Iran, Egypt, and others would be positioning
themselves for whatever they see as an opportunity. That's one of the
facets of warfare that this author doesn't seem to understand. Also, if
one is looking for CREDIBLE commentary on the actions of the US and
others, don't look to Fidel Castro or President Omar al-Bashir for depth
of analysis. These leaders have a track record of poor care of their
citizens, so it's clear they have very little moral grounds to stand
on. So what can be done to fix the problems? To start, I would submit
that there needs to be a unification of the region on political issues
and a consistent message that this militant extremism is unacceptable.
The religious aspect is a much larger challenge that will need to be
dealt with on a more local level (too many issues to list here). A
coalition of the countries involved needs to create leadership and an
outlet for a comprehensive list of rules that all of the countries must
follow (not to be confused with the UN. Only countries in the
geographic area of the middle east and northern Africa need be
involved). Then, coalition forces need to remove the scourge of
extremist elements and enforce the unilateral rules they set forth. The
world is tired of the endless death and division of religious zealots
killing their brothers and sisters. The finger-pointing is old and
tired. It solves nothing. Let's identify WHAT the problems are, accept
that we can't change HOW they became this way, and move forward with
SOLUTIONS instead of vitriol.
5 minutes ago
Jack
The SOLUTION to all This RELIGIO POLLUTION is that SAUDI//GCC's Need to be FORCED INTO DEMOCRACY! Note: An special Exception can be made With MECCA and MEDINA where they can Have Same (Diplomatic) Status as the VATICAN State!
Note:
People can still make HAJ and or Pilgrimage there. But the rest of the
GCC's and SAUDI will be DEMOCRACY's. Note: PETRO Can still Flow and
Petro Dollars etc... AND
The "Arab League" and the "Organization of Islamic Council" Will be Dissolved!
PS:
If [Islamic and Sunni] TURKY (a quasi NATO Member) wants to retain it's
previous OTTOMAN-EMPIRE glory Days THEN [Secular?] Turkey should Lead
the Charge into Forcing SAUDI and GCC's to DEMOCTATIZE!
BIG
NOTE: This is the POINT of HISTORY where RELIGION must be reined-in and
Tamed once and for all! ONLY DEMOCRACY can do that! Remember: SHARIA
(even Halakah etc..) is a Form of COMMUNISM (Worse).
Wake-Up
TIME or be Forced into [Democratic] Submission! Note: there are
different flavors f Democracy that Fits almost any Culture and Sects! No
more ["MY RELIGION"] Excuses!!!
23 minutes ago
Jack
[Trouble
Maker] TURKEY from 2003 to 2014 was the 'Chair' of the 53 Muslim Nation
via the "Organization of Islamic Counci"l (OIC) and helped NATO's
Leadership set the Ground Work for War and ISIS+ !! And
IT was/is
under Hillary CLINTON's and OBAMA rein who created the "Muslim Brother
Hood" Monster 2009+ (before 'Arab Spring; which unfortunately turned
into "Islamo Spring+"). And "BMH" was Created when Hillary and Borak
Removed G.W. Bush's 'U.S. Patriot Act" which Labeled "MBH" as TERRORISTS
(along with Hamas; Kpp etc.)! And It was done for "POLITICAL ISLAM:
Advocate TARIQ RAMADAN (Grandson of Founder of MBH)!
Big Note:
Today: [Sunni] SAUDI Arabia is now (as of JAN.2014) the 'Chair' of their
"OIC". And Saudi/GCC's Military [secretly unleashed] the "ISIS+ scourge
against the "SHIA" and thus Rose-Up after Saudi Took Power. So they
DID-IT then DENY-IT!
1 hour ago
Jamal Hamid
Bush
and Blair are guilty of waging an illegal war on Iraq. Today we see the
legacy of their illegal act. Israeli advisers have played a major role
in instructing US occupation forces in Iraq on the practices of urban
counter-insurgency and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60
years of experience. The infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian
families at Deir Yasin in 1948 was emblematic of Zionist elimination of
hundreds of productive farming villages, which had been settled for
centuries by a native people with their endogenous civilization and
cultural ties to the soil, in order to impose a new colonial order. The
policy of the total deracination of the Palestinians is central to
Israel’s advise to the US policymakers in Iraq. Their message has been
carried out by their Zionist acolytes in the Bush and Obama
Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire modern Iraqi
civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads
made up of extremists to purge the modern universities and research
institutions of that shattered nation. - see:
The US War against Iraq: The Destruction of a Civilization
Wasn't there muslims being recruited into waffen ss by the so called leader of palestians in the 40s nice idol.
2 hours ago
Sudi Maharaj
bishara is a political analyst now...? senior?
gimme a break...
these revelations and political assessment is last years news...
if bishara has any rationality, he should endeavour to predict what will happen next..
china is the answer... look sharp bish... brains seem suspect...
at least it wasnt a phone call bob newhart scene
2 hours ago
Cody Pill
I
love this guy he picks everyone who hates america Sudan Castro and Iran
to say it was cia Mossad and mi6 of coarse they say that thye hate the
west.
2 hours ago
Isabel Cid
Dear
Marwan Bishara, a very informative, well balanced analysis that I
really enjoyed reading and yet I can't help but being disappointed with
your last few lines.
Since you are finishing your article with
the sentence 'but there is more...' -disappointed by that, if you are
going to tell a story, then tell us the whole story, particularly one
that you were telling so well- I wonder, do you have in mind producing
a sequence for your analysis or are you just going to leave your
readers with the nagging unanswered question of what do mean by 'but
there is more..."
4 hours ago
Mulugeta Atlaw
In
one of the document obtained in Osamas' house after the assassination
of Osama Bin laden reveals Bin laden was continuously disappointed by
the name Al-Qaeda...and think to change the name after the westerns use
it effectively for black propaganda ,when Al-Qaeda kills
Muslims.....That means After I read that news..we can simply predict
that ISIS is the newly established Al-Qaeda which means with only change
of Name and style........Deep down they are the same....because
nowadays Al-Qaeda is in hibernating state as ISIS is outshine...
4 hours ago
Akmal Sultan
Aljazeera
never forget to involve Iran in any problem created by arab states ,,,
Every one now who supported ISIL to establish , who funded ISIL in syria
??? Saudi and Qatar , Kuwait ,Bahrain are behind the scene ....
6 hours ago
mahkhi
is this arab prejudice that sees Irani hand in every problem which they let created, which they should own and they must solve?
by blaming Iran and Syria, are they trying to absolve themselves of any call to action?
7 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
and in other news today...
only 6 comments about the barrel bombs used by hezbollah and assad to kill thousands of people in syria...
6 comments....!!!!!!!!!!!!
you arrab should be ahshmed
7 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
“My
opinion of Christian Zionists? They are scum. But don’t tell them this!
We need all the useful idiots we can get right now.” ~ Benjamin Netanyahu
7 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
so now you are just inventing this as you go along,,,, a
haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
you arrabs are the best
58 minutes ago
Jamal Hamid
Google the quote.
8 hours ago
Gary Smith
Its
everybody's fault but us poor Sunni, right Marwan? Shamlees populism
regardless of the truth. The world would be so wonderful if we could
only have back Saddam Hussein and his sweet sons. Muslims all over the
world want, progress, peace and modern tolerances. Yet all Muslim
leaders can give is tyranny, dictatorship or Wahhabi Salafi barberisum.
It is the ISIS invasions that brought the Iranians. It is your anti
Israeli support of Assad and Hezbollah that expanded Iran's influence.
Time immemorial, your council and your voice put Arabs on the wrong
horse. Anti American, anti Western, anti Israel, anti democracy and
here you are in chaos and tragedy once again, shocking! And as usual
its time to blame somebody else!
8 hours ago
Abdennasser Guana
Mr Smith, Do you still doubt that Israel is an aggressor and a rogue nation? Do you still doubt that The USA has been supporting the corrupt regimes in our countries, Sissi in Egypt as an example? Do
you still deny that the USA does not want to see democracy in our
countries? even in Latin America. How many coup d'etat were orchestrated
and financed by the CIA? Let's face the truth please Mr Smith.
7 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
the answer is YES!!!!
only there is no doubt about it...
Stop blaming Israel and the USa for your problems.. grow up...
there never was a palestine and no one has any doubt about this any more ..
8 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
i wonder why they need to post this????
9 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
It is time to take Israel to ICC for war crimes in Palestine and for 9/11 - see:
In
the annals of history, no event has ever been so thoroughly dissected
by as many disparate humans as the 9/11/01 Massacre. Hundreds of real
people were scorched and roasted alive in an explosive conflagration.
And yet, with such unprecedented scrutiny tearing at the carelessly
pressed seams of the official conspiracy theory fairytale, it’s an
ineffable wonder indeed how even a decade after the event, Israel,
specifically Israeli Mossad and its extended octopus Zionist terror
network largely escape the view of the overwhelming majority of the
major researchers.
See also:
[PDF] Made In Israel - Constitutional Republic Now!
Quran itself gives warning to those who pick and choose verses according to their own wishes. "
So do you believe in part of the Scripture and disbelieve in part? Then
what is the recompense for those who do that among you except disgrace
in worldly life; and on the Day of Resurrection they will be sent back
to the severest of punishment." 2:85 So it is least
wonder why they are being getting humiliated and disgraced in this world
itself. because they not follow the words of allah that the sons of
israel are the chosen people
8 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
I know about the people who disobeyed the Sabbath and were turned into monkeys and pigs not chosen people.
8 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
jammal go to your goats... te miss you
7 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
As James says:
"In
the minds of most of the vast population of this planet there are no
such people called Israeli's.. The scumbags living there in Palestine
are generally known as occupiers! As in the past where these obnoxious
creatures have been kicked out of nearly every country on Earth their
same deserved fate awaits them there.."
7 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
sorry jammal....
Israel is a state amember of the United nations and souveirgn country
there is no and never was a palatine,,,
just a bunch of arab lies
6 hours ago
mahkhi
would
you complete your argument by quoting verses of quran implying sons of
israel are chosen people ... if of course there is any!
Let me enlighten you with Quranic verse 5:82:
"Thou
wilt find the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who
believe (to be) the Jews and the idolaters. And thou wilt find the
nearest of them in affection to those who believe (to be) those who say:
Lo! We are Christians. That is because there are among them priests and
monks, and because they are not proud."
and another verse, 39:72
"Enter the gates of Hell to abide eternally therein, and wretched is the residence of the arrogant."
9 hours ago
Nor Mubeen
The
French Revolution took more than 20 years and they did not have a fast
way of communication like today. So the dictator of this world should
read up on history: 10 years to get rid of the absolute monarchies,
relapse into dictatorship, tedious rebuilding of a functioning state...
9 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
For wider perspective I suggest you read this article:
Cables Reveal Background of Pro-Dictator U.S. Policy By Ted Rall
this is the source of this whole story,,,, as revealed to 2 days ag,,
I
am Wumi Abdul; the only Daughter of late Mr and Mrs George Abdul. My
father was a very wealthy cocoa merchant in Abidjan,the economic capital
of Ivory Coast before he was poisoned to death by his business
associates on one of their outing to discus on a business deal. When my
mother died on the 21st October 1984, my father took me and my younger
brother HASSAN special because we are motherless. Before the death of my
father on 30th June 2002 in a private hospital here in Abidjan. He
secretly called me on his bedside and told me that he had hidden some
top security documents from the south african security forces and
also indisputable evidence of
the intelligence community spies working in the arab world ...
i wil be happy to make some business with you and sell you those documents in return for a few millions...
i
know that only stupid jpurnalist with your back ground will find it
necessary to buy this so please contact me asap so i can forward you all
the original security and spies documentation
8 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
Dean Gilboa
I am selling a bridge. Interested?
9 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
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"
"For
tactical reasons , Jordan , which is a sovereign state with defined
borders , cannot raise claims to haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian
,I can undoubtedly demand Haifa , Jaffa , Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem.
However , the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine , we will
not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan. "
(PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein ,
but this is something the paid troll by al j does not wish to hear,,, as he has a paid agenda
9 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
As a "paid troll by al j", I would like to hear about the UN partitioning of Palestine. :-)
What was it all about? lol
8 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
there
is no paletine.. the never was a paletine.. it was fabricated in 1967
after the jordaninas and egyptians left a bunch of arrabs on the land
they lost in the war..
8 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
You are as ignorant as Mike Huckabee - see:
Mike Huckabee: There’s No Such Thing As The Palestinians By Luke Brinker
GOP presidential contender makes inflammatory claim -- again
Mike
Huckabee has revived the incendiary notion that there’s no such thing
as a Palestinian people, repeating an assertion that has been condemned
by a wide spectrum of historians and political analysts. ..... Yet the
Palestinians exist now, and that’s a politico-diplomatic reality with
which a President Huckabee would have to reckon. His unwillingness to do
so reveals him to be either embarrassingly ignorant or deeply
dishonest.
8 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
James says:
"In
the minds of most of the vast population of this planet there are no
such people called Israeli's.. The scumbags living there in Palestine
are generally known as occupiers! As in the past where these obnoxious
creatures have been kicked out of nearly every country on Earth their
same deserved fate awaits them there.."
6 hours ago
Abdulrahman Ibrahim
There
was no Israel. Only after the European Jews who were " banished by
Europeans" setlled down and seized the Arab lands was the Israeli state
established. There were only a small minority of original genuine Jews
at Palestine. Do not change historical facts. The British colonizer has
already called the land Palestine even when they favorably agreed to
let the European Jews to move there. Israeli trolls keep repeating your
twisted version of history.
28 minutes ago
Ali Zaid
If the Palestinian people does not exist as you and voters hungry Huckabee
claim, then you should also explain how your good book mentions the
story of Samson (the Jew) vs Delilah (the Palestinian) and on whom did
Samson bring the temple down?
If you think
this story is false, then the world should also assume that the Jewish
claim of historical Palestine is also baseless. Because you've occupied
the land of the Palestinians based on what is written in your good book.
If you deny part of it then we (the world) should deny all of it.
Hence,
we can deduct that there are no descendants of the ancient Israelites
left, and all those that claim to be Jews are in fact impostors that
immigrated from all over the world to rob the land and displace the
natives. And the natives are the Palestinians.
9 hours ago
Jamal Hamid
The "war on terror" is a hoax, a false boogeyman for intervention in the Middle East.
US created Al Qaeda (Operation Cyclone)
Biden admitted US allies armed ISIS.
Media traced the identity of ISIS beheader but covered-up the story of ISIS funding.
US allies Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Turkey, created ISIS. CIA and Mossad helped to train them - see:
...
There is something absurd about this, since the foreign jihadis in
Syria and Iraq, the people whom Obama admits are the greatest threat,
can only get to these countries because they are able to cross the
510-mile-long Turkish-Syrian border without hindrance from the Turkish
authorities. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan may now be frightened by
the Frankenstein’s monster they have helped to create, but there is
little they can do to restrain it. An unspoken purpose of the US
insistence that Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain take part or
assist in the air strikes on Syria in September was to force them to
break their former links with the jihadis in Syria. There was always
something fantastical about the US and its Western allies teaming up
with the theocratic Sunni absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf to spread democracy and enhance human rights in Syria, Iraq, and
Libya. ....
Talk about monarchies spreading democracy in Libya, Egypt and Syria with the help of terrorists. - What a joke? lol
50 minutes ago
ALi
you have to be on some very strong herbal medicine dude
10 hours ago
Ali Zaid
Part 3:
By
publicizing that ISIL, Boko Haram and co are Devil worshipers, we may
be able to cut down the influx of fooled ones and undermine their
recruitment machine. I hope the world leaves no stone un-turned if it
could help save a life and aid the fight against the NeoDemons.
10 hours ago
Ali Zaid
Part 1: DearMarwan,
Let me explain the obvious, at least for me, without much ado: These
crimes are carried-out by Devil worshipers. We may not believe whether
the Devil exists or not and frankly I don’t give a d - a - m - n. But
they do believe, and there lies the danger. They
are embracing a self-styled Islamic version of Devil
worship, in-which the black banner that they share has the three
Arabic words inside the circle written backwards, in imitation
to inverted cross in Christianity. Read, as written, from top to bottom it says “Allah is messenger of Muhammad”,instead of the other way round.
The
banner itself depicts primitive deformed image of Satan, with the
legend written abovethe circle representing flames for
hair. (Continued…)
10 hours ago
Ali Zaid
Part 2: Ask yourselves now :why don’t they just simply kill their victims by ordinary means instead of overacting ruthlessness?
The
answer is that according to Demon worship lore, Satan relishes on human
suffering, which explains the vicious methods used to kill their
targets.
More suffering means,in Demon theology, more reward for the perpetrator.
They maybe
disillusioned, but surely they are commending each other by now for
achieving one of their major goals, i-e, pitting humans against
each other.
Their first
major goal was their success in convincing the naive hordes to join
them,which the fooled flocks still do. They will not stop until all
humans grab eachother’s throats and chaos rules.
They are simply the enemies of all humanity regardless of faith, color, gender or status.
I leave it for you, dear Marwan and the CIA to investigate and verify my humble findings.
11 hours ago
AdultSupervisor
This
article is pretty much a load of bull, and this quote is the biggest
load of bull: "Israel exploited the world's preoccupation with ISIL to
attack the Gaza Strip, take over more Palestinian lands and deny
Palestinians their basic rights with no repercussions, even when it
turned its back to Washington."
How ridiculous
can this author get? Israel's attacks on Gaza were solely the result of
Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, especially those expensive and
intricate terrorist tunnels.
4 hours ago
Brigitte de Andrade
Hamas
"terrorist attacks" were just some ineffective rockets and most of them
were not even by Hamas but by the Zionists themselves. They loved
posing next to some hole in the ground in some field. Killing thousands
and flattening all their homes and infrastructure is -according to you -
not despicable. The few films of Israelis cowering against a wall or
something out of fright were cheap filiming, a lot of the 'cowering'
people were giggling.
So you are the ignorant one and think by calling yourself 'supervisor' it makes you somegbody? grow up
2 hours ago
Sudi Maharaj
correct...israel did not use isis as a cover for attack...
they dropped malaysia 370...still unfound...
they attacked at that moment.
12 hours ago
Fairgo Smith
Israel
is the poison. Israel always wants unstable middle east. That is the
way it is easier to loot and steal resources. USA been stupid to listen
to Neteniahu to attack and occupy Iraq. This Neteniahu still wants to no
agreement with Iran on nuke.
The whole ME is now
poisonous due to the cancer Israel is successfully spreading the poison
by the help of its loyal servant USA.
12 hours ago
Harry
It is 1400 year of inbreeding.....
That
is why Muslims have contributed nothing to mankind. 1 1/2 BILLION
Muslims and only eleven Nobel Prizes. Only 15 million Jews and more
than 120 Nobel Prizes, including eleven Israelis.
Nothing more needs to be said
11 hours ago
Fairgo Smith
Did you ever go to school....
11 hours ago
Harry
Actually
I graduated, first of my class, from one of Europe's finest
universities; I speak five languages, am financially very comfortable,
have a great family, and I love America and Israel.
10 hours ago
Adil Haider
@Harry
In reply to your graduating from one of Europe's finest universities:
Dear
Harry, this is the tragedy, you have graduated from one of Europe's
finest universities, you speak five languages, are financially very
comfortable, have a great family, but still you love Israel!
If
our universities were producing decent human beings who had respect for
other cultures and people this would never have been the case...I thank
you for your honest comment.
9 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
exactly.. and that what pisses them of.,,
9 hours ago
Dean Gilboa
love of israel is the love of truth..
and now most Eurpoean countries are finally getting the messeage.. its time all you muslims shape up or go out
4 hours ago
Brigitte de Andrade
A
person who gets a Nobel prize can still be a mass murderer! Does a
nobel prize make a whole nation who proved themselves to be despicable
better people?
A person should not generalize, but it seems in a
case of some certain countries a person can generalize that the majority
of a people are proven evil.
8 hours ago
Gary Smith
Israel
is the one bright shining light in the Middle East. Free, democratic,
powerful the 19th largest economy in the world. If I were a young
Muslim. That's where I would want to live, pretty good night clubs to!
12 hours ago
Harry
DON'T BLAME ISRAEL FOR THE CHAOS IN GAZA, IT'S ALL ABOUT HAMAS ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Israel exited Gaza ten years ago · Rather than developing an economically viable democracy, Hamas turned the strip into a terrorist wasteland. · Hamas attacked Israel · Hamas was quickly offered a cease-fire by Egypt, and accepted by Israel, but Hamas turned it down. · Hamas
launched rockets at Israel from public places in Gaza and then cries
foul when Israel shoots back at where the rockets came from. · After
weeks, with its back against the wall, Hamas finally accepted the same
cease-fire that it could have accepted week earlier. . The final cease-fire, as the first proposed after a few days, offered Hamas no rewards. · More
than 2000 people would still be alive had it not be for Hamas imposing
a war on Gaza, and or had it accepted the first cease-fire proposed by
Egypt. · Hamas
has only Erdogan, Qatar and Iran left as supporters, but no weapons or
money can flow to Hamas. Iran's economy is collapsing, Qatar is getting
tired of Hamas and Erdogan is n^ts.
12 hours ago
Fairgo Smith
I
am pretty sure you are doing your job very well. Everyday I can see so
many of your vulgar comments, it shows, you are really serving the
master very well. But I feel very sorry for you, that you must be the
dumbest student of a dumb university. Could not find a proper job that
is why you find specializing in propaganda is the best one for your
pathetic career. Your boss Mosad should pay you very well. Good luck in
doing this
11 hours ago
Harry
It is 1400 year of inbreeding.....
That
is why Muslims have contributed nothing to mankind. 1 1/2 BILLION
Muslims and only eleven Nobel Prizes. Only 15 million Jews and more
than 120 Nobel Prizes, including eleven Israelis.
Nothing more needs to be said
11 hours ago
Harry
i see that i'm getting under your skin !!!! lol
11 hours ago
Yaseen Waiyan
It
was the local Arabs leaders who accepted the Jews in their land -
Balfour treaty of 1917. Then, Balfour treaty of 1926 came and Jews were
trying to escape from Europe due to the Nazies.
The Jews who
come to the land of Palestine and Arabs as to receive shelters by the
help of England turned out to be the cruels who killed the children of
the people (Palestinians and Arabs) who had given shelters in their
lands.
ONLY the Jews are like that in the world. In this sense, the Jews are the same as terrorists in Western nations.
10 hours ago
AdultSupervisor
Harry - you're the best. Keep up the good work here.
13 hours ago
Torrential
For
the many posters here who are aghast at the abyssmal quality of AJ
'Senior Political Analyst' Marwan Bishara's effort, you should know
that:
Average IQ in northern European countries (adults) = 104.
Average IQ in 15 muslims countries surveyed (adults)= 76
So you see, its not entirely Mr. Bishara's fault...he is genetically-challenged!
12 hours ago
Harry
A
Danish psychologist warns that 1,400 years of inbreeding—marrying first
cousins—may be wreaking havoc on Muslim intelligence, health and
sanity. “A large part of inbred Muslims
are born from parents who are themselves inbred – which increase the
risks of negative mental and physical consequences greatly,” says
Nicolai Sennels, author of the book Among Criminal Muslims and articles
on the psychology of Islam and Muslims, in a Dec. 26 article in
10News.dk.
Combining
his own research and several studies, Sennels says the genetic damage
of such intermarriage, which is part of Islamic religion and culture
since their prophet, Mohammad, allowed it, is causing lower intelligence
(IQs), increased physical defects and greater incident of mental
illness. Almost half of Muslims worldwide
are estimated to be inbred, with 70 percent of marriages in Pakistan, 67
percent in Saudi Arabia and 80 percent in Nubia in southern Egypt in
consanguineous (blood-related) marriages to first cousins, to name just a
few of the countries he cites. “Several
studies show that children of consanguineous marriages have lower
intelligence than children of non-related parents,” Sennels says.
“Research shows that the IQ is 10-16 points lower in children born from
related parents and that abilities related to social behavior develops
slower in inbred babies.” And children born of cousins are twice as
likely as the general population to have mental or physical
disabilities, which drain municipal funds, he says. “It
probably also explains – at least partly – why two-thirds of all
immigrant school children with Arabic backgrounds are illiterate after
10 years in the Danish school system…,” Sennels says.
Read more at http://dcgazette.com/muslim-inbreeding-may-genetic-catastrophe/
13 hours ago
Bibi Yahu
"After
25 years and five failed Israeli military efforts, Gaza's natural gas
is still underwater and, after four years, the same can be said for
almost all of the Levantine gas. But things are not the same. In energy
terms, Israel is ever more desperate, even as it has been building up
its military, including its navy, in significant ways. The other
claimants have, in turn, found larger and more powerful partners to help
reinforce their economic and military claims. All of this undoubtedly
means that the first quarter-century of crisis over eastern
Mediterranean natural gas has been nothing but prelude. Ahead lies the
possibility of bigger gas wars with the devastation they are likely to
bring."
"The Great Game in the Holy Land" by Michael Schwartz
12 hours ago
Harry
A
Danish psychologist warns that 1,400 years of inbreeding—marrying first
cousins—may be wreaking havoc on Muslim intelligence, health and
sanity. “A large part of inbred Muslims
are born from parents who are themselves inbred – which increase the
risks of negative mental and physical consequences greatly,” says
Nicolai Sennels, author of the book Among Criminal Muslims and articles
on the psychology of Islam and Muslims, in a Dec. 26 article in
10News.dk.
Combining
his own research and several studies, Sennels says the genetic damage
of such intermarriage, which is part of Islamic religion and culture
since their prophet, Mohammad, allowed it, is causing lower intelligence
(IQs), increased physical defects and greater incident of mental
illness. Almost half of Muslims worldwide
are estimated to be inbred, with 70 percent of marriages in Pakistan, 67
percent in Saudi Arabia and 80 percent in Nubia in southern Egypt in
consanguineous (blood-related) marriages to first cousins, to name just a
few of the countries he cites. “Several
studies show that children of consanguineous marriages have lower
intelligence than children of non-related parents,” Sennels says.
“Research shows that the IQ is 10-16 points lower in children born from
related parents and that abilities related to social behavior develops
slower in inbred babies.” And children born of cousins are twice as
likely as the general population to have mental or physical
disabilities, which drain municipal funds, he says. “It
probably also explains – at least partly – why two-thirds of all
immigrant school children with Arabic backgrounds are illiterate after
10 years in the Danish school system…,” Sennels says.
Read more at http://dcgazette.com/muslim-inbreeding-may-genetic-catastrophe/
11 hours ago
Yaseen Waiyan
There
are paternal first cousins and maternal first cousins. According to
cultural anthropology I had taken at a college, the marriage among first
cousin is allowed depending on where you are in your family tree and
which first cousin you want to marry based on paternal first cousin or
maternal first cousin, depending on your gender. Research about it.
10 hours ago
AdultSupervisor
You are the voice of reason here Harry. Keep up the good work.
14 hours ago
Bibi Yahu
The leader of the radical Islamic State(IS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been reputed to be a Mossad-trained operativewhose real name is Elliot Shimon, the sonof Jewish parents. This information is said to have originated from1.7 million pages of top-secret documents recentlyreleased by National SecurityAgency whistleblower Edward Snowdenand made public by Iranian intelligence. Arabic Internetradio website “Ajyal.com” and the Arabicnews website “Egy-press” were also early sources beforethe news went viral. Although it cannot be conclusively verified at this point, evidence points in thatdirection.
12 hours ago
nishtfunsatmar
"Although it cannot be conclusively verified at this point, evidence points in thatdirection."
Of
course it cannot be conclusively verified; much like ti can't be
verified that Jews put blood from Chrishtian children in their matza-
because they didnt'
12 hours ago
Laura Wrzeski
Conspiracy theories and scapegoating and Muslim-against-Muslim butchery are going to destroy the Islamic world from within.
11 hours ago
Harry
It is 1400 year of inbreeding.....
That
is why Muslims have contributed nothing to mankind. 1 1/2 BILLION
Muslims and only eleven Nobel Prizes. Only 15 million Jews and more
than 120 Nobel Prizes, including eleven Israelis.
Nothing more needs to be said
10 hours ago
AdultSupervisor
That's beyond silly Bibi.
If that's your best shot, you may as well run up the white flag and surrender now in this debate.
14 hours ago
Bibi Yahu
"Iran's first female vice president, Masoumeh Ebtekar,singled out the United States and the CIAas
the progenitor of ISIL. And Iran's former Iranian minister of
intelligence, Heydar Moslehi, went further by arguing that Mossad, MI6,
And CIA created ISIL, or Daesh.Sudan's President Omar
al-Bashir agreed. He told Euronews this week that America's CIA and
Israel's Mossad are behind Boko Haram and ISIL.
"I said CIA and
the Mossad stand behind these organisations. There is no Muslim who
would carry out such acts," he said. (Bashir also blames the US and
Israel for the ICC's 2013 warrants accusing him of responsibility for
war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide.)
And so does Fidel Castro. He believes that Israel and certain American elements are behind ISIL."
Many of us have been saying this for a very long time. This is part and parcel of the Yinon Plan.
12 hours ago
Laura Wrzeski
You forgot those Mossad-trained killer sharks.
You
and those like you are going to be telling each other conspiracy
theories and trading propaganda while the Islamic world continues to
self-destruct from within.
The US/west has a
responsibility to fight Daesh because we were duped into Iraq II.
However, we no longer need ME oil and our citizens are sick of ME
entanglements. So as soon as Daesh is annihilated the US/west will
continue our interrupted process of disengagement from the ME. The ME
will be left to its self-destruction.
11 hours ago
Yaseen Waiyan
Okie, Laura,
11 hours ago
Yaseen Waiyan
Islam
can never self-destruct if there are no manipulations of the Europeans
and the Westerners. If you remember the history correctly, it was the
Europeans who colonized around the world and imposed their culture of
alcohol, tobacco, and such to their colonies. American's economy grew
with the sale of alcohol and tobacco initially after USA gained
independence from the England.
Islam can be practiced in
advanced tech and advanced functioning societies except that there are
moral grounds that people MUST abide by according to Islam. Females'
earning income is not preferable in Muslims' societies NOT because
Muslims think that females are low IQ and such BUT because many Muslims
want to have close family, which is the basic unit of society, and
mothers need to care for the children especially until the children
finish elementary school or so. Male and females are of different
natures due to God's creations. Male and female have different kinds of
strengths and weakness.
You said, " The US/West duped into Iraq
II so they have responsibility to fight Daesh. That's true, but together
with troops from Islamic nations."
And you said, " The ME will
be left to its self-destruction." It's what you said, "Okie, Laura."
But, it is not definitely what God Wills for us, Muslims. It may be or
it may not be. Whatever God Wills to be, shall be. Whatever God does
not Will to be, shall not be.
Also, I don't agree that the US/West will no longer need the ME oil. But, ME can still have customers such as China and Russia.
Just
to let you know that many Muslim students and people in Europe and
Western nations are developing skills to avoid morally corrupted
practices of the West and to blend in the technology, wisdom, prudence,
and bright conscience light of the human all together to contribute to
the societies they are in as well as the countries they come from.
That's
why I said, Okie, Laura if you say that ME will be left to its
self-destruction. Why? It will not come true with nowadays getting older
Muslim youths, young adults and adults. Islamic laws abiding Muslims
are getting better to adapt to throw away western corrupted cultures and
to improve their lives and societies positively. This period is the
period where ME is not militarily strong and such to fight the Daesh, ME
needs weapons and war training and war strategy.
But, as you said, take the responsibility of fighting the Daesh by the US/West.
11 hours ago
Harry
It is 1400 year of inbreeding.....
That
is why Muslims have contributed nothing to mankind. 1 1/2 BILLION
Muslims and only eleven Nobel Prizes. Only 15 million Jews and more
than 120 Nobel Prizes, including eleven Israelis.
Nothing more needs to be said
10 hours ago
AdultSupervisor
Your posts are always foolish Bibi, but this sort of ridiculousness is beyond stupid.
14 hours ago
Torrential
For
the many posters here who are aghast at the abyssmal quality of AJ
'Senior Political Analyst' Marwan Bishara's effort, you should know
that:
Average IQ in northern European countries (adults) = 104.
Average IQ in 15 muslims countries surveyed (adults)= 76.
So you see, its not entirely Mr. Bishara's fault...he is genetically-challenged!
14 hours ago
Bibi Yahu
Ann Hum Biol. 1983 Sep-Oct;10(5):453-63.
Genetic composition of Jewish populations: diversity and inbreeding.
Kobyliansky E, Livshits G.
Abstract
Genetic
diversity and F statistics analysis, using 9 and 5 blood group loci,
respectively, were carried out on 16 Jewish populations from 5
geographic regions: East Europe, Central Europe, South Europe, Middle
East and North Africa. The proportion of total diversity found within
populations was 98.9% while that between populations, within geographic
groups and between groups altogether was only 1.1%. The average
heterozygosity between geographic groups ranged from 0.3867 to 0.4150.
There were no significant differences between geographic groups of
populations in heterozygosity or in its variance. Average estimates of
inbreeding were as follows: Fis = 0.0419, Fst = 0.0084 and Fit = 0.0498.
Because the heterogeneity and relative proportion of diversity were
less between Jewish populations than between non-Jewish ones, we
conclude that genetic similarity between Jews is higher than between
Gentiles. The findings are in agreement with our previously obtained
calculations of genetic distances (Kobyliansky, Micle,
Goldschmidt-Nathan, Arensburg and Nathan 1982).
PMID: 6638941 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
11 hours ago
Harry
It is 1400 year of inbreeding.....
That
is why Muslims have contributed nothing to mankind. 1 1/2 BILLION
Muslims and only eleven Nobel Prizes. Only 15 million Jews and more
than 120 Nobel Prizes, including eleven Israelis.
Nothing more needs to be said
11 hours ago
Laura Wrzeski
What's your point?
14 hours ago
Yaseen Waiyan
hahahahaha...... IQ is the ONLY thing that defines intelligence???? hahaha... really?
Solve
this problem. A student at the dorm called his parents and asked them
to send more money. The parents asked, "how much?" Their son said, "Add
SEND and MORE, you will get the MONEY. Send that MONEY. That is, S E N
D + M O R E = M O N E Y. Solve it without using any equipment. If
you want to know how to solve without any equipment, google my name and
come to my blog. One of the posts at my blog is the solving that problem
without any equipment.
IQ??? If people in Europe and Western nations have higher IQ, then, why some of the inhumane acts are allowed openly???
I
don't agree that ISIL/ISIS are Muslims. But, I can't think why the
inhumane acts are done openly in the nations of very high IQ.
11 hours ago
Laura Wrzeski
I
don't think IQ has much to do with whether or not atrocities are
committed. Full-blown psychopaths are usually very intelligent and
charismatic; that combination of traits make them extremely dangerous.
Psychopathy
is now understood to be primarily genetic along with gestational
issues. So is intelligence. Science is still puzzling out the "nature
vs. nurture" question, but it is clear that
nurture/experiences/parenting MIGHT be accountable for no more than
about a third of what makes people who they are.
Fascinating stuff.
11 hours ago
Harry
It is 1400 year of inbreeding.....
That
is why Muslims have contributed nothing to mankind. 1 1/2 BILLION
Muslims and only eleven Nobel Prizes. Only 15 million Jews and more
than 120 Nobel Prizes, including eleven Israelis.
Nothing more needs to be said
11 hours ago
Fairgo Smith
very well said..
13 hours ago
peacefully911
IQ
tests are not based on intelligence levels, they are based on education
levels.. doing poorly on an IQ test, doesn't make you less intelligent,
just means your oppressive government has kept you from a decent
education..
12 hours ago
Laura Wrzeski
Erm...too
much is wrong about your post to even attempt to correct it. You
wouldn't be able to understand the corrections anyway.
11 hours ago
Harry
It is 1400 year of inbreeding.....
That
is why Muslims have contributed nothing to mankind. 1 1/2 BILLION
Muslims and only eleven Nobel Prizes. Only 15 million Jews and more
than 120 Nobel Prizes, including eleven Israelis.
Nothing more needs to be said
10 hours ago
AdultSupervisor
There must be an error in those calculations. No way the average Muslim IQ could possibly be that high.
![ISIL fighters parade in a commandeered Iraqi security forces armoured vehicle down a main road in Mosul [AP]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiWzIxx9PD60cS4r4x_IhISlu4LxXOt_nvQ_MiV4JULAVfY1nwA-ZepLXsGO99AH-g2FzdrlwGUqTHAgCBH_j0y1hC_Kymkh4QB9pgVKYcarMBCaHe5Bec77FcAoq0qcBg1KcVnLpIxJHM7mCVUjaKpoJyGi7pGRKDw80iZ-Vu4qSFdWHY4SkUuHJWsHEXO5AVjdpkoZfE_-6WaInLHGiQyzZNXUDoMdFkq7XA8PVls9cgglAYpBEU=s0-d-e1-ft "ISIL, CIA, Mossad, Quds Force, etc")
ISIL fighters parade in a commandeered Iraqi security forces armoured vehicle down a main road in Mosul [AP]
