Thursday, November 29, 2007

TALKIN' THOSE MELTDOWN CRUSADES BLUES

Yawn. Ninety-five percent of the people must be genetically inclined to be wrong 95% of the time, I suppose. But do they all have to be so obvious in their flip to skullduggery?

Or put more politely another way:

An' here again I sit so patiently
waiting to find out what price you
have to pay to get out of going through
all these [damned] things twice.


Take a gander at the soggy mush of radio personality and high-ranking dhimmi—Garrison Keillor—as he frolics through the dandelion fields of gross dhimmitude along with a gentle rejection of said mush by meat-chewing, fact-resolving, hard-working author and anti-Jihadist scholar Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.

Perhaps Keillor should jump up off his stool, wring out his PC drawers and get real. Let's begin with any number of Muslim sites which contradict this screwball western-dhimmi propaghanda. Here's one called Muslims Against Sharia, who are very clear about what is wrong with Islam, historically and currently.

Let's start here: THE BIG LIE

The Big Lie is taqiyya. The Allah-sanctioned lie is defined quite clearly in the Qu'ran. Hear the explanation through the words on one rather humorous Muslim:

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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

BLOODY, BRUTAL, AND NEWSWORTHY

Read the following, and do not be confused. This sort of activity is not unusual in parts of the world ruled by Islamicists. The question sis: should we not be against them? But you won't hear about this in the mainstream media of the West. Why not?

Crucifixion:

"The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter..." (Qur'an 5:33)

Beheading:

"Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks; at length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly (on them): thereafter (is the time for) either generosity or ransom, until the war lays down its burdens...." (Qur'an 47:4)

"Muslim crucified, two Buddhists beheaded in Thailand: police," from AFP (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):


NARATHIWAT, Thailand (AFP) — A Muslim military informant was shot and crucified, while two Buddhist men were beheaded Wednesday by suspected Islamic separatists in Thailand's restive south, police said. The Muslim man, a 58-year-old who belonged to a government-backed militia, was shot and then stabbed so badly that he was nearly decapitated, police Lieutenant Khanchitthol Kreunor told AFP.

Suspected rebels then drove six-inch nails through his head, arms and legs to attach him to two pieces of wood, which were laid out like a cross in the middle of a road in Rueso district of Narathiwat province, near the southern border with Malaysia, he said. Khanchitthol said police found a note written in Thai and left near the cross, reading: "This is what the infidels deserve. The soldier dogs must meet this end."

"The victim was attacked and killed in such a grisly way because they knew he was a military informant. This is to terrify the people," Khanchitthol said.

About two hours later, two Buddhist fishmongers aged 20 and 61 were shot and then beheaded in another district of Narathiwat, police said. The killings came after a month of spiralling violence in the region, which has seen more than 2,700 killed since separatist unrest erupted four years ago....

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

THE TEDDY BEAR OUTRAGE

Teddy Bear
LONDON, England (CNN)— UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Tuesday that officials were working to secure the early release of a British teacher who faces being whipped in Sudan after she allowed her class to name a teddy bear "Mohammed" in an exercise designed to teach creative exchange, voting protocol, and consensus-building, Gillian Gibbons, 54, has been accused of blasphemy and is being held by police in the capital Khartoum, Kirsty Saunders, British Foreign Office spokeswoman told CNN.

Police arrested the school teacher after she asked her class of seven-year-olds to come up with a name for the toy as part of a school project, according to widespread media reports. Parents of students at the Unity High School in Khartoum informed the authorities and Gibbons was taken into custody Sunday, Saunders told CNN. So far Gibbons has yet to be charged with any offense, however, under Sudanese law, insulting Islam is punishable with 40 lashes, a jail term of up to six months or a fine, she said.

However, a Sudanese official told CNN that if police decided that Gibbons had acted in good faith, she would most likely be spared punishment.

"If the intentions are good, definitely she will be absolved and will be cautioned not to repeat this thing again," Mutrif Siddig, Sudan's under secretary for foreign affairs, said.

According to a report in The Times newspaper, Gibbons had asked the children to pick their favorite name for the new class mascot, which she was using to aid lessons about animals and their habitats. A member of the Sudanese government told CNN Muslim parents at the school informed the authorities after considering that her actions were offensive to their faith.

Mutrif Siddig, Sudan's under secretary for foreign affairs, said: "To give the name of Mohammed to this teddy bear, it was considered as insult by some parents. And this school is mixed, it is not all Christian students."

Separately, CNN contacted a member of staff, who confirmed the school had been shut down temporarily as a result of the incident involving Gibbons. He refused to give his name and said no other members of staff were available.

Geez, it was the kids who named the teddy bear, not the teacher. As someone surely must point out, if there is to be an outrage, should it not theoretically be directed against these "blasphemous" Islamic children?

Read more.

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FRANCE AND HER MUSLIM YOUTHS

VILLIERS-LE-BEL, France - Rampaging youths rioted for a second night in Paris' suburbs, firing at officers and ramming burning cars into buildings. At least 77 officers were injured, a senior police union official said Tuesday.

The overnight violence was more intense than during three weeks of rioting in 2005, said the official, Patrice Ribeiro. He said that "genuine urban guerillas with conventional weapons and hunting weapons" were among the rioters. The riots were triggered by the deaths of two teens killed in a crash with a police patrol car on Sunday in Villiers-le-Bel, a blue-collar town in Paris' northern suburbs.

Residents claimed that officers left the crash scene without helping the teens, whose motorbike collided with the car. Officials cast doubt on the claim, but the internal police oversight agency was investigating. Rioting first erupted in Villiers-le-Bel on Sunday night. It grew worse and spread Monday night to other towns north of Paris. Rioters hurled stones and petrol bombs at police, authorities said.

The use of firearms added a dangerous new dimension. Firearms are widespread in France, and police generally carry guns. Guns, though, were rarely used in the 2005 riots that spread to poor housing projects nationwide. Police are facing "a situation that is far worse than that of 2005," said Ribeiro, national secretary of the Synergie officers union.

"Our colleagues will not allow themselves to be fired upon indefinitely without responding," he warned on RTL radio. "They will be placed in situations which will become untenable."

Read more commentary on the sad state of French affairs here, but in particular, new observers to this story should first read Hugh Fitzgerald's more comprehensive comments found here.

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Friday, November 23, 2007

BEHEADINGS IN BAGHDAD

Beheading
BAGHDAD - Three suspected al Qaeda militants, including two sisters, beheaded their uncle and his wife, forcing the couple's children to watch, Iraqi police said on Friday. The militants considered that school guard Youssef al-Hayali was an infidel because he did not pray and wore western-style trousers, they told police interrogators after being arrested in Diyala province northwest of Baghdad.

The three cousins executed Hayali and his wife Zeinab Kamel at the all-boys school in Jalawlah in Diyala province, village police chief Captain Ahmed Khalifa said. No further details were available. Sunni Arab communities across Iraq have been turning against al Qaeda because of its indiscriminate killings and strict interpretation of Islam, which includes a ban on smoking in public and forcing schoolgirls to wear veils.

Read more...

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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY


It's not easy in the world of appearances to disappear.
Dreaming, one pixel at a time. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Okay, that's an old riff I lifted from the man on the moon, but having just signed up for the news aggragate Technorati, I'm feeling more than a bit bellicose right now, in fact I am feeling dizzzzz zeeeeee....

Technorati Profile

Which reminds me that I have recently kindled a fledgling friendship with a woman who's somewhat of a semi-pro in the political activist game, as far away from my point of view as to seem a mere speck on the horizon, this anarcho-Marxist seems to always be on the prowl for fellow operatives, a beautiful, delightful, captivating woman, but how dare she tell me this week that I seem to project little or no politics. My response to her was simple, "I know what I am against more than I know what I am for."

This was a lie, but it seemed appropriate.

I thought my response summed things up rather nicely, especially since I had leveled a similar characterization at dozens of hard Left associates who have dragged me into their oscillating sphere of influence the past twenty uears or so, associates who were quite nimble and adept at negatively critiquing every cubic inch of modern life as we know it, but never seemed to have three words to rub together in actually articulating a workable vision of a better world, much less slaying the existing dragon, laying the new tracks and dredging the old tributaries true believers in this brave new world would require in getting from here to there.

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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

FOR THE LOVE OF HATRED

Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Sheik Ahmad Bahr from Hamas, declared during a Friday sermon at a Sudan Mosque that America and Israel will be annihilated and called upon Allah to kill the Jews and the Americans "to the very last one."

"America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain."

But hey, according to our "selfless" ideolgues on the Left and the Right, it's the Zionist Jews and the headbanging Americans who are conducting all the bully boy tactics, never mind that the Lords of Islam have maintained this posture long before the founding of the Jewish State in 1947 and their concerted attack on Israel in 1948.

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DEFINING HATRED BY MANIFEST DESTINY

Here we go again, with this damnable moral equivalency argument. We are living in the year 2007, but some people, both the aggressors and their apologists just love to pacify us all with references to the deep past when it is the actions of the aggressors in today's world that is at issue.

In this video, this terse Muslim carefully lays out his asnine plan of destruction for Israel and the United States. Let's be clear about this singular point. Friends of Mohammed are no friends of mine.

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Monday, November 19, 2007

ARTISTS FEARFUL TO ADDRESS ISLAM



Britain’s contemporary artists are fêted around the world for their willingness to shock but fear is preventing them from tackling Islamic fundamentalism. Grayson Perry, the cross-dressing potter, Turner Prize winner and former Times columnist, said that he had consciously avoided commenting on radical Islam in his otherwise highly provocative body of work because of the threat of reprisals.

Perry also believes that many of his fellow visual artists have also ducked the issue, and one leading British gallery director told The Times that few major venues would be prepared to show potentially inflammatory works.

“I’ve censored myself,” Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

Perry’s highly decorated pots can sell for more than £50,000 and often feature sex, violence and childhood motifs. One work depicted a teddy bear being born from a penis as the Virgin Mary. “I’m interested in religion and I’ve made a lot of pieces about it,” he said. “With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction so I just play safe all the time.”

The fate of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker who was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004 after he made a film portraying violence against women in Islamic societies, is the most chilling example of what can happen to an artist who is perceived to have offended Islam. Perry said that he had also been scared by the reaction across the Islamic world to Danish cartoons deemed anti-Muslim in 2006 and by the protests against Salman Rushdie’s knighthood this year.

Across Europe there is growing evidence that freedom of expression has been curtailed by fear of religious fundamentalism. Robert Redeker, a French philosophy teacher, is in hiding after calling the Koran a “book of extraordinary violence” in Le Figaro in 2006; Spanish villages near Valencia have abandoned a centuries-old tradition of burning effigies of Muhammad to mark the reconquest of Spain, against the Moors; and an opera house in Berlin banned a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo because it depicted the beheading of Muhammad (as well as Jesus and other spiritual leaders).

Read it all, and don’t neglect the comments. That’s where the REAL story exists.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

TANCREDO HITS A NERVE

Tancredo
On the heels of Republican Tom Tancredo's recent controversial television spot, where he links open borders to lost American jobs and easy immigration access to jihadists, here is an excerpt from The Concord Monitor in New Hampshire of a recent exchange between the candidate on the campaign trail and a young Muslim woman in his audience:

Describing the United States as "the last best hope" for carrying on the ideals of western civilization, Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo called last night for an end to the nation's "bilingualization" and "Balkanization."

Tancredo's comments didn't go unchallenged last night. One after another, audience members pressed him on his views on language, assimilation and border security, at times leading to heated exchanges.

"I speak the same language as the people that flew into the towers; I speak the same language as all the Iraqis we are killing; I speak many languages, and I'm proud of it," said Siham Elhamoumi, 22, who recently graduated from St. Michael's College in Vermont and traveled to the event with a group from the college. "Am I the enemy?" Elhamoumi then pulled her shawl over her head, so it covered her hair. "Am I the enemy if I do this?"

"Do you take us for idiots, for people who have no appreciation of our history?" she asked. "Perhaps you don't have an understanding of your country right now, of its composition."

Tancredo repeatedly broke in, asking Elhamoumi to pose a question. He finally asked her a question of his own: "Do you believe that we should replace the Constitution with Sharia law?"

"That is below me," Elhamoumi replied. "Do not belittle people's opinions and people's beliefs and people's religions. Do not put one religion above the other."

Pure subterfuge and deception. Islam is the religion that puts itself above all others, and in fact seeks to eradicate all others as soon as it possibly can gain the upper hand. Just ask the Buddhists and hindus in the Far East. Ask the Christians in Lebanon, Egypt, Pakistan, and dozen of other fronts. This young Muslim women is a codespeaker.

For commentary and translation, read more here.

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Friday, November 16, 2007

THE STORY OF ADAM



HERE IS THE story of how I got snookered into supporting a group of nincompoops, and what happened with these same nimcompoops at George Washington University a week later…

On the morning of October 8, a group hung more than 100 posters containing the text “Hate Muslims? So do we!!!” The poster also featured a picture of an Arab man, labeling Muslims with “lasers in eyes,” “venom from mouth” and a “suicide vest.”

Two days passed. Finally, seven students admitted the actions to the GWU newspaper, The Hatchet, with Adam Kokesh, a grad student admitting his leadership of the group. Two others signed confessions with the university's police department but chose to protect their identity by not coming forward publicly. Reportedly, the students involved met each other through the Campus Anti-War Network, a student organization.

In their own defense, the group claimed that the poster was meant to mock Islamo-Facism Awareness Week, an event organized by Young America’s Foundation, a conservative organization. Kokesh, a prominent anti-war Iraq veteran, and one of the two members of the IVAW that I had met at a fundraiser eight days prior to the mass posting, admitted that the satirical posters were intended to be overtly racist, therefore rendering them "obviously" satirical.

The political vision of Adam Kokesh insists that those who oppose Islamofascism, and want to educate people to its dangers, are racist, but the problems with that stance are immediate, and would include Muslims who speak out, like Muslims Against Sharia. And the rub is intensified when we include notable ex-Muslims and those "treasured" moderate Muslims who brave retaliation within their own ranks to oppose the radical Islamic fundamentalism.

These twisted arguments against Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week inevitably infected liberal Fox News pundit Alan Colmes (who'd invited Kokesh onto his show, but had to reel him in when Kokesh accused the show itself of racism because it didn't have room for Kokesh's Muslim friend to sit on the panel) with the same loss of judgement a few days later when Colmes was completely flummoxed by terrorist expert Steve Emerson by repeatedly insisting that, “The word Islamofascist smears all Muslims!”

Of course, the Colmes logic (and Bush with his "Religion of Peace" mantra) is strained beyond credibility because it falsely describes the dangerous and ruthless war ideology we’re all up against, and have been for several decades, while others before us have been fighting off these jihad-inspired marauders across the globe for centuries.

What did Mr. Kokesh and his band of merry “satirists” get for their inflammatory smears against a reputable organization, (Young America’s Foundation)? Disciplinary probation and a mere $25 fine each. But for those living here in DC when the firestorm broke out, university officials and DC police were in a fearsome lather in broadcasting their hunt for these "hate speech" criminals. Turns out, it was just satire. Oh, now I see.

Sergio Gor, YAF’s president, indicated that he was unhappy with the outcome of the judicial proceedings, pointing out that the students unfairly attacked his group and should be suspended or expelled. “I think it’s absolutely unacceptable that, once again, we see the double standards that are being applied—because the punishment doesn’t fit the crime,” Gor said.

With all that dirty laundry out of the way, allow me to share a personal observation. As stated above, I met Adam Kokesh in person a mere eight days before this scandal hit the GW campus. I donated thirteen small painting works to the silent auction fundraiser in which he appeared, raising several hundred dollars to benefit the IVAW cause. My position on the war is predicated on fighting the real war, not a war intent on nation-building and spreading democracy to an improbable candidate. Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch admirably articulates this position here, and I tend to agree with his language.

So while I found myself standing on a crowded wooden deck in southern Maryland fumbling with plastic plate and beer cup among a group of hardcore anti-war activists, pseudo-pacifists, and friends of Nader, most of whom I might surely disagree on most political talking points, I felt that I could concede common ground with regards to witnessing for a patriotic intelligence in saving American lives and treasure by withdrawing from Iraq sooner rather than later with the intent of throwing the Camp of Islam into inevitable chaos and allowing it to do unto itself what it wishes to do unto us, thus weakening it, and at the same time, revealing its true ugly nature.

Yes. There I was on the deck. Two former Iraq War veterans, who at some point later in the afternoon would give five minute pep talks to the crowd of devoted activists, included Adam Kokesh. What I found very strange as each of these two former military combatants passed, or I should say, pressed by me in the elbow to elbow strain of the moment on a crowded deck, was this. I was wearing a black t-shirt with the word SECURITY in bold white letters sprawled across the front. Who hasn't seen these shirts, right? I recollect buying my two at a JC Penney Big & Tall Man's shop.

But immediately upon meeting me eye to eye, each of the former soldiers cum activists, as they pushed past me following each other to the opposite end of the crowded deck, staggered backwards a few inches, their heads thrown back in a whiplash movement, after reading the word SECURITY on my shirt. One of them, and I believe it was the other young man, and not Mr. Kokesh, who said to me with a puzzled look, "I guess that shirt gets you into a lot of places, doesn't it?"

I was stunned by this visual image of him jerking back, and was already busy trying to interpret it in my mind, but I still managed to reply, "Well, I guess it does."

Not exactly the king of the snappy comebacks, but I remain perplexed at the notion that the written word—security—itself was tantamount to intimidation in the minds of these two young former soldiers.

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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

SOUR DISSENTION ON THE TEAM



Two old hands in the anti-jihad mpvement have suffered a major, and from several vantage points, a seemingly permanent one. This riff between Little Green Football's blooger Charles Johnson and the European freelance essayist working under the pseudomyn of Fjordman has been going on for a while, deals with those subtle matters found in any "guilty by association" smear, and has been reported on by several independent sources. Both have been liberally linked and quoted on this site. Now Fjordman himself, musters up his substantial response, published on the Gates of Vienna blog:

I recently announced my intention to take a long break from posting at the website Little Green Footballs due to the ongoing controversy regarding the participants in the counter-Jihad in Europe. Shortly after, Charles Johnson announced that Fjordman was “taking a permanent break. After the misrepresentations he’s posted about me and my views, despite being corrected many times, he’s not welcome at LGF.” Just out of curiosity, and with no intention of posting anything, I tried to log in to my account at LGF and discovered that it was blocked. I’ve now been officially banned from LGF, after having posted comments there at irregular intervals for several years.

I have a few unofficial rules I try to stick to when I write essays. The first one is that I should cooperate with as many different people as possible, religious or non-religious, right-wingers or left-wingers (yes, a few sensible left-wingers do exist, even if you have to dig for them) provided I think they have a sensible approach and contribute to combating the global Jihad. The other one is that since I write under the pseudonym Fjordman and not my real name, I try as much as possible to refrain from criticizing those who make significant contributions while using their real names. I will have to deviate somewhat from these rules here because, frankly, I feel that I don’t have much of a choice in this particular case. I cannot pretend that what has happened during the last few weeks didn’t happen, and I have to write some kind of response since the rift between me and LGF now has become permanent. So here goes.


Read it all.

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THE TAFFY PULL OF MUSLIM SCIENCE



With all the Orwellian distortions by Muslim apologists of Islamic contributions to hard science filtering in from the Twilight Zone of lates, here is another generalized take by a reader named Jerome From Layton:

Actually, I think that there are two sides to this "Middle Eastern Science" question. During the early Middle Ages, there was a higher level of freedom of action within the areas under Islam than in Europe. This meant that the Arabs, Persians, Egyptions, etc. could participate in commerce, technology, and science as long as they didn't threaten the position of Islam. And, yes, there are Arabic words in our scientific lexicon such as alcohol which was identified as a specific chemical after the Arabs invented distillation. A huge number of stars are derived from Arabic names which helps explain why they are so hard to pronounce. The Church demeaned the Arabic numbering system that the whole world uses today as "vulger mathematics". While the Greeks invented concepts such as pi and geometry, the Arabs gave us the word "algebra". So far, so good, then something changed.

I suspect that change happened when the Islamic forces started losing. It took them a couple hundred years to realize that they lost the initiative after they were beaten by Charles "The Hammer" Martel in France. After that, came the Crusades which put more pressure on Islam and what followed can be explained by any cop who deals with domestic disturbances. Losers tend to get violent and very controlling with independent thought being the first casualty. After that, "Islamic Science" became a memory.

Western science took off during the Reformation and the Age of Reason. The question of the day is about the ability of the Islamics to perform a similar transformation. If they don't, the current world war will only intensify.

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

NO PEACE FOR MUSLIMS



Is this the New Europe, slithering into the old lands on empty bellies and sadistic, dark beliefs? Are Muslims being deprived of painkilling anesthesia during surgery by evil neo-Nazi racists? Read on...

A Belgian anesthetist has filed a complaint against a Muslim who blocked him from entering the operating theatre where his wife was to undergo emergency surgery. The woman was operated with the male doctor shouting instructions from a hallway to a female nurse.

Doctor Philippe Becx from Bree, Belgium, was called to the hospital in the middle of the night because a woman had to undergo an emergeny caesarean section. However, her husband blocked the door and demanded a female anesthetist. The latter was unavailable.

After a two-hour discussion proved fruitless, an imam was summoned. The imam permitted the doctor to apply an epidural injection, but only if the woman was fully covered with only a small area of skin showing. During the surgery itself, performed by a female gynecologist, the anesthetist was to remain in the hallway. Through a door that was slightly ajar, he shouted instructions to a nurse who was monitoring the anesthesia.

According the hospital’s directors, the doctor acted with ‘admirable understanding.’ He would have been in his right to have the man removed by police. And this behavior on the part of Muslim men explains why breast cancer is generally left untreated in the Middle East.

And here is another quite reasonable response to this Islamic hysteria I read somewhere:

"General Charles Napier, one-time conqueror and commander-in-chief of India, was faced with a Hindu grandee who insisted on keeping the Indian tradition of burning alive the wives with their predeceased husbands. Napier said,

'You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.'"

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Monday, November 12, 2007

AMAZING ANTI-JIHADI RADIO SHOW


Better late than never. I just found this today. Shire may be closing down its podcast production, but before they do Little Green Footballs' own Charles Johnson is interviewed by Tom Paine of the Shire Network News podcasting team. Listen to it all. There's more first-hand info packed into this one clip than I could offer in three days worth of essays:





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UNTIL OUR SHADOWS CRY

Noose
In noting that recent racial events in the southern states of Louisiana and Maryland have escalated tensions among certain neighborhoods and racial activists across America, many continue to co-opt and elevate the noose and its mere representation to the level of a hate crime. By claiming ownership of such symbols, as visceral as these symbols may have come to represent their own "progressive" stance against the real horrors of violent racism, these activists tend to rewrite history to fit their present day special interests in race politics. However, we should remember that there have been many other groups in this young nation's history and elsewhere who have been strung up by the neck until they were lifeless.

In the American west, cattle rusters and horse thieves were among the unwashed hordes who were hung from the nearest tree, often without so much as a trial. Suffice it to say, most of these criminals as well as the vigilantes and lawmen who hung them were white. Suicides also often carefully paln and hang themselves by the noose.

In the global news just today, in a culture half a globe away we learn that another group exhibits a certain predilection with regards to capital punishment by hanging. More than 1,000 university students demonstrated in eastern Afghanistan Sunday to demand the death penalty for an official accused of insulting the Qu'ran, police and witnesses said.

The attorney general's spokesman, former journalist Mohammad Ghaws Zalmai, was arrested at the Pakistan border a week ago trying to flee after being accused of misinterpreting the Muslim holy book in a new translation. Apparently, this reformer had softened some of the more violent passages in the Qu'ran, and for this transgressions, his life is of course, now in danger.

"Death to Ghaws Zalmai!" shouted the angry mob in the eastern town of Jalalabad, an AFP reporter in the crowd said. "We want him hanged!"

The conservative parliament last week banned Zalmai from leaving the country days after the distribution of about 6,000 copies of his Dari-language translation. Sad news indeed.

Ignoring all other pressing issues beckoning us from this blog entry, my question is this. Who among us really owns the right to be "offended" by the mere symbolism of the noose? Blacks? Horse thieves? All humanity in seeking the humane? How is it that we all seem to be given enough rope to hang ourselves by the time all is said and done by the positions we take in our very short and contradictory lives? I wonder.

Because we must also remember that several Jewish students at George Washington University also recentkly confessed to painting a swastika on their own dorm rooms, apparently "to raise awareness."

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Saturday, November 10, 2007

CHEATING ON THE LITMUS TEST


Where once was sand and rock, Israel blooms despite its enemies.
When Middle Eastern Muslims speak of "peace" what they really mean is the annihilation of Israel. They announce wth fervor "the Jews stole our land" but this bit of moral subterfuge is as much a lie as their delusion that Kuffirs "steal our oil."

Last time I looked, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, the UAE and others were making a killing off he West, and building monuments to their own egos and flexing their militant nee religious muscles as a result of this sudden lucre in their midst.

Prior to 1948, the Zionists, by and large, bought marginal real estate (Tel-Aviv was sand dunes) from the large Arab landowners. The Arabs got top price for the real estate. Many Arab land sellers then antagonized the average Arab with denunciations that the Jews coming into the area.

The real objection that these Arabs nurse to the hilt is that Jews should dare create much less prosper a non-Dhimmi state of their own in Dar-al-Islam at all. Hence the 1948 war and all subsequent hostilities.

Though Zionism is essentially a defensive ideology (as opposed to offensive Islam), at some point Israel will have to become extremely aggressive in order to survive. The Arabs have consistently underestimated the Mideast Jews who relocated there, as well as the Holocaust survivors who fled to Israel. "Never again," means "never again".

Just yesterday, a friend of mine, a 20-year anti-terrorism veteran of the US State Department recently returned from a vacation in Israel and Jordan. He made several remarks or gave answers to questions I posed that seemed at odds with each other. First of all, when I asked did he feel safe, he answered affirmatively. But he also added that as a secular Jew, he found himself empathizing and actually becoming more of a Zionist every day as reports of missles lobbed into Israel every day he was there took root in his psyche, echoing the "Never again" sentiment.

He was also amazed that when riding in the country, one could immediately spot whether he was approaching an Israeli village or a Arab one. The tell-tale sign was simple green grass. Of the billions of dollars in foreign aid sent to Palestine few of them ever get into the ground except with the death of one of the corrupt pocket-lined officials. But missles? Oh yes, the Arabs have AN ABUNDANCE of them.

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Friday, November 09, 2007

GADHAFI'S SON ADMITS TORTURE

Bok
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's son, who is touted as a reformer, has acknowledged that Bulgarian medical workers jailed for allegedly infecting children with HIV were tortured in captivity, an admission apparently aimed at showing a more open face to the West. Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, shown in a 2002 photo, has been touted as a reformer. The release last month of the five nurses and a doctor after nearly nine years in prison boosted Libya's ties with Europe, a key goal of the elder Gadhafi.

But since their release, Dr. Ashraf al-Hazouz, a Palestinian who was granted Bulgarian citizenship, and some of the nurses have spoken frequently in the European media of the torture they underwent to force them to confess to infecting the children with the AIDS virus. They have since retracted the confessions and denied infecting the children.

With the admission, the Libyan leader's son, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, may have been trying to put the torture issue aside and burnish his own credentials as a candid promoter of change in the long-isolated nation.

"Yes, they (the medics) were tortured by electricity and they were threatened that their family members would be targeted," he said in an interview with the pan-Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera, excerpts of which were aired Wednesday.

The younger Gadhafi made no apology for the torture in the excerpts and even cast doubt on al-Hazouz's specific allegations of mistreatment, saying "a lot of what the Palestinian doctor has claimed are merely lies."

Al-Hazouz accused Gadhafi's son of acting in his own self interest. "Seif al-Islam always tells only a part of the truth, manipulating the media," the doctor told The Associated Press. "I told the full truth ... All of us were tortured like animals."

Later Thursday, al-Hazouz repeated many of his allegations of torture to Al-Jazeera, saying the medics were subjected to "electricity, beatings, sleep and food deprivation."

"They threatened to rape me and they threatened to rape one of my sisters," he added. Snezhana Dimitrova, one of the nurses, said she was glad Gadhafi's son had told the truth. "The fact that a Libyan and the son of Gadhafi at that has told the truth is very gratifying and I thank him for it," she told the AP.

Read it all.

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Friday, November 02, 2007

TEN THINGS TO REMEMBER



Originally published on Jihad Watch website on November 24, 2004

JIHAD WATCH Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald's brilliant and absolutely must-be-read exploration of the very concept of moderate Islam and the existence of moderate Muslims:

1. Not only Muslims, but "islamochristians" objectively promote and push the propagandistic line that disguises the Jihad (evidence of which can be found worldwide), and mislead as to both what prompts that Jihad (not "poverty" or "foreign policy" but the precepts of the belief-system of Islam) and what will sate it (not Kashmir, not Chechnya, not the absurd "two-state solution," not continued appeasement in France and Holland—there is nothing that will sate or satisfy it, as long as part of the globe is as yet resistent to the rule of Islam). "Christians" such as Fawaz Gerges or Rami Khoury, or someone who was born a Christian, such as Edward Said, are Arabs whose views are colored by that self-perception. Their loyalty to the community and history of Arabs causes them to be as loyal to the Islamic view of things as if they had been born Muslim. They stoutly defend Islam against all of Western scholarship (in Orientalism), or divert attention away from Islam and constantly assert, in defiance of all the evidence, from Bali to Beslan to Madrid, that the "problem of Israel/Palestine"—the latest, and most sinister formulation of the Jihad against Israel—is the fons et origo of Muslim hostility and murderous aggression throughout the world. Save for the Copts and Maronites, who regard themselves not as Arabs but as "users" of the "Arabic language" (and reject the idea that such "users" therefore become "Arabs"), many Arab Christians have crazily embraced the Islamic agenda; the agenda, that is, of those who have made the lives of Christians in the Middle East so uncertain, difficult, and at times, imperilled. The attempt to be "plus islamiste que les islamistes"—the approach of Rami Khoury and Hanan Ashrawi—simply will not do, for it has not worked. It is Habib Malik and other Maronites in Lebanon who have analysed the problem of Islam in a clear-eyed fashion. Indeed, the best book on the legal status of non-Muslims under Islam is that of the Lebanese (Maronite) scholar Antoine Fattal.

Any "islamochristian" Arab who promotes the Islamic agenda, by participating in a campaign that can only mislead Infidels and put off their understanding of Jihad and its various instruments, is objectively as much part of the problem as the Muslim who knowingly practices taqiyya in order to turn aside the suspicions of non-Muslims. Whoever acts so as to keep the unwary Infidel unwary is helping the enemy.

Think, for a minute, of Oskar Schindler. A member of the Nazi Party, but hardly someone who followed the Nazi line. But what if Schindler had at some point met with Westerners—and had continued, himself, to deny that the Nazis were engaged in genocide, even if he himself deplored it and would later act against it? Would we think of him as a "moderate"? As someone who had helped the anti-Nazi coalition to understand what it was up against?

Or for another example, think of Ilya Ehrenburg, who in 1951 or so was sent abroad by Stalin to lie about the condition of Yiddish-speaking intellectuals whom Stalin had recently massacred. Ehrenburg went to France, went to Italy. He did as he was told. "Peretz? Markish? Oh, yes, saw Peretz at his dacha last month with his grandson. Such a jovial fellow. Markish—he was great last year in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District—you should see how it comes across in zhargon, Yiddish..." And so it went. Eherenburg lied, and lied. He was not a Stalinist. He hated Stalin. He of course hated the destruction of Peretz, Markish, and many others who had been killed many months before—as Ehrenburg knew perfectly well. When he went abroad and lied to the editors of Nouvelle Revue Francaise, what was he? Objectively, he was promoting the interests of Joseph Stalin, and the Red Army, and the Politburo. We need not inquire into motives. We need only see what the results of such lying were. And the same is true of those Christian Arabs who lie on behalf of Islam—some out of fear, some out of an ethnocentric identification so strong that they end up defending Islam, the religion of those who persecuted the Christian Arabs of the Middle East, and some out of venality (if Western diplomats and journalists can be on the Arab take, why not Arabs themselves?), some out of careerism. If you want to rise in the academic ranks, and your field is the Middle East, unless you are a real scholar—Cook or Crone or Lewis—better to parrot the party line, which costs you nothing and gains you friends in tenure-awarding, grant-giving, reference-writing circles. There is at least one example, too, among those mentioned, in a situation where an Arabic-speaking Christian, attempting to find refuge from Muslim persecution, needed the testimony of an "expert"—which "expert," instead of offering a pro-bono samaritan act, demanded so much money to be involved (in a fantastic display of greed) that the very idea of solidarity among Arab Christians was called by this act permanently into question.

2. The word "moderate" cannot be reasonably applied to any Muslim who continues to deny the contents—the real contents, not the sanitized or gussied-up contents—of Qur'an, hadith, and sira. Whether that denial is based on ignorance, or based on embarrassment, or based on filial piety (and an unwillingness to wash dirty ideological laundry before the Infidels) is irrelevant. Any Muslim who, while seeming to deplore every aspect of Muslim aggression, based on clear textual sources in Qur'an and hadith, or on the example of Muhammad as depicted in the accepted sira—Muhammad that "model" of behavior—is again, objectively, acting in a way that simply misleads the Infidels. And any Muslim who helps to mislead Infidels about the true nature of Islam cannot be called a "moderate." That epithet is simply handed out a bit too quickly for sensible tastes.

3. What of a Muslim who says—there are terrible things in the sira and hadith, and we must find a way out, so that this belief-system can focus on the rituals of individual worship, and offer some sustenance as a simple faith for simple people? This would require admitting that a great many of Muhammad's reported acts must either be denied, or given some kind of figurative interpretation, or otherwise removed as part of his "model" life. As for the hadith, somehow one would have to say that Bukhari, and Muslim, and the other respected muhaddithin had not examined those isnad-chains with quite the right meticulousness, and that many of the hadith regarded as "authentic" must be reduced to the status of "inauthentic." And, following Goldziher, doubt would have to be cast on all of the hadith, as imaginative elaborations from the Qur'an, without any necessarily independent existence.

4. This leaves the Qur'an. Any "moderate" who wishes to prevent inquiry into the origins of the Qur'an—whether it may be the product of a Christian sect, or a Jewish sect, or of pagan Arabs who decided to construct a book, made up partly of Christian and Jewish material mixed with bits and pieces of pagan Arab lore from the time of the Jahiliya—or to prevent philological study (of, for example, Aramaic and other loan-words)—anyone who impedes the enterprise of subjecting the Qur'an to the kind of historical inquiry that the Christian and Jewish Bibles have undergone in the past 200 years of inquiry, is not a "moderate" but a fervent Defender of the Faith. One unwilling to encourage such study—which can only lead to a move away from literalness for at least some of the Believers—again is not "moderate."

5. The conclusion one must reach is that there are, in truth, very few moderates. For if one sees the full meaning of Qur'an, hadith, and sira, and sees how they have affected the behavior of Muslims both over 1400 years of conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, and in stunting the development—political, economic, moral, and intellectual—of Muslims everywhere, it is impossible not to conclude that this imposing edifice is not in any sense moderate or susceptible to moderation.

What must an intelligent Muslim, living through the hell of the Islamic Republic of Iran, start to think of Islam? Or that Kuwaiti billionaire, with houses in St. James Place and Avenue Foch and Vevey, as well as the family/company headquarters in Kuwait City, who sends his children to the American School in Kuwait, and boasts that they know English better than they know Arabic, helps host Fouad Ajami when he visits Kuwait, is truly heartsick to see Kuwait's increasing islamization? Would he allow himself to say what he knows in public, or in front of half-brothers, or to friends—knowing that at any moment, they may be scandalized by his free-thinking views, and that he may run the risk of losing his place in the family's pecking order and, what's more, in the family business?

The mere fact that Muslim numbers may grow in the Western world represents a permanent threat to Infidels. This is true even if some, or many, of those Muslims are "moderates"—i.e. do not believe that Islam has some kind of divine right, and need, to expand until it covers the globe and swallows up dar al-harb. For if they are still to be counted in the Army of Islam, not as Deserters (Apostates) from that Army, their very existence in the Bilad al-kufr helps to swell Muslim ranks, and therefore perceived Muslim power. And even the "moderate" father may sire immoderate children or grandchildren—that was the theme of the Hanif Kureishi film, quasi-comic but politically acute, "My Son the Fanatic." Whether through Da'wa or large families, any growth in the Muslim population will inhibit free expression (see the fates of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the threats made to Geert Wilders, Carl Hagen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others), for politicans eager to court the Muslim vote will poohpooh Muslim outrages and strive to have the state yield to Muslim demands—for the sake of short-term individual gain. And Muslim numbers, even with "moderates," increases the number of Muslim missionaries—for every Muslim is a missionary—whether conducting "Sharing Ramadan" Outreach in the schools (where a soft-voiced Pakistani woman is usually the soothing propagandist of choice), or Da'wa in a prison. The more Muslims there are, the more there will be—and no one knows which "moderate" will end up distinctly non-moderate in his views, and then in his acts.



And this brings up the most important problem: the impermanance of "moderate" attitudes. What makes anyone think that someone who this week or month has definitely turned his back on Jihad, who will have nothing to do with those he calls the "fanatics," if he does not make a clean break with Islam, does not become a "renegade" or apostate, will at some point "revert" not to Islam, which he never left, but to a more devout form, in which he now subscribes to all of its tenets, and not merely to a few having to do with rites of individual worship?

6. The examples to the contrary are both those of individuals, and of whole societies. As for individual Muslims, some started out as mild-mannered and largely indifferent to Islam, and then underwent some kind of crisis and reverted to a much more fanatical brand of Islam. That was the case with urban planner Mohammad Atta, following his disorienting encounter with modern Western ways in Hamburg, Germany—Reeperbahn and all. That was also the case with "Mike" Hawash, the Internet engineer earning $360,000 a year, who seemed completely integrated (American wife, Little League for the children, friends among fellow executives at Intel who would swear up and down that he was innocent)—until one fine day, after the World Trade Center attacks, he made out his will, signed the house over to his wife, and set off to fight alongside the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (he got as far as China) against his fellow Americans. In other words, if fanatical Muslims exist, it does not mean that they all start out as fanatics. Islam is the necessary starting place, and what sets off a "moderate" may have little to do with anything the Infidels do, any question of foreign policy—it may simply be a crisis in an individual Muslim's life, to which he seeks an answer, not surprisingly, in ... more Islam.

7. Much the same lesson can be drawn from the experience of whole societies. In passing, one can note that the position of Infidels under the Pahlevi regime was better than it had been for centuries—and under the regime that followed, that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that position of Infidels became worse than it had been for centuries. "Secularism" in Islamic countries is never permanent; the weight and the threat of Islam is ever-present.

The best example of this is Turkey since 1924, when Ataturk began his reforms. He tried in every way he could—through the Hat Act (banishing the salat-friendly fez); commissioning a Turkish translation of the Qur'an and an accompanying tafsir (commentary) in Turkish; ending the use of Arabic script for Turkish; establishing government control of the mosques (even attacking recalcitrant imams and destroying their mosques); giving women the right to vote; establishing a system that discouraged the wearing of the hijab; encouraging Western dress; and discouraging, in the army, preferment of any soldier who showed too great an interest in religion. This attempt to constrain Islam was successful, and was reinforced by the national cult of Ataturk.

But the past few decades have shown that Islam does not die; it keeps coming back. In Turkey, it never went away, despite the creation of a secular stratum of society that amounts perhaps to 25% of the population, with another 25% wavering, and 50% still definitely traditional Muslims. Meanwhile, Turks in Germany become not less, but more fervent in their faith. And Turks in Turkey, of the kind who follow Erdogan, show that they may at any moment emerge and take power—and slowly (very slowly, as long as that EU application has not been acted on, one way or another) they can undo Ataturk. He was temporary; Islam is forever.

8. That is why even the designation of some Muslims as "moderates" in the end means almost nothing. They swell Muslim numbers and the perceived Muslim power; "moderates" may help to mislead, to be in fact even more effective practitioners of taqiyya/kitman, for their motive may simply be loyalty to ancestors or embarrassment, not a malign desire to fool Infidels in order to disarm and then ultimately to destroy them.

9. For this reason, one has to keep one's eye always on the objective situation. What will make Infidels safer from a belief-system that is inimical to art, science, and all free inquiry, that stunts the mental growth, and that is based on a cruel Manichaean division of the world between Infidel and Believer? And the answer is: limiting the power—military, political, diplomatic, economic power—of all Muslim polities, and Muslim peoples, and diminishing, as much as possible, the Muslim presence, however amiable and plausible and seemingly untroubling a part of that presence may appear to be, in all the Lands of the Infidels. This is done not out of any spirit of enmity, but simply as an act of minimal self-protection—and out of loyalty and gratitude to those who produced the civilization which, however it has been recently debased by its own inheritors, would disappear altogether were Muslims to succeed in islamizing Europe—and then, possibly, other parts of the world as well.

10. "There are Muslim moderates. Islam itself is not moderate" is Ibn Warraq's lapidary formulation. To this one must add: we Infidels have no sure way to distinguish the real from the feigning "moderate" Muslim. We cannot spend our time trying to perfect methods to make such distinctions. Furthermore, in the end such distinctions may be meaningless if even the "real" moderates hide from us what Islam is all about, not out of any deeply-felt sinister motive, but out of a humanly-understandable ignorance (especially among some second or third-generation Muslims in the West), or embarrassment, or filial piety. And finally, yesterday's "moderate" can overnight be transformed into today's fanatic—or tomorrow's. Shall we entrust our own safety to the dreamy consolations of the phrase "moderate Muslim" and the shapeshifting concept behind it that can be transformed into something else in a minute?

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Thursday, November 01, 2007

ARAB SLAVE TRADE IN SUDAN

Columnist Stephen Brown offers a critical piece of journalism in war against Islamic aggressors.

Bok
It was the kind of excitement that made children uneasy. Grownups were pointing toward the river. Others were arriving at a run. The bustling atmosphere in the market place of the peaceful African town of Nyamlell in the Dinka tribal area in the southern Sudan was changing. Worried adults could see what a seven-year-old Dinka boy, Francis Bok, who had gone to the market that fateful day with older village children to sell his mother’s eggs and peanuts, could not: “a storm of smoke” rising from a nearby village. Sellers frantically began to gather up their wares and hurry away with the buyers. The adults understood. They recognized the approaching signs of the dreaded scourge that most people believed had disappeared from the pages of African history long ago: a slave raid.

It was 1986 and Bok was about to see his happy world of family and village shattered forever by a centuries-old, barbaric practice that has never died out: the violent capture and enslavement of black Africans by Arabs.

“The Arab militias were told to kill the men and enslave the women and children,” said the now 28-year-old Bok, who was himself captured and enslaved that day, to an audience of 80 people at the University of Toronto recently where he had been invited to speak by the campus organization, Zionists at U. of T.

Bok, who would spend the next ten years working as a child slave, then outlined for his college listeners in horrifying detail the savage hurricane of violence he next witnessed when the Arab slavers attacked.

“I saw many people on the ground, shot…I saw people with their heads cut off with swords and shot in the head. People were lying on the ground like they just wanted to relax for a moment. I saw blood pouring like a small stream,” the 28-year-old Bok recounted in a voice that still quivers with emotion.

Unknown to him at that time, Bok was also an innocent victim of the decades-long, savage civil war between Sudan’s Arab Muslim North and the country’s African Christian and animist South. Based in the capital, Khartoum, the North’s Islamist government, which also hosted Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, had promulgated sharia law in 1983 for the whole country in its quest to Arabize and Islamicize the non-Muslim South. Also as part of this goal, the Khartoum government armed Muslim militias and sent them in the 1980s and 1990s to wage jihad against the infidel southerners. However, the spears and hippopotamus shields of the South’s Dinka and Nuer tribes, the war’s main victims, were no match for the Kalashnikov-armed Muslims, who went on to kill two million southern Sudanese, displace another four million and take tens of thousands of slaves in a silent genocide.

After the slave raid, Bok, a Christian, told the audience he was taken to the Muslim North to work for one of the Arab raiders’ families as a child slave for the next decade. During the pitiless trip north, the little Dinka boy witnessed the depth of racism, cruelty and religious hatred of his captors and their world towards black Africans when an Arab slaver cut off the leg of a Dinka girl who would not stop crying because she had seen her parents butchered in the market place. Upon his arrival at his master’s home, Bok was to experience himself this racial viciousness when he was immediately surrounded and beaten by the masters’ children who called him “abeed” (slave), an Arabic word also used for black Africans in general.

And a slave Bok was in every sense of the word as he worked for his master without a day off and without payment for the next ten years, often laboring from four in the morning until after the family had gone to bed that night.

“I was supposed to look after the goats; there were about two hundred goats,” Bok told listeners of his first days as a seven-year-old slave. “My master knew all the goats. He would ask: ‘Where is this goat? Where is that goat?’ If I answered: ‘I don’t know. He would beat me…He had a favorite stick to beat me. When I had done something wrong, even when I had done nothing wrong, he beat me.”

Lonely and isolated, Bok said he was made to sleep in a shelter near the animals and was never allowed to talk to the Dinka slaves owned by other Arab families. The child slave even received a beating, Bok told the audience, when he asked his master one day why he calls him ‘abeed’ and why no one loves him. He was told never to ask that question again.

The treatment Bok received from his master’s wife, however, was even worse. She would, he related, not allow her ‘abeed’ to look her directly in the face and would spit in his, often calling on her children to spit on the Dinka boy too.

“That hurt,” said Bok. “I asked her why? She said: ‘You are my slave and this is my house.’ She would also grab a knife and say she would kill me like a chicken.”

For ten long years, Bok told his listeners, he would lie awake at night and wonder who was going to come and free him from this hopeless, helpless life of a slave where he was told he was just an animal. Even his forcible conversion to Islam, outwardly in Bok’s case, did not bring any improvement in treatment. Only his faith in God, the Dinka slave stated, and his desire to see his parents again kept him going.

“I hated the way they treated me and the way they treated the other slaves,” said Bok, recounting his humanity was never once recognized during all those years with the Arab family, his only value being the work he could do.

This was hideously emphasized by a nightmarish incident that convinced Bok to take matters into his own hands and escape. On a visit with his master to his master’s friend, Bok said he was instructed to talk in the Dinka language to another boy-slave, who had had his leg cut off.

“I asked him what happened,” Bok remembers. “He started crying and said he had refused to go to work for one day. He told his master he was sick and wasn’t going to work. His master told him he had to go to work. There was no excuse. The boy continued to argue with his master, so his master cut his leg off.”

At age 14, Bok told a silent audience he was caught escaping twice and badly beaten, and nearly killed the second time. Waiting until he was 17 to make another attempt, Bok successfully made it to Khartoum with the help of a kindly Muslim truck driver who took him home and bought him a bus ticket. From Khartoum, the young Dinka made it to Cairo where he was eventually allowed to come to America as a United Nations refugee in 1999. Today, the former African slave is a proud American citizen.

In 2000, sponsored by the American Anti-Slavery Group, Bok began speaking of his experiences to audiences across the United States, especially at schools and colleges, giving as his reason the fact he could not forget those Dinka slave boys he remembered seeing in the Sudan. In his anti-slavery advocacy, Bok became the first escaped slave to appear before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and has spoken to other politicians, including Colin Powell and George Bush, whom he and most Dinkas, he says, hold in high regard for his assistance to the southern Sudanese cause. The new African American, grateful to America for the second life it has granted him as well as for the opportunity to speak about his people, also wrote a highly engrossing book about his days as a boy slave, Escape From Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity – and My Journey to Freedom in America, that should be required reading in every high school.

About the only setback for Bok in America occurred when he discovered his father had been killed and his mother and sisters went missing in the same Muslim militia raid that saw him enslaved. His brother, however, was still alive and a member of the southern Sudanese, anti-government army.

As for the Sudan today, Bok says the problem remains the same in that the government is still trying to impose sharia law on its non-Muslim citizens, whom, he says, will never accept it and the second-class status it confers on non-Muslims. Bok, who is not against independence for the African South Sudan, also says he did not believe in the 2005 peace treaty between the North and the South that ended the war.

“It was a big deal for the Sudanese; but I didn’t even smile,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t the real thing. I don’t see it as a real peace. Why is it a peace when there is still a war (Darfur) in the country? They (the government) shifted the war to another region.”

Bok says he plans to return next spring to the Sudan for the first time since his escape and would like to teach English to refugees in Darfur. Asked what he would say to his former master if he was standing in the same University of Toronto lecture room with him at that moment, the supposedly ‘half savage’ ex-slave said he would tell his former tormentor that he was “absolutely wrong” to do what he did and never to do it to another person.

“I don’t want to do anything bad to him or to his wife who hit me,” he said. “The only thing I could do is point a finger at him and say: ‘This is the man who took my childhood away from me.’ Other than that, I forgive him.”

But Stephen Brown doesn't cover it all. Saudis are known to be contemporary slavesmen, and in the north African Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the practice while officially banned, is actually flourishing.

For more information concerning the systematic enslavement of African blacks by Arab Muslims, please visit The African American Registry where extensive research into this appalling but largely ignored Islamic phenomenon is charted:

These modern slaves often serve as maids or cooks, farm laborers or cattle herders. Many were taken too young to remember their homes or families. Some who have tried to escape have been branded, or have had their Achilles tendons cut; some have been castrated. Many, both male and female, are regularly raped. Yet, the international community's influence is limited. The Organization of African Unity does not interfere in the internal affairs of its member states. The rules of the World Bank dictate that economic considerations not human rights issues determine support.

These facts are well known to Western governments and to the United Nations, and reports on slavery do appear in the Western media from time to time. Yet they have failed to ignite the popular resentment that fired up the abolitionist and anti-apartheid movements. With the time span being centuries many African nations have been silent on this subject and the role that neocolonialism plays in continuing an unspeakable practice.

Another factor is the state of denial in the United States Black community. First, there is not enough indication of a connection, and even respect, between African Americans and Africans. An initial brotherhood between the groups turns out to be based on a nostalgic desire by the Americans about Africa and it soon dissolves. Secondly, many African Americans look to Islam for an alternative to their racially prejudiced experience under Christianity.


Read it all.

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