Salman Rushdie in 1989.
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 Ali Khamene'i and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in better times. |
Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, the doctor who single-handedly kept polio alive.
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United We Stand postage stamp.
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In an upbeat 2008 article, "When fashion meets the skies!" the in-flight magazine of Turkish Airlines (Türk Hava Yolları, abbreviation: THY), called Skylife, celebrated 75 years of stewardess fashion with pictures and prose. Some excerpts from the airline's fashion history:Hostesses first graced our planes with their presence in the late 1940's. Since that day fashions have come and gone in Turkish Airlines' cabins, bringing everything from military-style uniforms to shocking pink mini-skirts, and now tulip motifs in shades of turquoise. …
When hostesses were first introduced bringing Turkish hospitality on board the planes, the importance of presentable cabin personnel was soon realized. It was a time when the silhouette of the elegant woman, born of the deprivation years following World War II, was at the forefront of world fashion. Turkish Airlines hostesses, who first took to the skies in 1947, therefore greeted their passengers with a degree of chic that make jaws drop even today. …
Daniel Pipes, one of our leading experts on Islam, established the Middle East Forum and became its head in 1994. He was born in 1949 and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Richard Pipes, was a professor of Russian history, now emeritus, at Harvard.
Daniel studied Arabic and Islamic history and lived in Cairo for three years. His PhD dissertation became his first book, Slave Soldiers and Islam (1981). Then his interest in purely academic subjects expanded to include modern Islam. He left the university because, as he told an interviewer from Harvard Magazine, he has "the simple politics of a truck driver, not the complex ones of an academic."
His story of being harassed through the legal system by a Muslim who later committed suicide was recently told in The American Spectator ("A Palestinian in Texas," TAS, November 2012). He has been personally threatened but prefers not to talk about specifics except to note that law enforcement has been involved.
I interviewed Pipes shortly before Christmas, when the Egyptians were voting on their new constitution. I started out by saying that the number of Muslims in the U.S. has doubled since the 9/11 attacks.
I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan. I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.
From a letter from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989
But ISNA isn't without its detractors.There really is nothing like unbiased investigative reporting--it is all well and good to note that the ISNA has condemned 'terrorism', but the question is whether they condemn all terrorism.
It has been a frequent target of attacks from bloggers and authors who specialize in criticizing Muslim groups. [emphasis mine]
ISNA has never condemned terrorist groups like HAMAS or Hizballah by name. More notably, in June of 1997, two and a half years after HAMAS was officially designated as a terrorist organization by the United States government (and long after common sense and reality indicated as such), top HAMAS official Mousa Abu Marzook thanked ISNA (and several other U.S.-based Islamist and “civil rights” organizations), writing that ISNA supported him through his “ordeal” – Marzook had been detained at JFK airport in 1995 and arrested and the Israelis were seeking his extradition. Marzook wrote that ISNA’s efforts had “consoled” him.And ISNA's actions have not been altogether passive:
Additionally, evidence has been introduced during the HLF trial which further exposes ISNA’s claim of “unqualified condemnation of all acts of terrorism” as lies, at the same time, undercutting HLF’s innocent claims that the organization only assisted impoverished widows and orphans, and establish long-standing ISNA ties to HAMAS. Exhibits entered into evidence a few days ago at the HLF trial include an expense voucher from the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), an ISNA subsidiary, made out for $10,000 in the name of Musa Abu Marzook, as well as a check drawn on a NAIT account in the same amount made out to Marzook. Another check for $10,000 on the same account was made out to Marzook’s wife, Nadia Elashi. Another check for $30,000 was made out to the Islamic University of Gaza (and has Shukri Abu Baker/OLF written on the memo line), a school long known to be controlled by HAMAS, and which counted such notables as former HAMAS leader Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantissi and current HAMAS leader Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zahar as professors, and the recently deposed HAMAS Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh is a former dean of the University.Emerson is not alone. In January of this year, The Jewish Week carried a letter to Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who also had claimed that ISNA was a moderate Muslim group with which he wanted to form an alliance. The letter was from a number of moderate Muslims who pointed out, in part:
We do not presume to judge the political or theological outlook of Rabbi Yoffie or his organization, except with regard to his and their comments about Islam. We, however, know the Muslim community, worldwide and in North America, and we do not recognize or otherwise support ISNA as a legitimate representative of mainstream Islamic believers in the West.The letter is signed by:
...ISNA, which URJ has accepted, apparently uncritically, as a “partner,” has a long history of association with extremist trends in Islam. ISNA has served as a front group for Wahhabism, the official sect in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia; the jihadist ideologies originating in Pakistan with the writings of a certain Mawdudi and the Deoband schools in that country — the latter of which produced the Afghan Taliban, and the Ikhwan al-Muslimun, or Muslim Brotherhood.
Technorati Tag: Obama.
Earlier, writing in December 2000, the future pope (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) affirmed his close alignment with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, and the ecumenical thought of his predecessor and dear friend, Pope John Paul II. Ratzinger's statement reiterates this "new vision of Jewish-Christian relations," and even acknowledges a role for Christian anti-Semitism in the Holocaust itself:Then there is the Grand Imam:Down through the history of Christianity, already-strained relations deteriorated further, even giving birth in many cases to anti-Jewish attitudes, which throughout history have led to deplorable acts of violence. Even if the most recent, loathsome experience of the Shoah was perpetrated in the name of an anti-Christian ideology, which tried to strike the Christian faith at its Abrahamic roots in the people of Israel, it cannot be denied that a certain insufficient resistance to this atrocity on the part of Christians can be explained by an inherited anti-Judaism present in the hearts of not a few Christians.He then implores that a new relationship be forged between the Church and Israel out of the tragic ashes of the Holocaust, based upon overcoming "every kind of anti-Judaism," and engaging in sincere, meaningful dialogue.
In contrast to the pope, consider Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the current Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. For more than a thousand years, since its founding in 792 A.D., Al-Azhar, has served as the academic shrine — much as Mecca is the religious shrine — of the global Sunni Muslim community (Sunnis are about 90 percent of Muslims).Actually, back in 2002 MEMRI noted that Tantawi had a change of heart regarding suicide bombings. He changed his mind and decided to support them:
Tantawi's Ph.D. thesis, Banu Israil fi al-Quran wa-al-Sunnah (Jews in the Koran and the Traditions), was published in 1968-69. In 1980 he became the head of the Tafsir (Koranic Commentary) Department of the University of Medina, Saudi Arabia — a position he held until 1984. Tantawi became Grand Mufti of Egypt in 1986, and a decade later he took his current post as Grand Imam.
My forthcoming book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism includes extensive, first-time English translations of Jews in the Koran and the Traditions. In the 700-page treatise, Tantawi wrote these words:These are the expressed, "carefully researched" views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a pope.[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/ 3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness. . . . Only a minority of the Jews keep their word [Koranic citations here]. . . . All Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims [Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not.
Within the past year, Sheikh Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, the top Egyptian cleric of AlAzhar University, has shifted his position regarding the targeting of civilians in suicide bombings. While he previously stated that Palestinians should refrain from targeting civilians, he recently declared that martyrdom (suicide) operations and the killing of civilians are permitted acts and that more such attacks should be carried out. Tantawi's positions were posted on www.lailatalqadr.com, a website associated with AlAzhar.In an editorial last year addressing the case of the 6 Imams who were removed from a plane after acting suspiciously, the Investor's Business Daily notes the activities of other Imams:
"[Sheikh Tantawi] emphasized that every martyrdom operation against any Israeli, including children, women, and teenagers, is a legitimate act according to [Islamic] religious law, and an Islamic commandment, until the people of Palestine regain their land and cause the cruel Israeli aggression to retreat…" [emphasis added]
Omar Abdul-Rahman, a blind sheikh, is serving a life term for plotting to blow up several New York landmarks. Imam Ali al-Timimi, a native Washingtonian, is also behind bars for soliciting local Muslims to kill fellow Americans. Imams in New York were recently busted for buying shoulder-fired missiles. Another in Lodi, Calif., planned an al-Qaida terror camp there.In his book The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis paints a picture of Islam that implies that Imams such as Tantawi and his friends are making up the rules as they go:
Because holy war is an obligation of the faith, it is elaborately regulated in the sharia. Fighters in a jihad are enjoined not to kill women, children, and the aged unless they attack first, not to torture or mutilate prisoner, to give fair warning of the resumption of hostilities after a truce, and to honor agreements. [p. 39]Besides dictating who can be attacked, Sharia also dictates how:
The medieval jurists and theologians discuss at some length the rules of warfare, including questions such as which weapons are permitted and which are not. There is even some discussion in medieval texts of the lawfulness of missile and chemical warfare, the one relating to mangonels and catapults, the other to poison-tipped arrows and the poisoning of enemy water supplies. On these points there is considerable variation. Some jurists permit, some restrict, some disapprove of the use of these weapons. The stated reason for concern is the indiscriminate casualties that they inflict. At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point--as far as I am aware--do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders. [p. 39.]Which leaves the question of what do you do when the Imams themselves do not follow Islamic law.
Technorati Tag: Islam.
Technorati Tag: Palestinians.
The political crisis has propelled a debate among Palestinian intellectuals over whether Palestinians might be better served by dumping the trappings of the 1993 Oslo peace agreement, which created the enfeebled Palestinian Authority, and leaving themselves under Israeli occupation without their own government.Of course that power-sharing agreement didn't get the complete backing of Hamas and Fatah either--but why quibble? Besides, recent demographic research indicates that the Palestinian demographics are not everything they've been cracked up to be.
This would, in effect, swap the two-state solution for a one-state vision in which Arabs might someday achieve a demographic majority in the region that includes Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The idea has gained momentum since the power-sharing agreement reached in February between Hamas and Fatah failed to get the international community to end its ban on aid to the Hamas-led government.
"One cannot exclude such a possibility: that this is the end of the two-state solution," said Yitzhak Reiter, a fellow at Hebrew University's Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace in Jerusalem.
Technorati Tag: Israel and Palestinian Civil War and Hamas and Fatah.
Technorati Tag: Israel and Bennett Zimmerman and American-Israel Demographic Research Group and Jerusalem.
