France: The World’s Canary?
By Amber Pawlik
Recently, the French government banned Islamic headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and Christian crosses from their classrooms. As most know, the main purpose of this was to remove the Islamic symbols – banning Jewish and Christian symbols was just done to be fair. Now a minister in the French government has called for something equally as ridiculous: banning “religious” beards and bandannas in the classroom.
This is clearly a method to target Muslim religious dress. Muslim women often wear the bandannas now in replace of the Islamic headscarf. The French, revealing that they are thought police, are in debate over if all beards and bandannas should be banned or just ones that are “religious signs.” “How will teachers identify religious facial hair? Would they reprimand a ‘religious’ bandanna but allow it as a fashion statement?”
I want you to breathe in the marvel of this. It isn’t the United States, who was attacked by Muslim terrorists two years ago, that is banning Muslim religious symbols. It’s France: the most vocal country opposed to the war. The question is really begged: why has the French government become so hostile to the Muslim religion?
An article entitled, “France: Ripe for a Muslim Coup d’Etat?” describes the situation in France.
“President Jacques Chirac says the law’s [banning Islamic headscarves] goal is to protect France’s secular underpinnings. However, it also is seen as a way to hold back Islamic fundamentalism in the nation’s Muslim community, at an estimated 5 million the largest in Western Europe.”
The French aren’t banning Muslim religious signs because they believe “all Muslims are responsible for 9-11.” France is the least likely place to do this. They are doing it to restrain violence and harassment committed by Muslims, which is an ever-growing problem in France.
In the article linked above, it describes some of the things Muslims have been responsible for in France: Muslim radicals insulting and harassing non-Muslim teachers in classrooms; Muslims vandalizing supermarkets that carry products not approved by the Koran; Muslim males harassing and threatening their fellow Muslim females into wearing the hijab – just to name a few of the things happening there.
So much for those who say that radical Islam only exists in the Middle East.
“Islamists have the clear goal of transforming France into the first Islamist regime of the West.”
Because they are opposed to war, racial profiling, and other effective tools to stop violence and crime, the French have been gutted of any ability to protect their own streets. Their only option has been to ban headscarves and now beards – all in the name of “secularism.”
Indeed, one can easily see those in the United States doing such a thing, except in the United States they are only trying to remove Christian religious signs from the classroom – not Islamic. At least the French are consistent, although at this point they have to be.
Of course, radical Muslims knew what Western country to hit first in their effort to Islamicize the rest of the world. France, being France, was the most vulnerable country to go after. Is France the world’s canary? Are the rest of us watching, like coal miners as the canary falls over and dies, knowing what will happen to us next?
France got itself into this mess by being such a “progressive” and “tolerant” country. Now the rest of us watch while they, like a hippopotamus trying to do ballet, try to get themselves out. And what do you know. The United State’s “unilateral” mission in Iraq and the Middle East may very well end up saving them.
Source: Faith Freedom International
The Enemy of the World
By Alan Caruba
December 24, 2005
The October rioting throughout France has managed to convince the French at last that they are playing host to an enemy in much the same fashion as the July bombings in London woke the British from their slumber. The destruction of the Twin Towers had that affect on America in 2001.
Elsewhere around the world, in the Philippines and Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, and Russia, those entrusted with the globalization that will connect us all are facing up to the single greatest challenge to freedom since the rise and fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union, and its quiet, but steady dissolution in the Republic of China. Communism thrives on poverty, so we will continue to see pockets of it where nations resist the capitalist, free trade, and entrepreneurial ingredients of prosperity.
Few regions of the world are more plagued with poverty than the Middle East and Africa , both places where Islam is widely practiced. So, despite the billion or more Muslims in the world, the new enemy of the world is Islam as personified in its most extreme form, the ideology of Islamism. Nothing, however, about Islam is benign.
Anyone who has read the Koran, Islam’s holy book, knows that it is replete with constant calls to war, constant reinforcement of the belief that those who do not submit to Islam are unworthy of life. “Disbelievers will be burned with fire.” “Kill disbelievers wherever you find them.” “War is ordained by Allah.” This theme is relentlessly driven home in chapter after chapter. (Visit www.faithfreedom.org/Quran.htm).
A friend of mine who is fighting to free his fellow Iranians from the grip of the ayatollahs says, “You can’t reason with people blinded by hate. Islam hates the power of the individual. Islam hates the achievements of women. Islam hates the religious freedom of others. Islam is against the free will and hates liberty and justice for all.”
Now that Europe has awakened to the threat, there is evidence that its various security and law enforcement agencies are beginning to take action. Consider a small news item in late November that did not make it into the mainstream media. Morocco and Spain smashed a large al Qaeda network that was gearing up for new attacks in Western Europe . Some twenty suspects were arrested in Morocco , ten in Spain , and several more were secretly picked up in the United Kingdom , Germany , Belgium , the Netherlands and Denmark . Several members of the network had been meeting in Turkey to coordinate attacks on American, Israeli and Jewish targets.
Meanwhile, in Iraq where the “anti-war” objectors continue to say we are losing, its citizens braved death to vote for a constitution and a democracy such as does not exist any other comparable Arab nation.
In addition, the US military’s latest offensive in the western region succeeded in killing more than 700 terrorists and capturing 1,500 in the last two months or so. The offensive in Iraq has done what it intended to do, remove the dictator Saddam Hussein and then become a killing ground of every wannabe martyr for Islam. You can either kill them there or you can pull out our troops and end up having to fight them in the streets of America .
In an excellent, new book, “Al Qaeda in Europe”, by Lorenzo Vidino spells out just how great a struggle lies ahead for a continent that, despite a magnificent cultural history of great art, architecture, music and literature gave us two major wars in the last century. It was, in fact, the positioning of vast US military forces throughout Europe and the creation of NATO that insured the freedom that was formerly threatened first by Nazism and then Communism, and now faces the new threat of militant Islam.
Europe remains a great tourist attraction with its great churches, largely unattended by a local population that has turned away from Christianity, an industrial base threatened by an archaic Socialist system, and an indigenous population whose every need is tended to cradle-to-grave and which has failed to demographically reproduce itself sufficiently. Europe is running out of Europeans.
Indeed, the social system Europe created proved to be a magnet for millions from Northern Africa and the Middle East after colonialism retreated. Thanks to Socialism, however, jobs did not increase, nor did anything resembling assimilation. Muslims saw themselves as living amidst unbelievers and, with the certitude the Koran confers, found no cause to abandon the religion that had failed to produce any freedom in the nations they left behind and which is responsible for their failed economies.
As Vidino notes, for “over forty years, European countries have knowingly and voluntarily hosted hundreds of Islamic fundamentalists. Acting on humanitarian motives, for decades countries such as Britain , Sweden , Holland , and Germany have made it their official policy to welcome political refugees from all over the world.” Unfortunately, “most European countries rarely distinguished between democracy-supporting opponents of autocratic regimes and Islamic fundamentalists who had bloodied their hands in their home countries with heinous terrorist acts.”
Indeed, the duty of all Muslims is to bring Islam to the Europe their predecessors had failed to conquer in earlier centuries. The “crusaders” had to be subjugated, converted to Islam, and, given enough time, Muslim immigrants believe they can achieve this.
Europe , however, must now institute a whole new system of integrated law enforcement to meet the threat of terror. That is why the news of a coordinated effort to smash a large al Qaeda network is such good news. For too long, Europeans have lacked the machinery of law and internal security to meet the now too-obvious threat in their midst.
There is some irony in all this because terrorism in France and elsewhere is not a new phenomenon. In the summer of 1995, France experienced an unprecedented string of attacks and, in July of that year, a bomb exploded in a Paris metro station, killing seven people. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has recently announced new, tightened controls on immigration.
Before we chide Europe, it is well to remember that in 1993 the first, albeit unsuccessful, attack on the Twin Towers occurred on our soil. Americans at that time were encouraged to regard it as a criminal act, not part of a determined effort to destroy our society. Attacks on American Marines in Beirut , on American embassies in Africa , and on the USS Cole also had failed to generate a level of awareness or concern about the Islamic Jihad.
We know better now. Or do we? While Europe begins to identify and rid itself of the cancerous Islamofacism in its midst, Americans are still debating over getting control of our own national borders, despite a population of illegal immigrants estimated to be upwards of ten to twelve million. This suggests that we are still far short of putting this nation on a war footing, implementing the measures needed to protect the homeland.
The war is global and while, of the more than a billion adherents of Islam, surely the vast majority are good people who may well deplore what is done in the name of Islam, the fact remains that millions of Muslims hold fast to and support the deadly fantasies of Islam.
Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com.
© Alan Caruba, December 2005
Source: Faith Freedom International
Why Islam Can Never Be Appeased
By Pete Fisher
January 14, 2006
I have to shake my head in disbelief just about every day when I listen to people who have no clue about Islam or what is happening all around the world.
I still have a very hard time buying into the claims by many of our politicians and media that this is somehow a peaceful religion. This does not mean that every Muslim out in this world is violent. I am not saying that at all. But what I AM saying is that Islam is the perfect spring board for violent acts of every kind and is simply unchecked by its own members.
This week in Mecca we can watch the video from Memri http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=991 where in the height of the Muslim spiritual Hadj, the holiest time and holiest site in all of Islam, are Muslims screaming for the death and mutilation of all infidels, but specifically Americans and Jews. They cry to their god for our hands to be chopped off and to be murdered while thanking Allah for his greatness.
And in Mount Arafat this week the people who were on Hadj were told that there was a huge holy war against Islam ongoing in this world right now, according to the Grand Mufi of Saudi Arabia.
We are now finding that Saddam did provide for terrorist training, we see evidence that Syria was involved in goading Iraqi terrorists into action, we see recruiting in Europe and Canada as well as the USA . We see Muslims worldwide who refuse to live as their host nations live, but rather demand those nations bend to the will of Islam. Rapes have become the crime of choice for many Muslim men living in Australia and Europe, where violent crimes in many of these countries has risen to heights unknown before the Islamic immigration into those nations.
The Palestinians will never be satisfied with the way Israel has bent backwards trying to appease them. They still scream for blood, and they still train their children in the ways of death and slaughter.
Iran has snubbed their nose at the IAEA and the rest of the world with its cat and mouse tactics on nuclear technology. They claim they need the power, but in truth, the population of Iran has never been the concern of the mullahs running the place. All they care about is pushing Islam as a world power and desire the technology to use it as a terror threat when they deem it necessary.
Islam has no concern for human rights if one looks around the world. There are no storms of people protesting the rapes and oppression by the millions, even when perpetrated on Muslims, by Muslims. They have no care for the Sudan where they shoot at innocent women and children as they drink from the muddy Wadi because they have no other source of water due to Muslims destroying their lives, land and population.
The funny thing is, Muslim women have written to me telling me the wonderful rights they have, all the while being forced to wear a head cover and not even being able to drive or shop without a male escort. And the Saudis are concerned that when we report such inane and evil events that we as the West are chasing people away from Islam.
However, this to me is the typical Islam double standard and total lack of responsibility so prevalent in the religion. Like not long ago in Sydney where a well known Lebanese Sheik Faiz Mohammed publicly condoned raping of women by saying they had no one to blame but themselves. It is not the fault of the Muslim male; it had to be the fault of the victim.
Much like the Democrats in America , the criminal did what they did for any other purpose that by personal choice. Whether it is their upbringing, abuse, poverty, wealth, illness, being bullied, all lame excuses that have actually been used in our courts. And because of this like minded philosophy, Islam can never blame itself for its own shortcomings or actions. If one of them rapes, it was the fault of the victim for wearing no socks. If a school house got bombed and children slaughtered in innocent blood, it was the fault of the village or country not accepting Islam that made them bomb it.
If Palestinians are starving in dire poverty due to Arafat having skimmed the coffers and pocketed the money, then it must be the Jews who are not allowing them into Israel . If the Jews do not want them in Israel because they cannot abstain from terror and crime, then it must be an agenda against Islam and Jihad must be waged. It can not be that they are simply terrorists and like Jordan and Syria before Israel , they are not wanted due to their proclivities.
In the mind of Islam, anything that is not Islam is the fault of their people starving, the fault they fight each other, the fault they use acts of extreme cowardice to make a political point. It is the fault of all others on Earth that they refuse to help their own and the image they put to the world. It is NOT the West chasing people away from Islam. It is Islam chasing people away. It is the actions of Muslims, it is the writings of the Koran and Hadiths, it is the questionable life of Mohammed himself that keep people away from Islam. It is the silence of Muslims when their own commit acts so diabolical it would take the Devil himself some trouble to devise.
It is the chaos within Islam and the chaos it creates without that make human beings shake their heads in disbelief at the horrors committed in the name of their god. But we who are civilized can never teach those who refuse to hear.
It is simply easier for Islam to blame the rest of the world for the evil it creates and commands through the Koran. It is much easier to hide behind the lies than to look at the deceit within. It is easier to write off the starvation, blood letting, and lust for murder with Koranic passages than to actually become human beings that care for one another.
It is easier for Muslims around the globe to say nothing while their own walk this Earth spewing evil. It is easier for many to believe that just because a few of the billions do not act like this; it may have enough peaceful elements to actually be placed in the Great Religion category. But those who have befriended Islam have been bitten badly by the ones they reached to. France , Spain , England , The Netherlands, Finland , Canada , USA , and many African nations have learned the price of treating them like decent and civilized people. They have been attacked from within, they have been demanded to change laws that favor Islam, they seen crime rates rise, and they have been berated by these people.
This is a simple thing really. It stems from a great arrogance that Islam and only Islam is to survive on Earth at any cost. Though arrogance is evident in other religions to some extant, it is the mainstay of Islam and because oft his millions are enslaved by Islam and millions die by the hand of the followers of Mohammed.
And because of this, Islam can never be appeased. It is never enough until they dominate. It will never be enough until they make all the laws. It can never be enough as long as there are those who refuse to buy into Mohammed and his more than 6,000 satanic verses called Koran. It can never be appeased until it is fully dominant, or until it does not exist to create the evil it does on a daily basis.
I love my fellow man, and I love animals, but even a rabid dog is shot to protect the townsfolk from the death a bite can bring about.
Pete Fisher is a concerned citizen in the Chicago area who has written several articles on the economy, educational system, politics, and religion. He has been feature on several sites such as RenewAmerica.us, Chronwatch.com Blessedcause.com, Michnews.com, mensnewsdaily.com, The Rant.us, and has been circulated on various other sites worldwide. He is a 6 year veteran of the Armed Forces.
Pete can be contacted at: pfisher2005@aol.com
Source: Faith Freedom International
URL: http://www.faithfreedom.org/oped/PeteFisher60114p2.htm
Islamic Banking Is Not Islamic
By Ohmyrus
Islam forbids interest loans. This is clearly stated in the Holy Koran 2:278 and 279:“O ye who believe! Fear Allah and give up what remains of your demand for riba, if ye are indeed believers. If you do it not, take notice of war from Allah and His Messenger. But if ye turn back, ye shall have your capital sums. Deal not unjustly and you shall not be dealt with unjustly.”
I believe that in those days as in some third world countries today, loans impose a backbreaking burden on the rural poor. The reason is that there are usually one or two wealthy individuals (usually a powerful landowner) in a village that can lend money. Eventually, the borrower is reduced to serfdom because he cannot repay the debt.
There is an interesting description of wealthy landlord cum moneylender in VS Naipaul’s book, “India: A wounded Civilization”. He wrote:
“And in these villages, interest rates were so high, ten percent or more a month, that debts once contracted, could never be repaid.”
The man he described was practically the master of the village, a kind of feudal lord, more important to the lives of the villages than the central authorities. His house was always full of grain. This gave him power. Villages who cannot repay became his indentured labor. The villages had a deep reverence for this man.
Nothing moved in the village without his blessings. Yet he was a kind man who provided his villages with food during shortages. But a less kindly man can easily abuse his power. To repay debt, villagers in some parts of the world have been reported to sell their children into prostitution.
Thus the original prohibition against usury does have its justification and wisdom. But for those of you who refuse to accept anything redeeming about Prophet Mohammed, you can easily find another less honorable motive. Perhaps he was trying to find recruits from among the impoverished indebted class by playing Robin Hood or Mao Tse Tung.
As the Indian central government sometimes find these landlords/moneylenders to be obstructions for their development plans, the Prophet too may have found his plans thwarted by this group of men. He may not have liked having to share power with anybody. Take your pick of motives. But whatever the original reason, this prohibition against interest is clearly out of date.
The root cause of the problem is that there are very few lenders. They are thus able to lend at high interest rates. The nearest bank or village may be far away and even then nobody may be willing to lend to the needy villager. Villagers may be illiterate and unaware of other sources of financing.
But in the modern world, there are many lenders. If a bank charges too much, you go to another. Money flows across continents from lender to borrower at the touch of a computer button. The interest rate you pay is very competitive and not jacked up artificially by a monopolistic situation.
Yet Muslims still struggle to satisfy the conflicting demands of modernity and their faith. The result is the rise on Islamic Banking which started in Dubai in 1975 and is today a $200 billion industry. Islamic banking was not started to cater to a financial need but to a religious need. In theory, Islamic banking is supposed to work like this:
Depositors place their savings with the bank whom then provide the funds to businessmen in exchange for a share of the profit (or loss). This profit (or loss) is then passed on to the depositor. Interest may be forbidden but profit is not. So what is the difference between profit and interest?
The key difference is that interest is fixed and certain whereas profit is not. Thus the more successful the project, the more the bank will earn and pass this down to the depositors. This is called the Profit/Loss Scheme (PLS) and is considered just according to Islamic scholars. Not sharing the profit with the bank and depositor is considered unjust.
However, this plan has some serious flaws. Remember, the higher the expected return, the higher the risk. The chief flaw is that the bank and its depositors have to share in the risk of project failure, which in the worst case may see the loss of the entire principle. The depositor may be a pensioner who does not want to take risk. He or she just wants principle to be assured and is contented with a little return (i.e. interest) for his bank deposit.
If he is willing to risk his capital in hopes for higher return, there are already instruments for him to invest in. He can buy stocks directly or through trust funds. If he thinks George Bush is going on a warpath against the Axis of Evil, he can buy defense contractors like McDonald Douglas. If he thinks people are becoming more horny and sinful, he can buy stocks in a condom manufacturer.
There is no need to specially start Islamic banking for these people when they are already well served. The Islamic Bank, however, does not cater to the group of people who just wants the preservation of capital and are content with a low interest rate.
If all the world’s banks are Islamic, this group of people will have to hide their money under their mattresses in order to ensure their capital is preserved. But they have to spend lots of money on rat poisons and traps to make sure their dollar bills do not get eaten. Somehow or other, Islam tends to bring people back to the 7th century. I wonder why.
Another problem is that under the PLS, there is an incentive for the businessman who took the bank’s money to report a loss. That way, they don’t have any profit to share with the bank.
Can you see the irony? Under the kaffir financial system, greedy and unprincipled managers are reporting profits when they are making losses so that they can cash in on their share options.
Under the amazing Islamic world financial system, unprincipled businessmen will try to report losses when they are making profits. This can be done by creative accounting. Let me give you a simple example.
Suppose that a date plantation owner needs financing to buy camel dung fertilizer. The bank advances him the money in exchange for a share of the profit. He uses it to buy dung from his dung merchant brother-in-law at an inflated price. This jacks up the costs. He cannot make a profit from his dates because he bought grade F dung instead of grade A. He does not owe any money to the bank, since his plantation is making a loss but he splits the money with his crooked brother-in-law.
To prevent fraud, the Islamic banks must have a detailed knowledge of the businesses they invest in and have a say in the management. In this case, the bank must be able to tell the difference between grade A dung and grade F. In practice, it is impossible for a bank to acquire such detailed expertise in such a wide range of businesses that banks deal in. Even if they could, they don’t have the manpower to supervise management decisions. In the conventional banking system, banks usually don’t get involved in management.
Other possible accounting tricks to reduce accounting profits include the following:
1)Early recognition of expenses.
2)Late recognition of revenues.
3)Change from FIFO accounting to LIFO accounting
4)Shortened amortization/depreciation periods
5)Reporting bogus revenues. Etc
In practice, Islamic banks are aware of this problem. A report by the Institute of Islamic Banking and Insurance stated:
“While designing an alternate to interest-based system, it was realized that large scale resorting to PLS system of Islamic banking could pose serious risks and hazards to Islamic banks due to wide-spread tendency to adopt unethical accounting practices to conceal true profits, high rate of illiteracy and host of other reasons.”
In practice most so called Islamic banking is not truly based on the PLS. This means that depositors and the banks get fixed return for their money. The common financial instruments are:
1)Muradaha (Cost-plus sale).
2) Deferred payment sales
3) Purchase with deferred delivery
4) Leasing
5)Loans with a service charge
The most important is the Murabaha. This is how it works. The bank, at the request of its client, buys some goods and resells the goods to a client at a fixed profit (read interest) regardless of the success or failure of the client’s business. The payment can be in one go or in installments over many years. The only risk that the bank take is that the client cannot honor its agreement to pay up – same as in conventional banking.
Whether his client makes a lot or money or lost money, he is entitled to ask for his fixed “profit”. So in spirit, there is no difference with conventional financing. It is the same for the other instruments. The whole Islamic banking is an exercise in self-delusion. An Islamic scholar, Justice Taqi Usmani said:
“Islamic banks are using the instrument of Murabaha within the framework of the conventional benchmarks like Libor etc. where the net result does not differ from interest-based transactions.”
He added:
“When the common people realize that the net result in the transaction of the Islamic banks is the same as was in the transactions of conventional banks, they become skeptical towards the function of Islamic banks. It therefore, becomes very difficult to argue for the case of Islamic banking before the common people, especially before the non-Muslims who feel that it is nothing but a matter of twisting documents only.”
Commendably frank, the Institute of Islamic Banking and Insurance wrote:
“It is therefore, seriously apprehended that if the present sad state of affairs is allowed to continue, even many innocent Muslims may develop doubts about the feasibility, practicability and usefulness of the ‘Islamic system of banking’ notwithstanding that the fault lies with us and not with the system.”
Personally, I think it is better for Muslims to say that the fault lies with the system and not with themselves. They should stop kidding themselves and proclaim that lending money for interest is part of the modern world and cannot be banned. But to say that would be to admit that the system is flawed and then the whole edifice of Islam will come crashing down. It is too painful to do that and you might get accused of blasphemy. So Muslims will continue to bang their heads against the brick wall trying to make Islamic banking work. That’s mission impossible.
Source: Faith Freedom International
