Writing about Wahabism and Salafi-Islam, could fill many books. I will however in this article, try to make clear why it is of tremendous importance in our time. Both movements are considered as the origin of Islamic terrorism. A lot of recent Islamic terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, have been inspired by Wahabism.
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703 - 1792 ) was an Arab theologian born in Saudi Arabia and can be considered as the founder of Wahabism. Wahab is considered by many to be a great reformer of Islam, and at the same time as the "father of Islamic terrorism. Iwill not go deeply into his teachings, but expose the teachings of two of his contemporary followers.
Salman bin Fahed al-Auda, in his book "The End of History", asserts that the solution to Islamic distress , that may bring about the fall of America and the Western world, "exists in one word which is Jihad". According to al-Auda, the meaning of jihad is much broader than fighting with a sword. Appealing to Muslims throughout the world, he wrote: "We should not simplify this issue and narrow its meaning to a restricted military battle in one of the Islamic regions or even to an all-out war against the West, which is possible and predicted and we assume is arriving… Life as a whole is a battlefield. The weapons are not only the rifle, the bullet, the airplane, the tank, and the cannon. Not at all! Thinking is a weapon, the economy is a weapon, money is a weapon, water is a weapon, planning is a weapon, unity is a weapon, and so there are many types of weapons." In "The End of History", al-Auda concluded that the West by itself was already in an advanced state of decay: "The West, and above all the United States, and Western culture, in general are undergoing a historical process that is deterministic. This process leads to its total collapse, sooner or later." His jihad was intended to accelerate that collapse. During the 1990's, he was regarded as the most influential preacher in Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden often cites out of his work.
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Posted by Walt as Islam, Middle East Issues, Terrorism at 1:00 AM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
"Trusting in the Rock of Israel we now place our signatures in witness to this proclamation, sitting as the Provisional State Council, on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, this day, Friday afternoon, the 5th of Iyar, 5708, the 14th of May, 1948.”
This was the moment of the re-birth of Israel announced by Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel. I would call your attention to the year of the Jewish calendar he cited, 5708. It reaches back over the millennia, deep into the Torah, the Old Testament, with its long history of a people chosen to be “a nation of priests and a holy people.”
This fact alone eviscerates all arguments and lies put forth that the Jews do not have a right and a claim to their own homeland. Historians put the birth of Judaism at approximately two thousand years before the advent of Christianity. When the Roman Empire fell, it was restructured as the Holy Roman Empire with Christianity at its core. Jewish resistance to the Roman Empire shaped much of its early history.
At the heart of the Islamic protestations of modern Israel is their contempt for the two faiths that preceded their own that began in 622 A.D. By then Judaism was already a very ancient faith. To be anything other than a Muslim, then and now, was declared to belong to an inferior faith. Islam is distinguished by its inflexible fixation on Allah, a former moon god worshipped in Mecca, and the cult of Mohammed.
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Posted by Walt as Middle East Conflicts, Middle East Issues at 10:38 PM EDT
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ARLINGTON, Va. April 14 /Standard Newswire/ – U.S. Senator John McCain today issued the following statement on former President Carter's plans to meet with Hamas:
"It is a grave and dangerous mistake for an American leader to meet with a terrorist organization like Hamas. Engaged in a campaign that deliberately targets innocent Israeli civilians, Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. President Carter is wrong to meet with Hamas, a terrorist group that has also killed innocent Americans.
"The very idea that a former President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief would meet with a terrorist organization demands a clear stance from all presidential candidates. Refusing to take a stand, as Senator Obama has done, is not the strong leadership we need today. If Senator Obama is not decisive enough to condemn former President Carter, how can he be strong enough to deal with the threat they pose to America and to our allies?"
Contact: Press Office, 703-650-5550; www.JohnMcCain.com
Posted by Walt as Middle East Issues, National Security, Presidential Race, Terrorism at 9:59 PM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
Seven years passed 9/11 and five years passed the invasion of Iraq, Americans are still trying to figure out what makes Arabs behave the way they do. There is a vast cultural difference between those in the West and those in an Arab world that fills the Middle East and stretches across the northern tier of Africa. Indeed, military conflict with Arabs goes back to the days of Thomas Jefferson.
In writing about Arabs, it must be acknowledged that one must use generalizations. No group is unanimous in all respects. All have their conservatives, their moderates, and starry-eyed liberals. Every group, however, has widely shared cultural and religious views, and as history teaches us, it is the silence of good people that permits the bad actors among them to dominate events.
In her new book, Sandra Mackey uses the calamity that is Lebanon to provide some useful insights to the Arab world she knows well. “Mirror of the Arab World” is well worth reading with the caveat that Mackey has bought into the view that Israel does not have any right to exist. For her it is always “Zionist” Israel in much the same way Arab news media always refers to “occupied Jerusalem.”
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Posted by Walt as Islam, Middle East Issues at 1:48 AM EDT
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By Erik Rush
"There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The agreement must establish a Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people."
–President George W. Bush, January 10, 2008
Geopolitics is such a complicated subject, you see, far beyond the comprehension of the average American. Those whom destiny has ordained to ameliorate the world’s geopolitical woes are far more insightful and inherently capable that you or I could ever hope to be.
I’m being facetious, of course. Without going into the promotion of that belief by politicians over the years due to spineless vacillation or their quest to keep Americans ignorant and uninvolved in the political process, I’d be interested in hearing how the Founding Fathers of this nation would have viewed the above concept, those who took on the most powerful empire on the planet and declaring that they were prepared to fight, kill and die to throw off the yoke of tyranny.
President Bush has gotten a lot of bad press from the establishment media because of who and what they are. I was forwarded some factoids the other day which, though verifiable, I was reluctant to use simply because the initial contact was a group email from a business associate.
There have been 39 combat related killings in Iraq in January. In Detroit there were 35 murders in the month of January. That’s just one American city, about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq.
Though some claim that President Bush "shouldn’t have started this war," consider:
FDR (a Democrat) led us into World War II. Although we were attacked, from 1941-1945, 450,000 lives were lost, an average of 112,500 per year.
Truman (a Democrat) finished that war and started one in Korea.
North Korea never attacked us.
From 1950-1953, 55,000 lives were lost, an average of 18,334 per year.
John F. Kennedy (a Democrat) started the Vietnam conflict in 1962.
Vietnam never attacked us.
Johnson (a Democrat) turned Vietnam into a quagmire.
From 1965-1975, 58,000 lives were lost, an average of 5,800 per year.
President Clinton (a Democrat) went to war in Bosnia without United Nations or French consent.
Bosnia never attacked us.
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Posted by Walt as Biased Media, Middle East Conflicts, Middle East Issues, U.S Foreign Policy at 12:26 AM EST
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"We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahedeen."
Al-Qaeda commander and spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid, referencing the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto; Adnkronos International News Service (AKI), December 27, 2007.
Lest I wind up standing back-to-back with actor Will Smith tomorrow morning defending myself against flying produce (Smith is taller, so I might not fare too badly), I’ll insert the disclaimer here: My personal, moral and religious values preclude a belief that any ethnic group is inherently superior or inferior to any other.
That being said, periodically I find it necessary and useful to state that such values do not preclude a belief that a particular culture might be inherently superior or inferior to another, and this is precisely the comparison I am making as regards Western culture versus the retrograde Indo-Arabic culture that spawns the mentality and social convention we glimpse in radical Islam.
True, the West and Western-influenced cultures do produce our share of sick freaks, however one cannot compare the body counts generated by one Jeffrey Dahmer, Jim Jones or even Aum Shinrikyo to that of radical Islamists worldwide or the primal, inhuman barbarity that is the hallmark of so many of their atrocities. Islamic extremists around the globe are currently averaging one People’s Temple-sized massacre each month, according to a cross section of media outlets, both reputable and questionable.
Benazir Bhutto, like many heads of state, particularly in the Third World, was no saint. Though definitely a cut far above her craven killers, this wasn’t Gandhi getting gunned down. In addition to the charges of corruption that plagued Bhutto during her tenure, the former Pakistani prime Minister was party to the repression of religious minorities in Pakistan. As is the case with many foreign politicos America has supported (and perhaps should not have), being an open advocate of cooperation with the West was Bhutto’s chief appeal. It was widely expected that her pro-Western stance would result in a government more cooperative and less duplicitous than that of the Pervez Musharraf regime.
This brings us to the likely course that might have been taken by the Bush administration and whichever administration follows. Was the hope that Bhutto would have immediately allowed NATO forces into northern Pakistan to wipe out Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives – as opposed to sucking another $10 billion in American taxpayers’ money out of the invertebrates in high office as did Musharraf? The scenario is indeed reminiscent of that in Egypt, where a "cooperative" Sadat replaced the anti-West, anti-Israel Gamal Abdel Nasser, with Bhutto being an avatar of the former. As long as the U.S. aid dollars kept flowing, Sadat was willing to come to the table with Israeli leaders. It bears mentioning that he too was gunned down for his political coziness with the West.
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Posted by Walt as Cultural Issues, Islam, Middle East Issues, Terrorism at 12:02 AM EST
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by Sher Zieve
Ever since the Democrat-run US Senate’s unanimous January 2007 confirmation of Lt. General David Petraeus’ position to the new US forces commander in Iraq, the Democrat senators have been fighting against both the General and our troops. House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) traveled to terrorist-run Syria, with her assortment of submission-scarves to wear before the throne of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Pelosi believes conversations with, and lending credibility to, countries that train and support terrorist-factions (as well as vowing to destroy the USA) is the good and appropriate thing to do. Then, in regards to meeting with the more powerful terrorist leader Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) issued the jubilant and begging-Iran statement: "Speaking just for myself, I would be ready to get on a plane tomorrow morning [to Iran], because however objectionable, unfair and inaccurate many of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statements are…it is important that we have a dialogue with him. Speaking for myself, I'm ready to go! And knowing the speaker [Pelosi], I think that she might be!"
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Posted by Walt as Middle East Issues, Terrorism at 10:39 PM EDT
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by Alan Caruba
A lot of people, attributing the current conflicts in the Middle East to either religion or oil, believe they don’t really have a dog in the fight. What cannot be ignored however is that a paroxysm of religious strife has broken out in the Middle East and it is exporting death and terror in the name of Allah.
Still angry over the defeat in 732 A.D. at Poitiers, France that stopped their northward conquest of Europe and the Crusades that followed from 1095 to 1291, the Arabs of the Middle East have taken the temperature of the West today and concluded that it’s time for a big comeback. Either through birthrates in Europe or the use of terror from Bali to Manhattan, they have concluded it’s time to try once again to be the ones who run the world.
Considering how little previous generations of these Arabs or Islam have contributed to modern civilization this seems astonishingly arrogant. The modern world is entirely the creation of the West.
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Posted by Walt as Islam, Middle East Issues at 8:42 PM EDT
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by Jeff Lukens
Imagine a Super Bowl football team quitting the game in the third quarter simply because they were behind. The premise is so absurd it is inconceivable. So too would be our quitting a war to protect our way of life simply because battlefield conditions are not going perfectly.
Football teams continually adjust their tactics and strategy during a game based on playing conditions on the field. And so does a nation at war. Seldom does any country enter a war with a perfect strategy in which to win it. Almost always, shortcomings are found that require a new approach. A victorious nation modifies what needs to be modified, and they go on.
That's what we've done in almost every war since the American Revolution. It did not happen in the first Iraq war in 1991 because it was over so quickly, but it's what we must do now in the second Iraq war. No one ever said things would go perfectly this time. Unlike football, no one knows for sure when a war will end. But we do know that if we don't play to win, we are sure we lose.
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Posted by Walt as General Commentary, Iraq, Middle East Issues, Terrorism, US Military at 10:51 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
The ever-changing (aka flip-flopping) Senator Kerry gives us his latest straight scoop on Iraq.
In a December 24, 2006, Washington Post article, Senator Kerry shares his insights after literally having been on all sides of the question in the past. His latest thoughts originate in the visit that he and Senator Christopher Dodd made recently to Iraq.
The Senator's conclusion is: The only hope for stability lies in pushing Iraqis to forge a sustainable political agreement on federalism, distributing oil revenues and neutralizing sectarian militias. And that will happen only if we set a deadline to redeploy our troops.
We'll look at that in a few paragraphs down, but first let's indulge in the fun of a few pot-shots at an easy target to hit.
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Posted by Walt as Middle East Issues, U.S. Political Issues, US Military at 11:53 PM EST
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