[MestaMachine]

Unveiling the truth behind Shariah
By SALIM MANSUR, QMI Agency

Last Updated: February 20, 2010 2:00am

Let’s revise the famous opening sentence of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto to state there is a real peril, instead of a spectre, haunting the West — the peril of acquiescing to the Shariah-based demands of the Islamists.

At the top of the Islamist demands is to make defamation of religion a punishable offence. Since Judaism and Christianity are open to criticism, even ridicule in free and secular societies of the West, such a demand is to make an exception for Islam.

The trial of Geert Wilders in Amsterdam for offending Muslims indicates the extent to which Holland, one of the most open European countries, has tilted in the direction of becoming a “Shariah-compliant” society.

Holland is not alone in this effort to appease the Islamists. Across the West, a chill has fallen over the fundamental right to think and speak freely about Islam like any other subject of public interest.

The not-so-curious fact that the mainstream media remains silent by not exposing the travesty in bringing Wilders to court for expressing his thoughts on Islam — it also remained silent by not publishing the Danish cartoons that incited a large number of Muslims around the world to rage and commit acts of violence — is proof of how great is the peril of western societies conceding de facto or de jure to Islamist demands for Shariah-based rulings.

There is terrible irony in this. Muslims remain the first victims of a Shariah-governed society, and the imposition of Shariah is the primary cause of the contemporary retardation of Muslim countries.

But the Islamists have succeeded in making the argument that the faith in, and the practice of, Islam is confined by the Shariah, and anything outside of it is non-Islam.

This argument deliberately obscures the fact that the Shariah is a legal system devised under Arab supremacy during the last three centuries of the first millennium and it was based on a reading of the Qur’an that reflected the prejudices of that age in history.

Dutch Cabinet falls over Afghanistan mission

PM Balkenende Sunday, 21st February 2010 Olivier Schotel
The trust between PM Balkenende (CDA), his vice-PM and Minister of Finance Wouter Bos (PvdA) and Minister of Foreign Affairs Maxime Verhagen (CDA) was distorted so badly that the parties could no longer form a working coalition. The main issue the Cabinet seems to have fallen over was the Dutch presence in Uruzgan, which was scheduled to end in December 2010. It had already been prolonged once. The PvdA was mainly opposed to prolong the mission once more.

A very odd event, finally causing the relations between the governing parties to explode, was a fax sent by the NATO asking the Cabinet for its position on the mission. This fax does not come when you have declined. Only several hours before the NATO contacted the Dutch Government, vice-PM Bos had already made a statement saying that the Dutch would retreat from Afghanistan following the set course of action. Members of Parliament for the PvdA now state that CDA cabinet ministers have somehow worked on their own initiative.

Balkenende has been one of the longest governing PMs in Dutch history, presiding over four coalitions, starting in 2002. None of his coalition Cabinets has completed the four-year term. This is descriptive of the social and political situation in the Netherlands since 2002. The last of his Cabinets fell in 2006 because of the hard line Minister of Immigrant Affairs Verdonk drew. Verdonk’s plan to take away the Dutch citizenship of well-known political thinker Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the final drop.

AYAAN

Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Somali: Ayaan Xirsi Cali; born Ayaan Hirsi Magan, 13 November 1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia)is a Dutch intellectual, feminist activist, writer, and politician. She is the estranged daughter of the late Somali scholar, politician, and revolutionary opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse. She is a prominent critic of Islam, and her screenplay for Theo Van Gogh's movie Submission led to death threats. Since van Gogh's assassination by a Muslim extremist in 2004, she has lived in seclusion under the protection of Dutch authorities.

When she was eight, her family left Somalia for Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and eventually settled in Kenya. She sought and obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, under circumstances that later became the center of a political controversy. In 2003 she was elected a member of the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Dutch parliament), representing the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led to her resignation from the parliament, and led indirectly to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet.

She is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and has been living in the United States. In 2005, she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She has also received several awards including Norway's Human Rights Service's Bellwether of the Year Award, the Danish Freedom Prize, the Swedish Democracy Prize (awarded in 2005 by the Liberal Party, a party which has been advocating a firmer stand on issues of assimilation of immigrants and promoting resistance to Islam in recent years), and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship. In 2006 she published her memoir, which appeared in English translation in 2007 titled Infidel. In a review posted on the summer reading list for the Middle East Strategy at the Harvard University website, Joshua Muravchik described the book as "simply a great work of literature," and compared her to novelist Joseph Conrad.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Video of her entire speech and Q&A at the University of Wisconsin last week.

Have you ever seen Sarah Palin and Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the same room?

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Me: WOMEN ROCK THE CRADLE, THEREFORE WOMEN ROCK THE WORLD! YES!!!!

[MestaMachine]

http://www.onejerusalem.org/2010/02/obamas-muslim-courtship.php

Obama’s Muslim Courtship
For those of us who prayed that Obama’s Muslim outreach would be limited to his Turkey and Egypt speeches in which he praised Muslims and gave them credit for contributions to American culture that are non-existent, I am sorry to report that the President’s words are only one part of his courtship of problematic Muslims.

In recent weeks, the Obama Administration has dropped all legal attempts to deny a visa to one Tariq Ramadan. Mr. Ramadan is a slick defender of his grandfather the founder of the radical Muslim Brotherhood and is a European intellectual rock star who has been banned from European countries and universities because of his radical views. A few years ago, in debate with Nicholas Sarkozy he called for a “moratorium” not a ban on the stoning of women in Muslim countries. He also wrote an article condemning Jewish intellectuals. These actions and some links with terrorists and the financing of terrorism caused the Bush Administration to refuse to allow him into the country.(For a full account of Ramadan’s record read Brother Tariq by Caroline Fourest a French journalist.)

In addition to giving Ramadan a pass into this country, the Obama administration’s counter terrorism guru has been making more troubling news. His latest pronouncements include an intellectual love fest with a largely Muslim crowd at New York university. He defended the release of terrorists and entertained a Muslim troublemaker who is dedicated to raising questions about who committed the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.Mr. Brennan is the same man who defended the handling of the would be Christmas Day airplane bomber. He was not disturbed by the kid gloves treatment the terrorist received.

And now we have the Obama Administration appointing what appears to be an apologist for a terrorist supporter.There is an old saying, “When there is smoke there is fire”: It appears there is a forest fire when it comes to suspicious Muslims and the Obama Administration.

http://michellemalkin.com/2010/02/17/national-security-nightmare-john-brennan-and-the-notorious-flying-imam/

During the question-and-answer session, Brennan welcomed a question from Omar Shahin. He identified himself as the head of the “North American Imams Federation.” What he didn’t mention was his role as the chief ringleader of the infamous flying imams.
Snip
As head of the Tucson Islamic Center in Arizona (home to past jihadi dry-run plotters), Shahin preached that his followers must put Islamic sharia law above Western laws. He told the Arizona Republic that he doubted Muslims were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, concluding: “All of these, they make it up.” Brennan didn’t appear to know who Shahin was. Somebody around him should have briefed him: Shahin’s involvement in Hamas-linked charities and radical Wahhabi “youth groups” has earned the Jordanian-born naturalized citizen increased FBI scrutiny over the years.

Instead, Brennan treated him as just another innocent Muslim with “reasonable” concerns about the government. “We came to this country to enjoy freedom,” Shahin began with faux, flag-waving emotion. “We feel that since September 11, we aren’t enjoying these values anymore…Also, we feel that there’s a big lack of trust between Muslims’ community and our government…My question: Is there anything being done by our government to rebuild this trust?”

Instead of countering the narrative, exposing Shahin’s true intentions, and vigorously defending America’s homeland security apparatus, Brennan dutifully genuflected to the gods of political correctness. President Obama, he told the militant 9/11 inside-jobber and jihad white-washer, is “determined to put America on a strong course.”

No, not a “strong course” that includes national security profiling of Islamic radicals pretending they care about our country’s best interests. By “strong course,” Brennan assured Shahin, he meant a course towards assuaging the civil rights groups who have objected to every security program at airports, borders, train stations, and visa offices for the past nine years.

Brennan told Shahin that the post-9/11 response of the Bush administration was a “reaction some people might say was over the top in some areas” (insert indignant grievance-monger nodding and mmm-hmm-ing here) and that “in an overabundance of caution [we] implemented a number of security measures and activities that upon reflection now we look back after the heat of the battle has died down a bit we say they were excessive, okay.”

It gets worse: Brennan then went on to decry the “ignorant feelings” of Americans outraged at the jihadi attacks on American soil. And then he told Shahin and the audience of Muslim students that he “was very concerned after the attack in Fort Hood as well as the December 25 attack that all of sudden there were people who went back into this fearful position that lashed out not thinking through what was reasonable and appropriate.”

The Fort Hood jihadist slaughtered 14 innocent soldiers and an unborn baby after an Army career openly threatening the lives of our soldiers and Brennan is wringing his hands about the rest of us “lashing out” over government incompetence. He believes our true sin is not in the systemic underreacting by the military, homeland security, intel, and White House officials in charge, but in the “overreacting” of the American public.

With clueless capitulationists like Brennan in charge of our safety, who needs enemies?