Posted on 12/05/2002 3:37:52 PM PST by TLBSHOW
By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - With Muslims worldwide growing more suspicious of the United States, President Bush (news - web sites) marked the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan with a visit Thursday to a mosque.
"The spirit behind this holiday is a reminder that Islam brings hope and comfort to more than 1 billion people worldwide," Bush said. "Islam affirms God's justice and insists on man's moral responsibility."
Bush left his shoes at the door, in keeping with the practice of the Islamic Center of Washington, a national center for Muslim culture and prayer. He also had visited six days after the terrorist attacks last year.
Back then, with a surge in hate crimes against Muslims in the United States, Bush was trying to defuse Americans' anger against Islam. Today, he has a different problem — increased hostility by Muslims around the world against America.
In an international survey released Wednesday, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found the image of the United States is slipping worldwide, and particularly in Middle Eastern countries with large Muslim populations. Large percentages of Muslim respondents in several countries said they believe suicide bomb attacks are a justifiable defense of Islam.
On Wednesday, Bush blamed America's tarnished image among Muslims on "propaganda machines (that) are cranked up in the international community that paints our country in a bad light."
The growing animosity comes at a time when Bush is trying to rally the world against terrorism and gather allies for possible military action against Iraq.
Inside the ornate mosque, Bush offered an explanation of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and renewed his defense of Islam.
Bush's speech was directed to a national and international audience. There was virtually no one inside except journalists and his staff. A few mosque officials stood next to Bush as he spoke.
"Over the past month, Muslims have fasted, taking no food or water during daylight hours, in order to refocus their minds on faith and redirect their hearts to charity," Bush said.
"Muslims worldwide have stretched out a hand of mercy to those in need, charity tables at which the poor can break their fast line the streets of cities and towns, and gifts of food and clothing and money are distributed to ensure that all share in God's abundance," he said.
From the Muslim event, Bush officially opened the Christmas season at the White House by lighting a Christmas tree just outside the gates.
"Ask a Muslim girl who is killed by her father for being raped."
I suppose you would consider it appropriate for all Christians to be judged by the actions of those who are the most extreme and violent.
If the violent ones were following a prescribed program of killing, pillaging and subjugation (which I still have yet to find in the words of Jesus) while the non violent ones sat on their ass and whined about people not accepting them and spouting "look at the killers grievances" crap while in the comfort of their western abodes? Damn straight I'd judge them...
How?
(Ask Miss Cleo?)
"A primary manifestation of the spirit of Babylon is a preoccupation with fear, violence, death and the destruction of the human spirit---choice sacrifices to the invisible rulers of darkness. Perhaps nowhere on earth have people suffered so ferociously for so long. In earlier centuries, the unfortunates of Mesopotamian society were liable not only to be pitched into Nebuchadnezzar's infamous fiery furnace, but also to have their 'lying tongues' pulled out by the Assyrians---a race of studied executioners who also burned, flayed, impaled and buried their victims alive.
During the Abbasid dynasty in the seventh century, the governor of Mesopotamia's Iraq province, al-Hadjadj, launched a reign that one historian has termed 'frank terror'. Upon assuming his governorship, he promptly executed all dissident rivals---an act that would later be emulated by Saddam Hussein. In full view of their severed heads, al-Hadjadj then delivered a public address that captured the spirit of Babylon. It contained these immortal lines that have been passed on to generations of Iraqi schoolchildren:
'I see heads before me that are ripe and ready for the plucking, and I am the one to pluck them, and I see blood glistening between the turbans and the beards'
If anything, the advent of 'modern civilization' has served only to make state-sponsored slaughter more efficient. From the early 1970's, Saddam Hussein and his immediate predecessors razed more than 4,000 villages, evicted at least 1.5 million people and killed upward of a quarter- million individuals. In the past decade (this was written over ten years ago), an estimated 35,000 people were executed for their religious beliefs alone. Thousands of others---primarily Kurds and Kuwaitis---were disposed of for other reasons.
In this unimaginably brutal land, it is possible to be arrested, tortured, even executed for such things as telling political jokes, failing to display the president's portrait, taking a picture of the Tigris River at sunset and accidently spilling coffee on a newspaper photo of Saddam. In the northern town of Sulaymaniyah, the bodies of victims were returned to relatives along with a bill for the bullets used in their executions. Others have been killed by rat poison, beatings, poison gas and hanging. In one particularly grisly episode, the government hung the mutilated bodies of several victims on Liberation Square while Radio Bahgdad summoned people to 'come and enjoy the feast'.
The footsoldiers of this terror are the members of Iraq's massive secret police apparatus. This four-headed monster includes the Amn al-Khass (State Internal Security), the Estikhbarat (Military Intelligence), the Mukhabarat (Baathist Party Intelligence) and the Presidential Affairs Department (Direct Presidential Intelligence). The largest and most dangerous of thses is the Mukhabarat, and agency that watches over the other police institutions and was active in the atrocities perpetrated in Kuwait. When the ranks of the secret police are added to those of the Border Guards, the Mobile Police Strike Force, the General Department of Nationality, the General Department of Police and the Armed Forces, an astonishing twenty percent of the Iraqi labor force is charged, according to al-Khalil, 'with one form or another of violence'.
In Stalinesque fashion, the Iraqi secret police have managed to place an effective mental straitjacket on much of the citizenry. Nearly everyone is afraid to speak for fear their words will be recorded by one of Saddam's ubiquitous hidden videocameras, a block watch informer or, worse yet, a member of their own family. In a 1977 publication, the Iraqi president wrote:
'To prevent the father and mother dominating the household with backwardness, we must make the small one radiate internally to expel it. Some fathers have slipped away from us for various reasons, but the small boy is still in our hands and we must transform him into an interactive radiating center inside the family...You must place in every corner a son of the revolution, with a trustworthy eye and a firm mind that receives its instructions from the responsible center of the revolution'
Nadhim Kzar, the first chief of Internal State Security under Saddam, reportedly ordered the torture and execution of several thousand people. In 1971, more than four hundred rivals were liquidated in the aptly named Qasr al-Nihayyah, or 'Palace of the End'. Famous for his habit of extinguishing cigarettes in the eyeballs of his victims, Kzar did much to nurture the widespread and sadistic foms of torture practiced today. A sampling of these methods have included roasting victims over flames, amputating noses, limbs and sexual organs, and hammering nails into joints. Children are tortured in front of parents, and suckling infants are held in cells next to mothers and denied food so that their cries will induce confessions. One survivor even reported that the entrance to his torture chamber was cynically marked with a mat that read 'welcome'.
It is also worth pointing out that the Iraqi regime has not reserved these horrors solely for its own domestic population. In occupied Kuwait, for instance, Iraqi soldiers and secret police tortured and summarily executed thousands of citizens before being driven back by advancing Allied troops. In oblique reference to the demonic nature of the carnage, General Norman Schwrzkopf could describe the participating Iraqui forces only as 'not of the same human race'.
Reflecting on the days of horror, Dr. Khalid Shalawi, head physician at Kuwait City's Mubarak Hospital, said he often wept over what had happened. According to eyewitness accounts from insiders like trauma nurse Basma Yusef, Iraqi torture vicitms were brought in with cigarette and acid burns, fingernails and facial hair torm out, holes drilled through their kneecaps and intestines inflated with air. Others were kicked in the stomach, electro-shocked on the genitals and suspended upside-down. One man had his ears cut off, while another was burned so badly 'he had no skin'. Scores were murdered with ax blows. 'The head is open and the brains are out', Yusef recounted. 'Some, their eyes have been taken out'.
Nor were women exempt form the nightmare. Newsweek reported that the Iraqis paraded one nursing mother before captured Kuwaiti resistance fighters. 'Here is the milk of Kuwait,' they taunted. 'Drink it.' Others, including countless rape victims, fared worse. Some were gang-raped and killed, their nude bodies stuffed into trash bins. Rasha Kabundi, a young mother of three, was shot four times in the chest and jaw before the top of her skull was removed with an electric saw. Her body, too, was found in a rubbish heap."
While I have grave doubts about your sincerity in this request, since, the teachings of Islam are available everywhere, you might begin with these:
Will The Real Islam Please Stand Up?
The Social and Economic Implications of Sharia Law
Music and Singing in the Light of the Quran and Sunnah by Abu Bilal Mustafa Al-Kanadi
Hank
The point is that those one billion people have declared war on us.
There was no outrage among the worldwide muslim community for 9/11. The only condemnation coming from muslims was for the victims.
You might vote for a grouch for President, but 99 out of 100 of your fellow citzens won't.
Do they beat those who use instruments? Do they attempt force those who do not follow their religion to conform to their views? Is the fact that other people have irrational views justification for those views?
Hank
Just ignore them. :-)
Maybe the Muslims will accept Bush as their new authority and he can redefine other things about Islam like who gets to be the real authority on it. Maybe that's one of the fatal flaws in that religion/political ideology ---bin Laden is a real Muslim, the terrorists are real Muslims, there's no way they can be excommunicated, maybe that's why Islam started from violence and has remained violent throughout the centuries. It's going to attract more violent types because of it's writings, and they will tend to keep it violent.
WOW! Does Jesus Christ know this? Who Bush claims is his Lord and Saviour.
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