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Saudi Arabia may bar Haj pilgrims below six years and above 65 years due to swine flu fears, a media report said Wednesday. Jeddah was yet to convey its decision to the governments across the globe that coordinate the Haj by their Muslim citizens every year, New Age newspaper said. In Bangladesh’s case, the number of pilgrims this year may be slashed by half. “We don’t have any specific information about how many pilgrims will not able to go for Haj if the ban (is) imposed, but the number can come down to half,” said Shahjahan Mia, Bangladesh’s state minister...

Sarah Hussein Obama, 2008From USA Today: Sarah Hussein Obama, grandmother of U.S. senator Barack Obama, when asked on Wednesday about recent attacks on her grandson that include the spreading of rumors that he is secretly a Muslim: "Untruths are told that don't have anything to do with what Barack is about," she said in the local Luo language ... "In the world of today, children have different religions from their parents," she said. She, too, is a Christian. Sarah Hussein Obama, 2009From Pakistani Daily Times today: US President Barack Obama’s paternal grandmother, Sara Obama, will perform haj this year along...

US President Barack Obama’s paternal grandmother, Sara Obama, will perform haj this year along with her son Syed Obama, a private TV channel reported on Saturday. According to the channel, Sara and Syed will also visit Dubai before going to Saudi Arabia for performing haj

HITLER RANTS ABOUT HAJ AND HIS BASEBALL GLOVE Hitler thinks he is signing up for Gil Hodges fantasy baseball camp. His travel agent misunderstands and sends him to Haj instead. He is very angry.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, made the hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca last week, calling it a "transformative" experience. The Democrat from Minnesota's 5th Congressional District traveled to the Saudi Arabian city along with about 3 million people. The journey is a lifelong dream for many Muslims. "It was transformative. It was a wonderful experience," Ellison said in a telephone interview today. "I learned a lot about myself, about my faith."

You might see a picture of thousands of Muslims throwing rocks at stone pillars and believe that they ran out of 13 year-old-girls or other women to stone to death. But in this case it isn't that they ran out of rape victims to prosecute for adultery but this is an actual rite of the religion of peace. Called Stoning of the Devil the ritual is the most dangerous part of the pilgrimage because On several occasions hundreds of participants have suffocated or been trampled to death in stampedes. Read more about this ritual below

Philosophy of Haj based on global government - Ahmadinejad Greetings, future dhimmis "If we would delete the ultimate objective of establishing a global system from the Haj rituals, the remainder would be deeds devoid of a soul." He said it. From IRNA (thanks to Sr. Soph): IRI President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here Wednesday on Al-Adha Eid Day in Saudi Arabia philosophy of Haj can be defined merely through considering Islam's aim at establishment...

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS by Clement Clarke Moore 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads; And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap, Had just settled down for a long winter's nap, When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, I sprang from the bed to see what was...

Pilgrims pack Mecca ahead of annual haj By Jonathan Wright Fri Dec 14, 10:11 AM ET MECCA, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - About 1 million Muslim pilgrims from across the world packed the mosque and streets around the Kaaba shrine in the holy city of Mecca for the last Friday prayers before the annual haj pilgrimage. Pilgrims trekked to the mosque hours in advance to reserve a space for their prayer mats as close as possible to the Kaaba, a cubic stone structure which Muslims regard as the centre of an ancestral monotheistic cult established by the prophet Ibrahim, known to...

NEW DELHI: India yesterday dismissed allegations of recklessness after Indonesia said one of its passenger jets was forced to turn around in mid-air due to a ballistic missile test. The Garuda Indonesia plane, full of Muslim pilgrims en route to Saudi Arabia, had reached Indian airspace when the nuclear-capable missile flew through the sky. The incident on Thursday has triggered a diplomatic row between the two countries, with Indonesia's foreign ministry demanding an explanation as to why no warning was given. But New Delhi said this was not the case. "A notice was sent a week before the test by...

As the Bush administration squanders a trust, Democrats prepare a new “Sister Souljah Moment.” By Andrew C. McCarthy On a weekend when the Bush administration achieved a new CAIR-friendly low, a prominent Democrat, following the lead of other prominent Democrats, distanced herself very publicly from the unsavory Council on American-Islamic Relations. The Transportation Security Administration is the executive agency created after 9/11 to protect American travelers. Yet, Americans viewing its website this weekend could not have felt very protected. Aghast, instead, would have been the proper response to this posting. As if snuggling up to CAIR, coercing our law-enforcement and...

MENA, Saudi Arabia, Dec 31 (Reuters) - More than 2.5 million Muslim haj pilgrims performed devil-stoning rites on Sunday, amid tight security to prevent overcrowding and protests following the execution of Saddam Hussein. The 5-day haj, marred by deadly stampedes in recent years, was overshadowed by the hanging on Saturday of the former Iraqi leader, a hero to some Sunni Arabs because of his anti-U.S. stance, but hated by many Shi'ites. "The number one Satan is America," said Iraqi pilgrim Suleiman Awadallah, who described himself as "a resistance fighter", after performing the stoning ritual. "The prayers of all Muslims when...

IT'S bad enough that friends of Hezbollah terrorists could trick so many journalists with just a tall story and a rusty Lebanese ambulance. Worse is that some of those journalists seemed so eager to believe this ambulance was indeed wickedly blown up by an Israeli missile fired straight through the big red cross on its roof -- leaving not even a scorch mark. But worst is that even now that this hoax has been exposed, none of the countless writers and commentators who fell for it have admitted to passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists. It is this...

The media war against Israel Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it — and on the wrong side of...

International journalists discuss Lebanon war coverage; NYT bureau chief: Israel 'not interested in Lebanese deaths' A number of journalists claimed during a convention in Jerusalem Monday evening that Israel and the IDF were mostly to blame for the way the foreign media covered the Lebanon war. The panel of journalists, largely from the international media, convened to discuss their coverage of the war, at a conference arranged by the Media Line agency's Mideast Press Club. "Journalists' access to the battlefield is controlled exclusively by the IDF," said Simon McGregor-Wood, Chairman of the Foreign Press Association, and Bureau Chief of ABC...

Fauxtography Defender's Faux News Turns out that Greg Mitchell, the Editor & Publisher editor who has been attacking the blogosphere like a rabid ferret for pointing out the bogus news from the Middle East, has first-hand experience with staging news. (Hat tip: Confederate Yankee.) Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally “turned off” the famous cataracts,...

All Your Fakes Are Belong to Us A jawa video spoof on Beirut Fauxtography.

Amid the controversy over certain pictures from Lebanon, a longtime student of war photography asks, "I'm not sure if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both." By David D. Perlmutter (August 18, 2006) -- The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism. In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks...

It's the story that the journalistic elite would rather just go away. In the aftermath of Reuters' admission that one of its photographers, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated two war images from Lebanon after bloggers smoked out his crude Photoshop alterations, and all 920 of his Reuters photos were pulled, evidence of far more troubling photo staging and media deception in the Middle East continues to pour in. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com) calls it "fauxtography." Reuters on Sunday withdrew an image of smoke rising from burning buildings after an Israeli air strike on the suburbs of Beirut on...

The first Photoshop war Lebanon war's doctored photos could be harbinger of photojournalism crisis Gal Mor The photo of an apparently new Mickey Mouse doll, resting on a ruined street in the Lebanese town of Tyre following an Israeli Air Force attack, took me back to a British TV show called "Drop the Dead Monkey," which aired in Israel about 15 years ago. One of the journalists in Channel 4's satirical show used to hang around battle zones with a teddy bear in his trunk and place it at disaster zones a short time before cameras began shooting, in order...