Free Republic

Over 13,000 camels to join beauty pageantry More than 13,000 camels from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Gulf Arab countries will be herded inside a massive well-built enclosure in the Kingdom for the region’s largest camel beauty contest, starting on Sunday. Organisers said 13,678 male and female Arabian camels will take part in the event, which will attract 280 camel owners from Saudi Arabia, 22 from Kuwait, 17 from Qatar and five from the UAE. The contest will be held in North Saudi Arabia and will last 31 days, during which three winners will be picked by a committee...

Man could receive death penalty for adultery with ex-wife Jeddah- Under strict sharia law a Saudi man could be stoned to death for committing adultery with his ex-wife, who was unaware he had divorced her. A Saudi woman has demanded that her ex-husband receive the strictest punishment under sharia law, for committing adultery with her. In a bizarre tale the Saudi man divorced his wife without letting her know, yet continued to have sex with her. The woman had no inkling they were no longer man and wife. Emirates 247 reported that four months after divorcing his wife, the man...

Wahhabism and Shia Islam are key threats to Malaysia’s security and should be kept under close watch to ensure they do not lead to extremism, a Department of Islamic Development (Jakim) official has said. The National Security Council (NSC) put a group of clerics on its terror watch-list last week for preaching Wahhabism, a puritanical strain of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia ... Zamihan stressed that, if left alone, Wahhabism and Shia Islam could “sow the seeds of extremism as seen in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Indonesia and Chechnya”. He said certain parties were now actively promoting both teachings with financial...

Over a phone conversation with one of the Saudi Arabian newspapers, he said: “there were not many Zoroastrians in history, but they have been well-known (so what! who has assigned you to be historian without documentation and authenticity, let's see what you have to say and what are your proves to the lies this time!!!). History knows them as a nation full of hate and oppression (lie, if you meant history of Iran, for you ignorant mind, it is good to say and let you know that Iran has been known as cradle of civilization, just check this link, if...

35 people have been killed in an explosion at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport according to the airport spokesperson. Up to 168 are said to have been injured in what the Investigative Committee believes to be a terror attack.Eighty-six people have been taken to nearby hospitals, 46 of them are reported to be in critical condition. Some reports say there are foreign citizens among the victims, including those from the UK, Italy, France, Serbia and Slovakia. *************************snip************************************ FSB knew about possible terror attack – reports Russia’s Federal Security Bureau had known about a suicide bomber in the city, but their information was...

Wahhabis threaten Serbia, officials Dec 28, 2010 Kosovo Albanian independence declaration and organized crime are threats to Serbia but the most dangerous threat to Serbia’s security is the the Islamic Wahhabi movement in Serbia’s Raska region says Serbia’s top spy Svetko Kovac. “Besides the existing criminal and terrorist groups in that space there are secessionist demands and provocations and other extremist associations and groups,” said Kovac about the Raska region which Muslims call Sandzak. A Muslim Imam Zukorlic has been fanning violence in the region and rounding up various extremist Muslims demanding “autonomy” not just for that area but from...

The Two Faces of Feisal RaufWhat's wrong with What's Right With Islam. This is part two of a two-part series. You can read part one here.The problems with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s book What’s Right with Islam begin with the title. As Andrew McCarthy noted on National Review Online, the book, whose full title is now What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West, was previously called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America; before that, it was published in Malaysia as A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of...

Having worked in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the home of its most extreme form, Wahhabism, I was shocked that a New York City neighborhood community board, in its ignorance, recently voted 29 to 1 to support a request to build a mosque and a Muslim center near Ground Zero. Muslims have always built mosques on the sites of their conquests. The Prophet Muhammad himself made the Ka'aba, a pagan pantheon, into a mosque after he captured Mecca in 630 CE. The Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem was deliberately built near the Temple Mount, the holiest places in...

SARAJEVO -- During the past week, an international Wahhabi organization has launched a campaign in Bosnia-Herzegovina calling on non-Muslims to convert to Islam. The organization, which calls itself "Poziv u Raj" (Invitation To Heaven), has been putting up slick billboards and posters and distributing leaflets in Sarajevo, Bihac, Sanski Most, Maglaj, Zenica, Travnik, Tuzla, and Tesanj. The group also has been organizing public lectures in Bosnian cities and towns by a Greek man and a German man who recently converted to Islam. Those recent converts have repeated the group's call for non-Muslims to convert to Islam. They have also been...

A woman from Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to receive 300 lashes and 18 months in prison over complaints against court officials. Sawsan Salim, who was taken to court last month in a court in Rass, in Qassim province, was sentenced after a judge decided that a petition she filed had contained 118 spurious complaints against officials, including the judges themselves, and she had appeared before him without a male guardian. Salim also claimed officials had chided her for not being accompanied by a male guardian, as required under Islamic law, during her visits to their offices.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia has launched a nationwide crackdown on stores selling items that are red or otherwise allude to the banned celebration of Valentine's Day. A Saudi official says the feared religious police are inspecting shops for red roses, heart-shaped products or gifts wrapped in red, and ordering storeowners to get rid of them. Red-colored or heart-shaped items are legal at other times of the year, but as Feb. 14 nears they become contraband in Saudi Arabia...

If you’re an LSU basketball fan, one story which might have been supremely disappointing over the past 20 years is that of former Tiger scoring machine Chris Jackson, who changed his name to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf following a conversion to Islam and subsequently refused to stand for the national anthem while playing in the NBA, among several incidents marking him as at least somewhat unfriendly to his country. There is a story behind Jackson’s conversion, and it’s one which needs to be told in light of recent events – because Jackson/Abdul-Rauf isn’t just a guy who decided to be a Muslim.

You would be excused for thinking that the Wahabbi religious establishment of Saudi Arabia and the religion guarantees of our First Amendment have no more in common than fire and water. But I think this oddest of odd couples helps to explain two recent events involving American Muslims and the rest of us -- instances of so-called “home-grown� Islamist terrorism, such as the Fort Hood murders, and the resentment being reported among American Muslims at FBI and other law-enforcement-agency activities at U.S. mosques. To be sure, the religious values the First Amendment protects -- freedom of worship, the nonestablishment of...

The Times also delivers their own absurd 'blame the victims' perspective: Mr. Obama has made it a goal of his presidency to repair relations with Muslims around the world; in a major speech in Cairo this year, he called for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world. The shootings at Fort Hood, however, pose a different problem for the president, by shining a spotlight on the tensions Muslims feel inside the United States. Pardon me? This incident spotlighted the tensions felt by Muslims in the US? Please - if investigators had discovered that Hasan had recorded a Glenn Beck segment...

Tenured Radical Goes Global Malcolm A. Kline, October 16, 2009 A professor whom Accuracy in Academia has covered extensively is getting ready to take his act on the road. “Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, produces a steady stream of writings that downplays the threat radical Islam poses to America and the West,” Jonathan Schanzer writes in The American Thinker. “His opinions are at odds with the beliefs of most Americans.” “Now, through a project designed to foster an understanding of America in the Arab world, he appears to be at...

In an authoritative essay published in The Wall Street Journal, Abdurrahman Wahid, the first president of newly democratic Indonesia from 1999 to 2001, described what constitutes "right Islam" as distinct from "wrong Islam." He warned people of good will to recognize that "a terrible danger threatens humanity." This peril, Wahid wrote, emanates from an "extreme and perverse ideology in the minds of fanatics," specifically "Wahhabi/Salafist ideology -- a minority fundamentalist religious cult fueled by [Saudi] petrodollars." The importance of this essay, and the warning in it, comes from the prestige of the author. Abdurrahman Wahid is an Islamic scholar who...

The New America Foundation and the Committee for International Trade cordially invite you to a major national policy forum US-SAUDI RELATIONS IN A WORLD WITHOUT EQUILIBRIUM Monday, 27 April 2009 The Four Seasons Hotel 2800 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 8:00 am Registration & Coffee 8:45 am Welcoming Remarks 9:00 am A Forward Projection of What the Saudi-US Relationship Should Look Like and Needs to Achieve The Honorable Chuck Hagel Former United States Senator Distinguished Professor in the Practice of National Governance, Georgetown University Chairman, Atlantic Council of the United States His Excellency HRH Turki Al-Faisal Chairman, King Faisal Center...

Shortly before noon on September 12, 2001, a visitor stopped by the palace, looking for Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz al-Saud, the Crown Prince. The man who now sits on the throne of Saudi Arabia was kneeling in shock and prayer. He had prayed there all night and had received news from Washington, but could still not believe that the hijackers who crashed their planes into New York and Washington were his countrymen. That experience is credited widely as part of the impetus behind King Abdullah’s attempts to reform his reactionary kingdom. But Saudi Arabia remains as he did...

Video about news story below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61mGcq1y96o Saudi Cleric want women banned from TV, Media http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hUoscqVn5bCHjZ5QLQN1mt-jaKAw Share your thoughts on this idea. Should we ban women from the media to protect men from impure thoughts?

Please, forgive me for presenting this article with my highlights. (I could highlight everything actually). I knew I like Michael Totten, but in this article he exceeded my high expectations. Follow the link to the original to bypass my highlights. Senator Barack Obama said something at the presidential debate last week that almost perfectly encapsulates the difference between his foreign policy and his opponent’s: “Secretary of Defense Robert Gates himself acknowledges the war on terrorism started in Afghanistan and it needs to end there.” I don’t know if Obama paraphrased Gates correctly, but if so, they’re both wrong.If Afghanistan were...

More than a dozen Christians in Saudi Arabia who were accused by government officials of worshipping in their homes have been ordered deported. According to a report from International Christian Concern, the Christians will be expelled tomorrow for one specific home worship service in Taif in April.

THE revelations over the past week that Griffith University aggressively pursued funds from the Saudi Arabian embassy to finance its Islamic studies unit illustrates a major problem facing all liberal democracies confronted with the vast reservoir of petro-dollars controlled by the Saudi Government. "Saudi Arabia today remains the location where more money is going to terrorism, to Sunni terror groups and to the Taliban than any other place in the world," according to testimony given by Stuart Levey, the head of the US Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, at a US congressional hearing on April 1, 2008. This...

History has been a harsh critic of Neville Chamberlain's decision in 1938 to allow Adolf Hitler to trash the WWI Versailles peace treaty to seize control of and change the borders Europe, first France in the Rhineland, then Czechoslovakia and Poland. President George W. Bush's quick acceptance of the efforts of the Albanians in Kosovo to change the borders of Serbia will also be viewed in history as an appeasement that did not work. World War II actually began when Adolf Hitler marched a mere 14,500 troops into the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, in violation of the Treaty of...

BELGRADE – Serbs will never forgive the United States if it helps ensure Kosovo's Albanians win independence for the Serbian province, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said on Monday. In a bitter response to President George W. Bush's promise to Albanians that Kosovo would soon be independent, Kostunica said Serbia was 'justifiably disgusted' by U.S. policy, the official Serbian news agency Tanjug reported. The row over Kosovo's future deepened as the province marked the eve of the 8th anniversary of the June 12 deployment of 60,000 NATO troops who entered the territory from Macedonia as Serb forces withdrew to the north....

Radical Islam Is Growing in the US: Where’s the American Anger? by Thomas D. Segel It is very difficult to understand why Americans are not enraged at the thought of any radical Islamic movement, particularly in the United States. But, being unconcerned seems to be an understatement, for Islam is rapidly expanding in this country and there is already evidence that from evening prayer to the teachings of Islamic schools the tone is anti-American and anti-Christian. We have already seen the growth of the Muslim faith in Europe. Even in England there are already calls for the country to adopt...

Restitution of Serbian Orthodox Church Property in Kosovo-Metohia ProvinceSerbian Orthodox Church is the legal owner of 5,300 hectares of land in Kosovo province. The word Metohia, an integral part of the name of southern Serbian province, is derived from the Greek word "metoch", denoting the land owned by the Church. Photo: Pec Patriarchate built in 1260, the seat of Serbian Orthodox Church, Kosovo-Metohia, Serbia. Raska and Prizren Diocese (encompassing Raska region and the province of Kosovo and Metohia) of the Serbian Orthodox Church will soon receive a decision stating the return of 5,300 hectares of land (13,097 acres) that was...

Saudi Arabia to execute woman for 'witchcraft'  Thursday, February 14, 2008 A leading international human rights organisation is calling on Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to halt the planned execution of a woman accused of "witchcraft". The woman is due to be put to death on foot of a coerced confession and the statements of witnesses who said she had "bewitched" them. One man claimed she had made him impotent. In another case, a divorced woman reportedly returned to her ex-husband during the month predicted by the witch said to have cast the spell. The court failed to probe alternative explanations...

Who Are These Wahhabis, and What Do They Want? By Alan Moretti According to Tom Carter, Wahhabism is a puritanical form of Islam that teaches intolerance of anyone who does not conform to its worldview, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steal, but they cannot dent the steel of Americans resolve. America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining”. — President George W....

Thomas Lippman Washington Post November 25. 2007 The subtitle of Yaroslav Trofimov's fascinating and important book about the 1979 takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca by heavily armed fanatics refers to that event as "the forgotten uprising." Perhaps it has been forgotten here but not in the Muslim Middle East, where it was a seminal event of the region's most traumatic year in modern times. That year began with the Iranian revolution and ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In between, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, radicalizing the Palestinians. Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq. And...

The United States has largely eliminated the infrastructure and operational leadership of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network over the past five years. However, its ideological offspring continue to proliferate across the globe. American efforts to combat this contagion are hamstrung by the fact that its ideological and financial epicenter is Saudi Arabia, where an ostensibly pro-Western royal family governs through a centuries-old alliance with the fanatical Wahhabi Islamic sect. In addition to indoctrinating its own citizens with this extremist creed, the Saudi government has lavishly financed the propagation of Wahhabism throughout the world, sweeping away moderate interpretations of Islam...

According to Tom Carter, Wahhabism is a puritanical form of Islam that teaches intolerance of anyone who does not conform to its worldview, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steal, but they cannot dent the steel of Americans resolve. America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining”. — President George W. Bush It was reported on June 27, 2003 that al- Qaeda’s second...

Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on Feb. 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of World War II, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that "Long Telegram" in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall four decades later. And what Mr. Robinson wondered was...

So many of the administration's present problems derive from squeamishness about ideological confrontation that any effective Long Telegram would have to address. When President Bush declared a "war on terror," cynics understood that he had no particular interest in the IRA or the Tamil Tigers, but that he was constrained from identifying the real enemy in any meaningful sense: In the fall of 2001, a war on Islamic this or Islamic that would have caused too many problems with Gen. Musharraf and the House of Saud and other chaps he wanted to keep on side. But it's one reason, for...

RIYADH (Reuters) - Hundreds of camels have died in Saudi Arabia this week from a mystery ailment. The Agriculture Ministry has said 232 camels died in the space of four days in the Dawasir Valley, 400 km (250 miles) south of Riyadh. King Abdullah has promised compensation for owners, who say the real number of deaths is far higher. Agriculture ministry officials have denied an infectious disease caused the deaths and blamed them on animal feed supplied by food storage authorities.

There is an insidious program featuring a white-washed, and thus untrue, version of Islam that has permeated our educational institutions, beginning in kindergarten, winding its way through the 12th grade, and into our universities. In circuitously slick ways, the Saudi government has managed to insinuate its own version of Middle Eastern culture and history, and strictly positive views of Islam, upon millions of American students thus indoctrinating them to a biased, pro-Islamic position when the full truth is far more complex and, not surprisingly, not quite as glowingly favorable. Journalist Stanley Kurtz has explored the depth of this interference and...

July 26, 2007 Fight to save teenage maid from beheading Jeremy Page in Delhi When Rizana Nafeek left her war-torn village in Sri Lanka two years ago, aged 17, she hoped to find a new life of peace and prosperity working as a maid in Saudi Arabia. Instead, she is on death row, facing possible decapitation in the next few months for allegedly strangling the baby son of her Saudi employers. Executions are commonplace in Saudi Arabia: there have been 109 so far this year, including four Sri Lankans who were beheaded for armed robbery. But Nafeek’s tender age, summary...

The Sunnis of Anbar, both sheikhs and ordinary folk, deeply resent the attempted imposition of an extreme Sunni order on them and are prepared to conciliate with Iraqi Shias and cooperate with the U.S.-led coalition to prevent it from happening. So why pull out now? Why do Westerners remain so reticent about Wahhabism and its Saudi backers?

BAGHDAD — "Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers." "About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the...

Western civilization, freedom and democracy are under attack around the world. The battle is taking place along all its borders and from within the countries who still remain within the fold. I have no concerns about our democratic and free military forces’ ability to defend us against our visible enemies. I am very concerned however by the mounting, almost unnoticed attacks from within, particularly here in my home, the United States. As the feminist author Tammy Bruce would say, I was raised to believe in prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope, charity, democracy and the American way of life. I...

Lately in Sarajevo, it has become common to see vans with tinted windows in which women in black hijab and children are escorted, usually by two bearded men in the traditional Wahhabi short trousers. Only until six months ago, Nermina from Sarajevo was one of those women dressed in hijab. For five years she was a follower of the Wahhabi movement and wore a long black dress concealing her entire body and a veil covering her hair, neck and face. She also had to wear gloves. Nermina (not her real name) left the movement and abandoned the hijab after feeling...

Four members of an ultraconservative Muslim sect, known as Wahhabis, have been arrested following a raid on a mountain terrorist training camp in the Rashka region of south-western Serbia on March 18. A large supply of weapons, ammunition, hand grenades, facemasks and plastic explosive with detonators was also discovered at a cave at Ninaja Mountain, 30 kilometres from Novi Pazar. A judge ordered the four to be detained for 30 days to allow police and intelligence officials to investigate their alleged activities at the training site. Dragan Jocic, the Serbian interior affairs minister, said: “We are determined to prevent any...

Perhaps no single figure better represents the lamentable situation of Middle East studies (MES) today than Professor Natana J. DeLong-Bas, a Georgetown graduate who currently teaches at Brandeis University and Boston College. Her specialty happens to be Wahhabism, the ultrafundamentalist Islamic sect and state religion in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism inspires al-Qaida and its variants--including the Sunni jihadists currently murdering U.S. and coalition troops, as well as Shia Muslims, in Iraq. DeLong-Bas is a professional apologist for Saudi extremism. She recently reached a depth of mendacity about radical Islam it is hard to imagine her exceeding. In an...

In the last few years, the critique of Wahhabism has gained unprecedented momentum in Saudi Arabia. First formulated by a heterogeneous group of prominent liberal and Islamist intellectuals, it seems to have received the approval of at least part of the ruling elite who have taken a few official steps towards socio-religious reform. But is Saudi Arabiayet ready to enter the era of Post-Wahhabism? Huge changes have recently taken place in Saudi Arabia, especially within the local political-intellectual field. Significant among these is the rise to prominence of a group of "islamo-liberals," who are "made up of former Islamists and...

What's in a name . . . WHEN THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY of the global war against Islamist extremism is written, it may well be recorded that one of the psychological victories by al Qaeda and its Saudi financiers and commanders was to convince Western governments and media that Wahhabism, the fundamentalist Sunni sect that is the state religion in the desert kingdom, should not be mentioned by its name. After September 11, 2001, Islamist adherents on our shores first denied that Wahhabism existed. There was, they insisted, just Islam. Excision of the W-word from Western discourse was a serious hit....

RUSH: (story) "Russia, in March, will start delivering nuclear fuel for a plant that it is building in Iran, the head of the state company in charge of the project said Monday." Now, I thought that Iran was a country rich in oil and in fuel. The head of the outfit here, Sergei Shmatko, "said during a trip to Tehran that he and Iranian officials had discussed financial problems related to the completion of the nuclear plant in Iran's southern port of Bushehr... Shmatko said his company would start preparations in January for nuclear fuel deliveries to Bushehr, and begin...

Mr. Allen is an historian who has written several books on Central Asia and the British colonial period, including Soldier Sahibs and The Buddha and the Sahibs. He recently received the Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal for his work in "stimulating public interest in Britain's imperial encounter with Asia." His latest book is God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (Perseus Books). He lives in England. There is a widely held view in the West that the violence perpetrated by Muslim jihadists is a response to Western imperialism: a defence of Islam that will cease...

In America Alone, Mark Steyn presents us with a doomsday scenario backed by impeccable science and research, and he does it in such a clever manner that we are actually amused as we read of the impending demise of Europe-as-we-knew-it, Japan, and Canada. Why are they failing? Procreation, or more pointedly, the lack thereof. Populations in Russia, Italy, and the Low Countries may have already passed the point of no return. Canada is on the borderline. America, on the other hand, appears to have a sustainable reproductive level, a fact that ought to make some Canucks wish that General Hull...

In the last few years, the critique of Wahhabism has gained unprecedented momentum in Saudi Arabia. First formulated by a heterogeneous group of prominent liberal and Islamist intellectuals, it seems to have received the approval of at least part of the ruling elite who have taken a few official steps towards socio-religious reform. But is Saudi Arabiayet ready to enter the era of Post-Wahhabism? Huge changes have recently taken place in Saudi Arabia, especially within the local political-intellectual field. Significant among these is the rise to prominence of a group of "islamo-liberals," who are "made up of former Islamists and...

NVM: Modules     Volume 3, Issue 14 (July 15, 2005) | Download PDF Version Understanding the Origins of Wahhabism and Salafism By Trevor Stanley The phenomenon of Islamic terrorism cannot be adequately explained as the export of Saudi Wahhabism, as many commentators claim. In fact, the ideological heritage of groups such as al-Qaeda is Salafism, a movement that began in Egypt and was imported into Saudi society during the reign of King Faisal. The official ‘Wahhabi’ religion of Saudi Arabia has essentially merged with certain segments of Salafism. There is now intense competition between groups and individual scholars...

Pope Benedict XVI recently cited a Byzantine-era critique of Islam, and the usual hubbub of outrage ensued. Various self-appointed and official Islamic spokesmen (they're always men), including the head of Turkey's religious affairs directorate (why does Turkey have one?), responded sharply in the name of their faith. One might argue that a confident, evolved religion welcomes all kinds of open debate. Or one might in tone gravely that the West continues to mishandle its relations with the umma -- the sphere of active Muslim believers -- with the implied assumption that there is such a unified entity of tens of...