Free Republic

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...

Islam is in danger TODAY'S EDITORIAL By Farid N. Ghadry September 21, 2006 The recent brouhaha surrounding Pope Benedict XVI comments on Islam delivered in Germany should give Muslims a pause. Not one that would conjure the recalcitrant attacks that we have seen recently but rather one that would question why such a prominent religious leader would utter these words. What the Pope said allows me, as a Muslim, to ponder self-examination and not rush into a reaction of condemnation. Islam, throughout its history, delivered its share of great minds to humanity during times of peace and prosperity. Scientists like...

The Washington Post, columnist David Ignatius asks, “Are We Fighting Islamic Fascists?” and answers a bold, “Yes and no.” His argument for “yes” is pretty strong: Ernst Nolte's "Three Faces of Fascism," a classic study of the social forces that created fascist movements in France, Italy and Germany during the 1920s and '30s … concludes … Fascism is "resistance to transcendence" … rebellion against the liberating but destabilizing transformations of modern society. In the countries where it took root, fascism began as a middle-class assault on the liberal elites who were creating that era's version of globalization. Jews were a...

Radical mosques are being built across the United States at an alarming rate, all tethered to a fanatical strain of Islam emanating from Saudi Arabia. And while so many have gone up, not one has come down. Not even Brooklyn, New York’s Al-Farooq Mosque, which housed al-Qaeda’s American hub in the early 90’s, the Alkifah Refugee Center, has met its demise. Recently, a new mosque of this kind was given the green light, a 29,000 square foot goliath, smack in the middle of South Florida. Tonight, a group of community leaders will be voicing their concern in protest. The mosque...

The people of Sarajevo, renowned for their pluralism, have been shaken after a series of incidents including the murder of a Muslim woman by her Islamic extremist son who questioned her faith. Upholders of Bosnia's moderate version of Islam say the problem caused by an influx of hardline fighters during the country's 1992-1995 war has worsened in recent months, highlighted by the gruesome murder. "Bosnia's tradition of Islam is tolerant, it promotes pluralism and we should not allow those representing a one-track ideology to teach us," says Jasmin Merdan. The 26-year-old -- a practising Muslim who portrays himself as a...

Saudis are still teaching intolerance by the bookClaims that school texts have been revised are untrue By NINA SHEA SAUDI Arabia's public schools have long been cited for demonizing the West as well as Christians, Jews and other "unbelievers." But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis — that was all supposed to change. A 2004 Saudi royal study group recognized the need for reform after finding that the kingdom's religious studies curriculum "encourages violence toward others and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own...

JERUSALEM -- The leadership of a West Bank Palestinian city now controlled by Hamas has warned a local Young Men's Christian Association to close its offices and leave town or face likely Muslim violence, WorldNetDaily has learned. The move highlighted long-standing fears Hamas would use its win in last January's Palestinian parliamentary elections to impose an anti-Christian, anti-Jewish hard-line Islamist regime in the West Bank and Gaza.

In the shop next to my house, there is a home delivery service which is run by an Indian. He is a good man, hardworking and devoted to his job. I talk to him whenever he delivers something to my house and he talks to me about the time he spent working in Abu Dhabi and of his dream to live in London. Last week I asked him to deliver a newspaper to my house. When he delivered it to me, he asked me whether I wrote in it. I told him that I did and he asked me to...

WASHINGTON: The Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban with the help of Pakistani and Saudi engineers. According to an account published here on Saturday, a local Afghan told the makers of a Swiss documentary on the giant statues which had stood there, carved in the side of a mountain for hundreds of years, had been destroyed by engineers from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The dynamiting of the statues took place in March 2001. Swiss documentary filmmaker Christian Frei, who has made several documentaries that have won praise at various international film festivals, shot ‘The Giant Buddhas’ in...

EDITOR'S NOTE — This is another story in an occasional series examining the fault lines within Islam between the forces of moderation and extremism. The consequences of this fight that shook America on Sept. 11, 2001, reverberate today, and the struggle for Islam may be the defining conflict of our era. LOS ANGELES — UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl has a scholarly manner and speaks in soft tones. But listen as he tells his story. A Kuwaiti native, he was fascinated by militant Islam as a young man, then evolved into a moderate champion of democracy and suffered...

LONDON - A British jury convicted radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri on Tuesday of fomenting racial hatred and inciting his followers to kill non-Muslims. Al-Masri, 47, the former imam at London's Finsbury Park mosque, also was convicted of possessing a terrorist document and threatening or abusive recordings. Al-Masri, Britain's best-known Islamist orator, could receive a maximum sentence of life in prison. The jury of seven men and five women found al-Masri guilty on seven of nine charges of soliciting murder. He also was convicted on two of four charges of stirring racial hatred. Though asked to stand for the...

Wahhabism has become institutionalised at the World Economic Forum with the advent of the 'West Islamic World Dialouge' ( aka Da'wa)- a Saudi run initiative designed to promote Islamist economic interests and establish a Khalifate under the guise of "understanding and cooperation between Western countries and countries with predominently Muslim populations". Adding insult to injury, the Wahhabists running the forum have cynically appealed for funding for terror linked charities like the UK Islamic Relief (which was linked to Al Qaeda), under the guise of combatting extremism with compassion (!).

EXTREMIST chaplains' domination and intimidation of Muslim believers incarcerated in New York prisons remains a major problem. Worse, the state Department of Correctional Services (DCS) is fighting to preserve this dangerous status quo. Last week's illegal-weapon charges against Warith Deen Umar, the former chief Muslim chaplain of the state prison system, were one sign. The raid this past weekend on his upstate home by NYPD counterterror cops was another. Born Wallace Gene Marks, Umar — now 61 — was once an adherent of Louis Farrakhan, with the alias Wallace 10X. He began his activities as a prison chaplain in 1975....

A U.S.-based Saudi professor and former U.N. fellow says he agrees with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust is a "myth" and says America eventually will collapse like the Soviet Union. Abdullah Muhammad Sindi, who has taught at four American schools, told Iran's Mehr News Agency Dec. 26, "I agree wholeheartedly with President Ahmadinejad."

EVER SINCE 9/11, we learned last month, federal officials have been monitoring radiation levels around a number of American mosques. It is an understandable precaution, given Al Qaeda's interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, and its history of mass murder. Understandable -- but also troubling. In a nation as tolerant as this one, nobody can be happy about the need to focus self-defensive attention on mosques. Unfortunately, we are at war with violent Islamist radicals, and they are not above using mosques to incubate terrorism. If there is evidence of heightened radioactivity around a Muslim facility, the government should be aware...

The former President of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, has published a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Right Islam vs. Wrong Islam: Muslims and non-Muslims must unite to defeat the Wahhabi ideology. Many, many people sent to me in the course of the day yesterday, asking me to comment; but really, it contains nothing new. It is just more of the kind of analysis we have seen by the bushel since 9/11: Islam is a religion of tolerance and peace, and the big bad Wahhabis are hijacking it into something else. But as I show in my book The Politically...

Saudi television featured an interview with a young Palestinian girl who called Jews "villains" and "dogs" and said the Palestinians have no desire for peace with Israel. In the segment on Iqra TV aired Dec. 7, the young girl said that in 1948, "the Jews occupied our land, our country. They drove us out of our homes, and put us in tents. Then they would destroy our homes. They'd put our clothes out on the sand, and then demolish the homes. They would get them out, destroy their homes, demolish and bring them down." The excerpt, translated by the Middle...

The key word in this entire story in 'quietly'. The keep-a-lid-on-it tactic adopted by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority makes one wonder whether the Canadian Government really wants its own citizens to be aware of the true scale of the Islamist threat that has grown significantly in the years under the Liberal rule. Hopefully, with thanks to CP, this revelation will become a subject of national debate, and will force the campaigning leaders to look at the issue more closely and suggest their strategies of dealing with radical Islamism.OTTAWA (CP) - Canada's air security agency has quietly warned its...

For more than three decades, Saudi-backed organizations have poured billions of dollars into the United States and other countries to fund Wahhabi mosques, Islamic schools, conferences and education for imams, or Muslim spiritual leaders. Some money comes directly from the Saudi government. Other funds come from wealthy Saudis, investigators say. In the United States, some of the money flowed through a web of Islamic organizations now under investigation for financing terrorism. But the main clearinghouse for Wahhabism in the United States is a group not known to be under investigation, the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA is subsidized by...

Perle claimed Saudi Arabia was no ally of the United States and that the Saudi royal family had allowed terrorist ideology to flourish within its borders and beyond. He called the U.S. government`s continued friendship with the Middle East nation the result of an intelligence failure worse than that concerning the Sept. 11 attacks. 'It is one of the greatest intelligence failures of the century that the rise of extremist institutions inspired culturally and intellectually by the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia went so unmarked,' Perle told a group at the conservative Hudson Institute. 'This seems to me a far larger...