Re: Fear Builds Walls...

Date: November 23, 2005 at 19:02:34
From: Calibigdawg, [lgl04dhammond.cdss.dss.ca.gov]
Subject: Re: Fear Builds Walls...

I really don't hate anybody. Your opinion of me at best is ignorant and ignorance breeds fear. Just because someone dislikes Nazism, it doesn’t mean that they hate Germans. They just find the message from Nazism to be a bit troublesome. The sources that were used in the article are from the Koran, hadiths and reputable scholars within the Muslim community. There are numerous atrocities that have been committed by the practitioners of Islam that for some reason have become lost over time. Here are but a few:

It is estimated that the 8 century long Islamic rule witnessed the massacre of 80 million Hindus26

The “secular” Muslim Mughal ruler of India, Akbar –oh, he had a policy of killing anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 Hindu Rajputs any given day

Hindu Kush mountains are translated into English as “Hindu Slaughter,” “Hindu Killer,” or “ Killing of Hindus

THE BLOODIEST STORY IN HISTORY”
Will Durant in his The Story of Civilisations, describes the Muslim invasion of India as “probably the bloodiest story in history.” The North Western region of India is called the Hindu Kush (“the slaughter of the Hindu”) as a reminder of the vast number of Hindu slaves who died while being marched across the Afghan Mountains to the Muslim slave markets in Central Asia. The Buddhists were also targeted for destruction. In AD 1193 Muhammad Khilji burned to the ground their famous library and the Buddhist stronghold of Bihar.
Shah Jahan is remembered as the builder of the Taj Mahal. What few Westerners know is that the builder of the Taj Mahal launched 48 military campaigns against non-Muslims in just 30 years. In AD 1628 he killed all his male relatives. Shah Jahan had 5,000 concubines in his harem but also indulged in incestuous sex with his daughters. In just one town, Banares, Jahan destroyed 76 Hindu temples. He also demolished Christian churches at Agra and Lahore. When he captured Hugh, a Portuguese enclave near Calcutta, he had 10,000 inhabitants “blown up with powder, drowned in water or burned by fire.” Another 4,000 were enslaved and offered Islam or death. Those who refused to convert were killed.

SPAIN UNDER THE MOORS
Neither was Spain under the Muslim Moors the jewel of Islamic tolerance that it is often purported to be. In AD 920 all the inhabitants of Muez were put to the sword. Cordova, Zarajoza and Merida were burned to the ground, with all adult males executed and all women and children enslaved. In AD 1066 all the Jews of Grenada were slaughtered. In AD 1126, all the Christians of Grenada were deported to Morocco.
In AD 1009, Kalif Hakem of Egypt ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre and all Christian places of worship in Jerusalem. Christians were persecuted cruelly and pilgrims were attacked.
CARNAGE IN CONSTANTINOPLE
Under Mehmet II the Turks conquered the great Byzantine capital, Constantinople. On 29 May, AD 1453, waves of Turkish soldiers swept into Constantinople, the greatest city in the world at that time, and put it to the sword. Priceless libraries and irreplaceable works of art were burned, the population slaughtered, even in the Hagia Sophia, the greatest Christian church in the world at that time.
For centuries the Turks demanded an annual “blood levy” of Christian boys. Parents were forced to hand over one out of every five Christian boys for service in the Sultan’s army as janissaries.
THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUSTS
Slavery, Terrorism and Islam documents hundreds of massacres of Christian populations by Muslim rulers. For example: In 1860 over 12,000 Christians were slaughtered in Lebanon. In 1876 14,700 Bulgarians were murdered by the Turks. 200,000 Armenian Christians were slaughtered by the Turks in Bayazid in 1877. And in 1915 the Turks massacred over 1.5 million Armenian Christians. As recently as September 1922 the Turkish army destroyed the ancient city of Smyrna with its 300,000 Christian population

The mass killings in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1971 vie with the annihilation of the Soviet POWs, the holocaust against the Jews, and the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated act of genocide in the twentieth century. In an attempt to crush forces seeking independence for East Pakistan, the West Pakistani military regime unleashed a systematic campaign of mass murder which aimed at killing millions of Bengalis, and likely succeeded in doing so.

In Southern Sudan, jihad has caused the death of some two million people, generated an even larger number of refugees, lead to the enslavement of tens of thousands, and produced deadly famines.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner-Arafat

As Arafat expanded his control over Christian and Muslim Lebanese, they too became part of the conflict that became a 12-year Civil War, killing 100,000 Christian and Muslim Lebanese.

Lebanon had once been called the Paris of the Middle East, the Garden of Eden spot for vacationing Arabs, with a Banking Center for the Arab world - but all that was destroyed. The Christians and Muslims had worked out a ‘peaceful, political accommodation’ to run Lebanon and, particularly, Beirut. Arafat had stirred them up, so now they were bitter enemies, attacking each other and fighting Arafat’s Palestinian Mini-State of Terror. The killings went on day and night, with whole villages massacred, with a retaliatory massacre soon after. Arafat turned the various Arab refugee camps into his bases of operation. Weapons and explosives were stored in apartment building, hospitals and schools, using the civilians as human shields.

Arafat’s gunman roamed the streets with modified pick-up trucks, manned with 30-50 caliber guns mounted in back. They were looking for various factions of Christian militia to gun down, but Muslims were also shot dead - as were any of the few Jews who still lived in Lebanon. (By that time, the Arab/Muslim nations had ejected almost all of their Jews (approximately 800,000) and had confiscated all their property and assets - personal and community. In effect, this was a replay of Hitler and Europe’s confiscation of all that their Jews owned

In 1982 when the Israeli soldiers entered the hospitals in Lebanon, they found Lebanese Christians’ bodies stacked like cordwood in the hallways. Their blood had been totally drained for transfusions into Arafat’s wounded, ‘more worthy’ fighters (on Arafat’s orders).

Arafat’s men often used a special torture and death on captured prisoners. Copying the Roman technique of drawing and quartering captured prisoners for the amusements of the crowds, Arafat used four cars to slowly pull a man apart by driving in four different directions. Here, too, the mob of Arafatian Arabs found this to be exciting and cheered. This ‘mind-set’ is endemic in most Arab nations; we recall the two Americans in Mosul, Iraq, being shot, pulled from their car, having their throats slit, and being mutilated. Then the mob moved in to crush their heads with cement blocks, and to stamp on the two doomed soldiers.(3) The surrounding mobs cheered delightedly.

This, in turn, was similar to the lynching the Arab Palestinians committed against the two Israeli soldiers who made a wrong turn into Ram’Allah,(4 ) and the frequent lynching of their own people who they accuse of being ‘collaborators’.(5)

Then, there was the matter of the village leaders in Lebanon (the mukhtars of the village) paying baksheesh, a.k.a. protection money, to keep his own village protected from Arafat’s murdering marauders. One mukhtar refused to pay protection money. So, Arafat’s collectors kidnaped the mukhtar’s teen-age daughter, raped her, cut off her breasts and delivered her back to the mukhtar’s doorstep in a gunny sack.(1) No tax collector of a mini-state could have been more convincing.

There were thousands of these examples, photographed, catalogued, books

Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (ca. 1895-July 4, 1974, أمين الحسيني, alternatively known as al-Husseini, el-Husseini, Al-Hajj Amin or Haj Amin), was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim religious leader. A member of Jerusalem's most prominent family, his most important positions were as Mufti of Jerusalem and President of the Supreme Muslim Council.
Known as the "Grand Mufti of Jerusalem", he received this title in 1921 after the death of his father (the Mufti of Jerusalem) under the auspices of the then High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel.
He played a major role in Arab resistance to Zionist political ambitions in the British Mandate of Palestine and recruiting Muslims to fight in the German army during World War II. Al-Husayni was very close to many leading Nazis and conducted radio broadcasts and recruitment operations on their behalf during the war.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Early life
• 2 Palestinian nationalism
• 3 Nazi ties and World War II
o 3.1 Pre-war
o 3.2 In Nazi-occupied Europe
 3.2.1 Recruitment
o 3.3 The Holocaust
• 4 Post-war activities
• 5 Mufti's influence
• 6 Footnotes
• 7 References
• 8 See also
• 9 External links

[edit]
Early life
Amin al-Husayni was born in Jerusalem in 1895 (some sources say 1893). He attended al-Azhar University in Cairo (where he founded an anti-Zionist society) and studied Islamic Law for about one year. In 1913 at the age of 18, al-Husayni made the pilgrimage to Mecca and received the honorific of Hajj. Prior to World War I, al-Husayni studied at the School of Administration in Istanbul.
With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, al-Husayni joined the Ottoman Turkish army, received a commission as an artillery officer and was assigned to the Forty-Seventh Brigade stationed in and around the predominately Greek Christian city of Smyrna. In November 1916, al-Husayni left the Ottoman army on a three month disability leave and returned to Jerusalem where he remained for the duration of the war. In 1916 he took part in the Arab Revolt and became an acknowledged leader of Palestinian nationalism. He was employed as a clerk in the British military administration in the Department of Public Safety.
In 1919, al-Husayni attended the Pan-Syrian Congress held in Damascus where he supported Emir Faisal for King of Syria. That year, al-Husayni joined (perhaps founded) the Arab secret society El-Nadi al-Arabi (The Arab Club) in Jerusalem and wrote articles for the first new newspaper to be established in Palestine, Suriyya al-Janubiyya (Southern Syria). The paper was published in Jerusalem beginning in September 1919 by the lawyer Muhammad Hasan al-Budayri, and edited by 'Arif al-'Arif, both were prominent members of al-Nadi al-Arabi.
Until late 1921, al-Husayni focused his efforts on Pan-Arabism and Greater Syria in particular with Palestine being a southern province of an Arab state with its capital in Damascus. Greater Syria was to include territory now occupied by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. The struggle for Greater Syria collapsed after Britain ceded control over present day Syria and Lebanon to France in July 1920 in accord with the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The French army entered Damascus at that time, overthrew King Faisal and dissolved Greater Syria.
After this, al-Husayni turned from a Damascus oriented Pan-Arabism to a specifically Palestinian ideology centered on Jerusalem and expelling the Jews and foreigners from the British Mandate of Palestine thus restoring it to Dar al-Islam.
[edit]
Palestinian nationalism
Viewing the Balfour Declaration as a betrayal of the Arabs by the British, al-Husayni organized violent anti-Zionist demonstrations in Jerusalem in 1920. His speeches called for unity with Syria, as he had not yet adopted the Palestinian nationalism for which he would become known a few years later.
One such demonstration, in April, 1920, turned into violent attacks against Jews, and in the ensuing riots 5 Jews and 4 Arabs were killed. Several Jews and Arabs were sentenced to prison terms for their parts in the riots, with al-Husayni being sentenced to ten years imprisonment in absentia, since he had already fled to Damascus by way of Trans-Jordan.
In 1921, the British military administration of Palestine was replaced by a civilian one, as a mandate under the League of Nations. The first High Commissioner Herbert Samuel decided to pardon al-Husayni and appointed him Mufti of Jerusalem, a position that had been held by his brother Kamil and the al-Husayni clan for more than a century. The following year Samuel "appointed" him as President of the newly formed Supreme Muslim Council, which controlled the Waqf funds worth annually tens of thousands of pounds, the orphan funds, worth annually about 50,000 pounds, besides controlling the Shariah courts, the Islamic religious court in Palestine. These courts, among other duties, appointed teachers and preachers.
This method of appointment was actually in consonance with tradition (some have said Al-Husayni seized power). For years under Ottoman rule, Muslim clerics would nominate three clerics and the secular temporal leader, the Caliph, would choose among the three who would become the Mufti. After the British took over Palestine, the secular temporal leader was the High Commissioner. This led to the extraordinary situation of a Jew, Herbert Samuel, choosing who would actually become Mufti. The only difference was that in this instance five candidates were nominated instead of three.
Al-Husseini launched an international Muslim campaign to improve and restore the mosque known as the Dome of the Rock. Indeed, the current landscape of the Temple Mount was directly affected by al-Husseini's fundraising activities. He raised the vast sums necessary to plate the Dome of the Rock with gold.
On 19 April 1936, an Arab rebellion broke out in Palestine. Soon the rebellion had spread across the country, openly and officially led by the Mufti and his Arab Higher Committee, founded a week after the rebellion had started. The Committee, presided by the Mufti, proclaimed an Arab general strike and called for nonpayment of taxes, shutting down of municipal governments and demanded an end to Jewish immigration, a ban on land sales to Jews, and national independence. Jewish colonies, kibbutzim and quarters in towns, became the targets for Arab sniping, bombing and other terrorist activities.
The British removed the leaders of his rivalling clan, the Nashashibis (Jerusalem's other most prominent clan, which tended to be more moderate and accommodating than strongly anti-British Husaynis) from influental positions. During most of the period of the British mandate, bickering between these two families seriously weakened the effectiveness of Arab efforts. In 1936 they achieved a measure of unity when all the Palestinian groups joined to create a permanent executive organ known as the Arab High Committee under al-Husayni's chairmanship.
In July 1937, British police were sent to arrest al-Husayni for his part in the Arab rebellion, but he was tipped off and escaped to the Haram where the British thought it inadvisable to touch him. In September he was removed from the presidency of the Muslim Supreme Council and the Arab Higher Committee was declared illegal. In October, he fled to Lebanon, where he reconstituted the committee under his domination. Al-Husayni retained the support of most Palestinian Arabs and used his power to punish the Nashashabis. He remained in Lebanon for two years, but his deteriorating relationship with the French and Syrian authories lead to him escaping to Iraq in Ocotober 1939.
The rebellion lasted until 1939 when it was quelled by the British troops. It forced Britain to make substantial concessions to Arab demands. The British abandoned the idea of establishing Palestine as a Jewish state and, while Jewish immigration was to continue for another five years (allowing a total of 75,000 Jews to immigrate), the immigration was thereafter to depend on Arab consent. Al-Husayni, however, felt that the concessions did not go far enough, and he repudiated the new policy. See also Peel Commission, White Paper of 1939.
[edit]
Nazi ties and World War II
[edit]
Pre-war
In 1933, within weeks of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, al-Husayni sent a telegram to Berlin addressed to the German Consul-General in the British Mandate of Palestine saying he looked forward to spreading their ideology in the Middle East, especially in Palestine and offered his services. Al-Husayni's offer was rejected at first out of concern for disrupting Anglo-German relations by allying with an anti-British leader. But one month later, Al-Husayni secretly met the German Consul-General Karl Wolff near the Dead Sea and expressed his approval of the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany and asked him not to send any Jews to Palestine. Later that year, the Mufti's assistants approached Wolff, seeking his help in establishing a National Socialist Arab party in Palestine. Wolff and his superiors disapproved because they didn't want to become involved in a British sphere of influence, the Nazis desired further Jewish immigration to Palestine, and because at the time the Nazi party was restricted to German speaking "Aryans" only.
On 21 July 1937, Al-Husayni paid a visit to the new German Consul-General, Hans Döhle, in Palestine. He repeated his former support for Germany and "wanted to know to what extent the Third Reich was prepared to support the Arab movement against the Jews." He later sent an agent and personal representative to Berlin for discussions with Nazi leaders. From August 1938, Husseini received financial and military assistance and supplies from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
In 1938, though Anglo-German relations were a concern, Al-Husayni's offer was accepted. Al-Husayni's links to the Nazi regime grew very close. From Berlin, al-Husayni would play a significant role in inter-Arab politics.
In May 1940, the British Foreign Office declined a proposal from the chairman of the Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council in Palestine) that they assassinate al-Husayni, but in November of that year Winston Churchill approved such a plan. In May 1941, several members of the Irgun including its former leader David Raziel were released from prison and flown to Iraq on a secret mission which, according to British sources, included to "capture or kill" the Mufti. The Irgun version is that they were approached by the British for a sabotage mission and added a plan to capture the Mufti as a condition of their cooperation. The mission was abandoned when Raziel was killed by a German plane[1].
In April 1941 the "Golden Square" pro-German Iraqi army officers, led by General Rashid Ali, forced the Iraqi Prime Minister, the pro-British Nuri Said Pasha, to resign. In May he declared jihad against Britain. In a few months British troops occupied the country and the Mufti went to Germany, via Iran, Turkey and Mussolini's office in Rome. See Farhud for more details of the events in Iraq.
[edit]
In Nazi-occupied Europe

al-Husayni and Adolf Hitler (1941)
Upon al-Husayni's arrival in Europe, he met the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop on November 20, 1941 and was officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941 in Berlin. He asked Hitler for a public declaration that "recognized and sympathized with the Arab struggles for independence and liberation, and that it would support the elimination of a national Jewish homeland". Hitler refused to make such a public announcement, but "made the following declaration, requesting the Mufti to lock it deep in his heart:
1. He (the Führer) would carry on the fight until the last traces of the Jewish-Communist European hegemony had been obliterated.
2. In the course of this fight, the German army would - at a time that could not yet be specified, but in any case in the clearly foreseeable future - gain the southern exit of Caucasus.
3. As soon as this breakthrough was made, the Führer would offer the Arab world his personal assurance that the hour of liberation had struck. Thereafter, Germany's only remaining objective in the region would be limited to the Vernichtung des...Judentums ['destruction of the Jewish element', sometimes taken to be a euphemism for 'annihilation of the Jews'] living under British protection in Arab lands.." [2]
The Mufti established close contacts with Bosnian and Albanian Muslim leaders and spent the remainder of the war conducting the following activities:
• Radio propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany
• Espionage and the fifth column activities in Muslim regions of Europe and the Middle East
• The formation of Muslim Waffen SS units in the Balkans
• The formation of schools and training centers for Muslim imams and mullahs who would accompany the Muslim SS and Wehrmacht units.

[edit]
Recruitment

Al-Husayni inspects Waffen SS recruits
Beginning in 1943, al-Husayni was involved in the organization and formation of Bosnian Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units. According to Chris Bishop, "Himmler convinced himself that Balkan Muslims were neither Slavs nor Turks, but were really Aryans who had adopted Islam."[3]
The largest was the 13th "Handschar" division of 21,065 men (sometimes spelled Hanjar: the word "scimitar" in Turkish, Arabic Khanjar خنجر), which conducted operations against Communist partisans in the Balkans from February 1944. In fact the 13th SS "Handschar" was made up of at least 10% Catholic Croats. This was done out of compromise as the Croat fascists, the Ustashe, had objected to the recruitment of the Bosnian Muslims, since they were worried about possible independence and considered the Muslim areas part of their "Independent State of Croatia".

Bosnian/Croat soldiers

Al-Husayni salutes the recruits on the cover of magazine "Vienna Illustrated"
The uniform worn by the division was regular SS issue, with a divisional collar patch showing an arm, holding a Scimitar, over a Swastika. On the left arm was a Croatian armshield (red-white chessboard). Headgear was the Fez, in field grey (normal service) or red ("walking out"), with the SS eagle and the SS skull emblazoned. Non-Muslim members could opt to wear the regular SS mountain cap. The oval mountain troop Edelweiss patch was worn on the right arm. The division also had Muslim imams.
The "Handschar" division was entirely commanded by German officers and was sent to France for training where a small number of Communist sympathizers staged a mutiny on September 17-18, 1943. A few were killed during the mutiny and later 12 others were executed by the Germans. The division later completed training in Germany.
It was responsible for a number of atrocities against civilians, mostly committed during its anti-partisan operations, which it was specifically raised for. Towards the end of the war, however, many of its members deserted the division, sometimes with their weapons, as many of the Muslims decided to return to Bosnia to protect their homes and families or defected to Josip Broz Tito's partisans. The division was essentially disbanded by November 1944, although some sources allege a small number continued to fight until being captured or killed by 1945.
The 21st "Kama" division (3,793 men) did not reach divisional operations strength and was disbanded after five months; its personnel being transferred to other units. Additional units included a Muslim SS self-defense regiment in the Raška (Sandžak) region of Serbia, the Ostmusselmanische SS-Regiment.
[edit]
The Holocaust

November 2, 1943 Himmler's telegram to Mufti: "In the recognition of this enemy (the world Jewry) and of the common struggle against it lies the firm foundation of the natural alliance that exists between the National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the whole world."
When the Red Cross offered to mediate with Adolf Eichmann in a trade prisoner-of-war exchange involving the freeing of German citizens in exchange for 5,000 Jewish children being sent from Poland to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Husseini directly intervened with Himmler and the exchange was cancelled.
Among the sabotage al-Husayni organized was an attempted chemical warfare assault on the second largest and predominantly Jewish city in Palestine, Tel Aviv. Five parachutists were sent with a toxin to dump into the water system. The police caught the infiltrators in a cave near Jericho, and according to Jericho district police commander Fayiz Bey Idrissi, "The laboratory report stated that each container held enough poison to kill 25,000 people, and there were at least ten containers."[4]
[edit]
Post-war activities
After the war, al-Husayni fled to Switzerland, was detained and put under house arrest in France, but escaped and was given asylum in Egypt. Zionist groups petitioned the British to have him indicted as a war criminal. The British declined, partly because they considered the evidence indecisive but also because such a move would have added to their growing problems in Egypt and Palestine, where al-Husayni was still popular. Yugoslavia also unsuccessfully sought his extradition.
From Egypt al-Husayni was among the sponsors of the 1948 war against the new State of Israel. The Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah, gave the position of Grand Mufti of the Jordanian part of divided Jerusalem to someone else, and Haj Amin al-Husayni was in contact with the Arab conspirators of King Abdullah's assassination in 1951, while still living in exile in Egypt. King Tallal followed Abdullah as king of Jordan, and he refused to give permission to Amin al-Husayni to enter Jerusalem. After one year, King Tallal was declared incompetent; the new King Hussein also refused to give al-Husayni permission to enter the City.
In 1948 al-Husayni declared the president of the All-Palestine government in the Gaza Strip. On October 1, an independent Palestinian state in all of Palestine was declared, with Jerusalem as its capital. This government was recognised by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, but not by Jordan or any non-Arab country. His government was totally dependent on Egypt. Egypt annulled the All-Palestine government by decree in 1959. The failure of this venture and al-Husayni's lack of credibility because of his collaboration with the Axis powers during World War II did much to weaken Palestinian Arab Nationalism in the 1950s.
Al-Husayni served as president of the World Islamic Congress, which he had founded in 1931.
Al-Husayni died in Beirut, Lebanon in 1974. He wished to be buried in Jerusalem, but the Israeli government refused this request.
[edit]
Mufti's influence
Yasser Arafat's interview with the London-based Arabic language newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat was reprinted by a leading Palestinian daily Al Quds (August 2, 2002):
Interviewer: I have heard voices from within the Palestinian Authority in the past few weeks, saying that the reforms are coordinated according to American whims...
Arafat: We are not Afghanistan. We are the mighty people. Were they able to replace our hero Hajj Amin al-Husseini?... There were a number of attempts to get rid of Hajj Amin, whom they considered an ally of the Nazis. But even so, he lived in Cairo, and
participated in the 1948 war, and I was one of his troops."
According to John Marlowe, "The dominant figure in Palestine during the Mandate years was neither an Englishman nor a Jew, but an Arab — Haj Amin Muhammed Effendi al Husaini... Able, ambitious, ruthless, humourless, and incorruptible, he was of the authentic stuff of which dictators are made."

Indonesian police increased patrols on Sunday in the Poso area, plagued by sectarian violence for years, after assailants in black beheaded three teenage Christian girls.

By Julia Duin, an assistant national editor at the Washington Times
January 2, 2002 9:15 a.m.

first became aware of central Indonesia eleven years ago, when I bought a map in an airport shop in Cebu, in the middle of the Philippines. A portion of this 17,000-mile archipelago was taken up by a huge island shaped like a pinwheel: Sulawesi. In 1999, horrific stories about Christian persecution in that part of the world started to leak out. A radical Islamic group called Laskar Jihad was terrorizing Christians in a group of islands called the Moluccas, just east of Sulawesi. Christians who refused to convert to Islam were killed; those who did convert were then separated from their families, given Muslim names, and forcibly circumcised — without anaesthetic, and with dirty instruments. Scissors were used on the adults. They were then told to wash in the sea to disinfect their wounds. The women underwent female genital circumcision.
Why, I wondered, weren't journalists reporting on this tragedy? It turns out that getting a journalist's visa to enter that part of the country is next to impossible. One has to first go to Jakarta to state the purpose of one's trip, and then wait for approval. But there are planes or ferryboats to these islands daily, so a truly dedicated reporter could slip in. One gets the impression that, when it's Christians being murdered or tortured, the international press isn't really interested. That's how Joanna Milosz — a member of the London-based Christian Solidarity Worldwide who recently traveled around the Moluccas — sees it: "The whole Moluccas conflict has been fraught with misinformation from the beginning," she says. "The Western press goes overboard in being sensitive to the Muslim community. They do not want to be Islamophobic, so they ignore the realities of the situation. What has been so astounding is how few other Indonesians know what the actual situation is. The Bacan-Seram islands are where people have faced forced conversions and circumcisions. Christians are subject to especially severe circumcisions. I've heard reports of them doing it to girls as young as 2."

I e-mailed a journalist in Jakarta who works for a respected international magazine, asking her about the refugee camps that ring the area. At least 5,000 people have died in the fighting between Muslims and Christians, and nearly half a million have been driven from their homes. Many of them are in refugee camps; the camp in Manado, a mainly Christian city on the northeastern tip of Sulawesi, alone numbers 50,000.
"I've been to many refugee camps in Manado and surrounding areas," she wrote me back. "The government does as little as they can. It's a diabolical situation that does not get much attention."
I kept on reading horror stories — mostly from Christian mission organizations monitoring the area, as they seemed to be the only ones brave enough to venture into the region. One Washington, D.C.-based group, International Christian Concern, interviewed a woman with a horribly disfigured face who had been attacked in Duma, a Moluccan village on the island of Halmahera.
"When I saw the jihad warriors approaching," the woman told the interviewer, "I cried out, 'Lord help me.' Then a jihad warrior came up to me and said, 'I'll show you how God helps you,' and then placed the pistol in my mouth and pulled the trigger."
The same interviewer met a twelve-year-old boy named Noledy on the same island. The boy had seen his parents hacked with machetes, then buried alive by jihadists. He managed to escape into the jungles, where he wandered for about a week before encountering other Christian refugees. Indonesian Christians on other islands have made cloak-and-dagger missions to these islands by boat to rescue such people; to date, about 2,700 have benefited from the boat rescues. Another 6,000 still need help.
Why have journalists ignored a group that equals the Taliban in cruelty? Laskar Jihad even have their own website, where they blame "Christian priests" for carrying out mission activities against their Muslim brethren. Their propaganda tells of Muslims who have been attacked and tortured by Christians. The Islamist group is involved in importing warriors into various trouble spots around the Indonesian islands. They had already made Ambon, an island in the southern Moluccas, a living hell for Christians, and starting a few months ago, they aimed their sights farther north. Their goal: Sulawesi.
Sulawesi is 1,000 miles east of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital. As for the government sending in its own military to keep the peace, the Indonesian military is not known for its fairness and impartiality — as the world saw in East Timor's fight for independence. The navy and air force are trustworthy, but the army — which leans heavily to the side of the Muslims — is fearsome to Christians.
Eighty-seven percent (174 million) of Indonesia's 201 million people are Muslim — the largest Muslim population of any country in the world. The goal of Laskar Jihad and like-minded radicals is to make Islam the country's official religion, and to impose sharia law. It already exists in Ternate, a small island-city just off of Halmahera. Christian pastors unfortunate enough to be discovered in the area simply get beheaded.
Steven Snyder of International Christian Concern and Dr. David Harding, a Maryland physician, recently visited Sulawesi to examine the situation there. They came back nine days later with a horror story: 7,000 jihad warriors were amassing to attack Christians in central Sulawesi, specifically Tentena, a lakeside city of 63,000 — about 28,000 of them refugees from around the island. Like the Israelites defending Jerusalem's walls during the time of the prophet Nehemiah, the men of the city were posted about city limits with whatever weapons they could scrounge up, while the women and children had gathered their belongings for a possible flight into the jungle. The 35 policemen in town had a total of three rifles.
The two men, plus an Australian translator who knows the island intimately, got through to Tentena with the help of an eight-man military escort. The worst part was the 70-mile drive from Poso, a larger city on the coast, south into Tentena. Along the way they saw burned-out Christian villages, and roadblocks with signs that read "jihad post." The men lounging by them carried AK-47s.
"Our police escorts were petrified," Mr. Snyder says. "We stopped at one jihad post and offered them coffee if we could take photos. They didn't know what to make of us; all these white guys emerging from behind a car with tinted windows." Somehow they got through, only to discover legions of sick and homeless in Tentena.
"Dr. Harding saw a seven-month-old baby that looked about three weeks old. She had only been fed with sugar water," Mr. Snyder says. "The pharmacy there was pretty pathetic, too."
They stayed for several days, interviewing residents and police, who told them that a boatload of 1,000 Laskar Jihad had arrived on the island just before they came — and that another was due the following week. The Indonesian Islamists have direct links to international Islamic extremists, including those in Afghanistan and in Osama bin Laden's network. Six Afghani and Pakistani "visitors" had been seen in the area when Harding and Snyder were there. Indonesian mujahedeen had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and the jihad posts had bin Laden's picture on them. An Australian magazine, Tempo, reported in October that trainers from Bosnia as well as Afghanistan were working with Laskar Jihad.
In addition, Baroness Carolyn Cox, Deputy Speaker of the British House of Lords, who heads up Christian Solidarity Worldwide, met up with some Afghan jihadists when she visited Ambon two months ago.
"They weren't there for a picnic," she said. The head of Laskar Jihad, Jafar Umar Thalib, is said to be a disciple of bin Laden's.
Now back in the United States, Mr. Snyder is pressing for some response from the American government in the matter of Tentena's beleaguered Christians. Megawati Sukarnoputri was one of the first foreign leaders to visit the United States after the terrorist attacks, and she was rewarded with a $130 million aid package. An additional $10 million was given to her by President Bush for assisting refugees, particularly in the Moluccas. And, with congressional approval, another $10 million will go for police training.
But to what end? The police almost always take the side of the Muslim majority in these conflicts, and have apparently helped arm groups like Laskar Jihad. Furthermore, they have stood by while Russian arms shipments purchased through Philippine channels have arrived at various island depots.
Not all Indonesian Muslims embrace Laskar Jihad. In Tentena, 31 Muslim families live in peace with their neighbors. But Indonesia's radical Muslims elicit little more than a yawn from most quarters. At a reception for journalists, held in December at the vice president's mansion, I asked Dick Cheney if he was aware of the problem. No, he was not. "Forgive me for being cynical," my journalist contact in Jakarta wrote me, "but stories on Muslim radicals in Indonesia are a dime a dozen."
But the tortured and persecuted are not a dime a dozen. By mid-December, some government forces, ranging from 2,000-4,000 troops, had flooded the Poso-Tentena reason, making it impossible for Laskar Jihad to achieve their goal of domination of central Sulawesi by the end of Ramadan on Dec. 16. So Laskar Jihad will simply wait. They've been at this for several years now, and their supreme commander, Jafar Umar Thalib, remains at large. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of refugees are sick and homeless because evil will happen, as the saying goes, if good men are content to do nothing.
"We were able to board our plane and depart in safety," Mr. Snyder says, "but our hearts cried out for our dear brothers and sisters trapped in the district of Poso. Many are simple peasants, farmers, fishermen and villagers. They are defenseless, weaponless and confused. They know nothing of all the political, religious or financial manipulations going on. Their only hope is that God will intervene."

On 23 February 1915, more than sixty Assyrian notables were taken from the French mission and shot by Turkish troops. Among these was Mar Dinkha, a bishop of the Assyrian Church. "Here, then, in the ancient city of Tebarma, the scene of many previous martyrdoms, an Assyrian bishop is being led to be executed. He was not alone. He had a large company of his Christian brethren with him. What Mar Shimun Bar Sabaee, the first Assyrian Patriarch had done, during the persecution of Shapur the Magi, in the fourth century, was now to be gloriously repeated by another bishop of his church in the twentieth century. The Moslems had established a rule in asking of their victims to deny Christ and embrace Islam in order to save their lives. But weaker men and women than this body of prisoners had already chosen to be burned alive, and to be cut to pieces with aces, then deny their Redeemer! "Be brave, take courage, be patient, falter not, be firm and look up. In a few moments we will be with Christ!" With such words he encouraged his companions in bonds, till they reached the end of their fatal journey, where they were all shot to death. (The Flickering Light of Asia, pp.49-51.)

But if they turn back (from Islam), take (hold of) them and kill them wherever you find them, and take neither Aouliya (protectors or friends) nor helpers from them" (Surat An-Nisa 4:88,89).

The first is Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie was born to a Muslim family in Bombay, India, but has spent much of his life in London, England. He wrote a book entitled The Satanic Verses. Muslims thought this book was an insult to the Prophet Muhammad and Islam so Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini issued an order to assassinate Rushdie and promised $5 million to the one whom would kill him. Khomeini, Iran's spiritual leader at that time, said in a statement read for him on the radio in 1989: "Anyone who died attempting to kill Rushdie, he promised, would go straight to paradise."

The second is Dr. Farag Foda, the great author who was assassinated in Cairo, Egypt in 1993 because he wrote many books exposing the true face of Islam and Islamic society. He was accused of being an apostate Muslim and was shot and killed in front of his son.

The third is Professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid, who was accused of being an apostate Muslim because of his books about the Koran. The court in Egypt ruled that he must divorce his wife, Ibtihal Younes. He fled from Egypt and is now living with his wife in Holland.

The fourth is the well-known Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, who became the first Egyptian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Muslims stabbed him in front of his house in an attempt to kill him. The man is over 80 years old. They wanted to kill him because they thought that he insulted Muhammad in his novel, "The Children of Gabalawi."

The imposition of sharia oppresses the Christians that make up half of the population.
by Obed Minchakpu
MAIKUNKELE, Nigeria, November 15 (Compass) – For Ishaya Kpotun Shaba of Niger state in north-central Nigeria, the past four years have been a jumble of tears and pain. He has not set his eyes on his daughter, Saratu, since she was abducted in December 2001 at age 19 by extremists bent on converting and marrying her to a Muslim.
When Shaba reported the kidnapping to the Maikunkele town police, officials showed no interest in rescuing his daughter. Instead, to Shaba’s shock and disbelief, he was summoned to appear before an Islamic court in Minna on January 9, 2002. The Upper Area Court judge informed him in the summons that his daughter had requested that he allow her to “embrace the religion of her choice.”
Shaba showed up at court but never saw his daughter. Instead, the judge called him into his chambers and told him that his daughter was now a Muslim, and that therefore he was summoned to an Islamic court.
“I protested this and told him that I was a Christian and should not have been summoned to appear before the Islamic court,” Shaba told Compass. He demanded that the court release his daughter – “wherever she may be” – but the judge refused.
Later, he heard that his daughter was forced to marry a Muslim man in Minna, the state capital.
“Isa Gwamna, a friend of mine who works with the Niger state government, told me that the marriage was conducted on the orders of the Islamic court,” Shaba said. “He witnessed the marriage, which was held in one of the government’s offices.”
Gwamna told Shaba that his daughter cried throughout the marriage ceremony, refusing to recite the Quranic passages she was asked to read; she also refused to declare a dowry amount.
“This clearly shows that not only was our daughter forcefully abducted, kept in seclusion, and forced into marrying a man she does not love, but also she was forced to marry a man who is not of her religion,” Shaba said. “My friend said that when my daughter refused to say how much should be paid as her dowry, she was forced to receive 5,000 naira [$381].”
Four years later, neither the court nor the police have advised Shaba of her whereabouts; they no longer know where she is, he said.
So far this year, nine cases of forceful conversions of Christian girls below the age of 14 were reported to the office of the state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), according to the Rev. Samuel Ayuba Shaba, CAN state secretary. Many other cases go unreported.
For many years, Rev. Shaba said, the palace of the Muslim leader of Bida town, the Etsu Nupe, has been used as a base for hiding abducted Christian girls. Once there, they are forcefully converted to Islam and married off to Muslim men.
Cruelties Large and Small
In Niger state, where Christians slightly outnumber Muslims, such a tactic is just one means extremists use in a quest for a dominant Islamic population, according to experts on religious movements. Increasingly, the extremists also target Christian widows as part of this effort.
Sharia (Islamic law) was implemented in Niger state in 2001. A first-time visitor to Minna does not need to be told that Islam now dominates the city. In every street, signposts bearing Quranic inscriptions have been planted in intervals of 100 meters. “Allahu-Akbar” (God is great) reads one of the signposts; “La’illa a-illala Muhammad rasu lillah” (There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger) reads another.
For the Christians who make up just over 50 percent of the 2.4 million population, life is full of seemingly unending cruelties. Besides forced marriages, Rev. Shaba and attorney Bob James say Islamic officials in the state deny Christians basic rights by imposing sharia, forcing conversions, seizing property, and discriminating against Christians in the public sector.
Rev. Shaba, 49, pastor of Harvesters for Christ Ministries in Minna, said sharia has made persecution a lifestyle. It is no longer news to hear of arbitrary arraignment of Christians in Niger state.
“Initially we were told that sharia was meant to serve only Muslims,” Rev. Shabas said, “but we are now living witnesses to the fact that it was meant to harass Christians and to combat Christianity.”
Muslim leaders in the state are deliberately trying to eliminate Christianity, he said. “It is a systematic and deliberate approach to oppress, deny, and frustrate Christianity.”
James, an attorney for the Justice Mission in Minna, noted that parts of sharia directly violate the Nigerian constitution. “The constitution says that one cannot use the machinery of government to promote any religion,” James said.
Cutting off the hands of those guilty of theft is clearly a doctrine of Islam, he said. A government that adopts the practice is promoting a religion, he said, and adopting Islam as a state religion contravenes the constitution.
Niger is one of 12 states (along with Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Jigawa, Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara, Yobe, Borno, Bauchi, and Gombe) implementing sharia in northern Nigeria. Islamic officials have claimed that the Nigerian constitution allows them to enact laws that would bring about good governance, which they have employed as a check against rampant moral laxity and corruption, as well as to restore political stability.
But James responded, “The same constitution says any laws enacted by any state are subject to the constitutional principles on which the Nigerian government is based.” Any other course, he said, will result only in anarchy.
“If there are fundamental human rights that have been agreed upon, the right of a state to make laws is subject to those fundamental rights,” he said. “You cannot violate them.”
So far this year, James’ office has filed 10 lawsuits on behalf of Christians who have been arbitrarily jailed by Islamic courts. Since 2001, his office has handled 30 such cases.
“If not for the maturity that Christians in this state have exhibited,” he said, “all the atrocities would be enough to stir up an uprising.”
Christians Need Not Apply
Christians working in the public sector have been wrongfully denied promotions or even sacked because of their faith, sources said.
Most affected are Christian women, who are forced to wear hijab (Islamic head covering). Christian women who dare to show up at work without the head covering are beaten by Islamic Police (Hisba) recruited by the state government.
Before the introduction of sharia, Christians in the state frequently were appointed as commissioners, permanent secretaries, directors, and principals of schools, Rev. Shaba said.
“But today, Christians have only one commissioner to the 10 commissioners who are Muslims,” he said. “The same applies to positions of permanent secretaries – we have only one.”
Christians are denied positions, Rev. Shaba said, even when they are the educated and have relevant experience.
“Muslims who are not educated are the ones getting appointed into positions of power,” he said. “There are even situations where Christians are retired from public service to pave the way for Muslims to be appointed into these offices.”
Suppressing the Truth
Increasingly, Rev. Shaba said, Christians find it difficult to obtain land for churches.
State authorities are finding pretexts to force even existing churches to relocate out of their towns. Rev. Shaba said this problem is “very common” in New Bussa, Sabon Wuse, Bida, Kontagora, and Dokko.
Efforts to force all churches from town, Rev. Shaba said, are designed to create the impression that there are no Christians in the state and to shield Muslims from the gospel.
Suppression of the gospel also shows up in the schools. In a state where Christian schoolchildren are required to wear uniforms distinct from their Muslim counterparts – presumably so that they will be easily distinguished in the event of religious violence – it is perhaps no surprise that students receive no instruction on Christianity.
Islam, on the other hand, is taught in the state’s 142 public schools.
The same government that refuses to permit teaching on Christianity has built six Islamic schools across the state, Rev. Shaba said. The state-built Islamic schools are the College of Arts and Islamic Studies, in Tudun Fulani; the College of Arts and Islamic Legal Studies, in Minna; and four campuses of the Women’s Islamic College, in Dikko, Kacha, Babana-Wawa, and Borgu.
How We Got Here
Attorney James and other Christian leaders in Niger state filed a lawsuit against the enactment of sharia in 2001. But while the case was being heard, he said, the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo pressured them into withdrawing the case.
Obasanjo, a Christian, was working toward re-election at that time, James said, and felt the legal tussle could mar his political chances. Additionally, Obasanjo believed that a legal war pitching Muslims against Christians would polarize the nation’s judiciary.
The legal battle that would have decided the constitutionality of implementing sharia thus ground to a halt.
Religious liberty is enshrined in the nation’s constitution, and Nigeria is a country of many diverse religions, Rev. Shaba said. “That makes it a more urgent task for the federal government to stop the implementation of the Islamic law.”
That is not likely in a country where religious tensions have already cost thousands of lives and displaced more than 60,000 people. And for Ishaya Kpotun Shaba, sharia has already cost him his daughter.
A retired civil servant who worked for the Niger state government for 26 years, Shaba is stunned at how he has been treated.
“I know of Christians whose daughters have also been forcefully married to Muslim men,” he said. “I know of Christians who have been jailed for no just cause. We can do nothing, except to take our burdens before Jesus, the Christ. This is what it means to a Christian in Niger state.”
Copyright 2005 Compass Direct

BANGKOK – By permitting judges to arm themselves in the southern provinces, Thailand has conceded that it faces a daunting task in trying to control violence in the region, which now seems to have taken a turn for the worse.
This week's decision by the Office of the Judiciary for court officers to be armed comes in the wake of a provincial judge being killed by insurgents in the predominantly Muslim province of Pattanti on Friday.
The 37-year-old Rapin Ruangkeow became the highest-ranking official to have been murdered since violence erupted in Thailand's south in January this year. Rapin, say newspaper reports, was shot seven times in the head and body by three gunmen on a motorcycle while he was in his car. His wife and daughter witnessed the killing.
Provincial judges with guns will become the latest in a growing number of civilians who are being encouraged to bear weapons to defend themselves – an indication that, at least in southern Thailand, the state cannot fulfill its role of protecting its citizens.
In June, teachers in high schools were given the nod to arm themselves in the wake of attacks by insurgents on the halls of learning. And since then, the army has helped train civilians in villages that are vulnerable to attacks.
Such measures towards self-defense arise from the high civilian death toll, a number that could increase with the targeting of high-profile civilians like provincial judges, say analysts.
"The shooting of the judge this month marks the beginning of a new trend," Panitan Wattanayagorn, a national security expert at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, said in an interview.
"The armed groups have been forced to switch tactics with the police and the army is better protected and going after them," he added. "They will turn to high-value targets, now that time is running out for them."
According to Panitan, there has been over 500 attacks against the security forces, government officials, civilians and symbols of the state in the south over the past eight months.
The death toll has reached 210, he added.
Of that, civilians have been the worst hit – with 114 deaths – followed by the police, with 38 killed. Thirty-five local officials have also been killed and the army, so far, has suffered 23 deaths.
And a spate of recent arrests has helped the government point a finger at some of the people behind these attacks – men belonging to Thailand's Malay-Muslim minority in the volatile region.
But Bangkok's attempt to bring the Muslims' under its wing through a show of force is provoking rage. The regular assaults mounted by security forces on an import symbol of the Malay-Muslim culture – the Islamic schools – are a case in point.
On Tuesday, the Bangkok Post accused the army of being heavy-handed in its raids on the pondoks, as the religious schools are known. "The raids were violent and insensitive," it argued in an editorial, adding further that since these crackdowns began, "authorities have yet to report the capture of any terrorist mastermind or weapons."
Further, human rights groups have already expressed concern about the deaths and disappearances of Muslim civilians since martial law was imposed at the beginning of this year.
The rage among sections of the Muslim youth towards the political climate in the South was witnessed on April 28, when scores of them, armed with mostly knives, machetes and some guns, attacked 10 police stations and security check points in the provinces of Yala, Songkhla and Pattani.
One hundred and seven of them were killed, including 32 Muslim militants who had taken refuge in a mosque of historic significance.
Some Muslim academics doubt that the government can curtail the bloodletting due to the increasingly heavy-handed military approach that Bangkok is embracing as a strategy.
"When you respond with violence towards culturally sensitive symbols like the pondoks, you risk pulling the phenomenon of violence to another level," Chaiwat Sath-Anand, director of the Peace Information Center at Bangkok's Thammasat University, told IPS.
Yet at the same time Chaiwat, a member of Thailand's Muslim minority, is disturbed by the way the assailants have targeted civilians. "It is quite different from the attacks against the state, which we have witnessed before."
Some of the victims who have been targeted, such as Buddhist monks, reveal a new form of hostility in the South, he asserted. "It is unprecedented in several ways. I have not seen it in all my years as an academic."
The Malay-Muslims accounts for 2.3 million people of Thailand's 63 million population, the vast majority of whom are Buddhists. The Muslim minority lives in five southern provinces, four of which share a border with Malaysia.
In the early 1970s, Muslim rebels launched a separatist struggle to restore a once independent Muslim kingdom of Pattani, which was annexed by Bangkok in 1902.
Such a struggle was a reaction to the attempts by military dictators who ruled Thailand, at the time, – when they tried to force Malay-Muslims to assimilate into the Thai nation. And although the rebellion was quelled by the early 1980s, the region has witnessed outbursts of violence since the early 1990s, with average attacks since 1993 being between 40 to 70 a year.
That Bangkok is far from immediate success in the current spate of violence was brought home over the weekend, when it announced that it would be sending nine more battalions to strengthen the 10 military battalions stationed in the south.
"Sending more troops to the area is good if it helps to crackdown on those who are breaking the law," Nimu Makaje, vice president of the Islamic Council in the southern province of Yala, told IPS. "Anything illegal has to be stopped."
But just as important, he cautioned, is the way the new troops will perform. "They have to have an understanding about what is going on in the South. They have to know who the people are."
"If not," he added, "they can make the situation worse."

Headless bodies found in Thailand's restive south BANGKOK, June 18 (AFP) - The headless bodies of a man and woman have been found near a school in the latest violence in Thailand's Muslim majority south, police said Saturday. The find brings to four the number of beheadings in Thailand's southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia in 11 days, and the third in the same district since Tuesday.(Posted @ 22:40 PST)

And I’m just starting to touch on this subject! Are you starting to see the problem? You can go through life blind, or you can start looking at the facts.

I can go on for days about atrocities that occur in Muslim dominated societies-from past to current times. You seem to blame me for the hate-mongering because I pointed out a few facts. This isn’t Buddhism that we’re dealing with. This is a religions that advocates violence towards nonbelievers from its origins up until now. The question is: how do we approach the subject without pissing off over a billion believers? And/or how to soften its message/messengers from pushing this religion to its extreme limits?

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Re: Fear Builds Walls... Leigh 23-Nov-2005 23:50:58 (1)

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