Apr
25
2013
Everybody sing! Don’t know the words? They’re easy:
“Jihad bestows pride and glory upon you when you become a martyrdom-seeker.
Oh explosive device of glory – with her blood she created freedom.
Ask [suicide bomber] Fatima Al-Najjar how one should live a life of pride.”
For an extra dose of WTF, wait for the guy in the chicken costume.
[hat tip: Middle East Media Research Institute]
Apr
24
2013
Father: “She turned to look at a boy. I’d told her before not to do that.”
A compilation of acid-attack victims’ stories, via the YouTube channel ConversationWithA.
See also the photo essay Faces of Islam:
Apr
24
2013
The ex-husband of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s sister told the New York Times in an e-mail that the Boston bomber
“…was looking for connections between the wars in the Middle East and oppression of Muslim population around the globe. It was very hard to argue with him on themes somehow connected to religion. On the other hand, he did not hate Christians. He respected their faith. Never said anything bad about other religions. But he was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.”
He certainly did a bang-up job of dispelling the idea.
Apr
24
2013
The assailant had severe mental problems. Not sure how that sets him apart from other Allah worshipers who sow mindless death and destruction.
An Iranian screaming “Allahu Akbar” on Tuesday attacked a rabbi and his son with a knife as they were entering a synagogue in Paris for the morning prayer.
The 50-year-old rabbi, identified as Philippe Baroukh, suffered cuts to his throat while his 18-year-old son was stabbed in the back. They were immediately transported to the hospital to undergo surgery and are out of danger.
The attack took place in the Beth-El synagogue on rue Saulnier in the 9th district of the French capital. …
“This man had escaped on April 16 from a psychiatric hospital,” a police source said.
Apr
24
2013
Two men in Canada were charged yesterday with plotting a terrorist attack on a train.
Two Canadian residents have been charged in an alleged terror plot to attack a Via Rail passenger train.
Raed Jaser [photo, left], 35, from Toronto and Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, from Montreal, face terrorism-related charges,
…including “participation in a terrorist group,” and “conspiracy to interfere with transportation facilities for the benefit of a terrorist group.”
Officials in Canada said Mr Jaser and Mr Esseghaier had “direction and guidance” from al-Qaeda members in Iran but no financial assistance, and there was no reason to think the planned attacks were state-sponsored.
In New York, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne declined to discuss reports that the plot targeted a passenger line between New York City and Canada. However, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that Canada has kept New York posted on the investigation.
Chiheb Esseghaier is a Tunisian-born PhD student at a Université du Québec nanotechnology lab who was threatened with expulsion for his disruptive behaviour and strict religious views that alienated his colleagues.
One colleague at Institut National de la Récherche Scientifique (INRS) in Varennes, Quebec, described Mr. Esseghaier, as “a brainwashed person, basically,” who tore down posters he did not approve of, and pestered the administration to install a prayer room. …
His co-accused, Raed Jaser, is a Palestinian born in the United Arab Emirates, who has permanent resident status in Canada.
Also:
Raed Jaser, 35, was convicted of threatening death in 2001, receiving a sentence of two years’ probation and a $1,000 fine. But his record was recently cleared after he applied for — and received — a pardon.
The encouraging news: The initial tip to police about the intentions of the darling duo came from an imam in Toronto.
[suspect sketches via CTV News, Montreal]
Apr
23
2013
I’ve wanted my two young daughters to learn to recite the Sneetches, by Dr. Seuss. Also, Tom Lehrer’s the Elements.
The girls do pretty well, but not perfectly. Although they fall short, and frequently miss words and lines, surely it would be a bit unreasonable for me to beat them to death for not performing better.
But change the book, and suddenly the need for kids to study the text deeply and perhaps even learn it by heart is deemed crucial by the most pious of the faithful. So crucial that if junior fails, physical punishment may be in order. And, in rare cases, death.
So I give you … the mother who beat who beat her seven-year-old son to death for failing to learn the Qur’an by heart — and who then burned his body in an attempt to hide her crime.
Upon hearing her sentence (life in jail with the possibility of parole),
Sara Ege, 33, collapsed and had to be helped sobbing from the dock after being told on Monday she would serve 17 years before she could be considered for parole.
Cardiff crown court heard that Ege treated her son Yaseen “like a dog” when he struggled to memorise passages of the holy book of Islam. She beat him on the hands and his body until he collapsed on the floor of his bedroom and died.
Ege used barbecue lighting gel to set fire to the boy’s body to try to conceal what she had done. Initially emergency services believed he had been killed in a fire at the family home in Pontcanna, Cardiff. But a postmortem revealed he had died before the fire had begun and had suffered multiple injuries to his body caused by three months of physical punishment.
Did no one notice? Yes, but no one helped. Every adult in his life failed the boy, starting with his own mother.
A teaching assistant at the boy’s school noticed that his handwriting was deteriorating and discovered he was using his left hand because it was too painful for him to use his right. On another occasion Ege was called into school because [Yaseen] was in too much pain to sit. She moved him to a new school.
And soon it was too late.
Ege initially felt twinges of remorse when she beat Yaseen all over his body. Now and then, she’d promise herself she’d stop, but the anger was a rush — a form of letting go.
As her violence spiraled more and more out of control, Ege’s sense that she was responsible for her own actions gave way to religion’s most delusional and fatal side:
She claimed she had been urged on by the devil and bad spirits. At one point she believed the stick she used to punish her son was possessed by an evil spirit.
She hadn’t done it — the devil had. But the court didn’t buy it, and it’ll be 2030 or later before Sara Ege is a free woman again.
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P.S.: It happens among (so-called) Christians too:
Apr
23
2013
Now that’s worth a try.
Apr
23
2013
Arnoud van Doorn, who came to modest prominence as a Dutch politician for the anti-immigration / anti-Islam PVV party, had a remarkable change of heart recently. He has seen the light, the truth, and the way — and it is Islam, van Doorn has decided.
In other words, the Dutchman is a convert to the very religion he justifiably made a career out of criticizing and lampooning.
Formerly a close associate of PVV head honcho Geert Wilders, with whom he made the 16-minute movie Fitna (below) to show that Islam is an inherently violent faith, van Doorn now distances himself from Wilders, the PVV, and Fitna.
Last month, when he broke the news of his conversion with a Tweet that said “there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet,” most people thought it was a prank, some comedy performance whose punchline would soon be revealed. But if van Doorn is playing a hoax on us, he has the stamina — and the cojones — of a prize bull camel.
Over the past couple of days, the newly-minted Dutch Muslim visited the prophet Mohammed’s mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, and then traveled on to Mecca for meetings with Islamic officials who presented him with a deluxe copy of the Qur’an. According to local media, van Doorn not only “wept in repentance” for his “evil deeds”; he also shed “tears of remorse.”
Yesterday, the Saudi Gazette published this photo of van Doorn:
The caption reads:
Sheikh Abdulrahman Al-Sudais, head of the Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques, delivers a copy of the Holy Qur’an to Arnoud Van Doorn during a reception in Makkah on Sunday as Shahzad Muhammad (right), head of the Canadian Dawa Association (CDA), looks on.
Van Doorn understands people’s surprise over his 180-degree turn, he told Al-Jazeera.
“In my own close circle people have known that I have been actively researching the Qur’an, Hadith, Sunnah and other writings for almost a year now. In addition, I have had numerous conversations with Muslims about the religion.” …
“I have heard so many negative stories about Islam, but I am not a person who follows opinions of others without doing my own research,” he said. “Therefore, I have actually started to deepen my knowledge of Islam out of curiosity.”
After that, there was more crying (emotionally, van Doorn may well be the Dutch twin of perennially teary House Speaker John Boehner):
“I couldn’t control my feelings when I stood in front of the grave of the Prophet (pbuh) as well as in Rawdah Sharif, near the pulpit used by the Prophet (pbuh). When I prayed at Rawdah Sharaif [Mohammed’s mosque, TF], my eyes were full of tears as I had the feeling that I am in a part of the Paradise.”
But that’s not all. Van Doorn announced that he will soon make another movie: a positive and reverential one about the Muslim warrior-prophet he has come to love. It’ll be the antithesis of this:
The Moral Compass team will let you know when his exciting new film debuts. We’re sure there won’t be a dry eye in the house, least of all van Doorn’s.
Apr
22
2013
But this was no fiction: Islamist would-be terrorists in Britain were sentenced to extended jail time for plotting an attack on British reserve troops by using a remote-controlled toy car packed with explosives.
Investigators said Thursday Britain’s domestic spy agency of MI5 and police were able to stop Zahid Iqbal, Mohammed Sharfaraz Ahmed, Umar Arshad and Syed Farhan Hussain before they could launch the deadly attack.
Iqbal and Ahmed were given extended sentences of 16 years and 3 months, which means they will be in jail for more than 11 years and put on parole for the rest of the time. Arshad was sentenced to more than six years in jail, while Hussain received more than five years. …
The men were recorded discussing sending a remote-controlled toy car carrying a homemade bomb under the gates of an army reservist center in Luton, and speaking of using instructions in an al-Qaida manual to make an improvised explosive device.
[perp photos via the Washington Post]
Apr
22
2013
Who knows what goes through the demented minds of religious killers? A news team at the Wall Street Journal put together a relatively thorough profile of suspected Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and while it’s not exactly enlightening — mental pathology is difficult to enlighten — it is plenty sad and often chilling.
Some passages:
His mother encouraged him to turn to Islam. “I told Tamerlan that we are Muslim, and we are not practicing our religion, and how can we call ourselves Muslims?” Mrs. Tsarnaeva said. “And that’s how Tamerlan started reading about Islam, and he started praying, and he got more and more and more into his religion.
Tell me again how more piety = better morals.
Tamerlan quit drinking and smoking, gave up boxing because he thought it was in opposition to his religion, and began pushing the rest of his family to pursue stricter ways, his mother recalled.
“You know how Islam has changed me,” his mother, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Makhachkala, Dagestan, says he told her. …
Tamerlan persuaded his mother to cover herself up, which she says at one point distressed her husband, Anzor. “He said, ‘You are being crazy, covering yourselves,'” she recalled her husband saying. She said that she told him, “This is what Islamic men should want. This is what I am supposed to do.”
Allah commanded it. And soon, in her son’s mind, Allah started commanding a lot of other things too.
People who knew him say Tamerlan would express outrage when he perceived a religious slight and was critical of Muslim immigrants’ efforts to assimilate in the U.S.
In one incident last November, Tamerlan confronted a shopkeeper at a Middle Eastern grocery store in Cambridge, near a mosque where he sometimes prayed, after seeing a sign there advertising Thanksgiving turkeys. “Brother, why did you put up this sign?” the shopkeeper, Abdou Razak, recalled him asking angrily. “This is kuffar” — an Arabic reference to non-Muslims — “that’s not right!”
At Friday prayers that month, Tamerlan stood up and challenged a sermon in which the speaker said that, just like “we all celebrate the birthday of the Prophet, we can also celebrate July 4 and Thanksgiving,” according to Yusufi Vali, a mosque spokesman. Mr. Vali said Tamerlan stated that he “took offense to celebrating anything,” be it the Prophet’s birthday (which not all Muslims celebrate) or American holidays.
Tamerlan also protested at Friday prayers in January, around the Martin Luther King Day holiday, when a speaker compared the civil-rights leader with the Prophet Muhammad, Mr. Vali said. Tamerlan interrupted the sermon and called the speaker a hypocrite.
But the most neck-snappingly bizarre snippet from the whole article is the answer to why Tamerlan Tsarnaev stopped boxing, a sport for which he had a rare talent.
[His father] Anzor Tsarnaev said he was “outraged” by his son’s decision to drop boxing. He said Tamerlan told him that a Muslim must not punch another man in the face. [emphasis added]
In this version of Islam, Allah tells you not to punch another man in the face — but says it’s fine to blow up innocent people by detonating pressure cookers filled with shrapnel.
In summary:
Got that?
Apr
21
2013
While I have no deep affection for Christianity, at least Christ was the peacenik hippie type, whereas Mohammed was a highway robber and warlord. You could say that Boko Haram and its fellow Islamist thugs only follow in their blessed prophet’s footsteps.
Fighting between Nigeria‘s military and Islamist extremists killed at least 185 people in a fishing community in the nation’s far northeast, officials said on Sunday.
The fighting in Baga began Friday and lasted for hours, sending people fleeing into the arid scrublands surrounding the community on Lake Chad. The unrest saw insurgents fire rocket-propelled grenades and soldiers spray machine-gun fire into neighbourhoods filled with civilians.
By Sunday, when government officials felt safe enough to see the destruction, homes, businesses and vehicles were burned throughout the area.
The assault marks a significant escalation in the long running insurgency Nigeria faces in its predominantly Muslim north, with extremists mounting a coordinated assault on soldiers using military-grade weaponry.
[image via Asian History]
Apr
20
2013
Finally, someone sorts through the world’s major faiths and helps us figure out “which Religion is right.”
We applaud South Africa’s Frik Vermeulen and his fearless decision to “way in and hopefully bring some sanity to the tables.”
