Levitt Letter Extra News

Germany joins Iran’s ‘Down with Israel’ rally.
From Wall Street Journal Europe

It’s been a while since German military officers attended rallies that feature threats to Jews. Last month Berlin’s defense attaché in Tehran resumed that tradition at Iran’s annual military parade.

The German envoy had the privilege of hearing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promise to “break the hands” of invaders amid banners that read “Israel should be eradicated from the universe” and shouts of “Down with Israel” and “We will crush America under our feet.”

Iran’s parades are notorious for their “Death to Israel and America” slogans, which is why the European Union shuns these hate-filled spectacles. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was “very annoyed” about the attaché’s faux pas, according to a report in Der Spiegel, and summoned Herbert Honsowitz, the ambassador to the Islamic Republic, to Berlin. Mr. Honsowitz, who is known for pushing trade between the two nations, has since returned to his post and is expected to serve out his term.

This episode illustrates the fundamental problem with Germany’s attitude toward Iran: the disconnect between what Berlin says is its official policy goal — stopping the mullahs’ quest for nuclear arms — and what Berlin actually does. Germany remains Iran’s key Western trading partner. The German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Trade counts about 2,000 members, including such big names as Siemens and BASF. In the first seven months of this year, Germany’s Federal Office of Economics and Export Control approved 1,926 business deals with Iran — an increase of 63% over last year. During that same period, German exports to Iran rose 14.1%.

For the record, French exports went up 21% during the first six months of the year, but they are still worth less than half of Germany’s €2.2 billion of exports. Britain’s exports to Tehran, only a fraction of Germany’s trade with Iran, fell 20%. And while France and the U.K. are both pushing for tougher EU sanctions against Iran, Germany is reluctant to join their cause.

Given this reality, it’s not surprising that Berlin’s ambassador in Tehran apparently thought nothing of sending a military envoy to Iran’s “Down with Israel” rally. He simply put Germany’s mouth where its money already is.

California State Assemblyman Joel Anderson

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Joel Anderson, a California State Assemblyman who represents San Diego’s East County.

FP: Joel Anderson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Anderson: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Jamie.

FP: You are focusing on Iran and pursuing Iran divestment bills and resolutions. Tell us some of the things you are up to. What inspires you to pursue these courses of action?

Anderson: In the State Assembly, I sit on the Public Employment committee, which has oversight of California’s public pension systems. CalPERS and CalSTRS — the public employees and schoolteachers — are the two largest public pensions in the nation. So, when I learned they were investing tens of billions of dollars in Iran, a terrorist regime, I was shocked and disappointed. I knew we had to do something to stop this practice.

FP: Ok, so what did you do?

Anderson: I introduced Assembly Bill 221 to divest CalPERS and CalSTRS from the Islamic Republic of Iran and prevent them from putting any more of our tax dollars at risk in a nation whose rogue leader craves nuclear technology and wants to start another Holocaust. We worked hard and formed a broad coalition to push this measure through a number of committees, the floor of each house, and ultimately secured the Governor’s signature to make AB 221 law. I knew this was the type of bill everyone should share credit and we encouraged legislators to sign on as co-authors.

Ultimately, people fundamentally understand money is the mother’s milk of terrorism.

FP: Have you encountered any obstacles from the Democrats in the CA Assembly and the CA Senate? How about pro-Islamic republic lobbyists?

Anderson: Well, ours was a bipartisan effort from the start. I actually wrote AB 221 based on a piece of legislation that a Democrat had authored to stop our money from going to Sudan. And before that, Democrat Maxine Waters — prior to her election to Congress — led the charge to divest from racial apartheid in South Africa. With very few exceptions, Democrats and Republicans joined together early on for many different reasons, because everyone agrees that divesting from Iran is simply the right thing to do. The most outspoken groups against my bill were outside radical groups tied to the Islamic Regime and California’s State Teachers’ Retirement System, who fought me in every committee hearing.

FP: Did you have the support of the Iranian opposition organizations and individuals in the US? Who are they?

Anderson: Our coalition really was an amazing group. We built a broad coalition from all walks of life: labor unions, ethnic organizations, holocaust survivors, state employees, students, you name it. The Iranian groups were fantastic. Roozbeh Farahanipour of Marze Por-Gohar, with the Iranians for a Secular Republic, testified before each legislative committee that heard the bill, and told his tragic, personal story of oppression by Iran’s government. The Iranian American Chamber of Commerce, Committee for Religious Minority Rights in Iran, Iran of Tomorrow Movement, and Iranians for a Secular Republic also lent their strong support.

FP: Tell us a bit about Iran’s human rights abuses and your efforts and plans to try to stop them.

Anderson: The Islamic Republic of Iran’s lack of human rights includes public hangings, the stoning of innocent women, producing IEDS that kill civilians and promoting the ethnic genocide of a country. This is where California can have a powerful impact. By pulling back our hard-earned dollars from the companies that prop up this odious regime, we can send a clear message that supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran is the wrong place to invest our retirement nest eggs. Our citizens want nothing to do with their blood money.

FP: What is the Assembly Concurrent Resolution (ACR) 79? How did it do?

Anderson: ACR 79 was a follow-up to AB 221. I wanted to carry forward the spirit and intent of AB 221 by pushing for University of California — a $42 billion pension — to join CalPERS and CalSTRS in divesting from Iran. It gathered overwhelmingly bipartisan votes, as AB 221 did before, but the clock ran out before its final vote in the Senate.

FP: Tell us about Iran Divestment on California Port.

Anderson: Other governmental entities are starting to realize the danger of risking their investment dollars in a place like the Islamic Republic of Iran. We’ve already seen the City of Los Angeles take steps toward shoring up their retirement system, and now, other public employees at the county level are looking at that, too. As an example, the San Diego Port Authority has been in touch with me because they are concerned about the message we’re sending by putting public dollars in a place like Iran. It is important to know we have a real opportunity to bring the Islamic Republic of Iran back to the world community without ever firing a shot. We can do it through divestment.

FP: Joel Anderson, thank you for joining us.

Anderson: Thank you Jamie.

By W. Thomas Smith, Jr. www.HumanEvents.com

It’s not clear if we can blame it on incompetence at the U.S. State Department, a swing and a miss, some bizarre appeasing of who knows what group by whom, or simply an international relations effort gone bad. But the recent U.S. granting of tens of millions of dollars — on top of hundreds of millions — of military aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) may be a combination of all.

Of course, the Lebanese government (including the LAF) is an ally of the United States, technically. At least it was (or should have been) until May 2008 — that was when the LAF refused to defend the country against Hezbollah after the Shiite terrorist group and its allies launched a series of armed attacks against the Lebanese government and citizenry.

The May attacks were launched in retaliation for the government’s firing of the Beirut airport security chief (connected to Hezbollah) and the government’s attempt to shut down Hezbollah’s extensive private telecommunications network linking Hezbollah command posts in Beirut and in south Lebanon with Teheran and Damascus.

In the end, the Lebanese government — under the direction of the Arab League and, yes, with the blessing of the U.S. and Europe — chose a pro- Hezbollah president (Gen. Michel Sleiman, the former Army chief who refused to fight Hezbollah in May) and rewarded Hezbollah for its bloody terror campaign by rescinding the previous orders against Hezbollah and granting Hezbollah more cabinet seats and government veto power. As if that wasn’t enough, Hezbollah — which, according to UN Security Council mandate, should have been disarmed years ago — has now been made a permanent wing of the legitimate Lebanese Army.

“It’s actually the other way around,” former CIA operations officer Clare M. Lopez tells us. “The army now appears to be part of Hezbollah. … It is clear that Hezbollah — and by extension — Iran, owns Lebanon. This means that a radical, revolutionary, and expansionist Shiite jihad force occupies a foothold on the southeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.”

Nevertheless, on Oct. 6, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Mary Beth Long and Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr “initiated the inaugural U.S.-Lebanon Joint Military Commission (JMC) in Beirut,” according to a statement issued by the State Department. “Participants in this year’s JMC discussed current and future military assistance to Lebanon, including the need for a broad range of military capabilities for counterterrorism [keep in mind, Hezbollah is a State Department-designated terrorist organization]. … Lebanon and the United States signed three military contracts totaling $63 million of U.S. grants to the LAF for secure communications, ammunition, and infantry weapons.”

Great. So despite the fact that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization — which Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff says “makes Al Qaeda look like a minor league team” — the American taxpayer is granting $63 million and much more to an army that refuses to fight Iranian-Syrian-supported Hezbollah on its own turf, considers Hezbollah to be a legitimate “resistance” force, and has allowed the terrorist group to worm its way into the official Lebanese Defense apparatus as a permanent fixture.

On Oct. 6, the same day State issued its release, the AP reported: “The United States is a backer of Lebanon’s army and has pledged more help since President Michel Suleiman’s [Sleiman's] September meeting with President Bush. At the time, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was quoted as saying the Lebanese army was given nearly $400 million in military assistance. A further $60 million worth of aid, including helicopters, ammunition and Humvees, is awaiting Congress’ approval.”

That does not include the $63 million.

The following day, Dr. Walid Phares, director of the Future of Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me: “The unreal equation here is that the U.S. grants $460 million to a Hezbollah-dominated government, thinking this half-billion dollars is going to be part of an effort against terrorism. But Hezbollah which has the upper hand over the political control of the Lebanese Army and has its hands and eyes inside the Lebanese government will be — at the end of the day — the final recipient of American military aid, as strange as it may seem.”

John Hajjar, U.S. director for Lebanon’s pro-democracy World Council for the Cedars Revolution, says the Lebanese Diaspora and friends of Lebanon in the U.S. have been tirelessly appealing for “military, diplomatic, and political assistance” but only “while Hezbollah was outside the government, while there was a parliamentary majority able to back the government, and while a huge popular majority in Lebanon was taking to the streets to tell the world that Lebanon wanted implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559 [calling for the disbanding and disarming of all militias in Lebanon]. … It was then that military assistance was needed to equip an army tasked with the disarming of the militias, including Hezbollah and fighting the Jihadi Salafists, some of whom were dispatched ironically from Syria.”

That window of opportunity for such assistance, according to Hajjar, has been closed with the granting of concessions to — and newfound political-strategic power of — Hezbollah.

According to Lopez, “The U.S. government’s decision to grant the Lebanese Army millions of dollars worth of military assistance, in full knowledge that those weapons will never be used to confront Hezbollah, and more than likely will only add to their arsenal, is foolish in the extreme, in my opinion.”

She adds that after the events of May and July — when the so-called national unity government was formed granting Hezbollah veto power — “there can simply be no doubt in any sane person’s mind about who controls Lebanon: it is not the [Prime Minister] Fuad Siniora government! [ Hezbollah Secretary General] Hassan Nasrallah controls Lebanon.”

Mr. Smith is a former U.S. Marine rifle-squad leader and counterterrorism instructor. He writes about military/defense issues and has covered conflict in the Balkans, on the West Bank, and in Iraq and Lebanon.

By Mark Silverberg www.IsraelNationalNews.com

According to recent UN Arab Human Development reports, written by an independent group of leading Arab scholars and intellectuals, oil has become a curse rather than a blessing for the Arab world. Unlike Japan, Taiwan, Israel, Singapore and many other countries who recognized early on that their scarce resources required them to turn their lack of material resources into technological strengths in order to become competitive in the world economy, the Arabs relied exclusively on the great sea of oil beneath their deserts as a substitute for intellect, creativity and entrepreneurship. It has now cost them their future and saddled the world with a parasitic and pathologically suicidal movement that has proven its capacity to destroy and its incapacity to create anything of substance for human civilization.

While it can be argued that the borders of the Arab Middle East are man-made deformities that must be redrawn to take into account the tribal nature of Arab society, rather than the strategic interests of the French and the British who created them in the early 20th century, border corrections alone cannot account for, nor will they resolve the sorry state of affairs in the Arab world. While a redefinition of borders would separate Shiites from Sunnis and Kurds from Baluchis, the problems plaguing Arab society in the 21st century cannot be so easily resolved.

That is because Arab societies, for the most part, have immersed themselves in a culture of denial. They emphasize struggle, quash competition and reject alternate approaches or ways of thinking. With few exceptions, Arab governments live in a state of internal fear that avoids investigating their failures or acquainting themselves with, or opening their societies to, the cultures of others. As a result, their societies cannot hand down positive achievements to future generations unless they overcome their secretiveness, their isolation, and especially their compulsive need to blame others for their own failings. Consequently, from Egypt to Damascus, opponents are neither answered nor rebutted. They are discredited, imprisoned, exiled or murdered; and with each disaster, defeat or tragedy, it is always the Zionists, colonialists, American imperialist conspiracies, multinationals, missionaries, communists, liberals, religious or ethnic minorities, middle classes or even poor Orientalists that are to blame.

For all the oil revenues that have flowed into the wealthier Arab countries, the overall state of the Arab world is appalling. It does not produce one single manufactured product of sufficient quality to sell on world markets. Arab productivity is the lowest in the world. There is not a single Arab university of world-class standing. The once-great tradition of Arab scientific achievement that flowed from Andalusian Spain has degenerated into a few research programs in the fields of chemical and biological warfare. There is not one country in the Arab world that can truly call itself a democracy. No Arab state genuinely respects human rights. No Arab state hosts a responsible media. No Arab society fully respects the rights of women or minorities, and no Arab government has ever accepted public responsibility for its own shortcomings.

To the best of my recollection, the Arab League has never once convened an Arab summit to discuss the backward state of education in the Arab world. As a result, these societies have yet to create one single monument to human achievement.

The Arab Muslim world prefers instead to blame others, to sleepwalk through history as it were, and to cheer when tyrants and terrorists avenge them. They knew Saddam Hussein was a monster who had killed more Arabs than Israel ever could. They knew he was the worst thing to happen to the Arab world since the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258. But they are so discouraged that they needed to inflate even “the Butcher of Baghdad” into hero status. During the war, the Palestinians cheered him on and celebrated his defiance of the American war machine, but in the end he failed them as well.

While most Arabs understand America’s current dilemma in Iraq and fear the expansion of Iranian Shiism and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s religious imperialist ambitions, they are not eager to assist in stabilizing that country. They prefer to see America leave humiliated even if it is at the expense of the Iraqi people and the stability of the entire region. Above all, they do not want to see America, a non-Muslim superpower, as the cause for Iraq’s good fortune, especially when the Arab countries did nothing to stop Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. And because Arab societies require a target for their anger and frustration, they are increasingly drawn to radical Islam.

Since external conflict is the lifeblood of Arab dictatorships (be they secular or theocratic), conflict in the Arab world is not seen as a problem that necessarily requires a solution. The enemy of the Middle East is not the West so much as it is modernism and the humiliation that accrues when millions are nursed by fantasies, hypocrisies and conspiracies to explain away their own failures. Quite simply, any society whose allegiance is to the tribe rather than to the nation, that does not believe in democracy enough to institute it, that shuns female intellectual contributions, allows polygamy, insists on patriarchy, institutionalizes religious persecution, ignores family planning, expects endemic corruption, tolerates honor killings, sees no need to vote, and defines knowledge as mastery of the Koran, is deeply pathological.

Instead of responding to demands for democracy, human rights, higher living standards, less corruption and incompetence, reducing illiteracy or improving education and educational standards, Arab rulers blame America for their societies’ ills and refocus popular anger against it. That enables them to demand national unity and silence reformers in the face of the supposed American “threat.” By seizing on anti-Americanism as the excuse for Arab failure, they ensure that their opponents cannot blame them.

“The painful truth,” writes columnist Suleiman al-Hatlan in the daily Al-Watan in Saudi Arabia, “is that the acts of violence and barbarism occurring at present are nothing but the natural consequence of generations of Muslims having been misled and force-fed speeches [filled with] hostility and hatred for others over the course of decades, which deepened the backwardness and the ignorance in the Islamic world.”

The sad truth is that the fantasies portrayed in Arabian Nights have long since become an Arabian nightmare in large measure because (as Victor Davis Hanson writes): “The Arab world has no real consensual governments; statism and tribalism hamper market economics and ensure stagnation. Islamic fundamentalism, the absence of an independent judiciary, and a censored press all do their part to ensure endemic poverty, rampant corruption and rising resentment among an exploding population.”

For the Arab world, the status quo is no longer sustainable and time is not on its side. The Salafist jihadists are gaining strength in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories, and they warn that an apocalyptic Armageddon between the Muslim world and the West is approaching. Whether moderate Muslim intellectuals and Western-educated Muslim technocrats will be able to bring on an Islamic Renaissance before rising radical Islam draws us all into a nuclear confrontation remains to be seen. Their success in doing so is by no means assured.

By Mohammed Tawfeeq www.CNN.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — At least 900 Christian families have fled Mosul in the past week, terrified by a series of killings and threats by Muslim extremists ordering them to convert to Islam or face possible death, officials said.

The attacks may have been prompted by Christian demonstrations ahead of provincial elections, which are to be held by the end of January, the deputy governor of Nineveh province said.

Deputy Gov. Khasro Goran said 13 Christians have been slain in the past two weeks in Mosul, about 260 miles north of Baghdad. Fleeing Christians have sought refuge in monasteries and churches and with family members in other towns, an Interior Ministry official said.

The attacks began after hundreds of Christians took to the streets in Mosul and surrounding villages and towns, seeking greater representation on provincial councils, whose members will be chosen in the local elections.

Duraid Mohammed Kashmoula, Nineveh’s governor, told The Associated Press that the exodus was “a major displacement.”

“Of course, al-Qaeda elements are behind this campaign against Christians,” Kashmoula told AP.

The Interior Ministry official said the homes of three families were destroyed with explosives Saturday after the occupants left. No injuries were reported.

A week ago, leaflets were distributed in several predominantly Christian neighborhoods, threatening families to “either convert to Islam or pay the jizyah or leave the city or face death,” said the Interior Ministry official.

Historically, jizyah is a tax paid by non-Muslims in exchange for protection.

Goran said that a few days after the leaflets were passed out, gunmen set up checkpoints in parts of Mosul, stopping vehicles to inspect identification papers, searching for Christian names or other signs of religious affiliation. Many of the Christians killed were targeted in this way, he said.

Bashir Azoz, 45, told AP he fled his Mosul home after gunmen warned a neighbor to leave or be killed.

“Where is the government and its security forces as these crimes take place every day?” asked Azoz, a carpenter who is staying with his wife and three children in a town about 25 miles east of Mosul, according to AP.

The Rev. Bolis Jacob, of Mosul’s Mar Afram Church, told AP he couldn’t understand the attacks.

“We respect the Islamic religion and the Muslim clerics,” he said. “We don’t know under what religion’s pretexts these terrorists work.”

Goran said police have set up security checkpoints in Christian neighborhoods.

In response to the violence, Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul Qader al-Obaidi visited Mosul, conducting meetings with local authorities and military commanders.

His spokesman, Mohammed al-Askari, said that in addition to ordering more checkpoints in Christian neighborhoods, al-Obaidi ordered more troops deployed, additional security patrols and an increase in aerial surveillance of Christian areas.

Al-Obaidi also ordered more guards for Christian clerics, al-Askari said.

www.Memri.org

The Saudi religious police recently demanded that the Jeddah municipality ban pet shops from selling dogs and cats, on the grounds that Islam forbids it because of the concern that displaying the animals in shop windows could be exploited by young people for courtship purposes. The ban dumbfounded Arab columnists, provoking several articles on the subject. In a column in the Kuwaiti daily Awan, Saudi columnist Samar Al-Muqrin wrote that there should be a distinction between stray cats and house cats, and called on the religious police to reverse the ban.

The following are excerpts from the article:

“So far, I haven’t been able to tell whether or not my beautiful cat Nani is afraid of the [Saudi] religious police apparatuses. However, I can say for certain that if she were to encounter one of its employees face to face, she would flee and feel ruffled for the rest of the day — especially now that this ‘governmental’ religious apparatus has revealed its true feelings about her in the media, and that she and her friends have become its targets…

“Nani has come to be seen as an abomination, against which religious police officials must wage an unrelenting war. Therefore, I feel compelled to explain the situation to her, so that she understands why, from now on, she cannot accompany me on my walks and car trips, which she so enjoys.

“I will try to explain all this to Nani, otherwise she might think that her house arrest is of my own doing, [prompted by] a dictatorial decision, and might be angry with me. I will explain the situation to her, and I am sure she will understand that we are in the same boat — with a hole in it, that [the Saudi authorities] have forced us to board — myself, Nani, the women of our country, and all the cats and dogs. We have been forced to remain in [this boat] even though we know that it is flawed and sure to sink”

“I am well aware of Nani’s predicament, and am seriously contemplating how to smuggle her out of my aunt’s house and into my own without hurting her feelings. [The problem is that] right now I am outside Saudi Arabia, and Nani is spending her [summer] vacation at my aunt’s, along with several other cats who inhabit the house. I am worried that when I return to Riyadh and try to bring Nani home, she will be apprehended en route, since the streets are not safe and religious police lurk at every corner.

“If I try to smuggle her under the car seat, she will be angry with me because she believes that looking out into the street, ensconced on the windowsill, is her prerogative as a ‘free’ creature, endowed with the right to observe what is going on around her. Certainly, I am endangering Nani’s life, so I am far from easy on her account. Religious police officials have informed me that they are planning to arrest Nani and her girlfriends, but they never mentioned whether a special prison had been prepared for her or whether she would be bundled together with strays — a veritable disaster.

“I would certainly expect the brave religious police to adopt a more honorable policy. Can’t they see for themselves what is going on in the Saudi streets? All those stray cats copulating in public — simply revolting! They have no respect for pedestrians, nor are they concerned that small children can see them… I would expect [the religious police] to stop these nefarious practices that are carried out in the open… This is a priority — while Nani and her friends do not present any moral threat to society. They are neither wanton, nor engage in the debauchery rampant among street cats”

“I hereby call on religious police officials to retract their statements, since Nani and her friends are virtuous and will never overstep moral boundaries… Accordingly, I ask this respected government apparatus to retract its media announcements and demand that those who issued the fatwa [prohibiting the sale of cats and dogs] abrogate it. Indeed, it is inconceivable that in their hearts, imbued with faith and meekness, they aim to harm housecats while letting strays continue their criminal practices, in blatant violation of moral codes.

“I call on these compassionate [individuals] not to dump Nani and her friends together with those evildoers, and to make a clear differentiation [between housecats and strays], since [such a differentiation] is both logical and rooted in fact.”

By Hillel Fendel, www.IsraelNN.com

The widely-disseminated Arab Muslim position that the Temple Mount is not Jewish has been debunked — by the Supreme Muslim Council (Waqf) of Jerusalem, in a Temple Mount guide published in 1925.

Waqf guidebook, 1925, cover, The Temple Institute

Guidebook Puts the Lie to Current Arab Campaign

In 1997, the chief Muslim cleric of the Palestinian Authority, Mufti Ikrama Sabri, stated, “The claim of the Jews to the right over [Jerusalem] is false, and we recognize nothing but an entirely Islamic Jerusalem under Islamic supervision…”

Thus began a campaign to convince the world that the millennia-old natural association between Jerusalem and Jews was untrue. As Islamic Movement chief Raed Salah stated in 2006, “We remind, for the 1,000th time, that the entire Al-Aqsa mosque [on the Temple Mount], including all of its area and alleys above the ground and under it, is exclusive and absolute Muslim property, and no one else has any rights to even one grain of earth in it.”

However, it is now known that this “absolute” Muslim claim is actually not as absolute as claimed. In fact, back in 1925, the Supreme Muslim Council — also known as the Waqf, which has overseen Temple Mount activities on behalf of the Muslim religion for hundreds of years — boasted proudly that the site was none other than that of Solomon’s Temple.

The Jerusalem-based Temple Institute (http://www.templeinstitute.org) reports that it has acquired a copy of the official 1925 Supreme Muslim Council Guide Book to Al-Haram Al-Sharif (the Muslim name for the Temple Mount). On page 4, the Waqf states, “Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which ‘David built there an altar unto the L-rd…’, citing the source in 2 Samuel XXIV, 25.”

Waqf guidebook, 1925, excerpt close-up Historical Sketch, The Temple Institute

In addition, on page 16, the pamphlet makes reference to the underground area in the southeast corner of the Mount, which it refers to as Solomon’s Stables. “Little is known for certain of the history of the chamber itself,” the guide reads. “It dates probably as far back as the construction of Solomon’s Temple. According to Josephus, it was in existence and was used as a place of refuge by the Jews at the time of the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70 A.D.”

The Temple Mount in Jerusalem was in fact the site of the two Jewish Holy Temples which stood for nearly 1,000 years (see below).

Waqf guidebook, 1925, excerpt Substructures page, The Temple Institute

Proof of Muslim Anti-Jewish Revisionism

The Temple Institute’s Rabbi Chaim Richman writes that the pamphlet provides proof that the Waqf’s current position is a departure from traditional Muslim belief. “In recent years,” he writes, “the Muslim Waqf has come to deny the historic existence of the Holy Temple, claiming that the Temple Mount belongs solely to the Muslim nation, and that there exists no connection between the Jewish nation and the Temple Mount. It is clear from this pamphlet that the revised Waqf position strays from traditional Muslim acknowledgment of the Mount’s Jewish antecedents.”

“The current denial of historical reality is merely one tool in the war being waged by Muslims against the G-d of Israel and the entire ‘infidel’ world,” Richman declares.

Examples of the new Palestinian/Arab position on Jerusalem:
PA Mufti Sabri was quoted in the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam on November 22, 1997 as saying, “The ‘Al-Buraq’ Wall [the Western Wall] is a part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Jews have no relation to it.”

The same newspaper, on July 18, 1997, reported that Hamad Yusef, head of The Institution for the Rejuvenation of the Palestinian Heritage, referred to the “false historical claim of the Jews in the holy city, a claim which they were unable to prove in all of the excavations conducted by foreign groups for the past hundred years.” The paper also stated that Hamad “accused the Israelis of unprecedented historical forgeries, emphasizing the Palestinian, the Arab and the Islamic nature of the holy city for the past 6,000 years. Israel fails in her attempt to find a historical connection to Jerusalem.” (courtesy of Jewish Virtual Library)

Jewish History on the Mount

The Temple Mount in Jerusalem was the site of the two Jewish Holy Temples, the first of which was built by King Solomon in the year 832 BCE, close to 1,500 years before Islam was founded. It stood for over 400 years, and after the 70-year Babylonian Exile, a Second Temple was built on the same site. Thus, for nearly 1,000 years, Holy Temples stood on the site, until the Romans conquered the entire land and destroyed the Second Temple. Though the area came under the control of the Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Christians, Turks, British and others over the intervening centuries, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount were always the focus of Jewish religious and national yearnings, and continued to be the Jews’ “capital” even while in exile. In the Six Day War of 1967, the modern State of Israel liberated the Temple Mount area and all of Jerusalem, placing it under Jewish control once again after a hiatus of 1,900 years.

Israel, however, never actualized its sovereignty over the holy Temple Mount site, but rather granted the Waqf nearly total control. Jews, in fact, have not been allowed to pray there ever since then-Chief IDF Rabbi Shlomo Goren led a prayer service there on the first Tisha B’Av after the liberation. Jews’ visiting hours are also restricted.

www.WorldNetDaily.com — originally from Israel Today

If Jerusalem’s Temple Mount stands at the heart of the Middle East conflict, and if Muslim treatment of other faiths at the site is any indication, talk of regional peace is somewhat premature.

Azzam Khatib, director of the Islamic Trust (or Waqf) that guards the mosques atop the Temple Mount, said that Jews and Christians who try to pray at the ancient holy site are declaring war.

Any non-Muslim “who seeks such an approach is really seeking a religious war,” said Khatib, who insisted that the Temple Mount is an exclusively Muslim site and that Jews and Christians should not even want to pray there.

Khatib even took issue with the use of the term “Temple Mount,” angrily demanding the site be called al-Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary.

Khatib refused to consider the possibility that the site was once home to the First and Second Jewish Temples, calling such claims unsubstantiated myths. When presented with a citation from a 1929 tourist guide published by the Supreme Muslim Council that acknowledged the Temple Mount as the site of Solomon’s Temple, Khatib rejected the idea that such a book was ever published by a Muslim authority.

According to Khatib, when the Muslims first arrived in Jerusalem 1,400 years ago, the Temple Mount area was barren, and no hard evidence of previous structures remained, making any non-Muslim claims to the hilltop mere speculation.

“When the Muslims came here they never found any standing building or any culture still alive, so they never threatened any standing building,” said the Waqf director. “We are not going to entertain theories about buildings that may or may not have been here before.”

Always a fount of contradiction, the Muslim officials later negated their own claims that the Temple Mount was empty in A.D. 600 with their stories of Muhammad’s midnight visit to the Al Aksa Mosque that today towers over the southern end of the raised compound.

Pointing to a massive retaining wall, which if the Muslim officials are to be believed should also not have existed 1,400 years ago, a Waqf guide identified the spot where Muhammad tied his horse, Buraq, after legend says he traveled thousands of miles in the span of just a few hours.

Various Waqf officials also failed to provide a single, cohesive answer as to why the gate on the eastern side of the Temple Mount, known in the Bible as the Golden Gate, is sealed shut. Historical Muslim sources state that the gate was sealed and a cemetery planted in front of it to prevent Jesus’ prophesied return.

But Khatib said the gate was closed simply because it was built in front of a cemetery and “it’s difficult to approach a gate while passing through cemeteries, through graves.”

When pressed as to why a gate would be built where a cemetery already existed, Khatib’s aide and translator chimed in and altered the story, saying that the gate had been there first and “after the blocking of the gate, and people stop using the gate, people made use of the area (by burying their dead).”

A third explanation was provided by a Waqf official identified as Abu Qatis, who mumbled something about a Crusader massacre of Muslims at the gate.

Returning to the issue of protection of access to and religious freedom at the Temple Mount, Khatib and his aide vigorously denied suggestions that Jewish and Christian visitors are ever denied entry. Moments later, however, Khatib defended the practice of turning away visiting Jews and Christians as legitimate payback for Israeli security measures that deny access to the Temple Mount to Palestinian Arab Muslims from outside Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries.

“You cannot expect us to allow in everyone when Palestinians from just outside Jerusalem cannot come here and pray,” said Khatib.

An Israeli police officer standing guard at one of the Temple Mount’s entrances told us that the restrictions on Muslim access are only enforced occasionally, and were only made necessary because of past Muslim riots at the site that ended with stones being hurled onto Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall.

“This is just an excuse,” insisted Khatib. “Tell me, during the last five years in Jerusalem, what riots do we have in this area?”

Clearly unfamiliar with having their positions challenged, Khatib and his aide abruptly ended the interview when it was suggested that perhaps the lack of violence over the past five years was due to the Israeli measures.

By Jamie Glazov www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Ex-Muslim Mohammad Asghar

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Mohammad Asghar, an ex-Muslim who came out of Islam after discovering its true teachings. Together with studying the Koran for over twenty-five years, he has also been writing his commentary on its verses — an endeavor, he hopes, that will help non-Muslim leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, understand the true messages they convey to Muslims.

FP: Mohammad Asghar, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Asghar: Thank you for inviting me to the Frontpage interview.

FP: Tell us about your background and your upbringing as a Muslim.
Asghar: I was born in a practicing Muslim family of Bangladesh. My parents adhered to almost all the tenets of Islam and they made sure that while growing up, I also learned all of them so that I could practice them in my own life. Like many other Muslim children of my neighborhood, I also attended a Madrassa and learned how to read the Koran without, of course, understanding what I was reading.

In my youth, I tried to live the life of a true Muslim. I said my Islamically mandated prayers, though not on a regular basis; visited, and prayed at, the tombs of the Muslim saints; celebrated the birthday of the Prophet of Islam, even though nobody knows even today the year of his birth; celebrated his ascension to the Gardens (Jannat) or Heaven and sang his praises, laden with amorous feelings towards him, whenever my parents and our neighbors organized Mehfil-e-Milad — which is a gathering that Muslims of the Indian sub-continent arrange to reinforce Islamic teachings in the Muslim attendees. I strongly believed that the things I was then doing were part of the duties I owed to Allah and His Prophet and that without pleasing both of them, I would not enter the Garden on the Day of Judgment.

FP: What is the point of teaching children to read the Koran without explaining it to them?
Asghar: According to some unconfirmed reports, there are over 1.565 billion Muslims in the world today. Out of these Muslims, only about 300 million understand and speak Arabic. Since a good part of the Koran is written in colloquial Arabic, spoken by the tribe of Quraish of the 7th century Mecca, understanding it even by many modern-day Arabic-speaking Muslims is not an easy task.

The bulk of the remaining 1.2 billion Muslims live in the Indian sub-continent and Southeast Asia. Almost all of them do not know Arabic. Even those people, known as Hafez-e-Koran, who commit the whole Koran to their memory, do not understand the meaning of the words they so assiduously memorize over a long period of time.

This being the reality, the question is why do Muslims read or memorize the Koran without understanding it? The answer to the question lies in the fact that most of them, especially those Muslims who live in the non-Arabic speaking countries, depend on their Mullahs for learning the essential doctrines and practices of their faith. They do what they are told by their Mullahs. This is more so in case of those Muslims who are illiterate and poor. A casual observation of Muslims of the Indian sub-continent will make this fact clear to any interested observer.

These Mullahs tell the ordinary Muslims that reading or reciting the Koran in Arabic is the easiest way to earn the pleasure of Allah, a condition without fulfilling which, no human or Jinn would enter the Garden (Jannat in Arabic) on the Day of Judgment. This leads not only the illiterate and poor Muslims, but also the highly educated and rich Muslims to read the Koran in Arabic without trying to understand what they are reading or reciting in their prayer. These Muslims, in their turn, require their children to read and also memorize a few short chapters of the Koran that they need to recite while saying their daily obligatory prayers.

FP: This is mind-boggling: people engaging in a religion by repeating things they do not themselves understand. So what made you start questioning the Islamic faith?
Asghar: About 25 years ago, I got the jolt of my life when a Maulvi (Muslim cleric) refused to let me lay the dead body of my mother to rest, as, according to him, the dress I was wearing at the time, was not an Islamic one. This dress is known as Lungi to the Bangladeshis, and it resembles the one the Malaysian and the Burmese men wear all the time (unlike the trouser, its lower part is wide open, and as such, one can see the wearer’s private parts, if one deigns to look upward from the earth).

FP: Why do people wear the lungi and why would a person want to keep one’s private parts exposed? Why were you wearing it?
Asghar: Lungi, like sari for women, is a traditional dress and it is worn by almost all the men of Bangladesh. With it, they cover the lower part of their bodies. Since the lungi’s bottom part remains wide open, many Muslim Mullahs believe that it should not be worn by Muslim men, as, through its opening, the earth can see their private parts. According to them, exposing oneself to the earth is a great sin.

But I have not heard any Mullah saying the same thing about sari. It is a long piece of cloth, which women wrap around their waists; its bottom part, like lungi, remaining open. The earth can easily see their private parts, if it wishes to do so, but surprisingly, the Mullahs freely let their wives wear it for reasons that only they know.

FP: Um, right. Well, what can I say, perhaps we’ll save this topic for a panel discussion. So in any case, what effect did the Lungi incident have on you?
Asghar: It led me to find out what Islam really stands for, and what the Koran actually teaches its followers. I began to read the Koran in English, translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall, as well as its translations in Bengali and Urdu. This I did in order to make sure that what I was reading in English was identical with the Bengali and Urdu translations and that these represented the correct and faithful renditions of the Arabic Koran.

What I read in, and discovered from, the Koran was, and still remains, mind-boggling to me. I could not believe that Allah, if He exists, could have said things that He is believed to have told Muhammad and his followers. I could not believe, for instance, that the Creator of the Universe could have told the Muslim men the following:

2:223: “Your wives are as a tilth unto you: so approach your tilth when or how ye will: but do some good act for your souls beforehand; and fear Allah, and know that ye are to meet Him (in the Hereafter) and give (these) good tidings to those who believe.”

By telling the Muslim men that they can engage their wives in sexual acts “when or how ye will,” Allah effectively permitted them to rape their wives, for this verse of the Koran does not require them either to obtain their wives’ consent, or to engage themselves in foreplays, without which, both men and women can hardly have what is known as consensual sex. To Allah, Muslim men doing “some good act for their souls beforehand” i.e. saying prayer to Him before raping their wives is what He considered to be a pious act that will help Him exonerate them from the crime of rape on the Day of Judgment.

FP: In terms of 2:223 in regards to the sanctioning for a man raping his wife, if God does not instruct this, then where did this come from? Who created these verses and why?
Asghar: In my judgment, the Koran is a record of what the Prophet of Islam had done or said during his stay on earth. His followers remembered and narrated them to the collectors of the Koran when it was being compiled. Therefore, the content of verse 2:223 should be considered in conjunction with what he had done in his lifetime and what he had told his followers on the issue mentioned in it.

In a storied Hadith (words of Muhammad), we read:
Sahih Muslim, Book 008, Number 3240:
“Jabir reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) saw a woman, and so he came to his wife, Zainab, as she was tanning a leather and had sexual intercourse with her. He then went to his Companions and told them: The woman advances and retires in the shape of a devil, so when one of you sees a woman, he should come to his wife, for that will repel what he feels in his heart.”

What the Prophet had done to his unprepared wife is exactly what is stated in the above verse i.e. Muslim men can have sex with their women with no notice to them, and they can also rape them, if it makes them happy.

FP: So you left Islam?
Asghar: Yes. I am an ex-Muslim. I no more subscribe to the teachings and the doctrines of Islam, as I consider them to be obnoxious and, thus, unfit for good humans.

FP: How did your family and community react to you leaving Islam? Has your life been in danger?
Asghar: I told my family members what I found in the Koran and they agreed with me. But it was a different story with the community I was living in; to it, I was a pariah. Most of my friends and acquaintances stopped talking to me, fearing that the information I was trying to disseminate was going to take them out of their religion, while others issued veiled threat against my person. Realizing that I might be harmed, if I continued to live in the country of my birth and talk about the fallacies of Islam, I, along with my family members, migrated to the United States.

Here I feel safe, even though I have already received a couple of threats against my life. The Justice Department of my adoptive country has assured me of all help, should I feel that my life is at risk. My family members and I are obliged to it for standing by our side.

FP: Your thoughts on Islam’s impact on Muslims and on non-Muslims?
Asghar: Muslims themselves are the victims of Islam. Many of them have knowingly become its victims, whilst a vast majority of them have fallen into its trap without knowing anything about its true nature and teachings. Islam has turned them into robots; most Muslims do only what, they believe, Allah told them to do. This is evident from the fact that most, if not all, Muslims do nothing in their lives without first saying “Bismillah …” i.e. beginning everything in Allah’s name, without whose help, so they believe, they can achieve nothing in their lives.

Since Allah has asked the Muslims to believe in the Unseen and to remain steadfast in their prayer (the Koran; 2:2), most of them spend a colossal amount of their valuable time on prayer to Him. Believing that mustering the teachings of the Koran is what they needed in their lives, they helped produce in the past, and are still helping produce, a large number of Islamic clerics, instead of good scientists and scholars of other subjects that are essential for the good, and the survival, of mankind. The following statistics throws a light on the state of the ‘man-given knowledge’ in the Muslim world:

There are 57 member-countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), and all of them put together have around 500 universities; one university for every three million Muslims. The United States has 5,758 universities and India has 8,407. In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities, and intriguingly, not one university from the Muslim-majority states was in the top-500.

This clearly tells us that the Muslims lack in education; this being the result of their Islamic beliefs, as a consequence of which, over the past 105 years, only three Nobel Prizes have been won by about 1.4 billion Muslims (other than the Peace Prizes), while approximately 14 million Jews have won 180 Nobel Prizes during the same period.

FP: What is behind this teaching about keeping everyone praying all the time? If this isn’t God wanting it, and let us suppose this is man-made, what was the intention here? Why teach this kind of stuff?
Asghar: Before the advent of Islam, the Pagans of the Arabian Peninsula prayed three times each day; about sunrise, at noon and about sunset, turning their faces towards the Ka’aba (Washington Irving, Mahomet & his Associates, p. 31). Muhammad retained this pagan ritual in Islam and, in some unguarded moments, he told his followers to pray twice, thrice or four times in a day. Since the norms to be followed while saying these prayers were well known to his followers, he did not mention them in the Koran. For want of clarity on the number of prayers that Muslims must offer everyday to Allah, Sunnis believe it to be five; Shias, by and large, consider it to be three (Dr. Rafiq Zakaria; Muhammad and the Quran, p. 74).

The Prophet of Islam, retained daily prayers in Islam for a specific reason: being militarily and economically weak, he needed to tell the Pagans of Mecca that the religion he was preaching was not drastically different from the one they themselves were practicing and, as such, they should accept it without resistance. He continued to follow his policy of appeasement even after his arrival in Medina, where the Jews vehemently opposed most of the precepts of his religion. In order to win them over, he changed the direction of the Muslim prayer from Ka’aba in Mecca to Jerusalem. When the Jews refused to budge, he expressed his mild displeasure by asking his followers to face Ka’aba at the time of saying their prayer.

The Muslim prayer achieved a new dimension, and importance as well, after Muslim rulers embarked upon conquering others’ lands. Once miserably poor and destitute, neo-Muslims from the desert of Arabia found themselves dazzled by the wealth and affluence of the countries they were able to conquer and plunder just a few years after the death of Muhammad. The fair and beautiful women of the conquered countries was another reason that induced them to fight valiantly against their foes.

Al-Baladhuri, the most judicious of the historians of the {Muslim} conquest, declares that in recruiting for the Syrian campaign Abu Bakr “wrote to the people of Makkah, al-Taif, al-Yaman and all the Arabs of Najd and al-Hijaz summoning them to a ‘holy war’ and arousing their desire for it and for the booty to be got from the Greeks {booty consisted of all things captured from the vanquished as well as their women}. Rustam, the Persian general who defended his country against the Arab invasion, made the following remark to the Muslim envoy: “I have learned that ye were forced to what ye are doing by nothing but the narrow means of livelihood and by poverty.” A verse in the Hamasah of abu-Tammam has put the case tersely:

No, not for Paradise didst thou the nomad life forsake;
Rather, I believe, it was thy yearning after bread and dates.
(Quoted from Phillip K. Hitti’s History of the Arabs, p. 144).

But as the time passed and the lust to procure more wealth and women became very acute in the soldiers of Allah, Muslim rulers became worried, and feared loss of control over them, if they took no action to check their overflowing passion. Finding a solution to their problem in prayer, they raised its number to five; prescribed recitation from the Koran as well as various movements and gestures in order to prevent their minds from thinking about the non-Muslims’ wealth and women for a number of hours of each day.

This was like the indoctrination that the dictators of our time have used to keep their military under control. Muslim rulers succeeded in their attempt and eventually, the daily five prayers became an integral part of the Muslims’ lives. In the hope of pleasing Allah, they not only waste a colossal amount of their valuable time, they also put off their important duties in order to perform their prayers, thereby greatly harming their own and their nations’ economic well being. The sooner Muslims realize this fact the better it would be for them as well as for the rest of the world.

FP: A large part of the Muslim world is also engulfed by poverty. This also has something to do with Islamic theology, right?
Asghar: Of course. Poverty is a virtue for Muslims. Most of them believe that they get what Allah gives them. Therefore, in contrast to other people and nations that have struggled hard to ameliorate their economic conditions, and then became wealthy, most Muslims deemed it appropriate, due to their religious convictions, to keep on inflicting poverty upon themselves. Indeed, many Muslim nations bartered away their self-esteem, political independence, and sovereignty to please those benefactors whose charity they needed for their economic survival.

But without taking responsibility for their own failures and follies, they blame the affluent and wealthy non-Muslims and the non-Muslim nations for all the ills they suffer from today; these, they contend, having been inflicted upon them mostly by the unjust and treacherous Christians. The Koran bolsters the Muslims’ hatred towards the Christians by telling them that Allah gives them wealth not for attaining prosperity on earth, but to punish them in their next life. (cf. the Koran; 10:69 & 70).

Inspired by this and similar teachings of the Koran, Muslims not only hate those non-Muslims who are rich, they also look forward, albeit, silently to the day when they will be able to obliterate Christianity, and other religions as well, from the face of the earth.

FP: This is founded on the war that Islam teaches Muslims must wage on unbelievers.
Asghar: Yes. As we all know, Islam has divided the earth into two camps: Darul Islam and Darul Harb i.e. the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world. Since the Muslims are Allah’s foot soldiers and they are required to fulfill His plan, as it is enunciated in the Koran, for earth and mankind, the Muslims must not only recover the land that the non-Muslims occupy today, they are also required to force them into Islam or kill them, if they refuse to become Muslims (see the Koran; 9:29). It is, in fact, “a notable declaration of State policy promulgated {by Allah} about the month of Shawwal. A. H. 9, and read out by Hadhrat Ali at the Pilgrimage two months later in order to give the policy the widest publicity possible. …” (Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Quran, as corrected by the King of Saudi Arabia, p. 494).

This teaching of the Koran effectively and automatically turns the Muslims against the Christians; the former having also been told by it not to take the latter as their friends or protectors, as they (the Christians) and the Jews are friends of each other and, thus, both of them are in collusion against the Muslim Umma (Nation) and their religion.

Apart from the Jews and the Christians, the Muslims also hate the Pagans (Mushrikun in Arabic) from the core of their hearts, as they, according to the Koran, are unclean (see the Koran; 9:28), and, thus, unworthy of living on Allah’s earth. Therefore, the Muslims must kill them whenever they get the chance to fulfill the instruction Allah gave them through the Koran (see verse 9:5). This is a very dangerous instruction, and it is not at all good for those inhabitants of the earth, who worship deities other than Him.

This and other truths about Islam, therefore, must be brought to the notice of the non-Muslim communities of the world in order to prepare them against the deadly hazards that Islam is likely to put them in, when its followers becomes, in future, a dominant force on earth. Paying keen attention to what is written in the Koran is not only in the best interest of the present-day non-Muslims of the world, it would also help them protect their descendants from the Allah-inspired wrath of the Muslims in days to come.

FP: Are you optimistic and pessimistic in the West being able to confront the Islamic agenda?
Asghar: I am saddened by the fact that the West has not learned anything from the Koran, the history of Islam and from its adherents. The following examples describe Muslims’ mindset and what Allah wants them to do for taking over the earth from the Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Polytheists and the followers of other religions:

(1) Muhammad came to Medina as a fugitive from Mecca and within ten years, he became its absolute ruler after killing and uprooting the Jews of the city and by converting the Pagans to his faith. By his action, he taught his followers that it is the number of Muslims that matters and that it is their number that will help them establish their rule over the whole of the earth. Had he known that a time will come when number of men will be replaced by gun, he would have advised his followers to arm themselves with it first and then rampage the whole world.

(2) Abyssinia, a Christian country in the seventh century, was the first country to give shelter to Muslims of Mecca. When Muslims became numerous and strong, they forgot the favor its Christian ruler had done to them and took it over as their possession and converted its Christian inhabitants to Islam. They also conquered almost one-third of the earth and would also have overrun the whole of Europe, had they not been defeated by the Christians at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

(3) Allah has promised to Muslims that He will make them the inheritors and the rulers of the earth and also help them establish Islam all over it (the Quran; 24:55, 57). To achieve these objectives, He has commanded them to engage in battles with those who refused to accept Islam; to smite their necks, and after overpowering them, to take them prisoners, whom they may either set free as a favor to them or ransom them for money after the hostility is over (the Quran; 47:4).

Instead of taking lessons from the past history of Muslims, most leaders and the people of the West believe that Islam is a religion of peace and its followers are as good as they appear to them. Many of them took no lesson even after seeing the destructions and deaths some Muslims inflicted on New York and Washington, D.C; they laud Islam’s good teachings even after knowing that a film director lost his life to a Muslim fanatic for the crime of making a supposedly anti-Islam film. They also praise the so-called tolerance that Islam teaches its adherents even after being informed that an American publisher refused to publish a book that contains an account of Prophet Muhammad’s wife after receiving threats of dire consequences from Muslims, if it published the book.

Many leaders of the West and its citizenry brushed off the president of Iran after he called for the complete annihilation of Israel, saying that he was a mad man. In reality, it was not his madness that had made him call for Israel’s destruction; rather, it was his hatred of the Jews that made him say what he believes Allah wants him to say and do to destroy them and their state.

How Muslims intend to destroy Israel and also, how they are going to take over the earth from the followers of other religions, when they do not have the necessary wherewithal to achieve their objectives? Here are the answers to the questions:

-Iranian and other Muslims will continue with their efforts to acquire deadly weapons, which they will need in days to come to destroy Israel – a desire that Dr. Mahathir, the former prime minister of Malaysia, had clearly expressed in his speech before the Muslim delegates to the OIC Summit, held in his country in 2003, saying:

“…It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategize and then to counter-attack. As Muslims we must seek guidance from the Al-Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Surely the 23 years’ struggle of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should do. … We must build up our strength in every field, not just in armed might. Our countries must be stable and well administered, must be economically and financially strong, industrially competent and technologically advanced. This will take time, but it can be done and it will be time well spent. We are enjoined by our religion to be patient. Innallahamaasabirin. Obviously there is virtue in being patient.”

While preparing themselves to attack the Jews, Muslims are gradually taking up residence in the affluent countries of the West, with two main objectives in their minds. The first one is to earn money and the second is to sow the seed of Islam among the people of their host countries. Together with converting criminals and disgruntled folks to their faith, they also seek to increase their own number by having as many children as their women can produce. In cases where they have no women of their own to produce children for them, they trap the Western women and, after converting them to Islam, they produce their desired number of children with them.

After their number, in this way, has become large and politically powerful, they will seek autonomy, or demand complete independence for those regions of their host countries in which they will be living. This has already happened to India, and it is happening right now to the Philippines, Thailand, and China.

What is likely to happen to the West, if it continues to follow its present policy of ‘political correctness’ and apathy towards the hostile teachings of Islam, the American Historian and Philosopher Will Durant (1885-1981) has described it for us in the following words:

“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”

FP: What advice do you give the West?
Asghar: Knowing that what Will Durant has said is true, I suggest that the West must take the following steps to counter the threat that Muslims pose to its independence, and to its people’s ways of life without further delay:

-It must curtail the inflow of Muslims to its territory and should allow only those Muslims to come to its shore who are willing to adapt themselves to the secular lifestyle of its citizens.

-It must not permit Muslims to build more mosques and religious seminaries on its soil, as these are the institutions where Islamic Fundamentalism breeds and where the minds of young Muslim children and youths are poisoned against the Jews, Christians and the followers of other religions by the Islamic clerics.

- The West must monitor the mosques to find out what the Muslim Imams say in their Friday sermons together with watching what the Muslim children are taught in their religious seminaries. Any Imam or religious teacher, who might be found delivering hateful sermons or imparting hateful lessons to his or her students, must be vigorously persecuted and punished.

-Together with fighting the Muslim terrorists in places, like Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the West must also ask the governments of all the Muslim countries to stop their religious teachers from teaching hateful lessons to their students. It must not hesitate to use its political and economic powers on the Muslim governments, if they refuse to comply with its request.

The West has no option, but to succeed with the Muslim countries, if it wants to contain the Muslim threat against it and its allies. Its failure will prove catastrophic for the entire world – a prospect that neither the West, nor other non-Muslim countries in the East and elsewhere will be able to contain without great sacrifice of lives and destruction to their economies. The West, therefore, must not rest until it has succeeded on this front.

FP: How can the West do these things that you recommend and still remain a place that allows freedom of religion and individual liberties?
Asghar: In order to protect its citizens from Islamic terrorism and from the future risk of being overrun by Muslims, all the West needs to do is to follow its own existing rules and laws and bring about some changes to its thinking process. Let me elaborate:

-Each country of the world has its own Visa Rules and it permits only those persons to enter its territory it considers eligible. The West can easily check the inflow of Muslims by being more careful at the time of issuing visas to them.

-There are enough mosques and religious seminaries in the West to meet the needs of its Muslim population. Since it is a proven fact that many Muslim Imams and teachers have been using them to plant hatred of non-Muslims, particularly of the Jews, Christians and the Polytheists, into the minds of the Muslim children and young men and women, the West has the right not to grant permission for building more of them and also to electronically monitor the existing ones for the sake of its own people. Monitoring the Muslim Imams and teachers is not a violation of religious rights of all Muslims, rather, it is a necessary step (the doctrine of necessity applies here) that will also protect Muslims’ own young from the influence of their rogue Imams and teachers.

Moreover, Islam permits surveillance of bad elements and Allah personally spied on the enemies of Muhammad to protect him from their mischief. Allah admitted this fact by saying in the Quran:

4:108: “They may hide (their crimes) from men, but they cannot hide (them) from Allah, seeing that He {i.e. Allah} is in their midst when they plot by night, in words that He cannot approve: and Allah doth compass round all they do.”

This should silence those Muslims who are likely to oppose the actions of their host governments against their Imams and religious teachers, for when their Allah could spy on Muhammad’s enemies, the law enforcers of the West can also do the same in order to protect their people from the evil designs of their enemies.

Additionally, freedom of religion and individual liberties are for those who value them and respect them. You cannot protest the arrest of a known or suspected criminal – religious or otherwise –, citing his or her religious freedom or liberties, as letting him or her go free will be a dangerous act for the society or the nation in which he or she lives. Therefore, in the matter of religious terrorism, or religiously inspired incitement to kill the followers of certain religions, the demand for religious freedom and individual liberties should have no effect and the West should do what is necessary to protect its citizens and their properties from those who are bent upon destroying them for the advancement of their own religion.

FP: Mohammad Asghar, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Asghar: Thank you for talking to me.

By Dr. Richard L. Cravatts, www.IsraelNN.com

As part of evaluating the competitive landscape of the popularity of nations, in a process referred to in marketing circles as “place branding,” Israel, to no one’s great surprise, comes up short in brand likeability, ranking last out of 35 nations included in an August 2006 survey conducted by nation-branding expert Simon Anholt; even less attractive to respondents than Indonesia, Estonia, and Turkey.

How could this have happened to a country that is the Middle East’s only thriving democracy and that enjoys a remarkably robust economy that has spawned some 1,000 startup high-tech companies, for example, second only to the U.S.? How, in short, would you go about making the world hate Israel?

This is how you would accomplish that objective if you were an enemy of Israel:

Even after 60 years of its existence, you question the fundamental right of Israel to even exist and regularly, though falsely, condemn it for being created “illegally” — through the “theft” of Palestinian lands and property — and thus decide, because of its original sin, that it has no “right to exist” and is merely a Zionist “regime.”

Of all the 100 million refugees who were dispersed around the globe and were re-assimilated since World War II, you choose only the Palestinians to languish in barbaric refugee camps where their lives are used as political fodder to denounce the existence of an Israel that supposedly has deprived them of a home.

You have the United Nations set up an agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), whose sole function is to make sure that this one group of refugees in the whole world is coddled. Give only this group of refugees a collective, as opposed to individual, “right of return,” and not only to those refugees who supposedly lived in and left what is now Israel, but all of their descendants, as well.

You use the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council of the United Nations to repeatedly demonize and delegitimize Israel, making it a pariah in the world community and issuing an edict that equates Zionism with racism. In 2006-07, if you are the Human Rights Council, you pass one hundred percent of your condemnatory resolutions against Israel.

You inculcate Palestinian children, nearly from birth, with seething, blind, unrelenting and obsessive hatred of Jews and the “Zionist regime,” so that kindergartners graduate with blood-soaked hands while toting plastic AK-47s and dedicate their lives to jihad, while older children are recruited to hide explosives on their bodies to transform themselves into shahids — a new generation of kindling for radical Islam’s cult of death.

When Israel launches a military strike against nests of terrorists or in response to ceaseless rocket barrages, you term their response “disproportionate,” another escalation in the “cycle of violence,” a violation of human rights, aggressive, militaristic, with Apache gunships “pounding” terrorist neighborhoods.

If you are the Palestinian media, and members of the world media who are either intentionally biased or willing to be duped by anti-Israel propaganda, you repeatedly report on supposed Israeli human rights violations, such as an alleged “massacre of the 21st century,” a horrible war crime and example of “genocide” committed by Israel against Palestinians in the village of Jenin.

You talk about the Israeli security barrier as an “apartheid wall” and describe it as a massive, soaring, unbroken division through Palestinian neighborhoods and communities, overlooking the fact that the wall is towering and solid concrete only in those regions that have been repeatedly assaulted by terrorism, and that 90 percent of the hundreds of miles of barrier comprises mere wire fence.

You use the “apartheid wall” image to create a broader misconception about the Palestinians living under a South African-style apartheid regime, disingenuously equating race restrictions that blacks lived under in Soweto with the open society of Israel, in which Israeli Arabs have more rights than in any Arab state and are asked only not to murder Jews in their midst.

On campuses where a coddled and insulated professoriate often express antipathy for the perceived ills of capitalism, the usurpation of “Palestine” by Israel, and the denial of the civil and economic rights of the Palestinians, you contend that Israel’s very existence is not at all about self-determination (something you deem appropriate only for the Palestinians) and all about greed, globalism, colonialism, exploitation, and undeserved political and economic might.

You fund Middle Eastern Studies centers on university campuses and use them as anti-Israel, anti-American “think tanks” where scholarship is tainted with ideology and singularly focused on the Palestinian cause. You fund the active and vocal Muslim Students Association on campuses across the US that hold “Israel Apartheid Week” and “Holocaust in the Holy Land” festivals at which propaganda, Jew-hatred, apologies for terrorism and further demonizing of Israel take place.

In the Arab world, you play fast and loose with history in your attempt to create a historical narrative conforming to your own political agenda, erasing any link between Palestine and the Jews. Though Jerusalem is mentioned not once in the Koran and over 669 times in the Jewish Bible, you claim that Jerusalem is now the “third holiest site to Muslims,” that, as Yasser Arafat announced at Camp David in 2000, the Temple Mount was never a Jewish site, that Jews now “occupy” Muslim lands.

If you are in the Muslim world or the netherworld of Jew-haters, you question the actual extent and truthfulness of the Holocaust, first complaining that the Palestinians should not have been made to suffer the loss of their homeland because of the German’s extermination of European Jewry — leading in some part to the creation of Israel — and then at other times questioning whether the Holocaust even occurred and accusing Zionists of using the fictitious event as a way to falsely extract sympathy from the world community and force them into giving Palestine away to the Jews.

You write academic books questioning the strength of the “Israel Lobby,” and wonder out loud if Jewish influence and wealth forces us to lose credibility and threatens America’s national security on behalf of Israel.

You do all of these things as part of a concerted effort and also as random, independent efforts on the part of Israel’s enemies, and you do it for the 60 years of Israel’s existence, and then you are shocked — shocked! — when Israel is shown to rank unfavorably in surveys which measure the public perception of nations and how they compare to one another in the world community. But you are pleased, because you know that if Israel cannot be annihilated with armaments and rockets, perhaps you can make it cease to exist simply by making the entire world loathe it for being what it is.