Is Saudi Arabia Holy Soil ? Last week -- that is, just over three years after the atrocities of September 11 -- the U.S. government, for the first time, listed Saudi Arabia as a "country of particular concern" on issues of religious freedom. The State Department described the kingdom as a place where no religious liberty exists, except for the state-supported Wahhabi sect of Islam. Indeed, in a real shocker, State actually used the word "Wahhabi," rather than avoiding any specific identification of those to blame, or utilizing such favored euphemisms as "extreme Sunni Muslims" or "adherents of an austere, rigid Islam." As State noted, millions of non-Wahhabi Sunnis as well as Shia Muslims living in the kingdom lack elementary religious rights. Shias, in particular, while making up as much as a quarter of the population and the majority in the Eastern Province, which possesses the bulk of oil resources, suffer "officially sanctioned political and economic discrimination," according to State.Click here to read the rest.....

"It says it right here. Do not take the infidels as your friends," citing Sura 5:51. "I'm making statements straight from the Quran. Said Boylan, an Irish Catholic, who grew up in Pakistan. "There is going to be a war on terrorism that is never going to stop, and Islam is behind it." Boylan's lecture made more than a few students in the classroom shift in their seats as he said the Islamic religion advocates killing Christians and Jews.
"I have a little bit of a different opinion," Sheriff Bill Young said during a class break. "Historically, Muslims, particularly in our country, are good citizens." Boylan's views do not represent those of UNLV. Boylan knows his views are controversial. He resided in Pakistan for the first 26 years of his life, where he said he saw firsthand discrimination and violence against non-Muslims. "Non-Muslims have been discriminated against all over the world," he said. "We are in a battle of religion right now." In Pakistan and other countries of Islamic rule, Christians are treated as second-class citizens and cannot obtain high-level positions in government, he told students. "There are no non-Muslims that hold significant positions of power," he said. In full....

"Our Prophet did not run for office in any election ... he won the war against the infidel". ALTHOUGH attempts at linking President George W. Bush to the Arabs have generated a veritable industry in the past two years, there is evidence that most Arabs favor his Democratic Party challenger Sen. John F. Kerry. A Zogby poll taken this month shows that in the November presidential election Kerry is likely to collect more than two-thirds of the Arab-American vote. A similar pattern is emerging in the Arab world itself. "If it were up to us, it would be 60 percent Kerry, 40 percent Bush," says Iyad Abu-Chaqra, an Arab columnist who has followed American politics for years. "Most Arabs have one dream this year: to see George W. Bush booted out."Dislike for Bush has created the most curious Arab coalition in a long time. The pan-Arab nationalists are angry at Bush because, toppling Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in Baghdad, he destroyed the illusion of a "strongman" leading Arabs to unity and socialism. "It may take a generation before anyone talks of Arab unity without being laughed out of the room," says columnist Ahmad Rabii. "Those who dreamed of an Arab superpower will never forgive Bush." The pan-Islamists also dislike Bush, but for different reasons. They see his talk of democracy as an attempt at preventing them from establishing their "ideal Islamic" system based on the Shariah rather than elections. Bush's "Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative" is seen by Islamists as "a plot to impose a Western model." "The Muslim world is not a blank sheet on which Mr. Bush could draw what he likes," says writer Walid Abi-Merchid, who would vote for Kerry if he could. Opposition to Bush's plans for democratization in the Middle East is put even more dramatically by Muhammad Shariatmadari, a mullah of Arab origin now acting as an advisor to Iran's "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenehi. "Bush is trying to develop an American Islam," Shariatmadari says. "He thinks that Americans will not be safe in their homes until the Muslim world is dominated by pro-U.S. governments." That view is echoed in sermons preached at mosques throughout the Middle East, Europe and the United States in recent weeks with an eye on the forthcoming American election. One theme of these sermons is that Bush's call for free elections and reform in the Muslim world amounts to "an act of cultural aggression." More.....

Malaysia's Muslims have 'no way out'. JOHOR BAHRU, Malaysia — In multiethnic Malaysia, where Islam is the official religion but freedom of religion is guaranteed under the constitution, the majority Malays are born Muslim and apostasy is all but impossible for them. Cases of aspiring apostates are handled by Shariah courts, rather than civil courts. According to the Koran, apostasy is grounds for death, and no Muslim should assist another out of the religion. So the appeals usually sit, and sit. Many would-be apostates don't live to see their conversion officially recognized.

Some have been jailed. As one religious scholar put it, "In Malaysia, there's a way into Islam, but no way out."Although proselytizing of Muslims by non-Muslims is forbidden, the reverse is permissible. Proselytizers have been sent to jail under the Internal Security Act (ISA), which allows for indefinite detention without trial. Hands off our Muslims, who make up 60 percent of the population, the Malay-led government appears to be saying. The government is especially worried about Christian proselytizing, said Shad Salem Faruq, professor of law at the University of Technology MARA. Malaysia is home to substantial Hindu and Buddhist minorities, 6 and 20 percent respectively.

"But Hinduism and Buddhism historically have had less of a tradition of proselytizing than Christianity," he said. It is illegal to print the Bible and other Christian materials in the national language, Bahasa Malay. Some states restrict the use of certain religious terms by Christians in the Malay language, lest Muslims be confused. Yet, despite the obstacles, some Christian proselytizers are busy. The Rev. Kumar — not his real name — recalls the religious police rattling his front gate in the middle of the night. The warning was clear. "But I am not afraid," Mr. Kumar said. "My work is God's will and I have a worthy cause to fight for. [Malays] have a right to find Jesus."

His evangelical church has 12 branches throughout Malaysia and 30 affiliates, and Mr. Kumar estimates that 100 Muslims are converting to Christianity every month in the country. He said there has been a marked increase in interest in the past three years, since the September 11 attacks in the United States. A royal family and the daughter of a former prime minister are among his list of converts.Christian groups estimate that there are 30,000 Malay converts in the country. Some Muslim groups say the figure is much lower.

However, nondenominational observers say most converts live in secrecy for fear of harassment from the government, family and fellow Malays. One Malay convert and former ustaza, a Muslim religious teacher, reports that she and her family are harassed regularly by the authorities. Because she is Malay, her son was born a Muslim and forced to adopt a Muslim name. In school, despite his protests of being a Christian, he has to sit through Islamic studies, a requirement for all Muslims. Last year, the religious police demanded that she stop her "activities," which included helping drug addicts and battered women. She conceded, though, that part of the assistance involved introducing Malays to Christian doctrine.

She recalled parking herself at a McDonald's wearing a Muslim head scarf to more effectively introduce Muslim schoolgirls to the Bible.In Kuala Lumpur, boys who are a part of Mr. Kumar's proselytizing movement frequent mosques. Christians reputedly also have resorted to sponsoring picnics for Malay children and offering them gifts. In the cramped lobby of Mr. Kumar's headquarters, a magazine headline reads: "Storming the Enemy's Stronghold." The first paragraph explains, "Within the 10/40 window," referring to the area stretching roughly from the Middle East through India, China and into Southeast Asia, "lie 62 of the least evangelized nations on this planet." The area is viewed by some zealots as the last stronghold preventing Christian global dominance. One is left to wonder, is the government rightfully fearful or just plain paranoid? What is seen by some as an issue of freedom of religion is viewed by others as an abuse of freedom.

"You can talk about your religion freely, just don't try to convert," said Azizuddin Ahmad, secretary-general of the Muslim Youth Group of Malaysia (ABIM). He said many apostates were led astray from Islam not by the virtue of the faith they were converting to but the concept of freedom. In Malaysia, Muslims are bound by certain laws, such as on alcohol consumption, sexual relations and marriage, that non-Muslims are not. Certain states are known to enforce these laws more than others.Muslims also get preferential treatment. The U.S. government's International Religious Freedom Report for 2003 said, "It is official policy to 'infuse Islamic values' into the administration of the country."

Indeed, the new Islamic-themed administrative capital houses a prominent mosque but no other place of worship. And non-Muslims report difficulties in obtaining licensing and state funding for their places of worship. Malaysia has become increasingly Islamized since the early 80s — inspired first by the Iranian Revolution and by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's charismatic deputy Anwar Ibrahim, who founded ABIM and joined the country's most powerful political party, the United Malays National Organization, in the 1980s.

Malaysia was further Islamized by government attempts to out-Islamize the hard-line Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS). PAS made substantial progress in 1999 parliamentary elections but suffered in its rematch with the National Front in March. The tide of these developments may pose challenges for non-Muslims and apostates, "but they are not paralyzing," said lawyer Lee Min Choon, adding that the government's religion policy generally is conducted with the best of intentions. "The government doesn't have a program to create difficulties for other religions. They want peace for all religions," he said. This is not an easy task. Non-Muslims grumble of "Malay/Muslim bias." But the government can't afford to be seen as anti-Muslim.

The government has appeased the various communities enough to prevent large-scale race- and religion-fueled violence — though at the expense of respect, interest and meaningful interaction among the communities. Race and religion are taboo subjects, and there's a lot of pent-up rage. At the same time, the government's policy — including banning a procession in at least one instance because it conflicted with Muslim prayer time — is prompting anger. "These gestures are causing some hard feelings," said an assistant to Mr. Kumar. Proselytizers of any stripe tend to feel justified in their actions, rationalizing them as a form of salvation, leading the astray from darkness. But Mr. Kumar will be hard-pressed to convince most Muslims here of the superiority of his faith, just as most Muslims here find little success in converting Christians. Yet, it's an undertaking that the zealous don't tire of, even though it rarely leads anywhere, other than to trigger fear and resentment.

Dzulkifli Achmad, director of the research center of PAS, is concerned about the net effect. "I used to seek to convert, but I no longer have the drive," Mr. Achmad said. "When you think of the unique fabric of this society, it is in our interest to enhance mutual respect ... proselytizing is a form of disrespect. It is the beginning of the conflict." Some Muslim and non-Muslim leaders say the government could be doing more to improve dialogue and understanding among the faiths. It has, for instance, denied permits for several interfaith dialogues. And when Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" arrives here soon, only Christians will be able to view it. Non-Christians will be weeded out in the ticket line on the basis of their national ID cards, which states one's religion. Nora Murah, a legal officer with Sisters in Islam, says the decision contradicts the prophet Muhammad's teachings. "The prophet embraced diversity and inclusiveness," she said. The source. Tip from, Rajan Rishyakaran

The Children of Beslan. The unique depravity of modern Islamic terror. It's hard to fathom now--with the images of Russian children in body bags scorched into our memories--but when the history of the war on terror is written, last week may go down as a turning point. The official death toll at School No. 1 in Beslan stood yesterday at 335, more than one-tenth the number who died in the terrorist attacks on America three years ago this week. One hundred fifty-six were children--boys and girls taken hostage when they arrived for their first day of the new school year. Before their slaughter, by rigged explosives or sniper fire, their captors denied them so much as a sip of water.The depravity of this is hard to believe, but believe it we must.

For it is the new reality of this current age in which innocents are specifically targeted by Muslim terrorists in the name of some Islamic cause. In Russia, the murderers were Chechens, aided by Arabs believed to be allied with al Qaeda. And so the children of Beslan join the ranks of other victims of Islamic terror--in a Moscow theater, a Bali nightclub, a Karachi church, and the Twin Towers of New York. In the face of such horror, who can offer up any shred of justification? Yet that is precisely what has happened in the wake of every terrorist event the world has seen in recent years. By such lights, terrorism is viewed as a political act, intended to draw sympathetic attention to a cause--in this case the brutal Russian occupation of Chechnya.

Post-9/11, there were those who "explained" the attacks by blaming U.S. policy in the Mideast as behind the "desperation" of the hijackers. After the Madrid bombings, half the Spanish electorate effectively blamed their nation's participation in the war in Iraq by voting out the government that supported the U.S. In the wake of every suicide bombing in Israel, that country's policy on Palestinians is deemed responsible in many quarters, especially in Europe. Post-Beslan, who is prepared to blame the children?

On the eve of last week's Republican convention, President Bush told a television interviewer that the war on terror is not winnable. Pundits were quick to pounce on what seemed like a political slip, but Mr. Bush's meaning ought to have been clear. What he meant was that the war on terror was not winnable in a conventional sense. It would not conclude with Osama bin Laden ordering all Islamists to stand down the way the Emperor of Japan asked his countrymen to do at the end of World War II. As should be obvious by now, the war on terror cannot be won only by disrupting terrorist networks and shoring up homeland defenses. It is also a war of ideas, and as such can be won only if the widespread ideological support for terrorism found in the Muslim world and some quarters of the West can be transformed into widespread condemnation.

There are historical models for this kind of transformational thinking. In the century that just ended, fascism and National Socialism, ideologies fashionable among some Western intellectuals during the 1930s, were stamped out by the Second World War. Communism lost ground during 50 years of the Cold War that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. All of these ideologies have been proven bankrupt, even in the parts of the world where totalitarianism still reigns.In making the case that the world needs to think differently about terrorism, Mr. Bush and other members of his Administration sometimes cite the example of the British in the 19th Century as changing the way the world thought about the slave trade.

By the end of the century, slavery may still have existed in parts of the globe, but no one was making the moral case for it. Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, explained the Administration's effort to de-legitimize terrorism in a speech last spring at the University of Chicago. "The world should view terrorism as it views the slave trade, piracy on the high seas and genocide," he said, "as activities that no respectable person condones, much less supports." That ideological struggle over the uses of terror is slowly being won in most of the world, but it remains at the center of the civil war within Islam itself--between extremists and conventional believers who are sometimes called moderates. That struggle cannot be won unless the vast majority of Muslims who condemn terrorism speak out publicly against such clerics as London-based Omar Bakri Mohammed, who told London's Sunday Telegraph that he would support hostage-taking at a British school if carried out by terrorists with a just cause.

Whatever Russian President Vladimir Putin's mistakes in Chechnya (see David Satter's article in The Wall Street Journal today), they don't justify the deliberate targeting of innocents. Nearly all nationalist movements--from the American revolutionaries to the Irish Republican Army--have had enough restraint to avoid the systematic murder of children. But there is something dysfunctional within the soul of modern Islam and its supporters that deems such depravity acceptable. Perhaps after Beslan more of the world, and especially much more of the Islamic world, will begin acknowledging this as the deadly poison it is. The source...

Darfur exposes trait of Arab and Islamic Racism. After Rwanda, the World learned once more the peril of genocide in rogue states. Yet the world, or the United Nations as its representative body, is seemingly a reluctant learner with flawed memory. Darfur is a remote part of Sudan -- itself remote from cosmopolitan centres of Europe and North America. There, in the arid deserts of the eastern Sahara, where living is a bitter daily struggle against sand and sun, a genocide is unfolding, with nary a whimper from the folks at the UN and sophisticates in cosmopolitan centres who remain outraged over American "imperialism" dismantling brutal rogue regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Over the past 18 months, nearly 50,000 Darfurians have been killed and more than a million made refugees by Arab Janjaweed militias, allegedly supplied with military support by the Sudanese government of strongman Gen. Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum. For more than two decades, Sudan, with an estimated population of 35 million, has been torn apart in a bitter civil war between a predominantly Arab-Muslim north, and a Christian-black south. This conflict has resulted in an estimated two million dead and another four million made homeless in their own country. Darfur, however, exposes another dimension of the internal conflict in Sudan. Here, the victims are Muslim, black and non-Arab. Those perpetrating the brutalities are Muslims of Arab origin.

Under the prodding of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- both of whom recently visited Darfur -- the UN Security Council produced a resolution demanding the Sudanese government, within a month, disarm the militias and restore security in Darfur, or be faced with sanctions. The tragedy unfolding in Darfur has been well-documented by reputable international human rights agencies such as Human Rights Watch. There is no disputing in this instance the facts of a state-supported ethnic cleansing being repeated in the heart of Africa. More on Arab and Islamic racism..............

Ex-Muslim's site trashes Muhammad. To any Muslims who may be reading this: this is an indispensable element of a free society. There are numerous sites trashing other religious figures as well. In a free society, Ali Sina is free to do this. You are free to disagree and to argue with him. It is not consistent with the parameters of a free society to try to close down his site or kill him. From WND, with thanks to Anthony: Claiming Muhammad's teachings are the root of terrorism, a website founded by an ex-Muslim attempts to dispel the oft-quoted statement "Islam is a religion of peace."

Headed by Ali Sina, FaithFreedom.org presents articles and commentaries that debunk much of the Quran and charge that Islam's founder, Muhammad, was a rapist, pedophile, mass murderer and an "evil man." On the site, which features, the description "Islam and Quran denounced by ex-Muslims as the root of terrorism," Sina promises that if anyone can prove him wrong in his assertions about Muhammad and Islam, he will take the site off the Internet.After presenting a list of charges against Muhammad, Sina writes, "Muslims are triumphalists and claim victory even when they are clearly defeated. A Muslim can never accept defeat.

A Muslim's typical response to this site is: 'My faith in Islam grew after I read your site.' How can one's faith grow after reading the proof that the man whom he thought to be a prophet was guilty of all the above charges? Has anyone disproved any of those charges?" Continues Sina: "I have debated with Muslims who claimed victory because according to them I have not proven that Muhammad's sexual relationship at the age of 53 with the 8 years 9 months old Aisha constitute pedophilia. I consider this a self-evident fact that needs no proof. I do not think there is any need to prove that day is bright and night is dark to a seeing person. And to [the] blind proofs are of no avail."

Besides Sina's writings, the site features other writers who delve into many different areas of Islam. One section, for example, is called "Wives of the Prophet" and includes this introduction: "The tales of Muhammad's wives and sex slaves are the most fascinating and also the most embarrassing part of the life of the Prophet. These are stories of lust, intrigues, mind games, jealousy and betrayal."Another section attempts to disprove the alleged miracles of Islam. Sina reads Arabic and, he says, uses only "the hadith, the Ibn Hisham's Sira and the Quran" when arguing against Islam. Faith Freedom International.