The Amboy Times

Iraq: It Ain't Gonna Happen

Good news for the surge.

Al Qaeda and the Sunni Arab terrorist organizations are in very bad shape. The momentum, gained by the start of the surge offensive earlier this year, has continued, and now the senior leadership of al Qaeda is getting killed or captured faster than the terrorist organization can find and appoint replacements. This is reflected in the greatly reduced number of attacks. U.S. casualties for December are the lowest American forces have ever suffered since the 2003 invasion. Iraqi police and army losses are down as well, but not as much. Iraqi security forces are doing more of the fighting. But there's another fight brewing between the new anti-terrorist Sunni Arab militias the Americans have established. The Shia dominated government sees these guys as Saddam's henchmen and previously terrorists themselves. That's accurate in many cases, but by getting these thugs to switch sides, the death rate in Iraq has plummeted. In fact, al Qaeda has called on its remaining followers to concentrate on the Sunni Arabs now working for the government. However, the Shia Arabs know that, long term, the Sunni Arab minority expects to regain power. To counter that, some Shia Arab militias are again attacking Sunni civilians and gunmen. The government is reluctant to deal with this, but U.S.  troops are not, and now there's a lot of American raids on Shia militias, including some being trained by Iranian agents.

 

It's going to take generations before the Kurds and Shia forget the atrocities inflicted on them by the Sunni Arabs. Don't expect a resolution on that score any time soon. It ain't gonna happen.

Death to America TV

"I only allow my wife to say, death to America"

Daniel Pipes: Obama and Islam

Obama may not be a Muslim, but Muslims may see it differently.

(...) Click here to read the article in it's entirety.

“I’ve always been a Christian,” said Obama, focusing on his own personal lack of practice of Islam as a child to deny any connection to Islam. But Muslims do not see practice as key. For them, that he was born to a line of Muslim males makes him born a Muslim. Further, all children born with an Arabic name based on the H-S-N trilateral root (Hussein, Hassan, and others) can be assumed to be Muslim, so they will understand Obama’s full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to proclaim him a born Muslim.

Further, family and friends considered him as a child to be Muslim. In “Obama Debunks Claim About Islamic School,” Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press wrote on January 24, 2007, that

Obama’s mother, divorced from Obama’s father, married a man from Indonesia named Lolo Soetoro, and the family relocated to the country from 1967-71. At first, Obama attended the Catholic school, Fransiskus Assisis, where documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim, the religion of his stepfather. The document required that each student choose one of five state-sanctioned religions when registering – Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant.

Asked about this, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs responded by indicating to Pickler that

he wasn’t sure why the document had Obama listed as a Muslim. “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim.”

Two months later, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times (available online in a Baltimore Sun reprint) reported that the Obama campaign had retreated from that absolute statement and instead issued a more nuanced one: “Obama has never been a practicing Muslim.” The Times looked into the matter further and learned more about his Indonesian interlude:

His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama’s grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended. That registration meant that during the third and fourth grades, Obama learned about Islam for two hours each week in religion class.

The childhood friends say Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque. “We prayed but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque,” Zulfin Adi said. “But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played.” … Obama’s younger sister, Maya Soetoro, said in a statement released by the campaign that the family attended the mosque only “for big communal events,” not every Friday.

Recalling Obama’s time in Indonesia, the Times account contains quotes that Obama “went to the mosque,” and that he “was Muslim.”

Summarized, available evidence suggests Obama was born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father. At some point, he converted to Christianity. It appears false to state, as Obama does, “I’ve always been a Christian” and “I’ve never practiced Islam.” The campaign appears to be either ignorant or fabricating when it states that “Obama never prayed in a mosque.”

Obama’s conversion to another faith, in short, makes him a murtadd.

That said, the punishment for childhood apostasy is less severe than for the adult version. As Robert Spencer points out, “according to Islamic law an apostate male is not to be put to death if he has not reached puberty (cf. ‘Umdat al-Salik o8.2; Hidayah vol. II p. 246). Some, however, hold that he should be imprisoned until he is of age and then ‘invited’ to accept Islam, but officially the death penalty for youthful apostates is ruled out.”

On the positive side, were Obama prominently charged with apostasy, that would uniquely raise the issue of a Muslim’s right to change religion, taking a topic on the perpetual back-burner and placing it front and center, perhaps to the great future benefit of those Muslims who seek to declare themselves atheists or to convert to another religion.

But would Muslims seeing Obama as a murtadd significantly affect an Obama presidency? The only precedent to judge by is that of Carlos Saúl Menem, the president of Argentina from 1989 to 1999. The son of two Muslim Syrian immigrants and husband of another Syrian-Argentine, Zulema Fátima Yoma, Menem converted to Roman Catholicism. His wife said publicly that Menem left Islam for political reasons—because Argentinean law until 1994 required the president of the country to be a member of the Church. From a Muslim point of view, NYT 8 Jan 89Menem’s conversion is worse than Obama’s, having been done as an adult. Nonetheless, Menem was not threatened or otherwise made to pay a price for his change of religion, even during his trips to majority-Muslim countries, Syria in particular.

It is one thing to be president of Argentina in the 1990s, however, and another to be president of the United States in 2009. One must assume that some Islamists would renounce him as a murtadd and would try to execute him. Given the protective bubble surrounding an American president, though, this threat presumably would not make much difference to his carrying out his duties.

More significantly, how would more mainstream Muslims respond to him, would they be angry at what they would consider his apostasy? That reaction is a real possibility, one that could undermine his initiatives toward the Muslim world.

I'm surprised Pipes never mentioned taqiyya.

Reagan's 1981 Christmas Address

Hat tip, STACLU.

Also of interest, The Queen’s Christmas message, 1957

My Christmas Card to all of You

Fred Thompson's Awesome Holiday Message

Hat tip, STACLU.

Watch a Painting

Amazing painting - must see NYFD 9/11 For more information on artist go to: www.michaelisrael.com

CAIR Canada; “Zero Tolerance” for “Honor Killings”?

An Anti-CAIR Blogburst.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations – Canada (CAIR-CAN) recently issued a press release calling for “zero tolerance” regarding domestic abuse in Canada.

     The press release involved a 16 year-old teenager, Aqsa Parvez, who was apparently strangled to death by her father for refusing to wear the traditional hijab outside her home. Her father has reportedly confessed to the murder.

     Completely missing from both the news report and CAIR-Canada’s press release is the simple fact that this was another religiously-mandated “honor killing”, one that takes place with great regularity in the Middle East, and now increasingly in the West as Islam spreads world-wide.

     Many Muslim families find the West to be not only foreign, but seemingly hostile to their religious beliefs. The idea that girls and women can walk alone outside the home, uncovered; go to school unescorted; even travel great distances without a male family escort or without permission is simply unthinkable. They view any society that allows these activities to be weak and immodest in the eyes of their version of Allah.

      CAIR-CAN goes on to quote Islamic Social Services Association President Shahina Siddiqui, who paints this murder as:

“... a problem that cuts across Canadian society…”

      But is it?

     Do non-Muslims murder their children based on religious conviction? If so, how often has it occurred in the past? We did a cursory check of Canadian newspapers and we could not find any cases of non-Muslims murdering their children based on religious beliefs in the recent past. However, that same check revealed an article in the Vancouver Sun that stated:

A 14-year-old female rape victim is strangled to death in March 2004 by her father
and brother because she has supposedly tarnished the family name.

    In April 2004, a man brutally kills his wife and daughter after finding out that
his brother had previously molested them.

    A teenage girl with a Turkish background has her throat cut by her father
after he learns she has a Christian boyfriend.

     All three of these cases had in common a single faith, Islam; a brutal murder at the hands of a family member; and were committed against Muslim females.

     By attempting to equate honor killings with other domestic abuse cases, CAIR-Canada is covering up the unique nature of Canadian Islamic honor killings and thus resolving itself of any need to take pro-active action to prevent them in the future.

     Why?

     Could it be because CAIR-Canada subscribes to Wahhabi Islam, that odious brand of Islam where honor killings are not only allowed, but are expected when female Muslims 'forget their place' in Islamic society? The same Wahhabi Islam that would sentence a  rape victim to 200 lashes for violating Shariah law?

     CAIR-Canada knows, as does its American master, that calling for an end to honor killings will upset their Saudi overlords.

     Like a good little lap-dog, CAIR-Canada knows who holds the leash ...

Related: Father Killed Daughter for not wearing Hijab

International Champaign Against Honor Killings

UNICEF Photo of the Year

Like a Modern day Mohammed and Aisha.


Hat tip, Right Truth.

The American photographer Stephanie Sinclair is the winner of the international photo competition “UNICEF Photo of the Year”. Her photo shows a wedding couple in Afghanistan who could not be more opposite. The groom, Mohammed, looks much older than his 40 years. The bride, Ghulam, is still a child; she just turned 11.

“The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 raises awareness about a worldwide problem. Millions of girls are married while they are still under age. Most of these child brides are forever denied a self-determined life”, says UNICEF Patroness Eva Luise Köhler at the award ceremony in Berlin. According to UNICEF, there are about 60 million young women worldwide who were married before they came of age, half of them in                           South Asia.

Watch Three CP1, Comrade

It's amazing the stuff you can find on satellite television these days.

From People's Cube, where else dumpkof?