It's no good getting older if you don't get smarter, as we used to say at the Squash Club.

I have to admit - I have been knocked around by Nabeel's death more than I expected. It's taking some time to work through it. And I never met him! How hard it must be for those who were close to him.

I put this entry here because, human nature being what it is, there will come a time when he will fade from my mind. But the death of such a man should not be allowed to pass by without taking the opportunity to learn as much from him as we can. All human life is valuable to God, but there are some lives that cause us to aspire to something higher and greater. Nabeel Qureshi's was such a life and it is appropriate for as many as will, to take the time to reflect on a worthwhile, fruitful & challenging life. Certainly as a follower of Jesus Nabeel's life is one of real challenge to me and I need to take the time to reflect & learn all the lessons I can from him.

Below is a 16 minute video from Dr David Wood on the various Muslim responses to Nabeel's passing. Some are kind & gracious, but unfortunately, many reflect the values of the prophet of Islam and are disparaging, cruel and vile. This is a useful study for those of us who seek the best for Muslims will they may only ever regard us with contempt & reject us. But if we seek to follow and grow to be more like Christ, then this is our avenue.

Brace yourselves for the foul language, the experience is worth it.

I thought the Rohingya were the victims here? Why haven't I read about this on Stuff?

You mean this is not as black & white as we have been led to believe?

It seems that India is using force to prevent Rohingya Muslims from entering its borders: “Our investigations have revealed that Al Qaeda wants to use India and Bangladesh as their base to start a religious war against Myanmar,” said New Delhi police official Pramod Singh Khuswah. “Clearly they are a threat to our security.”
​
​The Barnabas Fund also reports that Myanmar's Christians are experiencing worsening suffering since Army's clashes with the Muslims:~

    Last October, Islamic militants from a newly formed insurgency group called Harakah al Yaqin launched a series of attacks on police posts in Rakhine state. Harakah al Yaqin was created by a group of Rohingya emigres based in Saudi Arabia and therefore represents a dangerous new development. ... Now Al Qaeda is urging jihadists to flock to the region to fight for the Rohingya Muslims. This is not an idle suggestion. It is, in fact, almost exactly what happened a few months ago in the southern Philippines when Islamic State (IS)-linked jihadists from across South-East Asia quietly infiltrated Marawi city and then seized control of it, killing a number of Christians; ... 

The attacks which the Islamic militants from Harakah al Yaqin carried out three weeks ago were in the North of Rakine state. This is right next to Chin state, which is the only state in Myanmar that is majority Christian. ... If, as now seems likely, foreign jihadists arrive and turn a local Muslim insurgency into an Al Qaeda-linked jihadi struggle, as IS have just done in the Philippines, there is a very real danger that jihadists will attack Chin state.... there is the very real prospect of Christians in this part of Myanmar facing a humanitarian catastrophe that is even worse than the horrific levels of violence currently being suffered by Rohingya Muslims.

And today we read the article below, via Jihad Watch. Why am I not being told all this in the major news outlets?

All I'm saying is it would be nice to be thought intelligent enough by the media to comprehend the nuances and not be spoon fed with only certain information like we were tots.

On the other hand what are we to make of these stories? We have already experienced the strong First Narrative that it is the Muslims (which of course is true) - and the Muslims alone - who are in danger here. It takes a lot to get past the power of the first impression we get of a situation, especially if that picture is charged with emotion. Sometimes that is not helpful.

​
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Myanmar: Mass graves found as Rohingya Muslims massacre Hindus, burn their homes, kidnap women for marriage

​“Myanmar searches for more Hindu corpses as mass grave unearthed,”
SBS, September 25, 2017 (thanks to K.):

Violence has periodically cut through the western state, where communal rivalries have been sharpened by British colonial meddling, chicanery by Myanmar’s army and fierce dispute over who does — and does not — belong in Rakhine.
​
But the events of August 25, when raids by Rohingya militants unleashed a swirl of violence across the north, have sunk Rakhine to new depths of hate.

“All of our family died at the village… we will not go back,” said Chaw Shaw Chaw Thee, one of hundreds of displaced Hindus seeking shelter in the state capital Sittwe.

Bangladesh’s army was ordered Wednesday to take a bigger role helping hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who have fled violence in Myanmar, amid warnings it could take six months to register the new refugees.

The 20-year-old said she lost 23 family members as Rohingya militants swarmed the clutch of Hindu villages in Kha Maung Seik, near the Bangladesh border.

On Sunday the army said 28 badly-decomposed bodies of Hindu men, women and children had been pulled from two mass graves in the same area.

It was not immediately clear if they belonged to Chaw Shaw Chaw Thee’s family.

Heavily pregnant when she fled, she gave birth at a disused football stadium in Sittwe, where hundreds of traumatised Hindus now sleep on grubby mats in the overcrowded concourse.

An army lockdown has made it impossible to independently verify what happened in the villages of northern Rakhine, an area dominated by Rohingya Muslims who are a minority elsewhere in the mainly Buddhist country.
But allegations, carved along ethnic lines, are spinning out as conspiracy and competing identity claims override empathy between former neighbours.

Hindus, who make up less than one percent of Rakhine’s population, accuse Rohingya of massacring them, burning their homes and kidnapping women for marriage….

“We were barbers for Muslims, our women sold things in Muslim villages, I had Muslim friends, we had no problems,” said Kyaw Kyaw Naing, a 34-year-old Hindu who can dance across linguistic divides in Hindi, Rakhine, Burmese and Rohingya.

Community ties in what is also Myanmar’s poorest state have now unravelled.
“We want to go back, but we will not if the Muslims are there.”

This article is from a lady who was challenged - and in turn challenges us - to deal in a certain way with the threat of Sharia, the needs of our own culture and the needs of Muslims. She speaks from personal experience and this is quite engaging. She talks as someone who moved from a very left of centre worldview to the person she is today.

​She also talks about speaking the truth with love. Ah. What a lovely idea. And how impossibly difficult a concept this seems to be for so many of us these days. This is not a multiple-choice question, we are to do both.

I will place much of the article below the fold. Do read it all.

Immediately below is a link to the excellent 6 minute video she mentions.

Reflections on a fallen Counter-Jihadi
by Danusha Goska via Frontpage Mag.

​  September 11, 2001, was one of the happiest mornings of my life. I was seated at a computer, with a view of a green Indiana lawn. I had worked long and hard to get here: writing my dissertation on Polish-Jewish relations. I had spent years of my life eating, sleeping, and breathing Polish-Jewish relations.

In addition to my academic writing, I also broadcast short editorials via radio and I published in local print media. Anyone who heard or read me probably concluded, correctly, that I was a lifelong liberal. I spoke against misogyny and bigotry and for gay rights. I did not know a single person who voted Republican. David Horowitz was recognized, in my social circle, as Satan incarnate.

I stood up from the computer to take my breakfast break. I turned on NPR. Bob Edwards announced that one, no, now, two planes had flown into the World Trade Center.
​
You know that old line, "There are two kinds of people in this world"? Here's one such division. There are two kinds of people in this world. Some people had no idea why planes had flown into the World Trade Center. Some of us immediately knew why. I knew immediately.

Years before, in the 1980s, I had worked on a campus in Paterson, NJ. Passaic County has one of America's largest Muslim populations. I grew up with Muslims and count Muslims among my friends.

Back in the 1980s, on that Paterson, NJ campus, I used to spend hours debating with young Muslim men. Some of them – not all of them – voiced approval for terrorism. As we stood in a tutoring lab with wall-to-wall windows, one said to me, "Someday, when you look out this window and see a smoking ruin, you will know that we have finally done what Allah orders us to do."

I thought, "I'm just a nobody. There are wise and competent law enforcement officials in the US. They have this situation under control. It's not my place to intervene."

On September 27, 2001, the New York Times reported that Paterson, NJ, had served as a "kind of headquarters" for six of the 9-11 hijackers, including hijackers from all four flights.

On that September morning in 2001, I left my computer and my dissertation and I walked to the Indiana University Main Library. In the parking lot, I saw a pickup truck with a hand-lettered sign in the rear window. The sign threatened physical violence to Muslims. I walked toward the open passenger door. I had no idea what I was going to say or do. At the wheel was a bald man in heavy boots. I decided to focus on the immediate and concrete.
​
"That sign will attract trouble. There may be physical fights. You could get hurt," I said to the angry and scary looking Hoosier.

He informed me that he did not care if he were to be hurt. He was ready to beat up Muslims. I asked why. As we spoke, the man began to cry. Muslims had killed his friends in a terror attack.

I hugged the man. I urged him to remove his sign. I said that violence against random Muslims was not the best route for us to take.

What was the best route for us to take? The first, essential step: we must speak the truth about jihad. After September 11, 2001, I thought that that was exactly what would happen in the United States. I thought that the cataclysmic terror attack would cause media, education institutions, and church leaders to inform the public about jihad.

That first week after 9-11 was very silent in my home. US airspace was shut down. No planes flying overhead. There was another vital sound for which I was listening. The truth.

In place of the truth, what I heard was propaganda so distorted it render relatively bland the propaganda I had heard while living under Soviet Communism in Poland.

While the bodies were still smoking, I received a mass emailing to IU grad students. It instructed us to wear hijab in solidarity with Muslim women. This choice struck me as odd. Should we not, as a nation that had just been attacked, wear, say, flag lapel pins as a symbol of our unity? The local NPR affiliate broadcast a talk show dedicated to American bigotry against Muslims. One of my best friends said she wanted to go to Afghanistan to embrace Afghanis. If she needed to embrace someone, why not embrace the loved ones of 9-11's dead? This total lack of sympathy, among my liberal friends, for suffering Americans was a life-changing shock.

In national media, thought leaders announced that somehow Americans were to blame for the 9-11 attacks. This trend reached its nadir when University of Colorado Professor and faux-Native-American Ward Churchill called the victims "little Eichmanns." In this void without truth, in this toxic stew of lies, I felt as if I were suffocating, just like the first responders at Ground Zero.

Before September 11, 2001, all I had wanted to read, write, and publish about was Polish-Jewish relations.

But I had to say something.

​  I wrote my first ever words about Islam: "Islam and Terror: Some Thoughts after 9/11." I didn't want to write about Islam. I wanted those wiser leaders I had imagined when debating back in Paterson to take care of informing the American public about jihad. But somehow that just wasn't happening. Someone had to do it. My goal was to provide a direct counter to media's insistence on the following falsehoods: Islam means peace; Americans died because Americans did something bad and deserved to die; poverty causes terrorism; the best thing to do was to fully embrace and support, and never criticize, Islam, but, rather, to promote a relativism that insisted that how Islam handles violence is no different than how Christianity handles violence. It was hard to find anyone who would publish my piece. Finally, Answering Islam published it on their website.

Still, I felt very alone.  

Little by little, I began to find other counter-jihadis. Ali Sina launched Faith Freedom in late October, 2001. Jihadwatch.org launched in 2003. Wafa Sultan made a big splash in 2006. Every year there were more of us telling the truth.

All of us, whether we spoke on stages big or small, faced the same challenge. We were characterized, not as merely not speaking the truth about jihad and gender apartheid, but as bigots who hated, and wished harm to, Muslims. Jihad wasn't the problem. People who spoke the truth about jihad were the problem.

And we all worked, on stages big and small, to show that that charge was libelous and destructive. "Counter-Jihad. We're about truth, not hate," I wrote. "Is it racist, xenophobic, and imperialist to criticize Islam?" I asked. No, I showed. "I want to end hatred: Emmie, a Muslim-American woman speaks," I wrote, about a Muslim friend who is simply a wonderful human being.

For many, it doesn't matter how much truth we speak. The power narrative right now remains as it was on 9-11. In much of mainstream media, at workplaces, on Facebook pages, and in intimate conversations with friends, articulate critique of jihad is not just taboo, it is demonized and punished.

In August, 2017, news broke of Pakistani village elders ordering the rape of a girl in retaliation for her brother's alleged rape of another girl. This was not the first time a Pakistani girl was ordered to be raped in retaliation for her brother's alleged crime. I posted about this outrage on Facebook. I mentioned "qisas," Islamic retaliation in kind. Qisas informed ISIS' decision to burn to death Muath Al-Kasasbeh, a Jordanian pilot. Qisas informed Iran's decision to gauge out a man's eye. Rape disgraces a family's honor. The family of the rapist must be disgraced with a retaliatory rape.

One of my Facebook friends was himself outraged. This friend is a public Christian. He lives in the US. He is a husband and father. About what did he voice outrage? Not about the rape of Pakistani girls. No. He posted to protest, repeatedly and adamantly, against my mentioning retaliatory rape as representing "justice" as conceived by Muslim men in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. I was besmirching Islam's good name by posting about this rape on Facebook. I must be reprimanded, repeatedly. A Christian, American man did this. Such is our public culture today. Mentioning retaliatory rape of an innocent girl is an outrage that must be stamped out. The rape itself, and the reasoning behind it, must not be mentioned as an outrage.

Such shielding of Islam from critique occurs not just on in social situations. Robert Spencer recently noted that President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Defense Secretary Mattis did not mention Islamic terrorism in their 9-11 remarks.

I'm no Robert Spencer. I'm not a superhero. I feel the loneliness, the weight of the suppression of free speech, the demonization of heroes like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, even by mouthpieces like the Southern Poverty Law Center, now discredited not just by conservatives, but by leftwing NPR. And so I rejoice every time another member joins team counter-jihad. And so I rejoiced one night, some years back, when I was surfing the web and I stumbled on a video starring two young men I had never heard of, Nabeel Qureshi and David Wood.

The video had bargain-basement production values. Its one prop was a very bad blonde wig. Its low-budget quality was part of what made it so great. Its amateurishness shouted loud and clear: you don't have to be rich to be a counter-jihadi. You don't have to be sophisticated. You don't really even have to know how to make a good video. Just write the right script and point the camera and get it done.

This then-unknown quantity, David Wood, stands in a pulpit and pretends to be a Christian minister. He says things like "God hates Muslims" and "God wants you to kill and be cruel to Muslims."

Parishioners in the pews, listening to Wood, shout him down. How dare he say such hateful things?

Then Nabeel Qureshi takes to the pulpit. He begins to preach the exact same sermon, only switching the word "Christian" for "Muslims." "God wants you to hate and kill Christians," Nabeel preaches. As he preaches, the Koran and hadith verses he is quoting flash on the screen.

The parishioners in the pews, rather than condemning this sermon, applaud it, saying that "Other cultures are very interesting," "It doesn't sound so bad when he says it," "This is their culture. Don't be intolerant," and, "That's not violent. You have to understand the context."

This video makes the point that Politically Correct people adopt two different standards when assessing speech by Christians and speech by Muslims. When a Christian speaks intolerantly, Politically Correct people voice condemnation. When Muslims, quoting the Koran and Hadith, voice religious justifications for violence, the Politically Correct silence themselves, or justify such speech by saying, "We can't judge other cultures."

This video's satirizing of the thought processes of Islam-apologists is funny. The video, though, ends on an ominous note – with actual footage of David and Nabeel being arrested, in the United States of America, in 2010, for no other crime than publicly telling the truth about Islam.

Apparently not.

From Breitbart. Wait a minute! Oh dear, what have I done? That's not an approved outlet. I suppose that means the Danish PM never said anything of the kind. Well, you can safely ignore this then (just like he's been doing up to now).


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​“Danish Prime Minister Warns of the Emergence of Muslim Parallel Societies, No-Go Zones,”
by Chris Tomlinson, Breitbart

​Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen has warned that his country may be seeing a rise of Muslim “parallel societies” and no-go zones and has promised to take steps against them.

The Danish prime minister said that the problem has become so prevalent in Denmark that he is considering state intervention in some areas. The move is unusual for Denmark which rarely ever sees the government interfere in the operation of schools or set specific rules for housing estates, Jyllands-Posten reports.

The move is doubly unusual for Europe, where the normal approach of establishment politicians is to deny the existence of no-go zones altogether. The comments by Løkke Rasmussen seem to suggest a radical break from his fellow Western European leaders in that regard.

“It’s a matter of being realistic about the situation,” Rasmussen said, “and there are areas where there is already a different set of rules. Where the gangs are in control and the police can not work. I can not sit and passively let it happen.” 

​“We have tried everything possible, but we just could not solve the problem,” Rasmussen said and called on the Danish parliament to “engage us in a different and more robust way”.

Rasmussen has called on three ministers in his cabinet to brainstorm ideas on how to better integrate Muslim pupils in schools or solve complex issues in housing estates to prevent the emergence of parallel societies. The ministers would then be given special authority to interfere in local areas once only under municipal authority.

The municipal governments admit that there is a need for some intervention but some are cautious about the idea. Aalborg mayor Thomas Kastrup-Larsen has reservations on the proposal saying: “A ministerial hero who drives in and believes he can do it all will not be successful. It can hurt local involvement and aggravate the problems.”….

Twenty-four minutes of wisdom in this video from Al Fadi & Dr Wood.

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Many Muslims believe that Muhammad performed miracles, since the major Hadith collections are filled with claims about Muhammad's miracles. Unfortunately for Muslims, the main Hadith collections were written 2-3 centuries after Muhammad's death, and are therefore difficult to take seriously when they refer to miracles. Even more significantly, the Quran repeatedly denies that Muhammad could perform miracles, and it claims that the Quran was Muhammad's only miracle. In this video, Al Fadi and David Wood discuss whether Muhammad performed miracles.

In a short 6 minute video Brother Ismaa'eel Abu Adam deals with similar issues as Dr Wood here as he refutes the claim that the Qur'an is divinely transmitted & perfectly preserved. He works from Sunni sources but also offers Shi'a sources in the written notes (below). 

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Asalamu alaykum (Peace be upon you),
Welcome to the Converted2Islam channel. I am brother Ismaa’eel, a follower of Jesus, an Ex-Muslim and now Polemicist against Islam. I was Muslim for 16 years. I provide you with well-researched videos containing authentic information based on the Islamic Sources which will give you knowledge and help you make the right decisions on what to believe and do regarding Islam. Enjoy the videos.

Thank you and God bless you.
EMAIL: converted2islam@gmail.com

In this video I refute the Muslim claim the Qur'an is divinely transmitted and perfectly preserved.

Shia Muslim Sources for this video:
Usool al-Kafi, by Al-Kulayni, volume 7, 177.
‘Ilal al-Sharai’, by Ibn Babawayh, volume 2, 540.
Man la yahduru al-faqih, by Ibn Babawayh al-Saduq al-Qummi, volume 4, 26.
Tahdhib al-Ahkam, by al-Tusi, volume 8, 195.

More fruit of Islam's teachings on the place of non-Muslims, of women and of human rights generally.

In Egypt the Police are assisting Muslim gangs to kidnap, drug & beat Christian girls. While in the West Courts imprison people for the "hate crime" of putting bacon on a mosque door. New distortions of reality are being discovered every month as we continue to slowly sink into our coma. 

Back in 2014 in Scotland two people were given 9 & 12 month gaol sentences for what is basically a misdemeanour - putting bacon on a mosque door. Certainly it's wrong, but a year inside? In 2016 in England "Kevin Crehan got a year in prison and Mark Bennett got nine months for putting bacon on a mosque door and shouting abuse at a Muslim". What? That's it? As Robert Spencer notes regarding the Scottish case: "If they had desecrated a church, would they be serving a year in jail?"

Meanwhile in Canada just a few days ago a man was given 5 months in gaol for scribbling "No more Muslims" on some bus stop seats. Almost simultaneously it was decided that some Canadian Imams who had called for the death of Jews in a Montreal mosque earlier this year are not going to be prosecuted. Their remarks, it seems, were "taken out of context".

Right. Let's not all over-react. But bacon or graffiti - now that's serious. No room for nuance there.

Certainly do something corrective about vandalism and abuse but prison? All the while Western governments - and worse, Western church leaders - are largely "minding their own business" regarding the wide scale abuse of non-Muslims in Muslim majority contexts.

In the Muslim majority countries where Muslims can treat religious minorities according to the culture, if not in direct obedience to Sharia, the following horrifying story of the kidnapping & rape of Christian girls is found. Does it remind you of the behaviour of the Muslim rape gangs in Britain? It does me. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Egyptian Police ignore and even assist in the abuse of non-Muslim girls. As we see this behaviour even in Britain, it's not hard to believe.

We need to face this fact: there are very real problems wherever the teachings of the prophet are followed. The fact that some people in the West clumsily, inelegantly or even boorishly seek to oppose this does not make them more of a threat to liberty than such Sharia-compliant Muslims.

It really does seem to me that our authorities are moving ever more in the direction of the Chinese - "harmony" and "community cohesion" have become their top priorities. And they will use whatever strength is deemed necessary to maintain this "harmony". Even at the expense of their own young women or a sense of proportion of the law itself.

From Jihad Watch.

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Egypt: Muslim ex-kidnapper admits “they get paid for every Christian girl they bring in”​

Egypt: ex-kidnapper admits ‘they get paid for every Coptic Christian girl they bring in,’” World Watch Monitor, September 14, 2017:

“I remember a Coptic Christian girl from a rich, well-known family in Minya. She was kidnapped by five Muslim men. They held her in a house, stripped her and filmed her naked. In the video, one of them also undressed. They threatened to make the video public if the girl wouldn’t marry him.”

‘G’, an Egyptian, admits he was in a network actively targeting Coptic girls for years before he left Islam; he says that the kidnapping of such girls is now at an all-time high. “Salafist networks began in the seventies and it’s reached its highest levels now, in the era of President Sisi… A group of kidnappers meets in a mosque to discuss potential victims. They keep a close eye on Christians’ houses and monitor everything that’s going on. On that basis, they weave a spider’s web around [the girls],” he says.

Strategies can be subtle. “A Muslim boy tells a Christian girl he loves her and wants to convert to Christianity for her,” ‘G’ explains. “They start a romantic relationship until one day they decide to ‘escape’ together. What the girls don’t know is that they are actually being kidnapped. Most of the time they will not marry their kidnapper, but someone else.”

Kidnapping of a minor
This summer there were two ‘kidnap’ incidents within two days.

Sixteen-year-old Marilyn was kidnapped through this ‘love’ tactic, as her family priest, Father Boutros Khalaf, explains, when we meet in their village, Balansora, Minya province, as her desperate parents cry nearby. “On Wednesday evening [28 June, 2017] at 5pm, Marilyn disappeared. Her mother searched everywhere but couldn’t find her. Some people told us that she had been kidnapped by a young man named Taha. He had taken her to a farm where he works,” says Fr Khalaf.

An Egyptian researcher, who wants to remain anonymous, confirmed to World Watch Monitor over the phone: “Marilyn was seduced by a recruit of a Salafi organisation. She was involved in a love affair; he was then able to convince her to run away with him. Marilyn isn’t 18 yet. So even if she had agreed to go with Taha, in our law this is clearly a case of kidnapping a minor.”

The day before, 15-year-old Neveen Adly Beshai Sawiris was pushed into a car with force by two men as she walked along a street in Cairo. Her 38-year-old kidnapper later confessed he had forged her papers to show her as an over-18 and married her.

He was charged with kidnapping a minor, forgery, and inciting sectarian strife.

Pressure to convert
‘G’, who knows the groups from the inside, says, “The kidnappers receive large amounts of money. Police can help them in different ways, and when they do, they might also receive a part of the financial reward the kidnappers are paid by the Islamisation organisations. In some cases, police provide the kidnappers with drugs they seize. The drugs are then given to the girls to weaken their resistance as they put them under pressure. I even know of cases in which police offered helped to beat up the girls to make them recite the Islamic creed.

“And the value of the reward increases whenever the girl has a position. For example, when she is the daughter of a priest or comes from a well-known family.”

Many girls are handed over to extremists, ‘G’ explains. “The Salafist group I knew rented apartments in different areas of Egypt to hide kidnapped Coptic girls,” he says. “There, they put them under pressure and threaten them to convert to Islam. And once they reach the legal age, a specially arranged Islamic representative comes in to make the conversion official, issue a certificate and accordingly they change their ID.”

Marilyn’s father, Medhat Saad Edward, shares: “I filed a report in two police stations, and I gave the names of the kidnappers and the place where they hid my daughter. But the police haven’t arrested them. They didn’t even get in touch with Taha’s brother, who lives in the village and is in touch with Taha.”

“If all goes to plan, the girls are also forced into marriage with a strict Muslim. Their husbands don’t love them, they just marry her to make her a Muslim. She will be hit and humiliated. And if she tries to escape, or convert back to her original religion, she will be killed.”

Meanwhile, a Muslim girl kidnapped for ransom in Balansora around the same time was followed by the police and released in 24 hours.

“Kidnappers of Christian girls rarely get arrested or brought to the prosecution,” says ‘G’. “For instance, the police don’t report it as a kidnap but say the girl ‘went missing’. This way they cover up the crimes of those they see as their ‘Muslim brothers’.”…

How can anyone go for an actual holiday there?

From the Barnabas Fund.

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Analysis: Maldives - Christians losing the few rights they have

Christians in the Maldives have few rights, but until now at least the courts would protect those rights. Now, however, the government is increasingly controlling the courts and simply ignoring the law, leaving Christians in an even more vulnerable state.

The Maldivian government has just suspended one-third of all lawyers in the islands after they tried to submit a petition to the Supreme Court calling for the rule of law to be respected. The 56 lawyers who signed the petition were suspended from practising by the government.

Despite being a popular tourist destination, the Maldives is one of the most difficult places in the world to be a Christian. The 2008 Maldivian constitution bans non-Muslims from becoming Christians, which leaves open the question as to whether someone who becomes a Christian could be stripped of their citizenship.

In 1998, the government arrested 50 Maldivians suspected of having become Christians, and is thought to have tortured them. Any Maldivian even found to have a Bible in their house faces a prison sentence. There were signs of hope in 2008, with the election of President Mohammed Nasheed, of the Maldivian Democratic Party, who called for a “tolerant” form of Islam. However, he was forced out of office in 2012. He was recently granted political asylum in the UK, after being sentenced to 13 years in prison for “terrorism” in a trial that the UN said was politically motivated.

All of this makes the plight of Maldivian Christians even more precarious. The Maldivian government appears to be pursuing a slow process of Islamisation, possibly partly in response to the challenge from the Maldives’ other opposition group, the Islamist Adhaalath Party. Last year, the government passed a Defamation and Freedom of Speech Act, which criminalised any comments against “any tenet of Islam,” in effect an Islamic blasphemy law.

In some countries, Christians suffer because of repressive laws that restrict freedom of religion. In others, whilst the constitution guarantees freedom of religion, Christians suffer because the government simply ignores the law. This latest development suggests that Christians in the Maldives are now being oppressed in BOTH ways. They suffer because of laws preventing them openly living as Christians, and now the government is simply ignoring even the few legal freedoms they do have.

From David Wood and Al Fadi. For Muslims this is 35 excruciating minutes tearing apart yet another fantasy about the "perfection of the Qur'an".

Yet another point that Muslim leaders have lied to their people about forever.
​Enjoy. 

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Countering Muslim Claims, Episode 4: The Preservation of the Quran​
Muslims often claim that the Quran has been perfectly preserved, and that this is proof of its divine origin. However, when we examine Islam's most trusted sources, we find that entire chapters of the Quran were forgotten, large passages were lost, and individual verses were eaten by a sheep. Much of the Quran was lost when Muslims who had parts memorized died in battle. Indeed, the Quran was only compiled into a physical book to keep more of it from being lost. So, if Muslim sources say that the Quran went through countless changes, why do Muslim apologists lie by telling Muslims that the Quran has been perfectly preserved? David Wood and Al Fadi discuss the issue. For a short introduction to this topic, be sure to watch "A Brief History of the Quran": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91AM7...

Some Muslims are claiming that the recently deceased convert from Islam to Christianity, Nabeel Qureshi, died because Allah cursed him and killed him due to his apostasy & his subsequent lies about these two religions.

In response David Wood produced this 14 minute video introducing some passages from the history of al-Tabari; the Hadith collections - including one which is Sahih; & the Qur'an which prove that Muhammad was cursed by Allah.

You see Muhammad died in exact accordance with Q 69.44-46 where Allah stated that if he had falsified any revelation in the Qur'an he would die by having his aorta cut.

Oops.

Dr Wood's explanation is reasoned, scriptural & well attested.

So of course Muslims will automatically refuse to even look at it.

They are imprisoned both by the fear of upsetting Allah and by the possibility of finding out that Muhammad is a false prophet and that their whole belief system is a fable suitable only for the simple-minded.

Frankly, I don't think the average Muslim cares enough about the truth to look into this.
They prefer a children's fairy tale.

​But here is the argument...

One of the guys reputed to have inspired him.

I have read Fjordman's articles for several years and have never found him to be xenophobic, racist or violent. In fact I'd say he does what I try to do here - if rather more competently than me. But do read this yourself and consider: if these opinions should be considered outside the law because some mentally disturbed guy distorts them to pursue his own murderous goals will any of us be able to say anything?

In reality Breivik admitted that he only identified with the counter-jihad movement in order to destroy it. He admitted he was a Nazi who tried to undermine the counter-jihad movement. Breivik said in court “It is ridiculous to conduct a witch hunt on Fjordman. He is against violence and for democracy”.

Any doubt left? Watch this video from Dr David Wood on Breivik's supposed links to people like Fjordman. He tears the issue to pieces. It's brilliant, don't miss it. This is exactly how & why we need to fearlessly deal with the real issues - partly in order to stop future Breiviks.

I note Fjordman's comments on the desirability of an Islamic Reformation and am reminded of the comments of perhaps New Zealand's foremost scholar of Islam Dr William Shepherd. Some years ago Dr Shepherd stated that such a Reformation has already occurred - in the form of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic state of Iran! This is what Islam looks like when it returns to its roots and is not something anyone other than devoted Islamic literalists would ever want to see.

It's a thorough article from the Gates of Vienna which continues below the break. I have some comments interspersed. 


>>>>>>>
Interview with Fjordman

Note: This email interview was first published at the website The Apricity.

I was born in 1975. If I had any Islam-friendly or pro-Multicultural viewpoints in Norway in the 1990s, spending several years in the Middle East cured me of this. I was a student of Arabic at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, in 2001. I was in Cairo during the September 11th terror attacks in the USA that year. Some Egyptians I talked to were happy about these attacks against their American “allies.” Western mass media claimed that almost all Arabs and Muslims lamented the 9/11 attacks. I knew this was not true. I lived in the largest city in the Arabic-speaking world during these events.

In 2002 and 2003, I worked in Israel and the Palestinian territories in a civilian observer mission called Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH). The mission itself is not very useful. However, I continued to learn more about Islamic culture and mentality. From my personal experiences and studies, Islam turned out to be a lot less peaceful than we are being told by the media and mainstream academia.

When I returned to Norway in August 2003, I was convinced that Europe was importing big and dangerous future conflicts because of Muslim immigration. I also took a Master’s degree at the University of Oslo with an emphasis on technology studies and Internet censorship.

I was active on various websites for several years. Eventually, in February 2005, I adopted the pseudonym Fjordman. I have been using that pen name ever since, also after my real identity became known in 2011.

I lived in Oslo between 2003 and 2011. After the mass killings by Anders Behring Breivik on July 22, 2011, I was forced into involuntary exile from Norway for years due to massive media demonization. I genuinely feared for my personal safety at this point. The media presented me nearly as the brains behind a mass murder I had absolutely nothing to do with. I got no aid whatsoever from Norwegian authorities, even though I was forced to leave my home and my job and flee the country. I was homeless for some time afterwards.

The Norwegian police were very hostile during questioning, despite the fact that I volunteered to talk to them and was never charged with doing anything criminal. The police ransacked my home without a search warrant or court order.

ABB had created a very long compendium or manifesto where he quoted many different authors, some of them long dead writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson or Gandhi. Yet because I was the only Norwegian on the top ten-list of those who were quoted in his text, the pressure on me was particularly extreme. This public demonization has partly continued until today, albeit with less intensity than in 2011.

I have read Breivik’s so-called manifesto closely, as well as some of the letters he has sent to the media from prison. My view is that Mr. Breivik is a nutcase who is probably medically insane. The first, very experienced forensic psychiatrists who examined him in 2011 declared that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and is insane. His mother was mentally unstable. His maternal grandmother also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia or something similar to it. This fact was downplayed by the media.

Breivik declared that he is the “commander” of a non-existing terrorist organization. He created a uniform and medals for this imaginary organization. He even wanted to wear this uniform in court, but was denied this possibility.

Yet following massive political and media pressure, Breivik was nevertheless declared sane during the trial in Oslo in 2012. This ruling is highly questionable. It was disputed by quite a few observers. The ruling elites wanted a sane, white terrorist to use as a tool to smear critics of Islamization and mass immigration.

I have been critical of Western mass media for many years. Nevertheless, witnessing lies and media distortion up close and personal after Breivik’s attacks was still quite shocking. The person I actually am didn’t vaguely resemble the person I was portrayed as being by the press. Lies and smears were routinely published while truthful information was suppressed. Western media systematically distort reality and suffer from a profound left-wing bias on a range of issues.

I published texts more frequently in 2005 or 2006 than I do today. Back then, I was still trying to warn against huge problems and conflicts that I could see coming. After some years of trying this approach, it became apparent that this strategy would not work.

Ever since Greco-Roman Antiquity and the Bible, history is replete with examples of individuals who tried to warn against coming dangers but were not listened to. At best, they were ignored or mocked. At worst, they were blamed for creating the very problems they were warning against. Perhaps human nature makes it difficult to warn about potential problems in advance, before most people can see them with their own eyes.

Sadly, it is now too late to warn against some of these dangers. We have large and deadly Islamic terrorist networks operating in multiple Western countries. Many European countries seem to be heading for some sort of ideological collapse and disorder. This sad outcome can probably not be avoided any longer.

Criticizing Islam has become more dangerous during the past 10-15 years. Conferences dedicated to truthfully debating Islam and Muslim immigration now need much more security measures than they did a decade earlier.

Whether or not Islam can be reformed depends upon your definition of “reformation.” If a “reformation” simply means a return to the earliest days of the founder of the religion, this will lead to more Jihad violence inspired by the example of the warlord Muhammad.

It could be argued that such an “Islamic Reformation” has already happened, with the foundation of organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood plus the terror networks al-Qaida and the Islamic State (ISIS). This was not a positive development, and not something we should wish for.

Another interpretation is that an “Islamic Reformation” is taken to mean a new form of Islam that is peaceful, devoid of Jihad violence, without notions of Islamic supremacy and based on secular laws, not sharia laws. It is very unlikely whether such a version of Islam will ever become the primary one.

Moreover, Muslims are adults. They can and should fix their own problems in their own countries. They should not be allowed to export their problems to us and destroy our societies. We cannot continue importing Muslims who murder us in our own cities, and then hope that this will stop by itself in the future. Islam as it exists today is not compatible with our culture and does not belong in Europe.

While I usually vote in elections, I have never been a member of a political party in my adult life. I harbor no personal political ambitions. If I ever enter politics, it will be reluctantly and out of a sense of duty. I am unsure of how well suited I am for politics, though.

In this dangerous age of Islamic terrorism and invasion, Europe also needs generals and military leaders. I am not a military leader. Whatever modest contributions I can make to this cause should primarily be directed towards analyzing what went wrong with the Western world, as well as rediscovering the true richness of European culture after decades of distortion.

I have therefore refocused my writing efforts. I will continue writing, but with a different focus than before. If things work out, I hope to publish several books in the coming years.

If we are heading for come sort of discontinuity or collapse, perhaps it is more fruitful to focus on sowing the seeds of a new European Renaissance after this collapse. We are undoubtedly heading for a rough and unpleasant period. Yet European civilization has experienced rough periods before, and survived.

Fortunately, some younger Europeans seem to have a thirst for a more positive cultural and national identity. In today’s anti-European, Multicultural society, Europeans have been denied their own cultural heritage.

Author of the two books above and a useful source of information, news and facts & figures on Islam in Britain.

Do have a look at it right here.

Thanks to Martin Hanson.

Dr Bill Warner presents this 3 minute video on this fallacy and introduces what looks to be an excellent book on the matter.

TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO:~
Perhaps you have heard of the Golden Age in Spain? The Andalusian paradise? A time when from 711 to 1492, Islam ruled Spain. We’re told it was a wonderful place where Jews, Christians, Muslims, all lived together in harmony. It was a wonderful, multicultural community.

Well, this is not quite true. And there’s a book been written about this subject. By the way, one of the ways to see the importance of Spain being free of Islam, is to think of a Europe that was dominated by Islam. No music, no art and sculpture, no art and painting. So this is just some of the small effects if the multicultural paradise in Spain had ruled Europe.

There’s been a wonderful book written about this called, “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,” by Dario Fernandez-Morera. Now, the book is laid out in a very interesting way. Every chapter starts off with the argument for Islam and then it goes on to use facts to refute this argument. Now, the Islamic invasion is portrayed as a wonderful time when cultured elite Muslims came into a hillbilly part of Europe and took it over and brought great culture. But this is simply not the case. Spain was western Rome. They had poets, emperors. They had fine municipal buildings, irrigation. They had wonderful art. It was a very civilized place. It was the Arabs who were the barbarians.

Now another argument has been made that this wonderful golden age in Spain helped preserve Greek knowledge. But that also is false. Those were the Byzantine Empire. The eastern or Greek end of the Roman Empire. What Islam contributed to Europe was to dominate the trade on the Mediterranean with piracy and to impoverish Europe and make it part of the Dark Ages. The rule of Spain was plunder and domination and harsh Sharia Law. Christians and Jews who spoke against Islam could be murdered. Also, in the Muslim community, there was a violent suppression of heresies and apostasy.

This was not a nice place to live. Here’s how ironic it is, there are some writers who even say that the sex slaves in Andalusian harems were free women. I don’t know how they put that together but it is an argument that’s advanced. There were atrocities committed both publicly and private by a Muslim rulers. As an example, one Muslim ruler, every spring and every fall, went out on jihad raids. If Spain was ruled by the Sharia, which means that Jews and Christians were dhimmis and subjugated and this was the rule of Spain in its Golden Age. It was not pluralist, it was not secular, and it offers no model whatsoever of what we might have in civil society as a wonderful way to run our lives.

Why this paradise? Well, it turns out that there were those who hated the Spanish Catholics. Such as Gibbons, who wrote, “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and Voltaire. And so, they built Islam up to tear the Catholics down.

So, if you would like to know more about the truth of a piece of western civilization, read this book on the Andalusian paradise. I highly recommend it. I guarantee that it will stretch your head. Thank you.

The first is an intelligent young Iranian woman (IQ of 138) who was beaten & abused by her husband. A man she was compelled to marry when she was 14. She was forced to marry this man by her father - a Sheikh, surely someone expected to be more than familiar with correct doctrine - according to Sharia law.

In the face of the progress of M103 in Canada she warns of the stifling of free speech and of freedoms in general. In this 13 minute video she strongly encourages people to simply read the Qur'an, understand that some people take it very seriously and stand up for all the little girls languishing under its intolerable burden.

And on M103 itself, do read this article on the matter from Jihad Watch. Similar moves are being mooted all over the West these days and I expect they will come here quite soon - perhaps very soon depending on the outcome of this weekend's election. 

>>>>>>>>>>>
​Canada: Parliament begins study on how to combat “Islamophobia”

Introductory note by Robert Spencer

          This study will likely result in more restrictions upon the freedom of speech in Canada, for note that the “anti-Islamophobia” motion M-103 states “that extremist individuals do not represent the religion of Islam,” a claim that is often made in order to foreclose upon any honest analysis of the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism. This whole initiative is based upon the false assumption that “Islamophobia,” that is, suspicion of Islam or Muslims, is caused by “bigots” indulging in “hate speech,” when actually it is caused by jihad terrorists. If Iqra Khaled and her colleagues really want to combat “Islamophobia,” they will strengthen counterterror measures, and begin study of how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism. But they’re not going to do that; they’re purposefully looking at this problem from the wrong way around, revealing that the real objective is to crush dissent from the government’s line on Islam and terrorism.


“Iqra Khalid urges fellow MPs to take unified approach in Islamophobia study,” by Stephanie Levitz, Canadian Press, September 18, 2017:

The MP who touched off a fiery debate across Canada with a motion on Islamophobia, is urging parliamentarians to take a unified approach to find ways to combat it.

Liberal MP Iqra Khalid says she hopes the House of Commons heritage committee finds the right experts and data to complete its study on combating systematic racial and religious discrimination against all minorities.

The study was mandated as part of the motion Khalid introduced in the House of Commons last December and which passed last spring.

The debate around the motion set off showdowns between right and left wing groups on Parliament Hill and beyond, and saw the Liberal MP who sponsored it receive thousands of hate-laced messages and death threats. But she isn’t discussing those in her testimony before the committee, saying she’d rather the body focus on moving forward.

Liberal MP Hedy Fry, who chairs the committee, said all parties worked together to draw up the witness list and are intent on learning and listening. [Graeme: Are they? Are they indeed? Well, we'll see about that won't we? Having heard this sort of language used in my own denominational circles for decades I am sorely tempting to conclude that they will listen very carefully only to some preferred voices and not to others. I pray that I am wrong.]

“I don’t think there’s going to be any kind of nastiness,” she said before the meeting.

Dynamic shifting
The issue is among the first MPs are dealing with after a summer that included a violent protest in Virginia between white nationalists and their opponents that left one dead and injured nearly 20 others, as well as a series of protests and counter protests between similar groups in Canada.

People have long been concerned with the global climate for minorities, Fry said, but things are shifting. 

“All that we see with the things that have happened in the United States and Canada and around the world is that it’s becoming a little more acute,” Fry said. “That tells us that doing the study is important.” [Graeme: let's all hope the study doesn't merely focus on one particular minority shall we?]

The motion, known as M-103, stems from a petition circulating in the summer of 2016 calling on the House of Commons to join signatories in recognizing “that extremist individuals do not represent the religion of Islam, and in condemning all forms of Islamophobia.” [Graeme: "they do not represent the religion of Islam" even though they expressly state that they do? So we are all just going to assume that they do not are we? Is this point going to be clarified before any action is taken? Very funny. It seems then that to criticise Islam itself as the root of the "extremism" will henceforth be considered an act of hate should the Bill's sponsor prevail. Oh brother.]

More than 70,000 people had signed when NDP Leader Tom Mulcair introduced his own motion for the House of Commons to back them. His first attempt failed. A handful of Tories objected. But a few weeks later, his motion was passed.

On Dec. 1, Liberal MP Iqra Khalid gave notice of her motion. Hers called on MPs to recognize something had to be done to “quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear,” and to that end, the House ought to condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination. [Graeme: Yep, the Canadian public increasingly hates & fears terrorism, that doesn't make them irrational racists. It makes them Grown-ups.]

Then, it called on the heritage committee to come up with a “whole of government” approach to reducing or eliminating it in Canada, as well as to collect more information on hate crime reports. 

The petition itself arrived in the House of Commons a couple of days later. The Liberal government’s response came Jan. 30, saying that they condemned Islamophobia. [Graeme: Again - please give me a definition of this fallacious term. How can we make good law based on such a nebulous & emotive construct?] Their response had likely already been drafted when, hours earlier, a gunman stormed into a mosque in Quebec City, killing six people and injuring over a dozen others. 

The motion suddenly took on new political life. Two weeks later, Heritage Minister Melanie Joly announced it had the full support of the Liberal government.

Unclear meaning 
Even in their own counter motion, the Conservatives acknowledged the incident.

But their efforts to further broaden the motion by removing the word Islamophobia failed, with the Liberals accusing them of watering down Khalid’s intent and the Tories arguing one specific faith ought not to be singled out. 

The term “Islamophobia” has become the lightning rod….

I have mentioned Brother Rachid here a couple of times: The son of an Imam becomes a Christian (an extremely popular post that one) and this one where he compares the real persecution of ex-Muslims under Islam today with the spurious "Islamophobic" charges heard in the West.

This fellow is not anyone's idea of a hotheaded bigot, but is a measured, generous individual who deals with many of the falsehoods of Islam & Muhammad. Nevertheless he has been systematically censored by major social media outlets like Facebook & You Tube.

It's of interest to see why this is so.
It's also of interest to ponder what this may shortly mean for the rest of us.

>>>>>>>>>
My dilemma with Facebook and YouTube in Arabic
Sep 19, Brother Rachid

As a former Muslim hosting a live TV show for over a decade, I’ve come to rely on social media platforms to connect with my audience now more than ever before. My show, “DaringQuestions,” is watched via satellite TV (through Alhayat TV) by millions of viewers around the world (mainly in Arabic speaking communities). My show is popular among Muslims because it is highly controversial. I raise many bold questions about the Islamic faith and I expose the danger of some Islamic doctrine. I also present testimonies of ex-Muslims who have left Islam and allow them to share their experiences in order to empower others and encourage them to do the same. To engage further with audiences and the wider, global, Muslim community, these questions and testimonies are also posted on my two main websites, “BrotherRachid.com” and “IslamExplained.com,” as well as on social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.  However, Muslim governments impose restrictions and heavy censorship and my websites are often inaccessible in many Muslim countries due to material I present which uses critical thinking to address Islamic doctrines. As a result, social media platforms are an increasingly crucial way for me to reach out to the Muslim world and surpass the censorship that Muslim countries place on the material I present.

However, I face a dilemma that needs to be addressed and exposed to the whole world. The Arabic content for giant social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube is overseen predominantly by Muslims (since the majority of those who speak Arabic are Muslims). These companies have offices in the United Arab Emirates and give their Arabic speaking staff the authority to delete and block any material that does not fit their guidelines. However, this authority is abused when any channel or page that criticizes Islam or presents opposing views to Islam is blocked, deleted or removed. For example, my Facebook page (which has over 1.5 million likes) was once deleted, while the Facebook page of Alhayat – the channel that broadcasts my show – was also deleted without any explanation, causing the channel to lose all the money they had spent on advertising, among other damages. My YouTube channel (which has also garnered millions of views) was once removed for ‘breaking guidelines.’ Thank God, I appealed the removal and explained the details to those in charge in the US and have since been able to gain my channel back.

My Facebook posts are removed on many occasions and I am frequently blocked from posting because a post allegedly “does not follow Facebook guidelines!” No further explanation is provided. Sometimes, even my own picture is reported and removed because it violates copyrights! Recently, I posted a cover of my book in French; the post was removed for breaking “Facebook guidelines” and yet nobody could explain to me how a book that is published legally and sold on Amazon can break Facebook guidelines. 

I think Facebook and Twitter need to revise how Arabic content is handled – there is no balance here. Muslims criticize Christianity right and left and their Facebook pages and YouTube channels face no problems whatsoever, yet Christians, Atheists, and ex-Muslims as myself face huge challenges in criticizing Islam on social media in Arabic. Our pages are unfairly deleted, our posts are wrongfully removed, and our accounts are blocked and removed. We had thought that social media was about freedom of speech, but unfortunately it appears that Muslim censorship is prevalent even on social media. We are unable to express ourselves even on platforms like Facebook and YouTube.

N.B: My show and my posts never promote hatred or violence against Muslims; I always emphasize critiquing Islam as a doctrine but on loving Muslims as all other human beings.

A classic study in the life & teachings of the founders of two religions and the behaviour they inspired in their followers.

​Compare and contrast.

>>>>>>>>>>>
We can learn a lot about what's most important to a person by pondering his last words. In this 10 minute video, David Wood discusses the parting thoughts of Jesus, Muhammad, and Nabeel Qureshi.

Those words, "it's not about you," were the words God spoke to Nabeel when he saw how much his becoming a Christian had hurt his parents. He cried out to God concerning this very great grief. He had hurt his family very badly - his mother in particular - when he turned away from Islam to Christ.

Nabeel was the son of Ahmadiyya Muslim parents. Blessed as the child of an honourable father, who provided well for his family in every way, and of a loving mother. The kind of parents we all wish we could have but ever fewer of us seem to have these days. It was from them he inherited his kind & gentle nature and - very importantly - his integrity. His parents can rest knowing absolutely that no matter what others may think of his decision to leave Islam and follow Christ he did not make the decision lightly, nor did he make it selfishly.

He really struggled with God about how he had hurt his family and also about losing the close community he valued so much as a Muslim. This is why God had to speak to him by saying "It's not about you Nabeel". So Nabeel submitted. Nabeel, in his all too short life, struggled with God and overcame. Just as the Patriarch Jacob did. His own desires fell to the ground as he surrendered to the God of Salvation - the God who changes history. The God who changed & will change so many untold numbers of people through the life that Nabeel struggled to surrender to Him.

Nabeel shone out as a brave, sincere & honourable follower of Jesus. He lived a life of integrity, of wisdom and a life of love - which according to the book of Proverbs is the wisest life of all. I pray that his parents will be proud of their fine son. He contributed much to the world in his brief time here and left an example for all of us to imitate. Those of us who seek to follow Christ might consider & take to heart the Lord's words to Nabeel: it's not about you. It's about Jesus. 

I pray too that his dear wife & child will know the comfort of God, perhaps through dreams and through his tender care in other ways. Through this time our Lord will be especially close to them. 

Now the Lord has taken our much beloved brother Nabeel home to his reward and Nabeel has heard the words we all long to hear:~

"Well done good & faithful servant.
Enter into the joy of your Lord."


>>>>>>>>>>
This article from CBN.

​Ex-Muslim turned Christian apologist, Nabeel Qureshi, passed away Saturday after a year-long battle with stomach cancer.

The 34-year-old left behind a wife and two-year-old daughter.

The very man who led Nabeel to Christ, David Wood, announced his death on Twitter saying, "My beloved bother Nabeel, rest in peace and joy with the Risen Lord Jesus Christ."

Qureshi was born and raised in the United States to a devout Pakistani Muslim family. 

"My earliest memories are of my mother everyday sitting me next to her and having me put on my skull cap and showing me how to recite the Qur'an letter by letter. I finished the Qur'an when I was five-years-old," Qureshi explains in a video about his journey to Christ.

He also learned how to defend the doctrines of his Muslim faith and would often challenge non-believers to debates during his time in school.

Qureshi finally met his match when he attended Old Dominion University in Virginia and met David Wood. He challenged Wood's Christian faith when he saw him reading a Bible by himself. Thus began a two and a half year period where the pair challenged each other on the doctrines of their faiths.

Eventually, Qureshi realized his arguments for Islam crumbled under the evidence for Christ's death, burial, resurrection, and divinity. 

"At the end of my research, the arguments for and against Islam still hung in the balance, but one thing was abundantly clear: they were far from approaching the strength of the case for Christianity," Qureshi said.

But it wasn't just the physical evidence that convinced Qureshi. He had three prophetic dreams about Christ that eventually won him over. 

Qureshi accepted Christ as his savior and faced the difficult task of telling his parents.

'When my parents did find out it was probably the most painful day of my life," Qureshi said. "To have Christ in my life makes every loss worth it.

He went on to study Christian Apologetics at Biola University, while also getting his medical degree from Eastern Virginia Medical School. He later completed a degree in religion at Duke University and entered a phD program in New Testament studies at Oxford University. Qureshi also became an itinerant speaker with Ravi Zacharias' International Ministry.

Qureshi published three books, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity, and Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, and No God but One: Allah of Jesus? A Former Muslim Investigates the evidence for Islam and Christianity.

Qureshi made the official announcement of his cancer diagnosis August 2016.

"This is an announcement that I never expected to make, but God in his infinite and sovereign wisdom has chosen me for this refining, and I pray he will be glorified through my body and my spirit. My family and I have received the news that I had advanced stomach cancer and the prognosis is quite grim," he said in a Facebook post.

Qureshi continued to share the gospel and updates on his treatment through videos on his social media page.
In the last video before his death, he said he hoped he leaves behind a legacy of love.

"As you consider my ministry, I hope it leaves a message of love, of peace, of truth, of caring for one another," he says. "Our God is a God of love.

Hmm....

From the Middle East Forum.


>>>>>>>>>>>
What's on the Mind of a Muslim 'Refugee'?
by Burak Bekdil

The autumn of 2015 was unusual in almost every way on the north Aegean Greek island of Lesbos from which I am writing. There were tens of thousands of illegal migrants on the island, the native population of which was scarcely 100,000. New refugees arrived every day by the thousands.[1]

One evening, the blue-grey sky grumbled shortly after sunset. The thick clouds blackened and rain poured down over the city with a roar. As I ran across the slippery pavement into a friend's bar, I heard a group of five poor souls speaking Persian with a Turkic accent and running amok, seeking shelter under the eaves of a building.

A quarter of an hour later I found them in front of my friend's bar, totally soaked. I went out and asked them if they spoke English; they shook their heads. I asked them in Turkish if they spoke Turkish. With glittering eyes, three of them cheerfully said, "Evet!" ["Yes" in Turkish]. I told them they could come into the bar if they liked. They hesitated but politely declined. I asked if they needed food, water, or cigarettes.

The one with the most fluent Turkish stepped forward. He drew a pack of banknotes from his pocket and said, "If you really want to help, find us a hotel. The best, if possible. We have cash. Money is no problem. Find us a hotel and we'll pay you a commission." He explained that all the "damn" hotels on the island were full [of refugees] and they needed rooms.

I apologized and disappeared into the bar.

Nearly two years later, on a beautiful and cool summer evening, I met A. at a bar on the same island. A., a Syrian refugee, often spends his evenings bar-hopping with his Western friends. Those friends are mostly romantic European social workers who, I observed several times, sport t-shirts, bags, and laptops festooned with the Palestinian flag. They are on the island to help the unfortunate Muslim refugees who are fleeing war in their native countries.

"I'll tell you strictly Muslim-to-Muslim," A. said in good English after having poured down a few shots of whiskey. "These (European social workers) are funny guys. And they're not just funny. They're also silly. I don't know why on earth they are in love with a Muslim cause that even some of us Muslims despise."

Last year, three Afghans stopped in front of my house on the same island and asked for drinking water. I gave them three bottles and asked if they needed anything else. Coffee? They accepted and sat down in the garden chairs.

Over coffee, they said they were glad to be hosted "not by an infidel on this infidel island" but by a Muslim. The young Afghan who was dressed like a dancer from a cheap hip-hop clip on MTV said, "One day we good Muslims will conquer their infidel lands." I asked why he was receiving "infidel" money for living. "It's just halal," he answered. "They ['infidels'] are too easy to fool."

M., another fluently English-speaking Syrian, gave me a long lecture on the wonderful governance of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. "Turkey is the best country in the world!" M. said. " Erdoğan is the leader of the ummah." I asked why he had risked his life to cross illegally from the "best country in the world" to the "poor, infidel lands." "I want to go to Europe to increase the Muslim population there," he said. "I want to make a Muslim family there. I want to have plenty of children." I reminded him that Greece, too, is a European country. No it's not, he answered.

Almost all the illegal migrants on that and other Greek islands want to get to Germany, where they have heard from friends and relatives that they will be the best paid for being "poor" refugees. The cliché "the-poor-souls-are-fleeing-war-in-their-native-country" is becoming less and less convincing every day. True, most Syrians fled to Turkey after the start of civil war in their country. But why did they then risk their lives to squeeze into 12-man rubber boats with 40-50 other people, including children and the elderly? Because of war in Turkey?

No. Despite political instability and insecurity for all, there is technically no war in Turkey. It is a Muslim country whose mostly Muslim migrants want to leave it as soon as possible for non-Muslim Europe.

They reach the shores of the Greek islands, which are so beautiful that people from across the world fly there for their holidays. But the islands are not good enough. They want to go to Athens. Why? Because there is war on the Greek islands? No. It's because Athens is the start of the exit route to the Balkans.

Apply the same logic to Serbia, Hungary, and Austria. Like Greece, none of those countries will be good enough for the refugees. Why not? Because there is war in Serbia or Hungary or Austria? Or because "my cousin tells me Germans pay the best?"

Turkey's leaders often threaten Europe that they will "open the gates" and flood Europe with millions of refugees. They should ask themselves instead why those Muslim refugees are so eager to leave the "new Turkish empire" if given the chance. Why would they choose not to live a comfortable life in a powerful and peaceful Muslim country and instead flock to the "infidel" west?

Erdoğan blames the West for the tragedy. He has criticized the West for having taken only 250,000 Syrian refugees. In 2016, then Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the United Nations Security Council's five permanent members (the US, Russia, Britain, France, and China), should pay the price, not Syria's [Muslim] neighbors.

It is ironic that millions of Muslims are trying, through dangerous means, to reach the borders of a civilization they have historically blamed for all the world's evils, including those of their own countries. The "romantic" West does not question why millions of West-hating Muslims are heading in their direction. Or is it "Islamophobic" to point out that there is no war in Greece, Serbia, Hungary, or Austria?

Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based political analyst and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

This 8 minute video is 9 years old yet has less than 8,000 views. This about sums up the state of affairs we are facing.

I have 3 of this wonderful lady's books: The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians under Islam; The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Seventh-Twentieth Century; and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. These books cover the historical reality of Islam's conquest and treatment of non-Muslims under its suzerainty. The last book Eurabia looks into the alliance between the European & Arab Muslim powers to transform that part of the world.

Her personal story is one of a privileged Jew in Egypt who was forced to flee with nothing in the face of resurgent Islam. The lady's husband, now the late David Littman, states in this clip that "the Islamisation of Europe is beyond repair". He had a clear understanding of events even in 2008. The concept of Dhimmitude which arises from Islamic theology and history explains what is now being seen in the West - especially, but not uniquely, in Western Europe.

Mr Littman notes a truth that is obvious once pointed out to us: Muslims may say horrible things based on their religious texts, but non-Muslims may not point out that they have said these things, as that would be "blasphemous". Or perhaps, these days - as our stupidity deepens - "racist". The author explains the transformation of Europe as she saw it 9 years ago: "No-one understands this challenge - the challenge of the survival of our values".

Watch this brief clip and judge if you think she was right.

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Scholar on Islam Bat Yeor, and diplomat at the UN David Littman, explain Islamic conquest and the Dhimmi status placed upon peoples who have fallen to Jihad.

So, again: if even these top educators in the home of Islam misunderstand the peaceful religion of the prophet Muhammad is it any wonder that so many other Muslims also seem to? Maybe, just maybe, they aren't misunderstanding it at all.

From Jihad Watch.

Saudi schools teach Muhammad’s statements that Jews and Christians are accursed and Muslims must kill Jews 
​
“‘Whoever makes the graves of the prophets and righteous ones into mosques is evil,’ is the title of a seventh-grade textbook.”

This idea isn’t some Wahhabi invention. It comes from statements attributed to Muhammad in the Hadith:
“It was narrated from Aishah that the Prophet said: ‘May Allah curse people who take the graves of their prophets as Masjids [mosques].'” (an-Nasa’i 21.230.2046)

“Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah’s Messenger said, ‘May Allah’s curse be on the Jews for they built the places of worship at the graves of their Prophets.'” (Bukhari 8.86.437)

Nor is it a Wahhabi idea that “the hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.” That, also, comes from Muhammad:

“Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger as saying: ‘The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.'” (Muslim 6985)




“Saudi children are taught in school to hate ‘unbelievers,'” translated from “Saudische Kinder werden in der Schule zum Hass auf «Ungläubige» erzogen,” by Christian Weisflog, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 13, 2017 (thanks to Othmar):

Saudi Arabia likes to praise itself as a leader in the fight against Islamic terror. In the school books, however, the children are still being taught who is “disbelieving” and “perverse” and therefore has to be fought.

Since the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabia, with its Wahhabi state religion, is regarded as a sponsor of Islamic terror. 15 of the 19 aircraft hijackers were Saudi citizens. The United States then asked Riyadh to reform its religious education in the schools. But as a new study by the human rights organization Human Rights Watch shows, hatred of the “unbelievers” is still preached in schoolbooks in Saudi Arabia.
Hate against other Muslims, Christians and Jews

The al-Tawhid (monotheism) is a 45-book teaching tool that not only teaches that Christians and Jews as second-class people, but also condemns Islamic schools of thought such as the Shiite or the mystical current of Sufism. For example, the construction of shrines or mosques over the graves of religious personalities is condemned, a practice which can be observed among Shiites and Sufis. From the Wahhabi point of view, such veneration is a reprehensible act of polytheism. Those who do this have fallen away from Islam and are eternally condemned, teach the Wahhabi textbooks. “Whoever makes the graves of the prophets and righteous ones into mosques is evil,” is the title of a seventh-grade textbook. In another place, Sufism is called a “perverse path.”
In the eyes of the Saudi Ministry of Education, Christians and Jews are regarded as “the original unbelievers.”

Every Muslim, who doubts about his belief is himself a disbeliever, is the teaching material for the fifth class. The books also warn the Muslims not to show themselves loyal to “unbelievers.” The most important thing in this context is the statement on the Last Day: “The hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.”…

Using Canada as his example Dr Gad Saad provides this illuminating commentary on the loss of free speech that we in the West are undergoing.

He cites some disturbing and incendiary Islamophobes that he believes the authorities should hurry to prosecute and silence (not really - you'll see what I mean). He voices concern about the stifling of non-conformist thought and the chilling affect of new laws and those loud voices demanding they never be offended. He wonders out loud how long a society that restricts its own freedoms for the sake of peace can last. 

Are discouraging, shaming & prosecuting the only ways open to us to try to ensure peace in our quickly changing society? How about instead of less speech we have more speech?

Indeed one of my favourite atheists Dr Saad is, as usual, astute, affable and correct. 

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The Slow Eradication of Freedom of Speech in Canada.
This was the taped lecture that I delivered remotely (i.e., it was played for the audience) in Toronto on September 10, 2017. Twenty minutes.

A few months ago I chatted with a Christian Burmese PhD who was visiting our area as part of an aid organisation. I asked him about the problems with the Rohingya Muslims in Burma that are so often in the news. Our exchange was very brief as we were interrupted, but what he said to me was "there is no such thing as a Rohingya people".

I didn't understand this response & was unable to get an explanation from him, but now, reading the following article I can see what he meant.

There is no Rohingya people because the people we hear so much about who call themselves by that name are actually Bengali Muslims who have for many decades presented a clear and often violent threat to the Burmese government due to their desire to carve out the western Burmese State of Rakhine for themselves (we can see the same behaviour when we look at the Muslims in Mindanao in the southern Philippines, or the Muslims in Jammu & Kashmir, or the Muslims in Chechnya, or the Muslims in an increasing number of major European cities today). The Bengali Muslims only really arrived in significant numbers around WWII. H. Numan at Gates of Vienna notes:~

    From 1948 onwards lots of Rohingya, originating in Bangladesh on the other side of the border, crossed over and settled in Rakhine. They rather liked it there, and decided they wanted it. With full indirect support of East Pakistan [Bangladesh] they tried to take over the state. That almost became a real war, which they lost. The East Pakistani/Bangladeshis were permitted to stay, but they never got Burmese citizenship. Something they bitterly resent.

A couple of days ago one of the retired gentlemen with whom I regularly ride my motorcycle mentioned that the Burmese government had burned villages & killed families in pursuit of this Muslim minority. At the time, because I don't follow popular media, I hadn't heard of this. But again this article explains that "news".

There has been much "fake news" circulated on this & similar matters. Fake news designed to create international sympathy with the Muslims and to put pressure on the Burmese government on their behalf. This is an old story - just go back the last few decades in Israel's history by googling the term "Pallywood" and watch the videos and even the "news items" spread by gullible Western media like the venerable BBC. It's embarrassing.

This is a long thorough article most of which I place below the fold, but I do encourage you to read it. Has Aung San Suu Kyi suddenly lost her humanity as al Jazeera & co. allege? Or is there more to this than we are told? I do love that old saying: "You can tell a lot about someone by examining the character of their enemies".

Read on.


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Reporting on the Rohingya: “The Tip of a Huge Iceberg of Misinformation”
by Hugh Fitzgerald via Jihad Watch.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar, is now all over the news, being taken to task for “not speaking out” against the mistreatment of the Rohingya, the Muslim minority in Myanmar, almost all of whom live in the western Rakhine State of Myanmar. 365,000 people have signed a petition demanding she be stripped of her Nobel Prize for not speaking out and denouncing the Buddhists of Myanmar; in Pakistan, a country renowned for its humane treatment of minorities, her photograph has been publicly burned; Al Jazeera has denounced her, and so has that champion of justice Tariq Ramadan.

In the last month, the world media reports, 250,000 Rohingya have now fled the latest cycle of violence, that began with Rohingya attacks on the military in mid-August, for Bangladesh. In fact, Aung San Suu Kyi has spoken out, but not in the way that many expected. They wanted her to categorically denounce the Burmese military and to depict the Rohingya as entirely innocent victims of Buddhist attacks; this she has refused to do. She believes the story of the Rohingyas in Myanmar is more complicated than the outside world believes. She has noted that “fake news” about atrocities in Myanmar have been relied on by much of the world’s media. More than a few of the stories about the Rohingya have indeed been accompanied by photos purportedly showing the violence against them, but which, in fact, have turned out to be photos of other atrocities experienced by other peoples, having nothing to do with Myanmar. Even the BBC’s south-east Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head, concedes that “much of it [the photos, and the coverage]  is wrong.” A closer look reveals that many of the pictures supposedly from Myanmar have come from other crises around the world, with one of those tweeted by Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek even dating back to the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Jonathan Head discusses at the BBC website four of the most widely-circulated photographs, ostensibly showing Rohingya victims of current Buddhist violence, that are examples of “fake news.” The first photograph, showing a number of bloated corpses, “does appear on several websites dated last year. This suggests the image is not from the recent violence in Rakhine state.’’ “Suggests” is British understatement for “clearly shows.”

The BBC has ascertained that the second photograph, of a woman mourning a dead man tied to a tree, was taken in Aceh, Indonesia, in June 2003, by a photographer working for Reuters.

The third photograph, of two infants crying over the body of their mother, is from Rwanda in July 1994. It was taken by Albert Facelly for Sipa, and was one of series of photos that won a World Press Award.

It has also been difficult to track down the fourth image, of people immersed in a canal, but it can be found on a website appealing for funds to help victims of recent flooding in Nepal.

In other words, not one of the four photographs widely distributed as examples of Rohingya suffering has anything to do with the Rohingyas. This is what the BBC’s south-east Asia correspondent has confirmed. Surely that ought to be made widely known, and just as surely, it won’t.

This “fake news” is, according to Aung San Suu Kyi, “simply the tip of a huge iceberg of misinformation calculated to create a lot of problems between different communities and with the aim of promoting the interest of the terrorists.” 

Let’s refresh our memories of what has been going on in Myanmar this last month. All the news reports coming from Myanmar (Burma) tell the same story: tens of thousands of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, have been fleeing into Bangladesh, to avoid the sudden upsurge in violence from both Burmese military and civilians. The Rohingya are presented as the innocent and long-suffering victims of “racist” Burmese Buddhists (Islam being, for propaganda purposes, a “race”). Only a handful of the reports mention, and only briefly, as if in passing, that the current violence began when, in mid-August, Rohingya fighters attacked 30 different police stations and an army base, as part of their campaign to stake their claim to Rakhine State, in western Myanmar, and showing themselves able “to strike terror in the hearts” of the Infidels to get it. The attacks left more than 70 dead, Muslims and Buddhists.

The Rohingyas unleashed still other attacks, and the Burmese army then retaliated, and the Rohingya continued to strike back during the last two weeks in August, and then there was more retaliation from the Buddhists. Many Rohingya have fled the retaliatory violence — a violence which they began — for Bangladesh, but it is their flight, and that retaliation by the Buddhists, which is getting almost all of the attention in the Western press, complete with photographs of victims of other conflicts who are presented as Rohingya (the “fake news” of which Aung San Suu Kyi complained), rather than what prompted it.

Seldom mentioned is that the August attack by the Rohingyas was preceded by a similar attack, last October, by the Rohingyas on the Burmese (Buddhist) police, and again, it was not their initial attack, but almost exclusively the retaliation by the Buddhist army, that was the focus of reports in the foreign press last fall. Reports of Rohingya villages being burnt down are reported uncritically. The Myanmar authorities have claimed that Islamic militants, having infiltrated Rohingya communities, have themselves been setting fire to houses in Muslim villages in order to get the world even more on their side. Instead of assuming these claims must be false, why not investigate them?

According to most of the world’s media, an unfathomable tragedy has been unfolding in Myanmar. The Buddhist majority, inflamed by rabble-rousing anti-Muslim monks, has been persecuting, killing, even massacring, members of the entirely inoffensive Muslim Rohingya minority in the western state of Rakhine (formerly, and in some places still, known as “Arakan”). An example of this hysterical coverage can be found in a report from, unsurprisingly, the pro-Muslim Guardian. It describes a sinister senior monk, Shin Parathu, who is repeatedly accused by the Guardian of “stoking religious hatred across Burma. His paranoia and fear, muddled with racist stereotypes and unfounded rumors, have helped to incite violence and spread disinformation.” One might note that no examples of these “racist stereotypes” are ever given. Could it be that the “stereotype” that this monk is accused of spreading has to do with depicting Muslims as intent on Jihad in the path of Allah, unwilling and even unable to integrate into a Buddhist society, and with a history, going back to 1942, of violence against Buddhists, that is the Rakhine people of Arakan State, and even attempting to join part of  East Pakistan, and through the late 1950s, and in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, conducting a low-level insurrection against the Burmese state — all of which is true?

And while the Guardian insists that the Rohingya are never the instigators of violence, the policemen they attacked without warning and nine of whom they murdered last October, and the people they killed in 31 coordinated attacks in mid-August, and those Buddhists they have killed since, might beg to differ. The Western press remains resolutely unsympathetic to the Buddhists of Myanmar, unwilling to find out why those Buddhists might have reason to be alarmed.

The Western media have uncritically repeated the Rohingya claim that they have inhabited Arakan for many centuries or “since time immemorial.” Others beg to differ, among them a well-known historian, and author of many works on Burma, Professor Andrew Selth of Griffith University in Australia. He has stated categorically that the name “Rohingya” was taken by “Bengali Muslims who live in Arakan State…most Rohingyas arrived with the British colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries.” It is true that a handful of Bengali Muslims drifted down to Burma over the centuries, but Professor Selth makes the important point — unknown to Western reporters — that the vast majority of Rohingyas are recent arrivals, their great migration made possible by the fact that Burma was administratively part of British India until 1937, which meant there was no formal border to cross.

Pinched straight from Gates of Vienna (which always has many interesting articles from Europe), this piece shows how difficult it is to make any sort of public criticism of the policy surrounding the migrant influx to Western Europe. It is an instructive read. One of the disturbing features is that anyone who dares criticise the zeitgeist is immediately labelled as some sort of an extremist - "Nazi" being a typical label. Another is the death threats such people receive - usually from those who consider themselves tolerant.

When I read Col. Ion Pacepa's brilliant book Disinformation a couple of years ago I found that whenever the Communists wished to discredit any ideological opponents in Eastern Europe after WWII they labelled them as Nazis or Nazi sympathisers. They did this even to Catholic & Orthodox Bishops who had risked their lives opposing the Nazis and had even taken in Jews to protect them. The label was served to turn public opinion against these good men as it carried the same opprobrium as it does these days.

As the strategy had a proven track record why not keep using it? It still works like a charm - immediately putting those so named on the defensive. 

They also have this interesting article which covers the vandalism to the statue of King Jan (John) III Sobieski of Poland who led the army that defeated the Muslim Ottoman jihad at the siege of Vienna in 1683. Given the large number of Muslims accepted into Austria in recent times I don't think it overly speculative to suggest that we can easily guess who the culprits were. I suspect it will only be a matter of time before the statue is taken down for the sake of "community cohesion".

Here is their post of the media figure who dared voice concerns over immigration.


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A professional hayseed in Austria has gotten himself into trouble by saying politically incorrect things about immigrants on social media. Our German translator JLH has translated an article and interview with the “EU Farmer”, along with an introduction.

The Farmer Wasn’t Cowed
by JLH

The interview below was occasioned by the sudden emergence of a local celebrity as a white-hot focus of the “refugee” debate. The article in Kronen-Zeitung appended a short biography and the text of his remarks that caused the uproar. They appear here first, for the convenience of GoV readers. 

Manfred Tisal: Born in Vilach in the Austrian state of Carinthia on September 23, 1953. Apprenticed as a chef, later editor and spokesman for the private broadcaster “Tele Uno.” Appearing since 1990 as the “EU Farmer” at the Vilach Fasching festivities. He offers “COWmentaries” on Austrian Broadcasting radio in Carinthia. Publishes books and CDs. He is the father of four and married to his second wife, Daniela, a former journalist. 

Manfred Tisal’s “COWmentary” of a week ago: 

For everyone who criticized my post of yesterday — the COWmentary sez it like it is: 

      Day after day, from my balcony, I see asylum-seekers with Adidas shoes, Nike T-shirts and Diesel jeans, with smartphones and shiny new bikes sauntering by, talking. Envy gnaws at me. Not because I don’t have that, but because they have it for free. And with a guaranteed minimum income they haven’t earned. Maybe I could afford all that, if I didn’t have to pay rent. If I didn’t have to enter a contract to buy my smartphone, if I didn’t have to pay for personal hygiene products, the TV fee, food, the car needed for my job, and didn’t have to meet diverse expenses for wife and child. And of course all taxes and fees. When I hear about refugees, I think of my father walking all the way back to Vilach from imprisonment in Russia. He and his parents had to re-build their bombed-out house. In the post-war era, he had to feed his family on a railroad salary of 740 schillings. And there were others even worse off. He fought for his land and, in the years leading to his death, was rewarded by fine phrases. But he built it up with his small contribution.

           And that has allowed us to anticipate a social guarantee. A guarantee that is now being taken from us. By the onslaught of politically legitimized social spongers. I don’t think they chose their target without thought. After all, they are connected to the world by internet and cell phone. They are not so stupid that they would not choose the best for themselves. And I am telling everyone not to stick me into the “populist rightist corner” — which has become pretty much standard practice for us in this country. This is about justice and should not be about partisanship or religion.

And here is the interview:

Krone Interview With Manfred Tisal
With Connie Bischofsberger
September 2, 2017

His commentary on “asylum-seekers in Nike T-shirts, Diesel jeans and smartphones” has drawn the “EU Farmer” of Vilach Fasching into the public stew. Manfred Tisal (63) speaks with Connie Bischofsberger about the liberty of fools, applause from the right and anonymous death threats.

The waitresses in Staubers Städtschenke are serving the midway meal. The mayor of Vilach is there. When Manfred Tisal and his wife, Daniela, enter the pub, all present look up from their plates. In the course of the Krone interview, many of them come to our table and shake hands with the “EU Farmer.” “Thank you for you courage,” they say. Or, “You were right!” Mayor Günther Albel (SPÖ) does not feel that way — he would have preferred more a nuanced approach to the subject of immigration.

One post on Facebook in which Tisal was annoyed by “asylum-seekers with Adidas shoes, Nike T-shirts, Diesel jeans and smartphones,” reached hundreds of thousands of people and set off an unprecedented discussion about refugees.

The state’s attorney’s office in Klagenfurt is investigating a Carinthian woman for hate speech. On the EU Farmer’s Facebook page, she wished concentration camps and the Islamic State on “social sponges, rapists and Gutmenschen.” In our conversation, the Carinthian comedian regretted such comments, but took nothing back — quite the opposite, he doubled down. His wife, Daniela, on the other hand, looked worried.

Krone: Mr Tisal, Austrian Radio of Carinthia has temporarily put your satirical “cowmentaries” on ice. Do you fear that you will now have problems with the Vilach Fasching?
Tisal: We had a program committee meeting on Wednesday evening. I brought this up. I said: If you think the reputation of the Vilach Fasching guild will suffer because of me, I’ll be glad to step back. They were unanimous in refusing that, even though not all of them agreed with my point of view. And there were other reasons for my “cowmentaries” not being broadcast by Austrian Radio on Friday.

K: What were they?
T: There is a general directive out of Vienna that nothing political be broadcast eight weeks before the election. It had nothing to do with my post. Tuesday there will be a meeting and I will know more then.

K: In your post, you characterize the refugees as “politically legitimized social sponges.” What do you mean by that?
T: Simple. A sponge is someone who serves himself from a pot he should have no access to. My post was not so much an attack on immigrants as on our political leadership. which has been unable to find a solution to this problem since 2015. The immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, or whatever you call them, have cost us over eight billion euros, while our own people, who may have worked their whole lives, are fobbed off before the election with a pension increase of 2.2%. And our representatives are proud of themselves for that.

K: What do you have against refugees? Austria must take care of them and integrate them, if they achieve asylum status.
T: I have nothing against them. At first, when they arrived by way of Spielfeld and the Karawanken Tunnel,[1] I gave clothing and also donated money. Refugees in need ought to be helped. But not these economic refugees who have descended on us. There must be some regulating, to stop it or at least limit it severely.

K: Can’t a refugee be both? He comes from a war zone and wants to live in a country where he has it better.
T: If it is about having more money, then policy will have to decide if that can be allowed. We cannot allow ourselves to be inundated by men who won’t even shake hands with a woman. Not all, but some There is also a creeping infiltration of our society. And if anyone wants to stick me into. the “rightst” corner, be warned. I am convinced that 90% of Austrians are of the same opinion as me.

K: Are you a rightist?
T: I don’t know what that means. Politics is just like driving — there are right turns and left turns. Sometimes you have to turn right, sometimes left, when it’s about your own safety.

K: At any rate, you are getting applause from the right.
T: But what matters to me is what feels right, not partisanship. The sense of justice. Why is anyone on the right today called a Nazi? Just because someone has an opinion — that’s bad! Speaking of opinion, there is a page on Facebook called “Freedom of expression for the EU Farmer.”

K: You also have FPÖ chief Heinz-Christian Strache on your side. Does that seem right to you?
T: Why should I complain, if Strache agrees with me that there is no freedom of expression in the country any more? I think that everyone can have his opinion. What is important is that people talk to one another. We live in a democracy, after all! But that is why I won’t let myself be collected by any party.

K: But you are appearing at a festival Strache invited you to.
T: Yes, and I can also tell you why. Because that is my job! I would also appear with Kern and Kurz and with the Greens, but they don’t want me.

K: Do you have many cancellations now?
T: Yes, just yesterday a community did that. Not to mention that it threatens my livelihood. It is really sad that my family is being dragged into this. My wife is being insulted.
  (Daniela Tisal wipes away a few tears and says: “Tell her that you are getting death threats!”)

K: Is that true?
T: Yeah, sure. “You need to have your head cut off.” Or: “If we catch you on the street, we’ll knock you flat and take your iPhone.” One wrote: “Stick a knife in him so his stupid yap shuts up.”

K: Did you report these people to the police?
T: No. First, these threats are anonymous. They come by Facebook and the profile shows a Mickey Mouse or an angel, a tree or a mountain. These people are feeble-minded. I won’t be dragging them to face the Kadi.[2]

K: Are you afraid?
T: They won’t be stupid enough to shoot me in the head. Why should I be afraid?
  (Daniela Tisal says: “But I am.”)

K: Mr. Tisal, you have stormed against refugees, because they wear brand-name clothes and have smartphones and you claim they get them for free. Where?
T: People tell me every day about refugees shopping in stores and saying “Caritas[3] is paying.” They have a card to charge it.

K: But that is not true. Caritas has denied it.
T: If what I wrote is not true and Caritas can show me the opposite, I will be the first to apologize and I will accuse all the hundreds of people who have been there and seen that of lying.

K: But it could also be false.
T: Where else would they get Nike T-shirts, Diesel jeans and smartphones? They arrive in an inflatable boat, empty-handed, and here among us, they are chic, tonsured and posh. So I ask where they get the money. I think it would be fair for them to get credit, interest-free, which they would pay off later. Then we would only have those willing to integrate among us, and they would never have to feel guilty.

K: Aren’t you starting an envious debate that will also harm those who want to integrate?
T: Hats off to them. But only 37% are willing to work. Unfortunately, our policy does not distinguish. It legitimizes everyone. Primarily young men. I don’t see old people or women or children.

K: Why do you think there is such an energetic discussion of what you have said?
T: Because I attacked the policy. I was a welcome rural sacrifice for the election battle. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. But as a fool and a democrat, I am biting that hand.

K: Will the affair influence your work with the Vilach Fasching?
T: Not at all. I will go on stage again as the EU Farmer, tell a few smutty jokes, take some swipes at this or that politician, but my own opinion lost nothing at Fasching.

K: Is the ÖVP chief Sebastian Kurz suited to parody?
T: Well, a little something about anyone can occur to me. He certainly has wonderfully big ears.

 Notes:
1. i.e., crossing the border from Slovenia to Austria.
2. Islamic judge.
3. Catholic charities.​

But...but... surely Sharia is merely an optional extra and is of course a highly nuanced if not impenetrable subject for all but the most vocal of Western Muslim spokespeople & apologists who understand it perfectly. Their great insight is surely why they continually reassure us that it is completely in accord with Western traditions of tolerance, justice and magnanimity is it not?

Astonishingly these Indian Ulema actually equate Sharia with Islam. 
How could some of the finest minds in India on Islamic jurisprudence have got this all so horribly wrong? 
​
​Hmm. Yes, that's a toughy all right. You got me there...

From Jihad Watch. Do note the points Robert Spencer makes in his intro to the piece. Oh and the "Triple Talaq" mentioned here is the Sharia law stipulating that a Muslim man may irrevocably divorce his wife by saying the word 3 times to her. Sometimes in this modern, enlightened era this is done via text message to minimise inconvenience for the man. All this while the woman is often left homeless, penniless and childless.

>>>>>>>>>>>
“Those who oppose, question or do not accept the Sharia or Islam, we will explain these things to them also. If they still are not convinced, then they will be ex-communicated from the religion and not be considered as Muslims.”

Comparable declarations saying that jihad terrorists will be excommunicated and not be considered Muslims have been rare, at best.

Note also the implications of this for Islamic reformers, and for Islamic apologists in the [West] who insist that Sharia stonings and amputations, misogyny, and oppression of non-Muslims have nothing to do with Islam.
<<<<<<<<<<<<

“Telangana’s Sharia Faisla Board says those opposing Sharia will be considered as non-Muslims,” by Yunus Y. Lasania, Live Mint, September 7, 2017:

Hyderabad: Calling the Supreme Court’s verdict which ruled triple talaq unconstitutional as an “interference” in Islamic law, the Sharia Faisla Board (SFB), an umbrella body of prominent religious and social Muslim organizations in Telangana, said on Thursday that it will carry out a campaign to educate Muslims about Islam and the Sharia (Muslim personal law) in the coming days. It also said that those opposing the Sharia within the community will be considered non-Muslims.

“We will start this programme in Hyderabad and conduct it across south India. The Supreme Court’s ruling has opened the door for interference in our religion,” said Mushtaq Mallik, president, Muslim Shabban Tahreek, while addressing a press conference. Mallik, along with other members from various organisations which are part of the SFB convened a meeting on Thursday to discuss the SC’s verdict on triple talaq.

Mallik said that the SFB will carry out a door-to-door programme starting with Hyderabad to explain Muslims about Islamic jurisprudence. “Those who oppose, question or do not accept the Sharia or Islam, we will explain these things to them also. If they still are not convinced, then they will be ex-communicated from the religion and not be considered as Muslims,” he added….

Our New Zealand friend Martin Hanson has brought to my attention this useful British website:~
MARIAS - Mothers Aganist Radical Islam And Sharia. 

The site was started by Tony Bugle (the lady in the photo) - a woman of strength and Islamic rape survivor. Her harrowing personal story is here. I include a sanitised excerpt here:~

       ​No one is protecting these girls.  No one is listening to them either.  Nor is anyone telling them it’s okay to speak out.

I want those girls, and their families, to understand that “MARIAS” (Mothers Against Radical Islam & Sharia) is here to speak on their behalf.

We offer them a public and social platform any time that they want to speak out and be listened to.  We want these girls to be heard by everybody.

Political correctness above girls’ lives?
We want our police, social services, and spineless governmental officials to know that they are complicit in the grooming and raping of these girls.  They are, in part, responsible for the chaos and misery inflicted on an untold number of lives.  They are responsible for the loss of innocence and childhood up and down the country because they allowed our girls to be sacrifices on the altar of Pakistani Muslim men’s deprave sexual urges.

Why?

For fear of being called a ‘racist’ or a ‘bigot’ for pointing out the obvious?  Court records, social services records, and police records all show that this is a Pakistani Muslim problem.

I spoke to an ex police officer who informed me how they would be told to hush things up in order not to cause “Islamophobia” and that “Diversity and Equality” was daily shoved in the faces of police officers.

Girls’ lives matter more than sick, depraved perverts’ sexual needs matter.

It’s time to throw political correctness and fear out the window.
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I pray that this kind of website will not soon be needed in New Zealand, but again I return to the perennial question: Why should things be any different here than they have been elsewhere in the West? Let's at the very least heed the lesson.

Looks like another useful resource for us, thank you Martin.