Mohammed, two years before his death, had met his immediate goals. The Moslem faith, once practiced by a persecuted minority, was now, through the Word and more preponderantly, by the Sword, was now a state religion. He was strong enough and wealthy enough to pursue a policy of conquest. He had an army. But he needed an ideology. One year after the capture of Mecca, a revelation came to him that all idolatry should be converted, by force of arms if necessary. This meant first those Arabs who opposed Islam, and the half-hearted ones who Mohammed called hypocrites. But it also meant Christians and Jews: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day… The Jews say Ezra is the son of god, while the Christians say Christ is the son of god. That is what they say with their mouths, imitating the speech of those who disbelieved aforetime. May god fight them, how perverse they are.”
— that the U.S. Department of State has once again undertaken the dubious task of trying to reform Islam to fit the department’s international agenda. According to an August 10 report released by the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 450 imams were the target of the most recent effort, which aimed to combat “gender-based violence” which has been linked to Islam.
Word of the new State Department program came to light roughly two years after the department was engaged in a public controversy centered on the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who was engaged in an effort to build an Islamic center near the site of the September 11, 2001, attack in New York City. On August 10, 2010, a story for FoxNews.com (“Group: State Department Is Wrong to Sponsor Imam Trip”), the State Department was busy paying for a junket which would take Rauf to several Middle Eastern countries:
The State Department confirmed Tuesday that the administration is sponsoring Feisal Abdul Rauf’s trip to Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which is described as part of a program to send Muslims abroad to educate other countries about the role of religion in the United States. Rauf made similar trips during the Bush administration.
Rauf and his partners are preparing to build a $100 million Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that left nearly 3,000 dead.
Plans for Rauf’s junket at the expense of American taxpayers led to protests from the American Center for Law and Justice; the organization’s chief counsel, Jay Sekulow, was quoted by FoxNews as noting the offensive character of the State Department’s action during the midst of the Ground Zero Mosque controversy…Read More:http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/12548-state-department-teaching-womens-rights-to-imams image:http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Ramallah_5196/Picture_15819.html
Mohammed chose to stress the divergences rather than the common ground between Islam and the two other monotheistic creeds, in order to motivate his followers. In fact, there are between Christianity and Islam more reasons for agreeing than quarreling. They agree that one god created the universe, that Christ was miraculously born of a virgin, that he rose into heaven, and that God will grant men eternal life if they obey His divine will. Moslems reject the idea of god the Father , since it implies that god had a wife, and of Christ as the Son of God, which implies physical generation on the part of a pure being. They also reject Crucifixion. The subtle Arab mind is convinced that someone other than Christ was substituted on the Cross.
—Slowly but surely, Hamas was pulled out of Syria and is being fully taken out of the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance that threatens US-Israeli-Saudi strategy in the region, not only by transferring its top leadership from Damascus to Qatar, but also through a major rehabilitation effort of Hamas in Jordan, whose King Abdullah had exiled members of the Hamas leadership in 1999 on the orders of the US and Israel.
Jordanian electoral politics
As this will spell the accelerated rate at which Hamas will be offering concessions and reassurances to American interests following in the footsteps of Fateh, the PA is becoming most worried about its standing and its increasing dispensability for both Israel and the United States. US-supported and -protected Arab dictators have always feared only one type of domestic opposition to their rule, namely opposition groups who offer to serve US imperial interests as loyally as the existing regimes do.
Such fear was always warranted and well-founded, especially in the case of Egypt where the US has been for over a decade and a half courting the Muslim Brothers whose neoliberal businessmen leadership had assured the US of full compliance and collaboration with US policies better than even Mubarak could offer (indeed in contrast with the neoliberal right-wing of the Egyptian Brothers led by millionaire Khairat al-Shater, the centrist Abdel al-Moneim Aboul Fotouh was done away with fairly quickly, first by being expelled from the Muslim Brothers and later by losing the elections).
I should note here that the US’ openness to what it calls “moderate” Islamists has also been supported by a good number of Zionists and Israeli strategists who have been debating such alliances and their long term costs and benefits for the Jewish settler-colony.—Read More:http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128217513887730.html
The Prophet’s call to arms against the infidels was to propel his followers across North Africa and into Spain and France. Six years after his death, his disciple Omar had captured Jerusalem. In less than a century, Islam had imposed its faith on three continents. Mohammed did not live to see the empire he had founded. He was planning a military expedition to the Syrian border in 632 when he fell ill. He asked to be taken to his favorite wife Aisha, who put him to bed. He tried to get up to attend prayers in the mosque, but collapsed in her arms, raised his hand, said, ” with the most high companion,” and died.
— “kidnapped by the terrorists,” another officer muttered – and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The General agreed that weapons may have been taken from dead Syrian troops or soldiers who had been captured. Army defectors existed, he said, but they were “drop-outs, soldiers who had failed their basic tests who were motivated only by money”. This is what they say under interrogation, he said.
It wasn’t difficult to work out just how the fighting in Aleppo is developing. Walking the streets for more than an hour with a Syrian army patrol, individual snipers would shoot from houses and then disappear before government soldiers arrived. The army had shot dead one man with a sniper’s rifle who fired from the minaret of the El-Houda mosque. …
At least a dozen civilians emerged from their homes, retirees in their 70s, shopkeepers and local businessmen with their families and, unaware that a foreign journalist was watching, put their arms round Syrian troops. One told me he had stayed in his home as “foreign” fighters used his courtyard to fire on government soldiers. “I speak Turkish and most were speaking Turkish but some of the men had long beards and short trousers like the Saudis wear, and had strange Arab accents.”
So many Aleppo citizens talked to me, out of earshot of soldiers, about armed “foreigners” in their streets along with Syrians “from the countryside” that the presence of considerable numbers of non-Syrian gunmen appeared to be true. While much of the city continues its life under occasional mortar fire, tens of thousands of civilians displaced by the fighting between the Free Syrian Army and what the government always calls the “Syrian Arab Army” are now housed in vacant dormitories on the Aleppo University campus. And President Assad’s enemies are never far away—Read More:http://www.independent.ie/national-news/robert-fisk-on-the-aleppo-frontline-with-alasaad-bashars-most-battlehardened-commander-3207262.html
ADDENDUM:
This idea of romanticizing the Syrian rebels has been seen before: Afghanistan when Bin Laden was an asset.Typical New York Times spin, in the Thomas Friedman trademark style; we know very well who the colonized are and who are the tolerated guests:
(see link at end)…During five days last week, Mr. Yasin and his group, the Lions of Tawhid, allowed two journalists from The New York Times to live and travel beside them as they fought their part in the war to unseat President Bashar al-Assad.
This group falls under the command of Al Tawhid Brigade, a relatively new structure in Aleppo Province that has unified several groups and fights under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, the loose coalition of armed rebels.
—As they have grown in numbers and strength, they have organized into a force that mixes paramilitary discipline, civilian policing, Islamic law and the harsh demands of necessity with battlefield coldness and outright cunning. They have informants and spies, and eavesdrop on the government’s military r
s while trying to form a nascent government themselves in the territory under their control.
But mostly they yearn to fight, seeking to destroy the Assad government and its better-equipped forces by most any means. —Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/world/middleeast/syrian-rebels-coalesce-into-a-fighting-force.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast
While broad extrapolations are difficult to glean from one fighting group in a complex society, the activities and personal stories of these men, a mix of civilians who took up arms and dozens of army defectors who joined them, offers a fine-grained look of the uprising, and the momentum and guerrilla energy it has attained.
Mr. Yasin, 37, was a clean-shaven accountant before the war. He lived a quiet life with his wife and two young sons. Now thickly bearded and projecting a stoic calm under fire, he has been hardened by his war in ways he could not have foreseen.
He roams the Aleppo region with dozens of armed men in camouflage, plotting attacks with other commanders, evading airstrikes, meeting with smugglers and bombmakers to gather more weapons, and rotating through front-line duties in a gritty street-by-street urban campaign. He prefers to sleep by day, and fight by night.Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/world/middleeast/syrian-rebels-coalesce-into-a-fighting-force.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast
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(see link at end)…Jonathan Steele, Guardian: As destruction creeps nearer, the mood has changed dramatically in the six months since I was last here. People on all sides – government sympathisers, opposition supporters and civilians who waver in the middle – all feel that Syria has become a victim and a plaything taken over by foreigners. “The situation is no longer in the hands of Syrians. We are pawns in a big game,” said Youssef Abdelke, a leading artist.
Whatever awaits them in the next few months, whether a change of regime, a political compromise or – the most likely scenario in the minds of people I spoke to – a further intensification of war, they feel it will be decided by outsiders.
Discussion among Damascenes no longer centres on whether to support change or stick with the status quo for fear that the alternative to Bashar al-Assad’s regime will be worse. The focus is on priorities. Which objective is more urgent: to stop the killing or to topple a regime that has shown greater resilience than many predicted?
The argument that the opposition should negotiate with the regime about reform was never popular, given the regime’s rejection of compromise and its record of detaining critics. Dialogue now seems an even more remote option.
Conversation centres on the tactics of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), or at least of those bands of young men who fight the government under its banner without co-ordination from any centre. Are they right to come into city districts and attack police and army buildings, knowing that retaliation will be massive, bloody and brutal? The army is to blame for destroying people’s homes, but had the FSA not provoked it the homes might still be there and people might be alive.Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/20/pawns-syrian-conflict-await-endgame#start-of-comments
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