Category Archives: Islam

Mesmerizing The Musri (Egyptian) Mamba

Democracy, Elections, Islam, Israel, Middle East

Take your cues from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He approached the new, democratically elected Egyptian Prime Minister, Mohammed Musri, as a snake charmer would: with caution and sweet-sounding words.

Reacting to the announcement that the Muslim Brotherhood candidate won, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hoped the treaty would stand.
“Israel expects to continue cooperation with the Egyptian government on the basis of the peace agreement between the two countries, which is of interest to the two peoples and contributes to regional stability,” Netanyahu said in a statement Sunday.

In reply, Musri dispensed with the formality of Taqiyya (obfuscating facts for the faith), and got down to business. Basically, Musri’s message for Israel is, We’re coming for “al-Quds,” Jerusalem in Arabic.

Disclose.tv – “Egypt: Our Capital Shall Be Jerusalem, Allah Willing”

Yes, particularly pertinent is the Muslims’ fabrication about their attachment to Jerusalem.

“Yerushalaim” is the Hebrew biblical name for the city that was sacred to Jews for nearly two thousand years before Muhammad. Not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Koran. Muhammad was said to have departed to the heavens from the Al Aksa Mosque, but there was no mosque in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque were built on the Jewish Temple Mount. This usurpation was subsequently justified by Muslim theologians by superimposing their relatively recent fondness for Jerusalem upon the existing, ancient sanctity of the place to Jews.
Samuel Katz, in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy In Palestine, poses this question: What would the Christian reaction be if the same Muslim theologians had chosen to appropriate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, re-name it, declare it Muslim property (which means killing for it), and demand Arafat be buried in it?
Israel’s justice minister Yosef Lapid provided a wonderfully apposite response: “Jerusalem is the city where Jewish kings are buried and not Arab terrorists.”

Amen.

UPDATED: Who’s Worse: Bashar’s Babe Or ‘Obama Girl’? (There’s A Boy!)

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Jihad, John McCain, Media, Middle East

“Who’s Worse: Bashar’s Babe Or ‘Obama Girl’?” is my latest, weekly column, now on RT. It gets to the bottom of why we Americans are rooting for the Sunnis of the Middle East.

Here’s an excerpt:

A dictator known as Barack Hussein Obama has a devotee known as “Obama Girl.” In better days, Bashar Hafez al-Assad, another tyrant, had his own babe to do his bidding.

“Obama Girl,” Amber Lee Ettinger, is the toast of the town; Bashar’s babe, Sheherazad el Jaafari, is being chased out of town.

The 22-year-old el Jaafari, the daughter of Syria’s UN ambassador, was admitted to Columbia University, in the City of New York, on the recommendation of a veteran of American broadcasting.

Haya Dweidary, another Syrian student at Columbia, wants el Jaafari expelled from the University. Evincing the sort of reasoning we’ve come to expect from our Ivy League students, Dweidary calls el Jaafari “horrible and supporting the [Syrian] regime.”

Dweidary further alleges that el Jaafari is a close associate of Assad and was involved in human-rights violations in Syria. But, in the main, Dweidary’s case against el Jaafari rests on envy, directed at “privileged people getting access to everything.”

Syrian squabbles imported; that’s cosmopolitan diversity (or the “melting pot”) at work. …

… On the support-for-statism scale, “Obama Girl” got to first base with Obama, and beyond. … Is Assad’s sidekick so much more reprehensible than “Obama Girl,” who has worked her bootie off for America’s killer drone?”

Read the complete column, “Who’s Worse: Bashar’s Babe Or ‘Obama Girl’?,” now on RT.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive libertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” “Return To Reason” on WND, and the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT.

The paperback edition (softcover) of “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” is available on Amazon. It features bonus material, including an Afterword by Burkean philosopher, Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

Please LIKE “The Cannibal” on Amazon as well as on Facebook, and contribute your review of the paperback edition.

UPDATE: There’s a boy too.

UPDATE IV: “Jesus, No Radical”? (Jesus’ Jewishness)

Ancient History, Christianity, Classical Liberalism, Hebrew Testament, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Justice

“Jesus was no political radical or rebel. He was God” is how the ever-provocative Jack Kerwick introduces his latest Belief.Net blog to Facebook Friends.

Maestro, pray tell, why are the two categories of the title—“G-d” vs. “political radical”—mutually exclusive?

One might have theological reasons for designating “G-d” and “political radical” as mutually exclusive, but reason is reason. It has to work a priori, surely?

Jews (at least those who think) think of Jesus as a preacher in the great tradition of the classical Hebrew prophets, whose genius, courage and yes, radicalism is hard to match—they were forever telling the stiff-necked people where to get off in no uncertain terms.

UPDATE I: “Yiddishkeit.” In reply to the thread on Facebook: Jesus was indeed a Jew (or a Hebrew), with everything that being a Hebrew would imply. A lot of people describe Jewish traits negatively. But you can be sure that Jesus was not without a dose of “Yiddishkeit,” as my blond, blue-eyed, Jewish mother would call it.

UPDATE II: Meathead: One should never place Russell Kirk in the company in which you placed him. For one, Kirk was against the wars Buckley embraced as a matter of principle. As I read Kirk, he was a classical liberal of enormous talent.

UPDATE III (June 14): The “because” is unfairly placed in yours sentence below, Jack Kerwick.

As for Ilana’s contention that Jesus was a “radical” because, like the prophets of old, He told “the stiff necked people where to get off in no uncertain terms,” how does that make Jesus, or anyone, a radical?

Here is what I wrote in the post above:

In punctuation, the sentence indicates that the last clause is but an example of the “genius, courage and yes, radicalism” of the prophets, and hardly exhaustive.

In meaning, how does the last clause, which you rightly seem to disparage as inexhaustible, qualify the words “genius, courage and yes, radicalism”?

It doesn’t. Yours is a somewhat unfair read of the sentence.

As for conflating, as you do Jack, the views of Jews on Christ with those of Muslims: That, in my view, is a grave error.

The Quality of Egyptian Mercy… And Society

Democracy, Islam, Justice, Middle East, Military, Morality

“The concept of a society is based on the quality of its mercy, of its sense of fair play, its sense of justice,” goes that memorable line from the film “Midnight Express” (which surely represented Hollywood at its heyday). The protagonist’s protest against his inhuman and inhumane Turkish jailers was a plea against a merciless authority.

The kind the US and its surrogates (“NATO”) around the world endorse as democratic.

In another word, Egypt.

The new Egypt has demonstrated in spades the quality of its mercy and, by extension, society, by sentencing the “deposed leader Hosni Mubarak” “to life in prison for failing to stop the killing of 900 protesters in January 2011.” (Was that even provable?)

The demonstrating “activists” might want to consider giving old Hosni a sponge bath and reinstating him, rather than condeming an old man to life in prison (or death there, whatever comes first).

Since the ousting of Mubarak, reports BBC News, “Foreign direct investment has reversed from $6.4bn (£4bn) flowing into the country in 2010 to $500m leaving it last year. Tourism, a major revenue generator for the country, has also dropped by a third.”