Thursday, May 29, 2008
Muslim Fecal Jihad
http://theopinionator.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/05/muslim-squirts.html
MAY 20, 2008
ANOTHER CASE OF MUSLIM CONDUCTING FECAL JIHAD
42 year old, Sahnoun Daifallah, appeared in front of a magistrate on charges he squirted a "foul-smelling" substance, later determined to be a mixture of feces and urine, over frozen chips and wine bottles at a Tesco in Gloucester - he then went on to shower and ruin 706 children's books at Waterstones in Cirencester, Gloucs. Not quite satisified with showering his human liquid waste concoction over just two stores, Mr Daifallah proceeded to the Air Balloon pub where, after making offensive comments to the barmaid, he proceeded to sprinkle more feces and urine all over the pub food. This filthy defilement of property has cost the business owners considerable amounts of money to clean their establishment as well as replace the urine-fecal destroyed items.
This case is reminiscent of my past posting " I'll think I'll pass on this cake" from February 2008. In this case Cardiff Wales muslim Pizzaria shop owners, Saeed Hasmi and Jan Yadgari, "accidentally" sold chocolate cake with human faeces on top. Must be a new muslim icing recipe. Of course these "culinary specialists" admitted the charge but have no idea how the cake got those brown "sprinkles" on top - guess they were airborne.
Or another recent case from Dallas, USA where Behrouz Nahidmobarekeh, 49, is on trial for allegedly throwing the feces on pastries at a Fiesta grocery store. Police said that during an investigation, they found a pile of human feces by his bed. Investigators believe Nahidmobarekeh would dry the feces, either by microwave or just letting it sit out, grate it up with a cheese grater and then sprinkle it at the store. A young boy, maybe 3 years old, was later seen on the surveillance tape, eating one of the defiled cookies."
There appears to be a nasty and disgusting pattern emerging - muslim men conducting a body waste Jihad. Such body fluids would be considered hazardous waste in a medical setting. With the numbers of serious and often fatal diseases, including polio and hepatitis, that can be carried by human waste - there needs to be harsher penalties for fecal jihadists.
ENTIRE ARTICLE - EMPHASIS MINE
BODY FLUID SPRAY MAN IN COURT
By STAFF REPORTER
Published: 19 May 2008
A MAN was in court today charged with spraying urine at two supermarkets, a pub and a book shop.
Sahnoun Daifallah, 42, allegedly squirted a "foul-smelling" substance over frozen chips and wine bottles at a Tesco in Gloucester.
He is also said to have carried out a similar attack in Morrisons four miles away on the same day.
Prosecutor Liz Thomas claimed that, two days earlier, Daifallah used an improvised device to shower hundreds of children's books at Waterstones in Cirencester, Gloucs.
That day he is also said to have squirted the liquid over food in the Air Balloon pub, near Cheltenham, Gloucs.
Ms Thomas said the total damage was ?10,000, although the final bill for cleaning up the supermarkets and replacing the food would come to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Daifallah, of Bibury Road, Gloucester, indicated not guilty pleas to four charges of contaminating products between May 14 and May 16 this year.
Wearing a black top, with a full beard and long black wavy hair, Daifallah, spoke to confirm his name and address.
Magistrates in Cheltenham remanded Daifallah in custody and adjourned the case to May 28 when he will appear via videolink at Stroud for committal proceedings.
The Tesco store in Quedgeley, and the Morrisons, in Glevum Way, were both shut for much of Friday and all day on Saturday while all the stock in each store was removed.
Ms Thomas said a "squeezy sports bottle" had been used to propel the liquid into a freezer of chips, and later over a wine rack.
After going into the toilets at Waterstones in Cricklade Street, Cirencester, Daifallah is alleged to have ruined 706 books, many of them in the children's section, with a "very smelly, brown, unpleasant substance".
Previously that day he was said to have released the liquid in the Air Balloon at Birdlip after making offensive comments to a barmaid.
Preliminary tests by Tesco have shown the fluid to be a mix of urine, faeces and domestic products, the court heard.
Ms Thomas said a possible motive had yet to be established.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Using the Koran for Target Practice...A Criminal Offense in the USA?
By Diana West
It is late August 1939. American columnist Augusta "Gusto" Nash, played by the incomparable Claudette Colbert in the 1940 movie "Arise, My Love," is sitting in a French railway car taking her from Paris (and love interest Ray Milland) to her next assignment: Adolph Hitler's Berlin. Not surprisingly, she is boning up for her new post in the Nazi capital by reading "Mein Kampf." Turning the pages, she looks increasingly disgusted, finally becoming incensed to the point where she slams the book shut and tosses it out the window.
The audience doesn't learn precisely what that final straw was, but given the book's notorious anti-Semitism, racism and militaristic plans for world domination, it's not hard to imagine. Which makes me wonder: What if, in a 21st-century update of the movie, a columnist were filmed en route to Riyadh reading the Koran? Given the book's notorious anti-Semitism (not to mention anti-Christianism), Islamic supremacism and jihadist exhortations for world domination, what if a postmodern-day Western-reared correspondent were depicted becoming agitated to the point of throwing the Koran out the window?
Not very easy to imagine this scenario coming to a multiplex near you. At least not without bomb threats, bombast and boycotts from the world of Islam (not to mention assorted yelps and cries from the stateside sensitivity police).
But it's a setup worth considering -- quietly, privately, in that shrinking mental domain still free from speech controls (for now, anyway) -- if only as a bit of a culture check on a real-live news story that came out of Iraq this week when a U.S. sniper was discovered to have used a Koran for target practice in the former insurgent stronghold of Radwaniyah.
And what is the point of comparison here between movie fiction and recent fact? Namely, the contrasting reactions to these two manifestations of contempt for anti-liberty ideologies. Americans in 1940 widely shared Gusto Nash's loathing for Hitler's totalitarian message. In 2008, the superiors of the soldier in question, right on up the chain of command to commander-in-chief George W. Bush, only express their respect for, and, in a very frightening way, submission to the Koran despite its totalitarian message -- and even at the expense of the soldier's Constitutional rights.
The fact is, assuming this Koran belonged to the soldier, there is nothing illegal about shooting it or throwing it away. Impolitic, perhaps; but snipers -- trained rather specifically in this conflict to kill jihadists, who are, above all, inspired by the violent exhortations contained within the Koran -- are not diplomats.
But neither are generals. Missing a teachable moment -- "Turn the other cheek?" "Nuts!" "The soldier fired on an inanimate object that urges jihad; he didn't self-detonate in a teeming marketplace to advance jihad" -- Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond chose to abase himself before the local Sunni tribe. "In a most humble manner, I look into your eyes today and I say 'Please forgive me and my soldiers,'" he said. Then he called his sniper's actions "nothing more than criminal behavior."
The general was dead wrong -- unless, that is, he was talking about criminal behavior under Sharia, or Islamic law, which isn't, or certainly shouldn't be, the guiding light of the U.S. military. But, alas, this is what increasingly appears to be the case. For example, in presenting a new Koran to this gathering of local Sunnis who were very likely insurgents not so long ago, another American officer kissed the Islamic book. Last time I looked, kissing Korans wasn't a Yankee custom -- unless dhimmitude now counts as one.
Let's play around some more with the story. Imagine if, during the Allied occupation of post-Nazi Germany, a GI had been discovered using "Mein Kampf" for target practice. Would Gen. George S. Patton have kissed a new copy of the Nazi bible as he presented it to a cadre of former Nazis? In the words of Ol' Blood and Guts -- oh, wait; this is a family newspaper. Let's just put it this way: Not likely. Difference is, of course, the anti-Semitism and imperialistic supremacism contained within "Mein Kampf" were recognized and treated as an existential threat to the rest of the Western world. In the so-called war on terror, however, our primary strategy is directed at masking or ignoring the overall anti-infidelism and imperialistic supremacism contained within the Koran.
And -- in spite of the actions of the occasional "criminal" soldier -- that's one front where we're certainly winning.
Info and SF Conference on Raw Milk/Healthy Foods/Life-Energy Subjects
Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 14:46:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: info@westonaprice.org
Subject: WISE TRADITIONS 2008, OUR NINTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
Start Planning Now!
WISE TRADITIONS 2008
Ninth International Conference of the Weston A. Price Foundation
http://www.westonaprice.org
LIFE IN ITS FULLNESS: NUTRITION FOR MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH
Friday, November 7 - Saturday, November 8 - Sunday, November 9
Plus special activities Monday November 10
Our First West Coast Conference!
HYATT SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT
Burlingame, California
A Showcase for Delicious Traditional Food.
A Unique Opportunity for Health Professionals and
Laymen interested in Diet and Health.
SEMINARS AND SESSIONS ON
Gut and Psychology Syndrome
Non-Toxic Home and Lifestyle
Traditional Diets
Cooking and Food Preparation
Mental and Emotional Health
Heart Disease
Weight Loss
Iodine and Thyroid Health
Subtle Energies in Soil and Food
FEATURING
David Brownstein, MD, author of Overcoming Thyroid Disorders
Natasha Campbell-McBride, MD, author of The Gut and Psychology Syndrome
Paul Chek, HHP, NMT, author of How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy
Mary Cordaro, Home Environmental Specialist, CEOH3Environmental
Thomas Cowan, MD, author of The Fourfold Path to Healing
Debra Lynn Dadd, author of Really Green
Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, author of The Whole Soy Story
James DeMeo, PhD, author of Saharasia
Mary Enig, PhD, author of Know Your Fats
Dina Falconi, author of Earthly Bodies and Heavenly Hair
Sally Fallon, MA, author of Nourishing Traditions
Lynne Farrow, MA, breast cancer specialist
Joseph Heckman, PhD, soil specialist
Mark Kastel, president, The Cornucopia Institute
Claudia Keel, herbalist
Galen D. Knight, PhD, health researcher
Janet Lang, MD, thyroid expert
Chris Masterjohn, WAPF author and researcher
Mary Morris, CRT, RPSGT, expert on sleep disorders
Richard Morris, author of A Life Unburdened
Julia Ross, MA, MFT, author of The Mood Cure
Beverly Rubik, PhD, author of Life at the Edge of Science
Jack Samuels, MSG expert
Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception
Beverly Teter, PhD, lipids expert
Theresa Vernon, LAc, acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist
Louisa Williams, ND, author of Radical Medicine
Larry Wisch, co-owner, Three Stone Hearth community-supported kitchen
LOCATION AND ACCOMMODATION
The conference will be held at the beautiful
Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport
1333 Bayshore Highway
Burlingame, California 94010
(650) 347-1234, www.sanfranciscoairport.hyatt.com
The hotel offers free shuttle service from the San Francisco Airport. The shuttle runs every15 minutes from the hotel shuttle area on the street level at the airport.
Conference room rates are $165 for double, triple or quadruple occupancy.
Call (800) 233-1234 to reserve your room. Be sure to mention the Weston A. Price Foundation or Wise Traditions Conference.
To book your hotel room online, please go to:
http://sanfranciscoairport.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/index.jsp
Enter the Code G-PRIC to receive the discounted conference rate.
All rooms at the hotel have small refrigerators and windows that open.
Special conference rates are available only until October 22, 2008.
Self parking at $10 per day.
MONDAY ACTIVITIES
In the planning stages: A farm tour, a tour of Three Stone Health Community Kitchen and cheesemaking and cooking demonstrations. Stay tuned for details!
CHILDCARE
$100 per child, includes lunch.
Infants and children are welcome to Wise Traditions 2008 as long as they are enrolled in our children's program. For the sake of other conference attendees, we ask that parents refrain from bringing children to the conference sessions.
EARLY BIRD SPECIAL
Save $50 If You Register by October 1
No increase in fees over last year!
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, Visit http://westonaprice.org/conference/2008/index.html
TO REGISTER, Visit https://www.ptfassociates.com/secure/wisetraditions/2008registration.htm
ONLINE FORUM FOR ROOM AND RIDE SHARES
https://www.ptfassociates.com/secure/wisetraditions/forum/default.asp
EXHIBITING AND SPONSOR INFORMATION, Contact pfrank@pftassociates.com or registrar@ptfassociates.com or by phone at (240) 379-7072. Space for exhibitors is limited; early registration encouraged!
CONTINUING EDUCATION UNITS for many health professionals. Information will be posted shortly.
POSTER PRESENTATION: Submissions of abstracts for poster presentations from health professionals on a broad range of topics relating food and nutrition to health are welcome. Contact info@westonaprice.org
31,000+ American Scientists Reject Global Warming Theory - Petition
Monday, May 12, 2008
Sex and Sexuality in Islam - Abul Kasem
Sex and sexuality in Islam
By Abul Kasem
Part 1 of 6
[A word of caution: This article contains sexually explicit terms and coarse language that may offend many readers. The author will not take any responsibility in the event any reader may become upset reading this essay. My request to them: please do refrain from reading this essay if you are likely to be offended. You have been forewarned.]
Introduction
There is more to sex in Islam than meets the eye. Do you care to know that sex is the biggest taboo in Islam? It is a topic that is fraught with fear and seldom discussed by the followers of Islam, except when they are in trouble or when they go to a foreign/infidel country to 'enjoy' women there. Islam pretends as if sexual organs do not exit either in a male or in a female. A woman is covered from head to toe just to hide her 'awra,' which is the Islamic vocabulary for the part of body that arouses sexual desire in a man, or the 'shame' of her. Thus, sexual organs are shameful parts of a body! It is a great insult to a woman to depict her entire body as shameful. It is also a great insult to all men. Why? Because, this gives the impression that men are like beasts that are on the street, just on the lookout there for women to prowl on for sex. This is completely nonsense. While living in an infidel country, I have watched millions of kufur women dressed in very decent as well as not so decent dresses. However, never have I seen a single man jump on a woman in the street to copulate with her, despite her mode of dressing being aphrodisiac or in plain word 'sexy.' The Islamic concept of sex is based on Bedouin Arab culture, that is barbaric and uncivilized, to say the least, when compared to today's world. This is because sex is so a 'dirty' word and it is so 'severely' restricted in Islam that as a inquisitive person I became extremely interested in it and devoured any written material that dealt with sex in Islam. To my surprise, I found that so little information is available, although there are tons and tons of books on Tafseer, ahadith Sharia, fiqh and the list goes on for all other branches of Islamic studies. Therefore, I had to write from scratch without much help from Islamic/other sources. Another big surprise for me was that the restrictions on sex for men in Islam are just superficial. There are countless loopholes in Islamic rules, so much so that it is possible for a Muslim man, whether married or not, to have uninterruptible supply of sex if he so desires. But he must know the rules of the game very well, if not, then he may fall into a great torment. There are many secrets and untold provisions for sex in Islam that very few Mullahs will tell.
++++++++
Friday, May 09, 2008
Europe's Islamic Legacy: Bloodshed, Tyranny, Disaster
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/28/europe/politicus.php
Europe's debt to Islam given a skeptical look
By John Vinocur
Published: April 28, 2008
When Sylvain Gouguenheim looks at today's historical vision of the history of the West and Islam, he sees a notion, accepted as fact, that the Muslim world was at the source of the Christian Europe's reawakening from the Middle Ages.
He sees a portrayal of an enlightened Islam, transmitting westward the knowledge of the ancient Greeks through Arab translators and opening the path in Europe to mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy - a gift the West regards with insufficient esteem.
"This thesis has basically nothing scandalous about it, if it were true," Gouguenheim writes. "In spite of the appearances, it has more to do with taking ideological sides than scientific analysis."
For a controversy, here's a real one. Gouguenheim, a professor of medieval history at a prestigious university, l'École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, is saying "Whoa!" to the idea there was an Islamic bridge of civilization to the West. Supposedly, it "would be at the origin of the Middle Ages' cultural and scientific reawakening, and (eventually) the Renaissance."
In a new book, he is basically canceling, or largely writing off, a debt to "the Arabo-Muslim world" dating from the year 750 - a concept built up by other historians over the past 50 years - that has Europe owing Islam for an essential part of its identity.
"Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel" (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world's initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of "Islam" but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, and that a wave of translations of Aristotle began at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in France 50 years before Arab versions of the same texts appeared in Moorish Spain.
When I talked to Gouguenheim about his book a couple of weeks ago, he said he had no interest in polemics, just some concern that his research could be misused by extremists.
At the same time, he acknowledged that his subject was intensely political. Gouguenheim said it was in light of a 2002 recommendation from the European Union that schoolbooks give a more positive rendering of Islam's part in European heritage "that an attempt at a clarification becomes necessary." Reading Gouguenheim without a background in the history of the Byzantine Empire or the Abassid caliphate is a bit of a challenge. It justifies distance and reserving judgment.
But Le Figaro and Le Monde, in considering the book in prominent reviews, drank its content in a single gulp. No suspended endorsements or anything that read like a caution.
"Congratulations," Le Figaro wrote. "Mr. Gouguenheim wasn't afraid to remind us that there was a medieval Christian crucible, a fruit of the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem," while "Islam hardly proposed its knowledge to Westerners."
Le Monde was even more receptive: "All in all, and contrary to what's been repeated in a crescendo since the 1960s, European culture in its history and development shouldn't be owing a whole lot to Islam. In any case, nothing essential.
"Precise and well-argued, this book, which sets history straight, is also a strongly courageous one."
But is it right?
Gouguenheim attacks the "thesis of the West's debt" as advanced by the historians Edward Said, Alain de Libera and Mohammed Arkoun. He says it replaces formerly dominant notions of cultural superiority advanced by Western orientalists, with "a new ethnocentrism, oriental this time" that sets off an "enlightened, refined and spiritual Islam" against a brutal West.
Nuggets: Gouguenheim argues that Bayt al-Hikma, or the House of Wisdom, said to be created by the Abassids in the ninth century, was limited to the study of Koranic science, rather than philosophy, physics or mathematics, as understood in the speculative context of Greek thought.
He says that Aristotle's works on ethics, metaphysics and politics were disregarded or unknown to the Muslim world, being basically incompatible with the Koran. Europe, he said, "became aware of the Greek texts because it went hunting for them, not because they were brought to them."
Gouguenheim calls the Mont Saint-Michel monastery, where the texts were translated into Latin, "the missing link in the passage from the Greek to the Latin world of Aristotelian philosophy." Outside of a few thinkers - he lists Al-Farabi, Avicenne, Abu Ma'shar and Averroes - Gougenheim considers that the "masters of the Middle East" retained from Greek teaching only what didn't contradict Koranic doctrine.
Published less than a month ago, the book is just beginning to encounter learned criticism.
Sarcastically, Gabriel Martinez-Gros, a professor of medieval history, and Julien Loiseau, a lecturer, described Gouguenheim as "re-establishing the real hierarchy of civilizations."
They said that he disregarded the mathematics and astronomy produced by the Islamic world between the 9th and 13th centuries and painted the period's Islamic civilization exactly what it was not: obscurantist, legalistic, fatalistic and fanatic.
Indeed, Gouguenheim's thesis, they suggest, has "intellectual associations that are questionable at their very heart" - which I take to mean nastily right-wing.
If you read Gougenheim's appendix, he's preemptively headed off that kind of accusation. He offers his book as an antidote to an approach to Islam's medieval relations to the West exemplified by the late Sigrid Hunke, a German writer, described as a former Nazi and friend of Heinrich Himmler.
Hunke describes a pioneering, civilizing Islam to which "the West owes everything." Gouguenheim replies that, in deforming reality, her work from the 1960s continues as a reference point that unfortunately still "shapes the spirit of the moment."
He says he means to rectify that.
His book is interesting and bold. At the very least, it is kindling for arguments on a touchy subject where most people don't have more than inklings and instincts to sort out even shards of truth from angry and conflictual expertise.
"Chemtrail Orgonite" nonsense used to attack Reich
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Israel's 60th Anniversary
Monday, May 05, 2008
Beware of the Milk Police - SWAT Teams Confiscating Butter and Cheese!
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=63225
UDDERLY RIDICULOUS
Feds launch 'Gestapo raid' over raw milk
Rally planned for farmer whose dairy swept by government
By Bob Unruh
A rally has been set for tomorrow in front of the magistrate's office in Mt. Holly, Pa., in support of a Mennonite farmer who has brought the wrath of the government on himself for selling raw milk and other products - an act government prosecutors say violates a number of regulations.
That's when the next court hearing is scheduled for Mark Nolt, a Pennsylvania farmer who turned in his state permit to sell raw milk because it didn't allow for the sale of the other products he offered.
"They swooped in ... like a bunch of Vikings, handcuffed me and stole $30,000 worth of my milk, cheese and butter," he told the New York Daily News.
His case is just an example of what the government is trying to do to those who believe - based on medical results - that raw milk is better for them than the processed milk available in most grocery stores, according to Nolt's supporters.
Processed milk, many believe, leads to clogged arteries, strokes and heart attacks.
According to reports published by the Weston A. Price Foundation, results of a study by the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom revealed only one percent of the subjects in an ongoing lifestyle study of 5,000 men suffered heart attacks - if they drank full-fat milk and ate butter rather than margarine. ...
...snip ...
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Saudi Arabia - Nation of Hatred & Global Jihad War
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23634809-28737,00.html
Saudis' secret agenda
Richard Kerbaj and Stuart Rintoul | May 03, 2008
THE cheque from the Saudi Government for $360,000 was enclosed in an envelope.
It was a donation, a gift, a part payment to subsidise the construction of a building that would become Sydney's Muslim heartbeat: Lakemba mosque. More than 35 years after Sydney cleric Khalil Shami received the cheque, he insists it came with no strings attached. But while the cheque had no tangible conditions in the form of written instructions or binding contracts, the cleric received a message from his donors several months after depositing it.
"They said: 'Please, can you mention the tragedy of the Palestinian people and what's happened to them in your sermon?"' Shami tells Inquirer. "Which is really a very noble cause, a very noble cause, I couldn't see a negative in their request."
The message Shami received from Riyadh brings into question the influence petro-dollars can have on their recipients, whether the money is bankrolling a religious centre, a clerical allowance or Queensland's Griffith University, which was exposed by The Australian last month for seeking a $1.37 million Saudi grant, of which $100,000 was received, and offering to keep elements of the deal a secret.
The Saudi Government - largely through its embassy - is believed to have funnelled at least $120 million into Australia since the 1970s to propagate hardline Islam, bankroll radical clerics and build mosques, schools and charitable organisations.
But the Saudi cash that has flowed into Australia, that also allegedly has paid the allowance of hardline Canberra cleric Mohammed Swaiti, who has publicly praised jihadists, is dwarfed by the $90 billion Riyadh is believed to have pumped into promoting Islamic fundamentalism internationally.
Security agencies worldwide turned their focus on Saudi funding following allegations that the 19 Muslim terrorists - with 15 Saudi nationals among them - who turned commercial airliners into suicide bombs in the September 11 attacks in 2001 were funded from Riyadh.
Counter-terrorism networks also looked closely at the threat posed by Wahhabism or Salafism, a Saudi-pioneered interpretation of Islam espoused by Osama bin Laden, on radicalising Western Muslim communities.
Last October, US President George W. Bush declared that Saudi Arabia was "co-operating with efforts to combat international terrorism". But his administration is divided on the role Riyadh is playing in the West, as are Western intelligence agencies, including Britain's Scotland Yard and MI5.
Last September, weeks before Bush talked up Saudi Arabia's role in curbing radicalism and terror, his Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Stuart Levey, accused Riyadh of failing to prosecute terrorism financiers.
"If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia," Levey said. "When the evidence is clear that these individuals have funded terrorist organisations, and knowingly done so, then that should be prosecuted and treated as real terrorism because it is."
Saudi Arabia has argued that it wants to improve its image in the West by using its financial clout to promote interfaith dialogue and moderate, not radical, Islam.
Last November, Riyadh said it had arrested more than 200 suspected al-Qa'ida operatives and several months ago continued its supposed crackdown on terrorism by seizing dozens of men suspected of being linked to bin Laden's network.
But US counter-terrorism analyst Steven Emerson is sceptical. The Washington-based analyst tells Inquirer: "The notion that the Saudis have totally changed their ways and are not disseminating Wahhabist anti-Western literature and propaganda is simply false. The (Saudi) Government has indeed put out some declarations that would give the impression they are interested in interfaith dialogue. But when it comes to reviewing the statements of the clerics, the religious establishment, the educational textbooks, the crackdown on dissidents and the anti-Western propaganda exported by the regime, one can only conclude their efforts to project moderation is an exercise in propaganda."
In Australia, Griffith academic Mohamad Abdalla has defended his decision to seek the grant, saying the money came with no strings attached. But critics, including the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's national security project director Carl Ungerer, say this is naive and the money is part of a Wahhabist "hearts and minds" campaign being waged by the Saudis in the Muslim world.
US-based Middle East expert and author Daniel Pipes says it is wrong to presume that all academics would follow their donor's line merely to keep the stream of funds rolling.
"Academics have a distinct point of view and are not about to be bought and change their point of view for any sum of money," he tells Inquirer. "But they are willing to shape their work and their views. So you can't buy them but you can rent them. So someone who might have been inclined to ask tough questions will do something else. It's subtle. It's not like the Saudis come to town to buy up academics who grovel before them, as was the case with Griffith University."
Last month, Britain's MI5 director-general Jonathan Evans reportedly told his Government that the Saudi Government's multimillion-dollar donations to universities, along with other funds from Muslim organisations in countries such as Pakistan, had led to a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses".
His warning came just days after the Higher Education Funding Council for England held a special meeting to confront fears that Saudi donations were unduly influencing universities. Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies revealed that eight British universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, received more than $US465 million from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995, mainly to fund Islamic study centres.
In 2005, a prominent Saudi businessman, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, was reported by The Washington Post to have donated $20million to Georgetown and Harvard universities in the US for the study of Islam and the Muslim world to promote interfaith dialogue and understanding.
At Scotland Yard, a security expert cautions that one of Islam's five pillars - Zakat - requires Muslims to give alms and that charity is considered virtuous and essential.
But Emerson, best-selling author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, says Saudi Arabia should be allowed to bankroll religious initiatives in the West only when it becomes open to the idea of religious reciprocity. "I think there should be a law requiring religious reciprocity for funding coming from regimes that restrict religious freedom on their soil," he says. "Saudi Arabia does not allow the practice of any other religion, bars the operations of churches, confiscates Bibles ... As such, there should be laws passed by Western governments prohibiting Saudi donations to universities until and unless Saudi Arabia operates a pluralistic religious environment.
"Absent such laws, I believe that universities should be required to register as foreign registered agents - a law we have in the US - that designates the Saudi donors and their recipients as agents of a foreign power.
"That would certainly stigmatise the grant giving and give pause before a university accepts such money."
The most recent insight into the nature of Saudi society came with the release this month of the Human Rights Watch report Perpetual Minors, about the status imposed on women by Riyadh's doctrinaire interpretation of Sura 4, verse 34 of the Koran: "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women because God has given the one more (strength) than the other and because they support them from their means."
The report outlines how adult Saudi women generally must obtain permission from a male guardian to work, travel, study or marry, while being denied the right to make even the most trivial decisions on behalf of their children and being segregated from men under laws enforced by the Orwellian-sounding Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (the religious police).
In 2004, the UN ranked Saudi Arabia 77th of 78 countries for gender empowerment, defined as the ability of women to take part in economic and political life, ahead of Yemen. Australia was eighth, Norway first.
While Saudi Arabia exports its Wahhabi version of Islam to the world, Saudi society groans under the weight of its internal contradictions. The first class of female law students will graduate from King Abdul Aziz University this year, but the Saudi Ministry of Justice prohibits female lawyers from practising. Judges consider women to be lacking in reason and faith, and have refused to allow them to speak in the courtroom because their voices are shameful.
A Saudi labour code, which came into force in 2006, states that all Saudi workers have the right to work without discrimination, but also specifies "women shall work in all fields suitable to their nature".
Literacy among Saudi women and girls over the age of 15 has risen sharply, according to UN reports, from 16.4 per cent in 1970 to 83.3 per cent in 2005 and Saudi women make up 58 per cent of university graduates (most at teachers colleges), but education is dependent on the permission of male guardians, universities are segregated, and women are excluded from disciplines such as engineering, architecture or political science.
Last year, a 19-year-old gang-rape victim was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months' jail for being in a car with an unrelated man when she was attacked by seven men. In 2002, a fire at an elementary school in Mecca resulted in 15 schoolgirls being burned alive because the religious police refused to let them out of the school without headscarfs.
At the University of Melbourne, Richard Pennell, al-Tajir lecturer in Middle Eastern history, describes Saudi society as opaque rather than transparent.
"It doesn't allow research into its social structure by disinterested people; it doesn't allow disinterested comment about its inner workings; its legal system is closed; it is not a particularly easy society to deal with, partly because it is so stressed," he says. "There are so many things under the surface that are threatening to the regime."
But Pennell is sympathetic to the idea of an educational bridge between Western secular societies and Islamic societies. "We should be taking money from a variety of sources because that is how we get a variety of ideas," he says. "Provided you've got the mechanisms in place so that you don't sing to their tune, I don't think you've got a problem."
Global Warming -- Massaging the Data
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=63360
HEAT OF THE MOMENT
Does 'climate change' mean 'changing data'?
NASA temperature figures show agency reworking recent numbers upwards, older numbers downwards
Methodology used by NASA to estimate rates of climate change are resulting in dramatic shifts in previously published historical temperature data, causing figures for estimated global surface temperature prior to 1970 to now be lower and figures since 1970 to now be higher - and appearing to provide evidence for those who say the Earth is warming.
John Goetz, writing last month in the science blog Climate Audit, analyzed the way NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calculates estimated global surface temperatures and showed that the addition of new, contemporary data could "have a ripple effect all the way back to the beginning of a [weather] station's history."
Goetz found 32 different versions of published global annual averages going back to Sept. 24, 2005, that showed the published figures - figures used as a baseline to demonstrate change through time - changing hundreds of times.
"On average 20% of the historical record was modified 16 times in the last 2 1/2 years," he wrote. "The largest single jump was 0.27 °C. This occurred between the Oct. 13, 2006 and Jan. 15, 2007 records when Aug 2006 changed from an anomoly of +0.43 °C to +0.70 °C, a change of nearly 68 percent."
Temperature anomalies - differences between the average measured global air temperature and some long-term mean - are primary data for studies of climate change.
The magnitude of the changes in the reworked historical data observed by Goetz - 0.27 °C - is more that a third of the total average increase in global air temperature near the Earth's surface - 0.74 ± 0.18 °C - that has occurred over the last century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
U.S. temperature anomalies -- 1999 report -- see graphic
A comparison of annual temperature anomalies for the United States from 1880 to 1999 further revealed that shifts in historical estimates of temperature, since NASA refined its data for the period 1930 to 1999, are biased toward global warming.
Steven Goddard, writing in The Register, analyzed two different NASA reports of historic temperature anomalies - published in 1999 and 2007 - and showed estimates for years in the 1930s through 1970 were lowered while estimates for years from 1970 to 1999 were increased between the two reporting periods. The results, when graphed, described a temperature regime that was cooler than previously thought prior to 1970 and warmer than thought since - precisely what advocates of global warming argue but what earlier renditions of the data did not say so clearly.
That, said Goddard, defied statistical odds.
U.S. temperature anomalies -- 2007 report -- see graphic
"So what is the probability of this effort consistently increasing recent temperatures and decreasing older temperatures? From a statistical viewpoint, data recalculation should cause each year to have a 50/50 probability of going either up or down - thus the odds of all 70 adjusted years working in concert to increase the slope of the graph are an astronomical 2 raised to the power of 70. That is one-thousand-billion-billion to one. This isn't an exact representation of the odds because for some of the years (less than 15) the revisions went against the trend - but even a 55/15 split is about as likely as a room full of chimpanzees eventually typing Hamlet. That would be equivalent to flipping a penny 70 times and having it come up heads 55 times. It will never happen - one trillion to one odds (2 raised to the power 40).
"Particularly troubling are the years from 1986-1998. In the 2007 version of the graph, the 1986 data was adjusted upwards by 0.4 degrees relative to the 1999 graph. In fact, every year except one from 1986-1998 was adjusted upwards, by an average of 0.2 degrees. If someone wanted to present a case for a lot of recent warming, adjusting data upwards would be an excellent way to do it. ... <snip>
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