Saudi Top Cleric and Salafi Wahhabi authority: Qaeda, ISIL “Enemy No 1” of Islam

Saudi Top Cleric and Salafi Wahhabi authority: Qaeda, ISIL “Enemy No 1” of Islam

    Tuesday, August 19, 2014   No comments

Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh on Tuesday blasted Al-Qaeda and the Takfiri group, ISIL, as "enemy number one" of Islam, in a statement issued in Riyadh.

"The ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism... have nothing to do with Islam and (their proponents) are the enemy number one of Islam," the kingdom's top cleric said. Saudi Mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh

He cited Takfiris from the Islamic State, which has declared a "caliphate" straddling large parts of Iraq and Syria, and the global Al-Qaeda terror network.

"Muslims are the main victims of this extremism, as shown by crimes committed by the so-called ISIL, Al-Qaeda and groups linked to them," the mufti said, quoting a verse in the Quran urging the "killing" of people who do deeds harmful to Islam.

"In the circumstances the Islamic nation is living through, several countries have been destabilized" by extremists, who "divide Muslims" in the name of religion, the mufti said.

He warned: "In Islam, after heresy, dividing Muslims is the greatest crime."
The mufti urged "tolerance, which was at the origin of Islam's growth and longevity."

The ISIL had pronounced its “caliphate” last June. The Takfiri group has been widely known for its brutal crimes against civilians in Iraq and Syria.

Damascus has repeatedly accused the Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states of destabilizing Syria through funding and arming Takfiri groups like ISIL and Nusra Front.

Last Week, Hezbollah Secretary General, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah warned that several countries, including Saudi Arabia fear the threat of ISIL.

During an interview with Lebanese daily al-Akhbar, the resistance leader highlighted that some countries know what they have created and raised, and that's why their diagnosis of ISIL risk is the most accurate of others because they know what they have had, speaking about the "real horror" inside the Gulf countries and the Saudi Arabia because this thought have been taught for decades for people, schools and in the curriculum.

"Turkey and Qatar are backing ISIL, and I am convinced the Saudi Arabia's fear of it," Sayyed Nasrallah told al-Akhbar.

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The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race

The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race

    Monday, August 18, 2014   No comments

Will the recent rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, be a tipping point in the struggle against racial injustice, or will it be a minor footnote in some future grad student’s thesis on Civil Unrest in the Early Twenty-First Century?

You probably have heard of the Kent State shootings: on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University. During those 13 seconds of gunfire, four students were killed and nine were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralyzed. The shock and outcry resulted in a nationwide strike of 4 million students that closed more than 450 campuses. Five days after the shooting, 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C. And the nation’s youth was energetically mobilized to end the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and mindless faith in the political establishment.

You probably haven’t heard of the Jackson State shootings.

On May 14th, 10 days after Kent State ignited the nation, at the predominantly black Jackson State University in Mississippi, police killed two black students (one a high school senior, the other the father of an 18-month-old baby) with shotguns and wounded twelve others.

There was no national outcry. The nation was not mobilized to do anything. That heartless leviathan we call History swallowed that event whole, erasing it from the national memory.

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David Cameron: [War on ISIL] is a battle against a poisonous ideology that is condemned by all faiths and by all faith leaders, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim

David Cameron: [War on ISIL] is a battle against a poisonous ideology that is condemned by all faiths and by all faith leaders, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim

    Sunday, August 17, 2014   No comments

 Stability. Security. The peace of mind that comes from being able to get a decent job and provide for your family, in a country that you feel has a good future ahead of it and that treats people fairly. In a nutshell, that is what people in Britain want – and what the Government I lead is dedicated to building.

Britain – our economy, our security, our future – must come first. After a deep and damaging recession, and our involvement in long and difficult conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hardly surprising that so many people say to me when seeing the tragedies unfolding on their television screens: “Yes, let’s help with aid, but let’s not get any more involved.”

I agree that we should avoid sending armies to fight or occupy. But we need to recognise that the brighter future we long for requires a long-term plan for our security as well as for our economy. True security will only be achieved if we use all our resources – aid, diplomacy, our military prowess – to help bring about a more stable world. Today, when every nation is so immediately interconnected, we cannot turn a blind eye and assume that there will not be a cost for us if we do.

The creation of an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and extending into Syria is not a problem miles away from home. Nor is it a problem that should be defined by a war 10 years ago. It is our concern here and now. Because if we do not act to stem the onslaught of this exceptionally dangerous terrorist movement, it will only grow stronger until it can target us on the streets of Britain. We already know that it has the murderous intent. Indeed, the first Isil-inspired terrorist acts on the continent of Europe have already taken place.

Our first priority has of course been to deal with the acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq. We should be proud of the role that our brave armed services and aid workers have played in the international effort. British citizens have risked their lives to get 80 tons of vital supplies to the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar. It is right that we use our aid programme to respond rapidly to a situation like this: Britain has given £13 million to support the aid effort. We also helped to plan a detailed international rescue operation and we remain ready and flexible to respond to the ongoing challenges in or around Dahuk, where more than 450,000 people have increased the population by 50 per cent.

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Maliki and other Iraqi policians are bickering about their rights to power while poor Iraqis are struggling to say alive; Yazidi victims of ISIS dying of thirst on mountains

Maliki and other Iraqi policians are bickering about their rights to power while poor Iraqis are struggling to say alive; Yazidi victims of ISIS dying of thirst on mountains

    Monday, August 11, 2014   No comments

ISR Comment: While thousands and thousands of Iraqis are victimized by ISIL and its affiliates, Iraqi politicians are fighting about who has the right to form a government. Those politicians should be sent to live in these mountains, not these poor, vulnerable people. Shame on you Maliki, shame on you all politicians.

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Yazidi victims of ISIS dying of thirst on mountains

Stranded on a barren mountaintop, thousands of minority Iraqis are faced with a bleak choice: descend and risk slaughter at the hands of the encircled Sunni extremists or sit tight and risk dying of thirst.

Humanitarian agencies said Tuesday that between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians remain trapped on Mount Sinjar since being driven out of surrounding villages and the town of Sinjar two days earlier. But the mountain that had looked like a refuge is becoming a graveyard for their children.

Unable to dig deep into the rocky mountainside, displaced families said they have buried young and elderly victims of the harsh conditions in shallow graves, their bodies covered with stones. Iraqi government planes attempted to airdrop bottled water to the mountain on Monday night but reached few of those marooned.

“There are children dying on the mountain, on the roads,” said Marzio Babille, the Iraq representative for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “There is no water, there is no vegetation, they are completely cut off and surrounded by Islamic State. It’s a disaster, a total disaster.”

Most of those who fled Sinjar are from the minority Yazidi sect, which melds parts of ancient Zoroastrianism with Christianity and Islam. They are considered by the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State to be devil worshippers and apostates.
The dramatic advance of the extremist Sunni fighters has torn the ethnic and religious fabric of the country, with Christians and Shiites also uprooted from cities and towns.

The Islamic State’s takeover of Sinjar, the first major setback for Kurdish forces protecting the country’s north, sent about 200,000 people fleeing, according to the United Nations. Some 147,000 have arrived in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, flooding refugee camps.

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Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS

Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS

    Sunday, August 10, 2014   No comments

President Obama has long-ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army ... fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict—the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

Well, his former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, isn’t buying it. In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the "failure" that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

As she writes in her memoir of her State Department years, Hard Choices, she was an inside-the-administration advocate of doing more to help the Syrian rebellion. Now, her supporters argue, her position has been vindicated by recent events.

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Around 20,000 protesters marched through London waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans

Around 20,000 protesters marched through London waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans

    Saturday, August 09, 2014   No comments

 Thousands of demonstrators descended on the streets of central London this afternoon to protest at the bombing of Gaza by Israeli forces.

Waving placards and the black, white, green and red flag of Palestine, the marchers converged on the BBC's Broadcasting House near Oxford Circus.

Chants of "Free, Free, Palestine" were shouted across London's busy West End as marchers then made their way to Hyde Park to be addressed by speakers including George Galloway and Diane Abbott.

Organised by the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War, the march passed peacefully, according to most onlookers.

Pupils from Ed Miliband's old school, Haverstock, in Chalk Farm, north London, joined the march, accompanied by a samba band.


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Hard choices for a gun-shy President: How Obama Evolved on the Issue of ‘Genocide’ in Iraq

Hard choices for a gun-shy President: How Obama Evolved on the Issue of ‘Genocide’ in Iraq

    Friday, August 08, 2014   No comments

As a first-time presidential candidate in 2007, Barack Obama built his campaign around a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Nothing could shake him from his plan to end what he called a “dumb” war. At a New Hampshire campaign stop that July, Obama was asked whether he might delay a pullout if it meant preventing outright genocide in Iraq.

No, Obama said. “[If] that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done.”

Almost exactly five years later, Obama has ordered military action in Iraq “to prevent a potential act of genocide,” as he put it in his public remarks Thursday night.

For now, that action will consist of airlifting supplies to thousands of members of Iraq’s Yazidi religious sect, trapped atop a mountain and surrounded by the fanatical Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and greater Syria (ISIS). But it could also include air strikes against those ISIS fighters.

Did Obama flip-flop on a matter as serious as genocide? 

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Gaza is a crime made in Washington as well as Jerusalem: The carnage unleashed on the Palestinians is part of a decades-old routine that depends on western support

Gaza is a crime made in Washington as well as Jerusalem: The carnage unleashed on the Palestinians is part of a decades-old routine that depends on western support

    Thursday, August 07, 2014   No comments

by Seumas Milne
Global revulsion at the mind-numbing carnage of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza seems finally to have spurred some of the western political class to speak out. The resignation of Sayeeda Warsi, Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister, in protest against her government’s “morally indefensible” stance, emboldened Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, to demand the suspension of arms export licences to Israel.

Last week it was Ed Miliband who condemned Israel’s invasion and the prime minister’s “silence on the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians”. Even the United States administration denounced its strategic protege’s “disgraceful” bombardment of a school, while Barack Obama described Palestinian suffering as “ heartbreaking” – as if he had nothing to do with it.

Now that Israelis and Palestinians have arrived in Cairo to turn the ceasefire into something more long-lasting, perhaps it feels safer to take a stand. But a month of indiscriminate brutality in which 1,875 Palestinians and 67 Israelis have been killed is still presented, grotesquely, as a war of Israeli self-defence – rather than as a decades-long confrontation between occupier and occupied, in which western governments stand resolutely on the side of the occupier.

And while the overwhelming majority of Palestinian dead are civilians – 430 of them children – and 64 of the Israeli dead are soldiers, it is Hamas that is branded terrorist, rather than the Israeli armed forces armed with the most sophisticated targeting technology in the world.

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Who started the Gaza war, why, and how, Uri Avnery's account from inside Israel

Who started the Gaza war, why, and how, Uri Avnery's account from inside Israel

    Wednesday, August 06, 2014   No comments

BOMBS ARE raining on Gaza and rockets on Southern Israel, people are dying and homes are being destroyed.

Again.

Again without any purpose. Again with the certainty that after it’s all over, everything will essentially be the same as it was before.

But I can hardly hear the sirens which warn of rockets coming towards Tel Aviv. I cannot take my mind off the awful thing that happened in Jerusalem.

IF A gang of neo-Nazis had kidnapped a 16-year old boy in a London Jewish neighborhood in the dark of the night, driven him to Hyde Park, beaten him up, poured gasoline into his mouth, doused him all over and set him on fire – what would have happened?

Wouldn't the UK have exploded in a storm of anger and disgust?

Wouldn't the Queen have expressed her outrage?

Wouldn't the Prime Minister have rushed to the home of the bereaved family to apologize on behalf of the entire nation?

Wouldn't the leadership of the neo-Nazis, their active supporters and brain-washers be indicted and condemned?

Perhaps in the UK. Perhaps in Germany.

Not here.

THIS ABOMINABLE atrocity took place in Jerusalem. A Palestinian boy was abducted and burned alive. No racist crime in Israel ever came close to it.

Burning people alive is an abomination everywhere. In a state that claims to be “Jewish”, it is even worse.

In Jewish history, only one chapter comes close to the Holocaust: the Spanish inquisition. This Catholic institution tortured Jews and burned them alive at the stake. Later, this happened sometimes in the Russian pogroms. Even the most fanatical enemy of Israel could not imagine such an awful thing happening in Israel. Until now.

Under Israeli law, East Jerusalem is not occupied territory. It is a part of sovereign Israel.

THE CHAIN of events was as follows:

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How to Fix It: Ending this war in Gaza begins with recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political actor.

How to Fix It: Ending this war in Gaza begins with recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political actor.

    Wednesday, August 06, 2014   No comments

by Jimmy Carter , Mary Robinson
Israelis and Palestinians are still burying their loved ones as Gaza's third war in six years continues. Since July 8, when this war began, more than 1,600 Palestinian and 65 Israeli lives have been sacrificed. Many in the world are heartbroken in the powerless certainty that more will die, that more are being killed every hour.

This tragedy results from the deliberate obstruction of a promising move toward peace in the region, when a reconciliation agreement among the Palestinian factions was announced in April. This was a major concession by Hamas, in opening Gaza to joint control under a technocratic government that did not include any Hamas members. The new government also pledged to adopt the three basic principles demanded by the Middle East Quartet comprised of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia: nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and adherence to past agreements. Tragically, Israel rejected this opportunity for peace and has succeeded in preventing the new government's deployment in Gaza.

Two factors are necessary to make Palestinian unity possible. First, there must be at least a partial lifting of the 7-year-old sanctions and blockade that isolate the 1.8 million people in Gaza. There must also be an opportunity for the teachers, police, and welfare and health workers on the Hamas payroll to be paid. These necessary requirements for a human standard of living continue to be denied. Instead, Israel blocked Qatar's offer to provide funds to pay civil servants' salaries, and access to and from Gaza has been further tightened by Egypt and Israel.

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