Saudi Arabia: Your first choice destination for 'fun in the sun'

Photo of the Empty Quarter (Rub al-Khali) courtesy of Google Images

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia seems an unlikely destination for fun in the sun.

Yet here was a Saudi prince at a tourism conference in neighboring Dubai, busily trying to sell his country as a vacation spot — provided visitors don't expect alcohol, women come robed, and everyone refrains from eating in public from dawn to dusk during the holy month of Ramadan.

And swinging singles need not apply. Women younger than 40 must be accompanied by their brothers or fathers.

Undaunted, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, until recently accessible to only a handful of non-Muslim tourists, is opening its doors, beckoning curious world travelers to its mysterious and hidden treasures.

The change springs from the new policies of King Abdullah, who ascended the throne last August after the death of his half-brother, King Fahd.

Abdullah, a reformer, wants to show that his country is more than just the former home of Osama bin Laden and a breeding ground for Islamic extremism.

"He wants to show the world a different face to the kingdom. It's all part of a greater plan to open up the country, to show that though it is Arab and Islamic, it is also modern and moderate," said Mishari al Thaybi, a Saudi writer and analyst for the London-based newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat.

"Tourists are the best ambassadors for any country," Mishari added. Visit Saudi Arabia, but dress and behave appropriately by Lara Sukhtian

Mark Alexander

Happy Independence Day!

Flag courtesy of Google Images

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our American visitors a very happy Independence Day.

Mark Alexander

Islam's "higher status"

PUTRAJAYA: Islam has a higher status than other faiths in Malaysia, said a lawyer holding a watching brief for the Malaysian Muslim Lawyers Association. Islam has higher status in Malaysia

Mark Alexander

When the public must be kept in the dark

Anti-terrorist police are tackling an "accelerating" number of plots by violent Muslim Jihadi extremists, according to Britain's most senior counter-terrorism officer.

Scotland Yard anti-terrorism branch is involved in an "unprecedented" 70 investigations, Peter Clarke the head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch and national co-ordinator for anti-terrorist investigations, warned yesterday. More than 60 people are facing trial on terrorist allegations. Two-thirds of those have been charged since last July.

In one of the most sombre and detailed statements yet on the threat to Britain from Islamic extremist terrorists, Mr Clarke, who is heading the inquiry into last year's July 7 bombings said the intelligence picture includes some "sinister" threats. "There are some 60 individuals awaiting trial in the UK for terrorist-related offences. This is unprecedented and the flow of new cases shows no sign of abating - if anything it is accelerating," he said. Terror plots accelerating, warns police chief by John Steele

Mark Alexander

TOSH from THE TIMES!

In the anguished weeks of debate and foreboding that followed the London bombings last July, dire predictions were made. British Muslims would become the targets of widespread intimidation and hate campaigns as the backlash against extremism took hold. Young British Muslims, it was said, would become further alienated from mainstream society, retreating into a paranoid world of conspiracy theories and religious fanaticism. The community would run into growing hostility and discrimination as perceptions of them as a Fifth Column closed opportunities and people’s minds. They would become isolated and embittered.

The predictions were wrong. British society, and London in particular, rose above crude revenge. Politicians, faith groups and ordinary citizens reached out to the Muslim mainstream in support, sharing their bewilderment and supporting them in the painful selfexamination of why their faith had bred such violence. There were some isolated hate crimes, but no general spiral into communal violence and entrenched hostility. Islam in Britain

Mark Alexander

Islamophobia: A Turkish viewpoint

The hostility towards Islam that is experienced in European countries started to emerge when the Soviet Union dissolved and the Warsaw Pact countries regained their independence. In those years the enemy concept of Communism and Marxism vanished and people who were in need to find a new enemy concept started looking at the 1.2 billion Muslims living in 57 countries. And certain Islamist organizations gave reasons for this approach. Islam phobia by Faruk Şen

Mark Alexander

Make Jihad on Israel, say British Muslim extremists

British Jihad group declares 'Israel is cancer, Islam is answer,' calls on followers to carry out holy war by Yaakov Lappin

Radical Muslims in Britain have blasted Hamas for failing to carry out a "real" Islamic holy war, and have called for a Jihad against Israel following the recent escalation of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict in the Gaza Strip.

A number of British-based Muslim organizations have in recent days called on followers to wage war on Israel.

"What the Jews are doing in Palestine today will no doubt disturb any true Muslim," a statement authored by 'Abdul Aziz al-Dimashqi' said on the website of the Saved Sect group.

"However, what hurts us equally as much is to see the Muslims in Palestine calling for an independent Palestinian state, Palestinian constitutions, man-made law, democracy, freedom and so on. Hamas… have no intention of establishing the sharia (Islamic code), and are only concerned with having their own nationalistic state," the statement said. UK Islamists: Make Jihad on Israel

Mark Alexander

Soccer displeases Allah!

UK jihadists attack 'religion of soccer,' warn Muslims against taking part in 'colonial crusader scheme' by Yaakov Lappin

A British jihadist website has warned Muslims against being drawn in to what they described as "the new religion of soccer."

The Saved Sect website, which calls on Muslims to work to establish an Islamic state in Britain, has attacked "football fever," saying that soccer has "captivated the masses, dedicating their time and effort towards it."

Comparing the allegiance of soccer fans to Islam and jihad, the organization said: "Football is the deen (religion) by which people live their lives by and are willing to die for. Their jihad is to fight against those who are arch rivals against their team. Their da'wah (call, invitation) is to publicize, defend and justify their team, inviting others to support them in this." Jihadist site: Soccer is against Islam

Mark Alexander

Immigration no solution

'We recognise the positive contributions immigration makes to the country and the economy," the Prime Minister's official spokesman said last week. "If we don't have migration, we don't have the growth from the economy that we all benefit from."

He was responding to some concerns about the rate of immigration raised by Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead - but Downing Street's claim that "if we don't have immigration, we won't have economic growth" has been stated over and over again since Labour took office in 1997.

If you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it. What you cannot do is turn it from being false into being true. And the Government's claim about the economic benefits of immigration is false. As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration.

There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative. Never have we seen immigration on this scale: we just can't cope by Robert Rowthorn

Mark Alexander

O leaders! Harken!
In a brief, interesting and to-the-point letter published in the Galveston Daily News today, all our leaders really need to know:

The events in Florida in which the FBI arrested several followers of the “religion of peace” for conspiring to do America harm caused many to ask: Why would our own citizens want to do harm to America? Islam, Not Terrorism, Is Our Real National Enemy

Mark Alexander

Osama spews his venom again

Photo courtesy of the BBC

A new recording from al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has been posted on an Islamist website.

He praised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq killed three weeks ago, as a "lion of holy war".

The video, lasting 19 minutes, shows a still picture of Bin Laden, and moving pictures of al-Zarqawi.

Unnamed US officials said the recording was authentic. It is the fourth audio message Bin Laden has released since the start of this year.

However, no new video images of the al-Qaeda leader have appeared since October 2004.

Last week a video was broadcast purportedly showing the deputy leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, in which he paid tribute to Zarqawi and said his death would be avenged. New Bin Laden message is released

Mark Alexander

Islamophobia on the rise in Canada

Incidents of Islamophobia are on the rise following the arrest of 17 Toronto-area men and boys on terrorism charges, Ontario human rights commissioner Barbara Hall says. Islam attacks rising

Mark Alexander

Shocked Canada finds out what veiled women chat about!

MISSISSAUGA — When it came time to write up the premarital agreement between Zakaria Amara and Nada Farooq, Ms. Farooq briefly considered adding a clause that would allow her to ask for a divorce.

She said that Mr. Amara (now accused of being a leader of the alleged terror plot that led to the arrests of 17 Muslim men early this month) had to aspire to take part in jihad.

"[And] if he ever refuses a clear opportunity to leave for jihad, then i want the choice of divorce," she wrote in one of more than 6,000 Internet postings uncovered by The Globe and Mail.

Wives of four of the central figures arrested last month were among the most active on the website, sharing, among other things, their passion for holy war, disgust at virtually every aspect of non-Muslim society and a hatred of Canada. The posts were made on personal blogs belonging to both Mr. Amara and Ms. Farooq, as well as a semi-private forum founded by Ms. Farooq where dozens of teens in the Meadowvale Secondary School area chatted. The vast majority of the posts were made over a period of about 20 months, mostly in 2004, and the majority of those were made by the group's female members. Hateful chatter behind the veil

Mark Alexander

Row over Ayaan's immigration status brings down Dutch government

The Netherlands was without a government last night after the ruling coalition split over the behaviour of its immigration minister towards a prominent Somali-born Dutch MP.

Moves by the immigration minister Rita Verdonk to strip Ayaan Hirsi Ali of her Dutch citizenship and a successful legal campaign to evict her from her apartment resulted in international outrage against the Netherlands. It also touched off a political firestorm at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is at a peak.

Last night, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, who only hours earlier was vowing to hold on, announced that he will tender the resignation of the Government to Queen Beatrix. The Government's smallest coalition member, D66, withdrew support from the coalition over Ms Verdonk's policies. Mr Balkenende's announcement ended 36 hours of political drama and came moments after three ministers quit the Cabinet following a vote earlier in the day by the D66 party in a no-confidence motion against the Government . Dutch government falls in row over MPs passport by Leonard Doyle, Foreign Editor for The Independent

Mark Alexander

Supreme Court plays the dirty on ol' George
Lawyers behaving badly! Wars can never be won this way! - Mark Alexander

Children play a game called "opposite day." Whatever someone says is taken to mean the opposite. Some Supreme Court justices have apparently never grown out of their appreciation of this game, to judge by their ruling in the Hamdan case involving military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.

Last year, Congress (you might have heard of it — it writes the nation's laws) passed a bill signed into law by the president of the United States (he also should be familiar — the nation's commander in chief). It said that "no court, justice or judge" shall have the jurisdiction to consider habeas corpus applications of detainees at Gitmo. It would take a legal escape artist on par with David Blaine to wiggle out of that one, but, sure enough, five Supreme Court justices were up to the task.

The Supreme Court has an important role in our constitutional scheme, but it is not fit to, nor was it ever meant to, render fundamental judgments about matters of war and peace. For that we have the elected branches, primarily the executive, which has the flexibility and the focus to prosecute wars. But today's court knows no bounds. The Supreme Court at War by Rich Lowry for the Jewish World Review

Mark Alexander

Democracy, Freedom, and Islam

Islam supercedes nationality," says media mogul Rupert Murdoch. "You have to be careful about Muslims who have a very strong, in many ways a fine but very strong religion, which supercedes any sense of nationalism wherever they go," he told Channel Nine. Mr Murdoch was present at a function in Sydney that described him as the most influential Australian of all times.

It was indeed a bold remark from the media baron, considering the fact that mainstream media is sickeningly "secular". Is this an indicator of things to come? The Western media showed guts, even if misplaced, by republishing the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in various newspapers across Europe, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. According to confidential sources, Prophet Mohammed's cartoons were republished across newspapers to preempt a reaction from the Islamic world.

The Western intelligentsia is increasingly becoming aware of the danger that West (along with rest of the world) faces from Islam. Niall Fergusson and Mark Steyn anticipate civil war (like French riots last October) taking place in European cities as Muslim demography burgeons and European population senesces. European demography will be ill-prepared to meet an Islamic challenge in, say, 2020. Can Islam be democratic? By Balbir K Punj

Then there's my own essay which first appeared on Saturday, November 12, 2006, on this very topic:

"Until 9/11, the western world was largely ignorant of the religion of Islam, of its goals, of its aspirations. Indeed, even since 9/11, most people, and that includes our politicians, would not score very highly in a test of their knowledge on the subject. It should be obvious to all thinking people that our politicians are actually unaware, dare I say blind, to the dangers that Islam will increasingly cause us. It is truly a case of the blind leading the blind! That means to say, uninformed and unthinking politicians leading an ill-informed electorate. But folks, this is what we have right now. The same can hardly be said of Muslims in the Islamic world, though; for their knowledge of Christianity far surpasses - even though much of their knowledge is quite distorted - any knowledge of Islam by the man in the street in the West." - ©Mark Alexander Islam: The Enemy of Democracy and Freedom

Mark Alexander

A Reader's Letter to an Editor

As with every apologist for Islam, Aboo Mohammed totally obfuscates the real issue facing Islam today, which is certainly not whether Mohammed wrote the Quran. Such a fool's enigma is a non-issue at present. If it be true that Mohammed did not write the Quran, this in no way exculpates the religion of Islam from both its atrocious past and its contradictory present-- contradictory in that its most passionate defenders constantly refer to Islam as "the religion of peace."

The real issue for Islam today, even since its conception , whose apologists indelicately aggrandize their claims to the realms of metaphysical truth by making reference to the Torah of Jewish people; Islam, whose theological germinations and hadiths were made efficacious through enervating the Jews, Judaism, more precisely, the Torah of the Jews; the real issue for Islam is the horrendous and bloody manifestations of this religion emanating from among those Muslim masses who have faithfully and traditionally adhered to its tenets. In light of such obvious imperfections, regardless of who actually wrote the Quran, whether Mohammed or his god, one prodigious detail remains clear to many thinking people in the Western world: wherever Islam sets its expansionist gaze, there also will be found, inevitably, anti-Jewish hatred, intermingled with intolerance of the non-Muslim, which, predictably, translates into Islam's irrevocable tradition of violence and bloodshed. To deter from this, Islam's shameful reality, to equivocate in the slightest, is to construct a sort of intellectual epidermis, a covering if you will, for the preservation of the animal Islam, a beast which has been grandiloquently appellated as "the religion of peace." Poetry it is not, and I find it difficult to comprehend how such an aggregation of primative hatreds could ever be interpreted as such. Apologist for Islam (Written by Michael Devolin)

Mark Alexander

Can British Muslims Change?
I think this audio clip about what's supposed to be going on in Britain's Muslim community is worth listening to. I wonder what you think of it.

From the New Statesman

Mark Alexander

I know the feeling!

Three years ago, I [Melanie Phillips] wrote a proposal for a book about the alarming resurgence of anti-Jewish feeling in Britain, the way this had been taken up by the left and the fact that this was undermining Britain’s ability to defend itself against global Islamist terrorism. My literary agent thought it was good stuff and sent it round. Every publishing house said no.

I was taken aside by a senior editor at a big-name imprint who was well-disposed towards me. ‘Drop it’, he said. ‘No British publisher will touch this’. Why? Because it defended Israel, already well on the way to becoming a pariah state, and worse still levelled the charge of anti-Jewish prejudice against the British intelligentsia.

I broadened out the proposal to include an analysis of what I thought was the true nature of the threat posed by the Islamic jihad; the back-to-front thinking in Britain which was turning Islamist aggressors into victims while western and Israeli victims were turned into aggressors; the role played in this process by multiculturalism; and the lethal threat this all posed to a free world under attack.

My agent sent this proposal to specifically Jewish publishers in the hope of touching a nerve. It touched one all right - the problem was it was the wrong nerve. ‘I don’t agree with this AT ALL so I won’t publish it’, said one. Another jovially observed: ‘I’d rather take ricin than publish this’. The battle to publish Londonistan

Buy Londonistan in the US
Buy Londonistan in the UK

Mark Alexander

Christians turning to 'martyrdom' for Islam!

Many Palestinian Christians identify with the struggle against Israel to such an extent that they find themselves on the side of Islamic fundamentalism. In some cases, Palestinian Christians have actually joined Islamic terror groups. Christian 'Martyr' for Islam

Mark Alexander