Day: September 22, 2005

Financial Jihad

by Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
HumanEvents.com | Posted Sep 22, 2005

“A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing to abolish this slavery [to the West],” former Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir told a banking conference in Kuala Lumpur in November 2002. The conference was convened following the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. “to absorb the 11 September shock and reinforce the stability of Islamic finance.” Representatives of nine Islamic nations gathered to set up an Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) to “act as a global authority for Islamic banking and finance” and to compete with secular U.S. and international banking regulatory agencies.

Since 2002, internationally and domestically the Islamic impetus to impose Sharia-governed banking on the West has only increased.

Today, the Lariba American Finance House, based in Pasadena, California, operates its Islamic banking services in 28 states, modeled on the Sharia’aa Foundation guidelines of “His Eminence” Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi. The good sheikh endorses suicide bombing, wife-beating—and attacks against America. Lariba also sells Islamic mortgages to Fannie Mae. Continue reading “Financial Jihad” →


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

Morbid Philanthropy

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 22, 2005

In its 2004 annual report, the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation notes that it has “invested more than $400 million in pursuing a more secure world.” After the Cold War, the foundation sought to prevent “nuclear weapons … from falling into the wrong hands.” The “Age of Terror,” however, has urgently refocused MacArthur on its “duty” to understand “transnational terrorists,” who they are, how they are organized, how they gain “moral, political and economic support”–and what “resentments and frustrations” drive them “to perpetrate terrorist acts.” [1]
From this departure poin–the wrongheaded belief that frustrations drive terror–it is a short leap to seeking a scapegoat. It explains the foundation’s tendency, where the Middle East is concerned, to shower gifts upon researchers, universities and quasi academic institutions with an anti-American or anti-Israel bent. In doing so its grants cross the line into overt political advocacy.

Favorite Middle East grantees include “human rights” and “law” efforts with anti-American attitudes. [2] A $250,000 grant in March 2003 to Human Rights Watch “to monitor the human rights impacts of the war in Iraq” focuses primarily on U.S. rather than terrorists’ “human rights violations.” [3]

But studies of “Palestine” seem to be a foundation specialty. In October 2000, $51,000 was directed to the Institute for Palestine Studies—hardly a disinterested party—for a nine month study of “Palestinian Refugee Property Losses and Resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” The grant evidently backed anti-Israel Randolph-Macon College history professor Michael Fischbach, who published a paper on Palestinian refugee compensation in its Journal of Palestine Studies. [4] Continue reading “Morbid Philanthropy” →


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.