Category: Muslim Brotherhood

A Caliphate of Toxic Assets

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Frontpage Magazine | Jun. 29, 2009

When a pro-terrorist organization announces its intention to launch a financial jihad against the West, it is well worth learning their methods — especially when they promote a religious pseudo-financial scheme through largely unregulated practices purported to be safer than the conventional. But ultimately, the new brand of assets are constructed with as little, and perhaps considerably less, transparency than the last wave of toxic assets that hit the economy, with catastrophic results.

The Muslim organization Hizb Ut Tahrir capitalizes on Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna’s 20th century derivative, encouraging followers to build a parallel financial structure. Al-Banna envisioned the resultant shari’a-compliant finance as a “back door” into Western financial markets and institutions through which to supplant liberty and prosperity with Islam. Muslim clerics including MB spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi promote Shari’a finance as generally safer than Western investments, a diversification method to steady personal assets—and a stable economic system that should replace capitalism. Call it “financial replacement theology,” if you wish.

In July, Hizb Ut Tahrir plans to launch its U.S. arm with a huge Chicago “Khalifah conference” heralding the coming Caliphate and global Islamic supremacism. After 9/11, Germany and Sweden outlawed Hizb Ut Tahrir. In July 2005, Pakistan’s then-president Pervez Musharaf warned Britain not to tolerate its continued U.K. presence. But in the U.S., Hizb Ut Tahrir has proudly announced intentions to replace Capitalism with Islam.

Founded in 1953 — five years into Jordan’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem — Hizb Ut Tahrir labels itself “peaceful,” but strategically objects to violence only for the time being. The group sympathizes with the Muslim Brotherhood, considers Europe’s democracies “a farce”—and the U.S., U.K. and Israel, works of “the devil“—and seeks to impose Islamic law (shari’a) worldwide.

Major banks from Citigroup, HSBC, Chase, Bank of America and Lloyds TSB — probably unaware of the etymology of Islamic finance — established subsidiaries offering shari’a-compliant products. Mutual funds at Principal Financial Group, UBS, Amana Funds and SEI Investments, among others, followed suit. Especially late last year as the devastating toll of sub-prime mortgage lending mounted, clients were assured that Islamic banking — in many respects a dangerous financial fad — was much safer than other banks and investment houses.

Yet bad economic news has not escaped the supposedly secure Islamic investing sector. Islamic securities can also (like all other asset classes) go into default, moreover. Holders of East Cameron Partners LP’s “safe,” asset-backed Islamic bonds (sukuk) now line up before a Louisiana bankruptcy judge with all the other hapless creditors of the Texas-based Easter Cameron Oil and Gas Co. that filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last October.

The East Cameron default was no one-time Islamic finance anomaly, either. In May, Kuwait’s Investment Dar Co. — 50% owner of the Aston Martin Lagonda luxury car manufacturer — defaulted on a $100 million sukuk. And in June Saad Group Islamic bonds traded at a quarter of their “face” value — that is, the the roughly $650 billion price at which issued by Saudi billionaire Maan al-Sanea’s company. The Saad Trading Contracting & Financial Services subsidiary, like East Cameron, went into financial restructuring, aka bankruptcy, after the Saudi Central bank froze the al-Sanea family accounts.

As I’ve often previously warned, events now show that shari’a banking may prove more susceptible to market dislocations than other financial sectors.

Islamic bonds employ “some of the most complex” Western structured finance tools ever created. They transform liquid, traceable cash flows from interest-bearing debt into illiquid assets — that cannot be easily unwound. In the 1980s, bond sponsors transformed trillions of dollars in cash flow claims on illiquid real assets into liquid, traceable mortgage-backed “pass-throughs” and “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs).

The Muslim Brotherhood quickly re-branded the “special purpose entities” (SPEs) — that kind that, coincidentally, sank Enron — as Islamic “special-purpose vehicles (SPVs)” Sharia banks use these vehicles to “restructure interest-bearing debt, collecting interest [as] rent or [a] price mark-up.” Issuers of sukuk al-ijara—shari’a bonds like those now in default—sell hard assets to SPVs, which sell share certificates to fund their investment and in turn lease the purchased assets back to the sukuk issuers, collecting the principal plus interest that they then pass to sukuk investors as “rent.” But now, sukuk issuers are defaulting on “rent,” implying that SPVs can’t sell or return property to issuers when their sukuks mature.

That means, in essence, shari’a finance is a sham.
“There is no such thing as interest free investment,” warns New York University MBA Joy Brighton, echoing Rice University Islamic economics and finance chairman Mahmoud el-Gamal. “All Islamic finance today is interest based,” the latter complained in the Financial Times two years ago. Furthermore, Islamic finance features a few other unique “complexities”—namely that

*”Shari’a regulations can override commercial decisions.
*Documentation is not standardized
*Inter-creditor agreements can be complex

As U.S. financial institutions crumble, rattling markets, Congress has focused on regulating the opaque, previously unregulated securities called credit default swaps that Brighton describes as guaranteed boxes of counter-party risks. “One party pays a premium, the second guarantees payment, and a third guarantees the guarantor.” AIG, for example, guaranteed payment on billions of dollars worth of sub-prime mortgage loans. “The credit default swap is the guarantee, and AIG bore the default risk burden in exchange for upfront fees on maybe trillions of dollars in loans.”

But credit default swaps are old news, Brighton says. “A new generation of toxic assets has not yet hit anyone’s radar.” While touted as such, Islamic securities aren’t immune to default. Many more Islamic issues are likely to succumb as the global economy worsens.

“Islamic banking is in the toxic derivatives genre,” says Brighton. Each counter-party agreement within its complex “boxes” of interwoven counter-party risks, is a contract for “payment” and “delivery/receipt of funds.” Issuers create derivatives when they “peel off and resell pieces” from individual securities containing multiple counter-party contracts. One default by a party to any of the interwoven contracts in a “box” can cause its whole structure to collapse.

Moreover, Islamic finance is doubly toxic. Many banking corporations have created Islamic subsidiaries, says Brighton — segregated oil wealth managed by “outside money managers” and Islamic radicals who don’t circulate money globally, but keep it “within the Islamic community, as a charity—and jihad-funding mechanism.” They’re just another economic time bomb that financiers have blindly bought.


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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Sunlight is the best disinfectant

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | March 10, 2009

unitedinhateReview: United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror (WND Books, 2009), 239 pages.

In 2000, I noted a near-total mainstream news blackout on hateful Islamic ideological drivers of violence and jihad. I then began migrating from financial journalism to covering Islam and the Middle East. At first I believed colleagues were ignorant of services translating statements and articles from Arab, Urdu, Pashtan and Turkish clerics and media. A bevy of rude, angry replies to my letters, however, disabused me of that naiveté. Rather they suffered from an almost universal animus to facts—and to educating the public on underlying factors.

I simply could not understand.

Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate provides the first genuine insight I’ve yet found into this phenomenon. This brilliant historian and Ph.D. in U.S., Russian and Canadian foreign policy identifies a sort of psychotic dementia opposed to liberal humanism and the Socratic method. The diseased worship various Utopian ideologies, and are adamantly determined to reconstruct them on earth, regardless the costs in human life. Taking a page from everyman philosopher Eric Hoffer, Glazov labels them “believers.” These political theory ultra-advocates all possess one psychological characteristic—parallel to a genus, or DNA strand, and rooted in denial—a virulent, apparently communicable hatred for human imperfection, and therefore everything and everyone of the real world.

Neither believers nor their secular faiths are all identical. Yet deadly, duplicate attributes afflict all forms of Communism—engendered by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Pham Van Dong, Mao Zedong, and Daniel Ortega—and political Islam. Believers all suffer acute alienation from society, total blindness to it—and the inability “to rise to the challenges of secular modernity,” establish real, “lasting interpersonal relationships or [internalize] any values that help him find meaning in life.” (p. 6)

Even nearly two decades after the Soviet Union’s defeat, Glazov finds that believers continue to threaten Western civilization. Now, they have married their animus for humankind to Islam’s longstanding, toxic war against individual freedoms and its renewed, current-day jihad against the West.

After defining their ailment, Glazov reviews believers’ shocking prominence—and intense commitment to the communist death cult. Wooden-legged drug user, “satanic sexual orgies” aficionado and U.S. outcast, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, witnessed Ukrainian mass starvation in 1933, for example. Yet he reported the situation to be “not famine but abundance.” Peasants appeared “healthier and more cheerful” than anticipated. Their markets overflowed with “eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter.”

Journalist Anna Louise Strong covered Washington state’s 1916 Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) riots, became a World War I pacifist and in 1921 traveled to Poland and Russia, and metamorphosed into a Stalinist, immune to 1930s arrests and murders of her friends. In the 1950s, Strong migrated to China, where she died in 1970—still defending Mao’s bloody cultural revolution.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw, likewise “revered Stalin.” In 1931 his Soviet minders’ introduction of two train station waitresses “intimately acquainted” with his plays convinced him that Russians were more literate than Britons. Visiting Potemkin village prisons built to fool idiots like him similarly persuaded Shaw that ordinary English delinquents exited prison as “criminal types,” while Russia made such people ordinary men.

Few Kurt Weill fans may realize that Three Penny Opera collaborator Bertolt Brecht doubled as a dedicated Marxist, opposed to free expression. Art was meant “not to serve beauty or any other aesthetic value; [but] to destroy the old order and thereby enable the birth of the communist utopia.” Intellectuals were all scum, “parasites, professional criminals, informers….” The more innocent, the more they deserved to be shot. Brecht even said there “must have been enough evidence” to arrest his lover Carola Neher, who was never seen again.

These famous believers were followed by a long line of deniers—including Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Jean Paul Sartre, Abbie Hoffman, Shirley McLaine, Mary McCarthy, newsman Dan Rather, author Gunther Grass, producers Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg, actors Ed Asner and Michael Douglas and many famous others. None ever knew “real economic hardship” or lacked material comfort, educational opportunity or social advancement. Yet these “new left” devotees—like Students for a Democratic Society terrorist William Ayers, President Barack Obama’s political mentor since circa 1995—all longed to redistribute wealth from evil capitalists to sainted “have-nots,” with typical sangfroid for the deadly consequences.

Longing for submersion into a communal whole, indeed their own deaths, believers flocked throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to adulate mass murderers in Havana, Hanoi, Beijing and finally Managua. They denied victims of Castro’s vicious racism and homophobia—80% of them black, and Cuba’s 18%, post-1959 population decline; horrors and mass murders at Hanoi’s Cu Loc (nicknamed the “Zoo” and “Cuban program”) and North Vietnamese villages; mass starvation and murder in China; and malnutrition, begging and mass abuse in 145 Nicaraguan settlements, outside of which, Ortega ordered soldiers to ask no questions and shoot everyone on sight.

With the fall of communism, the believers migrated to yet another death cult—-jihad as exemplified in virtually every Islamic terrorist organization under the sun. In Islam, Algerian radical Ali Benhadj notes, “If faith… is not watered and irrigated by blood, it does not grow. It does not live. Principles are reinforced by sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom for Allah.”

Islam commands Muslims to commit violent jihad. “Myriad Koranic verses emphasize the importance of fighting unbelievers,” Glazov notes. For example, the “famous Verse of the Sword,” (Chapter 9: Verse 5) nullifies all non-violent passages and instructs Muslims to seek and obtain global “hegemony.”

Unfortunately, Glazov reaches this discussion, in Part III of his book, only after seeming to suggest that the current jihad arose from Nazism and Communism. He also subsequently suggests that Islamic hatred of Jews is partly an outgrowth of European anti-Semitism. In both instances, Glazov mistakes. Mohammed himself initiated Islam’s virulent hatred of Jews and Judaism, as becomes eminently clear in Dr. Andrew Bostom’s brilliant Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. Moreover, Islamic affinity for Nazism was an outgrowth of Islamic ideas, not the other way around: Hitler himself identified with Muslim thinking and numerous Nazis later converted. But these objections are slight.

Glazov correctly notes that Islam, as always practiced and taught today, is rooted in jihad ideology. He also recognizes that Western Marxist believers identify strongly with Islamic adoration for “purification through mass death,” although they don’t actually understand Islam at all. Just as Marxists denied every horror perpetrated by the Marxist regimes and heroes they worshiped in previous eras (which Glazov describes in detail). No, their rigid secular view of everything today prevents them from comprehending that Islamic violence “has absolutely nothing to do with economic inequality, class oppression, or Western exploitation.” They demonstrate “an obvious and profound racism,” Glazov observes: They consider Muslims and Arabs inadequate “to understand their own circumstances.” Muslims frequently explain jihad as the natural result of Koranic directives to make Islam a global empire. Yet, believers always reject their explanations—as if one cannot seriously expect Muslims to understand their own theocratic, imperialist ideology.

Perhaps Islam can be reformed, as Glazov posits—and a dedicated few do hope to turn Muslim minds away from hatred and violence. “Human rights is not negotiable, even for God,” says one moderate Muslim I was recently privileged to meet. “Otherwise, Islam is a only a cult.” But that would be news to stubborn mainstream media, who (considering Glazov’s reflections) look married to the same Marxist belief and denials that drove Walter Duranty and Anna Louise Strong.

Those few cannot change what is hidden, unrecognized, unknown—and largely denied by their potential Western allies, however. The success of a handful of Muslims fighting impossible odds to promote secular Islam and reform their co-religionists’ thinking requires gargantuan efforts.
Glazov’s book is therefore critical to everyone who cares about the survival of Western civilization. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Clearly, only public pressure can force the news media to pull up their window shades and shine the necessary light on Arab and Muslim ideological hatred of everyone not like them. And this book could help raise the pressure.
————————————-
Alyssa A. Lappen, a freelance investigative journalist, is a former senior fellow of the American Center for Democracy, former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance and former associate editor of Forbes. Her work has also appeared in FrontPage Magazine, the Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, Human Events, Midstream and Revue Politique. Her website is https://www.alyssaalappen.org/.


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.

The Evils of Islamic Political Ideology

Part Two: How Muslim Theory Suppresses Women

rightsidenews_301

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | Feb. 26, 2009
RightSideNews Copyright © 2009

U.S. women received universal suffrage in 1920 with passage of the 19th Constitutional Amendment, avowing that neither the federal government nor any state could deny or abridge the right of U.S. citizens “to vote … on account of sex.” Article II granted Congress the right to enforce the amendment legislatively.

Long before the U.S. declared itself a nation, however, America gave women at large great respect. The Uxbridge, Mass. town fathers in 1756 granted the young widow Lydia Taft the right to vote in local matters, for example. America again showed its respect for women in 1789 when the states ratified the U.S. Constitution, inferring rights to women amongst “We the people of the United States,” when early 19th century suffragette Abby Kelley Foster first sought votes for women, and in 1869 when Susan B. Anthony’s formed the National Woman Suffrage Association.

Voting rights would never have accrued to American women, moreover, without their basic and universal right to free speech and their right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” as guaranteed in the First Amendment, drafted and ratified in 1791.

Nowhere in the world, by contrast, does Islam grant such rights to women, either political or religious. Far from it. Current Islamic teaching more or less parallels that of the 7th century original. In October 2006, for example, former Australian Mufti Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali described women as “uncovered meat” in a sermon at Sydney’s Lakemba mosque. Similarly, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual chief Yusuf Qaradawi, widely recognized as Islam’s “greatest” living scholar, in the Status of Women in Islam derides any woman having “free rein to assert herself, promote her personality, enjoy her life and her femininity… mix with men freely, experience them closely where they would be together and alone, travel with them, go to cinemas or dance till midnight together.”

Moreover that theme—of women as not only chattel, but actually meat—is embedded in Islamic tradition, as stated by Second Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab (634-644). Umar stated, “innamaa al-nisaa’ laHm `alaa waDam illaa maa dhubba `anhu” (Women are only meat on the butcher’s block, except for any parts that have dried up), according to a medieval Arabic text cited in 1937 by the great Islamic scholar, Georges Vajda. [1]

This might be unbelievable but for the fact that Islamic law, as cited in the Hadith (traditions of Mohammed) ascribes to women’s testimony just half the value given to that of men. Muslims consider the accounts of Sahih al-Bukhari unassailable. And according to Sahih al-Bukhari (3:48:826), Mohammed said, “This is because of the deficiency of the women’s mind.” Presumably for the same reason, Islamic law historically accepts accusations of rape only when there are four witnesses (not including the victim), an intentionally impossible benchmark. Three quarters of women imprisoned under Pakistan’s hudud laws, not surprisingly, are reported to be rape victims.

The global Muslim war on free speech is best exemplified by verbal and legal attacks on Dutch freedom fighter and Member of Parliament Geert Wilders, who has for years required non-stop personal security protection, now faces trial at home for his truthful statements quoting the Qur’an, and was recently barred entry to the U.K. This is all the work of advocates for global shari’a rule.

As we’ve previously noted at Right Side News, several large North American Muslim organizations also advocate global imposition of Islamic law, which prohibits “defamation” of Islam and Mohammed. For Muslims who leave the faith or “blaspheme” against Islam or Mohammed, the punishment is death, a statute on the books in several Muslim states, and widely enforced by mob rule in others. Non-Muslims may not criticize Islam or Mohammed, either. Pakistan’s hudud code enforces shari’a laws on everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan also enforce hudud laws. According to Islamic scholars, these statutes apply to all of mankind.

“Shari’a is barbaric, hateful, imperialistic, and unjust,” says ex-Muslim Abul Kasem, who no doubt voices the thoughts of tens of thousands of former Muslims. But the situation in which shari’a places women, both in Islamic countries and the West, is by far one of most intolerable created by the code. In Women in Islam: an Exegesis Kasem, a contributor to Leaving Islam, Ibn Warraq’s superb collection of essays by many former Muslims, challenges readers to imagine their mothers and sisters imprisoned under such shari’a.

“Men are in charge of women,” asserts the Qur’an in Chapter 4, verse 34. Other edicts concerning women are also especially harsh, and they are all based on the Qur’an, as well as other traditional Islamic sources. Kasem also asks readers to find a single Western law as misogynist as the following two Haditha, which equate a woman with a rib, and therefore crookedness.

From Bukhari Volume 7, Book 62, Number 113, as narrated by Abu Huraira:

“Allah’s Apostle said, ‘The woman is like a rib; if you try to straighten her, she will break. So if you want to get benefit from her, do so while she still has some crookedness’.”

From Shahih Muslim, also narrated by Abu Huraira Volume 8, Number 3467,
“Women were created crooked; if you try to straighten her you will break her and breaking her is divorcing her….”

One of the foremost U.S. advocates of equal rights for Muslim women, in North America and worldwide, is AtlasShrugs.com editor and publisher Pamela Geller.

Here, in the second installment of an exclusive four-part Right Side News series on the Evils of Islamic Political Ideology, investigative journalist Alyssa A. Lappen focuses the discussion on the plight of Muslim women worldwide.

AAL: Why do you consider the situation of women so important within the Muslim war upon Western freedoms?

Atlas: This war is for women, and about women, and the ownership of women. You can judge the health of any society by how they treat women. And obviously in Islam, women are chattel.

I grew up in the Golden Age. I grew up in post World War II America. I was a post-boomer, what they called the generation Joneses. I grew up watching Andy Griffiths and I Love Lucy — mindless, carefree, free. Freedoms were like the air I breathe. It was not until those freedoms were threatened that I realized how privileged I was and am and how I must do everything in my power to save it. No one stomps on my neck because I wear high heal shoes and low necked sweaters.

And now, the key to our freedom, believe it or not, is the freedom of women in the Muslim world.

AAL: Changing the situation for them seems like a very tall order, almost an impossibility.

Atlas: Women in the Muslim world have to be part of the effort, although they know nothing else and they live under fear and oppression. They have no one fighting for freedom. They’re people who’ve had Stockholm Syndrome for 1,400 years.

If you throw a frog in boiling water, he will jump out. But if you put a frog into warm water and turn up the heat until it gets hotter and hotter, that frog will be toast. That is what has happened to Muslim women, and it’s why we have to work for them. We have to stop that, because it is already happening here.

People are auto-censoring themselves. There is double speak. People say what seems correct because they are afraid of the truth. Where you are not free to speak we are all in trouble. And the battle line in North America, first and foremost, is for Muslim women.

AAL: How can we show skeptics how difficult things have already grown in the West.

Atlas: Look, all you have to to is going onto YouTube to see videos on how to beat your wife without leaving marks, what tools to use, like they would beat a dog. There are Islamic clerics who teach men to beat their wives “gently.”

The long and short of it is, in Islamic countries, women are slaves. And there is still slavery in these countries. They have human trafficking. It is not part of our culture, it is not part of our rules. Of course, there is illegal human trafficking here, but it is not systemic. It is against the law. Slavery was abolished with the emancipation proclamation. Slavery is still very much a part of Islamic societies.

They consider it perfectly normal.

But we currently have a United Nations that has paid no attention to the millions of people murdered in the southern Sudan and Darfur genocides. These atrocities are of no consequence to them. So women’s rights are certainly not even on the playing field.

AAL: How much of this happens in the West. Do we now have an epidemic in North America, too?

Atlas: So many people ask me how many women in the West are murdered in honor killings. I can’t give them an answer. Part of the problem is that even when there’s unquestionably been an honor killing, officials do not want to label it. This was the case when Yaser Abdel Said murdered his daughters Amina Said, 18, and Sarah Said, 17 on New Year’s Day in 2008. They were gorgeous, vibrant, quintessential girls. But they were too Western and they were dating non-Muslims. They spoke to a teacher at school. They called social services. They totally invested themselves in the West. They took honors and advanced placement classes. None of that mattered. No one helped them. Finally they ran away. The West could not save them. Their mother Patricia and brother, Islam, lured them back to Texas, to be murdered on New Year’s Day. Their father Yaser fled the country, probably to Egypt and the FBI issued a wanted poster. Their great aunt, Gail Gartrell, lobbied officials to designate the crimes honor killings, which they were.

Their mother, father and brother are still at large. And it took the FBI 10 months to add the words “honor killing” to the wanted poster. I called it a pig-flying moment, when the FBI finally acted, it was so rare. They called a spade a spade. But within days, the FBI caved in to pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood and revised the wanted poster, to exclude the truth.

AAL: That’s horrible. But this is anecdotal. To play the devil’s advocate, how do we know the problem is so huge, even in the U.S.

Atlas: For one thing, there is a fear of labeling. It took the FBI 10 months to call those murders honor killings. After 10 months, the wanted poster finally said:

“CAUTION
Yaser Abdel Said is wanted for murder. On January 1, 2008, Said took his two teen-aged daughters for a ride in his taxi cab, under the guise of taking them to get something to eat. He drove them to a secluded park in Irving, Texas, where he allegedly shot both girls to death. They died of multiple gunshot wounds. The 17- and 18-year-old girls were dating American boys, which was contrary to their father’s rules of not dating non-Muslim boys. Reportedly, the girls were murdered due to an “Honor Killing.” Said may have fled to New York or Egypt.”

But the FBI redacted that language very quickly. I called them on it. I called the agent and the man in charge. And he said, look we do not want to get involved in labeling. So there is real fear. It’s fear, or dhimmitude.

AAL: How can people grasp the severity of the problem?

Atlas: I am documenting as much as I can, but I cannot cover everything. This is one giant thing. I keep a running list of cases, and I am adding to it all the time, unfortunately. Look at these gorgeous girls. Look at Amina and Sarah. Beautiful. But there was also a “deer-in-the-headlights” quality to them.

In Canada, Aqsa Parvez was 16. Her father and brother killed her because she refused to wear a hijab. She’s in an unmarked grave. I said, “This is nuts.” I established a fund and let me tell you. People responded, with little amounts. But they did.

I called Aqsa’s family and asked what they would like. They said “we don’t speak English.” I went through the cemetery. We were willing to accept any changes the family wanted. But they never looked at the artwork we sent by email or snail mail. The family would not sign off on anything. They will not allow a marker. I raised money from readers for a simple plaque. The family does not want that. She was too Western. She dishonored them. The cemetery also refused to let me buy a plot near her.

I worked with readers to find another location, an arboretum at the University of Guelph in Mississauga, where she lived. We were all set to have a memorial garden. But the University of Guelph canceled at the last minute. They told the school newspaper they didn’t want to appear to support my “politically charged views.” They’re liars. They are afraid of Islamic reaction to a plaque for a victim of an honor killing. We wanted trees and a little plaque to read “Aqsa Parvez — Beloved, Remembered Free.” That’s it. It would not have been controversial. But no. The arboretum sent an email saying, “We will not let you do it. This is a peaceful place.” I will not burn, sue, deface, harass, intimidate—I will be civilized. How could the University consider this political?

The case of Aqsa Parvez is one story. But it is a microcosm of everything. It is a travesty that this beautiful girl, who lived a tortured life, who was subjugated, beaten and finally murdered, cannot have a freaking headstone. It’s insane. People refuse to change, and refuse to help. They say Islam is peaceful. But what does “peace” mean in Islam, except submission. Aqsa Parvez had no freedom of any kind, certainly not freedom of speech. That’s why I am doing this. It is insane.

AAL: And there were many others as well.

Atlas: Yes. Now there was a “moderate” beheading in Buffalo, New York. Muzzammil Hassan, a Muslim Brotherhood big whig, murdered his wife Aasiya Hassan, 37, at the Bridges TV Islamic station they founded in 2004 to show Muslims in a good light. She’d filed for divorce, and had gotten a protection order against him. But that did not save her.

Muslims in the local community all knew Aasiya was suffering severe abuse. The Northeast Intelligence Network had investigated Hassan’s TV station for its relationship with Hezbollah’s al Manar TV. That’s a terrorist group. It’s illegal in the U.S. Okay, but this guy is charged with second degree murder for beheading his wife. And like Robert Spencer has reported, the media obfuscates about honor killing. It has to stop.

In India, in another case, Mohammed Suhaib Ilyasi, “a famous journalist who started the TV Show ‘India’s Most Wanted’…married Anju Singh. This non-Muslim converted and lost all her property, cash and jewelry to him. He was connected to the Islamic mafia and slit his wife’s throat. The police caught him, but his father was important in the All India Islamic Cleric Association and Ilyasi got away.

Let’s ask why it’s okay to throw out our women like so much chattel. Where is the wall-to-wall television coverage like that given to Natalee Holloway, Callee Anthony, Jesse Davis? The media has already submitted to Islam and Muslim women who experience the worst from shari’a law are trampled like so much garbage, in the name of multi-culturalism. What about Muslim women.

This week a German Muslim was jailed for life for murdering his 16-year-old sister last year. She “turned away” from Islam. There have been at least 50 honor killings in Germany in the last decade. Again, those are just the ones recognized officially.

In Basra, Iraq, 133 women were killed last year. At least 47 of them were honor killings. Abdel-Qader Ali stomped, suffocated and carved up his 17-year-old daughter Rand to cleanse his honor. She fell in love with a British soldier, Paul, and dreamed of a future with him. Ali went free and then beat his wife Leila Hussein, 41. He broke her arm for reporting the murder. Leila finally roused enough courage to leave him, go into hiding and plan to go to Amman. Before leaving Basra, she was targeted and gunned down.

Why didn’t the Americans protect her? Why didn’t U.S. troops arrest him? Did we free Iraq to institute shari’a? And the dhimmi media loves telling us she was still a virgin. What difference does it make? If she wasn’t a virgin, would her father have had a right to kill her? Of course not. This was a life.

I’ve written at least 81 blog entries on Islamic misogyny and honor killings. I get their photos. Every one of these women was a life. A beautiful life wasted, for what? Look at them all.

The point is that there is an ever growing number of these things that we know about. I have a list of cases that I keep adding to. And for every one we know about there are probably at least five that are never reported as such. The point is these are girls. They are young girls and young women. They just want to be free. And they are all individual people. Their lives are snuffed out. And the number is large and trending up.

AAL: Well obviously you care a lot about these women.

Atlas: Yes, I identify with these girls. [The random brutality of] every story is remarkably the same. Aqsa was getting a bus to go see her friends and her mother saw her and socked her in the head.

When Amina was a sophomore she came to school with huge red bruises on her arms and back. She told a friend that her father kicked her in the face after finding notes from her boyfriend. Her lips got intertwined with her braces and the family refused to take her to a doctor.

Amina was willful. She was the one who wanted to get away. He had to kill her immediately. Sarah was quiet and subservient. She figured if she went along, she’d stay out of her father’s line of fire. I read the autopsy and shared it with a friend who is a prosecutor. Sarah, the subservient one, he tortured her. He put the gun to her arm and shot. She had 9 bullets when she called 911. He tortured that girl.

AAL: Assuming you cannot scientifically prove your theory of rising honor killings, or even if you could, what can we in the West realistically do about this?

Atlas: There has to be a place for people to go. America was always that place. I believe in individual responsibility. So women, if they want to get out, have to find a way.

But there are also Muslim victims here in the West. Europe is no longer safe for women. And U.S. society has to wise up. Do you remember that journalist who went around wearing a burka to find out what it was like to be a Muslim woman? Afterwards, she said everyone was so solicitous to her. The only ones hostile to her were Muslim women. They know what it is. They don’t want us to be trapped like them. They want us to free them.

Now in some ways, you have to hold Muslim women responsible. In Iran, I have a problem with that. If you do not like your country, fight or get out. Do something.

The U.S., though, is a country Muslim women can run to, where Muslim fathers should not get away with murder and their sins should not be covered when they commit honor killings. This is what has to be done. We have to expose them. But the question remains, are we setting an example for the rest of the world. Are we setting a good example of what it means to be free. President Bush did that, and he got his ass handed to him.

AAL: Do you have any hope that Obama could help?

Atlas: He will not benefit the rights of Muslim women in any way. He’s giving the Muslim world a blank check to do and act as they wish. I don’t know anyone who left Islam with a happy face. I don’t know anyone. And I don’t think Obama is naïve or ignorant about that. He was raised on Islam. He lived in an Islamic nation and went to an Islamic school. He memorized Qur’an. It’s where his sympathies rest. And think about his church. I do not consider Rev. Wright a Christian. He founded a black nationalist organization, and was very close to the nation of Islam before he started that church.

It bodes ill for all of us, but especially for women.

AAL: So what’s the answer?

Atlas: As I said, the key is the women in the Muslim world. They have to be part of the effort.

We’ll get nothing from Western feminists here. It’s an abomination that no feminist group has researched these numbers or taken bold action. Meanwhile, Muslim men commit these heinous crimes.

But we must not give them an imprimatur of legitimacy. We cannot let them get up and spout evil incitement. This did not have to be handled militarily.

At the turn in last century, one in ten Americans were part of the Klu Klux Klan. Now, the KKK is completely marginalized. They are not accepted. We have to marginalize honor killing and Muslim abuse of women to the point where it is simply not accepted.

That is what should have been done with Islamic jihad. But it was not done. This was a critical mistake. In any compromise between good and evil, evil profits. We are still suffering from this poisonous fruit.

At the birth of this nation, there were people for slavery and people against it. The founding fathers allowed slavery. That was a mistake. It was rectified by the bloodiest war in our history. Deals with the devil are much more injurious when you do not nip them in the bud.

So as bad as things are, and as bad as they will get, we should put these people in padded rooms, like heroin addicts who need to get clean. That is what the country needs.

AAL: Why it is that Islamic culture has this problem with women? Why is that.

Atlas: This problem also exists in other cultures. It does. Muslims are not the only ones to commit honor killings. The shame-honor culture is also specific to other tribal societies.

But Islam brings several things to the picture so that Islamic men are more likely to kill women. Women are but little possessions in Islam. There’s a devaluation of women in the Qur’an, making them but little possessions. Also, the Qur’an gives no clear prohibition against murder. Mohammed personally killed people and ordered people to be killed.

We like to think that religions provide the ethics and morals to control impulses, to stop humans from acting like animals. Good religion stops those base instincts. Bad religion amplifies them. And unfortunately, the West is becoming increasingly Islamic in nature.

You tell me. What instincts did the father of those gorgeous girls, Amina and Sarah, have?

This is what we have to do. We have to make it safe for girls who want to escape Islam. Any Muslim girls who want to escape Islam, contact me. I will put them in touch with people who will make them safe.

Islam needs a Vatican II. Islam really needs a reformation. But until such time as Islam reforms, we have to save those we can save.

As I said before, in any society and any political system, you look at how they treat their women. It says everything. That’s why, ultimately, this is why a war about women and over women, over control and dominance. The West doesn’t want to recognize that. But it is plain as the nose on your face.

Notes:

[1] Georges Vajda, “Juifs et Musulmans Selon Le Hadit” [“Jews and Muslims According to the Hadith”] Journal Asiatique 1937, Vol. 229, pp. 57-127, included in Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: from Sacred Texts to Solemm History (2008, Prometheus).


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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The Evils of Islamic Political Ideology

rightsidenews_301

Part I: The Muslim War on Free Speech

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | Feb. 17, 2009
RightSideNews Copyright © 2009

The U.S. Constitution, ratified on March 4, 1789, forbade treason against the young republic. Article III, section 3 reads: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” The founding fathers apparently were more concerned with treason than individual rights—since the first ten amendments, establishing individual rights, were neither drafted nor ratified until 1791.

American patriots, whether of Christian or Jewish religious conviction, suffered brutal oppression at the hands of the British and their allies. Their homes were invaded, their property stolen, and their very lives forfeit. Therefore, they naturally cemented life and liberty “for all” into the Constitution’s very foundation. Moreover, to maintain that standard the founders realized that all citizens must support equal rights to life and equal liberty for all, without exception.

To put it another way, America’s fathers and the Constitution’s ratifying states—in both historical sequence and principal—held above everything else, loyalty to the supposition of life and liberty for all. Before all else, the nation’s founding idea was that citizens’ Constitutionally guaranteed rights were and are not exclusive to some, but deniable to others.

The very first clause of the opening item on the Bill of Rights (the initial ten Constitutional amendments) sets into U.S. law the principal of a federal government free from legislation “respecting an establishment of religion.” Americans generally understand that phrase to establish each individual’s right to freedom of faith, yet the precise wording mentions no individual rights at all. Rather, it pointedly prohibits U.S. federal laws or regulations that require or in any way institutionalize religious practices.

Now, President Barack Obama advocates a so-called civil rights agenda—to “expand hate crime” statues like the Matthew Shepard Act, named for a student tortured and murdered in 1998 for his sexual orientation.

Yet this insidious legislative turn would would raise motive above the importance of criminal acts themselves, and attempt to legislatively control thinking—something time and again proven impossible, always with murderous consequences.

Even “New York Times bestselling” uber-thought cop Glenn Greenwald recognizes the danger. In defense of free speech, Greenwald decries Obama’s new policy, albeit from inside a little glass house, while casting obnoxious epithets at journalists with whom he disagrees (totally without basis in fact). One needs only imagine hate-crime “proceedings directed at opinions and groups that one likes,” Greenwald correctly observes. “If Muslim groups can trigger government investigations due to commentary they find offensive, so, too, can…” Now, replace Greenwald’s stone-throwing and name-calling with whatever you like.

Here’s the rub: In the 21st century, some claiming themselves pious consider their right not to be offended—however they perceive that—more valuable and sacrosanct than all rights of all other Americans. Thwarting every criticism of that faction would simultaneously gut Constitutional rights to life and liberty for all, without exception.

Muslims constitute the “political faction” advocating loudest for “hate crime” statutes. Their intent is to “restrict and punish speech” they dislike, i.e. criticism of Islam and Mohammed, to benefit their global war on free speech. To consolidate gains against free speech in Europe and the United Nations, the Islamic faction is heavily campaigning against North American free speech too.

Most large North American Muslim organizations hope to globally impose shari’a law, which prohibits “defamation” of Islam and Mohammed. Muslims who leave the faith or “blaspheme” against Islam or Mohammed earn the classical punishment, death—a statute on the books in several Muslim states, and elsewhere, widely enforced by mob rule. Non-Muslims daring to criticize Islam or Mohammed often receive the same punishment, whether in Islamic states or not.

Pakistan’s hudud code for example enforces shari’a on all citizens and residents—Muslims and non-Muslims. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan also execute hudud laws—and not on modern whims. Under 7th century Islamic law, these statutes apply to all mankind.

The widespread Muslim hope to prosecute shari’a laws globally stems partly from the basic Islamic belief that “all people are Muslims at birth,” enshrined for example in Morocco‘s legal code and Malaysia‘s constitution, despite the latter’s ostensibly secular nature and 40% non-Muslim population. Indeed, everyday Muslims often advocate for global shari’a laws. A Malaysian blogger addresses such a message to “all Non Muslims reading this.”

“You must know about the Hudud Laws of Islam as you are also a creation of Allah, no matter that you are today a Kaffir @ an Unbeliever in Allah because you have been born as such

“It is up to you, as a free human being to choose to learn and study about these True Laws of Allah, as a source of knowledge and information about what they truly are and not be misled anymore about them based on what you have read or been fed by those who have an agenda to keep you in the dark about the Truth of Islam as revealed to us by our Lord and Creator.” (emphasis in original)

Fortunately, the West has individually sponsored websites too—like Right Side News.

Also fortunately, America has stalwart patriots such as Pamela Geller, editor and publisher of AtlasShrugs.com. Geller considers America’s current situation extremely dire. The U.S., she thinks, stands on the edge of a precipice. Like revolutionary-era journalist Thomas Paine, however, Atlas speaks common sense to, and for, common Americans. She too considers America “ultimately unconquerable.” And most importantly, unlike Paine, Atlas will never retreat to Europe or anywhere else.

Herewith we begin an interview with Atlas Shrugs founder Pamela Geller, on the evils of Islamic ideology. Right Side News opens this exclusive interview four-part series by investigative journalist Alyssa A. Lappen with a discussion on the worldwide Islamic assault on free speech, now intensifying in North America. Please check Right Side News in coming weeks for the second through fourth parts, covering other important aspects of the Islamic ideological threat.

AAL: What induced you to start a blog, and when?

Atlas: The blog was born on February 11, 2005. We just had our fourth birthday. I started it because I’m an individualist. I grew up in a post-historical world, as it were. I assumed my freedom. It was a given. After World War II, the good guys won. It was over.

I noted world events. But apart from being Jewish and supporting Israel because it is a beacon of democracy in modern civilization, I was not involved in politics. I was very ambitions and had a good career. I was the associate publisher at the New York Observer.

Then 9/11 clubbed me. On that day, I lost everything at the very foundation of what I believed. At that moment, I realized that nothing is forever, not even America. I felt very guilty that I did not know anything about who had invaded this country. So what could I do? One reacts to the political scene. But I was politically inactive, and I had a lot to learn.

Then I went to hear [Islamic scholar] Bat Ye’or speak at Columbia University. After her lecture, I asked for advice. She told me to learn everything. I started reading, and read all her books. I read everything I could about Islam. The media was not giving us information. And I read the internet—websites, news and blogs on subjects the media wasn’t reporting. I began to see that many people were saying what I was thinking.

In a way, I was raised to do this. My mother and father had a very good marriage. They worked hard. My father was a tough guy. He made $60 a day. He was a workaholic. My mother really respected him. Once, we were driving, and he said, “Nothing is for ever.” My mother objected, “America is.” My father said, “No, not even America.” On 9/11, I realized my father was right.

Initially, I did not do the blog. I went to protests. If there was an anti-Ahmadinejad protest, I was there. If there was a Hamas rally and counter-protest against them, I was there. I covered protests, I took videos and recorded them. Now the same rallies are against Jews, in America. Finally, a really smart commentator—I have a lot of respect for him—said, “Start a blog.” He said, “Do it,” and I did.

I am exactly the same now. I blog exactly the same as when I had 10 readers, and when I had 20,000 readers. My focus is just bigger and broader. It is hard when I go to my computer. There are always another 300 emails. It’s not terribly lucrative. But the responses are worth it. Today, I got an email from a woman. Listen to this. She writes, “I found your site by accident. I never realized what a mess we are in. Thank you. My eyes are open. I am passing this on.”

AAL: What took so long?

Atlas: I had never thought of blogging. And anyway, I had to learn before I could say anything. I spent about four years. You need to know what you’re talking about. It’s not like World War II. How many people are clued in to the doctrine in the Qur’an? They can expound on it all day long, but have never read it, and still call anyone a racist who cites what’s in there. This is not about al Qaeda, or Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, or any of those organizations. They are just changing their underwear. It’s all about jihad.

AAL: Why did you name the blog Atlas Shrugs?

Atlas: I loved the metaphor [Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged]. That was exactly what people were doing. Atlas Shrugging.

There are so many misconceptions about Ayn Rand. She is individualist. Her party is the party of individual rights, the smallest minority in the world. In this story, the world’s producers and entrepreneurs, people who make things happen, are so put upon by regulation and government. It is like what’s happening now. And the characters give nice names to things, like now, calling it a “Stimulus package” when it’s really a socialist package

In the novel, all the producers go on strike. The book is a stunning indictment of statism. It speaks for capitalism. It says, “I will not ask another man to live for my sake.”

Ayn Rand was an uncompromising person. In any compromise between good and evil, she understood that evil profits. The bad never comes over to our side. Evil has to be crushed. People do not like to hear that. But it does. Science advances and technology advances. Human nature stays the same.

AAL: Why do you think mainstream newspapers and broadcast media do not cover the the influence of the Qur’an, Islamic jurisprudence and theological edicts on Islam’s basically totalitarian goals?

Atlas: It is auto censorship and fear. Also, everyone is worried all about insulting Islam. Reporting even the smallest factoid earns an onslaught of charges of bigotry and racism. The net result is that you cannot even call an honor killing an honor killing and not get that kind of charge.

You can have a whole article on how a father, brothers and husband in a Muslim family are going to kill their sister or mother or niece. Yet the reporter will not even call the deed an honor killing. That line [of reporting leads] to the door. [Reporters get fired for it.] That is the problem. We saw that tendency with the [Kurt Westergaard Mohammed] cartoons. And that was [in September 2005] before Muslims were really on the march here. But even back then, in late 2005, I went to a panel discussion about the cartoons at New York University. They were going to show the cartoons so we could talk about them. But then the hosts decided at the last minute not to show the cartoons. I got there and the easels were black. That was March 2006. That is the level that we’re at now. At the one college where a school newspaper printed the cartoons, the university fired or suspended the student publisher. A couple of publishers were courageous enough to admit, “Look, we do not want to be targeted.” But that is now standard operating procedure.

AAL: A more current example is the failure to report Obama’s executive order giving $20 million and refugee status to “resettle” people from Gaza, in other words, Hamas.

Atlas: They haven’t reported that, no. The Arab narrative has taken over. The reporting in December and January said that Israel was targeting innocent civilians. But the only evidence was to the contrary. In fact, we have proof that Hamas shoots its own people in their homes. They literally shoot people in the streets, to punish them, or make it look like Israel targeted homes. Israel was hit from inside mosques and by mortars from a UN school and foreign press offices. Hamas hijacks ambulances to transport terrorists.

But U.S. newspapers don’t report it. This is auto-censorship. It is enormous. It shows where the sympathy lies. I see it as Islamic apologism. To their [Muslims’] credit, on even the smallest insult, their push-back is huge. They are winning. Mohammed said, “War is deceit,” and they are doing an awfully good job so that very few in America even recognize the risk.

If you report what they say, if you report their hate speech, you are considered a hate speaker. Truth has become hate speech. That is what we are talking about. So people are really clueless. They need blogs. Someone like me will be labeled a racist. This is what they do. They smear the good name of people and immediately associate you with the worst of humanity. If you say “ka ka”—or speak badly of Obama— your career is destroyed.

U.S. newspapers tell people not to believe their eyes. I tell people to believe their eyes and I am excoriated for it. The most highly visible example of that is Geert Wilders, [whom Holland is prosecuting for hate speech, for producing Fitna, and Great Britain denied entry last week to speak in the House of Lords]. Here is a man who cites Qur’anic verse, and they want him in jail.

But meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people can march and call for the death of Jews and it’s not hate, from London, to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Fort Lauderdale, and New York. Those death marches should have been on the front page of every newspaper and the lead story of every cable news and net. And it is almost unthinkable that the police would escort the jihadists to the Israeli embassy and at the same time be harassed and have shoes thrown at them. This is the apex of civilization. And where are the Muslims counter protesting not in our name? Where are they? I want them. Where are all those moderate Muslims.

AAL: This kind of thing goes on in government, too, doesn’t it.

Atlas: On February 2, I was on a conference call with [former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (2001 – 2005)] Douglas Feith. I asked, when the Bush administration was planning the invasion into Iraq, if they took into account the jihadist ideology. His response was very revealing. In the beginning, he said [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B.] Myers emphasized the importance of the ideology. They wanted a strategic method to counter it. The rest of the government was doing nothing. Rumsfeld and Myers created the Office of Strategic Influence at the Pentagon. But the Pentagon public affairs people were very unhappy with the creation of that office. And it was infiltrated almost from the beginning. Someone leaked its existence. The New York Times inaccurately reported that the Office of Strategic Influence intended to lie to foreign journalists. It never occurred to them that their sources, not the government, were lying to hurt the U.S. Feith said that U.S. government strategy has not recovered from that to this day.

AAL: So honestly, don’t you think we are going to lose?

Atlas: No. I have faith in the individual, and in the indomitable American spirit. The picture you get from the media is very misleading. I don’t think that the silent majority has a clue to who and what we elected and the pickle that we were in even before B. Hussein took [the president’s] office.

But America is already waking up. Look at [Diane McDaniels] the mother whose son [Seaman James Roderick McDaniels] died [with 16 other servicemen] in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. She voted for Hussein. Now she says she made a mistake. Her son was killed on the Cole, but Obama plans to release the [alleged] Cole perpetrator [Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri]. She was invited to go the White House with other Cole and September 11 families, and she refused to go.

And look at what this man did in his first two weeks of his office. The first foreign leader he calls is [Holocaust denier Mahmoud] Abbas, he is selling airplane parts to Syria, which is a state sponsor of terror [since December 1979]. He does not play hail to the chief. He ordered the U.S. Marine Band to play Sting’s “Desert Rose,” by an Arabic signer Cheb Mami, [rather than John Phillip Souza’s “Hail to the Chief”]. And he gives his first television address to apologize to the Muslim world. Apologize for what? For liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein? For paving the way to an Islamic state in the heart of Europe? And he alludes to the U.S. as being a colonial power. America was never a colonial power.

Well freedom of speech is for me. That is how I define what I do.

All is not lost. Look at Churchill. They were bombing London when he was Prime Minister. Londoners were running for the shelter in the underground. It will get much darker here. But we live in a free country. We have a moral imperative. And I know that what we see on the TV does not speak for the American culture, or America’s ethics. Freedom of speech will win in the end.
_______________________________________
Alyssa A. Lappen, a freelance investigative journalist, is a former senior fellow of the American Center for Democracy, former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance and former associate editor of Forbes. Her work has also appeared in FrontPage Magazine, the Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, Human Events, Midstream and Revue Politique. Her website is https://www.alyssaalappen.org/.


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.

Investing in Jihad

The hidden perils of shari’a finance

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Feb. 4, 2009

Indonesian sukuk buyers may sink in the same ship with the dupes heeding Western headlines and Islamic gurus since the Bernard Madoff scandal broke last December. These financial product pushers have increasingly exaggerated the “safety” of Islamic finance securities to offset “the cancer of interest-bearing debt.” Investors are now snapping up three-year Indonesian bonds that will supposedly hold their full value and make money—an astronomical 12%—while paradoxically avoiding speculation, alcohol, gambling, interest, and other “haram” activities forbidden under shari’a law.

Granted, Bernie Madoff’s “hedge fund” investors did not expect to be robbed blind. But they knowingly exchanged high risk for high returns. Indeed, alternative funds are so risky that U.S. securities laws limit their sale to investors with at least $2 million in financial assets—in other words, enough to protect them against being totally wiped out.

But even folks who should know better don’t grasp the risks of Islamic finance. London’s Financial Times, for example, touted the Amana Trust “Islamic” Income fund, based in Washington state, for “losing only 25.8 per cent” in 2008… half [sic] the average 44% loss for US stock funds.” Likewise, an SEI Investments company analyst recommended Islamic mutual funds as protection from the stock and bond markets’ “extreme ups and downs,” despite their substantial losses in the last quarter of 2008.

Odds are, the average Muslim “Mohammed Sixpack” doesn’t understand the financial risks of 12% Indonesian sukuk bonds either. High yields—for example 12%, when the U.S. Federal Reserve lends “overnight” to banks at rates close to zero—are usually called “junk.”

Unfortunately, these bonds are also backed by “assets” carved up like pie and “securitized.” Meaning: they can head south in a hurry, just like the sub-prime mortgages that sank the U.S. economy, which were also also backed by assets and securitized, not to mention the mortgage-backed issues that unraveled dozens of huge bond, pension and public institutional funds in 1994. In 1637, Dutch tulip bulb contracts sold for over 20 times the annual wages of a skilled craftsman—until their “solid” value withered overnight in the first financial crash in recorded history. [1]

Islamic finance carries many other risks besides.

The Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich. in December sued former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the Federal Reserve Board to stop $40 billion in U.S. bail out aid from reaching American International Group (AIG). The insurance giant devotes an entire division to shari’a finance products, which Thomas More considers unsafe, unconstitutional and anti-American.

The suit zeros in on statutes fundamental to shari’a law, such as funding jihad warfare. It also focuses on AIG’s “supervisory committee” members—Bahraini Sheikh Nizam Yaquby, Saudi Mohammed Ali Elgari and Pakistani Muhammed Imran Ashraf Usmani, a “devoted disciple” of his father Mufti Taqi Usmani. The latter Shari’a-compliant finance authority directs Western Muslims to aggressively pursue violent jihad against the their governments.

AIG is not alone.

As I’ve often previously noted, the shari’a finance boards setting “Islamic banking” standards themselves employ highly objectionable “authorities.” Both the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) and Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), for example, include many representatives of nations, banks, and organizations implicated in terror-funding.

Atlas Shrugs recently comprised a more inclusive list of hot shot shari’a personalities. Apart from Taqi Usmani—a Pakistani shari’a court justice since 1982, shari’a director of the Saudi Al Baraka Investment Corp. implicated in 9/11 financing and until recently an advisor to Dow Jones Islamic Indexes—shari’a boards include other graduates of the most radical Saudi and Pakistani Islamic universities and madrassas that duplicate Usmani’s wish to impose shari’a law globally.

Shari’a finance still retains Western adherents. A Jan. 16, 2009 Hedge Funds Review article for example advises forlorn, out-of-work money managers, “Don’t forget Islamic finance.”

Several readers disagree. “Forget Islamic finance…. It won’t make it through the crisis,” a private equity venture capitalist comments. Islamic finance itself is “flawed in principle,” since “charging more than you loaned is called ‘interest’,” adds an investor relations man. As these Hedge Funds Review subscribers avow, the industry cannot possibly elude the financial risks that now face every other bank and investment house in the world.

Notably, Stern School economics professor and former Treasury Department and White House advisor Nouriel Roubini, the publisher of Roubini Global Economics Monitor (RGE Monitor), also considers Islamic finance to be risky. The Islamic finance reliance on debt issues backed by assets exposes the business and investors both to “devaluation” of underlying assets (hyperbolically speaking, like wilting tulips) and the overall freeze in normal capital flows, or liquidity. The level of new Islamic bond issues worldwide fell 60% from January through October 2008, to only $15.2 billion, against that of the first 10 months in 2007. Low oil prices and Middle East liquidity troubles could also hurt demand for shari’a finance instruments throughout 2009, Roubini posits, according to the Asian Energy blog.

Yet the greatest, albeit hidden, risks of shari’a finance are unseen by even the most astute economists. By investing alone, non-Muslims actively participate in what former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed calls “a jihad worth supporting,” namely an effort to impose “universal Islamic banking.” Islamic banking is not an ancient religious tradition, but a 20th century invention of the Muslim Brotherhood and their spiritual chief Yusuf Qaradawi. It was developed to subsume capitalism with Islamic finance—a prospect neither safe nor mere fantasy.

Furthermore, shari’a investors may also inadvertently support economic jihad, as mandated by Qur’an 49:15: “Strive with their wealth and their lives for the cause of Allah,” and reiterated in 61:10-11: “Shall I show you a commerce that will save you from a painful doom? …strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives.”

Shari’a funds collect at least 2.5% of income, wealth and profits, plus arbitrarily determined “purification” levies on profits derived from those Islamically forbidden, or “haram,” activities. The Standard & Poor’s Islamic indexes do list some companies that get revenues from “non-compliant activities” totaling under 5% of their gross corporate sales. In those instances, S&P applies what it calls a “dividend purification ratio,” dividing “non-compliant” revenues by the total revenues of the index. The thing is, S&P doesn’t specify exactly what activities or other attributes constitute “non-compliant,” much less how or to whom it distributes zakat and purification levies. [2] Continue reading “Investing in Jihad” →


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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The Eternal Danish Optimist

by Alyssa A. Lappen
January 5, 2009 | An Exclusive Right Side News Interview
©2009

dialog1On Sept. 15, 2008, the editor of Danish daily Berlingske Tidende summoned historian and columnist Lars Hedegaard to his office to lower the proverbial ax. He received a transparently suspicious explanation. “I’d been tedious and repetitive, and they needed younger people,” he said. “I thought, they’re not going to get me. There will be a record of what I’ve done these nine years.”

Within two weeks of its December 1 publication, Danish bookstores sold out two printings of Hedegaard’s Groft Sagt (“Roughly speaking”), a collection of 109 of his 2,000-plus columns for Berlingske Tidende. The book also includes 26 cartoons by Kurt Westergaard, 73, renowned for Jyllands-Posten‘s September 2005 Mohammed cartoons—which the Muslim Brotherhood blamed for the January 2006 worldwide riots, murders and embassy attacks they instigated. But Hedegaard, too busy with two other book projects, does not plan to translate the work into English.

34The book cover (and page 35) feature a Westergaard caricature of former Danish Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, reviled by the Danish populace for opposing the original cartoons. Ellemann-Jensen is kneeling by an inkwell labeled “freedom of expression,” which also contains an explosive-laden (presumably Islamic) fanatic. For his courage, Hedegaard has received great blog coverage, but not much American press notice beyond that of Washington Times columnist Diana West.

Overall, the press and Western leaders have had “yet another missed opportunity” to stand up “and call madness what it is,” in the words of scholar Robert Spencer. During World War II, however, Denmark was the only European nation to save virtually all its Jewish citizens.

In that Danish tradition, Hedegaard recognizes “the fragility of freedom.” In an exclusive interview with Alyssa A. Lappen, Hedegaard announced the December 21 formation of International Free Press Society (IFPS), following the lead of Denmark’s Free Press Society, established in 2004. The founders chose Hedegaard as their president, and Diana West as vice president. Among the organization’s Board of Advisers is Fitna producer Geert Wilders.

Hedegaard: Of course, many more people are involved in this…. We are trying to create an organization that will defend free speech in the Western World, on the assumption that if free speech goes down where we live, it will be doomed in the rest of the world as well.

The organization will be built up over the next few months. I am the president of the Danish Free Press Society, created in 2004, and a very successful organization. The enemies of free speech are organized and well financed and we have to counteract their activities. The new international organization will lead the fight for free speech on a global basis. We will then set up national organizations where they do not exist, as sisters to the Danish organization. We have very ambitious plans to recruit people. We already have a board of directors, and want to recruit for the board of advisors. We will set up a website and will pull together all we know about relevant issues, that is, attacks on free speech everywhere.

AAL: How do you defend against an onslaught against free speech that is so prevalent and widespread?

Hedegaard: You make the public understand that free speech is under attack. That was why we thought of [forming the Free Press Society] in Denmark. We found ourselves in Denmark in a situation where most of the press was not telling the truth and not dealing with real issues.

AAL: How exactly does Denmark’s Free Press Society help?

Hedegaard: It is a fact that we exist. Even that alone [has made us successful]. The membership is 500 to 600, which is quite big for a country of our size. Membership is growing all the time. The very fact that we have the audacity to organize ourselves gives our members courage to express themselves. The biggest fear is that anyone thinks, “here, I am, Joe Schmo. I am all alone and no one thinks like I do. I can’t see anyone who expresses the same opinions or fears as I do, so I am probably crazy.”

My family tells me that I am insane.

So the fact that we did this gives people courage. We have big conferences in Copenhagen, and frequent meetings that are very well attended. The press is there and we always fill the hall. And we invite all kinds of speakers. Like Geert Wilders.

We have had Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or, Kurt Westergaard, Daniel Pipes, Roy Brown, Chahdortt Djavann, Shabana Rehman, Samia Labidi, Bruce Bawer, Henryk Broder, and anyone who is in fear for his or her life. Copenhagen gives them a hearty welcome and it makes a difference. In February we’ll have the pleasure of meeting [Dutch cartoonist] Gregorius Nekschot.

That’s how we operate. We also have friends in government and in parliament. Many do not say they are our friends, but that is quite an accomplishment. So if we stay the course, true to our convictions and do not waver, there is hope. I am optimistic.

AAL: Yet many Europeans are coming to North America because they think Europe is dead.

Hedegaard: Europe is not dead. What does it mean, “we’re dead?” You know the true resistance against tyranny and Islam and bullshit is here in Denmark. It is. I do not like to brag, but this is where it’s at. I do not feel that we have lost.

The backbone of all this is the Danish population of 5.4 million, of which about 5 million are Danes. It’s always been the backbone of our identity and our nation. Never the upper class, never the rich or famous or the nobility. It’s always been the peasant, the man in the street, the working class, and I do not have the sense that they are giving up. The upper crust are willing to sell out. They would sell us out for anything. Jesus. Of course there are exceptions and these brave people are more than welcome in our midst.

AAL: The same kind of people are selling out in the U.S. and Canada, too.

Hedegaard: It is happening all over. It is a disease. It is a sickness. The upper crust, the upper classes are simply opposed to the idea of the West. They hate our freedoms. They hate our culture. We saw it in the ’30s, with the British aristocracy [alliance with] Hitler. We saw it in the U.S., where many members of the political class were Stalinists, Alger Hiss and what not. Books were written about that. And again now, we see it. It’s a very mysterious thing. But you could go back even to the Roman Empire where a guy named Tacitus wrote a book about the barbarian Germans (my own ancestors, by the way), and his admiration for these people. The Roman upper crust admired barbarians. When some, a certain class of society get all they want, money, sex, power, it’s like they have gotten bored.

AAL: They seem to think that they will not be targeted and do not understand that they, too, will have nowhere to go.

Hedegaard: They can’t imagine that. They do not think that way. They start hating their own people. Why has practically every Danish political party backed immigration of Muslims into the country. We have taken in 10,000s people from the back woods, goat herders and the like who could neither read nor write. For what purpose? Why have they done that?

I am talking about things that I have thought about constantly for seven or eight years. Every day I question how they could have done this. What is the purpose? Why are the universities going along? Why haven’t they warned politicians about what would happen? Why have the journalists, the artists, everyone who should be in the know, failed to tell the truth? Not only that. They have actively encouraged this influx of enemies into our midst.

AAL: The press has committed a dereliction of public duty.

Hedegaard: You cannot trust any Western world institution. Mark Steyn wrote a book, America Alone. But in fact America will not defend itself either. There is no difference. I have been to the U.S. three times in the last three months. America is even more stupid when it comes to facing up to reality than Europe.

How can you allow some Taliban idiot to parade on Fifth Avenue with a sign saying: “Death to all Juice“? He’s not talking about orange juice but about finishing Hitler’s project. In the middle of the biggest Jewish town in the world. What a disgrace.

AAL: Why are you so optimistic, then?

Hedegaard: I am optimistic because I have experienced the difference made by what you do. You can accomplish a lot by organizing and telling the truth. What you absolutely must not do is sit back and despair. You mustn’t do that. That is what the enemies of free speech want you to do. Everyone that I know is telling the truth. So as long as we can tell the truth, and work, and talk and write and make waves, we are not dead. There may come a time when we can do nothing, none of what we’re doing now, and then we will be really dead. Let’s not give them the chance.

And also, despite the fact that I am probably one of the most hated men in Denmark, the enemies of free speech don’t know really where I am coming from. My views are noted. Hardly a week goes by than I am not talked about. “He’s an idiot. He’s an asshole. He’s evil.” But as long as you annoy them, you’re okay.

AAL: I had 2,200 attempts to break into my website the week before last alone.

Hedegaard: Well they fear you, and that is to your great credit. Keep it up. I have been asked, Do you fear for your life. The answer is no. I don’t know why. I have given that answer to others. I am sure that there are all kinds of plans to eliminate any one of us, but we are going to die any way. So let’s have some fun in the meantime.

I tell my family, “How would you like to live after I am gone. It won’t be a hell of a lot of fun, if we lose.” I think adults have an absolute duty to stand up for what is right.

AAL: Why aren’t you translating this book into English?

Hedegaard: I don’t have the time, and I’m not sure that my Danish angles on the concrete issues would be appreciated by an English-speaking audience. And if you have to provide footnotes for your pieces, it’s not very elegant. I can get things into the mainstream press. I won’t write any more for the paper that fired me in September, just as a matter of pride. I have no problem publishing. But I am more engaged in the work to set up the international organization. And I am also engaged in writing a couple of books now. The first one, I will finish in about three or four months, is on war theory and the concept of Holy War.
…

The other book that I’ve been working on for the last six or seven years, is on the Danish left wing.

For the time being, I feel very relieved not to have to write a daily column for any newspaper. I am sure I will be back to write something. But I am not in need of any immediate communication.

AAL: Are the Westergaard cartoons directly related to the content?

laban

Hedegaard: Every one of the cartoons is directly related to content. The cartoon labeled Adolf Laban relates to the text on page 29, written on Dec. 19, 2005, just [before] the cartoon [riots] took off in January 2006. A group of Danish imams was then traveling in the Middle East trying to stir up trouble. There was also a request by a number of Danish imams, including the most influential imam and chief organizer of trouble at the time, Ahmed Abu Laban, to atone for the cartoons with a Mohammad week in Danish universities. Several university presidents were receptive to the idea. My point was that this monopolization of Muhammad would leave other institutions chagrined. But they shouldn’t despair. So far no university had thought of celebrating Hitler’s birthday, so why not do that? However, the organizers had to make sure that the two arrangements didn’t collide – especially because they would largely appeal to the same audience.

Laban is dead. He died [in February 2007] of some disease [cancer].

crosspeeingOn page 82, there’s a cartoon proving a woman may rape a man. It is based on a column entitled “On the peeing front,” that is absolutely true. [In Sweden, activists at Malmoe’s Free Women’s University attacked “the root cause of sexual inequality – the fact that men stand up when they urinate whereas most women tend to sit down.” In August, 2007, the university offered a three-day course in Upright Urination for Women and university director Aasa Staahl noted in the daily Sydsvenska Dabladet that women could “either use a funnel-like device” or “direct the jet by means of a special squeeze with their fingers.”]

AAL: You don’t have to make this up.

Hedegaard: No I don’t.

jewsyogurt1On page 18, we find “Jews and Yogurt,” a January 2006 column written after Hamas won the Palestinian elections. “The Europeans have been pumping lots of Euros into creating a representative government that would reflect the will of the Palestinian majority.

And now they have succeeded as the great majority of the Palestinian voters have backed a party that favors the eradication of Israel. Now the big Arabian riddle is who will last longer? Danish yogurt in Saudi supermarkets or Jews in the tiny strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

And although the prospects are bad for both Jews and yogurt, “Roughly Speaking” would put its savings on the Jews. For even though Hamas leader Mahmud al-Zahar, speaking to the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera in July 2005, rejected co-existence with Israel, he was magnanimous enough to grant the Jewish State a respite of 5-10 years before removing it from the face of the earth. … That is better than nothing, and ‘Roughly Speaking’ therefore believes that it is only a matter of time before the European countries gathered around the EU’s idealistic foreign policy spokesman Xavier Solana will accept Hamas’ extended hand and put some billions into it. That will also give the European countries time to consider what to do with the Jews of Israel. In view of all the commotion it would cause among our Arab friends, the Jews would be wise not to settle in Europe. But in the 1930s there was a plan to settle them in Madagscar. Perhaps the EU would be well advised to reconsider that option.”

hijabOn page P. 43, “Uhort Klarsyn,” means “Unheard of perspicacity.” The column, written on April 29, 2008, concerns the fact that the Danish court authorities have decided judges can wear the hijab. A Supreme Court justice has ruled that there is absolutely no problem with women wearing Islamic garb when serving as judges or jurors. The important thing, according to this upholder of due process, is that veiled women signal neutrality. And they do. Otherwise they would be exposed before they were hired for the job.

Now the point of the commentary is that the Danish courts must have discovered a method to expose the Muslim use of taqiyya – which implies that the true believers are advised or required to hide their real intentions when it benefits Islam or the individual Muslim. “This newly discovered method – which Islam’s neighbors have been trying to find for the past 1400 years – enables the Danish courts to determine whether or not the veiled woman speaks the truth. … Would the court please be kind enough to inform the rest of us how they have accomplished this feat, particularly in view of the fact that this must be of great interest far beyond our Danish borders?”

Kurt’s cartoon shows that the real wielder of power is this jerk hiding behind a screen of legality. By opening our legal system to the hijab, we’re bowing to the leaders of the Islamic ummah, or “nation.”

102On page 104, another column entitled “Revealed law” concerns Islamic law, supposedly revealed by God, and the competing system in the European Union, which is also revealed law. Nobody knows where it came from, and no one has ever voted for it. There is, however, an important distinction between the sharia – Islamic law – and EU law in that no new revelations have come down since the death of the Prophet in the seventh century, whereas our European law-givers are constantly receiving new revelations from someplace they have never told us about.

I never asked Kurt what to draw or what his drawings mean. He had an absolutely a free hand. We took every drawing he did and put it into the book.
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