Flash: Moon Is Not Green Cheese

So extensive is current misuse of English that even George Orwell, I think, would be flabbergasted by its prevalence—and its chief source: not the government, after all, but pseudo scholars and unprincipled journalists who might as well contend the moon is made of green cheese, and have all but convinced the world with their reams of false propaganda.

To sensible critics, these malfeasants can only respond with scurrilous, vindictive personal attacks—and never facts—since they apparently have none at their disposal.

Take the verbal assault on Dr. Andrew Bostom by Trans-Atlantic “Un-Intelligencer” journalist John Rosenthal in his “review” of a book on the Mufti of Jerusalem and Nazism.

Remarkably, Rosenthal actually libels Bostom—twice: First, he falsely and maliciously accuses certain “self-professed Islamophobes,” by which he clearly means Bostom, of writing that Islam “was…the source or inspiration of the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists!” Secondly, he falsely and maliciously states that Bostom suppressed a quotation from Adolph Hitler concerning Arabs—simply to lambaste Matthias Kuntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred thesis—when Bostom did no such thing.

Having read both of Bostom’s books in their entirety, and all of his essays, I can attest that he has never suggested Islam as “the source or inspiration of the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists!”

What’s more astounding: Rosenthal subsequently added a footnote to his second libelous passage—admitting that Bostom after all hadn’t omitted Hitler’s quotation on Arabs, concerning their “racial inferiority.” As Bostom has explained, it was irrelevant to his essay’s point on Hitler’s effusive, alternative praise for Islamic aggression, and his profound dual regrets: that Islam had neither prevailed at the 8th century Battle of Tours, nor had “Islamized Germans” stood “at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.” Moreover, Bostom included the full quotation in his forthcoming Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, as I do below, with notes. [1] Yet, Rosenthal neither corrects his two libels in his text—nor troubles to properly apologize in print.

One leading intellectual replies, Rosenthal attributes to Bostom a thesis he never put forth, and then ridicules him for publishing it. He tries to make people think that Bostom attacked Matthias Kuntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred thesis, and then made

the ‘extravagant proposition’ that the Nazis discovered anti-Semitism by perusing the Koran or by exchanging letters with the mufti.

I have read two of [Bostom’s] books, and most of [his] articles, and nowhere do I remember [him] trying to blame Nazi anti-Semitism on Islam, which would be clearly absurd. …

Rosenthal … implies that the attack on Kuntzel … could not have been motivated by the fact that it is glaringly wrong. You do not have to be a ‘self styled expert in Islam’ to see the fallacy in Kuntzel’s thesis any more than you have to be a self-styled expert in astronomy to know that the moon is not made of green cheese.

There is a concept in economics called anti-work. That happens when people who pretend to be doing productive labor are in fact doing destructive labor—an auto mechanic who, upon examining someone’s car, breaks a part in order that he can charge for fixing it. Kuntzel represents anti-scholarship. He spends a great deal of intellectual labor in order to argue a thesis that no one thought of before. Then he gets a great deal of attention to his thesis, and soon people are wasting their intellectual energies debating it over and over. …

I heartily recommend Bostom’s own rebuttal to Rosenthal’s convoluted and idiotic attack. Read, and learn.

NOTE:
[1] Albert Speer,

who was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, wrote a contrite 808 memoir of his World War II experiences while serving a 20-year prison sentence imposed by the Nuremberg tribunal. 808a Speer’s narrative includes this discussion which captures Hitler’s racist views of Arabs on the one hand, and his effusive praise for Islam on the other: 809

Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. 810 For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. [emphasis added] Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire. [emphasis added] Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

A similar ambivalence characterized Nazi Germany’s support for Arab Muslim causes in the World War II era. 811 Hitler for example, in December 1937, even proposed omitting his “racial ladder” theory—which denigrated the Arabs—from a forthcoming Arabic translation of Mein Kampf. 811a Moreover, it is a tragic irony that despite the “very low rung” occupied by Arabs in Hitler’s racial ladder design, 812 the convergence between Nazi racist antisemitism and theological Muslim Jew hatred 813 still resonates across the Arab Muslim, and larger non-Arab Muslim world, to this day.

NOTES:
808. A recently discovered letter, however (Kate Connolly. “Letter Proves Speer Knew of Holocaust Plan,” The Guardian, March 13, 2007), indicates that despite repeated claims he was unaware of Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews, Speer attended a conference in 1943 where Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and Gestapo, made clear the Nazi regimes genocidal program during what has become known as the Posen speech. Writing in 1971 to Helen Jeanty, widow of a Belgian resistance leader, Speer admitted, “There is no doubt—I was present as Himmler announced on October 6, 1943 that all Jews would be killed….” Who would believe me that I suppressed this, that it would have been easier to have written all of this in my memoirs?
808a. Albert Speer. Inside the Third Reich. 1970, New York, p. 96
809. Ibid.
810. Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq, however, recounts how the Arab jihad ravages of Western Europe continued apace after their defeat at Tours. The Arab invaders found the Mediterranean regions of France, Italy, and Sicily, “more attractive” prey, in particular the churches and monasteries. Dufourcq wrote, (from Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, pp. 421-422: Around 734-735 they stormed and took Arles and Avignon. From the coast of Provence and in Italy, their sailors preceded the cavalry or substituted for them. In 846 they disembarked at the mouth of the Tiber, seized Ostia, went up the river, refrained from attacking the wall of Rome, but pillaged the Basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, which at that time were both outside the walls. This alarm prompted, as a counter-measure, the construction of a new Roman enclosure encompassing Saint Peter’s and rejoining the old one at the Castello Santangelo, the old mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian. In 849 the Moslems attempted a new landing at Ostia; then, every year from around 857 on, they threatened the Roman seaboard. In order to get rid of them, Pope John VIII decided in 878 to promise them an annual payment of several thousand gold pieces; but this tribute of the Holy See to Islam seems to have been paid for only two years; and from time to time until the beginning of the tenth century, the Moslems reappeared at the mouth of the Tiber or along the coast nearby. Marseilles, for its part, was also hit: in 838 the Arabs landed there and devastated it; St. Victor’s Abbey, outside the walls, was destroyed, and many inhabitants of the city were carried off in captivity; ten years later a new raid occurred, the Old Port was again sacked. And this perhaps was repeated once more around the year 920. The whole Italian peninsula was similarly exposed: around 840 Moslem ships followed the Adriatic coasts as far as the Dalmatian archipelago and the mouth of the Po River. Then, returning South, they dared to attack a city, Ancona, some two hundred kilometers northwest of Rome; a sort of commando dashed ashore: the city was devastated and set on fire. During their conquest of Sicily, when they took Syracuse in 878, after a deadly attack, they were exasperated by the resistance that they met with. When they rushed into the city, they found along their way the Church of the Holy Savior, filled with women and children, the elderly and the sick, clerics and slaves, and they massacred them all. Then, spreading out through the city, they continued the slaughter and the pillage, had the treasure of the cathedral handed over to them; they also took many prisoners and gathered separately those who were armed. One week later all of the captives who had dared to fight against them were butchered (four thousand in number, according to the chronicle al-Bayyan). In 934 or 935, they landed at the other end of Italy, at Genoa, killed “all the men” they found there, and then left again, loading onto their ships “the treasures of the city and of its churches”. A few years later they settled for a time, it seems, in Nice, FrÃ©jus, Toulon… One could list many other similar facts. Generally speaking, in these Arab raids carried out by a cavalcade or after a landing, the churches were especially targeted, because the assailants knew that they would find there articles used in worship that were made of gold or silver, sometimes studded with precious stones, as well as costly fabrics. And because the churches were considered to be an offense against God, the One God, given that they were consecrated to the “polytheistic” belief in the Trinity, they were then burned down. The bells were the object of particular animosity, because they dared to amplify the call to infidel prayer by resounding through the skies, towards heaven; therefore they were always broken.
811. Lukasz Hirsczowicz. The Third Reich and the Arab East, 1966, London, pp. 315-316.
811a. Ibid., p. 46
812. Ibid., p. 315.
813. The fourth conference of the Academy of Islamic Research; D.F. Green. Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel; Bat Ye’or. Chapter XXI “The New Egyptian Jew Hatred—Local Elements and External Influences” in Jews in Egypt (Hebrew), 1974, Jerusalem. Full English translation of the original French by Susan Emanuel is presented herein; Tantawi. Banu Isra’il fi al-Qur’an wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Qur’an and the Traditions]

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.

More lies (and fool’s gold) revealed

By Alyssa A. Lappen

Family Security Matters | Feb. 11, 2008

In “The Lies of the Nixon Center” (Nov. 15, 2007), I unraveled some tall tales of its former senior fellow Alexis Debat, a purported Muslim Brotherhood “expert.” Agence France Presse had reported in September 2002 that Debat had never been employed in any capacity by the French Defense Ministry (as he claimed)—which terror expert Jean Charles Brisard further corroborated. He had never earned a Sorbonne Ph.D. (as he also claimed), either.

It’s worth noting now that my October 23, 2006 American Thinker piece, “Islam’s Useful Idiots,” also evidently caught New York University Law School’s Center for Law and Security and purported Muslim Brotherhood “expert” Nick Fielding with their pants down.

Debat—then a consultant to ABC News and the U.S. Defense Department (DOD)—appeared at the Center’s October 19, 2006 Muslim Brotherhood seminar, claiming to be an “expert” on the subject. He made many ludicrous remarks. And in September 2007, Debat fled the U.S. to avoid a lawsuit and accusations of fraud in France–for fabricating interviews with several U.S. and global political leaders.

The October 2006 seminar also featured former Sunday Times reporter Nick Fielding as an “expert” on the MB, however; he made equally inane remarks. Center Director Karen J. Greenberg sang the MB’s praises. On visiting with “moderate” Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) founder Kamal Helbawy in London, Greenberg reported finding him a very kindly, grandfatherly type–and she decried U.S. State Department refusal to admit Helbawy to the country for the NYU conference.

Obviously Greenberg didn’t know. But in 2005, after then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair denounced suicide bombings—even in Israel—Helbawy replied, “Well he is wrong…. He is not a Mufti.” In a Jamestown Foundation interview, Helbawy blamed “events in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine” as “a factor” behind the July 7, 2005 London bombings–along with U.K. participation in Iraq and its “policy toward the issue of Palestine.”

And in December 1992, Helbawy was taped telling the Muslim Arab Youth Association, the Islamic war on Israel isn’t “a conflict of borders and land only. It is not even a conflict over human ideology and not over peace…. [I]t is an absolute clash of civilizations, between truth and falsehood. Between two conducts–one satanic, headed by Jews and their co-conspirators–and the other … religious, carried by Hamas, and the Islamic movement in particular and the Islamic people….” Muslims should never befriend “Jews and Christians,” he warned, who are only “allies to each other….”

Some grandfather.

Fielding denied the MB’s threat to the West and praised Helbawy as “a wonderful human being.” The 2005 election of 22 Muslim Brothers to Egypt’s parliament, Fielding said—and the January 2006 Hamas victory in the Palestinian Authority vote—were cause for celebration. He turned his ire only on “the silence of the U.S. State Department in the face of [alleged] Egyptian government abuse” of Muslim Brothers—and the U.S. and international boycott of the Hamas-controlled PA. Fielding dubbed the MB “reformist,” and offering “the best possibility in the Middle East of leaders who can make deals and stick to them.”

My expose prompted Fielding to falsely accuse me of misrepresenting his remarks. The same day, a sanitized version of his comments miraculously appeared on Ikhwanweb.

Debat had boasted that before the year was out, “NYU will publish the video of my remarks…” and thereby absolve them. Alas, the Center published no video or audio in December 2006—or in 2007.

When Center archives were finally published in early 2008 (surprise, surprise), the promised tape of the Oct. 19, 2006 event was notably missing from the roster.

I’d first noted on Oct. 26, 2006 that no tape could vindicate Fielding or Debat,

unless it is complete and unedited. But that may not be in the cards. Asked if the Center would post the entire session, including the question and answer period, a spokesman stated, “We are considering editing the content,” a process that could easily also exclude many controversial remarks that I quoted from the respective experts. The excuse is time limitation, although streaming digital MP3 downloads are not limited by time. Who is dishonest now?

In November 2007, I recalled Debat’s false complaint of “misquotes and distortions”—easily refuted—and observed that NYU had not published a recording “which would have been too embarrassing.”

NYU was between a rock and a hard place. Issuing an edited tape of the Oct. 19 2006 event would verify that NYU, indeed, has something to hide. Releasing an unedited tape of the Debat and Fielding remarks and Q&A, on the other hand, would recall the Debat scandal—and confirm the accuracy of my original quotations. If it isn’t already, the Center would be a laughing stock for inviting either of them.

But I’m not laughing.

It’s tragic that a Law School claiming to study law and security gave a platform to the hokum pokum of two Muslim Brotherhood apologists, or false notions of a “moderate” MB. As the known parent of every Islamic terror group now operating, the Muslim Brotherhood is today also an unindicted terror funding co-conspirator.

Still more tragic is the apparent acceptance by mainstream media—and U.S. leaders and presidential candidates—of Nixon Center fellow Robert Leiken’s lethal notion that the MB is moderate and reformist—not least, since Leiken’s training is in Latin American politics. Patrick Poole elaborately detailed Leiken’s falsehoods in a 4-part April 2007 series.

The MB unconditionally states, in Arabic and English, its plans to Islamize the globe and impose shari’a (Islamic law) worldwide–largely through “flexibility” (muruna in Arabic). Muslim Brotherhood General Guide Mohammad Mahdi Akef calls on all MB “member organizations to serve” the global agenda to defeat the West, and on “individual members” worldwide to join the “resistance” to the U.S.—both financially and “through active participation.” Even some Arab Muslims describe the MB as one of the world’s most malevolent forces.

The present danger stems mostly from the massive Islamic assault on Western economies and markets, however—both through the global push to institutionalize so-called shari’a finance, and a barrage of Middle Eastern securities markets, corporate, strategic infrastructure, bank and other acquisitions.

Skeptics should simply compare current economic events to an MB strategic plan—“Towards a worldwide strategy for Islamic policy”—written in 1977 and 1982 and discovered in the late 2001 Swiss raid on the home of MB financier Yousef Nada. Written by MB spiritual leader Yousef Qaradawi and known as The Project, the plan instructs members to “establish the Islamic state and gradual, parallel work to control local power centers….” It also requires “special Islamic economic, social and other institutions,” and “the necessary economic institutions to provide financial support” to spread Islam.

Documents unearthed also prove the MB has long operated as a central terror funding command, wiring funds for terror attacks through banks like the now-shuttered Al Taqwa, Saudi Arabia’s Dallah Al-Baraka Group, al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation and Kuwait Finance House–as well as the Islamic Development Bank, a.k.a. the Intifada Bank for funding families of suicide bombers and Bank Meli of Iran.

Now, sovereign Saudi and Dubai interests are buying up Wall Street, too. And their structured Islamic finance is not nearly as benign as they’d like the world to believe.

Beware Fool’s Gold — and Shari’a Finance

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Jan 21, 2008

The very expectations of glittering shari’a finance (Islamic banking) profits hypnotize financial institutions, securities exchanges, and banks–and there are few regulatory or monitoring protections against abuses. So why did United Arab Emirates (UAE) government IP address 92.97.131.110 send some 30,000 to 40,0000 spam messages on December 8, 2007, soliciting Islamic finance clients among U.S. citizens and small businesses?

“Need assistance,” the spam asks, soliciting inquiries to , registered to Emirates Telecommunications Corporation at UAE’s federal domain authority.

Maybe gorging on U.S. strategic assets increases UAE appetite–even though, the lower stocks go, the more prime U.S. investment companies Middle East investors scoop up. Maybe UAE spammers may want to lasso U.S. credit crunch victims desperate for cheaper home or small business loans.

Let’s hope U.S. consumers and U.S. presidential candidates–unlike those U.S. financiers falling like flies before UAE sheiks–will carefully scrutinize the entire Islamic banking scam.

The UAE email solicitation purports that Islamic finance provides four “attractions:”

* Good alternative source of funds

* Risk perceptions of Islamic financiers

* Off-balance sheet financing

* Preferred mode of financing for certain corporate (sic) and individuals

Many grave secular risks accompany shari’a‘s growing foothold in Western markets.

With wife-beating, stoning women, dismembering thieves, hanging homosexuals, supremacist ideology and an annual head tax (jizya) on non-Muslim subjects–shari’a also orders Muslims to fund jihad (financial jihad—al Jihad bi-al-Mal). As in Qur’an 61:10-11, “strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives.” and Qur’an 49:15. “Financial Jihad [is]…more important…than self-sacrificing,” says Saudi cleric and Muslim Brother Hamud bin Uqla al-Shuaibi.

Consider the four purported advantages.

First, the Saudi-favored shari’a finance “alternative,” as noted in FrontPageMagazine earlier, is a 20th century construct without basis in Islamic history–and often funds destruction. It’s an “invented tradition” empowering Islamic radicals, writes USC King Faisal Professor of Islamic Thought, Timur Kuran, in Islam and Mammon: “Neither classical nor medieval Islamic civilization featured banks in the modern sense, let alone ‘Islamic banks’.”

Muslims expect “humanitarian” Islamic finance to buy their “reward in the Hereafter.”

Conversely, Americans expect alternative “ethical” and “socially responsible” investing to build human rights in southern Sudan, common shareholder rights, and good corporate governance and transparency–terms not in the shari’a finance lexicon.

Then take “risk perceptions of Islamic financiers.”

Evidently bankers have forgotten to whom the advantage of this second bogus UAE-invoked “attraction” accrues: Citibank’s Islamic financiers in 1955 launched its Saudi American Bank subsidiary in Jeddah and in 1966 opened a Riyadh branch–without presenting due diligence on the risks of operating under shari’a law, which include sudden confiscation. So Citibank discovered in 1980, when the Saudis seized SAB by royal decree, denied Citi any future profits, and ordered the bank to train Saudis staffers.

Likewise, the “risk perceptions of Islamic financiers” apparently aided criminals at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was founded as an Islamic bank. BCCI perpetrated the largest fraud in banking history, costing depositors and investors at least $21 billion before U.S. prosecutors closed it in 1991. BCCI was also established “to help the world of Islam, and [as] the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists,” as Rachel Ehrenfeld noted in Evil Money (Harper Collins, 1992, pp. 160, 164-5, 169-70). Thus under UAE president Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahayan’s late, terror-financier father, BCCI funded such “alternative” organizations, states and projects as Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Syria, Iran and Pakistan’s nuclear bomb manufacturing.

And Islamic banking’s third “advantage”–its off-balance sheet financing–most readily explains its fourth: the domain’s preference by “certain corporate (sic) and individuals.”

But even the Finance and Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which sets standards for the self-regulated accounting industry, would agree with a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in December 2007, calling for more and better market and banking oversight–not less.

And that includes leashing the downside risks in off-the-books financing. Hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime mortgages caused the current global credit crisis, which is ravaging global equities and bond markets, and could slice $6 trillion from U.S. home values and take years to resolve.

In the 30 years since Bank of America technology and an 8.5% BOA mortgage-backed “pass-through” spawned a landmark market innovation–securitization–underwriters transformed trillions of dollars in claimed cash flows on illiquid assets into increasingly liquid, traceable securities. Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) made mortgage-backed and other complex lending securities so liquid that in the 1980s, U.S. brokerage firms practically sold them on street corners.

During that 1980s securitization boom, the Muslim Brotherhood heavily used the new Western financial technology to develop MB founder Hassan al-Banna’s shari’a banking invention. Today, Islamic financial institutions also manufacture “special purpose entities” (SPEs)–the same kind that coincidentally helped destroy Enron. Naturally, Islamic financial engineers renamed the prickly SPEs “special-purpose vehicles (SPVs)”–legal devices to “restructure interest-bearing debt, collecting interest [as] rent or [a] price mark-up.”

So-called sukuk al-ijara (shari’a bond) issuers sell real estate or assets to SPVs, which capitalize their investment by selling share certificates. In turn, the SPVs then lease back the assets they purchased to the sukuk issuers, collecting principal plus interest, which they pass on to sukuk investors as “rent.” When the sukuk matures, the SPVs sell or return the property to the sukuk issuers.

In short, the supposed “alternative” Islamic finance instruments, which claim to avoid usury, use Western structured finance tools–“some of the most complex ever created.” You got it. Shari’a bankers transform liquid, traceable cash flows from interest-bearing debt into illiquid assets.

How is that more secure for the financial markets?

Actually, financial innovation has sometimes caused market dislocations. Often, the bigger the innovation, the greater the unforeseen consequences–and market declines. Take the role of “portfolio insurance” in the 1987 crash. Or the 1994 bust of mortgage-backed bonds, which wiped out $1 trillion in value–then roughly 10% of the U.S. bond market. That free-fall took down (by several notches) many huge pension funds, municipalities and institutional investors–and also beached a few hedge funds like dead whales.

So how does the complex purported shari’a finance alternative create more security for Western financial markets?

It doesn’t. Under “complexities,” the December UAE solicitation for Islamic finance clients admitted, “Shari’a regulations can override commercial decisions.”

The email also noted two other major shari’a finance problems:

* Documentation is not standardized

* Inter-creditor agreements can be complex (emphasis added)

Taking monumental risks does not even eliminate usury. All “Islamic finance today is interest based,” complains Rice University Islamic economics, finance and management chairman, Mahmoud el-Gamal, in the Financial Times. Disparaging Islamic banking as “shari’a arbitrage,” el-Gamal calls it “first and foremost about religious identity.” And the “forefathers” of so-called “political Islam” intended precisely that in their conception of this 20th century financial concoction.

In reality, “innovative” Islamic financial securities involve enormous risks, which may be an intended prong of the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic financial jihad.

Sukuk issues entice investors with yields much higher than Western bonds. While central Western banks orchestrate historic, simultaneous rate reductions to contain losses feared to equal those of the 1986 to 1995 savings and loan crisis, a sukuk index with a mere 3.8 year duration sported 6.2% “coupon” on Nov. 30, 2007. Meanwhile, in mid January, yields were only 2.89% on intermediate Treasuries–and just 5.25% on the Lehman Brothers intermediate U.S. corporate bond index. Only long term U.S. corporate debt yielded more than 6.5%. No wonder sukuk issues have been fully subscribed.

But two key determinants of bond quality remain–the surety of payments for the scheduled life of the loan, and the certainty that, on maturity, investors will recover 100% of their principal.

Simply believing Islamic sukuk to be inherently safer than Western bonds doesn’t improve their quality of their higher interest rates–oops–“rent.” Islamic or not, buying a sukuk makes its purchaser a creditor. And for the same reasons “junk” is synonymous with high-yield bonds, larger returns carry greater risks.

Which says nothing of the dubious underlying “profit and loss sharing” Islamic finance philosophy. Investors should look doubly hard at whether to expect profit or loss when a sukuk matures–that is, whether recouping the loan’s entire “face value” is even in the cards. That might depend on the values of underlying properties or assets at maturity. But then, “Shari’a regulations can override commercial decisions,” and so on.

In 1983, my esteemed colleague, former Forbes senior editor Howard Rudnitsky, warned in a booming real estate tax-shelter market, “heavy leverage involves risks, and if the market turns bad, the top-heavy financing could wipe out the equity. The creditors would get the property back, the syndicator would keep his fees and the investor would get the shaft.” Not to mention the back taxes, interest and penalties if the Internal Revenue Service ruled the enterprise “uneconomic.”

The same principles apply here. With or without spam, better, safer and fairer for government and IRS regulators, banks, markets–and investors–to take all finance, unIslamic.

Alyssa A. Lappen, a senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy, is a former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance and a former associate editor of Forbes.

Shari’a Finance: Cordless Bungee Jumping

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Pajamas Media | Dec. 18, 2007

Despite flashy headlines extolling Shari’a finance (Islamic banking) and Wall Street bankers jumping into the market, don’t follow. It’s like bungee jumping without a cord—or following lemmings over a cliff.

[12/18/2007 update: The banking industry has a short memory. In 1955, Citibank established the Saudi American Bank in Jeddah and added a Riyadh branch in 1966. But on February 12, 1980, Saudi Arabia confiscated Citibank’s business by royal decree, changed its name to Samba, and forced America’s premier bank to accept a subservient role, staffing its old bank–with a promise not to take any profits. That was shari’a law in action.]

Shari’a is “the path of Allah,” Nizam Yaquby told October conference-goers. But the purportedly “ethical” and “socially responsible” investing supports neither environmentalism nor “renewable” growth.

A 20th century construct, without basis in Islamic history, it often funds destruction. This “invented tradition” empowers Islamic radicals, writes USC King Faisal Professor of Islamic Thought, Timur Kuran, in Islam and Mammon: “Neither classical nor medieval Islamic civilization featured banks in the modern sense, let alone ‘Islamic’ banks’.”

Consider its downside risks.

With 19.99% of Nasdaq in hand, Bourse Dubai, the Dubai International Financial Exchange (DIFX) parent—certified for Islamic “purity”—by Bahrain’s Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAIOFI)—now plans to “rebrand” America’s international over-the-counter market as Nasdaq-DIFX.

What does this mean for presumably “unIslamic” Nasdaq companies (like Israeli generic drug giant, Teva)? Supposedly, Bourse Dubai will be “restricted to 5 percent voting rights” in Nasdaq. But in anticipation of Nasdaq-DIFX’s “rebranding,” DIFX named four new board members.

Boards of directors generally call the shots.

Meanwhile, Citigroup is receiving a second-generation, $7.5 billion Islamic-cash-bailout from the ultra-conservative United Arab Emirates (UAE) sheikdom, Abu Dhabi.

Its initial, 1991 Islamic-rescue followed billions in bad loans, single-quarter losses of $855 million, and U.S. Federal Reserve Board concerns about Citibank’s potential failure.

Suddenly, Citi’s then-Middle East business chief, Shaukat Aziz—fresh from seven years in Riyadh hobnobbing with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal—convinced the latter to trade $600 million for shareholder-rights, Bangladesh’s Depardes reported in June 2004. He now has 3.6%. Aziz later headed Citicorp Islamic Bank, and maybe initiated Citi’s supposedly prospering Shari’a finance business.

But who controls whom? Today, doubling as Pakistan’s Finance and Prime Ministers, Aziz supports “Shariah compliant banking,” which the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) in 2005 strategically planned to promote “as a parallel system.” He’s discussed its potential with Bahraini Bank Alsalam CEO, Yousif Taqi.

Likewise, bin Talal wants to dominate U.S. businesses. Rather than boycott, “Arabs …stand more to benefit from maintaining trade ties with the US because the trade balance … is in our favor,” he told Saudi Arabia’s Arab News daily on May 1, 2002.

Both men’s ideas fit the 1928 cloth of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, whose disciples tailor-made it into shari’a finance—specifically to supersede Western banks, markets and democracies through “parallel economic” and financial institutions. It rests on shari’a—the 7th Century Qur’anic legal code developed by Mohammed’s followers—which clerics consider one, indivisible package, by definition seeking global Islamic supremacy and law.

With wife-beating, stoning women, dismembering thieves, hanging homosexuals, supremacist ideology and an annual head tax (jizya) on non-Muslim subjects—shari’a also commands Muslims to fund jihad (financial jihad—al Jihad bi-al-Mal). As in Qur’an 61:10-11, “strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives….” and Qur’an 49:15. “Financial Jihad [is]…more important…than self-sacrificing,” says Saudi cleric and Muslim Brother Hamud bin Uqla al-Shuaibi.

The 1982 Muslim Brotherhood document, “Towards a Worldwide Strategy for Islamic Policy”—discovered by Swiss police in November 2001 and known as the Project—maps al-Banna’s plan. His successors, and author MB spiritual leader Yusuf Qaradawi, Swiss authorities say, order Muslims to engage “economic institutions adequate to support the cause financially” in directives covering roughly 14 pages, headlined “departure points.”

Elsewhere, Qaradawi decrees, “‘holy war’ is an Islamic duty… [F]ighting…is the Way of Allah for which zakat must be spent.” His 1999 “Fiqh az-Zakat” describes the “‘most deserving’ zakat and jihad, to rebuild Islamic society and state and to implement the Islamic way of life in the political, cultural and economic domains.”

Itself now partly owned by bin Talal, the Wall Street Journal in November 2007 ironically noted the tragedy that bad management and “blundering U.S. monetary policy” had again left Citigroup prey to Arab sheiks. Citi got its cash transfusion by granting “only” a 4.9% “minority stake—and no board seats—magically for 0.1% under the 5% necessitating U.S. Federal Reserve Board approval.

The Fed should intervene anyway—given the avid and ongoing, apparent UAE observance of zakat and jihad directives from Muslim Brotherhood leaders like Qaradawi:

The UAE banks wired most of the funds for the 9/11 attacks.

In 2006, UAE donated $100 million to house Palestinian Authority prisoners and suicide bombers’ families, named for the late father of the current UAE president, who over 30 years donated millions to PLO, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror.

Hamas in July 2005, thanked Al-Nahayan’s “sisterly UAE” for its “limitless [financial] support,” and “aid for our Mujahid,” in other words, Hamas jihadist “charitable societies.”

The Palestinian Authority in May 2005 itemized millions of additional UAE U.S.-dollar aid, including $3 million paid directly to the Al Aqsa Intifada Fund.

UAE president Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahayan’s late, terror-financier father also “owned the infamous [global] Bank of Commerce and Credit International” (BCCI)—which bilked depositors of billions before being shuttered in 1991; funded terrorist groups, states and projects like Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Syria, Iran and Pakistani nuclear bomb manufacturing; and was created “to help the world of Islam, and [as] the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists,” as noted by Rachel Ehrenfeld in Evil Money (Harper Collins, 1992, pp. 160, 164-5, 169-70).

In October 2007, Dubai violated World Trade Organization (WTO) rules—banning the Israelis from the Federation of International Freight Forwarders and Customs Clearing Agents world congress. Dubai Ports World and its government holding company prohibit trade with Israel.

In 2003, the UAE established a federal agency specifically to collect zakat on government tax revenues from “companies listed on the Dubai Financial Market and Abu Dhabi Securities Market… oil-producing companies and branches of foreign banks,” obviously including U.S. oil companies and banks. This year alone, the UAE zakat tax agency collected an estimated $13.5 billion.

In what dark corner are U.S. legislators, Fed and securities market regulators asleep?
__________
Alyssa A. Lappen, a Senior Fellow at the American Center for Democracy, is a former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance, and a former Associate Editor of Forbes.

Lies of the Nixon Center

Whitewashing the Muslim Brotherhood
by Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Nov. 15, 2007

On the wall over my desk hangs an amusing trophy from the late, disgraced former President, Richard M. Nixon, whose lies about Watergate ultimately forced him from office. I framed Nixon’s letter–extolling secretive textile magnate Roger Milliken as one of America’s greatest businessmen–beside the May 1989 Forbes piece in which I also reported on the suitcases of cash Milliken gave to both Nixon presidential campaigns.

On October 19, 2006, I encountered a liar rivaling Nixon–ironically then a “senior fellow” at Washington’s Nixon Center. Also then a consultant to ABC News and the U.S. Defense Department (DOD), Alexis Debat appeared at New York University Law School’s Center on Law and Security on an “expert” panel on the Muslim Brotherhood. Debat claimed he was writing “a book on the Muslim Brotherhood,” reportedly with an enormous, indirect DOD grant, through the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) headed by former DOD analyst Andrew Krepinevich.

Masquerading as a Sorbonne Ph.D. and former French Defense Ministry adviser, Debat simultaneously made the most preposterous claims. “Let’s stop hyperventilating about the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said, adding, “I hear the same things in a [British] church as I hear in a mosque”–despite frequent, recurrent incitements emanating from Islamic mosques, centers and schools, including myriad tapes, textbooks, and other media.

“Islam is a source of enlightenment,” Debat said, calling the Muslim Brotherhood “chiefly a ‘political movement, not a party,”–a “liberation” movement, and a “highly pragmatic” prospective “leader in Egypt.”

As was obvious from his foolish remarks, Debat was no Muslim Brotherhood “expert.” Indeed, in September 2002 Agence France Presse had reported, the French Defense Ministry never employed Debat in any capacity–a fact further corroborated by terror expert Jean Charles Brisard, in a Sept. 26, 2007 email. Moreover, Debat never received a Sorbonne Ph.D.

Responding to my Oct. 23, 2006 American Thinker report, Debat falsely complained of “misquotes and distortions,” which I easily refuted. NYU’s Center for Law and Security didn’t publish a recording–which would have been too embarrassing.

Events quickly put the lie to Debat’s nonsense, as my colleague Patrick Poole noted in February 2007. Continue reading “Lies of the Nixon Center” →

Shari’a finance

by Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPage Magazine | Nov. 14, 2007

In October, Abu Dhabi Prince Nahayan Mabarak al-Nahayan advertised his ultra-conservative sheikdom’s openness “in this age of globalization,” and having had world trade “from ancient times” by welcoming 100 world-class Jewish intellectuals to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) second biennial “Festival of Thinkers.” The UAE higher education minister controls 90%-plus of UAE crude and natural gas reserves–and wants good press for planned UAE cultural, science, technology and education institutions.

Also in October, shari’a finance gurus lobbied U.S. bankers at two Islamic finance conferences “to access more Islamic investment opportunities” and create more shari’a compliant products and new Islamic banks. Shari’a is “the path of Allah” explained “scholar” Nizam Yaquby obliquely at first, the Oct. 24 and 25 “Islamic Finance in North America” meeting, thus convincing many U.S. bankers that Islamic economics dates to Muhammad.

However, accepting “shari’a finance” is like swallowing double-edged swords. U.S. politicians, businessmen and regulators should scrutinize–and disclose–the diplomatic and economic weapons that costly oil bestows on erstwhile allies. Muslim clerics consider shari’a–the 7th century Qur’an-based legal code developed by Muslim jurists after Muhammad–one indivisible package, including wife-beating, stoning women, hanging homosexuals, dismembering thieves, supremacist ideology–and funding terror. And shari’a clashes with secular, Constitution-based U.S. laws.

Moreover, Islamic finance is an “invented tradition” empowering Islamic radicals, writes University of Southern California King Faisal Professor of Islamic Thought, Timur Kuran, in Islam and Mammon: “Neither classical nor medieval Islamic civilization featured banks in the modern sense, let alone ‘Islamic banks’.” Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna concocted the idea in the 1920s to unite Muslims in one global Islamic nation (umma).

Finally, Federal Reserve Board officials admit to not understanding shari’a finance. For example, “[W]e are certainly in no position to take a stance on issues of shari’a interpretation,” said New York Federal Reserve executive vice president William Rutledge on April 19, 2005 to the Arab Bankers Association of North America (ABANA).

The Muslim Brotherhood designed dogma and Islamic finance to spread shari’a–seeking ultimate global supremacy over daily life, individual, political and religious freedom. Shari’a mandates that Muslims fund jihad (financial jihad–al Jihad bi-al-Mal). Qur’an 61:10-11, “strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives….” And Qur’an 49:15, “(true) believers are only those who…strive with their wealth and their lives for the cause of Allah.”

“Financial Jihad [is]…more important…than self-sacrificing,” says Saudi Islamic cleric and Muslim Brother Hamud bin Uqla al-Shuaibi. Muslim Brotherhood spiritual chief Yusuf Qaradawi decrees, “Declaring holy war…is an Islamic duty… [F]ighting…is the Way of Allah for which zakat [charity] must be spent.”

In 2006, UAE donated $100 million to house Palestinian Authority prisoners and families of suicide bombers–and honor UAE president Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahayan, whose late father, over 30 years contributed millions for PLO, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror. On July 27, 2005, Hamas thanked Al-Nahayan’s “sisterly UAE… for its ‘limitless [financial] support’,” and “aid for our Mujahid,” in other words, Hamas jihadist “charitable societies.”

UAE’s Bourse Dubai stock exchange recently requested approval to buy control of NASDAQ, 52% of London’s Stock Exchange (LSE) and 47.6% of OMX (Nordic exchange)–ten months after Bahrain’s Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAIOFI) certified its “Islamic ‘purity’,” designating it the world’s first “shari’a compliant” market.

AAOIFI’s members and shari’a board include Saudi Arabia’s Dallah Al-Baraka Group, al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation and Kuwait Finance House–all implicated in al Qaeda and other terror funding, according to former national counter-terror coordinator Richard Clarke. Other board members are the Islamic Development Bank, also known as the Bank of the Intifada for funding families of suicide bombers, whose principal owners are Saudi Arabia, Iran, Lybia and Egypt, and not one, but two U.S.-sanctioned terror states, Sudan and Iran. Islamic finance experts consider AAOIFI fatwas standards to which all shari’a banks and products, even in the U.S., must adhere. But UAE’s showcase Bourse on Oct. 22, 2007 denied its Islamic “purity” to the Partnership for New York City.

Dubai banned Israel’s delegation from the October Federation of International Freight Forwarders and Customs Clearing Agents world congress. Dubai Ports World and its government holding company prohibit trade with Israel. UAE banks wired most funding for the 9/11 attacks. Saudi Arabia boycotts Israel, despite promising in 2005 to stop, before joining the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Shari’a designates lying “one of the ugliest and most disgusting of sins.” Alas, lying is “permissible”–even encouraged–in innumerable circumstances. Sufi Imam Abu Hamid Mohammed ibn Mohammed al-Ghazzali (1058-1111) instructed followers, if one could achieve a praiseworthy “aim by lying but not by telling the truth, … [it is] obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory,” according to Nuh Ha Mim Keller’s Reliance of the Traveller.

Imposing shari’a–by proselytizing (da’wa) or jihad war–is obligatory.

U.S. banking and investment laws guarantee individual property rights, require full disclosure, and prohibit criminal or terrorist activities. Western bankers and businessmen, however, oblivious to shari’a and financial jihad history, clamor for Muslim petrodollars (supposed surpluses from overextended Middle Eastern exchanges) pouring into U.S. markets.

Former Goldman Sachs trader and Birthright Israel supporter Daniel Och, for example, plans to sell 9.9% of Och-Ziff Capital Management to Dubai International Capital, which on Nov. 6 also acquired Europe’s biggest diagnostic imaging company from Britain’s Bridgepoint private equity fund.

But DIC chief executive Sameer alAnsari sits on the board of Palestine Children Relief Fund, a U.S.-based Palestinian “charity” reportedly tired to the shuttered Holy Land Foundation, Global Relief Foundation, and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO)–which have all been federally investigated for funding Muslim Brotherhood terror groups al Qaeda, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

Buyers and sellers, beware.

Alyssa A. Lappen, a former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance, is a senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy. Her website is https://www.alyssaalappen.org.