Anti-al Qaeda Base Envisioned

Here is the second post which is connected to the last one. Again, I found this on my friends blog, thank you Stefan. It is an article from The Washington Times, the link for this story is below.  As always any thing in ((and)) is my comment on the subject. One other thing I want to say, completely off topic. I had this post already in the line up to put up. I had hoped to do some research over the last couple of days since this time of year finds most of us extremely busy until after New Year’s Day. The series I am writing on takes a lot of research to get it right and cover everything. Anyway, on Saturday I started coming down with something, now its a full on head cold. The problem is, if it goes to my lungs, I could be in serious trouble. I have a preexisting lung problem and any other insult could not only cause me to have to go into the hospital, but it could kill me.

I’m telling you all this for two reasons; Number 1 is, I will do what I can with my blogs, but you know what its like when you have a head cold or don’t feel well. 2 if I disappear for a week or so, it could be I am in the hospital, so just so you know, its not because I am quiting the blog. 

Now, on with today’s post:

   

Article published Sep 26, 2007
an article from www.washingtontimes.com

By Willis Witter

Exiled Egyptian cleric Ahmed Subhy Mansour, whose teachings have earned him dozens of death “fatwas” from fellow Muslim clerics, uses the English translation for al Qaeda — meaning “the base” — to describe a plan to defeat Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, who he says have seized control of Islam.”Suppose you have here [in the United States] a base to counter al Qaeda in the war of ideas?” Sheik Mansour asked during a recent luncheon at The Washington Times.

“You could convince a large number — millions of silent Muslims. We can convince them very easily that the real enemy is not the United States. It is not Israel. The real enemy is the dictators in the Muslim world and the culture of the Wahhabis and Muslim Brotherhood,” he said, referring to the dominant arbiters of Islamic orthodoxy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt respectively.

Sheik Mansour is the founder of a small Egyptian sect that is neither Sunni nor Shi”ite. They call themselves Quranists because they believe that the Koran represents the single authentic scripture of Islam. They especially anger Sunni Muslims by rejecting the Hadith and Sunna, purported sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad.

“Killing people just because they are not Muslims, they have a Hadith for this. To kill a Muslim like me after accusing him to be an ‘apostate,” they have a Hadith for this. To persecute the Jews, they have a Hadith for this.“All this is garbage. It has nothing to do with Islam. It contradicts more than one-fourth of the Koranic verses,” Sheik Mansour said. ((one-fouth Wow!))A former professor of Islamic history at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, he was expelled in 1987 as the Muslim equivalent of a “heretic” and was briefly imprisoned by Egyptian authorities. After subsequent waves of persecution, he finally fled Egypt just months after the September 11, 2001, attacks and received political asylum in the United States the next year.

More recently, in May and June, Egyptian authorities arrested five leaders of the movement, including Sheik Mansour“s brother, on charges of “insulting Islam” and began investigations of 15 others, with the intent, he said, to destroy the entire movement.

From exile in the United States, he continues to attack the Islam of bin Laden and the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia that gave birth to bin Laden”s beliefs. Sheik Mansour also attacks the Islamist vision of Egypt”s Muslim Brotherhood, a group that rejects violence but shares the goal of a theocratic nationhood under Shariah, or Islamic law.

Though illegal in Egypt, the Brotherhood is allowed to operate openly in an uneasy truce with the government. Police round up its members whenever it delves too publicly in politics — for example, by holding anti-government demonstrations. But the Brotherhood”s interpretation of Shariah provides a benchmark for Egyptian law, which is based primarily on Shariah.

“We are not against the people. We are against this culture that will produce more and more generations of fanaticism. We go to the core of this culture and prove that it contradicts the Koran,” Sheik Mansour said.

“Few Americans understand that the battle against terrorism is a war of ideas,” Sheik Mansour said. “It is a war that is very different from the military in its tactics, its strategy and its weapons.

“Suicide bombings are just one aspect of this war. They brainwash young men to blow themselves up, to kill randomly. Our mission is to convince him, to undeceive them, to convince them that what he is doing is against Islam. He will lose his life and lose his afterlife as well.”Sheik Mansour claims about 10,000 followers in Egypt who accept his teachings, many of whom are part of his extended family.“We find Islam has the same values as the West: freedom, unlimited freedom of speech, justice, equality, loving, humanity, tolerance, mercy, everything. This is our version of Islam, and we argue that this is the core of Islam according to the Koran.”  ((Somebody tell me why people like these are so feared by the powers that be in Muslim nations??))

He and his sons operate the Quranic Center in Northern Virginia, which includes an elaborate Internet site in Arabic and English. On its Web site at www.ahl–alquran.com, the organization is republishing dozens of Sheik Mansour“s books and hundreds of articles he has written over the years.  ((the english version http://www.ahl-alquran.com/English/main.php))

The campaign is not without risk. One can find a sampling of fatwas, or edicts by other Muslim scholars against the Quranists, including one saying, “We have issued our commands to the soldiers of God to worship God by pouring out their blood and burning their homes.”  ((Those of you who live in the West, be grateful for your religious freedom.))

Sheik Mansour said in response: “I do not care about my safety, but I do care about my persecuted people in Egypt.”

Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute”s Institute of Religious Freedom, said arrests of the Quranists reflect an attempt by Egypt”s government to demonstrate its loyalty to Islam to fend off challenges from even more extreme Islamists who want to impose much harsher restrictions on the Arab world”s most populous nation.

“These arrests are part of the Egyptian government’s double game in which it imprisons members of the Muslim Brotherhood when the latter appear to become too powerful, while simultaneously trying to appear Islamic itself and blunt the Brotherhood’s appeal by cracking down on religious reformers, who are very often also democracy activists,” Mr. Marshall wrote in a recent edition of the Weekly Standard.

The arrests of the Quranists received a brief mention in the latest annual report on International Religious Freedom by the State Department, which noted the arrests of five Quranists and defined the group as “a small group of Muslims who rely largely if not exclusively on the Qur’an as authoritative for Islam, to the exclusion of the prophetic traditions [Hadith] and other sources of Islamic law.”

One detainee told an Egyptian human rights investigator that he was beaten and threatened with rape by one interrogator, the State Department report says.  ((This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of this kind of punishment and interrogation torture.  So here we have a man being persecuted, because he is considered a heretic towards Islam, and we have some Muslims, torturing him and others… Please somebody tell me how one man raping another, or if a man rapes a woman … how ‘Islamic’ is that??  How is torture in any form Islamic??)) 

Since arriving in the states, Sheik Mansour has held a number of academic posts. In 2002, he was a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, where he wrote on the roots of democracy in Islam.

The next year, he received a visiting fellowship at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program.

He also briefly met Karen P. Hughes, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, last year in the office of Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican.The meeting, Sheik Mansour said, lasted for 10 minutes, barely enough for polite introductions.

“I said: ‘Please, let me sit down with you for more time. I have big plan,” ” he recalled. But there was no follow-up.

“We need official American help for our arrested people in Egypt,” he said. “We don”t want money. We are talking about releasing our arrested people, saving the lives of scholars, bringing them to the U.S., granting them asylum to help establish this new base for moderate Islam.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070926/FOREIGN/109260030/1003

Mufti: No Jewish Prayer In Palestine’s, Jerusalem

First things first, the photo above was of a 6 year old student who was punched in the face by her Moroccan teacher after she accidently stepped on his prayer mat… All I can say, is its a good thing that wasn’t my child.

I have done my fair share of posts on actions of both Muslim and non-Muslim acts of bigotry. And though I am sure it will meet with disapproval, as some will misunderstand what I am trying to do… I am posting this story anyway. Acts done to deliberately insult, demean, or intentionally hurt others is wrong regardless of who is doing it. If non-Muslims did it to Muslims, if Jews did it to Muslims, if Muslims did it to non-Muslims, or if Muslims did it to Jews. Which brings me to today’s post.

Sadly, this will not be the last post of this kind. I can only hope that by bringing this kind of stuff to the forefront and talking about it, that it might make a difference and change the way we think and act. I recently posted a story about an Italian politician who decided to walk a pig on a site on which a Mosque was due to be built. It was done out of hate, pure and simple. It can’t be justified, because it was completely out of line. It served no purpose and only reinforced the erroneous view that we are at war against Islam, and not Islamist. Obviously there are a whole lot of people out there that never learned the line our mothers taught us as children… “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” A bigot by any other name, is still considered a bigot.

We will be getting much farther into Israel as it plays a prominent role in ‘the end times’ prophecy in both Islam and Christianity. But this article is to point out a comment, and how it adds nothing towards the cause of peace. You can find the original article here. I am printing it below in its entirety.

If Jerusalem is divided, and it’s eastern part made the capital of “Palestine” -world Jewry will be forever cut off from the hope it has held onto for 2000 years, and be once and for all prohibited from ascending the Temple Mount and even from praying at the Western Wall.
This warning was clearly sounded in an interview the former PLO-appointed mufti of Jerusalem gave to The Jerusalem Post this week, excerpts of which were published Thursday.

Ikrema Sabri emphatically told the Post no Israelite temple had ever stood on the Temple Mount.

What’s more, the cleric insisted, the Western Wall – whose massive stones the entire world knows to have been laid by Herod the Great during the Roman occupation of the Land of Israel – had nothing to do with any temple either.

“The wall is not part of the Jewish temple. It is just the western wall of the mosque. There is not a single stone with any relation at all to the history of the Hebrews.

“It was always only a mosque – all 144 dunams, the entire area,” Sabri said.

“No Jews have the right to pray there. … No Jewish prayer. If the Jews want real peace, they must not do anything to try to pray on Al-Aqsa. Everyone knows that.”

The Mufti’s ranting underscored how the Muslim Arab effort to wrest Israel’s holiest site from the Jewish people and entrench it under irreversible Islamic control is intensifying in the run-up to next-month’s US-sponsored Middle East conference.

Washington is pushing for this conference, fully aware that the Arab side’s intent is to steal great chunks of Israel’s historic homeland for the creation of a juden-rein Palestinian state that will never tolerate Jewish and Christian worship on or near the Temple Mount – or at any other site deemed sacred to Islam. ((yes I am aware that the same charge has been made against Israel))

((My comment))What if it was the other way around?? What if Israel was “forever cutting off” Al-Aqsa Mosque?? There is another article below, which can be found here. I know that Israel invokes a lot of emotion, but this kind of thing doesn’t help. Is it absolutely hopeless?? Am I wasting my time?? Will everyone keep their preconceived idea’s with out trying for even a minute to understand the other side?? And I’m not just talking about non-Muslims here.

Israel to come under Sharia law, says Israeli Arab cleric
A leading Israeli Arab Muslim cleric said at the weekend that the Jewish state will very soon cease to exist and the whole of the country will come under Sharia (strict Islamic) law as another piece in the puzzle to reconstituting the Islamic Caliphate.

In an interview with a local Arabic-language newspaper, Sheikh Kamal Khatib, deputy head of northern Israel’s Islamic Movement, insisted that the world is “on the threshold of a new era. The future belongs to Islam and the Muslims.”

Khatib said that in preparation for the coming Islamic takeover, Muslims who hold Israeli citizenship like himself should begin to actively rebel against the state by refusing to cooperate with and forming alternatives to the Israeli authorities.

Also at the weekend, Khatib’s boss, Sheikh Raed Salah denounced current peace negotiations leading to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict as an “evil Israeli scheme.” Salah, who is also an Israeli citizen, has long maintained that that Muslim world must not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

((My comment))I have so much to say (in regards to the series we are in), too much actually, which makes it very hard to find the words and order that I want it in. Over the next few weeks our current series will discuss different Muslim views in regards to Dajjal, Imam Mahdi, Jesus or Isa as he is referred and Israel. We will talk about Iran and Ahmadnutjob’s feelings on the matter. I will share some of my personal views along with others. I actually feel that the most important time will be when the anti-Christ comes. But fear not, I will also write about Armageddon and the 7 years prior too. And I haven’t forgot about Gog and Magog in Islam. So hang on folks things are getting ready to jump off in here .

Last but definitely not least, what do you think of this story? Is this a crime worth torture and death? Please give me your honest opinion, if you think it is, why do you think it is.

Sorry about the indents, wordpress seems to have a mind of its own.  No matter how many times I formate the post, it decides how it will look when posted. 

Gog and Magog and The Differing Views Amongst Muslims

Before we get to far into Islam’s Gog and Magog, I wanted to put this up. The following posts are from 2 Muslim websites, the links are below. To my Muslim readers, there will be some posts where I will ask you to comment on whether the information is widely accepted and how much is or is not. In addition, some of what I am putting up, may seem offensive to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, it is not meant to be. I am merely putting up what each text/site/person believes, so take it for that.

I found this post to be interesting and refreshing, as I hear so much against the Jews in particular.

Don’t Blame The Jews

Another disturbing trend that is heavily propagated by extremists and accepted by many naive Arabs and Muslims is the blaming of all Muslim problems on the Jews. There are numerous examples for this but most recently news broadcasts out of Iraq quoted Iraqi victims of violence who blamed the bombings on Jews or a Jewish conspiracy.Many Arabs and Muslims still blame the 9-11 attacks on a Jewish conspiracy that was allegedly perpetrated to demonize Arabs and Muslims in the eyes of the world.

One of the most recent and tragic examples of unjustified hate towards Jews was the brutal murder of Daniel Pearl. Daniel Pearl was a journalist murdered by Islamic extremists in Pakistan who had never met a Jew, and the only knowledge they had about Jews was the tireless propaganda from Muslim extremists throughout the world blaming Jews for all of the world’s problems. The extremists targeted and murdered Daniel Pearl because he was a Jew.

Our research indicates that one of the modern origins of this trend is the mutual demonization by Israelis and Arabs of each other to gain global support for each other’s causes. This pattern includes the Arab media’s ceaseless reference to the falsified document, the Protocols of Zion. The Coalition strongly urges Muslims and Arabs to refrain from demonizing Jews and stop blaming Jews for all of the world’s problems. The Coalition also urges Israelis to stop demonizing Arabs and Muslims who peacefully advocate for the rights of Palestinians. http://pressthat.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/dont-blame-the-jews/

.((this is my comment on the above, in case it isn’t ‘outdented’)) I showed in my post ‘Israel, Prophecy, and The End Times’, that some Muslims have no problem with Israel. I wanted to show this post before putting up the next one, to remind you that not every Muslim is against Israel or the Jews, and the same can be said about Christians. Not every Christian is for Israel or Jews, (in this I believe Christians are wrong and not following the Word).

Here is some interesting stuff but it is considered unorthodox and infamous amongst Muslim scholars for its number 19 theory. Still, it shows the differing views of different Muslims. And I can’t say that everything he has to say is wrong in the main Islamic belief, because I have seen some of his views on other websites, which we will be getting too.

Who Are Gog And Magog

The Quran refers to Gog & Magog twice in Quran, in 18:94 & 21:96. It is a great blessing upon us that we have some additional information about Gog & Magog through Dr. Rashad Khalifa, God’s Messenger of the Covenant. Below are the relevant verses for this topic taken from Dr. Khalifa’s English translation of Quran.

[18:93] When he reached the valley between two palisades, he found people whose language was barely understandable.
[18:94] They said, “O Zul-Qarnain, Gog and Magog are corruptors of the earth. Can we pay you to create a barrier between us and them?”
[18:95] He said, “My Lord has given me great bounties. If you cooperate with me, I will build a dam between you and them.
[18:96] “Bring to me masses of iron.” Once he filled the gap between the two palisades, he said, “Blow.” Once it was red hot, he said, “Help me pour tar on top of it.”
[18:97] Thus, they could not climb it, nor could they bore holes in it.
[18:98] He said, “This is mercy from my Lord. When the prophecy of my Lord comes to pass, He will cause the dam to crumble. The prophecy of my Lord is truth.”
[18:99] At that time, we will let them invade with one another, then the horn will be blown, and we will summon them all together.

Footnote for 18:94-98: One of my duties as God’s Messenger of the Covenant is to state that Gog and Magog, the final sign before the end of the world, will reappear in 2270 AD (1700 AH), just 10 years before the end. Note that Gog and Magog occur in Suras 18 and 21, precisely 17 verses before the end of each sura, representing 17 lunar centuries (see 72:27 and Appendix 25).

[21:95] It is forbidden for any community we had annihilated to return.
[21:96] Not until Gog and Magog reappear, will they then return – they will come from every direction.
[21:97] That is when the inevitable prophecy will come to pass, and the disbelievers will stare in horror: “Woe to us; we have been oblivious. Indeed, we have been wicked.”

Footnote for 21:96: By the year 2270 AD, thanks to God’s mathematical miracle in the Quran (Appendix 1), America will be the heart of Islam, and billions around the globe will have believed in the Quran (9:33, 41:53, 48:28, 61:9). Gog and Magog (allegorical names of villainous communities), will be the only bastions of heathenism, and they will attack the submitters. That is when the world will end (15:87, 18:94, Appendix 25). Gog and Magog are mentioned in 18:94 & 21:96, 17 verses before the end of each sura; this may indicate the time of their appearance.

. One of the things I have noticed is that this person believes that anyone using the Hadiths and Sunnah’s are wrong and that the Quran spoke against it. He uses scripture that I thought was suppose to refer to non-Muslims. At least that is the way it was told to me, but it was told to me by Islamists so who knows. Some of his explanations on why he only uses the Quran seem to make sense. I also know that there are many different sects in Islam, and many different views as you will see. Suffice to say, he is not alone in his interpretations, there are others who use only the Quran. We will get into his number theory in the future.

This guy sees that all religion should be allowed to be freely worshiped, others obviously do not. And one in particular feels that everyone who isn’t Muslim is possibly Gog and Magog, we will be getting to his stuff.

The person who wrote this also said; “USA as a society and as a nation practices God’s laws as laid out in the Quran, more so, than any other nation in the world. He follows that comment with those great words from the pledge, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, With Liberty And Justice For All. So you see, as I have said over and over, not all Muslims think alike. Anyway, moving on to the next concept of Gog Magog. Too bad more don’t think like these 2.

One more thing, I want to set the record straight on a couple of things. #1 Christians are NOT polytheist which is the standard theme in Islam. #2 I really want Muslims to understand one simple fact, just because the west is considered Christian, does not mean that all Westerners are Christian. In Muslim nations the majority of people are Muslim, their nation revolves around the religion for the most part. Most people attend mosque, most people pray 5 times a day, most people follow the pillars. So, because of that, most Muslims who live in Muslim nations seem to think that Christian nations do the same thing in regards to Christianity…THEY DON’T. There are a number of Christians for sure, but not all are devout or follow the same beliefs as the other. Please keep this in mind before you lump all Westerners in the same basket!! And the same goes for Westerners.

http://www.submission.org/suras/app25.html
http://www.submission.org/miracle/
http://www.submission.org/islam/usa.html