$6 million taxpayer dollars (this year, in this economy) will be spent towards restoring 63 historical and cultural sites, including mosques and minarets in 55 nations.
The good will tour of the Middle East by the imam behind the proposed mosque near ground zero is just part of the U.S. government's efforts to reach out to the Muslim world.
This year, the Obama administration will spend nearly $6 million to restore 63 historic and cultural sites, including mosques and minarets, in 55 nations, according to State Department documents.
Under a program established by Congress in 2001, the department will fund at least five projects in as many countries at a cost of more than $271,000.
Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s adviser to the Muslim world, is speaking about U.S. foreign policy at a Ramadan dinner hosted by U.S. Rep. John Conyers at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, MI. Mr. Hussain has been criticized for remarks he made during a Muslim Students Association panel, in which he said the U.S. prosecution of some terrorism suspects, including Sami Al-Arian, was politically motivated.
President Barack Obama's adviser to the Muslim world is coming to the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn on Sunday to discuss U.S. foreign policy at a Ramadan dinner hosted by U.S. Rep. John Conyers.
Rashad Hussain, 31, is the special envoy of the U.S. to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of about 57 Muslim countries that acts as an international public voice.
After being appointed earlier this year by Obama, Hussain came under criticism for remarks he made in 2004 on a Muslim Students Association panel, in which he said the U.S. prosecution of some terrorism suspects, including Sami Al-Arian, was politically motivated.
Hamburg authorities closed a mosque with a history of indoctrinating and radicalizing young people (including several of the 9/11 hijackers) and serving as a meeting place for jihadists. Said Christoph Ahlhaus, secretary of the interior for the city of Hamburg, “Behind the scenes, a supposed cultural organization shamelessly used the freedoms of our democratic rule of law to promote holy war.”
The authorities in Hamburg said Monday that they had shut down the mosque where several of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks had met, asserting that it remained a source of radicalization nearly a decade later.
The Masjid Taiba mosque in Hamburg, known at the time of the hijackings in 2001 as Al Quds mosque, was “closed effective immediately,” according to a statement by the Hamburg Interior Ministry. German television showed blue-uniformed police officers carrying computers out of the mosque in the St. Georg neighborhood.
That the small mosque near Hamburg’s main train station was still in operation and still, according to law enforcement officials, indoctrinating young people with a form of Islam that encouraged violence demonstrated the challenges faced by Western democracies like Germany in controlling extremism without impinging on civil rights and religious freedom.
The mosque had been under surveillance for years, but efforts to close it received new urgency after a group of radicalized young people associated with the mosque, most of them German citizens with roots in Muslim countries, traveled last year to the region along the border shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan. Officials said clearing the legal and bureaucratic obstacles to closing a mosque was a slow process, one that finally succeeded Monday.
On June 22, 2010 the administration announced the appointments of the Class of White House Fellows 2010-2011. One of the 13 Fellows named is Samar Ali.
Let’s look at some history and see if we can connect the dots, shall we?
Shariah Law and Shariah Courts are on the rise in Great Britain and Canada. This editorial describes the severe, barbaric and discriminatory reality of these courts and compares them to other religion-based judicial systems such as Jewish Beth Din courts. To quote Suhaib Hasan, the Secretary General of the Islamic Sharia Council, "If Sharia law is implemented, then you can turn this country [Great Britain] into a haven of peace because once a thief's hand is cut off nobody is going to steal." Furthermore, "once[,] just only once, if an adulterer is stoned[,] nobody is going to commit this crime at all," and finally, "[w]e want to offer it to the British society. If they accept it, it is for their good and if they don't accept it they'll need more and more prisons."
The spread of sharia law to the entire world is part of jihad. In Canada and Britain, jihad is advancing.
A June 2010 report entitled "Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights" begins with Secretary General of the Islamic Sharia Council Suhaib Hasan saying, "If Sharia law is implemented, then you can turn this country [Great Britain] into a haven of peace because once a thief's hand is cut off nobody is going to steal." Furthermore, "once[,] just only once, if an adulterer is stoned[,] nobody is going to commit this crime at all," and finally, "[w]e want to offer it to the British society. If they accept it, it is for their good and if they don't accept it they'll need more and more prisons."
This perverse logic is illustrative of the brutality that is sharia law's penal code. The writers of the report have compiled evidence of "the discriminatory nature of these courts and make recommendations for curtailing sharia and religious tribunals on the basis that they work against and not for equality, and are incompatible with human rights." The authors explain that "whilst there is an obvious difference between stoning a woman to death and denying her the right to divorce and child custody, the fundamentals and misogyny behind sharia's civil and penal codes are the same -- it is just a matter of degree. It is deceptive, or at best a mistake, not to see the civil aspects of sharia law as part of and an extension of its penal code."
The first Sharia Council was begun in Birmingham, England in 1982. Muslim tribunal courts begun passing sharia judgments in August 2007 in Great Britain. In September 2008, Richard Edwards of the Telegraph reported that five sharia courts had been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford, and Manchester, and Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The British government had "quietly sanctioned" the sharia courts and made their rulings "enforceable with the full power of the judicial system." Prior to this, "the [sharia] rulings were not binding and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims." These cases dealt with sharia civil code, i.e., Muslim divorce and inheritance. In one inheritance case, the sons received twice as much as the daughters because men are favored over women in sharia law. Under British law, the daughters would have received equal amounts; in addition, in sharia law, "a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man's." Furthermore, "a woman's marriage contract is between her male guardian and her husband," and finally, "a Muslim woman is not permitted to marry a non-Muslim."
