"America"

The November 19, 2012 edition of Newsweek depicts "America" (Click directly on the image to enlarge it, and read the titles of some of the articles):

Is this the image they are trying to depict?

Haitian General 

Toussaint Louverture

Recent Essay By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The essay "Why America Is the World's Shelter" appears in the June 2012 edition of Smithsonian, recently voted the most interesting magazine in America. Excerpt:

...I began receiving physical threats: “You are no longer a Muslim, you are an apostate, you must be killed.” Finally, in 2004, the Dutch director Theo van Gogh and I created the film Submission focused on violence against Muslim women. Van Gogh was killed by a Dutch-born Islamic fundamentalist on a street in Amsterdam because of it.

Before van Gogh’s death I was placed under intense security. Afterward I was put in a virtual prison to keep me safe. The logical thing was for me to emigrate somewhere else, where I could be free and safe: I found that in America. In 2006 the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., offered me a job, a community of scholars, an application for a visa. The AEI raised money to pay for private protection, which I still have to this day. In terms of shelter and protection, this country has been so absolutely wonderful to me.

Today, I pursue the work of my foundation, which I established in 2007. Our mission is to protect and defend the rights of women and girls in the West from oppression and violence justified by religion and culture. By religion, I mean, first and foremost, militant Islam.

For me America is a place of refuge and a great nation. I say this without being blind to the problems we have in this country. But the people I have encountered here have given me protection, friendship, love. I feel not only safe, but also absolutely free to lead the life I wanted.

Read the rest HERE.

The essay isn't hard-hitting. However, I surmise that people who read Smithsonian don't read a lot of anti-jihad material. Maybe some of those people reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's essay as they are waiting in a doctor's office or visiting the public library will go to the Internet to learn more or, better yet, buy one of her books.

By the way, an essay by Ayaan Hirsi Ali also recently appeared in Newsweek. You can ready that essay HERE.

My Head Is About To Explode!

YE, GODS!!!

"Newsweek Calls For Impeaching Supreme Court Justices If They Overturn Obamacare."

Too Bad NEWSWEEK Doesn't Know What A Lingam-Yoni Is

With regard to the Obumma administration's treatment of the American public, this would have made a much more appropriate cover.

Flashback 1975: Government and MSM in Hysterics Over "The Coming Ice Age"....

Go read the whole thing at Weasel Zippers (click on the title above).



Just for the record, the reason I don't believe Global Warming is going to kill us is because, at 46 years of age, I have been Chicken Littled by scientists far too many times.

During the course of my lifetime, I have been told

1) we were overpopulating the earth (it turns out all of our problems with food have to do with distribution, not shortages)

2) we would eat each other like rats in cages (I have yet to see evidence of mass cannibalism caused by overcrowding)

3) we were polluting ourselves to death (the USA is cleaner than when I was a kid, but the third world is more polluted, proving the solution to pollution is not less productivity but more Capitalism)

4) we were destroying all the forests and would run out of oxygen (the US is more forested now than in the 1800's)

5) we were going to choke the earth with plastics (I have yet to see the Earth huffing and puffing for its last breath)

6) we were going to run out of oil (I had several professors in college in the early 80's who promised me we would run out of oil by the early 1990's - we actually have MORE KNOWN RESERVES NOW THAN AT ANY TIME IN HISTORY - AND IT IS ALL BUT A PROVEN SCIENTIFIC FACT THAT OIL IS NOT A FOSSIL FUEL, BUT IS INSTEAD A NATURAL OCCURRING SUBSTANCE)

And now, the stupid scientists are telling us we are destroying the Earth with CO2, which causes Global Warming.

Why would anyone believe them, after all they've been wrong about.

AND, THE MOST AMAZING THING IS I HAVE NEVER HEARD AN APOLOGY FROM ANY SCIENTIST FOR ANYTHING THAT THEY HAVE BEEN WRONG ABOUT.

Why do you think that is?

And note this, have you ever heard any apologies from the Left for having been wrong about Stalin, the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan's strategy for destroying the Soviet Union, the idea that Reagan would start a nuclear war, etc.?

No, there are no apologies from the Scientists who have been wrong.

And, there are no apologies from the Leftists who were wrong about Communism and its death toll, nor about how to destroy the USSR.

And, why do you think these two groups refuse to apologize when they have terrorized us with their consistent bullshit?

Because, the Leftists and the Scientists share the same goal, and that is they want to do away with consumption, capitalism, and ultimately, human beings in large numbers.

They hate life. And, they want to drag all of us down with them.

This Week's Cover Of Newsweek

This week is one of the holiest seasons of the Christian calendar as Christians throughout the world hold various services and celebrations related to Holy Week. Yesterday was Maundy Thursday, today is Good Friday, tomorrow is Holy Saturday, and Sunday is Easter Sunday.

All sensitivies toward Christianity aside, however, Newsweek chose this week to publish a cover depicting a cross with the following words spelled out with capital letters in the shape of the cross, in red lettering: "THE DELINCE AND FALL OF CHRISTIAN AMERICA." I was unable to capture the image, but you can see it here, Newsweek's accompanying article here.

The First Amendment right to freedom of the press certainly allows for Newsweek to publish such a cover and such an article and display them prominently at newsstands and at grocery check-out aisles, even during this Holy Week. But can you imagine the outcry were any mainstream-news magazine to publish a cover making any negative statement about Islam? Can you imagine what would happen if the Danish cartoons were splashed all over the cover of a news magazine at any time of the year, much less during Ramadan or Eid ul-Fitr?

More importantly, would any mainstream-news magazine dare to publish a negative cover about Islam?

This Week's Cover Of Newsweek

Note the following text: RADICAL ISLAM IS A FACT OF LIFE. HOW TO LIVE WITH IT.

Article HERE.

Take your Pepto Bismol before reading the article.

Attention, Bloggers! "Muslims Speak Out" (July 22-29)

Follow up to this posting...

To access the On Faith forum in order to post comments or questions, CLICK HERE, then on the name of the person to whom you wish to address the question or comment.

To the credit of the Washington Post, the following article was published in "Outlook," July 22, 2007

Losing My Jihadism

By Mansour al-Nogaidan
Sunday, July 22, 2007; B01

BURAIDAH, Saudi Arabia Islam needs a Reformation. It needs someone with the courage of Martin Luther.

This is the belief I've arrived at after a long and painful spiritual journey. It's not a popular conviction -- it has attracted angry criticism, including death threats, from many sides. But it was reinforced by Sept. 11, 2001, and in the years since, I've only become more convinced that it is critical to Islam's future.

Muslims are too rigid in our adherence to old, literal interpretations of the Koran. It's time for many verses -- especially those having to do with relations between Islam and other religions -- to be reinterpreted in favor of a more modern Islam. It's time to accept that God loves the faithful of all religions. It's time for Muslims to question our leaders and their strict teachings, to reach our own understanding of the prophet's words and to call for a bold renewal of our faith as a faith of goodwill, of peace and of light.

I didn't always think this way. Once, I was one of the extremists who clung to literal interpretations of Islam and tried to force them on others. I was a jihadist.

I grew up in Saudi Arabia. When I was 16, I found myself assailed by doubts about the existence of God. I prayed to God to give me the strength to overcome them. I made a deal with Him: I would give up everything, devote myself to Him and live the way the prophet Muhammad and his companions had lived 1,400 years ago if He would rid me of my doubts.

I joined a hard-line Salafi group. I abandoned modern life and lived in a mud hut, apart from my family. Viewing modern education as corrupt and immoral, I joined a circle of scholars who taught the Islamic sciences in the classical way, just as they had been taught 1,200 years ago. My involvement with this group led me to violence, and landed me in prison. In 1991, I took part in firebombing video stores in Riyadh and a women's center in my home town of Buraidah, seeing them as symbols of sin in a society that was marching rapidly toward modernization.

Yet all the while, my doubts remained. Was the Koran really the word of God? Had it really been revealed to Muhammad, or did he create it himself? But I never shared these doubts with anyone, because doubting Islam or the prophet is not tolerated in the Muslim society of my country.

By the time I turned 26, much of the turmoil in me had abated, and I made my peace with God. At the same time, my eyes were opened to the hypocrisy of so many who held themselves out as Muslim role models. I saw Islamic judges ignoring the marks of torture borne by my prison comrades. I learned of Islamic teachers who molested their students. I heard devout Muslims who never missed the five daily prayers lying with ease to people who did not share their extremist beliefs.

In 1999, when I was working as an imam at a Riyadh mosque, I happened upon two books that had a profound influence on me. One, written by a Palestinian scholar, was about the struggle between those who deal pragmatically with the Koran and those who take it and the hadith literally. The other was a book by a Moroccan philosopher about the formation of the Arab Muslim way of thinking.

The books inspired me to write an article for a Saudi newspaper arguing that Muslims have the right to question and criticize our religious leaders and not to take everything they tell us for granted. We owe it to ourselves, I wrote, to think pragmatically if our religion is to survive and thrive.

That article landed me in the center of a storm. Some men in my mosque refused to greet me. Others would no longer pray behind me. Under this pressure, I left the mosque.

I moved to the southern city of Abha, where I took a job as a writer and editor with a newly established newspaper. I went back to leading prayers at the paper's small mosque and to writing about my evolving philosophy. After I wrote articles stressing our right as Muslims to question our Saudi clerics and their interpretations and to come up with our own, officials from the kingdom's powerful religious establishment complained, and I was banned from writing.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave new life to what I had been saying. I went back to criticizing the rote manner in which we Muslims are fed our religion. I criticized al-Qaeda's school of thought, which considers everyone who isn't a Salafi Muslim the enemy. I pointed to examples from Islamic history that stressed the need to get along with other religions. I tried to give a new interpretation to the verses that call for enmity between Muslims and Christians and Jews. I wrote that they do not apply to us today and that Islam calls for friendship among all faiths.

I lost a lot of friends after that. My old companions from the jihad felt obliged to declare themselves either with me or against me. Some preferred to cut their links to me silently, but others fought me publicly, issuing statements filled with curses and lies. Once again, the paper came under great pressure to ban my writing. And I became a favorite target on the Internet, where my writings were lambasted and labeled blasphemous.

Eventually I was fired. But by then, I had started to develop a different relationship with God. I felt that He was moving me toward another kind of belief, where all that matters is that we pray to God from the heart. I continued to pray, but I started to avoid the verses that contain violence or enmity and only used the ones that speak of God's mercy and grace and greatness. I remembered an incident in the Koran when the prophet told a Bedouin who did not know how to pray to let go of the verses and get closer to God by repeating, "God is good, God is great." Don't sweat the details, the prophet said.

I felt at peace, and no longer doubted His existence.

In December 2002, in a Web site interview, I criticized al-Qaeda and declared that some of the Friday sermons were loathsome because of their attacks against non-Muslims. Within days, a fatwa was posted online, calling me an infidel and saying that I should be killed. Once again, I felt despair at the ways of the Muslim world. Two years later, I told al-Arabiya television that I thought God loves all faithful people of different religions. That earned me a fatwa from the mufti of Saudi Arabia declaring my infidelity.

But one evening not long after that, I heard a radio broadcast of the verse of light. Even though I had memorized the Koran at 15, I felt as though I was hearing this verse for the first time. God is light, it says, the universe is illuminated by His light. I felt the verse was speaking directly to me, sending me a message. This God of light, I thought, how could He be against any human? The God of light would not be happy to see people suffer, even if they had sinned and made mistakes along the way.

I had found my Islam. And I believe that others can find it, too. But first we need a Reformation similar to the Protestant Reformation that Martin Luther led against the Roman Catholic Church.

In the late 14th century, Islam had its own sort of Martin Luther. Ibn Taymiyya was an Islamic scholar from a hard-line Salafi sect who went through a spiritual crisis and came to believe that in time, God would close the gates of hell and grant all humans, regardless of their religion, entry to his everlasting paradise. Unlike Luther, however, Ibn Taymiyya never openly declared this revolutionary belief; he shared it only with a small, trusted circle of students.

Nevertheless, I find myself inspired by Luther's courageous uprising. I see what Islam needs -- a strong, charismatic personality who will lead us toward reform, and scholars who can convince Islamic communities of the need for a bold new interpretation of Islamic texts, to reconcile us with the wider world.

Mansour al-Nogaidan writes for the Bahraini newspaper Al-Waqt.

CLICK HERE to view the schedule for and to access the On Faith Forum "Muslims Speak Out." Here's our chance to ask pointed questions and to make appropriate comments. I've test-posted a comment there, and it went up onto the site.

As far as I can tell, Mansour al-Nogaidan, the author of the above article is not a part of the forum. Comments can be directed to Mansour al-Nogaidan at the Washington Post web site, but you might have to register first. You can address comments to all of the authors in the "Outlook" section HERE.