ACT! for America Palm Springs

Here is a U.S. group, Arab Aid Student International, Dublin, Ohio that needs an FBI look-see to determine if they are funding these types of groups. Look at all of the Arab/Muslim groups in your local colleges for this type of activity. Here is there website.,

Arab Student Aid International - ASAI

The labs were made possible by millions from a Saudi-financed charity in … Ohio.

December 30, 2008 - by Patrick Poole

The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday that Israeli Defense Forces aircraft bombed suspected Hamas terror laboratories located at the Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza (IUG).

According to the article, IUG professors were using the labs to build explosives for the terrorist organization. A BBC report confirmed that the IUG science building was the target of the Israeli retaliatory strikes.

Thus far unreported is that the IUG science and technology lab was financed and constructed with the assistance of the Dublin, Ohio-based ASAI. In fact, the IUG website has a page dedicated to ASAI’s ongoing contributions to the Hamas institution and specifically mentions the labs financed by the Ohio Islamic group. Additionally, the ASAI website promotes its assistance in creating the IUG science and technology center, which was completed in 2002.

In a previously published article I revealed ASAI’s extensive financial ties to the IUG, including direct cash payments to the Hamas school in addition to the facilities construction projects supported by ASAI. The Washington Post also revealed in April 2006 that ASAI had financed the Western education of a number of top Hamas leaders.

The organization’s primary benefactor is Prince Turki Ben Abdul Aziz, a former high-ranking Saudi government official and half-brother to King Abdullah. Prince Turki has lived in exile in Egypt since the 1970s following a highly-publicized marriage scandal, his 100+ entourage occupying the top three floors of the Cairo Ramses Hilton. The prince serves as ASAI’s chairman of the board, and the labs built by ASAI at the IUG bear his name.

The ties between Hamas and the IUG have been long established. The university was founded by Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yasin, and many Hamas leaders hold faculty and administrative positions at the school.

In an August 2007 policy report for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy entitled “Better Late than Never: Keeping USAID Funds out of Terrorist Hands,” Matthew Levitt, former deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the Treasury Department and author of Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (Yale Univ. Press), detailed the integral role that IUG plays as part of the Hamas terrorist infrastructure:

Indeed, Israeli and Palestinian scholars alike characterize the IUG as a Hamas institution. Meir Hatina described it as one of the key institutions that “coordinated [Muslim] Brotherhood activities in the Gaza Strip and later constituted a springboard for Hamas.” Similarly, in his book Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza, Ziad Abu Amr depicted the IUG as “the principal Muslim Brotherhood stronghold,” referring to the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, which became Hamas in December 1987. “The University’s administration, most of the employees who work there, and the majority of students are Brotherhood supporters,” he concluded.

Hamas itself has corroborated these ties. In a 2003 interview in the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal boasted of the group’s participation in building the IUG in 1978. And according to FBI surveillance of a 1993 Hamas meeting in Philadelphia, Muin Kamel Muhammad Shabib, a member of the organization’s Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, briefed attendees on “the situation inPalestine” and the status of “Islamic works” tied to Hamas, naming the IUG as one of “our institutions.” In fact, even a cursory search of articles on LexisNexis through March 2007 produces 149 articles mentioning the IUG and Hamas together. Yet, only after congressional and media scrutiny exposed the taxpayer-funded awards to the Hamas-linked institution was USAID funding for the university terminated.

Other reports have detailed how the IUG has also been used for weapons storage, launching rockets, and holding hostages. In February 2007, Palestinian security forces captured seven Iranian military trainers and confiscated 1,000 Qassam rockets located at the IUG. Another article reported that 2,000 AK-47s were also confiscated, as well as evidence that captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, abducted by Hamas in June 2006, had previously been held at the university.

A May 2007 International Herald Tribune article described IUG’s centrality in the Fatah-Hamas factional fighting in Gaza, with the university used to launch attacks against their rivals and for military training:

Hamas fighters have been inside Islamic University for days, trying to protect it from another Fatah attack like one last year that badly damaged the school, one of the prime means for Hamas to convert Palestinians to its Islamist cause. Hamas guards at the university have been killed by snipers in previous days, and on Friday, Fatah fighters fired rocket-propelled grenades and mortars at the school, setting a building on fire, and exchanged gunshots with Hamas men inside.

Fatah said that Hamas fighters were using the university as a base for attacks on nearby police stations.

After the IUG strikes on Monday, IDF spokeswoman Avital Leibovich gave an interview to investigative reporter Aaron Klein, characterizing the militant nature of the IUG and the use of its facilities for the manufacture of Hamas explosives. “This is the first university in world that gives out bachelor’s degrees in rocket manufacture,” she said.

IUG figured prominently in the recent Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial, with federal prosecutors entering documents into evidence showing that Holy Land officials used the IUG to funnel funds to Hamas.

With Israel declaring “all-out war” against Hamas, the present conflict will hopefully provide incentive for law enforcement officials to further roll back the extensive Hamas support network in the U.S. Considering the success that prosecutors had in securing convictions on all 108 counts against the Holy Land Foundation defendants, investigating the degree of involvement of Arab Student Aid International in the financing and construction of the IUG Hamas terror labs might be a good place to start.

Patrick Poole is a regular contributor to Pajamas Media, and an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the military.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/israel-targets-terror-labs-funded-by-us-islamic-group/

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | 12/10/2008

The first market day after President-elect Obama announced plans to appoint Federal Reserve Bank of New York president Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, U.S. equities rose 6.5%. Pundits praised his experience handling crises and understanding of the troubled economy. But possibly, the market hoopla was premature, or even unwarranted. Some analysts seek hisretirement.

As turmoil built, Geithner criticized Wall Street’s self-regulatory system, negative incentives and market forces, sought tighter supervision and berated insufficient “derivative securities” regulation and “credit-default” swaps allowing investors to “insure” against loses—only to fail. The Treasury Department’s former attaché to the International Monetary Fund had overseen U.S. responses to the 1990s Mexican, Indonesian and Korean bailouts. But at the Fed, Geithner did not useregulatory powers to check abuses, or advocate for more regulation, impartial supervision or new laws. He even concluded that markets were improving—and after Bear Stearns’ collapse confessed, nobody “understands [the causes] yet.”

Worst of all, since Nov. 2003, Geithner let dangerous new Islamic and shari’a-based securities, markets and financial institutions gain business currency—despite the Fed’s role in U.S. monetary policy, currency distribution, government securities markets, legal supervision, regulatory enforcement, bank and capital markets investigation, foreign accounts and a payments mechanism handling over $4 trillion daily in funds and securities transfers. Not to mention Fed officials’ admitted lack of understanding.

On July 1, 2004, eight months after Geithner assumed command, the New York Fed hosted Asim Ghanfoor (sic), AG Group founder and managing director, to address its Seventh Annual Global Economic Forum on “ABCs of Islamic Financing” and Islam’s increasing global financial role. A month later, a href=”http://www.globalterroralert.com/faisalgillletter.pdf”>Senators Charles Grassleyand John Kyl identified Ghafoor as a representative of Boston’s terror-funding Boston’s Care International, the Global Relief Foundation (GRF) and the Al Harimain Islamic Foundation, which the U.S. Treasury specially designated a terrorist organization in September 2004 and again inJune 2008. Given Ghafoor’s connections, how could the Fed have featured him, much less warmly accepted Islamic finance?

In fairness, the New York Fed began authorizing obscure shari’a banking institutions, structuredshari’a issues, and opaque Islamic securities trading long before Geithner arrived. “Islamic bankers have been quite ingenious in developing financial transactions that suit their needs,” New York Fed first vice president Ernest T. Patrikis told an Islamic Finance conference in May 1996. “We bank supervisors, too, can be ingenious and will want to work with any of you should you decide that you want to engage in Islamic banking” in the U.S.

The dangers of Islamic finance should have been apparent. From 1996 on, all 12 Federal Reserve banks received, and were charged to enforce many Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control circulars designating Islamic groups and banks as terrorist-financing institutions, organizations and individuals. In 1998, OFAC warned the Fed against transactions with Osama bin Laden and his affiliates, in 1999 froze Taliban assets, in 2002 reminded banks to check customers against known terrorist lists and in 2003 warned against trading with any unnamed counter-party.

Meanwhile, had the Fed only noticed, there were warning signs elsewhere too. In 1999, Saudi scholar Mohammad Nejatullah Siddiqi proposed at Harvard that banning interest would “cure the ills of contemporary finance,” “create a safer, saner financial world,” incorporate the “institution of waqf [Islamic trust]” in economics and create “morally inspired” behavior. In 2001, Siddiqi openly labeled shari’a finance a revolution-driver—an “universal endeavor” to replace “excesses of capitalism.”

Alarm bells should have gone off at a New York Fed event on Nov. 21, 2002, furthermore, whereshari’a banking proponent Wafiq Fannoun described Islam as “Peace through submission to Allah (God), however, “revelation-based [the Qur'an, Hadith] … complete way of life” — that is, a system of religious law proscribed by the U.S. Constitution from inclusion in secular legislation or regulatory systems. Equally at odds with Constitutional law and Western capitalism are other Islamic notions he described—namely that Allah is both creator and “owner” of all material things, and that “individuals” may not possess “natural resources important to society.” as “alternative financing for Muslims” and others recognizing individual ownership rights.

True, most of that happened before Geithner ran the New York Fed. But after he took the helm in November 2003, the bank missed several still more critical red flags on Islamic banking.

First came Basel II Capital Accord, supposedly designed to strengthen the “regulatory capital framework” for big international banks. Authorities increasingly expected to trust banks to internally assess their own credit and operational risks. However, in July 2004 Switzerland’s Bank for International Settlements (BIS) reported, 53% of Middle Eastern bank supervisory staffs lacked the necessary training to meet Basel II’s December 2007 deadline. Middle Eastern banks originated and still predominate in Islamic banking. Nevertheless, by 2007, they still needed historical data to fashion reliable risk models but instead counted on “heavy” collateral and “exceptional” economic conditions to eliminate risks.

Islamic institutions had manufactured “special purpose entities” (SPEs)—renamed, “special-purpose vehicles (SPVs)”— such as coincidentally helped destroy Enron. These legal devices restructured “interest-bearing debt, collecting interest [as] rent or [a] price mark-up,” Rice University Islamic economics chairman Mahmoud el-Gamal warned in May 2007. “Interest-based” Islamic finance equaled “shari’a arbitrage,” concerned only “religious identity” and merely employed Western securitization methods to transform liquid, traceable cash flows from interest-bearing debt into illiquid, opaque assets.

Shari’a banking, though, had far fewer regulatory and accounting protections than sub-prime mortgages—and like “portfolio insurance” in 1987, mortgage-backed bonds in 1994, and sub-prime mortgages in 2008, could also cause huge market declines. Islamic banking purveyors admittedshari’a regulations could “override commercial decisions;” didn’t “standardize” documentation; and used complex “inter-creditor agreements” and “off-balance sheet financing.”

Even hosting hosting Islamic financier Asim Ghafoor, a representative to three terror-funding organizations, on July 1, 2004 apparently gave no one inside Geithner’s Fed reason to pause from its rush to further accommodate shari’a banking.

In March 2005, New York Fed general counsel Thomas C. Baxter Jr. asserted the Constitutional “wall of separation between church and state” Thomas Jefferson had described was “not absolute.” Chief Justice Warren Burger had in 1984 suggested that the Constitution “affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions,” Baxter told an Islamic financial industry “Legal Issues” seminar. “[S]ecular law should … accommodate differing religious practices,” he indicated, apparently even if that meant specially excepting Islamic banking from secular laws and regulations.

In April 2005, New York Fed executive vice president William Rutledge admitted that the bank was “in no position to take a stance on shari’a interpretation.” He also claimed the bank would hold Islamic finance to “the same high licensing and supervision standards” as conventional banks.

Despite the New York Fed’s role as a legal supervisor of Islamic banking, neither Rutledge nor Geithner noticed, however, that shari’a banking, a 20th century “tradition” invented by the Muslim Brotherhood, can’t be severed from Islamic law—statutes that Mohammed initiated, which caliphs, scholars and jurists developed over the last 1,400 years. They hold that shari’a grants Muslims (theummah) supremacy over all others—along with all land and property to hold in trust for Allah. Thus as Fannoun effectively told the Fed in Nov. 2002, land or property, once conquered or acquired by Muslims (or for Allah), can’t generally revert to their original owners. Shari’a commands Muslims to wage jihad warfare until they subdue all “infidels” under universal Muslim rule, as Ibn Khaldun avowed in the Muqaddimah (trans., Franz Rosenthal, Princeton Univ. Press, 9th printing, 1989, p. 183).

Confiscating possessions from non-believers exacts “revenge,” wrote jurist Abul Hasan al Mawardi (d. 1058). Qur’an 57:2 argued, “To Him belongs all dominions of the heavens and earth.” Qur’an59:7 echoed, “That which Allah giveth as spoil [war booty] unto his Messenger…” Allah authorized 2nd Islamic Caliph, Umar Ibn Khattab, to confiscate property by force, fulfilling an Islamic trust, or ruling under Allah’s law. It was thereby just to take anything from nonbelievers, (The Laws of Islamic Governance, Taha Publishing, 1996, pp. 207-251) including all territories Islam ever controlled.

Apparently, Fed officials also neglected to investigate the alliances and beliefs of shari’a advisors and their affiliates in the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) and Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) standards agencies.

The shari’a-based Islamic Development Bank established the AAOIFI in 1990 to set Islamic finance standards. Its trustees include executives of Kuwait Finance House, Saudi Arabia’s Dallah al Baraka Group and al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation—all implicated in al-Qa’ida and other terror-funding—and Sudanese (and until recently Iranian) officials, both U.S. Treasury-sanctioned countries.

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir in 2002 christened IFSB “a universal Islamic banking system” and “a jihad worth pursuing….” Its board members include the terror-funding Iranian, Sudanese and Syrian central banks and Palestinian Monetary Authority.

Yusuf Qaradawi, an U.S.-designated foreign terrorist barred entry since 1999 for example, supports wife-beating, suicide bombings, murder of American military forces and female suicide “martyr operations.” A large shareholder of Al Taqwa Bank, Qaradawi also chairs the recently designated terrorist-funding Union of Good “charity,” Qatar National Bank, its al-Islami subsidiary, Qatar Islamic Bank, and Qatar International Islamic Bank—and follows AAOIFI standards he helped create.

Similarly, Dow Jones Islamic Market Indexes (DJIM) shari’a board uses “stringent and published” methods to determine “compliance of index-eligible companies.” But its industry screens, financial ratios and biographies omit advisors’ affiliations or beliefs. Dow Jones Citigroup Sukuk Index (DJCSI)’s shari’a board certifies Islamic asset-backed bonds if structures meet “AAOIFI standards” and shari’a principles, but don’t mention AAOIFI history or governance.

Until July 2008, shari’a banks, the Dow Jones Islamic Index board and an North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) fund also employed a 20-year veteran of Pakistan’s Shari’a Supreme Court, former judge Taqi Usmani, who taught at the Taliban spawning ground, Jamia Darul Uloom Karachi, headed the AAOIFI religious board, endorsed suicide bombing, and in 2007 advised U.K. Muslims to impose shari’a when their numbers suffice.

Shari’a finance advisor Muslim Brother Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo advised Pakistan’s tyrannical Zia ul-Haq from 1981 to 1984, and ran the Virginia Islamic Saudi Academy educational program cited in 2008 for using hateful Islamic texts. Trained at Karachi’s terror-espousing Jamia Al Alomia Al Islamia, he served the Muslim Brotherhood International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and from 1989, was secretary to the MB’s Fiqh Council of North America.

Perhaps Treasury Secretary-designate Geithner seriously meant to keep Rutledge’s promise to grant Islamic financiers no special favors. But allowing shari’a finance to exist at all is itself a special favor.

Moreover, on November 23, 2008 Geithner, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke agreed to add another $20 billion taxpayer-gilded bailout to Citibank’s previous $25 billion bailout—and offer $306 billion in new loans to cover Citi’s losses on soured real estate debts and securities.

Only three days earlier Citigroup uber-shareolder Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a godfather of Islamic finance, had announced plans to up his stake in America’s largest (failing and “underpriced”) bank from 4% to 5%. On March 20, 2006, the Saudi Kingdom Holding Co. CEO was “honored forhumanitarian contribution to Islam” at a “glittering gala to celebrate excellence in Islamic Finance” that also featured terror-financier and Dallah al-Baraka founder and president Saleh Abdullah Kamel.

Here’s a brief, straightforward explanation of islamic [sharia-compliant] finance, and how it is being used to subvert the West. 
THANKS TO JERRY of NEW YORK METRO CHAPTER OF ACT!   
By Rachel Ehrenfeld* and Samuel A. Abady  ||  Washington Times  ||  12/11/2008

If “cash is king,” then Middle East coffers are irresistibly enticing. During a recent tour of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Deputy Treasury Sec. Robert Kimmitt applauded the “growing role” of Arab banks in the U.S. economy. Treasury is seeking buyers for its newly acquired bailout assets because more than $1 trillion in cash is urgently needed to rescue the largest U.S. banks.

However, cash from the Arabian Gulf comes with a vital string attached: Islamic banking, erroneously viewed as an ancient practice. In fact, Islamic banking is a newly invented institution: “Neither classical nor medieval Islamic civilization featured banks in the modern sense, let alone ‘Islamic’ banks,” notes Timur Kuran, professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California. According to the Dinar Standard, “assets managed by Islamic banks are in excess of $700 billion - predominantly concentrated in the Middle East.”

Islamic banking took off in the 1970s, but was first concocted by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna in the 1920s. The stated goal was to penetrate the Western finance system, corrupting it from within in hopes of creating a parallel system to re-establish a global Islamic empire governed by Islamic law (shariah). Islamic rules of commerce (fiqh al-muamalat) forbid interest (riba) and investing in a prohibited (hara’am) enterprise. They also mandate tithes on wealth (zakat). However, the Koran fails to precisely define these concepts. Imams and ayatollahs differ, for example, on whether riba prohibits all interest or only usurious interest.

While the overhaul of American and Western banking regulations is urgent, Islamic banking cannot be the answer because Muslim clerics - not U.S. laws and regulators - make the rules. In 1969, the Saudis created the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which is now leading the charge for global expansion of Islamic banking and has established new regulatory, accounting and auditing organizations to govern such banks. Notably, the OIC’s charter is to “liberate Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa [mosque] from Zionist occupation.”

Not surprisingly, zakat from Islamic banks often funds terrorist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas. That organization’s agenda was exposed during the Dallas trial of The Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas front group and an American Muslim charity just convicted of terrorism crimes. Evidence of the charity’s true purpose included an 18-page “explanatory memorandum” outlining its “strategic goal … that all their work in America is a kind of grand jihad (holy war) in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

Sharia financing forbids loans to entities labeled hara’am, such as industries that use alcohol, and to all Israeli businesses The Arab League Council established the boycott against Israel on December 2, 1945, (more than two years before creation of the Jewish state). The boycott prohibits all Arab states, companies and individuals from any financial or trade relations with Israel. Companies worldwide are blacklisted for doing business with Israel, as are companies doing business with boycotted firms. The OIC high commissioner for the boycott of Israel coordinates the efforts of its 57 member states from the Central Boycott Office in Damascus.

In response, the United States made it illegal for individuals or companies to cooperate with the Arab boycott. The law mandates reporting of boycott requests and imposes civil and criminal penalties against boycott participants. Arab boycott requests have risen sharply in tandem with the U.S. financial crisis and the rapid growth of Islamic banking. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security reported a 20 percent increase in Arab boycott requests overall from 2005 to 2006, and the Congressional Research Service reported 24 boycott requests to U.S. companies in fiscal 2007 from little Bahrain alone.

On April 5, 2006, Congress unanimously condemned Saudi Arabia for its continued enforcement of the boycott - which violated commitments the Saudis made to the World Trade Organization in 2005. Nonetheless, last August Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states threatened to boycott Nissan, which aired a commercial on Israeli television promoting a fuel-efficient car, and demanded the Japanese carmaker’s apology. Not a word from Washington.

Instead, the Treasury Department, hungry for petrodollars, is holding seminars to promote Islamic banking and U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill. This must stop. Islamic banking corrupts our financial system, enables the illegal Arab economic boycott of Israel and entangles government with Islam in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

* Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the American Center for Democracy. Samuel A. Abady is a civil rights lawyer. 

Click Here Shariah Finance

While America struggles with the sub-prime and credit market crisis, Shariah Islamic Finance, also known as Shariah-Compliant Finance, is quickly infiltrating our financial markets – and bringing Islamic shariah law with it.  As one leading Islamic authority on Shariah-Compliant Finance has stated, it is “jihad with money.” In a new ACT! for America video, Joy Brighton, ACT! for America’s financial expert on Shariah- Compliant Finance, warns America of this chilling threat. 

The previous post informed you of a new video on our website describing the emerging and serious threat of shariah-compliant financing, or “Jihad with money.” If you haven’t yet viewed it we encourage you to do so by logging on to www.actforamerica.org. 

The commentary below, written by Melanie Phillips, gives us further insight into the chilling ramifications for countries that are buying into this “Jihad with money.” Ms. Phillips is well-respected for her research on issues like this and is the author of a book we highly recommend entitled Londonistan. 

One sentence deserves particular attention. Ms. Phillips notes that “Sharia banking was devised by mid-20th century Islamist ideologues specifically to further their strategy for global Islamic rule by creating separate administrative systems.” 

One of the features of Shariah-Compliant Finance is that financial institutions who participate in it may well be helping to finance terrorism through monies contributed to Islamic charities. As the article below reveals, some of these so-called “legitimate” charities have been funding and continue to fund terrorism. 

It May have already happened

Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a Muslim muezzin. Millions of Europeans already do.

And liberals will still tell you that “diversity is our strength” — while Talibanic enforcers cruise our cities burning books and barber shops… the Supreme Court decides sharialaw doesn’t violate the “separation of church and state” … and the Hollywood Left gives up gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.

If you think this can’t happen, you haven’t been paying attention, as the hilarious and brilliant Mark Steyn — the most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking world — shows to devastating effect in his New York Times bestseller, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It.

From Mark Steyn: 
Why America will have to fight alone 
in the battle for Western civilization

And why, if we fail, mankind faces a new Dark Ages

Are you ready for a conflict between America and the rest of the world? In America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn (the most widely read and wittiest columnist in the world today) argues that that’s just what’s coming.

America is facing this life-and-death challenge, says Steyn, because of the Western world’s demographic collapse and mass Muslim immigration into Europe, which threatens to turn parts of Europe into majority-Muslim countries by mid-century. Meanwhile, rising European and Islamic anti-Americanism may soon force America to confront the enemies of civilization without help from anyone else.

Steyn argues forcefully that much of the Western world will not survive the 21st Century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes — including many if not most European countries. He shows how this process is already well advanced, and explains that whether we will like the New Order in Europe and the world depends on whether America can summon the will to shape at least part of the emerging global picture.

If not, then we will see the end of the American moment and the beginning of the new Dark Ages: the return of much the planet to a primitive state.

Described with wit and wisdom by Mark Steyn:

• Why Libya’s Qaddafi is probably correct when he says that “there are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe without swords, without guns, without conquests”
• Why the progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both and how that mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse
• The hidden reason that the problem of Islamic jihad has exploded across the world since 1970
• The disquieting implications of the fact that Islam is a religion, not a race or nationality as is commonly claimed in the West; and an explicitly political religion at that
• Why the liberal talk of finding the “root causes” of terrorism in the errors and excesses of Western foreign policy is so wrongheaded
• How Europe’s welfare states are helping to foster the rise of a globalized Islam
• Dangerous consequences that are likely to come from manifestations of “cultural sensitivity” — such as the fact that U.S. guards at Gitmo must handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves because the detainees regard infidels as “unclean”
• How the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 along with other events such as the murder of Theo van Gogh were the opening shots of a European civil war
• Sobering facts about how advanced civilizational suicide already is in Japan and Russia
• How mosques in the West serve as recruiters for the jihad and play an important role in ideological subordination and cell discipline
• Why the Spanish government was so eager to appease the jihad terrorists after the Madrid bombings of March 2004
• How oil isn’t the principal Saudi export, Islamic jihad ideology is — and our oil money bankrolls its spread
• Europe’s suicidal multicultural malaise — and why jihadists understand that the Continent is ripe for the taking in a way that America isn’t yet
• How the ultimate victory of Islam in America can be avoided not by more government but by less: by government returning to the citizenry the primal responsibilities it has taken from them in the modern era

Suffused with Steyn’s trademark wit and piercing insights, this book calls on us to summon the will to fight this great struggle for Western civilization. In America Alone, Mark Steyn provides an enlightening primer on just how bad things are likely to get, and what we must do now to ensure that our children and grandchildren live in the bright light of freedom.

Attorney: U.S. gov’t financing terrorist activities  

Charlie Butts and Jody Brown - OneNewsNow - 12/16/2008 12:15:00 PM

Thomas More Law Center filed suit Monday morning against the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board. Law Center president Richard Thompson is asking the court to halt all bailout funds from going to American International Group, Inc. (AIG). Thompson explains why.

“Because that company has a branch that is controlled by Islamic scholars and who basically support the religion of Islam through Shariah and ultimately finance terrorist activities,” he says.
 
That gives the government an 80-percent stake in the business, which in part has a religious orientation — which raises constitutional questions, says Thompson. “[I]t also shines a light on serious national security issues that our own government has created by direct financial support and ownership of a business that supports anti-American, radical Islamic activities,” he states in a press release.
 
According to that release, AIG employs a three-person Shariah Advisory Board in its promotion of Shariah-compliant businesses and insurance products. Dr. Muhammed Imran Ashraf Usmani, the Pakistani member of that board, supports the belief that Muslims in Western countries have an obligation to wage violent jihad against their host country.
 
Thompson explains that Shariah-compliant financing includes “zakat” — a form of obligatory charitable contribution to assist those who wage jihad.
 
“A certain percentage of the profits go to Islamic charities such as the Holy Land Foundation,” the attorney notes, “and we know that many of those charities are nothing but fronts for terrorist organizations.”
 
In conclusion, that means there is an “internal cultural jihad” under way against America, says Thompson. The question then is: Is the American government, throughout its AIG bailout, perhaps financing the next 9/11 attack?
 
“Absolutely,” states Thompson. “There’s no question about it.
 
“This lawsuit is as much about protecting constitutional principles as it is about protecting our national security and preventing another 9/11 — whether it be overt through flying planes into buildings, or covert through appropriating taxpayer money to fund an Islamic cultural jihad.”

View 22-minute video discussion of this issue

Fox News Reports “Shariah-compliant banking, sometimes called Islamic banking, is growing in popularity in the Western and Islamic worlds. But critics say American interest in the system at a time of economic crisis is opening the door to increased Islamic influence in the American banking system. Worse yet, some fear the banks may be helping to finance international terrorism.

In Shariah-compliant banking, lenders may not charge interest and investors cannot make money from forbidden industries like gambling, alcohol, pork and pornography. Selling debt, devising derivatives and short selling are also prohibited, and investments must be closely tied to actual assets.In the U.S., the Dow Jones Islamic Index tracks Shariah-compliant companies and funds, and funds have sprung up like the Amana Mutual Funds Trust and the Azzad Asset Management.

American investment funds, like those offered by TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab, can invest in Shariah-compliant companies, and those companies can offer investments in American companies. Top holdings in the Azzad Ethical Midcap Fund, for example, include Western Digital Corp., Southwest Electric Co. and Apple Computer, Inc.

But allowing Shariah-compliant finance in the U.S. is green-lighting a seditious system that supports jihad, said Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.

“If you understand what Shariah is, you understand that it is a pretty awful system. Not something that you’d want insinuated in your society and becoming a major feature of your economic system,” Gaffney said.

“Shariah (Islamic law as dictated by the Koran) governs all aspects of life, from the personal practice of the faith to how you relate to your family to how you relate to your business partners, to your community …. all the way up to how the world is run, and it is all one seamless program. You can’t say ‘I’ll take the personal pietistic practice … and skip the beheading and the flogging and the stoning and the global theocracy,’” he said.”

 

I fully expect an Obama administration and a liberal Congress will be very receptive to sharia banking. Then it will be come very easy for terrorists to operate at will within our borders because they will have easy access to financing to do so. Given our free society, someone with $50,000 in cash can operate almost invisibly for quite a long time and cause untold damage.

Buckle up folks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Personally, I set the over/under for the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil to happen within 6 months of Obama taking office. I then put it at one chance in three that Obama will do anything but apologize.