Monthly Archives: August 2008

Random House pulls novel on Islam, fears violence

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Thu Aug 7, 2008 6:39pm EDT
By Edith Honan

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Publisher Random House has pulled a novel about the Prophet Mohammed’s child bride, fearing it could “incite acts of violence.”

“The Jewel of Medina,” a debut novel by journalist Sherry Jones, 46, was due to be published on August 12 by Random House, a unit of Bertelsmann AG, and an eight-city publicity tour had been scheduled, Jones told Reuters on Thursday.

The novel traces the life of A’isha from her engagement to Mohammed, when she was six, until the prophet’s death. Jones said that she was shocked to learn in May, that publication would be postponed indefinitely.

“I have deliberately and consciously written respectfully about Islam and Mohammed … I envisioned that my book would be a bridge-builder,” said Jones.

Random House deputy publisher Thomas Perry said in a statement the company received “cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”

“In this instance we decided, after much deliberation, to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel,” Perry said.

Jones, who has just completed a sequel to the novel examining her heroine’s later life, is free to sell her book to other publishers, Perry said.

The decision has sparked controversy on Internet blogs and in academic circles. Some compared the controversy to previous cases where portrayals of Islam were met with violence.

Protests and riots erupted in many Muslim countries in 2006 when cartoons, one showing the Prophet Mohammed wearing a turban resembling a bomb, appeared in a Danish newspaper. At least 50 people were killed and Danish embassies attacked.

British author Salman Rushdie’s 1988 book “The Satanic Verses” was met with riots across the Muslim world. Rushdie was forced into hiding for several years after Iran’s then supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, proclaimed a death edict, or fatwa, against him.

Jones, who has never visited the Middle East, spent several years studying Arab history and said the novel was a synthesis of all she had learned.

“They did have a great love story,” Jones said of Mohammed and A’isha, who is often referred to as Mohammed’s favorite wife. “He died with his head on her breast.” 

Billboards announce: ‘Sharia law is hate’ Group hopes to spark debate over accepting Islamic rules in U.S.

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August 08, 2008 11:34 pm Eastern

By Drew Zahn © 2008 WorldNetDaily

An organization in Florida plans to educate what it perceives as an increasingly culture-tolerant public about the horrific dictates of Islamic law by purchasing billboard space with a simple, but confrontational message: “Sharia law is hate.”

The Central Florida chapter of the United American Committee, a nonprofit group that seeks to educate Americans on the threat of Islamic extremism, is raising money to purchase a six-month contract to display the billboard, which the group hopes will awaken the public to discussing the full extent of Islamic law.

“The UAC’s goal in this project is to raise awareness because most people have no idea what Sharia law is,” Alan Kornman, director of UAC’s Central Florida branch, told WND. “We are confident people will see the billboard and learn on their own what Sharia law is and come to their own conclusions. At the very least, we hope our billboard will spark public debate on this overlooked issue.”

The billboards will also include a link to UAC resources where people can learn more about Islam’s Sharia law, a set of religious codes ˆ both moral and legal; Sharia law recognizes no separation of church and state ˆ that bind both Muslims and Islamic nations.

“Under Sharia law if you are accused of stealing, a hand and foot from opposite sides are amputated. If you are caught having an affair, the woman is stoned to death and the man is given 80 lashes. If you change religions, you can be charged under apostasy laws and given the death sentence by a legal Sharia court. If you want to marry a nine-year-old child, Sharia law condones pedophilia, because Mohammad married Aisha at six and consummated the marriage at age nine. I find these and many more practices of Sharia law despicable and hateful,” said Kornman.

In nations with large Muslim populations, coordinating the nation’s laws with the laws a large minority demands to be governed under has proven difficult. WND has reported on Canada’s faltering attempts to incorporate Sharia law and on some of the stir created when England’s Archbishop of Canterbury recommended adopting tenets of the Islamic religious code.

Kornman told WND that Americans need to understand the enmity between the American way of life and living under Sharia law.

“If a person condones (the horrors of Sharia law enforcement), then living under our U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights is not possible,” Kornman said. “The two systems will never be ideologically compatible.”

In addition to the billboard campaign, the Central Florida UAC has purchased airtime for half-hour radio programs, the first scheduled for Sept. 12 on Orlando-area station WEUS, AM 810. The group said in a press release that the shows will focus on “discussing everything you will never hear from the mainstream press.”

The group’s billboard proposal, while unusually confrontational in its language, is not the first attempt at utilizing the power of advertising in the culture clash between Islam and America’s Western way of life.

WND reported earlier on a series of advertisements employed by Islamic groups on New York City’s subway system.

Another group called Jihad Watch has blazed the trail with billboard campaigns, two of which you can see below:

While Jihad Watch reports their billboards were subject to editing by the billboard company, the Central Florida UAC’s billboard plans are likely to be subject to heated controversy. Kornman, however, told WND that he stands behind the message that Sharia law is a hate-based ideology.

“Sharia is the glue that holds an Islamic society together,” Kornman told WND. “The harsh punishments associated with Sharia law in all facets of day-to-day life create a never-ending atmosphere of abject fear for those living under Sharia law.”

“For those people calling me hateful, then they would have to condone child marriages, amputations for stealing and death for apostates to name only a few punishments attached to Sharia law. If my critics condone this type of activity under any circumstances, then it is they who are hateful towards anyone who is non-Muslim and should look into their own mirror before crying hate speech,” he said.

The Oil In the Arctic May Be LOST to the UN!!

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By Alan Caruba
web posted August 4, 2008
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0808/0808lostoil.htm
 
One would have thought that the Bloomberg News report by Joe Carroll that “The Arctic may hold 90 billion barrels of oil, more than all the known reserves of Nigeria, Kazakhstan, and Mexico combined, and enough to supply U.S. demand for 12 years” would have evoked some interest by the public and other media outlets. The report by the U.S. Geological Survey was greeted mostly by a giant collective yawn.
 
“One third of the undiscovered oil is in Alaskan territory, the agency found…”  Considering that the Democrat-controlled Congress adamantly refuses to let exploration and drilling occur for the oil known to exist in and off-shore Alaska, it is perhaps not surprising that the public has concluded that it will remain beneath the hoofs of caribou.
Apathy, however, is not a very good response to the prospect of this mother lode of potential new oil. Worse yet, we stand lose any of the wealth it will generate if the same Congress signs the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty, whose acronym, LOST, could not be more accurate. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have endorsed it, apparently oblivious to the fact that the mighty U.S. Navy can go anywhere it wants in the world. Even the Bush administration has marshaled no arguments against it.
 
This monstrosity of a treaty has been around since the days when the Reagan administration first rejected it.
Full disclosure of the contents of this treaty would have Americans in the streets of Washington, D.C. brandishing pitchforks. Bernard Oxman a professor at my alma mater, the University of Miami, describes its text as “amply endowed with indeterminate principles, mind-numbing cross-references, institutional redundancies, exasperating opacity, and inelegant drafting.” In other words, it is a document intended to steal the wealth to which the United States has a legitimate claim.
 
Douglas Stone, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy, warns that, “LOST fostered the idea, per se, of international organizations with increasing transnational jurisdiction. Its bureaucracy will be nourished by royalties on mineral extraction and provide a model for similar agencies to assume authority and impose taxes and to inexorably devour American institutions and autonomy.”
Can you imagine gifting the United Nations with $50 trillion in Arctic oil taxes? That is what the U.S. Senate proposes to do if it ratifies LOST.
 
Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center, reminds us that, “If Americans have learned anything about the United Nations over the last 50 years, it is that this ‘world body’ is, at best, riddled with corruption and incompetence. At worst, its bureaucracies, agencies and members are overwhelmingly hostile to the United States and other freedom-loving nations…”
 
The United Nations International Seabed Authority (ISA) for more than a decade has never produced a single commercial minerals harvesting operation despite having unfettered access to all the world’s great oceans resources.
 
The United States, however, needs oil now. In addition to Congress having put vast reserves in Alaska’s ANWR off-limits, it has done the same for exploration and drilling in 85% of the nation’s continental shelf. The windfall profits tax imposed during the Carter administration led to a huge decline in oil industry activity in the United States, even after it was repealed.
 
The solution to America’s present oil crisis lies in part in the Arctic Commons and, in particular, the Amerasia-Canada basin that holds the promise of huge oil reserves for centuries to come.
A dangerous scramble for the oil and gas reserves between Russia and the West can be avoided and, more to the point, the U.S. will lose its entire future commercial and energy security by signing onto LOST. Meanwhile, Democrat leaders in both houses of Congress have already rejected President Bush’s July 14 effort to end a 25-year moratorium on drilling in most coastal waters.
 
The Democrat controlled Congress are either insane, treasonous, or both. Its presumptive candidate for President wants to repeat Carter’s appalling windfall profits tax on oil companies.
 
As the Bloomberg News report noted, “The region above the Arctic Circle also holds an estimated 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, equal to 27 percent of the world’s known gas reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey report. “Contributors to the data included the Geological Survey of Canada, the U.S. Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, the Cambridge Arctic Shelf Program, and researchers in Denmark and Greenland. No Russian institutions took part in the study.”
At a time when nationalized foreign oil companies control more than 70% of the world’s energy resources, private enterprise is the only answer to our national energy security. The largest transfer of wealth in history is occurring and it bodes ill for the United States. We dare not compound this travesty by failing to take steps to ensure access to the Arctic Commons vast reserves.
Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center . He blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com .

Tyson Replaces Labor Day with Muslim Eid al-Fitr at Union Request

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If you want to know what U.S. a suicidal death march is, then read on about these un-America Dhimmis!  Our enemies at CAIR will use this as a precidence and before we know it the death cult holidays will slowly replace all America holidays.  I scream in a LOUD voice – BOYCOTT TYSON PRODUCTS and pass the word!  How many politically incorrect Americans who will fall for the tent encompassing camel? Now read the evidence!
Tyson replaces Labor Day with Muslim Eid al-Fitr
Chicken company: Workers wanted Islamic religious event recognized
Posted: August 02, 2008
12:10 am Eastern

By Bob Unruh
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

A Labor Day parade from the early 1900s

Food workers at the Shelbyville, Tenn., plant for Tyson Foods, which
boasts on its corporate website that it strives “to honor God,” will
have time off for Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday closing the month of
Ramadan, instead of the American tradition Labor Day.

Officials with the company told WND the labor union representing the
1,200 plant workers, including about 700 immigrants from Somalia who
largely are Muslim, sought the holiday change in the new five-year
contract, and the company agreed.

Officials with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union issue
a press statement about the new “contract [that] creates an additional
paid holiday, [Eid al-Fitr,] a Muslim holiday that occurs toward the
end of Ramadan.”

A spokeswoman at the union’s office told WND no one was in the office
today who could comment on the request.

To the Shelbyville Times-Gazette, Gary Mickelson, Tyson’s media chief,
said there is no new holiday, but at the union’s request the company
agreed to discontinue the Labor Day holiday and implement Eid al-Fitr.
“Union leadership did request and receive Eid al-Fitr (which is
apparently spelled various ways including Id al-Fitr and Eid ul-Fitr)
as a paid holiday in place of Labor Day,” Mickelson told the newspaper.

“Since all Team Members will still have eight paid holidays, the
change will not affect production,” Mickelson said.

On the paper’s forum page, readers were outraged.

“If this holiday is that important to them, make them take it off
instead of Christmas Day and allow ALL workers to be off Labor Day.
Most AMERICAN families have some type of function on Labor Day,” wrote
one anonymous participant.

“It says union leadership made this request, makes you wonder who runs
the union. I guess they are already working on a plan to replace
Memorial Day, that means nothing to the Muslims so why should we have
the right to celebrate it. Labor Day commemorates the plight of
workers and the struggle of labor unions to improve working conditions
for American workers. The Muslims will not stop until all of our
rights and laws are changed to accommodate their beliefs. This will be
a new America but it will be their America,” said another.

The union boasts on its website, “Diversity is one of the strengths of
our union. … We may come from different countries and speak different
languages. But what unites us is the belief that by standing together
we can better advance our interests.”

The holiday comes at the conclusion of the month-long Ramadan for
Muslims, but it not on the same day each year. Officials with Tyson
said they were working out how best to address what apparently now
will be a floating holiday for the company.

Mickelson said other holidays for the company workers include
birthday, New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Memorial Day,
Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.

Union spokesman Randy Hadley told the newspaper, “The negotiating
committee felt this was extremely crucial, since this holiday is as
important to Muslims as Christmas is to Christians.”

The union also reported “two prayer rooms have been created to allow
Muslim workers to pray twice a day and return to work without leaving
the plant.”

Ironically, the company on its website also promotes a variety of
traditional and customary Christian and secular blessings for food —
its primary product.

“This is America, founded by the blood of our forefathers and should
not be challenged by Somalians, Hispanics, or any other immigrants. If
they come to America, they need to learn our language and our ways.They can practice their culture in private if they so please, but not

shove it down our throats. Would they let us go there and change there
country? I have banned Tyson’s products from my home for years because
of the illegals they were hiring. I am sorry for the producers that
are supplying them, but Tyson’s has once again crossed the line with
the American people. Labor Day was here long before Tyson’s. What
holiday will be next to be taken away and replaced to accommodate an
immigrant. This stinks worse than the plant,” said another anonymous
forum participant.

“Disgusting … appalling … horrifying … there just aren’t enough
words to describe this situation. There will never be another Tyson
product in my home EVER!! Bedford County and the rest of the nation
needs to take notice. Is this what we are coming to?” said another.

A Muslim website says the holiday is a “joyous three-day celebration”
that concludes Ramadan, during which Muslims fast during the day.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the national holiday dates
from Sept. 5, 1882, and is “dedicated to the social and economic
achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national
tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength,
prosperity, and well-being of our country.