Back in February, 2008, I blogged about Islam and Brain Damage. I offered evidence that the Islamic custom of proving one’s piety by slamming one’s head into the floor is dangerous to one’s mental and physical health. That blog post continues to draw occasional comments and considerable traffic.
The unwisdom of this activity should be so obvious as to need no explanation, but apparently those who have already spent their lives bashing their heads into the floor may be impervious to further attempts at reason.
…and to the health of your offspring
In a nutshell, the problem is that both the cultural traditions in Islamic lands, and Islam itself, encourage inbreeding.
Suffice it to say that there are excellent reasons why the descendents of the royal families of Europe no longer intermarry as they once did, and why some States in the USA ban first-cousin marriage. The Orthodox Christian Church takes it further, prohibiting marriage between first or second cousins. Yet cousin marriage remains customary, not only within Muslim countries, but also among expatriate Muslim populations elsewhere.
Charles II of Spain, mentioned in the article below, suffered throughout his short life from severe mental and physical disabilities.
…What’s the negative? Pedigree collapse. I’ve been talking about marriages between first cousins throughout this post, but that’s really a small issue next to this. Even first cousin marriages produce individuals with a fair amount of inbreeding. I ran a test for runs of homozygosity in my 23andMe genetic profile and I got 3 hits, while a friend whose parents are first cousins got ~70 (the parameters for the test aren’t important, just giving a relative sense). For inbred clans it gets much worse because people are related in many different ways, and genetically are far closer than first cousins. That is what happened to the Spanish Hapsburgs. As you can see from the pedigree of Charles II his parents were closer than typical first cousins. The Samaritans of Israel are a religious sect which seems to be going through pedigree collapse. Some of them are proactively marrying outsiders to prevent their extinction through high infant mortality rates. Others, “traditionalists,” oppose exogamy because intermarriage within the group is the custom, and diseases are God’s will.
The Samaritans are an extreme case. But we may be seeing a thousand Samaritan flowers blooming across the Middle East. From what I know cousin marriage in the Middle East is not limited to Muslims, Christians and Jews practice it as well. But among many Muslims it has some cachet because of particular hadiths which point to this practice as preferred. Setting religion aside, there are also social reasons why this practice is common. As I noted above sex segregation means that you may not know women outside of your family well, and in some societies where veiling is practiced it may be that you do not see many women you are not related to (even if veiling occurs at puberty, you may have seen your cousin at a younger age). Marriages are bonds which may tie a family into one operational social unit, and so produce a powerful inbred clan. This illustrates the cross-purposes of a cultural unit of selection vs. the individual unit of selection. In a society where clan vs. clan competitions are critical sorting mechanisms consanguineous marriages may serve as beneficial cross-linkages. Balanced against this of course are marriages across clans. On an individual level a first cousin marriage reduces the reproductive fitness, but higher potential reproductive fitness of two individuals who have no social support because of ostracism may be a moot point.
By Tazeen Ahmad
Last updated at 11:11 AM on 23rd August 2010
Sitting in the family living room, I watched tensely as my mother and her older brother signed furiously at each other. Although almost completely without sound, their row was high-octane, even vicious.
Three of my uncles were born deaf but they knew how to make themselves heard. Eventually, my uncle caved in and fondly put his arm around his sister.
My mum has always had a special place in her family because she was the first girl to live beyond childhood. Five of her sisters died as babies or toddlers. It was not until many years later that anyone worked out why so many children died and three boys were born deaf.
Today there is no doubt among us that this tragedy occurred because my grandparents were first cousins.
My grandmother’s heart was broken from losing so many daughters at such a young age. As a parent, I can’t imagine what she went through.
My family is not unique. In the UK more than 50 per cent of British Pakistanis marry their cousins – in Bradford that figure is 75 per cent – and across the country the practice is on the rise and also common among East African, Middle-Eastern and Bangladeshi communities.
Back when my grandparents were having children, the medical facts were not established. But today in Britain alone there are more than 70 scientific studies on the subject.
We know the children of first cousins are ten times more likely to be born with recessive genetic disorders which can include infant mortality, deafness and blindness.
We know British Pakistanis constitute 1.5 per cent of the population, yet a third of all children born in this country with rare recessive genetic diseases come from this community.
Despite overwhelming evidence, in the time I spent filming Dispatches: When Cousins Marry, I felt as if I was breaking a taboo rather than addressing a reality. Pakistanis have been marrying cousins for generations.
The effects of inbreeding are not limited to the incidence of obvious birth defects. Even those offspring who do not have overt congenital defects will, on the average, have lower intelligence and less ability to deal with life in the modern world.
Massive inbreeding within the Muslim culture during the last 1.400 years may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool. The consequences of intermarriage between first cousins often have serious impact on the offspring’s intelligence, sanity, health and on their surroundings
The most famous example of inbreeding is in ancient Egypt, where several Pharaonic dynasties collapsed after a couple of hundred years. In order to keep wealth and power within the family, the Pharaohs often married their own sister or half-sister and after a handful of generations the offspring were mentally and physically unfit to rule. Another historical example is the royal houses of Europe where royal families often married among each other because tradition did not allow them to marry people of non-royal class.
The high amount of mentally retarded and handicapped royalties throughout European history shows the unhealthy consequences of this practice. Luckily, the royal families have now allowed themselves to marry for love and not just for status.
The Muslim culture still practices inbreeding and has been doing so for longer than any Egyptian dynasty. This practice also predates the world’s oldest monarchy (the Danish) by 300 years.
A rough estimate shows that close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred: In Pakistan, 70 percent of all marriages are between first cousins (so-called “consanguinity”) and in Turkey the amount is between 25-30 percent (Jyllands-Posten, 27/2 2009 More stillbirths among immigrants”
Statistical research on Arabic countries shows that up to 34 percent of all marriages in Algiers are consanguine (blood related), 46 percent in Bahrain, 33 percent in Egypt, 80 percent in Nubia (southern area in Egypt), 60 percent in Iraq, 64 percent in Jordan, 64 percent in Kuwait, 42 percent in Lebanon, 48 percent in Libya, 47 percent in Mauritania, 54 percent in Qatar, 67 percent in Saudi Arabia, 63 percent in Sudan, 40 percent in Syria, 39 percent in Tunisia, 54 percent in the United Arabic Emirates and 45 percent in Yemen (Reproductive Health Journal, 2009 Consanguinity and reproductive health among Arabs.).
A large part of inbred Muslims are born from parents who are themselves inbred – which increase the risks of negative mental and physical consequenses greatly. … Low intelligence
Several studies show that children of consanguineous marriages have lower intelligence than children of non-related parents. Research shows that the IQ is 10-16 points lower in children born from related parents and that abilities related to social behavior develops slower in inbred babies:
“Effects of parental consanguinity on the cognitive and social behavior of children have been studied among the Ansari Muslims of Bhalgapur, Bihar.
IQ in inbred children (8-12 years old) is found to be lower (69 in rural and 79 in suburban populations) than that of the outbred ones (79 and 95 respectively). The onset of various social profiles like visual fixation, social smile, sound seizures, oral expression and hand-grasping are significantly delayed among the new-born inbred babies.” (Indian National Science Academy, 1983 Consanguinity Effects on Intelligence Quotient and Neonatal Behaviours of nsari Muslim Children“).
The article “Effects of inbreeding on Raven Matrices” concludes that “Indian Muslim school boys, ages 13 to 15 years, whose parents are first cousins, were compared with classmates whose parents are genetically unrelated on the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices, a nonverbal test of intelligence. The inbred group scored significantly lower and had significantly greater variance than the non-inbred group, both on raw scores and on scores statistically adjusted to control for age and socioeconomic status.” (Behaviour Genetics, 1984).
Another study shows that the risk of having an IQ lower than 70 goes up 400 percent from 1.2 percent in children from normal parents to 6.2 percent in inbred children: “The data indicate that the risk for mental retardation in matings of normal parents increases from 0.012 with random matings to 0.062 for first-cousin parentage.” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 1978 Effect of inbreeding on IQ and mental retardation“). The study A study of possible deleterious effects of consanguinity concludes, that “The occurrence of malignancies, congenital abnormalities, mental retardation and physical handicap was significantly higher in offspring of consanguineous than non-consanguineous marriages.”
Starting with the Clinton Administration, we GAVE a wealth of technological access to the Chinese, allowing their military-industrial complex to progress much faster than would otherwise have been the case.
Through the H-1b program and the tax and regulatory advantages of offshoring, the federal government has made it more and more difficult, verging on impossible, for Americans to make a decent living in high-tech careers. Young people aren’t going into those fields, and older folks are finding low-paying jobs outside their fields, or are retiring on inadequate incomes because they can’t find work any more.
This gives the high-tech companies (run by tranzi progressives, and sometimes by immigrants from Muslim countries, who contribute heavily to the Dems) an excuse to claim that we need to outsource and offshore even more, because of the a shortage of home-grown high-tech help. Of course, it is a lie, but in the future, this shortage will indeed exist, simply because nobody born here can hope to make a living in high-tech fields.
Creating TWO underclasses of indentured servants
Managers and CEOs at high-tech firms aren’t offshoring and outsourcing in order to enhance America’s competitiveness by recruiting “the best and the brightest.” It’s all about short-term self-interest. What they really want are poorly-paid, compliant, and easily intimidated foreign workers who will make no demands and who will do exactly as they are told, with no thought given to pesky matters of conscience such as loyalty to the US or to Judaeo-Christian standards of ethics in the workplace.
Adding insult to injury are all of those efforts to get American youngsters interested in studying for high-tech careers. That includes one of the three things that Obama tasked former NASA director Charles Bolden to do: to inspire children to learn math and science. Even the most talented children will seldom put the effort into studying math and science unless they think there’s something worthwhile that they will be able to do with that knowledge.
By the time they reach college age, those youngsters are being induced take out student loans that they will never be able to pay back, because there will be no jobs in those fields for Americans. The sneaky thing here is that student loan debts cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, so the federal government gets a permanent class of people in peonage and debt-slavery. The federal government can then promise to forgive some part of the student loans if the victim agrees to spend a certain number of years doing menial tasks promoting the interests of those currently in power.
Raising vipers in our bosom
On the other hand, the offspring of our jihadi enemies have enough petrodollars that they need not trouble themselves about unpaid student loans. Instead, they come to the US on student visas, accumulate the technical knowledge that their own benighted societies cannot produce, and take it back to their compatriots at home and abroad to use against us. It never occurs to the members of the leftist-jihadist convergence who run our universities that it is a bad idea to provide technical training to our avowed enemies.
Here’s my advice:
If you want a high-tech career, don’t borrow money to learn it and don’t plan on living in the US.
Click thumbnail to view original, then click again to view full size. The text is worth a closer look.
What a tragic irony!
In case you haven’t heard, Satyam was the fourth-largest IT outsourcing company in India, with 55,000 employees (or so they claimed). The CEO, Ramalinga Raju, recently resigned after admitting massive financial fraud. As of this writing, the company is almost out of cash.
Here we go again…
Satyam has done business with companies and governments in over 60 countries, including the U.S. This scandal appears to be even larger in scope than the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandal of late 2001. Price Waterhouse, the Indian subsidiary of PricewaterhouseCoopers, is facing close scrutiny over having signed off on Satyam’s audits.
Obviously, the much-touted Sarbanes-Oxley law enacted after the Enron/Arthur Andersen debacle did nothing to prevent the recent collapse of the U.S. real estate, stock market, and financial sector. The take-home lesson is that once any corporation becomes multinational in scope, and politically well-connected, no laws, no regulations, no bureaucratic restructuring can possibly keep it honest if its management chooses to do otherwise.
Another reason why outsourcing is wrong
Outsourcing and offshoring are always and everywhere the enemies of accountability. The further away one’s trading partners are located, the harder it is to comprehend what they are up to, and that will never change.
Why corporate cheating is contagious
Whenever one major company in an industry has been “cooking the books” to promote or exaggerate its own success, what effect do you suppose that has? Think about it! Every other executive, every other company in that industry will be pressured to match or exceed the cheater’s inflated results, by fair means or foul, or face the wrath of board members and stockholders.
Dutch parliamentary member Geert Wilders has announced that his Islam critical film named “Fitna” will be ready at the end of this week. The film, he announced, will soon have its own website:
Revealing fact is that the Dutch parliamentary member choose to host the website not from a server in The Netherlands, but from a server located in North America. Presumably to hold it out of reach of the Dutch government.
Next week, says Wilders, he will start negotiating with Dutch broadcasters to get his 15 minute film broadcasted in The Netherlands. A process that, according to him, can take up to several weeks. This could be sign that the movie will not be released the end of this week. But it could also be a way to put pressure on the Dutch broadcasters who don’t want to broadcast the whole movie, because they all politically oppose Wilders, but who at the same time would even sell their own mother for a scoop.
We keep you posted about the developments around the film Fitna. In the meantime, if people like to provide some free PR to the movie, they should create as many back links as possible to the website “fitna the movie”. This can be done by simply placing links to www.fitnathemovie.com. This can be done on you’re personal blog, other people’s blog comments, discussion forums, websites, etc.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani authorities on Tuesday lifted a ban on popular video-sharing website YouTube after it removed “objectionable content” insulting Islam.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had ordered about 70 internet service providers last week to block the website because it had hosted a trailer for a “blasphemous film” by Dutch politician Geert Wilders that portrays Islam in a negative light.
The move by Pakistani authorities to block access to the website caused an accidental near global blackout of YouTube on Sunday.
YouTube , which is owned by Google, said on Monday that an ISP complying with Pakistan’s ban had caused a blackout of the website on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Senate or upper house of Parliament strongly condemned the republication in Denmark of the blasphemous cartoons caricaturing Prophet Mohammed that were also posted on YouTube.
A resolution passed unanimously by the Senate said “serious tensions” are also brewing because of a “sacrilegious film against Islam” made by Wilders.
(Emphasis is ours.)
That’s right… the controversy even brought down YouTube!
These crude and heavy-handed efforts to stop people from watching Fitna will eventually backfire. The harder our foes work to censor vital political speech, the more attention it will get, and the more curiosity will be aroused. That’s just human nature; after all, if the movie warrants that much consternation, then what it contains must be very important indeed.
But even though totalitarian censorship fails in the long run, before that happens it always does enormous damage to human societies and to the human spirit. Geert Wilders’ movie is going to be huge – and it deserves every opportunity to reach its eagerly-awaiting audience.
Here’s where YOU come in:
Cross-post the Fitna movie announcement on your own blog.
A lot of people think that Albanian Muslims have a less religious character than the rest of the Islamic world. Which is, of course, not true. The real question is why the Islamic character of Albanian terrorism is concealed. (And I will call it terrorism, because actions where one group of people are trying to seclude a part of tne country in a illegal way is terrorism.) Maybe the answer is that there is a fear that the public will recognize that, in the heart of Europe, a new Islamic state has been formed by taxpaying citizens of the “West”.
Nothing new about the push to Islamize the Balkans
However, the Islamization of the territory around Albania – especially the effort to force Islamization upon Kosovo and Metohia – isn’t a recent process. It has been active for centuries and has gone through a number of phases. In certain phases, Islamization was interlaced with solving a national territorial question; that is, joining all territories with Islamic populations in one state.
At this point, I would like to point out that Kosovo and Metohia (the full name of the region) was Serbian before the first Albanian tribe came down from the mountains and set up there. In 1389 there was a famous Battle of Kosovo, of Serbs and their allies against the Ottoman Turkish empire. The Turks conquered Serbia and stayed there for 500 years before they were forced out, and Serbia was declared an independent state once more. When Turks came and brought Islam on Balkan soil, the Serbs and other people had a choice to join Islam or to become a form of slave to the newly-established and mighty Ottoman Empire.
Icon of Nemanjic Dynasty, medieval rulers of Serbia
An unthinkable surrender for the Serbs
Now we are talking about proud people who had a holy lineage of rulers during the previous couple of centuries, and such thing was unthinkable. When I say holy, I mean holy like saints – they were acknowledged to be saints and they are celebrated even today. It is even said that one of the descendants could perform miracles… so I hope this will shed a little light on what was going through people’s minds.
Oh, and I said a form of slaves – well, the main difference is that Ottomans took the Serbs’ firstborn male children 7-14 years old, and trained them to be an elite army for the empire, never to return home.
Well, unlike Serbs, Albanians were a group of mountain tribes without a significant heritage, so they didn’t have any problem with accepting Islam. Under the Ottoman Empire, this gave them an advantage over other people in this region. They also participated in violence against the Christian people. In spite of this, a great number of Serbs survived to see the fall of Ottoman Empire in this region, and, after the Balkan Wars, the rejoining of Kosovo and Metohia to Serbia. Albanians, of course, were not satisfied with such a solution. They also participated in the liberation from the Turks, but with different ambitions. They wanted to create a “Greater Albania” that would include all territories where Albanians lived, either as a majority or a minority, it didn’t matter.
WWI poster – “Kossovo Day” June 28, 1916 Solidarity with our Serb allies
That was a great source of frustration for a great number of Albanians and their ideology. In the newly created state of Serbia, they were a considerable minority, even in Kosovo (according to the records, in the late 19th century, there were 415.000 residents of Serbia who were Christians, 236.420 who were Muslim, and only 106.270 Albanians). By the end of WWI they became an even smaller minority, but that didn’t stop them from harassing the Serbs of Kosovo, who were beaten up, humiliated and forced out from their homes. Many foreign authorities wrote about it, so that you can be pretty sure that Serbs didn’t imagine it.
Nazi Albania
The most important phase in Islamization of Kosovo and Metohia occurred during WWII. Because of specific relations between Albania and their own interests, Italian occupiers allowed mass persecution of Serbs from these parts, and at the same time allowed a large number of Albanians from Albania to move there. In this way, a significant artificial demographic upheaval was made, which went unpunished and uncorrected. This also was to have a deciding role in the growth of terrorism and separatist ambitions in the region.
In this period around 10.000 Serbs were killed, 70.000 were banished, and 30.000 houses and other structures were demolished and destroyed. At the same time, 300.000 Albanians came from Albania to the territories of Kosovo and western Macedonia.
In battle against Christian Serbs (and later I will return to this, because there are other Christians in these parts beside Serbs), the Albanian leaders mobilized all Albanians – Muslim and Christian. To Christian Albanians, the struggle against Serbs was portrayed as a fight against Serbian oppression, and for the creation of “Great Albania.” But within the inner circles, among the Muslims themselves, they spoke freely of their real goal of creating an Islamic country – a goal that is entirely consistent with Islam as a religion. As an expression of their ambition for creating such a country, along with other things, a Skenderbeg Division was created.
Skenderbeg Albanian Muslim Waffen SS Division
The Skenderbeg Division had in its assembly military imams who worked to promote ideology among the fighters. Of course, the pan-Islamic and jihadist basis for doing battle against unbelievers was constantly highlighted. Among the unbelievers were Partizans, a Slavic (Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Bosnian and Slovenian) guerrilla anti-German military in Balkan parts. [In other articleson this blog, we have discussed the Chetniks, led by Draza Mihailovic, a Serbian Orthodox anti-German force loyal to the Kingdom. - 1389] The first action of the Skenderbeg Division, which confirmed their Nazi orientation, was the arrest and execution of 281 of Pristina’s Jews in May of 1944. Pristina is a city in Kosovo.
The pan-Islamic character of the Skenderbeg division was revealed in the fact that it consisted of, among others, almost 150 Tajiks and Turkmen. Probably under their influence, the division was remembered for countless crimes against the Serbian population, even against women and children.
Communist Yugoslavia ratifies Nazi-era theft of Serbs’ property
After WWII, in spite of expectations, life for Serbs of Kosovo and Metohia in the newly-formed, atheist country of Yugoslavia for began as hard and difficult a period as before. After the war came a law that prohibited Serbs who had been exiled from Kosovo and Metohia from returning there. The direct consequence of this law was that a large number of Albanians who had entered Kosovo and Metohia during the war were given legal status. This made it possible for them to stay on property that they had taken from the Serbs. Albanian terrorists got a clear hint that they could run amok. Instead of being punished for their actions and receiving the same status as all other defeated nations, the Albanians got a total legalization of the demographic imbalance that they had created, and the Serbs got the short end of the stick.
“Godless Communists” favored Muslims over Christians
Confirming that Albanians as Muslims were privileged, unlike the Christians, is the fact that polygamy was tolerated because it was in the Islamic tradition. While in other parts of the country, marriages between nationalities were promoted, in Kosovo and Metohia it was possible only in one direction – an Albanian male could take a Serbian female, but not the other way around, because of reasons given in the Kuran.
There are other examples of Islamization of Albanians and Kosovo and Metohia, and of their preparations for the terrorism that never completely stopped, but more or less escalated over the years. From Enver Hodza’s Albania (that also declared itself as atheist) came a number of sheik dervish privates, that were convicted in Prizren in 1956 for aiding a terrorist gang. President of Central Comity of Communist Alliance Muhmut Bakali, as a communist (and communists were officially declared to be atheists) had a mosque built in Pec and further led to breaking Serbs in those parts. Several of his anti-Serb slip-ups were recorded, where he showed his sympathy for Muslims and Albanians, as a supposed communist and atheist.
The West works hand in glove with al Qaeda
Now we come to the year 1999, a year that NATO dumped its surplus of bombs on Serbia, even cluster or “cassette” bombs that are outlawed by international war rules. At various round tables that were organized to resolve the Kosovo and Metohia problem, various pronouncements often denied or negated the Islamization of this region. Those conclusions often came from abroad, from circles that stood to gain political benefit from denying these facts. Only one counter-argument is needed to prove that this Islamization is real: What about the Catholic Albanians, the famous jewelers from Janjevo? Although they were Albanians, they would have had to be Muslims to live a safe and carefree life in Kosovo. As Catholics, they had to seek refuge in Croatia.
At various times, Al Qaeda has announced terrorist acts and declared fatwas against “infidels”: USA, UK, France, Israel, India, Russia and Serbia. Osama bin Laden himself, during 1995, spent some time in Albania where he met with Hashim Thaci and Ramush Haradinaj.
Osama bin Laden with Ayman al-Zawahiri
The unconcealed connection between Kosovo Albanian separatists and the Islamist factor was confirmed in 1996 in Skopje (capital of Macedonia), at the 118th annual celebration of the Prizren League. It was attended by representatives of Albanians from Kosovo and Metohia, where they again sworn to fight for the league’s expansionist ideals. This is significant, because in the documents of the league, they appear as Muslims and not as Albanians, clearly showing the desire to create an Islamic country.
In 1998, the American administration even found it necessary to put its ally, the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army, consisted of Muslim Albanians who fought against Serbs for, well you guessed, liberation of Kosovo) on a list of terrorist organizations, for the stated reason that they had found records of funds from Islamic countries that were involved in drug trafficking. At that time, they said that one of the financiers was Osama bin Laden. According to Interpol data, one of the elite KLA units was led by Muhammad al Zawahiri, the brother of al Qaeda ideologist Ayman al Zawahiri, who is considered second in command after Osama bin Laden.
Islamic organizations fund Kosovo terrorism
During 1998. the existence of the “Abu Bekir Sidik” unit was confirmed. This unit operated in the Drenica area, and was financed with funds from the “Balkan Islamic Center” and “Active Islamic Youth”. The unit consisted of around 40 foreign citizens, and its commander was Ekrem Avdia. When the unit was disbanded, almost all of its members were arrested, along with its leader Ekrem. But they all were released because of pressure from the “international community” during 2001. Soon after he was released, Ekrem was put in charge of the organization “Kosovo’s Islamic Biro,” which had a great number of outposts across Kosovo and Metohia. After that, Ekrem reactivated his old unit. They operate and contribute to the instability of this region to this day.
A great number of Islamic organizations even now operate on the territory of Kosovo and Metohia. Believe it or not, even under the cover of humanitarian organizations they smuggle weapons, they do other illegal trading, and they finance extremist and terrorist activities.
The bottom line is that there is nothing more frustrating when a small child is beating you up, and when you try to defend yourself, a bigger child slaps you down. Meanwhile, the other children just silently watch the whole thing and shout but won’t help you. It’s a messed-up world we live in.
…Also, I wish to let you know that I’m the Director of the Free Kareem Coalition. Kareem Amer is an Egyptian blogger who was sentenced to 4 years in prison for writing posts critical of Islam and the Egyptian government. This coming Feb 22nd, it will be a full first year since he was officially sentenced, even though he was in prison for a year and 3 months now (3 of these months, he was imprisoned with no official charge or trial.)
On this date, we are organizing a worldwide op-ed day. Basically, this means that many people around the globe will be writing about Kareem’s case in order to increase awareness on it and making the Egyptian government realize that we have not forgotten this brave, young, innocent man whose only crime is free speech.
Also on this date, 2 rallies will be taking place: One in France and the other in Washington DC. Last year, we organized 3 worldwide rallies which took place everywhere from Brazil to India to Romania. Over 20 cities were involved and thousands wrote about it on their blogs.
This year however, since our last rally just took place in November, we are trying to take another approach and directly target the media to help keep Kareem in people’s minds and prayers.
I hope you can get involved in any way, at least by posting something about it on your blog. We could really use the help in spreading the word.
Nasser Rabbat, a Syrian professor of Islamic architecture at MIT, told the Park Service not to worry about the giant Mecca oriented crescent at the center of the Flight 93 Memorial. He said that since it does not point quite exactly to Mecca (it is off by 1.8°) it can’t be considered a proper mihrab (the central feature around which every mosque is built).
Liar. Many of the most famous mihrabs face as much as 20 or 30 degrees off of Mecca.
Here is another Rabbat deception:
Mosques are never in the shape of a crescent or a circle. This defeats the purpose of lining up the worshipers parallel to the Qibla wall (Mecca orientation), which usually translates into a rectangular shape, or sometimes a square. [From the White Paper released by the Memorial Project in August 2007.]
It is true that most mosques are rectangular, the more clearly to mark the direction to Mecca, but this is certainly not a requirement, given that the two most religiously significant sites in Islam are round mosques. Significant site #1 is the Sacred Mosque in Mecca:
Second most significant is the Mosque of Omar, also called the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, from which point Muhammad supposedly ascended into heaven:
Perhaps because of the prominence of these precedents, a small but significant number of mosques around the world follow the round model.
There is the Tun Abdul Aziz mosque built in Malaysia in 1975, referred to colloquially as the “Masjid Bulat,” or “round mosque.”
There is the new 5,000 person Arafat Mosque in Nigeria, which the architect claims is “the only round mosque in Africa,” but he is wrong. Another round mosque, Al Nileen, sits at the confluence of Blue and White Nile rivers in Khartoum:
[From Google Earth. Look up "alnileen mosque".]
Africa is also home to some older round mosques. Here is a round mosque from the Ivory coast. Similar mosques have also been found in Sierra Leone.
Here is a modern Russian mosque, laid out in shape of an eight point star.
There is even a famous round mosque right in the heart of the EU, at the northwest corner of the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels.
There is a round mosque in Kuwait, a round mosque in Kadavu India, and probably many more.
At the Islamic architecture website Archnet, a Muslim architect (not a native English writer) explains the problem with round mosques:
… a circular mosque can not function well because a mousqe should have an oriantation to kibla and as we all know that a circle does not have an orientation, How can we know the kibla wall if it is a circle ?
This problem does not afflict Paul Murdoch’s mosque design for the Flight 93 memorial because Murdoch’s giant crescent does create an orientation. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just as with a smaller size mihrab.
Geometrically, Murdoch’s Crescent of Embrace is just a gigantic Islamic prayer rug:
A Muslim prayer rug is a two dimensional mihrab, laid out to face Mecca, just as the Crescent of Embrace is.
Notice that to a person looking into the Flight 93 crescent, the irregularity of the outer arc of the crescent is not visible. The radial arbors are all behind the double row of red maples that line the walkway. The ends of the crescent are also well defined by the end of the walkway of red maples at the bottom and the end of the thousand foot long, fifty foot tall Entry Portal Wall on top. This is a perfectly comprehensible and recognizable Mecca direction indicator.
Rabbat’s comments to the Park Service do not even pretend to be objective. He lists “talking points” in defense of the crescent design without ever even pretending to weigh the merits of the case against the design.
Most obviously, Rabbat never considers the almost exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent as a grounds for concern, but limits his remarks to possible excuses for not worrying about this obviously worrisome fact. The same for all of his other talking points. He only even considers ways to absolve the crescent design.
In short, Rabbat is as overtly biased as he could possibly be, yet the Park Service has no qualms about this overt bias. Rabbat gives them the excuses for unconcern that they want and they eagerly embrace him. The Park Service investigation into warnings of an enemy plot was a total fraud.
The heaviest snowfall in [Iran] in more than a decade has killed at least 21 people…Some died of the severe cold, some were buried under avalanches, and others died after their cars overturned on snow-covered roads…Heavy snow and cold weather has also affected Afghanistan, India, and several Central Asian countries.
Winter-related tragedies reported by the BBC hereand here by the Gulf Daily News (Bahrain) here and by Reuters here include:
Iran: eight people frozen to death after being trapped in their cars…snowfalls for the first time in living memory [in desert areas]
Kyrgyzstan: 50 homeless people froze[n] to death
Tajikistan: daytime temperatures as low as -10C and nighttime temps as low as -25C with power rationing
Afghanistan: 50 deaths caused by heavy snow, and food shortages due to closed roads
Ghor: Five people killed in an avalanche
Herat: eight members of the same family died after their roof collapsed under heavy snow
Pakistan: seven soldiers killed in avalanche
Mazandaran: unprecedented cold weather and gas shortages
Baghdad: first snowfall in “living memory”
Uzbekistan: coldest temperatures for almost four decades
India: more than 20 people killed by cold weather
Tehran: airports and schools closed
Die-hard members of the religion of Global Warming, however, are keeping the faith:
OSLO: Climate change is still nudging up temperatures in the long term even though the warmest year was back in 1998 and 2008 has begun with unusual weather such as a cool Pacific and Baghdad’s first snow in memory, experts said. “Global warming has not stopped,” said senior scientific co-ordinator of the World Meteorological Organisat-ion’s climate programme Amir Delju.
