Another Provocation Hate Speech or Free Speech

Geert Wilders who is creating a film to create a provocation

The Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders has touched off a fierce debate with his plans to post a short film on the Internet that is said to be highly critical of the Koran and Islam. A date has not been set, and there is no certainty that the film will be posted. But the anticipation has already touched off a heated discussion, and raised fears that the film could set off violence of the sort that followed publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark.

Following are four comments on the film and the furor around it.
A recent Gallup poll of Muslims in 39 countries reported that 92 percent of Muslims believe that attacks on civilians can never be justified. When asked to explain their position, a significant segment of the group cited the Koran's insistence on safeguarding innocent life as a moral duty. In spite of this, Geert Wilders would have us think otherwise.
Wilders's film is the latest in a series of provocations against Muslim communities in Holland, and against Islam in general. Its title, "Fitna," is taken from an Arabic word meaning chaos and civil strife.
It seems that this is also Wilders's intended outcome in producing the work. He argues that most Dutch Muslims should leave Holland or tear up at least half the Koran if they wish to stay. He promises that his film will definitively show "the violent and fascist elements of the Muslim faith."
There is no doubt that a small number of criminal extremists have committed violence in the name of Islam in recent years. But they do not represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims.The Gallup poll also shows that the tiny minority of people who believe that violence can sometimes be justified rarely use religion or the Koran to support their views. Their reasons are mostly geopolitical. In other words, Wilders's anti-Muslim ranting is not only racist, it is inaccurate.
The cynical use of identity politics to pit people against each other for political gain is not a new tactic. The past few years have been marred by a rise in tensions between small groups of extremists all over the world promoting the perception of a supposed "Muslim-West" divide.
It is no surprise that those on the fringes of either side of "the divide" use similar, incendiary rhetoric to provoke young people, with the ultimate aim of strengthening their own political platforms. In releasing a film that will undoubtedly insult deeply held religious beliefs, it seems that Wilders is hoping to cause a violent reaction to prove his own argument.
As with the Danish cartoon crisis two years ago, this situation, while dangerous, also presents unique opportunities.
Every time resources are deployed to spread disinformation, there is an attendant rise in the public's curiosity. Already there are many who are interested in learning more about Islam. It is likely that their number will grow after this. It is critical that we seize this opportunity to mobilize ourselves to present a more accurate picture of Islam.
As mediators in an increasingly heated debate, our efforts to counter the likes of Wilders must be both outwardly directed - in teaching others about Muslims - as well as inwardly directed toward our youth.
How do we ensure that our youth do not fall prey to such provocation?
We must be sensitive to their needs, and listen to them carefully. We should use every opportunity to further the development of healthy Western and Muslim identities. We must provide them with alternatives both in terms of information and platforms for dialogue and participation. And the best way to start doing this is to exemplify moderation in our own words and actions. Our Prophet would have done no less.

By Hamza Yusuf, Din Syamsuddin & HH Prince Hassan bin Talal.



http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/25/opinion/edfilm3.php

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson is a Muslim American scholar of Islam. Din Syamsuddin is the president of the Muhammadiya, the second largest Islamic organization of Indonesia. Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan is the president of the Arab Thought Forum.

Please Geert Wilders do not start the flame of hate, we have seen to much hate in this world of ours.Hate only generates hate, which leads to violence not peace.What saddens me most is that your speech, Geert is very inaccurate, if you study the history of tolerance, you will discover that tolerance was introduced in Europe through Islam.Like most things that you take for granted such as the street lights you walk under which came from Muslim Spain, or the orange juice you drink in the morning which also came from Muslim Spain.Not to much the Algebra you were taught that helped you to pass your Maths exams in school, not forgetting the coffee you drink that was invented by a Ethiopian Muslim, his idea went to Arabia, then was practiced in Turkey, finally appearing in Italy.This probably calms you down when you are stressed and helps you stay awake when you burn the midnight oil.Oh I forgot the shampoo you use when you have wash your hair that to my dear friend is an Islamic idea. These are just some of the vast contributions Islam has brought to the west.I pray that you correct your speech and understand what Islam really is and not what the media conveys.



Peace your brother in humanity

Priceless Jewel

"Each of your breaths is a priceless jewel, since each of them is irreplaceable and, once gone, can never be retrieved. Do not be like the deceived fools who are joyous because each day their wealth increases while their life shortens. What good is an increase in wealth when life grows ever shorter? Therefore be joyous only for an increase in knowledge or in good works, for they are your two companions who will accompany you in your grave when your family, wealth, children and friends stay behind "

Imam Al-Ghazali

Celebrating Martin L King 40 years on

A classic pitcure of the elegant Martin L king

Forty years ago, Martin Luther King was assassinated, but his legacy lives on. So who is the This great man ? What were his achievements ?

"Let freedom ring" that is what he said so powerfully on capital Hill. But, what does it really mean ? The BBC have produced a profile of his life. I think eveyone should know who he is and what he has doneas and his hardwork has affected all of our lives indirectly and directly in some way or another.







King was an American clergymen, Nobel Peace Prize winner and one of the principal leaders of the American civil rights movements.
King was born on 15 January 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. His father was a Baptist minister, his mother a schoolteacher. Originally named Michael, he was later renamed Martin. He entered Morehouse College in 1944 and then went to Crozer Religious Seminary to undertake postgraduate study, receiving his doctorate in 1955.
Returning to the South to become pastor of a Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, King first achieved national renown when he helped mobilise the black boycott of the Montgomery bus system in 1955. This was organised after Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man - in the segregated south, black people could only sit at the back of the bus. The 382-day boycott led the bus company to change its regulations, and the supreme court declared such segregation unconstitutional.
In 1957 King was active in the organisation of the Southern Leadership Christian Conference (SCLC), formed to co-ordinate protests against discrimination. He advocated non-violent direct action based on the methods of Gandhi, who led protests against British rule in India culminating in India's independence in 1947.
In 1963, King led mass protests against discriminatory practices in Birmingham, Alabama where the white population were violently resisting desegregation. The city was dubbed 'Bombingham' as attacks against civil rights protesters increased, and King was arrested and jailed for his part in the protests.
After his release, King participated in the enormous civil rights march on Washington in August 1963, and delivered his famous 'I have a dream' speech, predicting a day when the promise of freedom and equality for all would become a reality in America. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1965, he led a campaign to register blacks to vote. The same year the US Congress passed the Voting Rights Act outlawing the discriminatory practices that had barred blacks from voting in the south.
As the civil rights movement became increasingly radicalised, King found that his message of peaceful protest was not shared by many in the younger generation. King began to protest against the Vietnam war and poverty levels in the US. He was assassinated on 4 April 1968 during a visit to Memphis, Tennessee.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/king_martin_luther.shtml

You Will Never Walk Alone

When you walk through a storm

Hold your chin up high

And don't be afraid of the dark.

At the end of a storm

Is a golden sky

And the sweet, silver song of a lark.

Walk on, through the wind,

Walk on, through the rain,

Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart,

And you'll never walk alone,

You'll never walk alone.

The song is sung at football clubs around the world, where it is performed by a massed chorus of supporters on matchday; this tradition began at Liverpool FC in the early nineteen-sixties and later spread to several other clubs.

A Cup of Coffee

I received this from article from a friend as a email, a quite interesting reading

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.
Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups - porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the hot coffee.
When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for each of you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.
What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup. But you consciously went for the best cups and were eyeing each other's cups. Now if life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn't change. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it." So, don't let the cups drive you.. enjoy the coffee instead!

Robert Fisk: The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn

President George Bush addresses US Army soldiers and their families at Fort Hood, Texas, 3 January 2003. Bush addressed the possiblity of military action against Iraq

Robert Fisk: The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn

Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".
But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.
Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people – the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world – not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?
Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning – of which more later – but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.
As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I'd brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy's War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror – I recommend the Battle of Borodino – along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.
"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill's brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.
On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia – "Mission Accomplished" – and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians – ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents – annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus's head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.
To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer – should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war – and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper – daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?
But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith's proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us – be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or "terrorism" – are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.
Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam's capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.
But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had "penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks".
Why didn't Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere "dead-enders".
On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: "The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune." Why didn't Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved – even just a few tears for a minute or so – for the Iraqis?
For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders "the Allies" – they did, by the way – and painting Saddam's regime as the Third Reich.
Of course, when I was at school, our leaders – Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States – had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.
Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen – Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz – have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like "Shock and Awe" appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.
Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won't even account for Iraq until the war is over.
It is a grotesque truism that today – after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago – we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).
They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq – 176 – is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq – 29,395 – is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).
Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead – they range from 350,000 up to a million – these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom – 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded – from 1940 to 1945.
Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or – more terrible still – two Hiroshimas.
Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan's warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.
America's massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?
We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa'ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto – in Afghanistan – unheard of suicide bomber.
And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror – yes, our terror – of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and "terror". But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror". It's not too complicated an equation. And we don't need a public inquiry to get it right

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/robert-fisk-the-only-lesson-we-ever-learn-is-that-we-never-learn-797816.html

Don't send a 6 year old girl to her death - stop the deportation of Maria!

Maria Amen (God keep her smiling )


This is will hopefully stop the prevention of a deportation of a Palestinian child to her death.



Please join on facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6052314364





Maria Amen was wounded in 2006, when an Israeli missile struck her uncle's car, killing four members of her family, including her mother, grandparents and uncle. Maria herself, who was five at the time, had been left paralyzed up to her neck, and will never be able to breath without medical assistance. Maria is hospitalized in a Jerusalem rehabilitation hospice, the only one in Israel or Palestine capable of keeping her alive. Her permit to stay there expired, and the Ministry of Interior wants to deport her to the West Bank. THIS IS EFFECTIVELY A DEATH SENTENCE, as no other hospital has the medical equipment to help her breathe. At the moment Maria's case is before the High Court of Israel. This group is an online petition and a focal point for all those who think that this is a monstrous travesty which shouldn't be allowed to happen. Since not one government could care less about petition, we urge any and all members of the group to take action: if you are a journalist, write about Maria for your paper. If you are an activist, make your organization get involved. If you are member of a religious community, get any religious authority you can reach to issue a statement of concern - be it a mosque, a temple, a church or a synagogue. The pressure already raised by the family had the Ministry of Interior suddenly ask to postpone the hearing in the High Court . With more pressure - letters, statements, articles, phone calls - we can get them to give it up for good.



( By Dimi Reider, God bless her )



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/peace-studies-children-of-israel-394977.html

Please spread the word! Maria dear do not worry I support you, and pray for you.