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- Soeren Kern: Germany: A Koran in Every Household
- Raymond Ibrahim: Death to Churches
- Irfan Al-Alawi: The Muslim Brotherhood Goes to Washington
Germany: A Koran in Every Household
by Soeren Kern
April 11, 2012 at 5:00 am
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3007/germany-koran
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Salafists also believe that democracy, because it is a man-made form of government, must be destroyed.. According to Die Welt, the Salafists have launched a "frontal assault" against people of other faiths and "unbelievers". Many Islamists believe Islamic Sharia law is a divine ordinance that is to replace all other legal systems. The number of Islamic radicals in German is surging. Islam is giving them respectability.
Islamic radicals in Germany have launched an unprecedented nationwide campaign to distribute 25 million copies of the Koran, translated into the German language, with the goal of placing one Koran into every household in Germany, free of charge.
The mass proselytization campaign -- called Project "Read!" -- is being organized by dozens of Islamic Salafist groups located in cities and towns throughout Germany, as well as in Austria and in Switzerland.
Salafism is a branch of radical Islam, practiced in Saudi Arabia, that seeks to establish an Islamic empire (Caliphate) across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe -- and eventually the entire world. The Caliphate would be governed exclusively by Islamic Sharia law, which would apply both to Muslims and to non-Muslims.
Salafists also believe, among other anti-Western doctrines, that democracy, because it is a man-made form of government, must be destroyed.
Although Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), regards the Salafist groups as a threat to German security, Salafists have free reign in the country, and Salafist preachers are known regularly to preach hatred against the West in mosques and prayer centers that are proliferating across Germany.
The campaign to place a Koran in every German household is being spearheaded by a Rheinland-based Salafist, Ibrahim Abou-Nagie, a Palestinian preacher of hate, who leads a radical Islamic group called "The True Religion" ("Die Wahre Religion").
In September 2011, German public prosecutors launched an investigation into Abou-Nagie after he called for violence against non-believers in videos posted on the Internet. In his sermons, Abou-Nagie glamorizes Islamic martyrdom and says that Islamic Sharia law is above the German Constitution. He outspokenly believes that music should be prohibited, that homosexuals should be executed, and that adulterers should be stoned.
Abou-Nagie has tens of thousands of followers across Germany. Among them are two German Muslim converts-turned-terror suspects trained by Abou-Nagie and recently arrested in Dover, England, after British border police searched their luggage and found a document entitled "How to Build a Bomb in Your Mom's Kitchen," an article from the English-language online magazine "Inspire" produced by Al-Qaida in Yemen.
In one video, Abou-Nagie tells his audience that "whoever follows the Christian Bible or the Jewish Torah instead of the Islamic Koran will go to Hell for eternity."
Not surprisingly, Abou-Nagie sees it as his calling to save the German people from the wrath of Allah by converting them to Islam. To achieve this aim, Abou-Nagie founded Project "Read!" to distribute tens of millions of copies of the Koran throughout Germany.
The campaign is now well under way. More than 100 Salafist "information booths" have already been set up in dozens of German cities, particularly in the regions of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Hessen and Hamburg.
Abou-Nagie's approach is simple and effective: German Muslims are encouraged to purchase a copy of the Koran (red cover) in order to fund the free distribution of additional copies of the Koran (blue cover). In addition to the public distribution of the Koran on the streets and market places, non-Muslims can order a free copy of the Koran on an Internet website called hausdesqurans.de.
According to Abou-Nagie, Salafists have already distributed more than 300,000 German translations of the Koran, and a fifth print run consisting of tens of thousands of additional copies has already been ordered from the printing plant, which is located in Baden-Württemberg.
During the extended Christian Easter weekend from April 5-9, Project "Read!" entered into a new phase. According to the Berlin-based newspaper Die Welt, the Salafists have launched a "frontal assault" against people of other faiths and "unbelievers". On April 7, for instance, Project "Read!" organized a nationwide campaign to distribute the Koran in 35 German cities, including Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Heidelberg, Konstanz, Munich and Osnabrück.
According to Die Welt, German authorities view the Koran project, which fundamentalists are using a recruiting tool, as a "most worrisome" campaign for radical Islam. Security analysts say the campaign is also a public-relations gimmick intended to persuade Germans that the Salafists are transparent and "citizen friendly."
In an effort to improve their image, the Salafists have removed from their "information booths" all literature about the role of women in Islam or the supremacy of Islamic Sharia law over democracy.
Moreover, the German translation of the Koran has edited out many of the verses which call on Muslims to make war on non-believers. According to BfV, the German domestic intelligence agency, the German version of the Koran is "rather non-controversial."
German authorities also say, however, that Project "Read!" is being organized by Islamist networks that hold an extremist world view and a militant ideology.
A spokesperson for the Berlin branch of the BfV told Die Welt that "the objective of this campaign is to help bring those who are interested into contact with the Salafist scene in order to influence them in the context of their extremist political ideologies."
Although not everyone who takes a Koran into their home will convert to Islam, German authorities say Abou-Nagie's Project "Read!" is a establishing a breeding ground for anti-constitutional ideas.
In any case, the number of Islamic radicals in Germany is surging.
According to the BfV, there are an estimated 29 Islamist groups in Germany with 34,720 members or supporters who pose a major threat to homeland security. Many of them want to establish a "Koran-state" in Germany because they believe Islamic Sharia law is a divine ordinance that is to replace all other legal systems.
The head of the German Police Union (DPolG), Rainer Wendt, has told the Hamburg-based Bild newspaper that he is concerned about the presence of clandestine Islamic sleeper cells made up of Muslim immigrants and converts in Germany. He has called for the recruitment of undercover agents to infiltrate the Islamic environment. It is the "only way to monitor the scene," Wendt said.
"Radical Islamists live everywhere and nowhere in Germany. One cannot rule out that that nice young man from next door, who brings grandma her fresh bread every morning, is not in fact an Islamic sleeper and terrorist," Wendt warned.
The BfV is particularly concerned about Muslim youth who are prone to "rapid radicalization patterns," and who possess a "high willingness to use force" and "to attack." Some of them are under surveillance by the security authorities, according to Wendt.
The BfV is also monitoring a surge in online Islamist propaganda, much of which warns Muslims that they are not to integrate into German society. With an estimated 4.3 million Muslims, Germany has Western Europe's second-biggest Islamic population after France.
Some of the Islamists are Germans who recently converted to Islam. This would include former boxer Pierre Vogel, who converted to Islam and studied in Saudi Arabia. He is now an Islamic preacher who rails against Muslim integration into German society.
Many of the German converts to Islam are socially disaffected drop-outs from school and/or ex-convicts, and radical Islam is giving them respectability, according to German security services.
Some of the home-grown Muslim radicals are being alienated from German society by means of Sharia law, which is now competing with the German criminal justice system in all major cities in Germany.
Settlements reached by the Muslim mediators often mean perpetrators are able to avoid long prison sentences, while victims receive large sums in compensation or have their debts cancelled, in line with Sharia law. This is fomenting distrust for the established legal system, analysts say.
According to Kirsten Heisig, the author of the book "The End of Patience": In Germany "the law is slipping out of our hands. It is moving to the streets or into a parallel system where an imam or another representative of the Koran determines what must be done."
Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.
Related Topics: Soeren Kern
Death to Churches
Christian Holidays in the Islamic World
by Raymond Ibrahim
April 11, 2012 at 4:30 am
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3009/terrorized-churches-islamic-world
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While the mainstream media, government officials and so on try to portray these attacks as products of poverty, the fact is, wherever there are significant numbers of Muslims, churches are under siege.
Last Sunday, many Christians around the world celebrated Easter, taking for granted that they can congregate and worship in peace. Not so in the Islamic world, where top religious officials call for the destruction of churches, Christian holidays celebrated in church are increasingly a time of death and destruction, and a time of terror.
Nigeria, for example, saw some 50 Christians killed "when explosives concealed in two cars went off near a church during Easter Sunday services in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna….the casualty figure may go up because some injuries were really critical." The church targeted was "the Assemblies of God's Church near the centre of the city with a large Christian population and known as a major cultural and economic centre in Nigeria's north." According to the pastor holding Easter services at the time, "We were in the Holy Communion service and I was exhorting my people and all of a sudden, we heard a loud noise that shattered all our windows and doors, destroyed our fans and some of our equipment in the church."
There is little doubt that the Islamist group Boko Haram ["Western Education is a Sin"] is behind the terror strike. Boko Haram has long been targeting churches—most glaringly, last December 25, when several churches were bombed in the Muslim majority areas of Nigeria, in what was described as "Nigeria's blackest Christmas ever: then, over 40 Christians were slain, "the majority dying on the steps of a Catholic church [in Madalla, near the capital of Abuja] after celebrating Christmas Mass as blood pooled in dust from a massive explosion." As usual, the charred and dismembered remains of Christian worshippers were seen scattered in and around the destroyed church.
While the Christmas -- and now Easter -- church attacks may be Nigeria's most known, they are certainly not the only ones. The last six weeks alone reveal:
- Sunday, March 11: A Boko Haram suicide car bomber attacked a Catholic church during Mass, killing at least 10 people. The bomb detonated as worshippers attended Mass at St. Finbar's Catholic Church in Jos, a city where thousands of Christians have died in the last decade as a result of Boko Haram's jihad.
- Sunday, February 26: A Boko Haram suicide-car bomber killed at least three people, including a toddler, at another church in Jos. Witnesses said the jihadist drove his car into the prominent Church of Christ during morning prayers.
- Sunday, February 19: A Boko Haram bomb attack outside a church in Abuja left at least five people seriously injured and many more hurt, when a parked car filled with explosives detonated outside the Christ Embassy Church.
While the mainstream media, analysts, government officials, and so on, try to portray these attacks as products of Nigerian poverty, the fact is, wherever in the world there are significant numbers of Muslims (Nigeria's population is half Christian, half Muslim), churches are under siege (see sections dealing with church attacks in the "Muslim Persecution of Christians" reports for February, January, December, November, October, September, August, and July).
Some of the more spectacular ones include the Baghdad church attack where 58 Christians were killed; similarly, the New Year's Eve church bombing in Egypt that saw over 20 Christians killed (when several more churches were bombed and attacked, and thousands of Egyptian Christians demonstrated, they were slaughtered by their own military); earlier, in 2010, eight Egyptian Christians were shot dead by drive-by Muslims as they were leaving church on Christmas Eve.
Further, Muslim attacks on churches during the holiest of Christian holidays are not limited to Nigeria and Egypt, but occur throughout the Muslim world—for instance, in distant, "moderate" Philippines, where another church was bombed during Christmas.
Of course, there are some Muslim nations—Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and soon possibly Kuwait—where one rarely hears of church attacks; but only because they have nipped the "church problem" in the bud by not allowing them to exist in the first place. The hatred for churches is still there, but in an unseen form.
What an efficient way church attacks are, with worshippers tightly gathered in one spot, to ensure the deaths of maximum numbers of Christians.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Related Topics: Raymond Ibrahim
The Muslim Brotherhood Goes to Washington
by Irfan Al-Alawi
April 11, 2012 at 3:30 am
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2997/muslim-brotherhood-washington
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Like the Turkish AKP, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood will be exposed not a new period of civil power in Muslim society, but as a party working toward the installation of permanent clerical authority.
Representatives of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) arrived in Washington DC on April 3, an event that was predictable after the pan-Islamic movement won pluralities in the recent elections in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt. The aim of their journey to the Potomac was to improve the organization's image as a leading force in radical Islam. Members of the MB delegation hoped to convince American lawmakers, media, and experts that they represent a "moderate" variety of Islamist doctrine. According to the Voice of America, they were "one of five Middle Eastern Islamist political parties taking part in meetings with U.S. officials in Washington as well as a conference organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace." In reality, all five parties at the Carnegie conference were branches of the MB: from Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Libya.
The MB acolytes were also favored by meetings with officials of the U.S. National Security Agency. As noted in The Washington Post, the MB visitors to the American capital were subordinate figures in the movement, chosen "in part for their fluency in English and their familiarity and ease with American culture. But the delegation did not include the decision makers at the top of the Brotherhood's leadership."
The MB public-relations campaign evidently borrowed tactics from similar efforts by the so-called Justice and Development Party (AKPartisi) of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Playing on the (correct) assumption that Westerners know little of Islam and the Muslim lands, the Egyptian MB delegation repeated the catch-phrases they are convinced will win them friends in the U.S. and Europe: "The priorities for us are mainly economic, political — preserving the revolution [sic] ideals of social justice, education, security for the people," Sondos Asem, a member of the delegation, said.
As Erdogan and the AKP have emphasized Turkey's economic boom, its commitment to entrepreneurship, and its middle-class support, the Egyptian MB likewise claimed to value practical economic and social improvements for the country's masses over the Brotherhood's traditional vision of an "Islamic state."
Since the fall of Hosni Mubarak a year ago, however, the Brotherhood has already alienated Egypt's non-Islamist citizens by its devious behavior: during the Egyptian Revolution and in the period preceding the election cycle, the Brotherhood promised it would not run its own candidate for the national presidency, but it now has such a standard-bearer: business magnate and Brotherhood ideologue Khairat al-Shater.
Additionally, ever since the MB expelled Abdel-Moneim Abul-Futouh, a physician and party stalwart who announced his run for the presidency last year, the Brotherhood's constituency has been divided. Many Brotherhood supporters consider Abul-Futouh a better-known and more credible candidate for the position.
Both Al-Shater and Abul-Futouh could benefit from the disqualification in the Egyptian presidential race of the radical fundamentalist television preacher, Sheikh Hazem Salah Abu Ismael. Sheikh Abu Ismael, an independent Wahhabi (so-called "Salafi," the extreme form of Islam imposed on Saudi Arabia), wants to remake Egypt in the image of Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is likely, however, that he will be removed from the electoral list on the grounds that his mother acquired American citizenship.
Brotherhood intrigues have provoked concern among both Egyptian liberals and Coptic Christians. Both recently walked out of discussions on a new constitution, charging that the MB and other Islamists dominated the proceedings.
Notwithstanding its apparent self-confidence and its supine welcome by gullible Westerners, the Egyptian MB enjoys no certainty in its fight for the presidency. Former Arab League general secretary Amr Moussa possesses the highest level of name recognition and an international profile that is lacking among the rest of the Egyptian contestants. Although he was a political ally of Mubarak, Moussa managed to extricate himself from his association with the former dictator and his circle.
If, as is most probable, the elected Islamists of the Egyptian MB follow the pattern developed by Erdogan and the AKP in Turkey, they will endeavor to employ economic privatization and "moderate" positions on regional conflicts to cover their more central agenda.
In Turkey, this has meant an energetic penetration of neighbouring countries' markets, plus the disapproval of the bloodthirsty regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria. At the same time and at home, nevertheless, Erdogan and the AKP pursue discriminatory policies against the large, heterodox Alevi Muslim minority; disregard the interests and rights of Christians, and seek to downgrade women's education, while enhancing the status of official training for Sunni clerics.
Like Turkey, Egypt has a substantial history of military rule, although the Cairo government was never as thoroughly committed to secularism as its peers in Ankara. According to sources, the Egyptian MB gained 37.5% of the post-Mubarak parliamentary ballots with the approval, if not the direct connivance, of the military. In Turkey, however, the AKP under Erdogan has attacked the military power sharply, with the encouragement of Western liberals and other observers, who apparently believe a civilian Islamist administration is a preferable alternative to a garrison-led secular state.
The Egyptian MB has drawn away from the Egyptian army in protest against the assumption of power by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) after the fall of Mubarak. It is doubtful, nonetheless, that the Egyptian MB will choose to confront the Egyptian military in the manner Erdogan adopted against the Turkish armed forces: by a series of political show-trials during which he accused members of the military of having planned a coup against his rule, and now by a retrospective trial of officers involved in the military takeover of Turkey in 1980.
Turkey had previously undergone years of debate over the limits of military power. The AKP and other Islamists had constructed a widespread network of religious groups able to pose as a civic force. For Egypt, a complete MB break with the army would be a sudden and unsettling move; and, notwithstanding the undeniable success of the MB in organizing an oppositional Islamist subculture in Egypt, it has not achieved the extent or sophistication of the Turkish AKP and its allies.
Although members of the AKP came West during the first decade of the 21st century reiterating their attachment to transparency, accountability, and even secularism in government, as well as frequenting free-market think-tanks and cultivating conservative opinion, the actions of the AKP in power have proven such rhetoric and intrigue hollow.
The Muslim Brotherhood has passed through various phases: a revolutionary party, a political partner of the Egyptian army, and an important component of the global alliance of Islamist fundamentalists. These included the predecessors of Ayatollah Khomeini (whom it inspired), the Saudi Wahhabis, and the South Asian jihadists. The MB has now reached the summit of its influence as a faction able to hypnotize Western leaders with its "moderate" idiom.
But regardless of its honeyed words and the slick, updated, Westernized vocabulary of its travelling exponents, the Egyptian MB cannot, in its middle sectors, its base, and its fundamental outlook, change. It is a thoroughly Islamist party with a profoundly retrograde vision of a state based on religious dictates. As in Turkey, sooner or later, as soon as the Egyptian MB thinks it is strong enough to prevail, the mask will fall, and the promises it made in Washington and elsewhere in the West will be shrugged aside. Like the Turkish AKP, The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood will be exposed not as a new period of civil power in Muslim society, but as a party working toward the installation of permanent clerical authority.
Related Topics: Irfan Al-Alawi
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