Tuesday, June 7, 2011

'Gay Girl in Damascus' Allegedly Kidnapped

 
As the anti-government uprising in Syria has unfolded, Syrian-American blogger Amina Abdallah has attracted readers and been noticed by The Washington Post, CNN, Time,and The Guardian for her musings on the protest movement and what it's like to be gay in Syria. But her blog--A Gay Girl in Damascus--broached a very different topic today: Someone introducing herself as Abdallah's cousin wrote that Abdallah was seized by three armed men while on her way to meet with protest organizers.

The cousin adds that while the family suspects Abdallah was seized by Syrian security forces, all that's known right now is that she's missing. A Facebook page has quickly sprouted up for Abdallah, a dual citizen who was born in Virginia to an American mother and a Syrian father and, at six months, moved to Syria, where she has relatives in the government and the Muslim Brotherhood (the photo above comes from Facebook, though we can't confirm its authenticity). On the Facebook page, there's discussion of Abdallah's name (Amina Abdallah or Amina Arraf?) and how to contact U.S. representatives from Virginia to facilitate Abdallah's release.

read more: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/06/gay-girl-damascus-allegedly-kidnapped/38556/

Destroying the Dollar

 
Something I never thought I would ever see in my former hometown, a wealthy New Jersey suburb of New York City, was a Dollar Store, but one opened recently in a former supermarket. Dollar Stores are giving Wal-Mart, Target, and similar outlets a run for their money and it’s not hard to see why. The local one has just about everything you could need and all for astonishing low prices.

In countless ways people are looking to save money these days. The looming problem, however, is the question of what happens when Americans wake up to learn that even a dollar can no longer buy anything?

“When Faith in U.S. Dollars and U.S. Debt is Dead the Game is over – And that Day is Closer than You May Think” is the cheery title of an article recently posted on EconomicCollapse.com.
 

"We Ask a Person Nicely to Convert, But If He Refuses...We Fight Him"

The Death of Ilyas Kashmiri

 
On Friday June 3, Ilyas Kashmiri was reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike. Kashmiri headed the Islamist terror group called Harkatul Jihad Islami. Following the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1 (local time), it was briefly postulated that Kashmiri was a candidate to take over as the acting head of al-Qaeda. He was head of an al-Qaeda unit known as the 313 brigade.
 
According to the U.S. State Department, Kashmiri had given the orders for a combined ballistic and bomb attack upon the regional headquarters of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, in Lahore, Punjab province. That attack on the twin buildings of the local Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) on May 27, 2009 killed 35 people, including seven agency personnel. A senior ISI figure, identified as Colonel Amir, was among the dead.
 
Kashmiri had also been closely linked to the people who kidnapped a Hindu Pakistani film-maker called Satish Anand, who was snatched in the port city of Karachi in the south of Pakistan in October 2008. Anand was freed in April 2009 after a ransom was paid, with Ilyas Kashmiri involved in the negotiations. Though kidnapped in the south, Anand had been released in North Waziristan, in the north of Pakistan.
 

Islamic concepts misunderstood by Westerners.

Islamic concepts misunderstood by Westerners.

jonmc

Freedom

The Western viewpoint.

In the West “freedom” is used to describe a whole range of things encompassed in civil, political and individual rights.

Perhaps the most succinct definition of “freedom” is that of Thomas Jefferson: “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.”

He went on to say: “I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often [nothing] but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

Quite explicit in Jefferson’s definition is that all people have equal rights and that all (non-tyrannical) laws must apply equally to all people without exception. (This idea was put in British law as the law acting indifferently -as in ”without difference” – towards all people.)

read more: http://www.faithfreedom.org/articles/op-ed/islamic-concepts-misunderstood-by-westerners/

Netanyahu accuses Syria of abetting border clash

JERUSALEM — A day after Israel used lethal gunfire to repel protesters from Syria who tried to breach the frontier with the occupied Golan Heights, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu defended the army’s conduct and suggested that the Syrian government had used the protest to deflect attention from its own deadly crackdown on a popular uprising.

Syria said that 23 people were killed by Israeli fire during Sunday’s border confrontation, including a woman and a child, and it accused Israel of “flagrant aggression” against unarmed civilians.


read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-accuses-syria-of-abetting-border-clash/2011/06/06/AGYCeaKH_story.html?wprss=rss_world

Egyptian Shaykh: Conduct jihad, confiscate wealth, kidnap women & children (audio)

From the Translating Jihad blog.


…prominent Egyptian Salafi Shaykh Abi-Ishaq al-Huwayni explains that Muslims’ financial difficulties are due to the fact that they have abandoned jihad.

Transcript: