http://www.jihadwatch.org/ Remember when the Salafists were a Tiny Minority of Extremists? They gotalmost 29% of the second round of voting in Egypt's elections, and depending on the report, about a quarter of the first round. On one hand, they may not be toning their rhetoric down much because they simply don't have to. They have gotten this far on the hard sell. On the other hand, someone desperate to rationalize their advance is probably bound to plead at some point that Salafism is not a monolith, and there is a Tinier Minority of Extreme Extremists in the Tiny Minority of Extremists. More on this story. "Jews and Christians are 'infidels,' reiterates Salafist cleric," from Al Ahram Online, December 24 (thanks to The Religion of Peace): Borhami or Borhamy appear to be the common spellings of this cleric's name. And that ain't much. It is not unlike the now-hilarious quotation from the early '80s, apocryphally attributed to Bill Gates, that "640k [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody." Sharia's regressive, discriminatory "rights" "ought to be enough for anybody," and that's all the dhimmis will ever get, on the condition that they can stay on their overlords' good side. But: That's a new one. The intrepid mujahedin, keeping the world safe from tidings of comfort and joy. "Explosions Rip Through Churches in Nigeria," from the New York Times, December 25: Rumors have circulated for some time about the mistreatment of Asia Bibi in jail, and this story reports that she is recovering from a beating at the hands of a Muslim prison guard in October. Irfan Masih, another defendant for "blasphemy," is in the hospital after being stabbed. Barack Obama should know these names. Hillary Clinton should know them. Their plights, that of Hector Aleem, and others, are as emblematic of all that is wrong with Pakistan as bin Laden's location under the nose of the Pakistani military. "Pakistan Refusing Christmas Day Visits To Jailed Christians," by Stefan J. Bos for BosNewsLife, December 25 (thanks to The Religion of Peace): She refused to convert to Islam. That helps to explain her fragile condition as described in this interview. In the U.S., Islamic spokesmen insist that the idea that non-Muslims must be offered conversion, subjugation or death (cf. Qur'an 9:29; Sahih Muslim 4294) is "Islamophobic" misunderstanding of Islam. Somehow Kirolos Andraws ran afoul of Islamophobic Misunderstanders of Islam in Egypt, where they appear to abound. "Egypt's Embattled Christians Seek Room in America," by Lucette Lagnado in theWall Street Journal, December 24 (thanks to all who sent this in): Then one day in February, says Mr. Andraws, a gang of thugs beat him and told him, "you deserve to die." His offense, he says: refusing to convert to Islam. In late March, Mr. Andraws, a 23-year- old engineer, used a tourist visa to board an Egyptair flight for New York City. He let a room in a friend's apartment, hired an immigration lawyer and applied for asylum. He has survived mainly on wages ... The whole idea of a uniform is to convey a sense of singleness of purpose, both to those within the organization and to those who encounter members of it. So if one group is allowed variations on the uniform, all other groups should be allowed them as well, and the very purpose of a uniform is destroyed. Hijabs and turbans in the JROTC will create a sense that the wearer has another allegiance and a different purpose from those of the rest of the outfit, rather than being dedicated primarily to the organization's mission and goals. But what is most disturbing about this story is Leon Panetta's rush, and the Army's rush, to placate the Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood group CAIR. Hamas-linked CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case -- so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedlyrefused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several formerCAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR's cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed posters telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI. An update on this story. "Army to allow hijabs, turbans in Junior ROTC," by Caroline May in the Daily Caller, December 22 (thanks to all who sent this in): The decision, announced Thursday, followed an October incident in which Muslim teen Demin Zawity quit JROTC when her commanding officer at a Brentwood, Tenn. high school would not allow her to wear her hijab in the homecoming parade. CAIR later wrote to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta requesting “constitutionally-protected religious accommodations for the girl and for future Muslim JROTC participants.” In a letter to the Muslim organization sent on Panetta’s behalf, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Larry Stubblefield explained that based on the incident that led Zawity to quit JROTC, the Army will now be making more accommodations for religious headwear in the training program. “Based on your concerns, the Army has reviewed its JROTC uniform policy and will develop appropriate procedures to provide Cadets the opportunity to request the wear of religious head dress, such as the turban and hijab,” Stubblefield wrote in the letter, made public by CAIR. “This change will allow Miss Zawity and other students the chance to fully participate in the JROTC program.” Army spokesman George Wright confirmed Stubblefield’s letter to CAIR and explained to The Daily Caller that while JROTC is affiliated with the Army, it is not actually a part of the Army. The new procedures will provide JROTC with a exemption method more similar to current Army procedure mandated through the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. That law allows soldiers on active duty to apply for religious accommodation if they want to alter their uniforms in accordance with their religious beliefs. The exemptions are applied on a case-by-case basis. Soldiers who are transferred must reapply.... I posted this video, a parody of A Charlie Brown Christmas in which Charlie Brown converts to Islam and becomes a jihadist, here at Jihad Watch on October 29, 2006. It had been posted at YouTube on April 17, 2006. So it is at least five and a half years old, and probably older. But Gothamist just noticed it, and featured it December 24 in a post entitled "Video: Charlie Brown Converts To Islam In Xenophobic Peanuts Parody." The title says the video is "xenophobic"; the commenters, inevitably, call it "racist." So apparently it is both of those things and more to poke fun at jihadists, and to make even the most comically innocuous recognition of the fact, abundantly documented here day in and day out, year in and year out, that some of the people who convert to Islam end up being violent jihadists. Xenophobic to oppose jihad. We should instead be welcoming of Islamic supremacists who want to kill, convert or subjugate us. To resist them would be racist. That's the Gothamist's take. And that of many others as well, of course. Western powers have likely been afraid that defending the rights of Christians in Muslim lands would be interpreted as showing partiality. It would not be partiality, of course, to demand impartiality in the protection of human rights by governments that claim in glowing generalities to have no problem doing just that. Christians seem to have been written off as collateral damage for the sake of political expediency and wishful thinking. They have been a consistent casualty of fantasy-based foreign policy that accepts as dogma the "tolerance" of Sharia, whose proponents have been the main beneficiaries of the past year's "Arab Spring." "How can we remain silent while Christians are being persecuted?" by Fraser Nelson for the Telegraph, December 24: But Islam appropriates Jesus into its own narrative to neutralize claims about his divinity and make room for Muhammad (dying for mankind's sins and rising from the dead are a tough act to follow). It claims Jesus as a Muslim, and posits its own revisionist account as true while rejecting the Gospels' message about Jesus as false. Jihad causes poverty, in Boko Haram's drive to "fix" the country by breaking it. More on this story. "Clashes between sect, police kill 61 in Nigeria," by Jon Gambrell and Ndjadvara Musa for the Associated Press, December 24: Rarely do humor and sad truth come together so well as in this video. How does this icon insult Islam? In many ways, including these: 1. It depicts human beings, which violates the traditional Islamic prohibition of images and would be considered idolatrous and blasphemous on its face. 2. It depicts Jesus not as a Muslim prophet, as this does: Instead, it depicts Jesus in the traditional Christian manner, as the incarnate Son of God: his halo reads ο ων, the One Who Is, a title of divinity derived from the name of God that God gives to Moses in Exodus 3:14), in violation of the oft-repeated Qur'anic injunction that Allah has no Son (4:171; 9:30; 25:2; 39:4; 72:3; etc. etc.). 3. In line with #2, it depicts what Muslims would consider to be idolatry, as the holy child's mother kneels and adores him. 4. In the beam or spear coming from heaven down to the child in the cradle, it depicts the activity of the Divine in the world, assuming the doctrine of the Trinity, which is rejected somewhat imprecisely in Qur'an 4:171 and 5:116. 5. The cradle resembles a casket, foreshadowing the core and heart of Christianity, the redemptive death of Christ, which is denied in Qur'an 4:157. Now, whether you are a Christian or not, and whether or not you believe all or any of these things, the question that is before us with this Christmas, as every Christmas these days, is whether or not people should be allowed to believe these things freely, without being brutalized or discriminated against, if they live in Iraq, or Egypt, or Pakistan, or Nigeria, or Indonesia -- and whether free people of all creeds and perspectives should defend their right to do so. In those countries, Christians today are being kidnapped, imprisoned, wrongly arrested, beaten, and murdered -- not because of anything they have done, but because they have dared to believe some of the things I have adumbrated above, beliefs that are considered blasphemous in authoritative Islam. And it is hardly better elsewhere in the Islamic world: nowhere in majority-Muslim countries today do people who believe these things enjoy full equality of rights with Muslims. We see this at Jihad Watch every day. We see jihadists attacking Christians with increasing fury. We also see the world largely yawning and indifferent as all this goes on. Christianity is a large and multifaceted thing, with so many different and various manifestations, but in the mind of the opinion makers of the West it is Western, white, suburban, wealthy, comfortable, oppressive, and oppressing. Christians are, in the little dramas that play out in mainstream media stories every day, a bit cracked, a bit sinister, a bit dangerous, a bit grasping, and sometimes fanatically jingoistic and xenophobic. They are never victims. Muslims, by contrast, are in the daily mainstream media playlets always cast as non-Western, nonwhite, poor, wise, serene, and oppressed. And so when it comes to the specter of non-Western, nonwhite Christians being persecuted by Muslims, the mainstream media's circuitry explodes. They can't handle it. They have no paradigm for doing so. It violates every rule in their playbook. So they either ignore it or mask the identity and/or motives of the perpetrators, and try to cast the focus elsewhere. And so remember this Christmas: if you are a free human being, whether or not you are Christian, those Christians who are being persecuted in Iraq, and the Philippines, and Nigeria, and Egypt, and Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Islamic world, are standing in your place. The jihadis would just as soon attack you as well, and will eventually if they get the chance. Remember that the Islamic supremacist program has you on its list. You may not be a Christian. You may not be a Jew. You may not be a Hindu. You may not wish to pay attention to the jihad at all. But the jihad is universal, and relentless. And you are on its list. So this Christmas, may all of us whose conversion, subjugation, or death is envisioned by the adherents of Sharia stand together. Let us stand together as Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, secularists, what have you, and stand up against those who would kill us or subject us to institutionalized discrimination because they find our beliefs offensive. For be assured: if we do not stand together, they will prevail. And if they prevail, then all the richest manifestations of the unfettered human spirit, from Theophanes the Cretan above to the fashioners of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, from the Hagia Sophia to the temple of Keshava Rai at Mathura, from the works of Socrates and Aristotle to those of Moses Maimonides and Dante Alighieri and Winston Churchill and Oriana Fallaci, will be trampled into the mud, destroyed, exploded, ruined, effaced. We will all be the poorer. Our children will be the poorer. It is time to fight for our life. Merry Christmas to all Christian Jihad Watchers who celebrate the Feast tonight and tomorrow morning. Weren't the Salafists and their supporters supposed to be a Tiny Minority of Extremists? "Main Islamist parties take 65% of second-round votes," from Agence France-Presse, December 24: These are the people who will be writing the country's next constitution. A democracy is only as good as the values that inform its participants. UPDATE: The Brotherhood now denies making this claim, and says it was false information planted by the regime. ----------------------------------------------------- Remember, the Brotherhood is "moderate." "Extremists" would have killed 88. More on this story. "Syria's Muslim Brotherhood claims responsibilty for deadly blasts," from AFP, December 25 (thanks to The Religion of Peace): The claim on Saturday contradicted assertions by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad that the blasts, which also wounded 166 people, were the work of al-Qa'ida and of the opposition Syrian National Council that the regime carried them out. ''One of our victorious Sunni brigades was able to target the state security building in Kfar Suseh in the heart of the ... capital Damascus in a successful operation carried out by four of our kamikazes drawn from the best of our glorious men, leaving many dead and wounded from the ranks of the Assad gangs,'' it said on its official website. ''We as defenders of the Syrian people and the sanctity of this nation send a message to Assad's gangs: This is the beginning of the liberation of Damascus and the tip of the iceberg,'' the statement added. ''Hence we warn our fellow citizens and advise them not to approach government centres or security branches ... because our martyrdom brigades are in a state of maximum readiness to carry out quality operations in Aleppo, Damascus, and the blessed land of Syria in the next 10 days.'' The statement was signed by the ''Muslim Brotherhood's media committee inside Syria''. The bombings, the first against the powerful security services in central Damascus since an uprising against Assad began in March, came a day after the arrival of an advance group of Arab League monitors who are to oversee a deal to end the bloodshed. After the attacks, Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Meqdad said ''this is the gift we get from the terrorists and al-Qa'ida, but we are going to do all we can to facilitate the Arab League mission''.... Here is a new post over at Liberated, the new blog written by an ex-Muslim: Last Sunday I went to the church here and attended the mass. Then I went to see the priest and asked him for help. He said that his hands were tied and he really could not do anything to help me, because when they had first gotten permission to built a church in this country, they had to agree to a few terms and conditions with the government here. One of them was not to convert anyone from Islam. He said if anyone finds out, the church would be closed and he would probably end up in jail. The priest said he could not help me personally, but that I was more than welcome to attend the mass and sit quietly at the back. He said, “Do not talk to anyone or reveal who you are.” It is a good idea, but frankly, I am not sure if I want to do that every week, because last Sunday I saw quite a few police cars circling the church premises, and I am really scared. What if someone checks my ID or something? They would probably close down the church and put me in jail, and maybe even execute me. My life will be in danger if anyone finds out that I have left Islam. I have a friend, a pretty young girl from Morocco who also lives here and works with me. She too has given up Islam recently but she is also very afraid of her life. This is what Islam does to you. When you are in it, your life is nothing but living in the fear of hell, and once you leave it, it is not less than hell because you are constantly scared to lose your life. "Freedom of speech means you can curse the prophet, and democracy will protect you." Cartoon Rage from a Muslim spokesman who must be some kind of Islamophobe. Video thanks to Answering Muslims.December 25, 2011
Egypt: Salafist cleric reiterates that Jews and Christians are "infidels"
Prominent Salafist cleric Yasser Borhami has reiterated his controversial stance on Jews and Christians, describing both as "infidels".
Borhami, one of several extremist Salafist sheikhs renowned for eccentric and bizarre statements, said he would not reverse his opinion to seek political gains.
“I hold on to my stance that Jews and Christians are infidels, but they do have rights that Allah has given them,” he stated during a press conference in Dakahliah, north east of Cairo.
Borhami, the deputy leader of the Salafist call (Al-Dawaa Al-Salafiyya), was instrumental in forming Al-Nour Party in 2011, commonly viewed today as Al-Daawa’s political arm.
The Nour Party has been thus far the second biggest winner in the ongoing parliamentary elections, behind the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP).
After the Nour Party’s initial triumph in the ballot, liberals and secularists started to voice fears over the Salafist impact on the political landscape, economy and social freedoms.
Al-Nour Party President Emad El-Din Abdel Gafour and spokesperson Nader Bakar tried to reassure critics through relatively moderate statements,unlike Borhami.
“We would never give up our thoughts for politics,” Borhami added.
Al-Nour’s parliamentary candidate Hazem Shoman is another Salafist sheikh who has made the headlines for his acid tongue and abrasive nature. He also spoke at the conference.
“Deviating from Islamic Sharia is the reason why Egypt was vanquished in 1967 [by Israel] and 2,700 women have committed suicide for being spinsters,” Shoman said.
A series of explosions were reported Sunday across Nigeria, including one at a Catholic Church near the capital that killed at least 25 people, Nigerian authorities said. A radical Muslim sect, Boko Haram, has claimed responsibility.
At least three of the five explosions appeared to target churches during Christmas services, according to media reports. One explosion struck St. Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla, a town about 25 miles north and west of the capital, Abuja.
Rescue workers there recovered at least 25 bodies and officials continued to tally the wounded in various hospitals, said Slaku Luguard, a coordinator with the National Emergency Management Agency.
His agency has acknowledged it did not have enough ambulances immediately on hand to help the wounded. Mr. Luguard also said an angry crowd that gathered at the blast site hampered rescue efforts as they refused to allow workers inside.
“We’re trying to calm the situation,” he said. “There are some angry people around trying to cause problems.”
Witnesses said that St. Theresa’s Church was filled for the Christmas service when the bomb exploded.
“Mass just ended and people were rushing out of the church and suddenly I heard a loud sound ‘gbam’. Cars were in flames and bodies littered everywhere,” Nnana Nwachukwu told Reuters.
Timothy Onyekwere told Reuters that he was in the church with his family when the bomb exploded.
“I just ran out. Now I don’t even know where my children or my wife are,” Mr. Onyekwere said. “I don’t know how many were killed but there were many dead.”
Some said the blast was inside and others thought it came from just outside the church.
A Reuters reporter at the blast site said that the church’s front roof had been destroyed in the blast, as had several houses near it. Five burnt out cars were still smoldering.
A Boko Haram spokesman, who identified himself as Abu Qaqa, claimed responsibility for the attacks in statements to the media. In the last year, Boko Haram has carried out increasingly bloody attacks in its campaign to install strict Shariah or Muslim law across Nigeria, killing at least 491. The same group also claimed responsibility for a series of Christmas Eve bombings a year ago in the northeast city of Jos that left at least 32 dead and 74 wounded.
A second explosion on Sunday struck near the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Church in Jos, a government spokesman, Pam Ayuba, said. Mr. Ayuba said gunmen later opened fire on police officers guarding the area, killing one officer. Two other bombs were found in a nearby building and disarmed, he said....
LAHORE, PAKISTAN (BosNewsLife)-- A Christian mother of five sentenced to death on charges of "blasphemy" against Islam and over a dozen other Christians held in Pakistani jails spent Christmas Day without their families, after authorities refused requests to allow prison visits, well-informed Christians said.
Asia Bibi, 46, "is spending a third Christmas separated from her family as she awaits an appeal" against plans to execute her by hanging for “blasphemy”, Barnabas Fund, an advocacy group assisting her family, told BosNewsLife.
She is held in the high security District Jail Seikhupura, some 35 kilometers (22 miles) northwest of Lahore, the capital of Punjab province.
Bibi, a farm worker, was detained in June 2009 on charges of defiling the name of Islam's Prophet Mohammad during an argument with Muslim co-workers. She has denied wrongdoing.
"She is being kept in isolation for her own safety, and is able to see her children only twice a year because of the security risk to them."
Bibi herself has been recovering in her Pakistani jail after she was allegedlyattacked and beaten unconscious by a Muslim prison officer in October, said the Pakistan Christian Congress (PCC) party earlier. Authorities pledged an investigation.
Later, a fellow believer held on blasphemy charges, Irfan Masih, was among others being attacked by Islamists on Tuesday, December 20, in a Kasur City jail, Christians said. He was reportedly seriously injured in the knife attack and was believed to be in a Lahore hospital on Christmas Day.
Despite security risks, Bibi's family "had an emotional reunion on December 13, carefully organized by a Christian couple who run the school that Asia’s daughters attend," Barnabas Fund explained.
"When the incarcerated mother saw her children, she naturally wanted to hug and kiss them but was not initially allowed any contact. The school director pleaded with the jail authorities and obtained permission for the family to meet in a separate room."...
Kirolos Andraws had every reason to be excited about the January uprising in his native Egypt, figuring democracy would bring hope for young people like him.
The [Hamas-linked] Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has announced that the Department of Defense will now allow Muslim and Sikh students participating in Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) to wear headscarves and turbans while in uniform.
Christians have lost heartbeats and heads while politicians dithered over "hearts and minds."Father Immanuel Dabaghian, one of Baghdad’s last surviving priests, is expecting a quiet Christmas. To join him in the Church of the Virgin Mary means two hours of security checks and a body search at the door, and even then there’s no guarantee of survival. Islamist gunmen massacred 58 people in a nearby church last year, and fresh graffiti warns remaining worshippers that they could be next.
The Americans have gone now, and Iraq’s Christian communities – some of the world’s oldest – are undergoing an exodus on a biblical scale.
Of the country’s 1.4 million Christians, about two thirds have now fled.Although the British Government is reluctant to recognise it, a new evil is sweeping the Middle East: religious cleansing. The attacks, which peak at Christmas, have already spread to Egypt, where Coptic Christians have seen their churches firebombed by Islamic fundamentalists. In Tunisia, priests are being murdered. Maronite Christians in Lebanon have, for the first time, become targets of bombing campaigns. Christians in Syria, who have suffered as much as anyone from the Assad regime, now pray for its survival. If it falls, and the Islamists triumph, persecution may begin in earnest.
The idea of Christianity as a kind of contagion that is foreign to the Arab world is bizarre: it is, of course, a Middle Eastern religion successfully exported to the pagan West. Those feet, in ancient times, came nowhere near England’s mountains green. The Nativity is a Middle Eastern story about a child born to a Jewish mother, whose first visitors were three wise Iranians and who was then swept off to Egypt to escape Roman persecution. [...]
These dividing lines are now being made into battle lines by hardline Salafists, who are emerging as victors of the Arab Spring. They belong to the same mutant strain of Sunni Islam which inspired al-Qaeda. Their agenda is sectarian warfare, and they loathe Shia Islam as much as they do Christians and Jews. Their enemy lies not over a border, but in a church, synagogue or Shia mosque. The Salafists may be detested by the Muslim mainstream [the vote in Egypt suggests otherwise -ed.]. But as they are finding out, you don’t need to be popular to seize power in a post-dictatorship Arab world – you just need to be the best organised. The West is so obsessed with government structure that it doesn’t notice when power lies elsewhere, and Islamist death squads are executing barbers and unveiled women in places like Basra. [...]
The Foreign Office has been typically slow to recognise the gathering threat, despite repeated warnings. The biggest one of all came a fortnight ago, when the Archbishop of Canterbury opened a gripping debate in the Lords about the widening persecutions, and what the Government ought to do. Lord Patten, the former education secretary, revealed that he spent a year failing to persuade the Foreign Office to help a group of Anglicans in the Anatolian peninsula, who are banned from worshipping in any public place. “'The answer was no,’ he said. 'They would not approach the Turkish government to ask, 'Please can you ease up a bit?’” But when German Catholics were having trouble in the same place, Angela Merkel’s government intervened immediately, working with the Turks to send a Catholic priest to hold public worship.
So why the British reticence? It might be that the Foreign Office sees this as part of a soppy equalities agenda, unworthy of diplomatic attention. Those who have raised the issue directly with William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, say he is unenthusiastic. When Mr Hague visited Algeria recently, he did not raise its ban on any Christian activity outside state-licensed buildings.
When challenged, ministers deplore persecution in general – but, seemingly, not so much that they’d do something like pick up the phone to Ankara. Yet there is plenty Britain can do. Countries could be denied aid until Christians (or Jews, or Sunnis) are allowed to worship freely. British diplomats could be empowered, even instructed, to advocate freedom of religion. When a peer of the realm alerts the Foreign Office to some persecuted Anglicans, a red alert ought to sound. Mr Hague might even publish an annual audit of religious freedom in various countries, making clear its importance to Britain. It might make its own estimate about the scale of the flood of refugees. [...]
Our friends in the Middle East are all waiting to hear from HM Government. Perhaps, in the new year, it might have something to say.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) — Fighting between a radical Muslim sect and paramilitary forces in Nigeria has killed at least 61 people over several days of violence in the nation's northeast that has left churches bombed and people hiding in fear, authorities said.
In hard-hit Yobe state, where at least 50 people died, the government on Saturday ordered a dusk-till-dawn curfew following attacks by the sect known as Boko Haram. In Maiduguri, the capital of neighboring Borno state, bombs reduced at least three churches to rubble and raised fears of further attacks by a group that claimed Christmas Eve bombings last year that killed dozens.
The fighting began Thursday in the two states, with gunfire and explosions heard into the night and the following day in an arid region that borders Cameroon, Chad and Niger. Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, and the town of Potiskum bore the brunt of the violence.
In Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, a mortuary official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter told The Associated Press at least 11 bodies had been brought in from the violence. Authorities blamed Boko Haram for firebombing at least three churches around the capital, attacks that killed one pastor and his young child.
This is just the latest in a series of bombings over the last year by Boko Haram. The group, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the local Hausa language, wants to implement strict Shariah law across a nation of more than 160 million people that is home to both Christians and Muslims.
Boko Haram claimed responsibility for a Nov. 4 attack on Damaturu, Yobe state's capital, that killed more than 100 people. The group also claimed the Aug. 24 suicide car bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Nigeria's capital that killed 24 people and wounded 116 others.
While initially targeting enemies via hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes, violence by Boko Haram now has a new sophistication and apparent planning that includes high-profile attacks with greater casualties. The sect is responsible for at least 465 killings in Nigeria this year alone, according to an AP count.
Boko Haram has splintered into three factions, with one wing increasingly willing to kill as it maintains contact with terror groups in North Africa and Somalia, diplomats and security sources say. That, as well as its increasingly violent attacks, have some worried the group will carry out further attacks around Christmas and New Year's.
Last year, a series of Christmas Eve bombings in the central Nigerian city of Jos claimed by Boko Haram killed at least 32 people and wounded at least 74 others.....
December 24, 2011
The Byzantine icon above is the work of the 16th-century iconographer Theophanes the Cretan. Many Muslims around the world today would consider it offensive and insulting to Islam. Muslims in the Balkans just a few years ago have entered churches and destroyed icons like this one for precisely that reason.
AFP - Egypt's main Islamist parties won 65 percent of votes for party lists in the second round of a historic election for a new parliament after Hosni Mubarak's ouster, the electoral committee said Saturday.
The [Muslim Brotherhood's] Freedom and Justice Party won 36.5 percent of the vote for party lists, with 4,058,498 out of 11,173,818 votes, according to figures provided by the electoral committee for the second round which was held on December 14.
[The Salafists'] Al-Nur won 28.78 percent, with 3,216,430 votes.
In Egypt's complex electoral system, voters cast ballots for party list candidates who will make up two thirds of parliament, and direct votes for individual candidates for the remaining third.
The elections were scheduled over three rounds, with run-offs for individual candidates after each round.
At a news conference on Saturday, electoral chief Abdel Moez Ibrahim announced the winners for the individual vote, but not their affiliations. The official Al-Ahram newspaper reported that the FJP won 40 seats and Al-Nur 13.
The Islamists' liberal rivals fared badly again in the second round, with Al-Wafd -- the country's oldest party -- winning 9.6 percent of the party list vote and the Egyptian Bloc, the main liberal coalition, just seven percent.
After winning almost 65 percent of seats in the first round of the vote, Islamists are poised to dominate the next lower house which will convene on January 23.
The third round of the election will start on January 3, followed by another three-round poll for the senate.
The FJP has said it would have the right to form the next government, but the ruling military and the prime minister it appointed have said parliament could not appoint ministers.
The military, which has faced down days of deadly protests in November and this month, says it will transfer power to civilians after a presidential election is held by the end of June next year.
SYRIA'S Muslim Brotherhood has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in Damascus that killed 44 people, saying they were the first step in liberating the capital and that more attacks were to come.
...During the course of last four months, I have done nothing else but read, read and read. I spend hours a day reading Ali Sina and watching videos of David Wood and others who are trying their best to expose Islam to the world. I read 23 Years by Ali Dashti. The best among them all is Ali Sina'sUnderstanding Muhammad and of course Robert Spencer’s The Truth About Muhammad. These kind of books are banned here, but I managed to find Robert’s book on Ibook, so I purchased it and just finished reading it yesterday....
Sunday, 25 December 2011
“Oh what fun with a knife or gun a Christian guy to slay — hey!”
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