Category: Muslim

Don’t quit your day job!


Someone please tell me this candidate for US Senate in Kentucky is NOT a  serious candidate, nor a libertarian! In a radio interview in Kentucky, US Senate candidate Sonny Landham had this to say in response to questions posed to him about his fellow Arab/Muslim Americans.

there has been a holy war going for thousands, and thousands, and thousands of years. Long before we were ever thought of. The Muslims look at infidels. Anyone who is not a Muslim is an infidel. Whether you are a Jew, a Bhuddist, a Catholic, a Protestant, or an atheist, you are still an infidel. They will lie to you, and they will not tell you the truth because it is not a sin for a Muslim to lie to a infidel.

If I had my way, I would stop Arabs coming into this country. And I would take all, uh, non citizens of the United States, finger printing them, and having a complete background check before they set foot into this country.

Tom Dec: Uh, pretty good, how are you? Uh, um, why do you support bombing the OPEC countries if they don’t turn over oil to us, and how exactly is that a libertarian position?

Sonny Landham: Uh, this, that was not quite what I said. My first statement was, do the steps that we have in the switch and drill, and somebody said, well that’s not my diplomatic way and if that doesn’t work, I said I would bomb those camel dung-shovelers back into the sand, and you’re going to wind up having to do it. Now, I’m pro-Israel all the way. As far as my book goes, Israel can do no wrong, Israel has a right to survive. It’s the camel dung-shovelers that say Israel does not have a right to survive, we don’t recognize Israel. Well, pal, I am for Israel. The biggest thing we ever did was to stop Israel…Israel in the six day war.

In case you’re wondering, the other candidates in the race are Democrat Bruce Lunsford and Republican Mitch McConnell, the incumbent.

POV on Obama’s Muslim “problem”


A very well written editorial on Obama’s senseless way of dealing with critics who call him a “Muslim” in an attempt to negatively influence the campaign. The writer of this piece does such a good job expressing my own sentiments that I’ll let his words speak for me:

I WISH Barack Obama were a Muslim. Better that than having supercilious staffers whisk women in Islamic head scarves out of photo-ops. Better that than telling Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the nation’s first Muslim congressman, not to come help Obama in Iowa and North Carolina.

Better that than wooing red states by wobbling before the modern equivalent of the Red Scare. In his year-and-a-half-long run for president, Obama has visited churches and synagogues, but no mosque. This has the musty feel of light-skinned African-Americans passing for white, paranoid over daylight visits from dark-skinned relatives.

Obama’s campaign has been far more inclusive than John McCain’s. Yet as of late, Obama’s handlers are so bent on passing their biracial, binationally-raised man as a pure-blooded American – a new commercial plays up his “values straight from the Kansas heartland” – that they are reinforcing the perception that Muslim Americans are impure.

Asked what he would say to Obama if he had the chance, Bilal Kaleem, executive director of the Boston chapter of the Muslim American Society, said, “It’s a tough question, and it’s sad that it’s a tough question. . . . I would suggest that he might have to do the same thing [on Islam] that he did on race. He addressed it head-on in a landmark speech. He gave his speech in a mature way. If he could speak in the same way to that, it could be inspiring for our country and the world.”

It is understandable why Barack Hussein Obama and his handlers suffer from PTSD – post-traumatic smear disorder. Political woodpeckers hammer falsehoods from the right. Fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, when asked whether Obama is a Muslim, tackily peeped, “there is nothing to base that on, as far as I know.” Despite nearly hitting the third rail over his former Christian pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, only 58 percent of Americans think Obama is a Christian, according to a Newsweek poll in May.

It has been so outrageous that Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, an independent and a Jewish American, said the “whisper campaign” was “wedge politics at its worst.” Kaleem said of Obama, “We feel sympathy for him because it’s not just him who should be called out; it is also the people in the media and politics who made a cottage industry out of him being a wolf in sheep’s clothing and that all Muslims are subversive.”

But the sympathy may be short-lived as Obama’s “Fight the Smears” part of his website has some Muslims feeling betrayed by an over-the-top effort to denounce every Obama-is-a-Muslim claim as a “lie” and saying, “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.” How about something like, “Senator Obama is a Christian who, having lived in the world’s largest Muslim country [Indonesia], having traveled in Pakistan and having many Muslim friends, appreciates American pluralism like no other candidate in US history”?

A more positive approach by Obama of affirming Muslims while affirming his Christianity actually fits the nation’s values. A new Pew Research survey finds Americans more open than ever to a range of religious viewpoints. Muslim Americans themselves, according to a 2007 Pew survey, are “largely assimilated, happy with their lives,” and “decidedly American in their outlook, values, and attitudes.”

This obviously all came together for Ellison’s election, as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has noted that his district has more Lutherans than Muslims. Ellison this week told The New York Times about Obama, “A lot of us are waiting for him to say that there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim, by the way.”

A lot of Muslims are waiting because, seven years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an undercurrent of suspicion remains. In the 2007 Pew survey, a third of Muslim Americans said that within the last year, they had either been treated with suspicion, called offensive names, profiled by police, or even attacked. Kaleem, a graduate of MIT, said he sometimes is asked during grant proposals how radical his group is.

“In a way,” Kaleem said, “it is good that these missteps have come out in public so we can start talking about the undercurrent, which is the real issue.”

Obama himself has said “Christians and people of other faiths lived very comfortably” with each other when he lived in Indonesia. It is time for him to live comfortably with Muslims in his campaign.

In a 2006 trip to Chad, Obama issued the Muslim greeting for peace. A wise Obama would say “assalamu alaikum” at home, too.

The war on terror+humanitarian relief=the war on Islam and chaos of muslim societies


I have always been perplexed by the war, either militarily or psychologically the US is waging in places like Somalia and Sudan. Two of the poorest countries in Africa and the world, I just can’t understand what threat these two pose to the greatest military power in the world. I have heard the rhetoric, ‘America is fighting the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here’, kind of explanation, but what terrorists are they talking about? Shadowy ‘al-Qaeda’ figures seem to be all they can come up with in the assault on Somalia. Take this for instance.

The US has been engaged in a long, low-profile struggle with Islamist forces in Somalia, reported The Christian Science Monitor. A March 3 missile strike against the southern Somali town of Dobley was aimed at preventing violent Islamist militants from taking root in Somalia and spreading through East Africa. Some observers are concerned such efforts could generate greater anti-US sentiment. Islamist groups are regrouping in Somalia, some with more formal ties to al-Qaeda than in the past, says one security observer on the Counterterrorism Blog. The most important group, says Douglas Farah, is Al Shabab. Mr. Farah, citing a US State Department statement. Al-Shabaab is a violent and brutal extremist group with a number of individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda. Many of its senior leaders are believed to have trained and fought with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Somalia has seen intermittent conflict since two separate colonies gained independence from Britain and Italy in 1960, uniting into one country. Historians say tribal and ethnic conflicts fought over access to resources, including water and pastoral country, once fought with bows and spears are now fought with AK-47s.

The US has had a rather undistinguished history with Sudan as well, having attacked Sudan during the Clinton administration for what was later found to be a mistake, when the pharmaceutical plant Al-Shifa was bombed in 1998.

Kroll Associates’ investigation of the U.S. missile attack had apparently demonstrated the sheer vacuum of evidence allegedly linking the facility or its owner to international terrorism, chemical weapons production, and Osama Bin Laden. As the Washington Post reported: “Because of a cupful of soil, the U.S. flattened this Sudanese factory. Now one of the world’s most respected labs, and some of Washington’s most expensive lawyers, say Salah Idris wasn’t making nerve gas for terrorists, just ibuprofen for headaches.”According to the New York Times although “senior national security advisers [had] described Al Shifa as a secret chemical weapons factory financed by bin Laden”, “State Department and CIA officials [now] argue that the government cannot justify its actions.” Rather than manufacturing chemical weapons, the al-Shifa plant “made both medicine and veterinary drugs, according to U.S. and European engineers and consultants who helped build, design and supply the plant.”

At first glance one might think such actions were/are being undertaken by a federal government which seeks to divert public attention from more pressing issues with regard to its policies, foreign or domestic. In the Sudan incident, many critics on the right and the left cried immediately that the bombing in Sudan was undertaken at a time when Clinton was dealing with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and this was his attempt to relieve himself from that spotlight. Today the US is upset with the way the Sudan is handling its domestic policy in Darfur, a western province of that country, and wants to intervene. The way US officials and others are doing that is quite amusing; claiming they have the best interests of the black, African, Muslim people of Darfur, Sudan the US wants humanitarian aid delivered even under force of arms. By raising the specter of “genocide” which means countries can respond militarily without violating treaties, laws or international agreements, to save the lives of those threatened, the US is insisting on a military presence in the Sudan. But what’s the point of it all? In a word, OIL with a twist. Oil, Israel and Logistics= OIL.

Sudanese oil is found in areas not affected by the conflict in Darfur, notably the southern region of Sudan. That part of the country was plagued with a civil war with the central government for over 20 years, but now there is peace in south Sudan, so what happens after that? Fighting breaks out in the western province of Darfur and with it cries by governments and celebrities alike, people on the right and on the left of the political spectrum to “intervene” to stop the fighting, and with force if necessary. Nevermind that the humanitarian crisis in Sudan doesn’t really exist, or that such calls to action in support of Darfur weren’t made during the 20+ years of the southern Sudanese conflict, what’s important is an excuse is needed to justify a military presence which like the one in Iraq is designed to worsen an already bad crisis, and allow for the eventual exploration of OIL under western auspices. Because of it’s strategic location on the “horn of Africa”, USAFRICOM, responsible for U.S. military operations in and military relations with 53 African nations – an area of responsibility covering all of the African continent was formed on the initiative of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group in or about the same time as cries for intervention in Darfur were raised in the corporate media. At the same time, civil war in Somalia and the US backing of Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia took place to the south of Sudan. None of this is coincidental.

The timeline under which these things happened is clear when viewed against the backdrop of what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, two places where large, vast oil reserves have been the target of large oil companies for a very long time. Current US policy in those two places of the world is also driven by oil interests. The reason for “picking” on these two poor, underdeveloped countries is quite simply about the natural resources that lie underneath their territory. That has always been the dilemma between the west and the east since the development of the modern west; how to meet its growing demands for the earth’s natural resources controlling and dominating those resources in faraway lands while appearing to all concerned to be benign about such manipulation. The pretext for war, i.e. fighting terrorism, or providing humanitarian relief, whereby the citizens of the “west” are made to feel the necessity of sacrificing their sons and daughters to go fight and die in these distant lands has been the job of spokespersons (in and out of government), celebrities and the corporate media. Such lies have done a lot to incite fervor and support for this ideal. It is still inexcusable that the largest and mightiest military power in the world sees the need to destroy underdeveloped countries and essentially defenseless people under such transparent guises.