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Friday, December 2, 2016

LOVE IS WHAT GIVES US POWER OVER EVIL


On the one-year anniversary of the Dec. 2nd mass shooting in San Bernardino, we gathered in our places of worship and civic venues to honor those taken from us by two people who called themselves Muslims, but who violated God’s sacred laws in the Quran and chose instead the path of hate -- choosing the evil of murder over the sanctity of life.
There are some who think the two people who perpetrated the heinous and unspeakable atrocities one year ago today were, in fact, true followers of the religion and teachings of Islam. But this is not true.
In chapter 5, verse 32 of the Quran, God relates the powerful truth He first gave to the Children of Israel when He said: “Whosoever unjustly kills a person. . . . it shall be as though he had killed all mankind. And whosoever saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved all mankind.”
The foundation on which the sanctity of life is based comes from God’s requirement that we, as His highest creation, strive to be just in all matters. God states this clearly in chapter 16, verse 90 of the Quran:
“Verily, God enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and giving in charity as though to one’s own family; and He forbids indecency and manifest evil, and wrongful transgression.”
From just these two verses, it should be clear what Islam commands and condemns, and what it upholds as being right and wrong.
         On the anniversary of a tragedy, it is natural to grieve and to weep for those we have lost, and to seek help and solace in prayer for those who are thankfully still with us, but who rightfully suffer in the pain and sorrow of their wounds, both mortal and of the heart.
Our reflections in these difficult times naturally bring back the immediacy of what we all experienced on that awful day one year ago. . . The shock, the horror, the overwhelming sadness and grief. . . And yes, the anger and the hunger for vengeance that is normal in the aftermath of evil.
What is vital in this time of reflection is to understand the past and its participants, and to use that wisdom to maintain vigilance in the present to prevent future tragedies. This requires our sincere and sustained engagement – we must come together in unity of purpose to combat hatred and its causes with love and all its power and purity.
Most of us have heard the quote by the philosopher Sir Edmund Burke: “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
To update Mr. Burke to the modern age, let us all then, as good men and good women, join together so that good may triumph over evil. We can do this by standing for what is right and against what is based in fear and hatred and the demonization and exclusion of the “other.”
Let us always remember that love is God’s ultimate power over evil. He blesses us with this capacity within our hearts so we may love and seek understanding and connection with each other. It is this love that can remove our fears and animosities.
It is this love that can tear down the walls of stone and belief which we so often fashion to keep ourselves isolated and alone.
Let us strengthen our bodies, minds and spirits with this love, so that together we may prevail against the forces that seek to keep us in darkness and distrust.

It is only with this God-given power of love that we can be empowered and enabled to truly honor, reflect and rebuild our way to a better America.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

MY ANSWER TO "A GERMAN'S VIEW ON ISLAM"

I recently received an Email on the threat from Islam and Muslim refugees entitled: 
“A German’s View on Islam” credited to Dr. Emanuel Tanya [sic]. 
I remember reading something nearly identical to this but attributed to another person, so I searched for it on Snopes.com and found this:

A German's View On Islam. Dr Emanuel Tanya. Is this a true publication?

Origins:  On 21 February 2006, Canadian Paul Marek published on his blog Celestial Junk an 
article titled "Why the Peaceful Majority is Irrelevant." [article link: http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2006/02/why-peaceful-majority-is-irrelevant.html]

In passages such as the following, Marek's essay warned about the dangers of Islamic fanaticism and dismissed as irrelevant the notion that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful: 

“We are told again and again by "experts" and "talking heads" that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the "peaceful majority" is the "silent majority" and it is cowed and extraneous.

“History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the fanatics. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others, have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.”

Marek's article has been republished in books such as How to Achieve a Heaven on Earth and Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam, and it has been widely circulated on the Internet under the title "A German's View on Islam." However, in the latter form the essay has most commonly been attributed to the late Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who isn't German (he was born in Poland and immigrated to the United States) and had nothing to do with writing it.

It is uncertain how Dr. Tanay's name became attached to Internet-circulated versions of this essay. Some versions of the message state Tanay was one of the people (perhaps the first) who forwarded Marek's article to a wider audience, but this explanation does not seem likely and has not been proved.      [From 
www.snopes.com at this link: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/germanislam.asp ]
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My response. . .

I've seen this email before. Of course what it says, in general, is true: it is always the “silent majority” who allows by their inaction the evil in the world to increase. But what is striking to me about Mr. Marek’s full post (wherein he cites the tens of millions of deaths as a result of WWII and Communist purges) is that the vast majority of all of those tens of millions of people killed in WWII were not killed by Muslims, but by Christians and atheists and Buddhists or the followers of Shinto.

The obvious response is that governments orchestrated the bloodbath of WWII and all the wars before and after. Their participants were aligned with one religion or another or with no religion in the case of Communist nations, but the nations who responded with their armies in the conflicts that have consumed so many precious lives throughout history are the agents of death and destruction. The soldiers, regardless of their beliefs, are only pawns.

So in reality, the only way for Muslims as a standing army in countries bent on destroying the West to succeed would be if said Muslim countries could actually muster a viable army and equip it with arms and then successfully wage wars or military assaults on their "enemies." Only ISIS is in that category and they are isolated in Syria and Iraq and exist solely as a result of the civil war in Syria and the power vacuum left in Iraq when the US and its allies pulled out.

And the fact that the under-equipped and outnumbered Kurds have been more than capable of countering and defeating ISIS in their military engagements speaks volumes about the long-term ability of ISIS to seize and hold territory against a committed opposition. Add to this the fact that ISIS is spending nearly all its time and attention on killing other Muslims, not Christians. All other Muslim countries engaged in warfare are similarly targeting mostly other Muslims from different sects. 

Christians who desire the extermination of Islam and Muslims should be rejoicing at this information, and it's no secret that Christian-led and atheist-led governments are happily selling arms to any and all Muslim nations who can afford to buy them. So while Islam represents a cultural and ideological "threat" to western European and Christian societies based on the perceived differences (real or imagined) between Islam and Christianity, this is nowhere near the threat level that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people (nearly all non-Muslims) from the 1930s-1970s. 

Nor are there any forms of terrorism or warfare being propagated by Muslims (against themselves or anyone else) that even comes close to matching the civilizational destruction caused by the Western nations in the two Gulf Wars and by Russia and Syria in the current civil war in Syria, where close to half-a-million Syrians -- most of them innocent women, children, and non-militia members -- have been killed. If you wanted a conspiracy theory about the West's plan to eradicate Muslims from the world through wars and the fostering of sectarian Muslim violence, you wouldn't have to dig too deeply to find your damning evidence.

So it kind of amazes me how some people can raise the alarm over an influx of Muslim refugees -- created by the instability of their war-torn countries to which the West has much blood on its hands -- and signal the doom and downfall of their own countries when they do nothing to help prevent the death and destruction in Muslim countries which produce these unwanted refugees in the first place. 

Go back a decade or so before Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Yemen were embroiled in their political and military upheavals and you'll see tens of millions of Muslims living relatively peacefully in relatively stable societies. True, most were ruled by iron-fisted dictators, but the reality is that America and other Western nations, as well as Russia, were often instrumental in putting those dictators in power and were more than happy to turn a blind eye to these dictators' evils and repression of their respective populations. 

So it's hardly a surprise when these same populations rise up and demand their freedoms the first chance they get. Sadly, power vacuums are rarely, if ever, filled by altruistic, kind-hearted, benevolent statesmen who love their countries, but usually by murderous tyrants and despots who only crave self-enrichment and power. 

The answer to this whole debacle is simple: the US and all those who seek to end the problem of radical Islam need to empower the reformist and moderate forms of Islam such as the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community (visit Alislam.org, MuslimsForPeace.org, KhalifaofIslam.com) and also work to re-educate the Muslim world that, for the past half-century, has been fed a steady diet of hate and ignorance from the Saudi-funded madrasas (Islamic schools) teaching their radical Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines and intolerant, violent Jihadist version of Islam. (I know, easier said than done, but that’s the real solution in a nutshell.)

Then, at the same time, the US and her allies must stop supporting -- with their dollars, guns, and silence -- the root sponsors of this self-destructive interpretation of Islam. Then, after a generation of Muslims has been raised without this Saudi-financed Wahhabi-Salafi doctrinal cancer in Islam, you will see the Islam that existed for at least a millennia after the birth of Islam in the 7th century AD. 

History is the best barometer of what is actually true -- be it in a culture, a philosophy, a religion or a civilization. Barbarism never produces civilization. Even a cursory review of Islamic history demonstrates a worldview and reality where education, literacy, science, freedom of religion and interfaith tolerance, freedom to dissent, and technological advancements were all in evidence for well over a thousand years. This was not the result of the absence of true Islamic thinking and government in the world, but the presence of true Islamic thinking and government in the world.

Of course, Islamic history is not pristine, let alone perfect. As I often remark, “Religion would be great if there were no people in it.” But because people are often driven by fear, greed, insecurity and hate, it is no surprise that you have in a religion’s Holy Book all the good things it commands its followers to do and live by, and then you have the lives they often choose to live according to their own lower, animalistic natures instead of their own higher, moral and spiritual selves. It’s a wonder God puts up with us at all, given our frequent disobedience, arrogance, and outright disbelief in Him and His prophets and His Teachings. But all that is on us, not God.

All Holy Scriptures give the same core of ethical and moral tenets so we can freely choose to strive to better ourselves instead of butcher each other. Thank God I believe in a God Who is Patient and Forgiving or we would all be doomed and in deep spiritual trouble. The liability and responsibility, of course, are still firmly and entirely laid upon our shoulders. And this goes for the believers in any Faith, or for atheists who believe in no god but subscribe nonetheless to an ethical code and the sense of having an innate moral compass to be adhered to and not ignored.

For those who do believe in a Higher Power, God never forces us to do or be good. If He did, we would be little more than meat puppets. God gives us the freedom of choice and also the responsibility for the consequences of our choices. It is the key moral and spiritual arrangement between God and mankind that validates our purpose in this life.

The downside of this is that it does not remove evil from the world. But that, in fact, is also the upside as well and the main point of our existence. In whatever form evil takes and in whatever religious garb evil people seek to cloak themselves in, combating and defeating evil is our job, not God’s. That is why Islam clearly states that it is a Muslim’s duty to stand up to and fight against tyranny and evil – especially when it hides behind the name of Islam.

It would be nice to believe that Muslims can and will do this by and for themselves, but the reality, like the reality of Hitler and Nazi Germany, forebodes otherwise. When someone is dying from cancer – one they may vociferously deny is afflicting them in the first place – it becomes incumbent on others to do whatever they can to help affect a cure. The silent majority on every side of the issue needs to step up and speak out and be proactive and not just reactive. As the famous adage goes, “All that is required for the triumph of evil is for the good to do nothing.”

So decrying a “problem” is good in that you call attention to it, but unless you understand the problem and how it came to be and what you can actually do about it, you will find yourself woefully ill-equipped to solve it. This is the case with almost all the articles and essays and blogs and videos out there calling Islam a “terrorist religion” out to destroy the West.

The “solutions” presented are usually knee-jerk, reactionary, emotionally or religiously biased, and they invariably suffer from faulty and misinformed perspectives mired in fear and ignorance that only exacerbate the situation, making real, substantive and effective responses nearly impossible to achieve. The danger of this is obvious and often lost in the din of alarm bell rhetoric and the stampede of the frightened herd.

And it is this danger of rushing headlong into a hasty and flawed reaction to the very real problem of ”Islamist” terrorism that will doom the fight against it from the very start. As in any battle with an unpredictable opponent, the secret to winning depends on understanding your adversary, knowing the geography and pitfalls of the battlefield, and having the knowledge and resources to thoroughly defeat your enemy.


In this battle, the weaponry is overwhelmingly ideological and not military. The physical fight is always the “Lesser Jihad” – while the “Greater Jihad” is the much more difficult challenge to heal the hearts and minds of those infected with the deadly myopia of extremist, radical Islam. But that battle can be won. It must be won. The consequences are too dire to contemplate if we – Muslims and our religious and secular allies – fail to act. There is no room anymore for a “silent majority” on either side. In that respect Paul Marek is right.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

MY COMMENTS ON AN ANTI-MUHAMMAD VIDEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln5fVgM0gLQ

This video is pretty standard in how it shows hadith and Quran in a certain light and portends to "let the facts speak for themselves". . . I would strongly suggest visiting www.MuhammadFactCheck.org and read through the concise and well-vetted answers to many of the criticisms leveled in this video.

The trouble with her "take" on Islam and the Life of Muhammad (saw) is that it seems totally historically accurate the way she recounts it from hadith and Quran. But like her recounting of the poisoning of Muhammad (saw) event, she makes it seem like he ingested the poisoned meat and then immediately died, when in fact a good long length of time transpired between the two events. 

       And anyone who knows how poisoning works, knows that poison either kills you right away, or your body successfully fights off the poison and you survive the attempt without dying from it -- which is obviously what Muhammad did.

Regarding the story of Muhammad ordering (and in some Internet reports single-handedly performing) the beheading of 700-900 Jews.

#1. There are no Jewish historical records of this ever happening. Strange, for a group that has meticulously documented every injustice and atrocity committed against Jews throughout their history.

#2. The recorder of this event was a well-known anti-Semite (he hated the Jews with a passion), so much of what he says Muhammad said or did pertaining to the Jews needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

#3. The way the lady describes the attack on the Jews makes it look like the Jewish tribe in question was totally impartial and innocent of any malice towards the Muslims. Not true AT ALL.

The Jewish tribe instigated war against the Muslims at every opportunity. All the Jewish tribes in Medina agreed to and signed The Charter of Medina when the Prophet Muhammad was freely elected by the town as their mayor. He was invited to relocate to Medina for this express political purpose.

The conditions of the Charter were that all signatories pledged to defend the town and all the other signatories in the event of an attack by outside forces, like the Meccans. (Read the Charter of Medina here: www.CovenantsoftheProphet.com)

The Jewish tribe in question repeatedly conspired against the Muslims with the Meccans to undermine and destroy Islam and the Muslims. For one egregious breach of the Charter, Muhammad ordered the tribe banished -- not exterminated -- from Medina to another town.

Then, later, when this same tribe helped the Meccans breach the defenses of Medina and nearly cause a rout of the Muslim forces, Muhammad assembled his forces and went to their fort and besieged it for like a week. When the Jews finally agreed to surrender, to negotiate their terms, the Jews picked a Jew who had converted to Islam, thinking he would treat them favorably. He didn't.

The Jewish Muslim convert cited Deut. 20:10-14 which commands that after the war that all men on the losing side be killed and that all others be made captives of war and their property taken as spoils of war. These are not the commandments in the Quran, but in the Jewish Holy Book. The Jews agreed to abide by the ruling of their chosen arbiter.

Now, again, there are other hadith which state that Muhammad gave pardons to most of those Jews about to be slaughtered under the rules of war from their own book. And since the charge against them was, essentially, treason against the state (of Medina), death is the standard punishment for treason even today. Remember the Rosenbergs?

But like I said, for something so gruesome to have actually taken place, you would think the surviving Jews of Arabia would have recounted the event repeatedly in their oral and written histories -- but they didn't. Maybe because it never happened.

#4. About the Jewess poetess that Muhammad supposedly ordered killed for writing insulting poetry about him. . . In the book "Extremist" by Qasim Rashid (from which the website www.MuhammadFactCheck.org is based), this event is covered in detail. The salient facts NOT reported (i.e., intentionally omitted) in the video are as follows:

The man reportedly sent to kill her was a blind man (the first thing that doesn't make sense), who didn't know where she lived, but managed to find her house anyway. Then, he enters the woman's house while she's wide awake, with a baby in her lap, and her grown children asleep around her.

But the woman never yells to wake up her kids, doesn't get up and run away from the blind man with the knife (and I would assume easily escape) nor does she wake up her sleeping family members to come to her defense -- again something pretty easy against a blind guy.

So none of these escape maneuvers enter the woman's mind, and the blind guy is able to find his way across the room without waking up anyone sleeping by stumbling over them, and then he manages to stab her to death while not harming the baby in her lap and without waking up her family members or her fighting back. (If you believe THAT story, I've got a bridge I wanna sell yah. . .)

#5. The age of Aisha at marriage & consummation. There's only one source hadith for this story, and it comes from a guy -- Hisham ibn 'Urwah -- who narrated a decent number of uncontested hadith throughout most of his life, but the one in question about the age of Aisha was done AFTER he migrated from Medina to Baghdad at the age of 71.

Virtually all scholars of hadith consider his hadith narrations from when he lived in Baghdad unreliable because he was losing his memory. Now, in Arabic, to say six is "sittah" and to say 9 is "tissah." To say 16 or 19 you add the word for 10 in Arabic: "asharah."

What scholars believe happened is that the narrator forgot the word "ashara" to make it 16 and 19 respectively. Scholars think this mistake occurred (or maybe it was deliberate because pedophiles preferred the age of Aisha being 6 and 9 instead of 16 and 19) because of the failing memory problem. Plus the narrator only cites his father as the first reporter of the ages of Aisha being 6 and 9.

The reason it most certainly was not 6 and 9 is supported by the fact that almost all hadith record that Aisha was born BEFORE 610 AD -- the advent of Islam -- in what's called "jahiliyyah" the Time of Ignorance.

Aisha is recorded as being born about 4 years before the start of Islam. Now, the Muslims were in Mecca for 13 years before they migrated to Medina. Muhammad was Nikah'd (married) with Aisha about a year before he migrated, making a total of 16 years as the age of Aisha.

She was officially taken by Muhammad as his wife about 2 years after migrating to Medina, making her age 19 at the time of consummation. Aisha is also cited as being on the battlefield during the battle of Badr, and Muhammad would certainly not have allowed an 8-year-old girl to be in the midst of deadly fighting. Muhammad, in fact, forbade anyone under 15 from being in the battle.

Now, taking into account the bad memory and "10" dropping probability in the hadith, you can see how the ages line up exactly historically as either 6 and 9 (going by hadith) or 16 and 19 going by actual, dateable, historical events.

The nail in the coffin of the "Aisha age" hadith controversy is the following point: Aisha's older sister, Asma, was 10 years older than Aisha, and it is well recorded that Asma was 27 at the time of the migration to Medina. So Aisha would have been 17 at the time of the actual migration. One year less for her Nikah makes her 16 which lines up historically; three years later, in Medina, when Aisha became Muhammad's actual wife makes her 19. End of story.

The other point to remember is that the age of puberty is and has traditionally always been the age of "adulthood" in Judaism and in all pre-modern cultures. Puberty means menstruation in women. Able to have kids = legal to get married. That usually happens between the ages of 12-14 in girls. And in Islam, you cannot make a marriage contract -- or any contract -- with a minor. They must have reached what is called the "age of reason."

(As an aside with regard to Christian American history, the "Age of Consent" in America -- the age at which a girl could get married and/or have consensual sex with a grown man was 7 in the very early 1800s, 10 by the mid-1850s, 12 by the last quarter of the 1800s, and 14 by the 1900s. That's why the '50s rocker Jerry Lee Lewis could legally marry his 13-year-old cousin in Arkansas. It caused a scandal, but it wasn't illegal under Christian-passed marriage laws.)

People will believe anything they want if it aligns with their prejudices and beliefs. But those who have actually read the Quran and the vast majority of hadith (the Quran supersedes all hadith, by the way, not the other way around) know that the themes of: justice towards all (especially one’s enemies), love of God and His Creation, forbidding Muslims from being the aggressors in a fight or war, seeking peace to end fighting even when it is dishonorable to Muslims, no killing of religious clergy or any non-combatants in a war / battle, respect for one's parents, relatives, the elderly, the orphans and the oppressed -- all of these very clear commandments in Quran and hadith overwhelmingly demonstrate what is taught and focused on in Islam.

As Muhammad (saw) once stated: If anything he is said to have said or done goes against the Quran or his sunnah (behavior established by repeated example), don't follow or believe it to be true. The hadith are records of events and teachings sent and evolved over 23-years.

Many reports, like stoning to death for adultery, reflect punishments given before the Quranic ruling came down or punishments delivered to Jews by request from their Holy Book, the Torah. The Quran states only lashes for adultery not stoning to death, and no other punishment can supersede or countermand it.

Just because ignorant and often evil-minded Muslims do not obey God's Divine Commandments is not a poor reflection on Islam or Muhammad, but on those ignorant or disobedient Muslims who either do not know or choose not to follow the teachings of the Quran.


If anyone with an open mind and heart wants to know the truth about what Islam really teaches and requires from its followers, go to Alislam.org and get yourself educated. If one is literate, ignorance is a largely self-curable affliction.

Thursday, June 9, 2016

MUFTI MUHAMMAD SADIQ AWARD COMMENTS LINK

Link (below) to YouTube video of my comments upon receiving the Mufti Muhammad Sadiq Award -- how I became Ahmadi Muslim. . .  Below that is the link to comments on receiving the same award by my friend & fellow Tabligh (preaching) Road Dawg, Rahman Abdul Aleem. Please watch his video first, as I make mention of his experiences in conjunction with mine in similarity and impact.
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Ghaffar's comments on receiving the 2016 Mufti Muhammad Sadiq (ra) Award Ceremony May 28th: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iVhlzmJrGY
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Aleem's comments on receiving the 2016 Mufti Muhammad Sadiq (ra) Award Ceremony May 28th: