Ignorance of Islam Is No Excuse

The unfortunate article published on The Telegraph "Islam is way more English than the EDL" is a classical example of the most myopic and ignorant journalism. The author, Tim Stanley, has no idea of what Islam is, and yet insists in writing about Islam.

Just read this:

By contrast, most Muslims cling on to values that were once definitively English and that we could do with rediscovering. Islam instructs its followers to cherish their families, to venerate women [by beating and stoning them], to treat strangers kindly [by beheading them], to obey the law of any country they are in (yes, yes, it really does) [by imposing sharia law everywhere by hook or by crook], and to give generously. One recent poll found that British Muslims donate more money to charity than any other religious group.

Pity he doesn't know that the Quran prescribes to believers only charity for other Muslims, not infidels.

He is also unacquainted with the fact that one eighth of Muslim charity - zakat - must go, according to Islamic law, to jihadists fighting in Allah's cause: terrorists, killers of Christians in the Middle East, Hamas, al-Qaeda-linked groups and other such nice company.

The Muslim website Mission Islam clarifies it:

Zakat can be given in the path of Allah. By this is meant to finance a Jihad effort in the path of Allah, not for Jihad for other reasons. The fighter (mujahid) will be given as salary what will be enough for him. If he needs to buy arms or some other supplies related to the war effort, Zakat money should be used provided the effort is to raise the banner of Islam.

Which explains why one of the world’s largest and most influential Islamic charities, the Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), much loved by clueless Prince Charles and given tens of millions of dollars by the European Union, the United Nations and Western governments, is, according to an extensive amount of evidence gathered and recently published by the Gatestone Institute, “an extremist organization with a pro-terror agenda":

IRW’s accounts show that it has partnered with a number of organizations linked to terrorism and that some of charity’s trustees are personally affiliated with extreme Islamist groups that have connections to terror.

These include Hamas, al-Qaeda, terrorists in Chechnya, and other terror and Muslim Brotherhood groups in various parts of the world.

But Tim is adamant that Islam represents traditional English values worth rediscovering. What he writes next makes you think of a borderline case of a person living in a parallel universe:

Much is written about the need for Muslims to integrate better into English society, although I'm sure 99 per cent of them already do [they integrate even better into English prisons]. But I hope they retain as much of their religious identity as possible – it is vastly superior to the materialist, secular mess that they're being compelled to become a part of. [I'm really curious to know who compels them: it must be the invisible man, because I've never seen such a person or persons.]

...But its [sic] precisely because I'm a traditionalist that I look at Islam and see much to admire – ordered, sensitive to the sacred, civilised.

I suppose that it's because Islam is so civilised that Muslim countries are among the poorest, most violent, most illiterate, inhumane, politically unstable and backward countries in the world, and the people living there can't wait to leave those places to come and inhabit our materialist mess.

Halal: A Taste of Terror

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


“Beware! Halal food funds terrorists.” Stickers with this slogan were sold in July by a candidate of the Australian political party One Nation, and condemned by the country’s Multicultural Affairs Minister Glen Elmes as “offensive, grotesque and designed to inflame hatred.” He added: “People are encouraged to put the stickers on food products in supermarkets, which isn’t just racial discrimination, it’s also vandalism.”

What the sticker says, though, is apparently taking place in the USA and Canada where Campbell’s Soup and other companies have paid the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) for their halal certification, in France, where it is claimed that 60% of halal food is controlled by organizations belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and the so-called “halal tax” is the organization’s main source of funding. In the UK, major supermarket chain Morrisons is not only indirectly but even directly giving money to the Islamic National Zakat Foundation. I’ll explain what that is about in a minute.

“Ritual slaughter” is the slaughter of animals for food following religious prescriptions. The Muslim method to produce halal (“lawful” or “permissible”) meat consists of cutting fully conscious animals’ throat while the name of Allah is uttered and letting them bleed to death. The Jewish method of producing kosher meat shares with the Muslim one the fact that the animal is not stunned before being killed.

Laws of Western countries generally require that animals are stunned to render them unconscious before slaughter, but allow exceptions for both Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter.
Government advisory bodies, like the Farm Animal Welfare Council and the British Veterinary Association in the UK, have produced reports and made declarations saying that ritual slaughter causes ”intolerable cruelty” and have repeatedly demanded that it be banned.

The Muslim Council of Britain claims that most halal meat comes from stunned animals, but in reality a very low voltage is used in their electrocution, resulting in inadequate stunning.

This makes it objectionable to most non-Muslims on animal welfare grounds. Christians and others – Sikhs in Britain currently have an anti-halal petition – also consider the utterance of Allah’s name at the moment of slaughter as idolatry.

And a major concern is that halal meat is just no longer for Muslim consumption, but is sold to “infidels” in ever greater quantity the world over.

To get an idea of the extent of this phenomenon, one of the most influential halal certification bodies, the Halal Food Authority, now estimates that a staggering 25% of the entire UK meat market is halal. But Muslims are about 5% of the UK population, therefore there is as much as 5 times more halal meat than Muslims.

In Britain halal meat is routinely served and sold to non-Muslims who don’t even know that they’re eating it, let alone want to do so. Schools, hospitals, hundreds of restaurants and pubs, sporting venues like Wembley football stadium and Ascot race course, all the main supermarkets chains – none excluded – fast-food and pizza chains have been drawn into what commercially must look like a win-win situation for them: Muslims complain and demand halal, non-Muslims don’t complain, adapt and tolerate. Especially if they’re not informed and food is not properly labelled.

In dhimmi Britain, when pork or other non-halal food is accidentally discovered in school menus, as recently happened, it causes a fervor, hits headlines, the food is immediately removed and the responsible sacked, but it’s nearly impossible to have halal meat – which non-Muslims don’t want – removed from schools or at least not served to unbelievers. In an increasing number of schools halal is the only meat served. Is the only way to ban halal food in schools to “contaminate” it with pork, as someone suggested?

What’s happening with halal is that we are experiencing for the first time in the West Islamization on a large scale. Great numbers of people are forced to live according to Sharia law whether they like it or not, which is the essence of Islam and its supremacist nature.

Christian Concern reported the words of the Operation Nehemiah Halal Campaign, run by the Barnabas Fund:

There is an open campaign by Islamic food agencies to integrate halal into the mainstream market and to extend it to non-Muslims. The World Halal Forum held its annual conference in London earlier this month (November), and has identified the UK as a pilot project for halal in Europe…

The spread of halal is often part of the commitment to Islamic mission (dawa) and the Islamisation of non-Muslim societies. The imposition of sharia practices on non-Muslims may be interpreted as an act of Islamic supremacy.”

That it is a question of supremacy and economic profit and not religious compliance is shown by the fact that Islam specifically exempts its faithful from the obligation to eat halal food if none is available:

He hath only forbidden you dead meat, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and that on which any other name hath been invoked besides that of Allah. But if one is forced by necessity, without wilful disobedience, nor transgressing due limits,- then is he guiltless. For Allah is Oft-forgiving Most Merciful. Quran (002:173)

Every time you drive around London you are subjected to the sight of myriad halal signs, a constant reminder of the transformation of Britain into an Islamic country. You can even measure this process of Islamization by the number of halal signs that you see multiply in the same streets and areas.

If women in the hijab and burka are the visible representation of Muslim presence in the West, halal signs are the visible symbol of Muslim supremacism taking hold of it – at least women who veil themselves don’t impose their dress code on others.

We are witnessing a Muslim takeover of an increasing share of the food industry and other industries, with consequences on the job market of Britain, a nation with a high level of unemployment, especially among the young. Halal products include not just meat, but also a long list of goods containing slaughterhouse by-products like gelatin and collagen, which are ingredients in many various foodstuffs – from Easter eggs to cat food – cosmetics, toiletries, pharmaceuticals, and other products.

It is a multi-billion dollars industry, and growing.

All halal products require certification by a Muslim agency, which the agency is paid for.
The principle of “zakat” in Islamic law makes it obligatory for all Muslims to give 2.5% of their income to charity – only in aid of their coreligionists, of course. Zakat has to be distributed among 8 categories of recipients, one of which is the jihadists fighting in Allah’s cause. From Mission Islam:

Zakat can be given in the path of Allah. By this is meant to finance a Jihad effort in the path of Allah, not for Jihad for other reasons. The fighter (mujahid) will be given as salary what will be enough for him. If he needs to buy arms or some other supplies related to the war effort, Zakat money should be used provided the effort is to raise the banner of Islam.

According to Islamic law, it would not be permissible, or “halal,” for Islamic organizations providing halal certification not to pay zakat, which under Islamic law is obligatory for all Muslims, on the fees they charge.

Therefore, whenever you buy one of the many halal-certified products increasingly found in our Western countries, even without your knowledge and against your will, you are indirectly contributing to Islamic terrorists, killers of Christians in the Middle East, al-Qaeda-linked groups and so on. Buy halal and you fund jihad against Israel.

Many Islamic “charities” have known links to terrorism and Islamic extremism. In early July the Gatestone Institute published a report documenting the many links discovered between the Islamic Relief Worldwide charity, with headquarters in the UK, and terror groupswith an anti-Western agenda. Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) consists of a “family of fifteen aid agencies” which “aim to alleviate the suffering of the world’s poorest people.” What looks like an innocuous — indeed philanthropic — charity is, according to this report, “an extremist organization with a pro-terror agenda… [which] has worked with a significant number of organizations linked to terrorism.” Western governments, the United Nations and the European Union should be more careful about whom they donate their money to, since they all gave tens of millions of dollars to IRW, whose most important branches include Islamic Relief UK and Islamic Relief USA. The report says:

IRW’s accounts show that it has partnered with a number of organizations linked to terrorism and that some of charity’s trustees are personally affiliated with extreme Islamist groups that have connections to terror.

Those organizations and groups, over the years, have included Hamas and Hamas-related bodies like Al Wafa and Al Tzalah; terrorists in Chechnya; al-Qaeda; the Yemeni Al-Eslah organization, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood; terrorist and Muslim Brotherhood groups operating in various European countries; and many more.

What makes IRW, which is one of the world’s largest and most influential Islamic charities, more dangerous is that it has acquired legitimacy among Western politicians and public figures. Even heir to the British throne Prince Charles has expressed support and appeared at IRW events. But there has been very little scrutiny of IRW and its branches.

In sum, although halal is on its surface an animal cruelty concern, it is also a crucial area of conflict between the West and those who want to force Islam, literally, down our throats. It also empowers Muslims culturally, ideologically, politically and, last but not least, economically, in a terrifying way.

Egalitarians Want Us All Poor or Dead

I remember that Paola Cavalieri, the editor of the Italian journal Etica e Animali, once said to me: "If human beings have privileges at the expense of nonhuman animal suffering, it would be best if none of them existed: at least we would all be equal".

There is a deep truth in that: egalitarianism, taken to its extreme consequences, would lead to total destruction of all sentient life. Being dead is the only state in which we are all equal. Life is diversity itself.

I was reminded of that when I heard on the radio a discussion about zero-hours contracts, under which an employee must be available for work as needed, will only be paid for the hours worked, and has no guaranteed hours each month.

The recent concerns expressed arise from the emerging of new figures indicating that there could be as many as four times more people than previously thought in zero-hours jobs. The research suggests a million people could be working under them.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development surveyed 1,000 firms and found that up to 4% of the UK workforce were on such contracts.

Zero-hours contracts are on the rise, and is predicted that they will continue to increase, because employers more and more try to find cost-effective ways to meet short-term staffing needs.

Fast-food, catering, hotel, shop-assistant jobs are the most common occupations under these contracts, and also some NHS jobs.

Business Secretary Vince Cable is now concerned that, he said, there is "some exploitation" of staff on these contracts, and he started a review into the state of zero-hours contracts.

A ban on this hiring method is unlikely because many workers actually prefer it, like flexible hours and want to work only occasionally, around existing commitments, but we may see the usual government meddling, restrictions and regulations.

But why on earth should anyone want to force businesses to employ on a regular contract people they don't need or more people they can afford?

This can only lead to potential employers being increasingly wary of hiring, and to a rise in unemployment.

Don't they see that overregulating and interfering is a recipe for more destructive economic outcomes? The labour market must be subject to the same economic (not political) laws of the market as everything else. This is the only way that a modern society can be productive: call it capitalism if you like. The alternative, socialism, makes everybody poor.

But maybe that's what egalitarians really want. As Paola Cavalieri, they prefer everybody to have nothing, which is the only sure way to erase all income disparities.

Christianity Gave Birth to Science

Science is the systematic application of a logico-empiricist method to look at and understand things, and was born in Christian Europe first with the Scholastic philosophy and then with Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei.

The necessary foundation for scientific research is the belief in one God that created a universe regulated by immutable laws which can be understood by man exactly because God's mind and man's are similar except in extent. The Christian God is a person.

Galileo famously talked about the "book of nature", that scientists try to read, being written by God. This is possible because both God and man have a similar mind. If you read a book, you think you can understand the author because you speak the same language and your mind works in an analoguous way. Galileo also said that the book of nature is written in mathematical language.

The ancient people who went closest to developing science were the Greeks. But they were hindered by their polytheism and, after the 4th century BC, by the dominance of the Aristotelian method.

The latter consists in deducing phenomena from fixed principles. The many, capricious deities of the Olympus were also an obstacle to the rise of scientific thought, not being believed capable of creating a rational universe.

As historian of science Bernard Cohen (1914-2003) wrote, ancient Greeks were interested in explaining the natural world only through abstract general principles. The first technical innovations, dating back to prehistoric ages, Greco-Roman times, the Islamic world and China, were not science but are best described as observations, knowledge, learning, wisdom, arts, trades, crafts, technology, engineering. Even without telescopes, the ancient excelled in astronomic observations but without connecting them to testable theories.

It is no coincidence that many of the disciplines which are now part of science were once part of philosophy.

Science is made of theories which are subject to independent confirmation or falsification. The intellectual achievements of Greek or Oriental philosophers were either fruit of atheoretical empiricism or non-empirical theories.

Historian of science Harold Dorn considers the Greeks' atheoretical knowledge a barrier to the birth of science in Greece and Rome and also in the Islamic world, which preserved and studied Greek teachings.

This in no way diminishes the immense value of Greek culture and its great impact on Christian theology and European intellectual life. However, as historian of religions Rodney Stark observed, the birth of science was not the continuation of classical knowledge but the natural consequence of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God and, to love Him and honour Him, it is necessary to have a profound appreciation of the wonders of His actions.

The Chinese, when they came into contact with Western culture, found the idea of laws of nature and an order in the universe absurd. We now take it for granted, but it is by no means an easy notion to arrive at.

Bertrand Russell found the absence of science in China puzzling, but in fact it is understandable, since the Chinese scholars did not assume the existence of rational laws. Therefore, over millennia, what was sought was "enlightenment", not explanations.

British biochemist and science historian Joseph Needham (1900-1995), who devoted most of his career to the history of Chinese technology, reports that in the 18th century the Chinese rejected the idea of a universe governed by simple laws capable of being investigated by man - idea brought to them by Western Jesuit missionaries. Chinese culture, according to Needham, was not receptive to such concepts. He concluded that the obstacle to science in China was its non-Christian religion, because that prevented the development of the conception of a heavenly, divine legislator imposing laws on non-human nature. The Chinese believed that the natural order was not established by a rational individual being.

Zimmerman Attorney To Fight Prosecution over Withholding Evidence

Mark O'Mara, the attorney of acquitted George Zimmerman in the highly-politicized trial for the murder of black Trayvon Martin, said that his fight with the prosecution is not yet over.

America's career anti-racists, the Left and the mainstream media had convicted Zimmerman long before the trial, because for them it is axiomatic that a black must necessarily be innocent, so, despite all the evidence in support of the neighbourhood-watch volunteer Zimmerman (who is of mixed white-Hispanic parentage) and his plea of self-defence, in their prejudiced eyes he must have been guilty of murder.

But people with a bias don't have scruples about playing dirty. Defence attorney O'Mara pointed out the struggle he went through to get evidence from the prosecution team:

He cited the picture of a bloodied Zimmerman, taken the night Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, as an example.

"It is undeniable that they had a plan in mind, with the 15 months that we had to get ready, of keeping information from us, and I don't say that lightly, I really don't," O'Mara told the group.

A member of prosecutor Angela Corey's own team testified that prosecutors had kept evidence from O'Mara, for which he was fired and is now suing her office.

"You have this type of gamesmanship for the sole purpose of trying to deny a fair trial and, as it turned out, try to convict an innocent man," said O'Mara.

O'Mara has filed a motion that will be heard by Judge Debra Nelson.

He claims prosecutors purposely withheld evidence from him and the defense team.

Channel 9 has learned that O'Mara could go after Corey. She called Zimmerman a murderer on national television after the trial.

"He could bring civil action against Angela Corey for statement she made outside the courtroom. Also, he could file a grievance against her with the Florida Bar," WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said.

Sheaffer asked O'Mara whether he intends to drop the issue.

"I am not done with that motion. I'm not done with Angela Corey. And we are going to be seeing more of each other. We'll see how that turns out," said O'Mara. "This is because this is not supposed to be how we practice as lawyers."

Channel 9 contacted Corey's office for a response, but the call was not returned.

How Muslims Did Not Invent Algebra

Continuing on the theme of what Muslims did - or more likely did not do - for the world, there is a widespread misconception that they "invented algebra". Maybe this fallacy is due to the fact that "algebra" is a word of Arabic origin, but historical questions are not solved by etymological answers.

Yes, the English word "algebra" derives from the Arabic. So does "sugar" (from the Arabic "sukkar") but that doesn't mean that Muslims invented sugar.

The word "algebra" stems from the Arabic word "al-jabr", from the name of the treatise Book on Addition and Subtraction after the Method of the Indians written by the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who translated, formalized and commented on ancient Indian and Greek works.

It is even doubtful whether al-Khwārizmī was really a Muslim. The Wikipedia entry on him says:

Regarding al-Khwārizmī's religion, Toomer writes:

"Another epithet given to him by al-Ṭabarī, "al-Majūsī," would seem to indicate that he was an adherent of the old Zoroastrian religion. This would still have been possible at that time for a man of Iranian origin, but the pious preface to al-Khwārizmī's Algebra shows that he was an orthodox Muslim, so al-Ṭabarī's epithet could mean no more than that his forebears, and perhaps he in his youth, had been Zoroastrians."

In all likelihood he was a Zoroastrian who was forced to convert (or die) by Muslim rulers because Persia had been conquered by the Islamic armies and that was what Muslims did (and still do wherever they can). That could easily explain the "pious preface to al-Khwārizmī's Algebra".

Wikipedia also says:

In Renaissance Europe, he [al-Khwārizmī] was considered the original inventor of algebra, although it is now known that his work is based on older Indian or Greek sources.

There is archaeological evidence that the roots of algebra date back to the ancient Babylonians, then developed in Egypt and Greece. The Chinese and even more the Indians also advanced algebra and wrote important works on the subject.

The Alexandrian Greek mathematician Diophantus (3rd century AD), sometimes called "the father of algebra", wrote a series of books, called Arithmetica, dealing with solving algebraic equations. Another Hellenistic mathematician who contributed to the progress of algebra was Hero of Alexandria, as did the Indian Brahmagupta in his book Brahmasphutasiddhanta.

With the Italian Leonardo Pisano (known as Leonardo Fibonacci, as he was the son of Bonacci) in the 13th century, another Italian mathematician, Girolamo Cardano, author in 1545 of the 40-chapter masterpiece Ars magna ("The great art"), and the late-16th-century French mathematician François Viète, we move from the prehistory of algebra to the beginning of the classical discipline of algebra.

Even Bertrand Russell, who in no way is a critic of the Islamic world, writes in the Second Volume of The History of Western Philosophy:

Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy, and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs. Writers in Arabic showed some originality in mathematics and in chemistry--in the latter case, as an incidental result of alchemical researches.

Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be underrated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization--education, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism--the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth. In each case the stimulus
produced new thought better than any produced by the transmitters--in the one case scholasticism, in the other the Renaissance (which however had other causes also).

You can see that to say that Muslims invented or pioneered algebra is a gross misrepresentation.

In conclusion, there are various attempts at historical revisionism as far as Islamic contributions to the world are concerned. These attempts are more political propaganda than academic scholarship. After all, taqiyya, lying to the infidels to advance Allah's cause, is permitted, and even prescribed, to Muslims, and jihad does not just consist in violent aggression or terror attacks: it can be gradual, by stealth, through indoctrination and false reassurance.

Islamic "Science" and Other Nonsense

Above is the video of a BBC lynch mob against Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League, during the programme called - a misnomer - FreeSpeech on BBC3. It is not free speech if you verbally abuse and even incite to murder someone for exercising his right to free speech, as it happens in this "debate".

Interestingly, the comments to the video on YouTube reveal how the audience was cherry-picked by the BBC to fit its political bent and in no way represents the British general public. That's reassuring, because a country whose population the studio crowd faithfully represented would be a cross between the Soviet Union and Pakistan.

Horrendous ganging up against one person by clueless people - or worse - is a more apt description of the situation. A bloke in the video, apparently a "musician" I'd never heard of called Akala, who talks about Islamic culture pioneering mathematics and science, must have been listening to Obama instead of going to school. Has he ever heard of Euclid, the father of geometry, and Pythagoras? Muslims did not pioneer anything. All they did was translate intellectual treasures from the original Greek into Arabic. The numbers we use and call "Arabic" were actually developed in India and translated from Sanskrit into Arabic, hence their name.

Islamophile Barack Hussein Obama has been big on the subject of "Islam Has Contributed To The Character Of Our Country" in his celebration of Ramadan, recently but not for the first time. He also mentions "Muslims who helped unlock the secrets of our universe", whose names he must have been hard pressed to find because he didn't say them.

In reality, science and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, which is why, despite the propaganda, there are no Muslim scientists in the history of the Islamic world. The only rational thinkers of some influence that world has produced, Averroes and Avicenna, were not real Muslims, but apostates. Avicenna (980-1037) was an Aristotelian who tried to reconcile formal logic with Islam and failed. Averroes (1126-1198), also influenced by Aristotle, had his works burnt and his disciples persecuted.

The very notion of God in Islam, a being whose power is so absolute that cannot be limited by reason, logic or the laws of nature, and who can at any moment change the order of the universe at his will - if Allah arbitrarily so commands, tomorrow the sun will not rise - makes it impossible to have a Muslim science. Science, a systematic method of looking at things combining empiricism and logic, developed only in Christianity.

Even putting aside this little faux pas, that mercifully for Akala - who is a writer, artist and entrepreneur, no less - nobody disputed (another indication, if necessary, of the lacklustre intellectual standard of this audience), it was evident that Robinson's opponents, namely the whole studio, couldn't stand up to him.

Siara Khan never defined "racism" and how opposition to Islam could be racist. Muslims can be of all races.

The tone of the debate and the level of the participants are demonstrated to be low by the fact that, while all the "debate" - which mainly consists in hurling abuse of "racist" at Tommy Robinson - revolves around racism, you have right from the start something contradicting that premise: a white Muslim. Racism is unjust discrimination on the basis of race. If you "discriminate" against all races, whites included, you discriminate against no race, ergo you are not racist.