Indigo Jo Blogs

My New Blog

Salaams to all the Muslims and hi to all the others :) Thanks to you all for reading my blog the last couple of months; I would like to welcome you all to my new blog, which is located here: http://www.blogistan.co.uk/cgi-bin/blog.cgi . (The name, incidentally, comes from a comment on FM's blog, and it seemed a nice title for my planned directory of Muslim blogs. Thanks Karl and FM.) The new blog is run on my own webspace, using a CGI Perl script called Blosxom. This blog will be left up, but not updated unless I am unable to renew my lease on my webspace at Fasthosts this time next year.

Sons of Malkoviches

Press Action reports on the approval by the US House of Representatives for establishing a federal tribunal to monitor criticism of Israel on campus (?!).

http://www.pressaction.com/pablog/archives/001546.html#001546

Richard Clarke's statement

Bohemian Mama has an interesting take on why Richard Clarke had to quit Bush's administration: "He's an adult" LOL! (11:12AM entry)

Jack Kelley: Bloodthirsty Arabs, Vigilante Jews

A piece from Salon.com on the disgraced USA Today hack Jack Kelley (thanks Muhsin):

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/23/jack_kelley/

The MMR debate

I just found this rather interesting article by George Monbiot about conflicts of interest in the debate over the safety of the MMR vaccine. Andrew Wakefield, who published a paper alleging links between the MMR vaccine and a number of diseases including autism, was revealed to have possible conflicts of interest. However, as Monbiot reveals, this is an extremely common problem in sections of the scientific community, with scientists putting their names to papers ghost-written by companies, sometimes never having seen the data on which the papers' conclusions are based. Here's the story.

Muslim blog directory

I have made arrangements to move both my homepage and my blog to a new server, mainly to get away from the adverts but also to have more choice in blogging methods. I intend to start a directory of Muslim blogs, which could be personal blogs, or blogs about Islam, or blogs about Islamic activities - any blog with an Islamic connection except, of course, for anti-Islamic blogs. Please can anyone tell me if they are running a blog, and if you know someone who does, please tell them to contact me. The email address is: indigojo underscore UK at yahoo dot co dot UK.

New version of SUSE Linux on the horizon

OSNews reports that version 9.1 of SUSE's version of Linux is shortly to be released, and the company's own website gives the date for release as 6th May. Although I recently acquired a Mac and really like OS X, I'm still quite fond of Linux and use it on my laptop. I've bought three successive versions of SUSE's distro and found it to be the most comprehensive and workable distro on the market despite a few minor problems. I intend insha Allah to buy this version also. I wonder, though, why they call it version 9.1 and not version 10, given that it has a new kernel (2.6 rather than 2.4), new KDE (3.2) and new (for SUSE) GNOME (2.4)?

Gilad Atzmon on Sh. Yassin murder

This is an article by Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli dissident living in London. Here's his website. (Thanks to J. Muhsin Kilby for the info.)

Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was murdered at daybreak on
Monday. Israel Air Force helicopters fired missiles at the car carrying the
wheelchair-bound head of the Islamic group as he left a mosque near his
house in Gaza City. It also appears Ariel Sharon was in direct command of
the assassination operation, not entirely surprising considering his bloody
history.

For those who fail to realise, today's barbaric Israeli act is an open call
for a world war. It is the final wake up call for every Muslim around the
world. It is violent proof that Israel isn't only against the Palestinians
but rather against Islam. Israel killed a prime spiritual leader on his way
out of the mosque. I have no doubt that this Israeli act won't be forgiven.
I also have no doubt that many Israelis will pay with their life for
Sharon's act. Moreover I am sure that sooner rather than later many innocent
non-Israelis around the world will die just for being near by an Israeli
embassy, Israeli consulate, a synagogue or even an American bank... This is
the reality Sharon favours the most.

This is exactly what Israel wants: to turn the entire world into a victim
of terror. This might help us to realise the main difference between the
Israeli left and right. While both believe in the right of the Jews to live
in Zion on the expense of the Palestinian people, the Israeli right wing
rely on maintaining a bloody struggle, oppressing the Palestinian people
(in particular) and humiliating Arabs (in general). While the Israeli left
would attempt to come up with some unrealistic righteous suggestions to
appease the Palestinian people and the world community (Oslo accord for
instance), the right wing Israelis will suggest that the only method to
guarantee Israeli security is to maintain the conflict with the Palestinian
people and to let it escalate into an international battle.

On the surface it seems bizarre considering Sharon was just recently
pretending to suggest a plan of Israeli disengagement from the Gaza strip.
Today he gave us a real chance to peep into his mind. The 'disengagement
plan' was just another of Sharon's tricks. In fact, Sharon and the Israeli
right wing need the Palestinians, they need them oppressed and humiliated,
they need their terror. Israeli right wing hegemony is fed by terror. And
now there is a new need emerging. Israel is facing a demographic disaster.
Within five years there will be a Palestinian majority in the territories
controlled by Israel (between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River).
This is literally the end of the Zionist dream. Eventually Israel will have
to give away its Jewish identity. While the Israeli left remains confused
about this reality, the Israeli right wing is fully prepared. For years
Israeli warmongers have openly discussed 'transfer': the ethnic cleansing of
the Palestinian people. Considering the current world affairs and general
opposition to Israel it is hard to believe that large scale ethnic cleansing
would go ahead unless some colossal catastrophe was in place. Sharon is
preparing the ground for such a disaster. He needs a war, a big one,
something that will allow him to go wild, to go out of control, to initiate
a campaign in which Israeli soldiers will become murderous squads ready
massacre against the Palestinian civilians. Sharon wants to re-launch the
1948 Nakba. Sharon fully understands that this is what the Israeli public
want. He is very good at reading their innermost desires.

The killing of Sheikh Yassin pushed the violence far beyond any recognisable
measure. It is pushing the Palestinian masses towards martyrdom. According
to the Israeli military doctrine, Israel would never be defeated by terror.
But at the same time every Israeli realises that the Zionist adventure will
be categorically defeated by a demographic crisis. The assassination of
Sheikh Yassin is there to push the Palestinians towards acts that will allow
the Israelis to impose the most murderous measures against the Palestinian
civilians. Mr Sharon, a world acclaimed war criminal and serial murderer
proved again that at least when blood games are concerned, he is one step
ahead of the game.

New Look for SunniPath

Saraji tells us that SunniPath - probably the no. 1 source for Hanafi and Shafi'i fiqh, has a great new look ma sha Allah. They offer a free email address.

Crucifixion death toll rises to 2

Two people have now died while watching the crucifixion scene in Mel Gibson's new flick The Passion. The BBC reports that a Brazilian Presbyterian pastor, Jose Geraldo Soares, died of a heart attack while "calmly" watching the scene with his wife in Belo Horizonte.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/3559753.stm

I have to say I have no plans to go and see this film and watch a prophet (peace be upon him) being represented by some actor. This is something which would never happen in the Muslim world and I expect the film to be banned in several Muslim countries. There was one film called The Message in which a number of supposedly minor Companions (may Allah be pleased with them) were played by non-Muslim actors, and although Muslims were consulted and the film is popular among Muslims in some places, several countries did ban it. Apart from the issue of play-acting the Companions which is forbidden in Islam, the film excludes a number of major Companions like Abu Bakr, Ali and others of that stature (radhi Allahu 'anhum), as if those they do portray are 'minor'. They were nothing of the sort. One, Hamza, was the uncle of the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) and known as "God's lion", and another, Bilal, was an early Companion who bore all the sufferings of the Muslims in Makkah. They portray Abu Sufyan (radhi Allahu 'anhu) as the 'villain' of the piece, and fail to mention that he became Muslim at the end!

Apart from this I don't think the film will be very good for community relations - there may well be consequences in countries like Russia where the Jew-as-Christ-killer idea still has currency, and it may also add weight to the claims made by some Jews that if you "scratch a Gentile, you find an anti-Semite" and that Jews are at the end of the day not safe anywhere except Israel.

International reaction to Yasin killing

http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-03/22/article06.shtml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3556753.stm

Half century of Israeli assassinations

Reaction to my last post

Thanks to everyone who responded to my last post in reaction to the murder of Shaikh Ahmad Yasin. It at least disproves Flanstein's earlier jibe that "there's only the two of us here"! In fact, I actually thought I had deleted that post, which I made in anger in reaction to the murder and the gloating over it I saw on the BBC's website. You can read more of the same on the odious "Little Green Footballs" blog - http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/ - I'm not going to link it because they have a habit of redirecting links from hostile websites and blogs to the Israeli Defence Force's Hebrew website!

No doubt a few people have had their opinions of Islam and Muslims confirmed. These people haven't really broken any stereotypes either. Let's take their comments one by one:

Flanstein: Why am I not surprised? My theory about the joy muslims take over the deaths of Jews was that you don't see them as human beings.

Me: Well, they are human beings, and as Shaikh Hamza Yusuf once said, you can't blame a dog for being a dog, but you can blame a human being for acting like something less than an animal.

Avi W: I'm shaking in my shoes, Yusuf. Perhaps you should direct your prayers to Shaul Mofaz, since Allah doesn't seem to be to stop JDAMs. Your gnome got less than he deserved.

Me: What's a JDAM? What gnome? I don't have any gnomes. My garden's a gnome-free zone.

Allah Most High subjects many of those He loves to trials in this life. Our Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) was terribly persecuted and outlived all but one of his children. Paradise is surrounded by trials and Hell by temptations.

Robert: One down, several hundred thousand to go; care to strap on a bomb yourself, Yusuf? Naw, I didn't think so, since the average camel-buggering Arab hasn't even got that much courage.

Me: I wouldn't know about "camel-buggering Arabs" because I've never met one. And I'm not an Arab. My surname is Smith - if you'd read my website you'd know that. I have no personal plans to carry out a suicide bombing, but it is clear that Arabs in Palestine do have such courage.

Robert again: Just think, your old Sheik Yassin has gone to his reward, that special place in Hell reserved for impotent old men who send out children with bombs strapped to their chests.

If Shaikh Yassin is impotent, how did he manage to have children?!

http://www.islamonline.net/livedialogue/english/Browse.asp?hGuestID=XbQ5ap"

Who is the innocent? Is the Jew who took my home, land, and expelled me from it by force, killed my children, wife, and parents… is he innocent? The important thing is to determine who is the aggressor… Are we the ones that attack Israelis first or is it them? If you know that, the answer would be clear for you. (Shaikh Ahmad Yassin, 7th May 2003)

Haywood: If anyone still believes in the myth of a "moderate Muslim" here's your chance to repent.

Me: Of course, a "moderate Muslim" to you is someone who rejects part of the religion, or disavows the use of force to defend the religion or its people. The Jews did not disavow such force when trying to capture the land they currently occupy from the British. I don't see why Arab Muslims in Palestine (or any other locals, for that matter) should disavow it to defend their land.

SnickerGal: Who was the leader of the Palestinians before Arafat? Where can I read about the historic culture of the Palestinian people?

This is an irrelevance. Of course, the Arabs in Palestine were not called Palestinians before the British occupied the area under the "Mandate" scheme and called the region Palestine. Then, there was no need for a "leader" of the Palestinian people, because that particular group of Arabs had not been hived off and given another name. They were simply the local people, as they still are.

Crusader: As a proud kufr & Christian woman, I will surely die before I give birth to anything that follows Islam. Your comments are very revealing about the nature of this hostile, hateful religion, or at least this version of it.

Me: My own mother is not Muslim, and she never expected to give birth to someone who would later become Muslim, any more than you know such things about your children. May Allah guide your children. If you really feel that way, you will be pleased to know that the Muslims did execute some elderly Jews at their own request when they conquered one of the treacherous Jewish communities around al-Madinah. Should the need arise, just tell them and remind them of what I said, and ask them to chop off your head.

Crusader: Israel existed LONG before 1948 and has a right to exist now. The murderers of Palestine do not have the right to a state for a made up ethnic group!

Me: No country called Israel existed between before the time of Christ (peace be upon him) and 1948. That's a fact. They were displaced from the land God gave them when they rebelled against Him.

Crusader: BTW, why are kids always in the midst of violence in Israel? You never see Jewish kids at such scenes, unless they've been killed by some murdering bigot with a bomb.

Me: for more on this see LGF Watch - March 1st entry.

Crusdader: "Jesus answered: "Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am the Messiah,' and will deceive many. " It appears you have been deceived.

Me: no, you have been deceived by a long succession of lying priests and pseudo-theologians. We do not follow any false Messiah. Our Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said he was the Messenger of Allah, which he was, not the Messiah. He (peace and blessings be upon him) affirmed Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) as the Messiah, and this is affirmed in the Holy Qur'an, chapter 9, verse 30.

Crusader: And may God bless and protect His people Israel. And Kudos to the IDF for a job well done.

Me: why would a Christian speak such nonsense? The disbelieving and rebellious among the children of Israel ceased to be "His people" centuries ago.

Website update

Two new links have been added to the website:

Hanbali Text Society (see last article for sample of content) and Karimia Institute, both under Islamic links.

An interesting article on the Kharijites

This is a highly interesting article on the Kharijites and their modern-day equivalents, the Wahhabis. This is on the website of the Hanbali Texts Society, an organisation dedicated to propagating orthodox Hanbalism and distinguishing it from the Wahhabi sect.

HTS on the Kharijites

Me and my Mac

I've had my Mac nearly a week now (since Tuesday) and I have to say I'm generally pleased with it. We had it sitting on the dining table until Friday, but of course it couldn't stay there forever because people have to eat off that table (including me), so I ordered a computer table from Viking which arrived on Friday. So it's now next to the old computer in the upstairs office.

I haven't tried everything the Mac does yet - I've used it so far for a bit of programming and surfing the Internet (and blogging, of course). The performance is fine - 1GHz is a slower clock speed than many cheaper PC's (you can get an Athlon now for about £500) but I haven't noticed it. It's also very well-designed - the mouse, which sits next to the keyboard, plugs into a USB port on the keyboard rather than having to be connected to the system unit (there isn't one - the system is in the monitor) with a long cable.

The magazine I mentioned earlier made a big thing about the Mac's looks, but the user interface is what stands out. Apple have really done a good job on it. There is one thing I miss about Linux though - the multiple desktop thing, so you can keep your various windows separate and have your WP on one 'screen', your web browsing on another, your mail on a third and your chat on a fourth. The Mac's OS (on this version, 10.3) has a thing called Exposé, where you roll the mouse to a given point and it shrinks all the windows so they all appear at the same time. And you can use the keyboard to flick between applications, but not individual windows - you have to use the application's window menu to get to a particular window. I'd like to have that fixed somehow, although I'm not holding my breath - the mouse and menus are integral to using the Mac (unlike Windows where you can do most things without it).

Having come from Linux, I was looking forward to going back to some of my old X11 applications. X11 is supposed to come with the system, but I couldn't find it - the disk I read that it was on just contained translations of a "Readme" file about restoring the system. I had to download it from Apple, then get Fink and then learn how to use that. The apt-get program did not work for me - it connected to SourceForge where Fink is held, but trying to get the files only resulted in 404's. So I had to use the Fink command-line program itself to get the sources and compile them, which obviously takes much longer than just installing binaries although it's obviously safer.

Actually, many of the programs I used on X in Linux are actually available for the Mac's own GUI - this includes the Mozilla suite and even GNU Emacs. This is obviously preferable to running them on X11 because X11 has its own memory overheads. But it's still useful to have X11 around.

The Rally Yesterday ...

Well I went on the rally yesterday, it was not as big as the huge anti-war rallies last year but it was big enough that people were still leaving the start (Hyde Park) as the rest of us were having our rally in Trafalgar Square. It rained a little bit and it was very windy - I heard that people in other parts of the country had been killed by flying debris, but no-one here (al-hamdu lillah) was injured, although I almost got one of the Marxists' flagpoles land on my head in Hyde Park.

We had the usual speakers - obviously the groups who organised the rally (Stop the War, The Muslim Association of Britain and CND) and a few trade unionists and minor politicians, and four of the hundreds of Birmingham schoolkids who walked out of school last year to protest against the war. Nigel Kennedy gave two violin recitals (one by Bach and one piece he said was from Lebanon or Palestine) and after the rally the Asian Dub Foundation gave a gig. Respect were out, of course, but I had expected them to have a higher profile than the various Trot groups which come out of the woodwork on days like this. If these guys want to help organise anti-war rallies, fine, but don't they realise that they damage the credibility of these rallies by using them to advertise themselves? There can't be that many Communists in this country, surely?

I heard someone on the radio mention that a lot of the people who turned up on last year's big marches were notably absent - the married thirty-somethings and Twickenham brigade or something like that. As usual, they played down the number of people who turned out - the organisers said about 75,000, the police said it was a third of that number. Of course, the threat of wind and rain may well have deterred people from coming, but I don't see why it matters. The fact is that at least one group of people are still protesting at what is a ridiculous adventure in which we had no need to get involved and has not had the results the leaders promised. Yes, Saddam is gone, but what is going to take his place? Nobody knows, and I don't believe the coalition are in any place to decide.

No More Lies, Mr Blair!

Saturday's Stop the War march is intended to reinforce calls for political accountability and a withdrawal from Iraq, writes Andrew Burgin

Friday March 19, 2004

On the anniversary of the Iraq war the anti-war movement is marching once more. Demonstrations will take place in more than 100 cities round the world. In London people will march under the banner "No more lies, Mr
Blair!" What is clear is that the Iraq war was based on deceit and lies. Blair now says that when he went to the House of Commons to make the case for war he did not know that the 45-minute claim related only to battlefield weapons. To paraphrase Aneurin Bevan: if he knew this not to be the case he is too dishonest to be prime minister and if he really believed it then he is too stupid to be prime minister.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There were no links between al-Qaida and the Iraqi regime. But the biggest lie of all was that this war on terror would make the world a safer place. In Britain Sir John Stevens, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, now says that a terror attack in London is inevitable.

We also now know that the war was illegal in terms of international law. There was no second United Nations resolution and the military was concerned enough about the legality of military action to demand further assurances from the attorney-general. Lord Goldsmith had to search far and wide to find support for the position that the attack on Iraq would be lawful. We are marching this Saturday to demand a full account from our government. The Hutton report was a whitewash and the Butler inquiry is already discredited by its narrow terms of reference and by the decision to hold its deliberations behind closed doors. The full advice given by Goldsmith to Blair should be published and there must be a full public inquiry into the reasons for the war. Democracy demands that the lies that took us to war are accounted for.

Tony Blair, wrapping himself in Churchillian language, talks about being "at the end of the first phase of the war on terror". However, it looks as if we may be at the beginning of the end of Tony Blair.

In Spain the people came out onto the streets to protest against the terror attacks in Madrid which left more than 200 dead. The following day they voted out the Popular party of José María Aznar and voted in the Socialist party which promised to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. The newly elected Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, said after his election victory that war cannot be based on lies. More than 90% of the population in Spain opposed the invasion of Iraq. Aznar, Bush and Blair were the troika who met just before the war began to finalise the invasion plans. Bush and Blair are now isolated on the war; events in Iraq itself, which has been devastated by the invasion, are making them ever more unpopular.

Saturday's demonstration calls for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq. The people of Iraq have the right to determine their own future free from the interference of foreign troops. Bush and Blair now seek to use the United Nations to legitimise an unelected puppet government in which the convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi will play a prominent role. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress was the source for most of the disputed intelligence claims. Chalabi was financed over a long period by the US security services. There are no plans for democratic elections in Iraq and the farce of the supposed handover of power in June is nothing but a cover for the continuing military occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil reserves.

Over the last two and half years the Stop the War Coalition, together with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Muslim Association of Britain, have built a powerful voice against the war on terror. We have organised the largest marches in British political history. Saturday's march will once again show the resilience of the anti-war movement. From Madrid to Bombay and San Francisco people will demonstrate their opposition to war. The Spanish people had the chance to vote against their pro-war government, Saturday is our chance to show the deep and widespread opposition to war and occupation.

· Andrew Burgin is a member of the Stop the War coalition

Galloway wins damages

George Galloway has accepted substantial damages from the Christian Science Monitor after it admitted that documents on which it based accusations against Galloway were almost certainly fakes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3549679.stm

Bush gang's 237 lies on Iraq

A US House of Representatives Committee report has found that the Bush administration made no less than 237 misleading statements on the thread posed by Iraq.

Read it here (PDF file)

Respect - the Unity Coalition

George Galloway, the former Labour MP who was expelled from the party for supporting the right of Iraqis to defend their country, is standing as a Euro candidate for "Respect - the Unity Coalition". I think this could be an ideal opportunity to send a message to Tory Bliar and his gang because you don't have to worry about letting the Tories in by voting for them.

Here's a letter in yesterday's Guardian (you'll have to scroll down a bit) from Galloway and other R-UC candidates.

'The Register' hits the wrong note

The Register (a UK-based tech news site) has a feature about a British-based rap group called the "419 Squad" after the notorious email-based advance fee scam. It uses the headline "419ers form phat rap crew", which kind-of suggests that the people in the rap group are themselves 419'ers. They're not. They're kids from London who've simply used the name as a tongue-in-cheek reference to their country's reputation. Most Nigerians that I know (Muslims and others) see the 419 scam as a huge shame on their country. Some of the people who disputed the result of last year's election in Nigeria referred to the date as "4/19" in order to symbolise what they saw it as - a fraud.

Long way from home

Bangladesh, currently the largest contributor to UN peace-keeping missions, is to send troops to the Ivory Coast.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3524202.stm

CAIR meets Spanish ambassador

A delegation of American Muslim leaders met today with the Spanish ambassador in Washington, D.C., to offer condolences for the more than 200 people killed in last week's terror attacks on the Madrid train system.

The delegation, organized by the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), expressed the American Islamic community's condemnation of the bombings and told Ambassador Javier Ruperez that Muslims grieve for all those who died.

Read the full story here

(I decided to blog this because there are certain people who say CAIR is some sort of middle-eastern terrorist front group - the fact is they are a civil rights organisation and without them, Muslims would have a far harder time in the US than they do.)

By any means necessary

Zionism, and not just the Sharon government, is to blame for the subjugation of the Palestinians, reports Ghada Karmi, in the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1171705,00.html

Ice Cream Murders pair freed

Two men who were jailed for murder after the "Ice Cream Wars" in Glasgow were freed today after their convictions for murder were quashed. This was their third appeal and their prosecution has been denounced as "malicious".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3519328.stm

My Miscarriages of Justice page

A bizarre 419 invitation

I just got forwarded an exceptionally dumb 419 invitation through a mailing list I'm on, in which someone claiming to be Dr Mitchell Obi of some Nigerian financial organisation appeals for someone to do business with him as his "next of kin"?! Does this moron even know what a next of kin is?

419'ers being dumb is nothing new - there are at least a dozen websites dedicated to baiting these idiots, getting them to say stupid things or hold up banners with what they think are their new business partners' names on them (actually insults made to look like names). I wonder how people as stupid as these could get that amount of money together?

Article on 419'ers targeting Muslims

Canadians say: we were right to stay out

Canadians overwhelmingly believe President George W. Bush lied to
justify the Iraq war and their own government was wise to stay out of
the conflict, a new poll suggests.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040314.wiraq0315/BNStory/Front/

Muslims police their own? How?

It's very common to hear, whenever a terrorist incident happens that bears the hallmarks of Al-Qa'ida, calls for the Muslims to control extremist elements in their own community. I read an article on a UK Usenet forum today, claiming that "the peace loving Muslims throughout the world really need to bring some real pressure to bear on their albeit small minority of fanatical zealots calling for Holy War against The West".

The fact is, the overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose actions like the Madrid bombings. Muslims were killed in that incident and in the Sept 11 attacks, and the people who carry them out clearly don't care if they kill Muslims. The problem is that the extremists get the most publicity, as when a couple of imams somewhere in Saudi tried to justify the 9/11 attacks. But all Islamic scholars of note condemned them. They were completely against the principles of Islam.

The truth is that Muslims have generally done an awful lot to distance themselves from these people. In some mosques (though not all) membership and meeting rights are restricted to certain sections of the community which works to keep these sorts of people out. Most of the 'Salafi' (Wahhabi) mosques in the UK are run by people who are against al-Qa'ida. You can read reams of denunciations of the terrorists on websites like Salafi Publications.

In the Muslim world, most of the governments are anti-Islamic. Islamic teaching and preaching is restricted and this affects both mainstream Muslims and extremists. In fact, the mainstream scholars are often caught in the security clampdowns; the Deoband university in India was reported to have been prohibited from taking on foreign students for 'security' reasons, and foreign students were banned from private religious schools in Syria after the Tel Aviv bombings last year. Such clampdowns actually cut off the routes to the genuine scholarship which keeps the youth away from extremists.

On top of this, we have no control over the youths who preach about Khilaafa in the streets in London and elsewhere in the UK. Our imams can stop them preaching in the mosques, but they cannot stop them in the streets (although they can challenge them).

Anti-War demo coming up in London

The Stop the War Coalition have organised another demonstration in London this weekend under the slogan "No More Lies, Mr Blair".

Saturday 20th March, assemble 12 noon, Hyde Park, London - nearest tube station: Marble Arch (Central Line - the red line).

Phone 020 7053 2153 (or 2154, 5 or 6)

The website doesn't mention that the Muslim Association of Britain are involved in this one.

Got my Mac!

My Mac came just after 1pm this afternoon! I'm using it to type this.

It's heavy! I never realised eMacs were this heavy until I saw the delivery guy bringing it in. I supposedly got a free .Mac account but either I typed in the wrong password (a difficult thing to do twice!) or it's got lost en route or something. I'll get it sorted later insha Allah, I'm going out this afternoon.

Muslim woman becomes President of Oxford Union

This article, from the Straits Times of Singapore, tells how a Muslim woman became President of the students' union at Oxford University, despite dirty tricks and an anti-Muslim hate campaign against her.

http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/topstories/story/0,4386,240313,00.html?

Population decline in Eastern Europe

An interesting article (linked from Ladies Against Feminism) in the Daily Telegraph (a right-of-centre pro-Israeli London quality paper) about the declining population growth in Eastern Europe. A useful rebuttal to the scaremongers who talk of an invasion of immigrants from Eastern Europe - before long those countries won't have enough people!

Thank God some people saw sense

It seems the Spanish - who, it must be remembered, did not want to get involved in Iraq to begin with - have had their fears confirmed by last week's bombings in Madrid, and kicked out the government that got them into that mess. No doubt the morons at places like Little Green Footballs will start crying "surrender", but it gives hope to those of us in the UK who also never wanted to get involved in the Bush cabal's disastrous adventures.

A few weeks ago I read in the Spectator (a right-of-centre political weekly until recently owned by Conrad Black) someone going on about how "we need America". We need America a lot less now than we did in the 1960s during the Cold War, yet a Labour government (under Harold Wilson) kept us out of the Vietnam war, which was fought to prop up an American client dictatorship, went on for several bloody years, and failed miserably. Why get involved with this when we managed to stay out of Vietnam?

Site of good RPMs for SuSE

http://guru.unixtech.be/rpm/packages/Themes/

Mac vs PC comparison

I ordered a Mac on Friday - a G4 eMac which is all I could reasonably afford, but I did order some extra memory for it - and I also bought a copy of the Mac users' magazine MacFormat, which is published by the same people as Linux Format of which I have been a regular reader since late 2002. There's a feature in there comparing the Mac to the PC, and why should you buy a Mac rather than a PC.

Now, the reason I decided to buy a Mac was mainly due to the OS X operating system. OS X has the advantages of Linux (ie. security, stability and lack of viruses) with the various applications which come with a recognised platform. Linux, while a better OS than Windoze by a long, long way, suffers from a serious lack of applications. The Mac has one other important advantage: Macs are generally all the same, which means everything fits together and there are few compatibility problems like those which affect Linux. To me, it seems that at the moment it's the only computer which just works.

The problem with this feature is that the magazine dwells too much on the appearance of the Mac, and came back to that issue again and again. Sure, it looks lovely, which may attract first-time buyers and people who really want a computer that looks cool. PCs, they say, "look like sheds" (mostly), and "only look acceptable in a teenager's bedroom, where they blend in with the congealed Pot Noodles and dog-eared copies of Front. The thing about sheds, though, is that you can put lots of stuff in them, like storage devices, for example. The cheapest PC you can buy comes with a lot more expansion room than the eMac, the cheaper of which currently costs about £650, and comes with a 40 Gig hard drive, 128 Meg of memory and a built-in monitor. (At the moment, PC World is doing a bundled printer and scanner.) Admittedly, though, the cheap PCs don't come with anything like the big software bundle you get with the eMac.

I think the solution to the Mac's penetration problem is for Apple to release the components, and allow other manufacturers to make and sell Macs. That way, a geek like me can buy a Mac in a tower case with lots of expansion room and leave out all the multimedia stuff if they don't want it (I personally don't need a video DVD player on my computer) and the bundled software, and Apple can continue to sell their bundled eMacs in PC World as family computers. People will pay that amount of money for a good family computer, which the eMac certainly is.

Insha Allah my Mac should be delivered tomorrow, something to which I am very much looking forward! I'll keep you all posted insha Allah and I also intend to write to the magazine, but I can't do that until I've tested out my new Mac.

(I got mine from Computer Warehouse in Brentford, Middlesex, which gives a free email account for a year.)

The Morons Have Landed (II)

Message to anyone who might want to leave insulting anti-Muslim comments on my comments board: I will delete them as soon as I find them. It is barely more effort for me to log into Haloscan and delete your garbage than it is for you to post it.

Guantanamo: the truth is coming out

Jamal al-Harith, one of the five British detainees released from Guantanamo, has told (not to mention sold) his story to the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid. You can read the full story by clicking this link, it's pretty revolting.

Also, the latest in the squalid story of Amina Silmi (from the Vindicator, of Youngstown, Ohio) is that she is not even allowed to touch her own children during visits in prison. She is being held in prison because the Immigration Service want to kick her out of the US to Venezuela, despite the fact that she has three children who are US citizens, one of whom has special needs. Read the story here. What is the matter with these people?

Shukr Clothing Australian launch

An Australian website for the Syrian-based Islamic clothing company Shukr has been launched. The company is run by an American convert and the clothing is all made by religious Muslims. (I'd call it special occasion clothing though, unless you're very wealthy.)

http://www.shukr.com.au/

Mandrake Linux v10.0

A funny thing to put just above the post on the Madrid disaster, but this is a tech blog as well as a war blog - it's a general personal blog. So here goes.

Mandrake has just released the "Community version" of version 10 of its (GNU/) Linux distro and released ISOs to the Community. Many of the FTP mirrors were full as the Mandrake website warned, and those that weren't were painfully slow - ftp.sunsite.co.uk was as fast as my home broadband on a much wider connection. But I found a mirror in Ireland from which the download rate was 1.4 Mb per second, so I manage to download it pretty quickly.

The installation went pretty smoothly; it took rather a long time to repartition part of my hard drive and it prompted me to insert a non-existent disk 4 at the end. I'm not sure what I've not been able to install as a result. But apart from that it was uneventful, the look and feel is nice, and as a nice touch it installed KDevelop on the taskbar - something I've never seen before on any other distro.

I'm quite looking forward to the official release. I've not used it long enough to know whether the problems I had with 9.2 (such as going into never-ending swaps which I could only get out of by rebooting) have been fixed with this edition. The default font with Emacs is too small, and this will be a big problem for anyone who uses 1280x1024 resolution on a 17-inch monitor, as I used to do. On my laptop it's not such a problem.

Mandrake's homepage: http://www.mandrakesoft.com/

About the Madrid bombings

At the moment it is not certain that the bombings in Madrid, which has killed nearly 200 people at the time of this writing, was the work of Al-Qa'ida. It has been said that it bears the hallmarks of both that group and ETA ('Basqueland' and Freedom), the Basque separatist group. Whichever group is responsible this is a terrible action which has killed hundreds of innocent people, deliberately.

If it is indeed the work of an Al-Qa'ida related group, both Muslims and others should be in no doubt that this action is absolutely condemned by Islam. The bombers attacked a country which has taken a peripheral role in recent events in Iraq against the wishes of their people. They have no proof that all, or indeed any, of the people they have killed have anything to do with the situation in Iraq, or have ever had any role in the oppression of Muslims, or indeed anyone, in their entire lives.

If they consider such non-Muslims as fair game (and Muslims who understand their religion do not), they might consider the tens of thousands of Muslims in Spain, many of them native converts with nowhere else to go except ... elsewhere in Europe. A few years ago there was an anti-Muslim riot in southern Spain which led to Muslim workers fleeing to the hills. Yet, two days ago on this blog, I was able to report that hostility to Muslims in southern Spain had decreased as a result of the efforts of the local Muslim community. Every attack in the west which is attributed to Al-Qa'ida makes life more difficult for Muslims here - to say nothing of the Muslims who may be among those killed in the bombings themselves. (It was reported that hundreds of Muslims were killed in the Twin Towers attack, for example.)

I am not saying that, were the media to conclude that Al-Qa'ida were responsible, I would believe them. Large areas of the western media are controlled by people with known anti-Muslim and Zionist sympathies, and I don't believe the official story on anything. I was certain that the Tel Aviv bombing last year was a set-up, until I saw the Hamas video. I am still not convinced that Al-Qa'ida were indeed responsible for 9/11. But the fact remains that the bulk of the Muslim community are innocent of these actions and often victims of them. May people remember this before they vent their anger on innocent people.

Guantanamo Brits innocent after all

Al-Hamdu lillah, the five British detainees who were flown home from Guantanamo Bay yesterday have been released without charge. They have been held for two years and now it appears that not only have the Americans not a jot of evidence against them, neither have the British.

A few months ago I called a radio phone-in hosted by a loudmouth named Jon Gaunt. He has a morning show on the BBC's London station (94.9FM) and commonly greets controversial political and judicial decisions with "the world's gone mad!". He mentioned a report from Amnesty International criticising America's treatment of the detainees in Guantanamo, which alleged that this gave the message to dictators around the world that violating people's rights was acceptable because the US did it. Gaunt said that he wasn't losing any sleep over the treatment of the detainees in Guantanamo.

I argued that what AI were saying was important, because certain dictators use the excuse that someone is a "fundamentalist" to repress them, much as the excuse of "communism" was used for the same purpose during the Cold War (even for trade union organisers and the like). He brought up the issue of the "Tipton Taliban", and asked me whether I thought they should be brought back. I said yes, because they had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Northern Alliance - a group of various ex-mujahideen factions which had turned to fighting each other since the collapse of the Najibullah regime - and had fought back when they were attacked. After getting me to repeat this - "they were attacked, they fought back" - he said "you disgust me. Good morning" and put the phone down.

Now it appears, they are completely innocent and the British authorities have no evidence that they fired a shot at British troops. If they had, they would certainly have been tried for treason and would not have been released less than 24 hours after returning to the UK. Clearly Gaunt didn't know this, but then he should not shoot off his mouth about issues he does not know about. (He also allowed later callers to call me a plonker and question my 'loyalty'.) Should license fee payers' money be wasted on idiots like this man?

Plug for Saraji's blog

Sara Umm Zaid, the author of the Modern Muslima website, has started blogging seriously - so it's about time I gave her blog a plug - it's an interesting read ma sha Allah. Lots of links to other Muslims' blogs.

http://www.modernmuslima.com/blog.htm

QT Learning Blues (part II)

There's a report on OSNews about a review of a new book on programming with Qt. (I've got my copy on order, and I'm intending to pick it up tomorrow. More news when I get it insha Allah.)

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6300

Good reports on new mosque in Spain

Here's a nice BBC report on the new mosque which was opened last year in Granada, Spain. The mosque had stirred up a lot of opposition and city authorities delayed its construction for 22 years. Now it seems the mosque's 'open door' policy has calmed the fear and hostility somewhat.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3544237.stm

Vote Nazi, read the Mail

Searchlight Magazine, a British anti-fascist and anti-racist monthly, has picked up on the anti-immigrant vendetta in the tabloid press. It seems the BNP appreciate the support, as one of their goons held up a banner at a rally saying "Vote BNP, Read the Daily Mail"! Also a feature on the situation of the Roma ('gypsies') in Eastern Europe, particularly Slovakia, and why some countries accept Roma asylum seekers and others don't.

Bush Buddy Watch (II)

Article from the Guardian (London / Manchester) on Karl Rove, George W Bush's campaign manager.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1165037,00.html

Translation of Der Spiegel article on "freeping"

"Freeping" is online campaigns to flood web polls with votes. LGF is one of the biggest culprits.

http://lgfwatch.blogspot.com (see 8th March entry)

LGF's latest horror story

Little Green Footballs, for reasons (ahem) best known to themselves as this has nothing to do with the Middle East or with anything political, have posted an article about a five-year-old girl who was murdered by her abusive parents in Toronto for their goonish fans to foam at the mouth about. It is not the first time a young girl has been murdered by cruel relatives. A couple of years ago a little girl from the Ivory Coast, Victoria Climbie, was killed by her aunt after suffering years of terrible cruelty. I also heard about a young girl here in England whose resentful stepmother abused her for years, before kicking her in the stomach, killing her. The difference, of course, is that neither of these families were from a Muslim background.

For the benefit of anyone who cares, Islam does not blame a child born out of wedlock for the misdeeds of their parents. It certainly does not allow people to kill a child or to be cruel to a child. If these people are found guilty they should certainly be punished; what they have done has nothing to do with Islam and is certainly no reflection Pakistanis, never mind other Muslims.

(For more info: http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/TorontoSun/News/2004/01/30/329618.html)

LGF Watch

I've just discovered a blog which is dedicated to debunking the racist propaganda of LGF:

http://lgfwatch.blogspot.com/

The Morons Have Landed

An individual calling himself "Flanstein", who has been pestering at least one other Muslim blogger by posting inhumanity-of-Islam ravings on her comments page, has started on my blog too. I think he found my blog through a post I made on http://niqaabi-4ever.blogspot.com/, suggesting that the author of that blog simply ban his ravings, as certain anti-Muslim bloggers I have mentioned here before have no problem censoring my attempts to speak the truth on their patch. He wrote in response to my earlier post about Abu Hamza (14th Feb), by quoting something Abu Hamza said.

I am sure he is not sincere in anything but his hatred of Islam, but please let nobody think I was defending Abu Hamza. I don't agree with him in virtually anything, but I was commenting on the hypocrisy of the Sun comic which is notorious for its lowest-common-denominator 'journalism'. And given that Abu Hamza's circulation is considerably lower than theirs, it is obvious who causes more damage.