imra-usa.org

(A general view shows the Swiss mountain resort of Davos December 28, 2011. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann)

Leaders of the Arab Spring sought to assure the world’s elite in Davos that the rise of political Islam is not a threat to democracy, and pleaded for help creating jobs and satisfying the hunger of their people for a better life. Politicians, activists and entrepreneurs from countries that have cast off dictators and held free elections in the last 12 months were prized guests at the World Economic Forum, where they asked for patience, understanding and investment.

The new prime ministers of Tunisia and Morocco, both chosen from Islamic parties, dismissed Western worries about a surge of political Islam across North Africa and sought to dispel the notion that the promise of last year’s protests had faded.

“I do not believe the new regimes should be called political Islamist regimes. We must be careful with our terminology… For the first time in the Arab world, we have free and honest elections that led to democratic regimes,” Tunisian Prime Minister Hammadi Jebali told a Davos panel.

Twelve months ago, stunned Davos delegates watched live television images of crowds surging into Cairo’s Tahrir Square in a political earthquake few had anticipated. Arab officials and civil society activists urged Western executives and commentators not to demonize the Islamic movements that have gone from prison to parliament and the corridors of power in a year of stunning transformation.

“I would like to ask the businessmen in the room. Have you suffered from the victory of the Islamists? You supported the dictatorships in the past,” Moroccan Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane said.

“Today we can guarantee your interests more than they did in the past.”

Read the full story by Warren Strobel and Paul Taylor here.
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Photo Credit: Curmudgeonly & Skeptical presents Boned Jello

No one knows the evil power of Islam as well as the governments in secular Muslim nations. Sadly, most Americans and Europeans mistakenly assume Islam is a religion. Leaders in Muslim countries know better – they know Islam is a political and military system bent on world domination.

For example: Egypt, a country where Islam is the state religion and 90% of her inhabitants are Muslim, severely represses Islamic political parties because they understand that those parties would destabilize the country by instituting Shariah law and dismantling everything modern (or western) in the country ¹, perhaps even destroying all traces of the ancient Egyptian culture as devout Muslims have done in the past to the native artifacts of the cultures they conquered.

While western countries struggle with the morality of banning the hijab, secular Muslim-majority countries have no such qualms; as I pointed out in my article If Muslim Countries Can Ban the Veil Why Can`t Infidels?:

Egypt, 90% Muslim, was smart enough to ban the niqab in schools as being backward and demeaning to women. Turkey, 99.8% Muslim, and Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, ban the wearing of the veil in their public schools.

Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Syria and others who suppress Islamic parties know that wearing the veil is the first sign that devout Muslims are gearing up to take over the country.

So consider the photo at the top of this article.

Now consider the photo below:

Photo Credit: Curmudgeonly & Skeptical presents Boned Jello

Only western governments are stupid enough to actually facilitate the Islamization of their culture and country.

Notes

(1):

Federal Research Division of the US Library of Congress, Egypt – The Rise of Political Islam and Repression

The more violent messianic groups, such as Al Jihad, were the targets of continual repression and containment, apparently only partly successful. Their destabilizing potential was indicated by their role in the assassination of Sadat, a major rebellion they mounted in Asyut at that time, a 1986 wave of attacks on video shops and Westernized boutiques, and assassination attempts against high officials. The regime responded by arresting thousands of these radical activists. Another Islamic group, the Jamaat al Islamiyah, recovered the control of the student unions Sadat tried to break. In the mid-1980s, they won twice the number of votes of the NDP in student union elections, and the secular opposition was squeezed out. The left made inroads in their dominance toward the end of the decade, however. Radical groups belonging to Jamaat al Islamiyah tried to impose a puritanical, sometimes anti-Coptic, Islamic regime on the campuses and in the towns of Upper Egypt, where local government sometimes bowed to their demands. More moderate groups in Jamaat al Islamiyah could turn out large disciplined crowds for public prayer, the nearest thing to a mass demonstration that the regime reluctantly permitted. A major contest was waged over Egypt’s 40,000 mosques; the government sought to appoint imams but had too few reliable candidates, while the movement sought to wrest control of these major potential centers of Islamic propaganda.

Planck’s Constant

(Photo: Mourners at a 2 Nov 2010 funeral for victims of the attack on the Our Lady of Salvation Church/Saad Shalash)

With al-Qaeda declaring war on Christians in Iraq and no end to political instability in sight, Catholic experts on the Middle East fear the fate of the minority Christian community there will only worsen.

The pessimism followed the bloodiest attack against Iraq’s Christian minority since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Fifty-two hostages and police were killed on Sunday when security forces stormed a church that had been raided by al-Qaeda-linked gunmen.

The bloodbath struck fear deep into the hearts of remaining Iraqi Christians and confirmed some of the worst concerns of a Vatican summit on the Middle East held last month that warned of a continuing exodus of Christians from the lands of the Bible.

“In Iraq, every attack prompts the exodus of thousands of Christians,” said Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, an Egyptian Jesuit who is one of the Vatican’s leading experts on Islam.

(Photo: Funeral on November 2, 2010 of a victim of the attack on the Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad/Thaier al-Sudani)

“As the terrorists themselves say, their purpose is to eliminate the Christian presence from those lands either by physically destroying Christians or by terrorizing them into renouncing the faith or fleeing,” said Father David Jaeger, a Franciscan expert on the Holy Land and the Middle East.

Two days after the Baghdad church attack, which Pope Benedict condemned as ferocious because it took place in a house of God, the al-Qaeda front in Iraq said Christians were “legitimate targets” wherever they are. The group, which calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), ridiculed the pope as “the hallucinating tyrant of the Vatican” and warned that Christians would be “extirpated and dispersed” from Iraq.

Read the full analysis here. See also Factbox: Christian communities in Middle East

(Photo: Mourners march during a funeral for victims of an attack on the Our Lady of Salvation church, in Baghdad November 2, 2010/Thaier al-Sudani)

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