Listen to The Gathering Storm Radio Show, which WC and I cohost. The show broadcasts live every Friday for one hour at noon, Pacific Time.

The call-in number is (646) 915-9870.

Callers welcome!

Note: If you are unable to listen live to the radio show, you can listen to recordings of the radio broadcasts later by CLICKING HERE.

Friday, February 1: Our guest at the bottom of the hour is blogger Kevin of The Amboy Times. We’ll begin that portion of the show by discussing Kevin’s extensive posting “The List of Things That Offend Muslims.”
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Good news from Canada, oh Canada - Muslims speak out against Shariah finance, which brings in Shariah law and ends up costing the consumer more, with less disclosure and no transparency…hey, other than all that it’s great!  Oh, and did we mention the reverse money laundering through “purification” to undisclosed “charities”?

Here’s the Globe & Mail article from yesterday -  note that the consumer gets a wonderful “Islamic” opportunity to pay an extra 60 basis points on the loan fee (oh, but it’s not interest so it’s more “Islamic”):

Halt Islamic Banking Study, Group says

TAVIA GRANT

Globe and Mail Update

January 29, 2008 at 7:14 PM EST

A growing interest in Islamic banking has ignited a public debate on the concept, with one Muslim group calling on the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. Tuesday to abandon its study about the sector.

The secular group Muslim Canadian Congress issued a letter Tuesday criticizing Islamic products as more expensive than mainstream financial ones.

The letter comes as Ottawa is considering its first applications to start up Canadian banks operating within the strictures of Islamic religious law. Sharia-compliant products, such as mortgages and mutual funds, have sprouted up across the country in recent years and are gaining in popularity around the world.

The MCC said the move puts undue pressure on Canadian Muslims to sign on to more costly products.

“Islamic banking is nothing more than an attempt by Islamists, with backing from Middle Eastern financial institutions and their Western partners, to scare Muslim Canadians into believing that they should pay more to the banks and demand less in return, as an act of religiosity,” said MCC president Farzana Hassan in an open letter to CMHC.

It asked the Canadian housing agency to abandon its study into the issue, which will cost about $65,000, and said a better approach would be a banking system that seeks to integrate Canadians.

“What we need is a better deal from the banks for all Canadians, rather than dividing us up into religious groups and pacing obstacles in the way of better integration of all Canadians,” Ms. Hassan said.

“Religion has no place in the banking or mortgage industry.”

CMHC said it merely wants to understand the issue better, and stressed that it has no plans to start offering such products itself.

Proponents of Islamic-compliant products say they simply expand the range of consumers’ choices, in line with services being offered throughout the U.K., Asia and the U.S.

“Islamic finance are simply structured trade products devoid of usury, similar to ethical products which have filters,” commented Omar Kalair, chief executive officer of sharia-compliant mortgage firm UM Financial, on an online Globe and Mail forum Friday. “There is no injustice being forced on anyone.”

UM has said its mortgages cost about 0.60 percentage points more than a regular mortgage. Its homeowner mortgages tend to be structured like a rent-to-own system to avoid interest.

In Ottawa, meantime, decision-makers are mulling how to handle a banking trend that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the Islamic world and may be attractive to Canadian Muslims, known as the fastest growing immigrant population.

Canada’s bank regulator, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, is studying two proposals for banks that offer services in keeping with Islamic laws that forbid speculation and interest but are in favour of transactions where profit and loss is shared.

The federal Finance department established an Islamic financial services working group in June to study the issue. The 20-person group includes staff from OSFI, Canada Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Bank of Canada.

This Muslim Canadian Congress looks like an interesting group, and they don’t pull their punches.  I’d be annoyed too if someone tried to sell me a marked-up riskier mortgage  and told me if I didn’t buy I was at risk for a personal fatwa.  This whole Shariah-compliant finance marketing strategy makes local used car dealers look dignified in contrast.  Here’s the Muslim Canadian Congress letter from MCC President Farzana Hassan, who should probably run for office somewhere up north and give a voice to the majority of Muslims who oppose the Muslim Brotherhood and its many front groups:

So-called Sharia Mortgages are a Deception
MCC asks CMHC to drop $100,000 study to introduce Islamic banking in Canada

TORONTO - The Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) has asked the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) to abandon its $100,000 study to introduce so-called Islamic Banking in Canada, saying there should be no room in Canada for Saudi inspired Islamist political doctrines dressed up as innocuous religious requirements.

In a letter to Karen Kinsley, Chief Executive Officer of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the president of the Muslim Canadian Congress Farzana Hassan said, “Islamic Banking is nothing more than an attempt by Islamists, with backing from Middle Eastern Financial Institutions and their Western partners, to scare Muslim Canadians into believing that they should pay more to the banks and demand less in return as an act of religiosity. ”

“Sharia Banking is an obscene attempt to fleece an already marginalized Muslim community while promising them the exact opposite. On the one hand Imams are warning Muslims of hellfire if they deal with the existing banking systems, and on the other the same clerics are being paid by banks to herd Muslims towards a system that is based on lies and deception.

What we need is a better deal from the banks for all Canadians, rather than dividing us up into religious groups and pacing obstacles in the way of better integration of all Canadians. Our banking system has developed in Canada over the last 200 years, and there is no need to adapt it to the failed economies and medieval systems modeled on Saudi Arabia and Iran,” added Ms. Hassan.

In the letter, Ms Hassan said it was unfortunate that some Canadian Banks are succumbing to the lure of easy money that comes from supposed interest-free banking where customers receive zero interest on their deposits while paying more to the banks. “While the banks and their paid Imams and sheiks will make handsome returns, Muslim Canadians will end up as losers, with promises of rewards in the afterlife,” she wrote.

“Religion has no place in the banking or mortgage industry and banks should desist from employing imams or sheikhs who sanctify so called Islamic bank products and mortgages. We are not living in the middle ages to get our financial cues from clerics claiming guidance from the divine,” she added.

Explaining the deceptive workings of interest-free Sharia banking, as practised by Saudi and other Islamic banks, Ms Hassan said: “Muslim bankers and their hired clerics claim they indulge in interest-free banking, but in reality they hide this interest. So-called Islamic banking institutions claim they operate on “zero interest.” However, the fundamental characteristic of charging interest is never truly eliminated in Islamic banking, but rather is hidden.

The MCC president referred the CMHC president to Muhammad Saleem, a former president and CEO of Park Avenue Bank in New York, who has written a book, Islamic Banking - A $300 Billion Deception. Mr. Saleem, who was a senior banker with Bankers Trust where, among other responsibilities, he headed the Middle East division and served as adviser to a prominent Islamic bank based in Bahrain, dismisses the founding premise of Islamic banking, saying, “Islamic banks do not practise what they preach: they all charge interest, but disguised in Islamic garb. Thus they engage in deceptive and dishonest banking practises.”

The MCC president also referred the CMHC CEO to another critic of Islamic banking, professor Timur Kuran, who taught Islamic Thought at the University of Southern California, and who has authored, Islam and Mam-mon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism, Prof. Kuran writes that the effort to introduce sharia banking “has promoted the spread of anti-modern currents of thought all across the Islamic world. It has also fostered an environment conducive to Islamist militancy.”

Two other academics who have studied the phenomenon have reached similar conclusions. New Zealand business professors, Beng Soon Chong and Ming-Hua Liu of Auck-land University, in an October, 2007 study on the growth of Islamic banking in Malaysia, wrote: “Our study, however, provides new evidence, which shows that, in practise, Islamic deposits are not interest-free. ” They concluded that the rapid growth in Islamic banking was “largely driven by the Islamic resurgence worldwide.”

In the letter the MCC president said, an additional and related byproduct of Islamic finance is the legitimization and financial support by Western institutions for the type of radical Islamic scholarship and indoctrination. The need to certify shari’a-compliance of their Islamic products by “qualified shari’a scholars” has created demand for the services of experts that more often than not are the indoctrinated products of radical Wahhabi/Salafi shari’a faculties in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, who generally hold views fundamentally inimical to the most ba-sic values of Western civilization.

Even a cursory look at the names, affiliations and views of popular shari’a scholars, such as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, Sheikh Mohamed Ali Elgari, Faysal Mawlawi, Sheikh Nizam Yaquby, Suleyman al-Maniya and others , many of whom sit on the shari’a advisory boards of dozens of Islamic banks and get paid princely sums from each, would make it clear that most are hard line Islamists and, in at least some cases, open supporters of terrorism. She informed the CMHC CEO that Mr. Qaradawi, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, for instance, is chairman of the shari’a boards of the two Qatari Islamic banks owned by the ruling families among many others.

In another example, Muhammad Taqi Usmani, a radical Deobandi cleric and a former shari’a court member from Pakistan, who sits on dozens of shari’a boards in the West, is a key executive in the Karachi Deobandi ma-drassa Darul Uloom, which has trained and continues to train thousands of Taliban and jihadist cadres. He was also instrumental in the Pakistani government decision to declare the Ahmadi Muslims apostates and thus com-plicit in the murder and suffering of countless innocent Muslims. He is further on record preaching that Muslims living in the West “must live in peace until strong enough to wage Jihad’ against their fellow-citizens in order “to establish the supremacy of Islam.”

The same is true about many of the trustees of various Islamic banking insti-tutions. The Dow Jones Islamic Fund (IMANX), for example, is owned by the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) - a Saudi-controlled non-profit institution that holds title to hundreds of American mosques - which was recently listed by the US Dept of Justice as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism financing trial in Dal-las, Texas.

“We urge the CMHC to not proceed any further with their ill advised initiative to promote Islamic banking in Canada. A crown corporation should not be a party to any venture that strengthens the jihadi movement and leads to the segregation of Muslims from the mainstream,” Ms. Hassan added.

A copy of the letter was sent to Jim Flaherty, Minister of Finance and Monte Solberg, Minister of Human Resources and Social Development who is responsible for the CMHC.

Of course, Shariah compliant mortgages, insurance policies, mutual funds, index funds, hedge funds and pretty much any other financial product are now being sold in the U.S.   Canada is smarter than we are if they haven’t allowed Shariah-compliant Finance to take root yet.

Visit http://shariahfinancewatch.wordpress.com, a new blog tracking this whole phenomenon.  And look for some serious counter-attacks against Shariah-compliant finance in the coming months.  Our adversaries have planned on winning these battles without our fighting back.  Let’s make those best laid plans go awry.

CVF active researcher and writer “John O’Connor” offers this resource:

“Satellite Channel 767 is the home of INI (Inspiration Ministries) which runs a series called ‘What YOU Need to Know about Islam’ with news clips and clips of interviews with the likes of Robert Spencer & Bat  Yeor and various authors and Christian missionaries that were new to me.

Inspiration Ministries appears to be the brainchild of evangelical Christian David Cerrulo. I’m not a fan of TV preachers but Cerrulo  doesn’t come across as a hardline Bible thumper and the interviews and  news footage of Islamic terrorism are interesting. It’s actually quite  mind-blowing to hear people on TV discussing Islam in an informed way  that you usually only find on blogs. Some of the Christian missionaries interviewed are ex-Muslims so know what they’re talking about.”

[…]

This website is clearly for evangelical Christians, but even if you don’t fit that category these interviews might be of interest.  The speakers are all real experts.

For specific video segments from the series:

Interviews with Muslim apostate Faisal Malick:  interview 1 | interview 2 | interview 3

See also four interviews with Brigitte Gabriel starting here:

Three interviews with Walid Shoebat, here:

Two interviews with Zachariah Anani here:

H/T Islam in Europe for the video of the SIOE demonstration:

See the video of today’s Stop the Islamisation of Europe demonstration held in the Netherlands yesterday - http://www.at5.nl/media/at5nieuws_item.asp?newsid=32598

Islam in Europe reports:

About 80-100 people participated in a demonstration against the “Islamization of Europe” in Amsterdam, organized by Stop Islamization of Europe (SIOE). The group had expected about 300 people.

A counter-demonstration taking place at the same time attracted 30-40 people, organized by “Stop the witchunt against Muslims”. They gave out flyers and engaged demonstrators and passerbys in discussion.

The police was at hand to intervene, and reported that it was a calm protest.

The SIOE reports more like 200 people at the protest. Anders Gravers (SIAD) speech stated the purpose of the demonstration:Speech by Anders Gravers at the SIOE demonstration in Amsterdam:

I’m Anders Gravers, the founder of SIAD in Denmark and one of the organisers of SIOE.

First of all, I would like to thank Martin and Monique, organisers of SIOE Holland, for the great job of establishing the dutch SIOE chapter. In a very short time they have build up SIOE Nederland from nothing to one of the most active chapters of SIOE.

And a big thanks to all of you who are here today, who dare to stand up for the freedom of the european people.

More than 60 years ago, there was a generation who paid with their blood and their lives for the freedom we enjoy today. These brave men and women gave their lives for us. We have to ask ourselves today, did they die in vain?

Because our stupid politicians and all the political correct have now invited an idelogy that is absolutely unable to fit into our free european countries, witch are based on democracy and the right to express yourself in talk, writing, drawing and painting. In our western democracies we believe everybody is equal, no matter if you are a believer or a non-believer. We believe that women and men are equal. We also believe that everybody has the right to live in peace.
But this ideology called islam will not accept this freedom for all. They claim there is a difference between a believer and a non-believer. They also claim that women and men are not equal. They don’t accept that homoseksuals have the same rights as themselves. And furthermore, jews can no longer feel safe in Europe. The growing anti-semitism comes from islam. Dark clouds are once again hanging over Europe.

We have to put the line in the sand now and stand up for our precious democracies.
Now it’s our generations time to protect what WE have been given from our ancestors.

Let me finish with a quote from Edmund Burke:
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing!

We will update with photos when they’re available.

The liberation of Auschwitz:

Soon after liberation, surviving children of the Auschwitz camp walk out of the children’s barracks. Poland, after January 27, 1945.

From the web site of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
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Geert Wilders’ film on the Koran will be out in a few days - possibly in a few hours.

As we extend best wishes for him and his team, here’s the video of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
supporting his right to criticize the Koran.

Here’s his speech from August 2007, when he started this initiative, translated by Beila Rabinowitz of Militant Islam Monitor:

Enough is Enough: Ban the Koran

Geert Wilders opinion piece in the Volkskrant 8/8/07

The Koran is a facist book which incites violence, writes Geert Wilders. That is why this book, just like Mein Kampf, must be banned.

I have been proclaiming this for years: A moderate Islam does not exist. For those who don’t want to believe me: read the speech which the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci who alas, died last year held in New York on November 28th 2007 when she received a prize for her heroic resistance to Islamo facism and her struggle for freedom:

“A moderate Islam does not exist. It does not exist because there is no difference between Good Islam and Bad Islam. There is Islam and that it the end of it. Islam is the Koran, and nothing other than the Koran. And the Koran is the Mein Kampf of a religion that desires to eliminate others- non -Muslims-who are called infidel dogs, and inferior creatures. Read the Koran, that Mein Kampf, yet again. In whatever version and you will see that the evil which the sons of Allah against us and themselves has perpetrated comes from that book”. (Oriana Fallaci”The Force of Reason” post-script page 305 February 2006)

Ehsan Jami is one such infidel dog who had the courage to call the Prophet Mohammed a criminal and for referring to some of the strictures of the Koran as backwards and who got it into his head to stand up for other apostate dogs and even organized a committee for them. Allah finds that the death penalty is warranted for apostasy. Last Saturday that was almost a reality: the infidel Jami was beaten bloody by two Morrocans and one Somalian.

(Translators note: Ehsan Jami is a young Dutch munipal council member and is now living under guard in an undisclosed location after receiving scores of death threats after making critical remarks about Islam and Mohammed in a television interview. http://www.euro-islam.info/spip/article.php3?id_article=425 http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=1&story_id=42621)

Enough is enough. Let’s stop with the politically correct spin and hype. It is good that Jami now has protection and it is too bad it did not happen sooner, but that does not solve the core of the problem. The core of the problem is fascistic Islam, the sick ideology of Allah and Mohammed as it is set out in the Islamic Mein Kampf: the Koran. The texts in the Koran leave little to the imagination.

In various Sura’s Muslims are called upon to oppress, persecute, or kill Jews, Christians and others, believers and non -believers and to beat women and to rape and to use violence to implement a worldwide Islamist state. Numerous other Sura’s are used by Muslims to incite to death and destruction.

Ban that wretched book like Mein Kampf is banned!

In doing so send a signal to Jami’s attackers and other Islamist that the Koran never ever can be allowed to be used as an inspiration for violence. I am ashamed of the Dutch politicians. Their naïve and pathological striving for a utopian moderate Islam which will only bring our country hell and damnation. I am ashamed of the people inside and outside the Lower House who refuse to stop the Islamic invasion of Holland. I am ashamed for Dutch politicians who day in and day out accept the over representation of foreigners in illegality and criminality and have no answer for it.

The Hague is full of cowardly members. Fearful people who are born cowards and will die as cowards. They find and promote the idea that the Dutch culture is has its foundation in Jewish-Christian- Islamic -tradition. They award a general pardon to liars and criminals.

(Translators note: The Hague is the location of the Dutch parliament.Wilders also refers to a planned amnesy for 30,000 illegal immigrants http://wilders.web-log.nl/pvv/geert_in_de_media/index.html )

They look the other way when homosexuals are beaten up almost every day. Those who want to implement a system of shari’a interest.

(Translator’s note: A reference to the 19 year old Muslim who was just sentenced to jail for attacking homosexuals http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=1&story_id=42211 (note this article mentions the severity of the injuries but not that Muslim youth were behind the attack. Contrast this with the headline in the Dutch Elsevier magazine “Foreigners jailed for attacks on homosexuals” “Foreigners” being an obvious term for Muslim as the youth is named Hazim B. http://www.elsevier.nl/nieuws/laatste_24_uur/artikel/asp/artnr/163435/

Those who talk to the representatives of the terrorist group Hamas. Those who work for the dictatorial Morrocan king.

(Translator’s note: Wilders called for the scrapping of dual nationality after a Dutch/Morrocan parliamentarian spent time in her home country working on a Morrocan government project.)

Those who see the extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood as partners for discussion. Those who permit Muslim men to refuse to let their wives be treated by a male doctor. Those who couldn’t care less about the interests of the Dutch citizen and are working to transform the Netherlands into Netherlarabia as a province of the super state Eurabia.

I have had enough of Islam in Holland: Not one more Muslim immigrant should be let in. I have had enough of the reverence for Allah and Mohammed in the Netherlands: There should not be even one more mosque. I have had enough of the Koran in the Netherlands. Ban that wretched book.

Enough is enough.

UPDATE:

It appears that the EUBusiness article was a little premature - here’s the correction from the VB website, courtesy of Google translation:

Vlaams Belang performs talks on European cooperation

25.01.2008 14.51u - Today, on the initiative of the Austrian Freedom Party, convened a meeting in Vienna with MPs from the parties that belonged to the now disbanded ITS Group (identity, tradition, sovereignty) in the European parliament.
There were numerous cases and also discussed the possibility of a right-national umbrella organization forms were examined.

The chairman of the Austrian Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, said the desire for all European countries to establish new contacts with democratic right-wing parties and support each other in the fight against the politically correct establishment, in all these countries.

The Flemish interests took part in these discussions. The Flemish Interest is obviously willing to maintain close contact and the best relationships with like-minded parties abroad. At this time we can not commit to any form of European political parties. The whole thing is very premature. Europe imposes unreasonable because criteria for the formation of an overarching European political party, the ideological lines of political correctness to an unacceptable and undemocratic manner.

The preference of the Vlaams Belang is more to bilateral contacts with European geestesgenoten, or an umbrella party.

[UPDATE: Better translation below for above paragraph, H/T Oyvind Strommen]

[We prefer to have bilateral contacts with European friends in spirit, rather than taking part in an umbrella party. ]

There was a consensus reached on a number of cross-border principles, such as the opposition to the possible accession of Turkey to the EU and also opposed the Treaty of Lisbon, which is actually a new version of the European constitution was rejected.

Philip Claeys
MEP

Posted today at Gates of Vienna -

About the “Patriotic Party” by Baron Bodissey

The latest word, according to EU Business, is that a pan-European party has been formed by four political parties: Le Pen’s Front National of France, the Flemish independence party Vlaams Belang, the Bulgarian party Attaca, and the Austrian Freedom Party led by Heinz-Christian Strache.

This European-wide party has announced no platform or objectives to counter the Islamization of Europe, to oppose anti-Semitism, or to support Israel. It would be helpful if they were to make their positions on these issues clear. A detailed platform including all three of those objectives would be most welcome; it would demonstrate a policy leadership for all parties across the political spectrum.

From EU Business:

Right-wing nationalist leaders from four EU member states announced Friday in Vienna the creation of a broad new European “patriotic” party by November.

The leaders of Austria’s Freedom Party, France’s National Front, the Bulgarian Attaca party and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang told a press conference that they had agreed to set up the new party as a counter-balance to other political forces in Europe.

“We say: patriots of all the countries of Europe, unite! Because only together will we solve our problems,” Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache told journalists.

“European parties receive great benefits within the union and so we believe there is no reason nationalists shouldn’t also have a formation like the Socialists, the Christian Democrats, the liberals or the Greens,” the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen told AFP.

The announcement comes months after the demise of the barely one-year-old extreme right group in the European Parliament, “Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty” (ITS), to which several of the founders of the new party belonged.

[…]

Unlike a European parliamentary group, which according to EU law requires at least 20 deputies from five different states to exist, a party only needs members from seven states.

“Our goal is clear, we want more than 10 parties as members and ideally one party from each EU country,” Strache told journalists.

He said he and his partners were in talks with parties in several countries, including non-EU member states, but refused to give any names until decisions were finalised.

The new European party is expected to be set up on November 15.

Before the inevitable ton of bricks comes down on my head, I have to say this:
- - - - - - - - -
The Front National, the FPÖ and Attaca were not invited to the Counterjihad Brussels 2007 conference. They have not published policies that are specifically and publicly pro-Israel, they do not have a history of opposing Holocaust Denial and anti-Semitism, and they do not have a consistent history of anti-Islamization.

Vlaams Belang has all of these specific positions and did attend the conference.

In their dealings outside of Flanders and within EU the political labyrinth, VB is engaging in the same kinds of compromises and alliances that any political party has to make in order to survive and achieve electoral success. I don’t expect that all of their chosen allies will be palatable to me - but then again, I’m not trying to run a political party.

As long as Vlaams Belang continues to be a vigorous opponent of Islamization, a supporter of Israel, and a staunch denouncer of anti-Semitism, then I will continue to give it a favorable hearing.

Our primary mission here at Gates of Vienna is opposition to Islamization, with an emphasis on the incompatibility of sharia with constitutional law.

We also support Israel’s absolute right to exist as a Jewish state within defensible borders, and we oppose all forms of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism.

In other words, we stand with the Jews.

We also decry the massive genocides against Christians and other minorities in Muslim countries, the treatment of women under Islamic law, the violence and tyranny endemic to Muslim states, and all the other outrages and injustices perpetrated in the name of Islam.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Overt anti-Semitism and an ambivalence towards Islamism make some European political parties unacceptable allies for the Counterjihad. Vlaams Belang and others may find it expedient to build bridges to them, but the policies of such parties will keep us from supporting them.

Europe’s great misfortune over the last few decades has been the absolute anathema pronounced upon conservatives and the opponents of the EU by the ruling elites. The predictable result is that many worthy anti-jihad activists are being forced into the arms of the extreme right, since all other political groupings now consider them untouchable.

One of our jobs here is to make an ethically acceptable and broad-based case for the Counterjihad, and thereby ameliorate the pernicious effects of this European “cordon sanitaire”.

Just wait for the global financial meltdown from shariah compliant finance, which is truly a Trojan Horse entering western financial markets.

Perhaps Kerviel, the man who broke the second largest bank in France, is just a lone rogue trader. He has cost Societe Generale over 4 billion euros in what papers are referring to as a completely unmotivated trading scheme in which he made no profits.

Or, maybe this is a tactic to weaken Western financial institutions so they can be purchased much more cheaply (”rescued”) by outside investors - particularly sovereign wealth funds. The Islamist countries - Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia etc. - are the most active investors using sovereign wealth funds these days.

As to the repercussions…according to today’s Washington Post, shareholders from the U.S., Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland and the Neterlands filed lawsuits alleging fraud, breach of trust and receipt of stolen goods against Societe Generale.

If all these lawsuits emerge from a trifling 4 billion Euros, imagine the lawsuits that may be filed once the real material risks of Shariah finance are revealed, and the participating institutions are found to have failed to disclose - since the Shariah finance market exposure is closer to a trillion dollars.  As Citigroup is finding, the “rule of deep pockets” is ever with us, like death and taxes.

As the Financial Times writes:

On Monday morning, SocGen began to unload Mr Kerviel’s huge futures contracts. But the markets were moving against the bank. Investors in Asia and Europe were offloading equities. As SocGen attempted to sell, its losses mounted. By Wednesday evening, when it finally closed Mr Keviel’s positions, the loss had risen to €4.9bn.

Daniel Bouton, SocGen’s canny, long-serving chief executive, decided to look at ways of raising capital. After consulting with JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, Mr Bouton toyed with the idea of seeking fresh capital from a sovereign wealth investor. But ultimately they decided the best route was to launch a rights issue to raise €5.5bn.

On Thursday morning, SocGen announced the shocking news: one employee had put the future of one of France’s largest banks at risk.

The Financial Times notes that to avoid being taken over by sovereign wealth funds, SocGen is going to its own shareholders (and who might those be…)

SocGen’s failure is bound to add to scrutiny of banks. Mary Schapiro, chief executive office of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the US body overseeing broker-dealers, yesterday said: “It is quite surprising positions of that magnitude would not have been monitored much more closely in this era of enhanced risk management.”

SocGen joins the growing list of financial institutions seeking to raise fresh capital. Until now, this activity has been limited to large investment banks that have turned to sovereign wealth funds. But it was only a matter of time before a bank decided to turn to its own shareholders.

SocGen’s rights issue will have made this harder for other banks to contemplate.

And speaking of sovereign wealth funds, controlled by among others countries armed with petrodollars and Wahabism, even the IMF wants them more regulated…and the Saudis were protesting they need their secrecy, at the Davos conference occurring at exactly the same time as the SocGen meltdown:

The IMF’s move comes as countries with sovereign wealth funds and recipient states skirmished at the World Economic Forum in Davos over the need for a code of conduct for such state-owned investment funds.

The US Treasury and other advanced nations insist on the need for guidelines to cover the transparency of the funds and to prohibit aggressive behaviour by the funds as investors.

Lawrence Summers, the former US Treasury secretary, recognised that sovereign wealth funds had so far proved model investors but was baffled why, if they intended to continue to behave well, there was reluctance to sign a code of -conduct.

Speaking about a hypothetical and damaging piece of state-led pressure from a sovereign wealth fund, he said: “The argument, ‘We’ve never done x, but it would be the end of the world if we were to refuse to do x’ is not entirely reassuring for people concerned about x.”

But Mohamed Al-Jasser, vice-governor of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, the country’s central bank, replied that such statements implied that “the sovereign wealth funds are guilty until proven innocent”.

They ARE “guilty until proven innocent. ” Sovereign wealth funds represent the interests of national elites, not the market, and Islamist nations such as Saudi Arabia are imperialists looking to assert their supremacy over other countries.

How interesting to discover who was behind the fraud…stay tuned.

Saudi-financed private schools, and public teacher training programs, are established throughout the United States. The imposition of this “shariah compliant” education on American Muslims and American teachers most of whom are not Muslim continues, all with foreign money pouring into U.S. coffers unregulated and unmonitored.  Now even the Saudi princes are noting that they’re teaching Terrorism 101.  Of course, Nina Shea has been saying this - and proving it with study after study - for years.

H/T Sons of Pigs and Apes

Alarabiya (Saudi owned TV channel)

Translated from Arabic.

Saudi Prince Mohammad Al Abdallah Al Faisal called today, in an interview with Turki El Dakheil, famous Host for the popular Saudi Arabian (Arabiya channel) TV talk show Eda’at (enlightment), for “changing the education philosophy in Saudi Arabia”. Adding “our curriculum produces terrorists”.

Prince Al Faisal was the deputy Minister for education till he resigned in 1983.

“Education in Saudi Arabia suffer from a big problem, one day I went to the Minister of education Hassan El Sheikh, and told him ‘the religious books we teach are the books of Sheikh Mohamed Ben Abdel Wahab (the founder of - Wahabism) and we should change their interpretations and understanding for the student ” he told Al Dakheil.

He Continued, “I am not happy with the level and results of education in the Kingdom, and I personally sent my children after their middle school to study abroad .. Since we realized from experience that our curriculums produced terrorists who went and blew themselves up .. we have to find out how to get our students out of that path”.

[…]

Conclusion: Wahabism is the TRUE Islam.

According to a tacit agreement that sealed the power sharing in Saudi Arabia between the founder of the dynasty Ebn Saud and Mohamed ebn Abdel Wahab, the educational system has been in the grip of the Wahabi religious authority.

Mr. Bush and his administration can talk about the reform progress of the Saudi educational curriculum with all the optimism they want. As long as the Wahabi Islam is the prerequisite cornerstone of that curriculum, not only for Saudi’s consumption, but exported all over the world including in America’s madras’s and mosques, you can rest assured that we’ll never run out of suicide bombers. What more proof we need than today’s declarations from a high profile member of the royal family and a former deputy Minister of education.

Read it all - the analysis of Wahabism is particularly interesting.

A great piece yesterday by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, excoriating Rice and Bush for deciding Palestinian terrorism is, well, ok after all (H/T The Jerusalem Connection for bringing this to my connection, and they’re worth your time - subscribe here):

Death of the Bush Doctrine

The Bush Doctrine — born on Sept. 20, 2001, when President Bush bluntly warned the sponsors of violent jihad: “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists” — is dead. Its demise was announced by Condoleezza Rice last Friday.

The secretary of state was speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route with the president to Kuwait from Israel. She was explaining why the administration had abandoned the most fundamental condition of its support for Palestinian statehood - namely, an end to Palestinian terror. Rice’s explanation, recounted here by The Washington Times, was as striking for its candor as for its moral blindness:

“The ‘road map’ for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the ‘core issues’: the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the right of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel ’s border, and the future of Jerusalem.

Dry Bones Talkback Hamas Gaza”‘The reason that we haven’t really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status,’ Rice said. . . . What the US-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was ‘break that tight sequentiality. . . You don’t want people to get hung up on settlement activity or the fact that the Palestinians haven’t fully been able to deal with the terrorist infrastructure. . .’”

Thus the president who once insisted that a “Palestinian state will never be created by terror” now insists that a Palestinian state be created regardless of terror. Once the Bush administration championed a “road map” whose first and foremost requirement was that the Palestinians “declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism” and shut down “all official . . . incitement against Israel .” Now the administration says that Palestinian terrorism and incitement are nothing “to get hung up on.”[…]  read it all here…

A quick wrap-up of some recent info on the use of mosques as part of the radicalization process. Extremists take them over, radicalize them and then use those centers to spread demands for concessions from the host country…a little dawa here, a little financial jihad there, it adds up, pretty soon you’re talking real consolidation of power and infiltration of institutions…and too bad for the secular or reforming Muslims who came to the U.S. or Europe to get away from the bad guys. Not to mention for the rest of us…

1. UK:

Mosques in Britain are more extreme than in Iraq, according to the country’s deputy prime minister in the Daily Mail.  Dr Barham Salih claimed some mosques in Blackburn would be banned in Iraq for the extremist messages they preach.

He made his comments during a dinner party in Baghdad attended by Tory culture spokesman Tobias Ellwood.

The 41-year-old MP claimed Dr Salih said: “I am not surprised that you British are facing so many problems with extremists after what I saw in those mosques in Blackburn.

“What I saw would not be allowed here in Iraq. It would be illegal.”

Dr Salih, a Sunni Muslim, went to several mosques in Blackburn when he visited the town on the invitation of the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, in 2005.

Muslims make up about a quarter of the population of Blackburn where Dr Salih campaigned for Mr Straw in the runup to the general election.

Mr Ellwood said the comments made by Dr Salih at November’s dinner in Baghdad shocked him.

“I do not believe these comments can be dismissed out of hand,” he said.

“I was absolutely shocked. He went inside the mosques and said literature he saw would be illegal. He was quite clear.”

Mr Ellwood, who made the claims during a Westminster debate about terrorism, said: “The comments are only directed at a very small proportion of mosques in the UK. The vast majority of Muslims wouldn’t want to be labelled.”

Last night Muslim groups reacted with fury with what they saw as an attempt to smear them.

Salim Mulla, chairman of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, said: “We are going out of our way to bring the community together.

“Nobody is working harder than us at breaking down barriers.

“For Dr Salih to make these sort of comments is not very helpful at all. I don’t know where he’s coming from.

2. U.S.:

See the Mapping Sharia project, here at http://www.mappingsharia.us/.

They’re making significant progress. The first tranche of mosques have been investigated and the data analyzed according to the very detailed and prudent research protocol, and they’re on to the next group. The findings have been significant (understatement there). They’ll be going public with their findings soon - see the outline for this ongoing and important project here.

This investigation will require an extensive mapping of all the mosques and Islamic day schools in the US and to determine which ones teach or preach Islamic law, or Shari’a. Further, the mapping will scale the Shari’a threat by identifying to which school of jurisprudence it belongs, its historical and contemporary call for Jihad, and whether the Jihad includes violent Jihad against non-believers.

This investigation will also map the leadership of these Muslim organizations and their other affiliations. We will also attempt to uncover any related businesses used or run by the organizations as fronts for money laundering and other illicit activities.

Finally, we will examine and map any potential targets situated near these organizations, such as city, county, and federal government buildings, schools and universities, US military installations, major utility or infrastructure sites (i.e., nuclear installations, pipelines, water supply, etc.), and transportation hubs.

3. New York City Police Department:

Here’s that NYPD radicalization study from 2007, hard to find because of protests from CAIR and the submission to Islamists of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. See also the Mapping Sharia analysis of the report and this RAND study by Brian Jenkins, a highly regarded expert on terrorism. Both studies are an important first step in analyzing the radicalization process and how mosques play into it. The NYPD study is still limited by political correctness, focusing only on the role mosques play in fostering terrorism and avoiding the role they play in preventing integration into the political and cultural mainstream - but it’s a start:

Radicalization Incubators
Critically important to the process of radicalization are the different venues that provide the extremist fodder or fuel for radicalizing-venues, to which we refer to as radicalization incubators.” These incubators serve as radicalizing agents for those who have chosen to pursue radicalization. They become their pit stops, “hangouts,” and meeting places. Generally these locations, which together comprise the radical subculture of a community, are rife with extremist rhetoric. Though the locations can be mosques, more likely incubators include cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, nongovernmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores. While it is difficult to predict who will radicalize, these nodes are likely places where likeminded individuals will congregate as they move through the radicalization process.

4. Europe: the Cities Against Islamisation Charter (H/T Jihadwatch)

Robert Spencer of Jihadwatch received a memo from Wim Van Osselaer, who works in the Flemish parliament for the Vlaams Belang party, which stated:

I send you hereby the English text of the charter that was presented to the press by the participating parties. The BNP didn’t join and wasn’t present, simply because the party wasn’t invited. I send you also the URL of the weblog of Pieter Van Boxtel: http://groups.msn.com/pietervanboxel. Pieter is chairman of the Vlaams Belang group in the municipal council of Malle (look at http://www.malle.be/bestuur/gemeenteraad/samenstelling.aspx). Pieter is Flemish and … of Indonesian descent.

Here is the Cities Against Islamisation Charter:

Charter for “Cities against islamization”

By means of this charter the participating organizations lay the foundations of the connection of cities named “Cities against islamization.”

Conclusions

“Cities against islamization” concludes that since the renaissance the West in general and Europe in particular have renounced all religious dogma’s and replaced the standards resulting from them by standards and legal rules that are based on a multitude of sources like ancient classics, the Jewish-Christian values, humanism, the ideas of Enlightenment, nationalism, liberalism etc.

As a result of this evolution our civilization is now characterized by a respect for the fundamental rights and freedoms. Our civilization is moreover based on values like the separation of church and state, democracy, freedom of speech, equality of men and women etc.

On the other hand at the beginning of the 21st century West-European cities are confronted with substantial Islamic minorities, which are not in the least assimilated and which concentrate in constantly expanding ghettos. This is the result of a too lax immigration policy conducted by different authorities.

“Cities against islamization” concludes that the Islam is more of a social order rather than a religion. This social order is based on the Sharia (the Islamic religious laws, based on Koran and Hadith) and the Uma (the Islamic religious community), which is at odds with the entirety of values and standards, which are part of our European society.

“Cities against islamization” also concludes that at least a part of these Muslims prefers the Islamic divine laws to our civil laws. Within the Muslim population there is moreover an inclination towards radicalization which is expressed in a growing hostility to our western civilization and the values underlying it.

Mosques function like catalysts for the islamization of entire neighbourhoods, since they, as central authorities, emphasize a strict observance of Islam. In doing so they restrain the further integration of Muslim minorities.

Starting points

“Cities against Islamization” resists the multicultural ideology which results in the fact that West-European Muslims publicly live in accordance with their own values. That leads to the institutionalisation of this religion.

“Cities against islamization” resists the institutionalisation of Islam, the official recognition of Islam, the subsidizing of Islamic associations, Koran schools, imams etc. The institutionalisation of Islam will lead to the creation of an Islamic socio-political group which will slow down the integration of the Muslim community.

“Cities against Islamization” is opposed to concessions of the policy makers towards Islam which has for result that the Western values and standards are more and more suppressed in favour of Islamic customs, traditions and values, frequently not being compatible with our Western standards and way of life.

“Cities against Islamization” believes that the individual freedom of religion must be assured at all times - also when Islam is concerned. However freedom of religion cannot be an alibi for generalising or introducing undemocratic or discriminating customs or acts. “Cities Against Islamization” resists the introduction of Sharia law as a replacement for the European rules of law.

Initiatives

Islamization is not a local problem. It’s s a phenomenon taking place in almost all Western European countries and cities. The fast demographic increase of the Islamic population in the West threatens to result in an Islamic majority in a lot of Western European cities within a few decades.

The participating organisations engage themselves to coordinate their initiatives in the fight against the islamization, to organise demonstrations together and to mutually exchange information, with fighting the islamization of the Western European cities in a coordinated and better informed manner as a goal.

From National Review Online today -

Congress needs to hold hearings on this rapidly metastasizing scandal of Islamist penetration of national security offices throughout the government.

Read the entire article for Claudia Rosett’s masterful analysis on the scandal of the firing of national security expert Steve Coughlin, and Gordon England’s great shame - the infiltration throughout the Bush administration by the Muslim Brotherhood’s front organization.

(As an aside, I had been told by a fellow attendee about 6 months ago at Tawfik Hamid’s presentation at EPP, that in the U.S., few interagency meetings on Homeland Security policy or operations occur without a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood front groups in attendance. We hoped that might just be someone’s selective experience, but realized it might be the trend at least. Yesterday, I heard an identical statement about meetings with ministry officials in the UK, again specific to meetings on issues of terrorism, Islamisation and national security - that representatives of Islamist organizations are usually in attendance. )

This is what being colonized feels like, for both the UK and the US.

Congressional hearings are now mandatory, given Rosett’s research: the Hesham Islam scandal, like so many of the apparent infiltration scandals besetting this administration, shows how “political correctness” towards Islamists has eliminated any confidence in background investigations for sensitive jobs. The question isn’t whether this Hashem Islam security risk is England’s responsibility, but rather how far this scandal really spreads. We know similar problems are throughout the government, but given England’s close ties to General Dynamics and other primary military weapons system suppliers, should the possibility of contractor infiltration also be addressed?

This isn’t a Republican or Democrat issue - the problem occurred when both parties were in power. On enabling infiltration, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference that I can tell.

And now, Rosett’s research:

[…]

Who’s right? A request to the Defense Department press office to interview Coughlin runs straight into a brick wall. A press officer says that under terms of his not-quite-expired contract, Coughlin is “prohibited from speaking to the media.”

Hesham Islam appears to be under no such constraints. He gave an interview last year to ABC News, in which he talked about the hardships of being a Muslim in the military, saying that “Since 9/11, I no longer have a land line. I only work with my cell phone, because I got a lot of hate messages on the phone.”

For this article, however, Islam - according to a spokesman - was “not interested in an interview.” Nor would England’s office provide anyone willing to answer any detailed questions about Hesham Islam for direct attribution. Instead, after some discussion, an arrangement was finally offered in which a “Pentagon spokesman” would field questions, forward them to Islam, and relay any replies.

For more information, the spokesman recommended a profile of Islam, released October 15, 2007 by the Armed Forces Press Service under the headline: “Senior Advisor to Deputy Secretary Focuses on Relationship Building.” Still available on the Defense web site, the article includes an interview with Islam, some of the praise from England quoted above, and a photo of Islam, flashing a tight smile, seated in his shirtsleeves at his Pentagon desk, next to a bulletin board decked with diplomatic invitations.

But this Pentagon-endorsed profile raises more questions than it answers. It begins: “If Hesham Islam’s life story was translated into a screenplay - and it’s got all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster - the director would be hard-pressed to come up with a more compelling chain of events landing him as a top adviser to the deputy defense secretary.”

As told by Islam to the reporter, “The movie would open with Islam as a young boy growing up in Cairo, Egypt, huddling in terror as Israeli bombs came raining down, demolishing much of the building around him and his family.”

There’s one problem with this scene. As far as I have been able to discover, Israel during Hesham Islam’s entire lifetime has never bombed Cairo. Asked to explain this, the Pentagon spokesman duly conferred with Islam, and relayed to me by phone that Islam says this building-wrecking bombing raid took place during the 1967 Six-Day War. But as for details that might substantiate the when and where in Cairo of this graphic scene, Islam “Doesn’t remember. He was seven years old.”

It is of course possible that Islam was privy to a piece of history with which expert historians on the region are not acquainted. But if this tale is based solely on the unsubstantiated impressions of Islam as a seven-year-old, then what is it doing on the U.S. Defense Department website? Queries I have made to a number of experts in Tel Aviv, the U.S., and Cairo itself all get the same reply: It didn’t happen. According to Michael Oren, author of the extensively researched Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Israel during the Six-Day War struck the Cairo airport, but “Israel did not bomb any residential areas of Cairo.”

The profile continues: “Next would be the scene of the teenager who moves to Iraq when his Egyptian naval officer father is transferred to help establish the Arabian Gulf naval academy Islam would later attend.”

That family move to Iraq came as Saddam Hussein was consolidating his Baathist rule, though neither the Pentagon profile nor Hesham Islam’s Pentagon biography any makes mention of that context. In answer to questions, the Pentagon spokesman says Islam’s father was invited to Iraq by Saddam Hussein, but the spokesman doesn’t know when: “It was in 1971-1973 time frame.” Surely with Pentagon background checks, more exact information would be easily available? “It’s available,” says the spokesman, but “I don’t have his C.V. kind of thing.”

The profile goes on to describe young Hesham Islam as a “merchant mariner adrift for three days in the Arabian Sea after an Iranian torpedo sunk his 16,000-ton cargo ship, drowning all but Islam and four of his crewmates.”

That sounds memorable. But after more than a week of my repeated requests made by phone and e-mail, the Pentagon spokesman - despite being presumably in touch with Islam himself - was either unable or unwilling to provide such basic information as the name of the ship, or the date of its sinking. He just kept saying he was “looking into it.” But no answers.

Before I began the marathon requests for specific information, the spokesman had speculated earlier, based on conversations with Islam, that the ship might have been called the Ibn Khaldoon, which might have been registered to the Iraqi merchant marine, and might have sunk sometime in 1979. A check with the U.K.-based Lloyd’s Register turns up two cargo ships registered in Iraq during that time and under that name, but no record that either was ever sunk, either in the 1970s, the 1980s, or beyond. One is still in service; the other was broken up - and not by a torpedo - only a few years ago.

As for records of any incident fitting the generic description of a 16,000-ton cargo ship, under any flag, torpedoed by the Iranians and sunk in the Arabian Sea before Islam immigrated to the U.S. sometime in 1980 (the Pentagon spokesman can’t or won’t say exactly when in 1980), after searching news archives, shipping records, and consulting a number of naval historians, I have yet to come across anything that corroborates Islam’s Iranian-torpedo-in-the-Arabian-Sea story. There were ships sunk by the Iranians in 1980, as the Iran-Iraq war broke out - but that was happening in the Gulf, around the Shatt-al-Arab, on the other side of the Straits of Hormuz, hundreds of miles from the Arabian Sea.

It is of course possible that this torpedoing, ship sinking, and rescue took place exactly as described in the Defense profile. But having showcased the scene for public consumption, why won’t Gordon England’s office provide basic factual information that could confirm this story? Does Hesham Islam not remember that, either? Does no one at Defense have it on file?

In 1980, according to the profile, Islam immigrated to the U.S. to get married, being suddenly love-smitten after receiving a photo of an American pen pal with whom he had been corresponding sight-unseen for more than three years. For the next five years he worked in what the spokesman describes as the “food services” industry. In 1985 he joined the Navy as an electronics technician in the submarine service. According to his Pentagon biography, he went on to serve on a number of ships, in largely technical and operational posts, before hooking up with Gordon England and finally arriving at his current job in the Pentagon.

So, what qualifies Islam to serve as an adviser to whom Gordon England listens all the time, and whose advice England takes? According to Kevin Wensing, England’s pubic-affairs aide: “Mr. Islam brings 20 years of experience in the U.S. Navy and international relations to his current assignment.”

This includes an M.A. in national-security affairs, awarded in 1992 at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. For this degree, Islam wrote a 139-page thesis about the Middle East, entitled “Roots of Regional Ambition.” In it, he devoted dozens of pages to lambasting Israel, and the influence of American Jews on U.S. politics. He deplored “Israeli activities which have detrimentally affected U.S. objectives but which have continued with impunity.” He argued that U.S. support for Israel “has negatively affected the attainment of U.S. objectives in the Middle East.” He blamed the influence of American Jews on U.S. policy for a host of ills, ranging from Arab “retaliation” against Americans, to jobs lost overseas, to hampering sales of “defensive arms to friendly Arab states.”

Whether Gordon England (or Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for that matter) considers such views a relevant qualification for Islam’s current duties is unclear. But what’s emerging at the Pentagon is a landscape in which Stephen Coughlin’s insistence on crafting doctrine based not on politically correct assumptions, but on facts, is apparently deemed a bridge too far. Meanwhile, from the office of Deputy Secretary England, Hesham Islam continues his bridge building. The question isn’t just whom to believe, but who’s running this show?

From the Asian News: (H/T Europenews, one of the best sites for anti-Islamisation info on the web)

New Islamic account for Lloyds

24/ 1/2008

LLOYDS TSB has launched a new bank account enabling Muslims to transfer money around the world without breaking the rules of Islam.

The group claimed its Islamic Nostro Account was the first of its kind to be offered by a mainstream Western bank.

A Nostro account, complying with Shariah law, does not pay interest on money and does not offer an overdraft facility and it does not allow any of the funds held to be invested in industries - such as alcohol and gambling - which are prohibited under the rules of the faith.

CEO Corporate Banking at Lloyds TSB, Diana Brightmore-Armour, said: “Lloyds TSB has established itself as one of the leading providers of Islamic finance across the UK. But we are now seeing a rising demand, from Muslim businesses and personal customers, for Islamic banking across borders.

“We’ve designed this account to help the growing number of Islamic banks across the world, which deal with our customers’ transactions. We’re providing the missing link in the chain, so now any person or business receiving payments from abroad into their own Islamic account knows the money will be dealt with according to Islamic law, from start to finish.”

Head of Operations, Bank of London and The Middle East plc, Simon Ratcliff, said: “This account is a real milestone for banks like ours and means we can give our customers reassurance that their money is being dealt with according to Islamic law, from the moment it leaves their account to the moment it reaches its destination.”

The account adds to a suite of Islamic products and services Lloyds TSB has launched in the past two years, as it spearheads London’s drive to become a global centre for Islamic Finance. Last year, the bank launched a series of products including a current account, business and corporate account, mortgage and investment fund - each designed according to the principles of Islamic law.

The global Islamic financial services market is now worth an estimated $480 billion - and is growing at almost 15 per cent a year. As the range of Shariah compliant products and services widens, with developments such as the Nostro account, the market is expected to grow even further.

The authoritative voice, Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post’s deputy managing editor and Center for Security Policy Middle East affairs analyst, speaking in California earlier this week:

Video here.

Muslims hate pigs–real ones, digital images, statues, etc.

Once again in the UK, "The Three Little Pigs" (an award-winning version!) has been deemed offensive, as has the statue of a boar.

Read the details at Always On Watch.

Listen to The Gathering Storm Radio Show, which WC and I cohost. The show broadcasts live every Friday for one hour at noon, Pacific Time.

The call-in number is (646) 915-9870.

Callers welcome!

Friday, January 25: We have three guests scheduled for this week: Cinnamon Stillwell of Campus Watch, and bloggers Elmer’s Brother and Nanc.
(more…)

Blogger Foehammer, of the site Foehammer’s Anvil, has effectively been silenced, right here in the United States.

Read the details HERE.

The bungling New Labour Administration has done it again and lost personal data, this time the victims are 600,000 members and potential members of the British armed forces. In this era of ‘anti-Islamic’ activity such a loss is a very dangerous development. For instance what happens if ‘anti-Islamic’ groups such as Al-Quaeda get their hands on this information? Would this help them to infiltrate the British armed forces or to threaten, bribe or otherwise attack serving soldiers? Such a situation would give a great boost to the ‘anti-Islamic’ desire to institute Sharia Law and make Britain part of a global Caliphate.

Is this part of a deliberate Government effort to undermine our own armed forces. First they send our boys out on a fools errand to the sands of Iraq and now this! I am sure that this will provide our armed forces which are combating the ‘anti-Islamic’ insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan a real boost. It is a good job that they are not also fighting the ‘anti-Islamic regime’ that has held power in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Perhaps the New Labour propaganda machine can invent some newspeak to transform their incompetence into something positive that can then be transmitted to the populace via its Ministry of Truth (also know as the BBC). How about ‘Datareallocation’?

Listen to The Gathering Storm Radio Show, which WC and I cohost. The show broadcasts live every Friday for one hour at noon, Pacific Time.

The call-in number is (646) 915-9870.

Callers welcome!

Friday, January 18: SPECIAL SHOW — 120 minutes!

This week we have four guests scheduled: Ilana Freedman, Brigitte Gabriel, Blogger Lionheart, and Lee Kaplan.
(more…)

The following video, about seven minutes in length, comes from this January 13, 2008 posting at Atlas Shrugs:

YouTube link

Some context about that video: (more…)