Saud Abdulaziz bin Nasser al Saud

"A SAUDI prince who was jailed yesterday for a minimum of 20 years for murdering his manservant could use his royal connections to be transferred home much sooner.

...

An analyst close to the Saudis said that although al Saud's homosexuality was an embarrassment, the authorities were likely to make diplomatic moves to bring him home.

"His father [Prince Abdulaziz] is very well respected, the family is close to the king," said the source. "It is very sensitive. They will do this for his father, not for [him]."

The source said the authorities were likely to wait for several years before recommending a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) with Britain as part of the battle against terrorism.

Bandar Abdulaziz

Britain has PTAs with other states, allowing foreign prisoners to finish their sentences abroad and Britons jailed abroad to return home.

The Saudi source said: "If it is still the wish of the father and the king, the prince will be bought home. It will be very quiet."

"A Saudi prince who strangled and beat his servant to death at the culmination of a campaign of 'sadistic' abuse was jailed for life today and told that 'no one in this country is above the law'.

Saud Abdulaziz bin Nasser al Saud, a grandson of the billionaire king of Saudi Arabia, was ordered to serve a minimum of 20 years for murdering Bandar Abdulaziz in a 'brutal' assault at their five-star hotel earlier this year.

...Sentencing him today, Mr Justice Bean said: "It is very unusual for a prince to be in the dock on a murder charge. No one in this country is above the law.

"It would be wrong for me to sentence you either more severely or more leniently because of your membership of the Saudi royal family."

The judge said that while he could not be sure whether Saud had intended to kill Abdulaziz, "I think the most likely explanation is that you could not care less whether you killed him or not"."

The Islamic Development Bank was set up in the 1973 by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a major special-interest group composed of 57 Muslim-majority countries (it is in fact the second-largest international organisation in the world after the UN), which, despite its stated aim of ‘promoting Islamic values’ seems to do little other than make repeated attempts to ban criticism of Islam via its placemen on the UN Human Rights Council. (My Note: perhaps that's their way of promoting Islamic values...).

Those who visit the Arabic countries of the Persian Gulf can easily recognize the elevation of sectarian tension between the Muslims of Sunni tradition and the Muslims of Shiaa tradition. It is the era of strife among Shiaa and Sunni. The Sunnis are the majority in the Gulf, and other Arab countries as well, while the Shiaas are the second largest denomination of Islam in the region; they are even the majority in some Arab countries such as Iraq and Bahrain.

The Sunnis are backed by their religious head, Saudi Arabia lead by the Wahhabist conservative regime (Wahhabism is a particular orientation within Salafism). The Shiaas are influenced by their Shiaa-Iconic regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Mullahs regime that launched “The Shiaa Revival” with its Iranian Revolution three decades ago. Iran is now accused of imposing its political and religious agenda on non-Iranian Shiaas, causing conflict in their own countries, and also influencing Sunnis as well.

Throughout the Arabian Gulf countries, one phenomenon is found: Imams are loudly swearing to – both inside and outside their mosques – the fundamental basics of the Shiaa tradition. At the same time, many books have recently been released that are against the Shiaa tradition.Those books are freely available to the public. An analyst from the region told me in confidence that this phenomenon is a “Wahabist invasion of the Gulf countries”. The Sunnis have started to call the Shiaas as rawafid (Rejectionists and perhaps dissidents) The Shiaa have started to call the Sunni as Nawasib (Have intentional hostility against Imam Ali).These words are derogatory, stereotypical, and highly provocative.

"The “virus” of Saudi-financed Wahhabi radicalism has “destroyed every chance” for the development of European Islam, according to a leading Muslim theologian from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Professor Resid Hafizovic of the Sarajevo Faculty of Islamic Studies, in an interview with the Bosnian secularist daily Oslobodjenje (Liberation), condemns Wahhabism as “a new plague,” promoted by “Muslim puritans and perpetual world fixers.”

He chastises the radicals as “unschooled, uneducated, confused people, who forbid their own children, for example, to study biology in school.” He describes the followers of the Saudi state sect as “a movement unsatisfied with and intolerant of everything which does not fit its ideological views, and which therefore is often predisposed to the methods of murderous ideologies that use any means to achieve their goals.”

Twelve Filipinos and a Catholic priest have been released on bail in Riyadh after being arrested at a rest house in the city’s Rawdah district last Friday. The arrests followed a raid by members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice on the premises, where 150 expatriates were said to have attended a Catholic mass.

A source told Arab News that only the priest and the 12 Filipinos were arrested for allegedly being the organizers and leaders of the group while the others were let go because they could not all be accommodated at the police station.

“They were charged with proselytizing,” confirmed Ezzedin H. Tago, chargé d'affaires at the Philippine Embassy in Riyadh.

...as some analysts pointed out from the very beginning, there were serious reasons to question this assumption and its utility as a guide to policy. On the one hand, Iran’s brand of Islam had relatively few adherents in the post-Soviet states (only Azerbaijan had a Shiite majority) and Iran’s radicalism put off far more people there than it attracted.

And on the other, Turkey was never as secular as many in the West had assumed and has become less so with each passing year, and Turks because of their linguistic and cultural ties with five of the six Muslim majority former Soviet republics have enjoyed an influence there, on religion as well as on other matters, far greater than Iran.

In the 1990s, for example, Muslims in the post-Soviet states, including the Russian Federation, often travelled to Turkey either to study in medrassahs there or a way station on their route to Muslim educational institutions in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, including Afghanistan and Pakistan. Almost none of these people went to or through Iran.

And both the Turkish government and Turkish Muslim groups not only provided scholarship assistance to these people and religious literature for those back in the former Soviet republics but also provided enormous funds for the construction of mosques and religious schools in these countries, far more than Iran did.

One result of this difference is that the largest and most prominent mosque in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku was built by the Turks and one of the largest commercial facilities was the Bank of Iran, precisely the opposite of what Western governments and experts had expected and predicted.

Today brought two new reports which suggest that Turkey continue to play a far greater role in the rebirth of Islam in the former Soviet republics, including the Russian Federation. In the first, Gidayat Orudzhev, the chairman of the Azerbaijani State Committee on Work with Religious Structures, presented a report on foreign financing of mosques in that country.

According to Orudzhev, Kuwait has built the most, 71, but Turkey is in second place with 21, while Saudi Arabia has financed only one. He did not mention Iran’s role in this regard, but in the last decade at least, it has certainly been significantly smaller of that of Turkey and Turkish groups however much Iran has tried.

The second report highlights Turkey’s role among Muslims in the unstable North Caucasus republics of the Russian Federation. This week, a group of Turkish Muslim leaders and businessmen visited Ingushetia along with Bekir Gerek, the counselor for religious affairs of the Turkish embassy in Moscow.

The Turkish group was received by Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the head of the republic, who discussed with them the building of a new mosque in the republic capital, Magas, something that the Muslims of that republic have long sought. The Turks promised to fund the construction of the mosque as “a gift” to the Ingush Muslims.

The two sides also discussed the possibility of young Ingush receiving Muslim higher education in Turkey, something Gerek and his Turkish colleagues said they backed and would be happy to take full responsibility for funding, something that will make such training especially attractive given the high level of unemployment in Ingushetia.

The ringleader of the alleged illegal Bulgarian branch of the extremist Al Waqf al Islami Foundaton is the Imam from the village of Sarnitsa, Saud Muutlu, according to the Prosecutor's Office in the southern city of Pazardzhik.

The Imam and people believed to be his accomplices have been closely followed and monitored in the last two years, including with special surveillance devices.

According to the Prosecutor, the Bulgarian radical Islam branch has been founded in Istanbul. The pre-trial proceedings against an unknown perpetrator date from the beginning of 2009.

The organization has a plan to convert Bulgaria to Islam and is financed from Saudi Arabia via Turkey while the funds are transferred through illegal channels.

Saud Muutlu has a circle of lecturers, each paid EUR 300 a month. The organization also has a program for girls' education and its lecturers are paid EUR 200 a month. The Foundation has cells in the southern city of Blagoevgrad, the second largest city of Plovdiv and the capital Sofia. Special people monitor the upbringing and education of Bulgarian Muslim children round-the-clock.

The name of the Foundation means Foundation for Assisting the Good Understanding of Islam.

According to its teaching every child is born a Muslim and then parents make if an infidel, a practice that must be halted.

The probe of the seized literature is ongoing, but the investigation says they have serious reasons to believe the organization is a threat to Bulgaria's national security.

The Al Waqf al Islami Foundation was established in the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands and it is believed to be financed by extremist Muslim circles from Saudi Arabia.

Its headquarters were closed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US, when the Dutch authorities discovered ties between the Foundation and the perpetrators of the attacks.

"According to the figures of our intelligence agency we have some 3,000 Wahhabi followers in Bosnia, but that does not mean they are all terrorists," Bosnian Security Minister Sadik Ahmetovic said.

"However we cannot exclude that there are individuals among them ... who could at a certain point commit terrorist acts," he added, insisting that Bosnia's police have the capacity to deal with the menace.

Bosnian Muslims, some 40 percent of a population estimated at 3.8 million, are generally a moderate Sunni community.

During the bloody 1992-95 inter-ethnic war a number of foreign Islamic fighters joined forces with the Bosnian Muslim army. They introduced Wahhabism, also referred to as Salafism, to Bosnia and built a small following.

Currently there are some twenty radical Islamic groups in Bosnia, estimates Ahmet Alibasic, a professor of the faculty of Islamic sciences at the University of Sarajevo.

Seven suspected Islamic radicals were detained in February in Gornja Maoca, a remote northeastern hamlet seen as a key location for Bosnian followers of Wahhabism.

The men were accused of "endangering the territorial integrity" of Bosnia and confined to house arrest but have not been formally charged. 

Contacted through an intermediary, the leader of Gornja Maoca's Salafist community refused to talk to AFP. The imam who reads the important Friday prayers at Sarajevo's Saudi-funded King Fahd Mosque, known to attract Salafists, also refused to comment for this article.

The Economist:

As they struggled from the wreckage, poor Muslim congregations came to depend on foreign charities for help rebuilding their mosques, whose numbers have risen tenfold to around 250 today, says Bjorn Blengsi, an anthropologist. They also became receptive to imported versions of Islam, which tend to be stricter than the traditionally relaxed local variety. Agnès de Féo, another anthropologist and author of “L’Islam au Cambodge et au Vietnam” says both Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia and Tablighi Jemaat from India are gaining adherents.

Nothing wrong with that, perhaps. Most Islamic charities teach the faith and help the poor. But not, alas, all. In one much-publicised incident in 2002, according to the American government, a local member of the Kuwaiti-based Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS) helped an Indonesian fugitive, Riduan Isamuddin (alias Hambali), the mastermind behind the nightclub bombings in Bali. Hambali, who is now in prison in Guantánamo Bay, reportedly said he had hoped to bomb the American and British embassies in Phnom Penh and to use Cambodia as a base for terrorist operations throughout South-East Asia. RIHS, which has been cleared of links with terrorism by Kuwait’s government, remains active in Cambodia. A local affiliate, the Kuwait-Cambodia Islamic Cultural Training Centre, recently met the president of parliament.

The prospect of Iran marrying its arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles with unconventional warheads – perhaps, in time, nuclear warheads – is the possible threat they most fear.

Hence the United Arab Emirates wants to buy the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defence system, designed to guard against a missile attack. The country is also investing in weaponry produced by European companies: the UAE is due to buy up to 80 Rafale jet fighters, built by Dassault of France.

As well as dealing with any threat from Iran, the Gulf states are also trying to broaden their military capabilities. Saudi Arabia wants equipment designed for counter-insurgency, following its experience this year in trying to combat Houthi Shia rebels based in neighbouring Yemen.

...“The clear winner from the recent arms sales agreements is Boeing, which has been struggling to keep a toehold in the fighter market as the new generation of fighters are being built by Lockheed Martin,” he said. Raytheon also stands to gain from the investment in advanced missile defence technology, added Mr Sharp.

US and European defence companies have recognised the Middle East as a crucial source of future sales, especially as the UK plans to cut its defence budget by at least 10 per cent over the next five years and the US seeks to save $100bn in the same period.

Well-informed Saudi sources have confirmed to the “Beirut Observer” that the delay of Lebanon’s PM return to Beirut came in response to advice by Saudi officials. The Saudis are extremely concerned in regards to information became available to them indicating that an imminent Hezbollah coup is in on the horizon. The Saudis are fearful that Hezbollah’s threats are not mere political rhetoric this time. The Iranian-armed militia has set all the needed logistic preparations for the coup and is only waiting for the zero hour.

According to the report, Hezbollah’s planned coup will take a camouflaged cover of civilian protection this time. But the reality on the ground is that it will not be different from Hezbollah’s bloody and cruel invasion of Western Sunni Beirut and Druze Mount Lebanon in May 2008. The coup will be initiated by putting government officials under house arrest. This will include Lebanon’s PM, Saad Al Hariri, General prosecutor Said Mirza, Internal Security Forces General Director General Ashraf Rifi as well as many other officials and politicians. Sources said that Information Branch President Colonel Wesam Hassan will be spared from house arrest in the early hours of the coup.

The report went on to conclude that at the present time the centre of attention is a scheduled visit by a Saudi envoy to Damascus today and on the results of his talks with Syrian officials. The Saudi mission to Syria will focus on the current volatile situation in Lebanon, the avoidance of bloodshed, strife and and the repetition of what happened on May 2008. The Saudis fear that the impact of any military coup executed by Hezbollah in Lebanon will spread chaos over the entire region.

Image via Wikipedia. Young Saudi Arabian woman wearing Islamic clothing, as required by Sharia.

Saudi Arabian women's rights activist Wajeeha Alhuwaider has called for the political leadership in the country to abolish rules granting male authority over women, said Al Jazeera's website, which stressed the controversy that the request has created.

did you know that Muslims discovered America? Or that Jerusalem is an Arab city? That's just some of the "history" that students in America's K-12 classrooms have been taught in recent years--with the help of taxpayer money.

A new report by the non-profit Institute for Jewish and Community Research finds that American high school and elementary textbooks contain countless inaccuracies about Christianity, Judaism, Israel and the Middle East.

The Institute examined 28 of the most widely-used history, geography and social studies textbooks in America. It found at least 500 errors.

One book ignored the Jewish roots of Christianity, saying the faith was founded by a "young Palestinian" named Jesus.

Another stated as fact that the Koran was revealed to Mohammed from God.

Yet another said ancient Jewish civilization contributed "very little" to to the arts and sciences.

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (USA-Ret.), author of Endless War, does not want to belittle Iran's threat, but he believes there is a far more dangerous Islamic enemy that the United States is doing virtually nothing about.

"As far as I'm concerned, our number-one enemy is Saudi Arabia -- period," he contends. "Saudi royal princes are still funding terror. Certainly Saudi Arabia still has the goal of a global caliphate; they just differ from al-Qaeda on means, not the ends.

"But Saudi Arabia, the most religiously repressive state in the world, is allowed to fund up to 80 percent of North American mosques and mullahs. Now how can we allow a religiously oppressive state that allows not one Christian church or synagogue on its soil, how can we allow them to dictate what isn't Islam in North America?" the retired Army officer wonders.

He notes that those Saudi-funded mosques are converting American citizens into radical Muslims.

Image via Wikipedia

According to the rights organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), present at the Re:publica digital media conference in Berlin, about 120 bloggers and online reporters are currently in jail because of their work.

More than half of them are imprisoned in China, one of the countries most criticized for its rigid online censorship. Last month, RSF welcomed Google's decision to stop censoring its Chinese language search engine and to move its operations to Hong Kong.

"Companies who obey the demands of oppressive regimes are accomplices to censorship," said Lucie Morillon, the head of Reporters Without Borders' new media desk. "They are helping to silence basically those people who want to express dissident views. They are helping regimes to stay in place."

Lucie Morillon, head of the New Media desk at Reporters Without Borders talks about internet censorship at Re:publica conference Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Reporters Without Borders' Lucie Morillon, says many companies help state censorsMorillon hopes that other major international players follow Google's lead, especially Yahoo, which has a history of collaborating with the Chinese authorities. In 2005 it handed over information that resulted in the imprisonment of a Chinese activist for 10 years.

In recent weeks more allegations against Yahoo have surfaced. Morillon said the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China reported "13 cases of foreign reporters whose accounts have been hacked."

...In 2009, more than 60 countries experienced some form of internet censorship, according to Reporters without Borders. In March, RSF published a list of 12 so-called "enemies of the Internet," which are countries that seriously violate their citizens' free speech online.

Apart from China and Iran, the list also includes Saudi Arabia, Burma, Iran, Uzbekistan, Syria, Cuba and Egypt, who use a range of measures from Internet filtering and blocking Web sites, to imprisoning bloggers and journalists.

With 70 million people writing over 700,000 blogs, Iran has a strong Internet presence. Twenty-seven-year-old Farnaz Seifi, was one of the first Iranian women to start her own blog seven years ago. She worked for many years as a women's rights activist and journalist in reformist newspapers, which were shut down. Seifi now lives in the Netherlands.

"Iranian cyber army" hacked Twitter last year

Seifi has noticed the Iranian government's increasingly sophisticated range of strategies to suppress freedom of speech, including using blogs.

"Three years ago suddenly we had this huge wave of Muslim bloggers, very religious ones, very loyal to the Islamic Republic. And they are working for spreading the propaganda of the Islamic Republic regime," she said. "So it shows that the government of Iran thought, 'If we want to control them, we need to be active in what we are doing as well and spreading our own propaganda'."

Notice the list, don't you? Islamic theocracies or communist/socialist dictatorships.I miss North Korea, but for the rest, not really surprising at all!!