I suppose the politically-correct term is angry Muslims, but it doesn't fly phonetically and I need not worry about offending anyone. They are only Muslim.
Besides, it seems like a timely post even regarding the big anniversary on Friday.
"Tens of thousands in Malaysia demand prime minister’s resignation" by Eileen Ng Associated Press August 30, 2015
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Tens of thousands of Malaysians wearing yellow T-shirts and blowing horns defiantly held a major rally in the capital Saturday to demand the resignation of embattled Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Yellow shirts??
What, Thailand helping foment a coup in Malaysia?
Thai police seize explosives in Bangkok bombing investigation
Second arrest made in Bangkok shrine bombing
"Bangkok Bombing Investigation Becomes Even Murkier" Grey Wolves using Uighurs like Israel uses MEK. -- xymphora
From my prop pre$$ it looks like Thailand knows this.
"The Aug. 17 bombing of the Erawan Shrine was connected to the political grievances of Uighurs, a Turkic, mostly Muslim people. Uighurs in Xinjiang say they are oppressed by the ethnic Han, who dominate China. More specifically, the involvement of a Xinjiang resident would buttress the argument, which has been widely repeated in the local news media, that the attack may have been revenge for Thailand’s repatriation to China of more than 100 Uighurs in July. Much remained uncertain, however, and the investigation of the bombing has been plagued by a number of false leads, but if the bombing proves to be connected to the repatriation, the military government could be criticized for a different reason — that it had jeopardized the safety of the country. The military seized control from a democratically elected government last year, saying that it would keep Thailand safe from political turmoil and violence. Thailand’s failure to adequately secure its borders has been acknowledged by some officials. The country has long been known as a destination for criminals on the lam, who take advantage of its lax law enforcement to hide, sometimes for decades. Periodic attempts to remedy this situation have foundered. If confirmed...."
Bad Thailand, and big IF (and there is the confirmation).
"Thai police said Saturday that they are looking for a 10th suspect in last month’s bombing of a landmark in central Bangkok that killed 20 people. Authorities will seek an arrest warrant soon for a man who shared an apartment with a suspect who was arrested a week ago when a police raid found bomb-making materials in his room (AP).... Thailand’s military-backed Legislature, known as the National Reform Council [and] appointed by the junta, on Sunday rejected an unpopular draft of a new constitution, delaying a return to democracy after a coup last year. The junta-picked drafters had hoped the proposed charter would move the Southeast Asian country past almost a decade of political conflicts, but it was met with strong opposition on almost all sides of the political divide."
Did you catch that (junta twice)?
*****************
Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who stepped down in 2003 after 22 years in power, added momentum to the rally when he made a surprise brief appearance in the city late Saturday with his wife to loud cheers from the crowd, telling protesters to ‘‘carry on.’’
Yeah, he's the guy who came under criticism at the Islamic Conference for calling out the Jew World Order, even as he enabled it as a U.S. ally.
So are Malaysians looking to remove another U.S. puppet, or is Najib being removed because he stepped out of line?
Najib has been fighting for political survival after leaked documents in July showed he received about $700 million in his private accounts from entities linked to indebted state fund 1MDB. He later said the money was a donation from the Middle East, and fired his critical deputy, four other Cabinet members, and the attorney general investigating him....
Yeah, $omehow looting never seems to go over well with suffering populations in poverty. They kinda get mad (except here in Amurka; gotta get Inside Edition on the tube to see what stars took a shit today).
A nation of 30 million, Malaysia is predominantly Malay Muslim with significant Chinese and Indian minorities. Its ambitions to rise from a middle income to a developed nation this decade have been stymied by slow-paced reforms and Najib’s rising authoritarianism.
I certainly take that as the agenda-pushing press and mouthpiece souring on the guy.
Concerns about the political scandal partly contributed to the Malaysian currency plunging to a 17-year low earlier this month.
A-ha! Important! Bankers behind the scenes, removing regimes by destroying economies. If that fails, it's sanctions and military action (if needed).
Support for Najib’s National Front has eroded in the last two general elections. It won in 2013, but lost the popular vote for the first time to an opposition alliance....
So the people have soured on him?
Worried that authorities may jam communications, more than 41,000 Malaysians have downloaded FireChat — the smartphone application that allows users nearby to communicate with one another when the Internet is down and which powered last year’s Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, said developer Open Garden....
Aaaaaaaaaaah!
That was a U.S. destabilization effort, and they just tipped their hand in Malaysia!
--more--"
"Malaysian leader scoffs at protests" Associated Press August 31, 2015
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Embattled Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak on Sunday ridiculed a huge two-day rally that brought together tens of thousands of yellow-shirted protesters demanding his resignation over a financial scandal.
A large crowd of protesters camped overnight on the streets of Kuala Lumpur wearing yellow shirts of the Bersih movement — a coalition for clean and fair elections — even after authorities blocked the organizer’s website and banned yellow attire and the group’s logo.
Najib has been fighting for political survival after leaked documents in July showed he received some $700 million in his private accounts from entities linked to a state fund. He later said the money was a donation from the Middle East and fired a close deputy, four other Cabinet members, and the attorney general investigating him.
Police estimated the crowd size at 35,000, but Bersih said it swelled to 300,000 on Sunday from 200,000 on Saturday.
Najib has slammed the protests for tarnishing Malaysia’s image and dismissed their size.
‘‘What is 20,000? We can gather hundreds of thousands,’’ he was quoted as saying by local media at a rural event in a northern state. ‘‘The rest of the Malaysian population is with the government.’’
In his National Day message late Sunday, Najib said the government rejected street protests, saying they can disrupt public order and are not the right way to show unhappiness in a democratic country. They ‘‘reflected a shallow mind and poor national spirit,’’ he said. Najib also vowed not to bow to pressure. “Once the sails have been set, once the anchor has been raised, the captain and his crew would never change course,’’ he said.
He's got to go, doesn't matter.
The rally was peaceful Saturday and was scheduled to last until midnight Sunday to usher in Malaysia’s 58th National Day.
Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has been spearheading calls for Najib’s resignation, appeared at the rally with his wife for a second day, telling protesters that people power was needed to remove Najib and return the rule of law.
Then man behind the scenes and at the bottom of it all?
--more--"
Related:
"Until the wing flap washed ashore July 30 on the French island of Reunion, investigators had not found a single physical clue linked to the missing plane, despite a massive air and sea search. Officials believe it crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, killing everyone aboard, but they are unsure of the cause."
What bull. They searched and searched and couldn't find anything, and they come up with a wing flap that floated across the Indian Ocean and landed off the coast of East Africa?
I'll always believe that the plane was hijacked and diverted, it's passengers executed, and then it was dumped in a field in eastern Ukraine.
Thankfully mad Muslims can never reach Boston:
"An imam of fiery words and a fatherly presence; Some say imam should temper his speech, but he says he must not" by Lisa Wangsness and Shelley Murphy Globe Staff August 30, 2015
Uh-oh.
This grandfatherly figure is Imam Jeconiah Abdullah Taalib Faaruuq, who leapt to public attention in June when he accused the Boston police and FBI of murdering a young man who allegedly was an Islamic State sympathizer and lunged at police with a military-style knife.
I keep saying I'll get around to that..... maybe this week.
It was hardly surprising coming from the 68-year-old firebrand. His fiery rhetoric and defense of two convicted terrorists have drawn the attention of the FBI and prompted critics to pressure Northeastern University to dismiss him as its volunteer Muslim chaplain.
A former doo-wop singer and self-educated convert, Faaruuq has led the Mosque for the Praising of Allah in Roxbury for 20 years. As an African-American, born and reared in Boston, he represents a significant but sometimes marginalized segment of the Muslim community.
Faaruuq was formed by the Civil Rights movement; he can sound more like Malcolm X than Martin Luther King Jr. Unlike the politically savvy younger generation of Muslim leaders, he is an unapologetic throwback: a man who distrusts the establishment, and bluntly says so.
Anyone who does that now is considered a threat by this paranoid, anal-retentive, obsessively compul$ive, hall-of-mirrors government these days. You don't have to be some fiery preacher with the brothers of peace behind you (I also resent the lumping in of those characters assassinated by government then lionized by the same $y$tem that murdered them).
In a recent sermon — “Who Owns ISIS?” — Faaruuq condemned the terrorist group’s violence, but said, “This type of barbarity pales compared to the type of barbarity that’s been going on for the last 200 years.” He ticked through the casualties wrought by the United States and other Western countries in the American slave trade, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War.
He's got good points there, but the point I would like to make is we know who is ISIS™.
Faaruuq says he condemns terrorism unequivocally; Islam, he says, forbids violence and vigilantism. He says he supports the death penalty for Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Now I'm not believing in him.
“There is a message that goes out when the death penalty is exacted,” Faaruuq said on WBUR last April.
Boston Police Captain Haseeb Hosein, who became the department’s first Muslim captain last October, has known Faaruuq for 25 years and occasionally prays at his mosque.
“We do not see Imam Faaruuq as a threat,” Hosein said. “He does a lot of good for the Muslim community, as well as the community that surrounds the mosque.”
Hosein said Faaruuq’s sermons often stress that America “is the greatest country because of the Constitution. Our rights are protected.”
He believes the myth.
But Faaruuq’s unabashed critiques of American foreign policy, the government’s cases against several accused terrorists, and the treatment of black people and Muslims by law enforcement have riled critics and raised uncomfortable questions in a city still traumatized by the Marathon bombings.
It is nice to know I'm not a threat.
Ask Faaruuq what America should do to stop the spread of violent extremism, and he offers America a mirror.
“All the people you killed in Iraq for the last 20 years, this is what makes little boys go crazy and grow up to be terrorists,” he said in the “Who Owns ISIS?” sermon. “Not Islam.”
Telling it like it is
He just did.
*******************************
Later, he urged the crowd to stand up for Tarek Mehanna, a pharmacy PhD from Sudbury who was awaiting trial on terrorism charges; and Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT-educated Pakistani neuroscientist who had just been convicted of trying to kill American officials in Afghanistan. She is now serving an 86-year prison term; Mehanna is serving 17½ years.
“Some people are afraid to get involved with politics and things that are going on, but you know, after they finish with Aafia, they’re going to come to your door, if they feel like it,” Faaruuq said that night, referring to the Patriot Act.
In another speech the following year at a Worcester mosque, Faaruuq called Siddiqui “a brave woman” for firing a machine gun at American military officers while she was being held captive in Afghanistan. He said she was “only guilty of defending herself” and sought donations for her defense.
Yeah, except her prints were NOT on the gun (how that little woman wrestled it away from the FBI incompetent I'll never know)
Related:
"A former Sudbury man serving prison time for terrorism-related offenses is again challenging his conviction and sentence, court records show. A lawyer for Tarek Mehanna, 32, said in a legal filing Tuesday in US District Court in Boston that Mehanna’s 17½-year sentence should be vacated, since prosecutors withheld information about a key government witness during his 2011 trial. An appeals court upheld Mehanna’s conviction on providing material support to Al Qaeda, and the Supreme Court last year declined to review the case. Mehanna is currently incarcerated at a federal prison in Illinois and slated for release in December 2024."
That's what happens when you say no to the FBI.
Soon enough, the speeches would reach far beyond Faaruuq’s small audiences. Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a group that has accused many local Muslim leaders of being secret radicals, featured the speeches in a 2012 media campaign accusing Faaruuq of promoting Islamist extremism at Northeastern University, where he had served as a volunteer chaplain for five years.
I smelling supremacist Zionism at work under a nice-sounding name.
Charles Jacobs, president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, suggested that the imam had helped to radicalize Siddiqui, who attended Faaruuq’s mosque in the 1990s and helped him distribute Korans and other books to state prison inmates. Jacobs also showed clips of Faaruuq at a campus event applauding a virulently anti-Israel speaker.
“Faaruuq and people like him are claiming to the Boston citizenry that they are really moderate people who want peace,” Jacobs said. “He’s not being what he claims to be.”
I don't want to hear it.
Faaruuq said he has never promoted violence; the “gun and sword” reference was metaphorical, he said, and the government’s cases against Siddiqui and Mehanna seemed to him far-fetched.
“I can’t believe any of it if the United States government can’t bring in a little girl without half-killing her,” said Faaruuq, questioning how the diminutive Siddiqui seized a machine gun while in custody and why she was the only one shot during the confrontation.
He knows.
And yes, Faaruuq said, he is a strong critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, but he is not anti-Semitic, as Jacobs implied.
Shortly after he was targeted by Jacobs’s group, though, Faaruuq lost his chaplain’s post at Northeastern; university officials describe it as a restructuring. And his rhetoric attracted the attention of federal investigators, the imam said. He said the FBI paid him a visit several years ago to ask about his outlook.
“I said, ‘I’m not trying to tear up America; I want America to be fixed,’ ” Faaruuq said.
I am helpless to prevent the former and have given up on the latter.
Other imams, though, speak more cautiously. Talal Eid, a longtime Boston imam who served as chaplain at Brandeis University and Massachusetts General Hospital, and who is now based in Toledo, says he tries to avoid anything that could be construed as inflammatory.
“The way we prepare our sermons, we have to be careful how we say it so it won’t be misinterpreted by young people,” he said.
In the beginning
Faaruuq, born Jeconiah Barrow, was raised in the South End by a single mother, a Jamaican immigrant who worked as a housecleaner on Beacon Hill.
The South End in the 1950s was one of Boston’s most diverse neighborhoods; Faaruuq’s playmates were black, Irish, Chinese, Polish, Syrian. But as he came of age, he says he felt the cut of racism from some whites.
Mel King, the South End activist, former state legislator, and 1983 candidate for mayor, was a mentor. Faaruuq rode with other youth activists on a bus to the 1963 March on Washington and worked to help children of color get better educational opportunities.
“He was very concerned about how youth thought about themselves, their possibilities, their growth,” King said.
Faaruuq’s own education was cut short. Bright but unfocused, he was thrown out of English High School in his senior year for disciplinary problems.
He and a childhood friend, Beverly Sheets, gutted buildings and cleaned yards. With Sheets, who was mixed race but looked white, and another black friend, they briefly sang three-part harmony in local nightspots as The Equalities.
When the group dissolved, Faaruuq scraped by as a singer in New York, driving a taxi to make ends meet. Shuttling back and forth to Boston on a bus to see his children — from an early marriage to an Irish-Catholic woman — he ran across pamphlets handed out by Ansaaru Allah, a sect that mixed Black Power and Islam.
Faaruuq, who had grown up Christian, quickly found his way to an orthodox Sunni mosque on the Upper West Side. He read library books about Islam and took Arabic classes.
Faaruuq moved back to Boston following a severe illness related to a stabbing he survived in his youth and found his way to the Mosque for the Praising of Allah, a brick row house in Roxbury.
By the late 1980s, Faaruuq had become the mosque’s assistant imam. The community was thriving and excited about the future: City officials offered Muslim leaders the chance to develop a large Islamic center on city-owned land in Roxbury. Faaruuq’s predecessor helped start a coalition to work on the project, but it could not raise the money.
The Islamic Society of Boston in Cambridge could. It made a separate deal with the city to build what became the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.
Today, the 70,000-square-foot cultural center, which opened in 2007, is the largest mosque in New England, drawing a young, ethnically diverse crowd. Faaruuq’s mosque has persisted in its shadow.
Next to the cultural center’s first two imams, both of whom were educated at the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Faaruuq is a kind of neighborhood preacher, speaking careful Arabic and relying on knowledge drawn from a lifetime of self-study.
************************
Thrust in the public eye
In June, reporters were awaiting a press conference with Usaamah Rahim’s family and their lawyer in the parking lot where the 26-year-old African-American Muslim had been shot to death by law enforcement personnel two days earlier.
The authorities say surveillance of Rahim’s phone conversations showed that he had become radicalized and had imminent plans to kill police officers.
Faaruuq, who was handling Rahim’s funeral the next day, came to support the family; he arrived first. He was emotional, he said later; Rahim attended his mosque about twice a month, and the young man’s older brother and mother were regulars.
The reporters pounced, and Faaruuq wound up holding an impromptu news conference. He called law enforcement “reckless” for approaching Rahim amid the morning rush hour and suggested that Rahim’s race may have played a role in his death.
“I ask that God overlook the shortcomings of the people who continue to exist who murdered the young man,” he said.
Mel King says he immediately understood what Faaruuq was trying to do: raise questions about police tactics and whether race had been an issue.
“I said, ‘That’s him,’ ” King said. “Right out there, saying it like it is.”
But some Muslim leaders recoiled....
As have I. I'm no longer as angry and am more sad and jaded than anything else.
--more--"
Nothing I like better than attending a morning sermon at the mosque in the company of an agenda-pushing, war-promoting, Jewish War Pre$$.
Did I mention there was an election in Morocco?
"Split results for Islamists in Moroccan elections" by Paul Schemm Associated Press September 05, 2015
RABAT, Morocco — Morocco’s Islamist party dominated the North African kingdom’s urban areas in local elections, but trailed in total seats behind two parties with strong backing in the countryside, according to final results issued Saturday.
They rig 'em there, too, huh?
The elections were seen as an important test of the popularity of the Islamist-led government that came to power after the prodemocracy demonstrations of the 2011 Arab Spring, and that faces new parliamentary elections next year.
The local and regional councils manage municipal affairs in conjunction with state-appointed officials, and are being strengthened under a new government policy.
Some 30,000 local council seats and 700 regional council seats were contested by more than 140,000 candidates from at least 30 parties. Officials reported a turnout of 53 percent.
The Islamist Party for Justice and Development took the most seats in the regional councils with 25 percent of the total, but fell short in the local councils, which are weighted toward rural areas.
The Party of Authenticity and Modernity took 21 percent of the seats in the local councils, while the conservative Istiqlal (Independence) Party took 16 percent of the total.
The PJD, as the Islamist party is known, is mainly strong in the cities among educated voters, and took control of councils in the main cities of Casablanca, Tangiers, Rabat, Fez, and Agadir with just under 16 percent of seats — three times what it won in 2009.
Casablanca is a great movie, and I'm shocked, shocked that gambling is going on there!
The PAM was created in 2008 by one of the king’s counselors, and it dominated local elections the following year.
It fared poorly, however, in the 2011 parliamentary elections amid calls for reform. Those elections were dominated by the PJD, which went on to form a government.
Unlike counterparts around the region, Morocco’s Islamists have played down religious issues, instead focusing on corruption and unemployment.
The party has preserved its popularity despite implementing austerity measures and cutting energy subsidies to reduce the budget deficit.
Analyst Maati Monjib sees the PJD’s success with urban voters as a reflection of its anticorruption stance and opposition to the status quo in a country still ruled by the monarchy.
--more--"
At least some Muslims are calm, 'eh?
Well, you must remember this....
I have a lot of personal matters to attend to this morning so I'm going to post what's ready and what I've been working on.
