Category: Islam

By Max Blumenthal
AlterNet
March 26, 2015

One of America’s most prominent Islam bashers has a long history of making things up.

While promoting her new book, Heretic, on a March 23 episode of “The Daily Show,” Somali-born author and anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali made a staggering claim: “If you look at 70 percent of the violence in the world today, Muslims are responsible,” she told host Jon Stewart.

Stewart did not demand any evidence and Hirsi Ali provided no citation. However, she made a strikingly similar statement in a March 20 essay previewing her new book for the Wall Street Journal: “According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies,” Hirsi Ali wrote in WSJ’s Saturday Essay, “at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims.”

I contacted the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading British foreign policy think tank, to inquire about the source of Hirsi Ali’s statistic. According to IISS Media Relations and Communications Officer Kat Slowe, IISS did not explicitly state such a figure in its research.

“I have spoken to a number of our experts and they cannot identify where this statistic may have come from,” Slowe told me.

“Their best guess is that the journalist in question [Hirsi Ali] may have access/a subscription to the [IISS] Armed Conflict Database and may have calculated this statistic independently. There are some concerns that it could be misleading as, without Syria (near 200,000 total deaths, and almost half of last year’s global conflict deaths) the figure would look massively different (and of course, this conflict did not have its root in religion),” Slowe added. Continue reading “Exposing Anti-Islam Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Latest Deception”

By Zainab Chaudry
Patheos
March 31, 2015

Authors who publish books generally want to sell them. Well, what sells better then timely, dramatized sensationalism with a personal angle, which reinforces readers’ latent fears and beliefs?

After reading Somali-born author and anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s disturbingly deceptive new book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, I can confidently vouch that this read is exactly that: Dramatized sensationalism with a personal angle that reinforces the larger audience’s fears and suspicions.

The book’s abject flaws begin with the introduction, which doggedly fixates on media reports disproportionately covering slanted stories of terrorist acts involving Muslims in destabilized and conflict-ridden regions of the world — without providing any crucially relevant context or background.

All, of course, to make the case that Islam is not a religion of peace. Continue reading “To Ayaan Hirsi Ali – The Problem is Not with Islam, but with the Author”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Wall Street Journal
March 20, 2015

To defeat the extremists for good, Muslims must reject those aspects of their tradition that prompt some believers to resort to oppression and holy war.

“Islam’s borders are bloody,” wrote the late political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1996, “and so are its innards.” Nearly 20 years later, Huntington looks more right than ever before. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims. In 2013, there were nearly 12,000 terrorist attacks world-wide. The lion’s share were in Muslim-majority countries, and many of the others were carried out by Muslims. By far the most numerous victims of Muslim violence—including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics—are Muslims themselves.

Not all of this violence is explicitly motivated by religion, but a great deal of it is. I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.

When I assert this, I do not mean that Islamic belief makes all Muslims violent. This is manifestly not the case: There are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself. Continue reading “Why Islam Needs a Reformation”

By Mohamad Tajuddin Mohamad Rasdi
Malaysiakini
Mar 24, 2015

COMMENT Over the past few days, the mainstream media has highlighted the case of a “penghina hudud” (hudud insulter) from radio station BFM who subsequently received death and rape threats. Most of the news failed to put the concept of “insulting hudud” or “insulting Islam” in the proper perspective.

In this comment piece, I would like to ask who is actually insulting hudud by analysing the content of four YouTube videos – that of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Nur Jazlan Mohamad, Ahmad Farouk Musa and BFM’s Kupas clip.

The first video I would like to “kupas” (analyse) is the video of former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir. This video is an excerpt from an Astro Awani news clip where Mahathir was quizzed on PAS’ hudud.

He said PAS’ hudud was not fair because if a Muslim steals, his hand will be cut off, but if a non-Muslim steals he will only be jailed for two months. He add that “in the future all Muslims will have no hands.”

Now let us ask ourselves, is Mahathir an insulter of hudud? An ustaz from PAS, in the same video, argued that Mahathir has indeed insulted hudud. I am of the view that Mahathir did not. Continue reading “Who is really insulting hudud?”