Violent + Regressive Islam

+ 64-year-old female suicide bomber attacks Israeli troops in Gaza
+ Enraged Shiites burned people to death, torched mosques and denounced Sunni leaders and the United States a day after a bloody assault on Sadr City, the Iraq capital's Shiite bastion
+ Lebanon death may herald coup +++ US forces kill 22 insurgents in Iraq +++ US: Iraqi bomb factory destroyed
+ Turkey Puts Two Christians on Trial For Evangelizing
+ The death toll in Thursday's Baghdad bombings rose to 202, police said as another 22 people were killed in a double suicide attack in northern Tal Afar city, heightening fears Iraq is sliding towards civil war.
+ Iraq: Threats Force Closure of Catholic Charity to Muslims
+ The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan to buy two marine container terminals in the New York area. Well, I guess it's better that we Canadians buy them instead of a middle eastern country. The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan has $84 billion in assets under management.


Playing dirty, Middle-Eastern style.


Sunnis and Shiites continue to butcher, shoot, bomb and burn each other to death in Iraq. Even THEY don't believe this has anything to do with "western interests in the middle east." Did they lose their humanity? Is poverty the answer? No, those are easy answers...and false ones. Here's the real answer (thank you Louise):

"I've heard this poverty nonsense time and time again from Western apologists for Islam, most of them not Muslim by the way. There are millions of passive supporters of terror who may be poor and needy but most of those who do the killing are wealthy, privileged, educated and free. If it were about poverty, ask yourself why it is middle-class Muslims -- and never poor Christians -- who become suicide bombers in Palestine."

His analysis is fascinating. Muslim fundamentalists believe, he insists, that Saudi Arabia's petroleum-based wealth is a divine gift, and that Saudi influence is sanctioned by Allah. Thus the extreme brand of Sunni Islam that spread from the Kingdom to the rest of the Islamic world is regarded not merely as one interpretation of the religion but the only genuine interpretation. The expansion of violent and regressive Islam, he continues, began in the late 1970s, and can be traced precisely to the growing financial clout of Saudi Arabia.

"We're not talking about a fringe cult here," he tells me. "Salafist [fundamentalist] Islam is the dominant version of the religion and is taught in almost every Islamic university in the world. It is puritanical, extreme and does, yes, mean that women can be beaten, apostates killed and Jews called pigs and monkeys." More.