TBR News September 26, 2014

Sep 25 2014

The Voice of the White House

 

          Washington, D.C. September 24, 2014: “I see on a genuine, as opposed to a blo, that Obama is willing to lift sanctions on Russia if they obey the cease fire in the Ukraine. He is too busy bombing the ISIS people, their personnel and any infrastrucure above ground to bother with a lost cause. And soon enough, the focus will be on the oil-rich Arctic and America’s determination to wrest it away from Russia for their own gain. A stunning victory over ISIS, which will leave another trail of death and destruction behind, ought, Washington reasons, terrify the Russians into meekly surrending their oil rights to the Champion of Freedom-Loving American banks and oil companies.”

 

High Cost of Bad Journalism on Ukraine

 

September 22, 2014

by Robert Parry

Consortium News

 

The costs of the mainstream U.S. media’s wildly anti-Moscow bias in the Ukraine crisis are adding up, as the Obama administration has decided to react to alleged “Russian aggression” by investing as much as $1 trillion in modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.

On Monday, a typically slanted New York Times article justified these modernization plans by describing “Russia on the warpath” and adding: “Congress has expressed less interest in atomic reductions than looking tough in Washington’s escalating confrontation with Moscow.”

But the Ukraine crisis has been a textbook case of the U.S. mainstream media misreporting the facts of a foreign confrontation and then misinterpreting the meaning of the events, a classic case of “garbage in, garbage out.” The core of the false mainstream narrative is that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis as an excuse to reclaim territory for the Russian Empire.

While that interpretation of events has been the cornerstone of Official Washington’s “group think,” the reality always was that Putin favored maintaining the status quo in Ukraine. He had no plans to “invade” Ukraine and was satisfied with the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Indeed, when the crisis heated up last February, Putin was distracted by the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Rather than Putin’s “warmongering” – as the Times said in the lead-in to another Monday article – the evidence is clear that it was the United States and the European Union that initiated this confrontation in a bid to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence and into the West’s orbit.

This was a scheme long in the making, but the immediate framework for the crisis took shape a year ago when influential U.S. neocons set their sights on Ukraine and Putin after Putin helped defuse a crisis in Syria by persuading President Barack Obama to set aside plans to bomb Syrian government targets over a disputed Sarin gas attack and instead accept Syria’s willingness to surrender its entire chemical weapons arsenal.

But the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies had their hearts set on another “shock and awe” campaign with the goal of precipitating another “regime change” against a Middle East government disfavored by Israel. Putin also worked with Obama to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, averting another neocon dream to “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

 

The Despised Putin

So, Putin suddenly rose to the top of the neocons’ “enemies list” and some prominent neocons quickly detected his vulnerability in Ukraine, a historical route for western invasions of Russia and the scene of extraordinarily bloody fighting during World War II.

National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, one of the top neocon paymasters spreading around $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers’ money, declared in late September 2013 that Ukraine represented “the biggest prize” but beyond that was an opportunity to put Putin “on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

The context for Gershman’s excitement was a European Union offer of an association agreement to Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych, but it came with some nasty strings attached, an austerity plan demanded by the International Monetary Fund that would have made the hard lives of the average Ukrainian even harder.

That prompted Yanukovych to seek a better deal from Putin who offered $15 billion in aid without the IMF’s harsh terms. Yet, once Yanukovych rebuffed the EU plan, his government was targeted by a destabilization campaign that involved scores of political and media projects funded by Gershman’s NED and other U.S. agencies.

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover who had been an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, reminded a group of Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations.” Nuland, wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, also showed up at the Maidan square in Kiev passing out cookies to protesters.

The Maidan protests, reflecting western Ukraine’s desire for closer ties to Europe, also were cheered on by neocon Sen. John McCain, who appeared on a podium with leaders of the far-right Svoboda party under a banner honoring Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. A year earlier, the European Parliament had identified Svoboda as professing “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views [that] go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles.”

Yet, militants from Svoboda and the even more extreme Right Sektor were emerging as the muscle of the Maidan protests, seizing government buildings and hurling firebombs at police. A well-known Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader, Andriy Parubiy, became the commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense” forces.

Behind the scenes, Assistant Secretary Nuland was deciding who would take over the Ukrainian government once Yanukovych was ousted. In an intercepted phone call with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland crossed off some potential leaders and announced that “Yats” – or Arseniy Yatsenyuk – was her guy.

 

The Coup

On Feb. 20, as the neo-Nazi militias stepped up their attacks on police, a mysterious sniper opened fire on both protesters and police killing scores and bringing the political crisis to a boil. The U.S. news media blamed Yanukovych for the killings though he denied giving such an order and some evidence pointed toward a provocation from the far-right extremists.

As Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said in another intercepted phone call with EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Asthon, “there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition.”

But the sniper shootings led Yanukovych to agree on Feb. 21 to a deal guaranteed by three European countries – France, Germany and Poland – that he would surrender much of his power and move up elections so he could be voted out of office. He also assented to U.S. demands that he pull back his police.

That last move, however, prompted the neo-Nazi militias to overrun the presidential buildings on Feb. 22 and force Yanukovych’s officials to flee for their lives. Then, rather than seeking to enforce the Feb. 21 agreement, the U.S. State Department promptly declared the coup regime “legitimate” and blamed everything on Yanukovych and Putin.

Nuland’s choice, Yatsenyuk, was made prime minister and the neo-Nazis were rewarded for their crucial role by receiving several ministries, including national security headed by Parubiy. The parliament also voted to ban Russian as an official language (though that was later rescinded), and the IMF austerity demands were pushed through by Yatsenyuk. Not surprisingly, ethnic Russians in the south and east, the base of Yanukovych’s support, began resisting what they regarded as the illegitimate coup regime.

To blame this crisis on Putin simply ignores the facts and defies logic. To presume that Putin instigated the ouster of Yanukovych in some convoluted scheme to seize territory requires you to believe that Putin got the EU to make its reckless association offer, organized the mass protests at the Maidan, convinced neo-Nazis from western Ukraine to throw firebombs at police, and manipulated Gershman, Nuland and McCain to coordinate with the coup-makers – all while appearing to support Yanukovych’s idea for new elections within Ukraine’s constitutional structure.

Though such a crazy conspiracy theory would make people in tinfoil hats blush, this certainty is at the heart of what every “smart” person in Official Washington believes. If you dared to suggest that Putin was actually distracted by the Sochi Olympics last February, was caught off guard by the events in Ukraine, and reacted to a Western-inspired crisis on his border (including his acceptance of Crimea’s request to be readmitted to Russia), you would be immediately dismissed as “a stooge of Moscow.”

Such is how mindless “group think” works in Washington. All the people who matter jump on the bandwagon and smirk at anyone who questions how wise it is to be rolling downhill in some disastrous direction.

But the pols and pundits who appear on U.S. television spouting the conventional wisdom are always the winners in this scenario. They get to look tough, standing up to villains like Yanukovych and Putin and siding with the saintly Maidan protesters. The neo-Nazi brown shirts are whited out of the picture and any Ukrainian who objected to the U.S.-backed coup regime finds a black hat firmly glued on his or her head.

For the neocons, there are both financial and ideological benefits. By shattering the fragile alliance that had evolved between Putin and Obama over Syria and Iran, the neocons seized greater control over U.S. policies in the Middle East and revived the prospects for violent “regime change.”

On a more mundane level – by stirring up a new Cold War – the neocons generate more U.S. government money for military contractors who bestow a portion on Washington think tanks that provide cushy jobs for neocons when they are out of government.

 

The Losers

 

The worst losers are the people of Ukraine, most tragically the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, thousands of whom have died from a combination of heavy artillery fire by the Ukrainian army on residential areas followed by street fighting led by brutal neo-Nazi militias who were incorporated into Kiev’s battle plans. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]

The devastation of eastern Ukraine, which has driven an estimated one million Ukrainians out of their homes, has left parts of this industrial region in ruins. Of course, in the U.S. media version, it’s all Putin’s fault for deceiving these ethnic Russians with “propaganda” about neo-Nazis and then inducing these deluded individuals to resist the “legitimate” authorities in Kiev.

Notably, America’s righteous “responsibility to protect” crowd, which demanded that Obama begin airstrikes in Syria a year ago, swallowed its moral whistles when it came to the U.S.-backed Kiev regime butchering ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine (or for that matter, when Israeli forces slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza).

However, beyond the death and destruction in eastern Ukraine, the meddling by Nuland, Gershman and others has pushed all of Ukraine toward financial catastrophe. As “The Business Insider” reported on Sept. 21, “Ukraine Is on the Brink of Total Economic Collapse.”

Author Walter Kurtz wrote: “Those who have spent any time in Ukraine during the winter know how harsh the weather can get. And at these [current] valuations, hryvnia [Ukraine’s currency] isn’t going to buy much heating fuel from abroad. …

“Inflation rate is running above 14% and will spike sharply from here in the next few months if the currency weakness persists. Real wages are collapsing. … Finally, Ukraine’s fiscal situation is unraveling.”

In other words, the already suffering Ukrainians from the west, east and center of the country can expect to suffer a great deal more. They have been made expendable pawns in a geopolitical chess game played by neocon masters and serving interests far from Lviv, Donetsk and Kiev.

But other victims from these latest machinations by the U.S. political/media elite will include the American taxpayers who will be expected to foot the bill for the new Cold War launched in reaction to Putin’s imaginary scheme to instigate the Ukraine crisis so he could reclaim territory of the Russian Empire.

As nutty as that conspiracy theory is, it is now one of the key reasons why the American people have to spend $1 trillion to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal, rather than scaling back the thousands of U.S. atomic weapons to around 900, as had been planned.

Or as one supposed expert, Gary Samore at Harvard, explained to the New York Times: “The most fundamental game changer is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically impossible.”

Thus, you can see how hyperbolic journalism and self-interested punditry can end up costing the American taxpayers vast sums of money and contributing to a more dangerous world

 

 

As Ukraine’s debt tangle unwinds, Russia holds key thread

 

September 24, 2014

by Sujata Rao

Reuters

 

LONDON- A selloff on Ukraine’s dollar debt is focusing attention on a controversial $3 billion bond held by Russia, raising investor concerns that President Vladimir Putin could use the issue to trigger a cascade of defaults across Kiev’s sovereign Eurobonds.

The so-called bail-bond, taken out late last year by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, carries a clause which – given Kiev’s steadily worsening finances – may enable the Kremlin to demand immediate repayment.

At best, that could force Western lenders to stump up more cash for Kiev. In the worst – albeit less likely – scenario, so-called cross-default provisions carried by most Eurobonds would force payment on all Ukraine’s remaining dollar bonds at once if Moscow is not paid on time.

Putin, who has annexed Crimea and is widely accused of stoking a separatist revolt in eastern Ukraine, is seeking to maximize economic leverage to prevent pro-Western President Petro Poroshenko fulfilling a far reaching free trade agreement with the European Union.

Under Russian pressure, the EU and Ukraine agreed this month to postpone implementation of the accord until the end of 2015 after Kiev accepted a ceasefire with the pro-Russian rebels in a conflict that has killed more than 3,000 people.

At the heart of the bond issue is an unusual clause in the covenant which stipulates “total state debt and state-guaranteed debt should not at any time exceed an amount equal to 60 percent of the annual nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of Ukraine”.

As Ukraine’s economy has shrunk and its currency has fallen, that level may already have been breached – Commerzbank analysts reckon the current hryvnia exchange rate around 13 per dollar UAH= is the trigger point. If not, debt-to-GDP will top 67 percent by end-2014, the International Monetary Fund predicts.

“There is little doubt the ratio will be crossed,” says Standard Bank analyst Tim Ash. “Russia will likely use this issue to make life very difficult for Ukraine.”

The issue is preying on Ukrainian officials’ minds, Ash says, noting that Finance Minister Oleksander Shlapak told a recent conference he expects Moscow to demand early repayment. In that event, Kiev would dip into IMF money and the central bank’s $16 billion reserves, Shlapak said.

But even if Russia does not call the bonds, there are other ways it can use them to strengthen its position against Ukraine.

 

 

RUSSIAN CLOUT

 

Moscow was canny enough to structure the debt as Eurobonds governed by UK law and enforceable in British courts. So even without demanding repayment, the Kremlin as holder of almost a fifth of the outstanding bonds will wield huge clout if Ukraine is forced down the debt restructuring path.

Because the other bonds are in relatively few hands – U.S. giant Franklin Templeton alone is believed to hold 40 percent – a debt workout without Russia could be relatively simple.

Thus it would make sense for Ukraine to delay restructuring until the bail-bond expires in December 2015 – just to avoid facing Russia across the restructuring table. But it now looks unlikely Kiev can hang on that long.

“I don’t think Russia wants to accelerate the bond because Ukraine does have the reserves to pay this debt. They want to be sitting at the restructuring table and have a say in the final outcome,” said David Spegel, head of emerging debt strategy at BNP Paribas.

“That’s the reason the (IMF and EU) have been unwilling to push the restructuring issue, it’s one of the biggest impediments.”

Putin’s leverage over Kiev is not without risk for Moscow. Russian banks, some already weakened by Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis, would take a hit of Ukraine defaults.

Three big Russian institutions – Sberbank, VTB and Alfa – are among Ukraine’s top banks by assets. Moody’s estimated last year that Gazprombank, Vnesheconombank (VEB), Sberbank and VTB had a combined exposure to Ukrainian risk of up to $30 billion.

Analysts say Russian banks also have large holdings of Ukrainian bonds though this has proved difficult to quantify. A Ukrainian default would almost certainly force losses on them.

 

 

“ODIOUS DEBT”

 

As Ukraine’s finances worsen, bond markets have started to price in a debt restructuring. Many note it makes no sense for the IMF, after its Greece experience, to keep handing cash to a country without making bondholders share the pain.

Gabriel Sterne, head of global macro at Oxford Economics, notes that Greece defaulted when confronted with a too-big-to-pay 12-billion euro maturity in 2012. For Ukraine, the Russian bond is the biggest payment on the horizon, not counting $5 billion or so in gas bills.

“Ukraine have to admit at some point their debt is not sustainable and for me, the $3 billion payment is that point,” Sterne said. “I would put odds on them not paying that bond in full.”

So far, there is no sign that Ukraine plans to repudiate the debt, though some have urged it to do exactly that.

Georgetown University law professor Anna Gelpern has been prominent among those recommending that Ukraine refuse to honor the bond as “odious debt”. (here)

The term refers to money borrowed by a previous regime that was either misappropriated or not used to citizens’ benefit.

Gelpern has also said the British parliament and courts should refuse to enforce the contracts on that Eurobond.

That seems unlikely. Aside from the reputational damage caused by defaulting, courts rarely endorse the “odious debt” argument, says Spegel of BNP Paribas.

Hardly any government has used it recently, not even Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein or post-apartheid South Africa, which might have had a case for doing so.

“Although it was a liability taken on by Yanukovich and there are claims he may not have acted in the public interest… the fact remains that he was a democratically elected president, so the argument is unlikely to sit well with a court,” Spegel said.

Others point out that legal action around an odious debt appeal will take a long time and cross-defaults could be triggered in the meantime on other Eurobonds.

“The easiest option for Ukraine might just be to repay early,” said Ash of Standard Bank.

 

 

(Reporting by Sujata Rao; Editing by Paul Taylor)

 

 

Putin warns Ukraine against implementing EU deal -letter

 

September 23, 2014

by Robin Emmott

Reuters

 

            BRUSSELS – Moscow will curtail Ukraine’s access to vital Russian markets if Kiev implements any part of a trade agreement with the European Union, President Vladimir Putin warned in a letter, toughening his stance on a deal at the center of East-West tensions.

In a letter to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, seen by Reuters on Tuesday, Putin warned that even changing national legislation to prepare for the EU-Ukraine trade deal, known as the association agreement, would trigger an immediate response from Moscow.

“We still believe that only systemic adjustments of the Association Agreement, which take into account the full range of risks to Russian-Ukranian economic ties and to the whole Russian economy, will allow to retain existing trade and economic cooperation between the Russian Federation and Ukraine,” Putin wrote in the letter, which is dated Sept. 17.

Putin did not go into detail about possible retaliation, but Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said last week he had signed an order to curb Ukrainian exporters’ access to Russia. Those measures are yet to take effect.

Substantially raising Russian tariffs could mean 3 billion euros a year in lost business for Ukraine, which exports mainly steel, coal, chemicals and grains to Russia, EU diplomats say.

The EU-Ukraine deal is at the heart of a dispute that has grown from a tug-of-war between Brussels and the Kremlin over Kiev to economic sanctions, the annexation of Crimea by Russia, armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, and concern about a new Cold War.

Following the overthrow in February of a pro-Moscow leader who rejected the EU deal, Ukraine’s parliament sealed a historic shift by ratifying the political and trade agreement. That put Kiev on a path it hopes will bring the prosperity it sees in fellow ex-communist states like Poland.

 

 

DELAYED OR FROZEN?

 

In a last-minute concession to Moscow, the EU delayed implementing the trade accord until Dec. 31 2015. Brussels hopes that will give it time to assuage Russian concerns about the pact, which is now a legal treaty that cannot easily be changed.

But Putin’s letter suggests that the Kremlin considers the 15-month delay to the EU-Ukraine agreement a complete freezing of the process until Russian demands for changes to the legal texts are met.

“Adoption of such amendments to Ukrainian legislation, including implementing acts, will be considered as infringement of the arrangement to postpone implementation of the Association Agreement, entailing immediate and adequate retaliatory measures from the Russian side,” Putin wrote.

Putin wants three-way negotiations to amend the EU’s accord with Kiev, which Russia says will hurt its own economy.

According to EU officials, Russia wants to remove more than 2,000 products eligible for duty-free access to the European Union, tearing up about a quarter of the agreement.

Russian companies are also concerned they will not be able to import into Ukraine after Ukraine adopts higher EU standards as part of its implementation of the pact.

Ukrainian companies will receive European technical help and funds to help adapt to EU regulations. But without some kind of agreement with the EU, Russia would have to put up its own funds to help its companies such as carmakers modernize and comply with EU standards.

EU officials say there is room for compromise.

Russian exporters could have a soft route to compliance with EU quality and other standards in Ukraine so that they only need meet the requirements for selling goods into the EU-Ukraine free-trade area over a very long time.

 

 

Reporting by Robin Emmott; Editing by Larry King

 

 

FBI gags state and local police on capabilities of cellphone spy gear

 

 

September 23, 2014

by Craig Timberg 

Waashington Post

 

The FBI requires state and local police to keep quiet about the capabilities of a controversial type of surveillance gear that allows law enforcement to eavesdrop on cellphone calls and track individual people based on the signals emitted by their mobile devices, according to a bureau document released recently under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The December 2012 document is a heavily redacted letter between the FBI and police in Tacoma, Wash., as the local department sought to acquire an IMSI catcher, sometimes described as a “fake cellphone tower” because it tricks individual phones into routing their calls and other data through the surveillance equipment. The Tacoma police were buying gear produced by Harris Corp., a Florida-based company that makes the StingRay and other IMSI catchers used by law enforcement agencies across the country.

The FBI letter, which was not classified but was designated as “law enforcement sensitive,” told the Tacoma police chief that the Federal Communications Commission authorizes the sale of such surveillance equipment to state and local police departments on the condition that they first sign an FBI “non-disclosure agreement.”

The details of the agreement are redacted from the letter as released; the blacked-out portions stretch across the bulk of a six-page document, which was first published on Monday by MuckRock, a news site that helps journalists, researchers and others submit Freedom of Information Act requests and publishes the results.

The FBI, which calls IMSI catchers “cell site simulators,” declined to comment on the document. The bureau has said elsewhere that it considers the tactics used by IMSI catchers to be sensitive technology that could be defeated if too much information becomes available about its capabilities. An affidavit by an FBI official in April said, “The FBI routinely asserts the law enforcement sensitive privilege over cell site simulator equipment because discussion of the capabilities and use of the equipment in court would allow criminal defendants, criminal enterprises, or foreign powers, should they gain access to the items, to determine the FBI’s techniques, procedures, limitations, and capabilities in this area.”

The FCC last month began investigating reports of illegal use of IMSI catchers, by foreign intelligence services and criminals but has said it does not oversee the use of the surveillance gear by federal government agencies. Last week, the marketers of a device that’s designed to detect IMSI catchers reported finding 18 in the Washington area over two days of searching.

The locations, said the marketer of the GSMK CryptoPhone, included areas around the White House, the Capitol, the Russian Embassy and the cluster of defense contractors near Dulles International Airport. The CryptoPhone was not able to determine whether the IMSI catchers were being used by the federal government, local police or some other entity.

E-mails collected through a separate Freedom of Information Act request, by the ACLU, showed in June that the U.S. Marshals Service had asked police in Florida to not reveal that they had used IMSI catchers in determining the locations of criminal suspects. Instead, the police were instructed to say that they had learned the whereabouts of suspects using “a confidential source.”

 

Craig Timberg is a national technology reporter for The Post.

 

Historic high’: Afghan drug crime to further deteriorate after US withdrawal, says Russia

RT

 

The drug production in Afghanistan is already at a “historic high,” but the situation is likely to deteriorate even more when international troops leave the country, Russia’s chief anti-narcotics official said.

“The beginning of the withdrawal of the International Security Assistance Forces from Afghanistan, political instability in the country and a number of other factors make it possible to judge that the situation may drastically deteriorate in the future,” Viktor Ivanov, head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service, stressed.

He was speaking in Russia’s southern Volga River city of Astrakhan where the heads of the anti-drug agencies from Caspian states, including Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan were holding a meeting.

According to the Russian official, drug production in Afghanistan has now reached “a historic high.”

“This year, over 250,000 hectares are allocated for opium poppy cultivation and another 150,000 hectares for the cultivation of cannabis,” he said, adding that 4 million Afghans are involved in the illegal drugs industry in the country.

Ivanov has labeled Afghanistan “a direct threat to international peace and security” as the country has recently become “a truly planetary center for drug production.”

There are around 8 million drug addicts in Russia and over 1.5 million of them use Afghan heroin, he added.

Ivanov also expressed his regret that the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US over the events in Ukraine have shattered anti-drug cooperation between the two states.

“The political leadership of the US has sanctioned me and banned me from entering the country, thus putting an end to the Russian-American working group on drugs, which actively operated for over five years and of which I was a co-chair from the Russian side,” he said.

Over the years, the anti-drug cooperation between Russia and the US brought good results, Ivanov stressed.

“I don’t know what was their motivation was, but it clearly wasn’t the interests of the American people, as Russia and the US conducted large-scale joint operations to prevent shipments of cocaine from South America to the US,” he said.

The turmoil in Ukraine has facilitated drug transit through this country, Ivanov said, with methadone already flowing into Russia.

“During the last eight years, so-called methadone substitute therapy has been used in Ukraine. Ninety percent of methadone purchased with state funds goes to the criminal market. The price of methadone is almost equal to the price of the Afghan heroin,” the anti-drug chief said.

“And now we see that methadone is making its way from Ukraine to Russia,” he added.

Ivanov also proposed a project that would make the Caspian Sea region free of drugs, which “offers a detailed action plan” in police co-operation and information exchange for the region’s states.

He referred to the use of surveillance drones, operative work at seaports, divers to search for and confiscate sunken drugs and a joint diplomatic effort.

The Russian anti-drug chief also stressed the need to create a Caspian network of rehabilitation centers for drug addicts as “the fewer drug addicts, the lower the demand for drugs, and the safer our regions.”

 

During the Astrakhan meeting, the results of a joint special drug-fighting operation were summed up, which saw around 500 drug-related crimes curbed and some 1,500 criminal were brought to justice.

 

 

Suspicions Run Deep in Iraq That C.I.A. and the Islamic State Are United

September 20, 2014

by David D. Kirkpatrick 

New Yok Times

 

 BAGHDAD — The United States has conducted an escalating campaign of deadly airstrikes against the extremists of the Islamic State for more than a month. But that appears to have done little to tamp down the conspiracy theories still circulating from the streets of Baghdad to the highest levels of Iraqi government that the C.I.A. is secretly behind the same extremists that it is now attacking.

“We know about who made Daesh,” said Bahaa al-Araji, a deputy prime minister, using an Arabic shorthand for the Islamic State on Saturday at a demonstration called by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to warn against the possible deployment of American ground troops. Mr. Sadr publicly blamed the C.I.A. for creating the Islamic State in a speech last week, and interviews suggested that most of the few thousand people at the demonstration, including dozens of members of Parliament, subscribed to the same theory. (Mr. Sadr is considered close to Iran, and the theory is popular there as well.)

When an American journalist asked Mr. Araji to clarify if he blamed the C.I.A. for the Islamic State, he retreated: “I don’t know. I am one of the poor people,” he said, speaking fluent English and quickly stepping back toward the open door of a chauffeur-driven SUV. “But we fear very much. Thank you!”

 

 

How ISIS Works

 

With oil revenues, arms and organization, the jihadist group controls vast stretches of Syria and Iraq and aspires to statehood.

The prevalence of the theory in the streets underscored the deep suspicions of the American military’s return to Iraq more than a decade after its invasion, in 2003. The casual endorsement by a senior official, though, was also a pointed reminder that the new Iraqi government may be an awkward partner for the American-led campaign to drive out the extremists.

The Islamic State, also known by the acronym ISIS, has conquered many of the predominantly Sunni Muslim provinces in Iraq’s northeast, aided by the alienation of many residents to the Shiite-dominated government of the former prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. President Obama has insisted repeatedly that American military action against the Islamic State depended on the installation of a more inclusive government in Baghdad, but he moved ahead before it was complete.

The Parliament has not yet confirmed nominees for the crucial posts of interior or defense minister, in part because of discord between Sunni and Shiite factions, and the Iraqi news media has reported that it may be more than a month before the posts are filled.

The demonstration on Saturday was the latest in a series of signals from Shiite leaders or militias, especially those considered close to Iran, warning the United States not to put its soldiers back on the ground. Mr. Obama has pledged not to send combat troops, but he seems to have convinced few Iraqis. “We don’t trust him,” said Raad Hatem, 40.

Haidar al-Assadi, 40, agreed. “The Islamic State is a clear creation of the United States, and the United States is trying to intervene again using the excuse of the Islamic State,” he said.

Shiite militias and volunteers, he said, were already answering the call from religious leaders to defend Iraq from the Islamic State without American help. “This is how we do it,” he said, adding that the same forces would keep American troops out. “The main reason Obama is saying he will not invade again is because he knows the Islamic resistance” of the Shiite militias “and he does not want to lose a single soldier.”

The leader of the Islamic State, for his part, declared on Saturday that he defied the world to stop him.

“The conspiracies of Jews, Christians, Shiites and all the tyrannical regimes in the Muslim countries have been powerless to make the Islamic State deviate from its path,” the leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared in an audio recording released over the Internet, using derogatory terms from early Islamic history to refer to Christians and Shiites.

“The entire world saw the powerlessness of America and its allies before a group of believers,” he said. “People now realize that victory is from God, and it shall not be aborted by armies and their arsenals.”

Many at the rally in Baghdad said they welcomed airstrikes against Mr. Baghdadi’s Islamic State but not American ground forces, the position that Mr. Sadr has taken. Many of the 30 lawmakers backed by Mr. Sadr — out of a Parliament of 328 seats — attended the rally.

Mr. Sadr’s supporters opposed Mr. Maliki, the former prime minister, and many at the rally were quick to criticize the former government for mistakes like failing to build a more dependable army. “We had a good army, so where is this army now?” asked Waleed al-Hasnawi, 35. “Maliki gave them everything, but they just left the battlefield.”

But few if any blamed Mr. Maliki for alienating Sunnis, as American officials assert, by permitting sectarian abuses under the Shiite-dominated security forces.

Omar al-Jabouri, 31, a Sunni Muslim from a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad who attended the rally and said he volunteers with a Shiite brigade, argued that Mr. Maliki had alienated most Iraqis, regardless of their sect.

“He did not just exclude and marginalize the Sunni people; he ignored the Shiite people, too,” Mr. Jabouri said. “He gave special help to his family, his friends, people close to him. He did not really help the Shiite people, as many people think.”

But the Islamic State was a different story, Mr. Jabouri said. “It is obvious to everyone that the Islamic State is a creation of the United States and Israel.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com

 

A Murderous ‘Modernity’: Progressivism and the rise of the welfare-warfare state

September 24, 2014

by Justin Raimondo

 

Ticking at the heart of American society all through the 1920s was the mechanism of false prosperity, which was blowing great quantities of air into a bubble of gigantic proportions. The Federal Reserve system set up before the war made financing the war possible – but at what price? The price was setting up a financial oligarchy with near absolute power over the economy – and also setting up the country for the Great Crash of 1929.

The rise of the totalitarian ideologies as challengers to Western liberalism was made possible, first of all, by the Great War, and by the Crash, which was also caused by the very system that had made the prosecution of the war possible. National Socialism and militant Marxism were “blowback” from World War I just as the jihadists of today are blowback from the cold war era. And these two great enemies of liberty, abhorred by today’s liberals, were at first greeted with something approaching admiration by the progressives of the time. The subsuming of private interests to the collective good under the Italian system drew admiring glances from our liberal professors: Herbert Croly, first editor of The New Republic and champion of Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” touted Italian corporatism as the wave of the future and ended his days as the Duce’s chief apologist outside of Rome. No matter what else they disagreed about, ideologues of both the right and the left agreed on one thing: capitalism was doomed and some form of state-controlled economy was destined to succeed it. The only question was: would it be communism, or fascism?

The same factors that led to our fatal intervention in the first world war were brought to bear in order to have us enter the second. The messianic world-saving doctrines originating in the realm of theology had by this time thoroughly penetrated the secular mainstream and had become the default ideology of the political class and the intellectuals. The Kingdom of God on earth – without God, but with various substitute gods – and every ideological grouplet had their favored gods. The advocates of Technocracy, a group founded naturally enough by an American engineer, wanted to put the technocrats – scientists, and other “experts” – in charge of things. The Communists, the followers of Huey Long, the advocates of the so-called Townsend Plan, which called for a guaranteed annual income and ice cream for everyone, the various small fascist groups with their colored shirts and crude appeals to ethnic and religious prejudice – everyone had a Grand Plan that would defeat the Depression and lift the world out of the abyss into which it seemed to be falling deeper by the day.

Once again, the intellectuals were in the forefront of the war hysteria, the first to call for blood and the last to volunteer. While public opinion in general was opposed to US intervention right up until the bombing of Pearl Harbar, as usual our intellectuals were in the vanguard of the War Party – and, yes, The New Republic was back in action. As were the same financial interests whose fate was now even more closely aligned with British interests. To our Yankee Anglophile elite, snatching England’s chestnuts out of the fire amounted to a sacred duty.

British intelligence played a very active role in the United States during the run-up to Pearl Harbor, planting pro-interventionist articles in the media and actively seeking to undermine the large and vocal America First Committee and allied individuals who were organizing to keep America out of the war. A massive British propaganda effort was undertaken, much of it covert, with their agents in the media feeding the American people a steady diet of interventionist agit-prop. They also acted through groups like the Committee to Aid the Allies, the more militant “Fight for Freedom” group, and the elite Century Group, whose wealthy and well-connected members did much of War Party’s fundraising.

And again, there were elite financial interests pushing for intervention abroad in one direction or another. As Murray Rothbard pointed out in his brilliant monograph, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy:

“During the 1930s, the Rockefellers pushed hard for war against Japan, which they saw as competing with them vigorously for oil and rubber resources in Southeast Asia and as endangering the Rockefellers’ cherished dreams of a mass ‘China market’ for petroleum products. On the other hand, the Rockefellers took a noninterventionist position in Europe, where they had close financial ties with German firms such as I.G. Farben and Co., and very few close relations with Britain and France.

“The Morgans, in contrast, as usual deeply committed to their financial ties with Britain and France, once again plumped early for war with Germany, while their interest in the Far East had become minimal. Indeed, US ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew, former Morgan partner, was one of the few officials in the Roosevelt administration genuinely interested in peace with Japan.

“World War II might therefore be considered, from one point of view, as a coalition war: the Morgans got their war in Europe, the Rockefellers theirs in Asia.”

The real turning point in public and elite opinion came when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the “workers’ fatherland” came under threat. That’s when left-wing opinion in this country – and at the time an important component of the New Deal coalition – turned on a dime and suddenly the cry for intervention was heard from all sorts of former peaceniks who just happened to be friendly to the Soviet Union. Communist Party “peace” fronts were converted into pro-war front groups overnight: the change in the party line was immediate and carried out with impressive discipline.

World War II was liberty’s darkest hour, a time when patriots who warned of what was coming were derided as traitors and silenced, when libertarians were largely forced to go underground and the full dictatorship of thought and deed that is the rule in wartime took complete command, stamping out all public vestiges of dissent.

Government control of economic life, which had begun its assault during the early days of the New Deal, was now complete: with a system of wage and price controls in place, and total command of production, the collectivist juggernaught, fueled by the war, was going full speed ahead. Roosevelt’s wartime dictatorship extended throughout American political life, with an elaborate apparatus of repression set up to deal with the “problem” of dissent. We all know about the massive round up of Japanese-Americans and their imprisonment in camps not to mention the shameful looting of their property. Similar methods were used against Germans and Italians on both coasts, albeit on a smaller scale. Newspapers were banned from the mails, and groups deemed “subversive” of the war effort were dragged into court on phony charges of “sedition.”

It was the liberals who were the worst: it was they who demanded the prosecution of the so-called “isolationists,” and the Communist party was the loudest in demanding that the leaders of the old America First Committee, since disbanded, be tried for treason. It was only after the war, when the tables were turned on the Communists, that we suddenly began to see an appreciation for civil liberties by some on the American left.

With the Americans again taking their cues from their British elder brothers, the Truman administration ushered in the cold war era in response to Churchill’s infamous “Iron Curtain” speech. Having handed over half of Europe to the Soviet Union we now turned on our former allies and suddenly the question of “Who lost China?” was a major foreign policy issue. Who lost China, indeed! The destruction of Japan meant the destruction of the only regional counterweight to the Communists outside of Taiwan.

And in a French Indochinese colony few had heard of, a native rebellion was stirring and the French were asking their American allies for help.

The cold war era brought a whole new dimension to the War Party, which had previously lacked a consistent intellectual leadership. In the ideological wars that split the left during the cold war era a faction arose out of the unorthodox Trotskyist tradition that was to play a key role in ginning up the wars of our own time. These were ex-Communists of one sort or another who had come to hate their old comrades with all the passion of a rejected lover: although many still claimed to be socialists, or even “true communists,” in effect they became fanatical anti-communists, calling for a hard line in “rolling back” communism abroad as well as taking a hard line position on outlawing all manifestations of communism here in the United States.

The defectors from communism, both the official Stalinist variety and the various Trotskyite flavors, had become so numerous by the late 1940s and early fifties that they constituted their own political faction. Indeed, they had their own organization in Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League, which later became Social Democrats, USA. Shachtman had been Leon Trotsky’s chief intellectual advocate in America at one point, but he broke with the Old Man over the nature of the Soviet Union. The old-fashioned Trotskyites still defended the Soviet Union, even during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but the newfangled variety, headed by Shachtman, said the pact showed that the Soviet Union was no longer defensible from a socialist point of view. What existed in Stalin’s Russia wasn’t socialism, it was what they called bureaucratic collectivism – a danger just as deadly and even more oppressive than capitalism.

Shachtman’s tiny organization never had more than 1500 members, but it was vastly influential on the left and aside from that had top level connections in the labor movement, where Shachtman’s cronies acted as advisors to some of the biggest union bosses of the day.

The fabled creatures known today as neoconservatives came out of this milieu . Irving Kristol, the neocon “godfather,” spent his storied youth in a Trotskyite sect, and was no doubt well-acquainted with Shachtman, who loved to hold forth among his youthful followers. And Kristol wasn’t the only young Trotskyite to become an ardent anti-communist. Platoons of them flooded into the conservative movement starting in the 1950s, including among the founding editors of National Review – senior editor James Burnham was once an ardent Trotskyite. Frank Meyer, a close associate of William Buckley’s and a top editor at the magazine, was a former Communist Party theoretician and teacher at their Jefferson School. Willi Schlamm, former editor of the Communist party’s German newspaper, Rote Fahne, was also a founding editor. The transformation of Commentary magazine from a liberal journal to a neoconservative opinion organ limns the trajectory of a whole generation of “liberals who’ve been mugged by reality,” as one definition of a neoconservative phrases it.

In everyday usage the term neoconservative – neocon, for short – has become a synonym for those who advocate a foreign policy of aggressive intervention on a global scale. The neocons are all over the map when it comes to tax policy, social issues, and government regulation, but when it comes to foreign policy they are ruthless in their consistent support for military action, no matter what the context.

Although they started out as left-wing Democrats, and in many cases socialists of one sort or another, their evolving foreign policy views soon drove them so far to the right that they eventually left the Democratic party – after it was taken over by Vietnam war opponents – and joined up with the Republicans. They also moved into the conservative movement, which suffered from a lack of intellectuals, which they very quickly took over by, first, getting a lock on the money, and then getting a lock on the institutions. From there the neocons moved naturally into government, where, during the Reagan administration, they found a niche at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Not even Ronald Reagan was interventionist enough for them: when Reagan withdrew from Lebanon, they compared him to Neville Chamberlain. When he negotiated with the Russians and signed a treaty limiting nuclear weapons they compared him to … yes, Neville Chamberlain. For decades they had traded in their alleged “expertise” on communism, its history and its methods: when the communist empire imploded and went out of existence they were in shock for years. In spite of their supposedly extensive knowledge of the subject, they never saw the end of communism coming. Indeed, they took quite the opposite tack in claiming that communism, far from being on its last legs, was on the march. They were constantly warning that the West was falling behind in the arms race: we were suffering, they said, from a “missile gap,” with the Russians way ahead. When this turned out to be phony-baloney, they resorted to the old “will to power” argument: the Communists, they argued, were imbued with a fanatical devotion that the softhearted democratic powers couldn’t match. The communists knew what they wanted and they acted decisively to get it. The vacillating West couldn’t hope to stand against them unless we adopted some of their methods: clandestine efforts to overthrow enemy governments, funding proxies throughout the world, and even launching a military assault on the Soviet Union itself.

As it turned out, none of this was necessary: the Soviet system imploded, suddenly, in 1989, and did so with stunning rapidity.

This was something the neocons were totally unprepared for: their knowledge of – and respect for – economics was negligible. They were former socialists, for the most part, who still retained their faith in the power of government: they had no idea the Soviets were on their last legs.

Of course, the great libertarian economist, Ludwig von Mises, had predicted the fall of communism back in the 1920s, with his famous paper on the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. Libertarians knew Soviet communism was doomed to fail: they therefore saw no threat emanating from the Soviet Union, which was playing a defensive game at any rate. Stalin wasn’t as interested in exporting communism as he was in preserving his own rule on the home front. We handed him eastern Europe at Yalta but beyond that he did not go.

And now his heirs weren’t going anywhere, except onto the dust heap of history.

With the fall of the Kremlin, the neocons decided that what Charles Krauthammer dubbed the “unipolar moment” was at hand. This was our big chance, now that the Soviets were out of the way, to establish a “world order” with Washington – of course! – as its center, but also incorporating Western Europe and Japan into one vast superstate. This was all part of the flurry of discussion that followed the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” essay, in which he related that the Soviets’ demise and his reading of Hegel had revealed to him an astonishing fact: history had come to an end. Liberal democracy had triumphed over all other competitors and was fated to be “the final form of human government.” A World State was not only in the making, it was the inevitable outcome of the Spirit of History!

The old 19th century post-millennial pietism burns brightest in the hearts of our neocons. The urge to conquer, to remake, and purify the world of sin, to impose some kind of authoritarian “world order” out of what is a natural, beneficial, and self-regulating spontaneous order – this is the essence of the interventionist credo.

The neocons were lost for a while after the communist collapse: no one was listening to them anymore. The Kosovo war was a bust as far as Republicans were concerned: indeed, when a Republican House of Representatives voted down Clinton’s Kosovo war budget, Bill Kristol threatened to leave the GOP. If only he had followed through on his threat the Republican party might have been spared much – but, alas, it was not to be.

September 11, 2001 was the Neoconservative Moment, and in the months and years to come their star would rise until they had effectively seized control of the government. As Bob Woodward said in his book, Plan of Attack:

“[Colin] Powell felt Cheney and his allies – his chief aide, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and what Powell called Feith’s ‘Gestapo’ office – had established what amounted to a separate government.”

There’s no real need to go into this in much detail, since the story of their deception is well-known. They manipulated the “intelligence” and after lying us into war they presided over the worst military disaster in American history, with the blowback still coming at us right up to the present day.

At the end of the cold war, as the neocons were flailing about looking to gain some traction, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan co-wrote an essay on a new foreign policy agenda for America in the post cold war world in which they stated that the goal of American policymakers ought to be the creation of a “benevolent global hegemony.” This is the world state envisioned by Fukuyama: a global government with a world central bank backed up by a multinational military force and a system of universal surveillance – with nowhere to hide from the all-seeing eye of the Empire.

That is their goal – and they have come much closer to achieving it in the past few years. Already they have overrun much of the Middle East, and now they have their sights fixed on the lands of the former Soviet Union. In partnership with the EU, they are moving in on Russia. And while China may seem too vast a country to absorb, Western penetration of that formerly isolated and hostile land has been impressive.

The frontiers of the empire are moving outward so fast that one can hardly keep up with their progress. Could this turn out to be the fatal weakness that brings the whole thing tumbling down?

All empires fall. But each case is different. No one knows when the cracks will begin to appear in the façade, or how long the will take to fatally weaken and split the foundations once thought to be invulnerable. My best guess, however, is that whenever it starts, it will take quite a while to bring the whole thing down. The Soviet empire disintegrated in a little over a year – the Mayans, almost overnight. In the case of the American empire, the foundations are a lot stronger to begin with: I think we are going to go the Roman way, with ups and downs, long declines followed by brief revivals.

And finally, I want to say that I’ve gotten more optimistic as I’ve gotten older, and that the pessimism of my youthful vision of a rotten system collapsing under its own weight no longer seems either desirable or imminent. What I do see as a very real possibility is a political movement in this country that will restore our old republic, dismantle the empire, and return the Constitution to its rightful place at the very center of the American system. I see that a man with the last name of Paul is now the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination and suddenly I am a teenage libertarian all over again. You know, we had a slogan back then, in the 60s, when the libertarian movement first began to organize itself. It was: “Freedom in our time.” Back then, it seemed like a distant promise. Today, it seems like a real possibility. And that is, in itself, a great victory.

Overseas Americans continue to give up citizenship as banks refuse to deal with US tax returns

September 25, 2014

RT

 

            Thousands of Americans living overseas continue to give up their citizenship as foreign banks turn them away over the burden of completing increasingly expensive and complicated tax returns required by a controversial new tax law.

More than 1,500 Americans have renounced their citizenship in so far 2014,the Guardian reports. This year’s total may not top last year’s record-setting statistic – nearly 3,000 Americans gave up their citizenship in 2013 – but the high numbers shows that new tax law implemented by the US continues to force those living abroad to make difficult decisions.

Dubbed the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), the tax law was passed in 2010 as an attempt to crack down on tax dodgers and the banks that helped facilitate money laundering. The bill has been rolling into effect slowly over the years, with Congress passing the legislation in the hopes that it would bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes.

Since the US is one of the few countries that taxes its citizens regardless of where they live, the law has ended up ensnaring all Americans who live and work overseas and use foreign accounts to pay bills at home. As of 2012, all banks working with the US are now required to divulge information on their accounts held by American citizens.

If foreign banks fail to do so regarding Americans with assets totaling more than $50,000, they risk the US Treasury withholding 30 percent of its income from the United States. As a result, many foreign banks are now refusing to deal with American citizens or limiting them to a small selection of services.

Some Americans have been forced to remove their names from joint investment accounts, lest the bank refuse to work with them or their family. Others, meanwhile, have opted simply to decline filing tax returns and hope for new legislation to make their situation more bearable.

With many Americans either unable to find banks to work with or unwilling to deal with the intricate paperwork, a growing number then tried to renounce their citizenship. Even that process has become tougher, though, now that the State Department has raised the cost of doing so to $2,350 – up dramatically from the previous fee of $450.

What’s more, many overseas Americans were not even aware of the changes in US tax law until the countries they’re living in began authorizing the new regulations and passing laws.

“People are learning about this through websites, media, word of mouth and so forth,” Victoria Ferauge, a Seattle native living in Paris who blogs about tax laws, told the Guardian. “Where is the US government is in all this?”

‘I was terrified we’d lose all our money’: banks tell US customers they won’t work with Americans

Thousands of Americans abroad are giving up their citizenship as the implementation of a complex new tax law causes banks to shut down accounts for US expatriates

September 24 2014

by Siri Srinivas

theguardian.com

 

Angry Canadians are rare. But Patricia Moon qualifies.

            Until 2012, Moon was actually an American – albeit one who had lived in Canada for 32 years. She settled in so well that in 2008, she added Canadian citizenship to her US one.

But Moon cut ties with America three years ago, after new banking laws aimed at tax evaders required expats like her to file more thorough US tax returns. She was five years behind on the news. “I was terrified we’d lose all our money,” she says.

After back-filing years of tax returns, Moon renounced her US citizenship in 2012. It was a defiant act she describes as being one of the first canaries to leave the coalmine as US banking laws make life more difficult for American expatriates. She wasn’t pleased she had to do it.

“It was like cutting off my right arm,” to not be American any more, says Moon, who only became a Canadian citizen in 2008. “Now, I’m simply angry.”

In February this year, the US and Canadian governments signed an intergovernmental agreement to co-operate on Fatca. The Foreign Accounts Taxation Compliance Act required all foreign banks to disclose the financial information of any American with assets over $50,000 sitting in banks outside of the US.

Steep penalties add muscle to the law. If a foreign bank – not just in Canada, but anywhere – fails to report even a single US citizen as a customer to the IRS, the US Treasury department would withhold 30% of the banks’ US income as penalty.

Foreign banks, some of whom earned a reputation as tax scofflaws, are now deeply afraid of the Internal Revenue Service.

The US government is policing foreign banks aggressively as it comes down hard on any company that helps tax evaders, money launderers and other criminals.

Scared of running afoul of US banking laws, foreign banks are taking extreme steps to limit US citizens to a narrow range of services.

The result for expats has been a chaotic brew of closed bank accounts, mysterious excuses and a scramble to find local banks that would allow them to park their money

Moon considers the US-Canadian Fatca agreement akin to economic sanctions on Iran and North Korea.

Moon is on the board of the Alliance to Defend Canadian Sovereignty, a non-profit that in August filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government. The group claims that Fatca legislation effectively breaks Canadian laws governing the privacy of financial information of its citizens.

“Our bank is not allowed to report financial information to our tax agency [in Canada]. So it’s absurd that the US government can get this information,” says Moon.

Others are amazed they can’t find a foreign bank that will take their money.

A year ago, Brian Dublin, an American finance professional living in Zurich, received a notice from his bank in Switzerland. The note told him that the bank no longer served US citizens.

Citing mysterious “regulatory issues”, his bankers at the Swiss institution Raiffeisein gave him 30 days to close his account.

Dublin moved his money to UBS, another Swiss bank. No shelter there either: UBS allowed him to open a checking account but required him to close down his Swiss retirement fund. He had to transfer his retirement savings of five years into a regular checking account.

The reason? Again, the answer came: “Regulatory issues”.The ‘regulatory issues’, here, encompass the fact that banks are panicking at the prospect of the long arm of the IRS, which works through Fatca.

Fatca has caused Dublin some ribbing amongst his friends in Switzerland. “When [George W] Bush was president, they made fun of us”, he says.

Now, his Swiss friends cite Fatca as the new stand-in for overreaching American policy. “They say, you Americans are so arrogant and crazy. You think you control everything.”

And they’re right, Dublin now concedes

It started with the Swiss banking scandals of 2009, when the US government aggressively went after banks that aided tax evaders. This effectively ended the reign of the famous, secretive “Swiss bank accounts” enshrined in thrillers like the Bourne Identity and James Bond films.

The US government, using its economic power, was levying a polite ransom on financial institutions across the world to reveal their rich, potentially tax-evading US clients, or else face humiliation at best and prosecution at the worst. The IRS, which lives under the US Treasury, was keen to collect the taxes that it believes it is fairly owed, mostly from wealthy Americans using offshore tax havens.

UBS settled with the US government, paying a fine of $780m for helping tax evaders. Other banks, including Credit Suisse, soon followed.

Enter the “regulatory issues” that have bedeviled Dublin, Besser and other Americans living overseas.

The original Fatca law conjures an image of wealthy American individuals sipping cocktails on a beach somewhere with large offshore accounts filled with untaxed capital. But expats were never the targets, say experts. But Fatca’s impact has hit many of the seven million American expatriates who are not sipping umbrella-decorated drinks on exclusive beaches.

“Americans living abroad were not originally the primary target of Fatca,” says University of Virginia Law School professor Ruth Mason about the law, “which was designed principally to prevent offshore tax evasion by resident Americans.”

Expatriates such as Dublin spend several hours each year filing their US tax returns. Americans living overseas can exclude $100,000 a year of income from US taxes, according to David McKeegan, an international tax expert.

Many are caught by surprise. There has been no visible communication campaign to alert the millions of expatriates that they may be tax cheats.

“People are learning about this through websites, media, word of mouth and so forth. Where is the US government is in all this?” asks Victoria Ferauge, a Seattle native living in Paris who blogs about tax laws.

Genevieve Besser, a dual German-American citizen and a communications consultant in Germany, says that among expats in Germany, the preferred term for the legislation is ‘Berlin Wall’.

“It’s shameful and humiliating that a country so free is so restricting,” she says.

Besser says her bank, ING-DiBa, told her that that it did not work with Americans anymore.

Besser was a co-signer on her daughter’s bank account. ING-DiBa closed it down because of Besser’s German-American dual citizenship.

Her husband had to take her name off their joint investment account. His checking accounts have so far been left untouched.

“But if they find out he’s married to an American, they might tell him to get lost,” Besser says.

Besser’s investment options are severely restricted as an expatriate forcing her to invest in financial products such as individual stocks instead of mutual funds. “I’m shut out because I live abroad,” she says.

The complications have become so prevalent that, as a last resort, thousands of Americans have asked US Consulates abroad to cancel their citizenship. In 2013, 2,999 Americans renounced their citizenship; in 2014 so far, it’s a little more than 1,500 people.

 

Possibly to stem the tide, the state department raised the fee for citizenship renunciation fourfold on September 12, from $450 to $2,350. Officials seem to be hoping the steep fee will discourage more people from giving up their passports.

Says Dublin: “For many years I’ve paid $500 for my blue passport. But it becomes a very expensive thing to have.”

American expatriates who have not taken the extreme move of renouncing are taking the rather precarious approach of waiting and watching for new legislation instead of complying with the current law.

“They just don’t pay [taxes] and hope it goes away”, says Besser.

On a Skype call with a reporter, Victoria Ferauge sits in her sunlit Paris house, smoking the occasional cigarette, and following the day’s French Parliament session with particular interest. Ferauge, a Seattle-born American married to a Frenchman, has been following and blogging about US tax laws for the last three years.

On this Thursday afternoon, France’s parliament is voting to approve an inter-governmental agreement with the US on Fatca compliance.

“A vast majority of Americans suddenly woke up to what’s going on,” Verauge says. She relates stories of fellow expatriates who have had to take their names off joint accounts – some holding small family inheritances – because banks would not accept US customers.

“My bank will not answer questions,” she says about her enquiries regarding their Fatca compliance.

Verauge is preparing to move to Osaka, but she has doubts how the law will play out in Japan. She is infuriated to be put in the position of suddenly finding herself in a foreign country and not having a dollar she can spend.

“I will give up my citizenship if it came to that.”

            Even those Canadians who might be called ‘accidental Americans’ don’t like the long arm of the IRS.

Courtney Welch’s Canadian bank found out that he was, in spite of possessing a Canadian passport for the last 41 years, a dual citizen of US and Canada. He was naturalised as a child when his parents moved to Canada, but retains a dual-American citizenship because he was a minor.

To avoid breaking any laws, Welch will have to renounce his US citizenship and file five years’ worth of tax returns as well as possibly thousands of dollars to the US government in taxes on income he earned in Canada. He will have to foot bills for airplane flights and miss out on wages – and that’s not counting the $2,350 fee to renounce a citizenship he never assumed in the first place.

Welch, who has no intentions of living in the US, finds the idea that he has to pay taxes to the US government ridiculous.

“I feel about the same obligation to file US tax papers as you would if the supreme court of Uruguay all of a sudden decided you were a citizen and had to file a tax return there,” he tells the Guardian.

 

Scary FBI stats: Mass shootings nearly tripled in last 7 years, mostly at schools

September 25, 2014

RT

 

Shootings in which a gunman wounds or kills multiple people have nearly tripled in the US in recent years, according to a new FBI report. The majority of those shooting incidents have occurred at businesses or schools, the report found.

The study concentrated on 160 “active shooter incidents” between 2000 and 2013. Such incidents are defined as cases in which an attacking gunman shoots or attempts to shoot people in a populated area. The FBI excluded shootings that were gang- or drug-related.

The report found that during the first seven years involved in the study, an average of 6.4 “active shooter incidents” occurred each year. That average increased to 16.4 per year in the final seven years studied.

The largest portion of such incidents – 73 total, or 45.6 percent of all examined attacks – took place at a business, or “commercial environment,” the FBI found. Just over 24 percent, or 39 incidents, occurred at schools. The rest of the attacks studied happened at other locations, including military and other government properties, residential properties, open spaces, places of worship, and health care outlets.

All in all, the incidents yielded a total of 1,043 casualties – 486 killed and 557 wounded, not including the shooters. Researchers found these totals and other data for the report “using official police records, after action reports, and shooting commission documents as well as FBI resources and open source information.”

All but six of the 160 incidents involved male attackers. Only during two incidents were there more than one gunman involved.

Just over half of the attacks, or 90 shootings, ended “on the shooter’s initiative,” such as suicide or fleeing the scene, according to the FBI. Twenty-one incidents ended once unarmed citizens immobilized the shooter.

In 21 of the 45 attacks where law enforcement engaged the shooter to end the incident, the FBI found that nine officers were killed and 28 were wounded.

The report includes infamous attacks in this time period, such as those occurring at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary School, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Fort Hood, the Aurora (Colorado) Cinemark Century 16 movie theater, the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, and the Washington Navy Yard.

The FBI’s stated goal with the report – conducted with assistance from Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center – is “to provide our law enforcement partners—normally the first responders on the scene of these dangerous and fast-moving events—with data that will help them to better prepare for and respond to these incidents, saving more lives and keeping themselves safer in the process,” according to the FBI.

FBI officials said the number of shootings has increased based on selfish reasons, or fame. The officials believe many attackers follow the lead of other mass shooters and have a desire for the resulting notoriety.

“The copycat phenomenon is real,” said Andre Simons of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, according to NBC News. “As more and more notable and tragic events occur, we think we’re seeing more compromised, marginalized individuals who are seeking inspiration from those past attacks.”

What role issues such as economic despair, lack of mental health care, or life in an alienating society that rewards cruelty were not included in the report by the FBI, the nation’s largest law enforcement body.

 

The Strange Cult of Mohammad: The Coming Grand Expulsions

 

by Dr. Phillip L. Kushner

Head of Mathematics Department

University of Texas (Austin)

 

What is Islam? Who was Mohammad?

 

Islam is a strictly monotheistic religion, articulated by the Qur’an, a text considered by its adherents to be the verbatim word of God and by the Prophet of Islam Muhammad‘s teachings.

Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable and that the purpose of life is to worship God They regard their religion as the completed and universal version of a primordial, monotheistic faith revealed at many times and places before, including, notably, to the prophets Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Islamic tradition holds that previous messages and revelations have been changed and distorted over time. Religious practices include the Five Pillars of Islam, which are five obligatory acts of worship. Islamic law touches on virtually every aspect of life and society, encompassing everything from banking and warfare to welfare and the environment.

The majority of Muslims belong to one of two denominations, the Sunni and the Shi’a. About 13% of Muslims live in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country.31% in the Indian Subcontinent, 20% in the Middle Eastand 15% in Sub-saharan Africa. Sizable communities are also found in China and Russia, and parts of the Caribbean. Converts and immigrant communities are found in almost every part of the world. With about 1.57 billion Muslims comprising about 23% of the world’s population (see Islam by country), Islam is the second-largest religion in the world and arguably the fastest-growing religion in the world.

Islam’s fundamental theological concept is the belief that there is only one god. The Arabic term for God is Allah. Other non-Arabic nations might use different names, for instance in Turkey, the Turkish word for God, “Tanrı” is used as much as Allah. The first of the Five Pillars of Islam, declares that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is God’s messenger. In traditional Islamic theology, God is beyond all comprehension; Muslims are not expected to visualize God but to worship and adore Him as the Protector. Muslims believe the purpose of life is to worship God. Although Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet, they reject the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and divinity of Jesus, comparing it to polytheism. In Islamic theology, Jesus was just a man and not the son of God;

Muhammad (c. 570 – June 8, 632) was a trader and camel-breeder and who later became  a religious, political, and military leader. Muslims now view him, not as the creator of a new religion, but as the restorer of the original, uncorrupted monotheistic faith of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and others. In Muslim tradition, Muhammad is viewed as the last and the greatest in a series of prophets—as the man closest to perfection, the possessor of all virtues. For the last 22 years of his life, in 610, beginning at age 40, Muhammad started receiving what he claimed were “revelations from God.” It now also appears that Muhammed suffered from some form of Alzheimer’s Disease and that his final days were given to long and senseless utterances that his supporters claimed were ‘revelations.’ The content of these revelations, known as the Qur’an, was memorized and recorded by his companions.

During this time, Muhammad preached to the people of Mecca, imploring them to abandon polytheism. Although some converted to Islam, Muhammad and his followers were persecuted by the leading Meccan authorities. After 12 years of preaching, Muhammad and the Muslims performed the Hijra (“emigration”) to the city of Medina in 622. There, with the Medinan converts and the Meccan migrants Muhammad established his political and religious authority. Within years, two battles had been fought against Meccan forces: the Battle of Badr in 624, which was a Muslim victory, and the Battle of Uhud in 625, which ended inconclusively. Conflict with Medinan Jewish clans who opposed the Muslims led to their exile, enslavement or death, and the Jewish enclave of Khaybar was subdued. At the same time, Meccan trade routes were cut off as Muhammad brought surrounding desert tribes under his control. By 629 Muhammad was victorious in the nearly bloodless Conquest of Mecca, and by the time of his death in 632 (at the age of 62) he and his followers ruled over the Arabian peninsula.

 In 630 A.D. Mecca was re-taken followed by the battle of Hunain wherein the army under command of the Prophet, the non-Muslim tribes were defeated , and a large number of the enemy were killed but, under the Prophet’s order, no child was harmed. Often, after such a murderous battle, Muhammad had young children, both boys and girls, brought before him, had them stripped naked and then chose ones he wished “to lie with.”
            One day after battle, Muhammad came back home and said to his daughter Fatima, “Wash the blood from this sword and I swear in the name of Allah this sword was obeying me all the time.” .

The number of military campaigns Muhammad led in person during the last ten years of his life is twenty-seven, in nine of which there was hard fighting.  The number of expeditions which he planned and sent out under other leaders is thirty-eight

 

Muhammad’s last speech to his followers on Mt Arafat:

 

…..”I descended by Allah with the sword in my hand, and my wealth will come from the shadow of my sword.  And the one who will disagree with me will be humiliated and persecuted.”

  Muhammad told Abu Sufyan: “Woe to you! Accept Islam and testify that Muhammad is the apostle of God before your neck is cut off by the sword.” Thus he professed the faith of Islam and became a Muslim. This man, Abu Sufyan, was not a believer at first, but he quickly “believed” after he was threatened by death.’

  So, even before Muhammad pagans were worshipping this black stone in the Kaba.  Are we surprised that although Muhammad  proclaimed only one God, he continued to participate in idol worship at this pagan shrine (Kaba); and Muslims still do idol worship there today.  The black stone of Ka’aba is nothing but a holdover within Islam, from pre-Islamic paganism.

 There is evidence that black stones were commonly worshipped in the Arab world.  In 190 A.D. Clement of Alexandria mentioned that “the Arabs worship stone”.  He was alluding to the black stone of Dusares at Petra.  In the 2nd century, Maximus Tyrius wrote; “The Arabians pay homage to I know not what god, which they represent by a quadrangular stone”.  Maximus was speaking of the Kaaba (Ka’ba) that contains the Black Stone.

 Muhammad led 27 military campaigns against innocent villages and caravans and planned 38 others

 

            “I am the prophet that laughs when killing my enemies.” 

 

 Muhammad posed as an apostle of God, yet his life was filled with lustfulness (12 marriages and sex with many children, both male and female, slaves and concubines), rapes, warfare, conquests, and unmerciful butcheries.  The infinitely good, just and all holy God preached by Muhammad simply cannot tolerate anything in the least unjust or sinful.  What Muhammad produced in the Qur’an is simply a book of gibberish consisting of later evil verses superseding earlier peaceful verses. These verses in Arabic poetically “tickle” the ears of Arab listeners.    

Modern Islam is a caustic blend of paganism and twisted Bible stories.      Muhammad, its lone “prophet”, who made no prophecies, conceived his religion to satiate his lust for power, sex, and money. He was a terrorist. And if you think these conclusions are shocking, additional research will easily uncover the evidence mostly from Islamic historians 70% of what is here is from Muslim and ex-Muslim historians – back to the 8th century.

 Accordingly, after a degenerative disease of which the main symptom were headache, loss of memory, increasing skin eruptions and incontinence, he died in the arms of his favorite wife, Aysha, on Radiulawwal 11 A.H.—633 A.D.

After an objective and lengthy study of the life of Muhammad, the only rational conclusion is that Islam’s lone prophet was a ruthless terrorist, a mass-murderer, a thief, slave trader, rapist and aggressive pedophile.

            In his personal life, Muhammad had two great weaknesses. The first was greed. By looting caravans and Jewish settlements he had amassed fabulous wealth for himself, his family, and his tribe

When we turn and look at the life of Muhammad we find that he clearly killed and robbed people in the name of Allah according to the Quran. He taught his disciples by example, command, and precept that they could and should kill and rob in Allah’s name and force people to submit to Islam.
            His next greatest weakness was women and young boys. Although in the Quran he would limit his followers to having four wives, he himself took more than four wives, numerous concubines and young boys and girls into his bed.
            The question of the number of women with whom Muhammad was sexually involved either as wives, concubines or devotees was made a point of contention by the Jews in Muhammad’s day.
            “All the commentaries agree that verse 57 of Sura 4 (on-Nesa) was sent down after the Jews criticized Mohammad’s appetite for women, alleging that he had nothing to do except to take wives”

Since polygamy was practiced in the Old Testament by such patriarchs as Abraham, the mere fact that Muhammad had more than one wife is not sufficient in and of itself to discount his claim to prophethood. But this does negate the fact that the issue has historical in terms of trying to understand Muhammad as a man.
            It also poses a logical problem for Muslims. Because the Quran in Sura 4:3 forbids the taking of more than four wives, to have taken any more would have been sinful for Muhammad. He not only exceeded this fiat many times but also added young boys and girls to his harem in direct contravention of his own pronouncements.
            While in Islamic countries an eight or nine-year old girl can be given in marriage to an adult male, in the West, most people would shudder to think of an eight or nine-year old girl being given in marriage to anyone   

This aspect of Muhammad’s personal life is something that many scholars pass over because they do not want to hurt the feelings of Muslims, or, more pragmatically, they do not want to experience a knife in the dark. Yet, history cannot be rewritten to avoid confronting the facts that Muhammad had unnatural desires for little girls and, even more reprehensible, little boys.
            The documentation for all the women in Muhammad’s harem is so vast and has been presented so many times by able scholars that only those who use circular reasoning can object to it.

 Though a forbidden subject, pedophilia and homosexual practices were an active part of Muhammad’s life. Today, homosexuality and pedophilia is a very strong part of Muslim life. Adherents of Islam believe that these activities are fully approved, not only by the writings in the Quran but also by the examples set during his lifetime by the Prophet Muhammad himself. His harem did indeed have many women but many of them were as young as nine and there were also a significant number of pre-pubescent boys among them

  In brief summation, the Prophet of the Muslim faith does not come off as a spiritual leader. He lied; he cheated; he lusted; he failed to keep his word, He was neither perfect nor sinless. By Western standards of the present time, Muhammad was a fraud, a common murderer, a lecher and a pedophile.

 

Homosexuality and Islam

 

For centuries, Muslim men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Muslim Afghanistani Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern Afghanistan  towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means “boy player.” The men like to boast about it.

The Pashtun are Afghanistan’s most important tribe. For centuries, the nation’s leaders have been Pashtun.

As for Karzai, an American who worked in and around his palace in an official capacity for many months told me that homosexual behavior “was rampant” among “soldiers and personnel on the security detail. They talked about boys all the time.”

In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called “dancing boys” a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.”

A recent (July 2010) Department of State analysis, heavily classified,not only discusses rampant homosexual pedophilia among Muslims, not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, Iran and, especially, in Saudi Arabia. The thesis that American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud, aggressive pedophiles, is a subject that has been forbidden of discussion by orders from the White House itself. Fear of “energizing’ the Muslim world and creating more active terrorists is the maini motive for this concern.

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from interpretation of Islamic law. Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Muslim expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” Fundamentalist Muslim imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are “unclean” and therefore distasteful. That helps explain why women are hidden away – and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. ‘It’s not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren’t in love with their boys’.They only sodomize them because they view women as unclean and the Prophet approved of pedophelia .

 

Islamic revival and Islamist movements

 

The 20th century saw the Islamic world increasingly exposed to outside cultural influences, bringing potential changes to Muslim societies. In response, new Islamic “revivalist” movements were initiated as a counter movement to non-Islamic ideas. Groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt advocate a totalistic and theocratic alternative to secular political ideologies. Sometimes called Islamist, they see Western cultural values as a threat, and promote Islam as a comprehensive solution to every public and private question of importance.

In countries like Iran, revolutionary movements replaced secular regime with an Islamic state, while transnational groups like Osama bin Laden‘s al-Qaeda engage in terrorism to further their goals.

Modern criticism of Islam includes accusations that Islam is intolerant of criticism and that Islamic law is too hard on apostates from Islam. Critics like Ibn Warraq question the morality of the Qu’ran, saying that its contents justify the mistreatment of women, homosexuality and encourage antisemitic remarks by Muslim theologians.

Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer focus more on criticizing the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, a danger they feel has been ignored

 

Jihad

 

Jihad means “to strive or struggle” (in the way of God) and is considered the “Sixth Pillar of Islam” by a minority of Sunni Muslim authorities. Jihad, in its broadest sense, is classically defined as “exerting one’s utmost power, efforts, endeavors, or ability in contending with an object of disapprobation.

Within Islamic jurisprudence, jihad is usually taken to mean military exertion against non-Muslim combatants in the defense or expansion of the Ummah. The ultimate purpose of military jihad is the goal of global conquest. Jihad is the only form of warfare permissible in Islamic law and may be declared against apostates, rebels, highway robbers, violent groups, and non-Muslim leaders or states who oppress Muslims or hamper its aggressive proselytizing efforts.

Under most circumstances and for most Muslims, jihad is a collective duty

 

Sub-Cults of Islam

 

Sunni

Sunni Muslims are the largest group in Islam, comprising the vast bulk of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, The Qur’an and the Sunnah (the example of Muhammad’s life) as recorded in hadith are the primary foundations of Sunni doctrine. Sunnis believe that the first four caliphs were the rightful successors to Muhammad; since God did not specify any particular leaders to succeed him, those leaders had to be elected. Sunnis believe that a caliph should be chosen by the whole community.

 Shi’a

The Shi’a constitute 10–13% of Islam and are its second-largest branch. They believe in the political and religious leadership of Imams from the progeny of Ali ibn Abi Talib, who according to most Shi’a are in a state of ismah, meaning infallibility. They believe that Ali ibn Abi Talib, as the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, was his rightful successor, and they call him the first Imam (leader), rejecting the legitimacy of the previous Muslim caliphs. To most Shi’a, an Imam rules by right of divine appointment and holds “absolute spiritual authority” among Muslims, having final say in matters of doctrine and revelation. Shias regard Ali as the prophet’s true successor and believe that a caliph is appointed by divine will. Shi’a Islam has several branches, the largest of which is the Twelvers which the label Shi’a generally refers to.

Sufism

Sufism is a mystical-ascetic approach to Islam that seeks to find divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God. By focusing on the more spiritual aspects of religion, Sufis strive to obtain direct experience of God by making use of “intuitive and emotional faculties” that one must be trained to use. Sufism and Islamic law are usually considered to be complementary, although Sufism has been criticized by salafi for what they see as an unjustified religious innovation. Many Sufi orders, or tariqas, can be classified as either Sunni or Shi’a, but others classify themselves simply as ‘Sufi’. Some Sufi groups can be described as non-Islamic when their teachings are very distinct from Islam

 

The Demographics of Islam

 

A comprehensive 2009 demographic study of 232 countries and territories reported that 23% of the global population or 1.57 billion people are Muslims. Of those, an estimated 87–90% are Sunni and 10–13% are Shi’a with a small minority belonging to other sects. Approximately 50 countries are Muslim-majority, and Arabs account for around 20% of all Muslims worldwide.

 The majority of Muslims live in Asia and Africa. Approximately 62% of the world’s Muslims live in Asia, with over 683 million adherents in Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. In the Middle East, non-Arab countries such as Turkey and Iran are the largest Muslim-majority countries; in Africa, Egypt and Nigeria have the most populous Muslim communities

 Most estimates indicate that the People’s Republic of China has approximately 20 to 30 million Muslims (1.5% to 2% of the population). However, data provided by the San Diego State University‘s International Population Center to U.S. News & World Report suggests that China has 65.3 million Muslims. Islam is the second largest religion after Christianity in many European countries, and is slowly catching up to that status in the Americas, with between 2,454,000, according to Pew Forum, and approximately 7 million Muslims, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in the United States.

 

Muslims in Europe: Country guide

Islam is widely considered Europe’s fastest growing religion, with immigration and above average birth rates leading to a rapid increase in the Muslim population.

The exact number of Muslims is difficult to establish however, as census figures are often questioned and many countries choose not to compile such information anyway.

 

Albania 

Total population: 3.1 million

Muslim population: 2.2 million (70%)

Background: Religious worship was banned in Albania until the transition from Stalinist state to democracy in the 1990s. Islam is now openly recognized as the country’s major religion and most Albanians are Sunni Muslim by virtue of the nation’s history: The Balkans has had centuries of association with the faith as many parts of it were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. While the empire is long gone, the culture remained in place. Significant populations of Albanian Muslims exist in a number of other European countries.

Sources: Total population – Albanian Institute of Statistics, 2005; Muslim population – UK Foreign Office.

Austria

Total population: 8.2 million

Muslim population: 339,000 (4.1%)

Background: Large numbers of Muslims lived under Austrian rule when Bosnia-Hercegovina was annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908. Many of Austria’s Muslims have roots in Turkey and others arrived from the Balkans during the 1990s wars – partly because of historical ties. Islam has been recognized as an official religion in Austria for many years, meaning that it has a role in the religious teaching in schools. Vienna has historically been regarded as the point where the Islamic world reached its most western point, a critical battle in Austria in the 16th century marking the beginning of the decline of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Sources: Total population – Statistics Austria, 2005 figures; Muslim population – Statistics Austria, 2001 figures.

Belgium

Total population: 10.3 million

Muslim population: 0.4 million (4%)

Background: Islam is one of seven recognized religions in Belgium, a status that brings it a number of subsidies and official roles, such as providing teachers. Despite this there have been complaints of discrimination. Unemployment and poor housing have been one such cause of tension. There have also been claims of discrimination against women in traditional dress. A majority of Belgium’s Muslims are of Moroccan or Turkish origin; many others are from Albania. (Citizenship is available after seven years).

Sources: Total population – Statistics Belgium 2001; Muslim population – US State Department.

Bosnia-Hercegovina

Total population: 3.8 million

Muslim population: 1.5 million (40%)

Background: Bosnia-Hercegovina is still recovering from the bloody inter-ethnic war of 1992-95. Around 250,000 people died in the conflict between Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs. Almost 8,000 Muslims were killed by Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica in 1995 – Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II. Many Muslims were displaced, as were members of other communities. A peacekeeping force remains in the country, whose frontiers have long been considered the western borders of the Islamic faith in Europe.

Sources: Total population – Agency for Statistics Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2003 figures; Muslim population – US State Department.

 Denmark

Total population: 5.4 million

Muslim population: 270,000 (5%)

Background: In the 1970s Muslims arrived from Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco and the former Yugoslavia to work. In the 1980s and 90s the majority of Muslim arrivals were refugees and asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Bosnia. Access to housing and employment have been sources of concern for Muslims in Denmark. (A minority have citizenship).

Sources: Total population – Statistics Denmark, 2004 figures; Muslim population – US State Department.

France

Total population: 62.3 million

Muslim population: Five to six million (8-9.6%)

Background: The French Muslim population is the largest in western Europe. About 70% have their heritage in former north African colonies of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. France favors integration and many Muslims are citizens. Nevertheless, the growth of the community has challenged the French ideal of strict separation of religion and public life. There has been criticism that Muslims face high unemployment and often live in poor suburbs. A ban on religious symbols in public schools provoked a major national row as it was widely regarded as being a ban on the Islamic headscarf. Late 2005 saw widespread and prolonged rioting among mainly immigrant communities across France. Recent French forced mass expulsions of Gypsies have caused great apprehension, and anger, in France’s large and often very restive Muslim population

Sources: Total population – National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies, 2004 figures; Muslim population – French government estimate.

Germany

Total population: 82.5 million

Muslim population: 3 million (3.6%)

Background: The majority of the Muslim population is Turkish, with many retaining strong links to Turkey. Others arrived from Bosnia and Kosovo during the Balkan wars. Until recently Muslims were considered “guest workers”, who would one day leave the country – a view that is changing. Racist violence is a sensitive issue, with the authorities trying a range of strategies to beat it.

Sources: Total population – Federal Statistical Office, 2004 figures; Muslim population – Federal Ministry of the Interior estimate.

Italy

Total population: 58.4 million

Muslim population: 825,000 (1.4%)

Background: The Muslim population is diverse, the largest group coming from Morocco. Others are from elsewhere in North Africa, south Asia, Albania, and the Middle East. Most arrived from the 1980s onwards, many of them as students. Italy is working to formalize relations between the state and the Muslim community. Up to 160,000 Muslims are Italian born. Most Muslims have the right to reside and work in Italy, but are not citizens.

Sources: Total population – Italian National Statistical Institute; Muslim population – UK Foreign Office.

Macedonia

Total population: 2.1 million

Muslim population: 630,000 (30%)

Background: Macedonia’s largest religion is Macedonian Orthodox, but almost one third of the population describe themselves as Muslim. Macedonia was spared the inter-ethnic violence that affected much of the Balkans following the break-up of Yugoslavia. But in early 2001 rebels staged an uprising demanding greater rights for the ethnic Albanian minority – a group which includes most Muslims. With EU and NATO support a deal was reached offering them greater rights, although some have been unhappy with the pace of change. The US State Department suggests that religious freedom is generally respected and that “societal discrimination is more likely to be based upon ethnic bias” than religion.

Sources: Total population – UK Foreign Office; Muslim population – UK Foreign Office

Netherlands

Total population: 16.3 million

Muslim population: 945,000 or 5.8%

Background: The integration of Muslims remains a concern for the Dutch government, particularly after a film-maker critical of Islam was murdered in 2004 by a radical Islamist. Further tensions surround the view held by some that there is a high level of crime among Muslim youths and a problem with unemployment. In the 1950s Muslims arrived from the former colonies of Suriname and Indonesia. One of the most important groups is the substantial Somali minority. Others are from Turkey and Morocco..

Sources: Total population – Statistics Netherlands, 2005 figures; Muslim population – Statistics Netherlands, 2004 figures.

Serbia and Montenegro (with Kosovo)

Total population: 10.8 million (including Kosovo); 8.1 million (excluding Kosovo)

Muslim population: Serbia and Montenegro – 405,000 (5%); Kosovo – about 1.8 million (90%)

Background (excluding Kosovo): Within Serbia and Montenegro the predominant religion is Serbian Orthodoxy. Islam is the second largest faith, with Muslims accounting for about 5% of the population, rising to about 20% in Montenegro. The Muslim community is considered one of seven “traditional” religious communities. Religion and ethnicity remain closely linked across the country and discrimination and tensions continue to be reported.

Kosovo background: The late 1990s saw devastating conflict after the Kosovo Liberation Army, supported by the majority ethnic Albanians – most of whom are Muslim – came out in open rebellion against Serbian rule. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic began “ethnic cleansing” against the Kosovo Albanian population. Thousands died and hundreds of thousands fled. NATO intervened between March and June 1999 with a 78 day bombing campaign to push back Serb forces and Kosovo remains under UN control. The ethnic Albanian community has expressed frustration at the length of time being taken to decide Kosovo’s future status. Attacks against Kosovo’s remaining minority Serb population have caused concern.

Sources: Total population – UK Foreign Office; Muslim population – US State Department.

Spain

Total population: 43.1 million

Muslim population: 1 million (2.3%)

Background: Almost eight centuries of Moorish rule over Spain came to an end in 1492, providing the country with a strong Islamic legacy, particularly in its architecture. The modern Muslim population started to arrive in significant numbers in the 1970s. Many were Moroccans coming to work in tourism and subsequent growth came when their families joined them. The state recognizes Islam, affording it a number of privileges including the teaching of Islam in schools and religious holidays. There have been some reports of tension towards Muslim immigrants. Spain was shaken in 2004 when terror attacks by radical Islamists killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains.

Sources: Total population – Spanish National Institute of Statistics, 2005 figures; Muslim population – US State Department.

Sweden

Total population: 9 million

Muslim population: 300,000 (3%)

Background: The Muslim population is broad – with significant groups from Turkey, Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Syria. The size of the Muslim population is such that representative bodies receive state funding. There is now growing social tensions in Sweden, provoked by Muslim arrogance and, also, by increasingly forceful demands by the Muslim community for more welfare assistance. A great surge of rapes of Swedish women by Muslim men is also a point of friction.

Sources: Total population – Statistics Sweden

 2005 figures; Muslim population – US State Department.

Switzerland

Total population: 7.4 million

Muslim population: 310,800 (4.2%)

Background: Official figures suggest the Muslim population has doubled in recent years, but some sources say there are also about 150,000 Muslims in the country illegally. The first Muslims arrived as workers in the 1960s, mostly from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia and Albania. They were joined by their families in the 1970s and, in recent years, by asylum seekers. (Comparatively few have citizenship.) Recently, the Swiss have been clamping down on what was a burgeoning and aggressive Muslim population and Muslim radicals threatened a jihad against the country. A number of these radicals were promptly arrested and expelled from the country.

Sources: Total population – Swiss Federal Statistical Office, 2003 figures; Muslim population – Swiss Federal Statistical Office, 2000 figures.

Turkey

Total population: 68.7 million

Muslim population: 68 million (99%)

Background: Although Turkey is a secular state, Islam is an important part of Turkish life. Its application to join the EU divided existing members, some of which questioned whether a poor, Muslim country could fit in. Turkey accused its EU opponents of favoring a “Christian club”. Membership talks were formally launched in October 2005, with negotiations expected to take 10 years. Most Turks are Sunni Muslim, but a significant number are of the Alevi branch of Shias.

Sources: Total population – Turkish State Institute of Statistics, 2003 figures; Muslim population – US State Department

United Kingdom

Total population: 58.8 million

Muslim population: 1.6 million (2.8%)

Background: The UK has a long history of contact with Muslims, with links forged from the Middle Ages onwards. In the 19th Century Yemeni men came to work on ships, forming one of the country’s first Muslim communities. In the 1960s, significant numbers of Muslims arrived as people in the former colonies took up offers of work. Some of the first were East African Asians, while many came from south Asia. Permanent communities formed and at least 50% of the current population was born in the UK. Significant communities with links to Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and the Balkans also exist. The 2001 Census showed one third of the Muslim population was under 16 – the highest proportion for any group. It also highlighted high levels of unemployment, low levels of qualifications and low home ownership.

Sources: Total population – Office for National Statistics, 2001 figures; Muslim population – Office for National Statistics, 2001 figures.

 

Muslim population in European cities

 

Marseilles – 25% (200,000 of 800,000) PACA region – 20% (0.7-1.0 million of 1.5 million)
Malmo -25% [percent of immigrants, foreign born or both parents foreign born]: 36%
Amsterdam – 24% (180,000 of 750,000) Greater Amsterdam – 12.7%
Stockholm – 20% (155,000 of 771,038) [percent of immigrants: 36%
Brussels – 17%-20% (160,000-220,000) [some say 33%]
Moscow – 16%-20% (2 million of 10-12 million)
Greater London – 17% (1.3 million of 7.5 million)
Luton – 14.6% (26,963)
Birmingham 14.3% (139,771)
The Hague – 14.2% ( 67,896 of 475,580) Greater Hague – 11%
Utrecht – 13.2% (38,300 of 289,000) Greater Utrecht – 7%
Rotterdam – 13% (80,000 of 600,000) Greater Rotterdam – 9.9%
Copenhagen – 12.6% (63,000 of 500,000)
Leicester – 11% (30,000 of 280,000)
Aarhus -10%
Zaan district (Netherlands) – 8.8%
Paris – 7.38% (155,000 of 2.1 million)
Antwerp– 6.7% (30,000 of 450,000)
Hamburg – 6.4% (110,000 of 1.73 million)
Berlin – 5.9% (200,000 of 3.40 million)

Muslims in the United States

The earliest documented case of a Muslim to come to the United States is Dutchman Anthony Janszoon van Salee, who came to New Amsterdam around 1630 and was referred to as ‘Turk’. The oldest Muslim community to establish in the country was the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, in 1921 however, like the Nation of Islam, this sect is considered heretical by the mainstream Muslim community.

Once very small, the Muslim population of the US increased greatly in the twentieth century, with much of the growth driven by rising immigration and conversion. In 2005, more people from Islamic countries became legal permanent United States residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades.

Recent immigrant Muslims make up the majority of the total Muslim population. South Asians Muslims from India and Pakistan and Arabs make up the biggest group of Muslims in America at 60-65% of the population. Native-born American Muslims are mainly African Americans who make up a quarter of the total Muslim population. Many of these have converted to Islam during the last seventy years. Conversion to Islam in prison, and in large urban areas has also contributed to its growth over the years. American Muslims come from various backgrounds, and are one of the most racially diverse religious group in the United States according to a 2009 Gallup poll.

A Pew report released in 2009 noted that nearly six-in-ten American adults see Muslims as being subject to discrimination, more than Mormons, Atheists, or Jews. Modern immigration

There is no accurate count of the number of Muslims in the United States, as the U.S. Census Bureau does not collect data on religious identification. There is an ongoing debate as to the true size of the Muslim population in the US. Various institutions and organizations have given widely varying estimates about how many Muslims live in the U.S. These estimates have been controversial, with a number of researchers being explicitly critical of the survey methodologies that have led to the higher estimates.

 Others claim that no scientific count of Muslims in the U.S. has been done, but that the larger figures should be considered accurate. Some journalists have also alleged that the higher numbers have been inflated for political purposes. On the other hand, some Muslim groups blame Islamophobia and the fact that many Muslims identify themselves as Muslims, but do not attend mosques for the lower estimates.

 According to a 2007 religious survey, 72% of Muslims believe religion is very important, which is higher in comparison to the overall population of the United States at 59%. The frequency of receiving answers to prayers among Muslims was, 31% at least once a week and 12% once or twice a month. Nearly a quarter of the Muslims are converts to Islam (23%), mainly native-born. Of the total who have converted, 59% are African American and 34% white. Previous religions of those converted was Protestantism (67%), Roman Catholicism (10%) and 15% no religion.

Mosques are usually explicitly Sunni or Shia. There are 1,209 mosques in the United States and the nation’s largest mosque, the Islamic Center of America, is in Dearborn, Michigan. It caters mainly to the Shi’a Muslim congregation; however, all Muslims may attend this mosque. It was rebuilt in 2005 to accommodate over 3,000 people for the increasing Muslim population in the region.

In many areas, a mosque may be dominated by whatever group of immigrants is the largest. Sometimes the Friday sermons, or khutbas, are given in languages like Urdu or Arabic along with English. Areas with large Muslim populations may support a number of mosques serving different immigrant groups or varieties of belief within Sunni or Shi’a traditions. At present, many mosques are served by imams who immigrate from overseas, as only these imams have certificates from Muslim seminaries. The influence of the Wahhabi movement in the US has caused concern.

 Muslim Americans are racially diverse communities in the United States, two-thirds are foreign-born. The majority, about three-fifths of Muslim Americans are of South Asian and Arab origin, a quarter of the population are recent converts of whites and indigenous African Americans, while the remaining are other ethnic groups which  includes Turks, Iranians, Bosnians, Malays, Indonesians, West Africans, Somalis, Kenyans, with also small but growing numbers of white and Hispanic converts.

 A survey of ethnic comprehension by the Pew Forum survey in 2007 showed that 37% respondents viewed themselves white(mainly of Arab and South Asian origin), 24% were Africans and White converts in the ratio 2:1, 20% Asian (mainly South Asian origin), 15% other race (includes mixed Arabs or Asians) and 4% were of Hispanic descent. Since the arrival of South Asian and Arab communities during the 1990s there has been divisions with the African Americans due to the racial and cultural differences, however since post 9/11, the two groups joined together when the immigrant communities looked towards the African Americans for advice on civil rights.

 Remembering the fact that Arabs are generally counted among Whites and majority of Arabs in U.S. are Christians; the more accurate figure would be 65-70% South Asians and Arabs in the ratio 1:1 to 2:1 (includes mixed Arabs and Asians which comprise a significant 25% of the total Asian population) 20-25% Blacks belonging to traditional and Nations Of Islam sect and 4% were of Hispanic descent. Only about a quarter of the Arab American population is Muslim. The 2000 census reported about 1.25 million Americans of Arab ancestry. Contrary to popular perceptions the condition of Muslims in U.S. is very good. Among South Asians in this country, the large Indian American community stands out as particularly well educated and prosperous, with education and income levels that exceed those of U.S.-born whites. Many are professionals, especially doctors, scientists, engineers, and financial analysts, and there are also a large number of entrepreneurs. The five urban areas with the largest Indian populations include the Washington/Baltimore metropolitan area as well as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

The 10 states with the largest Muslim populations are California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, and Maryland. 45 percent of immigrant Muslims report annual household income levels of $50,000 or higher. This compares to the national average of 44 percent. Immigrant Muslims are well represented among higher-income earners, with 19 percent claiming annual household incomes of $100,000 or higher (compared to 16 percent for the Muslim population as a whole and 17 percent for the U.S. average). This is likely due to the strong concentration of Muslims in professional, managerial, and technical fields, especially in information technology, education, medicine, law, and the corporate world.

 Approximately half (50%) of the religious affiliations of Muslims is Sunni, 16% Shia, 22% non-affiliated and 16% other/non-response. Muslims of Arab descent are mostly Sunni (56%) with minorities who are Shia (19%). Pakistanis (62%) and Indians (82%) are mainly Sunni, while Iranians are mainly Shia (91%).Of African American Muslims, 48% are Sunni, 34% are unaffiliated, 2% Shia, the remaining are others.

 In 2005, according to the New York Times, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades. In addition to immigration, the state, federal and local prisons of the United States may be a contributor to the growth of Islam in the country. J. Michael Waller claims that Muslim inmates comprise 17-20% of the prison population, or roughly 350,000 inmates in 2003. He also claims that 80% of the prisoners who “find faith” while in prison convert to Islam. These converted inmates are mostly African American, with a small but growing Hispanic minority. Waller also asserts that many converts are radicalized by outside Islamist groups linked to terrorism, but other experts suggest that when radicalization does occur it has little to no connection with these outside interests.

 

U.S. Muslim population estimates

5 million+ U.S. News and World Report

7 million Council on American-Islam Relations

 

There is no accurate count of the number of Muslims in the United States, as the U.S. Historically, Muslim Americans tended to support the Republican Party.

Some Muslim Americans have been criticized for letting their religious beliefs affect their ability to act within mainstream American value systems. Muslim cab drivers in Minneapolis, Minnesota have been criticized for allegedly refusing passengers for carrying alcoholic beverages or dogs. The Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport authority has threatened to revoke the operating authority of any driver caught discriminating in this manner. There are reported incidents in which Muslim cashiers have refused to sell pork products to their clientèle.

Public institutions in the U.S. have also been criticized for accommodating Islam at the expense of taxpayers. The University of Michigan–Dearborn and a public college in Minnesota have been criticized for accommodating Islamic prayer rituals by constructing footbaths for Muslim students using tax-payers’ money. Critics claim this special accommodation, which is made only to satisfy Muslims’ needs, is a violation of Constitutional provisions separating church and stateAlong the same constitutional lines, a San Diego public elementary school is being criticized for making special accommodations specifically for American Muslims by adding Arabic to its curriculum and giving breaks for Muslim prayers. Since these exceptions have not been made for any religious group in the past, some critics see this as an endorsement of Islam.

The first American Muslim Congressman, Keith Ellison, created controversy when he compared President George W. Bush’s actions after the September 11, 2001 attacks to Adolf Hitler‘s actions after the Nazi-sparked Reichstag fire, saying that Bush was exploiting the aftermath of 9/11 for political gain, as Hitler had exploited the Reichstag fire to suspend constitutional liberties. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Anti-Defamation League condemned Ellison’s remarks. The congressman later retracted the statement, saying that it was “inappropriate” for him to have made the comparison.

At Columbus Manor School, a suburban Chicago elementary school with a student body nearly half Arab American, school board officials have considered eliminating holiday celebrations after Muslim parents complained that their culture’s holidays were not included. Local parent Elizabeth Zahdan said broader inclusion, not elimination, was the group’s goal. “I only wanted them modified to represent everyone,” the Chicago Sun-Times quoted her as saying. “Now the kids are not being educated about other people.” However, the district’s superintendent, Tom Smyth, said too much school time was being taken to celebrate holidays already, and he sent a directive to his principals requesting that they “tone down” activities unrelated to the curriculum, such as holiday parties.

The 2007 Pew poll reported that 15% of American Muslims under the age of 30 supported suicide bombings against civilian targets in at least some circumstances, while a further 11 percent said it could be “rarely justified.” Among those over the age of 30, just 6% expressed their support for the same. (9% of Muslims over 30 and 5% under 30 chose not to answer). Only 5% of American Muslims had a favorable view of al-Qaeda

             Some Muslims in the U.S. have adopted the strong anti-American opinions common in many Muslim-majority countries. In some cases, these are recent immigrants who have carried their anti-American sentiments with them. The Egyptian cleric, Omar Abdel-Rahman is now serving a jail sentence for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He had a long history of involvement with Islamist and jihadi groups before arriving in the US.

 There is an openly anti-American Muslim group in the U.S. The Islamic Thinkers Society found only in New York City, engages in leafleting and picketing to spread their viewpoint.

 Young, immigrant Muslims feel more frustrated and exposed to prejudice than their parents are. Because most U.S. Muslims are raised conservatively, and won’t consider rebelling through sex or drugs, many experiment with their faith shows a poll, dated June 7, 2007.

 At least one non-immigrant American, John Walker Lindh, has also been imprisoned or convicted on charges of serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons against U.S. soldiers. He had converted to Islam in the U.S., moved to Yemen to study Arabic, and thence went to Pakistan where he was recruited by the Taliban.

Other notable cases include:

The Buffalo Six: Shafal Mosed, Yahya Goba, Sahim Alwan, Mukhtar Al-Bakri, Yasein Taher, Elbaneh Jaber. Six Muslims from the Lackawanna, N.Y. area were charged and convicted for providing material support to al Qaeda.

Iyman Faris In October 2003 Iyman Faris was sentenced to 20 years in prison for providing material support and resources to al Qaeda and conspiracy for providing the terrorist organization with information about possible U.S. targets for attack.

Ahmed Omar Abu Ali In November 2005 he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison for providing material support and resources to al Qaeda, conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States, conspiracy to commit air piracy and conspiracy to destroy aircraft

Ali al-Tamimi was convicted and sentenced in April 2005 to life in prison for recruiting Muslims in the US to fight U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson and Robert Spencer have suggested that a segment of the U.S. Muslim population exhibit hate and a wish for violence towards the United States.

Muslim convert journalist Stephen Schwartz, American Jewish Committee terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky, and U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer have all separately testified to a growing radical Islamist Wahhabi influence in U.S. mosques, financed by extremist groups. According to Barsky, 80% of U.S. mosques are so radicalized. In an effort to address this extremist influence, ISNA has implemented assorted programs and guidelines in order to help mosques identify and counter any such individuals.

The Solution: Expulsion

The international communities with large Muslim populations have been secretly meeting to agree upon corrective steps to deal with this problem. The commission is called ‘Energy Control Commission’  and its members are: The United States, India, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. This commission has been meeting on a monthly basis in Copenhagen since July of 2006. Its sole purpose is to address the flood of potentially dangerous Muslims into Western countries. A good deal of intelligence material has surfaced in which telephone and internet communications between various Muslim activist groups point very clearly to deliberate infiltration of non-Muslim countries with the double goal of overwhelming the native populations with numbers and threats of physical violence, Muslim groups are strongly anti-Christian and are most especially vindictive towards any country that has engaged in military action against any Muslim country. The United States is considered a prime target for infiltration and domestic terrorism while Great Britain, Ireland, Sweden and France are also high on activist terrorist lists. The general agreement between all parties is that Muslims cannot remain in basically Christian countries because of their often-stated desire to not only take over these countries by population increase but also by the on-going threat of terrorism. At this time, the Commission is awaiting what is felt to be the imminent death of Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi, When this event occurs, either naturally of from outside implementation, Libya will then be opened up as a designated ‘Country of Welcome’ and when this happens, mass deportations of Europe, and America’s, Muslims will begin. This Islamic Diaspora will be implemented by a joint team of multi-national military personnel using aircraft and shipping that has already been allotted.  

                                                                                                        

Bibliography

 

Jeffery,Dr. Arthur Islam: Muhammad, and His Religion, New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1958

Munir, Muhammed, Islam in History, Law Publishing Co., Lahore, Pakistan 1974. Munir was the former Chief Justice of Pakistan.

Gibb, H.A.R. Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey, New York: Mentor Books, 1955

Hisham, Ibn (828 A.D., “The Life of Muhammad”, 3rd ed., pt. 6, vol. 3 (Beirut, Lebanon: Dar-al-Jil, 1998),

Watt, William Montgomery, Muhammad’s Mecca, p. vii. Also see his article, “Belief in a High God in Pre-Islamic Mecca”, Journal of Semitic Studies, Vol. 16, 1971,
Encyclopedia of Islam, I:302, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1913, Houtsma.
Arabic Lexicographical Miscellanies” by J. Blau in the Journal of Semitic Studies, Vol. XVII, #2, 1972
Islam: Beliefs and Observations, New York, Barrons, 1987, p. 28).
Encyclopedia of World Mythology and Legend, I:41, Anthony Mercatante, New York, The Facts on File, 1983
 The Call of the Minaret,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 31).
 Morey, Dr. Robert;  “The Islamic Invasion” by Harvest Home Publishers, 1992. ISBN 0-89081-983-1)

My co-authors are: Thomas K, Kimmel, Jr.of Cocoa Beach, FL a retired FBI official  and Mohan Srivastava, a mathematician with FSS International, Vancouver,B.C.(a holding company of Radian Holdings Premier, Inc. Kyoto, Japan)

 

 

            Dr. Phillip L. Kushner

          email address:pkushner@math.utexas.edu  

Home Address: 1845 W. 36th St., Austin, TX 78731

 

Work:(512) 232-6188 or (512) 471-0119 (Dept. Secty)

Home: (512) 451-8860

 

Lecturer
Ph.D., Stanford University, 1994
Petroleum Geology, Statistics, Applied Earth Sciences.
Office: RLM 13.146 Hours: MWF 10:00-11:00 a.m.

 

 

 

 

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