Freedom of speech divided

They say a week is a long time in politics, and it seems this week has been one of those. Two very different strands of the freedom of speech versus censorship paradigm emerged. On the one hand there is the video produced by Egyptian Coptic and convicted fraudster Nakoula Basseley Nakoula and directed by Hollywood porn film maker Alan Roberts at a cost of a quarter million dollar as yet another attempt to insult Muslims through denigrating the prophet Muhammad. Leaving aside the fact that the Muslim response has hardly been any more mature than when I published David Pidcock's Satanic Voices Ancient and Modern - A Surfeit of Blashphemy Including the Rushdie Report in 1992 as well as the likelihood that much of the violence has been engineered for ulterior motives which have nothing at all to do with Islam as elaborated in the more recent book Surrendering Islam - The Subversion of Muslim Politics Throughout History Until the Present Day  I co-authored with Muslim historian David Livingstone, the general response in the media has been that whilst the film is despicable, Muslims should moderate their response in the interest of freedom of speech. Google, for example, refused to take the trailer for the video off YouTube, describing it as merely an expression of a different opinion.

On the other hand there is the publication of semi-nude photos of Kate Middleton following the earlier publication of nude photos of prince Harry, both in countries who do not regard the British Royal Family as anything more than celebrities. Here the media response took a totally different tune calling for censorship and self-censorship. Of course, the British media also milked the interest in those celebrities being denigrated as much as possible, endlessly discussing the story whilst not, however, publishing the pictures themselves. The Belfast Telegraph, for example, published the front page of Closer, the French magazine originally running the photos, with the offensive pictures blacked out; most other papers did something similar. With the exception of the Sun, which published the incriminating photos of Harry, the other British tabloid papers also published the photos with key areas blurred or covered up. Had the pictures been of some lesser celebrity or a foreign, non-American, non-European dignitary, they would not have shown the same level of constraint even if the photos were taken under similar circumstances.

When contrasting the two, the uneasiness of the demand for freedom of speech as a universal human right becomes apparent. Just like democracy, which is deemed essential as long as the people make the right choices, but overthrown when they want to assert their rights against Anglo-American interests, freedom of speech is a two-edged sword: Western demagogues demand the right to insult, yet want to prevent being insulted. Now why, one ought to ask, should the yet uncrowned children of the monarch of a small island in the North Atlantic Ocean still living off its long gone history be afforded more respect than the prophet revered by a billion contemporaries on our planet? Why can you ridicule and smear Muslims unashamedly yet not voice even the mildest form of criticism of Israeli Jews? Why is the questioning of historic facts relating to the Holocaust narrative outlawed in many European countries, whilst the 20 million victims of Stalin are hardly ever mentioned and the genocide of indigenous Muslim populations continues barely noticed in one part of the world after another, Burma being the latest scene of unspeakable massacres?

The issue goes deeper than mere hypocrisy, however: it demonstrates the bankruptcy of the so-called universal declaration of human rights, which has become just another politically loaded term in the arsenal of cultural domination pursued by former imperial Western powers. Firstly note, that those rights are not universal, but the declaration is, everybody is meant to sign up to the declaration, but not everybody may be entitled to claim those rights. Those human rights postulate to protect the "life, liberty and security of person" of everyone (article 3) as well as against "attacks upon his honour and reputation" (article 12; the "his" in this article would nowadays be considered as sexist by the very same people waving the declaration in everybody's face), but in practice, some rights are "more equal than others". Man-made laws are subject to the realities of power constellations where "might is right".

In Islamic jurisprudence, there has always been the concept of the "rights of God", long before Magna Charta, bestowing upon all humans, whom God has honoured or dignified (Qur'an 17:70), an inviolable right to life, property and dignity. When Muslims demonstrate, therefore, against their prophet and religion being vilified, they are essentially defending and exercising their God-given human rights. They would also defend the right to privacy for a married couple like William and Kate, whereas in the case of Harry they would use the photos as evidence in a prosecution for fornication rather than publish them for the base gratification of tabloid readers. But since in Western media phraseology all Muslims have become subhuman and latent terrorists, we mustn't really let them speak. Let's ridicule their religion and be outraged at their response and let their protests be another proof of their inability to govern themselves, which is why we must continue to interfere and take their land and resources off them. Sure, we don't really want to profit from invading other people's countries, but somebody has to foot the bill for "keeping the peace".

Moonsighting revisited

It is no secret that Muslims are deeply divided and one of the times when this is most apparent in the West, where tribal differences or foreign alliances have not spilled over into civil war as in Libya, Yemen or Syria, is the time of starting and ending Ramadan. Since we have communities from around the world residing here, each retaining allegiances with their home countries, we often end up with two or even three different days for Eid to mark the end of the month of fasting. All attempts during the past two decades to unite those communities onto a common approach have failed so far. The prophet of Islam, peace be with him, stated that his Ummah would never unite upon error, so when we observe that unity continues to elude us we need to start asking whether maybe we have got the formula wrong by which we try to unite.

Irrespective of their country of origin, many Muslim organisations and mosques in the UK and other parts of Europe have in the past become dependent on funding from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. There were strings attached, and the Saudi state mufti became equivalent to the pope: whatever was declared in Saudi Arabia became gospel in Europe. The funding may have dried up in places, but with the advent of satellite television and the broadcasting of live prayers from Makkah the idea that Muslims worldwide had to follow Saudi Arabia's lead because this is where the Kaaba, the house of God, is situated, became increasingly prominent. This argument does not have much merit Islamically. When the prophet Muhammad, peace be with him, migrated to Medinah, the Kaaba was still in Makkah, but decisions were taken in Madinah since the rulers of Makkah were misguided. For Muslims, what is right or wrong does not get decided by location but by principle; leaders are followed on account of their adherence to the Qu'ran and the example of the prophet not because they happen to be in charge of a particular place of worship.

Since both traditional taqlid, the following of a righteous teacher, and independent study are in decline, Islam in the West is increasingly dominated by the likes of Islam Channel, a purely commercial enterprise, and Sheikh Google. Many mosques in the UK advised their followers to break their fast several minutes too early this year by obtaining prayer times online from sites like IslamiCity  or IslamicFinder, for example. Their algorithms allow for the input of longitude and latitude but not altitude above sea level. The result are sea level prayer times for every place on earth. For Muslims relying on those times, the earth is flat, very flat. The prayer times provided by such online services are useful as a rough guide for people travelling to places unfamiliar, but not for more accurate religious observances. Sadly, they do not point this out in a disclaimer but instead call their prayer times "accurate". Details on the calculation of prayer times can be found at Praytimes.org  and there is a Windows program to perform the calculations, written by Dr. Manzur Ahmed.  Longitudes and latitudes as well as altitudes can be obtained from Google Earth, so Sheikh Google still has his uses.

But back to the moon. There is the debate whether the month should start based on actual sightings or calculations. In spite of being often dismissed as problematic due to causing uncertainty until the day before the start of a new month, sightings are straightforward: either you see the moon or you don't. There is no room for ambiguity. Calculations, on the other hand, whilst permitting the publication of definitive advance calendars and more reliable forward planning, introduce ambiguity dependent on the calculation method used. Just as with prayer times, one can get it terribly wrong if one assumes that the earth is flat or, in this case, that the day can start at the same time everywhere upon the globe, ignoring the time zones which are responsible for a difference of up to twelve hours between locations.

Due to a lack of transparency, most Muslims believe that Saudi Arabia actually follows physical moon sightings. This is not the case. Saudi Arabia follows the Umm al-Qura calendar of Makkah, based entirely on calculations of the probability of sightings. Such probability predictions are nothing new and are available from various institutions dealing with astronomical data, e.g. the British Nautical Almanac Office. They present a graphical representation of where in the world the moon can be seen by naked eye or by telescope at a given date. So why does Saudi Arabia persistently pretend to see the moon well before it is physically possible to see it? An academic paper from the Netherlands describes the method used by which the Umm al-Qura calendar arrives at its lunar dates and why they do not match the actual moon, leading, for example in 2007 to a month of Dhu-l-Hijja lasting 31 days, whereas Islamic lunar months can only have either 29 or 30 days. The Saudis compensated for this by making the 19th of Dhu-l-Hijja 1428 last two full days, Friday 28 and Saturday 29 December. Initially the only condition stipulated by the Makkan calendar for a new month to start was that the moon would set after sunset. Since this lead to the anomaly that sometimes the month would start before the moon was even born (conjunction), the calendar was corrected in 2002 with the added condition that conjuntion must occur before sunset. Even then, when compared with the graphical data for probable visibility, the moon will in most cases be declared before the moon can physically be seen, because not much account is taken of the time lapse between conjunction and actual visibility.

This year sees an attempt at promoting the Umm al-Qura calendar of Makkah as a means of unifying Muslims. Even though in their explanation the promoters cite a Hadith by Kurayb indicating that different days of Eid at different locations were perfectly acceptable in early Islam [Kurayb said: "Umm Al-Fadhl, daughter of Harith, sent me on a mission to Mu’awiya in Damascus. I accomplished the mission and was still in Al Sham when Ramadan began. I saw the new moon there on a Friday evening. I returned to Medina and reached there towards the end of the month. I met Ibn Abbas who asked me: 'When did you observe the new moon (of Ramadan)?' I replied: 'We saw it during the night of Friday?' Ibn Abbas inquired: 'Did you see it yourself?' I replied: 'Yes, I saw it and other people as well. Thus they started fasting and Mu’awiya fasted too.' At this juncture Ibn Abbas said: 'But we saw it during the night of Saturday, and either we see it (again), or otherwise we will pursue the fast on the thirtieth day.' I asked: 'Do you not accept the observation by Mu’awiya and his fast?' Ibn Abbas replied: 'No! It is thus that the Messenger of God has ordered us." (Reported by Muslim, vol. 7, p.178)], they then move on to declare that to have the same Eid throughout the world would be desirable for Muslim unity. To achieve this, they are now basically satisfied for the moon to potentially be seen anywhere in the world, in other words, if it could have been seen in the far West of America, then this potential sighting is valid even in the far East of Asia, even though a physical sighting would be impossible. To avoid being caught out by time zones they extend the time window for moon visibility from maghrib all the way to fajr of the following day. Since they are not really bothered with looking for the moon but only with the calculated possibility of being able to see it, it will not matter to them whether the moon arrives after the announcement that it might have been seen. Islamically, however, this methodology is as flawed as that of the Umm al-Qura calendar itself: Since Tarawih prayers are prayed on the night before the 1st of Ramadan, a decision needs to be taken no later than Isha prayer, hence the actual time window for seeing the moon is two hours at most after sunset.

I sent an email enquiry about these problems to the sponsors of this new project of advocating the use of the Makkan calendar as global standard, but am not overtly optimistic as to this issue being resolved any time soon. Most Muslims still go with where the money is or ask Sheikh Google. And living in urban conglomerates with artificial lighting, sitting in front of satellite televisions or computer screens with ready-made fatwahs at the click of a button, it seems we can do away with the moon altogether. Next we might be given a uniform prayer time table because in some places on earth the days are too long and in others too short, hence why don't we all start and break fast with Makkah irrespective of the sun - saving us the headache of calculating accurate prayer times. And with the moon and the sun out of the way, we can follow the imam in the Kaabah on television for tarawih prayers without having to go to the mosque. This will cut down on the friction arising from the decision of which of competing mosques we should go to and thus further serve the cause of unity. Utopian Islam has finally arrived!

Eid Mubarak to all, whenever it might be.

German state extremism

In dealing with a case where a circumcision performed on a boy of four resulted in medical complications, a county court in Cologne has thrown the baby out with the bath water and ruled that circumcision itself amounts to bodily harm because "the body of the child is permanently and irreparably altered". This alteration, so the court, interferes with the interest of the child to later take his/her own decision about religious belonging. Not that the parents of the Muslim boy actually complained to bring a case. Due to some subsequent bleeding two days after the operation the mother attended the hospital's accident and emergency services. This, the German practice of nosing about and reporting on each other apparently still being alive and kicking, came to the ears of the public prosecutor who jumped to the occasion. The municipal court decided in favour of the parents and the prosecutor appealed. The regional court exonerated the doctor during its appeals hearing but took it upon itself to dictate that in future religiously motivated circumcision could legally only be practiced on adults who had given their consent.

Jumping on the bandwagon, the German Medical Association immediately expanded the regional judgment, which is most likely going to be appealed further, and told physicians nationwide to no longer perform circumcisions on children for religious reasons. Of course, the body supervising the practice of German doctors has no qualms about cosmetic surgery, but it appears that religious practices are a niggling thorn in its side. And obviously, circumcision is hardly as lucrative as cosmetic mutilation of the body. To be fair, the latter is not performed on children.

Yet, circumcision is not just a religious practice. Only a couple of weeks ago more than seventy members of parliament in Zimbabwe got themselves circumcised to kick-start a campaign amongst males in Africa due to the ongoing problems with the AIDS epidemic there and research which shows that circumcision reduces the risk of an AIDS infection by sixty percent. In the Mbala district of Uganda circumcision has been made compulsory. In the United States of America, too, circumcision is the prevalent practice chosen by parents regardless of religion. It is also proven to reduce the likelihood of cervical cancer in women.

Such medical considerations obviously played no part in the Cologne court's rush to judgment and the Medical Association's hurry to comply. The court agreed with an expert opinion stating that notwithstanding those medical benefits, there was "no necessity in Central Europe for preventative circumcision for health reasons". Whilst carefully coached in the legal justification of a child's right to self-determination, the judgment is a thinly veiled expression of religious, especially anti-Muslim, prejudice. Cologne is one of the cities with the highest concentration of Muslims in Germany. The issue is, however, complicated by the fact that circumcision is also a Jewish rite, thus immediately bringing up Germany's history in the debate, and the German National Jewish Council protested the attack on the "self-determination of religious communities" and on the "freedom of religion".

The clever ruse to enforce a monoculture by legally outlawing individual items of religious practice is not new. The German law on the prohibition of religious slaughter, for example, dates from 1933 as one of the earliest laws targetting Jews. Like the Nazis then, today's German authorities know only too well that to fight an "alien" religion, you don't have to attack their beliefs, you just curb their practices. About half of German's Federal states prohibit female teachers from wearing a headscarf, not quite as aggressive a prohibition as in France, but significant, and German courts have supported that decision. In Switzerland a referendum outlawed the building of minarets attached to mosques, so here they are clearly ahead of their German neighbours. Never mind that successive German presidents declared that "Islam is part of Germany" or "Muslims living in Germany belong there" - what they apparently meant was: You may call yourself a Muslim when you live in Germany, provided you practice Christianity or secularism.

Maybe they should take it a step further. With body scanner technology at airports it should be easy to detect whether a boarding passenger is circumcised or not. Those who are should be asked to step aside and be questioned under terrorism legislation; after all, they have taken their religious convictions too far. If such a pilot scheme is successful, it could be rolled out to other locations, too. The security industry would be grateful for the extra cash. And if the number of suspects ends up to be too great to process, they could be detained in special holding centres. Just don't call them concentration camps!

With friends like that who needs enemies

Today, 6 July, Paris is hosting a third meeting of the so-called "Friends of Syria" group, another coalition of the willing and coerced, as part of the ongoing propaganda war to aid the reshaping of the Middle East in the interest of American imperialism - a project begun with 9/11 and the conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan. The group of "friends" is essentially made up of two constituents: those who want to profit from the pillage and those who want to avoid or at least delay being pillaged themselves. Most of the attending Arab countries fit in the latter category, painfully aware that the "Arab Spring", the subterfuge for catapulting American-friendly Muslim Brotherhood governments (for details of that cozy relationship see my book "Surrendering Islam") into power through engineered popular unrest, could also engulf them any time they step out of line.

The situation of Syria is constantly being presented as a civil unrest having turned into a civil war with international humanitarian intervention required in order to counter government oppression. It is a re-run of the same model of regime change having been accomplished in Libya, except that this time Russia and China are no longer standing by altogether naively.

There is a lot which doesn't add up with this story broadcast throughout the loyal media outlets. How does civil unrest turn into civil war without the outside supply of arms? We do not expect oppressed people suffering under the yoke of cruel dictatorship to have acquired machine guns and heavy artillery from their local grocery store. So Western governments are arming the Syrian opposition, which makes the moralising of Hilary Clinton about Russia supporting the Syrian government and thereby prolonging the suffering sound rather hollow.

I do not for a moment deny that there are grievances the Syrian people have. But by turning dissatisfaction into an armed rebellion the West is guilty of destabilising the country. Of course, that is exactly, what they wanted to do, but it is not justifiable by international standards. I do not know of any country where there are no grievances. If Russia and China armed dissidents in the US or had armed last year's rioters in Britain, would that have given them the right to demand that Obama or Cameron must go and hand over to the protesters in the interest of world peace?

Will the people of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya be grateful for having been allowed to exchange American-groomed dictators who have outlived their usefulness with American-groomed collaborators brought into power through engineered social unrest followed by the farce of allegedly "democratic" elections held under ex-constitutional arrangements for which the people never voted? Only time will tell, but history does not hold out much promise for the people of those countries. Nobody, of course, wants us to relativate emotionally charged propaganda slogans by looking at history.

What is difficult to understand is, however, why the Russian bear and the world's leading economy of China are so subdued and quiet on the matter. They're not attending the "Friends of Syria" conference, but they're not challenging it either. In Libya they allowed themselves to be tricked by blindly believing the West would gentlemen-like honour assurances and international agreements and would not violate the sanctity of nation states by open military intervention to depose the existing government without at least the pretence of a threat to their own security. In the case of Syria, they no longer nod through an elastically worded UN security council resolution which can be used to give them the green light to send in the bombers. But they are nonetheless allowing themselves to lose the propaganda war.

Unless those two countries - the only ones capable of counter-balancing the American-Israeli hold on world affairs - stop being defensive and launch their own propaganda offensive, they will continue to be seen as the villains stubbornly standing in the way of a just world peace. What is it that stops them pointing the finger at Western nations arming the militias set up to overthrow the Syrian government? What is is that stops them naming names and exposing the supply routes? What is it that stops them challenging the American vision of world hegemony directly? Is it that because they are not part of the English-speaking world that they underestimate or misjudge the potency of Western propaganda? Is it that they do not understand sufficiently that for Western democracies those lies are essential in order to keep their own populations on side without having to reign them in through oppressive emergency laws and increased police powers readily available through anti-terrorism legislation? And having to do that would divert resources from meddling elsewhere. Or do they still trust the West more than they should?

America has been at war throughout her history, and except for the war of independence, all those wars were fought on other people's soil. The American empire has now finally reached the stage of decline and impending collapse, but it won't go quietly. As if to hold on for dear life, her leaders have gone on another rapid and rampant expansion drive and have begun to reshape Asia and Africa politically and militarily, and maybe the weakening of Europe through its financial crisis is also part of the plan. By entering into an alliance with Russia as well as challenging the supremacy of the dollar through a number of direct currency deals, China has finally upped the game. For years, China and Russia have sat back to led the West bleed itself out through overstretch. Confucian or Taoist as that may be, today, that strategy is no longer enough to prevent serious damage. Whilst it is sensible to tire out an opponent, sometimes you have to block or even strike so as not to get hurt yourself. What China and Russia need to understand is that winning the propaganda war can sometimes prevent having to fight the shooting war or, at least, it will provide an advantage in it. And the language of propaganda is English.

The fallacy of growth

Unwilling to have a bankers' technocrat government imposed, as happened in Italy, the Greek people have rejected the options usually put to the electorate in Western "democracies" to either tighten their belts or tighten their belts even more. By doing so they are challenging the Euro as a common currency for the European Union and with it the political edifice.
To avoid a domino effect from the forthcoming Greek repeat elections, governments throughout Europe have suddenly switched from talking austerity to talking growth. The idea is that rather than returning to living within our means we need to expand our economy in order to sustain our levels of production and consumption. It is the fallacy of growth which has driven Europe, and the rest of the world, to near financial collapse.
Growth is a natural phenomenon for any developing organism. Once the organism reaches maturity, growth slows down and, eventually, stops. Unstoppable continued growth, the dream of economists, is unnatural. It is exhibited, for example, in cancer, and cancer, if not stopped by drastic intervention, always kills the host.
Likewise, the growth-oriented economic model is bound to self-destruct if not stopped in its tracks. The days when countries could go around colonising other countries in order to expand have gone, although some in the power echelons of Western nations still dream of being able to conquer the rest of the world through war and plundering. Within established borders, nations have natural limits to their capacity to produce and consume. There is, of course, the export-on-credit option, but that's yet another fallacy which has landed us with much of the troubles we suffer from today.
So why has growth become the modern idol for politicians, economists and commentators? The need for growth is a result of the interest-based economy where money is not issued or regulated by the state but lent to the state as an interest-bearing debt by private financial institutions. Worse even, those institutions create the money they lend to government without having to put up any tangible collateral in real goods or properties.
In itself, growth is a rather poor indicator of the health of a national economy. Financial scams and pyramid schemes, for example, exhibit enormous growth rates, as do non-profitable internet businesses and other investment bubbles. But for most, growth does not equate profits, and just because a company is growing does not mean it is even breaking even. For the lenders, however, growth is an indicator of how likely they are going to be paid the interest on their loans, as a contracting economy has less capacity to shoulder the tax burden by which the productivity of the general public is translated into private profit. Banks create loans underwritten by government bonds, and hence making a direct claim on taxation, and various treasonous national laws as well as the Maastricht Treaty ensure that they have a monopoly on such money creation, preventing national and local governments from doing the same, thereby saving their subjects the interest and taxation. But the same banks only create the capital, not the means to pay the interest, so the money supply must continually be expanded by artificial means (e.g. quantitative easing) and grow if the system is not to burst at the seams very soon.
There is no doubt that the system needs fixing, but neither more austerity nor more growth are the answer. An abolition of fractional reserve banking, forcing all lenders to back their loans with real tangible securities would be the more likely solution.
For Greece, leaving the Euro and returning to the Drachme, would be a wiser option to being at the mercy of bank-elected technocrats. European integration and the common currency were promising improvements for citizens of Europe being able to cross borders with less formalities and without having to repeatedly change currencies, but all that has long since been mitigated by a stifling bureaucratic central administration with poorly conceived one-size-fits-all rule-making and general political alienation.
If Greece were to go one step further than just leaving the Euro and reclaim her sovereign right to the issue of currency and legal tender, she would soon move from a country drowning in national debt to a country of sustainable prosperity without the need for artificial growth. And maybe, there might even be an incentive for China as the upcoming power, to make more significant inroads into Europe than by trade alone through direct investment to balance the current American world hegemony. Provided, of course, China does not also fall for the banker's lie that money equals wealth.

The Damascus Dimension

On the face of it, events in Syria are not much different from the recent pattern of "Arab Spring" events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya: stir up trouble and then come in to arbitrate in order to achieve regime change. It marks a departure from the standards of international law which were upheld until then, namely the integrity of a nation's internal affairs and the illegality of outside interference. The humanitarian argument is weak. Imagine somebody had armed the Manchester and London rioters with machine guns so that they could go on looting for longer. This would then be followed by declarations that the looters were deeply unhappy with their government and that they were an expression of the will of the people. Finally, after more heavy-handed policing attempts, outside interference would recognise them as the real representatives of the British people and justify military action against the government due to their continued suppression of the revolt. The only key difference in the Western stance regarding Syria, and other Arab countries before, is that they had a hand in organising the nascent rebellion from the start.

Using this new ploy of political and, in Libya, military intervention without the need to declare hostilities or obey the rules of war, the USA, Britain and France redrew the political map of the Middle East with great ease whilst the people of those countries, long fed up with their rulers, fell for the rhetoric. In all those countries, the Muslim Brotherhood was installed in government. Not many people are aware that this organisation has been a tool in the service of imperial America since the second World War (see my book Surrendering Islam). Populist democracy remains well out of reach for the people of Egypt or Libya. In Egypt, the democratic process has been postponed. The one thing the West cannot afford is to give the people a real voice, knowing their opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinian cause.

In Iran and Syria, however, the price has evaded the West, not because those countries are inherently stronger, but because they are protected by China and Russia. Russia has not forgotten the humiliation she was subjected to by the West after having effectively been bankrupted and bought out and is gradually regaining her national pride. Whilst still a formidable military power, she has realised that she can't put up much resistance on her own and has finally teamed up as a junior partner with China. China in turn, has stepped up to a new phase in establishing its supremacy vis-a-vis the United States after having quietly waited for a long time for the only super power surviving the "Cold War" to weaken. Its oil deal with Iran in exchange for commodities is a direct affront to the supremacy of the dollar and, in particular after the US and European sanctions banning the import of Iranian oil, nothing short of a declaration of war. India did a similar deal with Iran at the same time, and the US has been powerless in preventing it. The gradual weakening of the dollar as the universal reserve currency means that the "free trade" ideology that served as a justification for imperial expansion in the past is irretrievably damaged and the empire will have to retreat slowly back into more clearly defined borders, in other words: the end of Pax Americana.

Like the British Empire before, we can expect that the American empire will not contract quietly or peacefully. We may well be heading for full-blown confrontation any time soon, but with a Chino-Russian alliance the USA is facing a superior enemy and one that also holds an economic trump card in that China owns much of America's debt and can thus accelerate the dollar's demise. Since Israel is also forcing America's hand, making the case for the supreme importance of her own security needs, this war is likely going to spark off in Syria once the exchange of insults goes out of hand. Already China has rebuffed Hilary Clinton for her arrogance with regard to comments about the alleged in-humanitarian Russian and Chinese veto of a UN security council resolution on Syria. China pointed the finger at America's poor human rights record in occupied Iraq. No mention was made yet of America's long history of using its veto to protect Israel against being censored for its human rights abuses against Palestinians.

In spite of the ongoing polemics against Iran's nuclear programme as well as numerous attempts of portraying Iran as an international terrorist threat, albeit so amateurish that one could conclude that if this is the best the Iranian government could manage, then we needn't worry about its nuclear capability, from the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the recent bodged terrorist attack in Bangkok - Syria remains the more likely candidate for the start of hostilities between the old and the new super power, not only because it is right at the doorstep of Israel, but also because Iran is a much more difficult target due to its excellent defence capability against an attack from the Persian gulf and, recently, its demonstration of the ability to interfere with drones that would be used in an aerial attack. China is already fighting a proxy war with the USA in Afghanistan, just like the USA fought on Afghan territory with Russia, and the war is not going well for the Western coalition. China also has bought support and forged alliances in South America and Central Africa, the latter being an added reason why the West needed to take a more direct control of North-African countries. However, China is moving at a slow pace and unlikely to go for an all-out confrontation unless the US forces her onto the battle field.

For the West, China remains a closed world, and likewise, China is not sufficiently aware of the way Western propaganda operates. Therefore, she missed many an opportunity at scoring points. Hosting the Olympics, for example, did not assist China in repairing its tainted image in the West. It seems, China also fails to fully comprehend the economic warfare in which the West engages through monetary manipulation. Instead of, for example, pledging to support the stability of the Euro, without giving much detail, however, probably in an attempt to impress on Western opinion or to gain a greater stake in policy deliberations of the IMF, China could have through bilateral arrangements assisted troubled European countries, such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, to exit the Euro zone, thus gaining direct political influence in the midst of Europe without risking a collapse of its European markets due to the break-up of the Euro. Such a strategy would have isolated the United States even further and would have been extremely smart given the American approach of trying to weaken the European Union on the one hand whilst resting assured, on the other hand, that Europe completely depends on her in political and defence terms.

A further dimension, highlighting the crucial importance of what is currently being played out in Syria, is the religious and prophetic narrative: Both Christian and Muslim prophecies describe the region as a key battle field during the end times. According to Muslim tradition, the dictator of the united Western (one-world) empire, as-Sufyani, will emerge out of the conflict in Damascus and wreak havoc in the Muslim world. He will be confronted by a re-united Muslim army which eventually rallies around the Mahdi. After their victory, the Dajjal, or Anti-Christ, emerges, and finally his slayer, Jesus, the Messiah, who descends again to earth at a mosque near Damascus. Watch this space!

Europe's stunning arrogance

Whilst the European is mainly making the news for its strenuous efforts of cancelling even the pretence of democracy to preserve the interest (pun intended) of the bankers, they have not entirely taken their eyes off the "Muslim menace" within their midst, maybe because the Islamic faith remains the last and final obstacle in the secularists dream of technocratic government unhindered by conscience or reference to divine commandments. As I am preparing for a talk at Greenwich Islamic Centre (my "Greenwich Mean Talk") on Friday, 9 December, about whether Fortress Europe will ever accept full Muslim integration, I am stumbling across yet another article on the BBC News website giving publicity to the Dutch campaign for outlawing Jewish and Islamic slaughter methods. If it wasn't for the Jews fighting their corner, we Muslims would already be on a hiding to nowhere, but luckily they have picked holes in the argument of the so-called scientific and humane method of stunning animals prior to slaughter as well as the associated terminology. Dutch chief rabbi Benjamin Jacobs is quoted as taking issue with the term "ritual slaughter", saying that "it's not dancing around a cow". "In my opinion", he says, "stunning is torture. Just because it can't say 'moo' or move anymore, it's very nice for the human eye, but the animal is alive and the scientists don't actually know if it's suffering or not."

Well, the "scientists" do know, but don't want you to: In my article The halal slaughter controversy I have quoted and provided a translation of a study performed by veterinary scientists in Hanover, Germany, in 1978, comparing the Jewish shechita method of slaughter (identical to the Muslim halal method) and the captive bolt stunning method. The results were clear-cut: Cows and sheep dispatched using the shechita/halal method were fully unconscious quicker and suffered less pain, measured by EEG, than those stunned prior to slaughter. For sheep slaughtered using the Jewish/Muslim method, a zero brain activity line was recorded after a maximum of 14 seconds, whereas for sheep slaughtered using pre-stunning, brain activity responding to pain stimuli could still be observed until 200 seconds from the animal having been stunned. So, in the worst case scenario, sheep slaughtered Islamically suffer and feel pain a whole 186 seconds less than those subjected to captive bolt stunning. For those who have been brainwashed into believing that animals slaughtered Islamically suffer unduly, I highly recommend a demonstration video produced by a Muslim small holding in Texas.

These results are, of course, not palatable to animal rights campaigners whose real agenda is to deter people from eating meat altogether, using the "barbaric" Islamic slaughter as a welcome weapon in their arsenal of tricks. In past discussions I had with them, they tend to dismiss the German scientific study as outdated, but when asked to commission a new study, they argue that this would not be ethical since animals would be subjected to pain in the process. Hence, due to this circle never potentially being squared, and Jewish and Islamic slaughter only affecting less than one percent of all animals slaughtered for food, they happily acquiescence into the other ninety-nine plus percent of animals suffering a good two to three minutes longer than those mercifully killed the Jewish or Muslim way.

The minute numbers involved and the large hysteria created by everything presented in the media as the Islamic threat are in themselves telling. There are a dozen Muslim women wearing the full niqab in France, yet the French parliament sees the need to pass a specific law outlawing this attire in public places and prosecute a woman for her defiance. Here in Britain, the Daily Mail has run a whole series of articles about unsuspecting British consumers being served "halal" meat, for example from New Zealand, conveniently forgetting to mention that such meat is about as halal as the proverbial halal or kosher pork chop (or the so-called Islamic mortgage, for this matter), since all meat in New Zealand is by law stunned prior to slaughter. At the Commonwealth Business Forum in Perth, British prime minister David Cameron had the nerve to suggest the giving of foreign aid by Britain should be tied to a commitment to accept homosexuality as a basic human right, a suggestion flatly rejected by African nations. The attack against Muslim, (orthodox) Jewish and (traditional) Christian values coming out of the corridors of power of the European super state and its constituent emasculated nation states is of a purely political nature.

Comparisons with the Spanish inquisition are not entirely inappropriate. The difference is one of scale rather than mindset. And Europe no longer wants to be Christian, but secular, a goal pursued with equal passion and fanaticism. Nobody is suggesting that Jews and Muslims ought to convert, confess and eat pork as a sign of the sincerity of having mended their ways or else they would be expelled or culled. In today's Europe Jews may remain Jews, provided they subscribe to the secular Zionist Israel project, and Muslims may remain Muslims, provided they abrogate the Qur'an as being no longer above human-made law, denounce the heretic idea of an Islamic state, pay lip-service to democracy as the best thing since sliced bread (as long as they don't demand popular rule for themselves), become vegetarian or eat only stunned meat, and concede that homosexuality is an entirely acceptable lifestyle for everybody but maybe themselves. Europe is willing to tolerate Muslims as long as they are moderate, non-Islamic and non-interfering. If not, they are radicals, potential terrorists, and must be monitored, locked up or sent "back home", where they can then be assassinated, preferably by remote control drone strike.

So far, our self-appointed leaders have made a good job of compliance on our behalf. They are apologetic and accommodating. They are grateful for being tolerated and receiving the occasional grant or other state funding. They try to outdo each other with ingenious arguments how Islam must evolve and its traditional sources be re-interpreted. They happily approve a "halal" seal for stunned meat now making up the majority of alleged halal produce in the UK. Thankfully, they have not yet managed to delivery us, the Muslim public, wholesale to the altar of Europe, which is why they vehemently object for genuinely halal meat to carry the added label "Derived from animals that have not been stunned prior to slaughter." And the popular (democratic) mood is expressed by the increasing presence of outlets approved by the Halal Monitoring Committee, who only approve non-stunned meat.

If there are enough Muslims to stem the tide of the commercialisation and emasculation of Islam, the rest of the European public may one day thank us for it. The public is suspicious of Europe whose structure is not democratic and has already blessed us with plenty of unnecessary bureaucracy of the type previously only seen in the Soviet Union of yesteryear. The centre of power has shifted to being more remote and less approachable. Make no mistake: Secular Europe (or European secularists) want total control. On the back of the excuse of the Muslim threat of terrorism they are introducing laws aimed to be used to control their own, increasingly disenfranchised, populations. As a contrast to heavy-handed policing of demonstrations, they let rioters run wild without much police interference to spread fear, a proven recipe to make people surrender their freedom to the state. Airport security serve the same purpose, frightening, harassing and controlling a compliant public: Never mind the idiocy of liquid explosives carried in hand luggage: if it is perfectly save to let planes land at European airports arriving from destinations where liquids are not controlled, why do Europeans have to have to surrender their water and coke bottles when they go abroad?

If our leadership hadn't sold us out and we weren't so trusting of them (and possibly ignorant of true Islam, including its animal welfare provisions), then maybe we could start to fill the political vacuum and provide much needed leadership at a time where the people rise up against the slavery brought unto them by fraudulent fractional reserve banking (The People against the Banks), and it could no longer be said of the "Occupy Wall Street" and "Occupy the City" movements that they lack a programme and an ideology. Until then, we will continue to be stunned by the arrogance of our self-appointed masters and remain the "scum of the sea" as in the prophetic warning: "You shall be numerous, but you will be like the foam of the sea, and Allah will take the fear of you away from your enemies and will place weakness into your hearts.". Until then, let them re-interpret Islam for us and reshape the Middle East and the rest of the world to their liking. An Islam, in which Allah is stripped of His sovereignty, is not going to impress anybody, even if it is momentarily still tolerable to European supremacists.