It's bit hard to overcome Islamic poverty when Islam's highest grade of Muslims knock down the World Trade Centre.

It is no surprise that those muslim countries that are the most insular, despotic, mullah ridden, and repressive, are the most staunch opponents of free trade and the most enthusiastic supporters of Osama bin Laden and his merry band of suicidal Jihadi's.

Guess what else they have in common? None of these nations even belongs to the hated World Trade Organisation. which, with 142 members, is hardly an exclusive club. The muslim world itself chooses to live in self imposed economic exile and is suffering terribly because of it.

For while economic rationalism, free trade and liberated market forces have fomented dramatic changes around the world, (mostly for the better) the two places they have achieved nothing is in the African and Arabic worlds. With a few mostly "liberal" muslim countries as exceptions, (Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia and some Gulf States) most Muslim countries have done their best to keep international economic integration completely at bay.

The extreme poverty that exists in Islamic countries, is a product of their own religious beliefs and almost every Muslim country is an economic basket case. Muslim economies are growing, on average, only 1% a year. But Muslim populations are growing, on average, at a disastrous 4% a year. Muslim societies are great believers in breeding like flies and Muslim families are noted for having very large numbers of children. This factor alone is instrumental in their appalling levels of poverty, superstition, unemployment and ignorance

Foxy – You say Jihad “in the Koran it is projected as exerting effort to change oneself.” Only in your dreams.

The word jihad is not used in the quran. The verb used instead is usually understood as “struggle” or “making an effort” And it is framed as “an effort in the way of Allah”.

In reality, jihad is nothing but holy war against infidels. In the quran, this struggle or effort requires that a Muslim leave home; the quran says it may cause the Muslim to get killed but it promises spoils of war (Surah 8). Sounds a lot like war to me.

For 1300 years jihad meant nothing but attacking and killing infidels, with the required looting, murder, rape and enslavement. Around 1960, Muslims apologists and silly infidels began to push the politically correct notion of “inner struggle”.

Do this, go to a site with Muslim texts and enter the work “Jihad”. Here is a link to hadith:

http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/home/search.php

Now go down the listed texts and read each result for jihad. Can you find any that is not about attacking, conquering non-Muslims?

Or better, if you wish, goto any Islamic news site (such as “arabnews” or others) and look for the word jihad and tell me if it is about stopping smoking, not looking at pornography or loosing weight.

Jihad as some inner struggle is only for stupid, silly infidels that believe anything, including that Islam is about peace.

On the other hand, Foxy, maybe you should devote your life to telling Muslims that jihad is really about character building and then they might stop attacking and killing us. Maybe, with your efforts, one day Ahmed the terrible will say: “Oh shucks, darn it… we didn’t know, they told us that jihad was about killing and capturing those hot infidels girls, sorry”.

Go for it, Foxy, make a difference.

PS: when I find time, I will write about your link to the “Muslim Australians - A Partnership under the Australian Government’s Living In Harmony initiative” booklet, a distorted piece of crude propaganda, full of misquotes, errors, and lies

Good post, Kactuz

Jihad this, Foxy.

Koran 8.12 When you Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those that believe. I will strike terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike of their heads and strike off every finger tip of them.

Koran 8:39: “And fight them until there is no more disbelief in Islam and the religion will all be for Allâh Alone...”

Sura (9:5) - "So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them."

Sura (2:216) - "Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye knoweth not."

We knoweth, but Foxy, Yuyutsu, and Julianutter are in denial, and knoweth not.

Yuyutsu

Further to the myth that jihad means a Sunday picnic in the park. The below is from "Osama Bin Laden" by Michael Scheuer p32-33

-“Some US and Western government officials, journalists, and historians –abetted by the clerics of Arab regimes assigned to mislead them –labor hard to portray jihad as a vigorous but peaceful endeavor through which the individual Muslim struggles to control himself and then master his baser tastes and inclinations. These writers often cite a hadith claiming the Prophet spoke of a ‘greater jihad,’ considering the ‘greater ‘ to be the individual struggle just described, and the ‘lesser’ to involve specific military activity. This is an indefensible position. When mentioned in the Koran –which is God’s word spoken to Gabriel, who repeats it to Muhammed --jihad is almost invariably used in a martial sense. Moreover the hadith prized by the jihad-is-personal-struggle advocates is so poorly sourced –hadiths’ reliability depends on a validated chain of transmitters who passed the data from one person who heard the Prophet speak or saw his deeds—that it is not included in the two canonical hadith collections, those by al-Bukhari and Muslim.

A here the related footnote: See Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, pp116 and 118. Professor Peters notes that many Islamists believe the frequent reference to this hadith by Muslims and Western writers is meant to’weaken Muslim combativeness.’ In addition, Shaykh Azzam quotes several eminent Islamic scholars who say the hadith ranges form weak to outright fabrication. Shaykh Ibn Taymiyyah, for example, wrote: “This hadith has no source and nobody whomsoever in the field of Islamic knowledger has narrated it . Jihad against the disbelievers is the most noble of actions and moreover it is the most important action for the sake of mankind.’ See note 71 in Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, ‘Join the Caravan,’ http:www.islamistwatch.org.text/azzam/caravan/reference.hmtl.

_______________________________________

Great post kactuz --I will copy it for future reference.

Dear LEGO,

Obviously the issues around the message of Islam are in contention among several groups who all call themselves 'Muslims'.

I know some of those who call themselves 'Muslims' who are good and hard-working Australian citizens, while at the same time obviously benefit religiously from their prayers and fasting on Ramadan. When visiting Israel I see many Muslim blue-collar employees which do their job well and seem to only care about feeding their families. Just give them a tip and they will be your best friends. Yes, I see some of them taking short breaks to pray and I also see others who hide from their friends in the toilet to have a forbidden snack during Ramadan (could they still be called Muslims then?). I also read about the mystical Sufis, who have great religious teachings and practices. The other types of Muslims, I mostly know from the media/news.

Which is the true "Islam"?
Is Islam a religion?
What were the original teachings of Mohammed?
Is anyone following these at all?

I am unwilling to accept popular or political opinion as "truth" (otherwise just imagine what views would I adopt about Jews if I lived in Germany in the 1930's) and I was in fact planning a couple of months ago to do a research on this issue and bought a copy of the Koran, but right now I do have higher priorities. Once I complete my research, I will let you know what I found.

Dear Kactuz,

My information has been gleaned not from arm-chair
"philosophers" such as yourself and others, but
from actual experts in the field such as Prof.
Abdullah Saeed of Melbourne University.

As for your "polite" suggestion as to whom I should
devote my life to? That's already been taken care of
by my chosen profession - that of librarian.
Which of course is to continue to add, enrich,
stimulate, and amplify, the reading of people such as
yourself.

Now jihad and its meaning in the Qur'an?

The following link may explain clearer than I did:

http://www.abdullahsaeed.org/sites/abdullahsaeed.org/files/Terrorism_and_Justice.pdf