Muslims – Page 2 – praag.org

Islam to catch up with Christianity by 2050

As of 2010, Christianity was by far the world’s largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, nearly a third (31%) of all 6.9 billion people on Earth. Islam was second, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23% of the global population.

But, if current demographic trends continue, Islam will nearly catch up by the middle of the 21st century.

Between 2010 and 2050, the world’s total population is expected to rise to 9.3 billion, a 35% increase.

Over that same period, Muslims – a comparatively youthful population with high fertility rates – are projected to increase by 73%. The number of Christians also is projected to rise, but more slowly, at about the same rate (35%) as the global population overall.

As a result, according to the Pew Research projections, by 2050 there will be near parity between Muslims (2.8 billion, or 30% of the population) and Christians (2.9 billion, or 31%), possibly for the first time in history.

Source: Pew Research

Nigeria elects Muslim president

Former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari defeated incumbent Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria’s presidential poll by 2.57 million votes, the country’s electoral commission announced on Wednesday, ending Jonathan’s rule of Africa’s most populous nation.

Three decades after seizing power in a military coup, Buhari became the first Nigerian to oust a president through the ballot box, putting him in charge of Africa’s biggest economy.

The Independent National Electoral Commission said the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate won 15,424,921 votes, or 53.95 percent of the 28,587,564 total valid votes cast.

Jonathan, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), won 12,853,162 (44.96 percent).

As the scale of this weekend’s electoral landslide became clear, Jonathan called Buhari on Tuesday to concede defeat to the opposition leader, an unprecedented step that should help to defuse anger among Jonathan’s supporters.

Jonathan’s quick concession could help alleviate fears of a repeat of post-election violence that saw 1,000 killed after Jonathan defeated Buhari in 2011.

As vote counts rolled in and Buhari’s victory looked ever more assured, thousands of people spilled into the streets of northern Nigeria’s biggest city Kano to celebrate.

For Buhari, 72, it has been a long road back to the pinnacle of Nigerian politics. A former army general, Buhari overthrew president Shehu Shagari – widely seen as inept and corrupt – in a military coup in 1983. As the head of a military government in the 1980s, he earned a reputation for his tough stance against nepotism and fraud.

Voter dissatisfaction with Jonathan – whose time in office has been marked by the rise of militant Islamist group Boko Haram and allegations of failing to tackle endemic corruption in the oil-rich country.

He also promised to stamp out Boko Haram’s insurgency in the north, which has claimed the lives of more than 13,000 people and left some 1.5 million homeless.

Buhari has also managed to bridge the traditional ethnic and religious fault lines of Nigerian politics – typically divided between the mainly Christian south and Muslim north.

As a Muslim from the north, Buhari for the first time won states in the southwest and even took one-third of votes in a southeastern state – an unprecedented development that some say reflects voter dissatisfaction with Jonathan more than it does enthusiasm for Buhari.

The tsunami of Latino immigrants to the US

Critics say the ginned-up fears of terrorism is a nearly non-existent threat. Americans are not about to be overwhelmed by Islam in the U.S..

Islam is used to distract whites from an enormous existential threat to their country, they say.

Immigration, legal and illegal, from Latin America must be stopped, or whites will be wiped from America, and many whites fear that it may already be too late. The Economist reports on the trend:

America is a country built by immigration, but nothing in its history compares to the rise in its Hispanic population. Changes to immigration law in the 1960s triggered a decades-long surge in arrivals, taking the Hispanic population from just 7m in 1970 to 57m today, a number that is set to double by mid-century.

At that point one in four Americans will be of Latino descent. In relation to the population of the day, there have been proportionally larger surges in the past, notably involving European migrations in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Two factors make the rise of Hispanic America different. Never before has such a large group of new arrivals lived so close to their ancestral homelands, linked to grandparents in the same time zone by cheap flights and Skype.

Secondly, America is entering an era of white decline. For almost two centuries, from the time of George Washington’s presidency to the election of Ronald Reagan, whites of European descent made up at least 80% of the population. That share is below two-thirds now, and the white majority is set to become a minority by 2044.

That brings both challenges and opportunities. Today’s Hispanics lag behind whites when it comes to education and wealth. But they are strikingly young, lowering America’s median age and offering workers to fill the labour market when other rich countries face greying decline.

Politicians too often discuss Hispanics as almost a single-issue group, as victims or villains of immigration. But five-sixths are legal residents and recent Latino growth has been mostly from births, not new arrivals.

Hispanics are dispersing across the country and their political clout will only grow: nearly 1m US-born Latinos reach voting age annually.

Suspects named in Nemtsov murder

The Nemtsov murder investigation has focused on the theory that the crime was organized by a Chechen militant commander Adam Osmayev, of the Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion, who also was named in the case concerning the attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin. Investigators are allowing for the possibility that the militants, who fought against DPR and LPR, operated at the behest of Ukrainian secret services, since the murder of the opposition leader would have discredited the Russian leadership and destabilize the political situation.

A law enforcement source had told the media that the investigating group has evidence that Ukrainian secret services played a role in Nemtsov’s murder. On the day of the murder the Investigative Committee spokesperson Vladimir Markin announced that the investigators are studying the possibility the murder was intended to destabilize the political situation in the country.

“The murder could have been used as a provocation to destabilize the situation, with Nemtsov becoming a sort of a sacrificial lamb for those who are not overly choosy in their political methods,” Markin told Izvestiya.

The investigators are also working on other versions: political, extremist, business, and personal. However, judging by the quality of preparation and implementation, it was done by professionals. The Izvestiya source said that the killer shot Nemtsov only a few tens of meters from the Kremlin, and it since became known that the murder took place in a spot not covered by a surveillance camera. Moreover, they chose a time during which there are no traffic jams, but there is still heavy traffic in the center which allowed the killers’ car to become lost among other vehicles.

The information that Ukraine’s special services ordered the murder is being verified. The bandits may have performed a mission assigned by Ukrainian secret services, but also avenged the death of their former leader Isa Munaev. He was killed on February 1 during the battle for Debaltsevo, after which the battalion’s command was taken over by Adam Osmayev.

The so-called Dzhokhar Dudayev international peacekeeping battalion is fighting on Ukraine’s side, and was formed by Munaev in March 2014. Munaev fought in the first Chechen campaign against Russian forces, and after 1999 he declared himself the commander of the South-Western sector and participated in organizing acts of terrorism.

Munaev fled Chechnya in 2006 for Denmark, where he received asylum. He founded the movement “Free Caucaus” which, according to secret services, financed terrorists. When in 2014 the Ukrainian government launched the ATO against LPR and DPR, Munaev went to Ukraine and declared the formation of his battalion. Russian sources indicate that he was personally invited Igor Kolomoisky, who financed the battalion. The battalion’s core were Chechen immigrants in Denmark, and citizens of other countries who belonged to terrorist organizations.

Isa Munaev was one of the individuals, along with the commanders of Azov and Dnepr, who supported terrorism on Russia’s soil and who were ordered delivered to Chechnya by Ramzan Kadyrov.

Russian services are trying to establish how many people participated in the preparation and implementation of Nemtsov’s murder. It cannot be ruled out that, in addition to killers and spotters, there were also “controllers” in Moscow who observed the murder’s aftermath and political effect. One of them may have been the Ukrainian deputy Aleksey Goncharenko. Experts who were questioned by Izvestiya believe the theory of foreign secret service involvement to have merit.

Translated from Russian LifeNews

Obama says Islam has always been part of United States

We hear a lot about the United States’ Judeo-Christian heritage, but according to President Obama, “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.”

That’s what the president told a White House conference on “countering violent extremism” on Wednesday.

In his speech on Wednesday, Obama was making the point that Western nations must show that they “welcome people of all faiths,” at a time when “extremists” are saying that Western nations are “hostile to Muslims.”

However, America’s first dealings with Islam were tense and unpleasant.

According to a Heritage Foundation paper, shortly after America’s founding, the United States “was dragged into the affairs of the Islamic world by an escalating series of unprovoked attacks on Americans by Muslim pirates, the terrorists of the era,” who looted American ships and captured American sailors, holding them for ransom or selling them as slaves.

The paper notes that America’s struggle with Muslim pirates from the Barbary States (modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) began soon after the 13 colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776 and continued for roughly four decades.

In his remarks on Wednesday, President Obama said Muslim Americans now serve as police officers, firefighters, soldiers, “and in our intelligence communities and in homeland security.”

He said Muslim American heroes are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, “having given their lives in defense of all of us.”

“And, of course, that’s the story extremists and terrorists don’t want the world to know — Muslims succeeding and thriving in America. Because when that truth is known, it exposes their propaganda as the lie that it is.

“It’s also a story that every American must never forget, because it reminds us all that hatred and bigotry and prejudice have no place in our country. It is not just counterproductive. It doesn’t just aid terrorists. It’s wrong. It’s contrary to who we are.”

So-called hate crimes against Muslims escalated in this country after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 — attacks perpetrated by Islamic radicals — but they have never reached the level of hate crimes against Jews, according to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Reporting statistics.

In 2013, for example, 62.4 percent of hate crime victims were attacked because of anti-Jewish bias, while 11.6 percent were victims of anti-Islamic bias.

Compare that with the year before the 2001 terror attacks: In 2000, of the 1,699 victims of anti-religious hate crime, 74.6 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias; and only 2.1 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Islamic bias.

President Obama on Wednesday stressed that U.S. is not at war with Islam:”We are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” he said.

He also said the West and Islam are not in conflict; and that Islam is not incompatible with modern life.

Source: CNS News

Outrage as ISIS beheads Christians

The Islamic State beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians over the weekend, propping the severed heads on the victims’ backs, a barbaric slaughter that led Reverend Franklin Graham to ask, “Can you imagine the outcry if 21 Muslims had been beheaded by Christians?”

“Where is the universal condemnation by Muslim leaders around the world?” he asked.

The brutal killing of the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, who had been abducted in Libya by members of the Islamic State, was videotaped and the entire death film was posted online on Sunday, Feb. 15. It is entitled, “A Message Signed With Blood, To The Nation of the Cross.”

In a Facebook post on Feb. 16, Rev. Graham, who heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said, “The militant Islamic terrorist group ISIS has released a video called A MESSAGE SIGNED WITH BLOOD TO THE NATION OF THE CROSS showing the beheadings of the 21 Egyptian Christians who had been kidnapped in Libya.”

“Can you imagine the outcry if 21 Muslims had been beheaded by Christians?” said Rev. Graham. “Where is the universal condemnation by Muslim leaders around the world?”

“As we mourn with the families of those 21 martyrs, we’d better take this warning seriously as these acts of terror will only spread throughout Europe and the United States,” warned Rev. Graham.

“If this concerns you like it does me, share this,” he said. “The storm is coming.”

Source: cnsnews.com

Qatar marches against ‘white hate crime’

About 1,000 people have taken to the streets of Doha, Qatar, to express their anger over the killing of three Muslim students in the US last week by their white neighbour.

Qatar branded the murder “a terrorist act.”

Protesters’ banners read, “End hate crimes”, “Unity”, and “We all have the right to live free from hate”, AFP reported.

US Ambassador to Qatar Dana Shell Smith was among the demonstrators.

She later posted to her Twitter that it was “good to see young people rejecting hate of all kinds.”

The march was organized by a foundation headed by the mother of Qatar’s emir, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser al-Masnad.

Last week, three students – 23-year-old Deah Shaddy Barakat, his 21-year-old wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and her 19-year-old sister Razan – were allegedly murdered by their white neighbour Craig Stephen Hicks.

The killing happened in the North Carolina university town of Chapel Hill.

Hicks, 46, has been charged with three counts of murder, and is thought to be a fierce opponent of religion: on his Facebook page, he published anti-religious posts, including against Islam, Christianity and Mormons.

According to police, they are looking into the incident as a parking dispute. However, the students’ families believe the attack was religiously-motivated.

Source: RT

Western embassies in Yemen evacuated

The embassies of Germany and Italy have announced evacuation of embassies’ personnel from Yemen. They followed the example of other NATO member states, such as Britain, France and the Netherlands, which have closed their embassies in Yemen over security fears.

US embassy staff were ordered to destroy all top-secret documents and sensitive equipment and pulled out of Yemen altogether Wednesday.

With major western embassies in Yemen evacuated, Houthi rebels and Al-Qaeda militants were left to deal with each other face to face. As Washington tries to enroll Shia rebels to combat terrorism, Islamic extremists are busy seizing military hardware.

In the meantime, an assault by Al-Qaeda militants on the camp of the 19th Infantry Brigade in Yemen’s Baihan on Thursday ended in the surrender of the garrison and the capture of a large quantity of armored vehicles and heavy weaponry. Seven people have been confirmed dead.

Islamic extremists captured a total of “30 tanks, 90 military vehicles, 25 armored vehicles and 28 artillery pieces,” a Yemeni military official told AFP.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has confirmed the seizure of the camp, accusing troops there of links with the Houthi rebels. Negotiations between Islamic extremists and tribal leaders resulted in Al-Qaeda releasing six Yemeni servicemen.

The Houthi rebels captured the vehicles used for the evacuation of the closed American embassy.

Officials at Sanaa’s airport confirmed that the looted property included more than 25 vehicles used by the US Marines who maintained security at the embassy, as well as three vehicles used by US Ambassador Matthew Tueller and his staff.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki slammed the seizure as “completely unacceptable” and urged the Houthi rebels to “respect international conventions” regarding foreign embassies.

The militia’s foreign relations chief, Hussein al-Ezzi, confirmed the seizure of an unspecified number of vehicles, but insisted they were taken for “safekeeping” and are going to be handed over “to a trustworthy third party, like the United Nations office.”

The US Marine Corps, which organized the evacuation from Yemen, said that Marines destroyed heavy weapons and personal firearms in their possession before leaving the embassy headquarters. They also destroyed computers, documents, phones and other sensitive materials within the embassy’s perimeter.

The closure of the US embassy in Yemen has affected Washington’s ability to conduct counterterrorist operations in the area against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), believed to be one of the world’s most dangerous jihadist networks.

Famous author Houellebecq says Muslims are dangerously underrepresented

The Union of French Muslim Democrats (UDMF) has said it hopes to field candidates in eight cities in French elections next month, a modest objective for a young party with big ambitions.

The UDMF this week filed applications to run two candidates in the Parisian suburb of Bobigny as part of local elections in March, French media reported on Thursday. The relatively new political party said it planned to do the same in seven other ballot races, including in Marseille, Lyon and Nice.

Famed French author Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel “Submission,” which envisions France ruled by a Muslim party in 2022, sparked a media storm when it hit bookshelves this year.

The Charlie Hebdo massacre, incredibly, took place on the same day as the novel’s release in France. Speaking to France Inter radio about his best-selling novel, Houellebecq admitted that Muslims were dangerously unrepresented in mainstream politics.

The controversial writer Houellebecq had been found not guilty of inciting racism in 2002 by calling Islam “the stupidest religion”.

A panel of three judges acquitted Houellebecq of the charges of provoking racial hatred in remarks made in an interview with the literary magazine Lire.

The charges had been brought by France’s Human Rights League, the Mecca-based World Islamic League and the mosques of Paris and Lyon in a trial reminiscent of Britain’s Salman Rushdie affair.

The case also pitted leftwingers against Christians at a time of rising public concern about Islam in France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim community.

Najib Azergui, who founded the UDMF in 2012, told the daily Le Parisian that his group wanted to give a voice to the country’s sizeable Muslim community, which struggles to find itself represented in the country’s mainstream parties.

Hocine Hebbali, 32, became the party’s first – and so far only – member elected to public office, winning a seat as a city councilor in Bobigny last year.

The UDMF says it supports using Islamic banking practices to decrease France’s bloated public debt and says the country should invest in the halal food industry as a way to create jobs.

The party wants to repeal France’s 11-year-old ban on headscarves in schools and backs Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, according to the group’s website.

Good luck to Nigeria’s president at the polls

Less than two weeks from national polls, Nigeria’s ruling party is facing unprecedented shifts in the politics of religion that could spell trouble for the incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan.

While he may still be the favourite on February 14, experts said some factors could remove his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from power for the first time since the end of military rule in 1999.

Opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Muslim, has gained surprising traction in the mostly Christian south, despite sustained PDP efforts to paint him as a religious extremist.

Jonathan has been heavily criticised for his apparent failure to reduce graft in Africa’s most populous country and top economy, where billions of dollars in public money have been stolen, especially in the oil sector.

Boko Haram’s brutal uprising has also worsened each year under Jonathan’s watch, with more than 13,000 people killed since 2009.

For Dapo Thomas, political scientist at Lagos State University, the emphasis on a candidate’s religion and tribe has “driven merit to the backseat”.

Jonathan beat Buhari by roughly 10 million votes in 2011, winning roughly eight million in the north and the religiously divided central states.

If Jonathan’s support in the north collapses and Buhari makes inroads in the south, analysts said the president could lose.

Buhari is helped by the fact that he is leading a united opposition, unlike in 2011 when rival candidates peeled off more than three million votes.

Source: AFP

New Saudi king beheads four

Saudi Arabia on Tuesday beheaded two more of its citizens and a Pakistani, continuing the strictest punishment under new King Salman.

Omar bin Yahya bin Ibrahim al-Barkati was tried and convicted of incest, the interior ministry said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.

“He was executed as punishment for his crime and as a lesson to others,” the ministry said, adding that authorities carried out the sentence in southwestern Asir region.

In a separate case, Yassir bin Hussein al-Hamza was executed in northwestern Jawf region after his trial and confession for smuggling amphetamine pills, the ministry said.

A third convict, Latif Khan Nurzada, a Pakistani, was executed for trafficking heroin into the kingdom. He was executed in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, the ministry said in another statement.

According to an AFP tally, their executions bring to 16 the number of Saudis and foreigners put to death this year under the kingdom’s strict version of Islamic sharia law.

Four have been executed since King Salman took office last Friday after the death of his predecessor Abdullah.

Under Abdullah, the number of executions jumped from 27 in 2010 to around 80 annually, with 87 last year.

The oil-rich Gulf Arab state faces constant international criticism over its human rights record, including the use of the death penalty.

Source: AFP

800 000 rally against Charlie Hebdo in a country of 1.3 million

Nearly one million Muslims rallied in Grozny, Chechnya against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. There are only 1.3 million people in all of Chechnya.

They’re more upset with the magazine than they are with the killer Kouachi brothers.

Voice of America reported:

Hundreds of thousands of people in the Russian Muslim region of Chechnya gathered in the regional capital Grozny on Monday to protest against caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

Chechnya’s Interior Ministry said more than a million people attended the demonstration. Earlier Monday, the Russian Interior Ministry had estimated the number of attendees at more than 800,000.

The republic’s population is around 1.3 million.

Before the rally, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov urged people to attend to protest against what he called “the vulgarity, immorality, lack of culture, and the shamelessness of those who drew the caricatures of the Prophet.”

Earlier this month, gunman attacked the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing 12 people. The killings were said to be retaliation for the publication’s depictions of Muhammad.

Some of the Chechen protesters Monday carried signs reading “Hands off the Prophet Muhammad,” Addressing the crowd, Kadyrov declared “If needed, we are ready to die to stop anyone who thinks that you can irresponsibly defile the name of the Prophet.”

Source: Gateway Pundit

German PEGIDA cancels rally over death threats

German PEGIDA movement, which stands against ‘the Islamization of the West’ has canceled next week’s rally in the city of Dresden after threats were issued against one of its top organizers.

The Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) movement has been holding protests every Monday in the eastern German city of Dresden since October.

The rallies, which initially gathered no more than 500 people, hit a record attendance of 25,000 last week.

PEGIDA announced on its Facebook page that the rally planned for January 19 has been called off after the police said “there is a specific threat against a member of the organization team.”

According to DPA news agency, the threats were filed by Islamic radicals against the movement’s co-leader, Lutz Bachmann.

The German police were informed of the threats against Bachman by foreign secret services, the agency added.

A spokesman for the Dresden police said that they had placed a “general ban” on all public gatherings on Monday, Reuters reported.

“The police in Dresden have received information of a concrete threat against the weekly PEGIDA rally,” a statement by Dresden police said. “Assassins have been called up to mingle among the PEGIDA protestors and murder one of the individuals leading the rally.”

Instead of taking to the streets, PEGIDA called on all Europeans who oppose “religious bigotry any kind” to hang the national flag of their country out of their windows and light a candle on Monday.

PEGIDA is currently the most supported anti-immigration movement in Germany as rallies by similar organizations in other cities have so far been unable to draw anywhere near as much people.

The Dresden group was criticized by many German politicians, with Chancellor Angela Merkel calling PEGIDA “racists full of hatred.”

Thousands in Pakistan call for boycott on French products

Around 5,000 people rallied against French magazine Charlie Hebdo in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore on Sunday, and the founder of a group banned for militant links urged protesters to boycott French products.

Hafiz Saeed, who founded Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organization banned for launching attacks in neighboring India, told protesters: “We will launch a movement against the insulting caricatures of our beloved prophet.”

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a picture of the Prophet Muhammad weeping on its cover last week after two gunmen stormed its offices and killed 12 people. The gunmen said their attack was revenge for previous cartoons the magazine had published mocking Islam.

Saeed urged traders to stop importing French products and for Pakistani leaders to try to get an international law against blasphemy passed.

Blasphemy is punishable by death in Pakistan.

On Friday, protesters trying to storm the French consulate in the southern city of Karachi shot and injured a photographer working for French news agency AFP.

Source: Reuters