Religious Hate:

• The Public Debate on Kuwait's School Curricula: To Teach or Not to Teach Jihad

  Kuwaiti educators and intellectuals claim that Kuwait's curricula include extremist messages encouraging terrorism, and that members of the Muslim Brotherhood movement who emigrated from Egypt to Kuwait played a central role in devising the country's Islamic education curricula. Other educators, who occupy positions in the Kuwaiti Education Ministry, argued that blaming the Kuwaiti curricula for extremism and terrorism is not only false but is part of an overall attack on Islam.

• On March 18, 2005 Dr. Amina Wadud led a mixed congregation of men and women in Friday prayers - the first known time in the history of Islam that a woman led the call to prayer. How did Muslim clerics react? Predictably, sentiments ran from plain anger to vehement opposition.

• Images de-humanizing Jews and promoting their murder continue to make regular appearences in Palestinian media accompanied by the requisite rife anti-Americanism. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority continues to promote martyrdom in its state-produced children’s television programs.

• Wafa al-Biss strapped on 25 pounds of explosives and was on her way to blow up an Israeli hospital when she was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint. Aside from getting little or no coverage in the media, this incident highlights three important points that the media usually ignore: the motivation of suicide terrorists is aspiration and not desperation, Israeli checkpoints save lives, and the Palestinian Authority is encouraging terrorism, not stopping it.

Idiotarian Seethings:

• There ought to be a most-convoluted-thought-of-the-month award: an Egyptian historian on Saudi television said that the Vatican has been on a mission to "christianize" the world. Since they didn't succeed in this "christianization" by the year 2000 (as was supposedly planned by the Second Vatican Council), in January 2001 the World Council of Churches delegated this mission to the US who in turn fabricated 9/11 as an excuse to eradicate Islam and Muslims. Also, according to this guy, 150 U.S. Congressmen are demanding an inquiry about "the 4,000 Jews who didn't go to work that day."

• Moishe Friedman, chief rabbi for hundreds of anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews in Vienna, doesn't think Israel has a right to exist and he says Zionist Jews share the blame for the Holocaust. He wants formal state recognition of his religious community and to achieve that goal, he has enlisted the help of neo-Nazis.

• Zakariya Zubeidi is an Al-Aksa Brigades terrorist who's on Israel’s most-wanted list for coordinating attacks on Israelis. He just joined the PA police force and announced that he has no intention of arresting Palestinian "activists." He will be joined in this wave of non-arrests by another few hundred terrorists who have been recruited by the PA to form the new security force.

• The Palestinian Minister of Environment accused Israel of deliberately spreading cancer to Palestinians by manufacturing and distributing biscuits and sodas containing saccharine. He also claimed that two Israeli truckloads of radioactive toys were confiscated, en route to Palestinian children.

• Authorities at the Venice Biennale have banned a sculpture by a German artist from being displayed on St Mark's Square because it might be offensive to Muslims. The sculpture was a cube covered in fabric modelled after the Ka’ba in Mecca. A spokesman for the Venetian arts authority said there was a danger that Muslims would feel provoked by the art, "heightening the risk of the city being vulnerable to terrorist attacks".

Race and Culture:

• An anti-semitic letter sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office in Moscow had called for a ban on Jewish groups in Russia claiming their values were offensive to Orthodox Christians. Prosecutors have declined to press charges against the authors of the letter, saying it didn't contain any calls for action against "any faith, ethnic group or race, and therefore its authors could not be prosecuted for a hate crime." Moscow prosecutors close file.

• And in the Ukraine, a number of politicians and public figures took part in a one day conference in Kiev, titled "Zionism as the Biggest Threat to Modern Civilization" and presided over by David Duke. Participants called for the deportation of Jews from the Ukraine.

• National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World

  Anti-Semitism based on the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy is not rooted in Islamic tradition but, rather, in European ideological models. The decisive transfer of this ideology to the Muslim world took place between 1937 and 1945 under the impact of Nazi propaganda. Important to this process were the Arabic-language service broadcast by the German shortwave transmitter in Zeesen between 1939 and 1945, and the role of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was the first to translate European anti-Semitism into an Islamic context. Although Islamism is an independent, anti-Semitic, antimodern mass movement, its main early promoters - the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Mufti and the Qassamites in Palestine - were supported financially and ideologically by agencies of the German National Socialist government.

• Turkish media often attack the local small Jewish community, accusing Jews of disloyalty and treason and of destroying the Ottoman Empire. They also blame Jews for the Armenian genocide, I guess not aware of the dissonance since Turkey will not even recognise an Armenian genocide occurred. Antisemitism in the Turkish Media (Part III): Targeting Turkey's Jewish Citizens.

• Last week, 130 tombstones were knocked down and broken at the Jewish cemetery in Budapest and another 86 graves were desecrated at the Jewish cemetery in London. This latest attack is the third desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Britain this year. There were 532 anti-Semitic incidents in Britain last year, the highest figure in 20 years.

• New Jersey is seeing an extraordinary increase in hate groups as anti-Semitic incidents in the state have shot to an all-time high. The Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked 31 hate groups in New Jersey last year, up from five in 1999.

• In Rotterdam, a mosque was marked with racist graffiti and gutted in an arson attack. It was the latest in a string of such attacks in the Netherlands since the murder of Theo Van Gogh. Dutch mosque damaged in arson attack. (Hat tip: liberalhawk)

A Hopeful Note:

• A Saudi journalist who hosts a popular interview program on Al-Arabiyya television wrote an article for the UAE daily Al-Itihad, describing his experience in the U.S. shortly after 9/11: Allah Treated Us Mercifully When He Did Not Stop the Blood in the Veins of the Jews and Christians So They Protected Us after 9/11

  "A few months later came the catastrophic events of 9/11. I met with a group of students from the Gulf states in the [U.S.] city where we were studying, and we discussed what we could do regarding our apprehensions about American reactions… We agreed that we would not go anywhere alone and would wait [to go together to the mosque] until the coming Friday – the first after the events.
  
  "[That Friday], when the young Arabs reached the street where the mosque was, their hearts were beating like that of a sprinter. Their pulses quickened when they saw groups of Americans surrounding the mosque. They drew closer in dread – to discover that the groups were Christian organizations and 'hippies' who wanted to protect the Arab and Muslim worshipers from any attack that might occur as a reaction by Americans to [the Al-Qa'ida] raid on Manhattan.
  
  "The sight was melodramatic. Those same people whom our imam customarily cursed every Friday and whom he asked Allah to exterminate, orphan their children, and widow their wives – and, when he was really fired up, whose blood he would also ask Allah to dry up in their veins – these same people came to serve as a human shield for our prayers.

• The Muslim community in Philadelphia has adopted a tough policy of public shunning of Muslims who abuse their spouses or abandon their families.

  The male leadership of the Muslim community of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley is adopting an initiative towards deterring and punishing, in the community, wife-beaters and men who abandon their families. Not only will they be banned from future marriages among the Muslim communities involved, their businesses will be targetted for boycotting as well. This is Amish-style shunning, and it will have a huge impact on tribally-oriented men, the kind most likely to abuse. If the tribe says it will kick you off the island for behaving a certain way, you probably won't behave that way—especially if you see other men getting the boot.