Ali Sina’s “Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography”

For those who are familiar with the extremist Islamophobic website called “Faithfreedom International”, the name of its founder Ali Sina (a pseudonym) is synonymous with the bigotry and vile rhetoric often displayed against Muslims and Islam. This was a person who openly advocated for the atomic bomb to be used on Muslim populations and have many times declared that he will “wipe out” Islam within 30 years.

Now this relatively unknown figure within academic circles — apart from becoming the self-appointed hero for the cause of Islamophobia, bigotry and the new emerging school of lay-people and pseudo-scholars — has moved beyond the world that he is more accustomed with on the internet.

Like his predecessors, such as the infamous Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, Ali Sina is now attempting to make his name within the world of published authors with the publication of his book Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography. Whilst it is true that over the course of years he has gathered a large following of largely misled haters, Ali Sina still has had to resort to self-publishing with a relatively small publishing press where anyone with anything to rant about can publish their own.

The book claims to be a “psychobiography” of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, but it is far from being objective and sane in its purported “scholarship”. It claims to refer to the Islamic religious texts (heavily relying on translations and not the original Arabic sources which betrays the author’s lack of command in the language) and then attempts to characterize Muhammad (SAW) in “modern analytical terms”.

Coming from a Shi’ite background in predominantly Shi’ite Iran, it is not clear from the onset as to why Ali Sina favours referencing the Sunni sources such as the hadith collection of Bukhari and Muslim (which is not used by the Shi’a and largely unfamiliar to them) and hardly mentions the Shi’ite sources themselves which talks about the Prophet (SAW).

This leads us to suspect that he may not have the credentials of an Iranian Muslim as he claims to have. Unfortunately, this book does nothing more than to resort to the old underhanded technique of cherry-picking a handful of half-truths, sprinkling them with lies, exaggerations and misrepresentations, and eventually to come up with a twisted mix of politically-motivated propaganda. MORE >>

Barack Obama, a good show, but no applause yet

Obama’s interview with Al Arabiya and his recent visit to Turkey highlighted the end of the polarising “Us vs Them” language and the beginning of dialogue and partnership.

“The United States is not and will never be at war with Islam,” promised Obama, despite a recent ABC/Washington Post poll showing that 48 percent of Americans hold an unfavourable opinion of Islam, the highest unfavourablity rating since 2001. Having shunned Muslim American voters like political kryptonite in his campaign, Obama now embraces them by stating: “Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know, because I am one of them.”

Obama now invites American Muslims to become part of his “political family” with his recent appointments of several distinguished Muslims, such as Rashid Hussain, Dalia Mogahed and Eboo Patel, to influential positions in his administration.

FULL ARTICLE, HERE. (Pic: Books on Obama in Malay language)

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My JIHAD, a true story

Synopsis

Aukai Collins grew up hard: abandoned, surviving in the streets and running with thugs. While serving time, he converted to Islam, and went to fight with the Muslims who were targeted for genocide in Chechnya and Bosnia.

This led him to Usama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan. As terrorist attacks on civilians around the world intensified, Aukai was asked to lead a mission that included hostage taking and the killing of civilians -- something he would not do.

Disillusioned by those who used Islam for their own ends or to attack innocents, Aukai offered his services to the FBI and CIA as a counter-terrorist operative, even getting close to one of the leaders of the September 11 attacks. Yet his greatest strength -- providing insight into the problems surrounding the U.S. government's fight against something it doesn't understand -- was ignored by inept members of the American intelligence community.

My Jihad is an insider's story about the greatest threat to world peace and stability in modern times, told by an unforgettable true-life warrior who has walked the walk, fought the fights, and lived to tell about it.

I read this book (My Jihad) about 3 years ago. This book takes a very good look into the true meaning of 'jihad'. It has awesome descriptions of frontline battles from the man that was there in the face of danger.

Any men (also women), especially American, should read this if they want to understand 'jihad' in its true state (something many Muslims and non-Muslims probably do not understand). The book is very entertaining and easy to read, but sometimes slows pace around many different characters and places.

Book newsletter highlights, January 2009 by Malaysiakini

The Politics of Hunger: When Policies and Markets Fail the Poor

"The Politics of Hunger: When Policies and Markets Fail the Poor", exposes the real issues and structural causes that initiated and aggravated the global food crisis and the continued hunger and malnutrition. The book provides an overview of the same policies: the speedy conclusion of the WTO Doha negotiations and support for corporate agriculture.

While these policies have benefited the corporations, the real losers are the small food producers i.e. the peasants, rural women, agricultural workers, indigenous people, pastoralists and the fisherfolk who continue suffer increasing hunger and poverty as well as loss of livelihoods and displacement.

Malaya's First Year at the United Nations: As Reflected in Dr Ismail's Reports Home to Tunku Abdul Rahman (Hardback edition)

Dr Ismail's writings and speeches, and his letters to the Tunku, covering a variety of foreign policy issues, are a valuable asset in understanding the unique role he played in the nation's history. He was without doubt the primary architect of Malayan (Malaysian) Foreign Policy. - Tengku Tan Sri Dato' Seri Ahmad Rithauddeen, Former Foreign Minister of Malaysia.

Not only was Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman Malaysia's first ambassador to the United States and permanent representative to the United Nations, he was also Foreign Affairs Minister in 1959-60. Later, as long-time Home Affairs Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and occasionally Acting Prime Minister, he played a decisive role in making neutrality the pillar of Malaysia's foreign policy.

This important collection of notes he wrote to the Tunku in 1958 and of his speeches made in 1957-58 at the UN are being published for the very first time. It gives us a window into his seminal thinking and makes us understand the contribution he made to Malaysian nation-building in the early years.

Tawfik Ismail and Ooi Kee Beng deserve kudos for compiling these into one volume and for providing elaborate footnoting that presents the reader with an intriguing picture of the Cold War year of 1958.

Click here: Malaysiakini’s Kinibooks book of the month.

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Party of God: An Islamic Movement Perspective (Ref: Malaysiakini)

From a rag-tag band of guerrillas in the 1980S, the Hizbullah have become a near-professional army capable of resisting the Israelis on several fronts for prolonged periods.

But they are far more than simply a military force. They are also a popular political movement in Lebanon, capable of transcending the country’s fractured communal politics, and the main providers of education and welfare services to Lebanon’s poorest people.

It is not only for their military strength that they are massively popular with Arab and Muslim peoples everywhere – and regarded with fear by Israel, the West and Arab governments alike.

This volume brings together essays and features on what is perhaps the most successful non-government social, political and military movement in the world today.

Publisher: TOP, in association with Crescent International
Price: RM19.00 (142 pages)
Click here to buy.

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Is Iran emerging as a global power?

It ranks second in global natural gas reserves and has substantial oil reserves with plenty of growth potential in both energy sectors. This guarantees that the Islamic Republic will play a key long-term role in the world's increasingly important energy equation.

The United States has also been engaged in talks with Tehran over how to stabilise Iraq - an acknowledgment that Iran could hold the key to regional security. What does Iran's growing influence mean for its neighbours? Send your opinion to Aljazeera.net.

My opinion is, yes Iran will be a major world’s power, with its Islamic root. That’s why United States (especially George Bush) uses every effort and power at their disposal to restrain Iran from being a nuclear power with Iran’s nuclear program. For George Bush, only America and Israel will have the right to own nuclear weapons. Such an arrogant head!

On June 21, 2008 the Iranian envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh as reported by Voice of America (http://voanews.com) says, “Iran's envoy to the United Nations nuclear agency says Iran is continuing with its nuclear program despite a multination offer of an incentives package if Tehran stops atomic activity." He says “the Islamic Republic will continue its nuclear enrichment program, reiterating the country's claim that it is for peaceful purposes.”

Who’s the “real” George Herbert Walker Bush?

I hate the content of this book, I hate the initial price of this book (RM45), and I hate George Bush, Sr (and George Bush, Jr). But many thanks, firstly to authors namely Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin and secondly to the Malaysia’s publisher Thinker’s Library.

Initially I don’t want to buy this book because of the price. But when I saw the bargain price of RM15, I never have a second thought. I bought this book at one of the book expos (I forgot what expo, though) with the price RM15 only!

I strongly recommended this book to those who want to know in depth on how this George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first President of the United States came to power. Full of conspiracy; walks like conspiracy, talks like conspiracy, and acts like conspiracy.

From the publisher

This is the groundbreaking classic exposé of the Bush family, cited by all that followed it, yet still unmatched. Exhaustively documented by intensive search of dozens of archives and months of interviews with government insiders, this biography digs up all the dirt - frightening, gory, hilarious - on the Bush dynasty:

How the Bushes made their fortune building up Hitler and the Nazi war machine - Iran-Contra - Zapata's Watergate burglars - The Reagan shooting - The "war hero" story - the secret government - "Eugenic" population reduction plans - Kissinger, China, and genocide in the Third World - Luring Iraq to attack Kuwait - the Bush Leveraged Buyout Mob, theft of a nation - Jupiter Island, Skull and Bones, and other power centers.

Essential reading as long as this Anglo-American oligarchy directs American politics, this 700- page blockbuster is a vivid X-ray of the presidential dynasty, and the private forces dominating both major political parties.

“Those who betray their benefactors are seldom highly regarded. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, traitors to benefactors and to the established authorities are consigned to the ninth circle of the Inferno, where their souls are suspended, like insects in amber, in the frozen River Cocytus. This is the Giudecca, where the three arch-traitors Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius are chewed for all eternity in the three mouths of Lucifer.

The crimes of Nixon were monstrous, especially in Vietnam and in the India-Pakistan war, but in these Bush had been an enthusiastic participant. Now Bush’s dagger, among others, had now found its target; Nixon was gone.

In the depths of his Inferno, Dante relates the story of Frate Alberigo to illustrate the belief that in cases of the most heinous treachery, the soul of the offender plunges at once into hell, leaving the body to live out its physical existence under the control of demon [Satan].

Perhaps the story of old Frate Alberigo will illuminate us as we follow the further career of George Bush (Sr).” (Webster Tarpley & Anton Chaitki, Sins of the Father: The Life & Crimes of George Bush, Sr).

Publisher: Progressive Press & Thinker’s Library
ISBN: 978-0930852924 & 967-69-0499-6 (Thinker’s Library’s version)

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Publisher Comments:

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America's "free market" policies have come to dominate the world- — through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq's civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country's vast oil reserves.... Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the "War on Terror" to Halliburton and Blackwater.... After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans's residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened.... These events are examples of "the shock doctrine": using the public's disorientation following massive collective shocks — wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don't succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism — the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock — did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, "shock and awe" warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas though our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement

To know about Hamas, why they exist and why Palestinians fight Israelis, this is the book you should read. The truth is still the truth, no matter what; just open your eyes and heart.

I feel really excited to get this book.

From publisher
The radical Islamist movement Hamas shocked the world when it won a landslide election victory in January 2006 in the Palestinian occupied territories.

One of the few journalists not to be surprised by this outcome was Zaki Chehab who has developed an international reputation as a fearless reporter and was one of the first to interview members the Iraqi resistance in May 2003. Fluent in Arabic, he is a Palestinian refugee who grew up in UN refugee camps and has unique access to and understanding of Hamas.

Like Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon, Chehab shows how Hamas built a formidable social base in Palestine through its welfare programs. He also explains why, in the face of the endless complexities, disappointments and delays brought about by the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord, Hamas's strategy of armed struggle and terrorism offers the Palestinian people a seductive, simple and deadly alternative.

Title: Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement
Author: Zaki Chehab

Asy-Syahid Sheikh Ahmad Yasin

A Review by Michael B. Farrell

On April 6, 1994, Yehia Ayyash, one of the more elusive members of the Islamic Resistance Movement known by its Arab acronym Hamas, left an indelible mark on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The man whom former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called "the Engineer" dispatched a Palestinian named Raed Zakarneh on what would be a historic mission. When Mr. Zakarneh blew his car up, killing himself and eight Israelis at a bus stop in the Israeli city of Afula, he became Hamas's first suicide bomber.

The attack was retribution for a massacre perpetrated by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, who threw a hand grenade into a crowded mosque, killing 29 Palestinians.

And so Hamas literally exploded onto the world stage. Today, Israel and the US consider it a terrorist organization with which they refuse to negotiate.

Yet neither they -- nor the rest of the world -- can afford to ignore Hamas, particularly since the group's most recent historic feat: seizing control of the Gaza Strip and routing out Fatah, the main faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

So how did this marginal group, inspired by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, grow from its shadowy beginnings in the densely populated slums of the Gaza Strip to first win a landslide victory in the January 2006 Palestinian election and now to hold complete control over all of Gaza?

Zaki Chehab's new book, Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement, goes a long way toward answering such questions. Chehab's book not only explains the methodical rise of Hamas, but also offers insights into the group's psyche that go beyond the stereotypes perpetuated by so much of today's news coverage.

Chehab is a veteran Arab journalist who has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a quarter century and is now the London bureau chief for Al Hayat.

But he is more than that. Chehab is also a Palestinian who was himself born in a refugee camp, a credential that has allowed him unprecedented access to any number of high-level sources.

Through interviews with Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin, the so-called "father" of Hamas, Chehab lays the groundwork for the group's evolution: "The first phase was to build institutions; charities and social committees which would open their doors to the young and old -- anyone who could play a role in resisting the occupier," explains Sheikh Yassin.

The second, he told Chehab, was to work on "strengthening the roots of the resistance within every household in the West Bank and Gaza."

From there, it became possible to build a military that evolved from rock throwing to rocket launching and finally to establish a dialogue between Hamas and its Arab and Islamic neighbors.

Hamas saw success on all fronts, as Chehab explains in interviews with other key Hamas members who have managed to survive (avoiding the fate of Ayyash, the Engineer, who the author says was assassinated by Israeli intelligence) to lead it today.

But Chehab doesn't stop with an examination of the group's leadership. He moves on to probe its rank and file and offers the reader a glimpse of the poverty and anger that turn ordinary men and women into militants.

He talks to the mother of a young martyr who urged her son to take up arms at an early age. So enmeshed in her family's daily life is the fight against Israel that on their wall hangs a framed piece of barbed wire torn from a Jewish settlement.

Chehab watched as two Hamas members caught the elderly, grieving father of a suicide bomber in their arms as he collapsed from grief. Within minutes, they had persuaded him that this was not a loss but an honor. Such views, Chehab makes clear, are not the ravings of an isolated few. The Islamic Resistance Movement, he argues, is not going away, or not going quietly. It has broad and growing support among Palestinians, deep backing within the region, and impressive resilience.

Inside Hamas could hardly be more timely, although, written before the seizure of Gaza, it runs the risk of being overtaken by events. But that doesn't alter the force of Chehab's conviction: Hamas must be part of any regional negotiations.

"Attacking and isolating Hamas, as has been done," he writes, "is merely making the movement more popular."

Michael B. Farrell is the Monitor's Middle East news editor.

Rogue State, A Guide to the World`s Only Superpower

Ever meet a hit man? If not, then consider living in his political equivalent: The United States. In Rogue State: A Guide to the World`s Only Superpower, find out how the U.S. sentences blasphemers to death--that is, people and governments blaspheming the "holy objectives of American foreign policy." William Blum supplies us with the facts about:

* Why terrorists keep picking on the United States; * The numerous foreign leaders whose assassinations were plotted by the U.S.; * How the U.S. supported Pol Pot but helped incarcerate Nelson Mandela; * The U.S. government`s extensive connection to torture;

* How the U.S. has been a haven for foreign terrorists and human rights violators; * The War Crimes Tribunal that will never be: How the U.S. squelched the charges of war crimes against its own and NATO`s leaders in 1999; * How the U.S. has perverted dozens of foreign elections; and much, much more.

With information such as this available in the public realm, Blum asks, how does the United States get away with it? A major reason, he concludes, is the world`s long-running love affair with the mystique of "America", the world`s adoration of what it believes to be the relentless devotion to the cause of freedom and human rights that is America.

In Rogue State, learn about decades of ubiquitous U.S. cruelty, kept -- remarkably -- from penetrating world consciousness or shocking world conscience. Though President Clinton calls America "the world`s greatest force for peace", William Blum shows that our Rogue State is really a marauding Western brute.