Introducing... Obama Watch

Peace be upon you,

Recently there has been a huge amounts of coverage on the election and now the the transition to power. i dont think there has ever been coverage of White house politics like this. Obama for good or bad will indeed be a figure of immense importance for a long time to come.

For Muslims in particular this is a strange and trying time. Many will look to Obama as a savior figure. Many others will look to Obama as a anti Christ figure. A few will patiently and wisely wait to form their opinions. Only God knows best what is in store for the future. In the mean time i think i will keep a much closer and discuss the events as the come to pass and join in on all this ruckus. Expect old news because like i said before we need to patiently and wisely wait to form our opinions. So I would like to take this opportunity to introduce another segment in my blog... Obama Watch.

~ Peace till next time...MoCo

Where in the world is ...Osama bin Laden

Peace be upon you,

Well i dont have a quote this week but I do have a suggestion.

Did anyone check Colombia? Apparently Osama is doing some policing and bring law and order to the streets of Bogot, Colombia. That's more then we can say for US troops in Afghanistan.

Links to the articles:
Osama look alike in Colombia

Afgans want Taliban Style Justice

Funny how one man's idea of justice can inspire two opposite reactions on opposite sides of the world. I'm telling you... bin Laden is the next Che. I think in a few years everyone is gonna be sporting his face on shirts and sodapop drinks.



This is one crazy world... things, ideas, and alliances change so quickly. Well...

~ Peace till next time… MoCo

QUOTE OF THE WEEK & Muslim Heritage

Peace be upon you,

It is time for (Da Dum Da Dum )...QUOTE OF THE WEEK... and a update on Muslim Heritage in America.

"I have faith in the American intellect, in the American intelligence, and in the American love of fair play, and will defy any intelligent man to understand Islam and not love it."

~~~ Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb

Webb was dubbed the "Yankee Mohammedan" by newspapers for his conversion to Islam and his open practice. He was born in 1846 and started one of the first Islamic Movements in America.

~ Peace till next time… MoCo

...neither the Mahdi nor the Dajjal.

Peace be upon you,

I saw this letter around the blogosphere quite a few times but I wasn't totally sure it was legitimate, but since it is circulating so much I think its safe to assume Ralph Nader really did author it. I think that this highlights some very interesting points which Muslims overlook in all this election commotion.

November 3, 2008

Open letter to Senator Barack Obama

Dear Senator Obama:

In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words “hope and change,” “change and hope” have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not “hope and change” but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.

Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?

To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity— not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.

You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an “undivided Jerusalem,” and opposed negotiations with Hamas— the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored “direct negotiations with Hamas.” Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote “Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state.”

During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League’s 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.

David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: “There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President.”

Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, “of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. …Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli’s use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli’s assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its ‘legitimate right to defend itself.’”

In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government’s assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on “the heart of a crowded refugee camp… with horrible bloodshed” in early 2008.

Israeli writer and peace advocate— Uri Avnery— described Obama’s appearance before AIPAC as one that “broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama “is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future— if and when he is elected president.,” he said, adding, “Of one thing I am certain: Obama’s declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people.”

A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.

Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled “Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama” (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled “Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque.” None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans— even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.

Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.

Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to “tumultuous applause,” following a showing of a film about the Carter Center’s post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!

But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the “middle class” but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the “poor” in America.

Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke “change” yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the “corporate supremacists.” It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics— opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)— and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.

Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. “Hope” some say springs eternal.” But not when “reality” consumes it daily.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

Before the election I had the blessed opportunity to spend sometime with Imam Suhaib Webb and when I asked him his thoughts he summed up this situation in a very concise way. He said "Barack Obama is neither the Mahdi nor the Dajjal." I think Muslims should consider that very carefully before condemning him or pinning all our hopes on him.

One thing i think i am certain of is that Obama isn't going to do anything for Muslims until his second term...that is if he get elected for a second term.

~ Peace till next time… MoCo

Exciting new possibilities...

Peace be upon you,

Many people know of Christopher Columbus and his accidental discovery of the New World and there had been some small theories of other explorers who had pre-dated him but for the most part these were seen as weak theories or small trips which really did not affect exploration or travel.

Several years ago there was a big commotion in the academic world. Leif Ericson was a common name and he was recognized as having been a explorer who might have reached present day Canada but the unearthing of Leif Ericson’s voyages and other archeological evidence has firmly established the face that Ecricson did in fact reach, explore, and even settle the New World before Columbus.

This has raised exciting new possibilities. If the Norse were able to explore as far west as present day Canada, then other societies, such as the Muslims might have been able to reach the New World as well. Islam would then be one of the first Old World religions to arrive in the New World and share a place alongside Christianity.



~ Peace till next time… MoCo

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Peace be upon you,

It is time for (Da Dum Da Dum )...QUOTE OF THE WEEK!!!

It is important for the one who memorizes the Quran that he should recognize his nights when poeople are asleep; his days when people are not fasting; his grief when people are content, his weeping when people laugh (in indifference); his silence when they talk and his humbleness when they are proud.

~~~ Abdullah Ibn-Masud


~ Peace till next time… MoCo

I Vote ...Green

Peace be upon you,

Hey guess what I have become a productive, contributing, edumacated citizen of these here United States of America. I voted today for the first time in my life thanks to my mother who drove with me to the polling station.

As the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, truly said, heaven does lie under the feet of you mother.

Also, I would have to give it up to Stephen Colbert and John Stewart. Their unbelievably hilarious coverage called Indecision 2008 really kept me alive through all of this mind numbing campaigning and mud slinging. Last but not least I would like to thank our bumbling commander in chief, George Bush. It was his utter stupidity and his unbelievable knack for messing up the simplest of issues which really spurred me to vote today.

I did vote for Obama for the Presidential election but for the rest of ballot I just checked off the green party candidate...except for one I think.

~ Peace till next time… MoCo