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Bush Revisits Mosque to Praise Islam
jannah
12/12/02 at 09:50:06

Bush Revisits Mosque to Praise Islam


By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 6, 2002; Page A23


President Bush pushed ahead yesterday with his administration's efforts to portray Islam in a favorable light, returning to the Islamic Center of Washington for a second visit to the mosque he toured in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Bush's speech at the Islamic Center, on Massachusetts Avenue near Rock Creek Park, was the 17th time since the terrorist attacks that the president has devoted a speech, or a passage of a major speech, to proclaiming the peaceful and humanitarian values of Islam. In doing so, Bush has defied the wishes of several religious and military conservatives who say he should regard the religion as hostile to the United States.

"Islam brings hope and comfort to more than a billion people worldwide," Bush said at the mosque, using wording similar to his earlier remarks on the religion. "Islam affirms God's justice and insists on man's moral responsibility. . . . Islam gave birth to a rich civilization of learning that has benefited mankind."

The White House has created a page on its Web site featuring the new postage stamp honoring the Muslim holiday of Eid and displaying a photograph of Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill at an Iftaar dinner in Islamabad, Pakistan. The page also noted Iftaar dinners, which celebrate the Ramadan holiday, attended by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and Bush himself. Last month, the White House issued a compilation of Bush quotations titled "In the President's Words: Respecting Islam."

The purpose of the regular references to Islam as a benign faith is to prevent discrimination against American Muslims and to demonstrate to Muslim countries, such as Pakistan and Indonesia, that the United States is hostile to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government but not to Muslims generally.

"Millions of our fellow Americans practice the Muslim faith," Bush said at yesterday's celebration of Eid, the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. "They lead lives of honesty and justice and compassion."

Bush's efforts continued to rankle some conservatives. The conservative Free Congress Foundation yesterday released an article by one of its scholars, William S. Lind, mockingly comparing Bush's efforts to a celebration of the Japanese religion of Shinto after the Pearl Harbor attacks.

American Muslim groups have urged Bush to speak out more forcefully against conservatives who have maligned Islam as an enemy of the United States. Even these groups, however, have been surprised by the number of opportunities Bush has taken to deliver his "Islam is peace" message, as Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations described it recently. "Even I get a little tired of that," Hooper said.


Re: Bush Revisits Mosque to Praise Islam
yunus
12/19/02 at 21:43:34
may God forgive me for saying this but i hope Bush and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld die fromt he smallpox vaccine they are evil genocidal terroroists
Re: Bush Revisits Mosque to Praise Islam
jannah
12/19/02 at 21:51:05
whoa bro...there's a lot of evil people through all walks of life...  i'm so glad we believe in the afterlife  inshaAllah they will get what they deserve. ever wonder about those verses that are very strong and describe the various punishments in the Hellfire, unbelievably they're sometimes a comfort through frustration.
Thank You, Mr Bush
WhatDFish
12/24/02 at 09:38:10
Thank You, Mr Bush
by
Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal


The News International, December 6, 2002

Quantum Note

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For your Eid greetings, we are indeed greatly indebted. And thank you for telling us, one more time, that your new war is not against Islam and Muslims. It was time that you reminded us that we should not take the B-52 bombers showering bombs on our cities so personally. Indeed, the six Iraqis who died on the first day of December are not to be counted among the dead; they were illegal combatants, working in an oil factory.

As Muslims, we are grateful to you for all the food packages that were sent down from the Afghan skies during the last year. Had we been the children of Israel, it would have reminded us of our great past when Manna and Salva was sent down by God. Let me assure you, Mr President, American peanut butter tastes so good that our Afghan children became so keen to pick up the food packages that they could not even distinguish between the food packages and thousands of canister bombs that your B-52 bombers left behind in their wasteland. But, of course, it was their bad luck; we will just add them to the list of collateral damage. That way, we will not have to go through the tedious ritual of calculating the number of dead.

I am sorry to hear that things are not going well back home. Some unpatriotic Americans have started to ask questions about your war of terror, excuse me, war on terror. They ask for results for the 40 billion dollars you so graciously and hurriedly sanctioned for the great war. That little audio cassette that recently surfaced at the Al-Jazeera did not help much, I suppose. Although you have the Al-Jazeera’s Kabul correspondent firmly locked up in a cage at camp X-ray (and thank God, the international union of journalists has not made a peep about him), this little island of a network keeps coming up with trouble after trouble.

You were, however, more successful with Frau Herta Däubler-Gmelin, the German Justice Minister who so rudely compared your new war policies to that of Adolf Hitler; thank goodness, she was quickly sacked by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for poisoning the relations. I must also congratulate you on quickly getting rid of Mme. Francoise Ducros, the Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s Director of Communications, who so ungratefully called you a moron despite all the soft lumber that American companies so cheaply buy from Canada in order to help their economy.

Mr President, it is heartening to know that the new Department of Homeland Security is finally off to a grand start. With an operational budget of $37.5 billion and nearly 170,000 federal employees, it should keep the homeland secure. Just let no American walk out of your great country without the protection of piloteless drones for streets of the world have become very dangerous for them.

I hope that with your ambassador in London so ardently standing behind you in your war after war, it should not be difficult to soon control all the unruly streets. Whatever happened the other day in Amman should never be allowed to happen again. I think it would not be a bad idea to send a little congratulatory note to your distant relative in Amman for taking care of the matter so promptly. I hear the little town of Mann is also grateful to you for bringing all the world attention to this tribal region. The price those little rabbles had to pay was not much, I suppose, compared to what the Afghans have paid. It was merely a double digit number that they lost. But we will not call it war against Muslims; after all, it was their own king whose army was doing the job.

Mr President, in your Eid greetings, you have rightly told us that the new year is full of promises. We look forward to the new ventures. Afghanistan is indeed becoming a little too dull and although great news is in store regarding Iraq, Hans Blix and his team of inspectors are taking too long. Please hurry up or else the current rating will start to go down and you know very well how difficult it is to whip up the hysteria once it has subsided.

You know that anthrax cannot be used again to create fear. (By the way, the little leak leading to the US military was plugged very well and I sincerely hope that all patriotic Americans will remember never to ask any questions about anthrax.) So, what are we going to do next time? How would you generate new waves of fear? I suppose those little Napoleons in thousands of homeland security offices would come up with something. Perhaps, you should ask them to start cooking something like the danger of a bio-engineered mosquito bringing a deadly virus. That would be something!

It is my sincere hope, Mr President, that in the new year, you will not be so lenient with men who keep bothering you with their silly questions about Afghanistan. I was shocked to read a report by one Robert Fisk who sketched a graphic picture of little children being blown up in the deserts of Khost. He also had the nerve to draw world attention to the endless queue of mutilated civilians sitting outside the hospital in Herat, hoping to get an artificial leg. Likewise, people who keep mentioning international laws, protocols and agreements should be stopped from reminding the world that in your war of terror (excuse my slip again, Mr President), you have not even spared ambassadors. No one has the right to remind the world that Ambassador Mullah Zaeef is still locked up in a cage in Camp X-ray.

I am glad to know that early in 2003, Germans will take charge of the Afghan ordeal. It would be their boys who would risk their lives for this grand show which, we all know, will only last for as long as money keeps coming. But I am afraid, Afghans are rather notorious for their tenacity. There is little hope that what the Soviet Union could not achieve with 140,000 men, we can achieve without large-scale disasters soon erupting all over this unruly land. Those who keep saying that the Afghan adventure is headed for disaster should all be locked up with the “illegal combatants”. (By the way, that was an excellent invention for which its inventor should be amply rewarded.)

That reminds me to say that events like the appearance of those four pictures of C-130 planes carrying their human cargo to Camp X-ray should not be allowed to happen again. They do bring the specter of war crimes being launched in some court, somewhere in the world although you have rightly declined to sign the international charter which would put the American soldiers in risk. But the images of those shackled men, which recently flashed on millions of computer screens around the world, was not nice, to say the least.

I am also sad to know that some Edward Saids are still around. They keep talking about an impossible linkage: the suffering of Palestinians, so carefully crafted by a 2.1 billion dollar annual aid to Israel and numerous supplements. They have maps, numbers and pictures which they keep showing to the world. The appearance of a new great wall here, barbed fences there, burned olive orchards, destroyed homes, pieces of dead bodies scattered on streets, made-in-America gunships and helicopters bombing the refugee camps. Of course, your war is not against Muslims and certainly there is no link between the suffering of Palestinians and the catastrophes Americans continue to experience abroad. No, the world should accept the verdict of your “man oftr>
Re: Fasting while pregnant
NinthMuharram
09/23/04 at 22:05:53
[slm]

I have decided not to fast for this coming ramadhan.

I have mentioned to my co-workers that I won't be fasting and they will be seeing me eating at my cubicle. Most of them are non-Muslims anyways and they usually refrain from eating in front of the muslims when it is ramadhan.

I am much more worried abt my husband who will be doing his first ramadhan AND in a hot and humid country. He insisted he wanted to complete 30 days fulll day (optimistic ) and I kept telling the man to take baby steps (pessimistic).

Wasalam.
09/23/04 at 22:09:20
NinthMuharram
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Re: Fasting while pregnant
umm_ibby