http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/us/pol...wanted=all

All Her Life, Nikki Haley Was the Different One

By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBBIE BROWN

Published: June 13, 2010



BAMBERG, S.C. — Nikki Haley, the favorite to become the first governor of South Carolina who is neither white nor male, has always challenged established norms with her own brand of moxie.



South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley won 49 percent of the vote in the primary.



As a girl, her parents — the first Indian immigrants this small, working-class town had ever seen — entered Nikki and her sister in the Little Miss Bamberg pageant. The judges of the contest, one that crowned one black queen and one white queen, were so flummoxed that they simply disqualified Nikki and her sister, Simran — but not before Nikki, about 5, sang “This Land Is Your Land.”



Ms. Haley, 38, upended things again last week after a sharp-elbowed primary that included allegations of marital infidelity and pitted her against the lieutenant governor, the attorney general and a congressman. Ms. Haley, a state legislator, received 49 percent of the vote, but faces a June 22 runoff with Representative Gresham Barrett, whom she beat by more than 25 points Tuesday. And this from a campaign that was so underfinanced that it had to sell yard signs at $5 apiece, Ms. Haley said.



Now, she finds herself one of the brightest rising stars in the Republican Party, a Tea Party favorite, a Sarah Palin endorsee and the subject of national attention.



“I love that people think it’s a good story, but I don’t understand how it’s different,” she said in an interview Friday, in a voice with a faint watermark of Southern drawl. “I feel like I’m just an accountant and businessperson who wants to be a part of state government.”



Ms. Haley — born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa and always called Nikki, which means “little one,” by her family — said that growing up in Bamberg was at times tough. Her father wears a turban and, though male Sikhs are not supposed to cut their hair, her brothers’ was trimmed after teasing at school grew vicious. “It’s survival mode,” she said. “You learn to try and show people how you’re more alike than you are different.”



But her political rise has raised questions about her difference, and she has become more careful about how she presents the religious aspect, in particular, of her life.



In 2004, for instance, she was widely hailed, particularly in news outlets like The Hindustan Times and sikhchic.com, as the first Sikh elected to the South Carolina Legislature and the first Republican Indian-American elected to any state legislature.



“I was born and raised with the Sikh faith, my husband and I were married in the Methodist Church, our children” — Nalin, 8, and Rena, 12 — “have been baptized in the Methodist Church, and currently we attend both,” she said.



She did not mention that she and her husband, Michael Haley, wed in two ceremonies, one Sikh and the other at St. Andrew’s by-the-Sea, a Methodist church in Hilton Head, where Mr. Haley’s parents live.



Back then, though, Ms. Haley seemed comfortable publicly embracing both religions. Nowadays, she talks of having “converted to Christianity” before her wedding in 1996, when she was baptized at St. Andrew’s. She has also changed the wording on her Web site under the heading, “Question: Is Nikki a Christian?” from an answer that references “Almighty God” to one that references “Christ.”



“I still find these things to be very private,” she said about the change. “However, when people question you, you do have to answer to them.”



Tim Pearson, her campaign manager, said that the campaign grew more specific in response to questions. “We got a lot of e-mails and whatnot from people saying, ‘She’s talking about God, but what God?’ ” he said.



Even her name became an issue in 2004, when a political opponent, a 30-year incumbent who was at the time the longest serving state legislator, pointed out that she was registered to vote as Nimrata Randhawa and not Nikki Haley. (Campaign literature and e-mail messages calling her a Buddhist and a Muslim also circulated, she recalled.) But such nicknames are not unusual: one of Ms. Haley’s inspirations and a fellow Indian-American politician, Gov. Piyush Jindal of Louisiana, is better known as Bobby.



From early on, Ms. Haley was involved in her family’s clothing business — Exotica International, which sells gowns, suits and jewelry — taking over the bookkeeping at age 13.



Her father, Ajit Randhawa, was a biology professor at Voorhees College in nearby Denmark, S.C.; her mother, Raj, started Exotica as a gift shop.



Before she ran for office, Ms. Haley got an accounting degree at Clemson University, where she met Mr. Haley. She worked for FCR, a waste management and recycling company, and then returned to Exotica as chief financial officer and helped the company grow into a multimillion-dollar business.

[url="http://bastiat.net/en/cercle/meetings/Understanding_Islam.htm"]Understanding Islam[/url]

Quote:Account of the talk given by Jean-Jacques Walter on 16th February 2008



One of the rules of Judeo-Christian civilisation is that the law is superior to power. The most ancient demonstration of this is when David seduced Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. When David learnt that Bathsheba was pregnant, he didn't know how to explain it to Uriah, and had the latter killed so as not to have to answer for it. David was punished by God, because king though he was, he had no right to kill his neighbour to take his wife : the law is above the king. In the Old Testament, this story is presented as exemplary, but, in fact, it took 3000 years for that principle to become integrated into Christian societies. Only two centuries ago, there was a legal principle in France, "Rex a legibus solutus est", in other words, he who lays down the law is above the law. I remember a discussion I had ten years ago with a member of the Council of State. He said to me, "Yes, of course, the State is subject to the law like anyone else, but it happens to be one step above". That is exactly what Orwell remarked : "All men are equal, but some are more equal than others".



It took two thousand years for the principle of equality to be adopted by society as a whole.



When one analyses societies that have been shaped by an ideology, it is important to look closely at the ideology, because that is what enforces itself in the end, and eventually changes society. This holds good for Islam. What matters is its ideology and not the way in which it is embodied in different countries. The wars between France and Islam are an example. We always speak of Poitiers : "the Muslims were defeated at Poitiers and they left". We are more or less consciously comparing it to other battles, for instance the battle of Vouillé, in 507 : Clovis defeated the Visigoths and Aquitaine became French. That is not at all what happened with Islam.



The Muslims entered what was then France in 714. They seized Narbonne, which became their base for the next 40 years, and carried out methodical raids. They ravaged the Languedoc region from 714 to 725, destroyed Nîmes in 725 and devastated the right bank of the Rhone as far north as Sens.



In 721, a Muslim army of 100,000 soldiers laid siege to Toulouse, defended by Eudes, the duke of Aquitaine. Charles Martel sent troops to help Eudes. After six months' siege, the latter made a sally and crushed the Muslim army, which retreated in disarray to Spain and lost 80,000 soldiers in the campaign. Little is said of the battle of Toulouse because Eudes was a Merovingian. The Capetians were in the process of becoming kings of France and didn't fancy recognizing a Merovingian victory.



The Muslims concluded that it was dangerous to attack France from the eastern end of the Pyrenees, and they conducted their fresh attacks from the western end of the chain. 15,000 Muslim horsemen took and destroyed Bordeaux, then the Loire region, laid siege to Poitiers, and were finally stopped by Charles Martel and Eudes twenty kilometres north of Poitiers in 732. The surviving Muslims broke up into small bands and continued to ravage Aquitaine. Fresh soldiers would join them from time to time to take part in the looting. Those bands were eventually eradicated only in 808, by Charlemagne.



The ravages in the east went on until, in 737, Charles Martel went south with a powerful army, successively regained possession of Avignon, Nîmes, Maguelone, Agde, Béziers, and laid siege to Narbonne. A Saxon attack on the north of France compelled Charles Martel to leave the region. Eventually, in 759, Pépin le Bref regained possession of Narbonne and crushed the invaders definitively.



The latter broke up into small bands, as they had done in the west, and continued to devastate the country, notably by deporting the men to turn them into castrated slaves, and the women to introduce them into North African harems, where they were used to give birth to Muslims. The bastion of these bands was at Fraxinetum, the present-day La Garde-Freinet. An area of about 10,000 square kilometres, in the Maures massif, was totally depopulated.



In 972, the Muslim bands captured Mayeul, the Abbot of Cluny, on the road to Mount Geneva. The event created an immense stir. Guillaume II, count of Provence, spent 9 years conducting a sort of electoral campaign in order to motivate the inhabitants of Provence, then, from 983 onwards, methodically hunted down all the Muslim bands, small or large. In 990, the last of them were destroyed. They had devastated France for two centuries.



Muslim pressure did not cease for all that. It was exerted over the following 250 years by raids carried out from the sea. The men who were captured were taken to castration camps in Corsica, then deported to the forced labour prisons of Dâr al Islam, and the women of nubile age to the harems. The Muslim pirates' lairs were in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, on the coasts of Spain and of North Africa. Toulon was completely destroyed in 1178 and 1197, the population massacred or deported, the town left deserted.



Finally, the Muslims having been driven from Corsica, Sicily, Sardinia, from southern Italy and northern Spain, the attacks on French soil ceased but they continued at sea. It was not until 1830, that France, exasperated by the exactions, made up its mind to go to Algeria in order to definitively destroy the last bastions of the Muslim pirates



What is striking is that between the years 714, the first incursion, and 1830, the final crushing of the Barbary pirates, there elapsed over a millennium. Now no political organisation lasts for a thousand years. How then was that endless war kept going for so long?



The active principle of the war was the same as that of the war waged by the Spaniards on their own soil, and which also lasted over one thousand years : ideology. Only an ideology is lasting enough to give rise, century after century, to that sort of inexpiable war. That is why, if you wish to understand Islam, you must study its ideology and not conduct an almost ethnological study of the different varieties of Islam. I repeat : its ideology; because, for Muslim scholars, Islam is Dîn, Dunya, Daoula, i.e. religion, society, state. Khomeiny used to say that 90% of Islamic rules are to do with civil society, and that, in an Islamic library, 90% of the books deal with society and the state, and only 10% with private morals and man's relationship with God. The problem with Islam is not religion, it is the civil part of the ideology.



Islam is founded on the same structure as political totalitarian machines. The most well known are the total socialisms of the 20th century, but if we delve deep into history, the Akkad dynasties, ancient China, the Incas etc. were totalitarian machines that have a certain number of elements in common with Islam. To show up these elements, one only has to compare the main features of total socialisms with those of Islam.



Islam, like soviet socialism, is founded on a dual basis : on the one hand the ideological foundation, and on the other the imposition of that ideology through armed force. The combination of the two is characteristic. The earliest person to speak of this was Sima Qian, one of the greatest intellectuals in China, a historian, who was also prime minister. As an intellectual and as prime minister, he was perfectly acquainted with a system based both on ideology and on violence. In his letter to Jen An, which dates back to 91 B.C., he explains that, in such a system, there can be only two solutions :



* physical death : you oppose the system and in that case you are killed

* spiritual death : you pretend to believe in the ideology, and in that case you wear a mask.



But "the mask sticks to your face", as Sima Qian puts it. The mask becomes your face and you become what you didn't want to be. It may take a few years or a few generations, but it always happens.



Thus, according to Sima Qian, in a system founded both on force and on ideology, one can choose only between physical death and spiritual death.



That is precisely the structure of Islam, founded both on ideology and on the use of armed force. I have already spoken of violence towards the exterior. One must add to that the interior violence that is exerted on the 'dhimmis'. The term 'dhimmis' refers to peoples conquered by the Muslim armies, who lose all their political rights and the greater part of their civil rights, and who become foreigners in their own country. They are driven to extinction by a combination of methods.



Throughout antiquity, and right up until the second half of the 19th century, there were fluctuations in population due either to famines, or to epidemics, or to wars. After each decline, the population would increase again until it reached its equilibrium, that is, the maximum number of people who could live on the land considering the agricultural techniques available. The Muslims built new towns, Oran, Cordoba, Cairo, etc. while slaughtering or deporting the local populations, and peopling the towns with Arabs either from the Hedjaz region or from Syria. At first, these immigrants were few in number. In North Africa there were 5 million Berbers. About 200,000 Arab-Muslims were brought in and established in areas that had been depopulated to that end. The immigrant population grew to the maximum number tolerated by the agricultural production of the occupied areas, they then cut up the remaining land into strips that were depopulated one by one and given over to the expansion of the Arab-Muslims. Each successive strip was small enough not to stir up a general revolt, but sufficient for the Arab-Muslims never to reach their demographic equilibrium, and to be able to continue their growth.



Alongside localized massacres in order to invade new areas, a fall in the birth rate was deliberately brought about among non-Muslims. The latter, the 'dhimmis', had to wear a round yellow badge on dark clothes. They could use only donkeys, lowly mounts, camels and horses, noble mounts, being reserved for Muslims. Donkeys could only be mounted with a pack and not a saddle, in the country and not in town. Dhimmis' houses had to be smaller in size than those of Muslims. Many other provisions of a similar nature destroyed the dignity of dhimmis and lessened their self-confidence, whence a drop in their birth rate and their progressive extinction.



The fall in the birth rate, massacres and conversions under coercion were the means which, in invaded countries, gradually brought about what Bat Ye'or calls a demographic reversal. There were 200,000 Muslims to 5 million Berbers at the start of the Muslim invasion. After 8 wars, and three centuries of the above methods being applied, there were 1% Berbers left in Tunisia, 10% in Algeria, where they were driven into Kabylia, about 35 to 40% in Morocco, where they were driven into the Atlas and Riff regions, each time infertile mountainous lands.



It is a general phenomenon. Thus the Turkish population, initially 100% Christian, had fallen to 30% Christian by 1900, and is 0.2% Christian today.



The methods referred to above compel the inhabitants of invaded countries either to become Muslims or to disappear. In addition, within the Muslim populations themselves, the ideology imposes a certain type of society.



The first Islamic principle is the primacy of the collectivity, or 'Ouma'. In that word, the radical 'oum' means the mother and 'ouma' means that Muslims should be to Islam as children are to their mother. The primacy of the collectivity is the opposite of what goes on in our present-day societies. Our view is that society is at the service of each person to help him or her to develop. The collectivist view is that each person is at the service of the collectivity to establish its power. That is one of the elements common to total socialism and Islam.



The second principle is the foundation of morals. A Russian dissident said : what is morally right is what those in power declare to be right at present (it may change tomorrow, and morals will change tomorrow). Islam means "submission" and Muslim "a submissive person". Many Muslim intellectuals will tell you that it is only a question of submission to God. But if you read the Koran, you will see that it says twenty or so times "obey God, obey the prophet" and once "obey the prophet" (without adding God). But there is no verse that says only "obey God". Again it says "obey God, obey his prophet, and those in authority", that is to say the caliph and his representatives. The caliph is Allah's deputy, one must obey him, and his representatives, as one obeys God. Submission is the basis of Muslim morals and it is also an element common to all totalitarian systems.



Yet another principle is the combat against anything that develops the ego. One of the first factors that develop the ego is affectivity. You are aware of some of the rules governing the statute of Muslim women, in particular polygamy. A man may have four wives, but a woman may not have four husbands. That is not all. A man may have as many concubines as he wants, as long as they are not the wives of another Muslim. If a woman has a lover, no matter whether he is a Muslim or not, she will be stoned to death. In a court of law, it takes two women to have the same weight as one man. When it comes to inheritance, a woman has only a half share. A husband may repudiate his wife but a wife may not repudiate her husband.



The Muslim ideology is founded on the Koran, and on the hadiths, the words or acts of Mohammed. There are a million and a half of them. It would have taken him 600 years to utter them. Everybody knows, including Muslims, that most of the hadiths are apocryphal. There are, however, six compilations, containing 20,000 hadiths in all, that are held to be assuredly authentic. Among those books there is one, compiled by the scholar Bukhari, that is considered to be particularly sure. The Koran and the compilation by Bukhari are the only two books on which a Muslim can lay his hand to take an oath.



In the above compilation, Mohammed explains : "You know that women can give only a semi-testimony in a court of law, well, that is because of the inferiority of their intelligence". He says that he had a vision of Hell. There were principally women there. He also says that there have been perfect men in history, but no perfect women. Or again, taking up the Bible story in which Eve is supposed to have been created from one of Adam's ribs, "woman was made from a rib, she is bent like a rib; if you try to straighten her, you will break her, so let her remain crooked and take your pleasure from her as from a crooked thing". The conclusion is the Sunnite definition of marriage : "marriage is the contract by which one acquires a woman's genital organs with the intention of taking pleasure from them".



In such an ideology, it is difficult to respect a woman and to build a relationship of marital love. It may happen from time to time, because men are not always completely subject to ideology, but there is massive social pressure to prevent it. The destruction of affectivity and respect in the relationship between husband and wife is destructive of the ego, both for the man and for the woman.



In total socialisms, the destruction of affectivity was achieved through the encouragement of denunciation. Anybody could inform against anybody. You could trust neither your spouse, nor your parents, nor your children, nor your friends. Soviet socialists had made a hero of Pavel Morozof, a boy of 14 who had denounced his father for protecting kulaks who had been condemned to death. The father died in the Gulag. Even today, in Moscow, the building where the Komsomols hold their meetings is called Morozof palace. These mutual denunciations give rise to a system that destroys all mutual trust, which leads to the death of affectivity.



The combat against affectivity was complemented, in the early years of soviet socialism, by an attack on marriage – which did not last very long, but which was extremely violent. In the flats built during the twenties, there was no kitchen so that people would be forced to have their meals in common. In fact, they preferred to use Primus stoves so that they could have their meals as a family all the same.



Islam destroys affectivity by humiliating women, total socialisms do it by encouraging denunciation and hampering married life; the means are a little different, but the result is the same.



Another means of destroying the ego is the combat against intelligence. The way in which the contradictions in the Koran are dealt with shows the methods at work in Islam. For example, a surah that Muslims are always quoting (verse 257 of surah 2) : "No constraint in religion" is in contradiction with another verse, known as the verse of the sword : "Massacre all heretics". Mohammed had been asked how it was that two surahs that had come from Allah could contradict each other. The answer is in surah 2, verse 100, and in surah 16, verses 104 and 105, which say that Allah is the master of the Koran; he does as he pleases with it. When he replaces one verse by another, the newer one is better. And those who consider Mohammed to be a falsifier will go to Hell. The Koran is like a packet of circulars, the most recent of which cancels and replaces the previous ones on the same subject. Thereby, all the moderate verses are cancelled by the violent ones, which came later. In that case, the contradiction is settled, through a process whose validity may be questioned, but in other cases the contradiction is deliberately maintained.



A certain number of examples are given by the vice-chancellor of Al Azhar university in Cairo, the largest Muslim university. There are taxes levied on the rich to provide money for the poor, and to conduct wars of conquest. Wealth is determined according to the number of animals. If you own five camels or more, you have to pay tax. But you don't pay any for herds of horses, even if they comprise several thousand animals.



When a woman has her period, she has the right to fast, but not to pray. Yet prayer is more important than fasting.



When a thief commits a petty theft, he has his hand cut off, because it was the instrument of his fault, but they do not punish a rapist or an adulterer by cutting off you-know-what.



There is a whole series of contradictions of this kind. The vice-chancellor of Al Azhar explains that this is deliberate. It is to show that Allah is not bound by logic. Nor is he bound by morals. If he had said that one should lie, then lying would be good.



Tabari, one of the greatest exegetes of the Koran, explains that anyone who approaches the Koran with his or her intelligence, and who is in the right, is nevertheless at fault : no one has the right to be right.



Islam rejects novelty, which it calls 'bida'. Characteristically, the word means both what is new, and the moral fault consisting in doing or thinking something new. This outlook renders progress impossible, especially in economy, with the result that most Muslim countries experience great poverty. 57 States belong to the Conference of Islamic States. Their standard of living is 22 times lower than in Europe. Of these 57 States, 8 are oil-producing and 3 are only partially Muslim : Turkey, which has been trying to be a secular country for 80 years, Lebanon, where the population is 45% Christian, and Malaysia, where 28% of the population is Chinese and 7% Indian. Those three countries are six times richer than the others. If you exclude the oil-producing States and the partially Muslim States, the rest, that is, nearly one thousand million people, have a standard of living 35 times lower than that of Europeans. At such a degree it really means something. The fundamental reason is the totalitarian nature of Islam, destructive of the ego.



Countries under total socialism have experienced the same poverty, for the same reason : damaged egos can no longer be creative, whether in economics, in the intellectual or artistic sphere, or in any field whatsoever.



I have had discussions with many Muslims and have explained to them that one cannot be a Muslim and a Frenchman at the same time. If you are a Muslim, you say that woman is inferior, if you are French, you say she is equal. I have received the same answer umpteen times : according to one hadith, Paradise is under the feet of mothers, so women have a particular dignity which compensates their inferiority. I would retort that this point of view reduces women to their reproductive function. Furthermore, in that case, maiden girls, sterile women or women married to sterile men, have no dignity.



The above argument made no impact. On the other hand, another would leave Muslim women and girls without an answer and very troubled : the French conception of relationships between men and women is equality, the Islamic conception is female inferiority compensated by a special dignity. The woman who chooses equality is French, she who chooses compensated inferiority is not, even if compensated inferiority suits her personally.



In fact, 95% of those with whom I have debated believe themselves to be Muslim men or women, but they are not. In all important matters they have made their choice, and their choice is to be French and not Muslim. When you ask a girl, even wearing a veil to assert her identity, "Do you fancy having 3 co-wives?", she will answer passionately, "Oh! Out of the question!"



"Do you fancy your husband bringing concubines home?"



"Out of the question!"



"Do you consider it normal that, as the Koran says, if your husband suspects you of thinking of disobeying, he has the right to beat you?"



"Out of the question!"



In France, you have the right to think what you like, and to change your convictions if you feel like it. In Islam (surah 4, verse 91), a person who ceases to be a Muslim must be put to death. The first time I said that in a talk, a Muslim got up and shouted, "That's not true!" Now I take a copy of the Koran to talks, and show people the verse. And they say to me, "Well, we don't accept that".



"So you're not Muslims, you're French!"



"Eh, no, I am a Muslim, but I take some and leave some".



"If you say that in Egypt, or elsewhere in Dâr al Islam, at best you'll go to prison, at worst you'll be killed by your neighbour. You can choose to reject part of the Koran because you live in France, where you have French and not Muslim rights. Since you make use of those rights, you have chosen to be French, you are not a Muslim any more".



Each time you take a point on which the opposition between the French and Muslim views is irreducible, you find that all the women and most of the men are in fact French and not Muslim.



I do not believe Islam can last very long in the modern world. I am told it has lasted 14 centuries, and that it will continue. In 1980 people also said, "Communism has lasted 70 years, it will go on". Then in 1989, Mitterand, who was an excellent seismograph of public opinion, said, 5 weeks before the fall of the Berlin wall, "The reunification of Germany is neither for this generation nor for this century". He had seen nothing coming, despite his political sensibility, because the violence of the repression in countries under total socialism dissimulated the loss in conviction of their inhabitants. Islam exerts the same repression against dissident opinions, which gives rise to the same dissimulation, but that does not prevent minds from secretly evolving.



As I was able to see in Lebanon and in Kabylia, there are three factors on which the modern world is radically opposed to the Muslim world, and those three factors will eventually bring about its downfall :



* Freedom. Freedom to defend one's opinion, to change one's mind. Muslims are demanding it more and more. As they are in danger every time they demand it in a Muslim country, they do not do so very often, but the yearning is stronger and stronger.



* Rationality. The Koran, according to Muslims, was written by Allah before the founding of the world, in Arabic because Allah spoke Arabic with the angels. Now Arabic has only existed for 2,000 years while the creation of the world goes back 14 billion years. Confronted with that sort of improbability, a Muslim, even moderately cultivated, will answer, "We can't believe that!"



* Affectivity. Among the Kabyles, there are many conversions : about 5,000 per year. They are converted by the American Baptists. I asked several converts, "Why did you become Christian?". The answer wasn't what I expected at all. Freedom, that was secondary. Rationality hardly bothered them for they were not great intellectuals. The decisive factor for them was affectivity. The Baptists organise prayer meetings, Muslims come along to have a look, and they are taken by the affectivity that reigns in those meetings, between men, between women, between men and women. From what they say, at Muslim gatherings there is comradeship, solidarity, but not the sort of affective warmth they find amongst Christians.



Affectivity is one of the foundations of the Western World. Today 50% of marriages break up. One has the impression that the institution is falling apart. It is exactly the opposite. For centuries marriage was based on the desire to have descendants and on social convenience. When there was affection or love between the spouses, it was all the better. Today, the ideal is marital love. If love is not there, the couple separates. That is radically incompatible with Islam. The idea of marriage founded on personal choice and on marital love is incompatible with the woman's place in Islam. That is the strongest pressure at work on Islam.



In Lebanon and in Kabylia at least, Islam finds itself in the position in which communism found itself in 1970. I'm going to tell you an anecdote. My wife, the founder, director and chief editor of a music magazine, had been invited to Poland along with 200 French journalists. During a grand cocktail party, one of the ministers present told her, in quite good French, that she was an abominable capitalist and that she ought to be in the Gulag. "Besides, you'll be there before long because the Soviet army can reach Brest in ten days". Two minutes later another minister said to her, "Don't think Poles are stupid. My colleague is the only communist amongst us. All the others are ministers because it's pleasanter to be a minister than something else, but none of them believes in communism. We know perfectly well that communism doesn't work " I was very surprised that communist ministers should speak so freely to journalists and I calculated that the system was ripe for collapse. It was holding out because of the administrative structures whose interest was to make the system last, but no one believed in it any more.



Islam today is in a similar position. Its internal mental structure is caving in. At any rate in Kabylia and in Lebanon. And I don't think the political organisation can survive the downfall of its ideology for very long.



Today, Islam versus the Western World is like the fable of the clay pot against the iron pot, it has met more than its match : let us look at what those who are neither Muslims nor from the West are doing, that is to say the Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese etc. I remember going to a concert about ten years ago, in Berlin. The pianist was Japanese and wore a black western-style dress. The conductor was Chinese and wore "tails". I have never, anywhere on earth, seen a Chinese, Japanese or Indian person don a turban and a jellabah and intone an Islamic chant. Nowadays, if you go to any country that is neither Islamic nor of the West and look at the architecture in the towns, at the town planning, at the methods applied in economy, at science, at technology and even at marriage, everything comes from the West. When Eugénie de Montijo married Napoleon III, she wore a white dress. All the Parisian girls copied her, French girls copied the Parisians, European girls copied the French. Now the whole world gets married in a white dress.



As a whole, countries that are neither Islamic nor of the West, that is over 4 billion inhabitants, have adopted Western ways. Islam has but a very weak power of conversion : it converts about one million people a year, essentially in black Africa, whereas the different variants of Christendom convert 10 million every year, essentially in the southern hemisphere. When it comes to freedom, rationality, and especially affectivity, Islam has no capacity of assimilation into the modern world. Moreover, Islam has been frozen for over a thousand years, whereas, at the instance of the West, the world today is experiencing the most rapid evolution in its history.



Islam has another weakness that is even more deadly : the way in which it was developed is beginning to become known. People commonly believe that the history of the development of Islam and Mohammed's biography are quite well known. That is not the case at all.



In the region where Islam developed, all the original documents, covering over two centuries, have disappeared. The biography of Mohammed was written 220 years after his death, under the orders of a caliph. The hadiths were written down between 250 and 300 years after the death of Mohammed. The Koran was replaced several times, notably by general Hajjâj, in 692, sixty years after the death of Mohammed, with the destruction of previous copies.



Islam in its early years extended over the Middle East, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, the most civilised region in the world at the time. It had libraries, scribes' workshops, universities. It is absolutely unnatural that all the original documents should have disappeared. That can only be explained by a deliberate and methodical intervention by the political authorities.



A comparison with France at the same period is significant. At that time there was no library, nor university, nor scribes' workshop, nor bookshop in France. Yet those holding political power in France, Clothaire II and Dagobert I, left their traces in many a written document, and it is even more the case with their immediate successors, Pépin de Heristal, Charles Martel, Pépin le Bref, Charlemagne. The prominent religious figures were bishops, Saint Ouen of Rouen, Saint Omer of Thérouane, Saint Césaire of Arles, Sidouane Apollinaire of Clermont, Saint Grégoire of Tours, Saint Léger of Autun, Saint Eloi of Noyon, etc…They are well known.



Mohammed was both a political and religious figure. Why did no original document about him remain, unless it was to cover up a story that was very different from that told by Muslim scholars? As a famous specialist on Islam, Harald Motzki, says, either one makes a critical study of the sources of Islam and one does not write a history, or one does not make a critical study of the sources and one can write "stories". Alfred-Louis de Prémare, professor at the university of Aix-en-Provence, a historian of the Arab-Islamic world, and a lecturer at the Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Muslim world, adds, "Any biography of the prophet of Islam has as much value as a novel that one hopes is historical".



Over the past ten years, the work of a number of researchers has made it possible to uncover texts written in Georgian, Armenian, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew or Coptic, that give information (a few sentences in books of several hundred pages) on what the Islam of the origins was. The discoveries are surprising : Mohammed was never a Muslim, for the words Muslim and Islam appeared sixty years after the death of Mohammed. His first companions called themselves the 'Magrayes', a Syro-Aramaic term meaning emigrants. Their holy language was Syro-Aramaic, not Arabic. Mohammed was not born in Mecca, for the work of Patricia Crone, a specialist on Islam who teaches at Princeton and Cambridge, has shown that the town was founded around 670, forty years after the death of Mohammed.



Islam as we know it today is a fabrication by the caliphs, invented to serve as an ideology for the empire that Mohammed's companions had started building, and that his successors developed. Mohammed's religion was Nazareism, a Judeo-Christian sect born in the Middle-East. Nazareism could not serve as a binding agent for the empire they were setting up, on the one hand because it was not Arabic, while the Arab conquerors wanted a religion that would justify their pre-eminence over all other Muslims, on the other hand because Nazareism anticipated the return of Christ, who would come and take command of the Nazarene armies to conquer the world by force. Since that had not happened, Nazareism had to be replaced by a religion that made no false prophecies. The construction of the new religion out of material drawn from the earlier one and the obliteration of all trace of the earlier religion went on for over two centuries. Hence the destruction of all written evidence of what had happened, and the construction by the caliphs in power of a sacred book in Arabic, an Arab prophet, and an Arab history that could be used as a basis for their ideology.



The enormous number of researchers in every field in the modern world, the use of new techniques in exegesis, archaeology, epigraphy, etc., the discovery of ancient, non-Muslim texts on the development of Islam, dating from 10 to 30 years after the event, and not from over 200 like the Islamic documents - all the above are leading people to question everything they thought they knew about the development of Islam. It is unlikely that the Islamic religion and ideology will be able to withstand the destruction of their historical foundations by modern science.







(Translated by Diana Dupuy)

This is a children’s book from 1971 (back when I was a child) but I am ashamed to admit it was lurking in our adult collection until very recently. I found it when I was looking for something else. I particularly love the lady police officers.





www.publiclibraries.com/

This thread will discuss the kalachakra puja of the Mahayanist Tibetan Buddhists

No better topic than this to start this topic:

as it tells us as to how contemporary politics can mire into military history as Kargil war is considered to be BJP war.

SHILLONG: Former Army Chief General V P Malik, who led the troops during the Kargil operation, on Thursday said Brigadier Devinder Singh's case was an "aberration" and it will be "unfair" to suggest that the complete war history needs to be rewritten.



"To pass the judgement on the entire Indian Army and to suggest that complete war history was fudged and the Kargil Review committee report be rewritten, I think this is unfair. This does not take away the entire good work done by the Army. This is an aberration," he said here. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india...981975.cms <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/angry.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':angry:' />

[url="http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100522/tts-uk-india-crash-ca02f96.html"]Plane crash in south India kills at least 160 people [/url]

Quote:An Air India Express passenger plane from Dubai crashed outside an airport in southern India on Saturday, killing at least 160 people when it burst into flames after overshooting the runway and ploughing into a forest.



There may have been five or six survivors, local media said.



One eyewitness said the plane skidded off the runway in rain at Mangalore airport in Karnataka state.



Air India said the plane was a Boeing 737-800, with 166 people on board, including six crew members. Air India Express is the budget arm of state-run carrier Air India.



"At least 160 passengers have died in the crash," V.S. Acharya, home minister of the southern state of Karnataka, told reporters. "At least five to six people have been taken to hospital, their condition is not known."



First indications are that the crash was an accident, officials say.



Television channels said the plane crashed around 6:30 a.m. (2 a.m. British time). TV images showed it struck a forested area. Flames were seen blazing from of some of the wreckage as rescue workers fought to bring the fire under control.



"The plane had broken into two. I jumped out of the plane after it crashed. I saw two other people also come out," Abdullah, a survivor from the plane, told local channel TV9 from hospital.



"There was tyre-burst kind of noise. I tried to get out of the front but saw that there was a big fire. So I went back again and jumped out from there."



One television channel showed a fireman carrying in his arms what seemed to be the remains of a child. Charred bodies and an engine lay in the forested terrain.



"The flight had already landed. There was slight rain. The flight skidded off," eyewitness Mohiuddin Bava told CNN-IBN channel. "After that it caught fire. Villagers, everyone there, came to rescue. The plane wings are right in front of me now."



Air India Express is the low cost arm of Air India. The budget airline started about five years ago. This is the first crash involving an Air India Express plane, according to an Air India spokesman.



Air India is a state-run loss making carrier. The government has been trying to infuse funds to revive the airline against stiff competition from private carriers.

West Bengal Communists and social networking

Dr S Chakraborty

A P C Roy Polytechnic

Kolkata

West Bengal

India

I was 12 years old when communist party of India Marxist (CPIM) capture power in West Bengal at the leadership of Mr Jyoti Basu in 1977. Like my father, I enjoyed that night when voting results came as my father was strongly against congress party due to torture on people during Emergency-The regime of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. The euphoria about communists lasted in me upto 1988 when I got admitted into graduation course. Though some of the atrocities conducted by communists stuck the news at that time like cruel burning of 11 Anandamargis (a religious group) on a street and genocide in Marichjhanpi(West Bengal).

In 1989, I came to know few things about CPIM party structure.

1) Hierarchy of CPIM party:

POLITBURO-CENTRAL COMMITTEE-W.B State committee-District committee-Local committee-Branch committee- Mahalla and People committee( apolitical)

Upto branch committee all members are political and mahalla and people’s committee are so called apolitical.

2) Share of resources

The resource is generated by branch committee and local committee by different means which I will describe later on. Each committee keep with itself 50% of generated resource and the rest 50% is passed to the next higher committee.

Meanace of income by local committee and branch committee

• Subscription from local people

• Cut money( upto90%) from different Govt. of India social projects like mass education, 100 days work for poor people and so on.

• Extortion of money from building promoters in cities.

• Cut money from Municipality and village development work(50%)

• Money earned for negotiation between land-lord and tenant and family disputes

• Help people to pay less corporation tax and other taxes and thereby earn money.

• Lavy from people who get job under CPIM help.

• For any kind of activity by which people earn livelihood they have to pay commission.

• For smooth transaction of money communists formed people’s organization at every service and industry sector.

Incidentally one can’t show a single people’s activity from where the communists did not extort money.















3) Measures taken by communists to correct people who declines to pay or protest against the system:

• The communists used different tactics other than to beat the man or harass him openly

• Practically the local apolitical committees of CPIM who play a key role in social networking. These people publicly show that they are apolitical but passes information of common people to party. Each such member takes care of 10 common people. For this reason they get extra fecility from Government.

• By this way 15% active communists take scan of the whole population of West Bengal. The total scanning was completed in 1988 under the chairmanship of then CM Mr. Jyoti Basu.

• The rest is easy. If a common people tries to revolute different issues start to happen in his life, like

Problems within family

Divorce between husband and wife

Problems in his workplace

Court case

Deprive from rights etc.

• The more stringent measures were:

• Make him gradually isolated from the society

You being a common people can’t guess where it is wrong

• Most deadly weapon to humanity

One particular way the CPIM controls individual is to create a situation so that he becomes a mental patient. Suppose you are walking through the street and as you pass three group of people, they are discussing some secrets about you. You just imagine what is your condition if this situation persists for one month.

Process to win elections

Within 1992 almost 90% of the common people come to feel what is happening . So they start daring CPIM and during elections they avoid to go to the booths helping the CPIM cadres to rig the polls at most places of West Bengal. If some one dares to go to the polling booth he finds his vote already polled.

During rigging they keep in mind that above 90% polling in favour of CPIM may be a cancellation of election process.

During election where a group of people revolt the party used arms.

The apolitical stooges of CPIM found in the voting line was indicated by the party as free and fair election.

Capture the juditiary

• The party , when first came to power started politicizing school and college students. In some cases of Law college teachers, students all do politics. The examination was fair but if you investigate you will find that the questions are out and there is no evaluation. These law students, after passing out as lawyear join political organization for better carrier and when some of them becomes







judge they persue politics silently for better transfer and better fecility. Kolkata High court chief justice was also found in a land scandal involving the then Chief Minister of West Bengal.



Money Management

The total money gathered by CPIM Politburo per year from west Bengal is 2000-2500 million dollars. This huge money is managed by a few fund managers in a distributive way firstly to evade tax and to avoid vigilance. In the process money was also deposited in the name of pets.

Opposition party

The opposition party leaders are fully purchased as they enjoy all the class –A fecilities of Government. Whereas most CPIM leaders used to maintain low profile life style.



CPIM is doing all those things for last 34 years in West Bengal in the name of democracy and socialism. They call it the formation of scientific society.



Indeed it is scientific.

With the apparent discovery of this radiated area, parallels were quick drawn to the Mahabharata, the Indian epic. It reads:



... (it was) a single projectile

Charged with all the power of the Universe.

An incandescent column of smoke and flame

As bright as the thousand suns

Rose in all its splendor...



...it was an unknown weapon,

An iron thunderbolt,

A gigantic messenger of death,

Which reduced to ashes

The entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas.



...The corpses were so burned

As to be unrecognizable.

The hair and nails fell out;

Pottery broke without apparent cause,

And the birds turned white.



After a few hours

All foodstuffs were infected...

....to escape from this fire

The soldiers threw themselves in streams

To wash themselves and their equipment.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ancien...mic_07.htm



---



I find this very fascinating - hard evidence provided

I posted there under my name and asked why they want to kick out all roma gypsies from serbia and discussed with them. They banned me for 5 days and said next time they will send me a bill and i have to pay 50euros. I think its a threat. And they put up in my avatar a pic of me i didnt wanted that i wanted a other or no pic, i changed it and deleted it but they again put it up against my will. Im afraid. Please help. What should i do?

What would you improve about hinduism? Is there even anything to improve for you? Im not born a hindu but will give my opinion however. I would stop worship of unhiegynic and dangerous animals like rats and snakes. I would stop superstition like believing that retarded people are reincarnation of gods like the little girl who was born retarded and was thought by hindus to be the reincarnation of the godess lakshmi. I would not forbid idol worshipping because i think the hindu idols and arts is beautiful and something to be proud of. I would also get rid of marrying dogs or animals, tantric teachings like vagina(yoni) worship, and sects and cults like the aghoris who drink cow piss practice cannibalism and smoke weed would be forbidden because they are no saints for me. I would put on emphazy more on the monotheistic side of hinduism like the one supreme being (i know that even hindus believe in the one supreme being but with many faces). I would restrict cow worship wouldnt end it but restrict it. Cows shouldnt walk freely on the streets and block the traffic and shit on the roads, i would also allow people to eat the cow because if she is holy its ok to drink her milk and eat her meat because she will give you power i think the early santhana dharmis ate cow meat (dont quote me on that because im not sure) but she has to be respected and not tortured or killed in a painful way etc...



What do you think of my ideas? No disrespect intended. Thanks