IRIS Blog

Despite repeated and categorical denials, evidence continues to mount that Barack Hussein Obama was raised a Muslim. Of course this speaks only to his honesty, which has already been called into question over his close links to so many radical Leftists. Here are excerpts from the data Daniel Pipes has collected:

The Catholic school: Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports that "documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim" while at a Catholic school during first through third grades. Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune confirms that Obama was "listed as a Muslim on the registration form for the Catholic school." A blogger who goes by "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" found that "Barack Hussein Obama was registered under the name ‘Barry Soetoro' serial number 203 and entered the Franciscan Asisi Primary School on 1 January 1968 and sat in class 1B. … Barry's religion was listed as Islam."

The public school: Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times learned from Indonesians familiar with Obama when he lived in Jakarta that he "was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended." Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star visited the Jakarta public school Obama attended and found that "Three of his teachers have said he was enrolled as a Muslim." Although Siddiqui cautions that "With the school records missing, eaten by bugs, one has to rely on people's shifting memories," he cites only one retired teacher, Tine Hahiyari, retracting her earlier certainty about Obama's being registered as a Muslim.

Koran class: In his autobiography, Dreams of My Father, Obama relates how he got into trouble for making faces during Koranic studies, thereby revealing he was a Muslim, for Indonesian students in his day attended religious classes according to their faith. Indeed, Obama still retains knowledge from that class: Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times, reports that Obama "recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them [to Kristof] with a first-rate accent."

Update: Obama's half-brother just confirmed his Muslim background in an attempted boost to his campaign.

Constructing bomb factories inside of homes in crowded neighborhoods is a routinely-practiced war crime by Islamists:

Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades confirmed Friday that the operatives who died in Thursday's explosion in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya were making last-minute preparations for a “special mission”, a Hamas codename for a “high-quality” attack.

According to the statement, the dead were operatives of a special Hamas unit. The organization promised that its people will “continue following in the path of those killed.”

A Hamas gunman who was wounded in Thursday's died Friday morning. Hamas’ announcement does not refer to the blast's circumstances even though the group's media has begun using the term “explosion” and not just “attack,” the term repeatedly used on Thursday.

Hamas was quick to blame Israel and reacted with a heavy rocket fire on the western Negev. Recent statements, however, have omitted placing the blame on Israel.

On Thursday, Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida said that as a result of the IDF denying it's involvement, the military wing will conduct an investigation into the blast and make its results public immediately.

Hamas’ announcement confirmed Ynet reports saying that Ahmed Randur, commander of the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades in north Gaza was present at the time of the explosion and lightly injured as a result.

Additional senior Hamas officials were present at the scene including Beit Lahiya Hamas Area Commander Ahmed Hamouda, whose house is the one which exploded. His daughter was killed in the blast. Hassan Abu Shakfa and Ashraf Mushtaha, both senior officials in Hamas’ military wing were killed as well.

A neighbor who lives adjacent to the exploded house said that the presence of Hamas’ senior officials at the scene of the incident and at the hospital immediately after it occurred, proves that those present at the blast were very high-ranking. “The fast arrival of the civilian leadership and of the firefighters proves that extreme pressure was felt due to the identity of those injured.”

That last sentence is priceless. In Islamist Gaza, the quick arrival of firefighters to a massive explosion is an phenomenon reserved for senior leaders. Think of the attitude toward life epitomized by this incident.

Earlier, the Palestinian taqiyya machine had produced witnesses who blamed Israel. The media reported it of course, because "there are two sides to every story:"

Palestinian witnesses said that an Israeli F16 aircraft dropped a bomb at a house in northern Gaza Strip.

God bless Israel and George W. Bush for saving countless oppressed people in Iraq. (Remember how Leftists used to claim that Iraq was invaded to take oil for America?) I wonder why she didn't seek justice in Iraq?

Fifty-five years after she was abducted from her family's home in Baghdad by her Muslim neighbor and forced to renounce her Judaism, Hannah Menashe managed to flee Iraq and find her way to one of Israel’s European embassies. Her long, exhausting journey is finally coming to an end these days, as she will soon be reunited with he family in Israel, who thought her murdered all these years.

Hannah’s fascinating story begins in the 1950s, when her Baghdad-native family – parents and seven siblings – decided to immigrate to Israel. Hannah, already married to a Jewish Iraqi, was also planning to make aliyah, when fate struck: A Muslim neighbor, who was aware of the family’s plans to immigrate, kidnapped the striking Hannah to keep her by his side. Her siblings only have a vague recollection of that horrible day. They went looking for Hannah, they say, but the earth had swallowed her.

Decades passed, the siblings made aliyah and the family expanded, all the while keeping their bitter secret to themselves. Shortly after arriving in Israel, Hannah’s mother died at 37, her heart broken by losing her child.

Six months ago, out of the blue, the family received a surprising phone call. The woman on the other side of the line was Ravit Topol from the Ministry of Interior, with an extraordinary story she was looking to verify.

It turns out Hannah had been forced to become a Muslim and had raised her neighbor’s children for 50 years. No one in the Baghdad neighborhood knew about her secret or her Jewish roots, and she was afraid her husband would kill her if she tried to contact her siblings.

When her husband died a year ago, the now 76-year-old Hannah escaped Baghdad under the guise of being being a war refugee. She was able to reach Europe through an Arab country and decided to locate an Israeli embassy.

"I am Jewish, I want to go to Israel," she said in fluent Arabic and with great excitement. The embassy found it hard to believe her story; but when she named her relatives in Israel, the embassy officials realized the truly incredible nature of the story unfolding before their very eyes and quickly contacted the Ministry of Interior’s population administration.

Read the whole thing...

Antonin Scalia summed it up well, speaking on behalf of the four conservative justices, saying "America is at war with radical Islamists" and that the decision "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed". Here is the opening of his dissent:

Today, for the first time in our Nation’s history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war.

What the liberal judges did not calculate was that the jihadis will be catalyzed by the victory because their religion commands them not to fight when weak:

The future of President Bush's controversial military trial system for terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay has been dealt a potentially terminal blow by the US Supreme Court.

In its third rebuke of the Bush Administration's treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the court ruled that the 270 foreign terror suspects have the right under the US Constitution to challenge their detention in civilian courts on the American mainland.

The 5-4 ruling did not order the military tribunal process to be halted but it could trigger a chaotic rush to civilian courts that in practical terms will leave the question of what to do with men such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the September 11 mastermind, in the hands of the next president.

Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, has pledged to close down the site and opposes the military tribunals. John McCain, his Republican opponent, also wants Guantanamo Bay closed. Unlike Mr Obama, however, the Arizona senator supported a law rushed through Congress in 2006 by Mr Bush to resurrect the tribunal system after the Supreme Court last ruled it unconstitutional.

Every day mortars and rockets are fired from Gaza. Today was notable because of the quantity (50 according to some estimates), which may have been cover for an attempted large-scale terror attack:

A 59-year-old Israeli woman was lightly-to-moderately wounded in the Yad Mordechai area on Thursday afternoon as Palestinian terror groups launched a barrage of mortar shells and Qassam rockets against Israeli communities near the Gaza border.

The injured woman was evacuated to the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon for treatment.

At least 40 mortars and 25 Qassams landed in Israel, primarily in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council, a number of fires have broken out as a result. A member of Kibbutz Nahal Oz told Ynet that residents have currently been instructed to remain in bomb shelters and fortified rooms.

Shas has just announced that it is joining with Labor and Likud to dissolve the Knesset:

Senior officials from Shas announced on Thursday that the party would support the motion for the dissolution of the Knesset, initiated by Knesset Member Silvan Shalom (Likud), at any date in which the motion would be put to a vote.

The statements made by Shas and Labor indicate that Shalom's motion is set to have a significant majority in the Knesset's vote, at least in its preliminary reading. If no dramatic political changes take place to cause the Labor Party to retreat from its announcement, there will be over 65 MKs supporting the motion on June 25.

Child marriage is rampant throughout the Muslim World, in emulation of Muhammed, who married the nine year-old Aisha when he was in his 50's.

Over half of women who marry in Yemen are under 15 years of age, said a field study conducted by Yemen's Women and Development Study Centre, which is affiliated with the University of Sanaa.

According to the study which was cited in the Yemen Times newspaper, the rate of child marriage among females in Yemen reached 52 percent, compared to less than seven percent among males.

On top of that, in rural parts of Yemen, girls usually get married at an average age of 12 to 13 years old.

The parliament in Yemen is reportedly working to raise the minimum marriageable age, which currently stands at 15 years old and so far there is no punishment for those families who allow their daughters to marry under this age.

"Recently the case of early marriage in Yemen has come to light, especially after the divorce of a little girl last month," said Amatalrazaq Hummad, Yemen's Minister of Social Affairs, in an interview with the Qatari daily Al-Watan.

Hummad was referring to the case of 'Noujoud', the first eight-year-old child to obtained a divorce from her husband who is in his early 30s, through a court in Sanaa.

Muslim social pathologies, such as polygamy, female genital mutilation and wife beating have followed immigration patterns. Here is more evidence:

Honour-related violence is rampant across the country, according to a new study by Sveriges Radio.

Nearly 60 percent of the country’s social services have helped victims of honour violence or those threatened with honour violence to hide themselves.

75 percent of the country’s social services answered a survey from Sveriges Radio. Seven of ten responded that they had dealt with cases involving honour-related violence....

Elder of Ziyon has a case of an Egyptian who was sentenced to life imprisonment for a botched wedding-night honor killing. He claims that the prosecution waited 45 days to gather evidence, including whether the victim was indeed not a virgin, as the murderer claimed.

'Justified' honor killings have broad support throughout the Muslim world.

Thomas Sowell makes a winning argument that is sure to fail with the electorate. Democracies invariably choose candidates who help them forget troubles of this magnitude:

....While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world-- Iran-- is moving step by step toward building a nuclear bomb.

The point when they get that bomb will be the point of no return. Iran's nuclear bomb will be the terrorists' nuclear bomb-- and they can make 9/11 look like child's play.

All the options that are on the table right now will be swept off the table forever. Our choices will be to give in to whatever the terrorists demand-- however outrageous those demands might be-- or to risk seeing American cities start disappearing in radioactive mushroom clouds.

All the things we are preoccupied with today, from the price of gasoline to health care to global warming, will suddenly no longer matter.

Just as the Nazis did not find it enough to simply kill people in their concentration camps, but had to humiliate and dehumanize them first, so we can expect terrorists with nuclear weapons to both humiliate us and force us to humiliate ourselves, before they finally start killing us.

They have already telegraphed their punches with their sadistic beheadings of innocent civilians, and with the popularity of videotapes of those beheadings in the Middle East.

They have already telegraphed their intention to dictate to us with such things as Osama bin Laden's threats to target those places in America that did not vote the way he prescribed in the 2004 elections. He could not back up those threats then but he may be able to in a very few years.

The terrorists have given us as clear a picture of what they are all about as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did during the 1930s-- and our "leaders" and intelligentsia have ignored the warning signs as resolutely as the "leaders" and intelligentsia of the 1930s downplayed the dangers of Hitler.

We are much like people drifting down the Niagara River, oblivious to the waterfalls up ahead. Once we go over those falls, we cannot come back up again.

What does this have to do with today's presidential candidates? It has everything to do with them.

One of these candidates will determine what we are going to do to stop Iran from going nuclear-- or whether we are going to do anything other than talk, as Western leaders talked in the 1930s.

There is one big difference between now and the 1930s. Although the West's lack of military preparedness and its political irresolution led to three solid years of devastating losses to Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, nevertheless when all the West's industrial and military forces were finally mobilized, the democracies were able to turn the tide and win decisively.

But you cannot lose a nuclear war for three years and then come back. You cannot even sustain the will to resist for three years when you are first broken down morally by threats and then devastated by nuclear bombs.

Our one window of opportunity to prevent this will occur within the term of whoever becomes President of the United States next January....

Prediction: The first threat Iran is likely to make to America: turn away from Israel, or it will cost you a city.

But you say, America has huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The ayatollahs know that bin Laden was essentially correct in accusing America of being a paper tiger. Weapons of mass destruction are worthless to a country that is unwilling to use them. Will the US be willing to incinerate millions of innocents to stop a few madmen?

Here's one for all of you who have complained that Global Warming is not an issue that should be of concern for an Israel-oriented blog. As I have been warning, these alarmists are looking for unprecedented amounts of money.

Spending on the order of $45 trillion would severely undermine Western strength. I say Western strength because China, India, and the Muslim World will likely never contribute any money to this:

The world needs to invest $45 trillion in energy in coming decades, build some 1,400 nuclear power plants and vastly expand wind power in order to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to an energy study released Friday.

The report by the Paris-based International Energy Agency envisions a "energy revolution" that would greatly reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels while maintaining steady economic growth.

"Meeting this target of 50 percent cut in emissions represents a formidable challenge, and we would require immediate policy action and technological transition on an unprecedented scale," IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said.

A U.N.-network of scientists concluded last year that emissions have to be cut by at least half by 2050 to avoid an increase in world temperatures of between 3.6 and 4.2 degrees above pre-18th century levels.

On the other hand, the new openness to the concept of nuclear power is a positive development for those of us who understand that Arab oil revenues are a key driver of the Global Jihad.

Not diplomacy, but military strength, is routing the Islamists in al-Qaeda's must-win battle:

U.S. troop deaths in Iraq fell to their lowest level last month since the 2003 invasion and officials said on Sunday improved security also helped the country boost oil production in May to a post-war high.