President Obama has revealed his true nature. After 20 months in the Oval Office, he still remained a largely unknown figure. A picture is coming into focus now, and it should trouble all Americans. It is widely known that Mr. Obama is a post-national progressive. Yet he is also a cultural Muslim who is promoting an anti-American, pro-Islamic agenda. This is the real meaning of his warm – and completely needless – embrace of the Ground Zero Mosque.

At an Iftar dinner celebrating Ramadan at the White House, Mr. Obama told Muslim-Americans that he supports the building of an Islamic community center and mosque just two blocks away from where the Twin Towers were destroyed and nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered on Sept. 11, 2001. He later tried to back away from those comments. Mr. Obama said he was defending the right of religious freedom but not the “wisdom” of erecting the mosque.

Nonetheless, Mr. Obama has been clear: In his view, the Ground Zero Mosque should be built. There was no good practical reason even to comment on the issue. He had been silent for weeks as the controversy gathered steam. The overwhelming majority of the American people oppose the mosque — especially the families of the Sept. 11 victims. Politically, it is a loser — for him and his party. Yet he could not keep his mouth shut. Why?

Answer: For Mr. Obama, defending Islam has been a key priority of his presidency. In his famous speech in Cairo, Mr. Obama apologized to the Muslim world for the alleged “sins” and “mistakes” of America — even though no country has done more to liberate Islamic peoples than the United States, including campaigns in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. His aim was to engage the Islamic world on its terms and norms rather than defend America’s values and national interests.
Mr. Obama openly bragged about his “Muslim background” and that his family had “followers of Islam.” He spoke of his youth in Indonesia, his study of the Koran and the call to Islamic prayer. In short, he discovered his inner Muslim in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Arab street. The message was: I understand you, and I will usher in a new era of Islamic-American relations.

This Mr. Obama has done with a vengeance. He is the most Muslim-friendly president in the nation’s history. He wants the detention center at Guantanamo Bay closed. He demands that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, be tried in civilian court — with the full legal and constitutional protections given to U.S. citizens — several blocks from the World Trade Center site. He has ordered that the words “Muslim extremist,” “Islamic terrorist” and “jihad” be cleansed from national security documents. He is openly anti-Israel. And he is prematurely withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, threatening to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Israeli military and intelligence officials concede that the administration — through diplomatic back channels — has told Jerusalem that Washington will not bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Jews are on their own in confronting the Holocaust-denying dictator President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. Obama’s tepid sanctions have failed to curb Iran’s relentless march toward acquiring the nuclear bomb. This weekend, the Iranian nuclear power plant at Bushehr will begin fueling with enriched uranium. Thus, theocratic Iran is on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. It is only a matter of time before radical Islam also has the bomb.

Mr. Obama has done everything possible to appease the Muslim world — including, now, backing the Ground Zero Mosque. The debate about the mosque has little to do with religious freedom or tolerance. There are more than 1,200 mosques in America and dozens of them in New York City. The debate is about the meaning and memory of the Sept. 11 attacks. Those on the left — led by Mr. Obama — have been determined to alter the nature of that event. For them, it was simply a criminal act by several deranged individuals linked to a little tiny group called al Qaeda.

Instead, the Sept. 11 attacks were acts of war in which 19 Muslim hijackers in the name of radical Islam brought global jihad here on American soil. This is why the Ground Zero Mosque is so offensive: It will be a symbol of radical Islam’s conquest of America. If Islamists can erect a monument of victory that will permanently loom over our most hallowed ground, what can’t they do? It will signify the surrender of liberal multiculturalism to the forces of political Islam. That is why so many Americans are passionately opposed to the mosque. They realize what is at stake.
This, however, is too much for some politically correct conservatives to swallow. Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online, taking a break from writing on Hollywood, complained in a blog posting that one of my recent columns making this very point struck him as “nonsense.”

For Mr. Goldberg, the mosque issue is not “as big a deal as some are making it.” Yes, it’s an “offensive and ill-advised mistake that might make things harder in a long, complicated struggle,” but really all of this heat and friction could have been avoided with a few phone calls by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. My advice to Mr. Goldberg: Stick to writing about Michael Douglas and Paris Hilton.

A more probing analysis reveals the dangers we are courting. It is remarkable that our liberal ruling elites refuse to demand an investigation into Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the cleric spearheading the Cordoba House initiative, or his dubious and murky sources of funding. Even in Obama nation, $100 million for a mosque is not chump change. Mr. Rauf is not a moderate. He is not some Muslim Gandhi, preaching the virtues of multireligious tolerance. Rather, he demands that America adopt Shariah law. He has said that U.S. policies were an “accessory” to the Sept. 11 attacks — in other words, we brought it upon ourselves. He openly defends Hamas. Now, he is on a State Department-sponsored trip across the Middle East, likely raising money for the mosque from rich Persian Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Obama has much to say when it comes to defending the rights of Muslims in America — even if this means supporting a project that deeply offends the values of Americans, disgraces the honor and memory of those who died on Sept. 11 and bolsters a pro-Shariah militant imam. But he is strangely silent about the rampant persecution of Christians and Jews in Muslim-majority nations — especially Saudi Arabia, which likely will provide the bulk of the financing for the Ground Zero Mosque, where churches and synagogues are banned.

Across Europe and Canada, a stealth jihad is taking place. Radical Muslim groups have learned to use the West’s freedoms and secular tolerance to advance their Islamist agenda. Shariah law tribunals now exist in Canada, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. Slowly but surely, political Islam is establishing itself as a potent force across the West. In the vacuum of progressive multiculturalism — with its moral relativism, radical secularism, hatred for the Judeo-Christian heritage and loathing of Western civilization — Islamism is filling the void.

The great irony is that the First Amendment was aimed at preventing the state establishment of religion. The Saudis have turned it upon its head: Riyadh, by financing mosques like the one at Ground Zero, is erecting radical Muslim sects here on U.S. soil that ultimately may threaten our most cherished freedoms. For the Saudi regime, there is no separation of mosque and state. And it is gradually imposing its theocratic will — its Islamist agenda based on Shariah law — upon the West. In light of this, Mr. Obama is a self-conscious radical, who is now putting the interests of Islam ahead of his own country. The debate over the Ground Zero Mosque has unmasked him as a president who favors Muslim interests over those of the American people.

When questions came up during the campaign about Barack Obama’s religious affiliation, his aides flatly asserted that he was a “practicing Christian” and was “baptized” in the Trinity United Church of Christ. However, some of the same questions have come up again in the wake of opinion polls finding people confused about Obama’s religious identity. Our media cannot understand the confusion.

For most in the media, it is cut-and-dried: Obama is a Christian. People who don’t believe it are dumb or misled.

But calling yourself something is not the same thing as proving it is the case. This claim deserves to be scrutinized, even when it involves a sensitive and personal matter such as religious belief.

Unfortunately for Obama and his backers, the same Obama campaign apparatus which claimed that he is a baptized Christian asserted that the mysterious “Frank” in Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, was just a black civil rights
activist. It turned out that “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member under surveillance by the FBI who served as a mentor for a young Obama in Hawaii. The 600-page FBI file on Davis even suggests he was an espionage agent on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Dupes, a forthcoming book by Professor Paul Kengor, promises to take another close look at Obama’s Frank Marshall Davis connection.

So what the Obama presidential campaign says about Obama’s religious affiliation is not something to be taken at face value. They have a vested interest in making Obama look more acceptable to the American people.

As President, he has gone to church only a few times, which undermines the claim that he is a practicing Christian. People see him playing golf on Sunday; they don’t see him going to church.

In fact, however, being a Christian is not just a function of attending church services. Rather, it is related to being baptized. Did this critical development occur in Obama’s life?

In this context, it is important to take a look at what Obama’s own books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, say about the President’s religion, or lack thereof.

He acknowledges in Dreams that his grandfather was a Muslim (page 104) and that he spent two years in a Muslim school in Indonesia studying the Koran (page 154). In The Audacity of Hope, he says (page 204) that “my father had been raised a Muslim” but that by the time he met his mother, his father was a “confirmed atheist.”

His stepfather was not particularly religious and his mother professed “secularism,” Obama wrote (pages 204-205), but as a child he went to a “predominantly Muslim school,” after being first sent to a Catholic school. His mother, he said, was concerned about him learning math, not religion.

Obama’s reference to being baptized is found in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006, not in Dreams, published in 1995. Obama wrote on page 208, “I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.”

Traditionally, Christianity teaches that baptism is a sacrament involving the use of water to signify acceptance of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Since Obama was not born and baptized a Christian, in order to become a Christian he had to enter into the sacrament of baptism some time later in life.

In this regard, Obama does not indicate anywhere in his books that he came into contact with what Christians regard as the “living water.” Instead, he says that, in his baptism, he made “a choice,” knelt beneath a cross, and “felt God’s spirit beckoning.” He said, “I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”

This sounds like a powerful religious experience but it is not what Christians regard as baptism.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama discusses his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, noting that he had been “dabbling with liquor, Islam, and black nationalism in the sixties” but that “the call of faith had apparently remained” and that he went on to study religion, including “the black liberation theologians.” For his part, Obama visited Wright to discuss membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ as an extension of his community organizing activities and the hope that he could get “involvement” in this effort from churches like Wright’s.

As Obama contacted the churches and their ministers, he reveals that they thought he was a Muslim (page 279) or, he jokes, an Irishman, “O’Bama.”

Obama talks about hearing a Wright sermon, “The Audacity of Hope,” which inspired the title of his second book. However, there is no mention of any baptism in this—his first—book. The reference to being baptized came in the second book, as Obama was preparing to launch his presidential campaign. The timing is significant.

These are the facts as Obama himself reported them. So how have the media handled them? Needless to say, there has been no serious investigation into whether the claims are true and what they mean.

“Obama’s religious biography is unconventional and politically problematic,” Newsweek’s Lisa Miller reported. “Born to a Christian-turned-secular mother and a Muslim-turned-atheist African father, Obama grew up living all across the world with plenty of spiritual influences, but without any particular religion. He is now a Christian, having been baptized in the early 1990s at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.”

The phrase, “having been baptized,” is apparently based on Obama’s claim about being baptized. Our major media haven’t questioned the claim.

Miller went on to say, “His baptism presents its own problems. The senior pastor at Trinity at the time of Obama’s baptism was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., the preacher who was seen damning America on cable TV…”

Notice the formulation, “at the time of Obama’s baptism.” She carefully does not say that Wright performed the baptism. In fact, there’s no evidence it was a baptism in the traditional sense that it was performed by Wright or anybody else. It looks like Obama walked down the aisle and made a profession of faith. That is not a Christian baptism.

The Canada Free Press published a very interesting article in February by Madeline Brooks, who asked, “Where is the baptism certificate? We do not see one because there was no baptism. That central part of Christianity was not required at Obama’s former church, the Trinity United Church of Christ, during the years Obama attended…”

She cites the research of a pastor, Usama Dakdok, who had called Obama’s church to ask about membership:

“Do I have to be baptized to join the church?” asked Pastor Dakdok. “No, you don’t,” was the answer. “You can be a member without being baptized.”

“And what exactly is required to become a member?” The answer: “You attend two Sunday school classes in a row about membership, and then you walk the aisle.”

Walk down the aisle? That sounds exactly what Obama described in his book. This is how one becomes a member. But it is not a baptism into Christianity.

“I called the Trinity United Church of Christ and they confirmed that baptism is merely optional for members,” Brooks added.

Pastor Dakdok reports that he also asked a spokesperson for Trinity, the membership director:

If I am a Muslim man, and I believe in the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, but I also believe in the prophet Jesus, do I have to give up my Islamic faith to join your church?”

The answer was, “Absolutely not! We have so many members of our church who are Muslims.”

Dakdok asked the Trinity spokesperson, “Is that how Senator Barack Obama became a member?” The membership director of the church refused to answer.

Madeline Brooks calls this “Muslim Christianity,” which she says is theologically impossible.

In fact, the contradictions don’t end there. Obama’s pastor for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, could be described as a “Marxist Christian,” which is also theoretically impossible, since Marxism is materialistic and atheistic. Yet Wright gave a speech in which he praised Marxism and faulted the media for claiming that communism and Christianity were somehow opposed to one another.

So the question regarding Obama is not just whether he is a Muslim but a Marxist, based not only on his attendance at Jeremiah Wright’s unusual church but the influence exercised over him during his growing-up years by Communist Frank Marshall Davis.

Dakdok, who was brought up in Egypt, a Muslim country, is adamant that Obama is a Muslim, based on the fact that his birth father was a Muslim and that there is no evidence that Obama ever specifically rejected Islam. Christian radio host Brannon Howse interviewed Dakdok, at the urging of conservative columnist David Limbaugh, brother of the national talk show host, Rush Limbaugh. Dakdok was also interviewed recently on Stacy Harp’s Christian radio show. He speaks around the country in front of Christian audiences.

While Obama may have been a Muslim by birth, that doesn’t mean that he accepts the Muslim faith or philosophy. Instead, Islam may be seen as just another religion/ideology that can be used for his own political purposes.

The case for Obama being a Marxist is far more convincing. He was exposed to Marxist ideology in church under Wright, as well as from Frank Marshall Davis.

The American people now seem to get it, even though the truth about Obama’s relationship with Davis has never been thoroughly explored by the major media. A poll from the Democracy Corps, a Democratic Party firm, found that 55 percent said that Obama could accurately be described as a socialist.

This is far more than the number of people who see him as a Muslim.

If and when the media start examining the Frank Marshall Davis connection, the “socialist” label could take on more sinister connotations.

This is why, of course, they will avoid it.

The Iranian nuclear clock is not slowing down, claims Prof. Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, an organization that tracks the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the world.

Just days after the Obama administration leaked to the New York Times about delays and technical problems plaguing Iran’s nuclear program, Prof. Milhollin claims that Iran is continuing its nuclear developments on schedule.

In an article in The Atlantic, Milhollin warns that the claims being made by the administration that Iran’s capabilities have been dimished thus creating more time to convince the regime to change its path are false.

“Sad to say, the assumption is false. The clock is still ticking, vigorously,” writes Milhollin. “By the beginning of this year, Iran had produced enough low-enriched uranium to fuel two nuclear weapons if the uranium were further enriched to weapon-grade. By now, Iran has added almost enough of this low-enriched uranium to fuel a third weapon, and by the middle of next year (at the current production rate), it will probably produce enough to fuel a fourth.”

Milhollin also warns that Iran started enriching uranium to a higher grade during February of this year, reaching 90% of the required enrichment to produce a nuclear weapon.

“All this is happening at a time when Iran is successfully fielding ballistic missiles that can carry a nuclear payload far enough to reach Israel,” Milhollin writes.

Additional secret facilities?

While the Obama administration is claiming that it will take Iran another year to obtain weapons-grade uranium, Milhollin reminds readers that “the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), while acknowledging that it could, indeed, take this long, says also that it could take as little as three months.”

According to him, there are additional unknowns in the equation, such as the existence of additional secret nuclear facilities such as the one recently discovered at Qom. If such facilities do exist, he states, they render the administration’s calculations meaningless.

Milhollin charges, “But why quibble about how long the final phase of bomb making might take? Instead, we should keep our eyes on the big fact here, which is that Iran is fast approaching the status of a ‘virtual’ nuclear weapon state – one with the ability to kick out UN inspectors and build a handful of nuclear warheads.”

He concludes, “This is not an argument for bombing Iran, by Israel or anyone else. But it is a warning — a warning that we must confront the growth of Iran’s nuclear capability, and not be lulled into imagining that it’s not real.”

  
    I did not think that the pro-Muslim/pro-Islamist and anti-Western propaganda could get any worse—and yet it just has.

    TIME magazine has an August 30 cover story titled “Is America Islamophobic?” Within, the article is titled: “Islam in America: It’s part of the fabric of life, but protests reveal a growing hostility to the religion of Muslims.”

    President Obama’s rather strange assertions that “seven million” Muslims live in America (only 2.5-3 million actually do), and that “Islam has always played a role in America,” actually contradict the point of this piece, but no matter.

    One might wonder why any “hostility” to a productive, historically significant Muslim presence in America exists. TIME magazine does not tell us.

    The article portrays Muslims as innocent victims and American non-Muslims as prejudiced racists who, historically, once banned Catholicism, tried to limit immigration, burned African-American churches, passed anti-Chinese legislation, criminalized certain Native-American rituals (polygamy, rejection of modern medicine), spawned the Ku Klux Klan, failed to elect a Catholic President until 1960, allowed Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi rants to appear over the airwaves, and interned 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War Two. This is all contained in TIME’s “Brief History of Intolerance in America.”

    This article could easily appear in an Egyptian or Syrian magazine; however it would be Israel that would be blamed for various alleged atrocities, and Palestinians, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, even al-Qaeda, who would be seen as the innocent victims.

    TIME magazine does not balance out their history of American intolerance with a history of American tolerance, which included separating the state from religion, reforming religions, instituting a tradition of free speech, fighting a bloody Civil War in order to free the slaves, giving women the vote and educational opportunities, freeing Europe from Nazi fascist rule and waging a Cold war against Soviet totalitarianism. 

    Also missing in the TIME magazine article is the fact that Muslim leaders, in the name of Islam, have behaved very badly and for a very long time. Missing is an equal history of Muslim countries which have practiced colonialism, imperialism, forced conversions, slavery (which is still practiced), and a far more barbaric mistreatment of non-Muslims infidels.

    Muslim leaders, in the name of Islam, killed and forcibly converted Hindus in India for 800 years—and are still persecuting them; they have also destroyed the Christian Church in the Middle East and Central Asia—it is no more; in its place are only mosques and minarets where once only churches stood. Muslims vanquished Zorastrianism and Buddhism, and both exiled and genocidally exterminated Jews, Armenians, and Greeks. According to Israeli historian, Benny Morris, the Arab 1948 war against Israel must now also be understood as a religious holy war, a jihad, one that is still ongoing (“The 1948 War Was an Islamic Holy War,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2010).

    TIME magazine fails to note all this—and gives little credence to more recent historical events.

    Recently, Muslims, in the name of Islam, have hijacked planes, blown themselves and other people up, flown planes into tall buildings, plotted bomb attacks in New York City’s Times Square and over Detroit, shot American soldiers down on a military base in Texas, plotted to do so on military bases in New York and New Jersey. In addition, mosques everywhere, even in the West, have been preaching death to the Jews, death to Zionists, infidels, and Jihad Now! These mosques and their imams or mullahs have been funded by Arab and Muslim pro-jihad financiers.

    After years of denial, indifference, and anti-racist, multi-culturally relativist political correctness, Europeans and Americans are only now just waking up to what Israel has been living with for 63 years. Too little, too late, they are now trying to halt some of the Islamist practices which are crimes and are best described as Islamic gender and religious Apartheid.

    When westerners protest Islamic Apartheid, they are demonized as “Islamophobes” and “racists.” This means that any resistance to aggressive Islamification is shamed and slandered. If that doesn’t work, physical intimidation and lawsuits (“lawfare”) follow. 

    Incredibly, the Western media and political establishment has taken the Islamist side. They confuse “Islamism” or “radical Islam” with the majority of silent Muslims who are too afraid to take on the Islamists, (or who agree with them), and with the small but precious number of Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents, feminists, secularists, and moderates who do stand up to the Islamists but who are not consulted by western leaders or quoted in the Western media.

    TIME magazine does not quote Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Seyran Ates, Zeyno Baran, M. Zuhdi Jasser, Magdi Allam, Bassam Tibi, Khaled Abu Toameh, who are Muslims and ex-Muslims who have written major works against Islamism, and who have argued for human rights within Islam, including the right to leave Islam without risking death.

    TIME magazine’s approach has also been adopted by the mainstream media in how they cover the controversy over the controversial mosque near Ground Zero. Those who oppose it are being called “bigots,” “racists,” and madmen, at least in the mainstream media. Those who defend it are seen as enlightened, tolerant “victims” whose religious freedom has been impinged. Just yesterday, Daisy Khan, Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf’s wife, claimed that the attacks have gone far beyond “Islamophobia” and are now in the realm of “discrimination against Jews.”

    Next thing I expect to hear is that the “Zionists” are behind the discrimination against the “Jewish” Muslims.

    Folks: Welcome to the Middle East in New York City. Now, we are really all Israelis.

‘Ramadan tours to Al-Quds: Make your pilgrimage to the holy mosques.” “We offer you a pilgrimage to the sites that were undertaken by Jesus, a trip to the Holy Land, which is open to all citizens of the Kingdom.”

Recently, the tourism market in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has become swamped with deals for Jerusalem tours. There were ads in newspapers, magazines and the Internet offering affordable three and four-day packages to Jerusalem during Ramadan.

After all, the holy city with its sacred mosques and churches is only a short ride away from Jordan’s capital.

It takes about an hour and a half to drive from Amman to Jerusalem via the Allenby Bridge (including inspection by the Border Police), which spells easy and convenient tourism for Jordanian visitors.

To visit Israel from Jordan, you don’t need to take a plane – a short bus ride will do, which reduces the price of the tour considerably. The cost of a three- or four-day package starts from $530, although one agency advertised a three-day tour for $180.

Ibrahim Zumot, manager of the east Jerusalem based Overseas Travel Bureau, says that the city has indeed witnessed an increase in Arab tourists from Jordan and Egypt recently, due to the quiet maintained in the region. “The region has been quiet for some time and nothing has happened, therefore the tourists feel that it’s OK to travel to Jerusalem,” he explains.

However, the Jordanian tour operators who jumped at the opportunity to corner the market soon discovered there was much more to Jerusalem tourism than just booking buses and hotels. Influential Jordanian unions and hard-liners believe that these tours are nothing more than a ploy designed to circumvent a longstanding, unofficial boycott against Israel.

“Some travel agents exploit the religious feelings of our people, especially in these days before Ramadan, and offer package deals to Jerusalem. A phone call to one of these agencies confirmed that they cooperate with Israeli companies. In order to get to Jerusalem, you need to receive a visa from the Israeli Embassy,” the Jordanian Web site egbid.com wrote.

Although the Hashemite Kingdom is officially connected to Israel through a peace agreement signed in 1994, Jordanian unionists vehemently deny any normalization of relations with the Jewish state and therefore view the tours to Jerusalem as a form of recognition of Israel.

“Obtaining a visa from the Israeli Embassy is tantamount to a recognition of the Zionist entity that bestows legality on the occupation of the holy city,” the president of the Trade Unions Council, Ahmad Armouti, said during the last spate of protests. Last week, demonstrations were held in front of the Jordanian Tourism Ministry, which allegedly supports the tourist flow to Israel. The protesters, who belonged to the National Committee for Resisting Normalization of Ties with Israel, carried signs that called for a ban on all such trips, as they advocate normalization with Israel. Some of the signs quoted the recent ruling of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, chairman of the International Union for Muslim Scholars and spiritual father of the Al-Jazeera satellite channel, who issued a fatwa condemning the calls to visit Al- Aksa Mosque and Jerusalem under occupation.

“These trips will only legitimize the occupation in Al-Quds [Jerusalem], which is the place of the first qibla [prayer direction] in Islam,” Qaradawi wrote in his ruling.

Those who condemn the tours and visits to Jerusalem also rely on an explicit ban on visiting Jerusalem issued by Ibrahim Qaylani, the former minister of the Wakf in Jordan, and Baba Shanouda III, the head of the Egyptian Copts. Both men ruled that religious tourism to Jerusalem is a form of normalization and that it will not serve the interests of the Palestinian people.

“As long as there is occupation of Al-Quds, Muslims are not permitted to visit the holy city,” Ibrahim Qaylani wrote.

There are also calls to blacklist and boycott those who maintain relations with Israel. Consequently, a lawyer who represents an Israeli firm might lose his membership in the Lawyers’ Union, an owner of an apartment might receive threatening phone calls or emails, so the local newspapers were cautious enough not to name the travel agency in question, probably so that they would not be threatened afterwards.

OPPOSITION TO normalization of ties has been consistent in the Arab world since 1967, which resulted in almost total isolation of Jerusalem and the Arab population in Jerusalem from the larger Arab and Islamic contingent. Even during the Jerusalem – Capital of Arab Culture 2009 event, the city didn’t experience any increase in visits from Arab countries, let alone celebrity Arab singers and performers who were afraid of being accused of normalizing ties with the Jewish state.

This approach comes in sharp contrast to the view of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, in particular President Mahmoud Abbas, who said on more than one occasion that a visit to Jerusalem is an expression of solidarity “with the prisoner and not with the guard.”

Referring to Qaradawi’s ruling, Abbas said, “We serve the religion, we do not use it. They, however, use the religion as they wish.”

The Palestinian Authority did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq recently supported the PA’s approach, calling on a convergence on Jerusalem by Muslims to strengthen the city’s Islamic identity.

“I say to those who insist on not visiting [Jerusalem] before its liberation: My worst fear is that you will have nothing to visit after Israel realizes its plans in Jerusalem and elsewhere,” he told the London-based pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat.

In 2009 in Jordan, during another wave of interest in tours to Jerusalem, the Palestinian mufti Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, who was probably trying to placate the hard-liners in the Arab world, said, “When on tour, the pilgrims only stay in east Jerusalem, and the State of Israel doesn’t benefit from them; therefore, these tours are not prohibited and only serve the interest of the Palestinian people.”

Judge Taysyr al-Tamimi added that “The visits to Jerusalem only support the heroic people of Jerusalem, who are threatened by the occupation and are subject to expulsion.”

However, all this rhetoric fell on deaf ears. Despite the high status of Jerusalem in Islam and despite the fact that there is hardly a Muslim or an Arab who hasn’t heard of Al-Aksa Mosque, the Arab and Muslim tourism to the city remains limited. According to the Tourism Ministry, the record number of Jordanian visitors to Israel was 16,807 persons in 2008. The following year, only 15,821 Jordanians crossed the border.

Meanwhile, there has been a certain increase in Jordanian visitors since the beginning of this year (7,847 persons from January to June). Naturally, these figures could be substantially higher if there had been a consensus regarding tourism to Jerusalem in Jordanian society.

ALTHOUGH WHAT is being done is allegedly meant to serve their interest, Jerusalem Arabs feel more abandoned and hurt by these developments than happy.

“Our economy really needs all the help and support we can get. Since Jerusalem was cut off from its surroundings by the Israeli wall, our markets are not as active as they used to be. I wish that all Arabs and Muslims would come to visit here,” says Muhammad Said, a vendor who sells nuts and candy near Damascus Gate.

“I have heard of the anti-normalization movement, but they have to understand that they are really boycotting us, their kinsmen, rather than Israel. Israel doesn’t care about these boycotts; the city is filled with foreign tourists. We want our brothers from Jordan and Egypt and other countries to come to visit us,” says Intisar, a student at Al-Quds University.

Travel agent Zumot says he has a hard time understanding what could be wrong with religious tourism.

“The Christians perform pilgrimages in the footsteps of Christ, the Muslims visit the holy mosques. What could be wrong with that?” he asks.

But for now, the majority of Arab tourists who face threats and intimidation at home and the uncertainty of visiting a country that is regarded by most as “the enemy state” choose to explore the holy city virtually, viewing Al-Aksa and the Holy Sepulchre on Google Earth. Despite the geographic proximity and the convenient means of transportation, the geopolitical gaps are still difficult to overcome.

The moon is a permanent feature in our skies, but is it as unchanging as it seems?

Scientists consider the Earth’s only natural satellite to be a pristine environment, an “open book” where the history of the solar system is written. But according to new observations by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), there’s more than just impact craters — born from the violent early days of our developing star system — written in the lunar landscape.

Reported in a new paper set for publication in the Aug. 20 issue of the journal Science, previously undetected landforms have been spotted by the LRO’s high resolution camera. These landforms are known as “lobate scarps” and were first identified in photographs taken by the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions.

However, the lobate scarps seen in these early missions appeared to be clustered around the equatorial regions. Now, very high resolution observations made by the LRO have revealed 14 more previously unknown scarps, signifying that they can be found all over the moon’s surface.

Lobate scarps are raised features approximately 9 meters high by several kilometers long that form along thrust faults. On Earth, thrust faults are obvious as older rock is forced to lift and fold over younger rock — this is caused by compression. For a geologically active body like the Earth, this is common, but the moon is not geologically active. What is creating this pressure?

“Relatively young, globally distributed thrust faults show recent contraction of the whole moon, likely due to cooling of the lunar interior. The amount of contraction [from the center of the moon to lunar surface] is estimated to be about 100 meters in the recent past,” said Thomas Watters of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum and lead author of the paper.

David Morrison, senior scientist at NASA’s Lunar Science Institute and NASA’s “Ask an Astrobiologist” expert who wasn’t involved with this research, likened this process to the wrinkles that form on an old apple as it dehydrates and shrinks. “You’re trying to fit the crust [of the moon] around a smaller interior, and the only way that can happen is if these scarps form,” Morrison told Discovery News.

“In the Earth system, where you have plate tectonics, you have as many new voids created as mountains thrust up,” he added, pointing out that there is no evidence on the lunar surface for these “voids” — or regions where the lunar crust has been pulled apart to balance out the regions of compression causing the scarps. The moon just has compression regions, wrinkling the surface. The logical conclusion is therefore that the core of the moon has shrunk and the crust buckled under the resulting compression.

Another interesting fact about these newly discovered scarps is their apparent young age. Along the thrust faults, some small impact craters have been overridden by the scarps (pictured above), giving an idea that the scarps are must have formed after some ancient lunar impacts.

Although this is fascinating, the moon isn’t the only celestial body to show signs of shrinkage.

“Ever since the first Mariner 10 flyby of the planet Mercury, one of the things that characterized the surface is the same lobate thrust faults also attributed to shrinkage,” Morrison said.

“Until now, Mercury was the only place that we’ve seen this with crustal shrinkage of several kilometers. Now it looks like it’s happened in our own back yard as well.”

A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien “sentient machines”.

Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth.

But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short.

Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than “biological” life.

Many involved in Seti have long argued that nature may have solved the problem of life using different designs or chemicals, suggesting extraterrestrials would not only not look like us, but that they would not at a biological level even work like us.

However, Seti searchers have mostly still worked under the assumption – as a starting point for a search of the entire cosmos – that ETs would be “alive” in the sense that we know.

That has led to a hunt for life that is bound to follow at least some rules of biochemistry, live for a finite period of time, procreate, and above all be subject to the processes of evolution.

But Dr Shostak makes the point that while evolution can take a large amount of time to develop beings capable of communicating beyond their own planet, technology would already be advancing fast enough to eclipse the species that wrought it.

“If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you,” he told BBC News.

“But within a few hundred years of inventing radio – at least if we’re any example – you invent thinking machines; we’re probably going to do that in this century.

“So you’ve invented your successors and only for a few hundred years are you… a ‘biological’ intelligence.”

From a probability point of view, if such thinking machines ever evolved, we would be more likely to spot signals from them than from the “biological” life that invented them.
‘Moving target’

John Elliott, a Seti research veteran based at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, says that Dr Shostak is putting on a firmer footing a feeling that is not uncommon in the Seti community.

“You have to start somewhere, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Dr Elliott told BBC News.

“But having now looked for signals for 50 years, Seti is going through a process of realising the way our technology is advancing is probably a good indicator of how other civilisations – if they’re out there – would’ve progressed.

“Certainly what we’re looking at out there is an evolutionary moving target.”

Both Dr Shostak and Dr Elliott concede that finding and decoding any eventual message from such alien thinking machines may prove more difficult than in the “biological” case, but the idea does provide new directions to look.

Dr Shostak says that artificially intelligent alien life would be likely to migrate to places where both matter and energy – the only things he says would be of interest to the machines – would be in plentiful supply. That means the Seti hunt may need to focus its attentions near hot, young stars or even near the centres of galaxies.

“I think we could spend at least a few percent of our time… looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out.”