Somalia’s al-Shabaab militia bans use of internet

Somalia’s al-Shabaab militia bans use of internet.(Taz).

An Islamist militia controlling parts of Somalia has banned the use of the internet for fear of spying and surveillance on its operations in the Horn of Africa country, dpa reported.

Internet providers must sever services on mobile phones and using fibre optic communications within 15 days, al-Shabaab said in a statement aired on Andulus, one of its radio stations, late Wednesday.

Companies refusing to comply with the ban "would be seen as collaborating with the enemy and necessary steps would be taken against them in compliance with sharia, or Islamic law," the statement said.

Al-Shabaab controls mainly rural areas in central and southern Somalia, but there was concern that the internet ban could have a wider effect.

"Some of the main antennas transmitting the signals belong to companies here in Mogadishu" and they would have to be disabled for the ban to enter into force, one operator for a local telecommunications company said on the condition of anonymity.

Somalia's largest telecommunications operator, Hormuud Telecom, which has signed an agreement with South Africa's Liquid Telecom to link Somalia with an African fibre optic network, did not issue an immediate comment.

African Union peacekeepers in Somalia and Kenyan troops have stepped up their operations against al-Shabaab, which is believed to be linked with al-Qaeda, after its attack on a Nairobi shopping mall that left 67 people dead in September.

Welcome to Pakistan A.D. 630 - Dera Bugti jirga: 13 underage girls bartered to settle tribal feud.

Welcome to Pakistan A.D. 630 - Dera Bugti jirga: 13 underage girls bartered to settle tribal feud.(TP).QUETTA: As many as 13 young girls have been bartered to settle a blood feud between two tribes in Dera Bugti district of Balochistan, officials and tribal elders said on Monday.
The girls — aged between four and 16 — were given in Vani by a tribal jirga which arbitrated a five-month-old blood feud between the Baloch tribes of Masoori and Shahwani Masoori. 
Both are sub-clans of the Bugti tribe.
Mir Tariq Masoori Bugti, a lawmaker in the Balochistan Assembly, is said to have conducted the jirga, which was attended by tribal elders and notable locals, in the Baikar area of Phelawagh. Due to conflicting statements, the date of the Jirga is still not clear.
Two tribal elders, however, told the BBC Urdu Service that it was either convened on September 3 or 4. According to them, Masoori tribesman Roshan Khan had murdered Mira Khan, a Shahani Masoori tribesman.
The jirga declared Roshan Khan guilty and ruled that his tribe give 13 girls in Vani to the offended family besides an Rs3 million fine.
Vani is a tribal custom in which girls are forcibly married off to settle tribal feuds. A senior official based in Dera Bugti confirmed the girls were bartered and that they were aged between four and 16. Mir Sarfraz Khan Masoori Bugti, a cousin of Mir Tariq, also concurred that the lawmaker convened the jirga and that the girls given in Vani were less than 16 years of age.
Condemning the morbid tradition, Mir Sarfraz called upon the chief justice of Pakistan to take suo motu notice of the incident. According to Ghulam Nabi Shahani, an elder of the Shahani Masoori Bugti tribe, several participants of the jirga have also confirmed the harrowing episode Mir Tariq, however, has denied conducting any jirga despite reports that the first tranche of the Rs3million fine has already been paid to the offended party. Interestingly, Mir Tariq defended the jirga system’s reconciliatory powers. According to him, it helps resolve local feuds and maintain peace and harmony in the society.Hmmmm...........Pakistan.......Come and visit the 'Dark Ages'.Read the full story here.

'Sharia-Medicine'- Egyptian Clinic Treats People with Camel Urine Per Prophet's Advice.

'Sharia-Medicine'- Egyptian Clinic Treats People with Camel Urine Per Prophet's Advice.(MiddleEastForum).By Raymond Ibrahim.  FrontPageMagazine.com.  October 1, 2012.

A recent Egyptian TV program showed how Islamic Sharia law's many prescriptions do not merely clash with modern-day concepts like free speech and religious freedom, but even with medicine and science.
On September 16, popular TV persona Wael El-Ibrashi hosted Dr. Zaghlul al-Naggar, a prominent Islamic thinker and Chairman of Egypt's Committee of Scientific Notions in the Quran, on the topic of medical science and Islam. Inevitably the idea of drinking camel urine as a form of therapy—first proposed in the 7^th century by Muslim prophet Muhammad—came up.
Not only did Dr. Naggar promote this practice, but he made the staggering announcement that right now in Egypt a medical center in Marsa Matrouh actually specializes in treating people with camel urine, all in accord with the prophet's advice.
Other Egyptian thinkers joined the show via satellite, including Khaled Montaser (who earlier exposed the Islamic world's "inferiority complex"). At one point, while delineating how science and medicine work, Montaser reminded that urine is where all the body's toxins are carried out, asking "so, shall we drink it for health?"
Naggar simply responded with arrogance: "I am older than you and more learned than you: you are not going to teach me; I will teach generations of people like you."
Staunch secularist Sayyid al-Qemany—whose strong support for rationalistic thinking and the separation of religion and state caused Egypt's Islamic establishment to pronounce him an apostate infidel—also joined the show via phone, deploring the very idea that drinking camel urine could heal people.
Referring to Naggar's announcement that there is a clinic specializing in treating people with camel urine as a "catastrophe" that only indicates how far Egypt has sunk, Qemany called on Egyptian health officials to verify if such a medical center truly exists, saying this is a serious issue involving the health of Egypt's citizenry.
Naggar tried to defend the "salutary benefits" of camel urine by arguing that European pharmacies produce a medicine that contains female urine (possibly a reference to HCG). Qemany replied that such medicines are not based on drinking crude urine but are synthetic, exclaiming, "does this mean I should go drink my wife's urine?!"
An exasperated Qemany concluded by offering a compromise. He suggested that Nagger, whose PhD is in geology, should lead an expedition to Mecca and Medina and somehow try to extrapolate the urine of Muslim prophet Muhammad, and use that to heal people instead of camel urine, sarcastically adding, "surely the urine of the prophet—peace and blessings upon him—is better than camel urine?"
Dr. Naggar simply shook his head, saying such talk was inappropriate.
In fact, both ideas—drinking camel urine and drinking Muhammad's urine—are traced to the prophet's own words, and, accordingly, are aspects of "Sharia-medicine."
In a canonical tradition, Muhammad once told some men who were sick "to drink the milk and urine of camels, and they recovered and grew fat," that is, they were healed (more information on this practice can be found in a modern-day fatwa in the English language aptly titled "The Benefits of Drinking Camel Urine.")
Likewise, Egypt's Grand Mufti, Ali Gomaa, once wrote that drinking Muhammad's urine was considered "a great blessing.
All of this sheds light on the totalitarian nature of Sharia law, which treats, not just the Quran, but canonical hadiths, or traditions and sayings of Muhammad—which is where both urine-drinking ideas appear—as sacred and not to be questioned.
Saudi Arabia's highest Islamic authority until he died in 1999, Sheikh Bin Baz, held that the earth was flat and that all scientific evidence otherwise was a "Western conspiracy," simply because Quran 18:86 claims the sun sets in a pool of mud, suggesting that the earth is flat.
The greater lesson for non-Muslims is that, if Islam's most prominent thinkers—the many ulema, muftis, sheikhs, and "Islamic thinkers" like Naggar himself—tenaciously cling to Islam's teachings even when they defy objective science (not to mention grossly defame Islam), surely they must cling to those other ironclad teachings that deal with "subjective" matters, from freedom of religion and freedom of speech, to hostility, jihad, and subjugation for the infidel.
At one point in the debate, Qemany made this connection when he likened the mentality that would give sick people camel urine to drink, to the mentality that attacked U.S. embassies and killed people. In both cases, blind obedience and/or fanaticism is at work—and all to Muhammad's words, which advocated drinking camel urine for health no less than they banned mockery of the prophet.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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Egypt’s top prosecutor to appeal Mubarak verdict amid public outrage

                                                            Who needs enemies?




Egypt’s top prosecutor to appeal Mubarak verdict amid public outrage.(AA).Egypt’s state prosecutor will appeal the verdict in Hosni Mubarak’s trial, which acquitted the former leader and his two sons on corruption charges and cleared senior police officers of complicity in killing protesters during last year’s uprising, an official told the Associated Press on Sunday. The prosecutor must appeal the entire verdict, which also included convictions and life sentences for Mubarak and his former security chief for failing to stop the killing of protesters in the uprising that ousted him. Six top police commanders, who faced the same charge of complicity in killing protesters, were acquitted for what the judge said was lack of concrete evidence. The official spoke Sunday on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media. Mubarak, the only autocrat toppled in the Arab Spring to be put in the dock, could have been sent to the gallows as demanded by the prosecution. He was also cleared of graft charges. The prosecution had asked for the death sentence against the ousted president and his security aides, but it has received much criticism over its preparations for the case. Mubarak’s defense has also said it would appeal. Both Mubarak’s defense team and lawyers representing his victims said the life sentence verdict could easily be appealed, triggering fears among protesters that he could be ruled innocent. Around 20,000 people took to Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square on Saturday after the verdicts were issued. We expect a lot more people to come during the day,” said Omar Abdelkader, a young protester in Tahrir on Sunday. “Many people had the feeling while listening to the verdict that we were back in the days of the old regime,” said student Feda Essam, another protester in the square.Hmmmm.......Welcome to the 'justice' by the "Age of the Muslim BrotherHood" ...a.k.a. A.D. 630.Read the full story here