Mind Soup

Pastor Jones during his press conference CNN :  A Florida pastor Thursday called off his controversial plan to burn copies of the Quran on the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. The Rev. Terry Jones of the Gainesville, Florida-based Dove World Outreach Center, standing with a Florida Muslim leader, also said the imam who planned a mosque and Islamic center near ground zero in New York has agreed to move it to another location. But the imam who appeared with him said that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in New York agreed to speak with Jones about possibly moving the center. A spokesman from Soho Properties told CNN producer Vivienne Foley that "the Muslim community center called Park51 in lower Manhattan is not being moved." Jones, meanwhile, said he will travel to New York on Saturday to meet with Rauf. The pastor appeared at an afternoon press conference with Imam Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, who said he will make the t...

MIND SOUP : For weeks now, a minute church by the name of "Dove World Outreach Center" in Gainesville, Florida, has been advertising for an event it calls "International Burn a Qur'an Day". Pastor Terry Jones is insisting to hold this "event" on September the 11th "to honor those killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington." He says the burning of the Qur'an will "send a message to violent Islamic extremists like al-Qaida, which carried out the attacks against the United States." The second day of Eid el-Fitr falls this year on the same day. As many world leaders and institutions, including the Vatican, US President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and  others , have denounced this act, this pastor is insisting on carrying out this event. This is as much facts as I am willing to give about this issue. Below in ten points is my opinionated response. First of all, as a Muslim, I don...

I was getting my daily fix of news from google reader this afternoon and I fell upon this inspirational blog post about religious tolerance in Lebanon from Seif and his Beiruti Adventures  and I thought I'd share it with my readers, especially after the journalist incident  last week. I sure hope that Ali Seif doesn't mind the repost. [...] Ramadan seems to have passed by very quickly this year with 10 days or so left of fasting (depending on where you are). Ramadan is one of my favourite months, as I really enjoy the days of fasting, prayer, forgiveness, and blessing associated with this month. It’s a break from the 11 other months of hectic busy schedules, anger, and nagging. I may have mentioned this before, but my family has never been “all that religious” in the past, as is the case with many Sunni Muslim families of the Bekaa Valley (specifically in the Zahle province). I was taught how to pray, fast, and the basic necessities of Islam, but not muc...

Annahar's Hiyam al-Kosayfi Photo Credits: Youtube/AnnaharTV MIND SOUP : Journalist for the Lebanese daily Annahar, Hiyam al-Kosayfi, expressed her anger about being denied wine in a hotel restaurant in Down Town Beirut during Ramadan. This hotel which was "founded by a Maronite Christian and blessed with sacred water by a priest" has made it a policy not to serve any form of alcoholic beverages during the month of Ramadan, where Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset on food, drinks, and sex, and usually abide strictly to Islamic Law during this month. According to al-Kosayfi, she said the that waiter recommended a good bottle of wine, but then embarrassingly apologized and took back the wine glasses from the table after realizing the policy. The (Christian) writer and her crew made a fuss about this incident until a manager approached them and offered to serve them wine in blue tinted glasses, as not to alarm the Muslim customers who were having breakfast (iftar)...

AFP:  Manchester United 's fans in Malaysia erupted in astonishment and anger on social media Thursday after clerics warned Muslims against wearing the team's famous jersey with its "devil" emblem. Manchester United and the rest of the English Premier League are hugely popular in Muslim-majority Malaysia, where conservative religious leaders said the jersey was un-Islamic and should be banned. Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook were flooded with comments from fans in the Southeast Asian nation. "Maybe the religious leaders are just fans of Liverpool?" quipped one supporter on Twitter. "Why this become an issue after Manchester United has won the title for 11 times? They haven't been watching the matches all this while?" said Sharifah Shahidah, a die-hard Manchester United fan of two-decades standing. "What am I gonna do with all my Man Utd jerseys? And my sons' jerseys?" Sharifah, a Muslim mother of two a...

The following article is extracted from Debbe Schlussel's blog and is only presented to you here for humor purposes. [ via ] May 16, 2010, - 11:38 pm Donald Trump, Dhimmi: Miss Hezbollah Rima Fakih Wins Miss USA; Rigged for Muslima? Miss Oklahoma’s Arizona Immigration Answer By  Debbie Schlussel It’s a sad day in America but a very predictable one, given the politically correct, Islamo-pandering climate in which we’re mired.  The  Hezbollah-supporting Shi’ite Muslim, Miss Michigan Rima Fakih – whose bid for the pageant was financed by an Islamic terrorist and immigration fraud perpetrator –won the Miss USA contest. I was on top of this story before anyone,  telling you about who Fakih is  and  her extremist and deadly ties . Rima Fakih: Miss Hezbollah is Now Miss USA No, it’s not “just another beauty pageant.”  Donald Trump, Muslims (who mostly support Islamic terrorist groups, like Hezbollah, which features many of Fakih’s close relatives as t...

VATICAN CITY — Papal bodyguards overpowered a woman who rushed at Pope Benedict XVI, yanking him to the ground Thursday as he entered St Peter's Basilica to celebrate Christmas Eve mass. Video footage showed the woman, dressed in a red sweatshirt, jumping over a security barricade and rushing at the 82-year-old pope as he began leading the traditional procession of about 30 cardinals to the vast basilica's altar. She was immediately tackled by a security guard, but succeeded in grabbing Benedict's vestments near the neck and yanking him to the ground, according to video footage taken by a pilgrim broadcast on Sky News. Several others fell over in the melee. Prominent French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, 87, broke a leg in the incident though he was "several metres (yards)" from the pope, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told AFP, adding that the prelate was rushed to hospital. The woman is in the custody of the Vatican police, the ANSA news agency reporte...

Deck the pools: Festive divers work at an aquarium in Manila As the lights were switched on in Trafalgar Square last night – and we all start thinking of getting ours in this weekend – other countries were creating their eye-catching variations. The smallest would be pretty tricky to decorate – because it measures less than half the width of a human hair. Little bit of fun: This silicon tree is 0.04mm wide It is made from silicon with an ion beam, normally used on silicon chips, at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory. Meanwhile, Mexico City has gone to the other extreme, hoping to enter the record books with a tree that towers 90m (295ft) over shoppers – beating Rio de Janeiro’s 82m (270ft) effort. Dizzying: Mexico City’s 90m tree dwarfs the traffic passing by Big in another sense is the effort standing in New York’s Rockefeller Center. It has been bedecked with a dazzling 30,000 lights. But lights would be a fairly risky decoration for the tree ...

The "invention" of language is not known except for references in the Bible. It is not known what language Adam and Eve spoke. The first mention of different languages is the reference to the tower of Babel when different tongues were bestowed. The invention of writing, however, is credited to the Sumerians of Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC. Their descendants, the Sumero-Babylonians, developed the time system that we use today: an hour divided into 60 minutes, which are divided into 60 seconds. Today, there are more than 2 700 different languages spoken in the world, with more than 7 000 dialects, most of which are catalogued by the Ethnologue language dictionary. In Indonesia alone, 365 different languages are spoken. More than 1,000 different languages are spoken in Africa. The most difficult language to learn is Basque, which is spoken in north-western Spain and south-western France. It is not related to any other language in the world. Mandarin is the most spoke...

A lovely and useful confectionary, chocolate, is rich with charms itself. Since the first time people discovered chocolate, it has become a hit among those who consider themselves as chocolate lovers or chocoholics. Nowadays, chocolate is more than food and superb desserts, human’s creativities bring to an idea of transforming chocolate into unusual things. 1. Chocolate Spa Hershey, American’s largest chocolate company, has created an exotic and sublime spa at THE HOTEL HERSHEY where you can unwind your tensions and enjoy chocolate without gaining more calories. The Chocolate Spa is located in Hershey, Pennsylvania and more than its beautiful view that attracts people, Hershey provides extraordinary therapies with ingredient for innovative spa treatments such as the Whipped Cocoa Bath, Cocoa Butter Scrub and Chocolate Fondue Wrap. All are worth indulgence. The sweet and bitter spa has made itself to perfection with several ways of chocolate treatments; Chocolate Foundue Wrap,...

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot. Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country. We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a...

By Robert Fisk What we found inside the Palestinian camp at ten o'clock on the morning of September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to re-tell in the cold prose of a medical examination. There had been medical examinations before in Lebanon, but rarely on this scale and never overlooked by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident - how easily we used the word "incident" in Lebanon - that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist activity. It was a war crime. Jenkins and Tveit were so overwhelmed by what we found in Chatila that at first we were unable to register our own shock. Bill Foley of AP had come with us. All he could say as he walked round was "Jesus Christ"...