By Ilyas Choudry, MMNS Houston Correspondent

This past Monday and Thursday, Helping Hand For Relief & Development (HHRD) sent from Houston five 40-Feet Long Containers to Pakistan, containing Survival Kits, Food Items, Hygiene Kits, Medicines, Sleeping Bags, Comforters, Utensils & Household Items, Winter Clothing, and much more. The weekend on Saturday, September 18, 2010 between 11am and 6pm, a sixth container will be prepared.

“The way Houstonians of all backgrounds have come forward on our appeal, it seems that we at Helping Hand For Relief & Development will be sending more than three large containers of goodies to the flood ravaged Pakistan. Due to the coverage given by mainstream American media about HHRD’s efforts, we have received donations from people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. Our In-Kind Donation Center located at 11955 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77099 has remained been inundated with the relief items and despite loading two containers, people keep filling up our In-Kind Donation Center. We will keep sending containers as long as we keep getting donations. Some monetary assistance is needed to ship these containers.”

These were the sentiments shared by Maaz Adil, Musab Abdali, ILyas Choudry, and Maaz Hasan of Helping Hand USA South Central Region.

For more information, one can reach them at (713) 984-4558 or mail your donation checks to Mailing Address: P. O. Box 571492, Houston, Texas 77257 or visit www.ReliefForPakistan.Org.

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By Parvez Fatteh, Founder of http://sportingummah.com, sports@muslimobserver.com

Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic was transferred from Barcelona to A.C. Milan last week. The deal was officially a one year loan with the option to purchase. Just one year ago Ibrahimovic had been sent from Inter Milan to Barcelona in a celebrated move for Samuel E’to. But Ibra never got settled in Barcelona, encountering lack of success on the pitch and much criticism off of it. And ultimately, he developed a reputation, perhaps unfairly, for being moody and inconsistent. This reputation was further underscored after he quit international competition for Sweden after they were eliminated from World Cup qualification last fall.

Ibrahimovic is the product of a Bosnian father and a Croatian mother, but he was born and raised in Malmo, Sweden, a city that has one of the largest Muslim populations in all of Europe. He went on to star for such big football clubs as Ajax in Holland and Juventus in Italy, before moving on to Inter Milan. His transfer from Inter Milan to Barcelona last year holds the record for the second highest transfer fee, 69 million euros, in football history. And at one time last year, Ibrahimovic and another player, Kaka of Real Madrid, were the two highest paid football players in the entire world.

Well, he has now been sent back to the fashion capital of Italy, with a chance to rehabilitate his career and resuscitate his image. The reported purchase price is 24 million euros should Milan choose to keep him permanently. Ibrahimovic seems happy with the move, and he has since resumed playing for Sweden in international competition, which seems to have lifted his spirits as well. Perhaps this change of scenery will give the talented striker a chance to remind everyone that it was not too long ago that he was one of the most feared goal-scorers in the whole world.

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By Nadia B. Ahmad

A small church in Gainesville, Florida has planned to burn the Quran in commemoration of the ninth anniversary of September 11th.

The planned Quran burning at the Dove World Outreach Center, led by Pastor Terry Jones, has caused a ruckus at home and abroad.

Yet the actual long-term impact of this planned Quran burning remains to be seen. Critics fear that this brazen act of hate and bigotry can pave the way for more incidents of anti-Muslim discrimination and perhaps violence.

Further, General David Petraeus in a statement warned that burning Qurans “is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems – not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”

Angry protesters in Kabul have already condemned the planned Quran burning, lashing out against the U.S. and demanding the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.

In Gainesville and across other U.S. cities, though, the planned Quran burning has prompted a flurry in interfaith dialogue and calls for peace and tolerance.

On September 2nd, twenty religious leaders on behalf of Muslims, Christians, and Jews stood together in solidarity on the steps of Gainesville City Hall to decry the proposed Quran burning. 

The Rev. Milford Lewis Griner, the pastor at Hall Chapel United Methodist Church in Rochelle, called for the community to “rise up with boldness and swift determination and show forth love, peace and understanding at this time in our history. Let it be declared that we stood together and spoke and prayed as one community and collectively became a new biblical David that brought down a new and threatening Goliath with a spiritual stone of humanity.”

Gainesville Mayor Craig Lowe at the city commission meeting also issued a proclamation declaring September 11th as “Interfaith Solidarity Day.”

In addition, the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church and Trinity United Methodist Church in Gainesville will be holding interfaith events to promote unity, understanding, and hope.

A group called the Gainesville Muslim Initiative has planned a series of counter events, which include lectures at the University of Florida about the Quran, an interfaith vigil, and open house events at the local masajid.

On September 4, Muslims hosted an iftar program for local community leaders, city commission members, religious leaders and University of Florida officials at the Hoda Center in Gainesville.

Meanwhile, officials at the University of Florida are concerned that the Quran burning event, which has garnered worldwide media attention, could have a negative impact on the university image as accepting of diversity and promoting tolerance and understanding.

“It’s important that Gainesville be recognized as a welcoming place for people of diverse backgrounds, interests and abilities,” UF President Bernie Machen told The Gainesville Sun, “That’s what makes this a great place.”

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By Dr. Phillip L. Kushner, Cryptome.org

The current opinion in some circles, mostly in the United States, is that at some point in the near future , the growing  imposition of devastating economic sanctions on Iran will hopefully convince its radical religious leaders to terminate their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Also, there is the growing hope that the CIA- funded Iranisn Green Movement will overthrow, a la the Ukrainian Orange Revolution’ and replace the Muslim fundamentalist  regime, or at the very least find the means to modify and secularize the regime’s ideological extremism. It is also possible that disrupting operations  now being implemented by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers—programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through physical sabotage and, upon occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists—will have derailed Iran’s progress towards achieving the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.

It is now planned in Tel Aviv that senior Israeli officials, representing both their political and military establishments, will come to Washington for conferences both with their American counterparts and, eventually, with President Obama. These conversations, which have been carefully planned and scripted, will have the Israelis advising their American counterparts that they are planning an attack, nuclear or non-nuclear as the situation develops, on Iran because a nuclear Iran poses the ‘gravest threat since Hitler’ to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe that  by launching a preemptive strike at all possible Iranian sites suspected of participation in their nuclear program they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years,. Further, talking-point secret Israeli memos state: Israel will inform their American counterparts that Israel has no other choice than to launch this attack. They will not ask for permission for this attack, because it will soon be too late to ask for permission.

Insofar as President Obama is concerned, the Israelis are considering the most important point of these interviews would be to discover as to what would be the circumstances under which President Obama would move to halt the Iranian projects. The primary point, then,  is to convince the Americans that only military force, i.e., heavy bombing raids, would be able to “totally obliterate Iran’s attempts to get a nuclear weapon and, further, to prevent them from rebuilding their infrastructure in the foreseeable future.” From the Israeli point of view, all of their future actions, which also include the use of their own nuclear weapons on Tehran depends entirely upon the answers, primarily of the President but also of the American military leadership.

Also, in the possible event that the American President were to agree fully with Israeli wishes, i.e., to use American aircraft to obliterate the perceived Iranian threat by bombing specific, and even general, Iranian targets, could an Israeli-sponsored domestic American propaganda campaign to encourage sections of the American public, outside of the fully-cooperative Jewish community, to support such an American attack.

At the present time, it is well-established that Israeli agents, Mossad and others, have inserted themselves into all the instruments of power and propaganda in the United States where they have sent any pertinent information to Israel and kept up a steady offensive against the minds, and wills, of the American people. Also, many of the more prominent American newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post are entirely Jewish-owned, the former is stated to be the most receptive to the needs of both Washington and Tel Aviv.

Israel is fully prepared to take a chance on permanently alienating American affection in order to make a high-risk attempt at stopping Iran. If Iran retaliates against American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, the consequences for Israel’s relationship with America’s military leadership could be catastrophic.

It has been seriously discussed in Tel Aviv and in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, that probably the best way to compel the American public and through them, the President, to unilateral action,would not be to launch an attack on Tehran  but instead, attack America through a false-flag operation. This would consist of a believable attack, or attempted attack, on a major American target a la the 9/11 Saudi-supported attacks.

The most current plan would be for a known militant Arab anti-Israel group, Hezbollah, to actually deliver an atomic device to the city of New York, or, alternatively, to Washington.

The American Central Intelligence Agency, now seeking to reshape its negative image, would report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation the exact details of the arrival and placement of the bomb.

The actual bomb would be genuine but would have a part that was malfunctioning, thus rendering the weapon impossible to detonate. The Arabs involved in this delivery would have in their number, a Yemeni Jew, such as the ones that instigated the 9/11 Saudi attacks, and this sleeper would carry numerous forged documents “proving” that Tehran was directly behind this planned attack.

Revelation of these documents by the fully-supportive New York Times and Washington Post would immediately swing a significant bulk of the American public behind an immediate attack on Tehran with the purpose of neutralizing its atomic weapons capacity.

This program is now on the table and undercover Israeli agents, posing as top-level Iranian operatives, have located a small group of Hizbollah in Lebanon who would be willing to deliver and prepare this device in New York or, as an alternative, Washington itself. Israeli intelligence feels that the use of Hizbollah personnel would entirely justify their obliterating Hizbollah-controlled territory in southern Lebanon that now house many thousands of long-range surface to surface missiles that could easily reach Tel Aviv and other vital Israeli targets.

This action, which has already been planned in detail, would be conducted by Israel alone and would compliment the projected American attack on Tehran. Israel stresses the fact that both attacks must be simultaneous lest a forewarned  Hezbollah launch rocket attacks on Israel upon hearing of the American attack. Timing here is considered to be absolutely vital. 

Both Israel and Hezbollah have accused UNIFIL of bias. Israel again accused them of failing to prevent, and even collaborating with, Hezbollah in its replenishment of military power. Hezbollah, in turn, said "certain contingents" of UNIFIL (i.e., the French)are spying for, if not assisting, Israel.

Israel has long been a serious planning for a future invasion of Lebanon and such an assault would continue attacking until both Hezbollah’s membership and their system of tunnels and bunkers was completely destroyed, because Israel will never tolerate a "zone of invulnerability" occupied by a sworn enemy, or a double threat posed by Hezbollah’s rockets.

In the event that Israeli military aircraft attack Tehran, there is the vital necessity that these Israeli military aircraft would be under great pressure to return to base at once because Israeli intelligence believes that Iran would immediately order Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israeli cities, and Israeli air-force resources would be needed to hunt Hezbollah rocket teams.

Israel’s Northern Command, at his headquarters near the Lebanese border, is ordered that in the event of a unilateral Israeli or American strike on Iran, their mission would be to attack and completely destroy any and all identified Hezbollah rocket forces, by any and all means necessary, to include small nuclear devices that could destroy a number of square miles of what is called ‘terrorist territory’ and render it useless as any future base of attack against Israel. At the present time the Iranians are keeping their Hezbollah firm ally  in reserve until Iran can cross the nuclear threshold.

During  the four years since the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon Hezbollah has greatly increased its surface-to-surface missile capability, and an American/Israeli strike on Iran, would immediately provoke all-out retaliation by Iran’s Lebanese subsidiary, Hezbollah, which now possesses, by most Israeli/American intelligence estimates, as many as 45,000 surface-to-surface rockets—at least three times as many as it had in the summer of 2006, during the last round of fighting between the group and Israel. It is further known that  Russia has sent large numbers of longer range surface-to-surface missiles to Syria which has, in turn, shipped them to Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. These missiles have the capacity to easily reach Tel Aviv and Israelis are very concerned that a massive rocket barrage deep into Israel could not only do serious damage to their infrastructure but could easily provoke a mass immigration of Israelis to other areas, thus depriving Israel of both civilian and military personnel it would certainly need in the event of increased Arab military actions against Israel.

Even if Israel’s Northern Command successfully combated Hezbollah rocket attacks in the wake of an Israeli strike, which American experts have deemed to be “nearly impossible” political limitations would not allow Israel to make repeated sorties over Iran. “America, too, would look complicit in an Israeli attack, even if it had not been forewarned. The assumption—that Israel acts only with the full approval of the United States is a feature of life in the Middle East, and it is one the Israelis are taking into account. A serious danger here to Israeli attack plans would be if the United States got wind of the imminence of such an attack and demanded that Israel cease and desist in its actions. Would Israel then stop? Though highly unlikely, this is an unpleasant and unacceptable.

At this time, the Israelis have drawn up specific plans to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and the Bushehr reactor, along with four other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program that have been identified by joint past and present Israeli-American aerial surveillance.

If Israeli aircraft succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, all well and good but even if  they fail to damage or destroy these targets ,such an attack is feared by American and other nations as risking a devastating change in the Middle East. Such an attack could initiate immediate reprisals such as a massed rocket attack by Hezbollah from southern Lebanon as well as other actions from neighboring Muslim states.

This could become a major diplomatic crisis for Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the international price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of seriously endangering Jewish groups around the world, and especially in the United States by making them the targets of Muslim-originated terror attacks and most certainly accelerating the growing immigration of many Israelis to what they felt might be much safer areas.

An Israeli political and military consensus has now emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by December of 2010. (Of course, it is in the Israeli interest to let it be known that the country is considering military action, if for no other reason than to concentrate the attention of the Obama administration. The Netanyahu government is already intensifying its analytic efforts not just on Iran, but on a subject many Israelis have difficulty understanding: President Obama.

The Israelis argue that Iran demands the urgent attention of the entire international community, and in particular the United States, with its unparalleled ability to project military force. This is the position of many moderate Arab leaders as well. if America allowed Iran to cross the nuclear threshold, the small Arab countries of the Gulf would have no choice but to leave the American orbit and ally themselves with Iran, out of self-protection. Several Arab leaders have suggested that America’s standing in the Middle East depends on its willingness to confront Iran. They argue, self-interestedly, that an aerial attack on a handful of Iranian facilities would not be as complicated or as messy as, say, invading Iraq. The basic question then is,why the Jewish state should trust the non-Jewish president of the United States to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.

For more than a year, these White House officials have parried the charge that their president is unwilling to face the potential consequences of a nuclear Iran, and they are frustrated by what they believe to be a caricature of his position. It is undeniably true, however, that the administration has appeared on occasion less than stalwart on the issue.

The current French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, himself a Hungarian Jew,has criticized Obama as a purveyor of baseless hope. At the UN Security Council last September, Sarkozy said, “I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good have proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map,” he said, referring to Israel. At Sarkozy’s demand, French UN forces in southern Lebanon are now “fully cooperative” with Israeli intelligence, passing to them any and all important information about current Hezbollah positions, personnel and residences.

Obama administration officials, particularly in the Pentagon, have several times signaled unhappiness at the possibility of military preemption. In April, the undersecretary of defense for policy, Michele Flournoy, told reporters that military force against Iran was “off the table in the near term.” She later backtracked, but Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also criticized the idea of attacking Iran. “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome,” he said in April. “In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.”

One question no administration official seems eager to answer is this: what will the United States do if sanctions fail?

In Israel, of course, officials expend enormous amounts of energy to understand President Obama, despite the assurances they have received from Emanuel, Ross, and others. Delegations from Netanyahu’s bureau, from the defense and foreign ministries, and from the Israeli intelligence community have been arriving in Washington lately with great regularity. As an alternative to cooperation by Obama, Israel, through her supporters and lobbyists in the United States are preparing to offer extensive financial and other incentives to political opponents of Obama, mostly the right-wing Republicans and American Christian groups and cults. Both of these groups are being cultivated currently with the idea that if Obama will not cooperate, the Republicans will in the future as they always have before. Also to consider is the current antipathy of American Jews for Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and these American Jews, who are, like the president they voted for in overwhelming numbers, generally supportive of a two-state solution, and dubious about Jewish settlement of the West Bank.

Both Israeli and American intelligence agencies are of the firm belief that Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability, which is the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device.. The Iranian regime, by its own statements and actions, has made itself Israel’s most zealous foe; and the most crucial component of Israeli national-security doctrine, a tenet that dates back to the 1960s, when Israel developed its own nuclear capability as a response to the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, is that no regional adversary should be allowed to achieve nuclear parity with the reborn and still-besieged Jewish state. the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons and the regime’s theologically motivated desire to see the Jewish state purged from the Middle East.

If Iran crossed the nuclear threshold, the very idea of Israel as a Zionist entity would be endangered. Instead of a gathering-in of Jews as Zionists desire, there would be growing exodus of Jews for safer areas.

Most critically if a Zionist Israel is no longer seen by its 6 million Jewish inhabitants and also by the approximately 7 millions of Jews resident outside of Israel that because of continuing threats from outside the country as no longer a natural safe haven for Jews then the entire concept of a Zionist haven/state is destroyed.

To understand why Israelis of different political dispositions see Iran as quite possibly the most crucial challenge they have faced in their 62-year history, one must keep in mind the near-sanctity, in the public’s mind, of Israel’s nuclear monopoly. The Israeli national narrative, in shorthand, begins with shoah, which is Hebrew for “calamity,” and ends with tkumah, “rebirth.” Israel’s nuclear arsenal symbolizes national rebirth, and something else as well: that Jews emerged from World War II having learned at least one lesson, about the price of powerlessness.

If Israel is unable to change Obama’s mind, they will continue to threaten to take unilateral action against Iran by sending approximately one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—by crossing Saudi Arabia, and along the border between Syria and Turkey, and, without consulting the Americans or in any way announcing their missions  by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)

The first belief by Israeli military planners is that Israel would get only one try. Israeli planes would fly low over Saudi Arabia, bomb their targets in Iran, and return to Israel by flying again over Saudi territory, possibly even landing in the Saudi desert for refueling, according to a U.S. DIA analysis, with secret Saudi cooperation.

Israel has been working through the United States to procure Saudi cooperation with an Israeli air strike against Tehran and other targets inside Iran.. The Saudis are treating this subject with great caution lest other Arab states learn of their putative cooperation in an Iranian attack with over flights of Saudi territory by Israeli military aircraft.

The current American/Israeli military plans are for the Saudis to turn off their radar after they have been noticed by the American embassy that an Israeli attack is imminent and also to permit the Israeli aircraft to land in their country for refueling The Israelis are not concerned with any kind of Iranian aircraft resistance because their airfields have been pinpointed by American satellites and one of the attacking groups would use low-yield atomic rocketry on all the identified Iranian bases. It is obvious that when, not if, the Saudis part in this becomes public, it will create immense ill-will in neighboring Muslim states, an impression the Saudi government is most anxious not to deal with. 

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

The reasoning offered by Israeli decision makers was uncomplicated: At the present moment, Israel possesses 135 nuclear weapons, most of them  mainly two-stage thermonuclear devices, capable of being delivered by missile, fighter-bomber, or submarine (two of which are currently positioned in the Persian Gulf). Netanyahu is worried about an entire complex of problems, not only that Iran, or one of its proxies, would, in all probability, destroy or severely damage Tel Aviv; like most Israeli leaders, he believes that if Iran gains possession of a nuclear weapon, it will use its new leverage to buttress its terrorist proxies in their attempts to make life difficult and dangerous; and that IsraelÂ’s status as a haven for Jews would be forever undermined, and with it, the entire raison d’être of the 100-year-old Zionist experiment.

Another question Israeli planners struggle with: how will they know if their attacks have actually destroyed a significant number of centrifuges and other hard-to-replace parts of the clandestine Iranian program? Two strategists told me that Israel will have to dispatch commandos to finish the job, if necessary, and bring back proof of the destruction. The commandos—who, according to intelligence sources, may be launched from the autonomous Kurdish territory in northern Iraq—would be facing a treacherous challenge, but one military planner I spoke with said the army would have no choice but to send them.

Netanyahu’s obvious course is to convince the United States  that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is obligated to grapple with it, not Israel alone. It is well-known that Israel by itself could not hope to deal with a retaliation against it by Iran and other Arab states but that a confederation of other nations, led, of course, by the United States could defend Israel against her enemies. The Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, does not place and credence in the current sanctions against Iran, even the ones initiated by the United States at Israel’s urgent request. Is it known that Netanayahu is not happy with President Obama’s reluctance to support an Israeli attack on Iran and has brought a great deal of political pressure to bear on the President by American Jewish political and business groups.   

Recently, the chief of Israeli military intelligence, Major General Amos Yadlin, paid a secret visit to Chicago to meet with Lester Crown, the billionaire whose family owns a significant portion of General Dynamics, the military contractor. Crown is one of Israel’s most prominent backers in the American Jewish community, and was one of Barack Obama’s earliest and most steadfast supporters. According to the highest level intelligence sources both in America and Israel, General Yadlin asked Crown to communicate Israel’s existential worries directly to President Obama.

Those close to him say that Netanyahu understands, however, that President Obama, with whom he has had a difficult and intermittently frigid relationship, believes that stringent sanctions, combined with various enticements to engage with the West, might still provide Iran with a face-saving method of standing down.

Israel’s current period of forbearance, in which Israel’s leadership waits to see if the West’s nonmilitary methods can stop Iran, will come to an end this December. Robert Gates, the American defense secretary, said in June at a meeting of NATO defense ministers that most intelligence estimates predict that Iran is one to three years away from building a nuclear weapon.

One of the consistent aims of Israel is to pressure President Obama, who has said on a number of occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran “unacceptable,” into executing a military strike against Iran’s known main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities. Barack Obama is steadfastly opposed to initiating new wars in the Middle East and an attack by U.S. forces on Iran is not a foreign-policy goal for him or his administration. The Israeli goal is to compel him by public, and private, pressure to order the American military into action against Iran

Barack Obama has said any number of times that he would find a nuclear Iran “unacceptable.” His most stalwart comments on the subject have been discounted by some Israeli officials because they were made during his campaign for the presidency, while visiting Sderot, the town in southern Israel that had been the frequent target of rocket attacks by Hamas. “The world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he said. “I will take no options off the table in dealing with this potential Iranian threat. And understand part of my reasoning here. A nuclear Iran would be a game-changing situation, not just in the Middle East, but around the world. Whatever remains of our nuclear nonproliferation framework, I think, would begin to disintegrate. You would have countries in the Middle East who would see the potential need to also obtain nuclear weapons.”

But the Israelis are doubtful that a man who positioned himself as the antithesis of George W. Bush, author of invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, would launch a preemptive attack on a Muslim nation.

If the Israelis reach the firm conclusion that Obama will not, under any circumstances, launch a strike on Iran, then the countdown will begin for a unilateral Israeli attack.

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In fluid dynamics, wind waves or, more precisely, wind-generated waves are surface waves that occur on the free surface of oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, and canals or even on small puddles and ponds. They usually result from the wind blowing over a vast enough stretch of fluid surface. Some waves in the oceans can travel thousands of miles before reaching land. Wind waves range in size from small ripples to huge rogue waves. When directly being generated and affected by the local winds, a wind wave system is called a wind sea. After the wind ceases to blow, wind waves are called swell. Or, more generally, a swell consists of wind generated waves that are not — or hardly — affected by the local wind at that time. They have been generated elsewhere, or some time ago. Wind waves in the ocean are called ocean surface waves.

Tsunamis are a specific type of wave not caused by wind but by geological effects. In deep water, tsunamis are not visible because they are small in height and very long in wavelength. They may grow to devastating proportions at the coast due to reduced water depth.

The great majority of large breakers one observes on a beach result from distant winds. Five factors influence the formation of wind waves:

    * Wind speed
    * Distance of open water that the wind has blown over (called the fetch)
    * Width of area affected by fetch
    * Time duration the wind has blown over a given area
    * Water depth

All of these factors work together to determine the size of wind waves. The greater each of the variables, the larger the waves. Waves are characterized by:

    * Wave height (from trough to crest)
    * Wavelength (from crest to crest)
    * Period (time interval between arrival of consecutive crests at a stationary point)
    * Wave propagation direction

Waves in a given area typically have a range of heights. For weather reporting and for scientific analysis of wind wave statistics, their characteristic height over a period of time is usually expressed as significant wave height. This figure represents an average height of the highest one-third of the waves in a given time period (usually chosen somewhere in the range from 20 minutes to twelve hours), or in a specific wave or storm system. Given the variability of wave height, the largest individual waves are likely to be about twice the reported significant wave height for a particular day or storm.

Some waves undergo a phenomenon called “breaking”. A breaking wave is one whose base can no longer support its top, causing it to collapse. A wave breaks when it runs into shallow water, or when two wave systems oppose and combine forces. When the slope, or steepness ratio, of a wave is too great, breaking is inevitable.

Individual waves in deep water break when the wave steepness — the ratio of the wave height H to the wavelength λ— exceeds about 0.17, so for H > 0.17 λ. In shallow water, with the water depth small compared to the wavelength, the individual waves break when their wave height H is larger than 0.8 times the water depth h, that is H > 0.8 h.[4]Waves can also break if the wind grows strong enough to blow the crest off the base of the wave.

Three main types of breaking waves are identified by surfers or surf lifesavers. Their varying characteristics make them more or less suitable for surfing, and present different dangers.

    * Spilling, or rolling: these are the safest waves on which to surf. They can be found in most areas with relatively flat shorelines. They are the most common type of shorebreak
    * Plunging, or dumping: these break suddenly and can “dump” swimmers—pushing them to the bottom with great force. These are the preferred waves for experienced surfers. Strong offshore winds and long wave periods can cause dumpers. They are often found where there is a sudden rise in the sea floor, such as a reef or sandbar.
    * Surging: these may never actually break as they approach the water’s edge, as the water below them is very deep. They tend to form on steep shorelines. These waves can knock swimmers over and drag them back into deeper water.

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By Siddiq Ather

What do you think makes Stanford unique in comparison to other top tier schools?

The level of acceptance is truly remarkable. People go out of their way to make you feel welcome, and are they enjoy hearing about other peoples’ cultural and religious views.

How is life and culture on campus?

There is definitely a significant amount of stress, yet students try their best not to show it. The parable I have heard is that students are like ducks in a pond, they look calm above the surface but below they are waddling uncontrollably.

How would you describe your freshman year at Stanford?

Personally it was difficult for me to adjust to such a different environment. Coming from a small private Islamic school, I was accustomed to a certain regimen. I was used to things falling into place for me, but when I arrived at Stanford, I found that there was a lot out there that I had never been exposed to.

Any advice for high school students who want to get into top tier schools?

Focus on a meaningful experience in high school, and stick to it throughout application essays. There is only so much you can do with your GPA and ACT score, but what will separate you from others is the way you express yourself, whether it is in an essay or an interview. Whether you focus on a sport or a club activity, make sure it was your most meaningful experience in high school.

Any words of experience for new college freshman?

Do not listen to anyone who tells you that freshman year is easy and that they are not struggling. Every single person faces a certain struggle, and by thinking that you’re the only one struggling, it makes you feel left behind. You and every other freshman on campus have trouble with something, so focus on improving that weakness. Also, prepare yourself mentally for the challenges that you will face, because college is not like high school.

How active and helpful is the Muslim community at Stanford?

The upperclassmen were extremely helpful, but make sure you ask them for their help. Some of the older students will approach you, but many times you have to take the initiative. They gave me and other freshmen advice on coping with studies, dealing with teachers, what classes to take, and so on. They have experience and students should take advantage of them.

How does being Muslim affect your student life?

In terms of studying, being Muslim does not get in the way. But when it comes to the social aspect of student life, being Muslim keeps you out of trouble. Every weekend you will find plenty of parties, but during this time the Muslims are out with each other, keeping each other away from harm. Prayer is also extremely helpful because while many people might see it as an impediment, it keeps you on schedule.

Any tips on balancing studying, sleeping, and socializing?

Make studying your number one priority, and only after you are completely done with studies, then you can enjoy your time socializing. Many times you underestimate the workload you are given, and it comes back to affect you, especially in terms of sleep. And when your sleep cycle is affected, it affects your entire week. Sleep should be consistent, and not more than seven or less than six hours a day. Sleep is actually extremely important and people sometimes ignore it, but it affects performance in the long run.

How do you suggest using your summer before college?

I would suggest that you enjoy the summer before college because every summer afterwards will be spent doing something work-related.

What character traits do you believe will help you succeed in college?

Persistency is a good trait to have. When you feel like you have been working for hours and can’t do anymore, persistency will get you through your work. It is also good to be persistent when it comes to asking for help, whether it is from teachers or a friend. If the teacher is not answering your question, make sure you keep asking until you get what you want.

How do you stay upbeat when work starts to pile up?

Just remember that in twenty years it’s not going to matter whether you get an A or a B in Chemistry. If you do not plan on going to graduate school, grades are not the most important thing. If you do plan on going to graduate school, just remember that you will get in with the help of Allah alone. This does not mean you sit back and do not work, but as long as you put forth the effort, remember that the rest is in the hands of Allah.

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By Mark Steel

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, executive director of the Cordoba Initiative, at a hotel in Abu Dhabi August 29, 2010. Rauf was in the UAE on a funded tour as part of an outreach effort by the US State Department to promote religious tolerance. Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative is building a Muslim cultural centre, which currently faces an emotional campaign to block it by conservative politicians and families of the Sept. 11 2001 attacks. REUTERS/Leo Hoagland/The National

Try telling people there are no plans to build a mosque at Ground Zero. You’ll get nowhere, although the truth is there are plans to build an Islamic centre, with a swimming pool open to everyone, two blocks away from Ground Zero.

If this is a continuation of the terrorist agenda, as claimed, it is a peculiar plan and Bin Laden must have started by telling his followers: “First we will destroy their buildings – and then, ooh, it’s so deliciously evil, we will get people to swim near to where the buildings were …”

The centre will include a memorial to victims of the attack on the towers but Sarah Palin has called upon “peaceful Muslims” to reject the building – a centre that commemorates the victims of 9/11.

Doesn’t that make her the extremist? She’s certainly got the experience of being filmed with rifles – she is probably sitting by one right now, leaning into a camera and booming, “The front crawl is the agenda of the infidel, my friends.”

The centre will also include a basketball court but that doesn’t convince these people because it won’t be proper basketball, it will be Muslim basketball.

There’s bound to have been some senator on Fox News howling: “Now, you imagine you’ve got the tallest Muslims learning to jump up high – next time you want to bring down a tower you don’t have to fly planes to do it, you just get these guys to jump up with whatever bomb they’ve smuggled in through Mexico and whack, you’ve got 5 million dead.”

And the centre is two blocks away from Ground Zero which, in Manhattan, is another district. So how far away is it permissible to be Muslim?

Maybe there should be specific guidelines – three blocks away before you can whistle anything by Cat Stevens, five blocks away before you can stop eating during Ramadan.

One persistent argument of those who oppose the mosque (that isn’t a mosque) on Ground Zero (that won’t be on Ground Zero) is that Ground Zero should remain a special place of sombre tranquillity.

So, instead of this centre there should be more buildings such as the Pussycat Club, which is next door to where the towers were and boasts of being the area’s premier strip joint.

But that must be in keeping with the sombreness, presumably because the girls slide down the pole to honour the heroic firefighters of that fateful day.

Then there are the salesmen who hover around Ground Zero. As you contemplate the site, someone stands soulfully beside you, taps your shoulder and opens a leather-bound collection of photos of the towers on fire.

“Hi, I’m offering souvenirs of 9/11,” I was told when I was there. What are you supposed to say to that? “Ooh, yes, you’ve caught the contrast between the fire and the clouds on that one, what a delightful shade of crimson”?

A philosophical argument against the new building came from Mark Williams, chairman and spokesman for the Tea Party, who said: “The mosque would be for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey god.”

To start with, he appears to have mixed up Islam with Hinduism. When he finds out he might change his mind and say, “Oh, silly me, well in that case go ahead with the mosque, it’s Hindus I have a problem with – it’s all to do with being squeamish about monkeys.”

Similarly, Newt Gingrich, who hopes to be Republican candidate for President, says: “The folks who want to build this mosque are radical Islamists.”

And this is where they’re more honest, because they seem to believe all Muslims are terrorists. In which case they don’t really care where a mosque or Islamic centre is built.

There’s a section of America that hates Muslims and those like Palin and Gingrich are delighted to lead them.

According to a recent survey, 24 per cent of America believes that Barack Obama is Muslim and Tea Party politicians promote that nonsense.

Obama seems willing to try and placate characters such as Palin but he might be better off saying, “Alright then – nothing Islamic near Ground Zero but that principle applies to everything.

“We’re withdrawing every branch of McDonald’s and Starbucks from Vietnam, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama or anywhere else we’ve ever bombed.”

New Zealand Herald

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By Tom Hussain, The National

ISLAMABAD–Malik Riaz Hussain, a billionaire Pakistani developer, has responded to the misery of millions of his flood-stricken compatriots by pledging to spend 75 per cent of his fortune on rebuilding their lives.

The extraordinary offer was made in a television interview in which he told how he had sent a letter before the floods to 100 of Pakistan’s most wealthy and powerful people asking them to pool money into a fund to repair homes, provide vocational training and extend microfinance loans to impoverished Pakistanis.

Mr Hussain is the chairman of Bahria Town, a US$6 billion (Dh22bn) urban development enterprise that has built gated communities for a million people in the central cities of Lahore and Rawalpindi.

Bahria Town has already responded to the current floods by vastly expanding a corporate social responsibility programme called dastarkhwan, or dining spread, to provide two meals a day to more than 150,000 flood refugees in inundated areas and free medical care at mobile hospitals.

Its housing projects, unrivalled in Pakistan as models of highly desirable but affordable suburban living, have revolutionised Pakistan’s real-estate sector over the last decade by targeting the previously untapped middle class, rather than the rich.

The huge popularity of the Bahria Town brand has made Mr Hussain, at the age of 62, one of a handful of Pakistanis believed to be billionaires in US dollar terms, although this cannot be verified as he has never released his tax records.

A man of unremarkable origins, Mr Hussain espouses traditional family values, and has expressed them in the modern family-friendly suburbs he has built.

Reproductions of famous landmarks, such as London’s Trafalgar Square, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, point to his aspirations for Pakistan, while beautiful mosques and Quranic calligraphy suggest that modernity is in harmony with Muslim beliefs.

Drawing on that experience, and with a fleet of 2,500 earth-moving machines, Mr Hussain sees the reconstruction of the almost one million homes destroyed or damaged in the floods as a matter of numbers.

Nearly all the destroyed homes have been simple two-room mud-brick constructs belonging to the poor that, by his reckoning, would cost 300,000 rupees each to rebuild, with enough left over to buy a few head of livestock.

“That’s all it will take to give them back their lives,” he said.

Mr Hussain quickly calculates aloud the math and remarks that the requisite $3.5bn could easily be raised if Pakistan’s wealthy elite, named in his list of letter recipients, were to match his pledge of donating 75 per cent of his wealth with half of their personal fortunes.

However, his letter was not written as a desperate appeal to their better nature.

Rather, it issues a stern warning that the floods could exacerbate social tensions between Pakistan’s moneyed elite, a tiny percentage of the country’s 170 million people, and the impoverished half of the population that the United Nations said did not know where their next meal was coming from.

In the letter, Mr Hussain said the ostentatious lifestyles of Pakistan’s wealthy and their indifference to the plight of the poor were disturbingly reminiscent of social conditions before the French and Iranian revolutions, which occurred nearly 200 years apart.

“It is time that we realise our duty towards Pakistan. If we are unable to see the imminent consequences of our continued ignorance, I am scared that not only our families, but also our businesses, will fuel a bloody revolution,” Mr Hussain wrote.

“This is a clear warning to land barons, politicians, bureaucrats and industrialists to shed their sloth and wake up before all is lost, and there is no place to hide.”

Mr Hussain is not a conspiracy theorist; his prediction is based on his experience of housing orphan students from the Jamia Hafsa seminary in Islamabad, the setting in July 2007 for a bloody stand-off between security forces and militant clerics that ended in the deaths of more than 100 people.

The deaths of the students, many of them children from the Swat valley, caused nationwide outrage, decisively turned public opinion against Gen Pervez Musharraf, then the president, and ignited a Taliban insurgency that, until the success of military counteroffensives last year, threatened to overwhelm the government.

Mr Hussain says he has been deeply disappointed that his letter has failed to evince a single response to date, and is unhappy that his offer to place the Bahria Town fleet of earth-moving machinery at the government’s disposal has been ignored. “I have stepped in to help my people, but I cannot do this alone,” he said
But he is not a man accustomed to taking no for an answer, and has vowed to lobby those who have been sent the letter.

“At this time, what I need is support from fellow Pakistanis who, like me, have earned a fortune from the motherland and are indebted to it,” he said.

“Trust me, it’s time to pay back to our country.”

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