Economic Jihad Spreads to Ireland; Shari’ah-Compliant Financial Services ‘Should’ Be Made Available to Muslims There as a Matter of Urgency
At this rate, capitalism will be dead in a short time. It took the West years to defeat communism. Western capitalism eventually won the day as it was seen to be superior. Indeed it was and still is superior. Islamic economics is now winning the day, though. And there has been no need of a Cold War, and no need for guns (or swords). All it has taken is intimidation of Westerners by an assertive Muslim population, a sense of subservience to the Gulf Arabs, especially the Saudis, ignorance of the true nature of Islam and its goals, a refusal to admit to the dangers of that faith, appeasement, meekness, and timidity on the part of Westerners who are afraid of confronting the ideology, a loss of belief in our own destiny, and a dogged determination on the part of our leaders and captains of industry NOT to call Islam what it actually is: A political system wrapped up in a deity.

The end of capitalism and liberty, dear readers, is nigh! - ©Mark

THE IRISH TIMES: THERE IS an “urgent need” for sharia-compliant financial services to be made available in Ireland so that Muslims living here do not contravene religious teachings, representatives from Irish financial institutions were told at a seminar on Islamic banking yesterday.

The seminar was held at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland (ICCI), which is based at Ireland’s largest Sunni mosque in Clonskeagh, Dublin.

“We organised this conference because there is an urgent need for the Muslim community here to have mortgages and other financial services that do not drive them to break their Islamic teachings,” said Ali Selim, a theologian and secretary to Imam Hussein Halawa of the ICCI.

During yesterday’s seminar Imam Halawa outlined the religious tenets of Islam that forbid the payment or receipt of interest, known as riba.

Representatives from the Arab Banking Corporation’s London subsidiary and the Islamic Bank of Britain gave presentations on how the market for Islamic finance has developed in the UK in recent years.

Several high street banks in Britain now offer a variety of sharia-compliant services, including mortgages.

One of the most common types is based on the Islamic principles of “diminishing musharaka” or diminishing ownership. Under this scheme, the customer and bank jointly acquire a property, with the customer’s share usually similar to the normal deposit, but the property is bought in the bank’s name only.

The customer makes monthly payments made up of rent and contributions towards the purchase price over an agreed period of time.

The amount of rent decreases as the customer’s share in the property increases. Ownership is transferred when the customer eventually buys out the bank.

Similar partnerships are available so Muslim business people in the UK can avoid interest repayments.

Mr Selim told the seminar that as Ireland’s Muslim population increased there would be more demand for such services here. Call for Sharia-Compliant Finance Services to Be Available in Ireland >>> By Mary Fitzgerald | May 30, 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback - UK)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback - UK)

The Silent Jihad Against the West
RIGHT SIDE NEWS: Anyone that cares to learn about what is going on in the world is familiar with active jihad, the "holy war", conducted with terrorism and directed at the modern world in general and western civilization more specifically. But there is also another form of jihad that is part of the deliberate effort to have Islam replace all concepts of morality and the values held dear by the rest of us.

The name of this silent "fifth column" effort is "Sharia Banking". Unfortunately, Sharia Banking is increasingly accepted by western banking institutions without any real understanding of what the Muslim goal is and what is at stake in the efforts by these institutions to attract more business, profits and money to bail them out of financial messes they brought upon themselves.

Islamic Sharia banking is coming to the United States and other western nations, thanks to global banks such as Citigroup, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Great Britain is now pledging to become the Islamic banking center of the world. Clearly the headlong rush by all global banks to enter the world of Islamic banking is well underway. Why do western banks seek to participate in Sharia banking; because it gives them a chance to enter the Islamic banking industry which has over $1.5 trillion available today and is growing at a steady and explosive rate of over 15% per year.

The implications for the west, and especially for the United States, are staggeringly destructive. Islamic banking working through global banks is doing for Islam what it could never do on its own: giving legitimacy to Sharia law and infiltrating it into the fabric of western society.

For those not familiar with Sharia Banking; it is a system which creates and sells services and products that are in strict accordance with Sharia law. Sometimes it is referred to in the Islamic culture as "Sharia finance". It dictates how the practices of banking, investment, bonds, loans, brokerage, etc, are to be conducted.

To insure compliance and to become "Sharia banking" compliant, banks must hire Sharia experts to review and approve each product and practice of the bank. This is known as "halal", which has been described as "the Muslim equivalent of kosher in Judaism." There is a shortage of such Sharia experts so there is competition among banks to find such experts to sit on their boards of directors. By having an "expert" involved in banking decisions, this provides the legitimacy to each banking decision because it is made at the director rather management level. However, most of these Sharia experts" are from the radical Wahhabi school of Islam in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and they hold views diametrically opposed to the basic values of Western civilization.

The Center for Security has identified some of the Sharia experts sitting on the boards of U.S. financial institutions. The top twenty "advisors" include many with conflicts of interests and anti-trust issues since they sit on boards of many Islamic banks at the same time. The Center for Security identifies a couple of advisors with ties to money-laundering and terrorism:

Yousuf Quaradawi who is prominent in the Muslim Brotherhood, owns two banks himself and has issued statements in support of Palestinian attacks on Israeli citizens and has issued rulings supporting Hamas and Hezbollah jihad attacks against Israel. The Silent Jihad Against the West >>> By Vincent Gioia | May 1, 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – USA)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardcover – USA)

God and Mammon
FORBES.COM: The notion of ethical investing goes back at least to 1758, when the Quakers banned profiting from the slave trade. But the market for ethical investments has always remained a niche. The goals of maximizing profit and fulfilling a moral agenda conflict more often than they complement one another, and investors who want to put ethics first have turned out to be relatively few. "Socially responsible investing," or SRI, as it is called these days, has never captured the heart of Wall Street.

That could be changing. Finance that complies with Sharia, or Islamic law, is still a niche within the ethical investing niche. In all, there are at least $500 billion worth of Islamic finance assets worldwide. That's not much in terms of global banking--U.S. banks alone hold about $12.7 trillion in assets, according to the American Bankers Association.

But the industry's growth is eye-catching: Islamic banking has expanded by more 10% annually over the past decade, according to Standard & Poor's. It's grabbing the attention of some of the biggest banks in the world, and changing how they do business. God and Mammon >>> By Elisabeth Eaves | April 21, 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback - UK)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback - UK)

Jihad with Money
THE SPECTATOR – Melanie Phillips: Alex Alexiev on National Review Online sets out the reasons why sharia finance — described by Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi as ‘jihad with money’ — is a serious threat to the west:

The legitimization of sharia in the West and its gradual imposition in Muslim communities and beyond is a key objective of sharia finance, and there is no doubt it has already made huge strides. …

Notably, for those Muslims who cannot engage in physical jihad using force of arms, sharia requires that they support jihad financially. This is what sharia finance is all about.

Far from being a legitimate investment vehicle, sharia finance facilitates religiously sanctioned support for terrorist organizations — as well as providing radical Islamists with highly paid sinecures as sharia-finance board advisors in the sanctum sanctorum of capitalism, all the while that they are pursuing a subversive campaign to destroy it.

Predictably, none of this is even remotely disclosed by any of the dozens of Western banks promoting sharia finance today, which obviously exposes them to huge non-disclosure risks ranging from fraudulent misrepresentation, to material support for terrorism.

And not disclosed either by Gordon Brown, whose stated ambition is to make London the global centre of Islamic banking (reported to be yet another brilliant wheeze from Ed Balls). Of all the manifestations of the Islamisation of the west (see this piece by Dan Rabkin on the acceleration of Londonistan) sharia finance is perhaps the most deadly, because it effectively sells the west to Islam, and the most difficult to stop — because for the financiers and politicians in the west who are thus selling it, all they can see are the trillions of dollar and pound signs being dangled enticingly before their eyes. [Source: Jihad with Money By Melanie Phillips]

Cross-posted at A New Dark Age Is Dawning

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback)