Why Do Muslims Support the Palestinians?

This is an extract from Q&A in www.islam-online.net with regard to Palestine Israel conflict.

		Question and Answer Details Name of Questioner John- United Kingdom Title Why Do Muslims Support the Palestinians? Topic Human Rights Question Why do Muslims who are not Palestinians and not Arabs get so angry and worked up about what is happening in Gaza (Israel’s air strikes) now? Last time I checked, supporting Palestinians is not the sixth pillar of Islam. Date 30/Dec/2008 Name of Counsellor Shahul Hameed Answer Salam, John. Thank you for your question. The answer to the question can be simply put thus: It is because Islam more profoundly than any other religion has taught its followers to be the upholders of justice, that they cannot tolerate the kind of brutal injustice inflicted by the Israelis. And here is Allah’s command about justice: *{O you who believe! stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (of your hearts), lest you swerve, and if you distort (justice) or decline to do justice, verily Allah is well- acquainted with all that ye do.}* (An-Nisaa’ 4:135) This verse, among others, emphatically teaches Muslims to establish justice as witnesses for Allah (God). And Allah Almighty warns us against the tendency to follow our own lusts which may prompt us to avoid doing justice. Any sensible person can see that justice is the key to world harmony and peace. Indeed human equality and justice are the bases on which all human rights are founded. This is a fact acknowledged by all those who value human dignity. Whereas we can see that Zionism denies human equality, as it is founded on the racist idea that by birth the Children of Israel as “God’s Chosen People” are a cut above the rest of the world. They claim that the Land of Canaan (Palestine) is promised to them exclusively by none other than God Himself. In fact, their own Torah says that the Land of Canaan is given to Abraham’s “seed” (Genesis 17:8-9), who should reasonably include all the children of Abraham. But from the angle of Zionist interpretation, Abraham’s firstborn Ishmael and his children have no right to the Promised Land. What is funny is that the “secularist”, postmodern “civilized” world led by the self-styled upholders of “democracy, freedom and human rights” supports, for all practical purposes, the racist claim that YHWH (God) about four thousand years ago had granted to the Israelis exclusive right to Palestine now occupied by the Zionists. And the State of Israel illegally founded on Arab land in 1948 is allowed to hold hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs ransom. Their atrocities began with the massacre of over 250 Palestinian men, women and children of Deir Yassin committed by terrorist gangs led by Menachem Begin. And then on they brutally murdered thousands of Palestinian men, women and children and destroyed their homes, farms, shops, and other workplaces ignoring world criticism. In the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government inflicted collective punishments on the Palestinians such as curfews, house demolitions, and closure of roads, schools and community institutions. Hundreds of Palestinian activists were deported and tens of thousands of acres of Palestinian land were confiscated. Torture of Palestinian prisoners has been a common practice, and scores of people have died in detention from abuse or neglect. And Israel has built hundreds of settlements on Palestinian land and permitted hundreds of thousands of its own Jewish citizens to move there, defying international law. (Karen Armstrong: The Battle for God (Harper Collins, London, 2001).) The systematic occupation of more and more of Arab land by Israel has been going on all the while. It was made easy for Israel to do this by the United States. It is interesting to note that Israel goes on changing its border as it needs more and more land for its planned expansion at the expense of the Palestinians. The “Intifada” (the Uprising) and the recent “martyr-operations” of the Palestinians is the last ditch battle of a people for their basic human rights. But the world media distort the facts to tell the world a different story. The Americans who support the racist claims of Israel have no qualms at all in bankrolling and arming the Israelis to deny the Palestinians their birthright to their homeland. Speaking of the present siege of Gaza by Israel, Ramzi Kysia, a member of the Free Gaza Movement writes: “Because of the siege, eighty percent of families in Gaza are now dependent on international food aid just to be able to eat…. Running water is now available to most households for only four to six hours a day. Sewage treatment centers no longer function properly….The humanitarian condition of the one and a half million men, women, and children illegally incarcerated in Gaza is now at its worst point in the last forty years of Israeli occupation.” (Ramzi Kysia, Gaza: Breaking Into a Prison) Patrick O’Connor, an activist with International Solidarity Movement states about Gaza: “The conflict here is driven by the imprisonment of a people — the theft of their land and the denial of their basic rights. Israeli policies, and US complicity, are feeding desperation, and dimming hopes for achieving peace any time soon.” And now the Israelis have started bombing heavily populated residential neighborhoods in Gaza, massacring hundreds. And the “civilized” world looks the other way. The foregoing clearly highlights the plight of the Palestinians; and all dignified humans have a duty to uphold their cause. And the Muslims of the world – Arab or non-Arab – are proud to do this duty of supporting their hapless brothers and sisters in Palestine in their struggle for freedom. You can not just look for the external statements of creeds in assessing the worldview of a people. In order to understand what it is about Islam that makes Muslims such staunch supporters of the Palestinian cause, you have to first understand the essence of the teachings of Islam. The first pillar of Islam states that “there is no God other than Allah”. This essentially means that all humans created by the same One God, are one – that all humans are equal. And so there is no question of any Muslim worth his or her name acknowledging the claim of one set of people asserting that God has given them the right to trample on the rights of others. For this reason if any Muslim is complacent and quiet about the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians — and indeed, any racism of any kind — he or she effectively denies that God is One! And thus that person rejects the first and foremost creed of Islam. And also note that after the unity of humanity in general, comes the unity of those who acknowledge the essential unity of Divine Message as well as our accountability before Allah as the Final Judge of our life in this world. This in fact, is the religion of Islam taught by the prophets of God and perfected by the final Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). The world community of the followers of the final messenger of God, Muhammad, is known as the Muslim Ummah. And the Palestinians belong to the Muslim Ummah, and so their pain is our own pain. I hope this answers your question. Please keep in touch. Salam. Useful Links: Palestine Holocaust: What Can Religion Offer? The Biblical Roots of the Palestinian Problem The Palestinian Question When Mere Sympathy Doesn’t Do the Trick (Speak Up)

Read Microsoft Office 2007 files in Microsoft Office 2003

You are using Microsoft Office 2003 and your friend send you a file in docx format (products from Microsoft Office 2007).

To be able to open and view the docx file, you have to install this Microsoft Office 2007 compatibility pack. It can be downloaded from Microsoft website HERE.

How to store your bookmarks online

This might be the simple tip that I can share to all the netters.

If you have several computers (e.g. one at office, one at home), how do you want to syncronize all the bookmarks from both PCs?

There are a lot of online bookmark websites that you might subscribe to cater for this need. One of my favorite is Delicious.

The good about Delicious is I can tag bookmark to different catergories plus I can easily search the description about my bookmarks.

This tool is very useful if you would like to do extensive research using the internet.

Time Value of Money, A Revisit

One of my favorite topics apart from my digital gadgets is macro economy and financial system. I am an engineer by background and that my passion toward gadget is fully justified but my interest toward macro economy? How it can be…

I still recalled when I was in the final year of my college where I took Introduction to Finance. I scored the highest in the class and received public compliment from my lecturer at that time.

At that time, one of the concepts that were made for me to believe is the concept of “time value of money.” It is written in almost all financial textbooks. In simple words, what it means is, the price of a glass of soda in the future will always be higher than the price of it today. To put it in a formulae, it will be something like this:

Price of soda_{in the year 2030} = Price of soda_{in the year 2008} x (nominal interest rate)

From this concept, interest either nominal or effective should be accepted as part of our daily life.

But remember that this concept is different from the fundamental price escalation due to variance in supply and demand where it price escalation based on variance in supply and demand is fully justified throughout human civilization.

The time value of money that I explained above is solely with regard to the financial system related to money and its derivatives.

Before I finished my study at college, I was further fortified with this concept when I was sponsored to joint a summer business school program in Lee Iacocca Institute, Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

During the one and half month program, I was given the opportunity to meet top executives of multinational company, handle real life finance, marketing project with real company, visit United Nation offices and other Breton Wood institutions e.g. World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in New York and also New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) trading floor.

I fully accepted this concept until now and it is about to change.

From my research and I think almost everybody know this fact clearly which have to attend Finance class, it is:

“A critical point is that gold is always the same — an ounce of gold today is the same as it was 5000 years ago and the same as it will be in 5000 years time — whereas the US$ and all other forms of paper money are constantly changing. The US$, for example, might not exist in 20 years — let alone 5000 years — time, and even if it does exist it is certain to be a lot different than it is today.”

Excerpt from:

http://www.safehaven.com/article-3511.htm

This fact is proven by the fact that, almost everyone is advised by their so-called Financial Planner (aka insurance, unit trust marketing agent) to have some portion of their wealth in gold). They said it is because the gold will protect them in case of other investments e.g. stock, bond, etc do not yield good return.

Let’s now, try to understand the exact meaning from the above excerpt before we proceed further. It says the value of gold is always constant. Remember to read properly here  as “value of gold” not price of gold” because those two will give different contrasting meaning all together.

Price of gold might change as shown from the graph below:

You may get the price of gold against other currencies from this link, HERE.

Now let’s us further understand this.

The value of gold is always constant (as per the excerpt)

BUT

The price gold (as we can see from the above graph) is increasing

So what it actually tells us??

It is our currencies (aka money) that are decreasing (read also as inflation) in value while the gold maintains its value.

So here, we can conclude that time value of money does not apply to GOLD!

At this point, I want to draw our attention to what Islam preaches us. In Islam, all economic measurement e.g. the amount of zakat needs to be paid is always fixed to gold.

That’s how, Allah ensure the amount of zakat that I pay today for my net present wealth is equal to anyone 50 years before or after me pay for the same amount of my net present wealth. In other words, Islam practices justice to all humankind throughout time.

On the other hand, Islam strictly forbids the practice of riba (charging interest). In other words, Islam doesn’t recognize the concept of time value of money.

Now, I really can appreciate one beauty aspect of Islam…

In conclusion, I would say, we were forced to believe about this interest and time value of money concept so that those blood sucker banks and financial institutions can charge interest to us!

How to unload/uninstall Trend Micro OfficeScan without password

In my other posting, I did explain how to kill the Trend Micro OfficeScan processes (aka services).  You can read that HERE.

In this posting, I will explain how if you want to permanently remove/uninstall the not so useful anti-virus from your PC.

If you try to uninstall directly from the Add/Remove Program in the Control Panel, you will encounter a pop-up menu asking you to enter the password.  This posting will assist you in case you do not have the password for what ever reason.

Here’s a simple hack for that:

1. Search for Ofcscan.ini file. Normally the file is located in C:\Windows folder for Windows 95 and Windows 98, or C:\WINNT directory for Windows NT and Windows 2000. In newer operating system, the Ofcscan.ini can be saved in C:\Program Files\ folder.
2. Open the Ofcscan.ini file using Notepad for editing.
3. Search for the [INI_CLIENT_SECTION] section heading.
4. Locate the line starting with Uninstall_Pwd=. Comment the line (make it inactive by typing a # at the beginning of the line, i.e. #Uninstall_Pwd=…..
5. Insert a new line beneath the existing line as following:Uninstall_Pwd=70
6. Save the Ofcscan.ini file.
7. Try to uninstall Trend Microsoft OfficeScan again. When prompted to enter a password to continue to uninstall, enter 1 as the password.