Monday, February 9, 2015

The New York Times Mahathir Inspiring leadership in Islam unlike Najib has an Appetite for woman and expensive champagne

The New York Times found in an investigation
Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak has "received an inheritance" which is his source of wealth, a statement from his office reportedly said.In early 2010, a young Malaysian financier named Jho Low began making some very expensive real estate deals in the United States.First, a shell company connected to Mr. Low,

The New York Times found in an investigation
Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak has "received an inheritance" which is his source of wealth, a statement from his office reportedly said.In early 2010, a young Malaysian financier named Jho Low began making some very expensive real estate deals in the United States.First, a shell company connected to Mr. Low,
So in Malaysia, the Chinese are rich, Indians are rich and Malays are rich. Only the the Muslims are poor. Do you agree, Mahathir? ask Malaysian financier named Jho Low


Mr Prime Minister, is this what you meant by “concrete and rational excuses why GST should be implemented”? So that you can continue to channel huge amount of public funds into 1MDB? How is that in line or has anything to do with the people and national aspiration? To begin with, GLCs lack accountability, have no profit motive or the kind of incentive that private companies are subjected to. That is, to produce goods and services that consumers want, at the lowest possible costs. The comfort of the government’s backing - the availability of subsidized funds and the largesse in the pricing of government’s contracts – works to the detriment of and undermines productivity, and worst still, is subject to gross abuse.




In lieu this publicity, people in Malaysia are asking where Zhen Low is getting all this money to waste on Paris Hilton. And Low's father is not happy with all this unwanted publicity back at home. He is the brother of notorious partyboy Taek Jho Low, who may or may not be an arms dealer according to press reports. Nothing like a good champagne ordering contest to spice up your vacation. Low won, with the $2.6 million bill but people back at home are questioning his lifestyle and businesses. Anyway, Zhen (or Taek) should keep in the back of his mind the fact that all the money on Earth can't cure herpes. All I see in these photos is a topless herpes spreader doing her thing. In an unrelated story: all of the jellyfish around St. Tropez have contracted herpes. Q



 famous back home for partying with the likes of Paris Hilton, purchased a $23.98 million apartment in the Park Laurel condominiums in Manhattan. Three years later, that shell company sold the condo to another shell company, this one controlled by someone even more prominent in Malaysia: the film-producing stepson of the prime minister.A similar transaction was playing out on the other side of the country. Mr. Low bought a contemporary mansion in Beverly Hills for $17.5 million, then turned around and sold it, once again to the prime minister’s stepson. (Read a summary of this article in Malay.)Mr. Low also went shopping at the Time Warner Center condominiums overlooking Central Park. He toured a 76th-floor penthouse, once home to the celebrity couple Jay Z and BeyoncĂ©, then in early 2011 used yet another shell company to buy it for $30.55 million, one of the highest prices ever in the building.At the time, Mr. Low said he represented a group of investors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the transaction. Mr. Low recently told The New York Times that he had not purchased the penthouse for investors, and that it was owned by his family’s trust.One thing is clear: As with nearly two-thirds of the apartments at the Time Warner Center, a dark-glass symbol of New York’s luxury condominium boom, the people behind Penthouse 76B cannot be found in any public real estate records. The trail ends with Jho Low.Mr. Low, 33, is a skillful, and more than occasionally flamboyant, iteration of the sort of operative essential to the economy of the global superrich. Just as many of the wealthy use shell companies to keep the movement of money opaque, they also use people like Mr. Low. Whether shopping for new business opportunities or real estate, he has often done so on behalf of investors or, as he likes to say, friends. Whether the money belongs to others or is his own, the lines are frequently blurry, the identity of the buyer elusive.Mr. Low’s lavish spending has raised eyebrows and questions from Kuala Lumpur to New York, where he has made a boldface name for himself as a “whale” at clubs like the Pink Elephant and 1Oak. The New York Post once called him “the mystery man of city club scene,” adding, “Speculation is brewing over where Low is getting his money from.”One answer resides at least indirectly in his relationship, going back to his school days in London, with the family of Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak. Mr. Low has played an important role in bringing Middle Eastern money into numerous deals involving the Malaysian government, and he helped set up, and has continued to advise, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund that the prime minister oversees.Now, that relationship has become part of an uproar gathering around Mr. Najib and threatening his already shaky hold on power. In Parliament, in political cartoons and in social media, Mr. Najib’s critics tend to argue that he is too close to Mr. Low.Much of the concern, even in Mr. Najib’s own long-ruling party, involvesquestions about the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. More broadly, though, the prime minister’s trappings of wealth and the widely broadcast tales of his wife’s outsize spending — the diamond jewelry, the collection of extravagantly costly Hermès Birkin bags — have become a focus of Malaysians’ rising unease with their government’s institutionalized culture of patronage and graft.“We are very concerned,” Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, a member of Malaysian royalty and an independent-minded elder statesman of Mr. Najib’s party, said in an interview in Kuala Lumpur last summer. “We want people of integrity to be up there.”Increasingly, the glare turns to Mr. Najib’s stepson, Riza Aziz, and so to Mr. Aziz’s friendship with Mr. Low. With Mr. Low’s help, Mr. Aziz runs a Hollywood company that produced the films “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Dumb and Dumber To.” He has spent tens of millions more on the homes in Manhattan and Beverly Hills, transactions that involved Mr. Low, The Times found.“That’s a lot of money,” Sivarasa Rasiah, an opposition lawmaker, said of Mr. Aziz’s spending. He added, “Every U.S. report on him talks about family wealth. Family who?”While Mr. Aziz has previously said he is personally wealthy, he declined to explain how he had acquired his money. Mr. Najib’s office, in a statement, said, “The prime minister does not track how much Mr. Aziz earns or how such earnings are reinvested.” As for the prime minister himself, the statement said he had “received inheritance.”In a statement provided by a spokesman, Mr. Low, whose full name is Low Taek Jho, said he “is a friend of Mr. Riza Aziz and his family.” His real estate transactions with Mr. Aziz were made “on an arm’s-length basis,” he said, adding that he had never purchased real estate in the United States for the prime minister’s family or “engaged in any wrongful conduct regarding any financial matters for the prime minister and his family.”At the Time Warner Center, The Times found, the 76th-floor penthouse, purchased through a shell company called 80 Columbus Circle (NYC) L.L.C., is one of at least a dozen that can be traced to people with close ties to current or former high-ranking foreign officials, or to the officials themselves.
don't see a problem with free copies of a holy book. I have copies of holy books of many religions all around my house. Giving it out free also shouldn't be a problem if its an accurate translation. We treat all books like we treat literature, we first read and seek to understand the topic at hand. I have read both the Quran and Bible front to back. I think the Council should rethink its statement and not get tempted into behaving exactly like the people and misguided beliefs that they are trying to speak out again a Quran (English version) 27 years ago, Read them but it did not make me a Muslim. In fact, the more I read, the more I am convinced it is not of the truth. I've read the Bible too and realised God is so intelligent and awesome. Why is there Islamophobia?...before trying to teach the others, they should learn to contain the fanatics... Ismail Sabri Yaakob's controversial "boycott", Chinese traders are still fuming over the racial remark.

When asked, some even said they would rather have the Islamic penal system hudud rather than have to deal with people like the Umno agriculture and agro-based industries minister.

Anti Islam Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism - 

Unlike medieval Europe, Malay’s intellectual climate is free and tolerant:  achievements of ancient Malay civilisation,would be a great idea to distribute the Quran , the more the better. If the Quran can bring benefit to humanity then this would be a great thing. Let non-Muslims not forget that the Quran was written down by scribes brought together by Uthman the Arab conqueror in the 7th century. So it is only understandable that attitudes towards human rights, equality, sexual slavery, religious freedom differ completely to modern notions in 2015. As such, I believe non-Muslims should read the Quran as an educational exercise and accept what is good in it and reject what is unacceptable or immoral according to our modern day civilised values.

The dissimilarities between Muslims and Kafirs do not really need to be spelled out- they are self-evident. They operate on a different scale, come from different political imaginations, practice politics in dramatically different ways and possess personalities that verge on the opposite.What is perhaps more interesting and less obvious are things that can be said about both that are common, at least at the level of principle. Bracketing the two together in any way, is something that will please neither camp, but the effort is not to suggest that the two are alike, be it in terms of stature, moral position or ideology, but that they have had an effect on politics that has some similarities.After a long period where politics in Malaysia, re-arranged some set pieces, in some limited ways, by shuffling considerations of religion and race, and packaging welfare schemes variously, the political equations that both Muslims and Kafirs have used, use a new kind of arithmetic.Malays has found a way to unite what is imagined as a cultural mainstream held together by aspiration, with an invisible binding provided by being part of an implicit cultural consensus, what can be described as a form of benign majoritarianism. This constituency has a great belief in progress, without too much interest in change, and wants its existing beliefs to be confirmed and not challenged. The ability to use Islam in the appropriate dilution while offering material well-being, packaged in a form that offers strength and clarity makes Mahathir a powerful leader who speaks to the unarticulated desires of a significant number of people.Politics has become simultaneously more real and more symbolic. People believe more and suspect more. They want to be heard more and at the same time they want to drown in a leader’s passion.

These are reliable translations of original texts. to reject translated copies of the Quran aimed at “lessening misconceptions and alleviating the fear of Islam among non-Muslims.
The Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Taoism (MCCBCHST) was referring to a project organised by the Islamic Information and Services Foundation under which one million copies of the Quran will be produced and translated into Tamil, Chinese, English and Malay to be distributed to the public.
The statement said the project’s patron is Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. represents someone who understands the meaning of living a hard grinding life and they see him as one of them. They don’t merely believe his promises, they believe in him, and that takes some doing.
In their own very different ways, the two are rewriting the rules of politics in Malaysia. Mahathir is the master of aerial battles and  in his own, smaller but deeply significant way, someone who restores to politics its feisty localness of spirit. This is a new kind of politics, of a more direct kind, where the leaders need to put themselves on the line and ask to be followed as well as evaluated. Both speak to something that is buried inside the hearts and minds of people, but do so along with promises of performance of a direct kind that can be evaluated..
The MCCBCHST advised non-Muslims not to accept the translated copies of the Quran and said non-Muslims had every right to protect their religion and to alert their children and members of their family of the advances made by the Islamic Information and Services Foundation.The MCCBCHST said it was of the view that the intended distribution of the translated copies of the Quran to non-Muslims was obnoxious as similar rights were not given to non-Muslims.
“The Quran being a holy book should not be distributed freely as there may not be proper respect shown to it. Some Muslims may think that the possession by non-Muslims  of the translated copies of the Quran is blasphemous. What happens if the translated copies have words which have been forbidden for use by non-Muslims by the various state enactments?” it asked
“It is Muslims who are indulging in killing and condemnation of other religions and religionist. Therefore, the need is for Muslims to be educated on the true teachings of Islam and not non-Muslims,” the statement said.
The statement said the actual intention appeared to be to propagate the Islamic faith to the non-Muslims under the guise of removing misconceptions of Islam.
“The first objection to this is that the intended distribution of the translated Quran to non-Muslims is being done in bad faith as the main reason given to remove misconceptions does not hold water as the misconception is with the Muslims and not the non-Muslims.
The MCCBCHST

The news of the killing of Jordanian pilot Muath Safi Yousef al-Kaseasbeh, who was captured by Islamic State jihadis last December, has shocked the international community. According to a video released on jihadi websites, al-Kaseasbeh was burnt to death by Islamic State militants. In fact, the latter had demanded the release of jihadis lodged in Jordanian prisons for al-Kaseasbeh’s release. Jordanian authorities had even indicated that they were willing to free al-Rishawi, a militant accused of the 2005 hotel attack in Amman, but wanted proof that al-Kaseasbeh was alive. However, failure to reach any concrete understanding led to the Jordanian pilot becoming the latest victim of Islamic State barbarity.
The brutal execution of al-Kaseasbeh comes days after news that the jihadis had beheaded Japanese journalist Kenji Goto. Add to this reports that Islamic State members have been killing homosexuals by throwing them off tall buildings in areas under their control. Plus, there is ample proof that the jihadis have been enslaving women in non-Muslim hamlets they capture. Reports across international media, day after day, suggest that the Islamic State is a brutal and barbaric group that would go to any lengths to enforce and expand their so-called Islamic caliphate.
And yet, day after day, there are reports that recruits from all over the world are joining the Islamic State. As I have mentioned earlier in this blog that according to US government statistics close to 1,000 recruits are joining the jihadi group every month. And they come from countries as far apart as Malaysia and France and several nations in between. They are child soldiers, disgruntled youth and middle-aged men – some of them even married. They come from diverse backgrounds – uneducated, semi-educated and highly educated. So the question is despite the apparent barbarity of the Islamic State, what is it that is attracting droves of people to join the group. I refuse to accept that a majority of Muslims are extremists. Yet I cannot deny the fact that the Islamic State has been extremely successful in recruiting Muslims to the jihadi cause.
The only explanation that I can think of is that the spread of Wahhabism over the last few decades has been far deeper than we had imagined. Most of the world treated Wahhabism as an exotic creed that was confined to certain parts of the Middle East. But as the Islamic State’s rise shows, Wahhabism’s reach and penetration have been far more extensive. Two main factors are responsible for this – massive funding in the form of Middle-eastern petro-dollars and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
While Middle East’s oil economy financed Wahhabi ideologues, madrassas and mosques, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq helped steel the creed, providing the latter with thousands of jihadis. The American support for the Afghan mujahideen to reverse the then Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s was the first instance of implantation of the Wahhabi virus on foreign soil. This virus was then incubated through the Taliban and its many Middle-eastern and Pakistani sponsors. However, it only reached its virulent form after the second Iraq War. As US troops withdrew from Iraq, having toppled the Saddam Hussein regime and installing a Shia-dominated dispensation in its place, the old sectarian faultline in the Muslim world combined with hatred for the West and its puppet regimes to give rise to a violent jihadi beast. And it is from the bosom of this beast that the Islamic State was born.
In order to neutralise this Wahhabi virus, the international community must adopt both military and ideological approaches. A much more robust military intervention is needed in Iraq and Syria to defeat the Islamic State. Jordan has already hinted its willingness to sign on to such operations after the al-Kaseasbeh incident. But countries such as Turkey are still ambivalent. Full-fledged cooperative military action is the need of the hour – not just limited airstrikes. Second, moderate Islam must triumph over Wahhabism. An ideological war needs to be waged to destroy the jihadi virus once and for all. Unfortunately, only Morocco is undertaking serious efforts in this direction. Under the guidance of King Mohammed VI the North African nation has initiated a programme of training imams from different countries in the moderate Maliki creed. These imams will then go back to their home countries and preach a moderate version of Islam that is congruent with modern 21st democracy and human rights.
In fact, this is a good opportunity to enhance Morocco-Jordan relations around the common aim of fighting extremism. For far too long Arab countries have been divided either along sectarian lines or because of historical rivalries. Such divisions have also plagued institutions such as the Arab League, the Arab Maghreb Union and the Oragnisation of Islamic Cooperation to various degrees. But given the rise of Islamic terrorism, an opportunity has been created to rewrite the rules and reconfigure regional relations. New partnerships can be formed around the issues of counterterrorism, intelligence sharing and mutual judicial cooperation.
In fact, the monarchs of Morocco and Jordan can champion such an alliance purely centred on the aim of defeating the Islamic State. They share several complementarities and are faced today by a common enemy. Plus, if they take the first step, other countries are sure to follow. An organic regional coalition that takes into account the ideological, military and economic dimensions of the fight against terrorism needs to be realised as soon as possible. Otherwise, the Islamic State and the Wahhabi ideology will continue to spread their evil shadow.re

1 comment: