Dr. Husam Zarad and nearly 40 other Muslim colleagues are finally having their moment of joy on Wednesday, June 11, opening a free clinic to serve the people of Hernando County in Florida.

“This is our dream coming true,” Zarad told San Petersburg Times.

“And after talking about this for so long, we decided to make it really happen,” he added while helping move an exam table into the clinic’s building.???????? ????? ????????

The Muslim physicians have been planning the Crescent Community Clinic in the city of Brooksville for over a year.

The clinic, financed by Muslim doctors from Hernando, will start as of Wednesday offering charge-free medical services to the County residents.

It is located at the crowd downtown area, where there are stores, businesses and several homeless camps in the nearby woods.

The location also makes it easy for people to walk to the clinic if they don’t have transportation.

The doctors expect to have two or three general physicians staffing the office while specialists, including cardiologists and neurologists, will rotate on various days.

The dream project is modeled after a handful of other free Muslim clinics across the US, including the Red Crescent Clinic in Tampa city and a similar one in central Los Angeles.

There are between six to seven million Muslims in the US, making up less than three percent of the country’s 300 million population.

The number of Muslims in Hernando, which has a 166.000 population, is unknown, but about 400 people are affiliated with the county’s mosques.

Contribution

The Muslim doctors are eager to see the clinic offering much-needed health care for Hernando residents.

“This is how we are going to give back to our community,” says Zarad.

“I’m losing sleep just thinking of the benefits this will bring for the community.”

For years, he and his colleagues have watched the uninsured in Hernando get underserved in primary health care.

“We’ve all seen the number of indigent patients increase. That was a big reason for us to finally get this open.”

According to the 2006 Health Needs Assessment, about 18 percent of Hernando population do not have medical insurance.

It’s not uncommon for many of those who can’t afford health care or insurance to end up in emergency rooms for primary care, and often when their health problems have become worse.

“The new clinic will be a great contribution to the community, and a welcomed resource to our many residents in need,” said Jean Rags, County Director of Health and Human Services.

The Muslim doctors hope their clinic will motivate others to take up similar initiatives and donate their time and talents to serve the community.

“For example, many of the same people who can’t afford medical care can’t go to the dentist,” Ahmed Bedier, the clinic spokesman, told the San Petersburg Times.

“We hope this sets an example for others to follow, and maybe a way to compete in doing good.” 

Source: http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1212925208579&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout

The list dates reportedly back to 1,400 years, according to an article in the New York Times.

The article reports that recent findings by Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni scholar at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, may help lower those barriers and challenge prevalent notions of women’s roles within Islamic society. Nadwi has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Quran, transmitting Hadith and even making Islamic law as jurists.

Akram embarked eight years ago on a single-volume biographical dictionary of female Hadith scholars, a project that took him trawling through biographical dictionaries, classical texts, madrassa chronicles and letters for relevant citations, reports the Daily Times.

“I thought I’d find maybe 20 or 30 women,” he was quoted by the paper as saying.

An English translation of his 400-page preface will come out in England this summer.

Akram has talked with Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to the United States, about the possibility of publishing the entire work through his Riyadh-based foundation.

Post Date: 2007-02-27 News Source
Author: ANI

The proposed system will replace the Medicare card and be compulsory for any Australian who wants to access up to 16 other government health and welfare services.

In its submission to a Senate inquiry examining the access card legislation, which is currently before parliament, the Government provided examples of a how a photograph would be taken of a person wearing a headscarf.

The instructions say the headscarf will have to be pushed back so that the forehead, cheeks and chin are clearly visible.

While some Muslim women wear the headscarf without any face covering, others wear it with a veil that leaves only their eyes exposed.

In its submission, the Government launched a strident defence against critics who are worried the access card may become a de facto national identity card.

“The access card will not be a national identity card,” the government said.

“The Bill expressly provides that one of the objects of the legislation is that access cards are not to be used as, and do not become, national identity cards.

“This is a strong statement of parliamentary intention that has been included to assure the public that not only is the access card not a national identity card, it is also not to become a national identity card.”

The Government says there are strict penalties for people and organisations which flout this aspect of the laws.

Penalties include up to five years’ jail for a person who asks someone to produce the access card as proof of identity.

The Government indicated there would be further privacy protections included in future legislation relating to the access card.
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Post Date: 2007-02-28 News Source
Author: http://www.news.com.au

Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician, also dubbed the Prophet Mohammed as a “violent man”.

Presently, Netherlands now has a population of one million Muslims, which is six per cent of the country’s total population.

The 43-year-old leader of the Freedom Party is convinced that governments were being forced to accommodate a ‘tsunami of Islamisation’ that is fundamentally incompatible with European social values.

“Islam itself is the problem. Islam is a violent religion. The Prophet Mohammed was a violent man. The Koran is mostly a violent book. We should invest in Muslim people but they have to first get rid of half the Koran and half of their beliefs,” the Daily Telegraph. Quoted him as saying.

Wilders is convinced there is growing support for his views across Europe but its political leaders, particularly in Britain, are too obsessed with being politically correct.

“There is almost no country more politically correct than the UK. Look at the terrible things that happened in London after Madrid, you have more reason than most to make this debate transparent and public,” he said.

His intense campaign for a ban on the Islamic veil, or burqa, in public places is gaining such momentum that the country’s new coalition government could be forced to introduce the ban it does not support.

On the burqa, Wilders said: “It is a medieval token of a barbaric time, of how not to treat women, even if they want to wear it themselves.”

Allowing Muslims to wear the burqa in the Netherlands, or to have segregated swimming sessions so as not to offend religious sensitivities, amounts to “religious apartheid”, he added.

Post Date: 2007-03-01 News Source
Author: ANI

Since September 11, 2001, Muslims around the world have had unrelenting pressure brought to bear on them to apologize, or explain, or condemn every act of violence committed by those who call themselves Muslims. And that is exactly what Islamic leaders have been so pathetically doing – incessantly and fruitlessly trying to explain to an already-indoctrinated audience that not all Muslims are evil or violent.

Yes, the 9/11 terror attacks were a truly grotesque act of mass murder, leading to the deaths of 3,000 innocent men, women, and children. But their lives and their innocence was not greater than the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives lost as a result of Western and Zionist aggression. How many 9/11s have been unleashed against the Iraqi people in the last four years alone, to say nothing of the countless victims generated as a direct result of US-led economic sanctions during the 8 years prior to the invasion?

Why is it more evil to plan an attack like 9/11 than to conspire to wage a war of aggression against a defenseless nation and reduce it to rubble? The answer is, it isn’t – so stop apologizing.

When someone asks you to condemn Islamic violence, demand they first condemn Christian and Jewish violence and apologize for the disproportionate amount of death and destruction they have visited upon the world. Because, if you added up every fatality caused by all the so-called Islamic fundamentalist organizations combined, they would barely amount to a fraction of the murders committed by Christians and Jews in the last 100 years alone.

When you are reminded of how Muslim financial support for terrorist organizations has led to thousands of deaths around the world, don’t forget to remind them how Zionist Jewish bankers in New York, Germany, and England funneled millions of dollars to the Bolsheviks, who killed an estimated 20 million Russian Orthodox Christians between 1917 and 1945.

You may also wish to remind them that $5 billion a year from the US has been funding Israel’s 40-year occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, its construction of segregated Jewish supremacist settlements, and its continued violation of dozens of UN resolutions, to say nothing of its history of violence against innocent Arab civilians.

The Israelis who get blown up on buses are not more important than the Palestinians killed by American-supplied Israeli tanks, planes, bombs, and missiles. By all means mourn and condemn the US and British lives recently lost to terrorist acts, but don’t forget to remind the world to condemn the wholesale killing of hundreds of Lebanese civilians during last summer’s savage Israeli bombing campaign, using cluster bombs and other munitions supplied by the US and transported to Israel via Britain. Not only did President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair fail to condemn Israel at the time for what were obviously grievous violations of international humanitarian law, but they also blocked any attempt by the UN to intervene and supplied the arms to help the attack along.

It is indeed quite impressive that Western leaders don’t “teach” their young men and women to strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up like militant Muslim leaders do. But, then again, why would they when they have their armies to do that? I mean, why use a pathetic little homemade bomb when you can drop a 2,268-kilogram (5,000-pound) Daisy Cutter? Why content yourself with bringing down two buildings when you can reduce entire neighborhoods to rubble as those in Bint Jbail, Beirut, Jenin, Gaza, Fallujah, and Kabul have been?

To somehow mitigate the criminality of the terror perpetrated on behalf of the Western ruling elite, it is oftentimes pointed out by their apologists that Muslims themselves have, in the past, and present, killed each other – frequently with cruelty and without mercy – as they are now doing in Iraq. Well, the fact is, Christians have acted in the exact same way among themselves. Remember the 200,000 Germans incinerated in Dresden in 72 hours? Or the obliteration of 180,000 civilians in Hiroshima, then the only Christian city in Japan? What about the massive Christian-on-Christian violence in the Balkans, including 78 days of round-the-clock US bombing? The list goes on. Do those facts somehow negate the criminality of Muslim terrorism against Christians?

The point here is not to make excuses or justify the killing of innocents by Muslims. But rather to point out that it must also be recognized and understood Muslim violence is not inherently more evil than that perpetrated by their accusers. And the loss of Muslim life as a result of Western imperialist and colonialist aggression is not more benign than the killing of innocents as a result of so-called “religious” imperatives. The time is long overdue for Muslims to stop speaking from a position of apology and weakness and to start exercising the moral imperative they have to stand up for themselves.

News Source
Author: Victor Lama

The International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, yesterday judged that Serbia was not directly responsible for the 1995 genocide that took place in the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica.

The court also said Serbia had not done all it could to prevent the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys there by Bosnian Serb troops.

The ruling triggered relief in Serbia and disappointment among the former wartime foes in Bosnia, where a 1992-to-1995 bloody conflict left at least 100,000 people dead and millions displaced.

“I am speechless,” said Fadila Efendic, whose son and husband were killed in Srebrenica.

“We know that Serbia was directly involved. We saw Serbian troops shell us…and kill our sons and husbands. We saw them commit genocide here.”

Sehida Rahmanovic, another massacre survivor, added: “Bosnian Serbs could not have committed genocide without the help in arms, money, troops and everything from Serbia.”

In Belgrade, Serbia’s President Boris Tadic said the verdict “is very important for the Republic of Serbia and its citizens because it has determined that Serbia did not commit genocide in Bosnia”.

He added: “For all of us, the part of the judgment that said that Serbia did not do all in its power to prevent genocide against Bosnians in Srebrenica is very hard.”

The prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica said the verdict would boost post-war reconciliation.

“Thank God,” said Mirko Kocic, a 25-year-old economy student. “For once we are cleared of something!”

The World Court also said that Serbia, which was ruled by late nationalist president Slobodan Milosevic during the Bosnian war until he was overthrown by reformist forces in 2000, has failed to comply with its obligations to punish those accused of the genocide.

The World Court ordered Belgrade to hand over suspects for trial by a separate UN court, also based in The Hague, singling out Bosnian Serb wartime commander Ratko Mladic.

Warning of “dramatic consequences” for the country unless Mladic is handed over as demanded by the World Court, Tadic also urged a “finalisation” of the “co-operation” with the UN war crimes court.

Serbia has repeatedly said it is unable to locate Mladic, despite claims by UN court officials that he is hiding there.

Tomislav Nikolic, an ultranationalist leader, dismissed the World Court proceedings as “part of a conspiracy” to declare the Serbs a “genocidal nation”.

Also indicted for genocide by the UN war crimes court over the Srebrenica massacre was the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic, and a number of Bosnian Serb military and political leaders.

Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik rejected the responsibility of his mini-state for genocide, saying a “horrific” crime took place in Srebrenica, but that individuals should be held responsible.

The Muslim member of Bosnia’s three-member presidency, Haris Silajdzic, however, suggested that the ruling, declaring the Bosnian Serbs guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, should lead to the abolishment of their entity.

Quebec’s soccer federation said Asmahan Mansour of Ottawa was given the choice of taking off her hijab or not playing in a Sunday tournament in nearby Laval. It says the hijab – an Islamic veil or head scarf – violated a no-headgear rule set down by the sport’s governing body for safety reasons.

But others have slammed the referee’s decision, saying it’s just another example of how Quebec is trying to get immigrants to toe a cultural line.

Maria Mansour, the girl’s mother, told CBC Radio that she thought the incident was racially motivated.

“Strongly, I do think so, because soccer is soccer whether it’s in Ontario or Quebec or Europe and it’s not right at all to not allow a Muslim girl who’s proud of her religion to play soccer, a sport she loves so much,” Mansour said.

“It took a lot out of me to see my daughter in the middle being humiliated in front of a lot of people,” she said.

The Quebec Soccer Federation noted the referee was also a Muslim.

Quebec Premier Jean Charest, himself a one-time soccer player, weighed in on the issue Monday.

“My understanding is that the referee applied the rules of the soccer federation and that’s why that decision was made,” Charest said.

The Muslim Council of Montreal said the Ontario Soccer Association allows players to wear religious clothing on the field and urged the Quebec federation to respect the religious rights of its players.

“Asking minority groups to integrate cannot be equated with forcing them to assimilate and stripping them of their identity and rights,” said council spokesman Salam Elmenyawi.

The council also criticized Charest, saying he failed to address the issue properly.