Author: M Barbu

French President Macron – What He Said and What He Meant?

Politics is a game of pretension, saying something and meaning something else. President Emmanuel Macron appears to be no exception in a hybrid political culture of uncanny coincidence to blame Islam for the criminal acts of one individual.

If the children are added to about 400 adults – including militants detained in particular in the Syrian city of Hasaka – there are in total about 1,000 Europeans detained in the Iraqi-Syrian region.

Very few books have tackled the exploitation of Islam by political organizations to achieve wealth and power. As a result, those who ascribe to these ideologies and ways of life are rarely held accountable. However, Mohamed Said Al-Ashmawi’s book Political Islam scrutinizes the phenomenon of Political Islam and exposes the true motives of such organizations. It distinguishes between these groups and the true essence of Islam based on tawhid and its central value of mercy.

The concept of “no-go-zones” has been a hot topic in media discourse in recent years. Sensational claims have been made about the existence of exclusively Muslim neighborhoods where non-Muslims are not allowed to enter. For instance, in 2015, to emphasize the gravity of the situation, Fox News guest and “terrorism expert” Steve Emerson stated that the city of Birmingham in the UK is totally Muslim. The city is in fact only 22% Muslim. The statement led David Cameron to brand Emerson a complete idiot.

The residual threat posed by the banned terrorist group al-Muhajiroun (ALM) group is matched by the enduring public curiosity that it provokes. The symbiotic relationship between the threatening rhetoric that the group employs and the resulting fascination with its activities has played to the group’s strategy of courting attention and transmitting their ideology to a larger audience. For many years the media fed this preoccupation by promoting the provocative exploits of ALM and publishing interviews with its most prominent spokesman, the deceptively outlandish Anjem Choudary.