130 requests for zakat, and counting

Money Jihad has just added a new page to the website cataloging about 45 previously unpublished requests we’ve received from Muslims around the world asking us to give them money through zakat donations.

Some of the requests claim to be for personal reasons—such as helping somebody with their education or helping them get out of debt—but some have a broader Islamic agenda such as “helping us to raise Muslim power” or “making Islam gain ground.”  Most of the messages don’t request a specific amount.  The smallest amount sought is $200; the largest request hints at $1 million.

Take a look!  Some of them, like one requesting help with “skull fees,” are unintentionally humorous.

There are about 85 separate requests on this old post, too, including a comment that “-Jihad -zakaat, I hope it will go a long way in achieving all predetermined goals.”

RadicalIslam.org interviews Money Jihad

Ryan Mauro recently conducted an interview with Money Jihad which was published yesterday at RadicalIslam.org—a leading news site about the treat posed by Islamic fundamentalism.  We covered a wide range of topics including what laws on terrorist financing are being insufficiently enforced, what countries are funding terrorism, and problems with hawala.

The full Q&A is available here.  Here’s just a taste of our exchange:

Ryan Mauro: What methods are the Islamists using today to raise money, besides soliciting wealthy donors?

Money Jihad: Well, it’s not just about zakat from wealthy donors.  Folks like Amina Farah Ali in Minnesota, Shabaaz Hussain in London, and Irfan Naseer in Birmingham have fundraised for relatively small donations from individual Muslims to support jihad overseas.  A few thousand dollars from the West goes a long way to fund a holy warrior on the ground in Somalia.

But apart from zakat donations, there are a whole host of other Islamic taxes that receive less attention but are huge revenue stream for jihad.  Western reporters call it extortion, but the mujahideen don’t look at it that way.

Take for example two terrorist organizations with a ground game:  Al-Shabaab and the Taliban.  They have fighters on the ground and control definite territory.  Organizations like that rely to a great extent on levying Islamic taxes on the people under their jurisdiction.  The Taliban still gets money from ushr, the Islamic tax on harvests, which includes poppy yields.  Al Shabaab imposes harbor taxes, checkpoint taxes (a practice from the early days of Islam up through Ottoman times), and a zakat on the lucrative Somali charcoal trade.

Ransoms, which are also permitted against infidels by the Koran, are a major revenue source for organizations like AQIM and Abu Sayyaf.  For Hezbollah, the West focuses on their drug money, but they get a lot of money from khums, the Shia Muslim tax on individual profit.

Counterfeiting, Sharia finance, street crimes, welfare fraud — those are all being used as well in different parts of the world to fund terrorism, individual Islamists or both…

Ryan Mauro asked some other great questions during the interview, such as:  “Do you believe that the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S. has stopped financing Hamas since the shutting down of the Holy Land Foundation, deciding to solely focus on political influence instead?”

In addition to serving as the national security analyst for RadicalIslam.org, Mr. Mauro is also a Clarion Fund fellow, the founder of WorldThreats.com, and often appears on the Fox News Channel.  It was a pleasure to be interviewed by him.

Gone fishing

Time for a break!  Back in a week or two.

In the meantime, new links and tweets will still be sent out on Twitter at @MoneyJihad.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 44,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 16 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Money Jihad’s two year anniversary

Woo-hoo!  Having completed Money Jihad‘s second year on the web, we’ve made it well past the “experimental” stage.  It’s hard to believe we started out two years ago (with my first, but not last, rant against Treasury dufus David S. Cohen).  Thank you, dear readers, for visiting and sticking with this blog.  Special thanks to the indispensable Shariah Finance Watch and to Puneet for their support.  The top-shelf Religion of Peace, Het Vrije Volk, and Creeping Sharia have sent us lots of readers as well–it has been greatly appreciated.

Money Jihad has also finally taken a flying leap—into social networking—by launching its own Twitter feed (@MoneyJihad).  I tried to keep it a little hush-hush at first, but Creeping Sharia crept onto our feed, and was kind enough to tweet their whopping 12,000 followers about our existence.  Anyway, that got us going with a few dozen followers off the bat, but the more the merrier!  I’m blasting out links to informative, disturbing, and amusing articles that we don’t have the time or space to examine fully here on the main blog.  Come join the fun!

Reader seeks bank to fund charity

Sir, my “charity” is doing okay, but I really need bank sponsorship to take it to the next level. Please help!

Muslim charity asks us for money to help “to fight Christians”

As we’ve noted before, Money Jihad blog receives demands for zakat from Muslims all over the world from direct emails or from comments submitted on Money Jihad posts.  (See this old post for for a dozen examples of “zakat spam” we’ve intentionally left un-deleted.) 

These requests are laughable to anybody who is actually familiar with the content of this blog.  As an anti-poverty program, zakat has an abysmal record.  As a terrorist financing method, zakat has been wildly successful.  This blog donating a single penny in zakat would be as absurd as saying that Islam is a religion of peace.

This message we received through “Contact us” from an entity purporting to be “Islamic Relief Aid Uganda” is also absurd, laughable, and disturbing.  Their IP address corresponds to Kampala, Uganda.

Name: Islamic Relief Aid Uganda
Email: uganda@islamicreliefaiduganda.tk
Website: 
Message: Assalamu alaikum Brothers
 
This is an Email from Islamic Relief Aid Uganda.we need to fight Christians who want to take over our land in Northern Uganda,we are requesting for Money Jihad Brothers to help us fight the Christians get out of our land and this will require publication of materials to be distributed to all Mosques.
 
We Officially submit this application as United 220 Mosques Leaders for request of Support USD 8,000 to buy a Printing Holy Quran Machine and Printing Papers.
 
We appeal to Money Jihad Administration and the Director for support.We look forward for response in Names of Allah.
 
The Bank Account is available on request
 
> Time: Sunday June 12, 2011 at 3:38 am
> IP Address: 41.210.173.26

Muslim scams abound

Western crooks, including Christians, do lie, cheat, and steal.  But they don’t have a religious authority telling them that theft is a duty imposed by god.

Meanwhile, Radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki has told Muslims living in the West that it is a commandment of Islam to engage in a variety of financial crimes against infidel governments.  That includes defrauding the welfare states that play host to Muslim immigrants.  With that as a preface, here’s a round-up of recent Muslim financial criminals at work:

• Two bank clerks plotted to steal £350,000 by using fake ID cards (Men Media, Jan. 20)
• Ten apparently Muslim families cost the U.K. over one million pounds per year in outrageous housing benefits (Daily Mail, Jan. 29).
• An Afghan woman living high on the hog in Britain was able to live in a £1.2 million mansion through housing benefit fraud (Daily Mail, Jan. 25).
• A mortgage fraudster and Islamic religious teacher was able to acquire £1.7 million in real estate through false mortgage papers (Daily Mail, Feb. 19).
• Fake orphan scam:  a Pakistani immigrated to Great Britain and claimed he was a poor, homeless orphan facing death if he were deported, but who was actually just staying in Britain to send cash back to Pakistan (Daily Mail, Feb. 21, h/t GoV).

I’m leaving out some other recent flimflams from Canada, Sweden, and the U.S., but there’s only so much blog space and so many crimes…

Stealing for Islam is an accurate viewpoint

Islamic cleric and terrorist mentor Anwar al-Awlaki recently made headlines for advocating theft and other financial crimes against “hostile” powers like the United States.  The position al-Awlaki has adopted, however, is not held by him alone.

In an interview with World Net Daily (h/t RoP), British Islamist rabble-rouser Anjem Choudary said of al-Awlaki’s statement that, “That is an Islamic viewpoint, and that is based on the Quran and the traditions of the messenger Muhammad, that originally there is no sanctity for the life and the wealth of non-Muslims unless they embrace Islam or unless they covenant with them in a covenant of security.”  Choudary says that Islam permits killing and stealing against non-Muslims whose countries are at war with Muslim countries.  There is no “sanctity of life” or of wealth possessed by infidels. 

But don’t take Choudary’s word for it either.  Let’s go straight to the source.

Sura 8 of the Koran is entitled “The Spoils,” which refers to the booty that shall be taken from the infidels.  Al-Awlaki says that taking money by force from disbelievers as booty is the “best and purest form of income.”  The basis for his statement comes from the Hadith Sahih Bukhari, when Muhammad said, “the spoils of war are made halal for me” (see Volume 1, Book 7, Number 331). 

Al-Awlaki also cites a Hanafi scholar who says stealing from people in the dar al-harb “is considered mubah (permitted) just like hunting or wood gathering.”  Al-Awlaki references other traditional Muslim sources who say that theft and embezzlement are different from booty because they are taken by deception or trickery rather than by force, but that such theft and embezzlement is still legal.  Al-Awlaki’s full “ruling” is available at Jihadology.

How mainstream the view is within Islam is unclear, but it is clearly a commonly held view among jihadists.  It is noteworthy that Muhammad himself, the greatest example for Muslim men to follow, abandoned business and trade after declaring himself to be a prophet and lived off of looting and the spoils of war for the rest of his life.

See additional coverage on robbery for Islam here.

Spreadin’ the word about Al Jihad bi-al-Mal

Take heart, dear reader.  You’re not alone in your concerns about the financial jihad against us.  You’re not the only one who wants to follow the money behind the Ground Zero Mosque.  You’re not the only one who wants to know where Al Qaeda gets its financing.  You’re not the only one who recognizes that the Islamists receive most of their funds through taxes mandated by Muhammad, and that Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s “jihad with money” must be resisted at every turn.  The jihadist is being unveiled.  The word is spreading.

As of this week, this blog has been viewed over 20,000 times.  Thank you, Money Jihad readers & referrers!  And thank you, WordPress, for providing nifty little charts and summaries like this:

If I had a dollar for every visit, I’d have $16,000 after I pay my 20 percent khums tax of $4,000 to my local imam…

Money Jihad's average monthly readership since inception

Jihad, sharia, and Islamic charity

There’s been a spate of great blog posts over the last week at some of our favorite blogs, all illustrating how the jihadists continue tapping into zakat and other Koranic tax revenues streams to wage their money jihad against the West.

• Global MB Daily Report:  Kuwait’s the International Islamic Charitable Organization, IICO, observes its 25th anniversary.  IICO appears to have the full support of Kuwait’s royal family and government.  IICO also has ties to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Virginia…
• Shariah Finance Watch:  The ruler of Dubai has mandated that waqf projects be fully sharia compliant.  Waqf religious endowment projects are common.  But explicitly mandating their sharia compliance is an extra layer of detail they don’t normally publicize.  Remember that sharia=subjugation (of women, non-Muslims, etc.).
• JihadWatch:  Five members of a Muslim “humanitarian” group have been arrested in Kosovo.  With all the arrests, criminal investigations, and convictions of Muslim charities, is anybody else catching on that there is something inherently criminal about Islamic charity?
• Shariah Finance Watch:  Anwar al-Awlaki has come out championing the money jihad.  Yes, the Yemen-based cleric who inspired some of the 9/11 hijackers, the Ft. Hood’s Maj. Hasan, and other lowlife murderers has joined Osama Bin Laden and Yusuf al-Qaradawi in his public support for the Al Jihad bi al-Mal.
• Rantburg:  Big bounties are being paid to Taliban for each NATO casualty they cause.  Money for the bounties comes from protection payments (zakat), opium harvests (ushr), and the Gulf (sadaqa & hawala).  NATO deaths are the fruits of the money jihad.