A rather surprising video was uploaded on Sep. 14 to Youtube showing Shia Iraqi scholar Sayyid Ahmed al Qabbanji blasting Iranian leaders on how they use their revenues from the khums tax:
Al Qabbanji is right that the Iranian clerics have become stinking rich taking money from their people (both through religious taxation and government corruption). He goes as far as to call khums not obligatory, but haram, and that giving khums is like flushing “a million in the toilet.”
Still, given the choice, I’d rather the ayatollahs travel to London and spend khums on hotels and shopping sprees versus diverting the money toward Hezbollah, which is one of the terrorist organization’s key revenue sources.
Syria’s black market rife with hawala
September 27, 2011According to the State Department’s “2010” (actually, August 2011) report on global terrorism, Syria remains a state sponsor of terrorism. That’s not very surprising, but what is interesting to read is that hawala there is rampant within a black market that is as big as Syria’s whole economy.
Hawala is a method of financial transfer embraced by Muhammad. It is used today by Muslims across the world to send remittances to their home countries, for routine transactions, but also, thanks to its invisible paper trail, to fund terrorism.
Posted in News commentary | Tagged hawala, State Department, Syria, terrorist financing | Leave a Comment »