I love how they run this shit as a one-day affair, then go back to promoting Zionist-sponsored LIES!
Like the report on P.J.A.K.! Ever here of that again?
Case closed, readers!!!
"In Mixed Slice of Baghdad, Old Bonds Defy War" by SABRINA TAVERNISE and KARIM HILMI
BAGHDAD — At its oldest spot, a small dusty strip of dirt road near a mosque, the neighborhood of Bab al Sheik — a maze of snaking streets too narrow for cars — dates from a time, more than a thousand years ago, when Baghdad ruled the Islamic world.
At that time, orchards and palaces of Abbasid princes unfolded in stately splendor not far away.
Ten centuries later, Bab al Sheik is less grand, but still extraordinary: it has been spared the sectarian killing that has gutted other neighborhoods, and Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians live together here with unusual ease. It has been battered by bombings around its edges, but the war has been kept from its heart, largely because of its ancient, shared past, bound by trust and generations of intermarriage.
Monther, a suitcase seller here: “All of these people grew up here together. From the time of our grandfathers, same place, same food, same everything.”
Much of today’s Baghdad sprang into existence in the 1970s, when oil nationalization drew Iraqis from all over the country to work. The city’s population more than tripled over the course of 20 years, and new neighborhoods sprawled east and west. The war and civil conflict have seemed to take a heavier toll in those areas than in some of the older neighborhoods.
No one knows that better than Waleed, a rail-thin Bab al Sheik native who 10 years ago moved his family to Dora, a newly built middle-class neighborhood in southern Baghdad.
In Dora, residents were from all over. That never seemed to matter until the basic rules of society fell away after the American occupation began. The only bulwark left against chaos was trust between families, and in Dora there was not enough.
Waleed, sitting recently with Monther in a barbershop in Bab al Sheik, rain spitting on the street outside, jabbing a finger in Monther’s direction:
“We didn’t know each other’s backgrounds. Here, he can’t lie to me. He can’t say, ‘I’m this, I’m that,’ because I know it’s not true.”
Neither man wanted to be identified by his last name out of concern for safety.
In Dora, he said, he did not have those powers of discernment. And he paid the price: his son was shot to death on Oct. 9, 2006, while trying to get a copy of his high school diploma.
Waleed moved his family out of the area immediately:
“My first thought was this neighborhood. My grandfather is from here. I always felt safe here.”
So did two reporters, who made six visits to the area over two months. It was safe enough, in fact, to walk through the warren of narrow streets, nod at older women sitting at street-level windows, linger in a barbershop and make long visits to Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish homes.
On a recent Friday, a large Kurdish extended family relaxed at home. The living room was dark and cool, tucked in an alley away from the afternoon sun.
Abu Nawal, the father, recounted how a group of men from the office of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr came to a local cafe, proposing to set up shop in the area. The cafe owner pointed to a sign, which stated in dark script that all discussions of politics and religion were prohibited. The men were then asked to leave.
Abu Nawal, a shoemaker, whose family has lived in the neighborhood for four generations:
“The guys in the neighborhood said, ‘If you try to make an office here, we will explode it.’”
Some time later, Sunni Arab political party members came and were similarly rebuffed.
Abu Nawal, who asked to be identified by his nickname for the safety of his family:
“They wanted to put their foot in this neighborhood, but they couldn’t.”
He said he despised the poisonous mix of religion and politics that was strangling Iraqi society, and he enjoyed cracking wry jokes at politicians’ expense. Playing off the names for extremist militias, which in Iraq call themselves things like the Islamic Army, he refers to his group of friends as the Arak Army, righteous defenders of an anise-flavored alcoholic drink.
The neighborhood has another rare asset: moderate religious men.
Sheik Muhammad Wehiab, a 30-year-old Shiite imam whose family has lived in Bab al Sheik for seven generations, was jailed for 14 months under Saddam Hussein, a biographical fact that should have opened doors for him in the new Shiite-dominated power hierarchy. But his moderate views were unpopular in elite circles, and he has remained in the neighborhood.
He feels connected. So much so that while talking on the phone one night this fall, he walked out into the tiny alley outside his door, lay down and watched the stars in the night sky.
Sheik Wehiab, to himself:
“I think Maliki right now is envying me. No bodyguards. Just free. This is the blessing.”
Sheik Wehiab has radical views. One of them is that Muslims have behaved terribly toward one another in the war here and that they have given Islam a bad name in using it to gain power.
Sheik Wehiab, referring to the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that set off riots and protests across the Islamic world last year, sitting in an armchair in his quiet living room:
“I don’t blame those guys who drew the cartoons. Muslims are the ones to be blamed. They have given them this picture.”
When I think of this shit coming out of the Zionist paper, I simply don't believe it anymore, folks!
An ice cream seller walked past his window, hawking in a loud voice.
Sheik Wehiab’s friend, a Sunni cleric whose smooth voice echoes through the neighborhood as he calls worshipers to prayer every day at Qailani Mosque, the neighborhood’s anchor, holds a similar view:
“The greatest jihad is the jihad of yourself.”
The cleric, who asked that his name not be published out of concern for his safety, because of the high profile of the mosque, lovingly ticks off qualities of the 12th-century Sufi sheik Abdel Qadr Qailani, who gave the mosque its name: Intellectual. Scholar. Moral teacher.
But moderate religion is not drawing an audience on a national scale, and Qailani Mosque, one of Baghdad’s most important Sunni institutions, has fallen on hard times. Donations are down. Its long-running soup kitchen serves one meal a day instead of three. Sufi clerics cannot perform their rituals. A bomb sheared off part of a minaret in February.
The cleric: “Please, please, write as much as you can that we don’t want war.”
At afternoon prayer, a trickle of worshipers walked over marble floors in stocking feet.
War has come hard to the edges of Bab al Sheik. Bombings in its outer market areas have killed dozens. But deep inside the neighborhood, residents still feel free to poke fun.
In the barbershop, Waleed and Monther listen to the barber’s stories. A favorite, about the death of a man named Abdul al-Majeed, begins one night in 1977 when he demanded that the barber, Abu Zeinab, an elfin man, put on some music for a card game outside.
Abu Zeinab grudgingly obliged. The song was famous, but Mr. Majeed found its refrain — “you, who are buried under the sand” — morose. Angrily, he told a different shop owner nearby to put on some music to drown it out. By coincidence, that man put on the same song.
Then came the funny part. Mr. Majeed, at that very moment, keeled over dead.
Abu Zeinab, waving his arms for emphasis, his tiny shop throbbing with his audience’s laughter:
“The song was a message for him.”
Even in death, Mr. Majeed was unlucky. He died on the eve of the census, when traffic all over the city was stopped. Large amounts of arak were consumed. By the time the pallbearers made it to the cemetery they were swaying in an undignified manner.
Abu Zeinab: “Even the gravedigger was drunk.”
Oh, those drunk native amer..., I mean, those drunk Arabs, boy!
The man dug the grave on the same spot where Mr. Majeed’s son was buried and said;
“They’ll hug each other down there.”
Outside, it was almost dark. Cheeks felt tight from laughing.
A small boy entered the shop, carrying a battered aluminum tray. Lentils, rice, tomatoes and cabbage in bowls of chipped green glass.
Abu Zeinab made room on the counter, putting aside a pair of scissors and a tiny potted plastic plant that looked like a child’s toy.
He loaded a cassette tape into his battered boombox. Prayers came out in a melody.
Then he sat, and invited his guests to share his dinner."
After reading this I realized that -- despite the seductive headline -- this is just another Zionist pack of lies about Muslims.
Have you eaten enough shit from the Zionist-controlled AmeriKan MSM, readers?
Also see:
Asymmetrical Warfare Group
Operation Gladio
Operation Northwoods
Salvador Option
Special Police Commandos
Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group
Prop 201 tutorial
FRU
And did I mention the Pentagon's press offices in Lincoln, the Pentagon and Langley?
