Can you smell it, readers?
"Moroccans divided on loud prayer calls" by Alfred De Montesquiou, Associated Press | August 10, 2008
RABAT, Morocco - The muezzins' calls echo well before daybreak, summoning the Muslim faithful to daily prayers and reminding foreign tourists in the Moroccan capital how far they are from home.
But the rising decibel level is deepening fault lines between a government drive to modernize and a wave of rigorous political Islam.
Morocco, a country of 33 million people, gets more than 7 million tourists a year, and there are worries that some may be put off by the five heavily amplified calls a day, each lasting five minutes, to "hasten to the prayer, hasten to the prayer."
Muslim purists counter that authorities are compromising religion to please Westerners and the country's liberal elite.
Personally, I wouldn't mind hearing some Muslim calls to prayer around here.
I've heard them before, and they are much more soothing than any noises our consumerist society belches out.
Besides, I'm sure it isn't any worse than the traffic tie-ups around the corner on Saturdays because of the Jewish temple!
The frictions are happening in a country that is considered moderate on matters of religion and is a US ally at a time when there are fears that Al Qaeda is establishing itself in North Africa.
Oh, really? "Al-CIA-Duh," huh?
And JUST LOOK who has been in-country for a while, readers?
Coincidence?
"Israeli history is studded with accounts of high-level secret visits to Morocco.... Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were among the Israeli leaders who, in elaborate disguises, flew in Hassan's private planes at crucial moments. Israeli newspapers said that Hassan allowed Mossad to set up a station in Morocco and develop close ties with Moroccan security forces"
Morocco has lately been shaken by two different cases in which the government, or wealthy Westerners, have been accused of plotting to force down the volume on the muezzins who make the call to prayer.
Nouzha Skalli, the minister for family and social affairs, is accused of seeking legislation to lower the volume on muezzins in tourist zones. Newspapers have asked whether Skalli, a feminist and former communist, is trying to curb Islam and impose secularism on Morocco's overwhelmingly Muslim society. Some hard-line imams have cursed her during public sermons.
Oh, NOW THINGS MAKE SENSE!!!
You know, I AM SICK of shoveling DIVISIVE ZIONIST GARBAGE DOWN the THROATS of the rest of the world!!
WHAT BUSINESS IS IT OF OURS, anyway?
"It made huge waves, even a tsunami," Skalli said in an Associated Press interview.
She wouldn't say what exactly she had proposed, since it happened at a closed-door Cabinet meeting, but denied suggesting a law to muzzle the muezzins and said her statements were taken out of context. "It was a complete manipulation," she said.
Skalli views her job of promoting women's rights as part of a wider struggle between two models of society: one of "modernity, equality and openness" versus "closing-off and backwardness." She suspects she was targeted "because I'm a woman and because I represent modernity."
Translation: She is a NWO Feminist Agent sent to DESTROY OTHER CULTURES!!!
I'm sorry, I never wanted to know the truth, either, but THAT'S THE WAY IT IS!!!!
Another BETRAYAL!!!
Earlier this year Annie Laforet, a Frenchwoman, was blamed for the closure of a mosque next to the luxury guest house she runs in the old town, or medina, of picturesque Marrakech.
Yeah, piss off the people who LIVE THERE why don't you?
What are running, anyway, a brothel?
That's "liberation," too, isn't it?
The claim, which Laforet denied, caused outrage in the local press, and Laforet says she received death threats on Islamist websites.
Oh, you mean like THESE?
Jewish Media Group, SITE, is the first to release another Islamic threat video
Local authorities backed her denial and then reopened the mosque, from which the prayer call now blares every morning about 4:30 a.m., and then again an hour later. "It's a bit loud, but it's fine," Laforet said. "Tourists know it's part of living in the medina."
I'll bet it sounds beautiful.
Still, Mohammed Darif, a Moroccan political scientist and expert on Islamism, says hard-liners increasingly are depicting the tourist influx as a threat to Muslim values. The wealthy may support the government's pro-Western and liberal values, he says, "But the Morocco of poverty, backward countryside, and urban slums is increasingly averse to tourism and the internationalized elite."
Which is why they must be crushed!
He says some Moroccans complain of walled-off resorts that make them feel unwelcome. "It's discrimination by wealth, and tourism is highlighting the sore," he said.
That is what ELITE WAR CRIMINALS DO!!!!
ERECT WALLS!!!!
Olivier Roy, French author of "Globalized Islam," says the tensions are a new phenomenon, and that the former French colony has "a history of cohabitation" in which Western hippies of the 1960s and '70s were welcome.
Roy says louder calls to prayer are a product of Salafism, a rigorous strain of Islam imported from Saudi Arabia. "Thirty years ago you could barely hear the muezzin," he said.
Uh-oh!
Also, he said, the audio technology used for prayer calls has improved, and imams are in competition to fill their mosques."
Oh, so they are just like the Amerikan shysters trying to increase the flock, huh?
