History and Origins of Recent Wave of Terrorism

By Mamnoon Ahmad Khan

Introduction

I clearly remember that thirty years back I haven’t heard the word terrorism or terrorist. There was only one term in use which was Israel’s aggression on Arabs and Palestinians. But after the Russian (formerly USSR) invasion on Afghanistan, the scenario changed. Russian brutalities were not hidden from the world. They not only destroy this independent country but they destroy its future generations. On many villages after killing their inhabitants they crushed the whole village with bulldozers. Even they did not forgive innocent children. Russians threw toy bombs in towns and villages from helicopters and when a child found it and started to play with it blew up. As a result so many Afghan children died or became handicapped. 

Soviet Aggression in Soviet-Afghan War

Over 1 million Afghans were killed.15 million Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran, 1/3 of the prewar population of the country. Another 2 million Afghans were displaced within the country. In the 1980s, one out of two refugees in the world was an Afghan.2 Along with fatalities were 1.2 million Afghans disabled with the blessings of the Russian  landmines (mujahedeen, government soldiers and noncombatants) and 3 million maimed or wounded (primarily noncombatants).3

Irrigation systems, crucial to agriculture in Afghanistan’s arid climate were destroyed by aerial bombing and strafing by Soviet or government forces. In the worst year of the war, 1985, well over half of all the farmers who remained in Afghanistan had their fields bombed, and over one quarter had their irrigation systems destroyed and their livestock shot by Soviet or government troops, according to a survey conducted by Swedish relief experts 4

The population of Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar, was reduced from 200,000 before the war to no more than 25,000 inhabitants, following a months-long campaign of carpet bombing and bulldozing by the Soviets and Afghan communist soldiers in 1987.5Land mines had killed 25,000 Afghans during the war and another 10-15 million land mines, most planted by Soviet and government forces, were left scattered throughout the countryside to kill and maim.6 A great deal of damage was done to the civilian children population by land mines. A 2005 report estimated 3-4% of the Afghan population was disabled due to Soviet and government land mines. In the city of Quetta, a survey of refugee women and children taken shortly after the Soviet withdrawal found over 80% of the children refugees unregistered and child mortality at 31%. Of children who survived, 67% were severely malnourished, with malnutrition increasing with age.7

Critics of Soviet and Afghan government forces describe their effect on Afghan culture as working in three stages: first, the center of customary Afghan culture, Islam, was pushed aside; second, Soviet patterns of life, especially amongst the young, were imported; third, shared Afghan cultural characteristics were destroyed by the emphasis on so-called nationalities, with the outcome that the country was split into different ethnic groups, with no language, religion, or culture in common.8

The Geneva Accords of 1988, which ultimately led to the withdrawal of the Soviet forces in early 1989, left the Afghan government in ruins. The accords had failed to address adequately the issue of the post-occupation period and the future governance of Afghanistan. The assumption among most Western diplomats was that the Soviet-backed government in Kabul would soon collapse; however, this was not to happen for another three years. During this time the Interim Islamic Government of Afghanistan (IIGA) was established in exile. The exclusion of key groups such as refugees and Shias, combined with major disagreements between the different mujahedeen factions, meant that the IIGA never succeeded in acting as a functional government.9

Before the war, Afghanistan was already one of the world’s poorest nations. The prolonged conflict left Afghanistan ranked 170 out of 174 in the UNDP’s Human Development Index, making Afghanistan one of the least developed countries in the world.10

 Once the Soviets withdrew, US interest in Afghanistan ceased. The US decided not to help with reconstruction of the country and instead they handed over the interests of the country to US allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Pakistan quickly took advantage of this opportunity and forged relations with warlords and later theTaliban, to secure trade interests and routes. From wiping out the country’s trees through logging practices, which has destroyed all but 2% of forest cover country-wide, to substantial uprooting of wild pistachio trees for the exportation of their roots for therapeutic uses, to opium agriculture, the past ten years have caused much ecological and agrarian destruction.11

Captain Tarlan Eyvazov, a soldier in the Soviet forces during the war, stated that the Afghan children’s future is destined for war. Eyvazov said, “Children born in Afghanistan at the start of the war… have been brought up in war conditions, this is their way of life.” Eyvazov’s theory was later strengthened when the Taliban movement developed and formed from orphans or refugee children who were forced by the Soviets to flee their homes and relocate their lives in Pakistan. The swift rise to power, from the young Taliban in 1994, was the result of the disorder and civil war that had warlords running wild because of the complete breakdown of law and order in Afghanistan after the departure of the Soviets.12

Israeli  Brutalities since the Arab-Isreal War 1967

       According to eyewitness accounts by Israeli officers and journalists, the Israeli Army – the army that claims to hold itself to a higher moral standard than other armies – executed as many as 1,000 Arab prisoners during the 1967 war.

Historian Gabby Bron wrote in the Yediot Ahronot in Israel that he witnessed Israeli troops executing Egyptian prisoners on the morning of June 8, 1967, in the Sinai town of El Arish.

Bron reported that he saw about 150 Egyptian POWs being held at the El Arish airport where they were sitting on the ground, densely crowded together with their hands held on the back of their necks. Every few minutes, Bron writes, Israeli soldiers would escort an Egyptian POW from the group to a hearing conducted by two men in Israeli army uniforms. Then the man would be taken away, given a spade, and forced to dig his own grave.

I watched as (one) man dug a hole for about 15 minutes, Bron wrote. Afterwards, the (Israeli military) policeman told him to throw the shovel away, and then one of them leveled an Uzi at him and shot two short bursts, each of three or four bullets.

Bron says he witnessed about ten such executions, until the grave was filled. Then an Israeli Colonel threatened him with a revolver, forcing him to leave the area.

The reality is that Israel encouraged and then took advantage of that war for many political, economic, and territorial reasons. To grab these advantages, Israel attacked on Syria and captured the Golan in the last days of the war.

Sabra and Shatila Massacre Sep.16, 1982

Today, 27 years later, Israeli aggression against Palestinians continues.

The scars left by the Sabra and Shatila massacres are indescribable. Photo courtesy: Piotr_360

On Sept. 16, 1982, members of the Lebanese Christian Phalange militia – with direct approval and support of then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon – entered Sabra and Shatila and initiated a 36-hour long assault, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of unarmed Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

Journalist Robert Fisk, who was on the scene on September 19, 1982, reported seeing the “blackened bodies of babies tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded U.S. army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.”

The infants had been shot in the head. Some had had their throats slit. Scores of men had been shot in the back of the head or mutilated by axes. Women had been raped. Pregnant women had fetuses torn from their bodies.

The United Nations, which issued a formal declaration of genocide in 1982, also calls the Sabra and Shatila massacre one of the most heinous events in the 20th century.

How many died is not known, but figures range from about 1,000 to at least 3,500, a number estimated by the late Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk.

“The exact figure (of victims) can never be determined because, in addition to the approximately 1,000 people who were buried in communal graves by the International Committee of the Red Cross or in the cemeteries of Beirut by members of their families, a large number of corpses were buried beneath bulldozed buildings by the militia members themselves,” wrote Dr. Laurie King-Irani, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. “Also, particularly on 17 and 18 September, hundreds of people were carried away alive in trucks towards unknown destinations, never to return.”

Dr. King-Irani also was the North American Coordinator of the International Campaign for Justice for the Victims of Sabra and Shatila, which hosted the Web site indictsharon.net.

Yet the perpetrators of the massacre were never brought to justice. An internal Israeli investigation called the Kahan Commission – which was political and not judicial – found Sharon to be indirectly but personally responsible. He resigned as defense minister but retained a government cabinet position. He served as prime minister from 2001 to 2006. A case that had been filed in November 2001 on behalf of some survivors against Sharon and others for committing war crimes under Belgium’s universal jurisdiction law was later rejected by a Belgian appeals court.

Sharon told the Israeli Knesset that the decision to send in the Phalangists had been made at 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 15. The Israeli Command received the instructions that the “mopping up of the camps will be carried out by the Phalanges or the Lebanese army,” Dr. King-Irani writes, citing the Kahan Commission report, page 125.

Today, 27 years later, Israeli aggression against Palestinians continues. Operation Cast Lead in December and January killed more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than 5,300. Israel’s continuing siege has squeezed the 1.5 million residents there into an inhumane and unthinkable crisis.

All the Muslims of the world should honor the victims and survivors of Sabra and Shatila by keeping their memories alive. Where their voices have been silenced, we must raise our voices loudly and clearly and call for an end to the brutal occupation of Palestine and for the right of refugees to return to their homeland.

The Jenin Massacre of April 2002

A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins.

A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shovelled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks.

In one nearby half-wrecked building, gutted by fire, lies the fly-blown corpse of a man covered by a tartan rug. In another we found the remains of 23-year-old Ashraf Abu Hejar beneath the ruins of a fire-blackened room that collapsed on him after being hit by a rocket. His head is shrunken and blackened. In a third, five long-dead men lay under blankets.

A quiet. sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland, littered now with detritus of what were once households, foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes, tin cans, children’s toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing.

We stared at a mound of debris. Here, he said, he saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank. We could not see the bodies. But we could smell them.

A few days ago, we might not have believed Kamal Anis. But the descriptions given by the many other refugees who escaped from Jenin camp were understated, not, as many feared and Israel encouraged us to believe, exaggerations. Their stories had not prepared me for what I saw yesterday. I believe them now.

Until two weeks ago, there were several hundred tightly-packed homes in this neighbourhood called Hanat al-Hawashim. They no longer exist.

Around the central ruins, there are many hundreds of half-wrecked homes. Much of the camp — once home to 15,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war — is falling down. Every wall is speckled and torn with bullet holes and shrapnel, testimony of the awesome, random firepower of Cobra and Apache helicopters that hovered over the camp.

Building after building has been torn apart, their contents of cheap fake furnishings, mattresses, white plastic chairs spewed out into the road. Every other building bears the giant, charred, impact mark of a helicopter missile. Last night there were still many families and weeping children still living amid the ruins, cut off from the humanitarian aid. Ominously, we found no wounded, although there was a report of a man being rescued from beneath ruins only an hour before we arrived.

Those who did not flee the camp, or not detained by the army, have spent the bombardment in basements, enduring day after day of terror. Some were forced into rooms by the soldiers, who smashed their way into houses through the walls. The UN says half of the camp’s 15,000 residents were under 18. As the evening hush fell over these killing fields, we could suddenly hear the children chattering. The mosques, once so noisy at prayer time, were silent.

Israel was still trying to conceal these scenes yesterday. It had refused entry to Red Cross ambulances for nearly a week, in violation of the Geneva Convention. Yesterday it continued to try to keep us out.

Jenin, in the northern end of the occupied West Bank, remained a closed military zone, was ringed Merkava tanks, army Jeep patrols, and armoured personnel carriers. Reporters caught trying to get in were escorted out. A day earlier the Israeli armed forces took in a few selected journalists to see sanitised parts of the camp. We simply walked across the fields, flitted through an olive orchard overlooked by two Israeli tanks, and into the camp itself.

We were led in by hands gesturing at windows. Hidden, whispering people directed us through narrow alleys they thought were clear. When there were soldiers about, a finger would rise in warning, or a hand waved us back. We were welcomed by people desperate to tell what had occurred. They spoke of executions, and bulldozers wrecking homes with people inside. This is mass murder committed by Ariel Sharon, Jamel Saleh, 43, said. We feel more hate for Israel now than ever. Look at this boy. He placed his hand on the tousled head of a little boy, Mohammed, the eight-year-old son of a friend. He saw all this evil. He will remember it all. So will everyone else who saw the horror of Jenin refugee camp. Palestinians who entered the camp yesterday were almost speechless.

Rajib Ahmed, from the Palestinian Energy Authority, came to try to repair the power lines. He was trembling with fury and shock. This is mass murder. I have come here to help by I have found nothing but devastation. Just look for yourself. All had the same message: tell the world.

Recent Israeli aggression in Gaza

Israel has perpetrated an unprecedented barbaric slaughter on defenseless civil Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel’s intent seems to have been not only the destruction of some locations in the Gaza Strip, but the annihilation of Gaza and the burial of its population under piles of rubbles and blood lakes.

The time chosen by Israel to launch its aggression mounts anxiety amongst Arabs.

Worldwide concerns about the deep financial crisis, the transitional period in the White House, and Hamas’s declaration of the end of its truce with Israel without any Palestinian or Arab support that may halt Israel’s hostile intentions, all trigger anxiety that Israel is preparing for the worst to terrorize the entire Arab region.

Israel launched its aggression on Saturday, Dec. 27, 2008 on three stages:

Stage One: Air bombardment as of Dec. 27, 2008 to Jan. 2, 2009.Stage Two: Ground attack as of Jan. 3 to 10, 2009.Stage Three: Starting on Jan. 10 with advance inside large cities, occupying more  territories and setting a buffer zone along the borders of the Strip, which finally ended on Jan. 18.

Throughout the three stages, more than 1300 people have been killed and more than 5300 injured of which more than a half are women, children, and aged persons. 

Blame the Victim, Not the Aggressor US Foreign Minister, Condoleeza Rice accused Hamas for the violence. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon could only express “deep alarm,” and where was Barack Obama? An AP photo showed him on vacation “working out” at the Semper Fit Center at the Marine Corp Base Hawaii in Kailua, Hawaii on Saturday, and CBS News reported that he’s “closely monitoring global events, including the situation in Gaza, but there is one president at a time,” according to Brooke Anderson, his chief national security spokesperson.In a July 2008 interview, The New York Times asked Obama if Israel should negotiate with Hamas in Gaza. He replied that “I don’t think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens….I expect Israelis to do (all they can to stop them)….In terms of negotiating with Hamas, it is very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation state, does not recognize your right to exist, (and) has consistently used terror as a weapon. Hamas is a terrorist organization….it’s hard for Israel to negotiate with a country like that.”Hamas was democratically elected. It’s the legitimate Palestinian government. It’s falsely called a terrorist organization, and it has every right to resist an illegal occupation under international law. It observed a unilateral ceasefire for months and extended peace overtures numerous times in the past. Israel spurned them by dividing Gaza and the West Bank, co-opting Mamoud Abbas, inciting Fatah against Hamas, isolating Gaza, and pursuing a policy of aggression, killings, targeted assassinations, mass incarcerations, and torture with full support from Washington, the West, and (from his comments above) the incoming Obama administration.The UN Refugee Works Relief Agency’s (UNWRA) operations head for Palestinian refugees, John Ging, expressed outraged on what’s happening. Earlier he said: Gazans got nothing from the months of ceasefire. There was no “restoration of a dignified existence. We had our supplies restricted (during the period) to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position” with very little food left until it ran out.The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) campaigns for Palestinian justice in areas of civil, human and political rights according to international law. Along with the Palestine Return Centre (PRC), the Palestinian Forum of Britain (PFB), the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), Stop the War, Friends of al Aqsa, the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), and Respect, Islamic Human Rights Commission it organized emergency protests opposite Israel’s London Embassy on December 28 and 29 to demand an end of the Gaza siege and ongoing aggression. The urgency was highlighted by saying: Israel’s Cynicism (Is) Supported by the West’s Complicity” as it called for public solidarity to end it.For her part, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni ordered the Ministry to “take emergency measures (to) open an aggressive and diplomatic international public relations campaign,” according to Haaretz. In other words, Israel will spin its wanton aggression into justifiable self-defense and get dominant media help to sell it. On December 27, The New York Times took the lead. It reported that “Israeli airstrikes hit Hamas security facilities in Gaza on Saturday in a crushing response to the group’s rocket fire….Israeli military officials (called the attack) an effort to force Hamas to end its rocket barrages into southern Israel. Thousands of Israelis hurried into bomb shelters amid the hail of rockets,” making it seem like Israel resembled London during the blitz when, in fact, Hamas attacks are mere pin pricks and only respond to first-strike Israeli attacks. The Times and dominant media are silent on this. They continue spreading spurious lies about Hamas being “officially committed to Israel’s destruction, and when it won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and then ‘forcibly’ took over Gaza in 2007, it said it would not recognize Israel, honor previous Palestinian Authority commitments to it, or end its violence against Israelis.”All of the above is untrue. The Times continues to report falsely. Hamas wants peace, has repeatedly been conciliatory, and its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said earlier that armed struggle would end “if the Zionists ended (their) occupation of Palestinian territories and stopped killing Palestinian women, children and innocent civilians.”Israel rejects all overtures. More recently, Hamas offered peace and Israeli recognition in return for a Palestinian state inside pre-1967 borders – its Occupied Territories that it’s entitled to under international law. As early as 1988, the PLO under Yasser Arafat accepted a two-state solution with Palestinians willing to settle for only 22% of their pre-1948 homeland – a generous offer that, if accepted, would have had two sovereign states living peacefully alongside each other as neighbors.Israel rejects this out of hand. It chooses dominance over peace, violence over reconciliation, and imperial conquest above the rule of law. It’s colonizing the West Bank, ethnically cleansing the population, and continues to terrorize Gaza. “The newspaper of record” is selective about “fit news to print,” so uncomfortable truths are suppressed. It reported that one Israeli was killed Saturday and another four wounded, one seriously, but didn’t explain that previous rocket attacks caused no deaths or injuries.After many months of siege compounded by ongoing attacks, Gaza is gravely affected, but so is the West Bank. Under the Fatah government, no rockets are launched, yet Israel maintains a violent occupation, continues to seize Palestinian land, expand its illegal settlements, and lets its residents terrorize Palestinians with impunity, even in cases of wanton killings and destruction of property.

 US administration supports Israeli aggression against Gaza

 On 31 December, Associated Press reported that the UN Security Council had held an emergency meeting on an Arab request for a legally binding and enforceable UN resolution that would condemn Israel and seek to force the Zionist state to stop its military attacks on Gaza. The draft resolution also called for the immediate protection of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the opening of border crossings for humanitarian aid. But the draft, which was presented by Libya on behalf of the 22-member Arab League, was immediately rejected by the United States as “unbalanced”. Despite this US veto, Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN observer, told Associated Press that Arab nations would be working “day and night” to get the UN Security Council’s approval for a binding resolution in the announced terms. As with the 2006 war in Lebanon, the government of President George W. Bush has strongly supported the Israeli attack on Gaza. White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe even called Hamas “nothing but thugs”. Moreover, the US administration has been working to block all diplomatic proposals for a cease-fire in order to give Israel the green light to increase its attacks on Gaza. While Israeli fighters, warships and artillery continued to destroy civilian buildings, bridges and mosques, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice did not hesitate to blame Hamas for the Israeli aggression and showed US backing for Israel’s rejection of cease-fire initiatives from the European Union and several Arab capitals. Washington and Israel did not accept the victory of Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary election. In June 2007, they promoted a coup d’état to bring down the national unity government that Fatah and Hamas had previously set up during their negotiations in Jeddah. The coup failed and from then on, the Bush administration backed the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, which has often prevented 1.5 million Palestinians from receiving food, fuel, medicines and so forth. The goal of this blockade is to make life for the people of Gaza so intolerable that the Hamas administration will fall. The United States is not only protecting Israel in the diplomatic front but it has also given Israel some weapons that have been used on the Palestinians, including the GBU-39 missile — a new bunker-buster weapon. Israel received 1,000 missiles of this type in early December in addition to the 3 billion dollars a year in US military aid, including F-16 fighters and Apache helicopters and the fuel and spare parts needed to keep them in operation. Israeli attacks have killed hundreds of Palestinians (scores of them children), while the US Administration continues to insist that Hamas is “responsible” for the fighting. US President Barack Obama’s Senior Adviser, David Axelrod repeated the same lies as President George W. Bush: that Hamas had been the first to break the ceasefire agreement. Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi agreed. She issued a statement concerning the Israeli aggression on Gaza in which she wrote, “When Israel is attacked, the US must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally.” On the night of November 4, the day of the US election, Israel fired missiles on Gaza. It then continued to bomb Gaza over the following six weeks killing dozens of Palestinians. “The escalation towards war could, and should, have been avoided. It was the State of Israel which broke the truce, in the tunnel raid … two months ago,” the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom wrote in a press release. The army continued its calculated raids and killings. The truth is that the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is a crime against humanity for which not only the Israeli government but also the American one bears full responsibility. In fact, for the US to support and be an accomplice in Israeli war crimes is serving a far more strategic purpose. What it is actually doing is setting up a “new order” in the Middle East which will ensure continued US domination in the region and control over its oil resources. Israel is but a small partner in this bloody effort. The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, threats against Iran and Syria and the Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006 are all part of this US application of the Israeli doctrine to dominate and divide the Arab and Muslim worlds. In spite of all this military and diplomatic support, the officials of the US Administration fear a possible Israeli failure, similar to what happened in Lebanon in 2006 and have urged Israel to settle a timetable and exit strategy, foreign diplomats told the Los Angeles Times. “US officials are concerned that the campaign could drag on without destroying Hamas, and might even bolster support for the militant group – just as the Israeli campaign in Lebanon strengthened Hezbollah. You are not hearing that same confidence you did in 2006 that the Israeli military can impose a new strategic reality,” said one Arab diplomat in Washington. According to numerous observers, the war will weaken the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas and strengthen his Hamas rivals, even though Israel will continue its Gaza invasion. The fighting has also ruined the already damaged reputation of the US-backed regimes of Egypt and Jordan, both of which have diplomatic relations with Israel and are regarded by the Arab people as corrupt and accomplices in the Israeli aggression. The stability of these regimes is seriously threatened. Some observers believe that Israel wanted to create an international crisis at a time when Obama was on the verge of becoming the US President, in order to gauge the new Obama government’s sensibilities to the killing of Palestinians. Israel wanted to determine Obama’s policies even before they are decided by his administration in order to make it complicit in its crimes against the Palestinians. Obama’s submission to Israel has been put in doubt by the Israeli media. In March 2007 Obama told a small gathering of Democratic activists in Iowa: “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” The comment made headlines and earned him the outrage of pro-Israel groups. As a candidate in the recent presidential election, Obama changed his tone and said that Israel had the “right” to full sovereignty over all of Al Quds (Jerusalem), a position that guarantees that there will not be a lasting peace in the region, as Arabs and Muslims will never renounce their legitimate rights to the city. Obama’s right-hand man, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, is a rabid Zionist who worked for the Israeli army during the 1991 [Persian] Gulf War. Now, these measures were seen as a means to avoid criticism by the influential pro-Israeli lobby in Washington, which has deeply infiltrated both the US Republican and the Democratic parties. Obama’s initial reaction to the Gaza massacre was “no comment”. This has led many people to start wondering if his self-declared principles of safety and dignity are also going to be applied to the Palestinian people. There is no doubt that the United States will pay a high price for its support of Israel’s state terrorism. Many protesters from all over the world are burning US flags and showing their complete rejection of US policies that promote Zionist terror. Although US mainstream media, which are under Zionist or corporate control, continue to falsify the reality regarding the extent of Israeli aggression and occupation, the internet and satellite channels of the Muslim world are offering professional coverage of the developments in Palestine. Washington’s continued support for Israeli crimes will lead any initiative aimed at recovering its destroyed credibility in the Muslim and Arab worlds to failure.

How the CIA created Taliban and Osama bin Laden

 Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today’s supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the “evil empire”, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The “evil empire” was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.

How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities — the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11 — bin Laden the “freedom fighter” is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a “terrorist mastermind” and an “evil-doer”.

Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt — and perhaps the disaster that befell New York.

The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

Mujaheddeen

In April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in reaction to a crackdown against the party by that country’s repressive government.

The PDPA was committed to a radical land reform that favoured the peasants, trade union rights, an expansion of education and social services, equality for women and the separation of church and state. The PDPA also supported strengthening Afghanistan’s relationship with the Soviet Union.

Such policies enraged the wealthy semi-feudal landlords, the Muslim religious establishment (many mullahs were also big landlords) and the tribal chiefs. They immediately began organising resistance to the government’s progressive policies, under the guise of defending Islam.

Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government’s radical example) to its allies in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan mujahedeen, as the “contra” force was known.

Following an internal PDPA power struggle in December 1979 which toppled Afghanistan’s leader, thousands of Soviet troops entered the country to prevent the new government’s fall. This only galvanised the disparate fundamentalist factions. Their reactionary jihad now gained legitimacy as a “national liberation” struggle in the eyes of many Afghans.

The Soviet Union was eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the mujahedeen captured the capital, Kabul, in 1992.

Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujahedeen factions. Other Western governments, as well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more.

Washington’s policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread religious fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski’s grand plan coincided with Pakistan military dictator General Zia ul-Haq’s own ambitions to dominate the region. US-run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central Asia (while paradoxically denouncing the “Islamic revolution” that toppled the pro-US Shah of Iran in 1979).

Washington’s favoured mujahedeen faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The West’s distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury “freedom fighter”. Hekmatyar was notorious in the 1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.

After the mujahedeen took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar’s forces rained US-supplied missiles and rockets on that city — killing at least 2000 civilians — until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister. Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.

Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the mujahedeen from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was the world’s single largest source of heroin, supplying 60% of US drug users.

In 1995, the former director of the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan was unrepentant about the explosion in the flow of drugs: “Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets… There was a fall out in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.”

Made in the USA

According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, in 1986 CIA Chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).

John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujahidin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American “black Muslims” were taught “sabotage skills”.

The November 1, 1998, British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained “bin Laden’s operatives” in 1989.

These “operatives” were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar’s forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army’s elite Green Berets.

The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called “Operation Cyclone”.

In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the mujahedeen factions by an organisation known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services — MAK).

MAK was a front for Pakistan’s CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.

Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with the CIA’s approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was “partly culpable” for the 1993 World Trade Center blast, the Independent reported.

Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in 1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialised in recruiting, financing and training the estimated 35,000 non-Afghan mercenaries who joined the mujahidin.

The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and political ties to that country’s pro-US royal family.

Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia’s minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam’s holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world’s largest private construction company.

Osama bin Laden’s father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill-gotten business empire.

(Bin Laden junior’s oft-quoted personal fortune of US$200-300 million has been arrived at by the US State Department by dividing today’s value of the bin Laden family net worth — estimated to be US$5 billion — by the number of bin Laden senior’s sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama and took control of his share.)

Osama’s military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully aware of his activities.

Milt Bearden, the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, “Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did … [Guys like] bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It’s an extra $200-$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did.”

In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built “training camps”, some dug deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.

These camps, now dubbed “terrorist universities” by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.

Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the mujahedeen told the August 13, 2000, British Observer, “The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism — car bombing and so on — so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns … Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.”

Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden’s organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly-run capitalist holding company — albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary force and related logistical services with “legitimate” business operations.

Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.

Bin Laden only became a “terrorist” in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden’s anger turned to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes — such as Egypt — in the Middle East were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.

He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of the Gulf States. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there were frozen.

After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services — and thousands of his mercenaries — to the Taliban, which took power that September.

Today, bin Laden’s private army of non-Afghan religious fanatics is a key prop of the Taliban regime.

Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.

In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the mujahedeen, as saying he would make “the same call again”, even knowing what bin Laden would become.

“It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union.”

Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation.

Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano, described as a former CIA chief of “counter-terrorism operations”.

Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their “work”. He was in charge of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980s. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid to the Afghan mujahedeen for the US National Security Council.

The last word goes to Zbigniew Brzezinski: “What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Conclusion

A moment’s thought would show that any invasion that replaced the Taliban with a western puppet in Kabul would merely restore the Taliban as champions of Afghan sovereignty. The Americans sponsored them to be just such a puppet in the 1980s, funding some 60,000 foreign mercenaries to join them against the Russians. Intervention reaps what it sows.

Americans don’t want to acknowledge their mistakes but this is realty that [currently] Americans have made Taliban look like illegitimate child.  It was the Pakistani ISI with the blessing of CIA, who brainwashed Taliban when they were small kids living in the Tents in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, next to Afghanistan. They taught them to hate Russians. They taught them to fight, and they didn’t teach them anything else. Then they were just children growing up in Pakistan. And they are the ones who made them very religious and they are the ones who made them terrorists. They are the ones to teach them kill people and they did not teach them anything else.

Now America is savagely killing her own made Taliban without any mercy as they are non living things. These killings comprised of Taliban and a large number of Pakistani and Afghani civilians.

America has spread the circle of its drone attacks to Pakistan Administered Tribal Areas in the doubt of Taliban hideouts. Resulting a heavy loss of civilian lives consisting of innocent women and children while no or few Taliban causalities. The remaining members of these ill-fated families bearing fire of revenge in their hearts became suicide bombers. These suicide bobbers commonly known as terrorists, attack Pakistani forces and civilians causing heavy loss of life and property. Pakistan is paying an unbearable price for killing her own people (American made Taliban) in the so called War against Terror. America has injected terrorism in the form of Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan in an effort to defeat Russia. Now this jinni of Aladdin (Taliban) is out of the lamp while American and Pakistani forces are not capable enough to put this jinni back into the lamp. If military operations against Taliban succeeded in restoring law and order in the region it would not be durable. Dialogue and a policy of tolerance is the only way to win the hearts of these Pukhtoons, otherwise the history showed us that they are born fighters and no military might is capable to subdue them. In the light of all historical facts I come to this conclusion that Israel, Russia and America are equally responsible of recent wave of terrorism which has engulfed the major portion of Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. If American policy makers don’t react on time then these acts of terrorism can happen any where around the globe!!

Notes

10.   Panetta L. (2002) Collateral Damage and the uncertainty of Afghanistan. Daily Dawn Karachi August 17, 2002.

11.   Kirby, A. (2003). War ‘has ruined Afghan environment.’  National Journal of Environment, Fall 2007edition,(p.75)

12.  Hauner, M. (1989). Afghanistan and the Soviet Union: Collision and transformation. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. (p.51)

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There are significant turning points in the history of mankind. We are now living in one of them. Some call it globalization and some say that this is the genesis of the “information age.” These are true, but there is yet a more important concept than these. Although some are unaware of it, great advances have been made in science and philosophy in the last 20-25 years. Atheism, which has held sway over the world of science and philosophy since the 19th century is now collapsing in an inevitable way.

Of course, atheism, the idea of rejecting God’s existence, has always existed from ancient times. But the rise of this idea actually began in the 18th century in Europe with the spread and political effect of the philosophy of some anti-religious thinkers. Materialists such as Diderot and Baron d’Holbach proposed that the universe was a conglomeration of matter that had existed forever and that nothing else existed besides matter. In the 19th century, atheism spread even farther. Thinkers such as Marx, Engels, Nietsche, Durkheim or Freud applied atheist thinking to different fields of science and philosophy.

The greatest support for atheism came from Charles Darwin who rejected the idea of creation and proposed the theory of evolution to counter it. Darwinism gave a supposedly scientific answer to the question that had baffled atheists for centuries: “How did human beings and living things come to be?” This theory convinced a great many people of its claim that there was a mechanism in nature that animated lifeless matter and produced millions of different living species from it.

Towards the end of the 19th century, atheists formulated a world view that they thought explained everything; they denied that the universe was created saying that it had no beginning but had existed forever. They claimed that the universe had no purpose but that its order and balance were the result of chance; they believed that the question of how human beings and other living things came into being was answered by Darwinism. They believed that Marx or Durkheim had explained history and sociology, and that Freud had explained psychology on the basis of atheist assumptions.

However, these views were later invalidated in the 20th century by scientific, political and social developments. Many and various discoveries in the fields of astronomy, biology, psychology and social sciences have nullified the bases of all atheist suppositions.

In his book, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, the American scholar Patrick Glynn from the George Washington University writes:

The past two decades of research have overturned nearly all the important assumptions and predictions of an earlier generation of modern secular and atheist thinkers relating to the issue of God. Modern thinkers assumed that science would reveal the universe to be ever more random and mechanical; instead it has discovered unexpected new layers of intricate order that bespeak an almost unimaginably vast master design. Modern psychologists predicted that religion would be exposed as a neurosis and outgrown; instead, religious commitment has been shown empirically to be a vital component of basic mental health…

Few people seem to realize this, but by now it should be clear: Over the course of a century in the great debate between science and faith, the tables have completely turned. In the wake of Darwin, atheists and agnostics like Huxley and Russell could point to what appeared to be a solid body of testable theory purportedly showing life to be accidental and the universe radically contingent. Many scientists and intellectuals continue to cleave to this worldview. But they are increasingly pressed to almost absurd lengths to defend it. Today the concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis.1

Science, which has been presented as the pillar of atheist/materialist philosophy, turns out to be the opposite. As another writer puts it, “The strict materialism that excludes all purpose, choice and spirituality from the world simply cannot account for the data pour in from labs and observatories.”2

In this article, we will briefly analyze the conclusions arrived at by different branches of science on this issue and examine what the forthcoming “post-atheist” period will bring to humanity.

Cosmology: The Collapse of the Concept of An Eternal Universe And the Discovery of Creation

The first blow to atheism from science in the 20th century was in the field of cosmology. The idea that the universe had existed forever was discounted and it was discovered that it had a beginning; in other words, it was scientifically proved that it was created from nothing.

This idea of an eternal universe came to the Western world along with materialist philosophy. This philosophy, developed in ancient Greece, stated that nothing else exists besides matter and that the universe comes from eternity and goes to eternity. In the Middle Ages when the Church dominated Western thought, materialism was forgotten. However in the modern period, Western scientists and philosophers became consumed by a curiosity about these ancient Greek origins and revived an interest in materialism.

Immanuel Kant: Proposed the idea of a universe without a beginning or an end. He was terribly wrong.

The first person in the modern age to propose a materialist understanding of the universe was the renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant—even though he has not a materialist in the philosophical sense of the word. Kant proposed that the universe was eternal and that every possibility could be realized only within this eternity. With the coming of the 19th century, it became widely accepted that the universe had no beginning, and that there was no moment of creation. Then, this idea, adopted passionately by dialectical materialists such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, came into the 20th century.

This idea has always been compatible with atheism. This is because to accept that the universe had a beginning would mean that God created it and the only way to counter this idea was to claim that the universe was eternal, even though this claim had no basis on science. A dogged proponent of this claim was Georges Politzer who became widely known as a supporter of materialism and Marxism in the first half of the 20th century through his book Principes Fondamentaux de Philosophie (The Fundamental Principles of Philosophy). Assuming the validity of the model of an eternal universe, Politzer opposed the idea of a creation:

The universe was not a created object, if it were, then it would have to be created instantaneously by God and brought into existence from nothing. To admit creation, one has to admit, in the first place, the existence of a moment when the universe did not exist, and that something came out of nothingness. This is something to which science can not accede.3

By supporting the idea of an eternal universe against that of creation, Politzer thought that science was on his side. However, very soon, the fact that Politzer alluded to by his words, “if it is so, we must accept the existence of a creator”, that is, that the universe had a beginning, was proven.

This proof came as a result of the “Big Bang” theory, perhaps the most important concept of 20th century astronomy.

The Big Bang theory was formulated after a series of discoveries. In 1929, the American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, noticed that the galaxies of the universe were continually moving away from one another and that the universe was expanding. If the flow of time in an expanding universe were reversed, then it emerged that the whole universe must have come from a single point. Astronomers assessing the validity of Hubble’s discovery were faced with the fact that this single point was a “metaphysical” state of reality in which there was an infinite gravitational attraction with no mass. Matter and time came into being by the explosion of this mass-less point. In other words, the universe was created from nothing.

John Maddox: His prophecy about the Big Bang utterly failed.

On the one hand, those astronomers who are determined to cling to materialist philosophy with its basic idea of an eternal universe, have attempted to hold out against the Big Bang theory and maintain the idea of an eternal universe. The reason for this effort can be seen in the words of Arthur Eddington, a renowned materialist physicist, who said, “Philosophically, the notion of an abrupt beginning to the present order of Nature is repugnant to me”.4 But despite the fact that the Big Bang theory is repugnant to materialists, this theory has continued to be corroborated by concrete scientific discoveries. In their observations made in the 1960’s, two scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, detected the radioactive remains of the explosion (cosmic background radiation). These observations were verified in the 1990’s by the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite.

In the face of all these facts, atheists have been squeezed into a corner. Anthony Flew, an atheist professor of philosophy at the University of Reading and the author of Atheistic Humanism, makes this interesting confession:

Notoriously, confession is good for the soul. I will therefore begin by confessing that the Stratonician atheist has to be embarrassed by the contemporary cosmological consensus. For it seems that the cosmologists are providing a scientific proof of what St. Thomas contended could not be proved philosophically; namely, that the universe had a beginning. So long as the universe can be comfortably thought of as being not only without end but also without beginning, it remains easy to urge that its brute existence, and whatever are found to be its most fundamental features, should be accepted as the explanatory ultimates. Although I believe that it remains still correct, it certainly is neither easy nor comfortable to maintain this position in the face of the Big Bang story 5

An example of the atheist reaction to the Big Bang theory can be seen in an article written in 1989 by John Maddox, editor of Nature, one of the best-known materialist-scientific journals.

In that article, called “Down With the Big Bang,” Maddox wrote that the Big Bang is “philosophically unacceptable,” because “creationists and those of similar persuasions… have ample justification in the doctrine of the Big Bang.” He also predicted that the Big Bang “is unlikely to survive the decade ahead.” 6 However, despite Maddox’ hopes, Big Bang has gained credence and many discoveries have been made that prove the creation of the universe.

Some materialists have a relatively logical view of this matter. For example, the English materialist physicist, H.P. Lipson, unwillingly accepts the scientific fact of creation. He writes:

I think …that we must…admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it. 7

Thus, the fact arrived at finally by modern astronomy is this: time and matter were brought into being by an eternally powerful Creator independent of both of them. The eternal power that created the universe in which we live is God who is the possessor of infinite might, knowledge and wisdom.

Physics and Astronomy: The Collapse of the Idea of a Random Universe and

The Discovery of the Anthropic Principle

A second atheist dogma rendered invalid in the 20th century by discoveries in astronomy is the idea of a random universe. The view that the matter in the universe, the heavenly bodies and the laws that determine the relationships among them has no purpose but is the result of chance, has been dramatically discounted.

For the first time since the 1970’s, scientists have begun to recognize the fact that the whole physical balance of the universe is adjusted delicately in favor of human life. With the advance of research, it has been discovered that the physical, chemical and biological laws of the universe, basic forces such as gravity and electro-magnetism, the structure of atoms and elements are all ordered exactly as they have to be for human life. Western scientists have called this extraordinary design the “anthropic principle”. That is, every aspect of the universe is designed with a view to human life.

We may summarize the basics of the anthropic principle as follows:

The speed of the first expansion of the universe (the force of the Big Bang explosion) was exactly the velocity that it had to be. According to scientists’ calculations, if the expansion rate had differed from its actual value by more than one part in a billion billion, then the universe would either have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size or else have splattered in every direction in a way never to unite again. To put it another way, even at the first moment of the universe’s existence there was a fine calculation of the accuracy of a billion billionth.

The four physical forces in the universe (gravitational force, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, and electromagnetic force) are all at the necessary levels for an ordered universe to emerge and for life to exist. Even the tiniest variations in these forces (for example, one in 1039, or one in 1028; that is—crudely calculated—one in a billion billion billion billion), the universe would either be composed only of radiation or of no other element besides hydrogen.

There are many other delicate adjustments that make the earth ideal for human life: the size of the sun, its distance from the earth, the unique physical and chemical properties of water, the wavelength of the sun’s rays, the way that the earth’s atmosphere contains the gases necessary to allow respiration, or the Earth’s magnetic field being ideally suited to human life. (For more information on this topic, see Harun Yahya, The Creation of the Universe, Al-Attique Publishers, 2001)

This delicate balance is one of the most striking discoveries of modern astrophysics. The wellknown astronomer, Paul Davies, writes in the last paragraph of his book The Cosmic Blueprint, “The impression of Design is overwhelming.”8

In an article in the journal Nature, the astrophysicist W. Press writes, “there is a grand design in the Universe that favors the development of intelligent life.”9

The interesting thing about this is that the majority of the scientists that have made these discoveries were of the materialist point of view and came to this conclusion unwillingly. They did not undertake their scientific investigations hoping to find a proof for God’s existence. But most of them, if not all of them, despite their unwillingness, arrived at this conclusion as the only explanation for the extraordinary design of the universe.

In his book, The Symbiotic Universe the American astronomer, George Greenstein, acknowledges this fact:

How could this possibly have come to pass [that the laws of physics conform themselves to life]? …As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency—or, rather Agency—must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?10

By beginning his question with “Is it possible”, Greenstein, an atheist, tries to ignore that plain fact that has confronted him. But many scientists who have approached the question without prejudice acknowledge that the universe has been created especially for human life. Materialism is now being viewed as an erroneous belief outside the realm of science. The American geneticist, Robert Griffiths, acknowledges this fact when he says, “If we need an atheist for a debate, I go to the philosophy department. The physics department isn’t much use.”11

In his book Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, which examines how physical, chemical and biological laws are amazingly calculated in an “ideal” way with a view to the requirements of human life, the well-known molecular biologist, Michael Denton writes:

The new picture that has emerged in twentieth-century astronomy presents a dramatic challenge to the presumption which has been prevalent within scientific circles during most of the past four centuries: that life is a peripheral and purely contingent phenomenon in the cosmic scheme.12

In short, the idea of a random universe, perhaps atheism’s most basic pillar, has been proved invalid. Scientists now openly speak of the collapse of materialism.13 The supposition whose falsity God reveals in the Qur’an, “We did not create heaven and earth and everything between them to no purpose. That is the opinion of those who disbelieve…” (Qur’an, 38: 27) was shown to be invalid by science in the 1970’s.

Quantum Physics and the Discovery of the Divine Wisdom

When scientists have gone deeper into the atom, they found it shockingly “empty”.

One of the areas of science that shatters the materialist myth and gives positive evidence for theism is quantum physics.

Quantum physics deals with the tiniest particles of matter, what is called the sub-atomic realm. In school everyone learns that matter is composed of atoms. Atoms are made up of a nucleus and several electrons spinning around it. One strange fact is that all these particles take up only some 0.0001 percent of the atoms. In other words, an atom is something that is 99.9999 percent “empty.”

An even more interesting fact is that when the nuclei and electrons are further examined, it has been realized that these are made up of much smaller particles called “quarks,” and that these quarks are not particles in the physical sense, but simply energy. This discovery has broken the classical distinction between matter and energy. It now appears that in the material universe, only energy exists. What we call matter is just “frozen energy.”

There is a still more intriguing fact: The quarks, those energy packets, act in such a way that they maybe described as “conscious.” Physicist Freeman Dyson, on his acceptance of the Templeton Prize, stated that:

Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom.14

What this means is that there is information behind matter. Information that precedes the material realm. Gerald Schroeder, an MIT-trained scientist who has worked in both physics and biology and author of the famous book The Science of God, makes a number of important comments on this subject. In his more recent book, The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth (2001), Schroeder explains that quantum physics—along with other branches of science—is the tool for discovering a universal wisdom that lies behind the material world. As he puts it:

It took humanity millennia before an Einstein discovered that, as bizarre as it may seem, the basis of matter is energy, that matter is actually condensed energy. It may take a while longer for us to discover that there is some non-thing even more fundamental than energy that forms the basis of energy, which in turn forms the basis of matter.15

John Archibald, professor of physics at Princeton University and recipient of the Einstein Award, explained the same fact when he said that the “bit” (the binary digit) of information gives rise to the “it,” the substance of matter.16 According to Schroeder this has a “profound meaning”:

The matter/energy relationships, the quantum wave functions, have profound meaning. Science may be approaching the realization that the entire universe is an expression of information, wisdom, an idea, just as atoms are tangible expressions of something as ethereal as energy.17

This wisdom is such an omniscient thing that covers the whole universe:

A single consciousness, a universal wisdom, pervades the universe. The discoveries of science, those that search the quantum nature of subatomic matter, have moved us to the brink of a startling realization: all existence is the expression of this wisdom. In the laboratories we experience it as information that first physically articulated as energy and then condensed into the form of matter. Every particle, every being, from atom to human, appears to represent a level of information, of wisdom.18

This means that the material universe is not a purposeless and chaotic heap of atoms, as the atheist/materialist dogma assumes, but is instead a manifestation of a wisdom which existed before the universe and which has absolute sovereignty over everything that exists. In Schroeder’s words, it is “as if a metaphysical substrate was impressed upon the physical”. 19

This discovery shatters the whole materialist myth and reveals that the material universe we see is just a shadow of a transcendent Absolute Being. Thus, as Schroeder explains, quantum physics has become the point where science and theology meet:

The age-old theological view of the universe is that all existence is the manifestation of a transcendent wisdom, with a universal consciousness being its manifestation. If I substitute the word information for wisdom, theology begins to sound like quantum physics. We may be witnessing the scientific confluence of the physical with the spiritual. 20

Quantum is really the point where science and theology meet. The fact that the whole universe is pervaded by a wisdom is a secret that was revealed in the Qur’an 14 centuries ago. One verse reads:

Your god is God alone, there is no god but Him. He encompasses all things in His knowledge. (Qur’an, 20:98)

The Natural Sciences: The Collapse of Darwinism and

The Triumph of Intelligent Design

Darwin: His theory is now refuted by a great deal of scientific evidence.

As we stated at the beginning, one of the main supports for the rise of atheism to its zenith in the 19th century was Darwin’s theory of evolution. With its assertion that the origin of human beings and all other living things lay in unconscious natural mechanisms, Darwinism gave atheists the opportunity they had been seeking for centuries. Therefore, Darwin’s theory had been adopted by the most passionate atheists of the time, and atheist thinkers such as Marx and Engels elucidated this theory as the basis of their philosophy. Since that time, the relationship between Darwinism and atheism has continued.

But, at the same time, this greatest support for atheism is the dogma that has received the greatest blow from scientific discoveries in the 20th century. The discoveries by various branches of science such as paleontology, biochemistry, anatomy and genetics have shattered the theory of evolution from various aspects. (See Harun Yahya, Evolution Deceit, 2000). We have dealt with this fact in much more detail in various other books and publications, but we may summarize it here as follows:

Paleontology: Darwin’s theory rests on the assumption that all species come from one single common ancestor and that they diverged from one another over a long period of time by small gradual changes. It is supposed that the proofs for this will be discovered in the fossil record, the petrified remains of living things. But fossil research conducted in the course of the 20th century has presented a totally different picture. The fossil of even a single undoubted intermediate species that would substantiate the belief in the gradual evolution of species has not been found. Moreover, every taxon appears suddenly in the fossil record and no trace has been found of any previous ancestors. The phenomenon known as the Cambrian Explosion is especially interesting. In this early geological period, nearly all of the phyla (major groups with significantly different body plans) of the animal kingdom suddenly appeared. This sudden emergence of many different categories of living things with totally different body structures and extremely complex organs and systems, including mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms and (as recently discovered) even vertebrates, is a major blow to Darwinism. For, as evolutionists also agree, the sudden appearance of a taxon implies supernatural design and this means creation.

Biological Observations: In elaborating his theory, Darwin relied on examples of how animal breeders produced a different variety of dogs or horses. He extrapolated the limited changes he observed in these cases to the whole of the natural world and proposed that every living thing could have come to be in this way from a common ancestor. But Darwin made this claim in the 19th century when the level of scientific sophistication was low. In the 20th century things have changed greatly. Decades of observation and experimentation on various species of animals have shown that variation in living things has never gone beyond certain genetic boundary. Darwin’s assertions, like “I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”21 actually demonstrates his great ignorance. On the other hand, observations and experiments have shown that mutations defined by Neo- Darwinism as an evolutionary mechanism add no new genetic information to living creatures.

The Origin of Life: Darwin spoke about a common ancestor but he never mentioned how this first common ancestor came to be. His only conjecture was that the first cell could have formed as a result of random chemical reactions “in some small warm little pond”.22 But evolutionary biochemists who undertook to close this hole in Darwinism met with frustration. All observations and experiments showed that it was, in a word, impossible for a living cell to arise within inanimate matter by random chemical reactions. Even the English atheist Nobel Prize-winner Fred Hoyle expressed that such a scenario “is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”23

Intelligent Design: Scientists studying cells, the molecules that compose the cells, their remarkable organization within the body and the delicate order and plan in the organs are faced with proof of the fact that evolutionists strongly wish to reject: The world of living things is permeated by designs too complex to be found in any technological equipment. Intricate examples of design, including our eyes that are too superior to be compared to any camera, the wings of birds that have inspired flight technology, the complexly integrated system of the cells of living things and the remarkable information stored in DNA, have vitiated the theory of evolution which regards living things as the product of blind chance.

All these facts have squeezed Darwinism into a corner by the end of the 20th century. Today, in the United States and other Western countries, the theory of intelligent design is gaining everincreasing acceptance among scientists. Those who defend the idea of intelligent design say that Darwinism has been a great error in the history of science and that it came to be as the result of materialist philosophy’s being imposed on the scientific paradigm. Scientific discoveries show that there is a design in living things which proves creation. In short, science proves once more that God created all living things.

Psychology: The Collapse of Freudianism and the Acceptance of Faith

The representative of the 19th century atheist dogma in the field of psychology was the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed a psychological theory which rejected the existence of the soul and tried to explain the whole spiritual world of human beings in terms of sexual and similar hedonistic motivations. But Freud’s greatest assault was against religion.

Later studies showed that Freud’s ideas, especially the ones about religion were totally flawed.

In his book The Future of an Illusion published in 1927, he proposed that religious faith was a kind of mental illness (neurosis) and that, as human beings progressed, religious faith would completely disappear. Due to the primitive scientific conditions of the time, the theory was proposed without the requisite research and investigation, and with no scholarly literature or possibility of comparison, and therefore, its claims were extremely deficient. Indeed, if Freud had the possibility of evaluating his propositions today, he would himself be surprised by the logical deficiency of his claims and he would be the first to criticize such senseless presuppositions.

After Freud, psychology developed on an atheist foundation. Not only Freud, but the founders of other schools of psychology in the 20th century were passionate atheists. Two of these were B.F. Skinner, the founder of the behaviorist school and Albert Ellis, founder of rational emotive therapy. The world of psychology ended up by becoming the forum for atheism. A 1972 poll among the members of the American Psychology Association revealed that only 1.1 percent of psychologists in the country had any religious beliefs.24

But most psychologists who fell into this great deception were undone by their own psychological investigations. It became known that the basic suppositions of Freudianism had almost no scientific support and, moreover, that religion was not a mental illness as Freud and some other psychological theorists declared, but a basic element of mental health. Patrick Glynn summarizes these important developments:

Yet the last quarter of the twentieth century has not been kind to the psychoanalytic vision. Most significant has been the exposure of Freud’s views of religion as entirely fallacious. Ironically enough, scientific research in psychology over the past twenty-five years has demonstrated that, far from being a neurosis or source of neuroses as Freud and his disciples claimed, religious belief is one of the most consistent correlates of overall mental health and happiness. Study after study has shown a powerful relationship between religious belief and practice, on the one hand, and healthy behaviors with regard to such problems as suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, depression, even, perhaps surprisingly, levels of sexual satisfaction in marriage, on the other. In short, the empirical data run exactly contrary to the supposedly “scientific” consensus of the psychotherapeutic profession.25

Finally, as Glynn says, “modern psychology at the close of the twentieth century seems to be reacquainting itself with religion”26 and “a purely secular view of human mental life has been shown to fail not just at the theoretical, but also at the practical, level.27

In other words, atheism has been routed also on the field of psychology.

Medicine: The Discovery of “How Hearts Find Peace”

Another branch of science that was affected by the collapse of atheist suppositions was medicine.

According to results compiled by David B. Larson and his team at the National Institute for Healthcare Research, a comparison among Americans in relation to church attendance yielded very interesting results. Risk of arteriosclerotic heart disease for men who attended church frequently was just 60 percent of that for men who were infrequent church attenders. Among women, suicide was twice as high among infrequent as among frequent church attenders; smokers who ranked religion as very important in their lives were over seven times less likely to have normal diastolic pressure readings than were those who did not.28

Secular psychologists generally explain such phenomena as having a psychological cause. In this sense, faith raises a person’s morale and contributes to his well-being. There may be some truth in this explanation, but if we look more closely we see something much more dramatic. Belief in God is much stronger than any other influence on the morale. In comprehensive research on the relationship between religious belief and physical health, Dr. Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School came up with some interesting results. Although he did not have any religious faith, Benson arrived at the result that faith in God and worship had a much more positive effect on human health than could be observed in anything else. Benson concludes that he has “found that faith quiets the mind like no other form of belief.”29

Why is there such a special relation between faith and human spirit and body? The result arrived at by Benson, who is a secular researcher, was, as he put it, that the human mind and body are “wired for God.”30

This fact, that the medical world is slowly beginning to notice, is a secret revealed in the Qur’an with the verse, “Only in the remembrance of God can the heart find peace.” (Qur’an, 13:28) The reason why those who believe in God, pray to Him and trust in Him are physically and mentally more healthy than others is that they behave in harmony with their nature. Philosophical systems opposed to human nature always bring pain, sorrow, anxiety and depression upon people.

The basic source of the peace experienced by a religious person is that he acts in order to gain God’s approval. In other words, this peace is the natural result of a person’s listening to the voice of his conscience. A person does not live the morality of religion simply “to be more at peace” or “to be healthier”; a person who acts with this intention cannot find peace in its true sense. God well knows that what a person stores in his heart or what he reveals. A person experiences peace of mind only by being sincere and attempting to gain God’s approval. God commands:

So set your face firmly towards the [true] religion, as a pure natural believer, God’s natural pattern on which He made mankind. There is no changing God’s creation. That is the true religion—but most people do not know it. (Qur’an, 30:30)

In the light of the discoveries that we have briefly indicated above, modern medicine is starting to become cognizant of this truth. As Patrick Glynn says, “contemporary medicine is clearly moving in the direction of acknowledging dimensions of healing beyond the purely material”.31

Society: The Fall of Communism, Fascism and the Hippie Dream

The collapse of atheism in the 20th century did not occur only in the fields of astrophysics, biology, psychology and medicine; it happened also in politics and social morality.

Communism may be considered the most important political result of 19th century atheism. The founders of this ideology, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky or Mao, all adopted atheism as a basic principle. A primary goal of all communist regimes was to get society to adopt atheism and to destroy religious belief. Stalin’s Russia, Red China, Cambodia, Albania and some Eastern block countries applied immense pressure on religious people to the point of committing mass murder.

Yet, amazingly, at the end of the 1980s this bloody atheist system collapsed. When we examine the reasons for this dramatic fall, we see that what collapsed was actually atheism. Patrick Glynn writes:

To be sure, secular historians would say that the greatest mistake of Communism was to attempt to defy the laws of economics. But other laws, too, came into play… Moreover, as historians penetrate the circumstances of the Communist collapse, it is becoming clearer that the Soviet elite was itself in the throes of an atheistic “crisis of faith”. Having lived under an atheistic ideology—one that consisted of lies and that was based on a “Big Lie”— the Soviet system suffered a radical demoralization, in every sense of that term. People, including the ruling elite, lost all sense of morality and all sense of hope.32

An interesting indication of the Soviet system’s great “crisis of faith” was President Mihail Gorbachev’s attempts of reform. Since the time that he assumed the presidency, Gorbachev was interested in moral problems as well as economic reforms. For example, one of the first things he did was to initiate a campaign against alcoholism. In order to raise the morale of society, for a long time he used Marxist-Leninist terminology but he saw that this was of no use.

Gorbachev: His futile attempts could not heal the “crisis of faith” in the Soviet society.

Then, in the later years of the regime, he even began to mention God in some of his speeches, even though he himself was an atheist. Naturally, these insincere words of faith were of no use and the crisis of faith in Soviet society continued to worsen. The result was the collapse of the gigantic Soviet empire. The 20th century documented not only the fall of communism, but also that of another fruit of 19th century antireligious philosophy—fascism. Fascism is the outcome of a philosophy which may be called a mixture of atheism and paganism and which is intensely hostile to theistic religions. Friedrich Nietzsche, who may be called the father of fascism, extolled the morality of barbarous idolatrous societies, attacked Christianity and other monotheistic religions and even called himself the “Antichrist.” Nietzsche’s disciple, Martin Heidegger, was an avid Nazi supporter and the ideas of these two atheist thinkers gave impetus to the terrifying savagery of Nazi Germany. (The Holocaust, one of the greatest act of evil in human history, was the result of Nazi anti-Semitism, an ideology that hated Jews and the monotheistic faith that has been the cornerstone of Judaism—and also Islam.) The Second World War, that caused the death of 55 million people, is another example of the calamity that atheist ideologies like fascism and communism have brought upon humanity.

At this point, we must recall another atheist ideology—Social Darwinism—which was among the causes for the outbreak of both the First and the Second World Wars. In his book entitled Europe Since 1870, Harvard history professor James Joll states that behind each of the two world wars lay the philosophical views of Social Darwinist European leaders who believed in the myth that war was a biological necessity and that nations developed through conflict.33

In contrast with the theist and peaceful American Revolution, the French Revolution was atheist, neo-pagan and extremely violent.

Another social consequence of atheism in the 20th century appeared in Western democracies. In the present day there is a tendency to regard the West as the “Christian world.” However, since the 19th, century, a quickly growing atheist culture has held sway with Christian culture, and today there is a conflict between these two cultures in what we call Western civilization. And this atheist element has been the true cause of western imperialism, moral degeneration, despotism and other negative manifestations.

In his book God: The Evidence, the American writer Patrick Glynn draws attention to this matter and, in order to compare the God-fearing and atheist elements in the West, he takes the examples of the American and French Revolutions. The American Revolution was carried out by believers; American Declaration of Independence states that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”. Since the French Revolution was the work of atheists, the French Declaration of Human Rights was very different, with no reference to God and full of atheist and neo-pagan notions.

The actual results of the two revolutions were quite different: in the American model, a peaceful, tolerant environment was created that respected religion and religious belief; in France the fierce hostility to religion drowned the country in blood and unleashed a savagery such as had never been seen before. As Glynn says, “there is an interesting historical correlation between atheism, on the one hand, and moral and political catastrophe, on the other hand.”34

Glynn notes that attempts to turn America into an atheist country have also caused harm to society. The fact that the sexual revolution (for example) that spread in the 60’s and 70’s caused immense social damage is accepted even by secular historians.35

John Lennon: The world he imagined —one without religion— did not bring a happy end, neither to him nor to his followers.

The hippie movement was a demonstration of this social damage. The hippies believed that they could find spiritual emancipation through secular humanist philosophy and by such things as unlimited drugs and sex. These young people who poured onto the streets with romantic songs—like John Lennon’s Imagine in which he spoke of a world “with no countries, and no religion too”—were actually undergoing a mass deception.

In fact, a world without religion actually brought them to an unhappy end. The hippy leaders of the 1960s either killed themselves or died from drug-induced comas in the early 1970s. Many other young hippies shared a similar fate.

Those young people of the same generation who turned to violence found themselves on the receiving end of violence. The 1968 generation, who turned their backs on God and religion and imagined they could find salvation in such concepts as revolution or selfish Epicureanism, ruined both themselves and their own societies.

The Dawn of the Post-Atheist World

The facts that we have briefly summarized to this point shows clearly that atheism is undergoing an inevitable collapse. In other words, humanity is — and will be — turning towards God. The truth of this assertion is not limited only to the scientific and political areas that we have written about here. From prominent statesmen to movie stars and pop artists, those who influence opinion in the West are much more religious than they used to be. There are many people who have seen the truth and come to believe in God after having lived for years as atheists. (Patrick Glynn from whose book we have quoted is one of these ex-atheists).

The fact that the developments which have contributed to this result began in the same period, that is from the second half of the 1970s, is quite interesting. The anthropic principle first appeared in the 1970s. Scientific criticism of Darwinism started to be loudly voiced at that same time. The turning point against the atheist dogma of Freud was a book entitled The Road Less Traveled published in 1978 by Scott Peck. For this reason, Glynn, in the 1997 edition of his book writes that “over the past twenty years, a significant body of evidence has emerged, shattering the foundations of the long-dominant modern secular worldview.”36

Surely, the fact that the atheist world-view has been shaken means that another world-view prevails, which is belief in God. Since the end of the 1970’s, (or, from the beginning of the 14th century according to the Muslim calendar) the world has seen a rise in religious values. Like other social processes, this does not happen in a day and the majority of people may not notice it because it has been developing over a long period of time. However, those who evaluate the development a little more carefully see that the world is at a major turning point in the realm of ideas.

Secular historians try to explain this process according to their own principles but just as they are in deep error with regard to the existence of God, so they are greatly mistaken about the course of history. In fact, as the following verse reveals, history moves as God as determined: “…You will not find any changing in the pattern of God. You will not find any alteration in the pattern of God.” (Qur’an, 35: 43) It follows, then, that history has a purpose and unfolds as God has commanded. And God’s command is the perfection of His light:

They desire to extinguish God’s Light with their mouths. But God refuses to do other than perfect His Light, even though the disbelievers detest it. (Qur’an, 9: 32)

This verse means that God has sent down His light upon humanity through the religion that He has revealed. Those who do not believe want to extinguish this light by their “mouths”— intimations, propaganda and philosophies, but God will finally perfect His light and give dominion to religious values on earth.

This may be the “turning point in history” mentioned at the beginning of this article as also indicated by the evidence we have provided here, as well as the implications of various hadiths and statements by scholars. Surely, God knows best.

Conclusion

We are living at an important time. Atheism, which people have tried for hundreds of years to portray as “the way of reason and science,” is proving to be mere irrationality and ignorance. Materialist philosophy that sought to use science for its own ends has been in turn defeated by science. A world rescuing itself from atheism will turn to God and religion. And this process has begun long ago.

It is clear that believers have important duties in this period. They must be aware of this major change in the world’s way of thinking, interpret it, make good use of the opportunities that globalization offers and effectively represent the truth along this road. They must know that the basic conflict of ideas in the world is between atheism and faith. It is not a struggle between East and West; in both East and West there are those who believe in God and those who do not. For this reason, faithful Christians, as well as faithful Jews are allies of Muslims. The main divergence is not between Muslims and the “People of the Book” (Jews and Christians), but between Muslims and the People of the Book on the one hand, and atheists and pagans on the other. Of course, we must not show hostility to such people but view them as people who need to be rescued from their error.

The time is fast approaching when many people who are living in ignorance with no knowledge of their Creator will be graced by faith in the impending post-atheist world.

Under the pen name of Harun Yahya, Adnan Oktar has written some 250 works. His books contain a total of 46,000 pages and 31,500 illustrations. Of these books, 7,000 pages and 6,000 illustrations deal with the collapse of the Theory of Evolution. You can read, free of charge, all the books Adnan Oktar has written under the pen name Harun Yahya on these websites www.harunyahya.com

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(1) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World , Prima Publishing, California, 1997, pp.19-20, 53

(2) Bryce Christensen, in a review of Gerald Shroeder’s book The Hidden Face of God, Booklist March 15, 2001

(3) George Politzer, Principes Fondamentaux de Philosophie, Editions Sociales, Paris, 1954, p. 84

(4) S. Jaki, Cosmos and Creator, Regnery Gateway, Chicago, 1980, p.54

(5) Henry Margenau, Roy Abraham Vargesse, Cosmos, Bios, Theos, La Salle IL: Open Court Publishing, 1992, p.241

(6) John Maddox, “Down with the Big Bang”, Nature, vol. 340, 1989, p. 378

(7) H. P. Lipson, “A Physicist Looks at Evolution”, Physics Bulletin, vol. 138, 1980, p. 138

(8) Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint, London: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 203

(9) W. Press, “A Place for Teleology?”, Nature, vol. 320, 1986, s. 315

(10) George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe, p. 27

(11) Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, p. 123

(12) Denton, Michael Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, The New York: The Free Press,1998, p. 14

(13) Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992, p. 10

(14) As quoted in Gerald Schroeder, The Hidden Face of God, Touchstone, New York, 2001, p. 7

(15) Gerald Schroeder, The Hidden Face of God, Touchstone, New York, 2001, p. 8

(16) Ibid. p. 8

(17) Ibid. p. 28

(18) Ibid. p. xi

(19) Ibid. p. 48

(20) Ibid. xii

(21) Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, Harvard University Press, 1964, p. 184

(22) Charles Darwin, Life and Letter of Charles Darwin, vol. II, From Charles Darwin to J. Do Hooker, March 29, 1863

(23) “Hoyle on Evolution”, Nature, vol. 294, November 12, 1981, p. 105

(24) Edwin R. Wallace IV, “Psychiatry and Religion: A Dialogue”, in Joseph H. Smith and Susan A. Handelman, eds., Psychoanalysis andReligion, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1990, p. 1005

(25) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World , Prima Publishing, California, 1997, pp.60-61

(26) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World , Prima Publishing, California, 1997, p.69

(27) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World , Prima Publishing, California, 1997, p.78

(28) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World , Prima Publishing, California, 1997, pp.80-81

(29) Herbert Benson, Mark Stark, Timeless Healing, Simon & Schuste, New York, 1996, p. 203

(30) Herbert Benson, Mark Stark, Timeless Healing, Simon & Schuste, New York, 1996, p. 193

(31) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World , Prima Publishing, California, 1997, p.94

(32) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World , Prima Publishing, California, 1997,pp.161-162

(33) James Joll, Europe Since 1870: An International History, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1990, pp. 102-103

(34) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World , Prima Publishing, California, 1997, p.161

(35) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World , Prima Publishing, California, 1997, p.163

(36) Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, Prima Publishing, California, 1997, p. 2

The Association of British Insurers (ABI) estimates that one in three Britons are without any form of life insurance, and of those that do have cover a further one in three may be under-insured. However, those headline figures don’t show the full picture as many industry experts believe the young to be more under-insured, and that may be because of the way that they buy life insurance.

Recent separate surveys into the UK life insurance market commissioned by Norwich Union and Sainsbury’s Bank have highlighted that there may be a different approach between the generations when it comes to buying life insurance.

The Sainsbury’s Bank survey found that young people tend not to shop around when it comes to buying life assurance and the majority simply choose to go with their mortgage provider. The reason given for this appears to be a form of attrition; that they are already so worn out and over-whelmed by the house-buying process that they readily agree to the cover offered by their lender; it is an easy option as they leave it to the lender to arrange all the details. But, taking this approach may not be in their best interest. A Sainsbury’s spokesperson said: “Not shopping around is a big disadvantage for younger people as premiums stay the same throughout the life of the policy, so getting a more advantageous deal with more favourable premiums from the start could save thousands over the life of the policy.”

However, a survey by Norwich Union showed that the opposite applies when it comes to those over 30 years old; they will shop around to make sure they have fully investigated the market before committing to a purchase. Norwich Union spokesman Darren Dicks said: “As people get older they become more responsible. They also tend to have children from 30 onwards forcing them to think about things like life insurance.” He believes that the combination of life experience and the need to provide for their children means that the over-30s, on the whole, tend to be more financially aware. As a result they will take time to compare life insurance policies and the benefits that they offer, as well as the premiums charged. In addition, as people get older they also tend to have more experience of buying financial services and have more confidence in shopping around to find the best deal.

However, despite the survey’s findings Sainsbury’s Bank estimates that UK mortgage-holders are currently under-insured by a staggering £2.3 trillion, and that can’t all be down to people under 30.

Life insurance UK policies are primarily of two types: term life insurance and investment type life insurance. These are the most commonly available insurance policies types. As per the terms and conditions of investment type of insurance, you are in any case paid the compensation if you survive the term of the policy or if you do not. In the latter case, the family one leaves behind benefits.

This type of policy is consequentially much more expensive than term life insurance, which is a protection only type of insurance policy. Since it covers you for a set term, life insurance is also sometimes known as term insurance. You can set the term for your life insurance policy up to the number of years until your children become financially independent.

Usually, the term is stretched up to around 20 years. Under this type of policy, nothing is paid out if you do not die during the ‘term’ of the insurance coverage. Quotes are important for life insurance UK policies. Term life insurance quotes are available in two categories, usual life insurance and mortgage life insurance. Term life insurance policies do not have cash in values.

They provide peace of mind in that if anything fatal happens to the insured, his/her dependents would not be left in the lurch as they will be benefited by cash payment. Mortgage life insurance UK provides a cost-effective way of ensuring security for one’s partner or children. It ensures that the family home is not confiscated if anything fatal happens to the bread-earner and he fails to pay off the outstanding mortgage payment.

The coverage of this type of life insurance decreases along with the outstanding balance of the mortgage. As a rule, the lump sum payment of mortgage life insurance is sufficient to clear the outstanding dues of your mortgage. On the other hand, full life insurance UK lets you protect your home. But at the same time, it ensures that those whom you leave behind are financially secure for the future, even though they lose the earning member of the family.

Introduction

“And when the female infant (Al-Maw\’udah) buried alive is questioned, for what sin she was killed!” (Surah 81, al takwir: 8-9). On judgmental day, fathers will be asked for which reason they abused their daughters. Islamic teachings ended those cruel pre-Islamic practices of female infanticide “wa\’d” which was common in dark ages. However, child abuse has for a long time been recorded in literature, art and science in many parts of the world. The historical record is also filled with reports of unkempt, weak and malnourished children cast out by families to fend for themselves and of children who have been physically, sexually, and emotional abused. In recent years, countries witnessed a movement towards child abuse addressing and prevention.

This concept paper aims at portraying the different types of child abuse, manifestations and consequences. Different types of child abuse are caused by many factors; those factors will be discussed also. The prevention approaches by family and health service providers will by highlighted at the end of this paper with the therapeutic approaches. Most of the available studies are concerned with aspects of physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse, and therefore the discussion and recommendations would have the most validity when applied to such situations.

Anyone under age 18 who\’s been neglected or abused by a parent or someone responsible for his care is considered a victim of child abuse. In statistics for 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services revealed that: about 896,000 American children were victims of abuse and neglect. Of all abused children, 60.5% suffered neglect; 18.6%, physical abuse; and 9.9%, sexual abuse. Some experienced more than one type. An estimated 1,400 children died from abuse or neglect; 76.1% of them were under age 4. Parents were the most common abusers. Although these numbers on child abuse are appalling, many authorities believe they\’re conservative. Because abuse occurs within the family and often involves young preverbal children, many cases are never discovered or reported. Particularly, 63% of the participants were identified as victims of domestic violence on Karachi Domestic Violence Screening Scale. 36% of the victims were males and 64% of the victims were females. 35% of the victims reported facing physical abuse, 52% of the victims reported psychological abuse and 30% of the victims reported sexual abuse from their relatives. 60% of the victims had depression and 67% of the victims had anxiety. Another Study by medical students of AKU (class of 1996) in a sample of 176 children, it showed that 27% of them had suffered physical abuse.

Child abuse crosses all ethnic, racial, cultural, and socioeconomic lines. There is clear evidence that child abuse is a global problem. “It occurs in a variety of forms and is deeply rooted in cultural, economic and social practices” (Bethea, L, 1999). Many parents who abuse their children are immature and impulsive, with low self-esteem. Sometimes family is isolated within the community and one or both parents may be a substance abuser. Environmental stressors that can trigger abuse include work problems, poverty, unemployment, illness of family members, marital tensions, and domestic violence between adults. The child consequences lead to consider child prevention as the priority in primary health care system. “The short-term consequences of abuse are the physical and behavioral indicators that led to suspect abuse in the first place in health care system”.

The role of the community, religious leaders and school teachers is vital in countering the exploitation of children, but, unfortunately, there is often ambivalence among people regarding such issues. So that there is a need to nurses to sensitize parents and teachers on the crucial issues around child abuse and mobilize them to form networks to protect children. Typically, neglect comes to light when a teacher reports a child who has poor hygiene and inappropriate clothing, appears listless, frequently complains of hunger, or frequently misses school without explanation. Neighbors may report a child being left unsupervised, or a health care provider may report that a child is missing appointments for medical care. As a health care professional, nurse role is reporting child abuse and neglect, especially when a nurse discovers it during home visitation. “Nurses who work with children and families in various health care, education, and social service settings can play a key role in stopping neglect and abuse before they begin, by promoting primary prevention procedures”. ( Kathleen ,2004)

Body

The International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect recently compared definitions of abuse from 58 countries and found some commonality in what was considered abusive. In 1999, the WHO Consultation on Child Abuse Prevention drafted the following definition: ‘‘Child abuse or maltreatment constitutes all forms of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect or negligent treatment or commercial or other exploitation, resulting in actual or potential harm to the child’s health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust or power.’’

The definition given above covers a broad spectrum of abuse. This paragraph focuses primarily on manifestations and consequences of three types of child maltreatment, namely: physical abuse; sexual abuse; emotional abuse and the neglect.

Physical abuse of a child is defined as those acts that cause actual physical harm or have the potential for harm. Injuries inflicted by a caregiver on a child can take many forms. Serious damage or death in abused children is most often the consequence of a head injury or injury to the internal organs. Head trauma as a result of abuse is the most common cause of death in young children, with children in the first 2 years of life being the most vulnerable. Because force applied to the body passes through the skin, patterns of injury to the skin can provide clear signs of abuse. The skeletal manifestations of abuse include multiple fractures at different stages of healing, fractures of bones that are very rarely broken under normal circumstances, and characteristic fractures of the ribs and long bones.

Sexual abuse is defined as those acts where a caregiver uses a child for sexual gratification. Children may be brought to professional attention because of physical or behavioral concerns that, on further investigation, turn out to result from sexual abuse. It is not uncommon for children who have been sexually abused to exhibit symptoms of infection, genital injury, abdominal pain, constipation, chronic or recurrent urinary tract infections or behavioral problems. To be able to detect child sexual abuse requires a high index of suspicion and familiarity with the verbal, behavioral and physical indicators of abuse. Many children will disclose abuse to caregivers or others spontaneously, though there may also be indirect physical or behavioral signs.

Emotional abuse includes the failure to provide an appropriate and supportive environment, and includes acts that have an adverse effect on the emotional health and development of a child. Such acts include restricting a child’s activities, ridicule, threats and intimidation, discrimination, rejection. Neglect refers to the failure of a parent to provide for the development of the child – where the parent is in a position to do so – in one or more of the following areas: health, education, emotional development, nutrition, shelter and safe living conditions. Neglect is thus distinguished from circumstances of poverty in that neglect can occur only in cases where reasonable resources are available to the family or caregiver.

Many risk factors are responsible on child abuse phenomena, among which: community and social factors, age and sex. Numerous studies across many countries have shown a strong association between poverty and child maltreatment. Rates of abuse are higher in communities with high levels of unemployment and concentrated poverty. Such communities are also characterized by high levels of population turnover and overcrowded housing. Research shows that “chronic poverty adversely affects children through its impact on parental behavior and the availability of community resources”. Community correlation represents the degree of cohesion and solidarity that exists within communities. “Children living in areas with less ‘‘social capital’’ or social investment in the community appear to be at greater risk of abuse and have more psychological or behavioral problems” (Macmillan, 1994). On the other hand, “social networks and neighborhood connections have been shown to be protective of children” (Macmillan, 1994). This is true even for children with a number of risk factors – such as poverty, violence, substance abuse and parents with low levels of educational achievement – who appear to be protected by high levels of community correlation.

Vulnerability to child abuse – whether physical, sexual or through neglect – depends in part on a child’s age. Fatal cases of physical abuse are found largely among young infants. In reviews of infant deaths in Fiji, Finland, Germany and Senegal, for instance, the majority of victims were less than 2 years of age Kathleen,M(2004). Young children are also at risk for non-fatal physical abuse, though the peak ages for such abuse vary from country to country. For example, “rates of non-fatal physical abuse peak for children at 3–6 years of age in China, at 6–11 years of age in India and between 6 and 12 years of age in the United States” (Kathleen,M(2004) ). Sexual abuse rates, on the other hand, tend to rise after the onset of puberty, with the highest rates occurring during adolescence ( ). Sexual abuse, however, can also be directed at young children.

Sex is another vulnerability to child abuse. In most countries, girls are at higher risk than boys for infanticide, sexual abuse, educational and nutritional neglect, and forced prostitution. Findings from several international studies show rates of sexual abuse to be 1.5–3 times higher among girls than boys. Globally, more than 130 million children between the ages of 6 and 11 years are not in school, 60% of whom are girls (Macmillan, 1994). In some countries, girls are either not allowed to receive schooling or else are kept at home to help look after their siblings or to assist the family economically by working. Male children appear to be at greater risk of harsh physical punishment in many countries. Although girls are at increased risk for infanticide in many places, it is not clear why boys are subjected to harsher physical punishment. It may be that such punishment is seen as a preparation for adult roles and responsibilities, or else that boys are considered to need more physical discipline. Clearly, the wide cultural gaps that exist between different societies with respect to the role of women and the values attached to male and female children could account for many of these differences.

The majority of programmers focus on prevention of child abuse. Very few emphasize primary prevention approaches in the first place. Family support approaches, health service approaches, therapeutic approaches are described below.

A number of interventions for improving parenting practices and providing family support have been developed. These types of programmers generally educate parents on child development and help them improve their skills in managing their children’s behavior. As an example, Wolfe et al. evaluated a behavioral intervention to provide training in parenting, specifically designed for families considered at risk. Mother–child pairs were randomly assigned to either the intervention or a comparison group. Mothers who received the training in parenting reported fewer behavioral problems with their children and fewer adjustment problems associated with potential maltreatment compared with mothers in the comparison group. Furthermore, a follow-up evaluation by the caseworkers showed that there was a lower risk of maltreatment by the mothers who had received the training in parenting.

A number of health care organizations have developed training programmers to improve both the detection and reporting of abuse and neglect, and the knowledge among health care workers of available community services. In the United States, for example, the “American Medical Association has produced diagnostic and treatment guidelines for child maltreatment and sexual abuse”. (Kempe,1962) The detection of child abuse and neglect, however, is not always simple. Specific interview techniques and types of physical examination are generally required. I have conducted a presentation about ethical dilemma on domestic abuse last year. It was emphasized on nursing role in helping child by solving that dilemma according to teleological and deontological methods.

A review of treatment programmers for physically abused children found that “therapeutic day care with an emphasis on improving cognitive and developmental skills – was the most popular approach” ( ). Therapeutic day care has been advocated for a range of conditions related to abuse, such as emotional, behavioral or attachment related problems and cognitive or developmental delays. The approach incorporates therapy and specific treatment methods in the course of the child’s daily activities at a child care facility. Most programmers of this type also include therapy and education for the parents.

Ill health caused by child abuse forms a significant portion of the global burden of disease. While some of the health consequences have been researched, others have only recently been given attention, including psychiatric disorders and suicidal behavior. Importantly, there is now evidence that major adult forms of illness – including ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia – are related to experiences of abuse during childhood (99– 01). Similarly, there are many studies demonstrating short-term and long-term psychological damage. Such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, aggression, shame or cognitive impairments. The financial costs associated with both the short term and long-term care of victims form a significant proportion of the overall burden created by child abuse and neglect. Included in the calculation are the direct costs associated with treatment, visits to the hospital and doctor, and other health services. In 1996, “the financial cost associated with child abuse and neglect in the United States was estimated at some US$12.4 billion.” (Kempe,1962)

From my point of view, child abuse is serious hidden problem, which I had already suffered in my childhood in side home. But the role of professionals at that age 1990 was not effective. Otherwise, I could have been protected. I believe that health care professionals have a key part to play in identifying, treating and referring cases of abuse and neglect and in reporting suspected cases of maltreatment to the appropriate authorities. It is vital that cases of child maltreatment are detected early on, so as to minimize the consequences for the child and to launch the necessary services as soon as possible.

As I mentioned above, I can conclude that child abuse is a serious global health problem. It has different types, and every type leads to different short and long term consequences. Many factors were responsible to increase voluntarily of child abuse. Prevention methods can be applicable on known cases which reach the clinical levels; however, we can’t predict the violence forms if they are hidden inside houses secrets.

The complex nature of child abuse doesn\’t allow for easy solutions. But nurses who work with children and families in various health care, education, and social service settings can play a key role in stopping neglect and abuse before they begin. Here\’s how. Primary prevention targets the general population. Public service announcements encourage positive discipline techniques, media campaigns tell people how and where to report suspected abuse. And parent-education programs teach parents about child development and parenting skills. For example, expectant and new parents may know little about the basics of child care. They typically know even less about a child\’s emotional, social, and medical needs; the stages of normal development; and how critically the first 3 years of life affect development. Seize your opportunities to teach and model behaviors in clinic settings, childbirth and parenting classes, home visits, and parent support groups

I recommend we should not take a defeatist attitude toward child prevention. Despite the absence of strong evidence to guide our preventive efforts, nurses can do many things to try to prevent abuse. At the very least, showing increased concern for the parents or caregivers and increasing our attempts to enhance their skills as parents or caregivers may help save our most vulnerable patients from the nightmare of abuse and neglect. Recognition and awareness, although essential elements for effective prevention, are only part of the solution. Prevention efforts and policies must directly address children, their caregivers and the environments in which they live in order to prevent potential abuse from occurring and to deal effectively with cases of abuse and neglect that have taken place.

References :

- Kempe,CH et al. The battered child syndrome. Journal of the American Medical

Association, 1962,181:17–24.

- Key,j (1999). Protecting children. New York. Continuum

- Macmillan HL, MacMillan JH, Offord DR, Griffith L, MacMillan A. Primary

prevention of child physical abuse and neglect: a critical review. Part I. J Child

Psychol Psychiatry 1994;35(5):835-56.

-Bethea,L(1999).Primary prevention of child abuse

From http://www.rcn.org rcn.org.ukww.rcn.org.uk

- Kathleen,M(2004).How to recognize and respond to child abuse

From http://www.findarticles.com/

Before you take out a life insurance policy, be aware of these potential gaps in coverage. By becoming aware of these possible loopholes, you will be able to choose your life insurance policy wisely.

1. Decreasing coverage.

There are policies where the face value decreases over the term of the life insurance. This works for some people, but make sure it works for you before you take it up.

2. Unsure coverage.

A life insurance policy has specific terms of coverage. For instance, beneficiaries of those who die by their own hands cannot claim death benefits. Read the specific claim conditions of your life insurance policy.

3. Inadequate coverage for disability.

Even if your policy gives you both life and disability coverage, check how much disability benefits you can claim and under what types of circumstances disability coverage can be enforced.

4. Inadequate face value.

You should buy an insurance policy that covers your family’s needs for at least a year. It should be even greater if you think you’ll have lots of debts that need paying.

5. No withdrawal option.

Some life insurance policies with a cash value component let you withdraw your money after a certain period of time. However, some insurance policies – especially those with a very low premium – will not return your money. All those years of payments will then be lost.

6. Depreciated value.

If you get the life insurance policy that has an investment component (your payments will be used to invest in high-yield accounts and a percentage of the proceeds will be returned to your policy), bad investment decisions by the insurance company can leave you with a depleted policy and face value.

7. No death benefits.

If you die and your beneficiaries begin claims procedures, insurance companies may still refuse to pay them if you omitted an important (even a trivial) piece of information from the insurance application form. They can refuse coverage on the grounds that you have not been entirely honest with the company.

8. Wrong beneficiary.

When you apply for your life insurance, you have to name your beneficiary. Make sure that the name of the beneficiary may be changed at some later date in case you change your mind or in case your beneficiary dies before you do.

9. Loss of benefits or severe depreciation for one unpaid premium.

What happens if you miss one premium payment? You should make sure that your beneficiaries will not lose your death benefits or that these benefits will not be significantly reduced after just one missed premium payment.

10. Not enough to retire on.

If your insurance agents assure you that your whole or permanent life insurance policy is a good investment, they may be trying to mislead you. The typical life insurance covers you in case of death. While the cash value equivalent of your policy may be withdrawn in full upon maturity or converted to an annuity plan, this still does not make a life insurance policy a good retirement plan. You get the most benefit from it after death, and you’d do better to get a different plan – one that has a higher rate of interest – you’re your retirement.

There are many forms of life insurance policies available to a potential policyholder but all life insurance policies will always fall under two different categories:

Term Life Insurance – these types of policies are only active for a specified amount of time of your life, called a “term”. When the term ends, so does the policy. Payout only occurs should the insured die sometime within the policies defined term. This type of life insurance is best used for temporary or shorter term needs: 20-year mortgage, college education costs for children, and helping to support children and assist with family income needs should one of the parents die.

Permanent Life Insurance – this type of policy covers you for your entire life and will pay death benefits when you eventually die. This type of insurance policy is best for “permanent” related needs: burial fees, estate taxes, providing income for a spouse, etc.

Whichever type of insurance policy you choose, there are two factors that determine its cost: Mortality Cost and Policy Expense Cost.

Policy Expense Cost is the cost of insurance company expenses such as office rent, utilities, general staff, and agent commissions. Depending on the type of policy you purchase, this fee can either remain constant or fluctuate throughout your policy’s lifespan.

Mortality Cost is determined by the odds of the insured dying at that particular moment. Obviously, the odds of the insured dying increase exponentially with age. To avoid an ever increasing insurance premium that correlates directly with the insured’s aging, insurance companies average the increase and adjust the early premium payments accordingly. Essentially, you are paying an inflated premium when the insured is younger and a much lower premium as the insured individual ages, but the actual payment remains constant. This overpayment is called “cash value” and must be reimbursed to the policyholder should he or she cancel an existing permanent life insurance policy early. It is important to note that Term Insurance premiums increase with the policy holder’s age but they will never accrue a “cash value”. When a Term Insurance policy is terminated early, there is no refund for overpayment due from the insurer.

Additional life insurance terms you should know:

Beneficiary – This is the person or organization to whom the insurer will pay proceeds to should the insured die. This could be your husband/wife, or your spouse. It could also be your children or a perhaps your favorite charity.

Primary Beneficiary – This is the person or organization that will be paid upon the insurer’s death.

Contingent Beneficiary – This is the person or organization to which the proceeds will be paid to should the Primary Beneficiary be dead or no longer exist (such as a company or corporation named as the Primary Beneficiary). If no Contingent Beneficiary was named in the policy, proceeds will be paid to the Primary Beneficiary’s estate.

Face Amount – This is the amount of money payable at time of death. It is usually found on the first page of every Life Insurance policy, whether it’s a Term or Permanent policy.

Purchase Options – These are options that can be purchased throughout the life of the policy regardless of the insured’s health. A good example of a purchase option is allowing the policyholder to increase the amount of the policy without having to re-evaluate the health of the insured.

Waiver of Premium – This is an optional coverage that permanently suspends your premium in the event that you are disabled. However, you must first be disabled for six months before the waiver takes effect. Additionally, this option is quite expensive and may not be necessary should the insured have substantial disability coverage.

                                        Quotations.

1.      “I” is dangerous destroy it; “eye” is  precious protect it”  

2.      Doctor kills ills by pills some times by bills

3.      It is not aptitude, but attitude that determines your altitude.

4.      The only way to improve your performance is to improve your self- image

5.       “The can do  it all because they think they can”-Virgil

6.      Those who believe they can, can and those who believe they can’t, can’t.

7.       Human beings can alter   their lives by altering their attitude.

8.      “Man is what he conceives himself to be” Jean Paul Sarto

9.      “Man is what he believes”

10.  “None will improve your lot; if you yourselves do not”-Bertolt Brecht

11.   The examination of life begins when the life of examination ends.

12.  New Lords; new laws

13.   “ Go, wash your feet; the doctor is  down the street”

14.  Beauty passes; wisdom remains and increases.

15.   As a rule man is a fool;

When it is hot he wants  it cool;

When it is cool he wants it hot;

Always wanting what is not.

16.  He  who loves with purity considers not the gift of the lover; but the love of the giver.

17.  “ Circumstances are the rulers of the weak, they are instruments of the  wise”. Henry David Thoreau

18.  “ City life is millions of people lonesome together”- James Allen

19.  “When everyone is somebody; then no one is anyhody”-W.S. Gilbert

20.  “Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

21.  Immature poets  imitate; mature poets steal.

22.  “ The best religion is the most tolerant”-Delphine De Giradrian

23.   Art is ‘I’; Science is ‘We’

24.   “Science and art belong to the whole world and before them vanish the barriers of nationality”-Goethe

25.  “ Good teaching is one fourth preparation; three fourth theatre”-Gail Godwin

26.   “A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to  learn is hammering on cold iron”- Horace Man

27.  Put not your trust in money; but put your money in trust.

28.   As is our confidence, so is our capacity”- William Holmes Sr.

29.   A diplomat is man who remembers a lady’s birth day but forgets her age.

30.   When a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps, when he says perhaps he means no, when he says no, he is no diplomat.

31.  “Eat to please thyself; but dress to please  others” Benjamin Franklin

32.   “It is for us to make the effort; the result is always in God’s hands”- Mahatma Gandhi

33.  “ Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote  against somebody rather than for somebody” –Franklin Adams

34.  When duty calls some people are never at home

35.  If you have a head of wax  you should not go in to the sun.

36.  “ Pen is the tongue of the mind”- Cervantes   

 6. “If the girls  don’t run after the boys; the boys will  run after the girls”.

7. Plan your work; work your plan.

8.It is foolish to be silent when you are wise; It is wise to be silent when you are a fool.

 7. Almost and well-nigh save many a lie

5.. No great man ever complaints of want of opportunity- R.W.Emerson 

6. “He  that will thrive, must rise at five “-Ruskin                                                                                         

6.“Age is a matter of feeling not of years”

                                                                                                         George w. Curtis

37.  “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”

                                                                                                                 Archimedes

4.”Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage”

                                                                                            Anaxies Nin

5 “The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind”.

                                                                                                 Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

6.”Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? –Robert Browning

7. “In  Marriage each partner is  to be an encourager rather than a critic, a forgiver rather than a collector of hurts an enabler rather than a reformer”- N.Norman Wright.

9.Every patient is a doctor after his cure-  Irish proverb

10. “ A scholars ink lasts longer than a martyrs blood”

11. “ You must crack the nuts before you can eat the kernel”

12. “A  promise is a debt”

13.” Who ever hateth his brother is a murderer” The Bible

14. “The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for”

      – Maureen Down

15.” Anger is a brief madness”

14. “Learn from Yesterday, live for today and hope for tomorrow” Thomas Jefferson

15. “If your lips would keep from slips five things observe with care; to whom you speak, of whom you speak, and how and when and where- W.E Morris

16. “There is not a tree in heaven higher than the tree of patience”

17. “ Better own a trifle than want a great deal”

18.  “ A live dog is better than a dead lion”

19. “ Put a beggar on horse- back, he will ride to hell”

20. “ Don’t throw out the dirty water until you have the clean water in”

21. “Remember even if you lose all, keep your good name for if you lose that your are worthless”

22. “When the fruit is scarcest;  it’s taste is sweetest”

23. “When wrathful words arise, a closed mouth is soothing”

24. “ A closed mouth, a wise head”

25. “ A silent mouth never did any harm”

26. “It is often a mouth, broke his nose”

27.Never speak to the feet, while the head is alive”

28. “Great talk; little action”

29. Treachery returns

30.Pity him who makes his opinion a certainty

31.Wilful waste, makes woeful want.

32. A shamefaced men seldom acquires wealth.

33. The money maker is never tired.

34. Wisdom is what makes a poor man a king; A weak person powerful, a good generation of a bad one ;a foolish man reasonable.

35. Food is the medicine of healthy; Medicine is the food of the sick

36. “ To the world you may be just one person; but to one person may be the world”- unknown

37. “If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you day? And why are you waiting- Stephen Levite

38. “The reasonable man adopts himself to the world, the un- reasonable one persists in trying to adopt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the un-reasonable”-B.B.Shaw.

39. “ A smile is an in expensive way to improve your look”

40. “ If   you  can’t, you must. If you must you can”

41. Men come of age at 60; women at 15.

42. Some one is sitting in the shade today; because someone planted a tree a long time ago”

43. A man’s dreams are an index to his greatness

44. In statemenship, get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities-Mark Twain

45. Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven- Bible

46. Power will intoxicate the best hearts; as  well as the strongest heads. No man is wise enough nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.

47. “What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what lies with in us”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

48. A blind person who sees is better than a seeing person who is blind”

49. A brother may not be a friend, but a friend will always be a brother”

50 “A change is as good as a rest”

51. It is knowledge alone that will save us in every department of life.- Swami Vivekanandha

52. The man who depreciates himself blasphemes God.

53. Have  passion for achievement.

54. Change yourself, you don’t need to change your job.

55. All are happy in one way that everyone is unhappy in different ways.

56. Serve God, bear God, love God and God will bless you.

57. “ In college days we find love without marriage, and later marriage without love”.

58. Any thing can be refused but politely.

59. Machines are known by horse-power  but men by heart-power.

60.Females mature physically, men never, men mature mentally, women never.

61. The harder you work, the luckier you get”-Henry Ford

62. To err is human, to blame it on others is politics- Bill Vaughan

63. He that walketh with the wise men shall be wise

64. “A strong positive self-image is  the best positive preparation for success in life.- Dr. Joyce Poros

65. In Chinese the word “crisis”  has two characters; one means disaster and the other opportunity.- J. F. Kenndedy

66. Nothing great is ever achieved without enthusiasm- Emerson

67. “ In life as in Chess fore thought wins”

68. The world is always ready to receive the talent with open arms- Holms

69. Thinking well is wise, planning well is wiser, working well is the wisest.

70 Your example, your conduct in life will effect more than all your teaching”

71.If  men are so wicked with religion what would they be without it.

72.Science without religion is lame; Religion without science is blind.-Einstein

73. O lord! If there is lord, save my soul, if I have a soul

74. God is a verb not a noun.

75. If charity is extended to the undeserving, sin will accrue to the donor. Vedas.

76. We are what we think. All that we are , carries with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make our world.- Buddhah

77. It is a sin if you think you are weak- Vivekanandha

78.”Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem- Van Buren

79.”Worry is a kind of insult to the Lord. It is like throwing his promise and assurances back in to  his face, saying they are no good and you don’t trust him”

80. Failure is victory postponed

81. Words can cure diseases, words can save lives, words can make you ill, words can even kill.

82. He that cannot ask, can not live”

83. Kill the monster while it is little.

84. Better bend when it is a twig

85. Nip in the bud

87. Never trouble trouble  till  trouble troubles you

88. Never abandon virtue for the sake of pleasure

89.The art of  medicine consists in amusing the patient, while nature cures the disease” Seneca”

90. “It is the practice of the multitude to bark at eminent men as little dogs do as strangers-Seneca

91. Love is just the loss of valuable Education.

92. Wife is a knife that kills your life

93. The wife of a careless man is almost a widow

94. Why are women compared with audio cassettes? Both can be used both sides?

95. A teacher who can smile at each student, who can greet each student with love can work wonders

96. No time is bad to do a good thing and no time is good to do a bad thing.

97. If you can not find a way, make one.

98.Don’t you love life? Do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of-Benjamin Franklin

99. If you lack knowledge, what do you have? If you have knowledge, what do  you lack?

100. We are all apes, with changed shapes.

101. Technology owes ecology an apology

102. Men within us can live only animal within us is killed.

103. All our bodies are movable biogas plants”

104.In democracy asses worship jackals”

105. Hatred is the sign of secret attraction.

106. A student is a live long learner and a teacher is a life long student

107. He who buys what he does not need today will one day need what he can not buy.

108. If love is blind, marriage is eye opener.

109. It is cold iron that bends hot iron.

110. Hammer smashes glass, but forges iron.

111. Modern man has no love for books, modern wife cannot live without cooks.

112. “ Gratitude is the sign of noble souls”

113. Great ideas are the fuel of progress”

114.Great minds have purposes others have wishes.

115. Great spenders are bad lenders

116. We are what we repeatedly do

117. God’s delays are not God’s denials

118. Concentration comes out of a combination and hunger.

119. The man who has confidence in himself gains the confidence  of others.

120 Can you tell one word with all the vowels_ unquestionably

121. A lie gets half-way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Sir Winston Churchill.

122. When  I pray to Go, I ask him “please give me what I “need” and not what I “want” because sometimes what  we want is not what we need. Only God knows what we need and when we need it. We must have faith in our Lord then he knows what is best for us.

123. “ You see things; and you say why. But I dream things  that never were and I say “why not”- G.B.Shaw.

124. Let us endeavour to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry- Mark twain

124. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

125. “Nothing  will benefit human health and increase, chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet- Albert Einstein.

126 “Never play a thing the same way twice”

127. “ I wish a bag of money would fall on my head even if it hurts. –Mary Fernandez.

129 “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves but wiser people so full of doubts”-B.Russsel.

130. “When one door closes another one opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open  for us”

 ———Alexander Graham Bell

131. Lions of society are tigers in publicity

134. Life is not inaction. Life is in action.

135.Optimist is one who calls bull shit a fertilizer

136.People with ideals are never serious.

137    .”The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet”-Aristotle

138     Some cause happiness wherever they go and others whenever they go

139    “A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug”-Patricia Noel

140. A day of traveling will bring a basketful of learning

141. A Man’s house is his castle

142. A father is a treasure, brother comfort, friend both.

143. “ A good lather is half shaven”

143. A  library is a repository of medicine for the mind

144. Give good and get good

145. Give thy thoughts no tongue- William Shakespeare

146. God gave us the nuts and he doesn’t crack them

147. God grant a good sword and no use for it

148.God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts

149.Good deeds are the best prayer

150.Good to forgive; better to forget.

151. The profession of the teacher should not be reduced to a trade. It is a calling, a vocation, a mission. It is the duty of the  teacher to make pupils good citizens of the democracy. They must impart to the students zest for new experience, love for adventure in knowledge. Respect for the Teachers can  not be ordered. It must be earned. Magnificent buildings and equipments are no substitutes for a great teacher.-Dr.Radhakrishnan

152. “If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies”

153.Love your job, but never fall in love with your company, because you will never know when your company stops loving you.

154. “There are some people who in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one in to the other”

155.”Life is too short for mean anxieties”-Charles Kingsley

156. “Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people”-Voltaire

157.”That which can be conceived, can be achieved”- James Allen

158.    “Attention makes the genius; all learning, fancy, science and skill depend upon it”-William

159.    “We are all in gutter, but some of us are looking at the   stars”.- Oscar Wilde

160.    “When the candles are out, all women are fair”-Plutarch

161.     Good company, excellent books, and prayers make one a monarch of three worlds.

162.     The quest for rightness is Oriental, the quest for knowledge is Occidental-Sir William Hosler.

163.    “The next war will be fought with atom bombs and the one after that with spears”- Harold Urey

164.    “Noble blood is an accident of fortune; noble actions characterize the great

165.    “Noise and hurry are so much energy running to waste”- James Allen

166.     Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.

167.     Pray as though no work would help; and work as though no prayer would help.

168.    “An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult”-Lord Chesterfield

169.     “Sow a seed, and you will reap a habit; sow a habit, and you will reap character; sow a character and you will reap destiny”- C.H. Deems

170.    “ A good imitation is the most perfect originality”- Voltaire

171.    “Imitation is suicide” R.W. Emerson

172.    “Clever criticisms used at the right moment often ease difficult situation”

173.    “Make hunger thy sauce as a medicine for health” Thomas Tusker

174.    The darkest hour is just before the dawn

175.    “Everything  that is done  in the world is done by hope”- Martin Luther

176.     Self trust is the essence of heroism.

177.     “Happiness is mental harmony”-  James Allen

178.     The happiest people on earth are those who are emotionally involved in what they are doing.

179.    “Meaningful involvement and creative tasks bring more happiness than things acquired” C.N. Strain

180.     “Fish and visitors smell in three days”-B. Franklin

181.     When God measures man, he puts the tape around the heart, instead of head.

182.    “Nothing is  sacred to the gambler”- Jacques Saurin

183.    “Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else”- Will Rogers

184.    “My country is the world; and my religion is to do good” Thomas Paine

185.    “There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a  king among him” -  Helen.Keller

186.    “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind”-Blake

187.     “All your actions are thoughts made visible” James Allen

188.    “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”- Lord Acton

189.     Great men are almost always bad men- Lord Acton

190.    “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so  you shall come easily by what others have labored had for”- Socrates

191.    “Those who educate children are more to be honored than they who produce them, for the latter give them life alone but the former given them the art of living well”-Aristotle

192.    “The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins”-Hayword Brown

193.    “He  has a right to criticize ,who has a heart to help” –Abraham Lincoln

194.    “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath”- New Testament

195.    “The price of wisdom is above rubies”- Old Testament

196.    “God is not a cosmic bell boy, for whom we can press a button to get things”- Harry Emerson Frederick

197.    “The heart of the fool is in the mouth, but the mouth of the wise man is in the heart”-Franklin

198.    “The true University of these days is  a collection of books” –Carlyle

199.     Better a fortune in a wife than with a wife

200.     “She herself  a dowry”-Shakespeare

201.    Great dowry is a great slavery

202.    Plough deep when sluggards sleep

203.    He that will thrive must rise at five

204.    “Ideas are in the air”

205.     The only way to improve your performance is to improve your self- image

206.     “The can do  it all because they think they can”-Virgil

207.    Those who believe they can, can and those who believe they can’t, can’t.

208.     Human beings can alter  their lives by altering their attitude.

209.    “Man is what he conceives himself to be” Jean Paul Sarto

210.    “Man is what he believes”

211.    “If you want  to be creative go where your questions lead you, do things, have a variety of  examples”-Louis L. Amour

212.     Ability is the poor man’s wealth

213.    “Ability is of little account without opportunity”-Napolean

214.    We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, others judge us by what we have already done” Henry Words worth Longfellow

215.    “They are able because they think they are able”_ Virgil

216.    “We always love those who admire us, but we do not always love those whom we admire” Francis Bela Rocheroucauld

217.    “ A slave has but one master, an ambitious man has many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering  his position”_Jean De La Bruyer

218.     “Anger as soon as fed is dead; it’s starving makes it fat”. Emily Dickinson

219.     He who considers himself free is free indeed and he who considers bound remains bound. As one thinks  so one becomes.

220.    “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches the mice”-Deng Xiaoping

221.    “Houses are built to  live in  and not to look at”

222.    “An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity”

223.    “Drunkenness is a temporary madness”

224.    “Whom God wants to ruin, first makes him mad”

225.    “The good of the people is the Chief Law”-Cicero

226.     Language as well as faculty of speech was the immediate gift of God.

227.     “You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teachers tolerance”-Someset Maugham

228.     “A  Leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader” Golda Meir

229.    “What you can not enforce; do not command”

230.    “ All wish to be learned, but no one is willing  to pay the price” –Juvenal

231.    “The three foundations of learning, seeing much, suffering much; and studying much” – Catherall

232.     “ He loves a lass and remove the ‘l’ he is  he”

233.    “ What  sculpture is to a block of marble; education is to the human soul” Addison.

234.    “The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil” Emerson

235.    “ I care not what subject is taught if only it be taught well” T.H. Huxley.

236.    “ I am indebted to my father for living but to my teacher for living well” Alexander of Macedon

237.    “The ass carrying a load of sandalwood knows only the weight not the value of sandalwood” Swami Vivekananda.

238.    “ The donkey can not be described as the best- dressed animal simply because it carries on its back a pack of washed clothes” C. Rajaji.

239.     “With a positive attitude, any problem can be converted into an opportunity” Dada Jashan P. Vaswani

240.     “Undertake something that is difficult; it will do you good. Unless you try to do something  beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow” Ronald E. Osborn.

241.     “To achieve great things, we must live as though we were never going to die” Marquis de Vauvengargues.

242.     “What difference if the colour of the  cat is black or white, as long as  it catches

     the mice”

243.    “Learn to write well, or not to write at all”- John Dryden

244.    “Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; and old age a regret” _Disreli

245.     “ As you  travel down life’s high-way; may it ever  be  your goal;

 to keep your eye upon the doughnut; and not upon the hole; that is something to think about: