Slashdot Mirror
Western Union Blocking Money Transfers to Arabs
lowrydr310 writes "Western Union is blocking money transfers to people with Arab names. They have delayed or blocked thousands of cash deliveries on suspicion of terrorist connections simply because senders or recipients have names like Mohammed or Ahmed. 'In one example, an Indian driver here said Western Union prevented him from sending $120 to a friend at home last month because the recipient's name was Mohammed.' Western union claims they are merely following U.S. Treasury Department guidelines that scrutinize cash flows for terrorist links. I agree that Western Union shouldn't allow anyone supporting terrorism to use their service, however I'm fairly certain there are millions of people named Mohammed or Ahmed who aren't terrorists. I wonder if any other financial companies such as banks are doing the same thing."
From here:
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I work for a division of a large financial firm, and we are required to download a list of Specially Designated Nationals from the Treasury Department and compare names from it against new accounts and transfers. The list includes lists of suspected terrorists, and they're not all Arabic (think Irish Republican Army).
The last time I checked the IRA operated in Ireland and the Basque Separatists operated in the Basque region of present-day Spain. But, we could go on about other groups:
Aum Shinrikyo?
Communist Party of the Phillipines?
Kach and Kahane Chai?
Kurdistan Workers' Party?
Shining Path?
Revolutionary Armed forces of Columbia?
17 November?
ELA?
Tamil Tigers?
While Islamic groups get most of the press, there are many, many non-Islamic terrorist groups.
Speaking as a homosexual, it has more to do with spousal rights (right to visit your spouse in the hospital, getting on your spouses health insurance if you have none/job does not offer any/job has insurance that sucks and/or is more expensive than your spouses, right to say what happens upon death, etc)...
Right now we have no control over any of this unless whatever state we are in specifically grants such rights outside of marriage.
We want to be treated equally. We don't want any "extra' benefits that heterosexual people wouldn't have. Hell, if the religious don't want us having "religious" marriage, I (and many others) would be perfectly happy with a state official conducting the ceremony.
There is no "agenda" here, despite what the religious right-wingers would have you belive.
I'm sure the issue is a bit more indepth than I've stated here, but you could look at hrc.org to read up on it.
bork bork bork!
Muslims have never denounced the actions of Muslim Extremism.
Really? Google seems to have come up with a few examples. But, hey, it's so much easier to paint billions of people with the same brush than it is to attempt to actually comprehend the complexity of the situation, eh?
"Redneck" is racist, it just happens to be acceptably racist. The basis for the term is that white guys working in the sun all day will get a sunburned neck. So it relates to skin color/social class, has negative connotations, and is thus racist.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Yeeeeeees. Finally someone had the guts to come up with the "real" facts.
When were Jews allowed to enter the House of Commons? The 19th century, the first being Lord Rothschild. Indeed the Rothschild story is interesting because the _father_ of the Rothschild business dynasty lived in the Jewish Ghetto in Munich. Where every Jew had to pass under the arch of the ghetto entrance which had a picture on it. Of a pig. With little Jewish children suckling at its teats and a Rabbi eating its excrement. And its only one example out of many.
Gee-whizz. It seems Christian Europe didn't outright "kill" those Jews, but it sure made their lives interesting.
When were Jews allowed to hold high office in the Muslim Empire (Caliphate)? Well, blimey, for more than a thousand years, be it in academia, goverment, the Caliph's own purveyors, etc. Indeed when the Spanish threw out all their Jews, they went to the Caliphate and quite a few became involved in the goverment there (if one recalls correctly, Spanish power more or less declined not too long afterwards and they were supplanted by the Dutch and the English).
And why were those dastardly Muslims (remember those curvy swords) being so compassionate to the Jews? Well it seems that, apart from plain decency, the Quran tells them so.
"Lo! Those who believe (in that which is revealed unto thee, Muhammad), and those who are Jews, and Christians, and Sabians -whoever believed in Allah and the Last Day and did right- surely their reward is with their Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them neither shall they grieve."
Seems to me, that if Muslims are so het up about the Quran being the Word of God, and God sort Smiles upon those mentioned above, that Muslims would do well not to go round killing them, y'know? And the historical record of more than a millenium bears that out. Even Bernard Lewis, whom Said criticised, holds this view.
Now there are verses which are used by the ignorant repeatedly, notably the one about "Slaying unbelievers where ye might find them" and "Do not take Unbelievers as friends" (or something similar), so we shall deal with those:
You will actually find that the lines: "And magnify Mohammed and his followers as thou didst magnify Abraham and his followers..." "And bless Mohammed and his followers as thou didst bless Abraham and his followers..." are recited (at least) thirteen times _per day_ in the compulsory Muslim five daily prayers. Now what use would these lines be if you didn't know whom Abraham or his followers were? The key is context, in order to find out what those lines are teaching, you have to go and do a little bit of historical homework on Abraham and why he was such a good pal of God's, to the extent that people living thousands of years after Abraham are still being taught to behave like him and his congregation.
Similarly, for the "slaying" and "friends" verses mentioned above, context is needed otherwise the lines can easily appear to be contradictory. The verse about not taking Jews and Christians as friends is very often misused by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. But the actual historical reference (remember, that history homework again is needed), actually refers to when the northern Arabian tribes were becoming politically unified through their common adherence to Islam. Just as the Vatican or Israel would hardly trust its affairs to, eg, Iran or Saudi Arabia, and not necessarily because of antagonism but merely due to sensible political considerations, the same was true at the time for the fledgling Arab-Muslim state. Similarly, the slaying refers to a _state_ breaking its treaty and taking it as a call to exterminate non-Muslims is downright silly. Political Islam, or indeed Christianity or Judaism, is somewhat divorced from how you should treat your neighbour: it is how one nation should treat another. The verse about taking Christians as friends is the non-political way in which Man should deal with his brethren in the world, holding up the pious Christians of the time as an example to be followed. One can therefore easily ascertain how consistency is not lacking between the two verses, merely that people do not do their homework.
The parent is a learned genius. Mod appropriately, someone!
Muslims have never denounced the actions of Muslim Extremism. . Check this out: http://www.cair-net.org/html/911statements.html
"were carried out by militant Islamists."
Nice choice of words there. I noticed that you failed to mention that MOST "militant islamists" arrested in the US were african american.
If you are going to racially profile for terrorism then african americans should be your number one if not number two target group.
evil is as evil does
We are talking about ALL terrorist attacks against the United States and if you consider that then you will see the majority (and quite large majority) were carried out by militant Islamists. Take a look here: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001454.html [infoplease.com]
Your list is woefully incomplete. What about Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics in Birmingham and Atlanta, a gay nightclub in Atlanta, and a concert given during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta? What about the vast number of attacks on Americans -- kidnappings, hijackings, bombings -- in and around Columbia over the past several decades? I'm rather certain those attacks far outnumber attacks against Americans by "militant Islamists" prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq (assuming you classify all the suicide bombings in Iraq as terrorist acts, as opposed to acts of war). What else can I come up with off the top of my head? The Hutu rebels who attacked tourist camps in Uganda in 1999. The disgruntled FedEx employee who, sometime in the '90s, attempted to hijack a FedEx 747 on takeoff and crash it into the company's headquarters in Memphis (he was stopped by the pilot and copilot, but not before he cracked their skulls with an axe). The rocket-propelled grenade fired through the window of the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1995. The Catalan rebels who bombed a bar full of U.S. servicemen in Barcelona in the late '80s. For that matter, it's missing the world's first bombing of an airliner, which was committed in the '60s by a man from Missouri in an insurance scam.
Heck, with a little research I might really be able to make a list. If you think Muslims are the only significant perpetrators of terrorism in the world, you aren't paying attention. Your point of view is precisely why the idea of racial profiling is so popular these days. The more fact-based approach is the reason security experts say racial profiling not only doesn't work, but makes us less secure by focusing our attention in the wrong places.