Found these little tidbits about Lina Kreidie and Sadullah Khan

Lina Kreidie is a Social Sciences lecturer at UCI - Click here for related blog posts

Arab Americans Lobby Reps Across Country on Lebanon Crisis
Posted on Tuesday August 1, 2006
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Southern Californians Thank Congresswoman Sanchez

In Southern California, AAI NPC member Rima Nashashibi meets regularly with Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (D-47th District). Those joining her on this occasion to thank Congresswoman Sanchez for not voting on the one-sided H. RES. 921 supporting “Israel’s right to defend itself” and share their perspectives on the situation in Lebanon included Dr. Lina Kreidie of UC Irvine, who recently returned from Lebanon and had written her doctoral dissertation on Hezbollah

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Religion Has Nothing to Do With Violence
By Fakhr Ahmad
[ed: estimated date based on the URL: March 22, 2002]

Los Angeles: In the 2-hour forum titled “Islam and Violence,” organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on March 14 at Chapman University Campus, experts and scholars tried to explain to the audience through critical examples that religion itself has nothing to do with violence.

The topics included: What does the Quran say about religious violence; Poverty, foreign intervention, and lack of democracy and its impact on Muslims societies; and Preventing a clash of civilizations.

The event was co-sponsored by the Department of Peace Studies at Chapman University and the California Council for the Humanities.

Professor Lina Kreidie of University of California, Irvine (UCI)’s Department of Political Science, said Islam had been a subject of a premeditated, well-planned attack by the media to instigate hatred and bias against Muslims. She quoted the famous saying of former Secretary General of NATO forces in Europe: “It is no longer red parallel but green parallel,” giving an obvious indication to the West’s next target - Islam.

The Secretary General made those remarks following the domino demise of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

She later explained various political reasons for the ongoing violent tendencies in Muslims, which include lack of democracy, support of dictatorial regimes by the West and poverty and economic deprivation.

[sic] Kerdie, who has published many works and has interviewed members of various Islamic groups, also criticized the term suicide bomber, saying it was coined by the Western media. She said during her interviews to various organizations in Middle East, whose members actively participate in such suicide bombings, they told her suicide in Islam meant dying in hopelessness while what they are doing was dying for some cause. “They kill themselves so that their death can bring freedom and hope to others. They call themselves as martyrs.”

[ed: So, Ms. Kreidie, we should use their term and their own definition so they can escape responsibility? Get real - they commit suicide while bombing, and there is a lot of evidence that the suicide bombers are conned into doing it because of shame for some action - sometimes shame from an action forced upon them -C UCI S]

Another speaker Sadullah Khan, Executive Director and Imam of the Islamic Center of Irvine (ICOI), also said there was no concept of a suicide in Islam.

Khan, the author of Dimension of the Qur’an and a political activist against the former apartheid regime in South Africa, referred to various verses of the Qur’an, meaning of which were greatly twisted by the media due to lack of proper understanding of Arabic.

He said one should read the context of such verses and verses before and after.

He also gave an example of the Dutch church which had issued a decree a long time back, justifying apartheid and saying that black men were created to work for white men.

James Gelvin, Professor at UCLA’s Department of History, talked mainly on foreign intervention and its impact on Middle East and the creation of organizations such as Hizbollah.

The program was conducted by Ra’id Faraj, CAIR’s Public Relations Director.

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