UK

Government to hire more migrant barges despite growing backlash against Legionella-hit Bibby Stockholm

12 August 2023, 22:41 | Updated: 12 August 2023

There are plans to hire out more migrant barges. Picture: Getty/Alamy

 By Kieran Kelly

\The Government plans to hire more floating barges to house asylum seekers despite a growing backlash against the Bibby Stockholm.

The policy to house illegal migrants on the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland, Dorset, has come under fresh scrutiny after Legionnella bacteria was found in the water supply.

Conservative backbenchers have accused the Home Office of "incompetence" after the 39 people who had boarded the vessel were transferred to alternative accommodation on Friday evening.

But there remains plans to expand the Government's fleet of floating migrant barges, as well as office and student accommodation blocks, The Telegraph reports.

Legionella bacteria can cause Legionnaires' disease, a lung infection that causes flu-like symptoms, coughs, chest pain and shortness of breath.

In extreme cases, it can lead to people coughing up blood.

None of the people on board have shown any symptoms yet, but they have used the water supply.

Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge at Portland Port in Dorset, where asylum seekers are being removed due to the discovery of Legionella bacteria in the water supply. Picture: Alamy

Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Picture: Getty

It comes after six migrants died while crossing the English Channel in the early hours of Saturday morning.

All six migrants were Afghan men, French authorities said.

More than 50 people were rescued from the ship that was crossing the channel, including children.

A patrol boat told authorities that a migrant boat was sinking off the French town of Sangatte at around 4am on Saturday, France's Maritime Prefecture of the Channel and the North Sea said.

Local mayor Franck Dhersin said dozens of boats were trying to make the crossing at the same time.

Read More: Asylum seeker torture survivor says legionella-hit Bibby Stockholm reminds him of unsanitary ‘refugee camp’

Read More: Migrants moved off Bibby Stockholm just days after boarding as Legionella bacteria found in the water

It comes amid a growing backlash against the Government's floating barge policy as it tries to fulfil Rishi Sunak's pledge to 'Stop the Boats' - on both sides of the house.

Shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock wrote to his opposite number on Saturday asking what the Home Office knew about the risk of the bacteria being present before moving migrants onto the barge.

The department said all 39 of those on board had been disembarked as a "precautionary measure" after samples from the water system showed levels of Legionella requiring further investigation.

The Home Office said no migrants have fallen sick or developed Legionnaires' disease, which is a serious type of pneumonia, and that they are all being provided with "appropriate advice and support".

Department officials are understood to have been told by Dorset Council on Wednesday evening about the discovery of initial results indicating that the bacteria was present, but the transfer of a further six migrants on to the barge still went ahead on Thursday.

Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge at Portland Port in Dorset. Picture: Alamy

Government sources said the UK Health Security Agency then told ministers on Thursday that Legionella had been found in the vessel's water system and advised them that they needed to remove those six migrants.

With a capacity of more than 500, the Government hopes that the use of the Bibby Stockholm will help cut the £6 million a day currently being spent on hotel bills for asylum seekers awaiting the outcome of their applications.

Former Brexit secretary David Davis said the barge would not serve as a "solution" to the backlog even without the presence of the bacteria.

He told Radio 4's Today programme: "The primary thing that's been revealed has been the startling incompetence of the Home Office itself... It's really, really hard to understand how, at all layers, this could not be caught early".

The senior Conservative MP suggested the problems could be related to "management" of the department rather than "ministerial" issues specifically, but added: "Even working properly, the Bibby barge would only take effectively one day's arrivals.

"So it's not a solution to the problem and all of this is going to go on until the Home Office is able to process these arrivals more quickly."

Tim Loughton said the evacuation was an "embarrassment" and smacked of "incompetence," coming at the end of a week in which the Government had planned a series of announcements aimed at promoting its immigration approach.

The Tory MP told the Telegraph: "This is deeply troubling and rapidly turning into a farce that the Home Office can ill afford."

 

Operation Lone Star: Girl, 3, dies on Texas migrant bus

Published

IMAGE SOURCE,EPA

Image caption,

A three-year-old girl has died while travelling from Texas to Chicago.

By Charlene Anne Rodrigues

BBC News

US health officials are investigating the death of a three-year-old Venezuelan girl travelling with her parents on a bus carrying asylum seekers from Texas to Chicago.

Thousands of migrants have been sent from Texas to Democratic Party-run US cities under a controversial scheme.

The girl was taken to a hospital in southern Illinois and pronounced dead on Thursday.

Texas officials confirmed her death on Friday, but did not share more details.

The bus set off from the city of Brownsville, on the border with Mexico. Before it left the state, passengers had their temperature assessed and were asked if they had any medical conditions, Texas officials said.

Officials said when it was noticed that the girl's health appeared to be deteriorating, the bus "pulled over and security personnel on board called 911".

Officials from the Texas Division of Emergency Management said that "every loss of life is a tragedy".

Republican governor Greg Abbott of Texas has sent more than 30,000 migrants to cities controlled by the Democrats since last year under his "Operation Lone Star" policies.

Last month, the US department of Justice sued Mr Abbott for his refusal to remove a floating barrier placed on the Rio Grande river aimed at stopping migrants from entering the US from Mexico.

The latest tragedy comes weeks after an eight-year-old girl died at a US border patrol site in Texas.

Venezuela's refugee crisis is the world's second largest. More than seven million Venezuelans have left since 2015 due to the country's political and economic troubles.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

‘Bulletproof’ web hosting company seized; Polish national charged with computer fraud

DOJ says website alleged to have acted as a secure nexus of ransomware, brute-force and phishing 

By Brad Matthews - The Washington Times - Saturday, August 12, 2023

A Polish national is facing fraud and money laundering charges after his web hosting company purportedly used by hackers was seized, the Justice Department announced Friday.

Artur Karol Grabowski, 36, operated web host LolekHosted, which is alleged to be a secure and “bulletproof” platform known to be preferred by criminal hackers, according to court documents cited in the DOJ news release.

“Bulletproof” web hosting services have been known to have been used for multiple types of hacking, including ransomware, phishing and brute-force attacks in which an attacker submits passwords en masse in the hopes that one ends up being correct.

The LolekHosted.net domain was seized by the U.S. government on Tuesday, with a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Mr. Grabowski faces charges of computer fraud conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy and international money laundering.

If Mr. Grabowski is convicted, he could be sentenced up to 45 years in prison and would also have to forfeit $21.5 million in purportedly criminal proceeds. Mr. Grabowski is currently a fugitive.

Mr. Grabowski is accused of facilitating criminal acts by his clients by allowing them to register accounts with fake information, changing the IP address of the company’s servers repeatedly, not logging the IP addresses of clients, ignoring third-party claims of abuse against his clients, and warning clients about queries from authorities, according to the DOJ.

After registering LolekHosted in 2014, Mr. Grabowski advertised the company offered “100% privacy hosting,” allowing the hosting of any content with the exception of child sex abuse material, according to court documents cited by the DOJ.

One hacking operation that LolekHosted is alleged to have hosted is the NetWalker ransomware, which was deployed against around 400 victims in about 50 attacks worldwide, according to the DOJ.

Victims included municipalities, companies, hospitals, school districts, colleges and universities, and law enforcement. The hackers were paid more than 5,000 bitcoin in ransoms (currently worth about $146 million.)

LolekHosted is alleged to have been used as an intermediary for these attackers, as well as a digital storage space for hacking “tools” and stolen information from victims, the DOJ news release said.


• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.

Genetic study of 3rd- to 16th-century people living on Canary Islands provide North African history clues

by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

The genomic history of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands. 

Credit: Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40198-w

A team of paleo-geneticists at Universidad de La Laguna on Santa Cruz de Tenerife, working with colleagues from other Canary Islands and European institutes, has found that studying the genes of people living in the Canary Islands from the 3rd to the 16th century sheds light on the history of people living in North Africa around the same time.

In their study, reported in the journal Nature Communications, the group obtained bone samples from other research efforts and conducted genetic studies.

As archaeologists, historians and other researchers attempt to piece together the details of human history, going back as far as possible, they sometimes encounter blank spaces in the record. That has been the case with many parts of North Africa over the centuries from approximately the 200s to the 1500s. This is due, the researchers note, to the hot and dry climate.

The bones of those who lived there during that time have not been preserved well enough to extract DNA. To fill in some of the blanks, the team on this new effort looked instead at the bones of people living on the Canary Islands during that time. Prior research has shown that the people living in the Canary Islands during this period came from North Africa.

The work involved sequencing samples collected from bones and teeth unearthed on the islands during past digs by other research teams. They focused their attention only on bones and teeth of people known to have lived on at least one of the Canary Islands during the 3rd to 16th centuries.

The team found genetic ties between people living on the islands and those living in North Africa, mainly in what is now Morocco, dating back 5,000 years. They also found evidence of genetic influences from people living along the Mediterranean Sea, both in Africa and Europe—likely due, the researchers note, to migration across the Sahara.

The research team also found differences in the genes of people based on location—islands closer to Africa experienced more ancestral influence from European people, while those farther away were more African.

More information: Javier G. Serrano et al, The genomic history of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40198-w

Journal information: Nature Communications 

© 2023 Science X NetworkNorth Africans were among the first to colonize the Canary Islands

HERESIOLOGY

Once upon a time, eager acolytes thought their false Messiah could make their country great again — sound familiar?

On the strange but insistent parallels between Sabbatai Sevi of Smyrna and Donald Trump of Queens



Donald Trump and Sabbatai Sevi — separated by centuries; joined by some common themes. Photo by Getty Images/Wikimedia Commons


By Robert Zaretsky

August 8, 2023

The Sabbatian movement, one of the most convulsive episodes in Jewish history, was launched 375 years ago. It is named after Sabbatai Sevi, a young native of Smyrna (present-day Izmir), who in 1648 announced that he was the Messiah. Sabbateanism, the movement hatched by this epiphany, ranks among the more striking examples of millenarianism, a worldview that anticipates the world’s end — tomorrow, if not today — when the forces of good and evil will meet in an apocalyptic clash, leading to a world of perfect peace and prosperity.

Sabbatai Sevi certainly had an eager audience for his claim. In some ways, 1648 was the best of times for European Jewry. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War, created an independent Netherlands, which proceeded to become a haven of tolerance for Jews across the continent. In other ways, though, 1648 was the worst of times for European Jewry. Under the leadership of Bogdan Chmelnicki, the Cossacks, launching their war against their Polish rulers, torched and terrorized Jewish villages across the region. And it was also the strangest of times, thanks to this self-proclaimed Messiah from Smyrna whose credibility was strengthened by a Kabbalistic prediction that a Messiah would appear that very year.

Even stranger, perhaps, is that while Sabbatai Sevi died in 1676, as a convert to Islam, the apocalyptic worldview he represented remains with us to this very day. Nearly half a millennium after Sevi’s life and death, we are again living through a millenarian movement, one as apocalyptic as that of the Sabbatian movement.

A new Messiah

This, at least, is what a reader might take away from two of European Jewry’s most imaginative minds, Gershom Scholem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It seems the two men never met, but both spent their lives exploring the world of Jewish mysticism. (When asked what made him Jewish, Allen Ginsberg cited his love of the “bohemian mysticism of Scholem and Singer.”) Singer and Scholem were both especially taken, observed the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse, “to the frenzy of the Sabbatian movement.” Such frenzy, both men also grasped, was not limited to a single place, time and people. Instead, it was a potential that resided in all of us, capable of erupting given the right conditions.

This awareness infuses Scholem’s magisterial work Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, first published in Hebrew in 1957 and translated into English in 1973. (Re-issued as a Princeton Classic in 2016, it runs exactly 1000 pages, preceded by a critical and lucid introduction by Yaacob Dweck.) Though the title suggests a biography, the book is not really about Sabbatai Sevi, whom Scholem summarily diagnoses (and dismisses) as manic-depressive.

Gershom Scholem is the author of ‘Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah.’ Photo by Wikimedia Commons

With a doctorate in history from the University of Munich, Scholem was the wrong sort of doctor to make such a diagnosis. Moreover, it was a diagnosis based on centuries-old contemporary accounts of Sevi.

Nevertheless, Scholem was the right sort of doctor to offer a historical account that portrays Sevi as almost accidental to the history of Sabbateanism. What was essential, Scholem argues, was the role played by Nathan of Gaza. In 1665, this young and gifted Kabbalist, who had shortly before prophesized the arrival of the Messiah, met Sevi during the latter’s ramblings across the Middle East. According to a key account, Nathan “fell to the ground before Sevi,” convinced that the man who had been mostly shunned or ignored by Jewish communities until then was indeed the Messiah.

The rest is the stuff of history, partly because Nathan shaped that history. He was at once, in Scholem’s words, “the John the Baptist and the Paul of the new Messiah.” Or, as we might now say, Nathan was the crisis manager for a Messiah who, when the sultan gave him the choice between death or conversion, plumped for the latter. Expecting redemption at any moment, the thousands of Jews who had flocked to Sevi were dumbfounded. Had they been sold a bill of soteriological goods?

To survive a leader’s act of apostasy, whether political or theological, a movement needs both a base filled with fanatical devotion and a front office led by a skilled spinmeister. More than up to the task, Nathan sought to reassure Sevi’s followers that the Kabbalist texts made clear the “necessity” of this apostasy. In short, Nathan warned them not to believe not just the Messiah’s many enemies, but what witnesses saw with their own eyes. For the faithful who hold fast to their leader, “they will taste celestial delights.” That they never did hardly dampened the enthusiasm of Sevi’s base; if anything, the fact that Sevi seemed to be a loser made his followers’ conviction that he was a winner all the stronger.

More than two decades before Scholem published his book, Singer had already anticipated his findings. In 1933, he published Satan in Goray in a Warsaw literary journal while still living in his native Poland. It is, Wisse believes, Singer’s best novel. Published the same year Hitler came to power in Germany and Stalin launched the famine in Ukraine, the novel is certainly Singer’s most prescient work.


It is also much shorter than Scholem’s. In barely 200 pages, Singer unfolds the story of Goray, a Jewish village ravaged by the Cossacks under Chmelnicki. “They slaughtered one very hand, flayed men alive, murdered small children, violated women and afterward ripped open their bellies and sewed cats inside.” When those who fled eventually returned, they buried the bones of those who had remained, but they could not bury the memory of what had happened.

In Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer, pictured here in 1968 outside the Forward Building, depicted a land gripped by Messianic fervor.

 Photo by Getty Images

The massacres, the narrator drily notes, “were the birth-pangs of the Messiah.” The survivors of Goray are left wide open to a second invasion, one advertised in the Messianic message carried by the followers of Sevi. Blazing like a deadly pathogen through a vulnerable population, tales of miraculous events, each portending Messianic redemption, crackled through the shtetls and ghettos across the continent. These mysterious occurrences all led back to Sabbatai Sevi, a maker of miracles who, as one visitor to Goray affirms, “was as tall as a cedar” and whose face was too brilliant to behold.

The tidal wave of Messianic fervor washing over Goray, a devastated place desperate for hope, sweeps away those who, like Rabbi Benish, refuse to surrender their reason. What follows, depicted by Singer in crisp, nearly clinical language, is petrifying. Certain that redemption was around the corner, the villagers indulge in every imaginable excess, turning Goray into a place where any and all kinds of behavior, whether in the bedroom or the synagogue, was not just permitted, but expected.

Once news of Sevi’s apostasy reaches Goray, the depths of human behavior are fully plumbed. As factions arise between those who know Sevi is pulling the wool over the sultan’s eyes and those who know Sevi has pulled the wool over their own eyes, Goray slips into civil war. Moreover, there are differences even within the first camp, with one group concluding that if they are to be redeemed, they must first test the outermost limits of evil. They outdid one another in ways to desecrate the Sabbath, from practicing serial acts of adultery to the practice of adulterating kosher meat.
What Singer and Scholem understood about us

For both Singer and Scholem, Jewish mysticism is clearly so much more than a bohemian tendency. It was too enticing to take wonders in the writings of Isaac Luria, the founder of modern Kabbalah, and transform them into a howl against the way things had been for an entire people since time immemorial. Hence the promise of Lurianic mysticism, for it contains the promise of making the world whole again. But it also contains the potential of unmaking the world entirely. While Scholem warned against making any comparisons between events in the 17th and 20th centuries, he nevertheless did so toward the end of his life.

In an interview in 1980 with the historian David Biale, Scholem declared that the very same apocalyptic fervor that defined the Sabbatian movement also fired the Messianism of the Jewish settler movement.

As for Singer, historical events come and go, but human nature stays the same. In her introduction to Satan in Goray, Wisse quotes Singer’s recollection about arguments he had with his brother Israel over the idea of human progress. Always the optimist, Israel believed that “little by little, humankind would learn from its mistakes. My brother needed this faith in moral progress, although the facts refuted him left and right.”

His task, he then believed, was to “mercilessly destroy his humanistic illusions.” It was only years later, Singer concludes, that he came to regret his destruction of Israel’s beliefs, if only because he had nothing with which to replace them.

Despite Scholem’s warning, it is hard to ignore the many parallels we can draw between now and then. Just as Scholem, perhaps mistakenly, puts Sevi on the couch (and then in a straitjacket), we have done, perhaps no less mistakenly, with Donald Trump. While his followers vaunt him as the Messiah who will fix our country, too many specialists and non-specialists have put him on the couch (and then, it is hoped, in a prison cell).

Or, again, just as Nathan of Gaza devoted his life to putting Sevi’s outrageous acts and words into the proper Kabbalist context, Tucker of Fox, along with others, has devoted a career to putting Trump’s vile remarks in their proper context. Or, finally, just as Sevi’s apostasy reinforced the attachment of his followers — only a seeming paradox, since the psychic cost of admitting the truth was too great — so too with the support of Trump’s base, which deepens with each new indictment.

But these parallels either go only so far or not nearly far enough. They miss what both Scholem and Singer understood about us. As the narrator of Singer’s story concludes, “Goray, that small town at the edge of the world, was altered. No one recognized it any longer.” Perhaps we can say the same of our world today. But the funny thing is that, for those who try to keep their eyes open, they will always recognize the world for what it always, and unchangingly, was.

A professor at the University of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward. He is now writing a book on Stendhal and the art of living

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/08/heresiology-jewish-false-messiah-who.html

Sorcerer sentenced to eight years jail in Afghanistan

By 5Pillars (RMS)
-12th August 2023


A sorcerer has been sentenced to eight years in prison in Afghanistan’s Jawzjan province, amid a crackdown on witchcraft by the Islamic authorities.

The spokesman for the Ministry of Vice and Virtue, Muhammad Sadiq Akif, wrote on his Twitter page: “Some time ago in Jawzjan province, a magician was introduced to the court by the provincial directorate of the Ministry of Vice and Virtue, and finally he was sentenced to eight years in prison.”

He added that arrests of those practising sorcery has started with intensity.

The news comes after Ministry of Vice and Virtue ordered an end to all magic and spell-casting. According to the ministry, giving amulets to people is not against Shari’ah law, but jadugars (sorcerers, witches) who work against Islamic Shari’ah will be shut down.

“Provincial leaders have been instructed to be very serious in pursuing jadugars,” said Muhammad Sadiq Akif.

Although Afghan public opinion has always been disapproving of witchcraft, some Afghans have turned to amulet writers and witches to help solve their problems.

In Islam, witchcraft is considered haraam because it involves seeking supernatural powers supposedly outside of Allah’s control which goes against the belief in the oneness of God.
Sign up for regular updates straight to your inbox

Islamic scholars emphasise relying on Allah SWT for all matters and avoiding practices associated with witchcraft, such as casting spells or seeking assistance from supernatural beings.

Witchcraft is therefore seen as a form of deception and manipulation that contradicts the principles of faith and submission to Allah SWT.

Some Quranic verses and ahadith which back this opinion are as follows:

“They followed what the Shayaateen (devils) gave out (falsely of the magic) in the lifetime of Sulayman. Sulayman did not disbelieve, but the Shayaateen (devils) disbelieved, teaching men magic.” [al-Baqarah 2:102]

“And they learn that which harms them and profits them not. And indeed they knew that the buyers of it (magic) would have no share in the Hereafter.” [al-Baqarah 2:102]

“…and the magician will never be successful, to whatever amount (of skill) he may attain.” [Ta-Ha 20:69]

The Prophet (pbuh) said: “Avoid the seven sins which doom a person to Hell.” They asked, “What are they?” He said: “Associating anything in worship with Allah (shirk); witchcraft…”

And the Prophet (pbuh) said: “He is not one of us who practices witchcraft or has it done for him.”

 

Biblical Anthropomorphism (Tashbih) – OpEd

 August 13, 2023  

By Rabbi Allen S. Maller

The Qur’an teaches: Say, [O believers], “We believed in Allah and what has been revealed to us [the Qur’an] and what has been revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the Descendants [of Jacob] and what was given to Moses and Jesus and what was given to the prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and we are Muslims [in submission] to Him.” (2:136)

While Christians, Jews and Muslims should make no disrespectful distinction between any of their prophets or their sacred scriptures, we cannot help but notice that the circumstances and style of each of the three written revelations are very distinct. 

The Hebrew Sacred Scriptures are a vast collection (305,358 Hebrew words) of books written over a period of almost a thousand years, by more than two dozen different named Jewish Prophets, plus many more anonymous inspired Historians, Poets, and Philosophers.

The Greek New Testament is much shorter (a total of 138,162 Greek words); and was written over a period of less than 70 years, by four biographers plus maybe a half dozen other writers who all wrote in a language (Greek) that Prophet Jesus and Prophet John never spoke.

The Arabic Qur’an is still shorter (a total of 77,934 Arabic words) recited only by Prophet Muhammad during a period of less than two dozen years and written down by his own disciples.

The most shocking thing that a rabbi notices when reading the Qur’an is that Allah continually refers to himself as “We”. This reiteration of the pronoun ‘We’ referring to God; occurs over 2100 times in the Qur’an. 

In the Hebrew Scriptures the royal “we’ is very rarely used for God, except most noticeably in the creation narrative. All the Jewish Prophets declare God’s words using ‘I’. Of course, I know that ‘we’ in the Qur’an never means that God is plural or trinitarian. It is a matter of style that might also be meant as an important correction to the error that many of Prophet Jesus’ disciples entered into. 

Many disciples of Jesus took Prophet Jesus’ use of “my father in heaven” literally when it was of course meant metaphorically. They also misunderstood the statement of Prophet Jesus: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” (John 10:11) The metaphor of a shepherd describes both God and a human ruler. Jesus was saying that a good leader puts the good of the flock ahead of his own good. John understood that “I” [God] will sacrifice [My Son] to save all humanity. 

In the same way, many Muslim readers of the Hebrew Bible are shocked by the frequent use of metaphors to describe the Divine One. The Jewish People were the only on-going monotheistic Ummah (nation) in the world for more than a thousand years; so using anthropomorphic descriptions of God were minor compared to the on-going religious struggle (Jihad) to eliminate the polytheism and idolatry that many Jews engaged in, from within the Jewish nation.

As the Qur’an states: “They are not all alike. Some of the People of the Book are firmly committed to the truth. They recite the Verses of Allah during the hours of night, and remain in the state of [prayer] prostration before their Lord.” (3:113)

God created Man in His own moral image meaning that He wished humanity to live a life marked by justice, equality, fair dealing, mutual respect, sympathy, love, compassion, and charity etc. Many humans on the other hand chose to violate some or even many basic moral commandments of God, including their creating God in Mankind’s own physical image.

The first three of the Ten Commandments state: (Verse 3) ‘Thou shalt have no other gods’…. (Verse 4) ‘Thou shalt not make for yourself any graven image, or any likeness (picture) of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath’…. (Verse 5) ‘Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor serve them’… (Torah Exodus 20:3‑5)

All Biblical Anthropomorphism (tashbih) are not to be taken literally. They are only metaphors or poetic expressions.  For example, the metaphor of stubborn uncaring people as having an uncircumcised heart can be found in several different Biblical verses: Deuteronomy 10:16 Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn; Leviticus 26:41 …if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled and they make amends for their iniquity; Jeremiah 4:4 Circumcise yourselves to the LORD; remove the foreskin of your hearts, O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem; Jeremiah 6:10 To whom shall I speak and give warning, that they may hear? Behold, their ears are uncircumcised, they cannot listen. 

These are all like the Qur’an’s statement: “And do not invoke Allah with another deity. There is no deity except Him. Everything will be destroyed except His Face. His is the judgement, and to Him you will be returned” (28:88). Face is a clear metaphor for God’s presence.

The rabbinic Tafsir/midrash (Ecclesiastes Rabba 1:16) actually gathers 50+ different metaphors of the heart that are implied by various verses in the Hebrew Bible. The list begins describing that the heart: sees (Ecclesiastes 1:16), hears (I Kings 3:9), speaks (Ecclesiastes 1:16), walks (2 Kings 5:26), falls (I Samuel 17:32), stands (Ezekiel 22:14), rejoices (Psalms 16:9), cries out (Lamentations 2:18), is consoled (Isaiah 40:2), is pained (Deuteronomy 15:10), is hardened (Exodus 9:12), fears (Deuteronomy 28:67), breaks (Psalms 51:19), is prideful (Deuteronomy 8:14), refuses (Jeremiah 5:12), imagines (Deuteronomy 29:18), feels (Psalms 45:2), thinks (Proverbs 19:21), desires (Psalms 21:3), strays (Proverbs 7:25), desires sin (Numbers 15:39), eats (Genesis 18:5), convinces (Genesis 34:3), and errs (Isaiah 21:4). All of these are clearly intended to be metaphors. 

The issues of anthropomorphism (tashbih) in Islam are over the very few anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Qur’an, or the more frequent  aḥadith al-ṣifat – traditions that depict God and His attributes in an anthropomorphic language (God’s hand, God’s laughter or God’s sitting on the heavenly throne) and are well known to Muslim scholars.

In the verse: ‘There is nothing like unto Him; and He is All-Hearing and All-Seeing.’ Allāh first negated that something could be like Him and then affirmed that He does have many attributes and that some of the creatures of creation also have these attributes. “And (the unbelievers) plotted and planned and Allah too planned and the best of planners is Allah.” (3:54) 

And “Send not away those who call on their Lord morning and evening seeking His Face.” (6:52) And on rare occasions the Qur’an does use physical metaphors for Allah: “O Iblīs! What prevented you from prostrating unto one [Adam] I created with My two Hands? Were you arrogant or were you haughty?” (38:75).

Also in the aḥadith al-ṣifat: “Narrated Anas ibn Malik Allah’s Messenger said: That his bier (that of Sa’d) and the Throne of the most Compassionate shook.” (Sahih Muslim Hadith 6035)

And Sahih Al-Bukhari Hadith 5.147 Narrated Jabir: I heard the Prophet saying, “The Throne (of Allah) shook at the death of Sad bin Muadh.”

These few anthropomorphisms, like the much more frequent anthropomorphism in the Hebrew Bible are all to be understood as metaphors that should never be taken literally.

The Hebrew Bible uses frequent anthropomorphic descriptions of God because the Jewish minority that worshipped idols did it; not as a metaphor but in a disgusting reality. After the exile to Babylonia this party disappeared. 

Then came the Gospels using not just verbal anthropomorphisms, but the sad reality of a Divine embodied sonship and reintroducing human statues and paintings into places of prayer.

The Qur’an rebukes the Christian style of worship using pagan style art work and concepts of Divine incarnation; and since the Christians defended their actions by pointing to the frequent use of metaphors to describe the Divine One in the Hebrew Bible, the Qur’an very rarely uses metaphors for God at all.  

Some biblical texts use metaphor imagery in condemning the rich and powerful within Israelite society for oppressing the poor: Ezekiel 22:27 “Her officials are like wolves rending prey in her midst; they shed blood and destroy lives to win ill-gotten gain.”

Those who use force to harm other human beings are compared to wolves and lions in Psalm  57:5 “My soul is among lions, I do lie down among them that are aflame; even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.” 

And blood-shedding weapons are linked to the blood-shedding teeth of predatory beasts in Proverbs 30:14: “There is a generation whose teeth are as swords, and their great teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the ea