(When will “radical” Islam be called “fundamentalist” Islam? Isn’t that what it is? — DM)
Is it required for political leaders (except Trump and Cruz) to deny the presence of Islamic radicalism in instances of obvious Islam-inspired terrorism, such as the shooting in Philadelphia the other day? Philadelphia’s major Jim Kenney went out of his way to declare “In no way, shape or form does anybody in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam” had anything to do with the attack. Does the mayor think everyone is stupid? Just because most Philadelphia voters are?
The mayor’s comments, so bizarre in their determined denial of the deluge of facts delivered by top police officials standing next to him, were, nonetheless, familiar enough. Americans have learned to expect, after every Islamist terror attack, lectures instructing them that such assaults should in no way be connected to Islamic faith of any kind.
To hear the mayor of Philadelphia was to grasp, more clearly than ever, the fury that has led to Donald Trump’s success in attracting voters—the fury of citizens who know official lies when they hear them, whether about border security, immigration, or the ever-expanding requirements of multiculturalist dogma. . .
On no subject has there been more sermonizing than on Muslims and terrorism and on what the real Islam is and is not—no surprise in an administration which has from its outset tended to the apparent view that the American nation is essentially composed of yahoos whose barely controlled instincts to riot require regular monitoring and checks by their enlightened betters.
Leaders of Eastern European states opposed to Germany’s open-door refugee policy have been quick to tell Germany ‘we told you so’ after the Cologne sexual assaults.
Influential politicians across Eastern Europe have pointed to the Cologne attacks, in which men of Middle Eastern appearance allegedly sexually assaulted over a hundred women, as proof that Germany’s open-door refugee policy has been a mistake. . .
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in his weekly radio interview that it was proof of a crisis of liberalism that reporting of the sexual assaults in Cologne had been suppressed in Germany, adding that the press in Hungary is much freer than that in western Europe.
Orban added that Hungary is in the right on the refugee issue and that migration into Europe must be completely stopped.
The Saudi justice system is cruel and barbaric. But occasionally they get one right.
The media is scuttling to turn Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a Shiite leader so great they named him twice, into a martyr after the Saudis put him down on terror charges. But Nimr al-Nimr was a terror leader. There are no shortage of quotes from him endorsing terrorism, backing Iran and calling for Iranian intervention in Saudi Arabia.
And yes, he hated America too.
Sheikh al-Nimr also made various anti-American references, claiming that America “wants to humiliate the world.” In the case of America striking Iran, al-Nimr stated that “Iran has the right to close the Straits of Hormuz, to destroy the Zionist enemy, and to strike at American bases and American interests anywhere.”
Nimr was an agent of Iran. We, these days, have no ability to execute traitors. The Saudis do.
Saudi Arabia is full of Sunnis who say most of the same thing. Nimr got it because he was a Shiite and backed Iran. We don’t actually have a dog in this fight, but we can say good riddance to another enemy. The media has tried to turn Nimr and his relative Ali Mohammed al-Nimr into martyrs. But let’s remember how their Iranian bosses treated protesters during the Green Revolution.
Taraneh Mussavi may or may not be that green-clad girl who was arrested at a demonstration near the Ghaba Mosque on June 27. The girl who was raped, suffered from a torn uterus and a torn anus, landed at a Karaj hospital, and was finally found dead in an unknown cemetery in northern Iran. Regardless, her name is the secret name for all the women who have been raped in prisons since the 1979 Revolution. What I want to say is that Taraneh Mussavi is not just one individual.
Mehdi Karroubi writes: “Some individuals have raped detained girls with such force as to cause tears and injuries to their sexual organs.” His claim may be entirely false, but that does not make any difference. The following are not exceptions: When Azar Al Kanaan (Nina Aghdam) speaks in front of the camera about how she was raped at Sanandaj prison. When Roya Toloui speaks of how she was raped by her interrogator. When Monireh Baradaran writes in her book Simple Truth, about Tahereh, a woman remembered by most prisoners from the 1980s, a beautiful woman who lost her sanity after being raped by a Pasdar [“Revolutionary Guard”]. When [Canadian Iranian Journalist] Zahra Kazemi’s dead body is covered with cement and her attorney, Shirin Ebadi asks the court, “Why the victim’s clothing was torn and bloodied in a particular location.” When the report from the coroner’s office states that Zahra Bani Yaghub was raped in the Basij headquarters’ detention center in Hamadan.
Published reports are available about these types of torture committed against women political prisoners after the 1979 Revolution. The most systematic type of reported rape has been the rape of virgin girls who were sentenced to death by execution because of political reasons. They were raped on the night before execution. These reports have been substantiated by frequent statements from the relatives of women political prisoners. On the day after the execution, authorities returned their daughter’s dead body to them along with a sum considered to be the alimony. Reports state that in order to lose their virginity, girls were forced to enter into a temporary marriage with men who were in charge of their prison. Otherwise it was feared that the executed prisoner would go to heaven because she was a virgin!
This was the sort of thing that the Nimrs and other Iranian agents want to spread. No one will weep for either the House of Saud or the Shiite Islamic Revolution or ISIS when they are gone.
On Nov. 27, exactly two weeks after the terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in Paris, FBI agents swarmed into a private home in Harrisburg, Pa. Their target: 19-year-old Jalil Ibn Ameer Aziz, an American citizen and Muslim whom they’d been watching for several months, largely through his postings on Twitter. Using as many as 57 separate accounts, Aziz had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, called for the killing of non-Muslims, aided others to make hijrah to Syria to join the jihad there, and expressed his own wishes to do the same.
And if that weren’t enough, he promised further to continue the attacks against America, posting, for instance, “Know, O Obama, that we are coming to America, and know that we will sever your head in the White House.”
But as the FBI soon discovered, Aziz’s jihadist lust did not end with just words. At the home he shared with his parents in the Pennsylvania capital, according to the affidavit filed in the case, they found a “go-bag,” or knapsack, containing “five M-4 style high capacity magazines loaded with 5.56 ammunition, a modified kitchen knife with the handle removed and wrapped in cloth and string, a thumb drive, a tin filled with various over-the-counter medications, and a head wrap commonly referred to as a balaclava.”
This was only the beginning. Ten days later, the FBI arrested 20-year-old Abdirizak Mohamed Warsame, a Somali-American in Eagan, Minn., on charges of “providing and conspiring to provide material support, specifically personnel, to a designated foreign terrorist organization.”
In fact, since the Paris attacks of Nov. 13 and the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, law enforcement agents worldwide have apprehended dozens of suspects on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks or helping to support the Islamic State. Activity has been especially strong in Europe, where one German jihadist, who escaped ISIS in Syria and is now doing time in a German prison, warned that he and other European fighters were asked to commit jihad “in their homeland,” theIndependent reported. He claimed he was part of a propaganda video encouraging other Muslims: “All you need is to take a big knife, and go down to the streets and slaughter every infidel you encounter.”
With terrorist arrests in the U.S. reaching record numbers this year (60), and 315 in the UK, it seems that many Muslim followers around the world are happy to oblige.
And so you can’t help but wonder: as we head into the 15th anniversary year of the 9/11 attacks, is this what our “new normal” will become?
Below, a summary of Islamic terrorism-related arrests since Nov. 13 worldwide:
France
Under the supervision of six counterterrorism judges, in the wake of the Nov. 13 killings, police perform 2,700 raids and arrest more than 370 suspected jihadists. In mid-December, a plan to attack civil servants is foiled by police in Orléans. Two men are arrested in connection with that plot; both had been in touch with a possible “ringleader” in Syria, according to France’s interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
Germany
A Nov. 17 soccer match between Germany and the Netherlands in Hannover is cancelled amid threats of explosives, and the stadium evacuated. No bombs are found, but the intelligence, coming from France, was considered reliable.
After warnings that the country will be attacked, two men ages 28 and 46 are arrested during Nov. 26 anti-terror raids in Berlin and charged with plotting a terrorist attack in the northwest city of Dortmund.
Weapons handler Sascha W is arrested Nov. 27 near Stuttgart, accused of supplying some of the weapons used in the Paris terrorist massacres.
35-year-old Muslim convert Sven Lau is arrested Dec. 15 on four counts of supporting terrorism through his connections with ISIS and another organization, JAMWA. “Mr. Lau caused an uproar last year when he arranged for a group of young men to dress in orange security vests emblazoned with ‘Shariah Police’ and sent them into the streets of an ethnically diverse neighborhood in the western German city of Wupperthal, in an effort to encourage people to lead what Mr. Lau said was a more devout life,” the New York Timesreported.
Leeth Abdalhmeed, a Syrian in a Dortmund refugee camp, is arrested Dec. 17 on suspicion of links to ISIS and of smuggling medications and handling financial matters for the group. Syrian opposition members tell the Wall Street Journal that Abdalhmeed was “among the first Syrians who pledged loyalty to the Islamic State.”
Austria
Two men are arrested Dec. 13 at a Salzburg refugee center on suspicion of connections to the Paris attacks and of entering the country on fake Syrian passports with plans to carry out attacks there. Investigators also examine whether the two are French citizens.
Two other refugees also were arrested earlier this month on suspicion of having terrorist connections, according to the Press Chronicle.
Great Britain
Britain’s Home Office announced this month that a record 315 terrorists have been arrested in 2015. Of these, 16 percent were female – double the number in the previous year – and 79 percent were British nationals (compared to 56 percent in 2001). Among those arrests are four Luton men apprehended on Dec. 2, suspected of support for ISIS, and another arrested Dec. 22 “on suspicion of being involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.”
Spain
Spain has been a quiet hotbed of jihadism in the past few years, according to recent reports – so much so that an anti-jihadist hotline generated tips for 29 credible suspects within its first 24 hours. Ninety suspected jihadists have been arrested in 2015, though the numbers since 2013 paint an even grimmer picture. An inventory by editors of the Local showed 133 total arrests, of which:
40 percent were Spanish-born
45 percent were Spanish citizens
10 percent were “lone wolves”
60 percent were married
13 percent were converts
the average age was 20-34
16 percent were women
That so many women have been involved is likely no accident: Abdelhamid Abaaoud, suspected of leading the Paris massacres, has specifically targeted Spanish women via social media, said Spanish interior minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz. Notes the Local, “Spanish people have arrested several women this year on suspicion of recruiting women and teenage girls for Islamic State jihadists.”
Two prisoners already serving time for “common crimes” are arrested Dec. 5 on suspicion of distributing Islamic State propaganda and declaring their support for ISIS’s atrocities.
Two Moroccan nationals – a 32-year-old man and 19-year-old woman – both legal Spanish residents, are arrested on charges of pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, promoting jihad on social media, and helping to recruit others.
Finland
Finnish police arrest 23-year-old twin brothers from Iraq Dec. 23, charging them with shooting 11 people during ISIS’s 2014 massacre of 1,700 Iraqi soldiers in Tikrit. The twins were among 300 refugees being housed in the small town of Forssa.
Sweden
Sweden’s Security Service raises the terror alert level to its highest point ever Nov. 18, signaling an imminent threat. Even so, the country’s police force warns that it is inadequately armed to protect the public in the event of a terrorist attack.
On Dec. 14: Swedish courts convict 32-year-old Hassan Mostafa al-Mandlawi and Sultan al-Ami, 30, of participation in terrorist activities in Syria and sentence them to life in prison. “Chief Prosecutor Agnetha Hilding Qvarnstrom said the pair, who were arrested in July in Sweden, had both ‘expressed joy over the deeds,'” the New York Times reported.
Switzerland
Geneva raises its terror alert level Dec. 10 as the department of security announces they are seeking terrorist suspects. Reporters surmise that the search relates to a Belgian-registered car that may have belonged to a friend of Salah Abdeslam, the suspected leader of the Paris attacks. The US Embassy in Bern also warns Americans to be vigilant and alerts them to the raised threat level in Geneva. A day later, Swiss President Simonetta Sommaruga speaks of a “potential IS cell in the Geneva area,” according to Swissinfo, a local news site. That same day, two Syrian men are arrested, also in Geneva, with traces of explosives found in their car.
A Swiss national also is arrested for possessing an “unimaginable arsenal,” according to Geneva police, that included a Kalashnikov, muskets, hatchets, and other weaponry, as well as a Third Reich flag.
Swissinfo further reports that 70 cases of jihadi radicalization are under investigation in the country, with more than 50 citizens confirmed to have traveled to join ISIS.
Netherlands
In the country’s largest terror trial since the slaughter of filmmaker and author Theo van Gogh in 2004, Dutch authorities convict nine jihadist suspects on Dec. 10, six of whom they say form a terrorist organization in their own right, and all of whom are determined to have connections to ISIS. Sentences for the group range from seven days to six years.
Belgium
Only days after the Paris attacks, Belgium raises its terror level to its highest score in Brussels, placing the city in lockdown from Nov. 21-25 as the surviving perpetrator and possible leader of the attacks, Saleh Abdeslam, remains at large. A Belgian native, Abdeslam is thought to be in hiding in the Brussels region of Molenbeek, a largely-Muslim community that has bred a disproportionately high number of Islamic terrorists. Twenty-one raids in the first night of the lockdown lead to 16 arrests; others follow.
Though the government relaxes the alert Nov. 25 and reopens schools and offices, Brussels regional president Rudi Vervoort notes in a statement that the threat continues. “It is not the end,” he says, “just the beginning.”
Time shows that he was probably right: on Tuesday, police arrested two men believed to be planning an attack on New Year’s Eve, probably at the city’s main square, the Grote Markt, where thousands are expected to converge at midnight. Officials raise the terror level again, this time from level two to three – or second-highest.
A recent report by, of all places, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, found that the Syrian rebels were mostly Islamic Jihadists and that even if ISIS were defeated there were 15 other groups sharing its worldview that were ready to take its place.
And that’s just in Syria.
The official ISIS story, the one that we read in the newspapers, watch on television and hear on the radio, is that it’s a unique group whose brand of extremism is so extreme that there is no comparing it to anything else. ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. Or with anything else. It’s a complete aberration.
Except for the 15 other Jihadist groups ready to step into its shoes in just one country.
Islamic Supremacist organizations like ISIS can be graded on the “Caliphate curve”. The Caliphate curve is based on how quickly an Islamic organization wants to achieve the Caliphate. What we describe as “extreme” or “moderate” is really the speed at which an Islamic group seeks to recreate the Caliphate.
ISIS is at the extreme end of the scale, not because it tortures, kills and rapes, but because it implemented the Caliphate immediately. The atrocities for which ISIS has become known are typical of a functioning Caliphate. The execution of Muslims who do not submit to the Caliph, the ethnic cleansing and sexual slavery of non-Muslims are not aberrations. They are normal behavior for a Caliphate.
The last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, was selling non-Muslim girls as sex slaves after the invention of the telephone. ANew York Timesreport from 1886 documented the sale of girls as young as twelve, one of them with “light hazel eyes, black eyebrows and long yellow hair”. An earlier report from theLondon Post described Turks, “sending their blacks to market, in order to make room for a newly-purchased white girl”. This behavior is not a temporary aberration, but dates back to Mohammed’s men raping and enslaving non-Muslim women and young girls as a reward for fighting to spread Islam.
The ISIS behaviors that we find so shocking were widely practiced in even the most civilized parts of the Muslim world around the time that the Statue of Liberty was being dedicated in New York City.
To Muslims, the end of slavery is one of the humiliations that they had to endure because of the loss of the Caliphate. Europeans forced an end to the slave trade. The British made the Turks give up their slaves. The United States made the Saudis give up their slaves in the 1960s. (Unofficially they still exist.) When the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt, its Islamist constitution dropped a ban on slavery.
The Muslim Brotherhood is on the moderate side of the Caliphate curve not because it doesn’t want to bring back the Caliphate, it does, or because it doesn’t want to subjugate non-Muslims, it does, but because it wants to do so gradually over an extended period of time using modern political methods.
But whether you take the long road along the Caliphate curve or the short one it still ends up in the same place. Everyone on the Caliphate curve agrees that the world, including the United States, must be ruled by Muslims under Islamic law and that freedom and equal rights for all must come to an end.
ISIS is just doing right now what the Muslim Brotherhood would take a hundred years to accomplish.
We are not at war with ISIS. We are at war with everyone on the Caliphate curve. Not because we choose to be, but because like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich or Communism’s vision of one world under the red flag, the Caliphate is a plan for imposing a totalitarian system on us to deprive us of our rights.
The Nazis and the Communists had a vision for the world. So do the Islamic Supremacists who advocate the restoration of the Caliphate. All three groups occasionally played the victim of our foreign policy, but they were not responding to us, they were trying to bring about their positive vision of an ideal society.
Nazi, Communist and Islamist societies just happen to be living nightmares for the rest of us.
No one on the Caliphate curve is moderate. Some on the Caliphate curve are just more patient. They put up billboards, create hashtags and try to ban any criticism of their ideology as Islamophobic. But that’s just Caliphatism with a human face. And that makes them a much more dangerous enemy.
ISIS is in some ways our least dangerous enemy. We haven’t defeated ISIS, because we haven’t even tried. Instead Obama fights a war in which 75 percent of strikes on ISIS are blocked and leaflets are dropped 45 minutes before a strike on oil tankers warning ISIS to flee. If we were to fight ISIS by the same rules as our wars in the last century, the Islamic State would have been crushed long ago.
A insta-Caliphate like ISIS isn’t hard to beat. The global networks of Al Qaeda employing more conventional terror tactics are a trickier force because they are embedded within the stream of Muslim migration. And the Muslim Brotherhood is the trickiest of them all because it is so deeply embedded within Muslim populations in the West that it represents and controls those populations.
What ISIS accomplishes by brute force, the Muslim Brotherhood does by setting up networks of front groups. Both ISIS and the Brotherhood control large Muslim populations. ISIS conquers populations in failed states. The Muslim Brotherhood however exercises control over populations in the cities of the West. We could bomb Raqqa, but can we bomb Dearborn, Jersey City or Irvine?
This is where the Caliphate curve truly reaches its most terrifying potential.
The original Islamic expansionism was so devastating not because it managed to seize control over the hinterlands of Arabia, but because it conquered and subjugated civilized cities such as Alexandria, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Athens and Delhi. ISIS envisions repeating these conquests and more, but if it succeeds it will not be because of its military strategy, but because it targets have been colonized.
We can destroy ISIS tomorrow, but we will still be in an extended war with a hundred other groups who all have a vision for restoring the Caliphate. This war will never end until we crush their supremacist agenda by demonstrating that we will never again allow such a horror to exist on this earth. As long as Muslim groups hold out hope for a restoration of the Caliphate this war, in its various forms, will go on.
We are not at war with an organization, but with the idea that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims and are endowed by Allah with the right to rule over them, to rob them, to rape them and enslave them. ISIS is the most naked expression of this idea. But it’s an idea that everyone on the Caliphate curve accepts.
Until we defeat this racist idea, new Islamic groups will constantly keep arising animated by this vision. Wars fueled by supremacist beliefs have historically only ended when the illusion of superiority was destroyed by utterly defeating and humiliating the attackers. It worked with Japan and Nazi Germany.
Our war now will not end until we destroy the supremacist faith in the Caliphate curve.
Italian journalist Giulio Menotti documents the madness that has overtaken British universities–a madness that is eerily familiar:
“Rhodes Must Fall” cry the students and professors outside Oxford, many of whom are themselves part of the Rhodes Scholarship group, the program built by the “racist” tycoon to allow foreign students to study at Oxford.
It’s exactly like students at Amherst and Harvard denouncing Jeffrey Amherst and Isaac Royall.
Meanwhile, across the UK, a general air of hostility is spreading against opinions that could cause even only a hint of distress in students, forcing theFinancial Times to publish an editorial: “It is in the interest of universities to maintain a free and fertile academic environment.”
Ditto in the U.S.
Iranian dissident Maryam Lamaze … was attacked and prevented from speaking at many UK colleges, like Goldsmiths and Warwick. Her hymn against religion and for Western free speech “offended” British students of Islamic faith.
At University College in London, a former student, Macer Gifford, was prevented from telling his experience in the ranks of Kurdish fighters committed to battle against the Islamic State. The reason? “In every conflict there are two sides and our college does not want to take sides.”
Should we be anti-ISIS? That’s too close a question for universities in Britain, as in the U.S., to call.
The University of East Anglia has just banned the use of the sombrero, because it is considered hateful towards Hispanic students.
Just like the recent fiasco at Yale. It’s odd, though. Doesn’t every kind of hat originate with one culture or another, and mustn’t all hats therefore be banned? And why stop with hats?
Oxford has canceled a debate on abortion, because women’s organizations had complained about the presence, among the speakers, of “a person without a uterus.” Don’t laugh, it is really happening at the university founded in 1096.
Don’t laugh, because feminists don’t have a sense of humor, either here or in the U.K.
The University of Cardiff has tried to remove the feminist Germaine Greer, “guilty” of not considering women and transsexuals as equals.
Transsexuals, slightly more common than unicorns, have opened up whole new horizons of insanity.
Meanwhile, these British “safe spaces” are used by apologists for Islamist cutthroats who gather support and are affiliated with these universities (“Jihadi John”, the late Isis executioner, was a brilliant student of Westminster).
I hadn’t realized that. Apparently “brilliant” students aren’t what they used to be.
Some days ago, the Telegraph published an article entitled: “The ideology of the ISIS dominates British universities.”
Why are so many students and professors attracted to evil? It was true in the 1930s, too, when German students and professors were among the most enthusiastic supporters of National Socialism, and when Nazis were weirdly popular–as it seems today–on many American campuses.
The same universities that are uncomfortable accommodating heterodox feminists and Islamic dissidents, such as the Queen Mary University of London, allow events under the banner of Islam where women sit separated from men, in accordance with the Sharia or Islamic law, as if they were in Riyadh or Tehran.
Because that’s diversity.
Muslim activist for women’s rights, Maryam Namazie, has been driven away by fanatic Islamists with the approval of the stupid gay militants. In British colleges it was Namazie who needed a “safe space” to deliver her speech, protected by bodyguards….
Much like the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Michelle Malkin here in the United States. And finally:
Meanwhile, British professors, writers, musicians, intellectuals and professionals are busy promoting initiatives to boycott the Jewish State and its professors.
All of this is nauseatingly familiar. My question is: why? Why have British universities gone off the rails in precisely the same ways as American universities? Steve has referred to the “spreading virus” of madness on American campuses, but the virus has apparently replicated itself in England. Why?
I mean the question seriously. Have British students and professors taken inspiration from their American cousins? Or vice versa? Is it because Leftism is an international movement? Do left-wing British professors and students, like their American counterparts, hate the society that sustains them, and does their hatred produce eerily similar symptoms? I don’t know the answer to these questions. But a contagion is loose that transcends, apparently, international boundaries.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
A pro-Islamist resolution, HR 569, was introduced in Congress and referred to the Judiciary Committee on December 17th. Although it is quite unlikely that a binding law implementing the resolution will be enacted anytime soon, the resolution shows that troublesome views are held by many members of Congress.
The fight for the rights of women is among the most difficult aspects of the fight against Islam and Islamisation. The views expressed in HR 569, if implemented, would make that fight even more difficult.
Here is a list of the seventy-four members who supported H.R. 569:
Mr. Beyer (for himself, Mr. Honda, Mr. Ellison, Mr. Crowley, Mr. Carson of Indiana, Ms. Norton, Ms. McCollum, Ms.Kaptur, Mrs. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, Mr. Kildee, Ms. Loretta Sanchez of California, Mr. Rangel, Mr. Peters, Mr. Ashford, Mr. Grayson, Mr. Takai, Mr. Higgins, Mr. Keating, Mr. Grijalva, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, Mr.Butterfield, Mr. Connolly, Mr. Gallego, Mrs. Bustos, Mr. Delaney, Ms. Castor of Florida, Mr. Gutiérrez, Mr. Quigley, Ms. Esty, Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Kelly of Illinois, Ms. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, Mr. Meeks, Ms. Meng, Mr. Al Green of Texas, Ms. Clark of Massachusetts, Mr. Schiff, Mr. Hastings, Mr. Farr, Mr. Pallone, Mr. McDermott, Ms. Lee, Ms. Edwards, Mr. Brady of Pennsylvania, Ms. Wilson of Florida, Mr. Michael F. Doyle of Pennsylvania, Mr. Sires, Ms. DelBene, Ms. Judy Chu of California, Mr. Polis, Mr. Loebsack, Mr. Pascrell, Mrs.Dingell, Ms. Schakowsky, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Hinojosa, Mr. Yarmuth, Ms. Tsongas, Mr. Langevin, Mr. Pocan, Mr.Conyers, Mr. Takano, Mr. Ryan of Ohio, Mr. Serrano, Mr. Johnson of Georgia, Mr. Tonko, Ms. Lofgren, Mr. Van Hollen, Mrs. Capps, Mr. Price of North Carolina, Ms. Matsui, Ms. Moore, and Mr. Heck of Washington) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
Many of the usual suspects have endorsed the resolution: Keith Ellison, a Democrat and Muslim from Minnesota; Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat and chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Charles Rangel, New York Democrat; and Alan Grayson, a Democrat from Florida. Most of the other endorsers’ names I do not recognize. They are all termites who have made careers of eating away at the rule of law and “transforming” America from a Western nation into a multicultural, welfare-statist, politically correct stewpot of no particular character. [Emphasis added.]
[S]ince our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights, started businesses, taught at our Universities, excelled in our sports arenas, won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers – Thomas Jefferson – kept in his personal library.
. . . .
I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. [Emphasis added.]
A problem with Obama’s stated desire to deal with Islam as it is, not as it isn’t, is that His perceptions of what it is and what it isn’t are essentially backward.
The House Resolution does not mention such Muslim “contributions” to America as those made at Ford Hood, Texas several years ago or those more recently made at San Bernardino, California. Nor does it mention their “contributions” of honor killings and female genital mutilation, about which more is provided later in this post. It bemoans the disparagements some Muslims have suffered due to their “contributions” and others simply because they are Muslims.
Here’s a particularly disturbing part of the bill, set forth under “Resolved:”
The House of Representatives
(3) denounces in the strongest terms the increase of hate speech, intimidation, violence, vandalism, arson, and other hate crimes targeted against mosques, Muslims, or those perceived to be Muslim; [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
(6) urges local and Federal law enforcement authorities to work to prevent hate crimes; and to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law those perpetrators of hate crimes; [Emhasis added.]
Note the inclusion in (3) of “hate speech” as a “hate crime.”
Hate speech is speech that offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits. Should hate speech be discouraged? The answer is easy—of course! However, developing such policies runs the risk of limiting an individual’s ability to exercise free speech. When a conflict arises about which is more important—protecting community interests or safeguarding the rights of the individual—a balance must be found that protects the civil rights of all without limiting the civil liberties of the speaker. [Emphasis added.]
In this country there is no right to speak fighting words—those words without social value, directed to a specific individual, that would provoke a reasonable member of the group about whom the words are spoken. For example, a person cannot utter a racial or ethnic epithet to anotherif those words are likely to cause the listener to react violently. However, under the First Amendment, individuals do have a right to speech that the listener disagrees with and to speech that is offensive and hateful. [Emphasis added.]
Hate speech, fighting words and hate crimes
HR 569’s apparent inclusion of anti-Muslim “hate speech” as a “hate crime” is inconsistent with American law and the American Constitution. However, it is consistent with Attorney General Lynch’s remarks shortly after the December 2nd San Bernardino Islamic attack. She then
complained that the First Amendment allows people to say hateful things and noted that many do so from the safety of their computer keyboard. It’s something, she said, the DoJ would “take action” against, especially when that speech “edges towards violence, when we see the potential to lift…that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric.” [Emphasis added.]
Later, in response to many objections, Ms. Lynch pulled back with this: “Of course, we prosecute deeds and not words.” Really?
Statements such as “Islam is the religion of death” or “Mohamed was a pedophile” could indeed “provoke” a devout Muslim and perhaps “cause” him to react violently. Are such statements “fighting words,” which we have “no right to speak?”
Can “hateful” words be construed as “hateful” actions or “hateful” deeds” and therefore “hate” crimes? Is the following passage from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book Heretic, “hate” speech? Are her words “fighting words,” which the ABA material quoted above claims we have no right to speak? The quoted paragraph deals with an event in Somalia. However, she now lives in America, her books are sold in America and could offend devout Muslims in America.
In my homeland of Somalia, a thirteen-year-old girl reported that she had been gang-raped by three men. The Al-Shabaab militia that then controlled her town of Kismayo, a port city in the south, responded by accusing her of adultery, found her guilty, and sentenced her to death. Her execution was announced in the morning from a loudspeaker blaring from a Toyota pickup truck. At the local soccer stadium, Al-Shabaab loyalists dug a hole in the ground and brought in a truckload of rocks. A crowd of one thousand gathered in the hours leading up to 4: 00 p.m. Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow— named after the Prophet Muhammad’s nine-year-old wife— was dragged, screaming and flailing, into the stadium. It took four men to bury her up to her neck in the hole. Then fifty men spent ten minutes pelting her with rocks and stones. After the ten minutes had passed, there was a pause. She was dug out of the ground and two nurses examined her to see if she was still alive. Someone found a pulse and breathing. Aisha was returned to the hole and the stoning continued. One man who tried to intervene was shot; an eight-year-old boy was also killed by the militia. Afterward, a local sheik told a radio station that Aisha had provided evidence, confirmed her guilt, and “was happy with the punishment under Islamic law.” [Emphasis added.]
She related that incident to point out that that sort of thing is, unfortunately, both Islamic and common. It is both, as indicated later in this article. Where, other than in Islamic lands, does it happen? Perhaps writing, publishing or selling any book that disparages the present condition of Islam “as it is” according to Obama, and seeks the reformation of what Obama insists upon calling the religion of peace and tolerance now, could be considered a “hate” crime. After all,
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, condemned [Ayaan Hirsi Ali as] “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide.”
Neither HR 569, nor a criminal law based on it, will likely be passed anytime soon by either house of Congress. However, the mere introduction of such a bill, supported by seventy-four House members, is disturbing enough. It’s part of our multicultural, politically correct march for moral equivalence which ignores our — Judeo-Christian versus Islamic — distinctions between what is good and what is evil.
Was it good or evil to stone a thirteen-year-old Somali girl to death for her “crime” of having been raped by a gang of young men? Being raped was deemed to be her crime of adultery. Was her inability, and hence failure, to prevent her rape more or less evil than stoning her to death or, indeed, the rape itself? Few if any sane westerners would have difficulty answering such questions. Muslims? That’s different.
According to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other current and former Muslims, Muslims are taught about “honor” from infancy. However, Islamic conceptions of “honor” are very different from Judeo-Christian conceptions. In Islam, “honor” consists of honoring one’s family and clan, and thereby Mohamed and Allah. “Adultery” by a woman dishonors her husband, family, her clan, Mohamed and Allah. It does so even if her “adultery” consisted of being raped. It warrants death by stoning. To react “dishonorably” by not imposing such punishments would be a weakness which would dishonor them all.
Those women are not fighting for free birth control, abortions or even health care. Nor are they fighting for safe spaces against microaggressions or where unpleasant views cannot be heard. They are fighting for the most important “women’s rights,” absent under Islam. Has Obama ever spoken about the work those and other brave women are doing or why they are doing it? If so, I am not aware of it. American “feminists,” other American women and men? Europeans? If they are not, and I am not aware of many who are, they should be ashamed of themselves.
[W]hile certain stoning-related passages have been removed from Iran’s new penal code, other passages in the new code refer to stoning, and stoning remains as a possible form of punishment under the new Iranian penal code.
Amnesty International has documented 76 cases of lethal stoning between 1980-1989 in Iran, while the International Committee Against Execution (ICAE) has reported that 74 others were stoned to death in Iran between 1990-2009.
Is Iran better than the Taliban? Here’s a video, with the obligatory remarks that stoning adulterers is mandated by the Bible and denials that this sort of thing is either widespread or Islamic.
Saudi Arabia has a criminal justice system based on a hardline and literal form of Shari’ah law reflecting a particular state-sanctioned interpretation of Islam.
The death penalty can be imposed for a wide range of offences[4]including murder, rape, false prophecy, blasphemy, armed robbery, repeated drug use, apostasy,[5] adultery,[6] witchcraft and sorcery[7][8][9][10]and can be carried out by beheading with a sword,[11] or more rarely by firing squad, and sometimes by stoning.[12][13][Emphasis added.]
The 345 reported executions between 2007 and 2010 were all carried out by public beheading.[14] The last reported execution for sorcery took place in August 2014.[15][16] There were no reports of stoning between 2007 and 2010,[14] but between 1981 and 1992 there were four cases of execution by stoning reported.[17]
Crucifixion of the beheaded body is sometimes ordered.[7] For example, in 2009, the Saudi Gazette reported that “An Abha court has sentenced the leader of an armed gang to death and three-day crucifixion (public displaying of the beheaded body) and six other gang members to beheading for their role in jewelry store robberies in Asir.”[18] (This practice resembles gibbeting, in which the entire body is displayed).
In 2003, Muhammad Saad al-Beshi, whom the BBC described as “Saudi Arabia’s leading executioner”, gave a rare interview to Arab News.[5] He described his first execution in 1998: “The criminal was tied and blindfolded. With one stroke of the sword I severed his head. It rolled metres away…People are amazed how fast [the sword] can separate the head from the body.”[5] He also said that before an execution he visits the victim’s family to seek forgiveness for the criminal, which can lead to the criminal’s life being spared.[5] Once an execution goes ahead, his only conversation with the prisoner is to tell him or her to recite the Muslim declaration of belief, the Shahada.[5] “When they get to the execution square, their strength drains away. Then I read the execution order, and at a signal I cut the prisoner’s head off,” he said.[5]
As of 2003, executions have not been announced in advance. They can take place any day of the week, and they often generate large crowds. Photography and video of the executions is also forbidden, although there have been numerous cases of photographed and videoed executions in . . . spite of the law against them.
In Germany, the rape victim most likely will not be stoned to death for the offense of being raped.
Sweden?
Conclusions
“Honor killings” and other Islamic infringements on women’s rights in general are becoming more common in America. It has been estimated that there are twenty-seven honor killings in America each year. That estimate is probably low, because
Honor killings and violence, which typically see men victimize wives and daughters because of behavior that has somehow insulted their faith, are among the most secretive crimes in society, say experts. [Emphasis added.]
“Cases of honor killings and/or violence in the U.S. are often unreported because of the shame it can cause to the victim and the victim’s family,” Farhana Qazi, a former U.S. government analyst and senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism, told FoxNews.com. “Also, because victims are often young women, they may feel that reporting the crime to authorities will draw too much attention to the family committing the crime.” [Emphasis added.]
Even cases that appear to be honor killings, such as the Jan. 1, 2008 murder of two Irving, Texas, sisters that landed their father on the FBI’s most wanted list, cannot always be conclusively linked to a religious motivation. Without hard evidence, critics say, ascribing a religious motivation to crimes committed by Muslims demeans Islam. Yet, federal authorities believe they must be able to identify “honor” as a motive for violence and even murder if they are to address a growing cultural problem. [Emphasis added.]
Doesn’t alleging an Islamic motivation for any crime “demean” Islam?
The report, which estimated that 23-27 honor killings per year occur in the U.S., noted that 91 percent of victims in North America are murdered for being “too Westernized,” and in incidents involving daughters 18 years or younger, a father is almost always involved. And for every honor killing, there are many more instances of physical and emotional abuse, all in the name of fundamentalist Islam, say experts. [Emphasis added.]
an aspect of human nature that denies the enormity of any disaster where death is imminent because the mantra of its impossibility was accepted and believed by all. Regarding the Titanic, it was touted as the largest and the safest ship ever built (true at that time) … it is unsinkable (false, nothing man builds is disaster free). When the mantra is believed by all, including the builders … the designers who did not provide adequate life boats … the passengers and crew whose minds denied acceptance of the reality of disaster and peril as incomprehensible. This denial continued even while the disaster was unfolding. They either would not or could not admit or acknowledge the imminence of their peril of floundering in the icy cold sea of the North Atlantic. [Emphasis added.]
It can happen in America, America is already moving in that direction and will arrive there unless we prevent it. Are American feminists working on the problems? Very few, at most.
(Is it reasonable to expect Islamic reform in Salifast Saudi Arabia? — DM)
In a two-part article in the Saudi government daily Al-Watan, journalist Qenan Al-Ghamdi, the former editor ofAl-Watan and of the government daily Al-Sharq, harshly criticized the extremism in Saudi Arabia, which he said is present in every mosque and school and is constantly being spread by preachers, clerics,teachers and parents. The authorities, he added, do almost nothing to fight this extremism that is constantly seeping into Saudi society; on the contrary, they even give it a platform and help to promote it. This extremism is what makes Saudi youths especially susceptible to the extremist ideology of organizations, such as ISIS, he said. He wondered why, despite its awareness of the dangers of terrorist ideology, Saudi Arabia still has no law that criminalizes it.
The following are translated excerpts from both parts of the article:[1]
Qenan Al-Ghamdi (image: Saudi Gazette, Saudi Arabia)
“There is nothing new [under the sun]! Since the takfiri terror attacks began to occur in our streets, mosques and institutions, we have been condemning [its perpetrators] and calling them criminals, deviant, Khawarij,[2] etc. After every success of the security [forces] in exposing dormant or active terrorist cells – and these successes are too numerous to count – we praise the members of the security forces… and are proud of them and do everything we can to support them. Yet we do not do anything helpful and effective to assist the efforts of the Interior Ministry in the security and ideological [domains]…
“What the Senior Clerics Council [Saudi Arabia’s supreme religious body], and other relevant bodies, are expected to do is carry out a critical reading of the [takfiri] ideology, correct it and comment on it – yet nothing significant [has been done in this domain]. Most [imams], from their mosque pulpits every Friday, continue to hurl accusations of heresy at Muslim groups that live among us and also at the People of the Book [meaning Christians in this case], many of whom work in our country. The [imams] curse and hurl invective at them. Those we call ‘preachers and lovers of knowledge’ are still doing this in their lectures and sermons – and some of them are employees of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and work under its supervision. [Moreover], television channels continue to host them, giving them an opportunity to spread this poison, which reaches every home, every eye and every ear. Prohibitions and excessive strictness still dominate most areas of life, even when there is no clear evidence in the pure and genuine [texts of] the Koran or the Sunna that the prohibitions exist.
“Our sons are still marching en masse to become cannon fodder in civil wars and [to serve as] criminal murderers in the ranks of ISIS in every war or terrorist crime around the world. [Saudi youths] form the majority in every arena of so-called jihad. The wellsprings of extremism and fanaticism still [exist] everywhere in our country, to the extent that some boys and girls in our schools accuse other boys and girls of heresy or of straying from the right path just for mentioning some pictures [they liked] or some movies they saw. This is because some of their teachers still instill in them the notion that every source of pleasure in life is forbidden, [even if it is actually] permitted, and because some of their illiterate or nearly-illiterate mothers and grandmothers attend lectures by so-called women preachers who entrench extremism and fanaticism [in their minds]. Moreover, many of the women who attend such women’s forums are excited by what they heard… and share it with groups of women on social media. These are the mothers of families and the educators of the [next] generation, at home and in school, and some of them even become muftis and preachers [themselves]!! Many men are also subject to the same influences – so much so that some of them avoid listening to the national anthem or the musical inserts on news programs, and they are willing to preach and spout prohibitions in every forum, market and street.
“Consequently, many men and women have become preoccupied with [scrutinizing] others – their neighbors, acquaintances and friends – [and asking]: Is he Sunni or Shi’ite? Does he observe the non-obligatory fasts? Does he pray the [supererogatory] Duha prayer? How does he or she dress? Does he watch movies and [television] series? Does he shave his beard? Does she style her eyebrows? Does he do this? Does he do that? As though Allah appointed them to supervise His creatures, interfere in their affairs and assess their intentions…
“So far, despite our awareness of all the dangers of takfir and despite the shameful crimes that the country has witnessed, we [Saudis] have not found in all this a logical and intellectual justification for approving a law that would criminalize sectarianism, racism, takfir and everything that weakens [our] national unity. Even the Shura Council [the Saudi Parliament] ducked [the issue] with ridiculous and ludicrous excuses.
“Islam does not allow to kill a person, and in fact forbids this, regardless of [the person’s] religion or beliefs, unless he committed a crime that mandates killing him. Islam does not allow, and even prohibits, accusing a person of heresy as long as he recites ‘there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Messenger,’ for his account [is to be settled] by Allah [alone]. Islam does not allow prohibiting what Allah completely permitted. Islam does not allow you to exhibit hostility towards anyone who did not originally display overt enmity towards you.
“The [Saudi] state maintains amicable ties with all the world’s countries, excluding the aggressive Zionist Israel, and this does not contradict Saudi Arabia’s status as a path-breaking Arab Islamic state that respects all the Islamic ethnicities and sects and all those residing within its [borders] who come from all parts of the world and belong to different ethnicities, sects and religions… and there’s nothing wrong with this. Islam, via its justice, mercy and tolerance, grants protection to all people, as long as they respect its ways, serve them, benefit them and derive benefit from them…
“All the above is absolutely true. Consider this, [reader,] and then you will be entitled to ask: How will we wipe out terror when its sources come in successive [waves], flooding the eyes the ears and the minds? Moreover, we condemn the Internet and repeatedly say that recruitment [for terror] is done via [this platform]. This is completely incorrect, because we are the ones who filled [people’s] minds with extremism and fanaticism, before and after the Internet, whereas the incitement of ISIS and its ilk only awakens the admiration [for extremist ideology] that is already deep-rooted in the minds and hearts of the youth and makes them easily susceptible to every call to jihad.
“Let us leave aside those already brainwashed by this ideology, for the Ministry of Interior is handling them, but let us act to stop the creation [of more minds of the same kind]. This is the challenge, and it is within our capacity, should we so desire. Anyone opposing this, whoever he may be, has, I believe, shameful intentions [to undermine] the state’s unity and existence and seeks to destroy it – and this is the grave danger.”
[2] The Khawarij were a dissident group that split from Ali’s camp at the Battle of Siffin in 657; it is considered the first Muslim opposition group in Islamic history. Today its name is used as a derogatory name for dissident or deviant groups.
American Islamic Forum for Democracy president M. Zuhdi Jasser speaks at the launch of the Muslim Reform Movement, at the National Press Club on Friday, December 4, 2015. (Screengrab: AIFD/YouTube)
The leader of an umbrella group of moderate Islamic organizations is troubled by C-SPAN’s decision not to cover its launch event at the National Press Club earlier this month, when on Monday the public affairs network provided live coverage to another Muslim event – highlighting “Islamophobia” – at the same venue.
Attempts to get C-SPAN to cover the launch of the Muslim Reform Movement on December 4 were unsuccessful, said M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a key figure in the establishment of the MRM.
Jasser, a Phoenix-Ariz.-based Muslim physician and anti-Islamist activist, called the incident “beyond bizarre if not flagrantly biased.”
“They are mainstreaming Islamist organizations while willfully marginalizing us,” he said. “At least show both!”
Jasser noted that the launch of the Muslim Reform Movement took place just two days after the San Bernardino terrorist attack and weeks after the one in Paris.
Jasser’s communications director Tiffany Hopkins said Tuesday she sent four emails to C-SPAN several days before the launch, then discussed the summit and its relevance in a phone conversation with the assignment desk. She was given the direct email address of C-SPAN’s D.C. editor to contact for a booking and did so, but received no response.
In Jasser’s view, C-SPAN simply “ignored” the request for coverage of the event, which he pointed out had also been listed on the National Press Club website.
He said if C-SPAN chose not to cover either Islamic event then one could allow “that they have their own priorities and Muslim counter-radicalization may not be one of them.”
But after not covering the MRM launch, he was surprised to see C-SPAN give coverage Monday to what he described as the “Islamist ultimatums” of USCMO.
For the public service network to have covered USCMO “while they flatly ignored our reform summit of 14 leaders and our organizations, exemplifies the central obstacle with regards to the ‘perceived silence of reformers,’” he said.
“We are screaming from the rooftops and unfortunately ignored.”
Queries sent to C-SPAN on Monday and again on Tuesday brought no response by press time.
‘The Muslims the world has been waiting for’
The newly-formed Muslim Reform Movement brings together “Muslim reformers” from the U.S., Canada and Europe, who said in a statement, “We are in a battle for the soul of Islam, and an Islamic renewal must defeat the ideology of Islamism.”
The launch included a visit to the Islamic Center of Washington, “a mosque largely run by the government of Saudi Arabia,” where the activists posted a “declaration of reform” on the mosque doors. The document rejects the notion of an Islamic state, the caliphate, apostasy and “institutionalized shari’a.”
MRM founding signatories include representatives of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a Canadian group called Muslims Facing Tomorrow, the Coalition of Progressive Canadian Muslim Organizations, the Quilliam Foundation in Britain, a Danish lawmaker, and several authors, journalists and thinkers.
“I love my faith of Islam, and I wish to reclaim it from the extremists,” said Usama Hasan of the Quilliam Foundation.
“I’m a doting grandmother and I’m concerned about the future of my children and grandchildren as radical Islam is spreading across North America,” said Muslims Facing Tomorrow president Raheel Raza.
“I’m here to take back the narrative of my faith from the people who are destroying it,” said Sohail Raza of Muslims Facing Tomorrow.
AIFD community outreach director Courtney Lonergan said she was excited to “work with these amazing people, who are the Muslims the world has been waiting for.”
Despite the lack of C-SPAN coverage, Jasser said there was evidently “hunger for our message,” pointing to the fact that the launch video has been watched more than 15,000 times on YouTube.
Jasser is a sharp critic of CAIR, a controversial lobby group that describes itself as “America’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization.”
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