Partial no-go zones in majority-Muslim areas are a part of the urban landscape from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, with the French government alone counting 751 of them. This shirking of responsibility foreshadows catastrophe and calls for immediate reversal.
I call the bad parts of Europe’s cities partial no-go zones because ordinary people in ordinary clothing at ordinary times can enter and leave them without trouble. But they are no-go zones in the sense that representatives of the state — police especially, but also firefighters, meter-readers, ambulance attendants and social workers — can only enter with massed power for temporary periods of time. If they disobey this basic rule (as I learned first-hand in Marseille), they are likely to be swarmed, insulted, threatened and even attacked.
This situation needs not exist. Host societies can say no to the poor, crime-ridden, violent and rebellious areas emerging in their midst. But if governments need not abdicate control, why do they do so? Because of a fervent, slightly desperate hope to avoid confrontation. Multicultural policies offer the illusion of sidestepping anything that might be construed as “racist” or “Islamophobic.”
This abandonment is no minor aberration but a decision with grave consequences — consequences far deeper than, say, not controlling a crime-ridden American city like East St. Louis. That’s because Muslim quasi-no-go zones fit into a far larger political context, with dual Western and Islamic dimensions.
Western: Avoiding confrontation reflects a deep-seated ambivalence about the value of one’s own civilization and even self-hatred of the white race. The French intellectual Pascal Bruckner noted in his 2006 book “La Tyrannie de la Penitence” (“The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism”) that leftist thinking “can be reduced to mechanical denunciations of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.” Europeans preen as “the sick man of the planet” whose greed and false notions of superiority causes every problem in the non-Western world: “The white man has sown grief and ruin wherever he has gone.”
If the deadly triad of imperialism, fascism and racism represent all that the West has to offer, no wonder immigrants to Europe, including Islamists, are treated as superior beings due supine deference. They exploit this by acting badly — drug dealers ruling the roost, a gang raping 1,400 children over a period of 16 years, and promoting violent ideologies — with near-impunity because, after all, the Europeans have only themselves to blame.
Muslim: Partial no-go zones also result from an Islamic drive for exclusion and domination. Mecca and Medina constitute the official, sovereign and eternal Muslim-only zones. For nearly 14 centuries, these two Arabian cities have been formally off-limits to kafirs, who trespass at their peril; a lively literature of non-Muslims who penetrated their holy precincts and lived to tell the tale goes back centuries and continues still today.
Other Islamic no-go zones also exist. Before losing power in 1887, the Muslim rulers of Harar, Somalia, for centuries insisted (in the words of a British officer) on the “the exclusion of all travellers not of the Moslem faith.” In like spirit, women in hijabs scream at non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to make them feel unwelcome and so stay away. In the West, lawful Muslim-only enclaves represent one drive for Muslim autonomy and sovereignty; the Muslims of America organization, with its 15 or so no-go compounds bristling with arms and hostility on private property dotted around the United States, represents another.
Unlike places like East St. Louis, Muslim-majority partial no-go zones have a deeply political and highly ambitious quality to them. Indeed, it is not farfetched to foresee them turning into Muslim autonomous zones applying Islamic law and challenging the authorities. The mix of feeble European governments and a strong Islamic drive for power points to future unrest, crises, breakdown and even civil war.
Some believe it is already too late to avoid this fate. I disagree, but if catastrophe is to be avoided, the job to dismantle all partial no-go zones must be started soon and executed with a swift determination based on a renewed sense of self-worth. Two universal principles should guide European governments: attaining a monopoly of force and applying the same code of law to all citizens.
Domestic peace in Europe and perhaps other regions, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, demands nothing less.
December 17, 2015 ought henceforth to be a date which will live in infamy, as that was the day that some of the leading Democrats in the House of Representatives came out in favor of the destruction of the First Amendment. Sponsored by among others, Muslim Congressmen Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, as well as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Loretta Sanchez, Charles Rangel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Kennedy, Al Green, Judy Chu, Debbie Dingell, Niki Tsongas, John Conyers, José Serrano, Hank Johnson, and many others, House Resolution 569 condemns “violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.” The Resolution has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
That’s right: “violence, bigotry and hateful rhetoric.” The implications of those five words will fly by most people who read them, and the mainstream media, of course, will do nothing to elucidate them. But what H. Res. 569 does is conflate violence — attacks on innocent civilians, which have no justification under any circumstances – with “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric,” which are identified on the basis of subjective judgments. The inclusion of condemnations of “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric” in this Resolution, while appearing to be high-minded, take on an ominous character when one recalls the fact that for years, Ellison, Carson, and his allies (including groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR) have been smearing any and all honest examination of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to incite hatred and violence as “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” This Resolution is using the specter of violence against Muslims to try to quash legitimate research into the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us, which will have the effect of allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded and unopposed.
That’s not what this H. Res. 569 would do, you say? It’s just about condemning “hate speech,” not free speech? That kind of sloppy reasoning may pass for thought on most campuses today, but there is really no excuse for it. Take, for example, the wife of Paris jihad murderer Samy Amimour – please. It was recently revealed that she happily boasted about his role in the murder of 130 Paris infidels: “I encouraged my husband to leave in order to terrorize the people of France who have so much blood on their hands […] I’m so proud of my husband and to boast about his virtue, ah la la, I am so happy.” Proud wifey added: “As long as you continue to offend Islam and Muslims, you will be potential targets, and not just cops and Jews but everyone.”
Now Samy Amimour’s wife sounds as if she would be very happy with H. Res. 569, and its sponsors would no doubt gladly avow that we should stop offending Islam and Muslims – that is, cut out the “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” If we are going to be “potential targets” even if we’re not “cops” or “Jews,” as long as we “continue to offend Islam and Muslims,” then the obvious solution, according to the Western intelligentsia, is to stop doing anything that might offend Islam and Muslims – oh, and stop being cops and Jews. Barack “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” says it. Hillary “We’re going to have that filmmaker arrested” Clinton says it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, certain that anyone who speaks honestly about Islam and jihad is a continuing danger to the Church, says it.
And it should be easy. What offends Islam and Muslims? It ought to be a simple matter to cross those things off our list, right? Making a few sacrifices for the sake of our future of glorious diversity should be a no-brainer for every millennial, and everyone of every age who is concerned about “hate,” right? So let’s see. Drawing Muhammad – that’s right out. And of course, Christmas celebrations, officially banned this year in three Muslim countries and frowned upon (at best) in many others, will have to go as well. Alcohol and pork? Not in public, at least. Conversion from Islam to Christianity? No more of that. Building churches? Come on, you’ve got to be more multicultural!
Everyone agrees. The leaders of free societies are eagerly lining up to relinquish those freedoms. The glorious diversity of our multicultural future demands it. And that future will be grand indeed, a gorgeous mosaic, as everyone assures us, once those horrible “Islamophobes” are forcibly silenced. Everyone will applaud that. Most won’t even remember, once the jihad agenda becomes clear and undeniable to everyone in the U.S. on a daily basis and no one is able to say a single thing about it, that there used to be some people around who tried to warn them.
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.
Over at the United Nations, they are laying the groundwork for the 2016 American presidential election — on behalf of the Democratic party. The perceived golden ticket? Playing the victim card. Wild and repeated accusations are being hurled against the GOP of systematic racism, xenophobia, and, in particular, “Islamophobia.”
On December 18, 2015, the U.N. hosted two panels under the title “The Changing Dynamics of Islamophobia and Its Implications on Peaceful and Inclusive Societies.”
The predominant theme was victimhood. There were frequent mentions of 9/11, but not of the 2,977 who died, or their families. The alleged victims of 9/11 of interest to the U.N. gathering were the entirety of American Muslims. MuslimGirl.net editor Amani Al-Khatahtbeh told the U.N. audience: “I was in fourth grade when 9/11 happened. So I had to endure the height of Islamophobia during my formative years.” Wajahat Ali of Al Jazeera America said that 9/11 was “a baptism by fire. . . . As a result of that pain and trauma of 9/11, for my generation there is always a pre- and post-9/11.”
Each instance of radical Islamist terror was flipped the same way. Co-host Ufuk Gokcen, the U.N. representative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, had a long list of incidents bracketed by events in America: “9/11 terrorist attacks . . . and San Bernardino terrorist attacks. The level that Islamophobia has reached, and its mainstreaming into media and political discourse, is terrifying us.”
Terrifying who?
The idea was repeated in another form by his co-host, Sally Kader, head of the U.S. Federation for Middle East Peace, an NGO. She told the receptive crowd: “The FBI census on all the hate crime has always been against Jews, and, of course, blacks, and now we top everything. It’s about Muslims.”
Actually, the FBI census for 2014, released November 16, 2015, still found that 57 percent of anti-religious hate crimes were motivated by “anti-Jewish bias” and that 16 percent of victims were the object of “anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias.”
Then came the excuses. According to Joyce Dubensky, head of the Tanenbaum Center, “people talk about violent extremists and extremists as crazy. . . . I think that that’s an error. I think that’s a stereotype as well. They are also complex human beings, which is why we want to try to talk with them as well.”
One shudders to think of a meeting between Ms. Dubensky and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Scratch the surface of this latest batch of U.N. talking heads and the promotion of terrorism and anti-Semitism isn’t hard to find. The Muslimgirl.net site of Palestinian Al-Katahtbeh includes justifications of the “martyrdom” of Palestinian mothers and a drawing of the fashionable woman with a purse filled with knives, rocks, and a petrol bomb. Another speaker, journalist Haroon Moghul, wrote in the Huffington Post in January 2015 that he advocates terminating a Jewish state altogether: “A one-state solution . . . is the only option.”
Throughout the proceedings, one could have mistaken “impartial” U.N. New York headquarters for a Democratic political rally. Moghul was applauded for his political take on the GOP debate of December 15: “The Republican debate . . . was kind of terrifying and traumatizing,” and the GOP was “a political party that is increasingly indulging in open racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia.”
Another crowd pleaser from the Al Jazeera America journalist was this: “If certain people with wavy hair became president . . . we might end up in concentration camps. We can brand it and call it Trump centers.”
So how did all this go down for the diplomat who represented the United States?
Here is Laurie Shestack Phipps when she took the microphone from the floor:
I’m from the U.S. Mission to the U.N., and I wanted to assure the audience and all the speakers that the U.S. government shares many of the concerns that you’ve expressed about the growing anti-Muslim discrimination in this country and around the world. . . . I did want to emphasize the position of the U.S. government very much in line with the focus of these two panels.
Remarkably, when this American diplomat could not manage to defend her country following hours of America-bashing — because her bosses don’t know the difference between humility and submission, or decorum and capitulation — she was put to shame by an Irish diplomat who could.
Speaking also from the floor, Michael Sanfey said:
Concerns were expressed for the state of American religious pluralism, but isn’t it still incredibly more pluralistic? Where is the religious pluralism in some of the Muslim-majority lands? It just seems to me there is no pluralism whatever. Couldn’t it help to combat Islamophobia if greater diversity was promoted in those lands where the churches [a]re absolutely forbidden?
The profoundly embarrassing spectacle makes the punch line perhaps less surprising.
Moderator Kader revealed to American taxpayers what happened to some of their half billion dollars that were used to renovate the U.N. in Turtle Bay. The event wrapped up on early Friday afternoon by announcing Friday prayers. It turns out that a part of the U.N. building has been taken over, in Kader’s words, for “Muslims to pray.”
No women allowed. Hillary and the U.N. A hell of a plan for 2016.
♦ The irony is that no major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the United States to help, respect, please and, yes, appease Islam. And, yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S.
♦ The politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.” Is it Islamophobia to question a religion whose Middle East leaders often preach “Death to America” and hatred for Western values?
♦ More prevalent than Islamophobia is Islamophilia, as leftists treat Muslims as children whose feathers should not be ruffled. The Islamophilia crowd invites Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom in atonement of largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era.
♦ Many Muslims resent the kind of flattery that takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized. The world needs to wake up and ask: What is going on?
With Americans still trying to absorb the shock of San Bernardino massacre, the perennial debate about “why do they hate us” is on with more intensity than ever since 9/11. The irony is that no major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the United States to help, respect, please and, yes, appease Islam. And, yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S.
Both Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson tried to appease the Islamist pirates of North Africa in the hope of persuading them to cease their raids on U.S. commercial ships and stop capturing Americans and selling them as slaves in the Mediterranean. They sent peace missions laden with gifts and cash, and flattered the pirates, successors to Kheireddin, the Red Bearded One, in almost lyrical terms. In the end, however, they had to take military action to cut the head off the snake. However, the episode was soon forgotten, except in the U.S. Marine Corps, where it became part of its folklore, and the U.S., a nation built on the principle of religious freedom, resumed its benevolent attitude towards Islam.
I remember back in the 1980s, the diplomat then in charge of the United Sates counterterrorism program, Robert Oakley, insisted that the U.S. will never be targeted by homegrown Islamist terrorists because it was “their final destination, their last best hope.”
That was the time when groups controlled by Ayatollah Khomeini kidnapped or killed Americans in the Middle East.
So what happened to make that “final destination” a stopover to paradise for martyrs?
Why do so many Muslims hate Americans to the point of wanting to massacre them in their offices as in 9/11 or at a Christmas Party at San Bernardino — despite the fact that the United States is the only major power in modern times to offer Muslims a helping hand when they needed it?
Wasn’t it President Woodrow Wilson who insisted at the end of the First World War that the main European imperial powers of the day, Great Britain and France, publicly commit to respecting the right of self-determination for nations freed from the Ottoman yoke? The Americans invented the idea of “mandates” under the League of Nations to prevent the European imperialist world-grabbers from turning their Muslim conquests in the Middle East into a new colonial galaxy. Without that, there would probably have been no independent Arab states in the Levant, at least for decades.
And wasn’t it President Harry Truman who in 1946 used eyeball-to-eyeball diplomacy against Soviet despot Josef Stalin to force him to take Russian occupation troops out of Iran’s northwestern provinces and forget about his plan of creating a Soviet Iranistan? (At the time the Soviets hadn’t yet developed a nuclear arsenal and thought twice before provoking a clash with the U.S.)
It was President Truman again who prevented the British from sharing out mandatory Palestine among their Arab clients, having already taken a big chunk of it to create an emirate for their Hashemite protégés on the east bank of the Jordan.
And it was thanks to U.S. sending the Marines in the nick of time in 1958 that both Lebanon and Jordan managed to retain their independence and avoided becoming early versions of what is Syria today.
Then we had the 1956 crisis, when Britain and France invaded Egypt to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Wasn’t it President Dwight Eisenhower who went against American’s oldest allies to let the Egyptians assert their national sovereignty?
From 1961 onwards, President John F. Kennedy exerted immense pressure on France and used his charm on General De Gaulle to accelerate progress towards Algeria’s independence. In 1997 Redha Malik, a former Prime Minister of Algeria and key negotiator with France, told me that throughout the Evian peace talks, the Algerian team knew it had “a strong friend in Washington.”
In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, triggered by Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul-Nasser’s quixotic attempt at imposing a blockade in the Strait of Tiran, the U.S. used its clout to persuade the Israelis to stop the war after only six days. In his memoirs, the long-standing Soviet apparatchik and future Prime Minister, Yevgeni Primakov, claims that the Israelis wanted to complete their destruction of Arab air forces by wiping out Nasser’s heavy weapons on the ground as well. It was under American pressure that the Israelis agreed to temper their appetite for victory and accepted a ceasefire under the auspices of the United Nations.
The Nasserist regime could live to fight another day, which came in 1973. In the October 1973 war, too, U.S. intervention helped restrain the Israelis, who had built up an invasion force under General Ariel Sharon a stone’s-throw from Cairo.
In the Camp David talks that led to peace between Egypt and Israel, intense pressure by President Jimmy Carter forced the Israelis to abandon plans to maintain “security enclaves” inside the Sinai Peninsula, thereby helping President Anwar Sadat recover all of Egypt’s lost territory.
In 1982 a multinational force, led by the United States, intervened in Lebanon to stop the Israeli advance beyond the Litani River. That force also helped save the lives of Yasser Arafat and his close associates in the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when, trapped in Beirut, they risked being captured or killed by the Israelis. President Ronald Reagan even arranged for Arafat and his entourage a safe passage to Tunisia, free of charge.
During the lengthy crisis that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the U.S., having at first hesitated to intervene under President George H.W. Bush, assumed a leadership position under President Bill Clinton and helped save the lives of many Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where a Serbian ethnic cleansing master plan was in full application. Later, it was also U.S. military power that helped Kosovo’s Albanian majority, overwhelmingly Muslim, achieve independence. Ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova told me in an interview that he had counted on “Europe’s conscience to wake up” only to see that it was “the American cavalry” that in the end came to the rescue, while the Europeans “danced around the dying man.”
The U.S. was the only major power to have no state-owned oil company and thus never used its military clout to obtain a share of the Middle East’s energy resources.
Should Muslims hate Americans because they refused to disband their military bases on Islamic lands? Again, history shows that the U.S. was the only major power prepared to pack up and leave as soon as its hosts showed it the door.
In 1969, an astonished Col. Moammar Khadafy watched as the Americans closed one of their most important military bases in the Mediterranean, Wheelus, located on Libyan territory, as soon as his newly installed military government asked Washington to leave. A couple of years earlier, it had taken months of bloody battles and tens of thousands of lives before South Yemen was able to force Britain to close its base in Aden.
In 1979, the U.S. had 27,000 military personnel in Iran, operating “listening posts” set up as part of the strategic arms limitation accords to monitor Soviet missile tests. But when the new Islamic regime led by Khomeini asked the U.S. to close the listening posts, which had been approved by the Soviets as well, the Americans did no foot-dragging. The only Americans left behind were diplomats, soon to be seized as hostages by Khomeinist militants.
We witnessed a repeat of that in the 1990s on a grander scale, when the Americans simply packed up and left when the Saudis asked them to close their bases after driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, tangentially also saving Saudi Arabia from Iraqi occupation.
That the U.S. was a friend of Muslims and of Islam was again illustrated when American power helped drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and, later, liberate Afghans and Iraqis, a total of 50 million Muslims, from the vicious domination of Taliban and the Ba’ath Party.
In 2005, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Sharestani was publicly wondering why the Americans were not coming to “steal our oil,” which anti-U.S. propaganda claimed had been Washington’s key objective in toppling Saddam Hussein. We left there, too.
During the past six decades, the U.S. has been by far the largest donor of aid to more than 40 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations. In the 1940s and ’50s, tens of millions of Muslims were saved from starvation and famine thanks to U.S. food aid. And the Point IV program, launched by President Truman, helped eradicate a number of endemic diseases, including smallpox and malaria, which killed large numbers of Muslims each year.
Many Muslims nations have been annually receiving large checks from the U.S. for decades, among them Egypt, which gets $2 billion, and Pakistan, the homeland of San Bernardino killer Syed Farook, which gets $1 billion.
After the San Bernardino massacre carried out by jihadists Syed Farook (right) and Tashfeen Malik (left), the perennial debate about “why do they hate us” is on with more intensity than ever since 9/11.
When the last Islamic Caliph was driven out of Turkey in 1924, he went into exile first to France and then to the United States, where his descendants lived in New York. In fact, the last pretender to the Islamic Caliphate, Ertugul Osman V, died in Manhattan in 2009.
An open society, the U.S. has always welcomed Islamic exiles of all kinds, including some of its own bitter enemies. The only time that the pan-Islamist Hezbollah movement, founded and led by Iran, has ever held an international conference outside Iran or Lebanon was in Austin Texas in 1986, when a number of Latin American branches of the movement were created. Hundreds of former high-ranking Khomeinist civilian and military officials and clerics have ended up in the U.S. as exiles, while many others have their children attending U.S. schools and universities.
Today, half of Islamic Republic President Hassan Rouhani’s closest aides are holders of PhDs from U.S. universities, among them his Chief of Staff, Muhammad Nahavandian, a Green Card holder, and his Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif. (The other half consists of former holders of U.S. hostages in Tehran, among them Defense Minister Hussein Dehqan and Environmental director Masoumeh Ebtekar.)
Quite a few of Osama bin Laden’s 50 or so siblings are either holders of U.S. passports or green cards, along with thousands of other Saudis.
Unlike Russia, which has a 200-year history of war against Muslims, having annexed Islamic land at the rate of one square kilometer a day during the 19th century, the U.S. never annexed any Muslim-majority nation. And unlike China, which is still holding its Muslim minority, the Uighurs, in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) surrounded by a ring of steel, the U.S. is not trying to stop a Muslim nation’s aspiration after self-determination.
In the 1990s, when Saudi Arabia normalized ties with the People’s Republic of China, it shut down the offices of the Uighur exiles in Jeddah. Where did the exiles transfer to? The answer is: Washington DC, since neither Muslim nations nor Europeans would agree to host them.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. has been host to more than five million Muslims from all over the world, many of them fleeing brutal Islamist regimes in their homelands. In a conversation in 2002, Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis expressed the hope that Muslims in the United States and other Western democracies could become “beacons of enlightenment” projecting light back to their old counties. Many of us shared that hope.
Now, however, we see that the opposite is happening. Instead of exporting “light” back to the Muslim world, a growing number of Muslims in Western democracies have become importers of darkness in their new abodes.
Worse still, the politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.”
Is it Islamophobia to question a religion whose Middle East leaders often preach “Death to America” and hatred for Western values?
More prevalent than Islamophobia is Islamophilia, as leftists treat Muslims as children whose feathers should not be ruffled.
The Islamophilia crowd does great disservice to both Western democracies and to Islam itself.
They invite Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom in atonement of largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era. They also invite Muslims in the West to learn how to pose as victims and demand the rewards of victimhood as is the fashion in Europe and America. To the Muslim world at large, the message of Islamophilia is that Muslims need no criticism, although their faith is being transformed into a number of conflicting ideologies dedicated to violence and terror.
Never mind if Islamic theology is all but dead. To say so would be a sign of Islamophobia.
Never mind that God makes only a cameo appearance in mosque sermons almost entirely obsessed with political issues.
All that Western intellectuals or leaders need to do is stop flattering Islam, as President Obama has been doing for the past seven years, claiming that virtually anything worthwhile under the sun has its origin in Islam.
Many Muslims resent that kind of flattery, which takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized. The world needs to wake from its slumber and ask: What is going on?
(The views expressed in this article are mine, and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Judeo-Christian civilization has nothing in common with, and nothing to gain from, Islamic civilization as it now exists. They have been clashing for centuries. Now, Islamic civilization appears to be winning in much of the European Union and, to a lesser degree, in America.
Can anything be done to slow and then to halt the spread of fundamentalist Islam? Ayan Hirsi Ali hopes there is and that Muslims will do it. I also hope they will, but am quite dubious that it will happen in the foreseeable future. We need to take other steps promptly.
Preliminary disclosure
As I wrote here in 2012, I am an Agnostic and have been for more than half a century. I do not believe that one or more Gods exist, nor do I believe that none exist. I simply do not know and have no way to know. However, Judeo-Christian society has given me what I love most, freedom to think and to speak as I choose. That freedom is now under severe attack and is withering away. Far too few Christians and Jews seem to have noticed or to care.
When I was in tenth grade, my parents and I decided that I would have a better chance of being admitted to and succeeding at a good college if I were to transfer from public high school to a private high school. We researched area private schools and settled upon St. Stephen’s School for Boys, an Episcopalian school. The headmaster was an Episcopalian priest. During my admissions interview, I volunteered that I was an Agnostic. It did not seem to bother him, but he told me that I would be required to attend a daily religious opening ceremony and, during my senior year, a weekly sacred studies class which he would lead. The first did not bother me and I looked forward to the second.
During the morning religious ceremonies, I stood when the other boys stood and sat when they sat. When they sang hymns and recited creeds and bible verses, I did not. Nobody seemed to notice. During the sacred studies class, I voiced my views, the other boys voiced theirs and the Headmaster voiced his. Our discussions were collegial, not contentious.
These experiences have colored my views of Judeo-Christian culture as it has evolved through today: with increasing exceptions, it remains a culture of freedom and kindness. Sometimes, as with outreach to Islamists, it goes too far. Christian outreach to fundamentalist Islam is like bone cells inviting cancer cells in to discuss how they can be friends and get along. In the end, they can’t and won’t. The cancer cells will thrive and the owner of the infested bones will die painfully.
Fundamentalist Islam is a culture of compulsion and hate
Americans should learn far more than we have from the recent experiences of Sweden, Germany, England, France and other European Union countries in welcoming Muslims to Islamise their cultures. I posted a lengthy article on that on December 13th. If you haven’t read it yet, please do so now. It provides very helpful background for an understanding of the clash of Judeo-Christian and Islamic civilizations.
Here is a lengthy video by Walid Shoebat, once an Islamic jihadist and now a Roman Catholic opponent of Islam. Born in “Palestine,” he imbibed the Islamic culture of hate and compulsion as a youth, as did most of his acquaintances. Eventually, he changed from what he was to what he now is.
Here’s are Shoebat’s 2007 comments:
Most of Shoebat’s comments are consistent with my understanding of present-day Islam, which is largely fundamentalist, of “Palestine” and of its leaders. Here are videos of three who lead the “heroes of Palestine:”
Here’s are Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s 2015 comments on the possibility of an Islamic reformation, for which she argues in her recent book Heretic. (I just bought the Kindle version. After I have read it, I may post an article about it.) A former Muslim and now an Athiest, she is far more conciliatory than was Shoebat because she wants to promote change for the better within Islam. In her closing comments, she offers hope that someday Muslims will become as tolerant and peaceful as Christians and Jews. She does not expect that to happen during her life time, or for a long time thereafter. At seventy-four, I certainly don’t expect it during my remaining time on Earth.
Education today in Obama’s America
Obama’s America has become a multicultural, moral-equivalence based society dominated by political correctness. Many — including some nominal Christians and Jews — rail against Christianity and Judaism. Islam, on the other hand, has become a protected species: any suggestion that it is evil is condemned as “Islamophobic.”
At my alma mater, Yale (1959 – 63), freedom of speech and of thought now take back seats to politically correct condemnations of anything that anyone (except Christians and Jews) might find offensive.
I understand that the same sickness is spreading throughout the country. Maybe some fine day we will have an educational system like this:
Efforts to spread multicultural, moral-equivalence and hence Islamic values are not confined to our colleges. According to an article by The Clarion Project,
Controversy over the way public schools are presenting Islam has been making headlines in many school districts around the U.S. and worldwide:
♦ In Tennessee, a bill was introduced to prevent schools from teaching classes on “religious doctrine” before the 10th grade. The bill is in reaction to objections by parents to a three-week curriculum under the topic of world religion for middle-school students that covers the “Five Pillars of Islam” that obligated children to write assignments about Islamic principles of faith, such as “Allah is the only God.” Parents particularly objected because no other religion was taught at the same time and the amount of time spent on Islam was considerably more than that spent on any other religion.
♦ In Maryland, parents objected to the way Islam was taught in the school’s “World History” class, presenting Islam in an historically untrue way and listing all the “benefits” of Islam.
♦ After being threatened with a lawsuit, an Ohio school district agreed to remove a video about Islam from a seventh grade world-history curriculum that was challenged as falling under the category of proselytizing and favoring one religion over another (a violation of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause). The video, titled 30 Days: Muslim and America, features a young Christian man who agrees to totally immerse himself in Islam for a month by living with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Michigan. It was shown to students as part of a course that requires students to “describe achievements by the Islamic civilization and how these achievements were introduced into Western Europe in the time period between 750 BC – 1600AD.”
♦ In Massachusetts, the Wellesley Middle School, another public school was caught in a controversy when a video (see below) of a student trip to the Roxbury megamosque was released. On the trip, students were taught propaganda – among other things, that Muslim women got the vote before women in the West – by the mosque staff. The boys can be seen prostrating themselves to Allah alongside Muslim men. The video was covered extensively on Boston TV and radio.
♦ In Massachusetts, the Newton public school system became enmeshed in a similar controversy about deceptive and anti-Semitic lessons concerning Muslim women being taught to their students. Even though the curriculum was removed, school administrators refused to tell the children the information was inaccurate (as was the case above with the Wellesley Middle School).
Here’s the referenced video of a 2010 high school trip to a mosque in Newton, Massachusetts:
Fethullah Gulen’s movement is just one more manifestation of what the Muslim Brotherhood has called civilization jihad, albeit a particularly sinister one with its large footprint, penetration of our educational system and well-established, sophisticated and successful influence operations. With this new monograph – the [eighth] in the Center for Security Policy’s Civilization Jihad Readers Series, we hope to sound an alarm about this multi-faceted and dangerous Islamic supremacist cult that – despite significant setbacks in its native Turkey – constitutes a true Trojan Horse in our midst. [Emphasis added.]
It must be noted that those setbacks [in Turkey] are being dealt the Gulen cult and its empire by a rival Islamic supremacist movement: the AK Party and government of Turkish President Recep Tayyep Erdogan. Like erstwhile allies in organized criminal racketeering, these two Islamist mafia dons have had a toxic falling-out after they jointly took down the Ataturk legacy of secular governance in Turkey. Welcome as the rolling up of the Gulen empire and the extradition of its cult leader from the United States would be, nothing in this monograph should be seen as an endorsement of the no-less problematic Erdogan regime’s civilization jihadism and its ambitions to restore the Caliphate.
The state of Hesse has become the first in Germany to offer Islamic education in public schools, with religious instruction starting as early as the first grade.
Giving young children religious and moral instruction might sound like a good idea, if not for the content of the newly written Islamic curriculum and the influence of Islamist elements over the recruitment of teachers. [Emphasis added.]
The writing of textbooks is being overseen by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB). In an agreement reached between the State of Hesse and DITIB, the organization will play a key role in setting the curriculum, selecting the teachers and monitoring the Islamic religious instruction. The organization is apparently assuming a similar role in several other key German states. [Emphasis added.]
DITIB is the largest Muslim organization in Germany and controls several prominent mosques. The group depends heavily on the Turkish government for its funding, and maintains close ties with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist party, the AKP.
Our “great ally” Saudi Arabia is also spending lots of money to promote fundamentalist Islam.
[T]he Kingdom funded Western tax exempt Islamic organizations engaged in dawah (proselytization for Islam). Among them were networks of charitable organizations that provide financial aid to prisoners (including non-Muslims to lure them to Islam) in Western jails, lavishly funded academic chairs in Middle East Studies in universities around the world, student-exchange programs and spending many millions of dollars to increase Saudi political influence in the West — even contributing $100 million to coordinate and assist the United Nations international counterterrorism efforts.
. . . .
The public outrage and rejection of Saudi King Salman’s offer to fund 200 new mosques for more than 800,000 new Muslim refugees in Germany, and the Vice Chancellor’s statement: “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over” point in the right direction. But don’t hold your breath. Germany, the United States and the rest of the West have been turning a blind eye to Saudi funding of thousands of mosques, madrassas and Islamic centers that have propagated radical Islamic ideology for decades and are unlikely to face reality anytime soon. [Emphasis added.]
Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking—the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West. [Emphasis added.]
Remember, the reason people like French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are in power—three prominent Western leaders who insist that Islam is innocent of violence and who push for Muslim immigration—is because they embody a worldview that is normative in the West. [Emphasis added.]
In this context, the facilitation of jihadi terror is less a top down imposition and more a grass root product of decades of erroneous, but unquestioned, thinking. (Those who believe America’s problems begin and end with Obama would do well to remember that he did not come to power through a coup but that he was voted in—twice. This indicates that Obama and the majority of voting Americans have a shared, and erroneous, worldview. He may be cynically exploiting this worldview, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s because this warped worldview is mainstream that he can exploit it in the first place.) [Emphasis added.]
Western empowerment of the jihad is rooted in a number of philosophies that have metastasized into every corner of social life, becoming cornerstones of postmodern epistemology. These include the doctrines of relativism and multiculturalism on the one hand, and anti-Western, anti-Christian sentiment on the other. [Emphasis added.]
Taken together, these cornerstones of postmodern, post-Christian thinking hold that there are no absolute truths and thus all cultures are fundamentally equal and deserving of respect. If any Western person wants to criticize a civilization or religion, then let them look “inwardly” and acknowledge their European Christian heritage as the epitome of intolerance and imperialism. [Emphasis added.]
Add to these a number of sappy and silly ideals—truth can never be uttered because it might “hurt the feelings” of some (excluding white Christians who are free game), and if anything, the West should go out of its way to make up for its supposedly historic “sins” by appeasing Muslims until they “like us”—and you have a sure recipe for disaster, that is, the current state of affairs. [Emphasis added.]
Western people are bombarded with these aforementioned “truths” from the cradle to the grave—from kindergarten to university, from Hollywood to the news rooms, and now even in churches—so that they are unable to accept and act on a simple truism that their ancestors well knew: Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant creed that cannot coexist with non-Islam (except insincerely, in times of weakness). [Emphasis added.]
The essence of all this came out clearly when Obama, in order to rationalize away the inhuman atrocities of the Islamic State, counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and remember that their Christian ancestors have been guilty of similar if not worse atrocities. That he had to go back almost a thousand years for examples by referencing the crusades and inquisition—both of which have been completely distorted by the warped postmodern worldview, including by portraying imperialist Muslims as victims—did not matter to America’s leader.
Worse, it did not matter to most Americans. The greater lesson was not that Obama whitewashed modern Islamic atrocities by misrepresenting and demonizing Christian history, but that he was merely reaffirming the mainstream narrative that Americans have been indoctrinated into believing. And thus, aside from the usual ephemeral and meaningless grumblings, his words—as with many of his pro-Islamic, anti-Christian comments and policies—passed along without consequence. [Emphasis added.]
Conclusions
Too many of “We the people” demand “safe spaces” (offense-free zones) where rote acceptance of politically correct pablum is cherished rather than contested or even questioned. I doubt that another massively successful effort on the scale of the September 11, 2001 attack by Islamic fundamentalists would awaken many of them. Rather than begin to awaken and see what Islam is, how many would angrily demand to know what America did this time to offend our brothers and sisters of the Religion of Peace, Truth and love?
We once had a great culture and a great nation.
It is now fading and is in danger of being displaced by something far different and evil. What will WE do?
Getting rid of Obama will not be nearly enough, regardless of whether He is a Muslim.
Listen again to Ayan Hirsi Ali’s hopes for the reformation of Islam and think about what we can do to help. Read about Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, who wants to make Muslims believe that much of fundamentalist Islam is not Islamic.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser – a Navy vet and founder of the American Islamic Forum of Democracy – is one of those individuals taking the stand against Islamic organizations that support terrorism and claim to speak for the entire community. From Fox News:
“CAIR is a primary obstacle in the effort of many honest American Muslims who recognize our need to own up and lead long-overdue reforms against the root causes of radicalization: Islamism and its separatism,” said Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, an ex-U.S. Navy officer who founded and heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
and
“CAIR’s information is marketed and packaged so it seems that they speak for all of us, but they don’t speak for me and my group,” said Raheel Raza, president of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow. “CAIR does not and has never represented the majority Muslim voices which are as diverse as Muslims in America.”
‘They don’t speak for me’: New Muslim groups reject CAIR representation http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/18/dont-speak-for-me-new-muslim-groups-reject-cair-representation.html
Dr. Jasser has assembled an alliance known as the “Muslim Reform Movement” consisting of about a dozen moderate Islamic groups in the US, Canada and Europe. This movement rebukes jihad and advocates the separation of “Mosque and state,” among other things. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that they reject the idea of an “Islamic State” and Sharia Law.
Although political correctness prevents Democrats and many Republicans from admitting it, it is already well established that CAIR has ties to terrorism.
CAIR, which masquerades as America’s largest Muslim civil rights group, is an outpost of international jihadism. It is an enemy propaganda organization whose longstanding ties to the terrorist underworld have been exhaustively documented at DiscoverTheNetworks and elsewhere. CAIR aims to influence America’s domestic and foreign policies. CAIR wants to make America safe for Sharia law by bullying Americans into not questioning Islam, a religion-centered ideology that has been generating a body count for 1,400 years. [Emphasis added.]
Accusing critics of so-called Islamophobia, a term invented by Islamists, is CAIR’s favorite method of silencing critics and opponents. It is part of a dangerous effort to discourage Americans from thinking freely and arriving at their own conclusions about Islam and mainstream the tenets of Islam in our society. The idea is to eventually make it as difficult and uncomfortable as possible to criticize the faith founded by Muhammad in the seventh century after the birth of Christ. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men, reports DiscoverTheNetworks, “had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and founded as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States.” CAIR opened an office in the nation’s capital with a $5,000 grant from the Marzook-founded Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a charity that the Bush administration shuttered in 2001 for collecting money “to support the Hamas terror organization.” CAIR called the action “unjust” and “disturbing.” In 2004 Marzook was indicted on racketeering charges related to his pro-Hamas activities. Ahmad was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial.
Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder of the Texas branch of CAIR, was convicted in 2005 of terrorism-related offenses and sentenced to 80 months in prison. CAIR civil rights director Randall Todd Royer was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on federal weapons and explosives charges in 2004. Bassem Khafagi, a community affairs director at CAIR, was convicted in 2003 on bank and visa fraud charges and agreed to be deported to Egypt. Rabih Haddad, a fundraiser for CAIR’s chapter in Ann Arbor, Mich., was detained in 2001 after overstaying his tourist visa. Authorities found a firearm and boxes of ammunition in his home. He served 19 months in prison and was deported to Lebanon in 2003. CAIR board member Abdurahman Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment for funneling at least $1 million to al-Qaeda. CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men, reports DiscoverTheNetworks, “had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and founded as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States.”
CAIR and related Islamist organizations have often participated in White House meetings; Dr. Jasser and his group have been excluded.
[F]or the past seven years, the Obama White House has opened its doors to the entire spectrum of radical Islamist groups, just like CAIR. These groups have rationalized the actions of Islamic terrorist groups that have killed Americans, warned American Muslims against cooperating with law enforcement, smeared genuine Muslim moderates like Zuhdi Jasser and Asra Nomani as traitors and accused anyone who dared to utter the term “radical Islam” as “Islamophobic.” These are the groups that the White House should have marginalized. The fact that Obama legitimized radical Islamist groups will be his real legacy.
Is Dr. Jasser’s version of Islam “fantasy Islam?” Historically and presently, it unfortunately is. It rejects aspects of Islamism with which very many Muslims agree.
But need that remain the case? Christianity has changed since the time of the Inquisition and perhaps Islam — which except technologically remains stuck in the middle ages — can eventually change as well — if and when Islamic nations encourage, rather than prohibit, free speech. I have seen few significant signs of that happening. Egyptian President Sisi — despised by Obama for opposing the Muslim Brotherhood — has tried and is trying. He may not be around much longer because of it.
Jasser’s hopes for the future generally parallel those of Ayan Hirsi Ali, who wants Islam to revert to relatively tolerant and peaceful Mecca Islam and to reject subsequent Medina Islam, the fruit of Mohamed’s greatly changed status in Medina to become a powerful warlord. I see little reason to expect that it will change in that direction even in the distant future, and less that it will do so soon. I hope that I am wrong.
In any event, Muslims will need to do most of the work themselves, and that will require that there be enough of them to do it. If and when that happens, perhaps we can help a little. The most important things that we can do will be to
1. Recognize that fundamentalist Islam is evil and shun rather than accept those who espouse it, such as CAIR and its affiliates and
2. Prevent the further invasion of the United States (it may well be too late for Obama’s America) by Muslims who adhere to fundamentalist Islam. Unfortunately, most of our current crop of Republicans seem quite unlikely even to try.
Islam is terrorizing the world, not because it can, but because the West allows it to.
************************
As someone specializing in Islamic jihadism, one would expect I’d have much to say immediately after jihadi attacks of the sort that recently occurred in San Bernardino, or Paris, or Mali, where a total of about 180 dead. Ironically, I don’t: such attacks are ultimately symptoms of what I do deem worthy of talk, namely, root causes. (What can one add when a symptom of the root cause he has long warned against occurs other than “told you so”?)
So what is the root cause of jihadi attacks? Many think that the ultimate source of the ongoing terrorization of the West is Islam. Yet this notion has one problem: the Muslim world is immensely weak and intrinsically incapable of being a threat. That every Islamic assault on the West is a terrorist attack—and terrorism, as is known, is the weapon of the weak—speaks for itself.
This was not always the case. For approximately one thousand years, the Islamic world was the scourge of the West. Today’s history books may refer to those who terrorized Christian Europe as Arabs, Saracens, Moors, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, or Tatars[1]—but all were operating under the same banner of jihad that the Islamic State is operating under.
No, today, the ultimate enemy is within. The root cause behind the nonstop Muslim terrorization of the West is found in those who stifle or whitewash all talk and examination of Muslim doctrine and history; who welcome hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants while knowing that some are jihadi operatives and many are simply “radical”; who work to overthrow secular Arab dictators in the name of “democracy” and “freedom,” only to uncork the jihad suppressed by the autocrats (the Islamic State’s territory consists of lands that were “liberated” in Iraq, Libya, and Syria by the U.S. and its allies).
So are Western leaders and politicians the root cause behind the Islamic terrorization of the West?
Close—but still not there yet.
Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking—the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West.
Remember, the reason people like French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are in power—three prominent Western leaders who insist that Islam is innocent of violence and who push for Muslim immigration—is because they embody a worldview that is normative in the West.
In this context, the facilitation of jihadi terror is less a top down imposition and more a grass root product of decades of erroneous, but unquestioned, thinking. (Those who believe America’s problems begin and end with Obama would do well to remember that he did not come to power through a coup but that he was voted in—twice. This indicates that Obama and the majority of voting Americans have a shared, and erroneous, worldview. He may be cynically exploiting this worldview, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s because this warped worldview is mainstream that he can exploit it in the first place.)
Western empowerment of the jihad is rooted in a number of philosophies that have metastasized into every corner of social life, becoming cornerstones of postmodern epistemology. These include the doctrines of relativism and multiculturalism on the one hand, and anti-Western, anti-Christian sentiment on the other.
Taken together, these cornerstones of postmodern, post-Christian thinking hold that there are no absolute truths and thus all cultures are fundamentally equal and deserving of respect. If any Western person wants to criticize a civilization or religion, then let them look “inwardly” and acknowledge their European Christian heritage as the epitome of intolerance and imperialism.
Add to these a number of sappy and silly ideals—truth can never be uttered because it might “hurt the feelings” of some (excluding white Christians who are free game), and if anything, the West should go out of its way to make up for its supposedly historic “sins” by appeasing Muslims until they “like us”—and you have a sure recipe for disaster, that is, the current state of affairs.
Western people are bombarded with these aforementioned “truths” from the cradle to the grave—from kindergarten to university, from Hollywood to the news rooms, and now even in churches—so that they are unable to accept and act on a simple truism that their ancestors well knew: Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant creed that cannot coexist with non-Islam (except insincerely, in times of weakness).
The essence of all this came out clearly when Obama, in order to rationalize away the inhuman atrocities of the Islamic State, counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and remember that their Christian ancestors have been guilty of similar if not worse atrocities. That he had to go back almost a thousand years for examples by referencing the crusades and inquisition—both of which have been completely distorted by the warped postmodern worldview, including by portraying imperialist Muslims as victims—did not matter to America’s leader.
Worse, it did not matter to most Americans. The greater lesson was not that Obama whitewashed modern Islamic atrocities by misrepresenting and demonizing Christian history, but that he was merely reaffirming the mainstream narrative that Americans have been indoctrinated into believing. And thus, aside from the usual ephemeral and meaningless grumblings, his words—as with many of his pro-Islamic, anti-Christian comments and policies—passed along without consequence.
As Islam retreated into obscurity, the post-Christian West slowly came into being. Islam didn’t change, but the West did: Muslims still venerate their heritage and religion—which impels them to jihad against the Western “infidel”—whereas the West learned to despise its heritage and religion, causing it to be an unwitting ally of the jihad.
Hence the current situation: the jihad is back in full vigor, while the West—not just its leaders, but much of the populace—facilitates it in varying degrees. Nor is this situation easily remedied. For to accept that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant is to reject a number of cornerstones of postmodern Western thinking that far transcend the question of Islam. In this context, nothing short of an intellectual/cultural revolution—where rational thinking becomes mainstream—will allow the West to confront Islam head on.
But there is some good news. With every Islamic attack, the eyes of more and more Western people are opened to the true nature of Muhammad’s religion. That this is happening despite generations of pro-Islamic indoctrination in the West is a testimony to the growing brazenness of the jihad.
Yet it still remains unclear whether objective thinking will eventually overthrow the current narrative of relativism, anti-Westernism, and asinine emotionalism.
Simply put, celebrating multiculturalism and defeating the jihad is impossible.
However, if such a revolution ever does take place, the Islamic jihad will be easily swept back into the dustbin of history. For the fact remains: Islam is terrorizing the world, not because it can, but because the West allows it to.
[T]he most important obstacle is the West’s decades-long willful blindness to name and shame Saudi Arabia as the biggest terror financier, as well as the Saudis’ role in the development and spread of opaque Sharia finance institutions and Islamic charities.
The spread of Salafist radical groups, such as the global Hizbut–Tahrir,Tablighi Jamaat, and ISIS proves the effectiveness of the decades-long, $2 trillion’s worth of Saudi funding to indoctrinate Muslims everywhere, creating a large base of followers ready for further radicalization of what the West has erroneously labeled “self-radicalization.”
***********************
The first-ever global meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) network of some 200 jurisdictions over the weekend in Paris “to discuss actions…to combat the financing of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) …and to combat the financing of terrorism ” will probably make the participants feel good, but will do little to cut-off state sponsorship of the fast growing radical Islamist movement.
The development of new technologies and encryption of online communications, financial transactions and other non-traditional methods to transfer money present serious obstacles to monitoring funding of large number of terrorists and their supporters. But the most important obstacle is the West’s decades-long willful blindness to name and shame Saudi Arabia as the biggest terror financier, as well as the Saudis’ role in the development and spread of opaque Sharia finance institutions and Islamic charities.
Thus, Germany’s Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel‘s recent condemnation of Saudi Arabia’s ongoing funding of the spread of radical Islam in the West was surprising. “Wahhabi mosques all over the world are financed by Saudi Arabia. Many Islamists who are a threat to public safety come from these communities,” he told Bild am Sonntag, the largest-selling German Sunday paper. Even more unexpected was his statement: “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over.”
The Saudi role in fostering Islamic terrorism is no secret. Before it came under some criticism after the al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Saudi Kingdom used to openly brag about its large donations to build, maintain and supply mosques, Islamic centers and madrassas, stocking them with Wahhabi Imams and ulemas (religious teachers) and covering expenses such as salaries, pensions, and “terrorcare” that included hospitals and other public services.
Directed by Muslim Brotherhood advisors who championed the oxymoron ‘Political Islam’ to deceive the infidels, the Kingdom funded Western tax exempt Islamic organizations engaged in dawah (proselytization for Islam). Among them were networks of charitable organizations that provide financial aid to prisoners (including non-Muslims to lure them to Islam) in Western jails, lavishly funded academic chairs in Middle East Studies in universities around the world, student-exchange programs and spending many millions of dollars to increase Saudi political influence in the West — even contributing $100 million to coordinate and assist the United Nations international counterterrorism efforts.
Saudi efforts to bring Wahhabi Islam to global dominance began in earnest in 1962, with the establishment of the first international Saudi charity, the Muslim World League (MWL). Influenced by exiled Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members, then-Crown Prince Faisal bin Abdul Aziz used growing oil revenues to fund MWL, which in turn established many other Islamic charities and nonprofits that helped directly and indirectly create the global jihadist movement. Successive Saudi kings have created additional “charitable” organizations to fund the worldwide spread of Wahhabism and have on occasion organized several national campaigns encouraging their subjects to support Sunni terror organizations outside the country, including the PLO, Hamas and al Qaeda. Thus it would be wrong to distinguish between contributions to radical Sunni organizations by the Saudi theocratic monarchy, its government and its wealthy subjects.
But Saudi support for terrorism extends much beyond direct deposits to openly radical elements. Direct financing of terrorist activities is but one of several means to further their agenda.
Indeed, little has changed since then-Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey’s testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in 2008 that Saudi Arabia is “serious about fighting Al Qaeda in the kingdom…[but]the seriousness of purpose with respect to themoney going out of the kingdomis not as high” (emphasis added).
The spread of Salafist radical groups, such as the global Hizbut–Tahrir, Tablighi Jamaat, and ISIS proves the effectiveness of the decades-long, $2 trillion’s worth of Saudi funding to indoctrinate Muslims everywhere, creating a large base of followers ready for further radicalization of what the West has erroneously labeled “self-radicalization.”
Saudi Arabia’s role in initiating and fomenting worldwide Muslim riots to curtail Western free speech has been mostly ignored. However, Muslims riots following the October 2005 publication of the Muhammad cartoons in Denmark’s largest daily, Jyllands-Posten, began only after Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark; after Sheikh Osama Khayyat, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, praised on national Saudi television the Saudi government for its action; and after Sheikh Ali Al-Hudaify, imam of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, called “upon governments, organizations and scholars in the Islamic world to extend support for campaigns protesting the sacrilegious attacks on the Prophet.” The Saudi-controlled Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) initiated and coordinated Muslim rioting worldwide after the Danish Muhammad cartoon publications.
Moreover, to wield more control over Muslim communities worldwide, better orchestrate “spontaneous demonstrations,” and better allocate funds for them, the Saudi-backed OIC established the clerical International Commission for Zakat (ICZ) on 30 April 2007. Previously, there were more than 20,000 organizations that collected zakat. Now, however, the Islamic clerics’ centralized “expert committee” based in Malaysia also supervises and distributes zakat funds globally. Yet, President Obama and his former Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, describe Malaysia as a “moderate Muslim country” and Saudi Arabia as an ally.
The public outrage and rejection of Saudi King Salman’s offer to fund 200 new mosques for more than 800,000 new Muslim refugees in Germany, and the Vice Chancellor’s statement: “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over” point in the right direction. But don’t hold your breath. Germany, the United States and the rest of the West have been turning a blind eye to Saudi funding of thousands of mosques, madrassas and Islamic centers that have propagated radical Islamic ideology for decades and are unlikely to face reality anytime soon.
Outraged parents from Virginia met with school district officials to discuss their children’s assignments that included writing out the Muslim creed of faith and inviting girls to don a hijab, or Islamic headscarf.
As part of a world geography class in Riverheads High School in Augusta County, Virginia, students were asked to copy the Arabic “calligraphy” that stated that “There is no god but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”
The phase is known as the shahada, the Islamic profession of faith. Conversion to Islam is accomplished by saying this statement three times in front of witnesses. At the time, the children were unaware of what they were writing, according to district officials.
One of the parents also asked why the students were given copies of the Quran, but not the Bible, to which the teacher explained that all of the students had already seen or read the Bible.
As for the hijab, district officials said, “Modest dress adopted by many in the Islamic faith and were invited to try on a scarf as a part of an interactive lesson about the Islamic concept of modest dress.”
Officials said the school’s curriculum also covers others other world religions.
Controversy over the way public schools are presenting Islam has been making headlines in many school districts around the U.S. and worldwide:
In Tennessee, a bill was introduced to prevent schools from teaching classes on “religious doctrine” before the 10th grade. The bill is in reaction to objections by parents to a three-week curriculum under the topic of world religion for middle-school students that covers the “Five Pillars of Islam” that obligated children to write assignments about Islamic principles of faith, such as “Allah is the only God.” Parents particularly objected because no other religion was taught at the same time and the amount of time spent on Islam was considerably more than that spent on any other religion.
In Maryland, parents objected to the way Islam was taught in the school’s “World History” class, presenting Islam in an historically untrue way and listing all the “benefits” of Islam.
After being threatened with a lawsuit, an Ohio school district agreed to remove a video about Islam from a seventh grade world-history curriculum that was challenged as falling under the category of proselytizing and favoring one religion over another (a violation of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause). The video, titled 30 Days: Muslim and America, features a young Christian man who agrees to totally immerse himself in Islam for a month by living with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Michigan. It was shown to students as part of a course that requires students to “describe achievements by the Islamic civilization and how these achievements were introduced into Western Europe in the time period between 750 BC – 1600AD.”
In Massachusetts, the Wellesley Middle School, another public school was caught in a controversy when a video (see below) of a student trip to the Roxbury megamosque was released. On the trip, students were taught propaganda – among other things, that Muslim women got the vote before women in the West – by the mosque staff. The boys can be seen prostrating themselves to Allah alongside Muslim men. The video was covered extensively on Boston TV and radio.
In Massachusetts, the Newton public school system became enmeshed in a similar controversy about deceptive and anti-Semitic lessons concerning Muslim women being taught to their students. Even though the curriculum was removed, school administrators refused to tell the children the information was inaccurate (as was the case above with the Wellesley Middle School).
In the UK, regulators placed five Muslim-dominated public schools in the city of Birmingham under “special measures” after inspectors found pupils were systematically exposed to radical Islamic propaganda. The move followed emergency inspections of 21 primary and secondary public schools after a document surfaced that outlined a plot—dubbed Operation Trojan Horse—by Muslim fundamentalists to Islamize public schools in England and Wales.
In Germany, at least 25 primary and secondary schools across Hamburg are believed to have been infiltrated by Salafists and other fundamentalist who engaged in an organized strategy of intimidation and influence.
WarSclerotic 
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