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Signs of an Incipient Islamic Reformation?

April 10, 2016

Signs of an Incipient Islamic Reformation? Dan Miller’s Blog, Dan Miller, April 9, 2016

(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

Is a meaningful reformation of Islam possible? Probably not soon, but there have been indications that it may eventually come.

The first video in this article features an attractive Saudi television hostess opining that Islam has everything to do with terrorism and that adherents to the “religion of peace” should be ashamed.

Please note the absence of traditional Muslim female garb — on a Saudi television program.

Saudi journalist and TV host Nadine Al-Budair recently criticized the “hypocrites” who say that the terrorists “do not represent Islam or the Muslims.” After the abominable Brussels bombings, “it’s time for us to feel shame and to stop acting as if the terrorists are a rarity,” she said, in an address that aired on the Saudi Rotana Khalijiyah TV on April 3. “Why do we shed our own conscience?” she asked. “Don’t these perpetrators emerge from our environment?” [Emphasis added.]

Saudi Rotana Khalijiyah TV “is primarily owned by the Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.”

In 2014, Reporters Without Borders describes the government as “relentless in its censorship of the Saudi media and the Internet”,^[1] and ranked Saudi Arabia 164th out of 180 countries for freedom of the press.^[2]

Might recognition of the Islam-terrorism nexus be a step toward the moderation of Islam?Apparently, the censors let Ms. Al-Budair message get through. Why?

Writing in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai, Ms. Al-Budair

asks how Muslims would react if western youths acting in the name of Christ blew themselves up in their midst. She also slams Muslim attempts to absolve themselves of guilt by saying that terrorists do not represent Islam, calling such disclaimers “pathetic.” [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Taking the largest acts of terror from the last couple of decades, Al-Budair . . . wonders what would have happened if they had been perpetrated in the Arab world. Citing terrorist groups like the Islamic states desire to impose 7^th century Sharia law, Al-Budair writes,

Imagine a Western youth coming here and carrying out a suicide mission in one of our public squares in the name of the Cross. Imagine that two skyscrapers had collapsed in some Arab capital, and that an extremist Christian group, donning millennium-old garb, had emerged to take responsibility for the event, while stressing its determination to revive Christian teachings or some Christian rulings, according to its understanding, to live like in the time [of Jesus] and his disciples, and to implement certain edicts of Christian scholars.

She asks readers to imagine a world in which Christians call Muslims “infidels” and pray that God will eliminate them all. She continues by conjuring an Arab world that grants foreigners visas, citizenship, jobs, free education, and healthcare, and then asks what would happen if one of those foreigners killed Arabs indiscriminately.

Self-criticism in Arab world

Ms. Al-Budair is not the only Muslim in an Islamic nation calling for recognization of the Islam-terrorism nexus and arguing that change is necessary.

Here are excerpts from Arab media criticising popular views of Islam and terror.

In an article titled “We Have Failed Indeed,” the editor of the London-based Saudi daily Al-Hayat, Ghassan Charbel, attacked the Arabs and Muslims for sowing destruction and fear in the very same European countries that had agreed to take them in after they had fled their failed countries. Charbel argued that the Arabs and Muslims had not managed to build states and citizens that could integrate into the modern world, and that they must recognize their failure and start from scratch. He wrote: “Are we [the Arabs and Muslims] simply part of this world, or are we perhaps an explosive charge implanted in [this world’s] entrails? Are we a normal neighborhood in the global village, or are we maybe a neighborhood of suicide bombers in [that village]? Are these massacres that move [from place to place] aimed at annexing the Arab and Muslim communities in the West to the lexicon of slaughter and suicide? Are we part of the world’s present and future, or are we a dark tempest that seeks to send [the world] back to the caves that it abandoned when it chose the path of progress and human dignity? [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

“This is the truth that can no longer be concealed or condoned. We have failed at building a normal state – a state that lives within its borders. a state of institutions that strives its utmost to obtain progress and development and provide its citizens with work opportunities and involvement, a state that cooperates with its neighbors and the world without being panic-stricken or fettered by spite. We have also failed to build a normal citizen, [one] who belongs to the current stage of development in a rapidly developing world. [Emphasis added.]

Another:

Tareq Masarwa, a writer for the official Jordanian daily Al-Rai, criticized how some Arabs are attempting to justify terrorist attacks by claiming that European countries are racist and marginalize Muslims. He wrote: “… [According to] some analyses [of the Brussels attacks,] the terrorists grew up in the outskirts of European cities and were angry at being marginalized! We hear these same excuses here. However, other analyses responded [to these claims] with a wise comparison: They [the Muslim terrorists in Europe] chose terrorism. Otherwise, why aren’t there millions of [South] American terrorists in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, since they too are poor and grew up in the outskirts of big cities?! According to another analysis, Europe does not give immigrants from North Africa, and specifically from Africa itself, the same opportunities that it gives European immigrants. This constitutes a justification of terrorism, since Europe gives the immigrant the opportunity for a free education, and thousands of Jordanians have attended French and German universities for free… and had an easy time becoming citizens of those countries… How are France, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium expected to promote immigrants who are illiterate? And under what social conditions can a 10-person Arab or African family [hope to] exist?! [Emphasis added.]

“It is shameful that we demand that the world treat us justly as we drive away our sons by killing them, imprisoning them, or failing to provide them with proper education, healthcare, and employment, and with a dignified life. The sight of people flocking to Europe’s borders, including Syrians, Iraqis, Kurds, Afghans, and Iranians, is heartbreaking, especially when they are carrying their children or pushing them in front of them – but all we do is curse the Europeans as racists who hate Muslims and foreigners, and consider it our right to murder them in their airports, trains, and theaters. [Emphasis added.]

“Did the Europeans take over our countries? Yes. But they left over 50 years ago, and we now call on them to bring down our tyrants, and accuse them of dragging their feet [on this issue].

“Terrorism is a crime, and justifying it is an even worse crime. What is happening in the cities of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and Tunisia is terrorism, and we are responsible for its formation, its arming, and its funding. It is pointless to justify the murder of Europeans and Americans out of a desire to justify our own crimes.”[3] [Emphasis added.]

Another:

Kuwaiti writer and author Khalil ‘Ali Haidar wrote in the Bahraini daily Al-Ayyam that the Muslims are not doing enough against terrorism and are shirking their responsibility for it. He wrote: “What are we doing here in our countries, or in Western countries in Europe and America, while these terrible blows of terrorism land on us and them, one after the other? … In fact, we do not know how to act against these terrorists. Is it sufficient that following each of these terrorist actions, which take place in merciless rapid succession and are all perpetrated by young Muslims… that we say ‘they aren’t Muslims’ and ‘they do not represent true Islam’ and are misguided khawarij[4] and apostates? And will the world be satisfied with [such statements]?

“Is it normal that while terrorism succeeds in recruiting hundreds and even thousands of Muslims, we are satisfied to persuade ourselves that their numbers ‘are still negligible’ compared to the global Muslim population? Must the number of terrorists swell to tens or hundreds of thousands before we realize that a thunderous pounding torrent [is headed] towards us, and that this means that we must stop, convene, and give intellectuals the freedom to examine the reasons [for this] and the freedom to publish the results of their studies? [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

“The religious culture of the Islamic world during this era is afflicted with innumerable ills. We turn the world upside down over various matters, such as an article that offends us, or issues regarding the niqab, Halal meat, Christians using the word Allah – which Muslims in Malaysia, for instance, claim as their exclusive right. [Furthermore,] many leaders of Pakistani and other immigrant [groups] expend all their efforts in the sectarian campaign against the Ahmadi movement, to the point where they have no time to examine this terrorist urge among their young people, including among the educated, engineers and [other] experts. [Emphasis added.]

“Unfortunately, the Muslims do not yet unanimously condemn ISIS. Some Muslims praise them [ISIS members], think the media wrongs them, and join them at the first opportunity, and even carry out the first suicide mission they are offered anywhere in the world!

“One reason for the immaturity of Muslim young people in Britain, France, and the U.S. is that the leadership of the religious institutions, and all religious activity, still remain in the hands of Arab, Pakistani and other activists and leaders who have fled to the West [and continue to] support political Islam parties. These leaders may not [themselves] carry out terrorist attacks, but they also do not truly take a stand against the terrorist religious culture. Moreover, most of their writings, ideas, and strategic positions regarding an Islamic system and the caliphate state share [this religious culture]. [Emphasis added.]

“We say that ‘terrorism has no religion and no homeland.’ But we must confront the fact that most terrorist attacks in the Arab and Muslim world itself are not carried out by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Ahmadis, or Baha’is – but by Muslims and the sons and daughters of Muslims. Some are not satisfied with carrying out their crimes in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia, but carry them out in Western countries. And even if they believe that terrorism in Europe and the U.S. is justified because of [these countries’] ‘colonialist past’ and ‘hostile positions’ against the Arabs and Muslims – of what crimes are the Egyptians, Iraqis, Afghans, and Nigerians guilty? Do those countries also have shameful colonialist pasts?”[5] [Emphasis added.]

Islam in Obama’s America

There are also Muslim and former Muslim critics of Islam and its unfortunate teachings in Obama’s America, but their voices tend to be drowned out by Obama’s CAIR-Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood-linked friends. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, is perhaps the best known.

I have written extensively about her and her quest for an Islamic reformation, most recently here. Here is one of the Honor Diaries videos of which she is the executive producer. It deals with the Islamic concept of Honor and how it constrains women.

Here, in contrast, is an “Islam is good the way it is” reaction.

As I noted here,

Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Azeezah Kanji — the featured speaker in the above video — has been very active in disparaging Honor Diaries. Like CAIR, she has ties to the Obama White House and was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2011. What changes in Islam does Ms. Kanji champion? None, apparently, of those intrinsic to it.

And here is a video about the White House reaction to the “folks” in the video embedded immediately above.

Last month, Imam Obama visited a Muslim Brotherhood related mosque.

When Barack Obama visited the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday, he said: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Muslim Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.”

While Obama has been President, Muslims have murdered non-Muslims, avowedly in the cause of Islam, at Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, and San Bernardino, and attempted to do so in many, many other places. Imagine if armed Baptists screaming “Jesus is Lord” had committed murder, and explained that they were doing so in order to advance Christianity, in four American cities, and had attempted to do so in many others. Imagine that those killers were supporters of a global Christian movement that had repeatedly called for attacks on U.S. civilians and declared its determination to destroy the United States.

Imagine how incongruous it would be in that case for the President of the United States to visit a church and say: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Christian Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.” And imagine how unlikely it would be that Barack Obama would ever have done that. [Emphasis added.]

But his visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore . . . he signaled yet again to the world (and worldwide jihadis) that in the U.S., Muslims are victims, victims of unwarranted concern over jihad terror, and thus that concern is likely to lessen even more, as Obama dismantles still more of our counter-terror apparatus. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

“If we’re serious about freedom of religion — and I’m talking to my fellow Christians who are the majority in this country — we have to understand that an attack on one faith is an attack on all faiths.”

Once again Obama felt free to scold and admonish Christians, but said nothing about Muslims in the U.S. needing to clean house and work for real reform that would mitigate jihad terror. And his premise was false: there is no attempt to restrict Muslims’ freedom of religion. Donald Trump hasn’t called for that; nor has Ben Carson or any serious analyst. But the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) (a representative of which accompanied Obama to the mosque Wednesday) and other Islamic advocacy groups have consistently charged that counter-terror efforts and attempts to restrict the political, supremacist and authoritarian aspects of Sharia that are at variance with Constitutional principles were tantamount to restricting Muslims’ religious freedom. [Emphasis added.]

Now the President of the United States has endorsed their false narrative, which will only further stigmatize initiatives to understand the jihadis’ ideology and counter it effectively. He further criticized those who dare to suggest that Islam might have something to do with Islamic terrorism by criticizing those who say that the U.S. is at war with Islam: “That kind of mind-set helps our enemies,” he intoned. “It helps our enemies recruit. It makes us all less safe.” [Emphasis added.]

In Heretic, Hirsi Ali stated that there is a unique role for the West in the reformation of Islam.

Whenever I make the case for reform in the Muslim world, someone invariably says: “That is not our project— it is for Muslims only. We should stay out of it.” But I am not talking about the kind of military intervention that has got the West into so much trouble over the years. For years, we have spent trillions on waging wars against “terror” and “extremism” that would have been much better spent protecting Muslim dissidents and giving them the necessary platforms and resources to counter that vast network of Islamic centers, madrassas, and mosques which has been largely responsible for spreading the most noxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism. For years, we have treated the people financing that vast network— the Saudis, the Qataris, and the now repentant Emiratis— as our allies. In the midst of all our efforts at policing, surveillance, and even military action, we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Why the Tide Is Turning

Three factors are combining today to enable real religious reform:

• The impact of new information technology in creating an unprecedented communication network across the Muslim world.

• The fundamental inability of Islamists to deliver when they come to power and the impact of Western norms on Muslim immigrants are creating a new and growing constituency for a Muslim Reformation.

• The emergence of a political constituency for religious reform emerging in key Middle Eastern states.

Together, I believe these three things will ultimately turn the tide against the Islamists, whose goal is, after all, a return to the time of the Prophet— a venture as foredoomed to failure as all attempts to reverse the direction of time’s arrow.

. . . .

In November 2014, an Egyptian doctor coined an Arabic hashtag that translates as “why we reject implementing sharia”; it was used five thousand times in the space of twenty-four hours, mostly by Saudis and Egyptians. In language that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, a young Moroccan named Brother Rachid last year called out President Obama on YouTube for claiming that Islamic State was “not Islamic.”[Emphasis added.]

Here is the referenced video:

Finally, here’s a video of a Hirsi Ali interview shortly after the San Bernardino attack.

Among other key teaching points she elaborated upon in the video is the Islamist concept “don’t ask questions. Don’t ask why Mohamed wants us to do or to refrain from doing certain things. To question is evil. Just obey.” Only when she went to the Netherlands did she encounter the concept of critical thinking. What can we, in the United States, do to promote critical thinking among Muslims? We are doing little, if anything, now. Indeed, Obama’s America discourages it by affiliating with CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood related groups.

Meanwhile, the Islamic University of Minnesota is among the American “academic” institutions promoting age-old, “radical” Islam.

It is run by a man who used a recent sermon to invoke a Hadith commonly espoused by Muslim terrorists to kill Jews for causing “corruption in the land.” Waleed Idris al-Meneesey also has written that Muslims should place sharia law above “man-made” law.

. . . .

“The Prophet related that in the Last Days his Umma [people] would fight the Jews, the Muslims East of the Jordan River, and they [the Jews] west of [the Jordan River] … Even trees and stones will say: O Muslim, this is a Jew behind me, kill him, except for Gharqad trees, the trees of the Jews. Because of this they plant many of them…” [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Al-Meneesy, the IUM’s president and chancellor, also serves as an imam at a Bloomington, Minn. mosque where at least five young men left the United States to fight with terrorist groups al-Shabaab and ISIS.

. . . .

IUM also professes to serve as the official representative of Sunni Islam’s most important institution – Al-Azhar University, which has grown increasingly radical – in the U.S. and Canada. Al-Azhar officials have refused to condemn the Islamic State (ISIS) as apostates and heretics. According to Egypt’s Youm 7, IUM’s curriculum, offered to American students, endorses many practices used by ISIS. These include: “[K]illing a Muslim who does not pray, one who leaves Islam, prisoners and infidels within Islam [those who do not have a clearly specified creed or sect]. [It also allows] gouging their eyes and chopping off their hands and feet, as well as banning the construction of churches and discriminating between Muslims and Ahl al-Kitab [Christians and Jews], and insulting them at times.” [Emphasis added.]

Al-Azhar University was where Obama delivered a major address on the beauties of Islam in 2009. The text of His remarks is at the link.

Conclusions

America should be in a good position to promote an Islamic reformation. Europe has descended deep into the realm of multiculturalism and until she comes to her senses, it won’t happen there. It isn’t happening in Obama’s America due to the reluctance to associate Islam with terrorism and numerous human rights violations. It most likely won’t as long as Imam Obama remains in office. It’s futile to expect or even to hope that it will.

Due to Obama and His people, America is not safe from Islamic terror.

Cox Washington News Bureau reported that there were no fewer than 73 airport workers with possible terror ties, working at airports including Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle, Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, Logan Airport in Boston, Orlando International Airport in Florida, Memphis International Airport in Tennessee, and others.

Fear not!

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson this week set the record straight: “It’s not that they’re suspected terrorists. It’s that they hadn’t been vetted through all available databases. We have since corrected that problem and the cases have been resolved.”

There are just a few little problems:

Presumably Johnson and his team have consulted their extensive database of card-carrying Islamic State members, and have diligently compared it to their list of airport employees, and have removed those who appeared on both lists. The only problem with this scenario, of course, is that there is no such database, or anything comparable to it. There is simply no database that Johnson could consult that would enable the Department of Homeland Security to remove everyone with terror ties from airport jobs. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

[T]he Obama administration is bound as a matter of policy to ignore and deny the terrorists’ motivating ideology – so how can it vet for it? This goes back to October 19, 2011, [when] Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates, wrote a letter to John Brennan, who was then the Assistant to the President on National Security for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism. The letter was signed not just by Khera, but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islamic groups in the United States: 57 Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations, many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the CAIR, ISNA, MAS, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Islamic Relief USA; and MPAC. [Emphasis added.]

The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam,” and emphasized that this was an issue of the utmost importance: “The seriousness of this issue cannot be overstated, and we request that the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem, with a fair and transparent mechanism for input from the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, including civil rights lawyers, religious leaders, and law enforcement experts.”

Mr. Brennan saluted and said “Yes, Maam!”

Brennan assured Khera that all her demands would be met: “Your letter requests that ‘the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem,’ and we agree that this is necessary.” He then detailed other specific actions being undertaken, including “collecting all training materials that contain cultural or religious content, including information related to Islam or Muslims.” In reality this material wouldn’t just be “collected”; it would be purged of anything that Farhana Khera and others like her found offensive—that is, any honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists use Islamic teachings to justify violence. Brennan assured Khera that he saw the problem just as she did, and that remedies were being implemented quickly. . . . [Emphasis added.]

Some Muslims in Arab countries have been candid about the Islam-terror nexus. So have some reformist Muslims and former Muslims in America. Donald Trump also has a realistic perception of the Islam-terror nexus and might provide support for those seeking its reformation. I hope he has a chance to do it.

Categories: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Donald Trump, Islam - submission, Islam and the Islamic State, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic reformation, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamism, Islamists in America, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam, Obama's America
Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Donald Trump, Islam - submission, Islam and the Islamic State, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic reformation, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamism, Islamists in America, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam, Obama's America

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How Islamists Are Slowly Desensitizing Europe And America

April 9, 2016

How Islamists Are Slowly Desensitizing Europe And America, The Federalist, M.G. Oprea, April 8, 2016

(Compare and contrast the views of this Saudi TV hostess on Islam and terror with what seems to be the emerging European view. — DM)

[T]he overarching message is that Europe has slowly let this happen year by year, decade by decade, like a frog in a pot slowly brought to a boil. Post-colonial guilt and shame have stopped Europeans from openly loving and defending their own culture. The state of things in Europe today is the natural conclusion of that neglect. We in America are on the same road.

***********************

Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine whose offices Islamists attacked in 2015, published an editorial recently titled “How Did We Get Here?” that has raised some eyebrows. In it, they ask how Europe has become where European-born Muslims have attacked the hearts of Paris and Brussels. Their answer has proved distasteful to many on the Left.

The editorial has been harshly criticized and the magazine accused of racism and xenophobia. The Washington Post says Charlie Hebdo blames extremism on individual Muslims—the veiled woman on the street, the man selling kebabs. There’s some truth to this accusation, and to the extent that there is, Charlie Hebdo is wrong. But this, and other critiques, miss the larger point of the article, which is to demonstrate the gradual and quotidian way in which criticizing Islam has been silenced.

It’s worth quoting Charlie Hebdo at length:

In reality, the attacks are merely the visible part of a very large iceberg indeed. They are the last phase of a process of cowing and silencing long in motion and on the widest possible scale. Our noses are endlessly rubbed in the rubble of Brussels airport and in the flickering candles amongst the bouquets of flowers on the pavements. All the while, no one notices what’s going on in Saint-German-en-Laye. Last week, Sciences-Po* welcomed Tariq Ramadan. He’s a teacher, so it’s not inappropriate. He came to speak of his specialist subject, Islam, which is also his religion…

No matter, Tariq Ramadan has done nothing wrong. He will never do anything wrong. He lectures about Islam, he writes about Islam, he broadcasts about Islam. He puts himself forward as a man of dialogue, someone open to a debate. A debate about secularism which, according to him, needs to adapt itself to the new place taken by religion in Western democracy. A secularism and a democracy which must also accept those traditions imported by minority communities. Nothing bad in that. Tariq Ramadan is never going to grab a Kalashnikov with which to shoot journalists at an editorial meeting. Nor will he ever cook up a bomb to be used in an airport concourse. Others will be doing all that kind of stuff. It will not be his role. His task, under cover of debate, is to dissuade people from criticising his religion in any way. The political science students who listened to him last week will, once they have become journalists or local officials, not even dare to write nor say anything negative about Islam. The little dent in their secularism made that day will bear fruit in a fear of criticising lest they appear Islamophobic. That is Tariq Ramadan’s task.

The Charlie Hebdo editorial correctly points out that in Europe the dominant liberal culture has pounded into us that we must adapt to Muslims who come to our country, and never ask them to adapt to any of our ways. Doing so would be colonialist and wrong. It’s a double standard, of course. As the welcoming countries, Europeans must suppress their own culture and ideals for those of the Islamic immigrant population. But when they go abroad to non-Western countries, either to live or to visit, it’s considered offensive not to adapt to their ways of life.

Learning a Culture Should Work Both WaysNo one who found the Charlie Hebdo op-ed so offensive would ever suggest Morocco ought to welcome McDonalds or Wal-Mart with open arms. They would say the country is being ruined with Western culture. They want non-Western countries to remain exactly as they are—preserved and frozen in time-while the West must endlessly adapt to anyone who makes it their home.

The article highlights the important fact that Europe has failed to ask its Muslim immigrant population to assimilate. This fact was demonstrated recently when police discovered that the only surviving terrorist from the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, was able to travel from Paris to Brussels and conceal himself there until a few days before the Brussels attacks. He was aided by a large community of French and Muslim Belgians whose loyalties clearly lie with their own community, not with Belgium, or Europe at large. What’s more, a 2013 study shows the shocking degree to which European Muslims hate the West.

Asking immigrants to assimilate doesn’t mean white-washing their culture and religion, asking them not to wear the hijab, or demanding that they eat pork. But it does mean asking them to accept, to some degree, the culture of the country to which they have willingly moved. These are things like women’s rights, tolerance, free speech, or criticism of religion. It also means not having to apologize for having a culture of one’s own. This is the point that Michel Houellebecq made in his recent novel, “Submission.”

Slow-Boiling Our BrainsEuropeans have been lulled into accepting that it’s wrong to criticize Islam or scrutinize it in any way. The Charlie Hebdo editorial points out that it’s a slow process, an insidious wearing away of what is and isn’t acceptable to say or think. The process must be slow, because few people would accept a proposal dictating what topics they’re not allowed to discuss. So, you gradually shame them into it.

This establishes a pre-conditioned mindset so the line of acceptability can be moved further and further until the problem of global jihad can no longer be effectively explored because we aren’t even allowed to ask fundamental questions. This is Charlie Hebdo’s point about Tariq Ramadan, whose grandfather founded the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and whose father was an active member of the group. Through the guise of intellectualism and purported adherence to moderate Islam, he instructs his audience ever so gently that the problem has nothing to do with Islam, and that suggesting so is ugly and base.

We acquiesce, because, as Charlie Hebdo points out, we fear being seen as Islamaphobic or racist. We are made to feel guilty if the thought flashes through our head that we wish that the new sandwich shop run by a Muslim sold bacon, or that a woman wearing a hijab makes us a little uncomfortable. That fear that we feel when we entertain those thoughts, the op-ed argues, saps our willingness to scrutinize, analyze, debate, or reject anything about Islam. And this is dangerous.

Fierce Reactions Aim to Condition Us Into Fear

Although Europe is further along in this process, there is a clear relevance to the United States. We are already being instructed on college campuses and by our own president that Muslims are a sort of protected class regarding criticism. President Obama even went so far as to censor French President François Hollande when he used the forbidden phrase “Islamist terrorism.”

The latest incident of shaming those who do push back is happening in Kansas, where the Islamic Society of Wichita invited Sheik Monzer Talib to speak at a fundraising event on Good Friday. Talib is a known fundraiser for Hamas, the militant Islamist Palestinian group that the United States classifies as a terrorist organization. He even has sung a song called “I am from Hamas.” U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo dared to put out a press release objecting to the speech out of concern that it would harm the Muslim community, particularly in the wake of the Brussels terrorist attack.

In response, the mosque claimed Pompeo stoked prejudice and Islamaphobia and that they had to cancel the event because of protest announcements and because some individuals on Facebook made some offhand comments about guns. Cue a local media frenzy, letters to the editor accusing Pompeo of government overreach, and the predictable arrival of two CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) representatives to skewer Pompeo.

This is just one example of how criticizing or questioning the actions of a Muslim community—even one that is supporting a Hamas fundraiser—has become anathema. The line of acceptability has been moved so now it’s Islamaphobic to object to someone with links to Islamist groups being invited to a U.S. mosque while we’re in the midst of a global battle against Islamist terrorism. People don’t even want to discuss it. The conversation is over. Just as Charlie Hebdo asks, so should we ask ourselves, “How did we get here?”

Although the particulars of the Charlie Hebdo editorial may go too far, and I do not endorse everything the article says, the overarching message is that Europe has slowly let this happen year by year, decade by decade, like a frog in a pot slowly brought to a boil. Post-colonial guilt and shame have stopped Europeans from openly loving and defending their own culture. The state of things in Europe today is the natural conclusion of that neglect. We in America are on the same road.

Categories: Charlie Hedbo, Clash of civilizations, Europe, Freedom of speech, Hamas, Hate speech, Islam - submission, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic integration, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Islamists in America, Islamophobia, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama's America
Tags: Charlie Hedbow, Clash of civilizations, Europe, freedom of speech, Hamas, Hate speech, Islam - submission, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic integration, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Islamists in America, Islamophobia, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama's America

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Islamic University of Minnesota a Hotbed of Extremism

April 8, 2016

Islamic University of Minnesota a Hotbed of Extremism, Investigative Project on Terrorism, John Rossomando, April 8, 2016

(But, but only an Islamophobe would object to this. –DM)

1477 (1)

The Minneapolis-based Islamic University of Minnesota (IUM) has an extremism problem.

It is run by a man who used a recent sermon to invoke a Hadith commonly espoused by Muslim terrorists to kill Jews for causing “corruption in the land.” Waleed Idris al-Meneesey also has written that Muslims should place sharia law above “man-made” law.

During a November sermon, al-Meneesy referred to the Hadith, a saying from Islam’s prophet Muhammad, describing how Jews had been punished by God repeatedly for “corruption.”

“When the Children of Israel returned to cause corruption in the time of our Prophet Muhammad,” al-Meneesy said in a translation by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “and they disbelieved him, God destroyed him at his hand. In any case, God Almighty has promised them destruction whenever they cause corruption.”

History will repeat itself, he said.

“The Prophet related that in the Last Days his Umma [people] would fight the Jews, the Muslims East of the Jordan River, and they [the Jews] west of [the Jordan River] … Even trees and stones will say: O Muslim, this is a Jew behind me, kill him, except for Gharqad trees, the trees of the Jews. Because of this they plant many of them…”

Jerusalem “remained in the hands of the Muslims until it fell into the hands of the Jews in 1387 AH [1967 AD], and has been a prisoner in their hands for 34 years [sic], but the victory of God is coming inevitably.”

Al-Meneesy, the IUM’s president and chancellor, also serves as an imam at a Bloomington, Minn. mosque where at least five young men left the United States to fight with terrorist groups al-Shabaab and ISIS.

IUM opened in 2007, claiming 160 students registered for classes, which cost $150 each. Current enrollment figures could not be found. IUM’s website describes programs ranging from two year associates degrees to full doctorates. A bachelor’s program helps students “acquire all essential Islamic knowledge.” The Ph.D. program costs $3,000, including thesis review, and is structured “along the lines of Universities in the Middle East and Africa.”

The university’s website cites recognition by Holy Quran University in the Sudan,founded in 1990 by the regime of Sudanese war criminal and President Omar al-Bashir. Holy Quran University’s leaders signed a 2002 declaration saying it was forbidden for Muslims to buy American and Israeli goods.

IUM also professes to serve as the official representative of Sunni Islam’s most important institution – Al-Azhar University, which has grown increasingly radical – in the U.S. and Canada. Al-Azhar officials have refused to condemn the Islamic State (ISIS) as apostates and heretics. According to Egypt’s Youm 7, IUM’s curriculum, offered to American students, endorses many practices used by ISIS. These include: “[K]illing a Muslim who does not pray, one who leaves Islam, prisoners and infidels within Islam [those who do not have a clearly specified creed or sect]. [It also allows] gouging their eyes and chopping off their hands and feet, as well as banning the construction of churches and discriminating between Muslims and Ahl al-Kitab [Christians and Jews], and insulting them at times.”

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Al-Meneesy’s extremism goes further back than his anti-Semitic sermon. In 2007, he authored a paper for the Assembly of Muslim Jurists Association of America (AMJA), where he sits on the fatwa committee. Muslims should refrain from participating in non-Islamic courts that do not follow Islamic shariah law, particularly those in the West guided by “man-made” law, al-Meneesey wrote.

“The authority to legislate rests with Allah alone,” al-Meneesey wrote.

Anyone who uses law other than shariah, such as civil law, is a “corrupt tyrant,” the paper said. Judging by something other than shariah equals disbelief in Allah, injustice and sinfulness, he wrote.

Muslims should be forbidden from serving as judges in non-Muslim countries, except if they are able to rule “according to the judgments of Allah,” al-Meneesey wrote. Muslims who adhere to secular law and refuse to follow the shariah are infidels. Classical interpretations of the shariah say that apostates should be killed.

In 2008, the AMJA issued a declaration telling Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement “in countries which do not rule by Allah’s dictates.” That includes the FBI. The declaration invoked many of the same arguments as al-Meneesey’s 2007 paper.

Meanwhile, al-Meneesey’s own Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center and Al-Farooq Youth & Family Center have produced at least five young members who left to fight for ISIS or al-Shabaab in Somalia. They include:

Abdirizak Mohamed Warsame, 20, of Eagan, Minn. (He was the reputed leader of many ISIS recruits from Minnesota.);

Abdi Nur of Minneapolis;

Mohamed Abdihamid Farah of Minneapolis;

Abdullahi Yusuf of Burnsville, Minn.;

Yusra Ismail of Minneapolis;

It does not appear that al-Meneesy has addressed these cases publicly.

His radical views are not aberrations at IUM.

Instructor Sheikh Jamel Ben Ameur refused to denounce ISIS in the fall of 2014 amid stories about its brutality because news reports were “confusing” and “complicated,” the website MinnPost reported.

“We don’t need to accuse people of something we don’t know about. We don’t have to jump into judgment,” Ben Ameur told about 100 congregants at his Masjid al-Tawba in Eden Prairie, Minn.

Ben Ameur disputed the authenticity of the ISIS propaganda videos showing the beheadings of American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, suggesting he didn’t know whether ISIS was responsible or not.

Another IUM instructor, Hasan Ali Mohamud, offered condolences after Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 2004.

Writing under the name Sheikh Xasan Jaamici on the Minneapolis Somali community news website SomaliTalk, Mohamud said that Yassin had achieved martyrdom and that the “Hamas mujahideen” were fighting for the liberation of the Al-Aqsa mosque from Israeli control. His Facebook page suggests that Jaamici is his middle name.

Jews will face Muhammad’s wrath. Muslims who adhere to civil law over Islamic sharia are infidels. These are ideas supported by Waleed Idris al-Meneesey, who is responsible for a “university” teaching Muslims about their faith. Where will Islamic University of Minnesota students get a more modern and accepting education?

Categories: Academia, Al Azhar University, Hamas, Islam and Jews, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic State, Islamisation, Islamists in America, Israel, Minnesota, Palestinian terrorists, Sharia law
Tags: Academia, Al Azhar University, Antisemitism, Hamas, Islam and Jews, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic State, Islamisation, Islamists in America, Israel, Palestinian terrorists, Sharia law

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Saudi TV Host Nadine Al-Budair: The Terrorists Emerged from Our Schools and Universities

April 8, 2016

Saudi TV Host Nadine Al-Budair: The Terrorists Emerged from Our Schools and Universities, MEMRI-TV via You Tube, April 7, 2016

The blurb following the video notes,

Saudi journalist and TV host Nadine Al-Budair recently criticized the “hypocrites” who say that the terrorists “do not represent Islam or the Muslims.” After the abominable Brussels bombings, it’s time for us to feel shame and to stop acting as if the terrorists are a rarity,” she said, in an address that aired on the Saudi Rotana Khalijiyah TV on April 3. “Why do we shed our own conscience?” she asked. “Don’t these perpetrators emerge from our environment?”

Categories: Islamic indoctrination, Islamic terrorism, Saudi media
Tags: Islamic indoctrination, Islamic terrorism, Saudi media

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Massachusetts Islamism

April 4, 2016

Massachusetts Islamism, Gatestone Institute, Samuel Westrop, April 4, 2016

♦ The response of “non-violent” Islamists to counter-extremism programs displays a master class in deception. The greatest mistake made by the Obama administration is to treat groups such as CAIR and the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) as genuine representatives of the Muslim community.

♦ Very few American Muslims believe that CAIR is a legitimate voice of American Islam. A 2011 Gallup poll revealed that around 88% of American Muslims said CAIR does not represent them.

♦ It is little wonder that groups such as CAIR disparage genuine moderates. They perceive moderates as a threat to their self-styled reputations as representatives of American Islam. Many in them have learned to speak the language of liberalism and democracy in their pursuit of an ultimately illiberal and anti-democratic ideal.

♦ Counter-extremism work is best achieved by marginalizing such groups — by freeing American Muslims from their self-appointed Islamist spokesmen, and by working instead with the genuine moderates.

A number of Massachusetts Muslim groups, led by Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, are currently spearheading a campaign against the Obama administration’s program, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), which has designated Boston as one of its pilot cities.

From the government’s perspective, Boston was an obvious choice. The city has a long, unfortunate history of producing internationally-recognized terrorists, including the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston marathon; Aafia Siddiqui, whom FBI Director Robert S. Mueller describes as “an al-Qaeda operative and facilitator;” Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the founder of the Islamic Society of Boston, and named by the federal government as an Al Qaeda fundraiser, and Ahmad Abousamra, a key official within Islamic State, whose father is vice-president of the Muslim American Society’s Boston branch.

During the past decade, in fact, twelve congregants, supporters, officials and donors of the Islamic Society of Boston alone have been imprisoned, deported, killed or are on the run in connection with terrorism offenses.

Despite these alumnae, a number of extremist Islamic organizations, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have claimed that the government’s attempt to combat radicalization “targets American Muslims” and “undermines our national ideals.”

Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, who is also a director of CAIR’s Massachusetts branch, has spoken at a number of anti-CVE rallies, condemning the government’s approach as “authoritarian” because it included “violent practices like surveillance and racial profiling.”

In response, Robert Trestan, the Massachusetts director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), points out that the CVE program “is relatively new in this country. It’s not fair to judge it yet and be overly critical.” He added: “Nothing I’ve seen or participated in has gone anywhere near proposing or suggesting anything close to surveillance, crossing the line of people’s civil rights or profiling.”

What, then, is the basis for this opposition?

Critics of Nadeem Mazen look with concern at his opposition to policing that protects Americans from terrorist attacks. In May, Mazen voted against the Cambridge Police Department budget. He argued that the funding for SWAT teams and the police’s participation in CVE programs only served to “alienate the Muslim community.” The Cambridge SWAT team, however, played a crucial part in the arrest of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev just hours after he and his brother murdered three spectators and injured hundreds at the Boston marathon.

Mazen has also taken part in protests against Boston police departments. Addressing a crowd of activists from a group named Restore the Fourth, Mazen claimed that police counter-terrorism units are part of a larger conspiracy to suppress free speech: “They are working very hard…in the background….but really, there’s never any need. … Some of the research is looking at free speech activists…like me. … It is that type of government operation, it’s that that is the best and the most evident hallmark of tyranny.”

Are Mazen and CAIR, then, simply free speech campaigners?

CAIR does not exactly have a reputation for liberal activism. It was founded in 1994 by three officials of the Islamic Association of Palestine, which, the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial would later determine, was a front for the terrorist group, Hamas. During the same trial, the prosecutors designated CAIR as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis concluded that, “The government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR… with the Islamic Association for Palestine, and with Hamas.”

One of CAIR’s original Islamic Association of Palestine founders, Nihad Awad, is today CAIR’s Executive Director. Awad peddles conspiracy theories that the U.S Congress is controlled by Israel, and has stated that U.S. foreign policy was propelled by Clinton administration officials of a particular “ethnic background.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) notes that CAIR has long expressed anti-Semitic and pro-terror rhetoric. The ADL adds that, “[CAIR’s] public statements cast Jews and Israelis as corrupt agents who control both foreign and domestic U.S. policy and are responsible for the persecution of Muslims in the U.S.”

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In November 2015, CAIR, which in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial was determined to be a front for the terrorist group Hamas, organized a “lobbying day” at the Massachusetts State House.

Not all of Massachusetts’s Muslim groups have opposed involvement in the CVE program. In February, the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which is partly run by the Muslim American Society, took part in the White House’s summit on Countering Violent Extremism.

The ISB’s Director, Yusufi Vali, however, would later criticize the CVE program on the grounds that by focusing on radicalization rather than violence, the authorities were unfairly targeting Muslim-Americans simply because of their faith.

Instead, Vali has urged, the government should deputize responsibility for combatting extremism to groups such as his. Boston is a pilot city for the CVE program, he claimed, because of the “strong relationship” between law enforcement and institutions such as the ISB. Only the ISB’s version of Islam, Vali proposed, can “appeal to young people” and “win in the marketplace of ideas.”

But the ideology underpinning the Islamic Society of Boston itself is cause for some concern. In 2008, the Muslim American Society (MAS), which runs the ISB’s Cultural Center, of which Vali is also a board member, was labelled by federal prosecutors “as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.”

Religious leaders of the Muslim American Society have included Hafiz Masood, the brother of Pakistani terrorist Hafiz Saeed, who masterminded the 2008 Mumbai Massacre in which 164 people were murdered. While he was living in the Boston area, according to a Times of India report, Masood was raising money and trying to recruit people for his brother’s terrorist group. After being deported by the government for filing a fraudulent visa application, Masood has since become a spokesperson for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a branch of his brother’s terrorist group, Lashkar-i-Taiba.[1]

The ISB itself was founded by the Al Qaeda operative Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who was jailed in 2004 for participating in a Libyan plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. The ISB’s other trustees have included prominent Islamist operatives, including Yusuf Al Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood.

In October, an event hosted by the ISB featured a number of extremist preachers. One of them, Hussain Kamani has cited Quranic verse and commentary to warn Muslims, “do not resemble the Jews” and has advised parents to “beat” their children “if they do not [pray].” In a talk titled ‘Sex, Masturbation and Islam,’ Kamani explains that a Muslim man must only fulfil his sexual desires “with his spouse…[or] with a female slave that belongs to him.” Those who commit adultery or have sex outside of marriage, Kamani further declares, must be “stoned to death.”

If one looks to European experiences with counter-extremism programs, some of which have been in place for over a decade, Yusufi Vali and the ISB have good reasons to lobby against a focus on radicalization. In Britain, under Prime Minister David Cameron, the government has come to the realization that some of the Islamic groups entrusted with counter-extremism initiatives are, in fact, part of the problem.

In a speech delivered in Munich in 2011, Cameron stated:

“As evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by what some have called ‘non-violent extremists’, and they then took those radical beliefs to the next level by embracing violence. … Some organisations that seek to present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community are showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism. As others have observed, this is like turning to a right-wing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement.”

Groups similar to the ISB and CAIR, the Conservative government reasons, represent the “non-violent extremists.” These are likely the first stop on the “conveyor belt” path to radicalization: a young is Muslim exposed to anti-Semitism, excuses for terrorism and claims of victimhood and gradually becomes open to committing violent acts.

This insight was not without foundation. The previous Labour government, under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, partnered with British Muslim groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), Britain’s most prominent Muslim group — similar in ideology to CAIR and the ISB — to counteract extremist ideas in the Muslim community. In 2008, however, the Labour government severed all relations with the Muslim Council of Britain after it emerged that the group’s deputy secretary general, Daud Abdullah, had signed a declaration supporting attacks against Jewish communities and the British armed forces.

By seeking the partnership of groups such as the ISB, the Obama administration risks making the same mistakes of Britain’s last Labour government. And, in time, the U.S. government will arrive at the same realization as the British government — that non-violent extremists do not offer an alternative to violent extremism; in fact, they make the problem worse.

But all this invites the question: why do some Islamist groups oppose CVE programs while others join in? Although the ISB backed out of the Boston CVE initiative, the Islamic Council of New England (ICNE) remains a key partner. As with CAIR and the ISB, the ICNE is part of the “soft Islamist” network — groups that emerged from Muslim Brotherhood ideology and which have learned to speak the language of liberalism and democracy in their pursuit of an ultimately illiberal and anti-democratic ideal.

In 2002, the ICNE hosted a conference with the Muslim Brotherhood academic, Tariq Ramadan, and the British Salafist, Abdur Raheem Green, a former jihadist who warns Muslims of a Jewish “stench,” encourages the death penalty as a “suitable and effective” punishment for homosexuality and adultery, and has ruled that wife-beating “is allowed.”

The ICNE has announced its continued involvement in CVE programs because “rather than obsessing about the insidious erosion of our ‘civil rights’, Muslims should focus on the more immediate risk of being blind-sided by the overwhelming tsunami of Islamophobia.”

While CAIR protests against CVE, the ICNE believes it can work with counter-extremism programs to its advantage. The ISB lies somewhere in the middle. And yet all these Islamist groups are key partners, mostly founded and managed by the same network of Islamist operatives.

Has the CVE program really caused such discord?

Again, the European experience offers some answers. Daud Abdullah, the former deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, had his group work closely with the British government’s counter-extremism program, before later hosting an event with his other group, Middle East Monitor, which denounced the scheme as a “Cold War on British Muslims.” Similarly, the Cordoba Foundation, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood think tank, procured counter-extremism grants in 2008 only to run events condemning counter-extremism programs in 2009.

Non-violent extremists learn both to exploit and criticize counter-extremism initiatives to their benefit. By working in tandem, some Islamist voices accept government funds that legitimize them as leaders of the Muslim community and portray them as responsible Muslims concerned with extremism; while other Islamist groups oppose counter-extremism efforts in an effort to style themselves as civil rights champions and gain the support of libertarians on both the Left and Right.

The response of “non-violent” Islamists to counter-extremism programs displays a master class in deception. The greatest mistake, if it is one, made by the Obama administration is to treat groups such as CAIR and ISB as genuine representatives of the Muslim community. Very few American Muslims, it seems, actually believe that CAIR is a legitimate voice of American Islam. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, around 88% of American Muslims said CAIR does not represent them.

As for the ISB, it operates under the aegis of the Muslim American Society, which claims to be a national group for American Muslims. A 2011 report produced by CAIR itself, however, demonstrates that a mere 3% of American mosques are affiliated with the Muslim American Society. 62% of mosques claimed that they were not affiliated with any organization.

It is little wonder that groups such as CAIR disparage genuine moderates. They perceive moderates as a threat to their self-styled reputations as representatives of American Islam. CAIR Massachusetts Director Nadeem Mazen has denounced counter-Islamist Muslim groups that “foist secular attitudes on Muslims” and promote ideas that “are being projected, imperialist-style on to our population.”

American Islam is diverse. No group can claim to represent either Massachusetts Muslims or American Muslims. Islamist bodies have imposed their leadership on American Muslims. As inherently political movements, they were best organized to style themselves as community leaders. When politicians in D.C ask to speak to the “Muslim community,” groups such as CAIR and the ISB step forward.

Counter-extremism work is best achieved, in fact, by the government marginalizing such groups — by freeing American Muslims from their self-appointed Islamist spokesmen, by working instead with the genuine moderates among American Muslims, and by recognizing the link between non-violent and violent extremism. European governments have finally understood this reality, but far too late. For the sake of moderate Muslims everywhere, let us hope American politicians are quicker on the uptake.

Categories: CAIR, Clash of civilizations, Islamic indoctrination, Islamisation, Islamism, Islamists in America, Islamists vs Islam, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam
Tags: CAIR, Clash of civilizations, Islamic indoctrination, Islamisation, Islamism, Islamists in America, Islamists vs Islam, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam

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Europe’s perilous complacency

April 3, 2016

Europe’s perilous complacency, Israel Hayom, Dr. Ephraim Herrera, April 3, 2016

Despite the series of horrific attacks perpetrated by Muslim terrorists in the name of their religion, Europe is not taking the appropriate steps to suppress the phenomenon. Very few mosques in which clerics preach for war against the infidels have been closed down; public order has not been restored to the lawless suburbs in large cities; there is no real oversight of textbooks used in Muslim schools and mosques; very few radical imams have been deported; no significant countermeasures have been taken against Muslims expressing extremist views; and the burka ban has not been implemented.

These are just several of the signs pointing to Europe’s lack of comprehension that some of the Muslims living among them want the continent to fall under Muslim sovereignty, whether by way of the Islamic State approach of violent jihad or by the Muslim Brotherhood approach of population growth and Islamic preaching.

The first reason behind this European complacency is that most Islamic researchers in the West attribute the current situation to the dire economic status of many Muslims, social alienation, an inclination toward radicalization and the Israeli “occupation,” rather than attributing it to the implementation of orthodox Islam.

The second reason is Western economic interests. As early as 1969, the king of Belgium gave the Saudis an enormous building in the country’s capital, which subsequently became the “Islamic and Cultural Center of Belgium” and a headquarters for the Muslim World League, which aims to propagate the strict brand of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. The frenzied rush of European states to close business deals with Iran following the July 2015 nuclear accord is further evidence of this.

The third reason is the fear of uprisings. Rooting out militant Islam will require taking police action in Muslim-controlled areas. We have already seen the humiliating footage of police officers fleeing under a hail of rocks and Molotov cocktails, hurled at them by crowds of incensed Muslims. Another contributing factor is the dependency of political leaders, primarily from the Left, on the Muslim vote (French President Francois Hollande owes his election victory to the Muslims).

Additionally, feelings of guilt over Europe’s original sin of colonialism — a sin that serves to validate the yearning for revenge harbored by immigrants from countries once conquered by the West — also play a role in Europe’s stupor in the face of Islam. Thus we receive the paradigm widely accepted among mainly leftist circles that the impoverished individual is always justified, regardless of his actions.

The Europeans, apart from the Russians, have no desire to fight or put themselves in harm’s way. The fact that Western states have refused to deploy ground forces to fight Islamic State, which is responsible for the majority of the terrorist attacks in Europe, is proof of this. Another reason is the conviction that the current wave of immigration is necessary, due to the extremely low birth rates in Europe, along with the belief that Europe will be able to “Westernize” the Muslims, just as previous waves of immigrants have been “Westernized.”

Finally are the feelings of guilt over the atrocities committed by these Western states during the Holocaust, which the radical right is gradually shedding. Europe is shutting its eyes. The Islamization of Europe is a real possibility, precisely as Professor Bernard Lewis, the greatest researcher of Islam, predicted.

Categories: Complacency, Europe, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic jihad, Islamic State, Islamisation
Tags: Complacency, Europe, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic Jihad, Islamic State, Islamisation

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‘You Are Not The People, You Are The Past’ Public Broadcaster Tells German Critics Of Mass Immigration

April 2, 2016

‘You Are Not The People, You Are The Past’ Public Broadcaster Tells German Critics Of Mass Immigration, Breitbart, Virginia Hale, April 2, 2016

Not todays people

Screengrab/Neo Magazin Royal

“You are not the people, you are the past,” was the message to German critics of mass immigration on Germany’s public broadcaster ZDF’s NEO MAGAZIN ROYALE television programme.

The message was delivered in a video featuring a multi-ethnic crowd of disabled, gay and transgender people, as well as a Muslim woman wearing a face veil and a man wearing traditional Saudi headgear, all telling a crowd of Germans that they are “not Germany”.

The video opens with a crowd of angry-looking white Germans hitting against the windows of a bus to intimidate a frightened Arab child and his father, a policeman dragging the child out and hurling him to the ground. Led by the German comedian and television presenter’Jan Böhmermann, brightly dressed people rise from graves, forming a crowd to combat the beige-clad Germans who are wielding Donald Trump placards and signs reading “Refugees not welcome.”

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Condemning the German crowd as “authoritarian nationalist dorks” and telling them “you are not the people, you are the past,” Böhmermann cautions that “true Germans are coming for you, you’d better run fast.”

Warning the beige-clad Germans that “10 million bicycle helmets are in sight” Böhmermann describes the lifestyle of “true Germans” to be one of cycling, recycling and eating kebab and muesli. In what is perhaps a jab at protests from senior members of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union against pork being “quietly removed from menus” of public canteens, Böhmermann also declares that the “true Germans” eat vegan sausages.

Lambasting the crowd — which holds placards featuring politicians critical of mass immigration, such as Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany’s leader Frauke Petry, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen — Böhmermann rejects their calls for “strong leaders, fences and walls”. He explains that this is because Germans are “liberal”, “compassionate”,“temperate” and “peaceful” as the crowd on his side — which features a dog, a woman wearing a niqab, a man wearing a Saudi Arabian headdress and an elderly white woman in a wheelchair pushed by an African man — advances on the Germans protesting against mass immigration.

Showing politicians considered to be right wing, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, edited to be wearing Donald Trump’s hairstyle, Böhmermann warns against “maniacs with wicked hair” stating that Germany has “been there”, and that such politics resulted in Nazi Germany.

Employing similar tactics to Luke Montgomery, director of controversial left wing campaigns which feature foul-mouthed children, ZDF’s video shows a blonde child shouting profanities and yelling epithets at the beige-clad Germans.

As the young girl declares that because it’s 2016 “it is perfectly legal” for migrants to do “whatever the **** they want to do” because they are “******* human beings just like you and everyone else” the video shows the conservatively dressed Muslim man and the Jewish man smiling and shaking hands. There is also a white woman donning a purple hijab, a man dressed as a woman tearing his wig off, and even an elderly male Lutheran minister opening his robes to reveal lingerie and suspenders underneath.

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As Böhmermann announces Germany is “open”, “multicultural” and “tolerant”, his crowd charges forward under a giant European Union flag shouting and hurling objects towards the white Germans, who flee as they are hit with food and books.

He lists what he says to be German values which includes “never forget”, referring to the Holocaust, and “diversity”. Bizarrely he also declares “freedom of speech” to be a German value despite the government’s policy of working with social media websites such as Facebook to censor criticism of migrants’ behaviour, and the obvious irony that the message of the video appears to be that critics of multiculturalism must be shut down.

Regardless of equipment, or radio and television usage, all households in Germany must pay a blanket fee of €215.76 per annum which funds public broadcasters ZDF and Deutschlandradio, as well as the nine regional broadcasters of the ARD network.

Categories: Germany, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic invasion, Islamisation, Islamophobia
Tags: Germany, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic invasion, Islamisation, Islamophobia

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Spain: Courses on Islam in Public Schools

April 2, 2016

Spain: Courses on Islam in Public Schools, Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, April 2, 2016

♦ The guidelines for teaching Islam in public schools — drafted by the Islamic Commission of Spain and approved by the Ministry of Education — are aimed at stirring religious fervor and promoting Islamic identity among young Muslims in Spain.

♦ The guidelines, which envision the teaching of every aspect of Islamic doctrine, culture and history, are interspersed with “politically correct” terminology… but the overall objective is clear: to inculcate young people with an Islamic worldview.

♦ According to the guidelines, preschoolers (ages 3- 6) are to learn the Islamic profession of faith, the Shahada, which asserts that “there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.” The Shahada is the gateway into Islam: one becomes a Muslim by repeating the Shahada three times in front of a witness. They are also encouraged to “emulate, through different forms of expression, the values observed by Mohammed.”

♦ In primary school (ages 6-12), the guidelines call for children to “recognize Mohammed as the final prophet sent by Allah and accept him as the most important.”

The Spanish government has published new guidelines for teaching Islam in public preschools and primary and secondary schools.

The guidelines are being touted as a way to prevent Muslim children and young people from being drawn into terrorism by exposing them to a “moderate” interpretation of Islam.

On closer inspection, however, the guidelines — drafted by the Islamic Commission of Spain and approved by the Ministry of Education — are aimed at stirring religious fervor and promoting Islamic identity among young Muslims in Spain.

The new plan, which is the most ambitious in all of Europe, amounts to a government-approved program to establish a full-fledged Islamic studies curriculum at public schools nationwide, at a time when Christian religious symbols are being systematically removed from Spanish public schools by official enforcers of secularism.

Although Spanish taxpayers are being expected to pay for the religious education of up to 300,000 Muslim students between the ages of 3 and 18, it remains unclear whether Spanish authorities will have any oversight of the teaching of Islam in public schools. The government has agreed to allow local Muslim organizations to draft the course syllabi, choose the textbooks, and even determine who will teach the classes.

Spain’s Ministry of Education quietly published the guidelines in the official state gazette (Boletín Oficial del Estado) on March 18. The curriculum for teaching Islam in Spanish public preschools can be found here; in public primary schools here; and in public secondary schools here.

The guidelines, which envision the teaching of every aspect of Islamic doctrine, culture and history, are interspersed with “politically correct” terminology — the documents are rife with buzzwords such as coexistence, diversity, equality, human rights, inclusion, integration, intercultural education, interreligious dialogue, moderation, pluralism, religious liberty, respect and tolerance — but the overall objective is clear: to inculcate young people with an Islamic worldview.

According to the guidelines, preschoolers (ages 3- 6) are to learn the Islamic profession of faith, the Shahada, which asserts that “there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.” The Shahada is the gateway into Islam: one becomes a Muslim by repeating the Shahada three times in front of a witness.

Block 6 is aimed at instilling “interest for Islamic religious and cultural texts,” stirring “curiosity for the Koran in oral and written language,” and learning “Islamic recitations, narrations and descriptions.”

Children should develop an “attitude of listening to Koranic and prophetic texts” and memorize “short Hadiths [reports about the words, actions or habits of Mohammed] and Koranic stories.” They are also encouraged to “emulate, through different forms of expression, the values observed by Mohammed.”

In primary school (ages 6-12), the guidelines call for children to “recognize Mohammed as the final prophet sent by Allah and accept him as the most important.” Students are to “recite the Shahada in perfect Arabic and Spanish,” and “recognize that the Koran is a guide for all of humanity.” Children are to “know certain Arabisms in the Spanish language and appreciate the linguistic contributions of Islam to the history of Spain, using verbal language to communicate emotions and sentiments.”

Primary school students are to “know examples of Mohammed’s coexistence with non-Muslims,” although there is no indication that Muslim pupils will be taught about the 900 Jews of the Banu Qurayza tribe in Medina that Mohammed ordered to be beheaded in 627AD.

Students are also to “understand that Islam is a religion of peace — spiritual or internal peace and social or communitarian peace. The prophet teaches us to live in peace. Islam promotes solutions to resolve conflicts and social inequality.”

Moreover, the guidelines call for primary students to “comprehend and explain the existence of other monotheistic revelations of Allah: Judaism and Christianity.” But it remains unclear whether students will learn about the three instances in the Koran (Suras 2:65, 5:60 and 7:166) in which Allah turns Jews into apes and/or pigs.

In secondary school (ages 12-18), the guidelines call for students to “know, analyze and explain the affective-emotional attitudes of Mohammed when confronting personal offenses, valuing conflict resolution.” It remains unclear whether students will learn about Suras 5:33 and 33:57-61, which call for curses against those who “annoy Allah and His Messenger.”

Block 4 calls on students to evaluate the “transversality present in the Koran and the Hadiths regarding social relations.” It does not, however, mention whether students will be taught that the Koran and the Hadiths require non-Muslim subjects (dhimmis) residing in Muslim lands to pay a protection tax known as the jizya.

In a section on the “Islamic model for economics and jurisprudence,” students are asked to identify Islamic solutions to world problems. They are also asked to “analyze and explain the benefits of interest-free loans [aka Sharia finance].”

In Block 8, students are asked to “analyze the stages of the establishment and flourishing of Islamic jurisprudence [Sharia law] during the splendor of al-Andalus.”

Al-Andalus is the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal and France that were occupied by Muslim conquerors (also known as the Moors) from 711 to 1492. The Islamic State (ISIS) has repeatedly vowed to “liberate” al-Andalus from non-Muslims and make it part of their new Islamic Caliphate.

The guidelines also encourage students to use the internet to learn more about Islam, even though the internet is playing an increasingly important role in the radicalization of young Muslims.

The legal basis for teaching Islam in Spanish public schools can be found in Article 27.3 of the Spanish Constitution of 1978, which establishes that although Spain is non-confessional (meaning that it does not recognize an official state religion), “the State guarantees parents the right for their children to obtain a religious and moral education which conforms to their own convictions.” Muslims (and Roman Catholics) have long understood this to mean that children are entitled to religious education in public schools.

On November 10, 1992, the Socialist government of Felipe González — seeking to end the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church over Spanish education — negotiated a “Cooperation Agreement between the Government of Spain and the Islamic Commission of Spain” (Comisión Islámica de España, CIE). That agreement, codified in Law 26/1992, recognized Islam as a minority religion in Spain and guaranteed that “Muslim students … receive Islamic religious education in public schools.”

(Also on November 10, 1992, the Spanish government approved the “Cooperation Agreement between the Government of Spain and the Federation of Evangelical Christian Entities in Spain.” That agreement was codified in Law 24/1992. In June 1993, the Spanish government published guidelines for the teaching of evangelical Christianity in public schools.)

In recent years, Muslim leaders in Spain have complained that the Spanish government has failed to implement the 1992 agreement. According to the CIE, 90% of Muslims students in Spain lack access to Islamic studies in public schools. The new guidelines appear to signal the current government’s commitment to follow through on the promises of past governments.

The guidelines were drafted by CIE president Riaÿ Tatary, a Syrian who has lived in Spain for more than 45 years. Tatary, a medical doctor who is also the imam of the Abu-Bakr Mosque, the second-largest mosque in Madrid, is often portrayed as the epitome of Muslim integration and moderation.

Tatary is the chief interlocutor between Spain’s Muslim community and the Spanish government and has received a civilian merit award from the Ministry of Justice for his work on Spain’s law on religious liberty.

But Spanish counterterrorism analysts (here and here) have long suspected that Tatary is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is highly critical of Western concepts of justice and democracy. The Brotherhood’s motto is: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

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The Spanish government’s curriculum guidelines for public school Islamic studies were drafted by Riaÿ Tatary, imam of the Abu-Bakr Mosque. Spanish counterterrorism analysts have long suspected that Tatary is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Tatary denies the charges, although members of his mosque have, in fact, been tied to al-Qaeda.

Ahead of municipal elections in May 2015, Tatary admonished Muslims in Spain not to vote for any candidate who “hinders or impedes the establishment of mosques for our faithful, and cemeteries for our dead.” He also said that Muslim voters should not vote for anyone who “hinders or prevents the children of Muslim citizens from receiving Islamic religion courses in public or private schools.”

Spanish political analysts said Tatary’s attempt to enforce the Spanish Muslim vote was alarming:

“At first glance, it does not seem objectionable that a group, whatever its nature, defends the rights of its members. However, when it comes to an entity that appeals to religion to impose a massive discipline of the faithful in the political arena, we cannot but be alarmed. Especially when that religion is engaged in relentless war within itself and with the rest of the civilized world.”

It seems unlikely, however, that parents and imams will accept many of Tatary’s politically correct non-literal interpretations of the Koran, which apparently are aimed at securing the government’s approval of the guidelines. The challenge of reform-minded Muslims is to convince the majority of Muslims that the Koran and the Hadiths do not actually mean what they say.

In the end, the new guidelines may end up achieving a completely undesired objective: serving as gateway to radical Islam for tens of thousands of young Muslims in Spain.

Categories: Education, Islamic indoctrination, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Spain
Tags: Education, Islamic indoctrination, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Spain

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Integration is Not the Answer to Muslim Terrorism

April 1, 2016

Integration is Not the Answer to Muslim Terrorism, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, March 31, 2016

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There is a famous photo of Anjem Choudary, the head of multiple banned organizations calling for imposing Sharia law on the UK whose follower was responsible for the Lee Rigby beheading, getting drunk as a young law student. Friends recall“Andy” smoking pot and taking LSD, sleeping around and partying all the time. Andy was really well integrated, but he still turned back into Anjem.

While the proliferation of segregated Muslim areas, no-go zones in which English, French or Dutch is the foreign language, is a major problem, it is a mistake to think that “integration” solves Islamic terrorism.

It doesn’t.

The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings seemed integrated. Nobody noticed anything wrong with Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino shooter, or Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber. They weren’t lurking in a no-go zone. They had American friends, an education and career options if they wanted them. They didn’t want them. And that’s the point.

Bilal Abdullah was a British-born doctor who tried to carry out a terrorist attack at Glasgow International Airport. He wasn’t marginalized, jobless or desperate. He had a cause.

Quite a few converts have become Muslim terrorists. If integration were the issue, white converts to Islam wouldn’t be running off to join ISIS or plotting terrorist attacks like Don Stewart-Whyte, who converted to Islam and planned to blow up planes headed from the UK to the US. Along with his friend Oliver Savant, the son of a secular Iranian father and British mother, they are the reason why you can’t carry liquids onto a plane.

Muslim terrorism is not caused by failed integration, but by a conscious disintegration. What is often described as “radicalization” is really a choice by “integrated” Muslims to become religious and to act on their beliefs. Muslim men who formerly dressed casually begin growing beards and wearing Salafist garb. They consciously reject what Western society has to offer because they have chosen Islam instead.

Islamic terrorists have not been alienated by our rejection. They champion an alien creed that rejects us.

The debate over Islamic terrorism is bogged down by a refusal to name it and understand what it is. ISIS is not a form of “nihilism” that European Muslims resort to after being alienated by racism and driven to despair by joblessness. It’s an alternative system that draws on over a thousand years of Islamic religion and culture. It’s not a negative choice, but a positive one. It’s not an act of despair, but of hope.

Social, linguistic and cultural integration won’t stop Islamic terrorism. They may prevent it in some cases and accelerate it in others. But it’s not the primary factor. Religion is. Cultural integration won’t make much of a difference in the face of religious disintegration.

This is the type of integration that is the real problem. Some of the worst Jihadists are culturally integrated and religiously disintegrated. They speak the native language fluently. They are intimately familiar with popular culture. They move easily among the native population. It’s their belief system that is fundamentally disintegrated and whose demands cannot be integrated without a civil war.

Their choices are not a referendum on our society. What we do in response to their terrorism is.

The issue is not economic. It is not linguistic. It is not about alienation or racism. It is about religion. And Europe is not comfortable with religion. It assumes that the religious is political, but in Islam, the political is instead religious. Europe has given no thought to how Islam can be integrated as a religion. Instead it has relied on the assumption that all religions are basically alike and that the aims and ideas of Islam are therefore interchangeable with those of Catholics, Lutherans, Jews and anyone else.

Every Islamic terrorist attack sends the message that its ideas and aims are not interchangeable.

Europe does face challenges of cultural integration. But cultural disintegration isn’t blowing up airports or subways. Religious disintegration is. Cultural disintegration accounts for crime, riots and unemployment. It occasionally feeds into Islamic terrorism, but ideological violence is aspirational. It’s generally practiced by members of the middle class with money, leisure time and lots of self-esteem.

Like left-wing terror, Islamic terrorism is based on realizing a set of ideas about what the world should be like. These ideas are already embedded in the worldview of every Muslim to some degree. This is not a clash of civilizations or even cultures. It is a collision between the political and the religious.

The EU’s Federica Mogherini states, “Islam belongs in Europe…. I am not afraid to say that political Islam should be part of the picture.” Mogherini thinks of political Islam as a social welfare organization with a steeple, like the rest of the political religions of Europe. But political Islam is theocracy. And Europe was never able to integrate theocracy. Instead it overshadowed it with nationalism and then Socialism.

Secular Europe has forgotten what religion is. Religion is passion, conviction and redemption. It is not something that you occasionally live on the weekends. It transforms your life and your worldview.

How do you integrate that? Do you do it with language lessons, job training and a pat on the back?

Islamic terrorism is what happens when Muslims “get” religion. Not of the occasional casual variety, but of the fundamentally transformative kind. Integration assumes that once Mohammed is at university and drinking beer that he won’t suddenly decide to Jihad his way across Europe. But there are plenty of examples that show what a poor and fitful defense this is against the rebirth of a religious conviction.

Cultural integration is an issue, but the real issue is philosophical integration. The real challenge is not in linguistic integration, but in the integration of ideas. And it is impossible to do that without addressing what Islam actually is and what it believes. Islam is not Lutheranism with more Arabic. Political Islam is not a soup kitchen and a used clothes bin. It is a conviction that the world is locked in a titanic struggle between Islam and the infidels, the forces of light and darkness, which must be won at any cost.

How do you integrate an ideology that is convinced that non-Muslim political systems are evil into Europe? What explanatory videos will you use to admonish Ahmed from Syria that he shouldn’t set off bombs at the railway station even though his religion commands him to fight the infidels? Which job will you use to induce Abdul to abandon his fervent belief that everyone must live under Islamic law?

Sanctimony and denial won’t untangle this Gordian knot. No amount of NGOs will turn Islam into something else. Cultural integration won’t transform Muslims into non-Muslims. All it does is make them conflicted and insecure. And that is why it is those second-generation culturally integrated Muslims who go to bars, call themselves Andy or Mo, sell drugs, go to university, who take a detour into Syria and come back with bomb plans and big plans for transforming Europe into an Islamic state.

Cultural integration builds up a conflict with Islam. Some Muslims respond to it by abandoning Islam, others by embracing it. If we fail to recognize this, then integration becomes a ticking time bomb.

Categories: Europe, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Multiculturalism
Tags: Europe, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Multiculturalism

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An Up-close Look at the Liberal-Muslim Alliance

March 31, 2016

An Up-close Look at the Liberal-Muslim Alliance, American Thinker, Jack Cashill, March 31, 2016

(In Shiite Iran, “Homosexuality is a crime punishable by imprisonment,^[2] corporal punishment, or by execution.” In Sunni Saudi Arabia, “Homosexuality and transgenderism are widely seen as immoral and indecent activities, and the law punishes acts of homosexuality or cross-dressing with death, imprisonment, fines, corporal punishment, or whipping/flogging.” — DM)

I have read about the paradoxical alliance between Islam and the left for years. I have even written about it — at some length, in fact, in my newest book Scarlet Letters. But it was only a few weeks go that I got to see up close the mechanisms that allow people who celebrate homosexuals to find common cause with those who, when the law allows, happily sever their heads.

As a result of my book, I was invited to sit on a panel titled “Muslim in the Metro,” an event sponsored by an enterprise called American Public Square and televised in edited form — fairly, I must say — on the regional PBS channel here in Kansas City, KCPT.

There were five panelists — myself, a Republican state rep from Kansas, a fiftyish Muslim woman in the diversity business, a U.S. attorney appointed by Obama, and a female Muslim college student who used the word “microagression” as something other than a punch line to a joke. The moderator was also a former Obama appointee.

I would use names, but I am confident if American Public Square ran a comparable event in other cities, the four Muslim advocates — the moderator included — would espouse almost identical views. They represent a type. So too did the overwhelmingly liberal audience. I could have written their questions for them.

These American Public Square debates feature an active online fact checker and a civility bell. I was a little queasy about the civility bell, but I welcomed the fact checker. He proved to be my greatest ally.

The state rep did a fine job. As an elected official he had to be a little cautious, but he made his case about terror and immigration well.

My strategy was a little different. Knowing that I was not about to convert anyone, I thought I could at least confuse the audience members with the truth, and the truth is that their affection for Islam makes no apparent sense. This proved to be a difficult assignment, and here is why.

The left has a unique ability to deny the obvious.

In attempting to establish my premise, I said to the panel, “Muslims are culturally very conservative around the world,” adding rhetorically, “Is that fair to say?”

This premise struck me as inarguable. My fellow panelists felt otherwise. The two women, both wearing Hijabs, and the moderator all shouted out “No” or some variant. Said I, “When it comes to issues like family, women, abortion, gay rights, you’re telling me they’re not conservative?”

The moderator admonished me. “Jack,” he said, “you’re asking a question, and they didn’t give you the answer you want.” He then challenged me to make my case or move on.

Knowing there was a fact checker, I pulled out my one file card and read through the numbers from Pew Research Foundation, a liberal but generally reliable source. When asked about gay rights, 87 percent of Germans approved but no more than 9 percent of Muslims in any country surveyed and as little as 2 percent in some.

On the question of whether a women should always obey her husband, 87 percent of Muslims approved. On the question of whether apostates should be executed, 56 percent of Muslims who approved of Sharia law said yes. Asked whether they held “highly unfavorable” views of Jews, 99 percent of Jordanians and 100 percent of Lebanese sad yes. The fact checker could not deny what I was saying.

My fellow panelists could and did. They protested that these attitudes did not reflect American Muslims, but I had to repeat that I began my discussion by saying these surveys were done in the countries that comprise our immigration pool, and that the threat of immigration motivated the anti-Muslim sentiment about which they complained.

The left instinctively denies the worth of America.

I did concede that American Muslims were likely more moderate in their views. This relative moderation, I argued, reflected the “palliative effect of American culture on Islam.” This comment drew boos from the audience. From the left’s perspective, nothing America does is palliative.

The left controls the debate.

When I added, “If you go to Cologne, Germany you’re going to meet people who haven’t had that [palliative] experience,” the moderator insisted that I stick to local issues. Europe seemed particularly off limits. Although this was billed as a nonpartisan event, it proved to be no more nonpartisan than PBS in general or CNN or NBC or the New York Times. The moderator unabashedly took sides.

The left inevitably falls back on false moral equivalence.

Indeed, from the Muslim women and especially from the U.S. Attorney, there was so much talk of Timothy McVeigh, Clive Bundy, the KKK, the Sovereignty movement, and even the mid 19th-century Know-Nothing Party, a latecomer might have thought the event about Christian terrorism. Of course, in none of these conversations did the moderator insist the speaker restrict himself to local issues.

The left is plagued with cognitive dissonance.

I kept returning to the transparently separate standards liberals held for traditional Christians and traditional Muslims. I pointed out, for instance, that the Kansas City Star designated a prominent liberal pastor a “drum major for justice” for his denunciation of the Christian right as “a threat far greater than the old threat of Communism.”

The fact checker confirmed that to be an exact quote. And the threat the pastor alluded had nothing to do with violence. No, what troubled him was that Christian conservatives were running for office. They were “anti-pornography,” he warned, and opposed — he noted daintily — a woman’s “having a say about what goes on in her own body.”

Had he said something half as outrageous about Muslims, he would have lost his pulpit, if not his head. Focusing his spite on Christians, however, got his speech excerpted in the New York Times and won him the Harry S. Truman Good Neighbor Award.

The alliance validates the left’s moral superiority.

At one point, the older Muslim woman claimed to have been so appalled by the “anti-Muslim” tenor of the Republican debates that she would not let her children watch them. Echoed the U.S. Attorney, “Their children see grown men espousing hate.”

Bingo! There was the money quote. Indeed, if there is one shared feel good experience among leftists of all stripes it is the imputation of “hate” to others. Author Shelby Steele coined the phrase “zone of decency” to describe the sacred preserve in which progressives imagine themselves clustering. By aligning themselves with Muslims, liberals assure themselves a place in the zone and “decertify” those not quite so keen on self-destruction.

Did I mention that the left denies the obvious?

My opponents on the panel repeatedly insisted that terrorists did not represent Islam. “You have places called the Islamic State,” I countered. “These guys think they’re the real deal.”

“What one chooses to call oneself is not necessarily the only test we have to apply,” said the moderator who had long since abandoned anything resembling neutrality.

“There is an element of disingenuousness about this conversation tonight,” I replied. I pointed out that there are millions of Muslims who subscribed to ISIS or who supported ISIS “To make believe that there is not a religious thread to this,” I concluded, “is to deceive ourselves.”

“What’s disingenuous is to blithely say there are millions,” the moderator snapped back. He then made the fatal mistake of asking for a fact check on my numbers. Said the fact checker, “Pew says 63 million Muslims support the Islamic State in the eleven Muslim countries polled.”

“That,” I said with my final words, “is a lot of Muslims.”

Categories: Islam and homosexuality, Islam and human rights, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic State, Leftist perspectives, Multiculturalism
Tags: Islam and homosexuality, Islam and human rights, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic State, Leftist perspectives, Multiculturalism

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