Senior Obama administration officials are expressing concern that congressional attempts to tighten laws preventing terrorists from entering the United States could violate the Iran nuclear agreement and prompt Tehran to walk away from the agreement.
Congress is considering measures that would tighten the Visa Waiver Program to make it harder for potential terrorists to legally enter the United States by increasing restrictions on individuals who have travelled to countries with prominent terrorist organizations from bypassing security checks upon entering the United States.
Iranian officials have in recent days repeatedly issued threatening statements to the Obama administration, saying that such moves would violate the nuclear agreement, and the Obama administration last week conveyed the Iranian anger to American lawmakers.
Stephen Mull, the State Department official in charge of implementing the Iran deal, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee late last week that these congressional efforts “could have a very negative impact on the deal.”
Under the revised law, which came in the week of a deadly terrorist attack in California, individuals who have travelled to Iran—a lead sponsor of global terrorism—would no longer be eligible to participate in the Visa Waiver Program, which permits individuals from 38 partner nations to more easily enter the United States.
Congress remains concerned that gaps in the program could prevent federal law enforcement officials from detecting terror-tied individuals before they are granted entrance to U.S. soil.
However, a portion of the Iran nuclear deal mandates that the United States not take any action that could harm Iran’s economic relationships with other countries. Iranian officials maintain that the new restrictions violate this passage of the deal.
Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, said last week that these tightened measures “are aimed at harassment” and that they “blatantly violate the nuclear agreement,” according to comments carried by the Iranian state-controlled press.
Larijani warned that this action will detonate the deal before it has even been implemented.
“If the Americans pursue the plan, they will destroy an achievement with their own hands since it is against the [nuclear deal] and it will trouble them,” he warned.
Rep. Patrick Murphy (D., Conn.) echoed these concerns last week when he questioned Mull during a Senate hearing.
Visa waiver reform efforts include “a naming of Iran such that individuals who have travelled to Iran will no loner be eligible for the visa waiver program,” Murphy said. “There has been a suggestion because there is an element of the agreement that obligates us to not to take steps that would stop economic relations between other nations and Iran that we could perhaps be in jeopardy of breaching the agreement.”
Mull agreed with this assessment.
“I have heard from very senior, and Secretary [of State John] Kerry has as well, from very senior officials of differing European allies of ours that it could have a very negative impact on the deal,” he said.
Sources working with Congress on the Iran deal criticized the Obama administration for attempting to stymie increased action on terrorism due to its desire to preserve the nuclear deal.
“According to the Obama administration’s latest interpretation, the nuclear deal allows Iran to test ballistic missiles in violation of international law, but does not allow Congress to prevent terrorists from coming into the United States,” Omri Ceren, the managing director of press and strategy at The Israel Project, a D.C.-based organization that works with journalists on Middle East issues, told the Washington Free Beacon.
Seyed Araqchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, also warned that Iran is prepared to “take action” against the United States for implementing visa restrictions.
Iran’s latest threat to break the deal comes amid numerous Iranian provocations, including multiple tests of advanced ballistic missiles, acts prohibited under United Nations Security Council resolutions.
The Obama administration repeatedly said that, while it does not agree with those launches, they do not violate the nuclear deal.
(The views expressed in this article are mine, and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Judeo-Christian civilization has nothing in common with, and nothing to gain from, Islamic civilization as it now exists. They have been clashing for centuries. Now, Islamic civilization appears to be winning in much of the European Union and, to a lesser degree, in America.
Can anything be done to slow and then to halt the spread of fundamentalist Islam? Ayan Hirsi Ali hopes there is and that Muslims will do it. I also hope they will, but am quite dubious that it will happen in the foreseeable future. We need to take other steps promptly.
Preliminary disclosure
As I wrote here in 2012, I am an Agnostic and have been for more than half a century. I do not believe that one or more Gods exist, nor do I believe that none exist. I simply do not know and have no way to know. However, Judeo-Christian society has given me what I love most, freedom to think and to speak as I choose. That freedom is now under severe attack and is withering away. Far too few Christians and Jews seem to have noticed or to care.
When I was in tenth grade, my parents and I decided that I would have a better chance of being admitted to and succeeding at a good college if I were to transfer from public high school to a private high school. We researched area private schools and settled upon St. Stephen’s School for Boys, an Episcopalian school. The headmaster was an Episcopalian priest. During my admissions interview, I volunteered that I was an Agnostic. It did not seem to bother him, but he told me that I would be required to attend a daily religious opening ceremony and, during my senior year, a weekly sacred studies class which he would lead. The first did not bother me and I looked forward to the second.
During the morning religious ceremonies, I stood when the other boys stood and sat when they sat. When they sang hymns and recited creeds and bible verses, I did not. Nobody seemed to notice. During the sacred studies class, I voiced my views, the other boys voiced theirs and the Headmaster voiced his. Our discussions were collegial, not contentious.
These experiences have colored my views of Judeo-Christian culture as it has evolved through today: with increasing exceptions, it remains a culture of freedom and kindness. Sometimes, as with outreach to Islamists, it goes too far. Christian outreach to fundamentalist Islam is like bone cells inviting cancer cells in to discuss how they can be friends and get along. In the end, they can’t and won’t. The cancer cells will thrive and the owner of the infested bones will die painfully.
Fundamentalist Islam is a culture of compulsion and hate
Americans should learn far more than we have from the recent experiences of Sweden, Germany, England, France and other European Union countries in welcoming Muslims to Islamise their cultures. I posted a lengthy article on that on December 13th. If you haven’t read it yet, please do so now. It provides very helpful background for an understanding of the clash of Judeo-Christian and Islamic civilizations.
Here is a lengthy video by Walid Shoebat, once an Islamic jihadist and now a Roman Catholic opponent of Islam. Born in “Palestine,” he imbibed the Islamic culture of hate and compulsion as a youth, as did most of his acquaintances. Eventually, he changed from what he was to what he now is.
Here’s are Shoebat’s 2007 comments:
Most of Shoebat’s comments are consistent with my understanding of present-day Islam, which is largely fundamentalist, of “Palestine” and of its leaders. Here are videos of three who lead the “heroes of Palestine:”
Here’s are Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s 2015 comments on the possibility of an Islamic reformation, for which she argues in her recent book Heretic. (I just bought the Kindle version. After I have read it, I may post an article about it.) A former Muslim and now an Athiest, she is far more conciliatory than was Shoebat because she wants to promote change for the better within Islam. In her closing comments, she offers hope that someday Muslims will become as tolerant and peaceful as Christians and Jews. She does not expect that to happen during her life time, or for a long time thereafter. At seventy-four, I certainly don’t expect it during my remaining time on Earth.
Education today in Obama’s America
Obama’s America has become a multicultural, moral-equivalence based society dominated by political correctness. Many — including some nominal Christians and Jews — rail against Christianity and Judaism. Islam, on the other hand, has become a protected species: any suggestion that it is evil is condemned as “Islamophobic.”
At my alma mater, Yale (1959 – 63), freedom of speech and of thought now take back seats to politically correct condemnations of anything that anyone (except Christians and Jews) might find offensive.
I understand that the same sickness is spreading throughout the country. Maybe some fine day we will have an educational system like this:
Efforts to spread multicultural, moral-equivalence and hence Islamic values are not confined to our colleges. According to an article by The Clarion Project,
Controversy over the way public schools are presenting Islam has been making headlines in many school districts around the U.S. and worldwide:
♦ In Tennessee, a bill was introduced to prevent schools from teaching classes on “religious doctrine” before the 10th grade. The bill is in reaction to objections by parents to a three-week curriculum under the topic of world religion for middle-school students that covers the “Five Pillars of Islam” that obligated children to write assignments about Islamic principles of faith, such as “Allah is the only God.” Parents particularly objected because no other religion was taught at the same time and the amount of time spent on Islam was considerably more than that spent on any other religion.
♦ In Maryland, parents objected to the way Islam was taught in the school’s “World History” class, presenting Islam in an historically untrue way and listing all the “benefits” of Islam.
♦ After being threatened with a lawsuit, an Ohio school district agreed to remove a video about Islam from a seventh grade world-history curriculum that was challenged as falling under the category of proselytizing and favoring one religion over another (a violation of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause). The video, titled 30 Days: Muslim and America, features a young Christian man who agrees to totally immerse himself in Islam for a month by living with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Michigan. It was shown to students as part of a course that requires students to “describe achievements by the Islamic civilization and how these achievements were introduced into Western Europe in the time period between 750 BC – 1600AD.”
♦ In Massachusetts, the Wellesley Middle School, another public school was caught in a controversy when a video (see below) of a student trip to the Roxbury megamosque was released. On the trip, students were taught propaganda – among other things, that Muslim women got the vote before women in the West – by the mosque staff. The boys can be seen prostrating themselves to Allah alongside Muslim men. The video was covered extensively on Boston TV and radio.
♦ In Massachusetts, the Newton public school system became enmeshed in a similar controversy about deceptive and anti-Semitic lessons concerning Muslim women being taught to their students. Even though the curriculum was removed, school administrators refused to tell the children the information was inaccurate (as was the case above with the Wellesley Middle School).
Here’s the referenced video of a 2010 high school trip to a mosque in Newton, Massachusetts:
Fethullah Gulen’s movement is just one more manifestation of what the Muslim Brotherhood has called civilization jihad, albeit a particularly sinister one with its large footprint, penetration of our educational system and well-established, sophisticated and successful influence operations. With this new monograph – the [eighth] in the Center for Security Policy’s Civilization Jihad Readers Series, we hope to sound an alarm about this multi-faceted and dangerous Islamic supremacist cult that – despite significant setbacks in its native Turkey – constitutes a true Trojan Horse in our midst. [Emphasis added.]
It must be noted that those setbacks [in Turkey] are being dealt the Gulen cult and its empire by a rival Islamic supremacist movement: the AK Party and government of Turkish President Recep Tayyep Erdogan. Like erstwhile allies in organized criminal racketeering, these two Islamist mafia dons have had a toxic falling-out after they jointly took down the Ataturk legacy of secular governance in Turkey. Welcome as the rolling up of the Gulen empire and the extradition of its cult leader from the United States would be, nothing in this monograph should be seen as an endorsement of the no-less problematic Erdogan regime’s civilization jihadism and its ambitions to restore the Caliphate.
The state of Hesse has become the first in Germany to offer Islamic education in public schools, with religious instruction starting as early as the first grade.
Giving young children religious and moral instruction might sound like a good idea, if not for the content of the newly written Islamic curriculum and the influence of Islamist elements over the recruitment of teachers. [Emphasis added.]
The writing of textbooks is being overseen by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB). In an agreement reached between the State of Hesse and DITIB, the organization will play a key role in setting the curriculum, selecting the teachers and monitoring the Islamic religious instruction. The organization is apparently assuming a similar role in several other key German states. [Emphasis added.]
DITIB is the largest Muslim organization in Germany and controls several prominent mosques. The group depends heavily on the Turkish government for its funding, and maintains close ties with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist party, the AKP.
Our “great ally” Saudi Arabia is also spending lots of money to promote fundamentalist Islam.
[T]he Kingdom funded Western tax exempt Islamic organizations engaged in dawah (proselytization for Islam). Among them were networks of charitable organizations that provide financial aid to prisoners (including non-Muslims to lure them to Islam) in Western jails, lavishly funded academic chairs in Middle East Studies in universities around the world, student-exchange programs and spending many millions of dollars to increase Saudi political influence in the West — even contributing $100 million to coordinate and assist the United Nations international counterterrorism efforts.
. . . .
The public outrage and rejection of Saudi King Salman’s offer to fund 200 new mosques for more than 800,000 new Muslim refugees in Germany, and the Vice Chancellor’s statement: “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over” point in the right direction. But don’t hold your breath. Germany, the United States and the rest of the West have been turning a blind eye to Saudi funding of thousands of mosques, madrassas and Islamic centers that have propagated radical Islamic ideology for decades and are unlikely to face reality anytime soon. [Emphasis added.]
Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking—the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West. [Emphasis added.]
Remember, the reason people like French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are in power—three prominent Western leaders who insist that Islam is innocent of violence and who push for Muslim immigration—is because they embody a worldview that is normative in the West. [Emphasis added.]
In this context, the facilitation of jihadi terror is less a top down imposition and more a grass root product of decades of erroneous, but unquestioned, thinking. (Those who believe America’s problems begin and end with Obama would do well to remember that he did not come to power through a coup but that he was voted in—twice. This indicates that Obama and the majority of voting Americans have a shared, and erroneous, worldview. He may be cynically exploiting this worldview, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s because this warped worldview is mainstream that he can exploit it in the first place.) [Emphasis added.]
Western empowerment of the jihad is rooted in a number of philosophies that have metastasized into every corner of social life, becoming cornerstones of postmodern epistemology. These include the doctrines of relativism and multiculturalism on the one hand, and anti-Western, anti-Christian sentiment on the other. [Emphasis added.]
Taken together, these cornerstones of postmodern, post-Christian thinking hold that there are no absolute truths and thus all cultures are fundamentally equal and deserving of respect. If any Western person wants to criticize a civilization or religion, then let them look “inwardly” and acknowledge their European Christian heritage as the epitome of intolerance and imperialism. [Emphasis added.]
Add to these a number of sappy and silly ideals—truth can never be uttered because it might “hurt the feelings” of some (excluding white Christians who are free game), and if anything, the West should go out of its way to make up for its supposedly historic “sins” by appeasing Muslims until they “like us”—and you have a sure recipe for disaster, that is, the current state of affairs. [Emphasis added.]
Western people are bombarded with these aforementioned “truths” from the cradle to the grave—from kindergarten to university, from Hollywood to the news rooms, and now even in churches—so that they are unable to accept and act on a simple truism that their ancestors well knew: Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant creed that cannot coexist with non-Islam (except insincerely, in times of weakness). [Emphasis added.]
The essence of all this came out clearly when Obama, in order to rationalize away the inhuman atrocities of the Islamic State, counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and remember that their Christian ancestors have been guilty of similar if not worse atrocities. That he had to go back almost a thousand years for examples by referencing the crusades and inquisition—both of which have been completely distorted by the warped postmodern worldview, including by portraying imperialist Muslims as victims—did not matter to America’s leader.
Worse, it did not matter to most Americans. The greater lesson was not that Obama whitewashed modern Islamic atrocities by misrepresenting and demonizing Christian history, but that he was merely reaffirming the mainstream narrative that Americans have been indoctrinated into believing. And thus, aside from the usual ephemeral and meaningless grumblings, his words—as with many of his pro-Islamic, anti-Christian comments and policies—passed along without consequence. [Emphasis added.]
Conclusions
Too many of “We the people” demand “safe spaces” (offense-free zones) where rote acceptance of politically correct pablum is cherished rather than contested or even questioned. I doubt that another massively successful effort on the scale of the September 11, 2001 attack by Islamic fundamentalists would awaken many of them. Rather than begin to awaken and see what Islam is, how many would angrily demand to know what America did this time to offend our brothers and sisters of the Religion of Peace, Truth and love?
We once had a great culture and a great nation.
It is now fading and is in danger of being displaced by something far different and evil. What will WE do?
Getting rid of Obama will not be nearly enough, regardless of whether He is a Muslim.
Listen again to Ayan Hirsi Ali’s hopes for the reformation of Islam and think about what we can do to help. Read about Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, who wants to make Muslims believe that much of fundamentalist Islam is not Islamic.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser – a Navy vet and founder of the American Islamic Forum of Democracy – is one of those individuals taking the stand against Islamic organizations that support terrorism and claim to speak for the entire community. From Fox News:
“CAIR is a primary obstacle in the effort of many honest American Muslims who recognize our need to own up and lead long-overdue reforms against the root causes of radicalization: Islamism and its separatism,” said Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, an ex-U.S. Navy officer who founded and heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
and
“CAIR’s information is marketed and packaged so it seems that they speak for all of us, but they don’t speak for me and my group,” said Raheel Raza, president of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow. “CAIR does not and has never represented the majority Muslim voices which are as diverse as Muslims in America.”
‘They don’t speak for me’: New Muslim groups reject CAIR representation http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/18/dont-speak-for-me-new-muslim-groups-reject-cair-representation.html
Dr. Jasser has assembled an alliance known as the “Muslim Reform Movement” consisting of about a dozen moderate Islamic groups in the US, Canada and Europe. This movement rebukes jihad and advocates the separation of “Mosque and state,” among other things. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that they reject the idea of an “Islamic State” and Sharia Law.
Although political correctness prevents Democrats and many Republicans from admitting it, it is already well established that CAIR has ties to terrorism.
CAIR, which masquerades as America’s largest Muslim civil rights group, is an outpost of international jihadism. It is an enemy propaganda organization whose longstanding ties to the terrorist underworld have been exhaustively documented at DiscoverTheNetworks and elsewhere. CAIR aims to influence America’s domestic and foreign policies. CAIR wants to make America safe for Sharia law by bullying Americans into not questioning Islam, a religion-centered ideology that has been generating a body count for 1,400 years. [Emphasis added.]
Accusing critics of so-called Islamophobia, a term invented by Islamists, is CAIR’s favorite method of silencing critics and opponents. It is part of a dangerous effort to discourage Americans from thinking freely and arriving at their own conclusions about Islam and mainstream the tenets of Islam in our society. The idea is to eventually make it as difficult and uncomfortable as possible to criticize the faith founded by Muhammad in the seventh century after the birth of Christ. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men, reports DiscoverTheNetworks, “had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and founded as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States.” CAIR opened an office in the nation’s capital with a $5,000 grant from the Marzook-founded Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a charity that the Bush administration shuttered in 2001 for collecting money “to support the Hamas terror organization.” CAIR called the action “unjust” and “disturbing.” In 2004 Marzook was indicted on racketeering charges related to his pro-Hamas activities. Ahmad was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial.
Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder of the Texas branch of CAIR, was convicted in 2005 of terrorism-related offenses and sentenced to 80 months in prison. CAIR civil rights director Randall Todd Royer was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on federal weapons and explosives charges in 2004. Bassem Khafagi, a community affairs director at CAIR, was convicted in 2003 on bank and visa fraud charges and agreed to be deported to Egypt. Rabih Haddad, a fundraiser for CAIR’s chapter in Ann Arbor, Mich., was detained in 2001 after overstaying his tourist visa. Authorities found a firearm and boxes of ammunition in his home. He served 19 months in prison and was deported to Lebanon in 2003. CAIR board member Abdurahman Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment for funneling at least $1 million to al-Qaeda. CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men, reports DiscoverTheNetworks, “had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and founded as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States.”
CAIR and related Islamist organizations have often participated in White House meetings; Dr. Jasser and his group have been excluded.
[F]or the past seven years, the Obama White House has opened its doors to the entire spectrum of radical Islamist groups, just like CAIR. These groups have rationalized the actions of Islamic terrorist groups that have killed Americans, warned American Muslims against cooperating with law enforcement, smeared genuine Muslim moderates like Zuhdi Jasser and Asra Nomani as traitors and accused anyone who dared to utter the term “radical Islam” as “Islamophobic.” These are the groups that the White House should have marginalized. The fact that Obama legitimized radical Islamist groups will be his real legacy.
Is Dr. Jasser’s version of Islam “fantasy Islam?” Historically and presently, it unfortunately is. It rejects aspects of Islamism with which very many Muslims agree.
But need that remain the case? Christianity has changed since the time of the Inquisition and perhaps Islam — which except technologically remains stuck in the middle ages — can eventually change as well — if and when Islamic nations encourage, rather than prohibit, free speech. I have seen few significant signs of that happening. Egyptian President Sisi — despised by Obama for opposing the Muslim Brotherhood — has tried and is trying. He may not be around much longer because of it.
Jasser’s hopes for the future generally parallel those of Ayan Hirsi Ali, who wants Islam to revert to relatively tolerant and peaceful Mecca Islam and to reject subsequent Medina Islam, the fruit of Mohamed’s greatly changed status in Medina to become a powerful warlord. I see little reason to expect that it will change in that direction even in the distant future, and less that it will do so soon. I hope that I am wrong.
In any event, Muslims will need to do most of the work themselves, and that will require that there be enough of them to do it. If and when that happens, perhaps we can help a little. The most important things that we can do will be to
1. Recognize that fundamentalist Islam is evil and shun rather than accept those who espouse it, such as CAIR and its affiliates and
2. Prevent the further invasion of the United States (it may well be too late for Obama’s America) by Muslims who adhere to fundamentalist Islam. Unfortunately, most of our current crop of Republicans seem quite unlikely even to try.
Islam is terrorizing the world, not because it can, but because the West allows it to.
************************
As someone specializing in Islamic jihadism, one would expect I’d have much to say immediately after jihadi attacks of the sort that recently occurred in San Bernardino, or Paris, or Mali, where a total of about 180 dead. Ironically, I don’t: such attacks are ultimately symptoms of what I do deem worthy of talk, namely, root causes. (What can one add when a symptom of the root cause he has long warned against occurs other than “told you so”?)
So what is the root cause of jihadi attacks? Many think that the ultimate source of the ongoing terrorization of the West is Islam. Yet this notion has one problem: the Muslim world is immensely weak and intrinsically incapable of being a threat. That every Islamic assault on the West is a terrorist attack—and terrorism, as is known, is the weapon of the weak—speaks for itself.
This was not always the case. For approximately one thousand years, the Islamic world was the scourge of the West. Today’s history books may refer to those who terrorized Christian Europe as Arabs, Saracens, Moors, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, or Tatars[1]—but all were operating under the same banner of jihad that the Islamic State is operating under.
No, today, the ultimate enemy is within. The root cause behind the nonstop Muslim terrorization of the West is found in those who stifle or whitewash all talk and examination of Muslim doctrine and history; who welcome hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants while knowing that some are jihadi operatives and many are simply “radical”; who work to overthrow secular Arab dictators in the name of “democracy” and “freedom,” only to uncork the jihad suppressed by the autocrats (the Islamic State’s territory consists of lands that were “liberated” in Iraq, Libya, and Syria by the U.S. and its allies).
So are Western leaders and politicians the root cause behind the Islamic terrorization of the West?
Close—but still not there yet.
Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking—the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West.
Remember, the reason people like French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are in power—three prominent Western leaders who insist that Islam is innocent of violence and who push for Muslim immigration—is because they embody a worldview that is normative in the West.
In this context, the facilitation of jihadi terror is less a top down imposition and more a grass root product of decades of erroneous, but unquestioned, thinking. (Those who believe America’s problems begin and end with Obama would do well to remember that he did not come to power through a coup but that he was voted in—twice. This indicates that Obama and the majority of voting Americans have a shared, and erroneous, worldview. He may be cynically exploiting this worldview, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s because this warped worldview is mainstream that he can exploit it in the first place.)
Western empowerment of the jihad is rooted in a number of philosophies that have metastasized into every corner of social life, becoming cornerstones of postmodern epistemology. These include the doctrines of relativism and multiculturalism on the one hand, and anti-Western, anti-Christian sentiment on the other.
Taken together, these cornerstones of postmodern, post-Christian thinking hold that there are no absolute truths and thus all cultures are fundamentally equal and deserving of respect. If any Western person wants to criticize a civilization or religion, then let them look “inwardly” and acknowledge their European Christian heritage as the epitome of intolerance and imperialism.
Add to these a number of sappy and silly ideals—truth can never be uttered because it might “hurt the feelings” of some (excluding white Christians who are free game), and if anything, the West should go out of its way to make up for its supposedly historic “sins” by appeasing Muslims until they “like us”—and you have a sure recipe for disaster, that is, the current state of affairs.
Western people are bombarded with these aforementioned “truths” from the cradle to the grave—from kindergarten to university, from Hollywood to the news rooms, and now even in churches—so that they are unable to accept and act on a simple truism that their ancestors well knew: Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant creed that cannot coexist with non-Islam (except insincerely, in times of weakness).
The essence of all this came out clearly when Obama, in order to rationalize away the inhuman atrocities of the Islamic State, counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and remember that their Christian ancestors have been guilty of similar if not worse atrocities. That he had to go back almost a thousand years for examples by referencing the crusades and inquisition—both of which have been completely distorted by the warped postmodern worldview, including by portraying imperialist Muslims as victims—did not matter to America’s leader.
Worse, it did not matter to most Americans. The greater lesson was not that Obama whitewashed modern Islamic atrocities by misrepresenting and demonizing Christian history, but that he was merely reaffirming the mainstream narrative that Americans have been indoctrinated into believing. And thus, aside from the usual ephemeral and meaningless grumblings, his words—as with many of his pro-Islamic, anti-Christian comments and policies—passed along without consequence.
As Islam retreated into obscurity, the post-Christian West slowly came into being. Islam didn’t change, but the West did: Muslims still venerate their heritage and religion—which impels them to jihad against the Western “infidel”—whereas the West learned to despise its heritage and religion, causing it to be an unwitting ally of the jihad.
Hence the current situation: the jihad is back in full vigor, while the West—not just its leaders, but much of the populace—facilitates it in varying degrees. Nor is this situation easily remedied. For to accept that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant is to reject a number of cornerstones of postmodern Western thinking that far transcend the question of Islam. In this context, nothing short of an intellectual/cultural revolution—where rational thinking becomes mainstream—will allow the West to confront Islam head on.
But there is some good news. With every Islamic attack, the eyes of more and more Western people are opened to the true nature of Muhammad’s religion. That this is happening despite generations of pro-Islamic indoctrination in the West is a testimony to the growing brazenness of the jihad.
Yet it still remains unclear whether objective thinking will eventually overthrow the current narrative of relativism, anti-Westernism, and asinine emotionalism.
Simply put, celebrating multiculturalism and defeating the jihad is impossible.
However, if such a revolution ever does take place, the Islamic jihad will be easily swept back into the dustbin of history. For the fact remains: Islam is terrorizing the world, not because it can, but because the West allows it to.
GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson is demanding the federal government investigate the links that the notorious Council on American-Islamic Relations has to Islamic terrorism.
“The Department of State should designate the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations that propagate or support Islamic terrorism as terrorist organizations, and fully investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and a supporter of terrorism,” Carson wrote in a policy paper in which he also called for a formal declaration of war against Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh).
Although political correctness prevents Democrats and many Republicans from admitting it, it is already well established that CAIR has ties to terrorism.
CAIR, which masquerades as America’s largest Muslim civil rights group, is an outpost of international jihadism. It is an enemy propaganda organization whose longstanding ties to the terrorist underworld have been exhaustively documented at DiscoverTheNetworks and elsewhere. CAIR aims to influence America’s domestic and foreign policies. CAIR wants to make America safe for Sharia law by bullying Americans into not questioning Islam, a religion-centered ideology that has been generating a body count for 1,400 years.
Accusing critics of so-called Islamophobia, a term invented by Islamists, is CAIR’s favorite method of silencing critics and opponents. It is part of a dangerous effort to discourage Americans from thinking freely and arriving at their own conclusions about Islam and mainstream the tenets of Islam in our society. The idea is to eventually make it as difficult and uncomfortable as possible to criticize the faith founded by Muhammad in the seventh century after the birth of Christ.
In the words of one critic, CAIR exists to undermine law enforcement and U.S. national security. The group’s goal “is to create as much self-doubt, hesitation, fear of name-calling, and litigation within police departments and intelligence agencies as possible so as to render such authorities ineffective in pursuing international and domestic terrorist entities.”
CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men, reports DiscoverTheNetworks, “had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and founded as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States.” CAIR opened an office in the nation’s capital with a $5,000 grant from the Marzook-founded Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a charity that the Bush administration shuttered in 2001 for collecting money “to support the Hamas terror organization.” CAIR called the action “unjust” and “disturbing.” In 2004 Marzook was indicted on racketeering charges related to his pro-Hamas activities. Ahmad was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial.
Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder of the Texas branch of CAIR, was convicted in 2005 of terrorism-related offenses and sentenced to 80 months in prison. CAIR civil rights director Randall Todd Royer was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on federal weapons and explosives charges in 2004. Bassem Khafagi, a community affairs director at CAIR, was convicted in 2003 on bank and visa fraud charges and agreed to be deported to Egypt. Rabih Haddad, a fundraiser for CAIR’s chapter in Ann Arbor, Mich., was detained in 2001 after overstaying his tourist visa. Authorities found a firearm and boxes of ammunition in his home. He served 19 months in prison and was deported to Lebanon in 2003. CAIR board member Abdurahman Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment for funneling at least $1 million to al-Qaeda. CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men, reports DiscoverTheNetworks, “had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and founded as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States.”
This is just the latest in a series of run-ins that Carson has had with CAIR.
In October, Carson called for the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of CAIR after it demanded he withdraw as a candidate. “CAIR is a tax-exempt nonprofit, and the IRS rules explicitly prohibit such groups from intervening in political campaigns on behalf of – or in opposition to – a candidate,” Carson said in an email to supporters.
CAIR, which labeled Carson a bigot and an Islamophobe, was upset because Carson said a Muslim should not be elected president.
“We find it interesting that Dr. Carson seeks to use a federal government agency to silence his critics and wonder if that tactic would be used to suppress First Amendment freedoms should he become president,” CAIR said at the time.
“CAIR is not in violation of any IRS regulation in that we did not ‘participate in’ or ‘intervene in’ any political campaign. We, as mandated by our mission as a civil rights organization, merely expressed the opinion of our community” that Carson’s views made him “unfit for public office.”
Obama White House press secretary Josh Earnest attacked Carson at the time saying his statement was “entirely inconsistent with the Constitution.”
“Ultimately, there will be consequences and those views will be taken into account by voters, not only in the primary, but also the general election,” Earnest said.
Anti-Islamism activist Pamela Geller defended Carson. “Electing a Muslim president would be dangerous. We have seen the Islamic pattern of previously moderate Muslims becoming devout and then aiding and abetting jihad. How could we be sure a Muslim president would not do the same?”
But at least three Republican presidential contenders took shots at Carson back then.
“You know, the Constitution specifies there shall be no religious test for public office, and I am constitutionalist,” Cruz said, citing Article VI of the Constitution, which forbids the use of a “religious test” for a candidate who sees public office.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), echoed Cruz, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Carson’s comments were evidence he is “not ready to be commander in chief.”
On Dec. 2 CAIR hastily arranged a press conference while the bodies of 14 American victims of jihadism in San Bernardino, Calif. were still warm in order to push a media narrative that exonerated Islam in the attack.
CAIR, which the United Arab Emirates designated a year ago as a terrorist group, got to work crafting a storyline about the mass-murdering Muslim married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. As they fashioned a template for lazy, gullible, or sympathetic reporters to embrace, CAIR officials behaved as if Farook and Malik were strange outliers and bad Muslims.
CAIR-LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush pretended Islam didn’t inspire the attack.
“We don’t know the motive. Is it work, rage-related? Is it mental illness? Is it extreme ideology? At this point it’s really unknown to us and it is too soon for us to speculate.”
Two days later, Ayloush changed his tune, blaming America for the shootings. “Let’s not forget that some of our own foreign policy, as Americans, as the West, have fueled that extremism,” he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “We are partly responsible. Terrorism is a global problem, not a Muslim problem. And the solution has to be global. Everyone has a role in it.”
It used to be that the American people chastised their leaders when they didn’t live up to their standards. But under the left, the guy who dug the country deep into debt, trashed national security and the economy, and is letting Islamic terrorists take over half the Middle East is the one “chastising” us.
President Obama chastised Americans on Tuesday for forgetting their immigrant roots and neglecting the lessons of a checkered history
“In the Syrian refugee today, we should see the Jewish refugee of World War II,” Obama said at the National Archives, surrounded by the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. “How quickly we forget. How quickly we forget,”
I’m surprised the original Constitution didn’t burst into flames.
Also the Jewish refugee of WW2 was fleeing genocide by, among others, Muslims. The Syrian Muslim (Obama refuses to take Syrian Christians or Yazidis) is perpetrating genocide. Obama is comparing the victims of genocide to the perpetrators of genocide.
Polls show that 13% of Syrian migrants support ISIS. That’s 1,300 out of every 10,000 Syrian Muslims Obama brings to America. And he’s forbidden law enforcement from even checking their social media. That’s why the San Bernardino attack happened.
“New York and cities across America were transformed into a sort of global fashion show. You had Dutch lace caps and the North African fezzes, stodgy tweed suits and colorful Caribbean dresses.”
9/11 was a real global fashion show. Just think of the ruins as a kind of “global catwalk” to show off some fezzes.
But wait… now it’s time to bash America’s “checkered history.”
“From the start, Africans were brought here in chains against their will, and then toiled under the whip… New York City shops displayed those signs, “No Irish Need Apply.” … Chinese immigrants faced persecution and vicious stereotypes, and were, for a time, even banned from entering America. During World War II, German and Italian residents were detained.”
Some of those slaves were sold by Obama’s ancestors. And his people continue to engage in violence against other African groups. But we detained certain people during WW2 when we were afraid of an invasion… so we must be ashamed.
We must resolve to always speak out against hatred and bigotry in all of its forms — whether taunts against the child of an immigrant farmworker or threats against a Muslim shopkeeper.
Also we must resolve to speak out when Obama’s favorite anti-Israel protesters hijack Jewish ceremonies and rant about Islamophobia. Or when the government forces nuns to violate their religion. We must speak out when Christians are fired for opposing gay marriage and when Jewish students are terrorized for opposing Islamic terrorism.
“The truth is, being an American is hard. Being part of a democratic government is hard.”
It gets easier when you ignore the legislature, the courts and the people… and rule by executive order.
“Where we work through the democratic process, and not through violence or sectarianism to resolve disputes”
And now let’s applaud the latest race riots and #BlackLivesMatter activists screaming hate at a Christmas tree ceremony.
“More than 60 years ago, at a ceremony like this one, Senator John F. Kennedy said, “No form of government requires more of its citizens than does the American democracy.”
And Obama is a reminder that too many of our citizens have failed.
[W]hat if Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were never “radicalized”? What if neither of them “influenced” the other? What if both were exactly what they appear to be, devout Muslims who hated America and believed that it was their religious duty to kill Americans? What if this attitude did not show up last week or last year? What if it was the way that their culture and religion taught them to live?
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After Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook killed 14 Americans in their corner of the Jihad over in San Bernardino, the media began its long laborious search for their moment of “radicalization”.
The assumption that the intersection of terrorism and Islam can only be an aberration lead to the conviction that there was some moment in time at which Malik and Farook became “radical extremists”. Initial reports pegged that moment of “radicalization” as having happened at some point during the twenty minutes after Farook left the party. When the amount of firepower and preparation made the idea of a twenty minute radicalization massacre seem silly, the media tried to stretch it back for weeks.
Now they’ve had to give in and pull back that dreadful moment of radicalization for years.
But what if Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were never “radicalized”? What if neither of them “influenced” the other? What if both were exactly what they appear to be, devout Muslims who hated America and believed that it was their religious duty to kill Americans? What if this attitude did not show up last week or last year? What if it was the way that their culture and religion taught them to live?
There are some easy ways to test that theory.
Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were Pakistani Muslims. Farook was a second-generation Pakistani immigrant who was born here, but when it came time for him to marry, he picked a Pakistani Muslim girl who shared his commitment to Islam and contempt for America. And that’s not unusual.
A fifth of Pakistanis want to leave their country, but they don’t like America. In a Gallup poll three years ago, 92% of Pakistanis disapproved of us. More significantly, 55% believed that more interaction between Muslim countries and the West posed a threat. In a Gallup poll, 62% of Pakistanis disliked us.
While officially Pakistan is our ally, it’s a fairly thin line between ISIS and the ordinary Pakistani.
83% of Pakistanis favor stoning adulterers, 80% support cutting the hands off thieves and 78% want to kill anyone who leaves Islam. Looking at numbers like these, we have to ask when the 4 out of 5 Pakistanis, or 144 million people were radicalized? That’s certainly a huge tiny minority of extremists.
A majority of Pakistanis grieved for Osama bin Laden and 44% believed that the dead terrorist leader was a martyr.
Pakistan carefully hid Osama bin Laden. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been accused of meeting with the Al Qaeda leader by former officers of its ISI intelligence agency. Documents show that his brother attempted to negotiate with Al Qaeda and “reestablish normal relations” with the terror group.
The politics of Pakistan might seem far away to us, but Tashfeen Malik’s uncle is an important political figure with Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz party. The family is described as having connections to “militant Islam”, but then again so does the entire Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz party.
Its antecedents were in the Muslim League which committed horrifying atrocities in India to carve out an Islamic State. The atrocities committed by the Muslim League’s Islamic butchers might have even turned the stomach of ISIS. Long before ISIS, the Muslim League created its “impossible dream” of a Muslim Pakistan through mass murder, mass rape and terror aimed at Hindus, Sikhs and other non-Muslims. Horrors such as the Noakhali genocide and Direct Action Day were worse than ISIS.
They are also the reason why Pakistan exists. The current ruling party in Pakistan is the political stepchild of those abominations and atrocities. It’s also a quite popular political party.
Was it really Tashfeen Malik who was “radicalized” or was it Pakistan?
Around a quarter of Pakistanis support terrorist attacks on civilians in the United States. Under a third support attacks on American civilians working in Muslim countries. Around half supported attacks on American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That’s a minority, but it still means that as many as 45 million Pakistanis support Muslim terrorist attacks in the United States. And Pakistani Muslims are one of the fastest growing groups in the United States.
The problem is obvious and we can’t make it go away with gun control and wishful thinking.
Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook weren’t radical, they were mainstream. Most Pakistanis don’t run around killing people. But their country was made possible by genocide and it exists because of its repression of non-Muslim minorities at home and its sponsorship of terror against Hindus in India.
Over 40% of Pakistanis support Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic terror group responsible for the Mumbai Massacre. It’s a Jihadist organization which declares that, “Jihad will continue until the Jews and Hindus throughout the globe meet their worst end”. Throughout the globe is a lot more expansive than India.
One of the worst Muslim terror plots in North America was a plan to kill thousands of Hindus in Toronto by Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani terror group of black converts to Islam. It’s also responsible for a number of other attacks in the United States.
The ugly truth is that Malik and Farook weren’t radicals or extremists. Their attitudes and beliefs are mainstream in Pakistan. It’s only compared to the beliefs and attitudes of the average American that they appear deranged. But that’s a moral and cultural difference. It doesn’t mean that Farook and Malik were aberrant by Pakistani Muslim standards, only that they appear aberrant by our higher standards.
And attacking our standards is a big part of what Islamic terrorism is about.
We are not fighting radicals or extremists, but people who have a fundamentally different view of the world than we do. In their world, Muslims should rule over non-Muslims, leaving Islam should be met with murder and free speech should be illegal. These are values that the vast majority of Pakistani Muslims agree on.
Not all of them have considered how these values must be imposed, but most Germans didn’t think too hard about how Hitler would keep his promises and most Russians didn’t ponder too closely just how Lenin intended to fulfill his plans. Historically people who want a totalitarian result end up accepting the totalitarian means of bringing it about. The “radicals” just think harder about the means. The “moderates” accept the ends and don’t want to think about the means of achieving those ends.
But when the moderates are forced to choose whether they are willing to accept the means to preserve the ends, they shout “Heil Hitler”, they inform on their neighbors and dispatch them to gulags, they shout “Allahu Akbar” and celebrate the murder of Americans by the “radical extremists”.
Malik and Farook wanted an Islamic State where infidels would be kept down, Islam would be the law of the land and brutal Islamic punishments would be dispensed. That is what most Pakistani Muslims want.
The San Bernardino terrorist attack wasn’t caused by some phantom virus of “internet radicalization”, but by the toxic attitudes and values that permeate Pakistani Muslim society and have made it such a warm and willing host for Islamic terrorist groups. It’s not the internet that is a threat. It’s immigration.
High numbers of Pakistani Muslims support many of the same ideas and beliefs as ISIS. As the size of the Pakistani Muslim population in the United States grew, it was only a matter of time until a successful attack on this scale would happen. We may be able to stop the next attack, but only if we are willing to accept the hard truths about who are our enemies are and what they believe.
They aren’t radicals. They aren’t extremists. They’re the enemy.
Today on Good Morning America, John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and now a national security consultant for ABC News, dropped a bombshell: over the objections of security-minded DHS personnel, the Obama administration secretly barred DHS from looking at postings on social media by visa applicants like Tashfeen Malik:
Fearing a civil liberties backlash and “bad public relations” for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end a secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, a former senior department official said. …
Former DHS under-secretary Cohen said he and others pressed hard for just such a policy change in 2014 that would allow a review of publicly-posted social media messages as terror group followers increasingly used Twitter and Facebook to show their allegiance to a variety of jihadist groups.
Cohen said officials from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) both pressed for a change in policy.
“Immigration, security, law enforcement officials recognized at the time that it was important to more extensively review public social media postings because they offered potential insights into whether somebody was an extremist or potentially connected to a terrorist organization or a supporter of the movement,” said Cohen, who left DHS in June 2014.
Cohen said the issue reached a head at a heated 2014 meeting chaired by Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, other top deputies and representatives of the DHS Office of Civil Liberties and the Office of Privacy.
“The primary concern was that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly and there were concerns that it would be embarrassing,” Cohen said in an interview broadcast on “Good Morning America” today.
No doubt the policy will now be changed, but it is too late for the 14 people who were murdered by Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook.
As is so often the case with the Obama administration, one is confronted with a policy of such towering stupidity that one wonders whether it can be accidental. If you wanted more terrorists to enter the United States, what would you do differently?
The San Bernardino attackers Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook (Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection)
In his speech to the nation following the San Bernardino terror attack, U.S. President Barack Obama made a rightful plea to Muslims: “If we’re to succeed in defeating terrorism, we must enlist Muslim communities.” Making his case, Obama again rightly stated that “extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities” and “it’s a real problem that Muslims must confront without excuse.”
The president then insisted that Muslim leaders in American as well as around the world work with the U.S. to “root out” the problem, reject violence and ideological supremacism and promote “mutual respect and human dignity.”
It is telling in the fight against Islamist extremism who is rallying with the president on these points and who is fighting against him.
Linda Sarsour, executive director of the taxpayer-funded Arab American Association and co-founder of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, had this to say about Obama’s request: “We would never ask any other faith community to stand up and condemn acts of violence committed by people within their groups.”
Really? If Christians worldwide were committing terrorist rampages across the globe citing sources that it is sanctioned or even required by their religion, we wouldn’t ask for American Christians to condemn them and make sure their children did not get swayed by them?
Sarsour and her fellow apologists understand this well. What Sarsour’s remarks are meant to accomplish is a complete sidestep of the entire issue, ironically facilitated by Obama himself. Obama’s refusal to tie “extremist ideology” to Islam makes it is possible for Sarsour and those who share her sentiments to claim “Islamophobia” and call it a day.
Further commenting on Obama’s request, Sarsour said, “The fact that this is only directed at the Muslim community is something that I personally can’t accept.”
(It could be that Sarsour doesn’t feel the same way about violence as does the president. One of her recent tweets featured a Palestinian child with a rock in each of his hands approaching Israeli soldiers. Sarsour wrote underneath: “The definition of courage.”)
Muslims who are truly interested in rooting out the extremism in their midst would not bristle at Obama’s request. Indeed, many are already active in the fight against those who they believe are perverting their religion. They acknowledge the problem and don’t think it’s “Islamophobic” to talk about it.
“What we need to do now — rather than giving a forum to self-appointed spokespeople like CAIR who have not led the fight against extremism — is listen to those who have actually been taking on this very struggle the president referenced,” says Karima Bennoune, a University of Davis law professor, author of Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism. “Our conversation should be why and what is it in our theology that has been so bastardized to give people permission to kill? Until we honestly root this out, we will by default be blamed,” she said.
Nidal Alsayyed, an imam who heads the Islamic Center of Triplex of Beaumont, Texas went one step further, saying that he agrees with presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposal to halt Muslim immigration into the U.S. until the country’s “representatives can figure out what is going on.”
“I certainly see it to be wise (to) stop temporarily accepting any new Muslim immigrants (refugees and non-refugees) into the United States,” said Alsayyed. “We American Muslims need to be sincere in our religion and to the country we are living in. Peace comes before religion. We need to be truthful and transparent when we express a viewpoint or feedback. It does not matter whether Trump said it or anyone else,” he added.
Democratic president candidate Hillary Clinton has refused to use the words “radical Islam,” saying, “It doesn’t do justice to the vast number of Muslims in our country and around the world who are peaceful people.”
On the contrary. “Not saying it, when it represents a reality, is much worse,” says Bennoune. And certainly, not saying it will not make the problem go away.
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