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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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It’s Not ‘Islamophobic’ to Protest a Pro-Hamas Speaker

April 7, 2016

It’s Not ‘Islamophobic’ to Protest a Pro-Hamas Speaker, National Review, M. Zuhdi Jasser, April 6, 2016

taleb

This past Good Friday, the Islamic Society of Wichita, Kan., invited a self-declared Hamas supporter, Sheikh Monzer Taleb, as a special guest for its fundraising event. Sheikh Taleb is a notorious figure in the Muslim community, bringing controversy — and hate — wherever he goes. That is, until Representative Mike Pompeo caught wind of the plans and took a stand, calling on the Islamic Society to cancel the event, to the ire of the group and some in the community.

Sheikh Taleb has proudly sung as part of a pro-Hamas group that calls for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people, even declaring on video: “I am from Hamas.” His other extremist ties are also significant and damning: In the 2008 terrorism-financing case against the Holy Land Foundation, Taleb was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” for his deep association with Hamas. The case resulted in guilty verdicts on all 108 counts against leaders of the Foundation.

All Americans have a duty to speak out, like Pompeo did, for if we stay silent, we give Islamists a pass to suffocate critical thinking inside Muslim communities. There is nothing more American, more pro-Islam, and more pro-Muslim than taking a stand against the extremist and anti-Semitic hate spewed by Islamist individuals like Sheikh Taleb. In fact, this tough love is what every Muslim community needs to pursue on its own, long before their elected representative have to intervene.

Marginalizing and exposing the ideas of Sheikh Taleb and others like him is crucial if we are to effectively counter Islamist ideology and radicalization. This is the sort of reform work the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) encourages. Before Islamic terrorists become hell-bent on using violence, extremist Islamist ideologues radicalize them. Islamist movements such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood reject the liberal secular democratic order and seek an Islamic state with sharia law, filled with ugly anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

This debate is not about silencing speech, but rather about exposing and defeating extremist Islamist ideas. From San Bernardino to Brussels, radical Islamism will never be defeated unless Muslims and non-Muslims alike expose it, confront it, and marginalize it, much as Mike Pompeo did in Wichita last month.

It seems obvious that Sheikh Taleb’s Hamas sympathies and connections would make any American Muslim organization hesitant to have anything to do with him, much less invite him as a special guest to an event. Particularly in today’s climate, one would think that the Islamic Society of Wichita would want to stay as far away as possible from Taleb. Better yet, one would hope they would protest his appearances at mosques around the country in order to truly convey their dedication to reforming the hateful ideas that radicalize Muslims in our communities.

Instead, the Islamic Society of Wichita was stubborn in its invitation, cancelling the event only when Pompeo expressed serious concern and community pressure mounted. Now, rather than admitting its mistake, the Islamic Society of Wichita has the temerity to play the victim, blaming Kansans for their “Islamophobia.” The Islamic Society is attempting to dodge responsibility and avoid the repercussions of its terrible and even dangerous decision. But the facts remain the same: The Islamic Society invited and was planning to fête a man who has supported Hamas not only in word but also in deed, by raising funds for the terrorist group. In this case, the Islamic Society of Wichita can blame only itself for increased tensions in the community.

The event featuring Sheikh Taleb was canceled, yet it is critical for Kansans and all Americans, both Muslims and non-Muslims, to take a long, hard look at some of the key instigators and ideologies of extremist sentiment: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the other Hamas-sympathizing, Muslim Brotherhood–tied individuals and groups passing themselves off as mainstream.

M. Zuhdi Jasser is the president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. He is a former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and the author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam.

Categories: CAIR, Hamas, Islam in America, Islamic reformation, Islamophobia, Muslim Brotherhood
Tags: CAIR, Hamas, Islam in America, Islamic reformation, Islamophobia, Muslim Brotherhood

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The Bipartisan Enemy of the Good

April 5, 2016

The Bipartisan Enemy of the Good, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, April 5, 2016

secretary_kerry_with_president_al-sisi_july_2014

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

On March 25, The New York Times published an editorial effectively calling for US President Barack Obama to abandon the US alliance with Egypt.

The Obama White House’s house paper urged the president to “reassess whether an alliance that has long been considered a cornerstone of American national security policy is doing more harm than good.” The editorial concluded that Obama must “start planning for the possibility of a break in the alliance with Egypt.”

The Times’ call was based on an open letter to Obama authored by a bipartisan group of foreign policy experts that call themselves the “Working Group on Egypt.” Citing human rights violations on the part of the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Working Group urged Obama to tie US financial and military assistance to Egypt to the protection of NGOs operating in Egypt.

The self-proclaimed bipartisan band of experts is co-chaired by Robert Kagan from the Brookings Institution and Michele Dunne from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Among its prominent members are Elliott Abrams, Ellen Bork, Reuel Gerecht, Brian Katulis, Neil Hicks and Sarah Margon.

The Working Group has a history.

In January 2011, it called for Obama to force then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to resign from office. In so doing, it provided bipartisan cover for Obama’s decision to abandon the US’s most critical and dependable ally in the Arab world. Then, as now, the group’s esteemed experts argued that due to the regime’s infringement of human rights, the US could not in good conscience support it. Back in 2011, Israelis found a rare wall-to-wall unanimity of purpose in vocally and forcefully defending Mubarak from his American detractors. From the far Left to the far Right, from the IDF General Staff to the street, Israelis warned anyone who would listen that if Mubarak were forced out of power, the Muslim Brotherhood would take over and transform Egypt into a jihadist state.

Due in large part to the presence of senior Republican foreign policy hands on the Working Group, by and large Israel’s warnings were ignored in Washington. Facing the unusual Israeli consensus backing Mubarak was an American consensus insisting that “democracy” would ensure that a new liberal democratic Egypt would emerge out the ashes of the Mubarak regime.

The Americans chided us for repeating over and over again that the Muslim Brotherhood, the progenitor of al-Qaida, Hamas, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and every other major Sunni jihadist terrorist group around at the time, was a terrorist group.

We were attacked as “anti-democratic,” for insisting that the Facebook posters and twitterers on Twitter were in no position to replace Mubarak.

Who were we, the Americans scoffed, to point out that the “Facebook revolutionaries” were but a flimsy veneer which barely hid the Islamists from willfully blind Western officials and reporters who refused to admit that liberal values are not universal values – to put it mildly.

In the ensuing five years, every single warning that Israel expressed was borne out in spades.

Just as we said, right after Mubarak was forced from power, the Islamists unceremoniously dispatched with the Facebook crowd. The two million Islamists who converged on Tahrir Square to hear Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi call for jihad and the Islamic conquest of Israel weren’t interested in democracy.

The women and Christians of Egypt soon realized, Mubarak’s overthrow, which paved the way for the Muslim Brotherhood electoral victories in 2012, did not expand their rights, it endangered their lives. As for the hapless Americans, immediately after Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi was inaugurated to serve as president of Egypt, the government began demanding that the US release from prison Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheikh who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. The US embassy in Cairo was the target of jihadist riots on September 11, 2012.

Then, since Morsi was elected democratically, none of this was any sweat off the back of Washington’s Egypt experts. They supported sending F-16s to his air force even after he hosted then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Cairo, let Iranian warships traverse the Suez Canal and became a strategic ally of Hamas. They also supported his government, even though he enabled Libyan arms to flow through Egypt to Syria, transforming the war in Syria from a local dispute into the incubator for Islamic State – the precursor of which Morsi also gave a free hand to operate in the Sinai, in conjunction with Hamas.

The Americans didn’t reconsider their belief that Morsi was the guy for them, even after he allowed his Muslim Brothers to torch Coptic churches and massacre Christians. They didn’t revisit their support for the Muslim Brotherhood government even after Morsi arrogated to himself dictatorial powers that even Mubarak never dreamed of.

Perhaps if Morsi had been a responsible economic leader, and maintained the liberalization policies Mubarak enacted during his last five years in power, then defense minister Abdel Fatah Sisi wouldn’t have felt the need to remove him from power. After all, Morsi appointed Sisi to his position.

But in addition to ending even lip service to human rights, Morsi gutted the economy. By the time the military overthrew Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in the summer of 2013, Egypt had a mere $5 billion in reserves, and according to the World Health Organization, a quarter of Egyptians were starving.

So had the Muslim Brotherhood remained in power, Egypt would not have remained a democracy.

It would have become a jihadist state as dangerous as Iran, with the economic prospects of North Korea.

In other words, five years ago, there was no chance that a post-Mubarak Egypt would become a liberal democracy. There were only two options – a US-allied tyranny that fought jihad and maintained the peace with Israel, or a jihad state, aligned with Iran, that posed an existential threat to Israel, Jordan, the US and the international economy.

Those are still the choices today, but the stakes are even higher. Due to the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power, the jihadist elements that gathered force in the Sinai over the past 20 years were able to organize as a more or less unified force, under the rule of Islamic State (ISIS), and in strategic alliance with Hamas. Like ISIS in Syria, ISIS in Egypt is an aggressive, dangerous group that stops at nothing to achieve its aims of expanding the ISIS empire.

The war it now fights against the Egyptian state is a total war.

To his credit, Sisi recognizes the nature of the threat and has taken steps to counter jihad that Mubarak never contemplated. The Egyptian leader recognizes that to defeat ISIS nothing less than a reformation of Islam is required. And so, in addition to fighting ISIS with everything he has, he is risking everything by taking on the jihadist belief system.

Sisi has mobilized the clerics at Al-Azhar seminary to develop an Islamic narrative that rejects jihad.

Sisi risks everything because everything is already at risk. If ISIS wins, Egypt is finished.

To win this war, he has publicly embraced Israel as an ally. He has openly sided with Israel against Hamas. Unlike Mubarak, Sisi has been fully willing to acknowledge that just because Hamas’s primary victims are Jews doesn’t mean that it isn’t a terrorist group that has to be destroyed.

Without putting too fine a point on in, for his fearless fight to the death with the forces of jihad – both in the mosque and on the battlefield – Sisi has already entered the pantheon, alongside Winston Churchill, of word historical figures. And yet, rather than embrace him and support him in his fight for Egypt and humanity, the same “experts” who called for Mubarak to be overthrown now urge Obama to abandon Sisi.

It is depressing that there is no magic bullet – like democracy – for the pathologies that afflict the Islamic world. But there is no magic bullet. And there are no easy choices for people who refuse to recognize that the natural state of man is neither liberal nor democratic.

But it is hard to accept the credibility of those who refuse to learn from their mistakes. It is harder still as well to listen to the “moral calls” of those who refuse to accept that because their past advice was heeded, thousands have died, and if their current calls are heeded, millions of lives will be imperiled.

Categories: Egypt, Foreign policy, Human rights, Islam and human rights, Islamic reformation, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Leftists, Morsi, Mubarak, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Egypt, Obama and Islam, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Republicans, Sisi, U.S. Congress
Tags: Egypt, Foreign Policy, human rights, Islam and human rights, Islamic reformation, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Leftists, Morsi, Mubarak, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Egypt, Obama and Islam, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Republicans, Sisi, U.S. Congress

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Two Clashes of Civilizations

April 4, 2016

Two Clashes of Civilizations, Dan Miller’s Blog, April 3, 2016

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

One clash involves those who would make America more corrupt, more violent, more drug addicted and poorer. The other involves those who would make Islam dominant, bringing us Sharia law along with the violence and social unrest now seen in Europe.

Illegal immigration from South of the Border

Is she right or wrong?

Corruption in the United States mainly (but not exclusively) enriches the political class. In the Latin Amerian countries my wife and I explored during our seven years of sailing in the Caribbean, we saw corruption in most countries. However, rather than being mainly at the top, it was accepted and relied upon by all levels of society. Venezuela under Chavez was the worst. The more illegal immigrants from Latin America who enter America, the more corruption we will have at all levels.

Our southern border is not a sieve; it is wide open to all who can get to it, with no significant efforts to restrict entry or to deport the many who get across illegally.

Perhaps that’s among the reasons why the U.S. Border Patrol agents’ union broke with its policy of endorsing no presidential candidate to support Donald Trump.

“We need a person in the White House who doesn’t fear the media, who doesn’t embrace political correctness, who doesn’t need the money, who is familiar with success, who won’t bow to foreign dictators, who is pro-military and values law enforcement, and who is angry for America and NOT subservient to the interests of other nations. Donald Trump is such a man,” the union said.

Trump had scheduled a tour of the border with agents from a local chapter of the union, but that tour was canceled due to pressure from the group’s national headquarters. Yet the endorsement, which Trump’s campaign touted Wednesday, came from the national union.

The results of our open border are felt well beyond border states. In St. Louis, Missouri for example, a substantial spike in violent crime has been traced to cheap heroin and Mexican cartels. Ditto Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

“The gangs have to have a lot of customers because the heroin is so cheap,” said Gary Tuggle, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief in Philadelphia, who observed the same phenomenon while overseeing the agency’s Baltimore office. ”What we are seeing is these crews becoming more violent as they look to expand their turf.”

To attract customers, the cartels — usually through a local surrogate — instruct gangs to sell the drug at prices as low as $5 for each button (about one-tenth of a gram of powdered heroin, which could last a novice user an entire day). At times, the gangs distribute free samples, according to agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Drugs are one part of the illegal immigration problem, but far from the only part. On March 16th, an article by Victor Davis Hanson was posted at PJ Media. It was titled The Weirdness of Illegal Immigration. Hanson’s basic thesis is that illegal immigration begets disregard for the law and hence additional lawlessness.

[C]ontemplate what happens in a social, cultural, and economic context when several million immigrants arrive from one of the poorest areas in the world (e.g., Oaxaca) to one of the most affluent (e.g., California). For guidance, think not of Jorge Ramos, but of the premodern/postmodern collision that is occurring in Germany, Austria, and Denmark.

The first casualty is the law. I am not referring to the collapse of federal immigration enforcement, but rather the ripples that must follow from it. When someone ignores a federal statute, then it is naturally easy to flout more. In Los Angeles, half the traffic accidents are hit-and-run collisions. I can attest first-hand that running from an accident or abandoning a wrecked vehicle is certainly a common occurrence in rural California. Last night on a rural road, a driver behind me (intoxicated? Malicious? Crazy?) apparently tried to rear-end me, then turned off his lights, sped up, and at the next stop sign pulled over swearing out the window in Spanish. In this age and in these environs, why would one call a sheriff for a minor everyday occurrence like that? The point is simply that when there is no federal law, no one has any idea how several million arrive in the U.S., much less what exactly they were doing before their illegal arrival. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Out here almost all laws concerning the licensing and vaccination of dogs seem to have simply disappeared. No one can walk or ride a bicycle along these rural roads without being attacked by hounds that are unlicensed and not vaccinated—and that have no ID or indeed owners that step forward to claim ownership once the victim is bleeding. The Bloomberg Rule reigns (i.e., if you can’t keep snow off the street, deplore global warming or cosmic war): we talk of dreamers because we have not a clue how to ensure that hundreds of thousands of pets are registered and given rabies shots. No one suggests that once one breaks the law of his adopted home, and continues to do so through false affidavits, aliases, and fraudulent documents, then the law itself become an abstraction, useful as a shelter, expendable if an inconvenience. Again, one assumes that if a citizen were to do that, he would face a felony indictment.

. . . .

An indigent Oaxacan immigrant is reminded more often by his host that his poverty is not the result of his own wild gamble to leave his home and enter illegally an entirely foreign universe, but due to the racism, nativism, and xenophobia of his clueless host—pathologies that can be ameliorated by plenty of advocates whose own careers are predicated on open borders and slow if any assimilation.

Yesterday, I saw this story of a walkout from a local high school, five miles away: Among the many racialized complaints was a strange one that that were not enough Latino school board members (that might apparently ensure interpreters at board meeting). “We feel oppressed and underrepresented. When we try to speak up, they don’t listen,” said student Monica Velazquez. “When the majority of the school board is white and male, I don’t see us being represented. And [Laton High School] is just a small piece of that problem.” In our world of victimology, being oppressed and underrepresented are quirky assertions (e.g., ethnic chauvinism mean that coveted spots must reflect ethnic percentages of the population, while ethnic disproportion in unmentionable activities is left unsaid).

Where does all this lead? I suggest we open our eyes and watch it in progress. Mass flight either out of state, or to coastal enclaves, where liberalism and abstract progressive utopianism can be indulged safety without worries over the concrete ramifications that follow from one’s own idealism. If deeds trump words, then the real racists or exclusionists are those in the mostly affluent coastal enclaves who suddenly want no part of the California that they have helped to create.

The final tragedy? If the border were to be closed, if immigration laws were enforced, if there were some reduction in legal immigration, if entry were to be meritocratic, if we reverted to the melting-pot ideal of assimilation, if we cut –studies courses and jettisoned therapy and ideology for hard science, math, and English language, in just two decades one’s particular ancestry would become irrelevant — the image of Oaxaca would be analogous to having a grandfather from Palermo or cousin from the Azores. In other words, things would work out fine.

Please read the entire article. It’s one of VDH’s best.

Sanctuary cities? An article titled Terrorism, Enclaves and Sanctuary Cities compares sanctuary cities to “no-go zones”in Europe.

While there are no actual “No Go Zones” in the United States, there are neighborhoods scattered around the United States, where the concentration of ethnic immigrant minorities is so great that police find themselves unable to make the sort of inroads that they should be able to make in order to effectively police these communities. Adding to the high density of these aliens in these communities is the issue of foreign languages often being the prevalent language in such “ghettos.” This gives new meaning to the term “Language Barrier.”

. . . .

Not unlike the “No Go Zones” of European countries, these communities in the Unites States also tend to shield foreign nationals who may be fugitives from justice both inside the United States and in other countries. Terrorists and their supporters are able to go about their daily lives- undetected by law enforcement agencies.

Implementation of sanctuary policies in such cities greatly exacerbates the threats posed to national security and public safety- turning those cities into magnets that attract still more radicals and fugitives and terrorists who need to “fly under the radar.”

Any community that provides safe haven for illegal aliens willfully endangers the lives of it residents.

Even as concerns about increased threats of terror attacks are the topic of a succession of Congressional hearings, so-called “Sanctuary Cities” continue to flourish- with the tacit approval of the administration even though they are clearly operating in violation of federal law.

Islamic immigration, legal and illegal

Europe

Much of Europe has been overrun with Islamic “immigrants” and “refugees.” In consequence, Sweden, Germany and other nations are faring poorly. It is virtually impossible to determine who they are (use of forged passports and other identity documents is rampant), where they come from or whether they are seeking refuge from violence in their home countries or ways to bring it to Europe on behalf of Allah “the all merciful.” Perhaps national suicide is a “merciful” way to go. Unfortunately, few in Europe’s political class acknowledge the nature of the predicament their constituents face.

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.

There are many excuses: Misconceptions that violent Muslims are that way simply because they are poor and unloved, a misperceived need to expand the workforce by importing those unwilling and/or unable to participate in that workforce are parts of the problem. So is Europe’s “original sin” of colonialism, for which all of Europe must atone. Another is a fear that if they are not appeased Muslims will become more violent.

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).

Turkish Muslims living in Germany are on the move. Are they “refugees” (from where) or economic “immigrants” just seeking a better life?

Turkish Muslims living in Germany threaten Germany Shouting “With Allah’s (and Merkel’s?) help, we shall conquer you,” Turkish Muslims take to the streets of Germany, carrying Turkish flags and using the ‘Grey Wolves’ salute, the Turkish equivalent of a National Socialist (NAZI) salute. Just think, Angela Merkel has just signed an agreement to allow Turkish Muslims into Germany without having to get a visa.

Don’t they seem grateful for their new opportunities to prosper? Oh well. Swedish women and girls gotta “love” them, like it or not.

Some “ordinary” Europeans are getting fed with up mass immigration and support anti-immigrant politicians. The left objects.

“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.”

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.

Obama’s America

A relatively small, but significant, number of Muslims now live in America.

In 2005, more people from Islamic countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than there had been in any other year in the previous two decades.^[13]^[14] In 2009, more than 115,000 Muslims became legal residents of the United States.^[15]

That’s just those who are legally present. Those present illegally? The powers-that-be haven’t a clue as to who they are, where they are, how they got here, where they came from or what they want. We experienced the gifts bestowed upon us by some legally present in Obama’s America during the Boston marathon as well as in Fort Hood, San Bernardino and elsewhere.

Obama has already brought in more than 76,000 “Syrian refugees.” More seem to be on the way.

President Barack Obama has been quietly pushing new plans to bring thousands of additional Syrian refugees into the country, despite the concerns of state and county officials and the outrages committed by welfare-dependent migrants in Europe.

Obama’s special assistant to the president for immigration policy, Felicia Escobar, recently announced plans to increase America’s intake of migrants, according to the Washington Examiner.

“We want to make sure that we can increase our numbers of refugees that are able to settle here,” Escobar said. “The need globally is so, so, so massive right now, given all the displacement and conflict around the world, but we also know that we have to do it in a way that’s smart.”

Federal law already allows the administration to bring in 10,000 Syrian refugees a year, but many states and local county administrations have complained that once the Obama administration places refugees among them, few resources are available to deal with them.

The influx is very unpopular, according to polls. Also, nearly all immigrants from the Middle East are dependent on welfare. Some migrant and some second-generation Muslim Americans also embrace jihad.

During his March 2016 visit to a mosque, Obama praised Muslims living in America.

In rebuke to politicians like Donald Trump, Obama presented Islam as an essential part of the nation’s heritage, going back to Muslim slaves brought to the British colonies and running through Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom up to Fazlur Rahman Khan, who designed two of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers. And he spoke emotionally about mail he received from Muslim American children and parents who felt persecuted and unsafe.

“We’re one American family. And when any part of our family starts to feel separate or second-class or targeted, it tears at the very fabric of our nation,” he said.

. . . .

On Wednesday he responded to critics—especially Republican contenders to replace him in the White House—who complain that he won’t label Islamic terrorism as such, saying demands to label by religion only play into extremist propaganda.

“I often hear it said that we need moral clarity in this fight. And the suggestion is somehow that if I would simply say, ‘These are all Islamic terrorists,’ then we would actually have solved the problem by now, apparently,” he said. “Let’s have some moral clarity: Groups like ISIS are desperate for legitimacy…. We must never give them that legitimacy. They’re not defending Islam. They’re not defending Muslims.”

Implicitly responding to tiresome calls for the “moderate Muslims” to speak out against terrorism, Obama said that they are speaking—but not enough people are listening. He vowed to work to amplify their voices. [Emphasis added.|

There are, in fact, Muslims who want to reform Islam; Obama pays them scant attention. Instead, He consorts with CAIR and it’s co-conspirators to keep Islam just the way it is. Here’s a video of some reform-minded Muslims. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, produced and directed it as well as others in the Honor Diaries series.

And here’s a video of some who think Islam is just fine the way it is.

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.

In Heretic, Hirsi Ali argued,

There is probably no realistic chance that Muslims in countries such as Pakistan will agree to dispense with sharia. However, we in the West must insist that Muslims living in our societies abide by our rule of law. We must demand that Muslim citizens abjure sharia practices and punishments that conflict with fundamental human rights and Western legal codes. Moreover, under no circumstances should Western countries allow Muslims to form self-governing enclaves in which women and other supposedly second-class citizens can be treated in ways that belong in the seventh century. [Emphasis added.]

Yet there are Islamic enclaves in America where Sharia is practiced. According to The Clarion Project, there are at least twenty-two.

Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani militant group that has rebranded itself as Muslims of the Americas, says it has 22 “Islamic villages” in the U.S. Its “Islamberg” headquarters in New York is the most well-known.

The Clarion Project identified one village in Texas in 2014 and the group mentioned others, including one in Alaska during a frivolous lawsuit it filed against a prominent critic.

Fuqra’s 1994 book, Target Islam: Exposing the Malicious Conspiracy of the Zionists Against the World of Islam and Prominent Muslim Leaders,explains that its establishment of “villages” in the U.S. since 1980 is part of a jihad against a Satanic-Jewish-Communist conspiracy that puppeteers the U.S. government.

They have a cultish devotion to their extremist leader in Pakistan, Sheikh Gilani, who they believe is in constant contact with Allah and the Prophet Mohammed and a miracle worker chosen by Allah to lead Islam to victory.

. . . .

“The Jammatul Fuqra has been able to establish justice according to Islamic Law, not only in the United States, but wherever Muslims are living under un-Islamic laws. According to the Holy Q’uran, a Muslim is not allowed to follow laws other than the law of the Holy Qu’ran…This so-called ‘freedom’ is actually enslavement by the kufaar [non-Muslims] and Shaitan [Satan]…”

It continues:

“On these sites where Islamic Law is enforced as much as possible, anyone who commits a crime against the Law of Allah is punished according to Ta’azerat….Here you see one person receiving twenty lashes in one [Sharia] court in South America. He was found guilty of violating the honor of a Muslim lady, a crime for which he received a hard punishment with patience and faith.”

The article says that the hudud punishments, such as execution and severing of hands and feet, cannot be enforced in kuffar (infidel) lands like the U.S. Notice that this isn’t a stand against sharia‘s brutal hudud punishments; just that they aren’t implementable at this time.

With freedoms of speech and religion lacking in Islamic countries, America could become the birthplace of Islamic reform. With Obama in office? Not a chance.

Conclusions

People from some foreign cultures have integrated and become productive American citizens. Many who have come illegally have not and live on welfare payments and other government subsidies. Since the current administration welcomes them and seeks more, we get (some) cheap labor, plentiful cheap heroin and substantial welfare costs. We also get drug gang-related violence, lawlessness metastasizing into areas beyond immigration itself and corruption.

Our Islamic “refugees” and “immigrants” bring us some similar and some different bounties, just a bit less thus far. They bring us the gift of jihad and Sharia law while enjoying welfare-based lives and complaining that anyone who complains is racist and “Islamophobic.”

There is little that any of us, individually, can do to halt or even slow the Haspanification and Islamification of America. We need to vote for leaders who will undertake — seriously and not merely with pleasing slogans — the legislative and legitimate executive steps needed for that purpose.

Categories: 2016 elections, Corruption, Donald Trump, Europe, Freedom of speech, Human rights, Illegal immigration, Islam and honor, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic jihad, Islamic reformation, Islamisation, Multiculturalism, Obama and Islam, Obama's America
Tags: Corruption, Donald Trump, Europe, freedom of speech, human rights, Illegal immigration, Islam and honor, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic Jihad, Islamic reformation, Islamisation, Multiculturalism, Obama and Islam, Obama's America

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Islamic Terror: What Muslim Americans Can Do

March 28, 2016

Islamic Terror: What Muslim Americans Can Do, Prager University via You Tube, March 28, 2016

(It’s a small start, but it’s at least a start. — DM)

Categories: Islam, Islam and human rights, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic reformation
Tags: Islam, Islam and human rights, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic reformation

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Here Are the Moderate Muslims; Where are YOU?

March 27, 2016

Here Are the Moderate Muslims; Where are YOU? Clarion Project, Raheel Reza, March 27, 2016

(The author is active in the Islamic reform movement, is doing good works and should be listened to by our “leaders.” However, her views on the Islamic roots of Islamic terror seem a tad off base. — DM)

Freedom_go_to_hell-640

(Photo © Voyou Desoeuvre – Flickr: “Freedom go to hell”, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24190977)

Following the Brussels attacks, I’ve been glued to mainstream media listening very attentively to political pundits, intelligence agencies, experts and analysts. Something in what they are saying sounds familiar. Oh yes – it’s the same rhetoric that we heard since 9/11. Fifteen years down the road from the first mass attack on the West, and all we seem to be able to do is parrot the same questions.

Why do they hate us?
Why are there so many siblings involved?
Why is there lack of co-operation from ‘the community’?
Where are the moderate Muslim voices?

For the fiftieth time let me take it from the top.

They hate us because they don’t want to accept their own inadequacies and failures. They hate that we have freedoms they do not have and they hate us most because we are a successful liberal democracy while they have not invented or created anything new in the past 100 years. So they fall back on grievances – real and imagined to create a monster they call the West. Also they have declared the West as the land of war (not my words) and they feel justified to attack us. Even Achmed the dead terrorist gets it when he says “I will keel you” But you don’t.
Why is the question of sibling involvement so hard to comprehend? Siblings and close friends are the easiest to radicalize because they are close to you and open to your ideas and suggestions. In case of the San Bernardino terrorist couple, we know the wife radicalized the spouse. This is common in close knit communities. So when groups are ghettoized and shut themselves off from the mainstream, this is bound to happen.
The community has also been brainwashed by invoking Colonial oppression, invasion of Muslim lands, Afghanistan, Iraq and of course the lightening rod which is the Arab-Israeli conflict. None of these by the way have any bearing on why the radical Islamists are attacking the West because there are few terrorists that come from Afghanistan and Iraq. Pakistan has not been invaded, yet there is a direct link to this country in terms of radical Jihadists.
Where are the moderate Muslim voices? Well let me tell you that reform-minded and progressive Muslims have been speaking out since 9/11 and telling you that there is a global Islamist jihadist insurgency that will invade and attack us unless we wake up and smell the coffee.

So let me ask you. We are speaking out but what are you doing? What actions have the law enforcement agencies, the governments of the Western world and its leadership taken to stem the ideology that is being exported to the West?

We have explained time and again that the Islamists (ISIS and their ilk) are not Muslim fanatics like most people think. They are criminals. Their ideology has nothing to do with the spiritual message of Islam. It’s a politically-charged message infecting the minds of millions of Muslims.

You say that’s too high a number? Well watch the documentary By the Numbers and you will know better.

So ranting about the Quran and Mohammad has really no value in how to deal with the problem at hand. Ignorance and bigotry will not solve the problem of radical Islam. In fact knee-jerk reactions and racist remarks only fuel the Islamists and justify their ideological mandate that the West is against Islam. We must have a more intelligent, in-depth and long-term strategy.

The Islamist ideology comes from one of three sources:

1. Muslim Brotherhood

2. Wahhabi/Salafi doctrine from Saudi Arabia

3. Khomeni-ism

It’s frustrating to hear the Boston chief of police say they will use sniffer dogs at airports. Sniffer dogs can’t sniff out an ideology. Speaking of dogs – when a dog gets rabies and bites someone, the victims need injections to get rid of the venom. This radical ideology is the venom that needs to be treated. But how are we going to do that when you are not able to isolate the poison and call it what it is?

So I have a challenge for the experts and political leaders of the West. Why did you allow no-go zones to exist in the first place? In Toronto there is an almost no-go zone at Thorncliffe Park where the mosque runs a madrassah. In the same area, Friday congregational prayers are offered at a public school where girls having their periods are lined up at the back of the room. A local Islamic school was exposed spreading ant-Semitic literature. Were they charged? No – because we are such nice people.

Why are we not exposing these problems and eradicating the spread of this ideology? If we know about the imam who spreads hate and anti-Semitic rhetoric, why don’t the intelligence agencies know about this? And if they do, why haven’t they done something about it, like deport him? Why are 80 sharia courts allowed to operate in UK? We can only expose the problems – it’s up to policy makers and law enforcement to make the change.

Regarding law enforcement, we spent time with a regional police force suggesting we enlighten them about where the problems lie and help them identify the people and places where the Islamist ideology is spread. No response. Yet this month they are hosting a conference on Islamophobia with the very same organization that has ties to CAIR, which has been labelled a terrorist organization by The United Arab Emirates. The organization hosting this event with the police force has recently changed its name but that doesn’t change who they are.

The West has caved in to the Islamophobia industry and panders to the Islamists’ cause over and above a concern about the security and safety of the land in which we live. What we should be discussing at round tables is why public places like airports are so porous and easily accessible? Last time I travelled (which is not long ago) I see that the domestic arrivals lounge at Toronto’s Pearson airport has a door with no security, which allows anyone to enter the domestic baggage hall.

Have we not learnt anything in the past decade? Whose responsibility is this? Not the moderate Muslims surely.

Please be assured that these attacks will continue unless action is taken. It’s time to stop the ad-nauseum analysis and do something. Our enemy is the ideology. Take action to stop the flow of these messages and foreign funding into our organizations and places of worship. We know where the ideology is coming from and yet we have opened the flood gates and have allowed this ideology to flourish and foment in our very midst. Why?

These ideas are not politically correct but they will save lives.

Before asking where we are, let’s examine where all of us are on this urgent issue. We are speaking out. Now it’s YOUR turn to take action.

Categories: Islamic reformation, Islamic terrorism
Tags: Islamic reformation, Islamic terrorism

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American Fascists and delicate little snowflakes

March 26, 2016

American Fascists and delicate little snowflakes, Dan Miller’s Blog, March 26, 2016

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

Fascists want to take away our freedom of speech. So do the delicate little snowflakes infesting our institutions of “higher learning.” How much worse will it get over the next few years? Substantially worse, I fear.

In the above video, Bill Whittle recounts numerous Fascist attempts to shut down those with different ideas. I’ll not repeat what he says. Instead, I’ll point out a few other Fascist efforts.

Islamist Fascists

In line with its “misconception” that Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance, the Obama administration has consistently courted the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — which do everything they can to shut down all discussion of whether Islam is peaceful and tolerant and whether it should change. The Obama administration, following its lead, has ignored Muslim voices for reform.

What does Hillary Clinton think? Apparently that Islam is fine the way it is.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a different view.

As I noted here, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a former Muslim. She had been scheduled to receive an honorary degree from Brandeis University in April of 2014. However,

Brandeis University in Massachusetts announced Tuesday that it had withdrawn the planned awarding of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a staunch critic of Islam and its treatment of women, after protests from students and faculty.

The university said in a statement posted online that the decision had been made after a discussion between Ali and university President Frederick Lawrence.

“She is a compelling public figure and advocate for women’s rights, and we respect and appreciate her work to protect and defend the rights of women and girls throughout the world,” said the university’s statement. “That said, we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” [Emphasis added.]

Ali, a member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003 to 2006, has been quoted as making comments critical of Islam. That includes a 2007 interview with Reason Magazine in which she said of the religion, “Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace. I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars.”

Ali was raised in a strict Muslim family, but after surviving a civil war, genital mutilation, beatings and an arranged marriage, she renounced the faith in her 30s. She has not commented publicly on the issue of the honorary degree.

. . . .

More than 85 of about 350 faculty members at Brandeis signed a letter asking for Ali to be removed from the list of honorary degree recipients. And an online petition created Monday by students at the school of 5,800 had gathered thousands of signatures from inside and outside the university as of Tuesday afternoon.

“This is a real slap in the face to Muslim students,” said senior Sarah Fahmy, a member of the Muslim Student Association who created the petition said before the university withdrew the honor.

“But it’s not just the Muslim community that is upset but students and faculty of all religious beliefs,” she said. “A university that prides itself on social justice and equality should not hold up someone who is an outright Islamophobic.” [Emphasis added.]

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also got into the act:

“It is unconscionable that such a prestigious university would honor someone with such openly hateful views.”

The organization sent a letter to university President Frederick Lawrence on Tuesday requesting that it drop plans to honor Ali.

“This makes Muslim students feel very uneasy,” Joseph Lumbard, chairman of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, said in an interview. “They feel unwelcome here.” [Emphasis added.]

On September 15, Hirsi Ali spoke at Yale University. The usual suspects did not want her to speak.

WFB Program president Rich Lizardo tells the story of events that followed the WFB Program’s public announcement of the event in the Yale Daily News column “We invited Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak at Yale–and outrage ensued.”

Following the public announcement, the Muslim Students Association at Yale went through its usual routine, first seeking to have Ms. Hirsi Ali disinvited (though it disputes this), then to limit the subject matter of her speech, then to impose conditions on her speech that would stigmatize her. In the spirit of WFB himself, Lizardo stood firm.

The MSA routine worked at Brandeis; at Yale, not so much. Not this time.

Poor delicate little snowflakes. Isn’t it a shame that they might be exposed to new ideas that are alien to them? That they were not required to attend and listen to those ideas is, apparently, inconsequential. They did not anyone to listen to them.

Here’s a video of her remarks. The introductions are a trifle long and add little value. The questions she was asked at the end and her answers are, however, interesting. They begin at 55 minutes into the video.

When I posted the video here, I observed that

She seemed to be speaking less to the “choir” and more to a broader audience which she was trying to convince. To that end, she was as conciliatory as she could be without abandoning her thesis that Islam is the religion of repression, submission and death, not peace; that it is highly dangerous to Western civilization, including our concepts of freedom and democracy. “Radical” Islam is rising, becoming even worse and it must be defeated.

Even to try to defeat Islam, we need to defeat the increasing efforts to eliminate freedom of speech at home in favor of speech that is politically and multiculturally correct and therefore not free. [Emphasis added.]

On April 7, 2015, Hirsi Ali spoke at the National Press Club. Here’s a video of her remarks on the Clash of Civilizations, largely based on her book Heretic, which I later reviewed here. There, she writes optimistically of the possibility (but not the probability) of an Islamic revolution, someday.

There is a clash of civilizations. Muslims in Western countries generally refuse to help the police prevent Islamic terror attacks, such as recently occurred in Brussels.

There is a reason why Israel razes the homes of terrorists. It is because Israelis know that a terrorist cannot plot and carry out an attack without the knowledge and help of his or her immediate relatives, and further, the entire community. Punitive home demolition is meant to serve as a deterrent, the idea being that a would-be terrorist’s family will fear losing their home and thus persuade him or her against the attack.

In fact, knowing that it “takes a village” to aid and abet a terrorist is precisely why the terrorists responsible for the Paris and recent Brussels bombings could operate “right under the noses” of their victims. And it is why some are calling for heightened scrutiny of Muslim communities across the West, and right here in the U.S., despite cries of Islamophobia.

The MailOnline reports that police in Molenbeek — a district known for spawning jihadis like the France and Brussels attackers — have pleaded with local Muslims for help in finding the terror suspects only to have their pleas rebuffed.

Western nations which welcome and care for them are spit upon. “See something, say something” did not work before the San Bernardino Islamic attack. Perhaps those who saw something but said nothing remained silent because they feared being characterized as Islamophobes.

Here is a recent video of an interview with a teenage Yazidi girl who escaped the Islamic State. Is Islam the religion of peace and respect for females? For people of other religions?

In the unlikely event that any delicate little snowflakes watch it, will they be offended by its presence on You Tube, by the “lies” told by the Yazidi girl or by the truth of her statements?

Multicultural Fascists

Europe has many multicultural Fascists and Obama’s America has fewer. However, those who propagate the multicultural fantasy are winning. In the past, we sought immigrants who brought with them cultures compatible with ours. Now, Obama demands that we accept immigrants whose cultures of violence, drugs, gangs, crime and the like are not compatible. We have sanctuary cities where gang, other violence and drug smuggling and use are endemic. Although state efforts to enforce Federal immigration laws which the Obama administration refuses to enforce have been struck down by the judiciary, the Obama administration somewhat impotently challenged the sanctuary cities this year, only following pressure from the Congress.

Here is a video of remarks made by Victor Davis Hanson about one year ago on the travesty of “illiberal illegal immigration.” Illegal immigration breeds illegality across the board.

https://vimeo.com/122160603

A transcript of his remarks is available here. Here’s just a short snippet:

[I]t’s a controversial topic. If I had said to you 20 years ago, 10 years ago, we’re going to get in a situation in the United States where 160,000 people are going to arrive at the border and break immigration law and we’re going to let them all in at once without any prior check, medical histories, you would think I was a right-wing conspiracist. If I had said to you, we’re going to have a president who is going to not only nullify existing federal immigration law, but on 22 occasions prior to that nullification warn us that he couldn’t nullify it, or, if I had said, he’s not only going to nullify federal immigration law, which he said would be unconstitutional, but that he is going to punish members of ICE, the border patrol, who follow existing law rather than his own unlawful existing order, I could go on, but you’d all think this was surreal, Orwellian, it couldn’t happen. Yet that’s the status quo as we look at it today.

Our borders are worse than porous; they are open and little effort is being made to keep criminals, drug dealers, gang members and other violent people out. While Obama has many “top” priorities, doing that is not among them.

As noted in a post at American Thinker,

Cultures are either consciously abandoned, or consciously enforced. The theory of multiculturalism has always been a tonic for simpletons, since it celebrates the perpetuation and imposition of an incompatible culture, still being practiced by those who carry it, upon a host culture with which it is mutually exclusive. Multiculturalism is entirely subversive. It is intended to force one or more cultures upon the hosts who do not want or need them. Since both cultures cannot successfully coexist within the host, which has its own successful working culture, the purpose of the exercise has always been fraudulent. The “melting pot” concept worked not because of the concept of multiculturalism, but as testament against it. Those who came here in our parents’ and grandparents’ generation consciously chose to abandon the cultures they left in favor of the American culture. They became Americans, embracing one culture.

If one was being less generous than to call multiculturalism a tonic for simpletons, it would be more accurate to say that modern leftist multiculturalism is actually a weapon. Its purpose is not to enhance the host, but to consume it. If the host’s culture is peaceful, it has no use for malcontents who insist upon the dominance of their native culture. Malcontents, in the form of angry and entitled guests, foment chaos and disorder. And yet, the leftists insist that we demonstrate our cultural superiority by abandoning the superiority of our own culture and importing incompatible languages, traditions, practices, and morals.

Here’s a snapshot of our current Southern border by Sharyl Attkisson:

Conclusions

The delicate little snowflakes who demand safe spaces from reality in what were once institutions of higher learning seem to be increasing in number. They are our next generation and will soon begin to elect those with whose milquetoast views they agree. It will be a sad day for America when our nation mirrors those “educational” institutions. Solutions? I have none to offer, other than the development of backbones by their university administrators and teachers; perhaps even by their own parents. Perhaps some little snowflakes will be told, “If you don’t want to be exposed to views inconsistent with those you already hold, don’t come here.”

Living in America should be an honor not granted those who despise and abuse her by coming illegally, by illegally bringing crime and violence or by supporting those who do. Falsely characterizing Islam as the religion of peace and tolerance should not be “who we are” as Obama claims. Most of us are not deluded fools, I hope.

Oh well. Somehow we got Obama as the Commander in Chief. Twice.

This message was posted just eight days before the recent Islamic attack in Brussels, Belgium:

Categories: Academia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brussels terror attack, CAIR, Europe, Freedom of speech, Hate speech, Hillary Clinton, Immigration, Iran - human rights, Islam - the religion of war, Islam and girls, Islam and human rights, Islamic immigration, Islamic reformation, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Mecca Islam, Medina Islam, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and crime, Obama and Islam, Obama's America, Reform Islam, Saudi Arabia, Sisi, Supporting Islamic terrorism
Tags: Academia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brussels terror attack, CAIR, Europe, freedom of speech, Hate speech, Immigration, Iran - human rights, Islam - the religion of war, Islam and girls, Islam and human rights, Islamic immigration, Islamic reformation, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Mecca Islam, Medina Islam, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and crime, Obama and Islam, Obama's America, Reform Islam, Saudi Arabia, Sisi, supporting Islamic terrorism

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No More Hug-A-Terrorist

March 23, 2016

No More Hug-A-Terrorist, Gatestone Institute, Raheel Raza, March 23, 2016

(Please see also, Islamic Reformation and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. — DM)

♦ How hard is it to understand that radical Islamist jihadis have declared war on the West? In simple English this means: they will find you and kill you wherever and whenever they can.

♦ Time and again, many of us concerned Muslims have highlighted the dangers of political Islam/Islamism, which stems from one of three sources: the Muslim Brotherhood, Wahhabi/Salafism or Khomeinism.

♦ The West has been asleep at the wheel, waffling about how to address the issue with “sensitivity.” Calling out the truth should never be subject to political correctness.

♦ The world needs to take the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to task and challenge it about what it is doing to stem the tide of violence emanating from the Muslim world. The world needs to understand that ISIS is not trying to set up a Caliphate. OIC is the Caliphate.

The terrorist attacks at an airport and Metro station in Brussels has by now claimed at least 34 dead and 250 injured.

Shocking, sickening and appalling — but surprising? No.

How hard is it to understand that radical Islamist jihadis have declared war on the West? In simple English this means: they will find you and kill you wherever and whenever they can.

Why? Because the Islamists have pinpointed the West to be “Dar al Harb” (land of war), a concept that allows them to justify killing anyone on this land. You, me and everyone in between — from the USA across to Canada, the UK and Europe.

Just this year, there have been terrorist attacks all over the globe, including Paris, Turkey, San Bernardino, Israel, Toronto, Ivory Coast and yesterday in Belgium. Whether carried out by groups or so called “lone wolves,” these attacks are not isolated and have one thing in common.

They are all the result of a dangerous, violent and sick ideology. Time and again, many of us concerned Muslims have highlighted the dangers of political Islam/Islamism which stems from one of three sources: the Muslim Brotherhood, Wahhabi/Salafism or Khomeinism. This ideology has been on the rise for 35 years while the West has been asleep at the wheel, waffling about how to address the issue with “sensitivity.” Calling out the truth should never be subject to political correctness.

How are we Muslims dealing with this ongoing terror in the name of our faith? Social media tells us a lot. There are the usual deniers and apologists; there is a comparison that “while we show solidarity for Brussels, we must simultaneously remember every other country of the world,” hence watering down the impact of the horror and carnage that has just taken place in Belgium and showing a rancid face of inhumanity and deflection from the real issue.

Then the victim ideology kicks in and it’s all about the fear of a backlash. I say let’s speak out, take responsibility and deal with the backlash — it will be worse if we remain silent.

Added to this are people like the repulsive British politician, George Galloway, who says Europe is to blame for what has happened. No one wants to touch the real issue.

The real issue is that this violence will continue and get much worse unless all of us stand up and acknowledge the ugly virus within us and say no to armed jihad. All of us, in once voice, need to denounce and condemn armed jihad as a seventh-century construct, not applicable in this day and age.

How have media addressed the issue? They immediately brought in “experts” to analyze the motives of the attackers to smithereens. There is nothing left to analyze. It is simple: It is a war against us. Let us stop the talking heads and take some action.

Political correctness should not trump the truth.

To bring home this point: Following an attack on two Canadian military officers in Toronto on March 14, 2016, I was invited the next day by a local TV station to comment. At first, the media did not wish to publish the words spoken by the attacker: “Allah made me do it.” The next day, the news reported that the attacker had “mental health issues.” Again, no surprise here. Mental health issues are a good “fallback.” But I said on the news that if a person has the wherewithal to find a specific military location and attack two officers, he is capable of being a terrorist.

Once again, we failed to connect the dots. The CTV News clip of my interview never made it to the internet. Are they not able to handle the truth?

1522

Following a terrorist attack on two Canadian military officers in Toronto last week (left), the media initially did not wish to publish the words spoken by the attacker: “Allah made me do it.” Following yesterday’s bombings in Brussels, the media immediately brought in “experts” to analyze the motives of the attackers. There is nothing left to analyze. It is simple: It is a war against us.

Our leadership, meanwhile, has developed a philosophy of “hug-a-terrorist” and deflecting the conversation into a politically correct Kumbaya mode.

On October 22, 2014, I wrote an open letter to Canadians on my blog. In this I made some clear suggestions about the dangers we face, and solutions. The backlash was fast and furious, not only from Muslims but from bleeding-heart white liberals — those who do not help our cause by promoting the victim ideology.

So, once again we are standing where we were many years ago, but worse off because hundreds more civilians have been slaughtered in the radical Islamist war against the West.

Countering this armed jihad is our responsibility because the problem emanates from the House of Islam and the lives of our next generations are at stake here.

There are solutions. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which has a membership of 57 Muslims states spread over four continents, is the second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations. The world needs to take the OIC to task and challenge it about what it has done or is doing to stem the tide of violence emanating from the Muslim world. The world needs to understand that ISIS is not trying to set up a Caliphate. The OIC is the Caliphate. Its members conveniently look away in face of blatant terrorism because their only focus is to dislodge Israel and condemn the West.

We cannot let the OIC speak for us. We face a simple choice: We can either speak out ourselves or wait for Mr. Trump to be elected and he will do it for us.

Raheel Raza is president of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow and founding member of the Muslim Reform Movement.

Categories: Foreign policy, Islam - the religion of war, Islamic culture, Islamic invasion, Islamic jihad, Islamic reformation, Islamism, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Obama's America, OIC, Political correctness
Tags: Foreign Policy, Islam - the religion of war, Islamic culture, Islamic invasion, Islamic Jihad, Islamic reformation, Islamism, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Obama's America, OIC, Political correctness

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Obama Says Islam Needs Modernist Reformation

March 15, 2016

Obama Says Islam Needs Modernist Reformation, Clarion Project, Ryan Mauro, March 15, 2016

Obama-National-Security-Council-Mtg-Pete-Souza-White-House-IP

U.S. President Barack Obama makes a point at a National Security Council meeting in February 2016. (Photo: Pete Souza/White House)

For the first time, President Obama said that Islam needs a modernist reformation. This is what was missing from his speech at a Maryland mosque (see video below) on February 3, which presented a critical opportunity where Obama could have had his “tear down this wall” moment.

In a comprehensive interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama referred to his speech in Cairo at Al-Azhar University in 2009, saying:

“I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.”

Obama also said, “There is a need for Islam as a whole to challenge that interpretation of Islam, to isolate it, and to undergo a vigorous discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a peaceful, modern society.”

The Cairo speech was written to chip away at two boulders standing in the way of such a reformation, he explained: The scapegoating of Israel, which serves to distract Muslims from self-reflection and concerns about wholesale negative impressions of Muslims.

“I do not persuade peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate if I’m not sensitive to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush,” Obama argued.

Here, a word of caution is due: Not every “reformation” is equal. As Raymond Ibrahim explains, the hardline Islamic movements that President Obama wants swept away actually are a reformation movement. In fact, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and “Wahhabism” founder Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab styled their movements as “reformist.”

President Obama’s qualifier of a modernist reformation is helpful in guarding against these types of reformers. But again, another word of caution: Democratic elections are not necessarily the engines of this modernist reformation, since Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood participate in them.

One interesting point in the interview is when Jeffrey Goldberg reflects on President Obama’s early closeness to the democratically-elected Islamist leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who was then prime minister and is now president of Turkey).

Goldberg writes that Obama now “considers him a failure and an authoritarian.” Obama’s mistaken hope in Erdogan and his deceitful “moderate Islamism” should be a hard-earned lesson.

An equally surprising part of the interview is when Goldberg explains how President Obama has noticed Indonesia “move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation” (Goldberg’s words). Obama saw the proliferation of the hijab in Indonesia as indicative of this trend he is concerned about and for which he largely blames Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

Obama’s statements about the need for an Islamic modernist reformation are certainly welcome, but the right goal can only be achieved with the right strategy.

Similarly, the right reformation can only be achieved with the right reformers. And we have no reason to believe that the current administration has picked them, much less come up with a strategy to empower them.

Watch President Obama’s Baltimore mosque speech:

Categories: Islamic reformation, Obama and Islam
Tags: Islamic reformation, Obama and Islam

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Jordanian Writer: The Arabs Lag Behind In All Areas – As The World Moves Forward

March 3, 2016

Jordanian Writer: The Arabs Lag Behind In All Areas – As The World Moves Forward, MEMRI, March 3, 2016

On January 6, 2016, Jordanian journalist, writer, and political analyst Jihad Al-Mansi wrote in the Jordanian dailyAl-Ghad, under the title “Careful, The Car Is In Reverse!”, about what he termed Arab society’s position at the bottom of global rankings in science, culture, human and women’s rights, and the war on corruption. He added that it lags behind the rest of the quickly advancing world which “has overtaken us by centuries, perhaps millennia.”

Calling on the Arabs to wake up, take responsibility for their situation and stop blaming others for their problems, he said that instead they should invest their financial and human resources in advancing future generations, because it is no longer possible to rectify the situation of the current generation.

Following are excerpts from his article:[1]

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Jihad Al-Mansi (Source: Ammonnews.net)

“The world is developing, in the philosophical, scientific, social, creative, educational, and cultural sense; it is on the verge of breaking free of backward gender-driven thinking…

“This is taking place in countries far from our Arab region. There, they are developing scientifically and culturally, competing for the top position in all human indices. At the same time, we, in this region of the world, remain at the bottom of these indices – and some of our countries are absent from them altogether.

“The Nobel laureates in peace, medicine, chemistry, physics, economics, and literature include people from all [countries] – but we Arabs are rarely among them, and for the most part sit in the audience [during the awards ceremonies] or watch them on TV…

“Our only way of consoling ourselves is to reminisce and to recall [Muslim researchers and philosophers such as] Al-Razi,[2] Al-Farabi,[3] Ibn Sina,[4] Al-Kindi,[5] Ibn Rushd,[6] Ibn Khaldun,[7] and others. We do so in disregard of the fact that most of these people, in whom we take pride for human and cultural reasons, were not Arab, and most of them were stoned [to death] or imprisoned, and some had their books burned or were accused of heresy…

“Our problem does not end at [our failure to win] a Nobel Prize. It is manifested much more in the fact that we hold no respectable position on any index or metric concerning freedom of thought, human rights, media, gender, environment, water, or war on corruption; our countries often come last in every field.

“When we participate in the Olympic Games, our countries promote the motto ‘honor for [merely] participating.’ When we want to try for an Olympic medal, our solution is to grant citizenship to [foreign] athletes to do so. We are not among those on the winner’s podium – and if we are, our representation is miniscule. We celebrate every gold medal won by a Comoro Islander as if he had liberated Jerusalem. Kenya, Guinea, or Sierra Leone have medaled 10 times and aim for more – while we and our 22 countries rejoice at [winning] just one. This is despite the fact that the income of some of our countries, and maybe all of them, surpasses that of Kenya, Sierra Leone, and others. But [our] billions in income are squandered on purchasing [sporting] clubs, as we refrain from investing in [our own] human, ideological, and athletic resources.

“We are regressing, instead of progressing, in all fields: We fail in sports; we have no presence in the arts; politically, we execute the agendas of the superpowers and major enterprises, like pawns that move when expected and remain silent when demanded to do so. Economically, we are not welfare states; ideologically, we are influenced, not influencers; with regard to humanity, we reject the other rather than accept him. We accuse anyone who disagrees with us of being an infidel, and think that we’re always right and the world is conspiring against us, never asking ourselves the logical question: Why would the world do this, when we are of no consequence in global, cultural, and human enterprise? We avoid the real answer, and cannot acknowledge that it is we who conspire against ourselves, killing each other and shedding each other’s blood on pretexts based on a legacy that is 1,500 years old, more or less, [pretexts] that are intended to sow ethnic and religious conflicts among the streams and sects…

“Gentlemen, our car is in reverse, and is not moving forward – as the world has overtaken us by centuries, perhaps millennia. We have missed the boat for this generation, and it is beyond rectifying. Will we wake up and invest our financial and human resources to help the coming generations? Will we?”

Endnotes:

[1] Al-Ghad (Jordan), January 6, 2016.

[2] Abu Bakr Al-Razi (865-92) – Persian philosopher who wrote in Arabic and was one of the preeminent physicians of the Muslim world.

[3] Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (872-950) – Muslim mathematician, scientist, physician, and philosopher who also made contributions in psychology, sociology, cosmology, logic, and music. He was known as The Second Teacher, since he was seen as second in knowledge only to Aristotle.

[4] Abu ‘Ali Hussein Ibn Al-Sina aka Avicenna (980-1035) – Persian physician, philosopher, and scientist who was called “one of the greatest thinkers and medical scholars in history” by historian George Sarton.

[5] Abu Yousuf Al-Kindi (801-873) – Arab Muslim philosopher, mathematician, musician, and physician who was called “the Philosopher of the Arabs” and is considered the father of Arab and Islamic philosophy.

[6] Abu Al-Walid Ibn Rushd, aka Averroes (1126-1198) – Muslim physician and philosopher. Born and worked in Cordoba, Spain, and was highly influential on medieval European philosophy.

[7] ‘Abd Al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) – prominent Arab historian and historiographer. Considered one of the fathers of historiography and sociological and economic research.

Categories: Arab nations, Islamic culture, Islamic reformation
Tags: Arab nations, Islamic culture, Islamic reformation

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