Creeping sharia infiltrates every nook and cranny of America. Including our classrooms. Among other things, the Muslim Brotherhood (as well as the Saudis) wields enormous influence over curriculum that threatens not only public schools, but private and parochial schools as well.
After reporting on Islamic supremacy in our schools a year ago, I thought it worthwhile to see how things have progressed since then, for better or for worse. (Guess which it is.) When last we left off, here’s where things stood. In most cases, information only came to light because parents stumbled upon homework assignments or their child told them something of concern.
Students learned to recite allegiance to Allah along with Muslim prayers and chants. Students were also taught the Five Pillars of Islam, that Muslims pray to the same God as Christians and Jews, that Mohammed was a man with strong moral values, that terrorists are “freedom fighters,” that Muslims treat those they conquer better than America does, along with the taqiyya version of CAIR’s mission. Sharia law was promoted, Qurans were introduced into classrooms, students studied Arabic, female students wore burqas as part of a lesson on Islam, and special courses on Islam prohibited students from wearing a cross or saying the name “Jesus.”
Homework assignments required students to promote the “Golden Age of Islam” while students also had to write about what it would be like to travel to Mecca. All the while, Muslim students were given special privileges that Christian and Jewish students were not afforded, including time off during the day to pray.
Textbooks whitewashed Islam while diminishing Christians and Jews, videos framed non-Muslims as bigots and validated enforcement of blasphemy laws, a Muslim author gave a lecture that stretched over four days about her Islamic-themed book, and field trips to mosques (including the one the Tsarnaev brothers attended) involved non-Muslim students praying to Allah, with non-Muslim boys joined adult Muslims in prayer while girls were told Islam is pro-woman.
Teachers who spoke out were punished. An elementary school teacher was forced to resign after making critical comments about Islam on a talk radio program, CAIR attempted to smear another teacher by accusing her of being a “racist” after she drew an analogy between the Taliban and Hamas during a lesson on bullying, and Christian teachers were harassed by Muslims in the school hierarchy.
So where do things stand today? Sadly, we have more of the same. Much more of it, as Islamic supremacy continues to gain ground in our schools. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
A workbook for a three-week course on Islam told students that for the duration of the course they will “become Muslim” by selecting Muslim names and wearing them on ID tags around their necks, dressing up as Muslims and acting the part in order to receive a good grade, being told jihad is a struggle against oppression, playing a dice game called Jihad that pits one group of students against another, reading the opening chapter of the Quran and analyzing various other verses, and memorizing the Shahada (the prayer for conversion to Islam).
Students across various school districts were told that Islam had nothing to do with the 9/11 terror attacks, were taught an Islamic fight song that implied that Allah is the only God, completed a project that involved making pro-ISIS propaganda posters, and a Palestinian activist gave a presentation to third graders that urged them to become “freedom fighters for Palestine.”
Homework assignments included analyzing statements by bin Laden, material from an ISIS blog featuring a female recruiter, and statements from Obama’s Cairo speech that demonized the West and framed Muslims as victims. Students also had to write the Shahada (including the oath “There is no God by Allah”) and sing “Allahu Akbar” in an Arabic song. And a Muslim cleric who was a public school teacher peddled sharia and routinely left school early to conduct prayer services at his mosque. (He’s since been fired.)
Meanwhile Muslims continued to press for special accommodations, such as school closures for Muslim holidays. Mind you, federal law allows students of minority religions to take off from school on their religious holidays without any penalty. But this is not good enough for many Muslims who offer all manner of rationales for why they need more. Some cite relatively high (emphasis on relatively) percentages of Muslims who live in certain districts. But even when their numbers are scant the same pressure is applied, as in Baltimore where no tests are scheduled on Muslim holidays, despite the fact that Muslim students comprise a mere two-to-three percent of the student body.
In one case, a Muslim community leader argued that Muslim students don’t want to miss class even if the absence is excused because it would place an undue burden on them to catch up for the day they missed. So he wants school policy to prohibit tests on Muslim holidays and the day after so Muslim students won’t have any pressure to study during their observance. He admits the ultimate goal is for the school district to close schools completely on those days because: “We want our sons and daughters to feel as American as anyone else and to be on equal footing as everyone else.” (Nice try. How about Muslim students cope just like Jewish students and Hindu students and students from other religious minorities who have been faring just fine? Deal with it!)
Another example of we-are-a-tiny-minority-but-you-owe-us rationale can be found in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where Muslims comprise less than two percent of the population. No matter. Sporting events are banned the night prior to Muslim holidays and no tests are administered on the holidays themselves.
Then there’s this rationale offered up in Burlington, Vermont, where it is being recommended that schools close for Muslim holidays because most Muslim students are recently arrived refugees who don’t speak much English and missing school will have a negative effect on their learning. But as often happens in these cases a domino effect kicks in, and now the small Hindu community in Burlington wants school closures on their holidays. However no accommodations will be made for Hindus.
Here’s another scenario. In Irvington, N.J., where the superintendent had no idea how many Muslim students were in the school system, schools are closed on Muslim holidays based on “inclusion” rather than necessity. Riiiiiiiiight. And what “necessity” could one ever argue in any of these cases?
But who needs “necessity” when you can stand on the soap box of “rights,” as Kaity Assaf, a Muslim teenager in New Jersey did when she claimed it comes to down having the “right” to have the two most important Muslim holidays acknowledged publicly by closing all schools in her district.
Then there are those who claim victimhood and make loud demands, as happened a couple of months ago in Jersey City, NJ, when the school board made a “difficult and gut-wrenching” decision and refused to close schools for Muslim holidays after Muslims in the community requested this accommodation on six days notice. One Muslim in attendance screamed, “My child should be able to celebrate the holiday!” (as if anyone was stopping that from happening) while another stated “We feel alienated!” (what’s new?). Still another stepped up to the microphone and smirked: “We’re no longer the minority. That’s clear from tonight. We’re going to be the majority soon.”
Arrogance, demands, victimhood, threats, and above all, being above all.
Hat tips: Fox News, Counterjihad Report, Breitbart, Jihad Watch, The Clarion Project, Atlas Shrugs, The Right Scoop, Legal Insurrection, Front Page Magazine
Forget academic boycotts and protesting Israeli oranges in the produce aisle. The new BDS targets are Jewish charities with a special focus on those that provide services and support in ’67 Israel.
Under its new Muslim boss, Amna Farooqi, J Street U has been pressuring Jewish charities not to help Jews living in territory which had been conquered and ethnically cleansed of Jews by the invading Muslim armies during Israel’s War of Independence. Other groups, including T’ruah, which had a prominent role at Obama’s toxic Chanukah party, have also made Jewish charities into their target.
But the BDS campaign against Jewish charities has reached a new level of ugliness with a lawsuit by CAIR’s favorite lawyer which demands that Jewish charities be stripped of non-profit status and that the charities and their donors be potentially listed “as specially designated global terrorists”.
The lawsuit targets a number of pro-Israel groups, including Friends of IDF, an organization that helps wounded Israeli soldiers who have lost arms and legs in the fight against Muslim terrorism learn to live fulfilling lives again. The lawsuit uses claims made by the left-wing anti-Israel group Breaking the Silence as the basis for its hateful campaign against FIDF and Israeli soldiers. It contends that providing “financial, social, and emotional support” to soldiers serving in the Israeli army is a war crime.
The term “terrorist” is frequently thrown around in the lawsuit.
It’s a term that the immigration lawyers Melbourne team behind it is quite familiar with.
Martin F. McMahon demands that pro-Israel groups and donors be labeled as “specially designated global terrorists”. Again, he has represented one of those in the past.
John P. O’Neill, the counterterrorism expert who played a key role in investigating Al Qaeda, died on 9/11 along with thousands of Americans. His family sued a variety of institutions and figures for bankrolling the Islamic terror group.
Of these, the status of Wael Julaidan is clearest. The Treasury Department listed the former Muslim Student Association president as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. Osama bin Laden called him, “our brother”. Martin F. McMahon not only represented a founder of Al Qaeda, but his Rabita Trust, which had already been designated a month after the September 11 attacks.
While lawyers can and do defend whom they choose, including Al Qaeda leaders, Martin F. McMahon has a history of representing Islamist groups and individuals, some with confirmed terror ties.
Aside from CAIR and a founder of Al Qaeda, Martin F. McMahon represented the Syrian Emergency Task Force. The SETF’s director has shown support for Hamas and urged engagement with the Islamic Front, a Jihadi coalition allied with Al Qaeda. A top Islamic Front leader had described himself as Al Qaeda.
Martin F. McMahon lashed out at the female Prime Minister of Bangladesh for her actions against radical Islamist groups, including Hefazat-e-Islam, which demanded death for atheists and a ban on working women. In his application to the ICC, McMahon describes Hefazat as a “religious group” and its leader Allama Junaed Babunagari only as a “popular cleric”. That would be the “cleric” who called for “capital punishment” for atheist bloggers and spoke of them being beheaded.
Thus far four atheist bloggers have been brutally murdered in Bangladesh by Islamic terrorists.
While Martin F. McMahon accuses Israel of war crimes, his pro-Islamist ICC filing whitewashes an actual war criminal, Moulana Delwar Hossain Sayedee, who had been found guilty of genocide, mass murder and other horrifying crimes.
Lawyers can’t always be judged by their clients, but it appears that when Islamists need a lawyer, they call Martin F. McMahon. And it’s not clear that there is a Muslim group too repugnant for Martin F. McMahon, who even represented theNation of Islam’s International of Representative, to work with.
McMahon’s case against Jewish charities is pro-bono, which suggests that he has some personal investment in it, and it’s all over the place. The lead plaintiff, Mohammed Abdel Aziz, is an Egyptian immigrant who has never lived in Israel. Instead, based on a strange digression that has nothing to do with the actual case, he may be a Muslim Brotherhood member. Instead of spelling this out, the filing claims that, “Plaintiff Abdel Aziz comes from Egypt, and personally witnessed the atrocities that the Mubarak regime inflicted on ordinary Egyptian citizens.”
What does Mubarak have to do with Israel? Much of the lawsuit is equally messy. The filing manages to misquote the Bible, claims that the JNF plants trees to “obstruct the ruins of ethnically-cleansed Palestinian villages” and cites at least one anti-Semitic site. It demands audits for donors to a whole range of Jewish charities, a blatant intimidation tactic, and is nearly as ridiculous as McMahon’s earlier letter to Secretary of State John Kerry demanding a travel ban on the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.
And yet it is impossible to ignore the fact that the lawsuit is based on the work of left-wing anti-Israel groups. The lawsuit cites Breaking the Silence, J Street, Peace Now, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Yesh Din, Btselem, Haaretz and the Forward. But if the lawsuit is taken at face value then the targets potentially include some of the same liberal mainstream Jewish charities who fund anti-Israel groups through the New Israel Fund. By aiding these groups, they are not only helping attack Jews in Israel, but they are laying the groundwork for an attack on their own organizations in America.
Attacks on Jewish charities have become the new wave of BDS and the presence of T’ruah at the Obama Chanukah party shows that this form of BDS has the support of the White House. Jewish liberals who think that the Jewish targets of T’ruah or J Street U have it coming should consider that attacks on Jews historically begin with easy targets and escalate from there. This lawsuit is an example of what such an escalation could look like and will look like if they don’t end their support for all forms of BDS.
We know from the Z Street case that Obama already has an “Israel Special Policy” for pro-Israel groups. The left’s war against Jewish charities did not begin yesterday. And it must be exposed for it to end.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
In Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes her execrable life as a devout Muslim girl in Somalia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia. She explains why she became an Infidel after experiencing freedom in the Netherlands. In Heretic, she seeks a reformation of Islam, with a focus on women’s rights but including tolerance and freedom of thought and speech for all. That will not happen soon, even though there are other current and former Muslims who want it and others who claim to want it.
From the first page of Heretic:
On ______, a group of ______ heavily armed, black-clad men burst into a ______ in ______, opening fire and killing a total of ______ people. The attackers were filmed shouting “Allahu akbar!”
Speaking at a press conference, President ______ said: “We condemn this criminal act by extremists. Their attempt to justify their violent acts in the name of a religion of peace will not, however, succeed. We also condemn with equal force those who would use this atrocity as a pretext for Islamophobic hate crimes.”
. . . .
Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms: Islam is not a religion of peace. For expressing the idea that Islamic violence is rooted not in social, economic, or political conditions— or even in theological error— but rather in the foundational texts of Islam itself, I have been denounced as a bigot and an “Islamophobe.” I have been silenced, shunned, and shamed. In effect, I have been deemed to be a heretic, not just by Muslims— for whom I am already an apostate— but by some Western liberals as well, whose multicultural sensibilities are offended by such “insensitive” pronouncements. [Emphasis added.]
_______________________
Heretic explores differences between political Islam and Islam as a religion. Hirsi Ali tells of some horrors of Islam as currently practiced in Islamic states, officially pursuant to Sharia law but also unofficially and with little or no intervention by those states to prevent or ameliorate it. Here is an example of the latter type of political Islam:
Political Islam is rooted in and, I think, inseparable from, religious Islam as commanded by the Qu’ran, the Hadith and Sharia law. An article titled The Lure of Fantasy Islam disparages hopeful reformers such as Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a self-described “devout Muslim,” as promoting “fantasy Islam” by obscuring the nature of Islam as it has developed over the centuries and as it now is.
Dr. Jasser advocates the separation of mosque and state. He
That’s very good; but how can a “devout Muslim” call for the separation of mosque and state? He also appears to pretend that Islam today is something it is not: a peaceful, tolerant religion. Obama and organizations He supports do the same. He and they do not seek Islamic reformation but instead oppose it. Obama apparently believes that Islam is fine as it is. He is not stupid and must know what Islam is now and has long been.
Hirsi Ali does not pretend that today’s Islam is what it is not: she recognizes today’s Islam as a violent, intolerant and otherwise evil religion that seeks civilizational domination. She is the executive producer of, and appeared in, this Clarion Project Honor Diaries Video as well as others:
For producing the Honor Diaries videos, Hirsi Ali is deemed an “Islamophobe.” Although the suffix “phobia” in “Islamophobia” still invokes the notion of irrationality, that seems to have disappeared in current usage. Now, Islamophobia “(or anti-Muslim sentiment) is the prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of the religion of Islam or Muslims” — regardless of the rationality of such prejudice, hatred or fear.
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.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the CAIR, condemned Ayaan Hirsi Ali as “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide.”
Please see also my article titled Islam: Hate, Honor, Women’s Rights and Congress. Obama’s “Champion for Change” would most likely agree with the proponents of House Resolution 569 that “Islamophobia” is a hate crime.
What can we do to promote an Islamic reformation?
To a great extent, it’s up to the Muslims. However, Hirsi Ali suggests the following in Heretic:
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.]
. . . .
It is no longer plausible to argue that organizations such as Boko Haram— or, for that matter, Islamic State— have nothing to do with Islam. It is no longer credible to define “extremism” as some disembodied threat, meting out death without any ideological foundation, a problem to be dealt with by purely military methods, preferably drone strikes. We need to tackle the root problem of the violence that is plaguing our world today, and that must be the doctrine of Islam itself. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
[The] phenomenon of Christophobia (as opposed to the far more widely discussed “Islamophobia”) receives remarkably little coverage in the Western media. Part of this reticence may be due to fear of provoking additional violence. But part is clearly a result of the very effective efforts by lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading journalists and editors in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a deep-rooted Islamophobia. [Emphasis added.]
What does Islam need to reform?
Islam . . . . needs a Voltaire. But I have come to believe it is in dire need of a John Locke as well. It was, after all, Locke who gave us the notion of a “natural right” to the fundamentals of “life, liberty, and property.” But less well known is Locke’s powerful case for religious toleration. And religious toleration, however long it took to be established in practice, is one of the greatest achievements of the Western world.
. . . .
Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans, would much rather ignore the fundamental conflict between Islam and their own worldview. This is partly because they generally assume that “religion,” however defined, is a force for good and that any set of religious beliefs should be considered acceptable in a tolerant society. . . . [Emphasis added.]
But that does not mean we should be blind to the potential consequences of accommodating beliefs that are openly hostile to Western laws, traditions, and values. For it is not simply a religion we have to deal with. It is a political religion many of whose fundamental tenets are irreconcilably inimical to our way of life. We need to insist that it is not we in the West who must accommodate ourselves to Muslim sensitivities; it is Muslims who must accommodate themselves to Western liberal ideals. [Emphasis added.]
Unfortunately, not everyone gets this.
In the fall of 2014, Bill Maher, host of the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, held a discussion about Islam that featured the best-selling author Sam Harris, the actor Ben Affleck, and the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Harris and Maher raised the question of whether or not Western liberals were abandoning their principles by not confronting Islam about its treatment of women, promotion of jihad, and sharia-based punishments of stoning and death to apostates. To Affleck, this smacked of Islamophobia and he responded with an outburst of moralistic indignation. To applause from the audience, he heatedly accused Harris and Maher of being “gross” and “racist” and saying things no different from “saying ‘you’re a shifty Jew.’ ” Siding with Affleck, Kristof interjected that brave Muslims were risking their lives to promote human rights in the Muslim world. [Emphasis added.]
After the show, during a discussion in the greenroom, Sam Harris asked both Ben Affleck and Nick Kristof, “What do you think would happen if we had burned a copy of the Qur’an on tonight’s show?” Sam then answered his own question, “There would be riots in scores of countries. Embassies would fall. In response to our mistreating a book, millions of Muslims would take to the streets, and we would spend the rest of our lives fending off credible threats of murder. But when IS crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands— all in the name of Islam— the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag [# NotInOurName].” [Emphasis added.]
Islam is apartheid and should be recognized as such.
Too often, when it comes to women’s rights (and human rights more generally) in the Muslim world, leading thinkers and opinion makers have, at best, gone dark. [Emphasis added.]
I cannot help contrasting this silence with the campaign to end apartheid, which united whites and blacks alike all over the world beginning in the 1960s. When the West finally stood up to the horrors of South African apartheid, it did so across a broad front. The campaign against apartheid reached down into classrooms and even sports stadiums; churches and synagogues stood united against it across the religious spectrum. South African sports teams were shunned, economic sanctions were imposed, and intense international pressure was brought to bear on the country to change its social and political system. American university students erected shantytowns on their campuses to symbolize their solidarity with those black South Africans confined to a life of degradation and impoverishment inside townships. [Emphasis added,]
Today, with radical Islam, we have a new and even more violent system of apartheid, where people are targeted not for their skin color but for their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, or, among Muslims, the form of their personal faith. [Emphasis added.]
. . . . As I have repeatedly said, the connection between violence and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to Muslims when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect. We need to ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Should it be blasphemy— punishable by death— to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Why, when I have made these arguments, have I received so little support and so much opprobrium from the very people in the West who call themselves feminists, who call themselves liberals? [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
A Unique Role for the West
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.]
Are you listening, President Obama? Not at all likely.
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: Please listen. It’s powerful and compelling, albeit “Islamophobic.”
. . . .
I agree with Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize– winning Pakistani schoolgirl whom the Taliban tried to kill:
The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. That is why they are blasting schools every day— because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society. They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school.
Here, surely, is the authentic voice of a Muslim Reformation.
Conclusions
Islamic reformation will take a long time. Until there is an Islamic reformation, those who cry “Islamophobe!” — a made-up word intended to box people to keep them “politically correct” — will have won. So will those who despise our freedoms and want to “fundamentally transform” America.
Until we, and our “leaders,” stop damning “Islamophobes” and helping such organizations as CAIR, there will be no significant reformation. If and when we and our “leaders” also begin to take the other steps Hirsi Ali suggests, there may eventually be a reformation that will benefit us as well as Muslims.
The Christmas Day firebombing of a Houston mosque got plenty of attention. Perhaps because of all the pressure, a perp was rapidly arrested, and to the embarrassment of all those Islamophobia mongers, turned out to be a faithfull attendee, 5 times a day, seven days a week. CAIR was quick to cry “bias”:
Mustafaa Carroll, who is the executive director for the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on law enforcement to investigate, citing a recent spike in vandalism to mosques that have prompted hate crime investigations.
“We urge law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for this fire,” he said in a statement.
To the north and west of Texas, in the state of Nevada, some stupid prankster left a strip of bacon draped over the handles of a mosque located outside of Las Vegas. Not only is it being treated as a possible hate crime, but the FBI is offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the man seen on surveillance video placing the bacon on the door handles.
Wow.
And to think that about a year ago when multiple swastikas appeared scattered throughout my neighborhood, I was told by law enforcement that it was probably just a bunch of kids acting up. The message was loud and clear: the police didn’t take it very seriously and, indeed, it took several weeks before the swastikas were removed.
Obnoxious prank involving food that is forbidden under Islamic law on the door to a mosque = hate crime that warrants an FBI reward vs. swastikas, which are a symbol of genocide against Jews = childish prank.
OK. Got it.
Of note, the majority of hate crimes based on religion are against Jews. But what’s typically covered in the media are hate crimes (including those that are fabricated, such as here, here, and here) against Muslims. And ironically, it’s worth noting that as religiosity rises in Islamic communities, so does anti-Semitism. As a result, as the Muslim population in America rises, so too will anti-Semitism (as we see occurring in Europe).
But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the mainstream media to cover that story.
Hat tip: Jihad Watch, Your Houston News, Atlas Shrugs, Las Vegas Review Journal, Algemeiner
Using surveillance video from other area businesses to identify the arsonist, Gary Nathaniel Moore, 37, was arrested and charged with starting the Christmas Day fire that devastated a Houston, Texas mosque. Moore is a devout Muslim who attended this same mosque for years, praying up to five times a day every day of the week.
Also up in smoke is the DC Media’s hoped-for anti-GOP Narrative. Before any facts were known, numerous DC Media outlets immediately exploited the tragedy to place the blame for the fire on Donald Trump.
Advocacy groups believe there has been a spike in anti-Muslim incidents across the United States in recent weeks that can be linked to the mass shooting in California and the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates. And they say that Muslims are fearful the backlash could lead to further harassment and violence.
The Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on authorities to investigate the fire for an anti-Muslim motive.
“Because of the recent spike in hate incidents targeting mosques nationwide, we urge law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for this fire,” Mustafaa Carroll, the chapter’s executive director, said in a statement.
The Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on authorities to investigate a possible bias motive in the case, citing what it called a “recent spike in hate incidents targeting mosques nationwide.
Now that a devout Muslim has been charged, the DC Media will forget all about the incident.
The media’s playbook is always to immediately use any disaster or crime as a means to make the GOP answer for it. Then, once the facts come out and point to a member of the Protected Class, the story is memory-holed and the accusation against the Republican lingers.
December 17, 2015 ought henceforth to be a date which will live in infamy, as that was the day that some of the leading Democrats in the House of Representatives came out in favor of the destruction of the First Amendment. Sponsored by among others, Muslim Congressmen Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, as well as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Loretta Sanchez, Charles Rangel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Kennedy, Al Green, Judy Chu, Debbie Dingell, Niki Tsongas, John Conyers, José Serrano, Hank Johnson, and many others, House Resolution 569 condemns “violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.” The Resolution has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
That’s right: “violence, bigotry and hateful rhetoric.” The implications of those five words will fly by most people who read them, and the mainstream media, of course, will do nothing to elucidate them. But what H. Res. 569 does is conflate violence — attacks on innocent civilians, which have no justification under any circumstances – with “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric,” which are identified on the basis of subjective judgments. The inclusion of condemnations of “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric” in this Resolution, while appearing to be high-minded, take on an ominous character when one recalls the fact that for years, Ellison, Carson, and his allies (including groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR) have been smearing any and all honest examination of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to incite hatred and violence as “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” This Resolution is using the specter of violence against Muslims to try to quash legitimate research into the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us, which will have the effect of allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded and unopposed.
That’s not what this H. Res. 569 would do, you say? It’s just about condemning “hate speech,” not free speech? That kind of sloppy reasoning may pass for thought on most campuses today, but there is really no excuse for it. Take, for example, the wife of Paris jihad murderer Samy Amimour – please. It was recently revealed that she happily boasted about his role in the murder of 130 Paris infidels: “I encouraged my husband to leave in order to terrorize the people of France who have so much blood on their hands […] I’m so proud of my husband and to boast about his virtue, ah la la, I am so happy.” Proud wifey added: “As long as you continue to offend Islam and Muslims, you will be potential targets, and not just cops and Jews but everyone.”
Now Samy Amimour’s wife sounds as if she would be very happy with H. Res. 569, and its sponsors would no doubt gladly avow that we should stop offending Islam and Muslims – that is, cut out the “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” If we are going to be “potential targets” even if we’re not “cops” or “Jews,” as long as we “continue to offend Islam and Muslims,” then the obvious solution, according to the Western intelligentsia, is to stop doing anything that might offend Islam and Muslims – oh, and stop being cops and Jews. Barack “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” says it. Hillary “We’re going to have that filmmaker arrested” Clinton says it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, certain that anyone who speaks honestly about Islam and jihad is a continuing danger to the Church, says it.
And it should be easy. What offends Islam and Muslims? It ought to be a simple matter to cross those things off our list, right? Making a few sacrifices for the sake of our future of glorious diversity should be a no-brainer for every millennial, and everyone of every age who is concerned about “hate,” right? So let’s see. Drawing Muhammad – that’s right out. And of course, Christmas celebrations, officially banned this year in three Muslim countries and frowned upon (at best) in many others, will have to go as well. Alcohol and pork? Not in public, at least. Conversion from Islam to Christianity? No more of that. Building churches? Come on, you’ve got to be more multicultural!
Everyone agrees. The leaders of free societies are eagerly lining up to relinquish those freedoms. The glorious diversity of our multicultural future demands it. And that future will be grand indeed, a gorgeous mosaic, as everyone assures us, once those horrible “Islamophobes” are forcibly silenced. Everyone will applaud that. Most won’t even remember, once the jihad agenda becomes clear and undeniable to everyone in the U.S. on a daily basis and no one is able to say a single thing about it, that there used to be some people around who tried to warn them.
Jihadist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris have Americans on edge. Yet part of the Obama White House’s response to the attacks has been to invite Islamist groups that routinely demonize the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies to the White House to discuss a religious discrimination. “If we’re to succeed in defeating terrorism we must enlist Muslim communities as some of our strongest allies, rather than push them away,” President Obama said in his speech following the San Bernardino attack.
But partnering with such organizations sends the wrong message to the American people, said Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AFID).
“I think it says a lot when the president uses those organizations that have an ACLU-type mentality. They should have a seat at the table. That’s fine,” Jasser said. “But not to include groups, which have completely different focuses about counter-radicalization, counter-Islamism creates this monolithic megaphone for demonization of our government and demonization of America that ends up radicalizing our community.”
A White House spokesperson acknowledged to the Investigative Project on Terrorism that the Dec. 14 meeting on countering anti-Muslim animus included Hassan Shibly, executive director of Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Florida chapter. The same forum – attended by Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes – also included Farhana Khera, president and executive director of Muslim Advocates; Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab-American Institute (AAI); Mohamed Magid, imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS); and Hoda Hawa, director of policy and advocacy with the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) among others.
The White House guests, or the organizations they represent, have long histories of criticizing counter-terror investigations. CAIR leads the pack. Its Philadelphia chapter is advertising a workshop, “The FBI and Entrapment in the Muslim Community,” which features a spider with an FBI badge on its back, spinning a web of entrapment around an image of a mosque. The workshop “provides the tools needed to prevent entrapment of community members to become terrorists in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
Since 9/11, CAIR has repeatedly taken the side of defendants accused of financing or plotting attacks, calling their prosecutions a “witch hunt” against the Muslim community. For example, CAIR denounced the prosecution of Sami Al-Arian, who turned out to be the secretary of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s governing board, as “politically motivated” and a result of the “Israelization of American policy and procedures.”
A year ago, CAIR similarly protested the incarceration of Aafia Siddiqui, aka “Lady Al Qaeda” – convicted in 2010 of trying to kill two FBI agents. The protest came after the Islamic State (ISIS) offered to spare the lives of executed American photojournalist James Foley and aid worker Kayla Mueller in exchange for Siddiqui’s release.
CAIR also denounced the December 2001 shutdown of the Holy Land Foundation for Hamas support, saying, “…there has been a shift from a war on terrorism to an attack on Islam.”
Demonizing law enforcement and spreading “the idea that America and Western societies [are] anti-Muslim – the whole Islamophobia mantra is part of the early steps of radicalization so that Muslims get separated out of society,” Jasser said. “These groups certainly aren’t on the violent end of the Islamist continuum, but if there’s a conveyer belt that goes towards radicalization then it certainly starts with this siege and separatist mentality.”
CAIR has used such inflammatory imagery and rhetoric for years, with its San Francisco chapter removing a poster urging Muslims to “Build a Wall of Resistance – Don’t Talk to the FBI” in 2011 after the IPT reported on it.
Later that year, a CAIR-New York official told a Muslim audience that FBI agents would break the law to force them to talk. That includes threats and “blackmail, seriously blackmail; that’s illegal,” Lamis Deek told the audience. “But they’ll do it.”
Jasser blames CAIR and others which spread similar rhetoric for the increased fear of Islam and Muslims in America since 9/11 because they refuse to discuss Islamic extremism and the role Muslims have in fixing the problem.
“This creates a climate where people don’t trust us to be part of the solution,” Jasser said. “People say that if you aren’t part of the solution then you are part of the problem, which creates more fear and distrust.”
Neither Jasser nor the AIFD, which advocates for “liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state,” were invited to the White House meeting. Also shut out were Jasser’s colleagues in the new Muslim Reform Movement, whose members “reject interpretations of Islam that call for any violence, social injustice and politicized Islam” and stand “for secular governance, democracy and liberty. Every individual has the right to publicly express criticism of Islam. Ideas do not have rights. Human beings have rights.”
The White House did not reply to a request for comment about Jasser’s characterization of these groups; however, it previously said it engaged CAIR because of “their work on civil rights issues” despite the group’s Hamas ties.
Former FBI Associate Deputy Director Buck Revell also finds the White House’s choice of Muslim groups troubling.
“It’s a very confusing time and circumstance when you have the White House dealing with people who have fronted for the Muslim Brotherhood and are the spokespeople for Hamas in the United States and you bring them in for a conference at the White House and say they are supposed to speak for the Muslim community in America,” Revell said. “It’s unhelpful to have the White House essentially fronting for groups that want to make it harder to reach the jihadists in our society and in effect flush them out.”
Khera’s group Muslim Advocates has a pending lawsuit against the New York Police Department regarding its surveillance of mosques and other Islamic institutions using undercover police officers and informants.
“One of our key priorities at Muslim Advocates is ending racial and religious profiling by law enforcement,” Khera says in a YouTube video supporting the suit. “We’ve done work to combat profiling by the FBI, by Customs and Border Protection and now more recently we’ve had concerns about the way the New York Police Department – the nation’s largest police department – has been conducting itself.”
Like CAIR, Khera has called the FBI’s sting operations and informants against potential jihadists “entrapment operations” that rope in individuals who might otherwise never engage in terrorist activity.
CAIR’s Shibly also used the entrapment narrative in a June 2014 blog post in which he argued that the “FBI entrapment program targeting the Muslim community” was an example of tyranny. Many other CAIR representatives, such as Michigan director Dawud Walid, previously alleged the FBI has “recruited more so-called extremist Muslims than al-Qaida themselves.”
AAI stops short of embracing the entrapment narrative but labels surveillance programs by the NYPD and other government agencies “unconstitutional, ineffective, and counterproductive.” New York’s Mayor Bill De Blasio disbanded the NYPD unit responsible for infiltrating the city’s mosques and Muslim gathering places looking for potential terrorists in April 2014 under pressure from Muslim groups.
Another group, the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA), which countsMagid as a member, published an article in 2008 written by Hatem al-Haj, a member of its fatwa committee, giving religious justification for not cooperating with authorities. Al-Haj wrote it was “impermissible” for Muslims to work with the FBI because of the “harm they inflict on Muslims.”
However, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), which formerly accused the FBI of entrapment, conceded in 2013 that informants can be useful detecting terror cells and keeping them off balance.
“To be fair, informants at times can be effective in counterterrorism investigations even against cellular structures. Because terrorist groups are concerned about their operational security, fear of informants can create and increase tensions within a terrorist cell. As a result, it may generate enough paranoia that a cell may abandon a planned operation,” MPAC said in its 2013 report “Building Bridges to Strengthen America.”
Looking for jihadis before they strike is a bit like looking for a “needle in a haystack,” so sting operations are useful in finding them before it’s too late, according to Revell. He says such operations can be useful in preventing the next San Bernardino.
“If you don’t find them when they are talking jihad and you have to wait until they take an action then it’s too late to be able to prevent casualties and ensure that the public is safe,” Revell said. “There certainly is knowledge among those looking to do any type of jihadi activity that there is a force out there that is countering them and that they need to try to cover their activities to the greatest extent possible.”
In the past year, the Islamic State (ISIS) has published at least two documents instructing its jihadis how to evade being lured into stings by the FBI or other law-enforcement agencies. The ISIS manual “Safety and Security guidelines of the Lone Wolf Mujahideen” devotes a chapter to evading FBI stings by testing the weapons they receive prior to using them in an attack.
Khera’s organization stood front and center in 2011 when Muslim groups called on the Obama administration to purge FBI training materials that they deemed offensive. She complained in a Sept. 15, 2011 letter that counterterrorism materials then being used to train FBI agents about Islam used “woefully misinformed statements about Islam and bigoted stereotypes about Muslims.” Such allegedly misinformed statements included characterizing zakat – the almsgiving tax mandate on all Muslims – as a “funding mechanism for combat” and that “Accommodation and compromise between [Islam and the West] are impermissible and fighting [for Muslims] is obligatory.”
Yet numerous Muslim commentators, including from the Herndon, Va.-based International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), describe zakat as a funding mechanism for jihad. A footnote for Surah 9:60 found in “The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an” published with editorial assistance from IIIT, says that zakat can be usedamong other things to help “(4) those who are struggling and striving in Allah’s Cause by teaching or fighting or in duties assigned to them by the righteous Imam, who are thus unable to earn their ordinary living.”
The AMJA issued a fatwa in August 2011 stating that zakat could be used to “support legitimate Jihad activities.”
Top Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi similarly states in his book,Fiqh of Jihad, that zakat may be spent to finance “the liberation of Muslim land from the domination of the unbelievers,” particularly against Israel and India in Kashmir.
Numerous Islamic charities have been cited or closed down in connection with terrorist financing since the September 11 attacks. Qaradawi’s actions back up his words. In 2008, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the Union of Good, a network of charities headed by Qaradawi, for Hamas fundraising. That same year a federal court jury convicted the founders of the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation (HLF) for illegally financing Hamas.
“The government’s policy has inflicted considerable harm,” MPAC’s Salam al-Marayatiwrote in 2001 after federal authorities closed the Benevolence International Fund (BIF). “By effectively shutting down these charities, it has given Americans the false impression that American Muslims are supporting terrorists. It has also given the Muslim world a similarly false impression that America is intolerant of a religious minority.”
Representatives of MPAC, CAIR and Muslim Advocates each condemned the HLF prosecution or its subsequent verdict.
In the end, the White House’s decision to empower these groups sends a mixed message to the American people that it isn’t fully interested in rooting out the causes of jihadist terror and preventing future attacks.
The Muslim Brotherhood is to Islamic terrorism what a virus is to disease. Major terrorist leaders from the Caliph of ISIS to Arafat have the Muslim Brotherhood on their resume. And the current leader of Al Qaeda led a Muslim Brotherhood splinter terror group. But its linkages to Islamic terrorism are only a secondary aspect of the organization whose focus is on Islamizing nations through more subtle means.
Paradoxically the Brotherhood has met with far less success in the Muslim world than in the West. Its greatest victories in the Arab Spring would not have happened without Obama’s backing and its takeovers of Egypt and Tunisia were rolled back by popular uprisings while its efforts in Libya, Syria and Yemen were stymied by armed conflict with other Muslims.
The Muslim Brotherhood is unpopular in Egypt these days. It’s also unpopular with Americans.
In one poll, 61 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of the Muslim Brotherhood. Only 11 percent had a positive view of the Islamic supremacist organization. Only 5 percent of Americans saw the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of Egypt as a positive development.
Unfortunately Obama is at odds with the views of most Americans. The Muslim Brotherhood may have lost power in Cairo, but it still wields a great deal of power in Washington D.C. Brotherhood front groups such as CAIR and ISNA have open access to the media and dominate all discussions about Islam. The MSA dominates American campuses despite its history of terror ties.
As David Horowitz has warned, “The principal institutions of Islam in this country, the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Society of North America, to name a few — are all fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood.”
But not every country is equally willing to roll over for the Muslim Brotherhood’s hate network.
The Muslim Brotherhood headquarters was in London, but while Washington D.C. panders to the violent Islamic supremacist organization, the UK decided it did not want to host its Jihad. Last year, the British government authorized a report on the Muslim Brotherhood by veteran diplomat Sir John Jenkins. The report has been submitted to parliament and it’s making waves.
The British government report defines “aspects of Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics” as “contrary to our national interests and our national security.” It’s a striking contrast with a White House where the Muslim Brotherhood has its own revolving door and a rogue’s gallery of operatives.
Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the United States have been allowed to dismantle our counterterrorism training and replace it with Islamist propaganda. Even now, Obama pushes Countering Violent Extremism programs that encourage law enforcement to partner with Brotherhood front groups. Secretary of State Kerry urges including the Muslim Brotherhood in the political process.
Meanwhile the UK government has stepped forward to assert that the Muslim Brotherhood is not the solution to terrorism, instead it’s the source of the problem.
The Jenkins report rejects the “moderate” label so often slapped on the hate group by lazy media hacks. Instead it describes the Brotherhood as a clandestine group organized into a “secretive ‘cell’ structure” seeking to create a “Caliphate under sharia law” using a doctrine that allows “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society”. That ideology inspired “Al Qaida and its offshoots”. The most obvious offshoot to employ this Takfiri approach is ISIS.
It’s quite a contrast from the claim by Obama’s Director of National Intelligence that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence”.
The British report rejects the idea that the Brotherhood is peaceful. Instead it states that it is prepared to engage in violence, but prefers “incremental change on the grounds of expediency” because it believes that the “political opposition will disappear when the process of Islamisation is complete”.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not moderate or peaceful. It just thinks long term. Its endgame is the same as ISIS. It just has a slower and surer way of getting there. As fellow Islamist dictator Erdogan once said in Turkey, democracy is “a train that takes you to your destination, and then you get off.”
The British report takes a hard look at the Muslim Brotherhood’s support for Hamas and its local organizations in the UK. It notes that, “much about the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK remains secretive, including membership, fund raising and educational programmes” but that its front groups “which have claimed to represent Muslim communities” wield “an influence here which is disproportionate to their size”.
It’s a vital observation that can’t even be voiced in the Senate here, let alone in the media or the White House. It is utterly inconceivable that Obama and Hillary, who have fought wars on behalf of the Brotherhood, would ever be willing to authorize the creation of a similar report on the Brotherhood.
And yet such a report is desperately needed. The Muslim Brotherhood’s front groups have hijacked our foreign policy, involved us in foreign wars, endangered our national security and undermined our ability to fight terrorism. They promote a program of mass Muslim migration while pushing anti-American agendas with the ultimate aim of destroying the Constitution and replacing it with Islamic law.
Changes are already taking places in the UK after the release of the Brotherhood report. The Board of Deputies of the Jewish community distanced itself from the Brotherhood’s Muslim Council of Britain. While the government will not currently ban the Brotherhood, Prime Minister Cameron has stated that “membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism”. That may sound mild, but it should be contrasted with the position of Democrats and even some Republicans in this country that the Muslim Brotherhood is our best friend.
Prime Minister Cameron warned that the Muslim Brotherhood is “a transnational network, with links in the UK, and national organisations in and outside the Islamic world. The movement is deliberately opaque, and habitually secretive.” He stated that “it has been a rite of passage for some individuals and groups who have gone on to engage in violence and terrorism.” He concluded that aspects of its activities “run counter to British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, equality and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.”
This is a major development not only for the UK, but for the US where any criticism of the Islamic hate network has been banished as Islamophobic. The British finding is an important weapon in our own struggle with the Brotherhood and its collaborators on the left and the right.
Cameron has warned that the UK will keep a close watch to see “whether the views and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood meet the legal test for proscription.” This is a clear warning to the Brotherhood not to abuse the hospitality of the UK or face government action. By taking this step, the UK is joining a diverse group of countries, from Egypt to the UAE to Israel, in confronting the Muslim Brotherhood.
Obama insists that his critics are isolated, but his affinity for the Muslim Brotherhood is one of the elements that isolated his foreign policy even in the Muslim world. Western countries are beginning to wake up to the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood and his CVE policy will one day go down in history as a shameless whitewashing of a violently bigoted organization that has endangered our national security.
The UK has found that the Muslim Brotherhood is a national security threat. It’s time for Republicans and Democrats to start speaking the truth about the Brotherhood.
American Islamic Forum for Democracy president M. Zuhdi Jasser speaks at the launch of the Muslim Reform Movement, at the National Press Club on Friday, December 4, 2015. (Screengrab: AIFD/YouTube)
The leader of an umbrella group of moderate Islamic organizations is troubled by C-SPAN’s decision not to cover its launch event at the National Press Club earlier this month, when on Monday the public affairs network provided live coverage to another Muslim event – highlighting “Islamophobia” – at the same venue.
Attempts to get C-SPAN to cover the launch of the Muslim Reform Movement on December 4 were unsuccessful, said M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a key figure in the establishment of the MRM.
Jasser, a Phoenix-Ariz.-based Muslim physician and anti-Islamist activist, called the incident “beyond bizarre if not flagrantly biased.”
“They are mainstreaming Islamist organizations while willfully marginalizing us,” he said. “At least show both!”
Jasser noted that the launch of the Muslim Reform Movement took place just two days after the San Bernardino terrorist attack and weeks after the one in Paris.
Jasser’s communications director Tiffany Hopkins said Tuesday she sent four emails to C-SPAN several days before the launch, then discussed the summit and its relevance in a phone conversation with the assignment desk. She was given the direct email address of C-SPAN’s D.C. editor to contact for a booking and did so, but received no response.
In Jasser’s view, C-SPAN simply “ignored” the request for coverage of the event, which he pointed out had also been listed on the National Press Club website.
He said if C-SPAN chose not to cover either Islamic event then one could allow “that they have their own priorities and Muslim counter-radicalization may not be one of them.”
But after not covering the MRM launch, he was surprised to see C-SPAN give coverage Monday to what he described as the “Islamist ultimatums” of USCMO.
For the public service network to have covered USCMO “while they flatly ignored our reform summit of 14 leaders and our organizations, exemplifies the central obstacle with regards to the ‘perceived silence of reformers,’” he said.
“We are screaming from the rooftops and unfortunately ignored.”
Queries sent to C-SPAN on Monday and again on Tuesday brought no response by press time.
‘The Muslims the world has been waiting for’
The newly-formed Muslim Reform Movement brings together “Muslim reformers” from the U.S., Canada and Europe, who said in a statement, “We are in a battle for the soul of Islam, and an Islamic renewal must defeat the ideology of Islamism.”
The launch included a visit to the Islamic Center of Washington, “a mosque largely run by the government of Saudi Arabia,” where the activists posted a “declaration of reform” on the mosque doors. The document rejects the notion of an Islamic state, the caliphate, apostasy and “institutionalized shari’a.”
MRM founding signatories include representatives of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a Canadian group called Muslims Facing Tomorrow, the Coalition of Progressive Canadian Muslim Organizations, the Quilliam Foundation in Britain, a Danish lawmaker, and several authors, journalists and thinkers.
“I love my faith of Islam, and I wish to reclaim it from the extremists,” said Usama Hasan of the Quilliam Foundation.
“I’m a doting grandmother and I’m concerned about the future of my children and grandchildren as radical Islam is spreading across North America,” said Muslims Facing Tomorrow president Raheel Raza.
“I’m here to take back the narrative of my faith from the people who are destroying it,” said Sohail Raza of Muslims Facing Tomorrow.
AIFD community outreach director Courtney Lonergan said she was excited to “work with these amazing people, who are the Muslims the world has been waiting for.”
Despite the lack of C-SPAN coverage, Jasser said there was evidently “hunger for our message,” pointing to the fact that the launch video has been watched more than 15,000 times on YouTube.
Jasser is a sharp critic of CAIR, a controversial lobby group that describes itself as “America’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization.”
(The views expressed in this article are mine, and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Judeo-Christian civilization has nothing in common with, and nothing to gain from, Islamic civilization as it now exists. They have been clashing for centuries. Now, Islamic civilization appears to be winning in much of the European Union and, to a lesser degree, in America.
Can anything be done to slow and then to halt the spread of fundamentalist Islam? Ayan Hirsi Ali hopes there is and that Muslims will do it. I also hope they will, but am quite dubious that it will happen in the foreseeable future. We need to take other steps promptly.
Preliminary disclosure
As I wrote here in 2012, I am an Agnostic and have been for more than half a century. I do not believe that one or more Gods exist, nor do I believe that none exist. I simply do not know and have no way to know. However, Judeo-Christian society has given me what I love most, freedom to think and to speak as I choose. That freedom is now under severe attack and is withering away. Far too few Christians and Jews seem to have noticed or to care.
When I was in tenth grade, my parents and I decided that I would have a better chance of being admitted to and succeeding at a good college if I were to transfer from public high school to a private high school. We researched area private schools and settled upon St. Stephen’s School for Boys, an Episcopalian school. The headmaster was an Episcopalian priest. During my admissions interview, I volunteered that I was an Agnostic. It did not seem to bother him, but he told me that I would be required to attend a daily religious opening ceremony and, during my senior year, a weekly sacred studies class which he would lead. The first did not bother me and I looked forward to the second.
During the morning religious ceremonies, I stood when the other boys stood and sat when they sat. When they sang hymns and recited creeds and bible verses, I did not. Nobody seemed to notice. During the sacred studies class, I voiced my views, the other boys voiced theirs and the Headmaster voiced his. Our discussions were collegial, not contentious.
These experiences have colored my views of Judeo-Christian culture as it has evolved through today: with increasing exceptions, it remains a culture of freedom and kindness. Sometimes, as with outreach to Islamists, it goes too far. Christian outreach to fundamentalist Islam is like bone cells inviting cancer cells in to discuss how they can be friends and get along. In the end, they can’t and won’t. The cancer cells will thrive and the owner of the infested bones will die painfully.
Fundamentalist Islam is a culture of compulsion and hate
Americans should learn far more than we have from the recent experiences of Sweden, Germany, England, France and other European Union countries in welcoming Muslims to Islamise their cultures. I posted a lengthy article on that on December 13th. If you haven’t read it yet, please do so now. It provides very helpful background for an understanding of the clash of Judeo-Christian and Islamic civilizations.
Here is a lengthy video by Walid Shoebat, once an Islamic jihadist and now a Roman Catholic opponent of Islam. Born in “Palestine,” he imbibed the Islamic culture of hate and compulsion as a youth, as did most of his acquaintances. Eventually, he changed from what he was to what he now is.
Here’s are Shoebat’s 2007 comments:
Most of Shoebat’s comments are consistent with my understanding of present-day Islam, which is largely fundamentalist, of “Palestine” and of its leaders. Here are videos of three who lead the “heroes of Palestine:”
Here’s are Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s 2015 comments on the possibility of an Islamic reformation, for which she argues in her recent book Heretic. (I just bought the Kindle version. After I have read it, I may post an article about it.) A former Muslim and now an Athiest, she is far more conciliatory than was Shoebat because she wants to promote change for the better within Islam. In her closing comments, she offers hope that someday Muslims will become as tolerant and peaceful as Christians and Jews. She does not expect that to happen during her life time, or for a long time thereafter. At seventy-four, I certainly don’t expect it during my remaining time on Earth.
Education today in Obama’s America
Obama’s America has become a multicultural, moral-equivalence based society dominated by political correctness. Many — including some nominal Christians and Jews — rail against Christianity and Judaism. Islam, on the other hand, has become a protected species: any suggestion that it is evil is condemned as “Islamophobic.”
At my alma mater, Yale (1959 – 63), freedom of speech and of thought now take back seats to politically correct condemnations of anything that anyone (except Christians and Jews) might find offensive.
I understand that the same sickness is spreading throughout the country. Maybe some fine day we will have an educational system like this:
Efforts to spread multicultural, moral-equivalence and hence Islamic values are not confined to our colleges. According to an article by The Clarion Project,
Controversy over the way public schools are presenting Islam has been making headlines in many school districts around the U.S. and worldwide:
♦ In Tennessee, a bill was introduced to prevent schools from teaching classes on “religious doctrine” before the 10th grade. The bill is in reaction to objections by parents to a three-week curriculum under the topic of world religion for middle-school students that covers the “Five Pillars of Islam” that obligated children to write assignments about Islamic principles of faith, such as “Allah is the only God.” Parents particularly objected because no other religion was taught at the same time and the amount of time spent on Islam was considerably more than that spent on any other religion.
♦ In Maryland, parents objected to the way Islam was taught in the school’s “World History” class, presenting Islam in an historically untrue way and listing all the “benefits” of Islam.
♦ After being threatened with a lawsuit, an Ohio school district agreed to remove a video about Islam from a seventh grade world-history curriculum that was challenged as falling under the category of proselytizing and favoring one religion over another (a violation of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause). The video, titled 30 Days: Muslim and America, features a young Christian man who agrees to totally immerse himself in Islam for a month by living with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Michigan. It was shown to students as part of a course that requires students to “describe achievements by the Islamic civilization and how these achievements were introduced into Western Europe in the time period between 750 BC – 1600AD.”
♦ In Massachusetts, the Wellesley Middle School, another public school was caught in a controversy when a video (see below) of a student trip to the Roxbury megamosque was released. On the trip, students were taught propaganda – among other things, that Muslim women got the vote before women in the West – by the mosque staff. The boys can be seen prostrating themselves to Allah alongside Muslim men. The video was covered extensively on Boston TV and radio.
♦ In Massachusetts, the Newton public school system became enmeshed in a similar controversy about deceptive and anti-Semitic lessons concerning Muslim women being taught to their students. Even though the curriculum was removed, school administrators refused to tell the children the information was inaccurate (as was the case above with the Wellesley Middle School).
Here’s the referenced video of a 2010 high school trip to a mosque in Newton, Massachusetts:
Fethullah Gulen’s movement is just one more manifestation of what the Muslim Brotherhood has called civilization jihad, albeit a particularly sinister one with its large footprint, penetration of our educational system and well-established, sophisticated and successful influence operations. With this new monograph – the [eighth] in the Center for Security Policy’s Civilization Jihad Readers Series, we hope to sound an alarm about this multi-faceted and dangerous Islamic supremacist cult that – despite significant setbacks in its native Turkey – constitutes a true Trojan Horse in our midst. [Emphasis added.]
It must be noted that those setbacks [in Turkey] are being dealt the Gulen cult and its empire by a rival Islamic supremacist movement: the AK Party and government of Turkish President Recep Tayyep Erdogan. Like erstwhile allies in organized criminal racketeering, these two Islamist mafia dons have had a toxic falling-out after they jointly took down the Ataturk legacy of secular governance in Turkey. Welcome as the rolling up of the Gulen empire and the extradition of its cult leader from the United States would be, nothing in this monograph should be seen as an endorsement of the no-less problematic Erdogan regime’s civilization jihadism and its ambitions to restore the Caliphate.
The state of Hesse has become the first in Germany to offer Islamic education in public schools, with religious instruction starting as early as the first grade.
Giving young children religious and moral instruction might sound like a good idea, if not for the content of the newly written Islamic curriculum and the influence of Islamist elements over the recruitment of teachers. [Emphasis added.]
The writing of textbooks is being overseen by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB). In an agreement reached between the State of Hesse and DITIB, the organization will play a key role in setting the curriculum, selecting the teachers and monitoring the Islamic religious instruction. The organization is apparently assuming a similar role in several other key German states. [Emphasis added.]
DITIB is the largest Muslim organization in Germany and controls several prominent mosques. The group depends heavily on the Turkish government for its funding, and maintains close ties with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist party, the AKP.
Our “great ally” Saudi Arabia is also spending lots of money to promote fundamentalist Islam.
[T]he Kingdom funded Western tax exempt Islamic organizations engaged in dawah (proselytization for Islam). Among them were networks of charitable organizations that provide financial aid to prisoners (including non-Muslims to lure them to Islam) in Western jails, lavishly funded academic chairs in Middle East Studies in universities around the world, student-exchange programs and spending many millions of dollars to increase Saudi political influence in the West — even contributing $100 million to coordinate and assist the United Nations international counterterrorism efforts.
. . . .
The public outrage and rejection of Saudi King Salman’s offer to fund 200 new mosques for more than 800,000 new Muslim refugees in Germany, and the Vice Chancellor’s statement: “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over” point in the right direction. But don’t hold your breath. Germany, the United States and the rest of the West have been turning a blind eye to Saudi funding of thousands of mosques, madrassas and Islamic centers that have propagated radical Islamic ideology for decades and are unlikely to face reality anytime soon. [Emphasis added.]
Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking—the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West. [Emphasis added.]
Remember, the reason people like French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are in power—three prominent Western leaders who insist that Islam is innocent of violence and who push for Muslim immigration—is because they embody a worldview that is normative in the West. [Emphasis added.]
In this context, the facilitation of jihadi terror is less a top down imposition and more a grass root product of decades of erroneous, but unquestioned, thinking. (Those who believe America’s problems begin and end with Obama would do well to remember that he did not come to power through a coup but that he was voted in—twice. This indicates that Obama and the majority of voting Americans have a shared, and erroneous, worldview. He may be cynically exploiting this worldview, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s because this warped worldview is mainstream that he can exploit it in the first place.) [Emphasis added.]
Western empowerment of the jihad is rooted in a number of philosophies that have metastasized into every corner of social life, becoming cornerstones of postmodern epistemology. These include the doctrines of relativism and multiculturalism on the one hand, and anti-Western, anti-Christian sentiment on the other. [Emphasis added.]
Taken together, these cornerstones of postmodern, post-Christian thinking hold that there are no absolute truths and thus all cultures are fundamentally equal and deserving of respect. If any Western person wants to criticize a civilization or religion, then let them look “inwardly” and acknowledge their European Christian heritage as the epitome of intolerance and imperialism. [Emphasis added.]
Add to these a number of sappy and silly ideals—truth can never be uttered because it might “hurt the feelings” of some (excluding white Christians who are free game), and if anything, the West should go out of its way to make up for its supposedly historic “sins” by appeasing Muslims until they “like us”—and you have a sure recipe for disaster, that is, the current state of affairs. [Emphasis added.]
Western people are bombarded with these aforementioned “truths” from the cradle to the grave—from kindergarten to university, from Hollywood to the news rooms, and now even in churches—so that they are unable to accept and act on a simple truism that their ancestors well knew: Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant creed that cannot coexist with non-Islam (except insincerely, in times of weakness). [Emphasis added.]
The essence of all this came out clearly when Obama, in order to rationalize away the inhuman atrocities of the Islamic State, counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and remember that their Christian ancestors have been guilty of similar if not worse atrocities. That he had to go back almost a thousand years for examples by referencing the crusades and inquisition—both of which have been completely distorted by the warped postmodern worldview, including by portraying imperialist Muslims as victims—did not matter to America’s leader.
Worse, it did not matter to most Americans. The greater lesson was not that Obama whitewashed modern Islamic atrocities by misrepresenting and demonizing Christian history, but that he was merely reaffirming the mainstream narrative that Americans have been indoctrinated into believing. And thus, aside from the usual ephemeral and meaningless grumblings, his words—as with many of his pro-Islamic, anti-Christian comments and policies—passed along without consequence. [Emphasis added.]
Conclusions
Too many of “We the people” demand “safe spaces” (offense-free zones) where rote acceptance of politically correct pablum is cherished rather than contested or even questioned. I doubt that another massively successful effort on the scale of the September 11, 2001 attack by Islamic fundamentalists would awaken many of them. Rather than begin to awaken and see what Islam is, how many would angrily demand to know what America did this time to offend our brothers and sisters of the Religion of Peace, Truth and love?
We once had a great culture and a great nation.
It is now fading and is in danger of being displaced by something far different and evil. What will WE do?
Getting rid of Obama will not be nearly enough, regardless of whether He is a Muslim.
Listen again to Ayan Hirsi Ali’s hopes for the reformation of Islam and think about what we can do to help. Read about Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, who wants to make Muslims believe that much of fundamentalist Islam is not Islamic.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser – a Navy vet and founder of the American Islamic Forum of Democracy – is one of those individuals taking the stand against Islamic organizations that support terrorism and claim to speak for the entire community. From Fox News:
“CAIR is a primary obstacle in the effort of many honest American Muslims who recognize our need to own up and lead long-overdue reforms against the root causes of radicalization: Islamism and its separatism,” said Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, an ex-U.S. Navy officer who founded and heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
and
“CAIR’s information is marketed and packaged so it seems that they speak for all of us, but they don’t speak for me and my group,” said Raheel Raza, president of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow. “CAIR does not and has never represented the majority Muslim voices which are as diverse as Muslims in America.”
‘They don’t speak for me’: New Muslim groups reject CAIR representation http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/18/dont-speak-for-me-new-muslim-groups-reject-cair-representation.html
Dr. Jasser has assembled an alliance known as the “Muslim Reform Movement” consisting of about a dozen moderate Islamic groups in the US, Canada and Europe. This movement rebukes jihad and advocates the separation of “Mosque and state,” among other things. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that they reject the idea of an “Islamic State” and Sharia Law.
Although political correctness prevents Democrats and many Republicans from admitting it, it is already well established that CAIR has ties to terrorism.
CAIR, which masquerades as America’s largest Muslim civil rights group, is an outpost of international jihadism. It is an enemy propaganda organization whose longstanding ties to the terrorist underworld have been exhaustively documented at DiscoverTheNetworks and elsewhere. CAIR aims to influence America’s domestic and foreign policies. CAIR wants to make America safe for Sharia law by bullying Americans into not questioning Islam, a religion-centered ideology that has been generating a body count for 1,400 years. [Emphasis added.]
Accusing critics of so-called Islamophobia, a term invented by Islamists, is CAIR’s favorite method of silencing critics and opponents. It is part of a dangerous effort to discourage Americans from thinking freely and arriving at their own conclusions about Islam and mainstream the tenets of Islam in our society. The idea is to eventually make it as difficult and uncomfortable as possible to criticize the faith founded by Muhammad in the seventh century after the birth of Christ. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men, reports DiscoverTheNetworks, “had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and founded as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States.” CAIR opened an office in the nation’s capital with a $5,000 grant from the Marzook-founded Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a charity that the Bush administration shuttered in 2001 for collecting money “to support the Hamas terror organization.” CAIR called the action “unjust” and “disturbing.” In 2004 Marzook was indicted on racketeering charges related to his pro-Hamas activities. Ahmad was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial.
Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder of the Texas branch of CAIR, was convicted in 2005 of terrorism-related offenses and sentenced to 80 months in prison. CAIR civil rights director Randall Todd Royer was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on federal weapons and explosives charges in 2004. Bassem Khafagi, a community affairs director at CAIR, was convicted in 2003 on bank and visa fraud charges and agreed to be deported to Egypt. Rabih Haddad, a fundraiser for CAIR’s chapter in Ann Arbor, Mich., was detained in 2001 after overstaying his tourist visa. Authorities found a firearm and boxes of ammunition in his home. He served 19 months in prison and was deported to Lebanon in 2003. CAIR board member Abdurahman Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment for funneling at least $1 million to al-Qaeda. CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men, reports DiscoverTheNetworks, “had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and founded as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States.”
CAIR and related Islamist organizations have often participated in White House meetings; Dr. Jasser and his group have been excluded.
[F]or the past seven years, the Obama White House has opened its doors to the entire spectrum of radical Islamist groups, just like CAIR. These groups have rationalized the actions of Islamic terrorist groups that have killed Americans, warned American Muslims against cooperating with law enforcement, smeared genuine Muslim moderates like Zuhdi Jasser and Asra Nomani as traitors and accused anyone who dared to utter the term “radical Islam” as “Islamophobic.” These are the groups that the White House should have marginalized. The fact that Obama legitimized radical Islamist groups will be his real legacy.
Is Dr. Jasser’s version of Islam “fantasy Islam?” Historically and presently, it unfortunately is. It rejects aspects of Islamism with which very many Muslims agree.
But need that remain the case? Christianity has changed since the time of the Inquisition and perhaps Islam — which except technologically remains stuck in the middle ages — can eventually change as well — if and when Islamic nations encourage, rather than prohibit, free speech. I have seen few significant signs of that happening. Egyptian President Sisi — despised by Obama for opposing the Muslim Brotherhood — has tried and is trying. He may not be around much longer because of it.
Jasser’s hopes for the future generally parallel those of Ayan Hirsi Ali, who wants Islam to revert to relatively tolerant and peaceful Mecca Islam and to reject subsequent Medina Islam, the fruit of Mohamed’s greatly changed status in Medina to become a powerful warlord. I see little reason to expect that it will change in that direction even in the distant future, and less that it will do so soon. I hope that I am wrong.
In any event, Muslims will need to do most of the work themselves, and that will require that there be enough of them to do it. If and when that happens, perhaps we can help a little. The most important things that we can do will be to
1. Recognize that fundamentalist Islam is evil and shun rather than accept those who espouse it, such as CAIR and its affiliates and
2. Prevent the further invasion of the United States (it may well be too late for Obama’s America) by Muslims who adhere to fundamentalist Islam. Unfortunately, most of our current crop of Republicans seem quite unlikely even to try.
WarSclerotic 
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