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A Strategy to Defeat Islamic Theo-fascism

January 7, 2016

A Strategy to Defeat Islamic Theo-fascism, American Thinker, G. Murphy Donovan, January 7, 2016

Surely, whatever passed for American foreign or military policy in the past three decades is not working. Just as clearly, in case anyone keeps score these days, the dark side of Islam is ascendant at home and abroad. What follows here is a catalogue of policy initiatives that might halt the spread of Islamic fascism and encourage religious reform in the Ummah.

Some observers believe that the Muslim problem is a matter of life and death. Be assured that the need for Islamic reform is much more important than either. The choices for Islam are the same as they are for Palestine Arabs; behave or be humbled. Europe may still have a Quisling North and a Vichy South; but Russia, China, and even America, at heart, are still grounded by national survival instincts – and Samuel Colt.

Call a spade a spade

The threat is Islam, both kinetic and passive aggressive factions. If “moderate” Islam is real, then that community needs to step up and assume responsibility for barbaric terror lunatics and immigrants/refugees alike. Neither America nor Europe has solutions to the Islamic dystopia; civic incompetence, strategic illiteracy, migrants, poverty, religious schisms, or galloping irredentism. The UN and NATO have no remedies either. Islamism is an Ummah, Arab League, OIC problem to solve. Absent moral or civic conscience, unreformed Islam deserves no better consideration than any other criminal cult.

Western Intelligence agencies must stop cooking the books too. The West is at war and the enemy is clearly the adherents of a pernicious ideology. A global war against imperial Islam might be declared, just as angry Islam has declared war on civilization. A modus vivendi might be negotiated only after the Ummah erects a universal barrier between church and state globally. Islam, as we know it, is incompatible with democracy, civility, peace, stability, and adult beverages.

Oxymoronic “Islamic” states need to be relegated to the dustbin of history. If the Muslim world cannot or will not mend itself, Islamism, like the secular fascism of the 20^th Century, must be defeated, humbled in detail. Sooner is better.

Answer the Ayatollahs

Recent allied concessions to Tehran may prove to be a bridge too far. If the Persian priests do not abide by their nuclear commitments, two red lines might be drawn around Israel. Firstly, the ayatollahs should be put on notice, publicly, that any attack against Israel would be considered an attack against America — and met with massive Yankee retaliation. Secondly, any future cooperation with NATO or America should be predicated on an immediate cessation of clerical hate speech and so-called fatwas, those arbitrary death sentences.

Clerical threats to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth” and “death to America” injunctions are designed to stimulate jihad and terror globally. The only difference between a Shia ayatollah and a Sunni imam in this regard these days seems to be the torque in their head threads.

Ostracize the Puppeteers

Strategic peril does not emanate from Sunni tacticians like Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, or Abu Bakr al-Baghadadi. Nor does the real threat begin with or end with al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezb’allah, Hamas, or the Islamic State. Lethal threat comes, instead, on four winds: toxic culture, religious politics, fanatic fighters, and furtive finance, all of which originate with Muslim state sponsors. The most prominent of these are Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan.

Put aside for a moment the Saudi team that brought down the Twin Towers in New York. Consider instead, the House of Saud as the most egregious exporter of Salifism (aka Wahabbism) doctrine, clerics, imams, and mosques from which ultra-irredentist ideologies are spread. The Saudis are at once the custodians of Islam’s sacredshrines and at the same time the world’s most decadent, corrupt, and duplicitous hypocrites. Imam Baghdadi is correct about two things: the venality of elites in Washington and Riyadh. The House of Saud, an absolutist tribal monarchy, does not have the moral standing to administer “holy” sites of any description — Mecca, Medina, or Disneyland.

The cozy relationship between Europe, the European Union, and Arabia can be summarized with a few words; oil, money, arms sales, and base rights. This near-sighted blend of Mideast obscenities has reached its sell-by date. The “white man’s burden” should have expired when Edward Said vacated New York for paradise.

Jettison Turkey and Pakistan

What Saudi Arabia is to toxic ideology in North Africa, Turkey and Pakistan are to perfidy in the Levant and South Asia. Turkey and Pakistan are Islam’s most obvious and persistent grifters. Turkey supports the Islamic State and other Sunni terror groups with a black market oil racket. Pakistan supports the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS with sanctuary and tolerance of the world’s largest opium garden. Oil and drug monies from Arabia, Turkey, and South Asia are financing the global jihad. Turkey also facilitates the migration of Muslims west to Europe while sending Islamist fighters and weapons south to Syria and Iraq.

With the advent of Erdogan and his Islamist AKP, Turkey has morphed into NATO’s Achilles Heel, potentially a fatal flaw. Turkey needs to be drummed out of NATO until secular comity returns to Ankara. Pakistan needs to be restrained, too, with sanctions until it ceases to provide refuge for terrorists. Pakistani troops harassing India could be more prudently redeployed to exterminate jihadists.

Sanctions against Russia and Israel are a study in moral and political fatuity whilst Arabs and Muslims are appeased midst a cultural sewer of geo-political crime and human rights abuses. If NATO’s eastern flank needs to be anchored in trust and dependability, Russia, Kurdistan, or both, would make better allies than Turkey. Ignoring Turkish perfidy to protect ephemeral base rights confuses tactical necessity with strategic sufficiency.

Recognize Kurdistan

Aside from Israel, Kurdistan might be the most enlightened culture in the Mideast. The Kurds are also the largest ethnic group in the world not recognized as a state. While largely Muslim, the Kurds, unlike most of the Ummah, appreciate the virtues of religious diversity and women’s rights. Indeed, Kurdish women fight alongside their men against Turkish chauvinism and Sunni misogyny with equal aplomb. For too long, the Kurds have been patronized by Brussels and Washington.

While Kurdish fighters engage ISIS and attempt to control the Turkish oil black market, Ankara uses American manufactured NATO F-16s to bomb Kurds in Turkey and Syria. Turkish ground forces now occupy parts of Iraq too. In eastern Turkey, Ergdogan’s NATO legions use ISIS as an excuse for bookend genocide, a cleansing of Kurds that might rival the Armenian Christian genocide (1915-1917).

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Kurdish angel of death

All the while, American strategic amateurs argue for a “no-fly” zone in contested areas south of Turkey. Creating a no-fly zone is the kind of operational vacuity we have come to expect from American politicians and generals. Such a stratagem would foil Kurdish efforts to flank ISIS and allow the Erdogan jihad, arms, and oil rackets to flourish. A no-fly zone is a dangerous ploy designed to provoke Russia, not protect Muslim “moderates.”

Putin, Lavrov, and the Russians have it right this time; Turkish and Erdogan family subterfuges are lethal liabilities, not assets.

Washington and European allies have been redrawing the map in Eastern Europe, North Africa, South Asia, and the Mideast since the end of WWII. The time has come to put Kurdistan on the map too. Kurdistan is a unique and exemplary case of reformed or enlightened Islam; indeed, a nation that could serve as a model for the Muslim world. If base rights are a consideration, Kurdistan would be an infinitely more dependable ally than Turkey or any corrupt tribal autocracy in Arabia. America has a little in common with desert dictators — and fewer genuine friends there either. Indeed, at the moment America is allied with the worst of Islam.

Create New Alliances

NATO, like the European Union, has become a parody of itself. Absent a threat like the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact, Brussels has taken to justifying itself by meddling in East Europe and resuscitating a Cold War with the Kremlin. Indeed, having divided Yugoslavia, NATO now expands to the new Russian border with reckless abandon; in fact, fanning anti-Russian flames now with neo-Nazi cohorts in former Yugoslavia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

NATO support for the Muslims of one-time Yugoslavia is of a piece with support for Islamic troublemakers in Chechnya and China too. Throughout, we are led to believe that jihad Uighurs and caliphate Chechens are freedom fighters. Beslan, Boston, Paris, and now San Bernardino put the lie to any notion that Islamists are “victims” (or heroes). Indeed, the Boston Marathon bombing might have been prevented had Washington a better relationship with Moscow.

Truth is, America has more in common with Russia and China these days than we do with any number of traditional European Quislings. Indeed, it seems that Europe and America can’t take yes for an answer.

The Cold War ideological or philosophical argument has been won. Moscow and Beijing have succumbed to market capitalism. Islamism, in stark contrast, is now a menace to Russian, Chinese, and American secular polities alike. The logic of a cooperative or unified approach to a common enemy seems self-evident. America, China, and Russia, at least on issues like toxic Islam, is a match made in Mecca.

The late great contest with Marxist Russia and China was indeed a revolution without guns. Now the parties to that epic Cold War struggle may have to join forces to suppress a theo-fascist movement that, like its Nazi predecessor, will not be defeated without guns. The West is at war again, albeit in slow motion. Withal, questions of war are not rhetorical. Saying that you are not at war does not make it so. Once declared, by one party or the other, the only relevant question about war is who wins and who loses. Losers do not make the future.

If America and Europe were as committed to Judeo/Christian secular values as Islamists are committed to a sick religious culture, then the war against pernicious Islam would have been won decades ago. Or as Jack Kennedy once put it: “Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.”

Trump Footnote

Donald Trump made several policy suggestions on the Islamism issue, one on immigration, the other on Mideast oil. On the former, he suggests a hiatus on Muslim immigration until America develops a plan or reliable programs to vet migrants. On Arab oil, he suggests, given the lives and treasure spent liberating Kuwait and Iraqi oil fields, America should have held those resources in trust and use oil revenues to finance the war against jihad, however long that takes. The problem with both Trump ideas is that they come perilously close to common sense, an American instinct in short supply these days.

Categories: Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Iran, Iran - Middle East, Iran and Israel, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic immigration, Islamic jihad, Islamic nations, Islamic reformation, Islamic State, Israel, Kurdish fighters, Kurdistan, Middle East, NATO, Obama - Middle East, Obama and Iran, Obama and Islam, Obama and Islamic State, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Obama and Israel, Obama's affinity for Iran, Obama's America, Pakistan, Palestinians, Russia, Saudi Arabia
Tags: Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iran - Middle East, Iran and Israel, Iran Scam, Islam, Islamic immigration, Islamic Jihad, Islamic nations, Islamic reformation, Islamic State, Israel, Kurdish fighter, Kurdistan, Middle East, Nato, Obama and Iran, Obama and Islam, Obama and Islamic State, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Obama and Israel, Obama's affinity for Iran, Obama's America, Pakistan, Palestinians, Russia, Saudi Arabia

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Congress Investigating Obama Spy Ops on Congress

January 5, 2016

Congress Seeks Investigation Into Obama Spy Ops on Congress, Israel Lawmakers demand Obama administration disclose how it used private communications

BY: Adam Kredo Follow @Kredo0
January 4, 2016 5:00 pm

Source: Congress Investigating Obama Spy Ops on Congress

Lawmakers are demanding that the Obama administration disclose how it used private communications that were intercepted during a massive spy operation on Israel that included private conversations with members of Congress, according to letters sent to the National Security Agency and White House.

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) petitioned President Barack Obama late Monday afternoon, demanding the administration reveal how it used information obtained during secret surveillance of Israeli leaders, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Reports emerged last week that the NSA’s spy operation picked up private communications between Israeli officials, members of Congress, and U.S. Jewish community leaders. The information reportedly centered on Israeli efforts to halt the nuclear negotiations. The White House reportedly did not take steps to ensure that these political conversations were omitted.

DeSantis, who along with several other lawmakers has already requested that the NSA provide Congress with details of the operation, informed the Obama administration late Monday that he is seeking to learn if the information gleaned from these private conversations was used by the White House to sway the national debate over the Iran nuclear agreement.

“I am concerned that the vague guidelines and policies used by the NSA for intelligence collection and sharing, in conjunction with elusive direction from the Administration, have led to intelligence being collected on sitting members of Congress for political purposes, specifically relating to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was being negotiated at the time this information was collected,” DeSantis wrote.

The lawmaker is further requesting that the White House reveal if this information was shared with any other country, particularly other members of the international negotiating team that struck the nuclear accord with Iran last year.

“Did the White House receive any communications between Israeli officials and members of Congress regarding the nuclear negotiations and agreement with Iran?” Desantis asks.

“How was this information used by the Administration in the course of the JCPOA negotiations?” he follows up.

The White House also should disclose whether the information collected was “used by White House officials during the political debate in the United States about the Iran deal,” according to the letter.

DeSantis and three other lawmakers requested last week that the NSA turn over all information pertaining to how the program was run and how the information collected could be used.

Congress must continue to investigate the spy program to determine if the Obama administration violated laws pertaining to the separation of powers, DeSantis said in a statement.

While the Obama Administration was negotiating a nuclear deal with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, they were simultaneously spying on and trying to undermine our closest ally in the region, Israel,” he said. “This spying may very well have swept up the communications of members of Congress, which represents an affront to the separation of powers.”

“Congress needs to investigate how the Obama administration used this information and determine whether it shared information gleaned from this spying with Iran,” according to DeSantis.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Iran, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Islam, Israel, Obama, U.S. Congress, USA

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Islamic Reformation and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

January 2, 2016

Islamic Reformation and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dan Miller’s Blog, January 2, 2016

(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

is the Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and is the author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith (Simon & Schuster, June 2012). On March 20, 2012, Dr. Jasser was appointed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) where he currently serves as a Commissioner.

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.

Categories: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, CAIR, Islam, Islam and women, Islamic culture, Islamic honor, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic reformation, Islamic State, Islamophobia
Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, CAIR, Islam, Islam and women, Islamic culture, Islamic honor, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic reformation, Islamic State, Islamophobia

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It is time for Muslims to begin a deep self-examination

December 31, 2015

It is time for Muslims to begin a deep self-examination, Washington Post, Yasmine Bahrani, December 30, 2015

(Few Muslims speak favorably about an Islamic Reformation and many speak unfavorably about it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in Heretic, urges that there be a reformation and points to the voices for and against. I just finished Heretic and plan to write a review. — DM)

In the wake of the Paris bloodbath, the attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and Bamako, Mali, and murders elsewhere before and since, people desperately want to understand the root cause of all this violence. That’s true not only in the West, where many blame Islam itself. It’s true in the Middle East, too, where we are struggling to come to grips with the carnage and the region’s role in it.

Many of the usual suspects were singled out in the reaction here to the most recent attacks. Various Arab and Muslim writers blame Iran and Israel; others point to the West’s policies in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Of course, some media voices repeat the well-worn view that we Arabs are the victims of hidden conspiracies. But more self-critical voices have arisen as well.

Though their influence might still be minimal, a few journalists are speaking out. In the Arabic newspaper Al-Mada, Iraqi writer Adnan Hussein offered a suggestion: We must overhaul the educational system. In a piece published just two days after the Paris attacks on Nov. 13, he said that from elementary school through university, our young people are taught — sometimes with a stick — that Islam is not only great, but also better than other religions, and that those who are not like us belong in hell. What has emerged, he wrote, is a “savage faith that stirs up decapitation, spills blood, instigates plunder and rape.” As for the real Islam, he lamented: “It has no place in our lives, or in the best of cases, it has a barely audible voice that almost nobody hears.”

On the same day, celebrated Lebanese writer and editor of the Al-Hayat newspaper Ghassan Charbel wrote that to rescue itself, the Arab and Muslim world must participate in the struggle against Islamism. Charbel called for shutting down platforms of hate and said the Middle East needs to undertake “a deep re-examination” of its society. He called for “universities, schools, mosques, TV and electronic sites to reclaim their platforms from that handful” of destructive ideologues who control them. “What threatens the Arab and Islamic world today,” he said, “is no less dangerous than the threat that Nazism posed to Europe.”

Such writers are asking Middle Easterners to examine their institutions and society more broadly for their share of the responsibility for the violence. But this view is not limited to elite journalists; it is one that many of my own students at American University in Dubai share.

Recently, I asked my students what they thought about commentary that appeared in the Guardian newspaper in November suggesting that France and Britain had failed their immigrants through clumsy — and ultimately alienating — efforts to promote multiculturalism (in Britain’s case) and assimilation (in France’s). In this way, author Kenan Malik said, French and British policies gave Islamism an entrée into isolated Muslim communities.

Nearly all my students rejected the premise, arguing that immigrants were responsible for their own actions whether they were isolated or not. Of course, many of these students come from families who fled countries terrorized by Muslim extremists and have no sympathy for them. But they don’t blame Western multiculturalism for the rise of home-grown Islamism. “That’s silly,” shrugged one Syrian girl.

Why, then, I asked them, don’t Muslims march in the streets of London, Paris and New York loudly condemning the Islamic State? Because, they answered, mainstream Muslims are too scared that the extremists would come after them. The class brainstormed about what could be done instead. Most concluded that they, too, would be afraid to call attention to themselves.

When I asked another class what responsibility we have to explain to others that terrorists don’t represent all Muslims, the response was mixed. One Saudi student said it was not at all our responsibility. “If a (Western) person wants to learn about Islam, he should Google it,” she said. Another, an Egyptian, was angered by the question: “If I hear one more time that Muslims have not done enough to condemn terrorists. . . .” Many Muslims are weary of such criticism.

But others emphasize the work that needs to be done, whether it is in coming to terms with their own cultures’ problems, as Hussein and Charbel urge, or through advancing the acculturation of Muslim communities into Western societies. The Jordanian journalist Mousa Barhouma has written about such challenges for years, advising Muslims living in the West to integrate. If you are a Muslim who moves to Holland, he told me, “Don’t act shocked if they serve beer at the local restaurants.”

In a recent piece in Al-Hayat, Barhouma wondered whether anyone was struck by the fact that the carnage at Paris’s Bataclan theater took place on Boulevard Voltaire. Perhaps they were, and perhaps it was in response to this assault against not only life but also against reason itself, that more voices demanding responsibility are beginning to be heard.

Categories: Islam, Islamic culture, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic reformation, Islamism, Muslim assimilation
Tags: Islam, Islamic culture, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic reformation, Islamism, Muslim assimilation

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Founding Fathers’ Criticism of ‘Musselmen’ Sinks Suhail Khan’s Islam-Is-American P.R.

December 30, 2015

Founding Fathers’ Criticism of ‘Musselmen’ Sinks Suhail Khan’s Islam-Is-American P.R., Breitbart, Jordan Schachtel, December 29, 2015

Suhail_Khan

Suhail Khan, an official in the George W. Bush administration, is engaged in a media campaign that claims Islam is ingrained in the founding of the American republic.

In his Foreign Policy piece, titled “Islam is All-American,” (which would later be re-published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with the title “One Nation Under Allah“) Mr. Khan begins by insisting that American Muslims are under attack–a plea to perpetual victimization that seeks to immediately quash any legitimate debate.

Khan targets GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, insisting he has called for the “registration of all Muslim-Americans,” which is not true. As Breitbart News has shown, this was a media-created suggestion.

Khan claims that “5 million to 7 million” Muslims are living in the United States, without offering any evidence.

He tells us to look to former President George W. Bush for a more “unifying message,” and claims that “poll after poll” demonstrates support for “anti-Muslim sentiment,” without citing one such poll.

What Khan does here, whether purposely or not, is conflate criticism of Islam’s doctrines with “anti-Muslim sentiment” aimed at Muslim individuals. Unsurprisingly, he never addresses whether criticism of Islam is legitimate.

In many Islamic countries, majorities or large percentages of the population favor the death penalty for “apostates,” which includes people who criticize Islam, according to Pew Research. These countries say that the Koranic Sharia law demands they live by such methods.

Across the globe, critics of Islam are slaughtered (see Charlie Hebdo, Bangladesh secular bloggers, Saudi atheists) simply for discussing the “religion of peace.” The “lucky ones,” such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and others, have mere fatwas placed on their head.

While many in the Islamic world react violently to criticism of their religion, others, such as Suhail Khan, seek to delegitimize these free voices as ones that make Muslims “feel singled out.” He insists that our enemy “makes no distinction about our race, ethnicity, or religion – attacking us only because we are Americans.”

Americans turn on their televisions and see hundreds-of-thousands of Muslim men fighting on behalf of Islam, engaged in a wholesale murder campaign against religious and ethnic minorities. The free-thinking American people are gravely concerned to see these deeply-religious Islamic groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, targeting people simply because they’re Jews. Or whether it’s Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, and the Islamic State hunting down Christians simply because they’re Christians.

Yet, Mr. Khan tells us that the conflict is our fault. This supposed “anti-Muslim sentiment” trend in America needs to stop, he demands. How dare we start “casting suspicion on an entire faith group,” he suggests.

And the founders of the republic supported Islam, he claims, because they made clear their views on religious freedom, and their assertion that a belief in a particular religion should not prevent a man from holding office.

But in reality, the founders had plenty to say about Islam’s doctrines.

John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1814, stating that Islam’s Muhammad was a “military fanatic” who “denies that laws were made for him” and “arrogates everything to himself by force of arms.”

Ben Franklin, another founding father, said of Islam:

“Nor can the Plundering of Infidels be in that sacred Book [the Quran] forbidden, since it is well known from it, that God has given the World, and all that it contains, to his faithful Mussulmen (Muslims), who are to enjoy it of Right as fast as they conquer it.”

Thomas Jefferson, who would later become engaged in a war against the Barbary pirates, observed that peace was not possible with Islamic zealots, stating in a letter to Secretary of State John Jay:

“The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Our 6th president, John Quincy Adams, wrote that the Islamic Prophet Muhammad “spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth.”

“He declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind …The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust: to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature … As the essential principle of his faith is the subjugation of others by the sword; it is only by force, that his false doctrines can be dispelled, and his power annihilated.”

None of those critiques make their way into Khan’s piece, as he concludes, incoherently: “In this time of real danger, let’s not allow our zeal to defend our ideals destroy them.”

Categories: Islam, Islamic myths, Islamism, Islamophobia, U.S History
Tags: Islam, Islamic myths, Islamism, Islamophobia, U.S. History

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The danger of partial no-go zones

December 29, 2015

The danger of partial no-go zones, Washington Times, Daniel Pipes, December 28, 2015

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Partial no-go zones in majority-Muslim areas are a part of the urban landscape from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, with the French government alone counting 751 of them. This shirking of responsibility foreshadows catastrophe and calls for immediate reversal.

I call the bad parts of Europe’s cities partial no-go zones because ordinary people in ordinary clothing at ordinary times can enter and leave them without trouble. But they are no-go zones in the sense that representatives of the state — police especially, but also firefighters, meter-readers, ambulance attendants and social workers — can only enter with massed power for temporary periods of time. If they disobey this basic rule (as I learned first-hand in Marseille), they are likely to be swarmed, insulted, threatened and even attacked.

This situation needs not exist. Host societies can say no to the poor, crime-ridden, violent and rebellious areas emerging in their midst. But if governments need not abdicate control, why do they do so? Because of a fervent, slightly desperate hope to avoid confrontation. Multicultural policies offer the illusion of sidestepping anything that might be construed as “racist” or “Islamophobic.”

This abandonment is no minor aberration but a decision with grave consequences — consequences far deeper than, say, not controlling a crime-ridden American city like East St. Louis. That’s because Muslim quasi-no-go zones fit into a far larger political context, with dual Western and Islamic dimensions.

Western: Avoiding confrontation reflects a deep-seated ambivalence about the value of one’s own civilization and even self-hatred of the white race. The French intellectual Pascal Bruckner noted in his 2006 book “La Tyrannie de la Penitence” (“The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism”) that leftist thinking “can be reduced to mechanical denunciations of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.” Europeans preen as “the sick man of the planet” whose greed and false notions of superiority causes every problem in the non-Western world: “The white man has sown grief and ruin wherever he has gone.”

If the deadly triad of imperialism, fascism and racism represent all that the West has to offer, no wonder immigrants to Europe, including Islamists, are treated as superior beings due supine deference. They exploit this by acting badly — drug dealers ruling the roost, a gang raping 1,400 children over a period of 16 years, and promoting violent ideologies — with near-impunity because, after all, the Europeans have only themselves to blame.

Muslim: Partial no-go zones also result from an Islamic drive for exclusion and domination. Mecca and Medina constitute the official, sovereign and eternal Muslim-only zones. For nearly 14 centuries, these two Arabian cities have been formally off-limits to kafirs, who trespass at their peril; a lively literature of non-Muslims who penetrated their holy precincts and lived to tell the tale goes back centuries and continues still today.

Other Islamic no-go zones also exist. Before losing power in 1887, the Muslim rulers of Harar, Somalia, for centuries insisted (in the words of a British officer) on the “the exclusion of all travellers not of the Moslem faith.” In like spirit, women in hijabs scream at non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to make them feel unwelcome and so stay away. In the West, lawful Muslim-only enclaves represent one drive for Muslim autonomy and sovereignty; the Muslims of America organization, with its 15 or so no-go compounds bristling with arms and hostility on private property dotted around the United States, represents another.

Unlike places like East St. Louis, Muslim-majority partial no-go zones have a deeply political and highly ambitious quality to them. Indeed, it is not farfetched to foresee them turning into Muslim autonomous zones applying Islamic law and challenging the authorities. The mix of feeble European governments and a strong Islamic drive for power points to future unrest, crises, breakdown and even civil war.

Some believe it is already too late to avoid this fate. I disagree, but if catastrophe is to be avoided, the job to dismantle all partial no-go zones must be started soon and executed with a swift determination based on a renewed sense of self-worth. Two universal principles should guide European governments: attaining a monopoly of force and applying the same code of law to all citizens.

Domestic peace in Europe and perhaps other regions, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, demands nothing less.

Categories: Islam, Islamic supremacy, Islamic tolerance, Israel, No go zones
Tags: Islam, Islamic supremacy, Islamic tolerance, Israel, No go zones

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House Democrats Mover to Criminalize Criticism of Islam

December 29, 2015

House Democrats Mover to Criminalize Criticism of Islam, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, December 29, 2015

(Please see also, Islam: Hate, Honor, Women’s Rights and Congress. — DM)

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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.

Categories: CAIR, Democrats, Freedom of speech, Hate speech, Human rights, Islam, Islamic supremacy, Islamophobia, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution
Tags: CAIR, Democrats, freedom of speech, Hate speech, human rights, Islam, Islamic supremacy, Islamophobia, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution

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British Universities have Gone Crazy too

December 27, 2015

British Universities have Gone Crazy too. Why? Power Line, John Hinderaker, December 27, 2015

Italian journalist Giulio Menotti documents the madness that has overtaken British universities–a madness that is eerily familiar:

“Rhodes Must Fall” cry the students and professors outside Oxford, many of whom are themselves part of the Rhodes Scholarship group, the program built by the “racist” tycoon to allow foreign students to study at Oxford.

It’s exactly like students at Amherst and Harvard denouncing Jeffrey Amherst and Isaac Royall.

Meanwhile, across the UK, a general air of hostility is spreading against opinions that could cause even only a hint of distress in students, forcing theFinancial Times to publish an editorial: “It is in the interest of universities to maintain a free and fertile academic environment.”

Ditto in the U.S.

Iranian dissident Maryam Lamaze … was attacked and prevented from speaking at many UK colleges, like Goldsmiths and Warwick. Her hymn against religion and for Western free speech “offended” British students of Islamic faith.

At University College in London, a former student, Macer Gifford, was prevented from telling his experience in the ranks of Kurdish fighters committed to battle against the Islamic State. The reason? “In every conflict there are two sides and our college does not want to take sides.”

Should we be anti-ISIS? That’s too close a question for universities in Britain, as in the U.S., to call.

The University of East Anglia has just banned the use of the sombrero, because it is considered hateful towards Hispanic students.

Just like the recent fiasco at Yale. It’s odd, though. Doesn’t every kind of hat originate with one culture or another, and mustn’t all hats therefore be banned? And why stop with hats?

Oxford has canceled a debate on abortion, because women’s organizations had complained about the presence, among the speakers, of “a person without a uterus.” Don’t laugh, it is really happening at the university founded in 1096.

Don’t laugh, because feminists don’t have a sense of humor, either here or in the U.K.

The University of Cardiff has tried to remove the feminist Germaine Greer, “guilty” of not considering women and transsexuals as equals.

Transsexuals, slightly more common than unicorns, have opened up whole new horizons of insanity.

Meanwhile, these British “safe spaces” are used by apologists for Islamist cutthroats who gather support and are affiliated with these universities (“Jihadi John”, the late Isis executioner, was a brilliant student of Westminster).

I hadn’t realized that. Apparently “brilliant” students aren’t what they used to be.

Some days ago, the Telegraph published an article entitled: “The ideology of the ISIS dominates British universities.”

Why are so many students and professors attracted to evil? It was true in the 1930s, too, when German students and professors were among the most enthusiastic supporters of National Socialism, and when Nazis were weirdly popular–as it seems today–on many American campuses.

The same universities that are uncomfortable accommodating heterodox feminists and Islamic dissidents, such as the Queen Mary University of London, allow events under the banner of Islam where women sit separated from men, in accordance with the Sharia or Islamic law, as if they were in Riyadh or Tehran.

Because that’s diversity.

Muslim activist for women’s rights, Maryam Namazie, has been driven away by fanatic Islamists with the approval of the stupid gay militants. In British colleges it was Namazie who needed a “safe space” to deliver her speech, protected by bodyguards….

Much like the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Michelle Malkin here in the United States. And finally:

Meanwhile, British professors, writers, musicians, intellectuals and professionals are busy promoting initiatives to boycott the Jewish State and its professors.

All of this is nauseatingly familiar. My question is: why? Why have British universities gone off the rails in precisely the same ways as American universities? Steve has referred to the “spreading virus” of madness on American campuses, but the virus has apparently replicated itself in England. Why?

I mean the question seriously. Have British students and professors taken inspiration from their American cousins? Or vice versa? Is it because Leftism is an international movement? Do left-wing British professors and students, like their American counterparts, hate the society that sustains them, and does their hatred produce eerily similar symptoms? I don’t know the answer to these questions. But a contagion is loose that transcends, apparently, international boundaries.

Categories: Britain, Education, Freedom of speech, Fundamentalist Islam, Islam, Islamic culture, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic perversions, Islamic supremacy, Islamic tolerance, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Political correctness
Tags: Britain, Education, freedom of speech, Fundamentalist Islam, Islam, Islamic culture, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic perversions, Islamic supremacy, Islamic tolerance, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Political correctness

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Islamic activists say 9/11 and San Bernardino were terrible — because of their effects on Muslims.

December 23, 2015

Islamic activists say 9/11 and San Bernardino were terrible — because of their effects on Muslims. National Review, Anne Bayefsky, December 22, 2015

Over at the United Nations, they are laying the groundwork for the 2016 American presidential election — on behalf of the Democratic party. The perceived golden ticket? Playing the victim card. Wild and repeated accusations are being hurled against the GOP of systematic racism, xenophobia, and, in particular, “Islamophobia.”

On December 18, 2015, the U.N. hosted two panels under the title “The Changing Dynamics of Islamophobia and Its Implications on Peaceful and Inclusive Societies.”

The predominant theme was victimhood. There were frequent mentions of 9/11, but not of the 2,977 who died, or their families. The alleged victims of 9/11 of interest to the U.N. gathering were the entirety of American Muslims. MuslimGirl.net editor Amani Al-Khatahtbeh told the U.N. audience: “I was in fourth grade when 9/11 happened. So I had to endure the height of Islamophobia during my formative years.” Wajahat Ali of Al Jazeera America said that 9/11 was “a baptism by fire. . . . As a result of that pain and trauma of 9/11, for my generation there is always a pre- and post-9/11.”

Each instance of radical Islamist terror was flipped the same way. Co-host Ufuk Gokcen, the U.N. representative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, had a long list of incidents bracketed by events in America: “9/11 terrorist attacks . . . and San Bernardino terrorist attacks. The level that Islamophobia has reached, and its mainstreaming into media and political discourse, is terrifying us.”

Terrifying who?

The idea was repeated in another form by his co-host, Sally Kader, head of the U.S. Federation for Middle East Peace, an NGO. She told the receptive crowd: “The FBI census on all the hate crime has always been against Jews, and, of course, blacks, and now we top everything. It’s about Muslims.”

Actually, the FBI census for 2014, released November 16, 2015, still found that 57 percent of anti-religious hate crimes were motivated by “anti-Jewish bias” and that 16 percent of victims were the object of “anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias.”

Then came the excuses. According to Joyce Dubensky, head of the Tanenbaum Center, “people talk about violent extremists and extremists as crazy. . . . I think that that’s an error. I think that’s a stereotype as well. They are also complex human beings, which is why we want to try to talk with them as well.”

One shudders to think of a meeting between Ms. Dubensky and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Scratch the surface of this latest batch of U.N. talking heads and the promotion of terrorism and anti-Semitism isn’t hard to find. The Muslimgirl.net site of Palestinian Al-Katahtbeh includes justifications of the “martyrdom” of Palestinian mothers and a drawing of the fashionable woman with a purse filled with knives, rocks, and a petrol bomb. Another speaker, journalist Haroon Moghul, wrote in the Huffington Post in January 2015 that he advocates terminating a Jewish state altogether: “A one-state solution . . . is the only option.”

Throughout the proceedings, one could have mistaken “impartial” U.N. New York headquarters for a Democratic political rally. Moghul was applauded for his political take on the GOP debate of December 15: “The Republican debate . . . was kind of terrifying and traumatizing,” and the GOP was “a political party that is increasingly indulging in open racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia.”

Another crowd pleaser from the Al Jazeera America journalist was this: “If certain people with wavy hair became president . . . we might end up in concentration camps. We can brand it and call it Trump centers.”

So how did all this go down for the diplomat who represented the United States?

Here is Laurie Shestack Phipps when she took the microphone from the floor:

I’m from the U.S. Mission to the U.N., and I wanted to assure the audience and all the speakers that the U.S. government shares many of the concerns that you’ve expressed about the growing anti-Muslim discrimination in this country and around the world. . . . I did want to emphasize the position of the U.S. government very much in line with the focus of these two panels.

Remarkably, when this American diplomat could not manage to defend her country following hours of America-bashing — because her bosses don’t know the difference between humility and submission, or decorum and capitulation — she was put to shame by an Irish diplomat who could.

Speaking also from the floor, Michael Sanfey said:

Concerns were expressed for the state of American religious pluralism, but isn’t it still incredibly more pluralistic? Where is the religious pluralism in some of the Muslim-majority lands? It just seems to me there is no pluralism whatever. Couldn’t it help to combat Islamophobia if greater diversity was promoted in those lands where the churches [a]re absolutely forbidden?

The profoundly embarrassing spectacle makes the punch line perhaps less surprising.

Moderator Kader revealed to American taxpayers what happened to some of their half billion dollars that were used to renovate the U.N. in Turtle Bay. The event wrapped up on early Friday afternoon by announcing Friday prayers. It turns out that a part of the U.N. building has been taken over, in Kader’s words, for “Muslims to pray.”

No women allowed. Hillary and the U.N. A hell of a plan for 2016.

Hillary and the U.N. A hell of a plan for 2016.

Categories: Democrats, Islam, Islam and women, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam, Obama's America, Republicans, United Nations
Tags: Democrats, Islam, Islam and women, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam, Obama's America, Republicans, United Nations

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The United States and Islam: What Is Going On?

December 22, 2015

The United States and Islam: What Is Going On? Gatestone Institute, Amir Taheri, December 22, 2015

♦ The irony is that no major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the United States to help, respect, please and, yes, appease Islam. And, yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S.

♦ The politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.” Is it Islamophobia to question a religion whose Middle East leaders often preach “Death to America” and hatred for Western values?

♦ More prevalent than Islamophobia is Islamophilia, as leftists treat Muslims as children whose feathers should not be ruffled. The Islamophilia crowd invites Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom in atonement of largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era.

♦ Many Muslims resent the kind of flattery that takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized. The world needs to wake up and ask: What is going on?

With Americans still trying to absorb the shock of San Bernardino massacre, the perennial debate about “why do they hate us” is on with more intensity than ever since 9/11. The irony is that no major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the United States to help, respect, please and, yes, appease Islam. And, yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S.

Both Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson tried to appease the Islamist pirates of North Africa in the hope of persuading them to cease their raids on U.S. commercial ships and stop capturing Americans and selling them as slaves in the Mediterranean. They sent peace missions laden with gifts and cash, and flattered the pirates, successors to Kheireddin, the Red Bearded One, in almost lyrical terms. In the end, however, they had to take military action to cut the head off the snake. However, the episode was soon forgotten, except in the U.S. Marine Corps, where it became part of its folklore, and the U.S., a nation built on the principle of religious freedom, resumed its benevolent attitude towards Islam.

I remember back in the 1980s, the diplomat then in charge of the United Sates counterterrorism program, Robert Oakley, insisted that the U.S. will never be targeted by homegrown Islamist terrorists because it was “their final destination, their last best hope.”

That was the time when groups controlled by Ayatollah Khomeini kidnapped or killed Americans in the Middle East.

So what happened to make that “final destination” a stopover to paradise for martyrs?

Why do so many Muslims hate Americans to the point of wanting to massacre them in their offices as in 9/11 or at a Christmas Party at San Bernardino — despite the fact that the United States is the only major power in modern times to offer Muslims a helping hand when they needed it?

Wasn’t it President Woodrow Wilson who insisted at the end of the First World War that the main European imperial powers of the day, Great Britain and France, publicly commit to respecting the right of self-determination for nations freed from the Ottoman yoke? The Americans invented the idea of “mandates” under the League of Nations to prevent the European imperialist world-grabbers from turning their Muslim conquests in the Middle East into a new colonial galaxy. Without that, there would probably have been no independent Arab states in the Levant, at least for decades.

And wasn’t it President Harry Truman who in 1946 used eyeball-to-eyeball diplomacy against Soviet despot Josef Stalin to force him to take Russian occupation troops out of Iran’s northwestern provinces and forget about his plan of creating a Soviet Iranistan? (At the time the Soviets hadn’t yet developed a nuclear arsenal and thought twice before provoking a clash with the U.S.)

It was President Truman again who prevented the British from sharing out mandatory Palestine among their Arab clients, having already taken a big chunk of it to create an emirate for their Hashemite protégés on the east bank of the Jordan.

And it was thanks to U.S. sending the Marines in the nick of time in 1958 that both Lebanon and Jordan managed to retain their independence and avoided becoming early versions of what is Syria today.

Then we had the 1956 crisis, when Britain and France invaded Egypt to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Wasn’t it President Dwight Eisenhower who went against American’s oldest allies to let the Egyptians assert their national sovereignty?

From 1961 onwards, President John F. Kennedy exerted immense pressure on France and used his charm on General De Gaulle to accelerate progress towards Algeria’s independence. In 1997 Redha Malik, a former Prime Minister of Algeria and key negotiator with France, told me that throughout the Evian peace talks, the Algerian team knew it had “a strong friend in Washington.”

In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, triggered by Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul-Nasser’s quixotic attempt at imposing a blockade in the Strait of Tiran, the U.S. used its clout to persuade the Israelis to stop the war after only six days. In his memoirs, the long-standing Soviet apparatchik and future Prime Minister, Yevgeni Primakov, claims that the Israelis wanted to complete their destruction of Arab air forces by wiping out Nasser’s heavy weapons on the ground as well. It was under American pressure that the Israelis agreed to temper their appetite for victory and accepted a ceasefire under the auspices of the United Nations.

The Nasserist regime could live to fight another day, which came in 1973. In the October 1973 war, too, U.S. intervention helped restrain the Israelis, who had built up an invasion force under General Ariel Sharon a stone’s-throw from Cairo.

In the Camp David talks that led to peace between Egypt and Israel, intense pressure by President Jimmy Carter forced the Israelis to abandon plans to maintain “security enclaves” inside the Sinai Peninsula, thereby helping President Anwar Sadat recover all of Egypt’s lost territory.

In 1982 a multinational force, led by the United States, intervened in Lebanon to stop the Israeli advance beyond the Litani River. That force also helped save the lives of Yasser Arafat and his close associates in the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when, trapped in Beirut, they risked being captured or killed by the Israelis. President Ronald Reagan even arranged for Arafat and his entourage a safe passage to Tunisia, free of charge.

During the lengthy crisis that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the U.S., having at first hesitated to intervene under President George H.W. Bush, assumed a leadership position under President Bill Clinton and helped save the lives of many Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where a Serbian ethnic cleansing master plan was in full application. Later, it was also U.S. military power that helped Kosovo’s Albanian majority, overwhelmingly Muslim, achieve independence. Ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova told me in an interview that he had counted on “Europe’s conscience to wake up” only to see that it was “the American cavalry” that in the end came to the rescue, while the Europeans “danced around the dying man.”

The U.S. was the only major power to have no state-owned oil company and thus never used its military clout to obtain a share of the Middle East’s energy resources.

Should Muslims hate Americans because they refused to disband their military bases on Islamic lands? Again, history shows that the U.S. was the only major power prepared to pack up and leave as soon as its hosts showed it the door.

In 1969, an astonished Col. Moammar Khadafy watched as the Americans closed one of their most important military bases in the Mediterranean, Wheelus, located on Libyan territory, as soon as his newly installed military government asked Washington to leave. A couple of years earlier, it had taken months of bloody battles and tens of thousands of lives before South Yemen was able to force Britain to close its base in Aden.

In 1979, the U.S. had 27,000 military personnel in Iran, operating “listening posts” set up as part of the strategic arms limitation accords to monitor Soviet missile tests. But when the new Islamic regime led by Khomeini asked the U.S. to close the listening posts, which had been approved by the Soviets as well, the Americans did no foot-dragging. The only Americans left behind were diplomats, soon to be seized as hostages by Khomeinist militants.

We witnessed a repeat of that in the 1990s on a grander scale, when the Americans simply packed up and left when the Saudis asked them to close their bases after driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, tangentially also saving Saudi Arabia from Iraqi occupation.

That the U.S. was a friend of Muslims and of Islam was again illustrated when American power helped drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and, later, liberate Afghans and Iraqis, a total of 50 million Muslims, from the vicious domination of Taliban and the Ba’ath Party.

In 2005, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Sharestani was publicly wondering why the Americans were not coming to “steal our oil,” which anti-U.S. propaganda claimed had been Washington’s key objective in toppling Saddam Hussein. We left there, too.

During the past six decades, the U.S. has been by far the largest donor of aid to more than 40 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations. In the 1940s and ’50s, tens of millions of Muslims were saved from starvation and famine thanks to U.S. food aid. And the Point IV program, launched by President Truman, helped eradicate a number of endemic diseases, including smallpox and malaria, which killed large numbers of Muslims each year.

Many Muslims nations have been annually receiving large checks from the U.S. for decades, among them Egypt, which gets $2 billion, and Pakistan, the homeland of San Bernardino killer Syed Farook, which gets $1 billion.

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After the San Bernardino massacre carried out by jihadists Syed Farook (right) and Tashfeen Malik (left), the perennial debate about “why do they hate us” is on with more intensity than ever since 9/11.

When the last Islamic Caliph was driven out of Turkey in 1924, he went into exile first to France and then to the United States, where his descendants lived in New York. In fact, the last pretender to the Islamic Caliphate, Ertugul Osman V, died in Manhattan in 2009.

An open society, the U.S. has always welcomed Islamic exiles of all kinds, including some of its own bitter enemies. The only time that the pan-Islamist Hezbollah movement, founded and led by Iran, has ever held an international conference outside Iran or Lebanon was in Austin Texas in 1986, when a number of Latin American branches of the movement were created. Hundreds of former high-ranking Khomeinist civilian and military officials and clerics have ended up in the U.S. as exiles, while many others have their children attending U.S. schools and universities.

Today, half of Islamic Republic President Hassan Rouhani’s closest aides are holders of PhDs from U.S. universities, among them his Chief of Staff, Muhammad Nahavandian, a Green Card holder, and his Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif. (The other half consists of former holders of U.S. hostages in Tehran, among them Defense Minister Hussein Dehqan and Environmental director Masoumeh Ebtekar.)

Quite a few of Osama bin Laden’s 50 or so siblings are either holders of U.S. passports or green cards, along with thousands of other Saudis.

Unlike Russia, which has a 200-year history of war against Muslims, having annexed Islamic land at the rate of one square kilometer a day during the 19^th century, the U.S. never annexed any Muslim-majority nation. And unlike China, which is still holding its Muslim minority, the Uighurs, in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) surrounded by a ring of steel, the U.S. is not trying to stop a Muslim nation’s aspiration after self-determination.

In the 1990s, when Saudi Arabia normalized ties with the People’s Republic of China, it shut down the offices of the Uighur exiles in Jeddah. Where did the exiles transfer to? The answer is: Washington DC, since neither Muslim nations nor Europeans would agree to host them.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. has been host to more than five million Muslims from all over the world, many of them fleeing brutal Islamist regimes in their homelands. In a conversation in 2002, Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis expressed the hope that Muslims in the United States and other Western democracies could become “beacons of enlightenment” projecting light back to their old counties. Many of us shared that hope.

Now, however, we see that the opposite is happening. Instead of exporting “light” back to the Muslim world, a growing number of Muslims in Western democracies have become importers of darkness in their new abodes.

Worse still, the politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.”

Is it Islamophobia to question a religion whose Middle East leaders often preach “Death to America” and hatred for Western values?

More prevalent than Islamophobia is Islamophilia, as leftists treat Muslims as children whose feathers should not be ruffled.

The Islamophilia crowd does great disservice to both Western democracies and to Islam itself.

They invite Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom in atonement of largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era. They also invite Muslims in the West to learn how to pose as victims and demand the rewards of victimhood as is the fashion in Europe and America. To the Muslim world at large, the message of Islamophilia is that Muslims need no criticism, although their faith is being transformed into a number of conflicting ideologies dedicated to violence and terror.

Never mind if Islamic theology is all but dead. To say so would be a sign of Islamophobia.

Never mind that God makes only a cameo appearance in mosque sermons almost entirely obsessed with political issues.

All that Western intellectuals or leaders need to do is stop flattering Islam, as President Obama has been doing for the past seven years, claiming that virtually anything worthwhile under the sun has its origin in Islam.

Many Muslims resent that kind of flattery, which takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized. The world needs to wake from its slumber and ask: What is going on?

Categories: Islam, Islamic culture, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamic tolerance, Islamophobia, United States
Tags: Islam, Islamic culture, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamic tolerance, Islamophobia, United States

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