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Jihad Watch

Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Hugh Fitzgerald: What do we want in the Muslim lands?

January 6, 2016 2:54 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 54 Comments



The multifarious geopolitical messes in the Middle East, the almost comical variety of resentments, hostilities, mutual denouncements, and hatreds in the Muslim lands that are presented to us each day on some news channel’s platter, the confusion worse compounded that overcomes us when we look at any part or aspect of the Camp of Islam — all this beggars belief, but you’d better nonetheless believe it. You’d better believe, for example, that the Uber-Sunni Saudis, who gave rise to Al-Qaeda, who provided Al-Qaeda not just with Osama bin Laden but with a host of other members (including 11 of the 19 who went on that 9/11/2001 mission), are now dead-set on executing members of that same Al -Qaeda, and have just done so, and are also prepared to make war on the uberest-Sunnis of them all, the members of the Islamic State. And at the same time as those Saudi rulers execute, in the same galere, both those Al-Qaeda and Islamic State anti-Shi’a fanatics, they also can — and did — execute a leading Shi’a cleric in Saudi Arabia, one Nimr Al-Nimr. Those who like things kept simple, and not complicated, will be disappointed by the Muslim Middle East, where every (geopolitical) prospect teases, and only man is vile.

Let’s see what we can do to improve our chances of seeing things steadily and whole, by standing a bit back from the radio, and limning the broad outlines of Islam.
Let’s begin with the all-encompassing nature of this faith. Islam is a Total System, a Complete Regulation of Life, a Compleat Explanation of the Universe. The True Believers in Islam are consumed by their demands of their faith. There is no such thing as “wearing one’s faith lightly” when that faith is Islam. Even those whom one might have suspected to be Islamic “moderates” turn out too often on closer inspection to believe in the uncompromisable rightness of Islam, the ingratitude and perfidy of non-Muslims, the need or duty to engage in the Struggle or Jihad, using chiefly combat (qitaal) or terrorism, but not excluding the use of other instruments to promote the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam everywhere. And among those instruments are economic warfare (less of a threat now that the “oil weapon” has so obviously faltered, and oil producers are desperate for customers), propaganda and diplomatic warfare, and the latest instrument of Jihad, demographic conquest, through the large-scale movement of Muslims into non-Muslim lands, where through their mere presence they gain political power and inhibit the freedom to maneuver of political leaders and the freedom of speech of people who become too fearful to speak out about Islam: if they dare to do so, they are promptly attacked by all the bien-pensants.
But, as Muslims like to say, meaning something quite different, “Islam is not a monolith.” By that phrase they attempt to inhibit non-Muslims from ever speaking about something called “Islam” because — since it is “not a monolith”– any such generalizing attempt would be false. Yet in the basic tenets and teachings, in the centrality of the Qur’an, in the agreement as to which are the most authoritative collections of Hadith, in the understanding of what constitute the Five Pillars of Islam, the faith called Islam is indeed a “monolith.”

But that is not the end of the story. As Professor Bernard Lewis pointed out long ago, Muslims in the Middle East have “multiple identities.” A man may be a Muslim “and an Arab” or a Muslim “and a Berber” or a Muslim and a “black African in the southern Sudan.” A man may be a “Sunni Muslim” or “Shi’a Muslim” or — so as not to overlook a very small group found mainly Oman and in some Algerian oases — an “Ibadi Muslim.” And some Muslim peoples possess the awareness of and tug from a particular national history — I am thinking of Egypt and Iran especially, as those nations (along with Israel) have the strongest sense of national identity in the Middle East. An Egyptian is “Egyptian” or an Iranian an “Iranian” in a way that a Qatari is not a Qatari, nor an inhabitant of Abu Dhabi an Emiratian.

Islam is a universalist faith. It is meant for everyone to accept. And those who among the Ahl al-Kitab, or People of the Book (that is, Christians and Jews), do not accept the full message of Islam — i.e., become Muslims — are required to pay a tax, or Jizyah, in conditions that bespeak humiliation, in order to be allowed to continue to practice their religion.
The universalism of Christianity does not admit of favoring of one group of Christians over another. In Islam, however, Arabs are privileged. If Muslims are “the best of peoples,” then among Muslims, “Arabs are the best of peoples.” Islam was revealed to a 7th-century Arab, in western Arabia, and written down in the Arabic language, the same language in which, ideally, the Qur’an ought to be read. Indeed, it was not until Ataturk in the 20th century ordered a Turkish translation of the Qur’an, and a Turkish-language commentary or Tafsir, that a non-Arabic version was available. Non-Arab converts to Islam are encouraged to, and often do, assume Arab names. Some even give themselves — this is particularly common in Pakistan — made-up genealogies that make them descendants of the Prophet, and therefore entitled to use the honorific “Sayed.” Muslims are taught to dismiss their own non-Islamic or pre-Islamic histories (personal and collective), as being identified with what in Islam is called the Time of Ignorance, or Jahiliyya. These pre-Islamic pasts are to be regarded with contempt and dismissed, for they have nothing to do with Islam. Muslims should ideally dress like, and emulate the mores of, 7th century Arabs, of Mohammed and his Companions. And Muhammad, who for all Muslims, and for all time, remains the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) and Model of Conduct (uswa hasana), was, of course, an Arab. No wonder that Islam itself is called “the gift of the Arabs.”

While this privileging in Islam of the Arabs leads some non-Arabs to play the sedulous ape, and to re-imagine themselves as Arabs — all those Pakistani “Sayeds” — at the same time other non-Arabs react differently, and come to resent their treatment at the hands of the o’erweening Arabs. Think of how the Arabs of the northern Sudan treated the non-Arab Muslims of Darfur (rape, pillage, sexual slavery); what they did to the non-Muslim black Africans was, of course, even worse.

Or think of how the Arabs of Algeria for many years attempted to prevent the Berbers, about 30% of the population, from speaking the Berber tongue, or from observing Berber ways, even forbidding the public reading by a Berber poet back in 1980, a suppression that led to riots in Tizi Ouzou, in the Berber-inhabited Kabyle. And in Morocco, where half the population may be Berber, the Berber movement takes on an anti-monarchical aspect. The Moroccan Arabs, like the Algerian Arabs, have been conducting, in slow motion, a forced arabisation to which not all Berbers wish to succumb.
And in the immediate Middle East, think of the Kurds, a non-Arab Muslim people treated by the Arab Saddam Hussein with great ferocity. His Arab troops killed 182,000 Kurds, employing chemical warfare at Halabja, and he moved hundreds of thousands of Arabs into the Kurdish areas to “arabise” the Kurds.

And outside the Middle East, the cultural imperialism of the Arabs has caused resentment among the local Muslims, all the way to Bangladesh and to Indonesia, especially in Java.
Ideally, non-Muslims should be working to increase the fissures within Islam. They should seize the language, and control the debate. And the central thesis, which they should be repeating again and again, can be expressed thus: Islam Is A Vehicle For Arab Supremacism. And they can fill the airwaves, and the Internet, with the supporting evidence. Is it not true that Muslims pray five times a day Mecca-wards, that they emulate the mores of 7th-century Arabs, that upon conversion they assume Arab names, that they — ideally — read the Qur’an only in Arabic, and with an Arabic Tafsir (Commentary)? All this is so very different from those Christian missionaries who translated the Bible into every tongue they could, including some that had never before been reduced to writing. Is it not true that the Arabs, through Islam, have discouraged any local interest in pre- or non-Islamic histories, but have encouraged interest, among so many isnon-Arab Muslims, in Arab and Muslim history? Our aim should be to always and everywhere seek to find existing or potential fissures within the Camp of Islam, and to steadily widen them merely by adducing the truth.

But there is another great divide in that Camp of Islam even more obvious and of more immediate significance than the ethnic fissures: it is that between Sunni and Shi’a. Bob Woodward has reported on President George W. Bush as having plaintively asked a member of his staff to fill him in, after being told the Iraqis were divided into “Shi’a and Sunnis,” which information confused him because he, President Bush, thought “they were all Muslim.” We have come some way from that early exclamation of ignorance. Everybody and his brother now knowingly refers to the “Shi’a and the Sunnis,” but without any suggestion of knowing when the schism occurred, and what it was about, and why it matters.

In a sense, it doesn’t matter to us, the Infidels, when and where and why the Sunni-Shi’a split arose. What matters is our attitude toward that split: whether we deplore it or welcome it.
So far, American policymakers have made enormous efforts to minimize that split. They use that all-purpose word “destabilizing.” Anything that “destabilizes” in the Muslim Middle East is bad. And especially in Iraq, where the Shi’a inherited the power that had been stripped from the Sunni Arabs when the Americans invaded, the vast American effort was dedicated to keeping Iraq a single and prosperous country, where Shi’a and Sunni (and Arab and Kurd) could take part in a joint adventure to rebuild the country. Did this make sense, from an Infidel point of view? Why would one not wish Iraq to be subject to centripetal forces, and to break apart, possibly in partes tres, with a Kurdish part corresponding roughly to the old Ottoman vilayet of Mosul, the Sunni part to the old Ottoman vilayet of Baghdad, or possibly only Anbar Province (given that so many Sunnis have been pushed out of Baghdad by the Shi’a), and a Shi’a Arab part corresponding to the old Ottoman vilayet of Basra?
Again and again over more than a decade, we heard how important it was not to allow Iraq to split into Sunni and Shi’a regions. But no one explained why keeping Iraq in one piece was in the American, or general Infidel, interest. And if the Sunnis in Lebanon, perhaps with their numbers increased by Sunni refugees from Lebanon, attack the Shi’a, that is, attack Hizballah, the military and terrorist organization that claims to represent the Lebanese Shi’a, why is that a bad thing?

And if the Saudi incursion into Yemen, on the side of Yemen’s Sunni tribes fighting the Iran-backed Houthi (Shi’a) rebels, why is that something to deplore? At the very least, this conflict might use up Saudi money and materiel and keep the Saudis occupied, and less able to cause mischief elsewhere; ideally, neither side will win, but both sides will continue to go at it, losing men, money, materiel, destroying infrastructure, and in general creating a mess in one more Muslim country. And in one more such country, mistrust and hatred between Sunni and Shi’a in Yemen can only deepen. Again, why would that be — from our point of view — a bad thing?
And this brings us to the news of the week: the execution by the Saudis of a leading Shi’a cleric, Nimr Al-Nimr, and the severing of all diplomatic ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and then between Iran and Iraq, Iran and Bahrain, Iran and Qatar, Iran and Oman, Iran and Kuwait, and the downgrading of relations between Iran and the U.A.E. All the stories in the Western press are full of dire warnings, of worry and despair expressed at this state of affairs, and fears as to “what will happen next.”

I can’t understand this worry, this fear. Which was the Roman who laid down the law: Divide et impera? I am perfectly open to being persuaded that the deepening of the Iran-Saudi Arabia rift is a terrible thing for us. I am equally eager to be persuaded that whipping up the resentment of non-Arab Muslims for Arab Muslims is a Bad Thing. But I just can’t figure out why.
Perhaps, among this post’s readers, someone will enlighten me, and explain why ethnic and sectarian fissures in the Camp of Islam are a terrible thing for us, the Infidels. I’ll stay right here, ready to listen. I’m all ears.

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A prominent convert leaves the church

A prominent convert leaves the church


Magdi Allam

A prominent Muslim-born journalist baptized by Pope Benedict XVI, Magdi Allam, has announced he’s leaving the church because it is too “weak with Islam.”
Allam, writing on his Web site, said the “euphoria over Pope Francis” and the rapid way Pope Benedict was set aside was “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and convinced him to abandon his conversion to Christianity.
Benedict baptized Allam in 2008 during an Easter vigil service at the Vatican, saying he wanted to inspire other former Muslims to practice Christianity openly. At the time, some of the Vatican’s Muslim dialogue partners said the high profile given to the conversion was a deliberate provocation.
Allam said that what drove him away from the church most of all was “religious relativism, in particular the legitimization of Islam as a true religion, of Allah as the true God, of Mohammed as a true prophet, of the Koran as a sacred text and of mosques as places of worship.”
He said it was “true folly” that Benedict had prayed in a mosque in Istanbul, and that Pope Francis, in one of his first speeches, said that Muslims “worship the one, living and merciful God.”
Allam said he considers Islam an “intrinsically violent ideology.”
His very public departure from the church must be an embarrassment to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who personally accompanied Allam on his path to Christianity. Fisichella was later named head of the Vatican’s new Pontifical Council for New Evangelization – presumably the council is using a more productive model of evangelizing than highly politicized “conversions” from other religions.

Posted on Mon, March 25, 2013 by John Thavis filed under

• Pope Francis
• Pope Benedict
• Vatican
• Allam

http://www.johnthavis.com/a-prominent-convert-leaves-the-church#.Vo5yhuSheUl

​

 

Islamic State manual tells jihadis to pretend to be Christians

January 10, 2016 6:38 pm By Robert Spencer 42 Comments
Governing authorities and the media are sure to fall for this. They insist Islamic jihadis have nothing to do with Islam, anyway, and so a cross-wearing jihadi will be sure to fill the New York Times and CNN with portentous explorations of the phenomenon of “Christian terrorism.” Note also that the entire publication is for “lone wolves” — you know, the jihadis for whom authorities are still searching for their motive.



“Pretend to be Christians: ISIS urges UK jihadis to cut beards, shun mosques & wear crosses,” by Leda Reynolds, Express, January 10, 2016:
The booklet, called Safety and Security Guidelines for Lone Wolf Mujahideen, offers a chilling insight into the levels of preparation expected of those wishing to cause carnage in Europe.
The 58-page terror manual, which has burning western-style buildings on the front cover, gushes about the importance of surprise when launching an attack to cause maximum impact.
It urges home-grown terrorists to carry out attacks as they are less likely to be noticed.

It also explains how nightclubs, full of loud music and drunk people, are the perfect place to discuss terror plans without being recorded or snooped on.
The main thrust of the instruction booklet is the necessity to blend in with the western way of life and to avoid ‘looking like a Muslim’ so as to stay below the radar of the security services.
It has even been translated into English for those in the West who don’t speak Arabic.
The introduction says: “No doubt that today, at the era of the lone wolves, brothers in the West need to know some important things about safety in order to ensure success in their operations.
“We thought a lot of non-Arabic speaking brothers would find it interesting and may apply it in their blessed operations.”
Readers are urged to wear a Christian cross, splash on the aftershave, cut off beards and even shun prayer meetings and mosques to avoid detection.
There is even advice about what jewellery to wear and on which hand to wear a watch.
Potential terrorists are told: “If you can avoid having a beard, wearing qamis, using miswak and having a booklet of dhikr with you, it’s better.
“It is permissible for you to wear a necklace showing a Christian cross.

“As you know, Christians – or even atheist Westerners with Christian background – wear crosses on their necklaces.
“But don’t wear a cross necklace if you have a Muslim name on your passport, as that may look strange.
“If you want to use perfume, don’t use the oily, non-alcoholic perfume that Muslims use, instead use generic alcoholic perfume as everyone does, and if you are a man, use perfume for men.
“If you are wearing a watch, don’t wear it on your right hand, as this is a sign that you are religious.
“If you have an engagement ring or something like that, it’s better to wear one in gold or better yet, don’t wear any ring at all.
“A silver ring could tell you are religious, as Islam forbids wearing gold rings for men. “
It also offers advice on grooming habits.

It says: “Your beard should be shaved off at least two weeks before your travel so the skin under your beard can be exposed to the sun.
“If you don’t do that the fact that you removed your beard would be too easy to notice.
“If you can get a haircut in a professional hairdresser, try to do so.”

Eager jihadis are also instructed to avoid traditional Muslim greetings.
They are told: “No need to be using too much of the usual sentences that religious brothers use, like ‘salam alaykum’, ‘barakallah feek’ or ‘jazakallah khayr’ and so on.
And tips on where to plot a terror act are also given.
The author says: “A nightclub, because of the loud music, the drunk people and the crowd, could actually be a good location to secretly discuss the details of an operation.”…

Tipster tells Philly police that cop shooter was part of still-active jihad cell
German government predicts another million migrants in 2016

 

January 14, 2016
Israel Must Demand Loyalty from its Arab Citizens

By Shoula Romano Horing

Two days after the Israeli government approved a 15 billion-shekel budget to improve Arab Israeli towns, and cities’ infrastructure and welfare, an Arab-Israeli terrorist randomly shot and killed 3 Israelis and wounded 7 in Tel Aviv. Most Israeli Arabs, who constitutes 21% of the Israeli population, do not take arms against the Jewish state, but they almost never condemn or speak out publicly against the continuous anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish campaign of terror and incitement to violence by their Palestinians brethren and leadership.

Since 1967, a majority of Arab Israelis have chosen to identify themselves as Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims but never as Israelis, unless they want to receive a right or a benefit from the state or need to complain about alleged victimization and discrimination. The time has arrived for the Israeli people and the Israeli government to demand from Israeli Arabs that they show their loyalty to the state by willingly participating in national service and publicly condemning anti-Israel terror and incitement as a precondition to receiving further state benefits and privileges.
Israeli Arabs enjoy many benefits and rights from the country but almost never volunteer to share the burden of responsibilities and duties that most Israeli Jewish citizens must bear. The sole legal distinction between Jewish and Arab citizens is that the latter are not required to serve in the Israeli army in order to spare Arab Citizens the need to take up arms against their Arab brethren, but they can volunteer. Some Muslims, such as the Druze and Bedouins, do volunteer for military duty. Many individuals such as Ultra-Orthodox Jews voluntarily perform national service but few Arabs do. Arab society looks at members of their community who give back to the state as wearing a badge of shame and treachery.

Arab Israelis always demand socioeconomic equality to Jews but have seldom been willing to declare their national pride, gratitude, and dedication to the prosperity and survival of the country which gives them so much. To many Arabs, the symbols of the state mean little or nothing. On Independence Day, the most important date in the Israeli calendar, Jews dance in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. For the Arabs it is a day of mourning when they demonstrate and burn Israeli flags. It is the date they call Naqba Day, meaning “the disaster”, which they perceive as the day they lost their lands to the Jews. They look at the establishment of Israel as a disaster but never as the day their luck changed when they became citizens of the only democracy in the Middle East and began receiving democratic individual rights and liberties. They use their Israeli passports to travel freely in the world, but most refuse to sing the Israeli anthem or to display Israeli flags. Instead, they proudly display the Palestinian flag. Perhaps most memorable, was the occasion when Justice Salim Joubran, an Israeli Arab judge who serves on the Israeli Supreme Court, chose not to sing Israel ‘s national anthem at an official ceremony in 2012.
Reality shows that successive Israeli governments have absorbed Arabs into the democratic political system to an extent which does not exist anywhere else in the Arab world. Israeli Arabs have a higher degree of education, a higher degree of medical care, and a higher standard of living than Arabs anywhere else. The life expectancy of the Arabs in Israel has grown over the past 60 years from about 52 years to over 70 years which is similar to that of the Jewish population. Arabic, like Hebrew, is an official language in Israel and every street and sign inside Jewish Israel is written both in Hebrew and Arabic and all students in elementary schools must learn it. Arabs in Israel have equal voting rights and in fact it is one of the few places in the Middle East where Arab women may vote. Arabs currently hold 17 seats in the 120-member Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. Moreover, there have been remarkable improvements in the economic and educational situation of Israeli Arabs due to government affirmative action policies. Such policies, which include wage subsidies, have significantly increased the number of Arabs women and men employed in government agencies, high tech, and the rest of the private sector as well as and the number of Arabs students and faculty in colleges.

However, despite all those efforts, many Jews are wondering if and when the Arabs will ever choose to be an integral part of Israeli society. Many wonder whether they can be trusted and whether they can they be fully loyal Israeli citizens as long as they refer to themselves as Palestinians and Arabs. Reality shows that Arabs choose to live separately in all but a handful of cities and choose to study at different, Arab only, elementary and secondary schools funded by the Israeli government, which put an emphasis on Arab history and Islamic religion and is used to cultivate anti-Israeli resentment. The street signs and store signs in their cities and neighborhoods are mainly in Arabic and English and rarely in Hebrew. Every time there is a war, terrorist incident, or Intifada, many Arabs support Israeli enemies and protest in the streets. Most Arabs use their democratic voting rights repeatedly to vote for Arab parties and political candidates to the Israeli parliament which incite boycotts, divestment and Palestinian violence against the state. During the recent wave of terror, for example, Knesset member Hanin Zoabi has called for a “real intifada” against Israel and compared Israel and its government ministers to the Nazi regime. Their Arab members of parliament seem to be preoccupied with inciting the Palestinian issue and the Arab sector chooses to support their efforts.

It is a mistake to believe that the Arabs in Israel will choose to identify themselves with the State of Israel on their own volition, if the remaining socioeconomic gaps with the Jews were to be diminished. It seems that even if they achieve economic equality, they will still choose to stay separate from the Jewish state and be on the outside looking in both emotionally and morally.
In the Book of Exodus, Moses does not strike the Nile himself, remembering how it harbored him as an infant. He was grateful. Many Jews ask, when will the Israeli Arabs be grateful and proudly give back to Israel?

Shoula Romano Horing is an Israeli born and raised attorney. Her blog: www.shoularomanohoring.com


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/israel_must_demand_loyalty_from_its_arab_citizens.html#ixzz3xFi5pw5U
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Geller: The Third Man




FBI and California Department of Motor Vehicles via AP

by Pamela Geller10 Dec 20153,265
10 Dec, 2015 10 Dec, 2015

Conspiracy theories bore me. They are an enormous waste of people’s time and energy, particularly now, at a time when conspiracy fact (i.e. the global jihad) is so overwhelming. You don’t need fairy tales when reality is so much more compelling. But something smells rotten in San Bernardino.


Like many shocked and horrified Americans, I watched events unfolding in real time. There were, from the very first, three shooters. Eyewitnesses, police scanner broadcasts, news reports all said the same thing.
One eyewitness, Sara Abdelmageed, gave extensive detail to Scott Pelley on the CBS Evening News. Here’s the exchange: “I heard shots fired and it was from — you know — an automatic weapon,” Abdelmageed said, “we looked out the window a second set of shots goes off…and we saw a man fall to the floor. Then we just looked and we saw three men dressed in all black, military attire, with vests on. They were holding assault rifles. As soon as they opened up the doors to building three one of them started to shoot into the room.”
Abdelmageed said that she “couldn’t see a face, he had a black hat on — black cargo pants, the kind with the big puffy pockets on the side, long sleeve shirt, gloves, huge assault rifle six magazines I just saw three dressed exactly the same.”

Pelley asked her: “You are certain you saw three men?” Abdelmageed answered: “Yes. It looked like their skin color was white. They look like they were athletic build and they appeared to be tall.”
Another eyewitness, Juan Hernandez, saw the same thing: three men. He said the shooters were “three white men in military fatigues” who “took off” in a “black Impala or SUV.”
CBS Evening News titled one of its early reports: “Officials: 2 of 3 suspects dead in San Bernardino shooting.”
And then suddenly, the third man disappeared. No media reports mention him anymore. No law enforcement officials appear to be searching for him. He is gone without a trace, and no one has even noticed that he is missing, or was ever there in the first place.

It’s extraordinary. The vanishing of this third man recalls the disappearance of the third man who was involved in the Oklahoma Federal building bombing with Timothy McVeigh. Jayna Davis of KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City reported on an FBI alert for “Middle Eastern-looking” suspects – an alert that was later canceled.
Davis charged that a Muslim named Hussain Al-Hussaini was the third Oklahoma City bomber; tellingly, he sued Davis for defamation but his case was thrown out. It was reported that “documents obtained by The Associated Press show that our government was warned that Islamic terrorists were planning attacks on American federal buildings around the time of the Oklahoma City bombing. The Clinton administration even stepped up security around such buildings.”


Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)wrote in 2006:

“It is highly likely that the Arab connection and/or the Strassmeir connection played a significant role in the planning and execution of the murderous bombing of the OKC federal building. In both possible scenarios, the official investigation fell short and further investigation has been discouraged ever since.” Andreas Carl Strassmeir was a German national who was alleged to be involved in the bombings, but his role was never fully investigated.


Back in 2006, Rohrbacher announced hearings on the matter: “I also will call witnesses who say they saw McVeigh with Arabs in Oklahoma City.” Former FBI agent Danny Coulson said at that time: “I’m very much in favor of this investigation by Congress. We need to look very closely at why the five FBI commanders originally assigned the case were pulled off. The FBI needs to answer to the Congress why they shut down their own investigation into Strassmeir and Elohim City.” Elohim City was a terror training camp in eastern Oklahoma. Coulson continued: “Why did their total investigation into Strasssmeir consist of two ASUSAs (assistant United States Attorneys) calling Strassmeir’s flat in Berlin a couple of times? He never should have been allowed to leave here without a more thorough series of interviews, face-to-face, by FBI agents trained in those skills.”
But those hearings did not resolve the issue, either. The perfunctory nature of the Oklahoma City investigation came to my mind as I watched in real time what happened to the jihadis’ apartment in San Bernardino. I was shocked, and liveblogged when the unthinkable happened after the murders: a mob of reporters were let into the jihad killers’ home in large numbers, contaminating evidence left and right and obstructing an investigation that was ongoing. The Spectator reported:

Former NYPD Det. Harry Houck said, “This apartment clearly is full of evidence,” he explained. “I don’t see any fingerprint dust on the walls where they went in there and checked for fingerprints for other people that might have been connected to these two. You’ve got documents laying all over the place — you’ve got shredded documents that need to be taken out of there and put together to see what was shredded,” Houck added. “You have passports, driver’s licenses — now you have thousands of fingerprints all over inside this crime scene.”

David Bowdich, the assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, tried to explain why this happened, and only ended up arousing more suspicion. He said: “Once the residents have the apartment and we’re not in it anymore, we don’t control it. Once we turn that location back over to the occupants of that residence or once we board it up, anyone who goes in at that point, that’s got nothing to do with us.”
Houck, the former NYPD detective, was shocked and he explained why: “I tell you I am so shocked. This is detective 101 for crying out loud. It looks like there are dozens of people in there totally destroying a crime scene which is still vital in this investigation because we don’t know how many other people that they were connected with in this thing. There might be tons of fingerprints in there that we need to look at to see if there is any kind of connection to those fingerprints or some people that may be on a watch list or something else.”

Where is the third man? Is he still at large? Are people at risk? And why was the apartment opened up and the fingerprint evidence destroyed? Why was evidence strewn about?
Something is rotten in the state of California.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.
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Big Government, Islam, Jihad, terrorism, San Bernardino, Pamela Geller, Syed Farook, Scott Pelley, Third shooter

 

U.S. Christian Groups Support Muslim Refugees, Ignore Persecuted Christians

January 5, 2016 35 Comments
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FrontPage Magazine

According to recently released figures from the State Dept., the United States has let in a miniscule number of Christian refugees from Syria — only 34 — during the four years since the Islamic State began its campaign of mass slaughter. Put differently, although Christians amount for 10 percent of Syria’s population—and so should at least be 10 percent of the refugees accepted into the States—only two percent of those accepted are Christians.



This disparity is being ignored by influential U.S. Christian groups. The Church World Service (CWS) and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have both called for the resettlement of 100,000 Syrian refugees in the United States next year. Yet advocacy for especially persecuted Christians is lacking among these U.S. Christian organizations.

The CWS, for example, does not even mention the special plight of Christians on its website’s call to help Syrian refugees; it primarily features pictures of Muslims. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — which touts itself as the world’s largest refugee resettlement organization and even received $80 million from the federal government in 2014 for its Migration Fund — also often fails to mention Christians in its public advocacy for the resettlement of Syrian refugees.
Refugee Resettlement Watch charges that “The Bishops [of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops] surely are not telling local priests and parishioners that they are raking in millions of dollars of cold hard cash from federal taxpayers for refugee resettlement activities. And, they aren’t telling them that they are NOT advocating to save the persecuted Christians of Syria through this program” (emphasis in original).

When the Catholic hierarchy does mention persecuted Christians, they are often lumped in with every other group, including Muslim majorities. This approach begins with Pope Francis. Last September, when he stood before the world at the United Nations, his energy was, once again, spent on defending the environment. In his entire speech, which lasted nearly 50 minutes, only once did Francis make reference to persecuted Christians—and he merged their sufferings in the same sentence with the supposedly equal sufferings of “members of the majority religion,” that is, Sunni Muslims (the only group not to be attacked by the Islamic State, a Sunni organization). Said Francis:

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I must renew my repeated appeals regarding to the painful situation of the entire Middle East, North Africa and other African countries, where Christians, together with other cultural or ethnic groups, and even members of the majority religion who have no desire to be caught up in hatred and folly, have been forced to witness the destruction of their places of worship, their cultural and religious heritage, their houses and property, and have faced the alternative either of fleeing or of paying for their adhesion to good and to peace by their own lives, or by enslavement.​

In the real world, however, “members of the majority religion”—Sunnis—are not being slaughtered, beheaded, and raped for refusing to renounce their faith; are not having their mosques bombed and burned; are not being jailed or killed for apostasy, blasphemy, or proselytization. Quite the contrary, “members of the majority religion” are responsible for committing dozens of atrocities against Christian minorities every single month all throughout the Islamic world.
From a strictly humanitarian point of view, then—and humanitarianism is the chief reason being cited in accepting refugees—far from being lumped in with “members of the majority religion,” Christians should receive top priority simply because they are the most persecuted group, as repeated studies have shown.

At the hands of the Islamic State and in Syria alone, Christians have been repeatedly forced to renounce Christ or die; they have been enslaved and sold on sex slave markets; they have had more than 400 of their churches desecrated and destroyed.

If Christian minorities are true refugees, most Muslims are to a large extent economic migrants not fleeing real persecution but arriving from safe locales such as Turkey. Moreover, roughly 97-98 percent of those being accepted as refugees into the U.S. are Sunni Muslims—the same sect that ISIS, which supposedly precipitated the refugee crisis, belongs to. And many of them, unsurprisingly, share the same vision of relentless jihad on the infidel—such as the “refugees” who murdered some 120 people in France, or the “refugees” who persecute Christian minorities in European camps and slaughter them in their beds, or the “refugees” who drown Christian migrants in the sea, or the ISIS-affiliated Sunni jihads who massacred over a dozen Americans at a Christmas party in San Bernardino.

In short, the refugee resettlement system egregiously discriminates against those who are most deserving of sanctuary and refugee status. Yet little is said or done by pro-resettlement U.S. Christian groups to address, much less correct, this problem.

If influential Christian organizations are ignoring the discrimination against or at least indifference to Christian refugees, the Obama administration’s policies should not be surprising. Aside from the fact that 98 percent of refugees being accepted into the U.S. are Sunni Muslims and only two percent are Christian—a skewed ratio based on Syria’s demographics—consider:

• When inviting scores of Muslim representatives, the State Department is in the habit of denying visas to solitary Christian representatives.
• When a few persecuted Iraqi Christians crossed the border into the U.S., they were thrown in prison for several months and then sent backto the lion’s den.
• When the Nigerian government waged a strong offensive against Boko Haram, killing some of its jihadi terrorists, Secretary of State John Kerry fumed and called for the “human rights” of the jihadis(who regularly slaughter and rape Christians and burn their churches). More recently, Kerry “urged Tajikistan not to go overboard in its crackdown on Islam.”
• When persecuted Coptic Christians planned on joining Egypt’s anti-Muslim Brotherhood revolution of 2013, the U.S. said no.
• When persecuted Iraqi and Syrian Christians asked for arms to join the opposition fighting ISIS, D.C. refused.
• When working on releasing a statement accusing ISIS of committing genocide against religious minorities such as Yazidis — who are named and recognized in the statement — White House officials argued that Christians “do not appear to meet the high bar set out in the genocide treaty” and thus likely not be mentioned.

Days before the disparity against Christian refugees was revealed, President Obama lashed out against the idea of giving preference to Christian refugees, describing it as “shameful”: “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” loftily admonished the president—even as the exact opposite was occurring: Muslims were getting every preference over Christians.
Such open hypocrisy can stand when influential Christian groups—they who are most responsible for speaking up for savagely persecuted Christian minorities—engage in it themselves.

 

U.S. State Dept. Invites Muslim Leaders, Denies Christians

May 10, 2015 7 Comments

Gatestone Institute

Translations of this item:


Late on the evening of May 8, Newsmax TV announced that pressure from Americans acquainted with Sister Diana Momeka’s visa rejection has just caused the State Department to reverse its decision and permit her entry into the United States. Until then, however, she and others were barred.
After inviting a number of foreign religious leaders, mostly Muslim, the U.S. State Department, for the second time in a row, had denied the sole Christian representative a visa — despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Christians are the ones being persecuted by Muslims.


The Iraqi Christian nun, Sister Diana Momeka (left), just received a visa to visit the U.S. as part of a delegation of foreign religious leaders — but only after much criticism and pressure from American citizens. The State Dept. had originally denied her visa request, only allowing in non-Christian delegates. Last year, the United States Institute for Peace invited to the U.S. the Muslim governors of Nigeria’s northern states, but the sole Christian governor, Plateau State Gov. Jonah David Jang (right), was denied a visa by the State Dept.


Sister Diana, an influential Iraqi Christian leader and spokeswoman who was scheduled to visit the U.S. to advocate for persecuted Christians in the Mideast, earlier this month was denied a visa by the U.S. State Department, even though she had visited the U.S. before, most recently in 2012.
Sister Diana was to be one of a delegation of religious leaders from Iraq — including Shia and Yazidi — to visit Washington, D.C., to describe the situation of their people. Every single religious leader from this delegation was granted a visa — except for the only Christian representative, Sister Diana.
Similarly, in March 2014, after the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) brought together the governors of Nigeria’s mostly Muslim northern states for a conference in the U.S., the State Department had also blocked the visa of the region’s only Christian governor, Jonah David Jang, an ordained minister, citing “administrative” problems. The USIP confirmed that all 19 northern governors were invited, but the organization did not respond to requests for comments on why they would hold talks without the region’s only Christian governor.
According to Emmanuel Ogebe, a Nigerian human rights lawyer based in Washington D.C., the Christian governor’s “visa problems” are due to anti-Christian bias in the U.S. government:

The U.S. insists that Muslims are the primary victims of Boko Haram. It also claims that Christians discriminate against Muslims in Plateau, which is one of the few Christian majority states in the north. After the [Christian governor] told them [U.S. authorities] that they were ignoring the 12 Shariah states who (sic) institutionalized persecution … he suddenly developed visa problems. … The question remains — why is the U.S. downplaying or denying the attacks against Christians?

Regarding Sister Diana Momeka, determined Christian and human rights activists in the U.S. called on the State Department to reverse its decision. According to Johnnie Moore, an activist who met her in Iraq: “Sister Momeka is a gift to the world and a humanitarian whose work reminded me — when I met her in Iraq — of Mother Teresa. It is incomprehensible to me that the State Department would not be inviting Momeka on an official visit to the United States, as opposed to barring her from entry.”
Chris Seiple, President of the Institute for Global Engagement, wrote in a post, “In the same week that the State Dept says it will take the engagement of religious leaders seriously (as announced in its quadrennial review two days ago), it refuses a visa to a persecuted Christian nun who has fled ISIS, Sister Diana.”


Sister Diana (left)

Similarly, discussing the nun’s visa denial, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said: “This is an administration which never seems to find a good enough excuse to help Christians, but always finds an excuse to apologize for terrorists … I hope that as it gets attention that Secretary [of State John] Kerry will reverse it. If he doesn’t, Congress has to investigate, and the person who made this decision ought to be fired.”
On May 8, in an interview on Newsmax TV with host J.D. Hayworth, Johnnie Moore credited Newsmax TV viewers with helping to put enormous pressure on the Obama administration to allow Sister Diana Momeka to come to Washington to talk about the persecution of Christians in her war-torn nation: “It worked — people raised their voices. They wrote their congressmen and senators, they put pressure on everybody, everywhere. … She has been approved. … It’s exhibit A of what happens when people in this country start raising their voices.”
But Ogebe’s question remains: Why is the U.S. downplaying or denying attacks against Christians?

http://www.raymondibrahim.com/2015/05/10/u-s-state-dept-invites-muslim-leaders-denies-christians/

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Hugh Fitzgerald: Ten Things to Think When Thinking of Muslim “Moderates”

January 16, 2016 11:39 am By Hugh Fitzgerald 30 Comments

Note from Robert Spencer: The “moderate” Muslim never dies, and I thought that this 2004 Hugh Fitzgerald discussion of the “moderate Muslim” bears re-posting now. There are some references clearly reflecting the year of composition, but not a word has been changed, for it has stood, we think, the test of time — certainly compared to any comment by Tom Friedman or Nicholas Kristof, all of whose jejune columns are undone by reality about a week after they are published.




1. Not only Muslims, but “islamochristians” objectively promote and push the propagandistic line that disguises the Jihad (evidence of which can be found worldwide), and mislead as to both what prompts that Jihad (not “poverty” or “foreign policy” but the precepts of the belief-system of Islam) and what will sate it (not Kashmir, not Chechnya, not the absurd “two-state solution,” not continued appeasement in France and Holland — there is nothing that will sate or satisfy it, as long as part of the globe is as yet resistent to the rule of Islam). “Christians” such as Fawaz Gerges or Rami Khoury, or someone who was born a Christian, such as Edward Said, are Arabs whose views are colored by that self-perception. Their loyalty to the community and history of Arabs causes them to be as loyal to the Islamic view of things as if they had been born Muslim. They stoutly defend Islam against all of Western scholarship (in Orientalism), or divert attention away from Islam and constantly assert, in defiance of all the evidence, from Bali to Beslan to Madrid, that the “problem of Israel/Palestine” — the latest, and most sinister formulation of the Jihad against Israel — is the fons et origo of Muslim hostility and murderous aggression throughout the world. Save for the Copts and Maronites, who regard themselves not as Arabs but as “users” of the “Arabic language” (and reject the idea that such “users” therefore become “Arabs”), many Arab Christians have crazily embraced the Islamic agenda; the agenda, that is, of those who have made the lives of Christians in the Middle East so uncertain, difficult, and at times, imperilled. The attempt to be “plus islamiste que les islamistes” — the approach of Rami Khoury and Hanan Ashrawi — simply will not do, for it has not worked. It is Habib Malik and other Maronites in Lebanon who have analysed the problem of Islam in a clear-eyed fashion. Indeed, the best book on the legal status of non-Muslims under Islam is that of the Lebanese (Maronite) scholar Antoine Fattal.
Any “islamochristian” Arab who promotes the Islamic agenda, by participating in a campaign that can only mislead Infidels and put off their understanding of Jihad and its various instruments, is objectively as much part of the problem as the Muslim who knowingly practices taqiyya in order to turn aside the suspicions of non-Muslims. Whoever acts so as to keep the unwary Infidel unwary is helping the enemy.
Think, for a minute, of Oskar Schindler. A member of the Nazi Party, but hardly someone who followed the Nazi line. But what if Schindler had at some point met with Westerners — and had continued, himself, to deny that the Nazis were engaged in genocide, even if he himself deplored it and would later act against it? Would we think of him as a “moderate”? As someone who had helped the anti-Nazi coalition to understand what it was up against?
Or for another example, think of Ilya Ehrenburg, who in 1951 or so was sent abroad by Stalin to lie about the condition of Yiddish-speaking intellectuals whom Stalin had recently massacred. Ehrenburg went to France, went to Italy. He did as he was told. “Peretz? Markish? Oh, yes, saw Peretz at his dacha last month with his grandson. Such a jovial fellow. Markish — he was great last year in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District — you should see how it comes across in zhargon, Yiddish…” And so it went. Eherenburg lied, and lied. He was not a Stalinist. He hated Stalin. He of course hated the destruction of Peretz, Markish, and many others who had been killed many months before — as Ehrenburg knew perfectly well. When he went abroad and lied to the editors of Nouvelle Revue Francaise, what was he? Objectively, he was promoting the interests of Joseph Stalin, and the Red Army, and the Politburo. We need not inquire into motives. We need only see what the results of such lying were. And the same is true of those Christian Arabs who lie on behalf of Islam — some out of fear, some out of an ethnocentric identification so strong that they end up defending Islam, the religion of those who persecuted the Christian Arabs of the Middle East, and some out of venality (if Western diplomats and journalists can be on the Arab take, why not Arabs themselves?), some out of careerism. If you want to rise in the academic ranks, and your field is the Middle East, unless you are a real scholar — Cook or Crone or Lewis — better to parrot the party line, which costs you nothing and gains you friends in tenure-awarding, grant-giving, reference-writing circles. There is at least one example, too, among those mentioned, in a situation where an Arabic-speaking Christian, attempting to find refuge from Muslim persecution, needed the testimony of an “expert” — which “expert,” instead of offering a pro-bono samaritan act, demanded so much money to be involved (in a fantastic display of greed) that the very idea of solidarity among Arab Christians was called by this act permanently into question.


2. The word “moderate” cannot be reasonably applied to any Muslim who continues to deny the contents — the real contents, not the sanitized or gussied-up contents — of Qur’an, hadith, and sira. Whether that denial is based on ignorance, or based on embarrassment, or based on filial piety (and an unwillingness to wash dirty ideological laundry before the Infidels) is irrelevant. Any Muslim who, while seeming to deplore every aspect of Muslim aggression, based on clear textual sources in Qur’an and hadith, or on the example of Muhammad as depicted in the accepted sira — Muhammad that “model” of behavior — is again, objectively, acting in a way that simply misleads the Infidels. And any Muslim who helps to mislead Infidels about the true nature of Islam cannot be called a “moderate.” That epithet is simply handed out a bit too quickly for sensible tastes.


3. What of a Muslim who says — there are terrible things in the sira and hadith, and we must find a way out, so that this belief-system can focus on the rituals of individual worship, and offer some sustenance as a simple faith for simple people? This would require admitting that a great many of Muhammad’s reported acts must either be denied, or given some kind of figurative interpretation, or otherwise removed as part of his “model” life. As for the hadith, somehow one would have to say that Bukhari, and Muslim, and the other respected muhaddithin had not examined those isnad-chains with quite the right meticulousness, and that many of the hadith regarded as “authentic” must be reduced to the status of “inauthentic.” And, following Goldziher, doubt would have to be cast on all of the hadith, as imaginative elaborations from the Qur’an, without any necessarily independent existence.


4. This leaves the Qur’an. Any “moderate” who wishes to prevent inquiry into the origins of the Qur’an — whether it may be the product of a Christian sect, or a Jewish sect, or of pagan Arabs who decided to construct a book, made up partly of Christian and Jewish material mixed with bits and pieces of pagan Arab lore from the time of the Jahiliya — or to prevent philological study (of, for example, Aramaic and other loan-words) — anyone who impedes the enterprise of subjecting the Qur’an to the kind of historical inquiry that the Christian and Jewish Bibles have undergone in the past 200 years of inquiry, is not a “moderate” but a fervent Defender of the Faith. One unwilling to encourage such study — which can only lead to a move away from literalness for at least some of the Believers — again is not “moderate.”


5. The conclusion one must reach is that there are, in truth, very few moderates. For if one sees the full meaning of Qur’an, hadith, and sira, and sees how they have affected the behavior of Muslims both over 1400 years of conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, and in stunting the development — political, economic, moral, and intellectual — of Muslims everywhere, it is impossible not to conclude that this imposing edifice is not in any sense moderate or susceptible to moderation.
What must an intelligent Muslim, living through the hell of the Islamic Republic of Iran, start to think of Islam? Or that Kuwaiti billionaire, with houses in St. James Place and Avenue Foch and Vevey, as well as the family/company headquarters in Kuwait City, who sends his children to the American School in Kuwait, and boasts that they know English better than they know Arabic, helps host Fouad Ajami when he visits Kuwait, is truly heartsick to see Kuwait’s increasing islamization? Would he allow himself to say what he knows in public, or in front of half-brothers, or to friends — knowing that at any moment, they may be scandalized by his free-thinking views, and that he may run the risk of losing his place in the family’s pecking order and, what’s more, in the family business?
The mere fact that Muslim numbers may grow in the Western world represents a permanent threat to Infidels. This is true even if some, or many, of those Muslims are “moderates” — i.e. do not believe that Islam has some kind of divine right, and need, to expand until it covers the globe and swallows up dar al-harb. For if they are still to be counted in the Army of Islam, not as Deserters (Apostates) from that Army, their very existence in the Bilad al-kufr helps to swell Muslim ranks, and therefore perceived Muslim power. And even the “moderate” father may sire immoderate children or grandchildren — that was the theme of the Hanif Kureishi film, quasi-comic but politically acute, “My Son the Fanatic.” Whether through Da’wa or large families, any growth in the Muslim population will inhibit free expression (see the fates of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the threats made to Geert Wilders, Carl Hagen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others), for politicians eager to court the Muslim vote will pooh-pooh Muslim outrages and strive to have the state yield to Muslim demands — for the sake of short-term individual gain. And Muslim numbers, even with “moderates,” increases the number of Muslim missionaries — for every Muslim is a missionary — whether conducting “Sharing Ramadan” Outreach in the schools (where a soft-voiced Pakistani woman is usually the soothing propagandist of choice), or Da’wa in a prison. The more Muslims there are, the more there will be — and no one knows which “moderate” will end up distinctly non-moderate in his views, and then in his acts.
And this brings up the most important problem: the impermanence of “moderate” attitudes. What makes anyone think that someone who this week or month has definitely turned his back on Jihad, who will have nothing to do with those he calls the “fanatics,” if he does not make a clean break with Islam, does not become a “renegade” or apostate, will at some point “revert” not to Islam, which he never left, but to a more devout form, in which he now subscribes to all of its tenets, and not merely to a few having to do with rites of individual worship?


6. The examples to the contrary are both those of individuals, and of whole societies. As for individual Muslims, some started out as mild-mannered and largely indifferent to Islam, and then underwent some kind of crisis and reverted to a much more fanatical brand of Islam. That was the case with urban planner Mohammad Atta, following his disorienting encounter with modern Western ways in Hamburg, Germany — Reeperbahn and all. That was also the case with “Mike” Hawash, the Internet engineer earning $360,000 a year, who seemed completely integrated (American wife, Little League for the children, friends among fellow executives at Intel who would swear up and down that he was innocent) — until one fine day, after the World Trade Center attacks, he made out his will, signed the house over to his wife, and set off to fight alongside the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (he got as far as China) against his fellow Americans. In other words, if fanatical Muslims exist, it does not mean that they all start out as fanatics. Islam is the necessary starting place, and what sets off a “moderate” may have little to do with anything the Infidels do, any question of foreign policy — it may simply be a crisis in an individual Muslim’s life, to which he seeks an answer, not surprisingly, in … more Islam.


7. Much the same lesson can be drawn from the experience of whole societies. In passing, one can note that the position of Infidels under the Pahlavi regime was better than it had been for centuries — and under the regime that followed, that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that position of Infidels became worse than it had been for centuries. “Secularism” in Islamic countries is never permanent; the weight and the threat of Islam is ever-present.
The best example of this is Turkey since 1924, when Ataturk began his reforms. He tried in every way he could — through the Hat Act (banishing the salat-friendly fez); commissioning a Turkish translation of the Qur’an and an accompanying tafsir (commentary) in Turkish; ending the use of Arabic script for Turkish; establishing government control of the mosques (even attacking recalcitrant imams and destroying their mosques); giving women the right to vote; establishing a system that discouraged the wearing of the hijab; encouraging Western dress; and discouraging, in the army, preferment of any soldier who showed too great an interest in religion. This attempt to constrain Islam was successful, and was reinforced by the national cult of Ataturk.
But the past few decades have shown that Islam does not die; it keeps coming back. In Turkey, it never went away, despite the creation of a secular stratum of society that amounts perhaps to 25% of the population, with another 25% wavering, and 50% still definitely traditional Muslims. Meanwhile, Turks in Germany become not less, but more fervent in their faith. And Turks in Turkey, of the kind who follow Erdogan, show that they may at any moment emerge and take power — and slowly (very slowly, as long as that EU application has not been acted on, one way or another) they can undo Ataturk. He was temporary; Islam is forever.


8. That is why even the designation of some Muslims as “moderates” in the end means almost nothing. They swell Muslim numbers and the perceived Muslim power; “moderates” may help to mislead, to be in fact even more effective practitioners of taqiyya/kitman, for their motive may simply be loyalty to ancestors or embarrassment, not a malign desire to fool Infidels in order to disarm and then ultimately to destroy them.


9. For this reason, one has to keep one’s eye always on the objective situation. What will make Infidels safer from a belief-system that is inimical to art, science, and all free inquiry, that stunts the mental growth, and that is based on a cruel Manichaean division of the world between Infidel and Believer? And the answer is: limiting the power — military, political, diplomatic, economic power — of all Muslim polities, and Muslim peoples, and diminishing, as much as possible, the Muslim presence, however amiable and plausible and seemingly untroubling a part of that presence may appear to be, in all the Lands of the Infidels. This is done not out of any spirit of enmity, but simply as an act of minimal self-protection — and out of loyalty and gratitude to those who produced the civilization which, however it has been recently debased by its own inheritors, would disappear altogether were Muslims to succeed in islamizing Europe — and then, possibly, other parts of the world as well.


10. “There are Muslim moderates. Islam itself is not moderate” is Ibn Warraq’s lapidary formulation. To this one must add: we Infidels have no sure way to distinguish the real from the feigning “moderate” Muslim. We cannot spend our time trying to perfect methods to make such distinctions. Furthermore, in the end such distinctions may be meaningless if even the “real” moderates hide from us what Islam is all about, not out of any deeply-felt sinister motive, but out of a humanly-understandable ignorance (especially among some second or third-generation Muslims in the West), or embarrassment, or filial piety. And finally, yesterday’s “moderate” can overnight be transformed into today’s fanatic — or tomorrow’s.
Shall we entrust our own safety to the dreamy consolations of the phrase “moderate Muslim” and the shapeshifting concept behind it that can be transformed into something else in a minute?

Pakistan: Bill banning child marriage fails after it’s deemed un-Islamic
France's Jews advised to leave skullcaps off, for safety

 

Hugh Fitzgerald: Sticking to the Details

January 19, 2016 5:37 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 33 Comments



Each day brings news of fresh problems — even horrors — that are the result of the Muslim invasion of Europe. Millions of Muslims have been attempting to enter Europe — 1.1 million have managed this year to settle in Germany alone. Many of these migrants are from Syria, and many others pretend to be from Syria. They are all described as “refugees,” a word intended to evoke sympathy and to shut down the critical faculty of those who might dare to question the wisdom of this mass invasion. Most of the migrants are Arabs, but there are also Pakistanis, Afghans, Somalis, that is, assorted Muslims from all over. All of them carry, undeclared in their mental baggage, an ideology that offers a Total Regulation of Life and Compleat Explanation of the Universe. They have been suffused, since childhood, in an ideology that uncompromisingly divides the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the Lands of the Muslims and the Lands of the Infidels, and a state of permanent war, if not always open warfare, must exist between the two. They are raised up in an ideology that divides mankind in two: the Believers and the Unbelievers, of all kinds. It is the Believers who have a natural right, as the “best of peoples,” to dominate the world, and the Believers have a duty, too, to participate in the struggle, or Jihad against Unbelievers, so that ultimately Islam will everywhere dominate, and Muslims rule, everywhere.

These Muslim migrants have not made things easy for the Infidels in whose lands they have been settling. They have, for example,very different views from non-Muslims on how women should behave and how they should be treated. They find that Western women, in their hijabless state, are akin to “meat” that is on display, there for the taking, by Muslim men. And take they do — which is why more than 70% of those imprisoned for rape in the Scandinavian countries are Muslims, though they make up 2-3% of the population. In Cologne, nearly 500 German women were assaulted by Muslims in a single night. The other night, in Dortmund, there were similar attacks, with a Muslim man insisting that “German girls are just here for sex.” Muslim predators who took advantage of young girls and turned them into sex slaves to service gangs of Muslim men in a dozen British cities and towns were merely showing their contempt for Infidel women, and this to us monstrous behavior did not violate but rather fit their worldview of how Muslims can treat Infidels. And the attacks on Infidel men — just the other day a 15-year-old Lithuanian boy was stabbed to death in Sweden by an Arab enraged that the boy dared to protect a girl that Arab had been molesting — are also part of this story. The frequent attacks on inoffensive Jews by Muslims in France tell us something about the Muslim version of interfaith outreach, as does the mass murder of Christians by Muslims in the Islamic State. And then there are all the Muslim terrorist attacks all over Europe — from the killings of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, to the bombs at the Madrid subway station of Atocha, to the bombs on the London Underground and London buses, to the mass murder of innocents at a Parisian newspaper office, and cafes, and restaurants, and dance-halls, and kosher grocery stores. What are we to make of all this? Anything? Nothing?

Muslim migrants have nowhere exhibited an interest in learning about, much less conforming to, Western ideas about the equality of the sexes, about the equal treatment of people of all faiths or none, about freedom of speech and conscience. But they are convinced, and do not hide their conviction, that they are in Europe as by right, and cannot, will not be dislodged. To quote Tariq Ramadan, “We are here. We are here to stay. It’s over.” This is the note of triumphalism, of “just you try to get rid of us. We’re not leaving but are going to take over.” And as the Muslims will continue, by hook or crook, to try to enter Europe, and within Europe will try to make it to the countries that offer the most generous benefits, their presence will inevitably change, by sheer force of numbers, the societies within which they settle, but into which they do not integrate. Rather, it is the non-Muslims who are expected to change in order to fit into this new society.

Yet those who sound the alarm are attacked, declared sweepingly to be “Islamophobes,” a word designed to inhibit not only legitimate criticism, but even any tentative investigation of Islam. What, after all, did Donald Trump do that was so beyond the pale? He merely said that we ought to halt Muslim immigration “while we figure out what’s going on.” Do we all know “what is going on”? Clearly we do not all know “what is going on” — after all, we are allowing into our countries large numbers of people who grew up suffused in a faith that teaches them to despise, and to be hostile to, non-Muslims. The refusal to discuss this matter calmly, and to inform oneself appropriately by studying the texts of Islam, and by reading the non-Muslim scholars who devoted their lives to the disinterested study of Islam (C. Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, Antoine Fattal, Henri Lammens, K. S. Lal, Ignaz Goldziher, Sir William Muir, St. Clair Tisdall, Arthur Jeffrey, Samuel Zwemer, Georges Vajda, David Margoliouth), the ignoring of the testimony provided by such defectors from Islam as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Magdi Allam — this is a colossal dereliction of duty on the part of those who presume to protect and instruct us. Where in the Western world has the Muslim immigration not led to expenses and insecurities and a general civilisational confusion? Those who claim, and are prepared to discuss in detail the evidence supporting this claim, that the large-scale presence of Muslims has led, in Western Europe, to a situation that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for both the indigenous non-Muslims and for other, non-Muslim immigrants, cannot simply be waved away with a contemptuous smirk. And sometimes instead of a smirk, or a cry of debate-ending “Islamophobe,” a statement is made of such breathless idiocy that one doesn’t quite know what to say. The recent remark of Germany’s ambassador to the Vatican, Annette Schavan, was such a statement. She asserted that “there are warmongers who embrace religion. But that does not mean that religion promotes war. Religion has the great power to bring peace….Islam must be part of the solution.” Could it be that not all religions are identical, that Islam — Qur’an and Hadith and Sira — is suffused with “warmongering” and cannot possibly be “part of the solution” to the very “problem” its adherents alone have created?

In answering these absurd remarks and tendentious charges, it is always a good idea to quote, to bring to your opponent’s attention, and to force him to recognize and, if possible, answer, the superior detailed knowledge you offer in response to his one-word — “Islamophobia” — dismissal. Don’t simply respond in vague kind, but stick closely to details, quoting chapter and verse from the Qur’an. Bring any of more than 150 Jihad verses into the discussion. For example: 2:190-191, 9:5, 2:191, 3:112, 5:33. Keep repeating them, so that those who think they can get away merely by invoking “Islamophobia” have to respond. Mention little Aisha, the massacre of the prisoners at the Battle of the Trench, the attack on the Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis, the murders of Abu Afak and Asma bint Marwan. Always stick to the same handful of stories. Force your opponent to recognize and admit to these episodes in the life of Muhammad, the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil), the Model of Conduct (uswa hasana). And if he fails to do so, point out that failure to others who may be listening and looking for enlightenment. Refer, whenever you can, and quote from, the celebrated Western scholars of Islam, and wonder aloud why some think — like your opponent — that they can speak about Islam without having done the necessary work, without having even recognized the existence of these scholars they ought to, but did not, consult. Hold your opponent’s baseless dismissals up for inspection and ridicule, but on the basis of those details that come from three sources: the texts of Islam, the Western scholars of Islam, and the Defectors from the Army of Islam.

You will be ready with those enlightening eye-opening details about Islam — meant not just for your opponent, but for the broader public that is listening, or eavesdropping. Your opponent — used to relying on smirks and single-word dismissals instead of coherent debate — will not. And that is exactly the result you want.

Geert Wilders: "Welcome, Donald Trump, in the company of Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and myself"
Germany's ambassador to the Vatican: "Islam...is part of the solution"