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Hugh Fitzgerald: A Tunisian Moderate Remains, Alas, A Defender of the Faith

September 12, 2016 11:35 am By Hugh Fitzgerald 24 Comments



“Nobel laureate: Don’t ‘muddle up’ terrorism with Islam,” by Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press, September 2, 2016:

Nobel Peace Prize winner Wided Bouchamaoui urged people everywhere on Thursday [September 1] not to “muddle up” terrorism with Islam.
The Tunisian businesswoman, who co-founded the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet which won the 2015 peace prize, said Muslims who practice their faith calmly and respectfully are “victims of a semantic problem” when “terrorists” are described as “Islamic terrorists.”

In other words, don’t ever describe terrorism as “Islamic terrorism
,” because that will make the good, moderate, Muslims, the ones who do not engage in or support terrorism, feel bad, make them the real victims. And who knows what they might do in response?
In 2015, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to four Tunisian groups that had been engaged in a “national dialogue” to head off violence between the secularists and the Islamists in Tunisia. The reason such an effort succeeded in Tunisia, while failing everywhere else in the Muslim Arab world (think of the continued violence in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, which began with the “Arab Spring”), is that the Arab secularists have always been strongest in Tunisia, and once the French left, the redoubtable Habib Bourguiba and his Destour Party took power. Bourguiba was careful to constrain the forces of militant Islam in Tunisia, fearing a relapse back into the medieval Muslim mire. The French-educated Tunisian elite gave him their full support; his successor Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, though secular also, was extremely corrupt, and it was that which undid his rule. This gave the Islamic party of Ennahda a chance to share power, but after some terror attacks by Muslims even more extreme than those in Ennahda, a convinced secularist, 89-year-old Beji Caid Essebsi, was voted in, as a representative of the French-educated and secular Tunisian elite. They have been among the main beneficiaries of France’s mission civilisatrice, and wanted to ensure that Tunisia would not relapse into a medieval Muslim mire.

Ms. Bouchamoui, having insisted that “we should call a spade a spade,” as she told the U.N. General Assembly’s high-level forum on “The Culture of Peace, proceeded to call a spade a pitchfork: “A terrorist is a killer, a murderer, a criminal and I would even say an imposter who is manipulating Islam.”


What does this mean? It means that this distinguished member of the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, that was cited by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for making a “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia” after the Jasmine Revolution of 2011, remains, despite all these accolades, and her presumed “moderation,” an apologist for Islam. For how do these “terrorists” manage to “manipulate Islam”? Do they make up violent verses in the Qur’an that really aren’t there? Do they make up stories about an aggressive Muhammad and falsely ascribe them to an “authentic” collection of Hadith? How exactly do these terrorists “manipulate” Islam? Bouchamaoui doesn’t say. And she can’t, because the “terrorists” – from ISIS on down – are scrupulous about quoting textual authority for their acts. It’s the “moderates,” trying to convince Infidels that Islam is not a threat, who are the ones engaged in textual manipulation.
Bouchamaoui said Tunisia is still considered “the exception” to the Arab Spring because it has been able to avoid conflict and to promote dialogue and compromise. It has also been able to promote democracy and is taking steps to counter “terrorism,” she said.

She fails to answer the obvious question: why is Tunisia the “exception” to the Arab Spring? Isn’t it because the secularist heritage of Bourguiba and his Destour Party remained strong enough to stare down the Islamists, and to recover from the overthrow of Ben Ali (whose crime was not secularism, but corruption), and to suppress the would-be Islamists, retake power, and put Tunisia back on its secularist track? .

After deadly attacks in Tunisia and elsewhere carried out by extremists, she said “it is absolutely crucial to review and reconsider the solutions the international community can provide to the complex issue of terrorism in order to stem as best as possible the evil.” But she fails to follow the obvious trail: what ideology is it that prompts these acts of terrorism? Is Muslim terrorism really so complex an issue? Doesn’t it have a long history, that unsurprisingly shows us that the True Believers take seriously the command to “strike terror in the hearts” of the Infidels? And even Muslims who become “decadent” in their Western ways can make up for it, cleanse themselves of that decadence, precisely by engaging in Jihad, which is not something Westerners understand, determined as they are to believe that a “bad Muslim” (one who drinks alcohol, or eats pork, or doesn’t go to the mosque) could not then become a Jihadist. Of course he could, thereby making amends for his previous behavior, by now killing Infidels, which is the surest guarantor of attaining Paradise.

Beyond the immediate victims, Bouchamaoui said “terrorism seeks to strike public opinion, to intimidate it by instilling a climate of fear and terror — and they have achieved this in some places.”
Again, why does she never use the words “Islam,” “Islamic,” or “Muslim”? This theme, the same one John Kerry has been pitching, is that we should refuse to publicize acts of Islamic terrorism (“that’s what the terrorists want”), and instead keep quiet about these terrorist acts. If they don’t get the publicity they are said to seek, terrorism will level off. Where is the evidence for this? Isn’t it more likely that an insufficiently informed public, one not aware of the full extent of Muslim terrorism, will not support new security measures that need to be taken, may even come to believe that the whole business of Muslim terrorism is “exaggerated beyond belief” and there’s really nothing to worry about, if only those intolerable “racists” and “Islamophobes” would just shut up? When Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announces that terrorist attacks are foiled “all the time” and news of them never reaches the public, we know that the Muslim threat is already being grossly under-reported. When you misinform the public as to the scope of the threat, that public may misjudge the security measures that might need to be taken. The public needs a full and fair account of the terrorist threat, rather than attempts to minimize it so as “not to scare people.”

The Nobel laureate said she and others intend to join forces to fight “extremism,” which she said knows no borders. But that is true of only one kind of “extremism” – the very one she doesn’t want to name. The I.R.A. set off bombs only in Northern Ireland and the U.K. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka limited their attacks to Sri Lanka. The Baader-Meinhof Gang limited itself to West Germany. The Red Brigades attacked only in Italy. The only kind of “extremism” that “knows no borders” is Islamic extremism. For the field of battle is everywhere that the Infidels have not yet been subdued. “It [‘extremism’] must be considered as a priority of the U.N. agenda on the culture of peace and non-violence,” Bouchamaoui said.

Stressing the importance of international action, she said, “I would like to urge each and every one of you not to muddle up terrorism (with) Islam.”

But it is not “muddling up terrorism (with) Islam” that is the problem; it’s the refusal of so many in high places, including certified “Muslim moderates” like Ms. Bouchamaoui, to state publicly the obvious connection between the texts and teachings of Islam and Muslim terrorism. It is Ms. Bouchamaoui who, having pocketed her share of a Nobel Prize for Peace, turns out to be, disappointingly, a Defender of the Faith, claiming – as so many others do – that the Muslim killers “have twisted” (or “misunderstood”) “a great religion,” “muddling up terrorism” (with) Islam when these terrorists Have Nothing To Do With Islam,

By referring to terrorists as Islamic, Bouchamaoui insists,”confusion is created in people’s minds between the Muslim faith and a team of Jihadists who are prepared to blow themselves up by killing innocent people.” In other words, even where a team of Jihadists are prepared to blow up innocents, whatever else you do, don’t refer to those terrorists as connected to Islam, because that creates “confusion in people’s minds.” What “confusion” is that? Are we incapable of distinguishing between those Muslims who take the Jihad to heart, and act upon it, from those who do not? The only “confusion” that arises comes from such remarks as those by Ms. Bouchamaoui, who refuses to concede that terrorist acts by Muslims are mandated by the Muslim faith. Isn’t what we endure now the worst possible kind of “confusion,” where we are inveigled into believing nonsensically that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam; and that no one should be uncharitable enough to bring up the little matter of what is in the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, for fear of making things “worse”? And where we are uncertain of the true extent of the Muslim terrorism, because Jeh Johnson tells us that plots are thwarted all the time, and the public never learns of them. How, one wonders, could things be made even “worse”?

Tunisia is doing all right on its own, “a year of success for its democratic transition,” but Bouchamaoui doesn’t recognize that it was the strength of the secularist forces, a legacy from the Bourguiba period, who managed to stand fast against Rachid Ghannouchi’s Islamist Ennahda Party, that explain this success. That is, in Tunisia, the secular class is sufficiently numerous and powerful to hold the Islamists in check. But there is still the effect on Tunisia of the conflict in neighboring Libya and its “disastrous management.” “We are very much paying a very high price,” says Bouchamaoui, “for the instability in Libya. It affects our country every day, and our neighboring country [Libya].”And where does the instability come from in Libya, if not from the various Islamist armed groups in Libya, and especially from the forces of the Islamic State in Sirte, which even has Boko Haram fighters now in its ranks? And then there is the instability resulting from the constant infighting by a half-dozen other Islamic groups, some tied to Al-Qaeda and some to the Muslim Brotherhood, and including Ansar al-Sharia. These are the sources of the “instability in Libya” that affects neighboring Tunisia, and which Bouchamaoui chooses not to name. She might have said that Libya’s hope lay in the secular militia of General Khalifa Heftar (a possible savior of Libya from the Islamic groups and local militias still fighting), who could be Libya’s Bourguiba, and that Tunisia, and possibly Sisi’s Egypt, and the Western powers, should be helping him to secure Libya, to give secularism a chance. She did not. Instead, she simply said that while 2015 was a year of success for Tunisia’s democratic transition, it was also “ a terrible year for Tunisia and the world” because of extremist attacks, uncertainties, and “a lack of vision.” All very vague, for still she manages not to mention Islam, or name those Islamist militias in Libya.

It is disappointing that Bouchamaoui dared not state that those who linked Islam to terrorist attacks were not muddled; that there was indeed an obvious connection, and it was up to those who considered themselves “moderates” to find ways, if such ways can be found, to interpret away the Qur’anic passages that are most dangerous for Infidels, or at least to weaken the power of Islam as a political and social force. It has been done before – it’s exactly what Ataturk did in Turkey in the 1920s and early 1930s (and Erdogan’s undoing of some of Ataturk’s reforms doesn’t mean that Ataturk’s revolution was doomed to ultimate failure, but only that the class of secular Turks he helped create ought to have been more vigilant and ruthless in defending his legacy against the likes of Erdogan), and there is no reason why Ataturk’s example could not be followed by Arab secularists in Tunisia, where the legacy of Habib Bourguiba remains potent.
Ms. Bouchamaoui is herself in the camp of Bourguiba:

Indeed, the political Islamists in Tunisia deny the major role that Habib Bourguiba played in the national movement and in bringing about Tunisian independence. And they detest his secularism. Hence their desire to erase his memory by changing the name of “Avenue Bourguiba” to the “Avenue of Liberty” and posthumously demonizing him, impugning his own antecedents, describing him as ‘a Jew[a charge also levelled at Ataturk], a traitor, an agent working for France, someone who detested Islam and Arabization,’ charges made by, among others, the former minister of higher education, Moncef Ben Salem, in a video dated January 20, 2011.

Meanwhile, what if Ms. Bouchamaoui stopped being a Defender of the Faith, left off her worrying about the “muddling” of “terrorism” and “Islam,” and instead said something like this: “The attempt by Islamists in Tunisia to seize power fortunately failed. With the corrupt regime of Ben Ali out of the way, and Ennahda’s Islamist rule rejected, our people have wisely chosen to return to power a determined secularist, and lifelong supporter of Bourguiba, Beji Caid Essebsi; thus we are again being led by one of Bourguiba’s faithful. We realize, as Habib Bourguiba did, that Islam today has to adjust to the modern world, and we cannot expect the West to continue to endure, in a kind of reverse colonialism, the attitudes and behavior of many Muslims now living in Europe. Muslims should not expect to change the laws and customs of the countries of Dar al-Harb to which they have been so generously admitted. They should be prepared, rather, to show the same respect to non-Muslim laws and customs in Europe as they expect non-Muslims living in our lands to show to our laws and customs.. Meanwhile, in Tunisia, Bourguiba’s legacy needs to be strengthened, and the forces of Islamic fanaticism held in check.”

It’s not really much to ask of her, or of other Tunisian secularists. And she should not confuse matters by inveighing against those who “’muddle up’ terrorism with Islam.” It’s Islam itself that, with its 1400-year history of promoting terrorism in the service of Jihad, that long ago “muddled up” terrorism with Islam. And when Bouchamaoui says that “Muslims who practice their faith calmly and respectfully” are “victims of a semantic problem” when “terrorists” are described as “Islamic terrorists,” she is wrong: the phrase “Islamic terrorists” does not make victims of moderate Muslims, any more than the phrase “white racists” includes all “whites,” or the phrase “Japanese militarists” includes all Japanese. It is a useful phrase, because the prompting for such terrorism is to be found in the Islamic texts, the terrorists in question are all Muslims, their targets are all non-Muslims. Why shouldn’t the phrase “Islamic terrorists” be used? The adjective informs us that these terrorists share an ideology, and that that ideology can be found in Islam’s holy texts, texts we are free to study ourselves, to understand what motivates these terrorists.

In the context of Tunisia, Ms. Bouchamaoui is a secularist on the side of the angels. But she continues to present to the world’s Infidels an apologist’s view of Islam. When she, an obvious “moderate” Muslim, eventually shows herself prepared to publicly discuss the connection between Islam and terrorism, instead of continuing to insist that such discussion merely “muddles” things or, still worse, tell us that Islam is being “manipulated” to justify terrorism (how? With what textual authority?), then non-Muslims will be happy to recognize that Ms. Bouchamaoui has become part of the solution. Until then, however, she remains, though a moderate in the Tunisian context, and despite that Nobel Prize, a disturbing part of the problem.



UK children's show Fireman Sam won't be punished for showing character stepping on Qur'an

Imam of the Kaaba: "Terrorism is the biggest problem and Islam has no link with it. Terrorists have no religion."




Imam of the Kaaba: “Terrorism is the biggest problem and Islam has no link with it. Terrorists have no religion.”

September 12, 2016 9:25 am By Robert Spencer 50 Comments


The terrorists disagree. One Islamic State propagandist’s parents said of him: “Our son is a devout Muslim. He had learnt the Quran by heart.” One Malaysian Muslim said that the Qur’an led him to join the Islamic State. A Muslima in the U.S. promoted the Islamic State by quoting the Qur’an.

In its communiqués, the Islamic State quotes the Qur’an copiously. They quote it in threats to blow up the White House and conquer Rome and Spain; in explaining its priorities in the nations it is targeting in jihad; in preaching to Christians after collecting the jizya (a Qur’an-based tax, cf. Qur’an 9:29); in justifying the execution of accused spies; and in its various videos.

ISIS’s beheadings (47:4), sex slavery (4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30), subjugation of Christians (9:29), global imperative (8:39) and more are all based upon the Qur’an. ISIS has also awarded $10,000 prizes and sex slaves in Qur’an memorization contests. One of its underground lairs was found littered with weapons and copies of the Qur’an. Children in the Islamic State study the Qur’an and get weapons training. It has instituted fines for not knowing the Qur’an well enough.

By “terrorism,” Sudais may be referring only to the actions of Israel and the U.S.


“Terrorism can’t be linked to any religion: Imam-e-Kaaba,” Express Tribune, September 12, 2016:

Imam-e-Kaaba Abdul Rahman al Sudais delinked Islam from terrorism in a sermon as the Hajj reached its high point on Sunday with nearly two million pilgrims converging on Mount Arafat.
The pilgrims gathered from sunrise at Mount Arafat to spend the most important day of the Hajj in prayer and reading from the Holy Quran….

In his wide-ranging sermon, the Imam-e-Kaaba said terrorism cannot be linked with a particular religion or nation, Islam is a religion of peace and has nothing to do with terrorism. “Muslim rulers will have to address the collective problems realising their responsibilities. Terrorism is the biggest problem and Islam has no link with it. Terrorists have no religion,” he said….

At midday prayer hundreds of thousands prostrated themselves, men and women side-by-side, in wide alleys that run between prefabricated pilgrim lodgings. Under multicoloured parasols to protect against the burning sun, the mass of people moved through broad streets which are closed to traffic around Mount Arafat. Throughout the day the faithful chant a traditional Hajj incantation, “God, here I am.”

From a distance, the hill appeared a snowy white from the seamless two-piece white garment, ihram, worn by male pilgrims. They come from every corner of the globe, but Indonesia — the most populous Muslim nation — has the largest contingent.

“I have the impression of standing exactly in front of God,” said Khadem Ndyaye, 47, of Senegal. “Muslims came here from everywhere and we are all the same. If all the world was like that, there wouldn’t be any war. Here, we feel that Islam is a religion of peace.”…


Hugh Fitzgerald: A Tunisian Moderate Remains, Alas, A Defender of the Faith
London’s police ignore Muslim officers' ‘extremist views’ for fear of being labeled ‘Islamophobic’

 

Gilles Kepel: Keep Those Muslims Satisfied, Keep Europe For Them A Big Rock Candy Mountain

September 14, 2016 6:23 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 31 Comments


“Islamic Scholar: Europe May Be Heading Toward Civil War,” by Chris Tomlinson, Breitbart, September 11, 2016:

A French scholar of Islam has a dire warning for Europe, claiming that the third generation of young Muslim men are being increasingly radicalised and may lead the continent into a civil war.​

​

“Radicalized” for Gilles Kepel means “Wahabist” or “Salafist” Muslims, the bad kind, as opposed, in Kepel’s fantasy world, to the perfectly harmless mainstream Muslims.

Professor of political science at one of France’s most prestigious universities,…​

So listen up, please, to what Gilles Kepel has to say.

…Sciences Po, Gilles Kepel, claims that the current wave of Islamic terrorism in Europe is not so much a war of Western civilization against Islam, but a war within Islam itself.​

This is nothing new, it’s Gilles Kepel’s standard line, and in fact many others claim the same thing.

The result is an entire generation, adherents of the extremist Wahabist and Salafist movements, who want not only to take over Europe, but to eliminate more moderate Islamic opposition, reports Die Welt.​

​

In what ways does this “more moderate Islamic opposition” distinguish itself from “extremist Wahabist and Salafist” Muslims? Doesn’t normative Islam uncompromisingly distinguish between Muslim and non-Muslim, and in Islamic states, non-Muslims must either convert to Islam, or submit to a host of onerous requirements, of which the best known is the payment of the Jizyah, or be killed? Kepel attributes to “Salafists” alone doctrines which are part of Islam. Don’t ordinary Muslims “want to take over Europe” – and for that matter, the rest of the non-Muslim world, so that this giddy globe is a place where Islam everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere?

Prof. Kepel foresees that the growing number of Muslims, who are forming what he calls the “Jihad Generation”, will likely continue to commit acts of terror in European cities.​

To call young Muslims the “Jihad Generation” is to misleadingly imply that Jihad is not a permanent and central part of Islam. And his prediction that says that the members of that generation “will likely continue to commit acts of terror” hardly impresses; why ever would they not continue to commit acts of terror, when the Qur’an, that uncreated and immutable text, tells them to do so? And they will commit those acts not because they have been made into “Salafists” or “Wahabis.” Being a Muslim will do. Nor does it take a professor at the “prestigious” Sciences Po to predict more Muslim terrorism: more Muslims in Europe means more Muslim terrorism.

“The goal of the terror is not to provoke political change, but rather to incite hatred toward Muslims from the rest of society, which he believes would eventually radicalise enough Muslims to the point that Europe could enter into a full-blown civil war.”​

This is the heart of Kepel’s argument: his insistence that Muslim terrorists are committing these attacks not to “sow terror in the hearts of the Infidels” as the Qur’an instructs, and thereby to demoralize and weaken them so that they will ultimately yield to Muslim demands, but in order to “incite hatred” against Muslims “from the rest of society,” that is, from non-Muslims. For that “hatred” would ineluctably cause those nice, ordinary, moderate Muslims who are now in Europe by the millions to become “Salafists.” Apparently, there is no possibility of those Muslims, no matter how nice, moderate, etc. they may be, to actually sympathize with the non-Muslims under constant attack, and to make common cause with them. In Kepel’s moral universe, the very worst things Infidels can do is to show any “hatred” for those Muslims who are attacking them. That’s exactly what the Salafists want, he insists, because then those “moderate” Muslims will turn into Salafists.
So in the world of Gilles Kepel, what should non-Muslims do? Well, certainly not respond too vigorously to terrorist attacks. Because, you see, that’s exactly what the Salafists want. So keep the welcome mat out for Muslims. Don’t vote for those “extreme, nationalistic” parties that only make Muslims mad. If you must talk about Islam, just keep saying that real Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, that it’s all the fault of those who have (perverted, twisted, misunderstood) a great religion. Keep whistling in the dark, don’t get your knickers in a twist over Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, the Hyper Cacher Market. Don’t give the impression that these terrorist attacks by the “Bad Muslims” have made Europeans any less welcoming to the ordinary, non-radicalised, unthreatening Muslims.

If you get upset about attacks in Nice and Paris and Magnanville, or Munich and Hamburg, or London or Amsterdam or Madrid, you’re just doing the terrorists a favor; if you call for more security measures, you are practically a recruiter for “Salafists,” because, of course, no Muslim could possibly have any other reaction to Infidel mistrust than to promptly embrace Salafism. It’s simply impossible for the “good Muslims” to see things through the eyes of the Infidel victims, and agree that they have a perfect right to be alarmed.

The long-term goal of the Jihad Generation is to destroy Europe through civil war and then build an Islamic society from the ashes, Prof. Kepel said.​

Well, at least he’s got that right – the long-term goal of Muslims (and not just this “Jihad Generation” he has concocted, as if Jihad is not a permanent feature of Islam) is certainly to create in Europe a society where Muslims rule.

The strategy is similar to the expansion of Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and Libya where the terrorist organisation was able to use the chaos of civil war to slowly build its forces, grow in power, and rapidly seize territory.​

While Prof. Kepel says that most Muslims do not actively participate in terrorism or with terrorist groups, he says that the growth of Salafism among young people, combined with a sense of entitlement and lack of job prospects, means that third-generation Muslims will be far more likely to join radical groups.​

​

Certainly Muslims do have a “sense of entitlement,” but Kepel fails to explain why. It’s because they are Muslims. They read in the Qur’an that they are the “best of peoples” (3:110), while non-Muslims are the “vilest of creatures” (98:6). They know that in a just – i.e. Islamic – society, non-Muslims would have to pay the Jizyah. They take as by right the full panoply of benefits – free medical care, free education, free or subsidized housing, family allowances – European societies offer them. Though Kepel claims that “lack of job prospects” makes them more likely “to join radical groups,” he does not address the obvious question of why they ought to be guaranteed employment if they possess neither relevant training, nor willingness to be trained; nor do they exhibit an eagerness to work when in Europe they can receive so much for free. Their rates of unemployment far exceed the rates for any group of non-Muslim migrants, and certainly far more than the rates for native non-Muslims. But Gilles Kepel does not mention any of this. As for that Muslim “sense of entitlement,” which non-Muslim migrants do not appear to possess, Kepel appears to believe that in order to prevent “radicalization” (Salafism, Wahabism) of young Muslims, that “sense of entitlement” must not be rejected as preposterous but, rather, satisfied. And as to the “lack of job prospects,” another reason for young Muslims to “radicalize,” Kepel doesn’t waste any time on figuring out why it might be that Muslims, lacking training in skills relevant to the job market, unwilling to take jobs beneath what they believe they deserve, and many without a work ethic comparable to that exhibited by other, but non-Muslim, migrants (Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindus), would naturally have problems finding jobs – that is, if they really wanted them in the first place.

Salafism as an ideology is dangerous, Prof. Kepel maintains, because it preaches that Westerners are “unbelievers” and encourages a path toward violence.​

It’s not “Salafism” that “preaches that Westerners are ‘unbelievers’”; it’s Islam. And it’s not just “Westerners” who are unbelievers, but all sorts of people, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, who have been on the receiving end of Muslim attentions for centuries. And it is not “Salafism” but Islam that “encourages a path toward violence.”

Islamic intellectuals [!] are also not doing enough to combat the Salafist ideology, according to Prof. Kepel. The scholar stated that mainstream imams have a duty to reject Salafist teachings and while some do, he says the vast majority are silent on the issue.​

Shouldn’t Gilles Kepel ask himself why “mainstream imams” do not reject Salafist teachings? Is it because there is no deep opposition between mainstream Islam and Salafism, and no textual authority to invoke against Salafism? The “mainstream imams” who remain for Gilles Kepel so disappointingly silent, know this, but he apparently still does not.

Salafist preachers have become the target of raids in parts of Germany in recent months as the government is finding more and more preachers with links to Islamic State such as notorious preacher Sven Lau.​

There is also a fear among law makers and police that the increasing number of young migrants crossing from the Middle East and North Africa may be even more susceptible to Salafist teachings as their expectations of an easy life in Europe are not surely met.​

​

Well, then, if they are even more susceptible to Salafist teachings “as their expectations of an easy life in Europe are not surely met,” then we Infidels know what we must do to stay safe: just meet the expectations of young Muslims for an easy life in Europe. Detto, fatto.

To recapitulate:
Gilles Kepel predicts civil war in Europe. Apparently, to judge by his interview in Die Welt, it will not at first be between Muslims and non-Muslims. It may start as a civil war between those non-Muslim Europeans who are determined to keep their societies from succumbing to Islam, and other non-Muslims, especially those in government, who are perceived as not effectively opposing the islamicizing of their own societies. Kepel worries about “the rise of an extreme, nationalistic, right-wing ideology among Europeans as just as much a possibility” as the triumph of Islam. Of course, he applies those scare words – “extreme, nationalistic, right-wing” – indiscriminately, to those who oppose yielding Europe to Islam. What is “extreme” about not wanting to lose your own country, your own civilization, to an ideology that, as John Quincy Adams wrote, promises perpetual war: “Between these two religions [Christianity and Islam], thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men”?

Does Gilles Kepel recognize that it is possible to like or love or be sympathetically interested in one’s own native land without being “nationalistic,” a word that can no longer be used neutrally, but which has become a term of opprobrium, and that labelling people as “right-wing” for being intelligent patriots, not wanting to lose their country to Islam, is idiotic? Perhaps Kepel is unaware of just how many certifiably left-wing people have gone after Islam hammer and tongs. I am thinking particularly of the great Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, whose book The Rage and the Pride had such an effect in Italy, precisely because she was the most famous journalist, and well-known for her leftist sympathies, opposed to the Vietnam War, the Greek colonels, and so on and so obviously forth. But then she spent a lot of time in the Middle East, interviewing Arafat, Qaddafi, Khomeini, even spending time with the PLO, and took the measure of Islam, which she detested, and she was alarmed at the Muslim invasion of Europe, of Italy, of her native Tuscany. There is nothing “extreme, nationalistic, right-wing” about tens of millions of people who have properly informed themselves about the ideology of Islam and the history of Muslim conquest and subjugation of many different lands and peoples, and are consequently horrified by what is going on in Europe today. Oriana Fallaci expressed that horror in lapidary form:

Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense… I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion… I am disgusted by the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans… Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don’t know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don’t even know who Cavour was!… Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty… State-run television stations contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones… The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom… The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization… The struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions… The West reveals a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive… President Bush has said, “We refuse to live in fear.” Beautiful sentence, very beautiful. I loved it! But inexact, Mr. President, because the West does live in fear. People are afraid to speak against the Islamic world. Afraid to offend, and to be punished for offending, the sons of Allah. You can insult the Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jews. You can slander the Catholics, you can spit on the Madonna and Jesus Christ. But, woe betide the citizen who pronounces a word against the Islamic religion.​

Extreme? Nationalistic? Right-wing?
Or was Oriana Fallaci, rather, someone who knew her history, understood the achievements of Italy and Europe and the West, and recognized her “duty toward” her own “values, principles, civilization”?
And what does Gilles Kepel recommend to head off a possible civil war in Europe by preventing the “radicalization” of Muslims of the “Jihad Generation”?

He says that “the growth of Salafism among young people, combined with a sense of entitlement and lack of job prospects, means that third-generation Muslims will be far more likely to join radical groups.”​

“And they may be even more susceptible to Salafist teachings as their expectations of an easy life in Europe are not surely met.”​

So there you have the solution.
Satisfy that sense of entitlement of young Muslims, no matter what it is.
Make sure there is a jobs programs and a guarantee of employment for Muslims only.
And finally, do not disappoint those Muslims who have expectations of an easy life in Europe, but meet those expectations – for Muslims only – and just to be safe, and then some.
Gilles Kepel offers Europeans nothing except a warning not to be “extreme, nationalistic, right-wing.” But he offers to buy off Muslims in Europe, satisfying their every preposterous expectation, and thinks that that will prevent Europe’s Muslims from asking for ever more. It’s a lunatic prescription, and a despairing one. Let’s hope it’s not the last word on the subject, but from Gilles Kepel, a professor at the “prestigious” Sciences Po, let it be his last word. He’s delighted us long enough.



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Hugh Fitzgerald: A Few Questions For Simon Collis

September 15, 2016 5:37 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 131 Comments



The Saudis, and many other Muslims, are ecstatic. Simon Collis, the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, has just revealed to the world that he has converted to Islam (he did this a few years ago, but it was kept quiet until now). And he this week just completed the Hajj, the first British Ambassador to do so. What makes Muslims so ecstatic is that despite the outward show of believing that they, the Muslims, are “the best of peoples” (Qur’an 3:110), they are also aware of the fact that non-Muslims are none too impressed with Islam. A Western convert, one who comes from the highest levels of Infidel society, helps to validate Islam in Muslim eyes. Allahu Akbar, Our God Is Indeed Greater, when someone like Simon Collis converts.

And it’s especially pleasing when an upper class Westerner, as Simon Collis so obviously is (Christ Church, Cambridge, followed by the Foreign Office) converts not spur-of-the-momentish, but after a a long acquaintance with Muslim societies. On Twitter, Collis confirmed the story: “God bless you. In brief: I converted to Islam after 30 years of living in Muslim societies and before marrying Huda [his Syrian wife].” Add his name to the list of such celebrated Western converts as Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall (translator of the Qur’an), Muhammad Asad (née Leopold Weiss, a journalist, writer, and scholar of Islam), and St. John Philby (adviser to Ibn Saud, and one suspects that his conversion to Islam was not just a useful career move, but a kind of protest against the English establishment, in the same spirit as his son, Soviet spy Kim Philby, would later “convert” to Communism). The reason these converts’ names are known to so many Muslims is because there are so few of them. Now they can add Simon Collis to their shortlist.

What was it Simon Collis saw in Islam that he found so attractive? During 30 years he lived in many Musllm countries, as part of the British embassy staff. He was ambassador to both Syria (2007-2012) and Iraq (2012-2014). What could he possibly have found winning about the Assad family’s murderous regime, or about the even more barbaric Sunnis, including the Muslim Brotherhood, that was trying to overthrow the Assads’ Alawite despotism? What did Collis make of the massacres of the Christians by Muslims in both Syria and Iraq? Of the atrocities visited upon the Yazidis, their men massacred, their women made into sex slaves for Muslim Arabs? In Iraq he surely learned of the Anfal Campaign, in which Muslim Arabs killed 182,000 Muslim Kurds. Might the general Arab indifference to that campaign have had something to do with the Arab supremacism that Islam promotes? Were the Sunni terrorists attacking Shia shrines and mosques and crowds of flagellants during Ashura, or the Shia who blew up Sunnis in retaliation, an edifying spectacle of intra-Muslim harmony for Simon Collis? Or did this observable behavior of Muslim murder and mayhem have nothing to do with Islam?
When he arrived in Saudi Arabia on February 3, 2015, what was it that so impressed Simon Collis with that society? Was it the school textbooks that teach hatred of Christians and Jews? Was it perhaps the swift meting out of Saudi justice, in the no-nonsense execution of Nimr al-Nimr, for the crime of being a Shia cleric and calling for free elections? What else might have impressed him? Was it the 147 public executions in 2015, a new record for the Saudis? Was it the ten years in jail and 2,000 lashes given to a Saudi who simply tweeted his atheistic beliefs? What does Simon Collis think of religious freedom in Muslim countries? Perhaps, now that he’s a Muslim, and possessor of the One True Faith, he really doesn’t care.

What does Simon Collis make of the ongoing bombing campaign by the Saudis in Yemen, where almost all of the victims appear to have been civilians? Does he approve of the Saudi soldiers sent to help the King of Bahrain suppress his majority-Shia population? What does he make of the treatment of foreign workers, some not paid the wages they are due, others physically abused, or even raped, by their Arab masters?

What is it that most impressed Simon Collis about the Qur’an? Was it 2:256? 5:32? Does he know about 5:33? Did he ever bother to read 9:5 or 9:29 or other of the more than 100 “jihad” verses? Of course he did, so what we really want to know is, what did he make of those verses, how has he managed to accept a sanitized version of the Qur’an? And as for Muhammad, the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil), the Model of Conduct (uswa hasana), what does Simon Collis make of the Prophet’s approval of the killings of Asma bint Marwan and Abu ‘Afak, merely because they mocked him? What does he think of the killing of the inoffensive Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis by Muhammad and his men, in order to seize their property and women? What does Simon Collis think of the execution of the 600-900 bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza, while Muhammad looked approvingly on? What does he think about Muhammad and little Aisha? Anything? Nothing?
What does Simon Collis think of what the Muslim invaders did in Hindu India, where they killed up to 80 million Hindus during 250 years of Mughal rule? What does he think of the destruction by Muslims of the Hindu and Buddhist statuary and temple complexes in India, and Pakistan and Bangladesh, over the centuries? What does he make of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, where Saudi and Pakistani engineers lent a hand to the Taliban? Or of the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist temple complexes in what is now Indonesia? Or of Sufi shrines and libraries of manuscripts in Timbuktu, by the fanatical Islamists of Ansar Dine?

For celebrity converts, there are financial incentives to become a Muslim, especially in Saudi Arabia. Even a humble Western nurse who worked in Saudi Arabia told me of how her patients had offered her $30,000 if she would convert to Islam (she turned them down). If a nurse is worth that, what would someone at the ambassadorial level be worth? An ambassador from Great Britain? Simon Collis surely was impressed – who is not? – with the fantastic riches of the Saudis, and just as surely knew that once he retired from the Foreign Service, as a celebrity convert he would be assured a well-paid sinecure at some Saudi research center or foundation or university. Wouldn’t that be an inducement to say the Shehada, become a Muslim, and walk widdershins seven times round the Ka’aba which houses the magic wonderstone, as he did, swathed in white, just this week?

Imagine if someone in the Western press were to prepare A List of Questions For Simon Collis, more or less like those you have just been reading, and published it in The Telegraph or The Times or in the Washington Post or The New York Times. Collis wouldn’t– because he couldn’t — respond, but merely putting the questions to him publicly, knowing that his answer can only be an embarrassed silence, would be a salutary exercise, a way to smuggle in some home truths about Muslim societies. And the more that is done, the less likely it is that some other diplomat or public figure in the West will be quite so ready to throw in his dubious lot with Islam, as if it ever could be, morally or in any other way, superior to Western civilization.



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Hugh Fitzgerald: The Dalai Lama: In Every Sense, On Islam He’s All Over the Map

September 20, 2016 12:50 am By Hugh Fitzgerald 91 Comments


In 2008, the Dalai Lama said what lots of Western leaders have been saying about Islam. He said “it was wrong, it was entirely unfair,” to call Islam a violent religion.” But six years later, in September 2014, at a conference of religious leaders he had organized, the Dalai Lama seemed to modify his earlier brisk dismissal of any connection between Islam and violence, when he said that “killing in the name of faith is terrible.” The implication was clear: some people [Muslims] were killing in the name of faith, and while that was “terrible,” it was no longer “entirely unfair” to link some Muslims to such violence. Everyone understood what adherents of what faith he must have intended to set straight about their own faith. At least he recognized that some people “claimed” to be acting violently in accordance with the texts and teachings of their religion, even if those people were “wrong.”

Then he showed he was still determined to give Islam a pass, adding in the same speech that “jihad was being misused and the term connotes fighting one’s own impurities.” He clearly had been reading too much Karen Armstrong. And still worse was to follow: “Jihad combats inner destructive emotions. Everybody carries jihad in their hearts, including me.”
Is it possible that the Dalai Lama really does not know by this point how Muslims understand “Jihad,” or with what murderous meaning the Qur’an endows that word? Perhaps he really doesn’t know — one more case of willful ignorance. Or perhaps he thinks it better for all concerned to play the game of Let’s Pretend in discussing what Jihad means, in the hope that Muslims will in time convince themselves that “Jihad” really is all about an inner struggle. We’re used to this by now; it’s what we’ve seen from other world leaders — Barack Obama (“the true peaceful nature of Islam”), Tony Blair (the Islamic State’s ideology is “based in a complete perversion of the proper faith of Islam”), Pope Francis (“Islam is a religion of peace”) – whenever they pontificate about Islam, a faith which they so maddeningly presume to know so much about.

In fact, the prominent Syrian cleric Ramadan al-Buti complained that when Westerners describe Islam as a “religion of peace,” they are trying not to defend Islam but to trick Muslims into believing it is peaceful, and then – horribile dictu — into giving up the real doctrine of Jihad for that ludicrous “inner struggle” business. Of course Islam is about violence and war, said the truth-telling Ramadan Al-Buti. But why believe a prominent Muslim cleric about Islam, when there are so many non-Musilms ready to tell us what it’s all about?

At the same gathering, the Dalai Lama insisted that “India is the only country where different religions have been able to co-exist.” This was a bizarre remark, but the Dalai Lama is given to strange remarks. Could he have forgotten that in every country in the Western world, people of different confessions co-exist peacefully? Or is it that he just doesn’t want to say anything in praise of the West, because that would invite comparison of how Muslim states treat non-Muslims (badly) with how the non-Muslim West treats Muslims (very generously)?
Then the Dalai Lama said that Indian Muslims can offer lessons on Shia-Sunni harmony, as Shias feel safer in India than in Pakistan. He’s right – they do feel safer in India. But he’s wrong about the reason. It’s not that Indian Muslims can “offer lessons” on Sunni-Shia harmony to Muslims in Pakistan, which might hold out hope of lessening intra-Islamic hostilities.The sects remain just as ideologically at odds in India as in Pakistan. It’s just that the Indian government, in which Hindus predominate, can “offer lessons” to the government of Pakistan, in ways to assure people of different sects that they can live in relative security, because the police and army will dampen down communal violence. It’s not that the Muslims in India are a different, less violent breed than their coreligionists in Pakistan, but that in India the potential for violence can be held in check.

The next time the Dalai Lama mentioned Islam was at a gathering of his followers from 27 countries. On January 31, 2015, he said that “though terrorism has emerged as a global problem,” it should not be associated with Islam, as “Muslims were neither terrorist nor its sponsorer [sic].” No one had the bad taste to remind him of the nearly 25,000 terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims since 9/11; no one at the meeting jogged his memory with mention of Charlie Hebdo, Hyper Cacher, Bataclan, Magnanville, Nice, London busses and metro stations, Lee Rigby, the Atocha station in Madrid, Theo van Gogh’s murder in Amsterdam, or the attacks at Fort Hood, Boston,San Bernardino, Chattanooga, Orlando.

Like Pope Francis, who now says “equating Islam with violence is wrong” and just this past summer insisted again, astoundingly, that “all religions want peace,” the Dalai Lama is a “spiritual leader” who doesn’t want to call into conceivable question other faiths. All religions are good; no religion, rightly understood, can possibly countenance violence. Repeat ad libitum.
He offers, instead, treacly pieties, insisting that no religion could possibly be responsible for any violence or aggression by its adherents. His worldview cannot accommodate the real Islam, so he has chosen to believe in a sanitized, even imaginary, version of the faith.

Yet the Dalai Lama has also shown signs of justified worry. He has noticed that the migrants flowing into Europe have been a source of great anxiety and disruption, and this past May, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he surprised many when he forthrightly said: “Europe, for example Germany, cannot [that is, must not] become an Arab country. Germany is Germany.” And “from a moral point of view too, I think the refugees should only be admitted temporarily. The goal should be that they return and help rebuild their countries.”

This seemed to be a welcome volte-face from the pollyannish pronouncements of the past. Of course, one should notice that he said Germany “cannot become an Arab country,” rather than saying that Germany “cannot become a Muslim country.” It’s as if he still couldn’t bring himself to recognize that it is the faith of Islam, and not the ethnicity of some of its Believers, that makes Muslims permanently hostile to non-Muslims, and unable to integrate into their societies, that is, into Europe. But he certainly appeared to be suggesting that the migrants, almost all of them Muslims, should not be allowed to remain and transform the countries which had so generously admitted them, but those migrants should eventually be sent back to “help rebuild their countries.” It was a welcome display of common sense. He appeared to recognize the danger of letting “Arab” (i.e., Muslim) migrants stay, and that a policy of sending them home after they had acquired skills useful in rebuilding their own countries, was morally justified. Some might say — you and I, for example — that it would have been morally justified to send them right back, without that training: the Western world owes the world’s Muslims exactly nothing.

But then, in a visit to Paris in September, the Dalai Lama called for entering into talks – a “dialogue”? – with the Islamic State so as to “end bloodshed in Syria and Iraq,” which showed a complete misunderstanding of the Islamic State. Its fighters are determined to carry on without letup against those it considers — not just Christians and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, but also Shi’ites and even insufficiently-fanatical Muslims — to be Infidels. Not dialogue, but total destruction, is the only way to deal with the current Islamic State. But even that will not end the threat, because the ideology on which ISIS rests cannot be destroyed, which means that new recruits to the cause, and new Islamic States, will keep appearing. The Dalai Lama’s “dialogue” with ISIS is a fantasy solution, born of the despair of someone who doesn’t know what else to suggest.

In the same speech, the Dalai Lama also repeated that “religion is never a justification for killing,” when Islam – see the Qur’an, see the Hadith – overflows with justifications for the killing of insubmissive Infidels. And the Muslim killers do justify their killings, being careful to cite chapter and verse, from the Qur’an, or to adduce evidence from the life of Muhammad as recorded in the Hadith, that lend textual support to their every act.

Given a chance by an interviewer to repeat his remarks about there being too many migrants in Europe,and that Germany should not “become Arab,” the Dalai Lama refused to do so, and was careful, during that press conference on September 13, not to repeat those words. He limited his response to discussing the need for a timely welcome of the refugees: “’In the present moment, it is essential to open the doors and welcome those who are escaping the danger and the unlivable conditions in their own countries. It is just as essential to provide the necessary facilities for the education of their children and the professional training for older students. In effect, countries have a duty to welcome those who flee from difficulties and to give them every possibility of returning to their own countries. The main idea is not to send these refugees back, but to provide them with the kind of training that will enable them to reconstruct their own countries.’ As for the question of European or Arab identity, the Dalai Lama thinks that it will take a century to figure out such questions of identity because, he said we are headed toward a situation where we will all be, mainly, citizens of the world. A world that by its very nature will be more and more global. The question of boundaries will be different. Each person should be able to live at that place on the planet where he can best fulfill his aspirations.”

What the Dalai Lama sees as a wonderful new future, where anyone can choose wherever on the globe he wishes to settle, would be a nightmare for the advanced West. Swamped by peoples from the places that are least desirable to live in, all of them flooding in to live in the places deemed most desirable, it would be akin to the current Muslim migration into Europe, but even more devastating in its size. The hope he expresses that each person will be able to live in “that place on the planet that seems the most appropriate to his aspirations” put me in mind of that prescient work from 1973 by Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints. That book is a novel about the mass movement of populations from the Third to the First World, and its consequences. Wikipedia sums up this dystopian novel thus:

In Calcutta, India, the Belgian government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in Belgium. The policy is reversed after the Belgian consulate is inundated with poverty-stricken parents eager to give up their infant children.”​

An Indian “wise man” then rallies the masses to make an exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera,, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run-down freighters approaching the French coast.​

The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the goods that are in short supply in their native India. Although the novel focuses on France, the rest of the West shares its fate.​

Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of the United Kingdom must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia. The one holdout until the end of the novel is Switzerland, but by then international pressure isolating it as a rogue state for not opening its borders forces it to capitulate.​

Should such a mass migration come to pass, which is what the Dalai Lama seems not just to countenance but to approve of (“Each person should be able to live at that place on the planet where he can best fulfill his aspirations”), it is the West that will be inundated, and it is in the West where the very idea of the nation-state, of a shared national history and culture, would dissolve in this flood-tide of desperate humanity; the ties of nationhood, the tug of patriotism, the little loyalties whose sum is a society, would disappear; every place would be available to individuals from everywhere, to settle where they list, untethered to any steadying national traditions. The motto of this future world will be the innocent idiocy of “people-should-be-allowed-to-settle-wherever-they-want.” Something like that undergirds the inability of Western leaders, with some honorable exceptions, to right now flatly refuse to admit Muslim migrants. Where did this supposed duty to Muslims come from? Should the Dalai Lama’s vision (of people moving wherever they want) come to pass, the future will belong to those who, in the midst of this breaking of nations, still consider themselves to belong to a supranational community, or Umma, of fervent believers in what is not only a religion but also a complete politics – that is, the world’s Muslims.

We are still only at the level of immigration of a few million into the advanced West. Imagine what things will look like if tens or hundreds of millions got on boats, in Camp-of-the-Saints style, and headed to Europe, a prospect that the Dalai Lama, in his latest comments, appears to regard with equanimity. Perhaps he’s just a little too “spiritual” for the real world’s own good.
If you are from Calcutta or Cairo or Cuzco or the Congo, you will certainly find the Dalai Lama’s notion of everyone being allowed to settle anywhere attractive. But if you aren’t, if you are one of those who doesn’t want to leave the West, your country, your culture, and don’t want, either, to see your own culture transformed by those who have neither the ability nor the desire to integrate, but instead appear satisfied to batten on the benefits the indigenes so generously provide, (this is not so different from the reality being created by Muslim migrants in Europe today), the Dalai Lama’s suggestion is absolutely hair-raising.

The Dalai Lama once insisted that migrants to Europe must be trained and then sent home, so that European countries would not be transformed, and he now claims that everyone should be allowed to settle anywhere, which would, of course, mean the destruction of the civilized world. And just last Thursday, he told the European Parliament that “‘Muslim terrorist’: That wording is wrong.”
“Any person who wants to indulge in violence is no longer a genuine Buddhist or genuine Muslim, because it is a Muslim teaching that once you are involved in bloodshed, actually you are no longer a genuine practitioner of Islam,” the Dalai Lama said.

“All major religious traditions carry the same message: a message of love, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment, self-discipline — all religious traditions,” he continued.
This is arrant nonsense. It is presumptuous of the Dalai Lama to pontificate about Islam, about which he apparently knows so little. And when he makes remarks like these, he – this spiritual leader whom everyone loves to listen to as he crisscrosses the globe dispensing wisdom – shows himself to be both stupid, and cruel to a Western world that cannot bear too much more of this dangerous confusion.

Still, let’s give him one more chance, given that he once recognized the danger of Germany becoming “Arab” and even suggested sending migrants back.
We’d all like to know, crossing our fingers: will the real Dalai Lama please stand up?


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Hugh Fitzgerald: The Re-Education of Reverend Daisy Obi

September 23, 2016 5:54 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 32 Comments


The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has just upheld a lower court’s ruling that the Rev. Daisy Obi, a 73-year-old pastor originally from Nigeria, and a Somerville landlord, must not only serve six months in jail for pushing a Muslim tenant, but must “enroll and attend an introductory course on Islam.”
The original story was posted at Jihad Watch last December. “Landlord ordered to learn about Islam after pushing Muslim tenant; did judge go too far?,” Associated Press, December 13, 2015:

BOSTON – After a landlord was convicted of pushing her Muslim tenant down a flight of stairs, a judge ordered her to respect the rights of all Muslims and to take an introductory course on Islam. Now the highest court in Massachusetts is being asked to decide whether the judge violated the landlord’s constitutional rights.
The Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments next month in a case that poses interesting legal questions at a time when the country is grappling with anti-Muslim backlash following deadly attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, both allegedly carried out by radical Muslims.

The case centers on Daisy Obi, a 73-year-old ordained minister from Nigeria who is the pastor of the Adonai Bible Center in Somerville, just north of Boston. In April 2012, Obi rented an apartment in her multi-family home to Gihan Suliman, her husband and five young children.

Suliman complained about the heat and electricity not always working, while Obi complained Suliman appeared to have 12 to 15 people living in the apartment at one point.

Suliman testified that about a month after she moved in, Obi stood on the stairs outside Suliman’s apartment screaming anti-Muslim insults.
The following month, while Suliman was taking her baby out of the car, she said Obi yelled anti-Muslim sentiments at her other children.
Then, about a month later, Suliman said Obi accused her of ringing her doorbell, shouted at her and pushed her. Suliman said she fell backward down 15 to 20 stairs, hitting her face on the banister, cutting her lip and tearing a ligament in her shoulder.

“While sentencing Obi last year, Judge Paul Yee Jr. called Obi “the landlord from hell” after pointing out that she had harassment prevention orders issued against her by two other tenants.

These were not Muslim tenants.

He sentenced her to two years in jail on the assault and battery charge for pushing Suliman but required her to serve only six months, with the remaining 18 months suspended if she complied with certain probation conditions.​

“I want you to learn about the Muslim faith,” he said. “I want you to enroll and attend an introductory course on Islam,”​

“I do want you to understand people of the Muslim faith, and they need to be respected. They may worship Allah … but they need to be respected.”​

Obi vehemently denied making any anti-Muslim statements to Suliman or pushing her. She testified she was inside her apartment praying when she heard a knock at the door from the police, who arrested her.​

Obi said in a phone interview that she believes Suliman had a vendetta against her because she refused to allow her to let more people live in her apartment.​

“I’ve never, ever made a rude remark against her,” she said.​

“Why would I do that? I have three Muslims living in the house now.”​

Obi also said she believes Suliman hates her because she is a Christian.​

Suliman did not respond to messages left at her home and workplace.​

As to previous signs of anti-Muslim bias: Rev. Daisy Obi’s property is in one of the tightest rental markets in the country, and she would have had no trouble finding tenants. Her willingness to rent to Muslims is a reasonable indication of lack of bias when there were so many non-Muslims she might have taken instead. And even now she has three Muslim tenants. And there has been no suggestion that those Muslim tenants have had any problem with Rev. Obi.

Surely the chief grievance Rev. Obi had with the Sulimans has to do not with their being Muslims, but with those 15 people living in the apartment that Rev. Obi thought she was renting to a family of seven. Apparently Gihan Suliman had no response – none is reported – to Rev. Obi’s claim about those 15 people. Wouldn’t she have denied it if it were false?
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Rev. Obi’s charge is plausible. My own mother-in-law rented an apartment in her home to what appeared to be a quiet Pakistani couple. It was only when, several months into the rental, that she smelled smoke and went upstairs to see what was going on, that she discovered 15 people had been living there all along – never mind the gas burners that were spread out on the living room floor in violation of every relevant code. I’ve told that story to others, and have been surprised at how many people have had similar experiences with Muslim tenants.
We hear of Gihan Suliman’s complaint about intermittent heat and electricity, but not what likely caused the problem. Fifteen people make a larger demand on heat and electricity than seven, perhaps more than the systems – or the fuses – could bear. Nothing is said about whether Rev. Obi fixed the problems in a timely fashion once alerted. Did she? Are there utilities bills that might show unusually large usage of heat and electricity? Were utilities included in the rent? Why did Judge Yee not address this aspect of the case, to either confirm or deny Rev. Obi’s claim about the 15 people crammed into that apartment?

And then there are the two episodes, a month apart, of “anti-Muslim statements” that Gihan Suliman accuses her landlord of making. The landlord flatly denies having made them. It’s one person’s word against another. The Judge chose to believe Gihan Suliman. Does Suliman remember those “anti-Muslim” statements? What were the exact words that expressed “anti-Muslim” bias? Why does the opinion not include any of them, so we might judge for ourselves? Is it possible that Suliman was quick to perceive as an “anti-Muslim” sentiment what was merely anti-Suliman, or that, keenly aware of the usefulness of Muslim victimhood, she chose to hear, or might have thought she heard, or even, recollecting those words in tranquility later on, decided to claim she considered expressions of frustration by the landlord (who might, for example, have excoriated “you people”), as “anti-Muslim statements. Was Rev. Obi really the “landlord from hell,” or was it perhaps just as likely in this case that the Sulimans were “tenants from hell”?

There is the claim by Suliman that Rev. Obi pushed her down the stairs. Obi flatly denies it. How likely is it that a split lip and a torn ligament would be the only result of a violent and direct shove down many stairs?

Finally, Obi claims that Suliman hates her because “she is Christian.” Is that charge so outlandish? Obi comes from Nigeria, where almost two million Christian civilians were killed by Muslims during the Biafra War, a war that came about after pogroms against the Christian Ibos by the Muslim Hausa and Fulani led the Ibos to declare their independent state of Biafra. Rev. Obi has a certain amount of personal experience of being on the receiving end of Islam, which no course assigned by Judge Yee can provide. And if we look around the world today, do we not see many examples of Muslims displaying hatred, even murderous hatred, for Christians, as they have been doing for 1,400 years?

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, we agree with Judge Yee’s findings. We accept completely Gihan Suliman’s version of events. Yes, we believe she was shoved down those stairs by Rev. Obi. We believe that the landlord twice expressed (still unspecified) anti-Muslim sentiments. Let’s pretend that we find it preposterous that Gihan Suliman might have had 15 people in her apartment, and ludicrous to think that as a Muslim she could possibly hate Rev.Obi, and want to take advantage of her, merely “because she is a Christian.”

What worries is not so much Judge Yee’s finding, unfair as that may be, but the remedy he has ready. Not the six months in jail, onerous for a 73-year-old. It’s the Re-Education Camp aspect of all this: in sentencing Rev. Obi, Judge Yee said that “I want you to learn about the Muslim faith. I want you to enroll and attend an introductory course on Islam.
“I do want you to understand people of the Muslim faith, and they need to be respected. They may worship Allah … but they need to be respected.”

What does this forced re-education mean? It means that Judge Yee is sure that if only Rev. Obi learns about the faith of Islam, she will of course realize the error of having thought ill of Muslims (but she didn’t think ill of Muslims, to whom she is even now renting – she thought ill of Gihan Suliman). Possibly Judge Yee does not realize that Rev. Obi has had plenty of experience with Muslims in her native Nigeria, and hardly needs to be lectured on learning “about the Muslim faith.” But because Muslims “need” respect, it’s up to Rev. Obi to get with the program, learn just enough in some “introductory” class about Islam to see the faith, and its adherents, in a new light, and offer them, like so many pitiful rodney-dangerfields, the respect not that they “deserve” but, rather, “need.” Also sprach Judge Yee.

Rev. Obi has been ordered to “enroll” in a course on “introductory Islam.” Where? Taught by whom? On whose recommendation? Will Judge Yee be making that decision? Surely he will have to, for he can’t expect Rev. Obi to know what course is suitable for what she needs; she’s the one being “re-educated.”

And to whom will he turn to for advice? Will he rely on the local chapter of CAIR, that samaritan “civil rights organization for Muslims,” which is no doubt eager to recommend whatever course offers the most sanitized version of the Qur’an and Hadith? Or will Judge Yee turn to a certified Objective Authority on Islam, such as Professor Noah Feldman, who teaches at Harvard Law School (the Stamp of Quality), who surely must know whereof he speaks, else why would he be at Harvard? Or will Judge Yee reach out for advice to similar Leading Experts on Islam across the country, such as John Esposito, and Reza Aslan (“World’s Greatest Authority”), or even consult that Leading Writer on World Religions, the eminently fair-minded Karen Armstrong?
Let’s assume there is an “introductory course on Islam” for non-Muslims given at some community center or outreach program attached to a mosque in Somerville. And assume further, as is likely, the reading list for this course consists of a carefully abridged version of the Qur’an, leaving out all the most anti-kuffar bits (no 9:5 or 9:29 or 2:191-193), but giving a lot of attention to 2:256 and 5:32 without 5:33. Will Rev. Obi, or her lawyer, be allowed to object to the course she is assigned to take, to show in what ways the course is misleading, before the farce begins? Will we even be allowed to find out what is on the syllabus for the course, and to post it online for public discussion, so everyone can see what is being force-fed, as part of the re-education of Rev. Obi?

Since it is hard to make sense of much of the Qur’an (this “wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite, endless iterations, long windedness, entanglement,” as Carlyle called it), Rev. Obi would undoubtedly want to have on hand a commentary, or tafsir, to elucidate the many obscure passages. Now what commentary on the Qur’an will she be allowed to use? Would it be alright if she consulted a relentlessly straightforward exegesis, verse by verse, that is to say, Robert Spencer’s lucid exposition, “Blogging the Qur’an”? No? Why not? On what basis would Judge Yee claim that that such a commentary would “not be helpful” in understanding the Qur’an? Because it won’t lead to the “respect” for Muslims that is the whole point of this absurd and insidious exercise?
Will this “introductory course” include not just an expurgated Qur’an, but a similarly abridged Hadith? What will Rev. Obi be allowed to learn about Muhammad’s life? Will she learn, do you think, about Muhammad and little Aisha? Or about the murders of Asma bint Marwan and Abu ‘Afak? What about Muhammad’s raid on the Khaybar oasis? Or his watching with evident satisfaction the beheading of the bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza? What will be allowed, and what will be carefully kept out, from the handful of Hadith Rev. Obi will be assigned to read? Will she dare, in the privacy of her home, to read a little more of the Qur’an and Hadith than is assigned, or is there going to be a strict limit on just how much she will be allowed to learn, lest she start feeling less rather than more respect for Muslims, thus fatally vitiating the whole point of Judge Yee’s force-feeding of an “introductory course” on Islam? Or has Rev. Obi, having grown up in a country split between Muslims and Christians, already read the Qur’an, as well as experienced the Living Qur’an?

It is clear that Judge Yee believes that the more Dr. Obi learns about Islam, the more she will be disabused of whatever anti-Muslim feelings she may, so unfairly, have somewhere acquired. And then she will give Muslims the “respect” Judge Yee says they need (“I do want you to understand the Muslim faith…and they need to be respected”). The If P, then Q here is most doubtful: If you understand the Muslim faith, then you will give them the respect they deserve. Sez who? But the good judge seems to think it is simply impermissible for Rev. Obi to be allowed to think otherwise.
What kind of person believes that the more you find out about Islam, the more you will find in it to like? Oh, the kind of person who knows nothing at all about Islam, but doesn’t think he needs to take an “introductory course” himself, for his mind is made up, and he refuses to entertain the frightening possibility that, just maybe, the more one finds out about Islam, the less impressed, and the more appalled, any person of sense will become. Someone like Judge Yee.

It will be fascinating to follow this case further. Wouldn’t we all like to know what course Rev. Obi ends up taking, and whether she has had to receive the approval of Judge Yee? We’d like to see the syllabus, the topics covered, the readings assigned, as part of the Re-education of Rev. Obi. And after it’s been given, can we please see a copy of the final exam? It would be useful if everything about that course could be posted on the Internet, so those of us who take a keen interest in how Islam is presented in the West will be able to follow along. Why should anyone object? Certainly not Judge Yee. If such a course does wonders for Rev. Obi, why not allow many others to be “re-educated” at the same time?
And whoever is teaching the course will be put on notice that he now has a much larger audience than he may have bargained for, and certainly not the kind of submissive audience he was hoping for. Let’s see if it cramps his style.

Is this case worth this attention? Yes, because for the first time an American judge has assigned, as part of a defendant’s punishment for assault and battery, a course of “re-education” about Islam. And while this may be the first such punishment, it looks like the face of things to come. How long before many others will be forced to endure this kind of sinister “re-education,” until we are all parroting a party line on Islam, making sure to give Muslims the respect that some judge insists not that they deserve but that they “need,” and ready to tug at our forelocks as they pass, just like dhimmis of old, and all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.


Maryland imam allegedly helped finance arsenal for Islamic State jihadi in Detroit
Muslim cleric calls Jews "brothers of apes and pigs," prays, "O Allah, destroy America"

 

Muslim cleric calls Jews “brothers of apes and pigs,” prays, “O Allah, destroy America”

September 23, 2016 5:27 pm By Robert Spencer 18 Comments

The Qur’an says in three places that Allah transformed the Sabbath-breaking Jews into apes and pigs (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166).

“Sheikh Ahmad Mana’i in Jordan Eid Al-Adha Sermon Refers to Jews as ‘Brothers of Apes and Pigs,’ Prays: Oh Allah, Destroy America, Russia, and the ‘Rabbis’ of Tehran,” MEMRI, September 12, 2016:

http://www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5685.htm

Clip #5685 Broadcast: September 12, 2016​

In a sermon marking Eid Al-Adha, delivered at the Al-Maqari Mosque in Irbid, Jordan, Sheikh Ahmad Mana’i talked about “conspiracies” carried out by America, Russia, and Europe, along with the Jews, whom he called “the brothers of pigs and apes,” and traitors from among the Arabs. He prayed to Allah to support the Sunnis in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and to destroy the “criminal Rafidites” and the “plundering Jews,” and called upon Him to “destroy America completely” and to “destroy Russia completely as well.” The sermon aired on Yarmouk TV on September 12.
Sheikh Ahmad Mana’i: “We are witnessing conspiracies by America, Russia, and Europe, along with the Jews and the traitors from among the Arabs. They even deluded the Muslims with the so-called ‘Arab Spring,’ inflicting ruin and destruction upon them. They have diverted people from Islam’s number one cause, the Palestinian cause, and this was exploited by the brothers of pigs and apes, to inflict all kinds of torture upon our brothers in Gaza and Palestine.
[…]
“Oh Allah, may You raise the banner of Islam over all of Mankind, in Your grace. Oh Allah, support the Sunnis in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and send Your soldiers to help the people of Palestine. Oh Allah, support our persecuted brothers everywhere. Oh Allah, destroy the criminal Rafidites. They are no match for you. Destroy the plundering Jews. They are no match for you. Inflict upon them a day ‘austere and distressful.’ Oh Allah, destroy the ‘rabbis’ of Tehran and the ‘Vatican’ of Qom. You, our Lord, are all-powerful.
[…]
“Oh Allah, give strength to the Sunnis fighting the Houthis, the Alawites, the criminal Rafidites, and the traitors from among this nation. You, our Lord, are all-powerful. Oh Allah, destroy America completely. Destroy Russia completely as well.”


Hugh Fitzgerald: The Re-Education of Reverend Daisy Obi
Pakistan: Muslim mob beats Christians with metal rods, calls them "ritually impure"

 

UK’s Independent: 'Allahu Akbar' Is A Publicity Stunt, Not Jihad

The media’s never-ending quest to exonerate Islam grows even more farfetched.

September 1, 2016
Robert Spencer
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Andrew MacLeod is a “visiting Professor at Kings College London and a former UN and Red Cross official who served in countries like Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and others.” What sloppy writing. What countries are like Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan? “He has negotiated with warlords and terrorists.” Is that something to be proud of? In the UK Independent Tuesday, he explains that a Muslim who screams “Allahu akbar” and kills people may not be a terrorist, but just a lonely publicity-seeker committing the Muslim equivalent of “suicide by cop.”

And the never-ending mainstream media quest to exonerate Islam of all responsibility for the crimes committed in its name and in accord with its teachings grows even more absurd than it already was.
MacLeod’s evidence? He says that Smail Ayad, the Australia jihadi who murdered two non-Muslims, Mia Ayliffe-Chung and Tom Jackson, as well as “the Orlando murderer, the Sydney siege murderer,” and “the Nice murderer,” all “did not appear to be part of organised groups. We know none of the Nice, Sydney and Orlando killers had a deep religious history. All three rarely prayed in mosques. They drank, had sex out of marriage, failed to fast in Ramadan. None was a ‘devout Muslim’, according to anecdotal evidence from people who claimed to have known them.”

What MacLeod fails to take into account in this analysis is that they may have been trying to make up for all that sinful activity by doing a great good deed. A hadith has a Muslim asking Muhammad: “Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward).” Muhammad replied, “I do not find such a deed.” (Bukhari 4.52.44) The Qur’an teaches that Allah will place a Muslim’s good deeds on one scale and bad deeds on the other, and send them to Paradise or hell depending on which scale weighs more (cf. 21:47). A Muslim who is worried about his eternal destiny can decisively tip the scales in his favor by waging jihad, the deed that is greater than all others. He can seize the Qur’an’s promise of Paradise for those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111).

In light of that, it is wrong to assume that Muslims who were not devout and then kill while screaming “Allahu akbar” have no jihadi motive. Also, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda have repeatedly called upon Muslim individuals in the West to engage in random attacks. That means that a Muslim who has no ties to any jihad groups could still be heeding their call. MacLeod appears to assume that if a Muslim killer is not a verifiable member of al-Qaeda, ISIS, or some other jihad group, then he isn’t waging jihad. On what basis does he assume that an individual Muslim cannot undertake this endeavor? He doesn’t bother to explain that.

What really needs investigating in light of the murders of Mia Ayliffe-Chung and Tom Jackson is the psychic landscape that Islam provides for a Muslim such as their killer, Smail Ayad. Ayad may indeed have been non-devout and not interested in jihad or Islam in general. But at a moment of distress, at a time of upset and upheaval in his life, he was only able to provide a context for his anger and hatred in Islam and its call for warfare against unbelievers — hence even if his motive was being rejected by Mia Ayliffe-Chung, he screamed “Allahu akbar” and didn’t kill Mia only, but Jackson as well, and attacked police also: his rage at her became a generalized jihad against the Infidels all around him.

That is a scenario worth studying, as it could happen again, anytime, anywhere. But the willfully ignorant and politically correct such as MacLeod and the Independent will never venture into such territory.

The Independent says that MacLeod “can be followed on Twitter @Why_slow_down,” but he seems to have deleted that account. I wonder why. Did he have an inkling that he would be called out on his shoddy reasoning and attempt to keep non-Muslims complacent in the face of the advancing jihad?

Tags: Acts of Terrorism, Islam, Jihad, United Kingdom

 

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Warning! Incorrect Political Incorrect Language Use.




Do know one or some of those new age bullshitter hypocrites?​

 

For a rational historical Christian perspective on Islam!


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