Our Responsibility to Criticize Islam

By William Kilpatrick

“…Islam invites criticism. Given its bloody past and present, it would be highly irresponsible not to subject it to a searching analysis and critique. Such a critique would not aim at alienating Muslims (although some will inevitably be alienated), but at alerting likely victims of jihad.

One of the basics that non-Muslims need to know is that Islam divides the world in two – the House of Islam, and the House of War (all non-Islamic societies). And every Muslim is expected to do his part to make the House of War submit to the House of Islam. Europeans are now experiencing a “don’t-know-what-hit-me” sense of bewilderment because they never learned this basic fact about Islam.

One reason for our reluctance to analyze and criticize Islam (an idea) is that such criticism seems tantamount to criticizing Muslims (a people). Unfortunately, even if that is not the intention, it is often the result. A person can’t separate himself entirely from his beliefs, and, consequently, we take criticism of our religion personally. That’s a good reason for presenting the critique as tactfully as possible. But it’s not a good reason for offering no critique at all.

If you can’t criticize a belief system because it would hurt the feelings of people who subscribe to that system, then we were wrong to criticize Nazism, Communism, and Japanese imperialism. Ordinarily, we refrain from criticizing other religions. Such a live-and-let-live approach is generally sensible, but when the other religion takes the attitude that you must either convert, submit, or die, then live-and-let-live is no longer an option. That is the position that we are in with regard to Islam. And it is suicidal to pretend that things are otherwise.”

 

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Huma Abedin’s Muslim Minority Affairs: Not Just a Journal

By Andrew C. McCarthy

“Assimilation is a crime against humanity.” So said Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamic supremacist who is both prime minister of Turkey and a close chum of President Obama.

The assertion ought to be infamous. But this is, after all, Islam we are talking about — meaning, we are nottalking about it.

You won’t read it in the American media, nor will you hear it from our bipartisan Beltway profiles in courage. Both the Obama Left and the Republican establishment are deeply invested in the fantasy that Erdogan, like Islam itself, is our moderate ally — ironic, given that Erdogan himself is profoundly offended at the very suggestion that there is such a thing as “moderate Islam.” Yup, what you have been told is the plinth on which American Middle East policy rests, which is, according to Erdogan, not only a house-of-cards but:

 … an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it.

The prime minister is an excitable sort. Waxing metaphoric about his aggressive, ascendant ideology, he has also observed:

The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the cupolas our helmets, and the faithful our soldiers.

But he is inspired to new heights of fury by the admonition that Muslims living in Europe and North America should assimilate into Western societies. He first called that suggestion a “crime against humanity” in 2008, speaking to a throng of Turkish immigrants in Cologne. It was the obligation of Muslims, he elaborated, to cling to the tenets and culture of Islam. Yes, Muslims in places like Germany must integrate, in the sense of becoming politically active, of pressuring Western societies to give Islam a wide berth. But Muslims should never assimilate – they should use that wide berth to establish Islam’s authority.

Two years later, given an opportunity to recant during a joint press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Erdogan doubled down:

Assimilation … [is] the permutation of the values of humans. … [It puts] pressure on individuals to leave aside their customs and traditions, and such a behavior happens to be a crime against humanity.

The message could not have been clearer: Muslims are in the West to change the West, not to be changed by it….

 

….The other method of staving off assimilation is the construction of an Islamist infrastructure in the West. This enables Muslims to create enclaves — in the physical community, on campus, and in major social institutions, including government — in which sharia is honored as basic law and Muslims are given safe haven to refrain from pressures to assimilate.

In the United States, the foundation of this infrastructure is the Muslim Students Association, which has hundreds of chapters on campuses across the United States and Canada. (There are many chapters of the MSA in our local Houston area universities and high schools. –ed.)

Interestingly, in the late mid-to-late-nineties, while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and an assistant editor at JMMA, Ms. Abedin was a member of the executive board of the MSA at George Washington University, heading its “Social Committee.” That MSA chapter has an intriguing history. In 2001, its spiritual guide was … Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. Awlaki himself had led the MSA chapter at Colorado State University in the early nineties. As Patrick Poole has demonstrated, Awlaki is far from the only jihadist to hone his supremacist ideology in the MSA’s friendly confines. In the eighties, Wael Jalaidan ran the MSA at the University of Arizona. He would soon go on to help Osama bin Laden found al-Qaeda; he also partnered with the Abedins’ patron, Abdullah Omar Naseef, to establish the Rabita Trust — formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law due to its funding of al-Qaeda.

The MSA gave birth to the Islamic Society of North America. The two organizations consider themselves as one, and ISNA is now the largest, most consequential Islamist organization in the United States — a go-to consultant for the Obama administration, despite its having been a key cog in the Brotherhood’s Hamas financing network, as the Justice Department proved in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism prosecution. ISNA’s business side is the North American Islamic Trust, another Holy Land Foundation co-conspirator and the vehicle by which the Saudis and the Brotherhood buy real estate and establish hundreds of mosques and Islamic centers throughout the U.S. These groups are fortified by the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Brotherhood think-tank whose express mission is the “Islamization of knowledge” — developing an epistemological framework by which Muslims can fit current events and world history into an Islamic supremacist narrative. The infrastructure’s public face is organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), which combine public relations spin with sharia policy activism.

This is not a random proliferation of fraternities, the sort of cultural solidarity exhibition routinely seen throughout the American melting pot. The Saudi-constructed, Brotherhood-conducted Islamist infrastructure in the West is on a mission — the “Muslim Minority Affairs” mission. It seeks to grow an unassimilated, aggressive population of Islamic supremacists, who will gradually but dramatically alter the character of the West. Its goal is incrementally to infiltrate sharia principles in our law, our institutions, and our public policy. That means the mission takes direct aim at our liberties, particularly free expression, which enables examination and negative criticism of Islamist ideology. It takes aim at our alliance with Israel, because Jews are regarded as enemies and all of “Palestine” as Islamic territory. And it takes aim at our economic system, because sharia regards capitalism as a bane of human existence — there is a reason why the Brotherhood’s American operatives make common cause with the Left on everything from socialized medicine to finance regulation to gun control to surveillance law.

The media and the Obama Left will continue ridiculing the notion of Brotherhood influence on our government and attacking the five conservative House members who have raised concerns. The Republican establishment will lay cravenly low and pray that the controversy blows over — except for the stray useful idiot who calculates that there’s good press to be had in parroting the Democrats’ “McCarthyism” canard. Nevertheless, to perceive no correlation between the Islamists’ fervid anti-assimilation program and the United States government’s stunning accommodation of the Brotherhood and its agenda is to be willfully blind.

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Conservatives for Shariah

By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East has caused many Americans to reflect on that group’s stated ambition to impose worldwide the totalitarian,supremacist Islamic doctrine known as shariah.  Particularly unsettling is evidence of the group’s goal in America, namely of “destroying Western civilization from within,” as documented in the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas in 2008.

But for some prominent conservatives, such facts are not just inconvenient.  They – and any who point them out – must be denied, ignored or suppressed.

The latest examples involve a pair of articles published in two of the Right’s most prominent online outlets: Townhall and National Review Online.  The former recently distributed an essay by Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman (http://townhall.com/columnists/stevechapman/2012/06/10/the_bogus_threat_from_shariah_law/page/2).  He was joined on June 13 by Matthew Schmitz in NRO (http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/302280).  Both caricatured the “bogus” threat of “creeping shariah” as a figment of the superheated imagination of its American opponents.

Schmitz went further, wrongly describing shariah as “not one rigid legal system but rather an immensely varied set of legal, cultural, and ethical understandings.”  In fact, shariah as practiced by mainstream Islam is, indeed, one very rigid legal system that has simply been enforced to varying degrees around the Muslim world.  Its Brotherhood and other adherents are now aggressively seeking to impose conformity with all of its tenets in Egypt, in Iraq, in Indonesia and, in due course, here.  Schmitz even went so far as to describe those determined to resist that last prospect as “anti-Muslim bigots” who are “undermin[ing] our national security.”

Specifically, Messrs. Chapman and Schmitz find fault with those of us supporting state-level legislation aimed at countering stealthy civilization jihad in U.S. courts.  It is known as American Law for American Courts (ALAC) – a statute already enacted in four states and under consideration in many more.  ALAC prevents foreign laws, including but not limited to shariah, from being used in court to deny constitutional rights.  Incredibly, the authors contend that such laws are a threat to religious freedom in this country….

…Conservatives and other Republicans face, in short, a time of choosing.  Are they going to ignore the real and present danger posed by shariah and its adherents like the Muslim Brotherhood?  Will they therefore be recorded by history as having enabled, whether directly or indirectly, such stealthy threats to our republic and its government society?

Or are prominent conservatives going to help our countrymen of all political stripes understand the challenge we face and lead in developing and executing strategies for defeating it?

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As jihad plots multiply, DHS slumbers on

By Robert Spencer

Last week, a Muslim in Alabama shot out shop windows in an attempt to provoke a shootout with police, in order, he said, to “draw attention to Islam.” Another Muslim in Florida was arrested for plotting to bomb nightclubs and other locations for Islam; he explained: “We all have to die, so why not die the Islamic way?” A third Muslim, a convert to Islam who had served in the U.S. military, was arrested for attempting to make his way to Somalia to join the jihad terror group al-Shabaab. He said that he was “looking for dying with a gun in my hand” and wanted to die defending Islam. And in North Carolina, three Muslims were given prison sentences ranging from fifteen to forty-five years for plotting attacks on targets they deemed “un-Islamic.” One of them cried out in court: “You’re prosecuting Islam.”

The fact that all this unfolded within one week’s span illustrates yet again the obvious fact that Islamic jihadists are waging war against the United States. A sensible response to this undeniable fact would be for law enforcement agents to study Islam and jihad, in an attempt to discover what it is about Islam that leads some Muslims, including American converts to the faith, to regard their native land as the enemy and decide that they have a responsibility before God to take up arms against it.

Instead, the Obama Administration has succumbed to pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups in the United States and has promised to scrub all training materials for the FBI and other agencies of any reference to Islam or jihad in connection with Islamic terrorism. That means that law enforcement officials are now effectively forbidden to study the motives and goals of the Alabama shooter, the Florida and North Carolina plotters, the former military man, and so many others like them, for to do so would necessarily involve study and discussion of the texts and tenets of Islam.

It cannot be said, however, that the Obama Department of Homeland Security is lying down on the job. Recently it has come to light that for over a year, DHS agents have been monitoring a large number of websites. The purpose of this monitoring, according to a DHS report, is to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.”

Situational awareness? A common operating picture? It’s hard to tell whether this wretched English is intended to obfuscate deliberately, or if it was simply written by someone whose thoughts barely rise above the level of incoherence. Either way, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. But this bureaucratic gobbledygook apparently means that the DHS is watching the sites in question in order to become aware of situations involving terror plotting, and that DHS agents will share this information with other agencies so that they won’t be working at cross purposes.

So far so good — if the DHS were monitoring jihadist websites, which proliferate on the internet. But it isn’t…

More: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=48832