WASHINGTON — Two months into America’s war on terror, some conservative strategists are starting to disavow President Bush’s dictum that the conflict is not against Islam, insisting that to fight terror means to fight the fundamentalist streak wound through much of the world’s third largest religion.

Islam, these hardliners say, is at its core a faith hell bent on destroying the west and the civilization of the non-believer, or infidel.

“It is a religious war — it is a war of Islam against us,” charged Morgan Norvel, a U.S. Marine and the author of Triumph of Disorder: Islamic Fundamentalism, the New Face of War. “Islam is hostile to all non-Islamic countries. Conflict was, and still is, part of the faith.”

“The problem is Islam itself — there is no such thing as peaceful Islam,” said William Lind, author and military historian for the Free Congress Foundation. “There were never a case where Islam was spread throughout the world by missionaries, but rather by the sword.”

Such words are provocative these days, especially as Bush goes out of his way to demonstrate that the war is against terrorists and not their faith. The president, though he decided not to halt the bombing in Afghanistan for the holy month of Ramadan, will host Muslim leaders at the White House next week for a fasting ritual.

Bush is backed by moderate Muslims in America and elsewhere who say the Taliban and similar fundamentalist groups preach a perversity of Islam that is not the true word of the prophet Muhammad, the father of the faith.

John Voll, a Georgetown University professor of Islamic history, says all of the world’s greatest religions — including Christianity — have historically seen their faiths perverted and people murder in the name of God.

“Bin Laden and the Taliban … is a particular movement that is rationalized by one of the worlds largest religions,” he said. “But it is not accepted by the mainstream believers of that religion.”

But hardliners like Lind and Norvel said that to treat Sept. 11 as an isolated terrorist attack and not part of a global fundamentalist movement against America and Christianity may cost us the war.

“We cannot continue to whistle past the graveyard,” said Lind. “If we think of this as only a war on terrorism we will fail. Terrorism is a technique. What is going on here is much more than a technique.”

People like Lind also are concerned about taking a multi-lateral approach to the conflict. Cliff Kincaid, head of the Washington D.C-based America’s Survival, Inc., says the U.S. should be wary of United Nations involvement. The U.N stood by complacently as terrorists became the scourge of world in the last 30 years, Kincaid said, and failed to stop the Taliban and its cohorts with its treaties and sanctions.

In fact, Kincaid says that judging from the lukewarm response to Bush’s recent speech to the U.N., the world body seems downright unsympathetic.

“When our president appealed to them for support to find the killers, he got only polite applause,” he said. “The UN is an anti-American body, though they want our hospitality and our money.”

Fred Gedrich of the Freedom Alliance, a conservative Washington-based think-tank, chides the U.N. for giving equal standing to countries routinely accused of being linked to state-sponsored terror, among them Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, the Sudan, North Korea and Cuba.

“That devastating terrorist attack (Sept. 11) proves we can’t rely on the U.N. or these U.N. treaties to protect our national security. It (U.N.) obstructs and delays justice,” charged Kincaid.

Tom Neumann, executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, says that’s why he does not trust the tentative coalition that Bush has built with the Middle Eastern nations post Sept. 11.

“We cannot conclude a war on terrorism without concluding a war against all of these agents, all of these entities,” he said, pointing to the different terrorist organizations, most of which support the Palestinians’ violent war against Israel.

He added, “it is politically incorrect to suggest that this is a war against Islam.”

“Maybe it isn’t a war against Islam but a war of Islam against Christianity. But yes, it is a clash of civilizations,” he said.

More moderate voices disagree. “This is a clash on a number of levels and it is first a clash with the Taliban and bin Laden. This is why we can get the support of Egypt and Turkey,” says Georgetown’s Voll. “It is a war where Christians and Muslims can get together against a particular mode of fanaticism.”

==============================

“Relentlessly and Thoroughly”: The only way to respond (National Review Online, 011015)

By Paul Johnson, a historian and journalist whose forthcoming book is a history of art.

Bold and uncompromising words were spoken by American (and British) leaders in the immediate response to the Manhattan Massacre. But they may be succeeded by creeping appeasement unless public opinion insists that these leaders stick to their initial resolve to destroy international terrorism completely. One central reason why appeasement is so tempting to Western governments is that attacking terrorism at its roots necessarily involves conflict with the second-largest religious community in the world.

It is widely said that Islamic terrorists are wholly unorthodox in their belief that their religion sanctions what they do, and promises the immediate reward of heaven to what we call “suicide bombers” but they insist are martyrs to the faith. This line is bolstered by the assertion that Islam is essentially a religion of peace and that the very word “Islam” means “peace.” Alas, not so. Islam means “submission,” a very different matter, and one of the functions of Islam, in its more militant aspect, is to obtain that submission from all, if necessary by force.

Islam is an imperialist religion, more so than Christianity has ever been, and in contrast to Judaism. The Koran, Sura 5, verse 85, describes the inevitable enmity between Moslems and non-Moslems: “Strongest among men in enmity to the Believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans.” Sura 9, verse 5, adds: “Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them. And seize them, beleaguer them and lie in wait for them, in every strategem [of war].” Then nations, however mighty, the Koran insists, must be fought “until they embrace Islam.”

These canonical commands cannot be explained away or softened by modern theological exegesis, because there is no such science in Islam. Unlike Christianity, which, since the Reformation and Counter Reformation, has continually updated itself and adapted to changed conditions, and unlike Judaism, which has experienced what is called the 18th-century Jewish enlightenment, Islam remains a religion of the Dark Ages. The 7th-century Koran is still taught as the immutable word of God, any teaching of which is literally true. In other words, mainstream Islam is essentially akin to the most extreme form of Biblical fundamentalism. It is true it contains many sects and tendencies, quite apart from the broad division between Sunni Moslems, the majority, who are comparatively moderate and include most of the ruling families of the Gulf, and Shia Moslems, far more extreme, who dominate Iran. But virtually all these tendencies are more militant and uncompromising than the orthodox, which is moderate only by comparison, and by our own standards is extreme. It believes, for instance, in a theocratic state, ruled by religious law, inflicting (as in Saudi Arabia) grotesquely cruel punishments, which were becoming obsolete in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages.

Moreover, Koranic teaching that the faith or “submission” can be, and in suitable circumstances must be, imposed by force, has never been ignored. On the contrary, the history of Islam has essentially been a history of conquest and reconquest. The 7th-century “breakout” of Islam from Arabia was followed by the rapid conquest of North Africa, the invasion and virtual conquest of Spain, and a thrust into France that carried the crescent to the gates of Paris. It took half a millennium of reconquest to expel the Moslems from Western Europe. The Crusades, far from being an outrageous prototype of Western imperialism, as is taught in most of our schools, were a mere episode in a struggle that has lasted 1,400 years, and were one of the few occasions when Christians took the offensive to regain the “occupied territories” of the Holy Land.

The Crusades, as it happened, fatally weakened the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire, the main barrier to the spread of Islam into southeast and central Europe. As a result of the fall of Constantinople to the ultramilitant Ottoman Sultans, Islam took over the entire Balkans, and was threatening to capture Vienna and move into the heart of Europe as recently as the 1680s.

This millennial struggle continues in a variety of ways. The recent conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo were a savage reaction by the Orthodox Christians of Serbia to the spread of Islam in their historic heartlands, chiefly by virtue of a higher birthrate. Indeed, in the West, the battle is largely demographic, though it is likely to take a more militant turn at any moment. Moslems from the Balkans and North Africa are surging over established frontiers on a huge scale, rather as the pressure of the eastern tribes brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire of the West in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. The number of Moslems penetrating and settling in Europe is now beyond computation because most of them are illegals. They are getting into Spain and Italy in such numbers that, should present trends continue, both these traditionally Catholic countries will become majority Moslem during the 21st century.

The West is not alone in being under threat from Islamic expansion. While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over. The writer V. S. Naipaul has recently pointed out that the destructiveness of the Moslem Conquest is at the root of India’s appalling poverty today. Indeed, looked at historically, the record shows that Moslem rule has tended both to promote and to perpetuate poverty. Meanwhile, the religion of “submission” continues to advance, as a rule by force, in Africa in part of Nigeria and Sudan, and in Asia, notably in Indonesia, where non-Moslems are given the choice of conversion or death. And in all countries where Islamic law is applied, converts, whether compulsory or not, who revert to their earlier faith, are punished by death.

The survival and expansion of militant Islam in the 20th century came as a surprise. After the First World War, many believed that Turkey, where the Kemal Ataturk regime imposed secularization by force, would set the pattern for the future, and that Islam would at last be reformed and modernized. Though secularism has — so far — survived in Turkey, in the rest of Islam fundamentalism, or orthodoxy, as it is more properly called, has increased its grip on both the rulers and the masses. There are at present 18 predominantly Islamic states, some of them under Koranic law and all ruled by groups that have good reason to fear extremists.

Hence American policymakers, in planning to uproot Islamic terrorism once and for all, have to steer a narrow path. They have the military power to do what they want, but they need a broad-based global coalition to back their action, preferably with military contributions as well as words, and ideally including such states as Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. To get this kind of support is not easy, for moderate Moslem rulers are far more frightened of the terrorists than of Americans, and fear for their lives and families. The danger is that they will insist on qualification of American action that will amount, in effect, to appeasement, and that this in turn will divide and weaken both the administration and U.S. public opinion.

It is vitally important that America stick to the essentials of its military response and carry it through relentlessly and thoroughly. Although only Britain can be guaranteed to back the White House in every contingency, it is better in the long run for America to act without many allies, or even alone, than to engage in a messy compromise dictated by nervousness and cowardice. That would be the worst of all solutions and would be certain to lead to more terrorism, in more places, and on an ever-increasing scale. Now is the ideal moment for the United States to use all its physical capacity to eliminate large-scale international terrorism. The cause is overwhelmingly just, the nation is united, the hopes of decent, law-abiding men and women everywhere go with American arms. Such a moment may never recur.

The great William Gladstone, in resisting terrorism, once used the phrase, “The resources of civilisation are not yet exhausted.” That is true today. Those resources are largely in American hands, and the nation — “the last, best hope of mankind” — has an overwhelming duty to use them with purposeful justification and to the full, in the defense of the lives, property, and freedom of all of us. This is the central point to keep in mind when the weasel words of cowardice and surrender are pronounced.

==============================

Islam According to Oprah: Is Oprah Winfrey a threat to national security? (National Review Online, 011008)

By Rod Dreher, columnist for the New York Post

Is Oprah Winfrey a threat to national security? No, but now that the war has begun, I worry about her, and here’s why.

The nation cannot afford the naive illusions that have given many Americans comfort in peacetime. Chief among them is the notion, repeated ad nauseam by our leaders and the media, that Islam is a religion of peace. This may not be an outright lie, but it is so far from the full truth as to approach falsehood.

Americans have been told that they shouldn’t attack the Muslims among us, and only the lowest of the low would disagree. The American people, with very few exceptions, have risen to the challenge to be humane, decent, and loving toward Muslims in this country. Well and good.

Americans by nature want to think the best of those from other cultures. But we run the risk of blinding ourselves to the nature of the threat facing our country and our civilization. In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington warned us of deluding ourselves about the true nature of the Islamic threat.

“Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists,” Huntington wrote. “Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”

We can sit around making diversity quilts and thinking happy thoughts, or we can, with charity, commit ourselves to soberly assessing the historical and present-day reality of “peaceful” Islam, and its relations with non-Muslims.

Which brings us to Oprah. Last Friday, she devoted her program to “Islam 101,” purportedly a crash course in the Mohammedan faith for her vast television audience of clueless Americans. It was grossly imbalanced and extremely dishonest. In fact, given how many Christians and other non-Muslims are horrifically persecuted today by Muslims in the name of Islam, it amounted to offensive propaganda.

Oprah called Islam “the most misunderstood of the three major religions” — yet did her best to add to the confusion by candy-coating the complicated truth about the Muslim faith. If you were to take Oprah’s show as your guide to Islam, you would think Muslims were basically Episcopalians in veils and turbans.

Take her interview with Queen Rania of Jordan, a lovely, modern young woman who looks more at home in the pages of Vogue than in a hijab. The queen said that Islam “doesn’t impose anything” on people — an absurd lie. Oprah asked her about the so-called “honor killings” of women in Jordan, murders committed by men against women in their families who are believed to have shamed the clan. For example, some young women who have been raped are in turn murdered by their male relatives for having stained the family’s honor.

Progressive forces, supported by the palace and Jordan’s Islamic religious establishment, tried to outlaw these killings in 1999, but were thwarted by the conservative Islamist party in Parliament. Queen Rania, reflecting establishment opinion, told Oprah that honor killings were a “cultural” phenomenon.

If that’s true, then why have pre-Islamic Arabic tribal customs been taken up and spread throughout the Muslim world? Moreover, many Islamic religious leaders endorse them, or lesser violent punishment of women for the same dubious offenses.

Anyway, if one grants, for the sake of argument, the queen’s contention that the Koran doesn’t endorse honor killings, so what? Clearly very many Muslims believe honor killings are Islamic doctrine, and act on those beliefs — and we must be aware of that, and let that reality inform our judgment. If one were a Jew in Torquemada’s Spain, it would be useless to be told that the Inquisition was a betrayal of Christianity. Theological disputes would be ancillary to the question of survival: what would matter would be how the local Christians interpreted their faith.

Queen Rania’s dismissal of Muslim behavior that brings discredit upon Islam as un-Islamic brings to mind the bankrupt apologies leftists made during the Cold War for Communism. When the wickedness of the Soviets, or other Communist forces, could not be denied, it was claimed that these people did not represent “true” Communism. They may have actually believed that, but those who would be victims of real Communists, not theoretical Communists, didn’t have that luxury.

Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, the Pakistani ambassador to the United States, turned up to say that “There is nothing in Islam that does not accord women equal rights.” Oprah did not ask her to name one Muslim society in which women enjoy equal rights in the Western sense, because the ambassador would have had to remain silent. Or perhaps not: she had no trouble lying when she asserted that it was “absolutely untrue” that some people in her nation had taken to the streets to celebrate the September 11 attack.

Other quotes, from the program (available at www.oprah.com):

— “Muslims do not think that there is a non-Islamic world out there that we have to conquer. That is not the concept in Islam. Our job is to get to know one another, and the more we do that the better off we are.”

— “The main thing we would like non-Muslims to know about our religion is that we’re not so different from them.”

— “I would like to reassure the American public that Islam does not preach violence.”

— “Islam and Christianity and Judaism, and all the world’s religions share a common heritage. We come from the same root. And our prophets and the characters in our holy books are the same. In Islam, all the religions are permitted to exist in peace with these others until Judgement Day.”

That Oprah let these statements be broadcast unchallenged is appalling, an absurd fantasy that ignores the enormous suffering actual Muslims are inflicting on non-Muslim populations worldwide. “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors,” Harvard’s Huntington wrote. “Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming.”

In Sudan, the Muslim government in Khartoum imposed Islamic law nationwide in 1993, and has killed 2 million Sudanese Christians and animists, and enslaved countless more, in an attempt to Islamize the country. Coptic Christians in Egypt, whose presence in that country predates the arrival of Islam, have been slaughtered by fundamentalist Muslims, with authorities doing little or nothing to stop them.

In the Philippines and East Timor, Christians are being massacred by Muslims. Churches and Christian homes in Nigeria are being burned, and Christians murdered, by Muslim extremists. Arab Christians are oppressed by Muslims in the Holy Land, too. In Nazareth, Muslims are building a mosque just steps from the Basilica of the Annunciation, and make no secret of their intent to provoke and intimidate Christians. An imam in Gaza earlier this year broadcast a sermon over Palestinian Authority radio calling on Muslims to murder Christians and Jews as their Islamic duty. The ancient Christian presence in many Arab lands — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, among others — has been decimated in the last century by Muslim persecution.

The list goes on and on. While it is true that there are relatively peaceful Muslims who wish us no harm — the Sufis of Turkey come to mind, but there are others — it is unarguable that very many Muslims and their leaders despise non-Muslims, attack us rhetorically in religious terms, and wish to see us die for our infidelity to Allah. To these Muslims, many of whom are Wahhabi (the Muslim sect that, according to Islam scholar Stephen Schwartz, accounts for 80% of the imams in the United States today), there are two worlds: that of Islam, and that of war. No compromise is possible between them.

What can possibly be gained from ignoring this ugly reality? Nothing — and a great deal to be lost. As Andrew Sullivan notes in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, our leaders’ “laudable” post-9/11 efforts to discourage seeing the conflict in religious terms “doesn’t hold up under inspection.”

“The religious dimension of this conflict is central to its meaning,” Sullivan writes, adding that it would be “naive to ignore in Islam a deep thread of intolerance toward unbelievers, especially if those unbelievers are believed to be a threat to the Islamic world.”

It’s naive to ignore it on a macro level, and it’s naive to ignore it on a micro level, too. We know that the Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks lived for years peacefully among other Americans. We also know that they couldn’t have carried out their operations without the support of others. Further, we know that some mosques and Islamic institutions in this country have been helpful to the jihadists. Believing that the threat to America comes simply from foreign Islamic extremists may make Oprah viewers feel better, but it’s dangerous — and it lets moderate, patriotic American Muslims evade their responsibility to repudiate and root out fundamentalists among them. In Sunday’s New York Times, a reporter wrote of interviews she had with Muslim American students right here in my own Brooklyn neighborhood. One of the male students said, on the record, that he would abandon the United States and give his own life to back an “observant Muslim who is fighting for an Islamic cause.” Oprah honey, this is called sedition, and if there is an Islamic fifth column in this country, the American public needs to know about it.

American Muslims understandably feel pressured now to show the non-Muslim majority that they are no threat, and well-meaning dolts like Oprah are key to this effort. Watching Oprah’s “Islam 101” program, I thought of the Lebanese Catholics at my church, who stopped me after a prayer service for the World Trade Center dead to talk, on the record, about the anti-Arab persecution they feared coming.

They all said they knew plenty of Muslims here in New York who were peace-loving people, and that it would be wrong to think ill of them. I asked these Arab Christians if these Muslims supported terrorist organizations, monetarily or otherwise. Every one of them said yes, sheepishly. After the interview was over, the group asked me not to use their last names. They were afraid of being physically attacked by Muslims in their neighborhoods — this, for standing up for America in print.

“That’s amazing,” I said to them. “You are all Christians living in the United States of America, yet you are afraid to have your names attached to patriotic statements, out of fear that your Muslim neighbors, the same people you are defending to me, will attack you. What does that say about the reality of Islam in America?”

They did not answer me, because they had no answer. Think about that next time you’re told that Islam is a religion of peace. There’s more to the story than what Oprah is telling you.

==============================

Radical Islam in Nigeria: The Talibanization of West Africa (Weekly Standard, 020415)

AFTER SAFIYA HUSEINI was sentenced to death by stoning last October 9 by an Islamic sharia court in northern Nigeria, her case drew international attention. The New York Times Magazine profiled her, and European members of parliament protested to Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo. When, in March, an appeals court overturned the death sentence on a technicality, much of the world sighed with relief and lost interest in the growth of militant Islam in Africa’s most populous country.

But the extremism to which Huseini’s case drew attention—she had gone to the police to complain of being raped, then was arrested and tried for adultery—remains a growing threat to human rights in the dozen Nigerian states that have adopted a hard-line interpretation of Islamic law. Especially at risk are women and religious minorities, not to mention democracy and stability in West Africa.

Thus, three days before Huseini’s conviction was overturned in Sokoto state, a sharia court in neighboring Katsina state condemned Amina Lawal Kurami to be stoned to death for adultery, and another court is considering the same for 18-year-old Hafsatu Abubakar. (This mode of execution, incidentally, involves immobilizing the person to be stoned by first burying her up to her chest.)

Men are invariably let off for their part in these sexual crimes because sharia courts require a higher standard of evidence to convict them. But men face notable brutality for other offenses. In May 2001, an Islamic court ordered the removal of Ahmed Tijjan’s left eye after he was found guilty of partially blinding a friend. Another ordered 15-year-old Abubakar Aliyu’s hand amputated for stealing. Ahmed Sani, the governor of Zamfara, the first state to introduce this form of sharia, told Freedom House that “without amputations there is no sharia.”

The growth of radical Islam has effects far wider than these draconian punishments. Nigeria is about equally divided between Christians and Muslims, with a small number of animists. If radical Islam is left unchecked, it will continue to provoke widespread inter-religious conflict that, combined with endemic ethnic strife, may fragment the country. This could make the giant of sub-Saharan Africa—a major oil exporter to the United States and a new, struggling democracy—into a haven for Islamism, linked to foreign extremists.

As in much of Africa, family law in Nigeria has long drawn on sharia, the body of Islamic law and precedent. But the versions of sharia introduced in the last two years are closer to those imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. Since 1999, Zamfara state has sexually segregated buses, taxis, and many public places, banned alcohol, enforced a dress code on women, and closed non-Muslim schools. Its hizbah (religious enforcers) mete out immediate, harsh punishments for “un-Islamic” activities such as questioning Islamic teaching or women’s wearing pants.

In some states Muslims are subject to sharia even if they prefer civil courts that have protections under Nigeria’s bill of rights. Non-Muslims are barred from being judges, prosecutors, and lawyers in the courts to which they may be subject. Sharia state governments have destroyed dozens of churches.

Sani told Freedom House that the Koran requires Muslims to kill family members who leave Islam, and indicated that his state will not prosecute such killings. Trying to appeal a sharia verdict to one of Nigeria’s higher civil courts could be taken as a sign of such apostasy.

The new laws are not subject to democratic control. Since proponents of the new code say that it is divinely ordained, no constitution or election is allowed to challenge it. Sani says that sharia supercedes the Nigerian constitution, and Zamfara’s legislative assembly suspended two democratically elected Muslim members because they did not fully support the new laws. Governor Bukar Ibrahim of Yobe, another sharia state, said that he was prepared to fight a civil war to preserve it.

The new laws have precipitated riots throughout the country. February 2000 saw the worst violence since Nigeria’s civil war 30 years ago. In Kaduna City, whole neighborhoods were destroyed. Police conservatively estimate that 600 people died; human rights groups say as many as 3,000. Perhaps 6,000 have been killed in the last two years in religion-related violence nationwide.

After September 11, some Islamist violence took on a distinctly anti-American tone. In the cities of Jos and Kano, hundreds died in riots in September and October, with Muslims observed waving bin Laden posters and Christians waving American flags. Bin Laden remains a hero in much of the north.

While no evidence has surfaced of al Qaeda operations in Nigeria, the extremism from which it draws support is spreading rapidly, and is encouraged by radical Islamic groups and foreign regimes. Nigerian police say that dozens of Pakistanis have been involved in religious riots, and visiting Pakistani “scholars” have been ejected from the country. Before Zamfara instituted sharia, officials from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria, and even Palestinian representatives, visited. Sudan, which has already supplied Chechnya’s criminal code, is running training programs for Nigeria’s sharia judges.

The Nigerian federal government’s response has been tentative. Its justice minister has written that the new sharia is unconstitutional but has failed to mount a legal challenge.

Nigeria is further proof, if any were needed, that radical Islam is not created or driven by opposition to U.S. policy on Israel. It is an aggressive, worldwide ideological movement with its sights set on Africa and Asia as much as the Middle East. The situation in Nigeria also provides an additional reason for the United States to drop its 30-year practice of downplaying demands for human rights and democracy in Muslim societies. The United States should urge Nigeria to oppose extremist sharia vigorously and help it to do so. Even hardheaded realists should see the importance of aiding the country to reform its troubled legal system nationwide and provide education that includes modern knowledge and promotes freedom as an alternative to Islamist schools.

Otherwise this fledgling democracy, regional power, and U.S. ally is bound to face further religious violence. As Nigerian novelist and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka laments, “The roof is already burning over our head—the prelude to civil war.”

Paul Marshall is a senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House, which has just released his book-length report “The Talibanization of Nigeria: Sharia Law and Religious Freedom.”

==============================

Islam’s Threat to the West (NewsMax.com, 020509)

Wes Vernon

“We do believe Islam is at war with the Christian West.”

With that comment, Paul Weyrich and William S. Lind have broken through a taboo in the entire discussion of the war on terrorism.

Those who say the threat comes only from “Islamic fundamentalism” or “Islamic extremism” miss the whole point of the terrorist attacks, Weyrich and Lind argue. In fact, those who believe the terrorist enemy is confined only to a few fanatics “misportray the nature of Islam itself.”

“War against the unbeliever is as central a doctrine and practice of Islam as the Virgin birth, the Trinity and Christ’s resurrection are central to Christianity,” declares the Free Congress booklet.

The study promises to stir up a new debate as to the very nature of the threat the U.S. is fighting. Among its findings:

* Islam is simply “a religion of war.” You may protest that your Islamic neighbor down the street could not possibly be a threat. Free Congress says you should bear in mind that “there are lax Islamics.” Or to put it another way, the peaceful individual Muslims are out of step with their religion. They are outsiders looking in.

* The two principle sources of Islamic belief “ooze war and blood.”

The Koran includes such wording as defining war as “a religious obligation for the faithful” … “fight and slay the pagans,” meaning non-Muslims … “the punishment of those who wage war against God and his Apostle.”

The Hadith, a collection of sayings from Mohammed, quotes him as saying there is no deed “which equals Jihad” in reward … that “a single endeavour [of fighting] in Allah’s cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it” … that the only satisfaction a martyr could derive from coming back to earth would be “so that he may by martyred ten times because of the dignity he receives [from Allah]” … “Know that Paradise is under the shade of swords.” … that “exposing their [non-Muslim] women and children to danger” is justified because as “the prophet replied, ‘They are from them.’”

Presumably, that would explain present-day suicide bombings that kill innocents here and elsewhere.

Weyrich and Lind trace the violent history of Islam to Mohammed himself.

Mohammed Like ‘a Mafia Don’

“Not only did he personally wage war,” they note, “he repeatedly called for ‘hits’ on anyone he did not like, in the manner of a mafia don.” For example:

“The apostle Mohammed said, ‘Kill any Jew that falls into your power.’ Thereupon Muhayyisa leapt upon Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant with whom they had social and business relations, and killed him.”

Nobel literature prize winner Elias Cannetti has defined Islam as “a religion of war – literally a killer belief.”

“Islam has made war on Christendom and Christians since it first swept out of Arabia to conquer much of the Christian Mediterranian world,” the Free Congress study finds.

And then, a brief synopsis of history bringing us up to the present day:

“As recently as 1683, the armies of Islam were besieging Vienna. After about 300 years on the strategic defensive, Islam has recently resumed the strategic offensive. It is now expanding outward in every direction: down both coasts of Africa, east through the South China Sea toward Australia, north into both eastern and western Europe, and west into the United States where the fastest growing religion is Islam. As has been true throughout its history, the expansion of Islam is not peaceful. More Christians are being martyred today than at the height of the Roman persecutions, and most of them are dying at the hands of Islam. Christendom is in peril.”

Quite simply, Weyrich and Lind view the present-day terrorism as an extension of a religious war. Islam, they explain, divides the world into two portions; the Dar al Islam, the world of Islam, and the Dar al Harb, the world of war. Peace is possible only within the world of Islam.

Islam is on the cutting edge of the new kind of warfare that does not involve easily identifiable nations or governments. Rather, there is a war of cultures, occurring not just “over there” but on American soil, a trend Free Congress says was observable “long before September 11.”

==============================

Who’s Right? (Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, 020600)

Two views of Muslims vie for our attention since September 11

Is anyone else confused about what Muslims really believe? Since September 11 I have read, listened to, and discussed a myriad of perspectives on what Islam is all about and how it motivates and shapes Muslims around the world. I’m left with opposing versions.

I live six doors down from a mosque and only a few blocks from the apartment where the first suspected Muslim terrorists in Canada were arrested. In a sense, I’ve been living with the two realities.

In the last 12 years, I watched the neighbourhood mosque blossom from a dilapidated old church, left empty for decades, into a place of beauty. I saw the broken windows mended, and the dirt yard transformed into garden and interlocking pathways. Every Friday I viewed Muslims gathering, with heads covered, laughing with one another. Often I smiled back, commenting on the weather.

Once when a Muslim worshiper in a hurry blocked our driveway, the infraction drew a crowd. The driver was brought straight from his knees in the mosque to move his vehicle while the crowd watched. My Muslim defenders were vocal: “This is not right.” “Allah does not approve.”

Over the years my impression has been positive. If I felt any anxiety it was only because of the tremendous burden in their believing that they must earn God’s love in order to gain an eternity in paradise. Many times I silently prayed that God would show them His love for them—just as they are.

The only complaints about the mosque have been from neighbours who grumble over the lack of parking spots or the sound of exuberant children playing outside late at night during Muslim festivities.

Then the image of the crumbling twin towers and the arrest of suspected terrorists just around the corner changed my opinion overnight. The next day, to my horror, I began to view my Muslim neighbours with suspicion. Now their modest attire and quiet manner appeared deceptive. The daily newspapers and TV images painted pictures of hidden violence fueled by Islamic scriptures.

Then one morning I found a red long‑stemmed rose on our doorstep. On the tiny scroll attached I found a gracious plea from the mosque for continued goodwill and thanksgiving for our kind treatment of them in the past. Every household on our street received one.

I recalled my recent fears. “God, forgive me,” I thought. I realized that this gesture was far more in character with my experience of our peace-loving Muslim neighbours. It was far more in character with the Muslim community that has joined with Christians and Jews across our country in defending marriage and moral values.

I can’t deny the reality of Muslim terrorists or Muslim countries that persecute those who share my faith in Jesus Christ. But these are not the Muslims that I know. The ones for whom I continue to pray.

Gail Reid is managing editor of Faith Today and director of communications for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

==============================

Muslims & Christians: How Wide the Divide? (Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, 020600)

After September 11, people are finding ways to bridge centuries of misunderstanding

In the church hall, darting children laugh and yell to friends. Quick interchanges burst from clusters of young adults. Nearby, murmurs arise from a group of elderly people enjoying a special opportunity to socialize.

Soon the evening’s English lesson starts. Some continue chatting; but most of the 50 or so present concentrate on trying to comprehend the meaning of North American slang terms such as “off the top of your head.” Later, along with the teacher, they read a grade 5-level passage from the Gospel of Matthew, learning some English and listening attentively as the teacher explains Christian faith and doctrine at appropriate points in the text.

The night ends with the monthly music event. The students respond enthusiastically to the worship songs played by a Canadian group. Then musicians among the students get out their own instruments: a clarinet, drums, and a four-string, long-necked lute-like instrument. Then they jam, sometimes with the worship team.

These sounds can be heard at many of the weekly gatherings where Canadian Christians offer hospitality and lessons in life skills to refugees. What sets this gathering apart is the fact that the majority of the students are Muslims. For two years, many of these Muslims from the former Yugoslavia have regularly attended the meetings sponsored by Friends, a ministry to Albanian Kosovar immigrants in Surrey, B.C.

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and the subsequent war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the need for this type of relation building has become even more apparent. Though some non‑Muslims and Muslims in Canada have held fast to negative stereotypes, many more, including Christians, have sought to bridge the divide between Islam and Christianity.

Bob Granholm, who heads Friends, is one of a small group of Canadian Christians who, in the past several years, have made concerted efforts to reach out to some of the estimated 700,000 Muslims in Canada. He has seen changes in Muslim immigrants’ attitudes to Christians. Granholm, who has ministered to Muslims for 15 years, is encouraged by what he sees as a greater openness to the gospel.

“They ask a lot of questions,” he says. “Some are surprised to learn that Jesus was Jewish. Some think the New Testament was a book written by Jesus. A lot of them ask, ‘How do I change religions?’ Everyone wants a copy of the Jesus video in their language.” The Jesus film, produced by Campus Crusade for Christ, depicts Jesus’ life, using dialogue mainly from the Book of Luke.

Others have noticed this openness. “I believe the aftermath of 9-11 has been positive for spreading the gospel among Muslims,” says Tom Tan, a pastor with Coquitlam Alliance Church in B.C. Tan’s church began ESL classes for Afghans and Iranians early last year—and after September 11 the number of students almost doubled. Many Muslims, he says, “were drawn to the church because they want to have good Christian friends.”

In the past several months his horizons have expanded considerably. “Through the ESL classes, I managed to connect with an Afghan tribal leader,” he said. Last October the Afghani invited Tan to send Christians to work in community development in his village. “I could not dream of church planting among Afghans . . . before 9-11. But now there are plans for me to travel to Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan,” said Tan.

Seervan Dowlati, a one-time Muslim who now pastors Vancouver Persian Church, concurs. “We have many Muslims who are calling and asking us to pray for them.”

The interest goes both ways. “Among Christians,” asserts James Beverley, a professor with Tyndale Seminary in Ontario who has written on Islam, “there’s now an interest in understanding Islam that has never [existed] before in Western history.”

The Divide

Still, many bridges remain to be built—as the recent rise in hate crimes confirms.

According to a report issued by the Toronto police force in late February, hate crimes in Canada during 2001 showed a 66% increase over the previous year—due primarily to attacks against Muslims following September 11.

“There have been far too many incidents of harassment,” declares Alia Hogben, of the Ontario-based Canadian Council of Muslim Women. “On the other hand,” she adds, “we have been inundated since September 11 with wonderful expressions of concern by our Christian neighbours and friends.”

Some Canadian Muslims cite misrepresentation as a problem. “Many Christians’ only knowledge about Islam comes from the media,” says Ali Assaf, a spokesperson for the Canadian Islamic Centre in Edmonton. “They seem to think that Muslims do not believe in God, nor in the prophets common to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.” He exhorts Christians to think for themselves. “Please find out the truth about Islam and Muslims before drawing up a judgment.”

“There are definitely many misperceptions,” says Hogben “such as that Islam is a backward religion, belonging to the Middle Ages—[and] that ‘Allah’ means some other God, and not just the one God of all beings. Sadly, most of these [ideas] started with the first contacts between Muslims and Christians during the Crusades.”

Muslims, too, are still influenced by the Crusades. Don Little, Ontario-based director of Arab World Ministries, says that, although September 11 made some Muslims ask hard questions about Islam, the war in Afghanistan confirmed others in “their view of Christians as colonialists and oppressors.”

Some Christians continue to perpetuate ideas that many Muslims find offensive. On his web site, American Robert Morey, author of Islamic Invasion and head of the Faith Defenders apologetics ministry, invites Christians to join a spiritual and intellectual “Holy Crusade” against Islam. He dismisses the entire religion as “the root of terrorism.”

While not using Morey’s inflammatory rhetoric, some Canadian Christians have made similar assumptions. According to a Christian Week article written by John Azumah, a pastor with the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Islamic extremists “are simply implementing the fundamentals of Islam and taking official Islamic teachings to their logical conclusions.”

Others, such as Arab World Ministries’ Abe Wiebe, though equally critical of Islam, have been more balanced. He asserts that Islam’s “unifying purpose is to bring the whole of humanity under the banner of the Crescent [by] all means, including violence, terrorism and war if necessary.” However, he conceds that 85% of Muslims “practise a temperate form of Islam.”

Muslims’ perceptions of Christians are not always accurate. Despite overwhelming evidence that many contemporary North Americans and Europeans do not support or respect Christian faith, some Muslims still insist on identifying Christianity with the actions of the entire Western world—largely because of the West’s assault on Islam during the Crusades.

This perspective is exemplified in some of the ideas of radical Islamic leader Osama bin Laden. In a November statement translated by the BBC, bin Laden referred to “the people of the West, who are the crusaders.” Their leaders, he said, are waging “the most ferocious, serious, and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed to Muhammad.”

Mutual misunderstandings

The major source of misunderstanding for Christians and other non-Muslims has arisen from a view that Islam is a monolith. Now many Canadians are aware that the Islamic world is becoming increasingly polarized.

While evidence indicates that alleged Islamic terrorists such as Ahmed Ressam have conducted activities in Canada, moderate Canadian Muslims have been quick to repudiate extremist interpretations of their faith.

The September 11 terrorists, says Saleem Aneen Ganam, director of the Islamic Awareness Foundation in Edmonton, committed “an abhorrent thing.” Muslims, he insists, “don’t attack innocent people” or commit suicide. The terrorists, says Hogben, were “politicizing Islam.”

At a meeting held by Friends in Surrey soon after the terrorist attacks, several Muslims spoke. Some, Granholm says, “were infuriated that the terrorism had been perpetrated in the name of Islam.”

“Muslims are in the midst of a struggle for the soul of Islam,” wrote James Beverley in a January Christianity Today cover story. As evidence, he cited Muslim intellectual Kanan Makiya, who dismissed bin Laden and his ilk as “Islam’s ‘Ku Klux Klan.’ “

“The vast majority of Muslims,” wrote Beverley in his recent book, Understanding Islam, “believe that Osama bin Laden . . . has disgraced Islam.” However, Muslim extremists like bin Laden, he asserted, “view their actions as a true Jihad or ‘holy war’ against infidels and the enemies of Islam . . . We are left, then, with a world of two Islams.” He concluded: “There is an Islam of peace. It is in the millions of Muslims who live every day in love and gentleness.”

Conservative Christian columnists Ted and Virginia Byfield expressed a similar view. “Which is the real face of Islam?” they asked in their Report column. “Is it the terrorist or that nice guy next door?” They concluded that some Muslims “unquestionably reflect the peace of soul that can come only from God.”

The mass media, says Hogben, need to play a role in counteracting the perception of all Muslims as potential terrorists. “They could look for moderates instead of the [extremists], and let moderates have a voice.”

Assaf, however, believes things are improving. “Especially after September 11, there has been a greater deal of interaction and eagerness to come to common ground.”

Cultivating commonality

Canadian Muslims and Christians have proven they can cooperate on issues of mutual concern. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, for example, has worked with Islamic groups on court cases involving the protection of marriage. Exchanges of ideas between the faiths have created understanding. “I’ve spoken to dozens of churches over many years about Islam,” says Ganam of the Islamic Awareness Foundation. “It’s when you get to know each other that much of the animosity would be wiped away.”

In December, Christians and Muslims spent a day at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, fasting and praying to protest both Islamic terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. In other cases, Muslim and Christian organizations have jointly sponsored social activities, lectures, and humanitarian efforts for Afghan refugees.

Yet some evangelicals, notes Don Joshua, Canadian director of Middle East Christian Outreach, believe the new rapprochement may be going too far. “The Anglican Diocese of Toronto also has fellowship with the Muslim community in Toronto . . . St. James Anglican Cathedral opened up its basement for Friday prayers for Muslims [to use], much to the consternation of conservative Christians.” He believes Muslims can counter such reactions by demonstrating “the kindness, tolerance and love that are an integral part of Islam.”

Ali Assaf urges, “Let’s live together in peace and harmony, regardless of our personal beliefs.”

Building closer ties

Many Christians echo this call for peaceful approaches. The new Canadian social landscape, says Floyd Grunau of Alliance Biblical Seminary in Toronto, “has given us opportunities to affirm the love we have in Christ for [Muslims].”

“I have met many Muslims who are open to the biblical view of Jesus,” says Reda Hanna, pastor of the Arabic Evangelical Church in New Westminster, B.C. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “not many Christians make an effort to be friends with Muslims.”

The most effective way to evangelize Muslims, says Bob Granholm, is “through acts of kindness, a demonstrably righteous life, and a transparent faith.”

“Christians who associate with Muslims,” agrees Joshua, “should live their lives so that Muslims are attracted to their faith without persuasion.”

“Talk to them without criticizing Islam,” says Dowlati. “Simply talk to them about Jesus, and the ways He loved people and forgave sinners.”

“They are taught that the gospels are, to some extent, the word of God,” says Beverley. “I think that if they read the gospels for themselves, they’ll be amazed at who Jesus is.”

He hastens to add: “Being a loving Christian is more important than winning arguments.”

David F. Dawes lives in Vancouver and is an associate editor of BC Christian News.

==============================

Jihad Conquests: Islamism today (National Review Online, 020619)

By Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom

The ideology of jihad was formulated by Muslim jurists and scholars, including such luminaries as Averroes and Ibn Khaldun, from the 8th century onward. A recent Harvard commencement speech notwithstanding, these voluminous writings establish unequivocally the notion of jihad as a war of conquest. For example, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) stated, “..the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universality of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everyone to Islam either by persuasion or by force...”. Jihad conquests were brutal, imperialist advances that spurred waves of Arab and Turkish Muslims to expropriate a vast expanse of lands, and subdue millions of indigenous peoples, across three continents — Asia, Africa, and Europe. Moreover, jihad ideology ultimately regulated the relations of Muslims with non-Muslims. The contemporary relevance of this ideology is also clear, and disturbing. Professor John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, recently identified Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, as one of the most influential contemporary Muslim thinkers. Sheikh al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric and the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, reaches an enormous audience during his regular appearances on Al Jazeera. During a January 9, 1998 interview, Sheikh al-Qaradawi observed that Islamic law divided the People of the Book — Jews and Christians — into three categories: 1) non-Muslims in the lands of war; 2) non-Muslims in lands of temporary truce; 3) non-Muslims protected by Islamic law, that is to say, the dhimmis.

The sheikh had thus summarized the theory of jihad in a few words. Now, as we see from countless calls for jihad and daily world events, this ideology still impregnates current thinking and conduct. Jihad as such, is a genocidal war, since it orders men to be massacred and women and children to be enslaved, if there is resistance. In the Southern Sudan, the ugly living embodiment of the jihad war ideology is visible with the enslavement of the wives and children of Christian and Animist rebels by Muslim agents of the Khartoum government. Unfortunately, although many Muslims do not adhere to this ideology, formal rejection of its precepts by the major Islamic clerics at Al-Azhar University in Egypt, or in Saudi Arabia, has not occurred.

Historically, non-Muslims conquered by jihad wars were governed by the laws of “dhimmitude.” As opposed to flimsy notions of “tolerance” and “protection,” dhimmitude was the actual sociopolitical, and economic status of these vanquished peoples (dhimmis), including Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists. Unfortunately, this “tolerance” and “protection” was afforded only upon submission to Islamic domination by a “Pact” — or Dhimma — which imposed degrading and discriminatory regulations. The main principles of dhimmitude are: (i) the inequality of rights in all domains between Muslims and dhimmis; (ii) the social and economic discrimination against the dhimmis; (iii) the humiliation and vulnerability of the dhimmis. Numerous documents from both Islamic sources and the dhimmi peoples, establish the origins and aims of these nefarious regulations, including their contemporary incarnations (for example, in Iran, Egypt, the Sudan, Pakistan, and of course in Saudi Arabia, and under the Taliban in Afghanistan).

Every society and religion has developed its own form of fanaticism, particularly during periods of expansion, or internal unrest. In the Judeo-Christian societies, however, the separation of politics and religion — sometimes, it is true, entirely theoretical — has permitted intolerance and oppression to be challenged. The men who fought for the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of the Jews were Christians. Jews and Christians struggled side by side for the recognition of human rights. A similar progressive movement has yet to appear in the Muslim world, which has never acknowledged the oppressed dhimmi, or recognized that the degradation of the dhimmi represents a crime against humanity. The Muslim intelligentsia has failed to condemn both jihad as a genocidal war, and dhimmitude as a dehumanizing institution, which together resulted in imperialism, slavery, and the deportation of populations, whose historical and cultural patrimony were totally destroyed. If Muslims continue to avoid meaningful self-criticism of their own history of jihad and dhimmitude, it will be impossible for Islam to accept non-Muslims as full equals, and past prejudices will continue to be rampant.

— Bat Ye’or is the author of Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide. Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University School of Medicine

==============================

An honest accounting of Arab decline (National Post, 020705)

Victor Davis Hanson

The just-released Arab Human Development Report, commissioned by the United Nations and drafted by a group of Middle Eastern intellectuals, utterly confirms the deep pathology gripping the Arab world that Western analysts have long noted. Yet what was truly astounding about the account was less its findings than the honest acknowledgement that Arab problems are largely self-created.

Khalaf Hunaidi, who oversaw the economic portion of the analysis, remarked, “It’s not outsiders looking at Arab countries. It’s Arabs deciding for themselves.” And what they decided is sadly ample proof of Arab decline. Per capita income is dropping in the Arab world, even as it rises almost everywhere else. Productivity is stagnant; research and development are almost absent. Science and technology remain backward. Politics is infantile. And culture, in thrall to Islamic fundamentalism and closed to the ideas that quicken the intellectual life of the rest of the world, is “lagging behind” advanced nations, Hunaidi says.

Yet this novel panel of Arab intellectuals, remarkably, didn’t attribute the dismal condition of Middle Eastern society to the usual causes that Western intellectuals and academics have made so popular: racism and colonialism, multinational exploitation, Western political dominance, and all the other -isms and -ologies that we’ve grown accustomed to hear about from the Arabists on university campuses.

Instead, the investigators cited the subjugation of women that robs Arab society of millions of brilliant minds. Political autocracy — either in the service of or in opposition to Islamic fundamentalism — ensures censorship, stifles creativity, or promotes corruption. Talented scientists and intellectuals are likely to emigrate and then stay put in the West, since there is neither a cultural nor an economic outlet for their talents back home, but sure danger if they prove either honest or candid. The Internet remains hardly used. Greece, a country 30 times smaller than the Arab world, translates five times the number of books yearly.

The report didn’t give precise reasons for the growing Arab hostility toward the United States, but its findings lend credence to almost everything brave scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes have been saying for years. With exploding populations, and offering little hope for either material security or personal freedom, unelected governments in the Gulf, Egypt and northern Africa have allowed their press the single “freedom” of venting popular frustration against a very successful Israel and the United States.

Instead of discussing elections in Egypt, debating the Sudanese government’s budget, or advocating academic freedom in Syria, state-run newspapers and television stations spin countless conspiracy theories about September 11. They dub the Jews subhuman and worse, promise eternal jihad against the West, and churn out elaborate explanations why a tiny country like Israel is responsible for everything from train wrecks in Cairo to lawlessness in Lebanon.

What can we learn from this newly honest Arab self-appraisal? We should put no more credence in the preposterous “post-colonial” theories that ad nauseam argue that Westerners are still to be blamed a half-century after the last Europeans vacated the Middle East. Post-Marxist analyses that claim international conglomerates stifle the Arab world are just as silly. Nor must we believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or America’s support for Israel is the problem. Instead, the simple fact is that hundreds of millions of people are going backward in time in an age when global communications hourly remind them of their dismal futures. Frustration, pride, anger, envy, humiliation, spiritual helplessness — all the classical exegeses for war and conflict — far better explain the Arab world’s hostility toward a prosperous, confident and free West.

But the academic Left isn’t alone in misjudging the Middle East. The realpolitik of the U.S. government that allies itself with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and other “moderate” Arab states offers little long-term hope for an improved relationship with people of the Middle East. It is no accident that America is more popular in countries whose awful governments hate the United States — Iraq and Iran, for example — than among the public of its so-called allies. Saudis, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis and Egyptians, after all, have been murdering Americans far more frequently than have Iranians, Iraqis and Syrians.

We have replaced our old legitimate fears of godless Marxism in the Middle East with new understandable worries over fanatical Islamic fundamentalism to justify continued support for corrupt dictatorships. Yet the old excuse that there is no middle class in the Arab world, no heritage of politics, and few secular moderates will no longer do. It should be our job to find true democrats, both in and outside of the existing governments, and then promote their interests at the expense of both the fundamentalists and the tribal grandees. Chaos, uncertainty, risk and unpredictability may ensue, but all that is better than the murderous status quo of the current mess.

The contemporary Arab world is like the old communist domain of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, with its political and intellectual tyranny. We should accept that, and then adopt the same unyielding resolve to oppose governments that lie, oppress, and murder — until they totter and fall from their very own corrupt weight. There was a silent majority yearning to be free behind the Iron Curtain, and so we must believe that there is also one now, just as captive, in an unfree Middle East.

==============================

Mosques Planning Terror: Why Islamists hate new FBI rules (National Review Online, 020710)

By Debbie Schlussel

Why are Muslim and Arab “civil rights” groups the only ones protesting new FBI rules to fight terrorism?

Why aren’t mainstream Christian and Jewish groups protesting the new guidelines handed down by Attorney General John Ashcroft and his Justice Department? Or Hispanic groups?

Maybe because Muslim, mostly Arab, terrorists — including at least two 9/11 hijackers — deliberately used U.S. mosques to fundraise for and plan terrorist attacks. Maybe because they knew that, under the old rules, it had been difficult for FBI counterterrorism operatives to surveil terrorists once they stepped into the mosques. And they, the terrorists — and many Muslim allies in the U.S. — took advantage of this.

The old rules were used by a blind cleric, a professor, and even the mosque founded and headed by the father of a Bush administration official, to fund and/or plan terror, undetected.

Take the Santa Clara Masjid (Mosque). According to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, Osama bin Laden’s deputy (or boss, depending upon the intelligence report), Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited the United States in early 1995 using a forged passport, and raised money for terrorist operations at various U.S. mosques, including the Santa Clara Mosque, a.k.a. Masjid Al-Noor, a.k.a. MCA (Muslim Community Association) of Santa Clara.

The late Mahboob Khan is identified by a 1999 “MCA Newsletter” as the man “whose constant efforts and guidance. . . establish[ed] the Islamic Center” of Santa Clara. A 1999 Islamic Horizons magazine obituary for Mahboob Khan quotes a former secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America as saying that Dr. Khan “was in the forefront in the struggle” of “the Santa Clara mosque.” This includes the time period when Zawahiri was staying in Santa Clara and raising money at Khan’s mosque.

Khan was the founder of American Muslims for Global Peace and Justice, the group spearheading the boycott of Starbucks in the United States. Incredibly, Khan’s son, Suhail Khan, was the Bush White House’s Muslim outreach official last year. He is also a current and founding board member of the Islamic Institute, which openly opposes the new FBI rules, lodging protests with Ashcroft.

Islamic Institute board members, including founder Grover Norquist — allied with Arab congressman Darrell Issa — fought against the Patriot Act, which included some of the same reforms — allowing easier mosque and other surveillance of suspected terrorists by the FBI — as Ashcroft’s new guidelines. FBI monitoring of Khan’s Santa Clara Mosque would have led to Zawahiri’s arrest and prosecution, and possibly the discovery and prevention of future al Qaeda terrorism.

Islamic Institute and other prominent Muslim groups protested federal agents’ raids and/or shutdowns of several of the largest Muslim charities and institutions in America, all of whom were funding and laundering money for terrorism, to the tune of over $1.2 billion. That included a March raid of the Graduate School of Islamic Social Sciences (GSISS), which had a federal contract to train U.S. military and prison chaplains. GSISS donated to Islamic Institute as did some of its raided umbrella and sister organizations. Had federal agents been allowed to monitor these organizations earlier, their illicit activities would have been prevented.

Then there’s convicted terrorist, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the al Qaeda-connected religious leader who helped inspire and mastermind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He preached terror on America and helped plan the attack from mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City. According to Ronald Kessler, New York Times best-selling author of The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, FBI agents investigating him stopped their surveillance activities, each time he set foot in a mosque — the place where his most incriminating activities took place.

Rahman hung out at Brooklyn’s Alkifah Refugee Center, ostensibly a Muslim charity and welfare center directed in 1991 by bin Laden’s secretary Wadih El-Hage, later convicted of bombing the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. A number of terrorist operations, including the 1993 WTC bombing, the murder of an American rabbi, and the murder of Jewish children in a van on the Brooklyn Bridge, were planned at Alkifah.

But the FBI couldn’t listen in.

That’s because, under the old guidelines, FBI investigators couldn’t initiate investigations of religious places of worship, other organizations, and individuals, without independent evidence from outside the FBI, that criminal activities were being perpetrated within and/or by those parties.

The new guidelines have done away with that. Now mosques and other organizations can be investigated without waiting for outside evidence that might never come.

But you don’t hear rabbis and preachers complaining. Or Latinos. That’s because it’s difficult to come up with an example where terrorist attacks were planned in synagogues, churches, or the headquarters of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

On the other hand, Muslim and Arab groups and their spokesmen-Khaled Saffuri of Islamic Institute, Jason Erb of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and Hussein Ibish of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) — have been screaming out against the new rules.

In other words, forget their post 9/11 phony, ephemeral promises to help President Bush rout out terrorism. On the contrary, they attempt to protect those who enable and plan terrorism, not stop them.

That’s why they want don’t want the FBI entering the mosques.

All of these groups openly support Sheik Rahman’s buddy, Dr. Sami Al-Arian, the Islamic Jihad Chief of Military Operations, who doubles as the tax-funded, vacationing University of South Florida professor of computer science. Al-Arian raised money to fund his terrorist operations in mainstream mosques all over America, videotapes show, with the willing participation of the mosques’ imams (religious leaders) and congregants. In one video, Fawwaz Abu Damra, Imam of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, is shown introducing Al-Arian as head of “the active arm of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, and we like to call it the Islamic Committee for Palestine here for security reasons.” Abu Damra implored mosque congregants, “Donate to the Islamic Jihad! . . . If you write a check, write it for the Islamic Committee for Palestine.”

This is why some of the folks at CAIR, ADC, Islamic Institute, and America’s other radical Muslims don’t want the FBI in their mosques. And why we should be happy they now are. Americans who do not support terrorism should take note — and not allow themselves to be used as accessories.

— Debbie Schlussel is an attorney, columnist, and commentator.

==============================

Group Takes School to Court Over Quran Assignment (Foxnews, 020723)

NEW YORK — A Christian group is going to federal court to force the University of North Carolina from requiring its incoming freshmen to read a book about the Quran.

The university requirement is “putting a positive face on what many people believe to be an evil religion, a very evil religion,” said Joe Glover, president of the Family Policy Network.

The FPN and three unnamed students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, filed suit against the school at the federal court in Greensboro, N.C., on Monday.

University spokeswoman Karen Moon said the school could not comment on pending litigation.

The book flap began when the university announced all 3,500 Chapel Hill freshmen in the Class of 2006 would be reading Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. The book translates and discusses the earliest 35 suras, the first words Muslims believe God revealed to the prophet Mohammed.

“This was a book chosen in the wake of Sept. 11,” UNC Chancellor James Moeser said in a late May interview with Foxnews.com. “A fifth of the world’s population subscribes to the Islamic religion, and yet it’s not a well-understood religion. This is a great opportunity to have a conversation on the teachings of one of the world’s great religions, how it’s been used or misused, whether it’s a religion of peace or not.”

The school selects a different book for the freshmen every year to introduce them to college-level intellectual discourse. Last year, incoming freshmen were required to read a different book, and next year another book will be chosen.

The FPN loudly criticized the choice of the book, saying it amounted to a state university supporting one religion over another. The group was unappeased when the school decided to allow students to opt out of reading the book if they write a one-page essay explaining their decision.

“The university has become so entrenched in their position that they’re forcing kids to defend their own religious views as their first university experience, which is heinous,” Glover said.

In late May, author Michael Sells, a professor of comparative religion at Haverford College, said the controversy over his book is undeserved.

“The books is not called Islam. I think that [the FPN is] misinterpreting what the book is,” he said. “The purpose of a book is to give a sense of why a billion people belong to the tradition.”

==============================

Mother loses appeal against death penalty (London Times, 020820)

A 31-YEAR-OLD Nigerian woman was led from an Islamic court in tears yesterday after judges dismissed her appeal against death by stoning for bearing a child out of wedlock.

If her conviction and sentence are not overturned on appeal before a higher court, she will be buried up to her waist and stoned to death by fellow villagers and the Islamic authorities.

The packed courtroom in the conservative town of Funtua in Nigeria’s northern state of Katsina reverberated with cries of Allahu akbar (God is greatest) after Judge Aliyu Abdullani ordered that Amina Lawal should be stoned to death after her eight-month-old daughter, Wasila, has been weaned, which could be when she is two.

He spoke on behalf of a panel of judges as Lawal cradled the child in her arms.

Lawal, a divorcee who says that she was misled by the father of the child, could be the first woman to be executed for adultery since a dozen states in Nigeria’s predominately Muslim north began adopting the Sharia system more than two years ago.

The judgment was a sharp reversal for the federal Government, which chose the case to challenge the reintroduction of Sharia.

Lawal told the authorities that the father of Wasila, her third child, was Yahaya Mahmud, her boyfriend of 11 months, who she said had seduced her with an offer of marriage.

Mr Mahmud admitted being Lawal’s boyfriend, but swore on the Koran that he was not the father. He was discharged. Lawal was tried and convicted on the basis of her confession.

This mirrored Nigeria’s previous stoning case, that of 35-year-old Safiya Husseini, later acquitted on a legal technicality. Under Sharia’s rules of proof, witnesses are required to convict a man of adultery, while a woman may be condemned for falling pregnant. Clara Obazele, a spokeswoman for Aisha Ismail, the federal Women’s Affairs Minister, said: “This is a young woman with a child. A woman can not be pregnant without a man, so where is that man? He deserves similar punishment. It’s not fair.”

The verdict provoked protests from Lawal’s lawyers and human rights activists who have backed her case as part of a wider campaign against what they describe as the “injustices and excesses” of Sharia.

The verdict also shocked her supporters, including Ms Obazele. The federal Government has clashed with the northern states over Sharia but has yet to take concrete steps to ban it.

“We thought they were going to discharge her,” Ms Obazele said. “We’re going to appeal.”

Aliyu Musa Yawuri, Lawal’s lawyer, said that she had been tried retroactively. He said that her offence was committed before the new law came into effect, and that she would appeal.

Lawal was convicted of the Islamic crime of zina , or adultery, and sentenced to death in March. A regional appeals court gave her a two-year reprieve in June, allowing her to wean her child before the death sentence was carried out.

Her lawyers had hoped that the case would follow the precedent set by the court which quashed the sentence against Safiya Husseini in March after a worldwide appeal for clemency led by the European Union.

Lawal’s lawyers now have 30 days to appeal against the judges’ verdict, which is expected to be fought all the way up to Nigeria’s Supreme Court.

==============================

Multiculturalists are the real racists (National Post, 020820)

Mark Steyn

Last Thursday, in Sydney, the pack leader of a group of Lebanese Muslim gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years in jail. I suppose I ought to say “Lebanese-Australian” Muslim gang-rapists, since the accused were Australian citizens. But, identity-wise, the rambunctious young lads considered themselves heavy on the Lebanese, light on the Australian. During their gang rapes, the lucky lady would be told she was about to be “f—ed Leb style” and that she deserved it because she was an “Australian pig.”

But, inevitably, it’s the heavy sentence that’s “controversial.” After September 11th, Americans were advised to ask themselves, “Why do they hate us?” Now Australians need to ask themselves, “Why do they rape us?” As Monroe Reimers put it on the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald:

“As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. We need answers. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it’s time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practised with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions.”

Indeed. Many’s the time, labouring under the burden of some or other ghastly Ottawa policy, I’ve thought of pinning some gal down and sodomizing her while 14 of my pals look on and await their turn. But I fear in my case the Monroe Reimers of the world would be rather less eager to search for “root causes.” Gang rape as a legitimate expression of the campaign for social justice is a privilege reserved only unto a few.

Mr. Reimers, though, will be happy to know his view is echoed across the hemispheres. Five days before 9/11, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65% of the country’s rapes were committed by “non-Western” immigrants — a category which, in Norway, is almost wholly Muslim. A professor at the University of Oslo explained that one reason for the disproportionate Muslim share of the rape market was that in their native lands “rape is scarcely punished” because it is generally believed that “it is women who are responsible for rape.”

So Muslim immigrants to Norway should be made aware that things are a little different in Scandinavia? Not at all! Rather, the professor insisted, “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because their manner of dress would be regarded by Muslim men as inappropriate. “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.” Or to modify Queen Victoria’s wedding-night advice to her daughter: Lie back and think of Yemen.

France? Well, I can’t bring you any ethnic rape statistics from the Fifth Republic because the authorities go to great lengths not to keep any. But, even though the phenomenon of immigrant gang rape does not exist, there’s already a word for it: the “tournante” — or “take your turn.” Last year, 11 Muslim men were arrested for enjoying a grand old tournante with a 14-year old girl in a cellar.

Denmark? “Three quarters of rapes are carried out by non-Danes,” says Peter Skaarup, chairman of the People’s Party, a member of the governing coalition.

Well, you get the idea. Whether or not Muslim cultures are more prone to rape is a question we shall explore another day. What’s interesting is how easily even this most extreme manifestation of multiculturalism is subsumed within the usual pieties. Norwegian women must learn to be, in a very real sense, less “exclusionary.” Lebanese male immigrants, fleeing a war-torn wasteland and finding refuge in a land of peace, freedom and opportunity, are inevitably transformed into gang rapists by Australian racism.

After September 11th, a friend in London said to me she couldn’t stand all the America-needs-to-ask-itself stuff because she used to work at a rape crisis centre and she’d heard this blame-the-victim routine a thousand times before. America was asking for it: like those Norwegian women, it was being “provocative.” My friend thought the multiculti apologists were treating America as a metaphorical rape victim. But, even so, it comes as a surprise to realize they do exactly the same to actual rape victims. After the O.J. verdict, it was noted by some feminists that “race trumped gender.” What we’ve seen since September 11th is that multiculturalism trumps everything. Its grip on the imagination of the Western elites is unshakeable. Even President Bush, in the month after September 11th, felt obliged to line up a series of photo-ops so he could declare that “Islam is peace” while surrounded by representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization which objected, on the grounds of “ethnic and religious stereotyping,” to the prosecution of two men in Chicago for the “honour killing” of their female cousin.

On this “Islam is peace” business, Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at Goettingen University in Germany, gave a helpful speech a few months back: “Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them,” he said. “The word ‘peace,’ for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam — or ‘House of Islam’ — to the entire world. This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought.” Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar a-Salam, or “House of Peace.”

On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. The “Muslim world” — the arc stretching from North Africa through South Asia — is economically, militarily, scientifically and artistically irrelevant. But, looked at through the prism of Norwegian rape or French crime, the idea of a Dar al-Islam doesn’t sound so ridiculous. The “code of silence” that surrounds rape in tightly knit Muslim families is, so to speak, amplified by the broader “code of silence” surrounding multicultural issues in the West. If all cultures are of equal value, how do you point out any defects?

As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile white-bread cultures of Australia, Canada and Britain get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two in the morning. But, in the case of those Muslim ghettoes in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, in Copenhagen and in Manchester, multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture — the subjugation of women — combine with the worst attributes of Western culture — licence and self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of Northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes — women’s rights, gay rights — the political class turns squeamishly away.

Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India — curry, pyjamas, sitars, software engineers — but suttee was not one of them. What a pity we’re no longer capable of being “judgmental” and “discriminating.” We’re told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can’t expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it.

As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I’m not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture — rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. — is preferable to Arab culture: that’s why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu widow, we’re slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of our lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they’re scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations.

Islam For All reported the other day that, at present demographic rates, in 20 years’ time the majority of Holland’s children (the population under 18) will be Muslim. It will be the first Islamic country in western Europe since the loss of Spain. Europe is the colony now.

Or as Charles Johnson, whose excellent “Little Green Footballs” Web site turns up dozens of fascinating Islamic tidbits every day, suggested: “Maybe we should start a betting pool: Which European country will be the first to institute shari’a?”

==============================

Muslim extremism: Denmark’s had enough (National Post, 020827)

Daniel Pipes and Lars Hedegaard

A Muslim organization in Denmark announced a few days ago that a $30,000 bounty would be paid for the murder of several prominent Danish Jews, a threat that garnered wide international notice. Less well known is that this is just one problem associated with Denmark’s approximately 200,000 Muslim immigrants. The key issue is that many of them show little desire to fit into their adopted country.

For years, Danes lauded multiculturalism and insisted they had no problem with the Muslim customs — until one day they found that they did. Some major issues:

- Living on the dole. Third-World immigrants — most of them Muslims from countries such as Turkey, Somalia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Iraq — constitute 5% of the population but consume upwards of 40% of the welfare spending.

- Engaging in crime. Muslims are only 4% of Denmark’s 5.4 million people but make up a majority of the country’s convicted rapists, an especially combustible issue given that practically all the female victims are non-Muslim. Similar, if lesser, disproportions are found in other crimes.

- Self-imposed isolation. Over time, as Muslim immigrants increase in numbers, they wish to mix less with the indigenous population. A recent survey finds that only 5% of young Muslim immigrants would readily marry a Dane.

- Importing unacceptable customs. Forced marriages — promising a newborn daughter in Denmark to a male cousin in the home country, then compelling her to marry him, sometimes on pain of death — are one problem. Another is the vocal intent to kill Muslims who convert out of Islam.

- Fomenting anti-Semitism. Muslim violence threatens Denmark’s approximately 6,000 Jews, who increasingly depend on police protection. Jewish parents were told by one school principal that she could not guarantee their children’s safety and advised to send them to another institution. Anti-Israel marches have turned into anti-Jewish riots. One organization, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, openly calls on Muslims to “kill all Jews ... wherever you find them.”

- Seeking Islamic law. Muslim leaders openly declare their goal of introducing Islamic law once Denmark’s Muslim population grows large enough — a not-that remote prospect. If present trends persist, one sociologist estimates, every third inhabitant of Denmark in 40 years will be Muslim.

Other Europeans (such as the late Pim Fortuyn in Holland) have also grown alarmed about these issues, but Danes first made them the basis for a change in government.

In a momentous election last November, a centre-right coalition came to power that — for the first time since 1929 — excluded the socialists. The right broke its 72-year losing streak and won a solid parliamentary majority because it promised to handle immigration issues, the electorate’s first concern, differently from the socialists.

The next nine months did witness some fine-tuning of procedures: Immigrants now must live seven years in Denmark (rather than three) to become permanent residents; most non-refugees no longer can collect welfare cheques immediately on entering the country; and no one can bring into the country a spouse under the age of 24. The state prosecutor is considering a ban on Hizb-ut-Tahrir for its death threats against Jews.

These minor adjustments prompted howls internationally — with European and UN reports condemning Denmark for racism and “Islamophobia,” the Washington Post reporting that Muslim immigrants “face habitual discrimination,” and a London Guardian headline announcing that “Copenhagen Flirts with Fascism.”

In reality, however, the new government barely addressed the existing problems. Nor did it prevent new ones, such as the death threats against Jews, or a recent Islamic edict calling on Muslims to drive Danes out of the Nørrebro quarter of Copenhagen.

The authorities remain indulgent. The military mulls permitting Muslim soldiers in Denmark’s volunteer International Brigade to opt out of actions they don’t agree with — a privilege unique to them. Mohammed Omar Bakri, the self-proclaimed London-based “eyes, ears and mouth” of Osama bin Laden, won permission to set up a branch of his organization, Al-Muhajiroun.

Contrary to media reports, the real news from Denmark is not flirting with fascism but getting mired in inertia. A government elected specifically to deal with a set of problems has made minimal headway. Its reluctance has potentially profound implications for the West as a whole.

==============================

Media, government blamed for anti-Muslim ‘bias’ (Ottawa Citizen, 020906)

Small national poll indicates 56% feel anti-Islam slant

Noreen Majeed, a 29-year-old Montreal medical research assistant, is a Canadian Muslim who felt the sting of bigotry after the Sept. 11 attacks. She was waiting on a Montreal street last fall when a group of young white men swore at her and spit on her suitcase.

Canadian Muslims blame the media and the federal government for boosting anti-Muslim bias across the country after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Council for American-Islamic Relations Canada polled 296 Muslims across the country and said 56 per cent believe the media have grown more biased against Islam and Muslims while 69 per cent criticized Prime Minister Jean Chrétien for indifference to the Muslim community and lack of clear action to counter a wave of anti-Muslim incidents in Canada.

“There was a very well-documented, anti-Muslim hate wave that swept through Canada, and Muslims had their faith and their identify called into question (after Sept. 11),” Riad Saloojee, executive director of CAIR-CAN, said yesterday.

He said that 59.5 per cent of those surveyed said they experienced anti-Muslim incidents after Sept. 11: Mosques were defaced, Muslim children were beaten because of their faith, travellers were allegedly barred access to flights because of having common Muslim names, and police have unnecessarily intimidated Muslims by interrogating them at their workplaces.

Mr. Saloojee admitted the CAIR-CAN survey is small and cannot be considered truly scientific.

He said the Canadian media outlets perceived as being biased against Muslims were led by the National Post, which attracted complaints from 71 Muslims, primarily about its editorials and commentaries by columnists. Other Muslims also complained about bias by Global Television, and in commentaries in CanWest newspapers such as the Citizen and the Montreal Gazette. The CBC led media outlets perceived by Muslims as being fair in its treatment of Muslims.

==============================

Behind the Hate: The enemy’s problem (National Review Online, 020911)

By David Pryce-Jones

The events of September 11, you’ll remember, came out of a perfect cloudless sky, as if out of the blue, out of nowhere. The unexpectedness of this mass murdering then seemed some new kind of doom. In fact a long historical process is at work, involving the relationship of the West and the world of Islam.

For centuries now, the West and its social order has challenged other civilizations. In the face of that challenge, China, Japan, India, adopted the science and the arts, even the music, which were both the cause and the effect of Western creativity. Leaders and thinkers in Muslim countries also tried to match the West. With the possible exception of Turkey, they proved unable to do so. The reasons for this are unclear. Nobody and nothing effectively stands in the way of education, reform, experiment in building a modern social order with its own special characteristics like other peoples. Islam, it is true, offers the vision of a society based upon the Prophet Mohammed’s long ago divine revelation of the will of God. This is a sort of utopia. But other utopias and other revelations, from Christianity to Communism, have come to terms with the contradictions and conflicts inherent in reality.

In the Sixties I first began to travel in Arab countries. There was still a certain courtliness of manner, a social architecture, something of a settled life. This has all since vanished in what V. S. Naipaul calls “the steady grinding down of the old world.” Arab countries are centralized and militarized secret police states inhabited by subjects of a ruler and not by citizens. Injustice is everywhere. The big cities deteriorate into slums, and the countryside into ruin. The bonus of oil wealth ebbs away in corruption and inequality. Between them, dictators like Gamal Abdul Nasser, Saddam Hussein, and so many more, have put an end to settled life. The cruelty and waste are impossibly sad.

Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the hijackers have a mindset conditioned by this general failure, and they speak for millions of Muslims from Algeria to Pakistan and beyond. The only solution they envisage to the despair and envy from which they are suffering is at last to build the model of the Islamic society laid down long ago. Like all utopian hopes, this is irrational, and cannot be programmed. Incapable of realization, the proposed solution is only an aggravation of the condition.

That would be bad enough in itself, though still open to analysis. But the bin Ladens and other Islamists shut off debate through the conviction that their utopia could indeed by realized if the West did not stand in the way. Unable to explain why the West would want to do anything so stupid and pointless, they go on to maintain that the West consists of Christians or Jews who have a plot to destroy Islam and occupy its lands and generally behave like a Great Satan. However contorted or far-fetched, this alibi serves the purpose of allowing Muslims to blame the West for their own failures, and to present themselves as innocent and powerless victims.

What do you do to people who victimize you from a position of unmerited strength? Of course you kill them. I have no doubt that the September 11 terrorists went to their deaths without fear and in the certainty that they were somehow leveling a long score. Their hatred fed on the sense of inferiority. They couldn’t acquire the technological skills to make the planes, but they could at least have revenge by learning to fly them. I have no doubt that the Palestinian suicide bombers also believe fearlessly, even joyfully, that they have hit upon the right way to settle a long score with Israelis.

Terror of the kind carries the illusion of strength, while actually expressing weakness. Years will have to pass before Muslims are able to climb out of the political and social quagmire which they have made for themselves. In that time, there are likely to be attempts at other mass attacks like September 11. But the fact of Western success does not bring with it any responsibility for Muslim failure. They have to sort that out, and they will too, because it’s a truth as old as mankind that hate ends up destroying the hater.

— David Pryce-Jones is an NR senior editor whose books include The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.

==============================

The West and the Rest: On terrorism and globalization (National Review Online, 020923)

By Roger Scruton

EDITOR’S NOTE: This begins a series of excerpts from Roger Scruton’s new book The West and the Rest, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

It is thanks to Western prosperity, Western legal systems, Western forms of banking, and Western communications that human initiatives now reach so easily across frontiers to affect the lives and aspirations of people all over the globe. However, Western civilization depends on an idea of citizenship that is not global at all, but rooted in territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty. By contrast, Islam, which has been until recently remote from the Western world and without the ability to project its message, is founded on an ideal of godliness which is entirely global in its significance, and which regards territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty as compromises with no intrinsic legitimacy of their own. Although there have been attempts to manufacture nationalisms both appropriate to the Islamic temperament and conducive to a legitimate political order, they have fragmented under the impact of sectarian or tribal allegiances, usually giving way to military dictatorship or one-man, one-family, or one-party tyranny. Islam itself remains, in the hearts of those who live under these tyrannies, a permanent call to a higher life, and a reminder that power and corruption will rule in this world until the reign established by the Prophet is restored.

Terrorism has a long history in the Islamic countries, being the usual recourse of those who reject the legitimacy of the prevailing sovereign power. Until recently, however, it modeled itself on the Assassins, and took powerful or symbolic individuals as its targets. In 19th-century Russia, terrorism took a new and more destructive form, involving indiscriminate bombings and acts of destruction which, according to one estimate, claimed 17,000 victims between 1894 and 1917. The Russian methods finally led to a successful revolution, and have been adopted by the postwar nationalist movements in Western Europe, notably by the IRA and ETA, as well as by the urban revolutionaries of the 1960s in Italy, France, and Germany, by the PLO, and by the left-wing insurgents in Latin America. Those groups have formed mutually supportive networks for the exchange of training and expertise, and it is due to the globalizing process that these networks are available also to the Islamist extremists.

Nevertheless, Islamist terrorism is a distinct development in two ways. Islamism is not a nationalist movement, still less a bid to establish a new kind of secular state. It rejects the modern state and its secular law in the name of a “brotherhood” that reaches secretly to all Muslim hearts, uniting them against the infidel. And because its purpose is religious rather than political, the goal is incapable of realization. The Muslim Brotherhood failed even to change the political order of Egypt, let alone to establish itself as a model of Koranic government throughout the Muslim world. Where Islamists succeed in gaining power — as in Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan — the result is not the reign of peace and piety promised by the Prophet, but murder and persecution on a scale matched in our time only by the Nazis and the Communists. The Islamist, like the Russian nihilist, is an exile in this world; and when he succeeds in obtaining power over his fellow human beings, it is in order to punish them for being human.

Globalization does not mean merely the expansion of communications, contacts, and trade around the globe. It means the transfer of social, economic, political, and juridical power to global organizations, by which I mean organizations that are located in no particular sovereign jurisdiction, and governed by no particular territorial law. The growth of such organizations is, in my view, a regrettable by-product of our addiction to freedom. Whether in the form of multinational corporations, international courts, or transnational legislatures, these organizations pose a new kind of threat to the only form of sovereignty that has brought lasting (albeit local) peace to our planet. And when terrorism too becomes globalized, the threat is amplified a hundred-fold.

With al Qaeda, therefore, we encounter the real impact of globalization on the Islamic revival. To belong to this “base” is to accept no territory as home, and no human law as authoritative. It is to commit oneself to a state of permanent exile, while at the same time resolving to carry out God’s work of punishment. But the techniques and infrastructure on which al Qaeda depends are the gifts of the new global institutions. It is Wall Street and Zurich that produced the network of international finance that enables Osama bin Laden to conceal his wealth and to deploy it anywhere in the world. It is Western enterprise with its multinational outreach that produced the technology that bin Laden has exploited so effectively against us. And it is Western science that developed the weapons of mass destruction he would dearly like to obtain. His wealth, too, would be inconceivable without the vast oil revenues brought to Saudi Arabia from the West, there to precipitate the building boom from which his father profited. And this very building boom, fueled by a population explosion that is itself the result of global trade, is a symbol of the West and its outreach. The appearance of Arabia has been permanently altered by it — and altered, in the feelings of many Muslims, for the worse. Concrete high-rises dwarf the minarets, domestic alleyways give way to pretentious boulevards or jerry-built slums, and the hideous, unfriendly style of international modernism overlays and extinguishes the delicate fabric of the Muslim city.

It may seem quixotic to emphasize the role of architecture in the present conflict. But we should remember Mohammed Atta’s nostalgia for the old town of Aleppo and reflect on what has happened to the face of the Middle East under the impact of Western architectural norms, which have a symbolic significance at least equal to that of Western dress and Western manners. Architectural modernism was introduced with fanfares of globalist propaganda by the Bauhaus and by Le Corbusier, who envisaged their new style of architecture as both the symbol and the instrument of a radical break with the past. This architecture was conceived in the spirit of detachment from place and history and home. It was “the international style,” a gesture against the nation-state and the homeland, an attempt to remake the surface of the earth as a single uniform habitat from which differences and boundaries would finally disappear.

In the West, where democratic procedures and legal norms give power to the citizen, the impact of international modernism has here and there been controlled and limited. Although the damage has been great, many cities retain their local character, and villages hold out against the tide. The great exception — Germany — remains committed to architectural modernism as a symbol and instrument of its cultural self-repudiation. And the modern German city can be seen as part of the long sad coda of Germany’s defeat — the final transformation of a nation that does not dare to show its face without the benefit of plastic surgery. Elsewhere in Europe — notably in Italy, France, and Spain — the international style has been resisted; churches dominate the skyline and streets are still bordered by humane facades. A conscious effort has been made to retain the character of both town and country, in the knowledge that they define an experience of the homeland, and that the homeland is the thing to which the citizen’s loyalty is owed.

Americans have been careless of their cities, with the result that no one wants to live in them. But their suburbs radiate homeliness and comfort, and the country itself lies somewhere out there along the interstate, a still wild, open frontier that belongs to all of us, and we to it. Against the odds America has retained the aspect and the atmosphere of home.

In the Middle East, however, where land is disposed of by the governing power, and planning regulations are either non-existent or ignored, the landscape and cityscape have been mutilated beyond recognition. It was Le Corbusier who showed the way. Having failed to persuade the French authorities to adopt his plan to bulldoze Paris north of the Seine and replace it with militarized towers of glass, Le Corbusier worked on successive French governments, including the Vichy regime, to implement his insolent plan to raze the old city of Algiers, capital of Algeria, which was then a French colony. He succeeded at last, and after the war the bulldozers moved in, with catastrophic results. Thanks to the enormous profits that accrue to the modernist ways of building, Le Corbusier became a hero of the architectural establishment, and his repulsive plan for this once beautiful city is now illustrated in all the standard Western textbooks of architecture.

Le Corbusier showed the European intelligentsia how the inferior people of North Africa should be treated: such, surely, was Atta’s perception. Since Le Corbusier’s time, the rush of speculative building — most of it illegal and on land that is officially “publicly owned,” and fueled by the demographic explosion — has entirely transformed the visual aspect and daily rhythm of the Middle Eastern cities. Whatever hope there might have been that people would come to define their loyalties in terms of territory rather than faith has been obliterated by the impact of Western technology, which seems to believe in neither. And if we wish to understand in full the resentment of Palestinians towards Israeli settlements on the West Bank, we should not neglect the visual damage that these settlements have caused, introducing modernist styles and materials, sweeping roadways, and ubiquitous light pollution into a landscape that had worn its biblical aspect for centuries, with star-spangled nights above stone-built villages and historic cities like Jenin.

As the examples of bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the September 11 terrorists demonstrate, Islamism is not a cry of distress from the “wretched of the earth.” It is an implacable summons to war, issued by globetrotting middle-class Muslims, many of them extremely wealthy, and most of them sufficiently well versed in Western civilization and its benefits to be able to exploit the modern world to the full. These Muslims are products of the globalizing process, and Western civilization has so amplified their message that it travels with them around the world.

It may be hard to sympathize with these spoiled and self-indulgent advocates of violence. But it is not hard to sympathize with the feelings upon which they depend for their following. Globalization, in the eyes of its advocates, means free trade, increased prosperity, and the steady erosion of despotic regimes by the growing demand for freedom. In the eyes of its critics, however, it means the loss of sovereignty, together with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are exposed to them. In the United States, where pornography is protected as free speech, people are able to accept that this assault on human dignity is the price we must pay for freedoms too precious to relinquish. But if you have not known those freedoms, and believe in any case that happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God’s law, the impact of pornography is devastating. No less devastating, for pious Muslims, are what they see as the indecent clothes and behavior of young women in the West — clothes and behavior that are in no way modified when those women travel on business or as tourists to Muslim countries, there to presume on a toleration which they are willing to reciprocate but do little or nothing to earn.

People in the West live in a public space in which each person is surrounded and protected by his rights, and where all behavior that poses no obvious physical threat is permitted. But people in Muslim countries live in a space that is shared but private, where nobody is shielded by his rights from communal judgment, and where communal judgment is experienced as the judgment of God. Western habits, Western morals, Western art, music, and television are seen not as freedoms but as temptations. And the normal response to temptation is either to give in to it, or to punish those who offer it. Many Muslim muhajiroun do both. Like Atta, they drink, gamble, and fornicate in the flesh-pots of America, while secretly plotting revenge against the thing that made these indulgences possible.

Globalization, therefore, offers militant Islam the opportunity that it has lacked since the Ottoman retreat from central Europe. It both concentrates the resolve of the believer and offers him a sword with which to prosecute God’s will. Muslim states do not have the loyalty of their people, who are not citizens but subjects, contemptuous (for the most part) of their rulers. Hence, Muslim states have not recently posed a threat to the West. If they seem to do so, it is only because they form the shield around some crazy tyrant, whose power reaches no further than his weapons. Globalization, however, has brought into being a true Islamic umma, which identifies itself across borders in terms of a global form of legitimacy, and which attaches itself like a parasite to global institutions and techniques that are the by-products of Western democracy. This new form of globalized Islam is undeniably threatening, since it satisfies a hunger for membership that globalization itself has created. It calls on the old nostalgia of the muhajir, and directs it not at some local usurper but at God’s enemies, wherever they are.

==============================

Not Peace-Loving, After All: Is Islam itself a threat? (National Review Online, 020923)

Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith by Robert Spencer (Encounter, $24.95) 170 pages.

Most Americans have a benignly positive attitude toward religion, one that holds faith to be a good thing for the commonweal, regardless of sectarian particulars. Norman Rockwell’s famous “Freedom of Worship” painting captures this nicely, while Eisenhower’s remark — “I believe every American should have a religious faith, and I don’t care what it is” — does so a little more clumsily. That tolerant, pro-religion view has served America well over time, but one cannot help wondering if our civic piety, allied with political correctness, is blinding us to some hard questions about Islam — questions upon which the survival of our civilization depends.

I don’t know many non-Muslims who believe President Bush’s politically necessary but theologically nonsensical proclamation that, “Islam means peace.” But there are many more who take comfort in the belief that the threat to America comes not from Islam itself, but from an extremist form of the religion espoused by terrorists and their small but vocal band of supporters. That’s certainly the line taken by the mainstream media, who seem so afraid of sparking American bigotry against Muslim citizens that they have largely resisted critical analysis of Islamic writings, practice, and history.

What if they are wrong? What if the threat is not extremist Islam, but Islam itself? That’s the view set out by author Robert Spencer in his new book, Islam Unveiled, a relatively short, plainspoken analysis of the Islamic faith and the challenge it poses to pluralist democracy. Warns Spencer, “The culture of tolerance threatens to render the West incapable of drawing reasonable distinctions. The general reluctance to criticize any non-Christian religion and the almost universal public ignorance about Islam make for a lethal mix.”

This is a deeply unsettling little volume, because it offers scant hope that the West can live at peace with Islam unless the religion changes radically, and even less hope that that is possible. Still, the questions Islam Unveiled poses and the answers it provides are hard to dismiss, and given the urgency of the times, necessary to ask. As Spencer writes, “This is not in order to incite thugs to attack Muslims on the street, but to look squarely at what the West is up against.”

If Spencer is right, the West faces a primitive, violent, and fiercely chauvinistic religion whose followers, to the extent that they are pious adherents to its teachings, cannot be reasoned with, only resisted. Islam is at its core inimical to democracy and human rights as we in the West understand them. To expect Muslims to drop their belligerence toward the West, which has existed since Islam’s founding in the 7th century, is to expect them to jettison core values of their faith — something for which there is no precedent in Islamic history.

The Koran, writes Spencer, is more central to the Islamic faith than the Bible is to Christianity. Muslims believe it was revealed directly from God to the Prophet Muhammad. A pious Muslim may consult an imam or spiritual leader for guidance, but he will also read the Koran himself. He will find there many divine instructions to make constant war on the infidel, who is only to be given the choice of conversion, slave-like subjugation (in historian Bat Yeor’s word, dhimmitude) — or death. And throughout Islamic history, that’s exactly how Muslim societies have behaved toward non-Muslims, who are by the very fact of their unbelief not considered innocents in the eternal, divinely mandated conflict.

Undeniably, Christians have in the past committed many despicable acts in the name of God, but they did so in violation of scriptural teaching, not in fulfillment of it, as in Islam. Though the Bible testifies to violence committed at the command of God, and they the few if any Christians or Jews today believe that this is how God expects man to live today. “Islam, by contrast, generally rejects the idea of a historical progression in revelation, and allows little latitude for allegorical interpretation of the martial verses in the Qu’ran,” Spencer writes. “A book [that claims] literal perfection tends to resist any interpretation that diminishes the literal truthfulness of any of its statements.”

This literalism has profound consequences for the way Muslims live. Unlike in Christianity, there is no scriptural mandate for separation of church and state in Islam, making secular democracy an alien and hostile concept. Women have few rights over and against their husbands, who may legally beat them, and men in general. (Spencer, quoting from Islamic sources, demonstrates that Muhammad, considered the ideal man for all time, treated women cruelly by contemporary Western standards.) Enslaving infidels and raping infidel women are justified under Koranic law (and still occur in some Muslim lands). Grotesque punishments for crimes — beheadings and the like — are not medieval holdovers, writes Spencer; “On the contrary, they will forever be part of authentic Islam as long as the Qur’an is revered as the perfect Word of Allah.”

Spencer does not believe that Islam can be tamed. While Muslims in the West live in peace, prosperity and religious liberty, Christians and other non-Muslims are persecuted, sometimes unto death, throughout the Muslim world today. Turkey is the only Muslim country that could be called democratic, and that’s a stretch; it’s example shows that secularist values can only be imposed on Islamic societies by force, and will therefore remain tenuous. Because Islam demands death for heretics, moderate Muslims will always risk their lives by offering more liberal interpretations of their faith.

And most crucially, in his view, Islam cannot be other than a religion of violence. “Of course, most Muslims will never be terrorists. The problem is that for all its schisms, sects, and multiplicity of voices, Islam’s violent elements are rooted in its central texts,” Spencer writes. His final verdict on Islam is sobering, particularly when one considers the rapidly increasing Islamic presence in Europe, the cradle of Western civilization: “It would be too pessimistic to say that there are no peaceful strains of Islam, but it would be imprudent to ignore the fact that deeply imbedded in the central documents of the religion is an all-encompassing vision of a theocratic state that is fundamentally different from and opposed to the post-Enlightenment Christian values of the West.”

To be sure, Spencer’s despairing view is not shared by many scholars, even one as reliably critical of radical Islam as Daniel Pipes. In his recent Militant Islam Reaches America, Pipes emphatically denies that radical Islam is the same thing as traditional Islam. He insists that drawing the distinction and encouraging moderates within Islamic societies is an imperative for the West, though he offers scant evidence for this conclusion. And he admits that Muslim moderates are “weak, divided, intimidated and generally ineffectual. Indeed, the prospects for Muslim revitalization have rarely looked dimmer than at this moment... .” One gets the feeling that Pipes would rather light a candle for the unlikely hope of a peaceful revolution within Islam, not because the alternative — one-sixth of humanity, many of whom are already living among us, as implacable enemy of the West — is unrealistic, but because it is unthinkable.

“Nowadays, nothing seems less tolerated than what people call pessimism — and which is often in fact just realism,” says Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Is Islam Unveiled pessimism, or realism? We can only know for sure if we have a serious public discussion of the issues Spencer raises in this important (but unsatisfyingly brief) book — issues that stand to be ignored by the media, for fear of trading in anti-Muslim bigotry. If Islam Unveiled, which is published by Encounter Books, Peter Collier’s imprint, becomes the bestseller it deserves to be, it will be through talk radio and word of mouth by Americans who believe that post-9/11, America cannot afford the moral disarmament of indulging in multicultural platitudes.

Spencer may be wrong — I doubt it, but I’d like to hear a convincing refutation of his arguments — but he is asking questions that few others have the courage to. And until we hear from this supposed vast silent majority of peace-loving Muslims, the answers Spencer gives go a long way to explain the hatred, violence, backwardness, and fanaticism endemic to the Islamic world.

==============================

The Historic Roots of Islamism: Bat Yeor’s latest (National Review Online, 020930)

By Paul Giniewski

Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide by Bat Yeor (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Presses, 2002) Hardcover: ($60); paperback: ($19.95)

Historian Bat Yeor is a specialist on relations between Islam and the non-Muslim world and on their peoples and religions. We are already indebted to her for numerous scholarly articles and several books on dhimmitude (a term which she practically invented and has popularized in historical and political writing on the subject). Dhimmitude encompasses an exclusive system of protection, condescension, discrimination, exclusion, and persecution to which Christians and Jews, in particular, were subjected after being conquered by Muslims from the mid-seventh century onwards, if they refused to renounce their faith.

Islam and Dhimmitude returns to the major themes of her previous works, both complementing and greatly refining the analysis and documentation. The book’s subtitle, “Where Civilizations Collide,” reminds us its subject has never been more relevant.

Since the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001, and the start of the Afghan war, journalists and politicians have often spoken of a collision or war of civilizations, following Professor Samuel Huntington’s hypothesis. Was that collision determined by the traditional relations between Islam and infidel non-Muslims? Both the historical roots of the question — and the answer — can be found in Bat Yeor’s works. The philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote in the preface to her previous book that “the jihad is an institution, not an event.” This new volume examines that “institution” and links it to dhimmitude, which also was to become institutionalized. This study covers a period of 14 centuries — from the rise of Islam and through the resurgence of dhimmitude in contemporary conflicts, such as the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Palestinian intifadas.

THE SHARIA: ADOPTED OR ADAPTED?

The author shows how, from the birth of Islam, the submission of the infidels led to the dispossession of their lands and to their economic exploitation through protection-ransom relationships. Freedom of worship was restricted for Jews and Christians, and Christian proselytizing was prohibited. Individuals were subjected to degrading treatment and their human liberties limited. Though Europe’s advances in the East brought hope and protection to non-Muslims (the dhimmis), the rise of Arab nationalism — and the achievement of independence by Muslim states — was to mark a return of repressive regimes, not only in countries where the sharia is strictly applied (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan) but in countries which have “adapted,” if not completely adopted, it (Egypt, Iraq, and the autonomous Palestinian Authority).

The chapters dealing with Islamic anti-Zionism detail this adaptation and clarify the present phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They elucidate both the theological foundations, and the adulterated rewriting of history that underpins the campaign of hatred and incrimination against Israel, Zionism, the Jews, and all those whom Islamism perceives as enemies. These chapters further establish how anti-Zionism and third-worldism have collaborated and are still collaborating, as well as examining the relationship between certain Christian and Islamic trends: “Christian antisemitism has denied to the Jews historic rights by the doctrine of the fallen deicide people. For Islam, this same refusal results from a historical negationism which Islamizes all Jewish and Christian biblical history.” Curiously enough, certain Christians continue to espouse this doctrine, little understanding that they are shooting themselves in the foot: “neither the Vatican nor the World Council of Churches has officially condemned anti-Zionism as a criminal ideology advocating the elimination of the State of Israel. European policy is automatically pro-Arab, pro-Islamic, and consequently anti-Christian.”

Palestinianism is often an excuse for the politicized reevaluation of history. Thus, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, Yasser Arafat described Ottoman Palestine in the late 19th century as a “verdant land,” enjoying “freedom of worship” and populated by Arabs dynamically developing a culture which had existed over millennia. The accounts of contemporary travelers depict a very different reality: a neglected, semi-desert land — dominated by “the desolation which the Turkish government maintains in the countries still under its rule” — which is scarcely cultivated, inhabited by a “wretched” population, with “ruins everywhere.” Palestianism often accepts myths as fact, using them as the foundation for political claims.

WHAT USE IS THE PAST?

Nearly 17 pages of documents complement the historical account. Clearly, this is a work that can’t be ignored. Practically every page and each of the numerous — and often previously unpublished — citations from original sources contain thoughtful insights germane to what is happening today in Gaza and the West Bank, in Kabul, in Pakistan, in Sudan, in Nigeria, and in Indonesia. Above all, it provides a clear vision of what the Islamists believe and project — a premonition of what awaits us.

In a sense, Bat Yeor’s book is eminently political. It explains the need to modernize Islam, and shows why the West must reevaluate the real dangers that confront it. Moreover, the author does not stop at exhortations but suggests concrete attitudes the United Nations should take within the framework of the existing non-governmental organizations in the interreligious dialogue — a real program of action for the start of the millennium. The author concludes, however, on a pessimistic note: With the wave of anti-Zionist disinformation that has engulfed the media, she observes, “Europe seems to be remembering its past only to repeat it.”

— Paul Giniewski, a French journalist and writer, is the author of 30 books (including translations), and a specialist on the Arab-Israeli conflict. His latest work examined Christian antijudaism (La Mutation: L’Antijudaïsme).

==============================

Author’s ‘insult’ gets ruling today (Washington Times, 021022)

By Marc Burleigh

A Paris court will rule today whether best-selling French author Michel Houellebecq should be punished for calling Islam “the dumbest religion.”

Mr. Houellebecq, 44, faces up to 18 months in prison and a $70,000 fine if found guilty of both charges against him: racial insult and inciting racial hatred.

Officials from the main mosques in Paris and Lyon filed a lawsuit after the novelist’s interview with French literary magazine Lire, also a defendant in the case.

“The dumbest religion, after all, is Islam,” Mr. Houellebecq said in the interview. “When you read the Koran, you’re shattered. The Bible at least is beautifully written because the Jews have a heck of a literary talent.”

Mr. Houellebecq also told the interviewer that he felt Islam was “a dangerous religion right from the start.”

The comments touched a nerve in France’s Muslim community of 5 million, which says it is a victim of a Western backlash since the September 11 attacks in the United States last year.

Other writers have come to Mr. Houellebecq’s defense, saying that punishing the author for his opinion is tantamount to censure.

His most high-profile defender was British author Salman Rushdie, who was targeted for death by an Iranian religious ruling for reputed blasphemy in his 1988 satirical novel, “The Satanic Verses.”

In an article this month in the French newspaper Liberation and in The Washington Post, Mr. Rushdie said a guilty verdict for Mr. Houellebecq would be a blow to free speech.

He said “thin-skinned guardians of Islamic sanctities” were too quick to target writers and called the charges against the French author “ridiculously slight.”

“If an individual in a free society no longer has the right to say openly that he prefers one book to another, then that society no longer has the right to call itself free,” Mr. Rushdie wrote.

At a hearing on Sept. 17 — during which even the state prosecutor recommended that the judge hand down an acquittal — a typically dour Mr. Houellebecq ridiculed the charges against him.

“The facts of the accusation are being presented with grand airs. You’d think the whole world had been waiting to hear what I had to say. But there was no shock wave,” he said.

He added that his comments about Islam had been spoken with “disdain, not hate.”

Mr. Houellebecq’s latest novel, “Platform,” has been praised by critics worldwide. It seemingly predicted last week’s bomb attack, blamed on Islamic terrorists, on an Indonesian nightclub that killed at least 187 persons.

In the book, the main character — also called Michel — loses his girlfriend when an explosive rips apart an Asian nightclub called the Crazy Lips, resulting in “the deadliest attack ever in Asia.”

Mr. Houellebecq is not the only writer who has landed in a French court for making comments about Islam.

Another case is ongoing against Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who is accused by French human rights groups of inciting racial hatred by saying in her book “The Rage and the Pride” that Muslims “multiply like rats.”

==============================

Italian author slams Islam’s ‘hate’ for West (Washington Times, 021023)

The Islamic world is engaged in a cultural war with the West and the worst is still to come, Italian author Oriana Fallaci told a receptive Washington audience last night.

Spinning off a long list of Islamic countries, she told a group of about 80 people: “The hate for the West swells like a fire fed by the wind.

“The clash between us and them is not a military one. It is a cultural one, a religious one, and the worst is still to come,” she continued in what she said was her first public address in more than a decade.

Tight security was in place for the speech at the American Enterprise Institute after death threats were issued against her and her attorney as a result of her latest book, “The Rage and the Pride,” which contains harsh criticism of Muslims.

The book, which she called a “sermon” to Europe, was written in New York in the two weeks after September 11 as the smoke and dust from the destruction of the World Trade Center blanketed the city.

Miss Fallaci contends in the angry polemic that the only difference between “moderate Islam” and “radical Islam” is the length of their beards.

She said last night that critics have attempted to ban the book or have her arrested in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. The 72-year-old author described these efforts as “intellectual terrorism.”

Miss Fallaci, who lives in New York and is afflicted with cancer, also criticizes Western culture for its loose morals and licentiousness.

“Freedom cannot exist without discipline, self-discipline, and rights cannot exist without duties. Those who do not observe their duties do not deserve their rights,” she said.

In her prime, Miss Fallaci was famed as a belligerent journalist and argumentative interviewer, who had unprecedented access to the world’s most reclusive and wary leaders.

A partisan in the Italian resistance in World War II and a lifelong leftist, she once became so disgusted while interviewing Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that she ripped off her head scarf and threw it in his face.

The act of defiance was considered an unpardonable sin in the ayatollah’s Iran.

“The Rage and the Pride,” originally published in an Italian newspaper and then as a book, has sold more than 1 million copies in Italy and has been popular in Germany and France as well. All three nations have large Muslim immigrant populations.

Variously praised as the painful truth or decried as a “bigoted, anti-Muslim screed,” Miss Fallaci’s book is under threat of judicial action in France for inciting racial hatred.

A lawsuit brought by the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People, a Muslim human rights group, is demanding that the book be banned in France.

In a ruling yesterday that may affect her case, a French court acquitted best-selling French author Michel Houellebecq of charges of racial insult and inciting racial hatred for calling Islam the “dumbest religion.”

The Paris court threw out the case brought by officials from the main mosques in Paris and the central-eastern city of Lyon and other Muslim groups after an interview Mr. Houellebecq gave to the French literary magazine Lire.

“The dumbest religion, after all, is Islam,” he told the magazine. “When you read the Koran, you’re shattered. The Bible at least is beautifully written because the Jews have a heck of a literary talent.”

While the court ruled that the 44-year-old author’s comments were “without a doubt characterized by neither a particularly noble outlook nor by the subtlety of their phrasing,” they did not constitute a punishable offense.

While Mr. Houellebecq indeed had expressed hatred for Islam as a religion, the court said, he had not expressed hatred for Muslims, nor did he encourage others to share his views or discriminate against Muslims.

Miss Fallaci, in her first book in more than 10 years, said she was prompted to write by demonstrations throughout the Muslim world and in pockets of Europe celebrating the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Her anger, based on years of reporting in Muslim countries, is evident. Her detractors call the work an incitement to kill Muslims.

Unrepentant, Miss Fallaci calls the downing of the Twin Towers an act of cultural war and says the superior Western civilization must stand up and defeat Islam.

“War you wanted, war you want? Good. As far as I am concerned, war it is and war it will be. Until the last breath,” she writes.

==============================

Not Exactly Tocquevillian: Electoral democracy in Muslim world (National Review Online, 021028)

By Amir Taheri

By most accounts, this month’s parliamentary elections in Morocco were reasonably clean. There were few signs of the dirty tricks that had marked almost every election since the kingdom regained independence in the 1950s. Nevertheless, a chorus of criticism can now be heard. We are told, for instance, that the turnout was the lowest ever — even though it was equal to those of the British general election of 2001 and the American presidential election of 2000.

The real question, however, is whether this election can have any real impact on the composition of the ruling elite — and on the policies it has followed in the past five decades.

For some 150 years, many Muslim intellectuals and rulers have tried to borrow aspects of the Western political experience. They have experimented with many Western ideas: nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and, more recently, religious fundamentalism. In every case, the result has been disappointing; in some cases, it’s been tragic.

The latest borrowed Western idea is electoralism. Holding elections has become a la mode in the Muslim world. It makes the Americans and the Europeans happy, because they can delude themselves that their political model is being emulated in a civilization that had been a rival for 1,000 years. It also gives local rulers a veneer of legitimacy that most lack.

Of the 53 Muslim states, 50 have held some form of elections in the past 10 years. A generation ago, fewer than a dozen held any elections. On the surface, therefore, elections have become the norm in the Muslim world. But the problem is that in most cases elections are held only to confirm the status of those in power, and to offer a blank check for their policies.

In only four Muslim countries have the elections of the past decade resulted in changes of government. And even then, the changes took place within a narrow ruling elite.

In Bangladesh, elections serve as a mechanism for alternation between two lady prime ministers: Hasina Wajed, daughter of the nation’s martyred founder, Mujibur Rahman; and Khaleda Zia, widow of the assassinated Gen. Zia ul-Rahman. (Gen. ul-Rahman served as president in the 1970s.)

In Pakistan, power seesawed between Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, under the watchful eye of the military — who ended up seizing power for themselves in 1999.

In Turkey, one unstable coalition government has replaced another. But whenever there was a risk of meaningful change, for example by an Islamist-led coalition, the army intervened to preserve the status quo.

One election has also led to a very partial change of government in Indonesia, after Suharto’s downfall.

Otherwise, elections have largely served to glorify and prolong the status quo — regimes dominated by small power groups, or often a single man. The notorious 99.99% majorities, once common throughout the Third World, are now found only in Muslim countries.

The Muslim intellectuals and rulers who borrowed Western ideas often ended up discrediting them. In Iran, communists fought under the banner of mullahs led by Khomeini. In Iraq, communists became henchmen for Saddam Hussein. Self-styled nationalists in many Muslim countries did not hesitate to betray their nations to maintain their hold on power. The self-styled liberals saw capitalism as an excuse for self-enrichment through corruption.

Many Muslim intellectuals were obsessed with the idea of revolution — dreaming of red flags, guillotines, and fiery speeches before cheering masses. They ended up praising as revolution every military coup carried out by semi-literate army officers — even those whose leaders quickly became despots.

The discrediting of so many Western ideas has created a dangerous vacuum, especially because the Muslim world, mentally frozen for the past 400 years, has been unable to develop any serious political vision of its own. Without an organizing principle around which a normal political system might be built, these countries have essentially been left with a choice between despotism and chaos.

The last such organizing principle is electoral democracy. Sadly, that, too, is being discredited.

During the past decade, this writer has witnessed or indirectly followed more than 30 elections in the Muslim world. While a few were reasonably clean, none reached the level of a genuine democratic exercise. This is because those organizing the elections failed to realize that while you can’t have democracy without elections, you most definitely can have elections without democracy.

In the same vein, while there is no communism without a one-party state, there can be a one-party state without communism. While there is no revolution without a lot of killing, there can be a lot of killing without a revolution.

It’s all too easy to ape the form and ignore the content.

Not long ago this writer observed an election in an Arab country that shall remain unnamed. At one polling station, he asked to see the list of candidates. The list that was duly produced was scrupulously complete: It included not only the names of the candidates but also the number of votes each had won. And all that, 24 hours before anyone had voted.

In another Arab state, the government forced thousands of Sudanese immigrant workers to adopt its nationality so that their votes could prevent the native voters from winning an election.

Poor nationalism, poor socialism, poor communism, poor liberalism — and soon, maybe, poor electoral democracy.

Is there something in our soil and air that kills all foreign plants?

— Amir Taheri is editor of the French quarterly Politique Internationale

==============================

The supreme lesson of the sniper case (National Post, 021026)

David Frum

WASHINGTON - A gunman named Muhammad has terrorized the Washington area for weeks. He was a follower of Louis Farrakhan and joined the security detail at the Million Man March in Washington in 1996. He had expressed admiration for the 9/11 terrorists and violent hatred for the infidel United States. So: Could this murderous rampage have anything to do with, um, Islamic terror? If you have been watching television you already know the answer: Naaaah.

Sometimes it seems that the single most important prerequisite for a successful media career is a talent for ignoring the obvious. Every interviewer on television congratulates himself or herself on “asking the tough questions.” But the questions that most urgently need to be answered are the easy questions: Who are John Muhammad and John Malvo? What was their relationship? What was their background?

The police have been very quick to reassure the public that John Muhammad did not take orders from al-Qaeda. Unlike the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and the dirty-nuke bomber, Jose Padilla, Muhammad seems to have been acting for motives and purposes of his own: his own disappointments and resentments, his own greed and rage, and quite possibly his own weird personal dynamic with his “stepson.” In other words, Muhammad was not a Muslim who became a killer. He was a killer who became a Muslim.

This reassurance, however, is no reassurance at all. It raises what may be the single most important issue in the next phase of the war on terror: Is radical Islam becoming what black nationalism and communism and fascism each were in their day — the ideology of choice for psychopaths with a murderous grievance against the world?

Disturbed personalities can be found in every society and in every culture. In the West, they tend to be drawn to the animal-rights movement, to anti-globalization, and to radical environmentalism. But none of these movements looks very much like a threat to the existing order of society, especially not compared to al-Qaeda or Hezbollah. No wonder that at this April’s big anti-globalization march in Washington, the anti-Nike protesters wore Palestinian keffiyehs. No wonder that the star attraction at the anti-Iraq-war march in Madrid last month were two young European women dressed in suicide-bomber bikinis. There was an undercurrent of effeteness and silliness about the protests of the 1990s — all those ridiculous papier mâché puppets! Compared to that, from the point of view of the radically alienated, radical Islam is the real thing.

So what can we do to protect ourselves?

One lesson taught by the snipers is the comparative futility of what we now call “homeland security”: measures to improve the defence of aircraft, refineries, nuclear reactors and other potential targets. Homeland security protects things — and terrorists target people.

Better to continue to demand better police and intelligence work. The Patriot Act of 2001 gave the FBI, at long last, authority to send agents to listen to the sermons preached in mosques and to read the postings on extremist Web sites — and that will help. Ultimately, though, the police depend for their information on the help of alert citizens. It was good detective work that identified John Muhammad and John Malvo as the killers — it was a tip from a motorist that actually turned them in.

And this is the supreme lesson of the sniper case: It is the North American Muslim community that must be the first line of defence against Islamic terror.

In September, Assistant Attorney General Larry Thompson thanked the Muslim community of western New York for turning in six Buffalo men of Yemeni origin who had undergone training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and who were allegedly plotting terrorist attacks inside the United States. This patriotic act apparently split the area’s Yemeni immigrant community. The imam of the mosque accused the police of harassment, and passed the hat around his not-very-affluent membership to raise $700,000 bail. The Pakistani newspaper, The Dawn, quoted one unnamed mosque member’s excuse for the arrested men: “These men were looking for adventure and thought it was exciting to visit an al-Qaeda camp and listen to their leaders. They never wanted to commit an act of terrorism. They love America.” Uh-huh.

It’s been rightly said that the war on terror is not a war between the West and Islam — it is a civil war within Islam about the future of the Islamic world. The writer Christopher Hitchens has termed Islamic extremists “Islamo-fascists” and that term is taxonomically exact. Just as European fascism sought to beat back democracy and liberty in the 20th century by invoking a medieval past that never was, so now do the Islamic fascists of al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and their many sympathizers invoke the myths of ancient Arabia against democratization and westernizatoin in the 21st.

The Muslim communities of the West are one of the most decisive theatres of this civil war. And the case of John Muhammad reminds us that in this theatre, our victory is far from won.

==============================

The Enemy Within: Asking tough questions (National Review Online, 021029)

Here we go again. A Muslim is arrested and suspected of involvement in the planning and/or execution of acts of murderous terror in the United States. Suddenly, a number of organizations that purport to represent Muslims in the United States warn that the episode might produce a racist and bigoted reaction against their co-religionists.

For example, within hours of the arrest of a black convert to Islam named John Allen Muhammad in connection with the recent spate of sniper attacks in the Washington area, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a press release. In it, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad professed satisfaction with the breakthrough, but went on to declare: “We are concerned that because a suspect in the case has the last name of ‘Muhammad,’ American Muslims will now face scapegoating and bias.” Awad claimed that “Police reports indicate that the suspects acted alone, based on their own motivations. There is no indication that this case is related to Islam or Muslims.”

Actually, press accounts from Tacoma, Washington report that Muhammad sympathized with al Qaeda and cheered the September 11 attacks that brought down four jetliners and killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

Awad then went on offense: “We therefore ask journalists and media commentators to avoid speculation based on stereotyping or prejudice. The American Muslim community should not be held accountable for the alleged criminal actions of what appear to be troubled and deranged individuals.”

While “stereotyping or prejudice” is certainly to be avoided, CAIR’s real hope appears to be that journalists, media commentators and, more importantly, government officials will not recognize certain worrisome problems that the Muhammad case might illuminate. These include the following:

Organizations associated with the virulently anti-American Saudi strain of Islam known as Wahhabism have been actively seeking to recruit convicts in the U.S. prison system, particularly by converting black and Hispanic prisoners. In a recent op-ed. in the Wall Street Journal, Charles Colson wrote that America’s “alienated, disenfranchised people are prime targets for radical Islamists who preach a religion of violence, of overcoming oppression by jihad.”

This is not a hypothetical problem. Jose Padilla, a felon who — after his conversion to Islam in and release from jail — is alleged to have been involved in a plot to attack the United States with a radiological weapon. Individuals like Muhammad, who have had repeated run-ins with the law, would surely have been targets for such recruitment efforts. How many have been — and was Muhammad among them?

Some Wahhabi-backed organizations have also been selecting the majority of Muslim imams for the U.S. military’s chaplain corps. These chaplains are, of course, in a position to indoctrinate and otherwise influence converts about their faith — and what it dictates they do with skills learned while in the military (e.g., marksmanship). This ministering may influence behavior while in the service (for example, whether it is inconsistent with the Prophet’s teachings to take up arms against fellow Muslims), as well as afterwards. Is anyone monitoring what the Wahhabi clerics are preaching in the U.S. military, and with what effect?

Then there is the Saudi effort to recruit U.S. servicemen and women during Operation Desert Storm. One well-placed source who served there at the time recalls that, “Saudi officers appeared to have been directed by their senior military or religious leadership to spot and assess potential converts to Islam among American military members.” Recruitment attempts included generous giving of expensive gifts, as well as the long-standing Saudi practice of cash stipends for new converts to make the haj to Mecca.

Did Muhammad’s conversion occur during his time in that theater? Were other Americans induced during that period to enroll in the Wahhabist agenda?

There is also the matter of the black Muslims. Muhammad reportedly provided security for the so-called “Million Man March” on Washington organized by Louis Farrakhan’s militant Nation of Islam in 1996. After his arrest, some Wahhabi-affiliated organizations, like the American Muslim Council, succeeded in spinning the Associated Press into reporting: “Orthodox Muslims generally do not consider the Nation of Islam a mainstream religion. ‘We don’t represent their views, they don’t represent our views,’ said [Faiz] Rehman of the American Muslim Council.”

While Wahhabists may look down their noses at black Muslims, they are happy to count them so as to inflate the claimed size of the U.S. Muslim population to maximize its political influence. The question is: Are African-American Muslims actually seen as useful, and are they being employed, for other purposes as well — perhaps including as cannon fodder for terrorist operations?

It is very much to be hoped that law-enforcement officials will be addressing these larger questions as they explore the suspected sniper’s past. To do so, they will have to go places and ask questions that CAIR and other Wahhabist-connected groups will no doubt assail as racist or bigoted. For instance, they will have to get inside the mosques and Islamic centers where the murder suspect lived, and conduct a thorough investigation of the imam and others who mentored his conversion. In short, the investigators will have to stand up to CAIR and the other apologists for terrorist organizations and their operatives who claim to represent Muslims in the United States — even as they work to impede law enforcement efforts to protect all Americans.

On the other hand, American officials doing such work should be able to count on the help of those who really do represent mainstream Muslims. After all, those who are trying to resist Wahhabist efforts to hijack and radicalize their religion have as great an interest as the rest of us in figuring out how the Saudis and others are advancing their agenda. The place to start would be for such Muslims to denounce and work to end terrorism, in stark contrast to their co-religionists who quietly support jihad while impugning their critics as racists and bigots.

— Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy.

==============================

Damned If You Do: Historians dare to criticize Islamic dhimmitude at Georgetown and pay a price (National Review Online, 021029)

Will Jews and Christians on American college campuses have the freedom — and more importantly, the courage — to speak out against oppression of their people in Islamic nations? Not, it seems, at Georgetown University, where Jewish student leaders turned on the leading historian of dhimmitude — the state of formal discrimination historically imposed on Jews and Christians living under Islamic occupation — when Muslim students became angry and emotional over her remarks.

Bat Yeor, who occasionally contributes to National Review Online, made her reputation by documenting the tragic fate of the dhimmi Christians of the East, in lands conquered by Islam. Classical Islam prescribes a state of existence for subject Jews and Christians under which they must live as second-class citizens, paying a special tax to their Muslim rulers, living under special rules, and not granted the same basic human rights enjoyed by Muslims. Bat Yeor, born a Jew in Egypt but exiled to Europe, is the best-known historian of what she has termed dhimmitude, and has written three books on the subject.

A coalition of Jewish and Christian student groups at Georgetown invited the historian and her husband, historian David Littman, to deliver a lecture a week ago today on the stated topic of “Ideology of Jihad, Dhimmitude and Human Rights” — which was the title of the speech, according to flyers the event organizers produced. If statements the Littmans provided to National Review Online are accurate, it is hard to believe that their hosts were unaware of the nature of their work in the field.

“The various flyers in my possession that were prepared, posted, and widely circulated via e-mail by the organizers (I considered some of them somewhat provocative — and said so), confirm that all were fully aware of the subjects and themes to be addressed by both speakers,” David Littman said.

Littman says the organizers agreed to provide special security for the event, indicating that they anticipated the possibility of trouble. Littman says he and his wife met with Ben Bixby, one of the Jewish student organizers, a week before the lecture, gave him copies of Bat Yeor’s books, as well as copies of her recent articles. “Anyone glancing at these publications would know exactly the thrust of subjects and themes of the evening lectures,” he tells NRO.

On the morning of the lectures, says Littman, he and Bat Yeor met Bixby and fellow students Julia Segall and Salamon Kalach-Zaga for breakfast. They spoke about the planned speeches. Littman says he decided to present a version of a talk he had given at the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, and provided a copy to the organizers. For her part, Bat Yeor says it is impossible for her to believe that she would have been invited to speak by students who were unfamiliar with her work.

Of her lecture, Bat Yeor says, “I explained the roots of jihad according to Muslim theologians and jurists, its aim, strategy, tactics and rules. This was followed by a short description of the jihad war of conquest on three continents over a millennium: from Portugal to India, from Budapest to Sudan, as those war operations, victories and conquests were described in Muslim and Christian chronicles. Dhimmitude is the direct consequence of jihad. It embodied all the Islamic laws and customs applied over a millennium on the vanquished population, Jews and Christians, living in the countries conquered by jihad and therefore Islamized.

“Then I spoke of the return of the jihad ideology since the 1960s, and of some dhimmitude practices in Muslim countries applying the sharia [Islamic] law, or inspired by it. I stressed the incompatibility between the concept of tolerance as expressed by the jihad-dhimmitude ideology, and the concept of human rights based on the equality of all human beings and the inalienability of their rights.”

According to a letter written to the campus newspaper by Scott Borer-Miller, a Jewish student who was present at the lecture, students “openly laughed and made comments” during Bat Yeor’s half-hour lecture. In the question-and-answer period that followed, Bat Yeor reported “sometimes vehement” opposition from Muslim students in the audience. She describes it as “religiously motivated.”

“They wouldn’t accept a word of criticism on jihad and dhimmitude,” she says. “I had approached and explained the subject as a matter of human history, like any other such subject. My vision was pluralistic, and based on countless testimonies, including Muslim ones. It was clear that the students who objected would not accept nor even tolerate the perception of jihad’s victims.”

Bat Yeor describes the Jewish students as looking “miserable and stunned.” David Littman told me last week in New York that one of the Jewish students came to him and asked him not to deliver his lecture. He refused, and faced another outcry from Muslim students, particular when he mentioned disapprovingly that Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was a small child when she was married off to the Prophet. Bat Yeor told me last week that several Jewish and Christian students approached her and her husband after the event and thanked them for their testimony. “I asked them, ‘Why didn’t you stand up for us when we were being attacked?’” she said. “They didn’t have an answer.”

Three days after the lecture, a story appeared in The Hoya, the campus newspaper, in which Kalach-Zaga, spokesman for the Georgetown Israel Alliance, alleged that Bat Yeor and her husband misled the organizers. “We wanted an event that talked about authoritarian regimes and how they twist and distort Islam to justify repression against minorities. The information that [Yeor and Littman] provided us with was about this topic, but their presentation wasn’t concerned at all with this,” the paper quoted Kalach-Zaga as saying.

“The speakers gave us certain ideas about what they would speak about so that they could get in the door, and once they were in, they gave a completely different idea of what we had wanted. It was two-faced and manipulative,” he continued.

In a letter to The Hoya, Jewish student leaders Julia Segall and Daniel Spector called the event “a disaster, and [we] denounce the views brought forth by Bat Yeor and David Littman.” The pair called their guest speakers “hateful, slanderous and a crude surprise to us.” They accused the speakers of making “no effort to make a clear distinction between pure, harmonious Islam, and the acts of a few who falsely claim to act in the name of Islam.”

“This is pure nonsense,” Bat Yeor replies. “When one studies the Inquisition or the Crusades, one does not feel obliged to make a clear distinction between ‘pure’ Christianity and those historical events. In a university, the examination of several analyses of history should be encouraged. The Muslim view is exclusively religion-based, and proceeds from the assumption that there is only one valid interpretation of history: the Islamic one. No criticism of jihad is accepted because it is a just war according to Muslim dogma.

“This attitude imposes the worst law of dhimmitude on non-Muslims: the refusal of their evidence. The historical testimony of the millions of human victims of jihad is rejected on its face by this doctrinal attitude.”

It strains credibility to believe that the Jewish student organizers thought that Bat Yeor, whose work makes plain that jihad and dhimmitude are inextricably linked to Islamic doctrine and practice, would present them with a lecture saying the codified oppression of non-Muslim peoples is a peculiar distortion of Islam. None of several Jewish students involved with putting the event together responded to NRO’s request for comment. David Littman says that unless the student organizers retract their accusations that he and his wife deceived the event’s organizers, he will consult a lawyer about a libel suit.

Rabbi Harold White, the Jewish chaplain at Georgetown, said he was visited by several of the “horrified” organizers the day after the presentation. “They didn’t have problems with the facts [Bat Yeor and David Littman] were presenting,” says Rabbi White. “They believed [the historians] were very rude. From what the students said to me, it was their mannerisms, and cutting off questions, that led to the apology. No [student] said to me that they doubted what she said was true. The just didn’t like the presentation.”

That contrasts starkly with the complaints the three students — Spector, Segall, and Kalach-Zaga — made for public consumption, in the pages of the campus newspaper, in which they mostly complained about the content of the Yeor-Littman speeches (“we in no way agree or support what was said”), and in Kalach-Zaga’s case, accused the husband-wife team of being “two-faced and manipulative.”

Rabbi White at first told NRO he suspected that the Jewish students had not read any of Bat Yeor’s work prior to bringing her to campus, but corrected himself when he recalled that a Palestinian student group had requested of the Jewish student leaders that they cancel Bat Yeor’s talk. “I know [the Jewish students] were provided with the material in advance, because in justifying the program to the leadership of the Arab group, they said they had read it and were convinced the program wouldn’t be offensive.”

When Muslim students in attendance reacted angrily to the speakers’ presentations on jihad and dhimmitude, the Jewish students apparently changed their tune. “I don’t think it was intimidation,” says Rabbi White. “I think it was based on the fact that the week before, they had participated in a successful program on Jewish-Palestinian dialogue, and I think they must have figured it would endanger dialogue in the future.”

As for Chi Alpha, the lone Christian group co-sponsoring the event, Shawn Galyen, the group’s (non-student) chaplain, said he had never heard of Bat Yeor, but agreed to co-sponsor the lecture when Jewish organizers told him she would speak on the human rights situation of persecuted religious minorities in Islamic countries. Galyen said he was “disappointed” when her speech took up Islamic theology.

“I didn’t think I heard a clear distinction when there could have been one between religion and people using religion for bad purposes,” Galyen tells NRO. “If I would have known that was her work, I would have never been involved in it. It just isn’t helpful, that kind of presentation.”

But if what Bat Yeor and David Littman said about Islamic doctrine and history is true, I put it to Galyen, isn’t it “helpful” — as opposed to a lie that keeps social peace? Galyen demurred, saying that his group isn’t political, and that he only wishes that Bat Yeor had shown more “graciousness.” The chaplain added that he wasn’t sure that her voice belonged on a college campus, but when pressed, couldn’t explain why.

All this, say Bat Yeor and Littman, shows how the Jews and Christians of Georgetown have embraced a dhimmi mentality, by abasing themselves before the sensibilities of Muslims, whose co-religionists persecute and oppress Jews and Christians abroad. Political correctness demands that Islam be thought of as inherently peaceful and tolerant, and no explorations of its history and doctrines that would lead to a contrary view may be presented.

Walid Phares, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and ethnic-religious conflict at Florida Atlantic University, calls the Georgetown controversy “significant, but not unique.”

“In the past two decades, any intellectual who advocates the fact that Middle Eastern Christians have suffered, or presented their research on this phenomenon, has been repressed,” said Phares, who is a Maronite (Lebanese Catholic). “After 9/11, and continuing jihadist attacks on Christians around the world, it’s very sad that students at a prominent university would try to suppress voices of academics, of researchers who are just trying to shed light on a very difficult issue. History is history, and in the same way Christians have criticized their own history, including the Crusades, it’s time for the Muslim intellectuals to start criticizing the Islamic conquests and the jihad.”

It’s notable that this controversy erupted at Georgetown, says Phares, given the role its influential, Islamophilic Middle Eastern Studies department has played in what Phares calls “the erasing of the plight of Middle Eastern Christians under Islamic regimes.”

Charles Jacobs, director of the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Organization, says Bat Yeor’s historical argument must be heard because she is describing the basis for laws and ideology today in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran, parts of Nigeria, and other Muslim nations, that determine how non-Muslims are governed.

“In most of the Middle East, the legacy of this religious inequality exists today,” he says. “How can centuries of religious discrimination — cemented in daily practices through the requirement to wear distinctive garb, through the enforced custom of not looking at a Muslim in the eye, of not being able to defend yourself in court against a Muslim for any charge conceivable — how could this disappear overnight? This is what stokes the jihadi fires, and this is what Bat Yeor is calling attention to.”

Could it be that Jews and Christians at Georgetown and other elite universities, who are among the small number of Americans in a position to do something to draw attention to the plight of the dhimmi peoples, may not want to hear about their suffering, past and present, because it upsets the social peace on campus? Because it gainsays the comforting multiculturalist nostrum that any unpleasant manifestation of Islam is not Islam at all? Because preserving good relations with Muslim groups requires not noticing dhimmitude — and, if it comes to it, possibly even dishonestly trashing the reputations of two scholars who do?

Any peace built on a lie is no peace at all, and a dialogue based on anything but the truth is self deception. It is to be hoped that the Georgetown debacle may result not in Bat Yeor’s voice being silenced by dhimmitized Americans, but amplified by Americans who are tired of the silence on Islamic persecution of dhimmis. There is a nascent effort underway in certain Washington circles to establish an institute affiliated with Bat Yeor to promote scholarship on dhimmitude. This distressing incident at Georgetown underscores the need for such an institute, so Eastern Christians and Jews of dhimmi heritage can preserve and defend their history. “Ignorance is the enemy of reason,” says FAU’s Phares. “Maronites, Copts, Syriacs and others have been victims of jihad for centuries. After 9/11, the role of these communities in the West is extremely important. They can tell what has happened to them.”

==============================

Stop making excuses for Muslim extremists (National Post, 021029)

Mark Steyn

Heigh-ho. After weeks of assurances that the sniper was an “angry white male,” it turns out the only angry white males connected to this story are the ones in America’s newsrooms. On Thursday, after being informed that the two suspects were a black Muslim called Muhammad and his illegal-immigrant Jamaican sidekick, The New York Times nevertheless reported in its early editions that the pair were being sought for “possible ties to ‘skinhead militia’ groups.” The Feds had already released a photo of Mr. Muhammad looking like one of the less goofy members of the Jackson Five and, though one should never rush to stereotype, it seems unlikely that a black Muslim with big hair would have many “ties” to skinhead militias.

But in the early hours of Thursday morning, the Times wasn’t ready to give in: C’mon, there’s gotta be some angry white male National Rifle Association right-wing redneck Second Amendment gun-nut neo-Nazi militia types in here somewhere, preferably living in a compound Janet Reno can come out of retirement to surround and torch.

Sadly not. Instead, we have a Muslim convert. A Muslim convert who last year discarded the name “Williams” and adopted a new identity as “Muhammad.” A Muslim convert called Muhammad who publicly expressed his approval of al-Qaeda’s September 11th attacks. A pro-al-Qaeda Muslim convert called Muhammad who marked the first anniversary of 9/11, to the exact minute, by visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles in Camden, New Jersey. Two minutes after he left the building, the cops arrived to deal with a mysterious bomb scare.

What are we expert profilers to make of such confusing and contradictory characteristics? Well, obviously, those of us in the media should not to be too hasty in connecting the dots. Instead, we should rush to disconnect them. Thus, CNN finds it easier to call Mr. Muhammad “Mr. Williams,” a formulation likely to be encouraged by the guy’s lawyers, once they’re in place, just as, in the hands of the ever sensitive media, Abdul Hamid and Abdullah al-Muhajir were tactfully restored to their maiden names of John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla. (By the way, was that a picture of Cassius Clay on the front of the National Post last week?) My local radio news described Mr. Muhammad as “an ex-soldier” and “an African-American male.” Anyone spot the missing category? You can discern the preferred narrative: an African-American male from a deprived background driven psycho by military culture. But he left the army years ago and his transformation into a killer seems to be more or less coincidental with his transformation into Mr. Muhammad.

But pay no attention to that. Even though the crime (the random murder of Americans of all types, ages, genders and races) and the accused (an anti-American Islamist) are a perfect match, the network criminologists continue to profess themselves perplexed by the apparent lack of motive, as if we’ll shortly discover that Mr. Muhammad had been denied a promotion at Burger King or he’d been abused as a child. It doesn’t really matter whether Muhammad al-Sniper was acting on orders or simply improvising. The jihad-inciters in the Middle East are happy with either. If anything, the freelance approach suits them better: you don’t need complicated and traceable communications and wire transfers; the punks on the ground will act independently just to impress you.

The media lapsed into the same denial mode the last time a forty-year-old radical Muslim called Mohamed opened fire on U.S. soil. July the Fourth, LAX, the El Al counter, two dead. CNN and The Associated Press all but stampeded to report a “witness” who described the shooter as a fat white guy in a ponytail who kept yelling “Artie took my job.” But, alas, it was — surprise! — a Muslim called Hesham Mohamed Modayet.

Broadly speaking, in these interesting times, when something unusual and unprecedented happens, there are those who think on balance it’s more likely to be a fellow called Mohammed than, say, Bud, and there are those who climb into the metaphorical burqa, close up the grille and insist, despite all the evidence, that we should be looking for some angry white male. I’m in the former camp and, apropos the sniper, said as much in The Chicago Sun-Times. I had a bet with both my wife and my assistant that the perp would be an Islamic terrorist. The gals, unfortunately, had made the mistake of reading The New York Times, whose experts concluded it would be a “macho hunter” or an “icy loner.”

Speaking as a macho hunter and an icy loner myself, I’m beginning to think the media would be better off turning their psychological profilers loose on America’s newsrooms. Take, for example, the Times’ star columnist Frank Rich. Within a few weeks of September 11th, he was berating John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, for not rounding up America’s “home-grown Talibans” — the religious right, members of “the Second Amendment cult” and “the anti-abortion terrorist movement.” In a column entitled “How To Lose A War” last October - i.e., during the Afghan campaign — he mocked the Administration for not consulting with abortion clinics, who had a lot of experience dealing with “terrorists.”

You get the picture: Sure, Muslim fundamentalists can be pretty extreme, but what about all our Christian fundamentalists? Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow musicals, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school.

Oh, well. It’s not just the media who bend over backwards to look the other way. It turns out Muhammad al-Sniper was twice reported to the FBI for suspected terrorist links. Though living in a homeless shelter, he had the wherewithal to travel extensively round the country by plane, as the shelter’s director discovered when a ticket agent called up to confirm Mr. Muhammad’s booking. “At the mission, not many airline agents call and ask for residents,” says the Rev. Al Archer. I’ll bet. But, even after September 11th, a guy in a homeless shelter stacking up the frequent-flier miles wasn’t enough to attract the Bureau’s attention.

As for his teen “ward” (please, no giggling), he’s an illegal immigrant — or, in the loopily PC designation of the networks, “an African-American from Jamaica,” which seems a nicely inclusive way of describing a subject of the Crown. He was briefly in the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but they let him go in breach of their own procedures.

So 10 more Americans have been killed by a guy the FBI never bothered checking out and a guy the INS released into the community to add to the 3,000 killed by Saudis the State Department should never have approved the visas of. Perhaps it’s time for at least one white male to get a little angry: the President.

==============================

Punishment includes Islam indoctrination (WorldNetDaily, 021031)

Canadian to resume hate-crimes sentence under Muslim direction

An Ontario man convicted of promoting hatred against Muslims says his community-service sentence has included indoctrination into Islam.

After losing an appeal to Canada’s Supreme Court on Oct. 17, Mark Harding must resume his sentence of two years probation and 340 hours of community service under the direction of Mohammad Ashraf, general secretary of the Islamic Society of North America in Mississauga, Ont.

Harding, 47, said he had one session under Ashraf in 1998 before an appeal process stayed the sentence.

Ashraf, according to Harding, said that instead of licking stamps and stuffing envelopes, “it would be better if you learned about Islam.”

The cleric made it clear, Harding recalled in an interview with WorldNetDaily, that during the sessions nothing negative could be said about Islam or its prophet, Muhammad.

“He said he was my supervisor, and if I didn’t follow what he said, he would send me back to jail,” recounted Harding, who had been prevented from speaking publicly about his case under a gag order.

Harding was convicted in 1998 on federal hate-crimes charges stemming from a June 1997 incident in which he distributed pamphlets outside a public high school, Weston Collegiate Institute in Toronto. Harding – who said that until that point he spent most of his time evangelizing Muslims – was protesting the school’s policy of setting aside a room for Muslim students to pray during school hours.

In one of his pamphlets, Harding listed atrocities committed by Muslims in foreign lands to back his assertion that Canadians should be wary of local Muslims.

The pamphlet said: “The Muslims who commit these crimes are no different than the Muslim believers living here in Toronto. Their beliefs are based on the Quran. They sound peaceful, but underneath their false sheep’s clothing are raging wolves seeking whom they may devour. And Toronto is definitely on their hit list.”

“The point I was trying to make is you shouldn’t have a violent religion like Islam allowed in a school when Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism is not allowed,” he told WND.

Harding, an evangelical Protestant, insists he has love rather than hatred toward Muslims and wants to see them go to heaven.

A lawyer for Harding, Jasmine Akbaralli, says she is trying to obtain permission for her client to serve out his sentence in an Islamic community closer to his current home in Chesley, Ont., north of Toronto and about a three-hour drive from the Islamic Society of North America.

The plea is based on humanitarian grounds, she said, due to her client’s poor health.

Harding said he has suffered four heart attacks since 1997, and he and his wife and two children are penniless because his health has prevented him from maintaining his trade as a cabinetmaker.

Akbaralli said she would not comment on Harding’s previous experience with Ashraf, noting that she was not representing him at the time. Calls to Ashraf and others at the Islamic Society of North America on Tuesday and Wednesday were not returned.

Understanding Islam

During his 1998 session with Ashraf, Harding was told to read a book called Towards Understanding Islam, by Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi.

On page 12 of the book, Harding noted, it gives a description of a “kafir,” or infidel, a person who does not follow Islam.

“Such a man ... will spread confusion and disorder on the earth,” the book says. “He will without the least compunction, shed blood, violate other men’s rights, be cruel to them, and create disorder and destruction in the world. His perverted thoughts and ambitions, his blurred vision and disturbed scale of values, and his evil-spelling activities would make life bitter for him and for all around him.”

“It was obvious that he intended to make sure I understood that I was a kafir,” Harding said of Ashraf.

Harding’s 1998 conviction on three counts of willfully promoting hatred was commended by Canadian Muslims.

“The verdict sends a message to Christians, Muslims and Jews that personal views of that nature can’t be allowed in a public forum,” said Shahina Siddiqui, coordinator of community relations and social services for the Manitoba Islamic Association, in a report by the Canadian evangelical publication Christian Week. “There’s a fine line between freedom of expression and hatred. Harding crossed that line.”

Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said after the verdict that “spreading hate is against Canadian values and against Canadian law, and it doesn’t matter the group that is victimized.”

The verdict was not a suppression of free speech, Elmasry insisted, according to Alberta Report magazine, arguing that he would not consider scholarly books in the library that criticize Islam to be hate literature. Harding “is just trying to stereotype and put out hate literature, and he was found guilty by the courts,” he said.

Harding asserted at the time that he meant to criticize only Islamic terrorists, not all Muslims. But he added that faithful Muslims will always engage in jihad, or holy war, against non-Muslims because it is required by Islamic teachings.

Many Muslim scholars in North America argue that jihad essentially means “struggle” and is not necessarily violent.

But Harding said that after his case became public, he no longer felt safe, due to threats from Muslims. When he entered court for the first time for his trial, he required police protection as a large crowd of Muslims gathered, with some chanting, “Infidels, you will burn in hell.”

Harding said he received many death threats among more than 3,000 hate-filled calls that came to his answering service in 1997. Similar calls were received by police and the Ontario attorney general, he said.

“I had a call from someone who said they were from (Louis) Farrakhan’s (Nation of Islam) group, and they were going to break my legs,” he said. “Another caller said he would rip out my testicles.”

The Islamic Society of North America in Canada, where Harding is required to fulfill his community service, describes itself as a “broad-based unity of Muslims and Islamic organizations committed to the mission and movement of Islam: nurturing a way of life in the light of the guidance from the Quran and Sunnah for establishing a vibrant presence of Muslims in Canada.”

The organization shares facilities with the Canadian Council on Islamic Relations, an affiliate of the controversial Council on Islamic-American Relations, or CAIR, in Washington, D.C.

CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper indicated in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he wants to see the United States become a Muslim country.

“I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future,” Hooper told the Star Tribune. “But I’m not going to do anything violent to promote that. I’m going to do it through education.”

Hate crimes

Judge Sidney B. Linden’s 1998 ruling against Harding was based on Canada’s genocide and hate-crimes law. The judge determined he was guilty of “false allegations about the adherents of Islam calculated to arouse fear and hatred of them in all non-Muslim people.”

The law bars a public statement that “willfully promotes hatred” against groups “distinguished by color, race, religion or ethnic origin.” The code has an article that excuses statements expressed in “good faith,” including religious expression. But the trial judge found that Harding had either “tried to incite hatred or was willfully blind to it,” according to lawyer Akbaralli.

Canadian Christian groups are fighting a bill reinstated this month by a homosexual parliament member that would add “sexual orientation” as a protected category in the hate-crimes statutes. Known previously as bill C-415, it is now registered as C-250.

Evangelicals have supported Harding in principle, though many have signaled their opposition to his aggressive tactics or have expressed reservations.

Harding said he’s received support from Christians who immigrated to Canada from Muslim countries, where minority religions experience discrimination and persecution.

“I have a lot of Pakistani and Egyptian friends helping me through this because they understand what Islam is all about,” he said. “When they heard about me in the news, they called to offer their support.”

==============================

Muslims must disavow Osama’s message (National Post, 021118)

George Jonas

When the audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden was released last week, the voice that threatened America’s allies didn’t issue its warning in the name of al-Qaeda. It didn’t purport to speak for Iraq, Indonesia, Chechnya or the Palestinian territories. Though the voice listed them all, it spoke for what it called “the Muslim nation.”

“As you assassinate,” bin Laden said to the West, naming each of six countries in turn, from Australia to Great Britain, and from Canada to Italy, “so will you be assassinated. As you bomb so will you likewise be. So the Muslim nation begins to attack you with its children, who are committed before God to continue the jihad, by word and by the sword.”

About two days later U.S. President George W. Bush also made a set of remarks as he began a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

“By far, the vast majority of American citizens respect the Islamic people and the Muslim faith,” Mr. Bush said, while dissociating his government from intemperate comments about Muslims made by some televangelists, whom Mr. Bush didn’t name. The President probably referred to Pat Robertson who reportedly said recently that Muslims were “worse than the Nazis” or to Jerry Falwell who in a TV interview last month described the prophet Mohammed as a “terrorist.”

“It is encouraging to hear President Bush address the issue of Islamophobic rhetoric in our society. We hope the President’s rejection of anti-Muslim hate speech will be followed by similar statements from other elected officials and from mainstream religious leaders,” commented Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) communications director Ibrahim Hooper.

No disagreement here. It’s indeed encouraging for the general cause of peace and tolerance in the world that President Bush repudiates excessive or thoughtless statements and reaffirms fundamental Western values. But it would be equally reassuring for leaders of Islamic countries, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, to have issued similar statements following the speech attributed to bin Laden.

It would have been reassuring to hear one or more major figures in the world of Islam say that “the vast majority of citizens of Muslim countries respect the American people and the Christian faith.” Except this didn’t happen. Nor did Mr. Hooper express the hope that it might happen. He didn’t offer to repudiate what Osama bin Laden said while purporting to speak for the “Muslim nation.” Mr. Hooper expected “other elected officials and mainstream religious leaders” to follow the President’s example and declare that Pat Robertson and other televangelists don’t speak for America, but he didn’t offer to declare, or call on Muslim leaders to declare, that “bin Laden doesn’t speak for Islam.”

So what we’re left with is bin Laden declaring that he speaks for the “Muslim nation,” which now “begins to attack you with its children,” without anybody saying: “No, bin Laden, you do not. You do not speak for the millions of peace-loving Muslims. You speak only for a handful of terrorists.”

So far we’ve heard nothing from the millions of peace-loving Muslims. We heard nothing from their political leaders in Islamic countries. We heard nothing from their spiritual leaders, at home or in the West. We heard nothing from the spokespeople of CAIR. If it weren’t for President Bush’s assurance that millions of peace-loving Muslims exist, we wouldn’t know it. They’re silent, except when some exhort us, like Mr. Hooper, to keep declaring through our “elected officials and mainstream religious leaders” that Muslims are peace-loving.

I don’t doubt that they are, only I wouldn’t mind hearing it from them for a change. It was great to hear it from President Bush, but now I’d like to hear it from CAIR.

Whatever Pat Robertson said, he blew up nothing. However injudicious Jerry Falwell’s remarks have been, he didn’t threaten anyone with assassination. Robertson or Falwell cannot be mentioned in the same breath with Osama bin Laden — yet as soon as they spoke, the President dissociated his government and his country from them. “I’ll remind the Secretary-General,” he said, “that our war against terror is a war against individuals whose hearts are full of hate. We do not fight a religion.”

Did Muslim leaders, secular or religious, say anything to dissociate themselves and their faith from bin Laden when he declared his jihad against “the Crusaders and the Jews”? Did the ruler of a supposedly friendly Arab country, such as Saudi Arabia or Jordan, say, as Mr. Bush did, that “the comments that have been uttered do not reflect the sentiments of my government”?

When asked this question, Arab and Muslim commentators usually reply that (1) we have said it, and (2) why should we be obliged to say the obvious? The two replies are offered in the same breath, though reply no. 1 is negated by reply no. 2, and reply no 2. is worthless. On this test, President Bush shouldn’t be obliged to say the obvious either — i.e., that “ours is a country based upon tolerance” and that we won’t let “terrorists cause us to change our values” — yet he’s not only saying it, but CAIR demands that he and other leaders should say it even louder and more often. They’re right to demand it because in such situations the obvious isn’t obvious unless it’s stated loudly and often — except this is no less true for CAIR than for President Bush. The difference is that Mr. Bush is actually saying it, while Muslim countries and communities say little beyond reiterating their own grievances.

Sorry. Reiterating grievances isn’t enough to convince the world that bin Laden is only engaged in wishful thinking when he says he speaks for “the Muslim nation.”

==============================

Scores Killed in Nigerian Miss World Rioting (Foxnews, 021121)

LAGOS, Nigeria — More than 50 people were reported dead and 200 wounded Thursday as protesters rioted over a newspaper article that suggested Islam’s founding prophet might have chosen a wife from among contestants in the Miss World beauty pageant in Nigeria.

Rioters were said to be stabbing pedestrians and torching churches during violent demonstrations in the northern city of Kaduna.

More than 50 people were stabbed, bludgeoned or burned to death and 200 were seriously injured in the violence in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, Nigerian Red Cross President Emmanuel Ijewere told The Associated Press.

At least four churches were destroyed, he said.

Many of the bodies were taken by Red Cross workers and other volunteers to local mortuaries. Many others remained inside homes that were set afire by the demonstrators, Ijewere said.

Previous riots in Kaduna, a largely Muslim city with a sizable Christian minority, have escalated into religious battles that killed hundreds since civilian government replaced military rule in 1999.

Shehu Sani of the Kaduna-based Civil Rights Congress said he saw one young man being stabbed by men who then forced a tire filled with gasoline around his neck and burned him alive. Sani said he saw three other bodies elsewhere in the city.

Alsa Hassan, founder of another human rights group, Alsa Care, said he saw a commuter being dragged out of his car and beaten to death by protesters.

Schools and shops hurriedly closed as hordes of young men, shouting “Allah Akhbar,” or “God is great,” ignited makeshift street barricades made of tires and garbage, sending plumes of black smoke rising above the city. Others were heard chanting, “Down with beauty” and “Miss World is sin.”

Police and soldiers riding in pickup trucks fired tear gas at protesters marching through otherwise abandoned streets waving tree branches and palm fronds.

State government officials declared a curfew of 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

A businessman, Lateef Mohammed, said he saw young men smashing the windows of two small churches in Badarawa, a predominantly Muslim area. Two other witnesses interviewed separately gave similar accounts.

“I just rushed to get to my home. It was very tense,” Mohammed said by telephone.

The latest demonstrations began Wednesday with the burning of an office of the ThisDay newspaper in Kaduna after it published an article questioned the reasoning of Muslim groups that have condemned the Miss World pageant, scheduled to be held Dec. 7 in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

Muslim groups say the pageant promotes sexual promiscuity and indecency.

On Saturday, the newspaper published an article under the headline “The world at their feet,” which asked:

“What would (the prophet) Muhammad think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from among them (the contestants).”

The Nigerian Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, the country’s highest Muslim body, urged President Olusegun Obasanjo to cancel the pageant and sanction the newspaper.

On Monday, ThisDay ran a brief front-page apology for sections considered offensive to Muslims, which it said had been mistakenly published after being removed by the supervising editor. The newspaper ran a second, more lengthy retraction and apology Thursday.

Participants from at least five countries are boycotting the pageant because Islamic courts in Nigeria have sentenced several unmarried women to death by stoning for conceiving babies outside wedlock.

Nigeria’s government insists none of the judgments will be carried out.

==============================

Muslim activist won’t apologize to evangelists (Washington Times, 021122)

By Larry Witham

The spokesman for a prominent U.S. Muslim group, who regularly demands contrition from critics of Islam, will not apologize for comparing some conservative evangelical leaders to Osama bin Laden and saying they would kill Muslims given the chance.

Ibrahim Hooper of the activist Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) stood by his argument that the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Rev. Pat Robertson, evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and the Rev. Franklin Graham are “equivalent” to bin Laden in wanting to divide the world into a religious war.

They “have the same mentality as bin Laden” in trying to incite an “unending civilizational conflict,” Mr. Hooper said Wednesday.

“It’s the incitement we’re talking about,” said Mr. Hooper, whose organization has been linked to radical Islamist groups in the Middle East. “It’s not Jerry Falwell throwing a hand grenade into a mosque.”

Mr. Hooper said his original comment about the evangelical leaders was provoked in an interview with a conservative New York radio show last week. Under questioning by WABC radio’s Steve Malzberg, Mr. Hooper said evangelical critics wanted to spark a religious war.

When Mr. Malzberg asked whether the Christian leaders would kill Muslims as bin Laden urges Muslims to kill Jews and Christians, Mr. Hooper said: “Given the right circumstance, these guys would do the same in the opposite direction.”

The transcript was released on the conservative Web site, with which Mr. Malzberg’s show is affiliated. The radio host asked that he be given credit for the interview.

None of the religious leaders cited by Mr. Hooper demanded an apology from CAIR when contacted this week, but they stuck by their criticism of the violence of Islam or what they call its erroneous theological claims.

“We never demand apologies,” said Ron Godwin, senior spokesman for Jerry Falwell Ministries. He said Mr. Hooper’s comment was “irrational at best and very, very divisive and destructive at worst.”

But Mr. Godwin also said that some news outlets are distorting the debate between Christians and Muslims, and blamed CBS’ “60 Minutes” for tricking Mr. Falwell into saying that Muhammad was a terrorist at the very end of an hourlong interview on Christians and Israel.

“After what CBS did, we immediately sent a ‘statement of reconciliation’ all over the Middle East and were able to avert a lot of harm to Christians,” Mr. Godwin said. The CBS broadcast triggered some riots in the Middle East that caused at least five deaths.

In the past year, CAIR on dozens of occasions has demanded apologies with varying degrees of success from critics of Islam and companies it said treated Muslims unfairly.

Rep. Tom Lantos, California Democrat, apologized for questioning whether Muhammad kept his treaties, as did Northwest Airlines and Delta for asking women to remove head scarves at security checks, which CAIR called “religious harassment” and a “strip search.”

A spokesman for Mr. Graham, son of the famed evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham, said he “has not backed down on his statements,” which have included that Islam is “wicked.”

“But he has stopped giving interviews, because it’s perceived that he’s on a campaign against Islam,” which he is not, said spokesman Jeremy Blume.

For the past several months, criticism of Islam by conservative evangelical ministers has picked up as a news topic, including a call by the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart to expel all Muslim students on visas.

Last week, President Bush broke his silence on the subject and distanced himself from the evangelical rhetoric.

“Some of the comments that have been uttered about Islam do not reflect the sentiments of my government or the sentiments of most Americans,” Mr. Bush said. “Ours is a country based upon tolerance [and] we’re not going to let the war on terror or terrorists cause us to change our values.”

The Bush statement came two days after Mr. Robertson broadcast a discussion of Islamic anti-Semitism in which he said, “This is worse than the Nazis.”

A day after Mr. Bush’s comments, Franklin Graham said his criticism of Islam comes from bad experiences doing relief work in Muslim countries.

“I agree with the president that ‘our war against terror is a war against individuals whose hearts are full of hate,’” Franklin Graham said in a statement. “This is not a war against Islam.”

A Robertson spokesman said the broadcaster wished he had been clearer in his allusions to anti-Semitism and violence by saying “some Muslims.”

“We must distinguish between the origin of the religion and those who adhere to it in the United States, who are indeed a peaceful people,” Mr. Robertson said in a statement issued after Mr. Bush’s comments.

But calling historic Islam peaceful, “I do not think is accurate,” he said in a program that looked at violent passages from Islamic texts.

Mr. Swaggart said in an interview that his comment about expelling the students “was not appropriate and will not happen again.”

While backing religious freedom, said the Pentecostal evangelist, “I oppose the religion of Islam.” After the attack on the United States, “a line has to be drawn” on tolerance, he said. “This is not really a war between nations. It is a war with a religion.”

He rejected the argument that the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, with civilian deaths, amounted to Christians killing Muslims, saying it was a “play on words” because the actions involved a nation at war.

“You can look at the world today: How many Christians are going around killing Muslims?” he asked.

==============================

Crimes directed at Muslims surged after September 11 (Washington Times, 021126)

Muslims and people who are or appear to be Middle Easterners were reported as victims of hate crimes more often last year than ever before, a consequence of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the FBI said yesterday.

The FBI’s annual hate crimes report found that incidents targeting people, institutions and businesses identified with Islam increased from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001, a jump of 1,700%. Muslims had been among the least-targeted religious groups.

The increases, the FBI said, happened “presumably as a result of the heinous incidents that occurred on September 11.”

The statistics did not specify how many of the 481 occurred after September 11.

Hate crimes against people because of their ethnicity or national origin — those not Hispanic, not black and not Asian or American Indian — rose from 354 in 2000 to 1,501 in 2001. This category includes people of Middle Eastern origin or descent, whether Muslim or not.

Since September 11, the Justice Department has prosecuted 11 civil rights cases under its “Backlash Discrimination Initiative” and investigated 403 more, with 70 others prosecuted by state and local authorities.

A man was sentenced to 51 months in prison for attempting to set fire to a Pakistani restaurant in Salt Lake City; another got two months in prison and a $5,000 fine for leaving a threatening voice-mail message Sept. 12, 2001, for James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute in Washington.

Hate crimes, defined as a crimes motivated by prejudice, are somewhat subjective, because the numbers derive from witness and victim accounts given to police rather than court convictions.

Overall accusations of crime motivated by hate rose slightly more than 20% from 2000 to 2001, from 8,063 to 9,730 incidents — still less than one-tenth of 1% of the 11.8 million serious crimes reported to the FBI last year.

Part of the increase stems from a higher number of law enforcement agencies that supplied the data to the FBI in 2001.

With the increase to fewer than 500, Muslims remain far behind blacks, Jews, whites and homosexuals in the number of reported hate crimes.

There were 2,899 incidents against blacks in 2001, about the same as the previous year, and more than 1,000 against Jews, down slightly from the year before. Almost 1,400 incidents involved crimes against homosexuals, and whites were targeted in 891 cases, the FBI said.

Slightly more than 12,000 victims of all hate crimes were reported in 2001, with 46% of them targeted because of their race. Last year’s total was about 9,900 hate crime victims.

There were 10 murders, four rapes, 2,736 assaults and 3,563 cases of intimidation motivated by hate in 2001. There were more than 3,600 property crimes, all but a few involving vandalism or property destruction.

Most incidents against Muslims and people who are or were believed to have been of Middle Eastern ethnicity involved assaults and intimidation, but three cases of murder or manslaughter and 35 cases of arson were reported.

==============================

Robertson pleads for scrutiny of Koran (Washington Times, 021126)

By Larry Witham

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said yesterday the news media and political leaders have failed to educate Americans about violence in the Koran and in Islamic history and wishes President Bush had never said that “Islam is a religion of peace.”

“He is not elected as chief theologian,” Mr. Robertson said.

It would have been better for the president to speak only politically about the Islamic world, and not religiously.

“It is leading to needless confusion,” Mr. Robertson said in an interview with The Washington Times.

Mr. Robertson’s comments in the past year have been a major part of the public debate on how a predominantly Christian nation responds to a foreign enemy with Islamic roots.

The public would be better served, Mr. Robertson said, if the media would investigate the content of the Koran and what he says are many passages that incite Muslims to kill nonbelievers. But reporting on that, he said, “is not politically correct.”

He said that the violence visited on Christians in many nations, such as Sudan and Nigeria, arises from Shariah, or Muslim law, showing that the violent behavior is tied to Islamic beliefs.

Though Mr. Robertson relinquished his Baptist ordination to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, he has taken it up again and describes his primary work as promoting Christianity.

For 18 years, his Christian Broadcasting Network had an Arab-language broadcast station in Lebanon, but he said that “it was overrun by Hezbollah,” a terrorist group.

“In terms of Islam, I don’t think the issues have been ventilated at all in the press because no one has read the Koran,” he said.

Still, he said civil liberties in the United States are too important to allow the U.S. government the extra powers of domestic surveillance that it is asking for and that law-abiding Muslim citizens also must have protection.

“I have never advocated ferreting out Muslims in America,” he said. “They are citizens like I am. But if they are funneling money to Hamas, organizing terrorist cells or holding anti-American rallies, they ought to be deported.”

U.S. Muslim groups have organized a yearlong project to put a package of books and a PBS video on Islam, all by American authors, in the nation’s 16,000 public libraries to promote understanding of the religion.

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) reports that supporters have sent in 4,219 “sponsorships” of $150 each to pay for the library package, but the number of libraries accepting them is not yet clear.

“It’s a yearlong campaign, and it will take a year or so to sort that [number] out,” said CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.

Last week, Mr. Hooper said on a New York radio show that conservative religious leaders such as Mr. Robertson were “equivalent” to Osama bin Laden because they want to divide the world into a religious war.

When asked whether Christian leaders would urge killing members of a different faith as bin Laden has done, Mr. Hooper said: “Given the right circumstance, these guys would do the same in the opposite direction.”

Though CAIR often demands apologies from groups that criticize Islam, Mr. Hooper would not apologize for his radio comment.

He also confirmed reports that a Saudi billionaire, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, donated $500,000 to CAIR for the educational push. “I think most of it is going for the library project,” Mr. Hooper said.

The report about the Saudi money prompted conservative activist Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, yesterday to say that while libraries have intellectual freedom, the library packages “present a highly misleading view of Islam, spray-painting over the religion’s long history of animosity to Western values.”

He called for the American Library Association to issue a statement on the problems with stocking a one-sided view of Islam and urged the use of materials written by his foundation’s staff.

Mr. Hooper said a positive image of Islam is important to protect the civil rights of Muslims in the United States. He cited the FBI report yesterday that “hate crimes” against people of Middle Eastern ethnicity had increased from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001 across the country.

Mr. Robertson said he opposed as “bad law” the government’s plans, even in a time of war, to electronically track the lives of all Americans.

“As the war on terrorism is going forward, the thing I’m concerned about is how much government control they’ll have” on Americans’ domestic life, he said.

Meanwhile, he said his main business is not Islam but Christian evangelism.

“I don’t want to change my ministry and become some kind of Muslim fighter,” he said. “I don’t want to alienate Muslim people around the world,” whom he believes want more information about the West and even Christianity.

But Islam is “a deeply held religious belief pushed by mullahs all over the world” as a basis for attacking Jews and Christians, he said. “Maybe we can counter it by American propaganda. Maybe we can counter it by love.”

==============================

Censored and bullied, scholars sanitize Islam (National Post, 021130)

David Frum

More than 200 people are dead, some two dozen churches and thousands of homes have been destroyed, and much of the Christian population of the Nigerian city of Kaduna driven into exile — all because of a single joke by a Nigerian journalist.

The joke was inspired by the controversy over the siting of this year’s Miss World contest in Nigeria. Responding to Islamic extremists who denounced the contest, Isioma Daniel, the fashion writer for the Nigerian paper ThisDay, quipped in the paper’s Nov. 16 edition that the prophet Muhammad would not have objected to the pageant; indeed, if he were alive, he would want the winner for his wife.

It is hard to understand what precisely was so objectionable about this remark. The Koran itself tells us that Muhammad had a lively appreciation of feminine beauty. On a visit one day to his adopted son Zaid, Muhammad was struck by the loveliness of Zaid’s wife, Zainab. Soon afterward, Muhammad announced that he had a revelation from Allah: Zaid and Zainab must divorce — and Zainab must then remarry Muhammad. (The Clans, 33:37). The incident caused another of Muhammad’s wives, Aisha, to observe: “I see your Allah quickly grants your desire.”

Muhammad possessed somewhere between 10 and 12 wives over his lifetime. Other Muslims were allowed no more than four, but Allah waived the restriction in Muhammad’s unique case. (The Clans, 33:50).

Despite its Koranic background, Daniel’s joke was interpreted as blasphemy. Mobs of outraged Muslim men attacked the offices of ThisDay in Kaduna and rampaged in the Nigerian capital city, Ajuba. The government of the Nigerian state of Zamfara issued a fatwa calling for the death of Daniel. The editor of the paper that published Daniel’s article was arrested by Nigerian secret police and compelled by Nigeria’s federal authorities to issue an abject apology.

Horrific as this violence is, we can reassure ourselves that it happened in a backward and far-away country — that it has no implications for those of us who live in the free and democratic West. But it does, it does.

Islamic law has for many years been stretching its reach into the West. The case of Salman Rushdie is the most notorious, but it is by no means unique.

Glance again at those stories I just told about the life of Muhammad. I bet you never heard them before. Since 9/11, the media of North America have done their utmost to educate their readers about Islam — its holidays and customs, its teachings and its traditions — and yet the most basic facts about the Muslim faith remain almost entirely unknown to most of us. These facts are hardly obscure, but they go unreported and undiscussed, as if we in the Western media — we who are so proud of our freedom and independence — feel bound by the same code that has now condemned Isioma Daniel.

Nor is it just the press that is intimidated: Western scholars live under the shadow of the fatwa as well. There is a small band of academics who study the history of Islam in the same questioning spirit and with the same scientific methods with which their colleagues study Christianity and Judaism. And they have found, as again their colleagues have done with Christianity and Judaism, that much of the traditional account of the origins of Islam cannot be true.

Large portions of the Koran, for example, appear to have been translated from Aramaic, the language of the Roman Middle East. That one fact suggests that the Koran was assembled after the Arabs erupted out of the Arabian peninsula in the 600s, rather than before, as tradition insisted. If so, the Muslim holy book would turn out to have been finished many years — possibly many hundreds of years — after the death of the Muslim prophet.

All very interesting. There is, however, one important way in which the work of scholars of Islam differs from that of scholars of Christianity and Judaism: which is that they must do that work in the face of constant intimidation and threat of attack.

When Bat Ye’or, an Egyptian-born historian of early Islam’s wars of conquest, came to lecture at Washington’s Georgetown University in October, her academic talk was shouted down by Muslim students. Not only were the students unpunished, but the organizers of the lecture apologized to them for the offence caused by permitting a scholar of world-wide reputation to speak uncensored about events that occurred 1,000 years ago and more.

The West is not Nigeria. Yet even in the West, some radical Muslim groups are demanding the same power over speech and thought that their Nigerian counterparts now exercise. This newspaper has been one of their favorite targets. The fate of Isioma Daniel reminds us how urgent it is to reject these demands and reassert our continuing belief in our Western principles of liberty — and how dangerous it would be to begin to surrender them.

==============================

Silence of the ‘moderates’ (Washington Times, 021204)

Cal Thomas

A growing conflict between some conservative Christian leaders and the Bush administration over whether Islam is a “peaceful religion” or a militaristic faith with designs on world domination is threatening the cozy relationship between the White House and some of its most loyal supporters.

Conservative Christians are not about to stop supporting the president, but they are disturbed that he keeps saying things about Islam they do not believe are true and, in their hearts, do not believe he believes.

Paul Weyrich, a longtime conservative political force in Washington, has coauthored an essay titled “Why Islam is a threat to America and the West. “ In it, he quotes extensively from the Koran and rebuts the president’s contention this “great religion is mostly peaceful”: “ the real nature of Islam is a religion of war and conquest. Those who argue that the threat comes only from ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ or ‘Islamic extremism’ misportray the nature of Islam itself. War against the unbeliever is as central a doctrine and practice of Islam as the Virgin Birth, the Trinity and Christ’s Resurrection are central to Christianity. Islam cannot abandon jihad and remain Islam. The word ‘Islam’ does not mean ‘peace,’ it means ‘submission.’”

Mr. Weyrich also notes that more Christians are being martyred today than at the height of the Roman persecutions, and “most of them are dying at the hands of Islam.”

One can sympathize with the dilemma faced by President Bush. He needs some cover in the Muslim world in order to prosecute the war on terrorism. But he also needs to forearm Americans by warning them about the intentions of our enemies.

There is a way of doing this without getting into a theological argument similar to the unanswerable question about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. The theological battle must be taken to the Muslim world.

The president should consider calling for “moderate” Muslims to clean up their own house. Such demands are being made by Roman Catholic laity on their hierarchy in the wake of priests alleged to have sexually abused children. The president should ask Muslim political and theological leaders to go after their own, if they are, indeed, misrepresenting “true” Islam. We should not have to clean up after the mess they have made.

The problem in the Muslim world is not only theological. It is also the failure of governments to meet minimal human needs. Despite massive infusions of petro dollars, most people in nations run by Muslim authoritarians are poor and illiterate. Their poverty is not the fault of the West.

As with the Cold War, dictators change the subject and blame their people’s misery on “outsiders” and the rich nations of the West.

If people realize they have been robbed of enjoying a real life, not by America, but by their own political and theological leaders, the people might overthrow those leaders. That is why they seek to keep their people in intellectual, theological and political bondage — so they can remain in power and live well.

In his essay, Mr. Weyrich worries about “fourth generational warfare, “ which means war will no longer be determined by states but by cultural and other concerns. And he worries much about “invasion by immigration.” Just as the Palestinians want to undermine Israel from within through homicide bombings and a “right of return” that would flood the nation with people determined to bring down the Israeli government and kick out all Jews, so, too, does Mr. Weyrich believe America’s enemies have placed their fanatical warriors in this country to eventually wreak havoc and destabilize our economy and political system. That is a stated goal of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization.

Pressuring “responsible” Muslim leaders to police their own house will help in two ways. If they do it, it will demonstrate there are true moderates who believe in pluralism and tolerance. If they don’t, it will expose their real motives. Either way, Americans will benefit.

==============================

Religion of Peace? Prove it (National Review Online, 021204)

Jonah Goldberg

Of every German I meet or see is a Nazi, it’s reasonable for me to say all Germans are Nazis. It may not be true, of course, but having no evidence indicating otherwise it’s certainly understandable that I would draw that conclusion. If, however, I constantly hear Germans condemn Nazism and anything which remotely resembles Nazism, if I see them repudiating German Nazis, and working to repair the damage done by German Nazis, it would be outrageously unfair and malicious for me to say all Germans are Nazis.

Now, under both hypothetical circumstances, the actual number of Germans who are Nazis can remain the same. The only difference is what the non-Nazi Germans do. As the saying goes, all that evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

This goes for public relations too.

But first, let’s bring things up to date. Right now there’s an interesting debate going on, mostly on the right — which makes sense as that is where most interesting debates take place these days (think about it). It’s basically about the nature of Islam and how the Bush administration deals with the Muslim world. On the one extreme are folks like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who say Islam is soaked-to-the-bone violent and, according to some, just plain “evil.” On the other side, I suppose, are folks like David Forte, a law professor and reported adviser to the White House who, according to critics, believes religiosity is more important than the content of a religion. (He’s written for NRO defending this view) I’m sure there are people in the White House who truly believe “Islam means peace,” but — with the exception of George W. Bush — their names elude me.

In the middle of these two extremes — Islam is bad versus Islam is wonderful — are lots of pragmatists and agnostics of various flavors. Indeed, most of the folks who reject the “Islam means peace” bumper sticker, including Robertson himself, concede that as a matter of geopolitics President Bush has no choice but to make nice on the Islamic world. Asked by George Stephanopoulos whether Bush is being politically correct, Robertson replied “No, he’s not being politically correct. He is waging a war, and he’s waging a war against terrorism and he doesn’t want to take on the whole Arab world. He doesn’t want this to be a Muslim-Christian fight or a Muslim-America fight.” And this is why Bush has gone out of his way to either condemn or distance himself from comments by Robertson, Falwell, and others.

Now — just to be clear — on the substance, I guess I’m closer to the Islam-is-a-violent-religion party. I think Falwell was silly to call Mohammed a “terrorist” because the word as we know it simply cannot be applied with any validity to conquering Arab generals of the 7th century. I see no reason not to think of Mohammed as an enlightened ruler as far as things went back in those days and in that place. But let’s also face facts: Mohammed was a general, and his generations of successors and disciples were conquerors. There is just too much in Islam about the importance of grabbing and holding territory to ignore. Jesus was a nonviolent martyr who argued for rendering unto Caesar what was his. Mohammed was Caesar. The seed of the notion of a civil society outside the scope of religious authority was planted by Jesus in Jewish soil; it was subsequently nurtured, with much bloodshed, over two millennia until today where the separation of Church and State is a bedrock of Western Civilization. This separation of the City of God and the City of Man, to use Saint Augustine’s formulation, is still quite alien to Islamic society.

Furthermore, the first few generations of Christianity were marked by suffering and oppression. The first few generations of Islam were marked by conquering. In its harshness, I suppose you could say Islam resembles pre-Christian Judaism in some ways. Jews, too, believe in the importance of geography and the use of the sword to protect it. Of course, they believe in holding onto only one narrow strip of it. (Prediction: Jewish militants will never claim, say, Cleveland as rightfully theirs.) And, it should be said, many Jews do not see modern Israel as the fulfillment of any Biblical or religious imperative — lots and lots of Zionists are very secular. And, it should be noted, Jews haven’t spent most of the last two millennia ruling empires and conquering land so much as being brutalized, oppressed, or — at best — tenuously tolerated.

Anyway, Muslims tend to believe that once a strip of dirt becomes Muslim it’s gotta stay Muslim for ever and ever. And if a burg’s population becomes majority Muslim, it must be ruled by Muslims (see Kashmir for details). This is one of the primary understandings, historically and religiously speaking, of “jihad.” “Until fairly recent times,” writes Bernard Lewis, “[jihad] was usually, though not universally, understood in a military sense. It was a Muslim duty — collective in attack, individual in defense — to fight in the war against the unbelievers. In principle, this war was to continue until all mankind either embraced Islam or submitted to the authority of the Muslim state.”

According to Islamic tradition, the world is divided into the House of War and the House of Islam — and once real estate is brought into the House of Islam, there’s no getting out. And, eventually, the House of War will be brought into the House of Islam too. That’s why Osama bin Laden says that he won’t rest until he gets most of Spain back. And this is partly, though not entirely, why — as Samuel Huntington noted — “the borders of Islam are bloody.”

IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER

But now that I’ve given you some indication of where I come down on the question “Is Islam a religion of peace?” let me say none of this matters.

Look: I take law-abiding, tolerant, and peaceful Muslims at their word when they say to me that they believe Islam means peace. Further, I take them at their word that they live by that interpretation. But the fact remains that other Muslims surely believe that Islam means death. Death to Christians, Jews, and Hindus; death to unbelievers, heretics, blasphemers, adulterers, and plenty of other categories of human being. And guess what, it’s those Muslims who are killing us. And guess what else? Those other, peace-loving, Muslims aren’t doing enough about it.

I’ve written before that in the realm of public policy, theology doesn’t matter nearly as much as morality and behavior. You can believe that murder is wrong because it depletes the ozone layer for all we care — so long as you believe murder is wrong. The differences between, say, Greek Orthodox Christians and Quakers are fascinating, rich, storied, and significant. But in the public square they do not matter one bit so long as Greek Orthodox Christians and Quakers alike abide by the law and our common sense of morality. If one group wants to burn incense and the other wants to make oatmeal, nobody cares. So long as each group leaves the other alone.

So, to a certain extent, I couldn’t care less if Islam is, on paper, factually, textually, objectively, and in all other academic senses a religion of war and bigotry — so long as actual Muslims are decent and upstanding people. And, similarly, the fact that Christianity is a religion of love and compassion would be equally meaningless if Christians spent their days poking me with red-hot metal thingies — out of love and compassion no doubt — in order to get me to convert. Sure, I might take note of Christian hypocrisy while I waited for Torquemada to bust out his scrotal tongs, but, truth be told, scoring debating points wouldn’t be at the forefront of my agenda.

Which brings me back to the Nazis and Germans. Human beings draw conclusions from what they see. All around the world, Muslims are declaring, in the name of Islam, that they are at war with the West. More important, all around the world self-declared Muslims are actually waging war on the West. They may be a tiny minority of the global Muslim community. I have no doubt that’s true. But if the decent and peace-loving Muslims of the world sit on their hands and do nothing, you can hardly fault many in the West who draw the conclusion that Islam is anything but peaceful. Why is it so hard to find, for example, a Muslim “leader” to condemn the death sentence against the journalist who wrote about Mohammed and the Miss World pageant — without some moral-equivalence weasel words about how she should have known better?

Closer to home, consider our friends at CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (which has orchestrated endless spam campaigns against this publication). CAIR had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the business of denouncing terrorists. They do it now from time to time, but it sure doesn’t sound like their heart is in it. Scroll through these “News Releases” from CAIR over the last year or so. You’ll find a couple of denunciations of terrorists (followed by demands that Jews do the same to Israel, in a cute game of moral equivalence). But you will find these are the needles in the giant haystacks of whines and complaints about how unfair America is to Muslims. The folks at CAIR, and other Muslim activists, are much, much more concerned, it seems, about the U.S. government or American pundits saying vaguely un-nice things about Muslims than they are about the fact that Muslims around the world are insulting their faith through mass murder in Mohammed’s name.

When the FBI recently came out with its numbers on hate crimes against Muslims in America, American Islamic activists like Ibrahim Hooper were all over the airwaves and newspapers outrageously comparing American Muslims to Jews in Weimar Germany. But you can hear crickets chirp or, at best, you can read torpid boilerplate, when it comes time to denounce Muslim atrocities.

By the way, I’m outraged by the Germany comparison not as a Jew but as an American. There isn’t a scintilla of validity to the insinuation that America has been anything but the antithesis of what Hooper and self-pitying whiners claim. According to the very FBI statistics they cite, twice as many Jews as Muslims were the victims of hate crimes in the United States since 19 Muslim fanatics murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11. And, by the way, if a Jew used those numbers in order to justify saying America feels like Weimar Germany I would call him an idiot who should be ashamed of himself for slandering America (and demeaning the Holocaust as well). The fact is that, while even one crime is too many, the post-9/11 “backlash” against Muslims in America has been astoundingly mild by historical standards. Compared to what happened to German-Americans during WWI or Japanese-Americans in WWII it barely even warrants an asterisk in the history books.

Oh, and speaking of denouncing fellow Jews, I’ve done it plenty of times. For example, when Irv Rubin of the JDL was arrested for plotting a terrorist attack I denounced him in the strongest possible terms, as did pretty much every prominent Jewish figure in America within 48 hours. (See Jeff Jacoby’s excellent column from December 20, 2001. You need to scroll down.)

I bring this up not to brag about my consistency but to make the point that it’s important not to let others speak in your name if you disagree with what they’re saying. Especially when they’re saying it with bombs and guns. I will have a lot more sympathy for the complaints of Muslim activists once they put even a fraction of the energy they dedicate to portraying themselves as victims of bigoted America — or Europe — toward policing and condemning their own co-religionists. If they’re afraid for their personal safety or even their lives — not an unreasonable fear — that’s no excuse. Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and the rest may constitute hijackers in the cockpit of a peaceful religion, but they will define Islam if the folks in the main cabin don’t fight the hijackers. That’s what happened with Nazis in Germany, and that’s what will happen with militant Islam if non-militant Islam continues to insist that its biggest enemies are the open and tolerant nations of the West that gave them the opportunity to live decent lives in freedom. If they persist in that complaint, nobody will be able to justly blame average Americans for scoffing at the suggestion that Islam means peace.

==============================

Some conservatives back away from Weyrich letter denouncing Muslim stamp (Baptist Website, 021210)

By Robert Marus

WASHINGTON (ABP)—A leader in America’s Religious Right has weighed in on debate over a stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service to commemorate an Islamic holiday.

Stamps commemorating the Muslim feast Eid al-Fitr should be withdrawn, overprinted with an image of the World Trade Center towers destroyed in terrorist attacks Sept. 11 and reissued, suggests Paul Weyrich, president of the conservative political action group Free Congress Foundation.

“I have no doubt that a majority of Americans would find the altered stamps a more appropriate commemoration of Islam than the current celebratory version,” Weyrich wrote in a letter to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and other Republican Congressional leaders.

Critics denounced Weyrich’s suggestion as hate speech.

The Postal Service issued the stamps honoring the feast that concludes the Muslim holy month of Ramadan after a long lobbying effort by American Muslim groups and a letter-writing campaign by Muslim school children.

The post office has long issued commemorative stamps celebrating other religious holidays such as Christmas and Hanukkah and ethnic-group celebrations such Kwanzaa and Cinco de Mayo. The Eid stamps were the first issued to commemorate an Islamic holiday, however. They have drawn unusual attention because of the timing of their release, just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Weyrich was a pioneer in the development of the modern-day Religious Right and remains a prominent activist in conservative politics.

Weyrich’s attack on Islam comes on the heels of controversy over comments by evangelist Franklin Graham, who offended American Muslim groups and ignited a minor media firestorm by calling Islam “a very evil and wicked religion.”

Other conservative leaders, such as President George W. Bush, have been careful to emphasize what Bush calls the positive role Islam plays in the lives of millions of American Muslims and other moderate followers of Islam around the world.

Conservative and liberal commentators alike have viewed comments such as Weyrich’s and Graham’s as uncalled-for and inflammatory in the wake of the harassment and persecution of some American Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Southern Baptist Convention President James Merritt said in an interview he believes Weyrich’s suggestion is off base. Still, he questioned whether the stamps are appropriate.

“Quite frankly, I think we all have to say—to use an old colloquialism—what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” Merritt said from Snellville, Ga., where he is pastor of First Baptist Church. “I couldn’t really, in the spirit of religious liberty, issue a stamp for Christianity so to speak, but then say that you can’t issue a stamp for Jews and Muslims.”

However, Merritt—who recently made news himself by calling on Southern Baptists to pray for the conversion of Muslims during Ramadan—stopped short of criticizing Graham’s comments about Islam. “I believe Islam, as I do believe every other religion outside of Christianity, offers a false hope,” he said.

Merritt said he found it ironic that majority-Islamic countries often suppress religious liberty for religious minorities, while a majority-Christian country such as the U.S. allows complete religious freedom for Muslims.

“I find it interesting that there’s not one Muslim country that is a democracy,” Merritt said. “I find it interesting that Muslims can come to America and build mosques, but that we can’t go to Muslim countries and build churches.”

==============================

Are we at war with Islam? (World Net Daily, 020625)

Joseph Farah

Within hours of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center on Sept. 11, President Bush and other U.S. and western leaders were explaining that though we found ourselves in a state of war, that war was not with Islam.

Nine months later, we’re still confused about who our enemy is.

If you have any chance of winning a war, you must be able to identify the enemy.

Are we at war with Islam? Most definitely not.

But, Islam is at war with us.

In fact, Islam has been at war with the West, with Christianity, with Judaism – indeed, with the entire non-Muslim world – ever since the days of Muhammad. This struggle, more than any other, has defined history for the last 1,200 years.

Americans don’t understand this because they don’t know their history. In Muhammad’s era, Islam swept through the Arabian peninsula to conquer the Middle East. Its armies then marched on Europe, Asia and Africa. In the late 15th century, Columbus was exploring new trade routes because Islam’s armies controlled the land routes to the East. He accidentally discovered America. In the late 17th century, Islam’s armies were at the gates of Vienna.

For the next 300 years, Islam’s imperialist ambitions faded. But it is quite clearly on the rebound today.

Enriched by oil wealth, Islam is expanding in every direction – through Africa, through Asia, through Europe – and even in the United States where it is said to be the fastest-growing religion.

Can Islam defeat the West?

Certainly not in any conventional military confrontation. But that is not the goal. This is asymmetrical warfare. The beauty of this conflict from Islam’s point of view is that the West can’t even identify targets, can’t even clearly identify the enemy.

America has troops in well over 100 nations. They are stationed all over the world to provide peace and security. Yet, in truth, America can’t adequately provide security “1,000 yards from the U.S. Capitol after nightfall,” as Paul Weyrich and William S. Lind of the Free Congress Foundation write in a new paper, “Why Islam Is a Threat to America and the West.”

We are vulnerable to continued terror attacks. But these attacks are not designed to defeat us militarily. They are designed to break our will. They are designed to sow seeds of confusion in a culture that has already lost its own religious underpinnings and moral framework. They are designed, in Marxist theory, to “heighten the contradictions of capitalism” – or, as another generation of communists explained it, to “bring the war home.” That was how we lost a war to little Vietnam.

The West has little chance of prevailing in this contest without understanding who the real enemy is.

Am I saying all Muslims are the enemy? Of course not. Were the people living in communist countries during the Cold War our enemies? Not really. The evil regimes that victimized their own people as well as their neighbors were the enemies. The same is true in Islam today.

We must understand in the West today – whether we live in the U.S., Israel, the United Kingdom or elsewhere – that Islam reflects a vastly different worldview from the one that established western civilization. If we try to understand Islam as some sort of extension of monotheistic Judeo-Christian philosophy, we will fail to see the truth.

The truth is that western civilization faces perhaps its greatest test at the hands of Islam today. We don’t understand these people – and, not understanding them, we try to give them what we think they want, what we might want in a similar situation. This is how Israel has been led down the primrose path in its negotiations with the Arabs.

It’s a war. And, for Islam, the negotiating table is just another theater in that war.

Every day, around the world, if we look for them, we see disparate, seemingly unconnected reports of attacks by Muslims on non-Muslims. We see them in Israel. We see them in India. We see them in Indonesia. We see them in the Philippines. We see them in Sudan. We see them even in the U.S. and Europe.

People are dying – lots of them. In fact, more Christians are being persecuted today than ever before in the history of the world – even under the Romans. Most of those attacks come from Islam.

What we need to understand is that these attacks are connected. They are coordinated. Islam is on the march, again. The only question is whether we see it, acknowledge the reality of it and figure out an adequate response before it’s too late.

==============================

Sheikh Tantawi Grows in Office (Free Congress Foundation, 020418)

By Robert Spencer

George W. Bush knows that Islam is a religion of peace because Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi said so. Two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the President told the United Nations that Tantawi, “the Sheikh of Al-Azhar University, the world’s oldest Islamic institution of higher learning, declared that terrorism is a disease, and that Islam prohibits killing innocent civilians.”

Yet unfortunately for Bush and others who trumpeted Tantawi’s words around the globe last winter, this sheikh whom the BBC called “the highest spiritual authority for nearly a billion Sunni Muslims” has now changed his tune. As liberals say about conservatives who start voting for big government and high taxes, Tantawi has grown in office.

The Middle East Media Research Institute reports that on April 4, an Arabic-language website connected to Al-Azhar stated that Tantawi has “demanded that the Palestinian people, of all factions, intensify the martyrdom operations [that is, suicide bombings] against the Zionist enemy, and described the martyrdom operations as the highest form of Jihad operations. He says that the young people executing them have sold Allah the most precious thing of all.”

Islamic law, the good sheikh maintained, demanded the blood of non-combatants. He “emphasized that every martyrdom operation against any Israeli, including children, women, and teenagers, is a legitimate act according to [Islamic] religious law, and an Islamic commandment, until the people of Palestine regain their land and cause the cruel Israeli aggression to retreat...”

Tantawi, Bush’s imam of peace, thus joins Yasir Arafat in the Hall of Fame of Islamic dissemblers. Both are extremely adept at telling the Western media what it wants to hear - and then doing likewise for the Arabic press, contradictions be damned. Like Arafat, the wily Tantawi seems to have mastered this art long before September 11. As far back as 1998, he declared that “it is every Muslim, Palestinian and Arab’s right to blow himself up in the heart of Israel, an honorable death is better than a life of humiliation.” This right is, in fact, a religious duty: “All religious laws have demanded the use of force against the enemy and fighting against those who stand by Israel; there is no escape from fighting, from Jihad, and from [self-] defense, and whoever refrains from such things is not a believer.”

Maybe Tantawi’s latest change of heart was dictated by his faith. Unfortunately for those who want to believe that pro-terrorist Islam is an aberrant form of the religion of peace, the foundational text of Islam is, well, soft on terrorism. The Qur’an, which Muslims believe to be the perfect words of Almighty God, tells believers that “when you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly” (Sura 47:4).

This is just one of the verses that may have moved Tantawi to throw in his lot with the terrorists. Others include Sura 48:29: “Muhammad is God’s Apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another,” and Sura 9:5: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.”

Tantawi’s switch may also have been inspired by the example of the Prophet Muhammad himself; traditions about Muhammad’s words and deeds are for Muslims second in importance only to the Qur’an. According to George Washington University Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Muslims revere Muhammad as “the perfection of both the norm of the human collectivity and the human individual, the norm for the perfect social life and the prototype and guide for the individual’s spiritual life.”

This perfect Islamic man was a man of war. He never shrank from the use of force. He ordered his enemies murdered, and assured his followers that they incurred no guilt by carrying out these orders. While Jesus rebuked his disciples for asking Him if they should call down fire from Heaven upon a disbelieving village (St. Luke 9:51-55), Muhammad several times cursed those who rejected his message. An entire Sura, or chapter, of the Qur’an is devoted to cursing Muhammad’s disbelieving uncle and wife: “May the hands of Abu Lahab perish! May he himself perish! Nothing shall his wealth and gains avail him. He shall be burnt in a flaming fire, and his wife, laden with faggots, shall have a rope of fibre around her neck!” (Sura 111:1-5).

Tantawi, then, seems by embracing terrorism to have done nothing other than become more true to his faith. How many more such spiritual homecomings among Islamic “moderates” will it take for the multiculturalist establishment to admit the true nature of Islam?

Robert Spencer is an adjunct fellow with the Free Congress Foundation. He is the author of Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith, coming this summer from Encounter Books.

==============================

Reports of Moderate Islam’s Existence Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (Free Congress Foundation, 020422)

History just may remember George W. Bush as the American Caesar; not for founding a hegemonic empire like an Augustus nor, like a Marcus Aurelius, for subduing the barbarians bent on the destruction of his people. No, Bush Secundus, in the mold of Julius, might be infamous for his poor choice of friends - in this case his embracing of the countries of “moderate Islam.”

It grows ever increasingly apparent that to ally with “moderate Islam” is about as effective as coalition building with the lands of Narnia, Middle Earth and Utopia. In contradistinction to erroneous stories of Mark Twain’s death - reports of moderate Islam’s existence have been greatly exaggerated.

First and foremost amongst our chimerical comrades is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is no doubt that if King Fahd bin Abd al-Aziz Al wasn’t sitting on a quarter of the world’s known oil reserves, Saudi Arabia’s horrid human rights record would earn it a reputation in America lower than the enormous amount of phlegm needed to pronounce the desert monarch’s name. Grown bold with oil wealth, the Saudis don’t hide the fact that they provide “charity” to the widows and orphans of suicide bombers. But perhaps the greatest effrontery from a Saudi official came this month in London.

Saudi ambassador to Great Britain Ghazi Algosaibi, who is also a poet of some renown in Arab circles, penned an elegy, entitled “The Martyrs” in honor of the first female Palestinian suicide bomber. The poem was published in the London-based Arab newspaper Al Hayat.

Algosaibi’s poem calls Ayat Akhras, who upon exploding herself in a market killed two Israelis and wounded 25 more, “the bride of loftiness” who “embraced death with a smile, while the leaders are running away from death. Doors of heaven are opened for her.” The Saudi government official’s verse likewise provided a puerile existential justification for being a suicide bomber (“May God be the witness that you are martyrs ... You died to honor God’s word. You committed suicide? We committed suicide by living like the dead.”) and a blind-side swipe at their ally, United States (“We complained to the idols of a White House whose heart is filled with darkness”).

Remember, Saudi Arabia is the cornerstone of the administration’s moderate Islam nation coalition.

Meanwhile in Egypt, which benefits to the figure of $2 billion annually from the coffers of American foreign aid, the country’s leading Islamic authority, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, also praised the acts of “martyrs” who act against Israel. Tantawi is the Grand Sheik of Islam’s oldest and most prestigious university, Al-Azhar, which serves as “moderate” Islam’s highest seat of learning.

Mohammed Sayed Tantawi is not an unknown figure to the Western press as he was quoted extensively as President Bush’s imam of peace after the attacks of September 11th when he declared: “It’s not courage in any way to kill an innocent person, or to kill thousands of people, including men and women and children.” Unless they happen to be Israelis.

But what is more symbolic of kinder and gentler Mohammedanism than the Westernized Islamic woman. Soha Arafat, wife of Yassir Arafat, is such a woman. Bleach-haired, bejeweled and business suited, Mrs. Arafat even held an Islamic women’s conference (such summits, of course, being the penultimate activity for aspiring feminists) in concert with Jordan’s Queen Rania and Sudanese First Lady Fatima Bashir which called for an end violence against women and opportunities equal to their male Islamic counterparts. Putting the latter principle into practice, Soha Arafat showed in a recent interview that she can hold a blood-thirst equal to any man as she gave her approbation of “martyr operations.” Mrs. Arafat mused that if she had a son she would approve of him being a suicide bomber - “Is there any greater honor than (martyrdom)? Do you expect me and my children to be less patriotic and more eager to live than the sons of my people?”

Peaceful Islam?

Yes, to his credit the president has not shied away from using the “E” word - “evil.” However, he has refused to apply it to any sect of organized Islam or its leadership - men and women not evil because their beliefs are different from the Judeo-Christian traditions of the West, but evil because they promote terrorism. If American foreign policy is predicated on the myth that there is a sizable segment of Islam that loves baseball, apple pie and the good ol’ USA, then the administration will eventually find itself bloodied and forced to utter quizzically: Et tu, Islam?

==============================

Trying To Find A ‘Moderate’ Islam Is A Quixotic Quest (Free Congress Foundation, 020520)

By C.T. Rossi

Once upon a time (in the 1930s), a young Secretary of Agriculture believed in a mystical land peopled by wise elders of a foreign faith, full of peace and enlightenment. So the man, Henry Wallace (destined to be FDR’s vice-president), used federal money to fund an expedition to find the fabled lost city of Shambhala in central Asia. Needless to say, it was not found.

If history does repeat itself, the quest for “moderate Islam” might be an equally futile government endeavor. While kinder-and-gentler Mohammadism may never be found, we may at least gain apophatic knowledge of where it can’t be found - that being in places where a Muslim majority prevails, even in a detention center Down Under.

Strange stories first came out of the Australian immigration facility at ul protest.” They claimed that the time the Australian government was taking to screen Middle Eastern immigrants before granting them admission to Aussie society was unjustly long. Their protest consisted of a hunger strike, facilitated by the sewing shut of hungry mouths. In the case of adult Moslems, it appeared to be of a voluntary nature; in the case of the children, less so. Now, even more stories are emerging about the antics of these refugees who fled from the Taliban.

The Moslem majority has taken to oppressing the non-Moslem segments of the detention camp population, most notably Christians and Mandaeans (Mandaeans are a monotheistic sect, mostly found in Iraq and Iran, who claim descent from the followers of St. John the Baptist). Whether making do with what they have or following a prescription from the Koran, the Moslems’ chief weapon against the “infidels” is stoning.

In one stoning, Christians were ambushed upon leaving the dining mess - this resulted in the blinding of one man. Another blind man, this one a Mandaean, was held down and defecated upon by a Moslem mob. Various other attacks upon non-Moslems, both physical and scatological, have been reported - many perpetrated upon the unveiled “infidel women” who do not feel the need to conform to an Islamic law that is not their own. All of this speaks to the very hard fact that the majority of Afghani Moslems subscribe to a value system quite different from our own. This lesson is being taught concurrently in a classroom on the other side of the globe from Woomera.

With the deposal of the Taliban, some thought that nation-building in Afghanistan was the order of the day. But turning that rugged land, with its plethora of disparate tribes, into a democratic state may prove about as easy as readying the denizens of Woomera for “shrimp on the barbie,” a night at the Sydney Opera House, and not killing those who hold a different creed. Already, the nation-building effort seems to be unraveling due to warlord factionalism.

Afghan warlordism is based on the same bully-of-the-schoolyard philosophy displayed at Woomera - the most notable difference being that instead of hurling stones (or bodily waste) at their enemies, warlords tend to use Stinger missiles. Former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is such a warlord. Critical of U.S. involvement on Afghani soil, Hekmatyar found himself the recipient of a CIA attack, for allegedly planning an assault on the U.S.-backed interim government. But the problem far transcends one man.

In Islamic culture, dissent means death. This is not an “extreme” or “radical” position if one accepts the underpinnings of Islam and their logical consequences. To believe that the supreme being and creator of all (Allah) has manifested his express and perfect will in a series of divine edicts (the Koran) is also to believe that all who deviate from these commands are evil and an effrontery to God. Because Allah is the great potentate of the universe, these edicts are unilateral and binding on all creatures - whether they like it or not. There is no differentiation between realms of church and state. This distinction is given in the words of Christ when he commanded different shares to God and Caesar, much to the benefit of Western world ever since.

In a cosmology where political disagreement is heresy, heresy is a capital offense, and infidels are the enemy of God, is the warlordism of Afghanistan and mob mentality of Woomera really that unexpected?

No, the real radicalism is from the secular intelligentsia and politicos of the West, in thinking that Moslems can adopt an attitude where their religious beliefs don’t influence their actions - an attitude that has become all too prevalent in the West.

==============================

Four Myths About Muslims (Free Congress Foundation, 020613)

If Robert Frost was correct when he quipped that “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel,” then America has descended into the depths of leftism. The systematic way in which government and the media have consistently followed the path of self-loathing and self-negation could be the source of great humor, if the matters being bungled were not so grave.

While the attacks of September 11th roused a dormant patriotism in the collective American bosom, it also unveiled how deeply entrenched public discourse is in political correctness. Day after day the “war on terror” brings more misinformation, disinformation and propaganda. Most security measures are either window dressings for public consumption or usurpations of civil liberties by power-hungry elements within the bowels of bureaucracy.

The myths need to be dispelled and the elephant in America’s living room needs to be addressed for the sake of that rarest of post-modern commodities - the truth.

Myth #1: Terrorism is not about Islam.

In fairness, someone did try to warn America to this sobering fact last fall in a Wall Street Journal editorial. The author, Amir Taheri, is a Muslim. He declared that “to claim that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam amounts to a whitewash.” Some may think it ironic that a Muslim author is the one sounding the warning bell about his own faith. It isn’t ironic in the least. Given the ground rules of politically correct discourse, only a minority may criticize a minority - only a Muslim may criticize Muslims.

Myth #2: Profiling is an evil to be avoided at all costs.

Profiling is an integral part of detective work and one component of the process is a person’s race. When a cross is set ablaze on a black homeowner’s lawn, you can guess that “white male” is placed atop the list of likely attributes of potential perpetrators. A white male is also most likely to be a serial murderer.

Truthfully, there is nothing in the genetic composition of a race that dictates social behavior. The real danger is that similar groups of people tend to share common cosmologies. If an ethnic group (pygmies for example) adopts an evil practice (cannibalism) in their world view, one may rightly call them backwards and savage - not because they are animists or short or black or from a different part of the globe, but because they have chosen to dine on human flesh. Terrorists are, overwhelmingly, Muslim males between the ages of 17 and 40 and from Middle Eastern ethnicities. If there doesn’t exist a genetic predisposition to terrorism in the genes of peoples of the Tigres and Euphrates, then it must be their shared belief system - Islam.

If you are a young Islamic Arab male, you fit the profile for 19 of 19 terrorists of September 11th and you should be prepared to face additional security in airports.

Myth #3: Part of the FBI’s failure on September 11th was lack of Arab or Muslim agents.

This laughable idea comes from the spin machine of the FBI’s restructuring. Director Mueller has announced an Arab-American/Muslim affirmative action hiring policy as a part of the new proactive FBI. What Mueller or Attorney General Ashcroft have not done is explain exactly how having stuffy white-bread types at the Bureau led to the success of the attacks. If anything, there is evidence that just the opposite is the case.

FBI counter-terrorism special agent-turned-whistleblower Robert Wright has related an episode of some import. Wright asserts that while investigating possible Islamic terrorist activities, a Muslim special agent refused to wear an undercover wire, stating that “Muslims don’t record other Muslims.”

Mueller and Ashcroft have not addressed this claim.

Uncooperative Islamic FBI agents aside, the FBI does not receive the lion’s share of the blame for the incidents of September 11th. That honor goes to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Because of INS’s incompetence, the United States is overrun with illegal immigrants - some are past terrorists, some are potential terrorists.

Myth #4: We must ally the “moderate” Muslims.

The truth be told, we don’t understand who’s who in the world of Islam. President Bush trotted out Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi as the imam of”peaceful Islam.” However it wasn’t long before Tantawi was advocating the suicide bombers in Israel.

Even Mullah Omar calls himself a “moderate” Muslim, in that his Taliban regime did nothing more nor less than is called for in the Koran. With causuistries like that, Omar should move to Washington. After all, the FBI is hiring.

C.T. Rossi comments on contemporary culture for the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

Today’s Criminal Will Become Tomorrow’s Islamic Terrorist (Free Congress Foundation, 020625)

America is about to view a remake of a classic story. It’s not a multi-million-dollar Hollywood comic book-turned-movie spectacle nor a modernized version of a long-favored stage drama. Rather, America is discovering a 700-year-old stage for herself - the story of the Janissaries.

The Janissaries were the elite fighting force of the Moslem Ottoman Empire for centuries. Their ranks were filled with young Christian men (who often converted to Islam) conscripted to fight for the sultan. They became instrumental in holding together the Ottoman Empire precisely because they were free from the tribal loyalties that left other Moslem Arabs and Turks, at times, conflicted. In today’s parlance, we would merely call them Moslem extremists.

While most reporters (and unfortunately the White House) look at the John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla stories as some type of strange socio-religious anomaly, these instances are anything but. The advent of Jihad Johnny and Abdullah al Muhajir represent the revival of a proved weapon of radical Islam - the Janissary warrior. And the recruitment has just begun.

The key element in the recruitment of the new Janissaries is to seek out and evangelize those who are disaffected with Western culture. In the case of John Walker Lindh, Islam provided a young man with moral boundaries when his parents would (or could) not. With Jose Padilla, the story was different.

Padilla was recruited to his new vocation as an Islamic terrorist after prison. Time will show that Padilla was not alone.

Perhaps the foremost expert in prison evangelization in America is Chuck Colson, co-founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries. Colson is now warning that the Islam being preached is neither “noble” nor “peaceful.”

In the June 24 issue of the Wall Street Journal, Colson relates the story of how, when addressing an open meeting of prisoners, his use of the name Jesus was met with attempted censorship by Moslem inmates who upon hearing the name would turn up the volume on their portable radios. Not stopping there, Colson states that the multi-faith gathering came within a hare’s breath of becoming a full-scale prison riot - his ability to quiet the Christian prisoners being the pivotal factor.

Colson also made mention that Al Qaeda training manuals outline plans whereby American inmates are targeted for conversion because such individuals may be “disenchanted with their country’s policies.” These”converts” are extremely useful to terrorist groups as the inmates “combine a desire for ‘payback’ with an ability to blend easily into American culture.” This Islamic prison outreach, as recommended by Al Qaeda, is taking place - the most prominent ministry being the National Islamic Prison Foundation. Colson also notes that a main funder of such programs is none other than Saudi Arabia.

While the new American Janissaries, harvested from penitentiaries, could prove eminently useful to terrorist groups in waging a domestic terror campaign upon America, the solicitation of Moslem acolytes is not limited to American jails - nor even to America.

Islamic “missionaries” have also descended upon the volatile Chiapas region of Mexico. Since 1996, more than 300 conversions amongst the Mayan people have been made. According to the Houston Chronicle, the leader of the Islamic group, Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, “has sharply condemned democracy and global capitalism.” The Chronicle also provided a telling quote from Moslem missionary Esteban Lopez: “There isn’t a pure Islamic government in the world. That’s what we hope to create.”

All of these patterns lead us to serious questions that need to be asked.

Many Moslems have traditionally been critical (if not paranoid) of the proselytizing nature of Christianity. Such skepticism about the honorable intentions of Christianity led to the imprisonment of Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer in Afghanistan for their overt religious discussions with Afghani locals. It is also the attitude that makes it illegal to wear the religious garb of a faith other than Islam in Saudi Arabia. But now Moslem missionaries seem to be turning up in the oddest places, places that are violent and unstable, places where the people might harbor animosity toward American society, places recommended in Al Qaeda’s grand strategy. Saudi money also seems to be in play.

Are we prepared to ask the hard questions? Probably not.

And so the conscription of the new Janissaries continues. Under the guise (and legal protection) of a noble religion, the forces of radical Islam recruit disciples, for whom there is only one prerequisite - a hatred of America. All this is an old tale . . . but now it’s coming to a theater near you.

C.T. Rossi comments on contemporary culture for the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

More Administration Baloney About Islam (Free Congress Foundation, 020912)

By William S. Lind

On December 7, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not commemorate the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by urging Americans to regard Shinto as a religion of peace and love. Why, then, did President George W. Bush on September 10th mark the eve of the anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Towers by saying that Islam “is a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It’s a faith based upon love, not hate.”

The reality is that like Shinto, Islam is a religion of war. The Koran breathes endless hate for all non-Islamics (one of many examples, from Sura 9:5: “slay the idolaters wherever you may find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.”) The Koran and the hadith, the collected sayings and actions of Mohammed, point straight toward the World Trade Towers. The Koran says, “We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers (Sura 3:150).” “Unbelievers are those who declare: ‘God is the Messiah, the son of Mary (Sura 5:16)’.” According to the hadith, “As-Sa’b bin Jaththama said, ‘The Prophet (Mohammed)…was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The Prophet replied, “They (the women and children) are from them.’” In other words, who cares about taking innocent life?

Nor do we have to go back to the seventh century to see the real nature of Islam. All around the globe, Christians are being killed by Islamics. In the Sudan alone, the number is upwards of 1,000,000.

But what about the nice Islamics, apologists such as Mr. Bush say? Well, let’s look at what certainly should be nice Islamics, the Kuwaitis. Eleven years ago, we went to war to save Kuwait from Iraq. But according to the September 11th Washington Times, a recent poll taken in Kuwait found that 74% of almost 12,000 respondents said bin Laden was a “hero.” Maybe next time around, we would do better to go to war on Saddam’s side.

The reality is that Islam is at war with Christendom and always has been. The problem is that they know it while too many of our leaders, including President Bush, pretend it isn’t happening. A Marine friend of mine called a couple days ago to say he had recently watched an al Quaeda training tape, and the target the al Quaeda operatives were shooting to death was wearing a large cross. Can you imagine the White House’s reaction if our Marines started putting Islamic crescents on the targets on their shooting ranges?

Living in a world of “let’s pretend” is fine in the nursery. But it is a poor prescription for national security in a world where Islam is on the strategic offensive everywhere. Do we have to wait for a suitcase nuke to go off on K Street before the Bush Administration will haul itself into the real world?

==============================

“Islam Unveiled” Deserves Equal Time In Public Libraries (Free Congress Foundation, 021003)

By Paul M. Weyrich

CAIR packages” will be arriving at your public library soon, if they haven’t already gotten there. Unlike the CARE packages that provided needed sustenance to the Third World, these “CAIR packages” provide scant nourishment: they put forth a distorted and incomplete view of Islam.

CAIR, the Council for American Islamic Relations, has already placed hundreds of books and videos on Islam in public libraries across the nation through its “Sponsor Your Library Project.” They intend to send their packages to every public library in the country. The problem is that CAIR’s favored books and videos teach that Islam is a religion of peace, generally ignoring the disquieting roots of Islamic extremism in the bases of the Islamic faith: the Qur’ an and the Sunnah. [CAIR Sponsor Your Library Project]

This is comforting to many Americans today. But it is the contention of Islamic scholar Robert Spencer that this tendency to gloss over what Islam is really about puts both non-Muslims and moderate Muslims at a disadvantage: non-Muslims are not adequately apprised of the full causes of the threat from the Muslim world, and moderate Muslims are left defenseless in their attempts to prove that radical Islam is not authentic Islam. No adequate response is articulated to the Muslims who justify their violence on the basis of Qur’anic passages such as this one: “Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given [i.e., Jews and Christians] as believe neither in Allah not the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and His Apostle have forbidden and do not embrace the true Faith, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued” (Sura 9:29).

CAIR’s material gives little or no indication of the fact that there are many millions of Muslims worldwide who take such statements literally. Quite simply, they mean our country harm. If we are to face this threat adequately, we must come to terms with this reality.

Fortunately, Free Congress Foundation has Robert Spencer as an adjunct fellow. Spencer has written a new book, “Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith,” that takes off the rose-colored glasses that are worn by too many journalists in the media establishment when examining Islam. He dares to stare straight at the uncomfortable elements of Islam.

Spencer became interested in Islam over twenty years ago, while he was in college (from which he emerged with a Master’s Degree in Religious Studies.) He began reading the Qur’an and quickly became fascinated with Islamic religion and culture. He was moved by the power and beauty of many sections of the Qur’an, but the Muslim holy book’s many violent passages troubled him. For example, in the Qur’an, are many passages that command Muslims to subdue unbelievers, including Christians and Jews, through violence: they should either convert to Islam or submit to Islamic rule.

In an effort to discover what Muslims themselves thought of those passages, he began reading the voluminous collections of Hadiths, or traditions about Muhammad, that most Muslims regard as second in authority only to the Qur’an itself. After years of avidly reading innumerable books and articles about Islam, Robert reluctantly arrived at the inescapable conclusion that too many in the news media want to avoid: although there are many peaceful Muslims, Islam is not a religion of peace. Moderate Muslims have a great deal of difficulty replying to Muslim extremists because the violent elements that Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists invoke to justify their actions are deeply embedded in core Islamic texts that both camps revere.

When 9/11/01 hit, Spencer was disturbed by the by the distorted and incomplete presentations of Islam that flooded the news media. To set the record straight, he began work on “Islam Unveiled” (Encounter Books). According to National Review’s Rod Dreher, this book goes “a long way to explain the hatred, violence, backwardness, and fanaticism endemic to the Islamic world.” This is not a Politically Correct book, but it is absolutely correct in its examination of what Islam is about — and how and why it differs so radically from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Spencer explains why millions of Muslims do regard the Qur’an’s violent passages as valid guidelines for the behavior of Muslims today, while Jews and Christians don’t so regard the Old Testament’s violence. Muslims believe that the Qur’an was dictated directly by Allah through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad. As such, unlike the Old Testament’s directives about stoning and slavery, the Qur’an’s commands cannot be questioned or mitigated by consigning them to one time or place. Allah’s words have universal validity for all people in all times.

As Spencer points out, there is no Islamic version of “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44).” On the contrary, the Qur’an says: “Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are merciful to one another, but ruthless to unbelievers” (Sura 48:29).

Many prominent Muslim clerics, even in this modern era, still teach that non-believers must be forced into submission. Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeni was not a lone voice in Islam when he said, as quoted by Spencer: “Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world…”

In our own day, Sheikh Muhammad Saleh al-Munajjid, an imam in our ally Saudi Arabia, stated during a Friday sermon at a mosque: “Muslims must…educate their children to Jihad. This is the greatest benefit of the situation: educating the children to Jihad and to hatred of the Jews, the Christians, and the infidels; educating the children to Jihad and to revival of the embers of Jihad in their souls. This is what is needed now…”

But those in America and the West who have been raised in the tolerance preached by Judaism and Christianity are ill-equipped to confront a religion that is so intolerant.

Muslim harshness takes other forms as well. Feminists take note: Spencer has also published for the Free Congress Foundation a short monograph called “Women and Islam” that examines how the Qur’an is taken by men living under Islamic law as giving them permission to engage in polygamy, capricious divorce, marriage to children, and even wife beating. Thus, the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences’ research shows that over nine out of 10 Pakistani wives have been beaten or sexually abused — for offenses such as not giving birth to a male child or even cooking a poor meal.

Because such facts are seldom reported, most Americans know little about Islam. The Pew Research Center for People and the Press released a survey last March that showed a majority of Americans under 30 have a favorable view of the religion. Women are split 34% favorable to 31% unfavorable. Men were more favorable toward Islam: 42% favorable to 35% unfavorable.

Spencer’s book and his monographs, “Women and Islam” and “An Introduction to the Qur’an,” both published by the Free Congress Foundation, should be real eye-openers for those Americans who fail to understand what Islam is really about and why we should be concerned about it. Spencer’s book should be in every library in the country. It’s up to the grassroots to speak up and demand equal time: every library that offers the public CAIR-provided material should also offer “Islam Unveiled,” “Women and Islam,” and “An Introduction to the Qur’an.” Only in this way will library patrons have access to a realistic view of Islam and its problems in co-existing with the Judeo-Christian world.

Even after the horrors of 9/11, too many Americans did not open their eyes to what Islam really teaches. Thanks to Robert Spencer, they now have another chance.

==============================

A fatwa of one’s own (National Post, 021205)

Mark Steyn

To be honest, I felt mildly envious when I saw Zulf M. Khalfan’s letter on Tuesday. Mr. Khalfan, of Nepean, Ontario, was responding to David Frum’s defence of Isioma Daniel, the Nigerian journalist now in hiding after remarking that the Prophet Muhammad would have been happy to take the winner of Miss World for his wife. Mr. Khalfan replied that, as Muhammad’s wives are accorded “an honourable status,” it was obviously grossly objectionable to suggest that a woman who “exposed herself” — by wearing make-up and a bikini — would be an appropriate spouse for the Prophet.

Fair comment. But then: “Mr. Frum has to understand that it is Muslims who determine what is objectionable to their religion, not he dictating it to them,” added Mr. Khalfan. “And since he cites Salman Rushdie, he should know by now the fatal consequences resulting from ignoring this fact.”

Can you believe it? For most of the last 15 months, while I’ve been here playing the National Post’s Mister Islamophobe, that milquetoast Frum has been sitting in the White House, presumably cranking out all the President’s dopey “Islam is peace” speeches. He’s back in the Post for barely a fortnight and already he’s got his own fatwa? Thanks a bunch, you ungrateful Nepean Islamists! Where did I go right?

Well, Mr. Khalfan has now “clarified” his original letter on the page opposite. He doesn’t want to kill David Frum. He just wants David to be aware of how easy it is to provoke other people into killing him.

When Isioma Daniel remarked that Muhammad would have taken Miss World as his wife, she was correct to the extent that the Prophet seems to have had an eye for the ladies. But that wasn’t really her point. Her point was more basic, and it was this: Hey, lighten up, Muslims! Muslims responded by going nuts, rampaging through the streets, pulling Christian women and children from cars and burning them to the cheers of the mob. By the end of it all, the dead numbered 500. So no, Miss Daniel, Muslims won’t lighten up, but they’ll light you up, if they ever catch up with you. (I’m in favour of Izzy offering the poor gal a job at the Post, by the way.)

These days, we’re all citing Salman Rushdie but at the time — February 14th 1989 — most of us didn’t appreciate the significance of the event. It marked the first time the Ayatollah Khomeini had claimed explicitly extra-territorial authority. Why he chose an obscure and for most of us unreadable English novel for his expeditionary foray is unclear, but the results must have heartened him tremendously.

Rushdie had not set out to offend Muslims: None of the London reviewers found anything controversial in the book. When British Muslims and their co-religionists around the world burnt copies of The Satanic Verses in the streets, BBC arts bores — including our own Michael Ignatieff — held innumerable discussions on the awful “symbolism” of this assault on “ideas.” But it wasn’t symbolic at all: they burned the book because nothing else was to hand. If his wife or kid had swung by, they’d have gladly burned them instead. Overseas, they made do with translators and publishers. Rushdie’s precious lit. crit. crowd mostly opposed the fatwa on the grounds of artistic freedom rather than as a broader defence of western pluralism. That was a mistake.

In the Fifties and Sixties, Nasserism attempted to import Soviet socialism to the Middle East: it never really took. A generation later, the Ayatollah came up with a better wheeze: export Islamism to a culturally defeatist West. Everything that has become pathetically familiar to us since September 11th was present in the Rushdie affair:

First, the silence of the “moderate Muslims”: a few Islamic scholars pointed out that the Ayatollah had no authority to issue the fatwa; they quickly shut up when the consequences of not doing so became apparent.

Second, the squeamishness of the establishment: Rushdie was infuriated when the Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely: “There is only one person around here who is in any danger of dying.”

Roy Hattersley, the Labour Party’s deputy leader, attempted to split the difference by arguing that, while he of course supported freedom of speech, perhaps “in the interests of race relations” it would be better not to bring out a paperback edition. He was in favour of artistic freedom, but only in hard covers — and certainly, when it comes to soft spines, Lord Hattersley knows whereof he speaks.

His colleague, Gerald Kaufman, attacked critics of British Muslims: “What I cannot accept is the implication that it is somehow anti-democratic and un-British for Mr. Rushdie’s writings to be the object of criticism on religious, as distinct from literary, grounds.” Mr. Kaufman said this a few days after large numbers of British Muslims had marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. In the last few months, several readers have e-mailed me with their memories of those marches. One man in Bradford remembers asking a West Yorkshire police officer why the “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to play it cool. The cries for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The police officer told him to “F— off, or I’ll arrest you.”

And, most important of all, the Rushdie affair should have taught us that there’s nothing to negotiate. Mohammed Siddiqui wrote to The Independent from a Yorkshire mosque to endorse the fatwa by citing Sura 5 verses 33-34: “The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land, is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the hereafter. Except for those who repent before they fall into your power. In that case know that God is oft-forgiving, most merciful.”

Rushdie seems to have got the wrong end of the stick on this. He suddenly turned up on a Muslim radio station in West London one night and told his interviewer he’d converted to Islam. Marvelous religion, couldn’t be happier, praise be to Allah and all that. The Ayatollah said terrific, now you won’t suffer such heavy punishment in the hereafter. But we’re still gonna kill you.

Some of us drew from the Rushdie affair a different lesson than Mr. Khalfan: As bad as the fatwa was, the inability of the establishment to defend coherently Western values was worse. All those British Muslims who called openly for Rushdie’s death are still around, more powerful and with more followers.

Mr. Khalfan is being disingenuous. When was the last time a mob of Jews or Christians or Buddhists tore children from cars and burned them to death? A while back, I saw Terrence McNally’s ghastly Broadway jerk-off, Corpus Christi, in which a gay Jesus rhapsodizes about the joys of anal intercourse with Judas. The play was an abomination, and deserves all the abuse discriminating theatre-goers can heap upon it. But oddly enough, I didn’t feel an urge to slaughter perfect strangers, to ram a schoolbus, drag the little moppets from it, douse them in gasoline, and get my matchbook out.

When Mr. Khalfan says that irresponsible journalists “risk provoking individuals who cannot control their spiritual emotions and cause the death of innocent people,” he’s being far more objectionable about Muslims than me, Frum and that Nigerian woman rolled into one; he’s being more imperialist than any old-school Colonial Officer: He’s saying Muslims are wogs, savages, they know no better, what do you expect? You’ve gotta be careful around them, the slightest thing could set ‘em off. Might be a novel, might be a beauty contest.

Sorry, it’s not a good enough answer. If that Nigerian mob are really no more than “pious Muslims,” then pious Muslims should be ashamed. Pious Muslims can follow the murder-inciters of Bradford, the suicide-bombers of the West Bank and the depraved killers of northern Nigeria on their descent into barbarism. Or they can wake up and save their religion. Mr. Khalfan’s sophistry won’t cut it.

==============================

The invisible jihad (WorldNetDaily, 021206)

After praising the Sept. 11 skyjackers and threatening to commit major terrorist acts himself within the U.S., alleged sniper John Muhammad, along with 17-year-old Lee Boyd “John” Malvo, paralyzed the Washington metropolitan area for three bloody weeks in October. Yet since his capture, most in the media have been loathe to focus seriously on jihad as a motive.

In fact, the standard analysis of what makes Muhammad tick seems to include anything and everything except jihad – the personal spiritual mandate to engage in “holy war” against the “enemies of Islam,” that is, non-Muslims, especially Americans, Jews and Christians.

Such violent directives, long central to militant Islamism, have grown exponentially in recent years, emanating not only from known terror leaders like Osama bin Laden, but from militant Islamic clerics worldwide, including some in the U.S. (Last month, Sheik Abu Hamza, affiliated with London’s Finsbury Park mosque, was caught on film urging his followers to kill non-Muslims – particularly Americans – and to commit other acts of terrorism.)

Despite these eerie, medieval calls for the murderous purging of “unbelievers,” jihad doesn’t easily show up on the radar of the media elite, in spite of America’s unwelcome crash course in radical Islam in the aftermath of 9-11.

Thus, the Los Angeles Times offered up no less than six possible motives for Muhammad’s killing spree, reports Daniel Pipes, an expert on militant Islam. They included “his ‘stormy relationship’ with his family, his ‘stark realization’ of loss and regret, his perceived sense of abuse as an American Muslim post-9/11, his desire to ‘exert control’ over others, his relationship with Malvo, and his trying to make a quick buck,” said Pipes – “but did not mention jihad.”

“Likewise,” he adds, “a Boston Globe article found ‘there must have been something in his social interaction – in his marriage or his military career – that pulled the trigger.’”

Is this see-no-jihad, hear-no-jihad, speak-no-jihad mindset unique to the sniper case? Far from it.

* On July 4, a cab driver named Hesham Hadayet walked into the Los Angeles International Airport and shot two people to death before being shot and killed by a security guard. Despite the fact that Hadayet was Egyptian and that he had chosen the Israeli El Al ticket counter as the site for venting his rage, any suggestion that Hadayet was carrying out his own personal jihad was immediately dismissed.

“Investigators … believe that Hadayet was simply an overstressed man who snapped,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “He was known as a quiet, observant Muslim,” added the Times, which explained away the killer’s virulent anti-Semitism by saying: “While Hadayet occasionally mentioned a hatred for Israel, [one former employee] saw it more as a cultural perspective on Mideast politics than an emotion that would fuel violence.”

* One of the worst air disasters in recent history, Egypt Air Flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic shortly after takeoff from New York in October 1999, killing 217.

Two-and-a-half years later, the National Transportation Safety Board finally reached the same conclusion last March that virtually everyone else had immediately after the crash – that the plane’s Egyptian copilot, Gameel El-Batouty, had cut power to the engines and intentionally sent the plane plummeting into the ocean, killing all aboard.

But the government panel declined to suggest a motive, except to speculate that El-Batouty might have “committed suicide.”

Suicide? To most, “mass murder” or “terrorism” would better describe the wanton annihilation of hundreds of innocent people. Yet, despite the fact the copilot had calmly repeated over and over the Arabic phrase “tawkalt” – meaning “I rely on Allah” – for almost a minute and a half during his deed – and that such behavior, according to the report, “is not consistent with the reaction that would be expected from a pilot who is encountering an unexpected or uncommanded flight condition” – the federal report steered clear of suggesting jihad as a motive.

Egyptian reaction to the report was adamant: The plane’s failure was mechanical and the American report was a craven attempt to protect Boeing, the aircraft’s manufacturer. “Committing suicide is not a trait that Egyptians and Muslims are known for,” commented the head of the Egyptian pilots association.

But Jim Brokaw, who lost his father and stepmother in the crash and is now president of Families of Egypt Air 990 Inc., said it was clear the copilot was responsible. “American families regret that Egypt continues to resist this unavoidable conclusion, even after the events of Sept. 11,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “We call upon President George W. Bush to move beyond his predecessor’s failure of leadership in this matter, and ensure that a full criminal investigation takes place.”

But there will likely be no criminal investigation. The perpetrator is already dead, and “jihad” is not considered a motive. So what’s the point?

If the obvious conclusion is off-limits, what possible motive is left to explain the calm taking of 217 lives? The best the Los Angeles Times could come up with was the suggestion that El-Batouty might have been taking revenge against an Egypt Air executive who was aboard the flight.

As if 9-11 never happened

From the Washington, D.C., sniper shootings (in which police wrongly profiled white males despite eyewitnesses who said they saw dark skin), to the anthrax murders (after more than a year, the FBI is still guided by its profile of a “homegrown” terrorist, an angry loner with science expertise), to the Oklahoma City bombing (with which famed prosecutor David Schippers claims there is a “dead-bang Middle Eastern connection”) to the downing of TWA Flight 800 (in which multiple eyewitnesses who claim they saw a missile hit the plane contradict the government’s official conclusion of mechanical failure) – it is as if 9-11 never happened.

There is a strange aversion in both the administration and most of the press to investigate seriously the “jihad factor” in attack after attack that Americans are enduring.

Yet, the truth is that virtually all terrorist acts against the U.S. or its interests in recent years have been perpetrated by militant Islamists. Indeed, a glance at the headlines shows we are in the midst of what can only be described as a global Islamic jihad against America and Israel.

Thus, the official face of U.S. policy – that Islam is a religion of peace, that most Islamic nations are America’s allies in the war on terror, and that terrorist groups like al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t truly Muslim at all and, in any event, are supported by only a tiny fraction of the Muslim world – is increasingly at odds with reality.

Even after the resurgence of al-Qaida and the official confirmation that bin Laden is still leading the far-flung terror empire, as well as the recent mass atrocities in Bali, Moscow and elsewhere – all with direct ties to al-Qaida – the U.S. seems incapable of accurately defining its enemy.

The Islamic connection is always downplayed. Always.

John Muhammad’s militant Islamic belief system has barely figured into the analysis of his motivations. Yet, beyond the question of whether he was part of a known terrorist organization is the equally important, and ultimately more frightening, possibility that he acted as an unofficial “freelance” member of the global jihad forces.

After all, bin Laden – whom Muhammad reportedly admires – has repeatedly and publicly called for the wanton murder of Americans and Jews by all Muslims everywhere, acting on their own.

Muslim militia

In the world of Islamist terrorism, tiny, independent sleeper cells and “freelancers” are every bit as much a part of the global jihad force as are “card-carrying” members of al-Qaida and other known groups. It is in the nature of such groups to be highly decentralized and autonomous, held together despite long distances and minimal (or no) contact with leaders by their fervent religious convictions and intense hatred of a common enemy.

Think militia. In the United States, as codified by the Militia Act of 1792 and other later acts, the “militia” comprises all able-bodied males between 17 and 45. But there are two parts to the militia that together defend the interests of America (or, in this case, Islam). There is the “enrolled” or “organized” militia, where members are under a commander in a military structure. And then there is the “unenrolled” or “unorganized” militia – all able-bodied men. But both organized and unorganized militias are bound together by loyalty to a common goal – the defense of the homeland and her inhabitants from all enemies.

In the same way, the global Islamist jihad has its “organized militia” – members of terror groups like al-Qaida – and its “unorganized militia” – angry Islamists who hate America and Israel.

Even the distinction between a member of a terrorist group and a freelancer is illusory. Rather than a hard line, there’s a continuum of participation representing every type and level of involvement, all bound together by a common hatred (of America and Israel) and a common justification (Allah and the Quran).

Indeed, “most of the thousands of militants who passed through al-Qaida’s training camps are not technically al-Qaida members,” says U.S. News and World Report. “But the group’s leaders offer many of them encouragement and seed money to independently plan terror attacks.”

One such “freelancer” was American Jose Padilla (also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir), who, after training in Pakistan after 9-11, was arrested for allegedly plotting a dirty-bomb attack on U.S. soil. Another, Algerian Ahmed Ressam, was arrested at the U.S.-Canadian border and convicted of attempting to blow up the Los Angeles airport during millennium celebrations. Then there was Richard Reid, the British “shoe bomber” currently in U.S. prison for allegedly attempting to ignite a bomb hidden in his shoe aboard an American Airlines flight.

What about the expected next round of assaults on America? As USA Today reported Nov. 1: “Future terrorist attacks in the United States likely will involve suicidal operatives working alone or in groups of ‘twos and threes’ to try to carry out bombings and other relatively simple assaults, according to U.S. analysts who are tracking al-Qaida’s resurgence.”

Yet, despite such clear indications of a more decentralized and multi-faceted battle plan, heavily reliant on freelancers and loners inspired by their hatred of America and spurred on by the incendiary rhetoric of maniacal Islamic clerics calling for jihad – official Washington and, apparently, the mainstream press still don’t get it.

And because they don’t understand the new paradigm of war, they flail away at shadows, missing the enemy in our midst, while robbing precious freedoms from law-abiding citizens with new police powers and ever-more-intrusive surveillance capabilities.

In fairness, this gross official denial of reality is almost understandable. The circumstances of our “terror war” represent an unprecedented and politically radioactive situation for authorities. The plain truth is that while sleeper cells, their supporters and fund-raisers are living undercover in America, many of the biggest and most “mainstream” Islamic groups in the U.S.A. have proven ties to terrorist groups like Hamas, and – most vexing of all perhaps – a lot of fund-raising, sustenance and networking for Islamist terrorism has taken place, knowingly or unknowingly, in American mosques, Islamic centers and charities.

But how are law enforcement authorities to deal with such a threat? America’s very identity as a bastion of liberty is based on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of religion, speech and assembly. We don’t imprison people for saying bad things, or even for assembling together to say bad things. Do we now send police, FBI agents or new “Homeland Security Department” agents undercover into all 1,200 of America’s mosques?

Do we clamp shut all immigration of males from Muslim countries? Secretary of State Colin Powell certainly doesn’t think so. Despite the fact that the government has reportedly allowed some 50,000 men from Muslim countries into the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, Powell is on a campaign to open the doors wider still.

In November, Powell said he wants to expand programs to bring educators, journalists and political and religious leaders from Muslim nations to the U.S., telling a Ramadan gathering of Muslim-Americans: “We are committed to ensuring that our programs reach out to Muslims in all walks of life.”

Extremism and violence, not radical Islam, are America’s greatest enemies, said Powell, strongly criticizing major evangelical Christian leaders (including Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, although he didn’t name them) for their recent criticisms of Islam. “We must not listen to the siren song of the bigots, extremists who cloak themselves in false spirituality in an attempt to divide and to weaken us,” he said, according to an Associated Press report.

And yet, there is a price to pay for all of this pious inclusiveness, no matter how beneficial to the cause of diplomacy. An analysis by Mideast expert Daniel Pipes concludes that by not directly and publicly acknowledging militant Islam as the enemy, America is endangering its war on terror in the all-important areas of:

* Understanding the enemy’s motives: A virtual taboo exists in official circles about Islam’s role in the violence; in the words of one senior State Department official, this subject “has to be tiptoed around.” As a result, the violence is treated as though it comes out of nowhere, the work of (in Bush’s description) “a bunch of cold-blooded killers.”

* Defining war goals: The U.S. government’s stated objectives in the war are operationally vague – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once described them as preventing terrorists “from adversely affecting our way of life.” Only by naming militant Islam as the enemy is it possible to see the goal of defeating and marginalizing this ideology (along the lines of what was done to fascism and communism in World War II and in the Cold War).

* Defining the enemy: Right now, it’s just “terrorists,” “evildoers,” “a dangerous group of people” and other non-specific monikers. Naming militant Islam as the enemy reveals that the problem goes beyond terrorists to include those who in non-violent ways forward the totalitarian agenda – this includes its funders, preachers, apologists and lobbyists.

* Defining the allies: Allies are currently restricted to those who help prevent terrorism. Naming militant Islam clarifies the ideological dimension and points to the crucial role of Muslims who reject this radical utopian ideology. They can both help argue against it and then offer an alternate to it.

A time for truth

While the government and “mainstream” media avoid mentioning the Islamist elephant in the national living room, the nation is ripe for further recruitment.

Dr. Saul B. Wilen, president of International Horizons Unlimited, a terrorism prevention and strategies think-tank in San Antonio, Texas, writes:

“According to the American Correctional Association in 2001, the number of Islamic inmates in the federal prison system tripled over the previous nine years, and in some states, such as Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania, make up approximately 20% of the incarcerated population. This includes the 30% of all African-Americans who have embraced Islam in prison. Prison experts and experienced correctional facility administrators recognize that prisons offer radical fundamentalists such as al-Qaida a pool of potential recruits who can be prime targets for a religion advocating the overcoming of oppression with violence.”

Explaining that the opportunities for militant Islamist recruitment are great, not only in prison, but in gang cultures and other negative environments with angry and confused young people, Wilen adds, ominously:

“Ongoing recruitment efforts are much greater and even more complex than previously anticipated. The Justice Department and FBI have confirmed that in its major jurisdictions hundreds of suspects are being monitored 24 hours a day. This is only the beginning of the need for expanding investigation resources. The terrorist population drawn from America’s youth complicates intelligence and surveillance efforts by adding large numbers of potential terrorists who can strike widely and simultaneously against distant and multiple targets. Our preparedness and resources to respond, react and recover from such terrorist attacks would be overwhelmed.

“The existence and growth of American al-Qaida cells significantly frustrates our present strategies for fighting terrorism and urgently raises the need for developing a new focus for terrorism prevention.”

Islamic radicals come to America, not because they love freedom, but because they know they can exploit America’s unparalleled liberty, which they consider weakness, to either destroy America or to Islamize it – which of course would destroy it.

How do we dare deal with the fact that some Islamic mosques in America – although thousands of decent, law-abiding Muslims worship there – have also been and no doubt still are being used as cover for terrorists? How do we deal with the virulent, metastasizing hatred of Islamic militancy both around the world and on our own soil?

And most importantly, how do we deal with this vexing and deadly problem while still respecting law-abiding Muslims’ rights to fundamental freedoms, including freedom of worship, in America?

The solution will be difficult, but not impossible.

And it must start – as solving all seemingly intractable problems must start – with telling the truth.

==============================

Terrorists in our midst: How and why Islamists, jihadists, sleeper cells are flocking to U.S. (WorldNetDaily, 021205)

Shortly after the release of his explosive PBS documentary “Jihad in America” – featuring video footage of terrorists and their supporters holding boisterous fund-raising rallies throughout America’s heartland — investigative journalist and terrorism expert Steven Emerson was informed by federal officials that an Islamist death squad had been dispatched to kill him. He should leave his home immediately, he was told.

Ever since then, the former CNN reporter, working full-time on tracking the spread of terrorist networks to American shores, has ceased to maintain a home address, varies his routine, takes a different route to work each day and practices other “living-underground” techniques.

Emerson tells his amazing story in the December edition of WND’s acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, in an issue titled “TERRORISTS AMONG US.”

With the help of a staff of researchers, Emerson has followed the terrorists’ monetary sources, monitored their attacks and plans, exposed their ties to charitable foundations and assisted a variety of government agencies in the battle against them.

“What we discovered,” he says, “is that, indeed, international terrorist organizations of all sorts had set up shop here in America. They often took advantage of religious, civic, or charitable organizations. Usually this was more than enough to fool the public, the police, and especially naïve leaders of religious or educational institutions, who were more than willing to encourage and sponsor these groups in the name of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity.’”

Meanwhile, he adds, U.S.-based terrorists have used these organizations to ferry equipment to Middle Eastern terror groups, to provide financial support to the families of suicide bombers, coordinate efforts with other terrorist networks around the world, and ultimately, he says, “to plan and support terrorist acts in the Untied States.”

Yet, despite the extreme threat of further terror attacks on American soil, the U.S. government and much of the news media seem unwilling or unable to confront the radioactive religious core of the current conflict. As expert Mideast analyst Daniel Pipes notes in this issue of Whistleblower: “A virtual taboo exists in official circles about Islam’s role in the violence; in the words of one senior State Department official, this subject ‘has to be tiptoed around.’ As a result, the violence is treated as though it comes out of nowhere, the work of (in Bush’s description) ‘a bunch of cold-blooded killers.’”

“This issue of Whistleblower,” says WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah, “is free of the politically correct sensitivities of the State Department. It succeeds in effectively connecting the dots and showing the relationships between al-Qaida, other organized groups, ‘sleeper cells,’ so-called ‘freelancers’ like sniper suspect John Muhammad, the Saudi rulers who fund radicalized Islamic schools worldwide, including throughout the U.S., and much more. If you really want to understand the threat America is now facing, read this issue.”

==============================

Blond, blue-eyed Muslim terrorists? (WorldNetDaily, 021205)

Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, with help from Iran, have recruited and trained brigades of blond, blue-eyed Bosnians and indoctrinated them for martyrdom, according to a report in Insight magazine.

“It’s the Joseph coat of terrorism,” says a former terrorism investigator, referring to the Old Testament account of Joseph’s coat of many colors. “The next wave of terrorism could be carried out by people with fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes.”

Iran and the al-Qaida terrorist network began recruiting and training Bosnian Muslims more than 10 years ago for war against Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats in an effort to expand the Muslim base in Eastern Europe.

Congressional terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky says there are many blond, blue-eyed Slavs among these Bosnian Islamists, and there were “thousands trained by the mujahedin and a lot of them eventually joined the international brigades.”

Bodansky says, “We are not just dealing with Arabs.”

So far, he adds, the Bosnian Islamists have been in support positions such as couriers, but that it’s only a matter of time before they show up in other areas of the terrorist web: “They have been training in suicide missions.”

According to Insight, dismantling the jihadists’ training camps in the Balkans, after imposing peace plans that included Muslim power-sharing, was not a priority for the U.S. government, and the sponsors of the Muslim campaigns there have not decommissioned their jihadist forces in Bosnia, Albania and elsewhere in the region.

The U.S. House of Representatives Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, TFTUW, did manage to keep track of the Muslim extremist movement in the region and sounded early warnings.

TFTUW reports reveal a pattern of activities involving Islamists in the Balkans and around the world, and which point to potential threats to U.S. national security.

According to a report from 1992, Islam experienced an unexpected renaissance in communist Yugoslavia in the mid-1970s.

The revival increased the number of mosques throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina and led to a growing number of local youths being sent for higher Islamic studies in the Middle East, especially Iran, where the classes in schools for radical mullahs included some 250 Bosnians a year.

A former government terrorism expert, who spoke to Insight on the condition of anonymity, said Iran is at the core of recruiting and mobilizing terrorist-training efforts, with Iraq, Pakistan and Syria playing key support roles.

According to a TFTUW report, the Yugoslav government in Belgrade was concerned about what it saw as evidence that within its 40% Muslim population there were “Muslim terrorists operating against the West” and that “Yugoslav Muslim youths were drawn into cooperation with and emulation of Arab terrorists.”

Meanwhile, the mullahs of Iran saw the Balkans as a prize to be won for the glory of Allah and markedly intensified political involvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The report says Iran proclaimed the battleground of Bosnia-Herzegovina a microcosm for resisting the West’s war on Islam, and called in reinforcements.

Those reinforcements included highly trained and combat-proven volunteers from Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon and several other Arab countries.

Bodansky, who is the director of the TFTUW, says bin Laden and al-Zawahiri also played a significant role in deploying and concealing “Islamist elite” terrorist forces brought in from around the Middle East, inculcating them into the Bosnian army and setting up humanitarian front organizations to explain their presence.

According to Bodansky, Iran considered the outside aid to Bosnia as central to securing for Muslims a role in the leadership of a “multinational state” based on the imposition of the U.S.-led Dayton Accords of 1995 to keep peace in the region by deploying a NATO force.

The accords called for foreign Muslim fighters to leave Bosnia but, according to a 1996 TFTUW report, the majority of mujahedin scheduled to have left Bosnia still serve in the ranks of the army of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The mujahedin are divided among three clusters of operational units and a fourth cluster of units directly engaged in terrorism and other covert special operations.

The report says the special military units are “built around a hard core of foreign mujahedin while the rest of the troops are Bosnian Islamist.”

Ongoing training is provided by mujahedin fighters who were obligated to leave Bosnia under the Dayton Accords and who, according to Bodansky, are activating the Bosnian Islamists by reminding them that without jihadist support, “there would not have been a Muslim Bosnia. ... We helped you, you come and fight for us.”

According to terrorism experts with whom Insight spoke, the mujahedin fighters who went to Bosnia to help the Muslims already have been linked to attempted terrorist attacks in the United States.

The Washington Post reported that the Bosnian village of Bocinja Donja, which has 60 to 100 former mujahedin Islamic guerrillas from the Middle East, came under scrutiny when U.S. law-enforcement authorities discovered that a handful of the men who have visited or lived in the area were associated with a suspected terrorist plot to bomb targets in the United States on New Year’s Day of 2000.

Bodansky, whose most recent book, “The High Cost of Peace,” is a stinging criticism of what he describes as failed U.S. policy in the Middle East, says U.S. policy has lacked forcefulness in dealing with the mujahedin problem in Bosnia by not forcing them out of the country as called for by the Dayton Accords.

He says the failure to act allowed the Islamist military brigades to maintain bases in Bosnia and continue to recruit and train Muslim forces for terrorist attacks.

==============================

A Wahhabism Problem: Misleading historical negationism (National Review Online, 021206)

By Andrew G. Bostom

In his recent writings on NRO (here and here) and elsewhere, and in his new book, The Two Faces of Islam, Stephen Schwartz appropriately draws the attention of policymakers and the public at large to the dangerous, unsavory interactions between the Saudi royal family, Wahhabi Islam, and international terrorism. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Schwartz identifies Wahhabism as the source of all Islamic terror and injustice. He does not mention that the twin institutionalized scourges of Islam at the crux of the violent, nearly 1,400-year relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims — i.e., jihad and dhimmitude — were already well-elaborated by the 8th century, 1,000 years before Wahhabism arose in the 18th century.

Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), perhaps the preeminent Islamic scholar in history, summarized five centuries of prior Muslim jurisprudence with regard to the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force... The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense... Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.

In “The Laws of Islamic Governance,” al-Mawardi (d. 1058), a renowned jurist of Baghdad, examined the regulations pertaining to the lands and infidel (i.e., non-Muslim) populations subjugated by jihad. This is the origin of the system of dhimmitude. The native infidel population had to recognize Islamic ownership of their land, submit to Islamic law, and accept payment of the poll tax (jizya). Some of the more salient features of dhimmitude include: the prohibition of arms for the vanquished non-Muslims (dhimmis), and of church bells; restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches and synagogues; inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law; the refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts; a requirement that Jews and Christians wear special clothes; and their overall humiliation and abasement. Furthermore, dhimmis, including those living under “enlightened” Turkish and Bosnian Muslim domain, suffered, at periods, from slavery (i.e., harem slavery for women, and the devshirme child levy for Balkan Christian males), abductions, deportations, and massacres. During the modern era, between 1894-96, the Ottoman Turks massacred over 200,000 (dhimmi) Christian Armenians, followed by the first formal genocide of the 20th century, in 1915, at which time they slaughtered an additional 600,000 to 800,000 Armenians. Contemporary accounts from European diplomats confirm that these brutal massacres were perpetrated in the context of a formal jihad against the Armenians who had attempted to throw off the yoke of dhimmitude by seeking equal rights and autonomy. For example, the Chief Dragoman (Turkish-speaking interpreter) of the British embassy reported regarding the 1894-96 massacres:

…[The perpetrators] are guided in their general action by the prescriptions of the Sheri [Sharia] Law. That law prescribes that if the “rayah” [dhimmi] Christian attempts, by having recourse to foreign powers, to overstep the limits of privileges allowed them by their Mussulman [Muslim] masters, and free themselves from their bondage, their lives and property are to be forfeited, and are at the mercy of the Mussulmans. To the Turkish mind the Armenians had tried to overstep those limits by appealing to foreign powers, especially England. They therefore considered it their religious duty and a righteous thing to destroy and seize the lives and properties of the Armenians…”

The scholar Bat Yeor confirms this reasoning, noting that the Armenian quest for reforms invalidated their “legal status,” which involved a “contract” (i.e., with their Muslim Turkish rulers). This

…breach…restored to the umma [the Muslim community] its initial right to kill the subjugated minority [the dhimmis], [and] seize their property…

Schwartz extols the ecumenism and tolerance of Sufi Islam. Sufism was derivative from Hinduism, in addition to strains of mysticism borrowed from Judaism and Christianity. However, Sufi Islam as practiced in the Indian subcontinent was quite intolerant of Hinduism, as documented by the Indian scholar K. S. Lal (The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India [1992], p. 237):

The Muslim Mushaikh [Sufi spiritual leaders] were as keen on conversions as the Ulama, and contrary to general belief, in place of being kind to the Hindus as saints would, they too wished the Hindus to be accorded a second class citizenship if they were not converted. Only one instance, that of Shaikh Abdul Quddus Gangoh, need be cited because he belonged to the Chishtia Silsila considered to be the most tolerant of all Sufi groups. He wrote letters to the Sultan Sikandar Lodi, Babur, and Humayun to re-invigorate the Shariat [Sharia] and reduce the Hindus to payers of land tax and jizya. To Babur he wrote, “Extend utmost patronage and protection to theologians and mystics... that they should be maintained and subsidized by the state... No non-Muslim should be given any office or employment in the Diwan of Islam... Furthermore, in conformity with the principles of the Shariat they should be subjected to all types of indignities and humiliations. They should be made to pay the jizya...They should be disallowed from donning the dress of the Muslims and should be forced to keep their Kufr [infidelity] concealed and not to perform the ceremonies of their Kufr openly and freely… They should not be allowed to consider themselves the equal to the Muslims.”

Sadly, both Schwartz’s recent NRO contributions and his book reflect two persistent currents widespread among the Muslim intelligentsia: historical negationism and silent hypocrisy. To these two trends, Schwartz adds a third: misleading reductionism. If we would only neutralize “Wahhabism,” he claims — presumably by some combination of military means, promoting the “true Islam,” and perhaps having the world switch to a hydrogen-based fuel economy — all Islamic terror and injustice will disappear. But the reality is that, for nearly 1,400 years, across three continents, from Portugal to India, non-Muslims have experienced the horrors of the institutionalized jihad war ideology and its ugly corollary institution, dhimmitude. Post hoc, internal disputes among Muslim scholars, including Sufi scholars, about the theological “correctness” of “lesser” versus “greater” jihad are meaningless to the millions of non-Muslim victims of countless jihad wars: Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists. What is important is that after well over a millennium, Muslims finally acknowledge the suffering of these millions of victims of jihad wars, as well as the oppressive governance imposed on non-Muslims by the laws of dhimmitude. Thus far this brutal history has been completely denied, and even celebrated, as “enlightened” conquest and rule.

Moreover, it is critical to understand that there were never organized, mass progressive efforts within Islam comparable to the philo-Semitic movement by European Christendom that lead to the emancipation of European Jewry, or the European Judeo-Christian movement that led to the abolition of slavery. Indeed, it took European military (primarily naval) power to force Islamic governments, including the Ottoman Empire, to end slavery at the end of the 19th century. Beginning in the mid-19th century, treaties imposed by the European powers on the weakened Ottoman Empire also included provisions for the so-called Tanzimat reforms. These reforms were designed to end the discriminatory laws of dhimmitude for Christians and Jews living under Muslim Ottoman governance. European consuls endeavored to maintain compliance with at least two cardinal principles: respect for the life and property of non-Muslims, and the right for Christians and Jews to provide evidence in Islamic courts when a Muslim was a party. Unfortunately, the effort to end the belief in Muslim superiority over “infidels,” and to establish equal rights, failed. Indeed, throughout the Ottoman Empire, particularly within the Balkans, emancipation of the dhimmi peoples provoked violent, bloody responses against any “infidels” daring to claim equality with local Muslims. Enforced abrogation of the laws of dhimmitude required the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. This finally happened only after the Balkan Wars of independence, and in the European Mandate period after World War I.

Today, the Muslim intelligentsia focus almost exclusively on debatable “human-rights violations” in the disputed territories of Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, while ignoring the blatant and indisputable atrocities committed by Muslims against non-Muslims throughout the world. The most egregious examples include: the genocidal slaughter, starvation, and enslavement of south Sudanese Christians and animists by the Islamist Khartoum government forces; the mass murder of Indonesian Christians by Muslim jihadists, with minimal preventive intervention by the official Muslim Indonesian government; the imposition of sharia-sanctioned discrimination and punishments, including mutilation, against non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and northern Nigeria; the brutal murders of Copts during pogroms by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, as well as official Egyptian government-mandated social and political discrimination against the Copts; murderous terrorist attacks and the return of such heinous institutions as bonded labor, and punishment for “blasphemy,” directed against Pakistani Christians by Pakistani Muslims.

There is a dire need for some courageous, meaningful movement within Islam that would completely renounce both dhimmitude and jihad against non-Muslims, openly acknowledging the horrific devastation they have wrought for nearly 1,400 years. Nothing short of an Islamic Reformation and Enlightenment may be required, to acknowledge non-Muslims as fully equal human beings, and not “infidels” or “dhimmis.” It is absurd and disingenuous for Schwartz to pretend that Islam’s problems are centered solely within Wahhabism.

— Andrew Bostom, M.D., an associate professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School, has spent the past 15 months researching the history of jihad and dhimmitude. He has written for NRO previously, coauthor of a piece with dhimmi historian Bat Yeor.

==============================

The Jewish-Friendly Koran: A whole new context (National Review Online, 021219)

By David Klinghoffer

I wish I could crawl into the head of British historian Karen Armstrong, whose comments about Islam and the prophet Muhammad are astonishing. In good conscious, how does she say the things she does?

My occasion for asking is a new PBS documentary, Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet, that debuted Wednesday night. The filmmakers take pains to show how cuddly and non-threatening a religion Islam is, but the most mind-blowing words in the two hours of footage are from Ms. Armstrong. She says, “Muhammad had nothing against the Jewish people per se, or the Jewish religion. The Koran continues to tell Muslims to honor the People of the Book.”

Referring to Christians as well as Jews, that famous phrase, “the People of the Book,” comes up whenever someone is trying to paint a friendly face on Islam. The truth is that Muhammad typically means it not in praise but as an expression of bitter irony, as if to say: These people have Scripture, yet they reject me! Author of Mohammed: A Biography of the Prophet and Islam: A Short History, Armstrong presumably has studied the Koran carefully enough to know this. Or has she?

Muhammad takes a lively interest in Jews and Christians, whom he deals with explicitly in many, many passages. Here’s a quick sample.

God is quoted by prophet as saying, “The unbelievers among the People of the Book and the pagans shall burn forever in the fire of Hell. They are the vilest of all creatures.” “…those that disbelieve Our revelations and deny them are the heirs of Hell.” Of the Jews in particular: “God has cursed them in their unbelief.”

As to how one is to deal with such unbelievers, the Koran’s message is vigorously expressed. “Muhammad is God’s apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another.” “If you do not go to war, He will punish you sternly.” “Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them.” “Believers, take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends. They are friends to one another.”

A couple of verses suggest a pacifistic perspective: “Requite evil with good, and he who is your enemy will become your dearest friend.” But these are isolated thoughts. Much more representative are the passages that describe, with satisfaction, the destruction of the cities and nations of the unbelievers in the past, the ruin of their lives and fortunes in the future.

“Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and deal sternly with them. Hell shall be their home, evil their fate.” “God loves those who fight for His cause in ranks as firm as a mighty edifice.” In the surah titled “That Which Is Coming,” we find verses that sound weirdly like 9/11: “They [the unbelievers] shall dwell amidst scorching winds and seething water: in the shade of pitch-black smoke, neither cool nor refreshing.” “On that day woe betide the disbelievers! Be gone to the Hell which you deny! Depart into the shadow that will rise high in three columns, giving neither shade nor shelter from the flames, and throwing up sparks as huge as towers, as bright as yellow camels!”

As I was making my way through the text, occasionally I would read a particularly vivid passage aloud to my wife. “But you’re taking that out of context,” she’d say. “You must be.”

Actually, on page after page, sentiments like these are the context.

Karen Armstrong is either one of the biggest liars on the planet, or, more likely, self-deluded in the way only professional scholars can be. She mystifies me.

— David Klinghoffer is the author of a spiritual memoir, The Lord Will Gather Me In, as well as the forthcoming The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism.

==============================

Islam Soft and Hard: PBS’s whitewashed commercial for Islam (National Review Online, 021219)

By Robert Spencer

In a stunning move designed to “counter the negative image of Christian Fundamentalists,” PBS officials announced today that they’re beginning production of a lavish two-hour feature, Jesus: Legacy of a Messiah. Produced by a convert to Christianity and featuring interviews with gentle, introspective Fundamentalist Christians, the production is designed to offset the widespread representation of Christian Fundamentalism as harsh, vindictive, and unforgiving. “Christianity is really a soft thing,” says one of the preachers interviewed. “It’s not a hard thing.”

The production tells the story of Jesus from his virgin birth through his crucifixion and miraculous resurrection, highlighting the truth and miraculous character of these events and showing how each of them has significant impact on the lives of believers today. The New Testament, says one participant, “is the most extraordinarily beautiful discourse.” Of the angel Gabriel’s appearance to the Virgin Mary to announce her mission as the Mother of God’s Son, the same expert observes, “This is how the ineffable, incomprehensible, utterly transcendent, indescribable God makes itself known to us.”

Don’t check your PBS schedule just yet. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would no doubt be the first to tell you that such credulity and proselytizing has no place on public television. And the idea that they would plump for Christian Fundamentalism is, of course, laughable.

But the above is not made up out of whole cloth. The quotations above all appear, in reference to Islam and the Koran rather than Christianity and the Bible, in Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet, the real-life PBS production running during this Christmas season. In this handsome Christmas present from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, elements of Islamic faith such as Muhammad’s prophetic claim and miraculous journey to Jerusalem (for which journey there is no evidence whatsoever except the word of Muhammad himself, who never went to Jerusalem in any ordinary manner) and the court of Heaven are presented without question or challenge from skeptics. Attractive Muslim believers show the positive impact of their faith in their lives. Common challenges to Islam — that it encourages the oppression of women, as well as violence under the banner of jihad — are examined, found wanting, and dismissed.

Muhammad, one commentator exclaims, “is the kind of person who combines political and military and social and religious and intellectual dimensions of life in ways that are important for those of us in the 21st century who are struggling to put together complete lives ourselves.” I haven’t heard a more open and direct evangelistic call since a man on 34th Street in New York handed me a Gospel tract and said, “Read this, brother. It could change your life.”

But that street-corner preacher didn’t have an endowment from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Indeed, Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet presents such an appealing picture of Islam that it has become the best argument yet to cut off PBS’s public funding.

This “documentary” is just a small element of the broader multiculturalism movement, but against the backdrop of terrorist attacks all over the world it takes on an even more disquieting cast. Take, for example, its treatment of the concept of jihad. To hear PBS tell it, Muslims are just Methodists with hats and beards. “Jihad is misused,” one expert informs us. “There is absolutely nothing in Islam that justifies the claim of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda or other similar groups to kill innocent civilians. That is unequivocally a crime under Islamic law. Acts of terror violence that have occurred in the name of Islam are not only wrong, they are contrary to Islam.”

Very well. But here the producers of Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet had a real opportunity. Instead of flatly stating that terrorism cannot be justified by Islam, they could have explained why misunderstanding jihad isn’t a faux pas restricted to the benighted Falwells and Robertsons of the world. They could have informed viewers why millions of Muslims endorse the violent jihad preached by Islamic organizations spanning the globe — from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Jemaah Islamiah in Southeast Asia, Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya in Egypt, the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, Al-Ummah in India, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and so many others.

The documentary reports the views of Mohamed Zakariya, who is described by another Muslim as being among “the mildest people in our community.” Zakariya states that “revenge, suicide bombing, things of that kind, they have no place in Islam.” This is simply stated as fact. The producers pass up the opportunity to clarify opposing views held by quite prominent figures in the Islamic world, such as Sheikh Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, the prestigious and respected Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Tantawi was quoted by President Bush last Fall at the United Nations as saying that “terrorism is a disease, and that Islam prohibits killing innocent civilians.” But according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), last spring the same sheikh declared that suicide bombing was “the highest form of Jihad operations,” and that “every martyrdom operation against any Israeli, including children, women, and teenagers, is a legitimate act according to [Islamic] religious law, and an Islamic commandment.”

They could have answered the question that has gone conspicuously unanswered by Muslim organizations since September 11: If Osama and his ilk are so clearly misusing the concept of jihad and committing acts that are plainly contrary to Islam, why are all these terrorist groups able to win so many adherents among Muslims? Why is Islamic terrorism not the province of a few disenfranchised and desperate fanatics, but a worldwide phenomenon, everywhere capable of commanding the loyalty of its adherents even unto a bloody and violent death?

A breezy dismissal of the Islamic bona fides of suicide bombers, terrorists, and terrorist sympathizers is inadequate and, given that the threat to the civilized world has not abated in the least since September 11, cravenly misleading.

This glaring omission is compounded by the fact that the production deals explicitly with Muhammad’s notorious massacre of the Jewish Bani Qurayzah tribe — an exercise of seventh-century warrior brutality of the kind that Muslim terrorists today invoke to justify their actions. But we would never know that from PBS. In the documentary, the well-known American convert to Islam Hamza Yusuf, clearly uncomfortable with the subject, notes that “uh, approximately 700 men, uh, were killed. Uh, they were executed. So, this definitely occurred.” But to his rescue rushes Karen Armstrong, author of Islam: A Short History and indefatigable apologist for all things Islamic: “All that can be said is that this cannot be seen as anti-Semitism, per se. Muhammad had nothing against the Jewish people per se, or the Jewish religion.”

Adds another expert: “On the Jewish side, they have used that [massacre] as a way of saying, well, you see, the Muslims hate the Jews and they kill them.”

Ah. Muslim anti-Semitism is all a misrepresentation by the Jews. Surely it could have nothing to do with Koran verses such as the one that declares that the “People of the Book” (i.e., Jews and Christians) “incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath” so that “some He transformed into apes and swine” (Sura 5:60). [Editor’s note: See David Klinghoffer.]

Muslim apologists such as Armstrong and the others involved in this documentary might charge me with taking this verse “out of context.” Let them then explain why radical Muslims today so often refer to Jews as “sons of pigs and monkeys,” as USA Today reporter Jack Kelley found Muslim schoolchildren doing in the West Bank. Let them elucidate why Muslim clerics in Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere routinely note, in the words of Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi of the Palestinian Authority, that Jews are “the enemies of Allah, the nation accursed in Allah’s book. Allah described [them] as apes and pigs.”

What would Karen Armstrong, or the “mild” Mohamed Zakariya, say to Ibrahim Mahdi or any of the other clerics who claim that Muhammad indeed had a great deal against the Jewish people and the Jewish religion? Armstrong also notes that “the Qur’an continues to tell Muslims to honor the People of the Book.” What would she say to the Saudi Sheikh Marzouq Salem Al-Ghamdi, who recently preached in a Friday sermon at a mosque in Mecca that “the Jews and Christians are infidels, enemies of Allah, his Messenger, and the believers. They deny and curse Allah and his Messenger… How can we draw near to these infidels?”

Sure, he’s just a fanatical Wahhabi. But why do so many Muslims of all sects echo his words around the world? No answer is forthcoming from PBS.

For many, if not most, of its adherents, Islam may indeed be, as Mohamed Zakariya calls it, “a soft thing . . . not a hard thing.” But for so many Muslims their religion is so clearly a “hard thing” that PBS could have performed a great service by explaining this dichotomy and elucidating the conflict within the Islamic world between the “soft” Muslims and the “hard” ones. Instead, Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet is nothing more than misleading propaganda. It’s an abject failure as a source for the whole truth about Islam and a clarification of the bewildering features of the contemporary scene.

It would be wonderful if PBS’s attractively packaged, sanitized version of Islam were the only Islam. But I’m not sure that Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi or Marzouq Salem Al-Ghamdi would even recognize it as their religion.

— Robert Spencer is an adjunct fellow with the Free Congress Foundation and the author of Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith.

==============================

Islam studies required in California district (WorldNetDaily, 021219)

Course has 7th-graders memorizing Koran verses, praying to Allah

In the wake of Sept. 11, an increasing number of California public school students must attend an intensive three-week course on Islam, reports ASSIST News Service.

The course mandates that seventh-graders learn the tenets of Islam, study the important figures of the faith, wear a robe, adopt a Muslim name and stage their own jihad. Adding to this apparent hypocrisy, reports ANS, students must memorize many verses in the Koran, are taught to pray “in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful” and are instructed to chant, “Praise to Allah, Lord of Creation.”

“We could never teach Christianity like this,” one outraged parent told ANS.

Elizabeth Christina Lemings, a teacher in the Byron, Calif., Union School District , was unaware of the course until her seventh-grade son brought home the handouts. Obtained by ANS, the handouts include a history of Islam and the life of Mohammad, its founder. There are 25 Islamic terms that must be memorized, six Islamic (Arabic) phrases, 20 Islamic proverbs to learn along with the Five Pillars of Faith and 10 key Islamic prophets and disciples to be studied.

“We can’t even mention the name of Jesus in the public schools,” Lemings laments, “but ... they teach Islam as the true religion, and students are taught about Islam and how to pray to Allah. Can you imagine the barrage of lawsuits and problems we would have from the ACLU if Christianity were taught in the public schools, and if we tried to teach about the contributions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the Apostle Paul? But when it comes to furthering the Islamic religion in the public schools, there is not one word from the ACLU, People for the American Way or anybody else. This is hypocrisy.”

ANS reports that students are to pretend that they are Muslims, wear Muslim clothing to school, stage their own jihad via a dice game and pick out a Muslim name (to replace their own) from a list of 30.

When asked what they thought about the course, students described it as “fun,” while others described Islam as “a pretty culture.” Joseph Lemings, 12, told ANS, “the jihad was like playing a video game.”

The “fun” description disturbs Elizabeth Lemings, who sees the course as a tool, not only to engender sympathy and support for the Muslim cause, but for recruitment.

“This is not just a class of history of examining culture,” she said. “This course is entirely too specific. It is more about indoctrination.”

Nancy Castro, principal of Intermediate-Excelsior School of Byron, told ANS that the Islam course (included within “History of Culture”) reflects California educational standards. Castro maintains the course “is not religion, but ancient culture and history. We do not endorse any religion; we just make students aware.” Castro further emphasized the course textbook is in use throughout California.

The textbook used for the Islamic course, “Across The Centuries,” is published by Houghton-Mifflin and has been adopted by the California school system. In it, according to ANS, Islam is presented broadly in a completely positive manner, whereas the limited references to Christianity are “shown in a negative light, with events such as the Inquisition, and the Salem witch hunts highlighted in bold, black type.” ANS notes the portrayal of Islam leaves out word of “the wars, massacres, cruelties against Christians and other non-Muslims that Islam has consistently perpetrated over the centuries.”

Asked if there was any response from parents about the Islam course, Castro told ANS, “Oh, a couple of parents called to express concerns, three to be exact.”

==============================

Islam studies spark hate mail, lawsuits (WorldNetDaily, 021219)

Parents: ‘Biased’ state-adopted textbook distorts world history in favor of Muslims

Word of public-school students pretending to be Muslims, wearing robes, simulating jihads and memorizing verses from the Koran in a seventh-grade California classroom touched off a firestorm of debate, but WorldNetDaily has learned these classroom exercises are neither isolated to one school district nor are they anything new.

Parents of seventh-graders across the state report similar experiences, and one tells WND she battled with her school district over the Islam teachings in 1994.

As WorldNetDaily reported last week, an article by Assist News Service described student activities at Excelsior School in Byron, Calif., where “students are to pretend that they are Muslims, wear Muslim clothing to school, stage their own jihad via a dice game and pick out a Muslim name (to replace their own) from a list of 30.”

ANS quoted an “outraged” teacher at Excelsior and parent of a seventh-grader: “We can’t even mention the name of Jesus in the public schools, but ... they teach Islam as the true religion, and students are taught about Islam and how to pray to Allah.”

The story sparked outrage and prompted a flood of 500 calls, WorldNetDaily was told, to the Byron Union School District the following morning. Principal Nancie Castro also reports receiving about 200 hate e-mails. The story quickly became grist for talk shows from 560 KSFO radio to the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” program . And in response to the story posted on WorldNetDaily, the international public-interest law firm The American Center for Law and Justice is demanding Excelsior School permit students to opt out of the course, contending it “is a violation of the First Amendment free speech and free exercise rights of students and violates the right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.”

In its letter to the Byron Union School District, ACLJ states, “We want to make sure this district knows that it crossed the line. We also want to make sure that other school districts don’t fall into the same trap and require students to attend courses that violate their own religious beliefs.”

Dealing with ‘hysteria’

The raging controversy has parents blaming schools, schools blaming the state, and one lawsuit blaming the course textbook adopted by the state. Castro also blames the media. In a letter sent to parents, she claims the school has been “victimized by a classic case of misinformation that has led to hysteria among people outside of our community.” Included in the “misinformation” in the ANS report, according to Castro, is that it was not mandatory for students to take names of Arabs of the Middle Ages or to wear Muslim clothing, and they did not wear the robes to school but only during the class “simulation.”

As for the simulated jihad Castro explained, “There was a dice game where, depending on the role, they had to do various things like answer a quiz bowl question or read a trivia fact. One roll had them roll for the highest number and called it a jihad.” In a response to a query from Prophezine News, Castro explained, “Dressing up in costume, role-playing and simulation games are all used to stimulate class discussion and are common teaching practices used in other subjects as well.”

When asked whether students were to memorize Islamic terms, phrases, proverbs and the Five Pillars of Faith of the Islam religion, as reported by ANS, Castro replied, “There are vocabulary words to be learned as in every unit. They did not have to memorize proverbs or prayers. They learned some phrases such as peace be with you, but nothing religious or praying to Allah.”

As for lessons from the Koran, Castro said, “There are some verses in the text that are read, just like there are Bible verses in the text in the section on Christianity.” WorldNetDaily has learned, however, that students were offered extra credit if they memorized verses from the Koran. Sources also report that no Bible verses were learned, and Christianity overall was “barely touched on.”

It is this perceived slighting of Christianity and Judaism contrasted with the virtual promotion of Islam in public schools that parents are taking issue with all across the state, from Byron in Northern California south to San Diego. But WND has discovered that the issue is not new.

Valerie Moore says her daughter “was indoctrinated in the Islamic religion for over four months while in the seventh grade” in 1994. Moore expressed shock in arriving at Joseph Kerr Junior High School in Elk Grove, Calif., one day and being greeted by a “huge banner on the front grounds of the school that read ‘There is one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’” Moore also recounts witnessing “children dressed in Muslim attire, chanting from the Koran and praying while marching around the cabala.” Moore recalls the banner being up all day.

“What if we put up a sign that says ‘Jesus is Lord’ for 30 minutes? Oh, no. You can’t do that – separation of church and state,” Moore laments. “They aren’t just teaching them about Islam; they have them practicing it. They have them kneeling down and praying to Allah. I have a problem with that. That’s more like inculcation.” Moore says when she complained to the school officials she was ridiculed and yelled at.

In her letter to parents, Castro maintained, “At no point do we teach or endorse religion; we teach about religions’ impact from a historical context. ... students learn about Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and other major religions as they apply to the understanding of history and the development of major Western and non-Western civilizations. This is the state-approved curriculum, using state-adopted textbooks and has been part of the instructional program in California for over a decade.”

California standards

Content standards adopted in 1998 by the California State Board of Education explicitly state the content students need to acquire at each grade level from kindergarten to grade 12. The standards lay out the following for seventh grade World History and Geography:

7.2 Students analyze the geographic, political, economic, religious, and social structures of the civilizations of Islam in the Middle Ages.

1. Identify the physical features and describe the climate of the Arabian peninsula, its relationship to surrounding bodies of land and water, and nomadic and sedentary ways of life.

2. Trace the origins of Islam and the life and teachings of Mohammad, including Islamic teachings on the connection with Judaism and Christianity.

3. Explain the significance of the Koran and the Sunnah as the primary sources of Islamic beliefs, practice, and law, and their influence in Muslims’ daily life.

4. Discuss the expansion of Muslim rule through military conquests and treaties, emphasizing the cultural blending within Muslim civilization and the spread and acceptance of Islam and the Arabic language.

5. Describe the growth of cities and the establishment of trade routes among Asia, Africa, and Europe, the products and inventions that traveled along these routes (e.g., spices, textiles, paper, steel, new crops), and the role of merchants in Arab society.

6. Understand the intellectual exchanges among Muslim scholars of Eurasia and Africa and the contributions Muslim scholars made to later civilizations in the areas of science, geography, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, art, and literature.

“The state guidelines call for the approach to religion to be academic, not devotional,” stressed Tom Adams, the adminstrator for curriculum framework.

“I can’t confirm what went on at Byron but I don’t believe they were following the framework,” he added.

The Curriculum Frameworks and Instructional Resources (the framework) , first adopted in 1988 and updated in 2000 incorporate the content standards and serve as the basis for statewide assessment. The framework for history-social science for grade seven provides for an examination of “the rise of Islam as a religion and as a civilization. ... The religious ideas of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, should be discussed both for their ethical teachings and as a way of life. Mohammed should be seen as a major historical figure who helped establish the Islamic way of life, its code of ethics and justice, and its rule of law.”

While the framework encourages “simulations, role playing and dramatizations,” Appendix C specifies that “the school may sponsor study about religion, but may not sponsor the practice of religion.”

When asked about the scant coverage of Christianity and Judaism versus Islam set forth in the content standards and framework for grade seven, Adams points to the curriculum for sixth-graders. That framework instructs:

“6. Note the origins of Christianity in the Jewish-Messianic Prophecies, the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as described in the New Testament, and the contribution of St. Paul the Apostle to the definition and spread of Christian beliefs (e.g., belief in the Trinity, resurrection, salvation).”

Adams also stresses the state guidelines and standards “are not mandatory,” and the state recognizes the need for local control within school districts. Asked whether Byron would exercise local control and opt out of the Islam studies, Castro replied, “The state tests our students and ranks are performance on this curriculum. If we didn’t teach parts of it, students would not succeed in achieving the standards.”

Pitfalls of discretion

Parent Valerie Moore believes part of the problem lies in the discretion exercised by the teachers.

“The teacher spent four months on Islam and then ran out of time to teach about the Reformation and all that,” she said.

Field surveys conducted in 1994 by state educators substantiate Moore’s claim, revealing “gaps in student learning.” Appendix D of the framework states, “For example, in some sixth-grade classrooms students never reached the study of ancient Rome because of the extended time they spent on the study of Mesopotamia and Egypt earlier in the year. Some seventh-graders never studied about Europe during the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution” – lessons which follow the unit on Islam.

‘Pro Islamic, anti-Chrisitan textbook’

Moore and other parents find the course textbook, “Across the Centuries,” to be skewed.

“I started reading my daughter’s textbook and was astonished that nothing in the book resembled the history that I had been taught. It had all been distorted and rewritten,” says Moore, “No longer could the founding of America be traced through Judeo/Christian beginnings. ... The history had been altered to now show that America had been given birth through an Islamic heritage. Everything sprang up through Islam.”

The Pacific Justice Institute , a non-profit legal defense organization, has mounted a challenge to the textbook on behalf of a concerned parent from San Luis Obispo. Jen Schroeder noticed her son’s textbook “had a distinct bias toward Islam over Christianity” and proceeded to scour the book, writing a 10-page content analysis of it over the winter break. (See .pdf version of Schroeder’s report.)

“I was shocked,” Schroeder told WorldNetDaily.

“Across the Centuries,” she says, “instructs our children to ‘imagine you are a Muslim soldier’ and write about it; ‘imagine you are on a Mecca pilgrimage’ and write about it; to research what a mosque looks like and then to build a replica of one. Another assignment is to write why other nations are attracted to Islam. ... I found 20 Islamic beliefs stated as fact.”

While presenting a “white-washed version of Islam,” Schroeder asserts the textbook goes out of its way to depict Christianity in a negative light.

“In the textbook, there is a large three-column block titled ‘Understanding Religious Persecution,’ which blames Christians exclusively for persecuting others and forcing beliefs, when in fact there have been more Christian martyrs than any other religion.”

“The Bible says ‘Take heed that you do not inquire how other nations serve their gods,’” continues Schroeder, “For my son to obey the school, he must disobey what the Bible tells him.”

Schroeder tried to opt Eric out of the class but says the principal told her “no” because the state assessments require the knowledge presented in the class.

“It seems everyone has rights except the Christians, and I have no choice but to file a lawsuit.”

Pacific Justice Institute had scholars comb through both the textbook and the teacher’s version to substantiate Schroeder’s content analysis prior to filing the administrative complaint.

“The average parent would be outraged to see this kind of bias and distortion of world history,” said Brad Dacus, the group’s chief counsel.

California adopted the textbook in 1991. When asked why ten years have passed without a major challenge, Dacus replied, “Parents overlooked it, thinking Islam is far away. They never saw it as having a threat to their children. [The terror attacks of Sept. 11 have] changed that and [have] created more scrutiny.”

When seventh-grader Eric, was asked how he felt about the instruction, he responded, “It hurts my stomach.”

==============================

Book publisher: No Muslim bias (WorldNetDaily, 020219)

Parents’ lawsuit accuses teachers’ resource of presenting Christianity in negative light

Houghton Mifflin Company has released a statement defending its “Across the Centuries” textbook against claims it skews history in favor of Muslims and presents Christians in a negative light.

WorldNetDaily was first to report that the claims, made by parents, have spawned a lawsuit against school districts. The Pacific Justice Institute, a non-profit legal defense organization, is representing the concerned parents.

“Houghton Mifflin has always taken a neutral, fact-based approach to writing all of its educational publications, striving for a fair account of history,” the publisher states in its release.

WorldNetDaily reported last month that parents across California have raised objections to what they describe as in depth, promotional Islam studies being presented to seventh-graders in public-school classrooms as part of world history and geography. Students were asked to pretend to be Muslims with adopted Arabic names, offered extra credit for wearing robes and memorizing verses from the Koran, required to read verses from the Koran and learn the five pillars of faith of the Islam religion, and participated in a classroom simulation of a jihad.

“We can’t even mention the name of Jesus in the public schools, but ... they teach Islam as the true religion, and students are taught about Islam and how to pray to Allah,” complained Elizabeth Lemmings, a concerned parent and teacher at Excelsior School in Byron, Calif.

Excelsior Principal Nancie Castro defended the instruction as “state-approved curriculum, using state-adopted textbooks” that “has been part of the instructional program in California for over a decade.”

As WorldNetDaily reported, the course instruction and homework, including mock-Muslim exercises, are recommended in the state-adopted textbook “Across the Centuries.”

“I started reading my daughter’s textbook and was astonished that nothing in the book resembled the history that I had been taught. It had all been distorted and rewritten,” parent Valerie Moore of Elk Grove, Calif., said. “No longer could the founding of America be traced through Judeo/Christian beginnings. ... The history had been altered to now show that America had been given birth through an Islamic heritage. Everything sprang up through Islam.”

Parent Jen Schroeder from San Luis Obispo is among the plaintiffs in the Pacific Justice Institute’s lawsuit. While presenting a “white-washed version of Islam,” Schroeder asserts the textbook goes out of its way to depict Christianity in a negative light.

Last week, Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes echoed Schroeder’s complaints in his New York Post column. Pipes attacked the 558-page history textbook as an example of “the privileging of Islam in the United States.”

Pipes takes issue with the “covert propagation of Islam” in the textbook: “Everything Islamic is praised; every problem is swept under the rug. Students learn about Islam’s ‘great cultural flowering,’ but nothing about the later centuries of statis and decline.”

Pipes also complains the textbook promotes Islamic doctrines as objective fact and presents a distorted image of Muslims: “Jihad, which means ‘sacred war,’ turns into a struggle mainly ‘to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.’”

“Learning about Islam is a wonderful thing,” Pipes writes, “but students, especially in public schools, should approach Islam in a critical fashion – learning the bad as well as the good, the archaic as well as the modern.”

In the company release, Collin Earnst, director of media relations for Houghton Mifflin responded to Pipes’ attacks, calling them “based on misinformation” and arguing, “Most of the accusations ... made in Mr. Pipes’ editorial about omissions or interpretations of the text ... are based on his own bias and his choice to cite passages out-of-context.”

Earnst explains that a “multi-cultural and multi-faith panel of scholars reviewed and approved ‘Across the Centuries’ before publication” and that the text is part of a two-book series developed for the state of California that covers specific topics mandated and outlined by the state board of education. As per California state standards, “the dawn of the major Western and non-Western ancient civilizations, including the origins of Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity” are dealt with in the text used in grade six.

But one award-winning seventh-grade history teacher from the San Francisco Bay Area, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal, told National Review Online, that the role of Christianity in world civilization is studied primarily in grades seven and 10 in California public schools and that “at no point in either grade is the role of Christianity as cogently, thoroughly or engagingly described in the state history texts as Islam.”

Earnst further defends the textbook by explaining, “As directed by the state of California, these books were to be written with ‘Historical Empathy.’ Thus, the textbooks do not focus on accounts of violence, cruelty or hatred on the part of any religion. In accordance with California state standards, ‘Across the Centuries’ focuses on how the beliefs of certain cultures help shape their motivation and their effect on history.”

“The text does in fact mention instances of Muslim religious intolerance (chapter 4, page 81), just as it cites early missionary work and imperialism, as well as the Crusades and intolerance by the Christians,” Earnst points out.

According to Earnst, the meaning of the word “jihad” was “clarified” based on the recommendation of the multi-cultural and multi-faith panel of scholars (including Judaic and Christian scholars).

“Often misunderstood, this word means ‘to struggle or to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.’ ... Many Americans have come to see the word ‘jihad’ as some Islamic fundamentalists use it, as a right or a mission to kill and destroy. However, the vast majority of Muslims do not share this view, and assert that a ‘jihad’ is not necessarily an act of violence,” said Earnst.

National Review Online reports the Bay Area social-studies teacher credits activism on the part of California Muslims for the way Islam is presented in the textbook: “The local Muslim community makes it a point to attend social-studies teachers’ conventions to share teaching aids, and they also offer free guest speakers for the classroom.”

Schroeder disputes Houghton Mifflin’s defense of its textbook and remains steadfast in her view of the book: “‘Across the Centuries’ is a shameless example of how far a textbook company will go to pervert the truth and display it in a manner [that] would appeal and draw children into a violent religion. Under the banner of ‘tolerance’ they have completely rewritten a religion.”

==============================

Author puts herself on front lines against Islam (Washington Times, 021219)

NEW YORK — Oriana Fallaci, her once-famous face framed by clouds of smoke curling from a black cigarette, is sitting in her antique-filled Manhattan hide-out, talking about threats against her life.

Mostly they come by phone, she says — flat, Arabic-accented voices whispering, “You hide yourself in your house, but we will find you all the same.”

At 72, the celebrated Italian author and journalist — known for her explosive interviews with world leaders in the 1960s and ‘70s — has broken her silence and, in the interest of fighting back, she says, granted a rare interview.

It is also true that Miss Fallaci has a book to recommend, and that work, “The Rage and the Pride,” published in Italy a year ago, has given her a second life. It has made her the new Salman Rushdie, a female counterpart to the British author who satirized Islam in “The Satanic Verses” and then went into hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa — or death order — against him.

No fatwa has been declared for Miss Fallaci, but she is determined to endure the backlash against her stone-hard conviction: that Islam is a blight on the world, a serious threat to a superior Western culture, which does not realize the danger to its existence.

“Troy will burn, Troy will burn,” shouts Miss Fallaci from her perch on a beige silk chair, shapely legs and high heels folded beneath her. She is the Cassandra of Homer’s Iliad, warning that, like Troy, the West is doomed.

“They say, ‘There goes that crazy woman again.’” But Troy will burn because they have no passion, and they conduct this war with fear. If you go on being deaf and blind, you will be dead.”

Gesturing to rows of books covering the walls and carpets, she says: “These books, I don’t want them burned. I am worried for these books.”

“La Fallaci,” as she is sometimes referred to in Europe, has a commanding presence. Her slim, petite figure in a black jersey and gray skirt rarely sits still. All opinions must be acted out in a dramatic pantomime, often while standing.

The expressive blue eyes, widened by black eyeliner, recall the stunning looks of her youth. The flowing, dark hair has been replaced with a chignon fastened by a Spanish comb. Large pearl rings and red nail polish flash as she makes a point.

“The Italian police called the FBI and told them to keep an eye on me, but I know how to defend myself. I shoot very well,” she says.

“And when the phone calls come, I tell them their mothers, sisters and daughters are all together working in a brothel in Beirut. Strangely enough, they say, ‘OK’ and hang up,” in shock, she suspects.

The Fallaci furor started when she emerged from her seclusion the day the terrorists slammed into the World Trade Center. She wrote a scathing letter to her fellow Italians, exhorting them to wake up to the dangers of Islam. The letter appeared on the front page of the newspaper Corriere della Sera, her longtime employer.

This bombshell eventually led to the book that in Italy alone, home to about 1 million Muslims, has sold more than 1 million copies.

But even as the general public embraced Miss Fallaci’s anti-Muslim opinions, the intellectual left pilloried her as a Zionist agent. In France and Switzerland, activist groups went to court in unsuccessful attempts to confiscate it.

“Racist, racist! They have become the new masters of the earth, these sons of Allah,” she said in a talk to the American Enterprise Institute in October. Islam cannot be touched, she said, alluding to the political correctness — a kind of intellectual terrorism, she says — that she believes precludes any criticism of Islam and protects its followers. “They multiply like protozoa to infinity,” she said of Muslims.

Her vitriol against the Arab world boiled over into a manifesto against anti-Semitism, which she wrote in spring. Yet even in some Jewish quarters, endorsement has been cautious. Many Jews remember her hearty support for the Palestinian cause in past years. Her strident tone makes some nervous.

“We welcome her turnaround,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “Her comments on the Islamic world are in essence true, but the shrill way she expresses herself makes us uncomfortable.”

Miss Fallaci was a vocal liberal, if not a leftist, for much of her journalistic career. Her reports from Vietnam drew fire from all directions.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor at large for The Washington Times, remembers her from his days covering Southeast Asia.

“She’s a liberal icon who is now transmogrified into a not-too-convincing conservative,” he said. “The point is we’re at war with radical Islam, but she cannot distinguish between mainstream and radical Islam.”

Like many European countries inundated with immigrants from Africa and the Middle East in the past 30 years, Italy faces a critical issue, namely assimilation of Muslims into Europe, which Miss Fallaci believes will never happen.

“In the end, every Muslim, with few exceptions, is a fundamentalist because the Koran is what it is,” she roars, pausing only to sip a glass of champagne.

Small wonder that when she visited her native Florence in November to face down a demonstration, which she succeeded in blocking, of antiglobalists who despise her, the Italian antiterrorist police watched her every move.

Whether traveling by plane or car, she takes no direct routes. While in New York, she says, detectives from the local precinct with Italian-American names watch out for her informally. But she rarely goes out anyway because of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-smoking laws, which she says leave no place — restaurant, movie theater or bar — that she can light up. A privileged few, usually longtime friends, come to her home.

“She’s one of those fearless people who go out on a limb and then cut it off. But even those who don’t agree with her accept the fact that she’s courageous,” said Pia Lindstrum, daughter of the late movie star Ingrid Bergman, a friend from early in Miss Fallaci’s career, when she wrote about films.

Miss Fallaci is well-prepared for this latest battle. As a child, she fought in the underground against the Nazis — handy training for someone who would follow war and revolution and along the way produce several books and hundreds of articles.

Ten years ago the silence descended, and with it a duel with breast cancer, an invader she calls “the alien.” Then came September 11, 2001.

Those who make the threatening phone calls have miscalculated. Miss Fallaci is back, loud and clear.

“I cannot be intimidated,” she says, her raucous voice inviting the enemy in. “Each time they try to scare me, I will write something more ferocious. I will double the dose of my rage and my pride and write more and more against them, for the rest of my life.”

==============================

Wake Up! Islam Is About More Than Hate Crimes (Free Congress Foundation, 030129)

By Paul M. Weyrich

When the FBI released its statistics on hate crimes for 2001 late last year, the news media focused on the rise of hate crimes against Muslims living in America.

Well, let’s be clear about this. There is no excuse for vigilantism by any American citizen.

But there is no excuse for the reporting of so-called “hate crimes” separate and apart from a crime either.

In short, crime is crime. It is wrong regardless of whom the violence has been committed against. It should be punished under the existing laws that apply to each and every person.

But the use of added penalties for hate crimes takes away the meaning of “equal protection under the law,” something guaranteed Americans by the Fourteenth Amendment. This time-honored principle of American jurisprudence is being turned on its head by the “hate crimes” movement. That is not right, and it is just downright un-American.

But what I find particularly galling is how the news editors at many newspapers and TV stations are quick to pounce upon “hate crimes” against Muslims living in the United States. At the same time, these news executives give short-shrift to just what are the very roots of Islam and why its most fervent believers who, reading the Qur’an quite literally, have targeted Christians, Jews and anyone else deemed a non-believer in Islam, as enemies to be subdued.

The news media and the political establishment that predominates in Washington are simply very resistant to acknowledging the truth about Islam. The fact is that while there are many Muslims who may lead peaceful lives — for now — a literal reading of the Qur’an and other key Islamic texts leaves no doubt that violence is to be inflicted upon those who do not believe.

There are many Muslims who take what the Qur’an says quite seriously and literally. They mean us harm. And as the results of September 11th showed and, many incidents before and certainly after have also demonstrated, these Muslims are absolutely intent on destroying the West, caring nothing about who gets killed or what gets destroyed.

During the months following September 11, the powerful, well-funded Islamic lobby in the United States has stepped up its own PR campaign. Its purpose is to present an image of Islam that is diametrically at odds with the reality of its origins, theology, and the views held by many of its present day followers, including many of the clerics who command the utmost respect in the Islamic world. That false view holds that Islam is a peaceful religion.

This lobby maintains that the very name “Islam” means peace even though its true meaning is submission, indicating “peace” after a struggle. There is a separate word for ‘peace’ in Islam. Scholars of Islam can repeat troublesome Sura after Sura [scripture from the Qur’an] in which they make clear in startling terms that Islam is to be unmerciful to unbelievers, but peaceful and tolerant to those who believe.

Now, Islamic groups are attempting to stuff American libraries with books presenting an essentially false view of Islam, and some local libraries very willingly put on their shelves the books from the ‘CAIR packages’ sent by the Council on American Islamic Relations. It is incumbent upon those Americans who want the truth about Islam to demand that their libraries have on hand the publications that tell the other side.

Islamists truly despise multiculturalists, but, perversely, find them to be a great Fifth Column in our country, helping to pave the way for acceptance of those who truly are our enemy. Just think of the recent reports about our weak immigration laws and some of the very, very suspicious people from foreign lands who have been able to enter our country.

It’s time those of us who are Christian and Jews start to challenge head on groups like CAIR that present this false, sugarcoated view of Islam. It’s time we try to shake up the implicit alliance between the Islamic lobby in America and the news media.

For instance, anytime a CAIR representative makes an appearance on a TV news program or is quoted by a newspaper, Americans who want the truth told about Islam should call the producer of that network or the editor of that newspaper to make clear just what CAIR is about.

More than hate crimes are being committed against Americans. September 11th was more than the biggest hate crime of the year. It was an act of war because Islam is at war with the West. The sooner that all Americans learn to accept that bitter, hard truth, then the better off we will be as a nation.

==============================

Classroom Jihad: What our children’s textbooks say about Islam (030207)

We’re losing the war on terrorism in America’s classrooms. That’s the sobering conclusion of the American Textbook Council, which Friday releases a report on how our schools’ most popular world-history books fail to grapple honestly with the problem of militant Islamism.

“History textbooks accommodate Islam on terms that Islamists demand,” writes Gilbert T. Sewell in his 35-page analysis. “On controversial subjects, world history textbooks make an effort to circumvent unsavory facts that might cast Islam past or present in anything but a positive light. Islamic achievements are reported with robust enthusiasm. When any dark side surfaces, textbooks run and hide.”

Textbook content is especially important because the Muslim world is so alien to many Americans. “Few teachers have at their disposal anything more than a faint knowledge of Islam,” writes Sewell. “But state mandates expect or require them to teach something about Islam.” Teachers need books they can trust; unfortunately, many of their textbooks are not trustworthy on the subject of Islam.

Take the concept of jihad, which Bernard Lewis, our most gifted interpreter of Arab culture, defines this way: “The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic law.” Throughout history, of course, many Muslims have sought to achieve this goal with swords, guns, and bombs. Students reading Across the Centuries, a seventh-grade textbook published by Houghton Mifflin, however, receive a sanitized version of this reality. Jihad, according to this book, is merely a struggle “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.” There’s an element of truth in this definition, insofar as militant Islamists think anybody or anything not subscribing to their strict theology is “evil.” But the book gives students no way of appreciating this larger context. To them, jihad must seem like a useful tool to suppress their urges to pass notes in class, run in the hallways, and stick chewing gum under their desks.

One popular textbook, Prentice Hall’s Connections to Today, also whitewashes jihad: “Some Muslims took on jihad, or effort in God’s service, as another duty. Jihad has often been mistakenly translated simply as ‘holy war.’ In fact, it may include acts of charity or an inner struggle to achieve spiritual peace, as well as any battle in defense of Islam.” This is basically a dodge, and lays the onus for mistaken translations upon the presumed cultural insensitivities of Westerners — without acknowledging that the West, for perfectly understandable reasons, sometimes has difficulty understanding how the religion of peace distinguishes between “holy wars” and “any battle in defense of Islam.” Another favored textbook, Houghton Mifflin’s Patterns of Interaction, sidesteps this uncomfortable subject altogether; it doesn’t even mention the word jihad. Like Connections to Today, it was recently approved for use in Texas, whose statewide textbook-adoption policies influence the textbook market all over the country and drive much of its content.

The ATC’s report discusses similar problems with other concepts. The slave trade is an especially touchy subject for the modern multiculturalist, because it requires taking one of the great sins of the West and minimizing its role elsewhere. Patterns of Interaction, for instance, claims that the Muslim world exported fewer than 5 million slaves from Africa between 650 and 1600. This is much smaller than historian Raymond Mauvy’s estimate that 14 million blacks slaves have been sold to Muslims since the 7th century. (For comparison’s sake, 10 to 11 million Africans were shipped in chains to the New World between 1650 and 1900; the vast majority traveled to Latin America and the Caribbean, and only about half a million went to British North America and the United States.)

The status of women is also a tricky topic for multiculturalists, because nowhere are women more oppressed than in the societies they want to celebrate. Connections to Today engages is what can only be called a lie: “Conditions for women vary greatly from country to country in the modern Middle East. Since the 1950s, women in most countries have won voting rights.” That’s right: the freedom to vote for Saddam Hussein as president. Textbooks are dotted with references to obscure proto-feminists, who are held up as the fruits of Islamic culture. “Textbook editors’ relentless search to find such historical figures deforms and cheapens world history,” writes Sewell.

A chief culprit in all this is the Council on Islamic Education, a group that consults with publishing companies on how textbooks portray Islam. Anything that strays from the Islamist line is denounced as xenophobic, ethnocentric, and racist — labels which, if broadcast widely, are sure to depress book sales.

The ATC study concludes with positive suggestions on how to teach about Islam in ways that “take Muslims’ justified sensitivities into account, without capitulating to them and rewriting the historical record in a misguided attempt to compensate for past inaccuracies.”

It’s a dose of commonsense that won’t be found in many of the books our children are reading.

==============================

Islam and the Textbooks (American Textbook Council, 0302)

Islam and the Textbooks surveys content in seven widely adopted world history textbooks used across the country in grades seven through twelve. It reviews coverage of jihad, sharia, slavery, status of women, and terrorism, comparing lesson content to prominent histories and recognized sources. It focuses on the high school textbooks adopted in Texas in 2002.

This review faults world history textbooks on one of the most complicated and important subjects teachers face in classrooms today. What may seem on the surface to be a minor curriculum controversy has far-reaching implications for civic education and the promotion of American constitutional values. Its main conclusions include: (1) world history textbooks hold Islam and other non-Western civilizations to different standards than those that apply to the West, (2) domestic educational activists, Muslim and non-Muslim, insist at once on harsh perspectives for the West while gilding the record of non-Western civilizations, (3) Islamic pressure groups and their allies seek to suppress critical analysis of Islam inside and outside classrooms, and distorted textbook content is one symptom of this phenomenon, and (4) publishers respond to pressure groups on account of political expediency and sales. As a result, they are giving American children and their teachers a misshapen view of the past and a false view of the future.

==============================

Textbooks said to ‘hide’ problems with Islam (Washington Times, 030207)

By Larry Witham

World history textbooks in U.S. classrooms sanitize the problems of Islam when compared to how they often treat Western civilization, a review of seven widely used texts reported yesterday.

The study, released by the American Textbook Council, said a rosy treatment of Islam may arise from the lobbying of the Council on Islamic Education on national publishers.

“When any dark side [of Islam] surfaces, textbooks run and hide,” said the report, “Islam and the Textbooks,” by Gilbert Sewall, a former professor who directs the council.

“Subjects such as jihad and the advocacy of violence among militant Islamists to attain worldly ends, the imposition of [Shariah] law, the record of Muslim enslavement, and the brutal subjection of women are glossed over,” the 35-page study says.

This contrasts, the report suggested, with the candor in textbooks over such events of Western history as the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, imperialism, Christian fundamentalism and women’s suffrage.

Without solid facts about Islam, the study said, “instructors fall back on themes of tolerance and apology [and] skirt the reality of international affairs and threats to world peace.”

Many topics in history textbooks are reduced to a few paragraphs and require elaboration by teachers or supplementary materials. But Islam is so exotic that a few textbook sentences can have an inordinate impact, Mr. Sewall said in an interview.

“Few teachers are comfortable with the subject,” he said. “They are generally ignorant of Islam, so they depend on the textbooks for guidance.”

The textbook council, formed in 1988 in New York as an independent group researching social studies and history texts, advocates factual knowledge and appreciation of Western values.

It began a review of world history textbooks in 2001, but issued this “preliminary report” on Islam’s treatment because of its importance for students in an age of terrorism and new global tensions.

Shabbir Mansuri, founding director of the Council on Islamic Education, yesterday was sent a portion of the report. Other than describing the textbook council as “a conservative group,” he had no comment.

The Council on Islamic Education, formed in Orange County, Calif., in 1989, has sent publishers guidelines and definitions for words for the textbook treatments and protests if texts offend Muslim sensibilities, the new report said.

“For more than a decade, history-textbook editors have done the Council’s bidding, and as a result, history textbooks accommodate Islam on terms that Islamists demand,” the report said.

It noted that the Council on Islamic Education, which influences California public schools with materials and classroom speakers, is not listed as a nonprofit group and is funded by private donors. “My efforts to find out where the money comes from have met a stone wall,” Mr. Gilbert said.

Textbook publishers said yesterday that consulting with the public and with interest groups is routine.

“There’s no secret to that,” said Richard Blake, spokesman for Holt, Rinehart and Winston, which publishes the high school text “Continuity and Change,” which is reviewed in the new report. “Where publishers get in trouble is when the public thinks they are not fair or accurate.”

Collin Earnst, spokesman for Houghton Mifflin in Boston, agreed with other publishers that consulting is essential, but then a publisher makes independent decisions with its own scholarly editorial board.

“We have mentioned those topics about Islam in our book,” Mr. Earnst said of Houghton Mifflin’s “Across the Centuries,” which is used for the seventh grade in California and elsewhere. “It’s not as if there’s a rosy-colored view of Islam.”

He said a text for that age group must be simplified. Texts that cover Judaism and Christianity are used in the sixth grade. “None of these books are designed to delve into the dark side of any of these topics,” he said.

He rejected an assertion in the report that, although conservative Christian protests about textbook content are not heeded, Islamic protests are heeded to the point of censoring publishers.

“Neither of the groups are censors,” Mr. Earnst said. “They obviously want the textbook written the way that they like. It’s common to have groups review things. Then we walk a careful line.”

Mr. Gilbert said the main concern of his report are the high school texts, some of which avoid Islam’s poor record on violence, treatment of women, slavery and intolerance toward other religions.

Since about 1987, teachers and historians have agreed that world history was worth more attention for students, a goal that the American Textbook Council has applauded.

“This expansion of studying non-Western history is praiseworthy,” Mr. Gilbert said. But since it began, many of the cultural interest groups, particularly Muslims and blacks, have pressured publishers to sanitize the history of their native lands.

“I hope the publishers will take a second look at this,” Mr. Gilbert said.

==============================

Jailhouse Blues: The New Islam Remains The Same Old Islam (Free Congress Foundation, 030212)

By Paul M. Weyrich

Monday’s USA TODAY said on the front page that friends of record producer Phil Spector had believed that he no longer had a violent streak. He had “shed” it. Well, unless there is a stunning discovery and someone else ends up taking the rap for the killing of actress Lana Clarkson, the truth must be confronted by those friends that Spector’s violent streak was not shed at all, just submerged.

The same can be said about Islam. Give credit to the Council on American Islamic Relations, the American Muslim Council and other members of the American Muslim disinformation lobby for using generous donations from foreign lands to package a sanitized version of Islam as peaceful and tolerant. But their fantasy Islam collides with the truth about life inside those countries where the religion is dominant. Unfortunately, too many Americans are willing to believe that Islam is a gentle lamb of a religion, rather than the lion with blood on its claws, ready to pounce once more on unsuspecting innocents — and that it is being prodded to do so by its most devout believers.

This does not mean that all Muslims are that way. But all it takes is a small minority who take its scriptures (which Muslims consider to be words dictated by Allah himself) literally to destroy the peace of the nation and the world at large. That became clear in a story reported last week that should arouse concern over who is ministering to the prisoners in our country.

Last week in The Wall Street Journal, a Muslim prison chaplain named Warith Deen Umar claimed that our country’s alleged oppression of Muslims would bring further attacks along the lines of 9/11.

Umar wrote in an unpublished memoir, “Even Muslims who say they are against terrorism secretly admire and applaud” the 9/11 hijackers for their wanton destruction of the World Trade Towers and the taking of innocent life. After all, Umar insists, the Qur’an does not forbid terrorism against so-called oppressors of Muslims, even if it means innocent people die too.

Not all Muslims are in line with such radical thinking. But all this proves what Free Congress Foundation Adjunct Scholar Robert Spencer has long said about Islam: as long as the violent passages of the Qur’an are interpreted literally, then there will be Muslims who believe and act accordingly.

The worrisome thing is that Umar had been a figure of some influence in New York state prisons until the Journal’s revelations. Now, all of a sudden, Umar is no longer welcomed by the prison authorities. Umar had been ministering to prisoners during the last few years as a volunteer, but he had spent 25 years as the ranking Muslim cleric for the New York state prison system before retiring in 2000. He also worked as a part-time chaplain for a Federal prison in New York state only to be fired last week when officials discovered just what he had been telling prisoners about 9/11.

Evidencing the popular misconceptions about Islam, the chief spokesman for New York State’s prison system, James B. Flateau, insisted to the Journal that Umar had been distorting the teachings of the Qur’an. I don’t know where Flateau got his imam’s license, but I hope that Flateau’s boss, Prison Commissioner Glenn S. Goord, is more accurate in his assertion that Umar had not been telling prisoners to interpret the Qur’an literally when he was on the state’s payroll.

Muslims make up at least 10% of the populations of prisons in America. That’s the lowball estimate. Some put the percentage as high as 17%. In New York State alone, there are 13,000 Muslim prisoners. I’d like to think that even hardened cons would be appalled at Umar’s claims. But I know that not all will — as was made clear in the Journal article in which it also described what happened during the immediate aftermath of 9/11 at Cape Vincent, a medium security prison in upstate New York. One of Umar’s disciples, a chaplain named Sufwan El Hadi, told the inmates that America had gotten what it deserved. Some prisoners were agitated by these outrageous comments. Others went up to El Hadi after he spoke and congratulated him. Later, Imam El Hadi, after being fired from his job, protested the interpretation of what he said, claiming he was not justifying the attacks or the taking of innocent life.

The official reaction? Goord said that “Umar did a great job” and Flateau had stated a disinclination to investigate the other chaplains that Umar appointed, having been quoted in an Associated Press article that it would be a “dangerous philosophy” to assume they shared his views.

What has been going on in New York state’s prisons is an outrage. It begs the question: What’s going on in your state’s prisons? Do the officials really know who is doing the ministering and just what they are telling the inmates? Are the state legislators who oversee your state’s prisons on top of this?

But there’s also a lesson for those who insist, despite all available evidence to the contrary, on seeing the work of 9/11 as just that of a few terrorists. They fail to recognize that Islam has been waging war against the West well before 9/11 and that it will continue to do so until we submit to their rule. I pray that day will never come, and it has not so far. Just like Communism failed, I think Islam will too in its latest attempt to subdue the West. But it should also be clear, given what is being said in our own nation’s prisons, that much damage could be done before we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

CAIR: Nothing But Not The Truth (Free Congress Foundation, 030217)

By Robert Spencer

The Council on American Islamic Relations launches a year-long national advertising campaign with an advertisement that was scheduled to be run on Sunday, February 16 in The New York Times. The organization is staging this campaign to present a positive portrayal of Islam.

People who read these advertisements throughout the coming year should be aware of what CAIR’s own record has been in presenting an accurate, factual presentation of Islam.

CAIR presents Islam as a peaceful and tolerant religion, closely akin to Judaism and Christianity. From CAIR’s sources about Islam, one would get no idea that aspects of the religion are being used all over the world and right here in the United States today to teach Muslims intolerance and hatred of Jews, Christians, and all non-Muslims, as well as to justify violence. And this radicalism is based on a literal reading of the Qur’an as words dictated by Allah himself.

Instead of working constructively to counter such interpretations of the Qur’an, CAIR simply ignores them and tars as ‘racists’ and ‘bigots’ all who dare to point out how the Muslim holy book is being used in the Islamic world. CAIR seldom misses an opportunity to sling these charges: when al-Qaeda threatened violence during the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, CAIR’s Nihad Awad complained about the linking of the Hajj to terrorism - not by al-Qaeda, but by Attorney General John Ashcroft! Consequently, CAIR cannot pretend that its presentation of Islam is accurate and balanced.

Critics of the Islamic religion for its hostility toward unbelievers, particularly Christians and Jews, have repeatedly made clear that telling the whole truth about the religion is not to say that all Muslims are violent or even want to harm unbelievers. But it is especially important nowadays for Americans to realize that radical Muslims are using the Qur’an and the tenets of Islam to recruit and motivate terrorists. Nor are these just a few isolated nutcases: Muslim radicals have perpetrated violence against non-Muslims in Jerusalem, Lebanon, Malaysia, the Sudan, the Philippines, Bali, Egypt, and elsewhere. The United States has not been exempt from such attacks either. The WTC and Pentagon attacks of September 11 were not the beginning. The World Trade Towers were first bombed by Muslim radicals in 1993. (Siraj Wahaj, a member of CAIR’s advisory board, is someone whom Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes calls ‘a potential unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993.’) A later attack on the Lincoln Tunnel was foiled by FBI members who weren’t afraid to monitor what was going in a New York mosque.

CAIR’s rhetoric about Islam is not just open to debate, it is open to strong and clear refutation. CAIR itself has a history of questionable ties to supporters of terrorism. Before people accept the advertising claims made by CAIR about Islam, they should consider this organization’s history and lack of credibility.

Robert Spencer is Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation. He is the author of Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Facts About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books) as well as the Free Congress Foundation monographs An Introduction to the Qur’an, Women and Islam, An Islamic Primer, and Islam and the West: A Brief Overview. His latest Free Congress Foundation monograph, The Islamic Disinformation Lobby: American Muslim Groups’ Politically Motivated Distortions of Islam, will be issued later this month.

==============================

The jihad against the textbooks (Washington Times, 030220)

One man’s jihad can be another man’s mission of distortion. The Islamist terrorists who attacked America on September 11 cited their murderous rampage as a “jihad.” The suicide bombers who set out to terrorize Israeli schools, restaurants and malls call their mission their “jihad.” But American school kids might never know anything about that.

A lot has gone missing in our textbooks. “Patterns of History,” for example, published by Houghton Mifflin and adopted as a world history textbook in high-school classes in Texas and other states, never even mentions the word. A seventh-grade world history book by Houghton Mifflin, titled “Across the Centuries,” defines “jihad” merely as a struggle for a Muslim “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.” There’s no mention of the fact that millions of Muslims — not all, but many millions — are taught to regard everything not under Muslim rule or control as “evil.”

“Islam and the Textbooks,” a 35-page report compiled by the American Textbook Council in New York, analyzes seven history textbooks widely used between the seventh and 12th grades and finds that millions of American schoolchildren are being cheated of accurate history. Politically correct advocacy groups have thoroughly intimidated teachers, administrators and school boards — and in a way that the most fundamentalist of Christians or the most orthodox of Jews never could.

Textbooks are big money. Publishers cower at the prospect of offending anyone with a megaphone, and the advocacy groups are skilled at manipulating the timid and the cowardly with easy accusations of “bigot” and “racist.” Uninformed and uncritical teachers pass on their own ignorance with appeals to mushy sentiment disguised as tolerance. Parents who think textbooks are written by fair but tough-minded scholars are unaware of how political process, not scholarship, produces their children’s textbooks. There is neither understanding nor recognition of the abuse of Islam by radical Muslims and how they use this distortion to make war on America — and indeed on the millions of peaceful Muslims who do not share their distorted theology.

On significant Islam-related subjects, textbooks omit, flatter, embellish and resort to happy talk, suspending criticism or harsh judgments that would raise provocative or even alarming questions, says Gilbert Sewall, a former professor who heads the American Textbook Council (www.historytextbooks.org/islam). You wouldn’t even learn how Islamists frequently describe jihad in military terms, using passages from the Koran. Bernard Lewis, the author and scholar, says that “the object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic law.” You won’t find this view, widely shared by scholars, even acknowledged in the politically correct texts.

There’s no acknowledgment that religious dogma is dictated by certain Islamic states, how freedom of religion and speech are alien concepts in most Islamic countries. Double standards are the norm in these textbooks; Judaism and Christianity get short shrift, as do Western secular institutions. Slavery is often presented as a peculiarly European and American institution. One text does not even mention that Islamic civilizations engaged in the slave trade. In another, where slavery is acknowledged, it’s treated as a “benign institution” offering slaves the opportunity for “social mobility.”

Textbooks that robustly discuss the benighted condition of women that once prevailed in the West present severe contemporary restrictions on Islamic women as benign. “For some women,” one textbook states, “the [hijab, or veil] symbolized resistance to unpopular governments.” A “bridal fair” of the Berbers in Morocco is portrayed as a quaint ritual of happy natives enjoying the party, without noting that fathers sell their daughters to their prospective husbands through negotiations over dowries. Upper-class women may be secluded in the home, but “in rural areas, peasant women continued to contribute to the economy in many ways.” (Aren’t they the lucky ones?)

The exceptional women in Islamic society who achieved great knowledge and power, such as Shajar, a 13th-century freed slave who is said to have become a ruler of Egypt, are presented as typical. Maisuna, a Bedouin poetess, is portrayed in one text as a proto-feminist (sort of like Gloria Steinem in a burqa).

The Council on Islamic Education in Orange County, Calif., is particularly intimidating to publishers. It has warned scholars and public officials that those who do not see eye-to-eye with its positions will be cited as racists, reactionaries and enemies of Islam. High-profile (and easily frightened) publishers and editors eagerly seek the council’s imprimatur.

The American Textbook Council says the distortions, inaccuracies and omissions in the study of Islam are the result of complacency, not anti-Americanism. But its report suggests something worse than complacency is at work. It’s the cheating of our children — and the rest of us, too.

==============================

Muslim cleric guilty of soliciting murder (London Times, 030224)

A Muslim cleric who called for Jews, Hindus, and non-Muslims to be killed was today found guilty at the Old Bailey of soliciting murder.

Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, 39, was convicted on three charges of soliciting murder and stirring up race hatred in the first prosecution of a Muslim cleric in Britain and the first time in more than 100 years that anyone had been charged of soliciting murder without a specific victim.

It was also the first time that potential jurors were banned because of their religion. The judge agreed to a defence plea not to allow Jewish and Hindu jurors - but in the end none came forward.

Jamaican-born El-Faisal was remanded in custody for sentencing on March 7 and the Home Office is reviewing el-Faisal’s immigration status.

As he was led from the dock he waved to supporters who had sat in stunned silence as the jury delivered their verdicts.

The jury was unaware that an attempt had been made during the trial to bribe the judge, Common Serjeant of London Peter Beaumont. He ordered an immediate police inquiry after receiving a letter from Scotland offering him £50,000.

Judge Beaumont said that there was nothing to suggest that el-Faisal knew anything about the bribe attempt. Detectives view the letter as a deliberate attempt to try to discredit the judge.

It was also revealed today that Abu Hamza, Finsbury Park mosque’s controversial former cleric, had been due to give evidence at el-Faisal’s Old Bailey trial. He joined demonstrators who gathered outside the court and alleged that the British legal system was putting Islam on trial.

El-Faisal, who converted to Islam at the age of 16, was arrested by police investigating British links with al-Qaeda. He had been acquainted with James Ujaama, who is awaiting trial in Seattle for organising an al-Qaeda training camp in Oregon in 1999.

Special Branch inquiries found that el-Faisal had links to Brixton mosque but detectives had been unable to find any direct links between el-Faisal and other Brixton mosque members Richard Reid and Zacharia Moussaoui.

El-Faisal had left the Brixton mosque before Reid, the shoe bomber serving life in America for trying to blow up a plane, and Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker on September 11, attended there.

Mr Ujaama, whose original name was Thompson, was heard asking questions at two lectures.

Tapes of el-Faisal’s lectures to study circles around the country were on sale at specialist bookshops.

Officers were horrified to hear him call for the death of non-believers, and to hear references to training schoolboys to shoot Kalashnikovs. He was heard quoting the words of Osama bin Laden and backed the use of nuclear and chemical weapons. One recording had a picture of the burning World Trade Centre twin towers on the cover.

He promised that those who died fighting a holy war would not feel pain and would go to heaven, where they would be given 72 virgins. “We believe in the bullet not the ballot,” he told them.

In another speech, el-Faisal told youngsters: “People with British passports, if you fly into Israel, it is easy. “Fly into Israel and do whatever you can. If you die, you are up in paradise.

“How do you fight a Jew? You kill a Jew. In the case of Hindus, by bombing their businesses.”

El-Faisal, a father of three from Stratford, East London, said he was interpreting and updating the words of the Koran. He said that his references to killing were limited to the religious battlefield.

But David Perry, prosecuting, denied the cleric’s claim that the Koran was on trial and accused the preacher of hiding behind a “cloak of religion” to mask his hatred. “This is not some crank in Speaker’s Corner,” Mr Perry told the jury.

Mr Perry said that el-Faisal was encouraging Britons to go to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan before and after September 11.

==============================

Can good Muslims be good multiculturalists? (National Post, 030224)

Mark Steyn

The other day, Barbara Amiel was writing about the transformation in the European view of the United States and Israel, and came up with an arresting metaphor:

“Laying out the world’s changing attitudes to Israel and America so barely makes it sound like a conscious decision — which is absurd. But changes in the spirit of the times are as difficult to explain as those immense flocks of birds you see sitting on some great African lake, hundreds of thousands of them at a time, till all of a sudden, successively, they fly up and turn in a specific direction. One can never analyze which bird started it and how it became this incredible rush. All you see is the result.”

The world is always changing. In 1967, when the British Parliament decriminalized homosexuality in the teeth of some pretty vigorous opposition, no one would have predicted that a mere 30 years later the Conservative Party would be electing a leader in favour of gay marriage. If you’re a British gay who’s been longing to marry since 1967, that’s an eternity. But it’s a blink in the eye of a very old civilization’s social evolution. Things change. You don’t notice the iceberg melting, only that one day it seems a lot smaller than it was, and that the next it’s not there at all.

So what will the “spirit of the times” look like in the Western world in 10 or 20 years’ time? Here’s a couple of early birds on the lake, plucked more or less at random from recent headlines:

1. Last month, Judge Beaumont, the Common Serjeant of London, ruled that, in the case of a Muslim cleric accused of inciting the murders of Jews and Hindus, no Jews or Hindus or the spouses thereof could serve on the jury.

2. On January 21st, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported that the Court of Appeals in Eidsivating had acquitted a Middle Eastern immigrant of raping a retarded woman on the grounds that he had only lived 12 years in Norway and so could not be expected to understand her condition.

The man was 22 years old. Thus, he had lived virtually his entire conscious life in Norway. But the court ruled that his insufficient understanding of the language was a mitigating factor. He was a cab driver and the woman was his customer. She paid for the ride with a “TT” card — a form of transport subsidy for the handicapped, which he evidently recognized because he accepted it. Nonetheless, because of his “cultural background,” an adult who’d lived in Norway since he was 10 years old could not be expected to know that this woman was mentally incapacitated and that he should not assault her.

3. In the second week of January, Cincinnati’s Playhouse In The Park cancelled its tour of a specially commissioned new play by Glyn O’Malley called Paradise. The subject of the work was the suicide bombing of March last year by an 18-year old Palestinian girl, Ayat al-Akhras. My old friend, the Saudi Minister of Water Ghazi Algosaibi, wrote a poem in praise of Miss al-Akhras as “the bride of loftiness.” O’Malley’s approach was a little subtler. His starting point was a Newsweek cover story contrasting young Ayat with one of the Jews she killed, another teenage girl, a 17-year old Israeli, Rachel Levy. To some of us, this is already obscene — the idea that murdered and murderer are both “victims.” They’re linked only because Ayat couldn’t care less whom she slaughtered as long as they were Jews.

But there wouldn’t be much of a play in that. So O’Malley did the decent liberal thing and bent over backwards to be “balanced.” In his play, “Fatima” gets all the best lines, raging at the Israelis because they should know better: “How can you do this? You! You who know camps and humiliation and hate and death.” “Sarah,” by comparison, is just a California airhead who’s come to Israel for the guys and can’t really get a handle on the Holy Land: “It’s, like, old.”

But O’Malley didn’t stop there: He moved the scene of the bombing from within Israel proper to one of those “illegal” West Bank settlements. He even managed to remove any kind of religious component: To dear old Ghazi, Ayat was acting as a good Muslim; in O’Malley’s play, “Fatima” insists, “This is not about Allah!” This is not some crude Muslim-Jew thing, but instead arises from complex socio-economic issues unconnected to one’s faith.

And what was the upshot? At a read-through before invited members of the Jewish and Muslim communities, the latter denounced the work as “Zionist propaganda.” A few days later, the Jewish director was removed from the production. A few days after that, the play was cancelled entirely.

What normally happens with “controversial” art? I’m thinking of such cultural landmarks of recent years as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ — a crucifix sunk in the artist’s urine — or Terrence McNally’s Broadway play Corpus Christi, in which a gay Jesus is liberated by the joys of anal sex with Judas. When, say, Catholic groups complain about these abominations, the arts world says you squares need to get with the beat: A healthy society has to have “artists” with the “courage” to “explore” “transgressive” “ideas,” etc. Yet with this play, faced with Muslim objections, the big courageous transgressive arts guys fold like a Bedouin tent. And, unlike your Piss Christs, where every liberal commentator wants to chip in his two-bits on artistic freedom, pretty much everyone’s given a wide berth to this one, except for Christopher Caldwell, whom The Weekly Standard sent to Cincinnati to interview the various figures involved. What was interesting from Caldwell’s account was that the Muslim community figures didn’t really care in the end whether the play was pro- or anti-Islam: For them, it was beyond discussion.

When you soak a crucifix in urine, you may get a few cranky Catholics handing out leaflets on the sidewalk. When you do a play about suicide bombers, who knows what the offended might do? The arts world seems happy to confine its transgressive courage to flipping the finger at Christians.

These are a few straws in the wind, birds on the lake. They’re on the periphery of our vision right now, but they won’t stay there. You may have heard the statistics — in Amsterdam the most popular name for newborn boys is Mohammed, etc. You may be aware that some waggish Western Muslims refer to the Continent as “Eurabia.” The great issue of our time is whether Islam — the fastest growing religion in Europe and North America — is compatible with the multicultural, super-diverse, boundlessly tolerant society of Western liberals. This is the paradox of multiculturalism: Is it illiberal to force liberalism on others? Is it liberal to accommodate illiberalism? I don’t personally care if Germany waives its regulations on animal cruelty to permit Muslims to have the source of their meat slaughtered in accordance with Islamic practice. But then I’m not a member of PETA. And, if I were a feminist or a gay or an “artist,” I wouldn’t be reassured by these early birds winging their way from Norwegian courts and Midwestern playhouses.

Meanwhile, those of us who talk of reforming Iraq are assured by our opponents that it’s preposterous to think that Arabs can ever be functioning citizens of a democratic state. If that’s so, isn’t that an issue, given current immigration patterns, not for Iraq tomorrow but for Britain, France, Belgium and Holland right now? And shouldn’t we at least try to understand why Muslims in, say, Kazakhstan have been able to reconcile the contradictions between Church and state?

Given Europe’s birthrates, the survival of the West depends on conversion — on ensuring that the unprecedently high numbers of immigrants to the Continent embrace Western pluralism. Some of us think it would be easier to do this if the countries from which they emigrate are themselves democratic and pluralist. But to say there’s no problem here except Texan cowboy fundamentalist paranoia is to blind yourself to reality, to march to suicide as surely as Ayat al-Akhras did.

==============================

Bush’s Big Speech (National Review Online, 030227)

David Frum

The speech President Bush gave last night at the American Enterprise Institute was not only one of the most important of the war – it ranks among the most important state papers of the past three decades. In front of 2000 dinner guests, the president announced that the assumptions that have governed U.S. policy in the Middle East since 1945 would govern no longer. The U.S. government did not use to care about the internal governance of the oil-producers of the Middle East. From now on, it does. The U.S. will not merely overthrow Saddam Hussein – and throughout the speech, the president treated Saddam’s overthrow as a certain fact – but it will seek to build a more democratic Iraq afterward.

“There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. The nation of Iraq — with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people — is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.”

The President replied to those who would say that the forms of government adopted in Arab world are none of America’s business by arguing, to the contrary, that the Arab world’s authoritarianism bred the terrorism of 9/11:

“The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life.”

It’s hard to over-stress the grandeur and importance of this new departure. Bush emphatically repudiated the core belief of the old policy in the Middle East – that Islamic societies are somehow permanently unsuited for democracy.

“It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world — or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim — is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life. Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same.”

If the speech carried a title, it might have been called “Death of an Illusion.” Since World War II, American policy has assumed that progress in the Islamic world – if it comes at all – will be delivered, not by democratic reform, but by modernizing strongmen. For 50 years, American presidents have sought (and often believed they found) another Ataturk. Ataturkism led the United States to tilt toward Nasser in his early years in power – the Shah of Iran – and, yes, Saddam Hussein. (In the 1970s, that same Zbiegniew Brzezinski who criticizes Bush’s Middle East policy for its alleged naivety pushed hard as National Security Adviser for support for Saddam: “Iraq,” he was quoted at the time telling friends, “will be to my Middle East achievement what Egypt was to Henry’s.” Henry being of course Henry Kissinger.) The hunt for the modernizing strongman appears to have ended – terminated due to repeated failure. “The United States has no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq’s new government. That choice belongs to the Iraqi people. Yet, we will ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another.”

The speech stressed that humanitarian aid will again be essential, not peripheral, to the U.S. war effort. And it declared that the protection of innocent Iraqi life will be a war aim of the United States:

“The first to benefit from a free Iraq would be the Iraqi people, themselves. Today they live in scarcity and fear, under a dictator who has brought them nothing but war, and misery, and torture. Their lives and their freedom matter little to Saddam Hussein — but Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us.”

The speech did not lay out the details of Iraq’s transition to democracy. The time for that will come after the war is won. But it did suggest that Iraq is the beginning, not the end, of the internal reform of the Islamic Middle East.

“A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions.”

As to how that transformation might occur, the President preserved a discreet silence. The words “Saudi Arabia” and “Iran” went unmentioned. The one post-Iraq commitment the President did talk about was the Arab-Israeli dispute. This is more than a little strange: The speech almost left behind the idea that the next order of business after Iraq is not the extension of democratic transformation in the Arab world, but yet another dreary round of negotiations on the West Bank. There may be Realpolitik reasons why this will have to be so, but it does leave behind the unfortunate idea (widely held by many in the U.S. bureaucracy) that democracy is something disagreeable the United States is inflicting on the Middle East – for which the Arabs must be compensated with another round of concessions to the Palestinians. Still, the President repeated his bold insistence that the new Palestinian state be democratic and untainted by terror – and that the Arab states must “clearly” announce their acceptance of Israel as part of any final Middle Eastern settlement.

It was Bush all over: strategically bold, tactically cautious; gentle in tone, strong in content; carefully balanced between the innovative and the traditional. He didn’t actually say the words “Ahmed Chalabi” – but short of that, it was masterful. And to deliver it at AEI – the institution that began arguing for Arab democracy as the true solution to the troubles of the Middle East more than 20 years ago, back when Jacques Chirac was still a nuclear salesman for Saddam – went beyond boldness to outright cheekiness. Huzzah and huzzah.

==============================

Sound Familiar? Understanding Islamic End-Times beliefs (National Review Online, 030228)

Many Evangelical Christians in America are watching events unfold in the Middle East with great interest, seeing in the preparations for war the possible unfolding of the End-Times scenario predicted in the Bible. A small segment of ultraorthodox Judaism shares an apocalyptic vision, centering around rebuilding the Temple on Mount Zion (where the Islamic Dome of the Rock Shrine and al-Aqsa mosque, now sit). What many Americans don’t realize, though, is that Islam also has an eschatological endgame, and that like any Left Behind-reading American, many Muslims see current events as a run-up to their own version of Armageddon.

Islam derives its Last-Days scenario from the Koran, which appeared centuries after the Christian Bible — a fact that for non-Muslims could account for elements of Christian and Jewish prophecy appearing in the Koranic text. Particularly since the mid-1980s, modern interpreters within Islam cast the Arab-Israeli conflict, and more broadly, the conflict between Islam and the West, as part of the cosmic conflict that will mean the end of history and the ultimate triumph of Islam. David Cook, a Rice University scholar of Muslim apocalypticism, sketches below the main themes of Islamic End-Times prophecy, and its ramifications:

Rod Dreher: What are the main beliefs of Islamic eschatology?

David Cook: Referring to Sunni Islam, the principal beliefs are:

1)There are a series of signs or portents previous to the end: moral and social decay, natural and cosmic disasters, and political events that will demonstrate in an incontrovertible manner that the end is about to happen.

2) A tempter, or Antichrist, called the Dajjal will appear and lead the world (with the exception of true Muslims) astray. Almost everyone will be subject to his tribulations, but just before he succeeds in annihilating the Muslims, Jesus will come down from the heavens and kill him.

3) There will be a messianic age, led by either Jesus or another messianic figure called the Mahdi. This latter figure will conquer the entire world and convert everyone to Islam.

4) After the time of the Mahdi, then Gog and Magog [cf. Ezekiel 38, 39; the Islamic version goes by the name Yajuj and Majuj] will invade the world and destroy it.

5) God will bring the world to an end.

Dreher: What sort of Muslim tends to make Islamic End-Times prophecy central to his piety?

Cook: Usually one without much hope in the likelihood that there will be positive changes that will benefit Islam in the immediate future. Such people can oftentimes be attracted by an apocalyptic, destroy-it-all framework or long for the messianic age.

Dreher: How popular is apocalypticism at the present moment among Middle Eastern Muslims?

Cook: In certain areas, quite popular. Radical Muslims (followers of or sympathizers with al Qaeda) have responded to their setbacks during the recent past by publishing large numbers of apocalypses, and mahdi scenarios. Among Palestinians, apocalyptic speculations are also quite prominent. I think that apocalypse as a genre has become less popular in Egypt than it was 3-4 years ago, however, and Algerian radicals no longer use apocalyptic motifs either.

Dreher: If one is reading current events through the lens of contemporary Islamic prophecy, what will one see?

Cook: Many of the apocalyptic wars before the appearance of the Dajjal speak of Christian powers invading Muslim lands. This is the interpretation of the [seemingly imminent] Iraq war. The Dajjal is said to be a Jew, and will blaspheme the area of Jerusalem. Ariel Sharon is usually made to fit that bill. Among radical Muslims, the Mahdi is oftentimes said to be either Mullah Omar or in some cases Osama bin Laden. One of the traditions says: “The Prophet of Allah promised us a raid on India” which is widely cited by Pakistani radicals.

Dreher: Given the central role the Temple Mount plays in the End-Times beliefs of certain fervent Jews, Christians, and Muslims, what kind of trouble might we see there in the event of Middle Eastern war?

Cook: Right now the Temple Mount is effectively closed. It will probably always be the center of scary predictions and fears for Muslims as long as Israel has any power or influence in the region, but I don’t foresee any necessary reason why the Temple Mount should be a focus. Most of the material published now speaks of wars and apocalypses on a grand scale; the materials on the Temple Mount were all because of the fear that Israel would rebuild the Temple in the year 2000 (perhaps contributing to the explosion of the second Intifada during Sept. 2000).

Dreher: In the secular West, we tend to discount the role religious visions play in driving or at least shaping world affairs. If you were advising the president on what he could do to avoid provoking unnecessarily Muslims who believe strongly in Islamic prophecy, what would you tell him?

Cook: I would tell him to convert to Islam if I were trying to get him to avoid provoking Muslims who believe strongly in Islamic prophecy. There is probably no other way to avoid provoking them. For them, Bush is easily cast into the role of Pharaoh, the Dajjal (for those who aren’t satisfied with Sharon as the one). He is usually referred to as the Hubal (the name of a pre-Islamic idol) of this age, which signifies that there is no chance to mollify this type of people.

Dreher: It doesn’t matter whether or not a particular prophetic vision is true; what matters is how it affects the actions of those who do believe it’s true. With that in mind, what kind of problems could Islamic apocalypticism pose for the United States as it attempts to foment governmental and society change on Middle Eastern populations through force?

Cook: The basic problem is that our actions could, in the perception of large numbers of the population, coincide with apocalyptic interpretations. If this is the case then it will serve to radicalize people, and raise the stakes that much higher for the apocalyptic groups. If they view the situation (or perhaps I should say if enough of them, or enough of those placed in the right place) as an apocalyptic one, then they will respond accordingly.

Dreher: I guess what I’m getting at with this last question is this: How cooperative will Islamic populations be with the forces of a man, George W. Bush, whom they may see as their version of the Antichrist?

Cook: It depends upon the issue of perceived victory, I think. No one challenges the victory of the U.S. in Afghanistan because it was complete (more or less) and legitimate (or perhaps legitimized by the new Afghan government). If that is perceived to be the case in Iraq, then the result could be exactly the opposite. What should not happen is for something to drag out; in hindsight that was the problem with both the Oslo negotiations and the blockade of Iraq. They were lengthy and people forgot the original reasons why they were the way they were, and then allowed themselves to be swayed by radical and apocalyptic interpretations of events.

AUTHOR’S NOPE: For a more detailed description of Islamic eschatalogy, see this article by Cook, who is affiliated with Boston University’s Center for Millenial Studies.

==============================

Democracy in Arabia: An unexpected home (National Review Online, 030303)

When Iraq’s opposition leaders gathered last month to discuss the future of their country, one of the few words they agreed on wasn’t even of Arab origin. The word is dimuqratiah (democracy) which was first introduced to the Arabic political lexicon in the mid-19th century as the Nahda (Awakening) movement spread in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

The word had entered other Islamic languages, including Persian and Turkish, slightly earlier in the form of demokrasi. It was the magic word that inspired the constitutional movements in the Ottoman Empire and Persia.

By the start of the 20th century the constitutionalists had won in both Constantinople and Tehran, establishing the first Western-style parliaments in the Muslim world. A Martian visiting the Islamic world in the final years of the 19th century would have noticed the almost unanimous support that the democratic ideal enjoyed among Muslim elites.

Muslim writers, scholars, and reformers in British India, the czarist empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia tried to understand why it was that Islam, once a global civilization that ruled in three continents, had become what the reformist leader Jamaleddin Afghani described as “an abyss of misery and terror.” By the end of the 19th century only three Muslim nations, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, were independent, and then only nominally.

Muslim thinkers who pondered what had happened concluded that the answer lay in centuries of despotic rule that devastated civil society. “A nation whose government does not depend on its people is bound to become a slave of other nations,” wrote Ismail Agha, a Muslim reformer from the Crimea in the 1880s. His near contemporary Mirza Agha Kermani was more specific: “The rise of the Western powers as masters of the world, and the decline of Muslim nations into abject servitude, are due to one fact only. In Europe, governments fear the people. In Islam people fear the government.”

It now seems incredible that the idea of a people’s government was the central theme of political discourse throughout the Muslim world not such a long time ago.

By the 1920, however, the idea of democracy was under attack in the Muslim world from two opposite, but ultimately complementary, directions: the Marxists and the Islamic revivalists. The Bolshevik coup d’etat in Russia had split the Muslim intellectual elite of the czarist empire into two camps. Those who converted to Bolshevism survived and attained power and glory. Others who remained faithful to democratic ideals were killed or driven into exile.

The Bolsheviks “exported” their revolution with zeal, including through terrorism and military intervention in Turkey and Iran. The Ottoman Caliph and the Shah of Persia, in the name of resisting the onslaught of “heathen Bolshevism,” encouraged the Islamic revivalists. By the end of World War II and the advent of the Cold War, Muslim democrats were on the defensive. Their nations, often newly independent, were caught in a global game in which they could not develop their own strategies.

The 1950s witnessed a string of military coups that brought to power a new generation of army officers inspired by a cocktail of Marxist and Islamist ideas, and eventually backed by the Soviet Union.

Until then, such Arab countries as Egypt, Iraq, and Syria had been more or less open societies governed by parliaments that, although dominated by the wealthy, were not totally unresponsive to the masses. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, notably in Iran, Marxists, and Islamists formed united fronts to oppose authoritarian but pro-West regimes.

“The real threat to Islam does not come from the Shah,” Ayatollah Khomeini wrote in 1977. “The real threat comes from the idea of imposing on Muslim lands the Western system of democracy, which is a form of prostitution.”

The Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini, an adventurer who traveled to Berlin in 1938 to promote an anti-Jewish pact, had said it slightly differently in 1952: “We fight Israel not because it is Jewish. We fight it because it has a government in which the law of man replaces the law of God in the name of democracy.”

Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s democracy suffered what the late Persian poet Nader Naderpour called its “great occultation” in the Muslim world. This meant that democratic ideas were pushed into the background while Fascist, Marxist and Islamist themes dominated political discourse.

Now, however, democracy is back with a vengeance. It was the catchword in the Iranian presidential and parliamentary elections of 1997 and 2000. It has been written into half a dozen constitutions, from Indonesia to Algeria and passing by Bangladesh and Kuwait. Last year it was the flag around which the Afghan factions rallied to create a united front against the Taliban. Rebel students in Iran chant it with passion, and oppressed women in Pakistan and Morocco have adopted it as their battle cry.

Hashem Aghajari, the Iranian history professor sentenced to death for “blasphemy” merely for questioning the clerics’ right to rule, says: “Silence belongs to cemeteries. In a living society people talk, and the louder they talk the stronger they become.”

Rawyiah Shawi, a leader of the anti-Arafat faction in the Palestinian National Council, says: “We shall never achieve freedom until we adopt democracy.” And Kenan Makiyah, one of Iraq’s leading intellectuals, adds: “Without democracy we shall have many more Saddam Husseins in the future.” Saadeddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian intellectual who went to jail for having exposed the fraudulent nature of elections in his country, insists that “the only way for the Arabs out of their historic impasse is to adopt a democratic system.”

A generation ago, with two or three exceptions, virtually no elections were held in the Muslim world. Now, however 50 of the 53 predominantly Muslim nations hold regular elections. In the vast majority of cases the elections, held by often autocratic and corrupt regimes, are far from free and fair. But they represent the compliment that vice pays virtue.

Those familiar with the current debate within the Muslim world know that the democratic voice is being heard once again — often in the most unexpected places.

The reason is that the various ideologies of the left have almost disappeared while the different brands of Islamism have been discredited by the catastrophic experiences of Iran, the Sudan, and, more recently, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist enterprise.

Some fundamentalists have tried to confuse the debate by speaking of “Islamic democracy.” But few are deceived. “Islamic democracy is an oxymoron,” a student leader in Tehran told me. “Democracy cannot be modified by prefixes and suffixes.”

Today, the Islamists cannot field a single serious thinker or creative artist. There are no Islamist novelists, poets, filmmakers, architects, and, more obviously, no Islamist composers, painters, and sculptors. All the Islamists produce are suicide bombers and street thugs. They are fast losing the support they once had in sections of society that produce culture and sustain the economy. Political books with Islamist themes no longer sell in any significant numbers.

In every Muslim country, including the still hermetic Saudi Arabia, the democratic discourse is finding growing audiences. The West, understandably focusing on monsters such as Khomeini, Saddam, and bin Laden, has persuaded itself that democracy is a lost cause in the Muslim world.

But it is not. The West would do well to get to know “the other Muslims,” those who are trying to revive the democratic tradition within Islam, often at the risk of their lives. The world of Islam is certainly the last area of despotic darkness in the contemporary world. But some light is penetrating.

— Iranian-born Amir Taheri is author of The Cauldron: The Middle East behind the headlines. Taheri is reachable through www.benadorassociates.com. This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal Europe on January 20, 2003.

==============================

Who Do You Believe? (National Review Online, 030408)

David Frum

Yesterday I posted a story on the opposition of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to the appointment of Daniel Pipes to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace. I cited Pipes’s own work about CAIR and its beliefs—and specifically this 1998 statement by CAIR’s chairman, Omar M. Ahmad: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

Mr. Ahmad e-mailed me later in the day with this statement:

“Mr. Frum,

“My name is Omar Ahmad and I am the Board Chairman of CAIR. I wanted to let you know that the statement that Pipe attributed to me are false and pure fabrication. I never said these things and I challenged Pipe before to produce his evidence and he did not.

“Omar Ahmad”

So I asked Daniel Pipes to authenticate the quote. He sent me the following, an article from the San Ramon Valley Herald, dated July 4, 1998.

American Muslim Leader Urges Faithful to Spread Word

Lisa Gardiner

San Ramon Valley Herald July 4, 1998

FREMONT—The chairman of a national Islamic watchdog group urged Muslims Thursday not to separate or assimilate to American society, but instead to deliver Islam’s message.

Omar M. Ahmad, chairman of the board of the Council on American-Islamic relations, spoke before a packed crowd at the Flamingo Palace banquet hall on Peralta Boulevard, urging Muslims not to shirk their duty of sharing the Islamic faith with those who are “on the wrong side.”

Muslim institutions, schools and economic power should be strengthened in America, he said. Those who stay in America should be “open to society without melting (into it),” keeping mosques open so anyone can come and learn about Islam, he said.

“If you choose to live here (in America) . . . you have a responsibility to deliver the message of Islam,” he said.

“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant, “ he said. “The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth,” he said.

Ahmad was one of three who spoke as part of an Islamic Study School session entitled, “How Should We As Muslims Live in America?” Also speaking were Sidi Hatem Bazian, the director of Al-Qalam, an Islamic institute affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, and Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, director of the Zaytuna Institute, which is affiliated with the Islamic Studies School.

Ahmad spoke against people trying to impose values — such as environmentalism or vegetarianism — onto Islam, and only taking ideas from the faith that conform to personal opinions.

“One of the challenges is understanding the totality of Islam. Don’t come up with an opinion and find out the things that support it in Islam,” he said. “Everything we need to know is in the Koran. We don’t need to look somewhere else.”

Recently, the Council on American-Islamic relations challenged running shoe maker Nike when it printed the name of Allah in Arabic on a running shoe. Nike withdrew the shoes from stores, and agreed to build some basketball courts for the Muslim community, said Feraidoon Mojadidi, director of the Islamic Studies School.

There are about 150,000 Muslims in the Bay Area, Mojadidi said.

The Islamic Study School in Hayward is a non-profit, non-political school that has courses on Islam.

Thursday’s conference, which also included prayers, dinner and Koran readings, was organized by the school to help reconnect American Muslims with their heritage.

“We live in America, and a lot of us go to school here,” Mojadidi said. “What we’re trying to do is remind people in America, let’s not forget our way of life.”

==============================

Contradicting CAIR’s Spin: The Islamic School Book Controversy (Free Congress Foundation, 030409)

American Muslim organizations have been working hard these past few months to present Islam as a peaceful, tolerant religion. Those who dare to dissent against such presentations of Islam will run afoul of the ‘Political Correctness’ crowd, who view westernized Muslims to be representative of the entire religion and its followers.

They are engaging in wishful thinking about Islam: If only they knew what they do not know. They are quick to smear people such as Robert Spencer, Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation, as intolerant bigots because they dare to ask probing questions about Islam and do not settle for public relations spin. These preachers of PC tolerance would do better to challenge those Muslims who are propagating scurrilous falsehoods about Christianity and Judaism in the private Muslim schools right here in the United States.

The news media’s emphasis on the war has diverted attention away from stories that would receive greater attention in normal times, and one such story was printed last week in The New York Daily News.

What the Daily News’ investigative reporter, Larry Cohler-Esses, wrote in a story about their three-month investigation of the textbooks used by Muslim schools in the New York area would create a media firestorm ordinarily. Cohler-Esses wrote that the books “are rife with inaccuracies” and contain “sweeping condemnations of Jews and Christians.”

One textbook cites the Qur’an as saying in reference to Jews: “You will ever [sic] find them deceitful, except for a few of them.” Another textbook makes the assertion that the Jewish religion “even teaches [Jews] to call down curses upon the worship places of non-Jews whenever they pass by them!”

But Christians fare little better in these textbooks either. One called “What Islam Is All About” says, “The Christians also worship statues.”

One publisher contacted by Cohler-Esses said the material needed to be revised, even though it took a call from a Daily News reporter to obtain such an admission. Let’s hope the Daily News will be watchful and see if the publisher follows through on his promise to do so. The publisher of “What Islam Is All About” insisted that the assertions made by his books were not inflammatory.

Even before 9/11 there were Americans concerned about Islam and that its most devout followers would bring harm to America. A reading of these textbooks should certainly make more Americans aware that Islam is a religion that will be slow to change its ways. Muslims generally regard the Qur’an as being the literal words of Allah himself. Therefore, as long as Muslims continue to regard the Qur’an’s ultimatum toward non-believers to mean either conversion, submission, or death, there will be some Muslims who will continue to act violently toward Jews and Christians.

There is a special challenge in dealing with that news story for the Council on American Islamic Relations, which will hold its annual leadership conference in the Washington area later this month. One of the topics to be considered at their meeting is a growing link between conservative Christian and Jewish organizations. It is a connection that certainly makes sense given the hateful words and violent actions of Muslim extremists, on the West Bank, in the Sudan, in Europe and even here in America, against Christians and Jews.

CAIR is the organization that has been spending big money on an advertising campaign. Its initial bunch of advertisements sought to present all Muslims in America as everyday people who live normal American lives. Only under pressure, does CAIR deliver the most mincing acknowledgement that some have been terrorists and it would prefer to just ignore the fact that Muslims who profess violence toward non-believers are still on the streets and in the mosques. The New York Daily News story provides even more honest-to-goodness proof that CAIR is failing to tell the whole story about Muslim life in America.

Yet, CAIR self-righteously continues to regard any criticism of any Muslim as bigotry.

But CAIR has to answer some tough questions about itself, ones that Spencer has been raising in recent months. They include:

1) Who is supplying the money for CAIR’s expensive advertising and public relations campaign?

2) How much money does CAIR receive from the extremist Wahhabi sect of Islam?

3) What tangible effort has CAIR made, if any, to divorce Islam from its extremist elements?

4) If CAIR is really committed to America’s security, then when will it clearly and definitively repudiate the theology of violent jihad?

A tough, honest examination of this organization by the news media is long overdue. Unfortunately, it is very easy for most journalists to shy away from such a difficult assignment. It is just not ‘politically correct,’ certainly with CAIR’s own media representatives, to ask probing questions about the organization.

CAIR can stay mum about itself if it wants. But evidently, based on the reporting about the New York school books, printed exhortations of true hate are being read by young, impressionable minds in Islamic private schools and that should concern us all.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

Pentagon won’t yield to Muslims on Graham (Washington Times, 030416)

The Defense Department has no plan to rescind its invitation to the Rev. Franklin Graham to speak at Good Friday services at the Pentagon, despite Muslim concerns over the evangelist’s labeling of Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion.”

“One religion, regardless of the religion, does not have the veto right over another religion,” said Army Lt. Col. Ryan Yantis, a Pentagon spokesman. “I know of no plan or discussion to uninvite anyone.”

Three Muslim employees at the Pentagon complained about Mr. Graham’s participation, Col. Yantis said.

“You had three people who sat down in a meeting with the deputy chaplain and said, ‘As Muslims, we’re concerned,’ “ he said. The issue was addressed from the standpoint of avoiding future problems, he said, but added: “We can’t uninvite [Mr. Graham]. ... He is a recognized religious leader.”

Mr. Graham “has accepted the invitation from the Pentagon and is still planning to attend the Good Friday service,” a spokesman for the Boone, N.C.-based evangelist said yesterday.

Mr. Graham, son of famed evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham, is president of Samaritan’s Purse, a nondenominational Christian relief organization. He made headlines with his remarks at the dedication of a Wilkesboro, N.C., chapel a month after the September 11 attacks.

“We’re not attacking Islam, but Islam has attacked us,” the younger Mr. Graham said. “The God of Islam is not the same God. ... It’s a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion.”

He refused to retract those remarks, and in response to demands for an apology said: “How come the Muslim clerics haven’t gone to ground zero and had a prayer vigil and apologized to the nation in the name of Islam?”

He later told The Washington Times: “When people say [Islam] is a peaceful religion, don’t tell me that. When a suicide bomber straps on a bomb, that’s not a peaceful person. The Baptists are not doing that. Neither are the Pentecostals.”

The Pentagon’s invitation to Franklin Graham was the result of requests by Christian personnel, Col. Yantis said.

“These Christian congregants came to the chaplain and asked to have Mr. Graham speak,” he said, adding that the Defense Department has a policy of “providing religious support across the spectrum of religions.”

Christians of various denominations are about 98% of incoming troops who declare a religious preference, according to a 1999 study.

Friday’s observance at the Pentagon chapel will be led by chaplain Ralph G. Benson, and Mr. Graham will “provide the homily about the death and resurrection of Christ,” Col. Yantis said.

Mr. Graham’s appearance at the Pentagon “sends entirely the wrong message to the Muslim community,” said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“This action would only bolster suspicions in the Islamic world that the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq is really an attack on Islam,” Mr. Hooper said. “We can all guess what the reception would be for a religious leader who said that Christianity is evil or Judaism is evil or any other religion is evil.”

Franklin Graham has been condemned to death by some Muslim clerics, including Ayatollah Mohsen Mujtahed Shabestari of Iran. Speaking of Mr. Graham, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Ayatollah Shabestari said last year: “In our opinion, to kill these three is necessary.”

==============================

Islam in Britain: Extremists are preying on disaffected young Muslims (London Times, 020502)

The discovery that a suicide bomber in Israel had a quiet upbringing in suburban Britain is disturbing. For the Israelis, the arrival of two extremists from overseas opens up the awful prospect of a potentially vast new security threat among the Muslim diaspora. For the British authorities, the recruitment of young men from Hounslow and Derby as terrorists bears out the warning, first voiced a decade ago, that Britain has become a haven for Islamist militants. And for the British Muslim community the suicide bombing will deepen fears of alienation and reinforce the association of Islam with terrorism.

The bombing raises questions that must be faced by the security services, politicians and society as a whole as well as by the Muslim community in Britain and those who speak in its name. Why are young British Muslims so susceptible to the siren voices of extremists and self-publicising militants such as Abu Hamza and al-Muhajiroun? Why do they devote so much time to causes overseas — Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and Afghanistan — rather than grievances at home or getting ahead in British society? And why has the younger generation become more alienated than their parents and less integrated into the mainstream than the children of immigrants from India, the Caribbean or East Africa?

Classic revolutionaries have been recruited among the poor and the marginalised. In the case of suicide bombers, however, this is not so. The evidence suggests that Asif Mohammed Hanif and his accomplice Omar Khan Sharif were well brought up, well educated and reasonably well off. Others who have gone out to engage in terrorism overseas have also come from privileged backgrounds — Omar Sheikh, sentenced to death for the brutal murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, attended the London School of Economics. But they were spiritually disaffected, and like the frustrated and underemployed graduates from Middle East universities who form the backbone of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood, saw in radical Islam a cause. Many British Muslims, and not only extremists, mistakenly believe that Islam is under global threat and that they have a religious duty to defend it — by force if necessary.

Many Muslims, especially Bangladeshis, are noticeably worse off than other minority groups. There are pockets of great poverty in northern former mill towns, where Pakistanis settled a generation ago to work in the textile factories. Britain is a relatively tolerant society, but its liberal values are, almost by definition, offensive to the minority of Muslims who regard their doctrine as an excuse for intolerance. Socialising and socialisation can be far from simple. Women do not go out, and men do not congregate in pubs. Young Muslims have less opportunity to form easy friendships with others of their age. Some meet instead in mosques. And it is there they hear the corrupting message of jihad.

Such a message is cynically spread — sometimes by extremists seeking recruits for overseas causes, sometimes by imams who have been invited from Pakistan to fill posts here and preach a violent message. It falls on fertile ground. Islam has a keen sense of the “umma” or community, which can be distorted by “religious leaders”.

Some in the Muslim mainstream are now, commendably, speaking out against extremism as well as against discrimination and tokenism, but other community leaders remain reluctant to condemn acts of terrorism in a clear and loud voice. These leaders also need to look more closely at those shadowy figures who exploit the prison inmates, the idealistic and under-achieving young to lure them into “martyrdom” in God’s name. Their deeds destroy not only lives abroad but the standing of Islam in Britain.

==============================

Factor for Islamic Violence (Book)

Huntington, Samuel P. (1996): Clash of civilization and remaking of world order. Touchstone.

	Extra-Muslim Conflict	Intra & Extra Muslim Conflict
Historical and contemporary conflict	1. Proximity	4. Militarism
	2. Indigestibility
Contemporary conflict	3. Victim status	5. % 15-24 demographic bulge
		6. Core statust absence

==============================

Judge Orders Muslim Woman to Unveil for Driver’s License Photo (Foxnews, 030606)

ORLANDO, Fla. — A Muslim woman who says her religious beliefs forbid her from publicly showing her face cannot wear a veil in her driver’s license photo, a judge decided Friday.

Sultaana Freeman’s (search ) right to free exercise of religion would not be burdened by showing her face on the license, Circuit Judge Janet C. Thorpe ruled after hearing three days of testimony last week.

Freeman, 35, had sued Florida after the state revoked her license in 2001 when she refused to have her photo retaken with her face uncovered, saying it violated her religious beliefs. Her previous license showed her veiled with only her eyes visible.

Freeman, a convert to Islam previously known as Sandra Kellar, wore her veil for the photo on the Florida driver’s license she obtained after moving to the state in 2001.

Nine months later, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she received a letter from the state warning that it would revoke her license unless she returned for a photo with her face uncovered.

Freeman claims her religious beliefs require her to keep her head and face covered out of modesty and that her faith prohibits her face from being photographed.

Her lawyers argued that instead of a driver’s license photo, she could use other documents such as a birth certificate or Social Security card to prove her identity if necessary.

But a state attorney countered that Islamic law (search ) has exceptions that allow women to lift their veil and expose their face if the action serves a public good. Assistant Attorney General Jason Vail said arrangements can be made to have Freeman photographed only with women present to allay her concerns about modesty.

During the hearing, Freeman conceded that she has had her face photographed without a veil since she started wearing one in 1997. She had a mug shot taken after her arrest in 1998 on a domestic battery charge involving one of twin 3-year-old sisters who were in her foster care. The children were removed from her home, according to records from the Decatur (Ill.) Police Services.

Child welfare workers told investigators in Decatur that Freeman and her husband had used their concerns about religious modesty to hinder them from looking for bruises on the girls, according to the Decatur Police records.

Thorpe didn’t allow much of the facts about Freeman’s arrest into evidence.

==============================

No Safe Haven: Belgium ought to look within (National Review Online, 030625)

After suicide bombers attacked the Belgian consulate in Casablanca in May, most Belgians should have realized that being supine to Islamic terrorists does not shelter them from Islamist wrath. The fact that the terrorists tried to attack the diplomatic facility of one of the most Muslim-friendly countries in the West should make it clear that they do not hate the West for its alleged pro-Israel bias or its colonial past: They simply hate it for what it is and for the values for which it stands.

Belgium is one of the bastions — if not the bastion — of European liberalism. It opposed the Iraq war, just one of the many examples of its left-leaning policies and sympathy for Muslim grievances.

In 1993, Belgium adopted a law that gives its courts jurisdiction over war crimes, regardless of where the offenses took place. The cases against Ariel Sharon and Gen. Tommy Franks are examples of how a well-intentioned law can be used to pursue a biased political agenda. The majority of Belgian media and politicians have welcomed these lawsuits in the name of human rights and universal justice.

Additionally, Belgium teams up with France in maintaining a strong pro-Palestinian position and in criticizing the U.S. for its firm hand in the war on terror. Despite the proven presence of al Qaeda cells in Belgium, local authorities have repeatedly refused to extradite alleged terrorists to other countries. One example is Belgian citizen Maaroufi Tarek, an alleged planner of the assassination of the Northern Alliance’s legendary general Massoud. Italian authorities have repeatedly requested that Belgium extradite Tarek for his involvement in terrorist activities but have been denied by Belgian courts.

Belgians must have thought that this behavior would have been favorably perceived by Islamists, inoculating Belgium from terrorism. Unfortunately — but to the surprise of no one save the Belgians — that has not been the case. Islamic radicals hate any authority, ideology, or religion that is not theirs; if you do not think like them you are an enemy.

Belgium has been extremely active in trying to solve the world’s problems, playing a role in the international arena that is disproportionate to its small size and economic power. But the small European nation should look within its borders and solve its own problems first. Not only does Belgium find itself in a deep economic recession, caused mainly by a disastrous welfare state, but the social unrest in its cities are a source of major concern.

Like every other western European country, in the last 40 years Belgium has welcomed waves of immigrants, mainly from Muslim countries. The sons of these immigrants now constitute an amazingly large segment of those living on welfare and committing crimes. As is happening in other European countries, these young men find it difficult to straddle the two cultures they inhabit, and are often lured into the trap of Islamic radicalism. An intelligence report recently presented to the Belgian senate warned that Belgium is a recruiting ground for Islamic militants, with at least one in ten mosques used to spread anti-Western ideas.

Antwerp, Belgium’s second-largest city, is home to the Arab European League, a group founded by a former Hezbollah fighter, which advocates a form of separatism for Belgian Muslims, demanding segregated schools and the recognition of Arabic as the nation’s fourth language. Last year, the group sparked racial riots in this once-peaceful northern European city after a Moroccan man was shot dead by a Belgian neighbor.

Antwerp, the world’s diamond capital, has historically been home to a large Jewish community, which has always been respected. The last few years have seen a dramatic increase of attacks on local Jews and, as in France, most of the time the perpetrators are young Muslims.

The problem of integration becomes even more troubling in light of the astonishing growth rate of the Muslim community. Belgium’s 400,000 Muslims are only five percent of the population, but with immigration and a higher birth rate than that of native Belgians, Muslims will comprise a far higher percentage in a few years. Fifty-seven percent of the children born in Brussels are Muslims, which means that Belgium will be a completely different country in a few decades.

Nevertheless, mainstream Belgian politicians and the media refuse to have a serious debate on immigration, labeling as racist those who question Muslims’ willingness to integrate and to abide by Belgian law. Like Pim Fortuyn’s party in neighboring Holland, the Vlaams Blok party is trying to curb the wild flood of immigrants and to curtail the benefits that are automatically granted them once they reach Belgium, legally or illegally. Most newspapers refuse to publish interviews with Vlaams Blok leaders and politicians. The tactic has failed miserably: Vlaams Blok is the biggest party in Antwerp and Mechelen, gaining ground in most of Flanders.

The refusal of mainstream parties to address what is probably Belgium’s biggest problem is symptomatic of a general European reluctance to deal with issues deemed politically incorrect. But if the Europeans keep their heads in the sand, they will end up buried — six feet under.

— Lorenzo Vidino is a research analyst for the Investigative Project.

==============================

A Global Network: What’s really happening on some U.S. paintball courses (National Review Online, 030630)

On Friday, the government indicted eleven men from the D.C. area alleged to have trained with Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), a formidable Pakistani terrorist group fighting the Indian government in Kashmir. Remarkably, the men were indicted not for planning attacks within the United States, but for participating in a “military expedition” against India. The FBI’s Virginia office is to be commended for demonstrating its awareness of the confluence of Islamic terrorist groups. However, the fact that these men from the United States were able to train with an Islamic terrorist group reveals the grave situation that the civilized world faces in dismantling the global jihadist terrorist network.

Though not ostensibly interested in attacking American targets, the eleven men still comprise a very real and dangerous facet of the global jihad movement that must be recognized in order to combat terrorists effectively and thoroughly. Various jihadist factions may focus on specific areas of the world and can seem as though they have separate goals and values, but they are in fact all interconnected, sharing the same financial resources as well as ideology. The groups reinforce one another, aiding each other as needed, creating a global terrorist network.

The indictment of the eleven individuals never mentions al Qaeda, however al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba are very much connected financially, ideologically, and militarily. On September 12, 2001, Lashkar-e-Taiba claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks, releasing a statement maintaining, “The attacks on the World Trade Centre and other places were not an act of terrorism but an Islamic duty.” Though al Qaeda soon became and was the official perpetrator of the September 11 attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba’s claim of responsibility was not far from the truth.

Lashkar-e-Taiba tends to keep a low profile amongst Americans, but it is one of the most organized and best funded terrorist groups and remains a breeding ground for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The terrorist group has trained thousands of mujahedeen, sending them to areas as diverse as Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, and the Philippines. David Hicks, an Australian who was captured in Afghanistan fighting alongside al Qaeda, trained with Lashkar-e-Taiba before joining the ranks of al Qaeda foot soldiers. Reports of other Lashkar-e-Taiba fighters also indicate that they trained in Afghanistan with the Taliban. Perhaps most telling, al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah was captured in a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe house in Faisalabad in March 2002.

The group, like most other Islamic terrorist groups in the world, shares its roots with al Qaeda. Lashkar-e-Taiba is the military wing of the religious group, Markaz Dawa Waal Irshad, which had among its founders Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden’s mentor and original founder of al Qaeda. Azzam, assassinated in 1989 by unknown assailants, traveled the globe spreading his Jihadist ideology, seducing many disaffected men to participate in jihad, for no more than the sake of jihad. Azzam’s most famous quote is no doubt the most telling about his ideology: “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues.”

It is this ideology — perhaps mythology — that pervades the Islamic terrorist groups and binds them together in a common cause. That Lakshar-e-Taiba chooses to attack Indians does not remove it from the concern of the United States and the rest of the globe affected by terrorism. Lashkar-e-Taiba, demonstrating the union of the jihadist groups, notably linked on its website to the Hamas official website, the Hezbollah official website, and the English mouthpiece of al Qaeda, Azzam.com.

Recognizing the fluidity between the jihadist groups is integral to understanding the manner in which the terrorist network operates. Thus, while the men arrested were allegedly shooting at Indian positions, they could have easily been recruited to perform a devastating terrorist attack wherever they were needed — even in America. Indeed, Unindicted Co-Conspirator #1 in the indictment “told the conspirators that American troops were legitimate targets of the jihad in which the conspirators had a duty to engage.”

The majority of these men are Americans, some Christian converts who have lived here for their entire lives. They were not indoctrinated in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, but right here in the United States, even practicing military tactics on Virginia paintball courses. They needed a local spiritual adviser to assure them that participating in jihad fulfills their duty as a Muslim. The indictment makes clear that Unindicted Co-Conspirator #1, who seems to have fulfilled this clerical role for the men, “provided historical examples from Islamic history justifying attacks on civilians.” Thus, while the men’s military training took them to faraway Pakistan, their indoctrination was home grown, a testament to how widespread and ubiquitous the terrorist network has become.

In order to defeat this terrorist network, we must dismantle every component. No longer can we turn a blind eye to a terrorist group merely because it mainly operates in another country, nor can we ignore those that exhort people to violence in the name of Islam. The scourge of terrorism is global, and a terrorist trained on the opposite side of the world can easily have come from our backyard, just as these eleven indicted men did.

— Rita Katz, author of Terrorist Hunter, is the director of the SITE Institute, based in Washington, D.C. Josh Devon is a senior analyst at the SITE Institute.

==============================

Wahhabism & Islam in the U.S.: Two-faced policy fosters danger (National Review Online, 030630)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the text of testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on Thursday, June 26, 2003.

Chairman Kyl, other distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for your invitation to appear here today.

I come before this body to describe how adherents of Wahhabism, the most extreme, separatist, and violent form of Islam, and the official sect in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have come to dominate Islam in the U.S.

Islam is a fairly new participant at the “big table” of American religions. The Muslim community only became a significant element in our country’s life in the 1980s. Most “born Muslims,” as opposed to those who “converted” — a term Muslims avoid, preferring “new Muslims” — had historically been immigrants from Pakistan and India who followed traditional, peaceful, mainstream Islam.

With the growth of the Islamic community in America, there was no “Islamic establishment” in the U.S. — in contrast with Britain, France, and Germany, the main Western countries with significant Islamic minorities. Historically, traditional scholars have been a buffer against extremism in Islam, and for various sociological and demographic reasons, American Islam lacked a stratum of such scholars. The Wahhabi ideological structure in Saudi Arabia perceived this as an opportunity to fill a gap — to gain dominance over an Islamic community in the West with immense potential for political and social influence.

But the goals of this operation, which was largely successful, were multiple.

First, to control a significant group of Muslim believers.

Second, to use the Muslim community in the U.S. to pressure U.S. government and media, in the formulation of policy and in perceptions about Islam. This has included liaison meetings, “sensitivity” sessions and other public activities with high-level administration officials, including the FBI director, that we have seen since September 11.

Third, to advance the overall Wahhabi agenda of “jihad against the world” — an extremist campaign to impose the Wahhabi dispensation on the global Islamic community, as well as to confront the other religions. This effort has included the establishment in the U.S. of a base for funding, recruitment, and strategic/tactical support of terror operations in the U.S. and abroad.

Wahhabi-Saudi policy has always been two-faced: that is, at the same time as the Wahhabis preach hostility and violence against non-Wahhabi Muslims, they maintain a policy of alliance with Western military powers — first Britain, then the U.S. and France — to assure their control over the Arabian Peninsula.

At the present time, Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80% of American mosques are under Wahhabi control. This does not mean 80% of American Muslims support Wahhabism, although the main Wahhabi ideological agency in America, the so-called Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that some 70% of American Muslims want Wahhabi teaching in their mosques.1This is a claim we consider unfounded.

Rather, Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching — including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational solicitation. Similar influence extends to prison and military chaplaincies, Islamic elementary and secondary schools (academies), college campus activity, endowment of academic chairs and programs in Middle East studies, and most notoriously, charities ostensibly helping Muslims abroad, many of which have been linked to or designated as sponsors of terrorism.

The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and CAIR. Support activities have been provided by the American Muslim Council (AMC), the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, its sister body the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and a number of related groups that I have called “the Wahhabi lobby.” ISNA operates at least 324 mosques in the U.S. through the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). These groups operate as an interlocking directorate.

Both ISNA and CAIR, in particular, maintain open and close relations with the Saudi government — a unique situation, in that no other foreign government directly uses religion as a cover for its political activities in the U.S. For example, notwithstanding support by the American Jewish community for the state of Israel, the government of Israel does not intervene in synagogue life or the activities of rabbinical or related religious bodies in America.

According to saudiembassy.net, the official website of the Saudi government, CAIR received $250,000 from the Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank, an official Saudi financial institution, in 1999, for the purchase of land in Washington, D.C., to construct a headquarters facility.2

In a particularly disturbing case, the Islamic Development Bank also granted US$295,000 to the Masjid Bilal Islamic Center, for the construction of the Bilal Islamic Primary and Secondary School in California, in 1999.3 Hassan Akbar, an American Muslim presently charged with a fatal attack on his fellow soldiers in Kuwait during the Iraq intervention, was affiliated with this institution.

In addition, the previously mentioned official website of the Saudi government reported a donation in 1995 of $4 million for the construction of a mosque complex in Los Angeles, named for Ibn Taymiyyah, a historic Islamic figure considered the forerunner of Wahhabism.4 (It should be noted that Ibn Taymiyyah is viewed as a marginal, extremist, ideological personality by many traditional Muslims. In the wake of the Riyadh bombings of 2003, the figure of Ibn Taymiyyah symbolized, in Saudi public discourse, the inner rot of the regime. An article in the reformist daily al-Watan was headlined, “Who is More Important? The Nation or Ibn Taymiyyah”? Soon after it appeared, Jamal Khashoggi, editor of al-Watan and former deputy editor of Arab News, was dismissed from his post.)

The same official Saudi website reported a donation of $6 million, also in 1995, for a mosque in Cincinnati, Ohio.5 The website further stated, in 2000, “In the United States, the Kingdom has contributed to the establishment of the Islamic Center in Washington DC; the Omer Bin Al-Khattab Mosque in western Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Islamic Center, and the Fresno Mosque in California; the Islamic Center in Denver, Colorado; the Islamic center in Harrison, New York City; and the Islamic Center in Northern Virginia.”6

How much money, in total, is involved in this effort? If we accept a low figure of control, i.e. NAIT ownership of 27% of 1,200 mosques, stated by CAIR and cited by Mary Jacoby and Graham Brink in the St. Petersburg Times,7 we have some 324 mosques.

If we assume a relatively low average of expenditures, e.g. $.5 million per mosque, we arrive at $162 million.

But given that Saudi official sources show $6 million in Cincinnati and $4 million in Los Angeles, we should probably raise the average to $1 million per mosque, resulting in $324 million as a minimum.

Our view is that the number of mosques under Wahhabi control actually totals at least 600 out of the official total of 1,200, while, as noted, Shia community leaders endorse the figure of 80% Wahhabi control. But we also offer a number of 4-6,000 mosques overall, including small and diverse congregations of many kinds.

A radical critic of Wahhabism stated some years ago that $25m had been spent on Islamic Centers in the U.S. by the Saudi authorities. This now seems a low figure. Another anti-extremist Islamic figure has estimated Saudi expenses in the U.S., over 30 years, and including schools and free books as well as mosques, near a billion dollars.

It should also be noted that Wahhabi mosques in the U.S. work in close coordination with the Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), Saudi state entities identified as participants in the funding of al Qaeda.

Wahhabi ideological control within Saudi Arabia is based on the historic compact of intermarriage between the family of the sect’s originator, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and the family of the founding ruler, Ibn Saud. To this day, these families divide governance of the kingdom, with the descendants of Ibn al-Wahhab, known as ahl al-Shaykh, responsible for religious life, and the Saudi royal family, or ahl al-Saud, running the state. The two families also continue to marry their descendants to one another. The supreme religious leader of Saudi Arabia is a member of the family of Ibn al-Wahhab. The state appoints a minister of religious affairs who controls such bodies as MWL and WAMY, and upon leaving his ministerial post he becomes head of MWL.

The official Saudi-embassy website reported exactly one year ago, on June 26, 2002, “The delegation of the Muslim World League (MWL) that is on a world tour promoting goodwill arrived in New York yesterday, and visited the Islamic Center there.” The same website later reported, on July 8, 2002, “During a visit on Friday evening to the headquarters of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) [Secretary-General of the MWL Dr. Abdullah bin Abdulmohsin Al-Turki] advocated coordination among Muslim organizations in the United States. Expressing MWL’s readiness to offer assistance in the promotion and coordination of Islamic works, he announced plans to set up a commission for this purpose. The MWL delegation also visited the Islamic Center in Washington DC and was briefed on its activities by its director Dr. Abdullah bin Mohammad Fowaj.”8

In a related matter, on June 22, 2003, in a letter to the New York Post, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a civic lobbying organization, stated that his attendance at a press conference of WAMY in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had been organized by the U.S. embassy in the kingdom. If this is true, it is extremely alarming. The U.S. embassy should not act as a supporter of WAMY, which, as documented by FDD and the Saudi Institute,9 teaches that Shia Muslims, including even the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, are Jewish agents.

This is comparable to Nazi claims that Jewish business owners were Communists, or Slobodan Miloševic’s charge, in the media of ex-Yugoslavia, that Tito was an agent of the Vatican. The aim is to derange people, to separate them from reality completely, in preparation for massacres. We fear that official Saudi anxiety their large and restive Shia minority, aggravated by Saudi resentment over the emergence of a protodemocratic regime in Iraq led by Shias, and consolidation of popular sovereignty in Shia Iran, may lead the Saudi regime to treat Shias as a convenient scapegoat, making them victims of a wholesale atrocity. The history of Wahhabism is filled with mass murder of Shia Muslims.

There is clearly a problem of Wahhabi/Saudi extremist influence in American Islam. The time is now to face the problem squarely and find ways to enable and support traditional, mainstream American Muslims in taking their community back from these extremists, while employing law enforcement to interdict the growth of Wahhabism and its financial support by the Saudis. If we fail to do this, Wahhabi extremism continues to endanger the whole world — Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Thank you for your attention.

NOTES

1 Council on American Islamic Relations, The Mosque in America: A National Portrait, A Report from the Mosque Study Project, April 26, 2001.

2 Saudi Embassy Press Archive, August 15, 1999.

3 Islamic Development Bank; also, “IDB Allocates $202 Mln to Finance Islamic Development Ventures,” Arabic News, 1/25/2000.

4 Saudi Embassy Press Archive, July 8, 1995.

5 Saudi Embassy Press Archive, November 10, 1995.

6 Saudi Embassy Press Archive, March 5, 2000.

7 “Saudi Form of Islam Wars With Moderates,” St. Petersburg Times, March 11, 2003.

8 Saudi Embassy Press Archive.

9 Ali al-Ahmed and Stephen Schwartz, “Saudis Spread Hate Speech in U.S,” Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Washington, copublished with Saudi Institute.

— Stephen Schwartz is director, Islam and Democracy Program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

==============================

Islam vs. Christianity: The Age-Old Conflict Continues (Free Congress Foundation, 030822)

It’s not just because Prem Awaes has come to this country as a legal immigrant that Americans should welcome him.

No. He has a message that does not make for easy listening, but it is one that Americans, particularly those who are anxious to cast Islam as a peaceful and tolerant religion, need to hear.

Awaes has come to America thanks to the sponsorship of the Virginia Council of Churches and the Presbyterian Church of Fredericksburg. He had been trained as a missionary by the Salvation Army and had operated a Christian school for in Pakistan.

Because Pakistan is a Muslim republic, Awaes’ work as a Christian missionary made him run afoul of the government’s laws. Believers in the Christian religion are often persecuted; the police seldom do much to Ensure the protection of religious minorities. Indeed, as Awaes pointed out in an interview with the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star, they will often be the attackers.

Recalling the violence inflicted on his village in an attack six years ago, Awaes said: “They threw hand grenades at houses. Muslims robbed the houses and took everyone’s things.”

After living constantly on the run in Pakistan, Awaes fled to Asia, living there for awhile before being granted refugee status by the United Nations and finding sponsorship in the United States. He expects to be reunited with his family soon.

More Americans are coming to realize that while many Muslims lead peaceful and tolerant lives, those who truly believe that the Qur’an represents the divine words spoken by Allah will not be tolerant or peaceful toward the “People of the Book”: the Qur’an’s designation for Jews and Christians. As Sura 9:29 of the Qur’an declares: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the people of the Book, until they pay the Jizya (a special higher tax rate) with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

Many contemporary theologians depict the Crusades as Christianity’s war against Islam, but they have it dead wrong. For Islam was on the march centuries before the Crusades, having conquered the Christian lands of Egypt, Syria, North Africa, and Spain by the time Pope Urban II had declared the first Crusade.

To this day, the enmity continues. Just last year, a Muslim cleric in Indonesia called upon his fellow believers to fight “belligerent infidels” who are Christians.

Christians who believe that all people are equal in dignity before God need to realize that this idea is not taught in traditional Islam. Muslims who do believe in this equality of dignity have been influenced by the West, but within the Muslim community they are typically shouted down by the more fervent and louder voices of Islamic militants.

My colleague, Robert Spencer, writes in Islam vs. Christianity: The Age-Old Conflict Continues that Americans need to wake up to the fact that not all religions or their followers share the Western values of tolerance. Indeed, more Americans are waking up to this. A poll released last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press showed 44% of the American public now understands that Islam is more likely than other religions “to encourage violence among its believers.” Only a quarter of Americans realized this in March 2002.

September 11 should have alerted every American to that fact. Unfortunately, the innate American sense of trust and decency, our best values, leave us ill-equipped to confront an enemy like Islam — just as it was difficult in 1940 for many Americans to grasp that a civilized country like Germany could discard true Christian beliefs. Now, as the second anniversary approaches of that terrible day, conservatives need to make sure every American realizes the true nature of the threat we face from Islam’s true believers. We should not have to depend on al Qaeda to provide a reminder.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

Court Rejects Sentence of Nigerian Woman Facing Death for Adultery (Foxnews, 030925)

KATSINA, Nigeria — A single mother facing death by stoning for adultery had her sentence overturned by an Islamic appeals court Thursday in a case that has sparked international outrage.

A five-judge panel rejected the sentence against 32-year-old Amina Lawal, saying she was not caught in the act of adultery and she was not given “ample opportunity to defend herself.”

If the sentence had been carried out, the single mother would have been the first woman stoned to death since 12 northern states first began adopting strict Islamic law, or Shariah, in 1999.

Lawal, wrapped in a light orange veil, sat on a stone bench, eyes downcast, cradling her nearly 2-year-old daughter as the ruling was announced at the Katsina State Shariah Court of Appeals under heavy security.

The judges read their verdict, which is final, inside a tiny blue-walled courtroom equipped with ceiling fans to ease the sweltering heat.

Lawal was first convicted in March 2002 following the birth of her daughter two years after she divorced her husband. Judges rejected Lawal’s first appeal in August 2002.

In an hour-long hearing, the panel said Lawal was not caught in the act of adultery and wasn’t given enough time to understand the charges against her.

It also cited procedural errors, including that only one judge was present at her initial conviction in March 2002, instead of the three required under Islamic law.

The case had drawn sharp criticism from international rights groups. Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government and world leaders had called for Lawal to be spared. Last week, Brazil even offered her asylum.

Few believed the brutal sentence — in which Lawal would have been buried up to her neck in sand and executed by stoning — would ever be carried out.

Francois Cantier, a lawyer with French group Avocats Sans Frontieres, or Lawyers Without Borders, said the punishment was contrary to the Nigerian constitution and would violate international treaties against torture.

Prosecutors argued Lawal’s child was living proof she committed a crime under Shariah.

But lead defense lawyer Aliyu Musa Yawuri said that under some interpretations of Shariah, babies can remain in gestation in a mother’s womb for five years, opening the possibility her ex-husband could have fathered the child.

He also argued Lawal’s case should be dropped because no lawyers were present when she first testified that she had slept with another man following her divorce. Yawuri said Lawal — a poor, uneducated woman from a rural family — didn’t understand the charges against her at the time.

Lawal has identified her alleged sexual partner, Yahaya Mohammed, and said he promised to marry her. Mohammed, who would also have faced a stoning sentence, has denied any impropriety and has been acquitted for lack of evidence.

Lawal is the second Nigerian woman to be condemned to death for having sex out of wedlock under Islamic law. The first woman, Safiya Hussaini, had her sentence overturned in March on her first appeal in the city of Sokoto.

The introduction of strict Islamic law in a dozen northern states triggered violent clashes between Christians and Muslims that killed thousands.

Four other people have been sentenced to stoning deaths. Two have been acquitted, and two others — a pair of lovers — are awaiting rulings.

Also under Shariah punishments, one man has been hanged for killing a woman and her two children. Muslim authorities have amputated the hands of three others for stealing respectively, a goat, a cow and three bicycles.

Despite such harsh sentences, the majority of Muslims in the predominantly Islamic north have welcomed the implementation of Shariah, saying it’s a key part of their religion and discourages crime.

==============================

Announcing Dhimmi Watch: A Global Alliance For Justice (Free Congress Foundation, 030923)

It is long past time to bring the world’s attention to a global scandal.

Dhimmitude is the status that Islamic law, the Sharia, mandates for non-Muslims, primarily Jews and Christians. Dhimmis, “protected people,” are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur’an’s command that they “feel themselves subdued” (Sura 9:29). They are not to build new houses of worship or repair existing ones. They are to get off the sidewalk if a Muslim wishes to pass. They are to wear distinctive clothing (or sometimes a special badge indicating their status), are barred from certain professions and from wielding authority over Muslims, and they must pay a special and often prohibitive tax, the jizya, from which Muslims are free. Since the Sharia is not enforced in its fullness in most Muslim states today, these laws are not uniformly or universally enforced; however, they remain part of the Sharia, and, as such, are part of the legal superstructure that global jihadists are laboring to restore everywhere in the Islamic world, and wish ultimately to impose on the entire human race. Moreover, since they are organically part of the culture and history of Islamic nations, they form part of a culture of bias that even today strongly influences public policy and existing statutes in countries with ostensibly secular governments, particularly Egypt and Pakistan.

The dhimmi “contract,” which bought for indigenous non-Muslim populations under Islam the protection of the authorities, was conditional upon the dhimmis’ fulfillment of their part of the bargain. If they complained about their inferior status, institutionalized humiliation, or poverty, their masters voided their contract and regarded them as enemies of Islam, fair game as objects of violence. For this, untold millions have died. Tens of millions have been uprooted from their homes. Tens of millions have been stripped of their cultural identity. And above all, millions have been cowed into silence and worse: for centuries dhimmi communities in the Islamic world learned to live in peace with their Muslim overlords by acquiescing to their subservience. Like some slaves in the Old South, some even actively identified with the dominant class, and became strenuous advocates for it. It was almost unheard-of to find dhimmis speaking out against their oppressors; to do so would have been suicide.

Spearheaded by dhimmi academics such as Edward Said, John Esposito, and Noam Chomsky, that same attitude of chastened subservience has entered into Western academic study of Islam, and from there into journalism, school textbooks, and the popular discourse. One must not point out the depredations of jihad and dhimmitude; to do so would offend the multiculturalist ethos that prevails everywhere today. To do so would endanger chances for peace and rapprochement between civilizations all too ready to clash.

But in this era of global terrorism it must be said: this silence, this distortion, has become deadly. Before 9/11 it was easy to ignore and whitewash dhimmitude, but the atrocities changed the situation forever. To continue to gloss over the destruction wrought by jihad ideology and its attendant evil of dhimmitude is today to play into the hands of jihadists, who have repeatedly vowed to dhimmify the West and destroy any recalcitrant elements. While jihadist groups, even with their global diffusion, are not strong enough to realize this goal by themselves, they have a potent and destructive ally, a genuine fifth column, in the dhimmi academics and dhimmi journalists they have recruited in the West. They have succeeded in confusing millions in the West into mistaking honesty and truthfulness for bigotry, and self-defense for oppression.

Before it’s too late for Western Europe and the United States, which gave birth to the traditions of freedom and equality of rights for all that shine today as lights in the entire world, this must be stopped. Therefore a group of scholars and human rights advocates from across the political spectrum is uniting to form Dhimmi Watch: A Global Alliance for Justice.

Dhimmi Watch seeks to bring public attention to:

* The plight of the dhimmis, an immense but almost completely ignored ongoing scandal that continues in Muslim countries today;

* The plight of women under Sharia provisions, similar to conditions imposed on dhimmis, in the denial of equal rights and dignity;

* Slavery in Islamic lands, which continues today, justified by Sharia-’s dhimmi codes;

* The integral role of jihad and dhimmitude ideology in global terrorism today;

* The license that academic and journalistic whitewashes of dhimmitude gives to radical jihadist enemies of human rights for all.

We invite all concerned people to join forces now with Dhimmi Watch, to help us ensure that deeds done in the darkness for so long will not continue to be done. The light of world attention is anathema to the proponents of jihad and dhimmitude: we have seen in recent years that women sentenced to stoning for adultery, often victims of rape unjustly accused thanks to Sharia laws disallowing rape victims’ testimony, were freed following international outcry. We seek to provoke similar, continuous and increasing outcry wherever and whenever the Sharia’s institutionalized injustices threaten dhimmis and women.

Only when the truth about jihad and dhimmitude is widely told will moderate Muslims be able to prevail over jihadists and establish fully just societies in Islamic lands. May the truth prevail.

Robert Spencer, a grandson of dhimmi exiles from the Ottoman Empire, is the author of an in-depth look at terrorism, jihad and dhimmitude, Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (new from Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).

==============================

The Moderate from Malaysia (NR, 031110)

The prime minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, is an international superstar — a toast of the Davos forum, a darling of Western correspondents and analysts. He is thought to be the Great Muslim Moderate, and in certain respects he is — which can be most disheartening. Think of his famed political prisoner, Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister. Ibrahim has become a rallying point for anti-Mahathir opposition; the prisoner’s wife, Dr. Wan Azizah Ismail, has proven a tireless and graceful campaigner for his freedom — a descendant, in a way, of Avital Shcharansky, or Yelena Bonner.

Mahathir is ending his rule, after 22 years. But he has gone out with a bang, delivering the keynote address at the recent Organization of the Islamic Conference powwow, held in his country. At the beginning of his speech, he welcomed non-Muslim “observers at this meeting,” saying their “presence . . . will help towards greater understanding of Islam and the Muslims.” Perhaps it did — but perhaps not in the way Mahathir intended.

The prime minister delivered an almost perfect example of what has long ailed the Muslim world; it was as though he had set out to confirm the writings of Bernard Lewis and our own David Pryce-Jones. First and foremost, there was the presentation of Muslims as perpetual victims, oppressed by forces possibly not seen, but certainly non-Muslim, and almost certainly Jewish and Western. “We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated.” The “enemy” will “attack and kill us, invade our lands, bring down our governments,” etc., etc.

The speaker then went into history, sounding, for a moment, actually very much like Professor Lewis: “At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were still superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already built a great Muslim civilization, respected and powerful.” Why, “the Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars.”

But then The Turn took place, and, “intellectually, the Muslims began to regress.” The West wrapped its tentacles around the Islamic world, and “apart from the new nation-states, we also accepted the Western democratic system” — a calamity. (If only it were true — that the Muslim world had been forced to accept the “Western democratic system.”)

About mid-speech, Mahathir delivered his strongest poison: regarding “the Zionist transgression.” The Muslims are numerous, Mahathir noted: “We are now 1.3 billion strong. . . . We control 50 out of the 180 countries in the world. Our votes can make or break international organizations.” And yet “none of our countries are truly independent. We are under pressure to conform to our oppressors’ wishes about how we should behave, how we should govern our lands, how we should think, even.”

And, really, “1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way.” The Jews are very clever, those people. “The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. . . . They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights, and democracy so that persecution of them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries, and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.”

Mahathir suggested that Muslims learn a trick from the Jews and start thinking: but for the purpose of destroying those very Jews. The prime minister’s speech took for granted that the aim of Muslims should be the destruction of these people — interestingly, Mahathir didn’t even bother to say “Israelis,” out of politeness: He went straight for “Jews” — rather than peaceful co-existence with them. A history and a present of victimhood (at the hands of others); Jews as wily and all-powerful; Muslims as kept from their due place (supremacy) only by lack of unity — the great Dr. Mahathir mixed in every ingredient of the stew that has proven so toxic for Muslim people everywhere.

Later, confronting criticism, his foreign minister snapped, “Forget about anti-Semitism.” Ah, but that’s hard — and unwise. Israel’s own foreign minister said, “The civilized world has seen the results of such violent rhetoric in the past.” It will be good to be done with Mahathir. But the chilling question is: Among viable leaders in Muslim countries, is that the best of them?

==============================

The State Of Freedom (Free Congress Foundation, 031111)

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, President George W. Bush has made a sweeping declaration announcing a new policy toward the Middle East.

In speaking before the British Parliament 20 years ago, then-President Ronald Reagan made a similar speech aimed at the Communist empire. It was during that speech Reagan announced the formation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). At the time, most critics, including many in his own party, called Reagan’s pronouncement that freedom would overcome totalitarian ideologies in the Communist world naïve and unrealistic. Yet before the decade of the 1980s was over, the Soviet empire had begun to crumble. Reagan had more faith in freedom than almost anyone else. He believed that a system built on lies could not ultimately prevail.

The National Endowment for Democracy, which Reagan established, has given modest amounts of money to both the Democrat and Republican parties and to the US Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO to give technical assistance to democracy movements around the world. In addition, NED itself has projects modestly supporting individuals and organizations who promote democracy all over creation. I have seen NED in action both in the former Soviet empire and in Latin America. It represents the best investment of American dollars abroad in our nation’s history, in my view. It is far better than funds distributed by the Agency for International Development.

So any objective examination of NED would have to pronounce Ronald Reagan’s vision a success. While freedom is not complete in the former Soviet Union, the situation is a lot better there than it was twenty years ago. Certainly in most of Central and Eastern Europe real freedom has taken hold. They are no longer “captive nations.”

So what of the Bush vision? It clearly was Reagan-like in its vision and sweeping pronouncements. The Bush doctrine seeks to push democracy all over the Middle East. Except for Israel and now the Bush experiment in Iraq, there is little or no democracy anywhere in the Middle East. While the dictatorships in that region are not as repressive as they were in the Soviet empire (except where Christianity is concerned), people generally do not have the right to choose their leaders, even at the local level.

President Bush sounded themes reminiscent of President Woodrow Wilson (“Make the world safe for democracy”), although he stressed freedom as well.

The President is to be commended for his vision and for giving the nation a sense of purpose consistent with its ideals.

I wish I could say I believe that this president will succeed, as Ronald Reagan did. The reason I don’t believe he will succeed can be summed up in one word: Islam. President Bush went out of his way to suggest that freedom and democracy is compatible with Islam. He stressed that modernization does not necessarily mean Westernizing. Well and good. But Islam, at its core, does not believe in freedom. The President cited Islamic nations that do practice freedom and democracy such as Turkey and Indonesia. The hard core Islamists consider those nations traitorous and believe they are as much an enemy as the United States or Great Britain.

Ask the average Iranian if they have any real freedom or can practice real democracy. Their elections are a sham. Last time out they voted for so-called reformers who pledged to cut down on the influence of the religious hard liners who have imposed Islamic law on that nation. Virtually nothing has been done to moderate the situation. Iranians are not free people. Western media and publications, regardless of content, are forbidden. Women are second-class citizens. Dissenting religious or political views are not permitted. It is difficult for young Iranians to travel or leave the country. Technically Iran might be called a democracy since they elect their parliament and other leaders. In reality, the citizens there may as well be living in Saudi Arabia where the royal family determines who serves in office.

If the nations of the Middle East renounce Islam, then President Bush’s vision will work. If they stick to a death-oriented religion where the greatest act one can perform is to kill Christians and Jews, then the ideals of pluralistic democracy and freedom will hardly prevail. I know it is fashionable to pretend that Islam is really just another religion like Judaism or Christianity. It is not. The freedom Christians and Jews acknowledge because they believe we are created in the image and likeness of God, radical Islam fails to acknowledge.

Yes, there is a civil war within Islam, between the radicals and moderates. So far the radicals are winning hands down. So unless the Bush plan contemplates secretly aiding the moderates, I fear his ideas for the Middle East will not be realized. I take no comfort in saying this. Perhaps I will be wrong. For a few years after Reagan gave his address to the British Parliament, he appeared to be wrong as well. Believe me if I live long enough to see the Bush vision for the Middle East prevail, I will be perfectly happy to shout on the Capitol steps that I was very wrong.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

Cleric warns Muslims linked to U.S. (Washington Times, 031117)

JAKARTA, Indonesia — The imprisoned Islamic cleric thought to be a guiding force behind the Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah warned that all Muslim countries with close ties to the United States were targets for attack.

“As long as Muslim countries have close ties or support the U.S. government or U.S. policy, [they] will be threatened by a Muslim militant attack,” said Abu Bakar Bashir, as he sat on the rough floor of the Salemba Prison, the Jakarta prison where he has been held for the past year.

“Indonesia, Egypt, Afghan-istan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and some Mideast countries,” were all potential targets, the 66-year-old, white-bearded cleric told The Washington Times.

Bashir was convicted last year on charges of treason. But prosecutors at the time tried and failed to convince the court that the preacher was a leader of the militant Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) network responsible for a string of bombings and attacks across Southeast Asia, capped by the horrific October 2002 explosions that killed 202 persons, including many Australian and Western tourists, in the Indonesian beach resort of Bali.

The cleric and his lawyer, Mahendradata, have rejected all charges against him, including the one which landed him four years in prison. The Bush administration saw the short sentence as a slap on the wrist for the JI, which reportedly has links to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network.

Bashir rejected Afghan President Hamid Karzai as “an American doll,” and dismissed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a key U.S. ally in the war against terrorism, as an American lackey. He accused Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri of neither understanding nor caring about Islam. Indonesia is 87% Muslim and is the world’s most populous Islamic country.

Leaders of the small Islamic states around the Persian Gulf “are too soft against America. They are under America’s influence,” he continued, speaking under the gaze of four prison guards.

“As long as they are still under U.S. control like Megawati, we cannot call them as Muslim leaders. The Muslim leader should be free from American influence and should have power to rule the country. A Muslim leader should control the country, and non-Muslims in the country should obey.”

According to a report on JI by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group in August, Bashir was one of group’s top leaders from late 1999 until his arrest in 2002.

He also was the founder of a Muslim “pesantren,” or boarding school, committed to the principles of Islamic holy war, or jihad. A number of the graduates of the Pondok Ngruki school have been linked to JI attacks.

“I called on the students — the young Muslims for jihad — to help and protect Muslim people in Afghanistan and Bosnia who suffered and were killed by non-Muslims as their obligation, if they had enough capability and money,” Bashir said.

“Some of them were then recruited and trained by many militant Muslim groups such as al Qaeda, the [Moro Islamic Liberation Front] or Abu Sayyaf,” he said, referring to two Islamic separatist groups fighting in the Philippines. “Others only live normally.”

“But, then some of them who were trained by militant Muslim groups in the Philippines or Afghanistan committed bombings. I cannot control one by one my students after they leave my pesantren,” he said.

Like many Muslims in the region, Bashir denied the existence of Jemaah Islamiyah, which translates roughly as “Islamic Community.” Instead, he blamed al Qaeda for last year’s Bali bombing and the Aug. 5 Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta that left 12 dead.

“If we look at the concept [the bombers] used, it was clear that they used the concept of al Qaeda. I can say that al Qaeda was behind the attacks,” he said.

Families of fellow prisoners visited during the interview, but stayed a respectful distance away. Dressed in the traditional Muslim white cap, white tunic and sarong, Bashir is a short, slight man, and peers through thick glasses.

But he is still a powerful figure among certain Indonesians, and he has about 400 followers in this jail, set amid a riddle of crowded city streets. Saremba holds a little more than 2,600 prisoners, most of them sentenced for drug trafficking.

Of the roughly 14,000 pesantren schools in this largely moderate Islamic country, only a few are under extremist militant influence. Some leaders of the new generation of Islamic activists here have broken with Bashir’s former school and set up their own pesantrens, arguing that the aging cleric was too moderate.

“Even though they hate the Bush administration, he does not agree with the way of these groups involved in Bali bombing and in Marriott bombing,” said Mr. Mahendradata, the lawyer, speaking later outside the prison’s gray steel gates and walls topped with razor wire. Many Indonesians go by a single name.

Inside the prison, Bashir, who later led the evening’s Ramadan prayers from within an open-air caged-in courtyard, praised bin Laden, whom the United States thinks is the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks.

“He is the big hero, the big martyr who sacrificed his time, his wealth and his life to defend Muslim people all over the world even though I, myself, don’t agree with his way of struggle,” the cleric said.

“But I believe he is God’s army. He is the army of God who has mandate to fight against the enemies of Allah, of Islam.”

Those caught in the cross fire, Mr. Bashir added in the interview held through a local translator, were collateral damage.

“Civilians killed in the attack are a consequence of the war, the effect of unannounced attacks. Actually, the rule of war says it is normal, and Islamic teachings say it is the destiny of human beings to die in many ways, so if a non-Muslim died in a bomb attack that was his or her destiny.”

“That’s why I don’t agree with the way of al Qaeda’s struggle, because its effect will hit and kill innocent people.”

The cleric blamed the increasing militancy of extremist Islamic groups on the United States, arguing that President Bush’s pro-Israel stance and his policies in Iraq and Afghanistan threatened the existence of Islam.

“If the U.S. can change, not to be driven by Israel as the enemy of Islam, the world will be peaceful, because Islam loves peace. But if the enemy disturbs Islam and kills Muslim people such as in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya and other places, we, as Muslim people, are obliged to protect and defend our brother Muslims.”

==============================

European Dishonor: Sharia on the Old Continent (National Review Online, 031203)

Young women killed for dating. Limbs amputated for petty theft. Makeshift courts deciding the fates of members of local Muslim communities. The Western world has grown accustomed to hearing about the brutalities of Islamic law. However, these primitive practices are no longer limited to the remote tribal areas of Pakistan, the backward kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or oppressive, mullah-dominated Iran. Today, thanks in large part to a massive flow of immigration from Muslim countries, sharia law and medieval customs are becoming increasingly common in the heart of Christian Europe.

One of the most shocking examples of this new reality occurred in Sweden last year, when a Kurdish woman was killed by her father for having a romantic relationship with a Swedish man. Fadime Sahindal, 26, had taken her father and brother to sharia court in 1998, alleging that they had threatened to kill her for refusing to marry a Kurdish man the family had chosen for her. The two received only light sentences, however, and continued to abuse Fadime until, in 2002, her father shot and killed her. Disturbingly, the young woman was well aware of the fate that awaited her, as she said during the 1998 trial: “The only way for the family to regain its honor now that I have spread dishonor over it is to kill me.”

Cases similar to Fadime’s have been reported in France and Denmark. In England last September, a Kurdish father slit his daughter’s throat because he disapproved of her Christian boyfriend and Westernized way of life. And, recently, in the port town of Taranto in southern Italy, a Muslim man who suspected that his wife had committed adultery decided — after consulting with members of his local Muslim community — that she should be stoned to death. The tragedy was only averted thanks to the intervention of local police.

Honor killings are not limited to Muslim countries and are, in fact, a common practice in several third-world cultures. Not all Muslims approve of them, and, according to some Muslim scholars, they do not reflect “real Islam.” Nevertheless, the Koran itself permits men to beat their wives (Chapter 4, Verse 34), and the sharia-inspired penal codes of most Muslim countries give the benefit of the doubt to a man who kills his wife, daughter, or sister for engaging in adulterous or immoral behavior. This barbaric practice, which has not been seen in European countries in well over a century, is making an unsavory return within the Old Continent’s Muslim communities.

The effects of the application of sharia in Europe are not limited to Muslim women. Last year, in the small Italian town of Eboli, hospital workers treated a young Algerian man whose fingers on his right hand had been chopped off. Under questioning, the man refused to reveal how he had sustained his injuries, but investigators have no doubt that he was the victim of punishment carried out according to Islamic law. Authorities in southern Italy, where many migrants from North Africa flock to work in agriculture, are becoming accustomed to such incidents. A Sicilian doctor revealed to the Italian magazine Panorama that victims of violent sharia justice go to the hospital only as a last resort, “when the bleeding is serious.” He added that he had become knowledgeable about how amputations must be made according to Islamic tradition (the hand has to be chopped off piece by piece, without breaking any bones).

While these incidents may seem isolated, in actuality, several Muslim groups in Europe openly advocate the introduction of sharia in the West. Uneducated immigrants might use sharia simply because it is a system they are more familiar with, but militant Islamic organizations push for the introduction of Islamic law because they believe it is a superior system, the law revealed by God, and therefore the only acceptable law.

In Germany, Milli Gorus, a militant Turkish Islamic organization with more than 200,000 members, is accused by German intelligence of promoting Islamic law among Turkish immigrants in Europe. The August 2001 issue of Milli Gorus’s official publication, Milli Gazete, featured an article stating that “A religious Muslim is also at the same time an advocate for sharia. The state, the media, and the courts have no rights to interfere. The allegiance of a Muslim to sharia cannot be condemned or questioned.”

In Britain, the rapid spread of radical Islam in urban areas has led to major social exclusion and the development of sharia among England’s Muslims. Al-Muhajiroun, a London-based fundamentalist group with sympathizers throughout Britain’s burgeoning Muslim communities, has made the struggle against “man-made law” one of the key points of its agenda, declaring that its members do not recognize English law, but only Islamic law. (Nevertheless, al-Muhajiroun’s leaders do not disdain collecting unemployment benefits generously granted by English “man-made law.”)

In Italy, mainstream Muslim groups have asked for the introduction of Islamic marriages with no legal effects under Italian law, a de facto subtraction of the wedlock from the control of authorities. This request is aimed at creating a situation where two different legal systems regulate the lives of two different groups of citizens within the same state. In European legal history, it would represent a jump back to the Middle Ages, when different laws applied to different ethnicities. In practical terms, it would mean that Italian citizens of Muslim faith would be subtracted from the guarantees that the Italian legal system provides to its citizens. Therefore, while Christian Italian women would have the same rights as Italian men, Muslim Italian women would have very few rights. While a Christian woman would have the right to obtain a divorce simply by filing papers, a Muslim woman would have to go to great lengths to prove ill treatment at the hands of her husband.

Multiculturalists and leftist defenders of uncontrolled immigration, uneasy when confronted with episodes of the brutal application of sharia in Europe’s Muslim ghettoes, are quick to predict that these incidents will disappear once Muslims are wealthier and better integrated into Western society through marriage to native Europeans. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that these predictions will come true in the foreseeable future. Muslims in Europe account for the vast majority of those living under the poverty line, and Muslim neighborhoods are the poorest areas in nearly every European city. Furthermore, statistics show that the majority of European Muslims are not marrying indigenous Europeans but other Muslims, either from their country of origin or from within local Muslim communities.

Politically correct European politicians, ever mindful not to offend their newly arrived Muslim brethren, have done little to aid in the assimilation process. As a result, immigrants who settle in Europe’s Muslim communities are often greeted with the same sharia-inspired mayhem that they left behind in their countries of origin. From England to Holland to Greece, many European Muslims have managed to segregate themselves from society at large and maintain harsh traditions ill-suited to the West. As the number of unassimilated Muslims grows and Europe’s elites continue to remain silent, the ultimate victim may turn out to be Western civilization itself.

— Erick Stakelbeck is head writer and Lorenzo Vidino is an attorney and terrorism analyst at the Investigative Project, a Washington, D.C.-based counterterrorism think tank.

==============================

Murder For Fun and Prophet (Ann Coulter, 020904)

IN “THE TRUST” by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, a fawning historical account of the New York Times and the family behind it, the authors describe how the Newspaper of Record conspired to hide information about the Holocaust:

“A July 2, 1944, dispatch citing ‘authoritative information’ that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been deported to their deaths and an additional 350,000 were to be killed in the next three weeks received only four column inches on Page 12, while that same day a story about Fourth of July holiday crowds ran on the front page.”

To find out what the enemy is up to in the current war, you keep having to turn to obscure little boxes at the bottom of Page A-9 of the Newspaper of Record.

In a little-noticed story almost exactly one year after Muslims staged the most horrific terrorist attack the world has ever seen, a Muslim en route from Germany to Kosovo emerged from the airplane bathroom and tried to strangle a stewardess with his shoelaces. (Not that there’s anything unpeaceful about that.)

That story was squirreled away in small box at the very bottom of Page A-9 of the Times. In the entire Lexis Nexis archives, only three newspapers reported the incident. Not one mentioned that the attacker was a Muslim. It was a rather captivating story, too. Earlier in the flight, the Muslim responded to the stewardess’s offer of refreshments by saying, “I’d like to drink your blood.” (Not that there’s anything unpeaceful about that.)

Also last week, another practitioner of the Religion of Peace, this one with ties to al-Qaida, tried to board a plane in Sweden with a gun. This story did not merit front-page coverage at The New York Times.

On July 4 this year, an Egyptian living in California — who had complained about his neighbors flying a U.S. flag, had a “Read the Koran” sticker on his front door, and expressed virulent hatred for Jews — walked into an El Al terminal at the Los Angeles airport and started shooting Jews. (Not that there’s anything unpeaceful about that.)

The Times casually reported the possibility that his motive was a fare dispute. Four days after the shooting, the story vanished amid an embarrassed recognition of the fact that any Muslim could snap at any moment and start shooting.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (generally found around Page A-12 of the Times), Americans have been cowed into perseverating that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Candid conversations about Islam are beyond the pale in a country that deems Screw magazine part of our precious constitutional freedoms.

If the 9/11 terrorists had been Christians, the shoelace strangler a Christian, the gun-toting Swedish Muslim a Christian, the Los Angeles airport killer a Christian and scores of suicide bombers Christians, I assure you we would not be pussyfooting around whether maybe there was something wrong with Christianity.

In a fascinating book written by two Arab Muslims who converted to Christianity, Ergun Mehmet Caner and Emir Fethi Caner give an eye-opening account of Islam’s prophet in “Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs.”

Citing passages from the Hadith, the collected sayings of Muhammad, the Caners note that, by his own account, the founder of Islam was often possessed by Satan. The phrase “Satanic Verses” refers to words that Muhammad first claimed had come from God, but which he later concluded were spoken by Satan.

Muhammad married 11 women, kept two others as concubines and recommended wife-beating (but only as a last resort!). His third wife was 6 years old when he married her and 9 when he consummated the marriage.

To say that Muhammad was a demon-possessed pedophile is not an attack. It’s a fact. (And for the record, Timothy McVeigh is not the founder of Christianity. He wasn’t even a Christian. He was an atheist who happened to be a gentile.)

Muslims argue against the Caners’ book the way liberals argue against all incontrovertible facts. They deny the meaning of words, posit irrelevant counterpoints, and attack the Caners’ motives.

Ibrahim Hooper, with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says that by “6 years old” the Hadith really means “16 years old” and “9” means “19” — numbers as similar in Arabic as they are in English. Hooper also makes the compelling argument that the Caner brothers — who say they wrote their book out of love for Muslims whom they want to see in heaven — are full of “hate.”

Other Islamic scholars concede the facts but argue that Muhammad’s marriage to a 6-year-old girl was an anomaly. Oh, OK, never mind. Still others explain that Muhammad’s marriage to a 6-year-old girl was of great benefit to her education and served to reinforce political allegiances.

So was she really 16, or was it terrific that he had sex with a 9-year-old to improve her education? This is like listening to some Muslims’ earlier argument-in-the-alternative that the Zionists attacked the World Trade Center, but America brought the attack on itself anyway.

Muhammad makes L. Ron Hubbard look like Jesus Christ. Most people think nothing of assuming every Scientologist is a crackpot. Why should Islam be subject to presumption of respect because it’s a religion? Liberals bar the most benign expressions of religion by little America. Only a religion that is highly correlated with fascistic attacks on the U.S. demands their respect and protection.

==============================

So Three Arabs Walk Into A Bar ... (Ann Coulter, 020918)

AN AMERICAN CITIZEN overheard three Muslims at a Shoney’s restaurant laughing about Sept. 11 over breakfast.

“If people thought Sept. 11 was something, wait till Sept. 13.”

“Do you think that will bring it down?”

“Well, if that won’t bring it down, I have contacts. I’ll get enough to bring it down.”

Patriot Eunice Stone took down their license plate numbers and called the police as the mirthful Muslims left. (I’d give you the names, but they’re too complicated. There’s a reason they use numbers at Guantanamo.) Despite the racist hysteria sweeping the nation, the police did not rush out and start rounding up Arabs. They interviewed Stone in person to evaluate her credibility and corroborate her story.

That night, a little after midnight, one of the two cars being driven by the Muslims ran a toll booth — at least according to everyone but these beacons of truth. Law enforcement officials soon descended on the cars. According to accounts in The New York Times, the men were uncooperative, refused to answer basic questions, gave false information and told contradictory stories. A bomb-sniffing dog reacted to the presence of explosives in both vehicles. After a careful search, however, no explosives were found and the men were released.

Naturally, therefore, the men and their families accused Americans, especially Southerners, of being ignorant racists. “Just because of the way we look or the way we choose to live our lives, we’re persecuted,” said the sister of one. Demonstrating her own open-mindedness, she explained the entire incident by saying, “Unfortunately, they stopped in a restaurant in Georgia.” No prejudice in that.

It’s interesting that the Muslims’ denial of Stone’s account was instantly and universally treated as having precisely the same credibility as Bill Clinton denying he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Even the Islamic Al Sharptons simply assume these guys are lying. The Muslims now say they didn’t do it. Their defenders say they were joking. (Who knew the Religion of Peace was so darn funny? Did you hear the one about the release of VX gas in Disneyland?)

By my count, the Muslims have given at least five versions of what happened. Eunice Stone has given one consistent story. She has been interrogated by law enforcement officials and is corroborated by another witness.

According to the Boston Globe, the Three Stooges first told law enforcement officers they did it on purpose. Stone, they said, was watching them too closely and this got the poor little darlings’ undies in a bundle. So they decided to scare her. One year after Muslims murdered thousands of people on American soil, evidently it’s rude to look at three Muslim men decked out in Arabic garb.

Next, the Muslims told reporters that Stone had “put a little salt and pepper into her story.” A stunned CNN correspondent blurted out: “Salt and pepper?” He reminded them what Stone had heard them say. “Well, yes, whatever,” came the reply.

Third, they tried out the hysterical-woman defense — used to great effect by Democrats in the Clinton era. One of the Muslims tauntingly demanded to know “how many other people witnessed this event that supposedly took place, first of all?” Well, at least one other person. Stone’s son was there and he heard the conversation exactly the same way. He just thought the men were playing his mother and him for suckers. (The Muslims might want to try the Clintonian “she wants to write a book” defense.)

Fourth, the Muslims leapt to their very favorite explanation, the one they haul out at the slightest provocation for almost any occasion: Pogrom-oriented Americans were victimizing them. In a stirring sermon, one of the Arabs advised Americans to “read about other people and read about what they believe before we jump to conclusions.”

Yes, it’s manifestly absurd for anyone to think Muslims might blow something up. In point of fact, it is only by not reading that Americans have been deluded into spouting the Soccer-Momism about Islam being a “religion of peace.” Actually, reading would provide dozens upon dozens of contrary examples from the last year alone.

While I could be jumping the gun — the night is still young — it now appears that their final answer is: They were talking about a car. They didn’t say anything about 9/11 or 9/13, but the “bring it down” bon mot referred to bringing a car down to Florida. This occurred to them only after meeting with their lawyers. Oh, OK.

No one in the press has bothered to investigate the “car” story further. No one believes them, so what’s the point? It would be like chasing down Gennifer Flowers to ask her if it really happened only “once.”

Non-terrorist Muslims are crying wolf when they play these games — talking about blowing up buildings in restaurants, taking a lighter to their sneakers on commercial aircraft, and spending a long time shaving in airplane bathrooms. Intentionally or not, they are giving the real terrorists a cushion for the next attack.

Instead of preying on America’s hatred of prejudice, these aspiring Scottsboro Boys should capitalize on America’s capacity for forgiveness, admit they did something really stupid, and stop lying.

==============================

Tolkien & Civilization: Gimli on our generational challenge (National Review Online, 031217)

When you see him in person, John Rhys-Davies looks a lot taller than he does on the screen. That’s because clever camera angles and movie magic were utilized to make the 6’1 British actor fit the part of his height-challenged and axe-wielding dwarf character named Gimli in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. On the day of the Hollywood premiere, he stormed into the press suite at the Four Seasons Hotel with all of the gregariousness and dry wit of his irrepressible character. (He also provides the voice for Treebeard.) Crammed around a table in the center of the room sat a handful of journalists and film critics who had seen The Return of the King — the final installment of the trilogy — the night before. “O.K., let’s try to sabotage a career again!” he said jokingly, hinting at his willingness to make the interview more memorable — whether he was talking about the filmability of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or the potential downfall of Western Civilization.

To most movie fans, Rhys-Davies is most recognizable for his role as Sallah, an Egyptian archeologist, in the blockbuster films Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (It has been rumored that he may also appear in Indiana Jones IV.) He was here, however, to make his rounds at the press junket for The Return of the King.

“As you remember, Tolkien, I think, sold the original rights for a hundred pounds because he didn’t think the book could ever be made into a film,” he said. “And he’s right. It’s unfilmable.... If you are going to tell the story in the book...you will break all the rules of Filmmaking 101. The structure’s impossible.” He praised director Peter Jackson, however, for struggling to make the structure work for the film without sacrificing “fidelity to the book.”

When it was pointed out that Gimli is one of the principal characters of comic relief in the movies, Rhys-Davies took it in stride. Rather humorously, he synopsized the structure of The Lord of the Ring as follows: “Something’s quite nice, and then something bad goes wrong, and then there’s a fight, and then something gets worse, and then there’s a bigger fight, and then things look really bad, and then there’s a battle, and then things look really, really bad, and then there’s a bigger battle, and then things look really, really bad.”

Cutting into the laughter, he continued. “That’s the structure of the damn thing. And you can’t have that mounting tension all the way through. So we needed to find ways of sort of releasing the tension,” he said. “And we decided that Gimli was probably the way to do it. Because there’s something innately funny about Gimli.”

While Rhys-Davies strikes you as happy-go-lucky actor with a hearty laugh, there was one subject that brought the laughter to a halt as he spoke with sober intonations: the future of Western Civilization.

“I’m burying my career so substantially in these interviews that it’s painful. But I think that there are some questions that demand honest answers,” he confessed after being asked about how much resonance he had with Tolkien’s religious beliefs and perspectives.

“I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged. And if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization. That does have a real resonance with me,” he responded.

Rhys-Davies’s unique childhood was spent in both the United Kingdom and colonial Africa. While he viewed the experience as an “ideal background for being an actor,” one also senses that it contributes to his passionate beliefs about Western values.

He recalled a conversation with his father back in the summer of 1955 as the two of them overlooked the Dar Es Salaam harbor in Tanzania. He remembers his father pointing to a boat and saying, “Twice a year it comes down from Aden [in Yemen]. It stops here and goes down [south]. On the way down it’s got boxes of machinery and goods. On the way back up it’s got two or three little black boys on it. Now, those boys are slaves. And the United Nations will not let me do anything about it.”

As the conversation continued on that warm summer day, his father said, “Look, boy, there is not going to be a world war between Russia and the United States. The next world war will be between Islam and the West.” “Dad, you’re nuts,” Rhys-Davies responded. “The Crusades have been over for hundreds of years!’” (Precocious as it sounds at age 11, he points out that he did indeed know a “bit about history.”) After all, it was 1955. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the United States and the Cold War was front-burner foreign policy.

His father responded, “Well, I know but militant Islam is on the rise again. And you will see it in your lifetime.”

Although his father has passed on, Rhys-Davies said that “there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him and think, ‘God, I wish you were here, just so I could tell you that you were right.’”

Many of the Lord of the Rings actors have utilized their newfound fame to embrace political causes. Viggo Mortensen (“Aragron”) bashes President Bush with low-simmered contempt, Sean Astin (“Sam”) has hinted at running for political office, while Billy Boyd (“Pippin”) and Dominc Monaghan (“Merry”) promote various environmental causes.

Rhys-Davies, however, runs contrary to the prevailing political sentiment of the industry that feeds him. “You do realize that in this town [Hollywood], what I’ve been saying is rather like, sort of — oh well, I can’t find a comparable blasphemy ... but we’ve got to get a bit serious.” Surveying the room, he said: “What is unconscionable is that too many of your fellow journalists do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you around this table....” He continued by saying, “The abolition of slavery comes from Western democracy. True democracy comes from our Greco-Judeo-Christian-Western experience. If we lose these things, then this is a catastrophe for the world.” He pointed out that while projected population statistics in Western Europeans will be falling sharply over the next 20 years, Islam will become more prominent in those countries.

“There is a change happening in the very complexion of Western Civilization in Europe that we should think about, at least, and argue about,” he said. “If it just means the replacement of one genetic stock with another genetic stock, that doesn’t matter too much. But if it involves the replacement of Western Civilization with a different civilization with different cultural values, then it is something we really ought to discuss.”

Recognizing the sheer politically incorrect nature of his commentary, he summed it up by saying, “I am for dead white male culture” — utilizing a derogatory catchphrase used on college campuses to describe Western Culture.

As Rhys-Davies stood to leave the room, he jokingly asked the writers to make sure to “put verbs in my sentences” and concluded by saying: “By and large, our cultures and our society are resilient enough to put up with any sort of nonsense. But if Tolkien’s got a message, it’s, ‘Sometimes you’ve got to stand up and fight for what you believe in.’ He knew what he was fighting for in World War I.”

— Steve Beard is the editor of Good News magazine and the creator of Thunderstruck.org.

==============================

Chirac and the Muslims: A misguided policy (National Review Online, 031219)

France’s state-owned television channels reached their highest viewer ratings Wednesday when the nation was invited to witness what one commentator described as “an historic moment.”

This consisted of a 4,000-word address by President Jacques Chirac, live from the Elysee Palace. With a tricolor in the background to emphasise the solemnity of the occasion, Chirac read his text as if it were a declaration of war. A crowd of 400 “leading citizens,” including the prime minister, the entire cabinet, speakers of the two houses of parliament, and heads of the various religious communities, were present in the gilded hall to provide the cued applause.

But what was all the fuss about?

From the way the French media have covered the occasion, one would think that Chirac had raised the banner of national resistance against a foreign invader: something like Vercingetorix standing up to Roman conquerors in Gaul, or Charles Martel stopping the Saracens at Poitier.

All that Chirac did, however, was “instruct” the parliament to pass a law under which girls wearing the Islamist foulard (head scarf) would not be allowed to attend state-owned schools. Anxious that the move should not appear anti-Islamic, the president also announced that the wearing of “big crosses”, and Jewish skullcaps, would also be banned. Chirac said that the Hand of Fatma be banned too, though apparently he didn’t even know what it was: He pronounced it Fatima’s Hand, and appeared to regard it as an Islamic symbol.

Chirac presented the foulard as the greatest challenge faced by the French republic since it formulated its secular principles in 1905. Using the traditional devices of French grandiloquence, the president recalled the heritage of the Great Revolution and its rallying cry: freedom, fraternity, and equality.

The truth, however, is that Chirac has decided upon — or been misled into — making a mountain out of a molehill. By doing so, he risks casting himself in the role of a modern Don Quixote, off to fight the windmills instead of the real giants.

First, it is wrong to see the foulard as a symbol of conflict between Islam and the West: The foulard in question is a political, not a religious, symbol. Designed in Lebanon in 1975 and imposed by force in Iran in the 1980s, it has never been sanctioned by any Islamic religious authority in France or anywhere else; it has, however, been adopted as a symbol by many radical Islamist groups.

Thus Chirac is wrong to present the foulard as a means by which mainstream Islam is trying to extend religion into the public space. And even then, the foulard concerns very few Muslims in France, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

The French government’s own statistics show that no more than 2,000 out of 1.8 million Muslim girls wore it in 2002. Several studies conducted in various Muslim-inhabited French suburbs show that more than two-thirds of girls wearing the foulard do so because of intimidation by organized Islamist gangs. But Chirac isn’t passing laws to protect those girls from intimidation: He is suggesting legislation to punish them at the school gates instead.

France does have a problem with its Arab population, most of which comes from North Africa. The North African minority, known as beurs, bears deep resentment about France’s colonial past. It also regards itself as a victim of racial discrimination, much as do African Americans in the United States.

The problem of the beurs, therefore, is social, cultural, and economic — not religious. Even if all beurs converted to Christianity or became atheists, they would still feel like victims, because they cannot get good jobs and are confined to the shanty towns built by French Stalinists in the 1950s and 1960s.

There’s even more to refute about the “subversiveness” of France’s six million Muslims. Of these, for example, more than half have taken up French nationality and thus, one must presume, respect the principles on which the French republic is based. Another 1.5 million, mostly from Algeria and Morocco, are believed to have dual nationality. But there is no reason to believe that they wish to undermine the principles of French statehood. Nor is the Muslim community isolated, or self-segregating: Some 40% of French Muslims marry non-Muslims. (

To treat France’s Muslims as a single community is to mistakenly believe that Islam, like Christianity, has church-like structures. Islam, however, is the religion of the individual: Its chief feature is the direct line it establishes between the believer and the Creator, thus eliminating priests, intercessors, and other religious functionaries.

Since there is no baptism or confirmation in Islam, and certainly no excommunication either, the only way to know who is a Muslim and who is not is an individual’s self-identification as one. The Chirac administration’s attempt at inventing a single “authority” for Islam is already proving counterproductive. This was made abundantly clear last year when the interior ministry decided to create a “French authority” for Islam.

The ministry gathered a few beards from around the country and put them up for election as founders of the French “church” of Islam. Despite months of publicity, and some $50 million in public funds (illegal under French secular rules), the election that the ministry organized for the “church of Islam” attracted around 40,000 voters, less than one percent of Muslims eligible for the franchise. Not surprisingly, those who voted were mostly political militants who want to transform Islam into an ideology and use it as an instrument of achieving power, or at least a share in it.

Thus the battle Chirac needs to fight is not with Muslims in France, but instead with the militant Islamists that his own government has helped and financed.

French Muslims have scores of non-religious organizations and associations. But the authorities never talk to them. French governments, on both the left and the right, cannot understand a simple fact: It is possible to be a believing and practicing Muslim without subscribing to communitarian politics.

Despite Chirac’s typically monarchic “instructions” to the legislature, the French parliament should not rush into hasty lawmaking on this sensitive issue. What France needs instead is a proper study of the Islamic presence on her soil.

Such a study would show that France has no problem with its Muslim citizens as such. The problem it has is with fascists using religion not only against the French republic, but also, and often primarily, against Muslims. The overwhelming majority of the girls who wear the foulard is forced to do so by verbal threats or even physical violence. The small numbers that might wear it for political and ideological reasons must be allowed to do so for as long as they do not try to impose it on others through psychological terror or physical violence.

Chirac’s intervention may well be connected with the declining popularity of his government. His loose center-right coalition of half a dozen parties is facing local elections next May, and feels threatened by the rising tide of extremism from both left and right. The extreme Right, especially the National Front, which won over 18% of the votes in the presidential election almost two years ago, is trying to portray Islam as a religious threat to “Christian” France. The extreme Left, led by Trotskyites, claims that Islam is now the only religion that can endanger France’s secular traditions.

By trying to make his own Islamic pitch, Chirac may well be trying to chip at the support base of both extreme-right and extreme-left parties. This may a clever tactic in electoral terms. But it leaves the real issue untouched: France is threatened by a number of extremist groups of which the Islamists are but one — that have to be challenged and defeated in the political arena.

— Amir Taheri is an Iranian author of ten books on the Middle East and Islam. He’s reachable through www.benadorassociates.com.

==============================

Conflict With No End In Sight (Free Congress Foundation, 031204)

Terror alerts were sounded this week in Kenya and Saudi Arabia. Our government expressed concern about the likelihood of renewed action by Islamic militants. We hope it will turn out to be a false alarm. But innocent people in both countries have learned the hard way just what Islamic militants are capable of doing.

Many Americans have probably forgotten that al Qaeda terrorists destroyed the American embassy during the summer of 1998. Twelve Americans were among the 219 people killed. This summer, Kenya’s police are said to have discovered a scheme to destroy our new embassy.

Terrorists in Saudi Arabia reportedly have placed a housing complex for Westerners under “active surveillance.” The recent bombing in Riyadh did more than just kill and maim people. It sent a shock wave through the populace, particularly those in the government who had extended support to al Qaeda.

Many Westerners would think, given the terror alerts, that the term “jihad” represents violence against those whom the radical Islamists view to be their enemies.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

My colleague, Robert Spencer, adjunct fellow at the Free Congress Foundation, has worked tirelessly over the past few years to raise the public’s awareness about the threat that Islamists pose to the United States and Western Civilization. He has published a number of monographs and three books on Islam, including one co-authored by Daniel Ali, a former Muslim who converted to Catholicism. Their book, Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics, was written in the hope of awakening American Catholics to the threat that we face from Islamic true believers. Admittedly, there are many Muslims who are leading peaceful lives and who are sincerely tolerant in their dealings with representatives of other religions. But the threat posed by the radical Islamists represents an unusual conflict, unlike any experienced by our nation before: we face an enemy that is not a state. Instead, the enemy consists of true believers who, given access to sophisticated technology, can wreak a good deal of damage based on their ability to strike with surprise.

These true believing Islamists interpret the violent sections of the Qur’an quite literally and act upon their urgings without fear that they will kill innocent people. Nor do they respect Muslims who are intent on leading peaceful lives: witness the bombing in Turkey, a secular Muslim country that maintains good relations with our own country.

Spencer argues that we in the West are being sold an inaccurate view of Islam by writers such as Karen Armstrong, author of Islam: A Short History, who blame Christianity for the tensions between the two civilizations, failing to concede that even before the onset of the Crusades, the belief in jihad had driven Muslims to conquer Spain and much of North Africa. Jihad, explains Spencer, means that the Islamic community has a responsibility to fight unbelievers, including Christians and Jews — only because they believe another religion.

Spencer writes in the Free Congress Foundation monograph Jihad in Context: Beyond Political Correctness, What the Qur’an Really Says that “it is clear today and throughout Islamic history, millions of Muslims have considered jihad to be a war to establish the supremacy of Islam. Many have believed, and believe today, that they are commanded to fight this war by Allah himself.” Writers such as Armstrong prefer to discount the writings contained in the Qur’an’s Sura 9, the most violent teachings of Muhammad that come from when he was a political and military leader. Yet many Muslim theologians assign these teachings greater precedence in Islamic theology than more tolerant sayings of Muhammad that he spoke earlier in his life.

Radical Islamic fundamentalists harbor contempt for our democratic way of life and, given the opportunity, will stop at nothing to accomplish their goal of bringing our country to its knees. We have placed tough anti-terrorist laws on the books to help our law enforcement agencies stop terrorists. There is a need for proper accountability and oversight on the part of Congress and the Judiciary to ensure the USA-PATRIOT Act’s considerable powers are deployed against terrorists in the way that Congress intended when the law was passed in October 2001, not used to circumvent the constitutional liberties of American citizens involved in non-terrorism cases. If the USA-PATRIOT powers are allowed to be deployed indiscriminately, that would hand the terrorists a backhanded victory, proving their contempt for Western democracy is justified.

Even so, more than two years after the attacks of 9/11 many Americans would like to believe that things are back to normal. Spencer’s work, however, indicates that what many Americans and our radical Islamist adversaries consider “normal” are likely to be two very different things. We can only hope and pray that the West’s belief in peace and tolerance prevail in a conflict that has no end in sight.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

Questions For CAIR (Free Congress Foundation, 031212)

The Council on American-Islamic Relations struck another pose of “righteous” indignation. CAIR launched a campaign to protest the statement made on December 4 by radio broadcaster Paul Harvey that Islam is “a religion that encourages killing.” When Harvey made that inflammatory statement, he was discussing cockfighting in Iraq.

CAIR’s campaign of faxes and e-mails apparently motivated Harvey to retract his statement, saying through a stand-in that Harvey had been reminded that Islam is a “religion of peace.”

There is nothing Paul Harvey needed to retract or for which he needed to apologize. However, CAIR needs to answer a great many questions and has yet to do so.

Many Muslims honor people of other faiths and do not kill. Many have even made their own peace with the West and our traditions of tolerance. The work of those who have not can be seen in terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the millions of Muslims that support, often quite vocally, their bloody work.

Muhammad stated quite clearly: “I have been ordered (by Allah) to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform As-Salat (prayers) and give Zakat (obligatory charity), so if they perform all that, then they save their lives and properties from me except for Islamic laws, and their reckoning (accounts) will be with (done by) Allah.”

Muhammad answered quite clearly in response to a question about what the “best deed” is after belief in Allah that it is “To participate in Jihad (Holy fighting) in Allah’s Cause.”

These are only two quotations of many in the religious documents of Islam that indicate at its core its beliefs are different from the way that Judaism and Christianity have evolved. For one, the Qur’an is considered by Muslims to consist entirely of words spoken by Allah himself. When the Qur’an urges violence, as it does in the notorious “Verse of the Sword” (“Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them,” Sura 9:5) and many other passages, all too many Muslims believe that they have been given a command from Almighty God that must be obeyed.

CAIR ignores this, and demands that others ignore it, too, despite mounting evidence that radical Muslims are using such passages to recruit terrorists even here in the United States. Now CAIR is crowing that it has also bullied Paul Harvey into pretending that these Qur’anic exhortations to violence do not exist.

CAIR’s hands aren’t clean: CAIR officials have never explained how people who had important affiliations with CAIR, including their community affairs director, had been arrested on terrorism-related charges. Nor have they ever made a full disclosure about the backing CAIR has received from organizations affiliated with Saudi Arabia’s extremist Wahhabi sect.

CAIR has brazenly offered to arrange a summit meeting between its select list of American Muslim leaders and Harvey. If Harvey decides to go, he should not be buffaloed, but be armed with the facts and ask tough questions.

Robert Spencer, Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation, posed eight questions to CAIR in a March 10, 2003 article “Speak to Me, Ibrahim!” that appeared in FrontPageMagazine.com.

Question: The Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud gave CAIR $500,000 for its program to put books and tapes about Islam in American libraries. The American Muslim leader W.D. Muhammad has said that when Saudis give money to American Muslims, they say, “We’re gonna give you our money, then we want you to…prefer our school of thought.” Were these books and tapes approved by Islamic authorities belonging to the Saudi Wahhabi sect?

Question: CAIR’s stated intention in the library campaign is to help Americans learn about Islam “as a religion of peace and justice.” How is this goal consistent with financing from Wahhabis, a sect so fanatical and extremist that it sanctions violence against non-Muslims and even against Muslims it considers heretical?”

Question: Why, when terrorist groups around the world use the words “Islam and Jihad” in their names, are people who ask questions about this fact tarred by CAIR as having an “anti-Muslim agenda?” What is CAIR really doing to sever the worldwide connection between Islam and terrorism?

CAIR officials or former officials have been arrested on charges related to terrorism yet all it offers is silence and stonewalling in discussing what are its real motives.

It’s not Paul Harvey who should be called to account, it’s CAIR. When will the mainstream news media realize this?

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

Terror supporters stir up crowd at Florida Islamic conference (Jihad Watch, 040103)

http://www.jihadwatch.org/

An extraordinarily important report in today’s WND comes from the inside of the controversial Florida Islamic conference about which we have written here before. It’s a lengthy, detailed, insider’s account (and it’s just part one) — read it all, but here are a few highlights:

“Just as a Florida Islamic conference was trying to recover from one media controversy, they were mired in another when Islamic speakers who have voiced support for suicide bombers and referred to Jews as ‘Jewish crackers,’ ‘apes’ and ‘pigs’ freely addressed the crowd and were warmly embraced by conference leaders.

“The speakers addressed the crowd just hours after Islamic leader Dr. Sayed M. Saeed assured media that those present represented ‘mainstream’ Islam, and radical rhetoric or ‘misguided imams’ would not be tolerated. The controversial leaders addressed the crowd after all media (except for WND) had left. One addressed the attendees in only Arabic in a separate room. . . .

“Last April, while addressing 2 million followers at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, chief cleric Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Sudais prayed to God to ‘terminate’ the Jews, who he called ‘the scum of humanity, the rats of the world, prophet killers ... pigs and monkeys.’ Al-Sudais also urged Arabs and Muslims to abandon peace initiatives with Israel. His comments were carried worldwide by Reuters and the Associated Press. The racist characterization of Jews was not a singular occurrence, as suggested by some media. Al-Sudais has variously described Jews as ‘evil,’ a ‘continuum of deceit,’ ‘tyrannical’ and ‘treacherous.’

“Al-Sudais was listed as a ‘specially invited guest’ of the conference . . . Following media exposure, al-Sudais’ name disappeared from conference materials. Later, Imam Siraj Wahhaj’s name also was dropped from a new issue of the program. Wahhaj was deemed a potential unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and sits on the board of directors of the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA, and the advisory board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.

“On the opening night of the conference, Dec. 19, Dr. S.M. Syeed, secretary general of the ISNA, addressed the controversy directly, with media present.

Syeed said the conference presented and ‘extraordinary opportunity’ since the public and media are ‘waiting to see what we’re saying.

“‘We would never allow such statements to be made on our stage,’ Syeed said. ‘That kind of rhetoric has no place in our conference, projects or programs. We need to be sensitive and we should certainly distance ourselves from them.’

“Referring to the prior media controversy, Saeed said, ‘This does not represent the Islam mainstream … these misguided imams. …We should clearly announce they are not representing us or the message of the prophet as mercy to mankind.’ . . .

“Early the next day, the moderator announced that an address by Egyptian cleric Sheikh Wagdy Ghunaim would be re-scheduled from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The moderator said Ghunaim was ‘in town’ but was not present at the Silver Spurs Arena. The sheikh had previously referred to Jews as ‘monkeys’ and ‘pigs’ during a Brooklyn College conference of the American Muslim Alliance on May 24, 1998. Before leading the audience in anti-Jewish verse, Ghuneim said: ‘The Jews distort words from their meanings. ... They killed the prophets and worshipped idols. ... Allah says he who equips a warrior of jihad is like the one who makes jihad himself.’”

Another speaker, Imam Malik, “has previously voiced empathy and support for suicide bombers, denied Muslims were involved in 9-11, characterized the war on terror as a conspiratorial Zionist plot designed to destroy Islam and Muslims, and blamed attacks on affirmative action on ‘the rise of the Jewish cracker,’ according to media reports and audio/video recordings obtained by WND.”

One problem in an otherwise excellent piece was this nuggest of dhimmitude: “Middle East experts told WND that in contradiction to mainstream Islam, which accepts Jews as fellow believers in monotheism, Hamas is characterized by a theological anti-Semitism that regards Israel and Jews as an embodiment of evil in the world that will, in time, be destroyed as part of the divine plan.”

Unfortunately, Hamas’s view is supported by passages of the Qur’an such as Suras 2:62-5, 5:59-60, and 7:166, all of which depict Jews as “pigs and monkeys.” Sura 9:30 says Jews and Christians are under the curse of Allah. Mainstream Islam does recognize Jews as fellow monotheists, but these other aspects are part of it also.

==============================

Courts Weigh Libel Cases Against Legislators (WS, 040102)

By Peter Brownfeld

WASHINGTON — Libel cases against lawmakers are not uncommon — as North Carolina Republican Rep. Cass Ballenger learned this month — but in many cases the immunity lawmakers receive as elected public officials goes a long way in protecting them.

But not every time, say experts.

“I defended a spate of them when I was [general counsel for the House of Representatives] and they’ve continued on occasion, given that the members are always giving speeches outside their immunity,” said Stanley Brand, who served as general counsel from 1976 to 1983.

In libel suits, public figures such as lawmakers are accorded “absolute privilege.”

“Elected government officials who make statements that are a necessary part of their government function are completely immunized,” said John Watson professor of communication law at American University, explaining the cover that absolute privilege affords.

For a plaintiff to sue a congressman for libel, the plaintiff first “would have to show actual malice: that the congressman knew the statements were false or acted in reckless disregard, and that’s a heavy burden to overcome,” Brand said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is going to try. The group announced in early December that it has filed a defamation suit against Ballenger for his claims that CAIR is “the fund-raising arm of Hezbollah.”

Ballenger made the claim in an interview for his hometown paper, The Charlotte Observer. He also claimed that the stress of living across the street from CAIR’s Washington, D.C., office “bugged the hell” out of his wife and led to the breakup of their marriage.

In its lawsuit, CAIR says Ballenger’s statements damaged the group’s reputation and are not protected speech because he did not make them within the scope of his role as a congressman.

The suit says Ballenger’s claim that CAIR raised funds for terrorists was made “with actual malice, wrongful and willful intent to injure…and with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity.”

Brand said because Ballenger’s statement was not strictly speaking part of his legislative duties, but part of a newspaper interview, his priviliged status is not entirely clear.

But CAIR, which is seeking $2 million in compensatory and punitive damages along with attorney fees, may have a difficult time proving its case, he added.

“They would have to show that the congressman uttered a false statement about them that disparaged them in some way, that harmed them in some way, and they have to show actual damages,” he said.

Brand said cases like the one between CAIR and Ballenger can take years, in part because the courts are cautious abour dismissing claims against lawmakers unless the complaint referred back to a statement the lawmaker made on the floor of Congress or in committee.

Even cases that appear frivolous “are not that easy to dismiss,” Brand said. “You have to show that you’re absolutely immune. Courts are reluctant to throw things out on a preliminary basis.”

By example, one suit against former Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wisc., went all the way to the Supreme Court, said Don Ritchie, associate historian in the Senate Historical Office

Ritchie said Proxmire was sued by a scientist, Ronald Hutchinson, after the senator gave Hutchinson his “Golden Fleece of the Month Award,” a distinction Proxmire handed out to people or organizations that he thought wasted government funds. Hutchinson earned the “award” for his research on the emotional behavior of monkeys.

In delivering the prize, Proxmire made statements about the research on the Senate floor and in a press release.

Hutchinson “has made a fortune from his monkeys and in the process made a monkey of the American taxpayer,” Proxmire said in his release.

Although the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled that Proxmire was protected by his status as a legislator, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court ruling, concluding that the press release was not protected in the same way as the statement on the Senate floor.

Probably the largest number of libel suits against a single lawmaker was directed at Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc.. McCarthy took advantage of his senatorial immunity by making accusations and bold statements on the Senate floor.

“McCarthy would say things on the floor of the Senate and people challenged him to say it off the floor of the Senate,” Ritchie said. To protect himself from libel suits, “McCarthy was very careful about not repeating many of his statements.”

Ritchie said that although plaintiffs often ask for monetary damages, that is not necessarily the primary goal.

“In some cases people bring the libel case just to make a point. Whether they win it or not, in a sense they’ve drawn attention to the issue and put their opponent on the defensive,” Ritchie said.

“Usually a libel lawsuit is an effort to get back your reputation and you get back your reputation by having it repaired in the public arena,” said Watson, who added that libel cases often end with an apology, retraction or clarification of the contested comments.

One of CAIR’s likely motives is simply to contest publicly Ballenger’s assertions in order to protect its reputation, said Thomas Dienes, professor of law at George Washington University.

“I think sometimes it’s almost necessary to do it just for the sake of doing it. You don’t really expect the win and you’re telling all your donors: ‘We are contesting it.’ If you didn’t do it, then people would be saying that it must be true.”

==============================

Veiled Threat (Weekly Standard, 040119)

Can French secularism survive Islam?

IN LATE DECEMBER, Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual leader of the Lebanese radical organization Hezbollah, released to the Western media a letter in which he complained of a “stripping of liberties from Muslims, even when they have not disobeyed the law,” and warned of an emerging climate “hostile to religion and to Muslim citizens.” The tone was not unusual for a Hezbollah letter. What was unusual was the addressee. For the broadside was launched neither at George Bush nor at John Ashcroft but at French president Jacques Chirac, who until recently was hailed as a hero among Arab radicals for his opposition to the American invasion of Iraq. Last March, Chirac was mobbed by hundreds of thousands of Algerian well-wishers in the streets of Oran. Even Fadlallah in his letter (which is reproduced on the French Middle East website www.proche-orient.info) professed himself “mindful of France’s political role—under your administration—in Lebanese, Arab, and French matters, and the convergence of our positions, along with our interests, despite differences on certain points.”

Fadlallah’s gripe is a law now being rushed to the French National Assembly that by February will, in many settings, forbid women and girls to wear Muslim headscarves. On December 11, a Chirac-appointed blue-ribbon commission under the direction of the centrist politician Bernard Stasi recommended a ban on “conspicuous” religious symbols—including headscarves, yarmulkes, and “large crosses”—in schools, hospitals, and other public buildings. There were other things in the report, including the proposal to add two new national holidays—Yom Kippur and Id

al-Adha, the Islamic feast of Abraham. The new holidays were approved by 98% of Muslims, according to mid-December polling done by daily Le Parisien, but were overwhelmingly rejected by the public at large. The commission also broached the establishment of a School of Islamic Studies and the teaching of le fait religieux (“religion as a subject”) in secondary schools. This last measure would seem particularly pressing in a country that has grown thoroughly alienated from religion. According to an article published in Le Figaro two days after Christmas, 45% of those who describe themselves as Catholics are unable to say what Easter celebrates.

But the commission’s proposals on the veil dwarfed everything else. The French are obsessed with Muslim headwear, with an intensity that can mystify foreigners. There are a dozen books on the veil selling briskly in French bookstores now, and to rattle off some of their titles puts one in mind of a Monty Python routine: “One Veiled, the Other Not”; “The Veil That Is Tearing France Apart”; “A Veil Over the Republic”; “Drop the Veil!” (by the Iranian feminist Chahdortt Djavann), and “What the Veil Veils” (by the leftist gadfly and Stasi commission member Régis Debray). The controversy dates from 1989, when the first cases of girls’ refusing to uncover themselves cropped up. Over 15 years, the issue has been settled and reopened through a series of bans, rules, waivers, overturnings, and decrees.

It is true that more women are wearing coverings lately (at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Asnières, a third of the female students are covered, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education) and that there has been a spike in confrontations between public-school girls and authorities (some of them related to political issues in the Middle East and in Iraq). But the most recent statistics—1,200 cases of veiled girls in state schools, with four expulsions—would seem to indicate little more than a dress-code problem of limited extent. Yet the French are debating it as Americans would debate a declaration of war.

Which is what the French man on the street perceives it to be. At issue is the assimilability of France’s Arab immigrants and their children. France is now about 10% Muslim. Some set the Muslim population (almost all of it Arab) at 5 million, others at 8 million. But all agree that the Muslims are disproportionately (even unconscionably) poor, clustered in housing projects surrounding France’s biggest cities, victimized by discrimination, and ravaged by unemployment and increasingly crime. Young men of Arab descent (beurs, as they’re called) have been responsible for a lot of that crime, including the vast majority of the hundreds of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in France over the last three years, and for much of an epidemic unruliness in France’s schools. In “The Lost Territories of the Republic,” the sociologist Emmanuel Brenner made an inventory of such classroom incidents—kids guffawing through lectures on the Holocaust, teachers subjected to ethnic taunts, humiliation of girls—that is reported to have shocked Jacques Chirac profoundly. So the veil is to the French imagination what graffiti were to the American imagination in the late 1970s: harmless per se, yet a marking of territory, sparking fear that those willing to do harm are in the neighborhood.

This attitude toward the veil upsets Claude Allègre, the Socialist former minister of education, who wrote recently: “Anyone who thinks that the ‘atypical’ presence of a couple hundred veiled girls among 7 or 8 million adolescent students is enough to bring a rather apathetic France to its boiling point is kidding himself. The veil is above all a symptom of fear—a fear that Le Pen and his retrograde and dangerous ideas can ride on.” French centrist politicians don’t want the far-right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen to use anxiety over the veil—and more generally over immigration and assimilation—to score big victories in the regional elections coming this spring. That is part of the reason why the law on the veil is being rushed to the legislature. And also part of the reason why France’s minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, has spent much of the past year trying to bring Islam into line with the country’s laws.

France has a sharp separation of church and state that regulates religion under the rubric of laïcité, which can be translated as “secularism” but is a specifically French concept. As Paris’s Cardinal Lustiger has correctly noted, laïcité—particularly the 1905 laws in which it is encoded—is “a history,” more than a theory of government. It was meant to solve several concrete problems. In 1905, the church was reactionary; it possessed enormous state power through its control of the schools; and enormous power to influence elections through its assets and its authority to excommunicate and preach. These factors had come together to permit the church to play a central role—as both propagandist and backroom string-puller—in denying justice to Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish career officer framed on charges of spying for Germany and sentenced to exile.

Laïcité, in other words, is a hundred-year-old compromise between a decadent state Catholicism and a crusading rationalism, the key insistence of which is that all religions must confine their practice to the private sphere. Religion has no place in political life. A French politician who uttered an American-style platitude along the lines of “My faith sure as heck means a lot to me” would be pressured to resign. Where the American First Amendment seeks to protect the free exercise of religion from state interference, laïcité seeks to protect the country’s political life from being hijacked by the church.

PERHAPS WE ASSUME too much in asserting that the open democratic republics of the West are compatible with “religion.” We know empirically only that they are compatible with Protestantism, Judaism, and Catholicism. It is no insult to Islam to say that it may not be as assimilable into a regime of laïcité as Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism were—because there is little historical evidence that Islam can be effectively or sincerely practiced only in private. In recent years, French institutions have often tried to fudge the matter by offering ad hoc religious easements to Muslims that would be unthinkable for Protestants, Catholics, or Jews: Last summer in Lille, the mayoralty made one of its swimming pools women-only, and agreed to board up the windows, under pressure from Islamic groups.

The philosopher Chantal Delsol referred in a recent interview to Marsilius of Padua, who argued in the fourteenth century that the papacy had no right to interfere in the affairs of states. “The Islamic Marsilius hasn’t appeared yet,” she said. “And if he did, on what [Islamic] texts could he possibly base his case?” If Delsol is right, then France has a difficult choice: either scrapping the principle that has been the foundation of its social harmony for a century or banning the public expression of a religion. One of them—either the French social compact, or Islam as it is normally practiced—will have to go.

And France has a great deal of trouble admitting that this may be the choice it faces. The sociologist Michel Wieviorka answers Delsol by saying that we must distinguish between Islam (religious, good) and Islamism (political, bad), “much as one must separate Catholicism, Judaism, or Protestantism from their most radical fundamentalisms.” The distinction between Islam and “extremist” Islam redefines as political any elements of the religion that the French public doesn’t like. It thus offers an out to those who would retain their multiculturalist credentials—”your culture is just as good as mine”—while taking aim specifically at the veil. It is not Islam but “extremism” that is being targeted.

Such thinking has the added benefit of moving France’s biggest problem out of an arena the French don’t understand (religion) into an arena they understand quite well (politics). But at a steep price, for it throws the proposed legislation on the veil into a thicket of disingenuousness.

The neutrality of the law is a fraud, because France is worried about Islam, not about “religion.” So the Île-de-France chapter of the French Council on the Muslim Religion (CFCM), the newly established public body that mediates between French Muslims and their government, is right to declare that the law “is aimed at Muslims, stigmatizes their religion, practices exclusion, and condemns them to turning inward to their own community.” The ban on crosses and yarmulkes is meant only to disguise the singling out of Islam by distributing restrictions evenly across the religions—as if the religions themselves were different “styles” of the same thing. Clearly laïcité is not the principle that is being defended here—it is being defended, yes, but only incidentally, as a means of curbing Islam while allowing the French state to appear politically correct.

Obviously political correctness is not a presentable reason for an intrusion into the religious lives of a nation’s citizens. So French authorities are flailing about for a pretext that can be mentioned in polite company. Chirac has tried to cast his actions as a defense of feminism, saying that “a society’s level of civilization is measured first and foremost by the position that women occupy in it.” In this he has had ample backing, from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur to the magazine Elle. The magazine, casting the veil as an “intolerable discrimination” and the “visible symbol of the submission of women in public,” sponsored a petition against it that was signed by the designer Sonia Rykiel and the actresses Isabelle Adjani, Nathalie Baye, Emmanuelle Béart, and Isabelle Huppert, along with several intellectuals and politicians.

On the Monday before Christmas, 3,000 veiled women took to the streets of Paris, begging to differ. They marched against the proposed law along with a sizable male “security detail.” Two young students claimed to have come up with the idea for a “spontaneous” demonstration themselves. No one believed them. There are three more demonstrations planned before the first week of February. One will be led by the Muslim Collective of France, whose best-known organizer is the telegenic fundamentalist Tariq Ramadan. Another has been organized for January 17 by Mohammed Ennacer Latrèche, founder of the Strasbourg-based French Muslims’ party (PMF). The theme of the PMF march will be “No to Lay Islamophobia.” (“Islamophobia” being a word coined defensively two years ago in response to the essayist Pierre-André Taguieff’s book “The New Judeo-phobia,” which described an anti-Semitic upsurge on the left and in Islamist circles. A good dictionary definition of Islamophobia might be “resistance to Judeophobia.”)

Religious parties are a violation of French laïcité (the PMF is another of those ad hoc exceptions mentioned above), but in fact, Latrèche’s is not a Muslim party—its program consists almost purely of anti-Semitism. At Latrèche rallies, lists are handed out that detail American and Jewish products to boycott; the “Jewish” ones are accompanied by a Nazi yellow star bearing the word “Jude” (German for Jew). Latrèche was the subject of a telling profile in early January by the journalists Blandine Grosjean and Olivier Vogel of Libération, in which it was noted that he has taken to referring to France’s Socialist party as the Zionist party, and now associates with one of France’s notorious Holocaust deniers. He coedited a work called “The Judeo-Nazi Manifesto of Ariel Sharon” and took several Parisian youths to Baghdad to serve as human shields before the invasion of Iraq. “Fear is going to have to change sides,” Libération quoted Latrèche as saying. “It’s going to have to pass from the side of veiled women to the side of those politicians who are going to vote for this law.”

In a sense, this is exactly what France has bargained for in transforming a serious religious problem into a serious political problem. And it is a good bargain, too, making it possible to refer Latrèche-style outrages to the police, arresting the violent, and leaving in peace those who practice their religion inoffensively. But none of this is as easy as it sounds.

Jean Bauberot, one of the members of the Stasi commission, stressed that France needs a policy on religion that is “credible beyond our own borders.” He is right for two reasons. One is that, however battered it may look at present, the European Union could yet evolve into a tighter confederation, with community-wide directives on religious freedom. France would like those to arise out of its own system, and not out of, say, the system of Ireland, whose constitution mentions the Holy Trinity in its preamble.

The second reason involves Islam worldwide. French politicians were apt to brag during the Iraq war of how clearly their voice was heard in the Arab world. France indeed has sway there, but at the price that it must listen attentively to the Arab world’s wishes. The mufti of Egypt has darkly warned Chirac that the anti-veil law would “destroy the social peace of French society.” The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has called it “an interference in the realm of Muslims’ personal and religious liberty.” And Hezbollah wrote that angry letter to Chirac. Interior Minister Sarkozy was thus heartened when Mohamed Sayyed Tantawi, the hugely influential imam of al-Azhar theological institute in Egypt, told him that France had the right to ban the veil. While Sarkozy’s visit was presented as a drop-in after a vacation, it was obviously of high diplomatic import.

But alongside any cheer that Sarkozy may feel at this triumph of diplomacy, it must be sobering to know that France needs a nihil obstat from Muslim clerics abroad before it can pass a piece of domestic legislation. More sobering still is an increasing tendency among Muslim theologians to count France as part of Dar al-Islam (“the House of Islam”). When Tantawi made similar accommodations to Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, in the late 1990s, other clerics at al-Azhar repudiated them under pressure from French Muslim groups.

WHAT LESSONS has America drawn from this episode? None. It has decided to gloat instead. There are elements of laïcité in American politics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union’s efforts to ban crèches from public land at Christmastime. But the broader American system does not insist on the religious evacuation of the public square. It is probably the stronger for that. Nevertheless, Americans in government have been too quick to criticize French attempts to regulate the veil. John Hanford, the State Department’s roving ambassador for freedom of religion, expressed his concern that France was violating “a fundamental principle of religious freedom.” Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum called the law “further evidence of the postmodern culture in Europe. When you marginalize faith, you end up marginalizing the people of faith.” (In Britain, too, the measure was attacked by both the Foreign Office and Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury.)

These are cheap shots. Americans overestimate the constitutional issues involved primarily because they are ignorant of the historic ones. Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of Le Monde, is right to say, “It is no longer a question of religious freedom but of public order.” One can prefer the American means of dealing with religious diversity and still question the smug assumption that America’s constitutional order could easily cope with the facts on the ground that exist in France—i.e., the equivalent of, in this country, some 30 million rapidly radicalizing Muslims, concentrated in a handful of pivotal cities.

Banning the veil is not about Anglo-Saxon constitutional niceties, it is about a clash of civilizations. France’s Muslims bring higher rates of practice and much more passion to their religion than France’s post-Christian secularists bring to the defense of the Republic. Those Frenchmen who cling to the order of laïcité have begun to fear that Islam is strong enough to overthrow it. That is a problem for people of all non-Islamic religions. Devout Catholics have at times been shabbily treated under laïcité, and many likely think the world it structures is arid and unspiritual. Yet in a country where the public square is dominated by laïcité, Catholics are able to practice their faith unmolested. What guarantee do they have that they will be able to do so in a public square dominated by Islam?

Such questions show why this law, which looks illogical and off-the-point to foreigners, is nothing of the sort. France’s problem is not some short-circuiting of individual freedom due to a faulty constitutional code—in fact, looking at the problem that way is what has led France to delay acting on the veil for 15 years. The problem is finding a way to deal with Islam while it is still, as condescending editorialists put it, the second religion of France, and before it becomes, more simply, the religion of France.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

==============================

In The Crosshairs: Now it may be Europe’s turn (Midwest Conservative Journal, 040112)

Previously seen as a relative backwater in the war on terror, Europe is now in the frontline. ‘It’s trench warfare,’ said one security expert. ‘We keep taking them out. They keep coming at us. And every time they are coming at us harder.’

An investigation by The Observer has revealed the extent of the new networks that Islamic militants have been able to build in Europe since 11 September - despite the massive effort against them. The militants’ operations go far beyond the few individuals’ activities that sparked massive security alerts over Christmas and the new year. Interviews with senior counter-intelligence officials, secret recordings of conversations between militants and classified intelligence briefings have shown that militants have been able to reconstitute, and even enlarge, their operations in Europe in the past two years. The intelligence seen by The Observer reveals that:

Britain is still playing a central logistical role for the militants, with extremists, including the alleged mastermind of last year’s bombings in Morocco, and a leader of an al-Qaeda cell, regularly using the UK as a place to hide. Other radical activists are using Britain for fundraising, massive credit card fraud, the manufacture of false documents and planning. Recruitment is also continuing. In one bugged conversation, a senior militant describes London as ‘the nerve centre’ and says that his group has ‘Albanians, Swiss [and] British’ recruits. He needs people who are ‘intelligent and highly educated’, he says and implies that the UK can, and does, supply them.

Islamic terror cells are spreading eastwards into Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic for the first time, prompting fears of a new battleground in countries with weak authorities, powerful criminal gangs and endemic corruption in the years to come.

Austria has become a central communications hub for Muslim extremists; France has become a key recruiting ground for fighters in Chechnya; and German groups, who often have extensive international links, are developing contacts with Balkan mafia gangs to acquire weapons.

The investigation has also revealed that, despite moves by the government there to crack down, Saudi Arabia remains the key source of funds for al-Qaeda and related militant groups.

==============================

Terror cells regroup - and now their target is Europe (Guardian, 040111)

Secret intelligence papers from across the continent reveal a growing danger from a widening network of fanatics - and this is a struggle the West cannot lose

They had been watching him for months, aware that his pop star good looks concealed a secret life as one of Europe’s new terrorist kingpins. Finally, on a cold winter dawn, the police moved in. Abderrazak Mahdjoub did not resist as armed German officers surrounded his Hamburg home and led him away.

For at least a year, investigators claim, the 30-year-old Algerian had been a key part of a network of Islamic militants dedicated to recruiting and dispatching suicide bombers to the Middle East. Several volunteers had got through, wreaking havoc in a series of attacks in Iraq. Many more were on their way, along with bombers focused on targets in Europe.

Even worse, his associates were planning bombs in Western Europe. At least two European intelligence services had made previous attempts to take Mahdjoub out. Now, finally, it was the Germans’ turn. This weekend, just over a month after his arrest, Mahdjoub remains in prison at an undisclosed location. He is likely to remain incarcerated for some time.

Mahdjoub’s arrest was a minor victory in a major war being fought, bitterly and secretly, in cities from London to Warsaw, from Madrid to Oslo. It pits the best investigative officers in Europe against a fanatical network of men dedicated to the prosecution of jihad both in Europe and overseas. It is a war security officials know they cannot afford to lose - and that they know they will be fighting for the foreseeable future.

· Britain is still playing a central logistical role for the militants, with extremists, including the alleged mastermind of last year’s bombings in Morocco, and a leader of an al-Qaeda cell, regularly using the UK as a place to hide. Other radical activists are using Britain for fundraising, massive credit card fraud, the manufacture of false documents and planning. Recruitment is also continuing. In one bugged conversation, a senior militant describes London as ‘the nerve centre’ and says that his group has ‘Albanians, Swiss [and] British’ recruits. He needs people who are ‘intelligent and highly educated’, he says and implies that the UK can, and does, supply them.

· Islamic terror cells are spreading eastwards into Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic for the first time, prompting fears of a new battleground in countries with weak authorities, powerful criminal gangs and endemic corruption in the years to come.

· Austria has become a central communications hub for Muslim extremists; France has become a key recruiting ground for fighters in Chechnya; and German groups, who often have extensive international links, are developing contacts with Balkan mafia gangs to acquire weapons.

The investigation has also revealed that, despite moves by the government there to crack down, Saudi Arabia remains the key source of funds for al-Qaeda and related militant groups.

Investigators stress that most of the European cells are autonomous, coming together on an ad hoc basis to complete specific tasks. To describe them as ‘al-Qaeda’ is simplistic. Instead, sources say, the man most of these new Islamic terror networks look to for direction is Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian Islamic militant who some analysts believe was behind the recent Istanbul suicide bombings against British targets and synagogues. Though he follows a similar agenda to Osama bin Laden, the 37-year-old Zarqawi has always maintained his independence from the Saudi-born fugitive. Last week, his developing stature in global Islamic militancy was reinforced when he issued his first-ever public statement, an audiotape calling on God to ‘kill the Arab and the foreign tyrants, one after another’.

Zarqawi is believed to be in Iran or Iraq. However European investigators have discovered that one of his key lieutenants is an Iraqi Kurd known only as Fouad, a cleric based in Syria, who handles the volunteer suicide bombers sent from Europe to launch attacks in Iraq.

Italian investigators made the first breakthrough in the hunt for Zarqawi’s operatives. Just after 10pm on the evening of 15 June, 2002, an unidentified Arab visitor from Germany - believed to be a senior figure in the militants’ network - arrived at a mosque in the Via Quaranta, Milan. He began by warning the mosque’s Egyptian imam, Abu Omar, about increased surveillance. He was unaware that Italian police were listening to his every word.

Transcripts obtained by The Observer reveal that the visitor spoke of a project needing ‘intelligent and highly educated people’. Already, the visitor said, that ‘where the jihad part is concerned there was a battalion of 25 to 26 units’. It is these ‘units’, believed by investigators to mean potential suicide bombers, that the authorities knew they had to find.

The visitor then began a review of recent developments. He stressed that ‘the thread begins in Saudi Arabia’, where the bulk of funds apparently still comes from. ‘Don’t ever worry about money, because Saudi Arabia’s money is your money,’ the visitor says. He then refers to recent ‘confidential’ meetings in Eastern Europe with Islamic militant leaders.

‘Now Europe is controlled via air and land, but in Poland and Bulgaria and countries that aren’t part of the European Community everything is easy,’ he says. ‘First of all they are corrupt, you can buy them with dollars...[Secondly] they are less-controlled countries, there aren’t too many eyes.’

The man named Austria as a launch pad for attacks. ‘The country from which everything takes off is Austria. There I met all of the sheikhs and all our brothers are there ... it has become the country of international communications. It has become the country of contacts.’

Poland is a particularly important location too, the man says and names a ‘Sheikh Abd al-Aziz’, before boasting: ‘His organisation is stunning.’

After translating the conversation, held in Arabic, Italian investigators immediately relayed the information to counterparts elsewhere in Europe. The British security services swung into action. The transcripts also reveal the continuing importance of London.

‘The nerve centre is still London,’ the man says and hints that there are many recruits from the UK: ‘We have Albanians, Swiss [and] British.’

The role of the UK was reinforced when, last April, 29-year-old Somali-born Cabdullah Ciise was arrested in Milan days after arriving from London, where he had fled to escape Italian investigators months earlier. The Italians suspect him of financing a terror cell involved in the car bomb attack on Israeli tourists in Mombasa, Kenya in November 2002. According to Italian court documents, Ciise transferred money from Great Britain to Somalia through Dubai.

He is also accused of being an important member of Zarqawi’s international terrorist organisation. A year earlier, in May 2002, Faraj Farj Hassan, the suspected leader of an Islamic terrorist cell in Milan, was arrested in Harrow, west London, where he had taken refuge with a relative who had political asylum. Hassan, 23, was arrested for immigration offences and is believed to still be held in Belmarsh high security prison awaiting extradition to Italy.

And last November, an Algerian-born British national from west London was arrested after travelling to Poland. He was the subject of an Algerian arrest warrant alleging his involvement in a terrorist group.

When the Italians arrested Ciise they put him in the same cell as another Islamic radical known as ‘Mera’i’. Again, the conversation was bugged; it gives a chilling insight into the mind of a hardened militant.

Mera’i tells Ciise that he hates their jailers: ‘They like life, I want to be a martyr, I live for jihad. In this life there is nothing, life is afterward, the indescribable sensation of dying a martyr.’

Then the pair talk about the Syrian-based cleric Fouad, whom they describe as the ‘gatekeeper’ to Iraq. Other transcripts reveal conversations between Fouad and Mera’i about how they had organised the flow of ‘brothers’ to Iraq via the Syrian cities of Damascus and Aleppo. British suicide bombers who died in Israel last year travelled through both cities. One of the network’s recruits is believed to have been involved in the rocket attack in October against the Baghdad hotel where Paul Wolfowitz, the American deputy Secretary of Defence, was staying. One phone call between the two reveals Mera’i telling Fouad that: ‘This week more guests will be arriving ... they are good people.’ Fouad replies: ‘I want those that are awake and prepared ... I want those who will strike the earth and make iron rise out of it ... I’m looking for those that were in Japan [ie, kamikaze or suicide bombers].’

The Italian investigation yielded important intelligence and the focus shifted to Germany. After 11 September, authorities there had concentrated on rounding up all those connected with the ‘Hamburg cell’ who had led the attacks on New York and Washington. Soon, however, they came across a group known as ‘al-Tauhid’ (the unitarians) which posed as grave a threat. Al-Tauhid were loyal to Zarqawi; indeed, many of their key personnel had trained in his camp in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

According to an intelligence dossier compiled last year by German criminal intelligence, the link between the Italian network and the German cells was a 30-year-old Palestinian called Mansour Thaer. Another connection was a Turk called Mevluet Tar, a 23-year-old who spoke fluent German. Both were quickly picked up.

The dossier lists a dozen senior al-Tauhid operatives in Germany. Most were involved in the provision of false passports or spent their time raising and transferring funds to fighters in the Middle East. But others, many still at large, were involved in plotting bomb attacks against Jewish targets in Western Europe. At least one militant liaised with Albanian mafia gangs in a bid to obtain weapons, the dossier reveals. Only a handful of the individuals named in the document have been arrested.

Last week there were more arrests. In Paris a group alleged to be recruiting fighters for the war in Chechnya was picked up. In Switzerland a series of raids broke up an alleged support and fundraising network which had connections to the men who set off bombs in Riyadh last May. In Spain, a favoured entry point into Europe for North African militants, investigators continue to chase down terrorists linked to cells rounded up earlier.

A Moroccan cleric called Mohammed al-Garbuzi, whom local authorities claim was a key figure in the Casablanca bombings last May, is believed to be at large in the UK. Scotland Yard last week warned leaders of the Jewish community that the threat ‘remained high’. Senior British police officers said they are aware that millions of pounds are being raised in the UK by credit card fraud for Islamic militant groups.

‘We act when we can,’ said one police source. ‘But we are stretched enough going after the clear and immediate threats, let alone their back-up.’

Security experts stress that the campaign to prevent another major bomb attack in Western Europe has got no easier since major round-ups after 11 September. ‘We are dealing with something that is organic, not mechanical,’ one told The Observer . ‘You can’t remove a part and watch it all break down. It’s more like fungus. Burn some away and it just keeps growing somewhere else.’

The targets, the death toll and the suspects

Istanbul November 2003, 62 dead

Target: British consulate and bank, synagogues

Suspect: Local Islamic group thought to be linked to al-Qaeda or Abu Musab Zarqawi

Baghdad August-October 2003, 50 dead

Target: Al-Rasheed hotel, UN and Red Cross headquarters.

Suspect: European suicide bombers believed to have been recruited by Mullah Fouad in Syria.

Casablanca May 2003, 41 dead

Target: Jewish community centre and Spanish social club

Suspect: Local Islamic group. The authorities want to interview a Moroccan cleric, Mohammed al-Garbuzi, who is believed to be in Britain.

Riyadh May 2003, 34 dead

Target: Luxury compounds in Saudi capital

Suspect: Swiss arrest an eight-strong ‘logistics cell’.

Mombasa November 2002, 16 dead

Target: Israeli tourists at Paradise hotel

Suspect: Kenyan Islamic cell. Some funds allegedly provided by a Somali-born militant living in London, arrested in Milan and ‘a part of Zarqawi’s cell’.

==============================

Muslims Worldwide Protest French Head Scarf Ban (FN, 040117)

PARIS — Waving the French flag or wearing it as a head scarf, thousands of Muslim women marched Saturday through Paris, the center of a worldwide protest against France’s plan to ban head coverings from public schools.

From Baghdad and Beirut to London and Stockholm, protesters condemned the law as an attack on religious freedom. Even in the West Bank city of Nablus and in the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, Srinagar, women came out to support French Muslims.

[KH: Question for Muslims: Do you allow religious freedom in your own country?]

“Where is France? Where is tolerance?” the crowd chanted during the four-hour march through Paris. “The veil is my choice.”

The protesters want to scrap a bill that will go before French lawmakers next month forbidding “conspicuous” religious signs, from Islamic head scarves to Jewish skull caps and large Christian crosses, in public schools. Easy passage is expected, and the law is to become applicable with the new school year in September.

President Jacques Chirac says the aim is to protect the principle of secularism that anchors life in France. However, it also is seen as a way to hold back the swell of Islamic fundamentalism in France’s Muslim community — the largest in Western Europe at an estimated 5 million.

Protesters, from small girls to women, formed a sea of color in fanciful scarves of all sizes in Paris. Bearded men, some in long robes, also joined in the Paris march. A small group set out a prayer mat and prayed.

“Faith is not conspicuous,” said one of hundreds of banners. “Neither Fundamentalist nor Terrorist but Peaceful Citizen,” read another.

Police said up to 10,000 people took part in the peaceful march in the French capital, while several thousand others protested in a half-dozen cities around the country.

Critics of the law claim it will stigmatize France’s Muslims. French authorities contend the principle of secularism is meant to make everybody equal.

“I think it will make things worse,” Kods Mejry, 18, said of the head scarf ban. “There will be no more integration.”

Her blue, white and red scarf matching the French flag was meant “to show that we are French and Muslim and proud of it.”

In Washington, about 100 people protested outside the French Embassy; many were women wearing scarves. The crowded chanted “My scarf, my choice.”

Demonstrators held signs that read: “Repressive Does Not Equal Progressive” and “Is My Scarf a Threat to Democracy?”

In London, 2,400 people demonstrated near the French Embassy in the upscale Knightsbridge area. Waving placards, they chanted: “If this is democracy, we say ‘No, merci!”‘

“The government is isolating Muslims and setting a dangerous precedent,” said Ihtisham Hibatullah, spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain.

Nearby, a small rival group of about 30 demonstrators expressed support for the French ban.

British Foreign Office Minister Mike O’Brien said Britain’s overnment supports the right to display religious symbols.

“In Britain, we are comfortable with the expression of religion, seen in the wearing of the hijab, crucifixes or the kippa,” O’Brien said in a statement. “Integration does not require assimilation.”

Across the Middle East, protesters denounced the French ban. The largest turnout was in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, where some 2,500 people marched. Smaller rallies drew up to 100 people each in the Jordanian capital of Amman, in Cairo and in Kuwait.

Some 300 Palestinian women protested in the West Bank city of Nablus.

“As a people who have been oppressed, we know what it means for others in the world who are denied their freedom,” said Salam Ghazal, head of a local women’s group.

In Iraq, an Islamic group distributed an open letter to Chirac in mosques that called on him to reverse his position, while dozens of male and female students demonstrated at Baghdad’s Al Mustansiriya University.

In Canada, snowy weather and subzero temperatures did not shake the resolve of 300 protesters outside the French consulate in Toronto.

“Public outrage will hopefully cause the French government to rethink what they’re planning on doing,” said Rania Lawendy, a protest organizer.

In Stockholm, too, about 2,000 people marched to the French Embassy. A smaller group protested in Oslo.

The Party of Muslims of France, a small group known for its radical views, organized the Paris march. However, the huge Union of Islamic Organizations of France, a fundamentalist group, gave its blessing and encouraged people to take part.

“The next step is for the president to react before it’s too late,” said Mohamed Latreche, head of the Party of Muslims of France.

==============================

Cleric delivers veil threat (Washington Times, 040121)

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) — Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority said yesterday that Saudi women appearing without their veils in the presence of men “cause the doors of evil to open.”

Grand Mufti Sheik Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Sheik’s remarks came after Saudi Arabia’s leading businesswoman, Lubna Olayan, who delivered the opening speech at an economic conference in the Red Sea port of Jidda this week, was shown on the front pages of local newspapers without a head scarf.

“This is prohibited for all. ... I severely condemn this matter and warn of grave consequences. I am pained by such shameful behavior in the country of the two holy mosques,” Sheik Abdulaziz said in remarks carried by the state Saudi Press Agency.

Men and women at the conference were segregated by a screen, but women were able to cross over into the men’s section — portrayed by some Saudi journalists as a sign of liberalization in the conservative country.

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, is ruled by an alliance of the House of Saud and powerful Wahhabi religious authorities.

Under Saudi Arabia’s Shariah law, women are required to be covered fully in public. Contact with men outside their immediate families is limited.

Sheik Abdulaziz said those who strayed from what he called the righteous path should fear God and His punishment. “They cause the doors of evil to open before the people of Islam,” SPA quoted him as saying.

“What was published in some newspapers about this being the start of liberating the Saudi woman ... such talk is null and void. One’s duty is to obey Shariah by complying with orders and shunning that which is forbidden.”

Female speakers at the conference called for unlocking the potential of women in the work force.

Economists say women make up more than half the graduates from Saudi universities but just 5% of the work force.

The kingdom, facing a wave of militant violence and growing economic challenges, has embarked on a program of cautious reform despite fierce opposition from some religious figures.

Crown Prince Abdullah has promised municipal elections this year, although it is not known if women will be allowed to vote.

==============================

Jihad on U.S. soil (Washington Times, 040312)

Although most media attention has been focused on Martha Stewart, gay “marriage” and the national waistline, the jihad continues in America.

> The FBI and Coast Guard announced last Thursday that they have discovered nine members of the Merchant Marine who may have links to terrorist groups. This is the fruit of Operation Drydock, an anti-terror investigation that has lasted more than a year. These efforts, while laudable, only underscore the fact that terrorists have already begun to try to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of American seaports.

On the same day, three members of the “Virginia jihad network” were found guilty of conspiracy. Masoud Khan, Seifullah Chapman and Hammad Abdur-Raheem played paintball in 2000 and 2001 with a deadly serious purpose: They were training with the hope of joining the Taliban and waging jihad against the United States. Khan was also convicted of attempting to wage war against the United States.

> Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, formerly a high-profile Muslim student activist at the University of Idaho, was charged, also on Thursday, with ties to Hamas. He maintains his innocence. Fox News reported that he “was charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism after federal prosecutors said he helped run Web sites that urge people to contribute money to Hamas.”

> In San Diego last Wednesday, Ilyas Ali, an American citizen, and Muhamed Abid Afridi, a Pakistani national, admitted to drug trafficking in order to raise money for weapons for the Taliban and al Qaeda. They were selling heroin and hashish to raise money for Stinger missiles.

> On the same day, five Muslims were convicted in Buffalo of trafficking in untaxed cigarettes in order to get money for jihad. Mohamed Abuhamra, Aref Ahmed, Ramzy Abdullah, Nagib Aziz and Azzeaz Saleh could get 20 years and $500,000 fines for using the smokes to try to raise money to help the six jihadists from a Lackawanna, N.Y., mosque — the notorious “Lackawanna Six” journey to Afghanistan to join up with al Qaeda.

> A member of the Kashmir jihad was arrested last week in Pennsylvania. Mohammad Aslam, a British citizen, was originally arrested for staying in the United States after the expiration of his visa. Through his fingerprints, however, he was identified as a member of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, wanted for the kidnapping and murder of Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in England in 1984. Mhatre was seized and killed in an attempt to secure the release from prison of the group’s founder, Maqbool Bhat.

> Sgt. Hasan Akbar is the Muslim soldier who attacked his own commanding officers in Kuwait last year while crying out, “You guys are coming into our countries, and you’re going to rape our women and kill our children” — a clear indication that his attack grew out of his identity as a Muslim. After a long period of silence, the Army announced last Thursday that it is going to go ahead with a court martial. Sgt. Akbar could get the death penalty.

> The Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) is building a new mosque that it intends to be one of the grandest in the country. Arabic-language brochures boast that the project has the backing of the radical Sheikh Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian now based in Qatar.

In English, the ISB claims that al-Qaradawi “has never played any role in the ISB.” However, the Boston Herald reports that “records show al-Qaradawi’s name was listed on federal tax forms as recently as 2001 as a member of the society’s board of directors.” The ISB is not alone in embracing al-Qaradawi: establishment Islamic scholar John Esposito has praised him as a champion of a “reformist interpretation of Islam.”

Yet al-Qaradawi has justified suicide bombings, specifically praising such attacks against Israeli civilians. In this he works from tenets of Islamic law that forbid attacks against civilians unless they are aiding the war effort — and al-Qaradawi sees everyone in Israel in this category. Also, according to the Herald, al-Qaradawi exclaimed at a Muslim youth group convention in Toledo in 1995: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through (the) sword, but through Da’awa [preaching].” The Herald adds that “in March 2003, al-Qaradawi issued a religious ruling, a fatwa, encouraging Muslim women, as well as men, to become suicide bombers in the name of Allah and jihad.”

With the biases of the major media abundantly established, it will be interesting to see how much attention such stories receive as the election season kicks into high gear.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of “Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West” and “Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Fait

==============================

Islam And The West: Buzzwords Won’t Fill The Gap (Free Congress Foundation, 040205)

By Paul M. Weyrich

Recently, a friend forwarded an e-mail that contained a link to a news story that should make every adult - especially women - in our country rise to their feet in righteous indignation. A few years ago a Muslim cleric living in Spain published a book telling men how to beat their wives without leaving telltale signs. If a man’s “serene dialogue” failed to bring a “rebellious woman” under control, then he should use a “light and thin stick” to hit her “so it will not leave scars and bruising.” This led to a court case a few weeks ago in which the book was confiscated and the cleric, Mohamed Kamal Mustafa, was given a suspended sentence and a fine.

Given our country’s belief in the First Amendment, that cleric would be free to publish such a work here. If that were to happen, I could never agree to put him on trial for what he wrote, though any man in our country who followed through on the imam’s advice should be sent to trial and given a meaningful penalty. However, for what he wrote, the cleric should receive a hearing in our country’s court of public opinion.

Many Americans concerned with civil rights are quick to come forward with charges of abuse and discrimination against so-called “Islamophobes”, yet fall strangely silent when they are urged to examine Islamic beliefs in greater detail.

The Spanish cleric maintained that he was interpreting texts central to his religion. In his view the Spanish court, with arrogance and ignorance, took it upon itself to proclaim that the imam’s beliefs and the texts he cited are unrepresentative of the Islamic religion or culture.

Indeed, Robert Spencer, adjunct fellow at the Free Congress Foundation, and author of Women and Islam (Free Congress) and Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery), notes that the Qur’an does include sentences that show men and women to be equal, something that defenders of Islam will highlight while portraying Islam to be a religion in harmony with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But, as Mr. Spencer points out, there is much more to Islam and how it treats women.

The Qur’an also contains a directive for the husband to beat his disobedient wife (Sura 4:34) and other passages denying women equality with men - and too many Muslim husbands take these passages as guides for how to deal with their wives.

Women who live in Saudi Arabia, where the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect exerts such a strong influence, risk arrest on suspicion of prostitution simply for walking down the street alone. Ironically, Amnesty International claims that in Pakistan, a locus for sexual slavery trafficking, women have actually been killed for refusing to engage in prostitution.

We hear very little about the sad plight of women in Muslim countries. In America there is much more of an outcry against Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell for their alleged opposition to women’s rights. For instance, on the issue of abortion, Robertson and Falwell place the issue of the unborn child’s right to life ahead of the right of the mother to have a “choice”. They are condemned for speaking out on behalf of the child, who, after all, cannot speak for himself or herself.

I know these men well and I have never heard them say that a woman who gave birth to a child out of wedlock should be stoned or whipped. Never have I heard them say that women must not own property. Never have I heard them say, even in jest, that women cannot walk unaccompanied down a street. Yet, in Muslim countries or regions it’s a different story. Lashings still occur in Nigeria, where the northern provinces are under the influence of Shar’ia, which is an Islamic system of law. In the northern province of Zamfara in January 2001, a teenage mother was lashed one hundred times. Recently, another 16-year-old in Sudan was sentenced to 100 lashes for adultery. Not long ago attention was focused on a mother, Amina Lawal, 31, who had been sentenced to death by stoning. Fortunately, she escaped death through a massive worldwide appeal.

American advocates of diversity and multiculturalism just don’t get it. There is a vast fundamental difference between how women are treated in countries and regions under the sway of Islamic law and how they are treated in the West, with its tradition of individual rights.

That difference alone should make those who are interested in promoting “diversity” realize that a simple, feel-good buzzword will not wash away the differences between the West and much of the Islamic world.

==============================

Preaching Poison

Palestinian clerics encourage child-martyrdom.

By Steven Stalinsky

It has been reported that at least 29 suicide bombers younger than 18 years of age have been exploited into committing attacks by Palestinian terrorist organizations over the past few years. This past Monday an 11-year-old Palestinian boy was apprehended in Nablus with explosives to be used in another apparent suicide attack.

The concept of educating children to become suicide bombers often appears in weekly Palestinian sermons by Khatibs (preachers) who are paid employees of the Palestinian Authority (PA). The sermons are broadcast live every Friday at noon from mosques under control of the PA and are shown on PA television.

The most senior Palestinian Authority religious figure, Mufti Sheikh Ikrimeh Sabri, is a vocal proponent of sending children on terrorist attacks. In an interview with the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, he explained his thoughts on child martyrs, as well as the joy of their mothers: “I feel the martyr is lucky because the angels usher him to his wedding in heaven. I feel the earth moves under the occupiers’ feet... There is no doubt that a child [martyr] suggests that the new generation will carry on the mission with determination. The younger the martyr — the greater and the more I respect him... They [mothers of martyrs] willingly sacrifice their offspring for the sake of freedom. It is a great display of the power of belief. The mother is participating in the great reward of the jihad to liberate Al-Aqsa... I talked to a young man... [who] said: ‘... I want to marry the black-eyed [beautiful] women of heaven.’ The next day he became a martyr. I am sure his mother was filled with joy about his heavenly marriage. Such a son must have such a mother.”

Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, one of the most popular Palestinian imams, is especially vocal on educating children to become martyrs by sending them on terrorist attacks. During a sermon at the ‘Ijlin Mosque in Gaza, he repeats the following discussion he had with a child who approached him about becoming a suicide bomber: “A young man said to me, ‘I am 14 years old, and I have four years left before I blow myself up’.... We, the Muslims on this good and blessed land, are all — each one of us — seekers of Martyrdom.... The Koran is very clear on this: The greatest enemies of the Islamic nation are the Jews, may Allah fight them.... Blessings for whoever assaulted a soldier.... Blessings for whoever has raised his sons on the education of jihad and Martyrdom; blessings for whoever has saved a bullet in order to stick it in a Jew’s head...”

On another occasion, Madhi praised children who put on explosive belts in order to blow up Jews: “Shame and remorse on whoever refrained from raising his children on jihad... Blessings to whoever waged jihad for the sake of Allah; blessings to whoever raided for the sake of Allah; blessings to whoever put a belt of explosives on his body or on his sons’ and plunged into the midst of the Jews, crying ‘Allahu Akbar, praise to Allah, There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger’.... Allah, show us a black day for the Jews, like the day of ‘Aad and Thamud [Two pre-Islamic Arab tribes that refused to convert to Islam, and were punished by annihilation]. Allah, turn them into pillage for us. Allah, we strive for martyrdom for your sake...”

If there was only one Palestinian child left, he or she would be sacrificed by the Palestinian people for the sake of jihad, according to Madhi in another sermon: “Even if they slaughter all of the Palestinian people and the only survivors will be one single Palestinian baby girl and one single Palestinian baby boy, the baby boy will marry the baby girl and they will give birth to the one who will liberate Jerusalem from the defilement of the Jews.... While they [the Palestinians] sacrifice the last Palestinian child and the last Palestinian fetus, they [the Arab nations] will satisfy themselves with victories on the soccer courts.... It was rightly claimed that a thousand verbal shells cannot compare to one shell made of iron. It was rightly claimed that what was taken by force will be regained only by the use of force. We must prepare ourselves in accordance with the religion of Allah and the Law of Allah. We must educate our children on the love of jihad for the sake of Allah and the love of fighting for the sake of Allah.”

In addition to the usual calling of the Jews “sons of Pigs and Apes,” who “deserve death,” last Friday’s sermon by Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris discussed the joy a mother has when hearing her child committed a suicide bombing: “...But they accuse us of being terrorists. Terrorists, because when the Palestinian mother welcomes her martyred son, she wishes to receive him as a corpse. She does not want him to be alive.... The wish of the Palestinian mother is to see the body of her son the martyr...”

The importance of educating youth for battle has also been the topic of sermons by Sheikh Mudeiris, who stated on February 28, 2003, from the Khalil Al-Wazir Mosque in Gaza: “And here, I want to emphasize, oh people of Palestine, that our children, the fruit of our loins — we must protect them.... The children need proper education because it is they who will lead the struggle after us, on the day when they will grow up and become strong and we will grow old. They are our children, who will conduct the battle after us.”

To view videos of these and other Palestinian Authority sermons that deal with calls for the destruction of the U.S., the perceived American Crusader War Against Islam, honoring Shahids and the rewards of the martyrs, and anti-Semitism, including calls for the killing of Jews, visit http://www.memri.org/video/.

— Steven Stalinsky is executive director of The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

==============================

112 Killed in Thailand Clashes (FN, 040428)

PATTANI, Thailand — Police gunned down machete-wielding militants who stormed security outposts in the Muslim-dominated south of Thailand Wednesday, killing at least 112 people in one of the bloodiest days in the Southeast Asian kingdom.

The attackers were mostly teenagers — some wearing red head bands — and were intent on stealing weapons. They were poorly armed and apparently unaware that police had been tipped off in advance and were lying in wait for them.

The eight hours of mayhem ended when police fired tear gas and rocket-propelled grenades into a mosque, killing 32 militants who, witnesses said, were sheltering inside after running away from an earlier battle.

“Maybe the insurgents underestimated the preparedness of security forces. They used machetes to steal guns and when we fought back they suffered big losses,” Yala Gov. Boonyasit Suwanarat said.

It was the worst violence in a region that has seen dozens of people killed in near-daily attacks this year. The government has blamed Islamic separatists seeking for decades to carve out a homeland in the Muslim-majority south of this predominantly Buddhist country.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said the killings would halt the simmering separatist struggle in the Muslim-dominated south.

“After this, it will be hard for them to do these kind of bad things again,” Thaksin said.

The raids were linked to a Jan. 4 attack on a military camp in the nearby province of Narathiwat, which triggered an upsurge of violence in the area this year, Thaksin said. Four soldiers were killed and hundreds of guns stolen in that raid.

“The masterminds of this movement were in such high spirits after they raided the army camp, and they believed that they could do it again. But they were wrong,” Thaksin said.

He denied the attackers had connections to international terrorists, saying “most of the insurgents are youths from the southern provinces.”

The attacks began before dawn, when insurgents stormed more than 15 police bases, village defense posts and district offices in a bid to steal weapons, said Lt. Gen. Proong Bunphandung, the chief of police for the south.

However, security forces had been tipped off and were waiting for the assailants, most of whom carried only machetes, Proong said.

Television news reports showed the bodies of insurgents lying in pools of blood, some of them in front of police stations clasping machetes and wearing camouflage.

Gunfire could be heard in the background as armored personnel carriers drove down deserted village streets and commandos ran through the forest. Policemen and soldiers, carrying automatic rifles, ran across streets and ditches.

Army chief Gen. Chaiyasith Shinawatra said 107 insurgents were killed and 17 were arrested. He said three policemen and two soldiers also were killed.

No group claimed responsibility for the highly coordinated assault.

Nimu Magajae, deputy chairman of Yala Islamic Council, said he was told the attackers were drug addicts.

“This is the first time in my life that I have seen so many Muslim youths killed in one day. But if they were drug addicts we do not regard them as religious followers,” he told The Associated Press.

Nimu demanded that authorities hand over the dead so they could be buried within 24 hours, in line with Islamic custom.

Many parts of the region have been under martial law for months. Security was tightened Wednesday along the border with neighboring Malaysia, which in the past has denied allegations of harboring militants.

Thaksin said the attackers arrived at the target point with brand new motorcycles, which he said proved they were funded by “influential figures, including politicians and drug gangsters.”

Muslims have long complained of discrimination in jobs and education in Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat — Thailand’s only Muslim majority provinces.

They also say their culture and language are being subjugated by the Buddhist Thais, and cite as an example the state schools, which teach in Thai language. Muslims in the south speak Yawi, a dialect of Malay, spoken in neighboring Malaysia.

The alienation caused by the central government’s policies has been the source of a decades-old separatist struggle, which subsided after an amnesty in the late 1980s before exploding with the army arsenal raid in January.

The military also crushed pro-democracy uprisings in 1973, 1976 and 1991, killing dozens.

==============================

Outside Encouragement: Sharia rules Nigeria — with the help of foreign Islamists (National Review Online, 040505)

It is a pretty good rule of thumb that where you find Muslim extremism, Islamist terrorism, and women being sentenced to death by stoning, there you will find Saudi funds and Saudi-trained personnel. One exception to this rule has been Nigeria, but now evidence of Wahabbi mischief is surfacing there as well.

Since the governor of Zamfara State, Alhaji Ahmed Sani, introduced a draconian version of sharia in 1999, 11 of Nigeria’s 36 states have followed suit. Five women have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, though no punishment has yet been carried out. Thieves have had their hands amputated by court order. One man had his eye removed after accidentally blinding a friend (he could have escaped this by paying 60 camels, but the injured party wasn’t interested in the camels).

Under these sharia dictates, women are harshly subjugated. In northern Nigeria, they have been forbidden to rent houses and barred from riding motorbikes or traveling in the same vehicles as men. Taxi drivers have been caned for carrying female passengers. Zamfara requires all high-school girls to wear a hijab and bars them from wearing skirts and other “Western” forms of dress. State officials have advocated public flogging of those violating an “Islamic” dress code. Prostitution charges have been leveled at women merely for the crime of being unmarried after the age of 13. Judges in Bauchi State have told women to get married immediately or be sent to prison. One judge ordered four of them to pick out husbands from among the men in the court. Women are at a particular disadvantage in these criminal prosecutions since their testimony usually counts for only half that of a man.

Non-Muslims, usually Christians, have become second-class citizens. Their taxes pay for Islamic preachers, while hundreds of churches have been closed by government order. Last week, Sani announced that all “unauthorized” places of worship in Zamfara State would be demolished. Those who exercise their right under the Nigerian constitution to change their religion from Islam are threatened with death, a punishment for apostasy under sharia law. The Catholic and Anglican churches have had to set up protected centers for converts.

This spread of radical Islam has also led to riots, mob attacks, and vigilantes, producing the largest death toll in Nigeria since the civil war over Biafra in the 1960s. Over 10,000 people have died in the last four years in sharia-related violence — perhaps over 1,000 in the central states this year alone.

Recent months have seen the emergence of more organized militias. In early January, in Yobe State, there was an uprising by a group calling itself the “Taliban,” led by a “Mullah Omar,” and demanding an Islamic state. It took several hundred troops two weeks to put it down.

Foreign groups have been aiding the institutionalization of Islamic law. Saudi, Sudanese, Syrian, and Palestinian representatives appeared with Governor Sani in the days before he announced his plans for sharia. The Jigawa State government has sent Islamic judges for training in Malaysia and Sudan. The government of Katsina State has sent a delegation to Sudan to study its laws. Other states have been offered assistance from some these same countries as well as from Iran and Libya.

In January, the Saudi religious and cultural attaché in Nigeria, Sheik Abdul-Aziz, said that his government had been monitoring the implementation of sharia in Nigeria and noted the results “with delight.”

There is also evidence of infiltration by foreign Islamic radicals. According to some reports, extremists from neighboring Chad were involved in the July 2001 violence in Bauchi State. In November 2001, Nigerian police arrested six Pakistani preachers, accusing them of inciting religious violence in Ogun state. The police have announced that scores of Pakistanis have been arrested in different parts of the country for allegedly fomenting religious trouble since 9/11. Church spokesmen in Plateau State said last month that local Muslim extremists have brought in thousands of mercenaries from Niger and Chad to invade Christian towns and villages.

However, despite repeated rumors, there has until this year been little evidence of organized foreign support for violence and domestic terrorism. Now such evidence is appearing. On February 3, the Nigerian government announced that an unnamed Iranian diplomat was arrested on January 23 in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, after he was found taking photographs of Churches, a presidential villa, the defense headquarters, and the Israeli, British, and American embassies.

The usually reliable news service Compass Direct reports that one of January’s “Taliban” raiders, Muslim cleric Alhaji Sharu, confessed to police that he was a middleman between Nigerian extremists and the Al-Muntada Al-Islami Trust, a Saudi funded “charity” headquartered in Britain. Sharu said that the Trust’s money had been used to propagate a Wahabist version of Islam in Nigeria and fund religious violence.

Subsequent investigation by Nigeria’s police led to “the discovery of financial transactions running into millions of dollars” between Sharu and the Trust’s local head, a Sudanese businessman named Muhiddeen Abdullahi. Authorities arrested Abdullahi on February 20, accusing him and the Trust of financing attacks on Christians, including the January Taliban uprising.

When authorities released Abdullahi 10 days after his arrest, more than 5,000 Qadiriyya Sufi Muslims, the largest tradition within Nigerian Islam, mounted a protest march. Chanting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”), demanded that Wahabbis be banned from the country. Their spokesman, Abduljabbar Nasiru Kabara, told journalists, “As a matter of urgency, the state government should close the office of Al-Muntada Al-Islami because of its activities which have resulted in religious unrest in Nigeria.”

If Nigeria’s moderate Muslims can call for the rejection of Saudi interference, there is nothing stopping the Nigerian government from doing the same, and little stopping the U.S. government from encouraging it to do so.

— Paul Marshall is senior fellow at Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom. He is author of Islam at the Crossroads and God and the Constitution: Christianity and American Politics.

==============================

Lessons from Iraq: Can Arab democracy happen? (National Review Online, 040505)

Following the victory-but-fiasco that the British eked out in the Boer War of 1899-1902, Rudyard Kipling wrote:

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should, We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

Now, I am not going to present an argument that Iraq is America’s Boer War. I don’t believe it is, even in potential. Not that there aren’t some resemblances, mainly centered around the verb “to underestimate”; but we are not, except in the fevered imaginations of some of the more extreme Bush-haters, in the empire-building business. The “good” that Kipling looked forward to was a better and stronger British Empire (“We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!”)

That’s not us. It’s certainly not me — I persist in regarding the whole thing as a punitive expedition against a major nuisance and probable future threat. It’s not the more “neocon” of us neocons, either, though. The most anyone on the pro-war side hopes for is a modern, constitutional, independent nation in Iraq. I personally think that’s a stretch; but it’s not an ignoble idea, would actually be great for the whole world if it came to pass, and it certainly isn’t imperialist.

I do, though, want to try to peer forward to see what lessons the Iraq war might end up teaching us. A few days ago I posted a column about how our domestic obsessions with “diversity” and “multiculturalism” influence the conduct of our foreign policy, and of this war. Here I’m going to try to look at the topic from the other side: Will the war change our national culture? Will it, in particular, hasten the crack-up of the multicultural ideology?

Let’s take a close look at that ideology, through the eyes of a passionate adherent. Here was George W. Bush addressing the press on Friday, on the occasion of a visit by Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin:

There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern. And the Prime Minister — I don’t want to put words in his mouth — but I think he shares that great sense of optimism and possibility...

I bet he does. If he doesn’t, he’s in trouble, for multiculturalism is official state dogma in Canada just as much as it is here, and the prime minister would be run out of public life as a “hate-filled” heretic, with a howling pack of ideological enforcers close on his heels, if he showed signs of not believing in it.

Does our own president believe in it? I feel sure that he does. He is a sincere man, and also a very religious one, in the apologetic, guilt-addled, world-embracing style of upper-class white American Christianity. Further, I don’t think he has the kind of mind that responds critically to social dogmas. If they appeal to his emotions, and are widely believed, or at least repeated, by the people he moves amongst, he will incorporate them into his worldview, and from then on will defend them with the iron-willed certitude that is, of all his character traits, the one most useful to our nation in this time of war. Everything George W. Bush has said and done indicates that on matters of race, ethnicity, “diversity,” and multiculturalism, he is as liberal as it is possible to be.

Just look at his words up there above, for example. What is the president actually saying? What, for instance, is all that stuff about skin color? What does skin color have to do with the matter of democracy in Iraq? I have blood relatives in England who are darker-skinned than Saddam Hussein. Practically the entire editorial staff of National Review is darker-skinned than Muqtada al-Sadr. And how did we suddenly segue from “people whose skin color may not be the same as ours” (Whose? Yours? Condi’s?) to “people who practice the Muslim faith,” then back again in the very next sentence to “people whose skins...are a different color than white”?

The reason for all the confusion is that the president is talking — or rather, like a good multiculturalist, tying himself in knots by trying desperately not to talk — about race. One of the central tenets of the multiculturalist dogma is that there is no such thing as race. Populations of different ancestry may differ from each other in superficial and easily visible ways — that is why it is O.K., just about, to mention “skin color” — but in no other ways at all. So what the president is asserting is, if you translate it out of multiculturalist code, something like this:

While people from various regions of the world might differ in appearance, they do not differ innately in psychology or characteristic patterns of behavior. There is, therefore, no reason why any nation, anywhere, should not have constitutional government under representative democracy. To suggest otherwise is racist.

Now I, personally, have that deplorable cast of mind that, when it hears someone say that such and such a thing is racist, reacts instinctively with the thought: “Racist, schmacist: is it t-r-u-e?”

Well, is it? Are there any grounds for believing that the Arabs of Iraq are innately, genetically, incapable of practicing rational government, based upon the consent of the governed?

Let’s take a look. There is, of course — of course! — no such thing as race, but there is definitely such a thing as population genetics. I have a huge fat tome on the subject right here on my desk: the 1994 edition of Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza’s 1,088-page, backpack-sized History and Geography of Human Genes, the fruit of decades of research into the frequencies of numerous human genes in different parts of the world. Iraqi Arabs are covered in Section 4.15, “Genetics of West Asia.” Here we read that Iraqi Arabs are closest in genetic composition to the Kurds. The next closest populations genetically are Turks and Jordanian Arabs.

Democracy-wise, this is a mixed bag. The Turks have a pretty good democracy going — not up to Jeffersonian standards, perhaps, but they’d be popping champagne corks in the White House if Iraq ever got as democratic as Turkey. The Kurds of liberated Iraq have a way to go, but they seem to be on the road and moving fast. Cavalli-Sforza et al. don’t make it clear whether “Jordanian Arab” includes the Palestinians, so it’s hard to draw much of a conclusion there; but if the kingdom of Jordan is not exactly Switzerland, it’s not North Korea, either. (Neither, let it be noted, since we are talking about the intersection of genetics and political science, is South Korea...)

It does not, therefore, look as if race — oops, sorry!, I meant population genetics — has anything to do with it. So, then, the president is right, isn’t he? There is nothing in the biological make-up of the Iraqi Arabs that prohibits them from having a democracy, is there?

My guess is that there isn’t. Unfortunately, while biology is a much under-estimated part of human nature — an unmentionable one, in fact, to the strict multiculturalist — it is not the whole of it. The uncomfortable fact remains that of the 18** nations whose first language is Arabic, not one is a modern constitutional democracy. The further fact remains that while President Bush may, and probably does, believe that constitutional democracy is priority No. 1 for the Arabs, a great deal of circumstantial evidence suggest that for many in that part of the world, priority No. 1 is the humiliation and murder of their enemies, most especially the hated Jews, with constitutional democracy round about priority No. 853.

So what is it? Why can’t Arabs do what English and Irish, French and German, Japanese and Taiwanese, Barbadians and Trinidadians have done? Is it the folkways — cousin marriage, the subjugation of women, what David Pryce-Jones calls the “closed circle” of money-favoring and power-challenging, shame and honor? Is it perhaps even, as Goitein suggested, something to do with the language itself?

Whatever the barrier is, it makes it awfully difficult for the Arabs to take up a civilized form of government. And there we come to the lesson. Either the Iraqis can break through that barrier, or they can’t. If they can, we are of course home and dry, and George W. Bush enters the rolls of history as a world-transforming president.

If they can’t, though, then the American people are going to take a lesson from it. The lesson they take will be: “These people are fundamentally different from us. They don’t care about the things we care about — liberty, law, constitutionalism, rational economics — and can’t be persuaded to. They are different from us in some permanent, unfathomable, intractable way.”

If large numbers of Americans come away from the Iraq experience thinking that, then the multicultural ideology — which teaches that the cultures of the world differ only superficially, in things like cuisine and “skin color,” but in no ways that have anything to do with behavior, either individual or collective — will be in very serious trouble. So will be the nation’s most ardent enthusiast for that ideology, George W. Bush.

** Everyone gets a different count here. I make it 18, but I may have missed a couple: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen.

==============================

Kingdom Comes to North America: Top Saudi cleric to visit Canada (National Review Online, 040513)

Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, the Saudi government appointed imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, will give a series of lectures in Canada next week and attend the Islamic Studies of North America conference in Toronto. Al-Sudayyis’s position is one of the most prestigious in Sunni Islam. Thus, his sermons hold significant weight throughout the Islamic world.

The themes of his sermons are characterized by confrontation toward non-Muslims. Al-Sudayyis calls Jews “scum of the earth” and “monkeys and pigs” who should be “annihilated.” Other enemies of Islam, he says, are “worshippers of the cross” and “idol-worshipping Hindus” who should be fought. Al-Sudayyis has been consistent in calling for jihad in Kashmir and Chechnya, for Jerusalem to be liberated, and for the “occupiers in Iraq” to also be fought. He often claims that Islam is superior to Western culture.

At the Grand Mosque in Mecca on February 1, 2004, Sheikh Al-Sudayyis called on Muslims everywhere to unite to defeat the world’s occupiers and oppressors. “History has never known a cause in which our religious principles, historical rights, and past glories are so clearly challenged.... The conflict between us and the Jews is one of creed, identity, and existence.” He told those listening to “read history,” in order “to know that yesterday’s Jews were bad predecessors and today’s Jews are worse successors. They are killers of prophets and the scum of the earth. Allah hurled his curses and indignation on them and made them monkeys and pigs and worshippers of tyrants. These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, evil, and corruption....”

Al-Sudayyis elaborated on the conflict between Muslims and Jews:

O Muslims, the Islamic nation today is at the peak of conflict with the enemies of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, with the grandsons of Bani-Quraydah, Al-Nadhir, and Qaynuqa [Jewish tribes in the early days of Islam]. May Allah’s curses follow them until the Day of Judgment.

The nation must know that these are people with a disgraceful history and.... They want to establish the Greater Israel with Jerusalem as its capital. They also aspire to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build their alleged temple in its place. They want to liquidate the State of Islam and the Koran, and build the State of the Torah and Talmud on its debris. They will get what they deserve from Allah.... Our Al-Aqsa is crying out saying all mosques have been liberated, while I — a great holy mosque — am still being desecrated. Is the aspiration of over 1 billion Muslims to preserve their holy places [to be] considered savagery and terrorism? What a great lie, O Allah, O steadfast brothers in struggler and steadfast Palestine, the land of honor, loftiness, sacrifice, jihad, and bravery. The captivity of our Al-Aqsa in the hands of the tyrants makes us sleepless. May Allah please us with its liberation. Victory is coming soon, Allah willing.

....Here are the flags of victory looming on the horizon. We can smell it. It is crowned by a brave jihad, an intifada, which is still the winning card and the lit candle in the hands of the devout sons of this nation.... O nation of jihad and sacrifice, it is the duty of Muslims to support their brothers in creed in Palestine and elsewhere and to back them with material and moral support. Jihad with money sometimes supersedes jihad with soul, as mentioned in many Koranic verses and the prophet’s traditions.

In a sermon on April 23, 2004, regarding Iraq, Al-Sudayyis stated that “our Muslim brothers in the Iraq of history and civilization are facing another bloody chapter, particularly in the brave, steadfast city of Al-Fallujah.” He called on Muslims everywhere to unite “to defeat all their occupiers and oppressors” for the destruction of the enemies of Islam, to support “our mujahedeen brothers in Palestine,” and to disperse “the unjust Zionists.”

Discussing plots by enemies of Islam, who he identifies as Hindus, Jews, and Christians, Al-Sudayyis delivered a sermon on May 31, 2002, which stated:

Those whom Allah cursed, got angry with, and turned into monkeys and pigs, the tyrant worshippers among the Jewish aggressors and criminal Zionists. Their course is supported by the advocates of usury and worshippers of the Cross, as well as by those who are infatuated with them and influenced by their rotten ideas and poisonous culture among the advocates of secularism and Westernization.... The enemies of Muslims among the atheists insist on their arrogance and aggression against our people and our holy places in Chechnya? The idol-worshipping Hindus indulge in their open hatred against our brothers and holy places...in Muslim Kashmir, threatening an imminent danger and a fierce war in the whole Indian sub-continent?... O Allah, support our brother Mujahedeen for your sake and the oppressed everywhere. O Allah, support them in Palestine, Kashmir, and Chechnya. O Allah, we ask you to support our Palestinian brothers in Palestine against the aggressor Jews and usurper Zionists. O Allah, the Jews have oppressed, terrorized, and indulged in tyranny and corruption. O Allah, deal with them for they are within your power.

According to Sheikh Al-Sudayyis, Islam is superior to Western culture. He told worshipers in Mecca in February 2002: “The most noble civilization ever known to mankind is our Islamic civilization. Today, Western civilization is nothing more than the product of its encounter with our Islamic civilization in Andalusia [medieval Spain]. The reason for [Western civilization’s] bankruptcy is its reliance on the materialistic approach, and its detachment from religion and values. [This approach] has been one reason for the misery of the human race, for the proliferation of suicide, mental problems...and for moral perversion.... Only one nation is capable of resuscitating global civilization, and that is the nation [of Islam].... While the false cultures sink in the swamp of materialism and suffer moral crises...our Islamic nation is the one worthy of grasping the reins of leadership and riding on the back of the horse of pioneering and world sovereignty.”

“Read history,” Al-Sudayyis stated in another sermon in May 2002, “and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels, distorters of [others’] words, calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers ... the scum of the human race ‘whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs....’ These are the Jews, an ongoing continuum of deceit, obstinacy, licentiousness, evil, and corruption....”

The concluding supplications of Al-Sudayyis sermons are often filled with statements concerning current affairs. He consistently calls for “Muslims to humiliate the infidels (non-Muslims),” as well as for their destruction. For example, on November 1, 2002, he stated “O Allah, support our mujahedeen bothers in Palestine, Kashmir, and Chechnya and destroy the aggressor Jews and the tyrannical Zionists, for they are within your power.” In a June 21, 2002, sermon, Al-Sudayyis gives supplication: “O Allah, support them in Palestine, Kashmir, and Chechnya. O Allah, deal with the Jews and Zionists for they are within Your power. O Allah, scatter their assemblies, make them a lesson for others, and let them and their property be a booty for Muslims.”

In another sermon in May 2003, Sheikh Al-Sudayyis condemned what he termed the “serpents” to “spit their venom” by harming the Islamic religion, ridiculing the pious, and blaming the school curricula and religious and welfare institutions. Al-Sudayyis stated: “O Allah, support our brother mujahedeen for your sake everywhere. O Allah, support them in Palestine. O Allah, deal with the aggressor Jews and sinful Zionists. O Allah, deal with them for they are within Your power. O Allah, deal with the enemies of religion and show us the miracles of Your power on them.” Also, on July 11, 2003, he stated: “O Allah, support our mujahedeen brothers everywhere. O Allah, help them score victory over the unjust Jews and aggressive Zionists in Palestine. O Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. O Allah, destroy them, for they are within your power. O Allah, disperse them and make them prey for Muslims.”

According to statements beginning in June 2003 made by Washington D.C. Saudi-embassy spokesman Adel Al-Jubeir, “Hundreds of imams [in Saudi Arabia] who violated prohibitions against preaching intolerance have been removed from their positions and more than 1,000 have been suspended and referred to educational programs.” Clearly, this is not the case with Saudi Arabia’s leading imam, Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, who continues to preach incitement from the most holy site in all of Islam.

— Steven Stalinsky is executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

==============================

Sacred Murder (National Review Online, 040520)

by David Frum

Irshad Manji has an important oped in the Wall Street Journal today. Manji, NR readers may recall, is the Canadian Muslim who recently published The Trouble with Islam, a biting diagnosis of present-day Muslim religiosity. Brave and insightful, Manji brings from her own first-hand experiences a warning that demands attention.

The warning is this: actions like the murder of Nicholas Berg may violate the human feelings of decent Muslims. But the hard truth is that it is just wishful thinking to claim that the killing violates the teachings of Islam, as those teachings are authoritatively interpreted by the leading modern Muslims.

Islam, like all religions, teaches respect for human life. But Islam also contains unique elements all its own. For unlike Judaism and unlike Christianity, the spiritual elements of Islam are mixed with an ideology of war and conquest, even in the pages of the Koran itself. And both the text of the Koran – and the personal example of the Prophet Muhammad – justify killing in general and beheading in particular as legitimate weapons against unbelievers.

The brave Iraqi blogger at www.healingiraq.com reminds us of the Koranic text that he translates thus: “When you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads; then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives.”

This was not just a theoretical prescription. As Andrew Bostom has

observed, one of the great events in the story of Muhammad is his mass beheading of the defeated survivors of the Jewish Arabian tribe of the Qurayza.

“According to Muhammad’s sacralized biography by Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad himself sanctioned the massacre of the Qurayza, a vanquished Jewish tribe. He appointed an ‘arbiter’ who soon rendered this concise verdict: the men were to be put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, the spoils to be divided among the Muslims. Muhammad ratified this judgment stating that it was a decree of God pronounced from above the Seven Heavens.

“Thus some 600 to 900 men from the Qurayza were lead on Muhammad’s order to the Market of Medina. Trenches were dug and the men were beheaded, and their decapitated corpses buried in the trenches while Muhammad watched in attendance. Women and children were sold into slavery, a number of them being distributed as gifts among Muhammad’s companions, and Muhammad chose one of the Qurayza women (Rayhana) for himself. The Qurayza’s property and other possessions (including weapons) were also divided up as additional ‘booty’ among the Muslims, to support further jihad campaigns.”

In other words: It is very possible that the killers of Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg believed themselves to be re-enacting a scene from the life of the Prophet Muhammad. And when they videotaped the severed heads of their victims, they may have thought that they were fulfilling a commandment of the Koran.

Now I don’t want to single out the Islamic text and Islamic legends for criticism here. The Bible contains stories just as horrifying as the story of the story of the Qurayza; it too sacralizes war leaders like Joshua and Gideon. But over the centuries, Jewish and Christian tradition re-interpreted Biblical scriptures to make it plain that the massacring of Midianites and Amalekites is no guide of any kind to contemporary action, and there was a time when Islamic scholars did the same thing. Andy Bostom goes on to quote an 11th century Muslim jurist’s commentary on the Koran’s commandment to behead unbelievers:

“As for the captives, the amir [ruler] has the choice of taking the most beneficial action of four possibilities: the first to put them to death by cutting their necks; the second, to enslave them and apply the laws of slavery regarding their sale and manumission; the third, to ransom them in exchange for goods or prisoners; and fourth, to show favor to them and pardon them.”

The jurist in question was evidently a civilized man trying to deal with an awkward text. He has no choice but to reaffirm the religious permissibility of beheading captives. But then he goes on to suggest that there might be more intelligent ways to deal with them – leading up to option four, which is to spare their lives and deal kindly with them. Anyone who has ever studied the way in which the rabbis of the Talmud endeavored to explain away the more gruesome and primitive sections of the Book of Judges will recognize exactly what this Muslim jurist is up to.

You often hear people say that the Islamic world needs a “Reformation.” Alas, in many ways, Islamic extremism is the Muslim “Reformation.” Al Qaeda and its ideological supporters are rejecting a thousand years of interpretation - interpretation that has tended to soften the often harsh Koranic text - to return to the bald words of Islamic scripture.

And this last brings us to a very difficult problem – unfortunately, one that has to wait for tomorrow.

==============================

Moment of Truth: These are trying times for proponents of liberalism in the Middle East (National Review Online, 040524)

By Meyrav Wurmser

It’s been a tough year for us proponents and allies of Arab liberalism. We have spent a decade trying to solicit Arab good will. We sent troops to Somalia to end starvation. While we denied solace and assistance to endangered Christian communities in Sudan and Lebanon, we interceded in Bosnia to put an end to genocide and used our power to block the Serbs from further harming the Kosovars. We distanced ourselves from our “special relationship” with democratic Israel to be a neutral arbitrator with the Palestinians. We turned a blind eye to money flowing from the Arab world to various radicals in Europe and Muslim extremists around the world. We sent our wealth to rebuild Muslim societies, not only in the war-torn Balkans, but also in places like Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories.

We have spent a decade demonstrating our good will. And yet, we still find that the Arab world holds us in so much contempt and hatred that even after devastating, unprovoked attacks in New York and Washington that claimed thousands of innocents, Arab elites can — without a moment of introspection, remorse, or humility — blame us and our policies as the legitimizing “root cause.” Instead of a welling-up of popular indignation at the barbarities committed in their name, we hear excuses from most quarters of Arab society.

Recently we saw the mutilated body parts of six Israeli soldiers gruesomely displayed in the streets of Gaza. We saw an American citizen, who came to help rebuild Iraq, monstrously beheaded by al Qaeda, with the grizzly scene captured on video cameras and proudly displayed over the Internet. Some popular commentators told us not to expect any wellspring of condemnation from any quarter of the Arab world — even from those who call themselves moderates. Once again we wonder whether the West is caught in a hopeless clash of civilizations with the Arab and Muslim worlds.

It is not an easy question to ask for those who are historic optimists or believe in the basic ability of human nature to seek freedom, reform, and improve over time. It is even more difficult for those of us in Washington who believe that the regimes that engage in evil, reckless policies are often oppressive dictatorships ruling over innocent populations. Change the regime, goes the logic, bring freedom and democracy, and people will choose moderate, rational, more peaceful policies.

Thus, after September 11, we went to destroy the dictatorships of the Middle East that had brought so much radicalism and violence to the region, starting with Afghanistan and Iraq. We believed that encouraging freedom in the Middle East was the only answer to the core problems of the region and moreover a policy that reflected the American spirit and American values. In the months following September 11, many of us in leading magazines and research institutes argued that our relationships with liberal-minded Arabs and Muslims could lay the foundation for a forward-looking strategy of freedom. We were not naive; we knew that they represented a small minority in their societies. But we believed that with the right policies and encouragement from governmental and non-governmental forces in the West they could be brought to positions of power. These Arabs and Muslims were not our agents — they were our allies in what we believed was a large Arab civil war. We were willing to help because we believed that doing so would improve their lives and ours. As in World War II, it would require defeating and destroying the dictatorships in the region. The free societies that would be established in their place were thought to be the only long-term solution to terror and the best guarantee for the security of the West.

Moreover, we wanted to demonstrate to these freedom-seeking Arabs and Muslims that we rejected the idea of a clash of civilizations between our world and theirs. We did not ascribe to the notion that there was something inherent in Arab and Muslim history, religion, or culture that made it more violent and less free. We thought that, beyond cultural and religious differences, all people were alike and equal in their desires and aspirations. The dictatorial regimes of the Middle East were not the result of a culture that rejected progress but rather were born out of specific, sometimes unfortunate, historical developments. These developments produced destructive ideologies — both secular and religious in nature — that swept the region and gave rise to those regimes. Since there was nothing that was specifically violent or oppressive in their culture, there was no reason why — once free governments were established in the Middle East — there could not be peaceful co-existence between their societies and the West.

This logic was also applied by the Bush administration to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinian society was engaged in terror and violence because it needed to release its frustration with Arafat’s corrupt and oppressive regime. A regime change in the Palestinian-controlled territories and the establishment of a democracy — coupled with the eventual creation of a Palestinian state — would help moderate the population and put an end to political oppression. This was the logic behind President Bush’s speech in June 2002 and was viewed by his administration as the only way to bring about long-term stability and end Palestinian terror.

But a complete lack of respect for human life, demonstrated in the streets of Gaza and Baghdad, casts doubt on these hopes for reform in the Middle East. There are many Arabs and Muslims who are just as revolted as we are by the photos of mutilated body parts of Israelis and Americans. But they remain a silent minority. Even if the perpetrators themselves are only a small minority of blood-thirsty extremists, too many others applauded their actions. As we have often seen in recent years, there was no sweeping condemnation of these hideous acts by Arab leaders — no remorse, no apology. There is no real introspection. Even those who condemn such violence regard it as a legitimate reaction to the West’s own brutality.

Coming on the heels of events at Abu Ghraib, the difference between American society’s reaction to American misdeeds and the reaction of the Arab world to the brutal acts in Iraq and Gaza tell the whole story. For those of us who believe that the Middle East can be improved this is a moment of crisis, of soul-searching. It is very difficult not to think that, after all, there may be a hopeless clash of civilizations taking place between the Middle East and the West. It is impossible not to ask whether there is inherent violence and lack of civility in Arab society.

It now has become clear that we are confronted with a deep malady. So many years of corruption, despotism, and tyranny — not just a century of Arab ideologies, but also centuries of Ottoman imperial rule and centuries of Arab tyrannies before that — have distorted, even sickened, Arab societies.

There has always been a divide among those who study history. Some argue that cultures and civilizations are organic entities with lives of their own, creating the states they deserve; proponents of this view write off the Arab world as incapable of liberalism. Others continue to hope that the crafty state is, over time, the main forger of society. But merely removing a despotic state after a millennium of tyranny is no longer a sufficient corrective to the illness afflicting Arab society. The problem now is not only political. Arab economies have been reduced to Mafioso-like monopolies and fights to control the state. Arab culture and art have been reduced to statist self-glorification. Most of all, Arab politics have been reduced violence and personal destruction rather than debate and mutual respect. In Arab politics, opponents are not answered or rebutted, they are discredited or destroyed.

We should not give up on all Muslims or all Arabs. But the burden of proof now is on them. It is no longer up to us to show that we treat them as equals and are not motivated by Western (or Jewish) anti-Arab conspiracies. It is no longer up to us to solicit their approval and acceptance. We should no longer blame ourselves.

This is now more than a struggle for Arab and Muslim freedom; it is a struggle for Arabs and Muslims to reclaim their souls, and it can only be decided within their own societies. It is up to the Arabs and the Muslims of the Middle East to decide not whether they want to be a part of modern, Western society, but whether they want to be a part of the civilized world. Now is their moment of truth.

— Meyrav Wurmser is senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Hudson Institute.

==============================

Reform Begins At Home: Sudan’s anti-Muslim policies (National Review Online, 040527)

The Arab League wound up its lackadaisical weekend summit with several stunning displays of hypocrisy.

It condemned “the crimes and inhumane and immoral practices committed by the occupying soldiers” against prisoners in Iraq. The events at Abu Ghraib are terrible enough, but the idea that members of the Arab League are in any moral position to do any condemning is laughable. Many of its members are major-league torturers: Human-rights groups have been telling U.S. forces that it would be a violation of international law even to transfer prisoners to the custody of the likes of Egypt or Syria.

The Arab League also condemned Israel for purportedly conducting “military [operations]...that target civilians without distinction.” While it did so, the League managed to ignore the elephant in their living room, indeed, sitting in their lap: The fact that one of their members, Sudan, which is daily and hourly engaged in what the U.S. Congress, U.N. functionaries, Freedom House, and many other human-rights groups have labeled war crimes, and even genocide.

While the summit went on, the Sudanese government continued its war on the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa people in Darfur, in the west of the country. Government-backed militias are burning towns and villages, and engaging in systematic rape and murder. In recent months, more than 10,000 people have been killed and 110,000 have fled to neighboring Chad, with perhaps another million displaced. Many of those forced to flee their villages are now held in camps where they face starvation.

The targets of this policy are mainly Muslims — the inhabitants of western Sudan, who have the misfortune of being the “wrong sort” of Muslim: traditional, Sufi, easygoing Africans, at peace with their neighbors. They are rebelling against discrimination by the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired execration of Islam propagated by the ruling Sudanese National Islamic Front, a brother of Hamas.

How has the Arab League addressed this? As usual by ignoring it. Does it ignore it because it does not care about fundamental human suffering, because it would rather play political games with the all too real but, on a Sudanese scale, comparatively lesser suffering of the Palestinians? Does it not care about Muslims who are dying in their thousands, and soon to be tens of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands? Will it ignore this as it did Algeria, where Islamists massacred over a 100,000 Muslims, disemboweling them, tearing up pregnant women, and sawing off heads? As it ignored the earlier two million, largely Christian and animist, Sudanese who died owing to government policies of forced starvation? Or is it simply racist in ignoring what Arabs do to Muslims who happen to be non-Arab, black Africans.

Whatever it is, members of the Arab League should be questioned, exposed, challenged, mocked, pilloried, castigated, shamed, and humiliated for their vile abdication of any real human responsibility.

And why is our media doing so little? Why is there nothing in the broadcast media? Why do they let the Arab League off the hook? As we know all too well, visuals can drive a story and compel attention. Where are the photos and videos of Darfur?

If we do not act, then we may well sit here five years from now and hear the equivalents of Kofi Annan and Bill Clinton once more bleating about how the U.N. and the U.S. did not do enough in Rwanda. So far only America has shown much leadership on this issue. The U.N. Human Rights Commission managed only a watery resolution on Sudan, and even elected this practitioner of genocide to the commission itself. The U.S. needs to pressure the Arab League to begin reforming Sudan, and to influence the Europeans to put their sense of moral superiority to some good use.

— Paul Marshall is senior fellow at Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom. He is author of Islam at the Crossroads and God and the Constitution: Christianity and American Politics.

==============================

Sacred Murder II (National Review Online, 040524)

The reverberations continue from the Chalabi affair. There will be more to say – but for now I want to pick up with a theme from last week’s post on Irshad Manji’s May 20 oped in the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s where I left off: “Al Qaeda and its ideological supporters are rejecting a thousand years of interpretation - interpretation that has tended to soften the often harsh Koranic text - to return to the bald words of Islamic scripture.

And this last brings us to a very difficult problem ….”

The difficult problem that I was referring to forms the main theme of Irshad Manji’s oped and also of her book, The Trouble With Islam, and it is this: Why do Islam’s softer traditions seem to be losing out to the harsher versions of the faith?

We in the Western press often praise “moderate Islam.” But in practice, “moderate Islam” often turns out to be moderate in its actions only. As decent human beings, moderate Muslims will of course refrain from committing acts of oppression, cruelty, and terrorism. But intellectually, moderate Muslims have a difficult time explaining why these acts are “un-Islamic.” Take a look at Memri.org’s interesting posts on the important Sunni cleric, Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi.

Qaradhawi adamantly opposes terrorism. Yet his objections to terrorism are practical rather than moral, as in this sermon that Qaradhawi preached in Qatar in the summer of 2003 to denounce recent terror attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco:

“Therefore, I say that there is no use in operations of this type, because they kill peace-loving, innocent people. Not everyone who was killed in Riyadh was American and not everyone who was killed in Casablanca was American or foreign. Not every foreigner deserves to be killed. Killing has specific conditions. There are people whom we call ‘under Muslim protection’ who have entered our country. They must not be harmed and their blood must not be spilled. The brothers harmed, among others, a Belgian club, even though Belgium’s opinion was good – it opposed the war on Iraq and wanted to try Sharon and some American officers …”

Qaradhawi thinks the terrorists have gone too far, have damaged their own cause – but he cannot find ground to condemn them utterly. He rejects their actions, but he will not reject their intellectual and moral premises, not at least in public.

Or consider this. In 1997, one of the leading religious authorities of the Islamic world, Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Ahzar university, met with the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Tantawi was subsequently criticized for this meeting, and he gave a series of interviews to explain his actions:

“The Prophet’s stance, which is my own stance as well, was that anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews. You should know that you are interviewing a person who wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation. …

“I did not ask to meet with the rabbi; he was the one who asked to meet me and when he left the meeting, his face looked like his behind. …

“On the personal level, I attacked him, and proved to him that Islam is the religion of truth.”

The sheikh of al-Ahzar is by definition about as mainstream a figure as a Muslim can be – and yet he recoils as if from a libel the suggestion that he might have even been ordinarily civil to a visiting rabbi.

What Westerners are really yearning for is not a “moderate” Islam, but a “liberal” Islam – one that accepts peace and tolerance on principle, and not just as unfortunate necessities.

Yet such a “liberal” Islam, if it ever came to be, would pose a very serious challenge to the whole elaborate structure of Islamic thought and practice.

Socrates once posed a brain-twister to his disciples. “Is a good action good because it is approved by the gods? Or is it approved by the gods because it is good.” In other words – do the categories of right and wrong have an existence apart from divine will?

Islam’s answer to Socrates’ puzzle has been emphatic: An action is good because it is approved by Allah. There is no independent criterion of morality outside of the will of God. And since the Koran is an absolutely literal and accurate account of that will – since indeed in a deep sense the Koran itself actually incarnates that will – there is no independent criterion of morality outside the text of the Koran.

In other words: If the Koran says or teaches something that seems morally offensive, it is morality that is mistaken, not the Koran.

Intellectually, traditional Islam forms a closed system. You can exit the system (although the penalty for exit – apostasy – is death). But so long as you remain within it, the intellectual system forbids its own reform.

A liberal Islam would have to begin by challenging the system. It would have to begin by submitting the Koran itself to human inquiry and reason. Where did this book truly come from? How was it in fact assembled? What do we genuinely know historically about Muhammad and early Arabia? It will be a very painful exercise. And there’s no telling in advance where it will end.

—

The province of Ontario recently established a sharia court – an arbitration tribunal that Canadian Muslims can use to adjudicate certain kinds of family and personal disputes. An Iranian exile named Homa Arjomand has formed a protest movement against this court, the first of its kind in the Western world. She has a website and has posted a lengthy explanation there of her objections to the court. One excerpt:

“While, technically, all Muslim women have access to Canadian laws and courts, and while the Canadian legal system would reject the oppressive decisions made under Shari’a as being contrary to Canadian Law, the reality is that most women would be coerced (socially, economically and psychologically) into participating in the Shari’a tribunal. Women are told that the Shari’a Tribunal is a legal tribunal under the Arbitration Act 1991. The women would take that to mean that whatever is decided by the Tribunal would be considered as lawful. Even women who know that Canadian law would not uphold the decisions, would not challenge the decisions for fear of physical, emotional, economic and social consequences. Therefore, it is most unlikely that decisions that are contrary to Canadian law would ever come before the courts.”

Today’s shocking unacceptability has a way of becoming tomorrow’s shrugged-at reality. The legal arrival of Sharia in North America is not a small event. It deserves very careful attention – not least from Canadian voters as they choose their next government.

==============================

Taking Back Islam: Moderate Muslims say their faith is compatible with freedom (National Review Online, 040603)

By Erick Stakelbeck & Nir Boms

There’s an elephant in the room whenever the current U.S. operation in Iraq is discussed: Is Islam truly compatible with democracy? Or do the U.S.’s troubles in stabilizing Iraq signal that Muslims simply have no desire to live in a free, democratic society?

Right now the answers to these questions are unclear. For every modern Islamic “success story” like Turkey or Malaysia, there are Islamist nightmares like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

In the United States, too, there is reason for uncertainty. American Muslims with moderate views have been either unable or unwilling to engage in public discourse. As a result, militant groups with a moderate veneer have been able to set the tone.

A patriotic group of Arizona Muslims, however, is looking to change all that.

Earlier this spring in Phoenix, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) held a “Rally Against Terror” that gave moderate Muslims a platform on which to condemn terrorism and pledge support for the United States.

Identified by the Arizona Republic as “the nation’s first Muslim rally against terrorism,” the 50-minute event drew, according to various estimates, between 250 and 400 people, most of them non-Muslims.

Considering that the event was actively promoted within Phoenix’s 50,000-strong Muslim community, that number is a bit disappointing. Nevertheless, AIFD Chairman Zuhdi Jasser says the rally was a positive first step for the group, which was founded in March 2003 by Muslim professionals in the Phoenix area.

“When the moderates stay silent, the radicals speak for everyone,” says Jasser, a physician. “Up until now, moderates have not been articulating a moderate form of Islam which Americans can embrace. We want to take back our faith from the radicals and let them know that we are side-by-side with the U.S.”

Listening to Jasser, the son of Syrian immigrants, is a breath of fresh air at a time when anti-American sentiment engulfs a large part of the Arab and Muslim world. A former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander who served as a Navy medical officer from 1988 to 1999, Jasser clearly loves his country and his faith, and sees no reason why the two cannot coexist.

“Our inspiration for this is two things,” says Jasser. “Number one, at the core of the war on terror is a battle over ideology. World War II had fascism, the Cold War had Communism. Our present war has the targeting and killing of civilians in the name of religion: Islam. There needs to be a Muslim voice that speaks directly against that ideology. Secondly, there is a lack of any American Islamic institution that discusses the synergy of the U.S. Constitution with the Islamic faith. This makes it an obligation for us to be leaders in promoting a form of Islam that is tolerant and secular in nature.”

Jasser is quick to clarify his use of the word “secular.”

“Secularism as a term is almost associated with a lack of piety,” he says. “What I’m trying to say is that in America, there are many devout people who are politically active. But we don’t make decisions here based on theocracy or religious views.”

The values that Jasser and AIFD are promoting are deeply rooted in the American experience. Jasser is confident that Muslims in the U.S. will eventually embrace his message and realize that, as he says, “Freedom brings you closer to God.”

For now, though, Jasser realizes that views like the ones he expressed in a May 25 op-ed for azcentral.com aren’t likely to endear him to the al-Jazeera crowd. In the piece, titled “Iraq is Your War,” Jasser listed four reasons why the U.S. is currently fighting abroad:

It is impossible to keep America safe by just playing defense.

The Middle East is the epicenter of the terror network.

Despotic governments bring out the worst in religion.

Change the political environment in the Middle East and we change the associated religious pathology.

“Over half of the Muslim immigrants in the U.S. came here in the past 25 years,” says Jasser. “And many of them bring with them the baggage that government coercion and autonomy are necessary, just as in their former countries. We want to educate them and let them know that is not the case.”

It would help if U.S. government officials and the mainstream media took notice of AIFD’s efforts, rather than continuing to promote the agendas of radical Muslims with anti-American views. AIFD is attempting to increase its visibility through its website and by holding future anti-terrorism rallies.

By supporting the endeavors of AIFD and other moderate Muslim organizations, the U.S. may yet be able to avert the clash of civilizations simmering in its own backyard.

— Nir Boms is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Council for Democracy and Tolerance. Erick Stakelbeck is senior writer for the Investigative Project, a Washington, D.C.-based counterterrorism research institute.

==============================

Head in sand saw no evil (Washington Times, 040623)

Osama Bin Laden running for high office in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia? And winning a free election hands down? A preposterous scenario, but one that was suggested by one of the most important Saudi businessmen, speaking privately in a European capital this week. “We are reaping what we have sown over the last 25 years,” said the billionaire who is on good terms with the highest ranking members of the Saudi royal family.

The terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia over the past year have not weakened popular support for bin Laden, the Saudi said. The execution of an American technician, he speculated today, is precisely what fundamentalists seek. They want all the westerners who keep the economy and the military humming to leave. The economy would then grind to a halt and the House of Saud, they hope, would collapse like a sand castle at high tide.

Until al Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. September 11, 2001, U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia was see-hear-speak no evil about the royal family. CIA officers based in the kingdom were discouraged from reporting on the excesses of the royals and the activities of the Wahhabi clergy. Saudi intelligence, also in denial, failed to monitor what their nationals were up to in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya and the Muslim states of the former Soviet Union.

Even though 15 of the 19 suicide bombers on September 11 were Saudi nationals, the Saudi royals still failed to recognize they had become vulnerable on the home front.

Some 100,000 young men in the Arab and Muslim worlds, including about 20,000 Saudis, underwent guerrilla training in Pakistan in the years that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When Saudi veterans returned home after the Soviets decamped in Feb. 1989, veteran Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Feisal (now the ambassador in London) did not see them as a threat to the House of Saud.

When the Taliban regime fought its way to power in Afghanistan in 1996, and Osama bin Laden moved his headquarters from Khartoum, Sudan, to Kabul, drawing some 25,000 Saudis for indoctrination in his Islamist training camps, the royals remained oblivious to any internal threat — until May 2003, that is, when terrorist attacks got underway on Saudi soil.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Saudi organizations and individuals transferred hundreds of billions of dollars of privately-held money to their accounts in foreign banks. Surveillance of all this traffic was impossible for Saudi intelligence agencies. And for the less fortunate, the hawala (trust) system was virtually impenetrable. Known hawala clients transferred smaller amounts up to $50,000 without so much as a rudimentary paper trail.

It was these transfer channels that enabled the Wahhabi clergy to move some $300 million a year to Pakistan to maintain more than 10,000 madrassas that taught some 5 million young boys during the past 14 years to learn Arabic and recite the Koran by heart. Interspersed in the one-dimensional curriculum were messages of hate about the United States, Israel and India.

A critical turning point occurred in 1979 on several fronts: 1) the Soviets occupied Afghanistan; 2) Iran’s religious extremists — Shi’ite variety — overthrew the pro-western monarchy; 3) Saudi religious extremists — Sunni variety — occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

It took the royals — with technical assistance from French security — three weeks to subdue the religious revolt, but the compromise negotiated with the Wahhabi clergy left the royal establishment hoist on its own petard. In return for muzzling their Wahhabi critics, the royals left the clergy to its own devices outside of Saudi Arabia. Funded with the zakat — the 2.5% of yearly incomes that are semi-mandatory donations to clergy-controlled charities — the Wahhabis spread their strictest form of Islam from Mindanao in the Philippines to Morocco.

Such charities also financed extremist fronts, including the Palestinian terrorist organizations that most Saudis see as legitimate national liberation fronts. Thus, massive subsidies flowed to extremist and terrorist organizations under the guise of charity.

It was not until recently that Saudi intelligence discovered, belatedly, that some 15,000 young Saudis were involved in homegrown Islamist extremist groups. This was hardly a small number given the tiny size of a terrorist cell. In Northern Ireland, at the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign against British rule, there were never more than 300 Irish terrorists in the field. But they kept half the British army pinned down for a quarter of a century.

The Saudi kingdom’s head-in-the-sand surveillance also failed to detect a spreading Wahhabi missionary network in Europe and North America.

Alarmed by the spread of Islamist extremism in Europe, France’s new Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, who was the former foreign minister, asked the “Renseignments Generaux,” the French equivalent of the FBI’s counter-intelligence branch, for a report on what goes on in the country’s mosques.

Eighty percent of the imams in the 1,000 mosques surveyed by RG are foreigners; 20% French nationals, but only 2% born in France. Most of the imams said they are unpaid volunteers dependent on collection plates. In 40% of the mosques, imams admitted they were “self-proclaimed” or “improvised” with no theological credentials. Only the Turks could prove they had undergone religious training.

A little over one tenth of the imams surveyed said they were “self-taught” and were getting their religious training on the Internet. Asked to show what Web sites they were consulting, they were all pro-al Qaeda. France’s domestic intelligence agency also reported a steady increase in inflammatory sermons from Brest to Marseilles. Their attacks on French discrimination against Muslims — female scarves banned from state schools — paled next to anti-U.S. diatribes.

The Saudi royals detained over 1,000 imams after last year’s bombings in May and November. They were warned they would go straight to jail if they so much as mentioned the word jihad (holy war) in their Friday prayers. The Saudi billionaire, speaking not for attribution, said there are 40,000 mosques in Saudi Arabia, and the warnings go largely unheeded.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

==============================

Speaking Out: Muslim reformers condemn Saudi Wahhabism (National Review Online, 040628)

Liberal Egyptian intellectual Tarek Heggy, author of Culture, Civilization and Humanity, recently wrote about the need for Muslim moderates to work against Wahhabism: “What needs to be done at this stage is to champion the cause of enlightenment by supporting moderates and promoting the humanistic understanding of Islam.... Efforts in this direction must go hand in hand with a counteroffensive against the rigid, doctrinaire, even bloodthirsty, version of Islam that first appeared among isolated communities separated from the march of civilization by the impenetrable sand dunes of the Arabian Desert.”

Heggy, who will embark on a speaking tour in Washington, D.C., in late June to discuss his new Egyptian think tank and newspaper, added: “The time has come for the Saudi government to part ways with Wahhabism and to realize that the alliance between the House of Saud and the Wahhabi dynasty is responsible for the spread of obscurantism, dogmatism, and fanaticism, poisoning minds with radical ideas opposed to humanity....”

In addition to Heggy, an increasing number of reform-minded Muslims have begun to speak out against the impact of Saudi Wahhabism in the Muslim world. They have accused Wahhabism of serving as al Qaeda’s guiding philosophy, “poisoning minds” of young Muslims, and being the main purveyor of anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian sentiment in the Arab and Muslim world.

Egyptian Wael Al-Abrashi, deputy editor of the Egyptian weekly Roz Al-Yousef, wrote a series of articles critical of Wahhabism last year following the Riyadh bombings. According to Al-Abrashi: “Saudi Arabia has become the biggest area for extremist ideology and [provided] the broadest scope for the development of its viruses.”

Since his articles were first released, al Qaeda has attacked Saudi Arabia multiple times, something Al-Abrashi warned would happen: “...Although Saudi Arabia has adopted a strategy of exporting Wahhabism to the rest of the world ... Saudi Arabia created the monster, exported it abroad, and then lost control of it. Then, the monster turned on it...”

In an article in the Addis Tribune about the corruption of Somali Islam by Saudi Arabia, journalist Bashir Goth criticized the Saudis’ spreading of Wahhabism to his country: “It is a pity to see that, at a time when Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabism, is reassessing the damage that Wahhabism and extremism had done to their country’s name and to the reputation of Islam all over the world, that Wahhabism has to find a safe-haven in our country.” He also discussed how the Saudi-trained religious police have taken over Muslim towns: “The most conspicuous foot soldiers of Wahhabism are the moral police known as Mutawiun, who roam in the streets like riot police and force people to perform rituals or adhere to Wahhabism’s code of decency.... This is the Wahhabism that the Saudi-oriented clerics want to impose on Somaliland.... It is a closed [mindset] that turned Islam into a fragile creed that lives in constant fear of children’s toys and games such as Barbie dolls and Pokemon...”

Ethiopian journalist Alem Zelalem has written extensively about Wahhabism “corrupting” the Islam of his native Ethiopia and described how Saudis have built hundreds of mosques in Ethiopia over the past eight years, popping up “like weeds.” One way the Saudis have spread Wahhabism to Ethiopians, he explains, is “by taking advantage of the unfortunate economic conditions of the downtrodden Ethiopian masses, the Saudi Embassy in Addis Ababa is busy bribing people to convert to Islam. The usual amount that they pay...is some $600.00.” Zelalem called the mosques and madrassas “brainwashing factories” for teaching jihad and anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic ideology. He detailed how at least 5,000 Ethiopian boys have undergone “military training” for jihad in the Middle East.

Even in Saudi Arabia, the detrimental effects of Wahhabism are now discussed in public. Jamal Khashoggi, who currently advises Saudi Prince Turki in London, was fired last year following the Riyadh bombing when the paper he edited, Al-Watan, included articles critical of Wahhabism’s spiritual father, Ibn Taymiyya. One article written by Khaled Al-Ghanami condemned the Saudi government’s religious police and criticized the “spiritual father of Wahhabism,” calling his philosophy “the real problem,” and “a mistake” for Saudi Arabia.

As current events play out in Saudi Arabia, the royal family would do well to listen to the critique by reformist Muslims on how Wahhabism has negatively impacted their communities. As Wael Al-Abrashi explained, Saudi Arabia created the Wahhabi monster — and then lost control of it. They must now figure out how to battle against it.

— Steven Stalinsky is executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

==============================

Anti-Semitism and France (WS, 040713)

The story of assault on a French train highlights the problem in France. But nation’s elites have slowly begun to understand that their society has a problem.

YOU COULD EASILY HAVE MISSED the two-inch story on an inside page of yesterday’s Washington Post about the young mother attacked on a train near Paris, but it dominated the front pages in France. “Train of hate,” was the lead headline in the conservative Le Figaro, followed by the subhead, “The cowardice of the anti-Semitic thugs was matched by the cowardice of the passengers on the train.”

“Antis’mitism: A French story,” read the giant headline filling the first page of the leftist Libération. “Indignation is universal after the gang attack Friday in an RER train near Paris on a young woman and her 13-month old baby in front of passive witnesses.”

Even the establishment Le Monde made room for the story on page one above the fold: “Amazement after the anti-Semitic attack on a woman on an RER train.”

Stunning as it was, the story was developing some curious holes by the end of Monday. No witnesses had come forward, nor had security cameras helped to identify suspects. Unconfirmed reports on radio and TV said “Marie L.” had a history of reporting attacks that no one else saw. Her account was indeed unusual.

Early Friday, Marie L. told the authorities, she boarded a two-deck RER train in a Paris suburb with her baby daughter in a stroller. She chose to remain standing rather than maneuver the stroller up the stairs. Soon six youths of North African Arab or African descent came down the stairs and accosted her. Several had knives. One cut her clothing.

One started fishing through her backpack. He stole 200 euros and found an old identification card that listed an address in the wealthy 16th arrondissement of Paris. One of the assailants said, “In the 16th there are only Jews,” and the attack took a racist turn. Three swastikas were drawn on her body in black marker. Someone cut off some of her hair. Finally the train pulled into Aubervilliers station and the assailants ran, capsizing the stroller and knocking the baby to the ground. Only then did a couple approach Marie L. to help.

With echoes of Tawana Brawley now hanging about this particular case, one can draw no conclusion about the facts. Already, though, the story has thrown a spotlight on the steep rise in anti-Semitic crimes in France. According to official statistics, there were more attacks (vandalism, arson, assault, and so on) targeting France’s 600,000 Jews in the first half of this year than in all of 2003—135, up from 127 last year. An additional 95 racist attacks targeted all other groups, including some 5 million Muslims. This figure too, has already surpassed the total for last year.

Politicians from President Chirac on down are vowing to punish Marie L.’s assailants to the full extent of the law (assuming they are captured). And it has been announced that this year’s Bastille Day presidential pardons will not extend to perpetrators of racist or sexist crimes. More important, the current French government, according to numerous sources, has moved beyond the denial of three years ago and is starting to tackle its anti-Semitism/Muslim violence problem in a sustained way.

A cabinet-level group now meets monthly to monitor the incidence of anti-Semitism. Former interior minister Nicolas Sarcozy, who is credited with being the first to wake up to the dimensions of the problem, is now the powerful minister of finance. His successor at the interior ministry, Dominique de Villepin, has favorably impressed American collaborators on the issue.

“The French have actually gone further than any other country in Europe in recognizing that they have a mountain of a problem on their hands,” says David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, who consults with the French government. Indeed, from their point of view, anti-Semitism may turn out to be the least of it. The huge number of Muslim young people born in France who actively resist acculturation, he says, leaves French officials “baffled and challenged.”

But government officials are now eagerly seeking constructive policies. They have expressed interest, for example, in the “Hands Across the Campus” curriculum the AJC developed some years ago for schools beset by inter-group conflict. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, points to the French government’s role in prodding the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to hold a conference two weeks ago in Paris on the ways the Internet is being used to promote anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and racism. There were 55 nations at the table, says Cooper, “and my presentation wasn’t P.C. at all.”

At least behind closed doors, French officials are even starting to entertain the proposition that the virulence and relentlessness of their criticism of Israel and its supporters feeds the insalubrious climate in which crimes against Jews multiply. Despite French newspapers’ vigorous coverage of the latest apparent anti-Semitic attack, a further evolution may be needed before French intellectual and media elites will go that far.

Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.

==============================

Hate ‘victim’ admits she lied (Washington Times, 040714)

PARIS — A young mother who claimed she was the victim of a cruel anti-Semitic attack that stunned France has confessed she fabricated the story, authorities said yesterday.

The woman had claimed she was robbed on a suburban train Friday by a knife-wielding gang that mistook her for a Jew and scrawled swastikas on her body.

Police could find no clues or witnesses and took the woman in for questioning yesterday.

There was no immediate explanation of the woman’s motive for making up the story.

Reports of the attack in a suburban Paris train outraged France, drawing fierce condemnation from politicians and Jewish groups.

The woman told police her young attackers were of North African and African origin and that none of some 20 witnesses in the train car came to her rescue. She said the gang robbed her and turned over a stroller holding her infant, causing the baby to tumble to the floor.

Newspapers gave the story front-page prominence Monday with headlines like “The Train of Hate.”

But, by yesterday, front pages turned skeptical. “Questions on an attack,” said Liberation, which reported the woman’s account was full of “gray areas” and “contradictions.”

Surveillance cameras at the station where the gang reportedly left the train showed no young men running from the scene, and none of the purported 20 witnesses had come forward despite repeated calls from officials and promises of anonymity.

Both France-Info radio and the television station LCI reported that the young woman had filed several complaints about violence and aggression in the past that never panned out. Neither provided sources, but LCI said she had filed six such complaints. Justice Minister Dominique Perben urged the public to be patient and wait for investigators to reach a conclusion.

“All the elements are being verified and screened,” he said early yesterday. “It is, therefore, essential to wait for this work to be finished before making up our minds one way or the other.”

In a morning radio interview, government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope said that whether the woman’s account proved true or not had little bearing on France’s need to stem hate crimes.

The Interior Ministry released figures last week showing that hate crimes had spiked in the first half of the year. There were 510 anti-Jewish acts or threats in the first six months of 2004 — nearly as many as in all of last year, 593.

==============================

Spanish Judge: Morocco Biggest Terror Threat to Europe (FN, 040716)

Madrid Train Station Blasts Kill 190

MADRID, Spain — Europe’s biggest terrorist threat is Morocco — seething with as many as 1,000 Al Qaeda adherents capable of homicide attacks and skilled at slipping through the continent’s southern gateway, Spain’s leading anti-terrorism judge testified Thursday.

The impoverished kingdom just a short ferry ride across the Strait of Gibraltar has about 100 Al Qaeda-linked cells that raise money by dealing hashish, fencing luxury cars and smuggling people into Spain, Judge Baltasar Garzon told lawmakers investigating the Madrid train bombings. Most of the 17 suspects jailed in the March 11 bombings, which killed 190 people, are Moroccan.

“They use every means and mechanism, and their activity can even be initially perceived as ordinary delinquency,” Garzon said of the cells.

“In my opinion it is the gravest problem Europe faces today with this kind of terrorism.”

Garzon said his figures came from police and intelligence data.

Officials at the Moroccan Embassy could not be reached to respond to Garzon’s allegations. Morocco, too, has done its share of finger-pointing at Spain since the train bombings, but both countries have pledged to work more closely against terrorism.

Garzon said his first reaction to the train bombings was that Al Qaeda was responsible, not Basque separatists as initially claimed by the government. He cited the scale of the carnage and the level of coordination — 10 nearly simultaneous blasts from backpacks full of dynamite and shrapnel.

“The spectacle was absolutely horrifying,” Garzon said. “It is probably the most shocking thing I have ever seen and I hope it is the last.”

Garzon said he had second thoughts when police told him — in error — that the explosives were a brand favored by Basque separatists, but he became convinced the attacks were linked to Islamic extremists hours later after learning that a van containing detonators, explosives and a tape with Quranic verses was found near a rail station.

“It was like a light bulb going on,” Garzon said, referring specifically to the tape. “I had no doubt whatsoever.”

At that point the government already blamed the Basque group ETA, and even after disclosing the existence of the tape it continued to insist ETA was the prime suspect.

Spain’s then-conservative government at first backed the U.S.-led Iraq war despite fierce opposition at home, sending 1,300 troops after major combat ended. After the train bombings, it feared that word of an Islamic link would doom it in general elections due in three days.

Voters did punish the government, electing Socialists who opposed the war and quickly brought the soldiers home.

Garzon testified before the 16-member commission as an expert on Islamic terrorism after investigating extremist groups in Spain since 1989.

The National Court, where Garzon works, is conducting the main probe of the bombings, but Garzon is not directly involved. The separate, legislative inquiry is aimed at examining the government’s handling of the massacre and whether it could have been averted through warnings from intelligence agencies.

Last month, Garzon completed an eight-year investigation that led to indictments against 41 Al Qaeda suspects, including Usama bin Laden, accusing him and a dozen others of preparing the Sept. 11 attacks.

Morocco was hit by a string of terrorist bombings on May 16, 2003, killing 45 people, including 12 homicide bombers. One of the main targets was a Spanish restaurant and social club, and four of the victims were Spaniards.

Moroccan authorities blamed Al Qaeda and reacted with a crackdown on fundamentalist suspects, arresting more than 5,000 people, although most were released. But 700 remain behind bars and 17 face the death penalty, which has not been imposed in Morocco since 1993.

After the Madrid bombings, Moroccan authorities insisted they had warned Spain about one of the key suspects, a Moroccan named Jamal Zougam.

There also is a recent history of ill will between the countries: there have been disputes over fishing rights, illegal immigration and territorial claims that nearly led to a military clash in 2002.

Garzon said Thursday the Spanish government’s support for the Iraq war was probably only one factor leading to the terrorist attack.

Islamic cells have been present in Spain since the early 1990s, and Muslims in North Africa maintain a historic claim to the Spanish territory that the Moors ruled for 800 years and called al-Andalus, Garzon said.

Al Qaeda has struck other countries since Sept. 11, including Indonesia and Turkey. For Spain, he said, “maybe it was just a question of time.”

==============================

Truth Hurts (Tongue Tied, 040729)

Muslims diplomats in Norway are in a furor because a politician there criticized the practice of using children as suicide bombers, reports the Norway Post.

Speaking at a church festival in Bergen, Progress Party chief Carl Hagen said that children are used as suicide bombers in the effort to convert the world to Islam, while parents believe they receive glory and honour as their children become martyrs.

“I can see no similarity with the concept of moral and justice found in Christianity,” Hagen said.

A local theologian compared the comments to agitation against the Jews in Norway in the 1930s, and a group of diplomats wrote a letter to a newspaper complaining about the speech.

“Hagen has insulted 1.3 billion Muslims, and offended the principles of tolerance and freedom on which the Norwegian society is built,” the diplomats write in a letter to Aftenposten.

==============================

Abetting Beheadings: It is not clear that Islam condemns the al Qaeda killings (National Review Online, 040813)

Any rational person has to welcome yesterday’s attempt by Mustafa Akyol to find in Islam an unambiguous condemnation of the barbarous beheadings we’ve repeatedly seen since the butchering of Daniel Pearl two years ago. Regrettably, however, Akyol manages to achieve ostensible clarity only by abridging the Koran and seminal events in Islamic history — including the life of the Prophet Muhammed. I wish he had engaged these troublesome matters directly and opined about what we are to make of them.

To begin with, Akyol proceeds from the premise that jihad, i.e., violent holy war, as anticipated in the Islamic tradition, contemplates both that there will be many prisoners during active hostilities and that they must under all circumstances be treated humanely. Alas, there is abundant evidence that neither proposition is true. First and foremost, there is the Koran itself — specifically, Sura 8:65-67:

65. O Prophet, rouse the Believers to the fight. If there are twenty amongst you, patient and persevering, they will vanquish two hundred: if a hundred they will vanquish a thousand of the Unbelievers: for these are a people without understanding. 66. For the present, Allah hath lightened your burden, for he knoweth that there is a weak spot in you: But even so, if there are a hundred of you, patient and persevering, they will vanquish two hundred, and if a thousand, they will vanquish two thousand, with the leave of Allah: for Allah is with those who patiently persevere. 67. It is not fitting for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he hath thoroughly subdued the land: Ye look for the temporal goods of this world, but Allah looketh to the Hereafter: and Allah is exalted in might, Wise. (Emphasis added.)

To support the notion of a consistent Islamic doctrine mandating humane treatment of prisoners, Akyol mines verse 6 from Sura 9: “If one amongst the Pagans ask thee for asylum, grant it to him, so that he may hear the word of God; and then escort him to where he can be secure. That is because they are men without knowledge.” Unfortunately, this passage addresses the very different situation of the time after Muslims have “subdued the land” and find themselves dealing with unbelievers who have broken treaties.

In fact, and on the contrary — as the verses from Sura 8 excerpted above illustrate — there is clearly Koranic authority for militants to rely on in concluding that (a) when jihad is ongoing, the taking of prisoners is frowned on, and (b) jihad should be ongoing until the enemy is subdued, meaning he has either surrendered or been routed.

So if prisoners ought not be kept, what, according to Muslim tradition, is to be done with them? The answer is not nearly as clear or as reassuring as Akyol contends. As Andrew G. Bostom has recently explained:

According to Muhammad’s sacralized biography by Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad himself sanctioned the massacre of the Qurayza, a vanquished Jewish tribe. He appointed an “arbiter” who soon rendered this concise verdict: the men were to be put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, the spoils to be divided among the Muslims. Muhammad ratified this judgment stating that it was a decree of God pronounced from above the Seven Heavens. Thus some 600 to 900 men from the Qurayza were lead [sic] on Muhammad’s order to the Market of Medina. Trenches were dug and the men were beheaded, and their decapitated corpses buried in the trenches while Muhammad watched in attendance. Women and children were sold into slavery, a number of them being distributed as gifts among Muhammad’s companions, and Muhammad chose one of the Qurayza women (Rayhana) for himself. The Qurayza’s property and other possessions (including weapons) were also divided up as additional “booty” among the Muslims, to support further jihad campaigns. (Emphasis added.)

Akyol lingers on “historical accounts reporting Prophet Muhammad ordering his men to treat captives very humanely,” but he leaves this one out. Moreover, it is far from the only germane example of Islamic beheading practice. As Bostom elaborates, the eleventh-century classical Islamic jurist al-Mawardi, writing during the so-called “Golden Age” of the Abbasid-Baghdadian Caliphate, counseled the following with regard to captives taken in the jihad:

As for the captives, the amir [ruler] has the choice of taking the most beneficial action of four possibilities: the first to put them to death by cutting their necks; the second, to enslave them and apply the laws of slavery regarding their sale and manumission; the third, to ransom them in exchange for goods or prisoners; and fourth, to show favor to them and pardon them. (Emphasis added.)

Why give the choice of execution by beheading (“cutting their necks”)? Marwadi relied on the Koran itself, specifically Sura 47:4. This is precisely the verse that Akyol cites to support his proposition that if beheading victims Nicholas Berg, Paul Johnson, and Kim Sun-il had been “regarded as prisoners of war” by their jihadist captors, “The verdict of the Koran is clear about them: They should be taken as captives during the battle, then, after the war, they should be released for free or ransomed.” But is that what Sura 47:4 really says? Unfortunately, no. It reads:

Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers in fight, smite at their necks; at length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind the captives firmly: therefore is the time for either generosity or ransom until the war lays down its burdens. . . .” (Emphasis added.)

Obviously, we should all wish that the interpretation of this verse were as Akyol would have it — and perhaps someday, if there is a Muslim reformation and a clearly defined moderate Islam becomes the creed’s dominant ideological force, that will finally be the case. But we are not going to get there by pretending, ostrich-like, that the words “smite at their necks” aren’t there. The militants may plainly read this verse to say: Execute by beheading first, and show mercy only after the enemy — i.e., the entire enemy, not the individual captive — has been “thoroughly subdued.” Akyol needs to make a principled argument about why that jihadist construction is not only unreasonable but somehow pellucidly un-Islamic. He is not going to convince anyone who needs convincing by simply avoiding the words he’d prefer not to confront.

Nor, one is sadly forced to note, is Sura 47:4 singular. Others not addressed by Akyol but plain as day include, for example, Sura 2:191 (“[S]lay them wherever you catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they first fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who reject faith”); Sura 5:33 (“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief throughout the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land”); and Sura 8:12 (“Remember thy Lord inspired the angels with the message: ‘I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: Smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them”). (All italics mine.)

The execution of captives, particularly by beheading, is not unusual in the history and scripture of Islam. This is not in any way to say that beheading is unique to the Muslim world — it was, for example, practiced in Europe for centuries. But, it is still practiced commonly in the Muslim world, and not just among jihadists but also in states, such as Saudi Arabia, in which Islamic law is, at least nominally, the regnant legal system.

I applaud Akyol for condemning the depravity of the militants who have savaged Johnson, Berg, il-Sun, Pearl, and others. But I don’t believe he has made a compelling case for the “Islamic condemnation of the al Qaeda killings.” Such a case would require taking these troubling verses and incidents head-on, and providing a cogent explanation of why they should not be interpreted as jihadists have interpreted them.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is reachable through www.benadorassociates.com.

==============================

Russian siege stirs Muslim condemnation (Washington Times, 040916)

By David R. Sands

Revolted by the grisly seizure of a Russian schoolhouse by Islamic terrorists, Arab and Muslim leaders have become increasingly critical of terrorism committed in the name of their faith.

Long criticized for failing to speak out against the militant extremists in their ranks, Muslim clerics, politicians and intellectuals around the world have condemned the terrorist strike in Beslan, Russia, in which more than 170 children were among the victims.

“The sense of outrage is very strong, especially when the terrorists claim to be acting in the name of your religion,” said Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy.

“Muslims, in general, have some sympathy for the plight of the Chechens, but the size of this attack and the targeting of children is against everything Islam stands for,” he said.

Both the Arab League and the 56-nation Organization of Islamic Conference condemned the Beslan attack. Sheik Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, a leading religious authority among Sunni Muslims worldwide, said the attack could not be justified.

“Terrorists are taking Islam as a cover, and it is a deceptive cover,” Sheik Tantawi told the Turkish newspaper Zaman. “Those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims.”

The negative reaction has not been unanimous.

Many Muslims still argue that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin brought the Beslan tragedy upon itself by its brutal campaign in Chechnya.

At least 338 hostages died in the early September taking of the school in southern Russia, which the government has blamed on Islamic militants from Chechnya.

Azizuddin El-Kaissouni, writing on an Islamic Web site, Islam Online, said reports that Mr. Putin has accepted advice from Israeli anti-terrorist experts have only fueled resentment over what Muslims call “genocide” in Chechnya.

“It is tragic that it takes the deaths of 300 innocents to make the world pay attention to the death of 200,000 innocents,” he wrote. “The international media’s fickle, cynical coverage has made the Chechens’ cries worth noting only if they come drenched in Russian blood.”

But, editorials in state-owned press outlets across the Arab world condemned the Beslan hostage seizure in distinct contrast to the often-muted tone adopted toward anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli terrorism in the region.

Egypt’s official government daily Al-Ahram called Beslan “an ugly crime against humanity.”

“It is impossible that those who carried out the operation had a legitimate problem or that they acted out of religious belief,” the paper said.

Several commentators focused more on the fact that the bloodshed in Beslan reflected badly on Islam than on the human tragedy.

Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed, former editor of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, the influential Arabic daily published in London, said in a widely noted editorial that the violent tactics of Islamist extremists — from Iraq and Indonesia to Russia and Sudan — were tarnishing all believers.

“Obviously, not all Muslims are terrorists; but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims,” he wrote.

“What a terrible record. Does this not say something about us, about our society and our culture?”

Writing in the Saudi government daily Okaz, columnist Khaled Hamad al-Suleiman said violent Islamic extremists “succeeded in the span of a few years in distorting the image of Islam, while the enemies of Islam did not succeed in doing this in the course of hundreds of years.”

“The time has come for Muslims to be the first to come out against those interested in abducting Islam in the same way they abducted innocent children,” he said.

Sa’ad bin Tefla, former Kuwaiti information minister, argued in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat late last week that moderate Muslim silence in the face of Osama bin Laden’s global terror campaign helped prepare the ground for incidents such as Beslan.

“With our equivocal stance on bin Laden, we from the very start left the world with the impression that we are all bin Laden,” he said.

In Indonesia, polls in the world’s largest Muslim country say militant Islamic parties have been hurt badly in the run-up to next week’s elections by a series of terrorist attacks, including the Sept. 9 car bombing outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta that killed 11 bystanders.

==============================

Canada Weighs Using Muslim Law (Foxnews, 040917)

CHICAGO — In Muslim neighborhoods in Canada, some women fear the legal power handed to their religious leaders.

As long as the country’s law is followed, religious leaders can play a role in Canada’s legal system. But a controversy has erupted over whether Muslim law should be used.

Two parties in a Canadian civil dispute, like a divorce, can opt to use a religious leader as a mediator, and the mediator’s decision is binding. Canadian native tribes, Christians and Jews use this system.

“If Muslims have a civil dispute among themselves, they would want to settle the matter within the community rather than take it outside,” said Shabir Ally, president of the Islamic Information Institute.

But some Canadian Muslim women fear that Muslim law, or Sharia, will be imposed on them in these civil mediations. Critics say Sharia has been used, or abused, to discriminate against women. And some Canadian Muslim women say they will be badgered into accepting decisions from conservative imams acting as mediators.

“They will be oppressed in a sense because they’ll be coerced into feeling they need to follow this process of binding arbitration, implementing Sharia. Otherwise they’re deemed as blasphemous and labeled by the community and then where else is she to go?” said Iman Zebian, a member of the board of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women.

Unless the government watches closely, these women worry that imams acting as legal arbitrators will take advantage of women in the name of Islam.

==============================

Murderous Monotheists: What Zarqawi believes (Weekly Standard, 041011)

FACED WITH the series of beheadings and other grisly crimes committed in Iraq by the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Westerners may wonder why this gang should call itself “Monotheism and Jihad.” The group’s Arabic name, Tawhid wa’al-Jihad, is often misleadingly translated “Unity and Jihad,” which could lead English-speakers to suppose that Zarqawi and company are acting in the name of a united Iraqi nation, or of Arab unity, or of solidarity among jihadists or Muslims generally.

But Tawhid does not mean “unity,” much less “unification”; it means “uniqueness,” as in the uniqueness of God the Creator. To understand the theology behind this word is to appreciate the identity of the “foreign fighters” around Zarqawi—himself born in Jordan—and the purpose of their kidnappings and beheadings.

All Muslims, of course, are monotheists. Islam rejects the multiple gods and goddesses of the pagan religions, and proclaims the creation of the universe by a single God. But in the 18th century, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect, asserted that Muslims had fallen away from true monotheism back into pagan unbelief: worship of multiple gods, or polytheism. Wahhabism, now the state religion of Saudi Arabia, continues to assert that Islam as practiced in nearly the whole of the global Muslim community outside the Saudi kingdom is actually apostasy.

The Arabic term for polytheism is shirk, or “assigning partners to Allah.” According to the Wahhabi creed, in recent centuries, only the followers of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and their descendants have been true monotheists. All non-Wahhabis—whether nominally Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist—are steeped in shirk and deserve to be killed so that pure Wahhabi monotheism can reign supreme.

In this twisted view, the majority of Iraqis are guilty of shirk. Up to 70% of Iraqis belong to the Shia sect of Islam, and as such follow the guidance of their imams and ayatollahs, wise theologians recognized for their study and insight. According to the Wahhabis, to follow a supreme cleric or marja like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, leader of the Iraqi Shias, is to place him on an equal level with God. Shias should therefore be killed as polytheists, their property confiscated, and their women dishonored.

Wahhabis also hate Shias because they erect elaborate tombs for their martyrs and outstanding clerics and pray at these graves. Wahhabis believe that the very existence of graveyards and tombs is a kind of double polytheism, in which the person memorialized in the grave is elevated to equality with God, and the gravestone or tomb becomes an idol; to pray in cemeteries is, in Wahhabi eyes, to commit an abomination. Thus, once the Shias are killed, their holy sites must be torn down and their graveyards desecrated.

For this reason, the beheadings carried out in the name of “monotheism” in Iraq are aimed not only at terrorizing Westerners, but equally at intimidating Shias. We must understand that Iraqi Shias know this, and will help us in the struggle to extirpate Zarqawi and his gangsters.

Wahhabis equally accuse Sufis of polytheism. Sufism is a spiritual Islamic tradition influenced by Christianity and Eastern religions that is the dominant form of Islam in much of the world, notably French West Africa, much of North Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, Central Asia, India, and Indonesia. Once again, the Wahhabis’ virulent hatred is excited by the Sufi practice of discipleship, with sheikhs as teachers, and the Sufi devotion to praying at graves and maintaining the tombs of saints. Westerners sometimes believe that saints are absent from Islam. But they are not; in Kazakhstan, a country dominated by Sufism, a common, traditional prayer runs: “Thousands of saints in Turkestan / Thousands of saints in Turkestan / I pray for your aid.”

Prayers to saints and to the Prophet Muhammad for intercession with the Creator, along with obedience to sheikhs and preservation of burial sites, make the Sufis, from the Wahhabi viewpoint, deserving of slaughter and pillage. Since Sufism is the dominant form of Islam among Iraqi Kurds, each beheading by the Zarqawi conspiracy threatens them.

Obviously, Jews and Christians do not fare well in the Wahhabi scheme. As the historian Bernard Lewis pointed out in his authoritative volume The Jews of Islam, the Ottoman caliphate recognized and honored the “unflawed monotheism” of the Jews. But the Wahhabis hated the Ottomans as patrons of Sufism and friends of Shiism. Indeed, the Wahhabis loathe the Jews for treating rabbis as religious authorities, and considered them fit only for beheading even before the state of Israel existed. They also deride the Jews for their love of life. Wahhabis brag that they love death.

Finally, there are the Christians, whom Wahhabis despise as practitioners of polytheism because of their faith in the trinity. Above all, their belief that Jesus was God’s son and fully divine qualifies all Christians for murder, without argument.

Still, there is a special edge to the Wahhabis’ hatred of non-Wahhabi Muslims. As Saudi Wahhabi bigots typically put it: We know the Jews and Christians are our enemies; but the Shias and Sufis are worse, because they want to change our religion. (As if Islam had been invented by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab 250 years ago!) This may explain the otherwise peculiar news report in mid-September that a Turkish hostage in Iraq, apparently a born Muslim, was released after he “converted to Islam.” Wahhabis believe that mainstream, traditional, moderate, and normal Muslims must undergo a Wahhabi conversion to become real Muslims.

The principal writing of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab is entitled Kitab al-Tawhid, or the Book of Monotheism. Therein Wahhab proclaimed that Islam had become idolatry, and that he alone had found the perfect means of resolving this “grave problem”: namely, the purging of the guilty, whose “blood and property” were no longer to be respected. Wahhab’s poisonous tract, published in English translation in Riyadh in 1991, has been widely circulated in the United States, especially among young Muslims on college campuses.

There are additional political lessons here. Zarqawi’s Wahhabism did not originate in the country of his birth; it is a Saudi invention. Saudi Arabia prides itself on being known as “the land of tawhid.” The rhetoric of Monotheism and Jihad betrays the Saudi origin of the terror its acolytes sow far and wide. And in the mosques of Saudi Arabia, state-employed Wahhabi clerics continue to deliver Friday sermons inciting the faithful to “monotheism and jihad”—meaning, first and foremost, passage across Saudi Arabia’s long northern border into Iraq to kill and die.

There is a grotesque footnote to this nightmare. As the historian J.B. Kelly has pointed out, Western academic and political apologists for the Saudi state and Wahhabism have often translated the Arabic term “muwahid’dun”—or “believers in tawhid,” the Wahhabis’ preferred term for themselves—as “unitarians.” If certain powerful figures in the Middle East Studies departments at universities in the United States and elsewhere had their way, current headlines would read “Unitarians Behead Another American.”

The final significance of the atrocities committed in the name of Monotheism and Jihad should be obvious: The monsters who perpetrate these crimes are not partisans of resistance to foreign occupation, or Iraqi patriots, or ordinary Muslims angered by a non-Muslim intrusion into an Islamic land. They represent Islamofascism in its purest, Saudi-backed form—ideological, fanatical, and nihilistic. War against them is war to the death, a war they have chosen and from whence, in the view of traditional Muslims, divine punishment awaits them.

Stephen Schwartz is the author of The Two Faces of Islam.

==============================

Women win rights by relying on Koran (Washington Times, 041018)

Women’s rights advocates have won sweeping reforms of marriage and divorce laws in Morocco and Egypt by basing their arguments on an unlikely source — the Koran.

The latest reforms were in Morocco, where the parliament in February approved landmark changes to a 46-year-old family law by granting women property rights in marriage and the right to divorce.

Supporters of the changes — including King Mohammed VI — relied on verses from the Koran to support the reform.

“We showed in Morocco that there is no such thing as a contradiction between Islam and modernity, and there is no contradiction between Islam and equality between men and women,” said Aziz Mekouar, Moroccan ambassador to the United States.

The reforms also placed new restrictions on polygamy, requiring a husband seeking a second wife to first demonstrate to a judge that he can provide for the second wife as well as he has the first.

Morocco also raised the minimum age of marriage for women from 15 to 18 — the same age for men.

In Egypt, female politicians and activist groups relied on Islamic teachings to help pass changes to the country’s personal-status laws, making it easier for women to get a divorce.

In the past, Egyptian men could divorce their wives at will, but women had to prove they had been injured or harmed. Women now can get a divorce based on incompatibility.

The key to the legislative victories in both countries was that women’s rights advocates based their arguments on the Koran and worked within the existing political system, said Diane Singerman, an associate professor at American University specializing in Middle Eastern politics.

“It represents a learning curve within the women’s movement,” she said at a recent forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “Now the women’s movement is poised to do more extensive lobbying.”

She added, “These women basically turned Islam into an asset.”

In both Morocco and Egypt, as elsewhere in the region, family law is based on Islamic law or Shariah, whereas most other laws have a secular basis.

The Koran clearly spells out that women and men are to be treated equally, said Maysam Al Faruqi, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University. But in some cases, she said, the text has been misinterpreted to deny women their rights.

In other instances, she said, laws geared toward protecting Muslim women were added, but they had the unintended side effect of denying women their full rights. Muslim women now see it as their duty to correct these misinterpretations of the Koran.

“In general, Muslim feminists don’t operate outside the realm of Islam,” she said. “They use that religion to restore their rights.”

Ms. Al Faruqi said it is important to understand that most Muslim women do not want blind equality. There is a belief that because a wife is responsible for child rearing, her husband has a greater responsibility to provide financially for the family.

“Because of the fact that women have to carry children and therefore must provide time and effort and attention and care, they make the financial obligation fall on the man instead of the woman,” she said. “It equalizes the responsibility.”

Despite the gains, Farida Deif, a North Africa and Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch, cautioned that men and women remain far from equal in both Egypt and Morocco.

For instance, she said, if an Egyptian woman files for divorce based on incompatibility, she must return the dowry paid by her husband and cannot seek alimony. She also has no rights to the couple’s home.

“They are perpetually at risk of becoming homeless. There’s no sense of shared marital property,” she said. “Divorce can be basically tantamount to homelessness in the region.”

Throughout North Africa, she said, women accused of adultery or extramarital affairs face harsh laws while husbands accused of killing their wives for committing adultery can have their sentences reduced.

Even when the laws are changed, as in the case of Morocco, that does not mean women will take advantage of them.

“One big problem is public awareness, especially with a lot of older, immigrant women,” said Susan Schaefer Davis, a socio-economist and author of “Patience and Power: Women’s Lives in a Moroccan Village.”

She spoke at a forum sponsored by the Moroccan American Center for Policy earlier this week.

Besides learning about the new laws, Ms. Davis said, women in rural areas must travel to family courts in the provincial capital, which can prove extremely difficult. Once at the court, women then must rely on the judges to apply the new laws appropriately.

==============================

For Dutch, anger battles with tolerance (Herald Tribune, 041111)

By Craig S. Smith The New York Times

AMSTERDAM Anger toward the Netherlands’ Muslim community percolated among the crowd that gathered outside the funeral for the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was killed by an Islamic extremist a week ago.

The public debate over how conservative Islam fits into Europe’s most tolerant, liberal society had already become a no-holds-barred affair before the killing of van Gogh, who had publicly and repeatedly used epithets against Muslims. But his killing has now polarized the country, giving the rest of Europe a disturbing glimpse of what may be in store if relations with the continent’s growing immigrant communities are not managed more adeptly.

The anger is such that for the second time in two days an Islamic elementary school was attacked Tuesday, this time in Uden, part of what Dutch authorities fear are reprisals after van Gogh’s killing, The Associated Press reported. The authorities said that Muslim sites had been the target of a half-dozen attacks in the past week, The AP reported.

In apparent retaliation, arsonists attempted to burn down Protestant churches in Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amersfoort, the news service quoted the police as saying.

The attacks have scratched the patina of tolerance on which the Dutch have long prided themselves, particularly here in their principal city, where the scent of hashish trails in the air, prostitutes beckon from storefront brothels and Hell’s Angels live side by side with Hare Krishnas. But many Dutch now say that for years that tradition of tolerance suppressed an open debate about the challenges of integrating conservative Muslims.

Jan Colijn, 46, a bookkeeper from the central Dutch town of Gorinchem who was at the funeral Tuesday night, complained that the Netherlands’ generous social welfare system had allowed Muslim immigrants to isolate themselves. Because of that, “there is a kind of Muslim fascism emerging here,” he said. “The government must find a way to break these communities open.”

Another man, who declined to give his name, was more succinct: “Now, it’s war.”

For many years, such criticism of Islam and Islamic customs, even among Dutch extremists, was considered taboo, despite deep frustrations that had built up against conservative Islam in the country.

Many here say that began to change after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, when the Netherlands, like many countries, began to consider the dangers of political Islam seriously. The debate fueled an anti-immigration movement and helped propel the career of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered by an environmental activist shortly before national elections in 2002.

By all accounts here, Fortuyn’s murder removed any remaining brakes on the debate surrounding immigrants.

“After Pim Fortuyn’s murder, there were no limitations on what you could say,” said Edwin Bakker, a terrorism expert at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations. “It has become a climate in which insulting people is the norm.”

He and others said the public discourse, even among members of government, reached an unprecedented pitch and included language that went far beyond the limits set for public forums in the United States.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of Parliament and one of a handful of politicians threatened with death by Islamic extremists, publicly called the prophet Muhammad a “pervert” and a “tyrant.” She made a film with van Gogh condemning sexual abuse among Muslim women, who were portrayed with Koranic verses written on their bare skin.

Van Gogh himself was one of the most outspoken critics of fundamentalist Muslims and favored an epithet for conservative Muslims that referred to bestiality with a goat. He used the term often in his public statements, including a column he wrote for a widely read free newspaper and during radio broadcasts and television appearances.

The cumulative effect made van Gogh, a distant relation of the painter Vincent van Gogh, a kind of cult clown on one side of the debate, and a reviled hatemonger on the other.

The debate became so caustic that the Dutch intelligence service, AIVD, issued a report in March warning that the unrestrained language could encourage radicalization of the country’s Muslim youth and drive individuals into the arms of terrorist recruiters. The agency has warned repeatedly in recent years that such recruiters are active in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe.

While only about 20% of the Netherlands’ estimated 900,000 Muslims practice their religion, according to one government study, officials say as many as 5% of Muslims in the country follow a conservative form of Islam. Most are from the Netherlands’ Moroccan community, which has its roots in the Rif, an impoverished, mountainous Berber region in the north.

There are about 300,000 people of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands today, and the ratcheting up of the anti-immigration debate has alienated many of them from Dutch society and, many people argue, has also helped fragment the Muslim community.

Jean Tillie, a professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam, says that the debate has broken down a network that connected even the most extremist Muslim groups to the more moderate voices within the Muslim community. He cited an Amsterdam government advisory board that brought together all kinds of Moroccans and fostered communication and cohesion within the Muslim community.

“Those groups participating didn’t agree with each other, but they met together with the collective mission of advising the city government,” he said.

The board was abolished a year ago, he says, in the wake of the anti-immigration debate. He claims that funds for other ethnic organizations have shrunk and outreach policies have also been abandoned.

***

At El Tawheed mosque, considered by many people here to be the epicenter of extremism in Amsterdam, Farid Zaari, the mosque’s spokesman, argues that pressure from the debate has hindered the Muslim community’s ability to control its radical youth.

“If we bring these people into the mosque, it is possible to change their thoughts, but few mosques dare to because if you do, you’re branded,” he said.

Dutch media reports insist that van Gogh’s killer attended the mosque, and though Zaari says the mosque has no record of his ever being there, he said that political leaders and the media should encourage the mosque to reach out to the community’s radical youth, rather than stigmatizing it for doing so.

***

The mosque was previously associated with a Saudi-based charity, Al Haramain, which American and Saudi Arabian officials accused earlier this year of aiding Islamic terrorists. The mosque has since severed its ties with the charity, but more recently it has been criticized for selling books espousing extremist views, including female circumcision and the punishment of homosexuals by throwing them off tall buildings.

Several legislators have called for the mosque to be shut down, but under the Dutch constitution it is difficult to do.

Zaari admits that the Muslim community was slow to respond to the fears within Dutch society. “We didn’t feel it was our responsibility to bridge the gap, but now, with the murder, the gap has gotten wider,” he said. “All of us want to begin a dialogue now, but the language of the political right is too extreme, and that’s preventing discussion,” he said. “We all have to cool down and be careful what we say.”

The problem is how to bridge a gap that has yawned dangerously since van Gogh’s murder.

The Amsterdam Council of Churches published paid notices in some Dutch newspapers pledging solidarity with the Muslim community. But the government’s response has been to promise more money for fighting terrorism and stronger immigration laws.

“Islam is the most hated word in the country at this point,” said the terrorism expert, Bakker.

***

Explosion in raid on house

The explosion of a hand grenade during a terrorism-related raid on a house in The Hague on Wednesday wounded three police officers, The Associated Press reported from The Hague.

The Hague’s chief prosecutor, Han Moraal, said the raid was part of a “continuing investigation into terrorism” but would not say whether it was related to the killing of van Gogh.

Several city blocks were cordoned off in a mostly immigrant neighborhood near the Holland Spoor train station.

==============================

Anti-Americanism Unites Muslim Extremes (Foxnews, 041124)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have created a shared anti-American cause among otherwise-divided Muslim extremists and raised the stature of the radicals in the eyes of ordinary Muslims, a Pentagon advisory panel says.

The report by the Defense Science Board concludes that the government must urgently change its approach to understanding and communicating with the Muslim world. It says U.S. public diplomacy is in crisis, and neither the White House nor Congress has done enough to fix it.

At the root of the problem, the report says, is a fundamental misunderstanding of why many Muslims are hostile toward the United States. They “hate our policies,” not our freedom, it said.

The report cites a “pervasive atmosphere of hostility” toward the American government that has intensified since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the U.S. responses to them.

“The dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars” against the United States, the report said. “American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims.”

The report, first disclosed by the New York Times in its Wednesday editions, is available on the Pentagon’s Web site. It is among a series of reports produced last summer by the board, a group of nongovernment experts who advise the secretary of defense on a range of issues.

Among the board’s recommendations is that the government reorganize its strategic communications efforts so policy makers can improve their understanding of global public opinion and communicate U.S. policy decisions and actions more effectively to the rest of the world.

“To win a global battle of ideas, a global strategy for communicating those ideas is essential,” the board’s chairman, William Schneider, Jr., wrote in a memo introducing the report.

Bryan Whitman, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said Wednesday the report will “stimulate debate and add to the existing body of ideas” about how the Defense Department communicates.

“While there have been no decisions regarding the recommendations, the Pentagon will not deviate from its guiding principle of making information available in a timely and accurate manner,” he said.

The problem, as described by the report, is not so much the availability of information as a failure generally to understand how people in other parts of the world, particularly Arabs, perceive U.S. policies and actions.

“In the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering,” it said. “U.S. actions appear, in contrast, to be motivated by ulterior motives and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination.”

The report cited as an example Saudi Arabia, a longtime U.S. ally and birthplace of Usama bin Laden. A large majority of Saudis believe the United States is trying to weaken Islam, the report said.

“In other words, Americans have become the enemy,” it said. “It is noteworthy that opinion is (strongest) against America in precisely those places ruled by what Muslims call ‘apostates’ and tyrants — the tyrants we support. This should give us pause.”

==============================

Theo van Gogh (David Warren, 041114)

That you may live in “interesting” times is of course an old Chinese curse, and in this sense of the word, it will be interesting to see how the social, legal, and political situation develops in the Netherlands after the murder of Theo van Gogh. His cremation was this last week; his “execution” by a Muslim fanatic was performed on Nov. 2nd.

Let us linger one more time over the scene of death, so far as we can reconstruct it from press reports. The Dutch pundit and filmmaker, who had been out on his bicycle, was shot several times at close range, and according to witnesses, remained alive long enough to beg his assailant to stop. He then had his throat slit, and spinal cord severed, to the point where he was nearly beheaded. Five pages in Arabic were then pinned to his body, by the knife then embedded in his chest. This dissertation consisted of quotations from the Koran, and promises that Holland, Europe, Israel, and America would all be annihilated by victorious Islam. Various prominent Dutch personalities were threatened by name.

It is important to take this in. Theo van Gogh’s “alleged” murderer (we are dealing with Western legal niceties which are not recognized in Sharia law) was a psychopath, but not of the “normal”, loner sort with which we are familiar from the annals of Western psychiatry and jurisprudence. The police in Amsterdam were able to round up six of his alleged accomplices after the crime, and are seeking more. And the relationship between the ritual murder of Theo van Gogh, and the numerous butcherings of hostages by Jihadis in Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere, was obvious from any distance.

Whether in the Middle East, or embedded within Western society, the Jihadis claim not only the right to decide which among us should live or die, but also the right to perform theatrical executions, in some parody of the traditional Islamic manner.

Of what was Theo van Gogh guilty? Of making a film, in collaboration with the Muslim apostate, Somali-born Dutch woman politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as an act of protest against the subjugation of women in Islam. I have seen and don’t like the film; nor could I enjoy any of Theo van Gogh’s previous intemperate assaults on Christianity, both as filmmaker and newspaper columnist. But our Western tradition is, or was, to live with expressions of free speech, while instead suppressing acts of intimidation and violence.

Several Dutch regional television stations which were about to show the film, cancelled it in response to the murder. Ditto, a museum; and the national public television network which had already shown it, refused to show it again. So much for freedom of expression in the Netherlands today.

In the city of Rotterdam, opposite a mosque where it is widely believed Jihad is being preached on Fridays, a Dutch street-artist created a fresco inscribed with the words, “Thou shalt not kill.” Politically correct to a fault, the mayor of Rotterdam had it scraped the moment he received a complaint from the mosque’s imam, and Rotterdam police confiscated the film of journalists attempting to get a record of it.

As one lonely picket at the murder site read: “Theo rests his point.”

But there have also been attacks by vigilantes on several mosques, on a Muslim elementary school, and on a centre that aids Muslim immigrants, in the time since Theo van Gogh’s murder. These acts are reprehensible; truly, attacks on the innocent. The majority of the Muslims in Holland as elsewhere are probably more afraid of the Jihadis than non-Muslims are, because they live in closer proximity. Indeed, the much-criticized silence of Muslim “moderates” in the face of one atrocity after another can be too easily explained by their fear of reprisals.

And they know the authorities cannot protect them. Out of political correctness, our politicians and courts provide cover for radical Muslims to organize and intimidate. They finally prove helpless against the vigilante response. They think they are protecting the Muslim community by suppressing free inquiry into, and criticism of the Jihadi canker lodged within it; when in fact they are setting up innocent Muslims for a terrible blind retribution that will make no distinctions between innocent and guilty.

Free speech, under automatic protection of law, is the alternative to a society governed by intimidation and violence. The “political correction” that, in Canada as in Holland, leads to the suppression of free speech, necessarily restores the law of the jungle.

==============================

Muslim Extremists Preach Violence in Europe (Foxnews, 041129)

LONDON — He’s called Sheik Terra.

With a Koran in one hand and pistol in the other, the British rapper calls for the murder of non-Muslims, including several world leaders, on a videotape.

The video is well known in one London mosque, whose imam — or leader — is accused of setting up a terrorist training camp in Oregon and whose followers don’t like Western media.

Abu Hamza, who lost two hands and an eye in Afghanistan, is in jail now but other extremists from among Britain’s two million Muslims continue to preach violence, veiling the message to take advantage of some of Europe’s most liberal freedom-of-speech laws.

“We cannot tolerate a crocodile in our bedroom,” said Sheik Omar Bakri. “U.S. forces in Muslim countries are crocodiles in our bedrooms. So we are not going to give them ice cream.”

Bakri says the terrorists who staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States are magnificent and Westerners in Arab lands need to be killed by any means necessary. He makes the threats with a smile.

“If we use violence, you will forget the name of your mother and father,” he said.

The drawing power of the extremists, especially among the youth, has posed a challenge for mainstream Muslim leaders across Europe.

Part of Britain’s problem is that it can’t provide native-trained imams; more than 90% are foreigners with very limited training or, some like Hamza, have none at all.

To prevent more mosques from being hijacked, London’s Muslim college is trying to educate home-grown British imams but the voices of moderation struggle to be heard over media-savvy terrorists.

When a hostage gets beheaded in Iraq, the images spread through this community almost instantly. It is a real mix of barbarity and technology.

The beheading of British engineer Kenneth Bigley in Iraq went from videotape to the Internet, then from cell phone to cell phone, bringing a smile from one young British Muslim who says he knows who the real killers are.

“They are not Muslims. They are Jews,” the young man said.

An old message of hatred for a new generation of consumers who can spread murder across a continent with the push of a button, or a song and a laugh.

==============================

Education as key to fighting Islamism (Washington Times, 041215)

BRUSSELS. — Despite recent successes in preventing terrorist attacks in Europe, threats from radical Islamists are real, serious and long-term, according to the European Union’s chief antiterror coordinator.

Closer cooperation and exchange of intelligence between the European Union’s intelligence services have thwarted nearly a dozen terrorist attacks since September 11. The most recent success was upsetting a plot by Ansar al-Islam, a group affiliated with al Qaeda, to kill Iraq’s interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi during his visit to Berlin last month.

In addition to the Islamist threat, Geert De Vries, the EU’s top anti-terrorism man, speaking to United Press International in his office in the European Union headquarters in Brussels, said Europeans should not ignore risks from “classic terrorism” — Europe’s home-grown terrorist groups, such as the Basque’s ETA. A recent spate of bomb attacks across Spain was claimed by ETA, the Basque separatist organization.

Radical European Muslims who volunteered to fight the U.S. invasion of Iraq and who are now reportedly heading back to their respective countries may pose a more imminent risk, however. This raises concerns that the former jihadis — now hardened with combat experience — may become members of active or sleeper cells upon which al Qaeda or its affiliates could call on for future terrorist operations in Europe.

Claude Moniquet of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center in Brussels, who monitors Islamist terrorism, worries Europeans are inadequately prepared for this new crisis.

Reports of returning jihadis corroborates what U.S. military intelligence sources told UPI almost two weeks ago — that an emerging new trend in the Iraqi resistance of insurgents trying to rid themselves of foreign elements.

One report has recent treks of jihadis across the Iraqi-Syrian border, this time heading in the opposite direction, out of Iraq.

Foreign fighters who joined the anti-U.S. resistance in Iraq are vaguely estimated at from a few hundred to several thousands. However, one well-informed French intelligence source told UPI Iranian officials say about 7,500 foreign fighters are engaged against U.S. forces in Iraq.

While the potential return of these fighters to Europe is certainly reason for concern, the good news is that numerous intelligence reports say these groups are not organized. “Calling them ‘groups’ suggests cohesion,” said Mr. De Vries, explaining they are not organized in any real sense. “People have used the word ‘franchise,’ “ he said. “The phenomenon is more nebulous.” There is no centralized leadership, explains Mr. de Vries.

Claude Moniquet, author of many books on Islamist terrorism, agrees. He was recently assailed by a young Muslim, a professional soccer player, who accused him of “insulting Islam.” His attacker, who Mr. Moniquet said “heralds from a stable family with a good background, did not fit the ‘typical’ terrorist profile.” This makes the job of tracking Islamist terrorists all that much harder. “There is no direct link between poverty and radicalism,” noted Mr. De Vries.

“We are not talking about a clash of civilization, but rather a clash within Islam itself,” said Mr. De Vries. “It is a conflict between the murderous fringe and the overwhelming majority of Islam.” Mr. De Vries said Europe should encourage moderates to speak out against radicals. The chief European antiterrorist coordinator believes including Turkey in the European Union should provide a positive moderating force.

Turkish Prime Minister Receb Tayyip Erdogan, addressing some 300 Turkish business executives in Brussels Friday, echoed similar thoughts. “One of the greatest threats in the world today comes from terrorism. We have to fight it together,” stressed the Turkish prime minister as he continued lobbying European policymakers before their Dec. 17 decision on Turkey’s request for admission into the Brussels club.

With close to 70 million people, of which 99% are Muslims, Turkey would no doubt help in moderating Islam. However, only including Turkey in the EU will not address the clear and present danger of Islamist terrorism. Mr. De Vries says “both elements of soft and hard power” are needed.

He explains: “Soft power is dialogue. Getting moderate Muslims involved.” Indonesians and Turks are moderates and should be more involved in starting a dialogue and encouraging moderates to speak out. Hard power is more muscle, which he says Europeans should not be afraid to use when needed.

Mr. Moniquet, the Brussels-based terrorist expert, agrees this is the correct approach. Talk with the moderates and expel the radicals, he says. However, Mr. Moniquet is not overly optimistic. The radicals cannot win but can do serious damage.

Khadija Mohsen-Finan, an expert on Arab world affairs with the prestigious French Institute of International Relations — or IFRI — believes the answer to addressing Islamic unrest in Europe is education and integration.

A newly released report from the Pew Forum on religion titled “An Uncertain Road: Muslims and the Future of Europe” states that “the successful integration of European Muslims is crucial to the future of Europe.”

Unfortunately, integrating Muslim immigrants in Europe has had little success in recent years. As a result, more young Muslims, second-generation immigrants, turn to Islam as a means of identifying themselves. Part of the phenomenon is what Mr. Mohsen-Finan calls “religiosity, rather than religion.”

Antoine Sfeir, editor of a French publication specializing in Arab affairs, surveyed several thousand young French Muslims. He was surprised to learn that, despite their claims of adhering to a strict form of Islam, most could not name the five pillars of Islam, the basic tenets of the religion.

Claude Salhani is a senior editor with United Press International.

==============================

Europe’s failed multiculturalism (Washington Times, 041210)

PARIS. — For nearly 50 years Western Europe has weathered the storm of the Cold War, living with the threat of the Soviet Union on its doorstep. Now Europe is waking up to a new threat, only this time the danger comes from within.

From Paris to Amsterdam and from Brussels to Berlin, decades of liberal open-door immigration policies are bearing their mark on Europe’s domestic politics, not to mention the demographics of the Old Continent.

The arrival of several million immigrants — mostly from North Africa, Turkey and Southwest Asia, and mostly Muslims — has forever changed the face of a once largely white, overwhelmingly Christian Europe. Germany alone has some 7 million non-German residents, the majority of them Turks.

This influx of immigrants has caused a knee-jerk reaction from worried Europeans who have turned to right-wing parties for answers. Witness France’s National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen who came close to winning the last presidential election.

The failure of many immigrants to integrate has resulted in communities living parallel to one another instead of blending. Exacerbating the problem, Islamist activists have found refuge and anonymity among these immigrant communities into which they can easily blend.

Europeans today are quick to complain their cities have been transformed, many will argue not for the better. They will blame, often without justification, much of what goes wrong — rising crime, hooliganism and drugs — on the new arrivals. “Something need to be done about who we let in,” complained a Parisian woman after a teenage girl with a slightly dark complexion accidentally bumped into her as she ran out of school. “Ah, poor France,” lamented the woman.

Many Europeans bemoan that immigrants are not integrating. Angela Merkel, the German opposition center-right Christian Democratic Union leader, addressing the CDU annual conference in Dusseldorf earlier this week, stressed the importance of “patriotism and conservative values.” She remarked on Germany’s failure to nurture multiculturalism, urging immigrants to identify with Western “cultural values based on freedom and democracy.”

She is not alone in her concerns. Alain Boyer, the sous-prefet of Reims, a region famous for its fine champagnes, is one of France’s leading experts on Islam. He agrees that not enough is being done culturally to integrate Muslims in Europe. (The prefet is the central government’s regional administrator.)

Mr. Boyer acquired his expertise while working for the Ministry of the Interior, the government department responsible for internal security. Mr. Boyer admits much more is needed in educating Europe’s Muslims from a cultural perspective. Particularly the imams, says Mr. Boyer, should be made more aware of European culture. Of France’s 1,200 imams — or Muslim preachers — more than a third do not speak French.

On Europe’s lax policies, Mr. Boyer told United Press International, “There should be more control on people [immigrants] and imams.” When they break the law, they should be sent away.”

But Mr. Boyer also advocates turning to more moderate Muslims, particularly the influential, and using their sway to positively influence the minds of Europe’s young Muslims.

To be sure, the large influx of immigrants arriving both legally and clandestinely has come with its fair share of social problems. Partially at fault is the failure of many of the new immigrants to assimilate into their respective European societies. The CDU’s Mrs. Merkel said foreigners must accept “certain values and standards,” such as learning the language.

Many European countries face similar problems in trying to integrate their immigrant populations. France, which has a long history of separating church and state, was confronted with the issue of Muslim schoolgirls wearing veils, or headscarves, in public schools. This was a practice that would have countered strict rules meant to keep religion out of politics and state affairs, and vice versa.

After a tumultuous national debate peppered with street protests and demonstrations by supporters and opponents of the headscarf ban, the state banned all outward religious signs, including Islamic headscarves, yarmulkes and “large” crucifixes.

A far greater problem than headscarves has been the increase in Islamist activism in recent years. According to Mr. Boyer, much of the recruiting of Islamists occurs in Europe’s jails.

Europe has not been immune to terrorism, most of it homegrown — the actions of Basque, Corsican or Irish separatists. Some will say Europeans naively believed they were immune from Islamist terrorism.

The real eye-opener came last March when a series of bombs exploded in train stations in the Spanish capital, Madrid, killing nearly 200 people. Jose Maria Aznar’s government quickly blamed ETA, the Basque separatist organization, but, as UPI was first to report, the attacks turned out to be the work of Islamist militants with links to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.

As if that was not enough, another crime further jolted Europe, the brutal slaying of controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands by a Muslim man. Van Gogh’s murder followed the killing of Pim Fortuyn, the openly homosexual former columnist who rocked the very core of the Netherlands’ liberal political establishment by decrying the country’s immigration policy. He was gunned down in May 2002.

Fortuyn and Van Gogh’s killings have caused furor in the once easygoing Netherlands, forcing the Dutch to re-examine themselves. In a recent poll, the Dutch voted Fortuyn the most popular figure in the country — ahead of painters Rembrandt and Vincent Van Gogh, Jewish diarist Anne Frank, football legend Johan Cruyff and Prince William of Orange.

Criticism of Islam has started to come out in the open. Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, called Islam a “backward religion,” saying it has not gone through the “reformation as Christianity or Judaism.” He received death threats and remains in hiding.

Maybe a clearer image of how Europe really views Muslims will become apparent later this month, when on Dec. 17, the European Union decides if Turkey — a country with close to 70 million people, 99% of them Muslims — will be admitted into the EU. Some Europeans believe admitting Turkey will have a soothing effect. Others say it is naive to think it will deter Islamist terrorism.

Claude Salhani is international editor of United Press International.

==============================

The Ents of Europe: Strange rumblings on the continent (National Review Online, 041210)

One of the many wondrous peoples that poured forth from the rich imagination of the late J. R. R. Tolkien were the Ents. These tree-like creatures, agonizingly slow and covered with mossy bark, nursed themselves on tales of past glory while their numbers dwindled in their isolation. Unable to reproduce themselves or to fathom the evil outside their peaceful forest — and careful to keep to themselves and avoid reacting to provocation of the tree-cutters and forest burners — they assumed they would be given a pass from the upheavals of Middle Earth.

But with the sudden arrival of two volatile hobbits, the nearby evils of timber-cutting, industrial devilry, and mass murder became too much for the Ents to stomach. They finally “wake up” (literally). Then they go on the offensive — and are amazed at the power they still wield in destroying Saruman’s empire.

For Tolkien, who wrote in a post-imperial Britain bled white from stopping Prussian militarism and Hitler’s Nazism, only to then witness the rise of the more numerous, wealthier, and crasser Americans, such specters were haunting. Indeed, there are variants of the Ent theme throughout Tolkien’s novels, from the dormant Riders of Rohan — whose king was exorcised from his dotage and rallied the realm’s dwindling cavalry to recover lost glory and save the West — to the hobbits themselves.

The latter, protected by slurred “Rangers,” live blissfully unaware that radical changes in the world have brought evil incarnate to their very doorstep. Then to their amazement they discover that of all people, a hobbit rises to the occasion, and really does stand up well when confronted with apparently far more powerful and evil adversaries. The entire novel is full of such folk — the oath-breaking Dead who come alive to honor their once-broken pact, or the now-fallen and impotent High Elves who nevertheless do their part in the inevitable war to come.

Tolkien always denied an allegorical motif or any allusions to the contemporary dangers of appeasement or the leveling effects of modernism. And scholars bicker over whether he was lamenting the end of the old England, old Europe, or the old West — in the face of the American democratic colossus, the Soviet Union’s tentacles, or the un-chivalrous age of the bomb. But the notion of decline, past glory, and 11th-hour reawakening are nevertheless everywhere in the English philologist’s Lord of the Rings. Was he on to something?

More specifically, does the Ents analogy work for present-day Europe? Before you laugh at the silly comparison, remember that the Western military tradition is European. Today the continent is unarmed and weak, but deep within its collective mind and spirit still reside the ability to field technologically sophisticated and highly disciplined forces — if it were ever to really feel threatened. One murder began to arouse the Dutch; what would 3,000 dead and a toppled Eiffel Tower do to the French? Or how would the Italians take to a plane stuck into the dome of St. Peter? We are nursed now on the spectacle of Iranian mullahs, with their bought weapons and foreign-produced oil wealth, humiliating a convoy of European delegates begging and cajoling them not to make bombs — or at least to point what bombs they make at Israel and not at Berlin or Paris. But it was not always the case, and may not always be.

The Netherlands was a litmus test for Europe. Unlike Spain or Greece, which had historical grievances against Islam, the Dutch were the avatars of the new liberal Europe, without historical baggage. They were eager to unshackle Europe from the Church, from its class and gender constraints, and from any whiff of its racist or colonialist past. True, for a variety of reasons, Amsterdam may be a case study of how wrong Rousseau was about natural man, but for a Muslim immigrant the country was about as hospitable a foreign host as one can imagine. Thus, it was far safer for radical Islamic fascists to damn the West openly from a mosque in Rotterdam than for a moderate Christian to quietly worship in a church in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Algeria. And yet we learn not just that the Netherlands has fostered a radical sect of Muslims who will kill and bomb, but, far more importantly, that they will do so after years of residency among, and indeed in utter contempt of, their Western hosts.

Things are no less humiliating — or dangerous — in France. Thousands of unassimilated Muslims mock French society. Yet their fury shapes its foreign policy to the degree that Jacques Chirac sent a government plane to sweep up a dying Arafat. But then what do we expect from a country that enriched Hamas, let Mrs. Arafat spend her husband’s embezzled millions under its nose, gave Khomeini the sanctuary needed to destroy Iran, sold a nuclear reactor to Saddam, is at the heart of the Oil-for-Food scandal, and revs up the Muslim world against the United States?

Only now are Europeans discovering the disturbing nature of radical Islamic extremism, which thrives not on real grievance but on perceived hurts — and the appeasement of its purported oppressors. How odd that tens of millions of Muslims flocked to Europe for its material consumption, superior standard of living, and freedom and tolerance — and then chose not merely to remain in enclaves but to romanticize all the old pathologies that they had fled from in the first place. It is almost as if the killers in Amsterdam said, “I want your cell phones, unfettered Internet access, and free-spirited girls, but hate the very system that alone can create them all. So please let me stay here to destroy what I want.”

Turkey’s proposed entry into the EU has become some weird sort of Swiftian satire on the crazy relationship between Europe and Islam. Ponder the contradictions of it all. Privately most Europeans realize that opening its borders without restraint to Turkey’s millions will alter the nature of the EU, both by welcoming in a radically different citizenry, largely outside the borders of Europe, whose population will make it the largest and poorest country in the Union — and the most antithetical to Western liberalism. Yet Europe is also trapped in its own utopian race/class/gender rhetoric. It cannot openly question the wisdom of making the “other” coequal to itself, since one does not by any abstract standard judge, much less censure, customs, religions, or values.

So it stews and simmers. Not to be outdone, some in Turkey dare the Europeans, almost in contempt, to reject their bid. Thus rather than evolving Attaturk’s modernist reforms to match the values of Europe, the country is instead driven into the midst of an Islamic reactionary revival in which its rural east far more resembles Iraq or Iran than Brussels. So the world wonders whether Europe is sticking a toe into the Islamic Middle East or the latter its entire leg into Europe.

Everyone gets in on the charade. The savvy Greeks discovered that they didn’t want to be tarred with the usual anti-Ottoman obstructionism and so are keeping very quiet about their historic worries (legitimate after a near 400-year occupation) as a front-line state. And why not, when EU money pouring into Turkey might jumpstart the Eastern Mediterranean economy and lead to joint Greek-Turkish deals? With the future role of NATO and the 6th Fleet undetermined, is it not better to have the Turkish military inside the tent than for poor Greece to have a neighbor’s ships and planes routinely violating Hellenic air and sea sovereignty — while it waits for the Danish air force or the French army to provide a little deterrence in the Aegean or Cyprus?

Of course, we are amused by the spectacle. Privately, most Americans grasp that with a Germany and France reeling from unassimilated Muslim populations, a rising Islamic-inspired and globally embarrassing anti-Semitism, and economic stagnation, it is foolhardy to create 70 million Turkish Europeans by fiat. Welcoming in Turkey will make the EU so diverse, large, and unwieldy as to make it — to paraphrase Voltaire — neither European nor a Union. Surely Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia will wish to get in on the largess. Were they not, after all, also part of the historical Roman mare nostrum, and did they not also enjoy long ties with France and Italy?

So, to our discredit I suppose, we are enjoying schadenfreud after our recent transatlantic acrimonies: Europe preached a postmodern gospel of multiculturalism and the end of oppressive Western values, and now it is time to put its money (and security) where its mouth is — or suffer the usual hypocrisy that all limousine liberals face. The United States has its own recent grievances with the Turks — its eleventh-hour refusal to allow American troops to come down from the north explains why the now red-hot Sunni Triangle never saw much war during the three-week fighting. Recently a minister of a country that gave rise to the notion of 20th-century genocide slurred the United States for resembling Hitler, who in fact was an erstwhile Turkish near ally. Still, our realists muse, how convenient that Europe may carry the water in bringing Turkey inside the Western orbit and prevent it from joining the radical Islamic fringe. Knowing it is in our interest (and not necessarily in the Europeans’) and will cost them lots and us nothing, we “on principle” remonstrate for the need to show Western empathy to Turkish aspirations.

But gut-check time is coming for Europe, with its own rising unassimilated immigrant populations, rogue mosques entirely bent on destroying the West, declining birth rate and rising entitlements, the Turkish question, and a foreign policy whose appeasement of Arab regimes won it only a brief lull and plenty of humiliation. The radical Muslim world of the madrassas hates the United States because it is liberal and powerful; but it utterly despises Europe because it is even more liberal and far weaker, earning the continent not fear, but contempt.

The real question is whether there is any Demosthenes left in Europe, who will soberly but firmly demand assimilation and integration of all immigrants, an end to mosque radicalism, even-handedness in the Middle East, no more subsidies to terrorists like Hamas, a toughness rather than opportunist profiteering with the likes of Assad and the Iranian theocracy — and make it clear that states that aid and abet terrorists in Europe due so to their great peril.

So will the old Ents awaken, or will they slumber on, muttering nonsense to themselves, lost in past grandeur and utterly clueless about the dangers on their borders?

Stay tuned — it is one of the most fascinating sagas of our time.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

==============================

A Seat at the Table: Islam Makes Inroads in Education (Christian Broadcasting Network, 041212)

CBN.com – WASHINGTON — If you look closely, what is inside your child’s textbooks may shock you. They are full of evolution theories, and many liberal historians are rewriting American history as well. But there is even more. How Islam is portrayed in today’s textbooks is a subject of concern also.

The familiar images of Islam include praying at Mecca, and the prophet Muhammad, a man Muslims say is the messenger of God. But this is not the whole story.

When all is said and done, the story of Islam is being told and taught to our nation’s school kids in their textbooks. But are they getting the whole story, or just part of it?

Since the early 1990’s, teaching Islam to kids has taken on a new dimension. As our society moved into the era of political correctness where it became taboo to offend any one group, many educational analysts say that the controversial nature of Islam started to not only be downplayed, but to be totally ignored.

One of the leading critics is the American Textbook Council, which came out with a scathing report a year ago. It is called “Islam in the Textbooks,” and in it are numerous examples of how Muslim scholars are simply not telling kids the full truth.

For example, take the word Jihad. It is believed to represent a holy war, and the object is to bring the whole world under Islamic rule and law. But in the textbooks, that is not what kids are reading. In the World History Book, “across the centuries,” Jihad is called a struggle “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.”

The president of the American Textbook Council, Gil Sewell, recently spoke about his concerns at a roundtable discussion on Capitol Hill.

Sewell said, “When it comes to Holy War, to Islamic law, to slavery, to the treatment of women, the textbooks fudge, hedge - and it’s not accidental.”

And the report says, when it comes to women, most textbooks do not mention how many men in the Islamic world look at women as just another possession. Many times, it just ignores that aspect altogether. One textbook says, “Although men had most of the power in Arab society, women had some freedom. For example, women could own and inherit property. Women contributed to the group through such activities as spinning and weaving.”

When it comes to putting a positive spin on the teachings of Islam, one of the most influential organizations out there is the Council on Islamic Education, based in California. It is a research institute that gives guidance to publishers when it comes to what they say about Islam.

The founder, Shabbir Mansuri, came to the CBN News studios in Washington, and we asked him if the textbooks today are really giving students a complete and true picture.

Mansuri answered, “I think that is a valid point. I don’t think it’s a point we shouldn’t put on the table for us to discuss. I think it’s a valid point.”

But, Mansuri says, with just a few pages devoted to Islam in the textbooks, you can only include so much. And, he says, kids in grade school may not be ready to comprehend it all, anyway.

Mansuri added, “You can make an argument that we want them to know the good and bad of it. Valid argument. [But] are they equipped to understand the good and bad of it?”

Which brings us to Whahabbism, an extremist fundamentalist brand of Islam. Whahabbism is being taught to school children in Saudi Arabia, and its most infamous follower is Osama bin Laden himself. This is not being mentioned in American textbooks.

Mansuri remarked, “It’s put in some sort of large way that, as a Muslim, I’m scratching my head and saying what are they talking about?

We said we surmised that it was prevalent in the Islamic world.

Mansuri replied, “It is not. That is what I am saying. It is in the mind of those who are deniers.”

Mansuri said that all his group is trying to do, is to make sure that what is written about Islam comforms to the textbook standards in each state. In California, the standards say, “When ethnic or cultural groups are portrayed, portrayals must not depict differences in customs or lifestyles as undesirable, and must not reflect adversely on such differences.”

So, Mansuri says that he strives to make that happen.

But Historian David Barton says that all the facts must be put on the table. Barton remarked, “They [Muslims] may want to be presented well today, but historically there are some footprints that have to be looked at.”

And he says those footprints are not always so flattering. Barton said, “There was a Barbary Powers war that went on for 16 years in America, where America was dealing with Muslim terrorists for 16 years back, from 1790 through 1806. That is the reason we have the Marine Corps hymn. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli’ was because the American Marines went inland in the same area where they are now, to release enslaved Americans [who] had been taken prisoner by Muslim terrorists. And for 16 years, for four presidents, we fought a war against Muslim terrorists.”

Barton says that history should not be edited to make a faith look good. “As a Christian,” Barton said, “I can’t say we’re not going to teach the witch trials because that would make me look bad as a Christian.”

But in today’s textbooks, Muhammad is not made to look bad at all. He is mentioned numerous times in a positive light, but critics are curious as to why there is no mention of the controversy in which he supposedly had multiple wives, and one of them was a very young girl. Instead, you find role-playing exercises for students, like reading the Koran in class or dressing up as Muslim pilgrims on their way to Mecca.

Jordan Rubio in Virginia Beach knows the feeling. At his public school, one of his classmates was asked to go in front of his class and pretend to be an Egyptian pharaoh. Then Jordan and the rest of his classmates had to bow down to him. His mother could not believe it.

Teresa Rubio said, “I asked him how he felt when he did that, and to my surprise, he responded that he immediately went to praying, and asked for forgiveness.”

Jordan was not the only one in her family who had a problem. Her daughter Emily was asked to do an English grammar assignment, and the book used was the Koran. Theresa says, why not the Bible?

Teresa Rubio remarked, “I can understand that we need to understand other cultures and other traditions, but when Jesus is not given equal time in the classroom, I just feel that I have to oppose that.”

All of Theresa’s experiences have led her to a strong conclusion. “We really just need to pay very close attention to where we’re sending our children, and what they are learning when they go there.”

Mansuri says that the way Islam is taught is not the problem. Instead, he says, Christians simply do not have a seat at the table when it comes to reviewing textbooks at the state level.

He said, “Every committee that I’m invited to sit [on], if there are religious institutions that are brought in, I never see conservative Christians, for example.”

That is a problem. And until that happens, the textbooks remain in their current state. It can be debated whether the violent images kids see on TV should be represented in the pages of their textbooks. What is not up for debate is that only some of the facts are being taught to kids in America’s classrooms.

==============================

Nearly Half in U.S. Want Curb on Muslim-Americans’ Rights (Foxnews, 041217)

ITHACA, N.Y. — Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans, according to a nationwide poll.

The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims’ civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious.

Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and support limiting the rights of Muslim-Americans.

“It’s sad news. It’s disturbing news. But it’s not unpredictable,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society. “The nation is at war, even if it’s not a traditional war. We just have to remain vigilant and continue to interface.”

The survey found 44% favored at least some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. Forty-eight percent said liberties should not be restricted in any way.

The survey showed that 27% of respondents supported requiring all Muslim-Americans to register where they lived with the federal government. Twenty-two percent favored racial profiling to identify potential terrorist threats. And 29% thought undercover agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations to keep tabs on their activities and fund-raising.

Cornell student researchers questioned 715 people in the nationwide telephone poll conducted this fall. The margin of error was 3.6%age points.

James Shanahan, an associate professor of communications who helped organize the survey, said the results indicate “the need for continued dialogue about issues of civil liberties” in a time of war.

While researchers said they were not surprised by the overall level of support for curtailing civil liberties, they were startled by the correlation with religion and exposure to television news.

“We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding,” Shanahan said.

According to the survey, 37% believe a terrorist attack in the United States is still likely within the next 12 months. In a similar poll conducted by Cornell in November 2002, that number stood at 90%.

==============================

France Passes Muslim Head Scarves Ban by an Overwhelming Vote (Christian Post, 040304)

PARIS – The French government has adopted the ban on Islamic head scarves and all other religious symbols including Christian crosses from state schools yesterday, March 4, with an overwhelming vote of 276 to 20, which was reflected very similar result to the decision made by the National Assembly, the lower chamber which passed it by the vote of 494 to 36 on Feb. 10.

As soon as President Jacques Chirac signs the measure into law within the next 15 days, the ban will become effective for the new school year in September. Chirac has said the ban is necessary to preserve the constitutionally guaranteed national principles of secularity.

Other French leaders hope the law could end the debate over head scarves which has divided France since 1989, when two girls were expelled from their school in Creil for wearing their head scarves.

The law bans students from wearing “conspicuous” religious symbols, not only Islamic head scarves but also Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses as well. However, the government officials say the ban is aimed at removing Islamic head scarves from classrooms.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin along with French Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches expressed their concern over the possible negative outcomes the law could bring within the people who consider it discriminatory since there are increasing number of outraged Muslims who are against the ban.

“It is clear that on the international level the question is not always understood,” Raffarin said. The measure “could be perceived as sectarian,” he added. “We must not consider this to be a minor situation.”

Raffarin insisted, however, that the law was needed to protect the nation for secularism and the spread of Muslim fundamentalism. “We wanted to send a strong and rapid signal,” he said.

It is still unclear how the law will be applied to schools. The government would need to engage in more discussion on what must be done to the girls who wish to cover their hair with other smaller apparel. Education Minister Luc Ferry will be meeting with representatives of France’s tiny Sikh with the population of 4,000 on March 10.

==============================

Head Scarves Serve to Protect Iraqi Muslim, Christian Women Alike (Christian Post, 050104)

As the months have passed since the U.S.-led invasion, fewer women in Iraq—Muslims and Christians alike—are daring to venture out without wearing a traditional Muslim head scarf, according to a recent report by the Washington Post.

“Because of the current situation in the country, lack of security, the occupation and many other things, people started to look for a way to escape the terror,” a psychology professor at Baghdad University told the Washington Post. “They want to hide or take shelter to protect themselves. For women, the scarf is the best way to protect them. Women believe the scarf will be the wall to prevent people from looking at them.”

Before the war, Iraqi Christian women rarely put on scarves. There was no reason to do so, according to Christian women interviewed recently. “Their religion did not dictate it, Muslims and Christians in Iraq got along peacefully and they said they felt no pressure to blend in,” the Washington Post reported. “Even a few months ago, the sight of a Christian woman without a scarf or a Catholic nun in a habit was not uncommon in neighborhoods where Christians gathered.”

Moderate Muslim women, also, used to feel they had a choice whether to wear the scarf, the news agency reported, even as religious oppression under Saddam Hussein grew over the past decade. Now, in many neighborhoods, it is hard to find a woman outdoors without a head scarf.

Many of the women interviewed by the news agency said these days Iraqi society feels like it has lost its social compact, its religious tolerance. “Christians feel singled out. Anyone associated with the Americans, any foreign military force or the interim government feels singled out,” the news agency went on to report.

Although Iraq is predominantly Muslim, for many decades its capital was a “trendy, modern city.” In the 1960s, women wore short skirts and blouses with low necklines. But their daughters say they do not have such freedom today. They blame a postwar insurgency bolstered by conservative hard-liners.

According to the beliefs of conservative Muslims, women should cover their heads to hide their beauty and not tempt the men who see them. Such instructions are spelled out in the Koran, the Islamic holy book.

Today, the practice of wearing head scarves varies widely throughout the Islamic world, from more secular countries such as Turkey where many women dress in the Western style, to strict religious societies such as Saudi Arabia where all women cover their heads and most of their faces in public.

And now, for women in Iraq, wearing the scarves is a way to avoid being singled out and followed, or kidnapped, or shot. As stated by the Washington Post, “It was more than a matter of blending in. It was a matter of disappearing into the landscape.”

==============================

Jordan: Terrorism is ‘kidnapping’ Islam (WorldNetDaily, 050107)

Jordanian Interior Minister Samir Habashneh has urged Arab and Muslim states to join efforts in combating terrorism, which he said is tarnishing Islam.

“Islam is subject to an ugly and evil kidnapping operation by terrorists and is being targeted by unjust campaigns which are tarnishing it as a religion, culture and way of living,” Habashneh said Wednesday night at the end of a meeting of Arab interior ministers in Tunis.

“Those standing behind these campaigns are tarnishing the image of Islam through terrorist operations causing victims among innocent civilians,” he added.

He stressed that in order to abort the “kidnapping operation” by terrorists, Arabs and Muslims should join efforts “to restore the true image of Islam, which is that of tolerance and love.”

Habashneh asserted that his country’s border with Iraq is safe and under constant surveillance, “because Jordan believes that Iraq’s unity and national coexistence is a key to stability and will not allow any action that would undermine it.”

==============================

Terror groups call voting un-Islamic (Washington Times, 041231)

BAGHDAD — The radical Ansar al-Sunnah Army and two other terrorist groups issued a statement yesterday, warning Iraqis not to vote in the Jan. 30 election because democracy is un-Islamic.

“Democracy is a Greek word meaning the rule of the people, which means that the people do what they see fit,” the groups said in a warning. “This concept is considered apostasy and defies the belief in one God — Muslims’ doctrine.”

Democracy leads to passing un-Islamic laws, such as permitting homosexual “marriage,” if the majority agrees, the terrorists said.

After the warning was issued, all 700 employees of the electoral commission in Mosul, Iraq, resigned, the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera reported.

Farid Ayar, spokesman of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, said he was not able to confirm the Al Jazeera report.

“We have been trying to contact our people in Mosul to see if the report is accurate, but we have not been able to reach them,” Mr. Ayar told the Associated Press.

The warning came a day after insurgents in Mosul, which has seen increased violence in recent weeks, launched a highly coordinated assault on a U.S. military outpost.

The United States said 25 insurgents were thought to have been slain and one American soldier was killed in the battle, which involved strafing runs by U.S. warplanes.

The United States, which has said the vote must go forward, repeatedly has sought to portray recent attacks that have killed dozens of people as the acts of a reeling insurgency, not the work of a force that is gathering strength.

Ansar al-Sunnah earlier posted a manifesto on its Web site saying democracy amounts to idolizing human beings. Yesterday’s joint statement reiterated the threat that “anyone who accepts to take part in this dirty farce will not be safe.”

A message this week from Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind and a spiritual leader for millions of Muslims, branded anyone who votes in Iraq as an “infidel.”

Insurgents have intensified their strikes against the security forces of Iraq’s U.S.-installed interim government as part of a continuing campaign to disrupt the elections for a constitutional assembly.

The statements by the Sunni-dominated insurgent groups seemed aimed at countering Shi’ite leaders’ claims that voting in the election is every Muslim’s duty.

Shi’ite Islam includes a strong historic tradition of people rising up to oust corrupt leaders who deviate from Islam.

Shi’ites, who make up 60% of the population, hope to use the vote to gain power from minority Sunnis, who were favored under former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Iraqis will elect a national assembly, which will write a new constitution.

Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, has become more worrisome in the weeks since a U.S.-led invasion routed insurgents from their base in the Sunni-dominated city of Fallujah in mid-November.

Across Iraq, dozens of insurgents, Iraqi civilians and security forces have been killed in attacks in the past 48 hours, and the guerrillas have shown new ingenuity to inflict large casualties.

Thirteen U.S. soldiers died Dec. 21 when a suicide bomber walked into a mess tent in Mosul packed with soldiers having lunch. In all, 22 persons were killed and dozens wounded in the blast. The Ansar al-Sunnah took responsibility.

Late Tuesday, rebels lured police into a house in Baghdad after issuing an anonymous tip and then detonated nearly a ton of explosives. Twenty-nine persons were killed, 22 civilians and seven police, and several surrounding houses were leveled.

Mohammed Salah, a Cairo-based expert on Islamic militancy, suggested that insurgents might be experimenting with new tactics to test the Americans after the guerrillas lost their stronghold in Fallujah, west of Baghdad.

Up to now, their chief weapons have been roadside bombs and suicide attacks.

“Since they are always pursued, they try to be creative,” Mr. Salah said. “They have to be creative because they know repetitiveness is dangerous for them.”

==============================

Justice Out of Balance (Weekly Standard, 050103)

How differently Saudi Arabia and Albania treat the same terrorist financier.

AS THE NEW YEAR BEGINS, the latest chapter in the remarkable tale of a rich, 47-year old Saudi subject named Yasin al-Kadi offers many lessons, regarding terrorism, responses to it, and the role and responsibilities of Saudi Arabia in fighting it.

Yasin al-Kadi is a principal in the Muwafaq—or “Blessed Relief Foundation”—which has been officially designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as a global financier of al Qaeda. In 2001, the Bush administration ordered al-Kadi’s assets frozen. He was also listed by the European Union as a terrorist.

Al-Kadi is a property investor with a wide reach. At the end of 2002, one of his enterprises, the Massachusetts software firm Ptech, Inc., was raided by the federal authorities. Ptech was said to have been paid millions of dollars by official U.S. clients including the White House, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Air Force. Late in 2001, al-Kadi was linked to a gem-trading company, Global Diamond, in Southern California.

Just last month, al-Kadi was named (not for the first time) in a Chicago civil suit as a backer of Hamas terrorism in Israel by Matthew Levitt, a leading terrorism investigator at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. That proceeding resulted in a verdict against the Quranic Literacy Institute (QLI), an Illinois entity, for responsibility in the 1986 Hamas murder of an American Jewish youth, 17-year old David Boim.

Levitt, according to the Chicago Tribune, testified that “the paper trail doesn’t lie,” and that one of the QLI functionaries found responsible

for Boim’s death, Muhammad Salah, was paid as a Hamas recruiter on American soil, through checks written by Yasin al-Kadi.

And yet Yasin al-Kadi continues to operate unmolested on Saudi territory, even as the kingdom has become the theatre for a new campaign of al Qaeda atrocities. Saudi officials, who claim to be the closest friends and allies of the Bush administration in this fight, are paralyzed when it comes to dealing with one of their own residents.

However, not every governmental institution is so lacking in will. While the United States and European Union guarantee al-Kadi due process—and the Saudi kingdom looks the other way—the small and impoverished Balkan nation of Albania, a Muslim-majority country in which al-Kadi has held extensive assets, is pursuing a consistent and effective campaign against him.

In the latest development, Albanian authorities shut down a construction project owned by al-Kadi, comprising 22 apartments in the capital city of Tirana in December. Al-Kadi had established eight separate companies in Albania, under five different names, as well as 36 bank accounts. Another of his assets, a massive complex known as the “Albanian Twin Towers,” was seized while being completed—directly across from the main Albanian government offices.

Meanwhile, Albanian government representatives say they are continuing the search for other hidden al-Kadi properties in their country.

And in another small, Balkan Muslim country with few resources but plenty of incentive to crack down on terrorists, Bosnian officials in September 2004 announced that al-Kadi’s involvement in two Bosnian banks, Depozitna Banka and Vakufska Banka, remained blocked.

The lesson? Mighty and rich Saudi Arabia, with blood on the streets of its cities, pleads helplessness in dealing with the terrorists it has spawned. Poor, obscure Albania acts with precision and dedication to shut down activity by the same terrorists. Thus, we learn who our real friends are, among Muslim countries.

Oh, and Albania, which has a small military establishment, has also committed 71 troops as peacekeepers in Iraq. Sometimes the smallest gestures speak more loudly than the most exaggerated rhetoric—especially when the latter originates in Riyadh, capital of the Saudi kingdom.

Stephen Schwartz is the author of The Two Faces of Islam.

==============================

CAIR presses Fox TV on Muslim terrorists (WorldNetDaily, 050114)

Islamic group ‘encouraged’ after meeting, assurance of changes in content of ‘24’

Fox television bucked current media convention by portraying terrorists as Muslims in its drama series “24,” but a controversial Islamic lobby group that complained about the show now says it is “encouraged” after meeting with network officials and winning concessions and assurances.

Fox spokesman Scott Grogin told WorldNetDaily today the network has agreed to the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ request to distribute a CAIR public service announcement to network affiliates.

But when asked to comment on CAIR’s claim that network officials assured the Muslim group they had already removed some aspects of existing episodes “that could potentially be viewed as stereotypical,” Grogin refused to comment.

Grogin, who was at the meeting, said he had nothing to say aside from stating, “We met with representatives from CAIR on Wednesday and had a very informative and productive meeting, and we look forward to working with them in the future.”

However, he corrected CAIR’s statement that Fox agreed to ask affiliates that the PSA “be aired in proximity to ‘24.’”

Grogin said Fox only agreed to distribute the PSA to affiliates and will make no request as to when, “or even if,” it is to air.

CAIR said it called for the meeting Wednesday — which included representatives from CAIR’s Southern California office and from the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council — to “address the depiction of a ‘Muslim’ family that is at the heart of a terror plot in the popular program.”

The Washington, D.C.-based group said it was concerned that the portrayal of the family as a terrorist “sleeper cell” may “cast a shadow of suspicion over ordinary American Muslims and could increase Islamophobic stereotyping and bias.”

CAIR’s statement today said that in addition to distribution of the PSAs, “FOX also gave meeting participants assurances that the program will be balanced in its portrayal of Muslims. Network representatives said that they had already reviewed existing episodes and removed some aspects that could potentially be viewed as stereotypical.”

“We thank Fox for the opportunity to address the Muslim community’s concerns and for the willingness of network officials to take those concerns seriously in an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation,” said CAIR Communications Coordinator Rabiah Ahmed.

The show, which has a story line that runs the entire season, is based on 24 hours at a counter-terrorism unit.

In its fourth season, this year’s story centers on a terrorist sleeper cell planning an attack on the United States.

CAIR is a spin-off of the Islamic Association For Palestine, a group identified by two former FBI counter-terrorism chiefs as a U.S. front group for the terrorist group Hamas.

Since 9-11, CAIR has seen three of its former employees indicted on federal terrorism charges.

Randall Todd “Ismail” Royer was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges he trained in Virginia for holy war against the United States and sent several members to Pakistan to join Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri terrorist group with reported ties to al-Qaida.

In a plea bargain, Royer claimed he never intended to hurt anyone but admitted he organized the holy warriors after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.

After his arrest, Royer sought legal counsel from Hamas lawyer Stanley Cohen, who said after 9-11 he would consider serving as a defense lawyer for Osama bin Laden if the al-Qaida leader were captured.

Another CAIR figure, Bassem Khafagi, was arrested in January 2003 while serving as the group’s director of community relations. The previous December, Ghassan Elashi, the founder of CAIR’s Texas chapter, was indicted for financial ties to Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzook.

Current CAIR leaders also have made statements in support of Hamas and the domination of the U.S. by Islam.

As WorldNetDaily reported, CAIR’s chairman of the board, Omar Ahmad, was cited by a California newspaper in 1998 declaring the Quran should be America’s highest authority.

He also was reported to have said Islam is not in America to be equal to any other religion but to be dominant.

==============================

Jersey jihadists (Townhall.com, 050202)

Joel Mowbray

When a family of Egyptian immigrants was murdered in Jersey City recently, the media’s response was to wring its hands about anti-Muslim bias. But the truth is more complicated, and reveals the media’s own bias—against America.

Anti-Muslim bias had nothing to do the killing of the Armanious family; they were Coptic Christians. It wasn’t the religion of the victims that concerned the press; it was the religion of the suspected murderers.

Over the weekend, the Associated Press wrote of the “dirty looks and shouted slurs” directed at Muslims in Jersey City following the slaughter of an Egyptian Christian man, his wife, and two young daughters, which many reports attribute to local radical Islamists upset about something the man wrote in an Internet chat room.

The AP followed in predictable fashion:

The strife is particularly distressing in light of efforts the area’s Muslim community made to reach out to other faiths and strengthen ties after the 9/11 attacks.

What the AP conveniently ignored, however, was known and suspected radical activity in northern New Jersey’s Muslim community.

The former imam at the El Tawheed Islamic Center of Jersey City, Alaa Al-Sadawi, was convicted in July 2003 of attempting to smuggle more than $650,000 in cash to the terrorist Global Relief Fund in Egypt in April 2002.

One of Al-Sadawi’s former mosque-goers was convicted last March of murdering in the name of Islam. Alim Hassan, then 31, killed his pregnant wife, her mother, and her sister on July 30, 2002. He reportedly stabbed the women more than 20 times each because they refused to convert to Islam. According to reports, Hassan prayed regularly at El-Tawheed.

Al-Sadawi and Hassan were hardly the first Muslims in the area, though, to appear on authorities’ radar.

Mohamed El-Mezain , the former imam at the nearby Islamic Center of Passaic County, which has close relations with El-Tawheed, worked with the Paterson-based mosque to raise funds for Hamas in the mid-1990s, according to an FBI memo drafted in November 2001 by the FBI’s assistant director of counterterrorism Dale Watson. El-Mezain, who is no longer affiliated with the Islamic Center, was never charged or arrested.

The FBI document, which served as the basis for the U.S. government shutting down the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in December 2001, cited a “reliable” source in noting that “during a speech at the Islamic Center of Passaic County (ICPC) in November, 1994, Mohammad El-Mezain, the HLFRD’s current Director of Endowments and former Chairman of the HLFRD Board, admitted that some of the money collected by the ICPC and the HLFRD goes to Hamas or Hamas activities in Israel. El-Mezain also defended Hamas and the activities carried out by Hamas.”

El-Mezain also openly raised funds for Hamas, according to the FBI memo. After a speech at a Muslim rally in Southern California in the mid-90’s in which the keynote speaker urged attendees to “exterminate” and “finish off the Israelis,” El-Mezain asked for contributions and told the crowd that $1.8 million had been raised for Hamas in 1994 alone, according to the memo.

Radicalism at ICPC hardly seems to have subsided. The mosque in February 2003 hosted a lecture by Abdelhaleem Ashqar, long after he was identified by the FBI memo as a prominent Hamas figure.

Investigators in Jersey City have yet to announce the motive for the murder of the Armanious family. But if it turns out that the murder or murders were religiously-motivated Muslims, with whom will the media sympathize: those grieving for the victims or those who attend the same hate-filled mosques as the murderers? Is there any doubt?

==============================

Family of slain Christians speaks out (WorldNetDaily, 050216)

Egyptian immigrants’ kin confirm murder method comes from Quran

WASHINGTON – Relatives of a brutally slain New Jersey Christian family spoke out yesterday for the first time, saying the killings were consistent with Quranic methods of slaying infidels.

The bodies of the Coptic-American family, including father Hossam Armanious, 47, his wife Amal Garas, 37, and daughters Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8, were found bound and gagged with their throats slashed in their New Jersey home on Jan. 14. Hudson County prosecutors are said to be exploring several possible motives for the slayings, including retaliation by terrorists against Hossam Armanious, described as an outspoken advocate for Coptic Christian religious freedom in Egypt and a well-known leader of an online ministry to the Muslim-American community.

Held at the National Press Club, yesterday’s press conference included a statement by U.S. Copts Association President Michael Meunier.

“We feel it is extremely important that the public hear the Armanious family members’ side of the story and we are pleased to help them express their point of view on this disturbing crime,” Meunier said.

Cautious in their speech, and unwilling to ascribe outright motive for the slaying, the family, when questioned by the press did say the manner of slaying was consistent with passages in the Quran that describe how to kill an infidel. The family stressed it is waiting for the investigation to play out. Regarding the possibility the slaying was a jihadist act, family uncle Emile Garas told WND afterward, “We’re not ruling anything out.”

The Rev. Dr. Keith Roderick, Washington representative of Christian Solidarity International and secretary general of the Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights, offered a statement relating to concerns over the manner in which the crime is being investigated.

“The investigation is not complete; no suspects have been identified,” said Roderick, “and the district attorney’s office of Hudson County is pursuing a number of theories related to the motive and nature of the crime. Public statements by that office indicate that theories related to robbery have been given precedence over a possible hate crime as a motive. By stressing that there are no facts substantiating a religious motivation to this crime, the confidence of the family has been eroded that the local investigation will lead to a resolution.”

Roderick said that a “great deal in the media” has been made of the potential conflict within the Christian and Muslim communities if the investigation leads to a religious motive. Indeed, an Associated Press story, “Slaying spurs new wave of anti-Muslim bias” detailed community tensions and quoted Ahmed Shedeed, director of the Islamic Center of Jersey City as saying, “We Muslims living in America are getting sick of this crap. Why should we have to apologize for or make a defense of something we had nothing to do with? There is no proof at all that Muslims had anything to do with this, yet we are taking the blame again. Is Islam on trial, or is a killer on trial?”

“The central issue here,” Roderick said in his statement, “should not be about communal disputes, but the fact that the perpetrators of this vicious crime are still at large. To avoid pursuit of what may be the most obvious motive of the murder for fear of maligning one part of the Jersey City community or creating a backlash against that community is irresponsible.” The reverend indicated he hopes the investigation will confront the case “honestly without the fear of sectarian concerns.” Leaders of the communities and social workers are the people most qualified to address those concerns, not law enforcement, he said.

Roderick joined with his colleagues in urging the Justice Department to take a greater lead in the investigation and give special attention to the civil-rights dimension of the case.

“From the perspective of ethnic and religious minorities who have fled religious persecution in their native countries, this case is unnerving,” he said. “Many non-Muslim immigrants have told me that they believed that when they fled to the United States from these pressures, they would be safe. This case had made them feel vulnerable.”

The American Jewish Committee is also offering their support to the family, with New Jersey Area Director Allyson M. Gall sending a letter to Edward J. De Fabio, Hudson County prosecutor.

That letter read, in part, “While we are well aware that charges have not yet been brought, and that the full circumstances of this horrific murder are not yet known, we also know that there are valid reasons to consider that this may have been a hate crime, or even an act of terror. We cannot stress enough that the current heightened sense of fear in the Coptic community must be squarely addressed.”

Gall said that should the slaying turn out to be a hate crime or act of terror, her organization stands willing to give any appropriate assistance to the Coptic and Muslim community, including but not limited to helping organize other ethnic and religious groups to stand together and speak out against the intimidation inherent in such a crime.

Copies of Gall’s letter were also sent to Rep. Robert Menendez, Gov. Richard Codey, Jersey City Chief of Police Ronald Buonocore, Mayor of Jersey City Jerramiah T. Healey, Dr. Monir A. Dawoud and Attorney General Peter C. Harvey.

When asked by reporters whether any Muslim organizations had offered support, the family indicated they had received support only from Christian and Jewish organizations.

Family members addressed media rumors that robbery was a motive: “The Armaniouses were not rich. Hossam and his wife, Amal, lived modestly with their two young girls in Jersey City. Despite speculation regarding a possibly robbery, the facts before us today appear to contradict such a supposition. The jewelry in the home, including Amal’s ring, worth approximately $3,500, was left intact. As far as knowledge of our own family, the family did not keep large amounts of cash in their home so as to invite such a crime.”

They added, “If the primary motive was robbery, why would they have killed each person in such a cruel and vindictive manner? Robbery is certainly not a motive in this case.”

The family also dismissed another theory that has been circulated, that of an “old country vendetta” – an attempt to link an old Egyptian practice with the killings of the family. The family offered two reasons such a theory lacks credibility: “First, such vendettas, while common practice decades ago in Egypt, are no longer tolerated or practiced in modern society. Just as rivals in the West no longer engage in duels, so too has the notion of an old country vendetta or “tar” been eradicated from modern-day Egyptian society. Secondly, if such a theory were to be considered, the logical victims of such an attack would be family members in Egypt, and not here in the United States.”

The family said other misinformation published in recent reports includes a reference to Hossam Armanious’ alleged visit to Egypt last year as a factor in the slayings: “Hossam’s last visit to Egypt occurred in the summer of 2002 and played no role in the brutal murder of his family this year.”

Family member Garas told WND that the New York Post had asked him if the family had fled persecution. “Not true,” Garas told the Post reporter, who he said then published the theory anyway. The family is encouraging media to contact them directly with their questions. “We want the media to get their information right,” said Garas.

Family members also said they had no knowledge of any Internet threats against the family and had learned about the possibility after reading about it in the press.

Relatives praised the slain family, saying, “They were hardworking immigrants, devoted to their children, their church and their faith. Indeed, Hossam was a deeply religious man whose activities included engaging in religious dialogue via the Internet, on chat-rooms such as Paltalk, where Hossam practiced his newfound freedom of speech.”

“As we grieve the loss of our loved ones,” the family said, “we continue to demand and pray that justice be served. We respectfully request that such justice be rendered swiftly. As long as the murderers roam free, our streets are unsafe, and so we implore any person with information regarding the details of these brutal crimes to contact the appropriate authorities.”

Members of the Garas family present at the press conference included Ayman, Ferail, Elad Fahmy, Wanas, Alphonse, Milad, Gameel and Emile.

==============================

Tensions Linger Despite Capture of Jersey Murder Suspects (Christian Post, 050305)

Coptic Christians and Muslims alike expressed relief yesterday following the arrest of two former convicts charged with binding, gagging and cutting the throats of four members of a Coptic Christian family last January in what prosecutors called a robbery that went awry in their Jersey City home. But while religious fanaticism apparently wasn’t the motive behind the killing in New Jersey, tensions still lingered.

“Thank God, it’s not a religious matter,” former deputy mayor of Jersey City Fred Ayad told the New York Times.

“If they had been Egyptian or Muslim, we would have had—we would have had problems,” he added, expressing a sense of relief that many Copts were feeling.

Last month, enormous tensions between Muslims and Christians in the Jersey City area surfaced after the bodies of Hossam Armanious, a 47-year-old Coptic Christian, his 37-year-old wife, Amal Garas, and their daughters, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8, were found bound and gagged, their throats and heads stabbed repeatedly. Home to about 30,000 Copts, the Jersey City area has one of the largest concentrations of Coptic Christians in the country.

As mourners took the city’s streets to St. George & St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church during the funeral for the Christian on Jan. 17, grief and rage erupted as many blamed Muslims for the killings. According to some family members, Armanious had engaged in heated debate about Islam on a religious Web site.

While prosecutors were investigating whether Armanious might have angered Muslims with his postings under the name “I Love Jesus”, leading to the killings, they cautioned that robbery was a possible motive because the home was ransacked and money was taken from the victims. Also, no solid evidence tying the crimes to religious hatred had been established.

Despite this, the murders had reportedly spread fear throughout the region’s Coptic Christian community. The Rev. Randall Day, pastor of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Teaneck and vice president of the Teaneck Clergy Council told the Associated Press the killings had also damaged goodwill between Muslims and Christians that took generations to build up.

“Not only did these murders end those four lives, but they threaten a vision and a dream of a possibility of living together peacefully, which is the strong desire of many people in the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities,” Day said during an annual community brunch attended last month by Muslim and Christian leaders.

Although Egyptian Muslims and Egyptian Coptic Christians are at brutal odds with each other in their homeland, those who had immigrated to the United States had nonetheless managed to live peacefully, according to the Times. The Copts date their feud with the Muslims back to the seventh century and the rise of Islam.

The Times reported that for many Jersey City Muslims and Copts who had lived in peace for years but who feared that the case might lead to the kind of sectarian strife that has plagued their communities in Egypt for centuries, there were expressions of relief that two men—neither Egyptian nor Muslim—had been charged in a murderous robbery.

But for others, seven weeks of mounting tensions were not dispelled. Some Christians refused to believe the official version of what happened, and some Muslims demanded an apology for what they called unjustified suspicions and verbal abuse by the Coptic community. “For such antagonists, little had changed,” the Times wrote. “And it was unclear what it would take, or how long, to heal the wounds.”

Yesterday afternoon, nearly 100 spectators—many of them friends, relatives and members of the Coptic church to which the victims belonged—filled the Hudson County Superior Court for the arrangement proceedings for Edward McDonald, 25, who had rented an upstairs apartment from the family two months before the murders, and Hamilton Sanchez, 30, of Newark.

Briefing reporters, Hudson County Prosecutor Edward De Fazio—who emphasized yesterday that the motive for the murders was robbery—provided an account of the crime that was so detailed it appeared to be drawn, at least in part, from statements made by one or both defendants. The prosecutor declined, however, to say if any statements had been made.

According to De Fazio, McDonald and Sanchez had met by prearrangement in the vestibule of the family’s home at 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 11. Wearing a ski mask and armed with a semi-automatic handgun, McDonald burst in through the Armanious family’s first-floor door along with Sanchez, who wore no mask. Amal Garas and her daughters—who were alone in the house—were then bound with rope, gagged and placed in separate rooms, the prosecutor said.

The assailants then ransacked the house for money and waited two hours for Armanious, the father, to come home. De Fazio said upon his return, Armanious was then bound and gagged at gunpoint also.

The men took money and an A.T.M. card from Armanious’s wallet and were searching for more cash when Monica, who had slipped her ropes and was trying to sneak out, recognized McDonald as the tenant upstairs.

McDonald then proceeded to take her into a bathroom and, with a knife from the kitchen, cut her throat, De Fazio said. To eliminate all the witnesses, Sanchez then cut the throats of Armanious in a bedroom, Garas in an adjoining room and Sylvia in the children’s bedroom, the prosecutor added.

After the victims were missed at their jobs and schools over the following two days and failed attempts to contact the family, Garas’s brother, Ayman Garas, called the Jersey City police on Jan. 14. The police then broke into the house at around 4 a.m. and found the bodies.

In the meantime, the robbers had used Armanious’s A.T.M. card five or six times to withdraw a total of about $3,000 at cash outlets in Jersey City and Manhattan, said De Fazio. Investigators said surveillance cameras caught one or both suspects.

De Fazio said he had not decided whether to seek the death penalty, but stated: “This was a brutal attack, a vicious attack, on this family. They were desperate for money and greed was the cause of these murders.”

==============================

Getting to Know the Sufis (Weekly Standard, 050207)

From the February 7, 2005 issue: There is a tolerant, pluralist tradition in Islam. We can’t afford to ignore it.

JUST FOUR MONTHS AGO, thousands of mourners thronged the Grand Mosque in Mecca for the funeral of a famous Sufi teacher. This was an extraordinary event, given the discrimination against all non-Wahhabi Muslims that is the state policy of Saudi Arabia. The dead man, 58-year-old Seyed Mohammad Alawi Al-Maliki, had been blacklisted from employment in religious education, banned from preaching in the Grand Mosque (a privilege once enjoyed by his father and grandfather), and even imprisoned by the Saudi regime and deprived of his passport. That so many Saudi subjects were willing to gather openly to mourn him—indeed, that his family succeeded in excluding Wahhabi clerics from the mosque during the memorial—says something important, not just about the state of dissent inside the Saudi kingdom, but also about pluralism in Islam.

It’s hard to know which facet of Al-Maliki’s identity his mourners were turning out to honor—if indeed these can be separated. He was, first, a Hejazi, a native of the western Arabian region that was an independent kingdom before the Saudi-Wahhabi conquest in the 1920s. Home to Mecca, Medina, and the commercial port of Jeddah, the Hejaz hosts an urban, cosmopolitan culture very different from that of the desert nomads. Al-Maliki’s funeral was the first for a prominent Hejazi to be held in the Grand Mosque in decades.

He was also a leader of the Maliki school of Sunni Islam, a classical school of interpretation that the Wahhabis have forced underground in Saudi Arabia. Prior to the imposition of Wahhabi fascism, the

Malikis, along with the other three main schools of Sunni Islam, had maintained a respected presence in the Grand Mosque for many centuries. Dialogue had characterized relations among these schools of Islamic thought.

But perhaps most significantly, Al-Maliki was an eminent teacher of Sufism. This spiritual and basically peaceful form of Islam is anathema to the Wahhabis, who have ferociously suppressed it. With disciples in South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even the United States, Al-Maliki was an outstanding representative of moderate, traditional Islam.

Some Saudi dissidents saw a muffled demand for political reform in the public outpouring of admiration for Al-Maliki; he had attended a Saudi-government-sponsored national dialogue on political change in late 2003. Others viewed it as an affirmation of secret affiliation with the Maliki school. But many Saudis treated the massive funeral principally as a manifestation of sympathy for Sufism. Clandestine Sufi meetings have become commonplace in Jeddah, the hive of liberal reformism in the kingdom, and increasing numbers of young people have taken to Sufism as an expression of anti-Wahhabi defiance.

ISLAMIC PLURALISM is not a new idea dreamed up in the West and offered as a helpful cure for Muslim rage. It is a longstanding reality. The Muslim world comprises a spectrum of religious interpretations. If, at one end of the continuum, we find the fanatical creed of Wahhabism, cruel and arbitrary, more an Arab-supremacist state ideology than a religious sect, at the other end we find the enlightened traditions of Sufism. These stress not only intra-Islamic dialogue, separation of spiritual from clerical authority, and teaching in the vernacular, but also respect for all believers, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or other. Sufis emphasize, above all, their commitment to mutual civility, interaction, and cooperation among believers, regardless of sect.

Indeed, the further the distance from Wahhabism, the greater the element of pluralism present in Islam. Where the Wahhabis insist that there is only one, monolithic, authentic Islam (theirs), the Sufis express their faith through hundreds of different orders and communities around the globe, none pretending to an exclusive hold on truth. Sufis may be either Sunni or Shia; some would claim to have transcended the difference. Throughout its 1,200-year history, Sufism has rested on a spiritual foundation of love for the creator and creation, which implies the cultivation of mercy and compassion toward all human beings. These principles are expressed in esoteric teachings imparted through formal instruction.

Sufis follow teachers—known as sheikhs, babas, pirs, and mullahs (the latter, meaning “protector,” had no pejorative meaning before the Iranian revolution)—but they resist the notion that religious authority should be based on titles and offices. Rather, Sufi teachers gain acceptance and support by their insights and capacity for transmission of enlightenment to their students.

The history of Sufism is filled with examples of interfaith fusion, in contrast with the rigid separatism of the Islamic fundamentalists. Balkan and Turkish Sufis share holy sites with Christians. Central Asian Sufis preserve traditions inherited from shamans and Buddhists. Sufis in French-speaking West Africa adapt local customs, and those in Eastern Turkestan borrow from Chinese traditions such as Confucianism and Taoism, as well as martial arts. In the Balkans, Turkey, and Central Asia, Sufis have accepted secularism as a bulwark against religious intolerance and the monopolization of religious opinion by clerics.

The

mode of life followed by Sufis, who are also known as dervishes, is as varied as their geographical distribution. Some retire into seclusion, living on the grounds of tekkes or lodges where Sufis typically meet weekly for meditation, chanting, and other rituals, known as zikr or “remembrance of God.” Others give up their worldly possessions and wander as pilgrims. Yet most Sufis in the Muslim world maintain ordinary working lives, and some have become rich; it was said that when Sheikh al-Maliki’s funeral was held in Mecca, private jets choked Saudi airports for days. Sufism has also exercised an influence, if a limited one, on intellectuals and spiritual seekers in the West.

Among Western experts at the State Department and in academic Middle East Studies programs, Sufism is often dismissed as “folk Islam,” echoing the denigration voiced by the Islamic clerical establishment. This is paradoxical, for although there are regions where Sufism is the prevalent form of Islam and its influence is seen in a lack of strict observance, Sufis are more often than not sophisticated in their breadth of reading and worldview. In some countries, such as Egypt, Sufis are sometimes derided as credulous bumpkins, but in others, like India, they tend to be viewed as an elite.

Western experts’ disdain for Sufism, however, is worse than paradoxical. It indicates a remarkable blindness to a cultural resource profoundly relevant to the possible growth of pluralism and tolerance—and therefore the emergence of democratic cultures—in the Islamic world.

JUST WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP between Sufism and the prospect for political progress in the Muslim nations? At the risk of grossly oversimplifying complex phenomena, it may be useful to distinguish three different patterns.

(1) We have already seen how, under conditions of oppression, Sufism in Saudi Arabia has become something of a channel for cultural resistance and political opposition. The Saudi case is not unique. In several places, Sufism has nourished resistance to oppressive regimes. The Sufi always prefers peace to war, and nonviolence to violence. But Sufis are also fighters against injustice. As the dean of Western historians of Islam, Bernard Lewis, puts it, Sufism is “peaceful but not pacifist.” Some Sufis have been famous for their involvement in jihad, although the 19th-century Sufi and leader of the early Algerian opposition to French conquest Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi famously commented, “The Sufi does not go gladly to jihad.” Al-Jazairi himself preached, and showed by example, that protection of non-Muslim civilians (in this instance, French colonists in Algeria) was required of Muslims fighting a Christian invader.

Similarly, in Kosovo, Sufis played a major role, over decades, in resisting, sometimes by means of guerrilla war, the abuses inflicted on Albanians by the Turkish authorities, and later by Slavic imperialists. Iraqi Kurdistan is another Sufi center; its spiritual leaders were prominent in fighting Saddam Hussein, and now actively promote the Iraqi alliance with the United States. Sufis were the traditional inspirers of the struggle against Russian aggression in Chechnya and other Caucasian Muslim areas, until, at the end of the 1990s, the conflict in Chechnya was usurped by Wahhabi Arabs who bent it in a terrorist direction.

(2) A second model can be discerned where Sufism is the dominant form of Islam, in lands stretching from French-speaking West Africa and Morocco to the Balkans, Turkey, and Central Asia, and from India to Indonesia. Here, Sufism has deeply influenced local cultures, facilitating secularist attitudes as well as coexistence with non-Muslims. It is no accident that Morocco, Turkey, and Indonesia, all of which feature Sufi-dominated Islam, are the countries often deemed to have the best potential for the development of Muslim democracies. In India, of course, Muslims now numbering 130 million have lived as a minority in a functioning democracy for half a century.

Against many obstacles, the kings of Morocco—home to some of the most respected and subtle Sufi thinkers—have sought to maintain good relations with the country’s centuries-old Jewish community as well as with Israel. Turkey, whose cultural life is replete with Sufi influence (even though the Sufi orders themselves were outlawed by the secularizing regime in the 1920s and remain underground to this day), also has an excellent record with both Turkish Jews and the state of Israel. The constitution of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, with a population of 240 million, promises religious freedom for all beliefs, though the religion of the majority is taught in public schools; a Sufi mass organization with 30 million members, the Muhammadiyah, has been outspoken in its opposition to Islamist extremism. What varies considerably in these countries is the institutional strength of Sufism. Thus, in Central Asia, where famous Sufis are national cultural heroes, the long night of Soviet communism left the Sufis structurally weak, and they are presently rebuilding their orders.

In places where Sufism is dominant, spiritual traditions may play a positive role in fostering civic values conducive to democracy. The Bektashi Sufis of the Albanian lands, counting 3 million members from Kosovo to northern Greece, for example, declare boldly that they are “the most progressive Muslims in the world!”—as I was vociferously reminded in 2003 by Baba Tahir Emini, their leader in Western Macedonia. They are especially known for their dedication to women’s rights and popular education, and are the only Sufi order to permit drinking alcohol.

(3) A third model can be identified in places where Sufism is influential among the mass of Muslims, but the dervishes have kept their heads down so as to avoid conflict with the ruling dictators. In these countries—among them Syria, Iran, and Sudan—Sufism remains quietist. Nobody can say what role the Sufis might eventually play here, if or when each regime begins or accelerates a transition away from Baathism (in the first case), clerical rule (in the second), or violent Islamism (in the third). But the Sufis’ private dedication to religious and intellectual pluralism can only reinforce whatever positive developments may emerge.

GIVEN THIS VARIED PICTURE, how should Sufism enter into American strategies for dealing with the Islamic world?

Most obviously, Americans should learn more about Sufism, engaging with its leaders and followers, and getting to know its main trends. This isn’t hard, as the meeting houses of the Sufi orders are easy to find in every Muslim country except Saudi Arabia. American diplomats in Muslim cities from Pristina in Kosovo to Kashgar in western China, and from Fez in Morocco to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, should include the local Sufis on their lists for frequent visits. American students and business people, aid workers and tourists, should embrace opportunities to get acquainted with Sufis. Most important, anyone in or out of government who is in a position to influence the discussion and shaping of U.S. policy toward the Middle East can benefit from an appreciation of this indigenous tradition of Islamic tolerance.

It should go without saying that attempts at direct cooptation or subsidy of a “Sufi alternative” to radical Islam should be avoided. To remain true to itself, Sufism must be independent. Sufis do not need money, but comprehension and respect as a major component of the global Islamic community.

At the same time, on human rights grounds, the United States must speak up for Sufis against those who repress them, often violently, especially in Saudi Arabia. To repeat, in the Wahhabi-dominated kingdom, an independent, spiritual Sufi oppositional culture is emerging, with special attraction for young people. Against the backdrop of Saudi fanaticism, including the open support for radical Islam coming from some of Riyadh’s richest and most powerful personalities, Sufism exemplifies the Islamic pluralism that, if restored to Saudi Arabia, could shut off the money flow to al Qaeda and its allies worldwide. These are opportunities in the war against terror that the United States would be foolish to miss.

Stephen Schwartz is the author of The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and its Role in Terrorism.

==============================

Messages in the mosques (Washington Times, 050208)

Muslims in the United States should “behave as if on a mission behind enemy lines.” Not the admonition of a crank or a freak from the lunatic fringe, but Saudi-funded religious pamphlets distributed to mosques throughout America.

Says who? Says Freedom House, one of the oldest human rights groups in the U.S. and headed by James Woolsey, CIA director in the first Clinton administration. The organization did a one-year study of the kind of “hate propaganda” the Saudi government has paid to print and distribute to U.S. mosques. The 89-page report, based on 200 Saudi documents, released by Freedom House Friday before last, was titled, “Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques.”

One mosque where Freedom House researchers found evidence of Saudi Wahhabi skullduggery is 3 miles from where the World Trade Center once stood. Muslim newcomers to America are told Wahhabism, the official creed of the Saudi kingdom, is the only true religion. Anyone who doesn’t conform to the postulates of Wahhabism is an apostate.

The Freedom House report says, “In a book published by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and collected from the Al Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, Saudi Arabia’s official religious leader, the late Bin Baz, authorizes Muslims to kill converts to Islam who violate sexual mores on adultery and homosexuality.”

Worshippers at Al Farooq are told, “If a person says I believe in Allah alone and confirms the truth of everything from Muhammad, except in his forbidding fornication, he becomes a disbeliever. For that, it would be lawful for Muslims to spill his blood and to take his money.”

The Brooklyn mosque was a favorite of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik ringleader of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, on his fund-raising tours in the late 1980s. Several co-conspirators in the Landmark bomb plot (whose targets were the United Nations and New York City’s tunnels) also used Al Farooq as a safe meeting place.

Several of the 200 documents, obtained by Freedom House, were prefaced, “Greetings from the Cultural Attache of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington.” Saudi spokesmen were quick to deny wrongdoing and to condemn “extremism and hateful ex-pression among people anywhere in the world.”

Nina Shea, director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom and editor of the report, said incriminating literature was collected from mosques and Islamic centers in Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif., Dallas, Houston, Chicago, New York and the Washington D.C. area, including the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in Fairfax, Va. Clerics in charge of these mosques, when telephoned, denied everything, explaining, “Without tolerance, Islam cannot survive.”

Some documents in the Freedom House report advised Muslims in the United States on how to put down Jews and Christians by refusing to shake hands or to congratulate them on their religious holidays. Muslims who convert to another religion “should be killed because they have denied the Koran.”

The credibility of official Saudi denials could be judged by the provenance of the materials examined — the Saudi Embassy in Washington, the Saudi Education Ministry, the Saudi Air Force and other official branches of the Saudi government.

Beginning in 1979, after the revolutionary Shi’ite clergy in Iran overthrew the monarchy, and panicked the Saudi royal family, Wahhabi “missionaries” were given a free hand and countless billions to spread their anti-Shi’ite faith all over the world.

Beginning in 1989, following Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Wahhabi clergy began funding Pakistan’s mad-rassas, Koranic schools where hatred of America, Israel and India is taught to this day.

The Saudi royal family belatedly recognized last year that Wahhabism was sowing the seeds of the kingdom’s destruction. More than 1,000 imams were summoned to a meeting in Riyadh and told they could no longer use the words jihad (holy war) and jihadis (holy warriors) in their Friday prayers under penalty of detention and rehabilitation. They soon found a way around the ban by preaching it was every Iraqi’s duty to oppose U.S. occupation of their country.

Ms. Shea correctly said Saudi royals “have worked out an arrangement that exports the conflict within their own society.”

The Saudi royal family also feels protected against the kind of democratic tidal wave that swept over Iraq last Sunday. Wahhabism — the strictest interpretation of the Koran — could easily emerge victorious with a new standard bearer: Osama bin Laden.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

==============================

Religious hatred, Saudi-style (townhall.com, 050207)

Jeff Jacoby

In which country are Muslims being taught the following lessons?

+ “Everyone who does not embrace Islam is an unbeliever and must be called an unbeliever. . . . One who does not call the Jews and the Christians unbelievers is himself an unbeliever.”

+ “Whoever believes that churches are houses of God . . . or that what Jews and Christians do constitutes the worship of God . . . is an infidel.”

+ To offer greetings to a Christian at Christmas — even to wish “Happy holidays” — is “a practice more loathsome to God . . . than imbibing liquor, or murder, or fornication.”

+ Jews “are worse than donkeys.” They are the corrupting force “behind materialism, bestiality, the destruction of the family, and the dissolution of society.

+ Muslims who convert to another religion “should be killed because [they] have denied the Koran.”

+ Democracy is “responsible for all the horrible wars” of the 20th century, and for spreading “ignorance, moral decadence, and drugs.”

If this sounds to you like the kind of fanaticism you might encounter in Saudi Arabia — where the established creed is Wahhabism, an intolerant and extremist version of Islam — you’re right. Unfortunately, this religious hatred isn’t confined to the Arabian peninsula. Thanks to the Saudi government’s elaborate campaign to export Wahhabism worldwide, such anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-Western poison can also be found throughout the United States.

We know this from the work of Freedom House, a venerable human rights group that promotes democracy around the globe. In a new report, it documents the alarming degree to which Wahhabist propaganda has penetrated American mosques.

Between November 2003 and December 2004, Freedom House researchers assembled more than 200 publications from 15 mosques and Islamic centers in Illinois, Texas, California, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington, DC. All the documents were linked to the Saudi religious establishment — many were official Saudi government publications or had been supplied by the Saudi embassy, and several of the mosques disseminating them are funded by the Saudi royal family. Each was reviewed by independent translators, who found them replete with what Freedom House calls “a totalitarian ideology of hatred that can incite to violence.”

Before Sept. 11, 2001, the notion that literature in mosques could be dangerous might have struck some as alarmist. But of the 19 terrorist-hijackers that day, 15 were Saudi, and all of them were steeped in the relentless hostility to “infidels” that the Saudi publications inculcate. For some, the mosques were a crucial resource. The King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles, for example, was a home away from home for hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar. The mosque’s imam, Fahad al Thumairy, was an accredited Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles until 2003, when he was expelled from the United States for suspected involvement in terrorism.

Perhaps Hazmi and Mihdhar spent some of their time at the mosque studying “Loyalty and Dissociation in Islam,” a Wahhabi work that emphasizes the duty of every Muslim to cultivate enmity between themselves and non-Muslims. “Be dissociated from the infidels,” the book instructs. “Hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.”

Or perhaps they consulted “Religious Edicts for the Immigrant Muslim.” As Nina Shea of Freedom House observes, they would have found in its pages detailed instructions for intensifying their resentment of Americans: “Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel.”

It is important to note that most Muslims do not share the xenophobic Wahhabi dogma. Freedom House undertook its study in part because “many Muslims . . . requested our help in exposing Saudi extremism in the hope of freeing their communities from ideological strangulation.” Now that Freedom House has done so, it is up to moderate American Muslims to purge their mosques of the Saudi toxin, and to ostracize the extremists in their midst.

And it is up to Washington to put an end to the pretense of US-Saudi harmony. In his State of the Union address last week, President Bush referred to Saudi Arabia as one of “our friends” in the Middle East. But friends don’t flood friends’ houses of worship with hateful religious propaganda. We are in a war against radical Islamist terrorism, and Saudi Arabia supplies the ideology on which the terrorists feed. Until that incitement is stifled, the Saudis are no friends of ours.

==============================

“Kill a Jew—Go to Heaven” (Weekly Standard, 050209)

Natan Sharansky draws attention to a new report by the Palestinian Media Watch.

NATAN SHARANSKY’s timing was perfect. On January 25, Sharansky, the ex-Soviet dissident and current Israeli cabinet member, presented a detailed report on the Palestinian Authority’s promotion of anti-Semitism and genocide in its official media. He did so amidst the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Israel’s National Day Against anti-Semitism.

A day later, one of the co-authors of the report, Itamar Marcus, explained his findings to foreign diplomats in the Israeli parliament. The disturbing report compiled by the Palestinian Media Watch, titled “Kill a Jew-Go To Heaven,” illuminates what Sharansky calls the PA’s “culture of hatred.” After Marcus delivered his briefing, Sharansky seized on the Auschwitz anniversary in a statement to reporters, declaring that anti-Semitic propaganda poisons Palestinian society as it once did in Nazi Germany.

Is that an exaggeration? Not after perusing “Kill a Jew-Go to Heaven.” The 20-page report outlines the three phases of anti-Semitism found in various PA-run media, including newspapers, radio, crossword puzzles, political cartoons, and school textbooks.

The first phase depicts Jews as subhuman. “The foundation stage defines Jews and presents them as different from others, possessing inherently evil traits,” the report explains. This hatred is even disseminated to children. “Treachery and disloyalty are character traits of the Jews and therefore one should be aware of them,” the Palestinian textbook Islamic Education for Ninth Grade says.

When such content was brought to the PA’s attention in 1999, the U.S. government offered to fund the reprinting of that book and others. But the PA refused. The report also

contains 20 segments from interviews with various individuals on Palestinian television who compare Jews to animals.

Jewish traditions are maligned in this phase as well. A PA daily newspaper, while blaming the drug problem in the PA on Israel, ran a cartoon of the Jewish menorah, replacing the seven flames with seven syringes.

The second phase portrays Jews as a threat to the existence of Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general. “[The second] phase shows that these traits are not a private Jewish matter, but have ramifications for the entire world,” the report reads. “. . . Jews are planning and executing heinous crimes. If unchecked these crimes constitute a mortal danger, not only to all Muslims and Arabs, but to all of humanity.”

This phase also teaches that Jews control all media, which “they learned from the protocols of the elders of Zion,” as one Palestinian newspaper wrote. It is also taught that murder is a part of the Jewish religion and Jews are responsible for all catastrophes on Earth. Most recently, Jews were blamed for the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Particularly disturbing are references to the Holocaust. The Al Hayat Al Jadida newspaper has blamed Jews for starting the Second World War and the Holocaust. One children’s musical that ran on PA television last May claimed that the Jews built ovens during the Holocaust to kill Palestinians.

The third phase involves eliminating the threat of Jews by genocide. The PA promotes this as being both an act of self-preservation and for the good of the Arab world. “Kill them all, we won’t leave a single Jew here,” a Palestinian girl told PA TV in October 2000.

As the authors of the report point out, these calls for genocide are “neither the strategy of a fringe PA sect, nor the haphazard ramblings of private individuals behind doors.”

Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian president, has met with the state-controlled media and asked that they stop broadcasting anti-Semitic material. There has been some slowing, but the report demonstrates that such Nazi-like propaganda continues to be shown.

At the January 25 press conference, Sharansky dismissed the notion of any progress, and stressed that the PA needs to cease promoting all anti-Semitic themes: “The PA should pursue a policy of zero tolerance of any and all anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Palestinian media to promote a detoxification of Palestinian society and enable a public acceptance of our two nations living side by side.”

Rachel DiCarlo is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.

==============================

Wake-up call for my fellow Muslims (townhall.com, 050301)

Kamal Nawash

Muslim-bashing. That’s the accusation many of my fellow Muslims now hurl at the various news outlets for their news stories about a Freedom House investigation that found extremist Islamic literature in some leading American mosques. This name-calling is unfortunate.

Since 1980, the Muslim world has experienced an enormous growth of religious fanaticism and extremism the likes of which Islam has not experienced in its 1,400 years. This movement continues to grow because of the spread of Saudi-created and funded Wahhabi Islam, a sect that used to number no more than one percent of all Muslims. But now because of money and technology, it has spread around the world.

Extremism is also growing because of an ideology called political Islam. The basis of political Islam is the rejection of secularism and the belief that the mosque and the state should be completely intertwined. Unfortunately, history has shown that when politics and religion are completely intertwined, disaster results.

Most importantly, extremism in the Muslim world continues to grow because most Muslims are unwilling to admit that we have a problem with extremism and support for terrorism. The response by Muslims to the Freedom House report is not the first time that the Muslim community resorted to denial and accusations of Muslim-bashing when presented with evidence of Muslim culpability.

After September 11, many in the Muslim world chose denial and hallucination rather than face up to the sad fact that Muslims perpetrated the 9/11 terrorist acts. After 9/11, many Muslims, including religious leaders and “intellectuals,” blamed 9/11 on a Jewish conspiracy, and went as far as fabricating a tale that 4,000 Jews did not show up for work in the World Trade Center on that day.

Since 9/11, the world has watched in horror as hundreds of schoolchildren were murdered in Russia by Chechen Muslim terrorists. Scores of civilians were murdered by Islamic terrorists in the Madrid train bombings. Many others have been murdered in suicide bombings in buses, restaurants and other public places, dozens have been beheaded on camera, two Russian passenger planes were blown out of the sky, and many, many atrocities that are too long to mention. All carried out by Muslims.

With all the evidence that Islam is facing a crisis, one wonders what it will take for Muslims to realize that those who commit mass murder in the name of Islam are not just a few fringe elements. What will it take for Muslims to realize that we are facing as great a crisis as any in our history? What will it take for Muslims to realize that there is a large, evil movement that is turning what was a peaceful religion into a death cult?

Will Muslims wake up before it is too late? Or will we continue blaming an imaginary Jewish conspiracy and “the media” for all our problems? The blaming of all Muslim problems on others is a cancer that is destroying Muslim society. And it must stop.

Muslims must wake up, look inward and put a stop to many of our religious leaders who spend most of their sermons teaching hatred, intolerance and violent jihad. We should not be afraid to admit that as Muslims we have a problem with violent extremism. We should not be afraid to admit that so many of our religious leaders belong behind bars, and not behind a pulpit.

Only moderate Muslims can challenge and defeat extremist Muslims. We can no longer afford to be silent. If we remain silent to the extremism within our community, then we should not expect anyone to listen to us when we complain of stereotyping and discrimination by non-Muslims. We should not be surprised when the world treats all of us as terrorists. And we should not be surprised when we are profiled at airports.

Simply put, not only do Muslims need to join the war against extremism and terror, we need to take the lead in this war.

Kamal Nawash is president of the Free Muslim Coalition, which can be found at www.freemuslims.org. He can be e-mailed at president@freemuslims.org.

==============================

Wahhabis, Go Home (Weekly Standard, 050307)

From the March 7, 2005 issue: Confronting Saudi evangelism in Kuwait, Europe, and the United States.

IN THE PAST FEW WEEKS, Kuwait has been waging its own war on terror at home. The police have engaged in five fierce and bloody gun battles with extremists since January 10, as reported by the Associated Press. Five policemen have been killed in these encounters, along with four security men and two bystanders; foreign observers described police conduct as “ham-handed.” But the police also managed to kill 9 suspected terrorists and arrest more than 40.

Jolted by this first serious clash with Islamist terrorists, Kuwaiti authorities acted swiftly to tackle the root of the problem: They are closing down unlicensed mosques and barring Saudi imams, the tireless purveyors of Islamist extremism, from preaching inside the emirate. In addition, the AP confirms that Kuwaiti authorities are blocking Islamic websites that incite violence, seizing radical books from mosques, and purging textbooks of extremism.

Expressing the nub of the new policy, former Kuwaiti oil minister Ali al-Baghli wrote in the Kuwait daily Al Qabas on February 2: “What is needed is to cut off the snake’s head, namely the masters of terror and all those who propagate terror in mosques and the media.”

Yet even as tiny Kuwait, a Muslim country, confronts the problem of Saudi-funded propagation of extremism, European governments continue to treat it with something like benign neglect.

Or worse: In Germany, Wahhabi materials (produced by the extremist Saudis also called Salafis) are used to teach about Islam in public schools. To be sure, this came about by inadvertence. German law allows schools to offer optional religious instruction, so long as it is provided not by state authorities, but by the various religious communities themselves.

As Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle East scholars, explained recently at the Hudson Institute, when Germany’s large Turkish minority applied for the inclusion of classes on Islam in schools, they offered to supply textbooks from Turkey. As these were government textbooks, they were deemed unacceptable by the German authorities, who requested materials produced by the local Islamic community. The result, Lewis says, were materials produced by private Muslim institutions—funded by Saudi Arabia. As always, he says, it was “the Wahhabis who had the necessary combination of passion, money, and a complete lack of scruples.

“So the Islam that is taught in Turkish schools is on the whole a modernized, secularized, sanitized version of Islam. The Islam which is taught in German schools is the complete Wahhabi version.” And Lewis adds this footnote: “As an interesting result of that, of 12 Turks arrested so far who have active membership of al Qaeda, all 12 were born and brought up in Germany, none in Turkey, which I think is rather remarkable.”

In Spain, where the very large Islamic Center of Madrid has been directly financed by Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism is on the rise. As long ago as 2002, the Spanish secret services were worried about the radicalization of the local Muslim community. It came as no surprise when, after the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid, a link was established between a Madrid mosque and the men arrested for the bombing.

Meanwhile in France—which hosts the largest Muslim community in Europe, somewhere between 5 million and 8 million people—the link between radical mosques and terrorism is strong. As Louis Caprioli, former head of the counterterrorism unit of the DST, the French equivalent of the FBI, put it, “Behind every Muslim terrorist is a radical imam.”

One such, imam Chelali Benchellali, has been preaching jihad since 1991 in Vénissieux, a suburb of Lyon. Apparently his message is getting through. Three of the seven French prisoners held at Guantanamo are from Vénissieux, including Benchellali’s own son. Two other men from Vénissieux were arrested by the DST on November 5, 2002, and charged with terrorism; both are relatives of Nizar Nawar, the suspected mastermind of the terrorist attack on the Djerba synagogue in Tunisia, which killed 19 people on April 11, 2002.

The DST finally arrested imam Benchellali on January 6, 2003, along with his wife, another son, and a Vénissieux pharmacist suspected of planning a major chemical attack in France. Only this month, the daily Le Parisien reported that a group of newly arrested Islamists have confirmed that Benchellali had installed a chemical lab in his apartment and was on his way to manufacturing bombs containing the deadly poison ricin.

Completing the picture, three young French Muslims died recently fighting the Coalition in Iraq, and three more were arrested by American troops in Falluja. All six had attended the same mosque in Paris and answered the call to jihad of the imam, who has since been arrested. The mother of one of them told a reporter her son had been brainwashed and manipulated by an Islamist guru.

The vast majority of the imams preaching in France are foreigners, and most are in the country illegally. Back in May 2004, I asked Jean-François Copé, chief spokesman for the French government, whether it would make sense to deport them, particularly those preaching hatred. He answered that most have been in the country some time, have their families and their lives in France, and cannot be easily deported. Nevertheless, France has started to expel the most outrageously extremist imams: a total of five in 2004.

In a country with 1,500 imams, this is a drop in the sea. Even deporting the most virulent will scarcely make a dent in the growing radical movement, considering the hold Saudi Wahhabism has on French Islam. As long ago as May 2001—before 9/11—King Mohammed VI of Morocco warned the French interior minister of the danger posed by the influence of Saudi Arabia through French mosques. To no avail.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia is omnipresent. It financed the luxurious Institute of the Arab World in Paris, the Lyon mosque, and the King Fahd Islamic Center of Mantes-la-Jolie. When asked about Saudi influence in France, Jean-François Copé brushed off the question, stating it was irrelevant. He added that the French government was determined to encourage the emergence of a French Islam and to insist that from now on imams at least speak French (as only half do today).

Yet the development of Saudi institutions in France continues apace. A new school for training French imams will be financed by the Saudi-sponsored Islamic Countries Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization (ICESCO), reports the Arabic newspaper Al Watan. Just last week, Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin told Le Figaro Magazine that a decision of the European Court of Justice prevents European governments from barring the foreign funding of mosques. So much for a truly independent French Islam.

Finally, the government of the Netherlands has been on a steep learning curve since the murder of Theo Van Gogh, on November 2, 2004, by an Islamist following the release of Van Gogh’s documentary critical of Islam. The government has just issued a report on “Saudi Influences in the Netherlands: Links between the Salafist Mission, Radicalization Processes, and Islamic Terrorism” (available in English on the website of the Dutch Interior Ministry). It documents the usual patterns of funding and incitement, including “sermons and prayers [in Dutch mosques] that showed overt jihadist features, in which for example Allah was asked to ‘deal with the enemies of Islam,’ namely Bush, Sharon, and the ‘enemies of Islam in Chechnya and Kashmir.’”

WHAT ABOUT THE UNITED STATES? A landmark report initiated at the request of American Muslims has just been released by Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom. The report, edited by the center’s Nina Shea and Paul Marshall and available on the web, meticulously documents the presence of Saudi government propaganda in mosques and Islamic centers in Los Angeles, Oakland, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York. Researchers confirmed the availability, as recently as December 2004, of over 200 books and other publications teaching the Wahhabi ideology of hatred, intolerance, and sometimes violent jihad.

One small sample from a book for high school students published by the Saudi Ministry of Education and found at the Islamic Center of Oakland, California: “To be true Muslims, we must prepare and be ready for jihad in Allah’s way. It is the duty of the citizen and the government. The military education is glued to faith and its meaning, and the duty to follow it.”

It is telling that the researchers, translators, and principal analysts of this material have chosen to remain anonymous. Even in the United States, those who take on the Islamic extremists must live in fear.

The fact that Islamofascist ideology is being propagated within our borders is, as the Freedom House report underscores, a national security concern. That this is being done through the agency of an allied foreign government points to the need for strong diplomatic action.

There is good reason to believe the public would support this. An August 2004 poll by Luntz Research found that 82% of respondents want the president to put much more pressure on Saudi Arabia in the fight against terror. Now that Freedom House, a private organization, has further exposed this urgent problem, it is up to Washington to take vigorous action. If Kuwait can do it, why not we?

Olivier Guitta is a freelance writer specializing in Islamic radicalism and Europe.

==============================

Muslim Woman’s Courage Sets Example (Foxnews, 050317)

Last week, Pakistan’s Federal Shariat Court—the nation’s highest Islamic court—vacated an appeals court decision that had outraged the world.

In essence, the appeals court had acquitted five of the six men convicted in the 2002 “honor rape” of Mukhtar Mai. Her ongoing story may well foreshadow the future of Muslim women who suffer under tribal law and other oppressive traditions. Hers is a savage tale of brutalization and courage, with confusing twists and a resolution that is uncertain. But it is a story of hope, which provides reason for optimism.

In it, the West provides an invaluable voice of conscience and compassion. But the story’s ultimate message may be that Muslim women must stand up for themselves and say ‘no.’

In the summer of 2002, a panchayat court (or village council) sentenced Mukhtar to be gang-raped by four men. The sentence was not to punish Mukhtar for wrongdoing. Rather, her 14-year-old brother was accused of associating in public with a girl from a rival and more powerful tribe; her rape was meant to punish the family for his transgression.

Gang-raped, beaten, and thrown naked into the street, Mukhtar was forced to walk home through her village. The public nature of the punishment ensured she was an outcast and unmarriageable. Mukhtar was expected to kill herself, but a suicide attempt failed. Her family revived her, and the support of her loved ones deterred her from making future attempts.

Her story grabbed the media’s attention. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times visited her home and observed, “a girl in the next village was gang-raped a week after Ms. Mukhtaran, and she took the traditional route: she swallowed a bottle of pesticide and dropped dead.”

By contrast, Kristof wrote, Mukhtar survived and propounded “the shocking idea that the shame lies in raping, rather than in being raped.”

In rural Pakistan, as in many remote Muslim areas, tribal courts often take precedence over the law of the land on matters of family and “honor.” Indeed, when human rights organizations express outrage over ritualized violence against women in Islamic cultures, it is often the panchayat tribal courts toward which they point an accusing finger.

For example, Pakistan is notorious for “honor killings.” This is the practice by which women are murdered, usually by male relatives, for sexual ‘improprieties’ such as having sex outside of marriage. Mukhtar’s story is an international indictment of that system.

However, in recent years— largely due to its alliance with and dependency upon the United States—Pakistan’s national government has been trying to reform how women are treated in their country. President Musharraf has declared an agenda of “enlightened moderation” that sets his more Western version of society at odds with tribal traditions.

In Mai’s case, the first “official” encouragement came from a local imam (an Islamic cleric) who called for her attackers to be brought before a civil court. (The importance of calls of reform and rebellion originating from within the society itself cannot be overstated.)

Soon, international opinion took up the cry and Pakistan’s authorities reacted quickly. A special anti-terrorism court sentenced the four accused rapists as well as two members of the panchayat court to death. Musharraf presented Mukhtar with approximately $8,300 in compensation and ordered the police to protect her.

Mukhtar used the money to open schools for children in her village.

Sarwar Bari of Pattan— a non-governmental organization that supports Mukhtar —states, “A lot of people would have taken the money and run away, tried to forget, but Mukhtaran has not only stayed but has launched a visible challenge to the feudal landlords to change the status quo.”

And, then, a slow and boring appeals process ensued. And, then, world attention shifted focus.

Some of that shift was the natural consequence of a fast-moving world. Some was encouraged by Pakistan’s government to mute global criticism. Clearly, the Pakistani government was not pleased with reporters like Kristof.

Last September, Kristof reported, “relatives of the rapists are waiting for the police to leave and then will put Ms. Mukhtaran in her place…I walked to the area where the high-status tribesmen live. They denied planning to kill Ms. Mukhtaran, but were unapologetic about her rape.”

And while the world shifted focus, the appeals court set her rapists free.

Early this month, Kristof published an op-ed in the N.Y. Times entitled, “When Rapists Walk Free.” There, Kristof commented, “I had planned to be in Pakistan this week to write a follow-up column about Mukhtaran. But after a month’s wait, the Pakistani government has refused to give me a visa…”

But now that the higher court has overturned those acquittals, global attention is again on Mukhtar.

On a website about her ordeal, Mukhtar, a small, soft-spoken women in her 30s, says of the attention: “My legal name is Mukhtaran Bibi, though I have become known in recent years as Mukhtar Mai. The local media here in Pakistan gave me that name, meaning ‘respected big sister,’ after my story first became national news.”

But what the world sees upon refocusing on Mukhtar is a woman who has stood strong for two years and become a lightning rod around which other women gather to march and protest.

One official reaction: a contempt plea has been filed against 14 people, including Mukhtar, for making statements critical of the court to the press. Liberalizing the treatment of women and moving too openly against tribal courts obviously places Musharraf in an uncomfortable position.

Yet change is coming. Mukhtaran has said. “It’s more than I would have thought possible two years ago.”

Imagine what might be accomplished if the world pays attention for the next two years.

==============================

Moderate Muslims celebrate public rebuke of bin Laden (Washington Times, 050329)

CAIRO — The condemnation of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda by the Islamic Commission of Spain on the first anniversary of the train bombings in Madrid that took 200 lives is making waves throughout the Muslim world.

The Spanish commission’s fatwa, or condemnation, follows other signs of the kind of public theological debate rarely seen in the Muslim world, openly challenging the dominance of Saudi Arabia’s wealthy Wahhabi fanatics.

One Islamic scholar even calls it a sign of “a counter-jihad.”

In a recent interview with the Qatari daily newspaper Al-Raya, for example, Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, the former dean of Shariah and law at the University of Qatar, urged his fellow Muslims to purge their heritage of fanaticism and adopt “new civilized humane thought.”

Such humane thought, he said, “must be translated [into deeds] in educational ways, via the media, tolerant religious discourse, nondiscriminatory policy and just legislation.”

“We must purge the school curricula of all sectarian implications and elements according to which others deviate from the righteous path and the truth is in our hands alone. We must enrich the curricula with the values of tolerance and acceptance of the other who is different [in school of faith, ethnic group, religion, nationality or sex].

“The political regime must refrain from sectarian or ethnic preference; it must respect the rights and liberties of the minorities and must guarantee them through legislative action, practical policy and equal opportunity in the areas of education, media and civil positions.”

Other Muslims quickly attacked the Spanish fatwa.

A group calling itself al Qaeda in Iraq — the name Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi gave his organization after he aligned himself with bin Laden — mocked it in the familiar religious rhetoric. “Allah has promised us victory,” it said in a posting on its Internet Web site. “... Terrorizing enemies of God is our faith and religion, which is taught to us by our Koran.”

Nevertheless, the reaction to the Spanish fatwa astonished its authors, who were swamped with e-mail messages of congratulations.

“I couldn’t even read them all — there’s at least a thousand, maybe more,” said Mansur Escudero, secretary-general of the Islamic Commission of Spain. “The tone was nearly all the same: ‘It’s about time someone did it. Bravo!’ “

Says Khaled Abou El Fadl, an authority on Islamic law at the University of California at Los Angeles: “The long and painful silence of moderate theologians and experts in Islam jurisprudence — who had been bought off or intimidated into silence — is finally starting to break apart. We are seeing signs of a counter-jihad.”

The response to the Spanish fatwa was dominated by Muslims outside the Middle East, suggesting most moderates live outside traditional Muslim areas.

“I’m glad that someone of authority in Islam is taking a stand and demanding their religion back from the terrorists who have hijacked it,” a respondent from the United States wrote.

“This shows the Muslim world is tired of the harm that radicals and terrorists are doing to Islam,” said Mr. Escudero, whose declaration carried the support of Muslim leaders in Morocco, Algeria and Libya. “We hope this will inspire others to speak out.”

The subject of suicide attacks sharply divides the Islamic world. Many Islamic scholars denounce it, citing the Koran: “Do not kill yourself.” There are deep divisions over what the Koran justifies in a perceived defense of Islam. “There needs to be an awakening that radicals are manipulating the Koran for their own narrow motives,” said Omid Safi, professor of philosophy and religion at Colgate University.

In December 2003 — a year after the Bali bombings that killed 202 persons — Indonesia’s highest Islamic authority, the Ulema Council, declared terrorism and suicide bombings illegal under Muslim law, but said “holy war” is justified if Islam is under attack.

Some scholars caution that moderates exchanging fatwas and denunciations with radicals does little to make lasting reforms.

“Islam needs a new approach — to get away from the Islam of the Middle East being the only point of reference,” said Abdullahi An-Na’im, a specialist in Islamic law at Emory University in Atlanta.

==============================

Woman to Lead Muslim Service in New York (Foxnews, 050318)

NEW YORK — Even as Amina Wadud was preparing to lead an Islamic prayer service, her plans drew sharp criticism from Muslim religious leaders in the Middle East.

Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, was scheduled to lead a two-hour service Friday at Synod House at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

The event was meant to draw attention to the “second-class status” of women in Muslim spiritual life and Muslim life in general, said Asra Q. Nomani, an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter who is lead organizer of the prayer.

“We are taking actions that no one else would have dared to think about before,” she told The New York Times for Friday editions. “Nobody cared that we didn’t have a place in the faith.”

Muslim leaders denounced the plans.

The sheik of Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque, one of the top world’s Islamic institutions, said Islam permits women to lead other women in prayer but not a congregation with men in it.

“A woman’s body is private,” Sheik Sayed Tantawi wrote in a column in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in which he was asked about Wadud’s planned prayer. “When she leads men in prayer, in this case, it’s not proper for them to look at the woman whose body is in front of them. Even if they see it in their daily life, it shouldn’t be in situations of worship, where the main point is humility and modesty.”

Muslim leaders in New York were also wary of the plan.

“My concern is a backlash,” Aisha al-Adawiya, head of New York-based Women in Islam, told the Times. “This kind of change has to come from within the community. It’s being driven from outside.”

Some critics have accused Nomani of using the event to publicize a book she has written about women and Islam.

Three New York mosques refused to host the service, Nomani said. It was moved to Synod House after a site that had earlier been selected for the service, an art gallery in SoHo, received a bomb threat.

==============================

Muslim double standard on religious desecration? (WorldNetDaily, 050517)

Islamic world blasted for protesting Quran ‘story,’ silence on Jewish incidents

JERUSALEM – With Muslims worldwide protesting a now-retracted Newsweek report that claimed U.S. Army interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a Quran down the toilet, the father of a rabbi who was murdered while trying to defend a Jewish holy site from Palestinian rioters blasted Muslim leaders yesterday in an exclusive WorldNetDaily interview.

Rabbi Zevulun Lieberman, whose son Hillel died trying to save Joseph’s Tomb in the West Bank city of Nablus from Muslim rioters, told WND he is “sickened by this Muslim outcry when Muslims have shown the world they don’t have any respect for religion whatsoever. They lost the right to protest about disrespect for religion and holy objects a long time ago.”

Accusing Muslim leadership of using the Newsweek story to create “anti-American incitement,” Lieberman asked, “Where were the protesters when Muslims desecrated Joseph’s Tomb and other sites?”

In an issue dated May 9, Newsweek reported U.S. military investigators found evidence that interrogators placed copies of Islam’s holy book in washrooms and had flushed one down the toilet to get inmates to talk.

The report prompted demonstrations across the Muslim world, with thousands rallying in Afghanistan, Pakistan Indonesia and Gaza City to denounce America. At least 15 people died in riots in Afghanistan alone.

Yesterday, Newsweek officially retracted the story.

Lebanon’s most senior Shiite Muslim cleric said the alleged desecration is part of an American campaign aimed at disrespecting and smearing Islam. Spiritual leaders in Afghanistan gave the U.S. three days to respond to the accusations. The 22-nation Arab League issued a statement saying if the allegations panned out, Washington should apologize to Muslims.

Qazi Hussain Ahmed, a hard-line Pakistani Islamist leader and opposition lawmaker, said Islamic groups in Pakistan, Egypt, Malaysia, Britain, Turkey and other countries would hold more rallies to protest the alleged desecration.

In its retraction, Newsweek stated, “Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay.”

In a note to readers in its current issue, Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said the magazine’s information came from “a knowledgeable U.S. government source,” who, he said, later could not be sure he had read about the alleged Quran incident in the report that was cited.

Tomb desecrated

In October 2000, after Israeli troops evacuated the city of Nablus as a peacemaking gesture, scores of Palestinians stormed into the Joseph’s Tomb compound and destroyed the site believed to be the burial place of the biblical patriarch Joseph – the son of Jacob who was sold by his brothers into slavery and later became the viceroy of Egypt.

The 1993 Oslo Accords put Joseph’s Tomb under Israeli jurisdiction, but on Oct. 7, 2000, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered a unilateral retreat, based on a Palestinian agreement to protect the site.

Within hours of the Israeli withdrawal, smoke was seen billowing from the tomb as an Arab crowd burned Jewish prayer books and other holy objects. Palestinians used pickaxes, hammers and later bulldozers to tear apart the stone building. The dome of the tomb was painted green, and a mosque was subsequently erected in its place.

Rabbi Hillel Lieberman, who lived nearby, headed by foot to the tomb when he heard of its desecration, hoping, his family said, to save any Torah scrolls or other holy objects that might have been left intact.

Lieberman disappeared. His bullet-ridden body was found the next day in a cave.

“[Hillel] was unarmed, wearing a tallit (Jewish prayer shawl), and he was brutally murdered by our enemies who want to erase our existence,” said Yehudit Tayar, spokeswoman for the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.

Hillel’s father, Zevulun, a religious instructor at Yeshiva University, told WND: “If indeed the Quran was flushed down the toilet, that is despicable. But now they protest? The religion that actually desecrated the grave of Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham?

“Nowhere in the parameters of humanity is it tolerable to destroy a holy site. The Muslims did something even an animal wouldn’t do. Only humans who are completely sick with no sense of reason can do such a thing. And only a religion that is beyond the pale of humanity can sit back and not protest such an act.”

Lieberman accused Islamic leaders of using the Newsweek article to spur anti-American incitement: “These leaders, who have no conscience, they aren’t upset for religious reasons. It’s just an excuse.”

Susan Roth, director of the Eshet Chayil Foundation, one of the main benefactors of the biblical matriarch Rachel’s Tomb, to which surviving artifacts of Joseph’s Tomb were recently transferred, told WND: “There was almost total silence in the Muslim world when Palestinians blew up Jews at their Passover seder, when Joseph’s tomb was desecrated, and even overall with regard to terrorism.”

Roth was referring to a Hamas suicide bombing March 2002 that killed 30 and injured 140 when a bomb was exploded in the midst of a Passover seder at an Israeli hotel.

Nathan Katz, professor of religion at Florida International University, told WorldNetDaily: “Joseph’s tomb is one of many, many examples of a lack of Muslim respect for religious sites and objects, and the silence of Islamic leaders following such desecrations.”

He cited the desecration of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by Palestinian gunmen in April 2002, and the dynamiting of 2,000-year old giant Buddhist statues at Bamian, Afghanistan, by the Taliban regime in March 2001.

“In fact, those statues, destroyed by the Taliban, were first defaced when the Arabs came to Afghanistan in the late seventh and early eighth century. They cut the faces off the statues then. Later, the Taliban completely wrecked them. Like Joseph’s Tomb, the Muslims were largely silent.”

Israeli archeologists say they have convincing documentation of the authenticity of Joseph’s Tomb’s, dating to biblical times. The book of Joshua says, according to the New International Version, “Joseph’s bones, which the Israelites had brought up from Egypt, were buried at Shechem (Nablus) in the tract of land that Jacob bought for a hundred pieces of silver from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem. This became the inheritance of Joseph’s descendants.”

Said Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum: “This sequence of events reflects badly on everyone concerned: Newsweek, a stalwart of mainstream media, that can neither get its facts right nor its apology convincing; the U.S. government, which talked about the ‘Holy Quran,’ thereby falling into its old pattern of promoting Islam; and the Muslim masses, which took to the streets in lethal anger on nothing more than unconfirmed (and latterly rescinded) hearsay. This episode contains within it many lessons; let us hope they are properly learned.”

“Either Muslims respect religion,” Leiberman said, “and they protest their own intolerable and repeated desecrations, or they don’t. They can’t have it both ways.”

==============================

Palestinians used Bible as toilet paper (WorldNetDaily, 050518)

Muslims’ desecration of holy book received little notice

While Muslims have responded with deadly outrage to the now-retracted report by Newsweek of alleged Quran desecration by U.S. interrogators, there was little outcry three years ago when Islamic terrorists holed up in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity reportedly used the Bible as toilet paper.

Catholic priests in the church marking the spot where Jesus was believed to have been born said that during the five-week siege, Palestinians tore up some Bibles for toilet paper and removed many valuable sacramental objects, according to a May 15, 2002, report by the Washington Times.

Newsweek is under fire for a report in its May 9 edition that sparked protests and rioting across the Muslim world resulting in 17 dead, scores injured, relief buildings burned down and a setback to years of coalition-building against terrorists.

Newsweek’s Periscope column written by Michael Isikoff and John Barry included a brief item alleging U.S. military investigators at the Guantanamo Bay prison found evidence that interrogators placed copies of the Quran down the toilet in an effort to get prisoners to talk.

Despite Newsweek’s retraction, the outrage in the Muslim world continues.

In Saudi Arabia yesterday, the country’s top religious authority, Grand Mufti Adul-Aziz al-Sheik, condemned the alleged desecration and called for an investigation “to alleviate the sorrow that befell Muslims.”

“We condemn and denounce this criminal act against Muslims’ most sacred item,” al-Sheik said.

Afghanistan’s government said Newsweek should be held responsible for damages caused by the demonstrations, and Pakistan said the magazine’s apology and retraction were “not enough.”

In contrast, during the 2002 church siege, the muted complaints of Christians under the Muslim-dominated Palestinian Authority gained little traction.

The Palestinian gunmen, members of Yasser Arafat’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, seized church stockpiles of food and “ate like greedy monsters” until the food ran out, while more than 150 civilians went hungry, the Washington Times report said.

The indulgence lasted about two weeks into the 39-day siege, when the food and drink ran out, according to an account by four Greek Orthodox priests trapped inside. A church helper told the Times the quantity of food consumed by the gunmen in the first 15 days should have lasted six months.

Angry Orthodox priests showed reporters empty bottles of whiskey, champagne, vodka, cognac and French wine on the floor along with hundreds of cigarette butts.

“They should be ashamed of themselves. They acted like animals, like greedy monsters. Come, I will show you more,” said one priest, who declined to give his name.

Computers were taken apart and a television set dismantled for use as a hiding place for weapons.

“You can see what repayment we got for ‘hosting’ these so-called guests,” said Archbishop Ironius, according to the Times report.

==============================

Official PA sermon: Muslims will rule America (WorldNetDaily, 050518)

Government-paid sheik says Jews a virus to be destroyed

An Islamic preacher on the payroll of the Palestinian Authority gave a fiery sermon broadcast on PA television in which he vowed Muslims would rule America and called Jews an AIDS-like virus that will soon be finished off.

“Allah has tormented us with ‘the people most hostile to the believers’ – the Jews,” said Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris in his Friday sermon, which is viewable on the Middle East Media Research Institute website.

Mudeiris said that with the establishment of the state of Israel, “the entire Islamic nation was lost, because Israel is a cancer spreading through the body of the Islamic nation, and because the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers.

“You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations.”

Mudeiris then recounted how nations have tortured and driven out Jews over the centuries, insisting it was deserved in each case due to provocation. He referred to Britain in the sixth century, France at the time of Louis XIX, Portugal, Czarist Russia and finally Nazi Germany.

“It was the Jews who provoked Nazism to wage war against the entire world, when the Jews, using the Zionist movement, got other countries to wage an economic war on Germany and to boycott German merchandise,” he said. “They provoked Russia, Britain, France and Italy. This enraged the Germans toward the Jews, leading to the events of those days, which the Jews commemorate today.”

The sheik said Jews are committing “worse deeds than those done to them in the Nazi war.”

They have inflated their suffering, he said, “in order to win over the of the media and gain the world’s sympathy.”

Mudeiris said Allah has made all of the great superpowers in the past disappear, and “he who made them disappear will make America disappear too, God willing. He who made Russia disappear overnight is capable of making America disappear and fall, Allah willing.”

“We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again,” he said. “The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews.”

The sheik said: “The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews – even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.”

==============================

Saudis Shred Bibles, Rights Campaigners Claim (WorldNetDaily, 050519)

(CNSNews.com) - Bibles found in the possession of visitors to Saudi Arabia are routinely confiscated by customs officials, and in some cases copies allegedly have been put through a paper shredder, according to religious rights campaigners.

Reports from the Islamic world of the abuse of Bibles and other items important to Christians emerge from time to time, but generally have little impact - in contrast to the wave of Muslim anger sparked by a Newsweek report, since retracted, of Koran desecration by the U.S. military.

“The Muslims respect the Koran far more than Christians respect the Bible,” says Danny Nalliah, a Sri Lankan-born evangelical pastor now based in Australia.

During the 1990s, Nalliah spent two years in Saudi Arabia, where he was deeply involved with the underground church.

“It’s a very well-known fact that if you have a Bible at customs when you enter the airport, and if they find the Bible, that the Bible is taken and put in the shredder,” he said in an interview this week.

“If you have more than one Bible you will be taken into custody, and if you have a quantity of Bibles you will be given 70 lashes for sure - you could even be executed.”

Nalliah had not himself seen a Bible being shredded but said the practice was widely acknowledged among Christians in the kingdom.

Abuse of Christians and their symbols was not restricted to the destruction of Bibles, he added.

A friend of his, a fellow Christian in Saudi Arabia, told him of witnessing a particularly unpleasant incident involving a Catholic nun.

The man had been in the transit lounge at the airport in Jeddah - the gateway to Mecca, used by millions of Hajj pilgrims each year - when a nun arrived at the customs desk.

“Some fool [travel agent] had put her on a transit flight in Jeddah. You don’t do that to a Catholic nun, because she’s going to be tormented.”

“They opened her bag, went through her prayer book, put the prayer book through the shredder ... took the crucifix off her neck and smashed it, tormented her for many minutes.”

Eventually another Muslim official objected to their conduct, came across and “rescued” her, pointing out to the customs officials that she was not entering the country but only in transit and would be leaving on the next plane.

Briefed beforehand about the risks, Nalliah said he did not carry a Bible when he arrived in the kingdom in 1995.

Subsequently, however, he took possession of hundreds of Bibles that had been smuggled into Saudi Arabia to be used by believers there.

Nalliah said he had a close call one morning when armed members of the notorious Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice - the religious police, or muttawa - hammered at his front door at 1 a.m.

With 400 smuggled Bibles “sitting on the dining room table,” he believed his life to be in serious danger. “That was a crime equal to rape, murder, armed robbery, and in Saudi Arabia you get the same punishment,” he said - the death penalty.

Nalliah said he had prayed earnestly and, in what he could only describe as a miracle, the men left without entering his home.

‘Contraband’

Claims of Bible desecration in Saudi Arabia have been made by others.

“One Christian recently reported that his personal Bible was put into a shredder once he entered customs,” the late Nagi Kheir, spokesman for the American Coptic Association and a veteran campaigner for religious freedom in the Middle East, wrote in an article several years ago.

“Some Christians have reported that upon entering Saudi Arabia they have had their personal Bibles taken from them and placed into a paper shredder,” the U.S.-based organization International Christian Concern said in a 2001 report.

In its most recent report on religious freedom around the world, the State Department made no reference to Bible destruction, but said they were considered contraband.

“Customs officials routinely open mail and shipments to search for contraband, including ... non-Muslim materials, such as Bibles and religious videotapes,” it said. “Such materials are subject to confiscation, although rules appear to be applied arbitrarily.”

In a 2003 report on Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent watchdog set up under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, said: “Customs officials regularly confiscate Bibles and other religious material when Christian foreign workers arrive at the airport from their home countries initially or return from a vacation.”

Inquiries about the legality of Bibles and about the shredder claims, sent to the Saudi Embassy in Washington and the Saudi Information Ministry in Riyadh, were not answered by press time.

Koran vs. Bible

After Nalliah left Saudi Arabia in 1997, he went to the U.S. and took part in the lobbying effort on Capitol Hill in support of what eventually became the International Religious Freedom Act, signed into law the following year.

He heads an evangelical ministry in Australia, where late last year he and a colleague became the first people to be found guilty under a controversial state religious hatred law, after Muslims accused them of vilifying Islam during a post-9/11 seminar for Christians.

Nalliah said this week it did not surprise him that Muslims have reacted strongly to the claims that U.S. interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay base, where terrorism suspects are held, had thrown a Koran into the toilet.

While Bible scholars say the Bible is written by men who were inspired by God, Muslims believe the Koran is “the copy of an original that is sitting in heaven, and has been sent down [by revelation to Mohammed].”

The book is seen as something sacred in itself, he explained, its words having come “directly from Allah. That’s why they are so mad when they think something [unseemly] is being done to the Koran.”

A Muslim will never keep a Koran at ground level, for instance.

The Pentagon says a January 2003 memo issued to U.S. personnel at Guantanamo Bay instructed them to “ensure that the Koran is not placed in offensive areas such as the floor, near the toilet or sink, near the feet, or dirty/wet areas.”

Even in Western societies, Nalliah noted, copies of Bibles could often be found in witness boxes of courts, ready for use when witnesses are sworn in. But the Koran will generally be kept in safe storage elsewhere, covered in cloth, to be brought in when required by a Muslim witness.

He said such reverence for the Koran stood in stark contrast to some Muslims’ feelings about the Bible, however.

Nalliah said the Koran was “confusing” on this score. In places (e.g.: sura 29:46-47) it appeared to urge Muslims to respect the Bible and those who believe in it; elsewhere it exhorts them to fight those who don’t accept Islam until they pay tribute and accept inferior status (sura 9:29-31).

According to author and Islam scholar Robert Spencer, “a devout Muslim might very well mistreat a Bible, because traditional Islamic theology regards it as a corrupted and unreliable version of the genuine revelations that were given to Moses, Jesus, and other Prophets.”

Spencer noted that in sura 9:30 the Koran says those who believe Jesus is the Son of God are under Allah’s curse.

“Throughout history, most Muslim theologians have held that the New Testament has been tampered with since it teaches that Jesus is the Son of God.”

Some of the more notorious reported incidents of Muslims abusing Christian symbols implicate Palestinian radicals, including the trashing of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002; and the desecration of Maronite churches in Damour, Lebanon in 1976.

In the Damour episode, Yasser Arafat’s PLO killed more than 500 of the Christian town’s inhabitants before turning it into a stronghold, and used the interior of the St. Elias church for a shooting range, according to published accounts.

==============================

Muslim protests planned in advance? Security official says Newsweek article served as trigger (WorldNetDaily, 050518)

JERUSALEM – Muslim protests throughout the Middle East regarding a now-retracted Newsweek report that claimed U.S. Army interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a Quran down the toilet are being organized by anti-Western jihadists and were planned several months ago with the magazine article serving as a convenient trigger, a senior Israeli security source told WND.

He warned that if not quelled, the gatherings can turn into violent mass anti-American revolts.

“Jihadists have been planting the seeds for quite some time for mass anti-American protests in the Middle East, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where pro-Taliban elements have been looking for an excuse to revolt against what they see as Western imposed governments,” the security official said. “The Newsweek article was just the excuse they needed.”

Newsweek reported May 9 that interrogators at the Cuba detention camp placed copies of the Quran on toilets to torture Muslim inmates and in one case flushed one down the toilet.

After two weeks, the magazine retracted its story, but not before it set off violent protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gaza City, with at least 17 dead as a result.

Muslims in Indonesia and Pakistan continue holding anti-U.S. protests.

Islamic leaders in Pakistan have called for international anti-U.S. protest later this month.

“Islamic groups will hold demonstrations on May 27 across the world to condemn the desecration of Holy Quran in the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay,” Qazi Hussain Ahmad, head of a coalition of six politico-religious groups said Sunday.

Ahmad said his alliance, the Muttahida Majlis Amal, had “coordinated with Islamic organizations all over the world to join us in this day of condemnation.”

Groups in Pakistan, Egypt, Malaysia, Britain, Turkey and other countries are planning more rallies to protest the alleged desecration.

“We had reports beginning several months ago that Islamist groups have been seeking to start uprisings against American advances in the Middle East,” said the security official.

“Pakistan and Afghanistan will likely be the site of the most unrest, with al-Qaida linked groups rallying constituents with plans of turning against the governments there. Hard-line shieks are bringing their followers to the streets.”

The official continued: “This is about hopes to unseat [Pakistani president General Pervez] Musharraf, who they see as an ally of America, overthrow the new Afghan government, create unrest and instability that will bog down [American] forces and interests in Iraq and the greater Middle East.”

“If not put down,” the official warned, “continued protests can turn into violent insurgencies.”

Meanwhile, Newsweek’s retraction was met with skepticism throughout the Muslim world.

“The apology and retraction are not enough,” Pakistan’s Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told Reuters.

Muttahida Majlis Amal demanded interrogators responsible for the alleged Quran desecration be punished.

“Those who planned and flashed this story in Newsweek must be exposed and punished,” deputy secretary general of the MMA, Liaquat Baloch, told Agence France-Presse.

“We will not be deceived by this,” Afghan Islamic cleric Mullah Sadullah Abu Aman told the Gulf Times yesterday, referring to the magazine’s retraction. “This is a decision by America to save itself. It comes because of American pressure. Even an ordinary illiterate peasant understands this and won’t accept it.”

Aman was the leader of a group of clerics who on Sunday threatened a jihad against the U.S. in three days unless it handed over the military interrogators reported to have desecrated the Quran.

He told reporters the call for a jihad still stood.

==============================

Why Islam is disrespected (townhall.com, 050520)

Jeff Jacoby

It was front-page news this week when Newsweek retracted a report claiming that a US interrogator in Guantanamo had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. Everywhere it was noted that Newsweek’s story had sparked widespread Muslim rioting, in which at least 17 people were killed. But there was no mention of deadly protests triggered in recent years by comparable acts of desecration against other religions.

No one recalled, for example, that American Catholics lashed out in violent rampages in 1989, after photographer Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” — a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine — was included in an exhibition subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts. Or that they rioted in 1992 when singer Sinead O’Connor, appearing on “Saturday Night Live,” ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.

There was no reminder that Jewish communities erupted in lethal violence in 2000, after Arabs demolished Joseph’s Tomb, torching the ancient shrine and murdering a young rabbi who tried to save a Torah from the flames. And nobody noted that Buddhists went on a killing spree in 2001 in response to the destruction of two priceless, 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha by the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Of course, there was a good reason all these bloody protests went unremembered in the coverage of the Newsweek affair: They never occurred.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don’t lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don’t call for holy war and riot in the streets. It would be unthinkable today for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain. But when Reuters reported what Mohammad Hanif, the imam of a Muslim seminary in Pakistan, said about the alleged Koran-flushers — “They should be hung. They should be killed in public so that no one can dare to insult Islam and its sacred symbols” — was any reader surprised?

The Muslim riots should have been met by an international upwelling of outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek.

From the White House down, the magazine was slammed — for running an item it should have known might prove incendiary, for relying on a shaky source, for its animus toward the military and the war. Over and over, Newsweek was blamed for the riots’ death toll. Conservative pundits in particular piled on. “Newsweek lied, people died” was the headline on Michelle Malkin’s popular website. At NationalReview.com, Paul Marshall of Freedom House fumed: “What planet do these [Newsweek] people live on? . . . Anybody with a little knowledge could have told them it was likely that people would die as a result of the article.” All of Marshall’s choler was reserved for Newsweek; he had no criticism at all — not a word — for the marauders in the Muslim street.

Then there was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who announced at a Senate hearing that she had a message for “Muslims in America and throughout the world.” And what was that message? That decent people do not resort to murder just because someone has offended their religious sensibilities? That the primitive bloodlust raging in Afghanistan and Pakistan was evidence of the Muslim world’s dysfunctional political culture? That the Bush administration would redouble its efforts to defeat the Islamofascist radicals who use religion as an excuse to foment violence and terror?

No: Her message was that “disrespect for the Holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, tolerated by the United States. We honor the sacred books of all the world’s great religions.”

Granted, Rice spoke while the rioting was still taking place and her goal was to reduce the anti-American fever. But what “Muslims in America and throughout the world” most need to hear is not pandering sweet-talk. What they need is a blunt reminder that the real desecration of Islam is not what some interrogator in Guantanamo might have done to the Koran. It is what totalitarian Muslim zealots have been doing to innocent human beings in the name of Islam. It is 9/11 and Beslan and Bali and Daniel Pearl and the USS Cole. It is trains in Madrid and schoolbuses in Israel and an “insurgency” in Iraq that slaughters Muslims as they pray and vote and line up for work. It is Hamas and Al Qaeda and sermons filled with infidel-hatred and exhortations to “martyrdom.”

But what disgraces Islam above all is the vast majority of the planet’s Muslims saying nothing and doing nothing about the jihadist cancer eating away at their religion. It is Free Muslims Against Terrorism, a pro-democracy organization, calling on Muslims and Middle Easterners to “converge on our nation’s capital for a rally against terrorism” this month — and having only 50 people show up.

Yes, Islam is disrespected. That will only change when throngs of passionate Muslims show up for rallies against terrorism, and when rabble-rousers trying to gin up a riot over a defiled Koran can’t get the time of day.

==============================

Caution: Muslims easily inflamed (townhall.com, 050520)

Mona Charen

In the wake of mass rioting and death in Afghanistan and other Islamic nations ignited by a fallacious Newsweek story, furious finger-pointing has ensued. The White House, the departments of State and Defense, and most conservative radio talk show hosts are blaming Newsweek for carelessness and irresponsibility. Newsweek, while apologizing for the error, protests that the story was vetted by a Defense Department official who objected to other aspects of the piece but remained silent on the Koran flushing part. Others are suggesting that the Bush administration prepared the ground for this rumor by engaging in routine degradation of Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Absent from this blame exchange is any recognition that many Muslims can be incited to violence by anything or nothing. It’s as if they live poised for outrage. In 2002, the Miss World Pageant had to high-tail it out of Nigeria after rioting took more than 200 lives. Angry Muslims rampaged through the streets after a young fashion writer penned an article wondering how Muhammad would have reacted to the pageant, and suggesting that the Prophet (who had 14 wives) might have chosen a wife from among the assembled beauties. The offices of the newspaper were firebombed. A few weeks later, after many deaths, the Islamists remained unsatisfied. The deputy governor of a northern Nigerian province issued a “fatwa” declaring it the duty of religious Muslims to track down the 21-year-old author of the story and kill her.

Recall that Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death while bicycling to work in Amsterdam last year. His offense? Producing a movie that exposed Muslim mistreatment of women.

Salman Rushdie remains a marked man for writing a book Muslims detest. Norwegian/Swedish Pentecostal preacher Runar Sogaard received death threats last month — not anonymous ones, but direct threats from an organized Islamic group, for using highly insulting language about Muhammad. Sogaard was impolite to be sure. But since when is the proper punishment for impertinence death? Isioma Daniel, the Nigerian journalist whose musings sparked the Nigerian riot, remains under 24-hour-a-day guard.

Easily aroused to fury, Muslim fanatics are correspondingly difficult to court. Nowhere has there been acknowledgment on the part of Muslim leaders that the United States has again and again put its servicemen in harm’s way in order to rescue or aid Muslims. We did so in Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo. We poured out our hearts and opened our wallets when Indonesia was struck by a tsunami. It isn’t just that they’ve failed to say thank you. No, the U.S. is unrelentingly accused of making war on Islam. President Bush visits mosques, holds Ramadan services at the White House and declares (too optimistically?) that Islam is a religion of peace. And yet the U.S. is distrusted and reviled in many parts of the Muslim world.

The Washington Post coverage of the Koran story stressed that the Koran is holier to Muslims than the Bible is to Christians. Perhaps so, perhaps not. But it is simply impossible to imagine Christians burning down a newspaper building for an article that blasphemed Jesus, or rioting in response to any religious insult. We Americans can go at each other all day and night about whom to blame for the Koran flushing story — but if the Muslim world did not walk around with an enormous chip on its collective shoulder, this would not be a matter of life and death.

In the course of our wide-ranging war on terror, Americans have certainly committed some acts that are needlessly inflammatory to Muslim sensibilities. Abu Ghraib is exhibit A. But Abu Ghraib is also the exception, not the norm. Detainees at Guantanamo receive religiously appropriate food, prayer mats and time for daily worship. The U.S. even provides Muslim chaplains. The underlying truth is this: We are at pains not to fight a religious war. The trouble is, our enemies are fighting a religious war, and there is nothing we can do about it. Al Qaeda’s strongest suit is the sympathy it can tap among some of the world’s 1 billion Muslims for a jihad against the unbelievers. Our strongest suits are freedom and the reality that we are the winning side.

==============================

Moderate Muslims blaze new path (Washington Times, 050524)

Though met by modest crowds, the recent first-ever Free Muslims March Against Terrorism could be considered a success in one key respect: It further exposed the unwillingness of most major Muslim groups to condemn the radicals that have come to dominate their religion.

It also further cemented the growing reputation of organizer Kamal Nawash, head of the Free Muslims Coalition (FMC), as one of the only genuine moderate leaders of a national Islamic organization.

While most Muslim groups gripe about being expected to condemn every Islamic terrorist attack — they aren’t directly responsible, they reason — Mr. Nawash wastes no opportunity to do so. To him, the problem is one shared by all Muslims, even moderates, because most Muslims have allowed the extremists to take control of the religion, more or less without a fight.

Thus his inspiration for the rally against terror. Speakers at the event, which drew roughly 150, were clear in condemning the real root cause of terrorism: radical interpretations of Islam.

Groups like Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) have a track record of condemning — but only targets like the Fox television show “24,” which they blasted earlier this year for having terrorists who were Muslims.

Never mind that CAIR officials have refused to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah when asked to do so by The Washington Post and others, describing questions about the terrorist groups as a “game.” And MPAC maintains, for example, that the Hezbollah murder of 241 Americans in Lebanon in 1983 was not a terrorist attack.

Although not shy about badmouthing Mr. Nawash and FMC, CAIR and MPAC largely stayed silent regarding the rally. But CAIR was careful to refer people seeking comment about the rally to Hussein Ibish, former communications director at the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), who used to work in the same office as Mr. Nawash years ago.

Mr. Ibish has been on a tear of late, writing two rambling smear pieces on his former co-worker. In one, he labeled Mr. Nawash “unsavory” and called his efforts to condemn radical Islam in the same breath as terrorism “appalling.” This is a marked contrast to how he responds to fellow Muslims who call for “jihad” and “Death to America.”

Appearing on CNN in August 2002, Mr. Ibish was asked about a 1991 fund-raising letter from suspected (and indicted) terrorist Sami al-Arian that read, in part, “Jihad is our path! Victory to Islam! Death to Israel and victory to Islam! Revolution, revolution until victory! Rolling, rolling to Jerusalem!”

His response? “ ‘Death to Israel’ does not necessarily mean violence. Jihad can mean a lot of things,” he explained. Without explanation, Mr. Ibish abruptly — and bizarrely — switched the topic. “I’ll tell you who is advocating violence. It is Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who advocated torturing people.”

Someone who received far less criticism from Mr. Ibish was a man convicted of encouraging jihad against the United States. When prominent local cleric Ali al-Timimi — who had successfully cultivated a moderate image — was charged and later convicted of telling his followers in the days after September 11 to join the Taliban, Mr. Ibish was eerily silent. As were most of the Muslim groups that refused to join Mr. Nawash’s rally.

One high-profile Muslim leader, Muslim-American Society head Mahdi Bray, even went so far as to defend al-Timimi — after the imam was convicted last month. In an open letter on the MAS Web site, Mr. Bray wrote, “The verdict in Dr. Al-Timimi’s case is a sad day for American Muslims and the U.S. Constitution. It bodes ill for the Bill of Rights, and especially the First Amendment (Freedom of Speech).”

MAS is the most ardent advocate of the United States forging closer ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, the worldwide Islamist organization that has served as the theological inspiration for many of today’s leading terrorists. Muslim Brotherhood’s main goal is to create Islamic states around the world.

The kinds of Islamic states that Muslim Brotherhood and MAS would create, ironically, would be most inhospitable to someone like Mr. Ibish, who loves both wine and women. Though he does not shower praise on Islamist organizations, Mr. Ibish rarely criticizes them. Targets of his wrath, in fact, are almost always the enemies of the Islamists whom he should consider his enemies.

Were Mr. Ibish to change course and attack rabid Islamists rather than defend them, his stock among Muslim leaders would plummet. Such is the culture of conformity that punishes the likes of Mr. Nawash, while Mr. Ibish and other secular defenders of venomous Islamists thrive.

Though his coalition is barely a year old, Mr. Nawash hopes to blaze a new path, one where moderate Muslims can fight back and reclaim their religion. Until he does, though, even secular Muslims with a public profile are more likely to follow the path of Hussein Ibish.

Joel Mowbray occassionally writes for The Washington Times.

==============================

Newsweek’s blunder illuminates extremists’ major shortcoming (townhall.com, 050523)

Diana West

So, Newsweek had “little idea how explosive” its Quran-down-the-toilet story would be, theorizes Paul Marshall in National Review Online.

OK, I buy that — although Newsweek is hardly exceptional in its failure to understand Islam 101. Still, the anonymously sourced, now retracted story — evidence of “media mistrust of the military,” writes the Wall Street Journal — didn’t become “explosive” until after Imran Khan, a Pakistani anti-U.S. opposition leader (and divorced son-in-law of the late financier Sir Jimmy Goldsmith) held a press conference to light the fuse.

And then what happened? White House spokesman Scott McClellan put it this way: “The report had real consequences. People have lost their lives. Our image abroad has been damaged.” Regarding the spate of killing and mayhem across the Muslim world, the New York Post’s John Podhoretz wrote that people “are dead for no reason other than some ‘good and credible’ source had an axe to grind with one of his bosses 15,000 miles away in the United States.”

The “report” did this? Our “image” has been damaged — only now? For no “other” reason? Something’s missing. That is, Quran-gate offers more than just another example of Washington politicking or good, old-fashioned media bias.

Neither drove rioters to murder last week on the Arab-Muslim “street” any more than they drove Mohammed Atta to mass-murder a few years ago in the friendly skies. It was jihad then, and jihad now, the rigid ideology that infuses medieval bloodlust with an unlikely longevity in a post-Enlightenment, technological age. Which is why the Newsweek story is not about Us. Rather, it underscores something about Them that is much more significant.

Us and Them: the words are “divisive,” the concept politically incorrect. But what Michael Isikoff and Newsweek have done with their admittedly flimsy instance of reporting is focus our eyes on the chasm that lies between the Muslim world in which a book — one book — is sacred and life is cheap, and the Western world where speech is free and life is precious.

At least life is supposed to be precious here, just as speech is supposed to be free. The other revelation this story brought to light is the cringe-making extent to which we are willing to censor ourselves when it comes to Islam and the Quran — or, as our Secretary of State has kowtowingly taken to calling it, “the Holy Quran,” an adjectival distinction I’ve never heard officially appended to the Bible.

National Review Online’s Marshall suggested Newsweek probably didn’t know desecrating a Quran is a capital offense in “Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere” — with enlightened Pakistan meting out only life imprisonment. But whether American news editors are up on their Islamic law is, for once, not the issue. The draconian repression of Islamic dictatorships is nothing for us to emulate or pander to, in our policy or our coverage. Frankly, if we tolerate artwork such as “Piss Christ” and “Dung Virgin,” we should be able to shrug off Commode Quran.

Whether the toilet caper actually happened — in seeking to secure American lives, after all, not score an NEA grant — is also beside the point; the “damage,” the pundits keep saying, is done. As a Pakistani journalist told The New York Times, the Newsweek item confirmed suspicions of “a straight disrespect for the sensitivities of Muslims.”

Please. We see the “sensitivities” of some Muslims blowing up other Muslims on a daily basis in Iraq. We saw the sensitivities of Albanian Muslims on a rampage in March 2004, when they destroyed more than 30 Orthodox churches and monasteries in Kosovo. We saw the sensitivities of Taliban Muslims in 2001 when they dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. We saw the sensitivities of Palestinian Muslims when in 2000 they violently obliterated Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus. In 2002, Nigerian Muslims took their sensitivities to the streets after This Day newspaper reported on beauty pageant contestants so lovely the prophet Mohammed would “probably have chosen a wife from one of them.” Before you could say, “The Quran is in the toilet,” more than 200 people lost their lives in riots that also left 11,000 people homeless. Also in 2002, armed Palestinian guerrillas and their sensitivities occupied the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. As the Jerusalem Post reported, “Catholic priests later said that some Bibles were torn up for toilet paper.”

I don’t recall riots breaking out in St. Peter’s Square. Which is why the West still stands on one side of the chasm, and Islam stands on the other. From this vantage point, we can give Newsweek a pass — but not such violently uncivilized behavior.

==============================

Democracy shuts its eyes as Muslim women are enslaved (townhall.com, 050523)

Armstrong Williams

Throughout Europe, people are standing idly by as Muslim women are being murdered for having the audacity to date, or to not wear their head scarves outside, or to yearn for a life outside of the home. The problem is most pronounced in Germany. Last month six German women were murdered by their Muslim families for flirting with Western culture. Most recently, Hatin Surucu, a twenty-three-year-old Turkish woman who had been forced into marrying her cousin at age 16, was gunned down at a German bus stop. The attack had been planned. The motive— Surucu had divorced her husband, discarded her religious head scarf, and had begun dating German men. This was too much for her family to bear. So her three brothers killed her, and orphaned her five year old son.

The brothers bragged to their friends about the “honor killing.” In their community, they are considered heroes for suppressing their personal emotions and doing the tough work of God—discharging bullets into their defenseless sister. At least, that’s the way they tell the story in certain cloistered Muslim enclaves in Germany, where “honor killings” are becoming an increasingly familiar phenomenon.

And how is mainstream German society responding to this trend? For the most part, they’re not. Following World War II, Germans have been conditioned not to criticize other cultures. Afraid of being labeled racists or Nazis, Germans sit passively by while hundreds of Germany’s Muslim women are stripped of their basic human rights.

Well, wagging your finger at the practices of another culture might not be politically correct. But what about what’s morally correct? What about the thousands of Muslim women who are being enslaved by archaic religious practices? What about the women like Surucu who are being killed for wanting a personality outside of their restrictive religion? At some point the German people must realize that protecting the rights of women like Surucu is not a matter of cultural relativity. It is a matter of universally recognized human rights. The idea of enslaving an entire gender is fundamentally at odds with the basic freedoms embraced by all enlightened, democratic societies. Germany cannot allow the mere threat of charges of cultural or religious insensitivity to undermine the basic democratic values they have worked so hard to achieve in the post war era.

Very simply, the culture of another people does not have to be accepted when it is subhuman! “Honor killings” are subhuman! And human rights activists need to address the situation in no uncertain terms. The practice of killing women for wanting to have lives of their own needs to be held up to public scrutiny. At the same time, the German government needs to engage in outreach programs to Muslim youths. They need to make sure that Muslim kids are not so alienated from mainstream society that they can simply be programmed by Mosques to hate and degrade women. Most of all the government needs to provide sanctuary to oppressed women and girls, instead of allowing Muslim extremists to hide their abuses behind a disingenuous veil of cultural relativity. Democratic societies like Germany can no longer give religious fanatics a free hand to abuse and murder non believers. Such action betrays contempt for the basic human rights which animate any democracy with meaning. In a democracy, we simply cannot allow the word “honor” to be attached to such brutal and archaic religious practices.

==============================

More than the Koran (townhall.com, 050523)

Suzanne Fields

No matter what you think of the inaccurate Newsweek item about flushing the Koran down a Guantanamo toilet, it’s a mistake to say, as the White House does, that anyone died because of it. Toilets don’t kill people, fanatics do.

Americans don’t kill each other over burning the Bible, as reprehensible as Bible-burning would be, nor did any of us take to the streets to shout insults at Muslim “infidels” when Palestinian Muslims used pages from a Bible as toilet paper during the occupation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or when Islamic radicals beheaded Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, simply because he was a Jew. We mourned him with word and ceremony. The soldiers who abused Muslims at Abu Ghraib prison were brought to trial, after the U.S. Army itself exposed the scandal.

Afghan rioters who were whipped into a frenzy of hatred against America by their Islamist imams were nurtured on violence long before the publication of the Newsweek article and their leaders exploited the Newsweek item for their own cynical purposes. The imams may be the only people in the world who benefited from the Newsweek story. With the White House spreading the word about its “respect” for Islam and the Koran (and coming close to pandering to Muslim red-hots), it’s useful to point out how Islam and the Islamic holy book are used to encourage violence.

Americans are poorly educated in the ways of Islam and the White House doesn’t help when, seeking to appease, it simplifies the complex and varying interpretations of the Koran. Only recently, parents in Scottsdale, Ariz., objected to a new seventh-grade history textbook because it distorts significant interpretations of the Koran, ignoring the way it is used to further the global ambitions of militant Islam.

The book, “History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond,” was examined by Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, an organization that reviews history textbooks and social studies curricula. He agrees with the objections of the parents. He further observed that its chief author-adviser is an apologist for Islamists. The text renders “jihad” (holy war) uncritically and in lyrical terms, as “a struggle within each individual to overcome difficulties and strive to please God, (which) may become a physical struggle for protection against enemies.” This is exactly how Islamists define the jihadists who crashed the airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11. The Teachers’ Curriculum Institute, publisher of the textbook, is pushing the textbook now into the lucrative textbook market in California.

Two years ago, the American Textbook Council studied seven widely adopted world history textbooks for grades seven to 12 and found that many hold Western civilization to a much higher standard than non-Western civilizations, especially Islam. Diane Ravitch, a historian of education, shows how textbooks distort by omission.

In her book, “The Language Police,” she cites one text that observes how the Koran “sets harsh penalties for crimes such as stealing or murder,” but does not explain that the “harsh penalties” include chopping off the hands of thieves, or that women adulterers are publicly stoned or beheaded in strict Islamic societies such as Saudi Arabia. In discussing “enhanced rights” for Muslim women, texts acknowledge that a man can have four wives, but note, approvingly, that he must support all four of them equally. This is progress, perhaps, but only from the eighth to the ninth century.

Many of the textbooks that Palestinian children use include Islamist messages that Israel and the United States must be destroyed because they are “the big and little Satans.” Maps of the Middle East continue to omit Israel. Schools and communities continue to celebrate suicide bombers against both countries.

By contrast, Israeli school children are taught positive images of Islam and Arab culture. The Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, a nonpolitical, nonprofit organization, reviewed 360 Israeli textbooks and found them to focus on reconciliation, tolerance and peace without instigation toward hatred. Israeli textbooks aim to educate against stereotypes of “evil” Arabs and “bad” Muslims. The Israeli government actively supports “Seeds of Peace,” a program that brings Arab and Jewish teenagers together with an emphasis on reducing prejudice before it matures and festers. President Bush praises it for bringing tomorrow’s leaders together, “changing minds and hearts one person at a time.”

That’s good as far as it goes, but civilized men must find ways to move a little faster. More suicide bombers are in training.

==============================

Israel’s immigration idiocy (townhall.com, 050522)

Caroline B. Glick

Almost every day, a report surfaces of some new act of often violent intolerance committed by Muslim minorities in Europe against their fellow citizens.

This week, the London Times reported that at the beginning of the month, Chris Crain, the editor of the Washington, DC-based gay magazine The Washington Blade was brutally beaten by a group of young Muslim males while he was vacationing with his partner in Amsterdam.

It turns out that Holland – the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriages – has become a dangerous place for gays. The Amsterdam Tourist Board felt constrained to issue a warning to gay and lesbian tourists to be careful when they visit the city in light of the rash of anti-homosexual violence perpetrated regularly by gangs of Muslim immigrant youth.

In Sweden today, Pentecostal preacher Runar Sogaard is now under police protection after receiving death threats from Muslims angry that he referred to Muhammad as a “confused pedophile” during a sermon. Members of the Kurdish terrorist group Ansar el-Islam reportedly received a religious edict to kill him for his remarks.

Rather than rally to Sogaard’s defense, in an interview with the Swedish newspaper Expressen, Swedish Islam expert Jan Hjarpe, at the University of Lund, basically accused Sogaard of purposely stirring up trouble, saying, “It was a statement from an odd man in an odd sect but the effect is stronger antagonism between different groups. It becomes a pure religious polemic and is extremely unpleasant.”

Reports from country after country in recent years have referred to entire neighborhoods where ambulances and fire trucks refuse to enter for fear of being attacked by Islamic immigrant gangs. Quite simply, the European response to this violence has been to pretend that it isn’t happening as states exercise their sovereignty over decreasing areas of their territory.

The most discouraging cases of governmental passivity in the face of jihad-inspired local violence have occurred in France. On March 8, approximately 1,000 Muslim and black youths descended on tens of thousands of schoolchildren protesting against educational reforms in Paris. They beat them and taunted them, and according to a report in the Weekly Standard, “the general sentiment was a desire to ‘take revenge on whites.’”

Also in France, at the end of March, Jean-Pierre Obin, the inspector-general of the French school system, submitted a report to the Education Ministry regarding religious expression in state schools. According to the Weekly Standard’s write-up of the report, Obin found that schools attended by large numbers of Muslims are being systematically Islamized.

The most prominent victims of this trend are schoolgirls who, fearing violent attacks, have taken to wearing loose, long clothing to cover themselves, not only in schools but in the surrounding communities. Anti-Semitism has become so rampant that not only are Jewish children simply forced to study elsewhere, but the most popular insult that the schoolchildren now hurl at one another is “Jew.”

Obin noted that the levels of Islamization are determined in large part by the degree to which teachers and administrators tolerate the students’ behavior. In schools where the children’s violence and aggressiveness was met with little tolerance, Islamization was lower than in schools where school officials have sought to appease the aggressors.

This conclusion clearly had little impact on the Education Ministry, which sought to squelch the report – refusing to publish its findings until the report itself was leaked on the Internet.

Bat Ye’or, the prominent scholar of dhimmitude – or the systematic discrimination and repression of non-Muslims by Muslim societies – believes that the continent-wide phenomenon of Muslim aggression and intolerance met by European passivity and acceptance finds its roots in European policy toward the Arab world dating back to 1973.

According to her analysis, which is copiously documented in her recently released book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, the current pathological relationship between the Muslim immigrant communities and the European majorities is the direct result of a decision by the leaders of Europe following the OPEC oil embargo to allow open immigration of Muslims to their countries and to accept the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s demand that these immigrants would not only not be encouraged to integrate within their larger societies, but would be encouraged to maintain and cultivate their separate and intolerant ways of life.

Ye’or, who came to Israel this week to launch her book, is convinced that Europe is already too far along in its cultural decline and acceptance of its dhimmitude to save itself from ultimate destruction. She explains that she wrote her book in English and published it in the US because her target audience is “the Americans, who are the only society still capable of fighting the global jihad.”

It is possible that Bat Ye’or’s pessimistic view of Europe is correct. Her book makes a strong argument for believing that Europe, in casting its fortunes with the Arabs at the expense of the Americans and Israelis, long ago signed its own cultural and political death warrant.

And yet, in recent months we have seen an awakening of sorts among elements of European society to the threat posed to their way of life by the intolerant culture which in recent years has become the norm, rather than the exception, among Muslim immigrant populations.

Queen Margrethe of Denmark said last month that people have to take the “challenge” of Islam seriously. “We have to run the risk of being labeled in an unflattering way, because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance,” she said.

In 2002, Denmark itself passed one of the toughest immigration reform statutes in the world, and other EU member states like Ireland and Holland are considering enacting similar statutes. The law stipulates that (as is the case in the US) the fact that a foreigner is married to a Danish citizen confers no legal right to reunification with his or her spouse. At the same time, throughout Europe, instances of longtime Muslim immigrants being deported from their European havens have become increasingly frequent occurrences in recent years.

And yet, as luck would have it, just as the Europeans seem to be taking the first tentative steps towards acknowledging and contending with the dangers posed to their ways of life by separatist and intolerant Islamic minorities, Israel, which faces a much more acute threat of physical destruction from the same forces, is rejecting the wisdom – such as it is – that is now instructing Europe’s self-preservationists.

This past Sunday the government approved a change in immigration regulations governing the conferral of Israeli citizenship on Palestinians from Judea, Samaria and Gaza. From 1993-2003, some 130,000 Palestinians received Israeli citizenship by marrying Israeli Arab citizens. In 2003, after a number of these new citizens were actively involved in terrorism against Israel, the Knesset approved the government’s temporary ban on all “family reunification.”

Under the new regulation adopted on Sunday, Palestinian men over the age of 35 and Palestinian women over the age of 25 who marry Israeli citizens can again apply for Israeli citizenship and receive residency rights in Israel.

In so acting, the government paid no attention to the views of respected leftist Zionist legal scholars Profs. Amnon Rubinstein and Ruth Gavison. In an interview with Haaretz Rubinstein argues, “no country allows into its territory people who have attachments to the side that is fighting against the country during an armed confrontation.” Rubinstein recommends that in any permanent immigration law, Israel should restrict the entry of nationals from enemy states into Israel.

For her part, Gavison, the former chairman of the leftist Association for Civil Rights in Israel, recommends that Israel demand that the person seeking citizenship integrate into the public culture and swear allegiance to Israel as a democratic Jewish state.

Indeed, the government seemed not to note the absurdity of basically enabling large-scale immigration to Israel of Palestinians. The irony of the move is painful given that the government is defending its decision to destroy Israeli communities in Gaza and northern Samaria as a way to defend Israel’s Jewish majority, and at the same time as the Palestinians themselves are giving their support at the ballot box to Hamas – a group whose declared policy is the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state.

Fundamentally, there are two arguments which favor enabling Palestinian immigration to Israel. The first is put forward by Arab Israeli leaders like attorney Hasan Jabarin, the head of Adallah, an Arab-Israeli self-styled human rights group which, through generous funding from the liberal American-Jewish New Israel Fund, has gained prominence both in Israel and abroad for its insistence that Jewish nationalism is inherently racist.

In an op-ed in Haaretz on Wednesday, Jabarin argued that it is racist for Israel to differentiate between Jewish immigrants and Arab immigrants. Following Jabarin’s lead, mainstream Israeli leftist bureaucrats like Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz have argued in interviews with Haaretz for enabling Palestinian immigration to Israel based on family reunification because, given the proximity of Israeli Arabs to the Palestinians, it would be unfair for Israel to restrict their dating habits.

Immigration reform advocates on the political Left couch their support for immigration in policymaking terms, arguing that the fact that Israel has yet to set up a methodical policy for non-Jewish immigration is a failure that needs to be addressed. There is no doubt that this is a true statement.

But Israel, like every sovereign state, has a right, and indeed a duty to its citizens, to engage in selective immigration policies based on economic status, political loyalties, security implications and national origins of prospective immigrants before conferring them with the privilege of Israeli citizenship. Sadly, in voting to reinstate Palestinian immigration to Israel on Sunday, our government ministers, unlike some of their wiser European counterparts, failed to take any of these issues into account.

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where this article first appeared.

==============================

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (American Spectator, 050531)

By Bat Ye’or

(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 384 pages, $23.95)

Europe baffles many people. Why does this continent of democracies persistently favor Arab dictatorships while pouring vitriol on the United States and Israel? Why, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, did the streets of Europe fill with millions of demonstrators supporting Saddam Hussein while hurling epithets at George Bush and Ariel Sharon? Why does a continent that is historically, and still demographically, Christian let itself be inundated with Muslim immigrants who are allowed to keep their culture and fealties instead of assimilating to Western values?

In Eurabia the historian Bat Ye’or, pioneer of the concept of dhimmitude (submission to Islam by non-Muslim peoples), presents a deeply insightful, richly documented explanation of the European malaise. She locates its roots in France’s desire during the 1960s to revive its crumbling Mediterranean empire by building “quiet” influence in the Arab world, while indulging its Gaullist dreams of grandeur by uniting that world with Europe as a counterforce to American power. It was an impulse that, from the start, subordinated cultural affinities with democratic, Christian America to a mix of ressentiment and lingering romanticization of the Arab world.

Although Europe’s capitulation to the Arabs is often dated from the 1973 oil crisis and ascribed to economic factors, Bat Ye’or maintains that the Arab oil sheikhdoms’ own dependence on the West essentially rendered the oil weapon hollow, as evidenced by America’s successful surmounting of the crisis. By that time, though, France had already led Europe into closer affiliation with the Arabs for reasons that were largely political, and she suspects that the oil threat was only “a pretext...to reverse previous EEC economic policy toward Israel and the Arab world.”

It was, indeed, the period of the oil crisis that saw the creation of the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) — a network of parliamentary, propagandistic, cultural, and economic ties that Bat Ye’or views as the main engine of Europe’s creeping dhimmitude. Evolving through a series of pompous conferences and wordy, high-flown documents about supposed “common values,” the EAD enabled European politicians and intellectuals to impose their geopolitical program on a European populace that initially was neither pro-Arab nor anti-Israeli, and to this day is ignorant of the EAD and its activities.

It was a process of moral decay and betrayal of Europe’s own democratic ideals. Under EAD influence, Europe played the key role in legitimizing Yasser Arafat and his PLO even as they made terrorism an international plague. At the same time, Europe launched its campaign of pressuring and vilifying Israel while ignoring the plight of Christians in Arab countries like Lebanon, Egypt, and Sudan and embracing blood-drenched dictators like Saddam and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. This went hand in hand with mounting antagonism to America even while its Cold War umbrella was all that shielded Western Europe from the Soviet threat.

Meanwhile, a deliberate, preferential immigration policy, openly stipulated in EAD documents, brought millions of Arabs and other Muslims to Europe under advantageous terms that allowed them to import their civilization intact — including the traditional Muslim contempt toward “infidel” peoples. Although those EAD texts spoke in grandiose terms of “mutual” benefit and influence, the demographic traffic was strictly one-way. Accordingly, whereas Europe increasingly glorified Arab-Islamic culture and instituted it in its educational systems, while denying its own Christian roots, the Arab countries retained their dictatorial, exclusively Islamic character. Lurking behind this growing European cravenness, Bat Ye’or asserts, were motives of fear and greed — fear of Arab terrorism and the desire to avert it by paying what amounted to a traditional Islamic “poll tax” of servile tribute and economic assistance; greed for the economic benefits that this relationship brought to Europe itself.

The trends merged in what Bat Ye’or calls the “cult of Palestinianism.” It involved not only a morally insouciant, political backing of the Palestinians no matter what violence they perpetrated and what efforts Israel made to accommodate them, but also the growing embrace of a new Palestinian “replacement theology” that portrayed Jesus as a Muslim Arab and Islam as the matrix of Christianity. Though resisted by the Vatican, this theology was increasingly adopted by both Catholic and Protestant circles in Europe in comradeship with Middle Eastern churches whose own espousal of it reflected their condition of severe dhimmitude. Central, of course, to this outlook is a denial of the Jewish roots of Christianity as part of the delegitimization of Jewish ties to the Holy Land and of Israel as a state.

Three decades after the EAD began eroding Europe’s identity as a Western-aligned continent, Bat Ye’or sees Europe’s situation as bleak. As an “aging, confused, and timorous” civilization that has affiliated itself with “an assertive, demographically booming, Arab-Muslim world,” a reassertion of identity is “highly improbable” and the decline “may be irreversible.” “One may hope,” however — the sole hope Bat Ye’or offers in this sobering book — “that America’s resolute policy has opened...new opportunities for the world to eschew a former order of political connivance with hate and crime.” As she has stated in lectures and elsewhere, she sought specifically to publish this book in America as a means of alerting Americans both to Europe’s advanced state of decay and to the United States’ role as the last bulwark against Islamic encroachment and last possible force for Western moral revival.

The message is not made easier to absorb by the book’s often cumbersome prose, which strangely alternates with passages of almost prophetic eloquence and power. The fruit of the effort sometimes needed to read this work, though, is exposure to a mind of uncommon depth and brilliance and a message of urgent importance.

P. David Hornik is a writer and translator in Jerusalem.

==============================

The Muslim groups who wouldn’t attend the March Against Terror (townhall.com, 050601)

Joel Mowbray

In the first of its kind for an event organized by a major national Muslim organization, Kamal Nawash and the Free Muslims Coalition (FMC) recently held the Free Muslims March Against Terrorism. Not surprisingly, the leaders of every other major Muslim organization shunned the march and declined to take a public stand against terrorism and extremism.

Noticeably missing from the list of over 80 sponsors Nawash rounded up was any of the Muslim groups that claim to be moderates, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Though these groups pay lip service to opposing terrorism, they couldn’t put their money where their mouth is and bring themselves to stand side-by-side with the Free Muslim Coalition.

The reasons for the absence of the major national Muslim groups are obvious. The empirical evidence has clearly demonstrated where the true loyalties of organizations such as CAIR and MPAC lie. In this particular case, it is anathema for many Muslim groups to identify themselves with these unambiguous message of the rally. Nawash is among the few Muslim leaders—and certainly one of the very few leaders of the overtly political Muslim groups—to explicitly confront the real threat, the real root cause of terrorism: radical Islam.

Where most prominent Muslim leaders prefer ambiguity and moral equivalence, Nawash stakes out an unmistakable position not only opposing just violent jihad, but the doctrines of Wahhabism and political Islam as well. Nawash is, without exception, against the creation of Islamic states—anywhere. The other major Islamic organizations simply can’t take this position. Their refusal to back even Nawash’s message exposes their true sympathies.

See no evil

If other Muslim groups could even go as far as condemning specific acts of Islamic terror, that would be a step in Nawash’s direction. But organizations such as CAIR, for instance, have pointedly refused to condemn Islamic terrorist organizations, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, or even specific Islamic terrorist attacks. The best example of the latter occurred after the murder, burning, stoning, and mutilation of four American contractors in Fallujah. CAIR only condemned the mutilation as contrary to Islam, but did not condemn specifically the murder, burning, or stoning of the men—a position that was also taken by a leading Fallujah cleric.

MPAC’s apologist agenda has also become transparent. In a June 1999 publication, MPAC argued that Hezbollah’s 1983 attack killing 241 Americans in Lebanon was not a terrorist attack. From its “Position Paper on U.S. Counterterrorism Policy”: “Yet this attack, for all the pain it caused, was not in a strict sense, a terrorist operation. It was a military operation, producing no civilian casualties—exactly the kind of attack that Americans might have lauded had it been directed against Washington’s enemies.”

Another of the major Islamic organizations, Muslim American Society (MAS), actively promotes the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has served as the theological inspiration for many leading terrorists. At a conference last month, a consultant to the group passed out a MAS paper called, “An American perspective on why the U.S. must engage the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Sounds of silence

It is clear why Nawash poses such a great threat to groups like CAIR, MPAC, and MAS: he is a genuine moderate Muslim leader who emphatically condemns not just Islamic terror, but also any efforts to create Islamic states. His unflinching stances make it much more difficult for these groups to engage in verbal acrobatics by issuing vague condemnations of “terrorism,” while simultaneously refusing to admit the “Islamic” influence cited by its perpetrators.

For participation in the rally, Nawash set a very low threshold: opposing terrorism. (Almost every speaker, though, was careful to condemn Islamic terrorism, and not just terrorism in the abstract.) By his own account, and by that of others, Nawash actively tried to enlist the support of other Muslim groups—but to no avail. Nawash most likely realized that no matter how low he set the bar, none of his counter-parts would endorse an event sponsored by a Muslim who unequivocally denounces Islamic terrorism and just as enthusiastically supports free societies for Muslims everywhere.

CAIR, MPAC, MAS and other Islamic leaders shown up by the real moderate Muslims who locked arms with Nawash were both testy and defensive. CAIR forwarded all calls to Hussein Ibish, the former Communications Director at the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an avowedly secular Muslim who nevertheless does the dirty work of Islamists and radical Muslims. MPAC did not return calls seeking comment, and did not appear to have given comment to any other media outlet regarding the rally.

Shooting the messenger

Of the two Muslim leaders who shunned the rally who were willing to give comment—Ibish and MAS Executive Director Mahdi Bray—both resorted to attacking the messenger.

In two rambling smear jobs at MuslimWakeUp.com, Ibish labeled Nawash’s FMC as “the ugly” among leading groups, and called Nawash’s invitation for other Muslim leaders to denounce radicalism a “crude ploy.” Ibish went so far as to say that Nawash’s contention that other Muslim leaders don’t denounce radical Islam is an “odious lie.” While Ibish find Nawash’s message “odious,” it’s flat-out wrong to say it is a “lie”—especially when applied to Ibish himself.

Appearing on CNN in August 2002, Mr. Ibish was asked about a 1991 fund-raising letter from suspected (and now indicted) terrorist Sami al-Arian that read, in part, “Jihad is our path! Victory to Islam! Death to Israel and victory to Islam! Revolution, revolution until victory! Rolling, rolling to Jerusalem!”

Rather than criticize those plainly radical—and violent—words, Ibish played defense. “‘Death to Israel’ does not necessarily mean violence. Jihad can mean a lot of things,” he explained. Without explanation, Mr. Ibish abruptly—and bizarrely—switched the topic. “I’ll tell you who is advocating violence. It is Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who advocated torturing people.”

Ibish, of course, was not alone among Muslim leaders defending al-Arian—despite a substantial body of evidence that had already been in the public record since the mid-90’s. MPAC, which had nothing to say regarding Nawash and the rally, said after al-Arian’s arrest, “Dr. Al-Arian is being punished for the non-crime of sparking dissent.”

After al-Arian was suspended in 2002 from his job as a University of South Florida professor—but before his February 2003 arrest—CAIR expressed outrage because he was “a respected leader in the community and a committed civil rights advocate.” Even after the 50-count indictment laid out a comprehensive case that included as evidence documents and wiretaps, CAIR wasted no time reflexively defending the alleged Islamic terrorist, calling the arrest “a fishing expedition by federal authorities using McCarthy-like tactics in a search for evidence of wrongdoing that does not exist.”

Perhaps the biggest defenders of al-Arian, though, were the folks at MAS. Immediately following the arrest, MAS’ Shaker Elsayed bellowed, “This is becoming a war on Muslim institutions.” Perhaps to stress that Elsayed’s comment was no isolated outburst, MAS sent out a press release that proclaimed: “The arrest of Professor Sami Al-Arian today conforms to a pattern of political intimidation by an attorney general who seems to be targeting the American Muslim community’s leaders and institutions in a drive to erode Americans’ civil liberties.”

Doublespeak

When asked about Nawash and his rally, MAS leader Bray said, “It is absolutely the right message, but Kamal is just the wrong messenger.” But if it’s “absolutely the right message,” why isn’t MAS congratulating the government for prosecuting the likes of al-Arian instead of castigating them?

The game of claiming to have condemned Islamic terrorism or even radical Islam without actually doing so is one that has been mastered by many Muslim leaders. Ibish mocks the idea that Nawash is the first leader of a Muslim political organization to condemn Islamic terrorism and radical Islam, but when he was given the chance to do just that on CNN regarding al-Arian’s call to jihad, Ibish actually defended the accused terrorist. To date, Ibish has devoted more ink to attacking Nawash than all radical Muslims—combined.

Nawash has clearly taken his lumps from the supposed moderate Muslim leaders, but that’s not to say he’s without a following. But think in the mode of the “silent majority,” although in Nawash’s case, sadly, it’s almost certainly the “silent plurality”—for now.

Common are e-mails and phone calls to Nawash where Muslims tell him how important his message is, and how glad they are to finally have a Muslim leader delivering it. But most still won’t side with Nawash publicly, which partly helps explain the rally’s modest turnout of roughly 150-200. Yet the rally was attended by several respected Muslim leaders, who gained a much wider audience with the rally’s repeated airings on C-SPAN.

If there’s one thing that Nawash hopes to accomplish, it is to encourage other Muslims to speak up just as he has. Notes Nawash, “People who might want to speak out want somebody else to go first. Nobody wants to be a lone voice.” Though not exactly a lone voice, Nawash must feel like one some days—especially when he looks at his colleagues at the other national Muslim organizations.

==============================

To fight radical Islam, we need strange coalitions (Townhall.com, 050610)

Joel Mowbray

Any seasoned Washington veteran will tell you that a successful political movement frequently earns its victory thanks to the assemblance of strange bedfellows and partnerships. And the more difficult the battle, the stranger that coalition may need to be.

At the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s 25th anniversary conference in late May, it was clear that the prevailing viewpoint on the Middle East was what could be generously described as “pro-Palestinian.” However, it was in that crowd—a mix of Muslims and Christians—that maverick Muslim Kamal Nawash (a Palestinian by birth who rarely discusses Israel) found a surprisingly warm reception from many of the attendees.

A former ADC staffer, Nawash has recently become a pariah in the eyes of most American Muslim leaders thanks to his relentless attacks against the radicalism that has seeped into Islam as it is practiced in America. He is equally incensed at the leaders of major national American Muslim political organizations for their inability to condemn radical Islam even when it is staring them in the face.

Although he was no more than a mere attendee at the ADC conference, Nawash found himself receiving congratulatory handshakes from people who support his confrontational—and among Arabs and Muslims, controversial—message. Based on the overall currents at the event, it is likely that many of those at the ADC conference supportive of Nawash would not have a particularly benign view of Israel and some probably don’t even believe in the right of the Jewish state to exist.

Nawash has caught flak recently for putting a controversial figure on the board of his organization, the Free Muslims Coalition. Ray Hanania, a Chicago columnist, has repeatedly blasted the Jewish state for its policies of “violence” and even called Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a “Nazi.” (He has since repeatedly apologized and admitted in an interview with this columnist that he was wrong to use that term because, he explained, “Nothing compares to the Holocaust.”)

Though Hanania can be a hothead, he also is a relentless critic of Islamic terrorism and radical Islam.

But when Nawash and the FMC organized the first-ever Free Muslims Rally Against Terror, several Internet bloggers who should side with Nawash instead went after him, including one who ludicrously claimed that Nawash views “Jews/Israelis as the root cause of terrorism.”

Although Hanania is Arab Christian, he has long been involved with Palestinian politics inside the U.S. (his family hails from Bethlehem) and he has found himself assailed by “moderate” Muslim leaders because he unhesitatingly labels Hamas a terrorist organization.

Where Hanania really raised the ire of many Muslim leaders, though, was in his championing of the cause of Chicago-area Muslim Omar Najib, an observant—but modernized—Muslim who is battling the leadership of the Bridgeview Mosque, arguing that it has fallen into the hands of foreign-financed radicals. Without Hanania, Najib might have lacked a public platform.

It is impossible to determine how many Arabs and Muslims like Hanania and Najib are out there, in large part because of the intimidation that permeates the community. Speaking out is difficult and those who do almost always pay a price.

Najib, for example, has found himself on the outs with many in his mosque, and the leadership certainly has him in its crosshairs. And Nawash has found himself the target of repeated and vicious attacks from the leaders of supposedly moderate Muslim political organizations.

Because the climate for Arabs and Muslims to step forward and criticize radical Islam is already deeply inhospitable, every effort should be made to encourage such dissent. But part of that will mean having to listen to people who might not be at all supportive of Israel or even philosophically believe in the right of the Jewish state to exist.

In the end, though, if someone is genuinely critical of radical Islam, he has no choice but to unequivocally condemn suicide bombings or any other form of Islamic terrorism. With that as a basic ground rule, legitimate discussion should be possible. But the culture of conformity in the Muslim community in America—ruthlessly enforced by those who silence dissenters—has made nearly impossible any legitimate discussion amongst Muslims about the spread of radicalism.

For Nawash to succeed, he must do so by empowering the “silent majority”—if it is even that—among Muslims in America to fight back and reclaim the religion from the radicals.

==============================

Religious Visas Prove Problematic (Foxnews, 050622)

LOS ANGELES — Religious visas allow foreign nationals in religious occupations to enter the United States and work for nonprofit religious organizations.

Generally, the majority of religious visas have gone to Christian ministers. For the past five years, however, scores of Muslim clerics from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan have been let in on religious visas. Once here, many make provocative comments.

“The reality is that radical Islamic clerics, and even terrorists, have used religious visas to come to the United States,” Islamic terrorism expert Steven Emerson told FOX News. “It represents a clear and present danger to our security.”

Upon arriving on a religious visa in California, Imam Wagdy Ghoneim preached support for suicide bombings. In Cleveland, Fawaz Damra praised the murder of Jews. In Tampa, Fla., Islamic studies professor Mazen Al Najjar raised money for terrorists.

Religious visas are easier to obtain than other work-related visas because applicants sponsored by institutions in the United States are afforded religious freedoms that protect them from intense scrutiny.

One risk, however, is that Islamic clerics often come from unconventional schools and mosques in remote areas where intelligence resources are lacking. That makes background checks and security assessments difficult.

“If 259 Pakistani imams are coming into this country,” said Stephen Schwartz, executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, “I would say that the probability is very high that the majority of them are financed by the Islamic extremist movement.”

The Justice Department is struggling strike a balance between personal freedoms and national security, but it has taken little action thus far.

One proposed solution would be to create an Islamic institute staffed by U.S. religious scholars who are capable of examining clerics’ credentials before obtaining their visas.

==============================

The Muslim hate crime that wasn’t (Townhall.com, 050706)

Michelle Malkin

The grievance industry went into overdrive last month when burned Korans were reportedly discovered at a local mosque in southwest Virginia.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations issued an immediate press release on June 16 calling for “Americans of all faiths to obtain and read the Quran after burned copies of Islam’s revealed text were found” in a shopping bag at the front door of the Islamic Center of Blacksburg.

Repent, all ye infidels!

Incensed CAIR officials contacted the FBI and pressured authorities to treat the incident as possibly “bias-related.” CAIR-MD/VA Director of Civil Rights Shama Farooq lectured that “A redoubled commitment to freedom of thought and religious diversity is the best response to the burning of any sacred text” in order to “send the message that bigots do not represent our nation’s values.”

Not content to let CAIR get all the free publicity, other victim-card hustlers jumped aboard the burned Koran bandwagon.

Laila Al-Qatami, a spokeswoman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, lambasted police: “If pages from the Bible were burned and put in a bag outside a church,” she huffed to the Associated Press, “I think the reaction of the police would be that it would be a hate crime.”

Actually, in this country, when you dunk a crucifix in urine, that’s “art,” and when you hang a framed copy of the Ten Commandments inside a courthouse, that’s a crime.

Al-Qatami invoked the Guantanamo Bay bogeyman and blamed the burnt Koran incident on insensitive, ignorant Americans. The case, she asserted, was caused by “a lack of zero tolerance for hate crimes and ‘a lack of information about Arabs and Islam as a whole.’” Al-Qatami also told the Roanoake Times: “Let’s face it, books don’t burn themselves and end up outside of a mosque. It’s a willful act.”

Muslims in Virginia also expressed their knee-jerk outrage: “It is a shame that people are so ignorant,” said Blacksburg mosque member Idris Adjerid. Ahmed Sidky, a Muslim graduate student at nearby Virginia Tech, told the Roanoake Times that the case “was certainly very symbolic.”

It certainly was a symbol — a symbol of the knee-jerk penchant among some civil rights groups and their enablers to cry racism, claim discrimination, and criticize U.S. law enforcement authorities for not doing enough to stop “hate crimes.”

It turns out, you see, that the burnt Koran was left at the mosque by . . . a Muslim student.

According to the AP, a Muslim Virginia Tech student took responsibility saying he dropped off the burned Koran and other singed materials at the mosque, hoping “it could be given a respectful disposal.” Police Lt. Bruce Bradberry reported that the student, who was not named, apparently contacted police last week, “saying he was going to be traveling abroad and didn’t know what to do with the Koran, which had been burned in a 2004 house fire. The student said he placed the book and other fire-damaged materials in a bag and left the bag at the Islamic Center with a note, which apparently blew away.”

Whoops.

The grievance-mongers’ continued failure to act responsibly and with due skepticism when these cases arise is expected. But the mainstream media’s failure to put its America-bashing instincts in check is intolerable. Instead of providing readers with information about many cases of so-called Muslim hate crimes that have turned out to be fraudulent since Sept. 11, The Washington Post quoted the usual suspects and editorialized in its June 17 report that “The Koran burning comes at a time of particular sensitivity. The U.S. military recently confirmed five cases of U.S. personnel mishandling the Muslim holy book at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, acknowledging that soldiers and interrogators kicked the Koran, got copies wet, stood on a copy during an interrogation and inadvertently got urine on another one.”

Over the Independence Day weekend, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Colbert King added fuel to the fire, hysterically listing this now-debunked Koran-burning incident as evidence of rampant anti-Muslim bias in America.

Will Colbert King and the boys and girls crying wolf calm down and acknowledge the truth about the Muslim hate crime that wasn’t? I doubt it.

==============================

London a Longtime Haven for Radical Muslim Figures (CNSNews.com, 050708)

By Patrick Goodenough

(CNSNews.com) - Terrorism experts have long warned that Islamists espousing violence enjoy a haven in London, an assertion that has come into sharp focus again with Thursday’s bombings in the British capital.

For years, Britain tolerated the presence of high-profile and outspoken Islamic clerics whose fiery sermons frequently extolled jihad against the West. Since 9/11, however, anti-terror legislation has been tightened, some groups have been outlawed, terror rings have been broken and some controversial figures have been arrested.

One of them, Egyptian-born Abu Hamza al-Masri, went on trial this week at London’s Old Bailey courthouse, where he faces more than a dozen charges include inciting terrorism and racial hatred.

Al-Masri was formerly the imam at a North London mosque linked to confessed al-Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a U.S.-bound flight from Europe with explosives hidden in his shoe.

He also is wanted in the United States and Yemen on terror-related charges.

For years before his May 2004 arrest al-Masri used the Finsbury Park mosque as a base to speak for what he insisted were political causes.

Despite his radical rhetoric and close links to a group that claimed responsibility for attacks including the Oct. 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, it was only in 2003 that the authorities acted against him, stripping him of his British citizenship and barring him from preaching at the mosque.

Al-Masri then took to addressing his followers — mostly young British- and foreign-born Muslims — on the street outside the building.

Britain also detained another London-based extremist cleric, Abu Qatada, whose sermons were found in the 9/11 hijackers’ apartment in Germany.

But other radical leaders remained free, among them Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian-born cleric who has promoted and praised violence against Israel, America and Britain for years.

Yael Shahar of the Israel-based International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) said that although London had been a center for Islamic extremism for years, the British security services only started taking the threat seriously after 9/11.

Before that, Shahar said, “the firebrand clerics who preached jihad and hatred of the West were dismissed as ‘armchair warriors’ by British intelligence.”

Even since 9/11, however, critics have questioned Britain’s apparent tolerance for highly-controversial Muslim figures.

As recently as last year, the government allowed a visit by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Egyptian cleric who has publicly voiced support for suicide bombers. London’s leftwing Mayor Ken Livingstone, who has called al-Qaradawi a “man of peace,” welcomed him as an honored guest.

Exploiting democracy

In 2000, Bakri told Cybercast News Service in an interview: “We will use your democracy to destroy your democracy.”

Britain’s legal system and its willingness late last century to offer asylum to figures like Bakri, al-Masri and Abu Qatada made it a magnet for exiled radical organizations.

“In the past decade, the United Kingdom’s undisputed political, economic, and cultural center has also become a major world center of political Islam and anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American activism,” writes Hebrew University of Jerusalem academic Robert S. Wistrich, in online excerpts of an article to be published soon.

“Through its Arabic-language newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, not to mention its flourishing network of bookshops, mosques, and community centers, radical Islam has taken full advantage of what British democracy has to offer for its anti-Western goals, reaping the benefits of London’s significance as a hub of global finance, electronic media, and mass communications technology.”

Osama bin Laden himself laid the groundwork for a London-based network, according to terrorism researcher Yossef Bodansky.

In his biography on bin Laden, written before 9/11, Bodansky wrote that the al-Qaeda leader based himself in the London suburb of Wembley in 1994. By the time he left, after the Saudis began demanding his expulsion, “he had consolidated a comprehensive system of entities” in the city.

In Nov. 1998, Bakri hosted a conference in London called Western Challenge and Islamic Response, attended by more than a dozen extremist groups. At the gathering, Bakri voiced support for Osama bin Laden’s jihad and said recent anti-U.S. attacks such as those in Saudi Arabia and East Africa were “legitimate acts.”

Following 9/11, Bakri was one of the first Islamist figures to publicly applaud the attacks.

Since then he has spoken often of his support for violent jihad, even admitting to signing up recruits for Islamist campaigns in places like Kashmir and Israel.

A number of governments — including those of India, Algeria, Sri Lanka and Egypt — have long complained about the presence in Britain of groups connected to violent campaign in those countries.

Extremists recruited in Britain for terrorist acts abroad include “shoe bomber” Reid, eight men involved in kidnappings in Yemen, and two men who carried out a deadly suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in 2003.

Bakri insisted that fighters were never recruited to carry out violent acts inside Britain itself, although he did say it was his dream to see the Islamic banner flying over Downing Street.

After the fall of the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies in Afghanistan in late 2001, a member of Bakri’s organization, Hassan Butt, told the BBC from Pakistan that British Muslim volunteers who had been fighting in Afghanistan would return to Britain where they would “strike at the heart of the enemy.”

In an interview with a Portuguese magazine in April 2004, Bakri said attacks on London were “inevitable.”

One “very well organized” group in London called itself al-Qaeda Europe, he said. “I know that they are ready to launch a big operation.”

==============================

Choosing Sides: The challenge for Muslims (National Review Online, 050713)

By Alykhan Velshi

“You’re either with us,” said President George W. Bush, in a much-maligned speech delivered after 9/11, “or you’re with the terrorists.” At the time, our thoughts turned to whether the United States of America and her allies would have the steel to fight the war on terrorism to a victorious conclusion. Since then, a goodly number of America’s allies have wobbled, especially over Iraq, but even they realize that the United States is not the bad guy. One cannot say the same for the many Muslims living in the West who have yet to pick a side in the war on terrorism.

It shouldn’t be a difficult choice for Muslims. There is nothing in the Koran that sanctions violence on the scale we saw in London on 7/7, Madrid on 3/11, or New York on 9/11. There’s no passage endorsing suicide bombing, or its 7th-century equivalent. Indeed, suicide is a mortal sin in Islam: Muslims know this, and they also know that al Qaeda plays fast and loose with the Koran to justify its nihilist ideology. And yet, disquietingly, most have chosen to sit out this war — to remain insouciant while terrorists and brigands hijack their religion.

The subway attacks in London have demonstrated once and for all the necessity for moderate Muslims to openly repudiate Islamist extremism. Two underground stations that were targeted — King’s Cross and Aldgate East — were hubs for ordinary Londoners going about their business. But the third target, Edgware Road Station, was different.

Edgware Road is in an area heavily populated with Arab Muslims. Walking down Edgware Road in the evening, one sees Middle Eastern restaurants brimming over with young Muslims eating ethnic fare, smoking flavored tobacco in water pipes, drinking mint tea, and generally enjoying themselves. The London terror attacks — indeed, al Qaeda’s war against civilization — is against these moderate Muslims, too. It is a war against an Islam that is tolerant, adaptable to Western society, and that preaches respect and peace.

Even if a significant number of moderate Muslims wanted to condemn terrorism and repudiate Islamist fanaticism, it might be very difficult to do so: The menace of fanaticism does not simply infect Islamist states, it also poisons its civil society, even in the West.

Sadly — dangerously — it is not uncommon for U.S. and British Muslim groups to be evasive when discussing the war on terror. Of course they’ll condemn individual terrorist attacks, though more out of sympathy for the victims and their families than out of a sense of solidarity with the West. When so much of Islamic civil society is corroded by the ideology of extremism, moderate Muslim dissenters have few outlets to voice their frustration and stop the tragic hijacking of their faith.

I experienced this firsthand while studying at the London School of Economics. Less than two weeks into my freshman year, after I expressed some interest in becoming involved in the student Islamic Society, I was invited to a screening of an incendiary video on the conflict in Chechnya, and another on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These videos were clearly intended to recruit potential terrorists: Indeed, the London School of Economics has a grim history on this front, having educated the terrorist who murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and having unwittingly hosted the jihadist group al-Muhajiroun.

What is more, another extremist group recently set up shop on campus, and invited a speaker who expressed his support for a nuclear Iran and a “global Islamic caliphate.” All this occurs because school authorities look the other way, refusing to monitor campus Islamic groups which are increasingly being taken over by extremists. When even Islamic civil society is controlled by fanatics and terror partisans, there is very little, if anything, that moderate Muslims can do. It is a sobering, sad, and thoroughly dispiriting truth.

The war on terror is not simply against terror-sponsoring states, but against the institutions of civil society that give terrorists quiet support, that inflame local Muslim populations, and that prevent the emergence of a moderate, peaceful form of Islam. The war on terror can never be won unless Muslims who have the privilege of living in the West stand up for civilization against the forces of barbarism and nihilism. I wish I could say otherwise, but I won’t be holding my breath.

— Alykhan Velshi, an Ismaili Muslim, will graduate this month from the London School of Economics.

==============================

Palestinian TV sermon calls for genocide (WorldNetDaily, 050715)

After London attack, cleric urges: ‘Annihilate infidels’

Less than a day after the terrorist bombings in London, the Palestinian Authority’s official television channel broadcast a sermon calling for extermination of all non-Muslims.

“Annihilate the Infidels and the Polytheists! Your [Allah’s] enemies are the enemies of the religion!” said Suleiman Al-Satari in a July 8 broadcast translated by Israel-based Palestinian Media Watch, or PMW.

“Allah,” the cleric continued, “disperse their gathering and break up their unity, and turn on them, the evil adversities. Allah, count them and kill them to the last one, and don’t leave even one.”

Referring to the timing of the sermon, PMW’s Itamar Marcus noted that clerics in the Palestinian authority routinely include Britain in the “infidel” category.

“Such a call does not represent a new policy or even a shift in policy,” Marcus said. “While the PA is careful to exclude this hate ideology from the image it presents to the foreign media, to its own people in Arabic the PA has always presented itself as part of a greater Arab-Islamic conflict against the West.”

Marcus said this enmity is focused primarily on the U.S. and Britain, who are seen as the dominant forces of Western civilization.

Palestinians are taught that it is predetermined that Islam eventually will rule over America and Britain, he pointed out.

The representation of current affairs as an Islamic-Western religious conflict is of particular significance given the overwhelming religious sentiment in PA society, Marcus said.

A recent poll showed 69% of Palestinians want the PA to follow Islamic law, or sharia, while just 16% prefer laws passed by their own Palestinian legislature. Another 11% wanted both.

PMW provides some other examples of pronouncements by clerics on official TV or radio:

* “America, Britain and Spain ... are uniting to strike at the people of truth [Muslims] in their homeland. This is the Infidels’ way, oh Muslims. ... The United Nations, to our regret, has become Dar al-Nadwa [literally ‘House of Assembly,’ the term for the pre-Islamic meeting place in Mecca], because that is where the Infidels meet.” – Ibrahim Mudayris, PA TV, Feb. 28, 2003.

* “The Infidel countries under the leadership of the U.S. made up an excuse and justification to wage their dirty war [post 9-11 war in Afghanistan] against Islam and the Muslims. ... Concerning evil Britain, which directly brought about this corrupt entity [Israel] on Palestinian land. Britain forgot that it is the height of terror and the height of hatred against Islam and Moslems.” – Yusuf Abu Sneina, Iman of Al-Aqsa Mosque, PA Radio, Dec. 28, 2001.

* “Oh, Allah, destroy America and its supporters and collaborators. Oh Allah, destroy Britain and its supporters and collaborators.” – Ikrime Sabri, mufti of Jerusalem, highest-ranking Islamic figure in the Palestinian Authority, PA Radio, just 18 days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks:

* “It is our obligation to prepare for the soldiers of Allah who are advancing in the will of Allah, glorified and praised. We will prepare a foothold for them. Allah willing, this oppressive state will disappear, the oppressive state Israel. The oppressive country America will disappear. The oppressive country Britain will disappear - those who caused our people’s Catastrophe [PA term for the establishment of Israel]. – Muhammad Ibrahim Maadi, PA TV, June 8, 2001.

* “The Palestinian nation is the strongest on earth. Look at all the civilizations! Look at all the states! Look at all the civilizations and forces and empires. To where did Great Britain disappear..?

“We [Muslims] have ruled the world and a day will come, by Allah, and we shall rule the world [again]. The day will come and we shall rule America. The day will come and we shall rule Britain.” – Ibrahim Mudayris, PA TV, May 13, 2005.

“Allah, punish our enemies! You enemies, the enemies of the Religion [Islam]. ... Allah, punish America and those who set an alliance with it. ... Destroy them and destroy their weapons. ... Allah, cleanse the land of Islam from the treachery and shame, cleanse our lands from the conquerors’ filth, from the filth of America and the defilement of Britain. ...” – Muhammad Jamal Abu Hanud, PATV, Aug. 1, 2003

* “Those [Jews] do not know what a homeland is and do not know what a land is. ... Concerning Palestine, it belongs to us. ...

“They came, expelled from every land, came to this very country and claming to have a national homeland on the land of Palestine, with the help of Britain. That vengeance still stands between us and them; [a vengeance] that will not be forgotten except by a coward or traitor.” – Ibrahim Mudayris, PATV, April 4, 2004

* “In 1917 of the previous century, Palestine was conquered by Britain, on whom we place full responsibility for the events in this land. At this opportunity, we put the responsibility on Britain [for the creation of the state of Israel] and say: we will never forget our revenge! We will never forget our revenge on Britain, who cannot escape the burden of its historical, political and moral responsibility because of what it committed on the land of Palestine. ... “Britain [is the one] that promised them [Jews] the establishment of a national homeland on the land of Palestine. Why? Because Britain resented the Jewish presence there, in Britain, and wanted to be relieved of them. ... “ – Ibrahim Mudayris, PATV, May 13, 2005.

==============================

Enemies, foreign and domestic (Townhall.com, 050715)

Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — Last Nov. 2, Theo van Gogh, Dutch filmmaker and descendant of the painter, was cycling through Amsterdam. He was accosted by Mohammed Bouyeri, who shot him six times as Van Gogh pleaded “We can still talk about it! Don’t do it!” Bouyeri then cut his throat with a kitchen knife, severing his head all the way to his spine. Bouyeri was not done. He then took a five-page Islamist manifesto and with his knife impaled it on van Gogh’s chest.

On trial now in Holland, Bouyeri is unrepentant. In court he turned to van Gogh’s grieving mother, and with infinite cruelty said to her, “I do not feel your pain.”

He feels instead glory. Van Gogh had made a short film about the oppression of Muslim women. Bouyeri was acting “purely in the name of my religion,” championing his faith by butchering a filmmaker critical of it.

Bouyeri is no newly arrived immigrant. Nor is he, like the 9/11 hijackers, a cosmopolitan terrorist sent abroad to kill. He is native born and bred in Holland. As were three of the four London bombers, who were second-generation Pakistani Brits.

The most remarkable discovery is that Europe’s second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants are more radicalized than the first. One reasonably non-political and non-radical Muslim activist, raised in the suburbs of Paris, explained himself (to The Wall Street Journal) as having “immigrated to France at the local maternity ward.”

The fact that native-born Muslim Europeans are committing terror acts within their own countries shows that this Islamist malignancy long predates Iraq, long predates Afghanistan and long predates 9/11. What Europe had incubated is an enemy within, a threat that for decades Europe simply refused to face.

Early news reports of the London bombings mentioned that police found no suspects among known Islamist cells in Britain. Come again? Why in God’s name is a country letting known Islamist cells thrive, instead of just rolling them up?

British Islamists had spoken of a “covenant of security” under which Britain would be spared Islamic terror so long as it allowed radical clerics free rein. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, for example, a Syrian-born, exiled Saudi cleric granted asylum 19 years ago, openly preaches jihad against Britain. He is sought by the press for comment all the time. And, a lovely touch, he actually lives on the British dole — even though he rejects the idea of British citizenship, saying, “I don’t want to become a citizen of hell.”

One of the reasons Westerners were so unprepared for this wave of Islamist terrorism, not just militarily but psychologically, is sheer disbelief. It shockingly contradicts Western notions of progress. The savagery of Bouyeri’s act, mirroring the ritual human slaughter by Zarqawi or Daniel Pearl’s beheaders, is a return to a primitiveness that we in the West had assumed a progressive history had left behind.

Our first response was, therefore, to simply sweep this contradiction under the rug. Put the first World Trade Center bombers on trial and think it will solve the problem. Even today, there are many Americans and even more Europeans who believe that after 9/11 the United States should just have done Afghanistan — depose the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda’s sanctuary — and gone no further, thinking that would solve the problem.

But the problem is far deeper. It is essentially a civil war within a rival civilization in which the most primitive elements are seeking to gain the upper hand. 9/11 forced us to intervene massively in this civil war, which is why we are in Iraq. There, as in Afghanistan, we have enlisted millions of Muslims on the anti-Islamist side.

But what about the vast majority of European Muslims, the 99% who are peace-loving and not engaged in terror? They must also join the fight. They must actively denounce not just — what is obvious — the terror attacks, but their source: Islamist ideology and its practitioners.

Where are the fatwas issued against Osama bin Laden? Where are the denunciations of the very idea of suicide bombing? Europeans must demand this of all their Muslim leaders. They must also dismantle and destroy all “known” Islamist cells before trains and buses are blown up.

A modest beginning might be removing the likes of Sheik Omar — and Bouyeri — from the teat of the infidel taxpayer. “He (Bouyeri) had the time to plan this,” van Gogh’s mother told the court, “because for three years he was on unemployment benefits.” Decadence is defined not by a civilization’s art or music but ultimately by its willingness to simply defend itself.

==============================

Can you fight an idea? (Townhall.com, 050715)

Mona Charen

One was a young father of an 8-month-old. Another was a cricket fan. A third was supposedly “proud to be British.” Yet these four young Britons of Pakistani and Jamaican extraction committed an act of mass murder and suicide last week in the heart of London.

What were the danger signs? There were none, the stricken families of the terrorists report. The young men, between the ages of 19 and 30, showed no signs of violent intentions toward anyone. Only in retrospect does one red flag stand out: Several of them had, within the past two years, displayed a sudden increase in religious zeal.

Radical Islam is unlike any other modern religion. Imagine being afraid of someone because he had recently become a committed Christian, or Buddhist, or Jew, or Hindu? And indeed, most Muslims around the world are peaceable. But radical Islam is like a throwback to violent cults of mankind’s more primitive past. We know that Aztecs cut the hearts out of young men and women as they offered them to the gods. We know that many early civilizations practiced child sacrifice. People are evidently capable of any atrocity, provided they are convinced that the act is ordained by God — or some substitute for God, like Nazism or communism. And it is a most powerful idea indeed that can induce young, healthy men not just to kill infidels but to kill themselves for the satisfaction of killing infidels.

We have declared a war on terror, but the critics of this imprecision in language are right. Failing to name the true enemy obscures our task. The enemy is Islamism — the radical interpretation of Islam that sanctions violent jihad, and whose grievances include, to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, the unveiled female face, the existence of the Jews, the existence of Hindus, music, literature, democracy, and nearly everything we hold dear.

Until we clarify the enemy, we fumble about in the dark when it comes to fighting this war. Europeans have long tolerated the presence of radical mosques in their midst. As Louis Caprioli, formerly head of the DST, France’s equivalent of the FBI, told the Weekly Standard, “Behind every Muslim terrorist is a radical imam.” Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who has risen to prominence since the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004, declares, “For too long we’ve been tolerant of the intolerant.”

As are we here in the United States. Saudi money is infiltrating many of the mosques in America. With Saudi money come Wahhabi imams, textbooks and agitators. Saudi financed and controlled organizations have trained Muslim chaplains for the U.S. armed services. And radical Islamists are making inroads in Muslim student organizations on American campuses.

Remarkably, the one area in which officials exercise total control; that is, in prisons, the Islamists have found their most fertile soil. This is true in Spain, where the terrorists who bombed Madrid on March 11, 2004, met in prison, and in America where Jose Padilla, who allegedly participated in a plot to explode a dirty bomb in a U.S. city, was converted to Islam in prison. Wilders told the UPI that in Holland, “Our secret service has already known for two years that the recruitment for jihad in mosques and prisons were no longer incidents but a structural phenomenon.” The U.S. Justice Department inspector general warned recently that federal prisoners were being radicalized by religious services performed entirely in Arabic. Even among native-born English-speaking inmates, radical Islam is making inroads. The Bureau of Prisons was cited in 2003 for hiring Wahhabi imams. According to the Associated Press, 25% of the inmates at New York’s Riker’s Island prison are Muslims. It is impossible to know what percentage may be Islamists — but among a population of already disaffected men, it isn’t difficult to imagine the allure of an angry faith. The FBI has called America’s prisons “fertile ground for extremists.”

At the end of the day, lovers of freedom, decency and enlightenment must prove themselves as dedicated to preserving their civilization as the Islamists are to destroying it. Surely a healthy step in that direction would be simply to stop “tolerating the intolerant.” We need not open our prisons to Islamist chaplains, nor our military to radical imams. How about doing the opposite — beating the bushes for the Islamist killers and purveyors of hate? Deportation, anyone?

==============================

Muslims Pay Attention (American Spectator, 050715)

How goes the battle for hearts and minds in the war on terrorism? A survey released yesterday by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, including polls conducted in six predominantly Muslim countries, offers some clues. (Note that all components of the survey were taken before the London bombings.)

Osama bin Laden, it turns out, has a bit of a PR problem in the Muslim world. Asked how much confidence they had in bin Laden “to do the right thing regarding world affairs,” the percentage of respondents answering “a lot of confidence” dropped, since May 2003, from 38 to 25 in Jordan, from 37 to 14 in Morocco, from 19 to 8 in Indonesia, and from 4 to less than 1 in Lebanon. In some countries, outright anti-Ladenist sentiment has also grown; the percentage of respondents answering “no confidence” jumped from 29 to 40 in Morocco, from 67 to 73 in Turkey, and from 64 to 78 in Lebanon.

Support, among Muslims, for suicide bombing against civilians has also faded. (Only Muslims were asked this question.) The percentage saying the practice is “never justified” jumped since March 2004 from 35 to 46 in Pakistan and from 38 to 79 in Morocco, and jumped since the summer of 2002 (the last time the question was asked in these countries) from 54 to 66 in Indonesia and from 12 to 33 in Lebanon. (The Turks held stable on the issue, with 66% saying suicide bombing is “never justified,” statistically identical to the 67% who gave that answer in March 2004.) Most interestingly, opposition to suicide bombings in Iraq specifically was higher, in several countries, than opposition to suicide bombing in general; 56% of Pakistanis and 41% of Lebanese oppose that “insurgent” tactic, along with 43% in Jordan, where only 11% oppose suicide bombing in general (and by “general,” obviously, they mean “Israel”).

Concern over the threat of Islamic extremism is widespread in several of these countries, with the percentage deeming the threat “very great” or “fairly great” at 47 in Turkey, 53 in Pakistan, 73 in Morocco, and 45 in Indonesia. Interestingly enough, respondents in different countries define “Islamic extremism” differently. In Lebanon, Jordan, and Morocco, the prevailing view is that Islamic extremism means “Using violence to get rid of non-Muslim influences in our country.” But to pluralities in Turkey and Indonesia, it means “advocating the legal imposition of strict Shari’ah on all Muslims.” The respondents in those two democracies, it seems, are less worried about their Muslim extremists killing people than they are about their getting elected — another point in democracy’s favor, I’d say.

It isn’t all good news; in Pakistan, bin Laden’s popularity has actually grown; 51% of Pakistanis express “some” or “a lot of” confidence in bin Laden. And bin Laden’s support is slightly broader, if less intense, in Jordan, where the percentage expressing “some confidence” in bin Laden grew faster than the percentage expressing “a lot of confidence” dropped. The popularity of suicide bombing has also grown in Jordan, and the 79% of Moroccans who said suicide bombing was “never justified” shrunk to 40% when Iraq was brought up. Anti-Semitism remains endemic in the Muslim world, where the number holding a “very unfavorable” opinion of Jews reaches 99% in both Jordan and Lebanon; Turkey, where 60% hold an unfavorable opinion toward Jews (44% “very unfavorable”), is among these countries the philo-Semitic standout.

But the trends are headed in the right direction. Fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq does not seem to have massively radicalized the Muslim world; if anything the opposite is happening. Another defeat for defeatism.

John Tabin is a frequent online contributor to The American Spectator.

==============================

‘University of Jihad’ teaches students hate and bigotry (Times Online, 050715)

From Zahid Hussain in Islamabad

SPORTING black turbans or skull caps, the young men squat on a carpet in a crowded classroom and listen in silence to a lecture given by a thickly bearded, middle-aged cleric.

The students are at the final stage of their religious education at Darul Uloom Haqqania, one of Pakistan’s leading institutions of Islamic learning. Situated in the town of Akora Khatak, near Peshawar, the radical seminary is often described as the “University of Jihad”.

At least two of the London suicide bombers attended such a school.

The seminary, which was established in 1947, has been the cradle of the Taleban militia that ruled Afghanistan for more than five years before being ousted by the American-led coalition forces in 2001. Many of the Taleban leaders had graduated from the school.

The seminary has also been a recruiting centre for militant Pakistani groups fighting Indian forces in the disputed region of Kashmir. Many of its 2,500 students come from Afghanistan. But the number of foreign students has fallen after government pressure.

“The bomb attacks in London are the reaction against the British Government’s support for America’s war against Muslims,” said Maulana Samiul Haq, a fiery, black-turbaned cleric who is head of the seminary. He is also an MP in Pakistan. “The loss of innocent lives is regrettable, but the British Government should think why it all happened. It is time to review its policy on Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The school teaches the concept of jihad to prepare students to fight for the cause of Islam. “Jihad is an essential part of Islam,” said Mr Haq.

The proliferation of jihadi organisations in Pakistan over the past two decades has been the result of the militant culture espoused by radical madrassas, the hardline religious schools, like Darul Uloom Haqqania. They pose a threat to Pakistan’s internal security as well as abroad. Madrassas were once considered centres for basic religious learning, mostly attached to local mosques. The more formal ones were used for training clergy. The evolution of simple religious schools into training centres for Kalashnikov-toting religious warriors is directly linked with the rise of militant Islam.

Most of the pupils come from the poorest section of society and receive free religious education, lodgings and meals. Most of the madrassas have been isolated from the outside world for centuries. Students are brainwashed and the textbooks provide a one-dimensional world view that restricts their thought process.

Conditions in the schools are regularly condemned by human rights groups as crowded and inhuman. The day begins at dawn with morning prayer. A simple breakfast of bread and tea is served, followed by lessons, which continue until evening.

The students are subjected to a regime as harsh as any jail and physical abuse is commonplace. In many schools students are put in chains and heavy iron fetters for the slightest violation of rules. There are almost no extracurricular activities. Television and radio are banned. Teaching is very rudimentary and students are taught religion from a highly traditional perspective.

At the primary stage, pupils learn how to read, memorise and recite the Koran. Though the focus is on religious learning, some institutions also teach elementary mathematics, science and English.

The most dangerous consequence of the schools is that students emerge ill-prepared for any work except guiding the faithful in rituals that do not require great expertise. Job opportunities for graduates are few and far between. They can only work in mosques, madrassas or religious parties and their business affiliates.

The education imparted by traditional madrassas spawns factional, religious and cultural conflicts. It creates barriers to modern knowledge and breeds bigotry, laying the foundation on which fundamentalism is based. Divided along sectarian lines, these institutions are driven by the zeal to outnumber and dominate rival sects.

The rise of a jihad culture since the 1980s has given them a new sense of purpose. The number of madrassas multiplied and clergy emerged as a powerful political and social force. At independence in 1947 there were only 137 madrassas in Pakistan. Government sources put today’s figure at 13,000 with total enrolment close to 1.7 million.

==============================

CAIR to GOP: Repudiate Tancredo. Upset by radio discussion about bombing Mecca (WorldNetDaily, 050722)

The controversial lobby group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) wants the Republican Party to repudiate Rep. Tom Tancredo’s discussion in a recent radio interview about the possibility of the U.S. could bombing Mecca if provoked by a nuclear terrorist attack on American soil.

As WorldNetDaily reported, the Colorado Republican clarified his remarks after the interview Friday, saying he was not suggesting that the U.S. should bomb the Islamic holy site as a response to a nuclear homeland attack by al-Qaida.

The congressman’s press secretary told WorldNetDaily the comments were an off-the-cuff response to a hypothetical situation.

“He doesn’t believe that we should go out and threaten to bomb anybody’s holy city,” said spokesman Will Adams.

But CAIR’s government affairs director, Corey Saylor, urged the Republican Party and its leadership to “clearly distance America and the GOP from Tancredo’s inflammatory and irresponsible remarks.”

Yesterday, CAIR sent letters to President Bush and the chairmen of the national and Colorado Republican Parties.

“While the rest of America seeks to win the war on terror, isolate extremists and improve our nation’s international image, Rep. Tancredo is busy handing rhetorical ammunition to those who would do us harm,” Saylor said.

In the interview with Pat Campbell of WFLA radio in Orlando, Tancredo discussed his request for a briefing from the Justice Department on information it has on plans revealed by WND this week for a nuclear attack on the U.S. by al-Qaida terrorists.

Campbell noted that just after the July 7 London bombings, former Israeli counterterrorism intelligence officer Juval Aviv predicted an attack in the U.S. within the next 90 days. Aviv believes the plan is to attack not one big city, like New York, but half-a-dozen smaller ones, including towns in the heartland.

The host asked Tancredo, “Worst case scenario, if they do have these nukes inside the border, what would our response be?”

The congressman replied: “There are things you could threaten to do before something like that happens, and then you have to do afterwards, that are quite draconian.”

“Well,” Tancredo continued, “what if you said something like, ‘If this happens in the United States and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you could take out their holy sites.’”

Campbell: “You’re talking about bombing Mecca?”

Tancredo: “Yeah. What if you said, we recognize that this is the ultimate threat to the United States, therefore this is the ultimate response.”

The congressman quickly added, “I don’t know, I’m just throwing out some ideas, because it seems that at that point in time you would be talking about taking the most draconian measures you could imagine. Because other than that, all you could do is tighten up internally.”

The Washington, D.C.-based CAIR is a spin-off of a group described by two former FBI counterterrorism chiefs as a “front group” for the terrorist group Hamas in the U.S.

Several CAIR leaders have been convicted on terror-related charges.

==============================

Reality and Islam (Washington Times, 050722)

By Diana West

Last week, I outlined the problem of the age: the incompatibility of Islam with a multicultural West that hides away inconvenient history and disturbing doctrine under layers of political correctness. Without stripping them off to examine the problem, all we get is a lot of wishful thinking.

Historian Niall Ferguson, writing in the Telegraph on the intensifying “Muslim colonization” of Europe, has decided that such “demographic shifts” are not “invariably a bad thing.” After all, seven centuries of jihad-imposed dhimmitude for infidels in Muslim Spain gave us the Alhambra, or something. It’s that pesky “ideology” of conquest that follows all the shifting that’s the problem — something he thinks European Muslims ought to take “a much closer look at.” Really stern stuff.

Over at the Boston Globe, a lefty editorial mantra turns culture clash into harmonic convergence: “European Muslims and non-Muslims must learn to live together. Each will have to practice the tolerance that [Theo van Gogh] assassin Bouyeri proudly scorned.” They must, must they? As sharia law becomes a democratic option, who will enforce such tolerance?

As conservatives, columnist Charles Krauthammer and blogger-cum-radio host Hugh Hewitt still fight the good fight, but, in these multicultural days, that means sorting through “extremism” and finding nothing too terribly Islamic about it. Mr. Hewitt writes that my arguments of last week were wrong, citing “functioning democracies in Turkey and other predominantly Islamic countries” as evidence of Islamo-Western compatibility. He throws in the loyal host (“millions of loyal British and American citizens”) for good measure. Problem is, the extent to which Turkey — where, just incidentally, “Mein Kampf” was a top 10 bestseller this spring — has ever functioned as a democracy is directly related to the efforts of a strong man, Ataturk, to constrain Islam’s grip on the country’s institutions, replacing religion with a doctrine of Turkish racial and civilizational supremacy. And while it tugs on the heartstrings, the loyalty of individual Muslims fails to neutralize or reform the institutions of jihad and dhimmitude that rise from Islamic teachings. That I even raised the issue, Mr. Hewitt writes, “underscores the almost desperate need for Muslim leaders in the West again and again, to denounce, without argument or sidebar mentions of Israel, etc., the use of terrorism as a weapon.” Almost desperate is right.

Having determined that “99%” of European Muslims are “peace-loving and not engaged in terror,” Charles Krauthammer sounds a similar alarm. “They must actively denounce not just ... the terrorist attacks, but their source: the Islamist ideology and its practitioners. Where are the fatwas against Osama bin Laden? Where are the denunciations of the very idea of suicide bombing? Europeans must demand this of all their Muslim leaders.”

Why Europeans? Why not the Krauthammer 99%, or the Hewitt millions? This is where it gets tricky, where those cultural ties to terrorism’s tactics and/or goals seem to be all too binding. It is true that in March, something called the Spanish Muslim Council issued a fatwa against Osama bin Laden, calling him an apostate for his atrocities. Judea Pearl, father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, mentions this in his Boston Globe piece about a clerically star-studded conference on Islam in Jordan this month. Mr. Pearl notes that the fatwa led many to believe it would be followed by others, “and,” he writes, “that using the Islamic instruments of fatwa, apostasy and fasad (corruption), Muslims would be able to disassociate themselves from those who hijacked their religion.”

He continues: “Unfortunately, the realization of these expectations will need to wait for a brave new leadership to emerge. The final communique of the Amman conference, issued July 6, states explicitly: ‘It is not possible to declare as apostates any group of Muslims who believes in Allah the Mighty and Sublime and His Messenger (may Peace and Blessings be upon him) and the pillars of faith, and respects the pillars of Islam and does not deny any necessary article of religion.’”

Mr. Pearl spells out the chilling ramifications: “In other words, belief in basic tenets of faith provides an immutable protection from charges of apostasy.” Even what Mr. Pearl calls “anti-Islamic behavior,” including “the advocacy of mass murder in the name of religion, cannot remove that protection,” he writes. “Bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the murderers of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg will remain bona fide members of the Muslim faith, as long as they do not explicitly renounce it.”

Which leaves conservative Muslims, liberal Muslims and everybody else between a rock and hard place. Isn’t it time to crack things open?

==============================

One common enemy: Radical Islam (townhall.com, 050725)

Joel Mowbray

After the terrorist attacks in London, the Sun Online in the UK published a special feature of Islamic terrorist attacks that have occurred around the world since 1993.

The newspaper listed the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the explosion on a Philippines Air jet in 1994 that killed one and injured 10, the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 26 U.S. servicemen in 1996, the East Africa Embassy bombings in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, September 11, bombings in Bali and Jakarta, recent attacks in Saudi Arabia, the 3/11 Madrid bombings, and several others.

The world map posted by the Sun for this feature showed dots all over the atlas—except one area that is notably dot-free.

If this feature is to be believed, then practically the only place in the world to have been untouched by Islamic terrorism in the past decade is Israel.

Obviously, this was no accidental omission. Europeans, like much of the world, have long believed that the terror faced by the Jewish state is a particularized domestic dispute, or more specifically, a “resistance” to “occupation.” Few have linked Palestinian terrorism to the larger, global movement of Islamic terrorism depicted in great detail by the Sun Online.

While the old PLO, led by secular Communists under the banner of Arab nationalism, had no connection to the older European terrorist groups like the Irish Republican Army or the Basque separatists in Spain, brainwashed Palestinian youths blowing themselves up are motivated by the same ideology shared by Islamic terrorists from Indonesia to London.

With Wednesday’s announcement by British authorities that the terrorists behind the attacks were suicide bombers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that Israel faces a different enemy than the rest of the West.

As even Tony Blair himself noted, the perpetrators killed in the name of Islam—just as young Palestinian suicide bombers do. It was only after Arafat turned to Islam as his rallying cry that he was able to get young children to strap bombs onto their chest.

Palestinian children are indoctrinated to believe that violence is inherent in Islam, and those die in the course of murdering Jews will be rewarded with eternal paradise. “Martyrdom” is so glorified in Palestinian schools and society at large, in fact, that kids barely into puberty clamor for the “privilege” and “honor” of becoming a “shahid.”

The exaltation of terrorism under the guise of Islam helps explain why most of the suicide bombers come from middle- and upper-middle-class families. Early reports indicate that the four suicide bombers in the London attacks also were not from impoverished backgrounds—and all were born and raised in Britain.

But even before the London attacks, abundant evidence demonstrated that the Palestinian terrorist organizations were fellow travelers with the likes of al Qaeda. The views and goals of Hamas and Hezbollah, among other terrorist groups, are, if anything, in sync with those of al Qaeda.

Hamas founder and former “spiritual” leader Sheikh Yassin said repeatedly during his life that the entire world should become Islamic, that there was no legitimate government without Shari’a law—a position indistinguishable from that of Osama bin Laden.

Hezbollah’s founding charter calls for the destruction of the United States for its role in preventing the spread of Islam. And long before the start of the current intifada, Hezbollah had killed more Americans before 9/11 than any other terrorist entity on earth.

It’s not just the leadership of Palestinian terrorist organizations, however, that are of like mind with Osama bin Laden. Lest we forget the images of thousands of Palestinians cheering and gleefully burning American flags on September 11.

Already, many have attempted to claim that the “reason” for the London attacks was Britain’s involvement in the war in Iraq. What this ignores, however, is that adherents of al Qaeda don’t need a reason to attack other than the existence of freedom—a concept that goes against the core belief in Shari’a law and the necessity of Islamic states.

In the decade before 9/11, many U.S. targets were hit: the World Trade Center in 1993, Khobar Towers in 1996, the East Africa embassies in 1998, and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. Each time, we did nothing. Yet al Qaeda struck anyway on September 11.

There is a “reason” why four young British men took their own lives in order to murder more than 50. But it’s not Iraq. It’s not Afghanistan. It’s not Israel. It’s radical Islam.

==============================

Pope won’t call Islam religion of peace (WorldNetDaily, 050726)

‘I would not like to use big words to apply generic labels’

Pope Benedict XVI yesterday refused to declare Islam “a religion of peace.”

Asked by reporters whether Islam could be considered a religion of peace shortly before entering a meeting with priests and deacons of Valle d’Aosta in northwest Italy where he is spending a brief holiday, the pontiff refused to reply positively.

“I would not like to use big words to apply generic labels,” he replied. “It certainly contains elements that can favor peace, it also has other elements: We must always seek the best elements.”

The day before, he asked God to stop the terrorists.

“Even these days of serenity and repose have been disrupted by the tragic news of the execrable terrorist attacks which have brought death, destruction and suffering to various countries such as Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Great Britain,” he said. “As we entrust to divine goodness the dead and injured and their loved ones, victims of gestures that offend both God and man, we call on the Almighty to block the murderous hand of those who, driven by fanaticism and hatred, committed these acts, and we ask that He convert their hearts to thoughts of reconciliation and peace.”

He asked Muslims to embrace peace.

“Renounce the way of violence which causes so much suffering to civilian populations, and instead to embrace the way of peace,” he said in a statement issued through Vatican Cardinal Secretary of State Angelo Sodano, in response to terrorist attacks at the popular Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh in Egypt.

==============================

Muslims Call Comments by WMAL Host ‘Hate-Filled’ (Washington Post, 050726)

A local radio talk show host touched off complaints from an Islamic civil rights organization yesterday after repeatedly describing Islam on the air as “a terrorist organization” that is “at war with America.”

The organization, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), asked the station to take disciplinary action against Michael Graham, who hosts WMAL-AM’s late-morning call-in program.

A station executive, Randall Bloomquist, said yesterday that Graham’s comments were “amped up” but justified within the context of the program. He said the station, which is owned by the Walt Disney Co., had no plans to reprimand Graham.

The show host touched off the flap during a discussion of the Muslim community’s response to recent acts of terrorism. Graham suggested the fault lies with Muslims generally because religious leaders and followers haven’t done enough to condemn and root out extreme elements. “The problem is not extremism,” Graham said, according to both CAIR and the station. “The problem is Islam.” He also said, “We are at war with a terrorist organization named Islam.”

CAIR denounced the comments yesterday as “hate-filled” and “Islamophobic” and asked its members to contact the station’s advertisers to express their dismay.

“It’s amazing,” said Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s communications director. “I talked with Mr. Bloomquist and asked him if he would reprimand someone who used the n-word on the air. He said yes. I asked him if he would reprimand someone who read [approvingly] from the [anti-Semitic] ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ He said yes. So I asked him if he would do the same if someone had called Islam a terroristic organization. Well, he said, it’s all about context, but he never quite explained it to me.”

Added Hooper, “The First Amendment allows people to be idiots and bigots. All you can do is embarrass people and have them defend their reputation. If WMAL doesn’t feel embarrassed and doesn’t want to defend its reputation in the face of anti-Muslim bigotry, then there’s not much we can do about it.”

Graham, who broadcasts locally, is one of several conservative hosts heard on WMAL (630). The station’s daily lineup includes the syndicated Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity programs.

After rising slightly during the months preceding the presidential election last year, WMAL’s audience ratings have fallen precipitously. Exact ratings for Graham’s 9-11:45 a.m. time slot are unavailable, but WMAL’s morning programming, which includes part of Graham’s program, are off 25% since last year. The station overall has lost 41% of its core 25-to-54-year-old audience in the past 12 months, dropping from 158,200 individual listeners per week to 116,600.

Graham declined to comment when contacted yesterday, saying, “I’m saving all my comments for my show. You’ll just have to listen.” But in his weekly column, which will appear on WMAL’s Web site today, he repeats the statement that “Islam is a terror organization” and makes the following analogy:

“If the Boy Scouts of America had 1,000 Scout troops, and 10 of them practiced suicide bombings, then the BSA would be considered a terrorist organization. If the BSA refused to kick out those 10 troops, that would make the case even stronger. If people defending terror repeatedly turned to the Boy Scout handbook and found language that justified and defended murder —and the scoutmasters responded by saying ‘Could be’ — the Boy Scouts would have been driven out of America long ago.

“Today, Islam has whole sects and huge mosques that preach terror. Its theology is openly used to give the murderers their motives. Millions of its members give these killers comfort. The question isn’t how dare I call Islam a terrorist organization, but rather why more people do not.”

Bloomquist said his station had received more than 100 e-mails protesting Graham’s comments, many of them, he said, apparently generated by CAIR’s e-mails to its members. He went on to defend Graham, saying, “Remember that this is talk radio. We don’t do the dainty minuet of the newspaper editorial page. It’s not ‘Washington Week in Review.’ It depends on pungent statements to drive it. Michael is rattling the cage. It’s designed to start and further a conversation, and it has certainly done that.”

Graham made waves earlier this year when he scuffled with Montgomery County police after he tried to attend an event for illegal immigrants while wearing a T-shirt that read “INS (I Need Border Security).” He also recently led a rally in front of The Washington Post’s building in the District seeking the dismissal of Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, who wrote a story that inaccurately reported on alleged abuses of the Koran in the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (Newsweek is owned by The Washington Post Co.).

Graham has also clashed with CAIR in the past. The group last year cited him in a campaign called “Hate Hurts America” for what CAIR described as implicitly advocating violence against Muslims.

==============================

MAS’s Muslim Brotherhood Problem (Weekly Standard, 050525)

Does the Muslim American Society want an Islamic government in the United States?

ON MAY 14, 2005, PAX-TV’s Faith Under Fire broadcast a debate that I took part in against Mahdi Bray, the executive director of the Muslim American Society’s (MAS) Freedom Foundation. Bray had selected the debate topic in advance, and chose to argue about “The United States of Islam?”—that is, whether American Muslims wanted to see Islamic law (sharia) implemented in the United States. While I unwaveringly agreed that most American Muslims don’t want to see the United States ruled by Islamic law, I nonetheless jumped at the chance to debate this topic against Bray. After all, the Chicago Tribune recently published a story detailing how the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States as none other than MAS. So while most American Muslims don’t want to see the United States governed by sharia, Bray’s organization does. And while researching for the debate, I found that MAS—except in its most public of statements—is quite open about its agenda and allegiances. Even a brief review of various MAS chapters’ websites provides a revealing look at what the national organization is teaching its members.

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD is an international Islamist group that largely operates underground and behind the scenes, with branches in about 70 countries. The Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher who—in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and abolition of the caliphate—bemoaned the sickness of the Ummah, or larger Muslim community. The Brotherhood’s response to this perceived sickness was to emphasize doctrinally that Islam encompasses all the affairs of man. As al-Banna wrote, “Islam is faith and worship, a country and a citizenship, a religion and a state. It is spirituality and hard work. It is a Qur’an and a sword.” The group also emphasizes that Islam is a universal faith. As al-Banna put it, Islam “has encompassed all aspects of human life, for all peoples and nations, and for all times and ages.”

Because the Brotherhood views Islam as all-encompassing and universal, one of its highest goals is to spread Islamic law. The Chicago Tribune explains that the controversial “ultimate goal” of the U.S. Brotherhood is “to create Muslim states overseas and, they hope, someday in America as well.” Brotherhood members did emphasize to the Tribune that they operate within the laws of the countries where they live:

They stress that they do not believe in overthrowing the U.S. government, but rather that they want as many people as possible to convert to Islam so that one day—perhaps generations from now—a majority of Americans will support a society governed by Islamic law.

Despite these pronouncements, the Muslim Brotherhood has not always been known for non-violence. The “Qur’an and a sword” outlook trumpeted by al-Banna is, for example, evident in the organization’s militant motto: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Consistent with this motto, Muslim Brotherhood members have been involved in such episodes as the assassination of Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nokrashi and the attempted assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

One of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most violent theoreticians was Sayyid Qutb, whose ideas heavily influenced Osama bin Laden’s current conception of jihad. The 9/11 Commission Report explains Qutb’s writings:

Three basic themes emerge from Qutb’s writings. First, he claimed that the world was beset with barbarism, licentiousness, and unbelief (a condition he called jihiliyya, the religious term for the period of ignorance prior to the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed). Qutb argued that humans can choose only between Islam and jihiliyya. Second, he warned that more people, including Muslims, were attracted to jihiliyya and its material comforts than to his view of Islam; jihiliyya could therefore triumph over Islam. Third, no middle ground exists in what Qutb conceived as a struggle between God and Satan. All Muslims—as he defined them—therefore must take up arms in this fight. Any Muslim who rejects his ideas is just one more nonbeliever worthy of destruction.

THIS BRINGS US to MAS, which was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 and today has 53 chapters nationwide and about 10,000 members. According to the Chicago Tribune, a contentious debate among Brotherhood members preceded MAS’s incorporation, and the Muslim American Society is now the name under which the U.S. Brotherhood operates.

While MAS leaders admit that their organization was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, they claim that the two are now completely distinct. For example, MAS official Shaker Elsayed told the Chicago Tribune, “Ikhwan [Brotherhood] members founded MAS, but MAS went way beyond that point of conception.” The fact that a MAS spokesman such as Bray feels comfortable publicly arguing that MAS does not want to see an Islamic state in America demonstrates the strength of its public disavowal of the Muslim Brotherhood.

On Faith Under Fire I stated that, consonant with the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda, MAS has made clear that it would like to see our constitutional order replaced with rule according to the Koran and Sunnah. In response, Bray stated definitively, “I would be very happy if we could just maintain the constitutional principles that we have in the United States.” He went on to say that, for the past two years, the MAS Freedom Foundation has been training Muslims about the Constitution and showing them how to “take full benefit of those beautiful things called the Bill of Rights.” In fact, he accused me of taking words from MAS’s websites out of context, and claimed that MAS’s true agenda was “to support . . . the U.S. Constitution and to defend the Constitution against enemies both domestic and foreign.”

Let us examine what MAS stands for today—with reference only to its own material that is readily available on the internet—and determine who was taking MAS’s agenda out of context.

MAS’s outlook is best reflected in its curriculum. While any Muslim can join MAS by paying $10 a month in dues, the group has various gradations of membership. MAS’s highest membership class is “active” membership. To attain active member status, a Muslim must complete five years of community service and education. The website for MAS Minnesota outlines the objectives of MAS’s active member program. These objectives include:

(1) Continue building the correct unified comprehension of Islam as outlined in the Message of the Teachings by Imam Al-Banna. . . .

(9) Make the member fulfill his duties as outlined in the Message of the Teachings by Imam Al-Banna.

Although these objectives appear on MAS Minnesota’s website, there is no suggestion that they apply only to the regional chapter. Instead, MAS Minnesota’s website discusses the MAS curriculum in general terms that suggest that it is presenting the national organization’s curriculum and objectives.

And the listed objectives are telling. Even a cursory review of The Message of the Teachings indicates that al-Banna’s “unified comprehension of Islam” falls short of a call to defend the Constitution against enemies both foreign and domestic. In that book, al-Banna tells his fellow Muslims that they must work toward “[r]eforming the government so that it may become a truly Islamic government, performing as a servant to the nation in the interest of the people. By Islamic government I mean a government whose officers are Muslims who perform the obligatory duties of Islam, who do not make public their disobedience, and who enforce the rules and teachings of Islam.” Moreover, al-Banna implores his followers to “[c]ompletely boycott non-Islamic courts and judicial systems. Also, dissociate yourself from organisations, newspapers, committees, schools, and institutions which oppose your Islamic ideology.”

The message that all countries should be ruled by Islamic law is echoed throughout MAS’s membership curriculum. For example, MAS requires all its adjunct members to read Fathi Yakun’s book To Be a Muslim. In that volume, Yakun spells out his expansive agenda: “Until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments, every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful.”

Al-Banna flatly states in The Message of the Teachings that violence is an acceptable means for spreading Islamic ideology: “Always intend to go for Jihad and desire martyrdom. Prepare for it as much as you can.”

Nor is al-Banna’s work the only one in MAS’s curriculum to advocate the promotion of Islam through violence. MAS’s adjunct members are required to read Syed Qutb’s Milestones. Among other things, Milestones contains Qutb’s exposition on “Jihad in the Cause of God,” which is a refutation of those who claim that jihad encompasses only defensive warfare. Qutb states that jihad is, in fact, justified when the sole purpose is the establishment of Islam:

The reasons for Jihad which have been described in the above verses are these: to establish God’s authority in the earth; to arrange human affairs according to the true guidance provided by God; to abolish all the Satanic forces and Satanic systems of life; to end the lordship of one man over others since all men are creatures of God and no one has the authority to make them his servants or to make arbitrary laws for them. These reasons are sufficient for proclaiming Jihad.

JUST AS BRAY CLAIMED that one of MAS’s primary goals is to support and defend the Constitution, MAS president Esam Omeish recently wrote that the reason MAS draws inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood is “in order to espouse the values of human dialogue, tolerance and moderation.” Yet both MAS’s curriculum and also the scholars that MAS requires its members to read openly flout these values.

While Bray pointed out in our debate that MAS has educated Muslims about the American judicial system, that is not the issue. Muslims in America have no choice but to use the U.S. courts. Rather, the issue is one of respect for the liberal democratic traditions at the bedrock of our culture. While Bray tries to portray MAS as an organization that embraces these shared values, the group simultaneously teaches its members that all government should become Islamic and that non-Islamic judicial systems should be boycotted.

MAS has long played a double game where, despite its fringe outlook, it attempts to pass itself off as mainstream. When the Chicago Tribune began to lift the curtain on this deception with its investigative report, MAS’s leadership quibbled with the portrait that the newspaper painted. Yet an even bigger indictment lies in the material that MAS requires its members to read—and in the book that it touts as “the correct unified comprehension of Islam.”

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is an international counterterrorism consultant and an attorney with Boies, Schiller & Flexner.

==============================

Muslim scholar: Killing civilians OK (WorldNetDaily, 050712)

Head of Islamic center in London responds to attack

Responding to questions about the terrorist attack on London, a Muslim scholar in the British capital asserted Islam makes no distinction between civilians and military targets.

“The term ‘civilians’ does not exist in Islamic religious law,” said Hani Al-Siba’i, head of the Al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies in London.

Al-Siba’i, in an interview with the Arab news channel al-Jazeera, elaborated, “There is no such term as ‘civilians’ in the modern Western sense. People are either of Dar Al-Harb or not.”

Dar Al-Harb refers to the Muslim concept of the world being divided into two “houses,” the House of Islam and the remaining territories, the House of War, or Dar Al-Harb.

Al-Siba’i speculated that a Western nation could have been responsible for the attack, but he acknowledged it could have been carried out by Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization, according to a transcript provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI.

“If al-Qaida indeed carried out this act, it is a great victory for it,” he said. “It rubbed the noses of the world’s eight most powerful countries in the mud.”

But al-Siba’i said British Prime Minister Tony Blair “made a grave error when he spoke before the investigation and claimed that the perpetrators of these acts were acting in the name of Islam.”

The Muslim leader said “the possibility that it was done by the intelligence agency of another Western country hostile to Britain” should not be ruled out.

He also conjectured it could have been done by “some Zionist Americans who wanted to overshadow the G-8 summit.”

Al-Siba’i finally said al-Qaida could not be ruled out as the perpetrator.

He asserted the terrorist organization controls the “war agenda” in Iraq and “imposes its policies” on the Middle East.

As an example, he pointed out that al-Qaida’s beheading of an Egyptian envoy prompted Cairo to lower its level of representation in Baghdad.

On the subject of targeting civilians, the al-Jazeera host asked Al-Siba’i: “You, as a Muslim and as the director of a center for Islamic history. ... Is targeting wretched civilians considered brave or manly?”

Al-Siba’i replied that after the Madrid bombing, bin Laden called on the people of Western nations to pressure their governments.

“He told them: We did not attack you. You have been attacking us for more than two centuries, and your campaign continues. He said to them simply: Withdraw your soldiers from the Arabian Peninsula, withdraw from Afghanistan and Palestine.”

Asked whether he considered bin Laden a religious scholar who issues fatwas or the head of al-Qaida, Siba’i said, “First of all, he is one of this (Islamic) nation. ... We have no clergy or a pope, or anything like this. Anyone can carry out his religious duty, even if he is by himself.”

The host argued that the religious law assembly in Mecca at the end of last month issued a fatwa forbidding the killing of civilians.

“Should we follow it or Osama bin Laden?” the host asked.

Al-Siba’i said, “These assemblies resemble the assemblies of the church. These assemblies forbid young people from going to Iraq to fight the jihad. The Higher Religious Authority (in Saudi Arabia) are the ones who allowed the presence of Crusader forces in the Land of the Two Holy Places (Saudi Arabia).”

==============================

Muslim Support for Bin Laden Falls, Poll Says (Foxnews, 050714)

WASHINGTON — People in several heavily Muslim countries have lost some of their enthusiasm for Usama bin Laden and for violent acts like terror bombings, especially in countries where there have been recent terrorist acts, international polling found.

Surveys conducted for the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press looked at attitudes of people living in Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey, all countries with Muslim majorities, as part of an international survey of 17 countries done this spring.

In Lebanon, the number of people who think the use of bombings and other forms of violence is justified in defense of Islam has dropped from 73% in the summer of 2002 to 39% now. A decrease in this number also was seen in Morocco, which fell from 40% a year ago to 13% now, and in Pakistan and Indonesia. In Jordan, the number of people who feel such violence is justified has grown slightly; the number in Turkey remains very low.

Since March 2004, the sentiment for bombings against Americans and their allies in Iraq dropped from 70% to 49% in Jordan, which neighbors Iraq, and dropped by smaller margins in Pakistan, Turkey and Morocco.

The polling was done before the terrorist bombings in London last week.

Public confidence in bin Laden has dipped sharply since May 2003 in Indonesia, Morocco, Lebanon and Turkey — all countries that have experienced recent terrorist bombings. In Pakistan and Jordan, a majority of people continue to say they have at least some confidence in bin Laden, the Saudi who leads Al Qaeda.

“Support for Usama bin Laden is waning, but there are still people who admire him and view him as a hero,” said Ulil Abshor Abdala, chairman of the Islamic Liberal Network, a non-governmental organization in Indonesia that supports religious moderation and interfaith harmony.

“For some youth Usama Bin Laden is like Che Guevera, it does not matter what you say, he is a hero to them. Our challenge is how to limit the extent of this heroic admiration among the youth,” Abdala said.

The United States remains broadly unpopular in those heavily Muslim countries. Solid majorities of the people in Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan and Indonesia have an unfavorable view of the United States, while Moroccans are split. Young people in Morocco, Lebanon, Pakistan and Turkey view America more favorably than the overall populations in those countries, the polling found.

Reasons for Islamic extremism varied from one majority-Muslim country to the next. Poverty and a lack of jobs were mentioned most often in some countries, while U.S. policies and influence were mentioned in others. Lack of education, immorality and lawlessness also were cited.

“The concern about the causes of extremism are varied,” said Wendy Sherman, who was counselor for the State Department in the Clinton administration. “When the U.S. government looks at our counterterrorism efforts, we clearly have to use a variety of approaches.”

The surveys found that public acceptance is growing in some majority-Muslim countries that democracy is not strictly a Western way of doing things but could work in their countries. In Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco and Indonesia, increasing numbers of people feel that democracy can work there.

The Pew survey found some conflicting feelings about Islam in majority-Muslim countries.

In all of those countries except Jordan, people were more likely to say Islam is playing a greater role in their countries than it did a few years ago. The increasing role of Islam was overwhelmingly seen as a positive development in all those countries except Turkey. Respondents said growing immorality, government corruption and concerns about Western influence were among their reasons for turning to Islam.

A majority of people in Morocco and Pakistan say Islamic extremism greatly threatens their country, and almost half in Indonesia and Turkey said it poses a great threat. Few people in Lebanon and Jordan felt that way.

Muslims in Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan and Morocco say they think of themselves first as Muslims, then as citizens of their country. Muslims in Lebanon and Indonesia were divided on how they think of themselves first.

The polls were taken in various countries from late April to the end of May with samples of about 1,000 in most countries and slightly fewer than 1,000 in the European countries. The margin of sampling error ranged from 2%age points to 4%age points, depending on the sample size.

==============================

Blair takes on Islamic extremism (Washington Times, 050721)

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who yesterday called for an international conference on Islamic extremism, is proving far more willing than President Bush to demand that Muslim leaders confront their own failings in the global war on terror.

In the two weeks since coordinated suicide bombings killed at least 56 persons on London’s subways and a bus, Mr. Blair has repeatedly said the Islamic community and scholars face a special responsibility to curb the “evil ideology” behind the attacks.

Britain’s Muslims must “confront this evil ideology, take it on and defeat it by the force of reason and argument,” Mr. Blair told reporters in London on Monday.

British officials said details of the proposed conference remain sketchy, but Mr. Blair told the House of Commons yesterday that it would address head-on the sources of Islamist violence, such as Muslim religious schools in Pakistan and other countries that have a violently anti-Western bias.

The British prime minister noted that more than two dozen countries have been attacked by al Qaeda and its affiliates, and Britain cannot defeat the threat alone.

“Though the terrorists will use all sorts of issues to justify what they do, the roots of it do go deep, they are often not found in this country alone, [and] therefore international action is also necessary,” he said.

Mr. Blair’s response contrasts with the language used by Mr. Bush after the September 11 attacks, also engineered by al Qaeda and its sympathizers.

Despite leading military coalitions to oust regimes in overwhelmingly Muslim Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Bush repeatedly insists that his global war on terror is not a war on Islam.

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace,” he said in a visit to Washington’s Islamic Center just five days after the 2001 attacks.

The State Department this week took the unusual step of publicly repudiating the comments of Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, when he suggested that the United States consider bombing Mecca and other Muslim holy sites in the event of an Islamist nuclear attack.

Such comments are “insulting and offensive to all of us,” said State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.

Mr. Blair and his top ministers have reached out to British Muslim leaders since the July 7 bombings and have stressed that the vast majority of the country’s 1.6 million Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding.

But London police Commissioner Ian Blair also said this week that Britain’s Muslim leaders had been in “denial” about the extent of extremism in their midst.

“The crucial issue now is: ‘Can we engage with the [Muslim] community in Britain so that they move from being fairly close to denial about this into a situation in which they really engage us?’” he said.

The Guardian newspaper reported yesterday that British officials are setting up “Muslim Contact Units” to gather intelligence on extremist activity in a number of regions.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke told lawmakers that the government planned to create a global database of extremists and would push for more powers to prosecute and deport those who offer even an “indirect incitement to terrorism” — measures clearly aimed at Islamist propaganda and hate speech.

Nile Gardiner, an analyst on British politics at the Heritage Foundation, said Mr. Blair, far more than Mr. Bush, “is taking a head-on approach and not skirting the central issue, which is Islamic terrorism.”

He said the differing approaches of the two reflect in part the fact that the September 11 attackers all came from abroad, while the four bombers who carried out the London attacks were second- and even third-generation British citizens.

Mr. Blair has also earned a measure of respect and diplomatic leeway in the Arab and Muslim world by pressing Mr. Bush repeatedly for progress on the Palestinian-Israeli settlement even as the war in Iraq continues.

Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the District-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the group welcomed Mr. Blair’s idea for an international gathering on Islamic extremism.

He said leading Muslim groups around the world have condemned the London bombings, including in a statement to be released today by leading Canadian imams condemning religious-inspired terrorism.

“It clearly shows that we are all fed up with any violence that claims to be motivated by religious belief,” Mr. Hooper said.

==============================

North American Muslims Issue Fatwa Against Terrorism (Foxnews, 050728)

American Muslim scholars who interpret religious law for their community issued an edict Thursday condemning terrorism against civilians in response to the wave of deadly attacks in Britain and other countries.

In the statement, called a fatwa, the 18-member Fiqh Council of North America wrote that people who commit terrorism in the name of Islam were “criminals, not ‘martyrs.’”

“There is no justification in Islam for extremism or terrorism,” the scholars wrote. “Targeting civilians’ life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is haram — or forbidden.”

Many Muslim leaders overseas have issued similar condemnations in recent weeks, but some have left an opening for violence to be used. British Muslim leaders who denounced the July 7 attacks in London said suicide bombings could still be justified against an occupying power.

The U.S. fatwa did not specifically address suicide bombings in a war, but the scholars barred Muslims from helping anyone “involved in any act of terrorism or violence.” The council also declared that Muslims were obligated to help law enforcement officials protect civilians.

“It is the civic and religious duty of Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement authorities,” according to the Fiqh Council. The term “fiqh” refers to Islamic legal issues and understanding the faith’s religious law.

Islam has no central authority and the council serves an advisory role for American Muslims, who could number as high as 6 million. But some question whether the panel’s statements would sway extremists.

Leaders of major American Muslim organizations have taken pains since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to condemn terrorism and deny any religious justification for it. They have intensified their efforts following the July 7 bombings in London and the botched attacks two weeks later. Other terrorist attacks have occurred in Egypt and Israel in recent weeks, along with continued bombings in Iraq.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council, an advocacy group based in Los Angeles, started the “National Anti-Terrorism Campaign” last year, urging Muslims to monitor their own communities, speak out more boldly against violence and work with law enforcement officials.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based civil rights organization, is running a TV ad and a petition-drive called “Not in the Name of Islam,” which repudiates terrorism. In New York and other cities, mosque leaders have joined advisory committees created by the FBI to build relations between law enforcement and their local communities.

“We pray for the defeat of extremism and terrorism,” the scholars wrote. “We pray for the safety and security of our country, the United States, and its people. We pray for the safety and security of all inhabitants of our planet.”

==============================

Between the Sex Pistols and the Koran (Townhall.com, 050801)

Suzanne Fields

The name “Van Gogh” calls up visions of sunflowers and starry nights. But in Europe — especially in the Netherlands — “Van Gogh” recalls the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a distant relative of the 19th-century painter, who was brutally, obscenely murdered by an Islamist terrorist in broad daylight last year in Amsterdam.

Mohammed Bouyeri, 27, the attacker who shot him, stabbed him, slit his throat and spiked a five-page manifesto to his chest with a dagger, was sentenced last week to life in a Dutch prison. The son of Moroccan immigrants showed no remorse: “I was motivated by the law that commands me to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet.”

Like the London terrorists, he was homegrown and educated in the country where his parents sought a better life. The murder highlights how one of the most “tolerant” countries in Europe, proud of its multicultural diversity, has not only not brought about an appreciation for assimilation but has instead fostered the differences that encourage hatred. The Europeans, like the English after the bus and subway bombs of July 7, have begun to fear the Muslims in their midst, opening debate from left and right over their permissive immigration laws.

Germans from both ends of the political spectrum, for example, ask whether “Jihad behind the dikes” could spread across the continent. Der Spiegel, the weekly newsmagazine, says the episode “has unleashed a debate on immigrants and cultural values that will continue to simmer in Holland and Europe for years to come.” An editorial in the newspaper Die Welt warns that the Dutch must face the reality that their “liberal and tolerant society has often been too passive in defending its own values — so much so, in fact, that it has allowed a parallel society to be built.”

Pressure is at last exerted on moderate Muslims to speak out forcefully against terrorism, to re-examine what it is in their religion, however misguided it may be, that encourages violence. Theo van Gogh’s offense, for example, was making a movie called “Submission,” a 10-minute film about the suppression of Muslim women. In it he portrayed an abused woman in a transparent chador, her naked body covered with excerpts from the Koran prescribing punishments for women who don’t obey strict Muslim law.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch member of parliament who was born in Somalia, wrote the script for “Submission.” A fatwa has been issued against her, and she must have bodyguards with her 24 hours a day. Undeterred, she vows to make more movies about the plight of Muslim women. She knows of what she writes, having suffered genital mutilation as a child at the hands of a grandmother following the dictates of her religion. “The intolerable cannot be tolerated,” she says.

The murderer of Theo van Gogh targeted Ayaan Hirsi Ali with a death threat in the manifesto spiked to the filmmaker’s body, but she doesn’t consider the fatwa as directed only at her, “but against Holland, against the entire Western world. We are all targets. In the eyes of radical Muslims, any country in which Muslims can be criticized openly is an enemy of Islam.”

She tells how the Moroccan neighborhoods of Amsterdam, where Van Gogh’s murderer lived, is a closed community. Immigrant parents can’t speak, read or write Dutch and know nothing of the larger community around them. They listen only to Arabic television spewing hatred against the West. In their schools, their children are taught that holy war against unbelievers is a noble way of life.

When I was recently in Berlin, Zafer Senocak, a popular poet and essayist who was born in Ankara in 1961 and has lived in Germany since 1970, spoke of the schizophrenia of Muslims like himself who live in secular societies where they daily confront the “irreconcilable contradictions between the Sex Pistols and the Koran.” Muslims have been brought up in a religion that inhibits creative thinking, where tradition is handed down in the form of memorization and emulation: “This has created an ideology starved of creative energy, which is predestined to break out in violence and to set latent aggression in motion.”

For devout Muslims, diversity is exhausting, and the male rituals that religious fanatics find in murder and mayhem present a dangerous and appealing alternative to forging identity with their new countries. “What is needed is not so much a dialogue between religions as between Muslims,” Senocak wrote in an essay in Die Welt. “But where will this happen? And who will lead it?”

These are the urgent questions we’re all asking, questions easier to ask than to answer, but questions demanding answers soon.

==============================

Using faith to validate extremism (Townhall.com, 050805)

Clifford D. May

The Spanish Inquisition, the Thirty-Years-War, John Brown’s Pottawatomie Massacre, the terrorist attacks of the Irish Republican Army, the Oklahoma City bombing — these are just a few examples of violence carried out by extremists who found inspiration in their Christian faith.

Jewish radicals have justified violence against Arabs by citing the “holy war” that God commanded Israel to wage against the Canaanites for possession of the Promised Land. As recently as 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a deeply religious Jew, murdered 29 Muslims worshipping in a mosque in Hebron.

The kamikazes of World War II were religiously motivated. And it was members of Aum Shrinrikyo, an offshoot of Japanese Buddhism, who released vials of poisonous gas into the Tokyo subway in 1995.

There have been Hindu terrorists (the word “thug” originally referred to those who murdered to honor the Hindu goddess Kali); also Sikh suicide bombers.

So those who think Islam is the only religion that gives rise to extremism and carnage need to think again.

But let’s be clear, Islam is not — as has been repeatedly claimed — a “religion of peace.” Indeed, the idea is absurd, considering that Islam’s founding prophet also was a warrior — among the most successful in history, establishing an empire ranging from Spain to the South Pacific.

Nor did Osama bin Laden “hijack” Islam any more than Hitler hijacked Germanic culture or Lenin hijacked the Russian ethos. Rather, Hitler and Lenin drew upon the ugliest threads in their nations’ fabrics. So, too, has bin Laden invoked Islam’s most radically xenophobic doctrines to legitimize a vicious assault against all those who refuse to accept his authority, all those he demonizes as “infidels.”

Today, the overwhelming majority of modern Christians reject such religiously based fanaticism as that represented by the Ku Klux Klan and Timothy McVeigh. Most Jews condemn religious extremists like Meir Kahane.

But while recent polls have found support for suicide bombing declining in most Muslim countries, it is still far from clear that most Muslims unequivocally reject those who murder children in the name of Islam and Islam’s many grievances.

And that will not become clear as long as commentators on Arab television praise the killers of Iraqi civilians. It will not be clear as long as Muslim clerics in the holy city of Mecca continue to call for “jihad” against the West.

The West “doesn’t want us even to say the words ‘Allah’s enemies,” the Saudi cleric Musa Al-Qarni groused recently on Saudi government television. “They don’t want us to say that the Jews and the Christians are the enemies of the Muslims and the enemies of Islam.” But, he added: “This is fixed and established in the Koran...”

Hateful rhetoric and incitement to terrorism also can be heard on al-Manar, Hezbollah’s television station, from Iran’s ruling mullahs and even from the Palestinian Authority under “moderate” President Mahmoud Abbas. “By Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again,” the PA’s Sheikh Ibrahim Muayris said last month.

There are moderate, reformist voices of Islam but so far they are neither as loud nor as forceful as those of Wahabbism, a fundamentalist strain of Islam that emerged in 18th century Arabia. A bargain struck between the Wahhabis and the House of Sa’ud led to the rise, in the 20th century, of what we now call the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Wahhabis gave religious sanction to the House of Sa’ud; in exchange, Saudi princes have generously funded the Wahhabis, drawing upon enormous wealth derived from selling Arabia’s oil to infidels.

To be fair, though Wahhabi proselytizing has always been noxious, it generally stopped short of calls for a full-blown holy war against the Saudis’ best customers and frequent protectors, Britain and the United States. What changed that? Ideas that were blended with Wahhabism beginning early in the 20th century, ideas inspired in large measure by the Nazi, Fascist and Communist movements, ideas promoted by such radical groups as the Muslim Brotherhood and such radical theorists as Sayyid Qutb.

The point is this: As Christian behavior need not be modeled on Torquemada, as Jews needn’t emulate the Zealots, as there is nothing in Shinto or Buddhism to prevent Japan from living in peace with its neighbors, so too Muslims need not embrace an interpretation of their religion that is hateful, barbaric and incompatible with freedom, democracy and human rights.

It is not inevitable that Muslims will, as bin Laden predicts, join him in an apocalyptic clash of civilizations, intended to return the world to the 7th Century as fanatics dream it must have been. There is an alternative to a Muslim war against the Free World: Muslims can join the Free World instead.

Neither Islam nor any other great religion has always been peaceful in the past. But it should not take a prophet to see the need for tolerance, pluralism and peaceful coexistence in our future.

==============================

Dear Moderate Muslims (Townhall.com, 050716)

Doug Giles

Dear Moderate Muslims,

What’s up? I see that you guys have been in the news a lot lately. I thought I’d write you a letter and ask you some questions because it seems as if some Muslims are involved in some very bad stuff around the globe, i.e. targeting and killing innocent people and all in the name of your god.

After the damnable 911 terror attacks, President Bush stated that, “Islam is a religion of peace” and the people who carried out these atrocious acts of war are the evil fringe adherents of a good religion. We’d all like to believe him. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, says that those who carried out the 7/7 attacks on London held “poisonous and perverted” views of Islam that are inconsistent with what the Quran teaches.

So . . . what I’m getting from President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and many others is that Islam, as it is taken from the Quran, condemns both violent acts and those behind them and tables via its teachings harmony with all of humanity. I’d like to believe that, and seeing that you’re a moderate adherent, I’ve got a couple of questions to ask you regarding some of the radicals who are seriously fouling your peaceful religion’s public persona.

Look, I know that all groups and families have relatives and constituents they wish wouldn’t align themselves with their party or family because they are . . . let’s say . . . uh . . . loopy. Like my one-eyed, Uncle Slappy White who works for the Muleshoe, Texas sanitation department. Man, you do not want to bring him around your friends, especially when he’s all liquored up. He can be quite the embarrassment. Therefore, I can empathize with being wrongfully associated with some weirdoes who clearly do not represent who you are.

Please indulge me, moderate Muslims. I have two simple questions regarding your current religious beliefs, as we would not want you to be confused with the aberrant devotees with whom, we were told, you wholeheartedly disagree.

1. Seeing that you differ with the radical lunatic fringe players in your religion, we can safely know and state that you do not view the West and those who do not share your religious beliefs as “The Great Satan,” correct?

I mean . . . I know we eat pork, watch PG-13 movies, dance to Michael Jackson, believe Hillary Clinton [at least some do on the left] and watch Paris Hilton . . . it’s bad, I know. But c’mon . . . “The Great Satan”??? Thank God, that as a moderate Muslim, you do not go so far as to label the entire Western Civilization as satanic just because it isn’t based on an Islamic worldview. Amen?

2. What are you going to do about all the verses in the Quran that instruct Muslims to convert, conquer or kill those who will not bow their knees to Allah? You don’t believe that stuff, do you? You don’t believe that peaceful Jews, Christians and secularists are belligerent infidels, right? I would think not, because that would be extreme.

As a moderate Muslim, can we rest assured that you do not believe that warfare and terror are any way to establish your religion in people’s lives? Can we also be certain that those of us who do not believe and will not believe your particular take on divinity can feel completely safe around you and that we can confidently expect you to work with us to build our world into a better place without condemnation being breathed down upon our heads?

Well, that’s it for now. If you could help me with these two questions that would be really cool. Also, it would probably help us in the U.S. and London if you’d work to communicate more regularly and vociferously, given the continued bad press your radical adherents are getting, that you fundamentally disagree with their violent behavior against an unarmed citizenry. Communicating that and working very hard towards eradicating their global threats would kind of help to balance things out a bit.

In addition, your public and incessant condemnation of extremism within your ranks would also serve the purpose of exonerating all moderates from the smallest hint of supporting such behavior. The reason why? It’s simple. Usually, when groups are silent regarding an issue that should be condemned it leads other people to believe that the groups really don’t disagree at all with what has occurred and are, therefore, in agreement with the bad people that perpetrated the despicable act.

I’m really glad that you are moderate in your religious views and are ready and willing to work with us in stamping out these terrorists before they can do any more damage to our people or your people. No doubt, as you see people reeling from this most recent disaster in London, carried out by people who you condemn as crazy, we can count on you to help lead the charge in putting them down. We can count on you to monitor your mosques, to get on radio and TV and to “out” these nuts, wherever they may be found. Yes, it is good to know that we can trust you to blow the whistle on evil plans-even if it means turning in some of your family members, clerics or close friends.

Thank you for your help and all the best . . .

==============================

A Fatwa, or a fast one? (townhall.com, 050811)

Larry Elder

The fatwa denounces Islamic extremism. Or does it?

The Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) issued the fatwa — a religious decree — announced at a press conference held by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The fatwa, in part, said, “Islam strictly condemns religious extremism and the use of violence against innocent lives [emphasis added]. There is no justification in Islam for extremism or terrorism. Targeting civilians’ life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is haram — or forbidden — and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not ‘martyrs.’ The Qur’an, Islam’s revealed text, states: ‘[W]hoever kills a person [unjustly] . . . it is as though he has killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind’ [Qur’an, 5:32].”

The Los Angeles Times, in an Aug. 2, 2005, editorial, nearly fainted with enthusiasm. Under the headline “A Welcome Fatwa,” the Times wrote, “A broad group of U.S. and Canadian Muslim scholars and religious leaders last week issued a fatwa that is as unequivocally anti-violence as those of Khomeini or Osama bin Laden were pro-murder.” Unequivocally anti-violence?

The Times also noted that “Similar, if less sweeping, edicts have been issued by British and Spanish clerics in the wake of the attacks in those countries.”

But the newspaper also took the opportunity, of course, to take a whack at the Bush administration for its lack of enthusiasm over the fatwa: “The U.S. is safer for their efforts, but the government has been curiously reticent to acknowledge and praise the anti-terror cooperation of Muslim organizations.” No, the Bush administration took greater care in analyzing this supposedly powerful fatwa. They read the not-so-fine print.

For starters, the fatwa never defines “innocent lives” and condemns killing someone “unjustly.” This represents a hole big enough to drive a Hummer through. Terrorism expert Steven Emerson said, “It [the fatwa] does not condemn by name any Islamic group or leader. In short, it is a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate. In fact, officials of both organizations [FCNA and CAIR] have been directly linked to and associated with Islamic terrorist groups and Islamic extremist organizations. One of them is an unindicted co-conspirator in a current terrorist case; another previous member was a financier to Al-Qaeda.”

Some U.S. Muslim leaders, scholars and commentators also saw through the ruse. Omid Safi, who teaches religion at Colgate University, said the fatwa did not go far enough, “ . . . I would be more inclined to say there are elements of extremism in many parts of our tradition. Rather than simply saying these are not a part of Islam, I would acknowledge that these trends are there and do away with them.”

Muqtedar Khan, author of “American Muslims: Bridging Faith and Freedom,” said of the fatwa, “They should have been at least specific about events, if not individuals or organizations. They did not condemn al Qaeda or [Osama] bin Laden. It would have had more punch to end all these claims that American Muslims are not doing enough to end terrorism if they had.”

What does the Council on American-Islamic Relations say about these critics? Its spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, said the Council failed to mention persons or groups because “it would have been a laundry list”! Hooper added, “I think you can safely regard anyone listed on the State Department list [of terrorist groups] as included.” Such a list might include groups like Hamas. But according to terrorism expert Emerson, “CAIR has repeatedly attacked the prosecutions of Islamic terrorists arrested and/or convicted since 9-11 and has attacked the government’s freezing of Islamic terrorist fronts as part of a ‘war against Islam’ by the United States. CAIR has led protests against the deportation of radical Islamic clerics who have called for Jihad or who have been fundraisers for Hamas.”

Since CAIR does not wish to list names, they might consider amending their fatwa, along the following lines:

1. It is a sin for a Muslim to kill a non-Muslim, except in self-defense. And Islam is not, we repeat, not, under attack.

2. The Israeli-Palestinian struggle represents a dispute between two legitimate nationalist movements. This dispute must be resolved peacefully between the two parties.

3. Islam is not incompatible with democracy.

Short and sweet. No names named. But this statement acknowledges the extremism operating under its name in Islam, and it rejects the idea that the West and the “Zionists” threaten Islam.

Ahmed H. al-Rahim, who teaches Arabic and Islamic studies at Harvard University, urges fellow Muslims worldwide to specifically condemn Islamic religious terrorism: “ . . . [W]hat is more shameful is that there are no mass Muslim protests to speak of against terrorism that is committed in our name.”

Now, how about a real fatwa?

==============================

Radical Islam in Europe (Christian Post, 050725)

The Islamic Center in Munich, started by ex-Nazis, is now the base of radical Islam in Germany. Tens of thousands of Muslims in the Soviet Army switched sides to fight for Hitler. They stayed to build up a community influenced by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, an import from Egypt to Saudi Arabia and other breeding grounds for al-Qaeda. Thus Ian Johnson reports on this in great detail in The Wall Street Journal (“How a Mosque for Ex-Nazis Became a Center for Radical Islam,” July 12). Read it and tremble.

Similarly, the bombings in London the week before last, according to all reports, issued from extremist Muslim cells. The murder of film-maker Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands is still further evidence of the Europeanization of Muslim-offshoot extremism, as were the events in Madrid last year. Those who are ready to toss and turn at night might reflect on the fact that suicide bombers now seem to be part of the European cityscape.

In 1988, when R. Scott Appleby and I were asked to oversee the massive six-year, five-volume Fundamentalism Project for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and at the University of Chicago, we chartered over a hundred scholars from Europe, both Americas, Africa, and Asia to study fundamentalist or fundamentalist-like movements in a score of religions and cultures. Because we were only looking for Christian fundamentalisms in once-Christian Europe, we found them in militant form only in Ian Paisley’s Ulster Protestantism, and in the non-militant but intense Communione e Liberazione in Italy. Otherwise, Europe did not draw notice from our scholars, who assumed that fundamentalisms generally rise only on soil where conservative, traditionalist, or hyper-orthodox religion has been thriving and is now threatened. European Christianity was too non-thriving to be threatened from within.

Now, almost twenty years later, Europe is a hub of radical Islamist movements, the base from which the suicidal 9/11 destroyers emerged. While our scholars scrupulously described the perverted theologies, social discontents, the nature of extremist organizations, assassinations (Gandhi, Sadat, and others), insurgencies, and more, they did not yet use the term “terrorist.” In the indices to the five volumes, Europe and European Islamic movements do not show up. No study of fundamentalism had been as wide-ranging, comprehensive, and detailed as our project, yet something new was emerging.

Only in an Epilogue at the end of an attempt to put our endeavors in world-historical perspective did world historian William McNeill summarize with these portentous lines: “The radical instability that prevails worldwide, as the human majority emerges painfully from rural isolation and struggles to accommodate itself to the dictates of an exchange economy, gives religious fundamentalists an extraordinary opportunity to channel mass responses either into an angry assault on aliens and infidels or toward peaceable symbiosis with strangers. Both paths are sure to be tried; which will work best and prevail in the long run is, perhaps, the capital question for the twenty-first century.”

[Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on July 18, 2005.]

_____________________________________________________________

Martin E. Marty’s biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com. Original Source: Sightings – A biweekly, electronic editorial published by the Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

==============================

Keep Quiet And Listen! The words of radical Islam speak for themselves. (National Review Online, 050812)

“You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations.”

When and where did that venom come from?

This last May — and out of the hateful mouth of a prominent Palestinian cleric, Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris. He was broadcast on a Palestinian Authority station.

The televised Sheik finished with an even more frightening thought: “The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews — even the stones and trees which were harmed by them…The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.”

Nothing could be clearer than that promise of another holocaust — and promised explicitly on state-run Palestinian television, a public megaphone of the Palestinian Authority, itself the beneficiary of past and apparently promised future American financial aid.

Still, don’t hold your breath that the passive/aggressive sheik is about to lead a pan-Islamic army a few miles across the border to “finish off every Jew,” since he might then end up like Sheik Ahmed Yassin, whose threats of death earned him instead an early paradise.

Throughout this war we have an understandable, if ethnocentric, habit of ignoring what our enemies actually say. Instead we chatter on, don’t listen, and in self-absorbed fashion impart our own motives for their hatred. We live on the principles of the Enlightenment and so worship our god Reason, thus assuming that even our adversaries accept such rational protocols as their own.

So they talk on and on of beheading, suicide bombing, another holocaust, and blowing thousands of us up, while we snooze, now and again waking in the midst of a war to regurgitate Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, flushed Korans, the abusive Patriot Act, and the latest quip of Donald Rumsfeld.

But again keep quiet, and listen to radical Islam.

Take the August 4 declaration of al Qaeda’s second in command, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. He promises even “more destruction” for London, and tells us precisely why.

Many in the West assume that those mass murders were payback for the United Kingdom’s presence in Iraq, even though its troops are mostly confined to non-Wahhabi areas in the south.

But no, the Dr. instead lists a number of grievances beyond Iraq that justify his terrorist cadres murdering innocents. One complaint, for example, is “Stopping the robbing of our oil and resources.”

Examine that gripe carefully.

Oil is now at record highs. I just filled up with regular gas at $2.89 on a California interstate. It costs the Middle East about $3-4 a barrel to pump petroleum that was discovered, developed, and marketed for the Gulf autocracies through hated Western expertise — and is now selling at over $60. Despite Zawahiri’s rants, billions of poor the world over are being price gauged to enrich a Muslim world flush with petrodollars.

And some of those obscene profits have ended up in coffers of Zawahiri himself. Indeed, his al Qaeda blackmailers depend on recycled petrodollars from Gulf State sheikdoms. Nothing either he or bin Laden has ever done themselves warrants the type of cash that flowed into al Qaeda’s banks — a con operation that extorted oil dollars from autocratic price gougers who in turn got their revenues largely from inventive and productive Indians, Chinese, and Westerners.

Zawahiri next went on to cite, “Stopping your support for the corrupt and corrupting leaders.”

Did the terrorist Dr. read the text of Condoleezza Rice’s June 20 address in Cairo? There she rightly repudiated past American realpolitik that blinked at Arab dictatorships, and then prodded Arab governments to democratize?

Or maybe it was precisely that fresh support for democracy that grieves Zawahiri?

For clarification of al Qaeda’s ideas about democracy, we can turn to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the spiritual leader of the terrorists in Iraq. He recently warned that, “We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology.”

That pathological hatred of democracy was also amplified in the latest al Qaeda video of August 10: “Democracy, human rights, and freedom are all but hollow illusions, with which they tranquilize inhabitants.”

Western critics of America’s attempt to introduce democratic reconstruction in Iraq should ask why al Qaeda is so furious at the effort. The answer is clear: Radical Islam can no longer blame the United States for propping up dictators, but instead is terrified that there is a third choice — the people’s freedom — between creepy strongmen and even creepier pre-modern theocrats.

But back again to the good Dr. Zawahiri, who had still more complaints beyond oil and corrupt leaders that explain why he, of course, plans on more murdering of Westerners.

“What you have you seen, O Americans, in New York and Washington and the losses you are having in Afghanistan and Iraq, in spite of all the media blackout, are only the losses of the initial clashes.”

And we know precisely what were our perceived pre-September 11 wrongs that caused “New York and Washington” since Dr Zawahiri’s boss, bin Laden himself, spelled them out in a 1998 fatwa.

“The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip.”

Note that bin Laden omits any reference to American efforts to save Muslim Kuwait (a war in which in vain he also volunteered to fight against Saddam Hussein), to save Balkan Muslims (which his own mujahadeen had failed utterly to do), or to stop the Soviet killing of Afghan Muslims (a war in which his resistance counted on American arms to save his fellow Muslims).

The constant theme of this envious and insecure motor mouth? Americans saved Muslims, while bin Laden’s minions talked big, but couldn’t do much against much stronger Baathist Iraqis, godless Soviets, and nationalist Serbs.

September 11 was the promised answer to bin Laden’s fatwa. Later when America withdrew all troops from the land of Mecca, his death promises increased rather than ceased.

Remember that Dr. Zawahiri lists both Afghanistan (his former headquarters) and Iraq in the same breath as reasons for his attacks to come. We in our civil discord tend to distinguish the two theaters; al Qaeda in its unity does not.

So as we try to assess the causes of Islamists’ venom toward the West, it seems wiser to listen to what they say rather than what we say they say.

If we would do that, we would conclude that the hatred of radical Islam is fed by envy, frustration, and pride — and thus existential: They despise Americans for who we are.

That’s why al Qaeda must constantly find new grievances, whether the West Bank, Israel itself, Jews, oil prices, troops in Saudi Arabia, Oil-for-Food, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

Indeed, the latest two-hour training video is little more than cut-and-paste from the Michael Moore Left and hand-me-downs from Euro anti-globalist radicals. Thus America, al Qaeda assures us, “seeks to ravage the entire globe for the interest…of corporate companies,” and so kills the sons of Islam “in Palestine, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Indonesia, the Caucuses, and elsewhere.”

Apparently about three billion Europeans, Asians, Russians, and Indians have been picking on poor suicide bombers and terrorists, who, in fact, are incognito environmentalists bent on stopping corporate exploitation of Mother Earth.

Yet there is one and only one legitimate objection of the crackpot radical Islamists that rings true: We in the West don’t listen to them when they promise us our deaths.

We should. They are yelling as loud as they can to tell us something that we don’t really want to hear.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

==============================

Fatwa Frenzy: The Muslim backlash against terrorism has begun with many Muslim groups speaking out, but are they being heard? (Weekly Standard, 050818)

THE VICIOUS TERRORIST ATTACKS over the last 18 months—in Spain, Egypt, Great Britain, and Iraq—appear to have Muslim organizations in the West on the defensive. It’s not unusual anymore to hear clerics in Europe and America say they’re prepared to expel extremists from their mosques. More Islamic authors and organizations are condemning terrorism without a string of qualifiers. There’s even support in some Muslim quarters for the tough anti-terrorism laws proposed this month by Britain’s Tony Blair. The doctrine that the intentional killing of civilians is always wrong seems to be winning a new level of rhetorical support.

None of this can be equated with a serious campaign against extremism, of course. Influential clerics in the religious centers of the Islamic world continue to equivocate, even about Osama bin Laden; many if not most muftis, or jurists, endorse the terrorist activities of Hamas and Hezbollah. Nevertheless, ordinary Muslims in the West are growing impatient with their leaders’ silence or hedging on terrorism.

Over the last six months, Muslim authorities have issued several self-described “fatwas,” unenforceable legal rulings, condemning violence against civilians. These statements—from the Islamic Commission of Spain, the British Muslim Forum, and the Fiqh Council of North America—all cite the Koran to condemn the taking of innocent life.

The Spanish fatwa, issued a year after the Madrid train bombings, takes the unusual step of condemning Osama bin Laden as an apostate. It reads in part: “The terrorist acts of Osama ben Laden . . . that entail the destruction of buildings or properties, that entail the death of civilians, like women and children, or other similar things, they are prohibited . . . within Islam.” The ruling also rejects as a “fraud” the terrorists’ claim to be “defending the oppressed nations of the world or the rights of Muslims.”

Less than two weeks after the July 7 bombings in London, the British Muslim Forum announced a fatwa that “strictly, strongly and severely” condemns the use of violence against civilians: “Suicide bombings, which killed and injured innocent people in London, are haram—vehemently prohibited in Islam—and those who committed these barbaric acts in London are criminals, not martyrs.”

Most recently, the Fiqh Council of North America issued an “absolute condemnation” of terrorism. “Islam strictly condemns religious extremism and the use of violence against innocent lives,” wrote the 18-member council. Given the unsavory past rhetoric and affiliations of many of the 130 organizations and leaders who have endorsed it, this statement cannot be taken at face value. That the council felt compelled to issue it, however, is worth noting.

“I think there’s a little more clarity in these fatwas than any past effort,” says Husain Haqqani, who teaches international relations at Boston University. “But . . . will they be reiterated on a day-to-day basis in Muslim discourse?” Others complain that the rulings don’t come from the centers of gravity of the Islamic world—from authorities in Mecca or legal scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo. Mamoun Fandy, a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, puts it dryly: “A fatwa from Brooklyn or the National Press Club—that’s not where Muslims go to get their fatwas.”

AS FANDY AND OTHERS ARGUE, unless “extreme pressure” is applied on Muslims everywhere to treat terrorists as pariahs, very little will change. In this sense, it is important to watch the Islamic response to Tony Blair’s anti-terrorism initiative. Among other things, it will make it easier for the government to deport foreigners who are “advocating violence” and it will criminalize the “condoning or glorifying” of terrorism. Since Muslim organizations have failed to police themselves, Blair seemed to suggest, the government will now do it for them: A list will be drawn up of extremist websites, bookshops, networks, and organizations of concern.

“I’m glad that . . . the government is finally taking action to deal with this menace,” says Omar Farooq, of the Islamist Society of Britain, in response to Blair’s proposal. “Day after day these lunatics, on our behalf, go into the broadsheets, on to the televisions screens, and are really messing up our lives here. We don’t want that to happen.”

Neither do younger Muslims such as Shadi Hamid, a Fulbright Fellow in the United States who joined an August 4 panel discussion on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “When a lot of Muslims argue that the immorality and illegality of these killings is contingent upon certain political considerations . . . we enter a very dangerous, slippery slope.” Salim Mansur, a professor from the University of Western Ontario, agreed. “It is a Muslim reformation we have to talk about,” he said. “Muslim conduct, Muslim behavior has to change.” Three of the four Muslim panelists on that show called for an end to equivocation on terrorism.

Until such views seize the spiritual and intellectual strongholds of Islamic influence, the death cult of al Qaeda will probably have little trouble finding new recruits.

Joseph Loconte is the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation and editor of The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm.

==============================

Saudi: Radical Islam worse than Nazism (WorldNetDaily, 050819)

Saudi journalist says terror groups should be treated as Nazis, total war should be declared on extremist Islamic Ideology

Courageous words: Not everyone in the Arab world praises Osama Bin Laden and terror groups as heroes. Indeed, some Arabs have issues scathing attacks on radical Islamic groups and they manner in which they interpret Islam.

The criticism leveled at extremists by Saudi journalist Muhammad al al-Sheikh, however, is unusual in its harshness. In two pieces published

in Saudi newspaper al-Jazeera, and presented courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute, al-Sheikh charged radical Islamists hold a similar, and even worse, ideology than radical Islam, and should be treated as Europeans coped with Nazism.

The first article was published in July 10, following the release of an extremist spiritual leader from prison. The release raises many questions, al-Sheikh said.

“The man is one of the forefathers of terrorism and he is the one who raised, through his books and radical interpretations, many of those belonging to terror groups.”

“They say a Jordanian court acquitted him of charges that include the blowing up of American facilities…however, this dangerous terrorist did something much worse: he seized upon the down-and-out situation of many Muslim youths today in order to perpetuate violence, murder and destruction forever. In order to plant deep roots for the idea of suicide and to incite kids to commit suicide.”

“This is the root of the problem,” said al-Sheikh.

‘Hating the other’

According to al-Sheikh, “eradicating terror will only be possible by doing away with the ideas that come from our society. A military solution is not enough,” he said.

“We must treat modern Jihad parties just as the Europeans treated Naziism,” he added.

“The ideas of radical Islam are similar to the ideas that drove the Nazi ideology. If the economic freeze and national depression in 1930 led to the emergency to murderous Nazism, we can say that the economic and cultural failure that grip Arab and Muslim countries today, together with the frustration of many Muslims, are once again driving this murderous philosophy.”

Similarly, the common denominator is hatred and physical elimination of the other, al-Sheikh said

“I still believe that one of the first tasks for the international community today should be to reconstruct its experience with Nazism and cope with this barbaric, dangerous culture as it did with the Nazi culture,” al-Sheikh wrote.

“If this isn’t done, the coming days could be very eventful and their implications for the whole of humanity would be much more severe than those of the World War,” he concluded somberly.

==============================

Talk-show host fired for linking Islam, terror (WorldNetDaily, 050821)

Michael Graham refused retract demand by CAIR, ABC’s WMAL in Washington

WASHINGTON – Michael Graham, the Washington, D.C., talk-show host suspended for linking Islam and terrorism, has been fired by ABC Radio following weeks of pressure applied by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group with its own well-documented connections to terrorism.

Graham was the popular mid-morning host on WMAL in the nation’s capital until three weeks ago when CAIR demanded he be punished for his on-air statements about Islam. After initially backing the host, WMAL suspended him without pay July 28.

“CAIR immediately announced that my punishment was insufficient and demanded I be fired,” Graham said in a statement to WND. “ABC Radio and 630 WMAL have now complied. I have now been fired for making the specific comments CAIR deemed ‘offensive,’ and for refusing to retract those statements in a management-mandated, on-air apology. ABC Radio further demanded that I agree to perform what they described as ‘additional outreach efforts’ to those people or groups who felt offended. I refused. And for that refusal, I have been fired.”

CAIR is a spin-off of a group described by two former FBI counterterrorism chiefs as a “front group” for the terrorist group Hamas in the U.S. Several CAIR leaders have been convicted on terror-related charges.

Graham’s suspension stems come from characterizing Islam a “terrorist organization.” Graham explained that when a significant minority of a group conducts terrorism and the general population of that group does not denounce it, it is safe to conclude that the group promotes it.

He drew an analogy between Islam and the Boy Scouts.

“If the Boy Scouts of America had 1,000 scout troops, and 10 of them practiced suicide bombings, then the BSA would be considered a terrorist organization,” he said. “If the BSA refused to kick out those 10 troops, that would make the case even stronger. If people defending terror repeatedly turned to the Boy Scout handbook and found language that justified and defended murder – and the scoutmasters in charge simply said ‘Could be’ – the Boy Scouts would have driven out of America long ago.”

Graham is furious that CAIR is now able to exert this kind of influence in the U.S. media.

“It appears that ABC Radio has caved to an organization that condemns talk radio hosts like me, but has never condemned Hamas, Hezbollah, and one that wouldn’t specifically condemn al-Qaida for three months after 9-11,” he said. “As a fan of talk radio, I find it absolutely outrageous that pressure from a special interest group like CAIR can result in the abandonment of free speech and open discourse on a talk radio show. As a conservative talk host whose job is to have an open, honest conversation each day with my listeners, I believe caving to this pressure is a disaster.”

Graham said he couldn’t accept the idea of apologizing “for the truth and I cannot agree to some community-service style ‘outreach effort’ to appease the opponents of free speech.”

“If I had made a racist or bigoted comment – which my regular listeners know goes against everything I believe in – I would apologize immediately, and without coercion,” he said. “When I have made inadvertent fact errors in the past, I apologized promptly and without hesitation. But we have now gone far beyond that, with demands that I apologize for the ideas my listeners and I believe in.”

Though Graham’s characterization of Islam was blunt, it was also tactful.

“I have great sympathy for those Muslims of good will who want their faith to be a true ‘religion of peace,’” he said and wrote at the time of the controversy. “I believe that terrorism and murder do violate the sensibilities and inherent decency of the vast majority of the world’s Muslims. I believe they want peace.”

Graham was backed by supporters from coast to coast after his suspension.

“It is not a coincidence that, after my suspension July 28, WMAL received more than 15,000 phone calls and emails protesting my removal from the airwaves,” he said. “Why such a huge response? It wasn’t about me. The listeners I spoke to said they felt betrayed by my suspension because the vast majority of them agree with me on the subject of Islam. By labeling my statements as unacceptable, these listeners felt that WMAL management was insulting them, too.”

Graham said he could not dishonors his listeners and other Americans who agree with him by apologizing or retracting the truth.

“The whole point of the Michael Graham show is what my listeners and I call the ‘natural truth,’ those obvious facts about modern life that the PC police and mainstream media believe should never be discussed,” he said. “That includes the tragic, but undeniable relationship between terrorism and Islam as it is constituted today.”

Graham reiterated that the conversations of the controversial subject matter on his program were not designed to be offensive or bigoted.

“In fact, Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR (who has appeared on my show several times) credited ‘criticism from talk radio’ in part for the recent fatwa against terrorism issued by a group of U.S. Muslim scholars. Ironically, it was issued the day before I was suspended. That’s the real tragedy here. The people who most need free speech and open dialogue on the issues facing Islam today are America’s moderate Muslims. These are people of good will who have the difficult job ahead of reforming and rescuing their religion. They need all the help they can get.”

But it is the capitulation to what he perceives to be an extremist group by ABC that bothers Graham most.

“The decision to give CAIR what it wants – a group with well-publicized ties to terrorists and terror-related organizations — will make it harder for the reformers to successfully face Islam’s challenges,” said Graham. “Still worse, silencing people like me will make it easier for Islamist extremists to dismiss all sincere calls for reform as mere ‘bigotry.’”

In April, the founder of the Texas chapter of CAIR, Ghassan Elashi was found guilty of supporting terrorism. Elashi, along with two brothers, was convicted in Dallas of channeling funds to a high-ranking official of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. Elashi was the third CAIR figure to be convicted on federal terrorism charges since 9-11.

CAIR is a spin-off of the Richardson, Texas-based Islamic Association For Palestine, or IAP, which was founded by Marzook. Former FBI counterterrorism chief Oliver Revell has called the IAF “a front organization for Hamas that engages in propaganda for Islamic militants.”

Marzook, deputy chief of Hamas’ political bureau in Syria, founded the IAP in 1991. At its conferences in the U.S., the IAP hosted leaders of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Marzook was deported in 1997.

It was not the first conviction for Elashi. As chairman of the Holy Land Foundation charity in Dallas, Elashi was convicted last year of making illegal technology shipments to two countries on the U.S. list of terrorist-sponsoring states, Libya and Syria. Four brothers, including Bayan and Basman, also were convicted.

Other CAIR figures convicted since 9-11 are Randall Todd “Ismail” Royer, a former communications specialist and civil rights coordinator, and Bassem Khafagi, former director of community relations.

Royer was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges he trained in Virginia for holy war against the United States and sent several members to Pakistan to join Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri terrorist group with reported ties to al-Qaida.

In a plea bargain, Royer claimed he never intended to hurt anyone but admitted he organized the holy warriors after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.

Khafagi, was arrested in January 2003 while serving with CAIR and convicted on fraud and terrorism charges.

Current CAIR leaders also have made statements in support of Hamas and the domination of the U.S. by Islam.

As WorldNetDaily reported, CAIR’s chairman of the board, Omar Ahmad, was cited by a California newspaper in 1998 declaring the Quran should be America’s highest authority. He also was reported to have said Islam is not in America to be equal to any other religion but to be dominant.

“When CAIR is able to quell dissent and label every critic a ‘bigot,’ the chilling effect is felt far beyond ABC Radio and 630 WMAL,” said Graham. “If anyone is owed an apology, it is the moderate, Muslim community who have been failed once again by the mainstream media.”

==============================

The tragedy of Islam (WorldNetDaily, 050822)

Editor’s note: The following commentary is what led to talk-show host Michael Graham recently being fired from ABC Radio station WMAL in Washington, D.C. after pressure was applied by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

By Michael Graham

I take no pleasure in saying it. It pains me to think it. I could very well lose my job in talk radio over admitting it. But it is the plain truth: Islam is a terror organization.

For years, I’ve been trying to give the world’s Muslim community the benefit of the doubt, along with the benefit of my typical-American’s complete disinterest in their faith. Before 9-11, I knew nothing about Islam except the greeting “asalaam alaikum,” taught to me by a Pakistani friend in Chicago.

Immediately after 9-11, I nodded in ignorant agreement as President Bush assured me that “Islam is a religion of peace.”

But nearly four years later, nobody can defend that statement. And I mean “nobody.”

Certainly not the group of “moderate” Muslim clerics and imams who gathered in London last week to issue a statement on terrorism and their faith. When asked the question “Are suicide bombings always a violation of Islam,” they could not answer “Yes. Always.” Instead, these “moderate British Muslims” had to answer “It depends.”

Precisely what it depends on, news reports did not say. Sadly, given our new knowledge of Islam from the past four years, it probably depends on whether or not you’re killing Jews.

That is part of the state of modern Islam.

Another fact about the state of Islam is that a majority of Muslims in countries like Jordan continue to believe that suicide bombings are legitimate. Still another is the poll reported by a left-leaning British paper than only 73% of British Muslims would tell police if they knew about a planned terrorist attack.

The other 27%? They are a part of modern Islam, too.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is outraged that I would dare to connect the worldwide epidemic of terrorism with Islam. They put it down to bigotry, asserting that a lifetime of disinterest in Islam has suddenly become blind hatred. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Not to be mean to the folks at CAIR, but I don’t – care, that is. I simply don’t care about Islam, its theology, its history – I have no interest in it at all. All I care about is not getting blown to smithereens when I board a bus or ride a plane. I care about living in a world where terrorism and murder-suicide bombings are rejected by all.

And the reason Islam has itself become a terrorist organization is that it cannot address its own role in this violence. It cannot cast out the murderers from its members. I know it can’t, because “moderate” Muslim imams keep telling me they can’t. “We have no control over these radical young men,” one London imam moaned to the local papers.

Can’t kick ‘em out of your faith? Can’t excommunicate them? Apparently Islam does not allow it.

Islam cannot say that terrorism is forbidden to Muslims. I know this because when the world’s Muslim nations gathered after 9-11 to state their position on terrorism, they couldn’t even agree on what it was. How could they, when the world’s largest terror sponsors at the time were Iran and Saudi Arabia – both governed by Islamic law?

If the Boy Scouts of America had 1,000 scout troops, and 10 of them practiced suicide bombings, then the BSA would be considered a terrorist organization. If the BSA refused to kick out those 10 troops, that would make the case even stronger. If people defending terror repeatedly turned to the “Boy Scout Handbook” and found language that justified and defended murder – and the scoutmasters in charge simply said “Could be” – the Boy Scouts would have driven out of America long ago.

Today, Islam has entire sects and grand mosques that preach terror. Its theology is used as a source of inspiration by terrorist murderers. Millions of Islam’s members give these killers support and comfort.

The question isn’t how dare I call Islam a terrorist organization, but rather why more people do not.

As I’ve said many times, I have great sympathy for those Muslims of good will who want their faith to be a true “religion of peace.” I believe that terrorism and murder do violate the sensibilities and inherent decency of the vast majority of the world’s Muslims. I believe they want peace.

Sadly, the organization and fundamental theology of Islam as it is constituted today allows for hatreds most Muslims do not share to thrive, and for criminals they oppose to operate in the name of their faith.

Many Muslims, I believe, know this to be true and some are acting on it. Not the members of CAIR, unfortunately: As Middle East analyst and expert Daniel Pipes has reported, “two of CAIR’s associates (Ghassan Elashi, Randall Royer) have been convicted on terrorism-related charges, one (Bassem Khafegi) convicted on fraud charges, two (Rabih Haddad, Bassem Khafegi) have been deported, and one (Siraj Wahhaj) remains at large.”

But Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf admits what CAIR will not. He’s called for a jihad against the jihadists. He’s putting his life on the line (Islamists have tried to assassinate him three times) in the battle to reclaim Islam and its fundamental decency.

He remembers, I’m sure, that at a time when Western, Christian civilization was on the verge of collapse, the Muslim world was a bastion of rationalism and tolerance. That was a great moment in the history of Islam, a moment that helped save the West.

Let’s hope Islam can now find the strength to save itself.

==============================

Cowed by CAIR: DC talk station fires host (townhall.com, 050823)

Joel Mowbray

Washington, D.C. talk radio station WMAL, 630 AM, has caved to pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that has savaged journalists, critics of radical Islam, even the Fox TV show “24”—but which just as steadfastly has refused to specifically condemn various Islamic terrorist organizations.

After a three-week suspension, mid-morning host Michael Graham was fired over the weekend for his comment on July 21 that “Islam has, sadly, become a terrorist organization.” According to a formal statement issued by the host last night, Disney-owned WMAL terminated him for the original remarks and his refusal to apologize for them.

The latest development in the month-long saga is surprising given that there was barely a stir for the first few days after Graham’s original remarks—and he wasn’t suspended until a week later, on July 28. Once he was suspended—which happened as a result of a CAIR-led campaign—the group instigated a campaign to have him fired.

In the week before the suspension, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper even came on Graham’s show—telling him that CAIR didn’t want him fired, just punished. Once Graham was suspended indefinitely later that week, however, CAIR quickly called for his head.

In buckling to pressure from CAIR, WMAL has sided with an organization that continually demonizes genuine criticism of radical Islam as “Islamophobia” and has never specifically condemned radical Islam or Islamic terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

And in the process, the radio station arguably has given CAIR its biggest coup to date.

Not only did WMAL side with organization with three former officials who have been convicted, arrested, or deported on terror-related charges, but it demanded an apology for comments that were far from flippant and were not beyond the pale. The surrounding statements made by Graham, in fact, put the thrust of his comments in an entirely different light.

Here are Graham’s remarks, with full context:

Because of the mix of Islamic theology that—rightly or wrongly—is interpreted to promote violence, added to an organizational structure that allows violent radicals to operate openly in Islam’s name with impunity, Islam has, sadly, become a terrorist organization. It pains me to say it. But the good news is it doesn’t have to stay this way, if the vast majority of Muslims who don’t support terror will step forward and re-claim their religion.

Plenty of people can—and do—take issue with the framing of the religion itself as a “terrorist organization.” But his surrounding comments have more than a ring of truth. Islamic theology is used to promote violence. And in many parts of the world, radicals have taken control of Islam—and the moderates have been effectively silenced.

And Graham’s desire that moderates re-claim control of Islam is shared by many, though likely not by CAIR or groups of its ilk.

CAIR was founded in 1994 by two former high-ranking officials with the Islamic Association of Palestine, a rabidly anti-Semitic organization known as Hamas’ biggest political booster in the United States.

Since 9/11, CAIR officials have been careful to avoid the appearance that they support Islamic terrorism. But not before 9/11. In November 1999, CAIR President Omar Ahmad addressed a youth session at the IAP annual convention in Chicago, where he praised suicide bombers who “kill themselves for Islam”: “Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam – that is not suicide. They kill themselves for Islam.” (Transcript provided by the Investigative Project.)

Though CAIR’s mission is not to serve as an overt Hamas partisan, the organization has refused to specifically condemn the terrorist organization. Ditto for Hezbollah, which is responsible for murdering more Americans than any other terrorist group besides al Qaeda. And CAIR refused to condemn bin Laden or al Qaeda by name until three months after 9/11.

The Washington Post in November 2001 asked a CAIR spokesman to condemn Hamas or Islamic Jihad. He refused, explaining, “It’s not our job to go around denouncing.” Asked a similar question about Hamas and Hezbollah by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in February 2002, Hooper called such queries a “game” and added, “We’re not in the business of condemning.”

Of course, CAIR is very much “in the business of condemning.” The group gleefully slams critics of radical Islam, television shows, and talk radio hosts. But when it comes to Islamic terrorist organizations or prominent Muslims who endorse terrorism or embrace radical Islam, CAIR’s silence is deafening.

To provide cover—and further perpetuate the myth that CAIR and other American Muslim organizations are genuinely “moderate”—various fundamentalist Muslim leaders recently issued a fatwa against “extremism” and “terrorism.” It was classic CAIR obfuscation: it condemned terms that were intentionally not defined. Not coincidentally, no terrorist organizations were named. Sadly, many media outlets were snookered.

WMAL now appears to be the most recent media outlet duped by CAIR. The station, for its part, refused comment last week before Graham had been fired. No one at WMAL could be reached for comment over the weekend.

The station’s defense would likely be that it gave the host an out by allowing him to apologize. But as Graham notes, “WMAL wouldn’t be asking for apology without CAIR’s pressure. And if I apologize, then I’m admitting that I’m a bigot and wrong. I am neither.”

Now that CAIR can claim success in ousting Graham, it’s only a matter of time before the group launches its next smear campaign. There’s no telling who would be CAIR’s next target, though it is clear who it would not be.

==============================

About Michael Graham: CAIR’s tie to terrorism (WorldNetDaily, 050824)

When Michael Graham was suspended by ABC Radio for his perfectly sensible and well-articulated comments linking Islam with terrorism, I decided to read his exact words on my radio talk show.

I also said I agreed with every word he said.

I knew it was risky.

I knew there was a possibility I might lose some affiliates.

I knew it was unlikely that ABC Radio would order its owned-and-operated stations to pick up my program.

Nevertheless, truth is truth. Right is right. Let the chips fall where they may, I thought.

Since then, Michael Graham was fired by ABC Radio and its owned-and-operated station in Washington, D.C., WMAL.

And it’s time to speak out once again.

But today I would like to urge other radio talk-show hosts to do what I have done and am prepared to do again: Read Michael Graham’s commentary on your program and, if you agree with it as I do, say so.

Just imagine if every courageous talk-show host in America did this. Perhaps even some at the ABC Radio Network might dare to stand up in solidarity with Michael Graham.

This would be an important cause, not just for Michael Graham’s future in radio, but for all of us.

In fact, it is critically important to stand up for Michael Graham to expose a threat within America’s midst – the Islamic pressure group that turned the screws on him.

Of course, I am talking about the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. It’s about time real Americans started to care about CAIR.

Let’s review the facts.

In April, the founder of the Texas chapter of CAIR, Ghassan Elashi was found guilty of supporting terrorism – the third CAIR figure to be convicted on federal terrorism charges since 9-11. Elashi, along with two brothers, was convicted in Dallas of channeling funds to a high-ranking official of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook.

Marzook, deputy chief of Hamas’ political bureau in Syria, founded the IAP in 1991. At its conferences in the United States, the IAP hosted leaders of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Marzook was deported in 1997.

Other CAIR figures convicted since 9-11 are Randall Todd “Ismail” Royer, a former communications specialist and civil-rights coordinator, and Bassem Khafagi, former director of community relations.

In a plea bargain, Royer claimed he never intended to hurt anyone, but admitted he organized the holy warriors after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Khafagi, was arrested in January 2003, while serving with CAIR, and convicted on fraud and terrorism charges.

Current CAIR leaders also have made statements in support of Hamas and the domination of the United States by Islam.

Ask yourselves if this group has the moral authority to be determining who broadcasts on American radio.

==============================

Peaceful religion? (WorldNetDaily, 050825)

People like Joseph Farah and Mr. Graham make me proud to be an American. I am appalled that Mr. Graham was fired over the truth he spoke.

I have to wonder if anyone has actually taken a look into the Quran? I have, and I do not find it to be a peaceful book. Quite the contrary! Since I married a man from Turkey who was Muslim, I wanted to know what his religion was about. He – among many others who follow this book – has never read it. He simply took the word of others as to what it actually said.

I jotted down verses from the Quran to show my husband where these terrorists are coming from and here they are: Suras 47:5, 8:39, 8:59, 9:5, 9:14, 9:29, 9:39, 9:41 9:73, 9:111, 9:123, 2:216, 5:51, 5:57, 5:74, 5:78, 5:82, 5:93, and 3:68. You be your own judge. My husband has since discovered what Christianity is all about and has become a Christian himself.

I don’t know if this could be done, but it seems to me that quoting some of these verses on the air and/or printing them in the newspaper would enlighten people (if they really want to be) to the true nature of the Islamic religion. I, for one, am tired of hearing that it is a peaceful religion when it is not.

Mary Coban

==============================

How CAIR cows critics (Washington Times, 050826)

Though there is some disagreementbetween WMAL Radio and fired mid-morninghost Michael Graham over the details of his termination, one thing is not in dispute: The big winner is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which called for his ouster, yet has never specifically condemned Islamic terrorist organizations, such as Hamas or Hezbollah.

In a year that started with it blasting away at the Fox television show “24” — because it had terrorists who were Muslims — CAIR has garnered more attention than ever before. Now, with the firing of Mr. Graham, it has achieved perhaps its greatest feat yet — at least in perception, which is typically tantamount to reality.

And a stronger CAIR almost inevitably means a weakened spirit of free speech.

Mr. Graham was fired this week by Disney-owned WMAL for his on-air comments on July 21 that Islam is a “terrorist organization.” After initially defending him, however, the station suspended him without pay on July 28 — three days after CAIR launched its initial campaign.

In an official statement, the station dismissed the coincidence of timing, saying, “we make our decisions independent of external pressures or third parties.” But given that the station went abruptly from supporting Graham to suspending him, it seems difficult to believe that the CAIR-stirred controversy had no impact on the sudden switch.

Mr. Graham likely was not immediately shown the door after making the comments on July 21 because they were rich with context, with the logic and rationale for his labeling Islam a “terrorist organization” well laid-out. The remarks were far from flippant, and seen in context, they don’t read as the rantings of a fire-breathing bigot.

Here is a representative sample of Mr. Graham’s remarks:

“Because of the mix of Islamic theology that — rightly or wrongly — is interpreted to promote violence, added to an organizational structure that allows violent radicals to operate openly in Islam’s name with impunity, Islam has, sadly, become a terrorist organization. It pains me to say it. But the good news is it doesn’t have to stay this way, if the vast majority of Muslims who don’t support terror will step forward and reclaim their religion.”

Focusing solely on the “terrorist organization” soundbite obviously makes Mr. Graham’s comments indefensible — and legitimately an outrage. But with his clearly spelled-out reasoning, there is still much room with which to disagree with his labeling — but it is much harder to pillory his comments as bombastic bigotry.

Whether WMAL intended to or not, the station has handed CAIR arguably its biggest victory to date, and has certainly increased the legitimacy of an organization that deserves none.

It won’t just be radio talk hosts that will start feeling chilly when the topic of Islam arises. Television personalities, reporters, columnists, or anyone who works for a corporate interest that would bristle at being the target of a CAIR scare campaign would think twice before making even entirely defensible statements. It’s not inconceivable that the media outlet could set up clear demarcation lines and declare certain subject matters or groups off-limits.

In fairness to WMAL, it isn’t the first conservative media outlet to bow to CAIR pressure. National Review (where this columnist once worked) earlier this year removed a book from its online bookstore deemed “bigoted” and “anti-Muslim hate” by CAIR after the group sent a threatening letter to major advertiser Boeing — which sells planes to many wealthy Arabs.

The threat of public controversy is apparently so strong that major media outlets — the top conservative talk station in the nation’s capital and the nation’s premier conservative publication — are fleeing from rather than fighting an organization replete with ripe targets.

Take your pick: CAIR’s radical roots essentially as an offshoot of a rabidly anti-Semitic organization long viewed as Hamas’ biggest political booster in the United States, its co-founder Omar Ahmad praising suicide bombers who “kill themselves for Islam” in November 1999 (according to a transcript provided by the Investigative Project), or its repeated failure to specifically condemn radical Islam or Hamas and Hezbollah, dismissing requests to do so as a “game.”

CAIR’s key to success in spite of its ugly history is an odd combination of finesse and noise. Realizing that it needs to pass itself off as moderate, CAIR has become the master of making even intelligent people believe that they’ve condemned something when they haven’t.

Case in point: its recent fatwa against “extremism” and “terrorism.” CAIR and others came out against two terms that they intentionally didn’t define. Hamas, for example, has long maintained that it is not “terrorism” to kill Israelis because of the Jewish state’s mandatory military conscription. Last year’s CAIR-led “Not in the Name of Islam” campaign was of the same ilk.

All of this information is available to media outlets subjected to a CAIR onslaught. None has yet to take this tack, however.

Normal debating rules argue against attacking the messenger, but is it really unfair to ask CAIR to condemn terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah before acknowledging their criticisms of even admittedly offensive speech?

Joel Mowbray occasionally writes for The Washington Times.

==============================

The Peculiar Alliance: Islamists and neo-Nazis find common ground by hating the Jews. (Weekly Standard, 050901)

THERE HAVE BEEN rumblings of late about the developing alliance between Islamic radicals and neo-Nazis. In late May, Israeli president Moshe Katzav gave a speech before the German parliament in which he warned, “Let’s not be surprised if terror organizations use neo-Nazis for carrying out terror attacks.” And on August 5, WorldNetDaily reported, “Neo-Nazi skinheads are working with radical Islamists in a growing unholy alliance that has European law enforcement officials concerned about a new front in the war on terrorism.”

Such an alliance seems unlikely on its face; after all, neo-Nazis view most Muslims as racially inferior, while Islamic extremists believe that neo-Nazis are just another flavor of infidel. However, a closer examination reveals that many white-supremacist groups have expressed solidarity with Islamic terrorists recently, and in turn some white supremacists and far-right Holocaust deniers have found newfound supporters among the Islamists.

THE MOST PROMINENT recent example of white supremacists’ vocal support for Islamic terrorism came from August Kreis, the new head of Aryan Nations. In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Kreis said of al Qaeda, “You say they’re terrorists, I say they’re freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples’ heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah.” Going a step further, Kreis told CNN that he had a message for Osama bin Laden: “The message is, the cells are out here and they are already in place. They might not be cells of Islamic people, but they are here and they are ready to fight.”

The Aryan Nations website reflects Kreis’s desire to instill a “jihadic feeling” in his followers. For example, it features an article purporting to show that the idea of jihad can be found not only in Islam but also in the Bible. The article concludes with a battle cry: “All the sons of Abraham, all descendants of his three wives, Sarah, Hagar and Ketourah, the parties of the Islamic and Aryan World, all need to understand their duty to enact Holy Jihad, we need to live this Jihad; total war, death to our enemy, the insidious, poisonous and rabid satanic jEw.” [sic]

Aryan Nations also boasts a quote on its main page further reflecting its support for radical Muslims. Attributed to Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, the quote states that “a link is created between Islam and National-Socialism on an open, honest basis. It will be directed in terms of blood and race from the North, and in the ideological-spiritual sphere from the East.” The main page also touches on other issues of importance to Muslim radicals. It demands immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East, and under the headline “Ariel Sharon: your typical domineering jew,” the website features a picture of the Israeli prime minister with fire coming out of his mouth that ends in a mushroom cloud. Underneath, the website proclaims the photograph to be Sharon’s “plan for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc . . . “

BEYOND THE ARYAN NATIONS, a surprising number of other white-supremacist websites openly sympathize with Islamic terrorists. The National Alliance, the country’s largest neo-Nazi organization, published a 2002 essay by its founder, the late William Pierce, which claimed that the September 11 attacks were a salutary event. Pierce wrote that through the attacks, bin Laden “forced the whole subject of U.S. policy in the Middle East into the open: the subject of American interests versus Jewish interests, of Jewish media control and its influence on governmental policy.” Because bin Laden broke the “taboo” about questioning Jewish interests, Pierce claimed, “[i]n the long run that may more than compensate for the 3,000 American lives that were lost.”

Neo-Nazi James Wickstrom has a webpage that includes a number of featured articles, the headlines of which provide a good indication of where he stands on the Islamist question. These include “Military Personnel Wounded in Iraq & Afghanistan For The JEW Neo-cons,” “U.S. Slaughters People At Prayer At Baghdad Mosque,” “U.S. Teachers Targeted By jews If They Teach Contrary to Israeli,” and “The President and his jewish handlers LIED about 9/11!”

And the neo-Nazi ADLUSA website (a site designed to oppose the Anti-Defamation League) brands the Anti-Defamation League’s call for Hezbollah TV to be designated a foreign terrorist organization as part of a campaign “of smear, corruption, and harassment,” and promotes the conspiracy theory that Jewish hands were behind the 7/7 and 9/11 terrorist attacks. In case this doesn’t make their position perfectly clear, the ADLUSA features a direct appeal to Muslims: “Moslems, lay down your guns and join our mission to remove Jews from positions of power from which they persecute one people after another; killing Americans misled by Jews only incites endless wars.”

This vocal neo-Nazi support for al Qaeda reaches back to shortly after 9/11. The Jewish newspaper Forward reported in November 2001 that the World Church of the Creator displayed a bin Laden quote on its website warning Americans that they needed to tend to their own interests and not those of the Jews.

Around the same time, the website for Florida-based Aryan Action displayed the message: “Support Taliban, Smash ZOG.” (ZOG stands for Zionist Occupation Government, a term rooted in the idea that the Jews control world affairs.) In a perverse twist on President Bush’s declaration that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” Aryan Action’s website voiced its unequivocal support for al Qaeda: “Either you’re fighting with the jews against al Qaeda, or you support al Qaeda fighting against the jews.”

THUS FAR, THERE has been no proof of neo-Nazi cooperation with Muslim terrorist groups in planning attacks. Despite the lack of proof of operational links, several figures with feet in both movements have actively tried to bring them closer. One such individual is Ahmed Huber, a 77-year-old Swiss convert to Islam whose study is adorned with twin pictures of Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden.

Huber told the Washington Post that his goal is to build bridges between radical Muslims and the “New Right.” He said that a prevalent view on the New Right is that “what happened on the 11th of September, if it is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of counterterrorism.” Certain far-right figures, such as German National Democratic Party theorist Horst Mahler, seem amenable to Huber’s ideas. Mahler has spoken of the “sense of sympathy” and “common ground” that far-right European groups share with Islamists, and has admitted to “contacts with political groups, in particular in the Arab world, also with Palestinians.”

The neo-Nazis’ newfound love for Islamists is by no means unrequited. Some radical Islamic groups have—perhaps in an effort to undercut one of the justifications for the state of Israel—forged intellectual ties with right-wing Holocaust deniers.

At the forefront of contemporary Holocaust denial is the California-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR), which is dedicated to the idea that the Holocaust is a historical fiction. The IHR has been so heartened by the support it’s received in the Islamic world that investigative journalist Martin A. Lee noted its journal’s frenetic description of a “white-hot trend: the rapid growth of Holocaust revisionism, fueled by increasing cooperation between Muslims and Western revisionists, across the Islamic world.”

A number of Middle Eastern newspapers, in countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, have published articles endorsing the Holocaust deniers’ thesis. Beyond that, neo-Nazi writers who lack legitimacy in the West have increasingly found a platform in the Arab world. For example, Lee further reported that an article by David Duke was featured on the front page of the Oman Times.

Nor is the Islamic promotion of neo-Nazis confined to the Middle East. Lee reports that Muslims, a New York-based weekly newspaper, has published opinion pieces by both David Duke and William Pierce.

Even some Islamic groups with more mainstream legitimacy have promoted far-right figures as featured speakers. One such speaker is William W. Baker, author of the anti-Israel screed Theft of a Nation and former president of the neo-Nazi Populist Party. (While Baker claims that he did not know at the time that the Populist Party was racist, his own words undercut these denials. The Orange County Weekly reports that, in a speech Baker delivered around the time that he headed the Populist Party, he referred to Jerry Falwell as “Jerry Jewry” and commented that he hated traveling to New York City “‘cause the first people I meet when I get off the plane are pushy, belligerent American Jews.”)

Baker’s current avocation is promoting “religious tolerance” by emphasizing the commonalities between Christianity and Islam. In this capacity, Baker has frequently spoken at events hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and various chapters of the Muslim Students’ Association; he was also the featured speaker at the Assadiq Islamic Educational Foundation in Boca Raton earlier this year.

THERE ARE OBSTACLES to further development of the relationship between Islamists and neo-Nazis. In Europe, ethnic Muslims are frequent targets of neo-Nazi violence, and not all neo-Nazis share the sympathy for Palestinians expressed by the likes of William Baker. As one white supremacist website puts it, “I hate Jews but that doesn’t mean I automatically love the Jews’ victims.” And countless Muslims recoil from Nazi ideology.

Nonetheless, this developing alliance is not without historical precedent. Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, famously supported Adolf Hitler during World War II, broadcasting radio propaganda on Germany’s behalf and even forming Bosnian Muslim divisions of the Waffen SS. As with al-Husayni and Hitler, the current Islamist/neo-Nazi love affair is rooted in the notion that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”: Both groups are united in their hatred of the Jews, and of the United States.

Moving forward, this peculiar alliance presents the risk that neo-Nazis may collaborate with Islamist terrorist groups on attacks. But a second danger is that the far right’s newfound legitimacy in the Arab world may allow neo-Nazi figures to claw their way out from the lunatic fringe to which they’re currently relegated.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a counterterrorism consultant and attorney. Kamal Ghali provided research assistance for this article.

==============================

CAIR killing free speech in the U.S.? (townhall.com, 050902)

Joel Mowbray

Though there is some disagreement between local talk station WMAL and fired mid-morning host Michael Graham over the details of his recent termination, one thing is not in dispute: the big winner is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which called for his ouster, yet has never specifically condemned Islamic terrorist organizations such as Hamas or Hezbollah.

In a year that started with it blasting away at the Fox television show “24”—because it had terrorists who were Muslims—CAIR has garnered more attention than ever before. Now with the firing of Mr. Graham, it has achieved perhaps its greatest feat yet—at least in perception, which is typically tantamount to reality.

And a stronger CAIR almost inevitably means a weakened culture of free speech.

Mr. Graham was fired last week by Disney-owned WMAL for his on-air comments on July 21 that Islam is a “terrorist organization.” After initially defending him, however, the station suspended him without pay on July 28—three days after CAIR launched its initial campaign.

Graham likely was not immediately shown the door after making the comments on July 21 because they were rich with context, with the logic and rationale for his labeling Islam a “terrorist organization” well laid-out. The remarks were far from flippant, and seen in context, they don’t read as the rantings of a fire-breathing bigot.

Here is a representative sample of Graham’s remarks:

Focusing solely on the “terrorist organization” soundbite obviously makes Mr. Graham’s comments indefensible—and legitimately an outrage. But with his clearly spelled-out reasoning, there is still much room with which to disagree with his labeling—but it is much harder to pillory his comments as bombastic bigotry.

Whether WMAL intended to or not, the station has handed CAIR arguably its biggest victory to date, and has certainly increased the legitimacy of an organization that deserves none.

It won’t just be radio talk hosts that will start feeling chilly when the topic of Islam arises. Television personalities, reporters, columnists, or anyone who works for a corporate interest that would bristle at being the target of a CAIR scare campaign would think twice before making even entirely defensible statements. It’s not inconceivable that media outlets could set up clear demarcation lines and declare certain subject matters or groups off-limits.

The threat of public controversy is apparently so strong that major media outlets—the top conservative talk station in the nation’s capital and the nation’s premier conservative publication—are fleeing from rather than fighting an organization replete with ripe targets.

Take your pick: CAIR’s radical roots essentially as an offshoot of a rabidly anti-Semitic organization long viewed as Hamas’ biggest political booster in the U.S., its co-founder Omar Ahmad praising suicide bombers who “kill themselves for Islam” in November 1999 (according to a transcript provided by the Investigative Project), or its repeated failure to specifically condemn radical Islam or terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, dismissing requests to do so as a “game.”

Or when four Americans were murdered and mutilated in Fallujah last year. CAIR condemned the mutilations, but not the murders—the same exact position as a leading radical cleric in Fallujah. This was no mere semantic slip; it was the continuation of a pattern that has snookered many.

All of this information is available to media outlets subjected to a CAIR onslaught. None has yet to dig in and fight, however.

==============================

Jihad declared against LAPD: Nation of Islam flyer calls for gangs to unite against cops (WorldNetDaily, 050905)

The Nation of Islam in Los Angeles is calling on the Crips and Bloods street gangs to stop fighting each other – and to unite in a jihad against the LAPD.

That’s the essence of a flyer obtained by KFI News and circulated in South Los Angeles, calling on members of two violent street gangs to start a “holy war” against the police department.

The telephone number listed for the Nation of Islam’s Los Angeles mosque near 87th and Vermont has been disconnected, but a check of a reverse directory reveals the phone number on the flyer is connected to the mosque at the same address, according to KFI.

The Nation of Islam’s L.A. leader, Minister Tony Muhammad, has claimed he was the victim of an unprovoked attack by LAPD officers at the scene of a vigil for a murdered gang member.

The LAPD last week released an audio tape of some garbled radio transmissions in which they say Muhammad can be heard challenging officers.

The photograph on the flyer appears to have been taken at a news conference held just after Muhammad was released from jail. Muhammad and the Nation of Islam have not returned calls for comment.

It’s unclear who created the flyer so the LAPD has declined to comment, other than saying officers have been aware of them for several days.

“This is deeply disturbing,” Los Angeles Police Protective League President Bob Baker told KFI. “Quite frankly, this is a case in which I hope our mayor, our police commission and our community leaders can step in to remind everyone of our shared priorities.”

==============================

Karen Hughes’ big mistake (townhall.com, 050906)

Joel Mowbray

One of President Bush’s closest confidants, Karen Hughes, on Friday addressed the annual conference of an organization whose primary purpose is the propagation of Saudi-sponsored Wahhabist Islam—and which has praised suicide bombers, whose president has publicly denied that al Qaeda was behind 9/11, and whose web site to this day sells a book that lavishes praise on Osama bin Laden.

Not only did Hughes publicly endorse the Islamic Society of North America with her mere presence, but this was the first major public address in her new role spearheading outreach to the Muslim world. In the process, she undoubtedly sent a signal as to whom the administration does—and does not—support in the U.S. Muslim community.

Asked last week whether the woman who was instrumental in Bush winning the White House knew the true nature of the group she spoke to in Chicago, State Department spokesman Noel Clay responded, “Karen Hughes has been briefed on the organization.”

Somehow, it just doesn’t seem likely that Hughes had been fully briefed on ISNA. If she had, she almost certainly wouldn’t have headlined its annual conference—let alone as her first major appearance in her new post.

At the 39th annual ISNA conference, held in Washington DC, several speakers on a panel agreed emphatically that there was no proof that bin Laden was behind 9/11—and this occurred just shy of the one-year anniversary of the attacks, just miles from the Pentagon.

During a session dedicated to the aftermath of 9/11—not on how Muslims can help strip the religious justification of future such terrorism, but rather on how to fight back against “attacks on Islam”—a questioner expressed his anger that the Muslim leadership in the U.S. had “asked [Muslims] to accept the blame for 9/11.”

The three prominent members of the panel all rushed to assure the questioner that, in fact, they weren’t really sure that al Qaeda was behind 9/11, or for that matter, if any Muslim was. According to a transcript provided by the Investigative Project, panel moderator Jamal Barzinji, the then-director of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, responded, “It is not only that we don’t have any proof, but the FBI doesn’t have any proof. They are still looking.”

Former ISNA president Muzammil H. Siddiqi, who was still on the board, added, “We cannot say in surety whoever did it or not.” Rounding out the bizarre denials of al Qaeda’s culpability for 9/11, the then-president of Muslim-American Society, Suhail al Ganouchi, opined, “Probably we’ll never know who actually did it, or who, what, or what groups.”

But ISNA does more than just provide a forum for 9/11 deniers. For sale on its online bookstore is a tome by former Illinois Congressman Paul Findley, published in the summer of 2001, which lavishes praise on Osama bin Laden.

The book, called “Silent No More: Confronting America’s False Image of Islam,” contained the following description of the terrorist who had already orchestrated the murder of Americans in the East Africa embassy bombings and the U.S.S. Cole attack: “Outsiders do not seem to recognize that bin Laden is one of the pre-eminent heroes of Afghans, occupying a role similar to the Marquis de Lafayette, a Frenchman who fought at the side of the Colonials during America’s Revolutionary War.”

Also available at ISNA’s online bookstore is “More in Common Than You Think” by William Baker, who is only well-known to radical Muslims and neo-Nazis. According to a lengthy investigative piece in Orange County Weekly, Baker in 1984 was chairman of the Populist Party, which was “established and directed by Willis Carto, head of the now-defunct Liberty Lobby. …Carto also founded the Costa Mesa-based Institute for Historical Review, a group whose central purpose is Holocaust denial.” Seven months after the article was published, Baker was a panelist at the same ISNA annual conference in September 2002 where Siddiqi and others denied al Qaeda’s perpetration of 9/11.

When asked about much of the above, State spokesman Clay seemed uninterested. He first argued that Hughes’ appearance was no big deal, since the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security were also sending representatives. But DHS and DOJ sent low-level department lawyers who are neither principals nor political appointees. Not the same thing as sending someone who’s logged countless hours by the President’s side.

Clay also defended the appearance before ISNA by noting, “They do not support terrorism.” Except when they do. In a January 2000 press release, ISNA declared, “In order to honor the Shaheeds and the Mujahideen of Chechnia, ISNA has decided to dedicate Shawwal 1, 1420, the day of Eid al Fitr as ‘Solidarity with Chechnia Day’ throughout North America.”

“Shaheeds” is the term used by jihadists for glorification of suicide bombers. U.S. law officials think that the “shaheeds” and “Mujahideen” in Chechnya are terrorists; many of the most high-profile terror cases since 9/11 have involved support for those forces.

Even giving Clay the benefit of the doubt that he did not know of the Chechnya statement, is lack of support for terrorism the only bar which an organization must clear?

Administration officials—particularly someone of Hughes’ prominence—should embrace the organizations fighting the Saudi takeover of Islam in America, not the group perhaps most responsible for perpetrating that very takeover.

Spun off of the Saudi-created and funded Muslim Students Association (MSA) over 20 years ago, ISNA is likely the largest single provider of Islamic materials to mosques in America.

For a sampling of what might be contained in Saudi-sponsored pamphlets and literature, one need look no further than the Freedom House report issued earlier this year. Using Muslim volunteers to gather Saudi-published or sponsored materials in more than a dozen prominent mosques across the country, Freedom House found shocking intolerance, anti-Semitism, and even explicit endorsement of violence.

Though the Freedom House report does not specify if ISNA was responsible for funneling any of the most offensive literature into mosques, ISNA’s own track record suggests that it would do so willingly.

Given that it is highly unlikely Hughes knew exactly what she was walking into, she deserves the benefit of the doubt—this time.

But if groups like ISNA keep getting courted, the question must be asked: Is this embrace happening out of ignorance or out of some cunning—and dangerous—strategy?

==============================

Canadians Protest Islamic Law Proposal (Foxnews, 050909)

TORONTO — A proposal in one Canadian province to allow Muslim residents to use Islamic law for settling family disputes is drawing protests.

Organizers say the peaceful protests in Canada and at some of its diplomatic sites in Europe reflect growing concern over Ontario’s stance on Sharia law.

The provincial government is considering the use of sharia in settling Muslim family disputes such as divorce. Opponents see it as a threat to women’s rights and want to maintain a clear separation of church and state.

Ontario has allowed Catholic and Jewish tribunals to settle family law matters on a voluntary basis since 1991. The practice got little attention until Muslim leaders demanded the same rights.

Now officials must decide whether to exclude one religion, or scrap the whole idea of religious family courts.

==============================

In the Shadow of a Fatwa: Religious life bustles in the world’s largest Muslim nation: pluralistic Indonesia. (Weekly Standard, 050907)

THE HOTEL DHARMAWANGSA, in the teeming, steaming Indonesian capital, is an old Javanese palace that has been turned into a luxury resort. Fortunately for tourists, the Indonesian inflationary crisis has reduced its rates to a little more than a hundred U.S. dollars a night. In the room, one immediately finds an artifact of Indonesian religious pluralism: a small card stating, “We are pleased to present you with a copy of the Koran or the Bible should you require any during your stay.” Contrary to what a non-Muslim might suspect, the offering of the Islamic holy book is not intended for da’wa, or Muslim missionizing, but as a customary courtesy in hostelries, comparable to the Gideon editions of the Christian gospels; when I asked for a Koran, I was told it was only available in Indonesian, which I don’t read.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Indonesian independence and the 40th year since the near civil war provoked by Indonesian Communists in 1965, which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. Indonesia has serious problems with terrorism as well as its economic woes; the Dharmawangsa hotel has armed guards posted at its doors, and they check the undercarriage of arriving cars for bombs. Although it is a petroleum-producing country, Indonesia must now import oil to meet its needs. Jakarta has the chaotic feel of a typical Asian tropical city, but the country’s varied and pluralistic imagination is equally exceptional—and under attack.

For example, when I arrived at the end

of last month, the Sunday Jakarta Post included the headline “Drinking wine: New, popular trend for Indonesian yuppies”—something that would be rare in media even in such advanced Muslim countries as Bosnia-Hercegovina. Coca-Cola is widely consumed, with the word “halal”—the Muslim equivalent of “kosher”—on its bottle-caps. But reactionary clerics are fighting to impose a narrow interpretation of Islam on Indonesia. At the beginning of August, the country’s official body of Muslims clerics, the Indonesian Ulema Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia or MUI), issued 11 fatwas, including condemnations of religious pluralism, of an organization called the Liberal Islam Network (LIN), and of the Muhammadiyah, a 20-million member movement. I had some indication that the attack on pluralism was directed against none other than myself, since I had received email from Jakarta asking if I considered Islamic pluralism to be the same as religious relativism. In addition, the LIN has discussed my book The Two Faces of Islam, and I had been invited to meet with the Muhammadiyah. But the atmosphere in Jakarta, although challenging, did not feel tense.

Besides, the Jakarta media reported that the fatwa against liberalism, pluralism, and secularism was “unpopular” with ordinary Indonesians, many of whom consider MUI an accomplice of the former dictatorship of General Suharto, who ruled from 1965 to 1998. Peter G. Riddell, an expert on radical Islam in Indonesia, has described MUI, in the recent Freedom House publication Radical Islam’s Rules, as a group that after September 11, 2001, “increasingly began to embrace the rhetoric of Islamic radicalism,” calling for global Muslim unity in fighting jihad against the U.S.-led coalition’s combat in Afghanistan. Reassuringly the fatwa stated that the MUI favored no more than debate with the Liberal Islam and Muhammadiyah trends it condemned, rather than physical attacks.

Nevertheless, to cite another local headline, a “a struggle for the nation’s soul” is clearly taking place. Recent events have included the closure of dozens of Christian churches in West Java in 2004—and the government of president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has refused to restrain such actions, on the argument that the Christian communities shut down were “illegal congregations.” In a speech I attended, Yudhoyono declared his commitment to the struggle against extremism, saying “we know that the terrorist cells are still active. They are still hiding, recruiting, networking, trying to find new funding . . . and even planning. We are still actively looking for a dangerous bomb maker, Malaysian Dr. Azahari and Noordin Muhammad Top.” But Yudhoyono also said that an amnesty for Abubakr Baasyir, the al Qaeda ally who inspired the Bali bombing and other recent atrocities, would be unavoidable under the constitution. So far, the release of Baasyir has not been effected—he remains in jail.

The Aceh region, long troubled by separatist violence and still recovering from last year’s tsunami—with considerable help from U.S. relief agencies—is the sole Indonesian province in which radical sharia has been imposed. At the end of August, an Islamic court in Aceh ordered the caning of two unmarried couples for consumption of alcohol and spending time together after nightfall in a private place. “The women fainted after being beaten 40 times . . . outside a mosque,” according to witnesses. A local human rights group, Elsham, denounced the punishment as “insane” and called for its review by the national supreme court. But the blows had already been inflicted.

INDONESIAN MUSLIMS are subtle in their thinking, which cuts in multiple ways. For many of them, the Wahhabi cult, which has been the state religion in Saudi Arabia and spurred the formation of al Qaeda, was a reform movement aimed at the purification of Islam. Thus, although they will disclaim any support for Wahhabi violence, some will defend the sect’s original aims. The Liberal Islam Network, an object of the above-mentioned fatwa, in an event held in 2003, stated that in “emphasizing the importance of [the model of] Islam in the first two centuries after the life of Mohammed, prior to the emergence of differing interpretations, the Wahhabis have the same positions as the Liberal Islam movement.” Indonesian Islam has assumed a complicated and dialectical cast that is unpredictable and, one hopes, will fortify debate and acceptance of differences . . . even if it defends what it sees as Wahhabism.

Indeed, Wahhabi-style Islam has an old history in Indonesia, even though in a country with 220 million people—the largest Muslim country in the world—imposition of any single interpretation is probably bound to fail. In a volume produced last year by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the charitable foundation of the German Christian Democratic Party, titled Indonesia Today, a local author, Azyumardi Azra, recalled, “In the late 18th and early 19th centur[ies], the Padri—a Wahhabi-like movement in West Sumatra—attempted to force other Muslims in the area to subscribe to its literal understanding of Islam. This violent movement armed at spreading what they believed was a pure and pristine Islam . . . but it failed to gain support from a majority of Muslims, and it was the only example of Muslim radicalism in Southeast Asia.”

In a visit to the Jakarta headquarters of the Muhammadiyah movement, which has had a peaceful, Sufi reputation, I was struck by its novel rhetoric: a colorful booklet proclaims, “Welcoming Globalization.” Muhammadiyah maintains an extensive social welfare and educational network, including thousands of preschools, elementary/primary schools, junior high schools, senior high schools, hundreds of general hospitals, maternity hospitals, clinics, orphanages, family care centers, banks, microcredit, and even a life insurance country. Its organizational structure includes centers in the smallest villages.

Acceptance of globalization and modernization leads Muhammadiyah to argue that it “faces certain challenges, such as amending its messages, even its core Islamic doctrine, so it can be assimilated by the masses. Some Muhammadiyah figures have even begun to develop Islamic Sociology, Social Islamic Psychology . . . Others are shaping Islamic sciences and technologies . . . This frenetic rush is an effort to catch up where Islam was left behind.” (The latter comment is, it seems, intended as self-praise).

I had been told in an email by my Muhammadiyah contact that “Islamic fundamentalism is in vogue in recent years in Indonesia, including within the Muhammadiyah community, even though not in the mainstream. [S]ome leaders of radical Islam have a Saudi academic background, and want to spread their understanding of Islam.” A few young members of the movement with whom I met were influenced by the Wahhabi claim of purifying Islam, but one among them, Ahmad Najib Burhani, has published articles in The Jakarta Post opposing such acts of Islamic extremism as an attack on July 8 on a community of the Ahmadiyya, a “post-Islamic” group. The Ahmadis are shunned by most Muslims because they claim that their founder, a late 19th century figure named Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was a divine prophet comparable to the Messiah of the Jews—Islam recognizes no prophets after Mohammed. Burhani wrote of the assailants in the Ahmadiyya case, which caused considerable debate in Indonesia, “Imprisoned in authoritarianism, someone would speak, attack, and kill in God’s name . . . authoritarianism is heresy, the highest sin in Islam.”

The Indonesian MUI fatwas turned out to be nothing to worry about. Leaving the sometimes confusing but stimulating atmosphere of Indonesia, I proceeded to Singapore, a place widely identified with a “benign” authoritarianism. I was greeted on my arrival by a headline in The Strait Times, the state-controlled daily in English, proclaiming, “Moderate Muslims thrive in Singapore,” and describing Singapore Muslims as “conservative in beliefs and practices [but] against radicalism and terrorism.” Many moderate Muslims I have encountered believe that conservatism and traditionalism, rather than reform and liberalism, represent an appropriate alternative to radical Islam. In this way, they somewhat resemble Jewish and Christian neoconservatives.

In Singapore, the restrictive rules under which media function led to a series of speeches I gave being subject to a media blackout. But there as in Indonesia, Muslims are engaged in a highly creative process of self-definition. For example, the Naqshbandi Sufis are anathema to the Saudi Wahhabis, and the Singapore Naqshbandis had held their spiritual services in the Kampung Siglap mosque, off Marine Parade Road, which increasingly came under the Wahhabi influence. Eventually, the mosque officials barred the Sufis from entering the structure. The Naqshbandis responded by holding their observances in the mosque entranceway, and after several such instances, the Wahhabis gave up. Today, the youthful Naqshbandis of Singapore recount with a laugh, “we meet in a Wahhabi mosque!” From every indication, Islam in southeast Asia will continue to produce surprising, and, let us hope, positive developments.

Stephen Schwartz is the author of The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism.

==============================

Ontario Rejects Use of Islamic Law (Foxnews, 050912)

TORONTO — The premier of Ontario said Sunday that he won’t let his province become the first Western government to allow the use of Islamic law to settle family disputes and that he would move to ban all religious arbitration.

Ontario’s provincial government has been reviewing a report recommending that Shariah, or Islamic law, be allowed to settle family disputes like divorce and had said it would soon make a decision.

“There will be no Shariah law in Ontario. There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario. There will be one law for all Ontarians,” Premier Dalton McGuinty told The Canadian Press.

The proposal to let Ontario residents use Islamic law for settling family disputes drew protests Thursday in Canada and at some of its diplomatic sites in Europe.

Ontario, the most populous province in Canada, has allowed Catholic and Jewish faith-based tribunals to settle family law matters on a voluntary basis since 1991. The practice got little attention until Muslim leaders demanded the same rights.

Officials had to decide whether to exclude one religion, or whether to scrap the religious family courts altogether.

McGuinty said such courts “threaten our common ground,” and promised his Liberal government would introduce legislation as soon as possible to outlaw them in Ontario.

“Ontarians will always have the right to seek advice from anyone in matters of family law, including religious advice,” he said. “But no longer will religious arbitration be deciding matters of family law.”

A representative from Ontario’s Jewish community expressed disappointment and shock over McGuinty’s decision.

“We’re stunned,” said Joel Richler, Ontario region chairman of the Canadian Jewish Congress. “At the very least, we would have thought the government would have consulted with us before taking away what we’ve had for so many years.”

Homa Arjomand, a women’s rights activist, was elated.

“I think our voice got heard loud and clear, and I thank the government for coming out with no faith-based arbitration’s,” Arjomand said. “Oh, I am so happy. That was the best news I have ever heard for the past five years.”

Just hours before McGuinty’s announcement, a group including prominent Canadian author Margaret Atwood and actress Shirley Douglas issued an open letter to the premier on behalf of the No Religious Arbitration Coalition.

Shariah comes from several sources including the Koran, the Muslim holy book, and it governs every aspect of life. Under most interpretations, Islamic law gives men more rights than women in matters of inheritance, divorce and child custody.

==============================

‘An Islamist threat like the Nazis’ (Washington Times, 050912)

Tony Blankley, editorial-page editor of The Washington Times, describes the present danger posed by militant Islam and what must be done to counter it in his new book, “The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?” (Regnery Publishing)

First of three parts

The threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s.

We cannot afford to lose Europe. We cannot afford to see Europe transformed into a launching pad for Islamist jihad.

While we in the United States and Europe have vast resources for protecting ourselves, we have thought ourselves into a position of near impotence.

Beyond the growing number of Muslims committed to terrorism is the threat from the Islamic diaspora’s growing cultural and religious assertiveness — particularly in largely secular Europe, where Muslim cultural assimilation has not occurred.

It is beginning to dawn on Europeans that the combination of a shrinking ethnic-European population and an expanding, culturally assertive Muslim population might lead to the fall of Western civilization in Europe within a century.

This phenomenon, called Eurabia, is viewed with growing fatalism both in Europe and in America. Such fatalism, however, is premature.

Last November, an Islamist terrorist’s butchering of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had made a movie revealing abuse of Muslim women, aroused deep fears in Holland and across the Continent.

The public anger, which included the burning of mosques in traditionally tolerant Holland, is evidence that the European instinct for survival has not been fully extinguished.

But that survival instinct is threatened by the multiculturalism and political correctness advocated in media and academe — and institutionalized in national and European Union laws and regulations for half a century.

Europe’s effort at cultural tolerance since World War II slowly morphed into a surprisingly deep self-loathing of Western culture that denied the instinct for cultural and national self-defense.

If Europe doesn’t rise to the challenge, Eurabia will come to pass. Then Europe will cease to be an American ally and instead become a base of operations (as she already is to a small degree) against us.

Prepared to murder

What Muslims say and do now is the measure of the political, cultural and military danger facing the West.

Most other religious developments around the world, such as the spread of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere, have benign or nonviolent consequences.

However, the overwhelming political fact deriving from the ferment in Islam is that, to some degree, some percentage of Muslims are prepared to murder — and are murdering — great numbers in what they feel is their religious duty.

Many more Muslims are, to some degree, supportive or protective of these killers. Even more Muslims, while not supportive of such tactics, share many of the terrorists’ religious convictions and perceptions.

Radical currents within Islam drive some Muslims to terrorism and push others at least to a more adversarial view of their relationship to non-Muslim nations and cultures in which they live — whether in Paris, London, Hamburg, Rotterdam, or any American city.

The resurgence of a militant Islam drove the United States to fight two wars in Muslim countries in two years, disrupted America’s alliance with Europe, caused the largest reorganization of the U.S. government in half a century (with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security), changed election results in Europe and threatened the stability of most governments in the Middle East.

This resurgence of militant Islam also drove America to pressure Saudi Arabia to change the way it teaches religion to its children and others (through madrasses) around the world. It forced America to pressure Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan and Somalia, among others, to change domestic security policies. It prompted America to build a ring of bases in Central Asia across what used to be the Muslim part of the Soviet Union.

And we are only four years removed from the September 11 attacks.

Nazi parallels

Radical Islamists like Osama bin Laden are not traditionalists. The idea of individual jihad — separating jihadist decisions from the Muslim community — is a radical departure. But it is important for recruiting potential terrorists.

Over the past 30 years, the Muslim population in Europe expanded rapidly from a few hundred thousand to more than 20 million. Muslims there and in the United States are arguing over their role in Western societies: Should they integrate, seclude themselves, or convert the West to Islam?

Many Muslims in Europe are content to be law-abiding, culturally integrated citizens. But an increasing number feel some degree of alienation. Many are beginning to believe that they have a religious duty not to integrate.

Radical Islam, sometimes accurately called Islamo-fascism, has all the “advantages” the Nazis had in Germany in the 1930s. The Islamo-fascists find a Muslim population adrift, confused and humiliated by the dominance of foreign nations and cultures. They find a large, youthful population increasingly disdainful of their parents’ passive habits.

Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed Aryan origins of the German people, the radical Islamists reach back to the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture. And just like the Nazis, they claim to speak for authentic traditions while actually advancing expedient and radical innovations.

The Islamo-fascist mullahs encourage young Muslims not to turn to their parents for guidance on choosing a wife (or wives). Nor are young Muslims to be guided by parental or community disapproval of making an individual commitment to jihad. They are allowed to drink alcohol, shave their beards and commit what otherwise would be judged immorality in a Muslim — in order to advance jihad.

Postmodern radicalism

In many ways, these radical Muslim fundamentalists are postmodern, not pre-modern. They are designing a distinctly Western, fascistic version of Islam that is less and less connected to the Islam of their Middle Eastern homeland.

Radical Western Islam brings the combative strength and deep faith of authentic traditions while constantly modifying itself to best attack liberal, secular European and American institutions.

The radical Islamists are able to rationalize concessions to modernity with ancient-sounding mumbo jumbo while still sounding like authentic fundamentalists, the only true voice of Islam.

The Nazis overwhelmed German society with these methods 70 years ago. There is building evidence that the radical Islamists are moving ever more successfully down the same path — particularly within the younger generations in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the United States.

Many young Muslims in Europe, and some in America, particularly second- and third-generation Muslims, cannot be considered part of a diaspora. They no longer are strongly connected to their family’s country of origin, nor do they intend to return.

Instead, they are forming their own Muslim consciousness from the Internet, books, videotapes and audiotapes.

The Internet offers many radical Islamic “experts” and mullahs who function like Dear Abby. European Muslims pose questions on everything from whether to be polite to infidels to how to prepare for jihad. The immediate answer often is a hodgepodge of Koranic citations, quotes from ancient scholars and personal advice.

Within this constantly morphing digital environment, an increasingly radical Islam is emerging in Europe. Disconnected from their homelands, isolated from their non-Muslim neighbors and fellow workers, alienated from their elders, Europe’s young Muslims find a weird, disembodied, globalized radical Islam appealing.

Struggle for survival

Muslim sections of Paris, Rotterdam and other European cities already are labeled “no-go zones” for ethnic Europeans, including armed policemen.

As the Muslim populations — and their level of cultural and religious assertiveness — expand, European geography will be “reclaimed” for Islam. Europe will become pockmarked with “little Fallujahs” that effectively will be impenetrable by anything much short of a U.S. Marine division.

Not only will Islamic cultural aggression against a seemingly passive and apologetic indigenous population increase, but the zone of safety and support for the actual terrorists will expand as well.

If the current leaders of Europe do not respond to the Islamist threat boldly and effectively, the common European people might decide to defend their culture as vigilantes. In that case, Europe again will become a bloody urban battleground.

This would be a temporary tragedy for liberal principles of governance, but at least would secure Europe from Muslim domination over the next half-century.

The harm of a vigilante effort against the radical Islamists can be mitigated, if not avoided, if the governments themselves will lead the struggle for European cultural survival.

It should be a prime objective of American policy to encourage European governments and the European Union to lead their people in this struggle, rather than follow them.

==============================

Needed: Old war spirit in a new war (Washington Times, 050913)

By Tony Blankley

Second of three parts

American writer and social historian Studs Terkel memorably called World War II “the good war.”

Terkel interviewed hundreds of GIs and their families many years after the war. They recalled that the struggle lifted them above their personal lives to fight on behalf of something they believed was greater than themselves.

World War II was good, despite the millions of deaths, the limitations on daily lives, the encroachment on peacetime liberties and the arduousness of wartime life. The war was good because the sacrifice was for a noble cause, for the perpetuation of America and the American way of life.

The struggle against Islamist terrorism is an equally good war — and for the same reasons. We have just as great a responsibility to win our struggle against insurgent Islamist aggression as our parents and grandparents had to win World War II.

There is no other cause so urgent. If we do not pay with our sacrifices now, we (and our children) will pay in greater losses later. We must be prepared to be just as ruthless and rational as the “greatest generation” was in defeating fascism.

Just as their generals and admirals made no compromise to the imperative of total victory on the battlefield, so British and American political leaders, courts and popular opinion let the requirements for victory define the powers of their government on the home front.

Prior to America’s entry into the war, Congress passed laws that, collectively, authorized President Franklin D. Roosevelt to instruct the FBI to investigate suspected subversive activity.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, the Smith Act of 1940 and the Voorhis Act of 1941 were the grounds for Roosevelt’s wartime domestic surveillance of American citizens whose political activity might lead them to serve the interests of opposing nations.

Attorney General Robert Jackson described the targets and responsibility of the FBI’s domestic intelligence activities as involving “steady surveillance over individuals and groups within the United States ... which [are] ready to give assistance or encouragement in any form to invading or opposing ideologies.” Roosevelt authorized the FBI to use wiretaps (without a warrant), surreptitious entries and “champering” (secretly intercepting and reading private mail without consent).

Between 1941 and 1943, the Justice Department’s Special War Policies Unit took extensive action on the internal security front by interning thousands of enemy aliens, denaturalizing and deporting members of the German-American Bund, an American Nazi organization formed in the 1930s. The government prosecuted individuals for sedition and prohibited the mailing of some publications.

Wartime security

A total of 25,655 noncitizens living in the United States were interned or deported during the war years because of their ethnicity or nationality, rather than their words or conduct. They included 11,229 Japanese, 10,905 Germans, 3,278 Italians, 52 Hungarians, 25 Romanians, five Bulgarians and 161 other foreign nationals.

The Supreme Court later held, in Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950), that “executive power over enemy aliens, undelayed and unhampered by litigation, has been deemed, throughout our history, essential to wartime security.” The high court added: “The resident enemy alien is constitutionally subject to summary arrest, internment and deportation whenever a ‘declared war’ exists.” So the power to intern or deport comes into effect only when war has been declared.

Today, we are under attack not by a nation, but by groups of militant individuals who claim Islam as their faith. Yet for the first time in human history, the destructive power of terrorists can be as great as that of a traditional nation-state that has declared war. We need a mechanism to deal with this change.

During World War II, the country was faced with the prospect of large numbers of people — again identifiable by ethnicity, not conduct — who were real or potential enemies.

The logic of the Supreme Court’s opinion is applicable to the situation we face today. The court held that people ethnically connected to the war-makers are more likely to support them than are others — and our country at war has a right to protect itself from this presumed higher risk of danger.

This is true regardless of the personal innocence of particular individuals. The term we would use today is “ethnic profiling,” and 200 years of American law and practice during wartime permits ethnic profiling for the common defense.

The Supreme Court upheld internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry as well as curfews and other conditions under the principle of military necessity.

The war power “extends to every matter and activity so related to war as substantially to affect its conduct and progress,” Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote in the majority opinion.

The court specifically rejected the argument that if a curfew were necessary, every American citizen not just those of Japanese ancestry should have to comply. The court responded that it was not necessary to “inflict obviously needless hardship on the many.”

Compare that reasoning to the practice in airport searches since September 11, where our government’s policy is precisely to impose obviously needless hardship on the many. Security personnel search 80-year-old grandmothers equally with, or instead of, 23-year-old Arab men.

In essence, the court found that if there was rational support for discriminating on the basis of race, such discrimination was justified under the circumstances of a war menace.

A liberal icon

A decent man makes different judgments in different circumstances.

Members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were prosecuted during World War II for refusing to let their children recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a liberal, wrote the majority opinion in the case. He upheld the school expulsions and parental prosecutions for violating compulsory attendance laws.

Justice Frankfurter observed that “the mere possession of religious convictions which contradict the relevant concerns of a political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities.”

This is particularly applicable to the situation we face today. Radical Islamists are demanding to be covered by Shariah — laws compiled over a thousand years of Muslim jurisprudence, based on the Koran and its commentaries — rather than by the laws of the United States, Britain, Germany or the other non-Muslim nations in which the radical Islamists live.

Although Justice Frankfurter is remembered as a great liberal, in the 1940s, liberalism still understood our country’s history and government’s role in unifying our nation.

“We are dealing with an interest inferior to none in the hierarchy of legal values,” he wrote. “National unity is the basis of national security.”

Today, schoolchildren, senators and elite journalists would giggle at the idea of applying Justice Frankfurter’s lofty words to the defense of the modest little Pledge of Allegiance.

But back then, as now, we were a nation of newly arrived immigrants, threatened from abroad and bombarded with destructive ideologies.

Then, it was communism and fascism. Today, it is multiculturalism, political correctness and, among the Muslim population, radical Islam.

Most basic right

Justice Frankfurter delivered his Pledge opinion on June 3, 1940. On May 10, Germany had invaded France. On May 15, Holland had surrendered to Germany. On May 26, Britons had begun the evacuation of all their troops, and as many French soldiers as they could take, 338,000 troops in all, from the beaches of Dunkirk.

Evil was on the march. It was overwhelmingly powerful,well-organized and pitiless. All around the world, from Singapore to Norway, civilization was being routed by the mass forces of Nazi Germany and its ally Japan, while Soviet Communism was corrupting minds in democracies from France to America to China.

In those days, when Supreme Court justices — liberal, moderate, and conservative — sat down to write opinions, they knew their words and findings mattered.

Wrongly decided cases wouldn’t merely expose the justices to rude comments in fashionable newspapers and magazines. Wrongly decided cases might expose the United States to disunity, sabotage, revolution or conquest.

Under such circumstances, the justices were more than prepared to let Congress give the president of the United States broad powers to defend our country. And they were unlikely to interfere with the president carrying out such powers or to second-guess the military’s decisions.

The court would draw lines and preserve the essence of our freedoms. But the justices were practical men.

They understood that the broadest enforcement of every last theoretical right and privilege might well be purchased at the price of losing our most basic right: the right to effectively defend ourselves.

==============================

At war with an enemy of an unspoken name (Washington Times, 050914)

By Tony Blankley

When President Bush declared war on terrorism, he did not, legally, put the country on a war footing.

Up until now, we have never accurately named the enemy or the danger. If the government can’t speak the real name and nature of the enemy, it becomes impossible to explain, or even design, a policy for victory.

This is why Mr. Bush — who has tried to talk around the problem of radical Islam — has seemed (to his critics) foolish or deceitful, neither of which he is.

What we need is a clear congressional declaration of war, as prescribed by the Constitution. Congress should declare war on the Islamist jihadists.

Naming the formal enemy limits the focus of our war effort to the militant Islamists who have declared jihad against the West. There are many terrorist groups in the world. Many are no threat to the United States. The current danger is the Islamist one.

Naming the threat also expands the scope of our war effort to all the networks of radical Islam, including mosques, schools and radical sites on the Internet. It is not only terrorist acts that we are confronting, but the propaganda and organizations that make them possible.

Some people would argue that we would be declaring a religious war against more than a billion Muslims. But this is not true. We would be declaring war on a particular, violent, political ideology within Islam that threatens the West and the health of Muslim societies themselves.

By declaring war on the Islamist jihadists, we can underline why we stand side by side with peaceful and democratic Muslims and are opposed in Afghanistan and Iraq only by those Muslims who believe in car bombs, terrorism and murder.

Necessary powers

It is also important to declare war on the Islamist jihadists because we are a nation of laws.

When Congress declares war and passes enabling legislation, the president can accept the full authority delegated to him under the Constitution and by Supreme Court precedents that establish presidential powers in wartime.

Some such powers that barely were used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, such as the sedition laws, are necessary to fight our war against Islamist terrorism.

Muslim extremists on the Internet and in mosques openly call for jihad against the United States and Europe. In May, Muslim organizations gathered in front of the American Embassy in London to protest against the United States and Britain.

They burned British and American flags and threatened violence, including another September 11 attack. They chanted, “USA, watch your back, Osama is coming back” and “Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush” and “Bomb, bomb New York” and “George Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head.”

If this protest, with its threats of violence and assassination, had been conducted within our own borders, the protesters would have been ripe subjects for sedition prosecutions — and rightly so. Sedition laws do not outlaw dissent; they outlaw advocating the violent overthrow of our government and violent opposition to our war effort.

The likely prolonged nature of this war should be a concern to everyone who values civil liberties. As long as we are inventing a new form of war declaration, put a sunset provision on it. Every two years, all exclusively wartime powers would be extinguished and need to be renewed by the next Congress.

Ethnic and religious profiling is a specific war power that must be available to our government.

Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta has declared that any profiling that takes race, religion or nationality into account is forbidden in airport security.

Under current policy, our government cannot take action or make judgments on the basis of ethnicity, religion or nationality. Our government severely fined airlines that barred suspicious-looking young Muslim men from flights.

Back to common sense

Obviously, such policies are not based on reason but on political correctness run amok.

Muslim organizations are quick to hold press conferences and take legal action to intimidate the government. They put pressure on magazines by trying to persuade advertisers to withdraw ads or face charges of subsidizing racism. They try to intimidate authors and publishers.

During World War II, the internment of German, Italian and Japanese aliens (and American citizens of Japanese ancestry) was found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court on the explicit basis that it was reasonable to suspect them of loyalty to a hostile country.

Today, the question is not incarceration, but merely extra attention in sensitive settings, such as boarding an airplane.

Our policy must follow the dictates of common sense and national security.

For example, since September 11, our government has had a critical shortage of Arabic translators. But according to the testimony of Sibel Dinez Edmonds, a former Arabic translator for the FBI, ambiguous loyalties in the FBI translation office compromise our national security.

The FBI should not be intimidated into politically correct behavior that endangers security. But this is the natural outcome of policy that puts political correctness before common sense.

To give extra scrutiny to Muslims in sensitive situations is not bigotry. If America went to war against England, I would fully expect that as a former Englishman (now a naturalized American citizen), I would receive a thorough background check if I applied for government work or if I wanted to buy a gun or board an airplane.

In time of war, no loyal American citizen or peaceful resident should resent precautions taken for the common defense.

Urgent needs

Essentially, senior government officials admit that al Qaeda plans to illegally sneak terrorists across our borders and that we have no plan for dealing with that likelihood.

In World War II, we safely shipped more than 10 million troops through submarine-infested seas, built 100,000 combat planes in a single year and invented and deployed the first atomic bomb.

We are at war again and need to treat border security as a necessity. We need to meet the challenge with the same can-do spirit.

Here is one hard truth: We no longer can afford the luxury of not requiring national identification cards. Without biometric cards for every person living or traveling in the country, even secured borders will be insufficient.

Complacency also rules in the government’s search for reliable translators of Arabic and related languages. The FBI admits to a backlog of 120,000 hours of potentially valuable intercepts. The State Department admits that only one in five of 279 Arabic translators is fluent enough to manage the subtlety of the language. The military has similar problems.

Aside from classified material is a much larger domain of what intelligence officials call open sources — newspapers, Internet sites, magazine articles, television and radio broadcasts — that are not even submitted to our translators. And yet Arabic-language Internet sites are the primary medium for spreading Islamist doctrine — and communicating operational information for terrorists.

What we obviously need are tens of thousands of non-Muslim Arabic translators.

Challenge and strategy

The challenge for America and the West is that we must try to more or less simultaneously shield our nations from the Islamists; strengthen our own cultural vigor, laws and military capacity; and shrewdly intervene in the Islamic world to establish healthy economic and political connections.

These connections include creating a free and self-sufficient Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps, if the Israelis and Palestinians establish a lasting peace, pouring capital investment into the West Bank to promote mutual prosperity.

The best strategy to fend off and reverse the Islamist threat is to strengthen the alliance between the United States and Europe.

Of course, Christian Southern Africa (390 million of Africa’s approximately 850 million people), Hindu India, non-Muslim Southeast Asia, Christian Latin America and Russia all have important roles to play in defeating the Islamist jihadists.

But a defense of the West without the birthplace of the West — Europe — is almost unthinkable. If Europe becomes Eurabia, it would mean the loss of our cultural and historic first cousins, our closest economic and military allies, and the source of our own civilization. This is a condition Americans should dread and should move mountains to avoid.

It bears repeating: An Islamified Europe would be as great a threat to the United States today as a Nazified Europe would have been in the 1940s.

Even before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt understood that a Nazi-dominated Europe would be more than a fearsome military and industrial threat. It would be a civilizational threat.

Now we face another such threat in insurgent Islam.

==============================

Jordan’s king reaches out to Jews, hits radical Islam (Washington Times, 050922)

Jordan’s King Abdullah II told a gathering of American rabbis yesterday that Jews and Muslims are irrevocably “tied together by culture and history” and that he is willing to take radical measures to combat Muslim extremists.

“We face a common threat: extremist distortions of religion and the wanton acts of violence that derive therefrom,” the king said. “Such abominations have already divided us from without for far too long.”

Criticizing al Qaeda terrorists Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi for “abuses of our faith,” the king, speaking at a heavily guarded lunch meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Northwest, made clear he wishes to establish himself as the voice of moderate Islam.

He pointed to a July conference he held in Amman, Jordan, for 180 Muslim scholars as a key part of his effort to undermine the far Islamic right. The conference was supported by fatwas — or legal rulings — from 17 major Islamic scholars.

“Muslims from every branch of Islam can now assert without doubt or hesitation,” he said, “that a fatwa calling for the killing of innocent civilians — no matter what nationality or religion, Muslim or Jew, Arab or Israeli — is a basic violation of the most fundamental principles of Islam.”

Now, King Abdullah said, it’s time to mend fences with the worldwide Jewish community.

“It cannot be denied that the relationship between Jews and Muslims has been very difficult in recent years,” said the king, a close U.S. ally who met with Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday and will meet with President Bush today before flying home.

“Nonetheless,” the king added, “at this moment in history, we have no choice but to take bold strides towards mutual forgiveness and reconciliation.”

His 12-minute speech, laced with quotes from the Old Testament and the Koran, was met with standing ovations from the rabbis, most of whom were from cities along the eastern seaboard.

“He’s taking the lead for the moderate approach in the Islamic tradition,” said Rabbi Marc Gopin of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University.

Secular leaders “need to learn from your example,” the rabbi told the king as he presented him with a copy of the Old Testament in both English and Hebrew. They need to “learn from true heroism of one who confronts his adversaries,” the rabbi added.

Yesterday was the last of several interfaith meetings the king has held during his U.S. tour.

Other stops included a Sept. 13 speech at Catholic University, a Sept. 15 talk at New York’s liberal Protestant Riverside Church and a Tuesday meeting with about 15 Islamic leaders at the Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue Northwest.

The king has met with Jewish leaders before, embassy aides said, but yesterday was the first time he reached out to an exclusively rabbinical audience. The invitation-only kosher lunch included participants from the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and Reconstructionist branches of Judaism.

At home, however, the king encounters massive anti-Semitism. According to a July poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on global attitudes toward religious groups, 100% of Jordanian respondents said they either had a “very unfavorable” or “somewhat unfavorable” view of Jews.

Not only are there no known Jews living in Jordan, but also 1.7 million Jordanians are Palestinian refugees, many of whom fled their homeland in 1948 when Israel was proclaimed a Jewish state.

Thus, King Abdullah, 43, decided to present his reconciliation effort in Washington rather than his home country, said Robert Eisen, a religion professor at George Washington University who helped coordinate the lunch.

“The king may not, for various reasons, be ready to open up Jordan to a pluralistic dialogue between religions,” he said. “The fact he’s coming over here to start is a significant step down the road.

“The United States is the place where some of the warring elements in the Middle East can dialogue with each other. He’ll see how his people react to this at home and then take the next step.”

==============================

Naming Names: A GAO report unabashedly names America’s foe in the war on terrorism: Islamic extremism. (Weekly Standard, 050921)

FOUR YEARS AFTER September 11, 2001, the United States government has passed a significant turning point in the war on Islamist terror. In an official report the federal authorities have directly and identified the enemy as “Islamic extremism”—one of the few instances in which they have dared to commit to print this term, to which apologists for radical Islam so heartily object. More, the document forthrightly identifies the main threat: the Wahhabi cult that is the state religion in Saudi Arabia.

This breakthrough in policy nomenclature comes after four years of waffling about the Saudi problem.

The GAO’s report, Information on U.S. Agencies’ Efforts to Address Islamic Extremism, is dated this month and was submitted to intelligence agencies, the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The document is paired with a classified report on the same topic, to be released later.

These works originated with a congressional request to GAO and so far, the results are sobering. The non-classified report begins by admitting that “U.S. agencies do not know the extent of the Saudi government’s efforts to limit the activities of Saudi sources that have allegedly propagated Islamic extremism outside of Saudi Arabia.” The inclusion of the word “alleged” in this sentence seems perfunctory since the GAO report reads like a criminal indictment of the kingdom’s government. Echoing last year’s 9/11 Commission Report, the GAO emphasizes, “Saudi Arabia has been a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism.”

In the view of the GAO, “Islamic extremism” as a broad category “is the pre-eminent threat to U.S. interests”—rather than al Qaeda, which is a single exemplar of the phenomenon. Further, the GAO is admirably clear on what Islamic extremism consists of: “an Islamic ideology that denies the legitimacy of nonbelievers and practitioners of other forms of Islam [aside from the Saudi version] and that explicitly promotes hatred, intolerance, and violence.” The report takes into account the differing definitions of Islamic extremism: “militant Islam,” “radicalism,” “fundamentalism,” “jihadism,” “Wahhabism,” and “Salafism.”

Nearly all these definitions lead back to the Saudi kingdom. Among the leading factors in the growth of the problem, the GAO notes is “external funding and propagation of fundamentalism and extremism, especially by Saudi Arabia.” In an appendix reviewing its methodology, the GAO discloses that it reviewed 100 State Department cables written from 1998 through 2004, selected through computer searches focusing on “extremist ideology,” “intolerance,” “hatred,” “Wahhabism,” and “Saudi charities.” The cables monitored activities in Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the Saudi kingdom.

It is disturbing, however, to observe in the inventory of cables that the State Department generated only 100 documents in seven years dealing with these topics, when thousands of communications could and should have been dispatched. Nevertheless, the report cites government and nongovernmental sources attesting that “Saudi funding and export of a particular version of Islam that predominates in Saudi Arabia has had the effect . . . of promoting the growth of religious extremism globally.” The GAO links official agencies of the Saudi regime such as the Muslim World League (MWL), the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), along with privately sponsored charities and educational foundations, to “the global propagation of religious intolerance, hatred of Western values, and support to terrorist activities.”

The GAO report emphasizes that whatever measures the Saudis have adopted to cut off terrorist financing have lagged in application. The State Department “continues to stress, in its discussions with the Saudis, the need for full implementation of charity regulations, including a fully functioning (oversight) commission.” That State has to push for implementation, and the establishment of effective supervision over charities, speaks for itself. But the GAO also affirms that “appropriate regulatory oversight” of MWL, IIRO, and WAMY “is absolutely necessary.”

As a pragmatic check on its findings, the GAO traveled to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, where its representatives interviewed government officials along with leaders of two massive Islamic organizations, Nadhlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, and the reformist Liberal Islam Network (see In the Shadow of a Fatwa). Using Indonesia as a control on the data was wise; Southeast Asian Muslims are forthright in analyzing the problems of the global Islamic community, and are unafraid to describe Saudi-Wahhabi ambitions accurately, as religious colonialism.

The desert kingdom still owes us a Saudi version of the 9/11 Commission Report fully elucidating the involvement of their subjects in the terrorist assault on America; they owe the world a cutoff of support to Wahhabism; and they owe themselves the establishment, with our help, of the institutions of civil society. In other words, a clean slate that can reestablish the U.S.-Saudi alliance on a firm basis of transparency, honesty, and trust.

Stephen Schwartz is the author of The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and

Its Role in Terrorism.

==============================

Thwarting ‘Eurabia’ (Washington Times, 050927)

By Michael Barone

THE WEST’S LAST CHANCE: WILL WE WIN THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?

By Tony Blankley Regnery, $27.95, 256 pages

Tony Blankley is worried. The normally cheerful editorial page editor of The Washington Times and “The McLaughlin Group” panelist is worried about Eurabia, about the possibility that radical Islamists will take over Europe. “If current birthrates continue,” he writes in “The West’s Last Chance,” “if current EU policies continue, if current multicultural sensibilities continue to deny Western institutions any protection and special respect, if current unthinking tolerance of the intolerant continues, if current thinking in Europe (and to a substantial extent in America) doesn’t change, Western values and lifestyles will be supplanted in Europe by the values of radical Islam.”

Mr. Blankley is not kidding. He starts the book with a scenario set in 2007 and 2008. Islamist demonstrators in London are calling for the end of display of the nude statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. Other Muslims start destroying statues and paintings in London, Florence, Rome, Madrid and Paris. Within months Britain, France and Germany establish commissions that recommend the removal of statues offensive to Muslims. Aluminum folds of cloth are put around Eros.

This is not so farfetched as you might think, as Mr. Blankley readily demonstrates. Europeans were happy to import Muslim immigrants to do their dirty work, and found themselves dependent on them as European birth rates dropped to record lows. But Europeans were unprepared for the surge of Islamism among the immigrants and their children. The natural instinct of a Europe ravaged twice in the 20th century by world wars has been to shun nationalism and exalt tolerance.

But, as Mr. Blankley writes, “Europe’s effort at cultural tolerance has slowly morphed into a surprisingly deep self-loathing of Western culture that has denied the instinct for cultural and national self-defense.” High Muslim birth rates mean that an increasing proportion of Europe’s population will be Muslim; the appeal of Islamism, espoused by only a minority of Muslims but tolerated and excused by a majority, has been growing. Europe, Mr. Blankley argues, is well on the road to becoming Eurabia. And Eurabia, he goes on, is something we should want to live with no more than Americans two generations ago wanted to live with a Europe dominated by Adolf Hitler.

So what can we do? Here the optimistic Tony Blankley emerges. If current trends continue, Europe becomes Eurabia; but as history shows us, “we can take it as a general principle that current trends rarely continue indefinitely.” The shocks of 2004 — the Madrid bombings, the massacre at Beslan, the assassination of Theo Van Gogh — have waked up many Europeans, in somewhat the same manner as September 11 waked up Americans; the London bombings last July came after he finished the manuscript. “Just as 2004 was the year that the man and woman in the European street and workaday politicians began to shift their thinking away from the grand old idea of a multicultural Europe, so, too, in the loftiest reaches of European universities and senior government bureaucracies, there is noticeable, even flagrant, doubt about the utility of multiculturalism and the underlying principles that have formed European policy and law as they relate to immigration and citizenship.”

Mr. Blankley asks: What would Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill do? The answers will surely surprise the chattering class of today. Roosevelt promoted propaganda, imposed censorship, denaturalized citizens and deported them, interned citizens (not just the Japanese-Americans), restricted speech. Churchill imposed even stronger restrictive policies. The overwhelming majority of Americans and Britons and even of the chattering classes of the day supported them. They were emergency measures in a time of emergency. There was a war on.

“The West needs to recover its fighting faith,” Mr. Blankley writes and, in the case of Europe, its religious faith — which he thinks may be happening as the secular faith of multiculturalism is being undermined by events. He closes the book with specific recommendations. The United States should declare war on Islamic jihadists and enforce laws that prohibit the advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government. Our security forces should utilize ethnic profiling. We should secure our borders and adopt biometric national identification cards. We should do much more to develop Project BioShield, to hire translators fluent in Arabic and other relevant languages. We should be prepared for more military actions in the Middle East. We should try to strengthen Europeans’ belief in Western values and “win the European culture war.”

All this sounds like a tall order. But, Mr. Blankley argues, the alternative is dreadful. “If Europe becomes Eurabia, it would mean the loss of our cultural and historic first cousins, our closest economic and military allies, and the source of our own civilization. It would be a condition Americans should dread, and should move mountains to avoid.” It is comforting to believe that Islamism is no significant threat. Comforting to believe, yes, but very difficult to believe for anyone who has read “The West’s Last Chance.”

==============================

Sounding the alarm (townhall.com, 050927)

Rebecca Hagelin

Thousands of anti-war protesters (and pro-war counter protesters) marched in Washington, D.C., this past weekend, and emotions ran high. They filled the air with angry questions about everything from how soon we’ll withdraw from Iraq to how many more “children” we’re “willing to sacrifice,” as Cindy Sheehan asked the crowd.

Good luck finding anyone ready to face the real choice before America and Europe: Namely, will the West decisively confront the threat posed by radical Islam? Or will it ride its fabled “tolerance” into oblivion?

Before you answer, I’d like to suggest that you read an engaging new book by Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of The Washington Times. Tony recently visited The Heritage Foundation to discuss it. Titled “The West’s Last Chance,” it provides a hard-hitting analysis that’s heavy on facts and light on emotion. He sees reason to be optimistic, but only if the West wakes up to the mortal danger in its midst.

And what is that danger? It’s not merely “terrorism.” Many terrorist groups pose no threat to us. But terrorism carried out by those who adhere to a radical interpretation of Islam does. And it’s time, however painful it may be to the language police among us, to speak plainly about what we’re at war with: radical Islam. Those who refuse to assimilate and who plot our overthrow and destruction cannot be ignored without ensuring our own destruction.

Yet, for the West, that’s easier said than done. “It is increasingly likely that such a threat cannot be defeated while the West continues to adhere to its deeply held values — as it currently understands them — of tolerance, the right to privacy, the right even to advocate sedition and the right to equal protection under the law,” Blankley writes. “The day is upon us when the West will have to decide which it values more: granting these rights and tolerance to those who wish to destroy us, or the survival of Western civilization.”

If those strike you as harsh words, it shows how poorly understood the current threat really is. Blankley invites us to consider the way America and Britain faced Germany and Japan in the 1940s. In times of imminent peril — when the choice, like it or not, was kill or be killed — our leaders made some hard decisions that, frankly, saved us. For President Franklin Roosevelt, that meant, among other things, censoring radio broadcasts, investigating subversive activities and, yes, interning Japanese-Americans.

We’re in deep denial, Blankley says, if we refuse to realize that today’s threat is just as grave. Yes, there are millions of peaceful, law-abiding Muslims all over the world. But just as the Nazis shrewdly recruited from among the alienated young Germans in the 1930s, so today’s radical Islamic leaders “find a Muslim population adrift, confused and humiliated by the dominance of foreign nations and cultures,” he writes. “They find a large youthful population increasingly disdainful of their parents’ passive habits.”

This alienated youth is even easier prey in today’s wired world, Blankley notes: “Many young Muslims in Europe, and some in America, particularly second- and third-generation Muslims, cannot be considered part of a Muslim diaspora. They are no longer strongly connected to their family’s country of origin, nor do they intend to return. Instead, they are forming their own Muslim consciousness from the Internet, books, videotapes and audiotapes, where radical ideas and mullahs dominate.”

So what do we need to do? First, Blankley says, declare war. No, not today’s “Global War on Terror,” which is far too elastic, but a formal declaration of war against those we are actually at war with — Islamic jihadists. We could then expand our war effort to include the full network of radical Islam, from mosques and schools to Web sites dedicated to our destruction. Second, use ethnic/religious profiling. To do otherwise, Blankley says, “puts political correctness before common sense.” Third, secure our borders. Fourth, adopt national ID cards. We also need to strengthen our alliance with Europe, which is crucial to winning this war.

That fact — that we’re in a true war and we need to act accordingly — may be the most valuable insight you’ll glean from this fascinating book. As Blankley puts it: “… We have just as great a responsibility to win our struggle against insurgent Islamic aggression as our parents and grandparents had to win World War II … If we do not pay with our sacrifices now, we (and our children) will pay in greater losses later. We must be prepared to be just as ruthless and rational as the Greatest Generation was in defeating fascism.”

Blankley expects the West to rise to this challenge. Let’s hope — and pray — that he’s right.

==============================

An Islamic guide on how to beat your wife (Washington Times, 050929)

MADRID — An imam who wrote a book on how to beat your wife without leaving marks on her body has been ordered by a judge in Spain to study the country’s constitution.

The judge told Mohamed Kamal Mustafa, imam of a mosque in the southern resort of Fuengirola, to spend six months studying three articles of the constitution and the universal declaration of human rights.

Mr. Mustafa was sentenced to 15 months in jail and fined about $2,600 last year after being found guilty of inciting violence against women.

A judge released him after 22 days in jail on the condition that he undertake a re-education course.

The Spanish government has set up a commission to find ways for the Muslim community to regulate itself. A central recommendation is that imams speak Spanish and have a basic knowledge of human rights and Spanish law.

In his book “Women in Islam,” published four years ago, Mr. Mustafa wrote that verbal warnings followed by a period of sexual inactivity could be used to discipline a disobedient wife.

If that failed, he argued that, according to Islamic law, beatings could be judiciously administered.

“The blows should be concentrated on the hands and feet using a rod that is thin and light so that it does not leave scars or bruises on the body,” he wrote.

Mr. Mustafa’s lessons, which he must pay for, will be taught by teachers from Malaga University.

According to La Vanguardia newspaper, he will have to study articles 10, 14 and 15 of the constitution. The first two address “the dignity of a person and inviolable rights” and states “all Spaniards are equal before the law.”

The third one states “the moral and physical integrity of a person in no case can be submitted to torture nor inhuman or degrading punishments or treatment.”

==============================

Making the Muslims love us (Washington Times, 050929)

Susan Fields

Karen Hughes has her work cut out for her. She’s the undersecretary of state assigned to persuade foreigners, particularly Muslims, to love us. On her “maiden voyage” to the Middle East this week, she’s in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, trying to win friends and influence people. This requires a sail through the Scylla and Charybdis of multicultural paradox.

As a professional woman, she embodies Western emancipation and stands as a bold rebuke to Muslim misogynists who are determined to keep women in their place. She wears a pantsuit like a woman who wants men to treat her like a man. Muslim women who have carved out careers will no doubt see her as a champion for women’s rights. Women who cheerfully tolerate the indignities of an aggressively male religion and the men who want to keep it that way will see in her all they hate about America. For them, freedom is frightening. This is the most difficult of the issues Karen Hughes faces. She was stunned when several Saudi women told her they like the restrictions men put on them. When a Turkish woman criticized the war on terror, she was reduced to repeating Bill Clinton’s mantra: “I feel the pain you are feeling.”

Women are a dilemma for Islam. Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, urged his country in the 1920s to fully emancipate women, arguing that the Turks would never catch up with the rest of the world if they modernized only half the population. He was right, but the task hasn’t been easy, nor is it complete. “The emancipation of women, more than any other single issue, is the touchstone of difference between modernization and Westernization,” writes Bernard Lewis, the Middle Eastern scholar, in his book, “What Went Wrong.” He continues: “The emancipation is Westernization; for both traditional conservatives and radical fundamentalists it is neither necessary nor useful, but noxious, a betrayal of true Islamic values.” As a result, even where many Muslim women enjoy liberation misogynist practices continue, and even follow fundamentalist Muslim emigrants to Europe, particularly to Germany and the Netherlands.

Muslim men, who feel their masculinity threatened when women gain equal political, economic and social status under the law, combine contempt for women with contempt for Western values. Women who have worn Western dress for years, or who yearn to do so, feel renewed pressure today to put on the abaya, the burka, the chador, the headscarf or the veil.

Turkish women who have thrown off their chadors in Germany and gone secular in dress and dating habits have paid the full price for their rebellion. In recent months at least six Muslim women have been murdered in “honor killings”; a woman’s organization documents more than 40 honor killings in less than a decade. Their killers have been brothers, husbands and fathers, and are generally revered as heroes in their insulated communities.

Alice Schwarzer, “the Betty Friedan of Berlin,” blames the misanthropic and misogynistic multiculturalism that averts its eyes from the Muslim oppression of women in Germany. “Every denunciation of this abuse is branded as racism,” she tells der Spiegel newsmagazine. A woman who stumbles beneath a mountain of cloth and is forced into an arranged marriage is a “scandal” that Germans and others in the rest of the world refuse to stand up against: “After the Nazis condemned everything foreign, the children now want to love everything foreign, with their eyes closed tightly.”

Feminists in the United States, eager to blame fundamentalist Christians for everything, are reluctant to criticize fundamentalist Muslims for anything. But a cursory scan of the Internet finds several sites beginning to expose the way Muslim men both here and abroad get a politically correct pass in the name of multicultural tolerance. When all cultures are considered equal it’s difficult to criticize culturally protected traditions, even if those traditions brutalize women.

It’s no small irony that the chador has been given new life as a fashion trend, even though it’s a fashion dictated by men to reduce erotic temptation. A doll named Fulla, who looks a lot like Barbie, is a best seller in several Middle Eastern countries, including Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Qatar. She comes wrapped in a pink box, but the packaging is deceptive. Her basic wardrobe comes in two colors, all black or all white, a chador or long coat with headscarves.

Fulla, we’re told, seems destined to be an old maid; she will never get a boyfriend like Ken. But a Dr. Fulla and a Teacher Fulla are on the drawing boards. If Karen Hughes succeeds against all odds, maybe Fulla will get a pantsuit and an attache case. But I wouldn’t bet Fulla’s wardrobe on it.

==============================

Europe’s Wahhabi Lobby: Extremists get together to worry about intolerance. (Weekly Standard, 051006)

Warsaw

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN something would be out of kilter. At the end of September, the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE), an international body made up of 55 nations—including such dictatorships as nearby Belarus—called for a day-long roundtable in the lovely and spiritual city of Warsaw. The topic was “Intolerance and Discrimination Against Muslims.” Aside from OSCE diplomats, staff, and two representatives of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, the participants consisted of some 25 representatives of Muslim NGOs as well as European and North American human rights monitors.

I should have known something was amiss because I have witnessed much OSCE mischief since going to postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo in the late 1990s. And don’t forget that OSCE was the international organization with the nerve to propose that it “observe” the most recent U.S. presidential election for presumptive irregularities. But it has an especially bad record in the Balkans, as has been pointed out in The Weekly Standard.

The OSCE is, to put it bluntly, political correctness personified. Its agenda for combating intolerance and discrimination includes everyone from prostitutes to victims of schoolyard bullying. But it was obvious that the status of Islam in Europe, which has lately involved bloodshed in several countries, is viewed by OSCEcrats as an intractable challenge. The do-gooders had no apparent choice but to relegate the roundtable on Muslims to a place outside the regular agenda of a weeklong “human dimension” assembly in Warsaw, and to hold the Muslim gathering in the basement

of a hotel.

Reliable sources reported that the OSCE’s Warsaw conference on Islam came as a trade-off for a conference on anti-Semitism held in Córdoba, Spain, earlier this year. It was soon made clear that the event would serve as little more than a platform for ranters and cranks from such countries as Britain and Denmark who were there to defend radical Islam. It turns out that proponents of Islamist extremism are even more aggressive, defiant, and confrontational than their American counterparts.

Thus, a religious functionary from Britain, Imam Dr. Abduljalil Sajid of the grandly (and, it appears, falsely) titled Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmony, used up much of the morning’s discussion with loud denunciations of Tony Blair for his alleged assault on civil rights in the wake of “7/7.” Before that this religious leader, when asked which school of Islamic law, or madhdhab, he followed, said, “I shoot all madhdhabs.”

Imam Sajid regaled the audience with the many times he had confronted Blair, insisting to the British prime minister that Islam and terrorism are completely unconnected from one another. He also offered up a diatribe against internment at Guantanamo. In the minds of many Muslims at the event, it seemed, the London bombings and the attacks that preceded them, as well as the radical ideology that inspired them, are irrelevant; the only thing that matters is to push back against the legal response of the British, U.S., and other European authorities.

THE PHRASE “the Fight Against Extremism” was included on the agenda of the meeting, but not one word was said about it until the very end, when Turkish diplomat Omur Orhun let his voice sink to a near-whisper. He affirmed, in closing the deliberations, that the problem of extremism would eventually have to be taken up, “because that is what brought us all here.” But to listen to many of the other participants one might have thought fear of Muslims among non-Muslims in Europe was a purely gratuitous expression of bias, or, as Nuzhat Jafri of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women put it, a product of “U.S. foreign policy decisions.”

When I pointed out to her that Saudi-financed Wahhabi terrorists have struck Turkey, a country that opposed U.S. policy in Iraq, as well as Morocco and Indonesia, which have nothing to do with Washington’s policies, Ms. Jafri limited herself to the admission that additional “root causes” exist; these she left undescribed.

Others were less restrained. Scandinavian countries seem to have experienced a particular incapacity to exclude Muslim extremists from their territories. Bashy Quraishy, a man who disclaims being religious, averring that he is not a practicing Muslim, seems to have adopted the defense of radical Islam as a career move, and is a self-proclaimed functionary of the “Federation of Ethnic Minority Organizations in Denmark.” Although he admits his irreligion and distance from Islam, Quraishy has no compunctions about presenting himself as an expert on it.

Quraishy did his best to hog the proceedings. While Imam Sajid asserted the lack of any link between Islam and terror, Quraishy demanded that global media be prevented from even suggesting such a thing. His printed handouts, piled up on a side table, were hallucinatory in tone. To him, “America Under Attack”—a CNN caption after September 11, 2001—was offensively prejudiced. In addition, Quraishy’s handouts insisted, “there was no proof, no one took responsibility, and not one particular country or group was singled out” for blame in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. There was nothing more than “finger pointing” at Islam.

Quraishy also recycled the late Jude Wanniski’s attacks on Richard Perle as the evil controller of

“uncritical and nationalistic journalism and intentional use of anti-Islam terminology as a tool of propaganda.” Quraishy reproduced the clichés employed by al Qaeda and its supporters: the “Crusades are back,” and Saddam in Iraq was nothing but a “tiny dictator.” Quraishy’s pamphlets even asserted that “fundamentalist,” “ghetto,” and “ethnic gangs” are hate terms and should not be used in any media.

The rest of the palaver was less fervid, but equally absurd. Canadian Muslims complained about the effect of the U.S. Patriot Act on their country. As the afternoon wore on, phrases such as “so-called terrorists” were increasingly heard. Brit Mohammed Aziz, of Faithwise, declared that members of his community are “first responsible to God . . . then to the umma,” or global Islam, and only lastly to the country in which they live.

All of this came about three months after the horror in London. The meeting ended with nothing more than an agreement to hold more meetings. The OSCE it seems, like much of Europe, has few answers for the challenge of radical Islam—aside from their pieties about discrimination.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.

==============================

Test case for Quran as hate speech: British Christians want sellers prosecuted (WorldNetDaily, 051014)

An evangelical Christian activist group is warning it will attempt to use the British government’s new racial and religious hatred law to prosecute for inciting religious hatred book stores selling the Quran.

Christian Voice, a group that earlier campaigned against the BBC’s broadcasting of “Jerry Springer The Opera,” was part of a demonstration against the bill outside parliament as the House of Lords held a second reading of the legislation.

Its director, Stephen Green, said the organization would consider taking out prosecutions against shops selling the Islamic holy book, the London Guardian reported. He said: “If the Quran is not hate speech, I don’t know what is. We will report staff who sell it. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that unbelievers must be killed.”

“It is not just Islam which is the problem,” said the group’s website. “If a preacher is explaining the horrors of Hinduism ... a charge of stirring up religious hatred would be almost inevitable. Preaching against sin in general, or adultery or homosexuality in particular, may also land a preacher in court.”

During yesterday’s debate, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, said the law “threatens civil liberties”.

“I am troubled by the bill before us and feel that rather than strengthening the social fabric of our society it would weaken it. It has the potential to drive a wedge between the Muslim community and the rest of us,” he said.

==============================

Nigeria: Muslims horse-whip Christian female students for dressing improperly (Anglican News, 050924)

Sharia alert from Nigeria: “Muslim Fundamentalists Attack Xtian Female Students in FUT,” from the Daily Champion of Lagos via AllAfrica.com, with thanks to Silvester:

Academic activities were yesterday disrupted at the Federal University of Technology (FUT) Minna, Niger State as suspected Muslim fundamentalists attacked female Christian students whom they accused of improper dressing.

The fracas which took place at Bosso campus of the university about 9 a.m., saw the armed fundamentalist invading the lecture-theatres and beating up female students they claimed were not properly dressed.

An eye witness informed Daily Champion that the fundamentalist numbering about six, dressed in black clothes with red bandage on their heads, disrupted lectures by beating unsuspecting female students with horse-whips for alleged improper dressing.

It was further learnt that the male students on seeing the unprovoked attack on their female colleagues moved to intervene an action that prompted the fundamentalists to use knives to inflict deep cuts on them.

With this development, the university community broke into a free-for-all fight as Muslim students gathered themselves on one side, while the Christians equally mobilized themselves and this led to throwing of missiles at each other by the parties to the conflict.

==============================

The wrong kind of Prison Fellowship: Wahhabism on the Inside (townhall.com, 051018)

by Chuck Colson

In August, law enforcement officials foiled a Jihadist plot to attack a synagogue and military recruitment center in Los Angeles.

What made the plot especially disturbing wasn’t only the nationality of the organizers—they were native-born Americans of non Middle-Eastern descent—but where the plot was hatched: inside Folsom prison. As the Weekly Standard rightly points out, it’s a perverse take on the idea of “Prison Fellowship.”

The organizers were two inmates who converted to Islam while in prison. They recruited thirteen other prison converts into their “holy war” against America. Upon release, the converts would form their own terrorist cells.

While this particular plot was foiled, there’s almost certainly more where that came from. According to Edward Caden, a retired California prison official, “prisons are a prime, prime target for terrorist recruiting,” and the recruiters include al-Qaeda.

What happened at Folsom prison should not surprise anybody who has set foot in a prison lately. If they had done that, they would have noticed that the Islamic presence inside our prisons is—however you measure it—far greater than it is outside the prisons. I first wrote about this in 1991.

What makes prisons a “prime target” for al-Qaeda are two other things that, unfortunately, are in plentiful supply: a resentful population and people who will preach hate and violence to them.

After three decades of prison ministry, I can tell you that resentment and bitterness are the rule, not the exception, among prisoners. Radical Islam offers them a chance for vengeance against their perceived oppressors.

The incitement to hate and violence is provided by groups like the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Wahhabist group. Its literature, which urges war against Jews and Christians, was primarily sent to prisoners and Islamic prison chaplains.

The Koran they distributed in American prisons included an appendix by the former Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia entitled “The Call to Jihad (Holy Fighting in Allah’s Cause) in the Qur’an.” This appendix urged Jihad against all who refuse to convert to Islam.

While Al Haramain was shut down by federal authorities, there is, according to the Weekly Standard, “reason to believe that the literature [it] distributed . . . is only the tip of the iceberg of what has reached and may still be reaching U.S. prisons.”

Furthermore, Wahhabi influence over the selection of federal prison chaplains is well-documented. Given Saudi Arabia’s resources and intent to spread its brand of Islam, it would be foolish not to expect similar efforts at the state and local level.

That’s why the Weekly Standard is right when it calls for a concerted effort to understand what “extremist indoctrination has occurred and is occurring” in our prisons. The best way to prevent attacks like the one planned in California is not just to keep extremism from spreading inside our prisons—though that’s absolutely necessary. We need to counter falsehood with the truth by bringing the Gospel to our prisons, as Prison Fellowship does, because the best way to keep a man from acting on his resentment is to free him from it—something that the preachers of hate know nothing about it.

==============================

Appeals court hears ‘Islamic indoctrination’ case: Public students in California taught to ‘become Muslims’ (WorldNetDaily, 051019)

A case brought by parents and children challenging a California school district for its practice of teaching 12-year-old students to “become Muslims” will be heard in U.S. appeals court today.

As WND reported, the lawsuit was filed by the Thomas More Law Center against the Byron Union School District and various school officials to stop the “Islam simulation” materials and methods used in the Excelsior Elementary School in Byron, Calif.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco, widely considered the nation’s most liberal, will hear oral arguments in the case.

The Thomas More Law Center says that for three weeks, “impressionable 12-year-old students” were, among other things, placed into Islamic city groups; took Islamic names; wore identification tags that displayed their new Islamic name and the star and crescent moon; handed materials that instructed them to ‘Remember Allah always so that you may prosper’; completed the Islamic Five Pillars of Faith, including fasting; and memorized and recited the ‘Bismillah’ or ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,’ which students also wrote on banners hung on the classroom walls.

Students also played “jihad games” during the course, which was part of the school’s world history and geography program.

In December 2003, a federal district court judge in San Francisco determined the school district had not violated the constitution.

In her 22-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton determined Excelsior was not indoctrinating students about Islam when it required them to adopt Muslim names and pray to Allah, but rather was just teaching them about the Muslim religion.

But Edward L. White III, trial counsel with the Law Center, insists the school did cross a constitutional line into indoctrination.

“The public school placed students into the position of being trainees in Islam, which is impermissible in a public school,” he said.

Thomas More’s chief counsel, Richard Thompson, believes there’s a double standard at work in this case.

“If the students had done similar activities in a class on Christianity, a constitutional violation would surely have been found,” he said. “If the public school’s practice is upheld on appeal, all public schools should begin teaching classes on Christianity in the same manner as the Islam class was taught in this case.”

When WorldNetDaily first reported the story in January 2002 – shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks committed by 19 Islamist terrorists – major controversy ensued nationwide.

The course was part of a curriculum taught to seventh-graders all over the state, included in the state’s curriculum standards required by the state board of education. Although the standards outline what subjects should be taught and included in state assessment tests, they didn’t mandate how they’re to be taught.

At the end of the three-week course, Excelsior teacher Brooke Carlin presenting a final test requiring students to critique Muslim culture.

The Islam simulations at Excelsior are outlined in the state-adopted textbook “Across the Centuries,” published by Houghton Mifflin, which prompts students to imagine they are Islamic soldiers and Muslims on a Mecca pilgrimage.

The lawsuit also alleges students were encouraged to use such phrases in their speech as “Allah Akbar,” which is Arabic for “God is great,” and were required to fast during lunch period to simulate fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Nevertheless, Judge Hamilton ruled the program was devoid of “any devotional or religious intent” and was, therefore, educational, not religious in nature.

==============================

Iraqis seek aid without crosses (Washington Times, 051019)

BAGHDAD — The president of the Iraqi Red Crescent has urged the International Committee of the Red Cross to stop sending aid marked with red crosses after the internationally protected symbol almost cost four staffers their lives.

Two truck drivers and two volunteers were delivering water and medicine to the city of Haditha four weeks ago when they were captured by insurgents, said Said Hakki, a neurology professor who returned from Florida last year to take charge of Iraqi relief operations.

“They were seized by a terrorist group who threatened to behead them because they thought the crosses on the water and food containers meant the men were Christian missionaries,” said Mr. Hakki, who made his plea during a visit last week to ICRC headquarters in Geneva.

He said the terrorists seemed unmoved by the fact that the two trucks themselves were marked with the red crescent symbol typically used in Muslim countries.

In Geneva, an ICRC spokeswoman said the red cross and red crescent are not religious symbols and that international treaties require that both must be respected everywhere.

“Either symbol should be acceptable in either [a Muslim or Christian] country. ... In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, they use the Red Cross,” said Antonella Notari, an ICRC spokeswoman. “People and vehicles bearing these symbols cannot be attacked in any circumstances.”

Mr. Hakki said the kidnappers had bound and blindfolded the four men and told them to say their final prayers before the aid workers convinced their captors that they were Sunni Muslims from Fallujah and that their supervisor was a Sunni with strong tribal connections in the area.

The four men then were hauled in front of an impromptu court headed by a long-bearded Algerian. In a series of frantic calls from their satellite phones, the drivers were able to reach Red Crescent officials, who enlisted the support of a local tribal leader.

The men eventually were released, although the insurgents kept the trucks and their contents.

“We know the trucks were sold in an illegal market in Sulaymaniya, northern Iraq,” said Mr. Hakki, who said he hopes to recover them through the assistance of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd.

The Red Crescent has since suspended truck-delivered aid to most of western Anbar province, asking local branches instead to send their own unmarked trucks to pick up supplies in Baghdad.

Three of the organization’s other trucks were set ablaze earlier in the Shi’ite shrine city of Najaf, leaving only four of nine original vehicles still operable. One of its 12 ambulances also was destroyed in Najaf.

“Our drivers and the two volunteers have told us that they want to keep helping, as they believe that the work provides a vital lifeline for the vast majority of decent Iraqis, who are innocent bystanders in the conflict,” Mr. Hakki said.

==============================

Islamic group told to ‘read the Koran’ (Washington Times, 051021)

BANGKOK — Thailand’s prime minister angrily told the Saudi Arabia-based Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) to “read the Koran” before criticizing his crackdown on Muslim terrorists in the south, where more than 1,000 people have died.

“I would like him to read the Koran, which stated clearly that all Muslims, regardless where they live, must respect the law of that land,” Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said yesterday, in remarks aimed at OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu.

“This means the Koran wants Muslims to live peacefully with people of other religions,” Mr. Thaksin said, referring to Islam’s sacred text, which believers regard as God’s revelations.

Mr. Thaksin, a Buddhist, has been struggling to contain the rapidly escalating violence in southern Thailand, where most of this nation’s minority Muslims live.

“All Thai people are tired of the violence and want to see peace. I will do everything, by all means, to end the violence,” Mr. Thaksin said.

“Such criticisms contained in the Muslim organization’s communique is considered most inappropriate.”

The prime minister’s outburst, during his weekly press conference, came after Mr. Ihsanoglu said that the OIC was deeply concerned “about continued acts of violence in southern Thailand against Muslims, claiming the lives of innocent civilians, and inflicting harm on properties.”

Mr. Ihsanoglu’s official OIC statement, issued in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, did not mention the Muslim terrorist attacks on Buddhists.

Hundreds of Buddhist civilians — including businessmen, commuters, plantation workers and clergy — have died alongside Muslim civilians in the south, in addition to mostly Buddhist troops and Muslim insurgents.

“Some villages have been under siege, and some families had to migrate,” the OIC said, referring to 131 Muslims who recently fled from Narathiwat province across the border into Muslim-majority Malaysia.

Malaysia has since criticized Thailand over the plight of the 131 Muslims, causing relations between Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok to deteriorate in recent days.

Bangkok must “reach a peaceful settlement of the legitimate demands of the Muslim Thai citizens in southern Thailand” and allow them to “manage their local affairs through participation guaranteed by the Thai Constitution, within the framework of respect for territorial integrity of Thailand,” Mr. Ihsanoglu said.

The violence in Thailand’s southern provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala has left more than 1,000 people dead since January 2004, when suspected Islamic insurgents burned down 21 schools, raided a military base, killed several people and escaped with hundreds of weapons.

The self-styled mujahiedeen are demanding an end to perceived persecution and discrimination by Bangkok and a separate homeland in the south.

==============================

Piggy banks ‘offend UK Muslims’ (WorldNetDaily, 051024)

British banks are banning piggy banks because they may offend some Muslims.

Halifax and NatWest banks have led the move to scrap the time-honoured symbol of saving from being given to children or used in their advertising, the Daily Express/Daily Star group reports here.

Muslims do not eat pork, as Islamic culture deems the pig to be an impure animal.

Salim Mulla, secretary of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, backed the bank move.

“This is a sensitive issue and I think the banks are simply being courteous to their customers,” he said.

However, the move brought accusations of political correctness gone mad from critics.

“The next thing we will be banning Christmas trees and cribs and the logical result of that process is a bland uniformity,” the Dean of Blackburn, Reverend Christopher Armstrong, said.

“We should learn to celebrate our difference, not be fearful of them.”

Khalid Mahmoud, the Labour MP for a Birmingham seat and one of four Muslim MPs in Britain, also criticised the piggy-bank ban.

AdvertisementAdvertisement

“We live in a multicultural society and the traditions and symbols of one community should not be obliterated just to accommodate another,” Mr Mahmoud said.

“I doubt many Muslims would be seriously offended by piggy banks.”

==============================

>islam

Sheikh seeking to ‘terminate’ Jews honored: Awarded ‘Islamic Personality of the Year’ at international event (WorldNetDaily 051026)

A Muslim cleric who has prayed to “terminate” the Jews was awarded Islamic Personality of the Year at a ceremony in which he called Islam a religion of “harmony and kindness” that rejects terrorism.

As WorldNetDaily reported, Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al Sudais – the veteran Quran reader and imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia – prayed to Allah in 2003 in front of 2 million followers to “terminate” the Jews, who he called “the scum of humanity, the rats of the world, prophet killers ... pigs and monkeys.”

But he was honored Sunday during the closing ceremony of the Dubai International Holy Quran Award, an annual event in the United Arab Emirates capital during Ramadan aimed at promoting Islam’s main text.

According to the event’s website, the Islamic Personality of the Year “must have an honorable history in serving Islam and Muslims.”

In his remarks upon receiving the award, the sheikh said, “The message of Islam and Muslims is modesty, fairness, security, stability, sympathy, harmony and kindness.”

In his April 2003 address in Mecca, however, Al-Sudais urged Arabs and Muslims to abandon peace initiatives with Israel – comments carried worldwide by Reuters and the Associated Press.

While some media at the time suggested his racist characterization of Jews was a singular occurrence, Al-Sudais has described Jews variously as “evil,” a “continuum of deceit,” “tyrannical” and “treacherous,” WND reported.

Last December, Al-Sudais was listed as a “specially invited guest” of an Islamic conference in Florida. Following media exposure, however, his name disappeared from conference materials.

On the International Holy Quran Award website, the event’s organizing committee said Al Sudais “has been selected for his devotion to the Quran and Islam.”

“His remarkable and ear-catching intonation of the Quran during the Haj [pilgrimage] season and during the Taraweeh [special night prayers during Ramadan] in the holy mosque has made him very famous and beloved among the Muslim community,” said Saeed Hareb, vice chairman of the organizing committee.

Al Sudais reflects a bright picture of Islam and Muslims, Hareb added.

“He became a recognized personality among the Muslim community through his Quran reading and working as a specialized professor in Fuqoh [Islamic jurisprudence],” he said.

The award selection is carried out through nomination by states, universities and specialized institutions, according to the website.

The winner’s “writings or stances should be universally recognized,” it says.

Al Sudais was born in 1961 in the Al Qaseem area of Saudi Arabia where he reportedly memorized the Quran at the age of 12.

==============================

Arab women heard from (Washington Times, 051027)

Something is beginning to stir in the Arab world; women are speaking up about the crushing burdens they bear in their male-dominated world. And this burden has little to with the religion of Islam itself. After all, the most populous Islamic country in the world is Indonesia, yet women there have such high status that one of them, Megawati Sukarnoputri, became the president of Indonesia in 2003.

One of the most outspoken manifestoes against Arab male domination has just been published in the London Arabic language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat under the title “Imagine You’re a Woman.” The author is Badriyya Al-Bishr, a lecturer in social sciences at King Saud University. The translation is by MEMRI.

“Imagine you’re a woman,” she writes. “When your brother is born, people say: ‘It’s a boy, how wonderful,’ and when you are born they say: ‘How wonderful, it’s a little girl’ — using the diminutive form. Your arrival is welcome if [you are] the first or second girl, but it’s best if there are no more than two, so that nothing undesirable happens to the mother. On the other hand, your brothers’ arrivals are welcomed — the more the merrier.

“Imagine you’re a woman. You always need your guardian’s approval, not only regarding your first marriage, as maintained by the Islamic legal scholars, but regarding each and every matter. You cannot study without your guardian’s approval, even if you reach a doctorate level. You cannot get a job and earn a living without your guardian’s approval. Moreover, there are people who are not ashamed to say that a woman must have permission to work even in the private sector.

“Imagine you’re a woman and the guardian who must accompany you wherever [you go] is your 15-year-old son or your brother, who scratches his chin before giving his approval, saying: ‘What do you think, guys, should I give her my permission?’ Sometimes he asks for . . . a bribe [in return], heaven forbid! [But] your brother avoids taking such a bribe in ‘cash’ because his self-respect prevents him from touching a woman’s money. So he prefers the bribe to be a car, a fridge, or an assurance of money that you will pay in installments [for him], until Allah gets him out of his financial straits.

“Imagine you’re a woman, and you are subject to assault, beatings, or murder. When the press publishes your photo [together with] the photo of the criminals and [descriptions] of their brutality, there are people who ask: ‘was the victim covered [by a veil] or not?’ If she was covered up, [the question arises:] ‘Who let her go out of the house at such an hour?’ In the event that your husband is the one who broke your ribs, [people will say] that no doubt there was good reason for it.

“Imagine you’re a woman whose husband breaks her nose, arm, or leg, and you go to the Qadi to lodge a complaint. When the Qadi asks you about your complaint, and you say, ‘He beat me,’ he responds reproachfully ‘That’s all?’ In other words, [for the Qadi], beating is a technical situation that exists among all couples and lovers, [As the saying goes]: ‘Beating the beloved is like eating raisins.’

“Imagine you’re a woman, and in order to manage your affairs you must ride in a ‘limousine’ with an Indian or Sri Lankan driver . . . or that you [must] wait for a younger brother to take you to work, or that you [must] bring a man who will learn to drive in your car, and will practice at your expense . . . because you yourself are not permitted to drive.

“Imagine you’re a woman in the 21st century, and you see fatwas [issued] by some contemporary experts in Islamic law dealing with the rules regarding taking the women of the enemy prisoner and having sexual intercourse with them. Moreover, you find someone issuing a fatwa about the rules of taking the women of the enemy prisoner even in times of peace, and you don’t know to which enemy women it refers.

“Imagine you’re a woman who writes in a newspaper, and every time you write about your [women’s] concerns, problems, poverty, unemployment, and legal status, they say about you: ‘Never mind her, it’s all women’s talk.’”

The degradation of women in the Arab world is rarely described openly. That is why the report of Madame Badriyya Al-Bishr ought to be acted upon, perhaps by an American university. Such courageous candor ought not to be ignored and who better to recognize that courage than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice?

Arnold Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

==============================

Legislating Religious Correctness: Religious vilification laws converge with the Islamist vision of a blasphemy-free society. (Weekly Standard, 051027)

ON SEPTEMBER 6 AND 7, Pastor Daniel Scot, who last year was found to be in breach of Victoria, Australia’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, met with human-rights lawyers and policymakers in Washington, D.C. In these meetings, Scot described his experience defending himself in Victoria’s courts against the charge of inciting hatred against Muslims. Many of the people and groups with whom Scot met hope his visit will serve as a springboard for a campaign against the religious vilification laws that have been increasingly considered, and adopted, in Western countries.

Scot, a diminutive 55-year-old bearded Pakistani with speckles of white in his black hair, was forced to flee Pakistan for Australia in 1987. As a devout Christian who says that he’s filled with evangelistic zeal, Scot had never shied away from debating Muslims on theological matters. Unfortunately for him, in 1986 Pakistan adopted a vague and open-ended blasphemy law, section 295-C, which prohibited any speech that directly or indirectly defiled the Prophet Muhammad. Punishments included the death penalty and life imprisonment.

According to Scot, he came under official pressure to convert to Islam near the end of his time in Pakistan, and was charged with blasphemy when he refused. When he fled to the safety of Australia, he didn’t imagine that he’d again face legal penalties because of his faith.

UPON HIS ARRIVAL DOWN UNDER, Scot noticed many Australians converting to Islam. This prompted him to begin lecturing about the faith. “I wanted to help these people learn what’s in the Koran so they could make an informed decision rather than an ill-informed decision,” Scot explained in an interview. But just as Pakistan imposed penalties on improper religious speech in 1986, Victoria did so too, on January 1, 2002, when its Racial and Religious Tolerance Act went into effect.

The Act prohibits conduct “that incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule of” a class of people based on their religious beliefs. Its force was brought to bear against Scot and another pastor, Danny Nalliah, after three Australian converts to Islam covertly attended a seminar they held in March 2002, took notes, and then filed a legal complaint.

Although many controversial ideas were put forward in the seminar (Scot contended that the Koran makes offensive jihad obligatory and that Islam places women in an inferior position), the presenters made clear that they weren’t attacking Muslims as people. A transcript reveals that Scot admonished the audience to remember that “we are not here learning how to fight with Muslims, we are learning here how we can love Muslims and help them to see the truth.” Despite this, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal determined in December 2004 that Scot and Nalliah had violated the act. Their case is currently under appeal.

A number of U.S.-based organizations believe the time is ripe to stand against the spread of religious vilification laws in the West. The Australian states of Queensland and Tasmania have adopted laws similar to Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. A religious vilification law is in force in Sweden, and such legislation is being considered in Britain. Further, it isn’t uncommon in Europe for people to be taken to court for criticizing Islam. In France, actress Bridgette Bardot was fined last year for lamenting the “Islamization of France” and the “underground and dangerous infiltration of Islam.” Italian author Oriana Fallaci faces trial next year over charges that she defamed Islam in her book The Force of Reason.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, an international law firm that defends the right of free expression for all faiths, has submitted a pair of letters to Australia’s attorney general arguing that Australia will violate international law if Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act is used to punish religiously-motivated speech in Scot’s case. The Becket Fund’s position is that the government shouldn’t put itself in the role of referee over religious debate by determining which religious criticisms are “legitimate” and which are out of bounds. In an interview, Roger Severino, legal counsel for the Becket Fund, outlined why the Fund chose to oppose Victoria’s religious vilification law.

First, Severino contended, the act converts secular courts into religious review boards. “If you believe in the separation of church and state, you shouldn’t let the government determine what a reasonable interpretation of a faith is,” he stated. This is exactly what happened in Scot’s case. When Scot was accused of violating the act, the court was put in the unusual position of having to parse the Koran and hadith (neither of which it had an expert knowledge of) to determine whether Scot’s interpretations of Islamic law were reasonably accurate.

Which dovetails with Severino’s second criticism: The act is contrary to freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. “If you believe in freedom of conscience,” Severino said, “someone should be able to discuss their beliefs freely with respect to other religions.” Many observers fear that the act could have a chilling effect on religious debate, with people being forced to consider the possibility of legal liability before commenting on theological matters.

Finally, Severino argued that the Act subverts its own purposes. The act was intended to promote religious harmony, but appears to have done the opposite. Scot was charged with violating the act because three Muslim converts covertly attended his seminar—essentially, as spies. “They took offense, but they went there to be offended,” Severino said. Severino says that because such spying “has now taken off” in Australia, a law intended to foster religious harmony seems instead to have produced acrimony.

FATHER KEITH RODERICK, the Washington representative of the human rights group Christian Solidarity International, has another objection to religious vilification laws. “The way the laws are being used is to protect Islam from criticism and silence those who wish to challenge it,” he says.

While religious vilification laws are neutral on their face (and indeed, some Muslims have been prosecuted for religious hate speech), there is a remarkable convergence between these laws and the Islamist vision of a blasphemy-free society. Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, published an op-ed in the Telegraph in December 2004 arguing in favor of Britain’s proposed religious vilification law—in large part, he claimed, because European writers have a history of “taking liberties” in their discussion of Prophet Muhammad. Sacranie analogized the proposed law to the Satanic Verses affair, and then stated: “Is freedom of expression without bounds? Muslims are not alone in saying ‘No’ and calling for safeguards against vilification of dearly cherished beliefs.”

Similarly, Syed Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, argues on that group’s website that Canadian Muslims should be protected from blasphemous speech:

In the context of the special cultural/religious needs of the Muslim community in respect of their beliefs about blasphemy, it indeed behoves [sic] a broad-minded people like Canadians to accommodate their (Muslim community’s) needs . . . . Surely it will be worthwhile to rise above the pettiness and the “terminal meanness” of linguistic, regional, racial and narrowly defined cultural considerations.

One suspects that as religious vilification laws spread, the liberal proponents of these laws will end up unwittingly empowering those who believe that their religion should be above condemnation.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a Washington, D.C.-based counterterrorism consultant and attorney.

==============================

Three Schoolgirls Beheaded in Indonesia (Foxnews, 051029)

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Unidentified assailants attacked a group of high school girls on Saturday in Indonesia’s tense province of Central Sulawesi, beheading three and seriously wounding a fourth, police said.

The students from a private Christian high school were ambushed while walking through a cocoa plantation in Poso Kota subdistrict on their way to class, police Maj. Riky Naldo said. The rural area is close to the provincial capital of Poso, about 1,000 miles northeast of the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

He said the heads of the three dead girls were found several miles from their bodies.

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation. But Central Sulawesi has a roughly equal number of Muslims and Christians. The province on Sulawesi island was the scene of a bloody sectarian war in 2001-2002 that killed around 1,000 people from both communities.

At the time, beheadings, burnings and other atrocities were common.

A government-mediated truce ended the conflict in early 2002 but since then, there have been a series of bomb attacks and assassinations targeting Christians. A market attack in the predominantly Christian town of Poso killed 22 people in May.

Christian leaders have repeatedly criticized the authorities in Jakarta for allegedly not doing enough to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

The Christian-Muslim conflict in Sulawesi was an extension of a wider sectarian war in nearby Maluku archipelago in which up to 9,000 people died between 1999 and 2002.

Soon after it erupted in 1999, the Maluku conflict intensified with the arrival of volunteers belonging to Laskar Jihad, a newly created militia from Indonesia’s main island of Java that was supported by hardline elements in the security forces.

Analysts and diplomats accused senior army commanders of funding and training the militia, which was hurriedly disbanded following the terrorist attacks on the tourist island of Bali in 2002 that killed more than 200 people — including 88 foreigners. Some former militiamen are believed to have moved to Poso.

==============================

Chirac Calls for Calm in Paris Suburbs (Foxnews, 051102)

PARIS — French President Jacques Chirac, intervening after six nights of rioting in suburban Paris, called Wednesday for calm and said authorities will use a firm hand to curtail what may become a “dangerous situation.”

The violence, sparked initially by the deaths of two Arab teenagers, has exposed the despair, anger and deep-rooted criminality in the poor, mainly Muslim suburbs, where police hesitate to venture and which have proved fertile terrain for Islamic extremists.

“The law must be applied firmly and in a spirit of dialogue and respect,” Chirac said at a Cabinet meeting. “The absence of dialogue and an escalation of a lack of respect will lead to a dangerous situation.”

Chirac’s remarks were passed on to reporters by government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope.

The rioting, which spread Tuesday night to at least nine Paris-region towns, has exposed rifts in Chirac’s government, with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy — a potential 2007 presidential candidate — being criticized for his tough talk and police tactics.

It also has renewed debate about France’s failure to fully integrate its millions of North African and black African immigrants, many of whom are trapped in poverty and grinding unemployment, living in low-cost, sometimes decrepit, suburban housing estates where gangs dealing drugs and stolen goods sometimes are in control.

That Chirac intervened personally was a measure of the crisis. He acknowledged the “profound frustrations” of troubled neighborhoods but said violence was not the answer and that efforts must be stepped up to combat it.

“Zones without law cannot exist in the republic,” the French leader said.

In Tuesday night’s clashes, riot police fired rubber bullets at advancing gangs of youths in Aulnay-sous-Bois, where 15 cars were burned, officials said. Youths lobbed Molotov cocktails at an annex to the town hall and threw stones at the firehouse. It was not immediately clear whether there were any injuries.

Sarkozy told Europe-1 radio that police detained 34 people overnight.

Sarkozy — blamed by many for fanning the violence with his “zero-tolerance” approach to suburban crime — defended his approach and vowed to restore calm. He recently called rioters “scum” and vowed to “clean out” troubled suburbs.

Housing projects to the north and northeast of Paris are heavily populated by North African Muslim immigrants.

Because of the unrest, Sarkozy canceled a visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan planned to begin Sunday, his office announced Wednesday.

The rioting began Thursday in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the electrocutions of two teenagers hiding in a power substation because they believed police were chasing them.

Officials have said police were not pursuing the boys, aged 17 and 15.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s protege and Sarkozy’s rival, met Tuesday evening with the parents of the three families, promising a full investigation of the deaths and insisting on “the need to restore calm.”

In the northeastern suburb of Bondy, 14 cars were burned and four people arrested for throwing stones at police, authorities said.

==============================

Muslim youths battle Paris police (Washington Times, 051104)

AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France — Rampaging youths shot at police and firefighters yesterday after burning car dealerships and public buses and hurling rocks at commuter trains, as eight days of riots over poor conditions in Paris-area housing projects spread to 20 towns.

Youths ignored an appeal for calm from President Jacques Chirac, whose government worked feverishly to fend off a political crisis amid criticism that it has ignored problems in neighborhoods heavily populated by first- and second-generation North African and other Muslim immigrants.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin called a string of emergency meetings with Cabinet ministers throughout the day. He told the Senate the government “will not give in” to violence in the troubled suburbs.

“Order and justice will be the final word in our country,” Mr. de Villepin said. “The return to calm and the restoration of public order are the priority — our absolute priority.”

The riots started Oct. 27 after the fatal shocking of two teenagers who ran from a soccer game and hid in a power station in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after they saw police enter the area. Youths in the neighborhood said police chased the boys to their death.

French authorities have said that officers were investigating a suspected burglary and not pursuing the boys, a view backed up by an interim report by the national police inspectors office released yesterday.

Investigators said the boys — Mauritania-born Traore Bouna, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, of Tunisia — knew of the dangers of hiding in an electric substation as they sought to evade police. The report also cites two witnesses saying they did not see the boys being chased. A third boy, Muttin Altun, 17, was badly burned.

Separate administrative and judicial investigations into the accidental deaths also were under way.

By Wednesday night, violence triggered by the deaths had spread to at least 20 Paris-region towns, said Jean-Francois Cordet, the top government official for the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris where the violence has been concentrated. He said youths in the region fired four shots at riot police and firefighters but caused no injuries.

Nine persons were injured in Seine-Saint-Denis and 315 cars burned across the Paris area, officials said. In the tough northeastern suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, youth gangs set fire to a Renault car dealership and burned at least a dozen cars, a supermarket and a local gymnasium.

Traffic was halted yesterday morning on a suburban commuter line linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport after stone-throwing rioters attacked two trains overnight at the Le Blanc-Mesnil station. They forced a conductor from one train and broke windows, the national rail authority SNCF said. A passenger was slightly injured by broken glass.

Mr. de Villepin’s major political rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday that the riots in several Paris suburbs over the previous night were “not spontaneous” but rather “well organized,” Agence France-Presse reported.

“What we saw in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis overnight was not spontaneous, it was perfectly organized. We are looking into by whom and how,” Mr. Sarkozy told French news channel I-Tele.

The unrest has highlighted the division between France’s big cities and their poor suburbs, with frustration simmering in the housing projects in areas marked by high unemployment, crime and poverty.

The violence also cast doubt on the success of France’s model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community by playing down differences between ethnic groups. The country’s Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe’s largest. Rather than feeling embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.

==============================

Father and sons guilty of Oxford honour killing (Times Online, 051104)

A Bangladeshi waiter and his two teenage sons were found guilty of stabbing a student to death to salvage the honour of their family today.

Chomir Ali, 44, and his sons, Mohammed Mujibar Rahman, 19, and Mamnoor Rahman, 16, all from Oxford, were found guilty of murdering Arash Ghorbani-Zarin, a university student who fell in love with Ali’s daughter, Manna Begum, and made her pregnant.

Ghorbani-Zarin, an Iranian electronic engineering student at Oxford Brookes University, was found dead in his car in Rosehill, a suburb of Oxford, on November 20 last year. His head had been tied to a headrest and he had been stabbed 46 times, mostly in the chest.

During the month-long trial at Oxford Crown Court, the jury heard that Ali had ordered his sons to kill Ghorbani-Zarin because of the “shame and dishonour” incurred by the student’s relationship with his 19-year-old daughter.

Julian Baughan, QC, prosecuting, said that Ali, a devout Muslim, had become angry during the summer of 2003 when his daughter began going out with Ghorbani-Zarin, 19, who was also a Muslim.

Mr Baughan told the trial that Ali had already arranged the marriage of his daughter to someone else and tried to prevent her from leaving the family home. The arguments between Ali and his daughter prompted her to attempt suicide and to run away.

Miss Begum also continued to meet Ghorbani-Zarin, and the couple got engaged in the summer of 2004, over her family’s disapproval, when she became pregnant with Ghorbani-Zarin’s child.

Miss Begum returned home but Ali ordered Ghorbani-Zarin, who had dropped out of university to work in a toy shop and earn money for his new family, to stay away.

On the evening of his murder, Ghorbani-Zarin intended to go to a friend’s house and watch a DVD but he never arrived. His body was found by passers-by. Rahman, Ali’s elder son, who was 18 at the time, was arrested the next day.

Three days later, two Oxford City Council street cleaners spotted Ali throwing a plastic bag into an allotment. The bag turned out to contain bloodstained clothes belonging to Ghorbani-Zarin, a knife and DNA evidence linking Ali and his two sons to the murder.

During the trial, the prosecution argued that the evidence against Ali and his sons was overwhelming. Although “Muji” Rahman, the elder brother, acknowledged that the murder weapon belonged to him, he said it had gone missing in the days before the murder.

The prosecution said it was likely that Mamnoor Rahman, who was just 15 at the time and whose identity was protected during the trial, delivered the fatal wounds to Ghorbani-Zarin. Manmoor’s blood was found on the murder weapon and two small pieces of the blade, thought to have broken off during the ferocious attack, were found in Ghorbani-Zarin’s car.

The jury’s verdict was greeted by loud cheers today. The judge, Mr Justice Gross, said that all three men would serve life sentences. He adjourned the setting of minimum prison terms until pre-sentencing reports had been carried out for Mamnoor Rahman, whose lawyer said he was “in denial”.

==============================

First Fatality Reported in French Riots (Foxnews, 051107)

PARIS — Rioting by French youths spread to 300 towns overnight and a 61-year-old man hurt in the violence died of his wounds, the first fatality in 11 days of unrest that has shocked the country, police said Monday.

As urban unrest spread to neighboring Belgium and possibly Germany, the French government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm. One riot-hit town in suburban Paris said it was preparing to enforce a curfew.

Meanwhile, governments worldwide urged their citizens to be careful in France.

President Jacques Chirac, in private comments more conciliatory than his warnings Sunday that rioters would be caught and punished, acknowledged that France has failed to integrate the French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants in poor suburbs who have been taking part in the violence, according to Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who met Monday with the French leader.

She said Chirac “deplored the fact that in these neighborhoods there is a ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin” and recognized “the incapacity of French society to fully accept them.”

Chirac said unemployment runs as high as 40% in some suburban neighborhoods, four times the national rate of just under 10%, Vike-Freiberga said.

On Sunday night, vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles, and clashes around the country left 36 police injured, setting a new high for overnight arson and violence since rioting started last month, national police chief Michel Gaudin told a news conference.

Australia, Britain, Germany and Japan advised their citizens to exercise care in France, joining the United States, Russia and at least a half dozen other countries in warning tourists to stay away from violence-hit areas.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy sought to reassure his European counterparts about visiting his country, telling them at a meeting in Brussels that “France is not a dangerous country. France is still a country where one can go.”

The victim was identified as Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, a retired auto industry worker who died after being beaten by an attacker. He was trying to extinguish a trash can fire Friday at his housing project in the northeastern suburb of Stains when an attacker caught him by surprise and beat him into a coma, police said.

In the Paris suburban town of Raincy, the mayor was preparing to enact a nighttime curfew expected to go into force Monday or Tuesday, said one of his top aides.

Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels’ main train station, police in the Belgian capital said.

The mayhem started as an outburst of anger in suburban Paris housing projects and has fanned out nationwide among disaffected youths, mostly of Muslim or African origin, to become France’s worst civil unrest in more than a decade.

Attacks overnight Sunday to Monday were reported in 274 towns, and police made 395 arrests, Gaudin said.

“This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows up in the number of towns affected,” Gaudin said, noting that the violence appeared to be sliding away from its flash point in the Parisian suburbs and worsening elsewhere.

It was the first time police had been injured by weapons’ fire and there were signs that rioters were deliberately seeking out clashes with police, officials said.

Among the injured police, 10 were hurt by youths firing fine-grain birdshot in a late-night clash in the southern Paris suburb of Grigny, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Two were hospitalized, but the injuries were not considered life-threatening. One was wounded in the neck, the other in the legs.

The unrest began Oct. 27 in the low-income Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the deaths of two teenagers of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin. The youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation. They apparently thought they were being chased.

About 4,700 cars have been burned in France since the rioting began and 1,200 suspects were detained at least temporarily, Gaudin said.

The growing violence is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society’s margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination and despair — fertile terrain for crime of all sorts as well as for Muslim extremists offering frustrated youths a way out.

France, with 5 million Muslims, has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe.

Chirac, whose government is under intense pressure to halt the violence, promised stern punishment for those behind the attacks, making his first public comments Sunday since the riots started.

“The law must have the last word,” Chirac said after a security meeting with top ministers. France is determined “to be stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear, and they will be arrested, judged and punished.”

France’s biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that forbade all those “who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others.”

Arsonists burned two schools and a bus in the central city of Saint-Etienne and its suburbs, and two people were injured in the bus attack. Churches were set ablaze in northern Lens and southern Sete, he said.

In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with rocks, sending a 13-month-old child to the hospital with a head injury, Hamon said, while a daycare center was burned in Saint-Maurice, another Paris suburb.

Much of the youths’ anger has focused on law-and-order Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose reference to the troublemakers as “scum” appeared to inflame passions.

==============================

Paris When It Sizzles: The intifada comes to France. (Weekly Standard, 051107)

THE FRENCH USE THE EUPHEMISM “quartiers sensibles”—sensitive neighborhoods—for the troubled, predominantly Arab and African working-class suburbs of Paris and other cities that increasingly resemble a ticking bomb at the heart of their society.

One such sensitive neighborhood is Clichy-sous-Bois, nine miles northeast of Paris, where last week’s string of nightly riots began. Two Muslim youths—one black, one Arab—were electrocuted at a power relay station on October 27. The circumstances are sketchy: Were the youths being chased by the police because they were suspects in a break-in? Were they being chased for no reason? Or were they—as Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy claims, and the preliminary report of the prosecutor has now confirmed—never pursued by the police at all?

For the time being, what is certain is that the rumor that innocent youths had died as a result of police harassment spread like wildfire. Local residents called their friends in other neighborhoods and urged them to join the upcoming fight against the state. In fact, the first people attacked by the mob were the firemen who went to the power relay station to rescue the youths. The firemen, greeted by a barrage of stones, could not treat the victims on the spot but retreated to their trucks and drove the youths to a nearby trauma center.

Later, some 400 young men started trashing the town, burning cars, vandalizing a school, a mall, the post office, the fire station, bus shelters. They even tried to enter the town hall but were prevented by police. Fighting broke out when 300 antiriot forces entered Clichy and were met with Molotov cocktails and stones and even a live gunshot.

Seven cops were injured, and witnesses described the scene as “guerrilla warfare.” Philosopher Jean-François Mattei spoke of “urban barbarity.” In the eight nights of rioting that, at this writing, have ensued, in Clichy-sous-Bois and other Paris suburbs, about 1,224 cars were burned and numerous youths arrested. Three journalists from French TV had to abandon their car after they were threatened by the mob, which proceeded to torch the car along with an auto dealership, a preschool, and a gym. Another four gunshots were fired at cops and firemen, and two commuter trains were attacked.

One police-union leader, writing to Interior Minister Sarkozy, declared, “A civil war is unfolding in Clichy-sous-Bois. We cannot handle the challenge any longer. Only the Army, trained and equipped for this type of mission, can intervene to stabilize the situation.”

Yet despite all the national and international headlines they occasioned, last week’s disturbances were no freak occurrence. For at least 15 years, the immigrant and first-generation suburbs around France’s large and medium-sized cities have been out of control. Crime rates have gone through the roof: According to the Renseignements Généraux, a division of the police, 70,000 violent crimes have been recorded in urban settings since the beginning of the year. They include the torching of more than 28,000 cars and 17,500 trash bins. According to the Interior Ministry, some 9,000 police cars have been stoned by youths this year.

And property is not the only target. On October 27, the day the two died in Clichy-sous-Bois, three young thugs in another Paris suburb savagely killed a 56-year-old Frenchman who was photographing a lamppost. Plenty of witnesses were around, but none came forward to testify. The attackers were trying either to steal the man’s digital camera or to “protect their turf” from an intruder. Ten days earlier, in Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of France’s second largest city, Lyon, the police chased two teenagers on a stolen scooter and one fell and hurt his ankle. The rumor spread that he was in a coma because of the cops. A few nights of rioting ensued, with violent faceoffs between teens and police on the exact spot where similar, serious rioting occurred 15 years ago.

At least as worrisome as such intermittent flare-ups is what happens every day in these ethnic neighborhoods. Most have become a no-man’s land where police scarcely venture and the law of the jungle prevails. Honest, law-abiding inhabitants feel abandoned. As Bally Bagayoko, deputy mayor of Saint-Denis, a working-class suburb of Paris, put it: “People have totally lost confidence in the police. In most cases, they don’t even file a complaint.” Sometimes judges are physically threatened or attacked.

What’s more, none of this is any secret. It’s years since the first chilling firsthand accounts of what goes on in the worst ethnic slums were published. As early as 1984, President François Mitterrand made “sensitive neighborhoods policy” the fourth priority of his government. In 1990, after the first Vaulx-en-Velin riots, the newsmagazine Le Point trumpeted the headline: “These neighborhoods are scaring France.” Politicians warned that the events were just a foretaste of the explosions to come. Eight years later, in a report ordered by the Interior Ministry, two sociologists wrote: “Cops working in the difficult neighborhoods feel themselves to be, and are seen as, occupation forces in enemy territory.”

A particularly fearsome firsthand account of life in a Muslim slum was a bestseller in 2002. Entitled Dans l’enfer des tournantes (In Gang Rape Hell), it recounts the life of a courageous French Muslim teenager, Samira Bellil, who was repeatedly gang-raped, and in order to survive became a “racaille” (hooligan), beating up other girls to get protection and respect. Teenage girls are the most frequent victims of violence, especially rape, which sometimes happens inside public schools. As one Tunisian mother testified recently, public schools turn out to be not a haven but one more nightmare for families. She lamented, “The Republic no longer protects its children.” In fact, mothers sometimes enlist the toughest thugs to protect their daughters. The culture of violence is reinforced on every side, by the anti-police, anti-West gangsta rap kids listen to, and by the blogs where young thugs parade their exploits of arson or mugging at gunpoint, thereby becoming neighborhood “stars” and raising the stakes for other gangs.

An underground economy flourishes in the worst African and Muslim neighborhoods, with trafficking in drugs and stolen goods going on unimpeded and rival gangs fighting over loot. Communal tensions are equally pervasive, pitting white French (or “Gaulois”) against Arab and Black, Black against Arab, and Muslim against Jew. In light of this, it is no coincidence that France saw a record number of anti-Semitic incidents in 2004 (970, well over 2 a day), most of them committed by young Muslims from the suburbs.

In extreme cases, these neighborhoods might as well be foreign countries, with their own laws and value systems. Thus, good students are treated as pariahs, while outlaws get respect. Matters have reached the point where some young “Gauloises” have testified that, in a kind of inverse assimilation process, they converted to Islam to escape harassment by Muslim thugs.

Some intellectuals speak of the Lebanonization of French society. Others speculate about civil war in ten years if nothing is done. Michel Gurfinkiel, editor of the news magazine Valeurs Actuelles, likens France today to the Weimar republic just before the rise of Nazism.

Interior Minister Sarkozy wants to turn a new leaf. He expresses determination to end the laissez-faire attitude toward the pathologies of the “banlieues sensibles” that has prevailed for decades, under governments of both left and right, with the possible exception of his own previous stint as interior minister, in 2002-04. Facing down rock throwers in Argenteuil, another hotspot, last week, he vowed to rid the suburbs of the “racaille.”

Sarkozy has been widely criticized for using that term, even by members of his own party, who accuse him of adding fuel to the fire. Much hangs on the success of his Giuliani-like “zero tolerance” approach. As of now, he seems to be the only politician willing to tackle the thorny issues of immigration and security. Soon enough, French voters will have a chance to render their verdict on his policies: The current frontrunner in the presidential election of 2007 is none other than Sarkozy.

Olivier Guitta is a consultant on Middle Eastern and European affairs.

==============================

Anti-terror expert predicted French uprising: Judge sees potential of weapons of mass destruction (WorldNetDaily, 051107)

France and most of the rest of the world seem to be caught off-guard by the spontaneous rioting that began 11 days ago in and around Paris.

But the country’s leading anti-terror expert, Judge Jean-Louis Brugiere, saw it coming and warned about the threat more than one month ago.

Brugiere, an investigating magistrate, issued a stark assessment Oct. 4 that France faced a high-level threat from extremist, Islamic groups and he warned that the radicalization of Muslims was growing in the country.

The threat level is “undeniably high. Never, has radicalization been as strong,” he said in an interview in Le Fiago. “It is directly linked to the situation in Iraq, which has changed the contours of the threat.”

Brugiere also warned that the attacks in the future could be unconventional, saying “a chemical attack is still to be considered.” He said some of the networks have already experimented and trained with chemical and biological agents.

Brugiere also refused to discount the threat that a terrorist group would use a nuclear device.

France’s previous brush with Islamic radicalism was linked with its former colony of Algeria and perceptions that Paris was backing the military regime led by the Algerian generals against a popular Islamic movement that had won national elections.

Algerian radicals attacked French targets in 1995 and subsequently. About a dozen people died in bomb attacks in Paris and Lyons, while French anti-terrorism squads tracked down and shot some of those in a network known as the Islamic Armed Group.

Brugiere warned that a new group as taken the place of the now largely destroyed GIA. In early October, French police made eight arrests and charged four in connection with the new threat.

Now, Brugiere says France is faced with young Muslims who are eager to go to Iraq to fight U.S.-led coalition forces there. They are organized, he said, by networks operating from radical mosques.

France has already broken up several networks that were sending young men to Iraq. The Foreign Ministry said it knows of at least seven nationals who have been killed, while two are in detention and 10 are missing.

“The converts are undeniably the toughest,” Brugiere said. “Conversions today are faster and the commitment is more radical. The young recruits are often sent speedily to theatres of operation like Iraq.”

==============================

The intifada in France (WorldNetDaily, 051107)

Joseph Farah

It’s strange that the civil war in France is not getting wider media attention.

Imagine if this were happening in Israel?

In case you’ve missed it (and I can certainly understand how that’s possible with the spotty international coverage of this story), for nearly two weeks, spectacular riots by Muslim immigrants from North Africa as well as their descendants have brought Paris to its knees.

The firebomb and arson attacks have spread to western Paris suburbs, Rouen in northern France, Dijon in the east and Marseille in the south.

The attacks began primarily as clashes with police. Later businesses and warehouses were targeted with firebombs. Cars have been destroyed. In one attack, 23 buses at a depot were burned. Schools have also come under attack.

A handicapped woman in her 50s was badly burned when rioters poured gasoline on a city bus and set it ablaze.

It is now being characterized as all-out war.

“This is immense violence,” said Justice Minister Pascal Clement in Bobigny between Paris and the Charles de Gaulle airport. “I think all French are shocked to see things like this.”

Last Wednesday evening a gang of about 40 youths burst into the local shopping centre, next door to the police station, armed with baseball bats. They broke shop-front windows and hit sales assistants before making off with cash. It was 6.30 p.m. and the invasion “panicked” customers, according to the shopping center’s director, Alex Mussawy.

“This is not normal for Bobigny,” he said. “We are almost in Paris. We are on the Metro line. This is the sort of thing that you hear about from the other more troubled suburbs.”

French police intelligence say there have been 70,000 acts of urban violence in the area this year alone.

Officials in Seine Saint Denis said 187 vehicles were destroyed there in one night. French media reports say as many as 600 vehicles have been destroyed in the greater Paris region.

There is concern the rioting could spread to other cities in France.

“We’re afraid that what’s happening in Seine Saint Denis will spread,” said Manuel Vallas, mayor of Evry, south of the capital. “We have to give these people a message of hope.”

It all began when two teenagers of North African origin died while fleeing the police.

Day in and day out, French officials pledge to bring order – but there is no order in sight.

Therefore, it occurs to me that an international solution is in order. If France has these kinds of systemic problems with its Muslim population, then it is time to partition France. It’s time for an independent Muslim state to be created. After all, isn’t that what France and other European nations have determined is the proper solution for Israel?

These are not just riots. This is an intifada – just like the one begun in 2000 within and around Israel.

France and other countries, including the United States, have demanded that Israel meet those attacks with land concessions to the rioters and suicide bombers. That is the only viable, long-term solution, they say. They claim this violence will never cease until those oppressed by Israel are granted an independent, autonomous state of their own.

Why should the solution be any different in France?

The global jihad has come home to Paris. Let’s see if French officials impose upon their own population the same solution they demand upon the population of the Jewish state. After all, isn’t the key to addressing the concerns of the jihadists to appease them?

==============================

Who will raise the siege of Paris? (Washington Times, 051107)

By Mark Steyn

Ever since September 11, 2001, I’ve gloomily predicted the European powder keg’s about to go up. “By 2010, we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,” I wrote in Canada’s Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday’s edition of the Guardian reported in London:

“French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.”

“French youths,” huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted most of the “youths” are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn’t take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover the rioters do not think their primary identity is “French”: They’re young men from North Africa increasingly estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything likely in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, we find there really is an explosive “Arab street,” but it’s in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The notion Texas neocon arrogance frosted up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans?

For a half-decade, French Arabs have carried on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent these attacks from spreading to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have failed. Unlike America’s Europhiles, France’s Arab street correctly identified Jacques Chirac’s opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7.32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 AD — as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground “like a wall... a firm glacial mass”, as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname “Martel” — or “the Hammer.”

Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in Western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but, had they won, they would have found it difficult to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. “Perhaps,” wrote Edward Gibbon in “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”

There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, “would change the history of the whole world.”

Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying.

Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They’re in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It’s way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers.

In the no-go suburbs, even before the current riots, 9,000 police cars were stoned by “French youths” since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. “There’s a civil war under way in Clichy-Sous-Bois at the moment,” said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes’ trade union Action Police CFTC. “We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.”

What to do? In Paris, while “youths” fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the “minister for social cohesion” (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as “scum.” President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum’s grievances need to be addressed. He called for “a spirit of dialogue and respect.”

As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots an excellent opportunity to scuttle Mr. Sarkozy’s presidential ambitions rather than a call to save the republic.

A few years back, I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark.” But this is why. Defying traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin have scoffed at the Bush Doctrine for the last two years: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that’s less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.

If Mr. Chirac isn’t exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren’t doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They’re seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the ‘burbs gets you more “respect” from Monsieur Chirac, they’ll burn ‘em again, and again.

In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: “The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.” That sounds a lot like a new Dark Ages.

==============================

When Muslims attack... France (townhall.com, 051109)

by Ben Shapiro

Last week, Prince Charles of Wales visited the White House. His mission, as the UK Telegraph described it, was to “persuade George W. Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since Sept. 11.”

His timing could not have been much worse. As Prince Charles spoke with the president, Muslim rioters throughout France burned cars, shot at policemen, and launched gasoline bombs on schools and churches. Over 1,200 people have already been arrested. This rioting follows on the heels of a surefire Darwin Award situation, wherein two Muslim juvenile delinquents fleeing French police holed up in a power plant and electrocuted themselves. That tragedy sparked a maelstrom of rage among France’s large Muslim minority, which has responded by setting France’s major cities alight.

In the typically French way, President Jacques Chirac stated publicly that the French republic would remain “stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear.” Privately, however, he told the president of Latvia that the riots were France’s fault, largely due to the “ghettoisation [sic] of youths of African or North African origin” and France’s “incapacity to fully accept them.”

Maybe, just maybe, Europe doesn’t get it.

When Muslim terrorists murder 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, the European response is to lecture Americans about their “intolerance” (this is actually Prince Charles’ second attempt to teach Americans some European manners — in November 2001, Charles labeled American response to Sept. 11 “too confrontational”). When Muslim terrorists bomb Madrid, the European response is to elect a socialist apologist for Islamist terrorism. When Muslim terrorists bomb London, the European response is to complain about increased safety measures. And when Muslims riot and burn half of France, the European solution is to apologize for their own close-mindedness.

This is called enabling. The global Muslim community has shown itself to be aggressive internationally, isolationist domestically and often violent religiously. The solution to such behavior isn’t kowtowing — it’s strong and forceful opposition. Yet because of political correctness, because so many on the international left are afraid to label the indefensible (SET ITAL) as (END ITAL) indefensible, Western civilization finds itself in flames.

Because this is only the first step. Historically speaking, France, as detestable as it has been since at least the French Revolution, has been a bellwether for Western civilization. The French Revolution viciously initiated the rise of liberal democracy; the Paris Revolution of 1848 inflamed revolution throughout Europe; French inadequacy during World War II plunged Europe into extended darkness; French involvement in Vietnam led to American involvement; France’s inability to hold Algeria signaled an end to colonialism; French capitulation to terrorism (in Algeria as elsewhere) has from the beginning boded ill for the fate of Westerners engaged in the struggle against Islamism.

Should Western civilization adopt the “multicultural” policy-making of the French government, all of Western civilization could meet the fate France currently faces. France has allowed its Muslim minority to remain insulated and extreme. France has virtually ignored its burgeoning population problem — decline of native population combined with a drastic rise in Muslim immigration has quickly changed the character of the country. And France’s foreign policy has been spineless and capitulatory from the beginning, shrugging off Islamist terrorism by citing to differences in political and social perceptions in the Muslim world.

The essentially French notion that man is inherently good, malleable and perfectible (a notion springing from a rejection of God and a replacement theology deifying man) leads the French government to embrace the idea that all problems can be solved through higher levels of social tolerance and economic support. But just because humanistic ideology dominates in France does not mean it dominates France’s Muslim population, nor Muslim masses worldwide. Whether France is prepared to fight or not, radical Muslims spurred by their religious beliefs certainly are. It is irrelevant whether Muslim terrorists and rioters are motivated by a perverse vision of their religion, or whether they represent the mainstream. The bottom line is this: The current conflict is ideological, not social or economic. The conflict will not be solved by sending welfare dollars into mosques or by embracing French Muslims as Frenchmen.

Westerners, including Prince Charles, should take note: France’s greater “tolerance” does not translate into peace and goodwill. Shying away from an ideological conflict does not prevent that conflict from taking place — it only allows the enemy to run roughshod over you.

==============================

Civilization Under Siege—The Riots in Paris (Christian Post, 051109)

“Civilization is hideously fragile,” argued C. P. Snow. “There’s not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.”

Snow’s statement takes on ominous overtones in light of the raging riots in and around Paris. Over the past nearly two weeks, demonstrations, rioting, car burnings, and various other acts of violence have spread throughout the suburban enclaves where the city’s ethnic minorities—mostly immigrants from North Africa—are congregated. The violence is not limited to France. Similar violence has erupted in Brussels and other European cities. Clearly, something has gone horribly wrong.

Even as many in the Western media attempt to downplay the extent and nature of this violence, the smoke is spreading, and the debris is mounting. The world has watched as France has been thrown into a state of emergency, with riots, street fighting, and arson enveloping entire neighborhoods. The weak, slow, and confused response of the French government has only exacerbated the problem. Even as the government declared a state of emergency, French authorities still deny the extent of the disorder.

For years now, observers have warned that Europe has put itself in a position of tremendous vulnerability. Even as European birth rates have fallen below population replacement levels, immigrants, largely from Muslim lands, have been eagerly received and put to work. In one sense, many Western European nations built the economic expansions they experienced during the 1960s and 1970s on a base of immigrant labor.

Now, France and its neighboring countries are reaping what they have sown. The economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s has been replaced with economic stagnation and rampant unemployment. The young men now rioting in the streets of Paris represent the second generation of immigrants, and they face a bleak future with little hope of gaining jobs or a chance to obtain the European vision of happiness and prosperity.

Furthermore, they don’t want to embrace that European worldview in the first place. To a far greater extent than their parents, these second-generation inhabitants of minority enclaves want to reassert their Islamic identity and force their agenda upon the nation.

France is now home to an estimated six million Muslims, most of African descent. This Muslim population, the largest in Europe, represents almost one tenth of the total population of France. “The government hasn’t really realized we’re facing a major political crisis,” said Patrick Lozes, president of the Circle for the Promotion of Diversity in France told The Washington Post. “The French social model is exploding.”

Indeed, as The Wall Street Journal noted, “France is the main testing ground of the continent’s ability to bring this rapidly growing minority into the fold.” It’s not going well.

The Europeans have prided themselves on rejecting America’s concept of the “melting pot.” Instead of assimilating immigrants into the larger national culture, France (along with most other Western European nations) has encouraged immigrants to maintain their own identity, language, and culture and has created a “salad bowl” model that now contributes to this civil strife.

Without doubt, the protests are linked to economic realities. Young men who have little opportunity for jobs and economic power can easily opt-out of the entire cultural project—especially when they were never invited to join in the first place. Unemployment among French citizens in their twenties now stands at twenty percent, and the unemployment rate for members of the country’s minority population of the same age is forty percent. This alone is a recipe for disaster.

Nevertheless, the economic explanation is woefully insufficient. The rioters, often identified in the press as “youths,” are agents of violent rage and social anarchy. As observer Mark Steyn comments, the riot is now taking on the shape of “a rather shrewd and disciplined campaign.”

The urban terrorists who are rioting in France have taken their cues from terrorists in the Middle East, where car burnings and similar demonstrations of violence have become a means of routine political protest.

Paul Belien, writing from Belgium, suggests that France is no longer able to defend itself against the forces of barbarism. “Unlike their fathers, who came to France from Muslim countries, accepting that, whilst remaining Muslims themselves, they had come to live in a non-Muslim country, the rioters see France as their country,” he explains. “They were born here. This land is their land. And since they are Muslims, this land, or at least a part of it, is Muslim as well.”

Furthermore, Belien argues that the rioters are not driven by anger, but by hatred. These young agents of disorder do not merely hate their limited economic prospects, but the very civilization that has harbored them. “It is hatred,” Belien insists. “Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The ‘youths’ do not blame the French, they despise them.”

Steyn suggests that the widespread outbreak of violence in Paris and beyond represents “the start of a long Eurabian civil war.” Steyn, along with other concerned observers, understands that Europe is heading for a Muslim future. After all, the Muslims are having babies at a rate that far exceeds native Europeans. Furthermore, they are driven by a clear political agenda, deep Islamic conviction, and a clear and coherent concept of what they want the culture to be—an Islamic state.

The French, on the other hand, while possessed of an enormous sense of cultural superiority, no longer possess a clear or coherent concept of what it means to be French. They stress tolerance, but have embraced forces of radical intolerance.

As Thomas Sowell explains, “In the name of tolerance, these countries have imported intolerance, of which growing antisemitism in Europe is just one example. In the name of respecting all cultures, Western nations have welcomed people who respect neither the cultures nor the rights of the population among whom they have settled.”

Steyn’s concept of “Eurabia” also points to the links between the violence in France and the simmering hatreds of the Middle East. For the last several decades, France has attempted to appease its Muslim citizens by supporting Arab governments, criticizing Israel, and offering financial assistance to radical groups such as Hamas. Presumably, the frustrated Muslim youth of France were to be thankful for the French government’s support of Muslim extremism in the Middle East. What possessed the French to think that the extremism would remain outside its own borders?

The unrest in France should serve to underline the deep cultural commitments that are fundamental to civilization. No society can withstand the threat of rampant anarchy from within. Civilization is always an achievement—a work and project embraced and supported by the vast majority of citizens, who enter into a social compact for the common good.

France has struggled with these ideals ever since the French Revolution. Unlike the American Revolution, which was established upon an inherited Christian worldview and the conservative streams of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution was radical, violent, anarchic, and highly secular.

Indeed, secularism has been an official French project for most of the last two centuries. Even as the French revolutionaries replaced the cross on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame with a likeness of the goddess Reason, the French have prided themselves on the highly secular nature of their cultural experiment.

From one angle, this experiment appears to be a radical success. After all, only a small minority of French citizens consider themselves active Christians. Christianity plays almost no public role in the nation and its public culture. On the other hand, it is now apparent that this secularism, so eagerly embraced as a national project, has left a huge vacuum in the soul of French civilization. Even as nature abhors a vacuum, a secular vacuum will not long survive. The Muslim youths now rampaging through the streets of Paris want to fill that vacuum with Muslim rage.

Writer Theodore Dalrymple speaks of “barbarians at the gates of Paris.” Those who honor civilization and understand, like C. P. Snow, that civilization is “hideously fragile,” must look to France with concern and soberness. Will European civilization soon be a thing of the past?

_______________________________________________

R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

==============================

Seeing Islam Through ‘Condi-Colored Glasses’ (Christian Post, 051112)

Last month, during a speech given at the annual Iftar dinner at the White House (Washington’s recognition marking the end of Ramadan), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice referred to Islam as “a religion of peace and love.”

In a GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary, Don Feder said of Rice’s speech: “In all of existence, there is no greater dichotomy than between the way Islam is portrayed by western admirers and the way it’s practiced by its more enthusiastic adherents. Wherever large numbers of Muslims come in contact with ‘infidels,’ all jihad breaks loose. That’s as true on the West Bank as it is in the Kashmir, as much a reality in the Philippines as the Balkans and as sure in West Africa as it is in Indonesia .... Yet, reality notwithstanding, western elites insist on seeing Islam through Condi-colored glasses. No amount of suicide bombing, anti-Semitic agitation, rampant misogyny, persecution of Christians or slaughter of innocents is allowed to penetrate this mindset.”

Certainly every Muslim is not a terrorist — every Arab or Pakistani convenience store clerk is not plotting the overthrow of America. But neither has a tiny minority of extremists hijacked Islam. The fact of the matter is that violent jihad warfare against non-Muslims is at the heart of Islamic theology. And it is the mother of all politically correct myths to believe otherwise.

Joseph Schacht, in his book An Introduction to Islamic Law, notes: “The basis of the Islamic attitude towards unbelievers is the law of war; they must either be converted or subjugated or killed.” There’s your Islamic definition of peace — bow or die!

Rice also said in her speech: “We in America know the benevolence that is in the heart of Islam. We’ve seen it in many ways. And most recently, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Muslim nations extended some of the most generous offers of support that we received.” Yes, indeed moderate Muslims have performed such good works. Nevertheless, their motives should always be suspect.

For instance, Robert Spencer contends in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) that prominent American Muslim spokesman Siraj Wahaj “is often presented as a moderate” Muslim. In 1991, he was the first Muslim to ever give an invocation to Congress. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Wahaj declared: “I now feel responsible to preach, actually to get on a jihad against extremism.” However, “[w]hether his true thoughts are more extreme remains unclear,” says Spencer. “[A]fter all, he has also warned that the United States will fall unless it ‘accepts the Islamic agenda.’ He has lamented that ‘if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.’ In the early 1990s, he sponsored talks by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in mosques in New York City and New Jersey. Rahman was later convicted for conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and Wahaj was designated a ‘potential unindicted co-conspirator.’”

Spencer also points out that “moderate Islam does not exist to any significant extent in the world today.” He writes: “Where Muslims do coexist peacefully with non-Muslims, as in Central Asia and elsewhere, it is not because the teachings of jihad have been reformed or rejected; they have simply been ignored, and history teaches that they can be remembered at any time.”

What is more, Islamic doctrine teaches that lying is perfectly acceptable for jihads warring against unbelievers. Qur’an 3:28 reads: “Let not the believers take for friends or helpers unbelievers rather than believers. If any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah; except by way of precaution, that ye may guard yourselves from them.” In other words, the text prohibits Muslims from making friends with non-Muslims unless it’s for the purpose of “guarding yourselves from them.” Which is to say, it’s permissible for Muslims to pretend they are the friends of non-believers, if it’s so Islam may eventually reign over them.

Rice also mentioned in her remarks that “after the recent earthquake in South Asia, the entire world watched as thousands of Muslims, deep in the observance of Ramadan, led the relief effort without breaking their fast.” Well duh! What’s so great about that? In that case, Muslims were simply following their religion and in part by helping other Muslims. The epicenter of that great quake, where the worst damage was sustained, occurred in Pakistan — an Islamic State. Other places largely affected were Afghanistan, where 99% of the people are Muslim, and northern India, which is the main center for Islam in that country.

If one really wants to understand the “love” — “the heart of Islam” — consider this: According to a National Review Online article by Deroy Murdock, after the tsunami devastated the South Pacific last year, the United States raised over $350 million in government aid. Australia donated $810 million, Germany $680 million, and Japan $500 million. Even actress Sandra Bullock managed to give a million dollars of her own money. But the vastly rich oil countries — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Algeria, Bahrain, and Libya — made a combined pledge of less than a hundred million. Why? One Saudi cleric summed up the reason given by the Islamic clerics in those countries: “It happened at Christmas when fornicators and corrupt people from all over the world come to commit fornication and sexual perversion.” Wow, can’t you just feel the embrace — the warmth of that Islamic love — reaching out in compassion, offering great hope to the hurting masses. Granted, God at times does punish sin with natural calamities, but even when He does that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reach out generously with aid and support.

No! Islam is neither a religion characteristic of peace or love. It is, in fact, a false religion. It makes a show of righteousness, but it is wicked to the core. Alexis de Tocqueville once said of Islam: “I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad .... Its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress ....”

Obviously, de Tocqueville didn’t see Islam through “Condi-colored glasses.” And neither should we!

________________________________________________

Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

==============================

Islamic Radicals Plan World Revolution from Temple Mount (WorldNetDaily, 051114)

Islamic radicals have been using the Temple Mount as a focal point for planning and preaching the establishment of a world Islamic state with Jerusalem as its capital.

One of the radical groups operating on the Temple Mount is Hizab Altahrir (The Islamic Liberation Party), which espouses an ideology similar to Al Qaeda. Hizab Altahrir’s network spans most Western European countries. The party puts Islamic revolution and an uncompromising form of Jihad (holly war) at the top of its political agenda.

The group advocates subjecting the entire world to Islamic law (Shariya), and destroying non-believing nations and religions.

The party has targeted Europe, specifically Denmark, for spreading its ideology, and providing a springboard for renewing Islamic conquests in Europe. A senior party activist in Jerusalem, Sheikh Issam Amira, expressed this philosophy in a recent speech which he made on the Temple Mount:

“Listeners! The Moslems in Denmark make up three percent [of the population], yet constitute a threat to the future of the Danish kingdom. It’s no surprise that in Bitrab (the ancient name of Medina, a city in Arabia to which Mohammed immigrated) they were fewer than three percent of the general population, but succeeded changing the regime in Bitrab.

“It’s no surprise that our brothers in Denmark have succeeded in bringing Islam to every home in that country. Allah will grant us victory in their land to establish the [Islamic] revolution in Denmark.”

After Denmark, the Sheikh said, the party will carry the revolution to Oslo and change its name to Medina. “They will fight against their Scandinavian neighbors in order to bring the country into the territory of the revolution,” he said. “In the next stage, they will fight a holy jihad to spread Islam to the rest of Europe, until it spreads to the original city of Medina where the two cities will unite under the Islamic flag.”

Sheikh Riyad Salah, head of the Islamic movement in Israel has also been active teaching the tenets of “Islamic revolution.”

“We are at the gates of the Islamic revolution,” he proclaims in his sermons to Arab citizens of Israel. “The global forces of evil will be eliminated from the world and the Islamic nation will remain in place in order to bring about the world Islamic revolution, with its capital, Jerusalem.”

Salah, who until a few months ago was under arrest for allegedly assisting an organization connected to the Hamas terror group, has for a number of years been attempting to organize Israel’s Arab citizens into an “independent Palestinian society,” disconnected from the State of Israel and its institutions.

Salah’s organization contributed to efforts to repair Arab mosques on the Temple Mount, and also attempts to erase the remains of Jewish antiquities on the Mount.

In Israel, the Hizab Altahrir party is sending out charismatic Islamic preachers to spread its ideology to mosques in villages near Jerusalem, Hevron, Kalkilya, and Tulkarem.

When large numbers of Moslems visited mosques last October during the holy month of Ramadan, the party expanded its efforts to recruit new members and activists in the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Thousands of young Arabs living in the PA have been participating in the party’s youth movement under the slogan, “Campaigning to Preach Revolution.”

On the Temple Mount near the Dome of the Rock, Altahrir’s youth recently put up a giant banner declaring “Revolution is a Divine Command.” The party’s flag appears on the right and left hand side of the banner (See top photo). The youth were greeted by party members who shouted, “Next year in Jerusalem, under the rule of the Islamic revolution.”

==============================

U.S., West, Israel all face same threat: radical Islam (townhall.com, 051118)

by Joel Mowbray

While President Bush could be making a lasting—and to conservatives, positive—impression on the Supreme Court he has already started reframing the biggest issue of the day, the war on terror, by calling it what it is: a war on radical Islam.

Not only does he need to continue to do so, but he would be wise to take the lead on something that should have been done long ago: linking the Islamic terror that Israel faces with the Islamic terrorism that has struck elsewhere, from New York to London to Bali.

In a surprisingly little-heralded speech last month, Bush for the first time went beyond calling the enemy “terrorists” or “evil-doers.” He said, “Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism.”

Though he gave the necessary disclaimer that the enemy does not represent Islam, Bush then spelled out—in a way he has not before—the enemy’s ultimate goal. “This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.”

The few who noticed Bush’s speech hailed its potential significance as a turning point in the War on Terror. Not coincidentally, the address came just a few months after the silliness where many in the administration wanted to change the name of the worldwide war to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, or GSAVE.

Though no doubt some bureaucrats were quite proud of the two-syllable acronym, GSAVE had the same basic problem as the label we’ve been using all along: it only hints at what we’re up against. Which is why Bush’s October 6 speech was so important.

Without any context, the War on Terror seems like little more than a patchwork of military actions in various, far-flung regions around the world. But understanding that the ideology of Islam is the link between al Qaeda, its loosely affiliated offshoots, and other Islamic terrorist organizations better presents the enormity of what we are facing. It also makes clear that military action alone will never be enough.

Yet as brilliant as Bush’s speech was, just two weeks later he ignored its central premise when Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas came to town. With Abbas at his side, Bush urged Arafat’s long-time right-hand man to “confront the threat that armed gangs pose to a genuinely democratic Palestine.”

And while Bush later also called for Abbas to “dismantle terror infrastructure,” he never once referred to the root cause of Palestinian terror: radical Islam.

Even many who should know better have long been reluctant to link Palestinian terror with other Islamic terrorism. Yet to claim that the two movements are somehow separate and distinct, Hamas and Hezbollah, among others, would have to be clearly distinguishable from al Qaeda and Qaeda affiliates—and they’re not.

Aside from strong evidence that al Qaeda is establishing a presence in Gaza (which is denied by the Palestinian Authority), Hamas has for years expressed great sympathies for bin Laden’s network. This should be hardly surprising, though, since Hamas founder and former “spiritual” leader Sheikh Yassin said repeatedly during his life that the entire world should become Islamic. Yassin believed that there was no legitimate government without Shari’a law—a position identical to bin Laden’s.

Hezbollah’s founding charter called for the destruction of the United States for its role in stopping the spread of Islam, which is strikingly similar to one of bin Laden’s primary complaints about America.

But perhaps the greatest propagator of radical Islam to Palestinians is not Hamas or Hezbollah, but the PA. Schools, television and radio broadcasts, as well as books and newspapers are all littered with venomous Islamic indoctrination, albeit in a vein that contains a much heavier emphasis on violent anti-Semitism.

The prevalence of Islamic indoctrination did not spring up in spite of Arafat, who started out as a secular Arab nationalist, but rather because of him. After the decline of Communism and Arab nationalism, Arafat turned to Islam. In radical Islam, Arafat found the most powerful of motivators, one that would enable him to make young adults and even children clamor for the “honor” of strapping a bomb to their chests.

To put it another way: without Islam, the current intifada probably never would have happened.

The general unwillingness to identify Palestinian terrorism with the broader Islamic terrorism means that any intended solution will solve nothing. Without draining the swamp and dismantling not just the terrorist infrastructure, but also the indoctrination industry, there cannot be peace. Quite simply, Israel cannot share a peace with a neighbor that wants it dead.

President Bush might find resistance, particularly on the Left, to any attempt to link Palestinian terrorists with al Qaeda and others, but doing so would likely rally the base and possibly strengthen his foreign policy coalition. And in changing the paradigm we use for viewing the Arab-Israeli conflict, Bush could do the unthinkable: he could move the Middle East in the direction of actual peace.

==============================

European intifada? (Washington Times, 051123)

By Helle Dale

VENICE, Italy. — Amid the architectural gorgeousness and the fabulous shopping of Europe, the feeling comes easily that reality is suspended here.

Europeans live in a state of denial about the looming immigrant crisis closing in on their world, despite signs growing harder and harder to miss. Even after the Madrid bombing of a year and a half ago, even after the London subway bombing of last summer, even after last month’s riots by disaffected Muslim and other immigrant youth in the suburbs of France, there is a prevailing sense here that bad things happen to other people.

But not everybody is so complacent, and a few voices have begun to articulate strongly the continent’s problems. At the annual meeting of the Venice Colloquium, a gathering of conservative and free-market organizations from Europe and the United States, Ferdinando Adornato, head of Fondazione Liberal and a member of the Italian Parliament, issued a wakeup call for his fellow Europeans: “We want to give out an alarm,” he said. “The elite underestimate the crisis in Europe, economic and spiritual. To deal with a crisis, first you must recognize it.”

The malaise also leads to widespread failure to muster the courage to deal with Europe’s immigrant problem. The riots in the French suburbs, in which thousands and thousands of cars were set ablaze along with schools and other official buildings, should not be considered a temporary crisis, in Mr. Adornato’s view. “As a continent we have a wrong attitude toward integration. We are scared of immigrants. Social fears are the wrong attitude towards global challenges,” he said. The result is a society that produces no opportunity: “Young immigrants have no dreams.”

Getting Europeans to deal with the problem of integrating the millions of immigrants in their midst is not going to]U be easy, judging by conversations with Europeans. “It can’t happen here” is the repeated response in discussions about the rioting in France, a head-in-the-sand reaction that will not serve them well.

Germans (whose country has 3.2 million Muslims) insist “it cannot happen here” because they don’t have ghettoes of immigrants. This despite the fact that schools in inner-city neighborhoods are overwhelmingly immigrant, and despite the fact that the post-unification era in Germany saw ugly racially motivated violence.

Italians insist that “it cannot happen here” because the Italian immigrant population of Albanians, Romanians and Muslims is such a new phenomenon that it has not yet developed a second or third generation in which discontent can foster. Also, some say, as the Italians are nicer than the French, immigrants have less of a hard time. The Swiss maintain that “it cannot happen here,” even with 20% immigrants. They just don’t foresee any problems like the French.

Meanwhile the British, with 1.8 million Muslims, are being held up as an example of a successful multicultural European society. It is true that because of previous race riots in the 1980s, the British system already underwent significant change to become more flexible and inclusive. Yet it is also true that homegrown British terrorists perpetrated the London subway bombings this summer.

Even in France, where problems associated with young Muslim immigrants — unemployment, isolation, family breakdown and rage — have broken into full view, recognition has come slowly. Statistics regarding France’s immigrant population are highly uncertain, and in fact illegal to collect; estimates vary from 3 million to 6 million people of Middle Eastern and North African origin. It took President Jacques Chirac almost two weeks to talk about the riots in public. Remarkably, though, he did recognize that the French system had broken down as the evidence became overwhelming.

Equally amazing is the fact that even conservative French politicians reject outright the idea that the riots could have had any radical Muslim dimension at all. This is asserted as an absolute fact, and the evidence cited is that France’s chief imam has condemned the violence and urged its end. How can anyone be 100% sure when the potential for al Qaeda recruitment seems to be so obvious?

Perhaps the French government does have an opportunity here to grapple with the problem before vandalism turns into an organized French intifada. This will take an unflinching, honest evaluation of the problem, however, which Europe so far has shown little inclination for.

==============================

Saudi Arabia Accused of ‘Hate Literature’ Distribution in U.S. (Christian Post, 051126)

The Saudi Arabian government is distributing hate literature, pamphlets, and materials across the United States in an effort to cause division and hostility between American Muslims and Christians and Jews, according to the director of a religious freedom organization

Freedom House Center for Religious Freedom told the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month that the Saudi Embassy in Washington offers instructions on how to “build a wall of resentment” between Muslims and infidels, reported Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom, according to Army Times.

Among the instructions given to American Muslims are: “Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel,” quoted Shea during a committee hearing reported Army Times.

Saudi Arabia is one of the eight designated “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) this year for continual religious freedom violations and persecutions.

According to the recently released U.S. Department of State 2005 International Religious Freedom Report, freedom of religion does not exist in Saudi Arabia, a country where the official state religion is Islam and where the religious breakdown is described by the CIA World Factbook as 100% Muslim.

In addition to the instructions allegedly offered by the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Shea informed that there are more than 200 similar booklets that “demonstrate the ongoing efforts by Saudi Arabia to indoctrinate Muslims in the United States in the hostility and belligerence of Saudi Arabia’s hard-line Wahhabi sect of Islam.”

Moreover, she reported that hate literature, booklets, text books and other materials were gathered from mosques and Islamic centers in cities across the United States, including Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Washington and New York, according to Army Times.

The Center’s director also noted that some of the material was published by the Saudi Education Ministry.

==============================

Belgian Waffle: Jihad and the Girl Next Door (townhall.com, 051206)

by Chuck Colson

The British were stunned by a taped message left by one of the suicide bombers in July’s attacks on London. It wasn’t what he said—the usual stuff about the oppression of Muslims—but how he said it: with a classic Yorkshire accent. Islamic terror, it seems, is becoming a domestic product.

At least the British bombers were first-generation Brits who had grown-up in an Islamic subculture. Their actions might be, however perverted, seen as a reaction to discrimination against British Muslims.

But the people in Belgium have no such “consolation.” Their latest home-grown jihadist looked and talked just like the “girl next door” because she was the girl next door. Her story is a cautionary tale: not only about the spread of radical Islam, but about the kind of culture that makes that spread possible.

According to the Independent, “Murielle Degauque was, by all accounts, a normal child.” As a teenager, she dabbled in drugs and paid more attention to boys than to her schoolwork.

Nothing about her upbringing in southern Belgium suggested that she would do what she did last week: that is, strap explosives onto herself and detonate them near an American patrol in Iraq—killing herself, but fortunately, no Americans in the process.

In an attempt to make what happened seem like the product of a personal pathology, commentators point out that Degauque was attached to Muslim men: She married and divorced one; dated another; and finally went to Morocco with a third. And it was on this trip that she converted to the brand of Islam that led her to become a suicide bomber.

This shocking incident reminds us that Islam is no longer confined to oppressed and angry Arabs. It is in our midst and deadly dangerous. But there’s something else going on: that is, the cultural setting in which people like Degauque make their choices.

Commenting on this cultural setting in the December 12 issue of the New Republic, Editor Spencer Ackerman cites Europe’s “strident secularism” as contributing to the radicalization of European Muslims. European elites are so secularized, Ackerman writes, that they “view public expressions of religion, no matter how subtle or individualized, as subversive political statements.” So it is that young people who are searching are open to embracing a religious vision that takes that subversion of the political order to a new level: jihadist Islam.

The effects of European secularism, you see, are not limited to the children of Muslim immigrants. A culture where barely half the people believe in God, and far fewer practice any religion at all, cannot compete with Islam’s vitality. While Europeans have ceased believing in God, they and their children have not stopped needing Him: Their need for meaning and purpose has not gone away. They have just been convinced that these will not be found inside a Christian church.

And they certainly will not find them in the secular welfare state. So for many that leaves only one alternative: radical Islam, the alternative chosen by Degauque. It’s a choice that makes sense only when you realize that we are by design meaning-seeking creatures. That this young girl next door made that choice is a fearful warning about Islam, and a tragic reflection on our own culture.

==============================

Abdullah: Extremists have hijacked Islam: Saudi king urges muslim leaders to unite and combat radicalism (WorldNetDaily, 051208)

Abdullah: Extremists have hijacked Islam

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah appealed to Muslim leaders on Wednesday to unite and tackle extremists who he said have hijacked their religion. At a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) - the world’s biggest Muslim body - in the holy city of Mecca, Abdullah said the world’s 1 billion Muslims were weak and divided, a description echoed by other leaders.

“It bleeds the heart of a believer to see how this glorious civilization has fallen from the height of glory to the ravine of frailty and how its thoughts were hijacked by devilish and criminal gangs that spread havoc on earth,” Abdullah said.

U.S. critics have blamed the kingdom’s strict Wahhabi school of Islam for fostering extremism but Saudi officials say they are tackling the militants through a tough security crackdown and a campaign to win over militant sympathizers.

The two-day summit, convened on Wednesday to address what Abdullah said were grave dangers facing the Muslim nation.

He called upon the Islamic jurisprudence arm of the OIC to “fulfill its historic role of combating extremism.”

Abdullah called for greater educational efforts to promote tolerance. “Developing the curriculum is essential to building a tolerant Muslim identity ... and to having a society that rejects isolation,” he said.

“We don’t have the luxury of blaming others for our own problems,” OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddine Ihsanoglu said in a speech which also portrayed the Muslim world confronting one of “the most critical eras of its history”.

“We should fight terrorism by dealing with its roots and causes, whether committed by individuals, groups or states,” Ihsanoglu said. “Terrorism is a crime that every Muslim should fight.”

“The future of humanity depends on this part of the world,” Ihsanoglu said. “What is going on in the Islamic world has dire consequences elsewhere.” “Lack of moderation is one of the main sources of instability and chaos in the modern world,” the OIC secretary general said.

He stressed the need to combat poverty, illiteracy and corruption in the Muslim world, saying that “when these issues are not addressed properly by legitimate means, they are used as an excuse to push for extreme agendas.”

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi also issued a solemn warning, saying Muslims across the world were in a state of “disunity and discord” worse than at any time in 14 centuries of Islamic history.

“Thousands of our brothers and sisters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and Sudan and similar places, are living in fear under threats of war and violence,” he said. “Many more are living under threats of poverty and backwardness.”

Iran faces U.S. pressure over Tehran’s nuclear plans while Syria faces pressure over the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister. Several impoverished Asian and African states were also attending the talks in Mecca.

Algerian presidential representative, Abdel-Aziz Belkhadem, said reform of the OIC’s charter had not been updated in 36 years, adding: “The current era is full of challenges and Muslim nations must rise to meet these challenges”.

Among noted absentees were Syrian President Bashar Assad and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Mecca gathering aims to encourage political and social reform in Muslim countries by endorsing a 10-year plan for better education, faster economic development, more trade, religious moderation, and more rights for Muslim women.

It will also try to breathe new life into the OIC, which has been largely ineffectual since it was set up 36 years ago with the stated aim of recovering East Jerusalem from Israeli occupation after the 1967 Middle East War.

The Islamic leaders are also expected to approve a name change for the body to become the Organization of Islamic Countries.

==============================

Muslim Leaders Pledge Crackdown on Extremism (Foxnews, 051209)

MECCA, Saudi Arabia — Leaders from more than 50 Muslim countries promised Thursday to fight extremist ideology, saying they would reform textbooks, restrict religious edicts and crack down on terror financing.

Kings, heads of states and ministers closed a two-day summit in Islam’s holiest city, Mecca, that had been convened to address terrorism, seeking to counter criticism that the Islamic world has done little to confront extremism.

“The Islamic nation is in a crisis. This crisis does not reflect on the present alone, but also on its future and the future of humanity at large,” said the final statement of the gathering. “We need decisive action to fight deviant ideas because they are the justification of terrorism.”

In the declaration, the countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference promised to “change national laws to criminalize financing and incitement” as well as purge extremist ideas from school curriculums.

It also underlined that “fatwas” — or Islamic religious edicts — must only be issued by “those who are authorized,” an effort to rein in edicts by clerics who denounce other Muslims and allow their killing.

“It is now up to every Muslim government to implement the measures, God willing,” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at a news conference.

Leaders of about 40 countries were participating in the meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, with the remaining OIC members represented by ministers.

Saudi Arabia has cracked down on Al Qaeda militants there since a wave of attacks in early 2003, and King Abdullah has taken gradual steps to clamp down on militant preachers in his country, the homeland of Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II also played a leading role at the summit, pressing for strong language against terrorism and extremist ideology after his country was hit by its worst ever terror attack last month, a triple suicide bombing at Amman hotels that killed 60 people.

Among noted absentees were Syrian President Bashar Assad, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika — hospitalized in France — and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

==============================

Cultural flash points (Washington Times, 051209)

By Diana West

Now they want to put him to death — Mohaqeq Nasab, the Afghan editor already sentenced to two years hard labor for “blasphemy” against Islam. Now, Afghan prosecutors want to put him to death.

Why? The Muslim editor of Women’s Rights magazine published articles in post-Taliban Afghanistan that criticized aspects of Islamic law, including the penalties of stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, and death for leaving Islam.

“Sometimes the whole religion and the rules of the religion were attacked,” explained Muhammed Aref Rahmani, who sits on Afghanistan’s council of Islamic scholars.

Attacked? “For instance,” Mr. Rahmani told the Chicago Tribune, “he says one woman should be equal to one man, as a witness in a case, which is completely against our religion.”

Yes, those seismic vibrations rolling across your eardrums are the sound of culture clash. Under Islamic law, a woman’s court testimony is worth half as much as a man’s — another rank inequality Mr. Nasab’s magazine opposed — so I guess you could say Mr. Rahmani has an Islamic point. Of course, such Islamic “crimes” equal Western virtues. This, it seems, leaves Afghan officials unimpressed.

“The decision made by the lower court on Mohaqeq Nasab will in no way satisfy the public prosecutor’s office,” Zmarai Amiri told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Mr. Amiri ought to know: He’s Kabul’s chief prosecutor. “Nasab must be punished more severely, up to and including execution.” There are sure to be more arrests, Mr. Amiri continued rather Stalinistically, if anyone, including government officials, comes to Mr. Nasab’s defense.

So much for post-Taliban — and, come to think of it, post-Operation-Enduring-Freedom — life in Afghanistan. Maybe the more useful exercise here is not to wonder how we became midwife to a theocratic police state but to see what we can learn from it. One thing is clear: where Islam is protected from so-called blasphemy, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech — let alone women’s rights — are not.

This same notion of Islam’s “protection” came up when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie to death in 1989 for his “blasphemous” novel “The Satanic Verses,” pitching the Western world into craven fits of appeasement. As Daniel Pipes has written, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) not only endorsed Iran’s charges of “blasphemy” and Mr. Rushdie’s “heresy,” it also called for “necessary legislation to insure the protection of the religious beliefs of others.” Saliently, the OIC declared that “blasphemy cannot be justified on the basis of freedom of expression and opinion.”

Some things never change. As we see in Afghanistan — and, increasingly, elsewhere — this fundamental tenet of Islamic society is one of them. And it is on this point that the West and Islam are struggling to come to terms.

For example, the Islamic furor over a dozen Mohammed cartoons published in a Danish newspaper — and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s refusal to meddle with his country’s freedom of speech — continues to rise up the food chain, from death threats and street riots, to ambassadorial protests, to heads-of-state deliberations at the December OIC meeting in Mecca.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reaction not only sums up the official Islamic response but is also highly significant given Turkey’s bid to become the European Union bridge between the West and Islam. On a recent trip to Denmark, as recounted in the internet edition of the Turkish newspaper Zaman, Mr. Erdogan addressed the Mohammed-cartoon issue, saying, “Freedoms have limits, what is sacred should be respected.” As columnist Mustafa Unal put it, Mr. Erdogan “indicated that respect towards what is considered sacred is more important than the freedom of expression.”

Meanwhile, Denmark’s Berlingske Tidende, via the blogger Fjordman (fjordman.blogspot.com), reports that the 56 countries of the OIC have now written the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights to “help contain this encroachment on Islam, so the situation won’t get out of control.” In response, U.N. commissioner Louise Arbour emphasized her “regret” over “any statement or act that could express a lack of respect for the religion of others.” Which sounds like the Danes are in U.N.-trouble. But what about the statements or acts — from censorship to death sentences — of the religion that encroach on the rights of others? That’s a question no one dares to ask.

==============================

Changes in the Arab world (Washington Times, 051209)

By Claude Salhani

DUBAI, U.A.E. — Arab movers and shakers — along with quite a few Westerners too — gathered in Dubai for a two-day conference focusing on the “Arab world and the Media, with emphasis on ‘Getting it Right.’”

Surprisingly, the news from the Arab world is not all bad for President Bush. Several of the observers and panelists attending the Dubai conference agree that change is coming to the Arab world.

The American president, who is pushing for greater reform and democracy in the Arab world, may yet be getting his wish, albeit it may be coming at a far slower pace than he would like. One quasi-certainty is that the Middle East is unlikely to unilaterally adopt true democracy before the end of Mr. Bush’s mandate.

“We are seeing a major reform movement from Morocco to Syria take place,” said Saudi Arabia’s Prince Walid bin Talal, one of the richest men in the world. Replying to a series of questions, the Saudi billionaire said Arabs should get more involved in “getting it right.”

“We can change things,” he told the audience of several hundred people gathered in a resort complex resembling something out of “One Thousand and one Nights.” The prince cited as an example the recent French riots, which Fox News had labeled the “Muslim riots.” Prince Walid said he immediately telephoned Rupert Murdoch (the major shareholder of Fox) and told him it was wrong to portray the Paris disturbances as “Muslim.” He went on to explain that there were a number of other social-economic as well as racial facets to the disturbances.

“Within minutes,” said the Saudi prince, Fox corrected its reporting. Indeed, this is a good example of how to get involved. However, it helps if you are a rich Saudi prince who happens to be on a first name basis with the owner of a major U.S. television network.

Still, change is slowly seeping into the fabric of Arab society, largely thanks to the proliferation of satellite television and the Internet. Even in mostly totalitarian regimes where the media is tightly controlled by the government, change is beginning to creep in, if ever so slowly.

Joshua Landis, the first American blogger to comment freely from Damascus on his blog site “SyriaComment.com,” said he was surprised the Syrians allowed him so much leeway. “I kept waiting for the knock on the door in the middle of the night which never came,” said Mr. Landis.

Mr. Landis estimates the number of Syrian bloggers to be around 60 or 70. This may be a relatively small number, but given the state of the Internet in Syria and the government’s tight control on access to the World Wide Web, it is still an accomplishment.

Mr. Landis and several other panelists agreed that “everyone in Syria wants to see a change,” but stressed that Syrians were terrified of change coming in the form of a civil war like the one that devastated Lebanon for almost 18 years. Or, they look at their other neighbor, Iraq, and tremble with fear that the same might happen to them.

Accordingly, said Mr. Landis, Syria’s “disease” is that they believe they can prevent unwelcome change by adding more security, more secret police and more intelligence forces. The result is less openness and greater government control.

Of course no Middle East conference could be complete without some U.S. bashing. In the friendly United Arab Emirates, let’s say it was more gentle knuckle-rapping. Once again we heard what is becoming the mantra in many parts of the Middle East: The Arab world’s animosity for the Bush administration should not be translated as animosity for the American people.

“There is a big difference between the American people and the Bush administration,” said Prince Walid. And the reason for much of this distinction stems from the fact that U.S. foreign policy maintains double standards when it comes to dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict and other major policy decisions involving Arabs.

“These double standards create hate towards the administration,” said the Saudi prince. “But the hate is not directed at the American people.”

The same argument is often heard from Casablanca to Ramallah. The Saudi prince cited America’s “lack of understanding” of the Arab world as being at the core of anti-American feelings in the Arab world.

Claude Salhani is international editor for United Press International.

==============================

Censorship in the name of religion (townhall.com, 051212)

by Diana West

Now they want to put him to death — Ali Mohaqeq Nasab, the Afghan editor already sentenced to two years hard labor for “blasphemy” against Islam. Now, Afghan prosecutors want to put him to death.

Why? The Muslim editor of “Women’s Rights” magazine published articles in post-Taliban Afghanistan that criticized aspects of Islamic law, including the penalties of stoning for adultery, amputation for theft and death for leaving Islam. “Sometimes the whole religion and the rules of the religion were attacked,” explained Muhammad Aref Rahmani, who sits on Afghanistan’s council of Islamic scholars.

Attacked? “For instance,” Mr. Rahmani told the Chicago Tribune, “he says one woman should be equal to one man, as a witness in a case, which is completely against our religion.”

So much for post-Taliban — and, come to think of it, post-Operation-Enduring-Freedom — life in Afghanistan. Maybe the more useful exercise here is not to wonder how we became midwife to a theocratic police state, but to see what we can learn from it. One thing is clear: where Islam is protected from so-called blasphemy, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech — let alone women’s rights — are not.

This same notion of Islam’s “protection” came up when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie to death in 1989 for his “blasphemous” novel, “The Satanic Verses,” pitching the Western world into craven fits of appeasement. As Daniel Pipes has written, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) not only endorsed Iran’s charges of “blasphemy” and Mr. Rushdie’s “heresy,” it also called for “necessary legislation to insure the protection of the religious beliefs of others.” Saliently, the OIC declared that “blasphemy cannot be justified on the basis of freedom of expression and opinion.”

For example, the Islamic furor over a dozen Muhammad cartoons published in a Danish newspaper —and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s refusal to meddle with his country’s freedom of speech — continues to rise up the food chain, from death threats and street riots, to ambassadorial protests, to heads-of-state deliberations at the December OIC meeting in Mecca.

Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan’s reaction not only sums up the official Islamic response, but is also highly significant given Turkey’s bid to become the European Union bridge between the West and Islam. On a recent trip to Denmark, as recounted in the Internet edition of the Turkish newspaper “Zaman,” Mr. Erdogan addressed the Muhammad-cartoon issue, saying, “Freedoms have limits, what is sacred should be respected.” As columnist Mustafa Unal put it, Mr. Erdogan “indicated that respect toward what is considered sacred is more important than the freedom of expression.”

This is a major point of culture clash — or would be, if the West cared to defend its freedoms. Which is a big “if.” Meanwhile, Denmark’s “Berlingske Tidende,” via the blogger Fjordman (fjordman.blogspot.com), reports that the 56 countries of the OIC have now written the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to “help contain this encroachment on Islam, so the situation won’t get out of control.”

Let’s translate. “Encroachment on Islam” equals criticism of Islam — aka “blasphemy” in Islamic quarters. “The situation” equals freedom of speech. “Out of control” equals criticism of Islam as an exercise of freedom of speech. In response, the U.N. human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, emphasized her “regret” over “any statement or act that could express a lack of respect for the religion of others.” Which sounds like the Danes are in U.N.-trouble. But what about the statements or acts — from censorship to death sentences — of the religion that encroach on the rights of others? That’s a question no one dares to ask.

==============================

Going Medieval: The nature of jihad and this war we’re in. (National Review Online, 051213)

One hears a lot about the Crusades when studying the terrorist threat, and almost exclusively in the form of an accusation. These centuries-old conflicts are raised whenever someone, whether from the region or not, seeks to activate the Western guilt complex. We have to understand this conflict from their point of view, one is told. Memories are long in the region. The time of Saladin is as though yesterday. Had the Europeans (and by extension Americans) not started it all with the Crusades, we might not have the problems we face today.

O.K., but what about their crusade? We are accustomed to looking at maps that show an area called “the Muslim world,” stretching from West Africa across the Middle East to Southeast Asia, as though this always has been and must be; but before the time of Mohammed these same areas were Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or Zoroastrian, among others. How did they make the switch, and what happened when they did? This is the topic The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims a new anthology edited by Andrew G. Bostom. This exhaustive, 759-page tome contains both primary-source material and interpretive essays, dating from the earliest period of Muslim expansion to the present day. One learns very quickly that the caliphate was established not by evangelism but by the sword, and the non-Muslims who were subjected to the rule of the caliphs were either forced to convert, allowed to live as social inferiors under a religious caste system called dhimmitude, or simply killed outright.

There was no question among the early Muslim scholars that their faith should spread to the four corners of the world, and as quickly as possible. According to Islamic teaching, the time before the advent of Mohammed was the period of Jahiliyyah, or ignorance of the guidance from God. Once Mohammed brought the word of God, there was no longer any excuse for ignorance. And once an area was liberated and its people enlightened, they could not go back. Any place that became Muslim had to stay Muslim; thus groups like al Qaeda define the hoped for neo-Caliphate as encompassing not only areas where Muslims currently live, but all such places were they ever had influence. More to the point, this is only the first phase of consolidation. They will not stop there. The ultimate step in the al Qaeda program is the conversion of the world to their brand of Islam, and the realization of the vision first pursued by Mohammed and his successors.

The Legacy of Jihad deals at some length with the medieval roots of jihad, and the classical Muslim theologians and jurists writing on topics of the necessity of expansion, the legality of war, and the legitimate ways in which people may be enslaved. Some of the arguments may seem antiquated to modern ways of thinking, but one can find references to these same thinkers in the contemporary writings of the terrorists and their spiritual godfathers. Ibn Taymiyah, for example, the 13th-century scholar who justified rebellion against the Mongol occupiers of Baghdad even though they had nominally converted to Islam, is included in this volume. Today he is invoked by Iraqi insurgents for a similar purpose. Sayyid Qutb, the 20th-century Egyptian dissident whose writings are generally recognized as the inspiration for the current radical Islamist movements, was also inspired by Ibn Taymiyah. The book includes an excerpt from his seminal work Milestones in which Qutb discusses in some detail the nature of jihad as he understood it — something that “cannot be achieved only by preaching.”

The nature of jihad is of course one of the central questions of the conflict. Frequently I have had students from Muslim countries explain very passionately that our understanding of jihad is flawed. That what we think of as jihad — violent struggle to extend the domain of Islam — is actually the “lesser jihad.” True jihad is a moral struggle within each person to enjoin the good and resist evil, what is called the “greater jihad.” Some say further that the idea that force can be used to convert is not Islamic; it would make the greater jihad impossible because the convert would not sincerely believe. All this may be true, in their understanding of the faith, and I have no quarrel with it. Would that everyone felt that way.

Nevertheless, not all Muslims are as interested in this spiritual quest, and some of the more radical adherents of the faith are convinced that nonviolence is not an option. Andrew Bostom’s book shows comprehensively the historical roots of this school of thought, and its continuity over the centuries to the present day. It helps one understand jihad operationally; its use, its claims to legitimacy, its perceived inevitability. Whether this is or is not the way most Muslims view the concept of jihad in its totality is not particularly relevant because people sincerely engaged in “greater jihad” are not a national-security threat. Likewise, those terrorists who have made “lesser jihad” their avocation have no use for fellow Muslims who are seeking only to bring themselves closer to God’s ideal as they understand it. As the Ayatollah Khomeini said of those who argued that Islam was a religion of peace that prevents men from waging war, “I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”

This is a book rich in detail. It contains writings that have not previously been available in English, and is a useful sourcebook for scholars and students interested in the topic. It is a useful companion to contemporary terrorist statements and writings — you might be surprised how much is borrowed from other writers. Clearly given the length, the language, and complexity (and gravity) of the topic it is not a book for light holiday reading. But for those who want to deepen their understanding of the means and motives of the terrorists, there is more in one place than any other book of its kind. And you won’t have to feel guilty about the Crusades any more either.

— James S. Robbins is senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, a trustee for the Leaders for Liberty Foundation, and an NRO contributor.

==============================

Saudi Stories: Peeling back the slick Western imaging. (National Review Online, 051213)

Last Friday, senior Saudi leaders approached the international press privately in order to quietly denounce Iran’s president as an extremist. According to foreign-press accounts, the three Saudi officials, who asked to go unnamed, were fuming. (The Associated Press reported that the local press carried nothing of the flap.) President Ahmadinejad’s remarks in Mecca the day before denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel to be moved to Europe had upstaged a Saudi-convened summit attended by 50 Muslim nations that was intended to show a united front against — of all things — extremist thought.

Tehran had also put the Saudis on the spot back in November, when Iran’s president had called for the eradication of the Jewish state. Shortly afterwards, Saudi Ambassador Prince Turki Al-Faisal made his American debut at a friendly forum — Washington’s Middle East Institute — and someone in the room had the temerity to ask why Saudi Arabia hadn’t joined the rest of the civilized world in condemning the Iranian president’s threat against Israel. The dapper-suited ambassador replied that the Saudis preferred quiet diplomacy, adding with the tiniest hint of nationalist indignation that the Saudis wouldn’t go public just to get Western “cookies.” The nervous moment quickly passed and the ambassador moved on to regale the audience with a humorous camel-riding story involving his old pal Wyche Fowler, Clinton’s former ambassador to Riyadh and an ex-senator, who is now the institute’s president.

Since 9/11, the Saudi embassy has been staging a lavish public-relations campaign directed at American audiences. (The December 12, 2005 edition of The New Republic, for example, contains seven full pages of Saudi advertising.) The Mecca conference was itself part of this effort. Saudi Arabia is desperate to overcome its reputation as an incubator of intolerance and terrorism and show a moderate face.

But if it wants to score points with the West, why isn’t the House of Saud in full-throated protest against the Tehran madman? Why the “quiet” diplomacy and insistence that Saudi condemnations be unofficial and “off the record”? After all, it wasn’t just the United States, Europe, Russia, and the United Nations that openly decried Ahmadenejed — even some of his own radical Islamist allies back in Iran publicly distanced themselves from his latest provocation. Instead of seizing on the Iranian’s outburst as a golden opportunity to take a clear stand against extremism and show themselves as level-headed moderates in contrast to the reckless Shiite hardliner, the Saudis were guarded and hesitant.

The Saudis are coy for a reason. An open and unequivocal condemnation of Ahmadinejad’s outbursts by the Saudis would make them look like hypocrites to home audiences. As is well known, what the Saudis say in English differs greatly from their statements in Arabic. Wiping Israel off the map is exactly what Saudi authorities have been avowing for years to Arabic-speaking audiences. Saudi publications collected from American mosques that were translated from Arabic this year by Freedom House are replete with such statements.

In a publication produced by the Saudi press ministry, the late King Fahd is quoted:

[W]e consider ourselves to be in a continuous war against the Zionist enemy in every way until we achieve the hopes of the Arab nation driving the occupier out.

Another publication was produced by the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, a Virginia-based satellite office of a Saudi state university that, until it was raided by the FBI last year, had been staffed by over a dozen Saudi diplomats and chaired by the kingdom’s previous ambassador Prince Bandar, better known in Washington for his charm and wit. It says:

[I]f we …give [the Jews] a document stating that they have a right to a part of Palestine under the pretense that we are impotent, the presence of the Jews will become a legal presence…. [M]y children after me will come and throw you out, or the police will come and throw you out, and the house will not remain yours just because you were a powerful thief supported by the East or the West.

A Saudi government fourth-grade textbook collected from a New Jersey mosque warns about the dangers posed by the very concept of an “infidel” state in the midst of the Muslim world:

[Israel is intended as] a thorn in the back of the Muslim nations, and a window through which colonialism can sneak up among the ranks of the Muslims to work on dividing them and light the fire of hatred between them.[T]he Muslims will not rest until they cut off this disease and purify the land of Palestine from the plague of Zionism, and until its rightful owners reclaim it.

The Saudis also take a mixed approach to the United States. A Saudi ad currently running in America highlights the slogans, “committed friends” and “strong allies.” Yet Arabic-language Saudi propaganda has long insisted that America is the enemy.

The Saudi publications found in the United States — from the Saudi education ministry, cultural ministry, press ministry, embassy cultural attaché, air force, and the monarchy’s own publishing houses — reflect the extreme dualistic worldview of the hard-line Wahhabi sect of Islam: There are two antagonistic realms or abodes, the Muslim and the infidel, that can never be reconciled. This means that when Muslims are in the land of the “infidel,” they must behave as if on a mission behind enemy lines while they work to create an Islamic state. Such publications direct that those who disagree in any way are to be dehumanized, discredited, and intimidated. The language, substance, and goals in these Saudi materials are the same as those articulated by Ahmadinejad and al-Qaeda.

Booklets published in Arabic for the “Immigrant Muslim” by the Saudi embassy in Washington, for example, instruct Muslims to “hate” Americans. They counsel that, because America is ruled by infidel civil law, “it is forbidden” for a Muslim to become an American citizen, or join the U.S. military, or support Americans in any way.

The Saudi government exploits its position as custodian of Islam’s two holiest shrines, asserting that its rulings and interpretations of the faith are the authoritative ones. Muslims who fail to follow these dictates — whether they are Shiites, Sufis, or anyone else — are condemned as apostates. And, as another ministry of Islamic affairs book bluntly threatens its Muslim reader, if you become an unbeliever and fail to repent, “you should be killed.”

Such publications, distributed not only in the United States but around the world, are merely one part of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabization campaign. It spreads its ideology through its sponsorship of schools, mosques, imams, media outlets, cultural centers, and websites. A Treasury official told Congress that Saudi Arabia is the “epicenter” of Islamic extremism. Witnesses at a recent Senate hearing on the Saudi Accountability Act estimate that the Saudis expend three times as much as the Soviets did on external propaganda during the height of the Cold War. The late King Fahd’s website continues to provide a long roster of names of American universities, mosques, and other sites in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere that have benefited from his generosity. As Mayor Giuliani knew when he returned the $10 million check from Saudi Prince Talal after September 11, these donations come with strings attached.

In the last six months, the State Department and some in the media have begun to question the House of Saud about its noxious Arabic propaganda. Saudi Arabia’s official response is, in the words of one of its recent ads, that “the State is proceeding in its gradual and studied course of reform.”

So gradual is its studied course that it’s imperceptible. Extremism remains the order of the day in Riyadh, staged summits and public-relations campaigns notwithstanding.

At the same time that the ads appeared in November, the Saudi Al-Madina newspaper reported that one brave Muslim teacher in Saudi Arabia by the name of Mohammad al-Harbi was sentenced to 750 lashes and a three-and-a-half-year prison term for making positive statements about Jews and the Bible. Such religious tolerance is forbidden, according to the Saudi publications we found, because it “breaks the wall of resentment between the Muslims and the unbelievers.”

Early last week, Prince Talal was back in the news. Attending an Arab media conference in Dubai, he admonished fellow Arabs to be more “pro-active” in influencing the American media. By week’s end, Saudi officials were working to put spin on the Mecca conference debacle. But they still think they can have their cake and eat it too.

America is not the tightly controlled world of the Middle East. After 9/11, we are taking a closer look at those who claim to be our friends. And we know that friends don’t call friends “infidels,” in any language. If the Saudi public-relations campaign is to succeed in improving that country’s image, the House of Saud needs to disavow its own message of religious hatred and intolerance.

— Nina Shea is the director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom.

==============================

First TBN drops Lindsey, now Lindsey drops TBN: Best-selling author says Christian network tried to muzzle his views on radical Islam (WorldNetDaily, 060103)

Hal Lindsey, considered the best-selling non-fiction writer alive today, has notified the Trinity Broadcasting Network he will not return to his twice-weekly Christian commentary program, “The International Intelligence Briefing,” because of what he considers to be efforts to muzzle his opinions about radical Islam.

Lindsey, author of “The Late Great Planet Earth” and many other best-selling books and a weekly columnist for WND, has anchored the program for the last 12 years on the world’s largest Christian network.

The announcement follows an abrupt six-week suspension of the popular TBN-sponsored program by Jan Crouch, TBN’s vice president for programming.

Though John Casoria, TBN’s general counsel first told WorldNetDaily the show’s suspension was simply a traditional hiatus in lieu of seasonal programming, that statement was later revised to confirm that the network believed Lindsey’s program “placed Arabs in a negative light.”

Lindsey responded to this allegation: “I don’t have to cast radical Muslims in a bad light. If the intimidation and persecution of moderate Muslims makes radical Islam look bad, that is because it is bad – not that I ‘cast’ them in a bad light. But I have never cast the Arabs as a race in a bad light.”

“I also seek to show that radical Islam poses the greatest danger ever faced by the United States,” he added. “I believe that God called me as ‘a watchman on the wall’ to warn America and I must obey – although it is sometimes unpopular.”

On the other hand, Casoria told WND he believes the extremists are not Muslims at all but have “hijacked the religion.”

Lindsey contends that “the extremists are the ones most literally following the Quran and the Hadith, which are the most holy and authoritative books of the Muslim religion. This is why violence has erupted from Muslims in virtually every century since its birth.”

Casoria said he could not recall specific examples from Lindsey’s programs that were anti-Arab or anti-Muslim, but he expressed the network’s concern about how Muslims are portrayed.

“TBN is a worldwide ministry; we have an entire channel that airs 24 hours a day, seven days a week in Arabic,” he said. “We are trying to reach the Islamic world and open a dialogue with them regarding Christ and Christianity.”

Casoria explained, “We do not feel that the best witness of Christ is to bash them but rather to show them the nature of Christ – the way Christ said to present himself – and that is through love, understanding and the presentation of the gospel to them.”

Lindsey argued, however, his program is not shown in the Middle East.

“My show is produced for the Western world and for Christians who are at the most risk from radical Islam,” he said.

Lindsey has been associated with TBN since its inception in the early 1970s.

He told WND that he has “no ax to grind” with TBN, saying, “I’ve been happy with my opportunities for ministry at TBN. I’m thankful for the platform TBN gave me. I will speak at the gates of hell as long as they don’t tell me what to say. But it appears that they are now telling me what not to say – so sadly, it’s time to move on.”

Lindsey also announced that he is taking his popular television program to other outlets beginning in early February. His new half-hour news and commentary series will be called “The Hal Lindsey Report.” A new video version of it will also be streamed on Lindsey’s website.

When the New York Times surveyed all book sales for the decade of the 1970s, it found that Lindsey’s had far outsold all other authors. His “Late Great Planet Earth” alone sold more than 32 million copies.

==============================

Muslims and media (Washington Times, 051216)

By Diana West

There’s one good thing about the news that Alwaleed bin Talal, the richest Saudi prince in the world, just bought Harvard and Georgetown Universities — or, at least buried them up to their ivy in $40 million.

It gives everybody reason to relive a McAuliffe moment. “McAuliffe,” of course, was General Anthony C. McAuliffe, who, in response to a Nazi invitation to surrender during the 1944 Battle of the Bulge, sent back a one-word reply: “NUTS.”

In a very different war, Rudy Giuliani gave the United States a McAuliffe moment after realizing that Mr. Alwaleed’s $10 million donation to New York City after September 11 was in fact the price of principle. Having signed his hefty check, Mr. Alwaleed spoke his nasty piece: basically, that the United States had it coming — “it” being September 11 — given America’s support of Israel.

Rudy didn’t say “nuts,” but he returned the money. “Not only are those statements wrong,” Mr. Giuliani said, “they’re part of the problem.” Sigh. That was then. Now, Mr. “Part of the Problem” is a Crimson sugar daddy, a Hoya honey pot, whose millions will buy a colossal expansion of Saudi-friendly Islamic studies at the heart of the Ivy League and inside the Beltway.

Mr. Alwaleed explains his largesse this way: “Bridging the understanding between East and West is important for peace and tolerance.” Funny how that bridge goes only one way. We won’t ever, for example, see a Saudi prince (or anyone else) plunk down cold cash to expand — or even establish — Christian studies in Saudi Arabia, where exercising freedom of a non-Islamic religion is a crime.

This doesn’t stop Mr. Alwaleed from chattering about “bridges between East and West.” Maybe that’s because, as a mega-mogul of the East with major holdings in the West, he crosses them all the time.

Take his media holdings. In the West, they include a sizeable stake in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News, “fair and balanced” pride of any parent company. And Mr. Alwaleed takes pride — pride of ownership, anyway — in Fox as well. “During last month’s street protests in France,” he bragged to a Dubai audience, according to Middle East Online, “Fox ran a banner saying: ‘Muslim riots’. I picked up the phone and called Murdoch” — Rupert — “to tell him these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty. Within 30 minutes,” the prince recalled, “the title was changed from ‘Muslim riots’ to ‘civil riots.’ “ I guess money — oops, I mean, peace and tolerance — talks. Why else, as noted by Accuracy in Media (AIM), would News Corporation’s Harper Collins have published the prince’s “authorized biography” (#32,910 on Amazon)? In the DVD documentary accompanying the book — a royal bonus — Rupert Murdoch makes a cameo appearance (presumably “authorized”) to praise Mr. Alwaleed, dismissing Mr. Giuliani’s rejection as so much “politics.”

Mr. Murdoch might well have added that not everyone is too proud to take the prince’s, well, princely sums. In 2002, Mr. Alwaleed contributed $27 million to a Saudi government telethon that raised more than $100 million for the families of Palestinian “martyrs.” Like Harvard and Georgetown — like Andover ($500,000), like the Carter Center ($5 million) — no Hamas or Al Aqsa alums or legacies (survivors?) were about to give any bucks back.

And why should they? Harvard may have a record of Arab gifts gone wrong, including a $2.5 million donation returned following revelations of the donor’s anti-Semitic, anti-American leanings. “But,” as the Boston Globe noted, “problems with the Alwaleed donation do not seem probable.”

Here’s one. Prince Crimson bin Hoya is not only one of American academia’s most generous benefactors ever, he’s co-owner of ART TV network, the Saudi company that includes what Steven Stalinsky of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has described in the New York Sun as “the anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-Jihad Arabic TV channel Iraq.”

That’s putting it mildly. Programming, Mr. Stalinsky writes, includes telethons — the notorious terrorist fundraiser (mentioned above) of 2002, and an August, 2005 fundraiser for “Jihad in Palestine”; lectures that endorse suicide bombing and exhort Muslims to triumph over the West by the “slitting of throats and shattering skulls”; September 11 conspiracy theories blaming the United States, Israel and the Vatican; children’s shows that instruct parents to teach their children to pray for “martyrdom”; a soap opera with Jews casting spells on Mohammed; and talk shows on wife-beating. I’d say it’s about time Rupert picked up the phone.

As for Harvard and Georgetown — NUTS.

==============================

Muslim planned revenge attack on hero soldier (London Telegraph, 051223)

A Muslim man who planned to “hunt down” and kill a soldier who had won the Military Cross in Iraq was yesterday found guilty of terrorism offences.

Abu Bakr Mansha from Thamesmead, south London, was found with a balaclava and a blank-firing pistol which was being converted for live rounds when his flat was raided by police.

Alongside inflammatory videos of rebels attacking troops in Iraq was a newspaper article describing the exploits of Cpl Mark Byles, who was later decorated with the Military Cross.

Police also found a piece of paper with Cpl Byles’s former address on it and indentations on note paper requesting information on a rich Jewish man and the Hindu owner of a cash and carry business.

David Cocks, QC, prosecuting, told the jury at Southwark Crown Court, south London: “In their case, it is nothing to do with harm they may have done to the Muslim community. It was because of their religious beliefs.”

Cpl Byles, of 1 Bn, Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, led a bayonet charge after his comrades were ambushed in Al Amarah in May last year. A paragraph in the article had been circled which said Cpl Byles “reckons he killed between 15 and 20 insurgents”.

The article went on to describe him rifle-butting, punching and kicking rebels in hand-to-hand combat.

The court was told that the soldier was subsequently awarded the Military Cross for both “immense professionalism under fire” and bravery in leading an assault on an enemy position.

A number of DVDs were recovered from Mansha’s flat which included Arabic chanting that called for Muslims to take part in jihad and martyrdom following the allied attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

Some featured the al-Qa’eda leader Osama bin Laden, while one depicted the beheading of the British hostage Ken Bigley.

Mr Cocks said the material was “extremely distasteful and virulent”, and clearly indicated the “nature of the interests of this defendant and other people who used that flat”.

Mr Cocks said: “He had the piece of paper with Cpl Byles’s information on in his possession either to kill him or to do him really serious injury to exact revenge for what the corporal had achieved in Iraq.”

Mansha, 21, said most of the items found in his apartment were connected with research he was helping a journalist friend with.

He told jurors he was neither a strict Muslim nor had any strong political views and said he had bought the pistol for £25 from a market stall as a souvenir.

But the jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted him on a majority of 10 to two under the Terrorism Act which said the information in his possession was “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith adjourned the case until Jan 26 for sentencing. Mansha could face up to 10 years in prison.

==============================

Islamic terrorists shot aid couple as they watched TV (London Telegraph, 051223)

A husband and wife who dedicated their lives to helping African children were murdered in cold blood by Islamic terrorists, an inquest heard yesterday.

Dick and Enid Eyeington were watching television at their home in Somaliland when a terrorist linked to al-Qaeda shot them. Dick and Enid Eyeington had lived in Africa since marrying in 1963

The couple were considered “infidels” by their attackers, who wrongly believed that they were trying to convert Africans to Christianity.

Four men were involved in the attack in which a gunman wielding an AK47 put the weapon through the living room window and opened fire on Oct 20, 2003.

Mr Eyeington, 62, was shot four times. He was still holding the television remote control when he was found, Westminster coroner’s court heard. Mrs Eyeington, 60, died from a single shot to the head.

The aid workers, originally from Co Durham, where they were childhood sweethearts, had lived in Africa since marrying in 1963 and worked with poor children in Tanzania, Swaziland and Somaliland.

Mr Eyeington became headmaster of Waterford School and his wife worked with people suffering from HIV. Despite their families’ worries, they took up an offer three years ago to set up a new school for the charity SOS Village in the village of Sheikh, in Somaliland, a country in which violence is widespread.

Their daughter Louise, 37, a solicitor from London, told the hearing that her father, a Sunderland supporter, had run football clubs in Africa and her mother had set up outreach health centres. “Dick and Enid dedicated most of their lives to the education of underprivileged African children,” she said. “They had great courage, commitment and honesty and the world is a poorer place without them.”

The authorities in Somaliland asked the Metropolitan Police for help and officers flew from Britain to collect evidence and to help in the investigation.

There was a breakthrough in March last year when a German aid worker and his Kenyan girlfriend were attacked. A man was arrested and he confessed to killing the Eyeingtons.

Det Chief Insp Jill Bailey told the hearing that last month four men, including Mohammed Ali Essa, who fired the AK47, had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death by firing squad. The terrorists shouted “Allah Akbar” (God is Great) after being sentenced and are still awaiting execution.

Miss Bailey said the men were part of a terrorist cell called El Itihad which had killed an Italian nun a week earlier. She also said that Essa’s brother-in-law, Adan Ayro, who owned the house in which Essa was captured, could have had links to al-Qa’eda. A plan to blow up an Ethiopian airliner and bomb-making manuals were uncovered during the investigations.

“The defendants did not recognise their actions as crimes,” Miss Bailey said. “They felt justified in murdering infidels who they believed were offending Muslim fundamentalism.”

Recording a verdict of unlawful killing, the coroner, Dr Paul Knapman, said: “This is a terrible tragedy in which two people who had dedicated their lives to improving the lives of underprivileged African children were murdered in cold blood and appear to be victims of terrorism abroad.”

==============================

The Mayor of Bethlehem is Christian, but It’s Hamas That’s in Charge (WorldNetDaily, 051230)

It exalts terrorism, wants to wipe out Israel, and is threatening a tax of non-Muslim residents. Its testing ground is the city of Jesus’s birth

ROMA, December 29, 2005 – Thirty thousand pilgrims from all over the world came to Bethlehem for Christmas, one third more than the previous year. The leader of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, a Muslim, attended the midnight Mass at the basilica of the Nativity. And in his homily, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, an Arab, hailed him as a man of peace, reserving his protest for “the wall raised up before us, forcing us to live as if in a prison, our lands confiscated, our young men carried away at night and thrown into the Israeli prisons.”

But in the city where Jesus was born, relations between Christians and Muslims are more complicated than they appear.

Christians are no longer the majority of the 30,000 inhabitants of the city, as they always were in the past The Muslims are now more numerous than the Christians in the same proportion that the mosques exceed the churches, by a margin of 15 to 10.

The mayor of Bethlehem is still a Christian, as always. Eight out of the fifteen seats on the city council are still reserved for Christians. But in the latest municipal elections, which took place in May of 2005, a coalition with crucial support from the Muslims of Hamas emerged victorious.

The leader of the Hamas contingent in the municipal council of Bethlehem, Hassam El-Masalmeh, exalts the suicide attacks against the Jews, and asserts that these will continue until all of Palestine, including the territory of Israel, is under Palestinian control.

But mayor Victor Batarseh, a practicing Catholic, condemns the terrorist attacks and wants Hamas to stop carrying them out. He says that he is ready for a territorial compromise with Israel in order to bring about a true Palestinian state. But even before the latest municipal elections, he chose Hamas as his main ally, together with another extremist group called Islamic Jihad.

* * *

During the 1990’s, Bethlehem was governed by men connected with Yasser Arafat’s party, Fatah.

These men were accused of corruption and abuses against the Christian population. When the second intifada broke out, in 2000, part of Arafat’s security forces formed a new armed group, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.

In April of 2002, guerillas connected with Fatah, under hot pursuit from Israeli troops, occupied the basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and – a lesser-known fact – other convents and Christian institutions in the city. The crisis developed before the eyes of the world, and ended with the liberation of the basilica. The leaders of the uprising were transferred to Gaza, and to a few European countries.

Hamas quickly stepped into the vacuum that was created. It won the favor of a large part of the population of Bethlehem, creating initiatives for health care, the care of orphans, union protection for workers, and fighting corruption. Future mayor Victor Batarseh, 71 years old, a doctor who had once been a militant in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, allied himself with Hamas and against the Fatah party, in view of the municipal elections in May of 2005. His platform was the fight against corruption, transparent government, and the improvement of citizens’ lives. According to his agreement with Hamas, the reasons for religious division between Christians and Muslims were to be kept at bay.

Batarseh was elected mayor, and the coalition he presided over began to put its plans into practice. It banned the use of municipal vehicles for private purposes; it closed unauthorized businesses; it put new rules in place for public works contracts, aimed at eliminating the waste of money; it fired the municipal employees who were on the payroll but didn’t do any work.

The men connected to Fatah reacted in a variety of ways. A few days before Christmas, militants of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades occupied the city hall in Bethlehem, demanding back pay and new hiring.

But the reactions drew upon other fears as well. Hanna Nasser, the previous mayor of Bethlehem, a Christian of the current that is close to Fatah, accused the new administration of “spreading Islamic fundamentalism.”

It is a fear that took shape after the electoral victory of Hamas, not only in Bethlehem’s municipal elections, but also in those of other cities of Cisjordan: Nablus, Jenin, Qalqilya. A new style can already be seen in the municipalities where Hamas is installed: Christian women employed there, who are accustomed to shaking everybody’s hand, are held at a distance by the newly elected, for whom physical contact violates Islamic principles.

The general plan of Hamas also includes the imposition of a special tax, called al-jeziya, upon all of the non-Muslim residents in the Palestinian territories. This tax revives the one applied through all of Islamic history to the dhimmi, the second-class Jewish and Christian citizens.

In an interview with Karby Legget, published in the December 23-26 edition of “The Wall Street Journal,” Masalmeh, the leader of the Hamas contingent at the municipal council of Bethlehem, confirmed: “We in Hamas intend to implement this tax someday. We say it openly – we welcome everyone to Palestine but only if they agree to live under our rules.”

Batarseh, the mayor, doesn’t agree. He doesn’t want the tax, and says it will never be introduced.

He knows well that living with Hamas is difficult. But he says he is convinced that “the only way to make Hamas more moderate is to bring them inside the system.”

It is the same gamble that Mahmoud Abbas has on a number of occasions said he will make: integrating Hamas into the political system so that after this it will abandon terrorism. But neither Israel nor the United States is willing to recognize Hamas as a party to dialogue unless it first abandons terrorism.

General political elections will be held in the Palestinian territories at the end of January. The puzzle that emerges may already have been written in Bethlehem.

==============================

Fascism, Islamism, and Anti-Semitism: The president of the Islamic Republic is guided in word and deed by the most vicious of ideologies. (Weekly Standard, 060103)

Hardly anything has infuriated certain critics of the Bush Administration more than the president’s vocabulary to describe the war on terrorism. Bush warns of an “axis of evil,” in which rogue nations collude with Muslim extremists to acquire nuclear weapons. He regards Osama bin Laden and his cadre of suicide bombers as “evildoers.” He compares the theology of radical Islam to that of European fascism and “all the murderous ideologies” of the twentieth century. Intellectuals and others reject this talk as sophomoric and supremely arrogant-just another manifestation of Bush’s cowboy diplomacy. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration, voices a typical note of contempt: “We have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think can fairly be called a paranoiac view of the world.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that these same critics remain mostly mute over the stunning remarks of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Two weeks ago the Iranian president shocked Western leaders when he claimed that the Holocaust was “a myth” created by Jews and “Zionist historians.” This followed a previous slander against Israel as “a tumor” to be “wiped off the map”—or, at best, relocated to Europe. “Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury,” Ahmadinejad told the Organization of the Islamic Conference. His anti-Semitic tirade comes as the Iranian leader continues to defy the United Nations to pursue a nuclear weapons program. “I thought, my God, he’s a Nazi,” a German resident told Knight Ridder. “I couldn’t believe that again the world was faced with a Nazi as a head of state. It’s beyond comprehension.”

The rise of Islamo-fascism in Tehran, in fact, is not at all beyond comprehension. Its emergence is perfectly predictable—given the political theology of radical Islam and the culture of victimization that sustains it. Like his mentor, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Ahmadinejad embraces an extremist Shiite view of purity, obedience, death, and redemption. Bush deserves much credit for recognizing this ideology for what it is: the totalitarian impulse, inspired by utopian illusions and sanctified by the pathology of anti-Semitism.

Osama bin Laden and his allies, after all, have repeatedly expressed their hatred not only of America but of Israel and Jews everywhere. In a tape that surfaced recently in Cairo, bin Laden deputy Ayman Al-Zawahri again urged Muslims to take up arms against the “malignant illness” of Israel and the Christian West. Bush critics imply that this message resonates with the “Arab street” because of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians (and America’s support for Israel). More likely is the fact that anti-Semitism rises like a vapor from the political and cultural swamps of the Arab world. Television programs, newspapers, internet cafes, universities, mosques, religious schools—here and elsewhere Jews are regularly depicted as “satanic” enemies of Islam and instigators of U.S. intervention in Muslim lands. Holocaust denial is routine. A columnist for the Egyptian paper Al-Masaa, for example, defended the Iranian president’s outbursts with these words: “What this truth means is that these massacres . . . never happened. The famous execution chambers were no more than rooms for disinfecting clothing.”

It’s not just political hacks or cloistered imams who are tutored in this grammar of hate. Last month Lebanon’s government-run university, Universite Libanaise, held a nationally televised symposium on the Palestinian question. “My name is Hisham Sham’as, and I study political science,” one student began. He then offered this modest political proposal: “Israel should be completely wiped out . . . Just like Hitler fought the Jews, we are a great Islamic nation of jihad, and we too should fight the Jews and burn them.” Not long after the 9-11 attack, I met with a dozen Ph.D. students from Jordan, visiting Washington, D.C. in a program sponsored by the State Department. Here were the academic elite of a relatively moderate and prosperous Arab state. They were smart, well-heeled, and fluent in English. Yet every one of them suspected that the 9-11 attack was a Jewish plot to incite a U.S. war against Islam.

Too many critics of U.S. foreign policy betray a profoundly naïve view of human nature: They ignore the ability of propaganda to nullify reason, pervert conscience, and inflame our blackest impulses. People who believe such slurs are psychologically and spiritually prepared to believe almost anything—and, eventually, to act on those beliefs. “Nonsense in the intellect,” warned C.S. Lewis, “draws evil after it.”

The nonsense of anti-Semitism is the elephant in the Arab living room. At the moment, the elephant is thrashing about most conspicuously in Iran, but he’s at home in much of the Muslim world. “Over the last half-century, anti-Semitism

has been the essential theology of the Arab world,” writes historian Paul Johnson, author of A History of the Jews. “The Arabs have wasted trillions in oil royalties on weapons of war and propaganda . . . In their flight from reason, they have failed to modernize or civilize their societies, to introduce democracy, or to consolidate the rule of law.”

Take a look, for example, at the groundbreaking Arab Human Development Report, produced in 2002, 2003, and 2004, in which Muslim scholars candidly assessed the lack of economic and political freedom in the Middle East. The authors note that the Israeli occupation of Palestine “continues to impede human development and freedom,” but say nothing about the failure of the Palestinian Authority to stop terrorism against Israeli civilians. For all their frankness about political corruption and educational failure, these prominent intellectuals do not challenge the Arab fixation on Israel as the source of the region’s problems.

Much more surprising, however, is the silence of the 9/11 Commission Report, the most comprehensive, bi-partisan study to date of the terrorist threat against the United States. The report is praised for its sober analysis of the “catastrophic threat” of radical Islam and its recommendations for improving U.S. security and intelligence systems. It notes that terrorist violence is “fed by grievances” that are “widely felt throughout the Muslim world”—but never discusses the pandemic of anti-Semitism that lurks beneath them. The report rightly concludes that the United States is caught up in a clash within the civilization of Islam: “That clash arises from particular conditions in the Muslim world, conditions that spill over into expatriate Muslim communities in non-Muslim countries.” Yet nowhere in the document’s 567 pages is there mention of the anti-Jewish hatreds that stoke this cultural conflict.

Tone deafness to the racist fury of radical Islam is bad enough. What makes matters worse is that anti-Semitism is not just a problem in the Arab world, but in Europe and in much of the international community. The U.N. World Conference Against Racism, held in 2001 in Durban, famously degenerated into a platform for Israel-bashing. Since then, reports by non-governmental groups such as Human Rights First have described “a staggering wave” of anti-Jewish violence in Europe. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has sponsored four conferences to address anti-Semitism and xenophobia among its 55 member states. Numerous participants have noted that radicalized Muslim youth are a significant part of the problem. At the first-ever U.N. conference devoted to anti-Semitism, held in 2004 in Geneva, Secretary General Kofi Annan warned of “an alarming resurgence” of violence against Jewish institutions. But Annan failed to mention that a third of the resolutions adopted by the U.N. Human Rights Commission condemning specific states are aimed at Israel, or that U.N. resolutions have countenanced Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians.

To its credit, the OSCE has produced documents such as the Berlin Declaration, which insists that no political cause could ever justify intolerance or violence against Jews. This principle was upheld at an OSCE conference I attended in June in Cordova, Spain. “Nazi anti-Semitism produced a genocide 60 odd years ago, and it was one of the central elements in a ideology that destroyed Europe and killed some 35 million people,” Yehunda Bauer, an advisor to the International Task Force for Holocaust Education, told the Cordova delegates. “Isn’t that enough to make all of us . . . allies against anti-Semitism in its modern form?”

As the standoff with Iran continues, political and religious leaders in Europe and the United States should ponder that question in light of the latent anti-Semitism in their own communities.

The strident anti-Israel tone of European politicians and journalists, for example, surely helps explain the appalling opinion polls showing massive distrust of Jewish political loyalties. Most Europeans now believe that Israel—a democracy—is a greater threat to world peace than North Korea or Iran. There have been similar rumblings in the United States. On the eve of the Iraq war, Democratic Congressman James Moran claimed that “if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.” The claim went largely unchallenged by liberal political leaders. Anti-war protests have been similarly debased by racist shibboleths. A recent anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., for example, featured British MP George Galloway, who has described Israel as “this little Hitler state on the Mediterranean.”

Many religious leaders seem prone to either silence or confusion about the depth of the problem. Pope John Paul II did much to improve Catholic-Jewish relations during his pontificate, and a senior Vatican cardinal was quick to condemn the Iranian president for his statements. But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops still has not addressed the anti-Semitism of militant Islam. Neither has the National Council of Churches, which claims to represent 45 million believers in 100,000 congregations nationwide. NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar has denounced the Iranian leader for his “incomprehensible hatred.” Yet his organization works closely with left-wing groups such as MoveOn.org, which are reliably anti-Israel. In numerous NCC statements about the “root causes” of Islamic terror—assumed to be economic and political—nowhere does the organization confront the racist illusions of the terrorists.

Some liberal Protestant churches appear to be aping the politics of the Arab League. Last year the Presbyterian Church (USA) began calling for divestment from firms doing business with Israel, while two regional conventions of the United Methodist Church endorsed a similar divestment campaign in June. Neither church, however, makes similar demands on companies investing in the world’s notorious dictatorships. According to a 2004 study by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, liberal churches direct most of their human rights complaints against Israel and the United States. Of the 197 human rights criticisms issued by mainline Protestant groups over a three-year period, 37% targeted Israel—but not a whisper against the Palestinian Authority or some of the most despotic regimes on the planet.

Even when not brazenly xenophobic, the style of much of the Western criticism of Israel suggests that Jews have themselves to blame for anti-Semitism. This posture makes it easier for political and religious leaders to dismiss the Iranian dictator’s tirade as an irrelevant eccentricity. Yet there’s a grave problem with winking at the racist theology of radical Islam. For one thing, obsessive criticism of Israel from the West surely makes the vitriol of the Iranian president more credible in the Middle East; it plays into all the old stereotypes of Jews as subversives and conspirators. More importantly, it deflects attention from the most fearsome threat to democratic states—the rise of Islamic fascism and its glorification of murder and martyrdom.

Western statesmen made similar mistakes in the face of European fascism, with disastrous results. Beginning as early as 1933, the year Hitler came to power, American Jewish thinker and activist Stephen Wise tried in vain to alert U.S. leaders to the larger implications of Nazi hatreds, what he called “the Nazi revolt against civilization.” Democratic leaders failed to understand—just as many do today—that the Jewish people embody the political and religious ideals of Western culture, and that it was precisely these ideals that had come under attack. “Men heeded not that the Jews were assailed as a symbol of that civilization,” Wise wrote, “the values of which Nazism was resolved to destroy.” By viewing Hitler’s political aims in isolation from his racist ideology, Wise argued, the democracies had persuaded themselves he could be appeased.

Religious leaders helped pave the way. When in 1938 Hitler staged Kristallnacht, the beginning of his violent national campaign against the Jews, it sparked protests in New York and elsewhere. Yet the Catholic magazine America, which carefully followed Vatican policy, worried that the demonstrations were a ploy to stir up war fever. The editors argued strongly against U.S. intervention: “It is possible for a Fascist state to sign a Concordat,” they claimed, “and even to be faithful to it.” Albert Palmer, president of Chicago Theological Seminary, dismissed mounting reports of Nazi brutalities as “a haze of Allied propaganda.” He suggested instead a massive economic assistance program for Europe. On January 30, 1939, when Hitler delivered his ominous Reichstag address—in which he warned of “the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe”—the religious press ignored it. The liberal Christian Century magazine even admitted there was “plenty of extermination” of Jews occurring in Europe, but doubted that any good purpose was served by publicizing speculative numbers; better to focus on diplomatic solutions to Nazism. Wise, who had been watching closely the developments in Hitler’s Germany, was appalled. “With singular unintelligence, the world for the most part refused to heed the warning of his theories and his conduct alike, until he embarked upon a career of incredibly brutal conquest,” Wise wrote shortly after the fall of France. “No day has seemed darker, no portent blacker than that of this hour.”

We haven’t yet reached a similarly black hour in the standoff with Iran. But that hour appears to be approaching. The dictator in Tehran shows no sign of backing down, either in his designs against Israel or his lust for deadly weapons. His paranoia seems complete. Indeed, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has emerged as a blistering rebuke to President Bush’s cultured despisers. He reminds us that Bush has been right all along—right about the brooding racism of this threat, its genocidal ambitions, its corrupted spirituality. Yes, this is evil. “We’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed,” Bush told an audience in October. “No act of ours invited the rage of killers—and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.” Before the next round of negotiations begins, we should consider again the plans, theories, and conduct of this latest strain of the fascist disease.

Joseph Loconte is a research fellow in religion at the Heritage Foundation and a commentator for National Public Radio. His most recent book is The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm(Rowman & Littlefield).

==============================

Hal Lindsey proclaims: Islam a violent religion: On national TV, Christian author declares most Muslims don’t read Quran very much (WorldNetDaily, 060111)

Christian author Hal Lindsey proclaimed on national television last night that Islam is a violent religion, with many believers becoming more “radical” the more they read the Muslim holy book, the Quran.

“When someone becomes devout and they begin to get really into the Quran and they begin to study what it really teaches, they become what we call a fundamentalist or a radical because the Quran itself and the Hadith teaches violence,” Lindsey said on “Hannity & Colmes” on the Fox News Channel. “There are 109 verses that we sometimes call war verses ... these are the verses that the radicals begin to take seriously and they begin to want to overthrow Western civilization.”

Lindsey was a guest on Fox after WorldNetDaily broke a series of stories about the best-selling non-fiction writer who is in a dispute with the Trinity Broadcasting Network over the content of his own twice-weekly Christian commentary program, “The International Intelligence Briefing,” because of what he considers to be efforts to muzzle his opinions about radical Islam.

“After 9-11, I really studied Islam, studied the Quran, studied what they’re teaching and especially why there was a difference between the moderate Muslims and those who were radical,” Lindsey said last night. “I saw that there was a tremendous danger facing this country that many Americans really didn’t seem to be seeing. So I started warning that radical Islam was at war with the United States, and that the threat was as great as any enemy we’d ever faced.”

Co-host Alan Colmes asked Lindsey straight out: “Islam is a radical religion in your view?”

“It is,” Lindsey responded. “It’s kind of like most Christians don’t read the Bible very much. I believe most Muslims don’t read the Quran very much. That’s why most Muslims are not radical, but when someone begins to really study the Quran and they begin to read the 109 verses that call for violence and war, they become very, very different. They become radical, they feel that they need to convert people by force.”

Lindsey, author of “The Late Great Planet Earth” and many other best-selling books and a weekly columnist for WND, has anchored his own program for the last 12 years on the world’s largest Christian network, founded by evangelist Paul Crouch, whom Lindsey says remains his friend.

As WND exclusively reported Jan. 3, Lindsey announced he would not go back to his show following an an abrupt six-week suspension of the popular TBN-sponsored program by Jan Crouch, TBN’s vice president for programming.

Casoria said he could not recall specific examples from Lindsey’s programs that were anti-Arab or anti-Muslim, but he expressed the network’s concern about how Muslims are portrayed.

Lindsey argued, however, his program is not shown in the Middle East.

“My show is produced for the Western world and for Christians who are at the most risk from radical Islam,” he said.

Lindsey has been associated with TBN since its inception in the early 1970s.

==============================

Muslim cleric ‘told followers to kill Jews and non-believers’ (Times Online, 060111)

Abu Hamza, the Muslim cleric, preached “murder and hatred” to his followers, telling them that it was their “religious duty to kill” Jews and other non-Muslims, a court heard today.

The 47-year-old cleric faces an array of charges including incitement to murder, stirring up racial hatred and possession of a document likely to be of use to a terrorist. He denies all the offences.

“The prosecution’s case in a sentence is that the defendant, Sheikh Abu Hamza, was preaching murder and hatred in these talks,” David Perry, prosecuting, told an Old Bailey jury as the trial opened.

He said the alleged offences came to light when police officers searched an address in Fonthill Road, North London, associated with the Finsbury Park Mosque at which Mr Hamza preached until its closure in 2003. Officers discovered a large number of audio cassettes and videos.

He said that police discovered 2,700 audio tapes and 570 video tapes when they subsequently searched Mr Hamza’s own home. From those tapes, the prosecution extracted nine which the jury would hear during the course of the trial.

Mr Perry said: “You will hear the tapes and we will hear that the defendant, Sheikh Abu Hamza, encouraged his listeners, whether they were an audience at a private meeting or a congregation at the mosque, to believe that it was part of a religious duty to fight in the cause of Allah, God, and as part of the religious duty to fight in the cause of Allah, it was part of the religious duty to kill.

“The people they were being encouraged to kill, put shortly, were non-believers - those who did not believe in, or who were not a follower or even a true follower of Islam.”

Mr Perry said that since Mr Hamza was a spiritual leader, people might imagine that he preached a message of “tolerance, mutual co-existence and responsibility”.

“In fact he preached the opposite - intolerance, bigotry and hatred, in particular against Jews as a racial group and as a religious body,” he added.

“In the course of one lecture he accused the Jews of being blasphemous, traitors and dirty. This, because of the treachery, because of their blasphemy and filth, was why Hitler was sent into the world.”

Abu Hamza, also known as Mustafa Kamel Mustafa and Abu Hamza al-Masri, faces nine charges under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 that he solicited others at public meetings to murder Jews and other non-Muslims.

He also faces four charges under the Public Order Act 1986 of “using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred”.

A further charge alleges that Abu Hamza was in possession of video and audio recordings, which he intended to distribute to stir up racial hatred.

The final charge under section 58 of the Terrorism Act accuses him of possession of a document, the ten-volume Encyclopaedia of the Afghani Jihad, which contained information “of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. All the offences were allegedly committed before May 2004.

Abu Hamza, who has no hands and only one eye, sat flanked by three dock officers as he heard trial judge Mr Justice Hughes tell the seven-man, five-woman jury to ignore what they had read or heard about him in the media.

The panel then heard Mr Perry lay out the prosecution case, including a description of the jihad encyclopaedia.

“What the prosecution say about that encyclopaedia is that it was a manual for terrorism,” Mr Perry said. The encyclopaedia “explained how to make explosives, it explained assassination methods and it explained how a terrorist unit, or a military unit, can most effectively operate”.

The court heard that Abu Hamza was born in Egypt in 1958 but that he had lived in this country for a number of years and was now a British citizen. He was well known as a preacher and speaker,

“As a person delivering sermons in a holy place and as a person holding a position of responsibility in the Muslim community, someone who was a spiritual leader, you might expect that talks delivered by such a person contained expressions of hope and of charity and compassion,” Mr Perry said.

He told the jury that the speeches with which the court would be concerned contained “very little of these matters”.

Abu Hamza also claimed that Jews controlled the West, he added. “By that we take it to mean Western democracies such as this country,” Mr Perry told the jury. The preacher had said that Jews must be removed from the earth, an example of his alleged incitement of racial hatred.

Mr Perry added: “We cannot say whether or not any person who attended any of these lectures or summons was, in fact, later involved in any murder.

“But the fact the prosecution cannot point to any individual act of murder is irrelevant, because the offence of soliciting murder is made out if the defendant, by his words sought to encourage or even embolden or persuade his audience to commit murder.

“We say on his own words that their meaning is entirely clear.”

==============================

A Wiser Holland: The Dutch, mugged by reality, toughen up on radical Islam (National Review, 060130)

THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Before the assassination of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, the Dutch were apt to give you the impression that they had cracked the secret of life and knew without doubt how it ought to be lived. They viewed other, less enlightened societies — which meant all the rest — with a kind of complacent pity, tempered by the certainty that eventually even the most benighted of them would follow where the Netherlands led.

All that has changed. Whatever other effects the two murders have had, they have rendered the Dutch and their society much more interesting than when Holland was merely the land that permitted everything. The era of complacency is over; that of anxiety and doubt has well and truly begun. For the first time in several decades, liberal consensus is not enough; real thought has become necessary in Holland. In the not-distant past, Holland’s less-than-glorious performance during its occupation of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) — and its violent attempt to reestablish its power there after the Second World War was over — acted as a reproach to any Dutch conservatism or sense of national pride. But far from remaining a liberal paradise in which it is heresy to question the tenets of multiculturalism, Holland has become a country in which fear of inter-ethnic and religious strife is never far from the surface.

Several questions now haunt the country. Was its previous tolerance mere indifference, blindness, or, even worse, cowardice? How tolerant ought it to be towards those who want to destroy the institutional basis of the tolerance that they themselves have enjoyed but think mere weakness and decadence? Are there incompatible cultures, and if so was it wise to have encouraged mass immigration from a deeply alien land merely to ease a temporary labor shortage? In short, will the Netherlands reap the whirlwind it has sown?

These questions are uppermost in all Dutchmen’s minds, and provoke furious debates over small matters that quickly become emblematic. Salomon Kalou, a gifted soccer player from the Ivory Coast who plays for the famous Dutch club Feyenoord, applied for immediate Dutch citizenship in the hope of being included in the Dutch national team for the World Cup championships to take place later this year in Germany. The minister of immigration, Rita Verdonk, who has presided over a toughening stance towards immigrants and asylum-seekers, has steadfastly opposed granting him citizenship, arguing that Kalou should fulfill the conditions laid down for everyone else, including a five-year residence. This has led to howls of protest from liberals, hitherto used to having everything their way.

Events in Holland are now — for the first time in many years — of interest to its neighbors and near-neighbors, many of whose problems with immigration and multiculturalism are similar. Le Monde, the French liberal-left newspaper, reported the Kalou affair, in the process calling Rita Verdonk the most hated politician in Holland: which, translated from Le Monde–speak, means that she is by far the most popular politician in the country. According to polls, three-quarters of the Dutch population support her refusal to grant Kalou citizenship merely because he is good at kicking a ball about: They recognize that there is something more at stake than the results of a soccer tournament.

The fact is that Dutch citizenship has hitherto been insouciantly and indiscriminately granted to people to whom it means little other than a meal ticket. There was open, public rejoicing in some of the Muslim-inhabited areas of Holland immediately after the events of September 11, 2001, by large numbers of people who were on social security. The murderer of Theo van Gogh, Mohammed Bouyeri, did not recognize the legitimacy of the law under which he was tried for murder, but, with the grotesque and mercenary hypocrisy typical of Islamic fundamentalism, he did condescend to recognize the legitimacy of the law that had granted him three years’ unemployment benefits before he committed the murder.

The disdain that Bouyeri showed towards everything Dutch was not unique to him. A young man of Moroccan origin living in Holland named Samir Azzouz has been arrested several times on suspicion of being a terrorist (he is still only 19). Plans of the Dutch parliament building, Schiphol Airport, and a nuclear power station were found in his apartment after he was arrested during an armed robbery, as well as night-vision spectacles and bomb-making equipment, but this was all deemed by the judges to be of insufficient probative value, especially as the fertilizer he had in his apartment was of the wrong type to detonate a bomb, so he was acquitted on appeal. Who can blame the Dutch if they feel that the law is failing to protect them?

One thing Azzouz can’t be accused of is of hiding his disdain for Holland, its government, and its legal system. In his most recent court appearance, Azzouz said, “We reject you, we reject your system, we hate you.” As Dickens would have put it, you can’t say fairer than that.

Azzouz was defended by a German lawyer long resident in Holland, Britta Böhler, who also defended the murderer of Pim Fortuyn and the Kurdish Pol-Potist Abdullah Ocalan, and who has made no secret of her sympathy for the erstwhile German terrorists of the Red Army Faction. It is hardly surprising if ordinary Dutch people conclude that the rule of law is actually the impunity of terror.

As if this were not enough, there is plenty of evidence that the famed Dutch tolerance is indistinguishable from cowardice, both moral and physical. It is widely known that teachers in Holland are reluctant to teach the history of the Second World War in high schools in areas where there are large numbers of pupils of Moroccan origin, because these pupils will argue either that the Holocaust never took place or that, if it did, it can be reproached only for not finishing the job. Scared of physical attack, the teachers avoid the subject on the pretext of keeping the peace.

In February 2005, two students at a school attended by many pupils of Moroccan origin were advised by the director of the school to “consider urgently” the question of whether the little Dutch flags that they had sewn onto their school bags were sufficiently sensitive to the feelings of their fellow pupils, or whether they represented a provocation. In other words, the director took for granted that the children of Moroccan origin were profoundly and irredeemably anti-Dutch; he wanted to avoid the violence that he supposed any manifestation of patriotism would inevitably cause.

But pusillanimity and self-loathing have not altogether won the day, and there are signs of a healthy reaction. I had the extraordinary experience recently of finding my ideas about multiculturalism, criminality, and the underclass taken more seriously in Holland than in Britain. I was invited to give a talk in Rita Verdonk’s ministry, and found a highly intelligent, receptive, and appreciative, if questioning, audience of civil servants — far better and more open-minded than any audience I have ever had in Britain.

In Holland, for example, unlike in Britain, the reality of forced marriages among the Muslims has already been officially recognized, and the Dutch government has tried to do something about it. (Those who argue that such marriages are culturally rather than religiously sanctioned ignore the fact that they occur from Morocco to Somalia and from Somalia to Bangladesh, whose principal characteristic in common is adherence to Islam.) The law now confers upon Dutch citizens no right to bring into the country spouses they have married abroad, thus recognizing the non-voluntary nature of many of these marriages.

Of course, there are limits, as yet, to the determination of the Dutch to deal with the threat posed by Islamification. For reasons having to do with a residual belief in non-discrimination, the law on marriage applies to all marriages contracted outside of Holland, as if a marriage to a white Canadian from Toronto could possibly have the same sinister social meaning as a marriage to a Moroccan villager. Besides, the failure of other European countries to adopt the Dutch approach, and the recognition of marriages contracted in other member countries of the European Union, leaves a large loophole in the law that will soon be exploited.

Nevertheless, subjects that were taboo in Holland only a few years ago are now openly discussed, often very realistically, by Dutch intellectuals and politicians. Formerly among the most complacent people in Europe, the Dutch are now some of the most fearlessly self-examining (along with the Danes). It is as if they had woken from a beautiful and beguiling daydream and plunged straight into a cold bath of reality.

There is resistance, of course, to the new realism. You do not get rid of the intellectual habits of generations overnight. But I never thought there was the remotest possibility that Holland might in the end show more backbone than any other country in Europe. Now it is distinctly possible.

Mr. Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author most recently of Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.

==============================

‘Nudity invalidates marriage’ (National Review Online, 060109)

An Egyptian cleric’s controversial fatwa claiming that nudity during sexual intercourse invalidates a marriage has uncovered a rift among Islamic scholars.

According to the religious edict issued by Rashad Hassan Khalil, a former dean of Al-Azhar University’s faculty of Sharia (or Islamic law), “being completely naked during the act of coitus annuls the marriage”.

The religious decree sparked a hot debate on the private satellite network Dream’s popular religious talk show and on the front page of today’s Al-Masri Al-Yom, Egypt’s leading independent daily newspaper.

Suad Saleh, who heads the women’s department of Al-Azhar’s Islamic studies faculty, pleaded for “anything that can bring spouses closer to each other” and rejected the claim that nudity during intercourse could invalidate a union.

During the live televised debate, Islamic scholar Abdel Muti dismissed the fatwa: “Nothing is prohibited during marital sex, except of course sodomy.”

==============================

Silence that speaks volumes (Washington Times, 060120)

Remember when word came down from the Vatican that Pope John Paul II had watched Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” and liked it? The anonymously sourced story sparked a media firestorm around the globe as reporters sought confirmation of the papal equivalent of two thumbs up. “It is as it was,” we later learned the pope supposedly said. Which sounded like the perfect biblical movie blurb; but did the pontiff actually utter the words?

After some non-clarifying retractions from the Vatican, it was ultimately hard to say for sure — although not for journalistic want of trying. This natural curiosity stands in striking contrast to the media silence that has met a far more sensational, far more significant report of papal opinion: namely, that Pope Benedict XVI is said to believe that Islam is incapable of reform.

This bombshell dropped out of an early January interview conducted by radio host Hugh Hewitt with Father Joseph D. Fessio, SJ, a friend and former student of the pope. Father Fessio recounted the pope’s words on the key problem facing Islamic reform this way: “In the Islamic tradition, God has given His word to Mohammed, but it’s an eternal word. It’s not Mohammed’s word. It’s there for eternity the way it is. There’s no possibility of adapting it or interpreting it.” Father Fessio continued, elaborating not on how many ratings stars the pope thinks some biopic should get, but rather on the pope’s theological assessment of a historically warring religion with a billion-plus followers, some notorious number of whom are now at war with the West. According to his friend, the pope believes there’s no way to change Islam because there’s no way to reinterpret the Koran — i.e., change Koranic teachings on infidels, women, polygamy, penal codes and other markers of Islamic law — in such a way as to propel Islam into happy coexistence with modernity.

As I said, a bombshell. But this is one bombshell that has yet to explode because no one wants to touch it. Hugh Hewitt posted the extraordinary interview online, a couple of blogs picked it up, and Middle East expert Daniel Pipes wrote a short piece taking exception to it, but, as the Asia Times Online columnist Spengler noted (in a column called “When even the pope has to whisper”), “not a single media outlet has taken notice.”

Posting the Spengler column at The Corner at National Review Online, Rod Dreher wrote: “Spengler is amazed by the silence from the Western media over this remarkable statement attributed to the current pope... and he suggests that we shrink from acknowledging it because the consequences of the pope being right about this are too horrible to contemplate.” Indeed, with one exception, NRO Corner regulars failed to comment on the pope’s putative words—noteworthy, given the magazine’s tradition of a Catholic identity.

Is facing up to the pope’s notion of unreformable Islam really too horrible to contemplate? Sounds to me like the fabled abyss. By coincidence, a senior officer in Iraq with whom I’ve been corresponding made a similar point in explaining why he hoped for Islamic reform: basically, because without the hope of such reform, there is no hope of such reform — which, I assume, leads to those horrible consequences mentioned above, beginning, well, with hopelessness.

But despair masked in the wishful silence of studied neglect is the wrong response. That is, if the pope is right and Islam is not reformable along the lines of a Western model, it’s not a Western problem — meaning a problem the West is responsible for fixing. It is perhaps the ultimate Western chauvinism that even considering the failed overhaul of Islam, being beyond Muslim doctrine and beyond our own capabilities, should plunge us — infidels, non-Muslims, Jeffersonian deists, whatever — into the abyss. With apologies to Pygmalion via Lerner and Lowe, the question shouldn’t be: Why Can’t Islam Be More Like the West? It should be: How can the West prevent itself from becoming more like Islam?

One obvious answer is an immigration policy aimed at preventing the kind of Islamic demographic shifts we already see transforming Europe, although our policy makers, Republican and Democrat alike, aren’t even asking the question. Maybe they, like my military penpal, prefer to hope for the Islamic reform the pope is said to have ruled out. Hope may well spring eternal and all that, but it’s not the stuff on which military strategy or national destiny should hang.

==============================

Islamists in court (Washington Times, 060120)

In its recently filed lawsuit, the Islamic Society of Boston claimed that one of the defendants, terrorism expert and award-winning investigative journalist Steven Emerson, is “widely regarded as a discredited, biased, self-proclaimed ‘expert’ on radical Islam... with a known agenda against Muslims.”

Looking at the two decades during which Mr. Emerson has been busy exposing Islamists and the security threats they pose, however, it is difficult to determine how ISB can claim that he is “discredited.”

Mr. Emerson can be overly aggressive or too hard-charging for some people’s tastes (having worked with him on a limited basis in the past, I should know), but there is no denying that he has been right again and again — and each time long before almost anyone else. When no one was listening to him in the early 1990s, he used hidden cameras for his award-winning 1994 PBS documentary “Jihad in America” to capture supposed moderates spewing venom and vitriol behind closed doors.

ISB’s suit is the latest in a string of legal actions brought by Islamist organizations nationwide in a transparent attempt to stifle even legitimate criticism. Even in that context, the Boston mosque has been particularly active. Mr. Emerson is only one victim of ISB’s campaign of intimidation-by-lawsuit.

Despite having little chance of winning, ISB’s suit could nonetheless cause Mr. Emerson and the other 15 defendants a serious headache — and cost each of them a mint in the process. ISB is simply attempting to do what so many other Muslim groups have done across the country: make others think twice before criticizing.

Here’s the background. In 2002, ISB cut a sweetheart deal with the city of Boston, buying nearly 2 acres of prime real estate at the fire-sale price of $175,000, less than half of the $400,000 at which the relevant city agency had it appraised. But according to the Boston Herald, “The Islamic Society of Boston’s own newsletter said the land is worth $2 million.”

Various local media outlets began looking into ISB once the deal was announced, and what they found was shocking — especially since ISB, like so many others, had positioned itself as decidedly moderate.

Among the most damning evidence to emerge were the ISB’s connections to two high-profile radical Muslims, and the fact that the mosque’s longtime leader was a co-founder and former vice president of a virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic organization that apparently raised truckloads of cash to support Islamic terrorism.

The Boston mosque was co-founded by, among others, Abdurrahman Alamoudi, who was sentenced to 23 years in 2004 after he pleaded guilty to assisting in a plot to assassinate the leader of Saudi Arabia. But even if ISB can be taken at face value that Alamoudi had no involvement for the past “15 or 20 years,” it seems clear that a radical cleric from Qatar, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, did. Famous because of his fiery fatwas, the sheik hardly represents the moderate brand of Islam to which ISB supposedly adheres.

The sheik, whose Al Jazeera television show has become a phenomenon in the Muslim world, is an active cheerleader for Palestinian suicide bombers, has issued religious edicts encouraging the mass murder of Americans in Iraq, and has called for the murder of all apostates (those who convert away from Islam) and homosexuals.

ISB understandably tried to distance itself from the sheik once his radicalism became known, telling the Herald that the cleric “never played any role in the ISB.” The mosque chalked up the appearance of the sheik’s name on its tax filings from 1998-2000 as a member of the board of directors as “an administrative oversight.” Yet the sheik wasn’t just listed as a board member on tax forms; he was also listed as such on ISB’s Web site through at least March 2001.

Far more troubling, though, is that ISB’s leader for more than a decade was earlier deeply involved in Muslim Arab Youth Association. Osama Kandil was one of nine co-founders of MAYA — along with Osama bin Laden’s nephew, Abdullah — and then served as its vice president for several years.

At a mid-1990s MAYA conference, the keynote speaker, the head of “the Hamas military wing,” told the crowd: “Finish off the Israelis. Kill them all! Exterminate them!” according to an FBI memo written shortly after September 11. The crowd responded enthusiastically, as more than $200,000 was raised at the event for the terrorist organization, according to the memo.

When asked by the Herald about MAYA, Mr. Kandil defended it as moderate.

With so much incontrovertible evidence demonstrating that ISB is anything but moderate, its lawsuit seems like a surefire loser—but only in the sense of winning a final verdict. Litigation is costly, even defending against a case as flimsy as ISB’s.

Last month, Mr. Emerson and his Investigative Project on Terrorism filed a lengthy brief urging the court to dismiss ISB’s nuisance suit. Unfortunately for Mr. Emerson and the other defendants, the process could drag on for many more months — or longer.

But if the judge allows the ISB to secure victory by running up the legal tabs of the defendants — thus potentially silencing other would-be critics — the real fear for all of us must be: How many other radicals will learn the lesson and head to court?

Joel Mowbray occasionally writes for The Washington Times.

==============================

All Jihad All the Time: What Andrew Bostom’s “The Legacy of Jihad” tells us about the history of Islam. (Weekly Standard, 060130)

IN THE WAKE OF THE 9/11 ATTACKS, President Bush famously referred to Islam as a “religion of peace.” To display solidarity with this notion, politicians of all rank in both America and Europe hurriedly made their way to the nearest mosque to show that, in spite of the destruction of the World Trade Center, they bore no animus to Islam.

Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island based physician, had a different reaction. Until September 11 Bostom had been completely absorbed in his medical career. Afterwards, he began a singular effort to learn as much about Islam as possible.

The results of Bostom’s study have recently been published in book form. The Legacy of Jihad, for which Bostom is both editor and a contributing writer, studies jihad from the 7th century to the present day. It is a thorough work; hardly an act of offensive jihad in the last 1,300 years has escaped Bostom’s scholarship.

It’s a disquieting read. Counter to President Bush’s simplistic characterization of Islam as a religion of peace, the truth is far more nuanced; parts of the Koran call for peace, other verses have a decidedly different tenor.

In the 1,300 odd years of Islam’s existence, there have been peaceful interpreters and practitioners of Islam and war-like ones. What The Legacy of Jihad shows is that whether the war-like interpreters of Islam “hijacked” a peaceful or religion or not, their presence has been a near constant menace for well over a millennium. In other words, popular and

respected clerics such as Yussuf al-Qaradawi (who has vowed that Islam will conquer Europe and America) and war-mongering leaders such as Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad are not historic anomalies. Instead, they are links in a chain of Islamic leaders who have practiced jihad passionately for almost 14 centuries.

BOSTOM’S BOOK is likely to be controversial because it traces a history that polite society often seems unwilling to discuss. He explains that phrases like “Islam expanded in the 8th and 9th century” are often used to describe the religion’s history, but are rarely accompanied by an explanation of how this expansion occurred. The answer, Bostom reveals, is simple: It all happened through war.

Quoting Islamic scholars from the Dark Ages through the 20th century, Bostom documents the consistent and usually prevailing presence of an Islam bent on converting or conquering “non-believers.” The Legacy of Jihad charts the development of a code whereby it was each Muslim’s duty to spread the faith by war. What’s more, Islamic scholars developed a depressingly detailed set of rules prescribing the correct way to treat non-believers. One thing in this code was paramount—the best non-believers could hope for was second-class citizen status and an oppressive “head-tax.” Other options included slavery and death.

Bostom also debunks the comforting notion that such beliefs and practices are relics of ancient history. For instance, the Islamic slave trade that planted its roots over a millennium ago sadly continues to thrive today in places such as the Sudan.

The philosophy of offensive jihadists has also remained consistent through the ages. Not only does Bostom reprint passages from Islamic scholars from nearly a millennium ago belligerently calling for jihad, he shows the expansion of their thinking in the modern era. Perhaps most informative is a speech he reprints from Ayatollah Khomeini who wasn’t enthusiastic about the “religion of peace” concept: Said Khomeini, “All those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the world . . . Those who know nothing about Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. [They] are witless!”

AMONG THE WITLESS are many American academics, such as Georgetown’s John Esposito. In his book, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam,Esposito describes jihad this way: “Literally ‘struggle’ or ‘exertion.’ ‘Greater’ jihad is the struggle within oneself to live a righteous life and submit oneself to God’s will. ‘Lesser’ Jihad is the defense of the Muslim community.”

Esposito’s definition of jihad, especially “lesser” jihad, is ahistorical; the wars that spread Islam weren’t defensive. Certainly none of Khomeini’s or al-Qaradawi’s rhetoric suggests a defensive stance. While one could argue that, properly defined, jihad solely refers to an individual’s struggle for godliness, Bostom’s book proves that this definition has seldom been a monopoly view in the Islamic world.

Dean Barnett writes on politics at SoxBlog.com

==============================

Radical Roadshow: The British try to counter radical Islam with slightly less radical Islam. (Weekly Standard, 060131)

BRITAIN HAS A PROBLEM with Islam. The British Muslim community is mainly comprised of Indo-Pakistani Muslims. Their mosques are dominated by radical Sunnis, representing Pakistan-based jihad movements, and Saudi-backed Wahhabis. Britain does not want to tackle this problem directly, for a reason seldom perceived. Because the majority of the radical clerics in Britain are from the Indian subcontinent, race as well as religion is a factor in public perceptions of the issue. The U.K. authorities don’t mind cracking down on radical Islam, but they don’t want to be accused of discrimination against South Asians.

That is why in the wake of the London bombings last July, British media focused its attention on marginal Arab radicals rather than the extremist ideology in mosques attended by immigrants from Pakistan. Much of what appeared in British newspapers in the wake of the bombing was not only factually incorrect—an attempt to blame the bombings on sects in “Londonistan” that have no real influence—but also professionally inept because it ignored Pakistani jihadists.

British authorities have managed to trip over their own feet several times since then, but the worst botch came recently when the British Home Office announced that, at a cost of almost half a million pounds, “moderate” Islamic intellectuals would tour Britain in a “roadshow” to counter the radicals. It’s a fine idea. But to whom did the British authorities turn for this delicate mission? A raiding party of fake moderates, some of whom have alarming records of advocating jihadism. The speakers included:

* Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Islamist intellectual who has been barred from entry into the United States. Ramadan has been praised as a moderate by Time magazine and others, but he has been treated with greater realism in Arab media, including the Beirut Daily Star, which noted that Ramadan has “has failed to condemn Palestinian suicide bombers” and that he defended Qatar-based Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a notorious extremist who has also supported suicide terrorism, on a British television talk-show. The Star further quoted Marc Gopin, director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, who said “after closely examining Ramadan’s works and positions” he was “ ‘disappointed in Ramadan’s approach’ to the crises in the Arab and Muslim world . . . Gopin added [that] Ramadan’s message did not provide a real approach to fundamental Islam that would make it ‘more peaceful, nonviolent and pluralistic.’”

* Tariq Suweidan, from Kuwait, has also been excluded from the United States. Suweidan preached at a meeting of the Hamas-front Islamic Association for Palestine in Chicago in 2000, “Palestine will not be liberated but through Jihad. Nothing can be achieved without sacrificing blood. The Jews will meet their end at our hands.”

* Hamza Yusuf Hanson, formerly Joseph Hanson, who, in 1991, gave a provoking speech about why “Jihad is the Only Way,” at an International Islamic Conference held at the University of Southern California. That group is the local unit of the Islamic Circle of North America, a front for the al Qaeda-allied Jama’at-i-Islami movement in Pakistan.

* Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, who is also known for his radical proclivities.

British media, beginning a week ago with the Observer, noted that elementary research on the unsavory records of these “moderates” has caused chaos in the Home Office. There are many more serious and authoritative Muslim scholars in Europe (and America) who could champion moderate Islam among British Muslims. Trying to answer the wild radicals by trotting out allegedly-tame radicals, will only make matters worse.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.

==============================

Fight the bullies of Islam (townhall.com, 060201)

by Michelle Malkin

Something very important is happening in Denmark — a showdown over freedom, tolerance, and their wolfish menaces in religious clothing. So, please, turn off “American Idol,” put down the Game Boy for a moment, and pay attention. This does affect you.

Last October, a Danish newspaper called the Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The illustrations included various depictions of the prophet Muhammad, some innocuous (Muhammad walking in a pasture) and a few with provocative references to radical Islamic terrorism. One showed Muhammad with a bomb in his turban; another had Muhammad wielding a sword in front of two, wide-eyed Muslim women covered in black abayas; another featured a cartoonist hunched over his desk, sweating in fear, as he drew Muhammad in suicide bomb-like apparel.

The newspaper was making a vivid editorial point about European artists’ fear of retaliation for drawing any pictures of Muhammad at all. (Remember: It’s been a little over a year since Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist gunman over his movie criticizing violence against women in Islamic societies.) A Danish author had reported last fall that he couldn’t find an illustrator for a book about Muhammad; the Jyllands-Posten editors rose to the challenge by calling on artists to send in their submissions and publishing the 12 entries they received in response (available at http://www.michellemalkin.com/archives/004413.htm).

The reaction to the cartoons has resoundingly confirmed the fears those artists expressed about radical Islamic intolerance and violence. In fact, the Jyllands-Posten reported, two of the illustrators received death threats and went into hiding. The Pakistani Jamaaat-e-Islami party placed a 5,000-kroner bounty on the cartoonists’ heads. A terrorist outfit called the “Glory Brigades” has threatened suicide bombings in Denmark over the artwork.

Despite how relatively tame the pictures actually are (compared not only to Western standards, but also to the vicious, anti-Semitic propaganda regularly churned out by Arab cartoonists), the drawings have literally inflamed the radical Muslim world and its apologists. Eleven Muslim ambassadors to Copenhagen immediately protested to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen demanding retractions from the newspaper. The ambassador of Turkey urged Rasmussen to call the Jyllands-Posten to account for “abusing Islam in the name of democracy, human rights and freedom of expression.”

Rasmussen, in a rare show of European spine, steadfastly refused to appease the howlers.

As a result, anti-Denmark sentiment has simmered over the last four months, and it boiled over this past week. In Gaza City, masked Palestinian gunmen representing the so-called Religion of Peace raided a European Union office to protest the cartoons. Muslims burned Danish flags and banners depicting Rasmussen (American and Norwegian flags, as well as portraits of President Bush, were thrown into the fire for good measure). A Danish company, Arla Foods, reports that two of its employees in Saudi Arabia were beaten by angry customers. Danish aid workers are evacuating Gaza in fear for their lives.

The country now faces an international boycott from Muslim nations whose fist-clenched protesters led chants this week of “War on Denmark, Death to Denmark” while firing bullets in the air.

Soft-on-terror mouthpieces are blaming the messenger for the conflagration. Former appeaser-in-chief Bill Clinton condemned the cartoons as “appalling” and “totally outrageous.” Where was Clinton’s condemnation of the gun-wielding, death-threat-issuing, flag-burning bullies of Islam who have targeted Denmark for jihad?

On the Internet, supporters of free speech have launched a “Buy Danish” campaign in solidarity with the nation under siege. But this isn’t just about Denmark. American-based Muslim activists are on an angry campaign to stifle the speech of talk show hosts (most recently, KFI morning host Bill Handel in Los Angeles) who offend their sensibilities. And on Tuesday afternoon in advance of the State of the Union address, the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued an ultimatum warning President Bush to “avoid the use of hot-button terms such as ‘Islamo-fascism,’ ‘militant jihadism,’ ‘Islamic radicalism’ or ‘totalitarian Islamic empire’” in his speech — in other words, advising Bush not to identify our enemies for the sake of tolerance and diversity.

First, they came for the cartoonists. Then, they came for the filmmakers and talk show hosts and namers of evil. Next, who knows?

==============================

French newspaper reprints Muhammad cartoons (Times Online, 060201)

Under the headline “We have the right to caricature God,” a French newspaper today reprinted the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that have ignited extraordinary anti-Danish protests, death threats and boycotts across the Muslim world.

France Soir published the drawings, first printed by Jyllands-Posten, a right-of-centre Danish broadsheet last September, across pages four and five of this morning’s edition with an editorial that defended the freedom of the press.

“The publication of 12 cartoons in the Danish press has shocked the Muslim world for whom the representation of Allah and his prophet is banned,” the newspaper said. “But because no religious dogma can impose its view on a democratic and secular society, France Soir publishes the incriminated cartoons.”

For its front page, the newspaper even commissioned its own image, showing a peeved Muhammad sitting on a cloud with Buddha, a Jewish God and a Christian God, who says: “Don’t complain Muhammad, we’ve all been caricatured here.”

In an accompanying commentary, the editor of France Soir, which is in financial difficulties and has a readership of around 60,000, said he would never apologise for the decision to publish. Serge Faubert wrote: “Enough lessons from these reactionary bigots!

“There is nothing in these incriminated cartoons that intends to be racist or denigrate any community as such. Some are funny, others less so. That’s it. That is why we have decided to publish them,” he added. “No, we will never apologise for being free to speak, to think and to believe.”

There was no immediate reaction to the cartoons from the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), a body set up to represent France’s 5 million Muslims. With its strict separation of church and state, France has been the setting for vituperative religious controversies in the past. The Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, is closely associated with a 2004 law that prohibited the wearing of Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and prominent Christian crosses in secular state schools.

The images, which were the result of an offer to Danish cartoonists to depict Muhammad as they imagined him, have drawn thousands of Muslims out into the streets of the Middle East. This week, crowds in Gaza City burned Danish flags and images of the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and fired guns into the air.

Similar protests took place today in Baghdad and in Yemen, where the Danish Red Cross has already withdrawn aid workers because of threats against its staff. Threats have been made to harm Danish citizens in Muslim countries.

Saudi Arabia has removed its ambassador in Copenhagen because of the cartoons. Libya has closed its embassy altogether. The governments of Qatar and Iran have lodged protests.

Islam forbids portrayals of Muhammad because they are considered idolatrous. One of the offending drawings shows Muhammad’s turban as bomb with a lit fuse. In another he turns suicide bombers away from heaven because “We have run out of virgins”.

The decision of France Soir to republish the images comes as Danish Muslim groups, some of which were responsible for publicising the cartoons in the first place, have tried to calm the furore.

Although neither Jyllands-Posten and Mr Rasmussen have apologised for printing the images, prominent imams in Copenhagen said yesterday they were shocked by the extent of the protests, which have let to widespread boycotts of Danish goods across the Middle East.

Arla Foods, Europe’s largest dairy group which is headquartered in Denmark, said today it was losing 10 million kroner (£916,000) a day because of the boycott. The world’s biggest maker of insulin, Novo Nordisk, has also been hit after pharmacies and hospitals in Saudi Arabia refused to offer its products.

==============================

French, German Newspapers Run Muhammad Cartoons (Foxnews, 060201)

PARIS — French and German newspapers on Wednesday republished caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have riled the Muslim world, saying democratic freedoms include the “right to blasphemy.”

The front page of the daily France Soir carried the headline “Yes, We Have the Right to Caricature God” along with a cartoon of Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim and Christian gods floating on a cloud. Inside, the paper reran the drawings.

“The appearance of the 12 drawings in the Danish press provoked emotions in the Muslim world because the representation of Allah and his prophet is forbidden. But because no religious dogma can impose itself on a democratic and secular society, France Soir is publishing the incriminating caricatures,” the paper said.

Germany’s Die Welt daily printed one of the drawings on its front page, arguing that a “right to blasphemy” was anchored in democratic freedoms. The Berliner Zeitung daily also printed two of the caricatures as part of its coverage of the controversy.

The Danish daily Jyllands-Posten originally published the cartoons in September after asking artists to depict Islam’s prophet to challenge what it perceived was self-censorship among artists dealing with Islamic issues. A Norwegian newspaper reprinted the images this month.

The depictions include an image of Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse, and another portraying him holding a sword, his eyes covered by a black rectangle. Islamic tradition bars any depiction of the prophet to prevent idolatry.

Angered by the drawings, masked Palestinian gunmen briefly took over a European Union office in Gaza on Monday. Syria called for the offenders to be punished. Danish goods were swept from shelves in many countries, and Saudi Arabia and Libya recalled their ambassadors to Denmark.

The Jyllands-Posten — which received a bomb threat over the drawings — has apologized for hurting Muslims’ feelings but not for publishing the cartoons. Its editor said Wednesday, however, that he would not have printed the drawings had he foreseen the consequences.

Carsten Juste also said the international furor amounted to a victory for opponents of free expression.

“Those who have won are dictatorships in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia, where they cut criminals’ hands and give women no rights,” Juste told The Associated Press. “The dark dictatorships have won.”

Demonstrations and condemnations across the Muslim world continued.

The Supreme Council of Moroccan religious leaders denounced the drawings on Wednesday.

“Muslim beliefs cannot tolerate such an attack, however small it may be,” the statement said.

In Turkey, dozens of protesters from a small Islamic party staged a demonstration in front of the Danish Embassy. About 200 riot police watched the crowd from the Felicity Party, which laid a black wreath and a book about Muhammad’s life at the gates of the embassy building.

Despite the show of solidarity among Europe’s newspaper editors, not all Europeans appreciated the drawings.

Norway’s deputy state secretary for foreign affairs, Raymond Johansen, said they encourage distrust between people of different faiths.

“I can understand that Muslims find the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the Norwegian weekly ... to be offensive. This is unfortunate and regrettable,” Johansen said on a visit to Beirut.

There was also anger in France, which has Western Europe’s largest Muslim community with an estimated 5 million people.

Mohammed Bechari, president of the National Federation of the Muslims of France, said his group would start legal proceedings against France Soir because of “these pictures that have disturbed us, and that are still hurting the feelings of 1.2 billion Muslims.”

French government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope struck a neutral tone, saying France is “a country that is attached to the principle of secularism, and this freedom clearly should be exercised in a spirit of tolerance and respect for the beliefs of everyone.”

France Soir, which is owned by an Egyptian magnate, has been struggling to stay afloat and bring in readers in recent years.

French theologian [KH: Muslim theologian?] Sohaib Bencheikh spoke out against the pictures in a column in France Soir accompanying them Wednesday.

“One must find the borders between freedom of expression and freedom to protect the sacred,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, the West has lost its sense of the sacred.”

==============================

BBC to screen ‘blasphemous’ Muhammad cartoons (Times Online, 060202)

The BBC is tonight planning to screen the ‘blasphemous’ cartoon images of Muhammad which have caused uproar across the Muslim world.

Station controllers said this afternoon that they had decided to use the pictures during tonight’s edition of Newsnight on BBC2 in a report on the international dispute which has blown up around the cartoons.

The BBC said that the level of public interest justified a decision to ignore warnings from the Muslim community. A spokesman said: “We’ll use them responsibly and in full context to give audiences an understanding of the strong feelings evoked by the story.”

The BBC’s decision came as Peter Mandelson warned Muslim countries that they risk breaking trade law if they persist in boycotting Danish goods in protest at the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

The escalating row over the 12 caricatures, first published in the right-of-centre Jyllands-Posten in September last year, has evolved into an ideological clash between Western freedom of speech and Muslim religious teachings, which rule that images of the prophet are idolatrous.

The dispute has triggered violent protests in the Muslim world. In Europe, however, some or all of the cartoons were reprinted yesterday by newspapers in Norway, France, Italy, Germany and Spain as a gesture of solidarity with the Danish broadsheet and the principle of free speech.

Mr Mandelson, the EU’s Trade Commissioner, has now been drawn into the dispute as unofficial boycotts of the offending countries swept the Middle East. Two large Danish firms have reported a dramatic fall in sales.

He criticised cartoons as crude and juvenile, and warned British newspapers not to follow their European counterparts in reprinting them.

He said: “I understand on one level the motivation of newspapers to stand up for freedom of speech… but they are almost bound to cause offence.” He said that any other re-publication “throws petrol on the flames”.

Mr Mandelson has already warned Saudi Arabia, which has recalled its ambassador to Denmark and initiated a boycott of Danish goods, that the EU will take action at the World Trade Organisation action if the Riyadh government persists in the boycott,

In Gaza, EU staff were hurriedly evacuated as masked gunmen from Islamic Jihad and a Fatah brigade conducted an armed protest. “We will watch the office closely and if European countries continue their assaults against Islam and against the Prophet Muhammad, we will turn this office into ruins,” a spokesman for the Yasser Arafat Brigades told Reuters.

The row has had diplomatic and economic consequences in Arab countries sympathetic to the West as well as those already hostile. Syria and Saudi Arabia have recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. The Danish embassy in Damascus was evacuated after a bomb threat.

Several European journalists have left Gaza fearing for their safety, and Norway has closed its office in the West Bank.

The leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon revived the 1988 controversy over The Satanic Verses, and said that no-one would dare to insult Muslims today had the death fatwa against author Salman Rushdie been carried out.

Meanwhile in Europe, Jacques Lefranc, the editor of Paris daily France Soir who today splashed a caricature of the Prophet on his front page to illustrate the row, was sacked.

Under the headline “Yes, we have the right to caricature God”, the cartoon also showed Buddha, the Christian and Jewish deities sitting on a cloud. The Christian God says: “Don’t complain Muhammad, all of us have been caricatured.”

The newspaper deplored what it called the new inquisition by “backward bigots”.

Raymond Lakah, the paper’s Egyptian owner, appears however to disagreed with its editorial line. Today he swiftly issued a public apology and fired M Lefranc.

Dalil Boubakeur, President of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, said that the newspaper had “perpetrated a real provocation in the eyes of millions of French Muslims”.

The Muslim Association of Britain, an affiliate of the Muslim Council of Britain, has called on British broadcasters and newspapers not to reproduce the images. A spokesman said: “Printing or republishing these images is not advisable, knowing that they are going to offend.

“It will only infuriate the British members of the Muslim community and Muslims around the world. It will be insult to injury. You can’t reproduce these images in a sensitive manner.”

British newspapers, while all devoting space to coverage of the dispute, stopped short of re-printing the offending cartoons. Most chose to publish artfully cropped photographs of France Soir’s front page to illustrate reports of the unfolding conflict.

BBC1’s One o’clock News programme today chose the same compromise route, screening images of foreign newspapers containing the cartoons.

Right-wing magazine The Spectator bucked the trend on its website, using the most inflammatory of the cartoons - depicting Muhammad in a bomb turban - to illustrate a link to a previous Times Online story on the dispute. The image was not reproduced in the magazine. A spokesman told Times Online that the website and magazine were separate editorial entities, adding that the magazine had no intention of re-printing the image.

In Berlin, Die Welt reprinted one cartoon on its front page and three others inside. “The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical,” it said.

Roger Koeppel, Editor of Die Welt, told The Times: “We owed it to our readers. They have to understand what the fuss is about.”

In Italy some of the cartoons appeared in Corriere della Sera and La Stampa. Both newspapers said that the decision to publish had been taken on purely journalistic grounds.

Paolo Lepri, the acting foreign editor of Corriere della Sera, said that it was not a political decision. “We simply felt that you could not explain to readers why the cartoons had caused such a furore without showing them some examples by way of illustration”.

The Spanish daily El Periodico published a montage of the cartoons under the headline “The Effects of Terrorism: A Test”. Carlos-Enrique Bayo, foreign editor of El Periodico, said: “We don’t normally shy away from things like this. Publish and be damned, as they say.”

Carsten Juste, editor of the Danish broadsheet Jyllands-Posten which triggered the crisis, has apologised for the offence the cartoons caused but has refused to say sorry for their original publication.

He said that he would not have printed them had he known that it would endanger Danish lives. “The dark dictatorships have won,” he added.

==============================

Buy Danish. Nothing Rotten in the State of Denmark (Brussels Journal, 060131)

Four months ago to the day, on September 30th, Jyllands-Posten published its twelve Muhammad cartoons. Over the past four months The Brussels Journal, an internet publication, has posted 19 stories about the affair, but the mainstream media (MSM) have – until today – remained conspicuously silent. In the Belgian newspapers and magazines not a single letter has been published about this important story. And when the MSM finally decide to devote some attention to the case it is amazing to see how they manage to get basic facts wrong despite having had loads of time to do their research. The Australian networks SBS reported today that one of the twelve cartoons shows a pig-snouted Mohammed, while our readers know from our article of 14 January that Muslim hate mongerers had added this particular cartoon (and two others) to the original twelve because they did not deem the original cartoons offensive enough. Why do Western journalists repeat the lies of these anti-Western fanatics? Out of incompetence, or worse?

Meanwhile, one can but admire the courage of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. He is one of the very few European politicians with guts. If anyone deserves a prize for his valiant defence of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, it is certainly Mr Rasmussen. He did not give in to pressure from Muslim fanatics, nor from the appeasers at the UN, the European Commission and the Council of Europe. In the past weeks Denmark has shown that all is not yet lost in Europe. If something is rotten now it is not in Denmark.

Today conservative Americans have started a “Buy Danish” campaign in support of Copenhagen’s valiant stand. The Danes deserve this. The sale of Danish products in the Middle East has come to a standstill.

Meanwhile, today’s raid on the EU offices in Gaza has dragged the EU into an affair it has so far generally tried to ignore. The European ministers of Foreign Affairs discussed the cartoons in Brussels today and condemned threats against Danish and Swedish citizens – since they are EU citizens. “We have expressed a spirit of solidarity with our northern colleagues, as well as our belief and attachment to the freedom of press and the freedom of expression as part of our fundamental values, and the freedom of religious beliefs,” Austrian foreign minister Ursula Plassnik said after the meeting. Her French colleague, Philippe Douste-Blazy added: “We have all declared our solidarity with the Danes.”

The EU is also considering bringing the boycott of Danish products before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) because a boycott of Danish products is also a boycott of EU products. EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson told the Saudi minister of Trade to “convey the seriousness of this issue to his government.” “Any boycott of Danish goods would be seen as a boycott of European goods,” Mr Mandelson said.

Muslim consumers, however, have a right to boycott whomever they want. Similarly, Western consumers have the right to support whomever they want, and privately owned newspapers have the right to publish cartoons without government interference. If there must be a clash of civilizations and cultures, let it be over these cartoons. The Danish cartoons are as important as fighting for Danzig once was. If the West is unwilling to fight this battle, slavery will inevitably come and slavery will be what it deserves.

==============================

Militants Surround EU Offices in Gaza Over ‘Offensive’ Cartoons (Foxnews, 060202)

GAZA CITY — Armed militants angered by a cartoon drawing of the Prophet Muhammad published in European newspapers surrounded EU offices in Gaza on Thursday and threatened to kidnap foreigners as outrage over the caricatures spread across the Islamic world.

More than 300 students demonstrated in Pakistan, chanting “Death to France!” and “Death to Denmark!” — two of the countries where newspapers published the drawings. Other protests were held in Syria and Lebanon, while officials in Afghanistan, Iran and Indonesia condemned the publication. In Paris, the daily France Soir fired its managing editor after it ran the caricatures Wednesday.

A Jordanian newspaper took the bold step of running some of the drawings, saying it wanted to show its readers how offensive the cartoons were, although its editor also said he did not want “to promote such blasphemy.” In an editorial, it also urged the world’s Muslims to “be reasonable.”

Foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers began leaving Gaza as gunmen there threatened to kidnap citizens of France, Norway, Denmark and Germany unless those governments apologize for the cartoon.

Gunmen in the West Bank city of Nablus entered four hotels to search for foreigners to abduct and warned their owners not to host guests from several European countries. Gunmen said they were also searching apartments in Nablus for Europeans.

Militants in Gaza said they would shut down media offices from France, Norway, Denmark and Germany, singling out the French news agency Agence France Presse.

“Any citizens of these countries, who are present in Gaza, will put themselves in danger,” a Fatah-affiliated gunman said outside the EU Commission’s office in Gaza, flanked by two masked men holding rifles.

If the European governments don’t apologize by Thursday evening, “any visitor of these countries will be targeted,” he said.

The furor over the drawings, which first ran in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten in September, cuts to the question of which is more sacred in the Western world — freedom of expression or respect for religious beliefs. The cartoons include an image of Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse.

Islamic law, based on clerics’ interpretation of the Quran and the sayings of the prophet, absolutely forbids depictions, even positive ones, of the Prophet Muhammad in order to prevent idolatry.

The drawings have prompted boycotts of Danish goods, bomb threats and demonstrations against Danish facilities.

The Danish newspaper defended its decision to publish the caricatures, citing freedom of expression, but apologized to Muslims for causing offense.

France Soir and several other European papers reprinted the drawings in solidarity with the Danish daily. Jyllands-Posten also had put some of the drawings briefly on its Web site, and the images still can be found elsewhere on the Internet.

The Israeli newspaper Maariv published a tiny version of the Muhammad-bomb caricature Thursday, on page 16.

Foreign journalists were pulling out of Gaza on Thursday, and foreign media organizations were canceling plans to send more people in.

Norway suspended operations at its office in the West Bank town of Ram after receiving threats connected to publication of the cartoons by the Norwegian Christian newspaper Magazinet.

“There were threats from two Palestinian groups, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, against Danish, French and Norwegian diplomats,” Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokesman Rune Bjaastad said.

Jan Pirouz Poulsen, the Danish representative office’s deputy head, said there were six Danes in Gaza and about 20 in the West Bank, and that all had been urged to leave.

Raif Holmboe, the head of Denmark’s representative office in the West Bank town of Ramallah, said the office would be closed Friday and no decision has been made whether to reopen Monday. Holmboe said shots were fired at the Ramallah office earlier this week while the building was empty. No one was hurt.

Palestinian security officials said they would try to protect foreigners in Gaza, but police have largely been unable to do so in the past, with 19 foreigners kidnapped — and released unharmed — in recent months, mostly by Fatah gunmen.

Emma Udwin, a European Union spokeswoman in Brussels, said security measures have been taken in light of the threats.

Outgoing Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia condemned the caricatures, saying they “provoke all Muslims everywhere in the world.” He asked gunmen not to attack foreigners, “but we warn that emotions may flare in this very sensitive issues.”

Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Islamic militant Hamas also demanded an apology from European countries. However, he said foreigners in Gaza must not be harmed.

Thursday’s events began when a dozen gunmen with ties to Fatah approached the office of the EU Commission in Gaza. Three jumped on the outer wall and the rest took up positions at the entrance. The group demanded the apologies and urged Palestinians to boycott the products of Norway, Denmark, France and Germany.

A leaflet signed by a Fatah militia and the militant Islamic Jihad group said the EU office and churches in Gaza could come under attack and urged French citizens to leave Gaza. The gunmen left after about 45 minutes. Palestinian employees of the EU Commission had not come to work Thursday, and foreigners working at the office are based outside Gaza, and only visit from time to time.

In Multan, Pakistan, more than 300 Islamic students chanted “Death to Denmark!” and “Death to France!” and burned flags of both countries near an Islamic school.

Iraqi Islamic leaders called for demonstrations from Baghdad to the southern city of Basra following prayer services Friday.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai condemned the images, calling the publication an “insult ... to more than 1 billion Muslims.”

Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Yuri Thamrin said that while his country upholds free expression, “such freedom cannot be used as a pretext to insult a religion.” The Indonesian newspaper Rakyat Merdeka put the Muhammad-bomb caricature on its Web site to illustrate its story about the uproar but covered his eyes with a red banner to avoid making the image “vulgar,” a caption said.

Iran summoned Austrian Ambassador Stigel Bauer, representing the European Union, to protest the publication, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported. Bauer expressed “sorrow” and promised to convey Iran’s protest to his government and other EU countries, IRNA said.

The Jordanian newspaper Shihan ran three of the caricatures, saying it was reprinting them to show readers “the extent of the Danish offense.” Next to the drawings, the weekly said: “This is how the Danish newspaper portrayed Prophet Muhammad, may God’s blessing and peace be upon him.”

Shihan’s editor-in-chief, Jihad al-Momani, told The Associated Press that he decided to run the cartoons to “display to the public the extent of the Danish offense and condemn it in the strongest terms.”

“But their publication is not meant in any way to promote such blasphemy,” al-Momani added.

An editorial signed by al-Momani and titled “Muslims of the world, be reasonable,” questioned what sparked the outrage now, since the cartoons were first published in September. It said the Danish paper had apologized, “but for some reason, nobody in the Muslim world wants to hear the apology.”

Morocco and Tunisia barred sales of France Soir’s Wednesday issue.

The director of media rights group Reporters Without Borders, Robert Menard, called for calm. “We need to figure out how to reconcile freedom of expression and respect of faith,” he said.

Vebjoern Selbekk, editor of Norway’s Magazinet newspaper, said he had received thousands of hate e-mails, including 20 death threats, since printing the drawings and was under police protection.

==============================

Troubled Continent: A crisis of demography — and of the spirit (National Review Online, 060213)

The images we recently saw on the TV news suggest that Europe has, once again, lost its way. It looks as though Europe is set to repeat in the 21st century the disasters of the 20th.

Europe — especially France and Germany — seems to have a love affair with collectivism. Europeans refuse to learn the lessons of collectivisms past; they certainly fear liberty, especially in economics. Worse still, European elites have done their withering best to empty Europe of its Christian spirit. They have swept Europe clean just in time for the rapid rise of a rival faith prolific with children, vitality, passion, and confidence in long-term victory. What Muslims of the 16th century could not accomplish at Malta (1565) or Lepanto (1571), nor Muslims of the 17th century at Vienna (1683), they are beginning to accomplish in contemporary Europe. Europe is becoming Eurabia.

One could see this in “France ablaze” during the nights of October 27–November 12, 2005. On some of those nights, across some 300 French cities, more than 1,000 automobiles were being set afire. The young men involved did not look impoverished, and they did not look “angry.” Their clothing was modish and expensive, in the style of American “gangsta rappers.” Their faces radiated exultation. These young men are in the pay of the state, through unemployment insurance — paid for not working. But honor they do not receive: In French employment markets, Hamid and Abdul see that they are not held equal to Pierre and André. They are housed, fed, and clothed, and left to graze upon the land. In the eyes of others they can see that they are regarded as less than cultivated human beings. Few see in them any vision, enterprise, or energy to contribute to the glory of France.

When the French government had earlier said, with reference to Iraq, that Islam is not compatible with democracy, it said to these youths that their lives too are incompatible with democracy, at least in France. The young men could see that the government of France held them in fear, and as young men they enjoyed that. They will remember this lesson.

In all these sad events, we see that Europe has forgotten what made it great in nobility of soul and spirited accomplishment, and for many centuries great also in courage and victory in battle.

SOURCES OF GREATNESS

The distinguished sociologist Rodney Stark has just published a book, The Victory of Reason, about why Europe surged beyond all other civilizations in the past millennium. Europe’s greatness, he writes, arose chiefly from a vision of human possibility descended from the Creator of all things: a vision of reason, freedom, and progress — and also a drama of free will, refusal, and sin. Even some atheists, in honest clarity, admit how Jewish/Christian faith lifted up Europe among the continents, and inspired a vision of universal amity and mutual assistance — especially to the most vulnerable among us — that haunts persons of compassion still. One does not have to believe in God to see the power of that faith in lifting the horizons of human accomplishment. If you wish to see its monuments in Europe, look around you.

In the 20th century, sadly, Europe decisively chose against this faith, in favor of the lesser vision of the Enlightenment — and bathed the dream of Universal Reason in universal bloodshed. Neither Communism nor Fascism, once the passionate enthusiasm of hundreds of millions, left much behind of which to be proud, or even beautiful to contemplate. Instead Europe still suffers from nightmares, from spasms of guilt and unworthiness. Europeans today wear signs on their backs that read: Kick me again! Whence come these self-loathings? When one feels guilt, and there is no longer any God, there is no one to confess to.

Europe now carries a very heavy burden. Its two great passions are peace and security — but you cannot have peace unless you are willing to prepare for war; and you cannot have security unless you are willing to take risks. Few signs indicate that Europe is willing to do these simple things. In the past, that has always proved costly for America.

This lack of vigor shows itself in demographics. Very soon there will be far too few European workers to pay for the benefits of a much larger cohort of retirees, who will live longer and more expensively than any other retired generation in history. In an era of barely one child per married couple (with many couples not even marrying), we now have an Italy in which virtually no child has a brother or a sister. For the state, such families will mean fiscal bankruptcy; for rival ethnic groups, religions, and civilizations abroad, such numbers will telegraph fateful weakness.

There are still pockets of will and vitality. But having turned away from Jewish and Christian faith, a Europe based solely upon the Enlightenment cannot long survive. The Europe that is declining in population is a Europe more rational than Europe has ever been, more scientific, less religious, less pious, more mundane, wealthier, more consumerist, more universally close to living etsi Deus non daretur (as if God does not exist). A very large part of the “European crisis” is the crisis of the Enlightenment. On that ground, a civilization cannot be built, a civilization can only burn down to the last waxed threads of its wick.

For the beginning of culture is cult. Apart from the worship of God, human beings cannot in practice (whatever may be said in theory) transcend themselves — not, at least, in the large numbers needed to sustain a civilization. Unless human beings have a vision of something larger than their own natures, and beyond the bounds of their own natures, they cannot be pulled out of themselves; they cannot be inspired; and they will not aspire, in the way that Gothic steeples aspire. To be sure, there are secular ways to interpret the word “transcendence”: as some potential already within human beings to break their own records, to go beyond what has already been achieved in order to achieve new marks, and the like. But that is not the sort of transcendence on which civilizations are built. Real transcendence is from outside, a new form of life, a new human nature, an uplifting into participation in the divine. This transcendence is known to all religions, and is sensed by many artists. It is a new dimension of the human spirit, which does not spring from human potential, but is given from outside. It is experienced as an uplifting, a newness, a vision and a vitality not within one’s own powers to achieve or to deserve. It comes as a gift.

Only the type of transcendence that points to the divine inspires a civilization or a culture, properly so called. Ancient Chinese culture, worldly in its practical Confucian wisdom, aspired to harmony with the stars and the will of Heaven. As yeast lifts dough, so the great religions of the world have informed and inspired cultures. A merely secular culture instead reduces human beings to creatures of chance, deprives them of any end for which they were purposely created, and renders universal moral principles into pragmatic bargains or subjective personal preferences. While it often promotes highly moral living, a secular culture can give few reasons for such living except personal preference, and in ethical practice it frequently borrows a sensibility and even concepts formed by an earlier religious heritage. The social morals of a secular culture these days tend also to depend upon moral credits stored up in the past. Even such supposedly secular values as compassion, liberty, fraternity, and equality sprang first from Jewish and Christian moral commitments, as even Richard Rorty notices — not from Greece or Rome or any purely philosophical source.

It might seem, then, that secular cultures are solely parasitic upon earlier religious cultures. But they sometimes play a creative role in putting questions to religious concepts that result in the deepening, revision, or withdrawal of earlier versions. For instance, the struggle for religious toleration in Virginia (1776–1791) led to a deeper comprehension of the grounds, in large part religious, of liberty of conscience. (If a rational creature owes a self-evident duty of worship to his Creator, no state, civil society, or individual may alienate him from that duty; and the Jewish-Christian God, to whom that inalienable duty is owed, wishes to be worshiped in spirit and truth, by a free conscience.) Thus, in America, even natural right had a historical religious content. The thinking of Judaism and Christianity has benefited greatly from this and other challenges by secular thinkers, just as the latter have borrowed much from the former. The contestation between believer and unbeliever has been very fruitful for Western civilization as a whole.

When, in 1948, Europe wished to preserve itself from absorption into the Communist bloc, it turned to the Christian political parties. Later, it turned to the religious leadership of nonviolent labor unions such as Solidarity, and to church human-rights activists, in order to find a bloodless, democratic path. Apart from the extraordinary skills and the saintly charisma of John Paul the Great, it is not easy to explain how so much happened — so fast, and so peacefully — during the years 1978–1991. The Pope began his pontificate in the late autumn of 1978 by saying that the “twin branches” of Christian Europe would be reunited soon. Impossibly utopian, I remember thinking at the time.

One must conclude that Judaism and Christianity are still great powers slumbering in the soul of Europe. But secular Europe unaccountably does not want to draw upon them. We live in the age of the Grand Refusal: the age of Denial.

OLD FAITHS AND NEW THREATS

Islamic thought up until this time does not separate religion from politics, either analytically or in practice, exactly as Westerners do. Today, for example, we who are American, Italian, French, German, and so on do not think of ourselves as “Crusaders,” although a fair number of Muslims call us by that name. They know as well as we do how secular France is, for example, and their best writers often write of that, a few in admiration, others in disgust. That fact does not prevent them from lumping the French into the “Crusaders.”

In the view of some Muslims, the religion of Islam is not really distinguishable from the one, united, universal Islamic caliphate and its military vanguard. This singular Islam has been at war with “infidels,” they think, since its founding. This unitary Islam — politics, military, and religion all grasped as one single entity — has been at war with “Crusaders” ever since the latter found the nerve and the gall to resist, after about four centuries of fairly supine retreat, and then the effrontery to take back the Christian heartland, from Constantinople to Jerusalem to Alexandria.

Then, quite shocked, beginning about 1150, the Muslims, in return, began gathering their forces for another protracted assault to subdue Christian Europe once and for all. City by city, they took back the whole once-Christian Middle East. Probing westward, they failed at Malta in 1565, in one of history’s greatest sieges, and failed again at Lepanto in 1571 (Miguel Cervantes, a warrior in that naval battle, called it the greatest occasion of all history). Their overland advance through Hungary then made great strides until, just outside Vienna, they were prevented from cutting Northern Europe from Southern by the cavalry of Jan Sobieski, bearing at its forefront the painting of Our Lady of Czestochowa. The year was 1683, the date was September 11–September 12, a date of high symbolic value to Muslims, a date in September Americans too will long remember.

Europeans and Americans today do not think often of those battles of the Crusades, which seem so long ago and so irrelevant. Yet today the Muslim population of Europe is growing very rapidly, not only by immigration, but also by multiple births per family. Demographically, Muslim morale is very high. They are as it were investing with their bodies in the future, in a way Europeans are not. Already in various European states, there are important political districts in which Islamic constituencies predominate. In some cities, the number of new mosques is rising steadily, while the number of Christian churches actually in use continues to fall (partly from widespread lapses in religious practice). Some of the most ardent terrorists and political extremists among young Muslim radicals today are being raised in European cities, of second- or third-generation immigrants. Some Muslims in the past integrated themselves into European societies, mores, and political values. Many today, it appears, are making no effort to do so. On the contrary, they are resisting what some call the “moral decadence” of Western values, and some also resist the highest political principles of Western peoples.

Until recently, one of the expectations of Western democracies was that all immigrants would shortly embrace the core values, at least the political values, of their host countries. It is not yet clear what will happen to the functioning of democracies if sizable groups of immigrants do not wish to do so. A vulgar form of Euro-modern multiculturalism assumes that all cultures are equal in their moral and political preferences, as if underneath the skin, deep in their hearts, all peoples were universalist liberals. In a variety of circumstances, that is turning out not to be true: The long-term dangers of radical, alienated European Muslims feeding the leadership of worldwide terrorism are already being felt.

Europe needs to have a realistic understanding of the degree of benevolent competition, and long-term hostile threat, that it must expect from Muslim peoples, given the widespread lack of economic opportunity, and the fairly closed political outlets, of Middle Eastern societies during the past 50 years. One would think it in the high and urgent interest of Europe to set a new and different dynamic to work in that part of the world, which is so close to them. It is also necessary for Europeans to come to a clearer understanding of the intense hatred for and violent opposition to democracy of a small but intense faction of extremists who claim to be Islamists, for whom an adequate and accurate name seems to be Islamofascists. These are the factions led by the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden and the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

LOSING THE FUTURE?

The resurgence of religious conviction in the Muslim world (often not at all fused with political radicalism, but imbued rather with a longing to live under a regime of rights and individual dignity) does bring into sharp relief the most acute weakness of European culture today: the desert it has made of religious conviction, once its richest source of vision, courage, and practical good sense. And this depletion of spiritual resources is not unconnected to the recent European habit of demonizing capitalism. European elites reserve a special hostility for Anglo-Saxon economic thought, especially the liberating ideas emanating from Austria by way of Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, with their emphasis on incentives, enterprise, risk, flexibility, and liberty. These ideas cut very sharply against Communist, statist, and social-democratic emphases on stasis, security, and privileges won, and against their intemperate denunciations of business, enterprise, corporations, and wealth-creation. Without going so far as to hold that losing money is chaste, the European Left even holds that making money, creating wealth, and reaping profits are all obscene. The economies of the Left rarely do make money, create wealth, or show profits. Their economic chastity is their own punishment.

Given the demographic crisis mentioned earlier, it will be essential for Europe in the near future to create much more new wealth than its economies have ever been required to create before, simply to pay benefits due to the large proportion of retirees (compared with workers) in their economies. Social-welfare economies were constructed on the basis of a proportion of about nine, or at least seven, workers to every retiree. In Europe, the actual proportion will all too soon approach three workers per retiree. To make matters worse, most retirees were originally expected to die not long after their 65th birthday, but now very large numbers of them are living past 85. They will require their pensions to be paid for many more years than the planners of the welfare state ever imagined. In addition, medical care for them has become far more sophisticated and vastly more expensive than anyone dreamed 50 years ago. In Europe, it really is time to stop the show of disdain for economies that work better than Europe’s, at least in creating new jobs for an ever-expanding workforce, and in steadily raising living standards for all.

Europe will find during the next 30 years that it desperately needs alliance with the United States, for many reasons. It is utterly clear to Americans that in the immense challenges looming ahead in the 21st century — from China and India, as well as the Middle East — we will desperately need an alliance with a strong and united Europe. That is why the prospect of a Europe beset with sickness of soul, and with illusions about its own spiritual health, worry us deeply. We very much need Europe to be successful — and soon.

Mr. Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he is director of social and political studies. This article is adapted from remarks he delivered in Venice, Italy, on November 18, 2005.

==============================

Are We Serious? (National Review, 060213)

MARK STEYN

Abu Hamza is the most famous of Britain’s many incendiary imams, a household name thanks to the tabloids’ anointing him as “Hooky” — he lost his hands in a, um, “accident” in Afghanistan a few years back. Currently on trial in London for nine counts of soliciting to murder plus various other charges, he’s retained the services of the eminent Queen’s Counsel Edward Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald opened the case for the defense by arguing, according to the Daily Telegraph, that “Hamza was urging his followers not to murder British people but to fight in holy wars where Muslims were being killed in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Palestine. Asked if he had ever intended to urge or incite murder, Hamza replied: ‘In the context of murder, no. In the context of fighting, yes.’”

Hmm. Hamza wants to see a Caliph installed in Downing Street and to have Muslims “control the whole Earth.”

And, of course, wanting Muslims to control the whole Earth is not against the law, nor, as his counsel argued, is advocating the more robust methods of bringing it about. As the Times of London reported: “Edward Fitzgerald, QC, for the defence, said that Abu Hamza’s interpretation of the Koran was that it imposed an obligation on Muslims to do jihad and fight in the defence of their religion. He said that the Crown case against the former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque was ‘simplistic in the extreme.’ He added: ‘It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran itself.’”

Well, it’s ingenious, and who’s to say it won’t work? If the Koran permit, you must acquit. To convict would be multiculturally disrespectful: If the holy book of the religion of peace recommends killing infidels, who are we to judge?

In other courtroom news, Nick Griffin, leader of the highly non-multicultural British National party, is also on trial, charged with the crime of “using words or behaviour likely to stir up racial hatred” — and, unlike Hamza, he’s unable to avail himself of the But-I-got-it-straight-from-the-Koran defense. The jury was sternly reminded that its role is not to consider the truth or otherwise of Griffin’s remarks: The criminality thereof is not mitigated by factual accuracy. One of the offending observations is this, made at a meeting in Leeds, a year before the July 7 bombings: “We all know that sooner or later there’s going to be Islamic terrorists letting off bombs in major cities, and it might not be London, it could just as easily be the White Rose Centre” — which is in Leeds. Griffin ventured that the bombers would prove to be asylum seekers or second-generation Pakistanis “living somewhere like Bradford.”

Close enough. Well, closer than MI5 got. Three of the four July 7 bombers were, in fact, second-generation Pakistanis from Leeds — a mere stone’s throw or bomb blast from where Griffin was speaking. Tony Blair has for years been predicting terrorist devastation raining down on Britain, but very shrewdly he usually avoids hazarding too specific a guess at the likely identity of the perpetrators — which is why he’s not on trial and Nick Griffin is.

Go back four years. On September 11, the Bush administration had to choose whether to regard the events of that morning as a matter for law enforcement or an act of war. At one o’clock that afternoon, as the Pentagon still burned and after he’d helped pull the injured from the rubble, Donald Rumsfeld told the president, “This is not a criminal action. This is war.”

That’s still the distinction that matters: Part of the reason John Kerry lost in 2004 and why the Democrats will lose again this November is that they view this business as a law-enforcement matter: all warrants and due process. And, as we see in almost every case that comes up, to fight the jihad in the courtroom means you’ll lose.

Imagine if, during the London Blitz, you’d had Germans with British passports giving speeches advocating the United Kingdom’s incorporation within the Third Reich and demanding the Swastika fly over Buckingham Palace and you had to prosecute them individually and most Nazis were acquitted on technicalities but a few got 18-months-to-two-years. To be sure, one can argue (as many British and Americans do) that the jihad does not pose the same kind of existential threat, but at what point do you cross the line? Three hundred dead in a Tube blast? Six thousand in a skyscraper bombing? Why aren’t the dead of September 11 and July 7 already enough?

There are local factors at play in these court cases and the defendants know them very well. Under onerous British reporting restrictions, I can’t even write about the Hamza case in a Fleet Street paper lest it prejudice his trial. In cases like that of, say, Sami-al Arian or Zac Moussaoui, you’re free to talk about them but the nature of the U.S. justice system means there are years and years between the arrest and even the prospect of justice. Thus, the net effect in both jurisdictions is to limit or defer public awareness of these men’s activities.

A court of law is not meant to be a field of battle, and the enemy should not be upgraded to a defendant. The question is not “Why do they hate us?” but “Why do they despise us?” And putting Abu Hamza in the dock at the Old Bailey is a good example why.

==============================

Gunmen in Gaza close EU office (Washington Times, 060203)

TEL AVIV — Palestinian gunmen forced the closing of a European Union office in Gaza City and a German national was briefly abducted in the West Bank yesterday amid growing Muslim fury over caricatures in European newspapers poking fun at the prophet Muhammad.

A masked spokesman for the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades told reporters in Gaza that the armed band planned to kidnap more foreigners, prompting European diplomats and aid workers to begin leaving the Palestinian territories.

In Europe, at least two more newspapers published the cartoons yesterday, bringing the total to at least nine newspapers in two days as defiant editors turned the issue into a test of press freedom. An editor in France and one in Jordan lost their jobs for printing the drawings.

Across Europe and the Muslim world, political leaders felt compelled to take sides. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a close U.S. ally, condemned the publication of the drawings while U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan argued through a spokesman that press freedom “should always be exercised in a way that fully respects the religious beliefs and tenets of all religions.”

The cartoons, first published in a Danish newspaper in September and reprinted in a Norwegian newspaper last month, offend Muslims by satirizing Muhammad, in one case showing him with a turban shaped like a bomb. For Muslims, any depiction of the prophet is forbidden.

Editors of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper said they first commissioned the sketches to test whether the cartoonists would “succumb to self-censorship” on a Muslim issue. As Muslim protests grew, more and more newspapers have printed the cartoons in defiance, further fueling the anger.

In the West Bank yesterday, Palestinian gunmen searched apartments and other hotels in an effort to kidnap foreigners. English teacher Christoph Kasten, 21, was seized in the city of Nablus but released into the custody of Palestinian police after less than an hour.

About 20 gunmen surrounded the European Union office in Gaza and threatened to harm citizens of countries with newspapers that published the cartoons, which include France, Germany and Norway.

“Any citizens of these countries, who are present in Gaza, will put themselves in danger,” a Fatah-affiliated gunman told the Associated Press. “Any visitor of these countries will be targeted” if the countries don’t apologize.

Norway froze activities at an office just outside of Jerusalem, while the Danish foreign ministry urged its citizens to leave the West Bank and Gaza.

Hamas is planning a demonstration in Gaza today to protest the newspapers’ action, and some Muslim clerics reportedly called for “a day of wrath.” Religious leaders in Iraq also called for demonstrations after weekly prayers today.

After protests earlier in the week, the cartoons appeared in at least seven European newspapers on Wednesday, including France Soir and newspapers in Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

Le Temps in Switzerland and Hungary’s Magyar Hirlap followed suit yesterday, the latter with a drawing showing an imam telling suicide bombers to stop because heaven had run out of virgins to reward them.

In Jordan, the newspaper Shihan carried some of the cartoons, saying it wanted to show how offensive they were. The Jordanian government threatened legal action, and the chief editor was promptly fired.

The editor of France Soir was also fired yesterday by the paper’s editor, an Egyptian, as a “sign of respect” for religious convictions.

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy questioned the firing, saying, “We must defend freedom of expression, and if I had to choose, I prefer the excess of caricature over the excess of censure.”

But European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson criticized the repeated publication of the pictures as “throwing [fuel] onto the flames of the original issue.”

==============================

Democracy and the ‘Muslim street’ (Washington Times, 060203)

Despite recent elections, youth uprisings and a general antipathy toward its authoritarian leaders, the Muslim world still has much to learn about freedom. And who better to teach it than France? Seriously.

The proverbial “Muslim street” has been up in arms recently over 12 unsavory cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad which were originally published in a Danish newspaper last September. On Monday, Palestinian gunmen stormed the European Union office in Gaza, saying their anger over the cartoons made them do it. Several Muslim nations have withdrawn their ambassadors from Denmark, because, as the Syrian state news agency said, publication of the cartoons “constitutes a violation of the sacred principles of hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims.” Muslims everywhere were urged to boycott Danish products.

Then Europe fired back. Newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain and Switzerland showed their support for their Danish colleagues by reprinting several of the offending cartoons. In Paris, the front page of France Soir ran a banner headline declaring: “Yes, We Have the Right to Caricature God.” Provocative? To be sure. “No religious dogma can impose its view on a democratic and secular society,” the newspaper said. True, too.

European defiance hasn’t come without a price. Several cartoonists were threatened with death. In Denmark, where in 2004 filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for his critical film about Islamic societies’ treatment of women, this can’t be taken lightly. The Egyptian owner of France Soir sacked managing editor Jacques Lefranc yesterday for publishing the cartoons. In the Middle East, radical Islamist groups are threatening the lives of Danish tourists and diplomats unless the Danish government apologizes. Norway closed its West Bank mission due to mounting threats and yesterday Palestinian gunmen took over the EU office in Gaza.

While all of this seems like a sad parody of cultural differences, it is deadly serious. Refusing to apologize, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said, “I can’t call a newspaper and tell them what to put in it. That’s not how our society works.” For whatever reason, the Muslim protesters, gunmen and governments don’t understand this fundamental element of Western civilization, even as their own news outlets consistently portray Christian and Jewish icons in a derogatory manner.

Freedom to say what you please, as long as the disrespect is peaceful, is a freedom that must be defended without caveat or footnote. The sooner the Muslim world appreciates this, the sooner they’ll be fully accepted in the community of civilized nations.

==============================

‘Let the hands that drew be severed!’ (Times Online, 060203)

Muslims from London to Jakarta today mounted vigorous protests against cartoons of the prophet Muhammad which have appeared in European newspapers.

Answering the call to mount an international “day of anger”, Muslim crowds spilled from Friday prayers into protest demonstrations, demanding apologies from newspaper editors and the governments of a half dozen European countries that have refused to block the publication of the images.

The first protests took place in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, when around 150 members of the Islamic Defenders Front tried to storm the Danish Embassy in Jakarta after pelting the building with eggs. “Let’s slaughter the Danish ambassador!” Read banners carried by the crowd. “We’re ready for jihad!” They shouted.

Denmark’s best-selling broadsheet, the right-of-centre Jyllands-Posten, has been at the heart of the controversy since publishing 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad last September. One of the offending drawings shows Muhammad’s turban as bomb with a lit fuse. In another he turns suicide bombers away from heaven because “We have run out of virgins”.

Despite the best efforts of the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who appeared last night on Arabic satellite television to stress his country’s respect for Islam, anger has deepened this week after newspapers in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands reprinted at least one of the images.

Syria and Saudi Arabia have withdrawn their ambassadors in protest at the cartoons and Libya has closed its embassy altogether. According to the Hadith, the sayings of the prophet, all depictions of Muhammad, however complimentary, are considered idolatrous.

Amid demonstrations in Singapore, the country’s senior Islamic organisation said that the cartoons had no purpose but hatred: “No one is allowed to ridicule or cast aspersions on the faith of a people under the cloak of free expression,” it said.

Crowds gathered in Bangladesh and in cities across Pakistan, where the national parliament unanimously passed a resolution condemning the drawings. “I have been hurt, grieved and I am angry,” said President Pervez Musharraf. Last November, Islamic extremists in Islamabad issued death threats against the authors of the cartoons. Newspaper offices are frequently attacked in Pakistan for perceived slights against Islam.

Across the Middle East, Danish dairy produce has been boycotted by an estimated 50,000 shops since Saudi Arabian clerics asked shopkeepers to remove the items from their shelves. As Friday prayers ended in the region, thousands took to the streets to burn flags and threaten violence.

“We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us,” said Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, a leading imam in Qatar. “We can buy from China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia... We will not be humiliated.”

The Palestinian Territories have been alive with marches and unrest since the victory of the Islamist group, Hamas, in last week’s parliamentary elections.

Today a week of anti-Danish and anti-European protests reached its climax with 50,000 people attending a rally organised by the group, which is yet to take power. Danish goods were burnt and the crowd chanted: “Let the hands that drew be severed!”

Western diplomats have already been forced to abandon their missions in the Gaza Strip after reports of gunmen searching hotels for Europeans, declaring them legitimate targets. The Danish Red Cross has pulled out workers from Yemen and Gaza City after they received death threats.

Arab newspaper editorials held no trace of the ambivalence that led a Jordanian newspaper, al-Shihan, to print three of the cartoons yesterday. Instead, Jihad Momani, the newspaper’s editor who was fired for his decision to publish, issued an apology: “Oh I ask God to forgive me and I announce to everyone my deep regret for the gross mistake I have committed in Shihan without intention, which I fell into in my enthusiasm to defend our religion and the life of the Prophet,” he said.

By this afternoon, London also was witnessing furious demonstrations. After a small protest at the BBC television centre last night to complain about glimpses of the cartoons in news bulletins and on Newsnight, hundreds of Muslims gathered in Regent’s Park to march to the Danish Embassy on Sloane Street.

Placards reading: “Behead the one who insults the prophet” and “Free speech go to hell!” were carried by the protesters. Bushra Varakat, a 26-year-old student from Egham, Surrey, said: “This is our prophet, he did a lot of things for humankind, both Muslim and non-Muslim.

“We don’t know why these silly people use these cartoons unless they were showing how much they hate us. We have to defend our prophet otherwise Allah will punish us. We will not accept this ridicule.”

So far, British newspapers have declined to reprint the cartoons. Most explained their reasons today. The Sun said it seemed “ridiculous... that mayhem is breaking out over a handful of cartoons. Can we all get real.” The Financial Times said that it found the images offensive, but warned autocratic Arab leaders against letting extremists take over the debate.

In the most extended comment from a Government minister yet on the subject, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, welcomed the restraint shown by the press in a strong denunciation of the Danish cartoons.

“There is freedom of speech, we all respect that,” he said. “But there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory. I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong.”

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, condemned the images too, but urged British Muslims to resist the entreaties of extremists seeking to hijack the controversy.

“There may be elements that would want to exploit the genuine sense of anguish and hurt among British Muslims about the manner in which the prophet has been vilified to pursue their own mischievous agenda,” he said. “We would caution all British Muslims to not allow themselves to be provoked.”

==============================

Drawing the line: Publishing controversial cartoons and being damned (Times Online, 060203)

Some two decades ago, political relations between Europe and the Islamic world were convulsed by the controversy surrounding the publication of the book The Satanic Verses. It is depressing that cartoons first printed in a Danish newspaper last autumn appear to have had much the same effect now. It should also not, alas, be surprising. The cultural chasm has, if anything, grown in the past 20 years. Many in Europe today think nothing of mocking the most revered aspects of Christianity — often in a crass, tasteless manner — while the corruption and failure of secular regimes in the Middle East have helped to inspire a revival of Islam, including an extremist strain.

None of which excuses a situation in which the governments of France and Denmark have felt obliged to advise their citizens to avoid areas such as the Gaza Strip where the offices of the EU were stormed yesterday. There is undoubtedly a sizeable aspect of domestic politics surrounding events in the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere. It would also, though, be folly to deny that many individual Muslims have been aggrieved by the very fact of images of the Prophet Muhammad.

This newspaper has had anguish of its own over whether to reproduce the pictures at the centre of this saga. At one level, their appearance might be seen as an appropriate response to the fanatics who have demanded their prohibition and could help the reader to understand both their character and the impact that they might have on believers. But to duplicate these cartoons several months after they were originally printed also has an element of exhibitionism to it. To present them in front of the public for debate is not a value-neutral exercise. The offence destined to be caused to moderate Muslims should not be discounted.

On balance, we have chosen not to publish the cartoons but to provide weblinks to those who wish to see them. The crucial theme here is choice. The truth is that drawing the line in instances such as these is not a black-and-white question. It cannot be valid for followers of a religion to state that because they consider images of the Prophet idolatry, the same applies to anyone else in all circumstances. Then again, linking the Prophet to suicide bombings supposedly undertaken in his honour was incendiary. The Times would, for example, have reservations about printing a cartoon of Christ in a Nazi uniform sketched because sympathisers of Hitler had conducted awful crimes in the name of Christianity.

Muslims thus have a right to protest about the cartoons and, if they want, to boycott the publications concerned. To move from there to holding ministers responsible for the editorial decisions of a free press in their nations, to urge that all products from a country be ostracised or, worst still, to engage in violence against people or property is to leave the field of legitimate complaint and enter one of censorship enforced under threat of intimidation. That free speech is misunderstood in much of the Islamic realm shows how much progress has yet to be made.

Consistency would also be a virtue. The anger directed at these cartoons by certain Muslims would carry more weight if pictures that crudely insult Jews and Christians were not found regularly in the Middle East. To contend that faiths of many forms merit a degree of deference, but not absolute protection, is one notion. To insist that this principle be applied selectively is another, quite indefensible, assertion.

==============================

World press opinion of cartoon row (Times Online, 060203)

Newspapers around the world have published editorials this morning addressing the row over the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Here is a selection:

Al-Akhbar, Egypt (translated by The Egyptian Gazette)

“How can more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide be so weak compared to the 10-million strong Jewish community in standing up for their beliefs? That the Danish government refuses to make an apology is tantamount to condoning the newspaper’s behaviour, so no one can blame Muslims for their boycott of Denmark.”

Al-Gomhurriya, Egypt

“It is not a question of freedom of opinion or belief, it is a conspiracy against Islam and Muslims which has been in the works for years. The international community should understand that any attack against our prophet will not go unpunished.”

Al-Shihan, Jordan

(The newspaper published three of the cartoons before the editor was fired and copies were pulled from shops)

“Muslims of the world, be reasonable... What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?”

“Oh I ask God to forgive me,” editor’s apology.

Le Monde, France

“Religions are systems of thought, spiritual constructions, beliefs that are respected but which can, by turn, be freely analysed, criticised and ridiculed... Secular, republican society is built on religious neutrality and tolerance. It is, therefore, necessary to distinguish between religions and those who practise them: devotees must be protected against all discrimination and against all attacks motivated by their religious beliefs.”

The Sun

“The Sun believes passionately in free speech, but that does not mean we need to jump on someone else’s bandwagon to prove we will not be intimidated. It does seem ridiculous, though, that mayhem is breaking out over a handful of cartoons. Can we all get real.”

The Daily Mail

“While the Mail would fight to the death to defend those papers that printed the offending cartoons, it disagrees with the fact that they have done so. Rights are one thing. Responsibilities are another. And the newspapers that so piously proclaimed their right to freedom of speech were being - to put it mildly - deeply discourteous to the Islamic view.”

The Daily Telegraph

“Our restraint is in keeping with British values of tolerance and respect for the feelings of others. However, we are equally in no doubt that a small minority of Muslims would be offended by such a publication to an extent where they would threaten, and perhaps even use, violence. This is a problem that the whole of the Western world needs to confront frankly, and not sidestep.”

The Financial Times

“There is something dishonest, too, about the way Arab leaders defer in these matters to reactionary clerical establishments they rely on to legitimise their autocratic rule. That was for many, many centuries the way it used to be in Europe. The “Christian” west won through to modernity in the teeth of clerical reaction. As Arab and Muslim societies return to that road they will collide with their religious establishments on the way to repossessing their religion. Even Islamist reformers tend to believe this.”

The Guardian

“It is one thing to assert the right to publish an image of the prophet. As long as that is not illegal - and not even the government’s amended religious hatred bill makes it so - then that right undoubtedly exists. But it is another thing to put that right to the test, especially when to do so inevitably causes offence to many Muslims and, even more so, when there is currently such a powerful need to craft a more inclusive public culture which can embrace them and their faith.”

The Independent

“There is... no doubt that newspapers should have the right to print cartoons that some people find offensive. Indeed it goes to the very nature of the political cartoon that it seeks to make a point through exaggeration, distortion and caricature - a process which is, by definition, intended to needle those being criticised, or their supporters. In a free society it is proper that speech, and other forms of expression, should be free.”

==============================

West tries to calm tensions as militants threaten kidnaps (Times Online, 060203)

Even moderate Muslims would regard cartoons as sacrilege, say scholars saddened by the breach of sacred boundary

A LEADING Muslim scholar said that repeated publication of the cartoons would inevitably lead to more terrorist attacks in the West.

Mufti Abdul Barkatullah, senior imam at North Finchley Mosque in North London, said that editors who published the cartoons were “giving more fuel to al-Qaeda”.

He said that one of Islam’s sacred boundaries had been crossed and even moderate Muslims would regard the cartoons as sacrilege. He cited verses of the Koran that rail against slander and mockery of Islam and prayer.

Chapter 9 verse 12 urges all Muslims to “fight” any who “revile” Islam. Chapter 104 warns those who slander and defame that they will be hurled into “crushing disaster”.

Mufti Barkatullah, a member of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “In other religions, the sacred boundaries have been deleted. Not so in Islam. This is a no-go area at any cost. It will spur on suicide bombers.

“However moderate one is, there can be no compromise on the person of the Prophet. The Prophet is held above everything in the Universe, over one’s own person, family, parents, the whole world. It is less offensive to condemn and vilify God.”

A spokesman for the Muslim Council said that it was not necessarily offensive to publish the cartoons per se. It all depended on context. A television programme broadcast them two days ago in Britain to explain why they were controversial. He said that Muslims would not find their use insulting in that context. It was the provocative publication with the intention of stirring controversy that was offensive, he said.

Muslims worldwide obey the Islamic injunction not to display pictures of any animal or human, anything with a “soul”, in their homes and mosques, never mind pictures of the prophet. This element of Sharia, or Islamic law, has become a hallmark of their faith, even though it does not appear in the Koran.

It is in the Hadith — the collection of sayings of the Prophet — that pictures of living creatures are forbidden. The Arab word used for pictures is surah, which can mean anything from a two-dimensional drawing to a three-dimensional figure or statue.

Hadith-Bukhari 5:338 has Abu Talha, a companion of the Prophet, quoting him as saying: “Angels do not enter a house in which there is a dog or a picture.” The scripture records that he meant the images of creatures that have souls.

Imam Ibrahim Mogra, a leading Islamic scholar and senior member of the Muslim Council, said: “To depict the Prophet is unacceptable. To depict him as a terrorist is even more painful. It is extremely sad that they have not yet realised this.

“They should have realised from the response to what the Danish paper did that this was not the right thing to do . . . I do not see how the idea of freedom of speech and freedom of expression gives people the licence to cause this kind of hurt to more than a billion people around the world.

“Muhammad is a very, very special person. To us he is more than our parents are. We can imagine, if someone was to make a mockery of our parents in this manner, how hurt we would be. Imagine that hurt, multiplied a million times.”

He said that the teaching on this issue was strict and there were other verses in the Hadith that also supported the prohibition, although exceptions are made to the ban on dogs. For example, a blind man would be permitted a dog, as would a family living on a crime-ridden estate.

There are four sources of Sharia. The Koran is the first, and the second is the Sunna or Hadith, the collection of sayings of the Prophet. The third source is analogy, so where a new difficulty arises, as with scratchcards, the injunction against gambling is extolled to prohibit their use. The fourth source is the “consensus of scholars”.

==============================

Timeline: the Muhammad cartoons (Times Online, 060203)

September 17, 2005: Politiken, a Danish newspaper, reports that Kaare Bluitgen, a writer, cannot find an illustrator for a book about the life of Muhammad, because artists fear reprisals from Islamic extremists

September 30: In response, Jyllands-Posten, a right of centre newspaper, asks artists to draw Muhammad as they imagine him and publishes 12 cartoons of the prophet

October 8/9: Imams in Copenhagen protest. “This type of democracy is worthless for Muslims,” says Imam Raed Hlayhel. “The article has insulted every Muslim in the world. We demand an apology!”

October 14: Up to 5,000 people stage a protest outside the offices of Jyllands-Posten.

October 19: Ambassadors from ten Muslim countries request a meeting with Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, over the cartoons. He refuses to meet them

October 27: 11 Muslim groups report Jyllands-Posten to the Danish police for “blasphemy and racial discrimination”

November-December: A delegation from Danish Islamic groups visit the Middle East to spread publicity about the cartoons. Rumours circulate and additional images, not originally published in Jyllands-Posten, are attributed to the newspaper

November 14: Jamaat-e-Islami, a Pakistan-based group, protests in Islamabad

January 10, 2006: Cartoons reprinted by Magazinet, a Norwegian Christian newspaper

January 26: Saudi Arabia recalls its ambassador and initiates boycott of Danish goods

January 27: Thousands denounce the cartoons during Friday prayers in Iraq

January 28: The Denmark-based Arla Dairy Group places adverts in Middle Eastern newspapers to try to stop boycott of its produce

January 29: Jyllands-Posten prints a statement in Arabic saying the drawings were published in line with freedom of expression and not a campaign against Islam. Palestinians burn Danish flags and Libya announces it will close its embassy in Denmark. Danes told to be vigilant in the Middle East

January 30: EU says it will take World Trade Organisation action if the boycott persists. Several Islamic groups, including Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, call for worldwide boycott of Danish products. Masked gunmen in storm EU office in Gaza

January 31: Danish imams accept statements from Jyllands-Posten and the Prime Minister, and say are surprised at the extent of the protests. Jyllands-Posten evacuates offices after bomb threat. Saudi hospitals refuse to buy Danish insulin

February 1: Newspapers in Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands publish one or more of the cartoons. France Soir publishes all 12 and a new cartoon of its own. The editor is fired by the newspaper’s French-Egyptian owner. Syria withdraws ambassador to Denmark

February 2: Gunmen repeat protests in Gaza. Mr Rasmussen appears on Al-Arabiya, a Saudi news network, to try and calm situation. The Jordanian newspaper Al-Shihan prints the drawings. Peter Mandelson, the EU Trade Commissioner, says the boycott must end

February 3: The International Association of Muslim Scholars calls for a “day of anger” across the world. Extremists in Indonesia storm the Danish Embassy in Jakarta and a protest is planned outside the embassy in London. El Pais, Spain’s leading newspaper, reprints a drawing from Le Monde, which shows the prophet made of words saying: “I must not draw Muhummad”.

==============================

Leaders Appeal for Calm in Muslim Cartoon Protests (Foxnews, 060204)

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Rage against caricatures of Islam’s revered prophet poured out across the Muslim world Saturday, with aggrieved believers calling for executions, storming European buildings and setting European flags afire.

Hundreds of Syrian demonstrators have stormed the Danish Embassy in Damascus, and they’ve set fire to the building.

The building that’s been set on fire in the Syrian capital also houses the embassies of Chile and Sweden.

Protesters have been staging sit-ins outside the embassy almost daily since the uproar over the drawings broke out last week.

Witnesses say today’s protest started peacefully, but that as anger escalated, protesters broke through police barriers and torched the building.

In Gaza City, demonstrators hurled stones at a European Commission building and stormed a German cultural center, smashing windows and doors. Protesters also burned German and Danish flags and called for a boycott of Danish products.

In the West Bank town of Hebron, about 50 Palestinians marched to the headquarters of the international observer mission there, burned a Danish flag and demanded a boycott of Danish goods.

“We will redeem our prophet, Muhammad, with our blood!” they chanted.

The cartoons, first printed in a Danish newspaper in September and then republished in European publications this week, have touched a raw nerve in part because Islamic law is interpreted to forbid any depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. Aggravating the affront was a caricature of Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse, among other provocative images.

Muslims in Europe have reacted less passionately than their counterparts in the Mideast and Southeast Asia, but anger swelled there, too, on Saturday, with demonstrators clashing with police in Copenhagen and gathering outside the Danish Embassy in London.

The Vatican deplored the violence but said certain forms of criticism represented an “unacceptable provocation.”

“The right to freedom of thought and expression ... cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers,” the Vatican said in its first statement on the controversy.

In Munich, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she understood Muslims’ hurt, but she denounced violent reactions.

“I can understand that religious feelings of Muslims have been injured and violated,” Merkel said at an international security conference. “But I also have to make clear that I feel it is unacceptable to see this as legitimizing the use of violence.”

Hundreds of Palestinians protested in the occupied territories, and the leader of the Islamic militant group Hamas, which recently swept parliamentary elections there, told Italian daily Il Giornale on Saturday that the cartoons should be punished by death.

“We should have killed all those who offend the Prophet and instead here we are, protesting peacefully,” said a top group leader, Mahmoud Zahar.

Masked gunmen affiliated with the Fatah Party called on the Palestinian Authority and Muslim nations to recall their diplomatic missions from Denmark until that nation’s government apologizes.

The Danish government has tried to contain the damage. Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller has called Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and said the Danish government “cannot accept an assault against Islam,” according to Abbas’ office.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said his government could not apologize on behalf of a newspaper, but he personally would never depict religious figures “in a way that could offend other people.”

Many Muslims consider the Danish government’s reaction inadequate.

At least 500 Israeli Arabs gathered peacefully in Nazareth for the first protest against the caricatures on Israeli soil.

In Malaysia, prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said the publication of the cartoons showed a “blatant disregard for Islamic sensitivities” but urged citizens to stay calm.

“Let the perpetrators of the insult see the gravity of their own mistakes which only they themselves can and should correct,” he said.

In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono denounced the cartoons as insensitive.

About 500 people rallied Saturday south of Baghdad, Iraq, some carrying banners urging “honest people all over the world to condemn this act” and demanding an EU apology. The protest was organized by followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has been among the most outspoken Iraqi clerics on the issue.

Angry demonstrators rallied in Denmark and Britain on Saturday, signaling a ratcheting up of tensions among European Muslims.

Although many of Denmark’s 200,000 Muslims were deeply offended by the cartoons, mass demonstrations have not broken out.

But in Copenhagen, young Muslims clashed briefly with police after they were stopped from boarding a train to go to a demonstration north of the Danish capital. Some of the roughly 300 demonstrators threw rocks and bottles at police but no one was injured, officials said.

In London, several hundred demonstrators gathered under heavy police security outside Denmark’s embassy, shouting slogans to protest the publication of the drawings.

==============================

Abu Hamza jailed for seven years for inciting murder (Times Online, 060207)

Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical Muslim cleric whose fiery rhetoric has become synonymous with Islamist extremism in Britain, was jailed for seven years today after being found guilty of inciting his followers to kill non-believers.

The Egyptian-born Abu Hamza, 47, was convicted of 11 of 15 charges of using his influence as a spiritual leader of the Muslim community in North London to become, in the words of the prosecution, a recruiting sergeant for terrorism. His lawyer said that he would appeal against the conviction.

After four days of deliberations at the end of a three-week trial, a jury of seven men and five women at the Old Bailey found Abu Hamza guilty of six of the nine most serious charges - which relate to soliciting others to murder Jews and non-Muslims.

Abu Hamza, whose real name is Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, was convicted of three out of four charges of using threatening words or behaviour to stir up racial hatred. He was also found guilty of possessing of video and audio recordings which he intended to distribute to foment racial hatred.

He was also convicted on a final charge, under section 58 of the Terrorism Act, of possessing a document, the Encyclopaedia Of Afghani Jihad, which was described as a manual for terrorism. It included a dedication to Osama bin Laden and a passage suggesting a list of potential targets including skyscrapers, the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben.

He was jailed for seven years on the six charges of incitement to murder. The remaining sentences - of 21 months for threatening words and behaviour, three years for the distribution of the tapes and three-and-a-half years for possession of the encyclopaedia - will all run concurrently.

He has already served one and a half years in prison on remand, and could in theory be freed in two years. He intends to appeal against what he believes to be a politically motivated conviction.

But he is also wanted by the United States on charges of trying to set up a “terrorist training camp” in the state of Oregon. Those proceedings are expected to be stayed by any appeal.

Passing sentence, Mr Justice Hughes made it clear that Abu Hamza’s opinions were not representative of the Muslim faith. “Whether you think you do or not I don’t know but it is perfectly plain to me that you do not,” he said.

“You spoke with considerable authority and apparent learning, to an audience who treated you as entitled and qualified by your learning to tell them what their Islamic duty was.

“You spoke also with great anger. It was directed at virtually every country and at a very large number of people whom you labelled as less than true believers.

“You are entitled to your views and in this country you are entitled to express them, but only up to the point where you incite murder or use language calculated to incite racial hatred. That, however, is what you did.

“You used your authority to legitimise anger and to lead your audiences to believe that it gave rise to a duty to murder. No-one can say now what damage your words may have caused . No-one can say whether audiences acted on your words. The potential for both direct and indirect damage is simply incalculable.

“You helped to create an atmosphere in which to kill has become regarded by some as not only a legitimate course of action but also a moral and religious duty in pursuit of perceived injustice.”

He has already served one and a half years in prison on remand, and could in theory be freed in two years. He intends to appeal against what he believes to be a politically motivated conviction.

But he is also wanted by the United States on charges of trying to set up a “terrorist training camp” in the state of Oregon. Those proceedings have been stayed by Abu Hamza’s appeal although under present law he could not in any case be extradited until his release from jail in Britain.

“You spoke with considerable authority and apparent learning, to an audience who treated you as entitled and qualified by your learning to tell them what their Islamic duty was.

“You spoke also with great anger. It was directed at virtually every country and at a very large number of people whom you labelled as less than true believers.

“You helped to create an atmosphere in which to kill has become regarded by some as not only a legitimate course of action but also a moral and religious duty in pursuit of perceived injustice.”

The judge said that he would take Abu Hamza’s previously good character into account and noted that the offences occurred before the “international temperature was raised” by the events of September 11, 2001. But he said that much of the evidence Abu Hamza gave during his period in the witness box was evasive.

He said: “The picture which is to be gathered from the video recordings of you at the time when you delivered these speeches is very different from the picture that you presented of yourself in the witness box.”

Abu Hamza looked straight at the judge as sentence was passed, and showed no reaction as he was led away to the holding cell below the court.

The court heard how in his sermons to audiences at the Finsbury Park mosque, North London, and in Luton, Blackburn and Whitechapel, East London, Abu Hamza preached “terrorism, homicidal violence and hatred”.

The mosque where he presided as imam for six years until 2002 has been linked to a string of terrorist suspects, including Zacarias Moussaoui, a September 11 plotter, and Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”.

When police raided the mosque in January 2003, they found an array of terrorist paraphernalia, including nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) protective suits, blank firing weapons, a stun gun and a CS canister.

Abu Hamza continued to preach in the street outside the mosque every Friday until his arrest in August 2004. David Perry, prosecuting, said that the cleric used “the most dangerous weapons available - a great religion, Islam, his position as a civic leader and the power of words, his own words.”

Nine of Abu Hamza’s speeches were played to the jury during the trial - eight on video and one audio tape. Jurors were given nearly 600 A4 pages of transcripts to follow his frequently vitriolic sermons.

Mr Perry said: “Through his threatening, abusive and insulting words, he preached hatred against Jews as a racial and ethnic group - not limited to Zionist Jews, or Jews in Israel, if that would not be bad enough. He preached hatred unqualified of the Jews.”

Abu Hamza, who lost an eye and both arms in a mysterious incident abroad - he claims he was clearing landmines in Afghanistan - said that the case against him was politically motivated.

He argued that police had first arrested him in 1999 and taken away hundreds of tapes and the 11-volume encyclopaedia. He said that the tapes’ contents were very similar to those which formed the bulk of the prosecution’s case seven years later.

He alleged that he had held secret meetings with MI5 and Special Branch at which he was granted freedom to speech in return for keeping bloodshed off British soil. He also said that none of his sermons was intended to exhort his followers to commit acts of violence in Britain.

But those arguments were rejected by jurors who convicted him unanimously on the majority of the charges.

Shortly after sentencing, Muddassar Arani, who acted for Abu Hamza, said that he would be appealing against the convictions.

She described her client as a “prisoner of faith” and the victim of a campaign of vilification in the media. She said that the defence had been prevented from discussing the wider issues of Islam in the trial which Abu Hamza considered central to the case.

In a statement outside court, she said: “Abu Hamza considers himself to be a prisoner of faith. He is subject to slow martyrdom.

“The verdict has not been without hope, despite the massive media campaign against him.”

Ms Arani said that her client had been acquitted on several counts: “We cannot understand why the jury found him guilty of possession of the encyclopaedia when police returned it back to him in 1999.

“Unfortunately, the jury were not able to hear all of our evidence. We were precluded from presenting various evidence before the jury relating to world conflict where Muslim people have been oppressed around the world.”

==============================

Will Europe become Eurabia? (townhall.com, 060210)

by Mona Charen

“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” — Arnold Toynbee

As Danish embassies and European Union offices smolder in Beirut, Damascus, Gaza and Tehran — the result of a junior varsity jihad — the time could not be more apt for Bruce Bawer’s “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” due out at the end of this month. Bawer is a gay American with a flair for languages who moved to Europe in 1999 to escape what he perceived to be the narrow-mindedness of the Christian right in America.

The move changed him. It also afforded a front row seat at the clash of civilizations now flaring into flames. If American Christian conservatives seemed intolerant to Bawer, they were cream puffs in comparison with the Islamofascists who are multiplying in Europe. Theo van Gogh produced a film about the mistreatment of women in the Islamic community and was assassinated by an unrepentant Islamist who defiantly told the dead man’s mother, “I cannot feel for you because I believe you are an infidel.” A rumor swept the Muslim world that American soldiers in Guantanamo flushed the Koran down a toilet, and violence erupted worldwide. European newspapers published cartoons insulting to Mohammad, and death threats poured in, embassies were set ablaze, and red-faced Muslims now vow jihad throughout the world.

The Muslim world clearly is not composed solely of murderous fanatics — but only the most self-deluded would deny that the umma is under the sway of its most radical, medieval and intolerant members. It is they who have the wind at their backs at this moment of history. Forty percent of Britain’s Muslims hold a favorable view of Osama bin Laden. Hopeful Westerners continue to call for moderate Muslims to speak up. But, as Bawer asks, “[W]here were the moderate Muslims? British Muslims seemed sincerely to deplore the London attacks. But though hundreds of thousands of them had marched in protest against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, 7/7 occasioned no sizable Muslim protest demonstration against Islamic terror . . . if that silent majority existed at all, it had to be one of the most silent majorities ever. It had remained silent after 9/11, Madrid, Beslan, and van Gogh’s murder.”

Europe is a beacon for Arab and Muslim immigrants, who flock to the freedom, comfort and convenience available in Western nations. There is no corresponding emigration from Europe to the Islamic world. Immigrants seek a better life, which is abundantly available, particularly in light of Europe’s generous welfare benefits. But Europe does not assimilate its Muslim immigrants and does not wish to. Norway refers to its Muslim population as the “colorful community” and prides itself on keeping its “colorful” members separate from mainstream Norwegian society (in the name of multiculturalism, of course). But if a Muslim were to attempt to become an ordinary Norwegian (or Swede or Swiss or Frenchman), he would be met with rigid resistance. Multicultural cant thus covers a multitude of ethnocentric sins.

Many Muslim immigrants, Bawer argues, resist absorption as well, regarding Western society as fundamentally corrupt and unworthy. They want to live in Europe and reap the benefit of the civilization Christianity, rationalism and enlightenment have created — but they despise it and hope to destroy it.

Into this boiling cauldron (recall the October 2005 riots in France) insert demography. Muslim families have multiple children, and European families are failing to have babies at even replacement levels. Historian Bernard Lewis has predicted that Europe will be majority Muslim by the end of this century “at the very latest.” In Stockholm, Muslim teenagers can be seen wearing a T-shirt that says “2030 — then we take over.”

The heart of Bawer’s book is not to replow familiar demographic ground, but to probe the political, moral and psychological aspects of Europe’s response to this existential threat. The depressing answer, all too often, is that they capitulate. Bawer recounts how Amsterdam police, responding to a complaint by Muslims, dismantled a street mural erected on the site of van Gogh’s murder that said “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Some leftist academics in Norway have suggested establishing sharia courts for Muslim citizens. Britain’s Channel 4 canceled a documentary about abuse of girls in the Muslim community because the police cautioned that it might “increase community tension.”

That self-censorship was exactly what the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was attempting to expose with its cartoons. That impulse — to assert the value of free speech despite threats and violence — is the best evidence to surface in quite some time that there is some life spirit left in sagging old Europe.

==============================

Death toll rises to 38 in Pakistani town rocked by sectarian violence (National Post, 060210)

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Shiites and Sunnis battled each other with rockets and gunfire in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, raising the death toll from two days of Muslim sectarian violence to 38, an official said.

The latest fighting in the town of Hangu killed three Shiites and at least one Sunni, said the town’s top administrator, Ghani ur-Rahman. The violence began Thursday when a suicide bomber tore through a procession of minority Shiites observing Ashoura, their most important religious holiday. Shiites sought revenge, burning shops and cars while fighting with Sunnis in the area, about 100 kilometres south of Peshawar.

The bombing and the ensuing riot killed 28 people, including five who died from injuries overnight, said ur-Rahman. Four more died in a shooting Thursday on a minibus on the outskirts of Hangu, he said.

Hangu’s police chief, Ayub Khan, said investigators found the remains of the suspected suicide bomber. He said the attacker was wearing Afghan shoes but that didn’t necessarily mean he was from neighbouring Afghanistan.

He also would not speculate on who might have bombed the Shiite procession.

The fighting continued late Thursday and Friday morning, with assailants in the mountains firing rockets into Hangu and Shiites shooting back, ur-Rahman said.

Khurshid Anwar, a prominent Shiite Muslim cleric, said he believed that Sunnis were shooting rockets because they were launched from area popular with Sunnis.

“Those who fired rockets and other weapons wanted to target our people, our homes,” he said.

Most shops in the main Hangu bazaar were burned by mobs Thursday, and other small markets in the area were closed Friday. Troops and police were patrolling in the town to prevent any further violence, ur-Rahman said.

Violence has erupted in the past during Ashoura, which marks the seventh-century death of Imam Hussain, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Hussain’s death in a battle fuelled a rivalry between Shiites and Sunnis over who should succeed the prophet.

The two sects generally live in peace together in Pakistan, but extremists on both sides, who regard the other sect as heretical, often launch attacks. Last March, 46 died in a bombing of a Shiite shrine in the southwestern town of Fatehpur.

Previous attacks have been blamed on Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an al-Qaida-linked Sunni militant group. The organization was banned by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in August 2001 to curb extremism and militancy.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi also has been accused in the 2002 kidnapping and beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl. Most of the group’s top leaders and associates have been arrested in the past three years.

In the southern city of Karachi, prominent Shiite leader Allama Hasan Turabi said the Hangu incident happened because the government has been too lenient on local terrorism.

“The government always shrugged its shoulders by terming every bomb explosion as a suicide bombing so they can get out of the lengthy process of investigation,” Turabi said. “There is a need to reach the real masterminds behind these incidents.”

In the capital, Islamabad, about 300 Shiites staged a rally condemning the Hangu bombing and criticizing the government for not providing adequate security to prevent the attack.

==============================

All right, I insulted Americans – but they are not planning to behead me (Times Online, 060209)

But as the cartoon saga has turned to tragedy, with people dying and embassies burning, satire and irony would now be out of place. What is more appropriate is a serious comparison between the Muslim and American fundamentalists’ intolerance of other people’s ideas. This comparison may seem far-fetched but it brings out three distinctions that are critical in managing relations between Islamic fundamentalism and the modern world.

The first, very obvious, distinction is between civility and legality, between comment or behaviour that is discourteous, inconsiderate or unpleasant and behaviour which is, or should be, unlawful. Despite the hypersensitivity of the Americans who showered me with linguistic ordure, nobody would dream of suggesting that insulting America and its President should be banned. These 300 right-wing nuts wanted me sacked for my ignorance; they wanted The Times used as toilet paper, but none of them would suggest that I should be legally prevented from saying that President Bush was a fool.

How different from the paranoid religiosity of the Muslim fundamentalists who insist that “insulting religion” should not be a question of taste or of judgment, but a subject for criminal law. Yet this obvious distinction between what is offensive and what should be illegal is deliberately ignored by the Blair Government, which wants to make insulting religion a criminal offence.

The second, and related, distinction is between verbal abuse and physical violence. Returning to my self-selected sample of nutty Americans, none of them threatened me with physical harm, or suggested that such harm might be my just desert. How different from the violence of the Muslim rent-a-crowds whose banners portray their enemies beheaded. Yet this obvious distinction between verbal abuse and physical violence is deliberately overlooked by British police, who have refused to prosecute Muslim demonstrators threatening their enemies with hideous violence. Meanwhile, British judges have sentenced Abu Hamza, convicted for inciting multiple murders, to just seven years. Presumably this means that religiously motivated murder is less serious in the eyes of our learned judges than such offences as drug-dealing or fraud.

This brings me to the third and most important distinction that Americans seem to understand much better than we in Europe. This is the distinction between religion and other beliefs. Why should religions be entitled to legal protection from “insults” and “attacks”? Would anyone suggest that communists and fascists or, for that matter, Tories and social democrats, should be protected from insults? Yet the first two of these movements were all-embracing secular religions and their believers, who numbered in the hundreds of millions, believed in them every bit as passionately as Christians, Jews and Muslims believe in their religions.

Far from commanding any special respect or protection from the State, religions must be exposed to relentless criticism, like all non-rational traditions and beliefs. Some religions will survive this contest between tradition and modernity, between reason and revelation, as Christianity, Judaism and Islam have done for centuries. Others, such as Marxism and Scientology, will fall by the wayside. In America, the Constitution, with its prohibition against the establishment of any state religion and its absolute defence of free speech, demands a robust competition between faith and reason and among the religions themselves. And in the end, as America’s surprising piety clearly shows, it is not just society but also religion that emerges stronger from the refiner’s fire of competition, criticism and even insult.

==============================

The Cartoon Jihad: The Muslim Brotherhood’s project for dominating the West. (Weekly Standard, 060213)

IT IS NOW ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that the recent murderous protests over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper last September were anything but spontaneous. The actions of Islamist agitators and financiers have deliberately drummed up rage among far-flung extremists otherwise ignorant of the Danish press. The usual suspects—the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran—have profited from the spread of the disorders, and even the likes of tiny Kuwait has reportedly offered funds to spur demonstrations throughout France. More important, however, and perhaps less widely understood, the cartoon jihad is tailor-made to advance the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term worldwide strategy for establishing Islamic supremacy in the West.

As first reported by the Italian terrorism expert Lorenzo Vidino on the Counterterrorism Blog, one of Denmark’s leading Islamists, Imam Ahmed Abu-Laban, led a delegation late last year to visit influential figures in the Muslim world. He took with him a dossier of cartoons, both those that had been published and others, much more offensive, of dubious provenance. One place he took his road show was Qatar, where he briefed Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a star of Al Jazeera.

Even after the riots began, Abu-Laban continued his meddling. On February 4, he told Islamonline.net that Danish demonstrators were going to burn Korans in the streets of Copenhagen, a falsehood that nevertheless added fuel to the fire.

Abu-Laban’s extremist connections are well established. A Palestinian who is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, he was expelled from the United Arab Emirates in 1984 for his fiery sermons and denunciations of local leaders. According to Vidino, he served as translator and assistant to Talaal Fouad Qassimy, top leader of the Egyptian terrorist group Gamaa Islamiya, in the mid-1990s. During the Iraq war, he called the Danish prime minister “an American puppet.” In August, he told the Washington Post that the Danes “have made immigrants pay the price. Muslims have become the scapegoat. They think we will undermine their culture and their values.”

Abu-Laban’s labors were not in vain, and everywhere the loudest protests have come from the Muslim Brotherhood. On February 3 in Paris, Larbi Kechat, an imam linked to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, said, “The most abject terrorism is the symbolic kind, which spreads unlimited violence.” Meanwhile, in Qatar, al-Qaradawi was calling for an “international day of anger for God and his prophet,” describing the cartoonists as “blasphemers” and Europeans as “cowards.” Acknowledging the latter’s role, the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, in London, stated on February 8, “The issue disappeared from the radar until Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the mufti of Al Jazeera TV, seized upon it and called for Muslims worldwide to protest.”

Finally, according to the Moroccan daily Le Matin, the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim American Society (MAS), called on Muslims everywhere to use their economic power to punish European countries where the cartoons were published. After French and German newspapers reprinted the controversial cartoons, MAS executive director Mahdi Bray commented, “Denmark has already paid an economic price for disrespecting Islam. If France and Germany want to be next, then so beit.”

THAT THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD would seek to inflame this controversy makes perfect sense, given the organization’s Islamist philosophy and past links to al Qaeda. What may not be sufficiently appreciated, however, is the extent of the Brotherhood’s deliberate planning for an Islamist takeover of the West—and how neatly the cartoon jihad conforms to its strategy.

A new book published by Le Seuil in Paris in October may further Western understanding of this reality. Written by the Swiss investigative reporter Sylvain Besson and not yet available in English, it publicizes the discovery and contents of a Muslim Brotherhood strategy document entitled “The Project,” hitherto little known outside the highest counterterrorism circles.

Besson’s book, La conquête de l’Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The Islamists’ Secret Project), recounts how, in November 2001, Swiss authorities acting on a special request from the White House entered the villa of a man named Yusuf Nada in Campione, a small Italian enclave on the eastern shore of Lake Lugano in Switzerland. Nada was the treasurer of the Al Taqwa bank, which allegedly funneled money to al Qaeda. In the course of their search of Nada’s house, investigators stumbled onto “The Project,” an unsigned, 14-page document dated December 1, 1982.

One of the few Western officials to have studied the document before the publication of Besson’s book is Juan Zarate, named White House counterterrorism czar in May 2005 and before that assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing. Zarate calls “The Project” the Muslim Brotherhood’s master

plan for “spreading their political ideology,” which in practice involves systematic support for radical Islam. Zarate told Besson, “The Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us not because it deals with philosophical or ideological ideas but because it defends the use of violence against civilians.”

“The Project” is a roadmap for achieving the installation of Islamic regimes in the West via propaganda, preaching, and, if necessary, war. It’s the same idea expressed by Sheikh Qaradawi in 1995 when he said, “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not by the sword but by our Dawa [proselytizing].”

Thus, “The Project” calls for “putting in place a watchdog system for monitoring the [Western] media to warn all Muslims of the dangers and international plots fomented against them.” Another long-term effort is to “put in place [among Muslims in the West] a parallel society where the group is above the individual, godly authority above human liberty, and the holy scripture above the laws.”

A European secret service agent interviewed by Besson explains that “the project is going to be a real danger in ten years: We’ll see the emergence of a parallel system, the creation of ‘Muslim Parliaments.’ Then the slow destruction of our institutions will begin.”

One point emphasized in “The Project” is that Muslims must constantly work to support Islamic Dawa and all the groups around the globe engaged in jihad. Also vital is to “keep the Ummah [the Muslim community] in a jihad frame of mind” and—no surprise here—”to breed a feeling of resentment towards the Jews and refuse any form of coexistence with them.” (On February 2, At-Tajdid, a Moroccan Islamist daily close to the Brotherhood, explained to its readers that the Danish cartoons were “a Zionist provocation aimed at reviving the conflict between the West and the Muslim nation.”)

By inflaming a controversy such as the current one, the Muslim Brotherhood attempts to widen the rift between the West and Islam. It specifically targets Muslim communities living in the West, aiming to radicalize their moderate elements by continually pointing out the supposed “Islamophobia” all around them. Right on cue, the Saudi daily Al Watan reports that the Council of Islamic Countries decided in December to create a worldwide Islamophobia watchdog organization that will lobby for the adoption of “anti-Islamophobia” laws, as well as promoting a common position against states or organizations it sees as attacking Islam.

Under the scheme outlined in “The Project,” the Muslim Brotherhood would seek to become the indispensable interlocutor of Western governments on issues relating not only to Islam but also to international issues touching the Islamic world, notably the Israeli-Arab conflict, the war in Iraq, and even the war on terror.

The same approach turns up in Qaradawi’s 1990 book Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase. Qaradawi sees the presence of large Muslim populations in the West as a major opportunity. For him, “the Islamic presence” in the West is necessary “to defend the interests of the Muslim Nation and the land of Islam against the hostility and disinformation of anti-Islamic movements.” He actually calls on Western Muslim communities to reform their host countries.

The cartoon jihad has been a godsend for Islamists throughout the world. For the past year, Muslim lobbies in Europe have been pushing for the adoption of blasphemy laws by the United Nations, the European Union, and the nations of Europe. Predictably, Qaradawi endorsed this cause in his sermon of February 3 (translated and posted on the web by the Middle East Media Research Institute): “The governments must be pressured to demand that the U.N. adopt a clear resolution or law that categorically prohibits affronts to prophets.” Like the cartoon jihad, it is a ploy straight out of the Muslim Brotherhood playbook—and, most worryingly, a move likely to have strong appeal to Muslim moderates.

Olivier Guitta is a foreign affairs consultant based in Washington, D.C.

==============================

Selling Out Moderate Islam: Washington’s misbegotten campaign to be loved in the Middle East. (Weekly Standard, 060213)

THE DANISH CARTOONS of the Prophet Muhammad, like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against the British author Salman Rushdie and those who helped publish his Satanic Verses, have revealed more disturbing things about the West than they have about Muslims in Europe and the Middle East. With Rushdie, Westerners deplored the Iranian cleric’s death warrant but often temporized their condemnation by suggesting that the then hard-left author had been, as the former, redoubtable New York Times correspondent Kennett Love once put it, “mean to Islam.” (Few prominent Muslim clerics and intellectuals could bring themselves to make an unqualified condemnation of Khomeini’s actions; an enormous number of Muslim clerics, intellectuals, and scholars chose to remain quiet, and in their silence there was surely often both fear and assent.)

With Denmark, the initial response of the Bush administration aligned America more with those Muslims who felt the cartoons impugned their sacred messenger than with the European press that had printed the caricatures. Sean McCormack, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, declared, “Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief.” Former President Clinton echoed this sentiment while visiting the Persian Gulf emirate Qatar: “None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions. . . . There was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark, . . . these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam.” Senator John Kerry, too, took umbrage: “These and other inflammatory images

deserve our scorn, just as the violence against embassies and military installations are an unacceptable and intolerable form of protest.”

Former Democratic congressman Tim Roemer, a member of the 9/11 Commission, which was deeply worried about the woeful image of the United States in the Muslim world, articulated what many Democrats and Republicans were surely thinking but not saying: “We have done precious little to effectively communicate to the hearts and minds and win that long-term war. . . . This seems to be an opportunity to condemn the cartoons and communicate directly with the Muslim people on a host of issues.” And across the Atlantic, French President Jacques Chirac, who still hasn’t recovered from Muslim French youth rioting last fall, gave the most “sensitive” European response: “Anything liable to offend the beliefs of others, particularly religious beliefs, must be avoided.”

Beyond the question of whether any of these men really means what he says—it’s not hard to imagine Clinton, Kerry, the Anglophone Chirac, or McCormack enjoying Monty Python’s relentlessly mocking, anti-Christian romps Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life—they all echo a common view about Muslim sentiments and Western policy since 9/11, and especially since the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. To wit: We need to encourage interfaith dialogue, we need to show that the West, particularly America, is not opposed to Islam, and we need to solve, or at least play down, points of friction between the West and the Islamic world. (Until the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, this view inevitably underscored progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as indispensable to better relations.)

ANTI-AMERICANISM is the great bugaboo for these folks, and the more wonkish among them often have at their finger-tips polling data showing what a sorry state the United States is in among Muslims worldwide. A good, highly polemical example of this mindset is The Next Attack by Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon, former counterterrorist officials in the Clinton administration. In their book, Benjamin and Simon zealously use polls, and the opinions of unnamed American and European intelligence officials, to argue that the Bush administration is losing the war against Islamic holy warriors.

However well intended, this empathetic view is seriously wrong-headed. It camouflages what is really at stake in Denmark and the rest of Europe with these cartoons. This type of hearts-and-minds strategy will inevitably backfire, compromising the very Muslims that this administration and liberal Democrats would most like to see advance in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.

For better or worse, expatriate and foreign-educated Middle Easterners have helped to shape decisively the secular and religious cultures that have dominated their homelands since World War II. Many of the best and brightest of the Middle East now live abroad. Many have sought greater freedom of expression and personal liberty in the West. Is it Presidents Clinton and Chirac’s desire that Muslim satirists never develop because their work would be insensitive to less irreverent Muslims? In its heyday, Islamic civilization contained many heterodox and heretical strains. In particular, Shiism, always a vehicle for minority protest, was rich in movements and cultural experimentation that sometimes electrified and horrified the Sunni Muslim world.

It is possible that Muslims living outside the Middle East will have a substantial role to play in revivifying Islamic civilization—in shedding some light on the convulsive path that one may still hope will lead from dysfunctional dictatorship through bin Ladenism to more peacefully self-critical, democratic societies. If Westerners appease Muslims who countenance violent intimidation, we are doing a terrible injustice to the liberal and progressive Muslims among us, who really would like to live in lands where people can say about the Prophet Muhammad what they have said about Jesus, Mary, and Moses. Among the Muslims of the United States and Europe, if not in the Middle East, there are many who have Western cultural sentiments and wit. The irreverent, religiously skeptical Western elite has Muslim members and Middle Eastern counterparts of equal intelligence and similar tastes. Islamic civilization may yet produce its Edward Gibbon, a sincere religious voyager who ends up scrutinizing the foundations of his civilization with a skeptical, cynical, and, at times, profoundly unfair irreligious eye. It would appear that if President Clinton had his way, a Muslim Gibbon would not be welcome in the United States.

The fate of European Muslims is now openly in play. The militant Muslims of Europe who do not want their brethren to embrace the continent’s liberal, thoroughly secular culture helped fuel this controversy by emailing and faxing the offending cartoons to their spiritual allies in the Middle East. Most European Muslims, like their non-Muslim compatriots, didn’t notice and probably would not have cared about these caricatures, if it had not been for the activist imams in their midst.

AS IMPORTANT, the governments of the region also took sides. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted, somewhat tardily, the Syrian and Iranian regimes are trying to exploit this event for all that it’s worth. Damascus and Tehran, more closely allied than ever before, are under pressure from the West for their terrorist and nuclear ambitions, respectively. Both have responded by inciting demonstrations in Lebanon and Syria. It is a bizarre spectacle to observe the heretical Shiite-Alawite Baathist regime in Damascus—which has in the past been on the cutting edge of anti-Islamic pan-Arab nationalist propaganda and slaughtering thousands in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood—now defend the Prophet Muhammad from Danish despoliation.

Tehran has probably also been behind the demonstrations in Iraq. And the government-controlled media throughout the region, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have not been helpful. As the French scholar Olivier Roy acutely noted in Le Monde, Europe is now in the cross hairs of many Middle Eastern governments for its more activist role in the region since the invasion of Iraq. The French, British, and Germans have taken the lead in trying to thwart Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. France has sided with the United States against Syria in Lebanon. Most of Europe under the umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is now in Afghanistan, increasingly in combat roles against Taliban insurgents and the holy warriors of al Qaeda. And however timidly, Europe has joined the United States in calling for more open political systems in the Muslim Middle East. Democracy is an ugly word to most of the region’s rulers. With official encouragement, anti-Europeanism is bound to rise throughout the area. Muslim autocrats, in conjunction with European and Middle Eastern Muslim militants, are likely to interfere increasingly in Europe’s internal affairs to create fear and a more hesitant European community.

And the controversy over the Danish cartoons could conceivably betray the most important, though least remembered, player in this controversy: the average Muslim in the Middle East. Far more than most Middle Eastern Muslims and politically correct Western scholars of the region and Islam would like to admit, Western standards for individual liberty, curiosity, personal integrity, scholarship, and the political relations among men have become the defining benchmarks for Muslims everywhere, however resented or admired. If our standards collapse and give way to fear, theirs in the long-term have no chance whatsoever. The psychology of victimization—surely one of the worst gifts the Western anti-imperialist left has given the Muslim world—can only be made worse by Westerners who treat Muslims like children unable to compete and to defend their religion.

In the Middle Ages, Christian theologians said vastly worse things about the Prophet Muhammad than the Danish cartoons implied. Back then, Muslims cognizant of what the Christians were writing usually took it in stride, not too perturbed by the ruminations and calumnies of a superseded faith. Non-Muslims living beyond the writ of Islamic law were not expected to respect a prophet not their own. That is, after all, what it means to be benighted infidels.

To be healthy, Muslim pride and political systems need to be based on real accomplishments, where the average believer can feel that he is participating in a larger, productive enterprise. (In the classical and medieval Islamic eras, when Muslim armies usually defeated their non-Muslim enemies, manifestly fulfilling the divine promise that Muslims were God’s chosen people, maintaining both collective and individual pride was much easier.) Western indulgence of supposed Muslim outrage over these cartoon insults to the prophet is pretty demeaning. It can only fortify the destructive, self-pitying impulses that all too often paralyze Muslim conversations and thought. (One of the more bizarre facts of the modern Middle East is to see the ruling Muslim elites of these countries—men and women of considerable influence and privilege—bemoan their powerlessness owing to the hidden, omnipresent, all-powerful machinations of the West, in particular, the United States.)

LURKING BEHIND much of the American response to the Danish cartoons is a difficult, probably impossible, and certainly unnecessary short-term foreign-policy goal: improving the image of the United States among Muslims. There is perhaps nothing more debilitating for the Bush administration than to believe that anti-anti-Americanism ought to be a key component in our overseas policy. Anti-Americanism in and of itself is not a catalyst for Islamic terrorism. There are many other, vastly more important things, both historical and personal, at work inside young Muslim men (and occasionally women) who decide to kill themselves and others to express their love of God and their hatred of the United States. Muslims who loathe these holy-war killers and want to see them extirpated from their societies can often themselves dislike, if not hate, the United States for a wide variety of reasons, some legitimate, some fictitious, some surreal. On the traditional side, Muhammad Sayyid at-Tantawi, the head of al-Azhar, Cairo’s famous seat of Sunni Islamic learning, and Egypt’s grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, would probably fall in this category. So would the European Muslim “modernist” Tariq Ramadan and many members of the Arabic Al Jazeera television network, who can marry a real hatred for bin Laden with an exuberant loathing of the United States. Iraq is chock-full of devoutly religious Shiite and Sunni Muslims who abhor suicide bombers and religious radicals in their midst yet harbor—have probably always harbored—distinctly unfriendly attitudes toward the United States.

A greater liking for the United States would not enhance the counterterrorist credentials of any of the above. In all probability, more pro-American commentary by these men would do just the opposite. The spreading of democracy in the Arab Middle East will naturally increase, not diminish, anti-Americanism. The only exceptions to this rule may be Iraq and Syria.

Syria is the least certain, since the Syrian wing of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood would probably do very well in any free election there. And the Brotherhood—unlike Iraq’s Shiite religious parties, which have seen an American-led war against a barbarous tyrant and the enormous rise in pro-American sentiment in Shiite Iran—is consistently and deeply anti-American, as is the Brotherhood mothership in Egypt. We should not, however, be alarmed by this phenomenon. There is just too much historical baggage for the United States to overcome it quickly or easily.

Before the Bush administration, Washington usually gave unquestioning support to dictatorships in the region. And there is the little fact, always near the surface in the Muslim world but often ignored or forgotten in the United States, of nearly 1,400 years of always-competitive, often intimately antagonistic and violent, history between Christendom and Islam. There is Israel, which even the most liberal and moderate Muslims often acutely dislike. (The Jewish state is, after all, an existential insult to both Arab nationalism and Islamic pride, even for Arab Muslims who view Arab nationalism as a cultural catastrophe and view the faith as irrelevant to their lives.) And there is the very tricky issue of women, which often animates progressive, traditional, and fundamentalist conversations.

America is seen by all as a force supporting change in the dynamics between Muslim men and women. Touching the well-ordered, paternalistic home, which Muslim men, poor or rich, have always seen as a bedrock of their identity, is unavoidably convulsive. There is no way to gauge how many recruits fundamentalists have made on the women’s issue since the Muslim Brotherhood formed in 1928. It’s a decent bet that it has been a more intimate and effective message than the fraternal appeals after 1948 to eject the Jews from Israel.

American foreign policy has long been in the odd position of trying to assuage Muslim anger at Israel by advancing the peace process even though a sober analysis should have told Washington’s diplomats that the fundamentalist set—the young men who are most susceptible to making the leap to suicidal holy war—did not see this process as progress. (The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections has perhaps made evident what should have been obvious for years. But the sclerotic peace-process establishment in Washington, second in influence only to the transatlanticists, may not see what Hamas has tried to write as pellucidly as possible.)

And Washington has consistently advanced, especially in the Bush administration after 9/11, the women’s agenda throughout the region, another sure-fire way of angering the young men who are most likely to transmute into jihadists. American foreign policy should never be tailored to appease the anger of Muslim men—though, if we are to be honest, this is in part what we’ve been trying to do in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation and in much of our Muslim-oriented public-diplomacy.

What is striking is that Washington has been doing the opposite of what it intends and doesn’t know it. Americans have acted, at least on the issues of Israel and women’s rights, as if the Muslim world had a liberal silent majority waiting to rise up and embrace these issues as we do. In all likelihood, this isn’t so. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, who has repeatedly saved us from potential disaster in Mesopotamia, wrote numerous fatwas after the fall of Saddam Hussein on the proper comportment and dress for female believers. In Western eyes, his conclusions would hardly be called liberal—yet his commitment to democracy in Iraq is real. (Concerning the cartoons, Sistani also strongly condemned the “misguided and oppressive” elements of the Muslim community whose actions “projected a distorted and dark image of the faith of justice, love, and brotherhood.” Though no fan of the caricatures, Sistani is giving a slap to Tehran and its agents in Iraq.)

AS WE SAW IN EGYPT, the West Bank, and Gaza, Sunni Muslim fundamentalists are going to be among those pushing seriously for democratic change in the Middle East, and will, as in the Palestinian territories, surely be among those who benefit most from the collapse of secular autocracy. A rise in anti-Americanism throughout the region seems inevitable. And it is healthy.

With dictatorship giving way to democracy, Muslims of various stripes will make their best case to their brethren on why they should be given a chance to govern. The religious radicalization of the Muslim body politic, which has gained ground under autocracy, will likely lose speed, if not rapidly reverse itself. Young men who feel most acutely the injustices of their societies and have the testosterone-driven determination to do something about it will have broader personal experience and a wider range of political options than to embrace just the mosque, where Muslims have usually found brave and tenacious popular heroes when they could find them nowhere else. Let us be frank: For every Said Eddin Ibrahim, a courageous secular liberal who has seen the inside of Egypt’s prisons, there are several religiously motivated dissidents who are willing to question President Mubarak’s rule. Few of the Arab liberals and progressives one meets at conferences appear to have the intestinal fortitude of fundamentalists who are similarly opposed to their regimes.

What we have seen happen in the Islamic Republic of Iran under clerical dictatorship—the conversion of the most anti-American holy-warrior society into the least anti-American, probably most pro-democratic culture in the region—will likely happen elsewhere but even more rapidly if Sunni fundamentalists are given a chance to gain power democratically and demonstrate to their fellow Muslims how their interpretation of the Holy Law and Islamic history will improve their lives.

Correctly understood, anti-Americanism when it accompanies the loosening of political controls in the Middle East is a sign that the status quo that gave us bin Ladenism and 9/11—the perverse marriage of autocracy and Islamic extremism—is coming apart. Under dictatorship, Muslims cannot evolve politically. They will not be able to confront the “baggage” that all Middle Eastern Muslims have with the West, especially the United States, and come to a livable consensus on how they are going to absorb Western ideas, influence, and money. Even in Iran, where the bankruptcy of a virulently anti-American clerical dictatorship has done wonders for the democratic ethic and the prestige of the United States, a functioning democracy is probably the only way the Iranian people will find a sustainable, peaceful modus vivendi with their complicated love-hate for America. It is democracy, not dictatorship, that can best take Muslims through the difficult religious reformation that is well under way among both Shiites and Sunnis. (Correctly understood, bin Laden is an ugly expression of protest against the region’s rot.)

This is all about internal Muslim evolution, about coming to terms with the centuries-long absorption of both good and bad Western ideas. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether the Israeli-Palestinian peace process can somehow soon resume. When al Qaeda’s princes—bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—rail against the intrusion of Western democracy into the Muslim world, they know what they are talking about. If it succeeds, democracy will eventually kill them off. It will pull fundamentalist believers—the pool that bin Ladenism must draw from to survive—into the great ethical and spiritual debates that can best happen when free people fight it out in elections. Only Muslims—only fundamentalist Muslims—have the power to kill off bin Ladenism. Historically, there is no reason to believe this will happen under the dictatorships that gave birth to Islamic extremism in the first place.

Like Christendom before it, the Muslim Middle East will have to work out its relation to modernity. The faster democracy arrives, the sooner the debates about God and man can begin in earnest. It will probably be for both Muslims and Westerners a nerve-racking experience. But we have no choice, since continuing autocracy will only make the militants’ message stronger and judgment day, as in Iran, a possibly bloody revolutionary event. The electoral victory of Hamas should not give us pause. It should give us hope and encourage us to push for real elections where our national interest stands to gain the most—in Egypt and Iran. We should also not neglect to defend vigorously Christian, Muslim, or Jewish satirists, be they clever, banal, or ugly, wherever they may be found. Both elections and satire are basic to the evolution of the Muslim world.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

==============================

American Muslims Give Moderate Voice amid Cartoon Violence (Christian Post, 060213)

Some 7,000 students marched in protest on Monday to a Christian university in northwestern Pakistan, breaking windows as police shot tear gas at the crowd. The protest followed a larger peaceful rally involving at least 30,000 people in southeast Turkey on Sunday along with more indignant chants in Istanbul where crowds shouted “Down with the USA” and “Down with Denmark.”

Meanwhile, American Muslims have not joined the violent protests over the cartoons of Muhammad, calling such action bigotries and offensive to the Islam’s prophet and trying to mediate between European Muslims and the West, according to The New York Times.

Leaders of national organizations and two mosques called for Muslims in Europe and the Middle East to stop the violence “because the Prophet Muhammad would never have approved, and [they] are playing into the stereotype of Muslims as barbarians.” The leaders have also expressed concerns at the Washington embassies of European nations, saying the governments should condemn the cartoons as hateful and bigoted.

Amid the violent response in the last couple of weeks that erupted after several Western newspapers reprinted caricatures of Muhammad, following the Danish daily in September, a more united and moderate voice was called for.

“In the past, community here has been divided, and this had made it difficult to speak with one voice,” said Abdul Wahid Pedersen, an influential imam in Denmark, according to the Times.

“It is important in a crisis like this that moderate voices in the community are heard,” he added, pointing to the American Muslims as models to follow.

The violence that national and religious heads condemned have some Muslim American leaders feeling anguished over the outbursts.

“It hurts us when people attack embassies, because it reinforces the image that we were protesting in the first place, which is that Muslims are violent,” said Azeem Khan, assistant secretary general of the Islamic Circle of North America, according to the Times.

The cartoon controversy is expected to be addressed during a White House meeting between U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.S. President George W. Bush today, both of whom have called for an end to violence.

==============================

Islamic radicals take advantage of Western liberalism (townhall.com, 060212)

by John Leo

Is the biggest issue in the cartoon controversy free expression, sensitivity or fear? One vote here for none of the above. The key question may be this: Are Muslims in Europe going to live by the rules of the West, or by the rules of Islam? Every now and then, a European nation decides to put its foot down, banning headscarves in French schools, expelling some jihadist imams in three nations, and deporting Muslim illegals as the Netherlands did after two high-profile murders that shocked the nation.

But on the whole, Europe has chosen weakness and backpedaling. A British judge agreed to bar Jews and Hindus from the jury at the trial of a Muslim. Sheikh Qaradawi was welcomed in London; despite his call for the murder of homosexuals and the fact the he himself was wanted for murder in Egypt. King Ferdinand III, who fought to win Spain’s independence from the Moors, was removed as patron saint of the annual fiesta in Seville, out of deference to Muslim feelings. The Dutch Language Union decreed that the word Christ would now be spelled with a lower-case c, starting in August. Crucifixes are disappearing from hospitals and some Muslims are demanding that statues of Dante be removed, because the poet’s Divine Comedy placed Mohammad in hell. A government office in Britain banned Winnie the Pooh, piggy banks and other images of pigs so Muslims wouldn’t have to see them— a small but galling example of Europe’s unwillingness to live by its own standards.

In France, more than 10,000 cars were torched in 2005, mostly, it appears, by young Muslims. Ho-hum. In the post-cartoon demonstrations in Britain, police ignored the signs saying “Exterminate those who mock Islam” and “Be prepared for the real holocaust,” but quickly arrested two counter protestors carrying posters with images of Mohammad. In the first cartoon riots in Denmark last September, Danish police were warned to stay out of Muslim neighborhoods. As one Muslim said, “This is our area. We rule this place.”

Europe is facing more opportunities to back down. Muslim fathers in Linz, Austria, are demanding that all female teachers, whether Muslim or not, be required to wear headscarves in school. The Muslim Council of Britain, which justifies Palestinian suicide bombers, wants Holocaust Day eliminated.

Much of the Muslim assertiveness is an outgrowth of Europe’s disastrous love affair with multiculturalism. In theory, immigrants were to be encouraged to maintain their own identity and traditions in exchange for accepting Europe’s system of shared values. In practice, it has mostly been a plan for hands-off separatism and resistance to assimilation. Government offers financial help in building schools and places of worship, and encourages the importing of imams from Arab countries, many of them predictably haters of the west. Raed Hlayhel, an imam in Denmark, for instance, was part of an entourage that toured the Middle East building rage over the cartoons. He and the other imams took along several fabricated cartoons, one showing Mohammad as a pedophile and another depicting him having sex with a dog. Shouldn’t these provocations earn each of these imams a one-way trip back to the Middle East?

As Historian Fred Siegel of New York’s Cooper Union points out, many of the imams have taken a page out of Yasser Arafat’s book, speaking tolerantly in Europe, but calling for blood when on the Arab media. He says Muslim spokesman know how to game Western liberalism, demanding free speech when they deny the Holocaust, then dropping the free speech argument and arguing that anti-Muslim criticisms and cartoons should be censored on grounds of multicultural sensitivity.

Europe has a hard decision on what to do with the so-called “conveyor-belt” Islamist groups that do not commit terrorism themselves, but recruit, and indoctrinate young males, then turn them over to terrorist groups. One of them, Hizb ut-Tahrir, active in Denmark and more than 40 other countries, played an incendiary role in the cartoon controversy. “By combining fascist rhetoric, Leninist strategy, and Western sloganeering with Wahhabi theology, HT has made itself into a very real and potent threat that is extremely difficulty for liberal societies to counter,” Zeyno Baran of Washington’s Nixon Center wrote in Foreign Affairs. The conveyor belts are designed to take advantage of the West’s protections of free speech and civil liberties. But they are dangerous parts of the broader terrorist operation. Germany banned HT. Other nations should too. If the West doesn’t stop the spread of Islamic radicalism, the danger will soon be far graver than it is now.

==============================

Submission is all in your dhimmitude (townhall.com, 060213)

by Diana West

We need to learn a new word: dhimmitude.

I’ve written about dhimmitude periodically, lo, these many years since Sept. 11, but it takes time to sink in. Dhimmitude is the coinage of a brilliant historian, Bat Ye’or, whose pioneering studies of the dhimmi, populations of Jews and Christians vanquished by Islamic jihad, have led her to conclude that a common culture has existed through the centuries among the varied dhimmi populations.

From Egypt and Palestine to Iraq and Syria, from Morocco and Algeria to Spain, Sicily and Greece, from Armenia and the Balkans to the Caucasus: Wherever Islam conquered, surrendering dhimmi, known to Muslims as “people of the book (the Bible),” were tolerated, allowed to practice their religion, but at a dehumanizing cost.

There were literal taxes (jizya) to be paid; these bought the dhimmi the right to remain non-Muslim, the price not of religious freedom, but of religious identity. Freedom was lost, sorely circumscribed by a body of Islamic law (sharia) designed to subjugate, denigrate and humiliate the dhimmi. The resulting culture of self-abnegation, self-censorship and fear shared by far-flung dhimmi is the basis of dhimmitude.

The extremely distressing, but highly significant fact is, dhimmitude doesn’t only exist in lands where Islamic law rules. This is the lesson of Cartoon Rage 2006, a cultural nuke set off by an Islamic chain reaction to those 12 cartoons of Mohammed appearing in a Danish newspaper. We have watched the Muslim meltdown with shocked attention, but there is little recognition that its poisonous fallout is fear.

Fear in the State Department, which, like Islam, called the cartoons unacceptable. Fear in Whitehall (where British government offices reside), which did the same. Fear in the Vatican, which did the same. And fear in the media, which have failed, with few, few exceptions, to reprint or show the images. With only a small roll of brave journals, mainly in Europe, to salute, we have seen the proud Western tradition of a free press bow its head and submit to an Islamic law against depictions of Mohammed.

That’s dhimmitude.

Not that we admit it: We dress up our capitulation in fancy talk of “tolerance,” “responsibility” and “sensitivity.” We even congratulate ourselves for having the “editorial judgment” to make “pluralism” possible.

“Readers were well-served ... without publishing the cartoons,” said a Wall Street Journal spokesman. “CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam,” reported the cable network. On behalf of the BBC, which did show some of the cartoons on the air, a news editor subsequently apologized, adding: “We’ve taken a decision not to go further ... in order not to gratuitously offend the significant number” of Muslim viewers worldwide.

Left unmentioned is the understanding (editorial judgment?) that “gratuitous offense” leads to gratuitous violence. Hence, fear — not the inspiration of tolerance but of capitulation — and a condition of dhimmitude.

How far does it go?

Worth noting, for example, is that on the BBC Web site, a religion page about Islam presents the angels and revelations of Islamic belief as historical fact, rather than spiritual conjecture (as is the case with its Christianity Web page); plus, it follows every mention of Mohammed with “(pbuh),” which means “peace be upon him” — “as if,” writes Will Wyatt, former BBC chief executive, in a letter to the Times of London, “the corporation itself were Muslim.” Is it? Are we?

These questions may not seem so outlandish if we assess the extent to which encroaching sharia has already changed the Western way. Calling these cartoons “unacceptable,” and censoring ourselves “in respect” to Islam brings the West into compliance with a central statute of sharia. As Jyllands Posten’s Flemming Rose has noted, that’s not respect, that’s submission. And if that’s not dhimmitude, what is?

The publication of the Mohammed cartoons solicited by Denmark’s Jyllands Posten was an act of anti-dhimmitude. Since no Danish artist would dare illustrate a PC children’s book about Mohammed for fear of Islamic law (and Islamic violence), the newspaper boldly set out to reassert the rule of (non-Islamic) Danish law. It’s as simple as that. And as vital. The cartoons ran to establish — or re-establish — Denmark as bastion of Western-style liberty.

But in trying to set up a force field against encroaching sharia, Jyllands Posten and the Danes have showed us that no single bastion of Western liberty can stand alone. So, how do you say solidarity in Danish? If we don’t find out now, our future is more dhimmitude.

==============================

Your Honey Or Your Lyin’ Eyes? The myth of a vibrant “moderate Islam.” (National Review Online, 060215)

So here we are again, a dazed planet brushing ourselves off and surveying the wreckage from the worst spree of Islam-inspired rioting, bombing, murder, and mayhem since ... well, since the last one. And the one before that.

The ongoing one is over offensive cartoons published by an obscure Danish newspaper. That’s a step down from the one over a tall tale about Koran-flushing in a Guantanamo Bay toilet. Not to mention the one over infidel troops stationed (to protect Muslims) in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques, the one over the Occupation, the one over the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the one over the Crusades, and the one over that time in 680 A.D. when some scion of monkeys and pigs allegedly spied a bare ankle under someone’s sister’s wind-swept chador.

You get the idea. The cartoon caper, though, has been singular — there hasn’t been such an outpouring on the “Arab Street” since that heroic martyrdom operation against the Great Satan a little over four years ago.

OLD RELIABLE

This latest round was instigated by Old Reliable himself, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Qatar-based firebrand who is president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars and heads up something called “the European Council for Fatwa and Research.” Among his other sidelines, Qaradawi is also what’s known as the “spiritual leader” of the Muslim Brotherhood — Egypt’s 80-year-old font of terror ideology whose past members include al Qaeda honcho Ayman Zawahiri, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, jihadi extraordinaire Omar Abdel Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”), and terror financier Abdurahman Alamoudi. Reminiscent of Michael Corleone’s protestations to Kaye, the Brotherhood claims it is going legit any day now, so naturally it has become a favorite Islamic organization of the State Department and the CIA, at whom it bats one winsome eye while winking at suicide bombers with the other.

Months after the original, uneventful publication of the cartoons, Qaradawi used his ready platform at al Jazeera to issue one of those fatwas he’d researched at that European Council of his. This one called for a “Day of Rage.” It worked so well that, by the end of last week, the media were reporting, with a straight face, that Qaradawi was now “condemning” the savagery he’d quite consciously started. (See The Muslim Brotherhood Playbook, p.1.) The poor, misunderstood imam, it seems, had only meant to provoke “logical” rage, like boycotts of Havarti cheese and the like. After all, he’s a “moderate” who opposes violence ... whenever he’s not stirring it up.

Qaradawi, it turns out, is not just a moderate. He is, in addition, “a respected scholar and religious leader worthy of the deepest respect.” Says who? Says the State Department, that’s who.

It was only last October, you see, when Alberto Fernandez, newly minted by Secretary Condoleezza Rice as director for public diplomacy at State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, made one of his obligatory “live dialogue” appearances on Islamonline.net. After cooing about the new Iraqi constitution, taking pains to stress that it expressly “recognizes the role of Islam” (thanks in no small part to State’s labors), Fernandez proceeded straight to the required gushing over Qaradawi.

But wait a second. Hasn’t Qaradawi has been banned from the U.S. for promoting terrorism? Surely the State Department can mount a full-throated defense of that, right? After all, isn’t our moral compass supposed to be the Bush Doctrine — the one that says “you’re either with us or with the terrorists”? Is it really that hard for State to say Qaradawi is a disgusting character promoting a noxious agenda, rather than a model of moderation?

Apparently. Such a choice, our chic-sensitive public-diplomacy pirector opined, was “for the Muslim Umma to decide.” As for the rest of us, Fernandez would brook no denying that it is “important to listen to intelligent and thoughtful voices from the region like Sheikh Qaradawi, ... an important figure that deserves our attention.”

AL-QUDS DAY

He certainly does. For, just a month after Fernandez’s paean, this important figure proved his mettle yet again. This time, it was at December’s international conference commemorating Al-Quds Day.

Al-Quds, you should understand, is the Muslim Umma’s name for Jerusalem, and the Umma’s plan is for it to be everyone’s name for Jerusalem — that is, once Ahmadinejad and Iran’s mad mullahs, Syria’s latest Assad, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, al Qaeda, and all the other outfits patterned after those nonviolent fellas at the Muslim Brotherhood finally manage to wipe that nagging blight known as Israel off the face of the map (revised maps already being in Umma-wide circulation).

The three-day confab to mark Jerusal — er, I mean, Al-Quds Day, was held in Yemen, a country Secretary Rice recently praised for its “strong cooperation” with the U.S. in the struggle against terrorism. That may seem a tad embarrassing now that Yemen, besides hosting nasty conventions, has just allowed the escape of several notorious terrorists whom it steadfastly refused, for years, to extradite to us — including Jamal Badawi, the murderer of 17 American sailors in the October 2000 bombing of a naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole — an act of war that took place right in the strongly cooperative bosom of Aden harbor.

In any event, there was Qaradawi, shoulder-to-shoulder with Al-Quds concelebrants Khaled Mashal (Hamas’s top gun), Ali Akbar Mohtashemi (a key Ahmadinejad adviser), and other intelligent and thoughtful Muslim leaders. To the throng in attendance, and the millions tuned in on al-Manar (Hezbollah’s own satellite television network), Qaradawi brayed: “There is no choice but to wage jihad and resistance.”

This called for some quick lip-service to the moderate party line that there are “different kinds” of jihad. (Jihad being an Islamic tenet, moderates must offer some connotation of it besides the entirely accurate “holy war,” and the media have dutifully lapped up the ennobling “struggle to please God” treacle on which they’ve settled.) But Qaradawi promptly got back on-message, clarifying that he was most certainly speaking in this instance of the “armed” kind of jihad. And not just in al-Quds. Long an unabashed enthusiast of the shaheed cult (which involves the strapping of explosives to children and other “martyrs” who are then loosed among civilians), the sheikh exhorted his listeners that the fighting must continue “in Palestine, in Iraq, in Lebanon, and in every country that has been conquered by foreigners.”

Little wonder that the moderate, influential Muslim Council of Britain refers to Qaradawi as “a voice of reason, understanding and wisdom.” Indeed, with moderates like these abounding, how surprised should we be to find Secretary Rice herself — while very publicly hosting an Iftaar dinner to mark the end of the “holy month” of Ramadan — bestowing a federal promotion on the Muslim Umma, whose creed, she announced, is now the “religion of love” as well as the firmly entrenched “religion of peace.” (The ACLU was evidently unavailable for comment.) “We in America,” Rice effused, “know the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam.”

A MIRAGE

At least we say we do. And we repeat it with all the sincerest, heel-clicking fervor of Dorothy’s chanting “There’s no place like home” while she hopes against hope that all will be well when she opens her eyes. We all want to believe there is a vibrant “moderate Islam.” Not just the State Department, the CIA, the Bush administration, the European Union, and the West, but all people of good will.

Nonetheless, the contemporary vision of “moderate Islam” as a meaningful force for good is a mirage. Certainly there are moderate Muslim individuals. Large pockets of them, there and there, who have assimilated to the modern world and want only to live in ecumenical peace. But many of the people we call “moderates” are flat-out phonies, the bag-men who rise on the shoulders of the leg-breakers.

The authentic moderates, meanwhile, tarry in muted resistance to the domineering strain of their faith. The strain we like to tell ourselves is a mere fringe. The strain that has just managed, yet again, to unleash untold thousands (not handfuls of militants, but transcontinental thousands) to maraud over a trifling affront. The moderates must carry on by pretending, much like the State Department pretends, that the commands of their scriptures — toward brutality, beheading, conquest, death to unbelievers, eternal damnation to apostates, the subjugation of women, the dehumanizing of non-Muslims, and so on — either do not exist or have somehow been superseded (even though the Koran is said to reflect the words of Allah Himself, and even though much in it of a threatening nature actually comes later in time than the passages bespeaking moderation and tolerance).

Meanwhile, as we prepare to spend yet another $120 billion on a novel brand of democracy building — one which establishes Islam as Iraq’s state religion and enshrines the inequities of sharia as a source and measure of its fundamental law — our wildly premature birthing of the nascent Palestinian “democracy” has just resulted in the rise to power of Hamas, an entity the U.S. officially designates as a terrorist organization. (To be fair, its competition was Fatah, an entity successive U.S. administrations spent the last dozen or so years deluding themselves was not a terrorist organization. In the event, these legatees of Yasser Arafat were, of course, the “moderates.”) This result means that if American citizens did what our government is right now continuing to do — namely, contributing funds we well know Hamas will soon be controlling — they could be indicted under our antiterrorism laws. There are, as we speak, several defendants under such indictments in this country.

All of this intellectual and moral confusion — the disintegration of the Bush Doctrine, the compromising of our conception of democracy, the strange deference to charlatans spewing seventh-century venom, the pressure on our government to violate the very laws it enacted to choke off the funding that underwrites our enemies’ butchery — all of it is based on a single conceit: That there is a flourishing moderate Islam. One worth looking beyond all the menacing verses and countless atrocities to find.

Okay, where is it?

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

==============================

Islam’s problem with democracy (Washington Times, 060216)

By Suzanne Fields

Religion has always been linked to political power, often controlled by kings and despots. In a democracy there’s a different kind of link. Freedom allows everyone to raise questions, to confront dogma and challenge beliefs. That’s why maintaining the complete separation of church and state is crucial.

Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the United States in the early 19th century, identified this separation as crucial to democratic governance. Religion gave support to democratic political institutions because it restrained the exercise of liberties, appealing to conscience and morality in lieu of imposition by the state.

De Tocqueville’s words came to life in the controversy over the cartoons satirizing Muhammad in the European newspapers, and Muslim reaction threw in sharp relief the differences between East and West. Cartoons in Middle Eastern newspapers depicting the Jewish star placed across a swastika and Jews with hooked noses adorned in Nazi helmets, slaying innocents, were widely reviled by Jews, but Jewish mobs did not set out to torch embassies or to kill each other in protest. So where is the outrage of “moderate” Muslims over the way the suicide bombers invoke the name of Muhammad on behalf of the slaughter of innocents?

The Frenchman was surprised by the pervasive religious atmosphere he found here, and in interviews with both clergy and laymen he never met anyone who doubted that it was this separation of church and state that enabled religious belief to flourish. In times of enlightenment and democracy, he argued, the human spirit does not readily accept dogmatic beliefs except through faith. “...at such times above all, religions should be most careful to confine themselves to their proper sphere, for if they wish to extend their power beyond spiritual matters they run the risk of not being believed at all,” he wrote in his classic, “Democracy in America.”

The Founding Fatherscertainly thought this to be true, which is why Godisinvoked throughout our early history as the unifying force for equality, without dogma intruding into the specific details of government. The spirit rather than the letter of the law says “we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Like de Tocqueville, we cannot see into the secret places of the hearts of those who express faith in their religion; the benefit of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition is in its inspiration for our small-r republican institutions.

A century and a half before Samuel Huntington expressed concern for the “clash of civilizations,” de Tocqueville identified the difference between our inheritance of Western religious values and the teachings of Muhammad that inspired Arabs in the Middle East. Muhammad contributed political maxims, criminal and civil rules and scientific theories to the Koran, mixing religion and politics, whereas the Gospels deal only with the relationship between man and God, and man and man: “That alone, among a thousand reasons,” he wrote, “is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.”

An “open civilization” once flourished under the rule of Islam, but that was a long time ago, and the current incarnation of Islamic rule is theocratic and usually despotic, demanding that all see the world through the same lens. The Islamic scholar Ralph Ghadban, writing in a Swiss newspaper, argues that “a marked retrogression is observable in the Islamic world.” He observes that the strict blasphemy laws being introduced in Muslim countries are intended less to protect Islam than to get rid of other religions. The Islamists are eager to see whether they can transport their theocratic bans to Europe.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch writer and politician who wrote the film script for the movie that inspired an Islamist terrorist to murder filmmaker Theodore van Gogh, told the Danish newspaper that first reprinted the cartoons of Muhammed: “It’s important to remember that Islam hasn’t undergone all the reforms and adjustment which Christianity and Judaism have undergone over the past thousand years.” This controversy brings attention to the Muslim taboos that are incompatible with democratic values. Subjugating women and imprisoning writers is anathema to Western religions.

If religious institutions are to be capable of maintaining themselves in a democratic age, observed de Tocqueville, “their power also depends a great deal on the nature of the beliefs they profess, the external forms they adopt, and the duties they impose.” This is history’s challenge to Islam.

==============================

Nonsense and sensibility (townhall.com, 060221)

by Diana West

Maybe there’s some rarified irony about the fact that in a society increasingly dependent on imagery, not words, to convey information, it is imagery that the media have denied us in conveying the story of a Danish newspaper’s Muhammad cartoons. But with a Gallup Poll reporting that 61% of U.S. respondents believe that Europeans who printed the caricatures of Muhammad acted irresponsibly, it’s nothing to shrug off.

The rationale goes something like this: “Not all self-censorship is a bad thing.”

“Even if all the world had the right of free speech, I still believe there are things that should not be said.”

“It’s some weird presumption of modernity that says because something can be done it must be done.”

The above statements came out of my e-mailbag after last week’s column — my cartoon rage 2006, or, as I like to call it, How a Proud Press Bowed Its Head and Submitted to an Islamic Law against Depictions of Muhammad. These letter-writers, representing a small but noticeable contingent, rejected the submission argument as a point of pride, reading into their own contentment to “see no evil” — that is, see no Muhammad cartoons — an elevated sensibility: good manners, good taste and self-restraint. This may be highly commendable — the good manners, taste and self-restraint part — but it is entirely beside the point.

Which is what draws me back to this freak show of a story one more time before its narrative-memory is set, and before the beginning of the end of press freedom is permanently attributed to kindly, responsible behavior, not incipient dhimmitude.

In another context, I wouldn’t disagree with the readers’ comments I quoted above. Indeed, I’ve been known to make similar arguments against all manner of fetid cultural excess, from lurid children’s fiction to the notorious Sensation Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in which Dung Virgin first came to fame in 1999. (Or was that infamy? It’s easy to get them confused.)

The topic of Dung Virgin, not to mention its companion piece in shock value, Piss Christ, strikes the Good-Mannerists as an important marker in their personal guides to press etiquette. Not grooving to such “artistic” attacks on Christianity, the Good-Mannerists say they can understand the consternation of the Cartoon Ragers — at least to some point shy of death threats, arson and murder — and see media self-censorship as a matter of common decency.

Is the comparison valid? And is the politeness deserved? Absolutely not, and here’s one big reason why: Christianity and Islam are not interchangeable belief systems inspired by a generic divinity. One relevant distinction is the way they operate in relation to their societies. Christianity abides by the separation of church and state; Islam knows no separation whatsoever. As a result, the theological teachings of Islam as revealed by Muhammad, which form the basis of the Islamic law (sharia) that drives Islamic societies, necessarily belong to the political sphere in a way that Christianity does not.

This is not to say that Christianity should be, or has been, off the table. Indeed, all the ink (not blood) spilled over assorted Excrement Icons only enhanced their value, not to mention the reputations of their artists (using the word loosely). But the all-encompassing nature of Islam underscores a special need for open, critical examination of the Koran and Muhammad as political, and politically violent, forces that roil our times.

Let’s take what are considered the most inflammatory of the Danish Dozen: Bomb-head Muhammad; and Muhammad in the clouds, telling arriving suicide bombers that Islamic paradise is plumb out of virgins. What Denmark’s cartoonists did in these caricatures is something few writers have dared to do in words: They made visual reference to the copious, historical and contemporary theological underpinnings of holy war (jihad) and suicide bombings. What is offensive here, then, is not the extremely mild caricature, but rather those theological underpinnings of holy war and suicide bombings. When the widely influential Sheik Yusef al-Qaradawi can praise Muhammad as “an epitome for religious warriors (mujahideen),” Muhammad, a jihad model, shouldn’t be a taboo subject in the West, either in caricature or commentary, and certainly shouldn’t be super-sacralized, in effect, by a fearfully polite censorship. The subject should be laid out for all to see.

The valiant Dutch parliamentarian and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it this way: “You cannot liberalize Islam without criticizing the Prophet and the Koran. ... You cannot redecorate a house without entering inside.” And especially when you’re not allowed to see what it looks like.

==============================

Needed: Mature, Moderate Muslims: The cartoon rage is infantile. (National Review Online, 060222)

“Grow up.”

This should be the civilized world’s two-word response to the staggering overreaction to those cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, first published in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Its editors’ attempt to fuel debate ignited an inferno of Islamic rage that has consumed nearly four-dozen human beings, and counting. As Western embassies, fast-food shops, and even a statue of Ronald McDonald have gone up in Shiite and Sunni-stoked flames, what also has receded into the smoke is any sense of maturity among the rampaging, Hitler-praising Muslim mobs that have dragged this global outrage into its third week.

These fanatics are violent and deadly. But they also are infantile. Their unrestrained orgy of mayhem looks like a Romper Room full of homicidal babies screaming for fresh diapers at the tops of their tiny lungs.

These brats are acting out with no sense of direction, focus, or purpose. They have attacked American, Austrian, European Union, Italian, and Norwegian diplomatic posts. They also torched Danish missions in Beirut and Damascus, even though Jyllands-Posten is published privately, not by the Danish government. The paper apologized January 30 for the illustrations — five days before violence erupted. These monsters are utterly unburdened by the fact that, as Bishop Karsten Nissen of Denmark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church explained, the Danish prime minister “did not draw these cartoons. Our prime minister is not the editor of this newspaper. He cannot apologize for something he did not do.”

Living Up to Violent Stereotypes

Jyllands-Posten first published these images last September 30 beside an article on the Danish media’s self-censorship on Islamic issues. By December 18, the paper reported, it was “dealing with an avalanche of death threats against its staff.” Things obviously have gone far beyond mere threats.

So far, 45 people have lost their lives, either due to police crackdowns on destructiveness in the name of Islam or directly through mob murder. Muslim hordes burned down 15 Christian churches Saturday in Maiduguri, Nigeria. They also trashed and looted stores owned by Christians. Death toll: 16.

“Most of the dead were Christians beaten to death on the streets by the rioters,” Chima Ezeoke, a local Christian, told the Associated Press. Witnesses reported that the dead included a priest and three children.

This global march of the crybabies cost eleven people their lives in Libya Friday. An eight-year-old Pakistani boy died Wednesday after he was shot in the face during protests. Three demonstrators were killed February 7 when they used rifles and grenades to attack a NATO military base in Afghanistan.

Again, this and even more blood has been shed over newspaper cartoons. Militant Muslim tots set Italy’s consulate in Benghazi, Libya alight because Italian Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli wore a t-shirt on TV decorated with one of those Danish cartoons. A t-shirt!

This all sounds like a giant anti-Islamic tall tale concocted and disseminated by some secret cabal determined to undermine the pristine reputation of the Religion of Peace. But no. As if with titanium rods in concrete, these little horrors have reinforced every stereotype of Islamic hot-headedness. They have confirmed lingering suspicions that a disturbingly large proportion of Muslims just cannot express themselves with words rather than things that burn or go “boom.”

Even worse, prominent Muslims demand even more violence.

Pakistani imam Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi issued a fatwa Friday calling for the killing of the 12 cartoonists who drew these caricatures. Whoever murders these cartoonists will receive $25,000 from Quereshi’s mosque, $1 million reportedly pledged by a local jeweler’s association, and, as if this were The Price Is Right, a new car!

It would be far easier to respect Muslims’ gossamer sensibilities if these feelings were mutual.

Yes, it’s true. The whole world is watching the lethal behavior of a minority of the Muslim population. Thankfully, the streets are not filled with Earth’s 1 billion Muslims yelling for “Infidel” blood. In fact, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has complained that “misguided and oppressive” Muslims have “projected a distorted and dark image of the faith of justice, love, and brotherhood.” Moderate Muslims have been far too quiet through this whole grim affair. They need to speak up loudly, clearly, and immediately if they want to see their faith retain even a whiff of its badly charred credibility.

Meanwhile, in the February 8 Wall Street Journal, Iranian-born author Amir Taheri exposed the lie at the center of this entire debacle: “There is no Koranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else.” As Taheri explains, when Islam came into contact with literally iconoclastic Christians ages ago, some Muslim scholars denounced the creation of images of the Islamic prophet. But Taheri sees these declarations as debatable human pronouncements, not the Word of the Divine.

Taheri further identifies eight well-known paintings, portraits, and miniatures of Muhammad created by Islamic artists. He says there are many more such examples, including medallions carried by Ottoman soldiers with the Prophet’s head stamped on them. Such works, Taheri says, are displayed in museums in Islamic nations, such as Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, and others in Bukhara, Uzbekistan and near Isfahan, Iran. Topkapi houses some of the 841 illustrations created for a 1595 edition of a book called Siyer-i Nebi, similar to this miniature that depicts the Prophet Mohammed after the Battle of Badr. (Also see Paul Marshall.)

Why, one wonders, are Iranian, Turkish, and Uzbek embassies still untouched?

One cannot take seriously even a syllable from the mouths of these juveniles after weighing their cartoon-propelled rage against the West’s relaxed response to Muslim debasement of Judeo-Christian religious symbols and sites.

Consider this blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon of a hook-nosed Jew riding Uncle Sam like a jockey on a stallion. Though published in Saudi Arabia in May 2002, it has yet to inspire Jews to organize into packs to demolish Saudi businesses.

Al Qaeda used an exploding fuel truck to demolish a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, on April 11, 2002. That bombing killed 19 people, namely a French citizen, four Tunisians, and 14 German tourists. Worldwide, Jews kept their cool.

In October 2000, Palestinian mobs capitalized on the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers who had guarded Joseph’s Tomb, a Jewish holy site, in Samaria. Two hours after the Israelis departed, hoodlums burned Jewish books, set furniture ablaze, and then demolished the tomb and an adjacent yeshiva, brick by brick. Security forces with the Palestinian Authority, who had agreed to protect the site, did no such thing.

Jewish riots have yet to erupt.

On April 2, 2002, 39 gunmen with the late Yasser Arafat’s Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade launched a 39-day siege at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, the spot where Christians believe Jesus Christ was born. The Muslim terrorists held hostage 30 priests, nuns, and monks, as well as 150 Palestinian civilians. After they were released, most of the terrorists returned to the Gaza Strip, where they were received as heroes. On May 15 it was reported that the shrine was scarred with bullet holes, splattered with cooked rice, and strewn with empty wine and liquor bottles, cigarette butts, and other rubbish. Catholic priests at the church said the Islamic thugs stole sacramental objects and used pages ripped from the Holy Bible as toilet paper.

Christian violence over this defilement of the reputed birthplace of Jesus never occurred.

Saudi Arabia, home of the Grand Mosque, is the Mecca of Islam. Its respect for other faiths stops there. It is illegal to observe non-Islamic religions in that absolute monarchy.

“The Saudi government desecrates and burns Bibles that its security forces confiscate at immigration points into the kingdom or during raids on Christian expatriates worshiping privately,” Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Saudi Institute in Washington, wrote in the May 20, 2005, Wall Street Journal. “Saudi Arabia bans the importation or the display of crosses, Stars of David or any other religious symbols not approved by the Wahhabi establishment.” Saudi anti-Christian bigotry can be fatal, al-Ahmed reports: “The Bible in Saudi Arabia may get a person killed, arrested, or deported. In September 1993, Sadeq Mallallah, 23, was beheaded in Qateef on a charge of apostasy for owning a Bible.”

Nonexistent Christian mobs, thus far, have left Saudi facilities untouched.

For their part, Buddhists did not detonate falafel stands after the Taliban used mortar shells to pulverize the world’s two tallest statues of Buddha, located in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in March 2001, about the time Osama bin Laden and his henchmen orchestrated their surprise attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What a pity, by the way, that al Qaeda could not simply have mocked those American icons with pen, paper, and some zany captions.

These ongoing Islamo-fascist spasms indicate that the long twilight struggle against this enemy will be arduous and incredibly challenging. It would be nice if civilization simply could put these Islamo-infants back in their cribs so they could cry themselves to sleep. Alas, it will take much more than that — as Paris’s Le Figaro explained February 8 (in my friend Vance DeWitt’s translation) — for those “who want to modernize Islam to override those whose goal is to Islamize modernity.”

Beyond what American diplomats, soldiers, and spies are doing to win this war, the rest of us can help by standing with Denmark in its time of need. In hindsight, it might not look like such a great idea to have drawn the rather tame cartoons of Mohammed, such as the one below (and not the incendiary images of the prophet practicing bestiality that Danish imams included among Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons when they visited their Egyptian, Palestinian, and Syrian counterparts).

Action Items

However, in a free society, cartoonists should be free to draw what they want, even if some take offense. The duty of the offended is to behave like adults: Stop reading the offending publication, write its editor, boycott its advertisers, or peacefully picket its headquarters. Whatever second thoughts there may be about those cartoons, Denmark, its citizens, and its diplomats do not deserve the Islamo-slam they are enduring.

So, what can you do about this international outrage?

For starters, an online petition now features more than 35,000 signatures in solidarity with Jyllands-Posten’s journalists. You can sign it here.

Unfortunately, Denmark’s Washington embassy says there is no equivalent of the USO to assist Danish soldiers or veterans. So purchasing Danish products seems the most concrete way for free, civilized people to say “No!” to the Islamo-infants and stand with the citizens of Denmark, a NATO country with 522 troops serving in Iraq.

Buy Legos. Who knew those little plastic building blocks from Kindergarten were Danish? Share the joys of Legos with a kid today. You can buy them online here.

Buy Danish food. Denmark produces excellent hams, cheeses, cookies, and other delicacies. Many are for sale online here.

Buy Carlsberg Beer. This fine, light lager has cooled, refreshed, and relaxed beer lovers since 1847. I have enjoyed it through many memorable, and a few forgotten, moments over the years. Ask for it at your local tavern or retailer. Learn more about it here.

Canadian journalists at the free-market Western Standard have their hands full after republishing those Danish cartoons. While Canadian Muslims are free to be offended by the Calgary-based magazine’s editorial decision, their demands for retaliation by Canada’s Human Rights Commission go too far. Muslims have no more right to dictate journalistic content than journalists have the right to draft new chapters of the Koran and compel Muslims to chant them.

Free-minded people can support the free-market Western Standard in its fight for free speech by subscribing to it.

“We have received a number of new orders from Muslim and Arab Canadians who said they were subscribing to support our freedom of the press,” says Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant. “They all say the same thing: ‘We did not come to Canada to have Sharia law follow us across the seas.’”

In a turn of events beyond fiction, 45 people are dead over some newspaper cartoons. If this is no clash of civilizations, nothing is. Whether the world’s grown-ups teach these pillaging pre-schoolers some manners will determine whether coming decades resemble Father Knows Best or The Lord of the Flies.

— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service.

==============================

A timely letter to the Danish Prime Minister (townhall.com, 060222)

by Clinton W. Taylor

Nice civilization you got here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.

That was the sinister subtext of a letter addressed to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, asking him to “take all those responsible to task under law” for the infamous Mohammed cartoons. The letter is remarkable for when it was sent and for who sent it.

The letter was signed by the eleven ambassadors of Islamic or heavily-Islamic countries. Libya, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Palestine, Indonesia, Morocco, and Bosnia-Herzegovina complained about the Jyllands-Posten cartoons on October 12, long before the current round of protests.

It is, of course, their right to complain, but demanding legal action is pretty arrogant. It’s also depressing, because it shows that these worldly ambassadors don’t even know how a free country works. Asking an executive to restrain lawful speech in a free country is like asking him to kindly restrain the rotation of the moon.

But that’s not the surprising part. The surprise is the implied extortion at the end of this paragraph:

<blockquote> We strongly feel that casting aspersions on Islam as a religion and publishing demeaning caricatures of the Holy Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) goes against the spirit of Danish values of tolerance and civil society. This is on the whole a very discriminatory tendency and does not bode well with [sic] the high human rights standards of Denmark. We may underline that it can also cause reactions in Muslim countries and among Muslim communities in Europe.</blockquote>

“Reactions?” Whatever could they mean by that?

Peaceful protests? Harsh language? Nothing to worry about in a democracy with a strong free speech tradition, thanks. All in a day’s work. Not worth warning us about.

No, the ambassadors anticipated “reactions” sufficiently dangerous that they thought Denmark ought to be warned about them.

Even though it is written in English, the significance of the ambassadors’ thinly veiled threat has escaped the attention of the English-speaking media. I only saw it, because a Danish friend sent it to me. To see the letter for yourself, you can download it from the Danish newspaper Berlingske on this page, next to the word “Grafik”.

The nations involved in this undiplomatic bit of diplomacy saw some of the largest protests and the worst violence of the Comic Jihad on February 6 and 7 of this year. Curious, because they had seen this coming back on October 12. They had plenty of warning about it—in fact, they gave us plenty of warning about it. And yet they took no steps to prevent violence and chaos.

Indonesia saw an attack on the Danish Embassy in Jakarta, and the American consulate in Surabaya (and there was another attempt to storm America’s embassy in Jakarta on the 19th). Turkey saw, in addition to large scale protests, the murder of a Catholic priest on the 6th. In Tehran, protesters burned the Danish embassy and stoned the Austrian embassy. In Libya, a little later, protesters set fire to the Italian consulate. Pakistan has seen several huge protests and deadly riots, as well as a tragicomic assault on KFC and Pizza Hut.

Funny how these countries demanding that Denmark crack down on unpopular expression have so much trouble doing so themselves, even when things turn bloody, and even when they see it coming for three months. Not “funny-ha-ha”. The other kind.

Which leads to two possible interpretations of the Comic Jihad. These states are unwilling to stop the violence, or they are unable to do so.

The first interpretation suggests that at least some of the states involved in this travesty have manipulated it from the beginning for their own interests. While a lot of blame has rightly fallen on Denmark’s deceptive agitators Ahmed Abu Laban and Ahmed Akkari, they have clearly had the collaboration of receptive states in getting their message out—states that don’t mind cracking down on dangerous thoughts when it suits them.

Among the signatories of the letter, Iran has the most to gain from radicalizing the Muslim world right now. As America and Israel contemplate military strikes against Iran’s nuclear program, the smart play for Iran is to poison any efforts at cooperation between the United States and countries in the region—and specifically Turkey, which has already refused to serve as a staging area for American troops during the Iraq invasion. If Iran can convince Turkey to withhold its support again, the mullahs will have neutralized our 39th Air Base Wing at Incirlik without firing a shot.

If that state-security scenario sounds too conspiratorial for you, the alternative is no more reassuring: these signatories of the letter know that their nations are not in control at all. Radical Islamists are calling the shots, and there is nothing Islamic states can do to stop them.

If that is the case, it is a surprising and devastating indictment of global Islam. It is one thing for American pundits and politicians to say the Religion of Peace has been hijacked by violent extremists; it’s far more frightening when the warning comes from the governments that know it best.

==============================

Being Mocked: the Essence of Christ’s Work, not Muhammad’s (Christian Post, 060223)

Dr. John Piper, Pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church

What we saw this past week in the Islamic demonstrations over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad was another vivid depiction of the difference between Muhammad and Christ, and what it means to follow each. Not all Muslims approve the violence. But a deep lesson remains: The work of Muhammad is based on being honored and the work of Christ is based on being insulted. This produces two very different reactions to mockery.

If Christ had not been insulted, there would be no salvation. This was his saving work: to be insulted and die to rescue sinners from the wrath of God. Already in the Psalms the path of mockery was promised: “All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads” (Psalm 22:7). “He was despised and rejected by men . . . as one from whom men hide their faces . . . and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3).

When it actually happened it was worse than expected. “They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head. . . . And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ And they spit on him” (Matthew 27:28-30). His response to all this was patient endurance. This was the work he came to do. “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).

This was not true of Muhammad. And Muslims do not believe it is true of Jesus. Most Muslims have been taught that Jesus was not crucified. One Sunni Muslim writes, “Muslims believe that Allah saved the Messiah from the ignominy of crucifixion.” 1 Another adds, “We honor [Jesus] more than you [Christians] do. . . . We refuse to believe that God would permit him to suffer death on the cross.”2 An essential Muslim impulse is to avoid the “ignominy” of the cross.

That’s the most basic difference between Christ and Muhammad and between a Muslim and a follower of Christ. For Christ, enduring the mockery of the cross was the essence of his mission. And for a true follower of Christ enduring suffering patiently for the glory of Christ is the essence of obedience. “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (Matthew 5:11).

During his life on earth Jesus was called a bastard (John 8:41), a drunkard (Matthew 11:19), a blasphemer (Matthew 26:65), a devil (Matthew 10:25); and he promised his followers the same: “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household” (Matthew 10:25).

The caricature and mockery of Christ has continued to this day. Martin Scorsese portrayed Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ as wracked with doubt and beset with sexual lust. Andres Serrano was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts to portray Jesus on a cross sunk in a bottle of urine. The Da Vinci Code portrays Jesus as a mere mortal who married and fathered children.

How should his followers respond? On the one hand, we are grieved and angered. On the other hand, we identify with Christ, and embrace his suffering, and rejoice in our afflictions, and say with the apostle Paul that vengeance belongs to the Lord, let us love our enemies and win them with the gospel. If Christ did his work by being insulted, we must do ours likewise.

When Muhammad was portrayed in twelve cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the uproar across the Muslim world was intense and sometimes violent. Flags were burned, embassies were torched, and at least one Christian church was stoned. The cartoonists went into hiding in fear for their lives, like Salman Rushdie before them. What does this mean?

It means that a religion with no insulted Savior will not endure insults to win the scoffers. It means that this religion is destined to bear the impossible load of upholding the honor of one who did not die and rise again to make that possible. It means that Jesus Christ is still the only hope of peace with God and peace with man. And it means that his followers must be willing to “share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10).

==============================

The Long War: The radical Islamists are on the offensive. Will we defeat them? (Weekly Standard, 060227)

DEMAGOGUES TO THE RIGHT OF THEM, appeasers to the left of them, media in front of them, volleying and thundering. Can the Bush administration continue to charge ahead? Does it have the will—and the competence—to lead the nation for the next three years toward victory in the long war against radical Islamism?

From Copenhagen to Samara, the radical Islamists are on the offensive. From Tehran to Damascus, the dictators are trying to regain the upper hand in the Middle East. From Moscow to Beijing, the enemies of liberal democracy are working to weaken the United States. Across the world, the forces of terror and tyranny are fighting back. Are we up to the challenge?

It’s not clear that we are. Many liberals, here and in Europe, long ago lost the nerve to wage war—or even to defend themselves—against illiberalism. Parts of the conservative movement now seem to be losing their nerve as well. In response to an apparent clash of civilizations, they would retrench, hunker down, and let large parts of the world go to hell in a hand basket, hoping that the hand basket won’t blow up in our faces.

Remember: The United States of America and its allies—regimes that seek to embody, or at least to move towards, the principles of decent, civilized, liberal democracy—did not seek this war. But we are at war, and we could lose it. Victory is not inevitable.

Does that make Bush-supporting, liberal-democracy-promoting, Iraq-war-defending neoconservative “Leninists,” as Francis Fukuyama has recently charged? No. Does it mean we

believe—as Fukuyama defines Leninism—that “history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will”? Does it mean that history does not automatically move in the right direction, that justice does not necessarily or easily prevail? Yes.

It would be nice to believe, as Fukuyama does, that “a long-term process of social evolution” is under way that will inevitably produce liberal democracy. It would be nice to enjoy the comfortable complacency of a historical determinism that suggests—as Fukuyama has it—that what we most need to do is to embrace a “good governance agenda” on behalf of a long-term process of “democracy promotion” that “has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.”

Indeed, it would be nice if we lived in a world in which we didn’t have to take the enemies of liberal democracy seriously—a world without jihadists who want to kill and clerics who want to intimidate and tyrants who want to terrorize. It would be nice to wait until we were certain conditions were ripe before we had to act, a world in which the obstacles are trivial and the enemies fold up. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in.

To govern is to choose, and to accept responsibility for one’s choices. To govern is not wishfully to await the end of history. To govern is not fatalistically to watch a clash of civilizations from the sidelines.

As Marshall Wittmann of the Democratic Leadership Council observed last week, “We are in the midst of a jihadist offensive. The bombing of [Iraq’s] Askariya Shiite Shrine is another indication of the world-wide jihadist offensive against the West. From the cartoon jihad to the Hamas victory to the Iranian effort to obtain nuclear weapons to the attempt by al Qaeda to foment an Iraqi civil war—our enemy is taking the initiative. And the West is on its heels.”

The Bush administration leads the West. If the West seems to be on its heels, it is because the administration seems to be on its heels. The fact that the left is utterly irresponsible, and some of the right is silly, is no excuse.

Wittmann continued, “Many mistakes have been made since 9/11. But at the end of the day, we should recognize that we are all Americans and part of the West that is under assault by a truly evil foe. Our bravest are on the front lines in this war. The least we can do at home is to demonstrate some moral seriousness that the moment demands.”

Moral seriousness in this case means political seriousness. Insist on going ahead with the ports deal so that Arab governments who have stood with us in the war on terror are not told to get lost when one of their companies acquires port management contracts in the United States. Make a real effort to destabilize Ahmadinejad in Iran. Do what it takes to defeat Zarqawi and secure Iraq. Stand with Denmark, and moderate Muslims, against the radical mob. This is no time for dishonorable retreat. It is time for resolve—and competence. After all, it would be most unfortunate if the administration summoned its nerve and charged ahead—only to meet the fate of Tennyson’s Light Brigade!

—William Kristol

==============================

Media won’t report radical Islamic events (townhall.com, 060308)

by Tony Blankley

Denial is an often useful innate human trait. Few of us would be able to function in the present if we did not put out of mind many unpleasant realities — such as our inevitable death. The Woody Allen character in the movie “Annie Hall” stated the comic extreme version of not using the denial mechanism when, as a child he refused to do his homework because in 5 billion years the sun would explode, “so, what’s the use?”

But when a person, or a society, denies emerging or imminent dangers, the peace of mind it gains will be extremely short term, while the harm may be sustained or fatal.

Most of the world today not only is in denial concerning the truly appalling likely consequences of the rise of radical Islam, it often refuses to even accept unambiguous evidence of its existence.

The latest minor example of the latter is occurring at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As has been generally reported, an Iranian Muslim student drove a jeep into a crowd of students, causing only minor injuries. He turned himself in and informed the police and the media that he was trying to kill the students to “avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world.”

Neither the university nor most of the media has been willing to characterize this event as a terrorist attempt by a radical Muslim. Mr. Colmes, on “Hannity and Colmes” seemed to express genuine puzzlement as to why it mattered whether we called it that or merely an act of violence. Similarly, the attack at the Los Angeles International Airport a few years ago was for nine months just called a violent attack, before it was finally characterized by police as a radical Muslim act of terrorism.

I have been in contact with British politicians who tell me that there is increasing radical Muslim street violence in Britain that is explicitly motivated by radical Islam but is not reported or characterized as such. Even in its cleansed versions, I am told, these incidents are being extremely underreported.

In Antwerp last month, according to the reporter Paul Belien, rioting Moroccan “youths” went on a rampage destroying cars and beating up reporters, but the police were instructed not even to stop them or arrest them. According to an anonymous policeman, “An ambulance was told to switch off its siren because that might provoke the Moroccans.” This event, too, was under reported, or not reported at all in American media.

And of course, last October in Paris and other French cities, hundreds of buildings were torched and tens of thousands of cars burned by Muslim “youths” through weeks of rioting, while both the French government and most of the “responsible” experts denied there was any radical Muslim component to the greatest urban violence to hit France since World War. It was all to do with poverty and teenage angst and alienation.

Of course poverty and alienation can’t explain the Iranian student in North Carolina. He has just received one of the finest educations available to a privileged American. He reportedly has received advanced degrees in philosophy and psychology from one of our top universities.

The media has pointed out that there is no evidence he was connected to Al Qaeda or another terrorist cell. But that is exactly the point. As I discussed in my book last year, the threat to the West is vastly more than bin Laden and Al Qaeda (although that would be bad enough.)

The greater danger is the ferment in Islam that is generating radical ideas in an unknown, but growing percentage of grass-roots Muslims around the world — very much including in Europe and, to a currently lesser extent, in the United States.

A nation cannot design (and maintain public support for) a rational response to the danger if the nature and extent of the danger is not identified, widely reported and comprehended.

What are we dealing with? A few maladjusted “youth”? Or a larger and growing number of perfectly well-adjusted men and women — who just happen to be adjusted to a different set of cultural, religious (or distorted religious) and political values. And does it matter that those values are inimical to western concepts of tolerance, democracy, equality and religious freedom?

The public has the right and vital need to have the events of our time fully and fairly described and reported. But a witch’s brew of psychological denial and political correctness is suppressing the institutional voices of government, police, schools, universities and the media when it comes to radical Islam.

As the danger grows but is not publicly described, the public will first be ignorant and fail to demand sufficient remedial action.

But as incidents and rumors are encountered over time, the public mind will inevitably suspect the worst and demand the strongest action. Demagogues will emerge to gratify that vox populi. (The Dubai port deal is a small example of such a process — although in that incident the threat is real and there are many sincere and rational voices amidst the many demagogues.)

Institutional voices are not being responsible by suppressing honest description of radical Islamic events. Denying the existence of evil (or refusing to be judgmental about it) has never proved a reliable method for defeating it. Hell is presumably filled with souls who didn’t understand that point.

==============================

Reading up on Islam (townhall.com, 060309)

by Marvin Olasky

Since 9-11, I’ve received numerous letters like this recent one: “What can be done to help educate people on the dangers that radical Islam poses to Western civilization? I don’t think this ideological conflict will go away.”

No, it won’t. It is likely to be for the first half of the 21st century what the Cold War was for the last half of the 20th — a long, subtle struggle with occasional days of fire. How to educate folks? Use of all media will be needed, but here’s a list of books I’ve read and found useful. There are many more that I haven’t read.

First, to understand radical Islam, some sense of basic Islam is essential, and that starts with the Quran. Muslims insist that unless you’ve read it in Arabic, you haven’t read it. Maybe so, but in theology as well as in horseshoes, leaners are better than nothing, so I’d recommend either reading a translation on the Internet or buying the new Quran translation by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem that came out last year in paperback from Oxford University Press.

Some scholars now ask tough questions about the Quran’s historicity. As I type with one hand, I’m holding in the other John Wainsbrough’s “Quranic Studies” (2004) and Ibn Warraq’s “The Origins of the Koran” (1998). Warraq left Islam after coming to believe the Muhammad story was a sham, and his books include “Why I Am Not a Muslim” (1995), “The Quest for the Historical Muhammad” (2000) and “Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out” (2003).

Second in importance within Islam after the Quran are the Hadith, massive works delineating how Muhammad supposedly dressed, ate, ingested and excreted food and drink, and so forth. Many Hadith collections are available online, but Ram Swarup’s critical and succinct summary, “Understanding the Hadith: The Sacred Traditions of Islam” (2002), is a place to start. “Crossroads to Islam” by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren (2003) also gives useful insights into Muslim origins.

To understand how Islam affects non-Muslims (called “dhimmis”), read three books by historian Bat Ye’or. On top of my right foot now are “The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam” (1985), “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam” (1996) and “Islam and Dhimmitude” (2002). A book edited by Robert Spencer, “The Myth of Islamic Tolerance” (2004), includes many useful short essays on dhimmitude. Bottom line: Non-Muslims living in Muslim-controlled lands have faced discrimination always, persecution often and death sometimes.

“Islam at the Crossroads” by Paul Marshall, Roberta Green and Lela Gilbert (2002) and several books by Spencer provide succinct overviews of past and present. It’s also good to read material from the Islamophile side, so sitting on my left toes are Karen Armstrong’s “Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet” (1993), Malise Ruthven’s “Islam” (1997) and Richard Fletcher’s “The Cross and the Crescent” (2003).

Now, with the foundations laid, we can proceed to books about radical Islam that I’m balancing on my knees, including “Sword of Islam” by John F. Murphy Jr. (2002) and Paul Marshall’s “Radical Islam’s Rules” (2005), which shows how Sharia law works in many Muslim-dominated countries. Daniel Pipes’ “Militant Islam Reaches America” (2002) and David Horowitz’s “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left” (2004) tell of the threat to the good old, still asleep United States.

Those books suggest geopolitical responses, but in the long run theological responses are crucial, so I’d also recommend “Answering Islam,” by Norman Geisler and Abdul Saleeb (2002); “Muslims and Christians at the Table,” by Bruce McDowell and Anees Zaka (1999); “The Truth About Islam,” by Anees Zaka and Diane Coleman (2004); and other books by George Braswell and by the Caner brothers.

==============================

The media and Islam (Washington Times, 060310)

By Diana West

Way back when I was a cub reporter at this newspaper, I got hold of a book about the “art” of interviewing. It was a thin book. There was no use spending thousands of words to tell a reporter, cub or old Grizzly, to bone up on a subject and let natural curiosity take its course.

That thin book came to mind on reading a three-part series in the New York Times about an imam named Reda Shata who presides over the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, N.Y. As far as the art of interviewing goes, the reporter got it exactly backward: Thousands of words; negligible expertise; and no curiosity.

Both the New York Post and the New York Sun have already pounced on the most egregious flaw of omission: not a mention, in 11,000-plus words, of the day in March 1994 when a man walked out of that same Bay Ridge mosque and, inspired by the anti-Jewish sermon of the day (delivered by a different, unidentified imam), armed himself and opened fire on a van carrying Hasidic Jewish children. Ari Halberstam, 16, was killed. The Times series, as it happened, concluded on the 12th anniversary of his death.

Such journalistic jaw-droppers abound: gaping holes, like the one above, but also dead ends that leave countless questions that the female reporter, it seems, never thought to ask. For example, she notes, over six months of interviews, the Egyptian-born imam refused to shake her hand. “He offers women only a nod,” she writes. Why is shaking hands with a woman “improper”? What does the imam think about sexual equality? She doesn’t tell us. In Belgium last year, she doesn’t mention, the female president of the parliament made headlines for canceling a meeting with an Iranian delegation over this same refusal to shake a woman’s hand (the parliamentarian’s own), while in Holland, the English-language blog Zacht Ei reported, a Muslim man lost a month’s worth of welfare benefits for not only refusing to shake hands with female municipal employees, but also refusing to acknowledge their presence. This is supposed to be “the story of Mr. Shata’s journey west,” but the story bypasses such landmark issues.

Instead, we get a load of happy talk: “Married life in Islam is an act of worship,” Mr. Shata says. So impressed were the editors of the New York Times by this load that they ran the quotation, not just above the fold, but across the very top of the front page over a gold-bathed family photo four columns wide. Does Miss Reporter ask the imam to reconcile this ecstatic notion with the Islamic custom of arranged and forced marriages, the spate of spousal abuse and “honor killings” within European Muslim communities — as recounted in clarifying detail in Bruce Bawer’s important new book, “While Europe Slept” — or the tradition of polygamy which exists to this day in portions of Islamic society?

No, no and no. She writes: “One Brooklyn imam reportedly urged his wealthier male congregants during a Ramadan sermon last year to take two wives. When a woman complained about the sermon to Mr. Shata, he laughed. ‘You know that preacher who said Hugo Chavez should be shot?’ he asked,” referring to a comment by Pat Robertson about the Venezuelan leader. “ ‘We have our idiots, too.’ “ One clumsy feint and presto — the New York Times loses all interest in polygamy, from Mohammed’s Mecca to Bloomberg’s New York.

Then there was the series’ look at terrorism. “What I may see as terrorism, you may not see that way,” Mr. Shata says. What does he mean by that? The reporter doesn’t tell us. Hamas is a powerful symbol of resistance, he says; the assassinated Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin was the “martyred” “lion of Palestine,” he sermonizes; and yet the imam says he condemns all violence. How does he square that? She doesn’t tell us. And when he sanctions violence against soldiers, not civilians, how does he define “soldier” and “civilian”? She doesn’t tell us that, either.

When asked about a 2004 sermon that “exalted” a female suicide bomber as a “martyr,” Mr. Shata seems “unusually conflicted,” the reporter writes. He declines to comment for fear of “[inviting] controversy,” and alienating New York rabbis he has “forged friendships with.” And there the question lies: She just lets him slip away. All the news that’s fit to print, apparently, doesn’t include the heart of the matter.

==============================

Islam Fatally Flawed, Says Voice From Corona via Al Jazeera (Los Angeles Times, 060313)

Wafa Sultan, who tells a tale of terror from Syria, draws lots of Western media attention but not as much from Muslims.

She’s no longer a Muslim, has never connected with progressive Islamic groups and does not know the writings of Islam’s most respected voices of reform.

So why is Wafa Sultan, a 47-year-old Southern California woman, suddenly in the news as a fresh voice of reason and reform about Islam?

In a blunt interview on Al Jazeera television last month, Sultan harshly criticized Islam as violent and unfavorably compared Muslims with Jews. In remarks Sunday at her Corona home, Sultan, who said she left the faith after witnessing an act of religious extremism, went even further, saying Islam was beyond repair with teachings that exhorted Muslims to kill non-Muslims, subjugate women and disregard human rights.

“I don’t believe you can reform Islam,” Sultan said. Saying Islamic scriptures are riddled with violence, misogyny and other extremist ideas, she declared, “Once you try to fix it, you’re going to break it.”

Sultan’s Al Jazeera remarks have been widely circulated by such groups as the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based translation service founded by a former Israeli colonel, and the American Jewish Congress. She made the New York Times front page and is being plied with interview requests from CNN, Fox, “Good Morning America” and public radio. Her e-mail in-box is filled with messages from well-wishers around the world — mostly non-Muslims — praising her “courage,” offering donations and pitching proposals to make a documentary about her life.

“This woman, at great personal risk, has decided to come forward not only in English but also in Arabic to discuss what’s wrong with Islam and the Muslim world,” said Allyson Rowen Taylor of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to visit Israel. “She blames the mullahs and clerics for distorting the teachings of the Koran for 14 centuries and speaks about the anger and despair of fellow Muslims.”

But the flurry of interest among non-Muslims contrasts oddly with the near silence among Muslims themselves, many of whom say she is a largely unknown figure not causing any particular stir.

“I haven’t come across any indication that people are discussing her,” said Abdulaziz Sachedina, a University of Virginia Islamic studies professor who was blacklisted eight years ago by Iraqi Ayatollah Ali Sistani for his reformist ideas that women were equal to men and all Abrahamic faiths were equally respectable. “Cyberspace is almost silent.”

He said he first heard of her a few weeks ago, when the American Jewish Congress sent him an e-mail with a link to her Al Jazeera interview, which was translated from Arabic into English by the Middle East Media Research Institute. Sachedina said he agreed with some of her remarks, including her criticism that too many Muslim rulers fail to protect human rights. But he objected to what he called her “vilification” of the entire tradition.

Other Muslims questioned why groups outside the faith were so avidly promoting a non-Muslim to criticize Islam, a practice that has occurred before and is a sore spot in the Islamic community, particularly since many respected Muslims also advocate change.

“Reform is alive and well within Islam, but it will only happen by those from within Islam and not those who hate Islam,” said Hussam Ayloush, who heads the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Some Muslims, however, have embraced at least part of Sultan’s message. Ani Zonneveld of the Progressive Muslim Union in Los Angeles, who has been fighting to gain wider acceptance of female musicians in Islam, said she put the link to Sultan’s Al Jazeera interview on her personal website, under the title “Wafa Sultan Rocks!” But Zonneveld said Sultan’s critiques were not new. Plenty of practicing Muslims, including Zonneveld, have been outspoken in criticizing the way some Muslims interpret their tradition’s teachings on women, human rights and interfaith relations, she said.

Sultan herself says she’s making a difference. In her interview Sunday, she said growing numbers of Muslims were getting in touch with her to discuss her views. That’s a sign, she believes, that she is causing them to rethink their tradition.

“I am trying to push them to doubt their teachings,” she said. “My message is effective, and it’s doing the job I want it to.”

A Syrian native, Sultan said she walked away from the faith of her family 27 years ago, when she witnessed the murder of her professor by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist organization then battling the Syrian government. She said the men burst into her classroom at the University of Aleppo in northern Syria, where she was a medical student, and gunned him down, screaming, “Allah is great!”

“That was the turning point of my life,” she said. “I was traumatized. I lost faith in God — or their God — and started to question every single teaching of ours.”

She said that, a decade later, after practicing medicine in Syria, she and her husband moved to the United States, where she initially worked as a cashier and studied English at Cal State Long Beach. Today, the couple have three children. Her husband, David, runs an automotive smog-check station. She said she is waiting for acceptance into a residency program before she can be fully certified to practice psychiatry here.

But Sultan said her prime passion has always been speaking out about Islam, something she finally had the freedom to do after arriving in the United States. She began writing regular columns for a local Arabic-language newspaper. Five years ago, she began contributing to a website, http://www.annaqed.com , after the Arabic reference to “the critic.”

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks brought her critiques new audiences. Last year, she began appearing on Al Jazeera, the world’s most popular Arabic-language television network. Her appearance last month, however, attracted particular attention because she praised Jews for working hard to rebuild their community after the Holocaust, favorably comparing it to violent reactions by Muslims to their plights, whether in response to satirical Danish cartoons or subjugation in the Palestinian territories.

She said she has received death threats and been accused by Muslims of pandering to Christians and Jews with her critiques of Islam.

But Sultan insists that her motives are pure. “I am not against Muslim people,” she said. “They are my people. I am just trying to change their mentality and their behavior.”

==============================

Pat Robertson: Radical Muslims ‘satanic’: ‘These people are crazed fanatics ... I believe it’s motivated by demonic power’ (WorldNetDaily, 060313)

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – Televangelist Pat Robertson says radical Muslims are “demonic” and “satanic” and that Islam is not a religion of peace.

Appearing on his broadcast “The 700 Club” today, Robertson made the remarks after watching a CBN news story about protests in Europe over the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

Robertson said the cartoon rage “just shows the kind of people we’re dealing with. These people are crazed fanatics, and I want to say it now: I believe it’s motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it’s time we recognize what we’re dealing with.”

Robertson also said that “the goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, is world domination.”

On a previous program, he similarly said Islam “is not a peaceful religion that wants to coexist. They want to coexist until they can control, dominate and then, if need be, destroy.”

A statement released to the Associated Press after the program said Robertson was referring to terrorists seeking to bomb innocent people as being motivated by Satan. In the news story, he noted, radical Muslims were shown screaming: “May Allah bomb you! May Osama Bin Laden bomb you!”

The [KH: ultraliberal] Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told AP Robertson’s new comments are “grossly irresponsible.”

“At a time when inter-religious tensions around the world are at an all-time high, Robertson seems determined to throw gasoline on the fire,” Lynn said in a statement.

As WND reported last September, Robertson suggested the assassination of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

“We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” he said, though he later backed away from the suggestion of assassination, stating he was taken out of context.

In October, he said the catastrophic earthquake in South Asia in the wake of recent U.S. hurricanes and the December 2004 tsunami indicated we “might be” in the End Times described in the Bible.

==============================

Muslim: I attacked ‘out of love for Allah’: Man who barreled SUV into 9 people sends letter to N. Carolina TV station, cites Quran in defense (WorldNetDaily, 060316)

The North Carolina Muslim who drove an SUV into a group of people at the University of North Carolina has written a letter to a local TV station saying Allah approves of such attacks.

“Allah gives permission in the Quran for the followers of Allah to attack those who have raged war against them, with the expectation of eternal paradise in case of martyrdom and/or living one’s life in obedience of all of Allah’s commandments found throughout the Quran’s 114 chapters,” wrote Mohammed Taheri-azar in a two-page letter sent to a television reporter and anchor at WTVD-TV, an ABC affiliate in Durham.

“The U.S. government is responsible for the deaths of and the torture of countless followers of Allah, my brothers and sisters. My attack on Americans at UNC-CH on March 3rd was in retaliation for similar attacks orchestrated by the U.S. government on my fellow followers of Allah in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic territories. I did not act out of hatred for Americans, but out of love for Allah instead.”

Taheri-azar, 22, was charged with nine counts of attempted murder and nine counts of assault after driving a rented Jeep Cherokee through a crowd of people in the Pit area on the Campus Hill campus March 3. Six of the victims were hospitalized.

After the attack, the UNC graduate called 911 and surrendered to police saying he wanted to “punish the government of the United States for their actions around the world.” He said he had intended to kill the people he struck.

An Iranian native, Taheri-azar says he looks forward to defending himself in court to educate the public about “the will of Allah.” He is being held in a maximum-security prison.

According to an AP report, Taheri-azar wrote in the letter that he started reading the Quran in June 2003 and has read it 15 times since.

A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Associated Press Taheri-azar’s claims of religious support for his actions are an old and repudiated claim.

“Islamic scholars have clearly and repeatedly stated that attacks on innocent civilians of any kind are prohibited by Islam and should be repudiated,” spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said yesterday.

“There are people who have strange views about any number of faiths and they shouldn’t be taken as representative of those faiths. The people who kill abortion doctors claim they are doing it in the name of Christianity and we all know it is a distortion of Christian beliefs.”

After the incident, officials were reticent to call the attack terrorism.

“The only thing that makes this not look like a terrorist act is that he did a lousy job of it,” Solomon Bradman, chief executive officer of the Miami-based Security Solutions International, told The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C.

UNC Chancellor James Moeser commented after the attack: “He was a good student. He also was very much a loner.”

==============================

Democratic apostasy: The martyrdom of Abdul Rahman (townhall.com, 060321)

by Chuck Colson

Since October 2001, approximately three hundred Americans have been killed and another eight hundred have been wounded in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the Taliban was about more than denying a base of operations to al Qaeda—it was also about liberating the people of Afghanistan from a brutal theocracy.

All of this makes recent news from Kabul all the more ironic—and outrageous.

Abdul Rahman is on trial for his life in a Kabul court. His crime? Converting to Christianity.

According to reports, Rahman converted to Christianity sixteen years ago while working for a Christian group that helped Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan. When he returned to Afghanistan in 2002, he tried to regain custody of his daughters from his parents. They referred the matter to the police, and his conversion came to the attention of Afghani authorities.

While the Taliban no longer rules the country, conversion from Islam to another religion, called apostasy, is still punishable by death. The prosecutor offered to drop the charges if Rahman converted back to Islam, but Rahman refused. According to the prosecutor, Rahman “said he was a Christian and would always remain one.”

That fidelity could cost Rahman his life if the judge decides that his “attack on Islam” meets the requirements of apostasy.

The irony is inescapable: This is the country that we rid of the Taliban because of its religious oppression. This is the country in which we have spent at least $70 billion to establish a free democratic government. This is the country whose freedom cost us three hundred American lives and eight hundred casualties. And this is the country that is preparing to execute a man for becoming a Christian after he witnessed other Christians caring for his countrymen.

Is this the fruit of democracy? Is this why we have shed American blood and invested American treasure to set a people free? What have we accomplished for overthrowing the Taliban? This is the kind of thing we would expect from the Taliban, not from President Karzai and his freely elected democratic government.

I have supported the Bush administration’s foreign policy because I came to believe that the best way to stop Islamo-fascism was by promoting democracy. But if we can’t guarantee fundamental religious freedoms in the countries where we establish democratic reforms, then the whole credibility of our foreign policy is thrown into serious question. I hope the president and the administration can recognize what a devastating setback Rahman’s execution would be to the cause of democracy and freedom.

But just in case they don’t, we had better tell them. While Abdul Rahman is prepared to be a martyr, it is our solemn obligation before God to protest as loudly and strenuously as we can. You need to both call and e-mail your elected representatives and the White House. You need to tell them that Abdul Rahman’s execution must not take place. You need to let them know that “democracy” worth the name must include protection of the most basic human right: freedom of conscience and belief.

Otherwise, places like Afghanistan, whoever is in charge, are nothing more than brutal theocracies and will always remain so.

==============================

European Muslims seek social, political integration (Washington Times, 060408)

VIENNA, Austria — European Muslims are not content to remain “separate and isolated,” and moderate Islamic leaders must make greater social and political integration their goal, the head of Austria’s Islamic community urged yesterday.

Anas Schakfeh, president of the Islamic Authority in Austria, opened a conference of imams and religious advisers from across the Continent with the theme of developing a clear identity for European Muslims that can preserve traditions but embrace Western values. The conference also seeks to forge new alliances to confront issues of cultural isolation, youth anger and worries about growing radical movements among Europe’s estimated 33 million Muslims.

“The Muslims of Europe want to be an active and central part of the societies they live in,” Mr. Schakfeh told the gathering. “They don’t want to build a separate and isolated society.”

Muslim communities in Europe have been under intense pressure to work with anti-terrorism investigations after the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the blasts last year on London’s transit system. European views toward Muslims also hardened after last year’s riots in France and the worldwide fallout from caricatures of the prophet Muhammad first published in a Danish newspaper.

The challenge for moderate Muslim leaders is to encourage a brand of Islam that rests comfortably in the West and no longer defines itself solely as extensions of homelands in the Arab world and South Asia, organizers said.

“Muslims can integrate and participate, which is our goal, or remain on the fringes. This is where the danger lies,” said Mouddar Khouja, one of the organizers. “We remain Muslim, but our point of reference must be Europe. This is our home.”

Some steps have been taken. Centers have been established in France and the Netherlands to train new imams with a European perspective.

But the conference may also look at difficulties in some European nations for Muslim immigrants — and even their native-born children — to obtain citizenship. Polls across the European Union, meanwhile, continue to show widespread reservations about potential membership by mostly Muslim Turkey.

Resistance to Turkey’s EU bid is among the highest in Austria, which currently holds the presidency of the 25-nation bloc.

“Modern life comes to us without any instructions,” Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said. “We must not give in to fundamentalism, radicalism and fatalism. We must promote the voices of moderation.”

==============================

Where are the Muslim moderates? (Townhall.com, 060407)

by Clifford D. May

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev addressed a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. For nearly four hours, he spoke about the unspeakable: the crimes of his predecessor, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Though listeners were warned not to reveal what was said, and the speech would not be published for 32 years, word leaked out. The most widely told story, probably apocryphal, had it that as Khrushchev was detailing the mass arrests, torture and executions carried out within the Gulag, someone in the audience shouted: “And what were you doing then?”

“Who said that?” Khrushchev demanded. No one made a sound. “I want to know who said that!” he repeated, slamming a fist on the lectern. The audience was silent, trembling in fear. “That’s right,” Khrushchev said finally. “That’s exactly what I was doing.”

I am reminded of this story not only because this year is the 50th anniversary of Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” but also because it may provide at least a partial answer to the question: Where are all the Muslim moderates? Where are those who oppose terrorism, religious wars, hatred and intolerance? Where are those who think it crazy to attempt to recreate the 8th century in the 21st century? Where are those who want not to destroy the Free World but to join it?

They are out there, I suspect; in larger numbers than we might be led to believe. But if most are silent and fearful of speaking out, can you blame them? The vast majority of Arabs and Muslims live in countries ruled by illiberal and oppressive regimes. And in the few relatively free countries – Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia – there is no protection from the long arm of Militant Islamism. Indeed, even in Europe it can be dangerous to challenge religious fascism. And last year, Shaker Elsayed, leader of Dar al-Hijrah, one of the largest mosques in the U.S., told American Muslims: “The call to reform Islam is an alien call.”

Muslims who dissent from this orthodoxy have received precious little support from anyone. As far back as 1989, Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini called for the murder of British author Salman Rushdie. Such a frontal attack on freedom of speech should have prompted Western governments to send Iranian diplomats packing. Instead, Rushdie went into hiding while most Western intellectuals persuaded themselves this quarrel was none of their business.

Since that time, and perhaps partly as a consequence, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for making a movie some Muslims found insulting. Danish journalists who dared publish cartoons satirizing the radicalization of Islam have been threatened. Such formerly-courageous publications as The New York Times declined to publish the cartoons, claiming – unconvincingly — that they had not been intimidated; they were merely demonstrating sensitivity.

Meanwhile, in Jordan and Yemen, editors who thought their readers deserved to judge the cartoons for themselves were jailed.

The pandering has escalated: Last month, Columbia University held a conference that included as a “highlight” a video of Libyan dictator Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi presenting “his views on the prospects for democracy in the twenty-first century.” Columbia’s teachers and administrators are apparently untroubled by the fact that Libya’s leading dissident, Fathi Eljami, is currently rotting in one of Qaddafi’s dungeons.

And in Tunisia, democracy advocate Neila Charchour Hachicha is under police surveillance — her phone and internet connections severed, her car confiscated, her daughter threatened and her husband in prison. What did she do to deserve such punishment? It’s not clear, but she did give an interview to Middle East Quarterly about impediments to reform in Tunisia and she spoke at the “neo-con” American Enterprise Institute about the need for democracy in the Middle East.

The routine imprisonment and torture of dissidents in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia almost never prompts UN officials to consider interfering — or even criticizing. Once in a while, a Western diplomat expresses concern.

“I keep hearing, ‘Why are liberals silent?’” Said al-Ashmawy, an Egyptian judge and author, recently said. “How can we write? Who is going to protect me?”

If we in the West ever want to have allies in Arab and Muslim countries, we’ll need to start supporting moderates — and stop empowering their oppressors. Most immediately, it would be useful if American ambassadors in Muslim countries would welcome dissidents to their offices as they do cabinet ministers. And perhaps Columbia University President Lee Bollinger – whose “primary teaching and scholarly interests are focused on free speech and First Amendment issues” — might recognize how his institution has been compromised and at least express concern.

==============================

Imams vow to preach values of Islam, West (Washington Times, 060410)

VIENNA, Austria — European imams have pledged to work harder to prove that Islam is compatible with democracy and that the majority of Muslims living in the West support human rights, free speech and pluralism.

More than 130 prayer leaders from across the continent, in a meeting sponsored by Austria as the current president of the European Union, agreed that Islamic theologians in Europe must do more to establish that their faith does not clash with Western values.

The declaration published yesterday amounted to a catalog of homegrown moderate views that Western politicians have been urging Muslim leaders to draw up as a bulwark against radical Islamic ideologies from the Middle East.

But an attack on an Islamic cemetery being built in Vienna reminded them of the hostility that Muslims meet throughout Europe.

“Muslims in Europe are making history,” said Mouddar Khouja, a senior official of the Islamic Community in Austria, which organized the two-day meeting at which several speakers urged “new thinking” to develop a theological basis for Islam in Europe.

He said European imams were issuing fatwas, or religious edicts, dealing with modern challenges, such as condemning terrorism, instead of leaving the field open to radical Middle Eastern preachers who glorify violence on the Internet.

“We have shown how to protect ourselves from fatwas from other countries,” he said. “We have fatwas from imams living in Europe, and they speak for themselves.”

Imams, who lead Friday prayers in mosques, play an important role in Islam because the faithful often ask their advice on what the religion allows or forbids Muslims to do.

This is routine in Muslim-majority countries, but Muslims in Europe face new challenges as minorities in non-Islamic societies. They also have fewer Islamic scholars and little or no tradition of Muslim life in the West to which they can refer.

This Conference of European Imams was aimed at strengthening moderate voices that are sometimes drowned out in Muslim discussions by radical anti-Western preachers whose sermons and writings on the Internet inspire small groups of extremist Muslims in Europe.

The conference stressed that Muslims might better adapt to Europe, which some of them see as corrupt and immoral, if imams stressed in their sermons that core Western values of democracy and freedom meshed with their own faith.

“Imams, as teachers and preachers, have a duty to emphasize to their congregations to play a positive role ... in addressing the plagues of Europe — hate, bigotry, racism, extremism and terrorism,” said British imam Abduljalil Sajid.

The meeting was clouded by an attack on an Islamic cemetery being built in a suburb of Vienna. The building shell of the prayer room was set on fire over the weekend. Its outside walls were smeared with graffiti saying: “Will be blown up.”

The conference’s declaration urged Muslim theologians to point out chapter and verse how Islam fits with Western values.

“Theological arguments have a good chance of leading to lasting changes in attitudes,” it said. “These should be seen as part of the solution and fostered in public discussion.”

Among the practical steps they sought were Islamic arguments against immigrants’ isolating themselves in self-made ghettos, refusing to integrate or rejecting the separation of church and state in Western democracies.

Imams also should show that violations of women’s rights — through forced marriages, female circumcision and “honor killings” — were rooted in traditions from outside Europe and not justified by Islam, they said.

“We need some new thinking,” said Ayatollah Sayed Abbas Ghaemmagami, head of the Imam Ali Islamic Center in Hamburg, Germany, a leading Shi’ite center in Europe.

“Today, we are in dire need of a social model that is just and realistic [and can] arrive at solutions to the problems that prevent integration and peaceful living together,” he said.

==============================

The Boys Left Behind: The gender graduation gap. (National Review Online, 060419)

The educational achievement differences between white and minority students are well documented and universally understood. Less appreciated, however, is the gap in educational performance between the sexes. In a new Manhattan Institute study we find that females graduate high school at substantially higher rates than males. Importantly, while the gender gap is relatively small for white and Asian students, it is particularly large for blacks and Hispanics.

It is no longer a secret that alarmingly high numbers of students drop out of high school. Several independent calculations of the high-school graduation rate, including ours, confirm that around 30% of all students drop out. The figures are even more staggering when evaluated by race. While 78% of white students and 72% of Asian students graduated in the class of 2003, only 55% of black and 53% of Hispanic students earned a diploma.

In our latest calculations we discover that within the racial graduation gap there is a hidden gender gap as well. We estimate that while an already low 72% of female students graduate from high school, only 65% of male students earned a diploma. These figures are consistent with other evidence. On the latest administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a highly respected standardized test given to a nationally representative group of students by the U.S. Department of Education, 34% of public-school eighth-grade females could read at the “proficient” level or above compared to only 24% of males.

Notably, while females of all racial groups graduate at higher rates than their male counterparts, the size of this gap differs substantially by race. The difference in graduation rates between females and males was about five-percentage points for white students and only 3%age points for Asian students. Among Hispanic and black female students the graduation rates are 58% and 59%, respectively, compared to 49% for Hispanic males and 48% for black males. Thus, the gender gap is twice as large for minority students as for white students.

Future research is necessary to provide a full explanation for why the gender graduation gap exists and why this disparity is particularly large for minority students. Until such time there are a few hypotheses that deserve attention.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers argues that, contrary to popular belief, public schools have focused their instruction on female students to the detriment of males. Such neglect could help explain the gender graduation gap.

Explaining the disparity between male and female graduation rates by race is an even more interesting problem. We suspect that for minority students the substantially larger gender gap could be explained by a “push-pull” phenomenon that is particularly strong for minority males.

Black and Hispanic males might feel a “pull” out of high school because they are disproportionably attracted to short-term opportunities in the employment market. Jobs in construction, for example, might pay what appear to be relatively high salaries for a low-income minority student. Further, it is possible that the underground economy, including the drug trade, attracts a disproportionate number of minority male students.

Minority males might also be “pushed” from the graduation roles by their schools. While we suspect this does not describe most teachers, it is possible that some educators find black and Hispanic males particularly threatening relative to other students and are thus more likely to give up on them more quickly.

The gender gap in graduation is but one of the many problems facing American education. Even when we account for the disparity in graduation rates between males and females, overall graduation rates are far too low and the difference in graduation rates by race is simply horrific. While most agree that public education needs to improve across the board, it appears that minority male students have it the worst. Understanding both the racial and gender gaps in graduation rates should allow us to focus our reform efforts where the problems are most severe.

— Jay P. Greene is endowed chair and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas as well as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Marcus A. Winters is a senior research associate. They are authors of Education Myths.

==============================

Muslim students ‘being taught to despise unbelievers as filth’ (Times Online, 060420)

Pupils protest as college linked to Iran puts fundamentalist text on curriculum, reports our correspondent

MUSLIM students training to be imams at a British college with strong Iranian links have complained that they are being taught fundamentalist doctrines which describe nonMuslims as “filth”.

The Times has obtained extracts from medieval texts taught to the students in which unbelievers are likened to pigs and dogs. The texts are taught at the Hawza Ilmiyya of London, a religious school, which has a sister institution, the Islamic College for Advanced Studies (ICAS), which offers a degree validated by Middlesex University.

The students, who have asked to remain anonymous, study their religious courses alongside the university-backed BA in Islamic studies. They spend two days a week as religious students and three days on their university course.

The Hawza Ilmiyya and the ICAS are in the same building at Willesden High Road, northwest London — a former Church of England primary school — and share many of the same teaching staff.

They have a single fundraising arm, the Irshad Trust, one of the managing trustees of which is Abdolhossein Moezi, an Iranian cleric and a personal representative of Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme religious leader.

Mr Moezi is also the director of the Islamic Centre of England in Maida Vale, a large mosque and community centre that is a registered charity. Its memorandum of association, lodged with the Charity Commission, says that: “At all times at least one of the trustees shall be a representative of the Supreme Spiritual Leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Both the Irshad Trust and the Islamic Centre of England Ltd (ICEL) were established in 1996. Mr Moezi’s predecessor as Ayatollah Khamenei’s representative, another cleric called Mohsen Araki, was a founding trustee of both charities.

In their first annual accounts, lodged with the Charity Commission in 1997, the charities revealed substantial donations. The Irshad Trust received gifts of £1,367,439 and the ICEL accepted an “exceptional item” of £1.2 million.

Around the same time, the ICEL bought a former cinema in Maida Vale without a mortgage. Since then it has received between £1 million and £1.7 million in donations each year which, it says, come from British and overseas donors. The centre declined to say if any of its money came from Iran.

Since 2000, its accountants have recorded in their auditors’ report on the charity’s accounts that they have limited evidence about the source of donations.

The links between the two charities and Iran are strong. The final three years of the eight-year Hawza Ilmiyya course are spent studying in colleges in the holy city of Qom, the power base of Iran’s religious leaders.

The text that has upset some students is the core work in their Introduction to Islamic Law class and was written by Muhaqqiq al-Hilli, a 13thcentury scholar. The Hawza Ilmiyya website states that “the module aims to familiarise the student with the basic rules of Islamic law as structured by al-Hilli”.

Besides likening unbelievers to filth, the al-Hilli text includes a chapter on jihad, setting down the conditions under which Muslims are supposed to fight Jews and Christians.

The text is one of a number of books that some students say they find “disturbing” and “very worrying”. Their spokesman told The Times: “They are being exposed to very literalist interpretations of the Koran. These are interpretations that would not be recognised by

80 or 90 per cent of Muslims, but they are being taught in this school.

“A lot of people in the Muslim community are very concerned about this. We need to urgently re-examine the kind of material that is being taught here and in other colleges in Britain.”

Mohammed Saeed Bahmanpour, who teaches in both the Hawza and the ICAS, confirmed that al-Hilli text was used, but denied that it was taught as doctrine. He said that, although the book was a key work in the jurisprudence class, its prescriptions were not taught as law. When he taught from it, he omitted the impurity chapter, he said.

Dr Bahmanpour said: “We just read the text and translate for them, but as I said I do not deal with the book on purity. We have left that to the discretion of the teacher whether he wants to teach it or not.

“The idea is not to teach them jurisprudence because most of the fatwas of Muhaqiq are not actually conforming with the fatwa of our modern jurists. The idea is that they would be able to read classical texts and that is all.”

Dr Bahmanpour said that Mr Moezi had no educational role at either the ICAS or Hawza Ilmiyya. Mr Moezi has been the representative in Britain of Ayatollah Khamenei since 2004 when he also succeeded Mr Araki in the role and as a trustee of the ICEL and the Irshad Trust.

The Islamic centre’s website reports Ayatollah Khamenei’s speeches and activities prominently and one of the first sites listed under its links section is the supreme leader’s homepage.

A spokeswoman for the ICEL also confirmed its links with the Iran’s spiritual leadership but said the centre was a purely religious organisation.

Middlesex University, which accredits the ICAS course but not the Hawza Ilmiyya, said: “The BA in Islamic studies offered by the Islamic College of Advanced Studies is validated by Middlesex University.

“This means that Middlesex ensures that the academic standards of this particular programme are appropriate, the curriculum delivers to the required standards, learning and teaching methods allow achievement of standards.”

THE DOCTRINE

‘The water left over in the container after any type of animal has drunk from it is considered clean and pure apart from the left over of a dog, a pig, and a disbeliever’

‘There are ten types of filth and impurities: urine, faeces, semen, carrion, blood of carrion, dogs, pigs, disbelievers’

‘When a dog, a pig, or a disbeliever touches or comes in contact with the clothes or body [of a Muslim] while he [the disbeliever] is wet, it becomes obligatory- compulsory upon him [the Muslim] to wash and clean that part which came in contact with the disbeliever’

From the al-Hilli text

==============================

Globalization for Losers: The jihadists are far worse for indigenous cultures than Westernization. (National Review Online, 060428)

Jonah Goldberg

Osama bin Laden’s ratings are falling. His latest pronouncement was a yawn. His scripts could use a rewrite. “Infidels” this, “crusaders” that. Blah, blah, blah. We’ve heard it all before.

However, one new wrinkle in Bin Laden’s diatribe deserves more attention, as it illuminates the nature of the West’s struggle against radical Islam. “I call on the mujahedin and their supporters in Sudan and the Arabian Peninsula to prepare all that is necessary to wage a long-term war against the crusaders in western Sudan,” Bin Laden declared. The crusaders in question are United Nations peacekeepers, who aren’t even in Sudan yet but who are going to stop genocide there — we hope. Bin Laden suspects a Western plot to install U.S. bases and destroy Islam in Sudan, and he wants to fend off the U.N., which he calls an “infidel body” and “a tool of crusader-Zionist resolutions.” If he thinks the U.N. is a tool of the Zionists then he needs to get out of his cave more.

Nonetheless, bin Laden’s call to open a new front in Sudan highlights some underappreciated aspects of the jihadist mission. First, most of the people being slaughtered by Sudan’s Arab-controlled government are Muslims. Bin Laden wants his holy warriors to fight for a Sudanese right to exterminate indigenous Muslim tribes. In this, Bin Ladenism represents a perverse form of globalization.

In the West, we tend to talk about globalization as if it’s a euphemism for Americanization. But there are many competing forms of globalization. Even anti-globalization activists favor the “right” kind of globalization, one driven by the U.N. and “progressives” instead of corporations and markets.

Radical Islam is globalization for losers: It appeals to those left out of modernization, industrialization, and prosperity — particularly to young men desperate for order, meaning, and pride amid the chaos of globalization. Radical Islam provides it, but at a terrible price.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported the sad tale of the demise of Mak Yong, an ancient form of dance and theater in Southeast Asia drawn from pre-Islamic faiths, including Hinduism. But such traditional cultural influences are now considered “un-Islamic.” “Many Southeast Asian Muslims now navigate by guideposts from the Arab world,” the Journal reported. “Young men in Indonesia are starting to wear turbans and grow beards. In Malaysia, Malays have adopted the Arab word for prayer, salat, to replace the Malay word, sembahyang, which literally means ‘offer homage to the primal ancestor.’ “

This is merely an extension of trends that have already transformed the Middle East. As Fareed Zakaria writes in “The Future of Freedom,” until the 1970s most Middle Easterners “practiced a kind of village Islam that adapted itself to local cultures and to normal human desires. Pluralistic and tolerant, these villages often worshipped saints, went to shrines, sang religious hymns, and cherished art — all technically disallowed in Islam.” This indigenous form of Islam was bulldozed by urbanization and radicalization. The Iranian Revolution was a harbinger of the transformation toward a more “universal” Islam that was also more doctrinaire: “Islam of the high church as opposed to Islam of the street fair,” Zakaria writes.

Reihan Salam, a coauthor of one of the smartest blogs going right now — theamericanscene.com — is an American of Bengali descent who argues that the death of Mak Yong represents “globalization at its worst.” He rightly notes that if the choice is between the globalization of “crass Arabization” and the globalization of “crass Westernization,” then it should be no choice at all.

Although Western-style globalization may force certain technological and economic changes on indigenous cultures, it also provides those cultures with the tools and flexibility to keep much of their culture. The hard Islam coming out of Riyadh and Tehran offers no such freedom. Recall that Afghanistan was a Muslim country for centuries, but it wasn’t until the jihadi thugs of the Taliban took over that the historic Bamiyan Buddhas were deemed an offense to Islam and destroyed.

Bin Laden’s call to kill U.N. peacekeepers is consistent with the Islamist desire to impose a harsh, “one true Islam” across the Muslim world (and, someday, they hope, the non-Muslim world too).

Too many intellectuals and commentators take the ignorant and condescending view that because jihadism is exotic, it is also “authentic.” On the right, this often translates into the view that all strains of Islam are alike — and equally dangerous. And on the left, we get the usual knee-jerk defense of any seemingly “indigenous” foreign movement that casts America as a global villain. The reality is that in the War on Terrorism, America is on the side of freedom and diversity. Bin Laden & Co. are the real crusaders.

==============================

Not for the Feint of Heart: Robert Spencer asks the hard questions about Islam...and answers them. (National Review Online, 060428)

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), by Robert Spencer (Regnery, 233 pp., $19.95)

It is often said that in order to keep polite company polite, we must refrain from speaking of religion and politics. Yet, the two are not equals in the hierarchy of politesse. Political debate may be unwelcome in many settings, but no one clears the room by observing that the great totalitarian evils of the 20th century, Communism and fascism, were directly responsible for incalculable carnage.

Not so when it comes to religion — or, at least, one particular religion. The past three decades have borne witness to a rising, global tide of terrorist atrocities, wrought by Muslims who proclaim without apology — indeed, with animating pride — that their actions are compelled by Islam. Nonetheless, the quickest ticket to oblivion on PC’s pariah express is to suggest that the root cause of Islamic terrorism might be, well, Islam.

That the possibility is utterable at all today owes exclusively to the sheer audacity of Muslim legions, who have rioted globally, on cue, based on what even their exhausted defenders must now concede are trifles (newspaper cartoons and a tall tale of Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay leap to mind). But the largest obstacle to any examination of creed — larger even than a growing alphabet soup of Muslim interest groups — has been the same Western elites who are the prime targets of jihadist ire. In the most notable instance, President Bush absolved Islam of any culpability even as fires raged at the remains of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And, although attacks before and after that date have been numerous and widespread, it has become nearly as much an oratorical staple as “My fellow Americans” for U.S. politicians to begin any discussion of our signal national security challenge with the observation that Islam is a “religion of peace” — a religion that has surely been perverted, “hijacked,” and otherwise misconstrued by terrorists.

No more, insists Robert Spencer, the intrepid author and analyst behind the Jihad Watch website. Spencer’s theory is as logical as it is controversial: when the single common thread that runs through virtually all of the international terrorism of the modern era is that its perpetrators are Muslims, and when the jihadists themselves tell us that their religion is the force that drives them, we should seriously consider the probability that Islam is a causative agent, even the principal causative agent, of their terrorist actions. This he undertakes to do in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)..

One might once have assumed it inarguable that an ideological battle cannot be fought with complete inattention to ideology. But that has been the case with the war on terror, and Spencer’s mission is to rectify that with a simple, user-friendly volume that walks the reader through elementary facts about Islam — its tenets, its scriptures, and its history, including most prominently the Koran and the life and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed. It is a tutorial shorn of wishful thinking.

While Spencer does not declare that anyone adhering to Islam is a terrorist waiting to happen, he clearly believes it is a perilous belief system. Make no mistake: This is a disturbing account. And most disturbing is that the truly arresting passages are not the author’s contentions and deductions. They are the actual words of Islamic scripture and the accounts of several revered events in Islamic tradition.

The story by which Islam achieves hegemony over much the world and the loyalty of millions of worshippers, very nearly extending its dominion throughout Europe, is a story of military conquest. Mohammed, deemed the final Messenger of Allah — superseding the prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a group in which Muslims include Jesus — was a warrior, in addition to wearing the hats of poet, philosopher, and economist, among others.

The Koran, Spencer argues, does not teach tolerance and peace. At best, he explains, there are isolated sections which urge Muslims to leave unbelievers alone in their errant ways, and which counsel that forced conversion is forbidden. But these must be considered in context with other verses, such as those directing that Mohammed “make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them,” and that the faithful “slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them,” and so on.

What are we to make of the seeming contradiction? Obviously, self-professed moderate Muslims point often to the benign passages, while terrorists echo the belligerent ones. Who is right? Spencer vigorously contends that the militants have the better of the argument. The Koran, which is not arranged chronologically but according to the length of its chapters (or “suras”), is theologically divided between Mohammed’s Meccan and Medinan periods. The former, from the early part of the Prophet’s ministry when he was calling inhabitants of Mecca to Islam, are the soothing, poetic verses. The latter, written in Medina after Mohammed was ousted from Mecca, are the more bellicose. The Medinan scriptures come later in time and, sensibly, overrule their predecessors.

This is bracing in at least two ways. First, even if there were a logical counterargument to this (and let us pray that someone comes up with a compelling one soon), it underscores the seeming impossibility of proving wrong those who commit atrocities in the name of Islam. When they claim justification in their religion for merciless attacks and other brutalities (such as beheadings), they are not imagining it out of thin air — it’s right there in black-and-white. The reformers may try gamely to minimize or reinterpret, but they cannot make the words go away.

Second, those words are taken to be the words of God Himself. The Koran is not like the books of the Old and New Testaments. It is not thought to be “inspired,” to be related through intermediaries whose assumed human gloss opens up possibilities of reinterpretation or correction. Muslims believe the Koran contains the unvarnished teachings of Allah, dictated directly to Mohammed by the archangel Gabriel. This renders all the more challenging (to put it mildly) the burden of discrediting terrorist operatives who claim to be doing precisely what they have been divinely instructed to do — and doing it in the service of jihad, the “striving” which, Spencer explains, is a bedrock obligation of all Muslims.

Islam, Spencer elaborates, aims at nothing less than total domination — first, unrivalled supremacy in any territory that is (or was at any time) under its sway, and, ultimately, spreading throughout the world — whether by persuasion or by sheer force. The bleak choices presented to non-believers in the Muslim lands are to accept Islam (and its attendant social system, which is particularly oppressive of women); to live the grim life of dhimmitude by submitting to the authority of the Islamic state (permitted to practice other religions under tight regulations and only if the jizya, or poll-tax on non-Muslims, is paid); or to die. The bleak future for non-believers in the rest of the world is a state of war until they are subdued, as — beginning in the seventh century — were the Byzantine Empire, Persia and the Christian strongholds of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

Consistent with the “Politically Incorrect” model, Spencer spends much of his time deconstructing “PC Myths.” These involve not only the sugar-coated conventional wisdom about Muslim doctrine but also what he sees as the cognate project to revise Islamic history.

The “Golden Age” of Islam, for example, is, according to the author, a gross exaggeration. He does not deny that there were grand achievements under caliphates that ruled various places from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries, and Muslims themselves, he acknowledges, were responsible for important advances in mathematics and, to a lesser extent, medicine. Nonetheless, Spencer counters that many of the epoch’s achievements either occurred despite Islam (particularly in the areas of literature, art, and music) or are better understood as the accomplishments (especially in science and architecture) of better educated peoples whom Muslims conquered.

Islamic culture, for Spencer, thwarted great possibilities. Muslim philosophers were singularly responsible for preserving and explicating the work of Aristotle — but over time, these philosophers were read primarily in the West, because waves of anti-intellectualism and a conceit that rote study of the Koran was sufficient education overtook the Islamic world. Medical advance was stymied because of traditions that forbade or discouraged dissections and artistic representations of the human body. Spencer does credit Islam with causing the Renaissance and the discovery of the New World — but only indirectly. The conquest of Constantinople caused Europeans (like Columbus) to seek new trade routes to the East and hastened the flight of Greek intellectuals to Western Europe.

A final “Myth” Spencer endeavors to explode is the legacy of the Crusades. While not gainsaying Christian excesses and brutality, the story, he asserts, is far from one-sided. It is just that, consistent with today’s victimology leitmotif, only one side gets told anymore.

The comprehensive narrative, Spencer insists, stretches back for 450 years before the supposed eleventh century start of the Crusades — back to the conquest of Jerusalem in 638. “The sword spread Islam” and ultimately repressed the formerly predominant non-Muslim populations that are tiny minorities in what are now Islamic countries. The Crusades, Spencer relates, were largely defensive struggles to protect threatened Christians. He does not dispute that the political agenda of recapturing what had been eastern Christendom loomed large, but he does contend that the legends of forced conversions, insatiable looting, and mindless atrocities are largely overblown.

This is not a book for the feint of heart. Nonetheless, it is well done and extremely important. Much of current American policy hinges on the notions that there is a vibrant moderate Islam and that it must simply be possessed of the intellectual firepower necessary to put the lie to the militants. These are the premises behind the ambitious projects to democratize the Middle East, to establish a Palestinian state that will peacefully coexist with its Israeli neighbor, and to win the vast majority of the world’s billion-plus Muslims over to our side in the War on Terror.

They are, however, premises that are more the product of assumption than critical thought. In this highly accessible, well-researched, quick-paced read, Robert Spencer dares to bring that critical thought to the equation. The result is not a promising landscape, but it’s a landscape we must understand. You really can’t fight an ideological battle without grappling with the ideology.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

==============================

A Friendly Warning: Melanie Phillips on London’s identity crisis. (National Review Online, 060508)

An NRO Q&A

“Britain is in denial. Having allowed the country to turn into a global hub of the Islamic jihad without apparently giving it a second thought, the British establishment is still failing even now—despite the wake-up calls of both 9/11 and the London bomb attacks of 2005—to acknowledge what it is actually facing and take the appropriate action.” So writes Melanie Phillips, columnist for London’s Daily Mail, in her new book, Londonistan, released today.

Phillips talked to National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez about her hometown and the problems of America’s principal ally in the war on terror.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: So “Jews, don’t consider London a top vacation spot” is what you’re saying?

Melanie Phillips: Britain certainly isn’t a very comfortable place for Jews right now. It’s not that there’s a serious physical risk; even though there’s a relatively high level of attacks on Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, it’s still overwhelmingly likely that Jewish visitors to London or elsewhere in Britain would encounter no violence. It’s more on the intellectual and social level that you feel it. If you read the mainstream media, watch or listen to the BBC, go onto campus, or attend dinner parties, you come up against the demonization and delegitimization of Israel, along with breathtaking assertions about how the international Jewish conspiracy has hijacked U.S. foreign policy, which would have been simply unthinkable a few years ago.

Lopez: Zacarias Moussaoui’s mother has said that “Life in London made my boy a terrorist.” Does she have a point?

Phillips: Absolutely. Leave aside the self-serving nature of her remarks—it seems that Moussaoui’s family background was hardly stable and loving—I expect she’s right that it was his experience as a student in London that radicalized him. What’s so astounding is that from the 1990s onwards, the British political and security establishment simply turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the substantial network of radical Islamists who were preaching hatred of the West and recruiting for the jihad. As long as they believed—erroneously—that these people posed no threat to Britain itself, the authorities ignored them. But all the time they were steadily radicalizing impressionable young Muslims.

Lopez: Is there any sense of British nationalism/culture being taught in British schools? I remember spending an entire year on British literature in a New York City high school. Is that kinda thing a multiculturalism no-no in London today? How prohibitive is tolerance in the classroom?

Phillips: For three decades and more, the British education system has stopped transmitting the story and values of the nation on the grounds that national identity is racist, xenophobic, inhospitable, and so on. So English literature and, even more so, British political history are only minimally taught. If anything is racist, of course, it’s that attitude itself because it means that recent immigrants are excluded from equal participation in British society because they are left in ignorance of it. Britain used to do integration; now it does disintegration. In every sense.

Lopez: This was no quick thing for London. When did the conversion, so to speak start?

Phillips: Well, it depends how far you want to go back! Certainly this process of multiculturalism, minority “rights” that beat up the majority through “victim culture” and the loss of faith in the nation and its values that these and other examples of cultural breakdown represent, got going in a serious way directly after the Second World War and the winding up of the British Empire. But I think you can trace it all much further back, to the loss of religious faith in the 19th century and the rise of romantic hyper-individualism which had an impact in the U.S. too—Britain’s education meltdown, after all, derived from the “child-centered” theories of the American educationist John Dewey—and which you can trace back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century.

Lopez: How bad are the imams in London?

Phillips: The problem is not just in London; “Londonistan” is a phenomenon which has taken root in other parts of Britain too. I don’t think anyone knows how many imams are preaching extremism, which in itself is alarming. Some are; others aren’t. But it’s not just the imams; a lot of the radicalization is being perpetrated by people like youth workers or community activists working on campus and elsewhere below the official radar.

Lopez: Where are the moderate Muslims in London and what do they think of the situation there?

Phillips: There’s an increasing number of truly moderate Muslims who are deeply aghast not only at the extremists within their own religion but at the British establishment’s strategy of appeasing them which is cutting the ground from underneath the reformers’ feet.

Lopez: After the London bombings last summer, St. Paul’s Cathedral almost invited the families of the bombers to a memorial services? Are you kidding?

Phillips: Afraid not; all too true.

Lopez: How much are Christian leaders to blame for Londonistan? How much the government?

Phillips: The government is very much to blame because it denied the significance of what was going on and allowed it to grow under its nose. Amazingly, even since the London bombings last July the government and the security establishment still refuse to acknowledge the religious nature of Islamist terrorism. The thinking goes: Al Qaeda bad, Muslim Brotherhood not so bad; indeed, we can use the Brotherhood to divert young Muslims away from terrorism! This is called British sophistication.

The Church of England, in line with its principled position over the past several decades in supinely going along with moral and cultural collapse, is on its knees before terror. It regularly demonises Israel for defending itself, while uttering not so much as a peep of protest at the persecution of Christians by Muslims that is going on across the world. This all encourages the morally inverted thinking which holds that “Islamophobia” is the real problem rather than Islamist extremism, and turns the roles of victim and victimizer on their heads.

Lopez: How is Londonistan a threat to Americans? More Richard Reids in waiting there?

Phillips: Maybe; who knows? But I think the danger is more subtle. Some of the things that are going wrong in the U.K. are true for the U.S. too—the obsession with minority rights, for example, or the excessive reluctance to interfere with religion. If Britain sleepwalks into cultural oblivion, this may strengthen these tendencies in the U.S. too. After all, Britain was the originator of the concepts of liberty, democracy, and the rule of law. If Britain now unravels the values that underpin them, the consequences will be incalculable throughout the free world.

Lopez: Britain, of course, has been a key ally of the U.S. in the war on terror. That make us delusional?

Phillips: No, because under Tony Blair it has indeed been such an ally. The question, however, is whether—given the kind of things I’ve been talking about, and the associated widespread animosity in towards the US and the war in Iraq—it will remain as staunch as it has been when Mr Blair steps down as Prime Minister.

Lopez: How does Tony Blair rate in contributing to Londonistan? His wife hasn’t been a great help, has she?

Phillips: Cherie has certainly said some, er, unfortunate things about her sympathies for suicide bombers. I think Tony Blair personally does now understand the nature and extent of the threat of radical Islamism, and yet he has been unable to get the British establishment to take the same view.

Lopez: As Americans debate immigration, what would you highlight from London by way of lessons?

Phillips: Well U.S. immigration, despite all the controversy over it at present, is different in that Hispanic culture is not so very different from that of the host society. However, I think the general lesson is that, where people need to be integrated, this becomes very much more difficult if the numbers are too large.

Lopez: What’s your candidate for an American version? New York is too much of a melting pot, isn’t it? Windy Citystan?

Phillips: Doesn’t have quite the same resonance, does it?

Lopez: Is there a plausible turnaround option for London?

Phillips: Yes, if Britain (like the U.S.) grasps some time soon that it’s not enough to tackle terrorist cells producing bomb belts and poison laboratories, but we have to tackle also the lies and hatred that are inside people’s heads.

Lopez: When are you moving?

Phillips: What, and desert the battlefield?

Lopez: Does the post-election shakeup last week help any?

Phillips: Jack Straw’s removal as foreign secretary was a relief to all who are not over-keen on appeasing the Iranian regime; John Reid’s arrival at the Home Office offers the best chance that the political correctness that has that ministry by the throat might at last be prised off its windpipe. On the other hand, this was a shake-up of a government that is in turmoil, so maybe any hope of an outbreak of common-sense is premature.

==============================

A Different Sort of Radical Muslim: Ahmed Abaddi is helping Muslims to understand the West. (National Review Online, 060509)

As Osama bin Laden and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continue to breathe their murderous threats against Christians and Jews, and attempt to incite Muslims around the world to annihilate the U.S. and Israel, another Muslim leader made the rounds in Washington last week offering a radically different vision.

Topping his agenda were under-the-radar peace talks with Israel, religious classes to teach Imams the history and virtues of the West, and dramatic new initiatives to build ties to Rabbis and evangelical Christians.

Were Dr. Ahmed Abaddi merely a soft-spoken, gentle-mannered professor of comparative religion in his native Morocco, his views would certainly be welcome, but not particularly newsworthy. However, Abaddi is actually in a position of some influence. As Morocco’s Director of Islamic Affairs and senior advisor to King Mohammed VI, he is responsible for overseeing his country’s 33,000 mosques. And he’s not just talking about a new approach to Muslim relations with the West. At the direction, and with the blessing, of his King, Abaddi has already taken a number of concrete—and controversial—steps.

Abaddi recounted to House and Senate leaders, Bush administration officials, journalists, and business leaders the changes he and his colleagues have brought about in recent years:

They embarked upon a campaign of interviews, speeches, and sermons that condemn al Qaeda’s teachings and violence. This accelerated after 9/11 and a series of suicide bombings that ripped through Morocco’s Muslim- and Jewish-owned restaurants, as well as a bombing at a Jewish community center on May 16, 2003, that left some 45 dead and more than 100 wounded.

They helped mobilize more than one million Moroccans to take to the streets of Casablanca in May 2003 to denounce radical Islamic terrorism—a march in which 1,000 Moroccan Jews openly participated and were warmly embraced by the Muslim community.

They launched a theological training program for Imams to teach them how to promote moderation within Islam, to teach them more about Western history and the importance of Christianity and Judaism to Western social and political development, and to help them identify and oppose extremist forces and trends within Islam. Participants take 32 hours of instruction per week for a full year. The first class of 210 just graduated, and included 55 women.

They helped organize the “World Congress of Rabbis and Imams for Peace” in Brussels (January 2005) and Seville (March 2006) where some 150 Muslim and Jewish leaders “sit beard to beard” to explore common ground, denounce extremists, and “write declarations of peace.”

They launched an initiative to build a “bridge of friendship” to evangelical Christians in the U.S., including on-going dialogues with Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, Rob Schenck of the National Clergy Council, and Josh McDowell of Campus Crusade for Christ, among others. Abaddi and his colleagues have also invited pastors and evangelical business leaders to Morocco for conferences and high-level inter-faith talks, and have even helped organize a series of concerts in Marrakesh where Christian and Muslim rock bands perform together for thousands of Moroccan young people.

They published a book about the importance of encouraging religious freedom within Islam and even suggested that “Muslims have the right to change their religion” if they so desire.

Abaddi also confirmed rumors swirling about in the Arab press that his government is quietly laying the groundwork with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to hold a new round of high-level peace talks in the Kingdom in the near future. He noted that King Hassan II—the late-father of the current monarch—opened secret talks with the Israelis as far back as the early 1970s and that Morocco was the first Arab government after Egypt to welcome an Israeli Prime Minister for a public visit (Shimon Peres in July 1986).

“We need our people to know the real West…to understand that the West ain’t no angel, but it ain’t no demon either,” Abaddi said, attempting a Western accent, at a private dinner in a Washington, D.C., suburb last week. “[This effort] is not a luxury. We are not being pressured to do it. We are trying to train responsible people to live in dangerous times.”

“Our world is threatening to destroy itself,” he noted, citing apocalyptic rhetoric coming out of Tehran, Iran’s nuclear program, radical Islamic terrorism, AIDS, and severe global poverty. “Morocco can help bring about peace. I think the Moroccan model is practical and helpful. It communicates an entirely different concept of Islam to the rest of the world….I personally can’t sit back and do nothing. After all, there is an Arab proverb that says, ‘Don’t be a mute Satan.’ I feel compelled to do everything I can to make a better world.”

Abaddi’s refreshing vision notwithstanding, Morocco still has a way to go to insure religious liberty for all of its citizens. “The Government places certain restrictions on Christian religious materials and proselytizing,” noted the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report 2005. “The Government permits the display and sale of Bibles in French, English, and Spanish, but it confiscates Arabic-language Bibles and refuses licenses for their importation and sale despite the absence of any law banning such books.” What’s more, in March 2005, “authorities expelled a South African pastor of a Protestant church in Marrakech for not having lucrative employment, although authorities had renewed his temporary residence permit annually for five years…The deportation followed a series of news and opinion articles in the local press concerning the presence of foreign Christian missionaries in the country [and] the Government’s invitation to American Christian leaders to visit and meet with political and religious officials.”

Still, the efforts by King Mohammed VI and advisors such as Abaddi are impressive, and should be encouraged by the administration and congressional leaders, as well as by Jewish and Christian leaders in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere. Better still, the Moroccan model is being mirrored by Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who has consistently denounced sectarian violence, delivered the keynote address at the evangelical-organized National Prayer Breakfast in Washington in February, and just held the Iraqi Islamic Reconciliation Summit in Amman on April 22 to “call for an end to bloodshed and religious tension in Iraq” and “promote moderation and harmony among Muslims.”

The world needs more people who dream “God-sized dreams,” said Abaddi—dreams of peace and reconciliation, not just bigger houses and another Lexus. To that we should all say a hearty “Amen.”

—Joel C. Rosenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of political thrillers such as The Last Jihad and The Ezekiel Option, now out in paperback.

==============================

The war we are fighting needs a more accurate name (townhall.com, 060509)

by Dennis Prager

To understand what Americans are fighting, it is necessary to first understand that we are not fighting a “War on Terror.” We are no more fighting a “War on Terror” than we fought a “War on Kamikazes” in World War II. Of course we had to stop Kamikaze attacks, the suicide crashing by Japanese pilots of airplanes into American war ships. But we were fighting Japanese fascism and imperialism.

The same holds true today. We are fighting Islamic fascism and imperialism (though surely not all Muslims).

The parallels are almost as extensive as any historic parallels of two different phenomena can be. The fascist Japanese regime aimed to subjugate much of the world, Asia in particular, and it used whatever violence it could think of without any moral constraints. The fascist element within Islam wishes to subjugate the entire world using whatever violence it can think of without any moral constraints.

Of course, there are differences: Imperial Japan was preoccupied with dominating Asia, while imperialist Islam aims to dominate the whole world. And imperial Japan did so as an outgrowth of nationalism, while imperialist Islam does so from an outgrowth of a trans-national religious ideology.

Islamic terror is a tactic of an ideology. That ideology can be called “radical Islam,” “militant Islam” or “Islamist,” but it is rooted in Islamic imperialism.

With a background in religious studies and having studied Arabic and Islam, many listeners have called my radio show asking me if I consider Islam to be inherently violent or even evil. From 9-11 to now, I have responded that I do not assess religions; I assess the practitioners of religions. Why? Because it is almost impossible to assess any religion since its own adherents so often differ as to what it is. For example, is Christianity the Christianity of most evangelicals or that of the National Council of Churches? On virtually every important moral issue, they differ. The same holds true for right- and left-wing groups within Judaism.

Nevertheless, one can say that from its inception, Islam has been imperialist. My working definition of imperialism is that of University of London professor Efraim Karsh, whose recent book, “Islamic Imperialism” (Yale University Press), is one of the few indispensable books on Islam.

Karsh defines imperialism as “conquering foreign lands and subjugating their populations.” Whenever possible, Muslims from the time of Muhammad have done that. Now, the Church also subjugated peoples to Christianity, and Europe suffered from prolonged religious wars. But as Karsh notes, from its inception, Christianity acknowledged a separation of the religious and the political, rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.

No such division was allowed for in Islam. That is why the nation-state developed in the Christian world but not in the Muslim world. The Muslim states of the Middle East, for example, are creations of Western (secular) imperialism or pre-date Islam (Egypt, for example); and they are foreign concepts to most Middle Eastern Muslims, who recognize themselves much more as part of the ummah, the Muslim community, than as Iraqis, Jordanians, Syrians, etc.

Nor is Islamic imperialism only a function of Muslim behavior rather than Muslim theology. Karsh opens his book citing the statements of four Muslim figures.

The Prophet Muhammad in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’”

Saladin (great 12th-century founder of the Ayyubid dynasty that included Ayyubid Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and much of present-day Saudi Arabia): “I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah.”

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (father of the Islamic revolution in Iran): “We will export our revolution throughout the world . . . until the calls ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”

Osama bin Laden in November 2001: “I was ordered to fight the people until they say ‘there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.’”

No one should have a problem with Muslims wanting the whole world Muslim. After all, Christians would like the whole world to come to Christ. What should matter to all people is the answer to one question: What are you prepared to do to bring the world to your religion? For virtually every living Christian, the answer is through modeling and verbal persuasion (and Jews never believed the world needs to be Jewish).

But by the most conservative estimates, 10% of Muslims are in sympathy with the bin Laden way. That means at least 100 million people are prepared to murder (and apparently torture) in Allah’s name. And given the history of Islamic imperialism and its roots in Muslim theology, hundreds of millions more are probably fellow travelers. Hence the almost unanimous Muslim governments’ support for the genocidal Islamic regime in Sudan.

We pray that there arises a strong Muslim group that is guided by the Quranic verse, “There shall be no coercion in matters of faith.”

But until such time, we had better understand that we are not merely fighting a war on terror, but a war against an ideology that wishes us to convert, be subject to Islamic law, or die.

==============================

Uproar in Turkey over shooting of judge (Times Online, 060518)

Some 40,000 protesters took to the streets of Turkey today to noisily support their country’s secular traditions, a day after a suspected Islamist militant shot dead a judge.

Members of Turkey’s pro-Islamist government were booed as they attended memorial services, and the Turkish President issued a warning that “no one will be able to overthrow the (secular) regime”.

The entire leadership of the Turkish military, which has led three coups in the past and regards itself as the guardians of secularism, lined up beside the flag-draped coffin of Judge Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, at his funeral today.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, was however conspicuous by his absence from the funeral.

The outpouring took place the day after a militant burst into Turkey’s highest administrative court shouting “I am a soldier of God”, and shot five judges, fatally wounding Ozbilgin.

The suspect, a 28-year-old lawyer, reportedly told police that he was retaliating for the court’s recent ruling that a teacher who wore an Islamic-style head scarf outside of work should not be promoted.

The headscarf has long been a flashpoint between Islamists and secularists. Since the founding of the modern Turkish state nearly 80 years ago, the country has banned wearing headscarves in universities, in state offices and at state functions, fearing that the headgear symbolizes a desire to weaken the secular identity of the state.

The Government has made no secret of its desire to lift a ban on headscarves and had strongly criticised the court’s February decision. Mr Erdogan and many other ministers have their political roots in a pro-Islamic party that was forced from government by the military in 1997.

The Prime Minister’s wife, Emine, who wears a headscarf, cannot attend many state functions. The wife of Abdullah Gul, the Foreign Minister, and many other wives of Cabinet members also wear headscarves. Mr Erdogan’s Government has vowed to try to ease the restrictions and has been trying to raise the profile of Islam.

The shooting stunned the secular establishment. More than 15,000 angry Turks, from students to judges dressed in their robes, marched to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern and secular Turkey, in a show of loyalty to secularism. Many were chanting “Turkey is secular and will remain secular.”

They laid a wreath decorated with red and white carnations, the colours of the Turkish flag, at the mausoleum. Some were tearful as they kissed the marble stones of the mausoleum. The procession was broadcast live on national TV.

Later, some 40,000 people marched to the city’s main mosque to attend memorial services for Ozbilgin, many of them chanting slogans calling for the government’s resignation.

They also booed when Abdulkadir Aksu, the Interior Minister, Cemil Cicek, the Justice Minister, and Abdullatif Sener, the Deputy Prime Minister, arrived at the mosque and chanted “Murderers out”.

Police were forced to escort Mr Aksu into the memorial service, and Mr Cicek had to use a back entrance to flee a group of protesters who threw a bottle of water at him, private CNN-Turk television reported.

“This is the September 11 of the Turkish Republic,” wrote Ertugrul Ozkok, chief columnist for Hurriyet, a secular daily paper. “One of the main pillars of the regime, justice, was hit. This is an attack against all of us.”

President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, himself a former judge, said that the shooting “is indeed an attack on the secular republic.”

In an apparent warning to the Government and to pro-Islamic newspapers, Mr Sezer said that “those who provided the reason for this attack must review their attitudes and behaviours”.

Opposition parties said that they held Mr Erdogan’s Government responsible for the attack.

Prosecutors today filed charges against Vakit, a pro-Islamic newspaper, accusing it of supporting terrorism. The newspaper had printed the photos of the judges in February.

Vakit today condemned the attack but questioned whether it was being used by the pro-secular establishment to crack down on the Islamic movement.

Police captured the suspect, a 28-year-old lawyer, after the attack, and NTV television reported that he was also one of the people who threw grenades at the Istanbul offices of the pro-secular newspaper Cumhuriyet.

At least three more suspected accomplices have been arrested, and police are reported to be searching for more suspects.

==============================

What Saudis Preach (townhall.com, 060601)

by Clifford D. May

Nearly four years ago, Saudi dissident Ali al-Ahmed and author Stephen Schwartz conducted a study for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. They examined textbooks and other publications distributed by the Saudi government and by Saudi-funded organizations. They found such messages as these:

“Judaism and Christianity are deviant religions.”

“The unbelievers, idolaters and others like them must be hated and despised.”

“We say to every Christian and every Jew and all those outside Islam, ‘your children are born into Islam, but you and their mother take them away from Islam with your corrupt rearing.’”

Since then, Saudi spokesmen, assisted by high-priced Washington public relations professionals, have claimed that such intolerant views were no longer being promoted by the rulers of Arabia.

Saudi advisor Adel al-Jubeir — recently awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by the University of North Texas – stated last year: “We have reviewed our educational curriculums. We have removed materials that are inciteful (sic) or intolerant towards people of other faiths.”

Prince Turki al-Faisal, the new Saudi ambassador to the United States, said recently: “Not only have we eliminated what might be perceived as intolerance from old textbooks that were in our system, we have implemented a comprehensive internal revision and moderation plan.”

But these spokesmen are misinformed. Ali al-Ahmed, now head of the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs, obtained a dozen textbooks used during the current academic year by the Saudi Ministry of Education. He turned them over to Freedom House which then had the materials translated by two independent Arabic speakers. Among the messages included:

“The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.”

“The clash between this [Muslim] community and the Jews and Christians has endured, and it will continue as long as God wills.”

“Whoever obeys the Prophet and accepts the oneness of God cannot maintain a loyal friendship with those who oppose God and His Prophet, even if they are his closest relatives.”

“This indoctrination,” wrote Nina Shea, director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, “begins in a first-grade text and is reinforced and expanded each year. By the 12th grade, students following the Saudi curriculum will be instructed that their religious obligation includes waging jihad against the infidel to ‘spread the faith.’”

What’s more, such ideas are being taught not only to Saudi students but also to children in Saudi-funded schools in Pakistan, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy – and the United States as well.

In response to the Freedom House study, Prince Turki issued a statement insisting that the Saudi government “has worked diligently during the last five years to overhaul its education system.” This is a “massive undertaking,” he added, that “remains ongoing.”

Yet even as the ambassador was making that argument, the Saudi-owned satellite television carrier, Arabsat, was broadcasting al-Manar, Hezbollah’s television station. Al-Manar was recently named by the U.S. government as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity. By the admission of its own officials, al-Manar attempts to “help people on the way to committing what you call in the West a suicide mission.”

Prince Turki might let us know: How massive an undertaking would it require to turn off the switch on al-Manar’s terrorist incitement?

The truth is that what is written in Saudi textbooks reflects the worldview of Wahhabism, an extremist movement launched 250 years ago by Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. A grand bargain between the Wahhab family and the House of Sa’ud eventually gave rise to modern Saudi Arabia and established Wahhabism as its state religion.

In recent decades, oil revenues have extravagantly enriched the Saudi royal family, and much of that money has been spent in an attempt to make Wahhabism the dominant interpretation of Islam around the world. The growth of Militant Islamism and catastrophic terrorism has been one result. If you preach that “infidels” are vermin, eventually volunteers will come forward to serve as exterminators.

For Wahhabis to embrace religious tolerance would represent an historic reform. So far, there is no evidence such change is being seriously contemplated. If Saudi leaders truly believed in interfaith respect they’d invite leaders of other religions to establish houses of worship on Saudi soil – as mosques have been constructed from Washington to London to Tel Aviv.

To a devout Saudi Wahhabi, however, such a notion is unthinkable and repugnant. We fail to acknowledge this reality at our peril.

==============================

This is a Saudi Textbook (after the Intolerance Was Removed) (Christian Post, 060615)

Saudi Arabia’s public schools have long been cited for demonizing the West as well as Christians, Jews and other “unbelievers.” But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis – that was all supposed to change.

A 2004 Saudi royal study group recognized the need for reform after finding that the kingdom’s religious studies curriculum “encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the ‘other.’ “ Since then, the Saudi government has claimed repeatedly that it has revised its educational texts.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, has worked aggressively to spread this message. “The kingdom has reviewed all of its education practices and materials, and has removed any element that is inconsistent with the needs of a modern education,” he said on a recent speaking tour to several U.S. cities. “Not only have we eliminated what might be perceived as intolerance from old textbooks that were in our system, we have implemented a comprehensive internal revision and modernization plan.” The Saudi government even took out a full-page ad in the New Republic last December to tout its success at “having modernized our school curricula to better prepare our children for the challenges of tomorrow.” A year ago, an embassy spokesman declared: “We have reviewed our educational curriculums. We have removed materials that are inciteful or intolerant towards people of other faiths.” The embassy is also distributing a 74-page review on curriculum reform to show that the textbooks have been moderated.

The problem is: These claims are not true.

A review of a sample of official Saudi textbooks for Islamic studies used during the current academic year reveals that, despite the Saudi government’s statements to the contrary, an ideology of hatred toward Christians and Jews and Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine remains in this area of the public school system. The texts teach a dualistic vision, dividing the world into true believers of Islam (the “monotheists”) and unbelievers (the “polytheists” and “infidels”).

This indoctrination begins in a first-grade text and is reinforced and expanded each year, culminating in a 12th-grade text instructing students that their religious obligation includes waging jihad against the infidel to “spread the faith.”

Freedom House knows this because Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi dissident who runs the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs , gave us a dozen of the current, purportedly cleaned-up Saudi Ministry of Education religion textbooks. The copies he obtained were not provided by the government, but by teachers, administrators and families with children in Saudi schools, who slipped them out one by one.

Some of our sources are Shiites and Sunnis from non-Wahhabi traditions – people condemned as “polytheistic” or “deviant” or “bad” in these texts – others are simply frustrated that these books do so little to prepare young students for the modern world.

We then had the texts translated separately by two independent, fluent Arabic speakers.

Religion is the foundation of the Saudi state’s political ideology; it is also a key area of Saudi education in which students are taught the interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism (a movement founded 250 years ago by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab) that is reflected in these textbooks.

Scholars estimate that within the Saudi public school curriculum, Islamic studies make up a quarter to a third of students’ weekly classroom hours in lower and middle school, plus several hours each week in high school. Educators who question or dissent from the official interpretation of Islam can face severe reprisals. In November 2005, a Saudi teacher who made positive statements about Jews and the New Testament was fired and sentenced to 750 lashes and a prison term. (He was eventually pardoned after public and international protests.)

The Saudi public school system totals 25,000 schools, educating about 5 million students. In addition, Saudi Arabia runs academies in 19 world capitals, including one outside Washington in Fairfax County, that use some of these same religious texts.

Saudi Arabia also distributes its religion texts worldwide to numerous Islamic schools and madrassas that it does not directly operate. Undeterred by Wahhabism’s historically fringe status, Saudi Arabia is trying to assert itself as the world’s authoritative voice on Islam – a sort of “Vatican” for Islam, as several Saudi officials have stated– and these textbooks are integral to this effort. As the report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks observed, “Even in affluent countries, Saudi-funded Wahhabi schools are often the only Islamic schools” available.

Education is at the core of the debate over freedom in the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden understands this well; in a recent audiotape he railed against those who would “interfere with school curricula.”

The passages below – drawn from the same set of Saudi texts proudly cited in the new 74-page review of curriculum reform now being distributed by the Saudi Embassy – are shaping the views of the next generation of Saudis and Muslims worldwide. Unchanged, they will only harden and deepen hatred, intolerance and violence toward other faiths and cultures. Is this what Riyadh calls reform?

FIRST GRADE

“Every religion other than Islam is false.”

“Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ______________ is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____________.”

FOURTH GRADE

“True belief means . . . that you hate the polytheists and infidels but do not treat them unjustly.”

FIFTH GRADE

“Whoever obeys the Prophet and accepts the oneness of God cannot maintain a loyal friendship with those who oppose God and His Prophet, even if they are his closest relatives.”

“It is forbidden for a Muslim to be a loyal friend to someone who does not believe in God and His Prophet, or someone who fights the religion of Islam.”

“A Muslim, even if he lives far away, is your brother in religion. Someone who opposes God, even if he is your brother by family tie, is your enemy in religion.”

SIXTH GRADE

“Just as Muslims were successful in the past when they came together in a sincere endeavor to evict the Christian crusaders from Palestine, so will the Arabs and Muslims emerge victorious, God willing, against the Jews and their allies if they stand together and fight a true jihad for God, for this is within God’s power.”

EIGHTH GRADE

“As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.”

“God told His Prophet, Muhammad, about the Jews, who learned from parts of God’s book [the Torah and the Gospels] that God alone is worthy of worship. Despite this, they espouse falsehood through idol-worship, soothsaying, and sorcery. In doing so, they obey the devil. They prefer the people of falsehood to the people of the truth out of envy and hostility. This earns them condemnation and is a warning to us not to do as they did.”

“They are the Jews, whom God has cursed and with whom He is so angry that He will never again be satisfied [with them].”

“Some of the people of the Sabbath were punished by being turned into apes and swine. Some of them were made to worship the devil, and not God, through consecration, sacrifice, prayer, appeals for help, and other types of worship. Some of the Jews worship the devil. Likewise, some members of this nation worship the devil, and not God.”

“Activity: The student writes a composition on the danger of imitating the infidels.”

NINTH GRADE

“The clash between this [Muslim] community (umma) and the Jews and Christians has endured, and it will continue as long as God wills.”

“It is part of God’s wisdom that the struggle between the Muslim and the Jews should continue until the hour [of judgment].”

“Muslims will triumph because they are right. He who is right is always victorious, even if most people are against him.”

TENTH GRADE

The 10th-grade text on jurisprudence teaches that life for non-Muslims (as well as women, and, by implication, slaves) is worth a fraction of that of a “free Muslim male.” Blood money is retribution paid to the victim or the victim’s heirs for murder or injury:

“Blood money for a free infidel. [Its quantity] is half of the blood money for a male Muslim, whether or not he is ‘of the book’ or not ‘of the book’ (such as a pagan, Zoroastrian, etc.).

“Blood money for a woman: Half of the blood money for a man, in accordance with his religion. The blood money for a Muslim woman is half of the blood money for a male Muslim, and the blood money for an infidel woman is half of the blood money for a male infidel.”

ELEVENTH GRADE

“The greeting ‘Peace be upon you’ is specifically for believers. It cannot be said to others.”

“If one comes to a place where there is a mixture of Muslims and infidels, one should offer a greeting intended for the Muslims.”

“Do not yield to them [Christians and Jews] on a narrow road out of honor and respect.”

TWELFTH GRADE

“Jihad in the path of God – which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it – is the summit of Islam. This religion arose through jihad and through jihad was its banner raised high. It is one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God.”

_________________________________________________

Nina Shea is director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House.

==============================

The Economist and Euro-Islam: What the paper is missing. (Weekly Standard, 060727)

EUROPEANS HAVE BECOME RECEPTIVE to the argument that Israel participates in the global war on terror when it confronts Hezbollah. But the broadening of the context for conflict also means dragging in other issues and constituencies.

So far, the silence among European Muslims about the Israel-Lebanon confrontation has been deafening. Rather than pouring into the streets to denounce Israel, Euro-Muslims appear reluctant to get involved. Yet the background debate over the future of Euro-Islam has not subsided.

On this score, the Economist, the “newspaper” (as it always calls itself) which brilliantly recorded the English social upheavals of the early 19th century, has been a disappointment.

In recent attempts come to grips with the problems of Islam in Europe, the Economist has flopped. Its June 24 issue flaunted a cover with a graphic turning the Eiffel Tower into a mosque and the headline “Eurabia.” Inside, the paper came down against the “Eurabia thesis,” but failed to mention Europe’s notable Islamic asset: the indigenous Muslim communities of the Balkans, especially the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Ultimately the solution for Islam in Europe lies with an indigenous, rather than an immigrant, Islamic leadership. Since the very great majority of Muslims in Europe are Sunnis, establishment of a single authority for the credentialing of clerics, according to a European standard regarding democratic principles, could easily be accomplished with Sarajevo as the location of such an administrative body.

Given that the majority of Western European Muslim clergy are foreigners, in Britain (from Pakistan and often extremist), in France (from North Africa), and in Germany (from Turkey), the development of the Balkans as the center of Euro-Islam could be the best, if not the only, solution to problems of integration. In addition, Bosnian Muslims have proven their moderation in full, if not extra, measure. (The status of Turkey remains a separate topic.)

The government of Slovenia, which has a small Muslim community, but lies near the Balkan Muslim lands, has made clear that its presidency of the European Union, which begins in 2008, will foster a debate over European Islam that will include central and eastern Europe as well as the Atlantic and western Mediterranean countries.

The Economist also failed to mention that the single largest European Muslim population consists of Russian Muslims; an oversight that became more relevant with the announcement of the killing of Caucasian Wahhabi radical Shamil Basayev on July 11.

The Economist’s displayed a similarly weak grasp of matters in the July 15 edition, where it printed a dispatch describing a conference in Istanbul sponsored by the British Foreign Office, but “dreamed up” by Tony Blair. That pageant of presumptive personalities imitated earlier British efforts to appease Muslim extremists rather than to combat them—the guests at the Istanbul conference included Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the radical sheikh from Qatar who legitimizes suicide terror.

The Istanbul event also showcased the American Joseph Hanson—who calls himself Hamza Yusuf and who has been subjected to withering criticism by Muslim moderates. The Economist gushed about Hanson as, “a Californian teacher whose taped sermons are snapped up by the faithful in Cairo and Islamabad.” In reality, Hanson is only adulated by his own cult-like following in the U.S. and Britain, and is hardly famous among Muslims whose sole languages are Egyptian Arabic and Pakistani Urdu.

Before September 11, Hanson was known for his fire-breathing condemnation of America, delivered before Muslim groups. On September 9, 2001, two days before the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Hanson declared, “America has a great, great tribulation coming to it . . . this country is facing a very terrible fate . . . this country stands condemned.”

After 9/11, Hanson declared himself a spiritual Sufi, although he continued his old habits of rabble-rousing, including a performance where he bragged that he failed a test designed to identify moderate Muslims and hoped his listeners would also fail such a test. Hanson’s fans are also known for their harassment of his critics, but now the Economist was lured into promoting him nonetheless.

The Economist has managed to get a series of major issues, from the Balkan wars on, wrong. There is no reason to think they should do better with Euro-Islam. But alas, those who once loved the paper must mourn its moral demise.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

==============================

Faux ‘moderate’ Islamists (Washington Times, 060802)

By M. Zuhdi Jasser

Part one in a three-part series.

It is almost five years since September 11, one year since the July 7 attacks in Britain and just months after the arrests of alleged members of a Toronto terrorist cell. But the intellectual machinery of the United States has not legitimately engaged the Muslim American community and its leadership in an ideological debate about Islamism.

Stories about Muslims and Islam are now ubiquitous in the mainstream media. Yet rarely is there any substantive discussion with American Muslims about the ideology of Islamism or its prevalence. Is it limited to the activists? Is it the money trail? Or is it the faith? These questions and others that engage American Muslims in declaring or denouncing Islamist ideology seem to generally be off-limits for the media and for our elected officials. As they dance around this central cognitive engagement of our global war, the consequences to our nation’s security are immeasurable.

Many frontline reporters seem to actually have little understanding of the conflict between Islamism and Islam. There is a deep contradiction between the Islamist ideology of theocracy and our Americanism. Avoiding this, we forget who we are. The touchstone of Americanism that Islamists fear the most is our constitutional system, which protects our individual spiritual liberty through a complete separation of religion and state.

While the vast majority of Muslims do not support terrorism as a means of political change, the burning question is where Muslim leaders and their constituencies stand regarding the ideology of Islamism. Moreover, is there a difference between Islam and Islamism? If pious Muslims can be anti-Islamist, shouldn’t public discourse highlight this potent ideological weapon against the political ends of our enemies?

There are plenty of news and human-interest stories about Muslims and Islam that discuss the so-called “moderate” Muslim American identity. But what is the exact measure of this moderation? The concept of moderation can be superimposed upon any ideological construct. How long is it going to take for conventional wisdom to come to terms with the fact that moderation within Islamism is in no way moderation with regards to Americanism? Until this understanding is commonplace, anti-Islamist American Muslims are going to be unable to force the hand of their fellow Muslims in the ideological conflict within Islam against the Islamist ends.

Why? Anti-Islamists are a minority among activist American Muslims. Internally, we are usually ignored or dismissed by the majority of our activist co-religionists when trying to engage them in debate regarding the dangers and toxicity of Islamism upon Islam. No matter how pious, anti-Islamists are often demonized as irreligious. All the while we try to argue that, to the contrary, there is no closer relationship a Muslim can have with God than one entirely free from government and clerical coercion.

On June 18, the New York Times ran a story by Laura Goodstein, “U.S. Clerics seek a Middle Ground,” which highlighted the “moderate” work of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and his colleague, Imam Zaid Shakir. The bulk of this typical story discussed platitudes regarding the personal struggles of these American Muslim leaders and positively anticipated their development of a moderate Muslim seminary. However, nowhere did the New York Times delve into a genuine critical analysis of whether there was a central conflict in the ideology of the Zaytuna Institute, the school mentioned in the New York Times piece, and that of America. Yet, the piece ended with this alarming quotation from Mr. Shakir: “He still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law, not by violent means, but by persuasion.” The imam further stated, “Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country,” he said. “I think it would help people, and if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be a Muslim. Because Islam helped me as a person, and it’s helped a lot of people in my community.”

Not only is this a blatant endorsement of Islamism (theocracy) over Americanism (anti-theocracy), but this imam labels anti-Islamist Muslims dishonest. The radical Islamists are rabidly anti-American from their fear of pluralistic liberty. They are too insecure to give Muslims or any citizens the opportunity to be free and to choose to sin or not. Can mainstream American thought afford to be naive and uncritical about this central theme of Islamist movements? Radical or moderate, regardless of the packaging, the goal of Islamists is to create a Muslim theocracy. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League responded with clarity in his June 23 letter to the New York Times: “Religion flourishes in America because we have no imposed religion, as the founding fathers designed. Imam Zaid Shakir’s hope for an America ruled by Islamic law is fundamentally un-American. Our hope is that he is an aberration and that moderate Muslim voices will prevail.”

How long is it going to take for our mass media and political leaders to finally begin to turn our collective lenses upon this un-American ideology and report on the threat it poses to America even in its most subtle forms? If Muslims insist upon remaining silent about the dangers to Americanism of Islamist ideological infiltration, we must ask why. Anti-Islamist Muslims receive the brunt of attacks from radical Islamists. This is not happenstance. Conversely, attempts by so-called moderates to ‘Islamize’ America are cheered on by the radicals no matter how far these ‘moderates’ try to distance themselves from them in all their empty condemnations.

How long will it take Muslims to frontally counter Islamism (political Islam) and separate it from their Abrahamic religion of Islam? We in the Muslim community unfortunately need a little nudging before it’s too late. America’s security hangs in the balance.

M. Zuhdi Jasser is chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a former Navy lieutenant commander.

==============================

Muslims in the crosshairs (Washington Times, 060803)

By M. Zuhdi Jasser

Part two in a three-part series.

So far the ideological battle against political Islam has proven to be a fight few Muslims want to participate in. It has taken five years since September 11 for conventional wisdom to even begin to attempt to understand “moderate” Muslims let alone engage their ideology.

Far more important than a debate over who or what defines a moderate is our need in the United States to focus discussions upon the ideology of Islamism and political Islam. If radical Islamist terrorism is a means to an end, we should be pressing American Muslim leaders about where they stand regarding al Qaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood or Hezbollah.

Islamism, as I see it, is an overriding philosophy of Muslims who believe in a society guided by a system of government founded upon clerical interpretations of religious law as derived from their own interpretation of the Koran and Sunnah. Argumentation within Islamist governments and parties is based upon clerical interpretations of God’s law, not upon a reasoned deduction of effectiveness of human law. No matter how moderate Islamists present themselves, they will always hold on tightly to the notion that a majority Muslim state must be identified as an “Islamic state” with clerical guidance of their society’s proximity to the Muslim path.

Islamism is clearly in direct conflict with Americanism. Yet, an Islam which is anti-Islamist is not. Americanism as Islamists see it is defined by our Constitution and our legal precedents as a system based in legislative liberty for all faiths — true pluralism. Americanism uses a language of legislative debate not derived from religious precedent or clerical interpretation of one faith, but rather from the reasoned precedent of our secular courts and legislatures. Until this great chasm of thought between Islamists and American ideology is made clear, we are actually facilitating the spread of Islamism among American Muslims.

Make no mistake. There are many Muslims who do understand that anti-theocratic societies like the United States are preferable for the free practice of their own private faith and that of all others. In fact, many Muslims are inherently anti-Islamist by virtue of being pious Muslims demanding to be free of coercion. That is why many of our families immigrated to the United States. But virtually no efforts are underway to find these Muslims, who are our greatest untapped resource since September 11.

Islam, as a personal faith, and its inherent spirituality, worship, moral code and practices can and should be looked upon as entirely separate from all that is political Islam. This is the profound challenge of anti-Islamist Muslims of this generation. While this separation is admittedly hard to find, its existence is essential to our victory in this ideological battle.

Muslim ideological moderation is not achieved by a declaration of nonviolence. It is not demonstrated by a belief in elections and representative democracy. The radical Islamists simply ride along with moderate Islamists toward the same arena. They repackage themselves as moderates while still residing within an Islamist construct.

For example, Europe’s radical, pretend moderate, Imam Yusef al-Qaradawi, the international spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Grand Islamic Scholar of Qatar, has recently been pushing for a “wasatiya” (middle way) movement, often preaching to his followers to moderate and tolerate. Yet, he continues to have the blood of American soldiers and innocent civilians in Iraq on his hands, with his endorsement of the religious legitimacy of suicide bombing in Iraq. He moderates his language for European audiences and reverts back to his fundamentalism for his Al Jazeera audiences. His fundamentalist stances are misogynistic, anti-Semitic, anti-Western, pro-Islamist and anti-freedom.

In the current American discourse, we should be curious to learn whether Muslims agree with leaders like him and why. Unless my fellow Muslims are willing to take on the likes of al-Qaradawi ideologically, they will continue to facilitate Islamism and its associated threat to American security.

When we fought the ideological battle against communism during the Cold War, was there a moderate Communist ideology? The public intellectual debate was clear that Americanism and communism were entirely incompatible. The Soviet goal for global domination was an imminent threat to our security. Similarly, the Chinese, North Vietnamese, North Koreans and Cubans, to name a few, had central conflicts with American ideology. Are we as aware of the threat posed by “moderate” Islamists regardless of their denunciation of militancy? Those who know American Muslims will tell you that the violent jihadists are a small minority of the world’s Muslim population and hard to find in our local communities. This militant minority, including members of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and others, certainly needs to be found and reckoned with swiftly and forcefully on the battlefield. However, the jihadists use barbaric methods to achieve change toward a theocratic political end — political Islam.

Political Islam, on the contrary, has great support within the Muslim population. It should be engaged relentlessly in our public arena. Only anti-Islamist Muslims can change that tide. But, for now, our private and public-sector thought leaders should first wake up and force the debate.

M. Zuhdi Jasser is chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a former Navy lieutenant commander.

==============================

Overcoming Islamism (Washington Times, 060804)

By M. Zuhdi Jasser

Part three in a three-part series.

Islamists fear any real ideological battle within Islam against Islamism and its clerics. To that end, they seek the removal of American and Western involvement from Muslim majority countries. Americanism is founded upon an anti-theocratic ideology that is a global ideological threat to Islamism. “Jeffersonian” Muslims who depart from Islamism are similarly the greatest threat to the influence of Islamists within the Muslim community.

Disengage Islamism from Muslims and Americanism will flourish among Muslims. With the deconstruction of Islamism (the ends), Islamist terror (the means) has no cause.

Muslim activists should find it commonplace to address the central ideological issue of this war —Islamism vs. Islam vs. anti-Islamism. Islamist moderation, vis-a-vis anti-terrorism and anti-autocracy, should not dismiss the remaining overriding Islamist philosophy. This philosophy is what needs to be understood.

The issue is not one of patriotism. Islamists can be intensely patriotic while having a differing vision for America. It is the ideology of political Islam that needs to be engaged. The following questions may begin to help opinion leaders discern an Islamist from an anti-Islamist: Do you believe in the strict separation of religion and politics? Do you support the development of religious (Islamic) political parties and movements? Should the imam’s “mimbar” (pulpit) be the place for the advocacy of domestic and foreign policy opinions? Should clerics be politicians or legislators?

Also: Would you prefer (if Muslims were a majority) to see legislatures argue interpretation of scripture and religious law over secular non-theological argumentation? Do you believe in a movement at any time to return a global Caliphate into existence? Where do you stand in regards to the stated global goals of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Wahhabi Movement? Is the American system of government and the Constitution inferior to the basis used for an “Islamic” state? What is the role in local and global society of the Muslim “ummah” (community)? Of the mosque? Do you believe individuals who leave Islam should be a legal concern of society? In the hereafter, by your theology, do you believe that God will only judge individuals or will He collectively judge entire communities overriding the individual?

Moderate Islamists are not an ideological threat to the radicals of al Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah because they generally seek similar “Islamic” governance, albeit a more moderated, non-violent, even democratic playing field in the end. Moderate Islamists will usually also avoid identifying radical Islamists by name as the enemy.

We are five years behind and only just beginning to delve into the intellectual debate we should already be having with the Muslim world domestically and abroad. This debate needs to be at the forefront of our mass media and our “public diplomacy programs.”

Our public diplomacy leaders must no longer avoid these central questions when meeting with Muslims all over the world. Engagement involves real dialogue and debate where ideas conflict, not superficial photo-ops and sporadic ineffectual comments. Such superficial discourse actually makes the work of anti-Islamist Muslims much more difficult, for it publicly mainstreams Islamist ideology.

President Reagan did not defeat communism by creating photo-ops and a few verbal exchanges with non-Soviet communist nations during the height of the Cold War. Our leaders need to emphasize the ideological chasm between Islamism and Americanism and begin to methodically deconstruct Islamism. Our officials should also find and engage Muslims who are on the same wavelength against political Islam.

In the meantime, the United Arab Emirates just announced the provision of a very disturbing endowment to the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of reportedly upwards of $50 million. Not only is this unprecedented foreign interference, but these monies are also unlikely to be used to deconstruct the ideological basis for Islamism, Wahhabism or the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah or other enemies of the United States. They will rather be used to continue the focus on apologetics, non-Muslim “education” and political empowerment (Islamism) with very little attention to internal renewal (ijtihad), anti-terror work and the ideological incompatibilities between Islamism and Americanism.

All civil human beings and their organizations condemn terrorist acts. The real question is what separates Islamists from “Americanists”? In order to fight an ideological battle against the Islamist enemy, we must not only seek to understand them, but we must make sure that we understand ourselves. If we remain unclear about America’s ideology, then we will never understand what drives the ends of our Islamist enemies.

Our forefathers understood what was needed to extricate the oppressive influence of theocrats in England. Muslims have yet to articulate this understanding about Islamists. We must quickly embrace the openness and pluralism of our American religious heritage.

At our nation’s 230th birthday this July, we can no longer afford to dismiss the Islamist threat. Just as Islamism is a threat to the essence of the America we love, it is also a threat to the essence of my personal faith of Islam which I love. Many pious Muslims can engage in this debate to defeat Islamism. Defeat Islamism and its political ideology, and we have achieved a major victory for our nation’s security.

M. Zuhdi Jasser is chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a former Navy lieutenant commander.

==============================

Iranian cataclysm forecast Aug. 22: Islamists seeking heaven could spark apocalypse, Princeton expert warns (WorldNetDaily, 060808)

A top expert on the Mideast says it is possible Iran could pick Aug. 22, the anniversary of one of Islam’s holiest events, for a cataclysm Shiite Muslims believe will forever resolve the battle between “good” and “evil.”

Princeton’s Bernard Lewis has written an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal advising that the rest of the world would be wise to bear in mind that for those who believe the end of the world is imminent and good, there is no deterrent even to nuclear warfare.

As WorldNetDaily has reported, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has urged his people to prepare for the coming of an Islamic “messiah,” raising concerns a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic could trigger the kind of global conflagration he envisions will set the stage for the end of the world.

He’s also said, in a WND report, that Islam and its followers must prepare to rule the world, because it is a “universal ideology that leads the world to justice.”

Now comes Lewis, who notes that the world must be concerned about a leader for whom the possibility of death is not a deterrent.

“In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning,” Lewis wrote. “At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead – hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers.

“For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint, it is an inducement,” he said.

Lewis noted that Ahmadinejad has referred to Aug. 22 several times, including when he rejected – until that date – United Nations requests for nuclear program information.

Lewis, joining several other Mideast experts who have expressed similar concerns, said Aug. 22 corresponds to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427.

“This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back,” Lewis wrote.

In Islam, as in other religious, certain beliefs describe the “cosmic struggle” at the end of time. For Shiite Muslims, Lewis wrote, this will be “the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil.”

The significance, he said, is that there’s a “radical” difference between Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons.

“This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran’s present rulers,” he wrote. Iran’s leaders now “clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced.”

As for intent, a passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, reveals priorities: “I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers (i.e., the infidel powers) wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom.”

Lewis wrote, “This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadanejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.”

Lewis, the Cleveland E. Dodge professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, specializes in Muslim history and interaction between Muslims and the West.

His comments echoed those made just a few days earlier by Robert Spencer, another scholar of Islamic history, theology and law and the director of Jihad Watch.

In an article for FrontPageMagazine.com, he wrote that Farid Ghadry, president of the Reform Party of Syria, noted the commemoration of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven from the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Spencer said the Night Journey, or Miraj, is what makes Jerusalem a holy site for Islam, and Islamic tradition believes Muhammad, along with the angel Gabriel, went to the Temple Mount, and then to heaven in a bathing of light over Jerusalem.

Spencer reported that Ghadry talked of Ahmadinejad’s plans for an illumination of the night sky over Jerusalem to rival the light of that Islamic belief.

Ghadry said what the Iranian president is “promising the world by August 22 is the light in the sky over the Aqsa Mosque,” Spencer said.

He said a nuclear attack on Jerusalem, or even a conventional attack, would be consistent with the references that have been made, including Ahmadinejad’s talk that Israel “pushed the button of its own destruction” by returning fire for Hezbollah’s rocket barrage.

Also, “Atomic Iran” author Jerome Corsi notes that it’s less significant whether Hezbollah survives, “but it’s really the first chapter in the play for Iran and the Shiite Islam nation to come to ascendancy in the Muslim world.”

First is the battle against Israel and the United States, he said, then against Sunni Islam. Where that group is more dominant, he said, is in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where group members are “not unhappy to see Iran contained.”

“They may launch an attack, but I still think if they had a weapon they would just go ahead and use it,” Corsi said. “Terrorists don’t brag about things they’re going to do until after they do it.”

He said the recent comments are more typical of terrorists’ efforts to get attention.

“When Ahmadinejad is capable of taking action he will do it without any warning or bravado; he’ll just do it,” Corsi said.

In the updated edition of “Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians,” now available in paperback from WND Books, Corsi discusses many of the disturbing developments related to Iran.

Meanwhile, Tanzanian customs officials have uncovered an Iranian smuggling operation transporting large quantities of bomb-making uranium from the same mines in the Congo that provided the nuclear material for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima 61 years ago, according to a recent report in the London Sunday Times.

A United Nations report, outlining the interception last October, said there is “no doubt” the smuggled uranium-238 came from mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s mineral-rich Katanga province.

The smuggled uranium discovered by Tanzanian customs agents was hidden in shipment of coltan, a rare mineral used to make chips in mobile telephones. According to the manifest, the coltan was to be smelted in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan after being shipped to Bandar Abbas, Iran’s largest port.

Uranium-238, when used in a nuclear reactor, can be used to create plutonium for nuclear weapons.

==============================

US Muslims bristle at Bush term “Islamic fascists” (WorldNetDaily, 060810)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Muslim groups criticized President George W. Bush on Thursday for calling a foiled plot to blow up airplanes part of a “war with Islamic fascists,” saying the term could inflame anti-Muslim tensions.

U.S. officials have said the plot, thwarted by Britain, to blow up several aircraft over the Atlantic bore many of the hallmarks of al Qaeda.

“We believe this is an ill-advised term and we believe that it is counter-productive to associate Islam or Muslims with fascism,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group.

“We ought to take advantage of these incidents to make sure that we do not start a religious war against Islam and Muslims,” he told a news conference in Washington.

“We urge him (Bush) and we urge other public officials to restrain themselves.”

Awad said U.S. officials should take the lead from their British counterparts who had steered clear of using what he considered inflammatory terms when they announced the arrest of more than 20 suspects in the reported plot.

Hours after the news broke, Bush said it was “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”

Bush and other administration officials have used variations of the term “Islamo-fascism” on several occasions in the past to describe militant groups including al Qaeda, its allies in Iraq and Hizbollah in Lebanon.

Many American Muslims, who say they have felt singled out for discrimination since the September 11 attacks, reject the term and say it unfairly links their faith to notions of dictatorship, oppression and racism.

“The problem with the phrase is it attaches the religion of Islam to tyranny and fascism, rather than isolating the threat to a specific group of individuals,” said Edina Lekovic, spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles.

She said the terms cast suspicions on all Muslims, even the vast majority who want to live in safety like other Americans.

“When the people we need most in the fight against terrorism, American Muslims, feel alienated by the president’s characterization of these supposed terrorists, that does more damage than good,” Lekovic said.

Bush upset many Muslims after the September 11 attacks by referring to the global war against terrorism early on as a “crusade,” a term which for many Muslims connotes a Christian battle against Islam. The White House quickly stopped using the expression, expressing regrets if it had caused offense.

Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based Muslim activist, said he was upset by the president’s latest comments because he was concerned they would stir up resentment of Muslims in America.

“We’ve got Osama bin Laden hijacking the religion in order to define it one way. ... We feel the president and anyone who’s using these kinds of terminologies is hijacking it too from a different side,” he said.

“The president’s use of the language is going to ratchet up the hate meter, but I think it would have caused much more damage if he had done this after 9/11,” Elibiary said, adding that tensions were not running as high as they had been in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks.

Awad, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on Muslims to step up security at mosques and community centers to counter any negative backlash to news of the plot.

==============================

Gallup: Many Americans Harbor Strong Bias Against U.S. Muslims (WorldNetDaily, 060811)

NEW YORK A new Gallup poll finds that many Americans — what it calls “substantial minorities” — harbor “negative feelings or prejudices against people of the Muslim faith” in this country. Nearly one in four Americans, 22%, say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbor.

While Americans tend to disagree with the notion that Muslims living in the United States are sympathetic to al-Qaeda, a significant 34% believe they do back al-Qaeda. And fewer than half — 49% — believe U.S. Muslims are loyal to the United States.

Almost four in ten, 39%, advocate that Muslims here should carry special I.D. That same number admit that they do hold some “prejudice” against Muslims. Forty-four percent say their religious views are too “extreme.”

In every case, Americans who actually know any Muslims are more sympathethic.

The poll was taken at the end of July and surveyed 1,007 adult Americans.

==============================

Londonistan (townhall.com, 060811)

By Melanie Phillips

The following is an excerpt from Londonistan, a new book by Melanie Phillips.

Britain is in denial. Having allowed the country to turn into a global hub of the Islamic jihad without apparently giving it a second thought, the British establishment is still failing even now — despite the wake-up calls of both 9/11 and the London bomb attacks of 2005 — to acknowledge what it is actually facing and take the appropriate action. Instead, it is deep into a policy of appeasement of the phenomenon that threatens it, throwing sops to both radical Islamism and the Muslim community in a panic-stricken attempt to curry favour and buy off the chances of any further attacks. This disastrous policy ignores the first law of terrorism which is that it preys on weakness. The only way to defeat it is through strength — the strength of a response based on absolute consistency and moral integrity, which arises in turn from the strength of belief in the values that are being defended. By choosing instead the path of least resistance, Britain is advertising its fundamental weakness and is thus not only greatly enhancing the danger to itself but is also enfeebling the alliance in the defence of the West.

Britain has a long and inglorious history of appeasing terrorism, thus bringing true the aphorism in which its ruling class so cynically believes that “terrorism works.” Now, however, this dubious national trait has been cemented even more firmly into the national psyche by the governing doctrine of multiculturalism, which has made it all but impossible even to acknowledge that this is a problem rooted within the religion of a particular minority community. The fervent embrace of ‘victim culture’ means instead that this minority has to be treated on its own assessment as a victim of the majority and its grievances attended to on the basis that it is these grievances which are the cause of terrorism. At the same time, however, this minority disavows any connection with terrorism and vilifies anyone who dares suggest to the contrary…

The intersection of an aggressive religious fanaticism with the multicultural ideology of victimhood has created a state of paralysis across British institutions. The refusal to admit the religious character of the threat means not only that Britain is failing to take the action it should be taking but, worse still, is providing Islamist ideologues with an even more powerful platform from which to disseminate the anti-western views which have so inflamed a section of Britain’s Muslims. The refusal to acknowledge that this is principally a war of religious ideology, and that dangerous ideas that can kill are spread across a continuum of religious thought which acts as a recruiting-sergeant for violence, is the most egregious failure by the British political and security establishment. The deeply-rooted British belief that violence always arises from rational grievances, and the resulting inability to comprehend the cultural dynamics of religious fanaticism, have furthermore created a widespread climate of irrationality and prejudice in which the principal victims of the war against the West, America and Israel, are demonised instead as its cause. …

The cultural deformities of moral relativism and victim culture that have done such damage in Britain are present in American society too. At present, they are locked in conflict with traditional values in America’s culture wars. But it doesn’t take too much imagination to envisage that, if a different administration were installed in the White House, Britain’s already calamitous slide into cultural defeatism might boost similar forces at play in the United States.

Britain is the global leader of English speaking culture. It was Britain which first developed the western ideas of the rule of law, democracy and liberal ideals and exported them to other countries. Now Britain is leading the rout of those values, allowing its culture to become vulnerable to the predations of militant Islam. If British society goes down under this twin assault, the impact will be incalculable — not just for the military defence of the west against radical Islamism, but for the very continuation of western civilisation itself.

The west is under threat from an enemy which has shrewdly observed the decadence and disarray in Europe where western civilisation first began. And the greatest disarray of all is in Britain, the very cradle of western liberty and democracy, but whose cultural confusion is now plain for all to see in Londonistan. The Islamists chose well. Britain is not what it once was. Whether it will finally pull itself together and stop sleepwalking into cultural oblivion is a question on which the future of the West may now depend.

Melanie Phillips is an acclaimed and controversial columnist for London’s Daily Mail. Educated at Oxford, she won the Orwell Prize for journalism 1996. She provides an in-depth look at London as the European hub for Islamic terror and extremism in her book Londonistan.

==============================

Plot Shows Rise of Extremism in Europe (Associated Press, 060813)

VIENNA, Austria

Britain’s struggle to contain Muslim extremism points up a chilling trend across Europe: the rise of radical Islam, and with it, a willingness among a small but dangerous minority of young people to answer the call to jihad.

From the squalid suburbs north of Paris to the gritty streets of Sarajevo, young, disaffected Muslims are increasingly receptive to hard-liners looking to recruit foot soldiers for holy war, European counterterrorism officials and religious leaders warn.

The continent, they caution, remains vulnerable to attacks by homegrown militants despite the heightened security and attempts at inter-religious dialogue that followed the deadly 2004 train bombings in Madrid and last year’s suicide attacks in London.

“Their numbers are still relatively small, but I fear they could become larger as more young Muslims embrace militancy,” said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Islamic studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

Gerges calls it “the jihad generation”: converts to extremism in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and elsewhere who are becoming radicalized _ partly in response to the conflicts in Afghanistan and the Middle East _ and are spawning “self-generating” networks and cells.

“They’re not part of al-Qaida, but in their own eyes, they are foot soldiers” who share Osama bin Laden’s ideology, he said.

Little is known of what may have motivated the 23 suspects in British police custody to allegedly plot to blow up U.S.-bound jetliners with liquid explosives. But many in their middle and working class neighborhoods said the communities have become alienated by U.S. and British policy in the Middle East.

“Governments in Europe insist this is a problem of ideology, but the real cause of this phenomenon is the political crisis that is sweeping the world with the war in Iraq and the situation in Palestine,” said Azzam Tamimi, director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought.

Like the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the London bombings on July 7, 2005, “should have been lessons for everybody _ that government policies endanger the security of everyone,” Tamimi said. “The root cause has never been addressed. Unless they open a debate, the threat will never go away.”

Recruiters for hard-line Islamist groups can turn some Muslim youths with little interest in religion into extremists in a matter of weeks, contends Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, head of France’s counterterrorism agency.

An estimated 5,000 French Muslims embrace extremist Islam, according to a 2005 police intelligence report. France is home to about 5 million Muslims, the largest Islamic community in western Europe, and French authorities claimed to dismantle several cells earlier this year.

“Young people who are indifferent to religion fall in a matter of weeks into the toughest kind of Islam and, almost without any transition, into the most worrisome kind of activism,” Bousquet de Florian told the newspaper Le Parisien last month.

But the rise of homegrown extremists _ many of whom operate in small, close-knit circles difficult for law enforcement to penetrate _ has complicated counterterrorism efforts in many countries.

The Netherlands has been on high alert since a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004. Spanish authorities have been monitoring some 250 suspected Islamic radicals, and in Bosnia five men are on trial for allegedly plotting an attack on an unidentified European country, significantly, one with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An open letter published this weekend by prominent British Islamic groups said the “debacle in Iraq” and the failure to quickly secure a cease-fire in southern Lebanon as Israel waged a military campaign against Hezbollah militants has made Britain a target.

Britain’s archbishop of York, the Most Rev. John Sentamu, said he thinks disenfranchised young Muslims turn to extremism not because of Islam but “because they are alienated, because they have been given a vision which is so imaginatively wicked.”

==============================

It’s fascism (Washington Times, 060812)

On Thursday, President Bush said this week’s foiled plot to blow up airplanes over the Atlantic is part of a “war with Islamic fascists.” Immediately, Muslim activists condemned the president’s use of the phrase, with one group declaring it “counterproductive to associate Islam or Muslims with fascism.” As the newspaper that first put a variant of this term into public circulation in the United States, we’d simply say this: The Muslims who tried to blow up these airplanes are in fact fascists. This might be worrisome to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose raison d’etre is raising the specter of anti-Muslim backlash. But that doesn’t make it untrue.

Fascism is a chauvinistic political philosophy that exalts a group over the individual — usually a race or nation, but in this case the adherents of a religion. Fascism also espouses centralized autocratic rule by that group in suppression of others. It usually advocates severe economic and social regimentation and the total or near-total subordination of the individual to the political leadership. This accurately describes the philosophies of Hitler, Mussolini, the leaders of Imperial Japan and other fascistic regimes through history. It also describes Thursday’s terrorists.

It very accurately describes the philosophy of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and many other stripes of Islamism around the world. All the elements are present. The ideology is chauvinistic, regarding non-Muslims as a lesser breed of expendable or contemptible dhimmis and infidels. It favors autocracy and severe social and economic restrictions, as did the Taliban. It demands the total subordination of the individual to the group — sometimes manifesting in murderously suicidal deaths like the fiery destruction Britain’s would-be bombers sought. This is not mainstream Islam, of course. It is a corruption of the faith.

The use of the term “Islamic fascism” and its variants is growing, for the simple fact that it reflects the underlying reality of the militants in question. We’ve been using a close variant of the term since July 20, 2001, when reporter Larry Witham interviewed the German-born Muslim scholar Khalid Duran — who is sometimes credited with coining the word “Islamofascism” — in the wake of his mini-Rushdie affair over his book, “An Introduction to Islam for Jews.” Mr. Duran told Mr. Witham that Islamism is really “Islamofascism” because it seeks to impose religious orthodoxy on the state and the citizenry. Which is just as true today.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, of course, has had problems with this term and its expositors for some time. Mr. Witham’s article quotes CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper as saying that Mr. Duran “is not the right person to write a book about Muslim-Jewish understanding” and “doesn’t speak for Muslims.”

Islamofascism speaks for itself. It is a real phenomenon. That makes some people uncomfortable, but the truth is no less real for it.

==============================

Muslim leader calls for vigilance against fanatics (WorldNetDaily, 060811)

One of Canada’s leading Imams has said Muslims must be wary of Islamic fundamentalism, and fight radicalism in mosques head on.

Imam Syed Soharwardy, president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the founder of Muslims Against Terrorism, told CTV News that fanatics are a danger to everyone. “I’m concerned about not only my family but all Canadians,” he said. “What’s going on? God forbid if this increases, and something happens in Canada, the entire Muslim community in Canada will be in big trouble.”

On Thursday, British authorities announced the arrest of 24 people suspected of plotting an elaborate attack on several trans-Atlantic aircraft. It was a chilling reminder of the 17 terror suspects arrested in Toronto on June 2.

Those 17 suspects are alleged to have planned attacks on Canadian soil. An 18th suspect was arrested just last week.

Shaheed Sonier, a Canadian Muslim convert, knew some of those arrested. He claimed they were partly influenced by the 9/11 hijackers, who they considered as martyrs. “They obviously felt that there was nothing wrong with that act,” he said.

Soharwardy said some of the seeds of their alleged beliefs may have come from within Canada’s borders. “That brainwash is coming from the Internet and from some leaders in our community,” he said.

In a press conference in Calgary on Friday, Soharwardy warned Canadian Muslims to be vigilant against fanatical Imams. “We are not doing enough to counter this terrorism within our community, to counter extremism, to counter fanaticism,” he said. “And that’s what I’m asking the entire Muslim community — not only Imams, not only leaders of Muslim organizations but every individual Muslim.”

Sohardy added that terrorism goes against the teachings of Islam, and Muslims should report anyone who acts suspicious. “Based on their Islamic requirements, if they see a person who may be thinking or who may have extreme thinking about the West or Canada, then they must report this to law enforcement agencies,” said Soharwardy. “It is their obligation, otherwise they will not be practising Islam because Islam says you must be faithful to the country where you live.”

But he stressed that terrorists, such as those responsible for 9/11, should not be called Muslim terrorists, nor should they be defined by their religion.

He singled out U.S. President George Bush’s recent comment that America “is at war with Islamic Facists.” “The approach toward countering terrorism is absolutely producing more terrorists,” said Soharwardy. “It is helping people to become fanatics, it is helping people to take an extreme path. It’s not working and that has to change.”

==============================

The religion of peace — at gunpoint (Townhall.com, 060901)

By Kathleen Parker

“... disbelievers will be cast into an eternal fire. But Allah is also ever merciful, and the West can change its ways and turn to the purifying power of Islam ...” — Kidnapped Fox reporter Steve “Khaled” Centanni, channeling his captors.

We don’t often get to watch our media people convert to Islam, so the footage of Fox News’ Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig has been riveting.

Some people can’t get enough of watching planes fly into the World Trade Center towers; I can’t get enough of Centanni and Wiig pledging allegiance to Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.

The common thread between the two is disbelief. I keep rerunning the tapes, now posted on the Web, trying to read the kidnapped men’s body language and translate the meaning of deep breaths and eye movements.

Trying, alas, to imagine being in their place.

As everyone knows, reporter Centanni and cameraman Wiig were released several days ago after being seized in Gaza City by masked gunmen and held hostage for 13 days.

It’s not clear exactly who their kidnappers were, whether part of the Holy Jihad Brigades, as claimed, or whether they had ties to Hamas or the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah.

You need a scorecard to keep up with all the region’s disaffected. Apparently, when three or more angry Muslims gather in a garage, a new jihadist group is born.

What’s perfectly clear is that video is the new weapon of mass destruction. A billion people manipulated into religious frenzy is a formidable force. It is also clear that the West’s continued existence — at least from the perspective of Islamist militants — depends upon our willingness to bow to Islam.

Those two conclusions are made possible by the images of Centanni and Wiig holding up an index finger and proclaiming allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad.

Says Centanni: “My name is Steve. I’m an American. After I entered Islam, I changed my name to Khaled. I have embraced Islam and say the word Allah, and my leader is the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.”

Wiig — new name “Ya’aqob” — repeats the liturgy.

Then the two men proceed to read a script outlining all the reasons why the West is wrong — from invading Afghanistan and Iraq to the tortures of Abu Ghraib. They also ask that all prisoners be released from Guantanamo and that President Bush cease referring to Islamic fascists as “Islamic fascists.”

It’s not nice, and it makes the kidnappers mad.

“Yeah, they were very angry about that,” said Wiig in an interview after his release.

In his role as Khaled, Centanni said he hoped to help Westerners see the light of Islam, which “helps people to love mercy, brotherhood, equality and justice.” Especially — we can’t help filling in for him — when a gun is pointed at one’s head. Or a knife poised at one’s throat.

One of Wiig’s interrogators, a dark figure framed by two AK-47s and with a bayonet at his feet, provided a grim reminder that death is always an option for uncooperative infidels. Thus, the journalists did what they thought necessary to survive.

Obviously, none of us can imagine what we’d do under similar circumstances. Yet despite our empathy and relief at the men’s release, there is nevertheless something about that video — of seeing those two decent, open-hearted Western men surrendering to these lowlife fanatics — that makes me want to take a shower.

How dare those thugs lecture Westerners about the loveliness of Islam while forcing religious conversion at gunpoint?

Their objective was clear from the beginning, according to Centanni and Wiig. They wanted a video. The two Fox journalists were far more valuable shown as cowardly Westerners converting to Islam than as severed heads on the tip of a dull knife.

Let me be clear: I don’t think they were cowards. But those who are willing to strap explosives to their bodies — or enlist their children to become suicide bombers — surely see them, and us, that way. It is easy to imagine that rancorous Muslims are as attuned to the video as we are, watching replay after replay in the smug satisfaction that they have scored another victory against the infidel and the Great Satan. Those few minutes of choreographed horror affirm for the Islamic world that Westerners are weak, while they reiterate the jihadist’s message to the West:

Convert to Islam — or die.

==============================

The Fascist Disease: “Islamic fascism” is an accurate—and important—term. (Weekly Standard, 060914)

PRESIDENT BUSH used the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks to remind Americans of the nature of the fight against radical Islam. “It’s been called a clash of civilizations,” Bush said. “It is a struggle for civilization.” The president warned that a terrorist victory over the United States would bring a “desert of despotism” and “a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom.” Yet he stopped short of repeating the phrase he used last month—”Islamic fascists”—to describe terrorist groups such as al Qaeda. The administration ought to reprise the phrase as a legitimate and important tool in the war of ideas.

Many liberals think this rhetoric too simplistic, that it is a moralistic ploy to justify military adventurism. Others, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Council of Britain, fear it will spark hate crimes and divide communities. “In the Muslim world you’re going to have a difficult time having the mainstream community marginalize extremists when they feel that their faith and their culture is under attack,” complained Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR. “And phrases like ‘Islamic fascist’ make people feel like the entire faith of Islam is under attack.”

This is the language of denial, a refusal to admit spiritual corruption from within. Nevertheless, advocates of a fascist link to extremist Islam should recall that it was the West that conceived this corruption in the last century. We cannot neglect the fact that “Christian Europe” enabled the growth of fascism in the 1920s and 30s—in states such as Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Indeed, the fascist virus even managed to invade the bloodstream of the Christian church.

Immediately after seizing power in 1933, Hitler and his National Socialist Party infiltrated the state-supported Protestant churches in Germany. Soon church bells bore Nazi swastikas, crosses were draped in Nazi flags, and a new priesthood—the “storm troopers of Jesus”—preached martial sermons of racial purity and holy martyrdom. The Catholic Center Party supported steps that gave Hitler dictatorial powers, while the Vatican tacitly backed the revolutions of Franco and Mussolini. In Slovakia, a Catholic monsignor emerged as the fascist dictator. In Croatia, the Ustache openly presented itself as a Catholic movement.

Why fascism found support among political and religious leaders professing Christianity is a complex and much-disputed issue. Yet it’s clear that many fascists, Hitler pre-eminent among them, were masterful at enlisting religious imagery to advance their vision of a re-moralized and re-militarized society. The “Aryan Christian” movement—call it Christian fascism—swept through Germany and other parts of Europe with blitzkrieg-like efficiency.

FASCISM WAS REPUDIATED by the Christian church worldwide, however, and throughout Europe there were courageous dissenters. Catholic priests were arrested in large numbers as Hitler tightened his grip on power. Protestant leaders Karl Barth, Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer openly denounced the Nazi takeover of the German church as idolatry. They formed a “Confessing Church,” an underground congregation committed to historic, orthodox Christianity. Exposing themselves to arrest and execution, they sheltered Jews and challenged fellow believers not to shrink back from the moral obligations of the gospel. “Be perfectly clear,” Barth wrote after the fall of France, “that the demonic power of National Socialism . . . is connected with the fact that Christianity in Germany did thus retreat.”

If fascism could entice and manipulate the Christian religion as it did in the 1930s, why is it hard to imagine it could pervert the religion of Islam? If liberal political regimes could accommodate an ideology of militarism and racial supremacy, surely Islamic states are no less inclined to tolerate the theology of suicide and spiritual supremacy of the new fascists.

THE HISTORICAL PARALLEL HAS ITS LIMITS. European fascism elevated the state above all else, while today’s Islamists regard the state as a means to an end: the establishment of a vast, borderless caliphate. Nevertheless, Mussolini’s motto—”niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contra lo Stato (“nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”)—aptly describes the totalitarian impulse of Osama bin Laden and his allies.

An American observer, writing in 1939, saw in fascism “a deliberate return to barbarism.” The new barbarians share much with their European counterparts: a remorseless savagery, an obsession with blood and death, and a utopian vision of purity and power. If we consider the horrific plot to blow up 10 airliners bound for the United States; the ethnic cleansing of villagers in Sudan; the bombs hidden in Iraqi soccer fields and mosques; the beheadings of schoolgirls in Indonesia; the Lebanese boys, arms outstretched like Hitler Youth as they pledge martyrdom for Hezbollah—do we not see the stigmata of fascism?

It is not only the Bush administration that makes the charge. Stephen Schwartz coined the term Islamofascism and Christopher Hitchens noted the appearance of “fascism with an Islamic face” within days of the 9/11 attacks. Bernard Lewis, has traced the influence of the Nazi party on the Islamist movements in the Middle East. French philosopher Bernard-Henry Levy has employed the phrase to reject the suggestion that “Arab humiliation” somehow justifies Islamist rage: “Arab or Muslim fascism deserves, in my view, to be condemned just like any other fascism.” And Farid Ghadry, president of the Reform party of Syria, has taken to task those who “defend these Islamic fascists” and “fail to confront the true attackers of Islam.”

Muslims surely dishonor their religion by excusing the extremists—as Islamic groups here and in the United Kingdom have done—with complaints about U.S. and British foreign policy. Like the Christian fascism of an earlier era, the Islamic variety cannot be defeated by compromise and accommodation. It must be met, and condemned, head on. “The cause which is at stake in this war is our own cause,” wrote Karl Barth as Great Britain lay under siege, “and we Christians first and foremost must make our own the anxieties, the hardships and the hopes this war demands of all men.”

Joseph Loconte is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book is The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm.

==============================

Official OK with Islamic law in Netherlands: Dutch justice minister says Sharia fine if people vote for it (WorldNetDaily, 060914)

The Netherlands’ justice minister says he would welcome Islamic law, or Sharia, to his European nation if the majority of his people vote for it.

Piet Hein Donner wants the Netherlands to give Muslims more freedoms to behave according to their traditions, reported the NIS News Bulletin, a Dutch online publication.

“For me it is clear: If two-thirds of the Dutch population should want to introduce the Sharia tomorrow, then the possibility should exist,” Donner said. “It would be a disgrace to say: ‘That is not allowed!’”

Donner was reacting to a plea by a parliamentary leader, Maxime Verhagen, who wants to ban parties seeking to establish Islamic law.

Donner’s remarks came from an interview in a book being released today in the Netherlands, “The Country of Hate and Malice.”

The justice minister said, according to the Dutch Expatica News, “It must be possible for Muslim groups to come to power (in the Netherlands) via democratic means.”

Every citizen, he said, “may argue why the law should be changed, as long as he sticks to the law.”

“The majority counts,” Donner stated. “That is the essence of democracy.”

The justice minister insists Muslims have the right to practice their religion in ways that diverge from Dutch social codes.

He says “a tone that I do not like has crept into the political debate. A tone of: ‘Thou shalt assimilate. Thou shalt adopt our values in public. Be reasonable, do it our way’. That is not my approach.”

Donner said, for example, the Netherlands’ Queen Beatrix was wise not to insist on a Muslim leader shaking hands with her when she visited his mosque in The Hague earlier this year. Previously, Dutch Integration Minister Rita Verdonk scolded an imam who would not shake the queen’s hand.

As WND reported in 2004, Donner hasn’t always been open to every aspect of Muslim culture.

He joined with Verdonk in banning a Muslim book distributed by the Dutch Lel Tawheed mosque promoting the stoning of homosexuals, female circumcision and the beating of wives.

“Gay people should be thrown head first off high buildings and if not killed on hitting the ground, they should be then stoned to death,” says a book titled “The Way of the Muslim.”

Other allegations by those who read the book describe instructions on how to deal with women in clear violation of Dutch and any other civilized law.

Police and security agents were concerned the book might prompt Islamic militants in the Netherlands to become more militant and, in turn, create a violent reaction by Dutch people.

Another publication, called “Fatwas for Muslim Women,” says that a woman who lies should receive 100 blows, and it is the husband’s duty, even if the woman refuses, to force her to have sex.

Tension between traditional Dutch society and the country’s 1 million Muslims has heightened since the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh two years ago by a Muslim who warned of further reprisal against the “enemies of Islam.” Muslims were angered by Van Gogh’s film “Submission,” which centered on violence against women in Islamic societies.

Since then, the government of a nation proud of its liberal social attitudes has cut back on generous welfare programs to immigrants and made Dutch-language classes mandatory for newcomers.

==============================

Pope’s speech stirs Muslim anger (BBC, 060914)

Muslim religious leaders have accused Pope Benedict XVI of quoting anti-Islamic remarks during a speech at a German university this week.

Questioning the concept of holy war, he quoted a 14th-Century Christian emperor who said Muhammad had brought the world only “evil and inhuman” things.

A senior Pakistani Islamic scholar, Javed Ahmed Gamdi, said jihad was not about spreading Islam with the sword.

Turkey’s top religious official asked for an apology for the “hostile” words.

In Indian-administered Kashmir, police seized copies of newspapers which reported the Pope’s comments to prevent any tension.

A Vatican spokesman, Father Frederico Lombardi, said he did not believe the Pope’s comments were meant as a harsh criticism of Islam.

‘Abhorrent’

In his speech at Regensburg University, the German-born pontiff explored the historical and philosophical differences between Islam and Christianity and the relationship between violence and faith.

Stressing that they were not his own words, he quoted Emperor Manual II Paleologos of Byzantine, the Orthodox Christian empire which had its capital in what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul.

The emperors words were, he said: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Benedict said “I quote” twice to stress the words were not his and added that violence was “incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul”.

The Pope is due to visit Turkey in November and the Turkish response was swift and strong, the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford reports from Istanbul.

Religious leader Ali Badda Kolu said the Pope’s comments represented what he called an “abhorrent, hostile and prejudiced point of view”.

Whilst Muslims might express their criticism of Islam and of Christianity, he argued, they would never defame the Holy Bible or Jesus Christ.

He said he hoped the Pope’s speech did not reflect “hatred in his heart” against Islam.

Many Turks see Benedict as a Turkophobe and commentators call his words just before the holy month of Ramadan “ill-timed and ill-conceived”, our correspondent adds.

==============================

Pakistan’s Parliament Condemns Pope Benedict XVI (Foxnews, 060915)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s parliament on Friday unanimously adopted a resolution condemning Pope Benedict XVI for making what it called “derogatory” comments about Islam, and seeking an apology from him for hurting the sentiments of Muslims.

The resolution, moved by hardline lawmaker Fazal Karim, was supported by both government and opposition lawmakers in the National Assembly or lower house of parliament.

Chaudhry Ameer Hussain, speaker of the National Assembly, allowed Karim to move the resolution after Karim said the pope had insulted Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, and hurt the sentiments of the entire Muslim world by making “derogatory remarks.”

The measure was adopted a day after the Vatican sought to defuse criticism of the pontiff’s remarks, when he quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and an educated Persian on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

“The emperor ... said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,’” he quoted the emperor as saying.

On Thursday, the Vatican said the pope had not intended to offend Muslim sensibilities with the remarks.

But the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad termed the remarks “regrettable.”

“Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said.

“What he has done is that he has quoted very offensive remarks by some emperor hundreds of years ago,” Aslam said on Friday. “It is not helpful (because) we have been trying to bridge the gap, calling for dialogue and understanding between religions.”

She said Muslims had a long history of tolerance, adding that when the Catholic kingdom of Spain expelled its Jewish population in 1492 they were welcomed by Muslim nations such as the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

==============================

The enemy’s ideology (Townhall.com, 060914)

By Cliff May

In his speech on the anniversary of the September 11 atrocities, President Bush said the United States is fighting “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.” OK, but remind me: What ideology are we fighting?

Five years into this war, it remains curiously difficult to answer that question. In his address on Monday, the president did not do so, though at one point he got close, describing the ideology as “totalitarian” – totalitarians being those who favor complete control by a dictator over nations, societies and populations.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin were both totalitarian regimes, cut from the same cloth even if the former was perceived as a tyranny of the right and the latter a tyranny of the left.

Bush similarly intended to suggest that whatever differences there may be among Osama bin Ladin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saddam Hussein they, like our totalitarian enemies in the 20th century, share defining attributes, including a vehement hostility toward freedom and democracy.

In recent days, a debate has broken out over whether the ideology with which America is at war should be called “fascist” or, more precisely, “Islamic fascist.”

The original fascist movement was Italian but the term came to cover not just the regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, but also that of the Japanese Militarists who aligned with them to form the Axis Powers.

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) has used the term insistently to suggest that the enemy America confronts today is the ideological heir to the enemy America confronted in World War II — and is at least as serious a threat. President Bush used the term once last month, setting off a firestorm from self-appointed spokesmen for the Muslim community.

Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), sent Bush an open letter complaining: “You have on many occasions said Islam is a ‘religion of peace.’ Today you equated the religion of peace with the ugliness of fascism.”

In response, Bahraini journalist Omran Salman noted that Bush had not called all Muslims fascists but rather had singled out those who use religion to justify mass murder.

“What would Ahmed suggest calling people who intend to blow themselves up in commercial airplanes, taking thousands of innocent lives with them?” Salman asked. “Flying angels?”

As far back as 1979, Michael Ledeen, a scholar specializing in Italian history, called e Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini a “clerical fascist.” Like the European fascists, Khomeini was a supremacist. But whereas the Nazis waged a war for German domination of Europe, Khomeini looked forward to a war that would spread Islamic rule throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Back in 1942 Khomeini wrote: “[T]hose who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. … Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!”

Khomeini’s successors may soon have not just swords but also nuclear weapons to help them pursue their vision. Osama bin Laden’s ambitions are the same though he dreams of Sunni rather than Shia sheiks ordering infidels to convert or die.

Also influenced by fascist ideas were the Baathists, a 20th century movement calling for Arab supremacy and domination. Though people think of Baathism as secular, one of its founders, Michel Aflaq, said: “Islam is to Arabism, what bones are to flesh.” Baathism is the ideology espoused by Saddam Hussein and by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad — even as he has forged a close alliance with the Khomeinist rulers of Iran.

For these and other reasons, it is justifiable to call such ideologies fascist — or Islamic fascist or Islamo-fascist or neo-fascist. It’s also accurate to describe them as Militant Islamist or radical Jihadist.

In his speech this week, President Bush said, too, that the war in which America is engaged is not a “clash of civilizations” but a “struggle for civilization.” Perhaps that suggests another way we might characterize the ideology against which free nations are struggling: It is barbarism. There have always been barbarians at civilization’s gates. Maybe it’s time we accepted that, and resolved to fight them – wherever they are and for as long as it takes. Maybe we have to make up our minds that, difficult though it will be, on our watch the enemies of freedom – whatever their ideology — will not prevail.

==============================

Christian Leader Joins Muslims in Denouncing Pope’s Remarks (Foxnews, 060916)

CAIRO, Egypt — The head of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church on Saturday became the first top Christian leader to join the Muslim world in denouncing comments made by Pope Benedict XVI’s about Islam and jihad, as religious and political leaders warned of impending sectarian violence despite the Vatican’s insistence that the Roman Catholic leader’s words were misinterpreted and he didn’t intend to be offensive.

Coptic Pope Shenouda III said in published remarks that he didn’t hear Benedict’s exact words but that “any remarks which offend Islam and Muslims are against the teachings of Christ.”

Relations between Muslims and Christians in the Middle East already were strained, and political and religious leaders warned that the pope’s comments could spark a new wave of sectarian unrest. Anti-Western protests like those that followed last year’s publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad have popped up over the past two days around the Middle East, Turkey and Asia.

Violence erupted in some parts of the Middle East Saturday as Palestinians wielding guns, firebombs and lighter fluid attacked four churches in the West Bank town of Nablus, while gunmen opened fire at a fifth in Gaza.

No injuries were reported in any of the attacks, which left church doors charred and outer walls pocked by bulletholes and scorched by firebombs. Churches of various denominations were targeted.

Clergy played down the attacks as isolated incidents, but said they’d worry if more Christian sites are targeted. “It is easy to worry,” said Father Yousef Saada, a Roman Catholic priest in Nablus. “The atmosphere is charged already, and the wise should not accept such acts.”

Benedict on Tuesday in Germany cited an obscure [KH: bias] Medieval text that characterizes some of the teachings of Islam’s founder as “evil and inhuman” — comments some experts took as a signal that the Vatican was staking a more demanding stance for its dealings with the Muslim world.

The Vatican on Saturday said the pope “sincerely regrets” that Muslims have been offended by some of his comments. But a statement by Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, stopped short of any apology for what the pope said.

“In reiterating his respect and esteem for those who profess Islam, he hopes that they will be helped to understand the correct meaning of his words, so that, quickly surmounting this present uneasy moment ... collaboration may intensify” to promote social justice, moral welfare, peace and freedom for all mankind, the cardinal said.

A senior Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood member said the Vatican’s comments were not enough to quell the anger over his words.

“What was issued by the Vatican was considered as an attempt to give an excuse for what the pope has been quoted saying, and what we demand is a sincere acknowledgment that there was a mistake, not allegations that we misunderstood the pope,” said Brotherhood member Mohammed Bishr.

“We need the pope to admit the big mistake he has committed and then agree on apologizing, because we will not accept others to apologize on his behalf,” he said.

Other Muslim leaders said outreach efforts by papal emissaries were not enough and they also demanded the pope personally apologize. Morocco recalled its ambassador to the Holy See, the Moroccan Foreign Ministry announced Saturday, and Turkey’s ruling party likened the pope to Hitler and Mussolini and accused him of reviving the mentality of the Crusades.

The grand sheik of Al-Azhar Mosque, the Sunni Arab world’s most powerful institution, on Saturday condemned the pope’s remarks as “reflecting ignorance.”

Mohammed Sayed Tantawi made the comment in a brief interview with the pro-government Akhbar al-Youm newspaper, rather than issuing an official statement.

Criticism from the Arab world continued after the Vatican expressed regret over the offense caused by his comments.

Egypt, Sudan and Kuwait all sought clarification on the remarks from the Vatican envoy in their capitals. The Arab League likewise said the comments required explanation.

Kuwait’s deputy prime minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sheik Mohammed Sabah Al Salem Al Sabah, in a speech at the nonaligned summit in Havana,urged the Vatican to show respect for Islam, Kuwait’s official news agency reported.

“We hope that Pope Benedict XVI will follow the steps of Pope John Paul II, who carried out a series of constructive steps to conduct an interfaith dialogue,” Al Sabah said.

Some 100 Muslims demonstrated against the pope at Al-Azhar in Cairo after prayers Friday, with some protesters calling Christian “infidels.”

Christians, mostly Coptic, make up about 10% of Egypt’s 73 million people and generally live in peace with the Muslim majority, but violence flares occasionally, particularly in small southern communities. Many Copts have complained of discrimination.

The Coptic church also has been at odds with the Roman Catholic church since as early as the 5th century over the rising influence of the Catholic papacy. The split was sealed in 1054 with an exchange of anathemas — essentially spiritual repudiations — between the Vatican and the patriarch of Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey, and still the spiritual center of Orthodoxy. The Coptic Pope Shenouda refused to meet with the late Pope John Paul II when he last visited Egypt.

“Christianity and Christ’s teachings instruct us not to hurt others, either in their convictions or their ideas, or any of their symbols — religious symbols,” Shenouda was quoted as saying in the pro-government Al-Ahram newspaper.

In Lebanon, a county where roughly 40% of the population is Christian, the militant Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah and the country’s top Sunni Muslim religious authority denounced Benedict’s comments.

Hezbollah also warned that his comments could create a global religious schism and called on the Vatican to review the pope’s “declared attitude which can lead to world divisions and from which the enemies of humanity — the neo-conservatives led by (U.S. President George W.) Bush and the neo-racists and Nazis, the Zionists who attack civilians and the land — can benefit.”

Iraq’s biggest political parties on Saturday also condemned Benedict’s comments, with the main Sunni party warning that the pope “should not be lured into returning to the Crusades.”

“The world today needs all religious authorities to cooperate to curb the phenomenon of violence,” the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party said in a statement. “We urge all Christian religious authorities in both the Arab and Western world not to be involved in the confrontation against the Islamic world as it could lead to Muslim-Christian violence, God forbid.”

Comparisons to the Crusades also were made in other parts of the Muslim world with perhaps the harshest criticism coming from Turkey, where the pope is scheduled to visit in November. Turkish government officials said Saturday they would not ask Benedict to cancel the visit — in what would be his first papal trip to a Muslim country.

Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted party, said Benedict’s remarks were either “the result of pitiful ignorance” about Islam and its prophet or, worse, a deliberate distortion.

“He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages,” Kapusuz told Turkish state media. “It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades.”

“He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini,” he added.

==============================

Unreasonable Response: Benedict XVI hasn’t revived the Crusades. (National Review Online, 060918)

In November 1095 Pope Urban II called the First Crusade. To judge from the comments issuing from some Muslim groups and politicians, Pope Benedict XVI has done the same thing. According to Salih Kapusuz, a deputy leader of the majority party in Turkey, Benedict, “has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world.” Kapusuz maintains that the pope is engaged in “an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades.” And so it is that protesters across the Middle East are hastily sewing together pope effigies. In Ankara a black wreath was laid before the Vatican embassy and in Cairo people are chanting “Oh Crusaders, oh cowards! Down with the pope!”

So, what about that Crusade? Well, as one might expect, there isn’t one. Is it nonetheless true, as Muhammad Umar, chairman of the Ramadhan Foundation in Britain has claimed, that Benedict “has fallen into the trap of the bigots and racists when it comes to judging Islam…”? Not exactly. But he has fallen into the trap of association, even from the distance of six centuries, with someone who once criticized Islam. And that is clearly not acceptable.

On Tuesday, September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI addressed scholars and scientists at the University of Regensburg on the topic of “Faith, Reason, and the University.” It was a very learned and scholarly lecture, which means that it would put most people comfortably to sleep. However, it is in this lecture that, some believe, Benedict revealed his true colors when it comes to Islam. Early in the address he referred to an interfaith dialogue between a Persian scholar and the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus which probably took place in 1391. Manuel was the leader of the last Christian state in the East. The descendent of the once mighty Roman Empire, Byzantium had by Manuel’s day been reduced to little more than a few crumbs floating around in the soup of the ever-expanding Ottoman Empire. This was a world in which the forces of Islam were the real superpower, and they knew it. Manuel spent his reign flattering and appeasing the Turks on the one hand and desperately seeking aid from Europeans on the other. In neither case was he very successful. Less than three decades after his death, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II destroyed the Byzantine Empire and made its capital, Constantinople (modern Istanbul), his own.

But back to Benedict XVI. The pope resurrected Manuel II in order to make a point. He noted that the learned Manuel was well aware that the Koran states that “There is no compulsion in religion.” But he also knew, as someone who had been on the business end of jihad himself, that the Koran also speaks of holy war. With “startling brusqueness,” the pope continued, Manuel tackled this seeming contradiction by saying “‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’ The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.”

The pope’s purpose in citing this passage is made clear almost immediately. “The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor [of Manuel’s dialogue], Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” Now here is where it gets a little complicated. (I said that it was a scholarly lecture.) Benedict asks the question, “Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?” He concludes that the Greek concept of reason, bound together with Christianity, fundamentally shaped, even gave birth to Europe. He then describes a process which he calls “dehellenization” in which Europeans from the Late Middle Ages onward have chipped away the fusion of faith and reason, placing them in completely separate spheres. This separation is the main focus of the lecture. It is, in fact, not about Islam at all. Benedict is calling a crusade, but it is one against a Christianity stripped of reason and a science stripped of transcendent truths. “In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith. Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”

This is a tough lecture to boil down to one sentence, but if forced I would characterize it as: Theology belongs in the university because only by studying faith with reason will we find solutions to the problems of our time. However, if instead of reading the lecture we simply cut out everything except the words of Manuel II Palaeologus written six centuries ago, then we have a good justification for Pakistan’s parliament to unanimously condemn the pope. If we further pretend that it was Benedict, rather than a long-dead emperor, who expressed these sentiments we have a sound basis for the Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah of Lebanon to demand “a personal apology — not through his officials — to Muslims for this false reading (of Islam).” Or we can rage with Syria’s top Sunni Muslim religious authority, Sheik Ahmad Badereddine Hassoun, who replied to the pope, “We have heard about your extremism and hate for Arabs and Muslims. Now that you have dropped the mask from your face we see its ugliness and extremist nature.”

During Friday prayers in Iraq’s Shiite Muslim stronghold of Kufa, Sheik Salah al-Ubaidi reminded the faithful that “last year and in the same month the Danish cartoon assaulted Islam.” The pope’s comments were now a second assault, he said. Al-Ubaidi is at least partly right. The furor over the Danish cartoon brought in stark relief the cultural differences that exist when it comes to matters of free speech and expression. At least with the cartoon, the illustrator and publisher really were criticizing Islam and its founder. In the case of the pope, however, we have someone who is merely citing a medieval source within the context of a scholarly address. Is that really sufficient justification for Mr. Kapusuz to characterize the pope as “the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks… [who] is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini”?

In the coming days there will undoubtedly be more protests, more outrage, and perhaps even more violence (a nun in Somalia was murdered this weekend) in response to the 14th-century words of Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus. Pope Benedict XVI has already apologized to the world’s Muslims, assuring them that he had no desire to offend them. Heads should soon cool. But the underlying problem will still remain. Interfaith dialogues, by their very nature, require some criticism and some understanding of the shared histories of the respective faiths. If these are stifled, if reason is exiled, then we will never understand, let alone bridge, the religious and cultural gulfs in the world today. And that is what the pope’s lecture was all about.

— Thomas F. Madden is professor of medieval history and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University. He is the author most recently of The New Concise History of the Crusades.

==============================

Unreasonable People Will Not Keep the Pope from Reasoning (townhall.com, 060918)

By Mary Katharine Ham

The Pope has offered two non-apology apologies for his Tuesday remarks on Islam, which if an apology must be offered, is the only kind he should utter:

The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful, and should have been interpreted in a manner that in no way corresponds to his intentions.

On Sunday, he reiterated:

Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday he was “deeply sorry” about the angry reaction sparked by his speech about Islam and holy war and said the text did not reflect his personal opinion.

“These (words) were in fact a quotation from a medieval text which do not in any way express my personal thought,” Benedict told pilgrims at his summer palace outside Rome.

Have you read the Pope’s comments in context? You should. The entire speech is fascinating, and makes clear that he used the Islam passage in question to illustrate a larger point about the intersection of religion and reason, and the consequences of separating the two. I’m snipping some shorter, relevant parts, but the whole thing is recommended.

This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: It had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: This, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

Benedict sets up his Islam comments extensively. He’s quoting a discussion between an “educated” and “learned” Persian and a Byzantine emporer on the subject of Christianity and Islam.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by professor Theodore Khoury (Muenster) of part of the dialogue carried on — perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara — by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Koran, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the “three Laws”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran.

In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point — itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself — which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason,” I found interesting and which can serve as the starting point for my reflections on this issue.

Here it comes:

In the seventh conversation (“diálesis” — controversy) edited by professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that sura 2:256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion.” It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels,” he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The emphasized quote above is the one the “enraged” are citing, of course attributing it to the Pope, not the Byzantine emporer. But if you take that quote out, do you get a different reaction from the world’s Muslims? I don’t think you do. In the next paragraph, Benedict criticizes forced, violent conversions as incompatible with the nature of God. Frankly, these days, there’s one major world religion to which that criticism is much more readily applied than any others.

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably (“syn logo”) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death....”

That sounds like a version of blogger Instapundit’s statement of this weekend, “If they’re that insecure about their religion, maybe the problem isn’t with the critics.”

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?

Is he talking about the War on Terror? And, isn’t that next sentence a variation on the “are Islamic societies compatible with democracy” question? Benedict then moves onto the rest of his speech, and Islam doesn’t show up again until the end.

But were his Islam comments just a way to illustrate his larger point? Nah. Benedict knows his comments are heeded and publicized.

I don’t buy the “bumbling un-media savvy Pope” storyline a) because I resent the implication that the leader of a major world religion is under any obligation, media-imposed or otherwise, to avoid discussing another world religion in an academic setting and b) because the Pope wears Prada. Dude is not out of touch. Heck, he’s halfway to his own celebrity favorites list on iTunes.

I’m with The Anchoress on this one (and I feel like, when talking about the Pope, that’s probably a safe place to be):

Whether he is “media savvy” or not, Benedict has managed - in his very scholarly fashion - to apply a very hot drawing poultice to the enormous and festing boils of both radical Islamism and rampant secularism.

Benedict, as illustrated by the mere language of this speech, is much smarter than the press folks accusing him of blundering, here. He worked for years under John Paul II, one of the most politically active and aware leaders the Church has ever had. He knew what he was doing. Not only that, but he knew he was traveling to Turkey in November— his first trip to a Muslim nation. This was no accident.

Benedict didn’t bury his Islam comments in the middle of the speech where they might have been missed. They were right up front. And, in case anyone missed it, he wrapped with them, too:

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur — this is the program with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.

“Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God,” said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

It’s an invitation from the Pope to Muslims— an invitation to reason, an invitation to dialogue. Will you accept, Benedict asks? The response?

R. S. V. P., baby.

Now, we’ve got a best-seller predicting the assassination of the Pope in Turkey, and a Somali clerk demanding Islamists “hunt down and kill” the Pontiff.

The Anchoress says it feels like 1981 again, and those who like that might end up sorry:

Call it Karma. Call it God, or “Cosmic energy” or whatever you like. I don’t think it liked those assassination attempts in 1981, for things certainly (and quickly) doubled back and bit the asses of those who applauded the violence...

If you’re one of those pathetic people intrigued with the idea of someone, or some entity, assassinating Bush or Benedict, heed my warning - be careful what you wish for. Payback will be a bitch. And you won’t see it coming. You didn’t last time.

This will continue to escalate. No apology will be acceptable. They don’t play much football in Muslim nations because of those tricky moving goalposts indigenous to the region.

Benedict is not a blunderer. He is a brave man and a scholar. He values his freedom to speak out, reasonably and critically, about other world religions, and he’s not willing to relinquish it, even a month before he is to put himself in probable danger by traveling to a Muslim country in the wake of his remarks.

He is also a man of faith, who may have hoped against hope his invitation would be accepted, and put the response in God’s hands.

Some say— the NYT comes to mind— that Benedict’s comments were provocative, that they constituted just an unecessary addition to all the “religious anger in the world.” Sayeth the utterly clueless Times:

The world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal.

You wanna see “sowing pain?” You wanna see “dangerous?” Keep an eye on the attacks on Christian churches throughout the Middle East in the next weeks. Keep an eye on Western embassies. Already, an elderly nun has met her end, shot in the back by jihadis in Somalia. There’s a Catholic priest missing in Baghdad.

Words can heal. Benedict’s were a proclamation that unreasonable people will not keep him from exercising his own capacity for reason.

The fact that the New York Times, and much of the West, don’t share the same determination is much more dangerous anything Benedict said.

==============================

Extremists say pope, West are ‘doomed’ (Washington Times, 060918)

CAIRO — An al Qaeda-linked extremist group warned Pope Benedict XVI today that he and the West were “doomed,” as protesters raged across the Muslim world to demand more of an apology from the pontiff for his remarks about Islam and violence.

The Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni Arab extremist groups that includes al Qaeda in Iraq, issued a statement on a Web forum vowing to continue its holy war against the West. The authenticity of the statement could not be verified independently.

The group said Muslims would be victorious and addressed the pope as “the worshipper of the cross,” saying, “You and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. ... We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose [the] head tax; then the only thing acceptable is a conversion [to Islam] or [being killed by] the sword.”

Islam forbids drinking alcohol and requires non-Muslims to pay a head tax to safeguard their lives if conquered by Muslims. They are exempt if they convert to Islam.

In Indian-controlled Kashmir, meanwhile, shops, businesses and schools shut down in response to a strike call by the head of a hard-line Muslim separatist leader to denounce Benedict. For the third day running, people burned tires and shouted “Down with the pope.”

Protests also broke out in Iraq, where angry demonstrators burned an effigy of the pope in Basra, and in Indonesia, where more than 100 people rallied in front of the heavily guarded Vatican Embassy in Jakarta, waving banners that said the “Pope is building religion on hatred.”

The pope yesterday said he was “deeply sorry” about the angry reaction to his speech last week in which he cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of Islam’s prophet Muhammad as “evil and inhuman” and referred to spreading Islam “by the sword.”

Benedict said the remarks came from a text that didn’t reflect his own opinion.

“I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect,” he said during his weekly appearance before pilgrims in Italy.

The statement of regret — the pope’s second in two days — helped ease some tensions.

In Turkey, where outrage against Benedict’s remarks had been swift, Catholic bishops decided today that no changes were necessary in his upcoming visit in November — his first to a Muslim country, Vatican spokesman George Marovic said.

However, State Minister Mehmet Aydin, who oversees religious affairs in Turkey, said he expected Turkish authorities to cancel the visit if Benedict does not offer a full apology.

The secretary-general of the Turkish HUKUK-DER law association submitted a request to the Justice Ministry asking that the pope be arrested upon entering Turkey.

The appeal by Fikret Karabekmez, a former legislator for the banned pro-Islamic Welfare Party, called for Benedict to be tried under several Turkish laws. A prosecutor in the ministry will evaluate the request and decide whether to open a case.

Angry reactions also persisted in other corners of the Muslim world, where many demanded more of an apology by the pope than yesterday’s statement of regret.

“Muslims have all this while felt oppressed, and the statement by the pope saying he is sorry about the angry reaction is inadequate to calm the anger — more so because he is the highest leader of the Vatican,” Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said.

Morocco’s King Mohammed VI sent a letter to the Vatican in which he implored Benedict to show “the same respect for Islam that you have for the other religions,” Moroccan press reported. Morocco withdrew its ambassador to the Vatican over the weekend.

==============================

Pope ‘deeply sorry’ about Muslim fury (Washington Times, 060918)

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI yesterday said he was “deeply sorry” Muslims had been offended by his use of a medieval quotation on Islam and violence, but failed to quell the fury of some Islamic groups demanding a full apology.

The head of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics, whose Tuesday comments sparked worldwide Muslim anger because they were seen as portraying Islam as a religion tainted by violence, said the quotation did not represent his personal views.

“I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims,” the pope told pilgrims at his Castel Gandolfo summer residence.

The 79-year-old pontiff spoke after a Vatican statement on Saturday attempted to clarify the meaning of the academic speech he made in Germany on Tuesday.

Before the pope spoke and mollified some Muslims, there were attacks on churches in the West Bank and a protest in Iran. In Somalia, an Italian nun, Sister Leonella, was killed in an attack one Islamist source said could be linked to the dispute.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi hoped the death of the nun working at a Mogadishu children’s hospital was “an isolated event.”

One al Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq, the Mujahedeen Shura Council, threatened in an unauthenticated Internet statement to “break the cross and spill the wine” in revenge, referring to Christian symbols and sacraments.

Benedict’s apology was rejected by some Muslims.

“In Hamas, we do not view the statement attributed to the pope as an apology,” said Sami Abu Zuhri, spokesman for the militant group that controls the Palestinian government.

The main opposition force in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, initially said the pope made a “sufficient apology.” But deputy leader Mohammed Habib said later: “It does not rise to the level of a clear apology and ... we’re calling on the pope to issue a clear apology that will decisively end any confusion.”

In his weekly Angelus prayer yesterday, the 79-year-old pope said his remarks last week “in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought.” He said that he hoped “to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning” of the address he delivered Tuesday at an academic conference in Germany, which he said “in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with mutual respect.”

His remarks yesterday were interrupted by applause from the pilgrims at Castel Gandolfo, in the hills outside Rome.

In the speech, the pope, a former theology professor and enforcer of Vatican dogma, referred to criticism of the prophet Mohammed by 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus.

The emperor said everything the prophet Mohammed brought was evil “such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The heads of Muslim countries had expressed dismay at what they saw as an offensive comment, and religious leaders had called it the start of a new Christian crusade against Islam.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and politicians in Italy rushed to Benedict’s defense, saying he had been misunderstood and had really been making an appeal for dialogue.

But angry Muslim leaders flung accusations of violence back at the West, referring to the medieval Crusades and to the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have fanned the flames of Muslim resentment.

In Iran, about 500 theological school students protested in the city of Qom, and hard-line cleric Ahmad Khatami said that if the pope did not apologize, “Muslims’ outcry will continue until he fully regrets his remarks.”

Some Muslims welcomed the pope’s apology.

The Muslim Council of Britain said it was “exactly the reassurance many Muslims were looking for.”

The head of Turkey’s religious-affairs directorate welcomed the statement from the Vatican on Saturday. Ali Bardakoglu had previously called the pope’s comments “extremely regrettable.”

Questions had been raised on whether a papal visit to Turkey in November could go ahead, but the government, while calling his remarks “ugly,” said there were no plans to call it off.

The Catholic Church has officially encouraged dialogue with Islam and other non-Christian faiths since the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965.

Benedict has sought dialogue with Islam, but he also stresses Europe’s Christian roots and, before elected, said he opposed mainly Muslim Turkey joining the European Union.

==============================

Muslims Demand Further Apology From Pope (Foxnews, 060919)

ANKARA, Turkey — Muslims in Turkey, Iraq and the Palestinian territories demanded Tuesday that Pope Benedict XVI make a clear apology for his remarks on Islam, instead of saying only that he was “deeply sorry” that Muslims had taken offense.

The prime minister of Malaysia, which chairs the world’s biggest Muslim bloc, said that Benedict’s expression of regret was acceptable.

In Turkey, protesters said Benedict must make full amends before a planned November trip that would be his papacy’s first visit to a Muslim nation.

“Either apologize, or do not come,” read a banner carried by a group of demonstrators from a religious workers’ union.

Iraq’s parliament also rejected Benedict’s explanation of his remarks, saying it was insufficiently clear.

The parliament “demands the pope take practical steps to restore respect to the Islamic world and its religion, and a clear-cut apology for what he said,” lawmakers said in a statement read at a press conference.

The top Muslim clergyman in the Palestinian territories similarly demanded that Benedict offer a “clear apology.”

The mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Hussein, urged Palestinians to halt attacks on churches in the territories, but held the pontiff responsible for the outpouring of anger.

“So far, we consider the apology of the Vatican Pope insufficient,” Hussein told reporters. “We firmly ask the Vatican Pope to offer a personal, public and clear apology to the 1.5 billion Muslims in this world.”

In a speech last week, the pontiff cited a Medieval text that characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as “evil and inhuman,” particularly “his command to spread by the sword the faith.”

Benedict said Sunday that he was “deeply sorry” that Muslims took offense, and stressed that the emperor’s words did not reflect his own opinion.

Malaysia, which chairs the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, had demanded that the pope offer a full apology and retract what he said.

“I think we can accept it and we hope there are no more statements that can anger the Muslims,” Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi told Malaysian journalists late Monday in New York, where he is attending the U.N. General Assembly.

Abdullah’s comments, carried Tuesday by the national news agency Bernama, came after he met with President Bush, who told the Malaysian leader he believed that Benedict was sincere in apologizing.

Seven churches in the West Bank and Gaza were attacked following Benedict’s comments. Damage was minor and no one was hurt, but it unsettled the small Christian minority, which accounts for about 2% of the 3.4 million Palestinians.

In Ankara Tuesday, the protesters demanded that the Justice Ministry arrest the pope upon his arrival in Turkey, where he should be tried on charges of insulting Islam and causing hatred based on religious differences, local media reported.

Ilnur Cevik, editor-in-chief of The New Anatolian newspaper, said in a commentary that the pope must reach out to Muslims before visiting.

“How can the pope make amends and convince the masses with religious sensitivities in Turkey that he is not an enemy of Islam and that he wants to forge an atmosphere of coexistence?” Cevik wrote. “If he fails to do this, it will be very hard for the Turkish people to give him a warm welcome.”

In Turkey, the pope’s remarks strengthened the widespread view that he is hostile to the country’s campaign for membership in the European Union.

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the pope questioned whether the EU should open its doors to Turkey, saying it might be incompatible with European culture.

Secular Turkey’s ruling Islamic-rooted government accused the pope after his latest remarks of trying to revive the spirit of the Crusades, and called on him to offer a sincere and personal apology.

Catholic bishops met in Istanbul on Monday and decided the pope’s visit to Turkey in November should go ahead, said Monsignor Georges Marovitch, the Vatican embassy spokesman in Turkey. The pope was invited by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a staunchly secular leader.

Benedict is scheduled to visit Turkey from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1, where a focus of his visit will be meeting with the Istanbul-based leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Bartholomew I.

==============================

Papal Power: The new Pope is fighting for hearts and minds in Europe. (Weekly Standard, 060919)

Jerusalem

POPE BENEDICT XVI has sort of apologized for offending Muslims, and some Muslim leaders have sort of accepted. The Shia cleric usually described as Hezbollah’s one-time spiritual guide, Hussein Fadlallah, has invited the Pope “to carry out a scientific and fastidious reading of Islam.” Otherwise, Fadlallah warned, Benedict might “succumb to the propaganda of the enemy led by Judaism and imperialism against Islam.”

Maybe that is why Muslims are still burning effigies of the Pope—to teach interfaith dialogue to a 79-year-old theologian who is apt to be misled by those lying, intolerant Jews. After all, it is almost a week since the Pope spoke about Islam before an audience in his native Germany:

Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

As many have already pointed out, the words were taken out of context. As the Pope himself explained, they are not even his own words, but were rather excerpted from a dialogue between a 14th-century Byzantine emperor and a “learned Persian.” The text cited discusses the role of reason in Christian thought and uses Islam as a point of comparison: In “Muslim teaching,” the text asserts, God’s “will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”

Let us posit that the Pope himself is a rational man, moreover that he is also aware of current events and, in particular, the general tenor of Islamic political activism around the world these last few years. So, in quoting a text arguing that the Muslim concept of God is not rational but is rather predicated on violence, what sort of response would a rational man expect from Muslim masses who, among other enthusiasms, torched European embassies this past winter to express displeasure over a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad as a source of irrational violence? Is it not unreasonable to assume that such a speech would provoke yet more irrational violence?

Nonetheless, the Pope apologized—though as some Muslim officials correctly noted, the pontiff says he is sorry for “the reactions” to his speech, not the speech itself. But it taxes the rational intellect to believe he did not know what sort of furies he was tempting. After all, the Holy See is not the State Department, and the Vatican’s interest in Islam did not begin with September 11, nor even with the discovery of oil on the Arabian Peninsula. The New York Times writes that “the Vatican does not have enough experts on Islam to gauge reaction to any papal statements,” but the church has been contemplating its historical rival for about 1,300 years longer than the paper of record.

Ratzinger himself is both an intellectual familiar with church history, and a skilful political operator. Unlike his predecessor Wojtyla, he did not come to Rome as an outsider, but rather learned how to acquire and exercise temporal power within the world’s oldest and perhaps most unforgiving political institution. If Benedict had not known what sort of response his speech was likely to get, then the college of Cardinals elected the wrong man.

There was some hope among clerics and Catholic laypeople that, after the death of John Paul II, the Church might tap a candidate with a more pastoral vocation, a Latin American cardinal, say, or an African one. However, the historical legacy of the Church, as well as its wealth and political power, resides mostly in Europe, and in Ratzinger the Vatican has a leader who took his regnal name from one of the co-patron saints of the continent. Maybe aspects of the Church’s future are elsewhere as well, but Europe is the other rock the Church is built upon and Benedict means to protect that foundation.

Sure the Pope is concerned about Islam, as are all Europeans. His sentiments about Muslim Turkey not belonging to Christian Europe are well-known. “Europe is a cultural and not a geographical continent,” Ratzinger said back in 2004, a year before he became Pope. But he has stated repeatedly, and even in this recent address, that the major threat to Europe comes from secularism.

Here he is like many European Muslim leaders and ideologues, Tariq Ramadan for instance, who believe that the continent has been overcome with a spiritual malaise, a lack of purpose and self-esteem. Unlike secularism, Islam is a worthy competitor for men’s souls—it is just an inferior doctrine, self-evidently so because it did not produce Europe. Moreover, and this is the point of the text Benedict cites, Islam is incapable of producing a Europe because its conception of God does not assume a rational divinity.

Now the Pope says this excerpted text does “not in any way express my personal thought.” Really? So, the Vicar of Christ does not believe that Catholic doctrine is superior to Muslim teaching? Sure he does. The Pope does not want Christian Europe to regain its spirituality by becoming less rational, like Islam, but through an expanded concept of reason—one large enough to encompass a creator who is Himself rational.

AS THE CHILDREN OF A rational God, all men can think rational thoughts, but few are capable of philosophy. Early Christian and Islamic thinkers, especially those influenced by Neo-Platonism, understood the problem: The majority of men can only comprehend one level of reality, and only then through the use of symbols. Hence, what is most interesting about the Pope’s speech is that he is operating on two different levels: There is philosophy, reason, and logos for one type of understanding, and there are symbols for another. Here, the symbols are those of the Catholic Church—the papacy itself—which he himself barely even hints at. Benedict left it to his dialogue partners to fill in the rest, and now every burned effigy of the Pope is a prick in the conscience of Catholics the world over.

Sure the European intellectual class believes the Pope is a moron for getting so many Muslims angry, but the elite is not his primary audience; rather, he was speaking over their heads to the masses of ordinary Catholics. What will they believe in? What will they live for and die for? Maybe the Church.

It is hard to get people to live, never mind die, for principles based entirely on reason. Most people need something real to fight for, something tangible. And this is the dilemma of liberal democracies that bin Laden, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad, among others, have rightly identified. It is only rational that the citizens of such a state would prefer to enjoy the privileges of such a life than to die. However, the jihadi intelligentsia have also made a less than thorough study of the war that they have chosen.

For instance, Israel is a liberal democracy, but as my colleague here in Jerusalem, Middle East analyst Jonathan Spyer, explains, “Israel’s democratic structures are embedded in something older and deeper: The rooting of sovereignty in the shared history of the Jews, the Jewish connection to ancient Israel, and the story of its destruction and rebirth. This is a strong, resonant presence in the lives of many Jewish Israelis and it evokes a profound loyalty.”

Or take the Bush administration’s Middle Eastern democracy project. There are many people in the region willing to die for their ideas, but almost none of them are reform-minded Arab liberals. On one side, there are Islamists and various other fighters who want the Americans to leave their land forever, and on the other side are American soldiers who do not want their nation to suffer the outrages of Muslim-world politics ever again.

These are real things, tangible concerns, and the Pope is seeking to renew similar sentiments in Christian Europe. And in doing so he has reminded us how a 2000-year-old institution moves vast numbers of people and plays great power politics while the rest of us, even those on the right side in the GWOT, have been arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. How many troops do we need in Iraq? Is Islamofascism an apt phrase? If we revisit the Geneva conventions, won’t that expose our troops to mistreatment by the jihadi forces arrayed against us? How can we get the left to see that Hamas and Hezbollah do not, in fact, share its progressive principles? What would Orwell say?

Stalin famously asked of the Pope “how many divisions has he got?” Well, of course we know now that the USSR was a mayfly on the ass of the ages, but the more interesting fact is that many of Stalin’s troops were ranged against their own countrymen to ensure they fought the Germans rather than retreat. It’s hardly an efficient use of one’s divisions, but Stalin apparently understood the limited appeal of the Soviet idea. For the church, though, men will go to great lengths, they will live and die, all in the name of a man who died some 2,000 years ago on a wooden cross.

Lee Smith, a Hudson Institute visiting fellow based in Beirut, is writing a book on Arab culture.

==============================

Socrates or Muhammad? Joseph Ratzinger on the destiny of reason. (Weekly Standard, 060925)

To the memory of Oriana Fallaci

On September 12, Pope Benedict XVI delivered an astonishing speech at the Uni versity of Regensburg. Entitled “Faith, Reason, and the University,” it has been widely discussed, but far less widely understood. The New York Times, for example, headlined its article on the Regensburg address, “The Pope Assails Secularism, with a Note on Jihad.” The word “secularism” does not appear in the speech, nor does the pope assail or attack modernity or the Enlightenment. He states quite clearly that he is attempting “a critique of modern reason from within,” and he notes that this project “has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly.”

Benedict, in short, is not issuing a contemporary Syllabus of Errors. Instead, he is asking those in the West who “share the responsi bility for the right use of reason” to return to the kind of self-critical examination of their own beliefs that was the hallmark of ancient Greek thought at its best. The spirit that animates Benedict’s address is not the spirit of Pius IX; it is the spirit of Socrates. Benedict is inviting all of us to ask ourselves, Do we really know what we are talking about when we talk about faith, reason, God, and community?

For many, it will seem paradoxical that the Roman pontiff has invoked the

critical spirit of Socrates. The pope, after all, is the embodiment of the traditional authority of the Church, and the Church is supposed to have all the answers. Yet Socrates was famous as the man who had all the questions. Far from making any claims to infallibility, Socrates argued that the unexamined life was not worth living, and he was prepared to die rather than cease the process of critical self-examination. Socrates even refused to call himself wise, arguing instead that he only deserved to be called a “lover of wisdom.”

Socrates skillfully employed paradox as a way to get people to think, yet even he might have been puzzled by the paradox of a Roman Catholic pope who is asking for a return to Socratic doubt and self-critique. Benedict must be perfectly aware of this paradox himself, so that we must assume that he, too, is using paradox deliber ately, as Socrates did, and for the same reason: to startle his listeners into rethinking what they thought they already knew.

But why should Pope Benedict XVI feel the need at this moment in history to emphasize and highlight the role that Greek philosophical inquiry played in “the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe”? Christian Europe, after all, was a fusion of diverse elements: the Hebrew tradition, the experience of the early Christian community, the Roman genius for law, order, and hierarchy, the Germanic barbarians’ love of freedom, among many others. In this cultural amalgam, Greek philosophy certainly played a role, yet its contribution was controversial from the beginning. In the second century A.D., the eminent Christian theologian Tertullian, who had been trained as a Roman lawyer, asked contemptuously: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” For Tertullian, Athens represented hot-air and wild speculation. Many others in the early Church agreed, among them those who burned the writings of the most brilliant of all Greek theologians, Origen. Yet Benedict’s address can be understood as a return to the position of the man who taught Origen, the vastly erudite St. Clement of Alexandria.

St. Clement argued that Greek philosophy had been given by God to mankind as a second source of truth, comparable to the Hebrew revelation. For St. Clement, Socrates and Plato were not pagan thinkers; they prefigured Christianity. Contrary to what Tertullian believed, Christianity needed more than just Jerusalem: It needed Athens too. Pope Benedict in his address makes a strikingly similar claim: “The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.” This encounter, for Benedict, was providential, just as it had been for St. Clement. Furthermore, Benedict argues that the “inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history.” For Benedict, however, this event is not mere ancient history. It is a legacy that we in the West are all duty-bound to keep alive—yet it is a legacy that is under attack, both from those who do not share it, namely Islam, and from those who are its beneficiaries and do not understand it, namely, Western intellectuals.

Let us begin by taking seriously Benedict’s claim that in his address he is attempting to sketch, in a rough outline, “a critique of modern reason from within.” He is not using his authority as the Roman pontiff to attack modern reason from the point of view of the Church. His approach is not dogmatic; it is dialectical. He stands before his learned audience not as the

pope, but simply as Joseph Ratzinger, an intelligent and thoughtful man, who makes no claims to any privileged cognitive authority. He has come, like Socrates, not to preach or sermonize, but to challenge with questions.

Ratzinger is troubled that most educated people today appear to think that they know what they are talking about, even when they are talking about very difficult things, like reason and faith. Reason, they think, is modern reason. But, as Ratzinger notes, modern reason is a far more limited and narrow concept than the Greek notion of reason. The Greeks felt that they could reason about anything and everything—about the immortality of the soul, metempsychosis, the nature of God, the role of reason in the universe, and so on. Modern reason, from the time of Kant, has repudiated this kind of wild speculative reason. For modern reason, there is no point in even asking such questions, because there is no way of answering them scientifically. Modern reason, after Kant, became identified with what modern science does. Modern science uses mathematics and the empirical method to discover truths about which we can all be certain: Such truths are called scientific truths. It is the business of modern reason to severely limit its activity to the discovery of such truths, and to refrain from pure speculation.

Ratzinger, it must be stressed, has no trouble with the truths revealed by modern science. He welcomes them. He has no argument with Darwin or Einstein or Heisenberg. What disturbs him is the assumption that scientific reason is the only form of reason, and that whatever is not scientifically provable lies outside the universe of reason. According to Ratzinger, the results of this “modern self-limitation of reason” are twofold. First, “the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity.” Second, “by its very nature [the scientific] method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question.”

In making this last point about God, it may appear that Joseph Ratzinger, the critical thinker, has switched back into being Pope Benedict XVI, the upholder of Christian orthodoxy. Defenders of modern reason and modern science can simply shrug off his objection to their exclusion of God by saying, “Of course, the question of God cannot be answered by science. This was the whole point of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Science can neither prove, nor disprove God’s existence. Furthermore, by bringing in the question of God, you have violated your own ground rules. You claimed to be offering a critique of modern reason from within, but by dragging God into the discussion, you are criticizing modern reason from the standpoint of a committed Christian. You are merely saying that modern reason excludes God; we who subscribe to the concept of modern reason are perfectly aware of this fact. Maybe it troubles you, as a Christian, but it doesn’t bother us in the least.”

Can Joseph Ratzinger, the critical thinker, answer this objection? Yes, he can, and he does. His answer is provided by his discussion of jihad. Contrary to what the New York Times reported, Ratzinger is not providing merely “a note on jihad” that has no real bearing on the central message of his address. According to his own words, the topic of jihad constitutes “the starting-point” for his reflection on faith and reason. Ratzinger uses the Islamic concept of jihad to elucidate his critique of modern reason from within.

Modern reason argues that questions of ethics, of religion, and of God are outside its compass. Because there is no scientific method by which such questions can be answered, modern reason cannot concern itself with them, nor should it try to. From the point of view of modern reason, all religious faiths are equally irrational, all systems of ethics equally unverifiable, all concepts of God equally beyond rational criticism. But if this is the case, then what can modern reason say when it is confronted by a God who commands that his followers should use violence and even the threat of death in order to convert unbelievers?

If modern reason cannot concern itself with the question of God, then it cannot argue that a God who commands jihad is better or worse than a God who commands us not to use violence to impose our religious views on others. To the modern atheist, both Gods are equally figments of the imagination, in which case it would be ludicrous to discuss their relative merits. The proponent of modern reason, therefore, could not possibly think of participating in a dialogue on whether Christianity or Islam is the more reasonable religion, since, for him, the very notion of a “reasonable religion” is a contradiction in terms.

Ratzinger wishes to challenge this notion, not from the point of view of a committed Christian, but from the point of view of modern reason itself. He does this by calling his educated listeners’ attention to a “dialogue—carried on—perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara—by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.” In particular, Ratzinger focuses on a passage in the dialogue where the emperor “addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness” on the “central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’”

Ratzinger’s daring use of this provocative quotation was not designed to inflame Muslims. He was using the emperor’s question in order to offer a profound challenge to modern reason from within. Can modern reason really stand on the sidelines of a clash between a religion that commands jihad and a religion that forbids violent conversion? Can a committed atheist avoid taking the side of Manuel II Paleologus when he says: “God is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. . . . Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats. . . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.”

Modern science cannot tell us that the emperor is right in his controversy with the learned Persian over what is or is not contrary to God’s nature. Modern reason proclaims such questions unanswerable by science—and it is right to do so. But can modern reason hope to survive as reason at all if it insists on reducing the domain of reasonable inquiry to the sphere of scientific inquiry? If modern reason cannot take the side of the emperor in this debate, if it cannot see that his religion is more reasonable than the religion of those who preach and practice jihad, if it cannot condemn as unreasonable a religion that forces atheists and unbelievers to make a choice between their intellectual integrity and death, then modern reason may be modern, but it has ceased to be reason.

The typical solution to the problem of ethics and religion offered by modern reason is quite simple: Let the individual decide such matters himself, by whatever means he wishes. If a person prefers Islam over Christianity, or Jainism over Methodism, that is entirely up to him. All such choices, from the perspective of modern reason, are equally leaps of faith, or simply matters of taste; hence all are equally irrational. Ratzinger recognizes this supposed solution, but he sees the fatal weakness in it. Modern reason asserts that questions of ethics and religion

have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science,” . . . and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.

If the individual is free to choose between violence and reason, it will become impossible to create a community in which all the members restrict themselves to using reason alone to obtain their objectives. If it is left up to the individual to use violence or reason, then those whose subjective choice is for violence will inevitably destroy the community of those whose subjective choice is for reason. Worse still, those whose subjective choice is for violence do not need to constitute more than a small percentage of the community in order to destroy the very possibility of a community of reasonable men: Brute force and terror quickly extinguish rational dialogue and debate.

Modern reason says that all ethical choices are subjective and beyond the scope of reason. But if this is so, then a man who wishes to live in a community made up of reasonable men is simply making a personal subjective choice—a choice that is no more reasonable than the choice of the man who wishes to live in a community governed by brute force. But if the reasonable man is reasonable, he must recognize that modern reason itself can only survive in a community made up of other reasonable men. Since to be a reasonable man entails wishing to live in a community made up of other reasonable men, then the reasonable man cannot afford to allow the choice between reason and violence to be left up to mere personal taste or intellectual caprice. To do so would be a betrayal of reason.

Modern reason, to be sure, cannot prove scientifically that a community of reasonable men is ethically superior to a community governed by violent men. But a critique of modern reason from within must recognize that a community of reasonable men is a necessary precondition of the very existence of modern reason. He who wills to preserve and maintain the achievements of modern reason must also will to live in a community made up of reasonable men who abstain from the use of violence to enforce their own values and ideas. Such a community is the a priori ethical foundation of modern reason. Thus, modern reason, despite its claim that it can give no scientific advice about ethics and religion, must recognize that its own existence and survival demand both an ethical postulate and a religious postulate. The ethical postulate is: Do whatever is possible to create a community of reasonable men who abstain from violence, and who prefer to use reason. The religious postulate is: If you are given a choice between religions, always prefer the religion that is most conducive to creating a community of reasonable men, even if you don’t believe in it yourself.

Modern reason cannot hope to prove these postulates to be scientifically true; but it must recognize that a refusal to adopt and act on these postulates will threaten the very survival of modern reason itself. That is the point of Ratzinger’s warning that “the West has long been endangered by [its] aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby.” Because it is ultimately a community of reasonable men that underlies the rationality of the West, modern reason is risking suicide by not squarely confronting the question: How did such a community of reasonable men come into being in the first place? By what miracle did men turn from brute force and decide to reason with one another?

It is important to stress that Ratzinger is not repudiating the critical examination of reason that was initiated by Kant. Instead, he is urging us to examine the cultural and historical conditions that made the emergence of modern reason possible. Modern reason required a preexisting community of reasonable men before it could emerge in the West; modern reason, therefore, could not create the cultural and historical condition that made its own existence possible. But in this case, modern reason must ask itself: What created the communities of reasonable men that eventually made modern reason possible?

This was the question taken up by one of Kant’s most illustrious and brilliant students, Johann Herder. Herder began by accepting Kant and the Enlightenment, but he went on to ask the Kantian question: What were the necessary conditions of the European Enlightenment? What kind of culture was necessary in order to produce a critical thinker like Immanuel Kant himself? When Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, methodically demolished all the traditional proofs for the existence of God, why wasn’t he torn limb from limb in the streets of Königsburg by outraged believers, instead of being hailed as one of the greatest philosophers of all time?

Herder’s answer was that in Europe, and in Europe alone, human beings had achieved what Herder called “cultures of reason.” In his grand and pioneering survey of world history and world cultures, Herder had been struck by the fact that in the vast majority of human societies, reason played little or no role. Men were governed either by a blind adherence to tradition or by brute force. Only among the ancient Greeks did the ideal of reason emerge to which Manuel II Paleologus appeals in his dialogue with the learned Persian.

A culture of reason is one in which the ideal of the dialogue has become the foundation of the entire community. In a culture of reason, everyone has agreed to regard violence as an illegitimate method of changing other people’s minds. The only legitimate method of effecting such change is to speak well and to reason properly. Furthermore, a culture of reason is one that privileges the spirit of Greek philosophic inquiry: It encourages men to think for themselves.

For Herder, modern scientific reason was the product of European cultures of reason, but these rare cultures of reason were themselves the outcome of a well-nigh miraculous convergence of traditions to which Ratzinger has called our attention as constituting the foundation of Europe: the world-historical encounter between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry, “with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage.” Thus, for Herder, modern scientific and critical reason, if it looks scientifically and critically at itself, will be forced to recognize that it could never have come into existence had it not been for the “providential,” or perhaps merely serendipitous, convergence of these three great traditions. Modern reason is a cultural phenomenon like any other: It did not drop down one fine day out of the clouds. It involved no special creation. Rather, it evolved uniquely out of the fusion of cultural traditions known as Christendom.

A critique of modern reason from within must recognize its cultural and historical roots in this Christian heritage. In particular, it must recognize its debt to the distinctive concept of God that was the product of the convergence of the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman traditions. To recognize this debt, of course, does not require any of us to believe that this God actually exists.

For example, the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was an atheist; yet in his own critique of modern reason, he makes a remarkably shrewd point, which Ratzinger might well have made himself. Modern scientific reason says that the universe is governed by rules through and through; indeed, it is the aim of modern reason to disclose and reveal these laws through scientific inquiry. Yet, as Schopenhauer asks, where did this notion of a law-governed universe come from? No scientist can possibly argue that science has proven the universe to be rule-governed throughout all of space and all of time. As Kant argued in his Critique of Judgment, scientists must begin by assuming that nature is rational through and through: It is a necessary hypothesis for doing science at all. But where did this hypothesis, so vital to science, come from?

The answer, according to Schopenhauer, was that modern scientific reason derived its model of the universe from the Christian concept of God as a rational Creator who has intelligently designed every last detail of the universe ex nihilo. It was this Christian idea of God that permitted Europeans to believe that the universe was a rational cosmos. Because Europeans had been brought up to imagine the universe as the creation of a rational intelligence, they naturally came to expect to find evidence of this intelligence wherever they looked—and, strangely enough, they did.

Ratzinger, in his address, draws our attention to the famous opening passage of the Gospel of John, in which the Biblical God, the Creator of the Universe, is identified with the Greek concept of logos, which means both word and reason—”a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason.” Though Ratzinger does not mention it, the Roman tradition also comes into play in this revolutionary new concept of God: For the Christian God, like a good Roman emperor, is a passionate lover of order, law, and hierarchy. He does not merely create a universe through reason, but he subjects it thoroughly to laws, establishes order in every part of it, and organizes hierarchies that allow us to comprehend it all: Our cat is a member of the species cat, the species cat belongs to the order of mammals, all mammals are in turn animals, and all animals are forms of life. What Roman legion was ever better organized than that?

For Schopenhauer, as an atheist, the rational Creator worshiped by Christians was an imaginary construction, like all other gods. For Ratzinger, as a Christian, this imaginary construction is an approximation of the reality of God; but for Ratzinger, as a critical thinker, there is no need to make this affirmation of faith. In offering his “critique of modern reason from within,” it is enough for his purposes to point out how radically different this imaginary construction of God is from the competing imaginary constructions of God offered by other religions—and, indeed, from competing imaginary constructions of God offered by many thinkers who fell clearly within the Christian tradition.

For example, Ratzinger notes that within the Catholic scholastic tradition itself, thinkers emerged like Duns Scotus, whose imaginary construction of God sundered the “synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit.” For Scotus, it was quite possible that God “could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done.” If God had willed to create a universe without rhyme or reason, a universe completely unintelligible to human intelligence, that would have been his privilege. If he had decided to issue commandments that enjoined human beings to sacrifice their children, or kill their neighbors, or plunder their property, mankind would have been compelled to obey such commandments. Nor would we have had any “reason” to object to them, or even question them. For Scotus and those who followed him, the ultimate and only reason behind the universe is God’s free and unrestrained will. But as Ratzinger asks, How can such a view of God avoid leading “to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness?” The answer is, it cannot.

Intimately connected with the concept of God as a rational Creator who wishes for us to be able to understand the reason behind the universe is the concept of a God who will behave reasonably toward us. He will not be delighted when we grovel before him, nor will he demand that we worship him in “fear and trembling.” Instead, he will be a God who prefers for us to feel reverence and gratitude towards him.

Ratzinger notes that Socrates’ mission was to challenge and critique the myths of the Greek gods that prevailed in his day. These gods were imagined as behaving not only capriciously, but often wickedly and brutally. The famous line from King Lear sums up this view: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods—they kill us for their sport.” But, asked Socrates, were such gods worthy of being worshiped by reasonable men, or by free men? True, we may feel abject terror before them; but should we have reverence for them simply because they have the power to injure us? In The Euthyphro, Socrates quotes a Greek poet, Stasinus, who, speaking of Zeus, says “where fear is, there also is reverence,” but only to disagree with the poet’s concept of God. “It does not seem to me true that where fear is, there also is reverence; for many who fear diseases and poverty and other such things seem to me to fear, but not to reverence at all these things which they fear.” For Socrates, it was obvious that good was not whatever God capriciously chose to do; the good was what God was compelled by his very nature to do. Socrates would have agreed with the Byzantine emperor when he said, “God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.”

The Emperor Manuel II Paleologus pondered this question in his debate with the learned Persian. How can a god who commands conversion by the sword be the same god as the emperor’s god—a god who wished to gain converts only through the use of words and reason? If Allah is happy to accept converts who are trembling in fear for their lives, with a sword hovering over their necks, then he may well be a god worth fearing, but not a god worth revering. He may represent an imaginary construction of god suitable to slaves, but he will not be an image of god worthy of being worshiped by a Socrates—or by any reasonable man.

The New York Times expressed dismay that Pope Benedict XVI, by quoting the words of Manuel II Paleologus, had betrayed the ecumenical tradition of John Paul II, who insisted that all of us, including both Christians and Muslims, worship the same God. Many others have joined in the criticism of the Regensburg address; Ratzinger, in his role as the Roman pontiff, has apologized if his remarks offended Muslim sensibilities. Perhaps, as Pope Benedict, he was wise to do so. But Ratzinger, the man of reason, the critical thinker, owes no one an apology. He spoke his mind, and he challenged his listeners and the world to ponder questions that have haunted thoughtful men from the first age of Greek philosophic inquiry. He has thrown out an immense challenge to modern reason and to the modern world. Is it really a matter of subjective choice whether men follow a religion that respects human reason and that refuses to use violence to convert others? Can even the most committed atheist be completely indifferent to the imaginary gods that the other members of his community continue to worship? If modern reason cannot persuade men to defend their own communities of reason against the eruption of “disturbing pathologies of religion and reason,” then what can persuade them to do so?

Human beings will have their gods—and modern reason cannot alter this. Indeed, modern reason has produced its own ersatz god—a blind and capricious universe into which accidental man has found himself inexplicably thrown. It is a universe in which all human freedom is an illusion, because everything we do or think was determined from the moment of the Big Bang. It is a universe in which there is no mind at all, but only matter. Yet without mind, how can there be reason? Without free will, how can there be reasonable choices? Without reasonable choices, how can there be reasonable men? Without reasonable men, how can there be communities in which human dignity is defended from the indignity of violence and brute force?

On his last day on earth, Socrates spent the hours before he drank the fatal hemlock talking to his friends about the immortality of the human soul. Next to Socrates was a Greek boy, whose name was Phaedo—Ratzinger mentions him in his address. Socrates had come across Phaedo one day in the marketplace of Athens, where he was up for sale as a slave. Distraught at knowing what lay ahead for the handsome and intelligent boy, Socrates ran to all his wealthy friends and collected enough money to buy the boy, then immediately gave him his freedom. Socrates’ liberation of Phaedo was a symbol of Socrates’ earthly mission.

Socrates hated the very thought of slavery—slavery to other men, slavery to mere opinions, slavery to fear, slavery to our own low desires, slavery to our own high ambitions. He believed that reason could liberate human beings from these various forms of slavery. Socrates would have protested against the very thought of a God who was delighted by forced conversions, or who was pleased when his worshipers proudly boasted that they were his slaves. He would have fought against those who teach that the universe is an uncaring thing, or who tell us that freedom is an illusion and our mind a phantom. Ultimately, perhaps, Socrates would have seen little to distinguish between those who bow down trembling before an irrational god and those who resign themselves before an utterly indifferent universe.

In his moving and heroic speech, Joseph Ratzinger has chosen to play the part of Socrates, not giving us dogmatic answers, but stinging us with provocative questions. Shall we abandon the lofty and noble conception of reason for which Socrates gave his life? Shall we delude ourselves into thinking that the life of reason can survive without courage and character? Shall we be content with lives we refuse to examine, because such examination requires us to ask questions for which science can give no definite answer? The destiny of reason will be determined by how we in the modern West answer these questions.

Lee Harris is the author of Civilization and Its Enemies (Free Press). His new book The Suicide of Reason (Basic) is scheduled to be published next year.

==============================

Intolerance and “Infidel-Dogs” (townhall.com, 060923)

By Rich Tucker

My brother’s a vegetarian. Yet he doesn’t insist that the rest of us should forgo meat when he’s around. By the same token, we don’t insist that, if he wants to break bread with us, he must also swallow ground cow. That’s tolerance.

Contrast that with the “tolerance” we see from Iran’s president.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad skipped a recent luncheon at the United Nations because alcohol was being served. Now, he could certainly have dined without drinking. That’s what President Bush did. But with Ahmadinejad, it’s “my way or the highway.” Serve alcohol and he won’t come.

Unfortunately, Ahmadinejad’s attitude is similar to the one some in the Islamic world have toward the West. Instead of tolerance they demand “do what we say, or else.” Consider the recent uproar over one of Pope Benedict XVI’s speeches.

The pontiff quoted a 14th century Christian, who asked a Muslim to “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The point of the quote is that Islam is frequently spread through violence — even though the Koran says “There is no compulsion in religion.”

Just recently, of course, journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig spent two weeks in captivity in the Palestinian territories. They weren’t released until they converted to Islam — converts recruited quite literally by the power (and threat) of the sword.

Although the Pope’s speech was factually accurate, it was widely attacked in the Muslim world. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry warned, “Insufficient knowledge of the history and ideology of Islam had been in the past exploited by some elements to create misunderstanding about Islamic ideals, among the adherents of other faiths, so any reference which could strengthen such misperceptions needed to be strictly avoided.”

Well, how are we going to learn the history of Islam if we’re not allowed to read certain books? A tolerant faith should be confident enough to encourage its followers to read widely and be prepared to handle any doubts that arise with rational argument, not violence.

Instead, in Basra, Iraq, demonstrators burned the Pope in effigy. In the West Bank, several Christian churches were torched. And some warn worse is on the way. “You infidels and despots, we will continue our jihad and never stop until God avails us to chop your necks and raise the fluttering banner of monotheism when God’s rule is established governing all people and nations,” warned extremists led by al Qaeda in Iraq.

Still, some were quick to blame the victims. The Pope’s remarks “will convince more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic and engaged in a new crusade,” wrote author and former nun Karen Armstrong in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “We simply cannot afford this type of bigotry.”

She’s wrong on two counts. First, the problem here isn’t “Islamophobia.” It’s the fact that some Islamists are ready to destroy things any time their faith is criticized. Second, as Oriana Fallaci writes in her book “The Force of Reason,” the Crusades weren’t really an offensive operation (as we’ve so often been told). They were a defensive reaction to an Islam that spread deep into Europe behind the power of the sword.

By the year 711, Fallaci notes, Islamic warriors had conquered the Iberian Peninsula, parts of which they held until 1492. “As for the much-flaunted detail that the infidel-dogs were not obliged to convert to Islam,” she writes, “do you know why they were not? Because those who converted to Islam did not pay taxes. Those who refused, on the contrary, did.” The Crusaders, she writes, were simply trying to stop the spread of Islam by meeting its violence with violence of their own.

Fallaci died last week after a long fight with cancer. She spent most of her twilight years in New York, since she faced a European Arrest Warrant if she dared travel to the Continent. Because of her writings, she’d been charged with thought crimes.

“If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Pope, on the Catholic Church … nobody touches your ‘right of thought and expression,’” Fallaci noted correctly. “But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Mohammed, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination.”

Despite the persecution, Fallaci finished her life confident. Western ideas would eventually prevail, she wrote, because the West is a river, “water that runs, that flows, and in flowing purifies itself, renews itself.”

That’s what the Pope was getting at, too. As the Vatican explained, he simply aimed “to cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward the other religions and cultures, and obviously also towards Islam.”

The West has, at least for the most part, already mastered that. Now, it’s time for radical Islamists to join us. They could start by showing some real tolerance.

==============================

Tough Questions about Islam and Democracy (Christian Post, 060923)

The reaction of many on the Arab street to Pope Benedict XVI’s quotation of a medieval text, which was critical of Islam for its history of violence, has raised new doubts about the compatibility of Islam and democracy. Outraged by the perceived slight, angry Muslims have called for the Pope’s execution, burned him in effigy, bombed Christian churches, and—the evidence suggests—shot a Catholic nun in Somalia (whose dying words were “I forgive, I forgive”). Such a response undermines the characterization of Islam as a “religion of peace” and reinforces the notion that it is a religion that spreads at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun.

magnifier Enlarge this Image

Ken Connor

The Pope was on a pastoral trip to his native Germany when he gave the lecture that has caused the international ruckus. The speech was not actually about Islam; it merely touched on the Muslim religion briefly before launching into a much larger discussion about the limitations of secularism and the importance of reason in the Christian faith. His speech was a serious challenge to Western secularists who think faith is irrational. If anything, Benedict probably thought his lecture would anger those atheists and agnostics whom he clearly challenges, but instead Muslims are protesting his words.

The protests erupted because the Pope began his talk by quoting a medieval conversation between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a learned Persian. Benedict quoted the emperor, who “brusquely” said, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The Pope then discussed how “the emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.”

The violent response to the Pope’s remarks is not an isolated incident. It comes within a year of the Danish cartoon fracas that, by the time it was over, produced well over a hundred deaths. It also comes within a month of the release of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig of Fox News, who were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint. Similar incidents abound. Names like Salman Rushdie and Theo van Gogh come immediately to mind. All of these names and events raise larger questions: in general, does the Muslim world have respect for the indispensable pillars of democracy—freedom of speech and freedom of religion?

This is much more than an academic debate. Current U.S. policy is predicated on the fact that, given the opportunity, the Muslim world will embrace democracy. Yet over and over we see a vocal segment of the Muslim population attempting to limit speech and impose religion. Indeed, Islamic religious leaders commonly issue a fatwa, or a legal decree, when someone says something they consider blasphemous. A fatwa has been issued in Iran for the deaths of Salman Rushdie and Jerry Falwell, for example. When religious leaders have the power to condemn men and women to death for statements deemed to be blasphemous, what hope is there for freedom of religion or freedom of speech? Can democracy really flourish in the Muslim world?

While freedom of speech isn’t a reality in some countries, it is a reality in America, and we should use it to join Benedict in asking tough questions: Is the relationship between faith and reason as strong in Islam as it is in Christianity? Are forced conversions ever legitimate? Is the use of violence to support the expansion of religion unreasonable? To what extent is honest inquiry and dissent permissible under Islamic law? The list of questions could run very long. Muslims in America, who enjoy freedom of speech and religion, should be in the vanguard of those participating in the dialogue.

Despite these many unresolved questions, America is moving full steam ahead with efforts to democratize the Muslim world. At the same time, a number of Muslim scholars abroad are arguing that Western democracy is simply incompatible with Islam and Sharia law. Perhaps they are right, perhaps they are wrong, but regardless we should not ignore them. We should listen as they describe the possibilities and limitations in their own religion. We may find some of the answers disappointing and inconvenient, but it will be much better in the long run to work with Islamic self-understanding rather than deluding ourselves by imagining that Muslims are eager to embrace Western democracy.

We are told that the vast majority of Muslims would embrace liberal democracy if given the opportunity. Perhaps they have been intimidated into silence by extreme elements of their co-religionists. If so, we in the West would do well to encourage them to find their voice, and to urge them to speak up and prevent the extremists from projecting a vision of Islam that is incompatible with democratic ideals. If Islam is a religion of peace, if the majority of Muslims reject violence and support freedom of religion and speech, they should make their voices heard. Too often terrorist attacks perpetrated in the name of Islam are followed by the silence of those who would have us believe Islam rejects such acts. Democracy stands no chance of flourishing in the Middle East until a chorus of Muslim voices reject terrorism and embrace the notions of freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Until then, we should join the Pope in asking tough questions, and we should insist on honest answers.

___________________________________________________

Ken Connor is Chairman of the Center for a Just Society in Washington, DC and a nationally recognized trial lawyer who represented Governor Jeb Bush in the Terri Schiavo case. Connor was formally President of the Family Research Council, Chairman of the Board of CareNet, and Vice Chairman of Americans United for Life.

==============================

Pius attacked for not confronting evil, Benedict attacked for confronting evil (townhall.com, 060926)

By Dennis Prager

Among the most heated debates of the last 40 years has been the debate over Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. What did he do when the greatest evil of his day engulfed Christian Europe? Was he “Hitler’s Pope,” as the name of a widely read book about him charged? Was he too reticent in speaking out against Nazism and the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews? Was he perhaps even a Nazi sympathizer? Or was he in fact a great friend of Europe’s Jews who did whatever he could to save tens of thousands of Jews, especially in Italy, opening up the doors of Church institutions to hide Jews?

It is not my aim here to offer an answer to that debate. But the attacks on Pope Benedict XVI may help shed new light on some of the motives for the attacks on Pius XII. It is true that we have always known that most, if not all, of Pius’s critics were/are on the political/religious Left. But this no more discredited their critiques of Pius than the fact that the vast majority of Pius’s defenders were on the political/religious Right discredited their defense.

But recently the critics have lost credibility. If the same people who attack Pope Pius XII for his silence regarding the greatest evil of his time are largely the same people who attack Pope Benedict XVI for confronting the greatest evil of his time, maybe it isn’t a pope’s confronting evil that concerns Pius’s critics, but simply defaming the Church.

After all, has not Benedict done precisely what Pius’s critics argue that Pius, and presumably any pope, should have done — be a courageous moral voice and condemn the greatest evil and greatest manifestation of anti-Semitism of his time?

Take The New York Times editorial page, for example. It is written by people who condemn Pius for his alleged silence and now condemn Benedict for not being quiet. According to the Times, Benedict will only create more anti-Western Muslim violence. But that was exactly the excuse defenders of Pius XII so often offered for why Pius XII did not speak out more forcefully — that he was afraid it would only engender more Nazi violence. Yet Pius’s critics have (correctly) dismissed that excuse out of hand.

Another example is Karen Armstrong, the widely read ex-nun scholar of religion. She has written of Pius XII that his “apparent failure to condemn the Nazis has become a notorious scandal.” Moral and logical consistency suggest that she would welcome a pope who did confront today’s greatest evil. But she has joined those condemning Pope Benedict. She wrote (putting these arguments in the mouths of affronted Muslims with whom she sympathizes): “the Catholic Church is ill-placed to condemn violent jihad when it has itself . . . under Pope Pius XII, tacitly condoned the Nazi Holocaust.”

The argument is so illogical that only those who attended graduate school or Catholicism-bashers could find it persuasive. First, how do you condemn the silence of one pope when confronted with the greatest evil of his time and condemn another pope when confronting the greatest evil of his time? Second, if indeed the Church is guilty of condoning evil in the past, why does that render it “hypocritical” (her term for Benedict’s condemnation of Islamic violence in God’s name) to confront evil in the present? If my grandfather was a murderer, am I a hypocrite for condemning murder?

And as expected, the author of the above-mentioned critique of Pius XII, “Hitler’s Pope,” John Cornwall, has also condemned Pope Benedict, describing the pope’s words about Muhammad and Islamic violence as “incendiary” and “abrasive” (presumably calling Pius XII “Hitler’s Pope” is neither incendiary nor abrasive); and writing disparagingly of Benedict “having said that dialogue with Islam was difficult.”

The pope could have chosen a better way to warn about Islamic violence in God’s name than by citing a Byzantine emperor’s sweeping indictment of Muhammad and Islam. But he had the courage to do precisely what the critics of Pius XII bitterly complain Pius XII did not do — use the power of religion and the prestige of the papacy to focus the world’s attention on the greatest evil and greatest outburst of Jew-hatred since the Holocaust.

I have followed the arguments surrounding Pius XII and his behavior during the Holocaust all my life, and as a newly appointed member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, I particularly feel the need to attain clarity on this issue. But the condemnations of Pope Benedict by virtually every major critic of Pius XII lead me to wonder whether the critics really want popes to confront evil or just want popes to think like they do.

==============================

Traitors to the Enlightenment: Europe turns its back on Socrates, Locke, et al. (National Review Online, 061002)

The first Western Enlightenment of the Greek fifth-century B.C. sought to explain natural phenomena through reason rather than superstition alone. Ethics were to be discussed in the realm of logic as well as religion. Much of what Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Sophists thought may today seem self-evident, if not at times nonsensical. But that century was the beginning of the uniquely Western attempt to bring to the human experience empiricism, self-criticism, irony, and tolerance in thinking.

The second European Enlightenment of the late 18th century followed from the earlier spirit of the Renaissance. For all the excesses and arrogance in its thinking that pure reason might itself dethrone religion — as if science could explain all the mysteries of the human condition — the Enlightenment nevertheless established the Western blueprint for a humane and ordered society.

But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation.

What would a Socrates, Galileo, Descartes, or Locke believe of the present decay in Europe — that all their bold and courageous thinking, won at such a great cost, would have devolved into such cheap surrender to fanaticism?

Just think: Put on an opera in today’s Germany, and have it shut down, not by Nazis, Communists, or kings, but by the simple fear of Islamic fanatics.

Write a novel deemed critical of the Prophet Mohammed, as did Salman Rushdie, and face years of ostracism and death threats — in the heart of Europe no less.

Compose a film, as did Theo Van Gogh, and find your throat cut in “liberal” Holland.

Or better yet, sketch a cartoon in postmodern Denmark, and then go into hiding.

Quote an ancient treatise, as did the pope, and learn your entire Church may come under assault, and the magnificent stones of the Vatican offer no refuge.

There are three lessons to be drawn from these examples. In almost every case, the criticism of the artist or intellectual was based either on his supposed lack of sensitivity or of artistic excellence. Van Gogh was, of course, obnoxious and his films puerile. The pope was woefully ignorant of public relations. The cartoons in Denmark were amateurish and unnecessary. Rushdie was an overrated novelist, whose chickens of trashing the West he sought refuge in finally came home to roost. The latest Hans Neuenfels adaptation of Mozart’s Idomeneo was silly.

But isn’t that precisely the point? It is easy to defend artists when they produce works of genius that do not offend popular sensibilities — Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws — but not so when an artist offends with neither taste nor talent. Yes, Pope Benedict is old and scholastic; he lacks both the smile and tact of the late Pope John Paul II, who surely would not have turned for elucidation to the rigidity of Byzantine scholarship. But isn’t that why we must come to the present Pope’s defense — if for no reason other than because he has the courage to speak his convictions when others might not?

Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-chanting mobs.

In contrast, almost daily in Europe, “brave” artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. Why?

For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque.

Second, almost every genre of artistic and intellectual expression has come under assault: music, satire, the novel, films, academic exegesis. Somehow Europeans have ever-so-insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better.

So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed their won freedoms of expression — out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing.

Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won’t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing.

Third, examine why all these incidents took place in Europe. Since 2000 it has been the habit of blue-state politicians to rebuke the yokels of America, in part by showing us a supposedly more humane Western future unfolding in Europe. It was the European Union that was at the forefront of mass transit; the EU that advanced Kyoto and the International Criminal Court. And it was the heralded EU that sought “soft” power rather than the Neanderthal resort to arms.

And what have we learned in the last five years from its boutique socialism, utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism? That it was logical that Europe most readily would abandon the artist and give up the renegade in fear of religious extremists.

Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.

We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

==============================

South Park Creators Say ‘Open Season on Jesus,’ but Not Mohammed (Christian Post, 061005)

A Christian religion and media expert agreed with the creators of “South Park” that the Christian response to disrespectful portrayal of Jesus has been “far tamer” than the response from depictions of Mohammed.

“The Christian response to the disrespect shown for Jesus has been far tamer obviously than the response of sacrilegious depiction of Mohammed,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center and director of the Religion & Media program on Thuesday.

“While Christians are bothered by these depictions of Jesus, you don’t see anybody issuing threats of violence and if there are any protests they are protests of non-violent form – namely boycotting products or something like that,” Cromartie noted. “But it is never the case that these people threaten violence because we do believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression.”

South Park, a hit animation on Comedy Central which has been described as crude and disgusting, has poked fun at a wide range of religious figures, politicians, and celebrities including Jesus, Mohammed, President Bush, and Tom Cruise.

The creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, were recently interviewed on ABC “Nightline” about the show and its upcoming 10th season.

“That’s where we kind of agree with some of the people who’ve criticized our show,” said co-creator Matt Stone on Sept. 22. “Because it really is open season on Jesus. We can do whatever we want to Jesus, and we have.

“We’ve had him say bad words. We’ve had him shoot a gun. We’ve had him kill people. We can do whatever we want. But Mohammed, we couldn’t just show a simple image.”

The creators said when Mohammed was supposed to air on the screen, Comedy Central replaced the cartoon with a black screen that read: “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network.”

Following the Mohammed cartoon uproar earlier this year, several networks had refused to air images of Mohammed, even during coverage of the Denmark cartoon riots, claiming to observe religious tolerance, said the South Park creator.

“No you’re not,” Stone countered during the interview. “You’re afraid of getting blown up. That’s what you’re afraid of. Comedy Central copped to that, you know: ‘We’re afraid of getting blown up.’”

Most recently, more than ten churches in Nigeria were burned or destroyed in late September over a dispute between a Muslim and Christian woman, according to Voice of the Martyrs sources in Nigeria. Muslims had accused the Christian woman of blasphemy against the Muslim Prophet Mohammed.

Barnabas Fund’s International director, Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, had said he hopes that “Muslims [will] have the courage now to address this part of their faith and stop these attacks on Christians,” following the Nigeria church attacks.

==============================

Dutch hospital plans for Muslims only (Washington Times, 061006)

BRUSSELS — Plans for a Muslim-only hospital in the Netherlands have sparked a heated debate over its separate all-male and all-female wings, halal food and roster of duty imams.

A populist nationalist party described the plan for the clinic in south Rotterdam as “a step backwards to the Middle Ages.”

The sexes will be segregated, with male patients treated by an exclusively male nursing and medical staff and similar arrangements for female patients.

The Netherlands’ once proud multicultural model, which promoted tolerance of a rapidly growing immigrant population, has been questioned in recent years, especially after the slaying of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist.

The latest dispute concerns plans for a private hospital aimed at the Netherlands’ 1 million Muslims.

It is the brainchild of a health industry entrepreneur, Paul Sturkenboom, who plans to employ 45 doctors and 275 nurses. Staff will not have to be Muslims.

The plan has been attacked by the Rotterdam-based Leefbaar Rotterdam, or “Liveable Rotterdam” party, which controlled the local council until March.

Last month, the party unsuccessfully tried to have the hospital banned.

A nationalist member of parliament, Geert Wilders, has dubbed the hospital plan “apartheid.”

Construction work is about to start, and the clinic aims to open by 2008.

Mr. Sturkenboom defended his project.

“If Mr. Wilders is saying in a xenophobic way that this will prohibit integration of Muslim Dutch citizens, we just point to the fact that 20 or 30 years ago, Jewish, Roman Catholic and Protestant Dutch people had their own schools, their own hospitals, their own trade unions and employers’ organizations” he said.

“That autonomy helped those people integrate at their own speed into Dutch society. This compact hospital will give Muslims time to integrate at their own speed.”

He said that 40 of the 100 hospitals in the Netherlands were run by Catholic or Protestant foundations.

No Muslim hospitals are operating, though Muslim immigrants make up 5% of the population.

Mr. van Gogh, a relative of the famous painter Vincent Van Gogh, was killed in November 2004 while bicycling to work in Amsterdam after a film on Muslim women he had produced angered Islamist militants.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician known for her outspoken criticism of Islam, partnered with Mr. van Gogh on the film. She went into hiding after Mr. van Gogh’s murder and returned to parliament several months later. She still lives under heavy guard and is working on a sequel to the film she made with Mr. van Gogh, on Islam’s treatment of homosexuality.

Another Dutch anti-immigration politician lived in a maximum-security prison to protect himself from attack owing to his criticism of radical Islam.

Geert Wilders went into hiding after the van Gogh killing and the subsequent arrest of a group of suspected radical Islamists who are accused of plotting to kill him and other prominent politicians.

“It feels like being trapped and the word freedom has become a totally different concept for me,” Mr. Wilders said in an interview in the Dutch parliament, where he returned to work in December 2004.

Mr. Wilders is seen as an heir to populist anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, who was killed in Rotterdam by an animal rights activist.

==============================

The European jihad (National Review Online, 061006)

You would barely know it in Britain, but France is currently under violent siege from the jihad — and buckling under the onslaught. The Daily Telegraph yesterday broke the almost total media silence in Britain about the horrifying violence going on across the English channel with this story about the fighting in the suburbs between Muslim youths and the police:

Radical Muslims in France’s housing estates are waging an undeclared ‘intifada’ against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day. As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were ‘in a state of civil war’ with Muslims in the most depressed ‘banlieue’ estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin. It said the situation was so grave that it had asked the government to provide police with armoured cars to protect officers in the estates, which are becoming no-go zones…

Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the hardline Action Police trade union, has written to Mr Sarkozy warning of an ‘intifada’ on the estates and demanding that officers be given armoured cars in the most dangerous areas. He said yesterday: ‘We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails.’

It seems that other police officers, and other parts of French society, are even now still in a state of denial over what they are facing, insisting this is some kind of class war rather than what it really is, a religious war. They said the same thing about last year’s riots, ignoring clear signs of religious activism and incitement— along with the fact that the French government in desperation drafted Muslim Brotherhood imams into the banlieues to quell the disorder, thus giving the lie to the claim that these were merely ‘secular’ disturbances, all about poverty and unemployment and other such sub-Marxist claptap. They were anything but; they were actually all about French Muslims declaring their turf to be no-go areas for the French state.

The Brussels Journal crisply gets to the point:

Most observers in the mainstream media (MSM) provide an occidentocentric analysis of the facts. They depict the ‘youths’ as outsiders who want to be brought into Western society and have the same rights as the natives of Old Europe. The MSM believe that the ‘youths’ are being treated unjustly because they are not a functioning part of Western society. They claim that, in spite of positive discrimination, subsidies, public services, schools, and all the provisions that have been made for immigrants over the years, access has been denied them.

This is the Marxist rhetoric of the West that has been predominant in the media and the chattering classes since the 1960s. But it does not fit the facts of the situation in Europe today… Unlike their fathers, who came to France from Muslim countries, accepting that, whilst remaining Muslims themselves, they had come to live in a non-Muslim country, the rioters see France as their country. They were born here. This land is their land. And since they are Muslims, this land, or at least a part of it, is Muslim as well. The society they live in is a homogeneous Islamic one. For them that is society, there is no other. Consequently there is also no question of their “leaving” that society to become part of another society, the putative Western one. “Society” is the society they live in and from which they view and interpret what goes on around them. To understand their language we must understand how they see us, where we fit in in their society. Multiculturalism does not exist: it is always a matter of several cultures living side by side in defined territories, and the laws of one culture not applying in the territories of the others…

Those media that tell us that the rioting “youths” want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs. The violence in France is in no way comparable with that of the blacks in the U.S. in the 1960s. The Paris correspondent of The New York Times who writes that this a ‘variant of the same problem’ is either lying or does not know what he is talking about. The violence in France is of the type one finds when one group wants to assert its authority and drive the others out of its territory.

Meanwhile a French philosophy professor, Robert Redeker, has been in hiding for his life for more than three weeks after being denounced on al Jazeera by Ken Livingstone’s friend Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, following which he received death threats. His crime was to write an article in Le Figaro – which has since removed it from its website – denouncing Islam as a religion of inherent violence, unlike Christianity or Judaism, and comparing Islamism to Soviet communism. The Brussels Journal (again) reports:

In the article, which was published in the conservative daily Le Figaro of September 19th, Robert Redeker accused Islam of ‘exalting violence.’ Mr Redeker has not attended classes at his school near Toulouse since the article was published. Pierre Rousselin, the editor in chief of Le Figaro, apologized on Al-jazeera for the publication of the article. A number of Islamic countries, including Egypt, banned Le Figaro following the publication of Redeker’s piece. Mr Rousselin said the publication of the op-ed was a mistake. He said the article did not express the paper’s opinion. The article is no longer available on the Figaro website.

Mr Redeker has written a letter to his friend, the philosopher André Glucksmann, describing his ordeal [French text here]: ‘I am now in a catastrophic personal situation. Several death threats have been sent to me, and I have been sentenced to death by organizations of the al-Qaeda movement. […] On the websites condemning me to death there is a map showing how to get to my house to kill me, they have my photo, the places where I work, the telephone numbers, and the death fatwa. […] There is no safe place for me, I have to beg, two evenings here, two evenings there. […] I am under the constant protection of the police. I must cancel all scheduled conferences. And the authorities urge me to keep moving. […] All costs are at my own expense, including those of rents a month or two ahead, the costs of moving twice, legal expenses, etc. It’s quite sad. I exercised my constitutional rights, and I am punished for it, even in the territory of the Republic. This affair is also an attack against national sovereignty – foreign rules, decided by criminally minded fanatics, punish me for having exercised a constitutional right, and I am subjected, even in France, to great injury.’

The Journal has also been reporting violence in Brussels, with three days of ‘Ramadan rioting’ and prison officers having to receive police protection on their way to work because of attacks following the death of a Muslim prison inmate for which other Muslims blame the prison authorities. And now the violence is spiralling out into the political sphere:

Belgian artists warn that a victory of the “islamophobic” Vlaams Belang [Flemish Interest] party in the local elections on October 8th may lead to violence. In an interview in the Dutch-language weekly Knack Magazine this week painter Luc Tuymans says: ‘In the worst case you will get organised resistance, perhaps even rather violent reactions. I suspect many shop keepers will have their windows smashed. People do not seem to be aware, but a vote for the Vlaams Belang may have serious consequences. They should realize this before they take a final decision in the voting booth.’…

Last week, self-declared ‘anti-fascist’ activists vandalised a car with Belgian licence plates in Amsterdam. They mistook the vehicle for the car of Vlaams Belang politician Filip Dewinter. The car, however, belonged to a French businesswoman based in Brussels. VB politicians are often the victims of acts of vandalism, including arson attempts. Yesterday the party announced that it has established a fund to reimburse local candidates whose properties gets damaged.

Just across the channel, therefore, there is mayhem: a religious war, escalating violence and gross intimidation, supine or ineffectual public authorities locked into a state of denial, and a growing climate of political violence and anarchy. Yet apart from a small number of articles, the British media has barely registered these terrifying and most ominous events. It has been preoccupied with yet more evidence of its own deep confusion as it progressively allows itself to be cowed by Islamic extremism. I shall post on those particular matters later today.

==============================

French police face Muslim ‘intifada’ (Washington Times, 061012)

BRUSSELS — Radical Muslims in France’s housing estates are waging an undeclared “intifada,” or uprising, against the police, with violent clashes injuring about 14 officers each day.

As the Interior Ministry announced that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were “in a state of civil war” with Muslims in the most depressed “banlieue” estates. Banlieue, which means outskirts, is the commonly used euphemism for the low-income housing projects heavily populated by unemployed youths of North African origin.

The police union said it had asked the government to provide police with armored cars to protect officers in the estates, which it said were becoming no-go zones.

The number of attacks has risen by a third in two years. Police representatives told the newspaper Le Figaro that the “taboo” of attacking officers on patrol has been broken.

Instead, officers — especially those patrolling in pairs or small groups — are facing attacks when they try to arrest locals.

Senior officers insisted that the problem was essentially criminal in nature, with crime bosses on the estates fighting back against tough tactics.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who also is the leading center-right candidate for the presidency, has sent heavily equipped units into areas with orders to regain control from drug-smuggling gangs and other organized crime rings.

However, not all officers on the ground accept that essentially secular interpretation of the problem. Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the hard-line Action Police trade union, has written to Mr. Sarkozy warning of an “intifada” on the estates and demanding that officers be given armored cars in the most dangerous areas.

“We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails,” he said last week. “You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their ‘comrades’ free when they are arrested.”

However, Gerard Demarcq, of the largest police unions, Alliance, dismissed talk of an uprising as representing the views of a minority.

Mr. Demarcq said the increased attacks on officers were proof that the policy of “retaking territory” from criminal gangs was working.

Mayors in the worst-affected suburbs, which saw weeks of riots and car burning a year ago, have expressed fears of a vicious circle, as attacks by locals lead the police to harden their tactics, further increasing resentment.

As if to prove that point, there were angry reactions in the western Paris suburb of Les Mureaux after dawn raids in search of youths who had attacked a police unit last week. The raids led to one arrest.

Scores of youths had attacked seven officers who had tried to arrest a man for not wearing his seat belt while driving. The driver refused to stop and later rammed a police car trying to block his path.

Les Mureaux Mayor Francois Garay criticized aggressive police tactics that left “the people on the ground to pick up the pieces.”

==============================

French Police Face Attacks by Growing ‘Intifada’ (Foxnews, 061023)

EPINAY-SUR-SEINE, France — On a routine call, three unwitting police officers fell into a trap. A car darted out to block their path, and dozens of hooded youths surged out of the darkness to attack them with stones, bats and tear gas before fleeing. One officer was hospitalized.

The recent ambush was emblematic of what some officers say has become a near-perpetual and increasingly violent conflict between police and gangs in tough, largely immigrant French neighborhoods that were the scene of a three-week paroxysm of rioting last year.

One small police union claims officers are facing a “permanent intifada.” Police injuries have risen in the year since the wave of violence.

National police reported 2,458 cases of violence against officers in the first six months of the year, on pace to top the 4,246 cases recorded for all of 2005 and the 3,842 in 2004. Firefighters and rescue workers have also been targeted — and some now receive police escorts in such areas.

On Sunday, a band of about 30 youths, some wearing masks, forced passengers out of a bus in a southern Paris suburb in broad daylight Sunday, set it on fire, then stoned firefighters who came to the rescue, police said. No one was injured. Two people were arrested, one of them a 13-year-old, according to LCI television.

More broadly, worsening violence in France testifies to Europe’s growing struggle to integrate its ethnic minorities. Some mainstream European politicians — adopting positions previously confined largely to far-right fringes — are suggesting that the minorities themselves are not doing enough to adapt to European mores.

In Britain, former Foreign Minister Jack Straw, now leader of the House of Commons, this month touched off a wide debate about the rights and obligations of Muslims by saying that he asks devout Muslim women to remove their veils when visiting his office. Prime Minister Tony Blair said Islam needs to modernize.

In France, a high school teacher received death threats, forcing him into hiding, after he wrote a newspaper editorial in September saying Muslim fundamentalists are trying to muzzle Europe’s democratic liberties.

Ethnic integration and violence against police are both becoming issues in the campaign for the French presidency. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading contender on the right, said this month that those who do not love France do not have to stay, echoing a longtime slogan of the extreme-right National Front: “France, love it or leave it.”

Michel Thooris, head of the small Action Police union, claims that the new violence is taking on an Islamic fundamentalist tinge.

“Many youths, many arsonists, many vandals behind the violence do it to cries of ‘Allah Akbar’ (God is Great) when our police cars are stoned,” he said in an interview.

Larger, more mainstream police unions sharply disagree that the suburban unrest has any religious basis. However, they do say that some youth gangs no longer seem content to throw stones or torch cars and instead appear determined to hurt police officers — or worse.

“First, it was a rock here or there. Then it was rocks by the dozen. Now, they’re leading operations of an almost military sort to trap us,” said Loic Lecouplier, a police union official in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris. “These are acts of war.”

Sadio Sylla, an unemployed mother of three, watched the Oct. 13 ambush of the police patrol in Epinay-sur-Seine from her second-floor window. She, other witnesses and police union officials said up to 50 masked youths dashed out from behind trees.

One of the three officers needed 30 stitches to his face after being struck by a rock. On Saturday, five people were placed under investigation for attempted murder in relation to the ambush.

The attack was one of at least four gang beatings of police in Parisian suburbs since Sept. 19. Early Friday, a dozen hooded people hurled stones, iron bars and bottles filled with gasoline at two police vehicles in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a flashpoint of last year’s riots, said Guillaume Godet, a city hall spokesman. One officer required three stitches to his head.

Minority youths have long complained that police are more heavy-handed in their dealings with them than with whites, demanding their papers and frisking them for no apparent reason.

Such perceived ill-treatment fuels feelings of injustice, as do the difficulties that many youths from immigrant families have finding work.

Distrust and tension thrive. Rumors have flown around some housing projects that police are hoping to use the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ends this week, to round up known troublemakers, on the basis that fasting all day will have made the youths weaker and easier to catch.

Police say that suggestion is ludicrous. However, they are on guard ahead of the first anniversary this week of last year’s riots. That violence began after two youths who thought police were chasing them hid in a power substation and were electrocuted to death.

Police unions suspect that the recent attacks may be an attempt to spark new riots.

“We are getting the impression these youths want a ‘remake’ of what happened last year,” said Fred Lagache, national secretary of the Alliance police union. “The youths are trying to cause a police error to justify chaos.”

==============================

Some sobering lessons from Muslim taxi drivers (townhall.com, 061017)

By Dennis Prager

Understandably, those troubled by the contemporary Muslim world point to the amount of gratuitous violence emanating from it and the apparent absence of Muslim anger against it.

In response, Muslim defenders of their faith — and Western defenders such as Karen Armstrong and John Esposito — inform us that the terror, suicide and cruelty that emanate from a portion of the Muslim world are all aberrations. We are assured that the average Muslim is as appalled as all other decent people are by Muslims who torture, decapitate and blow up innocent people.

Some recent news items from Britain, Australia and the United States, however, suggest that we can make a more accurate assessment of contemporary Islam by looking beyond Islamic terror and beyond the lack of Muslim opposition to it.

I am referring to news reports not about Muslim terrorists but about the far more mundane group of religious Muslims who happen to be taxi drivers. In Britain and Australia, Muslim taxi drivers refuse to pick up passengers who have a dog with them — even when the passenger is blind and the dog is a Seeing Eye dog. Nearly all religious Muslims believe that Islam forbids them to come into contact with dogs. Therefore, Muslim taxi drivers will even drive by a blind person standing in the cold, lest they come into contact with the dog.

And in Minneapolis, Minn., Muslim taxi drivers, who make up a significant percentage of taxi drivers in that city, refuse to pick up passengers who have a bottle of wine or other alcoholic beverage with them.

This is significant. We are not talking here about Muslim fanatics or Muslim terrorists, but about decent every day Muslims. And what these practices reveal is something virtually unknown in Judeo-Christian societies — the imposing of one’s religious practices on others.

Now, many of those with a graduate degree in the humanities, and others taught how not to think clearly, will object that religious Christians do exactly this sort of thing when they try to impose their religious views on abortion, for example, on society.

But there is no analogy between a Muslim not allowing a non-Muslim to bring a bottle of wine or a dog into a Muslim-driven taxi and Christians trying to convince a democratic society to outlaw most abortions.

There is no comparing ritual prohibitions with moral prohibitions. Christians argue that taking the life of a human fetus where the mother’s life is not endangered is immoral. And so do religious Jews (and Muslims) and many secular individuals — because the issue of abortion is a moral issue. Contact with dogs, on the other hand, is a ritual issue, not a moral issue. Which is why non-Muslims do not consider it immoral — unlike the many non-Christians who consider most abortions immoral.

And Christians and others who deem abortions immoral when the mother’s health is not threatened have as much right to argue for passing laws banning most such abortions as other citizens do to pass laws banning racial discrimination.

Ah, the skeptic may argue, but what if Muslims deem human contact with a dog (except, according to Muslim jurists, for security purposes, farming and hunting) an immoral act, not just a ritually prohibited act for Muslims?

If indeed such were the Muslim argument, we would have an example of an unbridgeable difference between a Muslim conception of morality and that of non-Muslims.

There is then no analogy between Christians wanting to use the democratic process to ban a practice regarded by hundreds of millions of non-Christians as immoral and the Muslim ban on human contact with dogs, a practice regarded by no non-Muslims as immoral.

The appropriate analogy to Muslim taxi drivers refusing to take passengers accompanied by a dog or carrying a bottle of wine would be religious Jewish taxi drivers refusing to take passengers eating a ham sandwich or Mormon drivers refusing to take passengers drinking alcoholic or caffeinated drinks.

But such Jewish or Mormon examples don’t exist (and if they did, religious Jews and Mormons would regard such persons as crackpots). They do not exist because Jews and Mormons do not believe that non-Jews are required to change their behavior owing to Judaism’s or Mormonism’s distinctive laws. Religious Muslims, on the other hand, do believe that wherever applicable, non-Muslims should change their behavior in the light of Islam’s distinctive laws. And that difference is at least as important to Muslim-non-Muslim relations as the vexing issue of violent Muslims.

As for the difference between fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians, a Christian mailman in Denver called my radio show to say that despite his profound religious objections to pornography, he could not imagine objecting to delivering even the raunchiest porn to homes that ordered it. First, religious non-Muslims, especially in America, believe that liberty, too, is a religious value; that is why Christians put a quote about liberty from the Torah on the Liberty Bell. And second, they have no doctrine that holds outsiders bound to their religious practices.

And that is why there may be more to be learned about the future of religious Muslims’ relations with non-Muslims from Muslim taxi drivers than from Muslim terrorists.

==============================

The Problem With Islam: And what Americans can do about it (WorldNetDaily, 061020)

It may be the single most vexing question in today’s world: What to do about Islam and its rapidly expanding violent jihad?

The answer can be found in the October issue of WND’s always-groundbreaking monthly magazine, Whistleblower, in a provocative issue titled “THE PROBLEM WITH ISLAM.”

Most Americans were oblivious to Islam until a certain Tuesday morning five years ago. But on Sept. 11, 2001, they woke up to learn they were in the midst of a world war, targeted for destruction by an enemy they had scarcely ever heard of. Today, militant Muslims are on the rampage worldwide, some recently calling for the assassination of the pope, with others threatening that unless Benedict XVI converts to Islam, Christian churches will be burnt to the ground.

But such outrageous threats, as well as the mass murder that often follows, have become commonplace. On the slightest provocation – a newspaper publishing cartoons depicting Muhammad, a journalist making a comment about Muhammad during the Miss Universe pageant – angry Muslims erupt into a campaign of arson, brutality and murder.

Meanwhile, as Western governments and journalism organizations continue to refer to Islam as a “religion of peace,” virtually all terrorist acts worldwide – over 5,000 instances since 9-11 – have been committed by Muslims, against Jews, against Christians, against other non-Muslims, even against other types of Muslims.

Yet, there’s an even bigger Islamic threat than violent jihad. Today, the West is being transformed by Islam. Especially in Britain and Europe, where Islamic immigration is already well advanced, analysts conclude it’s simply a matter of time before some of these nations have Muslim majorities. Then comes Sharia law and the total transformation of these formerly Christian countries into repressive Islamic states.

Exaggeration? Consider that the Netherlands’ justice minister, Piet Hein Donner, recently announced he would welcome Sharia law to his European nation – already rapidly filling up with Muslims – if the majority votes for it. Under Sharia, just as in Arab-Muslim nations currently under this strict Islamic legal system like Saudi Arabia, Europe may see amputations – as prescribed in the Quran – as punishment for certain crimes; women publicly flogged and sometimes hanged or stoned to death for adultery or other so-called “crimes against chastity”; and death sentences for leaving the Muslim religion, or even for preaching Christianity, as occurs in Pakistan under its notorious “blasphemy laws.”

What about America? Though the percentage of Muslims in this huge nation is much lower than in Europe, the growth of radical Islam already has a powerful foothold in many parts of American society. Beyond the rapid proliferation of Saudi-funded mosques, Islamic centers and schools teaching hatred for America, consider the nation’s prison system.

“Radical Muslim chaplains, trained in a foreign ideology, certified in foreign-financed schools, and acting in coordination to impose an extremist agenda have gained a monopoly over Islamic religious activities in American state, federal, and city prisons and jails,” says author Stephen Schwartz. “Imagine each prison Islamic community as a little Saudi kingdom behind prison walls, without the amenities. They have effectively induced American authorities to establish a form of ‘state Islam’ or ‘government-certified Islam’ in correctional systems.”

Despite all this, most politicians and journalists in the West – whether out of sympathy, or out of fear of having their throats cut – are afraid to criticize Islam publicly. Yet if radical Islam can succeed in throttling all criticism, from the pope on down, it will have succeeded in imposing de facto sharia law– which prohibits all criticism of Islam or its prophet – on the entire world.

Highlights of “THE PROBLEM WITH ISLAM” include:

* “My prescription for peace” by Joseph Farah

* “A view from the eye of the storm,” by Haim Harari, in which the renowned scientist, born and bred in the Middle East, shares uncommon insight on how to deal with Islam

* “Time to profile airline passengers?” by Daniel Pipes, who identifies new high-tech systems designed to identify flyers with “hostile intent”

* “Why we must profile” by Robert Spencer, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam”

* “‘Glimpse into the heart of the Arabic world,’” shocking first-hand insights by former Middle East TV news anchor Brigitte Gabriel

* “The perfect enemy and how to defeat it” by “Infiltration” author Paul Sperry, who reveals – in detail – what FBI agents, terrorism investigators, and detectives confide will really work in defeating radical Islamists

* “The Crusade we must fight today” by Robert Spencer, who specifies what citizens and government must do to reverse the global jihad

* “The God vacuum: America and the barbarian hordes” by David Kupelian, on the bottom-line answer to the big question, “What to do about Islam?”

“‘THE PROBLEM WITH ISLAM,’” said WND founder and editor Joseph Farah, “provides the insight and answers Americans have long needed to deal with the gravest threat of our lifetimes. Read it carefully, and pass it on to others.”

==============================

Muslim veils prompt bans across Europe (Washington Times, 061023)

PARIS — When Nora Labrak arrived at a private employment agency in the summer near the French city of Lyon, the first question she was posed was not about her resume.

“I was asked to remove my head scarf at the lobby,” Miss Labrak recalled in a telephone interview. When the 29-year-old refused, she was hustled to the door.

Long and short, sober black and brightly hued, the Muslim veil is drawing growing criticism in much of Europe. It has been chased from public schools in France and Belgium, and its strictest, face-concealing variation, the niqab, has been outlawed in a smattering of European towns.

Even in multicultural Britain, the niqab has sparked ferocious debate after the suspension of a Muslim teaching assistant and remarks by top government officials that the niqab encourages an unsettling social rift.

That debate began politely but has since grown ugly and rancorous, the chairman of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality said yesterday.

“We need to have this conversation, but there are rules by which we have the conversation which don’t involve this kind of targeting and, frankly, bullying,” said Trevor Phillips in a British Broadcasting Corp. interview.

Feeding the controversy are a series of incidents pitting Europe’s Muslim population against its Christian majorities: Last year’s riots in France, the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, the slaying of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, honor killings in Germany, terrorist attacks in Britain and Spain, and Europe-wide concerns about illegal immigration.

“There’s a rise in Islamo-skepticism,” said Franck Fregosi, a specialist on Islam at France’s National Center of Scientific Research. “There’s a fear and tension that’s installed in certain parts of the population, and I don’t think it bodes well for the future.”

In Brussels, 41-year-old Nicole Thill shares that foreboding.

“I haven’t had problems until now, but things are changing,” said Mrs. Thill, who converted to Islam and adopted the veil in 2001. “People’s looks are increasingly hostile. And there’s less and less respect. People don’t mind jostling you on the street because, after all, you’re only a veiled woman.”

A July survey by the Pew Research Center found most European Muslims did not sense hostility from non-Muslims. But a significant chunk — including 39% in France, 42% in Britain and 51% in Germany — reported otherwise.

Perhaps more than any other symbol, the veil sets Muslims apart. Worn by a minority of Muslim women in Europe, it is an easy target for stereotypes.

In interviews with a halfdozen veiled women in Europe, all said they braced themselves going out in public. Several cited the veil as a barrier to employment.

“I have some friends who agreed to take their head scarves off or to wear a bandana to get a job, but not by choice,” said Miss Labrak. She has filed charges against the job agency that expelled her from its premises, and is awaiting a court ruling.

European politicians critical of the veil cite the importance of integrating ethnic African, Arab and Turkish immigrant populations. That was the message behind French legislation two years ago banning the head scarf and other religious symbols in public schools.

And it was one reason why Jan Creemers, mayor of the city of Maaseik in Belgium, outlawed wearing the face-concealing niqab in public earlier this year. Several Belgian towns have followed suit, while a number of Belgium public schools have banned students from wearing any kind of veil to class.

“We have many old people, and they were very afraid when they saw these women wearing the veil,” said Mr. Creemers. “It’s very important in our town and in our Western culture that people see each other face to face.”

Public wearing of the niqab is similarly banned in Italy under anti-terrorist laws, which make it an offense to hide the face in public. In Germany, four states have outlawed public school teachers from wearing head scarves — a ban that applies to all civil servants in the German state of Hesse.

Women employed in the public sector in France also are barred from wearing veils at work. The legislation has drawn widespread support, including from many Muslims.

“If you’re in Europe, you need to live according to European customs. Either you adapt or, if you want to wear Middle Eastern clothing, you leave,” said Khadija Khali, head of a French Muslim women’s group. A practicing Muslim who has gone to Mecca five times, Mrs. Khali does not wear a veil.

==============================

Turkish Cleric: Criticizing Islam Threatens Peace (Christian Post, 061101)

[KH: Islamofascism]

Benedict visits Turkey — his first as pope to a predominantly Muslim country — two months after provoking widespread anger by quoting an emperor who characterized the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings as “evil and inhuman.”

Ali Bardakoglu, head of the country’s religious affairs, said “it was saddening” to see Islam being criticized while the religion’s contribution to civilization is ignored.

“This attitude, which fuels division and lack of mutual trust, is seriously threatening world peace,” Bardakoglu told a conference in Istanbul attended by several African Muslim leaders.

The Religious Affairs Directorate oversees religious issues in Turkey. Bardakoglu is expected to meet with Benedict during the pope’s Nov. 28-Dec. 1 visit.

“We always tell the truth to everyone,” Bardakoglu said when asked whether he would express his dismay to the pope. “People meeting does not mean that they approve each other. It could help them express their opinions with an open heart and know each other correctly.”

Benedict has appealed for greater dialogue with Muslims since the September speech at a German university in which he quoted the 14th century Byzantine emperor as calling Islam a religion spread by the sword.

Since the uproar over the speech — which has cast a cloud over his visit to Turkey — Benedict has expressed his regrets for offending Muslims.

Bardakoglu, however, called the pope’s apology “indirect.” He encouraged Muslim religious leaders to work and correct false and misleading information about Islam.

“Today, Muslims must first remember the human values of Islam ... and the collective peace it aimed for, and tell and teach this to the world,” Bardakoglu said.

Benedict, in an appeal last month to Muslim envoys, said the two faiths must together reject violence because the future of humanity is at stake.

Although the official focus of Benedict’s trip is his scheduled meeting with Bartholomew, the Istanbul-based leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Benedict is widely expected to use the visit to improve relations with the Muslim world.

The pope’s tentative schedule includes a visit Nov. 28 to Ankara to meet with the Turkish president and Bardakoglu; a Nov. 29 trip to the ruins of Ephesus, and a meeting with Bartholomew in Istanbul the following day.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul are expected to attend a NATO summit scheduled for Nov. 28-29 in Riga, Latvia, and were not scheduled to meet the pope.

The pope’s vicar in Anatolia, Monsignor Luigi Padovese, told The Associated Press by telephone that Erdogan’s absence during the pope’s visit was a “lost opportunity.”

“It’s a pity: It could have been a good opportunity to talk about many issues,” Padovese said.

Benedict also is expected to lead a ceremony at Istanbul’s Saint Esprit Cathedral on Dec. 1.

==============================

Is Islam inherently violent? New blockbuster, ‘Religion of Peace?,’ reveals disturbing facts (WorldNetDaily, 061102)

It’s the secret question in official Washington, D.C., in the Pentagon, and in the White House. It’s the question that is so radioactive that most in government and the press dare not even pose it, let alone answer it:

Is Islam inherently violent and expansionist?

In the days following 9/11, President Bush assured America and the world that Islam was a “religion of peace” and that the violent followers of Osama Bin Laden had twisted the true Muslim faith. Acting on this belief, President Bush and other Western leaders sent troops to the Middle East in an effort to bring freedom and democracy to the Muslim world.

But what if this “understanding” of Islam is based not on fact, but instead on equal parts wishful thinking and Islamic deceit? It would mean that the entire War on Terror is based on a faulty – and increasingly deadly – premise.

In a disturbing but thoroughly researched new book, “Religion of Peace? Islam’s War Against the World,” author and filmmaker Gregory M. Davis rebuts the notion that Islam is a great faith in desperate need of a Reformation. Instead, he exposes it as a form of totalitarianism, a belief system that orders its adherents not to baptize all nations, but to conquer and subdue them. Islamic law’s governance of every aspect of religious, political and personal action has far more in common with Nazism than with the tenets of Christianity or Judaism.

Davis details how Islamic thought divides the world into two spheres locked in perpetual combat: There’s dar al-Islam (“House of Islam,” where Islamic law predominates), and dar al-harb (“House of War,” the rest of the world). This concise yet thorough book leaves no doubt as to why most of the world’s modern conflicts are connected to Islam – and calls into question why Western elites refuse to acknowledge Islam’s violent nature.

Virtually every contemporary Western leader has expressed the view that Islam is a peaceful religion and that those who commit violence in its name are fanatics who misinterpret its tenets. This widely circulated claim is false, says Davis.

As the author and filmmaker wrote in WND recently:

The mistake Westerners make when they think about Islam is that they impose their own views of religion onto something decidedly outside Western tradition. Because violence done in the name of God is “extreme” from a Western/Christian point of view, they imagine that it must be so from an Islamic one. But unlike Christianity, which recognizes a separate sphere for secular politics (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s”), Islam has never distinguished between faith and power. While Christianity is doctrinally concerned primarily with the salvation of souls, Islam seeks to remake the world in its image. According to orthodox Islam, Sharia law – the codified commandments of the Quran and precedents of the Prophet Muhammad – is the only legitimate basis of government. Islam is in fact an expansionary social and political system more akin to National Socialism and Communism than any “religion” familiar to Westerners. Islamic politics is inevitably an all-or-nothing affair in which the stakes are salvation or damnation and the aim is to not to beat one’s opponent at the polls but to destroy him – literally as well as politically.

Davis received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and is managing director of Quixotic Media and producer of the feature documentary, “Islam: What the West Needs to Know.”

Relying primarily on Islam’s own sources, “Religion of Peace? Islam’s War Against the World” demonstrates that Islam is a violent, expansionary ideology that seeks the subjugation and destruction of other faiths, cultures and systems of government. Further, it shows that the jihadis that Westerners have been indoctrinated to believe are extremists, are actually in the mainstream.

“Religion of Peace? Islam’s War Against the World” is a powerful and jarring wake-up call to all civilized nations – and one they ignore at their peril.

==============================

‘Sex in the Park’: The latest doings of the Danish imams. (Weekly Standard, 061121)

by Henrik Bering

Copenhagen

YOU HAVE TO hand it to them: Few men in recent history have been more successful in creating mayhem than the small group of Denmark-based imams who turned the appearance of cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper into a world event. In a recent Egyptian opinion poll of nations seen as most hostile, Denmark registered third, right behind the United States and Israel, an impressive score for a small Nordic country that is normally known for its pacifism and humanitarian efforts.

Pretending to be on a mission to create understanding and dialogue, the imams set out from Denmark for the Middle East last December, where they spread false rumors of the Koran being burned on the streets of Copenhagen and otherwise did their best to incite violence against their host nation, resulting in attacks on embassies, trade boycotts, and flag burnings. They were later caught on hidden camera by a French documentary filmmaker, bragging about their exploits.

Not ones to rest on their laurels, this band of bearded brothers have continued to enjoy great success at getting their names into the headlines; their activities have been followed with particular interest by the Jyllands-Posten, the paper that originally published the cartoons and has had to live under a strict security regimen ever since. As always, there is an element of Monty Pythonesque farce in these imams posturing as holy warriors while being welfare-state spongers, and constantly tripping up in their own lies. Farce, that is, if it were not so deadly serious.

First a bit of good news: As reported in the Jyllands-Posten, Sheikh Raed Hlayhel, who has been in Denmark since 2000 and was the prime instigator behind the cartoon protest, recently announced that he had had it with Denmark and was leaving to settle down in his hometown of Tripoli in Lebanon. “And I am not coming back,” he fumed, as if depriving the country of some tremendous cultural asset.

As a commentator noted, Hlayhel has not exactly been a model of successful integration. Having received his religious training in Medina in Saudi Arabia—where he imbibed pure, unadulterated Wahhabism—Hlayhel applied for asylum in Denmark and was at first denied. But as his young son suffers from spina bifida, and the Danish authorities felt the boy could not get the proper treatment in Lebanon, he was allowed in on humanitarian grounds.

Hlayhel thus did not have Danish citizenship and did not speak a word of Danish. But in Denmark’s fundamentalist parallel society, Arabic will do just fine, especially when you preach jihad. The center of Hlayhel’s activities was the Grimhøjvej mosque in the small town of Brabrand in Jutland, which has been closely monitored by Danish intelligence.

Among the users of the mosque were Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane, the so-called Guantánamo Dane—a holy warrior of Danish/Algerian parentage who was caught by American troops in Afghanistan—and Abu Rached, who has been identified by Spanish prosecutors as one of al Qaeda’s main operatives in Europe.

What prompted Hlayhel’s decision to pull up his tent pegs? He lost his lawsuit against the Jyllands-Posten for having printed the cartoons. And in matters like these, family considerations are clearly secondary. About his invalid son, who was receiving free care from the Danish national health system, Hlayhel stated, “His Muslim identity is more important than his treatment. I think all Muslims should live in a Muslim country. Farewell Denmark.”

But before the Danes get too relieved, intelligence experts cited in the Jyllands-Posten warned that the sheikh can still make mischief from the Middle East. In his last prayer in Denmark, Hlayhel denounced the pope, warned against repetitions of the cartoons, and threatened retaliation: “We are people who love death and will sacrifice ourselves before Allah’s feet. Do not repeat the tragedy, or else it will become a tragedy for you and the whole world.”

Meanwhile, Hlayhel’s fellow demagogue Ahmed Abu Laban, a Palestinian refugee who came to Denmark in 1984 and who is also not a Danish citizen, has written a book about the traveling imams’ achievements entitled The Jyllands-Posten Crisis, which has come out so far only in Arabic and has been published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masri al-Youm.

Laban rails against a new group in Denmark called the Democratic Muslims, which was created in the wake of the cartoon crisis and whose leader, Naser Khader, he describes as “a rat” and “an apostate.” This, according to a scholar cited in the Jyllands-Posten, amounts to a death threat, as in the fundamentalist view apostasy is a capital crime. Democratic Muslims are further characterized in the book as “such nice people, clean shaven, very clever, who are ready to have sex in the park, whenever they feel like it.” The phrase “sex in the park” is common Arab code for homosexuality, which in sharia law also merits a death sentence.

Laban’s name has been linked to Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric who in 1993 was behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center; to Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the planners of 9/11; and to Mohammed al-Fizazi, who was responsible for the 2003 Casablanca bombing. Laban at one point also claimed knowledge of an imminent terror operation on Danish soil.

His purpose with the book is to strengthen his own claims to leadership in the highly competitive world of extremist imams. Laban has also threatened in the past to leave Denmark, but, alas, thought better of it.

Downy bearded youth was also represented in the traveling cartoon road show in the person of 28-year-old Ahmed Akkari, who makes up for his tiny stature and squeaky voice with his great persistence. Akkari was born in Lebanon but has obtained Danish citizenship and is fluent in Danish. Among his political prognostications is that the leader of the Democratic Muslims would be blown up, should he ever become a government minister.

Most Danes were of the impression that Akkari had left the country last year to settle with his girlfriend in Lebanon, as he, too, felt insufficiently appreciated in Denmark. But lo and behold, when Denmark arranged for an evacuation of 5,000 people during this summer’s war in Lebanon, who was among the rescued but Akkari, his girlfriend, and his little daughter. The Jyllands-Posten carried a telling photograph from the rescue operation with Akkari seen against the Danish flag gently wafting in the breeze—the very flag that he and his friends had caused to be burned all over the Middle East.

Predictably, Akkari found fault with the caliber of the Danish rescue mission. In the Extra Bladet, a Danish tabloid, he stated indignantly, “You should write about the horrible plane the Danish Foreign Ministry first wanted to send us home in. It was Jordanian and so old that it was life threatening.”

In letters to the editor, Danes wondered the obvious: Why would a man who has so much to complain about want to return? They were also astounded by the number of Danish resident aliens found in Lebanon during the evacuation. There were calls to investigate how many were actually living in Lebanon while claiming unemployment benefits in Denmark. Predictably, the Danish liberal press deemed such questions crass and insensitive towards people who had been so massively traumatized by Israeli bombardments, but the issue will be debated in parliament in December.

Finally, the Danes have learned that Abu Bashar, a Syrian cleric living in the regional capital of Odense and working as a prison chaplain, has been fired after complaints from inmates at Nyborg State Prison that he was inciting hatred of Denmark, and after his statement in an article in the Fyens Stiftstidende that “Denmark is the next terror target.”

Bashar’s claim to fame stems from the cartoon crisis, when he showed a photograph of a man in a pig’s mask on BBC television, and afterwards slipped it in among the material being presented by the touring imams in the Middle East, though it had nothing to do with the cartoons. It turned out to be a photo of a French comedian in a pig-calling contest. Bashar later claimed that he was misinterpreted and that the photo had been sent to him anonymously, showing how Muslims were insulted in Denmark. His forked tongue has severely damaged his credibility here.

To no one’s surprise, Bashar claimed that his firing from his prison job was political. However, as a man who did not hold grudges, he was willing to forget the incident, if he could have his job back part-time, with disability pay. His knee was troubling him something awful. Sorry, no go.

The question remains why the Danish government puts up with these scoundrels and does not simply boot them out. France has rid itself of more than 20 extremist imams, as has Germany, while Spain and Italy each have deported four, and Holland three. Denmark so far has kicked none out. Surely, enough is enough.

==============================

Muslim birthrate worries Russia (Washington Times, 061121)

MOSCOW — Low domestic birthrates and rising immigration from the former Soviet republics are producing explosive growth in Russia’s Muslim community, which is on a track to account for more than half the population by midcentury.

“Russia is going through a religious transformation that will be of even greater consequence for the international community than the collapse of the Soviet Union,” said Paul Goble, a specialist on Islam in Russia and research associate at the University of Tartu in Estonia.

Two decades ago, the Sobornaya Mosque was the only Islamic house of worship allowed in the Soviet Union. It stood largely empty, filling only with the occasional large foreign delegation from an Islamic country.

Today, it is one of four mosques in Moscow serving a Muslim population of about 2.5 million. On Fridays and holy days, it overflows with worshippers, leaving many to kneel on newspapers outside, their foreheads pressed against the concrete.

As in many countries with growing Islamic populations, tensions are also on the rise. Many ethnic Russians fear their country is losing its traditional identity, while many Muslims are offended by widespread discrimination and a lack of respect for their faith.

Russia’s Muslim community is extremely diverse, including Volga Tatars, the myriad ethnicities of the North Caucasus and newly arrived immigrants from Central Asia. But they all share birthrates that are far higher than Russia’s ethnic Slavs, most of whom are Orthodox Christians.

Russia’s overall population is dropping at a rate of 700,000 people a year, largely because of the short life spans and low birthrates of ethnic Russians. According to the CIA World Factbook, the national fertility rate is 1.28 children per woman, far below what is needed to maintain the country’s population of nearly 143 million. The rate in Moscow is even lower, at 1.1 children per woman.

Russia’s Muslims, however, are bucking that trend. The fertility rate for Tatars living in Moscow is six children per woman, Mr. Goble said, while the Chechen and Ingush communities are averaging 10 children per woman. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have been flocking to Russia in search of work.

Russia’s Muslim population has increased by 40% since 1989, to about 25 million. By 2015, Muslims will make up a majority of Russia’s conscript army and by 2020 one-fifth of the population.

“If nothing changes, in 30 years, people of Muslim descent will definitely outnumber ethnic Russians,” Mr. Goble said.

For many Slavic Russians, the prospect of becoming a minority in their country is terrifying.

“Russia is historically a Slavic, Orthodox Christian land, and we need to make sure it stays that way,” said Alexander Belov, the head of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, an increasingly powerful lobby that has organized dozens of rallies in recent months.

Attacks on mosques have been on the rise, and in September an imam in the southern city of Kislovodsk was fatally shot outside his home. During days of rioting in August, mobs chased Chechens and other migrants out of the northwestern town of Kondopoga.

Sensing the nationalist mood, Russian authorities have begun to crack down with laws designed to defend Orthodox Christianity and restrict the activities and movement of Muslims.

Most Muslims living in Russia are not immigrants, but natives of lands seized by the expanding Russian empire. Islam is recognized as one of Russia’s official religions, along with Orthodox Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism.

But few nationalists distinguish between immigrants from ex-Soviet countries and non-Slavic Russian citizens. Mr. Belov, for example, said non-Slavs should be restricted from living in “traditional Russian lands.”

“The Muslims of Russia have roots here. We have been part of Russia for centuries,” countered Rusham Abbyasov, a spokesman for Russia’s Council of Muftis, which represents Islamic spiritual leaders in the country. “It is not right to say that Russia is a Christian country. These people either don’t know the history, or they are ignoring it.”

Mr. Goble said that after decades of Soviet religious repression, most Muslims in Russia are secular. But with interest in Islam surging, they are open to being influenced by extremist ideas, “especially if they feel excluded from Russian society.”

Western governments should encourage Russia to integrate Muslims into society and avoid discrimination, he said. “When Muslims are in the majority in Russia, they’ll remember whether we spoke out for their rights or failed to.”

==============================

Why radical Islam - and why now? (Townhall.com, 061221)

By Victor Davis Hanson

Read any newspaper or turn on any news broadcast and you’re bound to encounter stories of Islamic radicals fighting, killing and threatening each other — and just about everyone else.

In Somalia, jihadists, with the support of al-Qaida, have clashed with troops loyal to the country’s internationally recognized interim government and now threaten neighboring Ethiopia with all-out war.

Nearby in Darfur, Muslim militiamen called janjaweed are waging genocide against black Christian and animist villagers — apparently with the consent of the Sudanese government.

Shiite and Sunni militias, each claiming to represent true Islam, keep slaughtering each other in Iraq.

Hezbollah (“Party of God”) seeks to destroy democracy in Lebanon by provoking Israel, which it is sworn to eliminate.

On the West Bank, Hamas and Fatah have taken a timeout from their attacks on Israel to murder each other and innocent bystanders.

The Iranian Shiite theocracy — when not hosting Holocaust deniers or sending terrorists into Iraq — issues serial pledges to finish off Israel.

The shaky Pakistani leadership pleads that it can neither target Osama bin Laden nor stop Taliban jihadists hiding out in the remote regions of Pakistan from streaming back into Afghanistan.

In Europe, opera producers, novelists, cartoonists and filmmakers are increasingly circumspect out of fear of death threats from Islamists.

While each conflict is unique and rooted in its own history, the common thread — radical Islam — is obvious. It’s thus worth asking why this violent, intolerant strain of Islam has taken hold in so many unstable places — and at this particular time.

The ascent of radical Islam is, perhaps, the natural culmination of a century’s worth of failed political systems in Muslim countries that were driven by morally bankrupt ideologies, led by cruel dictators, or both.

In the 1930s, German-style fascism appealed to Arabs in Palestine and Egypt. Soviet-style communism had sympathetic governments in Afghanistan, Algeria and Yemen. Baathism took hold in Syria and Iraq. The secular Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser promised a new pan-Arabism that would do away with colonial borders that divided the “the Arab nation.” Then there is the more pragmatic authoritarianism that survives in Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya or in the petrol-monarchies in the Gulf.

Radical Islam may be as totalitarian and as morally bankrupt as any of these past or mostly defunct “isms,” but its current appeal isn’t hard to figure out. Unlike fascism or communism, radical Islam is locally grown, and not plagued by charges of foreign contamination. Indeed, Islamists claim to wage jihad against the modernism and globlization of the outside, mostly Westernized world. Such a message resonates in stagnant, impoverished Muslim countries.

Of course, while the people of the region may be poor, the Islamist movement isn’t. Huge oil profits filter throughout the Muslim world, allowing Islamists to act on their rhetoric. In today’s world, militias can easily acquire everything from shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to rocket-propelled grenades. With such weapons, and on their own turf, Islamists can nullify billion-dollar Western jets and tanks.

There is still another reason for the rise of Islamists: They sense a new hesitation in the West. We appear to them paralyzed over oil prices and supplies and fears of terrorism. And so they have also waged a brilliant propaganda war, adopting the role of victims of Western colonialism, imperialism and racism. In turn, much of the world seems to tolerate their ruthlessness in stifling freedom, oppressing women and killing nonbelievers. So how, aside from killing jihadist terrorists, can we defend ourselves against the insidious spread of radical Islam? Here are a few starting suggestions:

Bluntly identify radical Islam as fascistic — without worrying whether some Muslims take offense when we will talk honestly about the extremists in their midst.

At the same time, keep encouraging consensual governments in the Middle East and beyond that could offer people security and prosperity, while distancing ourselves from illegitimate dictators, especially in Syria and Iran, that promote terrorists.

Establish that no more autocracies in the Middle East and Asia will be allowed to get the bomb.

Seek energy independence that would collapse the world price of oil, curbing petrodollar subsidies for terrorists and our own appeasement of their benefactors.

Appreciate the history and traditions of a unique Western civilization to remind the world that we have nothing to apologize for but rather much good to offer to others.

Finally, keep confident in a war in which our will and morale are every bit as important as our overwhelming military strength. The jihadists claim that we are weak spiritually, but our past global ideological enemies — Nazism, fascism, militarism and communism — all failed. And so will they.

==============================

Somalia, U.N. regain Mogadishu (Washington Times, 061229)

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Jubilant Somalis cheered as troops of the U.N.-backed interim government rolled into Mogadishu unopposed yesterday, putting an end to six months of domination of the capital by a radical Islamist movement.

Ethiopian soldiers stopped on the outskirts of town, after providing much of the military might in the offensive that shattered what had seemed an unbeatable Islamist militia. Islamist fighters fled south vowing to continue the battle.

“We are in Mogadishu,” Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi declared after meeting with local clan leaders to discuss the peaceful transfer of the city.

Despite the celebrations in the streets, worries about the future were widespread in a country that hasn’t had an effective national government since clan warlords toppled a longtime dictator 15 years ago.

Many in overwhelmingly Muslim Somalia are suspicious of the transitional government’s reliance on neighboring Ethiopia, a traditional rival with a large Christian population and one of East Africa’s biggest armies. Witnesses said crowds threw rocks at Ethiopian troops on the city’s northern edge.

Somalia’s complex clan politics also are a big worry, having undone at least 14 attempts to install a central government in this violent, anarchic nation.

Mr. Gedi’s government, set up in 2004 with U.N. backing, is riddled with clan rivalries, most notably between the young prime minister and elderly president.

Mr. Gedi later said his government was seeking approval from the interim parliament to impose martial law across Somalia while its forces attempt to restore order. Weapons will be confiscated, he said, without giving details.

A chilling reminder of the chaos Somalia has known came as clan militiamen and criminal groups began looting almost anything they could after the Islamist forces fled. At least four persons were killed in the melee, said one witness, Abdullahi Adow.

President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, whose shaky acting administration has spent the last year in a temporary capital, Baidoa, 150 miles west of Mogadishu, said government troops are not a threat to the city’s people.

“The government is committed to solving every problem that may face Somalia through dialogue and peaceful ways,” he said.

But gunfire was heard for most of the day in the city. The United Nations flew out 14 aid workers and one U.N. staff member because of deteriorating security.

Ethiopian troops, who pledged not to enter the capital, were stoned by crowds on the northern edge of the city, witnesses said. “How could we welcome an invading enemy?” said one protester, Faiza Ali Nur.

Relations between Somalia and Ethiopia have long been strained. They fought a bloody war over their disputed border in 1977.

After starting an offensive against the Islamist forces Sunday, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said his army would go home once it defeated the Islamist movement, whose fighters had extended their control over much of southern Somalia in the past six months.

Mr. Meles vowed yesterday not to give up the fight until extremists and foreign fighters supporting the Islamist movement had been crushed.

Speaking in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, he said 2,000 to 3,000 Islamist fighters had been killed and 4,000 to 5,000 wounded. Ethiopia suffered a few hundred casualties, he told reporters.

Islamist militiamen, who had said they would defend Mogadishu to the last man, retreated toward the southern port of Kismayo.

The fighters had gone from door to door in Kismayo recruiting children as young as 12 to make a last stand on behalf of the Islamist movement, according to a confidential U.N. report, citing the families of boys taken to the front line town of Jilib, 65 miles north of Kismayo.

The Islamist movement took Mogadishu in a battle with clan warlords in June and then advanced across most of the south, often without fighting.

When Ethiopia began providing military aid to the transitional government, Islamist leaders issued a call for foreign Muslims to join their “holy war” against the Ethiopians. Somalis living on the coast reported seeing hundreds of foreigners entering the country.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said that over the past few days, hospitals and other medical facilities in southern and central Somalia had admitted more than 800 wounded people.

The U.N. refugee agency said yesterday that two boats carrying Somalis and Ethiopians across the Gulf of Aden from northern Somalia capsized late Wednesday as they were being pursued by Yemen’s coast guard. At least 17 persons drowned, and 140 were thought missing, it said.

The refugee agency said some of the 357 survivors claimed to be fleeing the fighting in central Somalia. But their boats sailed from ports far to the north in a relatively peaceful area of Somalia, from where a steady stream of economic migrants has set sail in recent years.

==============================

Thai insurgency targets Buddhists (Washington Times, 061229)

BANGKOK — Buddhists are fleeing their homes in southern Thailand in the face of an increasingly militant Muslim insurgency that has begun calling for an independent and pure Islamist nation in the impoverished region bordering Malaysia.

What began as an indigenous protest against heavy-handed rule from the mainly Buddhist capital, Bangkok, has developed into a battle reflecting extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan, including beheadings and the burning of schools.

“This land must be separated between Muslims and the nonbelievers. This land must be liberated, and an Islamic system must be its foundation,” warned a leaflet recently distributed in the south that the Thai military showed to reporters.

“This is a land of war that is no different from Palestine and Afghanistan,” said the leaflet, signed by an obscure jihadist group known as the Islamic Warriors of Pattani State.

“This land is not the land of the Thais, but the land of Fathoni Darulsalam,” it said, using an old Arabic name for the mainly Muslim region of southern Thailand.

Other fliers instruct Muslims not to buy or benefit financially from lands abandoned by Buddhists, saying the properties will be distributed to needy Malays once the region is liberated from the “occupying Siamese,” according to a Bangkok newspaper, the Nation.

Authorities say 1,730 persons have died in three years of unrest, more than 1,000 of them Muslims, including many killed by confused and poorly disciplined government forces. Others were killed as a warning to other Muslims not to cooperate with the government.

The dead also include about 680 Buddhists who appear to have been slaughtered to disrupt their work and frighten other Buddhists into leaving, according to the respected Prince of Songkhla University in Pattani.

The killers’ tactics have grown increasingly brutal, including the decapitation of 25 persons since 2004.

Insurgents also assassinate saffron-robed Buddhist monks who collect alms during barefoot walks through villages and towns, even when armed troops escort the clergymen.

Shocked by the sight of blood-splattered monks sprawled in the street and reports of nearby assaults, about 200 Buddhist villagers in Yala province have fled.

Carrying meager belongings, they clustered in Buddhist temples, grateful for sacks of supplies sent by Queen Sirikit, and hoping for financial compensation and resettlement.

Military efforts against the ethnic Malay insurgents have been ineffective, and negotiations have been hindered because the rebels refuse to identify their leaders. Bangkok is now worried that the shadowy force will hoist flags above a self-declared “Islamic Pattani Nation,” further demoralizing security forces and Thailand’s 64 million people.

“If the situation is left like this, in three years, we’ll see a new country in the deep south,” said Prasit Meksuwan, an adviser to the south’s Teachers Federation, which is encouraging Buddhist teachers not to flee.

Schools have become a favored target of the insurgents, who complain that the institutions tell lies about the three southern provinces — Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat — which formed part of an independent Malay kingdom before Thailand annexed the rubber-rich region about 100 years ago.

The Malay-speaking Islamists also oppose the schools’ curriculum, which absorbs youngsters into a modern Thai-speaking society, obedient to a god-free Buddhist philosophy and Bangkok’s monarchy. They demand that the schools focus instead on lessons gleaned from the Koran.

The government has given guns and training to hundreds of teachers who are willing to stay in rebel-infiltrated zones, while soldiers transport teachers to and from well-guarded schools. But more than 1,000 isolated schools shut down at the beginning of a term last month.

During one of the assaults last month, a 48-year-old teacher was shot and burned to death at his school in Pattani province while colleagues and students watched in horror.

==============================

Religion of Peace? Robert Spencer asks the hard questions. (National Review Online, 070111)

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Islam is quintessentially tolerant. Its adherents are hospitable to liberty, equality, and pluralism, the rudiments of modern democracy. Those committing terror in its name are heretics — a fringe which has “hijacked” a “religion of peace.”

This conventional wisdom brims over the mainstream media’s daily servings. It is, moreover, the not-to-be-questioned premise of U.S. policy on a host of paramount issues: everything from how the war on terror is conceptualized and prosecuted, to the wisdom of negotiations with Iran, a sovereign state for Palestinians, agitation for freedom and popular self-determination throughout the Middle East, and the assumption that our own growing Muslim population will seamlessly assimilate.

But is it true?

Emphatically, the answer is “no.” So argues best-selling author and Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer in The Truth about Muhammad — Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (Regnery, 256 pages, $27.95). And he does not expect you to take his word for it.

Painstakingly, Spencer has crafted a biography Islam’s Prophet from the authentic Muslim Sunnah, comprised of: the Koran, which is taken by believers to be the verbatim word of Allah, dictated to Muhammad in Arabic by the angel Gabriel; the tafsir, or Koranic commentary; the hadith, which are lengthy volumes recording the words and traditions of Muhammad (there are six different collections, dating from the eighth and ninth centuries); and, finally, the sira, authoritative biographies of the Prophet, including what remains to us of Ibn Ishaq’s hagiographic account, written about 150 years after Muhammad’s death in 632.

The picture that emerges is complex but not ambiguous. Muhammad was a dynamic figure — necessarily, among the most dynamic in history, having formed from scratch a movement that ultimately dominated lands from the Near East to Central Asia (to say nothing of pockets of Europe, Africa, and the Far East), a movement that today claims over a billion adherents. He was also, through and through, a product of Arabia’s tribal antiquity — a fact often stressed by Islam’s modern sympathizers to explain, if not smooth, the Prophet’s many rough edges.

In such a life, unsurprisingly, one finds episodic acts of tolerance and benevolence. But there are episodes and then there is trajectory. The arc of Muhammad’s life tends decisively to intolerance and inequality. His was, ultimately, a bellicose, us-versus-them world of conquest and booty. This cannot help but imbue the religion he founded. In it, his example is normative: the scriptures revere him as “an excellent model of conduct” (Sura 33:21), who exhibits an “exalted standard of character” (68:4) and obedience to whom is repeatedly adjured — indeed, is made equally as essential as obedience to Allah Himself (4:80). Recalling the Muslim fury over Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2005, Spencer points out that in the Koran “again and again Allah is quite solicitous of his prophet, and ready to command what will please him. To the mind of someone who accepts the [Koran] as an authentic revelation, this places Muhammad in a particularly important position.”

CONTRADICTION AND AMBIGUITY

The Prophet of Islam was born in Mecca, a member of the Quraysh tribe which did a lucrative trade in pilgrimages to the local shrine, the Kabah — now the central locus of Islamic worship but then home to numerous pagan idols. Both Muhammad’s parents died in his early childhood. In his twenties, he was hired as a traveling salesman by his distant cousin Khadija, an accomplished merchant woman whose wares he deftly traded in Syria. Though fifteen years his senior, Khadija proposed marriage, becoming the first of Muhammad’s many wives (biographers peg the number at between eleven and thirteen, with Muhammad having claimed to be “given the power of sexual intercourse equal to forty men”). Eventually, she also became the first Muslim.

Muhammad’s prophetic career spanned about 23 years after he received, at age 40, what he came to believe was his first revelation. Initially, the call to Islam was a straightforward summons to monotheism — to worship only “Allah,” who, Spencer explains, may have been the tribal god of the Quraysh (and thus one of the many local deities).

As further revelations fleshed out nascent Islam, there was transparent borrowing from the Bible, the Torah, other Jewish and Christian sources (including heterodox strains of Christianity then abundant in Arabia), Zoroastrian writings from Persia, and local pagan ritual. The resulting similarities discomfit Muslims, who often insist that they represent not emulation but happenstance, the Koran having been recited to Muhammad (who was illiterate) by Allah in His original language of Arabic. Beyond that, any seeming Judeo-Christian influence is attributed to Jews and Christians being fellow “People of the Book,” whose God Muslims share and whose heritage they claim to supersede. It is, in fact, an enduring tenet that Jews and Christians are, as Spencer puts it, “sinful renegades from the truth of Islam,” who corruptly altered their scriptures to elide foreshadowings of Muhammad’s coming.

One of the seeming contradictions of Muhammad’s life is the contrast of his early hospitality toward Jews (and Christians) with his final position of unremitting enmity. Contradictions, of course, create ambiguity. This is useful for Islam’s modern apologists, who incessantly underline a few isolated episodes of tolerance and even kindness as if they could bleach away Muhammad’s legacy of arch hostility toward non-Muslims — a legacy built, for example, on the Koran’s admonition that Muslims “take not the Jews and the Christians as friends and protectors” (5:51); on Muhammad’s vision of the end of the world: marked by Jesus returning to abolish Christianity and impose Islam, while Jews are killed by Muslims (with the help of trees and stones, which alert the faithful, “Muslim, … there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him”); and on the Prophet’s deathbed call for the total expulsion of unbelievers from the Arabian Peninsula — a desire the Saudi government honors to this day, particularly in Mecca and Medina, cities closed to non-Muslims.

Spencer cogently explains, however, that there is no real contradiction or ambiguity. Especially in the early phase of his prophesying — the Meccan period before Hijra, when the Muslims were forced to flee to Medina — Muhammad had great reason to be solicitous: He was building a movement. Arabia’s powerful Jewish tribes (the Qaynuqa, Auf and Qurayzah, among others) were among those the Prophet most energetically called to Islam. Thus we find Muhammad “situating himself within the roster of Jewish prophets, forbidding pork for his followers, and adapting for the Muslims the practice of several daily prayers and other aspects of Jewish ritual.” Muhammad, moreover, struck a treaty with Medina’s Jewish tribes — grandiosely regarded by Muslims as “the world’s first constitution” — which described them as “one community with the believers” (though tellingly, even in this amicable period, the pact drew sharp distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims).

In fact, this adaptability, when exhibited in Muhammad’s similarly earnest efforts to convert his native Quraysh to Islam, resulted in the nearly ruinous “Satanic verses” incident (made infamous in modern times by Salman Rushdie’s book and the consequent murder fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini). Desperate to be reconciled with his own people, Muhammad convinced himself that he’d received a revelation allowing Muslims to pray to three pagan goddesses favored by the Quraysh as intercessors for Allah. The Quraysh were thrilled, but the Prophet, upon a countermanding revelation from an angry Gabriel, soon realized he had not only contradicted the core of his monotheistic preaching but potentially undermined the entire Islamic enterprise by raising the possibility that his revelations were not authentic. Allah forgave Muhammad, observing that Satan’s interference had been an occupational hazard for all His beleaguered prophets through the ages. Still, the incident is sufficiently embarrassing that Muslim scholars and apologists continue ferociously to discredit it, although, Spencer concludes, the evidence preponderates against them.

BRUTAL CONQUEST

In any event, good will between Muslims and non-Muslims proved fleeting. Muhammad’s overriding aim was Islamic hegemony not ecumenical coexistence. Upon resettling in Medina, Muhammad became as much a political and military leader as the apocalyptic preacher of his first 13 years of prophesying. The Jews, like the Quraysh, many Christian communities, and other non-Muslims declined to heed his call. Rejection of Islam was construed as attack upon Islam, for which the prescription was jihad.

Incontestably, jihad is a central imperative (in fact, the highest obligation) of Islam. Muhammad’s career as a fierce and, at times, brutal warrior illustrates the futility of efforts to render congenial to modern sensibilities this command to struggle against perceived enemies. Yes, the Koran famously asserts that there shall be “no compulsion in religion” (2:256). But however hortatory this injunction may be, it is ahistorical. Islam was spread by the sword.

The Prophet’s military feats began with attacks, many of which he led personally, on Quraysh caravans. These raids, Spencer explains, were not merely acts of vengeance against those who had rejected Islam; they further “served a key economic purpose, keeping the Muslim movement solvent.” Booty would be central to Muslim militancy, and thus grew rules for its division (such as one-fifth of the haul set aside for the Prophet, and the propriety of using female slaves as concubines). Asked by a follower about the legitimacy of nighttime attacks given the probability of endangering women and children, Muhammad indicated these were permissible because such noncombatants “are from them” (i.e., the unbelievers).

It is due to this and other lessons that the battles of early Islam resonate today — creating a major hurdle (I fear, an insuperable one) for reformers hopeful of convincing the ummah (i.e., the worldwide Muslim community) that it’s the terrorists, not the reformers themselves, who are doctrinally wayward.

The Prophet, for example, directed “martyrdom” operations. Martyrdom, Spencer elaborates, was understood exactly as it is by today’s jihadists: “referring to one who (in the words of a revelation that came to Muhammad much later) ‘slays and is slain’ for Allah (Qur’an 9:111), rather than in the Christian sense of suffering unto death at the hands of the unjust for the sake of the faith.”

Muslims were authorized by another revelation to break treaties — particularly with the Jews — when there appeared advantage in doing so (8:58). And in the tone-setting “Nakhla Raid” against the Quraysh, a timely revelation helped Muhammad overcome his initial reluctance to accept booty derived from killings committed by his followers during the sacred month of Rajab, when fighting was forbidden. Those murdered had disbelieved Allah. This, the Prophet learned, was the greater evil. Of course, the collateral lesson, as Spencer relates, was that “[m]oral absolutes were swept aside in favor of the overarching principle of expediency.”

Believers were instructed to fight and behead non-believers (47:4), and did so mercilessly. After the out-numbered Muslims decisively triumphed over the Quraysh in the “Battle of Badr,” for example, one captured Quraysh leader pled for his life, asking, “But who will look after my children?” “Hell,” replied Muhammad, ordering the man killed. Another leader’s head was brought as a trophy to the Prophet, who expressed delight and gave thanks to Allah. (No wonder then, Spencer interjects, that when al Qaeda’s strongman in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, decapitated American hostage Nicholas Berg, he declared, “The Prophet, the most merciful, ordered [his army] to strike the necks of some prisoners in Badr and to kill them…. And he set a good example for us.”) (Brackets in original.) Allah, in fact, expressed anger at Muhammad after Badr because the Prophet agreed to take ransom from some captured Quraysh leaders rather than beheading them as his companion, Umar, had urged.

In Medina, the Muslims were pitted against an alliance of the Quraysh and the Qurayzah Jews in the “Battle of the Trench.” During the Muslims’ building of the defensive trench, Muhammad’s pick blows are said to have emitted lightening flashes, which drew cries of “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is greatest” — the “Islamic cry of victory” for Spencer) and were interpreted by the Prophet as a sign that Allah would eventually make Islam triumphant beyond Arabia in the east and west. Opining that “war is deceit,” Muhammad directed one of his followers to appear as a sympathizer to the enemy factions, while sowing discord between them. It worked: the Quraysh abandoned the field and the Muslims laid siege to the Jews, whom Muhammad called “brothers of monkeys.” (Spencer notes three places — 2:62-65, 5:59-60 and 7:166 — where the Koran records that “Allah transformed the Sabbath-breaking Jews into pigs and monkeys.”) When the Qurayzah surrendered and sought mercy, Muhammad agreed with the assessment of his follower Sad bin Muadh that “their warriors should be killed and their children and women should be taken as captives.” In the execution, Muhammad personally participated in the beheading of between 600 and 900 captives — including all males who had reached puberty.

This incident was not unique. Spencer recounts that Muhammad ordered a Jewish poet, Kab bin al-Ashraf, killed because the Prophet took offense at “amatory verses of an insulting nature about Muslim women.” After the murder, he commanded the Muslims: “Kill any Jew that falls into your power.” When Muhammad ordered the expulsion of the Nadir Jews with whom area Muslims had a treaty, Muhammad’s emissary declared, “Hearts have changed, and Islam has wiped out the old covenants.” When the Jews declined to leave, Muhammad construed this to mean that “[t]he Jews have declared war” — another reminder that whether Islam is “under attack,” the trigger of jihad, is ever in the eyes of the beholder. In the ensuing siege, the Prophet ordered the earth scorched, refuting his own prohibition against the wanton destruction of property so often cited by Islamic apologists. And in the “Raid at Khaybar,” Muhammad directed that a Jewish leader, Kinana bin al-Rabi, be tortured to extract the location of tribal treasure; when al-Rabi stood fast, Muhammad had him beheaded, and later, when more hidden treasure was located, the incensed Prophet — as he had done with the Qurayzah Jews — directed that warriors among the Khaybar Jews be killed and the women and children taken as slaves.

WHY MUHAMMAD MATTERS

Why rehash these and other chilling episodes in the meteoric, militaristic rise of early Islam? Because, Spencer maintains, they are crucial to appreciating the dual challenge faced by Westerners and Islamic reformers.

Americans, told incessantly by their elites that Islam is a “religion of peace,” watch in bewilderment when, for example, a Muslim convert to Christianity is subjected to a death penalty trial in the “new” Afghanistan, liberated from the Taliban due to great American sacrifice. How, they rightly wonder, could the “moderates’ now in charge abide such a thing? The answer is as simple: Islam’s prophet made death the penalty for apostasy. (“Whoever changed his Islamic religion,” said Muhammad, “then kill him.”) There is a crying need, Spencer observes, “for Westerners to become informed about the words and deeds of Muhammad — which make the actions of Islamic states much more intelligible than do the words of Islamic apologists in the West.”

The foundation of American policy, furthermore, is the conceit that moderates represent the Islamic mainstream, that they reflect the authentic image of a Muhammad — the “highest example of human behavior” — who championed the values of democracy and equality. “But,” as Spencer cautions, “if the jihad terrorists are correct in invoking his example to justify their deeds, then Islamic reformers will need to initiate a respectful but searching re-evaluation of the place Muhammad occupies within Islam — a vastly more difficult undertaking.”

And this must be said not just of jihad terrorists. Spencer, for example, is understanding about the actions of Muhammad, then aged 50, in taking Aisha as a wife when she was six and consummating the marriage when she was nine. This was, after all, in the spirit of the times. Nevertheless, for believers, the Prophet’s example transcends its time, and thus child-brides are a commonplace in the Islamic world. Muhammad’s Islam, moreover, still confines women to a subordinate status — the Koran likens a woman to a “tilth” to be used as a man wills (2:223); a man may take four wives and have sex with slave girls (4:3); a woman’s testimony is valued at half that of a man (2:282); and so on. There is, moreover, simply no credibly denying the denigrated status of non-Muslims, reduced by Muhammad and his successors to humiliating dhimmitude and, as we have seen, brutalized.

Individually, countless Muslims have evolved past these notions. But Islam has not — certainly not in a dominant or convincing way. If anything, atavism is at least as strong a current as reform. Is it realistic to believe the tens of millions (more likely, hundreds of millions) of Muslims whose compass is Muhammad’s belligerent, hegemonic vision of Islam — a vision that has endured for 14 centuries — will abandon it in favor of an Islam that embraces liberty, self-determination, and equality based on our common humanity? Anything, one imagines, is possible … but such a seismic shift is not going to happen any time soon.

Robert Spencer graphically illustrates the depth of our folly in thinking — or, rather, blithely assuming — otherwise. An alarming book, and a necessary one.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

==============================

Australian Muslim Cleric Sparks Outrage by Calling Jews ‘Pigs’ and Encouraging Jihad (Foxnews, 070118)

SYDNEY, Australia — The firebrand cleric who went overseas just days before some of his cohorts were rounded up in the nation’s biggest counter-terrorism raid is the subject of a new police investigation, after a call for children to join jihad as holy warriors appeared in a DVD being sold in Australia.

Sydney-born Sheik Feiz Mohamed’s radical sermons — available on the internet and on DVDs and videos — have become popular with Muslims around the world.

In one video, running on the hugely popular website YouTube, he admonishes his followers in English for not “sacrificing a drop of blood” as martyrs.

Australian Federal Police said yesterday they had begun inquiries into Sheik Feiz’s DVD encouraging jihad, which is believed to be unclassified in Australia and illegal to sell.

Click here for more on the global War on Terror.

New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma accused the cleric yesterday of inciting terrorism.

“This DVD goes a lot further than vilification,” he said. “The sort of incitement that the DVD encourages is incitement to acts of violence and acts of terror.”

Sheik Feiz, a member of Sunni Islam’s fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, left Australia for Lebanon in late 2004, just days before federal and state police and ASIO conducted raids in Sydney and Melbourne, arresting 23 people on terror-related charges.

The cleric calls two of the accused terrorists close friends and knew all of the Sydney men arrested.

He has links to almost every notable member of Australia’s Islamic community and continues to direct his Global Islamic Youth Center — the nerve center of Islamic youth in Sydney, setting the tone for 4000 youths, their families and fraternities.

Along with Sheik Mohammed Omran in Melbourne and Sydney’s Sheik Abdul Salem Mohammed Zoud, he is considered one of Australia’s leading radical clerics. Unlike Sheik Omran and Sheik Zoud, Sheik Feiz preaches in English with a strong Australian accent rather than Arabic.

In the video running on YouTube, which could not be dated, he criticises Muslims in Australia for not sacrificing their blood as martyrs and for putting lifestyle ahead of action in response to massacres of Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.

“In our times it is the fear of death, the fear of sacrificing your finger, your toe, a drop of blood that is more honourable than anything else,” he says.

“Why? Because martyrdom to us is, is not as appealing to us, as it was to those ancestors, the great warriors ... who lived around the best creature that walked the earth, Mohammed.”

Click here to watch a clip from the “Signs of the Hour” series.

The YouTube video follows revelations in a British documentary that Sheik Feiz’s collection of DVDs — called the Death Series — were being sold by children in the carpark of a mosque in the British city of Birmingham.

In that and another series called Signs of the Hour, made about four years ago, Sheik Feiz labelled Jews “pigs” and exhorted children to jihad.

“We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam,” he says. “Teach them this: there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid. Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom.”

In an exclusive interview with The Australian, Sheik Feiz said that every one of those remarks could be put in context.

“The jihad I speak of is not one of violence,” he said. “It is one of personal struggle against things like mischievousness, temptation and personal harm. I have never advocated violence against Australians or anyone embracing the Australian way of life. I have never called for people to be harmed. If anyone fights you for what you are, you defend yourself

“I don’t believe in suicide bombing, I don’t believe in violence against others. We don’t invite that, we don’t encourage that. We denounce that. This is not Islamic law and it is not moral.”

He said he regretted the remark about Jews being pigs and said this was made in the days following the images of a young Palestinian, Mohammed al-Dura, being pinned down with his father in crossfire in Gaza in 2002. The boy was killed and the images became an enduring propaganda tool for the Palestinians during the intifada years.

“That remark was made in the heat of the moment and I regret it,” Sheik Feiz said. “It was not something I should have said and is not something I believe.”

B’nai B’rith Anti-defamation Commission chairman Michael Lipshutz said the Muslim community had to publicly distance itself from anti-Semitic individuals and organisations.

However, Muslim youth representative Fadi Rahman said the reaction to the four-year-old video that authorities have been aware of for nearly as long was an example of prejudice against the Muslim community. “This is what tells us we will never fit in no matter what we do. “It’s telling the kidsthey’re always going to be marginalized.”

Acting Attorney-General Kevin Andrews said the matter was being investigated by the relevant authorities.

“It’s offensive to the Australian people, it’s reprehensible, it’s particularly outrageous that certain groups in Australia, such as the Jewish community, have been highlighted in these comments and we condemn the comments,” he said.

Experts believe the DVD material — recorded in 2004 — would escape federal sedition laws, which were passed in 2005 as part of the federal Government’s terrorism legislation, but may fall foul of other laws.

University of New South Wales (NSW) law lecturer Andrew Lynch said NSW racial vilification legislation might apply to Sheik Feiz’s description of Jews as pigs, and the videos could be in breach of the federal criminal code, which prohibits incitement to commit an offence.

While the Mufti of Australia, Taj Din al-Hilali, sparked national outrage by comparing scantily clad women to uncovered meat, Sheik Feiz once told a meeting at Bankstown, in Sydney’s southwest Muslim heartland, that indecently dressed women were setting themselves up for rape.

==============================

American-Born Imam Spews Message of Hate in England (Foxnews, 070118)

NEW YORK — A New Jersey-born Muslim cleric with links to a suspected Al Qaeda operative who surfaced at a college not far from the cleric’s Peoria, Ill., mosque the day before the Sept. 11 attacks has found a new home.

The imam now is spewing his message of hate to a growing group of followers at a mosque in Birmingham, England.

His target: the United States, the United Kingdom, Christians and Jews.

Abu Usamah at-Thahabi, who preached at the Islamic Center of Peoria in 2001, is the subject of a British news documentary that revealed Monday how he regularly exhorts worshippers at the Green Lane Masjid, or mosque, in Birmingham to hate Westerners, whom he calls “pathological liars” and “kuffar,” a derogatory term for non-Muslims.

Abu Usamah also calls for the public crucifixion of all “kuffar” and says they should be “left there to bleed to death for three days.”

Abu Usamah, who was born in New Jersey and is 42 or 43 years old, was the imam in Peoria when federal agents swooped down in December 2001 and arrested Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari student at Bradley University, on charges that he used false documents to open bank accounts and was in possession of a telephone credit card used to call a number in Dubai that federal agents said was linked to reputed Al Qaeda financier and Sept. 11 organizer Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

Sources tell FOX News that Abu Usamah is a mysterious character — no one, including federal agents and fellow imams, seems to know what his name was prior to his conversion to Islam.

But sources in Peoria say that though his public teachings there were moderate, he occasionally stepped over the line into anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Just prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he called President Bush a “pathological liar” and constantly argued to his followers that “Jews controlled the media.”

Al-Hawsawi, a Saudi known as the “Al Qaeda paymaster,” reportedly funneled more than $325,000 to the Sept. 11 hijackers, though the 9/11 Commission reportedly could account for only $15,000.

Al-Hawsawi was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003, by a joint U.S.-Pakistani operation against suspected Al Qaeda operatives. He reportedly is being held at the U.S. Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.

Al-Marri remains in custody and is awaiting trial by a military tribunal as an enemy combatant. Among the evidence reportedly seized by federal agents was Al-Marri’s computer, which contained a folder labeled “jihad arena.” According to court documents, the folder contained information on hydrogen cyanide, used in chemical weapons, and the teachings of Usama Bin Laden.

The Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism in its report said the information about hydrogen cyanide on Al-Marri’s computer “far exceeds the interests of a merely curious individual.” The task force report also alleges that Al-Marri was instructed by Al Qaeda to hack into the American banking system to wreak havoc on the U.S. economy.

Abu Usamah, in the days immediately after Sept. 11, asked Peoria residents not to judge the Muslim community by the actions of the terrorists who carried out the attack and thanked the local Christian community for its support.

“More faiths, different groups reached out to us,” he told the Peoria Journal Star newspaper a year after the attacks.

He went on to thank “those open-minded people who judge everyone individually.”

The New Jersey-born imam, who claims to have studied a strict version of Islam at the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, has since changed his tune.

“Lying is part of their religion,” Abu Usamah is heard telling his followers in the special report produced by the British news show “Dispatches” on Channel 4.

“They do whatever they want to do. They are liars, they are terrorists themselves. They are lying, you can’t believe them.

“They are pathological liars,” he rants.

He also is heard ticking off an enemies list that includes mainstream British culture.

“America, the U.K., Germany and France, they have come against the religion of Islam,” he declares.

“Popular culture … if you’re a person who gives yourself to that, your mind is going to be controlled by the so-called powers to be, who make these manmade laws.”

The mosque’s official Web site says its purpose is to counter Muslim stereotyping, but the Channel 4 report found there is a secret chat room area of the site that only mosque members know about, where At-Thahabi’s lectures are broadcast.

It is in this chat room, the report says, that Abu Usamah preaches the creation of a “total Islamic state” that advocates harsh punishments for non-believers.

“Whoever changes his religion from Islam,” he declares, “kill him, in the Islamic state.”

==============================

Jews flee homes after Muslim death threats: Accused of ‘serving global Zionism,’ paid special taxes for protection (WorldNetDaily, 070122)

Yemen

JERUSALEM – Many of Yemen’s Jews this weekend fled their homes for a hotel after receiving death threats from Islamic militants accusing the country’s tiny Jewish community of serving as agents for “global Zionism.”

The Jews said they feared for their lives. It was disclosed they had been forced to pay special taxes that Islam imposes on Jews and Christians in return for protection and security.

About 45 Jews left their village in Sa’ada county in Yemen after Dawoud Yousuf Mousa, one of the heads of the local Jewish community, was warned Jan. 10 if the Jews don’t leave within 10 days they would be exposed to killings, abductions and looting.

Four masked militants approached Mousa and delivered a letter to him warning the Jewish community had been under Islamic surveillance.

“After accurate surveillance over the Jews residing in Al Haid, it has become clear to us that they were doing things which serve mainly global Zionism, which seeks to corrupt the people and distance them from their principles, their values, their morals, and their religion,” the letter stated.

“Islam calls upon us to fight against the disseminators of decay,” the letter said.

The threats have been attributed to disciples of Shiite religious leader Hossein Bader a-Din al-Khouty.

Mousa reportedly told local authorities the militants told him if the Jews don’t flee within 10 days “the Jewish community would bear the consequences.”

According to a recent Yemeni immigrant to Israel with contacts in Sa’ada, the Jewish community there received another letter Friday warning, “whoever remains at his home, will be killed or his children will be taken away.”

Sa’ada’s Jewish community had lived in the village for generations.

They were forced to evacuate their homes and leave some of their possessions with local sheiks.

The displaced Jews are staying at a hotel in the center of Sa’ada, where they have been petitioning local authorities for protection. The Yemen Jews say the government has refused to offer assistance other than to temporarily pay for the hotel stays.

The Jews reportedly spoke of long-term Muslim intimidation and of having to pay special taxes because they were Jewish.

Salem Al Wehayshi, Sadaa deputy governor, told the Gulf News agency the Jews are being asked to go home.

“Yes, they received threats from Al Houthi supporters. They are now here in the hotel but I can assure you that the problem will be solved today, and they will return to their villages,” Wehayshi said.

The Jewish community in Yemen consists of several hundred members. According to recent immigrants to Israel, the Yemeni Jews don’t want to leave their country.

Yemen’s Jews have faced persecution since Israel’s establishment in 1948. After the declaration of the Jewish state, Muslim rioters killed 81 Jews in Aden, a large Yemeni city, and destroyed many Jewish cities.

Most of Yemen’s Jews were evacuated to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet, a series of semi-secret airlifts between June 1949 and September 1950 that brought 45,000 to the Jewish state with the assistance of Britain and the U.S.

A smaller, continuous migration was allowed to continue until 1962, when a civil war in Yemen put an abrupt halt to any further Jewish exodus. Several thousand Jews remained.

Then in the early 1990s, after years of petitioning by a group led by a professor at New York’s Yeshiva University, most of the rest of Yemen’s Jews were brought to Israel, except the few hundred who decided to stay in Yemen.

==============================

Who Says “Ladies First”? Ayaan Hirsi Ali appreciates the goodness, and uniqueness, of Western civilization; she’s trying to make sure the rest of us do the same. (National Review Online, 070129)

By Deroy Murdock

“When I first came to a Western country, I was astonished to find men who said, ‘Ladies first,’” Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently recalled. “I was amazed because I was born and raised in a culture that put me last because I was born a girl.”

The former Dutch parliamentarian captivated some 1,500 guests at the Congress of Racial Equality’s 23rd annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ali received CORE’s International Brotherhood Award January 15 at the New York Hilton. As a woman whom radical Muslims have marked for death, her message deserves every American’s attention.

Ali, 39, was born into a Muslim family in Mogadishu. Her father’s opposition to Somalia’s then-president, Siyad Barre, led him to move his family to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, then Kenya. When she was about 25, her father arranged for her to wed a stranger. En route to meet this distant cousin in Canada, Ali deplaned in Germany and instead absconded to Holland by rail. She secured asylum and changed her name from Hirsi Magan to Hirsi Ali.

Ali prospered. She learned Dutch, studied politics at Leiden University, and served several think tanks. In January 2003, she won a seat in the Tweede Kamer, Holland’s lower house of parliament.

In 2004, Ali wrote Dutch director Theo Van Gogh’s Submission, a provocative film about Islamic-fundamentalist misogyny. That November 2, Dutch-Moroccan citizen Mohammed Bouyeri assassinated Van Gogh — the great-grand nephew of the 19th Century Impressionist painter — on an Amsterdam street. After shooting him and slitting his throat, the radical Muslim used another knife to bury a five-page letter into Van Gogh’s lifeless chest.

“YOU WILL BREAK YOURSELF TO PIECES ON ISLAM!” read the communiqué, addressed to Ali. “Be warned that the death that you are trying to prevent will surely find you.”

Bouyeri also carried with him “Baptized in Blood.” The poem reads, in part:

To the enemy I say…
    You will surely die…
    Wherever in the world you go…
    Death is waiting for you…
    Chased by the knights of DEATH…
    Who paint the streets with Red.

Since then, Ali has labored under a fatwa. Scheich Fawaz, an imam in The Hague, said Ali would be “blown away by the wind of changing times” and would suffer “the curse of Allah.”

After going into hiding, Ali fled yet again, from Holland to America. Though still protected by bodyguards, she now thinks and speaks freely in Washington, D.C., primarily at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She also authored the forthcoming Infidel: My Life (Free Press, 2007).

“Because the culture the U.S. leads and stands for is under threat,” Ali tells me, “it would help a great deal if the Democrats and the Republicans were less polarized, if they understood that they are under threat, and that fighting for what America stands for is far more important, far more important, than all the small differences that we have on a domestic level.”

First and foremost, Ali argues, the West should champion a culture that is superior to militant Islam, which has civilization itself in its crosshairs. As she puts it: “Human beings are equal; cultures are not.”

“A culture that holds the door open to her women is not equal to one that confines them behind walls and veils,” Ali told CORE. “A culture that encourages dating between young men and young women is not equal to a culture that flogs or stones a girl for falling in love. A culture where monogamy is an aspiration is not equal to a culture where a man can lawfully have four wives all at once.”

Such candor has won Ali high praise on either side of the Atlantic. Time magazine in 2005 named her one of the “100 Most Influential Persons of the World.” In 2006, Reader’s Digest dubbed her its European of the Year. Also last year, Norwegian legislator Christian Tybring-Gjedde nominated Ali for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Ayaan Hirsi Ali is equivalent to Lady Thatcher — the iron lady of Somalia,” says Herbert I. London, president of the Hudson Institute, who introduced Ali at CORE’s banquet. “In standing up for women’s rights in the Islamic world, she has faced down the jihadists’ fatwa. While the West is on the defensive about its own values, this woman from the East comes to remind us that the culture we have is far superior to the culture she escaped.”

“Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the single most important figure in the fight for awareness of the plight of women in Islam,” says Douglas Murray, a fellow with the Social Affairs Unit, a London-based think tank, and author of NeoConservatism: Why We Need It. “Her own personal story and the eloquence and bravery that she has brought to the debate have brought the issue to the eyes of the world more than any other individual.” Murray notes that anti-Islamist Dutch parliamentary candidate “Pim Fortuyn said before his assassination, ‘It is five minutes to midnight, not just in Holland, but in the whole of Europe.’ With Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s departure, the Netherlands has gone back to sleep a little, and Pim’s clock is a stroke closer to midnight.”

Ali is grateful for what the West has done for her and many others it shields from Islamofascism. She despairs, however, for the West’s wavering self-confidence.

“Unfortunately, it is this culture that is under threat today,” she told CORE’s guests. “Many of those born into it take it for granted or, worse, apologize for it.” As Ayaan Hirsi Ali asked: “Let’s join together to protect this culture of life, this culture of liberty, this culture of ladies first.”

— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. He has moderated several CORE events.

==============================

Change or Die: Fighting Radical Islam (townhall.com, 070205)

By Harry R. Jackson, Jr.

I left the U.S. on my way to sunny South Africa for a conference a week ago. During my day long stopover in London, I read the most shocking headline, Young British Muslims Get More Radical. This article made three amazing pronouncements based a study done by a UK-based think tank:

• 1 out of 8 young British Muslims admire Al-Qaeda

• 40% want Sharia law in Britain

• 75% want women to wear veils.

The article was of special interest to me because I had just attended a briefing concerning “the threat” of modern Islam. The summit leaders emphasized that the conflict between Islam and the West would increase in intensity over the next few years. The advance of Islamic political influence in the West must be fought aggressively because of its close association with terrorism.

The article’s concluded that younger Muslim Britons are becoming more radical, but also that many second generation UK citizens do not see England as a secular “promised land” for their people. In fact, radical young Muslims want to set up self-ruling enclaves where Sharia law would supercede the laws of England.

If Sharia law were allowed to reign in a Muslim “ghetto” within London, grizzly practices of amputations, beheadings, and other unthinkable atrocities would be carried out in the name of justice. Radicals would attempt to take over the nation - one community at a time. They would use bully politics and intimidation to push their agenda. For example, we marveled at the threats against the Pope last year because he alluded to Islam’s irrational, violent behavior. Widespread acceptance of Sharia law within the UK would simply fuel this conflict. The UK must resist this kind of vigilante justice. It would be worse than allowing the KKK to set up an alternative court system in downtown Atlanta or Los Angeles.

Many are willing to give into “cultural differences” because they fear the consequences of denying radical Islamic requests. In addition, UK leaders are fearful of appearing prejudiced. Despite the timid responses of both local and national government, a showdown has already begun. Just two days after this article appeared, police uncovered an alleged plot to behead a British soldier who happens to be Muslim.

During the skirmish, the suspect is reported to have described a young soldier as a “traitor,” adding that “he should have his head chopped off.” After authorities questioned the nine men who were arrested, detectives discovered computer files that are said to contain images of western hostages being executed by Al-Qaeda sympathizers. Some of the material seems to be linked to extremist Islamic websites which call British Muslims in the military “collaborators” and that they should be “punished for fighting their Muslim brothers.”

Four of the detainees are reported to have visited Islamic extremists at a Pakistan terrorist training camp. It is thought that the plot to kidnap and then film the torture and execution of a Muslim soldier was contrived at that camp.

The average westerner has not fully understood the either the violence or complexity of the Islamic worldview. Politics and faith are inextricably connected in the mind of an Islamic radical.

In Christianity, governments are charged with waging wars, while individuals are called to a lifestyle of personal peace and nonviolence. Conversely, many Muslims have taken up the call to personal violence as art of their faith. Therefore, suicide bombings, rioting, persecution of non-believers, and other atrocities are all part of their personal choices.

This clash of worldviews is further complicated for most Britons because they believe in the same melting pot concept that Americans believe - that all cultures can be mixed together to form something beautiful, something new. The problem with multi-culturalism is that it ignores the fact that every nation needs its own unifying set of values, principles, and corporate “soul.”

There is a widespread disconnect between the current cultural reality and way the UK would like to treat people. At a recent conference on World Civilization-Clash of Civilizations, the problem of traditional, English thinking was exposed. Several of the participants wrongly described Islamic terror attacks as “reprisal events.” In their thinking, these violent outbursts need to be understood rather than condemned. Even the mayor of London has become a proponent of this theory. He has gone as far as to host receptions for radical Islamic theologians like Yusuf al-Qardawi. (A cleric who believes Muslims must not hesitate to use their children as human bombs). No other minority in England would be allowed to spout off such incendiary rhetoric.

Here are some of the factors that complicate the inclusive posture of the UK:

• 1 in 20 Londoners are of mixed race.

• Over 300 languages are spoken in London.

• 62 % of today’s Londoners are not UK-born - this implies that immigrants do not have a lot of English history to draw upon as they learn the strange new ways of the British world headquarters.

In this context, how can anyone single out one group and call them evil? Conversely, one immigrant group should not dominate the entire nation. Radical Islam is a unique threat to the freedoms that the average Briton has come to accept.

It’s time for America to learn from the problems we see exhibited in the UK. The U.S. must be more vigilant than ever before to inform our citizens of the threat that radical Islam holds to our entire way of life. I am thankful that FOX and other cable networks are producing specials which give hard facts about the world in which we live. The social climate in America appears to be only five or six years behind the UK. Let’s change now! Let’s resist the advance of radical Islam by speaking truth about its motives.

==============================

Psalm 2:8 (townhall.com, 070212)

By Harry R. Jackson, Jr.

Could it be that Christian Jihad is the only way to stop the blood-seeking radical, Islamic movement? A revival of bedrock Christianity, such as the brand of faith seen in the book of Acts, is our only hope of stopping the advance of violent anti-west radicals. This Christian response may require the mobilization of Christian missionaries that are willing to risk their lives for the cause of Christ.

Most Americans are only starting to wake up to the fact that modern Islam is planning a sinister plot to take over the world during the next two decades. The term “jihad” is used for their aspirations. It has two meanings to Muslims:

• An individual’s striving for spiritual, self-perfection,

• A Muslim holy war or spiritual struggle against infidels.

Fortunately, most dictionaries give a third meaning to this Islamic word. The definition, found in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, essentially calls any crusade or struggle a “jihad” – with the idea that this war carries with it great intensity and focus. It some ways, Christians must fight radical Islam with their brand of bold Christianity. Simply put, we must return to our roots!

An understanding of democratic freedom, personal rights, and the Judeo-Christian system of law are all apart of the gift that Christianity contributes to every society that accepts it. In other words, Christian evangelism and foreign missions must penetrate Islamic or “veiled” nations if lasting, cultural change is going to occur. Last week, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council wrote a persuasive article putting forth the thesis that lasting social change in Iraq may be impossible without the change of worldview that Christianity and its missionaries could bring to the people.

Ironically, an article written last week by Graeme Wilson for London’s Daily Telegraph reported that younger Muslim Britons are becoming more radical in terms of an anti-west mindset. This proves Dr. Perkins’ point. According to the article, older Muslims in the UK have been proud to assimilate into the warp and woof of the society. Unfortunately, second generation UK citizens and younger immigrants have embraced a worldview that pits their faith against all western nations. Growing numbers of radical young Muslims celebrate Al Quaeda and want to set up self-ruling enclaves within the UK where Sharia law would supersede the laws of England.

If English Muslims can reject the freedoms of England, how much more might the concept of democracy be rejected as the attractive democratic concept is fleshed out in practical terms.

The events I have just described beg the question “Is Islam really a religion of peace, or are there two faces of Islam?”

I would like to suggest that the average westerner has not fully understood both the violence and the complexity of the Islamic worldview. Politics and faith are inextricably connected in the mind of an Islamic radical. There is no comparison with the conservative Christian involvement in American politics. In Christianity, governments are charged with waging wars, while individuals are called to a lifestyle of personal peace and non-violence. Conversely, many Muslims have taken up the call to personal violence as an act of their faith. Therefore, suicide bombing, rioting, persecution of non-believers, and other atrocities are all part of personal choices that radical Muslims make.

Many people in the U.S. and the UK have not yet come to grips with the idea that many of their Muslim neighbors have not caught the vision of freedom that our nation espouses. Growing numbers of Muslims residing inour homelands do not share our views on women’s rights, social justice, or racial tolerance.

So what do we do? How do Christian nations conduct their own jihad? We should draw a line in the sand – defining our unique national cultures, while resisting the encroachment of unbending, imperialistic Muslims.

More specifically, we need to understand that we are conducting an ideological, spiritual battle. I am not suggesting that Christians arm themselves physically or become suicide bombers. Quite the contrary! I am recommending that we recognize our enemy and fight ideologically before we get embroiled in direct physical conflict.

In the West, we must avoid backing down from the intimidation of radical Islamic groups. Freedom of religion is a major tenet of our nation which should not be violated. On the other hand, we must resist the attempts of one group to dominate the cultural landscape of nations which have given them refuge.

In third world nations, where Islam is just starting to make inroads, we need to send aid and Christian missionaries. The gospel of Jesus Christ must be preached once again without compromise. The statistics say that large numbers of Muslims are converting to Christianity all over the world (perhaps the greatest conversion rates since the religion’s conception in the 7th century). With their conversion, former Muslims are dropping the notions of physical jihad and violent attack of infidels.

How do we win this fight? We must focus upon elevating the poor. Remember that at the core of Christianity the gospel offers good news to the poor. Most modern mission efforts reflect this core value by serving targeted communities with practical solutions to economic, health, or environmental problems. A final word of practical advice is appropriate here. Churches and denominations should attempt to dovetail their efforts as much as possible with the huge aid packages that western nations are giving around the world. This coordination could multiply the impact of our efforts.

In summation, it’s time for Christian nations to unashamedly preach the gospel. We need to strengthen Christian commitment within our own countries, while sending missionaries to foreign lands. This non-violent jihad must be won all around the world. Let’s roll!

==============================

Report: Serial Killers Cleared by Iranian Supreme Court as Victims’ Activities Were Un-Islamic (Foxnews, 070415)

The Iranian Supreme Court has vacated the murder convictions of a group of serial killers because their victims were engaging in un-Islamic activities, the British Broadcasting Corp. reports.

The men were convicted for a series of grisly killings in the southeastern city of Kerman in 2002. The vigilantes were said to believe that Islam condoned the killing of anyone engaged in illicit activities if they issued two warnings to the victims, the BBC reports.

At least 18 people were killed on the murder spree, but the men were only tried for five of the deaths. Some of the victims were stoned, others were suffocated and at least one man was buried alive, according to the vigilantes’ confessions.

These men told the court that their understanding of the teachings of one Islamic cleric allowed them to kill immoral people if they had ignored two warnings to stop their bad behavior, according to the BBC.

The Supreme Court has overturned the verdict of a lower court that found all the men guilty of murder five times, according to lawyers for the victims’ families. The vigilantes may still be liable for monetary damages.

==============================

Saudi Kidnap, Rape Victim Faces Lashing for ‘Crime’ of Being Alone With Man Not Related to Her (Foxnews, 070306)

A 19-year-old Saudi woman who was kidnapped, beaten and gang raped by seven men who then took photos of their victim and threatened to kill her, was sentenced under the country’s Islamic-based law to 90 lashes for the “crime” of being alone with a man not related to her.

The woman is appealing to Saudi King Abdullah to intervene in the controversial case.

“I ask the king to consider me as one of his own daughters and have mercy on me and set me free from the 90 lashes,” the woman said in an emotional interview published Monday in the Saudi Gazette.

“I was shocked at the verdict. I couldn’t believe my ears. Ninety lashes! Ninety lashes!” the woman, identified only as “G,” told the English-language newspaper.

Five months after the harsh judgment, her sentence has yet to be carried out, “G” said she waits in fear every day for the phone call telling her to submit to authorities to carry out her punishment.

Lashes are usually spread over several days. About 50 lashes are given at a time.

The woman’s ordeal began a year ago when she was blackmailed into meeting a man who threatened to tell her family they were having a relationship outside wedlock, which is illegal in the desert kingdom, according to a report in The Scotsman newspaper.

She met the man at a shopping mall and, after driving off together, the blackmailer’s car was stopped by two other cars bearing men wielding knives and meat cleavers.

During the next three hours, the woman was raped 14 times by her seven captors.

One of the men took pictures of her naked with his mobile phone and threatened to blackmail her with them.

Back at home in a town near the eastern city of Qatif, the young woman did not tell her family of her ordeal. Nor did she inform the authorities, fearing the rapist would circulate the pictures of her naked. She also attempted suicide.

Five of the rapists were arrested and given jail terms ranging from 10 months to five years. The prosecutor had asked for the death penalty for the men.

The Saudi justice ministry, however, said rape could not be proved because there were no witnesses and the men had recanted confessions they made during interrogation.

The judges, basing their decision on Islamic law, also decided to sentence the woman and her original blackmailer to lashes for being alone together in his car.

==============================

How Not to Discuss Islam: Slate provides an excellent example. (WorldNetDaily, 070322)

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

THESE DAYS, MOST EVERYONE AGREES that Americans need to develop a better understanding of Islam. They disagree, though, on how this understanding should be built. I’ve had ample opportunity to consider this question after the publication of My Year Inside Radical Islam, a book that details my time working for the U.S. headquarters of the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Wahhabi charity that has been named a specially-designated global terrorist entity. I became persuaded by Al Haramain’s teachings while there, and adopted their views as my own. I decided to write this book because a large part of the global war on terror is ideological and I thought my narrative could help shed light on how people are drawn to extremist Islam. The book has generated discussion among both Muslims and non-Muslims, many of which have been productive. Nonetheless, some of conversations are instead indicative of how one shouldn’t talk about the subject. Most instructive is Holly Lebowitz Rossi’s recent review in Slate, which engages in virtually all of the silly argumentative techniques that stifle serious discussion.

ONE TECHNIQUE used by people to disqualify those they disagree with from discussing Islam is the ideological pigeonholing of their adversaries. Rossi attempts this by claiming that I have become a “hero” to conservative media figures such as Michelle Malkin, Jamie Glazov, G. Gordon Liddy, and Sean Hannity. I’m not sure what hero status entails, but I’ve certainly reached out to conservatives. However Rossi fails to mention is that I have also made numerous appearances on NPR affiliates and progressive talk radio.

Indeed, since the publication of My Year Inside Radical Islam, I’ve made a point of reaching out not just to liberals and conservatives, but to the Muslim community too. Rossi’s review hit Slate the day after I held a closed book talk for an exclusively Muslim audience and shortly before an extensive author interview appears on the Islamic website alt.muslim. None of this hindered Rossi’s attempt to turn me into a conservative strawman.

A SECOND TECHNIQUE used by those who want to paint their opponents as fools or bigots is universalizing observations. For example, those who try to portray Islam only in a good light will universalize any criticism of the Muslim community and claim that their opponents think all Muslims are radical. Conversely, those who only want bad things said about Islam mock positive comments as whitewashes.

In a neat trick, Rossi universalizes my book in both directions, claiming that it misrepresents both mainstream Islam and radical Islam, too. In this way, the book supposedly makes readers think that radical Islam isn’t dangerous enough while also doing “a serious disservice to moderate and progressive Muslims, who are too often suspected of terrorist activities.” Strangely, Rossi argues that I gloss over the serious danger of radical Islam because in my time at Al Haramain I did not come close to committing religious violence myself. Half of this criticism can immediately be dismissed: the notion that the book whitewashes radical Islam since I don’t come that close to engaging in violence. Will people actually conclude after reading the book that there’s no intersection between radical Islam and religious violence? Of course not: this criticism is absurd.

What of the disservice that my book supposedly does to moderate and progressive Muslims? This too is absurd. So much so, that one suspects it was simply a throwaway line meant as a sop to Slate’s audience. Far from ignoring moderate and progressive Muslims, several appear as characters in my book. In fact, two such characters underscore Rossi’s point that average, good-hearted Muslims are sometimes unfairly suspected of terrorist activities and sometimes end up on a flight watch lists despite their religious moderation.

Others, who are not quite as interested in scoring political points as Rossi, have read the book differently. For example, a positive review in Islamica Magazine, a journal of contemporary Muslim thought, observed that “[Gartenstein-Ross] reveals how ideologically vulnerable a convert can be; in that first flush of excitement and devotion, almost anyone claiming Islamic authority can dramatically imprint the convert’s faith. . . . Gartenstein-Ross’ book, if anything, should prod progressive-minded Muslims to think twice about abandoning their local mosques.” Far from doing the “disservice” to moderate and progressive Muslims that Rossi claims, Islamica’s review felt that my book was instructive for such individuals.

A THIRD PROBLEM that impedes the discussion of Islam is the habit of writers giving pat answers to complex questions—and then claiming that their opponent is either bigoted or ignorant for not accepting these blanket answers. Unfortunately, Rossi does this too, by claiming that I conflate theological conservatism and radicalism.

It is true that, in my book, I do not step back from the narrative arc of my journey to distinguish for the reader which theological points are radical and which are merely conservative. There was a reason for this, which other, more nuanced reviewers picked up on: The Islamica review notes that while there is a line between “harmless conservatism and violent radicalism,” that line is “not always clear.” This is particularly so when you are trying to find your path within the faith, rather than studying it from a comfortable distance. As a young convert, I was bombarded by conservative and radical ideas simultaneously. My book’s narrative reflects that reality.

At the end of the day, it seems that Rossi doesn’t actually dislike my book much, on the merits. Instead, she is upset by three things: its title, the fact that the book is popular with a conservative audience, and the way that some conservative commentators have framed the discussion about the book.

Discussions about Islam must be rooted in integrity. There are many hard questions worth asking about Islam in the United States, and in the world. There are hard questions to ask about the way Islam is practiced. There are also hard questions to ask about whether Muslims are treated fairly and whether the media depicts Islam objectively. It is critical to approach these questions honestly and with open eyes. Unfortunately, some people—on the left and right, Muslim and non-Muslim—are interested less in intellectual integrity than in controlling the politics of the debate.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a counterterrorism consultant and the author of My Year Inside Radical Islam.

==============================

Judge Tells Battered Muslim Wife: Koran Says ‘Men Are in Charge of Women’ (Foxnews, 070323)

BERLIN — Politicians and Muslim leaders condemned a German judge Thursday for citing the Koran in her rejection of a Muslim woman’s request for a quick divorce on grounds she was abused by her husband.

Judge Christa Datz-Winter said in a recommendation earlier this year that both partners came from a “Moroccan cultural environment in which it is not uncommon for a man to exert a right of corporal punishment over his wife,” according to the court. The woman is a German of Moroccan descent married to a Moroccan citizen.

The judge argued that her case was not one of exceptional hardship in which fast-track divorce proceedings would be justified. When the woman protested, Datz-Winter cited a passage from the Koran to back up her argument that reads in part, “men are in charge of women.”

The judge was removed from the case and the Frankfurt administrative court said it was considering disciplinary measures against her.

Court vice president Bernhard Olp said Thursday the judge “regrets that the impression arose that she approves of violence in marriage.”

Olp said the judge had been convinced she was doing everything she could to protect the woman, who had been granted a restraining order against her husband. She had seen no reason to grant help in paying court costs for a fast-track divorce.

Olp said her reasoning was unacceptable, but insisted it was a “one-time event” that would not have an effect on other cases, or on the final ruling in the divorce proceedings.

The latest uproar comes amid an ongoing debate in Germany about integrating its more than 3 million Muslims, most of them from Turkey. A decision last year to cancel an opera featuring the severed heads of the Prophet Muhammad and other religious figures out of security concerns caused a furor and was later retracted.

Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries condemned the judge’s decision.

“Every so often, there are individual rulings that seem completely incomprehensible,” she said.

Lawmakers from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats said traditional Islamic law, or Sharia, had no place in Germany.

“The legal and moral concepts of Sharia have nothing to do with German jurisprudence,” Wolfgang Bosbach, a lawmaker with the Christian Democrats, told N24 television.

“One thing must be clear: In Germany, only German law applies. Period.”

Ronald Pofalla, the party’s general secretary, told Bild: “When the Koran is put above the German constitution, I can only say: Good night, Germany.”

Representatives of Germany’s Muslim population were also critical of the ruling.

“Violence and abuse of people — whether against men or women — are, of course, naturally reasons to warrant a divorce in Islam as well,” the country’s Central Council of Muslims said in a statement.

The mass-circulation Bild daily asked in a front-page article: “Where are we living?” The left-leaning Tageszeitung headlined its Thursday edition: “In the name of the people: Beating allowed.”

==============================

NIGERIA: Nigeria Christian Teacher Killed by Muslim Student Mob (Christian Post, 070326)

A Christian teacher was killed by an angry mob of Muslim students for allegedly desecrating the Koran in northern Nigeria – a region long plagued with intense Muslim-Christian violence.

Muslim students at Government Day secondary school in the northeastern state of Gombe killed Christian teacher Oluwatoyin Olusase who was supervising an Islamic Religious Knowledge exam on Wednesday, according to the Nigerian newspaper This Day.

The newspaper, which described the killing as “gruesome,” said that she was beaten to death and then set on fire. Students also burned the teacher’s car and three blocks of the school containing classes, the school clinic, administrative offices and the library.

Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, is about evenly split between Muslim in the north and Christians in the south with minorities of both religions living where the other faith is dominant. Since democracy was restored in 1999, there have been at least 15,000 deaths due to religious, communal or political violence, according to BBC.

According to reports, Olusase had allegedly collected books from a student who she suspected would cheat and tossed the books outside the classroom. The pupil had wanted to come into the exam hall with his books. She was not aware, though, that among the books was a copy of the Koran.

Before she knew what was happening the students started to shout “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and beat her to death.

According to Hajiya Hadiza Ali Gombe, the vice principal of the school, all efforts were made by the Muslim principal of the school, Mohammed Sadiq, to protect the Christian teacher. Sadiq was also beaten and injured by the students.

Following the incident, the government arrested at least 12 students involved in the killing, according to the Voice of America. An investigation of the event is underway with a five-person panel given two weeks to submit its findings.

==============================

Liberal Myths about Radical Islam (townhall.com, 070326)

By Dinesh D’Souza

As the Pelosi Democrats attempt to steer the debate on Iraq and the war on terror away from President Bush’s approach, it is useful to examine the premises behind the liberal Democratic understanding of the war on terror. So far the Democrats have been successful in faulting the president’s admittedly-flawed approach. But there is no advantage in trading one bad model for another. Here, then, is my critique of some of the major elements of the liberal explanation for “why they hate us.”

They’re very upset at us for the Crusades: James Carroll’s recent book Crusade, portrays the Crusades as a horrific act of Western aggression that still shapes the military thinking of America’s leaders and inspires outrage in the Muslim world.

Is it reasonable to think that Muslims today are genuinely outraged about events that occurred a thousand years ago? Let us remember that before the rise of Islam, the region we call the Middle East was predominantly Christian. Inspired by Islam’s call to jihad, Muhammad’s armies conquered Jerusalem and the entire Middle East, then pushed south into Africa, East into Asia, and north into Europe.

Rallied by the Pope and the ruling dynasties of Europe, the Christians attempted in the eleventh century to recover the heartland of Christianity and to repel the irredentist forces of Islam. The Crusades were important to Europe because they represented a fight to recover Christianity’s holiest sites and also because they were part of a battle for the survival of Europe.

By contrast, the Crusades have never been important to the Muslim world. Muslims were already in control of their own holy places in Mecca and Medina. Not once did the Crusaders threaten the heartland of Islam. From the point of view of Muslim historians, those battles were seen as minor disruptions on the periphery of the Islamic empire.

In summary, the Crusades were a belated, clumsy, and defensive reaction against a much longer, more relentless, and more successful Muslim assault against Christendom. The striking aspect of the liberal critique is that it stresses the horrors of the Crusades while virtually ignoring the Islamic jihad to which the Crusades were a response. Even if liberals detest the Crusades, however, there is no good reason for many of today’s Muslims to care about them, and there is no evidence that they think about the subject at all.

They’re angry about colonialism: Many on the cultural left, like the late Edward Said, attribute Muslim rage to the still-fresh wounds of Western conquest and subjugation.

But America—the focal point of the anger of radical Muslims—has virtually no history of colonialism in the Middle East. If the Filipinos or American Indians were launching suicide bombers in New York, their actions could perhaps be attributed to a reaction against colonial subjugation. But until the Bush administration ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, America had never occupied a Muslim country. This was not for lack of opportunity. After World War II, America could quite easy have colonized the entire Middle East, but never even considered doing so.

America’s record is one of opposing British and French colonial initiatives, and of encouraging the European colonial powers to withdraw from the Middle East. So Muslim hostility to America has to be explained by factors other than colonial occupation in the Middle East, since prior to 9/11 America has no record of colonial occupation in the Middle East.

They’re angry because American actions have killed so many Muslims: Actually America has actively fought on the side of Muslims in several recent conflicts. During the 1970s the United States supported the Afghan mujahedin and their Arab allies in driving out the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. In 1991 the United States assembled an international coalition of countries, including many Muslim countries, in order to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and restore the sovereignty of that small Muslim country. Later in the decade, President Clinton ordered American bombings and intervention to save Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo.

True, many Muslims hold America accountable for Israel’s bulldozing of Palestinian homes and Israeli shooting of stone-throwing Palestinian youths. And Muslims frequently deplore the civilian lives lost in the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. These deaths, however, are small in number compared with the devastation that other invading armies, including Muslim armies, have wrought through the centuries right down to the present day.

More recent Muslim wars, such as the Iran-Iraq war, have also produced unbelievable horrors and casualty lists. Over the eight-year period of the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, between 500,000 and 1 million Muslims were killed. Islamic radicals know all this, which is why one cannot find in their literature the kind of indignation over America’s killing of Muslim civilians that one routinely finds in liberal magazines, radio shows and websites.

My conclusion is that the main reasons leading liberals give to explain the antagonism of the Islamic radicals toward the United States and the West are false. Consequently we should be skeptical of liberal solutions such blocking additional troops, or squeezing funding, or calling for a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. These “solutions” reflect muddled thinking about radical Islam, and they are likely to produce results far worse than the situation as it is now.

==============================

A Dangerous Woman: Why Islamists want to kill Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (National Review Online, 070329)

By Clifford D. May

Theo van Gogh was a modern Western man, a believer in reason, tolerance and multiculturalism. And so it is perhaps fitting that his last words were: “Can’t we talk about this?”

He asked that question of Muhammad Bouyeri, a Militant Islamist outraged over Submission, a film van Gogh had directed, a film which took an unsparing look at the oppression of women in Islamic lands. In broad daylight, on a street in van Gogh’s hometown of Amsterdam, Bouyeri responded to the filmmaker’s appeal for civil discourse by shooting him, sawing into his throat with a butcher knife and then stabbing a five-page letter into his chest.

Prominently named in that letter was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the remarkable woman who wrote Submission. Bouyeri vowed to kill her as well.

Such intense hatred and violence is difficult for many of us to comprehend. Not so Hirsi Ali. Growing up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, she experienced multiple forms of cruelty and became, for a time, a devout believer in the radical brand of Islam preached by the Muslim Brotherhood. She has now written Infidel, a book about her extraordinary geographical, spiritual and intellectual journey. Anyone who aspires to understand the global conflict now underway — why it’s happening and where it may be leading — needs to listen to her.

Hirsi Ali’s personal story is by now familiar. She grew up in poverty and on the run – the daughter of a celebrated Somali revolutionary. When she was 22 years old, her father arranged for her to marry a man he thought suitable. She ran away, settling in the Netherlands where she cleaned toilets and worked on a factory assembly line. Before long, she also learned fluent Dutch, attended university and was elected a member of parliament.

But after van Gogh’s murder, the threats against her life and the controversy surrounding her views impelled her to leave Holland for Washington where Christopher DeMuth, the far-sighted president of the American Enterprise Institute, gave her a place to think and write about freedom, religion, and ideology.

In the U.S., Hirsi Ali may be safer from physical attack than she would be in Europe. But nothing can protect her from the attempts at character assassination emanating from the pages of the Economist, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and other elite publications.

Her detractors — who would never object to criticism of Christianity or Judaism — are apparently outraged that Hirsi Ali dares to question Islamic doctrine and practice. They are offended by her refusal to agree that Islam is intrinsically “a religion of peace” and that only a lunatic fringe has “hijacked” the faith to justify flying planes into buildings and dispatching suicide bombers to murder children.

Hirsi Ali argues instead that there are shortcomings and perhaps even pathologies within Islam that must be acknowledged and addressed. Such ideas came to her immediately after the 9/11/01 attacks. The chairman of the Dutch Labor party said to her: “It’s so weird, isn’t it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?”

“I couldn’t help myself,” Hirsi Ali writes. “I blurted out, ‘But it is about Islam. This is based in belief,’” in particular the belief that a war must be waged to force infidels to submit. Al Qaeda members are not protesting policies, they are fulfilling what they see as religious obligations. To fail to recognize this is, Hirsi Ali writes, “a little like analyzing Lenin and Stalin without looking at the works of Karl Marx.”

She adds: “The kind of thinking I saw in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values.”

Although Hirsi Ali is no longer an observant Muslim, it is unfair to call her anti-Islamic. The Prophet Mohammad, she says, “did teach us a lot of good things. I found it spiritually appealing to believe in a Hereafter. My life was enriched by the Quranic injunctions to be compassionate and show charity to others.” But what she found increasingly difficult to accept, particularly as she disobediently befriended infidels, was the teaching that “if you don’t accept Islam you should perish.”

Hirisi Ali believes that just as the West long ago “freed itself from the grip of violent organized religion” so, too, must Muslims today “hold our dogmas up to the light, scrutinize them, and then infuse traditions that are rigid and inhumane with the values of progress and modernity.”

Those are revolutionary ideas. No wonder Muslim totalitarians plot to kill her and Western apologists for Islamism conspire to discredit her.

==============================

Nigeria’s North Meshes Islamic Law with Secular Culture (Christian Post, 070416)

KANO, Nigeria (AP) – The new, lemon-yellow motorized rickshaws for women bear the slogan “Be Pious,” and their presence on the streets of Kano says something about the religious and political struggles of Nigeria.

The vehicles are an attempt to mesh Islamic law with the economic reality in this northern city. They appeared by the hundreds a few months ago, after women were banned from riding on motorcycle taxis – which forced them to press against male drivers.

It’s a situation that, at its heart, developed over years.

Nigeria is officially secular, with its 140 million people nearly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. Christians predominate in the coastal south and Muslims in the north.

In 1999, more than a decade of brutal military rule ended with President Olusegun Obasanjo’s election, and many in the north began clamoring for Islamic law. In many ways, it was a reaction to general lawlessness and Nigeria’s shattered justice system.

Northern politicians seized on the issue as a reliable vote-getter. As civilian rule and the new millennium dawned, 12 states across the north declared that they would follow sharia, the Islamic civil and criminal code.

But several factors have prevented Islam from becoming completely dominant.

When sharia was first declared, riots flared. Christian and Muslim youths did battle in Kano and other cities, leaving hundreds dead.

Obasanjo, a southerner and a Christian, and others in the federal government declared their opposition to sharia and said they would work to ensure that its implementation wouldn’t run afoul of the federation, which gives wide powers to the states. When sharia has clashed with national law, the federal government has won.

Obasanjo is barred by term limits from running in the April 21 presidential election, in which Muslims are the three main candidates. Even if the next president is Muslim, Nigerians say, constitutional checks make it impossible to strengthen sharia much more, or to extend it across the country.

Islamic fervor is stronger in northern Nigeria than in many other parts of Muslim West Africa, and Osama bin Laden has targeted the country for “liberation.” But signs of the most stringent interpretations of Islam are rare.

Unlike in some countries in the Middle East, women drive cars and vote. They have unfettered access to state education, although female literacy lags that of males. Women run for elected office, albeit rarely.

Only two amputations – the punishment for theft – ordered by a sharia judge are known to have taken place, and there have been no executions.

Despite a statewide ban on the sale of alcohol, beer and whiskey are openly sold in the north’s Christian enclaves, and the occasional man in Muslim gown and cap can be seen tipping back a green bottle of Star beer.

Many Muslim women cover their hair, but few adopt body-shrouding veils.

Nigerians say the strictest interpretation of sharia runs counter to their culture. Keeping women behind doors and out of sight, or cloaking them in fabric, is a foreign idea in Nigeria, where women play leading roles in economic life.

“That can be practiced in Saudi, but not here,” said Haruna Bakar, a 29-year-ld male mill worker. “The religion came from Saudi, but when it came here, it met our culture.”

Sharia has also met Nigeria’s poverty, which is among the worst in the world despite billions of dollars in government revenue generated by the country’s oil industry, the biggest in Africa.

A fact of life in Nigeria is that all able hands are put to use, male or female, at whatever jobs can be found.

For Aisha Ahmed Hassan, the head of the country’s Muslim Sisters’ Association, strict sharia would be the natural state of being if not for poverty. She supported the 2005 ban on women riding motorcycle taxis but says women chose the motorbikes because that’s all they could afford, not out of impiety.

“For me, what’s un-Islamic is the situation that made them do that. Their knees and legs are out, but they were just doing it because they have no other option,” she said. “It’s not ladylike.”

The state government agreed that women buzzing through streets clutching a man to whom they were not related was not in keeping with Islam and ruled that women could no longer ride the hazardous motorcycles, known in Nigeria as Okadas – named after a defunct Nigerian airline in a country known for air crashes.

But without motorcycles, women suddenly found themselves immobile in a city of tiny back streets and sprawling markets that cars can’t negotiate. Women, who make up 60% of commuters in Kano, protested, saying that they needed to go to work and the market and that the government had to find a solution.

Entirely rescinding the order would have angered Muslim leaders, so officials found a solution in the tricycle rickshaws, essentially motorcycles with two back wheels and a canopied seating area with room for three passengers.

Women sit behind the male drivers, with black plastic curtains that hide them from the traffic.

Initially, 500 of the rickshaws were imported from India. The government is planning to send 1,000 more rickshaws into the streets and keep up driver subsidies that artificially make the rickshaws cheaper than motorcycles.

A ride inside Kano is fixed at the equivalent of 30 U.S. cents – at least a quarter less costly than the Okadas. Cabs are much more expensive.

Many women have taken to the rickshaws, although some still ride the motorcycles – shooting past government-sponsored billboards calling on citizens to “fear God” and “be kind.”

Some feel oppressed by the official interference in their lives.

Tawkaltu Yakub, a 28-year-old market seller, has traveled to Nigeria’s unruly main city, Lagos, in the Christian south, where she saw how the other half lives.

“In Lagos, we’re free,” she said. “No restrictions there.”

==============================

O Brotherhood, What Art Thou?: Don’t mistake Islamic extremists for moderates. (Weekly Standard, 070418)

by Zeyno Baran

Even though Congress was in recess the first week of April, a number of lawmakers kept busy. A bipartisan delegation led by House majority leader Steny Hoyer paid a visit to Cairo, meeting with several Egyptian members of parliament, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a controversial Islamist group officially banned in Egypt. Hoyer’s contacts with the Brotherhood have added new intensity to the debate over whether or not the U.S. government should “engage” with the group as an ally in the war on terror.

Making the case for such engagement, Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke wrote an article in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs entitled “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood.” They conclude that the Brotherhood consists of “moderate Muslims with active community support” and that engaging with its members “makes strong strategic sense.”

Yet this could not be further from the truth. The argument for a strategy of engagement flows from the incorrect belief that if Islamist groups that denounce violence are strengthened, they will then confront their more violent brethren and rob them of their support base. Although various Islamist groups do quarrel over tactics and often bear considerable animosity towards one another, a “divide and conquer” strategy will only push them closer together. This is illustrated perfectly by the response to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to ban the revolutionary Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) after the July 7, 2005, bombings in London. HT reached out to various British Islamist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood (despite their intense historical rivalry), and urged them all to stand united or “be the next in line to be proscribed.” Sadly, HT’s effort was successful and Blair was forced to withdraw his proposal.

Allies in this war cannot be chosen on the basis of their tactics—that is, whether or not they eschew violent methods. Instead, the deciding factor must be ideology: Is the group Islamist or not? In essence, this means that a nonviolent, British-born Islamist should not be considered an ally. Yet a devout, conservative Muslim immigrant to Europe—one who does not even speak any Western languages but rejects Islamist ideology—could be.

Moderate, non-Islamist Muslims have long tried to explain the inherent incompatibility of Islamism with a Western society that extols pluralism and equality. Islamists seek the total imposition of Islamic law upon society at large. To the Brotherhood and groups like it, the Koran and Islam are not a source of law but the only source of law. As the Muslim Brotherhood declares in its motto, “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

Moreover, engaging with Islamist organizations such as the Brotherhood lends legitimacy to an ideology that does not, in fact, represent the views of the majority of Muslims. Thus, American policymakers who advocate pursuing such a strategy are actually facilitating Islamism by endorsing it as a mainstream ideology. Some have already endorsed organizations that were founded by Brotherhood members and maintain a close ideological affiliation with the group, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Whether at home or abroad, such a policy is leading to disaster, as liberal, non-Islamist Muslims—having already been denounced by Islamists as apostates—are now being told by Western governments that they do not represent “real” Islam.

Empowering Islamists at the expense of non-Islamists hardly seems a wise strategy for the United States to pursue if it wants to win the war of ideas. After all, non-Islamists are already tremendously disadvantaged in terms of organization and funding. The Muslim Brotherhood has well-established networks of institutions, educational centers, and think tanks, as well as millions of dollars in donations from the Middle East. At the same time, many moderates are deterred from speaking out because of the ire doing so would provoke from Islamist groups. In the West, not only do critics have to worry about a fatwa calling for their death, but they are also faced with the prospect of getting sued for millions of dollars.

Indeed, Islamist organizations have flourished in the tolerant environment of the West, taking advantage of the freedom of speech to spread their hate-filled, anti-Semitic ideas without fear of reprisal. In the process, they actively and openly create a fifth column of activists who work to undermine the very systems under which Western societies operate. They are creating self-segregated societies in a process that has been called “voluntary apartheid.” This tactic has been enthusiastically supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose unofficial spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi has repeatedly advised European Muslims to create their own “Muslim ghettos” to avoid cultural assimilation.

Islamist groups are engaged in a long-term social engineering project, by which they hope to lead Muslims to reject Western norms of pluralism, individual rights, and the rule of law. At the core of Islamist terrorism is the ideological machinery that works to promote sedition and hatred. That the tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood are nonviolent (or at least less violent) does not make the ideology behind those tactics any less antagonistic to the United States.

It may be that, when compared with al Qaeda or Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood is the lesser evil. Yet engagement is worse than no engagement if it legitimizes Islamist ideology and alienates non-Islamists. Recognizing and responding to the threat posed by the Islamist ideology is an important part of the war on terror. Any American or Western engagement with Islamists should be critical in nature. Under no circumstances should we do them the favor of extolling Islamist ideologues as “moderates.”

==============================

Where are the liberal non-Muslims? (townhall.com, 070430)

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

Since 9/11, many of us have wondered: Where are the moderate Muslims? If they are out there, why are we not hearing more, and getting more help, from them in the fight against our common foe — the totalitarian Islamists?

In recent weeks in this space, I have chronicled the saga of an effort to answer that question. It took the form of a 52-minute documentary I helped produce for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s “America at a Crossroads” series. The film, entitled “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center,” features compelling stories of anti-Islamist Muslims who have had the courage to stand up to co-religionists who are using faith to accomplish political ends.

The documentary makes clear why the moderates are not more in evidence. Observant Muslims who dare to challenge the Islamists over ideological agendas pursued in the name of religion are shown being subjected to ostracism, intense coercion to conform and, in some cases, death threats. As long as these anti-Islamist Muslims are rightly seen as isolated, vulnerable and powerless, it would be foolish to believe that many of their co-religionists will want to emulate them.

Such a conclusion is especially likely to the extent that fence-sitting moderate Muslims perceive those repressing the anti-Islamists to be what Osama bin Laden calls “the strong horse.” The success of organizations supportive of the Islamists and of their efforts to exploit real or perceived Muslim grievances and civil liberties to create “parallel societies” in Western democracies will, inevitably, attract more adherents to the former’s ranks.

Unfortunately, what has happened to “Islam vs. Islamists” can only compound this perception. The Public Broadcasting Service and its Washington flagship station, WETA, refused to air this film. While a number of explanations have been given for that decision – including demonstrably false claims that the documentary was not submitted on time, was too long, was unfinished, the officially stated reason is that it was: “flawed by incomplete storytelling, a limited focus that does not adequately corroborate the film’s conclusions, and a general lack of attention to the obligation of fairness, which requires that viewers have access to additional context and relevant information about a complex subject.”

In other words, PBS/WETA judged our film to be “unfair” to the “conservative imams” and fellow Islamists shown denouncing, threatening and, in one case, proposing to murder the moderate Muslims we profile. Unless our production team, which included a number of world-class journalists, agreed to change not the “storytelling” but the story, “Islam vs. Islamists” was going to be suppressed.

Interestingly, PBS and WETA were untroubled by the manifest lack of fairness in a film on much the same subject entitled “The Muslim Americans,” produced by Crossroads series host Robert MacNeil. This documentary amounted to a love letter to the Islamists and like-minded organizations in America. It helped legitimate a number of their most prominent spokesmen and agendas, in the process virtually ignoring easily ascertained records of troubling statements, behavior and/or affiliations.

It is bad enough that the public airwaves were used to disseminate only one rendering of the state of Islam in the West – and a highly misleading one, at that. The process whereby the voices of anti-Islamist Muslims were silenced by PBS and WETA was also characterized by egregious behavior, some of which would typically evoke howls of outrage from American liberals.

These included: attempts to blacklist producers on political grounds; outlandish conflicts of interest (notably, MacNeil’s self-dealing and his film’s featuring of two Islamist-sympathizing Muslim “advisors” recruited by WETA to help determine which documentaries were aired); and one of those advisors’ unauthorized preview of a “rough-cut” version for representatives the Nation of Islam, a subject of the film – in clear violation of the most basic tenets of journalistic ethics.

The question occurs: Where are the liberal non-Muslims in the controversy over “Islam vs. Islamists”? They have at least as much on the line as the rest of us in the outcome of this struggle for the soul and future character of Islam.

After all, the anti-Islamist Muslims and conservatives are not the only ones in the Islamofascists’ cross-hairs. Homosexuals, women and Jews are among those whose lives will be made miserable, or simply be prematurely terminated, in the new world order the Islamists have in mind. Blacks are still being sold into slavery in Islamist nations. And, to date, the Islamists have been responsible for killing more of their fellow Muslims than any other population, not just in Darfur but around the world.

Yet, as of this writing, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Brad Sherman of California have been the only examples of individuals with strong liberal credentials who have publicly urged that the American people be allowed to view “Islam vs. Islamists.” They understand the stakes if the voices of the anti-Islamists are suppressed and, worse yet, if those of their repressors continue to be amplified.

The struggle over a documentary designed to do the former is a microcosm of the larger struggle for the future of Islam and the War for the Free World. None of us can afford to be AWOL in these fights.

==============================

Hail Mauritania! An unheralded experiment in Arab democracy. (Weekly Standard, 070501)

by James Kirchick

Americans are right to be worried about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East. In Egypt, elections have done little to loosen five-term president Hosni Mubarak’s grip on power or to stop his plans for turning power over to his son Gamal upon retirement. Whatever degree of democracy exists in Lebanon is threatened by Syria’s not-so-secret meddling, and dour headlines about Iraq fill international newspapers on a daily basis. But now, in a remote corner of the Arab world, an elected government has suddenly bloomed.

On March 25, in the rural, undeveloped, west African nation of Mauritania (population: 3,270,000), Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, a sometime government minister, defeated rival Ahmed Ould Daddah, a prominent economist, in a runoff election for the presidency. Both sides campaigned vigorously and participated in a live, televised debate. Ould Daddah even had his own website, an impressive feat in a country where agriculture accounts for half of the population’s livelihood. Election observers from the European Union, African Union, and Arab League—as well as non-profit civic groups like the U.S. government-funded National Democratic Institute—all praised the process as free and fair. Turnout for preliminary balloting on March 11 was 70%, and it remained high at 67% for the March 25 runoff. Parliamentary elections and a referendum on the country’s new constitution had been held last year. All of these ballots went off without a hitch. Abdallahi was sworn in April 19 and claimed that the peaceful transition to democratic rule makes Mauritania “an undisputable model of a peaceful ending to a monolithic era.” Unfortunately, coverage of this noteworthy international development has been scant.

The good news out of Mauritania contrasts starkly with democracy efforts elsewhere on the continent. In Zimbabwe, on the very same day as the Mauritanian general election, President Mugabe unleashed a torrent of violence against peaceful protestors holding a prayer meeting outside the capital city of Harare. This he followed with a nationwide crackdown on the opposition, in which his secret police abducted hundreds of democracy activists from their homes for brutal beatings and interrogations. Zimbabwe watchers may take heart from the fact that Mauritania used to be as turbulent.

From 1984 until 2005, Mauritania was ruled by Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, a military dictator. His government actively discriminated against minority black Africans and black Moors. He survived an attempted coup in 2003, but in August 2005, while he was visiting Saudi Arabia for the funeral of King Fahd, a group of soldiers calling itself the Military Council for Justice and Democracy took control of the government and announced their plans for a democratic transition.

“The armed forces and security forces have unanimously decided to put an end to the totalitarian practices of the deposed regime under which our people have suffered much over the last several years,” the coup leaders said in a statement issued upon taking control. The military named Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall head of the transition government, promising elections soon. Vall vowed not to run for office himself and barred members of the junta from participating in the election. Mauritanians, given their country’s history, had reason to be skeptical. But events over the next two years showed the coup leaders meant what they had said.

Taking shelter in Niger, Ould Taya fulminated against the coup, calling it “senseless,” and tried to order the military to restore his premiership. But even his own political party renounced him. The African Union initially suspended Mauritania from the organization and the United States at first condemned the coup, but now both have waxed enthusiastic about the progress Mauritania has made.

Abdallahi, the new president, had served briefly as a minister under Taya, but was later imprisoned on corruption allegations. From 1989 until 2003 he lived in exile in Niger. Nevertheless, opponents seized on his association with the previous dictatorship during the campaign. The tactic was perhaps inevitable, given that Abdallahi’s rival, Ould Daddah, had been a vocal critic of the regime and was imprisoned multiple times for his dissidence. But rather than contest the election and pledge to undermine it—a common tactic among electoral losers in fledgling democracies—Ould Daddah has committed himself to seeing his country’s peaceful transition succeed.

As the American journalist James Martin, who was present for the first round of balloting, wrote in the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Weekly, “Mauritania’s official transition to democracy has given many hope that real reform may now become possible in the largely desert country and that its experiment in democratic rule will serve as an example to the rest of the region.” Publicizing the good news out of Mauritania should be an urgent task of the State Department.

The Mauritanians’ success—notably, on their own terms and with little foreign intervention—at establishing the basis of a democratic society in a country that formally outlawed slavery only in 1980, should serve as a challenge to those who claim that democracy is bound to fail in the Arab and Muslim world. Now Iraqis and others can look to the west coast of Africa for an example of Arab liberalism in action.

James Kirchick is assistant to the editor-in-chief of the New Republic.

==============================

Islamic Apologetics: Karen Armstrong tells us to ignore history and doctrine, focus on platitudes about peace and love. (National Review Online, 070507)

By Raymond Ibrahim

Islamic apologist extraordinaire Karen Armstrong is at it again. In an article entitled “Balancing the Prophet” published by the Financial Times, the self-proclaimed “freelance monotheist” engages in what can only be considered second-rate sophistry.

Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister figure.… The scholar monks of Europe stigmatised Muhammad as a cruel warlord who established the false religion of Islam by the sword. They also, with ill-concealed envy, berated him as a lecher and sexual pervert at a time when the popes were attempting to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy.

This is just an obvious error of fact. Armstrong and others try as a routine to tie European sentiments toward Islam to the Crusades, but in fact, “people in the west” had something of a “dim” view of Mohammed half a millenium before the Crusades. As early as the 8th century — just a few generations after Mohammed — Byzantine chronicler Theophanes wrote in his Chrongraphia:

He [Mohammed] taught those who gave ear to him that the one slaying the enemy — or being slain by the enemy — entered into paradise [e.g., Koran 9:111]. And he said paradise was carnal and sensual — orgies of eating, drinking, and women. Also, there was a river of wine … and the woman were of another sort, and the duration of sex greatly prolonged and its pleasure long-enduring [e.g., 56: 7-40, 78:31, 55:70-77]. And all sorts of other nonsense.

It wasn’t only during the Crusades — when, as Armstrong would have it, popes desperately needed to demonize Mohammed and Islam in order to rally support for the Crusades — that Westerners began to see him as a “sinister figure.” Many in the West have seen him as that from the very start. So, claims of Mohammed being a “lecherous pervert” were not due to any “ill-conceived envy” on the part of 12th-century popes trying to “impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy.” (Indeed, this last notion posited by Armstrong — an ex-nun — appears to be more telling of her own “ill-conceived envy” against the Church.) Despite the oft-repeated mantra that the West is “ignorant” of Islam — dear to apologists like Armstrong — this passage reveals that, from the start, Westerners were in fact aware of some aspects of the Koran.

Having distorted history, she next goes on to distort Islamic theology:

Until the 1950s, no major Muslim thinker had made holy war a central pillar of Islam. The Muslim ideologues Abu ala Mawdudi (1903-79) and Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), among the first to do so, knew they were proposing a controversial innovation. They believed it was justified by the current political emergency [emphasis added].

Even better than a “major Muslim thinker,” Allah himself proclaims: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger [i.e., uphold sharia], nor embrace the true faith, [even if they are] from among the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay tribute with willing submission, and feel themselves utterly subdued” (Koran 9:29). Mohammed confirms: “I have been commanded [by Allah] to fight against mankind until they testify that none but Allah is to be worshipped and that Muhammad is Allah’s Messenger” (Bukhari B2N24; next to the Koran, the second most authoritative text in Islam).

This and countless other Koranic verses and oral traditions of Mohammed, not to mention the course of conquest the first “rightly-guided” caliphs followed, have given Islam’s jurists and theologians cause throughout the ages to reach the consensus — binding on the entire Muslim community — that whenever the Muslim world is militarily capable, it must go on the offensive until it subsumes the entire world. Moreover, this world-view was postulated well before Armstrong’s blame-all — the Crusades — ever took place.

Qutb and Mawdudi were certainly not, as she puts it, “the first major Muslim thinkers to do so.” Their claim to fame is that they were great articulators of jihad who awoke the umma to its obligation — an obligation, however, which was formulated by the great sheikhs of Islam (such as revered scholars Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim of the 13th century) who, in their turn, based it on the words of the Koran and Mohammed. But Armstrong is right in that they did stress jihad due to the “current political emergency” — but not in the way she means (i.e., “self-defense”): In their lifetime the Ottoman empire — which, until its last moribund centuries, waged one jihad after another, terrorizing and conquering many of its Christian neighbors — fell and there was no longer a central Muslim sultanate, or “caliphate,” to maintain even a semblance of Islamic power, authority, and expansion. This needed — and still needs — to be rectified under Islam’s worldview.

In fact, Qutb was a staunch opponent of those apologists of Islam in his day who were — just like Armstrong — trying to reinterpret jihad into a defensive movement. Nearly half a century ago, Qutb wrote:

As to persons who attempt to defend the concept of Islamic jihad by interpreting it in the narrow sense of the current concept of defensive war… they lack understanding of the nature of Islam and its primary aim… Can anyone say that if Abu Bakr, Omar, or Uthman [the “rightly-guided” caliphs] had been satisfied that the Roman or Persian powers were not going to attack the Arabian penninsula [in the 7th century], that they would not have striven to spread the message of Islam throughout the world?

During the reign of the “rightly-guided” caliphs, Islam burst forth from Arabia as far west as Spain, as far east as Afghanistan through the sword alone.

Armstrong then spends an inordinate amount of time criticizing author Robert Spencer and his new book The Truth about Muhammad:

The traditions of any religion are multifarious. It is easy, therefore, to quote so selectively that the main thrust of the faith is distorted. But Spencer is not interested in balance. He picks out only those aspects of Islamic tradition that support his thesis. For example, he cites only passages from the Koran that are hostile to Jews and Christians and does not mention the numerous verses that insist on the continuity of Islam with the People of the Book: ‘Say to them: We believe what you believe; your God and our God is one [29:46]’.

But is Armstrong not herself being a bit disingenuous by assuring the people of the West — primarily Christian — that the Koran’s notion of God “insists on continuity” with theirs? What about the other koranic verses: “Infidels are those who say Allah is one of three… [i.e., the Christian Trinity; ]” (5:73). “Infidels are those who say Allah is the Christ [Jesus], son of Mary” (5:17). The divinity of Christ — anathema to Islam — is fundamental to the Christian view of God. Surely Armstrong has not forgotten this from her days at the convent.

Moreover, if writers like Spencer are guilty of quoting Koranic verses “that are hostile to Jews and Christians” that may well be due to Islam’s pivotal doctrine of abrogation — verses revealed later in Mohammed’s career (all the violent and intolerant ones such as 5:73, 5:17, 9:5, and 9:29) supercede and annul any contradictory verses revealed earlier, such as Armstrong’s 29:46 and most of the other peaceful ones which apologists try to make the cornerstone of Islam.

Finally, if books like Spencer’s focus on the violent side of Islam without devoting enough attention to Islam’s more “positive” aspects — is that not only natural? Let us be perfectly clear: Most people in the West interested in learning more about Islam had their interest piqued by the 9/11 attacks, perpetrated by an Muslim group — al Qaeda — who insists that Islam informed its actions. Westerners are primarily interested in how Islam affects them, as non-Muslims. So it should be understandable if books written about Islam in the West focus more on that which concerns it — jihad — than on Islam’s more peaceful side.

Armstrong’s lament that “there is widespread ignorance of Islam in the west,” and that we should rectify this by developing a more “balanced” and “nuanced” understanding of the Koran is as ridiculous as asking Muslims living in Palestine and Iraq to overlook the “Crusader” presence there and instead consult the Bible itself to see how many portions of it accord with peace and justice. (Indeed, such a proposition is worse than ridiculous, since the Bible comes nowhere near to theologically justifying violence against the “Other” in perpetuity as found in the Koran.

In the final analysis, Armstrong’s historical and theological “discrepancies” (to be polite) are baffling — particularly her many oneline sentences that simply defy historical fact: “Muhammad was not a belligerent warrior.” “The idea that Islam should conquer the world was alien to the Koran…” “Muhammad did not shun non-Muslims as ‘unbelievers’ but from the beginning co-operated with them in the pursuit of the common good.” “Islam was not a closed system at variance with other traditions. Muhammad insisted that relations between the different groups must be egalitarian.”

Still, in the end one can sympathize with Armstrong’s closing sentence: “Until we all learn to approach one another with generosity and respect, we cannot hope for peace.” But we should also hasten to add the more important virtues of honesty, sincerity, and truthfulness.

==============================

Islam and democracy (Washington Times, 070508)

By Tulin Daloglu

ANKARA, Turkey. — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a complicated man — a seasoned Islamist politician who understands what it means to challenge the secular principles of Ataturk’s Turkey. Yet during his five-year tenure, Mr. Erdogan made secularism the subject of constant public debate, portraying it as violating the rights of veiled Muslim women.

The country has been desperately lacking in serious discussion about the values of Turkish Islamists and how their understanding and practice of religion has fed fear. The challenge of teaching about Islam is narrowed down to the headscarf worn by Hayrunisa Gul, wife of Foreign Minister and former presidential hopeful Abdullah Gul. Millions of Turks throughout the country — and even in Germany, home to Europe’s largest population of Turkish immigrants — took to the streets to protest any attempt by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to cross the line dividing mosque and state.

Now the Europeans who said Islam and democracy could not harmoniously coexist can cite those crowds as proof, who actually have done all the hard work and struggled to persuade Europe that no clash of religious values exists to prevent Turkey from joining the European Union. The secular Turks admit that Turkey is not ready to be part of Europe today with that fear of darkness coming from inside. Alas it would be betrayal to the larger Muslim population who constantly look up to the West at times of trouble. Yet they don’t appreciate cheap shots about Turkey’s EU destiny. Secular Turks fiercely criticized Dutch parliamentarian Fritz Bolkenstein, who said, “If we are to admit Turkey into the EU then why did we bother to stop the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683?”

The secular Turks who protested do not necessarily doubt whether Islam and democracy can co-exist. But they are concerned about the increasingly visible role in Turkish society of Islamists who define religion by the wearing of headscarves; supporting the separation of the sexes in general and refusing to shake hands with women; banning alcoholic beverages; and shaping the society to more closely adhere to the customs of the Arab world, rather than the Western world. Currently, secular Turkish women have no representation when Mr. Erdogan travels abroad. And they poured to the streets protesting the changing image of Turkey’s women, and the many unknowns that are “veiled” behind it.

The AKP may have agreed to open official accession talks with the EU, but critics believe that party leaders misunderstand the idea of “freedom.” The fight is not over a headscarf, but over embracing modernity as a core component of Turkish society. It is tragic that secularists have failed to enact and stand behind the philosophy of liberal education and broadening the intellectual quest that would allow modernity to function within a Muslim population, ensuring Islam and guaranteeing freedom and liberty while simultaneously promoting advancements in science, technology, arts and literature. That failure haunts Turkey’s future, and the wide gap between urban and rural populations has resulted in a society dividing itself into camps.

Turkey has achieved many milestones, but it has not overcome the fear of reverting to the dark ages — again. But the relationship between freedom and totalitarianism, governed by an interpretation of religion, is not exclusive to Turkey. When the Taliban fell in Afghanistan, women gained freedoms that extended far beyond what the burqa represented — in their homes, in schools, and in society — and those freedoms may yet be threatened if the Taliban reconstitutes. Turkish women do not face such extreme domination, but they remain fearful of the Islamist influence.

Reducing the idea of freedom in to a piece of fabric is a failure for both Islamists and secularists; Turks are missing a crucial opportunity to debate their common future. Leaders have allowed the debate about how Muslim women dress to obscure and derail any real discussion about the understanding and practice of Islam and what it means for Turkish society. It’s not about a headscarf. If Iran’s leaders decided that women did not need to wear headscarves, the Islamic regime’s problems would not suddenly end. Debates would continue about the country’s character, what it represents, and how its society should function. This is no time for distractions from the important questions, or for politics as usual. The rightist parties, represented by the Motherland and True Path, have taken a step in that direction and united under a new but legendary name: “the Democrat Party.” The left, led by Republican People’s Party — Ataturk’s party — is determined to stay the course under its ego-centric leader Deniz Baykal. This approach obstructs any ability to unite the people and secure Turkey’s strategic interests. If the Islamists can secure Mr. Baykal’s resignation, it would be a step toward a fresh start. With him in power, the left cannot unite and put together a serious platform.

Mr. Erdogan’s stubbornness in proving that he can put a veiled first lady in Ataturk’s residence not only hurt religious people but also sharpened the divide among Turks. Now the country faces early general elections divided and confused about whom to vote for, and unsure whether the EU and the United States really want an Islamified Turkey.

==============================

The Subjection of Islamic Women: And the fecklessness of American feminism. (Weekly Standard, 070521)

by Christina Hoff Sommers

The subjection of women in Muslim societies—especially in Arab nations and in Iran—is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening.

If you go to the websites of major women’s groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National Council for Research on Women, or to women’s centers at our major colleges and universities, you’ll find them caught up with entirely other issues, seldom mentioning women in Islam. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today’s campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world.

It is not that American feminists are indifferent to the predicament of Muslim women. Nor do they completely ignore it. For a brief period before September 11, 2001, many women’s groups protested the brutalities of the Taliban. But they have never organized a full-scale mobilization against gender oppression in the Muslim world. The condition of Muslim women may be the most pressing women’s issue of our age, but for many contemporary American feminists it is not a high priority. Why not?

The reasons are rooted in the worldview of the women who shape the concerns and activities of contemporary American feminism. That worldview is—by tendency and sometimes emphatically—antagonistic toward the United States, agnostic about marriage and family, hostile to traditional religion, and wary of femininity. The contrast with Islamic feminism could hardly be greater.

Writing in the New Republic in 1999, philosopher Martha Nussbaum noted with disapproval that “feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States.” Too many fashionable gender theorists, she said, have lost their dedication to the public good. Their “hip quietism . . . collaborates with evil.”

This was a frontal assault, and prominent academic feminists chastised Nussbaum in the letters column. Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton pointed out the dangers of Nussbaum’s “good versus evil scheme.” Wrote Scott, “When Robespierre or the Ayatollahs or Ken Starr seek to impose their vision of the ‘good’ on the rest of society, reigns of terror follow and democratic politics are undermined.” Gayatri Spivak, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia, accused Nussbaum of “flag waving” and of being on a “civilizing mission.” None of the letter writers addressed her core complaint: Too few feminist theorists are showing concern for the millions of women trapped in blatantly misogynist cultures outside the United States.

One reason is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the “underrepresentation” of women on faculties of engineering) than criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist scholar who takes the women’s movement to task for neglecting the plight of foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order.

Take psychology professor Phyllis Chesler. She has been a tireless and eloquent champion of the rights of women for more than four decades. Unlike her tongue-tied colleagues in the academy, she does not hesitate to speak out against Muslim mistreatment of women. In a recent book, The Death of Feminism, she attributes the feminist establishment’s unwillingness to take on Islamic sexism to its support of “an isolationist and America-blaming position.” She faults it for “embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic, heartless, mindless and suicidal.” The sisterhood has rewarded her with excommunication. A 2006 profile in the Village Voice reports that, among academic feminists, “Chesler arouses the vitriol reserved for traitors.”

But Chesler is right. In the literature of women’s studies, the United States is routinely portrayed as if it were just as oppressive as any country in the developing world. Here is a typical example of what one finds in popular women’s studies textbooks (from Women: A Feminist Perspective, now in its fifth edition):

The word “terrorism” invokes images of furtive organizations. . . . But there is a different kind of terrorism, one that so pervades our culture that we have learned to live with it as though it were the natural order of things. Its target is females—of all ages, races, and classes. It is the common characteristic of rape, wife battery, incest, pornography, harassment. . . . I call it “sexual terrorism.”

The primary focus is on the “terror” at home. Katha Pollitt, a columnist at the

Nation, talks of “the common thread of misogyny” connecting Christian Evangelicals to the Taliban:

It is important to remember just how barbarous and cruel the Taliban were. Yet it is also important not to use their example to obscure or deny the common thread of misogyny that connects them with Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. . . .

In a similar vein, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich characterizes Christian evangelical movements as “Christian Wahhabism,” using the name of the sect that is the state religion of Saudi Arabia and the inspiration for Osama bin Laden. Eve Ensler, lionized author of The Vagina Monologues, makes the same point somewhat differently in her popular lecture “Afghanistan is Everywhere”:

We all have different forms of enforced burqas. Every culture has it. Whether it’s an idea or a fascist tyranny of what women are supposed to look like—so that women go to the extremes of liposuction, anorexia and bulimia to achieve it—or whether it’s being covered in a burqa, we all have deep, profound, ongoing daily forms of oppression.

On most American campuses there are small coteries of self-described “vagina warriors” looking for ways to expose and make much of the ravages of patriarchy. Feminists like Pollitt, Ehrenreich, and Ensler can cite several decades of women’s studies research supporting the charge that our culture is ruinous for women. Many scholars—including Camille Paglia, Daphne Patai, Noretta Koertge, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Christine Rosen, and myself—have questioned the quality of the findings and warned that the studies are twisted and unreliable. But academic feminists rarely engage with such criticism. They dismiss it as “backlash.”

Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Katha Pollitt wrote the introduction to a book called Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror. It aimed to show that reactionary religious movements everywhere are targeting women. Says Pollitt:

In Bangladesh, Muslim fanatics throw acid in the faces of unveiled women; in Nigeria, newly established shariah courts condemn women to death by stoning for having sex outside of wedlock. . . . In the United States, Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists have forged a powerful right-wing political movement focused on banning abortion, stigmatizing homosexuality and limiting young people’s access to accurate information about sex.

Pollitt casually places “limiting young people’s access to accurate information about sex” and opposing abortion on the same plane as throwing acid in women’s faces and stoning them to death. Her hostility to the United States renders her incapable of distinguishing between private American groups that stigmatize gays and foreign governments that hang them. She has embraced a feminist philosophy that collapses moral categories in ways that defy logic, common sense, and basic decency.

Eve Ensler takes this line of reasoning to equally ludicrous lengths. In 2003 she gave a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in which, like Pollitt, she claimed that women everywhere are oppressed and subordinate:

I think that the oppression of women is universal. I think we are bonded in every single place of the world. I think the conditions are exactly the same [her emphasis]. I think the nature of the oppression—whether it’s acid burning in one country, or female genital mutilation in another, or gang rapes in the parking lots in high schools of the suburbs—it’s the same idea. . . . The systematic global oppression of women is completely across the globe.

Though Ensler’s perspective is warped, her courage and desire to help are commendable. She went to Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban and smuggled out now-famous footage of a terrified woman in a burqa being executed at close range by a man with an AK-47. Ensler has firsthand knowledge of the unique horrors of Islamic gender fascism. But her “feminist theory” obliterates distinctions between what goes on in Afghanistan and what goes on in Beverly Hills:

I went from Beverly Hills where women were getting vaginal laser rejuvenation surgery—paying four thousand dollars to get their labias trimmed to make them symmetrical because they didn’t like the imbalance. And I flew to Kenya where [women were working to stop] the practice of female genital mutilation. And I said to myself, “What is wrong with this picture?”

A better question is: What is wrong with Eve Ensler? These two surgical phenomena are completely different in both scale and purpose. The number of American women who undergo “vaginal labial rejuvenation” is minuscule: There were 793 such procedures in 2005, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. By contrast, a World Health Organization 2000 fact sheet reports: “Today, the number of girls and women who have undergone female genital mutilation is estimated at between 100 and 140 million. It is estimated that each year, a further 2 million girls are at risk of undergoing FGM.”

The women who elect laser surgery, moreover, are voluntarily seeking relief from physical irregularities that cause them embarrassment or inhibit their sexual enjoyment. The practitioners of genital mutilation, in countries such as Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, believe that removing sensitive parts of the anatomy is the best way to control young women’s sexual urges and assure chastity. Genital cutting causes great pain and suffering and often permanently impairs a female’s capacity for sexual pleasure. Thus, the intentions of the handful of American adults who choose labial surgery for themselves are exactly the opposite of those of the African parents and elders who insist on cutting the genitals of millions of girls.

Given her capacity for conceptual confusion, it is perhaps not surprising that Ensler cites “gang rape in a suburban high school parking lot” to show how women in America are menaced. Yes, that is an atrocity. But it happens rarely, and America’s allegedly “misogynist” culture reacts to it with revulsion and severe punishments.

Happily, not all women’s groups follow the lead of the Enslers, the Pollitts, and the women’s studies theorists. The Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) has been intelligently fighting the mistreatment of women in the Muslim world for several years. In 1997, in a heroic effort to expose the crimes of the Taliban, Eleanor Smeal, the president of FMF, with the help of Mavis and Jay Leno, created a vital national campaign complete with rallies, petitions, and fundraisers. It was a good example of what can be achieved when a women’s group seriously seeks to address the mistreatment of women outside the United States. The FMF, working with human rights groups, helped to persuade the United States and the United Nations to deny formal recognition to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It helped convince the oil company UNOCAL not to build a pipeline across Afghanistan, and it brought the oppression of women living under radical Islamic law into clear relief for all the world to see.

But Smeal and her organization soon found themselves attacked by the same monitors of rectitude who disparaged Martha Nussbaum. Ann Russo, director of women’s and gender studies at Chicago’s DePaul University (writing in the International Feminist Journal of Politics), accused the FMF of practicing a kind of “imperial feminism.” Said Russo:

The FMF’s campaign narrative is one of colonialist protection rather than of solidarity. . . . [It] capitalizes on the images of prominent white Western women, like Mavis Leno, Eleanor Smeal and other women politicians and celebrity figures, who construct themselves as “free” and “liberated” and thus in the best position to “save” Afghan women.

Today, the Feminist Majority Foundation continues to support Muslim women around the world, but the effort has lost much of its momentum. Most of the foundation’s current work is directed against what it perceives as injustices suffered by women in America.

On February 20, 2007, a Pakistani women’s rights activist and provincial minister for social welfare, Zilla Huma Usman, was shot to death by a Muslim fanatic for not wearing a veil. And he had a second reason for killing her: She had encouraged girls in her community to take part in outdoor sports. The plight of women like Usman does not figure in NOW’s “Six Priority Items,” although Global Feminism is one of the 19 subjects it designates as “Other Important Issues.” NOW hardly mentions Muslim women, except in the context of the demand that the U.S. military withdraw from Iraq. So what sort of issue does the flagship feminist organization consider important?

NOW has just launched a 2007 “Love Your Body” calendar as part of its ongoing initiative of the same name. The body calendar warns of an increase in eating disorders and includes a photograph celebrating the shape of pears. There is also an image of the Statue of Liberty with the caption, “Give me your curves, your wrinkles, your natural beauty yearning to breathe free.” The calendar bears these inspiring words: “None of us is free until we are all free.”

To breathe free, college women are encouraged to organize “Love Your Body” evenings. NOW suggests they host “Indulgence” parties: “Invite friends over and encourage them to wear whatever makes them feel good—sweat suits, flip flops, pajamas—and serve delicious, decadent foods or silly snacks without the guilt. Urge everyone to come prepared to talk about their feelings and experiences.”

This is pathetic. To be sure, serious eating disorders afflict a small percentage of women. But much larger numbers suffer because poor eating habits and inactivity render them overweight, even obese. NOW should not be encouraging college girls to indulge themselves in ways detrimental to their well-being. Nor should it be using the language of human rights in discussing the weight problems of American women.

The inability to make simple distinctions shows up everywhere in contemporary feminist thinking. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, edited by geographer Joni Seager, is a staple in women’s studies classes in universities. It was named “Reference Book of the Year” by the American Library Association and has received other awards. Seager, formerly a professor of women’s studies and chair of geography at the University of Vermont, is now dean of environmental studies at York University in Toronto. Her atlas, a series of color-coded maps and charts, documents the status of women, highlighting the countries where women are most at risk for poverty, illiteracy, and oppression.

One map shows how women are kept “in their place” by restrictions on their mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out looking as bad in this respect as Uganda: Both countries are shaded dark yellow, to signify extremely high levels of restriction. Seager explains that in parts of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman for his wife by raping her. The United States gets the same rating because, Seager says, “state legislators enacted 301 anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001.” Never mind that the Ugandan practice is barbaric, while the activism surrounding abortion in the United States is a sign of a contentious and free democracy working out its disagreements. Besides which, Seager’s categories obscure the fact that in Uganda, abortion is illegal and “unsafe abortion is the leading cause of maternal mortality” (so states a 2005 report by the Gutt macher Institute), while American abortion law, even after the recent adoption of state regulations, is generally considered among the most liberal of any nation.

On another map the United States gets the same rating for domestic violence as Pakistan. Seager reports that in the United States, “22%-35% of women who seek emergency medical assistance at hospital are there for reasons of domestic violence.” Wrong. She apparently misread a Justice Department study showing that 22%-35% of women who go to hospitals because of violent attacks are there for reasons of domestic violence. When this correction is made, the figure for domestic-violence victims in emergency rooms drops to a fraction of 1%. Why would Seager so uncritically seize on a dubious statistic? Like many academic feminists, she is eager to show that American women live under an intimidating system of “patriarchal authority” that is comparable to those found in many less developed countries. Never mind that this is wildly false.

Hard-line feminists such as Seager, Pollitt, Ensler, the university gender theorists, and the NOW activists represent the views of only a tiny fraction of American women. Even among women who identify themselves as feminists (about 25%), they are at the radical extreme. But in the academy and in most of the major women’s organizations, the extreme is the mean. The hard-liners set the tone and shape the discussion. This is a sad state of affairs. Muslim women could use moral, intellectual, and material support from the West to improve their situation. But only a rational, reality-based women’s movement would be capable of actually helping. Women who think that looking like a pear is an essential human right are not valuable allies.

The good news is that Muslim women are not waiting around for Western feminists to rescue them. “Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim women are burning,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Kay Hymowitz in a prescient 2003 essay, “but in the Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning movement to address the miserable predicament of the second sex.” The number of valiant and resourceful Muslim women who are devoting themselves to the cause of greater freedom grows each and every day.

They have a heritage to build on. There have been organized women’s movements in countries such as Iran, Lebanon, and Egypt for more than a century. And many women in Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia already enjoy almost Western levels of freedom. But as radical Islam tightens its grip in places like Iran and rural Pakistan, and as it increasingly threatens Muslim women everywhere, even some devoutly religious women are quietly organizing to resist. Mehrangiz Kar, an Iranian human rights lawyer, now a researcher at Harvard Law School, predicts that “a feminist explosion is well on its way.”

Islamic feminists believe that women’s rights are compatible with Islam rightly understood. One of their central projects is progressive religious reform. Through careful translation and interpretation of the Koran and other sacred texts, scholars challenge interpretations that have been used to justify sexist customs. They point out that forced veiling, arranged marriages, and genital cutting are rooted in tribal paganism and are nowhere enjoined by the Koran. Where the Koran explicitly permits a practice such as the physical chastisement of wives by husbands, the feminist exegetes try to show that, like slavery, the practice is anachronistic and incompatible with the true spirit of the faith. This kind of interpretation of scripture has been practiced by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scholars for centuries. Now Islamic women want to play a part in it, and nothing in Islamic law, they believe, prohibits their doing so.

This past November more than 100 Muslim lawyers, scholars, and activists from 25 countries gathered in New York City for the express purpose of supporting the modernization of Islamic jurisprudence and reviving the spirit of ijtihad, a once vibrant Islamic tradition of independent thinking and reasoning about sacred texts. The organizing group, the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity (WISE), plans to launch an international shura, a consultative council of Muslim women leaders who will advise religious and political leaders on women’s issues. They are also establishing a scholarship fund for the training of gifted female students to become Koranic scholars, or muftia. These women would be licensed to render fatwas, religious judgments that, while nonbinding, drive custom and practice in Islamic societies.

The WISE participants were a who’s who of Muslim women lawyers, writers, and rights advocates. Perhaps the most affecting speaker was Mukhtar Mai. She is the Pakistani woman who, in 2002, was gang-raped by four men because of crimes allegedly committed by her brother. After the rape, which was sanctioned by an all-male village council, Mukhtar Mai was expected to preserve the “honor” of her family by killing herself. Instead, she and her family went to the police, even at the risk of being charged for the “crime” of being raped. A local imam, outraged by her treatment, denounced the attack in his Friday sermon. Reporters soon appeared, and Mukhtar’s case became a cause célèbre.

The conference participants varied widely in their politics and their relation to Islam. Unlike the present American feminist movement, which has no place for traditionally religious women, Islamic feminism is inclusive. Some of its proponents wear the veil, others oppose it. Some want egalitarian mosques, others don’t mind traditional arrangements where men and women are separated. Even a few non-Muslims were present. What unites them in feminism is their commitment to the universal dignity of women. They are all vehemently opposed to such practices as forced marriages, honor killings, genital cutting, child marriage, and wife-beating. They are passionately dedicated to the educational, economic, legal, and political advancement of women.

The feminism that is quietly surging in the Muslim world is quite different from its contemporary counterpart in the United States. Islamic feminism is faith-based, family-centered, and well-disposed towards men. This is feminism in its classic and most effective form, as students of women’s emancipation know. American women won the vote in the early 20th century through the combined forces of progressivism and conservatism. Radical thinkers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull, and Alice Paul played an indispensable role, but it was traditionalists like Frances Willard (president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union) and Carrie Chapman Catt (founder of the League of Women Voters) who brought the cause of women’s suffrage into the mainstream.

In particular, Frances Willard—today an almost forgotten figure—was beloved and immensely famous at the time of her death in 1898. She had a gift for reaching out to devoutly religious women and showing them how political equality was consistent with piety. This moved men too. She was critical in turning the once elite suffrage movement into a groundswell.

Today’s feminists have anathematized Willard because she held two conventional views they find intolerable: She regarded “womanliness” as a virtue and a source of strength, power, and beauty, not as a socially constructed domestic prison; and she advanced women’s rights within, not in opposition to, the framework of traditional religion. These two traits are precisely the ones that gave Willard mass appeal in her own day and that make her philosophy relevant to women struggling for their rights inside highly traditional Islamic societies.

In Search of Islamic Feminism, a 1998 book by University of Texas Middle Eastern studies professor Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, offers a rare glimpse of Muslim women activists. In Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, and Iraq, Fernea kept encountering what she calls “family feminism.” Several of the women she interviewed reject what they see as divisiveness in today’s American feminism. As one Iraqi women’s advocate, Haifa Abdul Rahman, told her, “We see feminism in America as dividing women from men, separating women from the family. This is bad for everyone.” Fernea was not only struck by the family orientation of the women she encountered, she was also awed by their feminine graciousness. The Italian novelist and essayist Italo Calvino once made a list of requirements for a successful liberation movement. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “There must also be beauty.” There is beauty in Islamic feminism.

Islamic feminism has some celebrated adherents, among them the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, the Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, and the Canadian journalist and human rights activist Irshad Manji. In her 2004 feminist manifesto, The Trouble with Islam Today, Manji writes, “We Muslims . . . are in crisis and we are dragging the rest of the world with us. If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it’s now.”

Manji is right: In particular, a feminist reformation could be as dangerous to the dreams of the jihadists as any military assault by the West. After all, the oppression of women is not an incidental feature of the societies that foster terrorism. It is a linchpin of the system of social control that the jihadists are fighting to impose worldwide. Women’s equality is as incompatible with radical Islam’s plan for domination and submission as it is with polygamy. Women freely moving about, expressing their opinions, and negotiating their relationships with men from a position of equal dignity rather than servitude are a moderating, civilizing force in any society. Female scholars voicing their opinions without inhibition would certainly puncture some cherished jihadist fantasies.

Is an Islamic feminist reformation a realistic hope? In the last speech of her life, in 1906, American feminist pioneer Susan B. Anthony famously told her audience, “Failure is impossible.” Anthony, however, was formed by and worked within a liberal democracy founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. Even when the American women’s movement was at its most controversial in the 19th and early 20th centuries, its exponents, with few exceptions, risked only ridicule or shunning. Today’s Muslim feminists face imprisonment, lashing, disfigurement, and murder. The leader of the radical wing of the 19th-century American women’s movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was a religious skeptic and harshly critical of sexism in the Bible. Her views were met by social antagonism and stern disapproval from more conservative feminists—all of it civil and peaceable. Stanton’s present-day counterpart, Somali-born Dutch author Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute), is a religious skeptic who is harshly critical of sexism in the Koran. Her views are met by violence and death threats from Muslim fanatics. She has to be escorted by bodyguards.

Success, then, is not certain. Yet there are many hopeful signs. Experience in Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey is encouraging. Groups like WISE are holding up a new image of female piety that does not require silence, powerlessness, and second-class citizenship. And individual women such as Pakistan’s Mukhtar Mai, Morocco’s Fatima Mernissi, Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, Canada’s Irshad Manji, and Holland’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali are offering the world profiles in astonishing courage and grace. Their example may prove as infectious as it is inspiring. Radical Islam does indeed pose an extreme challenge to the cause of women’s rights—but these wise and brave women pose a devastating and unexpected challenge to radical Islam.

I asked Daisy Kahn, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement and organizer of the WISE conference, how Americans can help. Her answer was simple: “Support us. Embrace our struggle.” That is already happening, though mostly outside feminist circles. There are scores of independent organizations—groups like Freedom House, Global Giving, the Independent Women’s Forum, Project Ijtihad, Equality Now, and the Initiative for Inclusive Security—that have begun to work in effective ways to support Muslim women. Such groups, both liberal and conservative, may not identify themselves as feminist, but they embody the ideals and principles of the classical, humane feminism of Stanton, Anthony, and Willard.

Those “First Wave” reformers made history. Their classical “equity” feminism was predominant in the United States long before the current band of activists and theorists transformed and debased it beyond recognition. Their understanding of equality was never at war with femininity, never at war with men, or with family, or with logic or common sense. It is alive again in Islamic feminism.

The women who constitute the American feminist establishment today are destined to play little role in the battle for Muslim women’s rights. Preoccupied with their own imagined oppression, they can be of little help to others—especially family-centered Islamic feminists. The Katha Pollitts and Eve Enslers, the vagina warriors and university gender theorists—these are women who cannot distinguish between free and unfree societies, between the Taliban and the Promise Keepers, between being forced to wear a veil and being socially pressured to be slender and fit. Their moral obtuseness leads many of them to regard helping Muslim women as “colonialist” or as part of a “hegemonic” “civilizing mission.” It disqualifies them as participants in this moral fight.

In reality, of course, it is the Islamic feminists themselves who are on a civilizing mission—one that is vital to their own welfare and to the welfare of an anxious world. A reviewer of Irshad Manji’s manifesto celebrating Islamic feminism aptly remarked, “This could be Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare.” Ipso facto, it should be our fondest dream. And if, along the way, Islamic feminism were to have a wholesome influence on American feminism, so much the better.

==============================

Poll: 1 in 4 U.S. Young Muslims OK With Homicide Bombings Against Civilians (Foxnews, 070523)

WASHINGTON — One out of four young U.S. Muslims believe homicide bombings against civilians are OK to “defend Islam,” according to a new poll.

The poll by the Pew Research Center also finds some Muslim Americans seem to be separating from mainstream America in their attitudes toward the War on Terror and U.S. Mideast policy.

The study found that among the nation’s younger Muslims, 26% say homicide bombings can at least rarely be justified “in order to defend Islam from its enemies.”

“It is a hair-raising number,” said Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, which promotes the compatibility of Islam with democracy.

The poll briefly describes the rationales for and against “suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets” and then asks, “Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?”

Younger U.S. Muslims under the age of 30 are much more willing to accept homicide bombing in the defense of Islam than are their older counterparts, the study found. While 69% of Muslims under 30 say homicide bombings are never justified, 2% say they’re often justified, 13% say bombings are sometimes justified and 11% say they are rarely justified. Only 9% of older U.S. Muslims said homicide attacks are at least rarely justified.

In addition to young Muslims’ attitudes towards homicide bombings, the study found that only 40% of U.S. Muslims believe that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. Another 28% said they don’t believe it.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, 53% said it’s been more difficult to be Muslim in America.

The Pew poll also found that almost half of the nation’s Muslims are more likely to identify themselves as Muslims first and then Americans, with 47% placing religious affiliation above nationality.

Three out of four people surveyed said the decision to go to war in Iraq was wrong, and 48% said using force in Afghanistan was wrong. Five percent of those surveyed had a “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” view of Al Qaeda, while 58% had a “very unfavorable” opinion of the terror group.

But the study also found that most of the nation’s Muslim community is “largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.”

The poll also found that U.S. Muslims reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries.

In Pew surveys last year, support in some Muslim countries exceeded 50%, while it was considered justifiable by about one in four Muslims in Britain and Spain, and one in three in France.

“We have crazies just like other faiths have them,” said Eide Alawan, who directs interfaith outreach at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Mich., one of the nation’s largest mosques. He said killing innocent people contradicts Islam.

The survey included more than 1,000 of the nation’s estimated 2.35 million Muslims and was conducted in English and several foreign languages.

Andrew Kohut, Pew director, said in an interview that support for the attacks represented “one of the few trouble spots” in the survey.

==============================

Tiny Minority, Big Problem: Even a few suicide-bomber sympathizers is still far too many. (National Review Online, 070523)

By Michelle Malkin

If we believe the spin of Associated Press headline writers, there’s little cause for concern about a new Pew poll of American Muslims. “Most U.S. Muslims reject suicide bombings,” the AP headline writer blithely reports.

But the details of the poll show that the always-downplayed tiny minority of jihadi sympathizers in America is cause for big concern.

The poll found that while 80% of U.S. Muslims believe suicide bombings of civilians to defend Islam cannot be justified, fully 13% said they can be justified, at least rarely. One in four younger American Muslims find suicide bombings in defense of Islam “acceptable at least in some circumstances.”

About 29% of those surveyed had either favorable views about al Qaeda or did not express an opinion. Yes, they either gave al Qaeda thumbs-up or had no opinion about the terrorist group responsible for slaughtering nearly 3,000 of their fellow Americans on 9/11 and responsible for a global bloodbath from Bali to Britain, the Middle East, and beyond.

A third of those polled believe the invasion of Afghanistan to take out al Qaeda training camps after 9/11 was wrong. In addition, only 40% of all American Muslims believe Arab men carried about the 9/11 attacks — joining Charlie Sheen, Rosie O’Donnell, and the inside-job conspiracy mongers. The poll focused particular concern on jihadi sympathy among young Muslims and black Muslims:

Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries. However, there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than others. Fewer native-born African American Muslims than others completely condemn al Qaeda. In addition, younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified.

“It is a hair-raising number,” Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, told the AP. Indeed. The numbers should be a wake-up call, not another excuse for the mainstream media to downplay the threat of homegrown jihad.

The poll comes on the heels of the Fort Dix jihadi terror bust involving young, American-raised Muslims and the conviction this week of Muslim doctor Rafiq Abdus Sabir — born in Harlem, based in Florida — who had pledged loyalty to al Qaeda and vowed to treat injured al Qaeda fighters so they could return to Iraq to kill Americans. A Brooklyn bookstore owner and a Washington, D.C., cab driver also pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison in the case. The tiny minority of jihadi sympathizers aren’t just sitting around stewing harmlessly about their beliefs. They are recruiting, proselytizing, plotting, and growing.

I’m reminded of a similar poll conducted in Indonesia last fall. One in ten Indonesian Muslims was found to support bombings in defense of Islam. They took the news a little more seriously in “moderate” Indonesia. One in 10 in Indonesia, you see, equals 19 million Muslims for violent jihad. That’s just Indonesia.

Recent polling in Britain found that 13% of British Muslims believe the London subway bombers are righteous “martyrs,” and 7% approve of suicide bombing attacks on civilians in Britain in some circumstances.

Now, add that to the 16% of French Muslims, 16% of Spanish Muslims, 7% of German Muslims, 28% of Egyptian Muslims, 14% of Pakistani Muslims, and 46% of Nigerian Muslims who told Pew last summer that “violence against civilian targets in order to defend Islam” can be justified “often/sometimes.”

A few fringe jihadists here, a few fringe jihadists there, and soon you’re talking about bloody real numbers.

==============================

“The World’s Gravest Terrorist Threat”: It isn’t Islamophobia that’s keeping Muslim nations down. (National Review Online, 070605)

By Fred Gedrich

Foreign ministers from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) recently held a meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan, where they declared, “Islamophobia is the world’s gravest terrorist threat.” The term connotes an irrational fear or prejudice toward Muslims and the Islamic religion.

While a legitimate concern for many Muslims, Islamophobia pales in comparison to the long-standing problems within OIC member countries. Thirty-eight years after the organization’s founding, a large number of Muslims suffer still from oppression, poverty, illiteracy, genocide, and locally bred terrorism. The principals most responsible for perpetuating these conditions are an assortment of authoritarian rulers and Islamic extremists.

The OIC is currently comprised of 56 nations plus the Palestinian Authority. One of its main missions is to “ensure the progress and well-being” of the world’s estimated 1.4 billion Muslims (about 85% Sunni and 15% Shiite) mostly residing in Middle Eastern, North African, Central Asian, and Southeast Asian countries.

Freedom House, a nonprofit group dedicated to monitoring global freedom and cofounded by Eleanor Roosevelt, reports that only five of 57 OIC members (Benin, Indonesia, Mali, Senegal, and Suriname) provide their citizens the full panoply of political rights and civil liberties to qualify as truly free countries. And only four members provide the necessary legal environment, political influences, and economic conditions to guarantee that news provided by national media outlets has been fully accessed, objectively reported, and accurately disseminated.

OIC residents lag far behind much of the world in terms of sustainable income, despite enormous wealth in several countries like Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The per capita gross domestic product for residents of OIC countries is $4,100, compared to $11,600 for residents of non-Muslim countries. In nations like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen, most residents live on $2 a day or less.

About 35% of the OIC’s residents, age 15 and above, cannot read or write. Conversely, the illiteracy rate for similarly-aged residents of non-Muslim countries is only 13%. In two of the group’s largest countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan, more than half of the combined population is illiterate. And one-third of men and half of all women in the 21 Arab states and Palestine are illiterate as well.

Genocide has been raging in Sudan’s Darfur region for several years, with 200,000 killed and 2.5 million displaced. Other OIC nations will not intervene. Its leaders seem to prefer honoring a provision in the organization’s charter requiring each member to “not interfere in the internal affairs of member states” above protecting innocent life.

Two-thirds of the world’s 42 foreign terrorist organizations, according to the U.S. State Department, have gestated and operate from areas governed by OIC members. While the primary aim of most of them is to destroy Israel and greatly diminish U.S. regional and global influence, the vast majority of their victims have been innocent Muslims. Radical Islamists use a dangerous mix of politics and religion to target for recruitment the abused, misinformed, impoverished, under-educated, and others to become participants in various jihad movements.

Islamic terrorists affiliated with the likes of al Qaeda (Sunni) and Hezbollah (Shiite) disguise themselves as civilians, hide in civilian populations, use civilians as shields, indiscriminately slaughter civilians, and torture and kill captives. Their actions clearly violate the laws and customs of war specified in Geneva conventions and soil the Islamic religion. If left unchecked, these non-state actors threaten the very foundation of the nation-state system. Respectable Muslims are appalled at their conduct. The OIC shouldn’t brand non-Muslims as Islamophobes for simply expressing their outrage and concern at, and for taking reasonable action against, this barbarity. Its specious claim of a worldwide Islamophobic scare is only an attempt to mask its greater failing to help its Muslim citizens.

After 38 years of failure, it’s doubtful that the current OIC majority will deliver all Muslims a better future as stated in its charter. Authoritarian rulers are unwilling to loosen their grip on power. Radical Islamic extremists, whose activists and sympathizers represent up to 20% of the Muslim population by some accounts, offer a trip back to the seventhth century under sharia law as a cure to current maladies — which law, among other things, treats women unequally and represents a major human-rights violation.

Freedom-seeking Muslims must take control of their governments and ensure much-needed changes to political, economic, and educational institutions occur. And if they do, free countries should be willing to help. When freedom flourishes, war abates and people prosper.

Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation, is showing the way forward. This former Dutch colony recently transformed into a true democracy. Hopefully, others will soon follow. Such a development can’t come soon enough for most residents of OIC countries.

==============================

‘Muhammad’ Jumps to No. 2 in Britain as Most Popular Name for Baby Boys (Foxnews, 070606)

Muhammad is now second only to Jack as the most popular name for baby boys in Britain and is likely to rise to No 1 by next year, a study by The Times of London has found.

The name, if all 14 different spellings are included, was shared by 5,991 newborn boys last year, beating Thomas into third place, followed by Joshua and Oliver.

Scholars said that the name’s popularity was driven partly by the growing number of young Muslims having families, coupled with the desire to name their child in honor of the Prophet Muhammad.

Muhammad Anwar, Professor of Ethnic Relations at Warwick University, said: “Muslim parents like to have something that shows a link with their religion or with the Prophet.”

Muhammad, which means “one who is praiseworthy”, is often given to boys as an honorary prefix and is followed by the name by which they are commonly known. It is regularly cited as the most common name in the world, though there is no concrete evidence.

Overall, Muslims account for 3% of the British population, about 1.5 million people. However, the Muslim birthrate is roughly three times higher than that of non-Muslims.

Statistics also show that Muslim households are larger than those headed by someone of another religion. In 2001, the average size of a Muslim household was 3.8 people while a third contained more than five people.

The leading name for girls born to Muslim parents in 2006 was Aisha, in 110th place. Its meaning is “wife of the Prophet,” or “life.”

==============================

CAIR membership falls 90% since 9/11 (Washington Times, 070612)

Membership in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has declined more than 90% since the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to tax documents obtained by The Washington Times.

The number of reported members spiraled down from more than 29,000 in 2000 to fewer than 1,700 in 2006. As a result, the Muslim rights group’s annual income from dues dropped from $732,765 in 2000, when yearly dues cost $25, to $58,750 last year, when the group charged $35.

The organization instead is relying on about two dozen donors a year to contribute the majority of the money for CAIR’s budget, which reached nearly $3 million last year.

Asked about the decline, Parvez Ahmed, CAIR’s board chairman, pointed to the number of donors.

“We are proud that our grass-roots support in the American Muslim community has allowed CAIR to grow from having eight chapters and offices in 2001 to having 33 today,” Mr. Ahmed said.

The self-described civil liberties organization for Muslims seeks to portray “a positive image of Islam” through public relations and the press, but instead has alienated some by defending questionable accusations of discrimination.

Critics of the organization say they are not surprised that membership is sagging, and that a recent decision by the Justice Department to name CAIR as “unindicted co-conspirators” in a federal case against another foundation charged with providing funds to a terrorist group could discourage new members.

M. Zuhdi Jasser, director of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, says the sharp decline in membership calls into question whether the organization speaks for American Muslims, as the group has claimed.

“This is the untold story in the myth that CAIR represents the American Muslim population. They only represent their membership and donors,” Mr. Jasser said.

“Post-9/11, they have marginalized themselves by their tired exploitation of media attention for victimization issues at the expense of representing the priorities of the American Muslim population,” Mr. Jasser said.

The organization has condemned some suicide bombings in Israel but has been criticized for refusing to condemn Hamas or Hezbollah by name.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, rescinded a “certificate of accomplishment” to Sacramento activist Basim Elkarra after learning that he was a CAIR official, according to Newsweek magazine.

Mrs. Boxer “expressed concern” about past statements and actions by the group, as well as assertions by some law-enforcement officials that it “gives aid to international terrorist groups,” the magazine quoted her spokeswoman as saying.

Rep. Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania Democrat, came under fire after delivering a speech at a local CAIR fundraiser in April. Mr. Sestak later said that one of his aides, a former CAIR spokeswoman for the Philadelphia chapter, booked the engagement without his consent.

In response to the arrest of the “Fort Dix Six” involving a plot to attack the New Jersey military base, CAIR “applauded efforts” by federal law-enforcement authorities but “requested that media outlets and public officials refrain from linking this case to the faith of Islam.”

CAIR also asked “mosques and Islamic institutions in New Jersey and nationwide to report any incidents of anti-Muslim backlash.”

CAIR is leading the legal charge for six imams who were removed from a US Airways flight in November claiming the men suffered from discrimination because of their religion.

Passengers who complained that the men were acting suspiciously are now being sued along with the airline, prompting legislative action by House Republicans to protect “John Doe” passengers from legal action for reporting suspicious activity that may foreshadow a terrorist attack.

CAIR listed contributors in its Form 990 filings with the Internal Revenue Service, but the IRS redacted all the names before releasing the documents.

In 2001, 26 contributors gave more than $1.6 million; in 2002, 26 gave more than $2.6 million; in 2003, 24 gave more than $2 million; in 2004, 20 gave more than $1.4 million; in 2005, 19 contributed $1.3 million.

The Washington Times requested from the IRS all the 990 Forms that CAIR has filed since its inception in 1994 under the law regulating tax-exempt organizations.

The first two annual forms are no longer on file pursuant to agency regulations. Tax forms for 1997 and 1998 were “unavailable” either because the group’s income was less than $25,000, was filed under a parent corporation or “the return may have been requested by another department of the Internal Revenue Service,” the IRS said.

CAIR’s papers were provided by the government agency for tax years 1996, 1999, and 2000 through 2005.

Revenue from those periods totaled more than $17.7 million, while program expenses totaled $8.5 million.

Mr. Jasser criticized CAIR “to be of little use in the war against militant Islamism. Their ideological sympathies for Islamism and inability to condemn Muslim terrorist organizations and dictatorships by name have made them a liability for a number of American Muslims who do not share their ideology.”

“All of this must impact their membership numbers,” he said.

In 2004, a federal grand jury returned a 42-count indictment against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and seven officers for raising money for Hamas, money laundering and falsifying tax returns. The Holy Land trial begins July 16 in Dallas, and CAIR is listed among 300 new co-conspirators filed May 29 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

According to the government’s trial brief, filed May 29, CAIR is an entity “who are, and or were, members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organization.”

Mousa Abu Marzook, a former CAIR official, “has been since 1995, a specially designated terrorist and Hamas leader,” the brief said.

Mr. Ahmed called the Justice Department’s brief “a McCarthyite political move that allows the government to smear major American Muslim groups, including hundreds of mosques representing hundreds of thousands of ordinary Muslims nationwide, without any evidence being offered in a court of law and without legal recourse for those defamed.”

“It is unfortunate that the Justice Department apparently violated its own guidelines, which indicate that such lists are to remain sealed to prevent unfair and un-American labeling of those who are not facing any criminal charges,” Mr. Ahmed said.

Conservative scholar Phil Kent said the Justice Department’s actions will “definitely hurt CAIR’s membership numbers in the future.”

“I’m not surprised to see these figures,” said Mr. Kent, who has written a book called “Foundations of Betrayal: How the Liberal Super Rich Undermine America.”

Mr. Jasser says some Muslims are hesitant to pay tithes to local imams or join organizations out of fear it may be linked to other groups that finance terrorism.

CAIR constantly notes in its press releases that it cooperates with federal law-enforcement activities and claims to conduct sensitivity training for Homeland Security officials. A February press release from CAIR’s Chicago office says it met with Homeland Security immigration officials and made an agreement to “conduct sensitivity training to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers and possibly prison personnel.”

Homeland Security officials deny such claims and a check of the Office of Management and Budget Watch database of government contracts since 2000 shows CAIR has never been awarded a grant or a government contract.

“The department does not have a formalized relationship with that particular organization,” said one Homeland Security official speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We do have formalized relations with other community groups with whom we do contracts for training and consultation on matters that are specific to a given community.”

“It is not uncommon for that particular organization to issue a press release attempting to overstate their interaction with the department,” the official said.

==============================

Pakistan Minister Says Salman Rushdie’s Knighthood Justifies Suicide Attacks (Foxnews, 070618)

TEHRAN, Iran — Pakistan on Monday condemned Britain’s award of a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie as an affront to Muslim sentiments, and a Cabinet minister said the honor provided a justification for suicide attacks.

In the eastern city of Multan, hard-line Muslim students burned effigies of Queen Elizabeth II and Rushdie. About 100 students carrying banners condemning the author also chanted, “Kill him! Kill him!”

On Saturday, Britain announced the knighthood for the author of “The Satanic Verses” in an honors list timed for the official celebration of the queen’s 81st birthday. It has also drawn condemnation from Iran.

Lawmakers in Pakistan’s lower house of parliament on Monday passed a resolution proposed by Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, who branded Rushdie a “blasphemer.” He said the honor had hurt the sentiments of Muslims across the world.

“This is an occasion for the (world’s) 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision,” Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, later said in parliament.

“The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the ‘sir’ title,” ul-Haq said, also urging Muslim countries to break diplomatic ties with London.

“If Muslims do not unite, the situation will get worse and Salman Rushdie may get a seat in the British parliament.”

After his comments were reported on local news networks, ul-Haq clarified to lawmakers that his aim had been to look into the root causes of terrorism.

Lawmakers voted unanimously for the resolution although one opposition member, Khwaja Asif, said it exposed a contradiction in the government’s policy as an ally of Britain in the war on terrorism.

Robert Brinkley, Britain’s high commissioner to Pakistan, defended the decision to honor Rushdie for his contributions to literature.

Rushdie is one of the most prominent novelists of the late 20th century whose 13 books have won numerous awards, including the Booker Prize for “Midnight’s Children” in 1981.

“It is simply untrue to suggest that this in anyway is an insult to Islam or the Prophet Muhammed, and we have enormous respect for Islam as a religion and for its intellectual and cultural achievements,” Brinkley said.

Asked if he was concerned it could provoke unrest in Pakistan, Brinkley said, “We will just have to see where it goes from here. There’s certainly no reason for that.”

At the Multan protest, Asim Dahr, a student leader from the group Jamiat Turaba Arabia, demanded Rushdie face Islamic justice.

“This queen has made a mockery of Muslims by giving him a title of ‘sir.’ Salman Rushie was condemned by Imam Khomeni and he issued a decree about his death. He should be handed over to the Muslims so they can try him according to Islamic laws,” he said.

Iran’s late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a 1989 fatwa, or religious edict, ordering Muslims to kill the author because “The Satanic Verses” allegedly insulted Islam. The threat forced Rushdie to live in hiding for a decade.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said Rushdie’s knighthood would hamper interfaith understanding and that Islamabad would protest to London.

“We deplore the decision of the British government to knight him. This we feel is insensitive and we would convey our sentiments to the British government.”

==============================

‘Dhimmification’ on the march (Townhall.com, 070629)

Diana West

If anyone wants to know why Muslims the world over tell pollsters the United States is at war with Islam, just read President Bush’s speech at the Islamic Center of Washington, especially the part about American-style religious freedom — in the president’s words, “what we wish for the world.”

He began this way: “For those who seek a true understanding of our country, they need look no farther than here.”

No, not the mosque itself, but down the street it occupies. “This Muslim center sits quietly down the road from a synagogue, a Lutheran Church, a Catholic parish, a Greek Orthodox chapel, a Buddhist temple — each with faithful followers who practice their deeply held beliefs and live side by side in peace,” the president explained, standing in his Islamically observant stocking feet before a cool Muslim audience. “This is what freedom offers: societies where people can live and worship as they choose without intimidation, without suspicion, without a knock on the door from the secret police.”

As one who has attended a Bar Mitzvah at that synagogue down the road, I have news for the president: Freedom, American-style, has changed. To enter, I passed an armed guard holding an automatic weapon manning the door. Armed guards like him man many such doors in many such cities. In fact, so common is it for religious worship (mainly, but not exclusively, Jewish worship) to require armed protection today that we miss the implications: the degree to which freedom to worship without fear in America has been curtailed by the open-ended threat of Buddhist violence.

Whoops, sorry. I mean, curtailed by the open-ended threat of Greek Orthodox violence. Or was that Catholic Lutheran violence?

No, the peril to the synagogue was, and remains, Islamic violence. The resulting diminution of freedom is a symptom of advancing dhimmitude — the diminished cultural condition of non-Muslims living in relation to Islam.

So, freedom of worship ain’t what it used to be. But even in its terror-constrained state, the spread of American religious freedom actually threatens religiously unfree Islamic cultures, which, for example, consider “apostasy” — deciding not to be Muslim — a capital crime.

But that threat is only on paper. Where Americans actually become involved in the Islamic world, Shariah (Islamic law) is protected, enshrined even, as shockingly attested by Shariah’s primacy in the American-fostered constitutions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority. The president doesn’t seem to understand that. I don’t think he even understands Shariah, under which the primacy of Islam is absolute, and other religions are “tolerated,” at best, at the high cost of dhimmitude. Nearly six years after September 11 — nearly six years after first visiting the Islamic Center and proclaiming “Islam is peace” — Mr. Bush has learned nothing.

In fact, his peroration on freedom at the Islamic Center mainly underscored “America’s respect for the Muslim faith here at home.” Abroad, too. Even as he was asking Muslim leaders (again) “to denounce organizations that use the veneer of Islamic belief to support and fund violence” (some veneer), the president announced the United States would send an envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a global Islamic support group that does a large bit of that. “Our special envoy,” the president said, “will listen and learn from representatives from Muslim states and share with them America’s views and values.”

What can the Free World learn from the Unfree World? Maybe something about the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted by the foreign ministers of the OIC in 1990. In dire contrast to the United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Islamic document recognizes only human rights sanctioned by Shariah — which, basically, leaves women and non-Muslims without human rights.

Hmm. Might Mr. Bush — or anyone in our leadership, civilian or military — notice the unbridgeable cultural differences revealed by these disparate notions of human rights? Alas, probably not. Islam’s still peace, according to the prez. Those pesky “extremists” fighting jihad are not, he said, “the true face of Islam.”

There Imam Bush goes again. “I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Qu’ran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam,” jailed jihadi cleric Abu Qatada said under similar circumstances almost six years ago. “Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Qu’ran?”

No. He’s just leader of the Free World — a Free World that has become less free and more dhimmified on his severely myopic watch.

==============================

Jihad and dhimmitude (Washington Times, 070821)

By Andrew G. Bostom

Celebrating its 17th birthday in 1961, Seventeen magazine triumphantly announced that it had given “stature” and “a sense of identity, purpose, and belonging” to once “forgotten” teenagers whose “needs, wants... even whims are catered to by almost every major industry” worldwide.

Brilliantly argued and presented in elegant, accessible prose, Diana West’s “The Death of the Grown-Up” demonstrates how this successful modern “Children’s Crusade” was perhaps more of a disaster, given its lingering pernicious effects, than the notorious ill-fated 1212 campaign under Stephen of Cloyes and Nicholas of the Rhineland.

(Most of these children died of exposure en route overland, or drowned at sea during a storm, the survivors being captured later by Muslim jihad pirates, enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam, or martyred for refusing to apostatize from Christianity.)

Because as the author, a syndicated writer whose column appears weekly in The Washington Times, reminds us with appropriate bluntness, her late father (about whom I know because I know the author) was an infantryman who waded ashore in 1944 at Normandy on D-Day plus two, then fought at the Battle of St. Lo. Many teens of his World War II generation already manifested a consummately healthy “sense of belonging” — to the U.S. armed forces.

And by 1949, the author notes, anthropologist Margaret Mead had discerned this unhealthy “abdication” of adulthood, characterized by mothers who no longer told their children, “When I was a girl, I was not allowed...” but instead substituted the query, “What are the other girls doing?”

Ominously, the writer asks, has the worst-case scenario projected by Tocqueville in the 19th century — a country inhabited by an “innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls,” governed by a state of “immense protective power... [resembling] parental authority... [trying] to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood” — materialized?

The author’s witty, evocative phrasemaking — “hair-trigger moderate [Muslims],” “mash of civilizations,” “far from realpolitik, this is dreampolitik,” “in denial there is defeat” — elucidates an infantilized American (and Western) culture, further immobilized by the pervasive fanaticism of the new “secular religion” of multiculturalism, to the point where it appears incapable of identifying, let alone adequately defending against, the resurgence of jihadist Islam.

Accurately portraying the central, uniquely Islamic institutions of jihad, and its corollary, dhimmitude, the author eschews the dominant, politically correct but ahistorical characterizations.

Jihad — as sanctioned by Islam’s core texts, the Koran, hadith and sira, and actualized by the Muslim prophet Muhammad himself — is the eternal, aggressive quest for totalitarian Islamic hegemony, i.e., the imposition of Islamic law, over the entire world, including via terrorism and genocide. Dhimmitude is the permanent state of legal, social and psychological inferiority imposed, coercively or by threat of force (i.e., resumption of the jihad), upon the non-Muslim survivors vanquished by jihad war, and neither converted to Islam nor enslaved.

Julien Benda, in his 1928 classic “La Trahison de Clercs,” decried with prophetic accuracy how the abandonment of objective truths abetted totalitarian ideologies, which led to the cataclysmic destruction of World War II. The author identifies the “Trahison de Clercs” of our time: The complete failure of Western intellectuals to acknowledge the heinous consequences of the living Islamic institutions of jihad war and dhimmitude.

Might Diana West’s pellucid analyses help awaken Western elites to the existential threat they pose? One hopes these elites follow the admonition to rediscover and reclaim our shamefully derided Western cultural patrimony of “dead white males,” including icons such as Britain’s Winston Churchill and America’s John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, whose uncompromised wisdom on Islam is so desperately needed if our civilization is to survive.

TR, for example, wrote these words in 1916, presaging this book’s advice: “The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization... [including] those of Charles Martel in the 8th century [over Arab jihadists] and those of John Sobieski in the 17th century [over Ottoman Turkish jihadists]. During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier [Martel] and the Polish king [Sobieski], the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today nobody can find in them any ‘social values’ whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influence [is]... concerned.”

Andrew G. Bostom is the author of “The Legacy of Jihad” and the forthcoming “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.”

==============================

India’s Muslims adopt Hindu names (Washington Times, 070821)

By Shaikh Azizur Rahman

Shaikh Salim (left), a Muslim, uses the common Hindu name Shankar Maity to run his food stall in Calcutta, where he was denied access to a job under his real name.

CALCUTTA — Members of India’s large Muslim minority are often adopting Hindu names and dress styles in an attempt to avoid widespread prejudice that keeps them from housing and jobs.

Shaikh Salim, a Muslim who runs a food stall in the central office district of Calcutta, uses the common Hindu name Shankar Maity and calls his stall “Shankar’s Fast Food.”

Shaokat Ali, a Muslim student who came to the city to do his master’s degree in English, tutors Hindu students using the name Saikat Das and keeps a large picture of the popular Hindu goddess Kali hanging on a wall in his room.

Jahanara Begum takes off a silver talisman embossed with ‘Allah’ in Arabic each morning, replacing it with a spot of vermilion powder on her forehead and red-and-white conch bangles of a married Hindu woman before heading to work in a fish market, where she is known as Parvati — the name of a Hindu goddess.

Analysts say there could be thousands of Muslims in Calcutta who, like these three, are quietly hiding their religious identities in order to fit in.

“In everyday life, Muslims in almost all spheres of life face a communal discrimination by powerful Hindus, and they are denied many of their basic rights and freedom in an unjustified way,” said Anjan Basu, a veteran social analyst and executive editor of Pratidin, a Bengali daily in Calcutta.

Six decades after Pakistan was carved off from British-ruled India, many Hindus believe that Pakistan was created for Muslims and that is where they belong, said Mr. Basu, who is a Hindu.

He added that communal discrimination has been “institutionalized,” with Muslims being denied employment in government and even many private sector offices, where 90% to 95% of the jobs are held by Hindus.

Many Muslims who adopted Hindu identities say they do not feel embarrassed because of their actions.

“Fifteen years ago, when I came to Calcutta in search of a job, almost all street restaurants in the city refused to employ me because I was a Muslim,” said Mr. Salim. “Some said their Hindu customers could refuse to eat at their shops if a Muslim worked there.

“But soon I met a Muslim man who worked as a cook in a Hindu-owned restaurant under a Hindu identity. I followed his advice, picked up a Hindu identity, and soon an upper-class Hindu employed me to run a food stall.”

Nearly all of Mr. Salim’s customers are Hindus, and he fears his business would suffer disastrously if his customers found out he is a Muslim.

“I know that [many Hindus] hate Muslims simply because of their religion. So, I have done nothing wrong by lying about my religious identity,” he said.

Mr. Ali, the 24-year-old university student, is troubled by his decision to hide his faith but says he had little choice after 29 guesthouse owners refused to rent him a room because of his religion. He intends to drop the pretense as soon as his finances improve.

“It pains me that I cannot tell people that I am a Muslim,” he said. “I am restlessly waiting for the day when I shall be able to get out of this religious guise.”

Some analysts worry that the deep-seated discrimination against Muslims could ultimately drive them to violence.

“As Indian Muslims strongly feel they are being unjustifiably denied their share in developing India, their grievances could snowball into severe anger against the state and society, forcing many to resort to terrorism one day,” Mr. Basu said.

But for the time being, the realities of the workplace mean that many Muslims will continue to hide their identities.

In the state of West Bengal, where the Islamic community makes up 27% of the population, Muslim employment in the government sector was less than 3%, according to a recent federally mandated study by former Judge Rajendra Sachar.

A federal minister acknowledged last week that Muslims have been victims of “religious apartheid,” both in the government and in society at large.

Discrimination against Muslims “is in the polity and the populace of the country. Worse, many of them have been implicated in fake charges of terrorism,” said Kapil Sibal, the minister of science and technology, who is a Hindu.

==============================

The Libel Tourist Strikes Again: How to kill a book you don’t like. (Weekly Standard, 070821)

In late July, Cambridge University Press announced it was destroying all its remaining copies of Alms for Jihad, a 2006 book exploring the nexus of Islamic charities and Islamic radicalism. At the same time, Cambridge asked libraries around the world to stop carrying the book on their shelves. The reason? Fear of being sued in a British court by Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire who ranks as one of the world’s richest men—and whose suspected links to terrorist financing earned him a mention in Alms for Jihad.

Cambridge issued a formal apology to bin Mahfouz, and posted a separate public apology on its website. The latter read in part:

In 2006 Cambridge University Press published Alms for Jihad written by J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins which made certain defamatory allegations about Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz and his family in connection with the funding of terrorism. Whilst the allegations were originally published in good faith, Cambridge University Press now recognizes that the information upon which they were based was wrong. Cambridge University Press accepts that there is no truth whatsoever in these serious allegations.

Therefore, “To emphasize their regret, Cambridge University Press has agreed to pay Sheikh Khalid substantial damages and to make a contribution to his legal costs, both of which Sheikh Khalid is donating to the charity UNICEF.”

Neither Burr nor Collins joined the apology. Both American writers and U.S. citizens, they stand by their scholarship. “We refused to be a party to the settlement,” says Collins, a professor emeritus of history at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “I’m not going to recant on something just from the threat of a billionaire Saudi sheikh.” What’s more, he adds, “I think I’m a damn good historian.”

According to Collins, Cambridge’s in-house lawyers reviewed the manuscript of Alms for Jihad in 2005, prior to publication. They gave it a green light. But when faced with the specter of a costly legal battle, the publisher caved. “Cambridge, frankly, came to us and said, ‘There’s no way we can win this case.’ And I had to agree with them,” Collins says. “I’m disappointed in the Press, but I understand their position. I’m not angry with them.” After all, “It’s probably the cheapest way out,” since U.S. and British libel laws “are as different as night and day.”

Therein lies the deeper significance of this case. Bin Mahfouz has a habit of using the English tort regime to squelch any unwanted discussion of his record. In America, the burden of proof in a libel suit lies with the plaintiff. In Britain, it lies with the defendant, which can make it terribly difficult and expensive to ward off a defamation charge, even if the balance of evidence supports the defendant. Just ask Emory University historian Deborah Lipstadt, who found herself hauled into court in Britain when she tagged David Irving as a Holocaust denier. Lipstadt won the decision, but not before she incurred staggering legal bills.

In a case more relevant to the Alms for Jihad spat, bin Mahfouz sued Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy, over her 2003 book Funding Evil, which painted a detailed picture of how money travels into the coffers of terrorist groups. Funding Evil, for which ex-CIA director James Woolsey penned the foreword, was billed on its cover as “The book the Saudis don’t want you to read.” Ehrenfeld fingered bin Mahfouz as a financier—whether deliberate or not—of al Qaeda, Hamas, and others.

He quickly sued her for libel in England, and Ehrenfeld chose not to contest it. A British judge then ordered Ehrenfeld to repudiate her statements, apologize to the Saudi magnate, pay him over $225,000 in damages—and destroy copies of her book. Instead, she chose to fight this ruling in the U.S. court system.

Ehrenfeld argues that the verdict cannot be enforced here because she is a U.S. citizen who published her book in America, where bin Mahfouz would not have won his libel case. (Bin Mahfouz’s lawyers originally secured British jurisdiction by showing that Funding Evil could be purchased—and read—in Britain via the Internet.) In June, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that Ehrenfeld could challenge the British libel decision in a U.S. court, thus setting an important precedent.

According to Ehrenfeld, there are “at least 36 cases” since March 2002 where bin Mahfouz has either sued or threatened to sue (mostly the latter) in England over the documentation of his alleged terror connections. He is the most prominent Saudi “libel tourist,” the moniker given to those who exploit British law to silence critics. “It’s had a tremendous chilling effect,” Ehrenfeld argues, on those seeking to investigate bin Mahfouz and other Saudi bigwigs. She will not apologize for her book, having “not even a shadow of a doubt” that her accusations against bin Mahfouz are true.

There is not room here to fully examine them. But they include charges that through his former bank, the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, and through an Islamic charity he sponsored, the Muwafaq (“Blessed Relief”) Foundation, bin Mahfouz either knowingly or unknowingly lent financial aid to terrorists. In October 2001, the U.S. Treasury Department described Muwafaq as “an al Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen.” Bin Mahfouz denies all such allegations on his website, www.binmahfouz.info, insisting his family “abhors violence as a way of achieving political or other objectives.”

His allies point to a string of successful libel challenges as vindication. In May 2005, the London Times reported that “Sheikh bin Mahfouz has sued four times in London for statements concerning his alleged role in terrorism financing. He has never lost.” But whether Burr and Collins—not to mention Ehrenfeld and others—are right or wrong about bin Mahfouz, does that justify pulping an entire book?

Burr told the New York Sun that “their book mentioned Sheikh Mahfouz 13 times, and in no place had they labeled him a terrorist.” A May 2006 review in Toronto’s Globe and Mail said that Alms for Jihad

provides the most comprehensive look at the web of Islamic charities that have financed conflicts all around the world: Afghanistan, Israel, Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Indonesia and the Philippines. Burr and Collins, who together have written many books on Islam and Middle East politics, also offer a very good discussion of the philosophy behind and role of the various manifestations of charitable giving in Islam.

Many “charities,” it seems, have fueled Islamic radicalization across the globe and given tangible assistance to terrorists. As Collins points out, the book is extensively referenced with hundreds of footnotes.

More than two years ago, the London Times warned that “U.S. publishers might have to stop contentious books being sold on the Internet in case they reach the ‘claimant-friendly’ English courts.” So why hasn’t this become a cause célèbre for American publishing firms and journalists?

“There’s been very little mainstream media coverage” of the Alms for Jihad story, observes Jeffrey Stern, president of the Los Angeles-based Bonus Books (which published Funding Evil). This lack of outrage is “absolutely appalling,” Ehrenfeld says. “They are burning books now in England, and we are sitting here doing nothing.” As for her own legal struggle, she says, “It’s been a very lonely fight. It still is.”

==============================

The Muslim World’s Hope and Ours (townhall.com, 070907)

By Mona Charen

He’s handsome, young and a devout Muslim. He is also his country’s leading pop star. But would it surprise you to learn that one of his songs, a tune that topped the charts, is called “Warriors of Love”?

Ahmad Dhani, Indonesia’s counterpart to Justin Timberlake, has called his song a “musical fatwa against religious extremism and violence.” The lyrics are derived from the Koran and Hadith. (Sample: “If hatred has already poisoned you/Against those . . . who worship differently/ Then evil has already gripped your soul/ Then evil’s got you in its damning embrace.”)

Dhani is a soldier in the culture war within Islam. With 190 million people, Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country — but its religious culture is far more tolerant and humane than that of Saudi Arabia and many other Muslim lands.

A former president of Indonesia, H.E. Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid (popularly known as Gus Dur) has co-founded an organization, LibforAll (www.libforall.com), that aims to contend with the radical Islamists on the extremists’ own chosen turf — the true meaning of Islam. Gus Dur denies that normative Islam is the faith of the torturers and suicide bombers, of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He finds within Muslim sources the ideas of tolerance, respect for others and humility. Islam is meant to be a “blessing for all the world,” he reminds his listeners.

Is this a mere pebble in a waterfall? That is very hard to gauge, particularly for outsiders. To us, it often seems as if the entire Muslim world is a roiling mass of barely contained hatreds and easily sparked violence. We’ve seen very few Muslim leaders brave enough to denounce the jihadists, and a cottage industry has sprung up in the West to supply books and articles arguing that Islam is by nature violent, cruel and hopelessly rigid. This interpretation has always seemed shallow to me. I simply cannot imagine that a religion based only on hatred and bloodshed could gain and hold more than a billion adherents over 14 centuries.

In addition to his position as former president of Indonesia, Gus Dur is also revered as the leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization, with nearly 40 million members. He’s been described by The Wall Street Journal as “the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world.”

Gus Dur has asked members of his group to protect Christian churches from Islamist attacks, and they have done so, at the risk of their lives. He and LibforAll co-founder C. Holland Taylor, an American former telecom entrepreneur who speaks fluent Indonesian and is very familiar with Islam, have launched what they hope will be a worldwide effort to counter radical Islam by enlisting moderate Muslims. Not all of the moderates are from Indonesia. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, an Egyptian Koranic scholar who had to flee his home country, holds a Ph.D. from Cairo University.

In 2007, LibforAll sponsored a conference on religious tolerance in Bali to counter the Holocaust denial conference Ahmadinejad convened in Tehran. Gus Dur called Ahmadinejad “my friend” but then forthrightly declared that the Iranian president had “falsified history” by claiming that the Holocaust was a myth.

Taylor believes passionately that we can affect the internal war now being waged for the soul of Islam. Admittedly, the extremists have a big head start. The Saudis have spent roughly $70 billion over the past 30 years to propagate their Wahhabi form of Islam (Question: What do you call an imam in a Mercedes? Answer: a Wahhabi.) And the threat the jihadists pose is dire for the Muslim world and for the West.

On the other hand, of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, 85 to 90% are traditional, non-radical believers. They are the target audience. LibforAll is hoping to translate “Warriors of Love” into Arabic, Urdu and other languages and distribute it to as wide an audience as possible. They are also launching educational, research and grass-roots activities, including translating the work of moderate Indonesian imams into other languages.

In the 16th century, radical Muslims attempted to impose their radical version of Islam on the island of Java. For a hundred years, the island was riven by conflict. But in the end, a Sufi Muslim named Senopati ing Alogo was able to defeat the extremists and inaugurate an era of religious tolerance and quiet spirituality.

That’s the inspiration. The spadework remains.

==============================

Religous Liberty Group Criticizes Flawed U.N. Report on Islamophobia (Christian Post, 070918)

The religious liberty arm of the World Evangelical Alliance strongly rebuffed a recent report that claims, among other assertions, that the source of Muslim extremism is the “defamation” of Islam.

“I would propose that the very heart of the issue is not ‘defamation’ of Islam or ‘baseless’ Islamophobia,” expressed Elizabeth Kendal of the WEA’s Religious Liberty Commission, “but the fact that the dictators of Islam are now as ever consumed and driven by ‘apostaphobia!’”

“Indeed the new openness brought to the world through globalization and developments in information and communication technologies is causing the power stakeholders and religious dictators of the non-free world to be seriously gripped by apostaphobia – a well-founded fear of loss of adherents, which is manifested primarily as uncompromising repression and denial of fundamental liberties, by violent and subversive means,” she added Monday.

Kendal, who serves as the principal researcher for the WEA RLC, was writing in response to a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) written by U.N. Special Rapporteur Doudou Diene, who recommended that the international human rights covenants be “reinterpreted and amended” to deal with Islamophobia.

According to Diene, the “defamation” of Islam generates dangerous Islamophobia, which leads to the repression of Muslim rights and in turn drives Muslims to extremism.

He believes that Islamophobia should be defined as “a baseless hostility and fear vis-avis Islam, and as a result a fear of and aversion towards all Muslims or the majority of them ….”

In response, Kendal pointed out that the generalizations in Diene’s report are untrue, and argued that any efforts to tie religion to race should be rejected. Diene is the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

Kendal noted that right from the beginning, the report took a bias viewpoint by only examining the democratic parties, governmental alliances, and traditionally democratic parties while staying silent on totalitarian regimes and religious dictatorships.

The partiality of the report was apparent, Kendal wrote, when Diene cited the Crusaders as an example of early Isamophobia without mentioning jihads, Dhimmitude (laws governing non-Muslims minority), and the fact that the unsuccessful Crusaders to the Holy Land were counter-insurgencies in response to imperialistic Islamic jihads.

In his report, Diene also claimed that the perpetuation of the “clash of civilizations and religions” theory was derived from the Cold-War mindset, which caused contemporary Islamophobia rather than, as Kendal pointed out, Islamic imperialism, repression and terrorism.

The U.N. special rapporteur’s report was submitted to the sixth session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) late last month after Diene was invited to report on “the manifestations of defamation of religions and in particular on the serious implications of Islamophobia on the enjoyment of all rights.”

“[Diene’s] recommendation will no doubt be discussed in the next session of the UNHRC,” Kendal reported in Monday’s special prayer bulletin for the RLC.

Furthermore, “[i]t is likely to elicit a resolution to draft an amendment to the UDHR and the ICCPR,” she added.

In her closing remarks, Kendal gave an ominous warning, concluding that if the forces of liberty do not have the number to keep Diene’s recommendation to amend the covenants from gaining acceptance, then the “Islamization of international human rights will have begun.”

==============================

Al-Qaeda urges cartoonist death, threatens Swedish firms (National Post, 070915)

STOCKHOLM/DUBAI — The head of an al-Qaeda-led group in Iraq has offered US$100,000 for the killing of a Swedish cartoonist for his drawing of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad and threatened to attack big Swedish companies.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq, also offered US$50,000 to anyone who killed the editor of the newspaper that published the drawing by Lars Vilks depicting the head of the Prophet on the body of a dog.

Sweden’s Nerikes Allehanda daily published the drawing, part of a series which art galleries in Sweden had declined to display, last month in what it called a defence of free speech.

Islam does not allow images of the Prophet Mohammad and Muslims consider dogs to be unclean.

The controversy follows violent protests in the Muslim world last year over the publication by a Danish newspaper of cartoons some Muslims felt insulted the Prophet Mohammad. More than 50 people died across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Until now, the Swedish image, published on Aug. 27, had drawn only diplomatic ire and a small local demonstration. Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt met ambassadors from 22 Muslim countries to try to defuse the row.

“From now on we announce the call to shed the blood of the Lars who dared to insult our Prophet ... and during this munificent month we announce an award worth US$100,000 to the person who kills this infidel criminal,” Baghdadi said in the 31-minute audiotape posted on an Islamist Web site on Saturday.

“The award will be increased to US$150,000 if he were to be slaughtered like a lamb.

“We know how to force them to withdraw and apologize, and if they don’t, they can wait for our strikes on their economy and giant companies such as Ericsson, Volvo, Ikea ...” He also mentioned Scania and Electrolux.

Mr. Vilks told Reuters he had been in touch with the police.

“These people represent a very small branch of our Muslims. They work with noisy threats,” Mr. Vilks said by telephone. “But I can, of course, not entirely disregard such a threat.”

He defended the right to freedom of expression.

“It is fundamental for Western thinking to be able to express one’s artistry without making exceptions for holiness. I had no murky motives, no racist motives and so on. It was initially a very modest local exhibition and the situation has changed little by little,” he said.

Swedish police spokesman Torsten Persson said police had opened an investigation into unlawful threats but Vilks was not under police protection and was in Germany at the moment.

Nerikes Allehanda Editor Ulf Johansson said he would step up security in cooperation with the police but did not regret publishing the image. He said it was “deplorable” the conflict had accelerated internationally.

When the protests erupted over the Danish cartoons, angry Muslims attacked Danish embassies and boycotted Danish goods in several countries. Swedish companies said they were considering the threats.

Telecom equipment giant Ericsson spokeswoman Ase Lindskog said the firm had stepped up security in the Middle East.

“We have taken some concrete actions, like taking away our flags from buildings where we have our sales offices,” she said.

Appliance maker Electrolux’s spokesman Anders Edholm said it was trying to find out more and had not decided on any response.

Carmaker Volvo spokesman Marten Wikforss said security staff were looking into the matter.

A major Swedish Muslim group, the Swedish Muslim Council, condemned Baghdadi’s threats.

The prime minister declined to comment on the threat.

==============================

Poll: More Americans Hold Unfavorable View of Muslims (Christian Post, 070925)

WASHINGTON – Public attitudes about Muslims and Islam have grown more negative in the United States in recent years, according to a poll released Tuesday.

The Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported that four in ten Americans (43%) who were recently surveyed said they have a favorable opinion of Muslims, while 35% expressed a negative view. In 2004, opinion about Muslims was somewhat more positive with 48% having a favorable opinion while 32% held an unfavorable one.

“There continue to be substantial age, education, political and religious differences in opinions about both Muslims and Muslim Americans,” noted researchers in the summary of the survey’s findings, which also included views on Mormonism and Pope Benedict XVI.

As was the case with polls in the past, the latest found young people, college graduates, and liberal Democrats more likely to express favorable views of Muslims than were older people, those with less education, Republicans, and conservative and moderate Democrats.

Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants stood out for their negative views of Muslims. While roughly half of white mainline Protestants (51%) and white Catholics (48%) express favorable views of Muslims, only about quarter of white evangelicals (24%) say the same, the poll found. Similar religious divisions are seen in views of Muslim Americans.

According to the survey, Muslim Americans are still seen more positively than Muslims in general (53% vs. 43%) as in previous surveys. Unfavorable opinions of Muslim Americans, however, have also edged upward, from 25% in 2005 to the current 29%.

Meanwhile, the belief that Islam encourages violence has increased among groups that express mostly negative views of Muslims, such as conservative Republicans, but also among those groups that have relatively favorable opinions of Muslims, such as college graduates.

The proportion of college graduates saying Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence saw a significant increase – from 28% in 2005 to 45% today. Furthermore, college graduates are now about as likely as those with no college experience (44%) to express this point of view.

When asked what single word best describes their impression of Islam, far more Americans mentioned negative words than positive ones (30% vs. 15%); roughly a quarter (23%) characterize the religion with neutral words; about a third (32%) do not offer an opinion.

The single most common word used to describe the Muslim religion is “devout,” or a variant of this word, such as “devotion” or “devoted,” the survey found, with 43 respondents use one of these words to describe their impression of Islam. Nearly as many (40 respondents in all) say that words like “fanatic” or “fanatical” come to mind when thinking about Islam. Other words commonly used to describe impressions of Islam include “different” (35 total responses), “peace” or “peaceful” (34 responses), “confused” or “confusing” (31 responses), “radical” (30 responses), “strict” (26 responses) and “terror” or “terrorism” (25 responses).

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, conducted Aug. 1-18 among 3,002 adults, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2%age points.

==============================

Anxious for Dhimmitude (Christian Post, 071019)

[KH: continuous downward spiral of NCC]

Mark D. Tooley

A large group of senior Islamic clerics and teachers has recently issued “A Common Word Between Us and You,” a statement addressed to churches urging greater comity between Muslims and Christians. The clerics unapologetically espouse Muslim teachings, while asserting there is common theological ground between the two faiths. The Vatican and some conservative Protestants have commented that the Muslim outreach merits a thoughtful response.

But the Religious Left, always anxious to burnish its multicultural credentials, has responded to “Common Word” with enthusiasm.

The National Council of Churches’ (NCC) top (though outgoing) interfaith official hailed the Islamic outreach, saying it will fuel the “urgency” of the NCC’s own Muslim-Christian dialogue. Part of the NCC’s own interfaith ministry, as Shanta Premawardhana described it, is standing “in solidarity with Muslims at a time when many Muslims in the United States faced significant levels of discrimination,” post 9-11.

Premawardhana thanked the Muslim clerics and scholars for speaking out against Muslim “extremists.” Similarly, he boasted, the NCC is trying to “counter the voices of extremist Christians with initiatives aimed at teaching Christians about Islam and helping churches build relationships with mosques in their local communities,” Premawardhana added.

Actually, “Common Word” did not criticize Muslim “extremists.” Nor did it attempt to modify Islamic teachings that demand that non-Muslims live in subordination to Islamic authority in majority Muslim societies. But it did call for non-violent interaction between Muslims and Christians, and it actually speaks of “freedom of religion.” This makes it “moderate.”

Perhaps an even more effusive reaction to “Common Word” was a quickly organized but lengthy statement from Ivy League seminary scholars, who were “deeply encouraged and challenged” by the Muslim outreach. They titled their piece “Loving God and Neighbor Together,” dedicated it, in typical seminary speak, to the “Infinitely Good God whom we should love with all our being.”

“We receive ‘A Common Word as a Muslim hand of conviviality and cooperation extended to Christians world-wide,” the academics enthused. “In this response we extend our own Christian hand in return, so that together with all other human beings we may live in peace and justice as we seek to love and our neighbors.”

The Ivy League seminary professors included with every reference to Jesus Christ a “Peace be Upon Him,” in a wan attempt to show the Muslims how attuned they are to Islamic lingo. No doubt the Islamic scholars will be impressed.

And the Ivy Leaguers opened their manifesto with apologies for Christianity’s perceived sins against Islam. “We want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. the war in Iraq) Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors.”

Naturally, the Ivy Leaguers want the Muslims’ forgiveness for all of Christianity’s countless outrages. “Before we ‘shake your hand’ in responding to your letter, we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world.”

The “Common Word,” unlike the left-wing Western religious response to it, carefully avoided political statements. There is no mention of Iraq, or the Palestinians, or even of the Crusades. No apologies are offered for any of Islam’s historic depredations, nor did the Islamic clerics request any apologies from their Christian audience. But the Religious Left, when conversing with perceived victims of the Christian West, is always anxious to extend remorse.

The Ivy Leaguers also took some other political swipes, warning against serving “idols” such as a “ruler, a nation, [or] economic progress,” which leads to “deep and deadly conflicts.” The professors commended the Muslim clerics & scholars for their “generosity” and courage.

“It is with humility and hope that we receive your generous letter, and we commit ourselves to labor together in heart, soul, mind and strength for the objectives you so appropriately propose,” the Ivy Leaguers concluded portentously, sounding like a sad caricature of the Founding Fathers.

The Ivy League signers of “Loving god and Neighbor Together” included the dean of Yale Divinity School, the president of Princeton Theological Seminary, the dean of Harvard Divinity School, and several seminary professors from those schools. [KH: beware of these liberal “Christians”.]

Unlike the responses from the NCC and the Ivy Leaguers, the Muslim statement definitively asserted Islamic beliefs about Allah, about Muhammad as his only Prophet, about the authority of the Koran, and about divine judgment. Neither the NCC nor the academics appeared to be anywhere near as resolute in presenting Christian doctrines about God, Jesus Christ, the Bible, and the end times.

If the Muslim scholars behind “Common Word” do not already know it, they will soon learn: left-wing clerics and scholars in the West often will not talk about much less defend Christian theology because they themselves do not believe in its historic doctrines. For them, Christianity is mostly just a vessel through which the goals of the political Left can advance.

In dialogues with Muslims, the Religious Left wants to apologize for Christianity and form common alliances against traditional Christians and Jews, while also denouncing various foreign and military policies of the U.S. No doubt, many “Common Word” Muslim scholars and clerics will be glad to indulge this. But if they are looking for substantive exchanges over theological differences between Christianity and Islam, they will have to look elsewhere.

==============================

Iraqi Christians forced to leave (Washington Times, 071001)

American soldiers from Alpha Company of 1/38 Infantry Regiment on patrol in downtown Baquba today. Many Iraqi Christians have been forced from their homes by threats telling them to convert to Islam, pay for “protection” or die.

BAGHDAD — Nabil Comanny and his family endured the dead bodies in the streets, the roaming kidnap gangs and the continuing power failures.

The Christian family stayed in their southern Dora neighborhood after their Muslim neighbors fled the daily fighting between Sunnis and Shi’ites.

But when a hand-scrawled note appeared on their door telling them to convert to Islam, pay $300 a month for “protection” or die, they realized they had to leave their home of 11 years.

“We don’t have weapons, and the government doesn’t protect us. What else can we do?” said Mr. Comanny, a 37-year-old journalist.

Islamic militants are increasingly targeting Christians, especially here in the capital, forcing an exodus that has cut deeply into the long-standing minority community.

Although meaningful numbers are hard to come by, the last Iraqi census, conducted in 1987, counted 1 million Christians. National aid groups estimate between 300,000 and 600,000 Christians remain today among an estimated 25 million people.

Mr. Comanny said he began to worry last spring when militants posted documents across the neighborhood ordering all residents to follow strict Islamic law. Among the 18 specific points, women were told they must wear all-enveloping black burqas.

“It’s not our tradition,” Mr. Comanny said. “How can Christian women be expected to do this?”

Christian families paid a bribe, Mr. Comanny said, “because it gave them time to prepare to leave. But most can’t afford to keep paying.”

Mr. Comanny, who shared a small house with his mother, three brothers and four sisters, moved his family on the advice of a “sympathetic” acquaintance among the insurgents.

Because militants in Dora frequently attack families returning home to fetch their belongings, Mr. Comanny paid his insurgent contact 1 million Iraqi dinars, or about $800, for safe passage from the neighborhood.

Today, the Comannys live in the New Baghdad section of the capital, where hundreds of Christian families have relocated. The families move cautiously among a majority Shi’ite population, which relies on the Mahdi Army militia for protection.

Christians in Dora once mixed easily with Muslims, sharing cookies at Christmas and joining Muslims for the daily evening dinner during Ramadan. Amer Awadish, a 47-year-old taxi driver, said those relationships saved his life. After a handwritten note was delivered to his apartment in December ordering him and his wife, Samia, to leave within two days, a lifelong neighbor appeared at his door. The man, Mr. Awadish said, advised him to leave immediately.

“This man used to kiss my mother on the forehead in public,” Mr. Awadish said, referring to a common gesture of respect toward elderly women. “He was too ashamed to kill me because of that.”

Other obstacles to Iraqi Christians are more subtle than direct threats.

William Warda, the founder of Hamorabi, a Christian-led human rights group in Iraq, said most Christians no longer feel safe embracing their former lifestyle.

“They can’t drink alcohol, or even dress in the fashion they’re accustomed,” Mr. Warda said. “Maybe they can stand this for a year or two, but not their whole lives.”

Many more would leave the country if they felt there was somewhere to go, he said. “If the U.S. and Europe open their doors, the Christians in Iraq will be finished. They will all leave.”

Most Christians in Iraq are Chaldean Catholics who acknowledge the pope’s authority but remain independent from the Vatican. Other denominations include Syrian Catholics, Armenian Orthodox and Armenian Catholics. Small groups of Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics also practice, as do Anglicans and evangelicals.

One common thread among most of the groups is a concern that church leaders have not spoken out to protect their rights.

“The church is not defending us,” said Bashar Jamil John, a 24-year-old engineering student at the Baghdad Technical Institute. “This is part of the problem.”

Emmanuel Delly, the Chaldean Catholic patriarch who serves as the Vatican’s representative in Iraq, declined to be interviewed, but the Rev. Mokhlous Shasha, 32, a first-year priest at the Lady of Our Salvation Syrian Catholic Church in central Baghdad, argued that the clergy are as much in danger as those they serve.

“Priests live in the same situations as their parishioners,” said Father Shasha, who added that he never wears his clerical collar into the streets. Since 2006, militants have killed three priests and kidnapped 10 others, church officials said.

==============================

Muslims Leaders Warn Pope ‘Survival of World’ at Stake (Foxnews, 071011)

The “survival of the world” is at stake if Muslims and Christians do not make peace with each other, leaders of the Muslim world will warn the Pope and other Christian leaders today.

In an unprecedented open letter signed by 138 leading scholars from every sect of Islam, the Muslims plead with Christian leaders “to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions” and spell out the similarities between passages of the Bible and the Koran.

The scholars state: “As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them - so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.”

The phrasing has echoes of the New Testament passage: “He that is not with me is against me” - a passage used by President George Bush when addressing a joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11.

The Muslims call instead for the emphasis to be on the shared characteristics of world’s two largest faiths.

The letter, addressed to Pope Benedict XVI, to the Orthodox Church’s Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew 1 and all the other Orthodox Patriarchs and to the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and the leaders of all other Protestant churches worldwide, will be rolled out around the world this morning in a series of press conferences beginning in Jordan. It is supported by the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Richard Chartres.

It is expected to be followed by a joint conference between Muslim and Christian world leaders at on “neutral” ground, such as at an American university.

“Finding common ground between Muslims and Christians is not simply a matter for polite ecumenical dialogue between selected religious leaders,” the Muslim scholars say, noting that Christians and Muslims make up over a third and a fifth of humanity respectively.

“Together they make up more than 55 per cent of the population, making the relationship between these two religious communities the most important factor in contributing to meaningful peace around the world. If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace.”

The Muslims even quote passages verbatim from the Bible, extremely rare in a publication of this kind and at this level and an indication of their resolve to bring the two faiths together and end the present tensions between them.

The letter continues: “With the terrible weaponry of the modern world; with Muslims and Christians intertwined everywhere as never before, no side can unilaterally win a conflict between more than half of the world’s inhabitants. Thus our common future is at stake. The very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake.”

It says: “And to those who nevertheless relish conflict and destruction for their own sake or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say that our very eternal souls are all also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony.”

Concluding with a quote from the Koran, the scholars say: “So let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works.”

The letter is being sent out today by the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Amman, Jordan.

Among those launching the letter in the UK will be two world leading figures in interfaith dialogue Professor David Ford and Aref Ali Nayed.

Professor David Ford is Regius Professor of Divinity, and Fellow of Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. Professor Ford is also the Founding Director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Program and led this year’s international inter-faith conference at Lancaster House in June on ‘Islam and Muslims in the World Today’.

Aref Ali Nayed is a leading theologian and senior adviser to the Cambridge Inter-Faith Program. He is formerly Professor at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome, and the International Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization in Malaysia.

Signatures include Shaykh Sevki Omarbasic, Grand Mufti of Croatia, Dr Abdul Hamid Othman, adviser to the Prime Minister of Malaysia and Dr Ali Ozak, head of the endowment for Islamic scientific studies in Istanbul, Turkey. They also include Shaykh Dr Nuh Ali Salman Al-Qudah, Grand Mufti of Jordan and Shaykh Dr Ikrima Said Sabri, former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Imam of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

==============================

Who Speaks for Islam? Regensburg again. (National Review Online, 071012)

By John F. Cullinan

Where’s the rest of it? That’s what one is left wondering after several readings of a curious statement issued yesterday by a curious assortment of Muslim scholars, religious leaders, and government functionaries.

The statement’s timing is rather easier to grasp than its substance or purpose. It is being released the day before the first anniversary of the Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI signed by 38 Muslim scholars in response to the Holy Father’s lecture at Regensburg exactly one month earlier. The Open Letter was meant as a rebuttal and corrective to perceived flaws in Benedict’s understanding of Islam as expressed in Regensburg (both texts are analyzed here and here on National Review Online) and is therefore structured as a reasonably specific and responsive argument.

That is decidedly not the case with yesterday’s Open Letter and Call from Muslim Religious Leaders, subtitled A Common Word Between Us and You (the latter drawing from the Quranic verse 3.64). This statement is addressed not only to Benedict, but also to two dozen named Christian religious leaders, as well as unnamed “Leaders of Christian Churches everywhere.” But it utterly lacks the focus provided by Benedict’s letter and is therefore limited to generalities about undoubted parallels in Islam and Christianity concerning the Two Great Commandments: love of God and love of neighbor.

It is certainly true and readily demonstrable that these two precepts figure prominently in Christian and Muslim scripture. But that only takes one so far, especially if as here uncomfortable scriptural passages inconsistent with the main argument are simply ignored. Consider, for instance, the notorious Sword Verse:

Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and do not forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden — such men as practice not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book [i.e., Christians and Jews] – until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled (9:29).

How exactly one reconciles this passage with the more irenic ones the authors commend is a question left unasked and unanswered. Yet that is precisely the question arising from the authors’ doom-laden vision of the consequences of interreligious conflict:

Finding common ground between Muslims and Christians is not simply a matter of polite ecumenical [sic] dialogue between selected religious leaders. … If Christians and Muslims are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace. With the terrible weaponry of the modern world; with Muslims and Christians intertwined everywhere as never before, no side can unilaterally win a conflict between more than half of the world’s inhabitants. Thus our common future is at stake. The very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake.

Whether or not this is the case is debatable; but debate requires at a minimum some basis in fact to avoid getting lost in abstractions and platitudes. In this case, naming a single instance of religiously motivated conflict — like the 9/11 attacks — would have focused the dialogue and made possible the exchange of views that the authors claim to seek. Unfortunately, the sole instance where the authors rise above proof-texting and approach this level of concreteness and specificity appears in this ominous proviso:

As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them – so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes…(emphasis added).

Where exactly do Christians as such — or Western states — “wage war against Muslims on account of their religion”? Unless the authors are willing to be more forthcoming, a useful exchange of views must await another day.

This overall lack of substance is made more apparent by the statement’s elaborate formal trappings (footnotes with Roman numerals!) and the fanfare manufactured for its release. In fact, these features only call attention to the statement’s omissions and inaccuracies. For instance, the second named addressee – Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch – is not addressed properly as such, presumably because the Turkish government has long sought to prevent the patriarch from using his historic title (dating from the fourth century) on the specious ground that the term ecumenical implies universality, which is unacceptable for nationalistic reasons. (According to the Turkish government — why exactly is it their business, anyway? — the figure whom all Eastern Orthodox Christians regard as first among equals is merely a local pastor of 2,500 souls.) Similarly, the addressees include the Assyrian patriarch but not his Chaldean counterpart, whose much larger flock shares the same perils in Iraq today. And it’s useful to point out that the World Council of Churches, whose general secretary is named, is not itself a church.

But it is the hype attending the statement’s release that contrasts most jarringly with its overall pointlessness. According to yesterday’s London Times, it “will be rolled out around the world in a series of press conferences beginning in Jordan.” The Times itself took advantage of a pre-lease leak to frame this headline: “Pope told ‘survival of world’ at stake if Muslims and Christians do not make peace.” Similarly, the BBC: “Muslim scholars reach out to Pope.” And the statement has its own website, activated Wednesday, encouraging readers to identify their religion, nationality and age while endorsing the statement.

As with last year’s Open Letter, Thursday’s raises the question, “Who speaks for Islam?” More than half of the 138 signatories are present or former government functionaries. What’s more, the signatories range from grand muftis to an assistant professor at a small American college to the director general of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood. Also included is the head of CAIR, the deservedly controversial American lobbying group. This may seem a collection of apples and oranges, but what all signatories have in common is that they are very much establishment figures (see this valuable Hudson Institute study). As such, they occupy a very different position from the statement’s named addressees, who have little or no influence on government policy (like Pope Shenouda III, head of Egypt’s beleaguered Coptic community).

Expect to hear much more about this statement in the coming days, even if it’s just a case of an elephant giving birth to a mouse.

==============================

U.S. Commission Wants Saudi-Funded School Closed Until Textbooks Can Be Reviewed (Foxnews, 071019)

WASHINGTON — A congressionally mandated panel that promotes religious freedom is recommending the Bush administration close a Virginia-based Islamic school run by the Saudi government if school officials don’t comply with demands to turn over textbooks that may include lessons on jihad and intolerance toward other religions.

“Significant concerns remain about whether what is being taught at the (school) promotes religious intolerance and may adversely affect the interests of the United States,” said a report released Thursday by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Saudi embassy officials say the books long ago were cleaned up and made available to commission members, but the commissioners never bothered to go to The Islamic Saudi Academy in Northern Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., to check them out for themselves.

“There’s nothing to hide. The books are there,” embassy spokesman Nail Al-Jubeir said.

Commission spokeswoman Judith Ingram said the panel did not request to speak to academy officials because that went beyond the commission’s mandate, but it has been trying to get a hold of the religious texts, written in Arabic and sanctioned by the Saudi government for use at the school, since this summer.

Without the books in hand, the school should be closed voluntarily until the State Department can determine exactly what the books say, reads the report.

The panel’s findings focuses on a number of areas of concern with Saudi Arabia, including a 2003 study showing that Saudi texts encouraged violence toward others, “misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the ‘other.’”

A separate study last year conducted by The Center for Religious Freedom, run by Freedom House, and the Institute for Gulf Affairs, found that a ninth-grade Saudi textbook “teaches teenagers in apocalyptic terms that violence towards Jews, Christians and other unbelievers is sanctioned by God,” the report reads.

“Because Saudi Arabia is a friend and ally of this country — our sincere hope is that the secretary of state will have a productive dialogue with the Saudi embassy, and that she will be able to secure the textbooks and curriculum that are used,” Commissioner Leonard Leo said in an interview with FOXNews.com after a news conference Thursday.

If the texts don’t promote violence and comply with accepted human rights standards, then everything is fine, Leo said.

“But if that doesn’t work, our hope is that the secretary will invoke the power that she has under the Foreign Missions Act to close the ISA,” Leo said. The Foreign Missions Act can be applied because the ISA is “an arm of the Saudi embassy,” and therefore can be shuttered by the State Department, commissioners explained.

Commission Deputy Director Tad Stahnke said Thursday commissioners made several official inquiries about the books when they visited Saudi Arabia in May and June, and in the United States through the Saudi embassy.

Specifically, Stahnke said, the commission sent an official request to Saudi Ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir, the school board’s chairman and brother to the embassy spokesman. “There was no response from the ambassador,” Stahnke said.

The request, written in a June 27 letter, sought “copies of textbooks, which include curricula on Hadith (Islamic traditions), Fiqh (matters of religious law and ritual), Tawhid (matters of belief) and Arabic language and Saudi history used at all grade levels, kindergarten through 12th grade, for schools in Saudi Arabia.” The letter also asked for “copies of such textbooks used at all levels of study in the Islamic Saudi Academy’s two campuses in Fairfax and Alexandria, Va.,” according to a description given to FOXNews.com.

The letter explained that the commission would reveal its findings in a report. Commissioners confirmed that the embassy did receive the fax.

Nail Al-Jubeir said that because the texts are school books, the embassy is the wrong place to look for them. The books the commission wants are printed yearly in paperback and regularly thrown out. The embassy had last year’s texts, but not the current year’s.

“They can get them from the academy. ... I find that hard to believe that they were in Saudi Arabia and they could not get copies,” Al-Jubeir said, noting that because they are official religious school texts, they are widely available and distributed to roughly six million students in Saudi Arabia.

Al-Jubeir said the embassy has no plans to close the school. He added that while the ambassador is the board chairman, the embassy does not meddle in ISA’s academic programs.

Stahnke said that the commission was interested particularly in the texts in the United States. He added that because the school is on Saudi-owned or rented land, the commission’s protocol is to go directly through the Saudi embassy.

Commissioners said that without more legal authority, it’s up to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to negotiate with the Saudis to get the texts. They have called on Rice to immediately begin negotiations with the Saudis and report back within 90 days.

In the State Department’s daily briefing on Thursday, spokesman Tom Casey did not have an immediate response to the commission’s recommendations.

The commission says that Rice can close the school forcibly “on the ground that the non-diplomatic activities of the ISA cannot be conducted by and through an embassy, and because significant concerns remain about whether what is being taught at the ISA promotes religious intolerance and may adversely affect the interests of the United States.”

Commissioner Felice Gaer, who was the group’s chairwoman when members traveled to Saudi Arabia earlier this year, said that because the commission’s recommendations are nonbinding, lawmakers may want to step in to turn the recommendations into law.

“We’re an advisory committee. We have no executive authority to tell them to do it. Should Congress wish to (enforce the recommendations), that’s — obviously that would be helpful. Should the State Department wish to do this voluntarily, that would be great,” Gaer said.

At least one congressman hopes to force the State Department to get moving. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., said he will introduce legislation to require the State Department to begin within 90 days of the law’s enactment the process of getting the documents and reporting back findings to Congress another 90 days later.

It was not clear Thursday if there would be any specific consequences in the bill should the State Department fail to meet the requirements.

The legislation may be unnecessary, said Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., suggesting that despite his concerns over Saudi efforts to spread the Wahabbi brand of Islam, which Wolf and a number of critics call “extremist,” he thinks the U.S.-Saudi relationship will prevail.

“My sense is that reasonable people will get to the bottom of this,” said Wolf, a co-author of the bill that started the commission during the Clinton administration.

Wolf said that if the ISA does have textbooks that promote hate against Jews, Christians or Muslims, “it is unacceptable.”

One observer Thursday said that he doesn’t think the report went far enough.

“It reflects the present administration policy towards Saudi Arabia. The present administration policy at this time is retreating to its habits prior to 9/11,” said Ali Alyami, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia.

Alyami said the Bush administration in its second term has been embracing the Saudi government more.

“This is this same institution that is feeding terrorism, hate toward this country and democracy, and that hasn’t changed, regardless of what books have been — what language has been taken out from these books.

“The fact remains the same. Freedom, religious freedom, is non-existent” in Saudi Arabia, Alyami said.

==============================

About that Muslim Letter to the Pope (townhall.com, 071019)

By Mona Charen

With a good deal of fanfare, a group of 138 Muslim clerics from around the globe released a statement to Christian leaders earlier this month calling for peace and understanding between the two religions. American and other Western newspapers and media lapped it up. “Muslim Leaders Reach Out to Christians” announced the Los Angeles Times. “Muslim Leaders Send Peace Message” headlined Time magazine.

Addressed to Pope Benedict XVI and a long list of metropolitans, patriarchs and archbishops, the letter literally cites chapter and verse in the Bible as well as the Koran spelling out the duty of believers to love God and one another. If “Muslims and Christians are not at peace,” the clerics write, “the world cannot be at peace.”

There is more — much more — along these lines. The missive closes with this peroration: “Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works. Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to one another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual goodwill.”

Fine words. Professor John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University (and the foremost American apologist for Muslim extremism), presented the letter to the American audience as “an historic event.”

So what do we have here? The statement is chock-full of Biblical and Koranic injunctions to love one’s neighbor and to pursue righteousness. And yes, it would be a lovely world if people could simply apply those dictates to their daily lives and abjure hatred, violence and sin. Arguably, millions do. But all of that skirts the elephant in the room. You can read through this entire letter and never learn that there are Muslims all over the world currently interpreting their faith as a license to slaughter innocent human beings (very much including fellow Muslims). Moreover, the overall thrust of the document suggests that misunderstanding between Muslims and Christians (rather than problematic interpretations of Islam) is what threatens world peace.

The clerics write: “As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them — so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.” Where in the world are Christians waging war against Muslims on account of their religion, or driving them out of their homes and oppressing them? Clearly Americans have fought against some Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq — but we have just as clearly fought alongside other Muslims. Nor do we fight Muslims “on account of their religion.” This is al Qaeda talk. Their propaganda videos preach a perverted version of reality in which Islam is under siege around the world.

By contrast, Christians living in Muslim societies have in fact suffered on account of their faith. In just the past couple of years Rami Ayyad, owner of a Christian bookstore in the Gaza Strip, was abducted, tortured and killed by Islamists. Two Palestinian Christian women were shot to death by the semi-official al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade for failing to wear the Islamic headscarf.

In Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace, Christians feel under siege from the increasingly Islamist Palestinian majority. Samir Qumsieh, owner of a Christian TV station, told the Jerusalem Post of beatings, theft and intimidation. “When I see what’s happening to Christians here, I worry a lot for our future,” he said. “They are targeting Christians, because we are seen as weak.”

Christian churches have been firebombed in Pakistan. In Afghanistan, a Muslim who converted to Christianity was sentenced to death. In Egypt, the Copts face continuing persecution. And of course, in Sudan, a Muslim government has carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Christian minority.

What do we make of Bosnia then? Good question. The nominally Christian Serbs did carry out an ethnic cleansing atrocity on the Bosnian Muslims. And guess who stepped in to stop it? A consortium of Western democracies. Where was the corresponding Muslim alliance to save the Christians of Sudan?

If the Muslim clerics are sincere in wishing for peace and understanding, they should issue a document that denounces Islamists; that rejects their violent interpretation of jihad; that affirms the human dignity of non-Muslims; and that condemns Osama bin Laden, Aymin al-Zawahiri and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by name. That would be historic. This letter is worse than a bromide, it’s a dodge.

==============================

Jury Reaches Verdict in Case of Muslim Charity Accused of Funding Terror (Foxnews, 071022)

DALLAS — A jury has reached a verdict in the federal case against five former leaders of a Muslim charity, but there was no assurance jurors had reached a decision on the major charges that the organization provided aid to the militant group Hamas.

The former members of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development — once the nation’s largest Muslim charity — were set to learn Monday whether the jury had found them guilty or innocent of charges they funneled millions in illegal aid to Middle Eastern terrorists.

The United States designated Hamas a terrorist group in 1995 and again in 1997, making financial transactions with the group illegal.

The jury reached its verdict Thursday after 19 days of deliberation. But a magistrate ordered it sealed so the judge and all the prosecutors who handled the case could be present.

Each of the five defendants faces up to 35 counts, including conspiracy and money laundering. Judge A. Joe Fish could order further deliberations or accept a partial result and declare a mistrial on undecided charges if jurors failed to agree on some counts.

The case’s importance to the government was illustrated in December 2001, when President Bush and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the seizure of Holy Land’s assets.

As was the case at the beginning of the two-month trial, courtroom security was expected to be tight Monday.

The defendants are Holy Land’s former chief executive, Shukri Abu Baker; former chairmen Ghassan Elashi and Mohammed El-Mezain; the group’s New Jersey representative, Abdulrahman Odeh; and fundraiser Mufid Abdulqader.

Abdulqader is the half brother of Hamas political chief Khalid Mishal, whom the U.S. government also designated a terrorist. Elashi is serving an 80-month sentence after being convicted at an earlier trial of having financial dealings with another designated terrorist, Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook, who married Elashi’s cousin.

Lawyers for the Holy Land officials said the group was a legitimate charity that provided medical help, social services and schooling to Palestinian children and families. The group sent millions of dollars to Palestinian charities in Gaza and the West Bank, areas occupied by Israel.

An Israeli security lawyer, who was allowed to testify under a false name, said the Palestinian charities were controlled by Hamas, which conducts suicide bombings inside Israel.

Defense lawyers tried to rebut the lawyer’s testimony by calling a retired U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem, who said he was privy to daily CIA briefings and was never told that Hamas controlled the charities. The U.S. government never designated the charities as terrorist organizations.

Holy Land was founded in California and moved to the Dallas suburb of Richardson in 1992. Three of the defendants attended a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia where participants spoke of helping Hamas derail a 1993 peace agreement between Israel and Palestinian representatives. The FBI secretly recorded the meeting.

Gary Osen, a New Jersey lawyer who has sued banks he believes handle money for terrorist groups including Al Qaeda, said the Holy Land case was more important in the war on terror than cases that got more attention, such as that of failed shoe bomber Richard Reid.

“Most of the money that moves globally on behalf of Islamic terrorist organizations is moved through charitable front organizations,” Osen said.

==============================

Al Qaeda Takes Aim at Al-Jazeera Over Bin Laden Coverage (Foxnews, 071026)

CAIRO, Egypt — Al Qaeda sympathizers have unleashed a torrent of anger against Al-Jazeera television, accusing it of misrepresenting Usama bin Laden’s latest audiotape by airing excerpts in which he criticizes mistakes by insurgents in Iraq.

Users of a leading Islamic militant Web forum posted thousands of insults against the pan-Arab station for focusing on excerpts in which bin Laden criticizes insurgents, including his followers.

Analysts said the reaction highlighted militants’ surprise at bin Laden’s words, and their dismay at the deep divisions among Al Qaeda and other Iraqi militants that he appeared to be trying to heal.

“It’s not about Al-Jazeera, it’s about their shock from bin Laden,” said Diaa Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on Islamic militant groups. “For the first time, bin Laden, who used to be the spiritual leader who gives guidance, became a critic of Al Qaeda and is confessing mistakes. This is unusual.”

“God fight Al-Jazeera,” railed one militant Web poster, calling the station a “collaborator with the Crusaders” for suggesting the tape showed weakness in Al Qaeda and featuring discussions of how the tape reflected weaknesses and divisions among insurgents in Iraq.

The recording aired Monday contained unusually strong criticism of insurgents in Iraq from bin Laden, who urges them to admit mistakes and unify. Bin Laden even aknowledges that he advises himself not to be “fanatical” in his stances.

“Some of you have been lax in one duty, which is to unite your ranks,” bin Laden said. “Beware of division ... Muslims are waiting for you to gather under a single banner to champion righteousness. Be keen to oblige with this duty.”

“I advise myself, Muslims in general and brothers in Al Qaeda everywhere to avoid extremism among men and groups,” he said.

The tape was met with a cautiously positive response from at least one insurgent coalition that has been opposed to Al Qaeda.

But the Al-Fajr Media Center, which usually posts Al Qaeda video and audio tapes on the Web, accused Al-Jazeera of “counterfeiting the facts” by making the speech appear as exclusively critical of insurgents.

“Al-Jazeera directors have shamefully chosen to back the Crusaders’ side, and the defenders of hypocrites and the thugs and traitors of Iraq,” Al-Fajr said in a statement posted on several Islamic Web sites.

Another Web contributor even rattled off a five-stanza poem of rhymed couplets, comparing the station to a “miserable fly in the garbage” and concluding, “Your day will come, vile one. As long as we live, you won’t be safe, Jazeera.”

Few of the thousands of messages posted by contributors on the Web sites — who are only identified by usernames — called for direct violence against Al-Jazeera. Most instead urged that the full bin Laden tape be distributed as widely as possible on the Web to show its true message.

The full 30-minute audio was posted on Islamic Web sites the day after excerpts were aired by Al-Jazeera. It features long sections praising insurgents for their “holy war” against U.S. and Iraqi troops and urging Iraqis to join them.

The editor-in-chief of the Qatar-based station, Ahmed Sheik, refused to comment on the criticism but said the tape had not been misrepresented.

“Every time, we deal with their tapes same way we did last time,” he told The Associated Press.

Bin Laden’s message came at a time of deepening splits in the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq. Some insurgent groups have formed a coalition rivaling one set up by Al Qaeda in Iraq. Other factions have broken away and joined U.S. troops in fighting Al Qaeda. A group of Sunni Arab tribes in the western province of Anbar also have campaigned against Al Qaeda.

The splits are believed to have been caused by anger over Al Qaeda attempts to dominate the insurgency as well as by its killings of Sunni tribal leaders and its attempts to impose Taliban-like rules.

The spokesman of one coalition of insurgents opposed to Al Qaeda welcomed bin Laden’s call and even left open the possibility of working with Al Qaeda if its mistakes were corrected.

“We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves ... but the subject is put forward before the council,” Khattab Abdul-Rahman al-Jabbouri, spokesman of the Political Council of the Iraqi Resistance, told Al-Jazeera in an interview.

He said Al Qaeda in Iraq’s actions “damaged the social fabric of the Iraqi people.” But “if someone corrects their mistake, no matter who they are, then that is a good thing. That’s what we hope for today, so that we can end the mistakes and unify our ranks so we can be a single line against the aggressor,” he said.

Kara Driggers, Mideast analyst for the Terrorism Research Center, said bin Laden’s criticisms of Al Qaeda in Iraq and his rhetoric addressing all Iraqis — including tribal leaders — “seems to have brought more authority to the request (for unity) and the groups are taking it more seriously.”

But Eric Rosenbach, a terror expert and executive director of research at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said the splits will be difficult to mend, pointing out that Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq view bin Laden as being as foreign as the Americans.

==============================

Gang-Rape in Saudi Arabia (Townhall.com, 071127)

[excerpt from article]

Millions Americans have lately been introduced to the Saudis’ attitude towards gang-rape, pursuant to the theocratic code known as Shari’a that they seek to impose on us all. We learned that a 19-year-old Saudi woman identified only as the Girl of Qatif had been kidnapped and raped by seven men. The rapists were to receive prison sentences and whippings. The woman, though, was sentenced to receive 90 lashes for the crime of sitting in a car with a male who was not a relative. When she had the temerity to appeal her barbaric sentence, it was increased to six months in prison and 200 lashes.

==============================

In Search Of The “Peace-Loving Muslims” – Again (townhall.com, 070930)

By Austin Hill

What is it with the combination of being a medical doctor and a “Muslim? That’s a very legitimate question to ask, in light of a certain event that unfolded at the end of last week in Virginia.

Dr. Esam Omeish, who in addition to being an “M.D.” was, up until last Thursday, a member of the Virginia State Commission on Immigration. He also happens to be president of the Muslim American Society. By all accounts an accomplished professional and a responsible contributor to his community, Dr. Omeish’s world changed, seemingly overnight, when some very damning video was discovered at Youtube Dot Com.

Turns out that back in August of 2006, Dr. Omeish delivered a speech before an Islamic rally in Washington D.C., and made some statements that, by any objective measure, are rather troubling.

First, the part that has people really upset. Dr. Omeish is seen on the video tape saying to his Muslim audience, “...you have learned the way, that you have known that the jihad way is the way to liberate your land.”

Is this something that has been taken out of context? Sure it is. I’m only providing a partial quote here. But can we just be very candid and honest here, and admit that hearing a Muslim in America— or anywhere else—utter the word “jihad,” is rather unnerving?

Since the discovery of the video, Dr. Omeish has explained that this jihad flap is all a big misunderstanding. Responding to the outcry, Dr. Omeish stated “in Islam, jihad is a broad word that means constant struggle—struggling spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, physically—in all respects. So my words were in support of people who are resisting occupation and people who are trying to ... remove oppression from their land.”

Okay…so all us “non-Muslims” need to keep an open mind, and think in terms of a broader definition of “jihad.”

But what about some of the other rhetoric that appears on Dr. Omeish’s You Tube debut? Elsewhere on the recording Omeish states that the ‘invasion” of Lebanon and “support of the Israeli war machine” are criminal, and should end now. And that Israel is “illegally occupying Palestine.” And that the United States Congress has an “agenda” to support Israel, and that agenda is ‘controlling” U.S. foreign policy.

Oh, really? And since when has it become socially acceptable in the United States to assert conspiracy theories about the undue influence of Jews (isn’t this as “old school” and as offensive as saying that “the Jews control Hollywood?”). And how much further should this kind of rhetoric progress before we are legitimately concerned about “anti-Semitism?”

This incident certainly raises concerns about Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine’s vetting process, for appointing members to his state commission. But it also bares at least some resemblance to a set of circumstances that unfolded earlier this year in Europe.

Recall that on July 1 of this year, authorities in both England and Scottland reported the discovery of a terror plot involving Muslim physicians and their plans to wreak havoc at airports in both London and Glasgow. Fortunately the plot was thwarted. But it was bad enough to raise concerns at 10 Downing Street about the adequacy of background checks that were being conducted on so-called “professional immigrants” into the U.K.

Similarly, the “discovery” of Dr. Omeish’s inflamed rhetoric in front of his Muslim “brothers” should raise concerns here in the United States. It should, once again, cause Americans to question where the true, peace-loving Muslims are. It should cause us to ask why, among the voices of hostility and hatred, we are not hearing from those who call themselves by the name of “Allah,” yet are also able to agreeably disagree with those who do not share their faith tradition, and not wish them harm.

I dared to raise these questions myself, just last Friday in Washington, D.C. While guest hosting a talk show on ABC radio’s 630 WMAL (a station where I frequently “fill-in”), I asked these very same questions, even as the news of Dr. Omeish was breaking. And quite quickly, I was inundated with some very enlightening email and telephone calls, labeling me as a “Nazi,” “a pawn in the big Zionist propaganda machine,” and a “hate monger who is painting with a broad brush every Muslim on the planet.”

I hadn’t asserted anything — I merely asked a couple of questions. If you’re going to ask the questions, be prepared to be so-labeled.

But the questions are still worth asking.

==============================

Terror leaders describe America bound by Islam: Death by stoning, church bells banned, new protection tax for all non-Muslims (WorldNetDaily, 071107)

[KH: US will never become an Islamic state; but here is a peek on what Christians face in Islamic states today.]

Madonna and Britney Spears stoned to death? Bars and clubs closed down? Church bells banned? That’s just a taste of what Americans have to look forward to if terrorists ever took over the U.S. and imposed Islamic law, according to a new book.

In one chapter of the recently released “Schmoozing with Terrorists: From Hollywood to the Holy Land, JIhadists Reveal their Global Plans – to a Jew!” author and WND Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein petitioned Mideast terror leaders to describe day-to-day life in the U.S. if al-Qaida won the war on terror.

“Once Islam dominates, anyone living inside the Islamic state must abide by our rules. There is no choice. You will abide or face the punishment,” said Muhammad Abdel-El, the spokesman and a senior leader of the Popular Resistance Committees terror organization.

Sheik Abu Saqer, a prominent Gaza-based preacher, a founder of the Sword of Islam terror group and a subscriber to the ideology of al-Qaida, explained if Islam controls the U.S., all American women, whether Muslim or not, must cover their hair.

“This is the demand of our religion. Being and walking naked doesn’t mean that you are enjoying more freedom; it means that you are going against Allah’s laws and you are serving the enemies of Islam who want to empty our Islamic society from its values. Uncovered heads is a form of nudity.”

Yasser Hamad, a cleric and a Hamas leader in the northern West Bank, explained in “Schmoozing” Islamic law enforcers would at first try to persuade American woman to cover their heads, but eventually females would be forced. Those women who refuse may be stoned.

Asked by Klein whether stoning was too harsh a punishment, Hamad replied:

“If you don’t respect the local law in America, if you don’t pay taxes, if you drive on a red light, aren’t there sanctions used against you by your government? Of course there are and it’s okay with you. Why is there a problem when it comes to the Islamic state that wants to impose its rules?”

Hamad and other terror leaders stated all Jews and Christians living in the U.S. once Islam takes over would need to pay the jizya – a special protection tax – and other special taxes for non-Muslims, including one for the right to cultivate land. Non-Muslims cannot own land themselves.

Saqer said no new synagogues or churches can be built in the Islamic state. Existing houses of worship may remain, but services cannot be conducted loudly or in any public fashion. The ringing of church bells or blowing of the ceremonial Jewish shofar would be forbidden, the terror leaders said.

Asked about crime and punishment, Hamad explained, “For every sin and crime there is a sanction:”

“Prostitution: one hundred whippings; if the prostitute was married, he or she will be stoned until death; for a thief, his hand will be cut. But before enjoying the primitive nature of Islam and before you express how much you are shocked by our rules, I must say that these are not immediate sanctions, but they are used only if the person was warned.”

Hamad explained prostitution doesn’t mean selling sex; he said the Islamic definition applies the term to all extramarital sexual relations. But he boasted Islam’s allowing men to marry many women was a perfect remedy for prostitution.

“In order to prevent prostitution and before reaching the sanctions of stoning or whipping, we will marry all our unmarried young. By the way, Islam allows the man to marry four women, so if he or she keeps practicing sex outside marriage and prostitution, in this case the sanctions mentioned in Quran will be used.”

The terror leaders all said alcohol would be banned and American movies and television would be shut down.

“American culture is very cheap and very corrupting. Your American culture is based on capitalism, on democracy, sex, and other principles that go against the nature of human beings as Allah created. We will fight all that this culture represents and promotes,” said sheik Saleh Faraj, one of the main leaders of the Islamic Liberation Party in the West Bank.

What about freedom of the press in the American Islamic state? The terrorists said once Islam rules us, American media outlets that don’t conform to disseminating Islamic messages will be closed. They said the NY Times, CNN, the Washington Post would all be banned.

“The media will be closed not because there will be no freedom but because what is the logic of allowing the activity of media that can endanger the political and social stability of our state?” said Nasser Abu Aziz, no. 2 of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group in the northern West Bank.

The terrorists took particular offense at the FOX News Channel, which some called a “network of evil.”

Abu Abdullah said, “The evil FOX encourages a lack of respect to Islam and resistance movements and will cause moral confusion and negative political influence.”

There is a possibility American music may be altogether banned if Islam takes over. Saqer explained in “Schmoozing,” some Islamic experts and sages, including those of the school of Egyptian scholar Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, allow music; while others, like those belonging to the Islamic Salafite school, forbid music.

Asked about American pop music icons, multiple terror leaders had never heard of many top singers but Klein said they were all familiar with Madonna and Britney Spears.

“Unfortunately, I heard the names of Madonna and Spears on [Arab] television when parents complain that their children neglect their studies and their values because they are influenced by your cheap American music that you call culture,” said Saqer.

Hamas’s Abu Abdullah said, “At the beginning, we will try to convince Madonna and Britney Spears to follow Allah’s way. But I honestly don’t think they will follow. If they persist with their whoring music, we will prevent them by force. I don’t think that I can be in the same place with these singers. They might be killed if they do not respect our laws.”

The Committee’s Abdel-El, whose group previously bombed Americans, said, “Their music video clips will be forbidden and these whores Madonna and Spears will be thrown in jail until they admit they made sins and return to the moral way. If they don’t, they will be stoned to death or eighty times hit with a belt.”

Abdel-El said even before Islam takes over America, he would personally kill Madonna and Spears if he ran into them. “If I meet these whores I will have the honor – I repeat, I will have the honor – to be the first one to cut the heads of Madonna and Britney Spears.”

In “Schmoozing,” the terrorists stress repeatedly their goal is a worldwide Islamic caliphate.

“We see already in America a nucleus of Islam, a base for Islam. This will become bigger, stronger, more important, until Islam will take control and will seize the power in America and the world,” said Faraj.

Abdel-El affirmed, “America will be overthrown. We are seeing more and more signs that prove that the process had already started.”

Among the highlights of “Schmoozing with Terrorists”:

* Terror leaders dish on loudmouth, anti-war celebrities such as Rosie O’Donnell, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Jane Fonda and Richard Gere and even sound off about American talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

* Jihadists list their U.S. election favorites, mouth off about politicians and even threaten to kill one 2008 presidential candidate.

* Klein and friends confront well-armed senior terrorists about whether suicide bombers really get 72 virgins after their deadly operation.

* Terror groups funded, trained and armed by the U.S.? American tax dollars donated to schools that double as terror training zones and jihadist recruitment grounds? A shocking expose on how your tax dollars fund terrorism!

* Bibles used as toilet paper, synagogues as rocket launching zones? Meet the leaders of the most notorious holy site desecrations in history.

* The under-reported story of Christian persecution in the Middle East as told by the antagonists and victims

* Terrorists even offer tips on how to win the war on terror!

==============================

19-Year Old Saudi Rape Victim Ordered to Undergo 200 Lashes (Foxnews, 071115)

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A 19-year-old female victim of gang rape who initially was ordered to undergo 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape,” has been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail for telling her story to the news media.

The new verdict was handed down by Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council following a retrial, the Arab News reported.

The court last year sentenced the six heavily-armed men who carried out the attack against the Shiite woman to between one and five years for committing the crime.

But the judges had decided to punish the woman further for “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media,” a court source told the Arab News.

The new verdict issued on Wednesday also toughened the sentences against the six men to between two and nine years in prison.

Saudi Arabia enforces a strict Islamic doctrine that forbids unrelated men and women from associating with each other, bans women from driving and forces them to cover head-to-toe in public.

The case has angered members of Saudi Arabia’s Shiite community. The convicted men are Sunni Muslims, the dominant community in the oil-rich Gulf state.

==============================

British teacher faces lashes in Sudan after class teddy bear is named ‘Muhammad’ (Times Online, 071126)

A British primary school teacher arrested in Sudan faces up to 40 lashes for blasphemy after letting her class of 7-year-olds name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, was arrested at her lodgings at Khartoum’s Unity High School yesterday, accused of insulting the Prophet of Islam.

Her colleagues said that they feared for her safety after reports that groups of young men had gathered outside the Khartoum police station where she was taken and were shouting death threats.

The Unity school is a Christian-run but multi-racial and co-educational private school that is popular with Sudanese professionals and expatriate workers.

Bishop Ezekiel Kondo, chairman of the school council, told The Times that the school was in dispute with authorities over taxes, and suggested that Ms Gibbons, who arrived in Khartoum in August, may have been caught up in that.

“The thing may be very simple but there are people who are trying to make it bigger. It’s a knd of blackmail,” he said.

Teachers at the school, in central Khartoum only a mile from the River Nile, said that Ms Gibbons had made an innocent mistake by letting her pupils choose their favourite name for the toy as part of a school project.

Robert Boulos, the Unity director, said that Mrs Gibbons was following a British National Curriculum course designed to teach young pupils about animals and their habitats. This year’s animal was the bear.

In September, she asked a girl to bring in her teddy bear to help the Year 2 class to focus and then asked the class to name the toy.

“They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad. Then she explained what it meant to vote and asked them to choose the name,” Mr Boulos said.

Twenty out of the 23 children chose Muhammad. Each child was allowed to take the bear home at weekends and asked to write a diary about what they did with the toy. Each entry was collected in a book with a picture of the bear on the cover, next to the message “My name is Muhammad”.

Mr Boulos said that the bear itself was not marked or labelled with the name in any way, he added, saying Sudanese police had now seized the book and had asked to interview the 7-year-old girl.

He said that he had decided to close down the school until January for fear of reprisals in Sudan’s predominantly Muslim capital.

“This is a very sensitive issue. We are very worried about her safety,” he said. “This was a completely innocent mistake. Miss Gibbons would have never wanted to insult Islam.”

The British Embassy in Khartoum said that it was still unclear whether Mrs Gibbons had been charged formally. “We are following it up with the authorities and trying to meet her in person,” it said.

Under Sudan’s Sharia law blasphemy could attract a large fine, 40 lashes or a jail term of up to six months.

==============================

Sudan Charges British Teacher With Insulting Religion With ‘Muhammad’ Teddy Bear (Foxnews, 071128)

KHARTOUM, Sudan — Sudan charged a British teacher on Wednesday with insulting religion and inciting hatred — a crime punishable by up to 40 lashes, six months in prison or a fine — after she named a class teddy bear “Muhammad.”

The charges come a day after a 7-year-old Sudanese boy said Gilliam Gibbons, 54, asked him what he wanted to call the stuffed animal as part of a school assignment and he said, “Muhammad,” after his name.

The British government says the foreign secretary has summoned the Sudanese ambassador to discuss the religious hatred charge against the teacher.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s spokesman, Michael Ellam, said Miliband would discuss the charge of inciting religious hatred against teacher, Gillian Gibbons. The meeting will take place as soon as possible, the Foreign Office said.

Gibbons, of the private Unity High School in Khartoum, was arrested Sunday after one of her pupils’ parents complained, accusing her of naming the bear after Islam’s chief prophet. “Muhammad” is a common name among Muslim men, but connecting the Prophet’s name to an animal could be seen as insulting by many Muslims.

Several Sudanese newspapers on Tuesday ran a statement reportedly from Unity High School saying that Gibbons had been “removed from work at the school” and apologizing for any offense, though it said the incident was a “misunderstanding.”

The boy said when he suggested they name the bear Muhammad, he wasn’t thinking of Islam’s Prophet, Reuters reported.

He also said most of the class agreed with him on the name, Reuters reported.

In the first official comment on the case, Sudanese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday downplayed its significance, describing it as isolated but also condemning it.

Ministry spokesman, Ali al-Sadeq, said the case of a “teacher’s misconduct against the Islamic faith” should not have provoked a British government caution warning to its citizens in Sudan.

Al-Sadeq said this was particularly so after the school had apologized to the parents, pupils and to the Sudanese in general for the teacher’s “unacceptable conduct.”

The statement in the newspapers was not officially confirmed by the school, however.

A person reached by phone at the school who identified herself as an administrator, said the statement was correct but would not confirm details in it. She refused to give her name, citing the sensitivity of the situation. She said the school has closed for at least the next week until the controversy eases.

The Unity High School, a private English-language school with elementary to high school levels, was founded by Christian groups but 90% of its students are Muslim, mostly from upper-class Sudanese families.

The school’s director, Robert Boulos, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the incident was “a completely innocent mistake. Miss Gibbons would have never wanted to insult Islam.”

Gibbons was teaching her pupils, who are around 7 years old, about animals and asked one of them to bring in her teddy bear, Boulos said. She asked the students to pick names for it and they proposed Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad, and in the end the pupils voted to name it Muhammad, he said.

Each child was allowed to take the bear home on weekends and write a diary about what they did with it. The diary entries were collected in a book with the bear’s picture on the cover, labeled, “My Name is Muhammad,” though the bear itself was never labeled with the name, he said.

A former colleague of Gibbons, Jill Langworthy, told The Associated Press the lesson is a common one in Britain. “She’s a wonderful and inspirational teacher, and if she offended or insulted anybody she’d be dreadfully sorry,” Langworthy, who taught with Gibbons in Liverpool, said.

The case brought widespread calls in Britain for her release. The Muslim Council of Britain calls upon the Sudanese government to intervene in the case.

“This is a very unfortunate incident and Ms Gibbons should never have been arrested in the first place. It is obvious that no malice was intended,” said Muhammad Abdul Bari, the council’s secretary-general.

British opposition Conservative party lawmaker William Hague called on the British government to “make it clear to the Sudanese authorities that she should be released immediately.”

“To condemn Gillian Gibbons to such brutal and barbaric punishment for what appears to be an innocent mistake is clearly unacceptable,” he said.

In the U.S., a spokeswoman for the National Organization for Women said the situation is definitely on the radar, and N.O.W. is not ignoring it.

But she added that the U.S.-based organization is not putting out a statement or taking a position.

Radio personality Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angles chapter of the National Organization for Women and past member of their board of directors, criticized the organization for not taking a stand.

“We have a duty to make a difference for women around the world,” Bruce told FOX News. “The supposed feminist establishment is refusing to take a position in this regard because they have no sensibility of what is right anymore. They’re afraid of offending people. They are bound by political correctness.”

“The American feminist movement has not taken one stand to support the women of Iraq, the women of Afghanistan, the women of Iran,” she said. “It is the United States Marines who have been doing the feminist work by liberating women and children around the world.”

Omar Daair, spokesman for the British Embassy in Sudan, said embassy officials were in touch with Sudanese authorities and had met with Gibbons. He said he expected authorities to decide whether to bring her to court, and on what charges, within a few days. “Her lawyer is trying to get her released on bail in the meanwhile,” he said.

Gibbons was being questioned on suspicion of abuse of religion — a charge that is punishable by up to six months in prison, a fine or flogging of up to 40 lashes under Sudan’s Islamic law-based legal system.

The case recalled the outrage that was sparked in the Islamic world when European newspapers ran cartoons deriding the Prophet Muhammad in recent years, prompting protests in many Muslim countries. The Prophet Muhammad is highly revered by Muslims, and most interpretations of the religion bar even favorable depiction of him, for fear of encouraging idolatry or misrepresenting him.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir earlier this month suggested he would ban Denmark, Sweden and Norway — where newspapers ran the cartoons — from contributing engineering personnel to a planned U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force in the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur.

But Sudanese authorities appeared so far to be playing down the incident of the British teacher. Her case has not been mentioned in state media.

The reported statement from the school said the administration “offers an official apology to the students and their families and all Muslims for what came from an individual initiative.” It said Gibbons had been “removed from her work at the school.”

The statement underlined the school’s “deep respect for the heavenly religions” and for the “beliefs of Muslims and their rituals.” It added that “the misunderstanding that has been raised over this issue leads to divisions that are disadvantageous to the reputation of the tolerant Sudanese people.

==============================

Saudi Court to Review Case of Rape Victim Sentenced to 200 Lashes (Foxnews, 071128)

A Saudi court will review the case of a teenage gang rape victim sentenced to jail and flogging after she was convicted of violating the country’s strict sex segregation laws, the foreign minister said Tuesday.

The remarks by Prince Saud al-Faisal, made in the United States and carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, were the latest in response to a salvo of international condemnation of Saudi judicial authorities’ handling of the case.

It was also a sharp turn from a statement Saturday in which the Saudi Justice Ministry condemned the 19-year-old woman — raped by seven men and then sentenced to six months prison and 200 lashes — as an adulteress who had allegedly confessed to cheating on her husband.

In the statement, the ministry said the flogging sentence would be carried out and condemned foreign interference. The statement likely sought to ease international outrage over the case by discrediting the woman.

On Tuesday, SPA quoted al-Faisal as saying “the Saudi judiciary will review the case.”

But al-Faisal was also on the defensive and maintained the case was being used against Saudi authorities.

The woman claims that when her brother learned of the attack, he tried to kill her, the Telegraph reported.

She also tried to commit suicide after the assult, the Telegraph reported.

“What is outraging about this case is that it is being used against the Saudi government and people,” he said, speaking in Annapolis, Md., where he was attending the U.S.-hosted Mideast peace conference.

Known only as the “Girl from Qatif,” the victim said she was a newlywed who was meeting a high school friend in his car to retrieve a picture of herself from him when the attack occurred in the eastern city of Qatif in 2006.

While she was in the car, two men got into the vehicle and drove them to a secluded area where others waited, and then she and her companion were both raped.

The ministry’s account Saturday alleged that the woman and her lover met in his car for a tryst “in a dark place where they stayed for a while.”

The girl was initially sentenced to prison and 90 lashes for being alone with a man not related to her. An appeals court then doubled the lashes to 200.

The increase in sentence received heavy coverage in the international media and prompted expressions of astonishment from the U.S. government. Canada called it “barbaric.”

Under Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law, women are not allowed in public in the company of men other than their male relatives. Also, women in Saudi Arabia are often sentenced to flogging and even death for adultery and other crimes.

The seven men convicted of gang raping the woman were given prison sentences of two to nine years.

The case has sparked rare domestic debate about the Saudi legal system, which gives judges wide discretion in sentencing and where rules of evidence are shaky and sometimes no lawyers are present.

Justice in Saudi Arabia is administered by a system of religious courts and judges appointed by the king on the recommendation of the Supreme Judicial Council. Those courts and judges have complete discretion to set sentences, except in cases where Sharia outlines a punishment, such as capital crimes.

That means that no two judges would likely hand down the same sentence for similar crimes. A rapist, for instance, could receive anywhere from a light or no sentence to death, depending on the judge’s discretion.

==============================

Dutch Lawmaker Planning Film Criticizing the Koran (Foxnews, 071129)

THE HAGUE, Netherlands: — A Dutch conservative lawmaker said Wednesday he is making a film to highlight what he describes as “fascist” passages in the Koran, his latest high profile criticism of Islam.

The interior and justice ministers said they were concerned, but believed they had no authority to prevent the lawmaker, Geert Wilders, from screening his film.

Wilders plans to depict parts of the Koran he says are used as inspiration “by bad people to do bad things.”

Less than 10 minutes long, the film is expected to air in late January. It will show “the intolerant and fascist character of the Koran,” said Wilders, whose anti-Islam campaign helped his Freedom Party win nine seats in parliament in last year’s election.

In the past, Wilders has said that half the Koran should be torn up and compared it with Adolf Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf.” He has claimed the Netherlands is being swamped by a “tsunami” of Islamic immigrants.

Immigrants from Muslim countries number about 1 million of the country’s 16 million people.

Wilders’ planned broadcast is reminiscent of the film “Submission” — a fictional study of abused Muslim women with scenes of near-naked women with Koranic texts engraved on their flesh.

“Submission” director Theo van Gogh was shot and had his throat slit by a Muslim extremist on an Amsterdam street in 2004. Prominent Muslim critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the screenplay, was threatened in a note left on Van Gogh’s body. She now lives under round-the-clock protection in the United States.

Justice Ministry spokesman Wim van der Weegen said the government is “taking measures” before the broadcast of Wilders’ film. He declined to elaborate.

“Based on the discussion, the ministers have expressed concern,” Van der Weegen said. “But at the same time (they) have said that Mr. Wilders has freedom of expression.”

Wilders said he is not afraid of reprisals if his film angers Muslims. “I have lived with 24-hour protection for three years,” he said.

“I will make the film and see what reaction it creates.”

Dutch Muslim leaders did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

==============================

Thousands in Sudan Call for British Teddy Bear Teacher’s Execution (Foxnews, 071130)

KHARTOUM, Sudan — Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, rallied Friday in a central square and demanded the execution of a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam for allowing her students to name a teddy bear “Muhammad.”

The protesters streamed out of mosques after Friday sermons, as pickup trucks with loudspeakers blared messages against Gillian Gibbons, the teacher who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in prison and deportation. She avoided the more serious punishment of 40 lashes.

They massed in central Martyrs Square outside the presidential palace, where hundreds of riot police were deployed. They did not try to stop the rally, which lasted about an hour.

“Shame, shame on the U.K.,” protesters chanted.

The protesters called for Gibbons’ execution, saying, “No tolerance: Execution,” and “Kill her, kill her by firing squad.”

The women’s prison where Gibbons is being held is far from the square.

Several hundred protesters, not openly carrying weapons, marched about a mile away to Unity High School, where Gibbons worked. They chanted slogans outside the school, which is closed and under heavy security, then marched toward the nearby British Embassy. They were stopped by security forces two blocks away from the embassy.

The protest arose despite vows by Sudanese security officials the day before, during Gibbons’ trial, that threatened demonstrations after Friday prayers would not take place. Some of the protesters carried green banners with the name of the Society for Support of the Prophet Muhammad, a previously unknown group.

Many protesters carried clubs, knives and axes — but not automatic weapons, which some have brandished at past government-condoned demonstrations. That suggested Friday’s rally was not organized by the government.

A Muslim cleric at Khartoum’s main Martyrs Mosque denounced Gibbons during one sermon, saying she intentionally insulted Islam. He did not call for protests, however.

“Imprisoning this lady does not satisfy the thirst of Muslims in Sudan. But we welcome imprisonment and expulsion,” the cleric, Abdul-Jalil Nazeer al-Karouri, a well-known hard-liner, told worshippers.

“This an arrogant woman who came to our country, cashing her salary in dollars, teaching our children hatred of our Prophet Muhammad,” he said.

Britain, meanwhile, pursued diplomatic moves to free Gibbons. Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke with a member of her family to convey his regret, his spokeswoman said.

“He set out his concern and the fact that we were doing all we could to secure her release,” spokeswoman Emily Hands told reporters.

Most Britons expressed shock at the verdict by a court in Khartoum, alongside hope it would not raise tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain.

“One of the good things is the U.K. Muslims who’ve condemned the charge as completely out of proportion,” said Paul Wishart, 37, a student in London.

“In the past, people have been a bit upset when different atrocities have happened and there hasn’t been much voice in the U.K. Islamic population, whereas with this, they’ve quickly condemned it.”

Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, accused the Sudanese authorities of “gross overreaction.”

“This case should have required only simple common sense to resolve. It is unfortunate that the Sudanese authorities were found wanting in this most basic of qualities,” he said.

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee, a political advocacy group, said the prosecution was “abominable and defies common sense.”

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, said Gibbons’ prosecution and conviction was “an absurdly disproportionate response to what is at worst a cultural faux pas.”

Foreign Secretary David Miliband summoned the Sudanese ambassador late Thursday to express Britain’s disappointment with the verdict. The Foreign Office said Britain would continue diplomatic efforts to achieve “a swift resolution” to the crisis.

Gibbons was arrested Sunday after another staff member at the school complained that she had allowed her 7-year-old students to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Giving the name of the Muslim prophet to an animal or a toy could be considered insulting.

The case put Sudan’s government in an embarrassing position — facing the anger of Britain on one side and potential trouble from powerful Islamic hard-liners on the other. Many saw the 15-day sentence as an attempt to appease both sides.

In The Times, columnist Bronwen Maddox said the verdict was “something of a fudge ... designed to give a nod to British reproof but also to appease the street.”

Britain’s response — applying diplomatic pressure while extolling ties with Sudan and affirming respect for Islam — had produced mixed results, British commentators concluded.

In an editorial, The Daily Telegraph said Miliband “has tiptoed around the case, avoiding a threat to cut aid and asserting that respect for Islam runs deep in Britain. Given that much of the government’s financial support goes to the wretched refugees in Darfur and neighboring Chad, Mr. Miliband’s caution is understandable.”

Now, however, the newspaper said, Britain should recall its ambassador in Khartoum and impose sanctions on the Sudanese regime.

==============================

Sudanese President Pardons British Teacher Jailed for ‘Muhammad’ Teddy Bear (Foxnews, 071203)

KHARTOUM, Sudan — A British teacher jailed after she allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad was released Monday hours after Sudan’s president pardoned her, a British embassy spokesman said.

Gillian Gibbons’ conviction under Sudan’s Islamic Sharia law shocked Britons and many Muslims worldwide. Hard-line Muslim clerics in Sudan accused her of intentionally seeking to insult Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, and the case angered some Sudanese, sparking a protest where demonstrators called for her execution.

Gibbons said in a written statement delivered to Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir that she did not intend to offend anyone and had great respect for Islam. Her release came after two British Muslim politicians from the House of Lords met with al-Bashir to plead for her release.

“She is in British Embassy custody and is with the deputy British ambassador,” embassy spokesman Omar Daair said. He would not give her exact location or say when she would leave Sudan.

Gibbons, 54, was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in prison and deportation for insulting Islam because she allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad — a common name among Muslim men — in a class project on animals. The trial was sparked when a school secretary complained to the Education Ministry that Gibbons aimed to insult the Prophet Muhammad. Her time in jail since her arrest Nov. 25 counted toward the sentence.

Embassy spokesman Omar Daair said the Gibbons was in “British embassy custody,” but he would not give her exact location or say when she would leave Sudan, citing security reasons.

Lord Nazir Ahmed, who met with al-Bashir earlier Monday along with Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, said the case was an “unfortunate misunderstanding” and stressed that Britain respected Islam.

He hoped “the relations between our two countries will not be damaged by this incident,” Ahmed told reporters at the presidential palace after Monday’s meeting.

Ghazi Saladdin, a senior presidential adviser, said al-Bashir insisted that Gibbons had a “fair trial,” but he agreed to pardon her because of the efforts by the British Muslim delegation.

It was unclear when Gibbons would leave Sudan. Earlier Monday, Sudanese presidential spokesman Mahzoub Faidul told The Associated Press that Gibbons would “fly back to England today.” However, travel agents in Sudan said the earliest European-bound flights would not leave Khartoum until the early hours on Tuesday.

The director of Khartoum’s Unity High School, where Gibbons worked, said the embassy told him Monday that she would be “coming over shortly” to the school to pick up her gear before leaving the country.

“We are very relieved and happy that she has been pardoned,” said director Robert Boulos.

In the written statement released by Sudanese presidential palace and read by Warsi to reporters, 54-year-old Gibbons said she was sorry if she caused any “distress.”

“I have a great respect for the Islamic religion and would not knowingly offend anyone,” Gibbons, who was sentenced Thursday, said in the statement.

“I am looking forward to seeing my family and friends, but I am very sorry that I will be unable to return to Sudan,” the statement read.

The teacher escaped harsher punishment that could have included up to 40 lashes, six months in prison and a fine. Her time in jail since her arrest last Sunday counted toward the sentence.

During her trial, the weeping teacher said she had intended no harm. Her students, overwhelmingly Muslim, chose the name for the bear. Muslim scholars generally agree that intent is a key factor in determining if someone has violated Islamic rules against insulting the prophet.

The conviction shocked many Britons, but the case was caught up in the ideology that al-Bashir’s Islamic regime has long instilled in Sudan, a mix of anti-colonialism, religious fundamentalism and a sense that the West is besieging Islam.

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was delighted by news.

“Common sense has prevailed,” Brown said in a statement released by his office.

The case also sparked criticism from many Muslims in the West who said she should have never been arrested. On Monday, Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, welcomed the pardon.

“It will be wonderful to see her back in the U.K. I am sure she will be welcomed by both Muslims and non-Muslims after her quite terrible ordeal at the hands of the Sudanese authorities,” Bunglawala said.

A small group of about 40 protesters gathered briefly Monday in front of the British embassy in Khartoum and handed over a petition, spokesman Daair said, without describing the petition. But several cars of riot police arrived and dispersed the crowd.

On Friday during a rally in Khartoum, thousands of protesters, many armed with clubs and swords and beating drums, burned pictures of her and demanded her execution.

After the rally, there were fears for Gibbons’ safety and she was moved from the Omdurman women’s prison to a secret location, her lawyer has said.

There was no overt sign that the government organized the protest, but such a rally could not have taken place without at least official assent.

Sudan’s ambassador in London, Khalid al-Mubarak, insisted Monday that the demonstrations “were an argument from the fringe.”

==============================

Cultures collide: Muslim immigrants will be expelled from Europe unless they reverse the growing perception of them as a social threat (National Post, 060217)

Lawrence Solomon

The Muslims refused to assimilate. They were expelled. This was the story in Europe 400 years ago. We are watching the sequel today.

Europeans are rarely welcoming to outsiders, even when the outsiders are blond and blue-eyed and come from the country next door. When the outsiders are un-European, swarthy and Muslim, they are tolerated at best. When some Muslims also insist that Europeans stop acting like Europeans, on pain of death, European tolerance comes to an end.

In the clash of cultures between secular Europeans and extremist Muslims, there can ultimately be no compatibility or compromise, only loss by one side or the other of the absolute values it holds dear. European capitulation on European soil, where they remain the dominant majority, is unlikely: Europeans revel in their liberty to mock religion, to poke fun at sacred cows, to be outrageous, even to offend.

European leaders have reacted to the Muslim upset over the cartoons two ways. Publically and to buy time, they seek to calm the protesters by deploring the abuse of freedom of speech. More significantly, they seek to preserve their societies by legislating Western norms, by tightening or ending immigration from Muslim countries, by enabling the expulsion of radical imans and other Muslim activists, and by raising the spectre of mass deportations.

In France, hard-line Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who in October characterized France’s urban rioters as “rabble,” will require non-European immigrants to sign a new “Contract of Welcome and Integration” that spells out their obligations. Among other reforms, the French government will be free to expel immigrants after 10 years. Insular Muslim communities — commonplace today — are outlawed. For immigrants to stay, they will have to demonstrate respect for French norms, such as equality between men and women. “If a wife is kept hostage at home without learning French, the whole family will be asked to leave [the country],” said Mr. Sarkozy, who proposes to rank countries to determine the desirability of their immigrants.

The Danes have brought in immigration laws that are stricter still, all but ending their liberal refugee program and discouraging even temporary workers. In the wake of the cartoon riots, many in Denmark, including those in government, want to see an outright ban on Muslim immigration and to have radical leaders stripped of citizenship and deported. To preserve home-grown values, Danish Minister for Cultural Affairs Brian Mikkelsen recently called for the creation of a “canon of Danish art, music, literature and film.” Last summer, he stated that, “In Denmark we have seen the appearance of a parallel society in which minorities practice their own medieval values and undemocratic views,” adding that, “This is the new front in our cultural war.”

In Germany, which pioneered the guest-worker program in Europe, a sea change has occurred. “Multicultural societies have only ... functioned peacefully in authoritarian states. To that extent it was a mistake for us to bring guest workers from foreign cultures into the country at the beginning of the 1960s,” said former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Germany’s new Chancellor, Angela Merkel, shares his view: “The notion of multiculturalism has fallen apart,” she said prior to her election. “Anyone coming here must respect our constitution and tolerate our Western and Christian roots.”

The Netherlands, which has cut immigration in half since 2001, is deporting 26,000 rejected asylum seekers and keeping new arrivals in detention camps. Under proposed legislation, women will be banned from wearing the burka anywhere in public, not just in schools and public buildings as French legislation has it. “I believe we have been far too tolerant for too long, especially being too tolerant of intolerance, and we only got intolerance back,” said Member of Dutch Parliament Geert Wilders, who has been forced to live in safe houses because of Islamist death threats. According to a recent Pew Global Attitudes poll, 51% of the Dutch view Muslims unfavourably.

Belgium may be less tolerant still. “Islam is now the number one enemy not only of Europe, but of the entire free world,” states Filip Dewinter, leader of Vlaams Belang (The Flemish Interest), now Belgium’s most popular political party. Mr. Dewinter has gained popularity by arguing that, “it is an illusion to think that a moderate Islam exists in Europe.” He states: “There are already 25 million to 30 million Muslims on Europe’s soil, and this becomes a threat. It’s a real Trojan horse.”

Many Europeans fear their Muslim populations. In Switzerland, 25% consider Muslims a threat to their country. In Italy, half the population believes a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West is underway and that Islam is “a religion more fanatical than any other.”

The fear debilitates but it also stiffens resolve. The President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, backs the Danish government’s refusal to apologize for the cartoons, saying, “It’s better to publish too much than not to have freedom.” France’s Sarkozy prefers “an excess of cartooning to an excess of censorship.” Italy’s Northern League Party, a member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition government, printed T-shirts sporting the cartoons in advance of elections in April. The U.K. this week passed legislation broadening the right of free speech, no matter how offensive, barring a specific intent to provoke hatred.

Europe’s Muslims now know that they are expected to integrate or to depart. Four centuries ago, after decades of threats of expulsion, forced conversions and other failed attempts to assimilate Muslims, complaints about them — their use of Arabic, their clothes, their rejection of Western culture — were similar. “They marry among themselves and do not mix with Old Christians,” complained one report of Spain’s Moriscos (Muslims who had undergone forced conversions to Christianity). Riots by Muslims at offences perpetrated upon them added to tensions. In the end, still not assimilated, most were expelled.

==============================

Radio Host Michael Savage Sues Islamic Group for Copyright Infringement (Foxnews, 071203)

SAN FRANCISCO — A conservative radio talk show host sued an Islamic civil rights group on Monday for copyright infringement over the organization’s use of a portion of his show in which he called the Koran a “book of hate.”

Michael Savage said the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, violated his rights by wrongfully using a 4-minute segment of his Oct. 29 “The Savage Nation” show in a letter-writing campaign directed against talk radio advertisers. Audio from the show remained on CAIR’s Web site Monday.

In the broadcast, Savage called the Muslim holy book “a throwback document” and a “book of hate.”

“What kind of religion is this? What kind of world are you living in when you let them in here with that throwback document in their hand, which is a book of hate,” Savage said during the portion of the broadcast highlighted by CAIR. “Don’t tell me I need reeducation. They need deportation.”

In an interview with The Associated Press on Monday, Savage said he was talking about Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his dangerous and violent brand of Islamic extremism, not about the religion in general.

Savage said he strongly supports freedom of speech, but “it’s another thing to take away a man’s millstone and try to put him out of business.”

A CAIR spokeswoman, who said the audio was not a four-minute segment, but a series of clips separated by beeps, called the suit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, “bizarre, sloppy and baseless.”

“We expect to prevail based on the facts, the law and the Constitution,” Amina Rubin said.

The group’s “repackaging” of Savage’s comments was “deliberately designed to obscure the specific message conveyed by Michael Savage,” according to the suit. “The actual message, while highly provocative and strongly worded, was not intended as an attack on people of faith.”

CAIR claims advertisers have stopped airing or refuse to air commercials during Savage’s show.

Bill Crawford, a spokesman for Talk Radio Network, which syndicates the Savage show, said “there have been advertisers who’ve canceled Michael’s show because of the CAIR situation.” He refused to identify the companies or reveal the amount of lost revenue. Savage said he’s lost at least $1 million in revenue.

The suit alleges CAIR is not a civil rights group, but a political organization funded by foreigners with ties to Hamas and other terrorist groups. CAIR denies those claims, saying it opposes terrorism and religious extremism.

==============================

USCIRF, Evangelist Defend Teddy Row Teacher (Christian Post, 071203)

The U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and an American evangelist were among those that defended a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam by allowing her students to name a teddy bear “Mohammed.”

Gillian Gibbons, 54, was pardoned by Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir earlier Monday and soon after, left Sudan on a flight to England, according to CNN..

“I have great respect for the Islamic religion and would not knowingly offend anyone and I am sorry if I caused any distress,” Gibbons said in a statement read by House of Lords member Sayeed Warsi – one of two Muslim lawmakers who helped secure her release.

The British teacher who worked at the British international Unity High School sparked international uproar when she was arrested and convicted of offending Islam when students in her class named a teddy bear Mohammed. The name Mohammed is the most popular name for boys in Sudan.

The teacher was arrested Nov. 25 and sentenced on Nov. 29 to 15 days in prison and deportation for insulting religion. Angry mobs armed with knives and clubs marched Friday in Khartoum demanding Gibbons be executed.

“The speed with which the defendant was found guilty also suggests that she was not permitted to mount a proper defense, in flagrant disregard of due process of law,” USCIRF pointed out.

USCIRF, a bipartisan federal body responsible for monitoring religious freedom in the world, condemned the Sudanese government for arresting, detaining, convicting and sentencing Gibbons, according to a released report.

Gibbons’ prosecution “illustrates the arbitrary nature of laws ostensibly designed to protect religion from insult or defamation,” said USCIRF chair Michael Cromartie in a statement.

“Any personal grudge or political vendetta can provide the pretext for spurious accusations of blasphemy, apostasy, or insulting religion,” he argued.

Meanwhile, American evangelist and host of LivePrayer Bill Keller denounced Islam as a violent, hate-inciting religion and launched a video on YouTube, which featured a pink, toy pig named Muhammad.

Some have criticized Keller’s attack as “senseless, ignorant, hateful,” according to WorldNetDaily.

“This ‘minister’ is a poor representation of the love that Christ has for all of mankind,” said WND reader Clay Hestilow of Houston, Texas.

Gibbons is scheduled to land Tuesday morning in London where she is expected to make a statement to the media.

==============================

Canadian Muslim Teen’s Dad Charged in Her Murder; Friends Say They Clashed Over Head Scarf (Foxnews, 071212)

TORONTO — A Canadian man has been charged with murdering his own daughter, and her friends say the two clashed over her refusal to wear a Muslim head scarf. Police have not commented on a motive.

Aqsa Parvez, 16, of Mississauga, Ontario, was rushed to hospital in critical condition Monday after a man made an emergency call in which he claimed to have killed his daughter, police said. She died late Monday night.

The emergency call “came in from the father saying he had killed his daughter,” police spokesman Wayne Patterson said. “Police arrived and rushed her to hospital and she passed away.”

Patterson said they are working at determining the motive and refused to confirm it was over the head scarf.

The girl’s friends said in interviews Tuesday that Aqsa loved shopping for clothes and clashed with her family over her reluctance to wear the hijab, a traditional veil or head scarf for devout Muslim women.

“She didn’t want to go home ... to the point where she actually wanted to go to shelters,” classmate Ashley Garbutt, 16, told the Toronto Star.

Muslim leaders cautioned against jumping to conclusions.

“I don’t want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue,” said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. “It is a teenager issue.”

The girl’s father, Muhammad Parvez, 57, made a brief court appearance Tuesday morning and was remanded in custody pending another court appearance Wednesday. Aqsa Parvez’s brother, Waqas Parvez, 26, is facing a charge of obstructing police and remains in custody pending a Dec. 14 hearing.

Neither man has entered a plea yet.

Calls to the Parvez family home went unanswered Tuesday night

Patterson said he did not know if the man had a lawyer yet.

==============================

Aqsa’s father remanded into custody (National Post, 071212)

A father accused of killing his teenage daughter, allegedly over a clash about her Islamic dress, was remanded into custody this morning.

Muhammad Parvez, a diminutive man with thinning grey hair, stood with his wrists cuffed and his hands clasped in the prisoners box during a brief appearance in front of Justice of the Peace Darlene Florence.

He was banned from communicating with his son, Waqas Parvez, who is charged with obstructing police after he allegedly misled officers at his home, after his younger sister was attacked. Aqsa Parvez, 16, died Monday overnight.

Outside the courtroom, the father’s lawyer said the family was “torn” by the recent events.

“You’ve got a sister that’s gone and a father and brother in jail,” said Joseph Ciraco. He said it’s likely his client will face a second degree murder charge, although that has not been finalized.

Mr. Parvez suffers from a heart condition, which dated prior to the attack, and will be seen by a doctor while in jail, Mr. Ciraco said.

==============================

Dead girl was ‘scared of her father’: friend: Aqsa Parvez; Allegedly killed for refusing to wear hijab (National Post, 071212)

A cab driver has been charged with murdering his 16-year-old daughter after she was allegedly attacked in a clash with her strict Muslim family over whether or not to wear the hijab, the traditional Islamic head scarf for women.

Muhammad Parvez, 57, was charged after his daughter Aqsa Parvez died in hospital late on Monday. The victim’s older brother, Waqas Parvez, was charged with obstructing police in connection with the girl’s death.

Police were called to a suburban home in Mississauga early on Monday morning by a man who told 911 operators he had killed his daughter. They found Ms. Parvez lying motionless on the floor of her bedroom, to all appearances dead, but paramedics found a faint pulse and rushed her to hospital. The teenager succumbed to her injuries several hours later, police said yesterday.

Constable J.P. Valade would not give any details about the teenager’s killing, but police sources said she was choked.

Const. Valade would not comment on the possible motive for the killing, but said detectives are continuing to interview neighbours and friends of the girl as well as members of her extended family. At least 11 people lived at the family’s large, two-storey brick house in a new subdivision in Mississauga.

Police cleared out the home yesterday to begin a detailed forensic sweep through the house.

Last night, it was reported that the brother was charged after allegedly misleading officers at the scene.

Friends of the girl told the National Post that she had left the family home, where her brothers also lived with their families, about a week before the attack because of arguments with her father and brothers over her refusal to wear traditional Muslim garb, including the hijab.

“She was scared of her father; he was always controlling her,” said Dominiquia Holmes-Thompson, a friend and classmate at Applewood Heights Secondary School, where both were Grade 11 students. “She wasn’t allowed to go out or do anything. That’s why she left.

“She got threatened by her father and her brother. He said that if she leaves, he would kill her.”

Her classmates said Ms. Parvez had been staying with a friend because of tension at home and returned on Monday only to retrieve some clothing.

A memorial table was set up at the front of her school yesterday where friends of the slain teenager could write their memories, put up pictures, leave flowers and mementos.

“Aqsa was honestly the brightest girl around,” one student wrote. “She had the biggest smile and was the happiest person in school. She loved to dance and take pictures.”

Sylvia Link, a spokeswoman for the Peel District School Board, said officials are looking into the case to see if there was anything they could have done to help Ms. Parvez or students in similar situations. “We want to see what we can learn from this tragedy,” she said.

Several Canadian Muslim groups condemned the attack on the teenager.

“There should be zero tolerance for violence of any kind against women or girls,” said Shahina Siddiqui, the president of the Islamic Social Services Association.

“The strangulation death of Ms. Parvez was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to colour or creed.”

“We call for the strongest possible prosecution of Ms. Parvez’s alleged attacker,” said Faisal Kutty, the legal counsel for the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations.

==============================

Barbara Kay: How Canada let Aqsa down (National Post, 071212)

Barbara Kay

The hijab marks those wearing it as chattel, leashed to their men as surely as if they were wearing a dog collar

We have this week two news items of tragedies involving girl victims. Both will serve to reinforce the belief of many Canadians — count me in — that the alliance of feminism with multiculturalism has created a two-tier sisterhood.

The top tier, western women, have achieved full equality rights. Any and all male aggression against a top tier woman triggers a public outcry and a million lit candles. The second tier women — those from other cultures — are not so fortunate. Feminists exploit multiculturalism to justify their moral abandonment of the women who most need them: girl victims of dysfunctional or socially unevolved cultures.

We begin in Australia, and the trial results of a 2006 rape of a 10-year old aboriginal girl by a group of nine aboriginal men and adolescents. District Court Judge Sarah Bradley gave all of them probation or suspended sentences — no jail time and no criminal records. Bradley concluded that the victim “was not forced and she probably agreed to have sex with all of you.”

This girl had been a sexual pawn since the age of seven. She is the kind of human wreckage that should have inspired amongst anguished feminists a mass demonstration with candles, white ribbons and demands for life sentences for her attackers.

But the judge was a woman, the girl and her attackers from a minority culture, creating the perfect ideological storm.

How could any woman get it so wrong? It’s like this: Indoctrinated in multicultural feminism, Judge Bradley is a moral and cultural relativist. Any sexual aggression against her own daughter would be anathema, but the cultural values of the Other are sacrosanct, and must be respected.

Thus, that judge didn’t see a 10-year old girl. She didn’t see an individual. She saw aboriginal Others engaged in behaviours particular to their culture, and she assumed it would be wrong to impose her standards on them. Believe it or not, I am sure she thought she was being sensitive to their “difference.”

Back to Canada and, if appearances turn out to be reality, Canada’s first honour killing. Sixteen-year old Mississauga teenager Aqsa Parvez died on Tuesday of wounds suffered in an attack on her Monday — allegedly by her father. (A brother is also charged with the crime of obstruction.) Friends of Aqsa painted a picture of a young girl eager to integrate into Canadian society, in ongoing conflict with her conservative Pakistani father who insisted she wear the hijab, the Muslim symbol of sexual modesty.

Multiculturalists would have us believe that the hijab is merely a religious symbol, like the Sikh kirpan or the Christian cross, freely embraced by the girls wearing them. It isn’t, as many Muslim commentators, including Tarek Fatah in these pages yesterday, have frequently explained. The hijab is rather a public sign of supervised sexual modesty, and marks those wearing it as chattel, leashed to their fathers and brothers as surely as if they were wearing a dog collar.

But you’ll never hear a feminist murmur a word of complaint about these girls’ lack of autonomy, for the same reasons the judge in Australia couldn’t imagine that an aboriginal girl should be treated with the same dignity and respect as her own daughter.

I have argued before in these pages that the hijab, however benign-seeming, is still one end of a female-submissive spectrum that ends in the burqa, a garment virtually all Canadians find antithetical to our values. If public schools, which are supposedly secular, had banned hijabs as France did, along with all other religious paraphernalia, in order to create a level social Canadian playing field, Aqsa would have had Canada on her side.

Aqsa’s father in turn would have had to accept the fact that his family lived in a country where women are not forced by any man to wear uniforms that define them as property or symbols of their family’s “honour.” And she might be alive today.

How many thousands of other Aqsas hate the hijab but wear it without complaint because they fear their fathers’ and brothers’ wrath? How many girls in minority cultures are sexually mutilated or degraded without intervention or censure?

Feminists and multiculturalists would rather not go there: Where the suffering of girls in other cultures is concerned, our feminists and multiculturalists adhere to the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

==============================

Report: Saudi King Pardons Teen Female Rape Victim Sentenced to 200 Lashes (Foxnews, 071217)

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has pardoned a female rape victim who had been sentenced to 200 lashes for being alone with a man at the time of the attack who was not related to her, a Saudi newspaper reported Monday.

The case had sparked international outcry. In a rare criticism of its Mideast ally, the White House had expressed its “astonishment” over the woman’s sentence. Canada called it barbaric.

Saudi Justice Minister Abdullah bin Muhammed al-Sheik told al-Jazirah newspaper that the pardon does not mean the king doubted the country’s judges, but instead acted in the “interests of the people.”

“The king always looks into alleviating the suffering of the citizens when he becomes sure that these verdicts will leave psychological effects on the convicted people, though he is convinced and sure that the verdicts were fair,” al-Jazirah quoted al-Sheik as saying.

The victim in the case, known only as the “Girl of Qatif” after her hometown in eastern Saudi Arabia, was in a car with a high school friend in 2006 when they were attacked and raped by seven men.

She initially was sentenced in November 2006 to several months in prison and 90 lashes for being alone in a car with a man with whom she was neither related nor married, a violation of the kingdom’s strict segregation of the sexes.

The woman, who was 19 at the time of the rape, has said she met the man to retrieve a picture of herself from him because she had recently married.

The court more than doubled the sentence last month to 200 lashes and six months prison in response to her appeal.

President Bush expressed anger at the sentence earlier this month, saying he wondered how he would react if it had been one of his daughters. But he said he had not made his views known directly to the Saudi king, a U.S. ally.

The Saudi Justice Ministry has defended the sentence, saying the girl was having an illicit affair with the man.

Al-Sheik told al-Jazirah newspaper Monday that the king was the only official who could issue a pardon, and he did so despite the government’s view that the Saudi legal system was “honest” and “fair.”

“The king’s order consolidates and confirms what is known about the Islamic courts,” said al-Sheik. “Efficient judges look into different cases and issue their just verdicts and those convicted have the right to appeal.”

The seven men who were convicted of raping both the girl and the man were initially sentenced to jail terms from 10 months to five years. Their sentences were increased to between two and nine years after the appeal.

==============================

Islamic child: ‘We all can be sacrificed’: Hamas kids program features discussion of martyrdom (WorldNetDaily, 071227)

A children’s program on Hamas television whose main character earlier was “martyred” has continued the theme, with a discussion that includes a child’s statement, “we can all be sacrificed for the sake of the homeland.”

WND has reported previously on the Hamas’ Mickey Mouse lookalike character’s “martyrdom.”

Farfur the mouse teaches Palestinian children jihad

Al-Aqsa TV, run by the Palestinian Territories ruling party Hamas, had featured a squeaky-voiced Mickey Mouse look-alike named Farfur in the weekly children’s program “Tomorrow’s Pioneers.”

In a show episode, the character was beaten to death, with a teen hostess confirming, “Farfur was martyred while defending his land.” She also said he died at the hands of the “killers of children.”

As a replacement, Hamas brought forward Nahoul, the bee, who now has continued the discussion of martyrdom.

In a clip captured and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Nahoul responds to a child’s request to “convey your holiday greetings on the Feast of the Sacrifice?”

Child on Hamas TV tells bee character everyone can be “sacrificed” for homeland

“Who should I convey greetings to, Saraa? Should I convey greetings to my brother, who was martyred in the first Intifada, at the hands of the Zionist Jews? Should I convey greetings to my second brother, who are martyred in the second Intifada? Should I convey greetings to my wounded brother, to my aunt, who was martyred because of the siege, or to her orphans? Who is there for me to greet, Saraa. I won’t greet anyone. I am so sad, Saraa,” the character said.

“Don’t be sad, Nahoul. We can all be sacrificed for the sake of the homeland,” Saraa responds. “May Allah help you. All we can say is that we place our trust in Allah against the enemies.”

The discussion then continues with comments about the slaughter of a sheep and a calf.

The new character earlier had been highlighted by Palestinian Media Watch, an Israel-based monitor.

PMW reported the character said he wished to “continue the path of Farfur … the path of martyrdom, the path of the jihad warriors … and in his name we shall take revenge upon the enemies of Allah, the murderers of the prophets. …”

Hamas, which won a majority in parliament in January 2006 elections, officially is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

As WND reported in March, an online forum tied to the website of Hamas posted a photo of a little girl in a combat vest and the head band of the terrorist Al-Qassam Brigades.

“Have you seen the new child martyr who will soon shake Israel [to the core]?” says the caption, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute blog

Future ‘martyr’

The message that accompanied the photo on the Shabakat Falastin Lilhiwar online forum says the girl “is part of the Muslim generation which will go down in history [as a generation] … that refused to [accept] humiliation and defeat.”

As WND reported, Hamas launched a children’s website in 2002, encouraging kids to follow the example of terrorist suicide bombers.

==============================

Influential Theologian Troubled by Christian-Muslim Dialogue (Christian Post, 080112)

A prominent theologian expressed concerns this week about the recent Christian response to a historic Muslim letter in which signers appeared unclear about their Christian identity and different beliefs of God.

The letter, titled “Loving God and Neighbor Together: A Christian Response to a Common Word Between Us and You,” failed to clearly define the Christian understanding of God as the trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, pointed out R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on his national radio program Tuesday.

Mohler explained that Muslims also believe in Jesus but only as a prophet, not as the son of God. Therefore, Christians must distinguish what kind of God they believe in when responding to the Muslim letter, which emphasized love for a common God.

“We don’t believe that Jesus Christ is our hero. We don’t believe that Jesus Christ is merely our prophet. He is Prophet and Priest and King,” Mohler said, according to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Towers news service. “He is the incarnate Son of God. He is the second person of the Trinity. He is the Lord over all. Any minimization of that is a huge problem.”

The high-profile Southern Baptist theologian was responding to a full-page letter endorsed by nearly 300 Christian leaders that appeared in a December issue of The New York Times. The letter was drafted by scholars at Yale Divinity School’s Center for Faith and Culture in response to an October letter signed by 138 Muslim scholars, clerics, and leaders that encouraged Muslims and Christians to work more closely for world peace.

At the heart of the Muslim letter was the “common ground” that believers of both faiths share – love for God and love for neighbors.

Signers of the Christian letter included Rick Warren, founder and senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of The Purpose Driven Life; Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill.; Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals; and David Neff, editor-in-chief and vice-president of “Christianity Today” Media Group.

Mohler did not sign the letter.

The SBTS president was also disturbed by the Christians’ request for forgiveness of sins committed against Muslims, including the Crusades and excesses in the war on terror.

“I am sure that all kinds of sin went on with the Crusades on both sides,” he said. “But I am not going to apologize for the Crusades because I am very thankful that the Muslim effort to reach a conquest of Europe was unsuccessful.”

“Otherwise, we would be speaking Arabic on this program right now and we would be talking about the Muslim continent of Europe and potentially even of North America.”

The war on terror, he also noted, is the responsibility of the United States so he was “not sure” why Christians are apologizing for that as a sin against Muslims.

“I don’t think that is the right way to put it,” Mohler said. “I don’t think we associate the United States of America with the Christian church. For whom are we apologizing and for what are we apologizing?”

But others disagree with Mohler, including members of his own Southern Baptist denomination.

Mike Edens, a professor of theology and Islamic studies at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, said while he agrees with Mohler’s arguments on a theological level, he disagrees with him in methodology. Edens has signed the Christian response to the Muslim letter.

“Many of us have chided Muslims for their unwillingness to address the culture fostered by their co-religionists which breed violence and death in our world in the name of Islam,” wrote the former missionary with over 25 years of work in the Muslim world, according to the Baptist Press.

“This is the first time I have seen a document from Muslim scholars seeming to respond, in the aftermath of a violent clash between East and West, with a request for a reasoned discussion between Muslims and Christians. Such documents need a response,” he contends.

Edens said Muslims misunderstand the Bible, Christ and Christianity and the best way to clarify the confusion is through close conversation.

“From my experience where Islam is dominant, our witness with individuals is hurt when Christian leaders refuse such offered conversations,” the former missionary said.

At the end of his program, Mohler recognized the good intention of the signers of the Christian letter but still held onto his concerns.

“Now, I want to be very clear: we should have nothing against a conversation. But I don’t think this is the way to get into the conversation,” Mohler clarified.

“My concern is that when Christians enter the conversation with Muslims we must enter the conversation as Christians,” he said. “I think when you address a letter to Muslims and refer to God in their terminology then there is a big problem…when Christians enter a conversation, we have to show up as Christians.”

Christians believe in the God who reveals Himself through the Trinity and the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the theologian said.

“This is the God who very clearly identifies Himself and says, ‘I am this and I am not anything else.’ If you disagree about the identity of Jesus Christ, then you disagree about the identity of God,” he added.

“The most important issues about the dialogue with Muslims is that Christians are very clear about the Gospel,” Mohler said. “It is not enough just to say, ‘we renounce violence.’ It is important, but it is not enough.”

==============================

Dutch will ban burkas in schools/govt offices: reports (National Post, 080123)

AMSTERDAM — The Dutch government is set to impose a ban on the Muslim burka in schools and government offices, media reported on Wednesday, in a retreat from the previous cabinet’s plan for a general ban.

The cabinet has decided against a broad ban on burkas in public as that would violate the principle of freedom of religion, news agency ANP said, citing unnamed cabinet sources.

The Muslim community says only about 50 women wear the head-to-toe burka or the niqab, a face veil that conceals everything but the eyes. They said a general ban would heighten alienation among the country’s about 1 million Muslims.

An interior ministry spokesman said there was no final decision on the subject yet and the issue is expected to be discussed at the weekly cabinet meeting on Friday next week.

The wearing of headscarves in schools and at work is a sensitive topic across the European Union.

France, with Europe’s largest Muslim minority, bans headscarves and other religious garb from state schools. Italy has a decades-old law against covering the face in public as an anti-terrorism measure.

Shortly before being voted out of office, the previous centre-right Dutch government proposed a complete ban on burkas and other Muslim face-veils in public, citing security concerns.

A new centrist coalition government of Christian Democrats, Labour and the Christian Union came into power in February 2007 and has taken a more conciliatory line on immigration.

Right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders — who has angered Muslims with his fierce criticism of Islam — sent a bill to parliament last July proposing a ban on the burka in public.

He called the government’s reported retreat “very disappointing and cowardly”, according to ANP.

Philip van Praag, political science professor at Amsterdam University, said the partial ban would be welcomed by many: “It does not seem extreme. In the eyes of lots of Dutch people, they do not like the burka at all,” he said.

==============================

Muslim Clerics Press Afghan President to Block Missionary Activity (Christian Post, 080107)

The President of Afghanistan has been told by the country’s Islamic council to stop foreign aid groups from converting locals to Christianity.

The influential council of Islamic clergy and ulema (scholars) made the warning in a statement during a meeting with President Hamid Karzai on Friday in which it also called for the reintroduction of public executions, which have not taken place since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

“The council is concerned about the activities of some ... missionary and atheistic organs and considers such acts against Islamic sharia (law), the constitution, and political stability,” the council said in its statement.

“If not prevented, God forbid, catastrophe will emerge, which will not only destabilize the country, but the region and the world.”

Ahmad Ali Jebrayeli, a member of the council and also a member of parliament, said that reliable sources had told him of Christian missionaries using offices in Kabul and in the provinces as bases from which to convert the local population.

He also alleged that the missionaries are being supported by NGOs.

“Some NGOs are encouraging them (to convert), give them books (Bibles) and promise to send them abroad,” he told Reuters on Saturday.

Missionary work in Afghanistan came under fire in 2007 when a group of 23 South Korean missionaries were kidnapped and held hostage by the Taliban, who accused them of converting Muslim Afghans to Christianity. They were later released, but not before two from the group were murdered.

Some Muslims who hold onto a strict interpretation of the Koran believe that conversion to another faith from Islam is apostasy and therefore punishable by death.

In 2006, Pope Benedict appealed for clemency and a number of Western leaders protested over the case made by an Afghan court against Abdul Rahman over his conversion to Christianity. The case was later dropped amid international clamor and widespread protests after the court ruled that Rahman was mentally ill.

A number of foreign aid groups and charities operating in Afghanistan are supported by or partnered with Christian organizations. They make clear, however, that their remit is restricted to providing aid and practical support, and not to proselytize.

==============================

Afghan journalist gets death for insulting Islam (WorldNetDaily, 080124)

The Taliban-style intimidation of Afghan newspapers came to the surface after a journalist was sentenced to death for distributing an article deemed to have “insulted Islam”.

Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh’s crime was to have passed around a piece taken from a website questioning why Muslim women cannot have multiple husbands in the same way as their menfolk can legally take four wives.

Mr Kaambakhsh, who works for “The New World”, a newspaper in Afghanistan’s northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was prosecuted for downloading this article, apparently gleaned from an Iranian website, and distributing it to his friends.

On Tuesday, a court found him guilty of “insulting Islam” and sentenced him to death.

“Based on the crimes Parwez Kaambakhsh committed, the primary court sentenced him to the most serious punishment which is the death penalty,” said Hafizullah Khaliqyar, the province’s deputy attorney general.

No lawyer represented Mr Kaambakhsh, 23, during the critical hearing, which appears to have taken place in secret in Mazar-i-Sharif. The journalist will appeal against the verdict and both Afghan and international campaigners denounced his treatment.

“This is unfair, this is illegal,” said Rahimullah Samander, president of the Afghan Independent Journalists’ Association (AIJA). “This is too big for a small mistake - he just printed a copy and looked at this and read it. How can we believe in this ‘democracy’ if we can’t even read, we can’t even study?”

The AIJA urged President Hamid Karzai to intervene in the case and quash the death sentence. The penalty must be confirmed by a higher court before it can be inflicted.

But campaigners believe that the court’s real motive was not protecting the honour of Islam. Mr Kaambakhsh’s brother, Yaqub Ibrahimi, also works as a journalist and has written a series of reports on atrocities committed by senior politicians in northern Afghanistan.

The authorities may have been trying to silence him by threatening Mr Kaambakhsh’s life. Jean MacKenzie, country director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which trains Afghan journalists, said: “We feel very strongly that this is a complete fabrication on the part of the authorities up in Mazar, designed to put pressure on Parwez’s brother, Yaqub, who has done some of the hardest-hitting pieces outlining abuses by some very powerful commanders in Balkh and the other northern provinces.”

The overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 brought a new era of media freedom in Afghanistan. Dozens of newspapers and television stations have sprung up across the country. In practice, however, the authorities are deeply suspicious of journalists and all media outlets face pressure and harassment. Laws protecting the good name of Islam can often be invoked to stifle press criticism.

==============================

Muslim Youth Violence in Danish Cities Continues for 6th Night; 43 Arrested (Foxnews, 080216)

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Groups of youths torched schools and cars in a sixth consecutive night of violence across Denmark, mostly in immigrant neighborhoods, police said Saturday. Forty-three people were arrested.

The spate of vandalism started last weekend and some believe it intensified with the reproduction of a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers Wednesday.

The unrest spread across Denmark, with youths torching dozens of cars and buildings and lobbing rocks at police and firefighters in Copenhagen, Aarhus, Ringsted, Slagelse and other cities, officials said.

“There’s been a lot of vandalism — they’ve set fire to cars, garbage containers and in some cases buildings,” Deputy National Police Commissioner Michael Hoejer said. “The good news is that we’ve made a lot of arrests.”

Hoejer said most of those arrested were teenagers, and some have since been released.

Police said they were not sure what triggered the unrest. Some observers said immigrant youths were protesting against perceived police harassment, and suggested the reprinting of the cartoon may have aggravated the situation.

More than a dozen Danish newspapers on Wednesday reprinted a cartoon that sparked massive protests in Muslim countries two years ago — a gesture of solidarity after police revealed an alleged plot to kill the cartoonist.

The reproduction of the prophet cartoon sparked protests and anger in many Muslim countries since Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.

On Friday, hundreds of protesters in Pakistan set fire to Danish flags and demanded the Danish ambassador’s expulsion, while Bangladesh on Saturday condemned the decision to publish the cartoon.

“We fail to understand how hurting the sentiments of a billion Muslims can advance the cause of freedom of expression,” the Foreign Ministry said. “It can only spur resentment that can be destabilizing.”

==============================

Abuse of U.S. Muslim Women Is Greater Than Reported, Advocacy Groups Say (Foxnews, 080131)

WASHINGTON — Two months into an arranged marriage, Fozia Sadiq, a young Pakistani immigrant, found herself trapped in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, with a violent husband.

She says he routinely beat her and intimidated her into never going anywhere in public without him.

“My neck had so many bruises, and I had scratches all over my arms,” Sadiq told FOXNews.com through an interpreter.

A practicing Muslim, Sadiq finally escaped in 2006, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

She says she stayed up all night reading the Koran and was physically abused by her husband for not cleaning up the kitchen the next morning.

“He yelled at her, kicked her and punished her,” says Mazna Hussain, an attorney who is helping Sadiq remain in the United States.

“And when she was on the ground [during the beating], at that point she finally decided to leave before he killed her.”

There are no solid statistics on the rate of domestic violence within the Muslim-American community, and it is difficult to determine whether Muslim women are victimized more than women in the general population.

But advocacy groups say Sadiq’s story is not an isolated case.

On New Year’s Day, two teenage Egyptian-American sisters, Amina and Sarah Said, were shot dead in Irving, Texas. Police are searching for their father, Yaser Abdel Said, who reportedly was angry with their American-like behavior, which included dating.

According to the girls’ great-aunt, their father had been abusing them for years. She says they, along with their mother, fled after he threatened to kill the girls.

The great-aunt called the murders “honor killings” for bringing shame to the family, a charge Islam Said, the girls’ brother, denies. Police say they are looking into motives.

Allegations that the girls were killed for dishonoring the family’s name has brought greater focus on all forms of abuse in the Muslim-American community in what some say is a bigger problem than is reported because, they say, it is veiled in secrecy.

“I suspect it’s happening a lot more than we think,” says Hussain, who works with battered Muslim women at the Tahirih Justice Center in Northern Virginia.

“We hear again and again from [abused] women who say, ‘I can’t tell my parents back home because if they find out, my younger sister can’t get married,’” says Meghna Gozwami, client services coordinator for DAYA, a South-Asian immigrant group that provides legal and financial assistance for abused families. The name “DAYA” means “compassion” in Sanskrit.

DAYA, which runs a domestic violence hotline, has seen a dramatic increase in distress calls —almost 20 times more — in the last five years (from 189 calls in 2003 to 3,308 last year).

It isn’t clear if the increase in calls is due to more abuse or whether more immigrant women, exposed to America’s open culture, have felt the freedom to seek help.

But Gozwami says she is sure that the women who call the hotline are afraid not only for their own safety but for fear that reporting the abuse will shame their families.

Those working to stop the violence say part of the problem is that women, often recent immigrants, face intense family and religious pressure to keep quiet.

Many Muslim immigrant women do not even know that they are victims of a crime. That’s because in their home country it may be legal or acceptable for men to physically punish or even kill their wives and daughters for dishonoring the family.

And when an immigrant woman tries to get help, advocates say, an abusive husband often will threaten to have her deported.

“Within our community we are still struggling with the issue of domestic abuse,” says Hadayai Majeed, who runs the Baitul Salaam shelter in Atlanta, which caters to Muslim women.

She says women and girls who come to the shelter sometimes have been physically punished for what their fathers, husbands and brothers believe is behavior that dishonors the family.

Dating a non-Muslim or not wearing a traditional head scarf can trigger a beating.

“This can be interpreted as being extremely rebellious or be an excuse for abuse,” Majeed says.

Not only is this behavior culturally accepted in many Islamic countries, but it is encouraged. Last year a prominent Saudi cleric went on television to tell Muslim men how to properly beat their wives.

In the video he instructs viewers: “Beating in the face is forbidden ... even if you want your camel or donkey to start walking, you are not allowed to beat it in the face. If this is true for animals, it is all the more true when it comes to humans”

Here in America, advocacy groups say those who turn to their community for help do not always find it, in particular from some religious leaders who, although they are in the United States, still hold to cultural traditions of their homeland and do not clearly reject violence against women.

“I had another client facing severe domestic violence from her husband, and her Imam kept going to the woman and persuading her to go back” to her abuser, Hussain says.

Author Phyllis Chesler, who writes about Islamic gender issues in the United States, believes domestic violence against Muslim-American women, not just immigrants, is covered up by an Islamic culture that treats women as second-class citizens.

“I’m not saying every Muslim family does it or that every Imam encourages it or that only Muslim men beat their wives, but Muslim men have control over their wives,” she says.

“And monitoring the chastity of their women is an obsession, because if she loses it, or has a boyfriend or wants to marry who she wants to marry, this could be a death sentence.”

The practice of murdering a woman or girl who is believed to have damaged the family honor is culturally accepted in countries including Jordan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories.

According to a 2000 report by the United Nations Population Fund, as many as 5,000 women worldwide are murdered each year in so-called honor killings. But reported killings in Europe and North America have raised concerns that Muslim women in the West are becoming increasingly vulnerable.

The most recent case came in December when a Canadian teenager died after an alleged attack by her father over a dispute about whether she should wear a traditional Muslim head scarf.

To date, there officially are no documented cases of honor killings in the United States. The recent slayings of Amina and Sarah Said, however, have triggered a debate over whether this is the first, and if the deadly ritual has been exported to America and more killings are on the way.

Members of groups such as the Tahirih Justice Center say they are watching the case closely.

“There is a very conservative, twisted view out there about Islam,” Hussain says.

Shariq Siddiqui, the executive director of the Muslim Alliance of Indiana, says some Muslims manipulate their faith and culture to justify abuse.

“I hate to use him as an example, but Usama bin Laden is doing this at a macro level, and Muslim-American men who abuse women are doing it at a micro level,” says Siddiqui, who works with Muslim domestic violence victims through the Julian Center, a non-profit agency in Indianapolis.

But many are reluctant to quantify to what degree Muslim faith perpetuates the problem.

Practicing Muslims, even battered women, do not want to portray Islam as an abusive religion or demonize all Muslim men.

“There’s domestic abuse in every community,” says Rafia Zakaria, an Indiana University scholar and writer who is working to educate Muslims about spousal abuse.

“Like American women, Muslim women who are abused face psychological pressure from their abusers, and they’re afraid to speak out.”

Muslim-Americans just recently have started to confront the problem. Some domestic violence shelters have opened for Muslim women, mostly in big cities. And activists are beginning to reach out to sympathetic Imams who will teach Muslims in the United States that domestic violence is unacceptable.

Zakaria has launched a legal defense fund to support Muslim victims of abuse.

“I won’t lie, it’s a controversial problem to talk about,” Zakaria says. “But the problem is within.”

Fozia Sadiq knows that all too well. She was one of the lucky ones who got out of her abusive relationship.

“In my culture there are men like this, even well-educated men, who call women ignorant and backwards,” she says. “But they are the ignorant ones.”

==============================

Muslims Protest Wikipedia Images of Muhammad (Foxnews, 080206)

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has again stirred up controversy — this time over a biographical entry on the prophet Muhammad.

Nearly 100,000 people worldwide have signed a Web-based petition asking Wikipedia to remove all depictions of the Prophet from its English-language entry, viewable here.

“I request all brothers and sisters to sign this petitions so we can tell Wikipedia to respect the religion and remove the illustrations,” the creator of the petition at The Petition Site asks.

Opposition among Muslims to images of Muhammad has its roots in the prohibition of “graven images” in the Ten Commandments, but has varied over time.

“Islamic teaching has traditionally discouraged representation of humans, particularly Muhammad, but that doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent,” Notre Dame history professor Paul M. Cobb told the New York Times. “Some of the most beautiful images in Islamic art are manuscript images of Muhammad.”

All four images on the English-language Wikipedia page are rather lovely Persian and Ottoman miniatures from the 14th through 16th centuries. The two later ones depict Muhammad’s face as covered by a white veil, but the earlier pair show his full face.

“Please take off those pictures or leave only the digitally blanked out faces please,” writes one anonymous petitioner from Belgium several times on the petition site. “Thanks for respecting Muslims beliefs. Peace and Light.”

Wikipedia has entries on Muhammad in several dozen languages. A quick survey found images of the Prophet on the Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Russian versions, but not on the Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Albanian, Urdu or Bahasa Indonesia versions.

The Croatian edition depicted Muhammad, but the version written in the nearly identical Bosnian dialect did not, reflecting Bosnia’s Islamic identity.

Surprisingly, one version in a language spoken overwhelmingly by Muslims had several images of Muhammad, both veiled and unveiled — the Farsi edition, legible to Persian-speakers in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and in the Iranian and Afghan diasporas worldwide.

==============================

American Woman Jailed in Saudi Arabia for Sitting With Man at Starbucks (Foxnews, 080207)

A 37-year-old American businesswoman and married mother of three is seeking justice after she was thrown in jail by Saudi Arabia’s religious police for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh, according to a report in The Times of London on Thursday.

Yara, who does not want her last name published for fear of retribution, was bruised and crying when she was freed from a day in prison after she was strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions by the Kingdom’s “Mutaween” police, The Times reported.

“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?’. I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” recalled Yara, who wears an abaya and headscarf, like most Saudi women.

The men were from Saudi Arabia’s Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a police force of several thousand men charged with enforcing dress codes, sex segregation and the observance of prayers.

Yara says she was interrogated, strip-searched and forced to sign and fingerprint a series of confessions pleading guilty to her “crime,” the Times reported.

Yara was visited this week by officials from the American Embassy, who promised they would file a report.

==============================

American Woman Boasted of Saudi Freedoms To Bush Brother Before Arrest at Starbucks (Foxnews, 080207)

Two weeks before Yara, an American businesswoman, was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police for sitting with a male colleague at Starbucks, she said she strolled past the very same cafe with another businessman: Neil Bush.

Bush, President George W. Bush’s younger brother and CEO of the education software company Ignite!, was in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, speaking at an economic forum hosted by King Abdullah for hundreds of influential business leaders.

Yara, who does not want her last name revealed because of safety concerns, is a managing partner at a Saudi financial company. She went to hear Bush speak, and she said she invited him later to tour her company’s offices, to give him a sense of what life was really like for women living in the capital.

“I was boasting about Riyadh, telling him it doesn’t deserve its bad reputation,” she said. “I told him I never experienced any harassment. I’d had no trouble as a woman. It was business as usual.”

But on Monday, Yara learned that she had been wrong. She was thrown in jail, strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions by the kingdom’s “Mutaween” police.

“When I was arrested, it was like going through an avalanche,” she said. “All of my beliefs were completely destroyed.”

Yara’s crime: sitting with a male business partner in the “family-only” section of the Starbucks — the only area of the café where women and men can sit together. In Saudi Arabia, public contact between unrelated men and women is strictly prohibited.

Yara, who was born in Tripoli, Libya, to Jordanian parents, grew up in Salt Lake City. She moved to Saudi Arabia eight years ago with her husband, a prominent businessman.

The 37-year-old mother of three said she had an “all-American” upbringing in Utah and lived most of her life in the U.S. before moving to Riyadh.

She described herself as secular, and apolitical. “I am anti-political,” she said. “I have never advocated for anything in my life.”

She said she made a point of wearing an abaya and a headscarf, like most Saudi women, “out of cultural respect.”

“I observed the rules and tried not to stand out in business settings,” she said.

But on Monday, when the power failed in her company’s offices, Yara and her male colleagues decided to use a nearby Starbucks, which has wireless Internet, as a temporary workspace.

She settled into a booth with a male colleague and opened her laptop. Moments later, she was arrested.

“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked, ‘Why are you here together?’ I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” Yara recalled.

The men were from Saudi Arabia’s Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a 10,000-strong police force charged with enforcing dress codes, sex segregation and the observance of prayer times.

Yara said they grabbed her mobile phone and pushed her into a taxi bound for Riyadh’s main prison. There she was interrogated, strip-searched and forced to sign and fingerprint confessions of guilt.

Later, she was made to stand before a judge who condemned her behavior, telling her she would “burn in hell.”

She said she spent hours in a filthy prison cell with dozens of other women who had been arrested by the religious police, before her husband used his political connections to secure her release.

She has since vowed to remain in Saudi Arabia and continue working, but she says she will never return to Riyadh and now travels with a bodyguard.

And her family is furious that the American Embassy hasn’t done more to support her.

An embassy official said her case was being treated as “an internal Saudi matter” and would not offer further comment.

Starbucks was waiting to learn more about the facts surrounding the incident, a company spokesman said.

“Starbucks was very concerned by reports that a customer was asked to leave one of our stores and arrested,” said Brandon H. Borrman, a spokesman for the company.

“Starbucks takes pride in respecting different cultures, and as a global company with locations in 44 countries, we recognize that religious customs, social norms and laws will vary among the communities where we work,” he said.

Yara said she carries her American passport with her as a precaution. But on Monday, she said, her identification was confiscated by the religious police, who told her they didn’t care about her citizenship.

She is taking medication to treat post-traumatic stress while she recovers from her ordeal at her family’s home in Jeddah.

“Thank God they did not harm her more,” said her husband, Hatim.

“The psychological impact is beyond description,” Hatim said. “She’s normally a very calm, stable woman. Now she’s afraid to leave our compound.”

==============================

Report: Sharia Courts Already Operating in England (Foxnews, 080209)

Just as the Archbishop of Canterbury was facing calls to step down for advocating Islamic law be added to the British legal system, reports surfaced that sharia courts already were tackling crime in London, The Daily Mail reported.

The Daily Mail reported that teen members of the Somali community in Woolwich were arrested on charges of stabbing another youth, but the victim’s family told police the case would be settled out of court and the suspects were released on bail.

At the hearing, the assailants were ordered to pay the victim.

“All their uncles and their fathers were there,” said Aydarus Yusuf, who helped set up the hearing. “So they all put something towards that and apologized for the wrongdoing.”

In Leyton, another Islamic council also said it had been handling cases — more than 7,000 divorces — while sharia courts in the capital were said to have settled hundreds of disputes regarding money.

Meanwhile Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams faced widespread condemnation after calling for an “accommodation” with parts of the Islamic legal code and calls to quit. Culture Secretary Andy Burnham described his action as a “recipe for chaos.”

==============================

Egypt Supreme Court Allows Return to Christianity (Christian Post, 080211)

Egypt’s Supreme Administrative Court ruled this past weekend that 12 Christian converts to Islam can “re-convert” back to Christianity.

The legal battle of the 12 Coptic Christians, which lasted over a year, concluded Saturday when Cairo’s highest civil court upheld the right of religious minorities.

“Our request was fully granted,” said Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a Cairo-based group that filed the case in association with Human Rights Watch, according to the New York Times. “The defendants are going to receive their ID cards, as Christians.”

Saturday’s court decision reversed a lower court ruling in April 2007 that forbade re-conversion.

While Egypt seems to be allowing former Christians to return to the faith, it has yet to allow Muslims to legally convert to Christianity. Leaving Islam is considered by many Muslims apostasy under Sharia (Islamic law) law, a sin punishable by death.

Last month, the same court ruled against allowing Mohammed Ahmed Hegazy, a Muslim convert to Christianity, to legally change his religion to Christianity on official papers. Hegazy was the first convert to Christianity to sue Egypt for rejecting his application to officially change his religion on his identification papers.

Both Hegazy and his wife are former Muslims and wanted to change their religion on documents so that their newborn baby can openly be raised as a Christian.

In Egypt, a child’s official religion is determined by the father’s official faith. Because Hegazy remains a Muslim legally, his daughter cannot attend Christian classes at school, be married in a church, or openly attend church services without being harassed.

Saturday’s ruling was thus seen as “a big step for religious freedom in Egypt, but religious freedom will only be fully reached once Muslims can convert to Christianity,” said Ramsis el-Naggar, a lawyer who worked on behalf of the 12 converts, according to the New York Times.

Egypt’s population is composed of 90% Muslims and 10% Christians, mostly Coptic Christians. There are an estimated 10 million Copts, which are the Orthodox Christians of Egypt and the largest group of Christians in the Middle East.

==============================

Danish Newspapers Reprint Controversial Muhammad Cartoon After Death Plot Foiled (Foxnews, 080213)

[KH: Danes with backbones compared with Spanish with no backbones]

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Denmark’s leading newspapers Wednesday reprinted a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad that triggered rioting in Muslim countries two years ago.

The newspapers said they republished the cartoon to show their firm commitment to freedom of speech after the arrest Tuesday of three people accused of plotting to kill the man who drew the cartoon depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.

The drawing by Kurt Westergaard and 11 other cartoons depicting Muhammad enraged Muslims when they appeared in a range of Western newspapers in early 2006.

Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even a favorable one, for fear it could lead to idolatry.

The Jyllands-Posten newspaper, which first published the drawings on Sept. 30, 2005, reprinted Westergaard’s cartoon in its paper edition Wednesday. Several other major dailies, including Politiken and Berlingske Tidende, also reprinted the drawing.

“We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper will always defend,” said the Copenhagen-based Berlingske Tidende.

Tabloid Ekstra Bladet reprinted all 12 drawings.

At least three European newspapers — in Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain — also reprinted the cartoon as part of their coverage of the Danish arrests.

Intelligence police arrested two Tunisians and a Danish citizen of Moroccan origin in western Denmark on Tuesday for allegedly plotting to kill Westergaard.

The Danish suspect was released Tuesday after questioning, his lawyer Henning Lyngsbo said.

“He has no knowledge about the case,” Lyngsbo told The Associated Press. “It doesn’t seem that the evidence is very strong.”

Intelligence service chief Jakob Scharf had indicated the man would be released, but could still face charges of violating a Danish terror law. The two Tunisians would be expelled from Denmark because they were considered threats to national security, Scharf said.

Danish Muslim leaders condemned the alleged murder plot, but also said reprinting Westergaard’s cartoon was the wrong way to protest.

“There could have been other ways to do it without the drawing, which I personally do not like,” Abdul Wahid Petersen, a moderate imam, told The Associated Press.

Imam Mostafa Chendid, the leader of the Islamic Faith Community, said his group was considering staging a rally in front of Parliament. The Copenhagen-based group spearheaded protests against the cartoons in 2006.

“We are so unhappy about the cartoon being reprinted,” Chendid told the AP. “No blood was ever shed in Denmark because of this, and no blood will be shed. We are trying to calm down people, but let’s see what happens. Let’s open a dialogue.”

Massive protests swept the Muslim world in early 2006 after publication of the cartoons. Danes watched in disbelief as angry mobs burned the Danish flag and attacked the country’s embassies in Muslim countries including Syria, Iran and Lebanon. Danish products were boycotted in several Muslim countries.

The Danish Foreign Ministry said its diplomatic missions worldwide were monitoring for any unrest related to the cartoon.

“We have no information about events or reactions that leads us to change our security assessment for Danish citizens,” said Uffe Wolffhechel of the ministry’s consular department.

==============================

Danish youths set fires, attack police in 5th night of violence (Paris, International Herald, 080215)

COPENHAGEN, Denmark: Rioting youths set fire to cars and trash bins and hurled rocks at police overnight as a spate of vandalism continued in Copenhagen and other Danish cities.

Nine youths were arrested in the capital after a fifth consecutive night of unrest, mostly in immigrant neighborhoods. Six of them would likely be charged with violence for throwing rocks at police officers, Copenhagen police operations chief Per Larsen said Friday. There were no reports of injuries.

Police said they were not sure what triggered the unrest last weekend. Some observers said immigrant youths were protesting against perceived police harassment, and suggested the reprinting of a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers Wednesday, may have aggravated the situation.

“It has been a very busy night for the police and the firefighters here,” said Henrik Andreasen, a spokesman for police in the western suburbs of Copenhagen. “It has been a bit insane.”

Firefighters responded to dozens of fires in and around the capital. About 10 cars were torched in Kokkedal, north of Copenhagen, while a school in Bagsvaerd, west of the city, was partly destroyed in a presumed arson, police said.

In some cases, firefighters said they were hindered from putting out the fires by rock-throwing youths.

There were also reports of fires and vandalism in other Danish cities, including Aarhus, Ringsted and Slagelse. No arrests were made in those cities.

==============================

‘Zero tolerance’ approach to rioters (Copenhagen Post, 080215)

A combination of boredom, irritation over increased police presence and the reprinted Mohammed cartoons may be an explanation to the prolonged rioting

Last weekend’s disturbances in the Nørrebro district have sparked off nation-wide riots and the justice minister is now calling for a zero tolerance approach.

Lene Espersen, the justice minister, called the latest wave of riots in several Danish cities ‘completely unacceptable’.

She warned that harsher penalties would be in store for trouble-makers and urged parents of the youths to take action. However, the authorities had a role to play in preventive measures as well, she admitted.

‘It is shocking and worrying that this kind of thing is happening,’ she told public broadcaster, DR.

‘We must have a zero tolerance approach to young offenders. They must realise that their actions have serious consequences,’ she continued.

Per Larsen, Copenhagen police operations chief, called the recent riots a ‘vicious circle’.

‘At the moment, nothing seems to point in the direction of organised rioting, but it seems that we are in a situation where there is risk of this spreading like a wildfire,’ he said.

He also denied any allegation that the police may have provoked the situation referring to commentators stating that increased police presence and new search zones in Nørrebro had allegedly sparked off the first of the rioting last weekend.

‘That is an absurd theory. Why would we want to do that? I think we’re talking about marginalised young people who are showing solidarity with other youngsters in different parts of the country,’ Larsen said.

There are mixed reactions and theories to the riots that have raged across the country.

A police spokesperson in Århus said it could be due to boredom during the half-term. Many of the youths are between the ages of 13 and 19.

Other sources point towards the reprinted Mohammed cartoons as a possible cause. Although the rioting in Nørrebro started due to an alleged argument between police and an elderly man, the continued rioting is considered by some to be in response to the drawings being reprinted in 17 of the nation’s newspapers.

Cities affected so far include Copenhagen, Århus, Brabrand, Gellerup, Ballerup and Bagsværd.

==============================

Fires set in Danish cities after cartoon published (Khaleej Times, Denmark, 080215)

COPENHAGEN - Cars and trash containers were set on fire overnight in several Danish cities and a blaze was also set at a school in a Copenhagen suburb in arsons that authorities blamed on juveniles from immigrant families.

A government spokesman said early Friday that the primary motive behind the arsons was a perception of police harassment by the youths, but some of the crimes were also thought to be a reaction to the republication of a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) in leading Danish newspapers on Wednesday.

The blasphemous cartoon, was one of 12 published in newspapers that sparked violent protests in 2006 by Muslims around in the world.

The newspapers said they republished the cartoon in a stand for freedom of expression after a plot to murder the cartoon’s creator, Kurt Westergaard, was uncovered this week.

No one was hurt in the fires.

==============================

SHARIAH I: Delusions in Canterbury (Paris, International Herald, 080215)

By Mona Eltahawy

As a Muslim woman, I am struck by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s naïveté in saying that some parts Shariah should be adopted alongside Britain’s legal system.

When it comes to Islamic law, or Shariah, words certainly do come easy if you’re a man. You can marry four wives, receive double the inheritance a woman gets and you can end your marriage simply by saying “I divorce you” three times. So why not pontificate?

Words are especially cheap if you’re the Archbishop of Canterbury, who ignited a storm last week by saying that the adoption of some parts of Shariah alongside Britain’s legal system “seems unavoidable” in certain circumstances.

Remember please that the Most Reverend Rowan Williams is the symbolic head of the global Anglican community, the U.S. branch of which installed an openly gay bishop in 2003. But the archbishop clearly does not believe in wishing unto others as you would unto your own. He extends no such progressive ideals to Muslims. Most interpretations of Shariah consider homosexuality an abomination.

He probably thinks his “tolerance” for Shariah is progressive in light of the Islamophobia that mars parts of Europe today. But it is a tolerance that condones only the most conservative options for Muslims. It is at best a form of the racism of lower expectations - the cheapest bargaining chip of liberal guilt.

Witness the archbishop’s insistence that he wasn’t advocating the “inhumanity” of Shariah à la Saudi Arabia or Iran, where adulterers are stoned and thieves have hands amputated. No, he told us, he was just referring to the use of Shariah to resolve marital disputes.

But that is precisely where the “inhumanity” of Shariah lies for women. As a Muslim woman - born in Egypt, raised in Saudi Arabia - I can only laugh at the archbishop’s naïveté. In Egypt, as in many Muslim countries, the legal system has been completely modernized, with the exception of one area that remains caught in the web of edicts issued by Muslim scholars who lived centuries ago - family law. Shariah is used only to govern the lives of women and children.

There are already some Shariah councils operating in Britain for Muslims who agree to abide by their rulings, but these are unofficial bodies not recognized by British law. It’s not difficult to imagine women being pressured to “agree to abide” by such rulings. And it’s just as easy to understand why a man would choose them over the secular legal system, which would not be as tilted in his favor.

It’s not just unofficial Shariah Councils, but Orthodox Jewish courts - and similar councils for British Sikhs. Women from those communities tell similar stories of how difficult it is to be granted divorces by their respective religious leaders. Why does the British legal system allow religious groups to create parallel systems to it?

For the less naïve view of just how “humane” Shariah is to women, I refer the archbishop to the recent study, “Crimes of the Community: Honor-Based Violence in the U.K.,” by James Brandon and Salam Hafez. It makes for difficult reading. Women and activists mince no words in showing the hurdles for women with children who want to get divorced, and tell the researchers that women are being forced to stay in violent marriages as a result of skewed decisions by the Shariah Council.

When the archbishop so generously extended Muslims the right to use Shariah, I wonder whose version of Shariah he meant? The Angel Gabriel did not reveal Shariah to the Prophet Mohammed. Much Islamic law was codified many centuries after the prophet died, by male jurists who came up with laws that met the needs of their time. There are various Sunni and Shiite Muslim schools of thought, but there is no consensus on one version of Shariah.

In a climate of growing anti-Muslim rhetoric, some Muslims find it difficult to stand up to radical Islamist posturing on Shariah. Such hesitation is often based on a reluctance to openly criticize fellow Muslims and ignorance as to exactly what Shariah means. Archbishops feeling generous to Muslims certainly don’t help.

We must resist selling out women’s rights and pandering to fundamentalist religionists. That was exactly the point that Bassam Tibi, a Syrian-born German political scientist, made at a conference on Shariah I attended in Copenhagen in 2005. While lamenting European governments’ habit of turning to the most conservative in the Muslim community to speak on its behalf, he vowed, “In the name of multiculturalism I will not accept cultural rights as a cover for Shariah.”

“I believe in Shariah as morality not as state law,” Tibi said. “I am not willing to shut up about human rights abuses by Islamists just because of the right wing. They are my enemy too. . . . Islamophobia is the weapon of Islamists to silence critics.”

Are you listening Dr. Williams?

Mona Eltahawy is a New York-based journalist and commentator on Arab and Muslim issues. Distributed by Agence Global.

==============================

SHARIAH II: Integrating Islam into the West (Paris, International Herald, 080215)

By Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Rowan Williams - the titular head of the 77-million strong worldwide Anglican Church - ignited a huge controversy last week when he suggested in a lecture in the Royal Courts of Law that Britain should adopt certain aspects of Shariah law. This was done with the benign intention of integrating into British law the practices and beliefs of Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims.

However, the archbishop’s apparent suggestion that Muslims could opt out of secular common law for separate arbitration and judgement in Islamic religious courts created the impression of one law for Muslims and another for everybody else.

This incendiary idea (subsequently corrected by the archbishop) provoked a furor about states within states and a widespread fear that any license granted to Shariah law would also license its more extreme aspects. Unfortunately, the media storm masked the real message of the speech, which concerned the authority of the secular state and its impact on religious minorities in general and Muslims in particular.

For the genuine target of the archbishop’s lecture is the increasingly authoritarian and anti-religious nature of the modern liberal state. Militant secularism has forbidden head scarves and wall-mounted crucifixes in France. It has also banned Roman Catholic adoption agencies in Britain for not selecting same-sex couples as potential foster parents. Under the banner of free speech, secular Italian leftists recently prevented Pope Benedict XVI from addressing La Sapienza University in Rome on the subject of rational enquiry.

Williams’ legitimate religious concerns with freedom of conscience tie in with wider Western worries about the consequences of failing to integrate a growing, devout and alienated Islamic minority within a relativistic and increasingly aggressive secular culture.

However, the solution proposed by the archbishop repeats the errors of 1960s liberal multiculturalism. In conjuring up the idea of communities sharing the same space but leading separate lives, he unwittingly endorses a scenario that entrenches segregation and fractures any conception of a common good binding all citizens. Despite this, Williams at least recognizes that Britain is struggling to find a way of accommodating its increasingly ghettoized and radicalized Muslim population.

Clearly, the integration of Islam into secular democracies is a challenge that confronts the Western world as a whole and Europe in particular. Regrettably, there are problems with all the existing secular models of integration. British and Dutch versions of multiculturalism hoped to ensure the equal rights of all citizens, but both countries - in abandoning the cultural cohesion based around religion - lost the very medium in which majorities and minorities could share.

Germany eschewed its own Christian legacy in favor of an ethnic account of its identity. Though it grants generous socio-economic rights, the German model still refuses Muslim “guest workers” citizenship and thus participation in civic life.

In France, the Republican ideal appeals to immigrants, but its secular reality denies the primary religious form of their identity. Moreover, the Muslim population is discriminated against in the labor market and tends to be confined to the banlieues. The French model’s refusal to accommodate religion prevents France from broadening its concept of French identity.

The trouble with all the European models is that they enshrine the primacy of secular law over and against religious principles. Far from ensuring neutrality and tolerance, the secular European state arrogates to itself the right to control and legislate all spheres of life; state constraints apply especially to religion and its civic influence. Legally, secularism outlaws any rival source of sovereignty or legitimacy. Politically, secularism denies religion any import in public debate and decision-making. Culturally, secularism enforces its own norms and standards upon all other belief systems. In consequence, the liberal promise of equality amounts to little more than the secular imposition of sameness. As such, contemporary liberalism is unable to recognize religions in their own right or grant them their proper autonomy.

By contrast, the United States offers a strong integrated vision that allows for the public expression of religion under the auspices of a state that guarantees not just individual rights but also the autonomy of religious communities. Even though minorities in the United States have suffered discrimination, the American model of religious integration explicitly shields religion from excessive state interference. Thus loyalty to the state is not necessarily in conflict with loyalty to one’s faith. Perhaps this explains why American Muslims appear more integrated and less alienated than their European counterparts. In part, this is because the European Enlightenment sought to protect the state from religion, whereas the American settlement aimed to protect religion from the state.

Thus, the real reason for Europe’s failure to integrate Islam is the European commitment to secularism. Only a new settlement with religion can successfully incorporate the growing religious minorities in Western Europe. Secular liberalism is simply incapable of achieving this outcome. Paradoxically, what other faiths require for their proper recognition is the recovery of the indigenous European religious tradition - Christianity. Only Christianity can integrate other religions into a shared European project by acknowledging what secular ideologies cannot: a transcendent objective truth that exceeds human assertion but is open to rational discernment and debate. As such, Christianity outlines a non-secular model of the common good in which all can participate.

Rather than trying to defend religion through the guise of secular multiculturalism, the Archbishop of Canterbury should have been defending religious pluralism through Christianity. What Muslims most object to is not a difference of belief but its absence from European consciousness. Thus the recovery of Christianity in Europe is not a sectarian project but rather the only basis for the political integration of Muslims and peaceful religious coexistence.

Phillip Blond is a senior lecturer in philosophy and theology at the University of Cumbria. Adrian Pabst teaches religion and politics at the University of Nottingham and is a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.

==============================

Freedom Remains Elusive for Journalist in Belarus Jailed For Printing Islamic Cartoons (Foxnews, 080219)

MINSK, Belarus — Freedom could be years away for Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, the Belarusian journalist sentenced to three years of hard labor for republishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked mass demonstrations and anti-Western violence across the Muslim world.

Sdvizhkov is currently being held with no means of communication at the Belarusian Interior Ministry’s transfer prison in Minsk, said Olexei Korol, co-founder of Zgoda (Consensus) newspaper, which published the cartoons.

“No one is allowed to visit him,” Korol said.

Belarusian strongman President Aleksandr Lukashenko shut down Zgoda in March 2006 after Sdvizhkov decided to re-print the cartoons that portrayed the founder of Islam, including one showing the prophet, with a bomb in his turban.

The 12 cartoons first appeared in the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005 and outraged Muslims who saw them as blasphemous. Last week Danish media republished the controversial images to show solidarity with the cartoonist, a day after police revealed an alleged plot to kill him. Islamic tradition prohibits images of Muhammad and other prophets.

In January a Minsk court sentenced Sdvizhkov to three years of hard labor in a penal colony for his decision to reprint the cartoons. No one knows when the Belarusian Supreme Court will get around to hearing Sdvizhkov’s appeal.

Vitaly Taras, a member of the Union of Belarusian Writers, said in an interview that Sdvizhkov’s punishment was excessive. “The case demonstrates to the whole world that European values, including the freedom of speech, have little value in Belarus,” Taras said.

The population of Belarus, formerly a Soviet republic, is overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian; only about 3% of the 9 million residents are Muslim. Lukashenko’s oppressive, Soviet-style government has a history of quashing independent media, and it has close ties to Iran.

“The authorities suddenly became very worried about the feelings of Belarusian Muslims,” said Aleksandr Klaskovsky, a Minsk-based independent political analyst with Belarusian News. “Prior to the scandal, Belarusian authorities told everyone who would listen that Belarus was a Slavic, Russian Orthodox country, ignoring the country’s true multicultural and religious reality.”

Taras said the government’s crackdown on Zgoda sent a message to Muslims worldwide: “The Sdvizhkov case in Belarus can only please extremists from Hamas, and other Muslim radicals, who will be happy our authorities turned out to be on their side.”

Lukashenko, the nation’s president, called the publication of the cartoons “a provocation against the state,” and in 2006 the Belarusian General Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal investigation into the paper’s decision to re-publish the cartoons.

Sdvizhkov, who is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, fled the country and wound up in a Russian Monastery while in exile and spent his time writing an erotic novel.

“It’s a terrific piece of work,” said Aleksandr Abramovich, Sdvizhkov’s lifelong friend and contributing editor to the Borisov News. He reviewed the manuscript when Sdvizhkov made a secret trip in July 2007 to his hometown of Borisov, a small city 31 miles northeast of Minsk.

On Nov. 18, 2007, Belarusian Secret Service agents arrested Sdvizhkov in Borisov on charges of inciting religious hatred. The 49-year-old journalist had re-entered the country and traveled there to mark the 10th anniversary of his father’s death.

“His neighbors turned him in,” said Abramovich.

According to his close friends and colleagues, he’s now getting little support from groups willing to work for his release.

The Belarusian Association of Journalists, a non-governmental organization founded in 1995 to defend the rights of Belarusian journalists, discussed how best to assist their colleague.

The group’s deputy director, Andrey Bastunets said they had asked lawyer Maya Aleksandrovna to help Sdvizhkov appeal his sentence.

Aleksandrovna said she last met with Sdvizhkov on Jan. 29 to help prepare his appeal.

“I haven’t seen him since,” Aleksandrovna said, adding that prison authorities would allow her to see Sdvizhkov in person only after she was formally contracted to represent him. “That hasn’t happened yet,” she said.

Appeals to the government from the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church to intercede on Sdvizhkov’s behalf have also been ignored.

A clerk at the Belarusian Supreme Court said that no date has been set to hear Sdvizhkov’s appeal.

==============================

The Archbishop and Sharia (BreakPoint, 080225)

By Chuck Colson

There are an estimated 1.6 million Muslims in Great Britain. By some estimates, more people attend mosque than go to Anglican churches every week. Judging by recent comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, it is easy to see why.

As most of you by now know, Archbishop Rowan William said in a recent interview that the “UK has to ‘face up to the fact’ that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.” He left no doubt who those “citizens” are: British Muslims.

So according to Williams, British Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” Instead, in the tradition of having your cake and eating it too, he proposes finding “a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law”—in other words, sharia.

British Muslims could choose to have “marital” or “financial” disputes resolved in sharia courts. Sharia courts in Britain? At first I thought the Archbishop misspoke.

But it turns out, no. He calls this “supplementary jurisdiction” unavoidable. He compared it to accommodating Christians in areas like abortion or gay adoption.

With all due respect to the Archbishop, there is no such parallel. The only thing that is unavoidable here is his failure to see sharia as it is practiced in the real world, as opposed to in seminars. As the Asia Times columnist “Spengler” put it, Williams is conceding “a permanent role to extralegal violence in the political life of England.”

In real-world Muslim communities throughout Europe, coercion is so commonplace “that duly-constituted governments there” no longer wield justice among its citizens. The imams do. And where would the Archbishop draw the line? At husbands beating their wives for wearing Western clothes or maybe stoning a woman accused of adultery?

Nor will, as Williams hopes, permitting sharia on British soil aid social cohesion. On the contrary, Williams’s fellow bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali, recently spoke about what he calls “no-go zones” in Muslim communities where Christians dare not enter. As a result of death threats, bishop Nazir-Ali and his family require police protection.

Nazir-Ali, whose father had to leave Pakistan after converting to Christianity, told the UK Telegraph that sharia is “in tension” with “fundamental aspects” of Anglo-American law. That is because our “legal tradition” is “rooted in the quite different moral and spiritual vision deriving from the Bible.” This crucial difference seems to have escaped the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The West’s greatest contribution to civilization has been the rule of law, the bulwark of freedom, captured in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Now a ranking religious official proposes compromising that with a theocratic church rule? Please.

Williams’s comments are a tragic sign of the Church’s weakness. We fawningly respond to Islamic overtures for dialogue, even as we see Christians being persecuted in Muslim nations—and sharia law being imposed on others right in our own backyards.

This weakness is the stuff that empty churches are made of.

==============================

Saudi Arabia Stands By Its Arrest of An American Woman in Starbucks (Foxnews, 080219)

[KH: good example of sharia law]

Saudi Arabia’s religious police have issued a rare public statement defending their arrest of an American woman living in Riyadh, jailed for sitting with a male colleague at Starbucks.

Yara, a businesswoman and married mother of three, said she was strip-searched, forced to sign false confessions and told by a judge she would “burn in hell” before she was released on Feb. 4.

Late Monday night, The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice publicly denounced her with a statement posted on the Internet, saying her actions violated the country’s Shariah law.

“It’s not allowed for any woman to travel alone and sit with a strange man and talk and laugh and drink coffee together like they are married,” it said.

“All of these are against the law and it’s clear it’s against the law. First, for a woman to work with men is against the law and against religion. Second, the family sections at coffee shops and restaurants are meant for families and close relatives,” it continued.

The Commission contested Yara’s version of events, saying she was never strip-searched or forced to sign confessions.

It accused her of wearing makeup, not covering her hair and “moving around suspiciously” while sitting with her Syrian colleague, who was also arrested, but later released.

Speaking from the family’s home in Jeddah where they have lived for eight years, Yara’s husband, who did not wish to be named for safety concerns said: “We are afraid for our lives, for our family and from further harassment.”

“The things that they are suggesting about my wife, of course it isn’t true. She’s a professional businesswoman and she was at a café, not at a bar. They are coming up with ways to justify their actions.”

Yara’s story captured international attention and has fuelled fierce debate within Saudi society, where reformers and human rights groups are pressuring the government to liberalize.

The powerful religious police have launched a crackdown on the local press for its criticism of the religious police and its handling of the incident.

The “Mutaween” has vowed to sue two newspaper columnists who have written in Yara’s defense, saying: “The Commission has the right to sue the writers because of the lies they are spreading. It gives the wrong idea of Saudi Arabia.”

Yara, a managing partner in a finance company, has meanwhile returned to work in Jeddah, though she no longer travels to her company’s offices in Riyadh where the incident took place.

Her family is contemplating a return to America, saying they feel caught in the middle of a greater debate in Saudi society between conservatives and reformers.

“There are a lot of Saudis who are angry and they are using Yara’s story to say ‘Enough of these people in our country.’ Regardless of whether we agree or disagree, we don’t want to get further punished for this,” Yara’s husband said.

==============================

Pakistan Lifts Ban on YouTube (Foxnews, 080226)

[KH: Islamofascism]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s telecoms regulator said Tuesday it has lifted restrictions on the YouTube Web site after the removal of a “blasphemous” video clip.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority told Internet service providers to restore access to the site after the clip became inaccessible, spokeswoman Nabiha Mahmood said.

Pakistan ordered the site blocked on Friday over a clip featuring a Dutch lawmaker who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence. The move accidentally knocked out access to the popular video-sharing site in many other countries for up to two hours.

==============================

Pope Baptizes Prominent Italian Muslim (Christian Post, 080323)

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

An Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim who is married to a Catholic, Magdi Allam infuriated some Muslims with his books and columns in the newspaper Corriere della Sera newspaper, where he is a deputy editor. He titled one book “Long Live Israel.”

As a choir sang, Pope Benedict XVI poured holy water over Allam’s head and said a brief prayer in Latin.

“We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another,” Benedict said in a homily reflecting on the meaning of baptism. “Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord we have become close.”

Vatican Television zoomed in on Allam, who sat in the front row of the basilica along with six other candidates for baptism. He later received his first Communion.

Allam, 55, told the newspaper Il Giornale in a December interview that his criticism of Palestinian suicide bombing provoked threats on his life in 2003, prompting the Italian government to provide him with a sizable security detail.

The Union of Islamic Communities in Italy — which Allam has frequently criticized as having links to Hamas — said the baptism was his own decision.

“He is an adult, free to make his personal choice,” the Apcom news agency quoted the group’s spokesman, Issedin El Zir, as saying.

Yahya Pallavicini, vice president of Coreis, the Islamic religious community in Italy, said he respected Allam’s choice but said he was “perplexed” by the symbolic and high-profile way in which he chose to convert.

“If Allam truly was compelled by a strong spiritual inspiration, perhaps it would have been better to do it delicately, maybe with a priest from Viterbo where he lives,” the ANSA news agency quoted Pallavicini as saying.

The nighttime Easter vigil service at St. Peter’s Basilica marked the period between Good Friday, which commemorates Jesus’ crucifixion, and Easter Sunday, which marks his resurrection.

Benedict opened by blessing a white candle, which he then carried down the main aisle of the darkened basilica. Slowly, the pews began to light up as his flame was shared with candles carried by the faithful, until the whole basilica twinkled and the main lights came on.

The pope administers baptism “without making any ‘difference of people,’ that is, considering all equally important before the love of God and welcoming all in the community of the Church,” said the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi.

Allam, who has a young son with his Catholic wife and two adult children from a previous relationship, indicated in the Il Giornale interview that he would have no problem converting to Christianity. He said he had even received Communion once — when he was 13 or 14 — “even though I knew it was an act of blasphemy, not having been baptized.”

He did not speak to the press Saturday and his newspaper said it had no information about his conversion.

Allam said in the interview that he had made a pilgrimage to Mecca, as is required of all Muslims, with his deeply religious mother in 1991, although he was not otherwise observant.

“I was never practicing,” he was quoted as saying. “I never prayed five times a day, facing Mecca. I never fasted during Ramadan.”

Allam also explained his decision to title a recent book “Viva Israele” by saying he wrote it after he received death threats from Hamas.

“Having been condemned to death, I have reflected a long time on the value of life. And I discovered that behind the origin of the ideology of hatred, violence and death is the discrimination against Israel. Everyone has the right to exist except for the Jewish state and its inhabitants,” he said. “Today, Israel is the paradigm of the right to life.”

In 2006, Allam was a co-winner, with three other journalists, of the $1 million Dan David prize, named for an Israeli entrepreneur. Allam was cited for “his ceaseless work in fostering understanding and tolerance between cultures.”

There is no overarching Muslim law on conversion. But under a widespread interpretation of Islamic legal doctrine, converting from Islam is apostasy and punishable by death — though killings are rare.

Egypt’s highest Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, wrote last year against the killing of apostates, saying there is no worldly retribution for Muslims who abandon their religion and that punishment would come in the afterlife.

On Wednesday, a new audio message from Osama bin Laden accused the pope of playing a “large and lengthy role” in a “new Crusade” against Islam that included the publication of drawings of the Prophet Muhammad that many Muslims found insulting.

Lombardi said Thursday that bin Laden’s accusation was baseless. He said Benedict repeatedly criticized the Muhammad cartoons, first published in some European newspapers in 2006 and republished by Danish papers in February.

==============================

The New Dhimmi Times (townhall.com, 080317)

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

Totalitarians have an uncanny appreciation for the subversive effect of foreign propagandists. The Nazis had Lord Haw-Haw, Imperial Japan its Tokyo Rose, the Soviets the World Council of Churches (among many others) and the North Vietnamese Jane Fonda. Now, our time’s totalitarian ideologues – the Islamofascists – have the New York Times.

This may not seem to be exactly a news flash. After all, the Times has been rendering invaluable service to the enemy’s information operations and military campaigns for years. To cite but a few examples: In December 2005, the paper disclosed a highly classified program for monitoring suspected terrorists’ communications on this war’s global battlefield. In June 2006, it revealed another enormously sensitive surveillance effort concerning movement of funds around the world. And practically every day, what passes for its news pages and editorials run down the Nation’s leadership, military and progress in defeating our foes.

The New York Times marked a deplorable new milestone this weekend, however – a true nadir in collaborating with the enemy in the War of Ideas. Its Sunday magazine featured an article by Harvard law professor Noah Feldman entitled “Why Shariah? Millions of Muslims think Shariah means the rule of law. Could they be right?” According to the Times’ Mr. Feldman, the answer is a resounding “Yes.”

The disinforming character of this essay is evident to the trained eye from the opening paragraph. Feldman depicts sympathetically the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who “gave a nuanced, scholarly lecture” recently in London. Dr. Williams we are told offered “the tentative suggestion…that, subject to the agreement of all parties and the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women, it might be a good idea to consider allowing Islamic and Orthodox Jewish courts to handle marriage and divorce.” Then, it seems through no fault of his own, “all hell broke loose” on the poor, thoughtful clergyman.

Actually, what the head of the Church of England declared on the BBC was that it was “unavoidable” that Shariah law – a theo-political-legal code that the Islamofascists seek to impose on Muslims and non-Muslims alike in all of its barbaric, intolerant, totalitarian and misogynistic glory – will be observed in the United Kingdom. The man now derided as “the Grand Mufti of Canterbury” was exhibiting the classic symptoms of an unbeliever who chooses to submit to the rule of Islam, rather than accept the other choice under Shariah, namely being put to death. The former is known as a dhimmi.

In an article that can only be described charitably as selective in its rendering of the facts, Feldman paints a portrait of Shariah that would earn admiration from the inventor of the Big Lie, Adolf Hitler. In fact, the text could have been written by the Muslim Brotherhood – an Islamofascist movement that is, by its own documents, charged with “destroying [the United States] from within” and “by its own hands.” Actually, it is no exaggeration to say that the Times’ Magazine has provided a six-page advertisement for the Brotherhood, effectively portraying it as a force for democracy and the rule of law that would make Thomas Jefferson swoon.

The Harvard professor, who helped write the new Iraqi constitution with its requirement that all laws must conform to Shariah, seems open to the Islamofascists’ determination to have the same apply elsewhere. He concludes with this rhapsody: “…With all its risks and dangers, the Islamists’ aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law while coming to terms with contemporary circumstances is bold and noble – and may represent a path to just and legitimate government in much of the Muslim world.”

Let’s call this what it is: a paean to dhimmitude. The people who are actually going to have to “come to terms with contemporary circumstances” are not the Islamists. They are hewing to the immutable traditions of Shariah going back to the 9th Century, as interpreted by the consensus of the faith’s “authorities,” the only figures allowed to speak for Islam.

It is the cruelest of delusions to contend that such Shariah law will produce “just and legitimate governments” anywhere. Feldman struggles to explain why it isn’t so in two of the four places ruled by Shariah today – Iran and Saudi Arabia; he doesn’t even try to do so with respect to Sudan or Gaza, let alone the nightmare that formerly was Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Sunday’s New York Times article could be chalked up to another travesty by a paper that has long since lost its way, but for one fact: It comes at a moment when the Islamofascists are poised to make a potentially decisive breakthrough. Unless action is taken swiftly, they will achieve a strategic penetration of Wall Street in the form of “Shariah-Compliant Finance” (SCF). Confusion, let alone deliberate disinformation, about the true nature of Shariah, constitutes an invitation to disaster.

After all, the calamitous credit crisis is vaporizing such pillars of American capitalism as Bear Sterns. Other investment houses and commercial banks are desperate for cash. Islamist Sovereign Wealth Funds (more accurately described as Dictators Slush Funds) and other champions of SCF are offering to recycle trillions of dollars here – if only Wall Street will allow Muslim Brothers and other Islamofascists to call the shots, dictating who gets capital and credit on the basis of Shariah adherence. Archbishop Williams judged Shariah law unavoidable in Britain in part because the UK has already embraced Shariah-Compliant Finance.

If we fall for this deadly Trojan horse and the seditious Shariah agenda that animates it, the New Dhimmi Times and Professor Feldman will deserve no small portion of the blame.

==============================

Iranian Textbooks Teach Islamic Supremacy, Inequality for Women and Non-Muslims, Study Finds (Foxnews, 080319)

Iran’s schools are teaching children to abide by Islamic supremacy and discriminate against non-Muslims and women, according to a study of Iranian textbooks by the think tank Freedom House.

The study, “Discrimination and Intolerance in Iran’s Textbooks,” examined about 95 different school textbooks that are mandatory for first- through 11th-grade students in Iran. Authored by Paris-8 University sociologist Saeed Paivandi, it is the most comprehensive look to date at the books being used in Iranian schools, according to The New York Sun.

“The discourse of the textbooks has not been written with the concept of equality of all human beings, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the study concludes. “In the textbooks’ reasoning, human beings cannot be equal with one another on this earth, in the same way that, on the day of reckoning, they will be subject to divine judgment for their identity and actions.”

Based on the analysis of the Iranian textbooks, Paivandi surmises that different people have different places in society; those who aren’t high on the status ladder will be victimized by prejudice.

“Some individuals are born first-class citizens, due to their identity, gender and way of thinking, while others become second- and third-class citizens,” the study states. “Those who are excluded from the inside are victims of this discriminatory system.”

Numerous laws passed by the Islamic Republic of Iran reflect the lack of equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, dictating that those who don’t embrace Islam should be barred from top government and military jobs, admission to universities and so on, according to the Sun. Such principles are reinforced in the textbooks for schoolchildren which Paivandi examined.

“By taking note of the guidance and instructions provided by Islam, every Muslim youth must strike fear in the hearts of the enemies of God and their people through combat-readiness and skillful target shooting,” one seventh-grade textbook says.

The books also dictate that women should not join the workforce, but instead must stay at home to raise children.

“A mother whose husband earns sufficient income cannot say, ‘My job demands that I leave my child at the day care center every day,’ and, in this way deprive her child from her constant love and attention,” reads a passage in a 10th-grade book.

The school textbooks recognize other affiliations, including Judaism, the study found. But others, like the Bahai tradition, are characterized as cults.

==============================

Peace-loving Muslims (townhall.com, 080319)

By Walter E. Williams

All of us should give some serious thought to some of the ideas contained in an article circulating the blogsphere titled “Why a Peaceful Majority is Irrelevant.” So often our political leaders, “experts” and talking heads tell us that Islam is a peaceful religion and most Muslims are not out to destroy the West. We’re told it’s only that 1%, out of 1.2 billion Muslims, who are fanatical jihadists who believe America is the Great Satan, cause of all evil, and should be attacked and destroyed. In terms of national policy, it’s irrelevant whether Islam is a peaceful religion and most Muslims are peaceful.

Think back to the 1930s when the Japanese murdered an estimated 3 million to 10 million people in China, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines and Indochina; and on December 7, 1941 when they attacked Pearl Harbor, killing over 2,400 Americans. I’m betting that most of Japan’s at-the-time 60 million population were peace-loving people and would have wanted nothing to do with the brutal slaughter in China and the attack on the U.S. In formulating our response to the attack, should President Roosevelt have taken into account the fact that most Japanese are peace-loving people ruled by fanatics? Should our military have only gone after the Japanese pilots and their naval armada? I’d also wager that most Germans were peace-loving people and not part of the Nazi sadists wanting to wage war on their neighbors and exterminate the Jews. Again, should Roosevelt and Churchill have taken that into account in their response to German militarism? My answer is no and thank God it was their answer as well. Whether most Germans, Italians or Japanese were peace-loving or not was entirely irrelevant in formulating the Allied response to their militarism.

Horrible acts can be committed in countries where most of the people are peace-loving and simply want to be left alone to attend to their affairs. I imagine that described most of the people in the former Soviet Union; however, that did not stop the killing of an estimated 62 million people between 1917 and 1987. The same can be said of the Chinese people, but it didn’t stop the killing of 35 million of their countrymen during Mao Zedong’s reign. Whether most people of a country are peace-loving or not is not nearly as important as who’s calling the shots.

At this particular time, fanatical jihadists are calling the terrorism shots in many Muslim countries. Their success in committing terrorist acts is in no small part the result of the actions by the millions of peace-loving fellow Muslims. First, there is not enough condemnation of their terrorist acts by the Muslim community. More important is the direct or indirect assistance terrorists receive through the silence of their fellow Muslims. There is no way terrorists can carry on their operations, obtain explosive materials, run terrorist training camps, raise money without the knowledge of other Muslims, whether they’re government officials, bankers, family members, friends or neighbors. Because those millions of peace-loving Muslims do not speak out and expose terrorists and don’t more fully cooperate with domestic and international authorities trying to stop terrorists, they become enemies of the West just as the peace-loving people in Germany, Italy and Japan became enemies of the Allied powers during World War II. Like them, Muslims should be prepared to suffer the full might of the West in its efforts to fight terrorism. I’m hoping that the millions of peaceful Muslims take the proper action to avoid such an outcome. I’m not that optimistic. We’re involved in a clash with a culture that has little regard for the Western values that hold the sanctity of human life and liberty dear.

==============================

Muslim Baptized by Pope Says Life in Great Danger (Christian Post, 080324)

A popular Muslim author who was baptized by Pope Benedict XVI Saturday night said that his life is now in great danger because of his conversion to Catholicism.

“I realize what I am going up against but I will confront my fate with my head high, with my back straight and the interior strength of one who is certain about his faith,” said Magdi Allam, formerly Italy’s most prominent Muslim, according to Reuters.

The 55-year-old Egyptian born writer wrote in the Sunday’s edition of Corriere della Sera – the leading Italian newspaper with which he is a deputy director – that “…the root of evil is innate in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictual.”

He said before converting he had continuously asked himself why a person who advocates for “moderate Islam” was “condemned to death in the name of Islam and on the basis of a Koranic legitimization.”

The newly baptized Christian, who is a strong supporter of Israel, has lived under police protection for his criticism of radical Islam, particularly after he criticized Iran’s position on Israel.

Allam, who was a secular Muslim married to a Catholic, was baptized during the Easter eve service in St. Peter’s Basilica that was broadcasted around the world. He said his conversion was the “happiest day of my life.”

He also understands that his conversion would likely make him the target of “another death sentence or apostasy,” or the abandoning of his faith. But he said he is willing to risk his life because he has “finally seen the light, thanks to divine grace.”

In 2006, the former Muslim defended the pope’s remarks about Islam and violence in his speech given in Regensburg, Germany.

Allam said he would take the name “Cristiano” – Italian for Christian – as his new middle name.

==============================

Iran, Indonesia condemn Dutch Koran film (National Post, 080328)

AMSTERDAM — Iran and Indonesia on Friday condemned a film by a Dutch lawmaker that accuses the Koran of inciting violence, while Dutch Muslim leaders urged restraint.

Islam critic Geert Wilders launched his movie on Thursday evening. Titled “Fitna”, an Arabic term sometimes translated as “strife”, it intersperses images of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and other Islamist bombings with quotations from the Koran.

The film urges Muslims to tear out “hate-filled” verses from the Koran and starts and finishes with a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb under his turban, originally published in Danish newspapers, accompanied by the sound of ticking.

The image ignited violent protests around the world and a boycott of Danish products in 2006. Many Muslims consider any depiction of the Prophet as offensive.

Iran called the film heinous, blasphemous and anti-Islamic and called on European governments to block any further showing.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation and a former Dutch colony, also condemned the film.

“We are of the view that the film has a racist flavour and is an insult to Islam, hidden under the cover of freedom of expression,” a foreign ministry spokesman said. “We call on Indonesian people not to be incited.”

Dutch Muslim leaders appealed for calm and called on Muslims worldwide not to target Dutch interests. The Netherlands is home to around 1 million Muslims out of a population of 16 million.

“Our call to Muslims abroad is follow our strategy and don’t frustrate it with any violent incidents,” Mohammed Rabbae, a senior Dutch Muslim leader, told a news conference in a mosque in an Amsterdam suburb that is home to many Muslims.

“Looking for conflict there is looking for conflict with us,” he added before an imam made a similar appeal in Arabic.

Dutch authorities reported a calm night in contrast to the unrest that swept the country after the murder by a militant Islamist in 2004 of Dutch director Theo van Gogh, who made a film accusing Islam of condoning violence against women.

Earlier this month, Dutch security officials raised the national risk level to “substantial” because of the forthcoming Mr. Wilders film and perceptions of an increased al-Qaeda threat.

Mr. Wilders, who has been under heavy guard because of Islamist death threats since the murder of director Van Gogh, has seen support for his anti-immigration Freedom Party rise in anticipation of the film to about 10% of the vote.

The Dutch government has worked for months to distance itself from Mr. Wilders and try to prevent the kind of backlash Denmark suffered over the Prophet cartoons.

In a statement on live television on Thursday evening in both Dutch and English, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said he rejected Mr. Wilders’ views and was pleased by the initial restrained reactions of Dutch Muslim organisations.

The European Union supports the Dutch government’s approach and believes the film serves no purpose other than “inflaming hatred”, the Slovenian EU presidency said in a statement:

“The European Union and its member states apply the principle of the freedom of speech which is part of our values and traditions. However, it should be exercised in a spirit of respect for religious and other beliefs and convictions.”

NATO has expressed concern the film could worsen security for foreign forces in Afghanistan, including 1,650 Dutch troops.

Before the film’s release, demonstrators had already taken to the streets from Afghanistan to Indonesia to burn Dutch and Danish flags, enraged after newspapers reprinted the Prophet cartoons in solidarity with the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, after three men were arrested on suspicion of plans to kill him.

Westergaard said he plans legal action on Friday to get the cartoon removed from the film as it was taken out of context.

A Dutch court was also hearing an injunction against Mr. Wilders on Friday brought by the Dutch Islamic Federation.

Dutch exporters have expressed fears of a possible boycott in the Muslim world, though trade with such states is small. There is also concern about 25,000 Dutch citizens living in Muslim countries.

==============================

Controversial Anti-Muslim Film Sparks Worldwide Condemnation (Foxnews, 080331)

[KH: did anything happen when the Last Temptation of Christ was released?]

Nations around the world are protesting the release of a Dutch lawmaker’s anti-Islamic film.

Australia condemned Geert Wilders’ 15-minute film, titled “Fitna,” or “Ordeal” in Arabic, Sunday with the foreign minister calling it “highly offensive.”

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith rejected the film’s premise of equating Islam with acts of terror and violence.

“It is an obvious attempt to generate discord between faith communities,” Smith said. “I strongly reject the ideas contained in the film and deplore its release.”

“Fitna” was posted online Thursday but removed from the site, LiveLeak.com, a day later. It has since been widely dispersed on other file-sharing sites.

The European Union issued a statement Saturday saying the film —that portrays Islam as a ticking time bomb aimed at the West — serves no other purpose than to inflame hatred. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also has condemned the film, saying there is no justification for hate speech or the incitement of violence.

Despite their condemnation, the European leaders defended the right to freedom of speech and called on Muslims to react peacefully.

In the Middle East, Iran has summoned the Dutch ambassador to Tehran to discuss the film, Reuters reported. A senior diplomat from Slovenia, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, was also called to the ministry in Tehran over Wilder’s film.

Jordanian lawmakers are taking more severe diplomatic measures and demanded their government cuts ties with the Netherlands. Forty-eight lawmakers in the 110-seat parliament have also called for the government to dismiss the Dutch envoy.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry on Friday summoned the ambassador of the Netherlands in Islamabad and lodged a “strong protest”, according to AFP. It has stepped up the security of the Dutch consulate and businesses in Karachi fearing protests over the Internet release of an anti-Islam film by the far-right Dutch MP.

And in Asia, hundreds of Indonesian students took to the streets Sunday in protest, according to AFP, after a minister called for protests. The students carried posters demanding that authorities shut down websites carrying Geert Wilders’ film.

==============================

Vatican: Islam Surpasses Roman Catholicism as World’s Largest Religion (Foxnews, 080330)

VATICAN CITY — Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world’s largest religion, the Vatican newspaper said Sunday.

“For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us,” Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Formenti compiles the Vatican’s yearbook.

He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4% of the world population — a stable percentage — while Muslims were at 19.2%.

“It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer,” the monsignor said.

Formenti said that the data refer to 2006. The figures on Muslims were put together by Muslim countries and then provided to the United Nations, he said, adding that the Vatican could only vouch for its own data.

When considering all Christians and not just Catholics, Christians make up 33% of the world population, Formenti said.

==============================

Report: Non-Muslims Deserve to Be Punished (Foxnews, 080401)

A report posted on Islam Watch, a site run by Muslims who oppose intolerant teachings and hatred for unbelievers, exposes a prominent Islamic cleric and lawyer who support extreme punishment for non-Muslims — including killing and rape.

A question-and-answer session with Imam Abdul Makin in an East London mosque asks why Allah would tell Muslims to kill and rape innocent non-Muslims, including their wives and daughters, according to Islam Watch.

“Because non-Muslims are never innocent, they are guilty of denying Allah and his prophet,” the Imam says, according to the report. “If you don’t believe me, here is the legal authority, the top Muslim lawyer of Britain.”

The lawyer, Anjem Choudary, backs up the Imam’s position, saying that all Muslims are innocent.

“You are innocent if you are a Muslim,” Choudary tells the BBC. “Then you are innocent in the eyes of God. If you are not a Muslim, then you are guilty of not believing in God.”

Choudary said he would not condemn a Muslim for any action.

“As a Muslim, I must support my Muslim brothers and sisters,” Choudary said. “I must have hatred to everything that is not Muslim.”

==============================

Hamas Cleric Predicts ‘Rome Will Be Conquered by Islam’ (Foxnews, 080414)

A sermon last Friday by a prominent Muslim cleric and Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament openly declared that “the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital,” would soon be conquered by Islam.

The fiery sermon, delivered by Yunis al-Astal and aired on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV, predicted that Rome would become “an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread though Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, even Eastern Europe.”

“Allah has chosen you for Himself and for His religion,” al-Astal preached, “so that you will serve as the engine pulling this nation to the phase of succession, security and consolidation of power, and even to conquests through da’wa and military conquests of the capitals of the entire world.

“Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our prophet Muhammad,” he added.

Al-Astal last June preached how it was the duty of Palestinian women to martyr themselves by becoming homicide bombers.

“The most exalted form of jihad is fighting for the sake of Allah, which means sacrificing one’s soul by fighting the enemies head-on, even if it leads to martyrdom,” he said in a June 23, 2007 interview.

“When jihad becomes an individual duty, it applies to women too, because women do not differ from men when it comes to individual duties,” he said, calling Jews “the brothers of apes and pigs” who should “taste the bitterness of death.”

Friday’s rant repeated that theme: “Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of apes and pigs in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam.

“I believe that our children, or our grandchildren, will inherit our jihad and our sacrifices, and, Allah willing, the commanders of the conquest will come from among them.

“Today, we instill these good tidings in their souls – and by means of the mosques and the Koran books, and the history of our Prophets, his companions, and the great leaders, we prepare them for the mission of saving humanity from the hellfire at whose brink they stand.”

==============================

Muslim educator’s dream branded a threat in the U.S. (Paris, International Herald, 080428)

U.S. Muslims face growing movement to limit their public lives

Andrea Elliott

Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”

Things have not gone according to plan. Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab-American. Since the school opened in New York last fall, children have been suspended for carrying weapons, repeatedly gotten into fights and taunted an Arabic teacher by calling her a “terrorist,” staff members and students said in interviews.

The academy’s troubles reach well beyond its cramped corridors in the Boerum Hill area of Brooklyn, New York. The school’s creation provoked a controversy so incendiary that Almontaser stepped down as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.

In newspaper articles and Internet postings, on television and talk radio, Almontaser was branded a “radical,” a “jihadist” and a “9/11 denier.” She stood accused of harboring unpatriotic leanings and of secretly planning to proselytize her students. Despite Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate, her critics quickly succeeded in recasting her image.

The conflict tapped into a well of post-9/11 anxieties. But Almontaser’s downfall was not merely the result of a spontaneous outcry by concerned parents and neighborhood activists. It was also the work of a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life. The fight against the school, participants in the effort say, was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle.

“It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” said Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Almontaser and the school.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, critics of radical Islam focused largely on terrorism, scrutinizing Muslim-American charities or asserting links between Muslim organizations and violent groups like Hamas. But as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted their gaze to a new frontier, what they describe as law-abiding Muslim-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.

Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law.

The danger, Pipes says, is that the United States stands to become another England or France, a place where Muslims are balkanized and ultimately threaten to impose sharia.

“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system — the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like — you can promote radical Islam.”

Pipes refers to this new enemy as the “lawful Islamists.”

They are carrying out a “soft jihad,” said Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a trustee of the City University of New York and a vocal opponent of the Khalil Gibran school.

Muslim leaders, academics and others see the drive against the school as the latest in a series of discriminatory attacks intended to distort the truth and play on Americans’ fear of terrorism. They say the campaign is also part of a wider effort to silence critics of Washington’s policy on Israel and the Middle East.

“This is a political, ideological agenda,” said John Esposito, a professor of international affairs and Islamic studies at Georgetown University who has been a focus of Pipes’s scrutiny. “It’s an agenda to paint Islam, not just extremists, as a major problem.”

That portrait, Muslim and Arab advocates contend, is rife with a bias that would never be tolerated were it directed at other ethnic or religious groups. And if Almontaser’s story is any indication, they say, the message of her critics wields great power.

Almontaser watched city officials and some of her closest Jewish allies distance themselves from her as the controversy reached its peak. She was ultimately felled by an article in The New York Post that said she had “downplayed the significance” of T-shirts bearing the slogan “Intifada NYC.”

Last month, federal judges issued a ruling — related to a lawsuit brought by Almontaser to regain her job — stating that her words were “inaccurately reported by The Post and then misconstrued by the press.”

While city officials and the Education Department declined to comment about Almontaser because of the lawsuit, a lawyer for the city said she had not been forced to resign.

In her first interview since stepping down, Almontaser said that education officials had pressured her to speak to The Post and had monitored the conversation. After the article was published, she said, the department issued a written apology in her name, without her approval.

“I kept saying I wanted to set the record straight,” said Almontaser, 40. “And they kept telling me, ‘You can’t undo what was done.’ “A Call to Lead

In April 2005, Debbie Almontaser got a telephone call that would change her life. The man on the line, Adam Rubin, worked for a nonprofit organization, New Visions for Public Schools. He was exploring whether to help the city create a public school that would teach Arabic. The group already had seed money — a $400,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — but needed the right person to help lead the venture.

Everywhere Rubin went — from the mayor’s office to a falafel stand in New York — people mentioned Almontaser. She was a teacher, a native Arabic speaker and arguably the city’s most visible Arab-American woman.

After 9/11, Education Department officials had enlisted Almontaser to hold workshops on cultural sensitivity for schoolchildren. She spread the message that Islam was a peaceful religion. She told of how her own son had served as a National Guardsman in the clearing effort at ground zero. She was soon attending interfaith seminars, befriending rabbis and priests. Mayor Michael Bloomberg honored her publicly. She became a ready commentator for the media, prompting some Muslims to joke that she was the city’s “talking hijabi.”

In fact, it had taken a long time for Almontaser to embrace the hijab, or head scarf. Born in Yemen, she was 3 when she moved with her family to Buffalo. Her parents encouraged her to blend in. She called herself Debbie rather than Dhabah, her given name. She began wearing a veil in her 20s, as a New York mother whose life revolved around PTA meetings and Boy Scout trips. She took to riding on the back of her husband’s motorcycle, her head scarf tucked beneath a black helmet. She got used to the stares and learned to be unapologetic.

In the months following the Sept. 11 attacks, she offered other Muslim women the lessons she had learned: “The only way to claim this as your country is to continue on with your life here,” she recalled telling them.

For years, Almontaser had hoped to become a principal. But soon after joining hands with New Visions, she faced her first challenge. To administer the Gates grant, the school needed a community partner. Two groups wanted the job: a secular Arab-American social services agency and a Muslim-led organization that runs Al-Noor School, a private Islamic establishment in New York.

Almontaser said she tried to remain neutral as discord erupted between the two groups. Quietly, though, she worried that if an organization linked to a private Islamic school took the lead, the city would never approve the project, despite the group’s pledge to keep religion out of the curriculum.

Ultimately, a steering committee led by Almontaser voted in favor of the social services agency. Leaders of the Muslim group walked away feeling disrespected and distrustful of her, several of the group’s members said in interviews. It was a rupture that would come back to haunt Almontaser.

As preparations moved forward, a design team assembled by Almontaser named the school after the Lebanese Christian poet and pacifist Khalil Gibran. A Palestinian immigrant had suggested the name, hoping it would deflect any concerns that the school carried a Muslim orientation.

In February 2007, the Department of Education announced that the school had been approved. It would eventually encompass grades 6 through 12, teach half of its classes in Arabic and be among 67 schools in the city that offer programs in both English and another language, like Russian, Spanish and Chinese. Almontaser designed a recruitment brochure to attract the school’s first class of sixth graders.

The leaflet cited the words of Gibran: “In understanding, all walls shall fall down.”

Opposition Forms

Irene Alter, a peppy, retired New York schoolteacher, was sitting at her computer one morning that February when she read an article in The New York Times about the Khalil Gibran school, she said. A series of questions flooded her head.

Which courses would be taught in Arabic? How would Israel be treated in the study of Middle Eastern history? Then in April, she read an op-ed article by Pipes in The New York Sun.

Conceptually, such a school could be “marvelous,” Pipes wrote, but in practice, it was certain to be problematic. “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with Pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage,” he wrote, referring to the school as a madrassa, which means school in Arabic but, in the West, carries the implication of Islamic teaching.

Given how little Pipes knew about the school at the time, the word was “a bit of a stretch,” he said in a recent interview. He defended its use as a way to “get attention” for the cause. It got the attention of Alter, 60, who contacted Pipes and, with his encouragement, helped form a grass-roots organization in response to the school project. Pipes joined the advisory board of the group, which called itself the Stop the Madrassa Coalition.

Pipes, 58, has emerged as a divisive figure in the post-9/11 era. An author of 12 books who has a doctorate in history from Harvard, he has made a career out of studying and critiquing Islam. His research group, which he established in central Philadelphia in the early 1990s, “seeks to define and promote American interests in the Middle East,” according to its Web site.

Among his supporters, Pipes enjoys a heroic status; among his detractors, he is reviled. Those sharply divergent views reflect the passions that infuse Middle Eastern politics, arguably nowhere in the United States more than in New York City.

Pipes is perhaps best known for Campus Watch, a national initiative he created to scrutinize Middle Eastern programs at colleges and universities. The drive has accused professors of, among other things, being soft on militant Islam and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. It has stirred widespread controversy and, in some cases, may have undermined professors’ bids for tenure.

Pipes was joined in the monitoring effort by other self-declared watchdogs of militant Islam. Their Web sites are often linked to one another and their messages interwoven. One critic, David Horowitz, founded Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a campaign aimed at college campuses. He noted in an interview that monitors of radical Islam have increasingly trained their sights on nonviolent Muslim-Americans.

“They don’t throw bombs, but they create political cover for ideological support of this jihadi movement,” he said.

Pipes places Muslims in three categories, he said: those who are violent, those who are moderate and those in the middle. It is this middle group, he argued, that now poses the greatest threat to American values.

“Are these people who are not using violence but who are not fully enthusiastic about this country and its mores, its culture — are they on our side or are they on the other side?” he asked.

Almontaser never considered herself unenthusiastic about America, she said. But as the conflict over the Khalil Gibran school intensified, she came to be seen by many through Pipes’s lens. In his article in The Sun, he referred to Almontaser by her birth name, Dhabah, and called her views “extremist.” He cited an article in which she was quoted as saying about 9/11, “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims.” (As The Jewish Week later reported, Pipes left out the second half of the quote: “Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and have stolen my religion.”)

The Stop the Madrassa Coalition focused primarily on Almontaser as a strategy, said Pipes, because the group could get little information about the school itself. The coalition quickly publicized several discoveries. Almontaser had accepted an award from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national Muslim organization that critics claim has ties to terrorist groups (an assertion the group adamantly denies). In news articles, Almontaser had been critical of American foreign policy and police tactics in fighting terrorism. She also gave $2,000 to Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, whom Pipes and others have characterized as an Islamist sympathizer. (McKinney, who is no longer in office and did not respond to requests for an interview, has had a strong following among Arab-Americans in part because of her criticism of the Patriot Act.)

Critics of the Madrassa Coalition say its tactics are typical of campaigns singling out Muslims: They lean heavily on guilt by association. The nuances of the claims against Almontaser were lost as the controversy lit up the blogosphere, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal organization outside Boston that studies the political right. One Web site, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, displayed photographs of Almontaser wearing her hijab in different styles, suggesting that she had undergone a public relations makeover to “disguise” her “Islamist agenda.” The criticism of Almontaser and the school spread to newspapers, eliciting negative editorials in The Daily News and The New York Sun.

Almontaser was stunned, she said: Her school would touch upon religion only in its global studies class, following the same curriculum as all New York public schools. She tried to keep her head down, she said, and set out to recruit students, half of whom she hoped would be Arab. But opposition to the school mounted after critics learned that its advisory council included three imams (along with rabbis and priests), that there would be an internship for students with a Muslim lawyers’ association and that the proposal for the school suggested it might offer halal food. (The advisory council never met and has since been dismantled, and the school does not offer halal food, Education Department officials said.)

As the attacks continued, Joel Levy of the New York chapter of the Anti-Defamation League published a letter defending Almontaser in The Sun. Levy made reference to the possibility that his organization would provide anti-bias training to Almontaser’s staff.

The letter caused a stir among some Arab-Americans, who were bothered by Almontaser’s ties to Jewish groups. In late June, Aramica, an Arabic and English newspaper based in New York, ran a cover story with the headline “Zionist Organization Supports Gibran School Principal,” focusing on the link between Almontaser’s school and the Anti-Defamation League.

In just five months, Almontaser’s image had been transformed. She was rendered a radical Muslim by one group and a sellout by another.

At first, some city officials rallied to Almontaser’s side. Among them was David Cantor, the chief spokesman for the Department of Education, who wrote in an e-mail message to the editor of The New York Sun, Seth Lipsky: “I won’t allow Dan Pipes a free pass to smear Debbie Almontaser as an Islamist proselytizer who denies Muslim involvement in 9/11. It is a false picture and an ugly effort.”

But behind closed doors, department officials were nervous, Almontaser recalled. With her help, she said, they drafted a confidential memo of talking points to review with reporters: the school was “nonreligious,” for example, and Almontaser was a “multicultural specialist and diversity consultant.”

The Stop the Madrassa Coalition pressed its campaign. In July, one of its members, Pamela Hall, made a discovery that would elevate the controversy. At an Arab-American festival in New York, she spotted T-shirts on a table bearing the words “Intifada NYC.” The organization distributing them, Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media, trains young women in community organizing and media production. The group sometimes uses the office of a Yemeni-American association in New York. Almontaser sits on the association’s board.

Hall took a photograph, and a few weeks later, the coalition announced on its blog that Almontaser was linked to the T-shirts.

On Aug. 3, Almontaser received a call from Melody Meyer, a spokeswoman for the Education Department. “What does ‘Intifada NYC’ mean?” Almontaser recalled Meyer asking.

Almontaser was stumped, she said. She knew of the group. But she had never heard about the T-shirts, she said she told Meyer, adding that “intifada” meant “uprising” and was linked to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Most reporters lost interest in the T-shirts after Meyer explained that neither Almontaser nor the school was linked to them, but The Post persisted. Almontaser said Meyer and Cantor pressured her to respond to the newspaper in an interview.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute,’ “ recalled Almontaser, who was critical of The Post’s coverage of Arabs and Muslims. “ ‘I am not comfortable doing the interview.’ “

Meyer promised to monitor the conversation, Almontaser said, and Cantor instructed her not to be “apologetic” about the T-shirts. While both Meyer and Cantor said they could not comment on the case, a city lawyer said that Almontaser was told to avoid discussing the T-shirts and intifada altogether, and was never pressured to speak to The Post.

During the Post interview, Almontaser said, she told the reporter, Chuck Bennett, that the Arab women’s organization was not connected to her or the school, and that she would never be affiliated with any group that condoned violence. Then Bennett asked her for the origins of the word intifada, she said.

“The educator in me responded,” Almontaser said. She explained, with Meyer listening in on the three-way phone call, that the root of the word means “shaking off.” Almontaser then offered what she described as a lengthy explanation about the evolution of the word and the “negative connotation” it had developed because of the Arab-Israeli struggle.

“The thought went across my mind to be extremely careful with my words — not to offend the Jewish community and not to offend the Arab-American community,” she said. “I was feeling pressure from all sides.”

Although Almontaser said she never spoke to the reporter about the T-shirts, she defended the girls in the organization because she believed that the reporter was set on “vilifying innocent teenagers.”

After the reporter hung up, Almontaser recalled, Meyer told her, “Good job.”

The next day, The Post ran the article under the headline “City Principal Is ‘Revolting’ — Tied to ‘Intifada NYC’ Shirts.” The article quoted Almontaser as saying that the girls in the organization were “shaking off oppression,” words that The Post, according to a ruling by federal appellate judges, attributed to Almontaser “incorrectly and misleadingly.”

Complaints about Almontaser began pouring into the Education Department, and Cantor informed her that an apology would be issued in her name. Almontaser objected, she said, and asked that the department clarify her comments to The Post, which she said were distorted, rather than apologize.

Cantor insisted on an apology, she said, and e-mailed her the proposed wording. The first sentence was not negotiable, she recalled him telling her. The apology began: “The use of the word intifada is completely inappropriate as a T-shirt slogan for teenagers. I regret suggesting otherwise.” Almontaser responded in an e-mail message that Cantor should change the latter sentence to “I regret my response was interpreted as suggesting otherwise.”

The press office issued the original apology. Pressure soon mounted for Almontaser to resign. Randi Weingarten, the head of the teachers’ union, published a letter in The Post criticizing Almontaser for not denouncing “ideas tied to violence.” On Aug. 9, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott asked Almontaser to step down, she said. “The mayor wants your resignation by 8 a.m. tomorrow so he can announce it on his radio show,” Almontaser recalled Walcott saying.

She said he promised her that in exchange for her resignation, the school would still open, and she would remain employed. She resigned the next day, taking an administrative job at the Education Department. She kept her principal’s salary of $120,000.

On his radio program, Bloomberg announced that Almontaser had “submitted her resignation,” which “was nice of her to do.”

“She’s certainly not a terrorist,” he said, adding that she was not “all that media savvy maybe.”

Three days later, Almontaser was replaced by an interim principal, Danielle Salzberg, who is Jewish and speaks no Arabic.

Chaos in a New School

On Sept. 4, the Khalil Gibran International Academy opened its doors at 345 Dean Street as parents ushered their children past a throng of reporters, photographers and television crews.

Chaos soon erupted inside. Students cut classes and got into fights with little consequence, said staff members, parents and students. At least 12 of the 60 students showed signs of behavioral problems or learning disabilities, said Leslie Kahn, a licensed social worker and counselor who was employed at the school until January. (Education Department officials, who denied repeated requests by The Times to visit the school, said there are currently six special-needs students there.)

“Something is flying through the air, every class, every day,” Sean Grogan, a science teacher at the school, said in an interview. “Kids bang on the partitions, yell and scream, curse and swear. It’s out of control.”

Physical altercations are frequent, Grogan and others said, with Arab students and teachers the target of ethnic slurs. “I just don’t feel safe,” said an Arab-American student, 11, who will not return to the school next year.

In the first days after Almontaser resigned, she felt numb, she said. Her support among Arab-Muslims remained uneven. Had she not alienated some who wanted more of a role in the school’s creation, “the whole community would have stood behind her,” said Wael Mousfar, president of the Arab Muslim American Federation. “A lot of our kids would be part of that school.”

Almontaser soon found herself flanked by a new group of supporters, including Jewish and Muslim activists, who began lobbying for her to be reinstated as the school’s principal. On Oct. 16, Almontaser announced that she was suing the Education Department and the mayor. She claimed that her First Amendment rights had been violated because she was forced to resign after she was quoted as saying something controversial.

She requested that the city be prevented from hiring a permanent principal until her case was resolved. A judge rejected the request, and Almontaser appealed. In March, a federal appeals court upheld the ruling, but the judges were sharply critical of the city’s handling of Almontaser’s case.

“This was a situation where she was subject to sanction not for anything she said, not for anything she did, but because a newspaper reporter twisted what she said and the result of it was negative press for the city and the Board of Ed,” Judge Jon Newman told a city lawyer at a hearing in February.

Almontaser’s case will proceed in the Federal District Court in New York.

The Stop the Madrassa Coalition continues to protest the school. The group sued the Department of Education in October, requesting detailed information about the school’s creation, faculty and curriculum. While the department has handed over thousands of records, the coalition’s lawyer said the documents leave many questions unanswered, including which textbooks the school is using to teach Arabic. A department spokeswoman said that a list of textbooks selected for the school was sent to the lawyer last fall.

The coalition has also broadened the reach of its campaign. Some members have joined with the Center for Policy Research in American Education, a new organization that will research the influence of radical Islam on public schools around the country.

In recent weeks, conditions at the Khalil Gibran school have improved, said several students and staff members. Holly Anne Reichert, who was appointed as the permanent principal in January, said in an interview that she had reduced some of the disruptive behavior by minimizing class sizes. She added that the media attention had led to a “chaotic experience” for students. “Adults have created this, and children are the ones who have had to endure,” she said.

The school will move to a larger space in Brooklyn, by next fall.

Almontaser still attends interfaith dinners and awards ceremonies. During the day, she works for the city’s Office of School and Youth Development. Part of her job entails evaluating other schools.

In an odd twist of fate, she was sent to the Bronx last fall to review a small, innovative school that had opened the same month as Khalil Gibran. It also taught a foreign language: Spanish. The students seemed to be thriving. As Almontaser walked the hallways, she was shaken, she said.

“It wasn’t that I was envious that her dream materialized,” said Almontaser, referring to the principal. “It was seeing her sixth graders, her teachers, and seeing that she did it. And I didn’t get a chance.”

==============================

Drawn to the Light: Why Muslims Convert to Christianity (BreakPoint, 080423)

By Chuck Colson

A few days ago, Fox News ran a grim special titled “Jihad USA: Confronting the Threat of Homegrown Terror.” It was a warning of the continuing danger of Islamo-fascism.

The program probably deepened many Americans’ fear of and hostility toward Muslims. That is unfortunate, because most Muslims are not would-be jihadists. But we Christians especially need to guard our emotions so we can be a good witness to Muslims—a caution raised by Dr. Dudley Woodberry, professor of Islamic Studies at Fuller.

Woodberry, aware that throughout the world Muslims have been turning to Christ, was curious about the reasons why—especially in countries where the cost of converting is so high.

To find the answer, he created a detailed questionnaire. Over a 16-year period, some 750 Muslims from 30 countries filled it out—and the results are eye-opening. The number one reason Muslim converts listed for their decision to follow Christ was the lifestyle of the Christians among them.

As Woodberry, Russell Shubin, and G. Marks write in Christianity Today, Muslim converts noted that “there was no gap between the moral profession and the practice of Christians” they knew. An Egyptian convert contrasted the love shown by Christians “with the unloving treatment of Muslim students and faculty he encountered at a university in Medina.” Other converts were impressed that “Christians treat women as equals” and enjoy loving marriages. And poor Muslims observed that “the expatriate Christian workers they knew had adopted, contrary to their expectations, a simple lifestyle.” They wore locally made clothes and abstained from pork and alcohol, so as not to offend Muslim neighbors.

Second, converts identified “the power of God in answered prayers and healing.” For instance, in North Africa, a Muslim family asked Christian neighbors to pray for a sick daughter; and then the girl recovered. Some converts “noted deliverance from demonic power as another reason they were attracted to Jesus.”

Converts also mentioned unhappiness with Islam itself, especially the Koran’s emphasis on God’s punishment and the uncertainty of salvation. By contrast, Woodberry notes, the biblical teaching that God loved us so much that “He sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” is deeply attractive to Muslims.

Converts are also attracted to “the love expressed through the life and teachings of Christ.” Ironically, Muslims first learn about Christ through the Koran, but then read the Gospels to find out more about Him.

Finally—and this is the key—”When Christ’s love transforms committed Christians into a loving community, many Muslims [identified] a desire to join such a fellowship.”

Woodberry’s research shows that when the Church is being the Church—witnessing to the love of Christ and of His transforming power—Muslims are drawn both to us and to Him.

When is the last time you welcomed a Muslim family to the neighborhood, or invited a Muslim co-worker for a cup of coffee?

Even though we are in the midst of a worldwide war against Islamo-fascism, we must never forget Christ’s command to witness to our neighbors—to all of our neighbors—of His redeeming love.

==============================

The Evolution of Religious Bigotry (townhall.com, 080402)

By Jonah Goldberg

I just watched “Fitna,” a 17-minute film by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders.

Released on the Internet last week, “Fitna” juxtaposes verses from the Koran with images from the world of jihad. Heads cut off, bodies blown apart, gays executed, toddlers taught to denounce Jews as “apes and pigs,” protesters holding up signs reading “God Bless Hitler” and “Freedom go to Hell” - these are among the powerful images from “Fitna,” Arabic for “strife” or “ordeal.”

Predictably, various Muslim governments have condemned the film. Half the Jordanian parliament voted to sever ties with the Netherlands. Egypt’s grand imam threatened “severe” consequences if the Dutch didn’t ban the film.

Meanwhile, European and U.N. leaders are going through the usual theatrical hand-wringing, heaping anger on Wilders for sowing “hatred.”

Me? I keep thinking about Jesus fish.

During a 1991 visit to Istanbul, a buddy and I found ourselves in a small restaurant, drinking, dancing and singing with a bunch of middle-class Turkish businessmen, mostly shop owners. It was a hilariously joyful evening, even though they spoke little English and we spoke considerably less Turkish.

At the end of the night, after imbibing unquantifiable quantities of raki, an ouzo-like Turkish liqueur, one of the men gave me a worn-out business card. On the back, he’d scribbled an image. It was little more than a curlicue, but he seemed intent on showing it to me (and nobody else). It was, I realized, a Jesus fish.

It was an eye-opening moment for me, though obviously trivial compared with the experiences of others. Here in this cosmopolitan and self-styled European city, this fellow felt the need to surreptitiously clue me in that he was a Christian just like me (or so he thought).

Traditionally, the fish pictogram conjures the miracle of the loaves and fishes as well as the Greek word IXOYE, which means fish and also is an acronym for “Jesus Christ God’s Son, Savior.” Christians persecuted by the Romans used to draw the Jesus fish in the dirt as a way to tip off fellow Christians that they weren’t alone.

In America, these fish appear mostly on cars. Recently, however, it seems Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you’ve seen these too. The fish is “updated” with little feet on the bottom, and “IXOYE” or “Jesus” is replaced with either “Darwin” or “Evolve.”

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing that “hate is not a family value.” But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. “Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with ŒShalom’ written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with ŒUsury’ written inside the same symbol would be an outrage.”

But it’s the false bravado of the Darwin fish that grates the most. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap, to show courage without consequence.

Whatever the faults of “Fitna,” it ain’t no Darwin fish.

Wilders’ film could easily get him killed. It picks up the work of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004 by a jihadi for criticizing Islam.

“Fitna” is provocative, but it has good reason to provoke. A cancer of violence, bigotry and cruelty is metastasizing within the Islamic world.

It’s fine for Muslim moderates to say they aren’t part of the cancer; and that some have, in response to the film, is a positive sign. But more often, diagnosing or even observing this cancer - in film, book or cartoon - is dubbed “intolerant,” while calls for violence, censorship and even murder are treated as understandable, if regrettable, expressions of anger.

It’s not that secular progressives support Muslim religious fanatics, it’s that they reserve their passion and scorn for religious Christians who are neither fanatical nor violent.

The Darwin fish ostensibly symbolizes the superiority of progressive-minded science over backward-looking faith. I think this is a false juxtaposition, but I would have a lot more respect for the folks who believe it if they aimed their brave contempt for religion at those who might behead them for it.

==============================

Tough Questions for Islam: The Challenge of Fr. Botros (Christian Post, 080424)

Chuck Colson

Zakaria Botros is a conservative television star with a huge audience. He is even more hated by his political enemies than Rush Limbaugh and Hillary Clinton put together, if you can believe that. At least one newspaper has labeled Botros: “Public Enemy Number One.”

So why haven’t you heard about this guy? It is probably because you do not watch Arab television. On channel al-Hayat, or “Life TV,” you will find Father Botros, a Coptic priest, discussing theology in a way that embarrasses—and enrages—Muslim leaders. His television talks are leading not only to mass conversions, but to the disempowering of radical Islam.

Recently in National Review Online, Raymond Ibrahim described the work of Father Botros. He is a bearded, bespectacled cleric who sports a large wooden cross, and his specialty is examining “little-known but embarrassing aspects of Islamic law and tradition,” Ibrahim writes. Because he speaks and reads classical Arabic, Botros can “report to the average Muslim on the discrepancies” and what Ibrahim calls “the affronts to moral common sense found” within Islamic teachings. Satellite TV and the Internet mean Butros can question Islam’s teachings in Arabic—the language of 200 million Muslims—without fear of reprisal.

Drawing on the Socratic method, Botros will ask such questions as: “Are women inferior to men in Islam?” “Did Mohammed [really] say that adulterous female monkeys should be stoned?” And, “Does sharia really teach that women must breastfeed strange men?”

Botros cites chapter and verse, so to speak, of Islamic sources, and then politely invites Islamic scholars to respond. “More often than not,” Ibrahim writes, “the response is deafening silence.” Even worse, religious experts have at times been forced to agree with Botros—”which has led to some amusing (and embarrassing) moments on live Arabic TV.”

Naturally, this drives the sheiks crazy—which is probably why there is a rumored $5 million price on his head.

Botros’s ultimate goal is “to draw Muslims away from the dead legalism of sharia law to the spirituality of Christianity.” In doing so, he is not only saving souls, but cutting at the very heart of radical Islam.

What Western critics fail to appreciate, Ibrahim says, is that the West will not disempower radical Islam by offering Muslims democracy, capitalism, secularism, materialism, feminism—or any other “ism.” Instead, we must offer them “something theocentric and spiritually satisfying.”

This is why, at the end of each program, Botros reads from the Bible and invites his listeners to follow Christ. That he is successful in this endeavor is acknowledged by none other than al-Jazeera, which complains of Botros’s “unprecedented evangelical raid” on the Muslim world.

Botros offers a great example of why we Christians must learn our own doctrines, along with those of other religions: so that we can lovingly reason with people and draw them into the kingdom of God.

Tune in tomorrow for more on how you can witness to Muslims—even if you do not star in your own television show. And do not forget to pray for the safety of “Public Enemy Number One,” who is doing a great work for the kingdom—in the heart of radical Islam.

==============================

What Muslims Really Think (townhall.com, 080428)

By Dinesh D’Souza

While on the debating circuit pounding atheists—a pastime I am really getting to enjoy—I have just started reading Dalia Mogahed and John Esposito’s Who Speaks for Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think. It’s one of the first books to put some real data behind a much-disputed question.

For several years now liberal and conservative pundits have been pontificating about the Muslim world, usually without a shred of data. I was amused last year to cross swords with some of my fellow conservatives like Scott Johnson and Victor Davis Hanson. These ideologues seem of the opinion that the average Muslim is a crazed polygamist who is ready to blow himself up. No surprise: this is supposedly what Muslims all learn in the school where they read nothing but the Koran! Only pundits who have no exposure to Muslim countries, Muslim history and Muslim people can go on like this.

For such gurus, Islam itself is the problem and nothing short of an Islamic Reformation headed by ex-Muslims like Hirsi Ali and will show the Muslim world where it has gone wrong over the past five centuries. I admire Ali and sympathize with her hardships, but how likely is it that Muslims will follow a woman who the author of a book titled Infidel? In Christianity, the Reformation was led by a devout Martin Luther and not by skeptics and freethinkers like Hume or Voltaire.

Practical difficulties aside, we often forget the simple fact that Islam has been around for 1300 years and Islamic terrorism has been around for a few decades. Yes, one can find isolated instances in Islamic history of fanatical groups like the Assassins, but these are hardly typical of the Islamic regimes that have ruled for centuries. The intelligent questions to ask are, what is it about Islam today that has made it an incubator of radicalism and terrorism? And second, what do most Muslims really think about the West?

Fortunately there is an increasing body of reliable data on Muslim beliefs. One source is the World Values Survey, which has the benefit of tracking opinions over a period of decades. Another is the Gallup surveys which are now under the aegis of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, a group headed by Mogahed. Esposito is one of the most respected American authorities on Islam. I am only getting into their book, but here I offer my own hypothesis, and then I’m going to find out if their data vindicate it.

The problem for Muslims is not Christianity or Judaism. In fact, Islam sees itself as incorporating both in much the same way that Christianity sees itself as incorporating Judaism. Moses and Christ are considered prophets in Islam. If you read the propaganda of the radical Muslims, they almost never condemn the West for being a Christian society. They typically describe the West as an atheist and immoral society. Bin Laden has called America “the leading power of the pagans and unbelievers.”

The problem for most Muslims is Western liberalism. But here we must distinguish between two kinds of liberalism. There is the classical liberalism of the American founding. Call this Liberalism 1. This liberalism is reflected in such principles as the right to vote, to assemble freely, to debate issues, to trade with others, to practice one’s religion, political and religious toleration, and so on.

Then there is the modern liberalism of the 1960s. Call this Liberalism 2. This liberalism is defined by such tenets as the right to blaspheme, the complete exclusion of religious symbols from the public square, the right of teenage boys and girls to receive sex education and contraceptives, the right to abortion, prostitution as a worker’s right, pornography as a protected form of expression, gay rights and gay marriage, and so on. It is this second type of liberalism that seems to drive the social agenda of today’s Democratic Party. For example, Hillary Clinton chaired a presidential task force during the 1990s that promoted prostitution as an international right for workers.

Now we are in a better position to understand Islamic attitudes regarding the West. The vast majority of Muslims worldwide embrace Liberalism 1 while rejecting Liberalism 2. They are generally comfortable with classical liberalism while abhorring the tenets of modern liberalism. And by equating America with such things as blasphemy, pornography, prostitution and homosexuality, the radical Muslims appeal to ordinary Muslims to join their cause in a battle against the Great Satan. This is what I have argued in my recent book The Enemy at Home. The book is just out in paperback, with an Afterward responding to my critics on the right and the left. I always try and learn from my critics, and I’m also interested to see how my thesis stands up in light of Mogahed and Esposito’s data.

Of course today’s liberals will chafe at the idea that their values are producing a powerful “blowback” from the House of Islam. That’s why we need good empirical work like this book. Let us find out what Muslims really think, and then let us look at the propaganda of the radical Muslims to see how they rally traditional Muslims to their side. Who cares if liberals don’t like to admit what is going on? People are entitled to their own opinions but they are not entitled to their own facts.

==============================

Malaysian Islamic Body Rejects Proposed Conversion Rule (Christian Post, 080430)

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Islamic authorities have rejected a proposal by Malaysia’s prime minister that would require non-Muslims to inform their families before converting to Islam.

The decision was made at a weekend meeting of top Islamic authorities, including legal and spiritual advisers, the Malaysian Islamic Development Department’s director-general, Wan Mohamad Sheikh Abdul Aziz, said in a statement received Tuesday.

The department’s rejection was a setback for the proposal, which minority religious groups had hoped would alleviate interfaith tensions in the Muslim-majority nation.

The department’s approval is needed to implement any rule relating to Islam. But the government can still get Parliament to pass a law which would override the department’s objections.

Wan Mohamad said it was up to converts to decide whether to inform family members.

He said it should be “left to the discretion of the person who wishes to embrace Islam to determine how and when it is appropriate to inform family members. ... The existing laws for conversion to Islam and related matters are sufficient.”

The failure by many converts to inform their families has led to disputes relating to funerals. In several instances, Islamic officials seized bodies for Muslim funerals, while non-Muslim family members disputed that the deceased had ever converted.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi announced that the government would soon require Muslim converts to produce documents showing they had told their family members.

The announcement was seen as an attempt to calm ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities over perceived religious discrimination, which led to heavy losses for Abdullah’s ruling National Front coalition in general elections last month.

Despite holding on to power, the coalition lost more than a third of Parliament’s seats and five of 13 states.

Ethnic Chinese and Indians make up more than 30% of Malaysia’s 27 million people and are mainly Buddhist, Christian and Hindu. They complain that court decisions in religious disputes favor Muslims _ who account for more than 60% and are mainly ethnic Malay.

Islam is Malaysia’s official religion. Non-Muslims are free to practice their religions but often lose out in interfaith disputes involving Islam. Malays are Muslim by law, and it is difficult for them to leave Islam.

==============================

The Truth about Mustard Seeds: Christianity and Islam (BreakPoint, 080409)

By Chuck Colson

In his history of World War II, Winston Churchill tells the story of a pre-war meeting between French premier Laval and Josef Stalin. When Laval asked Stalin if he could not “do something to encourage religion and the Catholics in Russia,” Stalin replied, “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?”

The joke was ultimately on Stalin. Fifty years later a Pope helped bring down communism without firing a single shot. Now another Pope is preparing to do the same to another intractable foe of the West.

At the most recent Easter Vigil, Pope Benedict XVI baptized Italian journalist Magdi Cristiano Allam. Throughout his career, Allam, who was born in Egypt, had been associated with “progressive” causes. He wrote for leftist newspapers, championed the rights of North African immigrants, and supported the Palestinian cause.

A leftist journalist asking to be baptized as an adult would be noteworthy enough, but the story does not end there. As you probably inferred from his last name and place of birth, Allam was a Muslim.

That, as they said in the Wizard of Oz, is a horse of a different color. Islam does not take kindly to Muslims, even non-practicing ones like Allam, converting to other religions, especially Christianity.

Then there is the historical context of Allam’s conversion. Some European leaders advocate creating exceptions to their laws and customs to accommodate Europe’s growing Muslim population.

Allam will have none of this. Even before his conversion, he concluded that the “moderate” Islam these leaders talk about, and which he supposedly represented, was a figment of their imagination. The “Islamic Reformation” they longed for could be found in convincing Muslims, Allam believed, to “cease being Muslims.”

As if to prove his point, Allam lives “confined to a life under guard.” His forthrightness and conversion have made him a marked man.

Yet, he accepts it because “the miracle of the Resurrection of Christ has reverberated through [his] soul,” so he writes. And he has discovered “the true and only God, which is the God of Faith and Reason.”

The Asia Times columnist “Spengler” has summarized Benedict’s approach to the issues of our day as this: “I have a mustard seed, and I’m not afraid to use it.” Benedict’s willingness to proclaim the truth of the Gospel, regardless of how inconvenient it might be and whom it might offend, is the West’s best defense against the threat of radical Islam.

Osama bin Laden certainly agrees. When he recently accused the Pope of playing a “large and lengthy role” in a “new crusade against Islam,” he was acknowledging that Christian ideas and beliefs pose the biggest threat to his vision of Islam. The estimated six million Muslim converts to Christianity I recently told you about on “BreakPoint” should worry bin Laden and company far more than any Western army.

Benedict knows this, which is why he has insisted on the right of Christians in Islamic countries to practice their faith openly. As “Spengler” puts it, the “sandals on the ground” in the conflict with Islam will come from the ranks of converted Muslims— and that is the kind of yield Christians ought to expect from a mustard seed.

==============================

Church of England: UK Gov’t Favors Islam, Ignores Christianity (Christian Post, 080607)

LONDON – Britain’s government has largely ignored the concerns of Christians as it has courted Muslims and members of minority faiths, a new Church of England report concludes, officials said Saturday.

The report, to be published on Monday, argues that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government has failed to understand the role – or importance – of Britain’s largest Christian church.

It claims that the Church of England has been neglected by British lawmakers, who have focused primarily on creating relationships with Islamic leaders, in part to help combat terrorism and enhance community relations.

Bishop Stephen Lowe, the church’s bishop for urban life and faith, commissioned the Von Hugel Institute, a research center at Cambridge University, to carry out the study.

The Times of London on Saturday quoted the report as saying that lawmakers had placed a deliberate focus on Islam and minority faiths, at the expense of relations with Christian leaders.

“We encountered on the part of the Government a significant lack of understanding, or interest in, the Church of England’s current or potential contribution in the public sphere,” the newspaper quoted the report as saying.

“Indeed we were told that government had consciously decided to focus ... almost exclusively on minority religions,” it said, according to the newspaper.

The Church declined to release the report ahead of a scheduled publication on Monday and would not comment on specific recommendations.

Peter Crumpler, spokesman for the Church of England, said the institute was asked to prepare a report “that could assist our reflections and contribute to our conversations with Government.”

“The hard-hitting report raises issues of considerable importance, the authors say, and makes recommendations that challenge the Government to recognize the Church’s involvement and potential in public service reform,” he said.

==============================

German Court Rules Muslim Girl Can’t Skip Swimming Lessons (Foxnews, 080508)

A German court on Wednesday ruled that a Muslim student cannot skip co-ed swimming lessons because her religion prohibits form-fitting clothes that do not cover her body, The Local reported.

The 12-year-old girl’s parents sued a school in the northern city of Remscheid after it refused to let the girl skip the lessons. The court sided with the school, saying that the state’s responsibility to educate the girl outweighed an infringement on her religious freedom.

Last year the girl’s parents rejected an offer from the school saying she could swim in leggings and a T-shirt. They argued that her body still would be visible through wet clothes, The Local reported.

The court concluded that because the swim lessons take place in water, there would be very little time that her body would be seen.

The parents’ attorney said the family will appeal the decision.

==============================

Jordanian Man Charged in Honor Killing of Sister (Foxnews, 080512)

AMMAN, Jordan — A man who is suspected of drowning his 22-year-old sister for having an extramarital affair was charged Monday with premeditated murder, a judicial official said.

The unidentified woman’s brother beat her with the help of his family Saturday and then took her to the Dead Sea where he drowned her, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

The state prosecutor also charged the woman’s parents and another brother Monday with assisting in the murder by knowing about it and beating the woman before she died, the official said.

The woman was killed after an unidentified man was seen leaving her house, the official said.

An average of 20 Jordanian women are killed by relatives every year in so-called honor killings in this tribal-dominated society.

[KH: It is not tribal killing; it is Islamic killing.]

==============================

Muslim ‘Numbers Game’ Proving Deadly for Christian Converts, Says Expert (Christian Post, 080515)

Inflated accounts of how many Muslims are converting to Christianity are putting the lives of these vulnerable followers of Jesus Christ at risk, warns an expert on Islam and Christianity.

Reports in recent months have cited “astounding statistics of conversion,” noted Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, international director of the persecution watchdog group Barnabas Fund, in a newsletter Wednesday. These exaggerated figures incite Muslim violence against converts and inspire greater Muslim evangelism, he said.

“Muslims view apostasy from Islam as bringing shame and humiliation on the Muslim community,” Sookhdeo, a former Muslim, explained. “Publicizing that there are large numbers of converts deepens the shame and loss of face.”

In response, “many” Muslims believe the shame is best removed by the shedding of blood of not only the convert, but those who seek to convert Muslims, he said. Some may even go further to get revenge and restore honor to Islam by attacking anyone associated with the “Christian” West.

Sookhdeo offered several reasons why someone would exaggerate the number of converts. Sometimes it is due to pure miscalculations stemming from the lack of clear information, such as names of the converts, when collecting data.

Other times, it is because cross-cultural missionaries misinterpret what they see. For missionaries who grew up in an individualistic Western culture, he said, they might mistakenly believe that, say, 1,000 responding to an “altar call” means that 1,000 people have accepted Christ into their lives.

But in many local cultures, people are more likely to go to the altar because of their community mindset than because they believe in Jesus Christ. In other words, they see their neighbor going to the front of the church and they follow.

Another reason behind number inflation is that people are unaware of historic indigenous churches in many Muslim-majority countries. So when someone sees a large Christian congregation, such as in Egypt, they mistakenly assume that all the worshippers must be converts from Islam.

There are also cases of deliberate efforts to exaggerate the numbers of converts. Muslim leaders have sometimes offered false numbers of Muslims becoming Christians in hope of alarming Muslims to persuade them to give more generously to Islamic missionary effort.

There is also a “very strong anti-evangelism move” within Islam recently, aimed at blocking Christian mission work among Muslims. By saying that there are a large number of converts to Christianity, Muslims fuel the Muslim-majority public opinion against Christian evangelism.

Also, since the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and the “war on terror,” Muslims have increasingly argued that President Bush’s policy is to transform the Middle East into a “Christian entity” using Christian mission combined with American military might. Motivation to prove this theory has caused some Muslim leaders to claim higher numbers of converts to Christianity.

“This totally erroneous linkage has created more danger for Western forces based in Muslim countries as well as for Christian missionaries, whether expatriate or national,” Sookhdeo said.

In addition to Muslims, some Christians are also at fault for intentionally enlarging the number of converts. To gain greater financial support, some Christian groups have inflated the number of converts to Christianity, he said.

But Sookhdeo does acknowledge that at this current time in history, there are more Muslims coming to Christ than at any other time. However, he still expressed serious concerns about the misrepresentation of the number of those coming to Christ.

“Converts are increasingly concerned at the way in which publicity in the West is creating extra danger for them,” Sookhdeo said. “The present ‘numbers game’ is proving deadly.

“While it is good to highlight in public discussions the issue of Islamic law’s death sentence for apostasy, the quoting of provocative numbers in the Western media is not welcomed by converts,” he added. “In any case there are many secret believers known only to God.”

Besides heading Barnabas Fund, Sookhdeo is also the director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity.

==============================

Bishop Fears Radical Islam Will Fill ‘Moral Vacuum’ in Britain (Christian Post, 080529)

LONDON – A senior Church of England bishop claims the erosion of Christianity in Britain is leaving the country with a “moral vacuum” that radical Islam is ready to fill.

Writing in the political magazine Standpoint, the Rt. Rev. Dr Michael Nazir-Ali quoted an academic who pointed to the failure of church leaders to prevent Christian values from being substantially eroded in society during the social and sexual revolution of the 60s.

Christianity began to fall to the wayside just as more people of different faiths were starting to settle in Britain, the Pakistani-born Bishop of Rochester added.

“It is a situation which has created the moral and spiritual vacuum in which we find ourselves. Whilst the Christian consensus was dissolved, nothing else, except perhaps endless self-indulgence, was put in its place,” he said.

Whereas Marxism failed to take hold in British society, he went on to question whether society could counter radical Islam with the same success.

“We are now, however, confronted by another equally serious ideology, that of radical Islamism, which also claims to be comprehensive in scope,” he said. “What resources do we have to face yet another ideological battle?”

Nazir-Ali answered that only Judeo-Christian values could stand up adequately against the threat posed by radical Islam.

“It remains the case, however, that many of the beliefs and values which we need to deal with the present situation are rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition,” the bishop said.

Earlier in the year, Nazir-Ali claimed that multiculturalism had failed and that radical Islam was turning some areas of Britain into “no-go” areas for people of different faiths.

He appeared to reiterate his position in the Standpoint article, declaring that the “newfangled and insecurely founded” doctrine of multiculturalism has created communities of immigrants that are “segregated” and “living parallel lives”.

Last weekend, Nazir-Ali was one of only three Church of England bishops to come out in support of a motion put forward by lay member Paul Eddy to step up its efforts to convert Muslims to Christianity.

“We need to respect people of all faiths and of none,” he said in response to the motion. “In the context of our dialogue with them, it is our duty to witness to our faith and to call people to faith in Jesus Christ, whilst recognizing that people of other faiths may have similar responsibilities.

“Cooperation among faiths arises from recognition of distinctive and not by diluting what we believe merely for the sake of good relations,” the bishop contended. “It is God who converts our task in to bear witness faithfully in every context in which we find ourselves.”

==============================

Large Explosion Rocks Danish Embassy in Pakistan, at Least 6 Killed (Foxnews, 080602)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An apparent car bomb exploded outside the Danish embassy in Pakistan’s capital Monday amid threats against Denmark over the reprinting of Prophet Muhammad cartoons in newspapers.

At least six people were killed and dozens were injured in the blast.

The blast echoed through Islamabad and left a crater more than three feet deep in the road in front of the embassy. Shattered glass, fallen masonry and dozens of wrecked vehicles littered the area. A plume of smoke rose above the scene as people, some bloodied, ran back and forth in a state of panic.

The explosion appeared to be a car bomb, police officer Muhammad Ashraf said. Someone parked a car in front of the embassy and it exploded at around 1 p.m, he said.

A perimeter wall of the embassy collapsed and its metal gate was blown inward, but the embassy building itself remained standing, though its windows were shattered.

Officials said at least six people — including two policemen — were killed and 35 people were wounded in the blast. The only foreign national reported hurt was a Brazilian woman working at the Danish Embassy. Her injuries were not serious, Brazil’s Foreign Ministry said.

The BBC reported that as many as eight people were killed.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri recently called for attacks on Danish targets in response to the publication of caricatures in Danish newspapers depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Denmark has faced threats at its embassies following the reprinting in Danish newspapers of the caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims generally consider depicting the prophet to be sacrilegious and Islamic militants had warned of reprisals.

Pakistan’s new government is trying to strike peace deals with militants in its regions bordering Afghanistan, a pursuit eyed warily by the U.S.

Pakistani officials condemned the blast but indicated they did not want to stop the talks. The government has insisted it is not talking to “terrorists” but rather militants willing to lay down their weapons.

“There is no question of any impact of this incident on the peace process, but of course it badly harmed our image in the world,” said Rehman Malik, the Interior Ministry chief.

Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said the explosion killed a male Pakistani custodian at the embassy and seriously injured a handyman. Two office workers were also injured, Moeller said.

He condemned the attack as “totally unacceptable.”

“It is terrible that terrorists do this. The embassy is there to have a cooperation between the Pakistani population and Denmark, and that means they are destroying that,” Moeller told Denmark’s TV2 News channel.

In April, Danish intelligence officials warned of an “aggravated” terror threat against Denmark because of the cartoon. The warning specifically singled Pakistan, along with North Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Ben Venzke, CEO of IntelCenter, a U.S. group that monitors Al Qaeda messages, said the bombing was likely the work of the terror group or one of its affiliates.

He said Al Qaeda laid out an extensive justification for attacks against Danish diplomatic facilities and personnel in a video last August, and repeated its threat earlier this year.

“I urge and incite every Muslim who can harm Denmark to do so in support of the Prophet, God’s peace and prayers be upon him, and in defense of his honorable stature,” IntelCenter quoted al-Zawahri as saying in an April 21 video.

Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir pledged Pakistan would do all it could to safeguard foreign diplomatic missions.

“I think the Pakistani nation feels very ashamed today on incidents such as these,” he said.

It was the second targeting of foreigners in less than three months in the usually tranquil Pakistani capital. A bombing in March at a restaurant in Islamabad that killed a Turkish aid worker and wounded at least 12 others including four FBI personnel.

“I was with a friend passing through a nearby street then we heard a big bang,” said witness Muhammad Akhtar. “Then we saw smoke and people running in a frenzy. We shifted at least eight or nine injured to hospitals. They all have got serious injuries. They were soaked in blood.”

Footage from the scene showed rescue workers dragging away a bloodied person, covering his torso with a blanket.

Sirens wailed as ambulances took the wounded from the scene. One group of rescuers carried away what appeared to be the upper half of a man’s body. Pieces of metal and glass were scattered at least 200 yards from the blast site.

The Danish flag and the EU flag were blown off their staffs and the windows of the embassy were blown out.

The Norwegian Foreign Ministry closed its embassy a few hundred yards from the Danish mission. It suffered “glass breakage” from the blast, a ministry statement said. The Swedish embassy also shut down, Swedish foreign ministry spokesman Kent Oberg said.

The U.S. Embassy, meanwhile, urged Americans to use extra caution when traveling through Islamabad and avoid the blast site.

The office of a Pakistani development organization opposite the embassy was badly damaged, its roof partially collapsed.

Anjum Masood, a field operations manager for the U.N.-funded group, Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment, said dozens of its 100 employees were wounded, mostly because of flying glass. His own left hand was bandaged.

Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked militants have launched a wave of bombings in Pakistan over the past year, mostly targeting security forces.

There had been a relative lull in violence since a new civilian government took power two months ago and began peace talks with the Taliban based along the Afghan frontier.

The United States has expressed concerns that the peace deals will simply give the militants time to regroup and intensify attacks on U.S. and other foreign forces inside Afghanistan.

In April, Denmark briefly evacuated staff from its embassies in Algeria and Afghanistan because of terror threats related to the Muhammad drawings. Foreign Minister Moeller then suggested Danish embassies in other locations also could be forced to relocate their staff following a warning in March by Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden.

==============================

Law and religion clash in France (Paris, International Herald, 080602)

PARIS: Forty years after the sexual revolution in France, the country is confronted with a question it thought it would never have to ask again: Can a husband annul a marriage because his new wife is not a virgin?

The discovery last week that a court in the northern city of Lille had annulled the union of two Muslims because the husband said his wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be has set off a highly charged and highly politicized debate in a country where religion is not supposed to interfere with public life.

It has also sharpened the focus on much broader questions that all of Europe is grappling with: How much should European countries adapt their moral and legal codes to their growing Muslim communities, and how much should those communities be expected to conform to Western norms?

Fadela Amara, the minister in charge of France’s suburbs and herself of Muslim origin, called the ruling “a fatwa against the emancipation of women”; Valérie Létard, the women’s minister, said the decision represented a “regression of the status of women”; and scores of feminists and lawyers warned that it could create a precedent increasing the pressure on young Muslim women in Europe to be chaste or to undergo an increasingly popular surgery to reconstitute their hymens before getting married.

“It’s a victory for fundamentalists and a victory for those who look at Islam as an archaic religion that treats women badly,” said Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist and the author of several books on Muslims in Europe. “I’m sure the judge wanted to be respectful to Islam. Instead, the decision was respectful to fundamentalists.”

On Monday, the office of Justice Minister Rachida Dati, who had initially defended the ruling, announced that it would be appealed. Dati, a daughter of North African immigrants, herself had a marriage annulled that had been arranged by her family.

The latest controversy started with the marriage of a French engineer and fresh convert to Islam to a French university student of North African origin on July 8, 2006. When the husband discovered during their wedding night that his bride was not a virgin, he abruptly canceled the festivities. The next day, he asked a lawyer to annul the marriage. The bride, who admitted that she had lied about her virginity but was initially opposed to the separation, eventually consented to his demand.

In its ruling, which was made on April 1 but only revealed in the French press Thursday, the court in Lille did not cite the religion of the couple. Instead, it based its verdict on the idea of a breach of the marital contract, concluding that the husband had married his wife after “she was presented to him as single and chaste.” The fact that the wife eventually agreed to the annulment showed that she herself considered her virginity “as an essential quality decisive for the consent of her husband,” the ruling said.

“Married life began with a lie, which is contrary to the reciprocal confidence between the married parties,” it said.

According to Article 180 of the French Civil Code, a marriage can be declared void on the basis of “an error about the person or the essential qualities of the person.” The law provides no clear definition of what constitutes an “essential quality.” Several precedents have made it into jurisprudence over the past two centuries - among them impotence, hiding a previous marriage or past prostitution - but it is the first time that a woman’s virginity is cited.

The husband’s lawyer, Xavier Labbée, said by telephone Monday that the annulment had “nothing to do with religion,” describing the ruling as technical.

But in France, which is strictly secular and where all religious garb is banned from public schools, the case has raised fears that religious considerations are indirectly creeping into the legal system. France is home to the largest Muslim community in Western Europe, with an estimated five million inhabitants of mainly North African origin.

Observers like Bouzar question whether a judge would have ruled the same way if the couple had been Roman Catholic or Jewish, even though, as she pointed out, “all three monotheist religions traditionally demand that both the bride and the groom are virgins before marriage.”

She also doubted that a Muslim woman could have obtained such a ruling because a man’s virginity is “impossible to prove.”

Indirectly, religious considerations have played a role in the past, said Caroline Fourest, a journalist and lecturer at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris who has written extensively on the issue. There have been cases of Catholic marriages annulled because one party found out after the wedding that the other was divorced and felt that this was incompatible with their beliefs.

Still, Fourest said, the latest ruling “sends a very, very bad signal to young Muslim girls who grew up in France and have the same sexual lives as other young French women but are trapped by their parents’ mentalities at the moment of their marriage.”

Fourest said the French civil code should be changed to better reflect modern-day reality. Today, she argues, divorce is no longer stigmatized and the disenchanted husband in the latest case should have sought a divorce instead.

Annulment should be reserved for very rare and specific cases, like forced marriages, she said. According to the latest statistics available, 745 marriages were annulled in 2004 in France.

“The law has not evolved as quickly as society,” she said. “We have to rethink the law.”

A growing number of young women in France, she said, are now seeking help from plastic surgeons for hymenoplasties, where the hymen is re-created from the already-torn tissue. There are no reliable statistics, but Fourest, who researched the subject for a television documentary, said the number of women undergoing the operation had risen to about 100 a year. The procedure is not covered by the tax-financed health system, and each operation can cost up to €2,700, or about $4,200, in Paris, Fourest said.

The pressures are not unique to France. In Germany, with a significant Turkish population, there are no statistics, but experts say hymenoplasties have become more popular. In Britain, where most Muslims are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, only about a dozen women a year have the operation paid for by the National Health Service, but observers believe hundreds more pay for private surgery.

The French ruling is only the latest in a string of controversies about how Europe is handling the integration of its Muslim citizens.

It came two months after the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, caused a stir in Britain when he suggested that the adoption of elements of Islamic Shariah law in Britain was “unavoidable” if social cohesion was to be fostered. Muslims, the archbishop said, should be able to choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in Shariah tribunals, which handle matters of Islamic law.

Observers like Bouzar strongly disagree.

“Let’s leave religion out of the courts altogether,” she said. “Muslims are either demonized or given too much room to be different. They should be treated like any other citizen.”

==============================

Surrender! (townhall.com, 080708)

By Cal Thomas

So this is how it ends: not with a bang, but a whimper.

The most senior judge in England has declared that Islamic legal principles in Sharia law may be used within Muslim communities in Britain to settle marital arguments and regulate finance. Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips said, “Those entering into a contractual agreement can agree that the agreement shall be governed by a law other than English law.”

In his speech at an East London mosque, Lord Phillips said Muslims in Britain could use Islamic legal principles as long as punishments - and divorce rulings - comply with English law. Sharia law does not comply with English law. It is a law unto itself.

And so the English who gave us the Magna Carta in 1215, William Blackstone and the foundation of American law are slowly succumbing to the dictates of intolerant Islam and sowing seeds of their own destruction.

The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organization (IKWRO), an umbrella group of activists who work in Muslim countries to liberate women from the dark side of this oppressive force, according to Womensphere.wordpress.com, identifies Sharia family law as the fundamental basis for discrimination against women in the Muslim world, including communities in the United Kingdom.

Here are just some of the “benefits” British Muslim women can look forward to if Sharia law replaces English law: The Muslim woman cannot marry without parental approval, worsening the problem of forced marriage; marriages can be conducted without the presence of a bride, as long as the guardian consents, creating a climate for underage and early marriage; Muslim women may only marry Muslim men.

It gets worse. A Muslim man can divorce his wife by repudiating her; they have no obligation to support a former wife, or her children after the divorce; women are prohibited from divorcing husbands without his consent; abuse is not grounds for a woman to end a marriage; in matters of inheritance, sons are entitled to twice as much of an estate as daughters.

Divorced women must remain single. If they remarry they can lose custody of their children. There is no similar requirement for a man. Child custody often reverts to the father at a preset age, even if the father has been abusive.

It is impossible to reconcile this antiquated “law” with English law, so what could Lord Phillips mean when he says that Sharia law can be used in Muslim communities as long as such laws comply with English law? This will mean English law must become subordinate to Sharia law. This is Dhimmitude, an Islamic system of religious apartheid begun in the 7th century that forces all other religions and cultures to accept an inferior status once Muslims become the majority.

Maryland’s Court of Appeals recently denied a Sharia divorce to a Pakistani man. The man’s wife of 20 years had filed for divorce. To circumvent having to share their $2 million estate and other marital assets, he went to the Pakistani embassy and applied for an Islamic divorce. The man wanted to invoke what is known as talaq, in which the husband says, “I divorce you” three times and it’s done.

The Maryland court said, “If we were to affirm the use of talaq, controlled as it is by the husband, a wife, a resident of this state, would never be able to consummate a divorce action filed by her in which she seeks a division of marital property” and the talaq “directly deprives the wife of the due process she is entitled to when she initiates divorce litigation. The lack and deprivation of due process is itself contrary to (Maryland’s) public policy.”

British Muslims who wish to live under Sharia law might have stayed in the countries from which they came - or return to them. But their objective appears to be domination of England, not assimilation. This also seems to be the goal for Muslims in other countries with large and growing Muslim populations.

There is no due process under Sharia law. Lord Phillips has signed the death warrant for his nation if his opinion becomes the law of England. It’s one thing to fight a war and lose it. It’s quite another to willingly surrender without a struggle.

==============================

Muslim father burns Christian daughter alive (WorldNetDaily, 080814)

A Muslim father cut out his daughter’s tongue and lit her on fire upon learning that she had become a Christian.

The child became curious about Jesus Christ after she read Christian material online, the Gulf News reported.

Her father read her Internet conversation, detached her tongue and burned her to death “following a heated debate on religion,” according to an International Christian Concern report.

The Muslim man lives in Saudi Arabia and is employed by the muwateen, or Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The muwateen are police tasked by the government with enforcing religious purity. The man has been taken into custody, and his identity has not been released.

According to the report, Saudi Arabia’s school curriculums and teachers deliberately instill hatred toward Christians and followers of non-Muslim religions.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom issued a press release stating that textbooks at the Saudi Arabian government school in Northern Virginia teach, “It is permissible for a Muslim to kill an apostate (a convert from Islam).”

The ICC claims Saudi Arabian authorities have begun exporting Wahabbism – a version of Islam that is said to be least tolerant toward non-Muslims – to other nations including the U.S.

Saudi oil money is said to be used to encourage countries such as Ethiopia and Indonesia to kill Christians and destroy their possessions.

ICC president Jeff King said, “Saudi Arabia has to treat Christians with the same respect that it wants Muslims to be treated in other countries. It has to stop exporting hate and persecution against Christians in other countries.”

==============================

Saudi Cleric Advises Killing Broadcasters of Seduction, Witchcraft and Comedy (Foxnews, 080914)

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A senior Saudi official said Sunday that owners of satellite TV networks that show “immoral” content should be brought to trial and sentenced to death if other penalties don’t deter them from airing such broadcasts.

The comments by Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan, the chief of the kingdom’s highest tribunal, the Supreme Judiciary Council, were an attempt to explain a fatwa, or decree, he issued last week, in which he said just that it was permissible to kill the network’s owners.

Appearing on government-run Saudi TV Sunday, al-Lihedan seemed to be trying to calm the controversy his original comments triggered, explaining that the owners of offending networks should be warned and punished before possibly being brought to trial and executed.

Still, al-Lihedan, who is also a cleric, did not back down.

A prominent cleric condemned al-Lihedan’s edict, saying it encourages terrorism and allows “the enemies of Islam” to portray the faith as one that favors murder.

Al-Lihedan’s edict was broadcast Thursday during the daily “Light in the Path” radio program in which he and others pass rulings on what is permissible under Islamic law.

One caller asked about Islam’s view of the owners of satellite TV channels that show “bad programs” during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, which began two weeks ago.

“I want to advise the owners of these channels, who broadcast calls for such indecency and impudence ... and I warn them of the consequences,” al-Lihedan said. “What does the owner of these networks think, when he provides seduction, obscenity and vulgarity?”

“Those calling for corrupt beliefs, certainly it’s permissible to kill them,” al-Lihedan added. “Those calling for sedition, those who are able to prevent it but don’t, it is permissible to kill them.”

Al-Lihedan, 79, did not name a particular TV channel or programs in the radio show, which was taped a couple of months ago.

On Sunday, he said his “advice” was aimed at owners who broadcast witchcraft, indecent programs, shows that mock scholars or the religious police and comedies that are not appropriate for Ramadan.

Government-run channels in deeply conservative Saudi Arabia steer well clear of any programming that could be deemed risque. However, on satellite broadcasts it is possible to see Western music videos as well as American soaps and TV series, such as “Sex and the City,” that include some nudity.

“If they are not deterred by the punishment and continue corrupting people through the broadcasts, then it is permissible for the relevant authorities to kill them after trials,” al-Lihedan told Saudi TV. A transcript of the interview was carried by the official Saudi Press Agency in Arabic and English.

Al-Lihedan’s remarks surprised many in the Arab world, especially since many of the most popular Arab satellite networks — which include channels showing music videos and special Ramadan soaps — are owned by Saudi princes and well-connected Saudi businessmen.

Sheik Abdul-Mohsen al-Obaikan, an adviser at the Justice Ministry and a member of the appointed Consultative Council that acts like a parliament, lashed out at al-Lihedan’s edict, telling Al-Jazirah newspaper it would “lead to sedition and lend support to terrorism.”

“It came to them (terrorists) on a gold platter and they will exploit it quickly and act to recruit our youths to take lives and blow up stations and the properties of the owners of the stations, all based on this (al-Lihedan’s) grave response,” al-Obaikan was quoted by Al-Jazirah as saying Saturday.

Saudi Arabia’s judiciary is made up of Islamic clerics whose decrees, or fatwas, on everyday issues are widely respected. Their fatwas do not have the weight of law. In the courts, cleric-judges rule according to Islamic law, but interpretations can vary.

==============================

Nigerian Police Arrest Muslim Preacher for Having 86 Wives (Foxnews, 080916)

ABUJA, Nigeria — Police in northern Nigeria have arrested a Muslim preacher who claims 86 wives and 107 children, charging him with breaking Islamic laws governing marriage.

Authorities detained Mohammed Bello Masaba, 84, on Monday after an order from northern Niger state’s Islamic court, according to police spokesman Richard Oguche. The preacher was charged with “infringing on Islamic laws,” Oguche told The Associated Press by telephone from the state.

It was unclear when the man would appear before the court, or what the potential punishment could be. Muslim principles forbid men to take more than four wives.

Around half of Nigeria’s 140 million people are Muslim, and Niger was one of twelve majority-Muslim states that adopted the Islamic Sharia criminal code after Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999. The move sparked religious riots throughout the country that left thousands dead.

But severe corporal punishments imposed by the Sharia courts are rarely carried out and no executions have taken place. Nigeria’s secular, federal government, which controls the national security forces, has said it won’t allow the most serious Sharia punishments.

Analysts say Sharia was implemented for political reasons as well as religious conviction — as a show of strength by the Muslim northerners and as an acknowledgment that secular courts had failed to stem years of crime.

Nigeria has 24 other states that do not follow Sharia law.

Masaba says God enables him to maintain such a large family.

“A man with 10 wives would collapse and die, but my own power is given by Allah. That is why I have been able to control 86 of them,” he has been quoted as saying in Nigeria’s local media.

==============================

‘Everybody’ Encouraged to Watch New Radical Islam Documentary (Christian Post, 080918)

The documentary on radical Islam that many are calling a “must-see” is set to release this Friday – one week after the seventh anniversary marking the horrific 9/11 attacks that struck at the heart of America.

“I encourage everybody to see this film ... you definitely get an incredible education by watching this film ... the movie left many of us speechless,” commented CNN Newsroom Anchor Kyra Phillips in a published endorsement of the “heart wrenching” documentary.

“‘Obsession’ reflects the facts of radical Islam,” added Major General Paul Vallelly, military analyst for FOX News. “This needs to be seen by everybody in America and in Europe.”

Using actual footage from Arabic TV rarely seen in the West, and interviews with former terrorists, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” documents the call for world domination and global jihad that are made by Islamic leaders daily. The undercover footage shows suicide bomber initiations, the indoctrination of young children into hate and violence, secret jihad meetings and public celebrations of 9/11.

“Image after image, example after example... [“Obsession”] is shocking beyond belief...” stated Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Since the distribution of the pre-release edition, “Obsession” has generated intense public interest. Fox News ran a one-hour prime time special on the film nine times in two weeks due to the high ratings it received. It has been the talk of several radio shows, including CNN News, The Glenn Beck program, Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes, BBC/PBS, and many others.

The New York Times, NY Post and other newspapers also covered the recent controversy when administrators from Pace University attempted to prevent the screening of “Obsession,” fearing Muslim opposition.

“‘Obsession’ shows that what the West perceives as seemingly isolated acts of terrorism are actually viewed by radical Islamists as integral parts of the global war they are waging against us,” the documentary’s promoters explained.

“You do not have to read between the lines here – their message is loud and clear,” they added, referring to the calls made by Islamic leaders as featured in the documentary.

Produced around two years ago, “Obsession” traces similarities between the Nazi movement of World War II and the “Islamo-fascists” of today and features interviews with Sir Martin Gilbert, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes, Steve Emerson, a former Federal Prosecutor, a former Hitler Youth Commander, as well as anti-Islamist Muslims including the daughter of a terrorist, a former Palestinian terrorist, a Palestinian journalist, and the director of the Palestinian Media Watch.

To date, “Obsession” has been awarded Best Feature Film at the Liberty Film Festival and a Special Jury Award at the WorldFest Houston. It was also an Official Selection for the Newport Beach Film Festival, the Great Lakes Film Festival, the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival and the Beloit International Film Festival.

==============================

We Are Losing Europe to Islam (townhall.com, 080918)

by Diana West

With Wall Street convulsing, and the White House race intensifying, the question “Who lost Europe” is on no one’s lips, let alone minds. Indeed, the question begs another: “Is Europe lost?”

The answer to the second question is, “No, not yet.” And losing Europe, I would add, is by no means inevitable. But that doesn’t mean the continent isn’t currently hell-bent to accommodate the dictates of Islamic law, bit by increasingly larger bit. Such a course of accommodation, barring reversal, will only hasten Bernard Lewis’ famous prediction that Europe will be Islamic by century’s end.

And what do I mean by “accommodation”? Well, to take one tiny example, one snowflake in a blizzard of such examples, there are schools in Belgium that not only serve halal food to Muslim and non-Muslim alike (old news), but, according to a recent French magazine report, no longer teach authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. (Don’t even ask about the Holocaust.)

For a more substantial, indeed, keystone example of accommodation, we can look to England, where, it pains me to write, Sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. According to press reports this week, the British government has quietly, cravenly elevated five Sharia courts to the level of tribunal hearings, thus making their rulings legally binding.

It may be difficult to quantify the impact of a Voltaire vacuum on the continent, but we can instantly see the inequities of British Sharia (I can’t believe I’m writing that phrase). Among the first official verdicts were those upholding the Islamic belief in male supremacy. These included an inheritance decision in which male heirs received twice as much as female; and several cases of domestic violence in which husbands were acquitted and wives’ charges were dropped.

In a decidedly minuscule minority, I say we ignore the spread of Islamic law across Europe, from the schoolroom to the courtroom, at our peril, particularly given that in so doing, we also ignore the vital political parties that have arisen in reaction to this threat to Western civilization. Why at our peril? Because the same type of liberty-shrinking, Sharia-driven accommodation is happening here.

Of the parties dedicated to resisting Islamization that I examined in Europe last summer, the most promising range from the sizeable Vlaams Belang in Belgium to the tiny Sweden Democrats, and include the Lega Nord in Italy, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders in Holland, the Danish People’s Party, the Swiss People’s Party and the Austrian Freedom Party. Such parties are unknown here, or ignored. Worse, they are shunned. Why? I believe it’s because their respective political opponents — the leftist media and governing establishments that are increasingly dependent on Islamic support, by the way — have successfully slandered these parties as “extremists,” “racists,” “fascists” and “Nazis.”

Is advocating freedom of speech “extreme” or “fascist”? Is opposing Islam’s law, which knows no race, “racist”? Is supporting Israel (which these parties do far more than other European parties) “Nazi”? The outrageously empty epithets of the Islamo-socialist left seem calculated to stop thought cold and trigger a massive rejection reflex. In this way, resistance becomes anathema, and Islamic law, unchecked, spreads across Europe.

Does that sound “Islamophobic”? You bet. How can anyone who values freedom of conscience, equality before the law and other such Western jewels not have a healthy fear of Islamic law, which values none of these things? Incredibly, this is an emotion that is supposed to be suppressed — and, in Europe, on pain of prosecution. Indeed, because Filip Dewinter admitted to such “Islamophobia” in an interview, his party, the Vlaams Belang, has been taken to court in Belgium on charges of racism, and, if convicted, will be effectively shut down through defunding by the government.

That hasn’t stopped Dewinter, who, in accepting an award at a memorial event dedicated to Oriana Fallaci in Florence, last week, said: “Islamophobia is not merely a phenomenon of unparalleled fear, but it is the duty of every one who wants to safeguard Europe’s future. Europe means Rome, Greece, Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian roots. Europe is a continent of castles and cathedrals, not of mosques and minarets.”

Of course, even as Dewinter admits to fearing the Islamization of Europe, he and his colleagues act with exceptional political — and physical — bravery in rallying voters against it. This coming weekend, he joins several other politicians on the Sharia-fighting right in Europe — among them two other men I interviewed, Mario Borghezio of Lega Nord, which is part of Italy’s ruling coalition, and Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s Freedom Party, which is expected to become part of Austria’s ruling coalition after elections this month — in Cologne, Germany. In that ancient cathedral city, where the city council recently approved the construction of a long-controversial mega-mosque, these men will address a rally against European Islamization. (Contrary to initial reports, Jean-Marie Le Pen will not be at the demonstration.) The Sharia-fighters expect 1,500 demonstrators. Police expect 40,000 counter-demonstrators.

These are frightening odds — a metaphor, perhaps, for Europe’s chances of staving off Islamic law. Who lost Europe? If it does happen, we certainly won’t be able to say we weren’t warned.

==============================

Moderate Algeria, Jordan New Spots of Islamic Fundamentalism (Christian Post, 080922)

Two Muslim-majority countries that traditionally have been respectful of minority faiths were highlighted by the U.S. State Department for their growing religious intolerance.

Sunni-dominated Algeria in northern Africa and Jordan in the Middle East had several reported cases of government imposed restriction on religious freedom, said U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, John Hanford, last Friday at the release of the 10th Annual State Department Report on International Religious Freedom.

In Algeria, there were several arrests and sentences of converts to Christianity, according to Hanford. Also, the government began enforcing a 2006 law that required non-Muslim congregations to hold a permit in order to operate, resulting in a series of forced church closure.

Meanwhile in Jordan this past year, a Shari’a court found a convert to Christianity from Islam guilty of apostasy. The judge then annulled his marriage and declared him to have no religious identity.

The Jordanian government also was reported to harass individuals and organizations because of their religious affiliation.

Hanford, during the event, agreed with the suggestion that Islamic fundamentalists at the grassroots level are having an impact on the two countries.

“[I]n the case of Algeria, this ordinance was passed a couple of years ago but now is being implemented. And so, things are cracking down a little more,” Hanford noted.

“And we’re particularly surprised in Jordan, where there’s been historically so much tolerance that we’ve seen some people detained and a greater sense of aggressiveness toward minority faiths.”

Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Queen Rania have been highly-regarded in the global community for their advocacy work with interfaith dialogue.

The State Department highlighted North Korea and Eritrea as the worst violators of religious freedom. It also spotlighted India for its recent surge in Hindu militant attacks against Christians and China and Burma for the use of government forces to squash religious freedom.

The comprehensive 800-page annual report covers 198 countries and territories and focuses on government policies and actions regarding religious freedom. The report is from the period between July 2007 and July 2008.

==============================

Sharia courts operating in Britain (Daily Telegraph, 080915)

Sharia courts have been operating in Britain to rule on disputes between Muslims for more than a year, it has emerged.

Five sharia courts have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester and Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The government has quietly sanctioned that their rulings are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Previously, the rulings were not binding and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

Lawyers have issued grave warnings about the dangers of a dual legal system and the disclosure drew criticism from Opposition leaders.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: “If it is true that these tribunals are passing binding decisions in the areas of family and criminal law, I would like to know which courts are enforcing them because I would consider such action unlawful. British law is absolute and must remain so.”

Douglas Murray, the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, added: “I think it’s appalling. I don’t think arbitration that is done by sharia should ever be endorsed or enforced by the British state.”

Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours.

It has also emerged that tribunal courts have settled six cases of domestic violence between married couples, working in tandem with the police investigations.

Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, whose Muslim Arbitration Tribunal runs the courts, said that sharia courts are classified as arbitration tribunals under a clause in the Arbitration Act 1996.

The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.

The disclosures come after Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sparked a national debate and calls for his resignation for saying that the establishment of sharia in the future “seems unavoidable” in Britain.

In July, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the Lord Chief Justice agreed that Muslims in Britain should be able to live according to Islamic law to decide financial and marital disputes.

Mr Siddiqi said he expected the courts to handle a greater number of “smaller” criminal cases in coming years as more Muslim clients approach them. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

“All we are doing is regulating community affairs in these cases,” said Mr Siddiqi, chairman of the governing council of the tribunal.

There are concerns for women suffering under the Islamic laws, which favours men.

Mr Siddiqi said that in a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons.

The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.

In the six cases of domestic violence, Mr Siddiqi said the judges ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders. There was no further punishment.

In each case, the women subsequently withdrew the complaints they had lodged with the police and the police stopped their investigations.

Mr Siddiqi said that in the domestic violence cases, the advantage was that marriages were saved and couples given a second chance.

==============================

Who Speaks For Islam (townhall.com, 080915)

by Dinesh D’Souza

Who Speaks for Islam, written by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, is one of the most important books on the War on Terror. In the seven years since 9/11, we have been subjected to all kinds of ignorant pontification—much of it from the left, but some also from the right—on “why they hate us.” This book, written by a leading scholar of Islam and the head of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, brings a wealth of real data to bear on this important subject.

The book is full of fascinating data on Islamic radicalism, on Muslim support for democracy, on the role of women, and on the values of Western popular culture. At first glance the results seem confusing: An overwhelming majority of Muslims rejects 9/11 style terrorism but a significant number of Muslims support the Palestine suicide bombers. Huge majorities of Muslims support democracy but reject the Western understanding of rights and liberty. In fact, a substantial majority of Muslims—including Muslim women—support some form of sharia or Islamic holy law. Most Muslim women want equal rights but even champions of those rights emphatically reject Western-style feminism.

What’s going on here? Esposito and Mogahed argue that traditional Muslims, who make up the bulk of Muslims in every Muslim country, strongly identify with the Western principles of rule of law, self-government, and religious toleration. In fact, their main critique of America is that, as they see it, America backs secular dictators in the Muslim world who deny to Muslims the rights that are taken for granted by Americans. Many Muslims who back Hamas do so because they see the group as fighting for Muslim self-rule.

On the other hand, Muslims reject what may be termed 1960s liberalism. They reject the shamelessness and frequent depravity of American popular culture. They reject the type of feminism that relinquishes the home in favor of careers. They are resolutely anti-abortion. They consider homosexual marriage to be an abomination. Rather than import these “alternative lifestyles” into their society, Muslims want to live according to their own traditional values and elect their own governments that will defend Muslim interests.

Esposito and Mogahed shrewdly note that the values of traditional Muslims worldwide are very similar to the values of traditional Jews and Christians in the West. For instance, only around 15% of Muslims in Europe consider homosexuality “morally acceptable.” That’s way below the figures for the general public in Britain, France and Germany. But when conservative and religious Europeans and Americans are polled, it turns out that the percentage of people who are fine with homosexuality is about the same as that of the traditional Muslims.

Yes, I could say that I predicted all this in my book The Enemy at Home. But the great contribution of Esposito and Mogahed is to put a mountain of data behind these conclusions. Over six years their group has conducted tens of thousands of face-to-face surveys of Muslims in more than 35 countries making what they rightly call “the largest, most comprehensive study of contemporary Muslims ever done.”

This book is a huge embarrassment to some conservatives who, based on no data and very little familiarity with the Muslim world, have been portraying Muslims as violent theocrats who reject modern science, modern democracy and modern capitalism and spend most of their day performing honor killings and genital mutilations. This portrait of the Muslim world is about as accurate as that of a Muslim who believes that typical Americans live their daily lives according to the values of “Natural Born Killers” and “Brokeback Mountain.”

What can we conclude from this book? First, that the values of the cultural left are an important source in alienating Muslims worldwide. Second, that Muslims don’t reject modernity or the West: rather, they embrace what may be termed “1950s America” while rejecting the libertine values of the 1960s. Third, America can build alliances with traditional Muslims by showing them the face of traditional America, so that they see that Hollywood values aren’t necessarily American values. Finally, left-wing groups like International Planned Parenthood and Amnesty International should stop pushing feminism, gay marriage and libertine values in the Muslim world.

Pundits like Chalmers Johnson love to say that American intervention in Iraq and elsewhere has produced a “blowback” of terrorism from the House of Islam. Wrong! It is in Iraq that America is allowing an elected Muslim government to rule according to Muslim interests and Muslim values. Iraq is the only country in the Middle East where the Muslim population actually chose its own rulers. Iraq is not the problem. Rather, it is the values of the cultural left, and the cultural imperialism that seeks to impose those values on reluctant Muslims, that is the real source of Muslim rage, and the best recruiting tool of the radical Muslims.

==============================

Group of Muslim scholars gains political clout in Indonesia (Paris, International Herald, 081007)

JAKARTA: In a sign of its growing prominence, the Council of Ulemas in Indonesia has moved its headquarters from the basement of a major mosque here into an expensive new office tower in the heart of the capital.

The council was established in 1975 by Suharto, the country’s leader for three decades, as a quasi-governmental body of Muslim scholars, partly as a tool to keep politically minded Islamic organizations in check.

But in the decade since the dictator’s fall, the group - whose leaders have increasingly espoused a radical form of Islam - has worked to establish itself as an assertive political force.

The group, known as MUI, built an impressive network of offices throughout the country, staffed by people who promote the council’s view of Islam. It logged its first major political success this summer when the government agreed to severely restrict the activities of a Muslim sect that does not believe that Muhammad was the last prophet.

Advocates of religious tolerance worry that the council’s new clout could signal the start of a religious radicalization in a country known for its moderate brand of Islam.

“Islamists use the MUI as a major base of operations, coordinating support for the Islamist agenda,” said Holland Taylor, founder of LibForAll Foundation, an American and Indonesian nongovernmental group that promotes religious pluralism.

Among the goals of some prominent council members is the introduction of Shariah, or Islamic law, in traditionally secular Indonesia.

But other experts, even some concerned about the council’s conservative leanings and newfound influence, see the broader radicalization of Indonesian Islam as unlikely. They point out that Indonesia’s largest Islamic association, the Nahdlatul Ulama, promotes tolerance and religious pluralism, and that Islamic political parties have struggled to gain ground in recent years.

Beyond that, broad anti-pornography legislation that had been championed by the Council of Ulemas and its allies in Parliament has been scaled back after a public backlash that included large street protests.

“I don’t think the Council of Ulemas is going to turn Indonesia into the Sudan,” said Sidney Jones, director of the International Crisis Group in Jakarta, citing “many other balancing forces.”

The council is an umbrella group that represents established Muslim organizations. In addition to advising the government on religious issues, it distributes fatwas, or religious directives, advising Muslims on how to practice their faith. Its fatwas are nonbinding.

Maruf Amin, the deputy chairman of the council, describes it as a moderate organization that represents the views of more than 60 Islamic groups in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

“Our job is to communicate to the government the aspirations of Muslim people in Indonesia,” he said, “and to protect the Islamic population here from any bad influences that might lead them to deviate from their faith.”

But some analysts who have studied the group say Islamic conservatives have had an increasingly dominant role in the group over the last few years.

“The council has a long history of moderation, but lately it has been infiltrated by some hard-liners,” said Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta. “I have told its leaders that if they want to remain a representative organization, they need to be aware of this infiltration.”

The growing prominence of radical voices is partly a byproduct of the transition to democracy. Religious leaders who were often silenced during Suharto’s rule now have the freedom to propagate their extreme views and have often proved adept at using the democratic system.

The growing relevance of the Council of Ulemas is partly a result of its budget, which some analysts believe is growing. (Neither the council nor the government would provide numbers.) In addition to government financing, the council also makes money through its sole authority to license halal food and medicine. More recently, the council has tapped into Indonesia’s lucrative Islamic banking industry. It acts as one of several organizations overseeing banks that refuse loans to companies involved in businesses that are contrary to Islamic values, like those producing alcohol or selling pork.

These financing sources have allowed it to purchase its new office tower and to operate more than 150 satellite offices.

But analysts say the group has also benefited from its relationship with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Although the president is considered moderate, in a speech last year he said that after the council issues any fatwas, “the tools of the state can do their duty.”

“Hopefully our cooperation will deepen in the future,” he said during the speech, according to translations by the International Crisis Group.

Some experts said they suspected the president was supporting the Council of Ulemas to shore up Muslim backing in elections next year. A coalition of Islamic political parties backed him when he first ran for president in 2004.

The council’s biggest coup so far was Yudhoyono’s decision in June to restrict the practices of Ahmadiya, a minority Muslim sect.

The council had been calling for a ban on Ahmadiya since 2005 when it issued two fatwas - one against the sect for not believing Muhammad is the last prophet and another calling on Muslims to reject “pluralism, liberalism and secularism.”

On June 1 in Jakarta, opponents of Ahmadiya, some affiliated with Forum Umat Islam, an organization formed to promote the council’s fatwas, whose leaders include several prominent council members, clashed with demonstrators supporting the sect. Dozens were injured.

Despite an outcry over the incident, the government ordered Ahmadiya members to “stop disseminating interpretations that deviate from the main tenets of Islam.” If they did not, they would face legal action. The government then asked the Council of Ulemas, with its network of chapters, to monitor Ahmadiya’s compliance.

A report in July by the International Crisis Group, which analyzed the conditions leading to the decree, laid significant blame on the dominance of radicals within the council and the council’s growing influence.

Several of those members are leaders of groups blamed for burning mosques and houses belonging to Ahmadiya adherents.

In its annual report on religious freedom in September, the U.S. State Department singled out the Council of Ulemas as “influential in enabling official and social discrimination” against minority religious groups in the last year in Indonesia.

Still, most of Indonesia’s Muslims remain moderate, and some have begun to fight back.

Taylor, whose group promotes religious tolerance, said moderate groups would need to try to take control of the council or press the government to privatize or dissolve it.

==============================

Britain grapples with role for Islamic justice (Paris, International Herald, 081119)

LONDON: The woman in black wanted an Islamic divorce. She told the religious judge that her husband hit her, cursed her and wanted her dead.

But her husband was opposed, and the Islamic scholar adjudicating the case seemed determined to keep the couple together. So, sensing defeat, she brought our her secret weapon: her father.

In walked a bearded man in long robes who described his son-in-law as a hot-tempered man who had duped his daughter, evaded the police and humiliated his family.

The judge promptly reversed himself and recommended divorce.

This is Islamic justice, British style. Despite a raucous national debate over the limits of religious tolerance and the pre-eminence of British law, the tenets of Shariah, or Islamic law, are increasingly being applied to everyday life in cities across the country.

The Church of England has its own ecclesiastical courts. British Jews have had their own “beth din” courts for more than a century.

But ever since the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, called in February for aspects of Islamic Shariah to be embraced alongside the traditional legal system, the government has been grappling with a public furor over the issue, assuaging critics while trying to reassure a wary and at times disaffected Muslim population that its traditions have a place in British society.

Boxed between the two, the government has taken a stance both cautious and confusing, a sign of how volatile almost any discussion of the role of Britain’s nearly two million Muslims can become.

“There is nothing whatever in English law that prevents people abiding by Shariah principles if they wish to, provided they do not come into conflict with English law,” the justice minister, Jack Straw, said last month. But he added that British law would “always remain supreme,” and that “regardless of religious belief, we are all equal before the law.”

Conservatives and liberals alike — many of them unaware that the Islamic courts had been functioning at all, much less for years — have repeatedly denounced the courts as poor substitutes for British jurisprudence.

They argue that the Islamic tribunals’ proceedings are secretive, with no accountability and no standards for judges’ training or decisions.

Critics also point to cases of domestic violence in which Islamic scholars have tried to keep marriages together by ordering husbands to take classes in anger management, leaving the wives so intimidated that they have withdrawn their complaints from the police.

“They’re hostages to fortune,” said Parvin Ali, founding director of the Fatima Women’s Network, a women’s help group based in Leicester. Speaking of the courts, she said, “There is no outside monitoring, no protection, no records kept, no guarantee that justice will prevail.”

But as the uproar continues, the popularity of the courts among Muslims has blossomed.

Some of the informal councils, as the courts are known, have been giving advice and handing down judgments to Muslims for more than two decades.

Yet the councils have expanded significantly in number and prominence in recent years, with some Islamic scholars reporting a 50% increase in cases since 2005.

Almost all of the cases involve women asking for divorce, and through word of mouth and an ambitious use of the Internet, courts like the small, unadorned building in London where the father stepped in to plead his daughter’s case have become magnets for Muslim women seeking to escape loveless marriages — not only from Britain but sometimes also from Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany.

Other cases involve disputes over property, labor, inheritances and physical injury. The tribunals stay away from criminal cases that might call for the imposition of punishments like lashing or stoning.

Indeed, most of the courts’ judgments have no standing under British civil law. But for the parties who come before them, the courts offer something more important: the imprimatur of God.

“We do not want to give the impression that Muslims are an isolated community seeking a separate legal system in this country,” said Shahid Raza, who adjudicates disputes from an Islamic center in the West London suburb of Ealing.

“We are not asking for criminal Shariah law — chopping of hands or stoning to death,” he continued. “Ninety-nine percent of our cases are divorce cases in which women are seeking relief. We are helping women. We are doing a service.”

Still, there is ample room for clashes with British custom. Three months ago, for example, a wealthy Bangladeshi family asked Dr. Raza’s council to resolve an inheritance dispute. It was resolved according to Shariah, he said. That meant the male heirs received twice as much as the female heirs.

Courts in the United States have endorsed Islamic and other religious tribunals, as in 2003, when a Texas appeals court referred a divorce case to a local council called the Texas Islamic Court.

But Shariah has been rejected in the West as well.

The Canadian province of Ontario had allowed rabbinical courts and Christian courts to resolve some civil and family disputes with binding rulings under a 1991 law. But when the Islamic Institute on Civil Justice there tried to create a Shariah court, it was attacked as a violation of the rights of Muslim women.

As a result, Ontario changed the entire system in 2006 to strip the rulings of any religious arbitration of legal validity or enforceability.

In Britain, beth din courts do not decide whether a Jewish couple’s marriage should end. They simply put their stamp of approval on the dissolution of the marriage when both parties agree to it. The beth din also adheres to the rules of Britain’s 1996 Arbitration Act and can function as an official court of arbitration in the consensual resolution of other civil disputes, like inheritance or business conflicts.

“People often come to us for reasons of speed, cost and secrecy,” said David Frei, registrar of the London Beth Din. “There’s nothing to prevent Muslims from doing the same thing.”

In Britain’s Islamic councils, however, if a wife wants a divorce and the husband does not, the Shariah court can grant her unilateral request to dissolve the marriage.

Most Shariah councils do not recognize the Arbitration Act, although Straw has been pushing them in recent months to do so. The main reason for their opposition is that they do not want the state involved in what they consider to be matters of religion.

The conflict over British Shariah courts comes at a time when Islamic principles are being extended to other areas of daily life in Britain.

There are now five wholly Islamic banks in the country and a score more that comply with Shariah.

An insurance company last summer began British advertising for “car insurance that’s right for your faith” because it does not violate certain Islamic prohibitions, like the one against gambling.

Britain’s first Shariah-compliant prepaid MasterCard was begun in August.

Here in London, Suhaib Hasan’s “courtroom” is a sparsely furnished office of the Islamic Shariah Council in Leyton, a working-class neighborhood in the eastern corner of the city. It has no lawyers or court stenographer, no recording device or computer, so Hasan takes partial notes in longhand.

“Please, will you give him another chance?” he asked the woman in black who was seeking divorce — that is, before she brought in the weighty voice of her father.

“No, no!” the woman, a 24-year-old employment consultant who had come seeking justice from 200 miles away, replied. “I gave him too many chances. He is an evil, evil man.”

“I’ll give you one month’s time to try to reconcile,” Hasan ruled.

Then her father tipped the scales.

“He was not a cucumber that we could cut open to know that he was rotten inside,” the father testified. “The only solution is divorce.”

Apparently convinced, Hasan said he would recommend divorce at the London Central Mosque, where he and several other religious scholars meet once a month to give final approval to cases like this.

Hasan, a silver-bearded, Saudi-educated scholar of Pakistani origin, handles the Pakistani community; an Egyptian ministers to the ethnic Arab community, while a Bangladeshi and a Somali work with their own communities.

The council in Leyton is one of the oldest and largest courts in the country. It has been quietly resolving disputes since 1982 and has dealt with more than 7,000 divorce cases.

Under some interpretations of Islamic law, a woman needs the blessing of a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence to be divorced, while a man can simply say three times that he is divorcing his wife.

Hasan counsels women that they must have their civil marriages dissolved in the British civil system.

“We always try to keep the marriages together, especially when there are children,” said Hasan’s wife, Shakila Qurashi, who works as an unofficial counselor for women.

If the husband beats her, she should go to the police and have a divorce, Qurashi said. “But if he’s slapped her only once or something like that,” she said, “and he admits he has made a mistake and promised not to do it again, then we say, ‘You have to forgive.’ “

One recent afternoon, the waiting room was full of women and their family members.

A Pakistan-born 33-year-old mother of five explained that her husband would beat her and her children. “He threatens to kill us,” she said, as her daughter translated from Urdu. “He calls me a Jew and an infidel.” Hasan told her to immediately get police protection and request an Islamic divorce.

Another woman, 25, wanted out of a two-year-old arranged marriage with a man who refused to consummate the relationship. Hasan counseled dialogue.

“Until we see the husband,” he said, “we can’t be sure that what you’re saying is true.”

==============================

Talk is cheap (World, 081129)

Religion: The kings of religious intolerance take the lead in interfaith dialogue | Alisa Harris

When King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia hosted a United Nations interfaith dialogue in New York on Nov. 12-13, it was only the latest in a series. Abdullah in July hosted one in Madrid. Yale that month hosted another. The Vatican hosted one in October. Plans are underway for declaration of a United Nations Decade on Interfaith Dialogue and Cooperation for Peace that will last from 2011 to 2020.

This month’s dialogue was filled as usual with highblown rhetoric—but Marshall Sana of the Barnabas Fund notes that the Saudis, while leading a dialogue calling for religious tolerance, are “the most religiously intolerant regime on the planet.” Last November the Saudi government executed an Egyptian pharmacist for sorcery, adultery, and desecration of the Quran on the evidence of a book, a candle, and “foul-smelling herbs.” In February 2008, the government sentenced a woman to death for witchcraft, and in April arrested and imprisoned 16 Asian Christians, including women and children. In May Saudi officials arrested 15 Indian Christians for having a church service.

President George W. Bush at the interfaith dialogue urged all UN members to ensure freedom of worship and the right of individuals to change their religious allegiances, but in Saudi Arabia many groups—including Shia Muslims, Jews, and Christians—suffer routine persecution.

In What the World Needs to Know About Interfaith Dialogue, Richard M. Landau advises participants to put aside “hot button issues” and instead identify “possible areas of common ground.” But here are three more guidelines for those seeking success in Saudi-sponsored interfaith dialogue.

• Ignore theological differences. Assume that any fundamental differences on human dignity, freedom, or religious choice will dissipate if you just focus on everything you have in common: a belief in God (whoever he is) and a love of neighbor (whatever that means).

• Remembering that words are more important than deeds, talk around the realities of persecution. When asked whether his country would tolerate religions other than Islam, Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, replied, “To say from the beginning you have to transform yourself into something which you are not now or nothing else can be achieved, is, I think carrying the argument too far.”

• Work to forbid the utterance of hard truths about Islam. Leonard Leo of the International Commission on Religious Freedom notes that the Saudis and the Organization of the Islamic Conference are pushing an international law outlawing the defamation of religion: “Historically, freedom of religion meant an individual’s right to practice his religion, his right to believe as he wishes to believe, or his right to not believe”—but this law would protect religion’s sanctity instead of protecting individual rights.

Not all interfaith dialogues gloss over differences: Last month’s Vatican discussions, the Barnabas Fund’s Sana says, included talk of theological distinctives, but this month’s UN dialogue was political and focused on a “theological conformity and unity.”

David Forte, professor of law at Cleveland State University, says that King Abdullah may be “trying to expand religious intolerance by making religious intolerance universal—a universal good.” Forte suspects that Abdullah is securing his international position by mouthing platitudes, but that gives an opportunity for Western countries to “take his platitudes seriously and give them back to him,” holding him accountable to practice what he preaches.

Forte concludes, “Just sitting down for dialogue, and everyone . . . nodding and saying, ‘Oh, we all love God, we all love peace,’ is not enough.” He’s right: Tough-minded discussion can be useful, but if the typical interfaith dialogue were an actual sign of interfaith peace, the lion by now would be having slumber parties with the lamb.

==============================

Model’s Death Exposes Murky World of Polygamy in U.K. (Foxnews, 081227)

The death of a model who learned that her husband was already married has shone a light into the world of Muslim polygamy in Britain.

Sahar Daftary, 23, fell 150 feet from the twelfth story of a block of apartments where she had gone to collect her belongings at the home of a businessman whom she had married in a religious ceremony last year.

Her husband, Rashid Jamil, 33, was arrested on suspicion of murder but bailed by police after they found no evidence that the death was anything other than an accident or suicide.

Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, the head of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, told The Times: “This story is very common, unfortunately. We have tried to plug some of the holes in the whole system, but unfortunately our clerics do not live on this planet.

“They don’t understand. For them, controlling the sexuality of the woman is far more important than justice, so we have this problem.”

Daftary, a Sunni Muslim from London whose family comes from Afghanistan, was crowned Miss Face of Asia in a beauty contest last year. She was found critically injured by the apartment block in Salford Quays near the Manchester United football ground on Saturday. She had been helping with makeup at a fashion show in the city but left early to collect clothes from Jamil’s home.

Daftary also wanted to arrange an Islamic divorce from him. She had undergone a Muslim wedding ceremony in Brentford, West London, only to learn later that her husband already had a wife.

Islam traditionally allows husbands to take up to four wives at a time

==============================

Christian Minister Beaten After Clashing With Muslims on TV (Foxnews, 090316)

A Christian minister in London who has clashed with Muslims on his television show says he was brutally attacked by three men who warned him, “if you go back to the studio, we’ll break your legs,” the Daily Mail reported on Sunday.

The newspaper said Reverend Noble Samuel was driving to his studio when a car pulled over in front of him. A man got out and came over to ask him directions.

“He put his hand into my window, which was half open, and grabbed my hair and opened the door,” Samuel said. “He grabbed my cross and pulled it off and it fell on the floor. He was swearing. The other two men came from the car and took my laptop and Bible.”

Police were treating the incident as a “faith hate” assault and were looking for three Asian men.

Pakistani-born Samuel, 48, hosts the hour-long Asian Gospel Show on the Venus satellite channel from studios in Wembley, England.

During the live broadcast, station owner Tahir Al, a Muslim, appeared on-air to condemn the attack.

==============================

Police Fire Tear Gas as Hundreds of Muslims Protest in Athens (Foxnews, 090522)

ATHENS, Greece - Authorities fired tear gas and stun grenades at hundreds of Muslims in central Athens on Friday as they protested a Greek policeman’s alleged defacement of a Koran owned by an Iraqi immigrant.

The clashes occurred outside Parliament as the demonstrators threw rocks and plastic bottles at police, and smashed windows of a luxury hotel in central Syntagma Square. A police helicopter hovered overhead.

Chanting “God is great!” and waving leather-bound copies of Islam’s holy book, about 1,000 Muslim immigrants had begun the demonstration with a march to Parliament to express their outrage. The clashes occurred after the protest had dwindled to about 300.

“We want the officer or officers involved to be prosecuted, and the government to issue an apology,” protester Manala Mohammed, a Syrian national, told The Associated Press. “We want people to show us respect.”

In a less violent demonstration on Thursday, police fired tear gas to dispel a few stone-throwing protesters. Later Thursday, police arrested an Afghan man on suspicion of trying to firebomb an Athens police station in an attack that left him severely burned.

Police said they will investigate the allegation that a police officer tore up the immigrant’s copy of the Koran while checking his identity papers in Athens on Wednesday.

Most native-born Greeks are baptized into the Christian Orthodox Church.

Waves of illegal immigration over the past few years have led to an influx of Muslims, mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The majority live in squalid, overcrowded apartments in poor areas.

Greek rights activist Thanassis Kourkoulas, one of the protest organizers, said the marches were intended to show immigrants “have a voice.” He said, “What happened is a great insult to every Muslim, every immigrant and every Greek who respects democracy.”

==============================

Hamas Tries to Detain Woman Walking With Man on Gaza Beach (Foxnews, 090708)

JERUSALEM — An attempt by Hamas police to detain a young woman walking with a man along the Gaza beach has raised alarms that the Islamic militant group is seeking to match its political control of the coastal territory with a strict enforcement of Islamic law.

The man she walked with and two of his peers were detained, beaten and ordered to sign statements promising not to engage in immoral activities, said the woman and one of the men.

The incident was the first known case of Hamas openly trying to punish a woman for behaving in a way it views as un-Islamic since seizing power two years ago. But it follows months of quiet pressure on Gaza’s overwhelmingly conservative 1.4 million residents to abide by its strict religious mores.

Hamas officials in Gaza have publicly urged shopkeepers to take down foreign advertisements showing the shape of women’s bodies and to stash away lingerie often displayed in windows. Officials search electronic shops to check if they are selling pornography on tiny flash drives.

“There’s an open, public program to preserve public morals in Gaza,” said local rights activist Isam Younis. “In reality that means trying to restrict freedoms.”

Hamas denies any crackdown is under way. Since taking power, it has said it would only try to lead by example and not impose its views on anyone.

However, the group has taken no public action against small, shadowy groups that have attacked perceived hotbeds of Western immorality, such as hairdressers and Internet cafes, fueling criticism that it has not been tough enough on hard-line Muslim groups.

Freelance journalist Asma al-Ghoul says a group of Hamas police sent a clear message that certain behavior would not be tolerated when she went to the beach one evening in late June.

Al-Ghoul, 26, said she was spending time with a group of friends — two women and three men — on the northern Gaza shore.

Al-Ghoul is fairly exceptional in Gaza because she does not wear a Muslim headscarf. On that evening she wore jeans and a T-shirt — dress that is considered fairly provocative in Gaza’s conservative society and which could have easily attracted the attention of the plain-clothed Hamas vice police who patrol the beaches.

Al-Ghoul swam, fully dressed, with a girlfriend, and then asked a male friend to walk her over to a nearby beach house rented by another couple she knew to shower and change.

Three policemen showed up and waited for al-Ghoul in the beach house garden, said an eyewitness who asked to remain anonymous because of security concerns. They took her identity card and demanded she accompany them to a nearby station — an order she refused.

An argument ensued and she was able to avoid detention and get her identity card back only after the homeowner contacted a senior Hamas official who intervened and spoke to the officers by telephone. The official, Taher Nunu, was not immediately available for comment.

The eyewitness said the police did not say why they wanted to detain al-Ghoul, but were insinuating that her behavior was unbecoming. Under Hamas’ strict interpretation of Islamic law, a woman should not go out in public with men who are not related to her.

However, al-Ghoul said her male friends were subsequently beaten by Hamas police, detained for several hours and asked to sign statements saying they would not “violate public moral standards again,” she said.

Al-Ghoul said she mostly felt angry that the police made her feel like she had done something wrong.

“I’m not provocative and my dress isn’t provocative, and I’m not scandalous either,” she said.

Her story only became public after rights groups published excerpts on their Web sites. Her version of events was confirmed by two other witnesses, including Adham Khalil, one of the men who was detained. Khalil said he was beaten.

Hamas police spokesman Islam Shahwan denied the incident took place but said Gaza residents “must preserve our customs and Islamic traditions.”

==============================

Ex-Muslim Teen Fears Family Honor Killing in U.S. (Christian Post, 090812)

Four years ago, Fathima Rifqa Bary snuck into a local church and had an “incredible encounter with Jesus” that led the formerly Muslim teen to convert to Christianity.

Now, the 17-year-old is involved in a legal battle with her parents, who are trying to regain custody of her after she ran away fearing that her family would kill her for leaving Islam.

“They have to kill me because I’m a Christian,” she told Orlando, Fla.-based WFTV, referring to the practice of killing a family member who fellow members believe has brought dishonor upon the family, clan, or community.

“It’s an honor [issue],” she added.

Though Fathima had tried to keep her faith hidden from her parents, her conversion was recently made known when friends from her family’s mosque alerted her parents about her Christian postings on Facebook.

The situation worsened last month when Fathima’s mother found a Christian book in her room. Fathima’s mother reportedly said she is dead to her unless she renounces her Christian faith.

The Christian teen also said her father had threatened to kill her after he heard that she had been baptized.

Fearful for her life, Fathima boarded a bus last month that took her from her home near Columbus, Ohio, to Orlando, nearly 1,000 miles away.

There, Fathima initially stayed with a Christian couple that she had befriended in a prayer group on Facebook.

“When she came to our house, she told us her parents would not report her missing,” said Pastor Blake Lorenz of Global Revolution Church, according to ABCNews.com.

But to Fathima’s surprise, her parents did report her missing.

And on Monday, Fathima found herself having to testify in a local Florida court about her fear of returning to her family in Ohio.

Throughout this time, her father has claimed that he has not threatened her.

On Monday, the judge decided that Fathima should move into a group home with the Florida Department of Children and Families until her next court hearing on Aug. 21.

The 17-year-old convert is being represented by a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group that frequently takes on religious freedom cases. Her parents, meanwhile, are still searching for attorneys to represent them with the help of the Muslim community.

In addition to being a minor, Fathima is not a U.S. citizen – details that complicate the case.

Her family emigrated from Sri Lanka.

==============================

Central Asia Sounds Alarm on Islamic Radicalism (Paris, International Herald, 090817)

KOSH-KORGON, Kyrgyzstan — The three men were locals who were said to have once crossed into nearby Afghanistan to wage war alongside the Taliban. They then returned, militant wayfarers apparently bent on inciting an Afghan-style insurgency in this tinderbox of a valley in Central Asia. By late June, they were holed up in a house here, stockpiling Kalashnikov rifles and watching pirated DVDs of martial arts movies.

Outside a mosque near the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan border.

Their exact plans will most likely never be known. The Kyrgyz security services tracked them down a week after their arrival and stormed the building, according to officials and village residents. All three men were killed, including one who blew himself up with a grenade after being wounded.

The security operation was one in a recent spate of firefights and attacks in Central Asia that have raised concerns that homegrown militants with experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan may be trying to move north to take on the region’s brittle governments.

Senior officials and analysts across Central Asia have said in recent weeks that there is evidence that some Central Asians who were allied with the Taliban are retreating from Afghanistan because of pressure from the NATO mission there.

“Our belief is that because of the blow they suffered in Afghanistan, they left for a calmer place in Central Asia where they could resume operations — either to regroup or to even open up a new front,” said Kadyr K. Malikov, director of the Independent Analytical Research Center for Religion, Law and Politics in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital.

The officials and analysts said one result could be a strengthening of Islamic movements in Central Asia, especially here in the Fergana Valley, which includes parts of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. All three countries are former Soviet republics with secular leaders and Muslim populations.

The valley has long been considered one of the region’s most unstable areas because of poverty, militancy and loose borders. In 2005, in the Uzbek section of the valley, soldiers killed hundreds of people massing in an antigovernment protest.

Warnings about the spread of Islamic radicalism to Central Asia are not new, and the region’s governments have long used this supposed threat to justify severe restrictions on political freedom. But if these recent signs point to a revival, it could pose difficulties for the United States and other NATO members, which have military bases throughout Central Asia that support operations in Afghanistan.

The Obama administration only recently persuaded the Kyrgyz president to allow the United States to remain at a major air base on the outskirts of Bishkek.

The fervency of some in the Fergana Valley was evident in Friday Prayer in a recent visit to a nearby mosque, whose imam was killed in 2006 by security forces after being accused of extremism. The mosque is a meeting place for followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a worldwide Islamist group that wants to establish a pan-national Muslim state, called a caliphate, albeit nonviolently.

“The people in Afghanistan who are helping the Americans have sold out their faith, sold out their consciences,” said Noomanjan Turgunov, 60, one of the worshipers.

“We support the Taliban because they are upholding and fighting for our faith — it is for Islam,” he said. “Only God knows for sure whether the Taliban will come here or not. But if you ask me, I think that they will come. Our president has sold out our faith for a little money from the Americans.”

The interview was interrupted by an undercover Kyrgyz security agent, who was apparently monitoring the mosque, in part because Hizb ut-Tahrir is outlawed in Kyrgyzstan. This month, several of its members were arrested in Osh, the largest Kyrgyz city in the Fergana Valley, and charged with promoting extremism.

Whatever the deeply held views of people here, some experts and opposition politicians in Central Asia said the danger of a renewed Islamic insurgency was being overstated. They pointed out that these countries are secular in character because of their decades in the Soviet Union.

They said that it would be all but impossible for the Taliban to gain a foothold here because they are rooted in an ethnic group, the Pashtuns, that differs from those in Central Asia. And they maintained that rampant corruption and drug trafficking (connected to Afghan opium) were far more grievous issues, saying that the authorities described bandits as terrorists in order to cover up the problem.

“In the valley, I would say that practically all the officers in the security services are involved in drug trafficking,” said Isa Omurkulov, a Kyrgyz opposition leader.

The most well-known radical group in the region is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which fought along with the Taliban in the 1990s but is believed to have been severely weakened by the NATO operation in Afghanistan.

Governments in Central Asia have linked some recent attacks to a revitalized Uzbek movement, but that is difficult to prove. Kyrgyz officials identified the leader of the group killed in Kosh-Korgon as Hasan Suleimanov, 32, who had been trained in Pakistan and was accused of having links to the Uzbek movement.

Russia also has military bases in Central Asia and is on the alert for any signs that Islamic extremism could spread into Muslim parts of Russia. In recent weeks, it reached a tentative agreement with the Kyrgyz government to establish a military base in the Fergana Valley, in part to help ensure stability here. The base would be Russia’s second major one in Kyrgyzstan.

The Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, began issuing louder alarms about radicalism just as he was seeking to rally the public around his re-election, which he won easily on July 23 in a campaign that was marred by widespread reports of electoral fraud and violence against the opposition.

Mr. Bakiyev said in an interview that he viewed requests for bases from the Americans and Russians more favorably recently because he was worried about the conflict in Afghanistan. He said the danger was not urgent but was growing.

He noted that eight extremists had been killed recently in the Kyrgyz part of the Fergana Valley, and many others were arrested.

“These are all people who received special training in Pakistan for terrorist activity,” Mr. Bakiyev said. “All their weapons and ammunition and documents demonstrate this.”

His claims could not be independently confirmed. And some people attending Friday Prayer at the mosque in the Fergana Valley expressed deep suspicions about recent security operations, suggesting that they were contrived to drum up backing for the government.

“It is all a show, and that is very clear,” said Dilshat Rumbaev, 33, a merchant. “We have no militants here, and we are not a threat.”

==============================

Islamic Radicalism Slows Moroccan Reforms (Paris, International Herald, 090826)

CASABLANCA, Morocco — Morocco has long been viewed as a rare liberalizing, modernizing Islamic state, open to the West and a potential bridge to a calmer Middle East that can live in peace with Israel.

But under pressure from Islamic radicalism, King Mohammed VI has slowed the pace of change. Power remains concentrated in the monarchy; democracy seems more demonstrative than real. While insisting that the king is committed to deeper reforms, senior officials speak instead of keeping a proper balance between freedom and social cohesion. Many discuss the threat of extremism in neighboring Algeria.

Since a major bombing of downtown hotels and shopping areas by Islamic radicals in 2003, and a thwarted attempt at another bombing campaign in 2007, there has been a major and continuing crackdown on those suspected of being extremists here.

In 2003, anyone with a long beard was likely to be arrested. Even now, nearly 1,000 prisoners considered to be Islamic radicals remain in Moroccan jails. Six Islamist politicians (and a reporter from the Hezbollah television station, Al Manar) were jailed recently, accused of complicity in a major terrorist plot. The case was full of irregularities and based mainly on circumstantial evidence, according to a defense lawyer, Abelaziz Nouaydi, and Human Rights Watch.

In a rare interview, Yassine Mansouri, Morocco’s chief of intelligence, said that the arrested politicians “used their political activities as a cover for terrorist activities.”

“It was not our aim to stop a political party,” he said. “There is a law to be followed.”

Morocco is threatened, Mr. Mansouri said, by two extremes — the conservative Wahhabism spread by Saudi Arabia and the Shiism spread by Iran. “We consider them both aggressive,” Mr. Mansouri said. “Radical Islam has the wind in its sail, and it remains a threat.”

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, especially active in Algeria, remains a major problem for Morocco, Mr. Mansouri said. Officials say it is appealing to the young and has recreated a training route to Afghanistan through Pakistan, and it just sponsored a suicide bombing in Mauritania.

Foreign Minister Taïeb Fassi Fihri said: “We know where the risks to our stability are. We know kids are listening to this Islamic song, so we have to act quickly.”

King Mohammed, who celebrated his 10th year on the throne this year, has vowed to help the poor and wipe out the slums, called “bidonvilles,” where radicalism is bred. One such slum, Sidi Moumen, where the bombers lived, is being redeveloped. Half of it has already been ripped down, and some 700 families shipped to the outskirts of the city, where they are provided a small plot of land at a cheap price to build new housing.

Hamid al-Gout, 34, was born in Sidi Moumen and built his own hovel here. Nearly everyone has been to prison, he said, and Islamist political groups quietly hold meetings. “Sometimes we talk, 12 or 14 people, about our lives,” he said, then added carefully, “But there is no radical thinking here now.”

Abdelkhabir Hamma, 36, said that he had been told that if he and his family did not leave by the end of the year, they would be thrown out. He said that while many respect the king, few trust other authorities.

The king sees himself as a modernizer and reformer, having invested heavily in economic development, loosened restraints on the news media, given more rights to women and shed light on some of the worst human-rights abuses of the past. These are remarkable steps in a region dominated by uncompromising examples of state control, like Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

Because the king, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, is also revered as the “Commander of the Faithful,” challenges to Moroccan Islam are taken very seriously.

In March, the king cut diplomatic ties to Iran, accusing Tehran of “intolerable interference in internal affairs” by trying to spread Shiism in Morocco and recruiting Moroccans in Europe, especially in Belgium, to participate in acts of terrorism, Mr. Mansouri said.

The king has tried to be more inclusive, traveling for instance to the north of Morocco, where his father had refused to go. The north is also a hotbed of extremism and home for many of the Qaeda bombers of Madrid. The king held a traditional ceremony of mutual allegiance, or baiaa, this year in Tetouan and highlighted significant development funds there.

But Morocco’s response has also been to slam the brakes on reform, even of the corrupt judiciary and of laws governing women’s rights, in order not to inflame conservative and traditional views of Islam, especially in the countryside and among the poor, where extremists fish. For that reason, too, the king has not put Morocco forward as an interlocutor between Israel and the Palestinians, as his father did. The view here is simply that Israel — and other, harder-line Arab states — must move first, before Morocco exposes itself.

The crackdown has also damaged Morocco’s human rights record. Muslim prisoners are treated roughly in jail, sometimes sodomized with bottles, said Abdel-Rahim Moutard, a former prisoner himself, his hands broken during interrogations. He runs Ennasir, a rights organization for prisoners. But when they emerge from prison, they get little help, even from the mosques or Ennasir.

“A lot of them are shocked that their country would treat them this way,” Mr. Moutard said. “After the bottle treatment, every time he goes to the toilet he’ll remember, and he will think of vengeance.”

The main Islamist party, the Party for Justice and Development, is effectively neutered, but officials want to ensure that it does not combine with the Socialists. So for recent elections for local authorities, the palace created the Authenticity and Modernity Party, run by Fouad Ali El Himma, 46, who as a youth had been chosen, like Mr. Mansouri and other boys from varied backgrounds, to study with the young king. Mr. Himma is also a former deputy interior minister.

The effort is to provide an alternative — sanctioned informally by the palace — but also to try to mobilize Moroccans, who do not see their participation as having much effect on weak governments, to vote. The new party won, with 22 percent of the vote on a turnout of 52 percent; Mr. Himma is seen as a future prime minister.

In an interview, Mr. Himma spoke passionately about the commitment of the king to aid the poor and reform the country. Morocco “has always been a country of transit, and we have found the cement for all this — our multifaceted monarchy,” he said.

Critics, however, see the king and his friends as a closed, anti-democratic “monarchy of pals.” The king has concentrated much economic power in the palace, argues Aboubakr Jamai, former editor of Le Journal Hebdomadaire — becoming Morocco’s chief banker, insurer and industrialist. Moves toward a more democratic system, with more power to the Parliament, or even a constitutional monarchy, are off the table, certainly for now.

The officials readily concede that poverty, illiteracy and corruption remain serious challenges. The king, they say, has made judicial reform a key goal.

Yet in a nationally televised address on his 10th anniversary as king, Mohammed VI spoke of poverty and development. But he did not use the word “corruption,” and he spoke only once of “social justice,” making no mention of judicial reform.

==============================

Puppets preach hate on Hamas TV (National Post, 091001)

A Palestinian children’s program is using a bear puppet that talks about “slaughtering” Jews, according to the Israeli watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch.

The character on Hamas TV is the latest in a series of puppets and cartoons used by the weekly show Tomorrow’s Pioneers to promote anti-Semitism and incite violence, said media watch director Itamar Marcus.

The show, which started in 2007, became popular in the Arab world when it began to feature a Mickey Mouse-type character, he said.

“This Mickey Mouse character was teaching killing and murder and slaughter and destruction of Jews. In fact, he was also teaching conquest of the West as well,” Mr. Marcus said.

When media watch, a pro-Israeli organization that monitors Palestinian media, highlighted the story the subsequent international attention led to the character being killed off.

“They had the Mickey Mouse character killed on TV. They had an Israeli kill him and he became a Shahid [martyr],” Mr. Marcus said.

He said since then there have been three more characters, Nahul the Bee (who also became a martyr) and a bunny character called Assud, who in the show was killed during the Gaza war.

“Every time Israel was responsible,” he said.

The latest character is a giant bear, Nassur.

Mr. Marcus said during the show, which also features a real presenter called Saraa, the bear uses two different words for “slaughter” to describe how to rid Israel of Jews.

During the show a child also phones in and talks about wanting to kill Jews for the death of his father.

The program was shown on Al-Aqsa TV, more commonly called Hamas TV, last week.

“All the adult messages of ‘It’s good to die for Allah; it’s good to fight the West; we are going to conquer the West; it’s important to kill the Jews,’ all these adult messages that often come through religious leaders and political leaders, the kids are getting through these cartoon and gigantic puppet characters,” Mr. Marcus said.

In recent years, Hamas has been using mass media to spread its message. In addition to a satellite TV channel, it owns a radio station and newspapers. A German-trained director also released a feature film produced by Hamas earlier this year; reports said he hoped to enter it in the Cannes Film Festival.

Tomorrow’s Pioneers has been widely criticized by media watchdog groups.

The TV station did not return calls for comment.

When the show launched, the station’s deputy manager told CNN that it was about Palestinian children.”They express their feeling regarding what they witness - if it’s occupation it’s about that, and about the prisoners and how to lead the world,” the deputy manager was quoted as saying.

Media watch was set up in 1996 to “gain an understanding of Palestinian society through the monitoring of the Palestinian Arabic language media and schoolbooks,” its website says.

==============================

Report: Nearly 1 in 4 People Worldwide Is Muslim (Foxnews, 091008)

The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practice Islam, according to a report Wednesday billed as the most comprehensive of its kind.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report provides a precise number for a population whose size has long has been subject to guesswork, with estimates ranging anywhere from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.

The project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For instance, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as Afghanistan.

“This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report,” said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University who reviewed an advance copy.

Pew officials call the report the most thorough on the size and distribution of adherents of the world’s second largest religion behind Christianity, which has an estimated 2.1 billion to 2.2 billion followers.

The arduous task of determining the Muslim populations in 232 countries and territories involved analyzing census reports, demographic studies and general population surveys, the report says. In cases where the data was a few years old, researchers projected 2009 numbers.

The report also sought to pinpoint the world’s Sunni-Shiite breakdown, but difficulties arose because so few countries track sectarian affiliation, said Brian Grim, the project’s senior researcher.

As a result, the Shiite numbers are not as precise; the report estimates that Shiites represent between 10 and 13 percent of the Muslim population, in line with or slightly lower than other studies. As much as 80 percent of the world’s Shiite population lives in four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq.

The report provides further evidence that while the heart of Islam might beat in the Middle East, its greatest numbers lie in Asia: More than 60 percent of the world’s Muslims live in Asia.

About 20 percent live in the Middle East and North Africa, 15 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2.4 percent are in Europe and 0.3 percent are in the Americas. While the Middle East and North Africa have fewer Muslims overall than Asia, the region easily claims the most Muslim-majority countries.

While those population trends are well established, the large numbers of Muslims who live as minorities in countries aren’t as scrutinized. The report identified about 317 million Muslims — or one-fifth of the world’s Muslim population — living in countries where Islam is not the majority religion.

About three-quarters of Muslims living as minorities are concentrated in five countries: India (161 million), Ethiopia (28 million), China (22 million), Russia (16 million) and Tanzania (13 million).

In several of these countries — from India to Nigeria and China to France — divisions featuring a volatile mix of religion, class and politics have contributed to tension and bloodshed among groups.

The immense size of majority-Hindu India is underscored by the fact that it boasts the third-largest Muslim population of any nation — yet Muslims account for just 13 percent of India’s population.

“Most people think of the Muslim world being Muslims living mostly in Muslim-majority countries,” Grim said. “But with India ... that sort of turns that on its head a bit.”

Among the report’s other highlights:

_ Two-thirds of all Muslims live in 10 countries. Six are in Asia (Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey), three are in North Africa (Egypt, Algeria and Morocco) and one is in sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria).

_ Indonesia, which has a tradition of a more tolerant Islam, has the world’s largest Muslim population (203 million, or 13 percent of the world’s total). Religious extremists have been involved in several high-profile bombings there in recent years.

_ In China, the highest concentrations of Muslims were in western provinces. The country experienced its worst outbreak of ethnic violence in decades when rioting broke out this summer between minority Muslim Uighurs and majority Han Chinese.

_ Europe is home to about 38 million Muslims, or about five percent of its population. Germany appears to have more than 4 million Muslims — almost as many as North and South America combined. In France, where tensions have run high over an influx of Muslim immigrant laborers, the overall numbers were lower but a larger percentage of the population is Muslim.

_ Of roughly 4.6 million Muslims in the Americas, more than half live in the United States although they only make up 0.8 percent of the population there. About 700,000 people in Canada are Muslim, or about 2 percent of the total population.

A future Pew Forum project, scheduled to be released in 2010, will build on the report’s data to estimate growth rates among Muslim populations and project future trends.

A similar study on global Christianity is planned to begin next year.

==============================

Runaway Teen Convert to be Returned to Ohio (Christian Post, 091014)

Runaway teen convert Rifqa Bary will be returned to her home state of Ohio, Florida and Ohio judges decided Tuesday.

Bary, 17, will be turned over to foster care once she arrives in Ohio, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Both state judges agreed after weeks of discussion that the teen, who ran away to Florida for fear of being physically harmed by her Muslim parents for converting to Christianity, is under the jurisdiction of Ohio.

But before Florida state relinquishes custody of Bary, Florida circuit Judge Daniel Dawson required her parents to provide documents that prove they are legal residents in the United States. Bary’s temporary guardian raised concern that if the teen is staying illegally in the United States then she could be sent back to Sri Lanka where her family is originally from.

John Stemberger, the teen’s attorney, said Rifqa’s immigration status is “very critical” because his client fears being killed, harmed or placed in an insane asylum if she is sent back to Sri Lanka given that her conversion has been made public to the world.

Earlier, Bary said her parents had threatened to send her back to Sri Lanka after they found out she had become a Christian.

In July, the Ohio teen ran away from her home near Columbus saying that her father had threatened to kill her for adopting a new faith. She boarded a Greyhound bus and headed to Orlando where she was taken in by an evangelical pastor couple in Orlando. She met the pastors through a Facebook prayer group.

She stayed with them for two weeks until Florida authorities discovered she was the missing person filed by her parents.

Since then, she has stayed in a Florida foster home during the custody trial. The Bary’s want their daughter to be returned to Ohio, while the teen wants to stay in Florida.

Investigators from both states have reported that they found no “credible” evidence that the teen convert is in danger of being harmed by her father.

The Bary’s attorney said they can turn in the immigration documents this week.

==============================

Crossroads of Islam, Past and Present (Paris, International Herald, 091014)

TARIM, Yemen — This remote desert valley, with its towering bluffs and ancient mud-brick houses, is probably best known to outsiders as the birthplace of Osama bin Laden’s father. Most accounts about Yemen in the Western news media refer ominously to it as “the ancestral homeland” of the leader of Al Qaeda, as though his murderous ideology had somehow been shaped here.

But in fact, Tarim and its environs are a historic center of Sufism, a mystical strand within Islam. The local religious school, Dar al-Mustafa, is a multicultural place full of students from Indonesia and California who stroll around its tiny campus wearing white skullcaps and colorful shawls.

“The reality is that Osama bin Laden has never been to Yemen,” said Habib Omar, the revered director of Dar al-Mustafa, as he sat on the floor in his home eating dinner with a group of students. “His thinking has nothing to do with this place.”

Lately, Al Qaeda has found a new sanctuary here and carried out a number of attacks. But the group’s inspiration, Mr. Omar said, did not originate here. Most of the group’s adherents have lived in Saudi Arabia — as has Mr. bin Laden — and it was there, or in Afghanistan or Pakistan, that they adopted a jihadist mind-set.

Mr. Omar set out 16 years ago to restore the ancient religious heritage of Tarim. It is an extraordinary legacy for an arid, windswept town in the far southeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula.

About 800 years ago, traders from Tarim and other parts of Hadramawt, as the broader area is known, began traveling down the coast to the Arabian Sea and onward in rickety boats to Indonesia, Malaysia and India. They thrived, and they brought their religion with them. Nine especially devout men, all with roots in Tarim, are now remembered as “the nine saints,” Mr. Omar said, because of their success in spreading Islam across Asia.

“This town, with its thousand-year tradition, was the main catalyst for as many as 40 percent of the world’s Muslims’ becoming Muslim,” said John Rhodus, a 32-year-old Arizonan who has studied at Dar al-Mustafa off and on since 2000. Tarim’s Sufist tradition also appears to have helped shape the relatively moderate Islam practiced in much of South Asia.

Hadrami merchants remained an extraordinarily intrepid and successful network until well into the 20th century. Some made their fortune in Saudi Arabia — including Muhammad bin Laden, Osama’s father, who became a construction magnate — and remained there. Others returned home and built flamboyant palaces as monuments to their success. Dozens of palaces remain, in a variety of styles — Mogul, modernist, British colonial — that contrast oddly with Tarim’s traditional mud-brick homes and mosques.

Most of the merchants fled after a Communist junta seized power after the British withdrawal from south Yemen in 1967. Now their palaces are abandoned and decayed, too grand even for the state to maintain in this desperately poor country.

The Communist years, which lasted until North and South Yemen unified in 1990, were even worse for those who refused to accept the new government’s enforced secularism.

“Some religious scholars were tortured, others murdered,” Mr. Omar said. “Some were tied to the backs of cars and driven through the streets until they were dead.” Mr. Omar’s father, who had been a renowned religious teacher in Tarim, was kidnapped and killed.

In 1993, Mr. Omar began teaching Sufi-inspired religious classes in his home. Three years later, he moved into a two-story white school building, with a mosque attached. There are now about 700 students, at least half of them South Asians, with a rising number of Americans and Britons.

Most of the students are between 18, the minimum age, and 25. They usually spend four years studying here before returning to their homes. Mr. Omar encourages them to pursue careers and spread their beliefs quietly rather than becoming religious scholars.

But even as the school grew, a more militant Islam was gaining followers across the region. Saudi Arabia, on Yemen’s northern border, was financing ultraconservative religious schools and scholars in an effort to shore up its influence here. In 1991 the Saudi king, angered by Yemen’s public support for Saddam Hussein, abruptly sent home a million Yemeni laborers, many of whom had lived in Saudi Arabia for decades and had been shaped by it.

The Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, accommodated the Saudis and welcomed many Arab jihadists who had fought in Afghanistan. Later, he enlisted the jihadists to fight his political enemies at home, incurring a political debt that has complicated his efforts to fight Al Qaeda.

Some of the former fighters resettled in Hadramawt. Two years ago, one of Al Qaeda’s top regional commanders was killed, along with two lieutenants, in a fierce gun battle with the Yemeni military just a few blocks from Dar al-Mustafa.

And in March a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt killed four Korean tourists and their Yemeni guide in the nearby city of Shibam. Al Qaeda’s Arabian branch claimed responsibility. The small trickle of adventure tourism that had remained in Hadramawt (it may not help that the name means “death came” in Arabic) slowed to almost nothing.

Several students at Dar al-Mustafa said there was concern about possible conflict with hard-line Islamists in Hadramawt, though the school itself has not been attacked or threatened.

On a tour of Tarim, one of the school’s teachers, Abdullah Ali, pointed to the house where the Qaeda leaders had been killed. They had been there for some time, he said, escaping scrutiny by disguising themselves as women under thick black gowns. A trove of explosives and weapons was found in the house.

“We are mulaataf,” Mr. Ali said, using an Arabic term that describes a divine rescue from danger.

Mr. Omar acknowledged, somewhat reluctantly, that his own, milder approach to Islam had enemies in Hadramawt.

“There are differences,” he said. “But we find the appropriate way to deal with these people is to remind them of Islamic principles, not to speak ill of them.”

==============================

Anti-Islamic Dutch Lawmaker Event at University Cut Short as Crowd Turns Nasty (Foxnews, 091021)

PHILADELPHIA — Amid tight security and a large turnout of protesters, Dutch right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders told an assembly of Temple University students that Europe and America must fight an ongoing “stealth jihad” that threatens democracy and free speech.

“Where Islam sets roots, freedom dies,” Geert Wilders told the students during his 30-minute address organized by a new student group called Temple University Purpose and funded by the California-based David Horowitz Freedom Center, a foundation that promotes conservative scholarship.

His remarks were met by a mixture of applause and boos, and occasionally gasps — particularly when he stated that “our Western culture is far better than the Islamic culture and we should defend it.”

He decried as a “disgrace” a resolution co-sponsored by the U.S. and Egypt, and backed by the U.N. Human Rights Council earlier this month, deploring attacks on religions while insisting that freedom of expression remains a basic right. Wilders also criticized President Barack Obama for his efforts to extend a hand to the Islamic world, saying that such appeasement marks “the beginning of the end.”

If the spread of Islam continues unabated in the Western world, “you might at the end of the day lose your Constitution,” he told the assembly. “Wake up, defend your freedom.”

He also touched on common themes in his speeches, including calling for an end to Muslim immigration and referring to the Muslim holy book, the Quran, as “an evil book” that promotes violence and intolerance.

A question-and-answer session was cut short after the tone of the event began to turn nasty, when some in the crowd of several hundred students began shouting jeers. Wilders’ security detail quickly ushered him from the room.

“In order to improve our understanding of others, we need to learn,” said Alvaro Watson of Purpose, the student group. “We can’t fight for something if we only know one side.”

Before his remarks at Temple, a public university serving about 34,000 students, Wilders showed his 15-minute anti-Islam film, “Fitna,” which juxtaposes passages from the suras, or chapters, of the Quran with images of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, beheadings, shootings and speeches from clerics advocating violence against non-Muslims.

“I think it’s completely wrong that someone who promotes racism and intolerance should be given a platform at this university,” said Temple student Josh Rosenthal. “It’s hate speech disguised as free speech.” [KH: hate speech is still free; again the liberal style demonstrated]

Another student, Joseph Rodrigues, said that being able to voice unpopular opinions is a freedom not to be taken lightly. “I might not like what he said, but I think it’s important that he be allowed to say it,” he said.

Temple officials issued a statement saying the university “is a community of scholars in which freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression are valued.”

“We respect the right of our student organizations to invite people who express a wide variety of views and ideas,” the school said in a statement.

British officials once banned Wilders from visiting for fear it would spark violence. He successfully sued the government and visited Friday.

Wilders is scheduled to speak at Columbia University in New York on Wednesday.

==============================

Arizona Man Runs Down Daughter For Becoming ‘Westernized’ (Foxnews, 091021)

PEORIA, Ariz. — Police in a Phoenix suburb are looking for a father suspected of running down his daughter because she was becoming too “Westernized” and was not living according to their traditional Iraqi values.

Police say 48-year-old Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale allegedly ran his daughter down Tuesday at an Arizona Department of Economic Security parking lot in Peoria.

The victim, 20-year-old Noor Faleh Almaleki of Surprise, remains hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.

A second woman, 43-year-old Amal Edan Khalaf, also of Surprise, suffered non-life threatening injuries. Police say the women are roommates.

==============================

Toronto imam preaching ‘hate instead of harmony’ (National Post, 091022)

A Toronto-area imam is under fire for using derogatory language against Jews and Christians, calling for Allah to “destroy” the enemies of Islam from within and calling on God to “damn” the “infidels.”

The address, given last Friday by Imam Saed Rageah at the Abu Huraira Centre and then posted on YouTube (watch it above), is an attack on those who have been calling for a ban on the niqab and burka, both of which cover the faces of women.

“Allah protect us from the fitna [sedition] of these people; Allah protect us from the evil agenda of these people; Allah destroy them from within themselves, and do not allow them to raise their heads in destroying Islam.”

Tarek Fatah, a Canadian Muslim author and commentator, said that type of language could be interpreted as a call to violence. As well, the imam asks Allah to “damn” Christians and Jews.

“The cleric’s ritual prayer asking for the defeat of Christians and Jews and the victory of Islam is not unique,” Mr. Fatah said. “It is uttered by many clerics across Canada spreading hate instead of harmony. There should be no room in Canada’s mosques for such hatred, especially when most of these institutions get [tax-free status].”

The Abu Huraira Centre attracts about 800 to 1,000 people to a typical Friday service. A man who worked at the centre said that many women who attend only wear the hijab, which covers the head, and do not wear any covering on their faces.

The National Post repeatedly attempted to reach Mr. Rageah for an interview, but was unsuccessful.

Throughout the 35-minute speech he uses the word “kuffar” to describe non-Muslims.

In referring to those Muslims who would seek allies outside the Muslim community to bring about legislation that would ban face coverings, the imam said: “You will see a lot of them going to the kuffar, taking them as friends and allies. The wrath of Allah is upon them. If they were true believers they would never take them as allies.”

At its most benign, kuffar means “non-Muslims.” But others say the most common usage is considered highly offensive, akin to calling a black person a “n****r,” Mr. Fatah said.

“It goes back to the Arab use of the word against black slaves. It’s used in a very derisive manner.”

Professor Amir Hussain, who teaches theology at Loyola Marymount College in Los Angeles, but grew up in Toronto, said he does not read the word “destroy” in a literal way.

“For me, I don’t see the remarks ‘destroy them from within themselves’ as hoping for violence. Rather, I see it as him asking that the group implode from within. Granted, implode and destroy are of course violent metaphors, but I liken it to him asking for the organization to disintegrate.”

Earlier this month, the Canadian Muslim Congress called on Ottawa to ban the wearing of the burka or niqab in public. They said the right should not be protected by the Charter’s guarantee of religious freedom because nowhere in the Koran is there a requirement for women to cover their faces in public. They argue that the burka “marginalizes women.” The Koran does call for modesty.

Much of Mr. Rageah’s address questions why the liberty of certain Muslims should be infringed upon. He even berates fellow Muslims for being far too passive in the face of attacks on their freedom.

“I’m appealing to the congregation not [to] allow such foolish people to be in charge of the affairs of the umma [family of all Muslims] to the point they would make such serious decisions for us. Our wives have the right to wear it. We should not allow them to dictate how we live. What we should do. Where we should eat. Enough is enough.”

Walid Saleh, professor at the centre for the study of religion at the University of Toronto, said much of what Mr. Rageah said must be taken in the context of how Muslims may use terms in the midst of a religious service.

“If you ask me [kuffar] is unreformed language that is unbefitting for a multicultural society. That being said, it is religious language that is Quranic, and in the hadith [the oral tradition], so the issue is internal: how do traditional Muslims want to refer to non-Muslims? Using this language is regrettable, but one is not sure how far one can go in demanding a change.”

However, he said the imam could have simply used non-offensive language to refer to non-Muslims.

“He could call them Christians and the Jews, either by their [neutral] Arabic names or even better, Ahl al-Kitab, or People of the Book, a rather positive Islamic term. In this sense there are options. That he chooses to use the term kuffar, is not innocent as such.”

However, Prof. Saleh said it was important to note that he was asking his members to write letters to the government to make their objections known.

“So, you can see that the democratic notions are seeping through. He is fully aware of the limitation of his position.”

==============================

Prison Bible Outreach Expands to 50 States Amid ‘Prison Islam’ Trend (Christian Post, 090603)

A used book ministry, as of this month, is sending Christian books and Bibles to prisons in all 50 U.S. states, according to an announcement Tuesday.

Though Christian Library International was founded in 1996, the ministry only began distributing Christian literature to prisons in 2003. But within a few years, CLI saw the great demand inside U.S. prisons and focused exclusively on providing such materials to inmates.

The ministry has grown from 32 outreaches to now over 1,000, supplying to U.S. prisons, jails and youth detention centers.

“It was like grabbing a tiger by the tail,” says CLI missions director Anders Skaar. “We could clearly see the fruit in the letters we received from both chaplains and inmates.”

“Prisons are the great evangelism opportunity of the 21st century,” he added.

Based in Raleigh, N.C., CLI receives books from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which is also located in North Carolina, and Prison Fellowship. It also partners with several Family Christian Stores who ask their customers to purchase a prison Bible for CLI at the checkout counter.

But most book donations come from Christian publishers, authors, churches, individuals, Christian schools and other ministries. To date, over 150 churches across the nation have sent Christian books to CLI.

One inmate, named Jose Garcia of Vacaville, Calif., wrote a letter to the ministry to thank it for the Bible he received.

“I was in need of a Spanish Bible so of course I prayed about it,” Garcia wrote. “Two weeks later the Lord answered my prayer and used your ministry to help. And (Praise God!), instead of just a Spanish Bible I got a bilingual version. Hallelujah! Now I hold a Spanish Bible study in my wing. I pray that the Lord blessed your ministry.”

While ministering to the hurt and hopeless in prisons has always been important, some say recent events have made prison ministry more important than ever.

In a 2007 report, the New York Police Department recognized that prisons can serve as a “radicalizing cauldron” where “disaffected” inmates can be turned into violent Muslims.

Just two weeks ago, police foiled a plot to bomb two New York synagogues and shoot down military planes. The four men charged in the terrorist plot are Americans who had converted to Islam while in prison.

“[R]adical imams feed off the discontent of these prisoners – this large and captive audience – and turn them into extremists capable of deplorable acts against American society,” commented Peter Connors, executive director of The Clarion Fund, which recently released the documentary film “The Third Jihad - Radical Islam’s Vision for America.”

In the film is a segment that discusses “Prison Islam” and how Muslim extremists are entering U.S. correctional facilities as chaplains to recruit terrorists.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim who is president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and narrator of “The Third Jihad,” responded to the recent foiled bomb plot in New York by affirming that “many Islamist imams are aggressively recruiting inmates in our prisons with ideologies that fuel ‘home-grown’ terror.”

He added, “It’s significant that this terrorist plot was targeted against synagogues, underscoring the dangerous hatred promoted by radical imams in American prisons.”

Jasser, who is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, has urged American Muslims, the majority of which are non-violent, to reject political Islam.

He calls on them to counter the “well-coordinated” and “well-funded” Islamic programs that exist in the United States.

==============================

West-Islam Clash ‘Not Inevitable’, Says Catholic Leader (Christian Post, 090608)

A clash of civilizations between the West and Islam is not inevitable, asserts the head of the U.S. Catholic community’s official international humanitarian agency.

“In his recent speech in Cairo to the Muslim world, he (President Obama) sought out the common ground and values that unite all people of good will, noting that America and Islam ‘share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,’” noted Ken Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services, over the weekend.

“As someone who leads a humanitarian organization that works in the five nations in the world with the largest Muslim populations, I could not agree more,” he stated.

In making his case, Hackett reported how his organization has built strong and effective relationships with a multitude of Muslim communities around the globe.

“These relationships, built around shared values, are examples of the type of partnership that President Obama spoke of,” the CRS leader noted.

According to Hackett, partnerships with Muslim communities must be characterized by mutuality and solidarity, recognizing that each partner brings unique resources to the table, such as knowledge, history, finances, expertise and relationships. And, each partner must be accountable to the other for achieving results.

“In our successful partnerships with Muslims communities, we have found that working together to meet the needs of real people helps demystify our respective religions and cultures and fights attempts to demonize the other,” Hackett stated.

“As a result, our staff have benefited from amazing generosity, hospitality, and even protection from those we work with,” he added. “As the President noted, interfaith dialogue can and should lead to interfaith cooperation in service to others.”

As one of the world’s largest networks of Catholic development and relief agencies, CRS works to alleviate suffering and provides assistance to people in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality.

Through its work, the agency seeks to foster within the U.S. Catholic community a sense of global solidarity, providing inspiration to live out their spiritual tradition of compassionate service to the world.

==============================

‘Stoning of Soraya M.’ Sheds Light on Human Cruelty, Islam (Christian Post, 090626)

Hitting limited theaters this weekend is the true and moving story of a modern-day woman who was tragically stoned to death in Iran after she was falsely accused and deemed guilty of committing adultery.

Produced by the man behind “Braveheart” and “The Passion of the Christ,” “The Stoning of Soraya M.” is based on true events that took place in 1986, around the time when French-Iranian novelist Freidoune Sahebjam was working as a journalist in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The movie comes out at an arguably fitting time as the world witnesses the current strife plaguing a deeply divided Iran.

On Friday, foreign ministers from Group of Eight countries said they deplored post-election violence in Iran and urged Tehran authorities to ensure that the outcome of Iran’s disputed election reflects the will of the Iranian people.

“We express our solidarity with those who have suffered repression while peacefully demonstrating and urge Iran to respect human rights, including freedom of expression,” said the statement, which countries such as Italy and France wanted to send as a tough message to Iran to halt the crackdown and demand a recount.

Though the story of the real Soraya took place more than two decades ago, the promoters of “The Stoning of Soraya M.” point out that what happened to her still happens today in some countries around the world.

Furthermore, the story of corruption and injustice goes beyond the issue of stoning, but stands for thousands of untold tales around the world – from Africa to Asia, from Europe to America, wherever people are battling prejudice and injustice, the producers say.

“There’s a lot of abuse internationally that happens particularly to women,” says producer Steve McEveety, who worked for many years at Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions.

“‘The Stoning of Soraya M.’ is a very universal story to me,” he adds.

The story centers around Zahara, played by Academy Award nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo, who reveals the story of Soraya, her niece, to a journalist that happens to become stranded in her village after his car breaks down.

In her effort to reveal Soraya’s story to the rest of the world, Zahara carefully yet boldly approaches the journalist, played by Jim Caviezel (“The Passion of the Christ”), and tells of the scheming, lies and deceit that ultimately led to Soraya’s stoning just the day before he arrived.

“At its heart, this movie is a human drama filled with tension, peril and hope – but it is also a true story that I felt strongly had to be told, a story the whole world needs to know,” says director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who is best known for his involvement in the controversial docudrama “The Path to 9/11.”

Though some might feel the movie is critical of Islamic law – which allows stoning as a form of punishment – and therefore of Islam, producer McEveety says many have found the film to be very pro-Muslim.

“Soraya is a wonderful example of a nebulous Muslim person. She chooses her god. She chooses her faith. She’s respectful. She’s honest. She’s serving. She’s heroic in terms of accepting the injustice done to her. And her last words, her last acknowledgments on earth are to her god,” he says.

“I think it depends on who you think is representing the Muslim world in this movie. I don’t think it’s the mullah in this movie or the mayor. I think it’s Soraya, myself,” adds McEveety, who is Catholic.

The producer also notes that while stoning is allowed under Islamic law, its practice is ultimately up to the country’s government.

Currently, six out of fifty-two Muslim-majority countries in the world use stoning as a legally-sanctioned form of punishment – Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In Nigeria, where Christians are mostly in the south and Muslims are mostly in the north, about one-third of the country’s 36 states permit stoning.

“I think you’re going to find it more a part of the government laws of various countries, not a Muslim law,” McEveety notes.

But as stated earlier, more than the issue of stoning, McEveety hopes that the message that viewers will take in as they watch “The Stoning of Soraya M.” is the broader one regarding how people treat one another.

“What the movie ended up actually doing, which I found incredible, was it shines the light on the abuser, more than the victim,” he says.

“We’re all guilty of abuse a little bit,” McEveety adds, specifically noting mental abuse. “This film is like moving a mirror to them (the audience).”

“People may not realize it, but they’re not always too kind,” he notes.

Starting Friday, “The Stoning of Soraya” will be showing in limited theaters across the nation. The movie had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was the runner-up for the Audience Choice Award. It was also selected as the second runner-up for the Cadillac People’s Choice Award.

The author of the novel from which the movie is based died last year at the age of 75.

As a journalist, Sahebjam was the first to report on the crimes of the Islamic Republic of Iran against the Bahá’í Faith community in Iran as well as the illegal use of children in the Iranian Army during the eight year Iran-Iraq War.

His novel, also titled “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” was published in 1995.

==============================

Barbara Kay, It is time for the (Anti) Canadian Arab Federation to fold its tents (National Post, 090701)

Barbara Kay

As Canada Day 2009, our 142nd birthday, draws to a close here in Montreal, I suppose it’s just as well I didn’t plan to attend any fireworks display, because - surprise! - it’s starting to rain. Of course, one needn’t attend fireworks displays, or march in parades or hang huge flags out one’s window in Canada to prove one’s patriotism. Indeed, our lowkey attitudes - even phlegmatism - with regard to outward signs of patriotism distinguish us from our more flamboyant neighbours to the south.

Nevertheless, like so many of my fellow citizens, no Canada Day passes without my spending a good deal of it in reflection on how blessed I and my family are to live in this great, peaceful country, as benign and well-meaning a nation as one is able to find on this troubled globe. No country is perfect, but what unmolested Canadian could fail to feel blessed in his or her good fortune?

Well, one springs to mind. Vancouver-based Omar Shaban is the Vice President for western Canada of the Canadian Arab Federation, and he is definitely not feeling the gratitude vibe. Quite the opposite. Shaban has labelled Canada a “genocidal state” and described our national holiday on Facebook as “F*** Canada Day,” adding, to be sure he had made his point, “It’s finally Canada Day...Couldn’t be more ashamed to be Canadian.” Shaban is no aberration in the CAF. As staunchly anti-Islamist Tarek Fatah reported here: “While one VP of the Canadian Arab Federation was throwing insults at Canada, another Vice President of CAF was on cable TV showering praise on the discredited leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Appearing on a Muslim cable TV show, Ali Mallah endorsed the election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as valid, and echoed the official line of the Tehran regime, claiming Western governments and Western Media were to blame for the current unrest in Iran. “

You will recall that in February of this year Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced he would slash federal funding to the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) after its president, Khaled Mouammar, called him a “professional whore” for supporting Israel. This was not a one-off. During the 2006 Liberal leadership campaign, the CAF initiated a smear campaign against Bob Rae solely on the grounds that his Jewish wife was active in her community. The CAF are also 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and last year sponsored an essay contest on “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” in which it urged high school students to channel the group’s own fervid hatred of Israel for prizes.

As Jonathan Kay noted February 17 here, “Last year, the National Post editorial board hosted Mouammar and a CAF colleague for an editorial board meeting. To our collective shock, they laid blame for virtually every problem the world faces on Israel - including the alienation of Arab-Canadian children in Canada’s public school system. (One explained that he had sent his daughter for education overseas - because the inclusion of Israel in Canadian textbooks was too traumatic for her to endure.)”

Many liberals reflexively rose up to challenge Jason Kenney’s announcement that the government would no longer fund the CAF. The wonder to any objective observer of this hateful group is how they ever came to get a red cent from the government in the first place. Nobody in this country is forced to celebrate Canada Day, but it’s a bit much, even for us phlegmatic types, to witness the alleged spokesman of a cultural community spewing hatred against a democracy they had no part in making, and whose freedoms and security, so unlike the countries they come from, they apparently take for granted. To bite the hands of one’s benefactor on the most symbolic day of the benefactor’s year is a provocation that must not go unchallenged. There is tolerance and there is masochism. We too often confuse them in this naive and well-meaning nation. It is past time that this intolerant and subversive organization folded its tents and retreated from the public forum. It is a disgrace to all Arabs, and it is, by the way, past time that we heard the same from a sizable number of Arab-Canadians. Loud and clear.

==============================

Head Scarf Emerges as Indonesia Political Symbol (Paris, International Herald, 090702)

JAKARTA, Indonesia — The three parties competing in Indonesia’s presidential election next week have plastered this city with campaign billboards and posters depicting, predictably, their presidential and vice presidential choices looking self-confident.

A stall in Jakarta selling Muslim head scarves, known in Indonesia as jilbabs. Sales are booming in the country, where women traditionally went unveiled.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, left, campaigning with the first lady, Kristiani Herawati, center, who does not wear a head scarf.

But one party, Golkar, has also put up posters of the candidates’ wives next to their husbands, posing demurely and wearing Muslim head scarves known here as jilbabs. The wives recently went on a jilbab shopping spree in one of Jakarta’s largest markets, and published a book together titled “Devout Wives of Future Leaders.”

Most polls suggest that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of the Democratic Party will be re-elected in next Wednesday’s vote, after running a smooth campaign based on his economic policies and a popular anticorruption drive. Despite television debates, the personality-driven campaigns have focused little on differences over policies or ideas, except regarding the wearing of the jilbab.

It is perhaps not surprising that the jilbab, the Islamic style of dress in which a woman covers her head and neck, has become an issue in a presidential campaign this year. Jilbab sales have been booming for three years across a country where women have traditionally gone unveiled, and where the meaning of wearing the jilbab — or not wearing one — remains fluid. The issue also cuts to a central, unresolved debate in Indonesia’s decade-old democracy: the role of Islam in politics.

“It’s the first time that the jilbab has become an issue in a presidential campaign in Indonesia,” said Siti Musdah Mulia, a professor of Islamic studies at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University here and a leading proponent of women’s rights. “There are so many more important issues that should be addressed in the campaign,” said Ms. Mulia, who has worn a jilbab for eight years. “Why this one?”

But it would not be the first time that politicians tried to co-opt religious symbols to win votes. The ruckus over the jilbab began a few months ago when Mr. Yudhoyono, whose wife, Kristiani Herawati, does not wear a jilbab, and Vice President Jusuf Kalla, whose wife, Mufidah, does, decided not to run together again.

The president selected as his new vice presidential running mate a respected central banker, Boediono, whose wife, Herawati, goes unveiled. Mr. Kalla, in turn, decided to run for president as the Golkar Party’s standard-bearer and picked as his No. 2 a retired general, Wiranto, whose wife, Rugaya, is veiled. (Many Indonesians go by only one name.)

Perhaps sensing an opening as it trailed in the polls, the Golkar Party soon put up posters of the veiled wives. With the news media in tow, the wives went shopping together for jilbabs at Tanah Abang, the city’s largest textile market, where the general’s wife was known as a regular, but Mr. Kalla’s wife was not.

Golkar Party officials rejected accusations by the president’s party that they were trying to exploit Islam for politics; they also denied having anything to do with the recent distribution of leaflets that stated, falsely, that Boediono’s wife was not Muslim, but Roman Catholic.

President Yudhoyono was also getting pressure from a current coalition ally, the Prosperous Justice Party, the country’s largest Islamic party. A party leader said that members were gravitating toward the Golkar candidates because of their jilbab-wearing wives.

The country’s Islamic parties have core supporters that are coveted by the major parties, though the Islamic parties have failed to make inroads among mainstream voters. In fact, in April’s parliamentary elections, they suffered a steep drop in support compared with five years ago, a decline interpreted as mainstream voters’ rejection of Islam in politics.

Neng Dara Affiah, an official at Nahdlatul Ulama, the country’s largest Islamic organization, which espouses moderate Islam, said the fight over the meaning of wearing the jilbab was taking place between “fundamentalists” and “progressives.”

The fundamentalists are trying to force women to wear the jilbab as an act of submission, and had already done so in various municipalities across the Indonesian archipelago in recent years, Ms. Neng said. For the progressives, she said, wearing the jilbab was an expression of a woman’s right.

“For women in Indonesia, whether they want to wear the jilbab or not is their choice,” said Ms. Neng, who started wearing one five years ago. “It shouldn’t be political.”

Despite being the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia does not have a tradition of Islamic dress. Most Indonesian women started wearing the jilbab in the last decade, after the fall in 1998 of President Suharto, who had kept a close grip on Islamic groups.

Fashion and clothing industry experts said the number of women wearing jilbabs rose sharply in the past three years, for reasons of religion, fashion or something undefined.

“If you ask 10 different women why they’re wearing jilbab, you’ll get 10 different answers,” said Jetti R. Hadi, the editor in chief of Noor, a magazine specializing in Muslim fashion, which features jilbab-clad models on its cover. “You cannot assume that because a woman is wearing a jilbab, she’s a good Muslim.”

At Tanah Abang, the market where the political wives shopped for jilbabs, many small shop owners had recently switched from selling Western clothes to jilbabs to capitalize on the boom. One shop owner, Syafnir, 53, said 7 of his 15 relatives working in the market had begun to sell jilbabs in the past two years. He himself now has two stores; the second opened just two months ago.

Asked whether faith was fueling the boom, he shook his head emphatically. Fashion was, he said, an answer echoed by others in the market.

Deni Sartika, 36, who was shopping with her mother and young daughter, all three of them veiled, said she started wearing a jilbab in 1991, long before most Indonesian women did. She was a member of the Prosperous Justice Party, the Islamic party that supports President Yudhoyono.

Ms. Deni said she would vote for Mr. Yudhoyono and his vice president even though their wives did not wear jilbabs.

“I’m looking at the candidates themselves instead of their wives,” she said, before adding, “but we’d be happy if the wives wore jilbabs.”