Recently in Islam Category

It all boils down to bringing your kids up the right way.

The perfidy of the Turks succeeded. Israel was condemned for defending itself against terrorists by the UN, the EU and all Muslim countries. Obama even supported a UN investigation, which will yield the usual anti-Israeli result. They could write the report before the "investigation."

How can you make the people of the world understand how the anit-Israeli forces in the world led by the media are feeding information upside down, inside out? Parody is one way and some Israelis, led by the brilliant Caroline Glick, quickly prepared the video below, which had been seen by more than three million people before YouTube took it down because of a bogus copyright violation protest, probably from a Muslim sympathizer. Have a few laughs as you appreciate the truth that's being conveyed.

What do Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Obama have in common?

An indifference to the life and death of American Jew Daniel Pearl.

Mark Steyn explains.

Now here is a straight-talking American on the war being waged against America by Islam.

You've heard the Attorney General of the United States, who can't seem to comprehend what motivated the Times Square bomber, the Fort Hood killer and the would-be Christmas Day suicide murderer.

It's well worth the three minutes to listen to someone who knows who our enemy is and is not afraid to speak clearly about the threat we face.

Colonel Allen West is a candidate for Congress this November in Florida's 22nd Congressional District which is mostly coastal Palm Beach County and some of Broward County, running along the coast from Jupiter to Fort Lauderdale. He will be an outstanding addition to the House of Representatives. Check out his website and make a contribution.

Two articles this weekend make the same point: It is essential that we understand Muslims and the Islam that is the driving force behind their actions. With a western mindset and political correctness we constantly delude ourselves and fail to recognize the real challenge of Islam and how huge a problem it is.

A new book "Son of Hamas" is by the son of a founder of Hamas who defected and now lives in the United States. He strikes to the heart of the matter in this interview posted by the Wall Streeet Journal:

As the son of a Muslim cleric, he says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can't be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Do you consider your father a fanatic? "He's not a fanatic," says Mr. Yousef. "He's a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he's doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn't matter if he's a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.

"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."

Former Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters writing in the New York Post makes somewhat the same point less dramatically:

Our reluctance to understand the Taliban on its own terms is strikingly evident in our insistence that Islam isn't a factor. A confederation of franchises, the Taliban has multiple interests, from a regional power-struggle to local issues that vary between valleys. But the common identity of Taliban fighters is that they're 100% Muslim and overwhelmingly Pashtun, members of a stateless ethnic group of 40 million straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Even the New York Times editorial page may be waking up to the internal threat posed by immigrants from barbarian Muslim societies with values far removed from those of the West.

What's happening in Europe is an advanced stage of what can happen and is happening already in America.

Politicians ignore the danger that citIzens increasingly face from unassimilated -- and unassimilable -- Muslims.

Islam is an all-encompassing ideology demanding submission to its command to wage war until Islam rules the world. Its hold on its adherents inculcated from the moment of birth is difficult to break for most and impossible for many.

European politicians turned a blind eye for decades to this fact as they waved Muslim immigrants in. The result is chaos sweeping through Europe with fear, resentment and anger building among the natives. Many are pessimistic about the chances of European civilization surviving the belligerent Islamic onslaught. Political correctness and multiculturalism stand in the way of an aggressive defense.

Oddmakers are betting on Islam.

Op-Ed Columnist

Europe's Minaret Moment

By ROSS DOUTHAT

They toasted to progress in Europe's capitals last week. On Tuesday, the Treaty of Lisbon went into effect, bringing the nations of the European Union one step closer to the unity the Continent's elite has been working toward for over 50 years.

But the treaty's implementation fell just days after a milestone of a different sort: a referendum in Switzerland, long famous for religious tolerance, in which 57.5 percent of voters chose to ban the nation's Muslims from building minarets.

Switzerland isn't an E.U. member state, but the minaret moment could have happened almost anywhere in Europe nowadays -- in France, where officials have floated the possibility of banning the burka; in Britain, which elected two representatives of the fascistic, anti-Islamic British National Party to the European Parliament last spring; in Italy, where a bill introduced this year would ban mosque construction and restrict the Islamic call to prayer.

If the more perfect union promised by the Lisbon Treaty is the European elite's greatest triumph, the failure to successfully integrate millions of Muslim immigrants represents its greatest failure. And the two are intertwined: they're both the fruits of the high-handed, often undemocratic approach to politics that Europe's leaders have cultivated in their quest for unity.

The European Union probably wouldn't exist in its current form if the Continent's elites hadn't been willing to ignore popular sentiment. (The Lisbon Treaty, for instance, was deliberately designed to bypass most European voters, after a proposed E.U. Constitution was torpedoed by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005.) But this political style -- forge a consensus among the establishment, and assume you can contain any backlash that develops -- is also how the Continent came to accept millions of Muslim immigrants, despite the absence of a popular consensus on the issue, or a plan for how to integrate them.

The immigrants came first as guest workers, recruited after World War II to relieve labor shortages, and then as beneficiaries of generous asylum and family reunification laws, designed to salve Europe's post-colonial conscience. The European elites assumed that the divide between Islam and the West was as antiquated as scimitars and broadswords, and that a liberal, multicultural, post-Christian federation would have no difficulty absorbing new arrivals from more traditional societies. And they decided, too -- as Christopher Caldwell writes in "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe," his wonderfully mordant chronicle of Europe's Islamic dilemma -- that liberal immigration policies "involve the sort of nonnegotiable moral duties that you don't vote on."

Better if they had let their voters choose. The rate of immigration might have been slower, and the efforts to integrate the new arrivals more strenuous. Instead, Europe's leaders ended up creating a clash of civilizations inside their own frontiers.

Millions of Muslims have accepted European norms. But millions have not. This means polygamy in Sweden; radical mosques in Britain's fading industrial cities; riots over affronts to the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark; and religiously inspired murder in the Netherlands. It means terrorism, and the threat of terrorism, from London to Madrid.

And it means a rising backlash, in which European voters support extreme measures and extremist parties because their politicians don't seem to have anything to say about the problem.

In fairness, it isn't clear exactly what those leaders could offer at this point. They can't undo decades of migration. A large Muslim minority is in Europe to stay. Persisting with the establishment's approach makes a certain sense: keep a lid on prejudice, tamp down extremism, and hope that time will transform the zealous Islam of recent immigrants into a more liberal form of faith, and make the conflict go away.

Or least keep it manageable. Caldwell's book, the best on the subject to date, has a deeply pessimistic tone, but it shies away from specific predictions about the European future. Other writers are less circumspect, envisioning a Muslim-majority "Eurabia" in which Shariah has as much clout as liberalism.

But even a decadent West is probably stronger than this. The most likely scenario for Europe isn't dhimmitude; it's a long period of tension, punctuated by spasms of violence, that makes the Continent a more unpleasant place without fundamentally transforming it.

This is cold comfort, though, if you have to live under the shadow of violence. Just ask the Swiss, who spent last week worrying about the possibility that the minaret vote might make them a target for Islamist terrorism.

They're right to worry. And all of Europe has to worry as well, thanks to the folly of its leaders -- now, and for many years to come.

The American media gave some notice to the massacre of 57 in the Philippines this past week.The New York Times did its usual best at not reporting the real news, as shown by this article that appeared in Saturday's Times.

What is really going on here?

The locale of the massacre is on the Philippine island of Mindanao, which is largely in the hands of Muslims, some of whom play ball with the national parties in the mostly Roman Catholic country. Other Muslims have been waging an insurgent war for decades to make the Philippines totally Islamic, starting with Mindanao.

One of the Muslim clans which rules in the Mindanao province of Maguindanao with the support of the national government did not like the idea of a fellow Muslim mounting a challenge for governor in next year's election. As the challenger's supporters were driving to the provincial capital to file his election certificate in a six-car convoy (which included the candidate's wife), they were ambushed by about 100 supporters of the ruling Ampatuan clan or tribe. Those in the convoy and two other cars that happened to be following the convoy were taken a couple of miles off the road and all 57 captives were brutally maimed and murdered. Army and police alerted to the ambush by witnesses located the massacre site before the Ampatua family had finished the job. Using a provincial government back-hoe, three massive holes in the ground had been dug for the bodies and vehicles and some had been filled and covered, but 22 bodies will still on the ground when the authorities arrived. The attackers had been warned by cell phone and had fled the scene.

Of the 57 victims, about 16 were women and 30 were journalists who joined the convoy to report on the filing of the electoral challenge.

Later, some participants in the massacre, who had pangs of conscience, reported to authorities what had happened, which led to the arrest of the son of the provincial governor.

A Philippine TV station posted a timeline on the internet, which can be accessed by clicking here.

Details are still coming out, as in the Times story linked, which fails to note the Islamic culture of vicious violence that is embedded in Mindanao. The late Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington, in advancing his theory in the early 1990s that the future would be marked by a "clash of civilizations," specifically referred to the "bloody borders" of Islam. Islam breeds not only a readiness to violence against infidels, but against "the other," including fellow Muslims of a different tribe or sect.

Read the Times piece and think about the brutality involved perpetrated by men who didn't even know their victims, including some who just happened to be in cars behind the official convoy of the challenger. There is what to a westerner appears to be a sick but gleeful use of violence deployed in the massacre, a terrorist warning to all who would challenge the clan that ugly things will happen to them and their followers should they even try.

Was it terrorism, the national government wonders. Of course it was. It is the stock and trade of true Islam that more and more is being revived as the teachings of what the Koran and Mohammed really mean are spread throughout the world by Saudi oil billions.

COLUMBUS, Ohio November 16, 2009 --Dozens of Christian activists descended on Columbus Monday morning to rally in the name of Rifqa Barry, the central Ohio teenager who converted from Islam to Christianity. Bary fled to Florida during the summer, saying she feared her father would kill her because of her conversion. Would she be another "honor killing" victim in the U.S. or in Sri Lanka, should she be sent back by her family to their Muslim relatives back home?

Bary is now back in Ohio under foster care. Her case is moving through the legal system. A hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed until December 22.

Rally-goers said they are worried about Bary's safety if she is returned to her parents.

"There is the larger question of, 'Is Aamerica going to protect religious freedom at this time and allow this girl to make a choice in conscience to be a Christian, rather than a Muslim," asked Robert Spencer, a co-organizer of the rally.

Spencer was interviewed at the rally about the threat of Islam, which has two aspects of concern to America: violent jihad and stealth jihad. The Fort Hood murderer Major Nidal Hasan is a violent jihadist killing "infidels" in the name of Islam. Those Muslims who constantly seek special privileges for Islamic practices or to silence all criticism of Islam as "racist" are examples of stealth jihadists. The ultimate goal of jihad is universal rule of Islam in the world, including Islamic law replacing the Constitution in the United States.

The interviewer of Robert Spencer in the video clip below is an ex-Muslim Nabil Qureshi. Spencer is one of the most knowledgeable students of Islam in the world.

Political correctness and multiculturalism are major obstacles in the battle to preserve Western civilization.

The problem with Islam is Islam.

The dominant view in Islam today is that promulgated by Saudi Arabia, which maintains that adherence to the words and practices of Muhammad as reflected in the Koran is the only right path for Muslims.for all time in all places.

Consequently, hatred of the other - be it Shiite, Christian, Hindu or athiest -- is inbred from birth. Generations have so been taught around the world by Saudi-funded texts, teachers, schools and mosques. This rigid, aggressive, all-conquering, violence-promoting ideology is a grave threat to western civilization. Islam, as an all-encompassing guide for every aspect of life, allows no deviation or accommodation.

There are three possibilities for non-Muslims: Accept, appease and be dominated by Islam as the implacable force overwhelms the compliant culture. Oppose by all means possible, from warfare to expulsion of aliens from western lands. An internal struggle within Islam will adapt it to western principles of freedom and individual rights.

In Europe, Islamization is on march and there appears to be no force to stop it.

However, some enlightened few within Islam are trying to make fundamental change. Whether these voices among the Islamic elite will have much effect on the more than one billion Muslims worldwide in the short run will have any effect is doubtful. The propensity if not encouragement to violence in the cause of Islamic domination that is a way of life in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, NIgeria and so many other countries where Muslims are numerous has been building for decades and will take at least decades if not centuries to moderate, if ever there is a movement to do so.

Nonetheless, a report from the Barnabas Fund, a British charity whose mission is providing support for persecuted Christians in Muslim lands, on new voices speaking out for moderation in Islam seems to present some hope.

The founder of the Barnabas Fund Dr Patrick Sookhdeo is an ex-Muslim convert to Christianity and is most knowledgeable about Islamic strategies to confuse and diffuse opposition to the advance of Islam.

That he sees something positive in the new report issuing from the Islamic Center at the University of Cambridge discussed at length in the report (Contexualizing Islam in Britain) is not a result of naivete.

However, optimism must be restrained at least somewhat when one realizes that the Cambridge Islamic Center is funded by the Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. Alwaleed has funded Islamic centers at Georgetown at Harvard which, for example, are promoting the acceptance of Shariah Finance, which was invented decades ago in Pakistan as nothing more than a subtle tool for the spread of Islamic practices in western societies.

The report does express disappointment that some western leaders such as President Obama are not supporting such voices of reform but are catering to those promoting the traditional Islam which is a threat to the West.

The report is well worth reading.

Islam: at war within itself

2009-10-29

Barnabas Fund

Dr Patrick Sookhdeo
International Director, Barnabas Aid

Introduction

Recent months have seen a number of unexpected and extremely encouraging statements coming out of the Muslim world. Respected, mainstream Muslim leaders in a variety of countries have voiced opinions which are at odds with traditional, conservative Islam. They have challenged aspects of shari'a and are calling for a liberal, modernist, enlightened Islam compatible with Western norms. Perhaps the most significant of all is a comment by a group of British Muslims calling for an end to the apostasy law and for full freedom in all religious matters.

Since modernisation first impacted the Muslim world following the imposition of secular laws and education systems by Western colonial empires, there have been tensions between Muslim conservatives and liberal intellectuals. Islamic traditionalists and Islamists have on the whole gained the dominant voice within Islam, especially since the Islamic resurgence which began in the 1970s and has swept all before it. These conservatives saw shari'a as divinely inspired and unchangeable, valid for all times and places, and attacked the few liberal voices seeking to reinterpret the Muslim sources in line with modern contexts and human rights.

A small minority of marginalised Muslim progressives has been bravely defying traditional and Islamist pressures by reinterpreting Islam in a way compatible with modern concepts of secularity, individual human rights, religious freedom and gender equality.

However, recently some significant cracks seem to be forming within the mainstream Islam. Important mainstream leaders are coming out against long-held key traditional views and Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines and practices, openly supporting ideas compatible with modernity. It would seem that the reformist teachings of Ahmad Khan (1817 - 1898) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849 -1905), which had been suppressed, are now resurfacing within mainstream Islam. As some experts on Islam have always been saying, "the really decisive battle is taking place within Muslim civilization, where ultraconservatives compete against moderates and democrats for the soul of the Muslim public." [1]

Some examples:

Kuwaiti Women MPs refuse to wear hijab

Two Kuwaiti women Members of Parliament, among the first four women to be elected to Kuwait`s National Assembly in May 2009, have refused to wear the Islamic headscarf (hijab) in parliament. They demanded the annulment of an amendment to electoral regulations, introduced by Islamists, that enforces the observation of shari'a in parliament.[2]

Tantawi and the niqab at al-Azhar

During a recent tour of a Cairo secondary school, Sheikh Muhammad Tantawi, the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar University in Cairo (the most important Sunni theological centre in the world), was angered by the sight of a girl wearing the niqab (the full veil which covers the face with only slits for the eyes). He instructed her to remove the niqab, saying "The niqab is a tradition; it has no connection with religion". Ironically, the girl claimed to have worn the niqab in honour of his visit.[3]

Tantawi angrily told the girl that the niqab "has nothing to do with Islam and is only a custom" and ordered her to take it off. He also announced that he would soon issue a formal order (fatwa) banning girls from entering al-Azhar institutions wearing the niqab. "Niqab has nothing to do with Islam, it is just a habit. I know more about religion than you and your parents," he told the student.[4]

Dr. Mahmoud Hamdi Zarqouq, Egyptian Minister of Religious Affairs, went further than Tantawi declaring his utter opposition to the niqab, stressing that "it is just a habit that has nothing to do with religion . . . niqab is an invention that has nothing to do with religion, for the religious men agree that the women`s face and jaws are not improper [to show]." [5]

Imam condemns Church passivity in face of Muslim persecution of Christians [6]

In an interview with Premier Christian Radio earlier this year, Sheikh Dr Muhammad al-Hussaini, founder of Scripture Reasoning and Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Leo Beck Rabbinical College, blamed the church hierarchy in the UK for not protesting vociferously and actively at Christian persecution around the world. Al-Hussaini mentioned specifically horrendous machete attacks on Christians in Nigeria, Iraqi Christians being burned out of their homes and Christians in Pakistan being stoned or attacked on the slightest pretext. He highlighted Barnabas Aid`s efforts on behalf of persecuted Christians as an example of how concerned Christians ought to respond to the plight of their fellow Christians.

While Muslims are hypersensitive to any ill-treatment of Muslims anywhere in the world, he added, they remain silent about the persecution of Christians in their midst. Many Muslims are simply looking for scapegoats to punish for their own troubles. They know that churches in the West will not do more than utter a whimper, as this issue is not sufficiently important to them, mainly because those suffering are neither white nor wealthy, so they can go on with impunity blaming Crusader-Zionist conspiracies for everything.

He called upon the church to be a voice for justice for persecuted minorities, which he claims would speak "into the heart of the Muslim community".

"Contextualising Islam in Britain" report [7]

This report, published in October 2009, is the work of several prominent British Muslim academics and religious leaders. It has broken new ground in coming out with plain statements on key issues, avoiding the ambiguous statements customarily offered by mainline Muslim leaders. It calls for a Muslim worldview based not exclusively on jurisprudence but including Islamic philosophy (falsafah), theology (kalam) and literature (adab).

For Muslims living as a minority in a secular liberal democracy, applying shari'a is a matter of personal conscience and communal suasion rather than legal sanction, says the report. Muslims are not obliged to implement full shari'a against the wishes of their non-Muslim neighbours.[8] Shari'a is not a detailed code of things forbidden and permitted but an ethical system of moral and spiritual education. There are commonalities between the underlying objectives (maqasid) of shari'a and human rights declarations.[9]

The paper opposes the traditional view of divine sovereignty only implemented in an Islamic state under shari'a. It states that this system engenders a lack of democratic checks and balance, a lack of accountability, and may lead to tyranny. An Islamic state is not necessary for Islam to thrive and be practised. Secular democracy as practised in Britain is legitimate because it holds power to account and upholds fundamental freedoms and non-interference in the religious lives of its citizens.[10]

British Muslims, say the authors, are perfectly happy with the British form of procedural secularism (in contrast to ideological secularism) and support its accommodative tradition. The separation of religion from the state and the principle of non-discrimination by the state between religions guarantee freedom and equality for all, giving Muslims the freedom to practise Islam without interference in an atmosphere of respect, security and dignity. [11]

The authors clearly oppose the concepts of takfir [12] and al-wala` wal-bara` [13] which differentiate sharply between perceived true believers and all others, demanding hostility and enmity. Distinctions between believers and non-believers are important only in matters of doctrine and worship, not in matters of social interaction and of seeking the common good of society. In these matters it is important to have friendly relationships with non-Muslims, treating them as equals, and to focus on commonalities and shared values. [14]

The paper states that Islam teaches the equality of all humans regardless of gender and that it forbids forced marriages, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, and honour killings.[15]

Muslims should campaign against injustices and oppression inflicted by Muslims on other Muslims and on non-Muslims. [16]

On suicide terrorism and bombings they state that there are many ways to oppose oppression other than fighting (jihad). These include lobbying, activism, and writing. Foreign conflicts cannot justify violence in Britain.[17] They add that "Islam is opposed to all forms of terrorism, regardless of who sponsors them . . . Both suicide and suicide bombings are absolutely forbidden (haram) in Islam as is the killing of innocent people. [18]

The authors adopt the modern Christian principle of differentiating between religious sin and state-legislated crime. Thus on apostasy they explain that Islam dislikes apostasy but prohibits discrimination against apostates, adding that: "It is important to say quite simply that people have the freedom to enter the Islamic faith and the freedom to leave it". Similarly on homosexuality they state that the Qur`an forbids both the practice of homosexual acts, and discrimination against homosexuals. [19]

The declaration on apostasy is especially important because it goes clearly against the shari'a law of apostasy, accepted by all Islamic schools of law, which lays down a death sentence for those who leave Islam. The authors explain that in early Islam apostasy was conflated with treason in times of war. It was treason that merited the death penalty, not the apostasy. Therefore today "there is no compulsion and people cannot be coerced into a religious commitment". [20] Other Muslim leaders dealing with apostasy had not dared question the validity of the classical apostasy law, but had either asked for the repentance phase (usually 3 days) to be lengthened indefinitely (for example, Ali Gomaa, Chief Mufti of Egypt) or for a moratorium until the time was deemed ripe for the full implementation of shari'a (for example, Tariq Ramadan).

Analysis

There is now a powerful struggle going on for the soul of Islam. It would seem that under the combined pressure of extremist Islamist terrorism, the "war on terror" and the dangers to Muslim regimes and societies, new voices are emerging within mainstream Islamic leadership embracing a new ijtihad [21] compatible with modernity and human rights. They would seem to accept the liberal reformist view of prioritising the core values of Islam, distilled from the Islamic source texts, as spiritual and moral norms that override literalist, coercive, political and social interpretations. They seem to be willing to ignore traditional Islamic concepts that contradict modern humanistic values of pluralism, freedom and equality.

Conclusion

France has forbidden the wearing of the hijab in public places and recently its highest constitutional authority, the Constitutional Council, has refused the introduction of Islamic finance on the grounds that a secular state must not allow principles of shari'a to be recognised in its legislation.[22] In contrast, the governments of the USA and of the UK have consistently sided with the more repressive, conservative and traditional sections within their Muslim communities, apparently hoping to placate, accommodate and appease them by accepting their demands for shari'a implementation in multiple spheres. At the same time they have ignored the more progressive and liberal voices in the Muslim community implying that they are too weak and marginal to be viable interlocutors for governments.

Arab liberals have criticised President Obama`s tendency to endorse conservative and radical forms of Islam while ignoring liberal Muslim trends. A Yemeni liberal journalist accused Obama of appointing Muslim advisors who do not represent the diversity of Muslim opinion and who want to implement oppressive shari'a rules.[23] Others have criticised Obama`s overtures to the Taliban and Iran as strengthening the radicals and weakening the reformists and liberals.[24]

A similar trend is visible in liberal and mainline Christian denominations whose leaders prefer to deal with Islamic traditionalists and hardliners in interfaith dialogue while ignoring the liberal reformist voices emerging within Islam.

It is time Western governments and Christian Churches implemented a policy of rejecting traditional Muslim and Islamist demands and that they shifted to a position of active support for the new voices of reason and moderation within Islam.

Barnabas Aid applauds these encouraging moves and the courageous Muslims advocating them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Robert W. Hefner, "September 11 and the Struggle for Islam", in Craig Calhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer, eds., Understanding September 11, Project coordinated by the Social Science Research Council, New York: The New Press., 2002, pp. 41-52.

[2] Richard Spencer, "Kuwaiti women MPs refuse to wear hijab in parliament", Daily Telegraph, 12 October 2009.

[3] Adrian Blomfield, "Egypt purges niqab from schools and colleges", Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2009.

[4] "Sheikh al-Azhar forces a student to remove her Niqab", Mideastwire, 5 October 2009, quoting Al-Masry al-Yawm, "Egypt`s Top Cleric Plans Face Veil Ban in Schools", Asharq Alawsat, 6 October 2009.

[5] "Sheikh al-Azhar: I`m not against Niqab and 80% of religious men...", Mideastwire, 13 October 2009, quoting Al-Masry al-Yawm.

[6] "Imam blames Christian leaders for the Persecution of Christians", Christian Concern for our Nation, 28 August 2009, http://www.ccfon.org/view.php?id=825, accessed 20 October 2009.

[7] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, University of Cambridge in Association with the Universities of Exeter and Westminster, Centre of Islamic Studies: Cambridge, October 2009.

[8] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 10-11.

[9] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 10-11, 54.

[10] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 10-11, 32-33.

[11] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 28, 33.

[12] takfir - the process of declaring someone to be an apostate from Islam, a process which has been revived by radical contemporary jihadi groups.

[13] Al-wala` wal bara` - "Friendship and Distinguishing", a doctrine applied by radical groups to differentiate and separate between real and false Muslims. True Islam is defined by a love for Muslims and a hatred for non-Muslims.

[14] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 11-12.

[15] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 12-13.

[16] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, p. 65.

[17] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, p. 14.

[18] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 71, 78.

[19] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, p. 75.

[20] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, p. 47.

[21] ijtihad - the process of individual effort by a jurist at logical deduction on a legal question, using the Qur`an and hadith as sources. Ijtihad allows fresh interpretations made from the two sources.

[22] "France court quashes Islamic Finance measure", Al-Arabiya News Channel, 15 October 2009.

[23] "Yemeni Liberal Criticizes Appointment of Dalia Mogahed as Obama`s Advisor on Islam", MEMRI Special Dispatch, No. 2518, 4 September 2009.

[24] "Criticism in the Arab Press of the US Administration`s Initiative to Reach Out to 'Moderates in the Taliban`", MEMRI Special Dispatch, No. 2353, 12 May 2009; "Arab Liberals Eight Years After 9-11: Obama`s Overtures Towards Iran Extremists Seen as a Sign of Weakness", MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis, No. 551, 29 September 2009.

Just another reminder of reality.

Muslim threats to Christians rise in Pakistan

October 4, 2009

Anjum Herald Gill THE WASHINGTON TIMES

LAHORE, Pakistan | Christians in Pakistan are feeling increasingly insecure after several violent attacks by Muslim extremists in the past two months.

In one case, eight Christians were burned to death by a Muslim mob after reports that the Muslim holy book, the Koran, had been desecrated.

Growing Talibanization of the country and a blasphemy law in place for two decades make non-Muslims, especially Christians, easy targets for discrimination and attacks, Christian and human rights activists say.

"The attacks on Christians seem to be symptomatic of a well-organized campaign launched by extremist elements against the Christian community all over central Punjab since early this year," Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Chairwoman Asma Jehangir said at a press conference last month.

The situation has become so serious that Pope Benedict XVI and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari discussed it during a meeting Thursday at the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, the Associated Press reported.

The Vatican said the two stressed "the need to overcome all forms of discrimination based on religious affiliation, with the aim of promoting respect for the rights of all."

Most of the attacks on Christians' houses and churches followed claims of desecration of the Koran. Subsequent investigations generally proved the claims to be false.

Pakistani Minority Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian himself, said that no Christian would even think of desecrating the Koran. Some elements wanted to create an atmosphere of disharmony, but the government would not allow anybody to play with the lives and properties of the Christians, he said.

On June 30, a mob attacked Christians' houses in the village of Bahmani Wala in Kasur district of Punjab province, destroying more than 50 houses after looting.

On July 30, eight people were burned alive in the village of Gojra, also in Punjab, after a purported incident of desecration of the Koran in the nearby village of Korian Wala. Churches were attacked and copies of the Bible and hymn books were burned in both villages. In Korian Wala alone, more than 50 houses of Christians were ransacked.

On Sept. 11, a church in a village in Punjab's Sialkot district was burned after claims that a 20-year-old Christian youth had desecrated the Koran. On Sept. 15, a day after his arrest, Robert Masih was found dead in his jail cell. Police reported it as a suicide, but Mr. Masih's family claims he was killed. Joseph Francis, who runs an organization providing legal assistance to Christians, said he saw marks of torture on Mr. Masih's body.

Christians account for about 4 percent of the 170 million population of Pakistan, which was carved out of India as a state for Muslims at the time of independence from Britain in 1947.

Since then, successive civilian and military rulers have progressively strengthened the Islamic character of the country by introducing Shariah law. A controversial blasphemy law introduced in 1986 also has widened the gap between the minority Christians and majority Muslims.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom listed Pakistan as a "country of particular concern" in 2006, citing forced conversions of Christians to Islam and a rise in hate crimes against religious minorities.

All the recent attacks targeting Christians, activist groups claimed, were provoked by hate speeches made by Muslim clerics on loudspeakers from mosques.

"The rising intolerance and violence against Christians is a result of the Talibanization and promulgation of Shariah law in the country," said Kanwal Feroze, a well-known journalist. "It is not a matter of blasphemy law, but shows a mind-set of the common man."

When the blasphemy law was introduced during the rule of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the punishment was life imprisonment. It was changed to the death penalty by the Federal Shariah Court in 1992 when Nawaz Sharif was prime minister.

Since the inception of the blasphemy law, as many as 976 cases have been registered under it, of which 180 were against Christians. When a Christian is accused of blasphemy, he or she can be granted bail only by the top court in the province.

The step-by-step Islamization of Pakistan began in 1956, when the country's name was changed from the Democratic Republic of Pakistan to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. In 1973, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto changed the country's constitution to declare Islam the religion of the state. Non-Muslims were barred from becoming president or the prime minister, and denied seats in the Senate.

Mr. Bhutto - father-in law of current President Asif Ali Zardari - also nationalized church-run schools and institutions. Some of them were denationalized later by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who led Pakistan from 1999 until 2008.

In 1979, Gen. Zia introduced several Islamic laws that discriminated against non-Muslims - strengthening fundamentalist organizations and sowing the early seeds for Talibanization.

Under the Evidence Act of the Islamic law, a Christian man's witness is worth half that of a Muslim. Christian women would not be deemed as witnesses at all.

Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women but a Christian man cannot marry a Muslim woman. The constitutional provisions also welcome a Christian to embrace Islam, but when a Muslim converts to Christianity, the penalty is death.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has promised to review laws that could fuel hate for non-Muslim citizens after the recent attacks. A committee has been formed to look into the laws and make recommendations.

However, hard-line parties such as Jamaat-e-Islami and the banned militant organization Dawat-ul-Irshad already have warned of protests if the blasphemy law is rescinded. Even the mainstream Pakistan Muslim League-Q party of Mr. Musharraf has threatened to resist any change in the law.

One commentator on this report said this:

Wake up world. Muslims have been raping, terrorising and pillaging for 1500 years. The Koran teaches to kill all infidels, unless they convert to Islam. It won't stop on its own. Islam is like a cancer, unless you kill it, it will kill you.

Another:

FINALLY, THE TRUE TARGET OF ISLAMISTS IS BEING REVEALED. IT IS NOT ISRAEL AS MANY LIKE TO BELIEVE. NOR IS IT UNITED STATES, AS SUCH. THE TARGET OF THE WAR ISLAM IS WAGING SINCE MUHAMMAD WENT TO MEET ALLAH, AND EVEN BEFORE THAT, WAS AND CONTINUES TO BE CHRISTIANITY.

The following story made headlines in British papers this morning. In our inbox the email from The London Telegraph featured the item, but a clickthrough showed that the story had been yanked from the Telegraph's site. So much for the bravery of the once leading conservative newspaper. This rendition of the story is from the London Daily Mail.

Author Sebastian Faulks risks Muslim fury by describing the Koran as the 'depressing rantings of a schizophrenic'

By Sophie Freeman
Last updated at 2:42 PM on 24th August 2009

Research: Author Sebastian Faulks turned to the Koran while writing his latest novel. He described the Islamic holy scripture as 'barren'

Best-selling novelist Sebastian Faulks has risked incurring the wrath of Muslims by dismissing the Koran as just 'the depressive rantings of a schizophrenic' with 'no ethical dimension'.

The author of Birdsong and Engleby also claimed that, compared to the Bible, the Islamic holy scripture is 'barren'.

Faulks, who turned to the Koran while researching his latest novel, said: 'It's a depressing book. It really is. It's just the rantings of a schizophrenic. It's very one-dimensional, and people talk about the beauty of the Arabic and so on, but the English translation I read was, from a literary point of view, very disappointing.

'There is also the barrenness of the message,' he told The Sunday Times. 'I mean, there are some bits about diet, you know, the equivalent of the Old Testament, which is also crazy.

'But the great thing about the Old Testament is that it does have these incredible stories. Of the 100 greatest stories ever told, 99 are probably in the Old Testament and the other is in Homer.

'With the Koran there are no stories. And it has no ethical dimension like the New Testament, no new plan for life. It says 'the Jews and the Christians were along the right tracks, but actually, they were wrong and I'm right, and if you don't believe me, tough -- you'll burn for ever'. That's basically the message of the book.'

Faulks read the Koran to help him write A Week in December, which will be published next month.

The novel, which is set in present-day London, has a cast of characters including the wife of Britain's youngest MP, a female Tube train driver, a hedge fund manager and a Glasgow-born Islamic terrorist recruit.

Ajmal Masroor, an imam and spokesman for the Islamic Society of Britain said Faulk's statements ran the risk of stirring religious hatred against Muslims.

'Attacks on Islam are nothing new, but the danger is this will have a 'drip, drip' effect.

'People don't seem to understand the consequences of saying things like this could be quite severe. History tells us it can encourage hatred.'

In 1989, a fatwa was issued for the author Salman Rushdie, after the publication of his book The Satanic Verses the previous year. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, said the book was 'blasphemous against Islam, and called for Rushdie to be executed.

UPDATE: Predictably, the author caved as the threats mounted. His craven apology appeared in the press a few days after publication of his honest remarks.

While top Obama officials are erasing from their vocabularies such terms as Islamic terrorism, jihad, jihadism, radical Islam, war on terror and Islamic war of world conquest, the Islamic war of world conquest goes on.

It's going on in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Russia, the United Kingdom, Somalia, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya, the United States, Canada, Australia and India, to name just a few places. It's also fanning out from the Islamic terrorist strongholds in Algeria down into the almost ungovernable states of Niger, Mali and Mauritania.

What's unusual about this report in the Wall Street Journal is that, unlike reports carried in the New York Times, other mainstream media and Associated Press and Reuters newswires the reporter actually uses correct descriptives in telling what's happening.

The Koran commands all Muslims to engage in worldwide jihad until Islam is universal and all infidels are killed or enslaved. Almost all Muslims learn this from birth and many decide the way to glory and Paradise is to take up arms, kidnap, rape, kill and seize the property of others (booty, as Mohammad called it). You can get rich and have fun in the process once you get used to the blood.

Islamic Rebels Gain Strength in the Sahara

Moving South From Algeria, al Qaeda-Affiliated Insurgents Find Support Among Locals in Mauritania, Mali and Niger

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania -- Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels are spreading far beyond their original battleground in Algeria and increasingly threatening Africa's Sahara belt, scaring away investors and tourists as they undercut the region's fragile economies.

Click to enlarge.

Dozens of security personnel, as well as an American aid worker and a British tourist, were killed by militants in several attacks in the region this summer alone. The attacks -- which prompted this year's lucrative Paris-Dakar car race to relocate to South America -- have become more frequent and brazen. Recent hits occurred not just in the remote desert but also in Mali's tourist magnet Timbuktu and in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where a suicide bomber attacked the French Embassy last weekend.

Though still dominated by the veterans of Algeria's civil war, this Saharan insurgency has grown deep local roots. Armed bands roaming the desert include hundreds of recruits from Mauritania, Mali and Niger -- vast and impoverished countries that straddle the Arab world and black West Africa, and that relied on the now-collapsed tourism industry as the key source of foreign exchange.

"What had started out as an Algerian problem is now engulfing Mali and Mauritania. They are the weak link," says Zakaria Ould Ahmed Salem, a specialist on political Islam at the University of Nouakchott.

An Islamist insurgency that cost 200,000 lives erupted in Algeria 18 years ago, after that country's secular regime annulled the second round of elections that the Islamists were poised to win. But it is only in the past few years, as Algerian security forces contained the violence at home, that the rebels -- who seek to create an Islamic state encompassing North Africa -- began mounting operations in neighboring Saharan countries that had been unscathed by international terrorism.

Underlining its wider ambitions, the main Algerian insurgent movement, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, re-branded itself in 2007 as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. Actual operational links between AQIM militants in the Sahara and traditional al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan or Afghanistan are tenuous, if they exist at all, Western officials say.

But the group's new name has made it easier to find money and recruits for the cause outside Algeria. "Someone like Bin Laden is considered a hero here," explains Mohamed Fall Ould Oumere, publisher of La Tribune newsweekly in Nouakchott.

Mauritania, where most people speak Arabic and watch satellite TV chains like Al-Jazeera, is a particularly fertile ground for AQIM's growth, and accounts for a growing share of the movement's cadres, Western diplomats say. In Mali, Niger and Chad, the bulk of AQIM recruits also come from Arab-speaking communities, which in these countries are outnumbered by black African majorities.

AQIM is trying to spread south, "aiming to attract the young Muslims of the region -- white ones and black ones," says Isselmou Ould Moustafa, a specialist on AQIM who interviewed many of the group's members for his Mauritanian publication, Tahalil Hebdo.

Security officials in Nigeria recently claimed that AQIM trained in Algeria some members of Boko Haram, the Islamist sect whose armed uprising cost several hundred lives in northern Nigeria last month. According to some experts on AQIM, there is also evidence of contacts between the Saharan insurgents and the Shabaab, the radical Islamist militia controlling a chunk of Somalia. "It's an arc of fire," says Mr. Oumere.

All the governments in the region say they are fighting back. But the area's political instability and frequent bickering between neighboring countries have long made it easy for Islamist rebels to roam the Sahara, obtaining sanctuary and help from local tribes. Mali and Mauritania both have strained relations with Algeria. Planned regional summits to tackle the cross-border terrorism problem have been repeatedly postponed.

A military coup in Mauritania last year complicated the situation: The U.S. reacted to the overthrowing of Mauritania's democratically elected president by reducing military cooperation with the country and pulling out a reconnaissance plane that flew regular sorties over the Sahara to search for insurgents. Cooperation is likely to be restored now that Mauritania has held a democratic election last month.

Government officials here say that, without outside help, Saharan countries have little chance of defeating AQIM. "This is a zone that can't be controlled. We don't know who's out there in the vast desert and what are they doing," says Mohamed Ould Rzeizim, who served until this week as Mauritania's minister of interior.

To finance its campaign, AQIM is smuggling Europe-bound cigarettes, drugs and illegal immigrants through the desert, Mauritanian and Western officials say. Depots of untaxed cigarettes, often brought in by ship from South America, dot the desert along Mauritania's porous northern borders.

An equally important source of revenue for AQIM is ransom money -- estimated at tens of millions of dollars -- paid by European governments for the freedom of European tourists kidnapped in separate attacks in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali and Niger. The hostages were usually transported across the Sahara to AQIM's bases in lawless northern Mali, where local officials helped negotiate the ransom collection and the tourists' release.

Mali's role as a sanctuary for AQIM has long infuriated Algeria and the U.S. The country appears to be taking a harder line after the Islamist rebels -- who refrained from killing their hostages in the past -- announced in June that they executed their British captive, Edwin Dyer.

A few days after the killing of Mr. Dyer, suspected militants also gunned down in Timbuktu the regional chief of Malian intelligence, Lt. Col. Lamina Ould Bou. The colonel, an ethnic Arab and former Islamist rebel, had played a crucial role in Mali's efforts against AQIM. According to Malian government accounts and al Qaeda Internet postings, armed clashes in the region in following weeks killed dozens of Malian troops and Islamist guerrillas.

"We are now engaged in a total struggle against al Qaeda," Mali's President Amadou Toumani Touré declared last month.

The Saharan rebels have so far targeted only foreigners and security forces, sparing civilian targets like restaurants and hotels. In Algeria, Pakistan and Iraq, by contrast, al Qaeda-affiliated militants showed no concern about killing large numbers of Muslim civilians.

"These youngsters are not yet ready to carry out blind attacks and to explode car bombs, Algerian-style. They have not yet completely broken with the Mauritanian society," says Mr. Moustafa, the AQIM expert. But, he cautions, bloodier attacks are likely to happen soon: "They have bad teachers. Their future targets will be Mauritanian."

Mainstream media outlets in Europe are finally beginning to comment, however gingerly, about the Muslim threat to civilization. Excellent books have been written by Americans Bruce Bawer, Mark Steyn and Walter Laqueur, and now Christopher Caldwell, about the Muslim "time bomb." Leading European media from the BBC to newspapers have pursued a politically correct course of ignoring the problem or euphemistically describing it away.

The London Telegraph has finally waded in with a large survey piece with the arresting opener:

A fifth of European Union will be Muslim by 2050

Britain, Spain and Holland will have an even higher proportion of Muslims in a shorter amount of time, an investigation by The Telegraph shows.

The Telegraph survey article itself (see below) sketches the demographics of the Muslim population explosion resulting from massive immigration and high birth rates, but only alludes to Muslim self-ghettoization while leaving out altogether mention of the accompanying explosions of youth crime and welfare costs.

For example, Caldwell reports these staggering statistics on immigration in Germany, which is overwhelmingly Muslim from Turkey:

Take the example of Germany. In 1970, 82 percent of its immigrants were in the workforce, but by 1980 only 58 percent had jobs. The decline continued: By 1990, just 41 percent were in the workforce, and by 2000 only 33 percent were. Over these five decades the number of foreign residents in Germany rose from 2.7 million to 7.3 million.

Sweden has been particularly welcoming to and accepting of Muslim "culture." As a consequence, Malmo, its second largest city, is virtually under the control of Muslim street gangs who attack the weak elderly for their possessions and native girls for rape. And France has mapped and publicly identified several hundred Muslim "no-go zones" which the public and public officials are advised not to enter.

The European left, which controls the BBC and much of the media and through the Labour Party the present government, not only studiously ignores the threat, but embraces Islam -- the views of which are completely antithetical to theirs except for anti-Americanism and anti-Christianity.

A few conservative political voices are being courageously raised, such as those of Geert Wilders in Holland, but so far political leadership is far behind the public in its opposition to Muslim immigration, separatism and their favored treatment by governments, media and the elites.

Mark Steyn, an early "alarmist," notes the Telegraph piece, declares it understates the problem and the rapidity of change to be effected by Muslim population growth in the major cities of western Europe.

Muslim Europe: the demographic time bomb transforming our continent

The EU is facing an era of vast social change, reports Adrian Michaels, and few politicians are taking notice

By Adrian Michaels
Published: 11:11AM BST 08 Aug 2009

Europe's low white birth rate, coupled with faster multiplying migrants, will change fundamentally what we take to mean by European culture and society.

Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a demographic time bomb: a recent rush into the EU by migrants, including millions of Muslims, will change the continent beyond recognition over the next two decades, and almost no policy-makers are talking about it.

The numbers are startling. Only 3.2 per cent of Spain's population was foreign-born in 1998. In 2007 it was 13.4 per cent. Europe's Muslim population has more than doubled in the past 30 years and will have doubled again by 2015. In Brussels, the top seven baby boys' names recently were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza.

Europe's low white birth rate, coupled with faster multiplying migrants, will change fundamentally what we take to mean by European culture and society. The altered population mix has far-reaching implications for education, housing, welfare, labour, the arts and everything in between. It could have a critical impact on foreign policy: a study was submitted to the US Air Force on how America's relationship with Europe might evolve. Yet EU officials admit that these issues are not receiving the attention they deserve.

The war to impose Islamic law in Nigeria through violence has claimed at least 700 more dead in new rioting. The war has been ongoing for years, pushing south from largely Muslim northern Nigeria, but also attacking non-Muslims living in lands already under Sharia. The most recent major explosion of Islamic violence four years ago in the north resulted in many Christian deaths and churches burnt. Associated Press reports on this current blood shedding:

In a wave of violence that began Sunday, July 26, in Bauchi and quickly spread to three other northern states, including Borno, the sect, Boko Haram -- the name means "Western education is sacrilege" -- attacked police stations, churches and government buildings. The group is seeking the imposition of strict Islamic Shariah law in Nigeria, a country of several religions.

Roughly half of Nigerians are Christians, living mostly in the south. Several northern states are officially under Islamic law.

35-year-old Ibrahim Mohammed, told the AP that he and his family cowered in their house for days, terrorized by knife and sword-wielding sect members -- then later by soldiers, who, he said, would shoot anything that moved.

"It was terrible," Mr. Mohammed said as he drew an imaginary knife across his throat. "At first if you run, (the sect) will knife you, and then after you run, (soldiers) will shoot you."

He said he hid 17 Christian neighbors, including a pregnant woman, in his house during the fighting.

The term Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington coined in his famous Foreign Affairs essay in 1993 continues to be apt: "Islam has bloody borders." So it has been for 1400 years as Mohammad's imperative for Islamic world conquest plays on.

More. . .

Oh, and in Pakistan rampaging Muslims torched Christian homes and killed six, including four women and an infant.

Wafa Sultan, brought up in Islamic Syria and trained as a physician, was lucky enough with her husband to emigrate to the United States and settled in the Los Angeles area. She appeared on al Jazeera TV and said that there wasn't a war of civilizations going on, it was a war between civilization and the barbarism of Islam. She has enraged the leading TV personality on al Jazeera, Shiekh Yousef al-Quaradawi, who opined that any Muslim would be blessed for causing her death. In America, Sultan with her husband are in hiding.

Well, is there barbarism? Isn't this an exaggeration? This story out of Iran makes one think not. Those who rule Iran not only had the military and the Revolutionary Guards, they also had their equivalent of the National Guard without uniforms -- recruits in plain clothes ready to do whatever for the regime for a paycheck. Neda, a music student watching the protests in Iran who has become a symbol of the revolution, was gunned down by a Basiji. There was worse evil.

So a Basiji admits to its barbarism. Because under Islam women who are virgins cannot be executed, prison guards rape them the night before.

The mainstream media, left wing that it is, acts as the left wing in Europe does, siding with Muslims as wonderful new neighbors in Europe. The reality is very different, as this article from Brussels Journal discloses. The Muslim invasion is gaining strength and only courageous people like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands is standing up to say, "STOP." But their numbers are expanding. The message is simple: "Become one of us or leave. We will not abandon our civilization for yours."

American columnist Diana West makes an excellent point: We are playing into Islam's hands in its war of world conquest by refusing, because of fear of offending Muslims or the corrosive habit of political correctness (and perhaps fear of violence), to speak of "the gross incompatibility of Islamic ideology with Western liberty."

Fudging with words and terms such as "Islamist" and "Islamofascism" and "radical Islam" is to confuse Americans who need to know the truth about Islam's true nature and why it must be tamed or turned back. The problem with Islam is its core ideology as contained in the Koran and proclaimed and acted out by Mohammad. Our problem is not with fringe groups who have hijacked Islam. Mohammad's Islam is a religion of war, not of peace, and it has been so for 1400 years. Jihad until Islam rules the world is the duty of every true believer Muslim.

But we must not say that.

Muslim organizations are working on "hate-crime" legislation in the UN and in various countries, including the United States, to make it a punishable offense to criticize Islam. The Attorney General of the United States under the leadership of President Obama is currently advocating expanded coverage of hate-crime legislation. (Dutch pro-freedom parliamentarian Geert Wilders and American Islam expert Robert Spencer both support all hate-crime laws.)

We may have the First Amendment and free speech in the United States, but, it we stifle ourselves from telling the truth about Islam, it is as if free speech doesn't exist.

There is an Islamic network of organizations active in the United States today working on their program of subverting the country from within with the goal that one day Sharia, Islamic law, will replace the U.S. Constitution.

Fanciful, you say? Islam has been engaged in this war of conquest against the rest of the world since it was begun by Mohammad. Today, with trillions in oil wealth and more than a billion followers, Islam may be in the best position at any time in its history to press forward with its war.

Strategies of conquest are tailored to the situation in each country. War in Afghanistan, terrror in Nigeria, aggressive immigration, high birth rates and intimidation in Europe, quiet subversion and random terrorism in the United States and building allies for control over human rights and other policies at the UN.

Ms. West delivered her timely warning against pre-emptive surrender to Islam at the free speech conference of the International Free Press Society held in Denmark's parliament on June 17th.

The Impact of Islam on Free Speech in America

Americans are proud, and rightly so, of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which, among other things, protects speech from government control. The Amendment says in part: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Increasingly, however, Americans seem content to regard the First Amendment not as the fundamental working tool of democracy, but as a national heirloom, a kind of antique to admire rather than put to use. I don't think many of my countrymen perceive how profoundly their attitude toward free speech has changed. But there is a difference between having freedom of speech and exercising freedom of speech, one that has become glaringly and distressingly obvious to me since September 11, 2001. So, while it is true that the US government is not Constitutionally empowered to make laws that censor Americans, it is also true, I believe, that Americans have come to censor themselves. But why?

President Obama is endangering American citizens not only by his constant displays of weakness in the face of foreign aggression, but by surrending to the Global War on Terror, preferring to treat terrorists driven by ideology seeking to destroy American and kill Americans as ordinary criminals rather than the war combatants they are.

Andrew McCarthy, who more than almost anyone, knows the limitiations of the criminal justice system in defending against attacks of war, makes clear the dangers that President Obama is exposing his country and its citizens to.

President Obama and Attorney General Holder are fond of labeling as a "false choice" the reality that, in national exigencies, we have to decide whether to trim some protections for enemy combatants in order to promote security. That's no false choice. It's a real choice, with the lives of our citizens hanging in the balance. If you want to defeat this enemy and prevent these attacks, you go to war and you get intelligence. If you are content to live with this enemy and endure its attacks, you go to court . . . . Obama has decided to go to court.

The problem is that [Obama] wants to treat international terrorists as suspects in a law-enforcement matter rather than as wartime enemies.

The consequences:

[I]f we return to law-enforcement mode under the Obama FBI's new "Global Justice" initiative, then we are back to September 10 -- to the embassy-bombing approach to counterterrorism, in which completed terrorist attacks, rather than interrupted terrorist plots, await us.

Americans will die in terrorist attacks because of Obama's abandoning the war against Islamic terrorism. Is this part of his wish to placate Muslims by denying the ideological hostility at the heart of Islam? In doing so, he is risking the lives of American citizens.

National security has always been the first responsibility of American presidents -- until Barack Obama.

Read the whole frightening story.

How War Fighting Became Law Enforcement

Obama Goes to Court

by Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review Online
June 17, 2009

(Note: In Part I of this article, Andrew C. McCarthy showed how Miranda warnings grew from a procedural safeguard into an inviolable constitutional right. In Part II, he explained how judges and the Justice Department expanded this right to the point where it applied to terrorists captured abroad. Here, in the final part, he describes how the odd couple of John McCain and Barack Obama have put the nation in great danger by turning the War on Terror into something resembling a police investigation.)

Two months after the 1998 bombers of the U.S. embassy in Kenya were convicted, al-Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers, struck the Pentagon, and was foiled by the martyred patriots of Flight 93 in an attempt to attack the Capitol or the White House. Unlike its predecessor, the Bush administration deemed the attack an act of war, as did Congress, which overwhelmingly authorized the use of military force a week later. American officials were dispatched to foreign lands to conduct military and intelligence operations, not criminal investigations. Prosecution, which in the eight previous years had managed to neutralize fewer than three dozen jihadists, most of them low-level, was aptly judged to have been a provocatively weak response to a transnational terrorist network with global aims and frightful capabilities.

The name of the game was now intelligence and prevention, not evidence and prosecution. Radical Islam had to be stopped from attacking -- there could be no trials of suicide terrorists after they'd struck, and even if there could, they'd be a grossly inadequate measure. After 9/11, a premium was put on obtaining information for purposes of mapping the terror network, uncovering ongoing plots, and acquiring operational intelligence that would be of use to our military and covert intelligence forces.

Miranda was separate from all of this. The Miranda rule is a device to ensure the constitutional integrity of confession evidence for use at trial. It has no place in situations where trial either is not contemplated or, if contemplated, is at best a third- or fourth-tier consideration, subordinate to national security, force security, and the preservation of foreign intelligence sources and national-defense secrets. Miranda is designed for the criminal-justice process, in which we impose the burden of proof on the government, the suspect is presumed innocent, we arguably do not want him to implicate himself unless he sees it as in his interest to do so, and we would rather see the government lose than see an innocent person convicted. To the contrary, when the nation goes to war, our primary concern is the national interest, not the suspect's interest; we don't presume a detained combatant innocent, because it is not our purpose to establish his guilt; the government's burden is to prosecute the war, not the war prisoners; and we see it as imperative that the government win -- to the point that we sacrifice our blood and treasure and are resigned to the inevitability of horrific collateral casualties and damage.

In the post-9/11 strategy, then, Miranda had no place. Interrogation was conducted by military and intelligence personnel whose objective was to obtain intelligence, not derive prosecutable evidence. And the emphasis on interrogation has been remarkably effective. For eight years, despite intense efforts to reprise 9/11, al-Qaeda has not carried out a terrorist attack in the United States.

Nevertheless, scandal erupted in 2004, with revelations about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and, later, the CIA's top-secret enhanced-interrogation program for a small number of high-level al-Qaeda detainees. Amid growing public unrest over the war in Iraq, the interrogations controversy provided ample opportunity for demagoguery. Chief among the grandstanders was Sen. John McCain, then planning a 2008 run for the White House. A Vietnam War hero who had famously endured a years-long ordeal of captivity, isolation, and torture, McCain railed at the harsh treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Echoed by allies like Sens. Ted Kennedy (who likened the U.S. administration of Iraq to Saddam Hussein's) and Dick Durbin (who compared American soldiers to thugs who had served the Nazis, the Soviets, and Pol Pot), McCain contributed mightily to the Left's smear that the Bush administration had instituted a systematic torture regime.

In 2005, capitalizing on the atmosphere he had stoked, McCain proposed legislation (the "McCain Amendment") that would vest every person detained by American officials, anywhere in the world, with rights under the Fifth Amendment (as well as the Eighth and Fourteenth). I was among a small number of naysayers who vigorously opposed the McCain Amendment (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). In the climate of the times, we were slandered as torturemongers for our trouble. But while I continue to believe it would be foolish to take off the table coercive interrogation tactics that do not meet the strict legal definition of torture, that was not the only reason for opposing the McCain Amendment. A principal reason was Dickerson, particularly as its Miranda requirement was construed by Judge Sand.

McCain explicitly included the Fifth Amendment in his legislation because it addresses his target, coercive interrogation. As we've seen, in Dickerson, the Supreme Court held that Miranda was now considered part of the Fifth Amendment's core. In the al-Owhali case, Judge Sand ruled that Miranda imposes daunting burdens on American agents overseas -- burdens far more challenging than the rote reading of an advice-of-rights card that typically happens in domestic policing. With the Supreme Court, beginning in 2004, imposing more and more criminal-justice procedure on the battlefield, the McCain Amendment would almost certainly be used by courts or a Democratic administration to impose Miranda protocols not just on FBI agents conducting criminal investigations (which is what it's meant for) in foreign countries, but on U.S. military and intelligence agents conducting combat and covert operations. That would be the death knell not of the "torture" over which McCain obsessed but of any effective intelligence collection.

The McCain Amendment passed by a 90-9 margin in the Senate, with all but nine Republicans joining the unanimous Democrats. It became law -- incorporated in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 -- with the signature of President Bush.

OBAMA GOES TO COURT
This is the background against which we must consider Steve Hayes's report that the Obama administration has orchestrated the world's first Mirandized war. A war against a terror network that specializes in sneak mass-murder attacks, in which intelligence is at an unprecedented premium, is a strange setting for inaugurating a practice in which detainees are told they needn't speak to you and have a right to the assistance of an attorney underwritten by the American taxpayers they've been trying to kill.

But expect President Obama to gaze at his teleprompter and assure you that he is not inaugurating that practice. It was President Clinton, he'll quite rightly tell you, whose (Reno/Holder) Justice Department first started Mirandizing captured terrorists overseas. He'll elaborate that it was President Bush, prompted by Senator McCain, who extended Fifth Amendment rights to enemy aliens and imposed on our soldiers and intelligence agents the duty to safeguard those rights. And this, he'll insist, was just a recognition of the "rule of law," because after all, it was the Supreme Court that developed Miranda and (relying on the arguments of the Reno/Holder Justice Department) made it part and parcel of the Fifth Amendment. Why are you blaming me, Obama will shrewdly ask, for a lawful, long-established policy that I am merely continuing?

It will all be very clever. But it will be wrong. Contrary to what his spokesmen have said, Obama is not simply continuing the policy of previous administrations; he is vastly expanding it, to the point where it becomes a serious threat to our nation's security.

The Obama administration's protestations ring false from the start. The very notion of advising enemy combatants of Miranda rights seems so absurd that, as The Weekly Standard's John McCormack reports, President Obama himself poked fun at it only three months ago ("Now, do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not."). And that was after, as a candidate, he had mocked Gov. Sarah Palin for arguing that he intended to give terrorists Miranda protections.

This is not about Miranda; it's about how we view terrorism.

Miranda has been applied to some alien terrorists captured overseas for eleven years, but only in the context of criminal investigations. It arose in the embassy-bombing case -- and nearly cost that case -- because the Clinton administration chose to treat that attack as a crime and the captured prisoners as criminal defendants. Had President Clinton adopted the Bush approach and proceeded with a military response -- not a flurry of cruise missiles but a real war -- he'd have had robust congressional support, Miranda would never have been an issue, al-Qaeda would have been decimated, and Pres. Al Gore would never have had a 9/11 to deal with.

The McCain Amendment is a debacle because it theoretically extends Miranda to enemy combatants. That is a trickier problem, yet not an insurmountable one, for two reasons. First, the courts have held that a Fifth Amendment violation -- and therefore a Miranda violation -- occurs not during the actual questioning but when the prosecution attempts to use the statement in court. There is thus at least a plausible argument that if you do not intend to bring a detainee to court -- if you are just questioning him to gather intelligence -- you do not need to give him Miranda rights.

Concededly, this is dicey. The concept that the conduct giving rise to the violation (the coercion used during the questioning) is somehow not really the violation is a legal fiction, and an unattractive one. But it has been enough to justify withholding Miranda warnings in most cases where high-value suspects have been captured. Still, it would help if the McCain Amendment were repealed, or at least amended to make clear that it was not Congress's intention to impose the Miranda component of the Fifth Amendment on U.S. officials overseas.

Second, in upholding al-Owhali's conviction earlier this year, a panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued a superb opinion that clipped the worst excesses of Judge Sand's nine-year-old ruling. Federal agents, it instructs, are merely required to communicate accurate information about a suspect's rights; it is not their job to master foreign law, intercede with other countries on behalf of captured terrorists, or browbeat nations whose cooperation we need into adopting American right-to-counsel rules.

Perhaps more important, the Second Circuit construed Dickerson as glossing the Fifth Amendment with a commonsense Miranda, one that is flexible in its application to varying circumstances. The panel observed that Miranda itself disavowed "creat[ing] a constitutional straitjacket" and that Rehnquist's opinion for the Dickerson Court admonished that "no constitutional rule is immutable." Indeed, on this point, the panel noted that the Supreme Court had long ago dispensed with any need to comply with Miranda "in a situation posing a threat to public safety." The public-safety exception was carved out by the Supreme Court in 1984 (in New York v. Quarles) in a peacetime domestic police emergency. A fortiori, there should be no Miranda requirement at all in battlefield circumstances or in connection with national-security emergencies.

But here, at last, is the point. The problem is not just that Obama wants to extend Miranda to nearly all captured terrorists. That's just a symptom. The problem is that he wants to treat international terrorists as suspects in a law-enforcement matter rather than as wartime enemies.

Despite the McCain Amendment, the requirement of Miranda in warfare is something we have been navigating around fairly well. The recent Second Circuit ruling provides further reason for optimism that we can continue doing so -- as long as we remain in war mode. But if we return to law-enforcement mode under the Obama FBI's new "Global Justice" initiative, then we are back to September 10 -- to the embassy-bombing approach to counterterrorism, in which completed terrorist attacks, rather than interrupted terrorist plots, await us.

There's no point making this into a controversy about Miranda. After all, if we go the law-enforcement route, there is no question that Miranda applies. The issue is not Miranda, but whether we should view terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as mere criminals. If so, then obviously we must follow criminal protocols, and there is no question that Miranda applies. We must tell them they don't have to talk to us, and that we will get them a free lawyer -- who will promptly advise them to clam up. We must also accept that we will no longer get the timely intelligence that thwarts attacks. We must resign ourselves to more dead Americans.

President Obama and Attorney General Holder are fond of labeling as a "false choice" the reality that, in national exigencies, we have to decide whether to trim some protections for enemy combatants in order to promote security. That's no false choice. It's a real choice, with the lives of our citizens hanging in the balance. If you want to defeat this enemy and prevent these attacks, you go to war and you get intelligence. If you are content to live with this enemy and endure its attacks, you go to court and you get Miranda. Obama has decided to go to court.

--Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008). McCarthy was the lead prosector who sent the blind shiekh who mastermineded the first Wold Trade Center bombing in 1993 to prison.

Hardly a week goes by without Charles Krauthammer providing this nation with clear, well-articulated vision.

The shame many Americans feel about the President's silence on the Iran protests is felt by Krauthammer, too. Are we not the "beacon of democracy"? In Obama's eyes, which are apparently principally focused on the "Supreme Leader," apparently not.

And where is our president? Afraid of "meddling." Afraid to take sides between the head-breaking, women-shackling exporters of terror -- and the people in the street yearning to breathe free. This from a president who fancies himself the restorer of America's moral standing in the world.

Disheartening. Depressing. Shameful.

Hope And Change -- But Not For Iran

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Washington Post
January 19, 2009

Millions of Iranians take to the streets to defy a theocratic dictatorship that, among its other finer qualities, is a self-declared enemy of America and the tolerance and liberties it represents. The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.

And what do they hear from the president of the United States? Silence. Then, worse. Three days in, the president makes clear his policy: continued "dialogue" with their clerical masters.

Dialogue with a regime that is breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, expelling journalists, arresting activists. Engagement with -- which inevitably confers legitimacy upon -- leaders elected in a process that begins as a sham (only four handpicked candidates permitted out of 476) and ends in overt rigging.

Then, after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of "some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election."

Where to begin? "Supreme Leader"? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts -- a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election.

Moreover, this incipient revolution is no longer about the election.

Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren't dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan.

They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

This started out about election fraud. But like all revolutions, it has far outgrown its origins. What's at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime -- and the future of the entire Middle East.

This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.

The latter is improbable but, for the first time in 30 years, not impossible. Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism -- leave it forever spent and discredited.

In the region, it would launch a second Arab spring. The first in 2005 -- the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon, first elections in Iraq and early liberalization in the Gulf states and Egypt -- was aborted by a fierce counterattack from the forces of repression and reaction, led and funded by Iran.

Now, with Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and Iraq establishing institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect.

The exception -- Iraq and Lebanon -- becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed.

All hangs in the balance. The Khamenei regime is deciding whether to do a Tiananmen. And what side is the Obama administration taking? None. Except for the desire that this "vigorous debate" (press secretary Robert Gibbs' disgraceful euphemism) over election "irregularities" not stand in the way of U.S.-Iranian engagement on nuclear weapons.

Even from the narrow perspective of the nuclear issue, the administration's geopolitical calculus is absurd. There is zero chance that any such talks will denuclearize Iran. On Monday, Ahmadinejad declared yet again that the nuclear "file is shut, forever."

The only hope for a resolution of the nuclear question is regime change, which (if the successor regime were as moderate as pre-Khomeini Iran) might either stop the program, or make it manageable and nonthreatening.

That's our fundamental interest. And our fundamental values demand that we stand with demonstrators opposing a regime that is the antithesis of all we believe.

And where is our president? Afraid of "meddling." Afraid to take sides between the head-breaking, women-shackling exporters of terror -- and the people in the street yearning to breathe free. This from a president who fancies himself the restorer of America's moral standing in the world.

Ralp Peters expresses his outrage at Obama's failure to stand with the protesting Iranians callling for freedom. His stinging rebuke warns that Obama's failure has consequences:

If we see greater violence in Tehran, the blood of those freedom marchers will be on our president's hands.

It's "treachery" to the cause of freedom.

OBAMA'S GREEN LIGHT FOR A CRACKDOWN
June 18, 2009
New York Post
Ralph Peters

SILENCE is complicity. Our president's refusal to take a forthright moral stand on the side of the Iranian freedom marchers is read in Tehran as a blank check for the current regime.

The fundamentalist junta has begun arresting opposition figures, with regime mouthpieces raising the prospect of the death penalty. Inevitably, there are claims that dissidents have been "hoarding weapons and explosives."

Foreign media reps are under house arrest. Cellphone frequencies are jammed. Students are killed and the killings disavowed.

And our president is "troubled," but doesn't believe we should "meddle" in Iran's internal affairs. (Meddling in Israel's domestic affairs is just fine, though.)

We just turned our backs on freedom.

Again.

Of all our foreign-policy failures in my lifetime, our current shunning of those demanding free elections and expanded civil rights in Iran reminds me most of Hungary in 1956.

For years, we encouraged the Hungarians to rise up against oppression. When they did, we watched from the sidelines as Russian tanks drove over them.

For decades, Washington policymakers from both parties have prodded Iranians to throw off their shackles. Last Friday, millions of Iranians stood up. And we're standing down.

That isn't diplomacy. It's treachery.

Despite absurd claims that Obama's Islam-smooching Cairo speech triggered the calls for freedom in Tehran's streets, these politics are local. But if those partisan claims of the "Cairo Effect" were true, wouldn't our president be obliged to stand beside those he incited?

Too bad for the Iranians, but their outburst of popular anger toward Iran's oppressive government doesn't fit the administration's script -- which is written around negotiations with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

To Obama, his dogmatic commitment to negotiations is infinitely more important than a few million protesters chanting the Farsi equivalent of "We Shall Overcome."

This is madness. There is no chance -- zero, null, nada -- that negotiations with the junta of mullahs will lead to the termination (or even a serious interruption) of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our president's faith in his powers of persuasion is beginning to look pathological. Is his program of negotiations with apocalypse-minded, woman-hating, Jew-killing fanatics so sacrosanct that he can't acknowledge human cries for freedom?

Is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a better role model than Martin Luther King? It's a damned shame that our first minority president wasn't a veteran of our civil-rights struggle, rather than its privileged beneficiary.

An ugly pattern's emerging in our president's beliefs:

He's infallible. This is rich, given all the criticism of the Bush administration's unwillingness to admit mistakes. We now have a president with Jimmy Carter's naivete, Richard Nixon's distaste for laws, Lyndon Johnson's commitment to the wrong war, and Bill Clinton's moral fecklessness.

Democracy isn't important. Our president seems infected by yesteryear's Third-World-leftist view that dictatorships are essential to post-colonial development -- especially for Muslims.

Look where Obama has gone and who he supports: the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, his groveling speech in Egypt, his embrace of Hamas, his hands-off approach to the gory regime in Sudan -- and now his dismay at the protests in Iran.

Strict Islam is true Islam. This is bewildering, given Obama's childhood exposure to the tolerant Islam practiced in most of Indonesia. The defining remark of his presidency thus far was his Cairo demand for the right of Muslim women to wear Islamic dress in the West -- while remaining silent about their right to reject the hijab, burqa or chador in the Middle East.

History's a blank canvas -- except for America's sins. Of course, we've had presidents who presented the past in the colors they preferred -- but we've never had one who just made it all up.

Obama's ignorance of history is on naked display -- no sense of the brutality of Iran's Islamist regime, of the years of mass imprisonments, diabolical torture, prison rapes, wholesale executions and secret graves that made the shah's reign seem idyllic. Our president seems to regard the Iranian protesters as spoiled brats.

Facts? Who cares? In his Cairo sermon -- a speech that will live in infamy -- our president compared the plight of the Palestinians, the aggressors in 1948, with the Holocaust. He didn't mention the million Jews dispossessed and driven from Muslim lands since 1948, nor the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians from the West Bank.

Now our president's attempt to vote "present" yet again green-lights the Iranian regime's determination to face down the demonstrators -- and the mullahs understand it as such.
If we see greater violence in Tehran, the blood of those freedom marchers will be on our president's hands.