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Multiculturalism and the Case of the Unwanted HelloThe Islamist campaign to undermine and ultimately supplant Western norms is waged on some of the most mundane battlefields. For example, a recent essay by Matthew Coutts describes a fascinating and instructive clash that arose in a residential hallway:
Continue to full text of posting... By David J. Rusin | June 30, 2009 at 11:58 pm | Permalink ISNA Becomes the New Belle of the Islamist BallWith the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) weighed down by legal problems, it was just a matter of time before the government found a fresh partner for its Muslim outreach efforts. Now we know who it is: the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Yet rather than representing some moderate alternative to CAIR, ISNA's ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood may be even more pronounced. The Obama administration's courtship of the Islamic Society started early, as ISNA president Ingrid Mattson was invited to participate in the inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral on January 21. This honor came despite her disturbing views of Wahhabism as a simple "reform movement" and the West being at the root of the Muslim world's decline. The initial flirtation has now blossomed into a full-blown relationship, as demonstrated by a pair of insider emails disseminated over the past week. The first message indicates that FBI Executive Assistant Director Tom Harrington met at agency headquarters with Imam Magid (Mohamed Hagmagid Ali), the vice president of ISNA. It also references FBI leaders' "decision" to "use ISNA as their official point of contact with the American Muslim community." How does the FBI square this approach with its mission "to protect and defend the United States," when a Muslim Brotherhood memo identifies ISNA as one of the "organizations of our friends" that could help advance the Brotherhood's "grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within"? A second email, leaked to Pajamas Media, indicates that the Department of Justice will run an information booth at ISNA's convention over the July 4 weekend. "Volunteers needed for unique opportunity," the message begins — and no doubt the opportunity is unique. It is not every day that Justice Department staffers have the chance to attend the convention of a group named by their own agency's prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terror financing trial. Robert Spencer reminds us of the rebuke that ISNA and its sister organization, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), earned after they protested their designation:
The mainstream's embrace of ISNA will only grow warmer from here, as seen in the news that "purpose-driven" pastor Rick Warren plans to speak at the group's upcoming shindig. Interfaith gurus such as Warren are all about brotherhood. However, he, like the Obama administration, one day may regret promoting ISNA's "purpose-driven" Islamists — and their Brotherhood of a very different kind. By David J. Rusin | June 26, 2009 at 12:17 pm | Permalink BBC: Television for DhimmisDownplaying the threat of Islamism while simultaneously disparaging Western culture is the stock in trade of countless media outlets, but few have pursued this task with such vigor as the BBC. Though its well-documented bias in covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict serves as Exhibit A, the same worldview is expressed in the BBC's broad deference to Islam. Islamist Watch highlighted two examples in 2008: comedian Ben Elton's assertion that "the BBC will let vicar gags pass but they would not let imam gags pass," along with a Christian party's protest that the network was censoring criticism of the London mega-mosque. Other cases from the IW archive include Hindus and Sikhs accusing the BBC of favoring Muslims and the head of the BBC arguing that Islam should be treated more sensitively than Christianity. News items from May and June demonstrate that the broadcaster has only accelerated its descent into dhimmitude:
To add insult to injury, British households with color TVs have the pleasure of paying £142.50 per year to subsidize the BBC's whitewashing of radical Islam and besmirching of Judeo-Christian civilization. However, one suspects that the ultimate cost to the UK will be far greater — and not quantifiable in pounds. By David J. Rusin | June 17, 2009 at 11:09 am | Permalink Obama's Cairo Speech Through the Lens of IslamistsPresident Obama's speech in Cairo to the so-called Muslim world has Islamist organizations fawning about the "new beginning" of relations with Muslims globally. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF terror trial and was recently wholly rejected by the FBI, issued a statement calling the speech "comprehensive, balanced, and forthright." This was not to be outdone by the like-minded Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which lauded the speech as a "foundation for mutual recognition and positive engagement." Here, locally in Phoenix, the reaction was predictably similar but more troubling. A prominent Islamist, Marwan Ahmad, publisher of the pro-Hamas newspaper Muslim Voice and original founder of the local CAIR chapter in Arizona, stated to the Arizona Republic: "This is the first time I felt proud of being an American Muslim. I felt really proud, actually." Interestingly, this is a remarkably candid comment when compared to a previous statement which was obviously a part of Islamist dissimulation: "The day I passed the test and became an American citizen is one of the proudest days of my life." So which is it, Mr. Ahmad? Ahmad also had the revealing temerity to apparently condone violence and chastise President Obama for openly calling on Palestinians to abandon violent resistance, stating: "They want us to take the Martin Luther King example and the example of other peaceful leaders, yet [in response to the terrorist attacks], America has launched all these wars around the world. That doesn't add up." These reactions of Islamists speak volumes to the unchanging ideological lens they use in reviewing American foreign and domestic policy. In Mr. Ahmad's case, his pride in being an American Muslim despite decades of residence on our soil came only now as an epiphany after a single speech. Words, not America, gave Ahmad pride. Simple words of appeasement given by our president on foreign soil over 7,000 miles away and hosted by the despotic Egyptian regime made all the difference to his Islamist mindset. The truth is that Mr. Ahmad should have felt proud to be an American Muslim at the first moment he published his Islamist and frequently anti-American newspaper and exercised his freedom of expression guaranteed to him by the U.S. Constitution. Only after the despotic governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who are blind and intransigent to political and religious reform, expressed pleasure and approval of our president have our local domestic Islamist groups become jubilant. Are the reformers in Egypt or the oppressed minorities of the "Muslim world" jubilant? No one knows because their voices cannot be heard. Although President Obama must be given credit for mentioning reform, women's rights, and minority rights, he obviously could have and should have said much more, specifically naming reformers and the real obstacles (i.e., Islamism) to the changes he cited as necessary. No such critique can be heard from Islamists in America, who would rather bask in the glow of appeasement of their motherlands than recognize a lifetime of pride in American values. The Islamist lens is all about protecting, legitimizing, and validating the agenda of political Islam and not about protecting, legitimizing, or validating all that is America.
By Sid Shahid | June 9, 2009 at 12:23 pm | Permalink Hijab Bullies Want Everyone to Cover UpLawful Islamists use two general strategies to advance their agenda: they request that Muslims be granted special privileges and, more broadly, they seek to impose their ways on others. Take the issue of head coverings. Some Muslims demand the right to wear hijabs or niqabs in situations where non-Muslim women would never be allowed to conceal themselves, such as when testifying in court or having a mug shot snapped. At the same time, more assertive Islamists abuse their authority by attempting to force other people to cover up as well. First, a British Muslim dentist named Omer Butt stands accused of requiring "that women cover their hair with a headscarf, or hijab, and that male patients remove any gold jewelry." Butt, whose practice operates under the auspices of the National Health Service, was reprimanded in 2007 for similar offenses. Here is one of the new complaints:
Second, an employee of Pakistani descent has manipulated non-Muslim first graders into accepting the hijab at a Norwegian school where most of the students are Muslim:
The assistant principal does not seem to mind. "This was just a small gesture from SFO," she said. "There were two little girls who wanted to dress up in pretty, colorful, and glittering hijabs, and therefore SFO asked if it was okay with the parents for them to give them to the girls." Whereas accommodations may be peddled with some success under the rubric of religious freedom, trampling on the rights of others tends to spark public outrage and backlash. People like Omer Butt and the pushy classroom helper thus provide a service of sorts. By crossing a line that wiser Islamists do not cross, they expose Islamism for what it is: a radical ideology whose adherents will prolong tooth discomfort and pressure six-year-olds in order to have their way. By David J. Rusin | June 8, 2009 at 11:11 am | Permalink Europe Pushes Back Against Female Genital MutilationIn a recent interview, activist Ines Laufer explains how female genital mutilation (FGM), which aims to destroy the ability to experience sexual pleasure, threatens thousands of Muslim girls in Europe. "The number of FGM victims and minor girls at risk and the prevalence of FGM in the EU are much higher than assumed," she reports. Some families send their daughters overseas for the procedure; others utilize practitioners who travel from those countries to the West. Yet several positive developments are of note. Last week a woman in Sweden was awarded compensation from her mother, who had subjected her to FGM during a "holiday" to Somalia in 2001 when she was eleven. "Torture" is how an administrative body describes her ordeal:
A similar case from Denmark resulted in a mother being sentenced earlier this year for allowing a pair of daughters to undergo the operation, which has been illegal there since 2003. Other nations also are taking notice, as demonstrated by the following actions:
The campaign to protect the human rights of Muslim girls in the West will be a long and difficult one. To paraphrase Churchill, this is not the beginning of the end. But with rising awareness, we are, perhaps, moving toward the end of the beginning. By David J. Rusin | May 31, 2009 at 11:05 am | Permalink New York Terror Plot Spotlights Radical Islam in PrisonsDisclosure of a plot by four ex-convicts — three Americans and a Haitian — to bomb synagogues and attack aircraft in New York City and upstate Newburgh, N.Y., highlights the intersection between social pathologies in the African-American community, radical Islam, and derivatives of the latter, especially in prisons. The defendants in the case were arrested on Wednesday, May 20. They are James "Abdul Rahman" Cromitie, whose age, somewhere between 44 and 55, is unconfirmed; David "Daoud" Williams, 28; Onta "Hamza" Williams, 32; and 27-year-old Laguerre "Amin" Payen — the original given name of the latter, curiously, means "war." They have been charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction in the U.S. and to acquire and use Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Cromitie, the leader of the group and a resident of Newburgh, claimed to have lived in Afghanistan and to have made contact with the Pakistani jihadist organization Jaish-e-Muhammad (Muhammad's Army), which mainly aims its violence at embattled Kashmir, claimed by Pakistan and India. JEM was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government in 2003. But it and its associated organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), which has been blamed for the Mumbai atrocities late last year, enjoy support among radical Pakistanis in Britain and the U.S. According to the Associated Press, the men became acquainted with each other and with jihadist ideology while incarcerated. Prison brought the quartet together and the subcultures of prison extremism remained a constant factor in their lives. As habitual criminals, the four men seem more characteristic of a gang-style phenomenon known as "prison Islam," in which drug users and other offenders adopt Islamic trappings to intimidate other inmates, than of the Nation of Islam or the Wahhabism that has been introduced into many American prisons by extremist chaplains. But under the tutelage of Cromitie, they appear to have graduated from "prison Islam" to serious jihadist ambitions. The Daily News reports that Cromitie, on his way to a Philadelphia meeting of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), spewed threats to "destroy a synagogue." MANA is led, according to its website, by Siraj Wahhaj, one of the most flamboyant hate mongers in American Islam. The website also claims support for MANA from the supposed "Sufi" and "peace apostle" Hamza Yusuf Hanson and his associate Zaid Shakur, as well as other prominent Islamists, such as Ihsan Bagby and Abdul Hakim Jackson. The pattern of prison conversion, followed by release and the pursuit of terrorist intentions, is not new. A similar scheme by a group calling itself Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (Assembly of Authentic Islam) originated at New Folsom Prison in California and was preempted by police action in Los Angeles in 2005. In 2007, the chief actors in the Folsom group, Levar Haley Washington and Kevin James, pleaded guilty to sedition charges. Washington was sentenced last year to 22 years in prison and James, early in 2009, to 16 years. Washington's sentence was augmented by an additional 22 years for his involvement in a gas station robbery. Another participant, Gregory Patterson, was penalized with 151 months incarceration. Prison Islamization and radicalization remain a major threat around the world, including in Western Europe and Russia, as well as the U.S. Unfortunately, correctional authorities have lagged behind police bodies and prosecutors in dealing with the danger. Moderate Muslims must assist authorities in non-Muslim countries in combating this very real menace, by helping remove radical chaplains and literature from prisons and otherwise taking the fight against extremism into the prison environment.
By Imaad Malik | May 22, 2009 at 4:23 pm | Permalink Can Muslims and Gays Coexist in Europe?In While Europe Slept, American Bruce Bawer describes how he moved to the Netherlands because of its vaunted tolerance for alternative lifestyles, only to find Islamist gangs attacking gays on Amsterdam streets. Three years after the book's publication, new evidence illuminates European Muslims' attitudes toward homosexuality and the challenges they pose. A survey by Dalia Mogahed's Gallup Center for Muslim Studies asked Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain, France, and Germany about their views on a number of issues, including whether they believe that homosexual acts are "morally acceptable or morally wrong":
The uniformity of the UK sample does stand out; has there ever been a poll in which everyone offered the same opinion on a controversial topic? However, the finding that Muslims are more critical than their non-Muslim counterparts is no surprise. Nor is it a grave concern on its own. Believing that others suffer punishment in the afterlife is very different than sending them there to face it. The problem is that, rather than "loving the sinner and hating the sin," some Muslim preachers cross the line by failing to condemn violence against gays — or even promoting it. For example, Bawer notes that in November 2007, "the deputy chairman of Norway's Islamic Council, Asghar Ali, refused to reject the death penalty for gays. When Senaid Kobilica, the head of the Islamic Council (which represents 60,000 Muslims), was asked where he stood on the question, he replied that he couldn't give a definitive answer until he got a ruling from the European Fatwa Council." Nine months later he was still waiting. In addition, there have been explicit justifications of violence against gays across Europe, including the UK. During a 2008 investigation of British mosques, "a female reporter infiltrated women's study circles. In one, a preacher using the name Umm Amira told followers: 'We are not going to be like animals … or to be like the homosexuals, God save us from that, you understand? We have to take the judgment; the judgment is to kill them.'" Extremist cleric Anjem Choudary also voiced support for the stoning of homosexuals in March 2009. Islamic leaders who excuse or even advocate anti-gay violence can turn Muslims' negative views of homosexuals, as documented by the Gallup survey, into a powder keg. It is these radical imams whom European governments must target. Are they ready and willing to do so? Bruce Bawer provides this discomfiting clue: the aforementioned Asghar Ali, who could not bring himself to renounce the execution of gays, sat "on the board of … the largest and most influential association within Norway's ruling Labor Party." By David J. Rusin | May 20, 2009 at 11:47 am | Permalink Jihadism in European PrisonsJihadists are radicalizing Muslims in prisons outside the U.S., in Europe and elsewhere, through aggressive indoctrination and recruitment. A new RAND Corporation report, "Radicalization or Rehabilitation: Understanding the Challenge of Extremist and Radicalized Prisoners," cites prisons as a key venue for Islamist recruitment. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a former inmate and mentor of the late al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, describes jihadist tactics in prisons in the radical periodical Nida ul-Islam to include:
The RAND report also notes that much of the literature on Islam in prison libraries is specifically Islamist. Fundamentalist authors like the 13th-century figure Ibn Taymiyya and the 20th-century writer Sayyid Qutb are prevalent and seem especially attractive to prison readers since these men spent time in jail themselves, making them sympathetic figures to these captive audiences in Europe's prisons. Governments are trying to counter the spread of Islamism in prisons. The RAND report assesses three programs in Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The religious rehabilitation group (RRG) in Singapore attempts to rehab arrested members of Jemaah Islamiya with counter-Islamist material produced by Islamic scholars and other experts. Moreover, relatives of inmates receive financial assistance and are counseled, while their children are provided with special education. Saudi Arabia and Yemen also have programs for deradicalization of jihadist prisoners. Some of the problems these programs run into include the high risk that inmates will use their "successful" rehabilitation to obtain release and rejoin terrorist networks. The Yemeni program specifically has been challenged for weak results. The questionable success of these programs is not an accident. RAND ignores analyzing elements inside and outside the Saudi establishment that finance radicalism while its government attempts to neutralize adherents of extremist doctrines. In such a situation, prison rehabilitation programs are being sabotaged by failures in their own governments, which use these programs for positive P.R. in the war against extremism without providing consistent results. Another problem in the RAND report is that its review of Europe is too broad. By comparing the Islamist movement to the Basque ultranationalist Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), RAND associates the Islamist global totalitarian religious movement with the grievances of local nationalist extremists. By wanting to avoid offending European Muslim ideologues, RAND offers an incomplete analysis. Fighting prison jihadism requires an alliance between secular governments and moderate Muslim leaders who demand not only an end to violence but the supremacist ideology behind it. Such moderates call for separation of religious and government authority and the equality of all religions under secular law. Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP) reports include the 2008 "Black America, Prisons, and Radical Islam." "A Guide to Shariah Law and Islamist Ideology in Western Europe 2007-2009" will be published by CIP on May 15, 2009.
By Imaad Malik | May 14, 2009 at 6:15 pm | Permalink 'Punk the FBI' Imam Abdul Alim Musa Gets Punked by BritainOn May 5 the British Home Office published a list of "individuals banned from the UK for stirring up hatred." The inclusion of radio host Michael Savage has garnered most of the press, given his placement alongside terrorists such as Samir Kuntar. However, another American on the roster deserves some attention of his own: Abdul Alim Musa. Born Clarence Reams, Musa converted to Islam in jail and now heads a D.C. mosque. He founded the radical organization As-Sabiqun, which seeks the "establishment of Islam as a complete way of life in America," citing Muslim Brotherhood thinkers and Ayatollah Khomeini as influences. According to the Washington Post, Musa "has been trying for years to build an Islamic community [in D.C.] … that he would like to see replicated nationwide until the United States becomes an Islamic state." In contrast to typical "lobby group" Islamists, Musa could not be clearer about his actual views:
Islamist Watch highlighted Musa earlier this year for his 2007 sermon on "How to Punk the FBI," in which he counsels Muslims against cooperating fully with law enforcement. The irony is that he was a longtime board member of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), one of the groups threatening to end their allegedly cordial relationship with the FBI. British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's positioning of a loudmouthed radio host beside convicted murderers may seem a bit odd, but she is correct that "coming to the UK is a privilege." All in all, banning a true extremist like Abdul Alim Musa is no bad choice. But do not celebrate too quickly. Now that Musa does not have to worry about planning any trips to Britain, he can focus on what he does best: radicalizing Muslims right here in America. By David J. Rusin | May 8, 2009 at 11:50 am | Permalink © 2007 - 2009 The Middle East Forum. |