FrontPage Magazine » God

Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shall Support the Welfare State

Larry Elder — Thu, 03 May 2012 04:00:47 +0000

As a candidate for the presidency, George W. Bush took heat for supposedly saying something like, “God wanted me to become president.” He never said that. But no matter. Here comes another yet another Bible-banging religious conservative “taking his marching orders from God.” Apparently, if you feel God endorses a particular path, God wants you to keep the news to yourself.

Religion, to many liberals, is a sign of weakness, a demonstration of the inability to reason for oneself. With the Bible telling him what to do, how to think, what to believe — why, such a person is downright scary. Recall Obama explaining how small-town Midwesterners deal with difficult economic times: “They get bitter,” as the then-presidential candidate put it. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them … as a way to explain their frustrations.”

When, however, the left uses religion to justify expanding the Welfare State, well, invoking God becomes perfectly acceptable. During the last National Prayer Breakfast, for example, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer praised how “movingly” Obama spoke about the way his religion informs his policies.

Take Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus. In a recent column, he uses religion to denounce those who oppose ObamaCare: “These critics seldom acknowledge other aspects of the law aimed at helping insure some of the roughly 50 million people in this country who now lack coverage. That’s an act of pure selfishness. … It’s also a display of heartlessness unbefitting a country that claims to define itself by love-thy-neighbor Judeo-Christian values.” (Emphasis added.)

Judeo-Christian values? In caring for the needy, scripture dictates that The State supplant individuals, community, houses of worship and other nonprofits in helping care for the needy?

Tell this to the Rev. Robert Sirico, of the free-market think tank Acton Institute. Whether arguing for government programs like Medicare, Medicaid or even Social Security, the first question to ask is a moral one: Does turning the business of compassion over to the state harm us as a society and damage us in ways proponents fail to consider?

In his 1999 piece “Morality and Social Security,” Sirico says Social Security’s biggest failing is that it creates a culture of dependency:

“Is it right that the young be taxed to enable the government to provide a generous retirement program for able-bodied older people? What are the social and moral implications of this idea?

“The very existence of Social Security has convinced tens of millions of people that government-mandated savings are utterly necessary for security in our later years.

Why You Better Pray that God is Not Dead – Dennis Prager Diagnoses America’s Disease

Diane Schrader — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 14:00:43 +0000

This popular post was originally published April 4, 2011.

Editor’s Note: Diane Schrader attended the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s West Coast retreat this past weekend and will be filing several reports on the various speakers and panels. This is the first.

I’ve got a few weighty things on my mind that I’m about to unpack on you. But let’s ease into it gently, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh:

Q: What do God and Barack Obama have in common?

A: Neither has a birth certificate!

Q: What is one difference between Obama and God?

A: Leftists love Obama!

Q: What’s another difference between Obama and God?

A: God doesn’t think he’s Obama!

Heh heh. El Rushbo tells a good joke. And that’s a lighthearted introduction into a heavy topic – a topic that talk show host and nationally-syndicated columnist Dennis Prager opted to take on as the final keynote speaker at this weekend’s David Horowitz Freedom Center retreat in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

God, according to Prager, is in trouble.

Of course, God is not really in trouble. We’re the ones who are really in trouble, because of what we as a society are doing to God. For the purposes of this discussion, it really doesn’t matter if you’re an atheist – the ramifications apply to us all. But Prager thinks he knows why atheism might be more attractive to a lot of people right now, and he outlined a number of reasons.

The first is the evil that people are doing in God’s name. And no, he’s not talking about the Westboro crazies (although they’re definitely in the running for consideration). He’s talking about Islam. Every time someone yells Allahu Akbar as they blow something up, or slit someone’s throat – they’re claiming to act for God. This, no doubt, is a turnoff to many.

What’s perhaps an even greater turnoff is what Prager calls the “pathetic response” to this evil from (mainstream) Judaism and Christianity. The fact that only Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians are consistently speaking out against Islam’s crimes (a good deed for which they are roundly condemned as “Islamophobic”) is indeed a sad commentary on the state of those who claim religious faith in this country.

It’s not enough, as Prager indicated, to condemn religious violence in general – because nobody is slitting anyone’s throat in the name of Jesus Christ, and nobody is yelling “Yay Torah” before blowing themselves up. Evil should be identified and denounced – and most Jews and Christians are doing a terrible job of that. It appears that their God has no teeth.

What passes for faith in most mainstream (liberal) Christian denominations and most of Judaism (outside Orthodox) has become a mushy pablum of warm fuzzy feelings instead of concrete moral standards. One can’t even discuss concepts like sin and hell (which are necessary prerequisites, by the way, for mercy and grace) without being accused of “extremism” and, in a torturous logical twist, of being just like “radical Muslims.”

The lack of critical thinking skills from which these illogical flights of fancy emerge is of course the fault, in part, of our current educational vacuum, but Prager frames it in an interesting way. If a student was homeschooled in a strict Christian home his or her entire life, never allowed to watch television, listen to popular music, read anything other than the Bible, get on the internet, or even leave the house – would you consider them somewhat brainwashed? You might – although of course, I defy you to actually find anyone who has experienced this (despite the fevered imaginations of teacher unions that oppose homeschooling or any type of Christian education).

Now Prager turns this on its head. Keeping in mind the virtually lockstep leftist leanings of popular culture, the media and our educational institutions – if a student went to a secular K-12 school system his or her entire life, absorbed countless hours of secular TV programming, listened to nothing but popular music, read nothing about teen-oriented magazines and books, and went to movies, concerts etc. that were all completely non-religious and non-conservative in nature, would you consider them to be somewhat brainwashed? Because you should – and I guarantee that you can find thousands and probably millions of kids whose lives mirror this set of experiences.

What does this have to do with God? Well, an entire generation has been inoculated against thinking about Him in any kind of serious way. And without an understanding of God, as Prager says, our concepts of good and evil grow blurry indeed, and we get all mixed up, just like the leftists who confuse hating people who fight evil with hating evil.

What’s more, as Prager points out, “When you don’t fight great evil, you fight little evils.” If you can’t be bothered to denounce the decapitation of an Israeli infant by murderous Palestinians, but you get all agitated about someone burning a book (I’m looking at you, Joe Klein, Harry Reid, and Lindsey Graham) – you’re part of this problem. If you’re an animal rights activist who is okay with PETA’s “Holocaust on Your Plate” program, which compares a barbecued hamburger with the gassing and incineration of 6 million humans – well, frankly, words fail me on that one.

But this is the kind of world we humans create when we shut out God. Our country was founded by men who, regardless of their personal relationship to any particular religion, recognized both the existence of a Deity and the moral imperative of aligning oneself with Him. They were not all Christians (although most of them were), but they all believed that the best government would be that system that understood man’s true nature (we are eminently corruptible) and crafted a system of checks and balances in full recognition of that nature.

Today, we still enjoy (some of) the fruit of those wise decisions. When we insist on denying the importance of God in our societal life, as Dennis Prager so eloquently reminded us, we do so at our own peril.

Why You Better Pray that God is Not Dead – Dennis Prager Diagnoses America’s Disease

Diane Schrader — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:00:32 +0000

I’ve got a few weighty things on my mind that I’m about to unpack on you. But let’s ease into it gently, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh:

Q: What do God and Barack Obama have in common?

A: Neither has a birth certificate!

Q: What is one difference between Obama and God?

A: Leftists love Obama!

Q: What’s another difference between Obama and God?

A: God doesn’t think he’s Obama!

God, according to Prager, is in trouble.

Losing Their Religion

William Kilpatrick — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:35:34 +0000

Although many won’t admit it, we are in the midst of an ideological war with Islam. And since the advantage goes to the side that fully realizes they are at war, the West is losing. The propaganda war is going in favor of Islam precisely because the West doesn’t realize it is supposed to be fighting one. The ability of Islam to rally much of the world behind its hatred of Israel is a telling indication of who is winning the war of ideas. As for war aims, it’s not clear that there are any. Even those who see the danger clearly rarely talk in terms of victory; they talk mainly in terms of resisting cultural jihad. You know you’re in trouble when your ideological opponent is a primitive seventh-century belief system, and yet the best that your top strategists hope for is to put up a good resistance.

As the Dracula-like return of Communist ideology demonstrates, an ideological war needs to be fought to complete and total victory. The enemy ideology should be so thoroughly discredited that no one—not even its former staunchest defenders, not even the most doctrinaire college professor—will want to be associated with it. In regard to Islam, then, our aim should go beyond simply resisting jihad; it should be the defeat of Islam as an idea. But, aside from inflicting crushing military defeats on Islamic powers, how do you accomplish that?

One answer is that you do all you can to force Muslims to question their faith in Islam. As Mark Steyn observes, “there’s no market for a faith that has no faith in itself.” He was speaking, of course, of the more mushy versions of Western Christianity—the post-Christian Christians who seem anxious to dialogue themselves into dhimmitude. But there’s no reason the concept can’t be applied to Islam. Surely the average intelligent Muslim has occasional doubts about the founding revelations. And just as surely he keeps them to himself, not only because he fears his fellow Muslims, but also because the rest of the world seems to be going along with the pretense that he belongs to a great religion. It may be time for the rest of the world to drop the pretense.

If one of your opponents’ core beliefs is that you need to be subjugated, why wouldn’t you want to foster doubts in his mind? Jihadists commit jihad because they correctly perceive that their religion calls them to it. As long as they are kept secure in the illusion that their faith is unassailable, they will continue the jihad by whatever means seem most expedient. They won’t question their faith—and neither will the majority of Muslims—unless they get used to the fact that it can be questioned and criticized.

One man who has done a lot to shake up the faith of Muslims is Fr. Zakaria Botros, a Coptic priest who hosts a weekly Arabic language TV program watched by millions of Muslims around the world. Among other things, the engaging Fr. Botros forces his Muslim audience to confront unflattering facts about their prophet. He also talks to them about the Christian faith—something that most Muslims know very little about, beyond some simple caricatures. Apparently he is very successful at what he does. According to reports he is responsible for mass conversions to Christianity.

Does such questioning of Muhammad’s character provoke anger among Muslims? Well, yes, it does. The elderly Fr. Botros has been labeled Islam’s “Public Enemy #1,” and a reported $60 million bounty has been put on his head. But, according to a recent piece by Raymond Ibrahim, “the outrage appears to be subsiding.” Ibrahim contends that Life TV (the satellite station that carries Fr. Botros’ program) “has conditioned its Muslim viewers to accept that exposure and criticism of their prophet is here to stay.” The first time a Muslim hears the moral flaws of the Prophet exposed, he may well be angry at the exposure. But how about the third time? The tenth time? The twentieth time? What initially provokes anger might eventually provoke doubts about Muhammad’s claims.

There are those who think that such efforts are doomed to failure—that Islam is too deeply rooted in the Muslim world. But deeply held beliefs are not always as deeply rooted as they seem. Thirty-five years ago it would have been non-controversial to say that the Catholic faith was deeply rooted in Ireland, but if you said it today you would be going out on a limb. More to the point, Islam itself was less “deeply rooted” 60 years ago in the Middle East than it is now. Consider this recollection by Ali A. Allawi, a former Iraqi cabinet minister:

I was born into a mildly observant family in Iraq. At that time, the 1950’s, secularism was ascendant among the political, cultural, and intellectual elites of the Middle East. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Islam would lose whatever hold it still had on the Muslim world. Even that term—“Muslim world”—was unusual, as Muslims were more likely to identify themselves by their national, ethnic, or ideological affinities than by their religion.

Deeply rooted? Perhaps you’ve seen that sequence of photos of the University of Cairo graduating classes for the English Department. The women of the Class of 1959 look like college students anywhere in the Western world circa 1959. They wear Western style skirts and dresses and no head covering. Ditto for the class of 1978. It could be the class of ’78 at the University of Chicago. But by 1994 half the women are wearing hijabs. By 2004 almost all the women are wearing hijabs and ankle-length clothing. So, sometime in the 1990’s educated Muslims apparently began to take their faith more seriously. They appear to take it very seriously now. But how “deeply rooted” is twenty years?

Given that the penalty for leaving Islam—or even criticizing it—can be death, we may be mistaking deeply rooted fear for deeply rooted faith. Moreover, the fact that Islam prescribes such harsh penalties for doubters suggests that the faith itself is not intrinsically convincing. As the Ayatollah Khomeini once said, “People cannot be made obedient except with the sword.” Any religion that needs so many external incentives—swords behind you, and virgins in your future—cries out to be questioned. Unfortunately, instead of exploiting its theological weaknesses the West insists on chivalrously shielding Islam from the kind of scrutiny that the West reserves for its own institutions and traditions. And with good reason. Because it’s generally understood, though rarely said, that Muhammad’s claims would not meet the tests of critical reason and historical evidence that we apply to the Judeo-Christian revelation. The much revered sufi theologian al-Ghazali wrote, “The dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or his Prophet…” You can see why. Curiosity didn’t kill Christianity, but curiosity would almost certainly kill the Caliphate—or, in our times, the hope for a resurrected Caliphate. Obliged not to mention the Prophet? Given the threat Islam poses to the world and to Muslims themselves, it’s beginning to look as though the obligation runs the other way. The world needs to take a much closer look at the Prophet and his claims. The Prophet is Islam’s main prop. If he is discredited, Islam is discredited. Hence, the mighty efforts by the OIC to make it a crime to blaspheme a prophet.

The Prophet’s integrity is not the only thing in doubt. Theologically speaking, Islam is a house of cards. The whole faith rests on the belief that Muhammad actually received a revelation from God. But where’s the proof? Were there any witnesses to this revelation other than Muhammad? Why should we take his word for it? Why were there so many revelations of convenience that worked directly to Muhammad’s personal advantage? Are there really dozens of renewable virgins awaiting young warriors in paradise, or was this revelation simply a clever recruitment tool manufactured by Muhammad to provide an incentive for following him? And why is the Koran, despite its flashes of poetic brilliance, put together like a soviet-era automobile? As an exercise in composition the Koran would not pass muster in most freshmen writing courses. Why can’t God write as well as the average college student?

Ordinarily it’s not a good idea to go around questioning other people’s firmly held beliefs. But these are not ordinary times, and Islam is no ordinary religion. As any number of observes have noted, it’s partly a religion and partly a supremacist political ideology—although no one seems to be able to say exactly what percent is political ideology and what percent is religion. Is it 50/50 or 60/40 or 80/20? Is it legitimate to criticize the political part of it, but not the religious part? How do you tell where the politics leaves off and the religion begins? Or are they so bound together that they can’t be separated?

If you remember “Joe Palooka,” the old comic strip series about a decent but not-too-bright heavyweight boxer, you might remember that one of Joe’s craftier opponents once tattooed his rather expansive stomach with the word “Mother” inscribed within a large heart. His midsection was his weak spot, of course, but he knew he could count on Joe to avoid hitting him there, Joe being too much of a gentleman to do otherwise. In On the Waterfront, Marlon Brando’s character refers to the place where failed fighters go as “palookaville.” Currently, our whole culture is in danger of ending up in “palookaville” because there are large areas of Islam we decline to examine out of a sense of delicacy that would be excessive in a Victorian matron. Islamic strategists are counting on polite Westerners not to hit them in their soft spot.

Islamic strategists invoke the supremacist principles of the Koran in order to stir up aggression against the Muslim world, yet any criticism of Islam is met with cries of, “No fair! You are blaspheming a prophet and his religion.” So far, the shame-on-you-for-criticizing-a-religion strategy has worked very effectively. Fortunately, a few, like Fr. Botros, aren’t buying into the ruse. He has enough respect for Muslims as individuals to realize that their religion should not be put beyond discussion. Many Muslims, especially Muslim women, suffer a profound sense of desperation: the feeling of being trapped in a 1400-year-old nightmare, with no way out. It’s difficult to see any convincing argument for propping up the system that oppresses them. On the contrary, it seems almost a duty to undermine that system—political and religious—and call it into question at every turn.

In past ideological struggles we wisely sought ideological victory—the discrediting of the belief system that inspired our enemies. Because the driving force behind Islamic aggression is Islamic theology, it makes no sense to treat Islamic theology like a protected species. Rather, we should hope that Muslims lose faith in Islam just as Nazis lost faith in Nazism and Eastern-bloc Communists lost faith in communism.

Of course, it would be all the better if, like Fr. Botros, we had something to offer them in its place. Winston Churchill once said that Greer Garson, for her role in Mrs. Miniver, was worth six divisions in the war against Hitler. It seems safe to say that Fr. Botros, for his role in instilling doubts about Islam and giving Muslims something solid in its place, is worth at least a couple of Departments of Homeland Security.

William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in FrontPage Magazine, First Things, Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Jihad Watch, World, and Investor’s Business Daily.

A statement from the Copt at the center of the kerfuffle during last Sunday’s SIOA rally

Robert — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:32:14 +0000

Thousands of people thronged to Ground Zero last Sunday to register their disapproval of a plan by Islamic supremacists to build a huge 15-story mega-mosque overlooking that site at the SIOA rally organized by Pamela Geller and me. The mainstream media ignored the rally, except to offer estimates of the crowd size so low as to strain credulity beyond the breaking point, and to focus on a minor misunderstanding between two Coptic Christians and some others in the crowd. Here is an exclusive statement from one of those Copts, Joseph Nasralla:

Dear Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer,
I am Joseph Nassrala, a Coptic Christian activist from Egypt and founder of The Way TV, a Christian Satellite TV station.

I attended the 10,000 person protest rally against the building to the ground zero mosque which took place at ground zero in NY on Sunday June 6th. We Coptic Christians wanted to express our full support to your initiative and to this important rally.

There was a minor incident at the rally that was blown out of proportion, when my partner, Mr. Karam El Masry, and I were distributing material with some Quran verses and we were also speaking Arabic thus we were mistaken by a few people in the huge crown, for being Muslims infiltrators trying to disrupt the event. This misunderstanding was clarified when we explained who we were and that we are there to support the crowd against the building of the mosque. I was a little frustrated initially for being identified as a Muslim infiltrator, but was glad that the issue was resolved later. My partner, Mr. El Masry, was even able to freely speak to the crowd after our identity was clarified. He explained how Christians are tortured, killed and oppressed in Egypt at the hands of Muslims who are encouraged to persecute Christians from the pulpit of mosques by Muslim preachers.

The reason I am writing to you, is because I am very disappointed in the mainstream media who used this minor incident to make a blanket generalization about all the attendees of the rally as Muslim haters.This kind of generalization was unfair to the good American people who legitimately stand against the building of a mosque next to ground zero and who are against Islamist agenda in the US. I am very well aware of such an agenda which has destroyed the Christian and Jewish existence in the Middle East.

The same mainstream media who denounces painting all Muslims with a broad brush, is doing the same thing they claim to stand against. They shamelessly use our incident to paint with a broad brush that everyone in the rally was a Muslim hater. I want to make it clear that we are not haters of Muslims, but we are against the Islamist agenda in America, the same agenda that drove us out of our homeland Egypt. We have the right to expose Muslim hate and oppression against us, the minorities in the Middle East who are oppressed on a daily basis by the Muslim majority. This mosque should never be built next to ground zero, it is an insult to the memory of the 3000 fellow Americans.

We did not mean to cause any misunderstanding at the rally, on the contrary, we came to support you and your organization. We come from a Muslim country where we suffered from Muslims and the Islamic Shariaa ourselves. That's why we felt burdened to attend this rally and flew for 9 hours to be part of it.. We do support you with our heart and soul, and will always support you and everyone who is opposing Islam. We do honor Mr. Robert's invitation to attend your next rally in September, God's willing, and are looking forward to seeing you there.

We have come to America to seek refuge from the oppression of Islam and expose to the American public what kind of instigation we suffered at the hands of hateful Muslim preachers who incite the worshiping crowds to burn our homes, kidnap our girls and suppress our freedom to practice our religion. We will never allow media misrepresentation to stop us from our mission.

Yours truly,
Joseph Nassralla

Tweet Of The Year: “Well, I Hope You’ll Die Soon, Stupid Hater, And Bring All Your Stupid Followers With You In Hell”

John Hawkins — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:00:44 +0000

Normally, I don’t bother to comment on angry tweets aimed in my direction. In fact, I generally block annoying people on Twitter. I don’t mind the fighting, but if I’m going to do it, I want to do it on my web page where it can draw an audience.

So, earlier today, I popped off a tweet promoting a link at Linkiest:

Her name is Lexi Bee and she may be the single most annoying woman on the face of the earth http://bit.ly/cwRH6b

Incidentally, I may be underselling it there. After seeing the video at that link, the commenters at YouTube, who as a general rule are like some sort of cranky mutants who live off of human misery, were even more brutal than normal. Here are some the comments on Lexi Bee’s videoat YouTube:

That is just about the most ANNOYING thing I have? EVER witnessed. Oh. My. God

MY EYES! MY EARS!? MY BRAIN!THE PAIN! please kill me!!

Kill it with? fire

Ok, now I understand why in? many countries you can buy a gun…

This. Is. Simply. WRONG

Napalm? squad, ready for action, sir !

where the f*ck is my revolver!??

Like I said, “even more brutal than normal” — and some of them were too much to post and of course, they were mixed in the “I’d tap that” comments since she’s cute. Granted, she’d be cuter if she didn’t look like an extra from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Read the whole thing at Right Wing News.

Selling out the people on Staten Island

Robert — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 05:57:37 +0000

The disparity between the perspectives and values of the political elites and their allies and those of the common people grows ever wider. We saw it again tonight on Staten Island, where my SIOA colleague Pamela Geller and I attended a civic meeting that discussed the mysterious sale of a Roman Catholic Convent to the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Brotherhood's chief operating arm in the United States.

The fix was in, as is always the case. The meeting featured three Muslims affiliated with the MAS, who were billed as being there to answer questions and allay the fears of the community. No opponents of the sale were set to speak from the dais; they were only allowed to ask questions from the floor after the MAS operatives made their presentation. The MAS men came armed with folders for the crowd, full of commendations of the MAS from the likes of the Boy Scouts, the Rotary Club, etc., and began distributing them. I had prepared a one-page summary of the Investigative Project's dossier on the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was also being distributed among the crowd, along with the full 40-page version -- but then one of the local officials running the meeting announced that no materials were to be distributed, as this was a meeting devoted to giving an opportunity to the MAS to explain itself to the community, and now people were distributing material "against" -- it had to stop. Many in the crowd took exception, however, to the MAS operatives distributing their folder full of soothing detours as well, and so ultimately that was stopped too and all the printed matter left up front for anyone to take.

Soon thereafter the meeting started, and after some other business, the Muslims began their presentation. They spoke in calm, measured tones. They spoke about their many years in the community, their children, their work (two were physical therapists, one a high school math teacher). They spoke, of course, of the need for "mutual respect." They spoke about the need for both sides to communicate and get to know each other better. They spoke about reassuring someone with a sentimental attachment to the convent building (many of those present had been educated by the nuns who lived there) by saying, "God will be praised in that building." They praised the Muslim American Society as an upstanding civic group with "50 chapters in 55 states across the nation" (yes, you read that right). They spoke of the MAS's commitment to establishing a virtuous and just American society. They denigrated Steve Emerson and his Investigative Project as Islamophobic and claimed that he purveyed falsehoods. When challenged later by an IPT official to name even one specific falsehood in the IPT report on the Muslim American Society and Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Muslim spokesmen said only, "Later on."

I asked them if they were prepared to denounce Hamas and Hizballah, both of which were publicly endorsed by MAS leader Mahdi Bray, as jihad terrorist organizations, and to renounce any intention to bring Sharia to the U.S., in line with the Brotherhood's stated goal of "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house" so that Allah's religion is "made victorious over other religions." In response, the main spokesman for the three hemmed and hawed and emitted billows upon billows of airy nonsense -- to the increasing impatience of the crowd. This spokesman, made nervous by the crowd's vocal disdain for his ever-lengthening non-answer, did ultimately call Hamas and Hizballah terrorist groups and renounce any intention to bring Sharia to the U.S. But since these positions are at odds with what are known to be the positions of the MAS, it seems likely that he was only saying this under pressure -- otherwise he wouldn't have needed to offer so much empty and condescending verbiage to the crowd before getting around to the point.

The other questions were pointed, informed and full of righteous indignation. Challenged about the MAS's leader, the unsavory Bray, the chief spokesman, a physical therapist named Ayman, called him a "civil rights activist." Challenged on whether he thought the people in the room were the Infidels that the Qur'an directs Muslims to wage war against, he told the questioner, "No, you are not an Infidel," and explained that the Qur'anic Infidels were only those who knew the truth and still rejected it. He did not mention, of course, that the Qur'an doesn't envision any other kind of Infidel, and that it has no conception of people who reject Islam in good faith.

Ayman defined jihad as the right of a nation to defend itself whenever it is oppressed and occupied -- a definition large enough to drive a bomb-laden truck through, and that fact didn't elude the questioner, who further asked him whether that definition would indeed make Americans Infidels, because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He explained that no, he wouldn't be raising his five children here if he thought America was Infidel. Another one of the Muslims on the dais insisted that Sharia was democratic and protected democracy. Once again, the glaring contradiction of all this with the words and deeds of the MAS leadership and the Brotherhood was left unexplained.

And so it went. Ultimately, one of the Muslim spokesmen, the other physical therapist, whose name was Muhammad, became firm. Asked if the MAS would prove the sensitivity to the community that the spokesmen were insisting they had by leaving the community, he said: "We are exercising our freedom of religion. We will not apologize for being Muslim. We will not apologize for being American."

Ringing words, but ultimately empty -- ignoring, yet again, the aspect of Islam that is political, and that would subjugate women and non-Muslims and deny the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience. And when they were challenged on such issues, the Muslim spokesmen retreated behind their clouds of rhetorical smoke.

Finally, when the local officials tried to stop the questions from the floor while there was still a long line of people waiting to be heard, and to bring on instead a couple of local dhimmis (including a Christian Arab minister in a clerical collar) to explain how wonderful their experience had been living next to the Muslims of another Staten Island mosque, the crowd had had enough of being railroaded and lied to, and wouldn't quiet down. The meeting was summarily ended, prematurely. But it mattered little. The fix was in from the start.

Prince Charles urges environmentalists to follow Islamic spiritual principles

Robert — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:26:58 +0000

Of course! This is why Islamic countries are such green showcases! Royal Dhimmitude Update: "'Follow the Islamic way to save the world,' Prince Charles urges environmentalists," by Rebecca English for the Daily Mail, June 9 (thanks to Tziona):

Prince Charles yesterday urged the world to follow Islamic 'spiritual principles' in order to save the environment.
In a high-profile speech, the heir to the throne argued that man's destruction of the world was contrary to the scriptures of all religions - but particularly that of the Islamic faith.

He said the current 'division' between Man and Nature had been caused not just by industrialisation, technological development and the relentless pursuit of economic growth, but also by our attitude to our relationship with Nature - which goes against the grain of 'sacred traditions'.

Charles, who is a practising Christian, spoke in depth about his own study of the Qu'ran [sic] which, he said, tells its followers that there is 'no separation between Man and Nature' and says we must always live within Nature's mean and limits

'From what I know of the Qu'ran [sic], again and again it describes the natural world as the handiwork of a unitary benevolent power,' he said.

'It very explicitly describes Nature as possessing an "intelligibility" and that there is no separation between Man and Nature, precisely because there is no separation between the natural world and God.

'It offers a completely integrated view of the Universe where religion and science, mind and matter are all part of one living, conscious whole.

'This suggests to me that Nature is a knowing partner, never a mindless slave to humanity, and we are Her tenants; God's guests for all too short a time.'

The prince was speaking to an audience of scholars at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, which attempts to encourage a better understanding of the culture and civilisation of the religion, of which he is patron....

Gaddafi: “We await the day when Turkey joins the European Union to serve as a Trojan horse”

Robert — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:47:09 +0000

He said it. "Gaddafi: God did not create a Europe for Europeans only," from Firas Press (Google translation), June 8 (thanks to Elder of Ziyon):

Tripoli - Firas Press: urged the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Muslims in the European Union to unite and join the People's Leadership of the Islamic World, which he chaired, to counter what he considered a threat to the Muslims there, pointing out that God - the Almighty - created the earth for all people and not for sex particular, in reference to the Europeans.
Gaddafi said at the meeting, on Thursday evening, in the Libyan capital Tripoli, the heads of delegations of leaders of the Social Popular Islamic Forum Muammar friendship and networking in the Balkans, and the Association of Gaddafi to young people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who were visiting Libya, «You are a rarity in Europe, you get the large number of willing God in the day, you will have the upper hand and higher levels, you will be imams and Oarthyn of the European continent ».

He added: «If Turkey joined the European Union, and the presence of both states the Balkans in the European Union and Albania in the European Union, the meaning of this is that the European continent is no longer a crusade or a Christian as it was, but Islam has become a strong partner in the European continent to the ground and human beings and actually».

«We await the day when Turkey joins the European Union to serve as a Trojan horse, which tells the history».

And reduced-Qadhafi, who holds the rotating presidency of the Arab summit, of the importance of statistics that declare the number of Muslims in Europe, said it was not true, because it is tendentious statistics show that Muslims are a minority. However, he added: «Muslims more than the number declared by the official statistics».

He added, saying: «Fortunately, the Muslims started to multiply and multiply more than the rest of the other religions, maybe this is a sign of God. Thus the will of God, made Muslims multiply times higher than other breeds. Perhaps this is proof that God wants to be more Muslims than anyone else in the end »....

He said: «We must unite in Europe, and to be an Islamic state and one under the banner of the World Islamic People's Leadership», pointing out that God created the earth for all people....

When Secularism Is Not Enough

William Kilpatrick — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:02:05 +0000

Can Islamic jihad be resisted simply on the basis of Western secular values? Some readers of my posts on the role of Christianity in resisting Islam have objected that bringing Christianity into the debate only muddies the water. As one reader wrote, “the anti-jihad movement can better be served if blatant theocons stay away.”

A number of important individuals in what might loosely be called the resistance movement do seem to believe that secular values are sufficient to rally citizens to a defense of Western civilization. A good example of this belief is the 2006 manifesto, “Together, facing the new totalitarianism,” which was signed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Salman Rushdie, and others. The manifesto calls for “resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity, and secular values for all.” The document also speaks of “universal values,” “universal rights,” and “Enlightenment” with a capital “E.”

But how sturdy are Enlightenment values once they are cut off from their Christian roots? Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s own experience provides some perspective. In her autobiography, Infidel, she tells how, after escaping Somalia to the Netherlands, she fell in love with the thinkers of the Enlightenment. At the same time she became an atheist—rejecting not just Islam, but all religions (although she willingly admits that Jews and Christians have a more humane concept of God). Of Holland she wrote, “Society worked without reference to God, and it seemed to function perfectly.”

But the problem with substituting Enlightenment humanism for religion jumps out, if not from every page of Infidel, at least from many pages. On the one hand, Holland is “the peak of civilization,” and “no nation in the world is more deeply attached to freedom of expression than the Dutch.” On the other hand, her colleagues keep warning her to keep her thoughts to herself, and in the end, enlightened Holland forces her out of the Netherlands precisely for freely expressing her opinions about Muslim treatment of women. Ironically, Hirsi Ali’s next port of refuge was the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank which numbers quite a few traditionalist Christians among its scholars.

Others, such as Oriana Fallaci, Geert Wilders, and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff have discovered that “enlightened” but post-Christian Europe is not nearly as friendly to freedom of expression as one might expect to be the case in the birthplace of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an important civilizational advance, but of late it seems to have gone a bit wobbly. Why is that?

One possible answer is that the core Enlightenment values are inextricably tied to Christian values. This view has been put forward most forcefully on the Continent in recent years by Marcello Pera (former President of the Italian Senate, and an agnostic) and by Benedict XVI (not an agnostic). They have argued that the Enlightenment grew out of Christianity organically, as a tree grows from its roots. Cut off from its roots the tree dies.

In this view the rights of man are based on a belief in the importance of man. The belief that ordinary individuals have a value and dignity of their own apart from their membership in a tribe or a society has its origin in the Judeo-Christian declaration that man is made in the image of God. Thus, if you take away God, you take away the foundation of human importance. As Thomas Jefferson undoubtedly discovered while composing the Declaration of Independence, it’s a bit difficult to establish the case for human rights without reference to the Creator. Purely secular societies can only assume human dignity and human rights as a given. We tend to forget that these concepts are now a given because they were given to the world by Christians. Before Christianity, the idea that all human beings are endowed with intrinsic value was not considered “self-evident,” it was considered ludicrous. Espousing human equality was a good way to get yourself laughed out of polite pagan society. Human dignity may seem self-evident to us now, but that is because the Christian moral view became internalized over the centuries. Gladiatorial combats and slavery didn’t go out of fashion because societies evolved but because people began to see one another in the light of the Christian revelation.

Of course, not everyone sees it that way. Some seem to think that Enlightenment humanism came out of nowhere, thanks to spontaneous advances in science, reason, and ethics. In this view, Enlightenment values can get along fine on their own without reference to God. But then you’re still faced with explaining how it is that these values have fallen on hard times precisely in those places that might legitimately be called post-Christian. Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion are defended much more vigorously in still-Christian America than in post-Christian France or Holland. For that matter, there’s more freedom of speech in Bible-belt America than in your average American university. With their speech codes and “hate speech” rules and their habit of disinviting “controversial” speakers, universities are among the least free institutions in society. And it’s no coincidence that most of them can be described as post-Christian, and in some cases, anti-Christian. There is also, of course, an increasingly anti-Semitic climate on American campuses.

What happened in the universities is essentially what happened in Europe. Both suffered a loss of faith (recall that many prestigious universities began as seminaries or denominational colleges), and in the process of losing their religion both became increasingly uninterested in cultivating or protecting genuine freedoms. Moreover, like post-Christian Europe, the post-Christian university has shown little ability to resist Islamization. Thanks to Saudi money and well-organized Muslim student associations, many universities are beginning to act like apologists for the Wahabbi faith.

Judging by the sorry records of the highly secularized European state and the highly secularized American university, it might not be a good idea to place all your bets on “secular values for all” as the main point of resistance to totalitarian Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves the gratitude of all for calling attention to the abuse of Muslim women, but she’s wrong to think that a rootless Enlightenment is going to bring them liberation. Likewise, we owe a lot to Ibn Warraq for his penetrating critique of Islam, but he’s mistaken to think that the universal values enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights would survive in the thoroughly secularized type of society he seems to favor. If these values are universal and self-evident, why is it that half the world doesn’t subscribe to them? Warraq seems not to have noticed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was composed for the most part by individuals who had grown up in Christian cultures, and had inherited a social conscience that had been formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Two of the chief framers, Rene Cassin and Dr. Charles Malik, made no secret of the influence Christian and Jewish beliefs had on their thinking. In a 1969 speech to the Decalogue Lawyer’s Society, Cassin, a Jew, outlined in detail how Jewish and Christian thought had paved the way for the Declaration. It’s also telling that while drafting the final version of the Declaration he received advice and encouragement from Cardinal Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), then the Apostolic Nuncio in Paris. Malik, who later served as President of the UN General Assembly, was a Greek Orthodox philosopher and theologian from Lebanon and the author of numerous commentaries on the Bible and on the early Church Fathers. While making his arguments to the drafting committee he was in the habit of quoting from Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian. Jacques Maritain, the eminent Catholic philosopher was also actively involved in the work of the committee, as well as the UNESCO committee which laid the groundwork for the Declaration. Eleanor Roosevelt, the Chairperson of the drafting committee later observed that the Declaration reflected “the true spirit of Christianity.” In short, although the Declaration of Human Rights makes no mention of God, the fingerprints of a certain religious tradition are all over it.

Western culture—indeed the whole world—owes a lot to the Enlightenment, but it’s important to remember that at crucial historical junctures it was Christian activists working on Christian principles who did most of the heavy lifting. Christian Evangelicals were at the forefront of the movement to abolish the slave trade; the Civil Rights movement was galvanized by the Reverend Martin Luther King and other Christian leaders; the end of Communism in Eastern Europe was brought about in large part by the work of the Catholic Solidarity Movement, of Pope John Paul II, and of numerous priests and pastors in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other countries who kept alive the spirit of resistance.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, it might be useful to think in terms of two Enlightenments: the Enlightenment which remained nourished by the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Enlightenment which cut itself off from God. The former led to the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the abolition of slavery, and the Civil Rights movement. The latter led to the French Revolution, to the Reign of Terror, to the suppression of church by state, to Marx and Nietzsche, to Socialism, and Communism, and more recently to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of cultural relativism where human rights are looked upon as relative rather than universal.

It’s unlikely that a pure secularism—even a humanistic, enlightened secularism—can be the foundation for resisting an aggressive Islam. It’s precisely “enlightened” secularism that produced the spiritual and population vacuum in Europe which is now being filled by Islam. John Lennon invited us to imagine “no religion”… “nothing to kill or die for.” In Europe they don’t have to imagine anymore. Having lost their religion, many are discovering that post-Christian values may not, after all, be worth fighting and dying for—all the more so for those who are getting on in years, and are hoping the really bad things won’t happen in their lifetimes. The new motto for many middle –aged Europeans seems to be “Apres moi le dhimmitude.”

Which culture is more likely to protect human rights and freedoms against totalitarian movements? A thoroughly secular culture which has cut itself off from a transcendent reference point? Or a culture imbued with the Judeo-Christian belief that human beings possess an inalienable, God-given dignity? It’s one of those non-academic questions to which the wrong answer might prove fatal. And final exam time is fast approaching.

William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in Front Page Magazine, First Things, Catholic World Report, the National Catholic Register, Jihad Watch, World, and Investor’s Business Daily.

The World’s Oldest Sickness

David Solway — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:02:27 +0000

The world is sick again with an old disease for which no cure has ever been found. It tends to go into remission here and there at various times but it invariably reappears, as virulent as ever, developing new strains as the bacillus adapts to the antibiotics of reason, shame or distraction. The disease is called anti-Semitism and it can afflict even those who would seem best prepared to resist it. Few are immune.

It can assume racial forms, the Jew regarded as a quasi-human deformity, as rodent, monkey or untermensch. International jurist Jacques Gautier, who finds it “shameful” that under the dispensation of the Human Rights community it is understood that Arabs will have legal and political rights in Israel while it is accepted that Arab countries can be judenrein, concludes that Jews do not enjoy human rights because they are not reckoned as human. Why extend the norms and principles that presumably govern human behavior and the relations between states to a people and a state tacitly considered as beyond the pale, as not quite “like us”? This is how double standards are implicitly justified. Judaism has also been condemned as a cultural and economic perversion that contorts the structure of society. This is a very old story. Indeed, whatever manifestation it assumes, anti-Semitism has been with us almost as far back as human memory goes. What historian Robert Wistrich has called the world’s longest hatred is also the world’s oldest sickness.

It is, in fact, best construed as a universal epidemic, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of the Black Death that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. The difference is that those who have contracted this septicemia of the mind do not die, except inwardly. Ironically, their victims are precisely those who do not suffer from the plague that has contaminated its bearers—except, of course, for those apostate Jews who are sick with the same morbid distemper. The list of such despicables would fill the devil’s Rolodex. But they too must eventually succumb to the fury of the demented carriers of the pathology. Unfortunately, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva, one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotic medicines, has no psychic or endocrinal equivalent to treat the malady.

In Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that anti-Semitism is not an idea but “first of all a passion” that is akin to hysteria. This passion connects schematically with “the idea of the Jew” to which individual Jews are made to conform irrespective of their personal attributes. For Sartre, anti-Semitism is founded in the “fear of the human condition”—of solitude, responsibility for oneself, and the terror of contingency. The Jew is made responsible for the inescapable distress of being human along the entire spectrum from the empirical to the ontological—an excuse for failure, a means of false absolution and a convenient repository of all we are unwilling to acknowledge about ourselves. As such he has been zoned for apartheid, whether metaphysical or social. Sartre concludes that “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”

For all his innovative phrasing, Sartre is really playing variations on the grizzled notion of the Jew as scapegoat, derived from Leviticus 16, which is true enough—witness the current U.S. administration’s treatment of Israel which, as historian Moshe Dann suggests, is a species of collective scapegoating to cover its own foreign policy failures. Philosopher René Girard adds a certain twist to the etiology of this recurrent sickness and proposes the concept of “ritual mimesis” or “mimetic victimage,” an ironic conflict-management elucidation of the scapegoat philosophy. In Girard’s thinking, the violence between groups in a given society is resolved by projecting it upon a third party—the Jew—who is then expelled.

In T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, Anthony Julius suggests an interesting comparison/contrast between Homeric mythology and anti-Semitism. They both “offer explanations intended to make sense of puzzling misfortunes in human life, the one by the intervention of the gods, the other by the intervention of the Jews.” The trouble is that “Jews are not malign Olympians who dispose of humankind by manipulative wizardry.” But tell that to the anti-Semite, who craves an easy explanation for what he does not comprehend in the larger world or cannot resolve in his own circumscribed life. By making the Jew responsible for all he cannot clarify, come to terms with or vanquish, the anti-Semite forfeits both courage and morality. What will he do when the Jew is no longer there? He would be like the parasite that has devoured its host and now faces starvation.

This suggests another definition of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a form of spiritual parasitism, the always tempting resort of the human leech who feeds his appetite for security, justification and self-acquittal from the life-blood of others—in this case, of course, from the body of the Jewish people. Put less offensively, anti-Semitism is blind ignorance, both of the world and the self. Psychologists like to call this psycho-reflex “projection” or “cathexis,” but these terms don’t even begin to cover the malice inherent in so invidious an emotional investment or to parry what Wistrich in his recent book, A Lethal Obsession, has identified as a “Judeophobic virus.”

Today, anti-Semitism has adopted a new expression, dubbed by Robin Shepherd in A State Beyond The Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel as “neo-anti-Semitism” which is “virulently anti-Israeli”. The Neurozone is gravely compromised, but the syndrome is making significant inroads on this side of the Atlantic as well. While not entirely ridding itself of its racial and socioeconomic baggage, neo-anti-Semitism converges on the Jew-as-Zionist, associated with the state of Israel as the modern embodiment of a discredited colonial enterprise. The purveyors of this claim affect not to be anti-Semitic, but their protestations are not convincing. It looks more like lying by ancillary focus.

The proof resides not only in the fact that Israel is unfairly and disproportionately singled out for opprobrium while flagrant and undoubted human rights offenders are generally given a free pass. It is also evident in the fact that Israel is conceived as no ordinary colonialist power. Israeli Jews are regarded as reviving the pestilence of Nazism, cleansing, or approving of the cleansing, of ethnic populations, aka the Palestinians—which is nothing short of a gross misreading of the historical archive and a wrenching misrepresentation of the present circumstance. For despite the fictions of a perjurious world, there can be no question that the Jewish people enjoy a religious, historical and legal right to their homeland, as Jacques Gautier, who spent twenty years studying the issue of ownership, as attorney and legal specialist Howard Grief in his The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, and as many others have established beyond the slightest doubt. The effort to deny what is the cadastral address of the Jewish people is a pattern of what Melanie Phillips has called, in her new book of that title, The World Turned Upside Down.

Interestingly, the accusation that Israel is the new SS is the contemporary distortion of the theme of Albert Camus’ The Plague, an obvious allegory of the Nazi invasion of Europe and North Africa. The wrinkle added to this fabric of defamation is that Jews have no right to any kind of power or authority. As Bernard Lewis writes in Semites & Anti-Semites, Jews have no business being anything other than, at best, “a tolerated subject minority.” Therefore, “by appearing as conquerors and rulers the Jews have subverted God’s order in the universe.” This calumny, says Lewis, is both the Muslim and “the fashionable leftist or progressive line.” But it is only a symptom or manifestation of the same old sickness. To paraphrase Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis, it is, in effect, “the narrative of a past episode reflected in a more recent mirror.”

And yet the mystery persists. But whatever theory we advance to decrypt what may be largely unfathomable or at least not wholly explicable, one thing is certain. Anti-Semitism is here to stay. Jessica may elope with Lorenzo but she or her children or grandchildren will one day be forced to accept the indelible fact of origins. Anti-Semitism is not a contagion that, like Daniel Defoe’s description in A Journal of the Plague Year of the catastrophe that visited London in the year 1665, will ever be “enervated and its malignity spent.” This is because anti-Semitism is unlike other forms of irrational hatred and operates under a different set of laws, which appear to be immutable.

Indeed, today once again, as we confront a new world-generation of venomous and commissurotomized anti-Semites, we might plausibly conclude that anti-Semitic sentiments and irruptions, in virtue of their millennial repeatability, have become entrenched in human consciousness as a natural inevitability. As I have written before, “It is something that it is perceived in the depths of the psyche to have moved from the dimension of history over into the structure of nature. It is as if anti-Semitism has now become part of our synaptic equipment.”

As a result, the destiny of the Jew is to be eternally unsafe in this world, despite the narcotic of assimilation or the illusion of self-rejection. The time seems invariably to come when the Jew is thrown back on his identity and regarded not as a human being or as an ordinary citizen but as, ab ovo, a Jew. After which, measures are adopted. Of no other people can this be said. And this is why the Jewish people cannot afford the luxury of historical amnesia, self-betrayal or the hallucination of ultimate security, but must remain vigilant, conscious and always prepared for the resurgence of the plague.

From the Writings of David Horowitz: June 6, 2010

Nichole Hungerford — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 10:45:04 +0000

Day in and day out, my wife prayed for my health and for my continued presence on this earth. Her brother Joe and his wife Martha, who attended a Catholic church, St. John’s of Vianney, had organized thirty Hispanic men, women and children, including my nieces, to pray for me too. There were others. Every morning these relatives and strangers whispered my name in their intimate conversations with God, and implored him to spare me. I was touched and strengthened by their love and by their answered prayers. I was saved – at least for the moment– and was grateful for that. I would be able to share life with April again, to be with my children and grandchildren, to rise in the morning and greet the sea.

Was God really behind this good fortune? Had he intervened to rescue an agnostic soul as a reward to the believers? Thankful as I was for their concern, I didn’t like to think so. For if He had saved me to answer their prayers then I would also have to hold Him responsible for the others, whose prayers went unheard.

One of the patients who came regularly at my appointed time was a young woman who seemed to be in her twenties. She did not come in from the parking lot where her husband might be waiting for her as my wife did for me. She came in a wheelchair accompanied by a sad woman who appeared to be her mother and who had wheeled her to the radiation clinic from one of the recesses of the vast hospital complex we were in. She had barely begun life, but her eyes had already traveled to a distant space, displaying a vacancy that could have been equally the result of medications or resignation. For her this life had become a waiting room from which there was no exit. I could not help thinking, each time I saw her, of the many lives I had been privileged to live in my span, and those she would not.

I was acutely conscious of the inhabitants of the cancer ward whose prospects were worse than mine. Along with those who loved them they had endured multiple operations, multiple setbacks, years of a crippled existence, and a fate on hold. “Life is a hospital,” the poet Eliot wrote. I could appreciate the metaphorical truth in the image, but it still felt like a violence to the reality that confronted me. Not all life’s hospitals were equal and not all God’s children were saved.

– The End of Time

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

“Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

Nigeria: Marriage of Muslim senator to 13-year-old girl sets up showdown between civil and Sharia law

Marisol — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:02:00 +0000

This case bears watching closely. Overruling civil legislation to accommodate Sharia will set a disastrous precedent for the future of human rights, and for the rights of women and non-Muslims in Nigeria.

An update on this story. "Nigeria: Court to hear child-bride case," by Bashir Adigun for the Associated Press, June 4:

ABUJA, Nigeria -- A Nigerian federal court will hear a case over whether the West African nation's religious freedom and privacy laws allow a Muslim senator to marry a 13-year-old girl, the latest rift in a country split between Christians and Muslims.

The lawsuit filed by the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria on behalf of Senator Ahmad Sani Yerima challenges the country's child protection laws that ban women from marrying before age 18. The suit, obtained Friday by The Associated Press, claims that Yerima's constitutional rights are being trampled over the controversy surrounding his alleged marriage to a 13-year-old Egyptian girl.

It's a common ploy the world over in courtroom jihad: pleading in the name of constitutional rights to advance an agenda that would trample those rights if given the chance.

"The Nigerian constitution guarantees and protects the privacy of any citizen (and) his family member ... against invasion, intrusion and interference," the lawsuit reads.

The suit names the government's National Human Rights Commission, the Senate president and the speaker of the house as defendants. The Human Rights Commission has urged the police to investigate Yerima, while both chambers of the National Assembly have called for their own investigations.

Human rights groups say the 49-year-old lawmaker married the girl at the National Mosque in Abuja after paying her family a $100,000 dowry. Under child protection laws enforceable in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, a woman must be 18 before being able to consent to marriage. However, those laws aren't enacted in all of Nigeria's 36 states and activists say child brides have been married off in Muslim communities after their first period.

It also isn't the first time Yerima has apparently married a child. The rights commission alleges he married a 15-year-old girl, only to divorce the young mother at 17.

Yerima himself appears unrepentant in recent interviews, though he has declined to say how old his new wife is. He told the BBC's Hausa language service in April that he considers "God's law and that of his prophet above any other law."...

And, he observes, Muhammad also married a child.

One can only trust the apologists are burning up the phone lines trying to reach him and tell him Aisha was actually older, and that the account given Sahih Bukhari, for example, is a bunch of hooey taken out of context by cheeky Islamophobes.

Casting the First Stone

Mark D. Tooley — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:00:28 +0000

The Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC) has yet really to condemn the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia 35 years ago. Or the Marxist orchestrated famine in Ethiopia that killed almost as many during the 1980′s. It never directly condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein’s hundreds of thousands of murdered victims also failed to arouse the WCC’s concern across 25 years. Nor has the multitude of crimes by Iran’s theocracy across 30 years interested the WCC. North Korea’s slave state for the WCC is a place of pilgrimage but not criticism. Even North Korea’s recent unprovoked torpedoing of a South Korean ship, killing 46 sailors three months ago, has not caused the WCC to peep.

But the WCC needed less than 24 hours to condemn Israel’s “deplorable” interception of a “peace” flotilla trying to bust the blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza. The 9 anti-Israel “peace” activists killed after the Israelis were resisted with metal poles and other weapons, were apparently more sacred to the WCC than the millions of victims slain by communism, Islamists and other anti-Western tyrannies over the last 4 decades.

“It is with great distress that the World Council of Churches received the news that the Israeli naval forces stormed a Gaza-bound vessel carrying humanitarian aid in international waters before dawn on Monday, killing at least 10 civilians and injuring many more,” immediately bemoaned WCC chief Olav Fykse Tveit. A Norwegian Lutheran theologian, Tveit seems steadfastly committed to the WCC tradition of bashing only Israel and America. ”We condemn the assault and killing of innocent people who were attempting to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, who have been under a crippling Israeli blockade since 2007.”

Why has Gaza been blockaded by Israel, and, though unmentioned by the WCC, also by Egypt? Could its rocket-firing Hamas regime be part of the explanation? The WCC is not interested in such details. “We further condemn the flagrant violation of international law by Israel in attacking and boarding a humanitarian convoy in international waters,” Tveit continued. ”We pray for all those who are affected by the attack, especially the bereaved families.”

Tveit demanded Israel repatriate all of the flotilla’s activists, release the impounded ships and, naturally, end the blockade of Gaza. He also wants a “full” United Nations investigation into Israel’s “assault.” For that, Tveit almost certainly will get his wish. He concluded: ”The deplorable events which occurred yesterday off the coast of Gaza remind us yet again of the pressing need for an end to the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories.” But of course, Gaza is not Israeli occupied. It is governed by its Islamist “liberators,” Hamas. And most of the West Bank is governed by the Palestinian Authority. It’s never entirely clear what the Religious Left means by “occupation.” But certainly it ignores the considerable problems created by Gaza’s and most of the West Bank’s ostensible liberation from direct Israeli control.

The WCC’s major U.S. member, the Presbyterian Church USA, also chimed in quickly over the Gaza flotilla in slightly more measured tones. ”A severe blockade of Gaza by Israel in response to the free election of Hamas representatives in 2006 and the military incursions of Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009 have dramatically increased the already acute humanitarian need,” surmised the church’s Stated Clerk, Gradye Parsons. “We grieve the killing and injuring of participants in the humanitarian effort, as well as the injuring of members of the Israeli military forces that occurred when the Israeli forces stormed one of the ships and those on board resisted.”

Parsons noted that the Presbyterian tradition is “not strictly pacifist,” which is surely an understatement, but “honors peaceful resistance, including nonviolent disobedience to unjust government policies and actions.” He opined that the flotilla could have been a “powerful” instrument for peaceful resistance. And he warned, ”These actions sometimes incite violent responses,” but the “long-term success of this kind of resistance requires a nonviolent response on the part of the demonstrators, even when they are under attack.” Parsons sounds like a Presbyterian Gandhi.

Meanwhile, Jerusalem-based Sabeel, a center for Palestinian Liberation Theology with Western affiliates, including Friend of Sabeel – North America, has quickly issued a prayer litany of solidarity with the failed Gaza flotilla. ”The Israeli attack on the Gaza Flotilla resulted in numerous deaths, dozens of injuries, and hundreds of arrests,” Sabeel bewailed. ”Almighty God, comfort the bereaved, heal the injured, and grant freedom to the prisoners. We pray that you will strengthen each of us to do what is necessary to end the siege on Gaza. Help us to recognize and to fight the structures of oppression, wherever we may encounter them.”

Do these “structures of oppression” include the Hamas regime in Gaza, or its chief patrons, the Islamist theocrats who tyrannize Iran? If so, Religious Left groups in the West, who are Sabeel’s main patrons, will not say so audibly. Maybe the WCC is praying quietly, very quietly, for Hamas’s victims. These silent prayers are perhaps similar to the inaudible prayers that the WCC and rest of the international Religious Left may have lifted up for so many otherwise unacknowledged victims of tyranny and oppression over the last 40 years. Apparently only Israel’s and America’s victims can benefit from the Religious Left’s very loud prayers.

Jerusalem Is Not a Settlement

Joseph Puder — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:00:49 +0000

Israel celebrated “Jerusalem Day” last week, which commemorates the 1967 reunification of the city following the Six Day War. The celebrations and speeches were especially poignant in view of the Obama Administration’s decree that Israel must cease building in Jerusalem.

For Jews, Jerusalem is, has been, and always will be the symbol and the heart and soul of their national identity. Jerusalem is mentioned almost 900 times in the Bible (767 in the King James Version and not a single mention of the city in the Koran) including Psalms (“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning” – Psalm 137:5) and in the Passover Haggadah with the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” concluding the Passover service. Through pilgrimages and prayers, Jews have demonstrated their love and yearning for Jerusalem for more than two millennia. Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, is derived from Zion, another name for Jerusalem.

King David made Jerusalem his capital in 1000 BCE and unified the nation around it. The city became the political and spiritual center of Jewish life, with the Temple at its heart. But it took one of King David descendants, King Josiah, crowned 2650 years ago, to fortify the Jewish nation with a memory of Jerusalem that has kept the Jewish people united together during the Babylonian exile and beyond.

At the age of twenty, King Josiah understood that the assimilation of Jews into the idol-worshipping cultures that surrounded them might doom his kingdom and his people. He, therefore, enacted religious and political reforms aimed at establishing a unified national and religious worship.

The struggle between Jewish particularism and universalism is as long as Jewish history itself. On one side, there were those who sought to assimilate into the neighboring (or prevailing) culture and on the other side, there were those who were dedicated to preserving the Jewish particularistic nature. We all know the story of Hanukkah and the Maccabean revolt against Greek rule and their agents from within. It was King Josiah, whose father King Amon was an idol-worshipper, who helped to create a Zion-oriented, national and religious Jewish particularism.

Following King Solomon’s death, the unified kingdom of Israel split up. The Kingdom of Israel turned its back on Jerusalem and adopted the idol-worshipping universalist culture of the surrounding lands. It did not survive. Conversely, the Kingdom of Judea, with Jerusalem as its capital, survived for almost a century-and-a-half thereafter. Josiah’s particularistic Jewish kingdom prepared the Judeans and future generations against ultimate defeat and exile by rededicating the lost Book of Deuteronomy to the people.

Josiah’s revolutionary actions were based on shifting the focus of religious worship from the physical domain (sacrifices) to the spiritual domain with the reading of the Torah. Josiah did in his time what Martin Luther did in 16^thcentury Europe. By removing the exclusivity of the priests (in sacrifices) and the scribes, who read for the entire community, the common people were now compelled to learn how to read, altering their role as passive participants.

The Book – The Torah, which maintained a unitary focus on Zion, had a centralizing impact on Judaism. Whereas sacrifices could be made at any place and for all “gods” or sovereigns, Josiah provided the Jews with a particularistic culture that is eternal and accessible to all the people. Josiah was in a sense fulfilling Moses’ command in the Book of Deuteronomy 31:19, “Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it to the Children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the Children of Israel.”

Josiah’s great achievement is in facilitating the rise of the synagogue as a replacement for the destroyed Jerusalem Temple. The practice of reading from the Torah began with Josiah and continues to this day among all Jews. King Josiah was greatly aided and strengthened by the Prophet Jeremiah who preached during his reign. Jeremiah tied together the notion that worshipping God in the City of David (Jerusalem) and the freedom from foreign oppressors the city afforded them, are connected by an unbreakable chain. It was an essential Zionist message.

The full extent and meaning of Josiah’s revolution is seen with the returnees from the Babylonian exile, Ezra and Nehemiah. While they were dedicated to the rebuilding of the Second Temple, they understood that the essence of public worship was concentrated in public prayer. Ezra stood on top of a wooden platform and opened the book while the masses of Jews rose to their feet; he read from the Torah and translated it to the masses (many of whom had lapsed in their practice of Judaism in the absence of strong Jewish leadership following the general expulsion to Babylon.)

The sacrificial alters (used by Jews and idol-worshippers alike) were replaced by a new institution, namely the synagogue, where Jews assembled for worship without the sole orchestration of priests who came from Aaron’s lineage (Moses’ brother). Instead, they were led by scribes from all walks of life and from any tribe.

Josiah’s contribution to Judaism and Zionism is in having forged an intellectual revolution based on three elements: Concentrating the kingdom (nation) around Jerusalem or Zion, from which all spirituality emanates; abolishing the foreign idol-worshipping and foreign cultural influences that erode the national and religious strength; and transferring the centrality of religious worship from the physical (sacrifices of animals) to a spiritual and intellectual worship.

Modern celebrations of Jerusalem serve a two-fold purpose: to remember that 2000 CE Jerusalem marked its 3000 birthday and 2010 marked the 43^rd anniversary of the reunification of city.

The Obama administration’s attempted imposition of a building halt in Jerusalem and his anticipated division of the city is once again pitting universalist Jews (those who seek to be accepted and liked by the world) against particularistic Jews, (who see Jerusalem as the heart and soul of Jewish sovereignty and faith). The Netanyahu government is currently in the midst of a debate on the building freeze. In Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “Jerusalem Day” speech he vowed never to allow the division of Jerusalem. It remains to be seen, however, whether Netanyahu will follow the particularistic actions of King Josiah or succumb to the universalist culture and accept Obama’s foreign idols.

An Ungodly Immigration Policy?

Mark D. Tooley — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:00:45 +0000

The 1.1 million-member United Church of Christ (UCC) is trying to raise $50,000 for a media campaign, including a newspaper ad in the Phoenix newspaper The Arizona Republic, to blast that state’s new immigration enforcement law. Church prelates hope the ad will appear on May 29, when reputedly 500,000 will march in Phoenix against the law.

As America’s most left-wing Christian denomination, the fast declining UCC’s zeal for political activism perhaps compensates for its lack of evangelism. Having lost about half its members in recent decades, and several hundred congregations in recent years, the 1.1 million member denomination, at least as expressed by its elites, unapologetically plunges ahead with the latest causes du jour.

“God’s love knows no borders” the proposed ad will sermonize, as though that point were the issue. The UCC’s top bureaucrat for “Justice and Witness Ministries” is also prominently quoted in the ad draft, asserting: “It is now legal for Arizona’s law enforcement to single people out because of the color of their skin, the language of their ancestors, their place of, or even the way they dress.” She further snidely alleges: “When racism raises its ugly head and our nation’s core justice values are at stake, fear cannot be an excuse to remain silent.”

When the Religious Left alleges racism, it’s usually because it has so few other arguments at its disposal. In the mid-20th century, liberal Mainline Protestantism waged serious moral campaigns against authentic racism, and on behalf of other admirable causes. Now an embarrassing shadow of once prestigious religious institutions, left-leaning Mainline Protestants have exhausted most of their Christian moral capital. When they speak politically, they typically only spout bumper sticker slogans that slam their targets as racists, militarists, or exploitative profiteers.

“This law is nothing less than a modern day Jim Crow law of the 19th and 20th centuries,” virtually shrieked UCC President Geoffrey Black in the immediate aftermath of the Arizona law enforcement law’s passage. He insisted: “The immigrant rights struggle is a contemporary civil rights struggle!” In typical fashion, he did not differentiate between illegal and legal immigrants, making his own sweeping ethnic assumption that all Hispanic immigrants, and their U.S. born descendants, essentially think alike. That many legal immigrants themselves favor immigration law enforcement is a possibility not recognized by the Religious Left, which is too busy advocating its mainly WASP theoretical version of multiculturalism to ponder what immigrants themselves actually want.

Rev. Black claimed the new Arizona law will mandate “racial profiling of persons of color” that will assault the “rights of women, men and children, citizens and non-citizens alike.” But what of the rights of women, men and children of all races in Arizona who expect a lawful society that regulates who can enter their state from outside the U.S. border? Of course, the main victims of uncontrolled illegal immigration, who are legal immigrants, and the native born working class, do not typically constitute the constituency of the upper middle class, and almost all white, Anglo UCC or other Mainline Protestant denominations. The UCC is among the most blue blooded of America’s old-line churches, having descended literally from the Pilgrim Fathers and the New England Puritans.

Like its 17th Puritan preacher ancestors, the UCC loves to inveigh against perceived evils. But while the Puritans primarily were concerned about the sin in their own hearts, the theologically modernist UCC is mostly focused on lambasting perceived sin in other people’s hearts. “We urge our brothers and sisters in the United Christ of Christ and our faith partners to resist hate, and insist that just immigration reform embodies our Christian understanding to love our neighbors,” Rev. Black implored.

“We call upon the President of the United States and members of Congress to enact comprehensive immigration legislation that protects the rights of all who reside in the United States.” Do illegal immigrants have the same rights to residence and government services as citizens and legal immigrants, in the UCC/Religious Left perspective? Apparently so.

Reportedly, the UCC has already raised most of what it needs for the Arizona Republic newspaper ad. Now it wants some additional dollars for Spanish language ads. Few UCC members are Spanish speaking, and Arizona’s Hispanics are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and Evangelical, primarily Pentecostal. No liberal-led mainline denomination has successfully appealed to large numbers of Hispanics. And the UCC lost much of its Spanish speaking membership when its Puerto Rico Conference officially withdrew from the UCC in 2006 to protest the UCC’s support for same-sex marriage.

“Across the church, we have heard eagerness that the United Church of Christ respond publicly in Arizona with a message that resonates both pastorally and prophetically to this unjust new law,” Rev Black explained to his denominational news service. ”At the same time, we need to prepare a long-term response strategy that prepares us for the multiple legislative battles over immigration that will take place in the coming months and years.” The UCC naturally is concerned about immigration law enforcement proposals in other states. Rev. Black has encouraged “meaningful and respectful” debate on immigration even as he has called his labeled his opponents as racist and hateful.

Meanwhile, the UCC’s Southwest Conference has urged, by an apparently narrow vote while meeting in Sedona, Arizona, a virtual economic boycott against Arizona to punish it for immigration law enforcement. ”We are profoundly disturbed by the passage of the harshest anti-immigrant legislation in the country by the Arizona Legislature,” this conference wrote in a public letter President Obama and other officials. “It is legislation such as this that codifies racial profiling and creates an atmosphere of suspicion, hatred, and scapegoating of immigrants and U.S citizens.” The Southwest Conference represents about 50 congregations mostly in Arizona and New Mexico. Its meeting “immediately went into a time of prayer for the soul of Arizona and all people who reside here” upon learning of Arizona’s “unjust and racist law,” against which it pledged “non-compliance.”

Posturing by Religious Left elites like the UCC’s prelates will not likely affect the enforcement of Arizona’s immigration law. But the UCC’s vapid and histrionic rhetoric further expose the moral vacuity of the Religious Left’s emptying churches.

What is Memorial Day?

Paul Vallely — Mon, 31 May 2010 04:14:02 +0000

Memorial Day is a great and wonderful way to remember our patriotic heroes who sacrificed their lives to help us breathe the air of freedom. This day is observed with families and friends visiting cemeteries and memorials to pay homage to their loved and forgotten ones.

“Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.”
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Memorial Day was first celebrated on May 30, 1868. It was observed by placing flowers on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers during the first national celebration. Gen. James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, after which around 5,000 participants helped to decorate the graves of the more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who were buried there.

Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. This date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country.

The alternative name of “Memorial Day” was first used in 1882. It did not become more common until after World War II, and was not declared the official name by Federal law until 1967. On June 28, 1968, the United States Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, which moved three holidays from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create a convenient three-day weekend. The holidays included Washington’s Birthday, now celebrated as Presidents’ Day; Veterans Day and Memorial Day. The change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. The law took effect at the federal level in 1971.

Red Poppies are a tradition inspired by a poem in 1915, “In Flanders Fields,” Moina Michael replied with her own poem:

We cherish too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies.

Memorial Day is a day of remembrance of those who have died serving our country. I tear at the sound of “Taps” played at ceremonies on Memorial Day. “We come, not to mourn our dead soldiers, but to praise them.” –Francis A. Walker.

It is the VETERAN, not the preacher, who has given us freedom of religion.
It is the VETERAN, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the VETERAN, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the VETERAN, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to assemble.
It is the VETERAN, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is the VETERAN, not the politician, Who has given us the right to vote.

I will tear up as well. We will be with our son, Scott, at his gravesite in Bigfork, Montana in memory of his service to our country.

Have a fun, safe, and memorable Memorial Day.

God Bless America and our great United States.

“Oh God, avenge those who have wronged our prophet Mohammed… I ask God the Mujahideen strike the throats of the infidels”

Robert — Sun, 30 May 2010 13:06:13 +0000

Motoon Rage and threats against the "Christian dogs." Not that this has anything to do with Islam! "Blood-Soaked Ticket: Al Qaeda's Warning To World Cup Fans," by James Murray for the Express, May 30:

BRITISH counter terrorism officers are probing Al Qaeda threats to bomb England's first World Cup match against the United States.
Extremists mocked up a ticket for the game splashed with blood and produced a map of South Africa with six cities ringed to indicate other targets.

The threats were made in Arabic on a secret website used by Al Qaeda.

Dutch footballing authorities have already banned their players' partners from travelling to South Africa because of a threat against their squad.

And last week, the US State Department warned there was a "heightened risk" of an attack during the World Cup and urged all its citizens going to South Africa to sign up to an alert system. [...]

One of several threatening messages on the website is entitled "Al Qaeda in the World Cup" and contains graphics promising a campaign of bomb attacks.

A map shows cities including Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg ringed and symbols representing explosions.

Accompanying text says: "To the Christian dogs in South Africa: it seems that you did not worry when we said that your blood will be spilled when we destroy the stadiums in South Africa." The internet blogger is in Algeria and appears to be referring to the recent threat made by Al Qaeda's north Africa wing to mount mass-casualty attacks.

The latest threat is one of several on a forum considered to be close to Al Qaeda's central leadership in Pakistan.

A response to the England attack threat says: "Oh God, avenge those who have wronged our prophet Mohammed... I ask God the Mujahideen strike the throats of the infidels."

In another message, the Dutch and Danish teams are targets because newspapers in their countries have printed cartoons of Mohammed. A plot to attack their game in Johannesburg on June 14 was discovered when terrorist Abdullah Azam Saleh al-Qahtani was arrested in Iraq on May 3....

Neil Doyle, a security expert, said: "Sporting events appear to be in the crosshairs... The World Cup could offer a wide range of attractive targets."

Fitzgerald: That Muslim Economic Summit in Washington

Hugh — Sat, 29 May 2010 13:10:55 +0000

Remember how Bush and his loyalists were reported as believing that if Iraq, or rather the fiction they described as "the Iraqi people," could be made "prosperous" through the introduction of "free-market ideas," then the lure and appeal of terrorism would be diminished? Remember how Americans were not only to bring "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in Iraq, so that the example of Iraq would serve as a beacon of hope blah-blah and a Light Unto the Muslim Nations, but also to re-fashion the economic system, so that individual enterprise would count and not merely what connections you had in the government? And all that talk about encouraging "entrepreneurship," and those meetings that took place with budding Iraqi "entrepreneurs" in the Green Zone, where young American civilians would explain the mysteries of Adam Smith to those who had always survived by taking their cut of oil revenues which, as in all the other Muslim oil states, were simply the result of an accident of geology, and not of industry or entrepreneurial flair?

Now, there are rags-to-riches Horatio Alger tales to be taken from American history, that might be told to Muslims - although perhaps those stories which, not infrequently, involved people who began in Russia or Eastern Europe, and got their Jacob-Riis start on or near Hester Street, should be downplayed. But the dreamy belief that Homo islamicus thinks like, or can be made to think like, Western man, Homo occidentalis, is an unproven and doubtful assumption.

But "the dream shall never die," as Senator Edward Kennedy used to bloviate. And that is why, in late April, "making good on a promise he made to the Muslim world last year [in Cairo]," Barack Obama a few weeks ago hosted "an entrepreneurship summit" in order "to deepen ties between business people in the U.S. and Muslim countries."

Here is how the event was described in advance:

More than 250 entrepreneurs, educators and investors from 50 countries will gather in Washington Monday for the two-day summit. The goals include finding ways to make economic and social climates conducive to entrepreneurship, and developing the role of businesswomen.
White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said the administration believes that promoting global entrepreneurship is a vital part of U.S. foreign policy.

"This is not simply an exercise in public outreach or public diplomacy," Rhodes said. "We believe this is the beginning of forging tangible partnerships."

During a June speech in Cairo, Obama said he wanted to forge a relationship between the U.S. and Muslims based on respect and partnerships with the private sector and civil society. Among his goals, Obama said, was to "create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries."

Several administration officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and White House economic adviser Larry Summers, will participate in the summit. Obama is expected to address the participants on Monday.

Rhodes said the administration will announce specific projects during the summit that the U.S. government will undertake to improve its business partnerships with Muslim nations.

Well, the event that was to bring "Muslim entrepreneurs" to Washington (all travel and hotel expenses paid by American taxpayers) to meet with American businessmen and "make contacts" took place. It hardly matters whether the event was a "success" according to the lights of the American organizers. What it did show the world is that in American eyes, you will get special attention if you are Muslim. Let's leave aside the Constitutional question - can the American government be spending tax money to further "Muslim" entrepreneurs, and thus, in a way that will be clear to some and that others will have to have explained to them, to further the faith of Islam by selectively furthering its adherents?

There is still greater damage to be done by holding such an event. For the certain result of such a ballyhooed meeting is to suggest to non-Muslims in the less-developed world, where help is sought and needed, that it pays to be Muslim. In sub-Saharan Africa, in Asia, including India with its Hindus and Sikhs and Jains, these people will notice that Muslims are being favored. And in Indonesia, where the Christians who constitute 10-15% of the population will similarly notice that Muslims are being favored by the government of the economically most powerful and influential country on earth, people will respond in a variety of ways, none of them good.

Some will simply be resentful. They will think that the American government is behaving bizarrely in favoring those who do not and, as Muslims, cannot, wish our Infidel nation-state well, with its Constitution that is flatly contradicted by the letter and spirit of the Shari'a. Muslims cannot wish Infidels, that is, the Americans who built America and 99% of its current citizens, well - though that would not prevent them from pocketing, without reciprocating gratitude, whatever handouts or help Americans may offer them in a spirit of gullible and confused generosity, the gullibility and the endless generosity often going hand in hand. With such things as this American-organized and American-sponsored summit for Muslims only, there will be those who will decide that perhaps there is something to be said either for becoming a Muslim (if, say, in sub-Saharan Africa, one is wavering between Islam and Christianity as both faiths make their appeal) or at the very least, for taking on a Muslim partner who can then - like so many of the scams involving government contracts awarded on an affirmative-action basis - attract from the Americans, as Muslims, the largesse, sympathy, and entrée to American businesses that Muslims are apparently to be offered but others are not. So here we are, implementing policies that signal that we not only do not think Islam is a retrograde force that naturally hinders economic activity and development, but that we intend to favor Muslims over others.

This sends a signal, one that may make Muslims happier, but will win us no hearts and minds, for they are unwinnable if Muslim. But it may make Islam more attractive, and more powerful. Is that the result the American government wishes? Is that the result that you wish as an American taxpayer, and hence as someone who is paying for such things as this Muslim-American Entrepreneurial Summit, or whatever the damn thing is called? Or do you rather wish to protest to high heaven that such things are being so foolishly done, as if we had not squandered trillions enough in vain attempts to achieve exactly the wrong goals in Iraq and now in what has been slyly called "the Greater Middle East" - extending its eastern border, apparently, all the way to include Afghanistan and Pakistan, that is, all the way to China?

Is it a good idea at this moment in world history to make people around the world think that to be a Muslim is a positive good, that it will make it more likely that the richest and most economically dynamic country in the world will take an interest in you and help to promote you? Won't such a policy tend to make Islam a more attractive option for those who don't really give a damn what they call themselves, and make local Muslims more attractive as possible business partners, even if they contribute very little? What's next? A kind of international Affirmative Action, where big contracts in the West are deliberately given to Muslim-owned or Muslim-operated companies, just so as to keep Muslims happy, and free of all the economic worries that might lead to bad behavior on their part, as they took out their economic distress on Infidels?

And there is another objection. The people who think that by giving money, say, or providing contacts to Muslim entrepreneurs, we will somehow win them over, make them less deeply believers in Islam itself, are misunderstanding Islam. Muslims are not grateful for the receipt of Infidel funds. They take it as their due. There is no example, in all of the countries where Muslims have received Infidel aid - not in Aceh after the tsunami, not in Pakistan after the earthquake, not in Egypt after all the tens of billions that have steadily been transferred to it, not in Jordan, not in the "Palestinian territories" - there is no example, even one, of some Muslim being deeply, truly, permanently grateful. Why, even the Iraqis are ungrateful, although they have seen the Americans spend two trillion dollars to remove a monstrous regime and then, on top of that, to try to keep the country together and even to bring to it "reconstruction" and prosperity - attempts that have largely failed because of the behavior and attitudes of Iraqi Muslims, which among other things have led to the forced departure of almost half of the country's Christians who, though they constituted 3% of the population of Iraq, also made up about one-third of its professional class, of doctors, engineers, professors, and others.

The reason that there is so little entrepreneurial activity certainly has nothing to do with poverty. Vast amounts of capital slosh around the Muslim world, for since 1973 alone the Muslim oil states have received, as revenues from the sale of oil and gas, more than thirteen trillion dollars. They have been the recipients of the largest transfer of wealth in human history. What amazes, then, is that in the nearly four decades - two generations - that have passed since the great fourfold increase in oil prices (and for decades before the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and others had already been receiving tens of billions, though not yet trillions) Muslim states have been completely unable to get off near-total dependence on oil and oil revenues. Every effort, including those that used up many billions of dollars, such as the Saudi attempt, now abandoned, to create a viable agricultural component to the country's economy, have led to failure. In Muslim states it is possession of power, control of the government and the military, that allows one to get one's hands on the nation's wealth, and to seize it for one's own sake, and for one's own family and one's own tribe. That is what has happened in every single Muslim Arab state. Wealth is not something you work for. It is something that others, preferably Infidels, somehow magically create, and that you, the proud Muslim and even prouder Muslim Arab, have a right to take.

In A God Who Hates, Wafa Sultan has a passage on the contempt for work in Islam, which she also connects to the pre-Islamic tradition of the raiding-party, one which continued under Islam:

[Islamic] teachings did not emphasize the importance of work. The concept of work in Islam was confined to nomadic migration, raiding, booty and the struggle for survival. Islam promised its followers rivers, fruits, wines and milk, but it did not encourage them to sink wells, grow fruit or raise livestock.

In citing this passage, Mary Jackson has asked readers to "contrast this with the New Testament, in which people are found fishing (even if they leave their nets), sowing seeds (even if on stony ground), watching their flocks by night (if interrupted by an angel), planting vineyards (even if grudgingly in the case of those hired in the morning), and separating wheat from chaff. Raiding and booty is not part of the picture. The closest the New Testament comes to a raid is the parable of the Good Samaritan. If that story had got in the Koran, the praise would not have gone to the Samaritan who helped the traveller, but to the thieves who attacked and robbed him, and there would have been advice on how to share out the spoils."

This kind of observation should not raise the objection that it is unkind; the only question to ask is: Is it true? Look at Saudi Arabia, with its millions of foreign wage-slaves, with the Americans and Europeans at the top, followed by the South Korean contractors and Lebanese Christian teachers, and the Indian and Pakistani day-laborers, and the domestics, some of whom double as sex-slaves forced to do their master's bidding, from India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and other Asian countries.

The word "Inshallah" that appears in almost every other sentence uttered by Muslims among themselves needs attention. It is not merely a verbal tic. It is a constant reminder that things happen or do not happen "God willing." And, repeated and believed, that phrase helps to keep vividly before Muslims the notion that Allah will do what he does, following his own whims, and it is not for Muslims to reason why. At any moment, Allah may will this or will that, and then all your plans will go agley. Why try, or why try very hard, in a universe with a whimsical and all-powerful Allah, subject to no physical and certainly to no moral laws, and to whom appeal cannot be made by prayer, for Muslim prayers are not supplications, as with Christians, but rather, they are occasions to demonstrate absolute mental submission to Allah and his dictates? Indeed, Muslims never question the morality of those dictates. The only thing that they may discuss is the degree of "authoritativeness" of the textual authority - Qur'an, Hadith, Sira - that is quoted. If a passage of the Qur'an is quoted, is it one of those that has been contradicted by a later passage in the Qur'an, and so is subject to the doctrine of naskh, or abrogation? If it is a Hadith, is it a Hadith assigned a high rank of authenticity by the most respected muhaddithin, Al-Bukhari and Muslim? If it is a detail in the life of Muhammad, who has written to make clear what the exact circumstances were, or what other passages exist in the other two main texts that shed light on details of the Sira, as the Sira sheds light on the Qur'an and Hadith, and the Hadith on the Qur'an and Sira?

The accounts of Western travelers used to include that phrase "Oriental fatalism." But as we can see, from the experiences of Japan, China, Korea, and now India, the "fatalism" in question is not really "Oriental" or "Asian." It is, rather, Muslim. It is Muslims who, despite the most fantastic sums, sums that have bought them everything conceivable, still cannot - and will not, I am certain - be able to create modern economies. Why should Saudis, Kuwaitis, Emiratis try if they have the oil wealth? Why should Egyptians, Jordanians, "Palestinian" Arabs try, if they can rely on endless aid, from Infidel governments, and from such Arabs-only outrages as UNRWA, start to acquire the habit of hard work? These are the lands of the Shisha, the hubble-bubble pipe, and of trictrac, the games of backgammon, and of other games that occupy the men who spend their days in the cafes and hookah-palaces of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and other Arab cities (less so in the Gulf), while at home their wives, chattel-slaves of one sort or another, breed and look after the brood.

Just think of that organization -- UNRWA - now entirely staffed, save for a camouflaging collaborating figurehead at the top, entirely by Arab Muslims. This is an organization that enrolls any local Arabs who want to get on the U.N. dole and can make the flimsiest of cases that they are "Palestinian" (formerly "Arab") refugees. UNRWA consumes fully half of all the sums set aside for "refugees" in the entire world, and does this more than sixty years after the conflict in which, it is said (not quite accurately), that those refugees were created. The actual refugees, of course, are only the half-million Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine in the months prior to and during the conflict started by the attacks of five Arab armies on Israel in an attempt to snuff out its young life, thus becoming, or seeming to become in the moral confusions of some, "refugees." The Jewish refugees - the nearly 900,000 Jews who fled the pogroms and intolerable existences in Arab-ruled lands - Yemen, Libya Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia and, a little later, Algeria - also leaving behind tens of billions of dollars in property, between 1948 and the early 1950s, are much more truthfully described as refugees, because they fled certain persecution. The Arabs who left "Palestine" were leaving a war zone, one created by the actions of the Arabs themselves. Had there been no war declared, the Arabs would still be living where they lived.

But the point is not the phoniness, and the seeming permanence, of the "Arab refugee," but rather, how amazing it is with all the tens of billions that have been spent by Western governments to support UNRWA, and to support Arafat and now his loyal henchman Mahmoud "No-One-Here-But-Us-Accountants" Abbas, the Arabs are still incapable of creating modern economies, and are, in the "West Bank," greedily grabbing whatever they can get from the Americans, the Europeans, and the Israelis, who have foolishly decided that creating "prosperity" among the local Arabs is an intelligent Israeli goal, a way of showing the Gazan Arabs what might be theirs - Israeli, American, European aid of every sort - if only they would transfer their allegiance from the Fast Jihadists of Hamas to the Slow Jihadists of Fatah. But that is not true prosperity; the Arabs on the "West Bank" have merely become masters at getting aid from every Infidel in sight, including the Israelis whose destruction, albeit on a different time scale, and using different tactics, they so ardently desire.

Hatred of Bid'a is rooted in Islam. If a Believer starts to allow for "innovation" in economic matters, if Believers start to talk about "doing things in a new way," you are courting danger from those who take Islam seriously, because they are keenly aware that all the truths that anyone needs are in the Qur'an, and those who talk about doing things in a "new way" might begin to see even Islam "in a new way," and that would never do. The impulse must be crushed, and those promoting "the new" ostracized or punished.

How can a conference, or a thousand conferences, on Muslim Entrepreneurship possibly undo the effect of this hatred of Bid'a, and this omnipresence of the idea of inshallah-fatalism? It is true that in the West, there are a few Muslims who have, in very narrow fields, those requiring the most technical kinds of prowess but not anything requiring a wider view or deeper intellectual skills, have managed, here and there, to take part in technology companies. There are a handful of those who, having left the world of Islam, have been able to conduct scientific research that they never could have engaged in in the lands dominated by Islam. Some of these people no doubt recognize the reasons why they could not do what they now do in their countries of origin. But most are unwilling, or perhaps psychologically unable, to connect the dots of economic and scientific backwardness with the effects of Islam itself as an ordering of the mental furniture. Still others may, while benefiting from their ability to enjoy the mental freedom of non-Muslim societies, do not wish to recognize publicly, out of filial piety or fear, what they obscurely or fully sense. There will never be many as brave and laser-like in their understanding as Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam. These are unusual people: the exceptions, and not the dreary rule.

But let's get back to that summit, with all the attendant attention, and expense, and general brouhaha as part of the effort to show the Muslims of the world that not only do we have any qualms about the ideology of Islam, but we are going to go out of our way to do everything we can to make Islamic countries and peoples just as well off as possible, and part of that effort is the encouragement of Muslim entrepreneurs.

I haven't seen the list of attendees, and I don't know who they are, or what their plans are, or whether or not some have doubtful connections or have made statements that, if known, would certainly be cause for alarm. But there is one attendee, Isabel Romero, about whom I did read in a Spanish paper, El Pais. You can find a Spanish-language article about her, and her evident delight with her attending the Washington "summit" for Muslim entrepreneurs, here.

Isabel Romero is a native of Spain, born Christian, but a convert to Islam. Her husband is a Christian from Madagascar, who has not converted with her. That means she converted out of conviction rather than out of a desire to please a Muslim husband. That is itself noteworthy, and disturbing, as are all cases of Adult-Onset Islam.

She is, she claims, more of an "activist" for Islam than she is an "entrepreneur." And her cause is encouraging the production of Halal products in Spain, not so much to be exported abroad but, she says, for the Muslims in Spain who - she claims - now number two million. Indeed, when she meets with the interviewer for El Pais, they go to Almudain, a halal restaurant, or at least one as close to strictly halal as can be found in Spain, that is located in the Old Jewish Quarter, La Juderia, in Cordoba. I presume that such a place has been established partly to cater to the Muslims who come from all over Europe and the Middle East too - why, just the other day a group of 120 Muslims from Austria arrived at the cathedral of Cordoba, which has not been a mosque for more than a thousand years, and, facing Mecca, began right there to prostrate themselves and offer Muslim prayers, an act correctly understood by many in Europe as one not of religious piety but of religio-political aggression, a kind of planting of the flag (as La Salle did near the Mississippi, claiming vast territories for the King of France, in 1683). And no doubt at Almudain, Isabel Romero's restaurant of choice, there are Arabs who come to Al-Andaluz to see the scenes of their once (as they see it) and future (as they hope it) glory. They can revel in their myth-making about the glories and tolerance of Islamic Spain -- much exaggerated -- and they can regard with satisfaction the new mosque that has opened in Granada, right by the Alhambra, and other mosques, too, all over Spain, paid for by rich Arabs. Isabel Romero wants to encourage such halal places; she wants to do everything she can to help Islam grow in Spain. That's understandable. But what is not understandable is why the American government should attempt to curry favor with her, or attempt to help her. The American government has a stake not in ensuring the success of this Isabel Romero, but in helping the Spanish, and the French, and the Dutch, and the British, and the Italians, and the Belgians, and the Swiss, and the Danes, and the Swedish, and the Norwegians, keep their countries from becoming places where the Muslim presence, and Muslim demands that grow pari passu with that presence, constantly increases. The American government does not understand why it is a mortal threat to Americans if Europe succumbs to Islam through deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest. And a cohesive Muslim community can, long before it becomes even one-third of the population, help silence many, and through the threat of violence, and through the even more effective means of spreading mental confusion, can undo the historic heart, and birthplace, of the West. And without Europe, the United States will be much lonelier in the world, and the psychic damage to those who think of our country as more than its GDP will be incalculable.

The American government should not wish to encourage the spread, and success, of halal food production and restaurants such as Almudain in Spain. It has a stake, rather, in aiding the Spanish people to discourage such things. Do those who make policy in the American government believe that a continually increasing Muslim community, one that has no difficulty finding a mosque because they are allowed to be built, with outside, chiefly Saudi, money, everywhere, and no difficulty leading a Muslim life because such people as Isabel Romero are there to push for making halal foods widely accessible, is in furtherance of our best interests as a nation and a civilization?

And do we want to help Muslims in Spain to grow and thrive? Why? Spain is high on the To-Do List of those Muslims - many Muslims - who not only recall the lands which were once under Muslim control, but give priority to recovery of those lands for rule by Muslims. Why should the American government wish to encourage such an entrepreneur, to help him find funding or make contacts? And those who have been observing up close know that those who convert to Islam include a much higher percentage of those who are fanatical in their Islamic faith than are those who, through no fault of their own, are simply born into the faith and are raised in societies suffused with Islam, from which they cannot extricate themselves with ease. Only sometimes, in the mental freedom and relative physical security of the West, do some dare to distance themselves from the Islam that was theirs by inheritance and not choice.

Should the American government let it be known that Europeans who convert to Islam are welcome to attend these conferences? Why? Even if one were to find plausible, rather than - as you and I do - idiotic, such an undertaking as this conference on encouraging Muslim entrepreneurs (and by now there are no doubt Americans specializing in this kind of thing, having smelled that there are foundation grants and government contracts to be garnered), surely the place to encourage them would be in the countries where, because Islam dominates, the rich are merely the well-placed, those who are the courtiers to the corrupt rulers, or the corrupt rulers, and their families, themselves. But that is not the situation in Spain, and the lady in question does not deserve to be offered and special help, by the American government.

No, what the American government should be doing is quite different. It should be allowing itself the freedom of having economists and others analyzing all the ways in which the ideology of Islam is responsible for the economic failures of Islamic peoples and polities. One such is the hatred of Bid'a, innovation, but that is merely part of a larger problem: the encouragement, in Islam, of the idea that the individual does not matter, but is merely a "slave of Allah" whose submission to him must be absolute, and that habit of mental submission is exactly the kind of thing that, in an entire civilization, has economic as well as political and intellectual consequences. Another is that inshallah-fatalism. Still another is the hatred of secular education, and the deep suspicion of education that teaches students to think. Even those who do not send their children to madrasas do not really wish their children to be exposed to the kind of training in free and skeptical inquiry that comes so naturally in the advanced West. And Muslims, so convinced - against all the evidence - of the superiority of Muslims and of their civilization, will only be offended by the presentation of history that they are likely to run across in the West. Shall we change not only our present ways, but our presentation of history, to give to Muslims, as such propagandists as Tariq Ramadan has suggested, "credit" for all of the West's most spectacular achievements, including the Renaissance and, even more absurdly, the Enlightenment? Shall we rewrite history so as not to offend Muslims, in the hope that we can win their hearts and win their minds? How much should we throw overboard in order to keep the mythical raft bearing gifts of Peace and Tolerance afloat?

No, we should learn. We should learn from those who, such as the economist Timur Kuran, have Muslim backgrounds as well as professional training in economics, all the ways that Islam keeps Muslims from economic as from other kinds of development. We should make sure that Muslims, instead of being the recipients of more and yet more kinds of aid (that we do not extend to non-Muslims), are forced to start confronting what Islam itself has caused, and what might have been had the "gift of Islam" never arrived in the vast swath of territories that were conquered by the forces of Islam, containing many peoples who found that with Islam came the attempt at arabization. Just imagine, if you will, what North Africa, where Tertullian and St. Augustine (Monica, his mother, was a Berber) lived, would now look like if Islam had never arrived. It would look like Spain, southern France, southern Italy. Think of what India would look like if the Muslims had never arrived to destroy so much, and to leave, in V. S. Naipaul's famous phrase, "a wounded civilization." Or think of Turkey, had Byzantium not succumbed to first the Seljuk and then the Osmanli Turks, and the destruction of so many churches, and mosaics, and frescoes, had never occurred: why, think of Ravenna, or rather, think of a hundred Ravennas.

You can go from there. You can take that imaginary counterfactual tour, in time and in space, yourself.

But keep in mind that a few weeks ago, you contributed your mite to the care and feeding and the entrepreneuring of a convert to Islam who is now promoting the halal food industry and who is, she declares, not so much an entrepreneur as an "activist" on behalf of Islam. And she was just one of 249 participants in this effort, where inshallah-fatalism and hatred of bid'a, you can be sure, never were mentioned, not even in the quietest of whispers. As with so much else having to do with the Western response, this was a squandering of resources (men, money, materiel, morale). The so very ineffective game being played was the one called "let's deal with Islam without ever finding out about, much less daring to discuss, Islam."

This can't go on. Yet it goes on. Those who presume to protect and instruct us think that the best way to do so is to keep pretending that Islam does not have the effect -- political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral -- on the minds of its adherents that it so obviously does. They have perhaps seen just a bit too much Beckett for their own good. Perhaps they should go to the bookstore and see if they can find something else. They might start with Bat Ye'or's Islam and Dhimmitude, which despite the grimness of the subject and the obvious description of present reality it contains, is - as the display of a mind at work tends to be - not depressing, or discouraging, but curiously bracing.

Obama’s counterterror chief: jihad is “legitimate tenet of Islam”

Robert — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:55:16 +0000

Willful blindness. "Counterterror Adviser Defends Jihad as 'Legitimate Tenet of Islam,'" from FOXNews.com, May 27 (thanks to all who sent this in):

The president's top counterterrorism adviser on Wednesday called jihad a "legitimate tenet of Islam," arguing that the term "jihadists" should not be used to describe America's enemies.

Why not? That's how they describe themselves. Wouldn't it be better to understand how they perceive themselves and what their motives and goals, rather than dismissing such study a priori?

During a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan described violent extremists as victims of "political, economic and social forces," but said that those plotting attacks on the United States should not be described in "religious terms."

Why not? That's how they themselves describe them.

He repeated the administration argument that the enemy is not "terrorism," because terrorism is a "tactic," and not terror, because terror is a "state of mind" -- though Brennan's title, deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security, includes the word "terrorism" in it. But then Brennan said that the word "jihad" should not be applied either.

Terrorism is indeed a tactic, not an opponent. I've been saying that for years. But then Brennan falls off the edge of sanity:

"Nor do we describe our enemy as 'jihadists' or 'Islamists' because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children," Brennan said.

Brennan should study the Qur'an and Sunnah in order to discover just how Muslims understand what it means to purify "one's community," and what the Islamic understanding is of the term "innocent." He would find, of course, that a community that is fully purified is one in which non-Muslims live as subjugated dhimmis, and that non-Muslims are never understood in the Qur'an and Sunnah as being "innocent." But he will not undertake such a study, and will never find these things out.

The technical, broadest definition of jihad is a "struggle" in the name of Islam and the term does not connote "holy war" for all Muslims. However, jihad frequently connotes images of military combat or warfare, and some of the world's most wanted terrorists including Usama bin Laden commonly use the word to call for war against the West.

It doesn't just "connote" warfare. It juridically means warfare, according to Islamic texts and teachings. There is not a single traditional school of Islamic jurisprudence that does not teach, as part of the obligation of the Muslim community, warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers.

Shafi'i school: A Shafi'i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, says that "Jihad means to war against non-Muslims" ('Umdat al-Salik, o9.0).

Hanafi school: A Hanafi manual of Islamic law emphasizes that jihad is a religious war against non-believers. It insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, "because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith." It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam "the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war."

However, "if the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do." (Al-Hidayah, II.140)

Maliki school: Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that "in the Muslim community, the holy war [jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force." In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with "power politics," because Islam is "under obligation to gain power over other nations."

Hanbali school: The great medieval theorist of what is commonly known today as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that "since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God's entirely and God's word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought."

But no, for Brennan it's just al-Qaeda:

Brennan defined the enemy as members of bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and "its terrorist affiliates."
But Brennan argued that it would be "counterproductive" for the United States to use the term, as it would "play into the false perception" that the "murderers" leading war against the West are doing so in the name of a "holy cause."

Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Taymiyya: Misunderstanders of Islam.

"Moreover, describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie propagated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism -- that the United States is somehow at war against Islam," he said.
The comment comes after Brennan, in a February speech in which he described his respect for the tolerance and devotion of Middle Eastern nations, referred to Jerusalem on first reference by its Arabic name, Al-Quds.

"In all my travels the city I have come to love most is al-Quds, Jerusalem, where three great faiths come together," Brennan said at an event co-sponsored by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Islamic Center at New York University and the Islamic Law Students Association at NYU.

Shame on Brennan for calling it "Al-Quds," the name given it by...Islamic jihadists.