Immigrants or Colonizers?

By Jan McDaniel

We Americans arrived, not as immigrants, but as European colonizers of the North American continent that was already inhabited by an indigenous race, whose ancestors were colonizers from Asia.

This bit of history was recently mentioned by an Israeli columnist who remarked on the irony of President Obama lecturing Prime Minister Netanyahu on where Israel can build settlements, while Obama was speaking from the formerly Iroquois territory of Washington, D.C.

I’m not sure the Iroquois nation extended that far south, but never mind—the point is valid.

The colonization process is underway again, or maybe it is better to say that it never stops.

We of the Western civilization send troops and Predators to Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan to get them, of the Islamic civilization, to reconsider their attacks on us and their neighbors. We advise them, with uneven success, on the creation of new Constitutions intended to embody Western freedoms.

They of the Islamic civilization immigrate to our Western countries to build a colony of believers in order to replace our civilization with theirs.

The indigenous inhabitants of North America recognized an existential threat in the Europeans, fought them, and lost. The indigenous civilization was subjugated by the new dominant civilization. Sometimes the waning civilization chooses not to fight. But either way, one of the big threads of history is the rise and fall of civilizations through colonization.

Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of
Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

If mankind ever arrives at any universal ideology, the distinction between immigrant and colonizer will disappear. But timing is everything. It is very dangerous to assume that we have arrived at the end of history, or will soon. If we behave as if the universal civilization is just around the corner, and thus do not need to resist Islam, we can be undone by our premature idealism. The issue is spelled out in detail in Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power.

President Obama is pushing America to catch up with Europe’s headlong rush to the end of history and he clearly does not believe that we are being colonized by Islam. What is his motivation? No one knows-- our CEO keeps his cards close--but his Cairo speech unveiled him as the Great Syncretist and he demonstrates interests that reach beyond America. If he serves two presidential terms, he will then be 56 years old. Who would be better positioned to lead a United Nations equipped with serious enforcement powers?

Most Westerners agree with Obama, and have not yet recognized an existential threat from Islam, though some in Britain and The Netherlands and a few in America are starting to react.

Some Muslims view their move to the West only as an attempt to live a better life, not to be terrorists, not as an attempt to change anything about their host country. Islamic law and doctrine are the farthest things from their minds. They are Muslims in name only.

But some of the new colonizers, the ones who run mosques and speak for Islam in the West, understand the history of Islamic colonization. As Solomon and Maqdisi explain in Modern Day Trojan Horse, the process is modeled on Mohammed's Hijra and the conversion of the pagan and Jewish Yathrib into Muslim Medina. The same process was used to convert Indonesia and Maylasia into Islamic states and these colonizers understand that Europe and America are next.

These directors of the Islamization process take money and direction from the Saudi clerical establishment and the Muslim Brotherhood. Some Brotherhood (Ikhwan in Arabic) directions were found in documents uncovered in the investigation for the Holy Land Foundation trial:

The most interesting exhibit is a Muslim Brotherhood memorandum by Mohamed Akram, dated May 22, 1991, where he outlines the Ikhwan vision of the future. He leaves no ambiguity as to the nature of the Ikhwan calling. Under the heading "Understanding the role of the Muslim Brother in North America," he writes:

"The process of settlement is a 'Civilization-Jihadist Process' with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and
'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

Douglas Farah,
counterterrorismblog.org

Islamists also understand that the natural process of assimilation can swallow colonizers. That is why Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan publicly told Turkish Muslim citizens of Germany in 2008 that “Assimilation is a crime against humanity."

If you believe that Western and Islamic civilizations are not essentially different, but essentially compatible, then none of this will be convincing.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in Turkey v. Refah that Islamic law is not compatible with Western civilization. If you agree with the Court's judgment, then Muslims in Europe and America are colonists, not immigrants.

History teaches us this: If the Muslim colony continues to grow, what we did to the Iroquois will happen to us.

Murray v. Geithner

Kevin Murray is suing our Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve Board. Mr. Murray, represented by David Yerushalmi and the Thomas More Law Center, claims that the government is violating the Establishment Clause of the Constitution by allowing AIG to sell sharia compliant insurance products.

AIG is 80% government owned now, so AIG actions are government actions. The suit claims that in offering sharia compliant products, the government is illegally promoting a particular religion, Islam. For more on sharia compliant finance and a copy of the legal documents, go here.

The government filed a motion to dismiss on two grounds, lack of standing and that the government had no intent to promote religion.

U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff recently denied the government motion to dismiss, saying: “In this case, the fact that AIG is largely a secular entity is not dispositive: The question in an as-applied challenge is not whether the entity is of a religious character, but how it spends its grant.” Kendrick, 487 U.S. at 624–25 (Kennedy J., concurring). The suit will go forward.

Given the nature of sharia (Islamic law), sharia compliance in any context is inappropriate in America. That the American government should support sharia in any way is a scandal, and illegal as sedition in addition to violating the Establishment Clause.

Islamic law is illegal in America because, unlike all other religions, the Koran (K. 9: 5-16) contains what is interpreted to be a religious duty on all Muslims to convert all national governments to Islam and does not preclude the use of violence in doing it.

This suit may turn out to be the first shot in the war against sharia in America.


Originally posted on 5/29/09

An Absurd Argument

Over and over, I see and hear the statement that America cannot do something or other because that will make us no different from our enemy. Absurd.

We will always be different from our enemy, even if we betray our best standards, even if we stoop to conduct the enemy uses routinely. Our history is full of examples—detention of Japanese-American citizens springs to mind.

We will always be different from our enemies because when we stop doing something repugnant and illegal by our own standards, we revert to who we have always been. Our history says who we are, not an instance of bad judgment or criminal behavior in the present. Our identity is not fragile and subject to rapid change under stress.

In other words, no country is perfect. Missing the mark of perfection does not change your identity, and it does not mean that you have adopted an “anything goes” attitude. I am absolutely certain that not one of the people who make the absurd argument would apply it to themselves. Mistakes do not define a person, but how the person corrects the mistakes does. Instances of illegal behavior do not define a state, a consistent history of illegality does.

Voltaire had a lot to say about the mistake of making the best the enemy of the good. That is what Americans who dine out on condemning American mistakes in its war with traditional Islam are doing. They would certainly refocus their efforts if they were convinced we were losing.

Why wait until the last ditch? Why not leave the overpopulated ranks of critics and join us infidels against jihad before it becomes necessary for us to win at all cost?

Alan Caruba recently said on this site that it is time to use nuclear weapons against Iran and North Korea because we have no options. Exercising that option would not make us the same as Iran and North Korea any more than removing Saddam Hussein from power made us the same as Saddam’s Iraq.

But we do have options. We have not begun to fight the ideology of traditional Islam that supports the goal of supremacy through jihad.

Because we are unwilling to declare the ideology of our enemy to be illegal in our country, we correctly hesitate at placing Guantanamo prisoners in American prisons. For the same reason, we are unwilling to close American mosques where imams spread the ideology of Islamic supremacy.

The clash between Islam and the West has only gotten worse since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Given the incompatibility of the respective ideologies, only one will survive in its present form. If it comes to a nuclear exchange, we will win. The question is on how many will die in the process.

The best option, from the critics’ point of view, is for us to stop shooting. That will not stop them from killing us. The next best option is to fight back in the ideological war.

Originally posted on 5/28/09

An Invitation to Muslims

If Muslims and non-Muslims ever accept the fact that there is a state of war existing between them, a promising option opens up.

Sunni-Shia fighting is continuous in the Islamic world. The conflict between Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan is about the supremacy of Islamic law. The Persian-Arab divide is explosive. The Syrian Alawites are occasionally attacked as heretics because of their worship of Mary, Sufis and Ahmadiyya are suspect, etc. Muslims living in the West, beyond the reach of an Islamic state with the power to enforce Islamic law, are beginning to challenge the traditional tenets of Islam that are so out of step with modern views of human rights.

These disagreements will damage the unity of Islam no matter what non-Muslims do. But when one group dominates, it will demand the support of all the rest in the battle against the unbeliever, to continue the pursuit of global supremacy for Islam.

The option: We and Islam can remove the cause of the permanent warfare.

Our strategy should be defined as inviting Muslims who reject the goal of Islamic political and religious supremacy through violence to join us against the Muslims who are using violence in seeking it. If this coalition based on mutual respect and equality wins the war against the supremacists, much of the tension between Islam and the rest of the world would be eased.

There would still be issues between Islam and the West over human rights. Islam’s list of rights and ours are different. But with violence removed as an option for spreading the religion, we would have the time to deal with those serious issues as we walk back from the edge of global religious war.

Such an invitation has been issued, with the definition of what it means to reject the doctrine of Islamic supremacy through violence:

We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree.

We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons.

We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights.

We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind.

We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called “Islamaphobia” in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation when they violate human reason or rights.

We call on the governments of the world to:

reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their forms; oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy, in accordance with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights;

eliminate practices, such as female circumcision, honor killing, forced veiling, and forced marriage, that further the oppression of women;

protect sexual and gender minorities from persecution and violence;

reform sectarian education that teaches intolerance and bigotry towards non-Muslims;

and foster an open public sphere in which all matters may be discussed without coercion or intimidation.

We demand the release of Islam from its captivity to the totalitarian ambitions of power-hungry men and the rigid strictures of orthodoxy.

We enjoin academics and thinkers everywhere to embark on a fearless examination of the origins and sources of Islam, and to promulgate the ideals of free scientific and spiritual inquiry through cross-cultural translation, publishing, and the mass media.
We say to Muslim believers: there is a noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine;

to Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha’is, and all members of non-Muslim faith communities: we stand with you as free and equal citizens;

and to nonbelievers: we defend your unqualified liberty to question and dissent.

Before any of us is a member of the Umma, the Body of Christ, or the Chosen People, we are all members of the community of conscience, the people who must choose for themselves.

Released by the delegates to the Secular Islam Summit,
St. Petersburg, Florida on March 5, 2007

Endorsed by: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam, Mithal Al-Alusi, Shaker Al-Nabulsi, Nonie Darwish, Afshin Ellian, Shahriar Kabir, Amir Taheri, Wafa Sultan, Hasan Mahmud, Tawfik Hamid, Ibn Warraq, Manda Zand Ervin and Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi.

Where are the Western leaders who will issue this invitation to end the permanent state of war declared by the believers in Islamic supremacy? Where are the Islamic leaders who will accept it?

Originally posted on 5/25/09

Update 8/9/09: Response to Secular Islam Summit http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/015663.php

The Demeanor is the Message

A consistent fact worth noting: Jihadists in the dock are invariably unrepentant, proud of their criminal deeds and aggressive toward the justice system that is judging them. They appear quite certain that their behavior is correct and that those judging them have no right to do so. They frequently wear a calm smile, as if they are in on something and no one else in the courtroom has a clue.

Where does this attitude come from? Ordinary criminals are sometimes repentant, sometimes not. Why are Islamic criminals 100% unrepentant? Are Muslim criminals this defiant in courts of Islamic law?

This is the last sentence of the Fatiha, the very important opening prayer of the Koran, which pious Muslims are obliged to repeat many times daily:

Guide us to the straight path: the path of those You have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray. [Haleem translation]

The usual interpretation of this verse is that the “straight path” is Islam, “those You have blessed” are Muslims, “those who incur anger” are Jews and “those who have gone astray” are Christians. If a Jew or a Christian said this prayer, it would have a very different meaning. When a Muslim says this prayer at an interfaith meeting with Jews and Christians, are they aware of the Muslim’s meaning?

So starts a divergence of meaning given to words used on both sides of the present war, and an explanation of why the two sides so often seem to be speaking past each other with no common ground. How can non-Muslims understand what Muslims say if commonly used, crucial words do not have the same meaning to both sides?

I have been puzzled for years over knee-jerk charges of racism against those who criticize Islam. My reaction is “What race is Islam?” The penny dropped for me when I read our UN Representative explaining to Muslims that racism is not an appropriate charge because, unlike one’s race, one’s religion can be changed.

But the Muslims charging critics with racism do not see the difference. One’s religion, for them, is no more changeable than one’s race. They do not recognize that a Muslim has the right to change his religion. So of course when Islam is criticized the charge should be racism—you are criticizing an aspect of a Muslim that is unchangeable. Racism is also a handy way to demonize a bothersome critic and place anything he says beyond consideration.

Wolfgang Bruno explains some more results of this divergence of meaning:

Peace: “Peace” in Islam equals submission to the will of Allah through his divine and eternal law, sharia, and the extension of the Dar al-Islam – or 'House of Islam' – to cover the entire world. The absence of sharia is the absence of peace. Since it is the will of Allah that Islam will rule the entire planet, entering non-Muslim lands to subjugate the population and wipe out their corrupt, infidel culture is not seen by Muslims as "waging war," but as spreading peace.

Freedom: Hurriyya, freedom, means freeing all people from being slaves of the laws of men and making them live in perfect slavery, in submission to the will of Allah and his laws.

Religious freedom: Subjugation of non-Muslims to religious apartheid and second class citizenship in their own country under Islamic rule. This option is only available to Christians and Jews, not Hindus, Buddhists or others, who have only the choice between embracing Islam or death. Muslims should practice sharia. Since these laws require the subjugation of non-Muslims, “freedom of religion” for Muslims essentially means the freedom to make others unfree.

Jihad: Peaceful, inner struggle that has killed up to 80 million people in the Indian subcontinent alone, and enslaved or killed tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people on three continents for 1350 years. It can also be violent, but only for defensive purposes, such as the Muslims who defended their way from the Arabian Peninsula to the borders of China, wiping out the indigenous cultures along the way.

Aggression: When non-Muslims do anything to preserve their culture and resist the Islamization of their country. Even when this “aggression” is non-violent, such as publishing a cartoon critical of Islam, this intolerable insult to Islamic supremacy on earth can be answered with violence by Muslims. Since a refusal to submit to sharia is a rebellion against Allah, the very existence of non-Muslim communities can be viewed as an act of aggression.

Do not let Mr. Bruno’s tone of grim humor mislead you. His assessment is spot on, and is no joke. I am told, and I believe, that some misunderstandings are simply due to the difficulty of translating from the Arabic.

The root of the problem comes from the necessity for early Muslims to differentiate Islam from Judaism and Christianity and to demonstrate Islam’s superiority. They did this by simultaneously absorbing Jewish and Christian ideas and leaders and rejecting the legitimacy of the religions:
• Moses and Jesus are accepted prophets in Islam.
• Jews and Christians have incurred anger and gone astray.

Doublespeak was present from the inception of Islam.

The next time you hear or read a pious Muslim call for peace and justice, remember that these words have special meaning to that Muslim. Peace and justice can only be attained by those who are subject to Islamic law. Everyone who lives under the rule of infidels is in the house of war and subjected to injustice; peace and justice are established when Islamic law is supreme.

Ask a pious Muslim to explain to you the laws that determine to whom he can offer the traditional Islamic greeting “Peace be upon you.” If you get a straight answer, you will be told that peace is to be offered only to those under Islamic law and known infidels may not be greeted with that phrase.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four featured three examples of how deliberate manipulation of language works to impose a desired mental attitude in the target audience:
• War is Peace
• Freedom is Slavery
• Ignorance is Strength
From the Western point of view, all three reversals of meaning are present in Islamic law.

The Muslim accused of a crime by an infidel state can only be contemptuous and amused by those who think they are speaking his language.


Originally posted on 5/24/09

Abuse of Muslims

"Guantanamo is used by al-Qaida as a symbol of American abuse of Muslims and is fanning the flames of anti-Americanism around the world," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.
Andrew Taylor, Associated Press, 5/20/09

It must be obvious that we are losing the propaganda war to al Qaeda.

We have been backed into a corner with few options. Capturing enemy combatants can never meet the legal standards of criminal law. Requiring soldiers to be policemen will not work. Nor will handing veto power over military operations to lawyers.

Fighting a war against an enemy dressed as a civilian, police ally or in our uniform is difficult under any conditions, but impossible under present rules of engagement.

We need to make the enemy identifiable. Our intuition tells us that most of the inmates of Guantanamo are enemies. So why is an American senator so troubled at their incarceration? Why is there a gap between what we intuitively understand and our ability to act on that understanding?

Look at the problem of enemy identification from the enemy’s point of view. He is standing up shouting, waving his arms identifying himself as our enemy. We can’t see him.

He marches in the streets carrying signs that identify him as our enemy. He has entire television stations and websites that broadcast day and night one message—I am your enemy. We can’t see him.

Our enemy is identified by what he believes. He proudly identifies himself when he announces his beliefs. We can’t hear him.

What is the content of the unspoken fear of bringing Guantanamo inmates to American prisons? It is that they will spread their beliefs in our prison populations. This infection is spreading in Britain and to some extent in America. From the enemy point of view, time spent in Guantanamo confers high status.

Of course we don’t want the rock stars of jihad preaching in our prisons. We can’t compete with them. That would identify Islamic teachings as the enemy’s ideology, and we are officially not at war with any part of Islam.

If we stand mute while the enemy preaches, we lose the propaganda war and the enemy gains recruits. We have a message too. It has proven to be more attractive than the enemy’s. That’s why there is a long line of people wanting to come to America, and no line to get into countries governed by the enemy’s message.

But if we refuse to identify the enemy, our message remains unspoken.

We must confront the ideology of Islamic supremacy through violence. Anyone who preaches or acts on it is our enemy. All Muslims who believe it should not be part of their religion are our allies.

Originally posted on 5/21/09

Intimidation

Tony Blankley,washingtontimes.com, 5/19/09, commenting on a Pew poll of Palestinians that showed they did not believe they could live side by side with a Jewish Israel, 77% to 16%:

Keep in mind, also, that after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a Sinai peace treaty with Israel, in October 1981 he was assassinated during a military parade in Cairo. A fatwa authorizing the assassination had been issued by Omar Abdel-Rahman, a cleric later convicted in the United States for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

It would take an unusually courageous leader to sign a peace treaty and his own death warrant in one document.

The same poll showed the Israeli population did believe they could live side by side with a Muslim Palestinian state, 61% to 31%.

I can think of two reasons why the poll came out as it did. One is the unique position Jews hold in Islamic law. There is a deep current of Jew hatred in Islam.

The second is intimidation. That is a nice word for politics by murder. This kind of intimidation has been used by both sides. But Israel reacted differently to it than the Palestinians did. After the murder of Rabin in 1995, Israel did not see a continuing rash of murders leading to civil war.

Politics by murder has become standard among the Palestinians. The larger point of Blankley’s article is that the two state solution is doomed on both sides. The right of return provision in the Arab plan dooms Israel to a Muslim majority. The Palestinian leader who signs a peace treaty with a Jewish Israel would have to be very confident in his bodyguards. The two state solution that would actually work, Jewish Israel and Muslim Jordan, is not seriously considered, and could not be implemented without American aid.

But most Americans and Israelis see their interests diverging because of the following assumptions:
• Americans need to repair their image with the Muslim world which is angry because of American support of Israel.
• Israelis need to protect themselves from an overt Iranian threat but cannot do so without disrupting the American image building program.

But in fact, America and Israel are facing identical problems. America is trying to assure no further attacks from the forces of traditional Islam, Israel is doing the same. Both countries are trying to find some way to security without full scale war against an Islamic ideology with global ambitions.

No one wants full scale war, but how to avoid it? Our two previous struggles against ideologies with global ambitions are instructive.

In World War II, it is probable that global conflict was inevitable. Too many people became convinced that the war machine of Germany was unstoppable. The Germans built a façade of invincibility and the Italians and Japanese were convinced. Many more countries were convinced enough to sit the conflict out, not taking sides.

In the Cold War, unlimited warfare was avoided by the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union caused by the arms race.

The WWII solution remains the final resort for America and Israel. The Cold War solution will not work. The forces of traditional Islam are too well funded to go broke with the war model they are using. There is one remaining approach that might avoid unlimited warfare. It is the identification of the ideology of traditional Islam as the marker of our enemy and a determined attack on that ideology.

The political will does not exist in either America or Israel to implement an ideological attack on traditional Islam. That political will is not likely to appear until more Americans and Israelis die at the hands of jihadists. Our short term future is more politics by murder.

Originally posted on 5/20/09

What Are They Thinking?

Deny and keep denying.

That’s the tactic some Muslims use today when faced with the chasm between modern human rights standards and the standards of traditional Islam. They also use it to disguise the fact that Islamic law constitutes an open-ended declaration of war against all non-Muslims.

Here are some of the traditional Islamic teachings that we non-Muslims are now being told we have misunderstood due to our cross-cultural insensitivity and inability to read Arabic:

• Wife beating and other forms of misogyny (female circumcision, honor killings)
• Spreading Islam by military conquest (offensive Jihad)
• Humiliation of conquered Christians and Jews (Dhimmitude)
• Muslims should not take non-Muslims as friends
• Mohammed’s nine-year-old wife
• The word “Islam” means “to submit” (to Allah’s will)
• The 9/11 attacks were permissible jihad
• It is Allah’s will for Islam to become dominant everywhere and every Muslim’s duty is to advance this goal; resistance to this imperative is injustice and impiety

The idea is to deny that these teachings are supported in Islamic law and that something is wrong with us if we ever got that impression.

The latest example of this tactic is The Muslim Next Door by Sumbul Ali-Karamali. Mrs. Ali-Karamali has impressive credentials—a J.D. from Stanford, a graduate degree in Islamic law from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

As Kamala points out here, her charm, wit and intelligence are not enough to overcome stubborn facts. You may think that Mohammed’s love life seems wildly out of place on a list of teachings which have serious implications for non-Muslim Americans. Why would it even be there? It’s there because Mohammed is the model Muslim, whose every action and opinion is law. If he did it in seventh century Arabia, it is right today in America.

So, why not say that what he did was right or at least acceptable in his time, but no longer?

Because questioning the appropriateness of using Mohammed’s behavior in seventh century Arabia as a guide for how Muslims should behave today opens the floodgates of reform. Are his commands to slay the unbeliever still appropriate when there are more than a billion Muslims in the world? Are his commands that prohibit gold ornaments, dogs, wine, representational art, pork, friendship with non-Muslims, etc. still reasonable?

I believe traditional Muslims will do everything they can to avoid reform. Here’s why.

Since the defeat of Islamic forces at Vienna on September 11 and 12, 1683, the Middle Eastern Islamic world has shrunk in size and influence. An oil-funded, resurgent, irredentist Islam is trying to reverse that trend. For them, 9/11 is the beginning of payback for 318 years of losses. They want their empire back. They see this war as a defensive effort to overcome and roll back the centuries of loss they have suffered and will continue to suffer as globalization and its attendant secularization force all traditional societies into a defensive position.

The West is defending itself against this effort -- unwilling, even if able, to recall the forces of globalization. What we have is a war in which both sides consider themselves to be on defense.

Real Islamic reform would stop the war. But traditional Muslims think they are winning and see no reason to reform. Soothing words by Mrs. Ali-Karamali, supported in various degrees by John Esposito, Khaled El Fadl, Karen Armstrong, Tariq Ramadan, Timothy Garton Ash, Ian Buruma and many American academic heavyweights are meant to lull us into believing reform is unnecessary. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, Geert Wilders, Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Spencer, Pascal Bruckner, Ibn Warraq, Nonie Darwish, Magdi Allam, Wafa Sultan, Amir Taheri, Brigitte Gabriel and other informed heavyweights from all parts of the political spectrum are not lulled. Some of these disputants met in debate on these issues here.

Mrs. Ali-Karamali evidently hopes we will believe without any evidence whatsoever that her Westernized interpretation of Islamic law will have some effect on the people in the Middle East who actually are in control of the definition of Islamic law and are keeping the war going. They feel besieged and surrounded by the forces of globalization, democratization and secularization in a way Mrs. Ali-Karamali does not and perhaps never has, living in America. She forgets that the colonist does not define the empire.
The tail does not wag the elephant.

But who knows? I could be wrong. Perhaps later she will see the need for the reform that will end up defining the empire. Changed circumstances can change minds. It has happened to colonists in America.

What I cannot understand is why anyone would think that traditional Islam will be successful in America without deep reform. What are they thinking? That America will ever adopt the goal of being more like Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran or Pakistan, the states where Islamic law is most accepted?

Do they really think they can bring a medieval desert society’s standards to 21st century America and no one will notice? Granted, the elites of America and most Western countries seem to be having some problem finding their sense of cultural identity. But do they imagine that the middle and working classes of America, the vast majority of the population, are going to stand still and allow this?

Do they think the women of America are going to surrender all they have gained in the last 90 years? Do they think gay America will welcome a belief that holds them to be criminal because of their sexual preference? Most amazing of all, do they think that a religion that defines itself everywhere as anti-Western and anti-American can be at home here in that hostile form?

It’s possible that an overwhelming sense of cultural superiority and entitlement blinds them to these realities. Without reform, it is inevitable that the violent people in their religion will push non-Muslim Americans too far.

My sense of the situation is that it would not take very much right now.

Originally posted on 5/16/09

Defining the Enemy

Words matter. They matter more than usual when defining an enemy in a war.

Our enemy has had no problem defining the enemy. Their enemy is everyone who opposes the spread of Islam. The West is high on that list because of its military and economic power and because it is the engine of globalization. Globalization is the organism that carries the pathogens that will transform or destroy traditional Islam and other tribal, pre-modern ideologies: capitalism, democracy and secularism.

We do have a problem defining our enemy. Here is a list of proposed names for our enemy that I see every day on the internet, arranged from the least specific (least likely to inspire political backlash) and least inclusive to the most specific and inclusive:

Criminals
Extremists, Terrorists
Radical Islam, Political Islam
Islamists, Fundamentalists
Traditional Islam
Islam

Another characteristic of this list is that it implies a response level appropriate to the enemy definition. If the enemies are criminals with no ideology that connects them, then we need do nothing in addition to business as usual—catch them and send them to jail and the problem is solved.

If the whole religion of Islam is identified as the enemy, the response cannot be business as usual and World War III is upon us.

I refer to Radical Islam, Islamism and Traditional Islam as the enemy in generalized contexts, but when being specific I use Traditional Islam, for the following reason:

The Human Rights Coalition Against Radical Islam:

We are advocating on behalf of all humanity, including Muslims who are themselves victims of Radical Islam. This group will never claim that Islam as a religion is inherently radical. We will take action against Radical Islam based upon concrete political grounds only.
http://hrcari.wordpress.com/about/

The only criticism I have of that statement is that it does not address the theological source of Radical and Political Islam. That source is traditional Islamic law.

Those who describe the problem in Islam as Radical and Political usually trace it back to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1929) and the writings of Sayyid Qutb, 1906-1966. What they miss when they say that today’s problem only appeared in the 20th century is that Qutb got his ideas from that influential Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, who was born in 1263 and died in 1328.

None of Qutb’s ideas were new to him or Islam:
• Separation of religion and state should not be allowed.
• The use of force is allowed to overthrow non-Islamic governments (sedition).
• The use of takfir — the Muslim equivalent of excommunication -- which carries a death sentence, is allowed.

My conclusion is that Islam must be reformed to remove traditional Islamic law that threatens non-Muslims. Our present problems with Islam did not start in the 20th century.

Originally posted on 5/16/09

Occidentalism

Proponents of free markets, limited government, limited immigration, individual liberties, national pride and patriotism have been painted into a corner and described as opponents of multiculturalism.

We should stop wearing that label for the following reasons:

• We don’t in fact oppose multiculturalism. No one has a problem with the fact that America has more than one cultural group. We settled that issue long ago.

• We don’t even oppose cultural relativism entirely. We don’t care if South Pacific Islanders have a different view of cultural values, so long as they don’t try to impose them on us. Live and let live. We do and should reject any notion that our culture is just one among many, all of which are equally valuable and welcome to become part of our multiculture without change. If South Pacific Islanders come to live here, they will have some adjustments to make, and we don’t apologize for that.

• What we actually oppose is the leftist-Islamist alliance called Occidentalism

Occidentalism is the hatred of all things of Western culture, especially capitalism. It has a long history, but the present mixture of haters is composed of:

• Bitter-end socialists who think the wrong side won the Cold War
• Disaffected Westerners whose every act is motivated by shame over racial, colonial and imperialistic mistakes made in the past by the West
• Islamists.

An alliance of temporary convenience if ever there was one. The holy text for Occidentalists is Edward Said’s Orientalism.

The leftist-Islamist coalition has defined the Culture War in a way that we should reject. We don’t want to return to nineteenth century America. We don’t want to return to a society dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. We want Americans to be proud of America as it is now and of its history and traditions, mistakes and all. What we should resist is the message that America has been bad in the past, but can become something good in the future if it changes a lot.

We want to reverse the changes that message has brought about.

• We have to show how historically wrong it is to say our culture is just one among many, no better, no worse.
• We need to reverse the trend against patriotism and pride in our nation’s history and traditions.
• We have to learn to say no to illegal immigration and make it stick. It might also be a good idea to slow down legal immigration to give us some time to absorb.
• We must re-introduce the teaching of American history in our schools in a way that produces citizens who are proud to be American right now. We must teach world history in a way that shows liberal democracy to be a vast improvement when compared to the ways societies have been organized in the past.
• We must resist the trend that places Spanish on the same level as English.

We should resist the call to follow Europe’s lead in socialism and cultural relativism, especially in its acceptance of Islamic law. But most of all we should oppose Occidentalism. We should defend the culture of the Enlightenment, encourage national pride and patriotism. The West is the only part of the world where national pride and patriotism are not openly and enthusiastically celebrated.

Think long and hard about why that is true.

Originally posted on 5/15/09

Saudi Blowback

We see many instances of the West’s contradictory efforts to respond to the assault from traditional Islam.

Traditional Islam has the same problem.

The Saudi government—a family leading a tribe with a flag—is not always on the same page as its Wahhabist clergy. Pakistan is an example.

The Saudi government has been building and staffing schools in Pakistan for some time with the goal of creating public demand for the Pakistani government to enforce more Islamic law. The Saudi clergy want this effort to create a Pakistan that more closely resembles Saudi society. The Saudis have the same program in Bosnia—and America, England, etc.

Rachel Eherenfeld, in the 5/12/09 Forbes, says that the total Saudi aid to Pakistan since the Taliban incursion caused massive displacement has been 150 tons of dates, while so far in 2009 has given the Palestinians almost $2 billion.

Maybe the reluctant aid means nothing. Maybe they are assuming that America will foot the bill. But maybe they see a monster of their creation and are reluctant to feed it very much.

A bin Laden-friendly Taliban in control of Pakistan’s nukes has to be a recurring Saudi nightmare.


Originally posted on 5/14/09

Whistling Past the Graveyard

“Don’t you think German women dress better now, since the war, M. Daladier?” “Why, yes indeed I do, Mr. Chamberlain.”

Two Christian Science Monitor articles Illustrate the optimistic wishful thinking prevalent today in some circles.

In an attempt to show that Islam is changing, the Monitor’s editorial board points out in its 5/11/09 article, The Unseen Burqa Revolution, that:

[…] it's so important to recognize victories large and small – from the women who gained 25 percent of the seats in Iraq's provincial elections Jan. 31, to the two Palestinian women in the West Bank who appear to be the first female sharia judges in the Middle East. […]

As the Pakistani Army fights the Taliban, remember that this Muslim country twice elected a woman as prime minister – the late Benazir Bhutto. In the past 20 years, female premiers have led Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim country), Bangladesh, and Turkey. […]

On 5/8/09, the Monitor ran a story by John Hughes, Islam and Democracy, which included:

[…] skeptics have argued that this is a lost cause, and that democracy and Islam are incompatible. So it is heartening to see the integration of democracy and Islam taking place in three huge countries whose Muslim populations make up somewhere between a quarter and a third of the world's entire Muslim populace. […]

Mr. Hughes goes on to say that democracy is thriving in Indonesia, India and Turkey.

Three very interesting countries, but not examples of thriving democracy, Mr. Hughes. In fact, just about the opposite. The Indonesian government systematically denies equal rights to non-Muslims. From the 2/9/09 Christian Today:

[…] Sixteen of 32 provinces have passed laws influenced by sharia. These laws vary widely in form. In Padang, both Muslim and non-Muslim women are required to wear headscarves, while a law in Tangerang allows women found “loitering” alone on the street after 10.00 pm to be arrested and charged with prostitution. Other laws include stipulate Quran literacy among schoolchildren and severe punishment for adultery, alcoholism and gambling. This is unacceptable because it is not in line with the pluralism that the constitution recognizes,” according to some lawyers. […]

India is an example of Islam held in check by a Hindu majority which answers Islamic aggression in kind and Turkey is an example of a failing attempt to maintain a secular government which Ataturk installed by force over a Muslim-majority populace.

More typical of the integration of Islam and democracy is the case of Maher El-Gohary, reported in Compass Direct of 5/12/09. Mr. El-Gohary is the first Egyptian Muslim ever to get official permission to change to Christianity. He is in hiding, in fear of his life, while his lawyer sarcastically says “In Egypt we have freedom of religion, but these freedoms can’t go against Islam.”

David P. Goldman writes injects a sense of reality in the 5/12/09 First Things:

America is even more vulnerable today, when its government cannot even identify who and what the enemy might be. President Obama insists that America is not at war with Islam, but it surely is at war with an interpretation of Islam shared by tens and possibly hundreds of millions of people. By falsely representing the terrorists as an unrepresentative minority in the Muslim world, Western governments have left their people vulnerable to a profoundly demoralizing shock.

What those hundreds of millions of Muslims share is not an interpretation but acting upon the commands found in the Koran that have never been limited in time or place.

And then there is the arch-pessimist himself:

The march of time cannot be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or
clever renunciation. Only dreamers believe there is a way out. Optimism is
cowardice.

Men and Technics, Oswald Spengler

Originally posted on 5/13/09

Havel is Wrong--McCain was Right

NYTimes.com:

OPINIONMAY 11, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor: A Table for Tyrants
By VACLAV HAVEL
The absence of competition in the election for the United Nations Human Rights Council suggests that states that care about human rights simply don’t care enough.

In his NYTimes article, Vaclav Havel correctly identifies the problem in the Human Rights Council. The fox is guarding the hen house. The major rights abusers are taking seats in the Council in order to prevent criticism being directed at them and to make sure the only nation criticized is Israel. The recent Durban II conference demonstrated how that works.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference has colluded with its leftist alliance members Cuba, Russia, China, Venezuela and many African states to this end.

The West is attacking Islam for its withholding of rights from women, gays and non-Muslims. Islam, in the form of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, is fighting back in the U.N. The OIC is a unique organization. It is made up of 57 U.N. member states that identify themselves as Islamic. No other religion has such an organization on the international political level. This is another expression of Islam’s lack of separation of religion and politics.

The OIC is pushing the idea that its framing of human rights in Islamic law is superior to the human rights outlined in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

CAIRO DECLARATION ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN ISLAM
Organization of the Islamic Conference, 1990
Preamble: Believing that fundamental rights and universal freedoms in Islam are an integral part of the Islamic religion and that no one as a matter of principle has the right to suspend them or ignore them as much as they are binding divine commandments, which are contained in the Revealed Books of God and were sent through the last of His Prophets to complete the preceding divine messages thereby making their observance an act of worship and their neglect or violation an abominable sin, and accordingly every person is individually responsible—and the Ummah collectively responsible—for theirsafeguard.”
Opening line: “Reaffirming the civilizing and historical role of the Islamic Ummah which God made the best nation…and the role that this Ummah should play to guide a humanity confused by competing trends and ideologies…”[emphasis added]

The Cairo Declaration denies the rights found in the UDHR and essentially states that everyone has the right to be a Muslim and get the rights guaranteed in the Koran. Maybe this is why the Pope does not consider Islam just another religion.

Jane Kramer reported the Pope saying, in her New Yorker piece of 4/19/07:
…

it (Islam) is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of pluralistic society. Islam has defined its own catalogue of human rights, which differs from the Western catalogue.

But Mr. Havel was wrong to conclude that the problem lies with the states that care about human rights. The problem lies in the standards for membership in the UN. There are two possible solutions. Either start enforcing those standards by kicking out members who do not comply or form a League of Democracies as John McCain suggested.

It might be a good idea to form the League anyway, since the OIC has the votes to block any membership issue. The League could function as a counterbalance to the OIC.

Originally posted on 7/28/09

Multiculturalism and Islam

Every time I turn around, someone is telling me that George Orwell was right, words do matter, and we have to agree on what the important words mean. Right now there is a significant disagreement on what the word “multicultural” means. It is in a category of words that have been drained of meaning and turned into clubs. “Fascist” is another word in that category.

Samuel Huntington, Ibn Warraq, Richard Rorty and John Rawls have all written penetrating, and sometimes wrong, comment on the subject.

For example, David Sapsted writes in The National of 5/10/09:

LONDON // A Muslim chef is suing Britain’s largest police force, claiming he suffered religious discrimination because he was expected to cook bacon and pork sausages for breakfast.

Hasanali Khoja is due to put his case against the Metropolitan Police to an employment tribunal, which starts a 10-day hearing in London tomorrow.

The case has caused outrage in the British press and has been seized on by far right political parties, being branded “the madness of multiculturalism” by the British National Party.

I am pretty sure the BNP is not objecting to the presence of another culture in Britain. The British peoples have absorbed cultures since the Romans. My guess is that the BNP is objecting to an attempted hostile take over of British culture.

The explanation of why this should not be labeled as multiculturalism comes in two parts, Occidentalism and cultural relativism.

Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit write on page five of their book Occidentalism about the potent mix of ideas that have combined to oppose Western culture.

“The loathing of everything people associate with the Western world, exemplified by America[…]” is attractive to Islamists, anti-capitalists and socialists who see the capitalist West as the roadblock in their path to dominance. David Sapsted probably agrees with most of the political left in their assessment of Islam as just another religion, no threat to the West. The left wing sees Islamists as allies against capitalism and look no further than that.

The reason the Muslim chef makes his demands and the reason they will be met is cultural relativism.

Pope Benedict, writing while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, speaks of an epidemic of relativism in Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, 2006:
Europe is infected by an epidemic of relativism. It believes that all cultures are equivalent. It refuses to judge them, thinking that to accept and defend one’s own culture would be an act of hegemony, of intolerance, that betrayed the anti-democratic, anti-liberal, disrespectful attitude toward the autonomy of other populations and individuals. Pp.85-86.

If I am right, the BNP is protesting the imposition of Islamic law—a cultural artifact dedicated to the downfall of Western culture.

The basic assumption of multiculturalism is correct—many cultures and religions can share one nation in justice and harmony—Western nations have been doing it for a long time. But Islamic nations have not. There is a long historical record supporting that truth, and the stronger Islam is in a nation, the more true it is.

Islamic culture cannot qualify for inclusion in multicultural nations. All cultures are not equal in that sense. The culture of traditional Islam is one that cannot qualify because Islamic law has not been reformed to allow the acceptance of other cultures and religions as equals.

Originally posted on 5/10/09

Enemy Generator

My reaction to 9/11 followed a path familiar to millions of Americans. Grief, rage, frustration. After Pearl Harbor, we spent a long time in Europe because it was circling the drain, but we always knew where we would wind up. In Japan. After 9/11 we had no return address for our response.

We killed a lot of enemies, unfortunately not bin Laden, in Afghanistan and Iraq. We captured some more and sent them to Guantanamo Bay. We tried some enemies in our criminal courts. But almost eight years later the number of enemies seems to have grown, if you believe their own statements. There seems to be something out there generating enemies.

I needed to understand the ideas behind 9/11, and I noticed that bin Laden was talking about religious doctrine as justification for his attacks. But not to Americans. To Americans he said something completely different.

Raymond Ibrahim has done the West a service by collecting and translating the writings of the leaders of Al Qaeda into The Al Qaeda Reader. In his 4/11/08 article for Middle East Strategy at Harvard, Jihadi Studies as Trivia, he says:
Consider the disparity of the following two quotes, both by bin Laden, one directed to Americans, the other to Muslims. To Americans, he says: “Reciprocal treatment is part of justice; he who initiates the aggression is the unjust one.”
However, in an obscure essay entitled “Moderate Islam is a Prostration to the West,” directed at fellow Muslims—his Saudi kinsmen, to be specific—bin Laden celebrates his understanding of Islam’s aggressive nature:
“[O]ur talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue, and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually?
Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: either willing submission [i.e., conversion]; or payment of the jizya [poll-tax paid by non-Muslims], thereby bodily, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or the sword—for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live.
The matter is summed up for every person alive: either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die…. Such, then, is the basis of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred—directed from the Muslim to the infidel—is the foundation of our religion.”
(The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 42.)

Bin Laden’s putative second-in-command, Zawahiri, quotes the chapter and verse from the Koran to back up bin Laden’s statements. I recommend The Al Qaeda Reader to anyone who wants to understand the war we are in.

The enemy generator is the Islamic law bin Laden and Zawahiri cite as justification for their jihad.

Any intelligent reader of the Koran and Sunna would have to agree that bin Laden and Zawahiri are correct when they say that traditional Islam allows only three paths for the infidel:
• converting to Islam
• becoming a Dhimmi, and therefore subject to humiliating second-class citizenship
• death.

So, I think that the return address for 9/11 is the reform of Islamic law. We are at war with those who believe, as bin Laden does, that Islamic law constitutes an open-ended declaration of war against unbelievers; that the Koranic commands to battle unbelievers are not limited in time or place.

It is not up to infidels to solve the problem. It is up to Muslims to rescind the state of war that has existed for centuries. It may, however, be prudent for us to suspend Muslim immigration until that happens.

The appropriate Islamic authorities should publish a new interpretation of the Koran which makes clear that the aggressive violence recorded there was wrong then and is wrong now. Experience has taught us that violence in the name of religion is wrong, and always has been.

That is the meaning of the right to freedom of conscience.

Originally posted on 5/8/09

Reform Islamic Law

We are very late coming to the game that Islamists in America have been winning since 9/11. They started their accusations of racism and bigotry early on and have not let up. It is well past time for us to stop playing defense and start playing offense. Full court press.

There certainly were inexcusable and criminal bigoted attacks on innocent Muslims after 9/11. I hope the perpetrators of these attacks are still in prison. I propose to criticize Islam. Criticism is not bigotry. I disagree with some of the ideas that are part of the ideology of Islam. In our society, religious ideas can be criticized because we do not place them above reason.

Criticism is not racism. Racism is disrespect for a person’s unchangeable physical traits. People deserve respect for who they are. They can’t change their race. Ideas should always be criticized. That’s how good ideas advance and bad ones are discarded.

America has been accused of declaring war on Islam. We have not declared war on Islam. We declared war on terror, which is the same as no declaration at all. It is time we declared that there is something wrong with Islam. Something that we intend to fight.

Islamic law needs to be reformed. It condones the use of violence to remove all barriers to the spread of Islam. This is the doctrine of jihadism, and we cannot allow it in America.
An Islam purged of the jihad imperative is no threat to us or anyone.

Muslims Against Sharia have shown one way it can be done. Mahmoud Taha of Sudan pointed to a different path to reform. They have in common the removal of the jihad imperative from the Koran, by different means.

I am not persuaded by Westernized Muslims who have denied that Medieval, Middle Eastern Islamic law has any relevance to modern Islam in the West. As if it is no longer in force. But it is, and why haven’t they joined the reform movement demanding reinterpretation? These Muslims live in the West because they do not want to live under unreformed Islamic law, but most of them see no reason to take a risk and join the reformers.

Our job is to keep the heat on them until reform happens.

Inside America, we need imprisonment for those who work toward imposition of Islamic law. They are committing the crime of sedition. This re-orienting the focus of our law enforcement efforts will give domestic Islamic reformers the safety they need to move from their present defensive position to offense. Our foreign policy should reflect the same goal. Aid those who resist the imposition of unreformed Islamic law, attack those who try to impose it. Europeans will have to decide which side they want to join, if they ever vacate that comfortable seat on the fence. There are signs that they are ready to move.

We have been so tentative, trying to find some way to express our sense that something is wrong with Islam. The events of 9/11 and the Middle Eastern reaction to them shouted that message to us. We have been living with a sense of foreboding as we tried to find the handle. We really didn’t want to look very hard at the realities of Islam, we wanted to be convinced that Islam is just another religion.

We wanted to be convinced that the problem lay only with Islamists--or al Qaeda, mujahidin, militants, radicals, jihadists, Hizballah, HAMAS, fundamentalists, Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iranian Mullahs, the Taliban, Salafis or extremists. We pointed to any splinter group that we could blame for the continuing mayhem being committed by Muslims around the world, much of this mayhem victimizing other Muslims.

Many Americans accepted with relief the Islamist claim that our foreign policy was to blame. Some Americans are ashamed to see how successful our businesses and our political style and pop culture and technology are around the world. They see our successes as confirmation of Edward Said’s cynical, Occidentalist view of the West as imperialist.

But all the above were avoidance strategies. The foreboding was justified. The problem was not found on the fringes of Islam, but at its heart, in Islamic law. In traditional Islam. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, it has not found a way to realign its dogma to the realities of modern human rights. The residents of the fringes of Islam are the reformers-- the few who have been allowed to remain alive—not the traditionalists.

So that is where we have been. How do we get into the game? No more playing defense. No more apologies. Let’s get our hands in Islamist faces and keep them there.

Originally posted on 5/7/09

Drawing the Line, Part 2

In American criminal law, the Smith Act of 1940, 18 U.S.C. paragraph 2385, says that it is a criminal offense for anyone to “knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force of violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association.”

The crime described by the Smith Act is sedition, which my dictionary says is “Conduct or language inciting to rebellion against the authority of the state.” Since its enactment in 1940, the Smith Act has been revised to make the bar higher for convicting those who are charged with violating the Act.

We should do two things:

---Congress should eliminate those revisions. Our law enforcement officials should have maximum latitude in pursuing such criminals.

---The Attorney General should select any one of the blatant advocates of Islamic law (sharia) in America for prosecution in order to make clear that the advocating of Islamic law falls within the scope of the Smith Act.

This is why I believe advocating the establishment of Islamic law in America is a crime.

The Koran (Haleem translation), 9:29:

Fight those of the People of the Book who do not truly believe in God and the Last Day, who do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden, who do not obey the rule of justice, until they pay the tax and agree to submit.

It is always dangerous to quote without context. The context of this quote is about who should be allowed to “come near the Sacred Mosque” in the seventh century. If this command had been interpreted in Islamic law as an instruction not to allow unbelievers to worship at the mosque, I would not be writing this.

I am writing this because Islamic law interprets this verse and many like it to mean that there is to be a continual struggle against unbelievers until they submit. No limitation in time or place. The struggle to establish Islam as the dominant religion is presented in Islamic law as an imperative that brooks no opposition. Infidel governments are no exception.

The opinion that Islamic law advocates forcible overthrow is confirmed by rulings of the Turkish Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights. In 1998, the Turkish court banned the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) because the rules of sharia promoted by Refah “were incompatible with the democratic regime …Democracy is the antithesis of sharia.” The European Court of Human Rights agreed on appeal in 2001 and 2003.
Noting that the Welfare Party had pledged to set up a regime based on sharia law, the Court found that sharia was incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy as set forth in the Convention. It considered that sharia, which faithfully reflects the dogmas and divine rules laid down by religion, is stable and invariable. Principles such as pluralism in the political sphere or the constant evolution of public freedoms have no place in it.
According to the Court, it was difficult to declare one’s respect for democracy and human rights while at the same time supporting a regime based on sharia, which clearly diverged from Convention values, particularly with regard to its criminal law and criminal procedure, its rules on the legal status of women and the way it intervened in all spheres of private and public life in accordance with religious precepts.

Luzius Wildhaber, President, European Court of Human Rights

http://www.echr.coe.int/NR/rdonlyres/29AC6DBD-C3F8-411C-9B97-B42BE466EE7A/0/2004__Wildhaber_Cancado_Trindade_BIL__opening_legal_year.pdf

The Court’s judgment included the following observations:

• The Refah claim of freedom of association does not overcome the State’s rights to protect its institutions.
• The means to change the State’s institutions must be legal in every respect.
• The final goal of the party must be compatible with fundamental democratic principles.
• Sharia does not exclude the use of force in order to implement its policies.

Until Islamic law is reformed to exclude the use of force in spreading Islam, its advocates should be subject to prosecution for sedition.

Originally posted on 5/5/09

Drawing the Line

Geert Wilders is having problems exercising his right to free speech when that speech is critical of Islam. His problems are part of a larger problem for all of us.

Commenting on Mr. Wilders, Gary Fouse wrote:

[…] In America, everyone can practice their religion freely, including Muslims. It is when it becomes a political ideology preaching hate that we draw the line. […]

Mr. Fouse touches on the central issue concerning America and Islam. Indeed, the central issue concerning the evolving relationship between America and religion: what limits do we want to place on the freedom to practice religion?

The secular version of that question is: what limits do we want to place on the freedom to promote political ideologies? In the case of Islam, both questions must be asked. They must be asked because the limits of these freedoms are being tested. Purposefully.

We must pay attention to these freedoms. Asserting them keeps our individual citizens free to act and think as they wish—a kind of freedom that should be on the world’s endangered species list. Acting against abuses of these freedoms protects the whole democratic enterprise which is America. As Mr. Fouse points out, we need to draw the line between freedoms we want to protect and abuses we must prosecute.

How to do it?

It’s not rocket science, but it must be done with care—we are dealing with fragile and precious national assets—our freedoms and our global reputation. No new legislation is needed. Islam does not need to be singled out, our laws apply to all religions. We simply need to enforce the laws we already have. We have some experience with this.

There was a time when American Mormons openly practiced polygamy. It was part of their church law, part of their covenant with their god. They passionately believed in it. But in America, secular law takes precedence over religious law and most Mormons gave up their illegal practice.

Islamic law (Sharia) is incompatible with our secular law in:

• Advocating the forcible overthrow of any national government that does not submit to Islam (Jihadism)
• The lack of separation of religion and state
• Demands from Islamic law on the allegiance of the American Muslim citizen
• The doctrine of Islamic supremacy
• Muslim treatment of non-believers
• Blasphemy penalties
• Gender inequity
• Persecution of homosexuals
• Lack of freedom of speech
• Lack of academic freedom
• Lack of artistic freedom
• Lack of freedom of conscience

Looking at this list, even a non-lawyer can see the cultural and legal chasm between American law and Islamic law. It’s not rocket science.

Are there Muslims who do not follow every command of Islamic law? Yes, as surely as there are Catholics who do not follow all of Canon law. Are there Muslims who are actively opposed to the present interpretation of Islamic law and want to change it? Yes, Muslims Against Sharia and American Islamic Forum for Democracy are two such groups. We should support them and groups like them in their efforts to create a version of Islam that is acceptable in a liberal democracy.

Unreformed Islamic law does not qualify to be part of a liberal democracy. It is more logical to treat it as a competitor than a component of America.

Originally posted on 5/3/09

Islam and Free Speech

The Islamic assault on free speech has become considerably more sophisticated since the death sentence on Salman Rushdie. A court in Jordan is seeking jurisdiction and an Interpol arrest warrant to try the creators of the Danish cartoons. Geert Wilders, the creator of the film Fitna and member of the Dutch Parliament, is being prosecuted by Dutch authorities on hate speech charges.

The British House of Lords invited Wilders to show his film and speak about it. The Labour government refused his attempt to enter the country, the first such refusal of any elected politician from an E.U. state. The refusal was based on the assumption that Mr. Wilders’ presence in the U.K. would cause a public disturbance. His right to free speech was not considered important enough to overcome the threat of public disharmony. Mr. Wilders is criticized for calling for the banning of the Koran. The charge comes from a September, 2007 speech Wilders gave to the Dutch Parliament. This is the relevant part of that speech.

Madam Speaker, the Koran is a book that incites to violence. I remind the House that the distribution of such texts is unlawful according to Article 132 of our Penal Code. In addition, the Koran incites to hatred and calls for murder and mayhem. The distribution of such texts is made punishable by Article 137(e). The Koran is therefore a highly dangerous book; a book which is completely against our legal order and our democratic institutions. In this light, it is an absolute necessity that the Koran be banned for the defence and reinforcement of our civilisation and our constitutional state. I shall propose a second-reading motion to that effect.

He is clearly calling for the Koran to be judged by the same statutes as all other incitements to violence. His call is for consistency in the application of the law. This is a perfect example of why hate speech legislation is a slippery slope and a bad solution for most problems. Mr. Wilders evidently agrees. In a speech on 2/27/09 at the Washington National Press Club he said this:

I propose the withdrawal of all hate speech legislation in Europe....In Europe, we should defend freedom of speech like Americans do....Millions think liberty is precious. That democracy is better than Shariah....there is no stronger power than the force of free men fighting for the great cause of liberty.

In his 4/27/09 speech in Florida, Mr. Wilders proposed nine steps Europeans should take to defend against Islamization.

• Speak out against the ideology of cultural relativism.
• Redefine Islam as a political rather than religious entity.
• Encourage voluntary repatriation of Muslim immigrants. Expel Muslim immigrant criminals.
• Stop mass immigration from Muslim countries.
• Adopt a European equivalent of America’s First Amendment rights.
• Require a pledge of allegiance and assimilation from everyone.
• Stop building new mosques. Close mosques where incitement to violence occurs.
• Close Islamic schools.
• Get rid of present political leaders.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations responded with a press release beginning:

WASHINGTON, D.C., 4/26/09) – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on GOP leaders to demand that Rep. Adam Hasner, the head of that state’s House Republicans, step down from his leadership post for co-hosting an event at which the speaker said Islam should not be recognized as a legitimate
faith and Muslims should not have religious freedom.

It may be possible for CAIR to exert enough political pressure to get Rep. Hasner removed from his leadership position. But Rep. Hasner is not the issue. The issue is Mr. Wilders’ right to say the things he says.

Originally posted on 3/30/09