Tag Archives: Andrew C. McCarthy

If you see something, say nothing

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Runners at the start of the 117th Boston Marathon. Stew Milne / AP

Runners at the start of the 117th Boston Marathon. Stew Milne / AP

Changes to the AP stylebook show that we’re blinding ourselves to the connections between Islamic extremism and terrorism.

by Andrew C. McCarthy:

It was a report of the now numbingly familiar sort. Witnesses at the synagogue in Paris recounted that an Iranian immigrant had been screaming “Allahu Akbar!” while he chased the rabbi and his son. When he finally caught up, he slashed away at them with a box-cutter, causing severe lacerations. Nevertheless, the Associated Press assured readers that “[a]n official investigation was underway to determine a possible motive.”

Quite a mystery, that.

It is necessary to search for some “possible” motive because to notice the actual and perfectly obvious motive is verboten in the judgment of both the legacy media and Western governments. The motive, of course, is adherence to Islamic supremacist ideology, a mainstream interpretation of Muslim doctrine commonly referred to by the shorthand “Islamist.”

Indeed, just this April, the AP revised its stylebook to posit new guidelines for use of the term “Islamist.” In so doing, the news service deferred to admonitions from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood’s influential public-relations-cum-lawfare arm in the United States, is a longtime supporter 0f Hamas, the terrorist organization that doubles as the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

Before these revisions, the definition off which the AP had been working was reasonably accurate. An Islamist, according to the old guidelines, was “a supporter of government in accord with the laws of Islam.” Such supporters make up a sizeable percentage of the 1.4 billion-strong global Islamic ummah (the community), and thus reflect a wide range of Muslim notions about how best to impose these “laws of Islam”—the societal framework and politico-legal system known as sharia (the path). But all Islamists agree that they must be imposed. That is what makes an Islamist an Islamist. The dramatic ascendancy of Islamists—the implementation of their substantially anti-democratic system through democratic procedures—is the story of the so-called Arab Spring.

There is plenty of disagreement within the ummah about what constitutes sharia, which is derived from the Koran and other sources of Islamic scripture, in particular the hadith—authoritative collections of the words and deeds of Mohammed, Islam’s warrior prophet. Some claim it is merely a set of aspirational guidelines intended as a private behavioral compass designed to achieve a Muslim’s personal experience of the divine. This construction, though held by various reformers and modernizing “secular Muslims,” flies in the face of some stubborn realities.

Sharia, for example, is the law of Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, bastions of fundamentalist Islam that admit of no other legal systems, that employ “religious police” to promote strict sharia compliance, and that routinely apply Islam’s harsh corporal punishments, such as scourging and even stoning. Furthermore, even in Islamic countries that attempt to meld sharia with other legal systems (e.g., Napoleonic law), sharia is given pride of place and enforced both officially, in civil and criminal court cases, and culturally, by public mores.

The claims that sharia is aspirational and a matter of personal conscience are further contradicted, by its emphasis on governance: Only a small percentage of Islamic ideology prescribes what we in the West would recognize as religious principles (e.g., the oneness of Allah); the lion’s share is a thoroughgoing regulation of political and social life, from economic and military affairs through interpersonal relations and matters of hygiene. In addition, sharia has long been codified: The treatise “Umdat al-Salik,” reflecting the broad consensus on sharia’s prescriptions across the four ancient Sunni jurisprudential schools, was assembled by the renowned scholar Ahmad ibn an-Naqib al-Misri in the fourteenth century. It is translated into English as Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, and is readily available through most large book retailers—complete with endorsements, in the manual’s foreword, from such influential institutions as Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the seat of Sunni learning since the tenth century, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, an Islamist think-tank headquartered in Virginia by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Islamic supremacist interpretation of sharia found in Reliance of the Traveller and systematically taught by the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most significant Islamic mass-movement, is the dynamic Islam of the Muslim Middle East. It is also gradually making inroads in the West, courtesy of a Brotherhood stratagem best described as “voluntary apartheid.” The idea is for Muslims to immigrate and integrate, but not assimilate. They are encouraged, instead, to move into Islamic enclaves, organizing their lives around the local mosque and Islamic community center, which the Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna stressed as the “axis” of the movement. The goal is to pressure the host government to abide an ever-increasing degree of sharia autonomy.

This form of sharia, to which Islamists widely adhere and aspire, is fundamentally antithetical to Western liberalism. It rejects individual liberty and privacy, equality before the law for women and non-Muslims, freedom of conscience and speech, economic liberty, and even the bedrock principle that a body politic has the power to make law for itself, irrespective of any religious or ideological code. Sharia also expressly endorses jihad. These are the “laws of Islam” to which the AP refers without describing them. The installation of these laws is the top priority of emerging Islamist “democracies,” which establish Islam as the state religion and enshrine sharia in their new constitutions—such new governments as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose sharia constitutions were drafted with the helping hand of the U.S. State Department.

Read more at The New Criterion

The Art of Death

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pic_giant_050513_The-Art-of-DeathBy Andrew C. McCarthy:

Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s epigrammatic founder, was never at a loss for the chilling turn of phrase. His rally cry, the Brotherhood’s signature pledge that “Jihad is our way” and “Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope,” is the soundtrack of the “Arab Spring.” It speaks for a region over two-thirds of whose putative liberty lovers prefer to kill apostates than to abide freedom of conscience. Their embrace of the very sharia chauvinism that ties together Banna, bin Laden, the Saudi royals, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev explodes the Western myth of the moderate Muslim majority.

Yet the United States government clings to the myth. Even as Boston buries its dead, just as they must do from Cairo to Thailand, Americans are instructed not to notice the inevitable progression from Islamic-supremacist ideology to aggression and murder. The See No Islam campaign entails such inanities as portrayal of the Brotherhood as a “largely secular” outfit. Thus, few of us have heard of Banna’s odes to “the art of death.” To know them is to see the farce in President Obama’s sudden angst over hunger-striking jihadists, and in the renewed vigor of his quest to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

About 166 detainees remain at Gitmo. Around 100 of them have joined in a hunger strike that began four months ago when some of the jihadists accused their military guards of mishandling Korans — sorry, I mean Holy Korans — during searches of their cells.

Mind you, cells are regularly searched in every prison. Gitmo is unusual only in the heightened necessity of this routine. Jihadistsfrequently attack the guards with weapons improvised and hidden in their cells. The Holy Koran, meanwhile, is not wholly Koran — jihadists often use it to pass each other messages. No surprise there: Islamic supremacists take the book to command war against infidels — under the crazy notion that scores of verses like Sura 8:12, Allah’s command to “strike off [the unbelievers’] heads and strike off every fingertip of them” in order to “cast terror into [their] hearts,” actually mean what they say.

Alas, as we’ve seen before, the Pentagon brass — the guys who see jihadist mass murder at a U.S. military base as “workplace violence” — would sooner repeal the First Amendment than abide any mishandling of the Holy Koran. Indeed, Gitmo protocols have long directed that, where possible, only white-gloved Muslim military personnel should touch the sacred text, even when cells are being tossed. The Defense Department has thus internalized the supremacist principle that infidels are not fit to touch things Islamic, the very principle by which our friends the Saudis forbid public professions of Christianity and ban non-Muslims from entering the cities of Mecca and Medina.

While we avert our eyes from the ugliness of our enemies’ ideology, they go to school on us. Guerilla training for jihadists prominently includes propaganda. Much of this, naturally, is geared to rally the Left’s assorted shock troops of Western self-loathing. In equal part, though, it is theater. A good hunger strike works wonders. Like all real jihad, it is what Banna famously called “the art of death.” The omnipresent specter of martyrdom, he knew, was a transformative agent of influence.

Read more at National Review

Huge Flaw in Pew Survey on Muslim Views about Sharia

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images (31)By  Andrew C. McCarthy:

There will be more to say about the findings of the newly released Pew survey ”The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society.” Of course, such revelations as the approval by upwards of two-thirds of Middle Eastern Muslims of the death penalty for apostates, and by one-third of suicide bombings, are depressing — though not at all surprising for anyone who has been paying attention. (I wrote about similar poll results in The Grand Jihad.) But what is striking is that the depressing state of affairs is manifest despite Pew’s best efforts to make things seem better than they are. Principally, the survey is about Muslim views about sharia, Islam’s legal system and framework for society. It is intimated that Pew’s study is exhaustive, involving interviews with 38,000 Muslims across 39 countries. But, as my friend Andy Bostom pointed out to me this morning, guess which countries are not included in the survey? That would be Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan — perhaps the three most sharia compliant countries in the world, home cumatively to nearly 150 million Muslims. (Scroll down from here to see which countries are included in the survey.)

This gaping omission invites the standard progressive fairy tale about sharia, and Reuters does not disappoint: “Unlike codified Western law, sharia is a loosely defined set of moral and legal guidelines based on the Koran, the sayings of Prophet Mohammad (hadith) and Muslim traditions. Its rules and advice cover everything from prayers to personal hygiene.”

Read more at National Review

President Obama Utters the T- Word

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20130417_worldwide-terrorism_-_LARGEby ANDREW C. MCCARTHY:

The Obama administration, which generally chokes on the word “terrorism” and fought against applying it to the jihadist atrocities at Fort Hood and Benghazi, is calling Boston Marathon bombing “terrorism.” Its reasoning, coupled with the way the term was rolled out, is intriguing.

Initially, President Obama made a brief statement to the nation in which, characteristically, he did not use the word “terrorism.” Moments afterward, however, an unidentified “senior administration official” pronounced that the bombing was a terrorist attack, telling Fox News, “When multiple devices go off, that’s an act of terrorism.”

In point of fact, while bombing is a common tactic of terrorists for obvious reasons, the choice of attack-method is not what makes violence “terrorism.” If, say, the mafia were to use two or three car bombs to rub out several rival gangsters at the same time, that would not be terrorism even though “multiple devices” would be involved. Terrorism is violencedirected at political communities – usually, nations and their governments. It is carried out for the specific purpose of intimidating the political community into submitting to the terrorists’ preferred policies, and, significantly, it is almost always ideologically motivated.

That last attribute of terrorism is the cause of the Obama administration’s paralyzing misgivings about the T-word. The president is mulishly determined to cultivate Islamic-supremacist governments and movements like the Muslim Brotherhood. The stubborn problem is that al Qaeda – the only Muslim outfit the administration seems willing to hang the “terrorist” label on – is also Islamic-supremacist. That is, al Qaeda is adherent to the same ideology – based on sharia, Islam’s legal code and societal framework – as the groups the administration considers “allies” and “moderates.”

Organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood have tactical disagreements with al Qaeda about what situations call for the use of violence to advance the supremacist agenda and how quickly sharia should be imposed. At bottom, though, they are in agreement with al Qaeda about the imperatives of imposing sharia, eradicating Israel, destroying the West, and eliminating Western influences from Islamic countries. Islamic supremacism is a mainstream Islamic ideology – held by tens of millions of Muslims, not just a few thousand al Qaeda members and collaborators. Thus, if the administration were to admit that this ideology and agenda catalyze terrorism, they would logically have to admit the problem is much bigger than al Qaeda.

Read more: Family Security Matters 

 

Islamic Apartheid Week

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Help the Freedom Center fight back by making a donation to fund placing this ad in 50 campus newspapers across the country.

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[Editor's note: The graphic accompanying this article was designed by Frontpage's illustrator, Bosch Fawstin]

“Israel Apartheid Week” is a common blood libel on college campuses, hosted every year by hate groups such as the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine. These hate weeks are designed to de-legitimize Israel and soften it up for the kill, claiming that it is an apartheid state and should be isolated. The declared goal of Hamas and the PLO is to “liberate” Palestine “from the river to the sea” – in other words, to destroy the Jewish state and push its inhabitants into the sea.

The growing BDS movement on campus (BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, which are the steps the movement advocates taking against Israel for its purported policies of “apartheid”) is another element in the jihadist assault. The accusations of apartheid levied on Israel are not simply lies; the truth of the true apartheid and discrimination in the Middle East has been obscured. Israel is actually the only apartheid-free state in the Middle East. Countries such as Lebanon and Jordan do in fact have apartheid-style laws on their books, and Islamic supremacy can be seen all over the world with the subjugation of women, the persecution of gays, and the persecution of religious and racial minorities. Despite the fact that these atrocities are par for the course in countries ruled by Islamic law, the Left (and especially the Women’s Studies departments and LGBT groups) on campus has remained silent.

Until now, there has been no national campaign to expose the brutal discrimination that occurs under Islamic Sharia law. But this spring, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is sponsoring “Islamic Apartheid Weeks” on over 50 campuses. These weeks will elaborate on the many forms of Muslim apartheid that have been integral to the Middle East for over a millennium and can now be seen in other regions of the world such as Africa: religious intolerance, ethnic inequality, racism, gender discrimination, denial of citizenship, political oppression and slavery, among others.

The centerpiece of each week will be panel discussions and keynote speeches featuring former victims of Sharia law and Islamic supremacism, including dissidents such as Nonie Darwish and Simon Deng, and experts on political Islam, such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Andrew C. McCarthy. We will also be providing students with a full compliment of resources, such as pamphlets, flyers, and films highlighting the various human rights abuses sanctioned under Sharia law. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine are in fact partially right: there is apartheid in the Middle East. It’s just that it’s being practiced by the Arab Muslim nations, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center is setting out to make that abundantly clear.

Islamic Apartheid Week events have already occurred or have been planned at these campuses so far:

Bellarmine University
Berea College
Bob Jones University
Brooklyn College
Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo
Liberty University
Michigan State
Missouri Western State University
Murray State University
Rutgers University
Stockton College
SUNY Courtland
Tufts
UC Irvine
UC San Diego
University of Missouri
University of San Diego
USC
Valdosta State University
Wesleyan University
Wisconsin – River Falls

Twenty Years after the WTC Bombing

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20121001_WTC_attack_1993By Andrew C. McCarthy, February 26, 2013:

Today is the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing. It also marks three weeks since the attempted murder of Lars Hedegaard, the intrepid Danish champion of free speech. These events are not unrelated.

Back in 1993, there was a tireless effort to limn the WTC bombers as wanton killers. They were, we were to understand, bereft of any coherent belief system, unrepresentative of any mainstream construction of Islam. In reality, though, they were devout Muslim operatives who belonged to a jihadist cell formed in the New York area by Omar Abdel Rahman – whose notoriety as the shadowy “Blind Sheikh” obscured the basis of his profound influence over Islamists across the globe.

Sheikh Abdel Rahman is an internationally renowned Islamic jurist, having earned a doctorate in the jurisprudence of sharia – Islam’s societal framework and legal code - from Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the center of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. Blind from early youth and plagued by several other maladies, Abdel Rahman was physically incapable of building a bomb, hijacking a jetliner, carrying out an assassination – in short, of performing any blood-soaked activity that would be useful to a terrorist organization . . . other than leading it.

It was nothing other than Abdel Rahman’s indisputable mastery of Islamic doctrine, and hence his capacity to give present-day vitality to a seventh-century summons to holy war, that vaulted him to the forefront of the jihad.

The World Trade Center bombing was Islamic supremacism’s declaration of war on the United States. It was a blunt statement by the savage shock troops of a worldwide movement that America – “the head of the snake,” as the Blind Sheikh called us – could be struck at home, right in the beating heart of economic liberty.

Despite serial atrocities, thousands of deaths, and a decade of war, we are today more willfully blind to the reason we were attacked than we were back in 1993 – back when our ignorance might have been excused by our homeland’s seeming invulnerability to the scourge of jihadist terror. Regardless of our reluctance to see it, mainstream Islam – the dynamic Islam of the Middle East, unadulterated by incentives to moderate, at least for a time, while settling in non-Muslim lands – is aggressively hegemonic. As proclaimed by another iconic supremacist, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated.”

And to dominate for a very specific reason. Supremacists are not the irrational savages we have been so desperate for two decades to portray them as. Whether the jihad terrorizes by explosives, suffocates by the systematic subjugation of women and persecution of religious minorities in Islamic countries, or infiltrates by stealthily using liberty to undermine liberty in the West, the mission is always coherent and always the same: the imposition of sharia.

The rationale of jihadist terror is to diminish our resolve to resist the gradual erosion of freedom and the relentless demands of Islamists – especially, Islamists of the Brotherhood variety. After the Blind Sheikhs and the bin Ladens have softened up the target, it is the Brothers who beguile us. Impeccably well-mannered and wearing neatly tailored suits, they flack for Hamas and maintain, straight-faced, that free speech is not so much a right to condemn their totalitarian ideology as a responsibility to suppress examination of it.

In that ideology, the implementation of classical sharia is the necessary precondition for Islamizing a society. Sharia is the architecture for a global caliphate. This is why Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood chieftain, promised that when elected he would birth a new constitution enshrining “the sharia, then the sharia, and finally the sharia” – a promise on which he has followed through. This is the utopia of all Islamists, be they terrorists, or faux moderates who proclaim their willingness to pursue totalitarian ends by “peaceful political” means, or the Muslim masses who celebrate 9/11 and vote Brotherhood parties into power.

We did not want to acknowledge the sharia logic of the terrorists 20 years ago. We were told then that Islam had nothing to do with attacks on the West incited by Muslim jurists citing Muslim scripture.

There is no selling that fairy tale today, not after thousands of Americans have lost their lives. So the lie has become more aggressive, like Islam itself. While poseurs such as John Brennan – President Obama’s counterterrorism czar and nominee for CIA director - distort the meaning of jihad, Islamists and their fellow travelers seek not merely to suppress by intimidation but to criminalize by law the objective examination of Islamic supremacism.
Read more: Family Security Matters 

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor  Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and blogs at National Review Online’s The Corner. 

 

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How Should We Treat American Jihadists?

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It is not possible to wage an effective war against an international terror network while simultaneously foreclosing the possibility that American traitors will be killed in military operations.

By Andrew C. McCarthy:

If a plane full of 200 American citizens is hijacked by foreign jihadists, the law does not tell us whether the president should shoot down the plane or let it be plowed into a skyscraper and kill 3,000 American citizens. It is the kind of excruciating decision that war makes necessary. Legal niceties do not tell us how to resolve it.

That is the problem with our debate over the treatment of U.S. nationals who join the enemy’s forces in wartime — most urgently, over the targeted killing of our fellow citizens. We want the legal answer. But the legal answer is not going to help us. Under the Constitution, Americans who join the enemy may lawfully be treated like the enemy, which includes being attacked with lethal force. That, however, tells us only the outer limits of what is permissible. It does not tell us what we need to know: What should we do?

The government’s war powers must be boundless, at least in theory. We must be able to marshal all our might to repel any conceivable existential threat. Yet the Constitution, the sole legitimate source of the government’s power to levy war, is, quintessentially, the citizen’s protection against aggression by that same government. Thus, the tension between government’s war powers and the citizen’s fundamental rights is a conundrum. It simply cannot be resolved with finality.

Neither side of our debate is satisfied with that. We want fixed rules. But fixed rules work only if they answer every conceivable hypothetical. So the debate lurches inexorably to worst-case scenarios.

Read more at National Review

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which is published by Encounter Books.

See also:

Report: Majority of Convicted Terrorists in U.S. Are American Citizens (dailybeast.com)


http://video.foxnews.com/v/2190907262001/report-al-qaeda-still-thriving-inside-us?intcmp=related?playlist_id=922779230001

Oppose Brennan for CIA Director

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imagesCAGPSB1RBy Andrew C. McCarthy:

To cut to the chase, a country that was serious about its national security would never put John Brennan in charge of its premier intelligence service.

Of course, it is by no means clear that the United States is any longer a serious country in this regard. Serious countries do not fund, arm and “partner with” hostile regimes. They do not recruit enemy sympathizers to fill key governmental policy positions. They do not erect barriers impeding their intelligence services from understanding an enemy’s threat doctrine – in conscious indifference to Sun Tzu’s maxim that defending oneself requires knowing one’s enemies. All of these malfeasances have become staples of Obama policy, under the guidance of Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism guru.

Still, the installation of a Beltway operator whose métier is misinformation as director of central intelligence would be an epic mismatch of man and mission. It would expand unseriousness to new frontiers of self-inflicted peril.

The reason is as elementary as it gets: The purpose of intelligence is to see what your enemy is trying to hide, to grasp how your enemy thinks, and how he cleverly camouflages what he thinks. That, to be certain, is the only security against stealthy foes who specialize in sabotage, in exploiting the liberties that make free societies as vulnerable as they are worth defending.

Mr. Brennan, to the contrary, is the incarnation of willful blindness. His tenure as Obama’s top national security advisor has been about helping our enemies throw sand in our eyes and thus enabling the sabotage.

As I detail in The Grand Jihad, which recounts the Muslim Brotherhood’s history, ideology, and self-proclaimed “civilization jihad” against the West, sabotage is the Brotherhood’s defining practice. Indeed, “sabotage” is the word the Brothers themselves use to describe their work. It appears in an internal memorandum, which elaborates that the organization sees its mission in the United States as “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” Besides that long-term goal, the Brotherhood’s network of American affiliates have pursued the more immediate aim of materially supporting Hamas, a formally designated terrorist organization to which the provision of material support is a felony under federal law.

None of that is new. It was not merely well known but had been proved in court by the Justice Department a year before Obama took office. I refer to the Justice Department’s 2008 Hamas financing prosecution, the Holy Land Foundation case. Yet, counterterrorism czar Brennan remains undeterred, a driving force of the Obama administration’s “Islamic outreach” – a campaign to give Islamist organizations influence over U.S. policy. That several of those organizations were proved in the HLF case to be members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American network is clearly of no moment.

Read more at PJ Media

 

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Why terrorists love the blind sheikh

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Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman

Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman

By Andrew McCarthy

An ugly and confusing terrorist attack at an Algerian gas facility is getting  even more troubling as the Islamic radicals now demand the release of Sheikh  Omar Abdel Rahman and another prominent terrorist in exchange for the remaining  American hostages.

Abdel Rahman is the blind sheikh now serving a life sentence for  masterminding the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center. Terrorists are  also demanding the release of Aafia Saddiqui, who is imprisoned on her  conviction for attempted murder.

And the captors in Algeria are not the only ones who want to see Abdel Rahman  released. The new leaders in Egypt are also urging the U.S. to free him. But why  is Abdel Rahman so revered?

“He is the most iconic symbol to Islamic supremacists the world over of not  only their struggle against the West but their deep-seeded conviction that they  will win that battle,” said Andrew C. McCarthy, the lead federal prosecutor in  the case that put Rahman and 11 others behind bars.

“He is thought of internationally as somebody who is virtually without equal  in facing down the United States in particular. That’s not just because of the  1993 Trade Center bombing and the plots that occurred right after that to try to  take out New York City landmarks but the fact that Osama bin Laden, someone else  that was thought very highly of as an iconic figure in the international jihad,  attributed to Abdel Rahman the credit for issuing the fatwa that approved the  9/11 attacks. So he’s a singular figure in this global movement and that’s why  really since we imprisoned him in the summer of 1993 they’ve been agitating for  his release.”

Despite the adoration that Islamic radicals have for Abdel Rahman, the  assumption of most is that the Obama administration will obviously reject the  demands. McCarthy told WND he isn’t so sure. He said the odd response from the  administration following Egyptian efforts to free Abdel Rahman leads him to  believe there is some chance this could happen down the road.

Read more at WND with audio

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Blasphemy and Islam

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Coptic Christian blogger Alber Saber

Coptic Christian blogger Alber Saber

By Andrew C. McCarthy

In Cairo on Wednesday, a Coptic Christian blogger named Alber Saber was convicted of blasphemy and “contempt of religion.” There’s a tragic irony: As any of the country’s Christians can tell you, contempt of religion is not merely permitted but encouraged in the new, post-Mubarak Egypt. What is criminal, what has become increasingly perilous, is any criticism of Islam.

Nor is truth a defense. Another Egyptian court recently upheld the blasphemy conviction of Makarem Diab, also a Coptic Christian. Diab had gotten into a discussion with a Muslim acquaintance, Abd al-Hameed, who, in the course of mocking Diab’s faith, insisted that Jesus was a serial fornicator. Diab countered Hameed’s baseless taunt with an assertion most Islamic scholars regard as accurate: namely, that Mohammed had more than four wives. Yet, because the context of Diab’s assertion evinced an intention to cast Islam’s prophet in an unfavorable light, Diab was prosecuted for “insulting the prophet” and “provoking students.” He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.

This is now everyday life in Egypt. It is also certain to be the future of Egypt. The overwhelmingly Islamist population, having first elected Islamic supremacists led by the Muslim Brotherhood to top leadership positions, is now poised to adopt a constitution that is founded on sharia, Islam’s totalitarian legal framework, and that expressly enshrines these blasphemy standards. But the problem is not just sharia in Egypt. Sharia is here.

About three weeks ago, another Egyptian court sentenced seven people to death after convicting them in absentia on blasphemy charges. Most of the seven are in the United States. Most of them are Coptic Christians; one is a Florida-based pastor who is a blistering critic of Islamic scripture. The charges relate to the defendants’ alleged involvement in “Innocence of Muslims,” an obscure amateur video that Islamists have frivolously cited as a pretext for their latest round of international mayhem — and that the Obama administration has fraudulently portrayed as the catalyst of a massacre in Benghazi in which jihadists killed four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya.

So how has President Obama responded to the Egyptian government’s human-rights violations, its failure to protect the Copts from persecution (indeed, its willing participation in that persecution), and its provocations against Americans — which now include ordering their killing, through a kangaroo-court process that flouts our due-process standards, over their engagement in activity that is expressly protected by our Constitution?

Well . . . the president has announced that not only will he continue funding Egypt’s Islamist government, but he intends to include in that U.S. aid the provision of 20 F-16 fighter jets. Moreover, Obama is continuing his administration’s collaboration with the 57-government Organization of Islamic Cooperation on the “Istanbul Process.” That is the OIC’s campaign to impose sharia’s repressive blasphemy standards.

The most recent aggression in this blasphemy enterprise — a years-long, carefully plotted OIC campaign to snuff out American free-speech rights under the guise of “defamation of religion” — is U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. It calls on Western governments to outlaw “any advocacy of religious hatred against individuals that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.”

Read more at National Review

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.

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