Tag Archives: Muslim

Media Analysts Dodge Jihad Connection in Boston, London

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833_largeby John Rossomando:

In separate attacks a month apart, Islamist terrorists made it clear that they believed they acted in the name of their religion, exacting vengeance for their fellow Muslims. Yet several media pockets have gone into overdrive to deflect attention from that Islamist motivation.

Still carrying the weapons that killed British soldier Lee James Rigby in his bloody hands, Michael Adebolajo explained why he attacked an unarmed man on a London street Wednesday: “We swear by Almighty Allah, we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. The only reasons we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We apologize that woman had to see this today, but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you.”

The New York Times omitted reference to the attacker’s invocation of Allah, relegating it to page A7. ABC, NBC and CBS similarly omitted the Islamic reference.

Media Matters for America went further, accusing Fox News of “Islamophobia,” for comments about the attackers’ motivations. The liberal organization made no reference to the attackers’ own words, but emphasized condemnations of the attack from British Muslim leaders. Commentator Michelle Malkin was singled out in the Media Matters post for saying the videotaped attacker was “quoting chapter and verse, sura and verse, from the Quran the justification for beheading an innocent solider there, and of course they’ve targeted civilians as well.”

In fact, that’s exactly what Adebolajo did at 1:15 of the graphic video below.

“But we are forced by the Qur’an, in Sura At-Tawba, through many ayah in the Qu’ran, we must fight them as they fight us,” he says.

Yet Media Matters cites Malkin’s comments as an example of Fox’s “Islamophobia.”

Following the Boston bombing last month, not even the discovery jihadist propaganda on Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s YouTube channel and other social media platforms was enough to convince some media liberals that the he and his brother Dzhokhar were motivated by religion. Instead they chose to look for other more secular explanations such as Chechen nationalism or disillusionment with U.S. foreign policy.

Hours after Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s names became public, The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber penned a column titled “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” in which she suggested pinning the Muslim label on them reduced them to being “caricatures” and “whitewashed” their humanity.

Had the bombers been white right-wing extremists like Timothy McVeigh chances are that Garber would not have called for tolerance and suggested using a label made them into “caricatures” or demeaned them.

Not to be outdone, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert charged that Fox News was engaged in a “war on Islam,” a conspiratorial, delusionary and incendiary narrative that Canadian intelligence says is the leading cause of radicalization among young Muslims.

Boehlert has consistently ignored the treatment of women as second-class citizens and the imposition of the death penalty on homosexuals in Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iran.

He has also routinely uncritically echoed the radical Islamist narrative pushed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and other groups. In turn, they have frequently cited his work in their own defense.

The Media Matters senior fellow has defended Islamic extremists such as Sami Al-Arian, a Florida professor who pleaded guilty in 2006 of aiding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group, accusing his detractors of “sloppy journalism” and of having a “pervasive anti-Arab bias.”

Boehlert also defended Islamic charities in a March 22 blog written after a biography about Fox CEO Roger Ailes showed that Ailes compared the charities to terrorist organizations. In fact, numerous Muslim charities have been shut down and prosecuted due to their support for terrorist groups. The Holy Land Foundation had been the largest Muslim charity in the United States before being convicted of routing more than $12 million to Hamas.

According to a Foreign Policy magazine article published in February, the involvement of Islamic charities in terrorist fundraising continues.

Boehlert refuses to use the term Islam and terrorism in the same sentence. Yet he had no such qualms about using the terms “right-wing” and “terrorist” in the same sentence following the Boston bombing to falsely describe Fox News’s supposed inattention to white supremacist violence during an April 29 interview on Current TV.

“When a right-wing nut, an extremist goes on shooting rampages, the response is how do they possibly stop a lunatic?” Boehlert said. “When a Muslim is accused of an act of terror, Fox News definitely knows how to stop the lunatic, and they are definitely interested in assigning political blame.”

This came six days after reports indicated that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told his interrogators that he and his brother, as NBC reported, “were motivated by a desire to defend Islam because of ‘the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.’”

That has since been reinforced by reports about Dzhokhar’s note, scrawled inside the boat he was captured in on the night of April 19. “When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” he wrote.

Boehlert has yet to acknowledge a religious motivation for the Boston bombings.

Read more at IPT

U.S. Praises Sharia Censorship

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2012-634807128700938005-93By Deborah Weiss:

The United States is silent as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) passes its most recent UN Resolution that unravels global consensus to support freedom of speech.

From 1999-2010, the OIC succeeded in passing its “defamations of religions” resolutions, which ostensibly would protect Islam from all criticism, including true statements of fact.  Though the name of the resolutions indicated that it would pertain to all religions equally, in the OIC’s interpretation, it applied to Islam only.

Realizing the clash that this concept holds with that of free expression, the US State Department urged the OIC to produce an alternative resolution which would address the OIC’s concerns about “Islamophobia” and still protect free speech.

Accordingly, in March 2011, the OIC introduced the now infamous Resolution 16/18 to combat intolerance based on religion or belief, purportedly proposed as a replacement for the defamation of religions resolution.  It garnered wide-spread support and Western states touted it as a victory for free speech.  They believed that its focus marked a landmark shift from suppression of speech critical of religions to combating discrimination and violence against individuals based on their religious beliefs.

Over time it became clear that the OIC retained its long term goal to protect Islam from “defamation” and indeed to criminalize all speech that shed a negative light on Islam or Muslims.  Resolution 16/18 turned out to be a tactical move by the OIC to bring the West one step closer toward realizing its goal of achieving global blasphemy laws, by using language more palatable to the West, and open to interpretation.

Against this backdrop the US held the first conference to “implement” Resolution 16/18, the process now known as the “Istanbul Process.”

Unfortunately, America’s concern for the protection of free speech seems to have gotten lost as its focus moved closer to the OIC’s positions, and an emphasis was placed on protecting Muslims in the West from “Islamophobia.”

Some circles including free speech advocates, national security experts, and those concerned about the Persecuted Church, have beaten the drum against Resolution 16/18 and the continuation of the Istanbul Process.  Their efforts have been to no avail as the Istanbul Process continues.

However, while awareness of the perils of Resolution 16/18 is on the increase, news on Resolution A/HRC/22/L.40 has gone virtually unreported.  It retains the same title as Resolution 16/18, but has glaringly dangerous amendments.

To focus on just one, it asserts that “terrorism…cannot and should not be associated with any religion, nationality, civilization or ethnic group.”  This is obviously problematic.  The lumping together of these categories implies a false equation of immutable characteristics such as nationality and ethnicity with those that are subject to choice such as religion or belief.

Religions and belief systems come in all stripes.  To preclude the possibility that any of them might be ideologically associated with terrorism leads to a position based on an unexplored assumption rather than a conclusion based on fact.  Indeed, the assertion condemns the mere exploration of the facts a priori, a notion which is not only illogical but dangerous.

Read more at Front Page

 

Swedish Multiculturalism Goes Awry

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A car on fire in the Stockholm suburb of Husby. Photo published on Google+ by Salah Moallin.

A car on fire in the Stockholm suburb of Husby. Photo published on Google+ by Salah Moallin.

by Soeren Kern:

“Sweden is the best Islamic State.” — Adly Abu Hajar, Imam based in Malmö

Hundreds of Muslim immigrants have rampaged through parts of the Swedish capital of Stockholm, torching cars and buses, setting fires, and hurling rocks at police.

The unrest — a predictable consequence of Sweden’s failed model of multiculturalism, which does not encourage Muslim immigrants to assimilate or integrate into Swedish society — is an ominous sign of things to come.

The trouble began after police fatally shot an elderly man brandishing a machete in a Muslim-majority neighborhood. Although the exact circumstances of the May 13 incident remain unclear, police say they shot the 69-year-old man (his nationality has not been disclosed) in self-defense after he allegedly threatened them with the weapon.

Two days later, on May 15, a Muslim youth organization called Megafonen arranged a protest against alleged police brutality and demanded an independent investigation and a public apology.

On May 19, Muslim youths initiated a riot in Husby, a heavily Muslim suburb in the western part of Stockholm where more than 80% of the residents originate from Africa and the Middle East.

At least 100 masked Muslim youths set fire to cars and buildings, smashed windows, vandalized property and hurled rocks and bottles at police and rescue services in Husby. The riots quickly spread to at least 15 other parts of Stockholm, including the districts of Fittja, Hagsätra, Kista, Jakobsberg, Norsborg, Skaerholmen, Skogås and Vaarberg.

After two nights of spiraling violence, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt appealed for calm, condemning the riots as hooliganism. But his plea (“Everyone must pitch in to restore calm — parents, adults”) failed to prevent more nights of unrest, during which Muslim youth set fire to two schools, a police station, a restaurant, and a cultural center, and burned more than 50 cars and buses.

The unrest — which has many parallels to the Muslim riots that occurred in France in 2005 — has shocked Swedes who have long turned a blind eye to immigration policies that have encouraged the establishment of a parallel Muslim society in Sweden.

Although there are no official statistics of Muslims in Sweden, the US State Department reported in 2011 that there are now between 450,000 and 500,000 Muslims in the country, or about 5% of the total population of 9.5 million.

Muslim immigration to Sweden has been fostered by open-door asylum policies that are among the most generous in the world.

During the early 1990s, for example, Sweden granted asylum to nearly 100,000 refugees fleeing the wars in the Balkans. Sweden has also been a magnet for refugees from Iraq; as a result of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the Gulf War (1990-1991) and the Iraq War (2003-2011), there are now more than 120,000 Iraqis living in Sweden. In fact, Iraqis (both Christians and Muslims) now make up the second-largest ethnic minority group in Sweden, second only to ethnic Finns.

More recently, Sweden has granted asylum to thousands of refugees from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria, as well as from Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

Read more at Gatestone Institute

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Denial is still a river in Londonistan

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images (55)By Melanie Phillips:

On one thing the British liberal class is certain – the hacking to death of a soldier in a Woolwich street yesterday had absolutely nothing to do with religion.  The murderers screamed ‘Allahu akhbar’ as they tried to decapitate the soldier (a barbaric hallmark of Islamic terror), announced proudly that ‘We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you’ and quoted the Koran as religious justification.

But the atrocity, we have been repeatedly told, had nothing to do with religion. Ever since 9/11, the UK and US political and media establishment, along with much if not most of the British security service and increasingly the US security establishment, has repeated this mantra. Killing in the name of Islam is a warped hijacking of the religion, a perversion of the religion, the very antithesis of the religion. But based on the precepts of the religion itself? Good heavens, no.

For more than two decades, the British political and security establishment has gone to extreme lengths to deny the true religious nature of the Islamic jihad, or holy war, against the free world and ‘backsliding’ Muslims (who are the jihad’s most numerous victims). There are several reasons for this state of denial, of which in my view the key is that to the official mind a holy war is such a fearsome prospect – it’s uncontrollable, can last for decades, is driven by wholly irrational motives immune to negotiation and is characterised by unmitigated savagery — they cannot admit that this is what it actually is.

So instead they come up with absurd statements like the one made to me some years ago by a very senior security official, who said this couldn’t be an Islamic religious war because to say it was would demonise all Muslims.

This was clearly a risible non sequitur. The fact that many Muslims not only do not support the jihad but are being themselves persecuted by it does not make it any less of a holy war against their perceived backsliding or heresy.

Nor can anyone plausibly claim that the jihad is based on a ‘warped’ or ‘perverted’ form of Islam and is therefore not actually Islam at all. It is clearly an interpretation of Islam which, whatever you may think of it, is grounded in the religion. The fact that many Muslims reject this interpretation – and that there are indeed other rival interpretations — is irrelevant to this point. It is arguably as authentic as more pacific interpretations – and more to the point, dominates the Islamic world today. To deny that is to deny its endorsement by the world’s leading Islamic jurists and scholars – or to pretend that they, too, are somehow not ‘real’ Muslims.

Read more at Melanie’s blog

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CAIR amplifies its message on website promoting Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb

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Center For Security Policy, By Adam Savit:

This week, CAIR’s (Council on American-Islamic Relations) “American Muslim News Brief”– a publication distributed by mass-email– linked to a piece entitled “Challenges Test American Muslims” at OnIslam.net.  The piece is full of standard CAIR boilerplate, quoting Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper on supposed “Islamophobia machines” and the “virtual cottage industry of Islam-bashers and fearmongers.”

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However, lurking alongside the “Islamophobia” story on the front page was an article that might raise more eyebrows: “End of a Homosexual Town (True Story).”  It is a theological commentary on the Islamic version of the story of Lot, even featuring a detailed consideration of bodily fluids.

What the casual reader may not notice is that the article is an antique.  The author is Sayyid Qutb, billed benignly as “Muslim Intellectual – Egypt.”  OnIslam.net does not mention that Qutb was a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, author of the seminal Islamist workMilestones, a key intellectual inspiration for al-Qaeda, and was eventually put to death in 1966 for plotting the assassination of secular Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

OnIslam.net seems to have great affection for the inflammatory works of Qutb.  In fact it has published more than 100 of his treatises going back to 2006.

One would think that CAIR– at pains to disassociate itself from anything Muslim Brotherhood-related since it was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation/Hamas terrorist funding trial– would be more careful about who it goes to for positive press.

CAIR’s message amplification via Islamist intermediaries is not limited to Sunni Muslim Brotherhood media outlets.  CAIR has also been known to cross the sectarian divide in utilizing Shi’a Islamist television.  In 2011, I documented for Breitbart’s Big Peace that 22 of the 30 videos on CAIR’s YouTube channel that featured CAIR talking heads were produced by PressTV, the state-owned English language propaganda arm of the Iranian government.

CAIR’s currency relies on a slick media image that features style over substance, and slippery platitudes over truthful answers.  The more the American public becomes educated about theirbackground associations, the less credibility their surface messages will hold.

The Incontrovertible Dead-End of Islam Revisited

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20121006_MAP003_0Islam is nothing if not a political ideology. The first time Mohammad raised his sword to forcibly convert men to Islam, and abandoned persuasion, that was the inauguration of political Islam. It has not changed since then. Force, coercion, slavery, death, and submission are the sole hallmarks of Islam.

By Edward Cline:

Excerpt:

The following is a revised and expanded version of “The Incontrovertible Dead-End of Islam,” which first appeared on October 30th, 2010. The revision and expansion are prompted by a May 13th, 2013 article by Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, “Islam vs. Islamism,” which also appeared in the Washington Times on May 13th. His article reflects a troubling central premise of alleging a necessary distinction between Islam and “Islamists,” that is, between ordinary, non-violent Muslims and their violent, “extremist” or “radical” brethren.

Pipes opens with a reference to the Boston Marathon bombings of April 15thand the foiled attack on the Canadian rail link to the U.S.:

What motives lay behind last month’s Boston Marathon bombing and the would-be attack on a VIA Rail Canada train?

Leftists and establishmentarians variously offer imprecise and tired replies – such as “violent extremism” or anger at Western imperialism – unworthy of serious discussion. Conservatives, in contrast, engage in a lively and serious debate among themselves: some say Islam the religion provides motive, others say it’s a modern extremist variant of the religion, known as radical Islam or Islamism.

As a participant in the latter debate, here’s my argument for focusing on Islamism.

His argument proposes a false dichotomy between Islam and “Islamists,” that is, between Muslims who wage violent jihad on the West and even amongst themselves for sectarian reasons, and those who don’t.

Islam is the fourteen-century-old faith of a billion-plus believers that includes everyone from quietist Sufis to violent jihadis. Muslims achieved remarkable military, economic, and cultural success between roughly 600 and 1200 C.E. Being a Muslim then meant belonging to a winning team, a fact that broadly inspired Muslims to associate their faith with mundane success. Those memories of medieval glory remain not just alive but central to believers’ confidence in Islam and in themselves as Muslims.

Major dissonance began around 1800, when Muslims unexpectedly lost wars, markets, and cultural leadership to Western Europeans. It continues today, as Muslims bunch toward the bottom of nearly ever index of achievement. This shift has caused massive confusion and anger. What went wrong, why did God seemingly abandon His faithful? The unbearable divergence between pre-modern accomplishment and modern failure brought about trauma.

Muslims have responded to this crisis in three main ways. Secularists want Muslims to ditch the Shari’a (Islamic law) and emulate the West. Apologists also emulate the West but pretend that in doing so they are following the Shari’a. Islamists reject the West in favor of a retrograde and full application of the Shari’a.

These paragraphs astounded me. The first one glosses over the conquest of the Middle East and North Africa which necessitated forced conversion, butchery, and slavery. Remarkable military successes, indeed. But for their defeat at the Battle of Tours, the “Islamists” would have carved out a huge empire in Europe. What economic accomplishments? The period he cites spans the economically stagnant Dark Ages and early Western Medieval periods. Cultural successes? Other than a certain architectural style, translating some Aristotle and other ancient thinkers – whose works Islam subsequently rejected – I can’t recall any great symphonies, artwork, or literature Islam produced in those six hundred years.

“Major dissonance” within Islam began over who was going to be Mohammad’s official successor in the 630′s. Thus the interminable conflicts between Sunnis and Shi’ites and other splintering sects of Islam. Islam never had any “cultural leadership.”

Secularist Muslims may want Islam to ditch Sharia law but only at the risk of being deemed apostates and of their deaths. Apologist Muslims feign a hypothetical reconciliation between Sharia and Western concepts of freedom, and demand the incorporation of Sharia into Western law. “Islamists,” however, are consistent with their creed, know that it is“retrograde” and primitive, and wage jihad to achieve that end.

Raymond Ibrahim, associate director of the Middle East Forum, on October 28, 2010, however, published an article, “Offensive Jihad: The One Incontrovertible Problem with Islam,” also in the Middle East Form (October 28, 2010), which seems to be at fundamental odds with Pipes’ article. Ibrahim’s article addresses one of the fundamental problems of and with Islam, one which I have continually stressed: jihad. Jihad is a core tenet in what is a codified system of irrationalism that cannot be “reformed” without obliterating Islam as a distinct religious creed. Remove the belligerent jihadist commands from the Koran and Hadith to wage jihad, for example, and it would cease to be Islam, not only in Muslim minds but in non-Muslim, as well.

There would, of course, remain a host of other irrational assertions and imperatives, such as the sanctioning of wife-beating and the murder of apostates and the like, which constitute, after some astounding mental gymnastics by Islamic clerics and scholars, the byzantine and illogical underpinnings and text of Sharia law. The jihadist elements of Islam, however, are easily transmutable into a political policy, which is conquest of all non-Muslim or infidel governments and societies and their submission to Sharia. That makes it an ideological doctrine. Muslims are either obliged to wage jihad, or they are not. Mohammad and Muslim scholars say they are. End of argument, so far as Koranic interpretation goes, and that interpretation is biased towards the literal.

Reading the debates about what Islam’s mission is and the role of jihad in it and what they truly “mean,” I am always reminded of H.L. Mencken’s observation on religious zealotry: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” Islam is a puritanical creed that makes no allowances for either infidels or apostates or its adherents. I cannot believe that beneath the pious exterior of any person who would be seduced by Islam is not a seething, percolating envy of men who are indeed free, an envy easily and maliciously transfigured into violent jihad.

This policy is operative and underway today in Western nations with varying degrees of success, and it is making progress only by default. Islam is strong only because the West’s defenders are emasculated by multiculturalist premises and a general disinclination to condemn any religion. Aggravating the problem is an unadmitted but general fear in tolerance-obsessed pragmatists of “offending” Muslims, who might start rioting and demonstrating again, claiming discrimination, defamation, and disrespect, and etc., none of it spontaneous but clearly organized and orchestrated by so-called “radicals.”

I was initially impressed by Ibrahim’s quotation from an entry on jihad in the Encyclopedia of Islam, which is an admission that “Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad can be eliminated” – until I realized that it could just as well mean that, after a global caliphate has been established, there would be no more justification for violentjihad. Every nation would by then be conquered, recalcitrant infidels slain, enslaved, or reduced to dhimmitude, and Sharia made the law of every land.

In short, after all the killing, enslaving, and oppression, jihad would be wrong!!

But, if Islam is completely” made over” in the sense of reforming it, what would be left of Islam that virtually any other creed could not claim as its fundamental tenets, as well? And to” make over” Islam, its principal font of “kilman” or wisdom, the objectionable and barbaric Mohammad, would need to be dispensed with. He is a role model for killers and tyrants and other psychopathic individuals. Remove that one critical link of the irrational and arbitrary in Islam, and all the other links fall to the floor or dissolve into nothingness.

 
Read more: Family Security Matters

U.S. Administration Wrongly Advocates the Islamist Interpretation of Islamophobia

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syriaBy Walid Phares:

The State Department issued a report denouncing what it called “a spike in anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe and Asia.” It said that “Muslims also faced new restrictions in 2012 in countries ranging from Belgium, which banned face-covering religious attire in classrooms, to India[,] where schools in Mangalore restricted headscarves.”

The State Department report confuses religious persecution, which is to be condemned, with politicization of religions, which is a matter of debate and includes strategies of which the U.S. government should not be a part. If countries ban the right to pray, broadcast, and write about theology — any theology — this would be against human rights. But Belgium and India do not ban religions per se. In fact, they are more tolerant regarding diverse religious practice than most of the members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The Obama administration is not criticizing secular European and Asian governments for deciding to ban prayer or theologically philosophical dissertations, but rather criticizing these countries for banning the hijab or niqab in public places.

The administration understands the wearing of the hijab as a religious injunction for all Muslims. This is not the case, as senior theologians have decreed, including al Azhar, and the niqab is not a universal Muslim obligation, as one can see in 53 Muslim-majority countries. It is a matter of choice. The organized groups calling for a systematic imposition of the niqab are Islamist forces. This translates politically into an official endorsement on the Obama administration’s part of the Islamist political agenda under the camouflage of religious rights.

The Obama administration, by using the charge of Islamophobia against countries that oppose the political agenda of an ideological and political faction comprising those known as Salafists and Khomeinists, has become a partner with these factions against secular, liberal, reformist movements who do not abide by the niqab rule. It is one thing to defend religious communities and something else to defend the agenda of ideological factions. The niqab is part and parcel of the ideological agenda advocated by the Islamists, not a tenet held by all Muslims. If the Obama administration is worried about the Islamist agenda not yet met by European and Asian countries, it should claim so, but the administration cannot claim defense of a religious injunction to all Muslims while the latter have no consensus on the matter.

It has been noted over the past few years that U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East, the Arab world, and Muslim-majority countries has come increasingly under the influence of pressure groups, identified also as “lobbies,” implementing the doctrinal and political agendas of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Khomeinist regime. The State Department has been made to believe that the Islamist agenda and the beliefs and values of all Muslims are one, which is a grave mistake.

Read more: Family Security Matters

 

The Woolwich Killing: “We must fight them as they fight us.”

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ScreenShot2013-05-22at20733PM_zps08ad9ab5MAY 22, 2013, By Mark Durie:

Today in Woolwich, England, a man reported to be a British soldier was cut down by two Anglo-African Muslims wielding knives and a machete.  One of the killers, speaking in a home-grown English accent, is heard on video to say:

There are many, many ayah [verses] throughout the Koran that says we must fight them as they fight us, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today but in our land women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don’t care about you.

(An earlier version of this post had a less accurate translation.)

Eyewitnesses said that the victim had been wearing a ‘Help for Heroes’ t-shirt.  Help for Heroes is a charity to help British soldiers wounded in current conflicts.

Eyewitnesses also reported that the killers attempted to behead the soldier, and that they asked bystanders to call the police, and moved towards the police as if to attack them, as soon as they appeared.

While some said the killers were crazed, the contrary seems to be the case.  They appear to have been acting in accordance with a theologically determined logic which can be understood on the basis of Islamic teachings.  In the midst of perpetrating this carnage, they found time, calmly and clearly, to explain their motivations on camera.

The killer captured on video was referencing passages from Islamic sacred texts. “We must fight them as they fight us” is a reference to a phrase found repeatedly in the Koran:

“fight in the cause  of Allah those who fight you … And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for fitnah (oppression, persecution) is worse than slaughter; …  if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith. ” (Sura 2:190-9)

“fight the polytheists all together as they fight you all together”  (Sura 9:36)

“Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those(believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory” (Sura 22:39)

The Arabic word for ‘fight’ used in the Koran in these passages is qātilūwhich literally means fighting to kill.  (See here for an explanation of the meaning of Sura 2:190-91, a passage used by Muslim jurists to justify killing.)

The reference ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ is also from the Koran (although ultimately borrowed from several passages in the Mosaic law):

And We prescribed for them therein: The life for the life, andthe eye for the eye, and the nose for the nose, and the ear for the ear, and the tooth for the tooth, and for wounds retaliation. (Sura 5:54)

The Muslim killers here are invoking a religious ruling that it is permissible to fight and kill people who wage war against Muslims.  As Bin Ladin put it in his letter to the American people:

“It is commanded by our religion and intellect that the oppressed have a right to return the aggression. Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge.”

The belief which seems to underly the Woolwich attack is that because the British government is fighting a war against Muslims in Muslim lands, it is therefore legitimate for Muslims to wage jihad against the British.  British people, who voted the government into power, are also considered to be personally culpable, which is why they ‘will never be safe’ and are told to ‘remove your government’.

The killer’s language is strikingly reminiscent of Bin Ladin’s November 2002 letter to the American people, in which he not only spoke of ‘removal’ of governments (in Muslim lands), but also explained that it was legitimate to attack American civilians because they are the ones who voted their government into power:

“… the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. … The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want. … the American army is part of the American people. … This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us. … Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. …  whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.

The phrase ‘you people will never be safe’ is reminiscent of Muhammad’s instruction to his followers to invite non-Muslims to Islam by telling them aslim taslam “Accept Islam and you will be safe” (see here).  The implication is that non-Muslims are not safe because their blood and property can be taken until they convert.  Thus Muhammad said to his cousin Ali, on the eve of the attack against the Jews of Khaibar:

“Fight (qātilū) until they bear testimony to the fact that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger [i.e. until they convert to Islam] and when they do that, then their blood and their riches are inviolable [safe] from your hands.” (Sahih Muslim. Book of the Merits of the Companions of the Holy Prophet 4:29:5917).

It seems  the killers desired martyrdom in accordance with their beliefs, because they asked bystanders to call the police and immediately moved to attack the police when they arrived on the scene.

This slaughter on the streets of Woolwich has all the hallmarks of a theologically motivated attack, and keys to understand it can be found in the Qur’an and the teachings of Muhammad.

Whether the views adopted by the killers are ‘legitimate’ interpretations of the Koran and Muhammad’s teachings may be disputed.  What cannot be disputed is the source where they found their inspiration.

Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

Texas Mega-Church Welcomes Islamists to ‘Global Faith Forum’

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indexBy :

The 3,000-member NorthWood Church of Keller, T.X. is holding a “Global Faith Forum” in November. In yet another Islamist-attended interfaith event, Christians will hear from a former Saudi intelligence chief, a former director-general of Al-Jazeera, officials from U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities and the non-Muslims who embrace them.

Pastor Bob Roberts. Jr. is known for his efforts to build-bridges with Muslims. He spoke at the “Christ at the Checkpoint” conference put together by Palestinian Christians at Bethlehem Bible College. So did Florida Pastor Joel C. Hunter, who has been negative attention for his association with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity. Hunter is also critical of “Christian Zionists.”

An article posted on Hunter’s website reports how the “Christ at the Checkpoint” audience, including students from Wheaton and Eastern Universities, “were moved by the testimony of Palestinian men and women who shared the pain and suffering they experience on a daily basis caused primarily by the continuing occupation.”

Pastor Roberts reacted to the anti-Islam Innocence of Muslims video by suggesting that governments crack down on its distribution. He said, “There is a ‘clear and present’ danger the U.S. courts have ruled in regard to freedom of speech—I think that has to extend globally.” 

In January, NorthWood Church hosted Azhar Azeez, Vice President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). ISNA is an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism-financing trial. Federal prosecutors labeled ISNA a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity, a fact confirmed by the Brotherhood’s own secret documents.

In November, his church’s Global Faith Forum will bring the spotlight to his interfaith efforts and those involved in them. Event speakers include Rep. Kay Graner (R-TX), former South Carolina Governor David Beasley and Christianity Today editor Mark Galli, but they aren’t the main attractions.

The conference website’s home page proudly advertises Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2005 to 2007, as a main speaker. Before that, he was the Saudi foreign intelligence chief from 1977 to 2001, making him a top figure in Saudi Arabia’s proliferation of Wahhabism around the world for over 20 years. He represented a Sharia-based government that persecutes Christians.

Faisal Bin Muammar was an advisor at the Saudi Royal Court and Secretary-General of the Riyadh-based King Abdul Aziz Center for National Dialogue.

Safi Kaskas is a co-founder of East West University in Chicago and a “strategy consultant for a number of business organizations in the USA and Saudi Arabia.” He is a member of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo identifies AMSS as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” The memo says its “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” The AMSS is also closely linked to the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Another main speaker is Professor John Esposito, one of the top non-Muslim supporters of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network. He is a frequent guest speaker at their events and was a witness for the defense in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation.

Read more at Front Page

France’s Growing Islamist Problem

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franceBy Ryan Mauro:

The reaction to a recent Muslim robbery of a priest in France is a sad indication of where the country is headed. A Catholic official pointed out, “If it had been an imam or rabbi, he [the Interior Minister] would already been on the spot.” This is no surprise, as Socialist President Hollande’s pandering to the Muslim population played a large role in his election.

The incident began when four Muslims surrounded the priest and told him to hand over his cell phone. One thief knocked him unconscious. The attack may have been motivated by criminality and not jihad, but the two are part of a common trend.

There are over 750 government-designated “Sensitive Urban Zones” in France, referred to as “No-Go Zones” by Dr. Daniel Pipes. About 5 million Muslims live in these areas of France where law enforcement doesn’t exercise decisive control. When the authorities do have to step in, a violent backlash quickly arises. There are many videos of Muslim worshippers holding illegal prayers in the streets when their mosques overflow without any response from police.

On New Year’s, about 1,200 cars were set on fire and police clashed with residents in the Muslim-majority districts of Strasbourg and Mulhouse. In August, a two-day rampage was sparked when a Muslim was arrested for driving without a license around the time of a funeral. Massive riots have broken out in these no-go zones because of the hostility to reasonable law enforcement. Over half of the French prison population is Muslim, where many are radicalized.

A lack of integration is the most common factor in Islamic terrorists. These unassimilated areas are not just breeding grounds for criminals, but for extremism as well—particularly when foreign Islamist governments and organizations get involved.

The Saudi Arabia-based Muslim World League, described by Andrew McCarthy as “the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology,” is helping finance the construction of 200 new mosques. The French Council of the Muslim Faith wants to eventually doublethe 2,500 mosques in the country.

Qatar, the supposed U.S. “ally” that subsidizes the Muslim Brotherhood, is also active in France’s Muslim community. It is financing mosques and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, the Muslim Brotherhood’s main branch there. It demands the government to pass a law against “Islamophobia.” The Qatari government is also investing $65 million in the suburbs where over 1 million Muslim immigrants live.

This isn’t purely an act of humanitarianism or a business investment. The Qatari constitution is based on Sharia Law. The Christians in Qatar, almost 6% of the population, are allowed to practice their faith but cannot proselytize  to Muslims. Hypocritically, Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani publicly pledged in December 2011 to “spare no effort” to proselytize the Islamic teachings of Muhammad al-Wahhab, the founder of what is often called “Wahhabism.”

Read more at Front Page