Tag Archives: Reform of Islam

Islam Vs. Islamism: A Case for Wishful Thinkers

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By Walid Shoebat:

“Our killer question is ‘How do you propose to defeat Islamism?’ Those who make all Islam their enemy not only succumb to a simplistic and essentialist illusion but they lack any mechanism to defeat it.”

This is what historian and Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes asks [1] in his recent Washington Times article.

To support his argument, Pipes makes an unsubstantiated claim [2] that a majority of Muslims are moderate and that Islamism is only,

supported by 10-15 percent [2] of Muslims…

So how and why did he come up with such numbers? Pipes uses different studies and surveys about which he himself confesses [2]: “These ambiguous and contradictorypercentages lead to no clear, specific count of Islamists.” Why then use such statistics? It is only to serve the major argument he made in my first paragraph.

And there are more “confessions.” Pipes writes: “Out of a quantitative mish-mash, I suggested just three days after 9/11 [3] that some 10-15 percent of Muslims are determined Islamists.” This is in itself contradictory and is even absolutely nonsense mathematically as he clearly admits. To further support this conservative number, Pipes adds:

 Indonesian survey and election results led R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani [4] in 2003 to conclude that the number of Islamists “is no more than 15 percent of the total Indonesian Muslim population.”

He did this while he ignored his other statement:

In contrast, a 2008 survey of 8,000 Indonesian Muslims by Roy Morgan Research [5] found 40 percent of Indonesians favoring hadd criminal punishments (such as cutting off the hands of thieves) and 52 percent favoring some form of Islamic legal code.

So here we have 52% of Indonesians are extremists, not 15%.

DanielPipes

Yet even that doesn’t determine the correct percentages to separate Muslims from Islamists. To say that “views on 9/11″ or “supporting Hadd” (Islamic punishment) is the yardstick to measure the percentages is also absurd and mathematically false. What if a Muslim doesn’t support 9/11 or Hadd but supports the idea that it takes two women in a court of law to equal the testimony of a man? Will Pipes count him as a moderate Muslim or an extremist Islamist? If he chooses “moderate,” then Pakistan got it right. No matter what Pipes chooses, it debunks all his unsubstantiated claims about moderate Islam.

What if a Muslim couldn’t care less about Sharia, jihad, and 9/11, yet he kills his sister for marrying a Jew? Is he a “Muslim” or is he an “Islamist”?

And what if we even use terrorism as a yardstick as Pipes prefers; in Saudi Arabia and across the Muslim world, you have many who do not support al-Qaeda. Are these then counted as moderates? In Pipes’ view the answer is “yes.” But this is false. Last week I had an exchange with Sheikh Faisal Al-Harbi, who chastised me on such issues,stating that his clan (Al-Harbi) would not support terrorism. Indeed, on his clan’s official website [7] they denounce al-Qaeda, adding:

Jihad for the sake of Allah is to go to war with the infidels and the polytheists to remove these and enforce Unitarianism. That is after inviting them to Islam and they reject the invitation (Da’wa). This Jihad is then organized and supervised by the Imam.

That cannot be placed in the moderate Islam camp. In light of this and my other arguments, Pipes’ percentages are escalating dramatically.

The true number for Islamists is 100%. Here, let me add more beef to my claim. What if a Muslim denounces today’s jihad, sharia, Islamic state and all? Is he then moderate?

Read more at PJ Media

 

The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch weighs in on the debate:

As made clear in our FAQ, the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch was created as part of an ongoing effort to track and an analyze the activities of the Global Muslim Brotherhood that we define as “global network of individuals and organizations that developed as Muslim Brotherhood members dispersed to other countries while fleeing the periodic crackdowns on the organization in Egypt.” The GMBDW considers the Muslim Brotherhood, in all its manifestations, to be both the wellspring as well the most important ongoing influence on Islamism in the world today. Therefore, in line with what Dr. Pipes has written, we want to reassert that the GMBDW also makes the distinction between Islam the religion and Islamism which we would characterize as even a greater threat to Muslim-majority nations than it is in the West.

That said, the GMBDW does take issue with one passage in Dr. Pipe’s otherwise salutary article.

He writes:

Those who make all Islam their enemy not only succumb to a simplistic and essentialist illusion but they lack any mechanism to defeat it. We who focus on Islamism see World War II and the Cold War as models for subduing the third totalitarianism. We understand that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution. We work with anti-Islamist Muslims to vanquish a common scourge. We will triumph over this new variant of barbarism so that a modern form of Islam can emerge.

We are not convinced that that World War II and/or the Cold War are appropriate models for taking on modern Islamism as we do not believe that Islamism can productively be analyzed in these terms. Therefore, those that adopt such models run the risk of advocating inappropriate strategies for taking on the problem. Further elaboration of this theme involves a degree of complexity and will have to wait for future analysis.

 

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CAN ISLAM BE REFORMED?

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Al-Ghasali: Photo source: Die Welt

Al-Ghasali: Photo source: Die Welt

By Tiffany Gabbbay:

After turning away from Islam and becoming an atheist, young blogger Kassim al-Ghasali became a target in his native Morocco. Following a string of death threats, he sought political asylum in Switzerland, where he now lives and continues to embrace ideals of freedom and tolerance.

Ever-outspoken in his beliefs, al-Ghasali presented a speech at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in February. Speaking to the German-language news outlet Die Welt following the event, the young Moroccan shared his views (a translation of the full interview can be found in the Gates of Vienna blog), on the Arab Spring, why he believes Islam cannot be reformed in the same way that Christianity was, and why moderate Muslims should admit that “terror and violence” — or more pointedly, “unmitigated horror” — is part of the Koran.

Al-Ghasali also poignantly added that the Koran is a “politically and historically-determined book and not the word of Allah” and that Islam cannot be reformed as its tenets are anathema to Western enlightenment, which helped to reform Christianity [emphasis added].

“In my opinion, there can be no reformation or enlightenment in Sunni or Shiite Islam, because there is no church to be reformed,” al-Ghasali explained to Die Welt.

“In Islam, we are subject to the power of a sacred book and the instructions it gives. Identity and understanding of self come from the Quran. If Muslims could use their reason without the instructions of a book which is recognized as the Word of God, then we could talk about enlightenment. But today most Muslims are against the ideas of the Western Enlightenment.”

Read more at The Blaze

 

Zuhdi Jasser and Robert Spencer debate Islamic reform:

 

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To Think or Not to Think: A Muslim’s ‘Outrageous Fortune’

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20130210_islam_muslim_adult_child_largeby Edward Cline:

In his penetrating essay on the futility of Islam’s efforts to “reform”  itself through revolution, “régime change,” or purification, “Springtime for  Islam” (February 5th), Daniel Greenfield noted:

There is a peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own  destructive nature, each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands  come up dripping with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty  tyrannies.

“Reform,” of course, means to change oneself or some institution for the  better, from bad and corrupt to good and pure, or at least to the unobtrusive  benign. But, as Greenfield points out and stresses, the Arab Spring is in  reality a continuation of an ongoing “Arab Winter.” The “Arab Spring” was fueled  by Islam, and Islam is, by its foundational nature, destructive and  self-destructive.

Islam’s only redemption is in establishing a theocracy. Its commitment to  power and the indulgence of the earthly and heavenly paradise of loot, slaves  and violence, led to its own degeneration over and over again. Having no other  spiritual form than the exercise of power, it has corrupted itself each time,  and then attempted to exorcise the corruption through more of the same.

Any theocracy must be totalitarian. It can become totalitarian by  default or happenstance or by negligence, or it can become totalitarian  according to an instruction manual written by clerics and intellectuals friendly  to what they know in their minds are dystopias for the masses and paradises for  the rulers. Islam has its instruction manuals.

Islam governs an individual’s life from his sandals to his beard, from his  diet to the number of times a day he must demonstrate fealty to his icons, to  how he may lawfully (per Sharia law) treat his wives and children. It governs  his social relationships with his friends and enemies, and his enemies are  everyone who is not Muslim. The Koran,  the Hadith,  and the Reliance of the Traveler  all command it. They are how-to manuals  written chiefly in Arabic and translated into a dozen languages.

A Muslim accepts this state of submission – whether or not he’s read all the  manuals from beginning to end – for a variety of reasons, none of them  complimentary and too often those reasons become a Molotov cocktail blend  waiting to explode: a repressed, unacknowledged fear of the mortal consequences  of not conforming; mental inertia, encouraged by an unquestioning faith  in non-evidentiary assertions; a delusional sense of superiority (qua Muslim, and qua Muslim male); a sense of predestination; an  attitude of privilege and expectation of deference; and a borrowed sense of  omniscience.

After all, the propaganda goes, Islam will conquer men, neighborhoods,  cities, nations, and the globe. It is written. Fealty to Islam gives a  rank-and-file Muslim the comforting confidence that he’s on the winning side.  Why bother to think about it? Islam is like an advancing glacier, and he is but  a lump of ice on it. He doesn’t mind. He knows that he’s just dross, a grain of  ballast that helps to keep the Islamic corsair upright and afloat and its sails  taut in the wind.

Islam cannot be “reformed” unless its caretakers repudiate its instruction  manuals. But their repudiation would necessarily entail the repudiation of  Islam. When the manuals go up in flames, so will Islam.

Read more: Family Security Matters

Can Muslims Reopen the Gates of Ijtihad?

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imagesCAW9P52Fby Harold Rhode

The way things look now, only if the forces which want to bring back seventh century Islamic society were to suffer a massive defeat, could there be much hope. Only then, after the anti-ijtihad forces were defeated and no longer had access to unlimited financial resources with which to spread their anti-critical thinking, can things change.

The exercise of critical thinking and independent judgment – or Ijtihad –was an important way to address questions in the early centuries of Islam. After approximately 400 years, however, the leaders of the Sunni Muslim world closed the “Gates of Ijtihad;” Muslims were no longer allowed use itjihad to solve problems. If a seemingly new problem arose, they were supposed to find an analogy from earlier scholars and apply that ruling to the problem that arose. From the 10th century onwards, Sunni Muslim leaders began to see questioning as politically dangerous to their ability to rule. Regrettably, Sunni Muslim leaders reject the use of itjihad to this day.

As questioning could very likely upset the established order and bring down the autocracies and despotic regimes which rule most of the Muslim world, even Muslims who live in freer Muslim countries such as Turkey often hesitate to exercise ijtihad. How did the Muslim world succumb to this situation, and is there a way out?

Ijtihad in historical context

Ijtihad was important in early Islam: when questions arose – even while Muhammad was alive – for which there were no answers, Muhammad would call the Muslims together in their mosque. They would discuss the issues at hand, reason them through, and come to a consensus — so came into being the Islamic concept of ijma’ (consensus among the scholars).[1]

After Muhammad died, however, the Muslim community rapidly expanded; the community of scholars became too large, and ijma’ no longer practical. What developed was a body of traditions – called hadiths – sayings and deeds attributed to their prophet Muhammad. When new questions arose, people would seek out individuals who had known Muhammad and ask them whether they had seen or heard Muhammad address the matter at hand.

Within 200 years, the number of hadiths was thought to be in the hundreds of thousands, but people had no way of knowing which were true and which were fabricated. The great Muslim scholar, al-Bukhari (810 -870 CE), who analyzed them, concluded that only a few thousand were reliable.[2]

Later, when still more questions arose, diverse schools of thought developed. The Quran, the hadiths, and those schools of thought were collected into Islamic law. This body of Islamic religious guidance is known as the Shari’a, or “The Path.”

During the first four centuries of Islam, Muslim scholars seem to have exercised independent judgment freely, and debated rigorously new issues that arose. The Muslim world at that time seems to have been inclusive and flexible; it accepted differing views, differing conclusions and differing sorts of influences that arose as part of the cultures of its large empire.[3]

Muslim scholars studied Arabic translations of ancient Greek texts which they thought might help them understand the nature of mankind as well as other aspects of life. These texts, though clearly non-Islamic, nevertheless provided scholars with useful insights. There were also intellectual interchanges with Jewish scholars, particularly in the fields of science, medicine, language, and geography. There seems to have been, however, little discussion with Christians.[4]

With time, however, the situation became unwieldy. Certain groups (called ghulat) were accused of extremism – going too far — and attempts were made to rein them in.[5] Questions arose as to the limits of divergent views, and whether “extremist elements” could still be considered Muslim. The many schools of Islamic thought were reduced to four; these became the basis of the Sunni Shari’a.

As Islamic rule started to become more autocratic, Islamic rulers began to see discord as potentially able to undermine their rule.

All four schools accepted the Quran as the divine word of God, and the hadiths as the source for legal decisions. But it soon became apparent that the larger the number of hadiths a school of thought accepted, the more restrictive and rigid this school became. The Hanafi school of law, for example – the most liberal school of thought, founded by Abu Hanifa (699-767 CE) — accepted over a few thousand hadiths. In contrast, the most restrictive of the four schools – founded by Ahmad ibn Hanbal (778-863 CE) — accepted tens of thousands. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the 18th century Wahhabism — probably one of the most restrictive forms of Islam — developed out of the Hanbali School of law.

The Islamic authorities possibly still worried that despite four schools of thought, dissent would become unmanageable. Towards the end of the eleventh century, therefore, they officially closed the “Gates of Ijtihad.” There may have been too many different answers to the same questions, leading to confusion. Possibly this, in turn, may have made it difficult for the authorities to maintain order as well as to justify their autocratic rule.

Muslim scholars also appear to have decided that as all questions had been addressed, there was no longer any need to exercise independent judgment. The result was that exercising independent judgment became no longer permissible.

During the twelfth century, nevertheless, there were still attempts to use rational and deductive reasoning. In Muslim Spain, for instance, Averroes (aka Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198 CE), one of the founders of secular reasoning in Europe, refused to accept the closing of the Gates of Ijtihad. He continued to use Arabic translations of classical Greek sources, and preferred strictly rational methods to decide matters in contention. As in the Muslim world the Gates of Ijtihad had been closed, however, his rulings proved unacceptable.

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Muslim attempts to re-open the Gates of Ijtihad

Most of the governments of the Muslim world are despotic regimes run by autocrats who do not allow their citizens to question them. Questioning might lead to insurrection; governments might be overthrown. These leaders, therefore, make sure to appoint “official” religious leaders who will endorse the government line. Ijtihad might lead people to question regimes; a situation that cannot be tolerated. It is not surprising that calls for re-opening the Gates of Ijtihad fall on deaf ears, as the Saudis, Egyptians, Emiratis, and others all do their utmost to stamp out individual thought.

Because questioning religion — and much else — is not allowed, some young Muslims who grow up in Islamic lands find much of what was forced down their throats meaningless, then reject Islam. When some of them come to the West, often their first reaction is to stay as far away from Islam and Muslims as possible. Some, after they remain in the West for a while, stumble upon books about Islam in libraries; they start reading and realize that there is a lot of beauty and knowledge in Islam – just not when forced down their throats. They read, but find almost no one with whom they can share their newfound curiosity.

If and when they do find a kindred spirit, there is often a sort of dance – a tiptoeing around the real questions – mostly out of fear and suspicion. With time, when they realize that other people might have similar interests and feel safe enough to open up, they introduce each other to other men who think like them, but as if these are secret societies: there is a fear that if others, who may not agree, find out what they are discussing, both they and their families back home could suffer. They know well that organized Islam, even in the West, is controlled overwhelmingly by forces that strongly oppose ijtihad.

The internet has offered many the anonymity to pursue an interest in Islam. A surgeon from Malaysia now living in California who says he is happy with his life there, writes on the internet extensively about his fascination with Islam and ijtihad. (See his blog at http://www.bakrimusa.com) His daring has attracted others who write on his blog about Islam. He also boldly states that he could never have engaged in these types of discussions about Islam in his native Malaysia. Could the internet be a way out of this Muslim predicament?

There is also a remarkable group called the Ahl al-Quran[8] which originated in Egypt. The group’s adherents maintain that the only true source of Islamic law is the Quran, the only divine text of Islam. The hadiths and the legal exegesis which constitute Shari’a law, they argue, are just interpretations of the Quran. The interpretations were made by man, and occurred because of problems Muslims had after the Quran was revealed. The scholars addressed problems Muslims faced centuries ago. Muslims in the 21st century, they state, face different problems and should use the Quran – and only the Quran, just as the earliest Islamic scholars did – to find solutions to modern problems. They see no reason why Muslim scholars today cannot think creatively as the scholars of early Islam used to do.

As it is more comfortable to find Quranic material that can be used to address modern situations, and not then feel encumbered by the enormous weight of the hadiths and other legal and interpretive material from ancient religious scholars, an Egyptian organization, Ahl al-Quran, maintains that science and technology are Allah’s gifts to man, to be used to address contemporary problems.

After Egypt’s religious establishment ordered the Ahl al-Quran banned, arrested, or expelled, the group was forced to flee; it is now based in the United States. Why was it forced out? Its adherents, well versed in the Quran, rejected the imposed decision-making of Egypt’s al-Azhar religious establishment,[9] and stated that Islam strongly opposes dictatorship in both its political and religious forms. Instead, this group has been using the Quran to demonstrate that the original Muslim community was inclusive and that it encouraged discussion,[10] both of which today are absent in Egypt and throughout the Muslim world.

When Western officials ask Egyptian political and religious officials about the Ahl al-Quran, the Egyptians laugh and smear the group, labeling its members as crazy extremists with no following. Sadly, because of our ignorance of Islamic culture, or political pressures, we usually accept what the Egyptian government officials tell us without subjecting their remarks to “our own ijtihad,” thereby closing our eyes to a force which could help save the Muslim world from itself, and possibly even help prevent a clash between the Western and Muslim worlds.

Conclusion

Is there a chance that the Muslims could reopen the Gates of Ijtihad? For the foreseeable future, the answer seems to be a resounding no. The mislabeled “Arab Spring” has turned into an “Arab Winter” in which the forces who apparently want to recreate an imagined, glorious past society modeled after what they believe their prophet established. Add to that the huge amounts of money Wahhabi “allies” of the U.S. are spending throughout the Muslim world, to propagate their militant version of Islam, and things do not look promising.

Those who understand that without itjihad, they have no future, are being forced underground, and, if they are lucky, then emigrate. These emigrants who think critically rarely move into Islamic communities where critical thinking is discouraged.

The way things look now, only if the forces which want to bring back seventh century Islamic society were to suffer a massive defeat, could there be much hope. Only then, after the anti-ijtihad forces were defeated and no longer had access to unlimited financial resources with which to spread their anti-critical thinking, can things change.

Until then, the Gates of Ijtihad will almost assuredly remain tightly shut, and the forces which now control Islam will see to it that they remain so.

Regrettably, if this analysis is correct, the future does not look able to be transformed for the Muslim world or its adherents in the near future. Until Muslim countries and communities in the West allow their people to express themselves freely — without fear of reprisal — it is unlikely that the Muslim world will be able to reopen the Gates of Ijtihad and again become a center of science and creativity as it used to be in the early centuries of Islam.

Read more at Gatestone Institute

Harold Rhode received in Ph.D. in Ottoman History and later served as the Turkish Desk Officer at the US Department of Defense. He is now a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

See also:

Dr. Tawfik Hamid: Islam Needs Modern Interpretation (radicalislam.org)

Can Islam reform?

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imagesCAD55194By James Lewis

When liberals sound out on religious fundamentalism they never seem to think of Islam. Yet the Religion of Surrender — Islam means “surrender,” not “peace” — is by far the most fundamentalist religion in the world.

Everything is supposed to go back to the Qur’an, written in the Arabian Desert in the 7th century, straight from the mouth of Allah and therefore impossible to question. If you can’t question something you’re set for mind-lock, and all the troubles flow from that.

As historian Bernard Lewis points out, Islamic civilization always gets stuck in dogmatism whenever the fundamentalist priesthood takes over. That is why the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution took place in Europe and then America, and not in Muslim Persia, Spain or Ottoman Turkey. In a rigidly closed society everybody becomes mind-locked. We can see it every day in the media.

Liberals claim that the US Constitution should be a ‘living document” — meaning they want it dead. Well, the Quran brings the ancient desert war of Mohammed back to life. There’s a living document that’ll kill ya! That kind of fundamentalism is utterly stuck in a dysfunctional past.

Liberals respect the Qur’an more than the US Constitution. The Qur’an runs a billion Muslim minds, half of them women living under virtual house arrest, and subject to constant fear and indoctrination — and murder if they try to escape.

Liberals respect that kind of thing.

When Muslims encounter the modern world they may yearn for freedom, or they may wish to go back to the mythical past. They feel torn between past and future, just like other, less militant creeds.

The battle for civilization will be won or lost in their minds and in ours.

Civilized peoples always hope to fight a war of ideas, so that we will not have to fight a hot war. But peace is not won by cowards. If you can’t stand up for your beliefs during family holidays — politely but firmly — you have not yet begun to fight.

Conservatives have to bear a share of the blame for the victory of radical liberalism in the recent election. Not all the blame, but we have not done enough. Half of America is on our side, at least 100 million people.

We must begin by standing up for our beliefs to friends, family, local leaders, then nationally and internationally. This is a worldwide struggle.

You have in your hands the most fabulous tool ever invented for outreach. If we don’t use computers and the web, as well as personal contacts, to stand for our values, nobody else will do it for us. When we stand up for our values we also empower others to do the same thing.

So far the United States and our “allies” have failed dismally to stand up for our values. We keep surrendering to barbarians, a sure formula for civilizational defeat. It is abject cowardice, and there’s no excuse. None.

The answer to the election of 2012 is not to retreat from our principles, but to redouble our efforts, work smarter and harder, do retail politics — everything is local — and never, never, never, never give in. Churchill had it right. Persistence wins the day.

The election did not change right or wrong, good or evil. They are what they are. A lost election is a setback. So was Valley Forge. So was the Battle of the Bulge.

Our history is full of setbacks followed by victories.

We need to read history. This isn’t the first time control freaks have tried to take over. King George was a control freak. Slavery in the South was bloody control freakery.

Abe Lincoln was the first Republican president of the United States, and contrary to media myths, Republicans have stood for freedom when the Democrats stood for slavery, Jim Crow, the Soviet Union and the Chicago Machine.

In a few places like India there are peaceful Islamic sects, but Saudi Arabia and Iran are run by totalitarian war cults. The Saudis were pure desert warriors until the British Empire raised them to power a century ago. Even Karl Marx couldn’t get more fundamentalist than the Wahhabis, a tiny sect with oceans of oil money to buy corrupt socialist parties and media.

When we see mosques rising today we should see them as another sign that Saudi oil money is coming back to destroy constitutional government. Saudi religious fundamentalism can’t tolerate real freedom, just as radical socialism can’t. You can see it in the liberal media and their politicians. Hillary’s recent PR bomb against Israel did not happen by chance. Those pro-jihadist PR bombs show all the signs of being orchestrated, because normal people don’t mouth the identical words on cue, day after day, like the Hollywood liberal artillery brigade.

Normal people have diverse beliefs. Only ideological monopolies repeat the same slogan over and over again. Presumably somebody pays for those PR bombs. They are much too predictable to be accidental.

No major religion today is as fundamentalist as Islam. If you doubt that, kindly explain which Christian or Jewish sect would commit the atrocities of 9/11? Southern Baptists? Holy Rollers? The Lubavitcher rebbe? What religious Christian or Jew believes that God wants him to commit those civilian massacres that constantly plague the Muslim world?

We stand in horror of the murder of children in Newtown, CT. We should. That is what civilized people do. But let a hundred Shi’ite pilgrims in Iraq be blown to pieces by Sunni terrorists, and there is no outrage. To liberals, Muslim massacres mean nothing. They don’t fit the agenda.

Everything comes down to ideology. Muslims don’t kill impulsively, but for ideology. When they kill other Muslims it’s because there is no worse enemy than a heretic in their eyes. That is why 40,000 people have died in Syria in a war between Sunnis and Shi’ites that started a thousand years ago.  Talk about being stuck in the past? Talk about religious fundamentalism? In the House of Peace everybody is somebody’s heretic.

It’s like the old Dean Martin song:

Everybody hates somebody sometime

Everybody falls in hate somehow

… but it’s not funny in the real world.

Islam is a fundamentalist religion at war with itself, and with infidels like us, because it preaches a war doctrine rooted in 7th century Arabia. Islam cannot change as long as it stays mind-locked in the 7th century.

So the question Can Islam reform? is no small matter, as Samuel Huntington wrote in his classic The Clash of Civilizations. We don’t know the answer yet. An Islamic Reformation is one of Rumsfeld’s Unknown Unknowns, the biggest one we all face today.

But then every civilizational war starts off as a complete unknown. In 1938 Churchill didn’t know that the civilized world could win against Hitler. He guessed, and then acted on his hope and passion, and made it happen.

We have to become Churchillian again.

There is no other way.

Imperialistic Islam may be able to reform, but only if the civilized world resists with all its might.

Read more at American Thinker

 

Also see:

Dr. Tawfik Hamid: Islam Needs Modern Interpretation (radicalIslam.com)

Mohammed Zuhdi Jasser, Hamas, and “Human Rights”

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Zuhdi Jasser

By Andrew Bostom:

Mo’ than enough of his immoral equivalences

Last night (9/2/12) I was sent (unsolicited) the video link to a conference held 3-months ago at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), entitled, “Rescuing Human Rights.” During his talk, one of the featured speakers, Mohammed Zuhdi Jasser, much ballyhooed as a “brave Muslim reformer,” opined (at 11:00 to 11:25) that Hamas’s openly declared annihilationist jihad against Israel was merely

…a tool for Hamas [and Hamas alone] to create a faith-based conflict…Us versus. them…Collectivist thinking which exploits human rights to oppress its own [ i.e., Palestinian Arab Muslim] people

Despite having been subjected to Jasser’s personalized immoral equivalences (he claimed in 2007 my extensive analyses of Islamic Antisemitism effectively made me the moral equivalent of “exploiters” of his noble faith—such as Osama bin Laden!), even I found his UCSD statement shocking. Jasser blithely ignores that Hamas was elected by a landslide vote in Gaza during 2006, and due to its prevailing popularity, would likely dominate any proposed Hamas-Fatah “reconciliation government” for all the Palestinian Muslim enclaves in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

Regardless, last July, 2011, data were released from an analysis by American pollster Stanley Greenberg who performed what was described as an “intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

The salient, pathognomonic findings, were as follows:

First, 73% of the Palestinians surveyed agree with the annihilationist dictates of this canonical hadith (the words and deeds of Islam’s prophet Muhammad which have a weight often equal to the Koran), quoted in the Hamas Covenant.

As characterized in the hadith, Muslim eschatology—end of times theology—highlights the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl – the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ – or according to another tradition, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions maintain that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan, or Jerusalem, wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered- everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree, as per the canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985) included in the 1988 Hamas Covenant (in article 7). The hadith– which ¾ of those surveyed agree should be acted upon—is cited in the Covenant as a sacralized, obligatory call for a Muslim genocide of the Jews—:

…the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to realize the promise of Allah, no matter how long it takes. The Prophet, Allah’s prayer and peace be upon him, says: “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985)

Second, 80% agreed with the quoted sentiments expressed in article 15 of the Hamas Covenant (subtitled, “Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine is a Personal Duty”) elucidates classical jihadist theory—including jihad martyrdom (i.e., homicide bombing) operations—as well as its practical modern application to the destruction of Israel by jihad,  and the need to recruit the entire global Muslim community, or “umma” in this quintessential Islamic cause:

The day the enemies conquer some part of the Muslim land, jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim. In the face of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, it is necessary to raise the banner of jihad. This requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally [in Palestine], in the Arab world and in the Islamic world. It is necessary to instill the spirit of jihad in the nation, engage the enemies and join the ranks of the jihad fighters. The indoctrination campaign must involve ulama, educators, teachers and information and media experts, as well as all intellectuals, especially the young people and the sheikhs of Islamic movements…

It is necessary to establish in the minds of all the Muslim generations that the Palestinian issue is a religious issue, and that it must be dealt with as such, for [Palestine] contains Islamic holy places, [namely] the Al-Aqsa mosque, which is inseparably connected, for as long as heaven and earth shall endure, to the holy mosque of Mecca through the Prophet’s nocturnal journey [from the mosque of Mecca to the Al-Aqsa mosque] and through his ascension to heaven thence. “Being stationed on the frontier for the sake of Allah for one day is better than this [entire] world and everything in it; and the place taken up in paradise by the [horseman’s] whip of any one of you [jihad fighters] is better than this [entire] world and everything in it. Every evening [operation] and morning [operation] performed by Muslims for the sake of Allah is better than this [entire] world and everything in it.” (Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi and Ibn Maja). “By the name of Him who holds Muhammad’s soul in His hand, I wish to launch an attack for the sake of Allah and be killed and attack again and be killed and attack again and be killed.” (Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim)

Third, 72% backed denying the thousands of years of Jewish history in Jerusalem.

Fourth, 62% supported kidnapping IDF soldiers and holding them hostage

Fifth, 53% were in favor or teaching songs about hating Jews in Palestinian schools.

Moreover, Jasser’s immoral equivalence at UCSD exculpates the “non-Hamas” Palestinian Muslims, and the rest of the Arab and non-Arab global Muslim umma incited for almost a century by mainstream, institutional Islam to a hydrophobic, annihilationist Islamic Jew-hating fury.  Particularly edifying examples of this incitement were two fatwas produced by Sunni Islam’s Vatican, Al-Azhar University, 9-months before the 1956 Sinai war when Israel was a rump state of 1949 armistice borders, and fully 32-years before Hamas was founded in 1988. Issued at the height of so-called secular Arab nationalism, these two complementary fatwas, one written on January 5, 1956, by then grand mufti of Egypt Sheikh Hasan Ma’moun, and another dated January 9, 1956, signed by the leading members of the Fatwa Committee of Al Azhar University and the major representatives of all four Sunni Islamic schools of jurisprudence, elaborated the following key points, indistinguishable from Hamas’s current Weltanschauung (from my forthcoming Sharia Versus Freedom):

Muslims cannot conclude peace with those Jews who have usurped the ter­ritory of Palestine and attacked its people and their property in any manner which allows the Jews to continue as a state in that sacred Muslim ter­ritory.[As] Jews have taken a part of Palestine and there established their non-Islamic government and have also evacuated from that part most of its Muslim inhabitants. . . . Jihad . . . to restore the country to its people . . . is the duty of all Muslims, not just those who can undertake it. And since all Islamic countries constitute the abode of every Muslim, the Jihad is impera­tive for both the Muslims inhabiting the territory attacked, and Muslims everywhere else because even though some sections have not been attacked directly, the attack nevertheless took place on a part of the Muslim territory which is a legitimate residence for any Muslim. Everyone knows that from the early days of Islam to the present day the Jews have been plotting against Islam and Muslims and the Islamic homeland. They do not propose to be content with the attack they made on Palestine and Al Aqsa Mosque, but they plan for the possession of all Islamic territories from the Nile to the Euphrates.

At UCSD, Mohammed Zuhdi Jasser deliberately ignored—as is his wont—Islam’s annihilationist jihad against the Jews, animated by its mainstream conspiratorial Jew hatred. Jasser compounded that offense by pretending Hamas—still resoundingly popular amongst the masses of Palestinian Muslims who share Hamas’s Weltanschauung—is somehow “denying” the Palestinians, not the Jews they seek to annihilate via jihad in accord with Islam’s canonical hadith,  etc.—their “rights”

Mohammed Zuhdi Jasser’s UCSD comments were emblematic of the reprehensible moral inversions he must create to remain in his disingenuous state of denial.

Andrew G.  Bostom is the author of The  Legacy of Jihad (Prometheus, 2005) and The  Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism ”  (Prometheus, November, 2008)

Andrew McCarthy and “Patriotic” Muslims

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by EDWARD  CLINE

Earlier this month author and former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy gave  a terrific, informative, and comprehensive address  at The Center for Security Policy at the National Press Club. It was principally  an answer and a rebuttal to the criticisms of a group of five House  representatives who called for a multi-agency investigation into the backgrounds  of numerous Muslims now employed in various capacities in those agencies. One of  those letters went to deputy inspector general of the State Department, and one  of the persons named in the letter was Huma  Abedin, Secretary Hillary Clinton’s deputy  chief of staff.

McCarthy was the point man in the prosecution of  Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheik,” over the 1993 World Trade  Center  bombing. He is a Republican conservative with a libertarian bent who writes for  National Review.

Abedin, it seems, has very close family ties to the Muslim  Brotherhood, an Islamist supremacist  organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the conquest of the  United States (if not its destruction, as well). The Mainstream  Media and its allies on the Left immediately  charged Michele Bachmann, representative from Minnesota, with alleging that  Abedin is an operative or spy for the Brotherhood. McCarthy and others have  countered with the facts: that Bachmann, based on knowledge that Abedin  especially has had family connections with the Brotherhood, suggested that  perhaps she had not been as thoroughly vetted as a possible security risk.  Bachmann and her colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee were requesting  an investigation of the vetting of Abedin and other individuals. And nothing  more.

The ensuing attack  on Bachmann gave Senator John  McCain of Arizona a chance to grandstand in Congress in Abedin’s defense.  Abedin and McCain, apparently, are friends. However, he committed the same error  as the mainstream media made, and interpreted Bachmann’s request for an  investigation as an allegation of “guilt by association.”

McCarthy not  only deflated such a charge in his Center for Security Policy speech, but  provided ample evidence that the Brotherhood has indeed infiltrated the highest  ranks of government for the purpose of influencing American foreign policy.  During his speech, he said he could not now say how many Muslims were in  positions of influence or even had access to security-sensitive documents.
However, there was a reservation in McCarthy’s depiction of the Islamic  peril. That reservation compromises and qualifies everything else he had to say.  These are the troubling paragraphs. The non-bolded Italics are  mine:

Now, let me be clear about what I said and what I didn’t say. I said Islamist influences, I did not say Muslims. I don’t know  how many Muslims work in the U.S. government, but I feel pretty safe saying  there are thousands. As a federal prosecutor on terrorism cases, I had the  privilege of working with several of them. These were patriotic American  Muslims, and a number of Muslims who may not be Americans but who have embraced  America and the West. Without them, we could not have infiltrated jihadist cells  in New York and stopped terrorists from killing thousands of people.   Without them, we could not have translated, understood and processed our  evidence so it could be presented to a jury as a compelling narrative.  Pro-American Muslims serve honorably in government,  in our military, in our intelligence services, and in our major  institutions. We are lucky to have them because they have embraced  the culture of individual liberty that is the beating heart of Western  civilization. They have accepted the premise of our society that everyone  has a right to freedom of conscience and equality before the law. They have  accepted our foundational principle that free people are at liberty to make law  for themselves, irrespective of the rules of any belief system or ideology. They  construe Islam’s spiritual elements and its laws as a matter of private  conscience, not as a mandatory framework for society. (Italics  mine.) Those Muslims are not Islamists.

What is troubling is that this is a common sentiment among virtually all  well-read, knowledgeable, and actively out-spoken anti- and  counter-jihadist writers and observers. The only Muslims I would  completely trust with my life would be apostates: Ayaan  Hirsi Ali, Walid Shoebat, Wafa  Sultan, and a handful of others. These individuals have repudiated Islam in  its entirety, discarded it as moral code, and warned that there can be no such  thing as a moderate Islam. They have acknowledged that there is no such thing as  a “moderate,” peace-loving Muslim, either, that there is no halfway point  between obeying Allah’s commands and the laws of man-made governments, which  Allah decreed, through Mohammad, were an “abomination.”

Parenthetically, the concept of a conscience is strictly religious in  nature, by which one’s explicitly held moral principles are at variance with the  more pragmatic or “practical” actions one must take to pursue one’s ends. As  such a dichotomy, a conscience serves more as a leash rather than as a  guide to moral action.

Let us for the moment take McCarthy’s statement  as true – that these “patriotic” Muslims are not security risks and who  sincerely do not wish harm on the United States – and pose some important  questions:

Which parts of the Islamic doctrine do “moderate,”  peace-loving, “patriotic” Muslims reject, or object to, or claim have been  misinterpreted by “extremists” and “radicals”? To my knowledge, this question  has never been answered, neither by any “moderate” Muslims, nor by any  non-Muslims such as Andrew McCarthy or Robert Spencer or Daniel Pipes. It would  be interesting to know which parts of that doctrine do not call for death,  destruction, enslavement or conquest – that is, the later, abrogating Koranic verses.

And if one could identify those parts, and  segregate them from the belligerent, violent parts, could the remainder be  justly called “Islamic”? Could a Muslim who adhered to those non-violent parts,  and eschewed the violent ones, still be called a “true Muslim”? Would he be any  kind of “Muslim”? Would “conservative” or “extremist” Muslims regard him as one,  or label him a slacker, or an apostate?

If one has serious  reservations about one’s beliefs, yet steadfastly holds onto them in the face of  the choices of rejecting them, compromising them, or of being consistent with  them, is this a matter of faith, or of a congenital psychological or  epistemological disorder? If a private conscience is a personal matter,  characterized by a belief in an all-knowing, omnipotent deity who commands one  to be moral (without any demonstrable, perception-based, reality-grounded  proofs), where would one’s strongest loyalty lay? With the belief, or with  secular law? In a crisis, would a Muslim’s personal ‘belief system” trump his  purported belief in the “foundational principle that free people are at liberty  to make law for themselves”?

Islam’s basic tenets reject any kind of  individualism. Islam is inherently hostile to such concepts of individualism and  political liberty. Islamic ideology seeks to extinguish those things. To wit, as  cited in the Journal  Huma Abedin worked on for twelve years:

The Western habit of reducing religion to the function of a residual force,  separating it from the state and relegating it to personal and individual  affairs, places a deep gulf between the West and other traditions,  especially the Islamic. (p. 6) The Islamic world sees the West as  arrogant, materialistic, repressive, brutal, and decadent with a lack of human  moral values. The domains of Islam perceive Western culture as threatening  because of its materialism, imperialism and its championing of unfettered  individualism at the expense of the common social good. These hallmarks of  Western culture are seen as the source of all troubles. (p. 9) Muslim  intellectuals believe that Western modernity is based on a metaphysical  foundation of immanence that denies transcendence. Sayyid Husayn Nasr describes,  “The embodiment of the Divine Will, as a transcendent reality which is eternal  and immutable, as a model by which the perfections and shortcomings of human  society and the conduct of the individual are judged….”   Sayyid QuÏb described it [modern Islam] as “a disastrous combination of avid  materialism and egoistic individualism.” (p. 9) The war that  has been declared against Western modernity now seeks a new modernity, and,  unlike Western modernity, it is not based on a revolution of rising expectations  and infinite progress, but, rather, on the idea of a human mind at peace with  itself, committed to the sanctity of man and of nature. The search for this new  modernity in the Islamic world gives a high priority to the ideal of justice and  the balancing of individual human rights with the rights of the human  community as a whole. (p. 11) The most common notion of freedom in the  West today is to do, be or say whatever one wishes without  intervention. A substantial range of actions by individuals or groups  cannot be questioned. But in the Islamic notion of freedom, an individual’s or group’s freedom is restricted if fellow human beings  complain of sentimental or sensual feelings as a result of those actions. (p.  11)

All Italics are mine. Need I point out the inherent hostility  of Islam to individualism? Islam requires the unquestioning submission  of the individual to Islamic authority.

All non-Islamist or  non-supremacist Muslims are faced with such a contradiction and the attending  problematic conflict of conscience. If they refuse or are unable to question  their faith, what then? If one could demonstrate to them that their faith is  incompatible with their purported patriotism and loyalty, what would they do  about it? Repudiate Islam, or continue to profess double and irreconcilable  commitments?

Read more: Family Security Matters

Edward Cline is the author of the Sparrowhawk novels set in  England  and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period, of several detective and  suspense  novels, and three collections of his commentaries and columns, all  available on  Amazon Books. His essays, book reviews, and other articles have  appeared in The  Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Information Ethics and other  publications.  He is a frequent contributor to Rule of Reason, Family Security  Matters,  Capitalism Magazine and other Web publications.

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Islamic Jihad: Hurry Up or Wait?

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By Edward Cline at FSM:

“The difference between the “radicals” and the “moderates” is that the radicals want to engage in genocide even while they are a minority, while the moderates want to wait until they are a majority. The radicals are satisfied with killing a few Hindus, Christians, Jews, here and there. The moderates want to wait and kill millions. Neither are our allies. Both are our murderers.”

So wrote Daniel Greenfield in his Sultan Knish column of March 21st, “The New Nazis,” in response to the murders of a rabbi and three children in Toulouse, France, and to the murders of the French paratroopers by Mohamed Merah. He likens, and not for the first time, Muslim jihadists, their agenda, and their tactics, to those of the German Nazis. He ended his column with:

“The old Nazis marched in at the head of an army. The new Nazis bought a plane ticket. The old Nazis had to get by the French Armed Forces and the Royal Air Force. The new Nazis are welcomed in and anyone who says a word otherwise faces trials and jail sentences. The old Nazis deported Jews to camps. The new Nazis kill them right in the cities. And the killing will not stop until the Muslim occupation of Europe comes to an end.”

Greenfield is right. I would liken Islam to an ideological Black Death that must be faced up to by politicians and intellectuals. There’s no such thing as a “benign” Islam. It is a death-worshipping ideology from top to bottom. And the only way to emasculate it is to repudiate it in its entirety.

The Black Death or the Bubonic Plague invaded Europe in the 14th century chiefly through Europe’s seaports. Ship rats carrying the Oriental rat fleas and passengers and crews of merchant vessels already infected by the fleas called on these ports and transmitted the disease to populations. The plague wiped out between 30 to 60% of Europe’s population over the course of two centuries, chiefly because no one knew what caused it or how to fight it. Beginning in 1346, it crept across Europe until by 1353 it had decimated all of Europe including a goodly portion of Russia. The Mideast was also stricken; many vessels calling on Italy, France, and England originated in the Black Sea. It would recede, then return many times over the centuries with diminishing potency, until the last outbreak of it in the early 19th century. The only nation to escape the Black Death’s first wave was Poland, which had no seaports, and Iceland, which had relatively little contact with Europe.

The Black Death was not welcome to Renaissance civilization. Political and religious leaders did not rationalize away its presence or its causes. They may have prayed for relief, or called it God’s vengeance, or perhaps blamed it on witches, but whatever they said, was said in ignorance of the causes. Suddenly, the plague was there and city streets filled up with the dead and diseased.

And today, just as suddenly, Europeans have noticed that their city streets were filling up with the living, walking, and arse-lifting dead, an invasion of them by invitation of their governments and often by the citizens themselves. The living dead wish to be accommodated in all things, which means gutting the cultures they migrated to and transforming them into replicas of the cultures they left behind.

I make no bones about my hatred of Islam. It isn’t the Rotary Club, or the Moonies, or any other harmless cult. Islam is as much a collectivist ideology as are socialism and communism and Nazism, and like those secular brands, its primary aim is total domination of their adoptive societies to the point that those societies become wholly Islamic. To submit to Islam is to voluntarily lobotomize oneself in favor of a ghostly authority and an iconic “prophet” who was basically a thug and a killer. Muslims submit to it, and expect all those around them to submit to it, or to defer to them.

Islam is the Black Death of modern times. It completes with secular totalitarianism. Its carriers are Muslims, who arrived by countless planeloads at the invitation and encouragement of western governments and proceeded to procreate and begin a process of insulation. At first these governments believed that Muslims would assimilate into the cultures they were migrating to, as though they were Christians of one sect settling into a country dominated by Christians of another sect. However, they were not Catholics settling in Lutheran Germany, or Episcopalians starting over in Catholic Italy.

There is no middle ground. There is no “reforming” Islam. Just as there is no “reforming” Nazism, or Maoism, or Stalinism. Islam is not a “buffet” religion; there is no picking and choosing which of its imperatives to adhere to, and which to disregard. The creed demands one’s full allegiance and obedience in every aspect of one’s private and public life, all one’s waking hours. That many Muslims do not live “by the book” is irrelevant. It’s their creed in whose name violent jihadists commit atrocities, and stealth or cultural jihadists corrode or corrupt Western social and judicial norms like bagworms consuming a tree’s bark, which means the death of the tree. The “silent majority” of Muslims dare not or care not to speak against the actions of their more zealous religious colleagues.

“Radical” and “moderate” Muslims aren’t about to “reform” Islam to make it “tolerant” of other creeds or more palatable to their adoptive cultures. So that task must be accomplished by those who will be its ultimate victims, either as dhimmis, or corpses. The penicillins of multiculturalism, “diversity,” “tolerance,” “sensitivity,” moral relativism and plain political expediency are what have allowed the plague to kill so many and make significant inroads in Western civilization. It’s time those who value that civilization to adopt the same “in your face” tactic as the violent and stealth jihadists have adopted. That will mean identifying Islam as a killer ideology. Period.

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FamilySecurityMatters.orgContributing Editor Edward Cline is the author of a number of novels, and his essays, books, reviews, and other nonfiction have appeared in a number of high-profile periodicals.

Can Islam be reformed? Robert Spencer, Zuhdi Jasser, Walid Shoebat

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To watch the full program, and more programs Please go to www.abnsat.com

Jihad Exposed,
Samar Gorial
Can Islam be reformed?
Robert Spenser, Director, Jihad watch
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, Presdent, American Islam for democracy
Walid Shoebat

 

Can Sharia be reformed?  Tawfik Hamid , Anjem Choudary , Walid Shoebat, Samar Gorial:

Support ACT! for America

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There has been a recent skirmish (see here, here, here and here) between Christopher Logan of Logan’s Warning and Brigitte Gabriel, founder of ACT! for America over her support for Zuhdi Jasser. The point of contention is whether there can really be a truly moderate practicing Muslim and whether Islam can be reformed. This has been a matter of intense debate among counter jihadi circles. In the camp that believes there can be no reform and no true moderate Muslim are Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and of course Christopher Logan among many others. In the camp that believes reform is possible, although unlikely, and moderate muslims are a legitimate group that we must reach out to are Andrew McCarthy, Frank Gaffney, Clare Lopez and of course, Brigitte Gabriel.

The Spencer/Geller camp believes that to hold out false hope of a moderate Muslim or a reformed Islam does more harm than good for the counterjihad movement because it disarms us with confusion over who to trust and who the enemy really is. Pamella Geller lays out her position and the history of her conflict with Jasser here.

The McCarthy camp believes that it is wrong to say Islam can never be reformed because there is always room for interpretation of written doctrine (as any good lawyer would agree) McCarthy also believes that there is such a thing as a moderate Muslim who wishes for reform of Islam and we must reach out to them rather than alienate them thereby making them more susceptible to radicalization. McCarthy also likes the use of the term “Islamist” to refer to Muslims who practice fundamentalist Islam with its attendant Sharia and goal of a global caliphate.

I must confess that I vacillate on this issue. But I am a pragmatist. Whether Islam can be reformed or not is mainly a question for Muslims to deal with. I support anyone who has the courage to risk their life in attempting it. I believe that a Muslim who is not practicing sharia and believes in our constitution is not a true Muslim as it stands now. But I also believe in a class of Muslims, however small their numbers may be, that can be called reformers.  Why would we want to discourage their efforts?

In any case, we must deal with the nature of the threat we face right now. And that threat is from the Global Islamic Movement which has risen up due to the influence of Saudi petrodollars and the “unholy alliance” between Islam and Progressives.

ACT for America is the largest grassroots lobbying and educational organization working to defeat radical Islam. The political process requires compromise and incrementalism in order to effect change. We must work with groups that we don’t trust completely because that’s the nature of democracy. Ideological purity is not always possible. But debate must continue and we must listen to each other. I am a big fan of Rep.Allen West. He lost a lot of support when he voted for the balanced budget amendment which amounted to voting for something he didn’t agree with ideologically in order to get “75%” of what he wanted in the bill. He did not lose my support because I understand that compromise is necessary if we are to get anything accomplished. We must work with and encourage the “reformers” If we are to win the support of all those Muslims out there who are on the fence and could either move towards radicalization or moderation.

I support ACT for America, Brigitte Gabriel and Zuhdi Jasser. They have done so much to further the cause of liberty, human rights and religious freedom that to disavow them because of this disagreement would be a travesty. We can only judge people by their actions and Brigitte and Zuhdi are doing a heck of a job in speaking out against political Islam.

 
Our Significant Accomplishments in 2011


Last year ACT! for America continued its growth and record of accomplishment as the largest grassroots national security organization in America.

  • Our number of members grew from 155,000 to 185,000.
  • Our number of chapters grew from 535 to 650.
  • We were instrumental in getting “Arizona Laws for Arizona Courts” passed. This legislation prohibits state courts from applying foreign law, including sharia law, in cases where doing so would violate the constitutional rights of any parties to the case. This followed up our successful effort in 2010 to get this legislation passed in Tennessee.
  • ACT! for America chapter leaders in Tennessee, working closely with Tennessee Eagle Forum, spearheaded legislative efforts that resulted in the passage of two important bills:
    • Material Support for Terrorism. This provides additional tools to the state of Tennessee to designate material support for terrorism, and, significantly, it prohibits the use of religious doctrine as a justification for terrorism.
    • Refugee resettlement legislation. A growing national security problem is the increasing number of terrorists arising out of refugee populations in America, notably the Somali refugee population. This legislation empowers the Tennessee state and local governments to have more say in the resettlement of refugees within the state.
  • One of ACT! for America’s high priority bills, the Iran Threat Reduction Act, passed the House and has been sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
  • A second ACT! for America high priority bill, the 9/11 Commission Review Act, was included in the Department of Homeland Security authorization bill that passed the House and is now pending in the Senate.
  • A third ACT! for America high priority bill, a modified version of the Team B Act, was included in the Intelligence authorization bill that passed both houses. This provision is a good start in requiring a competitive analysis on the issue of radicalization.
  • We sponsored briefings on Capitol Hill in Washington for Members of Congress and staff on topics including the Muslim Brotherhood and the ideology driving Islamic terrorism.
  • We increased our number of Facebook “fans” from 20,000 to 45,000. Using Facebook metrics our Facebook posts are now reaching over one million people per month. Our Facebook presence was demonstrated when our Facebook followers bombarded Everett Community College in Washington state regarding its decision to have a representative from CAIR speak on campus. The college responded by distancing itself from CAIR and scheduling a presentation with a speaker from another point of view from CAIR. This was social media grassroots power in action!
  • We released a new book targeted for young people titled “Understanding the Threat of Radical Islam.” If you would like to obtain a copy, click here and choose the “Contributing Member” option. A single copy is available for a contribution of $26, and orders of six or more copies are available for a contribution of $20 each.
  • We held our second annual National Conference and Legislative Briefing. Nearly a dozen key Members of Congress provided legislative briefings and updates to our attendees at this sold-out event.
  • We collected over 50,000 signatures on behalf of Tulsa police captain Paul Fields and held a rally in Tulsa which received extensive media coverage. As you may recall, Captain Fields was suspended for refusing to attend and order his officers to attend what amounted to an Islamic proselytizing event. In response to this effort an Oklahoma state legislator declared he intended to introduce legislation holding government officials liable if they order their employees to engage in such religious events.
  • We held an event the weekend of October 28 – 30 titled “The Doctrine of Abrogation: Open the Koran Day.” The purpose was to educate people about how the Islamic doctrine of abrogation, which is the annulling of contradictory passages in the Koran, has annulled up to 124 peaceful verses in the Koran and superseded them with violent and jihadist verses aimed at non-Muslims. The event was hosted by ACT! for America chapter leaders and members at over 325 venues across America and in 20 in foreign countries.

You have helped make all of this possible! Thank you!