Something Rotten in Denmark (And Here)
Surprisingly, on net, last week was not a good one for the Free World. Despite the signal accomplishment of liquidating Osama bin Laden, Western civilization suffered serious reverses on several fronts.
What these reverses all have in common is a deference to the doctrine our enemies' call "shariah," in a manner they perceive to be acts of "submission." Such behavior is exceedingly dangerous, as it invites our foes to redouble their efforts to make us, in the words of the Koran, "feel subdued."
For instance, consider the aftermath of SEAL Team 6's extraordinary take-down of bin Laden. What ensued was nothing less than a debacle as President Obama's political appointees kept changing their accounts of what had happened. As one wag put it, "Osama bin Laden died and we got 72 versions."
The subtext was of an administration effort desperately trying not to give offense to our adversaries. Yet, they and our friends could only have felt reaffirmed in their already dim view of what passes for American leadership under Mr. Obama.
Then, there was the unctuous effort to dispose of bin Laden's body in strict "conformance to Islamic practice." The fastidious cleansing and wrapping of the body, the 40-minute ceremony and the burial at sea conjure up images of an America treating one of its most psychopathic enemies as a legitimate, even revered figure. Islam scholar Andrew Bostom raises the question whether such rites actually included shariah-conforming denunciations of Christians and Jews? Either way, this exercise was a pathetic act of appeasement.
Next, the President announced that he had decided not to release the dead jihadist's photo. As with the handling of bin Laden's burial, the justification given was concern that the picture's dissemination would only inspire more violence against us and our forces overseas. The truth of the matter is that the more we signal our fear of the violence of shariah-adherent Muslims, the more certain it is to be visited upon us.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday an appeals court in Denmark convicted one of Western civilization's most courageous defenders - Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society. His crime? He gave offense to Muslims. Yes, that's right, a Danish judicial panel effectively enforced shariah blasphemy law. In the process, the court violated one of the most cardinal pillars of freedom: the right to free speech. This is similar to Dee Perez-Scott's censorship of comments on her blog contrary to its stated purpose or mission.
--Frank Gaffney
Showing posts with label Muslims. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muslims. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Reason #21 Why Obama Should be Impeached or NOT Re-elected
The developer of the Ground Zero "victory" mosque SharifEl-Gamel, a man who views himself as a peacemaker between the Muslim faith and the American people has a lengthy arrest record for assault, DWI, numerous disorderly conduct arrests and a $227,000 real estate tax bill that he hasn't yet attempted to pay. It is also reported that in an October, 2007 deposition for his assault case, El-Gamal responded "no" to the question had he ever been convicted or pled guilty to a crime. And let's not forget about Imam Feisal Rauf, and his apparent obsession with Shariah law - he founded the Shariah Index Project - an effort to rate which government best follows Islamic law. Many analysts see in the project his support for "a Taliban-style Shariah" or imposing Islamic law in the United States. The fact that these two very questionable men are behind the Ground Zero "victory" mosque have already raised the suspicions of New Yorkers - 71 percent of whom do not support a mosque built anywhere near Ground Zero. Given their backgrounds, and the historical context of theso-called "Cordoba House" mosque, this is nothing morethan a very thinly veiled attempt to, as Rush Limbaugh said,"hoist a victory flag" near the site where Muslim extremists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent Americans!
Monday, August 30, 2010
Reason #17 Why We Should Impeach or NOT Re-elect Obama
Ground Zero Mosque Cleric Rauf says Parts of His Book Were Woven into Obama’sCairo Speech (CNSNews.com) – The cleric who wants to build a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero claims that ideas from his book were incorporated into President Obama’s landmark Cairo address to the Muslim world last year by one of the drafters of the speech. Feisal Abdul Rauf made the remarks during two media interviews in Egypt last February.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Reason #13 Why We Should Impeach or NOT re-elect Obama
Obama thinks it is right for imam Rauf and Islam to build a mosque and community center in New York City near Ground Zero. He needs to understand what moderate Muslims really think.
"It can’t be done without confronting mainstream Islam and its Sharia agenda. ‘Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society.” The writer was not one of those sulfurous Islamophobes decried by CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations] and the professional Left. Quite the opposite: It was Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide and a favorite of the Saudi royal family. He made this assertion in his book, How the Imported Solutions Disastrously Affected Our Ummah, an excerpt of which was published by the Saudi Gazette just a couple of months ago.
This was Qaradawi the “progressive” Muslim intellectual, much loved by Georgetown University’s burgeoning Islamic-studies programs. Like Harvard, Georgetown has been purchased into submission by tens of millions of Saudi petrodollars. In its resulting ardor to put Americans at ease about Islam, the university somehow manages to look beyond Qaradawi’s fatwas calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq and for suicide bombings in Israel. Qaradawi, they tell us, is a “moderate.” In fact, as Robert Spencer quips, if you were to say Islam and secularism cannot co-exist, John Esposito, Georgetown’s apologist-in-chief, would call you an Islamophobe; but when Qaradawi says it, no problem — according to Esposito, he’s a “reformist.”
And he’s not just any reformist. Another Qaradawi fan, Feisal Rauf, the similarly “moderate” imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, tells us Qaradawi is also “the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.”
Rauf is undoubtedly right about that. So it is worth letting it sink in that this most influential of Islam’s voices, the promoter of the Islamic enclaves the Brotherhood is forging throughout the West, is convinced that Islamic societies can never accept secularism. After all, secularism is nothing less than the framework by which the West defends religious freedom but denies legal and political authority to religious creeds.
It is worth understanding why Qaradawi says Islam and secularism cannot co-exist. The excerpt from his books continues: “As Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (Ibadah) and legislation (Shari’ah), the acceptance of secularism means the abandonment of Shari’ah, a denial of the divine guidance and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions. It is indeed a false claim that Shari’ah is not proper to the requirements of the present age. The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of humans’ limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: Say! Do you know better than Allah? (Qur’an 2:140) For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shar’ah is downright apostasy. Apostasy is an explosive accusation. On another occasion, Sheikh Qaradawi explained that “Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished.” He further acknowledged that the consensus view of these jurists, including the principal schools of both Sunni and Shiite jurisprudence is “that the apostates must be executed.”
Qaradawi’s own view is more nuanced, as he explained to the Egyptian press in 2005. This, I suppose, is where his vaunted reformist streak comes in. For private apostasy, in which a Muslim makes a secret, personal decision to renounce the tenets of Islam and quietly goes his separate way without causing a stir, the sheikh believes ostracism by the Islamic community is a sufficient penalty, with the understanding that Allah will condemn the apostate to eternal damnation at the time of his choosing. For public apostasy, however, Qaradawi stands with the overwhelming weight of Islamic authority: “The punishment …is execution.”
The sad fact, the fact no one wants to deal with but which the Ground Zero mosque debate has forced to the fore, is that Qaradawi is a moderate. So is Feisal Rauf, who endorses the Qaradawi position – the mainstream Islamic position – that Sharia is a nonnegotiable requirement. Rauf wins the coveted “moderate” designation because he strains, at least when speaking for Western consumption, to paper over the incompatibility between Sharia societies and Western societies.
Qaradawi and Rauf are “moderates” because we’ve abandoned reason. Our opinion elites are happy to paper over the gulf between “reformist” Islam and the “reformist” approval of mass-murder attacks. That’s why it matters not a whit to them that Imam Rauf refuses to renounce Hamas: If you’re going to give a pass to Qaradawi, the guy who actively promotes Hamas terrorists, how can you complain about a guy who merely refuses to condemn the terrorists?
When we are rational, we have confidence in our own frame of reference. We judge what is moderate based on a detached, commonsense understanding of what “moderate” means. We’re not rigging the outcome; we just want to know where we stand.
If we were in that objective frame of mind, we would easily see that a freedom culture requires separation of the spiritual from the secular. We would also see that Sharia — with dictates that contradict liberty and equality while sanctioning cruel punishments and holy war — is not moderate. Consequently, no one who advocates Sharia can be a moderate, no matter how well-meaning he may be, no matter how heartfelt may be his conviction that this is God’s will, and no matter how much higher on the food chain he may be than Osama bin Laden.
Instead, abandoning reason, we have deep-sixed our own frame of reference and substituted mainstream Islam’s. If that backward compass is to be our guide, then sure, Qaradawi and Rauf are moderates. But know this: When you capitulate to the authority and influence of Qaradawi and Rauf, you kill meaningful Islamic reform.
There is no moderate Islam in the mainstream of Muslim life, not in the doctrinal sense. There are millions of moderate Muslims who crave reform. Yet the fact that they seek real reform, rather than what Georgetown is content to call reform, means they are trying to invent something that does not currently exist.
Real reform can also be found in some Muslim sects. The Ahmadi, for example, hold some unorthodox views and reject violent jihad. Witness what happens: They are brutally persecuted by Muslims in Pakistan, as well as in Indonesia and other purported hubs of moderation.
Meanwhile, individual Muslim reformers are branded as apostates, meaning not only that they are discredited, but that their lives are threatened as well. The signal to other Muslims is clear: Follow the reformers and experience the same fury. As Qaradawi put it in the 2005 interview, public interview, public apostates are “the gravest danger” to Islamic society; therefore, Muslims must snuff them out, lest their reforms “spread like wildfire in a field of thorns.”
Today, “moderate Islam” is an illusion. There is hardly a spark, much less a wildfire. Making moderation real will take more than wishing upon a star. It calls for a gut check, a willingness to face down not just al-Qaeda but the Qaradawis and their Sharia campaign. It means saying: Not here! Not now! Not ever!
--Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America”
"It can’t be done without confronting mainstream Islam and its Sharia agenda. ‘Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society.” The writer was not one of those sulfurous Islamophobes decried by CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations] and the professional Left. Quite the opposite: It was Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide and a favorite of the Saudi royal family. He made this assertion in his book, How the Imported Solutions Disastrously Affected Our Ummah, an excerpt of which was published by the Saudi Gazette just a couple of months ago.
This was Qaradawi the “progressive” Muslim intellectual, much loved by Georgetown University’s burgeoning Islamic-studies programs. Like Harvard, Georgetown has been purchased into submission by tens of millions of Saudi petrodollars. In its resulting ardor to put Americans at ease about Islam, the university somehow manages to look beyond Qaradawi’s fatwas calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq and for suicide bombings in Israel. Qaradawi, they tell us, is a “moderate.” In fact, as Robert Spencer quips, if you were to say Islam and secularism cannot co-exist, John Esposito, Georgetown’s apologist-in-chief, would call you an Islamophobe; but when Qaradawi says it, no problem — according to Esposito, he’s a “reformist.”
And he’s not just any reformist. Another Qaradawi fan, Feisal Rauf, the similarly “moderate” imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, tells us Qaradawi is also “the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.”
Rauf is undoubtedly right about that. So it is worth letting it sink in that this most influential of Islam’s voices, the promoter of the Islamic enclaves the Brotherhood is forging throughout the West, is convinced that Islamic societies can never accept secularism. After all, secularism is nothing less than the framework by which the West defends religious freedom but denies legal and political authority to religious creeds.
It is worth understanding why Qaradawi says Islam and secularism cannot co-exist. The excerpt from his books continues: “As Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (Ibadah) and legislation (Shari’ah), the acceptance of secularism means the abandonment of Shari’ah, a denial of the divine guidance and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions. It is indeed a false claim that Shari’ah is not proper to the requirements of the present age. The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of humans’ limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: Say! Do you know better than Allah? (Qur’an 2:140) For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shar’ah is downright apostasy. Apostasy is an explosive accusation. On another occasion, Sheikh Qaradawi explained that “Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished.” He further acknowledged that the consensus view of these jurists, including the principal schools of both Sunni and Shiite jurisprudence is “that the apostates must be executed.”
Qaradawi’s own view is more nuanced, as he explained to the Egyptian press in 2005. This, I suppose, is where his vaunted reformist streak comes in. For private apostasy, in which a Muslim makes a secret, personal decision to renounce the tenets of Islam and quietly goes his separate way without causing a stir, the sheikh believes ostracism by the Islamic community is a sufficient penalty, with the understanding that Allah will condemn the apostate to eternal damnation at the time of his choosing. For public apostasy, however, Qaradawi stands with the overwhelming weight of Islamic authority: “The punishment …is execution.”
The sad fact, the fact no one wants to deal with but which the Ground Zero mosque debate has forced to the fore, is that Qaradawi is a moderate. So is Feisal Rauf, who endorses the Qaradawi position – the mainstream Islamic position – that Sharia is a nonnegotiable requirement. Rauf wins the coveted “moderate” designation because he strains, at least when speaking for Western consumption, to paper over the incompatibility between Sharia societies and Western societies.
Qaradawi and Rauf are “moderates” because we’ve abandoned reason. Our opinion elites are happy to paper over the gulf between “reformist” Islam and the “reformist” approval of mass-murder attacks. That’s why it matters not a whit to them that Imam Rauf refuses to renounce Hamas: If you’re going to give a pass to Qaradawi, the guy who actively promotes Hamas terrorists, how can you complain about a guy who merely refuses to condemn the terrorists?
When we are rational, we have confidence in our own frame of reference. We judge what is moderate based on a detached, commonsense understanding of what “moderate” means. We’re not rigging the outcome; we just want to know where we stand.
If we were in that objective frame of mind, we would easily see that a freedom culture requires separation of the spiritual from the secular. We would also see that Sharia — with dictates that contradict liberty and equality while sanctioning cruel punishments and holy war — is not moderate. Consequently, no one who advocates Sharia can be a moderate, no matter how well-meaning he may be, no matter how heartfelt may be his conviction that this is God’s will, and no matter how much higher on the food chain he may be than Osama bin Laden.
Instead, abandoning reason, we have deep-sixed our own frame of reference and substituted mainstream Islam’s. If that backward compass is to be our guide, then sure, Qaradawi and Rauf are moderates. But know this: When you capitulate to the authority and influence of Qaradawi and Rauf, you kill meaningful Islamic reform.
There is no moderate Islam in the mainstream of Muslim life, not in the doctrinal sense. There are millions of moderate Muslims who crave reform. Yet the fact that they seek real reform, rather than what Georgetown is content to call reform, means they are trying to invent something that does not currently exist.
Real reform can also be found in some Muslim sects. The Ahmadi, for example, hold some unorthodox views and reject violent jihad. Witness what happens: They are brutally persecuted by Muslims in Pakistan, as well as in Indonesia and other purported hubs of moderation.
Meanwhile, individual Muslim reformers are branded as apostates, meaning not only that they are discredited, but that their lives are threatened as well. The signal to other Muslims is clear: Follow the reformers and experience the same fury. As Qaradawi put it in the 2005 interview, public interview, public apostates are “the gravest danger” to Islamic society; therefore, Muslims must snuff them out, lest their reforms “spread like wildfire in a field of thorns.”
Today, “moderate Islam” is an illusion. There is hardly a spark, much less a wildfire. Making moderation real will take more than wishing upon a star. It calls for a gut check, a willingness to face down not just al-Qaeda but the Qaradawis and their Sharia campaign. It means saying: Not here! Not now! Not ever!
--Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America”
Reason #8 Why Obama Should be Impeached or Not Re-elected
Ground Zero Mosque Cleric Says Parts of His Book Were Woven into Obama’s Cairo Speech (CNSNews.com) – The cleric who wants to build a mosque and Islamiccenter near Ground Zero claims that ideas from his book wereincorporated into President Obama’s landmark Cairo address to the Muslimworld last year by one of the drafters of the speech. Feisal Abdul Raufmade the remarks during two media interviews in Egypt last February.
I guess if he is not a Muslim, he is at least a good mouthpiece or applogist for them.
I guess if he is not a Muslim, he is at least a good mouthpiece or applogist for them.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
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