The Devil We Don't Know (16 page)

Mogahed's reasoning repeats the same old excuses we Egyptians heard, day in and day out, in defense of Islamic jihad and the oppression of women—she blames others for misunderstanding Islam. Her answers are always given with total confidence and conviction, as she tells her audience that any violent actions by Muslims have nothing to do with Islam. Never mind that Islamic mosques, education, art, and songs all glorify jihad as a holy war for the sake of Allah.

Mogahed brings nothing new to Islamic propaganda, but she certainly sounds assertive, eloquent, and interesting to Americans who are unfamiliar with the same old Islamic propaganda and who find it hard to question a religion. Mogahed has a unique advantage over the classic Islamic sheikh, in that she brings to the United States the traditional views of Islamic sheikhs in a Western-style presentation. Yet in reality, she is not much different from the sheikhs who ridicule those who question Islam with statements such as “Who are you to speak for Islam? Leave the analysis to the experts on Islam.” Mogahed's logic is very similar, and, coincidentally, her book
Who Speaks for Islam
is a rejection of critics whom she believes not qualified to speak for Islam. It is a meaningless title. She provides statistics that are designed to confuse the reader in order to show that Muslims are very different and are not all terrorists, which is no news anyway.

Of course, the 1.2 billion Muslims all over the world differ greatly. There is good and bad in every group, but one thing controls all of them, and that is the tyranny of sharia. What Mogahed refuses to admit is that reputable critics of Islam have nothing against the Muslim people, but they correctly deduce that the problem stems from
the ideology of Islam
and its scriptures and commandments. What Mogahed refuses to discuss are the actual laws of sharia, the history of jihad, the ideology and the education that produced 9/11, Islamic imperialism, the denial of human rights, and the oppression of women and minorities. Her answers are usually simplistic, such as the argument that sharia cannot be bad for women because the majority of Muslim women allegedly support sharia.

The bottom line of Mogahed's propaganda and others like her in the United States is the same old complaint that the West does not understand Islam and that with some education and sensitivity training, the West will finally accept Islam as a religion of peace. Her position, as well as that of some other Muslims in our government, has given her a powerful opportunity to enhance the standing of radical Islamist groups in the eyes of the U.S. government. Unfortunately, there is no equal voice given to the reformists and the anti-sharia Muslims or the former Muslims. Yet the responsibility falls on our leaders, who hired and entrusted Muslim Brotherhood figures to work in sensitive positions in our government. Mogahed, who is rumored to be, and I personally believe is, a Muslim Brotherhood member herself, has written speeches for the U.S. president to address the Muslim Brotherhood. I believe this was a glaring conflict of interest that the White House should not have allowed. The end result of the speech was an overwhelming impression on the Arab street that Islamism won and secular reformers were defeated. I will go into more detail on the impact of Barack Obama's Cairo speech in chapter 7.

It may surprise most Americans that the influence of the U.S. women's suffrage movement reached all the way to Turkey and Egypt. The only time that Egypt saw a relatively successful, but mostly cosmetic, feminist movement was in 1919, the year American women acquired the right to vote.

Around the same time, Turkey was also undergoing major reforms instituted by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and hosted some women conferences, one of which was attended by an Egyptian feminist, Huda Shaarawi (1879–1947). That same year, she led the first women's street demonstration in Egypt, and later in 1923 she founded the Egyptian Feminist Union, which never had more than 250 members and was composed mostly of wealthy upper- and middle-class women. Shaarawi herself was born into a wealthy family and was married against her will to her cousin, a strong tradition in Egypt at that time. She spent her early years in a harem, an experience she wrote about later in her memoir
Harem Years.
In May 1923, she attended the International Women's Suffrage Alliance in Rome. In a speech at this conference, Shaarawi said that women in ancient Egypt had equal status to men and that only under “foreign domination” had women lost those rights. Shaarawi was correct in saying that it was foreign domination, but she probably was not referring to the Arabian domination that actually diminished the status of women by bringing Islam to Egypt in the seventh century. Sadly, she then used the same argument that all Muslim feminists rely on, when she said that Islam granted women equal rights with men, but that the Koran had been “misinterpreted” by those in power.

On her return from Rome in 1923, Shaarawi did the unthinkable for her time: she took off her veil in the middle of the Cairo train station, declaring the end of the veil. This bold act became the central symbol of her movement.

Because of Shaarawi, my grandmother, my mother, and I have never worn the veil. This courageous woman was not only inspired by a global feminist awareness movement but, more important, was also helped by a more open political climate at the time in Egypt. Islam had become weakened in the early 1920s, particularly because Saudi Arabia was a poor country that could not finance the radicalization of the world around it. Egypt was then a Western-leaning kingdom with some residue of influence from the Ataturk reforms. It had several opposing parties with their own newspapers and a parliament that was not only for show. Sharia law was not in the Egyptian constitution, as it is today. Yet above all, the British and the French had considerable influence in the entire region, and their presence had a positive influence on protecting the human rights of minorities. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was not yet established, and Wahabi Islam, the most radical pure Islam, was limited to and localized inside Saudi Arabia.

Mainly, the 250-member Egyptian feminist movement succeeded in bringing about cosmetic changes, such as giving women freedom not to wear the veil. In the period after World War II, my baby-boom generation of Egyptian middle- and upper-class girls had been encouraged to go to college and later on work. Men and women, however, were still segregated, and dating was never allowed. I am grateful to Hoda Shaarawi because, without her movement, I would never have received the education I did.

Yet Shaarawi probably never could have imagined that her movement, which liberated Egyptian woman from the veil, would be overturned some fifty years later, not by the government but by Egyptian women themselves, who opted to go back to the veil. I remember the growth of Islamist infiltration in Egypt, which started in the seventies after jihadist wars with Israel. Many Egyptians fled the harsh poverty of Egypt to go to countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states—the same countries that were financing Egypt's wars with Israel. Very quickly, Saudi petro-dollars started to change Egyptian culture and the entire region. This coincided with the powerful radical Islamist movement that swept the Middle East as a result of the Iranian revolution. Saudi Arabia radicalized Sunni Muslim countries, and Iran radicalized the Shiites, and both groups ended up feeding on each other.

At that time, just like my mother and my siblings, not all of the women in Egypt wanted to wear the veil, and a small number refuse to do so even today. Yet the copycat tendency spread quickly, and many women who had initially rejected the veil were left in a quagmire: whether to be perceived as devout Muslims or as outcast rebel apostates. The majority chose the former, because perception is everything in Muslim society.

How can feminism be practiced openly, let alone survive under such conditions? Again and again in the Middle East, the passage of time has not necessarily led to progress, liberty, and positive results. Throughout the history of Islam, there have been cycles of reform and attempts to change society that ended with no gains being made. Muslim feminists have never succeeded in achieving serious reforms, such as the abolition of polygamy, equal inheritance rights, or the right to marry whomever they wish. These are all demands that go against sharia, and, as I mentioned earlier, women who make these demands are called apostates. To muzzle Muslim feminists, the Arab media will usually accuse them of borrowing corrupt and subversive ideas from foreign infidel Zionists and enemies of Islam.

Other than a few Iranian feminist organizations operating from the West and protesting honor killings and the abuse of women in Iran, there is no strong grassroots Islamic feminist movement in the Middle East. Islamic feminists, both in the Middle East and in the West, who still call themselves Muslims have no choice but to continue supporting the illusion that Islam was originally respectful of women and only later became corrupted against women.

With every serious attempt to reform women's lives, there is the opposing harsh reality of sharia: doors that are shut and windows closed to keep women in the confines of the Islamic jail. As soon as women work around one law that was designed to control them, another one pops up that is even harsher. The Muslim feminist movement cannot function successfully under such a hostile environment. Islamic sharia is the gun pointed at their heads.

To sum up, Islamic feminism is a twisted kind of feminism that champions pride in Islamic bondage. This is all that Muslim women are allowed to do. Islamic feminism features a unique kind of aggressive submission to the abusive laws of Islam—a kind of a mass Stockholm syndrome where the victim, the Muslim woman, identifies with and defends the oppressor, the Islamic establishment and its laws. As a result, in the Middle East there are many assertive militant Muslim women who act in the role of “virtue police” to oppress other women. This self-destructive form of feminism pits one woman against another in a competition to defend the religion that taught her to loathe herself and that makes her loathe other women as well.

Activist Muslim women in the West invest their energy in promoting the building of a mosque at Ground Zero in New York City or changing America's views of Islam, but they are nowhere to be found when there are reports of honor killing, the oppression of women, the flogging and stoning of women, female genital mutilation, polygamy, and the killing of apostates and blasphemers, all of which are being perpetrated today in the name of Islam. Far too many Muslim women in the West close their eyes to the plight of their sisters in the Muslim world, who suffer quietly in an often-unforgiving culture.

Where are the wealthy Saudi women who could be helping their sisters in distress in Darfur? Where is the Muslim Mother Teresa in Iraq, Egypt, or Afghanistan? Where is the compassion of Muslim women who could be defending other oppressed and wronged women? Has sharia deadened their hearts, closed their eyes, and dulled their senses?

The intellectual cowardice of some women who advocate sharia in the United States and Europe is staggering. While the few feminists in the Middle East are being humiliated, silenced, threatened, or killed, many of their sisters in the West simply ignore them. They do not want to expose anything negative about Islam, and if that means not supporting women in the Middle East, then so be it. That is why when the oppressed women of Afghanistan were imprisoned in their homes and deprived of an education or a job, none of these atrocities were uncovered or reported by Muslim women or groups. These are the same groups that today are demonstrating on college campuses with their burkas against the so-called discrimination in the United States. America needs to know that these women have no case and zero credibility.

Some female members of Muslim student associations on U.S. college campuses attack me and other speakers who criticize sharia. In one instance, an unnamed Muslim student at George Washington University, whose accent sounded Egyptian, yelled at a protest, “I want the sharia law imposed in my country.”
4
Note her choice of the word
imposed
. I presume that she meant “the United States” when she said “my country,” because sharia is already imposed in Muslim countries, on one level or another. Again, these holier-than-thou women are practicing the only feminism allowed to them in Islam: pride in bondage.

Liberty and equality for women in the Middle East are closely linked to defeating sharia. By people discrediting sharia, men will also be liberated from their obligation to do violent jihad, which may perhaps lead to the elimination of Islamic terrorism against the non-Muslim world.

It is not only in the best interests of Muslims to discredit and defeat sharia; it is also in the best interests of Western democracies. The West is extremely vulnerable to Islamism and sharia supporters who have risen to influential positions in the West, as we will see in the next chapter.

7

Western Vulnerability

The Arab Spring fooled and confused many in the West, even some seasoned observers, who enthusiastically believed that with the removal of dictatorships, life would get better for everyone in the Middle East. Some even compared the Arab Spring to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet Islamic concepts, such as “freedom from oppression,” are very different from those concepts in the West. To many Muslims, achieving freedom from oppression means life in the ideal Islamic state under Allah's law. Sadly, the world is gradually realizing that the 2011 Islamic revolutions followed in the same footsteps as previous Islamic revolutions, which brought only superficial changes but then fell back into the same mold of Islamic sharia.

In the post-9/11 world, the amount of information being tossed around about the ideology of Islam has been staggering. By now, people in the West should fully understand the dynamics of revolutions in the Middle East, let alone Islamic culture and the danger that Islam presents to the free world. Why do so many of them not comprehend these issues?

As I described in previous chapters, many influential Western politicians, academics, and the mainstream media have ignored or altogether rejected the basic facts about Islam. Despite the brutal orchestrated beheadings, stonings, honor killings, torture, and hanging of innocent men and women in the name of Islam by those who tell the world they are the true Muslims, it has become taboo in the United States to show fear or be alarmed at both the stealthy and the violent forms of Islamic jihad.

Even when Islamists in the United Kingdom declared that the three towns of Dewsbury, Radford, and Tower Hamlets were independent Islamic “emirates” and would operate entirely outside British law and be ruled by sharia, little concern was expressed by the Western media or UK politicians, who are civil servants sworn to uphold their constitution. Where is the outrage in Great Britain? Western citizens' legitimate concern about, and fear of, the Islamic threat to their way of life is often dismissed by elected civil servants and is suppressed by the media as being racism.

Criminalizing the criticism of Islam is prevalent in Europe today, yet this goes against the basic freedom and welfare of European citizens. Such repression and shaming of Europeans and Americans who reject the influence of sharia on their governments and societies will only exacerbate matters and increase tension between them and Muslim immigrants. This problem could be alleviated by passing simple legislation that would clearly make sharia and other foreign laws that violate human rights and the U.S. constitution illegal. Instead, Western governments have chosen to consider sharia and even defend it, in the case of the United Kingdom. By enforcing one-sided respect toward the culture of Islam in Europe and the United States and placing the pressure of absorbing change entirely on the shoulders of Western citizens, Western governments and media are setting the stage for a disaster.

Such a disaster actually did happen in Norway on July 25 when a deranged Norwegian terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, took matters into his own hands and went on a shooting rampage, killing more than seventy-six people, mostly teenagers. Such acts of terror were unheard of in Norway before the impact of Islam on that nation, and the violence left many stunned. Could this be the beginning of civil unrest in Europe, in response to the constant threat of Islamic terror all over that continent? Only time will tell.

There is not enough discussion in the West on the psychological traumas of 9/11, the Fort Hood massacre, the London and Madrid bombings, and all of the Islamic terror plots around the world. The United States must recognize the effect of such trauma on the American people and even on the U.S. military, whose freedom of speech regarding Islam has been muzzled. So far, the twenty-first century has been the century of Islamic terror and unrest, which are negatively rocking the world both psychologically and financially, in the form of a high price tag to fund national security.

Hardly a day goes by when an Islamic leader does not express his wish to destroy the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and all non-Muslim countries. There is no doubt that such Islamic threats, both verbal and in the form of terrorist acts and defiance of Western lifestyles, negatively affect the psyches of Westerners, whether they know it or not. Muslims around the world should understand this and be more sympathetic of it; they should stand against the Islamists who issue the threats. The reckless daily barrage of Islamic threats all around the world will not prompt Westerners to love Muslims because, unfortunately, that is human nature. Islamists have produced fear and trauma in the Western mind, and these feelings are now directed against Islam.

Because my first language is Arabic—and because I watch Arab TV, read Arab newspapers, and understand what Islamists are saying—I am more afraid than the average American is. Some U.S. and Muslim groups treat me and others like me without mercy for daring to lay bare the truth. Yet my fear is not an unreasonable phobia, despite those cruel accusers calling us critics Islamophobes. Why have statements such as the following not aired on American TV to expose who is inciting the Muslim world and to show that terrorists are not fringe groups rejected by mainstream Islam? Why are we hiding the truth from the American people, and why am I often told that my fear of statements such as this is unreasonable?

Four pounds of anthrax—in a suitcase this big—carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the U.S., are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour, if it is properly spread in population centers there. What would be a horrific terror attack that will make 9/11 appear as child play in comparison. Am I right? There is no need for airplanes, conspiracies, timings, and so on. One person, with the courage to carry four pounds of anthrax, will go to the White House lawn, and will spread this “confetti” all over them, and then will do these cries of joy. It will turn into a real “celebration.”
1

These words were not uttered in the secret caves of al Qaeda, but on Al-Jazeera TV by a Kuwaiti professor, Abdullah Al-Nafisi.

The terror card is not kept a secret. Many Muslim sheikhs proudly state that whenever there is a demand for a few jihadis to die for Allah, a thousand volunteer. Yet Western culture has made it taboo to take them at their word, even after 9/11. The U.S. media never report a newsworthy story such as the one I cited here. The media in the United States often practice self-censorship when it comes to Islam and go out of their way to omit coverage of stories broadcast over Arab media, which I watch every day. In that sense, Western media, which provide a window to the world on how Americans think, have abided by the sharia law never to criticize Islam or Muslims, even as Islamist threats hang over the West, waiting to explode at any time in the form of a terrorist act. The victims here are the American public, who are not treated as adults and who deserve to learn the truth about the enemy we are supposedly fighting. The trauma that many Americans have suffered in the aftermath of 9/11 is not being acknowledged as real and worthy of respect by a media telling Americans that the enemy is not really an enemy.

It is a mystery why some of the most intelligent people in the United States treat Islam this way. Why do they often go out of their way to embrace Islam and even promote certain shady Muslim groups and characters? No matter what plots are uncovered, how many public beheadings are shown on Al-Jazeera Arab TV, how many victims are terrorized, how many women are victims of honor killings, and how many threats are made, America remains split, with many continuing to disregard the uneasy truth about Islam.

Some believe that this is happening out of fear, but I think it is much more than fear, because those who deny the truth about Islam are not merely silent; they actually defend the indefensible. I have finally come to terms with what I believe is the truth: some Americans, including many on the left, simply admire and respect an ideology that is so contrary to the conventional wisdom in the West: Islamic pride in supremacy, control and power (even reckless power), petro-dollars, its disregard of Western taboos, the in-your-face male chauvinism, female pride in subservience, the eagerness to win at any cost, and the nostalgia of having a cause to die for. This is more than simply a Stockholm syndrome infecting certain Americans; it has become actual admiration of one's enemy.

The pro-Islam crowd in the United States does not stop at misinformation, self-censorship, or failing to report news from the Middle East, but they also engage in vicious attacks to silence those, myself included, who expose the Islamist agenda. They have little regard for our First Amendment rights, and they use the tactics of shaming and name calling—deriding us as Islamophobes, racists, bigots, and polarizing figures. Anyone with an opinion can be called a polarizing figure, but that expression is never used to describe those who, for instance, burn the American flag or produce a movie about the assassination of President George W. Bush while he is in office. Name calling is reserved for those who have a different opinion from antiestablishment Americans and their supporters in the media. As for the word
Islamophobe
, it has become meaningless, because I and all of the others who speak out are truly afraid for America's future in regard to Islam, and rightfully so. No illusions about that.

Something is wrong with this picture. It is the beginning of a slippery slope into tyranny, a picture I am very familiar with. Having lived under tyranny, I recognize its early signs. The conventional wisdom in the West is that we should be more concerned with not offending peace-loving Muslims and thus should suppress the truth, rather than face the reality about Islam. The fact that not all Muslims are terrorists has become a good reason to avoid reporting on Islamic tyranny or making a big deal out of it. This is equivalent to not reporting on the horrors of Nazi Germany or Japanese assaults on the United States during World War II lest we offend German or Japanese Americans. I have never seen the West be so cowardly about an issue, even when it is as extreme as the Islamic racism and slavery that are prevalent today in Arab Islamic Sudan against black Christian southern Sudan. The topic is hardly ever reported on, even by black Americans.

Wherever Islam goes, a Stockholm syndrome seems to afflict the people touched by its terror and tyranny. Just like the anthrax confetti the Arab professor recommended to poison the minds of Americans, there was mass damage inflicted on Americans as a result of 9/11 and the many smaller terror attacks that followed. We must never underestimate the impact of terror on a mass scale. Stockholm syndrome is a proven condition that results in an emotional attachment, an identification, or a bond between victim and victimizer. The mere fact that the captor spared one's life can prompt a feeling of gratitude, even admiration, for the captor, who is then seen as a savior. When the terror occurs on a large scale, it can produce a mass Stockholm syndrome, even toward a specific culture.

Psychologist William E. Schlenger said that the 9/11 attacks “represent an unprecedented exposure to trauma within the borders of the United States. Today, people from sea to shining sea are still dealing with the emotional repercussions of the events of September 11, 2001.”
2
Yael Danieli, a New York City clinical psychologist and a founding director of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, said, “September 11 was a terrible loss—not just in terms of lost life, but in terms of a lost way of life.”
3

Remember the expression “America held hostage” that was often heard on U.S. TV during the 1979 American hostage crisis in Iran? Now the American mind is being held hostage by Islamism. Many Americans now identify with their terrorist oppressors. Could it be a mere coincidence that the American people have voted in, not only its first black president, but a president whose name rhymes with Osama? The question is not meant to be an insult to President Barack Obama, but a legitimate questioning of the psychological motivations of the American people after 9/11, their sharp divisions and fears. That is what terrorism does to a nation; it splits it apart and throws it into disarray.

The whole world looked up to the United States as a symbol of protection and power from the evils of the world, yet the perception in the Middle East is that America is a paper tiger, that America is afraid to even name its true enemy or condemn the countries that produced the 9/11 terrorists. Somehow, we gave a pass to the Saudi and Egyptian cultures of hate. America's reaction to 9/11 up until today has not been strong enough, and I do not mean only military action.

September 11 put Americans in a weaker position, filled them with self-blame, and engendered a more forgiving attitude toward Islam, but it has given Muslims a sense of empowerment. Muslim American leaders, such as the chairman of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad, told the Saudi newspaper
Ukaz
that “34,000 Americans have converted to Islam following the events of September 11, and this is the highest rate reached in the U.S. since Islam arrived there.” I am not sure how accurate Awad's figures are, because one-third of converts to Islam in the United States convert out of it within two years. Immediately after 9/11, Sheikh Raid Sallah, the head of the Islamic movement in Israel, also told a rally, “Oh, peoples of the West . . . we say to you: We are the masters of the world and we are the repository of all good [in the world], because we are ‘the best people, delivered for mankind' [Koran, 3:111]. We do not hesitate, Oh Bush and Blair; we invite you to Islam, enter Islam, you and your peoples.”
4

Terror can play tricks on the minds of some of the most intelligent individuals, and it has caused some people to convert to the ideology that killed three thousand of their fellow U.S. citizens. The serious Islamic threat to Western civilization has been reduced to endless shouting matches, pro and con, as if the threat were nothing more than a discussion about the flavor of the month. The U.S. jury has not yet come back with a verdict on the nature of the ideology that is behind 9/11. It is all a matter of opinion, and never mind the facts. As I described in an earlier chapter, every poll taken in the Middle East on the death of bin Laden showed that a large majority of Muslims were saddened and angered by his death and many have threatened revenge, yet again on the United States. Strong indications show that the government and the intelligence agencies of Pakistan were helping bin Laden hide. The conspiracy to hide bin Laden could have been much larger than the Pakistani government and may have included many other Islamic governments, such as Saudi Arabia. For the United States to continue telling the American people that the problem was only al Qaeda is simply untrue. The U.S. citizen has been deceived.