The Worldwide Jihad: The Truth About Islamic Terrorism (3 page)

BOOK: The Worldwide Jihad: The Truth About Islamic Terrorism
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His list culminated with his principal bogeys, the chief things he believed interfered with global peace: “the occupation of Palestine and imposition of a fake government”; Saddam Hussein’s “invasion” of Iran; 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan; and a host of others. Among them, he complained about the supposed denial of “the right to criticize the hegemonic policies and actions of the world Zionism.” It was hard not to wonder at such moments in his speech what planet he was on, since the Palestinian jihadist propaganda machine has had such success in demonizing Israel in the world media; but of course a linchpin of that success has been to complain that the situation is exactly the opposite, and so that is what Ahmadinejad did in New York Wednesday.

In a speech that was heavy on Islamic proselytizing, after his survey of the world’s ills, Ahmadinejad asked: “Does anybody believe that continuation of the current order is capable of bringing happiness for human society?” And further: “Who is responsible for all these sufferings and failures?” He left that question unanswered at that point, although at another point he railed against the “uncivilized Zionists,” and he went on to delineate his prescription: “There is no doubt that the world is in need of a new order and a fresh way of thinking.” Foremost this would be “an order in which man is recognized as God’s Supreme Creature, enjoying material and spiritual qualities and possessing a pure and divine nature filled with a desire to seek justice and truth.” Consequently he called upon the nations to “place our trust in God Almighty and stand against the acquisitive minority”—in other words, to adopt Sharia and stand against Israel.

Morsi, for his part, was less subtle. “The first issue which the world must exert all its efforts in resolving,” he declared, “on the basis of justice and dignity, is the Palestinian cause.” He labeled it “shameful that the free world accepts, regardless of the justifications provided, that a member of the international community continues to deny the rights of a nation that has been longing for decades for independence.” About the many Israel peace offers and chances to establish a state that the Palestinian jihadists contemptuously cast aside he was, of course, silent, retailing Palestinian propaganda talking points as he called for “immediate and significant measures to put an end to colonization, settlement activities, and the alteration in the identity of Occupied Jerusalem.”

Morsi also added an additional item to Ahmadinejad’s laundry list for global harmony: the eradication of “Islamophobia.” “We must join hands,” he said ringingly, “in confronting these regressive ideas that hinder cooperation among us. We must act together in the face of extremism, discrimination, and incitement to hatred on the basis of religion or race… We have a responsibility in this international gathering to study how we can protect the world from instability and hatred.” How could this be done? Egypt, he said, “respects freedom of expression,” but only such expression that is “not used to incite hatred against anyone” and that is “not directed towards one specific religion or culture”—a freedom of expression that “tackles extremism and violence,” not the kind that “deepens ignorance and disregards others.” In other words, he was calling for international restrictions on speech that Muslims find objectionable.

Destruction of Israel and of the freedom of speech, both couched in high-flown terms that eluded most of the hearers and much of the international media. But the intentions of both of these Islamic supremacist presidents was clear. More’s the pity that there was no voice of freedom to stand up and defend free states, free speech and free people in terms just as clear. And because of that lack, Ahmadinejad and Morsi may well get what is on their wish list.

‘All-American Muslim’ Misleads on Islam

TLC’s much-ballyhooed All-American Muslim reality show makes its agenda clear in its opening sequences: shots of a hijabbed girl roller-skating, Muslims dancing at a wedding, an American flag waving proudly in the breeze, and newspaper clippings proclaiming “4 in 10 Americans ‘suspicious’ of Muslims,” “Outrage at Ground Zero ‘Mosque,’” and “Muslims Brace for Backlash.” The point of the show is to depict Muslims as ordinary folks just like you and me who are subjected to unjust suspicion.

And so we meet one zaftig girl who loves to have fun and go to clubs, and who is in the process of getting married. Another young woman, provocatively dressed by Muslim standards, is trying to open up a club of her own. A young hijab-wearing wife shares the joy of her pregnancy with her loving husband. They’re balancing the demands of faith and family with life’s daily pressures, just like most Americans. So why—the show implies—are non-Muslim Americans so mean to them?

Yet it is noteworthy that both the woman who is getting married and the one who is trying to open a club acknowledge that they are not all that religious. And that is the problem at the heart of All-
American Muslim
. The Muslims it depicts are for the most part undoubtedly harmless, completely uninterested in jihad and Islamic supremacism (although there is a notable undertone of something quite different here and there, such as when the career woman’s “friend and business partner Mahmoud” tells her, his voice full of quiet menace, that a Muslim woman is really better off tending to her family than opening a club).

But Americans aren’t suspicious of Muslims who are trying to get married, open clubs, and play football. Americans are suspicious of Muslims who are trying to blow up American buildings, subvert American freedoms, and assert the primacy of Islamic law over American law. The problem people have with Islam is not with every Muslim person. It is with Islam’s teachings of violence against and the subjugation of unbelievers. It is with the supremacist ideology and the fervent believers in those noxious doctrines of warfare and subjugation.

All-American Muslim addresses nothing of that supremacist ideology, although at times it makes an appearance despite the producers’ best efforts. The woman who is getting married is marrying a Roman Catholic, who converts to Islam in order to marry her. Her father insists on the conversion as a condition of the wedding, and at one point we are told in passing that while a Muslim man may marry a non-Muslim woman, a Muslim woman is not free to marry a non-Muslim man.

Left unanswered in the show is the question of what might have happened if the couple had decided to get married in the Roman Catholic Church, or to leave Islam at some later date. No doubt this non-observant woman’s Muslim relatives would have been less solicitous in that event. There are many women in the show who are wearing hijabs and many who are not, but we are not allowed to see what might happen if one of the hijab-wearing women decides to take it off. Such conflicts would not serve The Learning Channel’s agenda.

There is a spectrum of belief, knowledge and fervor among Muslims, just as there is among the believers in every religion: there are people who are very knowledgeable about its doctrines and serious about putting them into practice, and others who don’t know and don’t care about what their religion teaches but still identify themselves as members of it, and every gradation in between. It would never happen for obvious reasons, but All-American Muslim would be much more interesting if it tracked one of its secular, attractive nominal Muslims as he decided to get more serious about his faith, and ended up participating in jihad activity or Islamic supremacist efforts to demonize and marginalize those who resist that activity.

Such a show would be far more honest in its depiction of the causes of the trumped-up malady of “Islamophobia”—and of its remedies, for the best outcome would be a show in which the nascent jihadi was turned into the FBI by his patriotic and moderate coreligionists. But that is a show we will never see; instead all that All-American Muslim gives us is a denunciation of “Islamophobia” featuring Muslims who could never have conceivably inspired any suspicion of Islam in the first place. The show is a bait-and-switch.

‘Adulteress’ Slaughtered in Afghanistan

A video of a woman, Najiba, being shot dead in Afghanistan while a cheering crowd yells “Allahu akbar,” “Long live Islam,” and “Long live mujahideen” has provoked international outrage. Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, called the shooting “a barbaric attack on a defenceless woman and another stark reminder of the brutalities that were regularly committed under Taliban rule, and of the task ahead of us in advancing the rights of Afghan women and girls.” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “Such deplorable actions underline the vital need for better protection of the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.”

And so in the waning days of the West’s fruitless adventure in Afghanistan, at least two of our NATO allies have a new mission: protecting the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan. The video itself makes clear that this will be an uphill battle; and in any case the fate of Afghan women and girls was sealed, at least as far as getting any help from the West was concerned, when the Western powers oversaw the adoption of a Constitution in Afghanistan that enshrined Islamic law as the highest law of the land.

But many Muslim spokesmen have denied that the murder of Najiba had anything to do with Islam or Sharia in the first place. Many have decried the fact that Najiba was executed for adultery when there doesn’t seem to have been any evidence presented. Maulavi Sidiqullah Fedayee, an Afghan Islamic scholar, explains: “Islam has very clear rules. These clear rules of Islam cannot be changed. Those who implement Shari’a simply on the basis of accusations do not have an adequate understanding of the rules of Islam….In a case of adultery, there must be four witnesses, and these witnesses must testify that they actually saw the woman and a man together engaged in sexual intercourse.”

Fedayee is correct: absent a confession (which, for all anyone knows, may have been obtained in Najiba’s case), Islamic law requires four male Muslim witnesses who actually saw the act of adultery in order to establish it. This odd stipulation is based on Qur’an 24:4 and 24:13, which in turn are based, according to Islamic tradition, on a notorious incident in Muhammad’s life: his favorite wife, Aisha, was accused of adultery and thus had to be put to death, whereupon Muhammad received a revelation requiring four witnesses. Aisha’s accusers didn’t have them, and so she was exonerated.

Also, according to Islamic law Najiba should have been stoned to death, not shot, if she was indeed guilty of adultery. That law is not in the Qur’an, but in one hadith the caliph Umar, one of Muhammad’s closest companions, maintained that it originally was, and was still Islamic law:

Umar said, “I am afraid that after a long time has passed, people may say, ‘We do not find the Verses of the Rajam (stoning to death) in the Holy Book,’ and consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed. Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession.” Sufyan added, “I have memorized this narration in this way.” Umar added, “Surely Allah’s Apostle carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him.” (Bukhari, vol. 8, bk. 82, no. 816)

And so Maulavi Sidiqullah Fedayee is correct: “Islam has very clear rules,” and by them one can evaluate whether or not Najiba was put to death justly from an Islamic standpoint. This belies the smooth deceptions that Islamic supremacists, faced with growing opposition to Sharia in the U.S., peddle about Islamic law.
Reza Aslan
, for example, has claimed: “There’s really no such thing as just Sharia, it’s not one monolithic Continuum—Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it’s understood in many different ways.”

Yet neither Reza Aslan nor any other Muslim spokesman in the U.S. can point to any version of Sharia that does not mandate stoning for adultery, or polygamy, or female genital mutilation, or the devaluation of a woman’s testimony in court and inheritance rights, or any number of other provisions that ultimately make it impossible for the Western powers, despite the best intentions of Bob Carr and William Hague, to succeed in “advancing the rights of Afghan women and girls.”

Even if Najiba was the victim of an extrajudicial murder that violated the tenets of Islamic law, those tenets are oppressive enough for women as to ensure that the “rights of Afghan women and girls” will continue to be contravened in numerous ways, whether or not the Taliban returns to power—as long as Islam remains the dominant political and religious ideology of the land. Even if Najiba was killed unjustly in a manner that does not accord with Islamic law, other women are treated unjustly on a regular basis in Afghanistan in ways that accord perfectly with Islamic law: denied a just inheritance, treated as a commodity in a polygamous arrangement with a much older man, silenced in court, beaten (in accord with Qur’an 4:34), and more.

BOOK: The Worldwide Jihad: The Truth About Islamic Terrorism
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