The Worldwide Jihad: The Truth About Islamic Terrorism (7 page)

Underlining the claim that to oppose their rule is to oppose Islam itself, the Muslim Brotherhood of President Mohammed Morsi will rally in favor of the constitution at a Cairo mosque near the presidential palace on the day of the vote. Liberals, secularists, and Christians will rally against the constitution on the same day in Tahrir Square.

They’re against it because, as the
Associated Press
 reported, the draft constitution “largely reflects the conservative vision of the Islamists, with articles that rights activists, liberals and Christians fear will lead to restrictions on the rights of women and minorities and civil liberties in general.” They have every reason to fear, for the constitution reflects in numerous particulars Sharia restrictions on their rights.

Unfortunately, it appears unlikely that their cause will succeed: the constitution is likely to go through, and with it will come Sharia and the dictatorial powers that Morsi recently claimed for himself and then renounced under pressure.

This has been a long time coming, but its coming has been unmistakable to any objective observer. The “Arab Spring” was never about democracy and pluralism, despite the hosannahs of the Western press; it was always about imposing Islamic law upon Egypt. And now, with the new constitution, Egypt is at the brink. AP noted that the constitution’s wording “could give Islamists the tool for insisting on stricter implementation of rulings of Shariah.”

Also, “the draft contains no article specifically establishing equality between men and women because of disputes over the phrasing. However, it maintains that a woman must balance her duties toward family and outside work, suggesting that she can be held accountable if her public role conflicts with her family duties. No such article is mentioned for men.”

The implications for women’s rights are as obvious as they are unsurprising in light of Sharia’s reduction of women to the status of little more than commodities, slaves of the men who own them.

Then there are numerous articles heralding the introduction of Sharia restrictions on the freedom of speech. Islamic law forbids criticism of Islam, Muhammad and the Qur’an, and the constitution duly contains an article that “bans insulting or defaming the prophet and messengers.” And it doesn’t stop there. Another article bans “insulting humans,” suggesting authoritarian restrictions on criticism of political leaders, and yet another “underlines that the state will protect ‘the true nature of the Egyptian family … and promote its morals and values,’” about which AP notes: “phrasing that is vague and suggests state control over the contents of such arts forms as books and films.”

Nor is any of this likely to be contested in a future vote if this constitution passes Sunday. Once Islamic law comes to Egypt, it will come to stay, until the Egyptians themselves are so tired of its inhuman authoritarianism that another period of liberalization ensues. But that could be decades in the future. In the meantime, Sharia is much more compatible with dictatorship than it is with republican, representative government. That’s why Sunday’s vote could be the last one that matters in Egypt.

The prophet of Islam, Muhammad, is said to have counseled what appears to be unconditional obedience to rulers: “You should listen to and obey your ruler even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin” (Bukhari 9.89.256). Nor is he recorded as having set up any kind of voting system or representational government for the nascent Muslim community—and as he is the supreme model for emulation for Muslims (cf. Qur’an 33:21), that is a decisive point.

The great theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), foresaw a titanic struggle between Islam and jahiliyyah, the society and rule of unbelievers: “Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah; no half-half situation is possible. Command belongs to Allah, or otherwise to Jahiliyyah; Allah’s Shari’ah will prevail, or else people’s desires: ‘And if they do not respond to you, then know that they only follow their own lusts. And who is more astray than one who follows his own lusts, without guidance from Allah? Verily! Allah guides not the people who are disobedient’[Qur’an 28:50]; ‘Do they then seek the judgment of (the Days of) Ignorance? And who is better in judgment than Allah for a people who have firm faith’ [Qur’an 5:50]. The foremost duty of Islam is to depose Jahiliyyah from the leadership of man, with the intention of raising human beings to that high position which Allah has chosen for him.”

The day of that supposed deposition, and subsequent exaltation, is looming in Egypt.

Gaddafi’s Death Gives Rise to a Sharia State

Muammar Gaddafi is dead, and Barack Obama’s partisans are hailing the Brave New Libya as a triumph for his administration. Speaking about the Libyan revolution in March, Obama hailed “the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny,” saying now they have done it. It may, in fact, give him a boost in the polls, bolstering his manufactured image as a fearless anti-terror crusader, bagger of bin Laden, al-Awlaki, and now Gaddafi. But much less likely is the possibility that the end of Gaddafi’s regime will actually secure the rights of peaceful assembly and free speech for Libyans, or be any benefit to the United States.

This is hard for many people to believe. After all, Gaddafi has been waging war against the U.S. for so long that it was fully 25 years ago that Ronald Reagan dubbed him the “madman of the Middle East.” But following in Gaddafi’s wake is likely to be a Sharia regime that will be even more virulent in its anti-Americanism than he was—and much better connected internationally.

Supporters of Obama’s intervention in Libya generally assumed that the forces that were revolting against the Gaddafi regime were secular and oriented toward Western values. When Gaddafi was captured and killed, the victors were chanting “Allahu Akbar.” This is a common enough chant in Muslim countries, especially on such occasions, but in this case it was emblematic of the imminent replacement of Gaddafi’s bizarre Islamosocialist cult of personality with a straight Sharia regime populated by al-Qaeda elements.

It is likely that the new America-backed regime will compete with the Gaddafi regime in its hatred for America and the West, and become noted for being even more anti-American than he was. David Gerbi was one of the many who believed the mainstream media news stories about plucky Libyan revolutionaries fighting for freedom against a repressive regime. Gerbi, a Libyan Jew who had lived in exile in Italy for decades, took people like Barack Obama at their word and believed that what was happening in Libya was a wonderful throwing-off of oppression and reaffirmation of human rights. He decided to return to Libya to rebuild the synagogue in Tripoli, a once-grand structure that had been used as a garbage dump during the Gaddafi regime.

But when Gerbi arrived in the new Libya, he was in for a rude awakening. Demonstrators outside the synagogue revealed to him the brutal truth behind all the fog of political correctness: Carrying signs with inscriptions such as, “There is no place for Jews in Libya,” they made it abundantly clear that they believed that his attempt to rebuild the synagogue was yet another plot of the Zionism they detested, and the enlightened democratic revolutionaries called for Gerbi’s deportation. Gerbi ultimately returned to Rome.

Gerbi’s case was not isolated. Islamic law mandates a humiliating second-class status for Jews that, among other discriminatory regulations, forbids them to repair old houses of worship or build new ones. And Islamic law is going to be the foundation of post-Gaddafi Libyan society. Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the head of Libya’s Transitional National Council, declared before a jubilant crowd in Tripoli in September that Sharia would henceforth be the “main source” for Libyan law. Likewise Sheikh Abdel Ghani Abu Ghrass, a popular imam in Libya, who told a crowd of thousands in Tripoli, “We must underline the Islamic character of the new Libyan state,” and that Libya “should be governed in conformity with Sharia.” Libya’s new draft constitution declares: “Islam is the Religion of the State, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence [Sharia].”

Obama probably sees nothing amiss in all this. He has never shown any awareness of or concern about the possibility that Islamic states might in themselves constitute a threat to the United States.

Obama would do well to heed the words of the Egyptian Islamic jihad leader Sheikh Adel Shehato, who declared in August that the problem with Mubarak was that he did “not rule in accordance with the Sharia. … As Muslims, we must believe that the Koran is our constitution, and that it is impossible for us to institute a Western democratic regime.” Shehato said that if a Sharia regime came to power in Egypt, “of course we will launch a campaign of Islamic conquest, throughout the world.”

Once those holding the same sentiments secure their power in Libya, more conflict with the U.S. is inevitable.

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IV.

  Obama  

Obama Enables America’s Enemies

No sooner was Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi elected president of Egypt than he
announced his determination
 to work for the freedom of an enemy of the United States: blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life term for his role in planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Not since Jimmy Carter helped usher in the Iranian Revolution has an American president done so much to aid those who are determined to destroy the United States.

In fact, the parallels are numerous. Carter betrayed the shah of Iran, a longtime U.S. ally who had a dismal human rights record but was generally loyal, and paved the way for the ascent to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian mullahcracy that quickly showed its gratitude to Carter by taking U.S. Embassy personnel hostage, and has maintained a war footing against the United States ever since.

Obama, for his part, betrayed Hosni Mubarak, another longtime U.S. ally with a record of repressive rule, paving the way for the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power. And now President Morsi has shown his gratitude to Obama by announcing his determination to free from prison a man who plotted to murder hundreds of thousands of Americans.

It is said that history repeats itself, but it doesn’t do so by means of some automatic, inexorable, deterministic process. History repeats itself because people refuse to study and learn its lessons, and to face the unpleasant facts it presents. Thus, they make the same mistakes their predecessors did. The Obama administration didn’t have to be Carter’s second term, but both Carter and Obama are the products of a political culture that consistently discounts the importance of religious motivations. Informed sources have noted that at the time of the Iranian Revolution, only one book by the Ayatollah Khomeini could be found in the State Department, and no one had read it: no one thought the rantings of an obscure fanatic exiled to far-off France were important. That was the manifestation of a willful blindness to rival that of James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, who famously labeled the Muslim Brotherhood “largely secular.” In fact, it is the same willful blindness, and it has characterized the Washington establishment’s views on Islam and jihad from Carter’s day until now.

So secular is the Brotherhood that Morsi recently repeated its guiding motto to an enthusiastic crowd: “The Koran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our path, and death in the name of Allah is our goal.” Last week, Yasser Borhamy, a Salafi leader,
declared
 that the Muslim Brotherhood was planning to implement Sharia as the main source for Egyptian law. Noting opposition to Sharia in Egypt, Borhamy said: “What is disturbing in the Islamic Sharia law, is Sharia bothering anyone? We do not say ‘our views on Sharia,’ but we say that we want the Sharia law revealed by God. Would anyone be afraid of the Sharia that establishes justice, [public] interest and wisdom? This is very strange. How is it said that people are afraid of Sharia?”

By “Sharia law revealed by God,” Borhamy meant the Sharia that stones adulterers, amputates thieves’ hands, mandates death for apostates from Islam, and institutionalizes subjugation of women and non-Muslims. If the Brotherhood does succeed in implementing this in Egypt, it will have Barack Obama to thank: his applause for the “Arab Spring” uprisings, coupled with the universal misrepresentation of them in the Western media as outpourings of a longing for democracy and pluralism, has brought us to the inception of an Egyptian regime that is almost certain to go to war with Israel and pursue a path of unrelenting hostility toward its erstwhile patrons in Washington.

Yet even the likelihood that Egypt, long a recipient of American largesse, will become an enemy of America is unlikely to shake those entrenched core assumptions in Washington that got us into this fix. The Obama administration rejects, as a matter of repeatedly stated policy, the idea that Islam has anything to do with terrorism, or warfare against unbelievers, or the legal subjugation of non-Muslims. An Obama official who opined that a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt would likely be an enemy of the United States because of Islam’s core doctrines regarding the evil of the society of unbelievers would be reprimanded or fired outright for “Islamophobia.”

And so what was old is new again: a man who owes his seat of power to the United States demonstrates his hostility to the ones who put him in place. Then it was Khomeini, now it is Morsi, but in both cases it is the same. One wonders how many times Washington will have the luxury of making this same mistake before the consequences become too terrible to bear.

Obama: Sharia Enforcer

Madness has overtaken Washington, and the world. Every day this past week has brought fresh reports of more people murdered in Afghanistan over the burning of some copies of the Qur’an at Bagram Airfield. In response, every day new apologies come from American officials. Barack Obama, Leon Panetta, the commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, General John Allen, and others have all issued abject apologies to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the “noble people of Afghanistan,” and everyone else in sight.