Srdja Trifkovic zeroes in on media misunderstanding and dhimmitude in this Chronicles piece (thanks to Jim):
On September 19 the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune published an article entitled Struggle for the Soul of Islam: A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America. This 5,000-word feature sought to reveal the existence, methods and ultimate goals of the American offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, "the world’s most influential Islamic fundamentalist group." The Tribune story is important for revealing the magnitude of the threat America faces no less than for revealing the underlying misunderstanding of that threat by the American elite class in general and the media in particular.The Brotherhood’s slogan, ever since it was founded in Egypt in 1928, has been unambiguous: "Allah is our goal; the Messenger [Muhammad] is our model; the Koran is our constitution; jihad is our means; and martyrdom in the way of Allah is our aspiration." It has had a major impact on Islam in America by establishing mosques, Islamic schools, summer youth camps and Muslim organizations. Since 1993 it has operated under the name of Muslim American Society (MAS), a "charitable, religious, social, cultural and educational not-for-profit organization" with 10,000 members in 53 chapters nationwide.
The article claims that "because of its hard-line beliefs, the U.S. Brotherhood has been an increasingly divisive force within Islam in America, fueling the often bitter struggle between moderate and conservative Muslims." While separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of American democracy, the article says, "the international Brotherhood preaches that religion and politics cannot be separated and that governments eventually should be Islamic."
Other facts of the case concerning the Brotherhood, as revealed by the Tribune, can be summarized in seven key points:
1. Its long-term goal is the establishment of a world-wide Islamic state.
2. It does not seek "the overthrow of the U.S. government" but wants to convert the nation to Islam so that one day Americans will choose to be governed by Islamic law.
3. It endeavors to "save" the younger generations of Muslims in the United States from "melting into the American lifestyle."
4. Its ideologues believe "the Koran justified violence to overthrow un-Islamic governments."
5. Its current leaders praise Palestinian and Iraqi suicide bombers, call for the destruction of Israel and assert that the U.S. has no proof that Al Qaeda was to blame for 9-11.
6. Its leaders scout mosques, Islamic classes and Muslim organizations for those "with orthodox religious beliefs consistent with Brotherhood views."
7. Its proselytizing in the U.S. is backed financially by the Saudi Arabian government, "which shares the Brotherhood’s fundamentalist goals."
The problem with the Tribune story is not faulty research but flawed editorial paradigm. "Muslims [are] divided on Brotherhood," the sub-headline asserts, and the story itself suggests that the group’s goals are "controversial" and that its "hard-line views" have "alienated many moderate Muslims." The claim that the Brotherhood is in tension or even conflict with the Islamic "mainstream" is a figment of the liberal mind, however. In reality the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood, its methods and its goals—as enumerated by the Tribune—are in full accordance with standard Islamic teaching and practice. Such editorial slant reflects a structural problem: the refusal of the American opinion-forming elite to accept that Islam as such poses a threat, and not some allegedly aberrant variety of it.
The failure to come to grips with the message and implications of Islam, its sacred texts and teaching, its historical record and its contemporary political ambitions, is not limited to the media. It is endemic to the American elite class, which is prone to interpret the world by "Americanizing" reality. All religions are supposedly equally peaceful and tolerant, Islam is a religion, ergo it is also peaceful and tolerant. A blatant casuistic fallacy has become establishmentarian orthodoxy.
The most serious security implication of such mindset is manifest in the failure of the elite to examine the implications of Muslim immigration in the United States. It is evident that the existence of that multi-million-strong Muslim presence in the Western world is essential in providing the terrorists with the recruits, the infrastructure, the mobility, and the relative invisibility without which they would not be able to operate. Terrorist plots involving Muslim immigrants and their children or native-born converts are on the notable increase both in the United States and in Western Europe. That there is a correlation between the presence of a Muslim population in a country and the danger that it or some other Western country will be subjected to a terrorist attack is a demonstrable fact. Muslims are the only group, in Western Europe or North America, that harbors a substantial segment of individuals who share the key objectives with the terrorists, even if they do not all approve of all of their methods.
The Tribune asserts that the Brotherhood is in tension with the Muslim mainstream in America, but that claim is at odds with recent studies. In a survey of newly naturalized citizens, 90 percent of Muslim immigrants said that if there were a conflict between the United States and their country of origin, they would be inclined to support their country of origin. In Detroit 81 percent of Muslims "strongly agree" or "somewhat agree" that Shari’a should be the law of the land. This internal threat to America is increasing. Between 1987 and 1997 8 percent of all immigrants—two million—came from Muslim countries, but that proportion is rapidly increasing. While overall immigration (legal and illegal) has grown by 300 percent since 1970, growth of immigration from the Middle East has gone up 700 percent, from under 200,000 in 1970 to 1.5 million in 2000. Expected number of immigrants from the Middle East in 2010 will be 2,500,000. These figures are matched and likely to be exceeded by the number of Muslim immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh). Currently Muslims account for close to one-tenth of all naturalizations, and their birth rates exceed those of any other significant immigrant group. Even a conservative estimate of their number of three million, or one-percent of the population, has alarming security implications and the potential for disproportionate growth. A coherent long-term counter-terrorist strategy therefore must entail denying Islam the foothold inside the United States. The application of ideological and political criteria in determining the eligibility of prospective visitors or immigrants has been and remains an essential ingredient of any anti-terrorist strategy, whereby Islamic activism would be treated as eminently political rather than "religious" activity.
Read it all.
I'm not sure if this opinion piece, "Mecca, We Have a Problem" made it to this site yet . . .thought I'd share it.
http://www.cornellsun.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/09/21/414f9beff3de0
Mecca, We Have a Problem
Behind Liberal Lines
September 21, 2004
Sara Townsley
Over the weekend, three Kurdish truck drivers were beheaded and dumped north of Baghdad. Last week, terrorists kidnapped two Americans and a Briton, and a car bomb killed 47 and injured 114. At a madrassah in Bangladesh, a teacher cut off the ears of 17 children with a pair of scissors because they were not reading their textbooks loudly enough.
On Sept. 9, the Australian embassy in Indonesia was car-bombed, killing nine and injuring 180. The same day, major Swedish newspapers reported that Malmø, Sweden's third largest city, has been overrun by gangs of Muslim immigrants. The police can no longer maintain order, ambulance personnel are attacked with stones and weapons, gang rapes of Swedish girls have skyrocketed, and the number of people fleeing Malmø is reaching record levels.
A week earlier, terrorists in Kashmir dragged three informants out of their homes and beheaded them. Two Italian humanitarian aid workers were abducted in Baghdad. Ansar al-Sunna captured 12 Nepalese laborers in Iraq; one was beheaded, the other 11 were shot. Three Turks taken hostage in Iraq were executed and found dead on a roadside. A Turkish truck driver was taken hostage and threatened with beheading. Seven grenades exploded outside a cinema in northeastern Bangladesh, killing two and wounding 10.
At the end of August, suicide bombers destroyed two buses in Beersheba, Israel, killing 16 and wounding 100. A captured Italian journalist was slaughtered in Iraq, and two French journalists were kidnapped. In an attempt to gain their release, French diplomats openly sought the support of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Islamic Army of Iraq responded by blasting France as an "enemy of Muslims." The fate of the two remains unknown.
On Aug. 24, two Russian airliners were hijacked and downed by explosives in the lavatories, killing all 90 souls on board. A week later, a Moscow subway station was car-bombed, killing nine and wounding 51. The next day, a Russian school was overrun, leaving over 300 dead and 700 wounded, mainly children. The butchers of Khartoum continue the genocide in Sudan -- with the help of Syrians armed with chemical weapons -- leaving an estimated 50,000 dead, thousands more enslaved, and over a million refugees displaced.
And yet we all dutifully repeat: "Islam is a religion of peace."
With tiring predictability, academics and the press have taken up their role as apologists for the carnage. Universities cheerfully create Saudi-funded chairs in Whitewashing Jihad, and intellectuals manufacture reasons why we deserve to be slaughtered. Multiculturalists anesthetize us with fanciful "root causes," and students learn that "tolerance" means never pointing out the nexus between terror and Islamist supremacism. Muslim "civil rights" groups play the McCarthyism card, issue apologies for terror that sound more like justifications for it, and all the while their leaders keep pleading guilty to terrorism charges.
And in that bizarre wormhole where the universes of the extreme left and right collide, conspiracy theories proliferate, while the most horrifying actual "conspiracy" of our time is minimized or denied. The good news is, I'm not the only one who's fed up with tiptoeing around the problem.
Kamal Nawash of The Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism (www.freemuslims.org) wrote a heartfelt apology for Sept. 11 and issued a call to action. "We should not be afraid to admit that so many of our religious leaders belong behind bars and not behind a pulpit. ... Only moderate Muslims can challenge and defeat extremist Muslims. We can no longer afford to be silent. If we remain silent to the extremism within our community then we should not expect anyone to listen to us when we complain of stereotyping and discrimination by non-Muslims. ... Simply put, not only do Muslims need to join the war against terror, we need to take the lead in this war."
Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian raised in the Gaza Strip (www.mesaspeakers.com), writes: "The very few courageous Arab writers who think and speak independently are often attacked and terrorized for their views, accused of being puppets of the Zionists. Apparently, standing strong against terrorism and for reformation in the Muslim world is viewed as a 'Zionist' conspiracy no matter how heinous the murders carried out by militant Islamists." She points out that the U.N. Commission on Human Rights has never -- not once -- passed a resolution condemning an Arab country for human rights violations. As the surviving black Christians in Sudan could tell you, don't expect the U.N. to help.
Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble With Islam (www.muslimrefusenik.com), also condemns Islamist atrocities and advocates an Islamic reformation. A lesbian living in Canada, Manji terms herself a Muslim refusenik, meaning that she "refuses to join an army of automatons in the name of God." She asks non-Muslims: "Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called 'racists,' or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?"
These free thinkers are Islam's Bonhoeffers, Niemoellers, and Solzhenitsyns. They highlight how Kerry's proposed "more sensitive" war on terror demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of the threat rather than any diplomatic skill. Ayatollah Khomeini agrees: "those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless." Keep in mind, Kerry wants to solve the Iranian nuclear crisis by giving the mullahs uranium. Clinton tried that with North Korea in 1994, and gee, that worked out great. It's been said that trusting liberals with national security is like trusting a teenager with a fifth of whiskey and the keys to the car. We are fighting nothing less than World War IV -- the Cold War being number III -- and it's time we start acting like it.
justamomof4:
Please post that at JW also.
CGW -
re: Please post that at JW also.
I tried several times ending up with an error message requiring me to sign in. I can't seem
to figure out the problem. Since this is a
piece that clearly identifies the source and author - feel free to copy it to JW. Thanks :)
justamomof4:
The sign-in problems have nothing to do with the article. There's some sort of glitch in the system, many of us are having difficulty signing in. When you get the error message, try signing out, refreshing the page, signing in again and refreshing the page. If I do this three or four times I can usually get in and post. Of course, make sure you copy your post before trying all this so you don't have to re-wrtie the whole thing each time!
Update: I just ried to post this and had the same problem!
JustaMomof4~ Agreed with you on all points. Just wish Bush would get the gloves off already. But he has to wait for this election to end. With a stronger seating in both houses and the White House, we shall go forward!