Another look: Balancing The Books

In late 2003, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, of which I am an Adjunct Fellow, offered an alternative book list on Islam to the package CAIR was offering to libraries. Of course, FCF didn't have the funding CAIR did, so these books didn't make it into many libraries. Nevertheless, I thought that in light of General Vines' reading list, it would be useful to supply a corrective.

This is not by any means meant as a comprehensive list, but it is a start. And you can order the books here.

The recent attacks in Baghdad in which suicide car bombings killed at least 34 people no doubt will strike many Americans as disruptive of a major Islamic holiday, coming as they did during the start of Ramadan, the holiest holiday for Muslims. Fasting is required of adult Muslims to instill piety.

Right now, American officials believe that the planning of such attacks takes place after the mosque prayers held on Friday.

No doubt many Americans, viewing Islam through the prism of the mores that comprise our Judeo-Christian civilization, view such attacks as if they had been launched by Christians or Jews during Christmas or Passover, undermining the very nature of the religious holiday and the religion itself.

This is a misleading view of what truly constitutes the Islamic religion, a misconception that can not only be attributed to the naïveté of Americans but also the efforts of well-funded Islamic groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

CAIR and its allies like to gloss over the fact that the Qur'an's Sura 9:29 implores devout Muslims to "Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given [i.e., Jews and Christians] as believe neither in Allah nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and His Apostle have forbidden, and do not embrace the true Faith, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued." Yet Muslims worldwide are taking such verses as marching orders right now.

CAIR also prefers to ignore urgings such as that presented by Sura 48:29 which declares, "Muhammad is Allah's Apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another." Yet in Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and elsewhere today, Muslims are being "ruthless to the unbelievers."

Muslims accept the Qur'an as the direct words of Allah. Many passages preach violence against non-believers. As long as the Qur'an is held to be words dictated by God Himself, some Muslims will be motivated to carry out the urgings of Allah to commit violence against unbelievers, including Christians and Jews.

Right now CAIR is engaged in a campaign to stock the shelves of public libraries with books and videos maintaining that at heart Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. Undoubtedly, this is reassuring to the portion of the American public that accepts multiculturalism, and which refuses to accept the reality that there are many people in this world who do not share the post-modern, secular worldview that has come to define Western civilization.

The books that CAIR is placing on library shelves include The Islamic
Threat: Myth or Reality
by John L. Esposito. An online review on Amazon.com tellingly describes Esposito as a "nice guy" whose overwhelming desire for peace between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian worlds has turned him into "an apologist for the worst excesses of political Islam." Indeed, Esposito contends that jihad is a misunderstood concept and does not mean "holy war." True, the word "jihad" doesn't translate as "holy war," but to say that it hasn't meant holy war from time to time throughout history is simply fantasy.

Another book that is part of the CAIR packages is The Complete Idiot's Guide to Islam, which also makes the misleading assertion that Islam is at heart peaceful and misunderstood.

No doubt the message presented by the books and videos that comprise the CAIR packages will be comforting to many Americans who are very eager not to accept the truth about Islam. But it is not the whole story by any means. America's libraries have a responsibility to the public to ensure that their shelves contain a balanced view of Islam. They should make an effort to explain the context of the debate fairly, accurately, and in full context.

To balance the CAIR library package, at the Free Congress Foundation we've decided to offer libraries suggestions of our own, having compiled a list of twelve books.

Three of those books that deserve prominent places on the shelves of your public library - because they offer a frank discussion of Islam and how its radical believers view the West: Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West by Robert Spencer, Adjunct Fellow at the Free Congress Foundation; American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us by Steven Emerson; and Sword of the Prophet by Serge Trifkovic.

Spencer's Onward Muslim Soldiers (Regnery Publishing) contains numerous quotes from terrorists and Muslim radicals (including many in the United States) citing Islamic theology to justify violence. This is information that all Americans should know, given the current geopolitical climate. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, has proclaimed: "Jihad and killing is the head of Islam. If you take it out, you cut off the head of Islam." What makes Spencer's book also valuable is his willingness to explore how the West's commendable quality of tolerance has been taken so far by some that it has blinded them to the true threat that we confront. It is too easy to write off 9/11 as the work of a marginal gang of terrorists, not a global movement of determined extremists who harbor a deep-seated hatred for our society. Extreme as the viewpoints of Muslim terrorists are, Americans also need to understand that the violent actions and words of members of al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah are welcomed by many Muslims. Spencer's book shows why that is so.

Steven Emerson's American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (Free Press) details the effort of Islamic terrorists to bring our country to its knees, and exposes their extensive networks. The mainstream news media still has not paid enough attention to the network that the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has been able to build in the United States. Emerson's book compensates for the lack of coverage we see in newspapers and on television.

Serge Trifkovic's The Sword of the Prophet: History, Theology, Impact on the World (BHB International) examines, among many illuminating topics, the powerful anti-Semitism that is constantly promoted in the Islamic press. Like Americans willing to overlook the imagery promoted by the Nazi propagandists, today's establishment media largely gives the Islamist media a pass. Trifkovic is no more a saber rattler than are Emerson or Spencer. He endorses ideas such as more careful immigration policies as vital steps to help defend us from the radical Islamists.

These three books take a tough-minded look at the ideology driving the Islamic extremists and our unwillingness to confront the reality of the situation. It has been two years since the 9/11 attack and the lack of any major terrorists incidents on American soil since then has allowed many Americans to view the world as if 9/11 was an isolated incident.

I would like to think so. But our involvement in the Middle East and the continuing effort to "globalize" American cultural and economic relationships with Islamic countries makes it unwise for us to expect that Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations are willing to let bygones be bygones. They are willing to be patient, waiting to strike when we least expect it.

The first step to defending ourselves is to know our enemy. Indeed, for many Americans, that means recognizing that we do indeed confront an enemy in radical Islamists who hate our country and the West and the very freedom that defines our societies. In America, CAIR is free to try to place their books on the shelves of libraries. (Something that Christians or Jews would not be permitted to do in many Islamic societies.) But the library owes it to their patrons to inform them of the source of the donation and to ensure that other books with a different point of view are available too. The books by Spencer, Emerson, and Trifkovic represent a needed balance to the CAIR packages. They are more than deserving of space on the shelves of public libraries. Americans need to read these books and think hard about their unflinching portrayal of a religion whose central tenets are unlikely to let America and the West live in peace.

The Free Congress Foundation Islamic Books for Libraries Kit: we may not endorse everything in these books, but they provide a needed corrective to CAIR's list, and stand as monuments of courage in the face of jihad terrorism. Besides the three above, here are more suggested books to counterbalance the CAIR list:

Why I Am Not A Muslim by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus Books)

What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, and Commentary by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus Books)

Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus Books)

Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide by Bat Ye'or (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press)

The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad To Dhimmitude by Bat Ye'or (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press)

Jihad In The West: Muslim Conquests From The 7th To The 21st Century by Paul Fregosi (Prometheus Books)

Escape From Slavery: The True Story Of My Ten Years In Captivity And My Journey To Freedom by Francis Bok (St. Martin's Press)

The Early Development of Mohammedanism by David S. Margoliouth (Simon Publications)

Mohammed and the Rise of Islam by David Margoliouth (reprint publisher: AMS Press)

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Yes Steven Emerson lays it on the line about the penetration of Hamas in America, yet so many Americans still regard it as a quasi-legal charity!
In fact America as he shows has been HIGHLY penetrated by extremist Islamists and one should beAR STEVEN'S INVALUABLE INFORMATION when criticising Bush for not openly blaming Islamic Jihad.

More books and free, online books about Islam:

http://www.apostatesofislam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=661

Here's a first, just watched 'Ultimate Force' on ITV saturday night at 9.00p.m. (U.K.). Basically this is the prime slot on British T.V during the week so gets fantastic viewing figures.

Its a weekly drama series based on the exploits of the S.A.S.(you know the sort of thing).

This weeks episode involved the taking of hostages at the Italian Embassy in London by surprise surprise....... Muslim Terrorists!

During the course of the programme Jihad was mentioned at least 5 times.
The best bit though was when the terrorists started negotiating with the police only to use the time bought to actually start an attack (sounds familiar?).

It was superbly thought provoking and even made me wonder if the writer was a contributor to Jihad Watch!

Fantastic to see mainstream TV waking up to fact that they are actually allowed to portray mussies as terrorists.

Here is an article which is self-explanatory:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/magazine/23BANG.html?pagewanted=all&position=

The Next Islamist Revolution?
By ELIZA GRISWOLD

Published: January 23, 2005


efore dawn one morning this past November in Bagmara, a village in northwestern Bangladesh, six puffy-eyed men gathered beneath a cracked-mud stairwell to describe a man they consider their leader, a former schoolteacher called Bangla Bhai. The quiet was broken now and then by donkey carts clattering past, as village women, seated on the backs of the carts, were taken to the market. The women wore makeshift burkas -- black, white, canary yellow -- and kept their heads down, and this, the men explained, was Bangla Bhai's doing.

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Last spring, Bangla Bhai, whose followers probably number around 10,000, decided to try an Islamist revolution in several provinces of Bangladesh that border on India. His name means ''Bangladeshi brother.'' (At one point he said his real name was Azizur Rahman and more recently claimed it was Siddiqul Islam.) He has said that he acquired this nom de guerre while waging jihad in Afghanistan and that he was now going to bring about the Talibanization of his part of Bangladesh. Men were to grow beards, women to wear burkas. This was all rather new to the area, which was religiously diverse. But Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, as Bangla Bhai's group is called (the name means Awakened Muslim Masses of Bangladesh), was determined and violent and seemed to have enough lightly armed adherents to make its rule stick.

Because he swore his main enemy was a somewhat derelict but still dangerous group of leftist marauders known as the Purbo Banglar Communist Party, Bangla Bhai gained the support of the local police -- until the central government, worried that Bangla Bhai's band might be getting out of control, ordered his arrest in late May.

''There used to be chaos and confusion here,'' Siddiq-ul-Rahman, one of Bangla Bhai's senior lieutenants, said through an interpreter that morning in Bagmara. The sun was coming up and a crowd was gathering. Siddiq-ul-Rahman boasted that police officers attend Bangla Bhai's meetings armed and in uniform. The Bangladeshi government's arrest warrant doesn't seem to have made much difference, although for now Bangla Bhai refrains from public appearances. The government is far away in Dhaka, and is in any case divided on precisely this question of how much Islam and politics should mix. Meanwhile, Bangla Bhai and the type of religious violence he practices are filling the power vacuum.

Bangladeshi politics have never strayed far from violence. During the war for independence from Pakistan, in 1971, three million people died in nine months. Thuggery has been a consistent feature of political life since then and is increasingly so today. This has made it difficult to get an accurate picture of phenomena like Bangla Bhai. Under the current government, which has been in power since 2001 and includes two avowedly Islamist parties, journalists are frequently imprisoned. Last year, three were killed while reporting on corruption and the rise of militant Islam. Moreover, 80 percent of Bangladeshis live in villages that can be hard to reach and are under the tight control of local politicians. Foreign journalists in Bangladesh are followed by intelligence agents; people that reporters interview are questioned afterward.

Nonetheless, it is possible to travel through Bangladesh and observe the increased political and religious repression in everyday life, and to verify the simple remark by one journalist there: ''We are losing our freedom.'' The global war on terror is aimed at making the rise of regimes like that of the Taliban impossible, but in Bangladesh, the trend could be going the other way.

n Bangladesh, ''Islam is becoming the legitimizing political discourse,'' according to C. Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan, federally financed policy group in Washington. ''Once you don that religious mantle, who can criticize you? We see this in Pakistan as well, where very few people are brave enough to take the Islamists on. Now this is happening in Bangladesh.'' The region, Fair added, has become a haven where jihadis can move easily and have access to a friendly infrastructure that allows them to regroup and train.

Another close observer of Bangladeshi politics, Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch, told me recently: ''The practical effect of politics along religious lines is that you start to accept a religious identity and reject every other. It's absolutely crucial to understand that this is happening in Bangladesh right now.''

This was not supposed to be the fate of Bangladesh, which fought its way to independence 34 years ago. While its population of 141 million is 83 percent Muslim, the nation was founded on the principle of secularism, which in Bangladesh essentially means religious tolerance. After the guiding figure of independence, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was assassinated in 1975, military leaders, seeking legitimacy, allowed a return of Islam to politics. With the return of fair elections in 1991, power became precariously divided among four parties: the right-leaning Bangladesh National Party (B.N.P.), the mildly leftist Awami League, the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami and the conservative Jatiya. The two leading parties are led by women: the B.N.P. by the current prime minister, Khaleda Zia, widow of the party's murdered founder; the Awami League by Zia's predecessor as prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, herself the daughter of the assassinated founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Zia and Sheikh Hasina, as she is known, have a legendary antipathy toward each other. Each of their parties regularly accuses the other of illegal acts. When Sheikh Hasina very narrowly escaped assassination last August, B.N.P. activists all but accused her of staging the attack in order to acquire political advantage. Zia's government has been unable to identify the assassins -- who lobbed grenades into a party rally, killing at least 20 and wounding hundreds -- and Sheikh Hasina has refused even to discuss the investigation with the prime minister, saying: ''With whom should I meet? With the killers?''

The political breach between those two parties is being filled primarily by Jamaat-e-Islami, which agitated against independence in 1971 and remains close to Pakistan. The group was banned after independence for its role in the war but has slowly worked its way back to political legitimacy. The party itself has not changed much -- it was always socially conservative and unafraid of violence. The political context, however, has changed enough to give it greater power. Since 2001, Jamaat-e-Islami has been a crucial part of a governing coalition dominated by the B.N.P. The two parties have ties dating to the late 1970's, but it is only since 2001 that a politically aggressive form of Islam has found, for the first time since independence, a strong place at the top of Bangladeshi politics.

It has found a corresponding position at the bottom of Bangladeshi politics as well, in the social scrum that produces figures like Bangla Bhai. (Opposition politicians have linked Bangla Bhai to Jamaat-e-Islami, a tie that Jamaat and Bangla Bhai have both denied.) The border provinces have, since independence, harbored a proliferation of armed groups that either Bangladesh, India, Myanmar or Pakistan, or some region or faction in one of those countries, has been willing to support for its own political reasons. By the early 1990's Islamist groups began appearing, mainly at the periphery of the jihad centered on Afghanistan. The most important of these has been the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (Huji), which has been associated with Fazlul Rahman, who signed Osama bin Laden's famous declaration in 1998 endorsing international, coordinated jihad -- the document that introduced Al Qaeda to the larger world. But Bangla Bhai's group and others have since emerged and are making their bids for power.

''Bangladesh is becoming increasingly important to groups like Al Qaeda because it's been off everyone's radar screen,'' says Zachary Abuza, the author of ''Militant Islam in Southeast Asia'' and a professor of political science at Simmons College in Boston. ''Al Qaeda is going to have to figure out where they can regroup, where they have the physical capability to assemble and train, and Bangladesh is one of these key places.''


Six years ago, Huji chose its first prominent target: Shamsur Rahman, who is Bangladesh's leading poet. Recently, at his home in Dhaka, Rahman began telling me the story of the attack as he pulled a sheaf of papers from a pigeonhole in his writing desk, on which sat a bottle of black-currant soda and a copy of Dante's ''Inferno.'' Above the desk hung an ink sketch of the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, as well as a yellowing photograph of Rahman's father.

Rahman, who is 75, is birdlike and wears his hair in a fluffy white pageboy. Most of his poems are love poems, but some address the rise of militant Islam in his country. ''I am not against religion,'' he said, smiling wryly. ''I am against fanaticism.'' He reached for his mug of hot water. It was the holy month of Ramadan, and Rahman's family had just broken the day's fast.

Downstairs, four policemen were eating a meal prepared by Rahman's daughter-in-law Tia. Rahman has lived under police protection since Jan. 18, 1999, when three young men appeared at his house and asked for a poem. Tia refused to let them in. The poet was resting, she said. But the men begged for just a minute of his time, so Tia obliged. Immediately one of the men ran upstairs and tried to chop Rahman's neck with an ax. ''He tried to cut my head off, but my wife took me in her arms and my daughter-in-law too,'' Rahman recounted. The two women fended off the blows until the neighbors, hearing their screams, rushed into the house and caught the attackers.

Rahman gestured toward the women standing in the doorway. Tia looked exhausted. The hair around her face was damp from cooking. Rahman's wife, Zahora, not more than four feet tall, held her diminutive hands in front of her and smiled. (She understands English but cannot speak it.) Rahman pointed out the shiny scar on her arm. Zahora patted her husband and took his empty mug to the kitchen. ''They wanted my head, not a poem,'' he said.

The attack led to the arrest of 44 members of Huji. Two men, a Pakistani and a South African, claimed they had been sent to Bangladesh by Osama bin Laden with more than $300,000, which they distributed among 421 madrassas, or private religious schools. According to Gowher Rizvi, director of the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard and a lecturer in public policy, bin Laden's reputed donation is ''a pittance'' compared with the millions that Saudi charities have contributed to many of Bangladesh's estimated 64,000 madrassas, most of which serve only a single village or two. Money of this kind is especially important because Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world. Out of 177 countries on the United Nations' Human Development Index, Bangladesh is ranked 138, just above Sudan. The recent tsunami that devastated its neighbors hardly touched it -- a rare bit of good luck for the country, as most catastrophes seem somehow to claim their victims in Bangladesh.


In Bangla Bhai's patch of northwestern Bangladesh, poverty is so pervasive that, for many children in the region, privately subsidized madrassas are the only educational option. For the past several years especially, money from Persian Gulf states has strengthened them even more. Most follow a form of the Deobandi Islam taught in the 1950's by the intellectual and activist Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, who was born in India in 1903 and defined Muslim politics in opposition to Indian nationalism. While Maududi's original agenda was reformist, the Deobandi model is now better known from the madrassas of Pakistan, where it gave rise to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Whether Maududi intended it or not, his teachings have become synonymous with radical Islam.

In November, in a shop in the Bagmara bazaar not far from where Bangla Bhai used to hold his meetings, two young men sat waiting to tell their stories about the cruelty and repression of Bangla Bhai's movement. Everyone here wanted to talk about this, they said, but were afraid of the consequences. Several days earlier, Bangla Bhai's cadres had beaten a university student caught smoking cigarettes, another banned act.

''We weren't allowed to sell these,'' said one of the men, a 20-year-old shopkeeper, holding up a pack of Player's Gold Leaf he kept on a low shelf.

His friend, a thickset man in a white kurta -- a long-sleeved shirt extending below the waist -- sat on a carton next to the counter, with a blue mobile phone in his hand. He played with the phone distractedly as he described the announcements Bangla Bhai's men had made, beginning last summer, over the loudspeaker, demanding that people come watch public punishments. He told me that over the past months he himself had seen more than 50 men hanged upside down by their feet from bamboo scaffolding and beaten with hammers, iron rods and the field-hockey sticks that are commonly used in Bangladesh as weapons. He winced for a second recalling these tortures, and then his fleshy face lost all expression.

''In this place people live in fear,'' the shopkeeper said. ''They still punish people. If anyone is not keeping Ramadan, even if it's a sick man and he's eating in a restaurant, they treat them badly.''

The thickset man scanned the street over his shoulder and added, shaking his head, ''They wanted the regime of the Taliban here.''

Taskforce against Torture, a Bangladeshi human rights organization founded three years ago, has recorded more than 500 cases of people being intimidated and tortured by Bangla Bhai and his men. One of them is Abdul Quddus Rajon, a postmaster from Shafiqpur, a village near Bagmara. He is 42 and comes from a wealthy family of moderate Muslims. Rajon was abducted early last May when two men in green headbands showed up at the post office on a motorbike. They forced him onto the bike and demanded his brother's phone number. Abdul Kayyam Badshah, Rajon's brother and the leader of a banned Communist Party, was wanted by the government and being pursued by Bangla Bhai's men. Rajon refused to give them the number, so they took his mobile phone and drove him to one of Bangla Bhai's camps.

Rajon told me when I met him that he was held with 15 other men in two rooms. ''For four days they tortured me,'' he recounted. Every morning, his captors, who Rajon said were not more than teenagers, took him to a cell and beat him.

Bangla Bhai's men demanded 100,000 taka for his release, about $1,600. Rajon eventually agreed to pay. Before his release, he said, his captors tried to intimidate him into becoming more observant. ''They took me in front of a mosque and told me to promise I would keep my beard and pray five times a day, and to never tell anything about Bangla Bhai's camp,'' he said. ''They wore beards and long kurtas like religious men, but that was the only way in which they were religious.'' He pulled up the cuffs of his khakis to reveal deep black gashes in his shins.

''Eleven days later,'' he said, ''they caught my brother.'' At noon on May 19, Rajon was awakened by a loudspeaker. Bangla Bhai's men were announcing that his brother's trial would start the next day and he would be sentenced to death. ''I tried to contact the state minister and the superintendent of police by telephone,'' Rajon said. ''Because if Badshah was accused, he should be tried according to the laws of the land. But they wouldn't talk to me.'' (According to The Daily Star, Bangladesh's leading English-language newspaper, the local government has been accused of colluding with Bangla Bhai.)

The next morning, Badshah was found hanged by his feet from a tree near a police station. He had been beaten to death. Rajon first heard about it through whispering in the village. ''A policeman was wandering around asking people if they were glad my brother was dead,'' he said. In the village and the surrounding districts, Bangla Bhai's spate of killings and torture continued for another month. One man was dismembered. Another, according to local journalists and villagers who told me they heard him, had a microphone held to his mouth while he was tortured so that the entire village could listen to his screams.

ommunists are just one target of Islamic militants in Bangladesh. Most attacks have been carried out against either members of religious minorities -- Hindus, Christians and Buddhists -- or moderate Muslims considered out of step with the doctrines espoused at the militant madrassas. International groups like Human Rights Watch cannot gather information freely enough to be certain of the scope of the problem. Yet anecdotal evidence is abundant. In Bangladesh, as part of the militant Islamists' agenda, religious minorities are coming under a new wave of attacks. One of the most vulnerable communities is that of the Ahmadiyya, a sect of some 100,000 Muslims who believe that Muhammad was not the last prophet. (The Ahmadiyya are the subject of a Human Rights Watch report to be published next month.) In Pakistan, the Ahmadiyya have been declared infidels and many have been killed. In Bangladesh, religious hardliners have burned mosques and books and pressured the government to declare the sect non-Muslim. Last year, the government agreed to ban Ahmadiyya literature; earlier this month, however, Bangladesh's high court stayed the ban pending further consideration by the court.

But those who oppose the Ahmadiyya are not giving up. At a recent rally in Dhaka, 10,000 protesters gathered outside an Ahmadiyya mosque as one Islamic leader intoned from a parade float, ''Bangladesh's Muslims cast their vote to elect the current government, and the current government is not paying any heed.'' Police officers in riot gear tightened their formation protecting the mosque. ''Beware, we will throw you out of office if you do not meet our demands,'' he said. ''No one will be able to stop the forward march of the soldiers of Islam in Bangladesh.''

The Ahmadiyya are hardly the only group at risk. ''For the Hindus, the last couple of years have been disastrous,'' says Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch. ''There are substantial elements within the society and government itself that are advancing the idea that Hindus need to be expelled.'' On the ground, attacks against Hindus include beatings and rapes.

''Minority communities in the country are feeling less safe,'' said Govind Acharya, Amnesty International's country specialist for Bangladesh. ''The Hindus, the Ahmadiyya and the tribals in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are all leaving. This demographic shift is the most problematic for the identity and the future of the country.''


The permissiveness of at least some within the Bangladeshi government and the police in allowing violent groups like Bangla Bhai's to pursue their agendas has only increased the political legitimacy of such groups. Mohammad Selimullah, the leader of a militant Islamist group based across Bangladesh's eastern border in Myanmar, was arrested in Chittagong early in 2001, and he admitted in court that more than 500 jihadis had been training under him in Bangladesh. On his computer, intelligence sources found photographs to be sent to donors showing Islamic soldiers at rest and at attention, armed with AK-47's and wearing shiny new boots. Selimullah said that his group received weapons from supporters in Libya and Saudi Arabia, among others.

Last spring in Chittagong, 10 truckloads of weapons -- the largest arms seizure in Bangladesh's history -- were captured by the police as they were being unloaded from trawlers. The tip-off most likely came from Indian intelligence, which monitors the arms being sent to Islamist separatist groups in India's northeast. Haroon Habib, a leading journalist in the region, has written that a leader of the government's local Islamist coalition was helping to hide the weapons.

Several months later, under increased pressure from the European Union and the United States to crack down on terror, Bangladeshi security forces raided two camps in the Ukhia area belonging to Huji. Local journalists say that both camps, which were not far from Chittagong, have now been destroyed, but no one can get close enough to be sure. What is certain is that the attack didn't drive the militants out of the region. Four months ago, five more members of Huji were arrested in Chittagong.

In this environment, Bangladesh's radical leaders have ratcheted up their ambitions. Responding to the American invasion of Afghanistan, supporters of the Islamic Oikya Jote (I.O.J.), the most radical party in the governing coalition and a junior partner to the Jamaat-e-Islami, chanted in the streets of Chittagong and Dhaka, ''Amra sobai hobo Taliban, Bangla hobe Afghanistan,'' which roughly translates to ''We will be the Taliban, and Bangladesh will be Afghanistan.''

The I.O.J. is considered a legitimate voice within Bangladeshi politics. The I.O.J.'s chairman, Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini, who has served as a member of Parliament for the past three years, says he believes that secular law has failed Bangladesh and that it's time to implement Sharia, the legal code of Islam. During our two hourlong meetings, the mufti -- a welcoming and relatively open man with a salt-and-pepper beard and teeth dyed red from chewing betel -- asked if he could take photographs and pass them along to the local press to show his constituents that he is so powerful the Western press now comes to him.

The mufti presides over his father-in-law's mosque and madrassa, Jamiat-Qurania-Arabia, in Dhaka, where the traffic caused by 600,000 bicycle rickshaws, more than in any other city in the world, is so intense that it can take hours to travel fewer than 10 miles from Louis Kahn's ethereal Parliament -- a relic of a more hopeful period in Bangladesh's democracy -- to the warren of lanes in the old part of town where the mufti is based. At the mosque, he almost overfills the armchair in which he stations himself. He admits that as an Islamic state, Bangladesh still has far to go.

''As we are Muslim, naturally we want Bangladesh to be an Islamic state and under Islamic law,'' the mufti said. Amini is the author of books in Arabic, Bangla and Urdu. (He learned Urdu while completing graduate work in a madrassa in Karachi, Pakistan.) He recently completed a multivolume set of laws and edicts, or fatwas. The mufti is renowned for his fatwas, which, he said, he issues almost every day when people come to him with questions about the application of religious law. The mufti has also issued fatwas against the secular press when they investigate the rise of militant Islam in Bangladesh. When he advocates punishment for those who offend Islam, he said, he does not intend to preach violence. The young men of Huji who attacked the poet Shamsur Rahman were studying in one of his madrassas in Chittagong.

The mufti said that the only reason he is not a government minister is that the current regime snubbed him out of fear as to how his appointment would look. The West would see both him and Bangladesh as too extremist. The mufti has been named in Indian intelligence documents as a member of the central committee of Huji (itself linked to Al Qaeda), an association he would, of course, deny. He is also rumored to have close friends among the Afghan Taliban, which he denies, while adding that it's better not to discuss the Afghan Taliban, as they are so frequently misunderstood. Besides, he says as the corner of his mouth twitches into a smile, the Taliban are running all over his madrassa, as the word ''talib'' means only student.

Outside his office, the sound of boys' voices reciting the Koran rises and falls. Fifteen hundred students study at the madrassa, and the mufti's party, the I.O.J., sponsors madrassas all over the nation; how many, he claimed not to know. Financing, the mufti said, comes mostly from Bangladesh itself, but some money also arrives from friends throughout the Arab world.

Of all his political influence, the mufti is most proud of his fatwas, which, he said, give him a means to speak out against those who violate Islam. ''Whoever speaks against Islam, I issue a fatwa against them to the government,'' he said. ''But the government says nothing.'' He shook his head, frustrated. That's next on his agenda: to pressure the government to recognize his religious injunctions. ''It's possible,'' he said, ''now more than ever.''


Eliza Griswold is a writer based in New York.

I am afraid CAIR has been at this a long time. Last summer our public library had several big displays on the wonders of Islam I was shocked. I looked at a few of the books and then asked the librarian where in any of these books does it mention the nine year old wife. She did not belive me. She had read several of the books and was totally convinced that Islam was just like Christianity. I don't think we in America have a chance to get the truth out. Our kids the few who read will only see the glory of Islam we are at great risk our churches and teachers don't see the threat the Saudi oil money is winning. At least thats my view. I tried to argue with her and her staff but I lost. If our president is to stupid to see the obvious evil of Islam what chance is there in telling others the truth about it.

I always promote "The Haj" by Leon Uris for a good insight into the Arab Muslim mentality. Suitable for a general audience, good for teenagers, but not one for General Vines' list. "Closed Circle" is a classic and good for the Vines list.

I've read Spencer, Warraq and Trifkovic. I'm not familiar with Margoliouth. Can anyone briefly mention something about his work? Does it cover the same areas as the 3 I've read?

By the way, the New York Public Library ( http://www.nypl.org/branch/ ) has 27 copies of Robert Spencer's "Islam Unveiled." Congratulations, Mr. Spencer! Now, we'll have to get them to order “Onward!”
By the way, the NYPL also has/had 9 copies of Trifkovic with 3 “lost.”

David Samuel Margoliouth. (1858-1940)

http://muhammadanism.org/Margoliouth/Default.htm


The most damning book to put in the Library next to the Islamic tripe would be a English copy of the Quran,then people can read the facts about distroying America and the Christians and Jews.
Muhammed the murderous/misogynistic/pedophile
will be know to all and CAIR won't be able to
continue their charade of portraying Islam as a actual religion and one of peace and tolerance.


The jig is up Hooper,your very own book that details the tenets of Islam will be the book that hangs you and your murderous gutless buddies that you quietly support through a deafening silence.

Adding my two cents worth of book topics:

1) The Bible - This timeless piece is a must read, how else could you put anything into contex.
How many people have actually read this, actually read this, actually read this?
This is the rock we are anchored too and it is a great one.
The part about some ignorant people who who would never know the word of God and were banished to Babylon is especially good.
Jesus(ISA) is mentioned in the Koran more times than Allah himself.


2) The Blood Of Abraham (Jimmy Carter) - A splendid read that details the life and times of Abraham and his descendants.
Here we see how GOD told him to send the servant (Hagar) and her son(Ishmail) away. Isaac you see was the rightful heir and he was blessed by God.
The Scriptures regarding Isaac who was offered up as a sacrifice only to be saved by God as a test of his Fathers Belief get taken and twisted by Islam right here, as they believe Ishmail was the one offered up not Isaac.

This my friends is how Islam was Bourne of, a lie, a meeting in the desert with the Devil himself and Voila you have a false religion started with a lie A VERY LONG TIME AGO.

VERITAS VOSLIBERABIT

RE: JasonP

[By the way, the New York Public Library ( http://www.nypl.org/branch/ ) has 27 copies of Robert Spencer's "Islam Unveiled." Congratulations, Mr. Spencer! Now, we'll have to get them to order “Onward!”
By the way, the NYPL also has/had 9 copies of Trifkovic with 3 “lost.”]


Too bad the "lost" volumes weren't those listed on General Vines reading list.

Gee, I wonder how the missing volumes got "lost"?