My Human Events column today (many news links in the original):
Last Friday, Fox News -- one of the few media outlets that isn’t entirely in the Obama camp -- revealed that yet another Muslim outreach adviser for the Obama campaign has questionable ties to jihadist groups.Minha Husaini replaced Mazen Asbahi as Obama’s Muslim liaison after Asbahi resigned over revelations that groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood featured him as a speaker. The Muslim Brotherhood, according to a 1991 internal memorandum revealed during last summer’s Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial, is engaged “in America [in] a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” The HLF is accused of funneling charitable donations to the jihad terror group Hamas.
And now Fox has revealed that Husaini also met with groups tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas in Virginia on September 15. Also present were members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), including the group’s co-founder and executive director, Nihad Awad.CAIR is the notorious Islamic group that was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case last year. CAIR is a spinoff of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which is listed in that same 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as part of its “grand jihad.” Several CAIR officials have been arrested and convicted on terror-related charges, and one of its founders has made Islamic supremacist statements, hoping that one day the Qur’an would be the only law of the land in America.
This shady group still enjoys mainstream media support and is routinely depicted as a neutral “civil rights” organization. No sane person will ever confuse CAIR with the NAACP, however.
Still, the fact that so few have caught on to CAIR hardly gives the Obama campaign an excuse. Also meeting with Husaini in September were Mahdi Bray, an American Muslim leader who several years ago proclaimed his support for the jihad terror groups Hamas and Hizballah during a public rally in Washington, and a Virginia imam, Johari Abdul Malik, who declared in November 2004 that “you will see Islam move from being the second largest religion in America -- to being the first religion in America,” and who told Muslims in 2001 that they could “blow up bridges.”
And all this follows the debacle with Husaini’s predecessor Asbahi, who resigned after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had once served on the Board of the Allied Asset Advisors, a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The NAIT was named in the “grand jihad” Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as an allied group, and Holy Land Foundation prosecutors recently stated that NAIT has an “intimate relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood” and was “intimately connected with the HLF and its assigned task of providing financial support to HAMAS.”
Asbahi explained: “I served on that board for only a few weeks before resigning as soon as I became aware of public allegations against another member of the board.” However, “[S]ince concerns have been raised about that brief time, I am stepping down...to avoid distracting from Barack Obama’s message of change.” However, a few weeks after his resignation, Investor’s Business Daily reported that Asbahi had said his quitting was a “strategic decision” and that he was still “participating in campaign conference calls on Muslim outreach.” And Asbahi was also at the meeting with Husaini, Awad, Bray and Malik.
Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Obama, downplayed the meeting’s importance: “This meeting was not organized by the campaign -- our outreach staff attends many meetings in the course of each day and they accepted an invitation from community leaders to attend.” Asbahi, said LaBolt, “is not an employee of the campaign and does not speak on behalf of the campaign.” According to Fox, he said that “the campaign would not have sent a representative to the meeting had it known the list of participants.”
But this is a man who wants to be President of the United States. It is his business, and the business of the people around him, to know. With all the rumors that continue to swirl around Obama’s Muslim background -- rumors that his campaign has quashed aggressively -- one would think the Obama camp would be careful to avoid any contact with these highly questionable individuals and groups.
That it instead allows these contacts to be made again and again ought to be, in a sane world, something that mainstream reporters should be aggressively pursuing with Obama. But no one ever said it was a sane world.
Obama's Trickle Up Poverty
It's amazing just how much Obama doesn't know, especially what his own people are doing. That is if you actually want to believe Obama's subs are allowed to do just what they want without any oversight.
One should have looked closer to Obama's connection to Rashid Khalidi who founded the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), a group associated with confrontational statements of support for Palestinians and antagonism toward Israel. and once was on the payroll of the PLO just prior to it being named a terrorist organization.
Or Nadhmi Auchi an Iraqi born billionaire in London . who had connections to Saddam Hussein and evidence shows he was involved in the oil for food corruption in Iraq and had connections to Tony Rezko in Chicago on many corrupt business deals.
...a Virginia imam, Johari Abdul Malik, who declared in November 2004 that “you will see Islam move from being the second largest religion in America -- to being the first religion in America”
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"Second largest religion in America", huh? According to Wikipedia (not always the most reliable sourse, it it true, but this entry seems pretty non-partisan, and echos figures I have read elsewhere)--a whopping 78% of Americans identify as Christians of various denominations. 15% of Americans claim no religious affiliation, and just 5.5% belong to other religions.
Of these, Judaism is by far the highest at 1.7%. Buddhists come in at .7% of the population, with Muslims at just .6%. This would put Islam as a distant fourth in American religions.
It's like population estimates--I've heard official estimates of Muslims in the U.S. as fewer than 2 million, while Muslim claims range as high as 10 million, or more.
A Pew poll result estimates 1.86 million, while a Pakistani newspaper--way back in 1998!--estimated over 12 million Muslims in America.
Muslims will always exagerate their numbers and importance in the U.S., to gain as much influence as possible.
One would have thought, one would have hoped, that those running the Obama campaign, and the candidate himself, would understand the need, now and especially after the election if he is successful, to reassure the many Americans, and others in Europe, who are unsure of him, who worry about some kind of sentimental family attachment to Islam, one that would prevent him, for other reasons than George Bush's naive belief in the essential goodness of anything called, for want of a better word, a "religion." Islam is far more than a religious faith in the ordinary sense; it is a politics, it is a geopolitics. It presumes to Command or Prohibit in every area of life, and thus constiutes a Complete Regulation of Life (so dear to the hearts and minds of those who are confused and thrown into mental disarray by modern life, and these, the psychically marginal, can find Islam to be The Solution, or at least Their Solution).
Obama has to demonstrate, not merely that he is "a Christian" but that he grasps, as his predecessor did not grasp, that the ideology of Islam, and the central duty of Jihad, correctly defined as the duty of Muslims to engage in the "struggle" or Jihad to remove all obstacles, of every kind (the American Constitution, and especially the First Amendment, constitutes such an obstacle), to the spread, and then to the certain dominance, of Islam.
Obama is quite capable, if he so chooses, of finding out what is in the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and he ought to be capable of not taking tuition from the espositos and armstrongs, or even from the noah-feldmans, but by reading, and learning from those who have read, the informative highly-articulate "defecdtors" from Islma such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, and Ibn Warraq. He has to do this, and he has to do it if he does not want to leave so many -- including some who will vote for him despite all kinds of misgivings on this score -- permanently nervous, or soon outraged, and disappointed, that he turned out to be what they had worried about, and hoped would not be the case.
Even if elected, he has a great deal of reassuring to do as to his knowledge of, understanding of, the ideology of Islam -- one based not on dreamy or sentimental visions of his biological but absentee father or his four childhood years in Indonesia, for in both the case of Kenya and Indonesia, especially decades ago, the easy-going, often syncretistic, and relaxed practices he would have encountered are merely misleading: what counts is not the Islam that Obama may have had, as a child, in places or connnected to places (Kenya, Indonesia) that are far from the Middle East, in countries where there are still many non-Muslims, and where non-Islamic or pre-Islamic traditions are still much in evidence, not having yet been eradicated (but the situation in Indonesia, too, has changed, as the Muslims purs et durs are ever more insistent and aggressive). Obama may be elected, but he does not thereby become exempt from the responsibility, the duty, to reassure all of us that he is not a stalking-horse, does not harbor secret sympathies, will be as resolute in his defense of the West and of America, this country that he keeps telling us he "loves so much."
He, and Axelrod, and the rest of the juggernautish crew, should clearly understand that aside from the youthful tribe of sometimes hysterical enthusiasts, his support is not wild, but very measured, and mostly the result of the awfulness of the past administration and McCain's failure to articulate sufficiently his differences with Bush, and not because people have ceased to be wary, and worried, about Barack Obama.
A meeting with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others of that ilk would be a good thing. Attention to the Arab supremacism within Islam, exemplified in the genocidal campaign against black African Muslims in Darfur (and the renewed campaign against black African Christians and animists in the southern Sudan), would also be good. And if Obama can stop talking about Afghanisetan being the "central front" in the "war on terror" and instead take a much more effective approach, identifying the instruments of Jihad (and not, for god's sake not, repeating the Bush notion that we must transfer further Infidel wealth to Muslims in order to curb their aggression, which threatens to turn us, at a time when the tiniest OPEC Muslim Arab states have hundreds of billions in their "sovereign wealth funds," even as needy as our own government and people have become, into the permanent supporters of any Muslim state or people who happen not to have oil, but who have been led to believe that what the Qur'an teaches -- that the Infidels owe them a living, or at least the Jizyah -- led to believe this, alas, by the attitudes and behavior of Infidel governments themselves.
If Obama plays this wrong, four years of woe await him, as former enthusiasts, and others who always resisted falling into that category, see all their pre-election suspicions and worries confirmed. If he does what he should, what makes political and moral sense, and manages to do what Bush was incapable of, by openly and accurately identifying the ideology of Jihad (he can keep the word "Islam" out for now, and Kirsopp Lake's son can explain to everyone on the campaign what the word "synecdoche" means) then many, in this country and in India, and in southern Nigeria, and in southern Sudan, and in much of sub-Saharan Africa, and of course among the peoples of Westeern Europe who feel themselves, and their freedoms and customs and laws, everywhere under aggressive Muslim attack and siege, much relieved, and a first term not of woe but of weal, may conceivably be the result.
It requires knowledge. It requires study. It requires an intelligent and deliberate choice. By Obama, and by those who advise Obama.
We'll see.
Good luck with that one, Hugh.
Good luck with that one, Hugh.
Posted by: Ummah Gummah at October 16, 2008 1:53 PM
I second that, unfortunately.
Hugh -- I am so thrilled I can barely type this. The expression "others of that ilk" implies that you think disparagingly of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Websters New World Dictionary says so...Since I know you admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali, let me be the first to say YOU WERE WRONG in your word choice!!!
Ha. I feel good.
Sultan Shahin responds to Ghulam Muhammed’s nightmare vision
"Merely condemning the miscreants who demolished the ex-mosque and abusing them and vowing “Masjid wahin banayenge” will not serve any purpose. It doesn’t seem to me to be a good idea to get pathologically fixated on the demolition of an ex-mosque, which was actually a functioning temple at the time of demolition, and forgetting that we have tens of thousands of functioning mosques and madrasas all over the country and are building new ones all the time. The miscreants who demolished the ex-mosque claimed to be votaries of Hindutva but were not only anti-social, and anti-national but actually anti-Hindu: they gave Hinduism a bad name, sullied its image of peaceful demeanour and non-violence and tolerance built over several millennia and indeed made homeless Hazrat Ramchandra who, I understand, is now living in a tent, bereft of a roof over his head," says Sultan Shahin, editor, NewAgeIslam.com
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"The Mosque will never go. Take this from just one humble member of the 15 Crore of Indian Muslims. Babri Masjid has become the symbol of their freedom in India. Until they rebuild Babri Masjid at its own place, Muslims will not rest…. There can be no barter of our right to reclaim what is due to us. Shahin Saheb has every right to pursue his one-sided effort to denigrate and demonise Muslims and exhort them to accept what is on the table. But Sultan Shahin does not represent the consensus of the overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims", says Ghulam Muhammed
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