More denial and obfuscation. "Our enemy is not Islam -- it's extremists: The U.S. response should be zero tolerance for political cultists who try to achieve their goals through violence, regardless of their religion," by Judith Miller and David Samuels for the Los Angeles Times, November 11:
[...] Underlying both the left- and right-wing narratives of the shootings is the belief -- or fear, on the part of many liberals -- that what happened at Ft. Hood is, in fact, rooted in Islam, rather than in a perverted political ideology that is rejected by an overwhelming majority of Muslims everywhere. The threat posed to America by the jihadist cult recalls the hysteria surrounding the late 19th century mass migrations that brought thousands of anarchists, syndicalists and communists from eastern Europe to America. Preaching their secular gospel of violently overthrowing the U.S government and returning to a mythical agrarian past, the new immigrants, many of whom were Jewish, engaged in bombings, industrial violence and assassinations that killed hundreds of people, including President McKinley.There was no shortage of voices that blamed these attacks on immigrants, particularly "the Jews," and suggested that immigration from eastern Europe be stopped and that Jews be banned from sensitive government jobs and institutions of higher learning -- efforts that were enshrined in law and unofficial practice by 1924. In retrospect, we see these responses as products of ignorance and rank prejudice.
Question for Judith Miller and David Samuels: When and where did the leaders of these "immigrants" or "Jews" ever teach their followers that they "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands"? The rest of that passage, of course, is: "...and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions." That's from "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America," by Mohamed Akram, May 19, 1991.
Did any of these "immigrants" or "Jews" ever teach that their belief-system wasn't "in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant," and that their guiding manifesto "should be the highest authority in America"? CAIR co-founder and longtime Board Chairman Omar Ahmad said that about Islam and the Koran. (He denies saying it, but the original reporter stands by her story)
Did the fundamental law of any of those "immigrants" or "Jews" ever teach anything analogous to this, from a Shafi'i manual of Islamic law endorsed by the most prestigious institution in Sunni Islam, Al-Azhar University in Cairo? It says that the leader of the Muslims "makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians...until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax," and cites Koran 9:29 in support of this idea: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and who forbid not what Allah and His messenger have forbidden-who do not practice the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book-until they pay the poll tax out of hand and are humbled." ('Umdat al-Salik o9.8)
I could go on, but you get the idea. In Islam there is a clear and consistent strain, historical and contemporary, of supremacism and violence, and calls to conquer and subjugate those outside the fold. The "immigrants" and "Jews" who may have been scapegoated in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th century had no such teachings, and none of them were preaching such things. Thus the analogy adduced by Miller is not only wrong, but dangerously misleading and offensive: it implies that those who are sounding the alarm about the jihad in the U.S. and worldwide are simply bigots with some irrational hatred of Muslims, rather than people who simply listen to what Muslims say and take it seriously. So those who believe Miller will be more likely to dismiss talk of the jihad threat as bigotry, as an invention of "Islamophobes" -- and of course they will never hear about the supremacist statements I've quoted above and others like them, because Miller won't tell them.
So now we must be clear: The United States is not at war with Muslims or Islam.
Indeed not. But many Muslims believe that they, and Islam, are at war with the United States. Our refusal to engage them on that level does not mean that this fact ceases to exist.
We are at war, whether we like it or not, with Islamic heretics who argue that their own beliefs supersede traditional Islamic law, and that traitors to Islam as they define it should be killed. Our enemies are members of a violent cult that uses the language of religion to achieve political aims. Believers in such heresies have more in common with other violent political extremists -- anarchists, Stalinists, Nazis, Klansmen, Weathermen bombers and terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh -- than they do with mainstream Muslims.
But of course she does not elucidate just how their beliefs render them heretics, and how their understanding of Islam differs from traditional Islamic law. No one ever does. We are constantly told that they're heretics, but explanations of exactly how they're heretics are scarce.
Jihadists are the latest bearers of an ideological virus -- the idea that one can accomplish millenarian political aims by murdering innocents -- that has done terrible damage to human societies. Our response should be zero tolerance for political cultists who try to achieve their goals through violence, be they Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Tamil Tigers, animal-rights activists or self-professed followers of Thoreau. No one should hesitate to call such people what they are -- terrorists.
Perhaps she means that they're heretics because they're murdering innocents, and Islam forbids that. And that's all very well, but the jihadists maintain that no non-Muslim is innocent, and putatively moderate organizations like CAIR, when they condemn terrorism, have been slow to explain just who exactly they do think is innocent.
And so here again we have a typical example of deflection, falsehood, and half-truth, all served up in defense of a totalitarian, expansionist ideology that is going to keep coming at us. Judith Miller should know better, and should know who and what for which she is running interference. What is needed now is a call to the American Muslim community to acknowledge that there is a supremacist, expansionist doctrine within Islam, and a challenge to them to formulate ways to teach against it and promote American Constitutionalism among Muslims here. Instead, we get this.
It is exactly as Raymond Ibrahim says.
It is hard to choose from the two choices as to which is worse:
Obfuscation by muslims or naivete of western non-muslims in believing all the drivel about this-is-not-the-real-islam drivel.
from the article - "be they Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Tamil Tigers, animal-rights activists or self-professed followers of Thoreau."
Huh?
Comparing any religion to the violent and sociopathic system of Islam is an insult. No other belief has killed over 270 million people in the last 1400 years.
I have yet to run into a "terrorist" buddhist. As for Thoreau (a committed pacifist) inspiring a wave of suicide bombers................... just what are they smoking at the LA Times?
If Islam is so wonderful, why don't these kufr supporters join up or convert? Hypocrites...
You Islamic supporters are suicidal...YOU are terrorists...YOU get people killed...You deserve Islam in all it's finest manifestations...And you are about to get it...You're really going to like sharia...Idiots...
America's commentators make up stuff as they go along. It doesn't even MATTER anymore if its true. As long as it sound 'plausible' to themselves. With Fort Hood they have reached the point that their 'explanations' don't even sound plausible even to those completely ignorant of the true nature of Islam. As the Marx Brothers line goes, "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes."
Even those in the media calling this an act of "Islamic extremist terrorism" follow along the track that all of this "extremism" is a perversion of Islam, if not heretical. These by-now commonplaces spill from their lips as if they were the result of years of study and contemplation of the Qur'an and Shari'a, of course they are the result of no study whatsoever. O'Reilly on his show last night put on a clip of Pat Robertson condemning Islam as a "violent political system bent on world domination." Does this kind of talk do any good?, O'Reilly asked. No. He understands this kind of talk, O'Reilly, it is emotional, anger over all these extremist jihadists but "it's not fair, it's not right. Most Muslims are good people." As if most Muslims being good people has anything to do with whether Islam teaches what Robertson maintains it does teach. The teachings of Islam are objective and demonstrable, not simply a matter of opinion. What does O'Reilly et al believe this "Jihad" business is after all?
Let Judith Miller chew on Al Wala Wal Baraa, the creed guiding Muslims, strictly mainstream, not remotely heretical. The doctrine of allegiance or love and rejection or hate. Al Wala means "the believers are nothing else than brothers." Baraa is hatred and rejection of all that Allah deplores, to hold hate and enmity toward non-Muslims, especially Jews and Christians. As summed up by Dr. Abdul Rahman bi Abdul Khaliq "the only business of a Muslim is to humiliate the kuffar and make him surrender or to Islamize him thus preventing a greater corruption by undertaking a lesser one. For the reality and the root of the relationship between a Muslim and a non Muslim is enmity and war (suras 8:39 and 9:29)" And does this foundational doctrine of mainstream Islam not lead to Jihad, an obligatory duty on all Muslims "till the Day of Judgment"? Ah well, some truths are too painful to hear and so they won't be heard.
Traditional Islamic law, Judith, like Al Wala Wal Baraa, the traditional doctrine of allegiance or love and rejection or hate? Al Wala "the believers are nothing else than brothers" and Barra, rejection and hatred of all that Allah deplores, to hold enmity and hate for non-Muslims, Jews and Christians especially. Enmity toward the kuffar (nonbelievers) "is not Wahabism, nor is it some kind of radical doctrine of a radical cult but it is the religion of Allah, the love of the words." (Sheikh Dr. Nassar bin Yaha Al Hannini) "the only business of a Muslim is to humiliate the kuffar and make him surrender or to Islamize him thus preventing a greater corruption by undertaking a lesser one. For the reality and the root of the relationship between a Muslim and a non Muslim is enmity and war, suras 8:39 and 9:29." (Dr. Abdul Rahman bi Abdul Khaliq). Is this not foundational doctrine for Jihad, defined in Islamic law, traditional Islamic law, as warfare against non Muslims to establish the religion, an obligatory duty by Allah on all Muslims until the Day of Judgment?
Even those in the media calling Ft. Hood Islamic terrorism take this track, that this extremism has nothing really to do with Islam. These by-now commonplaces fall from their lips, as if they had spent years studying the Qur'an and Shari'a, instead of no time whatsoever. O'Reilly's show had a clip of Pat Robertson calling Islam a "violent political system bent on world domination." Does that kind of talk do any good? O'Reilly asked. No. He understands it, it is a result of all the anger with these extremist jihadists but "it's not fair, it's not right. Most Muslims are good people." As if most Muslims being good people had anything to do with whether Islam teaches what Robertson says it does. The teachings of Islam are capable of being examined, they are demonstrable, Bill and Judith. Ah well, the truth is painful to hear and so it won't be heard.
"We are at war, whether we like it or not, with Islamic heretics who argue that their own beliefs supersede traditional Islamic law, and that traitors to Islam as they define it should be killed. Our enemies are members of a violent cult that uses the language of religion to achieve political aims. Believers in such heresies have more in common with other violent political extremists --" - Op Ed (my bolds)
While this op ed is confused in may ways, as noted above, especially with false equivalence with 'other immigrants' and Jews (even the lone actor McVey loony) there is cause for glimmer of optimism that something of the truth about Islamic terror is beginning to sink in, even if only semantically. "Violent cult" is a first important step in acknowledging this is not a religion as understood. Now the next important step is to transcend the PC/MC model and actually connect the dots, that it is not the 'heretics' of Islam who are committing these heinous acts of jihad, not the Baha'i, nor Yazidi, nor Ismailis, the Hurufiya, the Alawis, the Bektashi and even the Sufis, all of whom are either direct or indirect Islamic 'heresies'; but these acts are committed by mainline, mainstream strict conservatives of Islam, the so-called 'extremists'. They are not extreme in the least, they are the real thing, people who interpret Islam as it was written literally. So what's the complaint about 'heresies' all about? As Hugh said, the comparison between Christian heresies and Islamic heresies are a totally false premise from the start, so the rest of the LA Times op ed is foolish nonsense.
But this once again holds out some promise: "Jihadists are the latest bearers of an ideological virus -- the idea that one can accomplish millenarian political aims by murdering innocents -- that has done terrible damage to human societies. Our response should be zero tolerance for political cultists who try to achieve their goals through violence,.." except it once again falls into the 'equivalence trap comparing Islam with other world religions. There ain't no comparison folks. Islam stands alone as a non-religious political cult movement written into text by followers of a 7th century warlord, not a prophet of any kind. And that is no heresy, not moral equivalence, not comparative religious equivalence, but the truth to say so! Just connect the dots.
"Our enemy is not Islam -- it's extremists:..."
"Extremist" is a euphemism (or worse, a denial-word) for: "one who takes his Islam seriously, takes it to heart."
To me the term "Muslim extremist" is a redundancy, and "moderate Muslim" is an oxymoron. That's why I don't use them.
As for Muslims who are not wild-eyed crazy, these might be Muslims in name only, until push comes to shove and they are forced to choose between supporting jihad, sharia, etc over civilization. But, just as a benign colon polyp might stay benign, it might also turn cancerous - so too a passive, cultural, or "moderate" Muslim is always a candidate for Sudden Jihad Syndrome.
"What is needed now is a call to the American Muslim community to acknowledge that there is a supremacist, expansionist doctrine within Islam, and a challenge to them to formulate ways to teach against it and promote American Constitutionalism among Muslims here. Instead, we get this."
It would be "needed", if the American Muslim community had numbers sufficiently viable (would it be crazy to expect over 50%?) who a) would be capable of that acknowledgement, and b) do not themselves agree in Islamic supremacist expansionism. I'd wager that the vast majority of his readers don't believe either (a) or (b) to be the case -- not even for a minuscule proportion of American Muslims let alone a sufficiently viable majority -- and thus would disagree with Spencer that this is "needed".
There are other things appropriately needed now, but the fantasy-based realization of expectation of goodness from Muslims which Spencer reiterates yet again, for the umpteenth time, is not one of them. Indeed, this expectation tends to serve to reinforce the prevailing PC MC doctrine of the (vast) majority of moderate Muslims, rather than helping to undermine it.
So a misunderstander of the religion of peace kills many other soldiers that misunderstand the religion of peace, and now we're being attacked by a defender of the misunderstanders of the religion of peace for not understanding the religion of peace..?
I don't understand where the confusion lies?
There`s none so blind as those who won`t see!