How interesting that the same “reporter,” Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, who filed this biased and shoddy FoxNews report about my FDI event last Friday at CPAC has now written two broadsides against the event, both at antisemitic paleocon sites: Antiwar.com and The American Conservative. The three pieces are similar — Kelley Beaucar Vlahos knows how to double-dip and triple-dip — but since she is plastering the Internet with this nonsense, responses are in order.
First, from Fox:
“Everyone knows Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority,” said Robert Spencer, sarcastically and to a great amount of applause and guffaws. Spencer, executive director of Jihad Watch and associate director of the Freedom Defense Initiative, which he recently founded with Atlas Shrugged blogger Pamela Geller, told his audience everyone believes that “like they believe in Santa Claus though no one has ever seen it.”
Sloppiness Alert: Pamela Geller’s blog is Atlas Shrugs, not Atlas Shrugged.
He declared that “conservative media leaders even parrot this line” that Islam is a peaceful religion at its core.
While holding up my statements as examples of some egregious falsehood — something she does only implicitly in the Fox article but explicitly in her other iterations of it — Kelley Beaucar Vlahos cannot and does not produce any mainstream sect of Islam or school of Islamic jurisprudence that does not teach the necessity to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. But she probably isn’t even aware that that’s the case.
So defined the event, which repeated the group’s message, that political correctness was preventing the American people — elected officials and the government included — from acknowledging — in Geller’s words — that Islamists “have infiltrated at every level of society and all levels of government.”
Re that infiltration, see here for information from two former government officials.
Spencer called recent complaints that full body scanners at airports violate the privacy and modesty of Muslim women according to Islamic law and attempts to accommodate them a “perversity,” since Muslims “themselves made (scanners) necessary.”…
Sloppiness Alert: I said “absurdity,” not “perversity.” But in any case, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos might be hard-pressed to explain why the full-body scanners are deemed necessary if it is not because of Islamic jihad terrorists like Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Christmas day underwear bomber on Flight 253, whose attempted attack is precisely the reason why the full body scanners are being contemplated.
Others speakers included Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who is being investigated for hate speech in Austria for her critical seminars on Islam; Simon Weng, a former slave in Sudan; Anders Gravers, a Dane who wrote Stop the Islamization of Europe; and Lt. Col Allen West (Ret.), a candidate for congress in Florida.
Sloppiness Alert: Simon’s surname is Deng, not Weng. And Stop the Islamization of Europe is a group, not a book. Gravers did not “write” it, he is one of its leaders.
On to Antiwar.com:
[…] Even worse were the CPAC events this year in which the very loyalty of Americans was questioned and entire religions were deemed a threat to global security.
There is a worldwide movement waging war against the United States in the name of a religion, and with no significant opposition from those members of that religion who are not participating in that war. Yet if I point this out, I am “Orwellian”:
If there was ever a manifestation of the radical impulses of these political events, it was the simply Orwellian experience of “Jihad: the Political Third Rail,” presented by the Freedom Defense Initiative, the latest venture of jihad-hunters Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch).
Attendees at this “unofficial” CPAC panel (yes, even among this crowd, Geller and friends are pretty radioactive) were forced to show picture identification at the door. Bodyguards roamed the capacity crowd, some of which donned lapel pins featuring crossed American and Israeli flags (meanwhile, new Muslim-American envoy Rashad Hussain should be put to a loyalty test to see if he is Muslim or American first, suggested one panelist)….
Radioactive? Sure. But because of moral and intellectual cowardice, and worse, among those doing the radiation tests.
Rashad Hussain defended a jihad terrorist, as he himself now admits having done. And Kelley Beaucar Vlahos actually likens this to supporting an American ally.
And does Kelley Beaucar Vlahos actually think that bodyguards and ID checks weren’t necessary? Of course, her jihad-enabling and antisemitism are fashionable on campuses today, but if she really were an “American conservative” and ventured on to an American university campus without bodyguards today, she might suddenly be awakened to the need for them, emanating from the peace-loving Left and the jihadis whose peaceful religion she insists I was maligning.
Antiwar.com and its panel of apostates were duly dismissed from the outset of the “Third Rail” forum as an “outrageous” affront to the conservative ideas held at CPAC, just before Geller and Spencer went on to blame Islam for 9/11 and charged that Islamists “have infiltrated at every level of society and every level of government” in the United States. The Koran (which Rashad Hussain has supposedly memorized – the horror!) is to blame for global terrorism. If we do not act now, went the message, Shariah law will soon prevail in the U.S.
Yes, we’re imagining all that. We’re imagining all this also:
The Muslim Brotherhood “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 and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” — Mohamed Akram, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” May 22, 1991, Government Exhibit 003-0085, U.S. vs. HLF, et al. P. 7 (21).
“We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don’t lobby Congress or protest because we don’t recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it. . . . Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah.” — Muhammad Faheed, Muslim Students Association meeting, Queensborough Community College, 2003
“Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death.” — former University of South Florida professor and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian
“Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad. Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital. . . . This capital of theirs will be an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas.” — Hamas MP and Islamic cleric Yunus al-Astal, 2008
“I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission.” — Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Akef, 2004
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” — CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad, 1998 (denial noted and full story explained at link)
“I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.” — CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper, 1993
“If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.” — prominent American Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj, 2002
Back to Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, who prefers to pretend that we are making all that up:
Fortunately, many of us still consider standing up to the government for doing things like detaining people indefinitely without charge, or presuming suspects guilty until proven innocent, or trying to prevent the persecution of an entire population based on religious beliefs, to be “constitutional correctness,” plain and simple.
Of course, no one is advocating the “persecution of an entire population based on religious beliefs,” but by means of that dishonest little reductio Kelly Beaucar Vlahos hopes to bamboozle people into thinking that there is no violent or supremacist imperative in Islam, and that those who think there is a jihad against the U.S. are just imagining it. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Nidal Hasan, and so many others would beg to differ.
And finally, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos at The American Conservative, where her crying need for an attentive editor is especially in evidence:
[…] The Newsmax alert included a headline, “Pope Warns about Full Body Scanners.” Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI told an audience of aerospace industry types this week that while he is aware of the terrorist threat that has prompted enhanced screening at airports, “the primary asset to be safeguarded and treasured is the person, in his or her integrity,” and that plans to implement devices that present screeners with “virtually naked” images of individual travelers compromises that integrity. […]
But at CPAC friday [sic!], at an “unofficial” panel sponsored by jihad-hunters Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch), called “Jihad: the Political Third Rail,” participants balked at these religious arguments against full body scanners — particularly because those concerns had been raised earlier, not by Catholics, but by Muslims. According to a group of Islamic scholars who posted a statement online, the intrusive images taken by full body scanners fly in the face of Koranic teachings on modesty. The group, the Figh [sic! It’s Fiqh] Council of North America (FCNA), issued a fatwah, or religious edict, preventing Muslims from going through such scanners at airports.
Of course, as it stands now, anyone can opt out of a full body scan by agreeing to a “pat down.” But Spencer roundly mocked these Muslims, because as far as he was concerned, Islam was responsible for 9/11 and Muslims themselves “made (full body scanners) necessary.” In fact, the entire thrust of the panel was that Islam is a violent religion, a plague in fact, that needed to be cured. So any idea that Muslims would consider their faith a reason to deny airport screening was rich. “Former Muslim” and speaker Wafa Sultan, cheered the full body scan, suggesting that it would be so repulsive to Muslims — and thanks to the fatawa [sic! This is plural of “fatwa,” but there was only one], inconvenient — that they might stop trying to bombing [sic!] airplanes….
Interestingly enough, you can add Jewish law to the fatwahs and papal declarations on full body scans…
There are two things I am taking away from this issue: one, the full body scans are creepy and intrusive and violate basic civil liberties of all individuals — on a global scale. Secondly, the sneering tenor of Robert Spencer about Muslim women and their “modesty” cannot hide the fact that the three major religions of the world — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — all regard modesty a prevailing virtue and, especially in the conservative observances of all three, it cannot be compromised by either the individual or the state.
Politics and the people who practice them can be so crude and reactionary- but all three religions, and the people who practice them, have much more in common outside of those political prejudices than they would care to admit. All three could create a united front on the issue of full body scans, but because one side blames the other for the use of the screening in the first place, they will remain divided….
One wonders if Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is willfully missing the point. She did not bother to speak to me, of course, before compiling this triplicate report; if she had, she might have discovered that on February 11, a week before the FDI event, I wrote that “there may be plenty of reasons to oppose body scanners.” I was not expressing scorn for the modesty of Muslim women, as Kelley Beaucar Vlahos suggests, but for the idea that Muslims should be exempt from these scanners when it was the actions of jihadis that made them necessary.
But if Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is as inattentive a listener as she is a speller and writer, it is perhaps understandable that this point escaped her.