Here is a useful summary of Louay Safi's checkered past and dubious associations, despite which he was employed as a military subcontractor to lecture on Islam. This report does not mention that, even after the Ft. Hood shootings, Safi was involved in troops' training, and was allowed to meet with victims' families. Those occurrences, of course, were part of the broader knee-jerk reaction in the aftermath of the attack to defend even more vigorously the establishment's dogma that Islam has nothing to do the steady stream of attacks and attempted attacks in Islam's name.
A clear pattern is observable in the military and broader governmental approach to anything related to Islam, and it involves an obsession with image over substance (lest appearances offend), a related fixation with "outreach" and "engagement" for their own sake, and an alarmingly unquestioning dependence on middlemen to feed them soothing interpretations of Islam. Never mind the agendas and affiliations of said middlemen, such as Safi, as long as those in charge hear what they want to hear.
And never mind that the non-engagement with reality consequently costs lives at home and abroad.
"U.S. torn over whether some Islamists offer insight or pose threat," by Brooks Egerton for the Dallas Morning News, February 7:
After the worst military base massacre in U.S. history, officials acknowledged that they failed to "connect the dots" - the shooter had been corresponding with an imam tied to al-Qaeda and had condemned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war against Islam.
But Fort Hood gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan wasn't the only one working on a Texas Army base the day of the shooting who had links to radical Islamists.
At Fort Bliss, an experienced military trainer was teaching soldiers about his Muslim faith. He, too, had denounced government counterterrorism efforts, and public records show he and some of his closest associates had ties to terrorism suspects.
But when The Dallas Morning News first inquired about the instructor, Louay Safi, military officials praised him. Only later did they say that Safi had been suspended from working on military bases pending a continuing criminal inquiry.
The Safi affair reveals the deep divisions within the U.S. government over how to combat terrorism and over what constitutes moderate Islam.
Some believe insight into Islamist thinking can be gained only by engaging a wide range of people in North America's close-knit Muslim community, where leaders may well have ties to extremists - ties that do not necessarily signal alliances or support. Others argue that engagement should be limited or shunned to avoid legitimizing radicals or embarrassing the government.
Safi is a senior official of the Islamic Society of North America, the country's largest Muslim organization. ISNA has been consulted for years by Washington and is described as a partner in the fight against terrorism. In addition to serving as ISNA's communications director, Safi runs its program certifying Muslim chaplains for work in the U.S. military and prison system. He publicly denounces terrorism and advocates peace.
How about jihad?
Safi was also named by government prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in one terrorism case in 2005. His last two employers were implicated in other government terrorism investigations while he worked for them. He was never charged, nor included among the targets of those investigations.
But Safi has called the widespread raids on Muslim organizations after 9/11 "a campaign against Islam" - a term that 9/11 Commission director Philip Zelikow says is part of "the jihadi narrative."
Safi has also complained that Muslims are treated differently from Christians and Jews when they do wrong. They are unfairly identified by and questioned about their religion, he says, treatment that can lead to isolation and aggression.
"The extremist ideology responsible for violent outbursts is often rooted in the systematic demonization of marginalized groups," Safi said in an Internet posting after the Fort Hood shooting. [...]
Lectures suspended
Safi, a 54-year-old native of Syria, is a military subcontractor who has lectured on Islam for the Army since 2005. His relationship with the Pentagon began a year earlier, when he became ISNA's leadership development director, providing Muslim chaplains the religious endorsement they need to work in the military and prison system.
He is one of seven lecturers in the Army's Islamic education program, overseen by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Much of the work is contracted out to Huntsville, Ala.-based Camber Corp., the privately held firm that hired Safi.
The training on Islam is part of a broader military educational program for which Camber is paid about $17.7 million annually, Navy Commander Brenda Malone said. Camber spokeswoman Rivka Tadjer declined to comment, citing instruction from the military.
One lecturer not affiliated with Camber who has worked alongside Safi is Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a staunch ally of Israel.
Safi's presentations stick to religious theory and do little to prepare deploying soldiers for how extremists exploit Islam, said Rubin, an Iran expert who also lectures at the naval school. "There's an element of excusing rather than explaining," Rubin told The News....
2010 - "U.S. torn over whether some Islamists offer insight or pose threat,"
1942 - "U.S. torn over whether some Nazis offer insight or pose threat,"
WTF? It's not rocket science here.
Hitler and Nazis are mild-mannered neighbors compared to Mohammed and Muslims
... he was employed as a military subcontractor to lecture on Islam.
So now the Pentagon is paying good money for lectures on Islam? No, I know, the lectures weren't to proselytize, they were to train the troops on Islam which, ironically, a tacit admission by the brass that the belief system is the key to all the trouble, not historical circumstance.
*** 9:5 ***
Having had some experience in military operations (in the rear, not in the theater), one word comes to mind: audit. The officer corps by charge is to constantly audit all its operations for effectiveness: supply, transportation systems, financial and inventory systems, technology applications, and, most of all, training.
*** 33:11 ***
So how effective was the training given our troops by the seedy Louay? Was it accurate? Did it account for all the facts of Islam and its Moslems? Was there a truthful history given in his lectures? Did it prepare the troops for what they were about to experience over in the Land of Sand? Would veterans of duty tours in Iraq and Afghan agree with our Moslem lecturer and tell the trainee troops the same things?
You guess.
"Safi, a 54-year-old native of Syria, is a military subcontractor who has lectured on Islam for the Army since 2005. His relationship with the Pentagon began a year earlier, when he became ISNA's leadership development director, providing Muslim chaplains the religious endorsement they need to work in the military and prison system.
He is one of seven lecturers in the Army's Islamic education program, overseen by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Much of the work is contracted out to Huntsville, Ala.-based Camber Corp., the privately held firm that hired Safi."
Making out like gangbusters, Louay Safi and others like him, as "lecturers" on Islam for the army.
Since 9/11/2001, the number of Muslims who have gone on the government payroll, to "explain Islam" or to "do outreach in Muslim communities" or even to be paid to monitor others in the "Muslim community" or local "mosque" -- why, while non-Muslims suffer unemployment, there appear to be jobs aplenty for Muslims, all because of the threat from Islam that the government confusedly grasps, and still wishes not to understand, nor to be schooled rightly in the matter, rather than by apologists, of every degree and level of suavity.
Bullshit is bullshit, but the study of bullshit is scholarship. In that sense, Safi is a scholar, oxymoronically speaking.
The whole problem is that sheeple think islam is a religion, not a satanic cult.
Yawn.
One by one, people will wake up and take their stand.
Just a cursory glance at the koran, and anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature knows that something is very very wrong with this self-described "religion."
I first perused the koran as a student of Arabic in college. It was like an evil P.T. Barnum put the thing together.
"'The extremist ideology responsible for violent outbursts is often rooted in the systematic demonization of marginalized groups,' Safi said in an Internet posting after the Fort Hood shooting."
Louay Safi should be asked to explain what that "extremist ideology is," and on the basis of what fabricated passages in the Qur'an or made-up Hadith that "extremist ideology" is based.
He should also be asked exactly what the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira inculcate about non-Muslims, about the state of permanent war (though not always open warfare) that must exist between Muslim and non-Muslim, until everywhere Islam dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere.
He should be asked why Muslims readily and openly describe the teachings of Islam when they live in Muslim countries and are speaking to other Muslims, but when they live in the still-powerful West, as he does, they take a different tack, different emphases, and carefully, as suavely as they can, using all the arts of taqiyya and tu-quoque, attempt -- not without success, obviously, for just look at who's been paying the rent for Louay Safi these many years -- to convince gullible, unwary, and wilfully ignorant Infidels that Islam itself is no cause for alarm, but only those "extremists" whom Louay Safi has not been able to distinguish from main-line Muslims (Muslims just like himself, presumably) who pursue the very same goals of Jihad using different instruments, because their situation is different in the West, and they also know -- Louay Safi surely knows -- that the most effective weapons in the West are propaganda, the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demograhpic conquest, and he is a propagandist, an apologist, for Islam whose apologetics are not helpful to those he claims to be enlightening on the subject of Islam (and that is what he is being paid for) but, rather, deliberately misleading, with the steady hum of apologetics throughout.
Are the lectures of Louay Safi, or of the other lecturers, taped? If not, they should be, and examined by those who are both non-apologists for Islam and capable themselves of analyzng the sly strategies by which certain realities are hidden from the audience.
Why not insist that all lectures be taped? That at the very least will limit the amount of taqiyya, kitman, and tu-quoque, a mise en garde that the well-paid Louay Safi needs. His words are being recorded; what he does will no longer bequite as under-the-radar, and ephemeral, and therefore safe from prying eyes, as he no doubt has been counting on.
Who could possibly object? On what grounds?
Note to our military - Employ Muslim apostates or infidels who grew up in a Muslim country and speak Arabic to be your Islamic scholars. It is not haram for a Muslim Islamic scholar (you know, after the second time I mention "Islamic scholar", the word "oxymoron" immediately springs to mind) to practice taquiyya.
Just one of the reasons why the scientific method never really caught on in the "House of Peace".
Hmm. Somehow, I don't recall us hiring Josef Goebbels to lecture us on Nazism back in 1941.
A Chart of Muslim Brotherhood in North America
http://educateusa.com/networkpicture.html
The unspoken—but nonetheless bizarre—irony here is that the Army is at least tacitly admitting there is a problem with Islam, or they wouldn't have characters like Safi lecturing in the first place. I doubt very much, for instance, that there are similar lectures in a military setting on the tenets of Buddhism or Baha'i.
from above:
"U.S. torn over whether some Islamists offer insight or pose threat"
...................
Rhetoric slippage. "Islamist" was used to distinguish a "radical" Muslim from a "moderate". Now we are seeing *the military* asking whether Islamists themselves might pose a threat.
Louay Safi himself admits that Islamic terrorism is on the increase—he pointed out that the number of terrorist incidents increased worldwide from 2,013 in 2002 to 3,646 in 2004, to a staggering figure of almost 6,500 in 2006.
To what does he attribute this shocking rise in Jihad violence? *The Global War on Terror*, which, because of its supposed "lack of clarity and the absence of consistency" has led—somehow—to this increase, rather than anything intrinsic to Islam itself.
In other words, resistance is not only futile, it will make things that much worse.
From the article:
"It's unclear whether the brotherhood is active today in the United States, but it remains a potent force in Muslim-majority countries. Its leaders, based in Egypt, describe themselves as nonviolent, pro-democracy moderates".
I would advise Brooks Egerton, of the Dallas Morning News, to get hold of a copy of John Roy Carlson, 'Cairo to Damascus' (1951), and therein read chapter four, 'The Muslim (Black) Brotherhood', which opens with a citation from the writings of Sheikh Hassan al Banna.
I should observe that Carlson seems to me to get one thing wrong: he states, without a shred of evidence, in a footnote to the first page of chapter four, that 'The American organisation called "The Moslem Brotherhood of the U.S.A" has no connection with the Ikhwan el Muslimin. My references are to the Egyptian organisation only', even though, a little further into the chapter, he records that a member of the Ikhwan asked him whether he knew a Euro-American convert to Islam, one 'Edward Abdur Rahman Lutz, who is 'a Moslem Brother'. Carlson had met this man, and describes Lutz' attempts to help various Arab embassies improve their PR and his [Lutz'] intention of founding a mosque in Sacramento and of raising a million dollars to establish an Islamic university.
Despite what I see as Carlson's failure to be insufficiently suspicious in this connection - he even states, in his second footnote, re. the American convert Lutz [who had been explicitly identified as a fellow Moslem Brother by a member of the Egyptian Ikhwan] that 'it should not be assumed that Lutz necessarily shared the political views *or condoned the terrorist practices* {my emphasis - dda} of the Ikhwan' - this chapter, on the Brotherhood as it then was in Egypt 1948-49, contains quite sufficient evidence to reveal that anyone who wants to believe that the Ikhwan are 'non-violent pro-democracy moderates' is living in fantasyland. I doubt they've changed their spots since 1949. They're keeping a lower profile under Mubarak, that's all; because he views them as competitors in the power-and-loot game.
From Carlson's book, just to give an idea of Hassan al Banna, major theorist of the Brotherhood:
"Sheikh Hassan el Banna had powerful contacts in the government. He received support from the Arab League, from wealthy pashas and landowners who opposed Westernization because it would bring with it the end of chid labor, the possible awakening of the fellaheen, and the possible revolt of workers who received wages as low as twenty cents a day. To workers El Banna preached the urgency of getting 'back to the Koran', which, he pointed out carefully, made no provision for labor unions."
"Several times a week, hundreds of students from Fouad University and El Azhar would gather in the courtyard and in study groups inside the building, to be harangued by the Moorshid himself, or by sheikhs sent especially by the Mufti.
"They preached the doctrine of the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other.
"It became clear to me why the average Egyptian worshipped the use of force. Terror was synonymous with power!
"this was one reason why most Egyptians, regardless of class or calling, had admired Nazi Germany. It helped explain the sensational growth of the Ikhwan El Muslimin. Beyond Egypt, El Banna envisaged the union of all Moslem counries into a gigantic Islamic power, with himself as caliph - both political and religious leader - of the Moslem world".
This is an unfortunate stance to take: that any Muslim who speaks out against radical Islam is doing so just to deceive "non-believers." That means people like me - Muslims who absolutely despise the radicals' ideas, and even those described as "moderate" - can't get a word in edge-wise without being branded as Trojan Horses. There's the often-heard question, "where are all the moderate Muslims who should be speaking out against the radicals?" But wait, if we do, we're threatened with death-fatwas by the radcial Islamists, and then folks like you assume we're full of it anyway. No win, I guess.