In FrontPage this morning I discuss a common-sense call for monitoring mosques that has gone out not in the United States, of course, but in, of all places, Saudi Arabia:
It’s happened again: venomous Islamophobes have called for the monitoring of mosques. That’s right: racist bigots, seething with unaccountable hatred for their fellow citizens who happen to be mosque-attending Muslims, are calling for unconscionable restrictions upon Muslims’ religious freedom, and a cloud of suspicion to be cast upon the entire Muslim community, as they have called for law enforcement authorities to step up their monitoring of Muslim houses of worship.Here’s the story:
JEDDAH: A number of religious scholars and academics have stressed the need for the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Call and Guidance to beef up monitoring of places of worship. It followed the recent report of a Riyadh mosque serving as a facade for manufacturing explosives.
That’s right: the call for the monitoring of mosques has gone out not in the United States, and not from “Islamophobes” at all, but from Muslims in Saudi Arabia. The call came after “the Interior Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that it discovered explosive substances and devices at a lean-to of a quiet mosque in Riyadh.”
These “religious scholars and academics” have a valid point. After all, in recent years we have seen mosques used to preach hatred; to spread exhortations to terrorist activity; to house a bomb factory; to store weapons; to disseminate messages from bin Laden; to demand (in the U.S.) that non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions; to fire on American troops; to fire upon Indian troops; to train jihadists; and more.
American authorities have as much reason as Saudi authorities to be concerned. Four separate studies all found that 80% of U.S. mosques were teaching jihad, Islamic supremacism, and hatred and contempt for Jews and Christians. There are no countervailing studies that challenge these results. In 1998, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi leader, visited 114 mosques in the United States. Then he gave testimony before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999, and asserted that 80% of American mosques taught the “extremist ideology.”
Then there was the Center for Religious Freedom’s 2005 study, and the Mapping Sharia Project’s 2008 study. Each independently showed that upwards of 80% of mosques in America were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to impose Islamic rule.
And in the summer of 2011 came another study showing that only 19% of mosques in U.S. don’t teach jihad violence and/or Islamic supremacism.
A random survey of 100 representative mosques in the U.S. was conducted to measure the correlation between Sharia adherence and dogma calling for violence against non-believers. Of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all. Mosques that presented as Sharia adherent were more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their non-Sharia-adherent counterparts. In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts. The leadership at Sharia-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshiper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-Sharia-adherent mosques. Fifty-eight percent of the mosques invited guest imams known to promote violent jihad. The leadership of mosques that featured violence-positive literature was more likely to invite guest imams who were known to promote violent jihad than was the leadership of mosques that did not feature violence-positive literature on mosque premises.
That means that around 1,700 mosques in the U.S. are preaching hatred of infidels and justifying violence against them. As Pamela Geller asks: “You think there will never be any consequences of that?”
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This can only happen in a muslim state where Imams don't have total control. It won't happen in post-Mubarak Egypt or Iran or most of the other Islamic toilets.