Wishful thinking rules the day, and one feature of it is the constant featuring of Muslim individuals and groups who are not representative of the mainstream or majority as if they were representative.
“Canadian and allied warplanes have ‘radically limited’ ability of ISIS to operate in Iraq, Jason Kenney says,” by Stewart Bell, National Post, November 23, 2014:
MISSISSAUGA — Coalition air strikes have “radically limited” the ability of ISIS to operate in Iraq, Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney told religious community leaders at a weekend gathering that discussed combatting the terrorist group.
The minister said the bombing campaign by Canadian and allied warplanes had made it much harder for the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham to use its heavy weapons such as tanks and artillery. “They can no longer move out in the open like that,” he said.
Acknowledging that military action, which also includes arming and training Iraqi and Kurdish security forces, would not stop ISIS by itself, he said it had at least “stopped the spread of Daish [the Arabic name for the group] in Iraq, and we will never know how many lives it has saved.”
Daish is not the Arabic name for the group, but the Arabic acronym for the group’s former name — latterly adopted by Western leaders so as to obscure the fact that the first word in the group’s name is “Islamic.”
The minister made the comments at an event organized by the Coalition of Progressive Canadian Muslim Organizations, which brought together leaders of Canadian Yazidi, Christian, Shia, Ahmadiya, Jewish, Sunni, Kurdish and other groups to discuss strategies for fighting ISIS.
Kamran Bokhari, a Middle East analyst and author, said it was up to police and intelligence agencies to deal with those who break the law, “but they can’t police ideology, that’s the job of the Canadian Muslim community.”
A job that Muslim communities in Canada and elsewhere in the West have shown scant interest in doing thus far.
He said a Muslim mainstream would have to emerge to moderate the extremists, whom he noted were not present at the event. “Ultimately what we need to do is wage a jihad against jihadism,” he said, defining the problem as “it’s our way or the highway” thinking. “How do we reach out to them? That is our challenge.”
People have been calling for this, or confidently announcing its imminent arrival, for well over a decade now. Few seem troubled by the fact that it has thus far not emerged.
The National President of the Ahmadiya Muslim Jama’at Canada, Lal Khan Malik, blamed Muslim scholars whom he said had misunderstood the concept of jihad as a call to kill non-believers. “This is a grossly misguided understanding of Islam,” he said.
Where could these Muslim scholars have gotten this grossly misguided understanding of Islam? How did Muslim scholars — men who had dedicated their lives to understanding Islam — come to misunderstand it so spectacularly?
Could they have gotten this crazy misunderstanding from Qur’an verses like these? “And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you, and fitnah is worse than killing. And do not fight them at al-Masjid al- Haram until they fight you there. But if they fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers.” (2:191)
“They wish you would disbelieve as they disbelieved so you would be alike. So do not take from among them allies until they emigrate for the cause of Allah . But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper.” (4:89)
“And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them [go] on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” (9:5)
All three of these verses exhort Muslims to kill non-believers. We’re constantly warned that only greasy Islamophobes think their literal meaning has any force for Muslims today — despite the fact that Muslims are acting upon their literal meaning with numbing regularity. Yet perhaps these “Muslim scholars” who have so grossly misunderstood Islam have some acquaintance with such passages, and consider them to be still in force. Lal Khan Malik is probably aware of these passages as well.
The National Post doesn’t see fit to mention it, but in reality, Ahmadi Muslims are only about 8 to 10 million out of over a billion Muslims worldwide, and are persecuted as heretics in Pakistan and Indonesia by mainstream Muslims who consider them to have deviated from true Islam. As such, it would be a lot easier to find Muslim scholars who would assert that the Ahmadi understanding of jihad is a misunderstanding of Islam than it would be to find non-Ahmadi Muslims who would agree with Lal Khan Malik.
He urged the government to ensure that such intolerance could no longer be preached in Canada. “Aggressive jihad has no place in Islam,” he said. “This erroneous belief system is responsible for the radicalization of youth.”…
He recounted a conversation with a Christian leader from Mosul, Iraq, which was overrun by ISIS in August. Forced to either convert to Islam or leave, the Christian community abandoned the city. But he said ISIS then went after infirm, elderly and disabled Christians who were unable to flee.
“And he said that Daish came into the hospitals and threatened those people in their hospital beds with conversion or death. And he broke down and could not tell me the rest of the story,” Mr. Kenney said. “So as we talk about how do we combat this phenomenon, let’s not forget the nature of this violence and let’s call it what it is. It is a form of evil.”