Arnaud de Borchgrave hits CAIR in Insight magazine for expecting us all to play the dhimmi in the face of Islamic extremism coming from mosques around the world. (Thanks to Stephen for the link.)
Expose the subversive activities of Islamist extremists around the world or in the United States, and speedy CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) pops up with accusations of Islamophobia.
Before Abdurahman Alamoudi, a U.S. citizen and prominent leader of Washington’s Muslim community, confessed to a Libyan-funded assassination plot, CAIR denounced his detractors as Muslim-bashers. CAIR suddenly fell silent when Alamoudi plea-bargained with the United States for a lighter sentence, in the range of a quarter of a century, instead of life for his part in a plot by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah.
It would behoove CAIR to care more about an institutional memory called MEMRI — The Middle East Media Research Institute — and read or listen to what it plucks daily from Islam’s airwaves.
Recent samples:
— “I say to you the American people, according to the Koran … your lives are lost, you will collapse, and America will collapse.” (Friday Sermon at Tehran U. titled “America will collapse).
— “The liberated Western woman works more with her breasts than with her hands, dancing in brothels. … Where are the lies about her liberation and the honor accorded her?” (Friday Sermon in Medina, Saudi Arabia).
— “From the day civil strife began in Islam, the Jews were behind it. There is no evil in the world that the Jews were not behind. (Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Qader Hammad’s sermon titled “A Muslim is not allowed to open his Heart to the enemy of Allah”).
— “The Jews are behind all moral corruption and perverse thinking. This is a putrid history whose stench is sickening (Friday sermon in Bahrain titled “Treachery Runs in the Jews’ Blood”)….
In most parts of the Muslim world, the war against global terrorism is viewed as a U.S.-Israel crusade, engineered by an alliance of neo-conservatives and the Christian Right, against Islam and the Muslims. Pictures and video of dead women and children during the siege of Fallujah; the Abu Ghraib prison pictures of U.S. Army guards humiliating Iraqi inmates; U.S. troops firing at Iraqi insurgents from behind headstones in the huge Shiite cemetery in Najaf, or forcing Iraqi civilians to lie face down in the street, hands behind their necks — all have combined to a steady stream of hate-filled commentaries in Muslim newspapers and on Arab satellite TV channels.
With anti-U.S. feelings running high on Arab streets, Middle Eastern governments are reluctant to open the valves of reform lest newfound freedoms backfire against the regimes that initiate them. Reforms at this juncture could well promote the kind of radical elements they are intended to neutralize. Democracy, U.S.-style, has given reforms a bad name.