Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald offers a pedagogic and defensive exercise:
It is useful to study the offerings at the www.dawanet.com website, especially the sample presentations of Ramadan, or the ways that Muslim parents are carefully instructed in a step-by-step wooing and winning of teachers and principals. There is even, if you look around, a precise guide as to when to invite the teacher or school administrators home to have a “delicious meal of chicken and pita” and so on. It is all down to a science — a carefully calculated and calibrated program, to ensure that whatever demands you make on a school, from the setting aside of a prayer room, to letting students out for such prayer, to permitting Muslims essentially to conduct propaganda — Da’wa — freely in the schools, under one guise or another (“Sharing Ramadan” Outreach, promoted by CAIR, is the best-known) are granted, and granted happily.
Much of what is at www.dawanet.com is simply rehashed or reposted stuff from various speakers’ bureaus — all designed to prepare you for your propagandistic missionary work in the schools, if you are an attentive Muslim. But some of it is even more sinister. It would be wise if parents and teachers and administrators alike visited this site, and fully informed themselves of just how studied and thought-out the propaganda effort is — and made sure that none of it gets by in the classrooms in which they teach, or which they oversee, or which their students inhabit.
More than one John Walker Lindh — I can think of an East Coast example — has been set on the course of Islam and is off seeking a suitable bride in Yemen because of a smiling Pakistani roommate (or some such) he had at prep school and then at Harvard, or schools like it. The problem is everywhere, at every level.
Eternal vigilance has to be exercised. This jihadist cult threatens everyone who does not belong to it, in a way that the Hare Krishnas and the other well-known cults never did. And it will permanently stunt the growth of all those who enter it. You do not want to stunt your child’s mental growth, do you?
So you need to study with care those parts of www.dawanet.com that are most relevant and most revealing. It is not hard to do. You can print out some of the stuff and share it with other parents. You can protest — or better yet, preempt the efforts of the smiling lady who wants to come to St. Grottlesex or your child’s homeroom to tell everyone about the wonders of Ramadan. You may think, at first, that little harm can come of it. You would be wrong. An initial false impression about Islam, implanted in someone at an impressionable age, may be stuck and hard to eradicate later on. The first task of all Infidels is to sufficiently study the matter so that no matter what is presented to them, they cannot be fooled. The second task is to help inform as many other people as possible, no matter how long it takes, no matter how tiresomely pedagogic one’s tone may become, no matter how repetitious — repetition even of phrases, until your audience has thoroughly assimilated those turns of phrase and made them their own, even possibly not recognizing where they came from. This is a duty of individuals, including many who come to this website, because the government has abdicated its responsibility. And if we are to believe a recent story about the 1,500 members of MESA (the academic association of those who teach in Middle Eastern Studies departments), only 50 of those 1,500 appear to take the current administration’s dim view of the Jihad — or 3%. That means that the teaching of Middle Eastern matters, you can be sure, will carefully avoid Qur’an (except the Sells version, or some equally sanitized, or explained-away-in-advance version), hadith, and sira.
Those 50 no doubt include Cook, Crone, Lewis, and a few others who are the only members of MESA whose scholarship is other than tendentious trash, but it is still a scandalous situation.
It used to be said to students going to Soviet Russia to study Russian that they had “chosen the worst place in the world to study” — for they would be subject to propaganda that would drown out the study of literature and language. The worst place now to try to learn about Islam and Jihad-conquest and the treatment of non-Muslims, from Spain to Indonesia, under Muslim rule, is now within university departments of Middle Eastern studies. There are still scholars in Leiden, in Germany, even in Paris and in England. In this country, given the general laxity about doctorates and the weigh-by-the-pound attitude toward publications, the situation is much worse. One cannot imagine Rashid Khalidi, Fawaz Gergez, Khaled Abou el Fadl and the rest getting academic posts at any institution of serious scholarship (that excludes, of course, St. Antony’s in its Middle Eastern wing at Oxford); in this country, they have no problem whatsoever.
Were another Joseph Schacht, David Margoliouth, Arthur Jeffery, Dufourcq, Bousquet, Snouck Hurgronje to come along, where exactly in this country would they find positions, much less be allowed to receive tenure? Hard to imagine.
Go to DawaNet. Spend some time there. No one else is doing this work for us. We must do it ourselves.