It’s an old quote, but worth revisiting. All right, which one of you “Islamophobes” said it? Come on, fess up. You, in the back there — was it you, Trifkovic? No? Greg Davis, it must have been you. No? Hmm. All right, Fitzgerald. Stop ducking your head down — this isn’t an air raid drill.
Very well. If none of you mugs are going to fess up, who did say this? What’s that? It was Abu Qatada, a Muslim cleric linked to Al-Qaeda? How astonishing! Who would have thought that Al-Qaeda had been infiltrated by Islamophobes!
But of course, that’s the charge: that people like me and the others I named above, and still others also, “endorse” the “Al-Qaeda version of Islam” when we point out that there is little or nothing that is unorthodox about that “version” from the standpoint of traditional Islam. The whole world takes for granted the idea that the Islamic world rejects contemporary jihadism on Islamic grounds, and various non-Muslim analysts have come up with various explanations of how exactly it deviates from traditional Islam — genuine jihad can only be called by state authority, etc. (That one ignores the fact that the jihadists today present their activities as entirely defensive, and according to traditional Islamic law defensive jihad doesn’t need anyone to call it to make it obligatory on all Muslims.) Meanwhile, however, the jihadists continue to recruit peaceful Muslims by presenting their “version” of Islam as the genuine article, the pure thing, and the soothing explanations that comfort so many in the West don’t seem to have any power to blunt the force of this recruitment.
What the learned analysts don’t realize is that many Muslims believe Abu Qatada when he says things like this. Peaceful moderates have yet to come up with a refutation of claims like this that is convincing to Muslims on Islamic grounds. It is not endorsing their perspective to point this out. It is just stating a fact.
And when CAIR and MPAC and the rest focus their ire on me and others like me instead of on Abu Qatada, they are doing nothing — nothing — to impede his efforts.
“Guess Who Came to Iftar for Dinner?,” by Diana West:
I wasn’t going to write about Ramadan in official Washington this fall season — not again. But I just can’t resist. First, there are all the holiday trappings of this by-now annual column — such seasonal staples as my all-time favorite “war on terror” quotation from Abu Qatada, the Al Qaeda-linked cleric. I just love to trot it out around Ramadan after President Bush has said something utterly ignorant about Islam meaning peace, or, addressing the Muslim pooh bahs he always has at the White House for a fast-breaking Iftar dinner, how the jihadists have “twisted” Islam.
“I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam,” Abu Qatada said about six years ago. “Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Koran?”
Of course he hasn’t.
Ah, me. Good stuff.
Then there’s the holiday excitement of combing through the White House Iftar dinner guest list looking for unindicted co-conspirators. Since I had to put this column together before White House Iftar 2007, I turned to White House Ramadans past, reading through the president’s old speeches — 2001 through 2006 — to see if I’d missed anybody he’d singled out for a mention.
And I had! White House Ramadan is so much better than bingo. In 2003 and 2004, President Bush asked Faizul Khan, who is affiliated with the Saudi-funded Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and serves on the board of directors of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), to give the blessing. This year, the Justice Department officially labeled ISNA as a U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement aiming to establish a global Islamic empire, and also as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas fund-raising Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development trial still awaiting a verdict in Dallas.
Then again, maybe the ISNA score doesn’t count in this holiday game since the official co-“conspiratorialness” of the group is practically brand new. Still, as Steven Emerson has pointed out, ISNA has “never condemned terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah by name,” which really should have come under White House consideration — if, that is, anyone at the White House ever considered anything. Heaven knows it’s hard enough finding good moderates these days. Look too closely and they might find a Sharia-supporter. Sharia, of course, is Islamic law — wholly antithetical to Western-style liberty.
Take Talal Eid. In 2006, Eid gave the blessing at the White House Ramadan dinner, and this year Bush appointed him to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. As Robert Spencer has reported, Eid is a Wahhabi-trained imam certified by the anti-American Muslim World League who has actually called for the establishment of Sharia courts in the United States to regulate the family affairs of American Muslims.
Read it all.