In PJ Media today I discuss calls for the restriction of the freedom of speech coming from prominent U.S.-based “moderate” Muslim clerics:
As the Muhammad movie riots continued into a second week, two imams based in the United States joined the calls from the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, and the Muslim Brotherhood for the U.S. to criminalize criticism of Islam.
Sheikh Husham al-Husainy of the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center in Dearborn, Michigan, said
about the worldwide Muslim riots that “the only solution is to replace
the hate with love.” And “love,” in his mind, meant that “they should
put a law not to insult a spiritual leader.”Meanwhile, Imam Mohammad Qatanani of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, New Jersey, said
that “we, as Americans, have to put limits and borders [on] freedom of
speech,” for while Americans do indeed have the freedom of speech, they
have “no right” to talk about topics holy to Muslims, for to do so will
lead to “hatred or war among people.”Al-Husainy and Qatanani are not marginal, fringe characters. Al-Husainy last year was the featured cleric on All-American Muslim,
a reality showed that aired on The Learning Channel and was dedicated
to countering the chimerical threat of “Islamophobia” by showing Muslims
as ordinary folks leading ordinary lives. Yet…he is also “a signatory to the Jerusalem Document of 2009, which reads more like Mein Kampf.
It refers to the war on Zionism as a war between “good and evil.”
Zionism is considered an “aggression” that is infecting “the entire
human race.” Muslims are told to “get ready for the holy Jihad.” The
document also expresses support for a jihad terrorist group: “We remind
our sons to get ready to carry out their duty in Holy Jihad and continue
the path which our young valiant men in Hezbollah began in Southern
Lebanon.”Al-Husainy also gave an invocation at the Democratic National Committee’s Annual Winter Meeting in 2007. Al-Husainy prayed:
Through you, God, we unite. So guide us to the right
path. The path of the people you bless, not the path of the people you
doom. “¦ And help us to stop the war and violence, and oppression and
occupation.He was echoing the Fatiha, the first sura of the Qur’an and most
common prayer of Islam. It asks Allah: “Show us the straight path, the
path of those whom Thou hast favoured; not the (path) of those who earn
Thine anger nor of those who go astray.” The traditional and mainstream
Islamic understanding of this is that the “straight path” is Islam,
while the path of those who have earned Allah’s anger are the Jews, and
those who have gone astray are the Christians. Thus al-Husainy was
condemning Judaism and Christianity right under the bowed heads of the
assembled Democrats. And his reference to “occupation” was clearly,
coming from this supporter of Hezbollah, a dig at Israel.