Surveillance is disproportionately affecting the Muslim community? Really? Maybe that is because jihad is disproportionately affecting the non-Muslim community.
Hamas-linked CAIR sent out a link to this piece in its daily email. It wants to perpetuate the idea that surveillance of Muslims in the U.S. is a gratuitous manifestation of bigotry and racism, and not a perfectly reasonable and understandable reaction to the actions of people like Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon jihad murderers; Terry Loewen, the Muslim convert who wanted to cause “massive carnage” and be martyred “for Allah” by bombing the Wichita Mid-Continental Airport; Amine Mohamed El-Khalifi, the would-be jihad/martyrdom suicide bomber at the U.S. Capitol; Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; or the many others like them who have plotted and/or committed mass murder in the name of Islam and are motivated by its texts and teachings, all in the U.S. in the last few years.
“How NSA Spying Impacts Muslim Communities and Cultivates Islamophobia,” by Rania Khalek at Dispatches from the Underclass, January 26:
GADEIR ABBAS: I think one of the key points that Muslims have been making for years now is that the spying and the surveillance that was disproportionately affecting the Muslim community would inevitably come to affect others outside the Muslim community. And as the Snowden revelations made crystal clear, that’s exactly what is happening now….
It is more likely that the NSA has placed everyone under surveillance in order to avoid singling out the Muslim community, so as to avoid appearing “Islamophobic.”
ABBAS: I agree wholeheartedly that the fear of Islam, the fear of Muslims, is a notion I think has been cultivated by policy choices at the federal level. The use of airport screenings, that inevitably cultivates and reflects the bias that people have against Muslims, has I think created space for an anti-Muslim movement to take root.
Airport screenings reflect “the bias that people have against Muslims”? When wheelchair-bound Methodist grandmothers are subject to exactly the same level of scrutiny as 21-year-old Saudi or Pakistani men? What planet is Gadeir Abbas living on — or hoping his hapless listeners are living on?
Right after September 11, you didn’t have your Act for America’s [sic], your David Yerushalmi’s [sic], your Center for Security Policy’s [sic]—this well-organized, well-financed movement dedicated towards marginalizing Muslims and that gave rise to essentially and engine of generating ant-Muslim [sic] sentiment that creates this terrible and despicable cycle where now you have the overt argument being made that Muslims are here in the United States to abrogate the US constitution, to overthrow the US government and replace it with Sharia law, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Hamas-linked CAIR ops and their Leftist and Islamic supremacist allies constantly push this myth; it is actually a massive exercise in projection. The well-organized, well-financed movement is not the counter-jihad movement, which in the aggregate takes in a pittance compared to the groups that are calling it “well-financed.” The Center for American Progress, publisher of one of the big “Islamophobia” studies, has a larger yearly budget than what it was trumpeting that a large number of counter-jihad, pro-freedom groups had taken in all together over a period of seven years. Hamas-linked CAIR itself is known to have received huge donations from Saudi Arabia, and that’s just what we know: there are huge lacunae in its financial statements.
Nor is it true that people like David Yerushalmi are responsible for the idea that “Muslims are here in the United States to abrogate the US constitution, to overthrow the US government and replace it with Sharia law.” The culprit for that would be the Muslim Brotherhood, with which Hamas-linked CAIR has numerous ties. A captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” explains that the Brotherhood’s agenda in the U.S. is subversive: the Muslim Brothers “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” Gadeir Abbas pretends this document does not exist.
As the facts would have it, the American Muslim community is a well-educated, well-integrated and looking to continue to do so in the world. You can’t identify an American Muslim radical voice in the United States, whereas if you go to Europe, you can find people that have a platform that say despicable objectionable things. In the US, that’s just not the case….
You can’t identify an American Muslim radical voice in the United States? Hmmm. How about the imam Siraj Wahhaj, a sought-after speaker in mosques and Islamic centers nationwide? He advocated for a caliphate in a 1992 speech to a U.S. Muslim audience; Daniel Pipes recounted, “if only Muslims were more clever politically, he told his New Jersey listeners, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.” Said Wahhaj: “If we were united and strong, we’d elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him….[T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us.”
Or how about Muhammad Faheed, a speaker at a Muslim Students Association meeting at Queensborough Community College in New York in 2003. He declared that Muslims “must not recognize any government authority, or any authority at all besides Allah.” Working himself into a frenzy, he shouted, “We are not Americans. We are Muslims. [The U.S.] is going to deport and attack us! It is us vs. them! Truth against falsehood! The colonizers and masters against the oppressed, and we will burn down the master’s house! We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don’t lobby Congress or protest because we don’t recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it. . . . Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah.”
Then there’s Omar Ahmad, Hamas-linked CAIR’s co-founder and longtime Board Chairman, told a Muslim crowd in California in 1998 that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran…should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”
In 2007, as-Sabiqun, a Muslim group based in Washington, D.C., announced on its website its intention to establish an Islamic state in America by mid-century: “As-Sabiqun is an Islamic movement that believes in the Islamic State of North America no later than 2050. Those who engage in this great effort require a high level of commitment and determination. We are sending out a call to the believers: Join with us in this great struggle to change the world!”
But Abbas brushes all that aside, adding a weepy note:
The saddest thing I’ve ever heard as a CAIR staff attorney, and I hear lots of sad things, was when a young guy told me that when he goes to the mosque to pray, his mom warns him to be careful. And the mom warns him to be careful because there’s an understanding based on experience that the mosque is likely filled with informants and infiltrators that are not there to make us any safer but there to extract information from innocent Americans by any means necessary….
Why should he have to be careful? Does this “young guy” have something to hide? Is he in touch with jihad terrorists? If a Jew goes to a synagogue or a Christian to a church and ends up chatting with an FBI informer, nothing at all will happen if the Jew or Christian in question is not engaged in any illegal activity. If Hamas-linked CAIR is really “moderate,” why should it have any problem with informants in mosques? If no one there is doing anything wrong, all will be well. Of course, at this point in the argument Hamas-linked CAIR starts talking about “entrapment” — but if I met someone in a house of worship and he started chatting me up about helping him blow things up and kill people, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that I would agree to get involved in his plotting. In fact, I would call the police on him.
So what is Gadeir Abbas really trying to accomplish? That’s obvious, is it not?