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Islam and Freedom Don’t Mix in New Charter (Part II)

Jan 16, 2019 8:00 am By Andrew Harrod

The November 29, 2018, American Charter of Freedom of Religion and Conscience claims as supporters a “multi-faith, non-partisan coalition” that includes several sharia supremacist charter signatories, as previously disclosed. Yet these and other dangers raise little alarm among the charter’s Christian signatories, who promote a flawed religious freedom defense.

​The disturbing Muslim charter signatories receive no critical corrective from non-Muslim signatories such as Charles Haynes, Religious Freedom Center (RFC) founding director at the Washington, DC, Newseum Freedom Forum Institute. While Haynes has written about the “Islamophobia” concern he shares with his fellow signatory and RFC colleague Asma Uddin, the RFC has welcomed noted British Salafists. In a parallel situation, the evangelical Bob Roberts has suggested censoring Innocence of Muslims while praising the extremist Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Roberts has a longstanding relationship with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). His fellow evangelical signatory Chris Seiple has also had a similar lengthy relationship with Suhail Khan, an American Muslim with numerous close ISNA and other Muslim Brotherhood (MB) ties. The CATO Institute’s past laughable pronouncements on sharia law’s compatibility with libertarianism and dubious Muslim “libertarian” advisers meanwhile make suspect the credibility of signatory Ilya Shapiro, a CATO legal scholar.

The Catholic signatories such as conservative intellectual luminary Robert George always seem to show affection for all things Muslim, including his fellow charter signer and friend Hamza Yusuf, notwithstanding his radical affiliations. Similar outlooks are found among George’s fellow Catholics at Washington, DC’s Religious Freedom Institute (RFI), including its executive director Kent Hill, who over-optimistically advocates pro-life Christian-Muslim alliances. Georgetown University Professor Timothy Shah’s past policy prescriptions for Middle East Christians have likewise emphasized encouraging Muslim respect for religious freedom rather than Christian realpolitik defensive measures.

RFI’s Thomas Farr has carefully assessed strategies “to help Muslim reformers win the war of ideas” for religious liberty in Islamic societies, a key tool “to forestall religion-based violence and terrorism.” Yet he has concluded that, while Ground Zero Mosque initiative leader Faisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan “have said some highly inflammatory things, their lives of service and outreach belie the charge of extremism.” Farr would amaze National Review Online writers such as Andrew C. McCarthy and Ibn Warraq, who have amply demonstrated how “Rauf is a master of double talk and prevarication.”

Meanwhile, the Jewish leaders who signed the charter often profess leftist pieties about peace and multiculturalism, such as American Jewish Committee (AJC) general counsel Marc Stern. The AJC has drawn Jewish criticism for forming a Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council with ISNA while on the other hand not opposing affirmative action programs inimical to Jewish students. Rabbi Jack Moline has previously responded to jihadist violence not with criticism of Islamic doctrines, but rather with calls for gun control. Rabbi Michael G. Holzman is a member of the rabbinic cabinet for the George Soros-funded J Street, a leftist group with a fraudulent “pro-peace, pro-Israel” slogan.

Holzman and his fellow charter signer Usra Ghazi both supported statements opposing Israel’s 2014 campaign against Hamas terrorism in the Gaza strip. Ghazi signed a letter condemning “Israel’s illegal and immoral actions in the Occupied Territories” and calling for suspending military aid to Israel. Holzman issued a joint letter with the former ISNA president Mohamed Magid that presented Israel’s defense against Hamas’ jihadist aggression as a matter of “vengeance and blood-feud” and “tribal urges.”

Among all the charter signatories, the popular Baptist website Pulpit and Pen (PP) spotlighted Russell Moore, the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). PP noted his lifelong leftist tendencies at variance with the SBC’s Christian conservatives and his leading role in the Soros-funded Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT). EIT’s pro-immigration positions are fine with Moore, who has decried building a border wall as a “golden calf,” and with his “social justice warrior-companion,” the Hispanic evangelical and charter signatory Reverend Samuel Rodriguez.

While Moore and other Christian charter signers might seek good relations with leftists and Muslims, increasingly these groups are forming somewhat paradoxical red-green political alliances opposed to Christian conservatives. In particular, even Islamist groups such as ISNA have expressed support for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) laws that would punish Christians and others for opposing homosexuality and “transgender” gender dysphoria.

In contrast, the charter makes the critical concession that “[l]ike all human rights, freedom of religion and conscience is not absolute.” As a press release states, the

American Charter frankly acknowledges today’s controversies involving tensions involving freedom of religion and conscience, including those involving the equal protection of the laws and domestic security.

The press release expresses the pious hope amidst the pelvic Left’s take-no-prisoners assault upon Christians and other traditional sexual morality supporters that what “unites us as Americans is greater than what we disagree” on. Invoking the “civility” mantra particularly in vogue among America’s modern Left, the charter states the desire to “counter the incivility of the last half century of culture-warring.” As Haynes has written in conjunction with Oliver Thomas from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the charter responds to a “divided, dangerous moment in our history.”

Correspondingly, one charter signatory, National Association of Evangelicals President Leith Anderson, has accepted a so-called compromise on SOGI laws paired with religious exemptions. Yet Farr has previously accurately reported from America’s culture wars that today the “greatest threat to religious freedom” is same-sex “marriage” proponents like the ACLU, who have “such anger and vindictiveness that it’s frightening.” Thus Moore and Rodriguez, among others, have rejected Anderson’s belief that religious exemptions could ever defuse the inherent threats of SOGI laws.

However, in the charter, notes Christian commentator Cody Libolt, Moore “continues his pattern of speaking up for non-Christians while saying nothing about the massive and escalating infringements of the rights of Christians in this country.” While the charter proffers peace to secular LGBT agendas and makes previously noted nods against “Islamophobia,” he is “taking a stand for groups that are known to take advantage of tolerance until they come to power.” Notwithstanding commitments to human equality, Libolt concludes, “principled Christians should not lift even one finger to assist the agenda of groups explicitly hostile to Christianity or to the security of our nation.”

No wonder PP dismisses as “feckless, cowering, ecumenical claptrap” the charter and its broad church of signatories. Among them appear religious freedom stalwarts and jihad opponents such as former representative Frank Wolf as well as Suhag Shukla, whose Hindu American Foundation promotes supremacist Hindutva Hindu nationalism. It is doubtful how much the American Charter, with its carefully calibrated compromises, code phrases against “Islamophobia,” and motley crew coalitions with groups varying in their sincerity towards liberty, will protect religious freedom.

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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    Jan 16, 2019 at 10:04 am

    Unread POLLYANNAS and unstudied, smug VIRTUE-SIGNALLERS want to APPEAR to be open-minded, when they actually have read NONE of Islam’s primary source texts nor do they even know the NAMES of the major ones, and yet, these same Western VIRTUE-SIGNALLERS present themselves as WELL-INFORMED about Islam on the basis of a few hours listening to TAQIYYA and WHITEWASHING in interfaith conferences.

    These POLLYANNAS will be among the first ARRESTED under Islamic DHIMMI LAWS when the Muslims impose SHARIA and THE PACT OF OMAR on Western countries.

    This is what happened when people become BLASÉ about their freedom of expression.

  2. Buraq says

    Jan 16, 2019 at 10:39 am

    There is a simple strategy to unmask this nonsense. Make an updated version of the text in which it states that believers can leave any religion if they so wish, without reproach or harm. Then ask the Muslim reps to sign it! They won’t, and so their scam will be revealed; and their refusal should be made public!

    • b.a. freeman says

      Jan 16, 2019 at 10:47 pm

      that would work with honest people, Buraq, but we have to remember that these people are liars. they would sign the agreement, but then find some reason not to support the enforcement of the apostasy-approval once put into force. i can’t imagine how they would do it, but then again, i’m not a liar trained from birth in the big lie. OTOH, if the document was written so as to be *completely* invalid if any part of it was later invalidated, then it *might* work. maybe.

  3. Walter Sieruk says

    Jan 16, 2019 at 12:29 pm

    Yes,that statement is ,indeed, right “Islam and freedom don’t mix.” For freedom of speech and thought about even raising the questions of “Is Islam really the one true religion”and “Is Islam actually the truth?” are forbidden questions in Islam .
    The reason that such questions are not allowed is because Islam very much lack the foundation of logic and reason make it stand . With the questions that freedom allows along with the use of logical reasoning the Pillars of Islam collapse . For Islam is bases on strong emotions and powerful feelings and not ,as all , on reason or logic. To such an irrational faith that is Islam the wisdom Benjamin Franklin has printed in his periodical POOR RICHARD’S ALMANAC reads “To see by the eye of faith is to shut the door of reason.”
    So withe feeling and emotion based religion of Islam ,not allowing freedom to question Islam ,its very true that “Islam and Freedom don’t mix.”

  4. Walter Sieruk says

    Jan 16, 2019 at 12:47 pm

    The truth of that saying “Islam and freedom don’t mix.” is clearly seen that so many Muslim nations have the absurd law with allows not freedom of speech or written that might put Islam under cynical of skeptical light. Therefore, true freedom in Islamic countries is forbidden.

    Thus the only real reason that Muslim nations, as Pakistan, have “blasphemy laws” enacted is because Islam, with its many falsehoods, is such a weak and fragile religion that it can stand up to or hold up to criticism, at all. No matter how very mild those criticisms might be.

    The total lack of real freedom in Islam is something that may be replied to in the spirit of the wise words written by Thomas Jefferson. For Mr. Jefferson wrote “I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the mind of man.”

  5. Battle says

    Jan 16, 2019 at 11:18 pm

    Andrew Harrod, good one.

  6. gravenimage says

    Jan 16, 2019 at 11:33 pm

    Islam and Freedom Don’t Mix in New Charter (Part II)
    ………………………

    Important pair of articles from Andrew Harrod.

  7. Robert Christopher Laity says

    Jan 17, 2019 at 4:25 am

    Islam is inextricable with Sharia Law which in turn is “repugnant to the US Constitution”. “Any law that is repugnant to the US Constitution is null and void”-Marbury v Madison (1803) USSCt.

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