“The case for pluralism should be relatively easy to make in an Islamic context,” stated Indiana University Professor Asma Afsaruddin on March 5 at Georgetown University’s Copley Formal Lounge. She and other panelists made such unconvincing claims concerning Islam and pluralism during an event hosted by Georgetown’s Saudi-established Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) before about 50 listeners.
The event’s very audience raised doubts about Islam’s compatibility with pluralism, as Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Executive Director Nihad Awad sat in the front row. An unindicted terrorism financing co-conspirator, CAIR traces its origins to American Hamas supporters, and unsurprisingly Awad has proclaimed that CAIR members “deal with racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism on [a] daily basis.” This did not stop ACMCU director Tamara Sonn, who introduced the event, and ACMCU founder John Esposito, who spoke as a panelist, from warmly greeting Awad during and after the panel. Audience member Nader Hashemi, a University of Denver professor and Hamas apologist, also expressed his admiration of CAIR to Awad.
Esposito and Hashemi would likely approve of Awad, for both academics in their strange understanding of pluralism support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign to destroy Israel. Afsaruddin similarly supports BDS and shares anti-Israel antipathy with the event’s keynote speaker, Jordanian Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein. As United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2014 to 2018, Prince Zeid oversaw the development of a BDS-enabling blacklist of firms investing in Israeli communities in the disputed West Bank/Judea-Samaria.
Prince Zeid condemned “merchants of hatred and division” of all faiths and ideologies, but he particularly applied a broad brush to “nationalistic chauvinisms in evidence around the world today” in places such as the United States and Israel. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban “conjures up imagery similar to what I heard in the Balkans” during the 1990s wars, this veteran diplomat stated, as if Europe’s mass Muslim migration did not involve legitimate concerns and costs. “Waves of Muslim refugees descending on Orban and his compatriots, the bastions of Christianity in Europe,” mean that “unless he resists the immigrants will crash through and force the hijab on the country.”
By contrast, Prince Zeid gave a positive spin to conflicts between human rights and Islamic doctrine. Human rights advocates (including himself) “recognize the deep differences between human rights law and Islamic doctrine” on issues such as blasphemy and homosexuality, but seek to “shorten the distance” between opposed positions. He especially recognized Islam’s “long and shameful historical association with slavery,” a notable contrast to former ACMCU director and BDS-supporter Jonathan Brown’s past scandalous Islamic slavery apologetic.
Prince Zeid similarly downplayed Islamic sharia law is a source of legislation in most majority-Muslim countries, as reflected in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s (OIC) 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. This document, where sharia repeatedly caveats human rights, “reflects quite accurately the position of Muslim countries.” As meager consolation he claimed that “no Muslim country has ever challenged seriously the validity of the international architecture” of modern human rights treaties.
Prince Zeid cited the hadith or canonical saying from Islam’s prophet Muhammad that the “greatest jihad is to speak the truth in front of a tyrant.” Hereby he claimed that “Islam and human rights are synchronized.” He omitted to note that dominant Islamic orthodoxy does not have rational understandings of concepts such as truth or morality.
Prince Zeid presented himself as a multifaceted “liberally-minded” individual, half-Swedish on his mother’s side, but Jordan’s reality is less enlightened. As Jordan’s United Nations ambassador, Prince Zeid voted for OIC resolutions that would have criminalized internationally blasphemy of Islam, a reflection of Jordan’s own domestic blasphemy prosecutions. He condemned “extremists in Islam” who reduce individuals to a single aspect such as ethnicity or religion, but Jordan has refused American extradition requests for Ahlam Tamimi, the mastermind of the 2001 Hamas bombing of a Jerusalem pizzeria.
Following Zeid, the panelists John Borelli, a Georgetown expert on Catholic identity, and Afsaruddin described an alternative-reality Islam free of sharia oppression of non-Muslims or antisemitism. Borelli cited Quran 5:48, 2:148, and 2:256 to claim that the “Quran is very clear” in favoring “religious pluralism,” but the “Bible is more subtle in endorsing religious pluralism.” He did not discuss whether such cherry-picked, somewhat benign-sounding verses had undergone abrogation by other more intolerant, violent Quran passages.
Afsaruddin similarly saw in Quran verses such as 49:13 a “scripturally-mandated pluralism,” a “cherished core value of Islam.” “Diversity is a divinely mandated feature which adds richness and variety to human existence.” Quran 29:46 “admits of interreligious dialogue…conducted with civility,” she said, without noting that often zealous Muslims have unreal strictness concerning what is “civility” towards Islam.
Afsaruddin praised that in seventh-century Arabia, “when Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, emigrated from Mecca to Medina, he found himself in a pluralist situation” with several Jewish and Arab tribes. Muhammad’s Medina Charter “legitimized” this, a “milestone” that was the “earliest evidence of the pluralist impulse of Islam,” she asserted. Yet this rudimentary tribal alliance made Muhammad Medina’s ultimate arbiter and ultimately fell apart as the Muslims expelled and exterminated Medina’s three Jewish tribes.
Afsaruddin extolled a “lived experience of Muslims through history” to promote hackneyed visions of a historically multicultural Islamic civilization, notwithstanding the debunking of such myths about past societies such as Islamic Spain. “Islamic civilization at its zenith, roughly between the eighth and 12th centuries of the common era, was a cosmopolitan civilization, certainly by pre-modern standards,” she stated, despite Islamic imperialism’s cultural ravages. She praised the “active participation of many Christians and Jews in the flourishing intellectual life of the Islamic world,” yet Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, born in 12th-century Spain, referred to Muhammad as ha-meshugga (“crazy one”).
Afsaruddin suggested that hostility between Muslims and non-Muslims was a relatively modern phenomenon stemming from the age of European colonialism and not centuries of jihadist conquest. European colonization created a “relationship of antagonism…that fostered jaundiced stereotypes of the Muslim other in the European mind.” The “colonized inhabitants would also learn to resent and distrust their Western occupiers.”
Accordingly, Afsaruddin dubiously assumed that jihadist terrorists “should not be regarded as representative of mainstream Islam.” However Ahmed Tayeb, the current Grand Sheikh of Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, Sunni Islam’s closest equivalent to a Vatican, tells a different story. Borelli had praised faux moderate Tayeb for signing with Pope Francis on February 4, 2019, a Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together. Yet Tayeb has justified outrages including suicide bombing, wife-beating, and Islam’s traditional death penalty for apostasy.
Jesuit priest Thomas Michel, an ACMCU senior fellow and longtime resident of Indonesia, continued Afsaruddin’s whitewash of jihad by arguing that Muslim terrorists represented Islamic rage against Western sins. He claimed that the April 21, 2019, Easter jihadist attack on Sri Lankan churches and tourist hotels “was carried out in response to the killing of Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand” on the preceding March 15 by a “hate-filled Christian.” In reality, Sri Lankan jihadists from the preexisting National Thowheed Jamath executed long-planned attacks after pledging allegiance to the Islamic State. Only Sri Lanka’s defense minister had claimed that IS had referenced revenge for Christchurch as an attack motive, despite rebuttals from many including New Zealand’s prime minister. Meanwhile the white supremacist Christchurch attacker had expressed no Christian beliefs.
Michel claimed to “understand why Muslims in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in Asia are angry. They feel that Muslims are being wronged.” While the United States and European nations had (justifiably) restricted the entry of Muslims such as refugees, there are also “popular movies picturing Muslims as primitive savages.” Thus blowback “is the only way really” to “explain how some can turn violently against their harmless Christian neighbors in Sri Lanka,” and he warned about when somewhere in America a “politician might give an anti-Islam talk or hate speech.”
So went yet another Georgetown ACMCU event that deceives more than it informs with a recurring thesis of Islam as a proto-progressive faith victimized by an evil West. ACMCU is merely enabling propaganda, such as the recent description by ACMCU’s anti-“Islamophobia” Bridge Initiative of Hamas terrorists as a “political and social organization, with an armed wing.” The only beneficiaries of this corrupt Ivory Tower will be the West’s enemies, such as Israel-hating CAIR.
SKA says
The imminent closing of university campuses due to coronavirus may lead to an unintended “academic Arab Spring” break: students will be spared the brain-washing clique culture on campuses. By returning to live with families and perhaps serving elderly relatives affected by the virus they may be brought back to a lived appreciation of the value of the nuclear family. Separated from major advisers students may have better opportunity to weight the value of dead-end majors that delivery only unemployment with crippling debt loads.
mortimer says
WHAT PLURALISM ???
James Lincoln says
mortimer,
Thanks for the video link.
It should a “featured presentation” by the mainstream media – in prime time – in all Western countries.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
Almost every press release put out by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) makes the claim that CAIR is “the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.” For examples, see
https://www.cair.com/category/press_releases/
Can any evidence be found in support of this assertion? Every time a CAIR official like Nihad Awad or Ibrahim Hooper appears at a public event like this, they should be asked relevant questions, like: What is America’s second-largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization? How many people are members of CAIR? What is the annual fee to be a member of CAIR? Can a Shia Muslim join CAIR? A kafir? A Jew? Are kafir members of CAIR zakat-eligible?
Has any reported ever put these basic and obvious questions to CAIR officials?
mortimer says
Excellent revealing questions. In fact, CAIR only represents its own members, who apparently are mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood.
mortimer says
Quote: “(Asma) Afsaruddin dubiously assumed that jihadist terrorists “should not be regarded as representative of mainstream Islam.”
Several leading Islamic scholars disagree with that opinion.
– in 2015, the former imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Sheikh Adel al-Kalbani, declared that the Islamic State and Saudi Arabia “follow the SAME THOUGHT”. He has stated as well, that ISIS is a “TRUE PRODUCT of Salafism,” the SAME brand of Islam as officially espoused by Saudi Arabia. He clearly stated, “We [in Saudi Arabia] follow the SAME THOUGHT [as ISIS], but apply it in a refined way…They draw their ideas from what is written IN OUR BOOKS, from OUR OWN PRINCIPLES … we DO NOT criticise the thought on which it (ISIS) is based”.
– (Is ISIS Islamic?) “Yes. This is the truth, and we must discuss this in full honesty and fairness. We must confront our [problems]. We must discuss (the actions of ISIS) in full honesty … ISIS has come to implement Islam as it is, by the book. It has not come up with anything on its own. It evoked the religious texts exactly as they are. It did not distort, change, or replace anything. It came with the text and implemented it exactly as it is….They came in order to [implement] the proper Islam, complete with slave girls, the rape … We cannot shut our eyes and deny this … We must not blame others … We must all own up to what is happening.” – Yemeni Academic, Dr. Arwa Al-Khattabi
Al Azhar University Cannot Denounce ISIS of Being Un-Islamic—Even If ISIS Commits “Every Atrocity”
– Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Sheikh and Grand Imam of Al Azhar refused to condemn ISIS terrorism, “Al Azhar CANNOT accuse any [Muslim] of being a kafir [disbeliever], as long as he believes in Allah and the Last Day—even if he commits every atrocity,” adding: “I cannot denounce ISIS as un-Islamic, but I can say that they cause corruption on earth. ISIS believes that those [Muslims] who commit the great sins are kafirs and can be killed. Thus if I denounce them of being un-Islamic, I fall into the same [trap] I am now condemning.”
mortimer says
Claim: “Afsaruddin praised that in seventh-century Arabia, “when Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, emigrated from Mecca to Medina, he found himself in a pluralist situation” with several Jewish and Arab tribes.”
Fact: Within two years of settling in Jewish Yathrib, the town had been renamed ‘Medina’ (the capital city) and there were no Jews left in Medina who had not been enslaved.
Pluralism was in fact destroyed by Islamic SUPREMACISM in Medina under Mohammed. One of Mohammed’s dying commands was to remove the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula.
Are those examples of Mohammed’s ‘pluralism’ ??
Wellington says
What rank hypocrisy. Islam in its very theological blueprint massively discriminates against non-Muslims—“the vilest of creatures” {Sura 98:6} and all that rot. My God, Islam to this day actually demands death for apostasy as evidenced by Sura 4:89 and Bukhari Hadith 9.84.57. Moreover, wherever Islam dominates it sets up a Jim Crow system based not on race but on belief. Some 60% of the Koran is about despising non-Muslims and just how many Christian missionaries are welcomed in Islamic nations and how many churches are being newly built in such nations?
Muslims: Your religion is replete with a despicable double standard and you know this or should know it. Shame on all of you. You expect to come to non-Muslim countries and practice your faith freely, preach your faith to others and build your houses of worship but you massively deny these same opportunities to non-Muslim religious people where Islam predominates. You make me sick as do non-Muslim apologists (e.g., Georgetown University) for the heinous, punitive, hypocritical religion which is Islam. Islamic pluralism my butt. Stuff it.
jca reid says
What BS. Pluralism, ‘multi cultural diversity”, under Islam. Get Real! NOTHING is allowed to exist under Islam. Only Islam. It is an Orwellian dystopia being passed off as “paradise”. Very akin to the old USSR & the “Workers’ Paradise”! Strange the Islamic World BANS Orwell’s novels, 1984 & Animal Farm. They banned Sheindlin’s book, “The People Versus Mohammed” in a New York minute, along with ANY book that casts light on Islam & Mohammed – the most perfect human ever. Yet, in their texts the double standards, hypocrisy, & vileness of Islam is clear to see for all.
Logic Flaw says
“popular movies picturing Muslims as primitive savages.” Thus blowback “is the only way really” to “explain how some can turn violently against their harmless Christian neighbors in Sri Lanka,”
In other words, when a movie allegedly incorrectly depicts **Muslims violently attacking harmless people unprovoked**, then the only possible way to respond to this misrepresentation is for **Muslims to violently attack harmless people unprovoked**?
Does he realize that this is self refuting? You cannot engage in the alleged moral wrong action to prove that you are not doing it!
Ray Jarman says
I would like to ask any of the congregation of fools who are trying to blame the world wide attacks on Christians and especially the poor Christian farmers of Nigeria by the subhuman creatures that are referred to as Fulani warriors have to do with Christchurch as like other attacks by the religion of peace long before Christchurch? Maybe they can explain the butchering of millions of peaceful Hindus and others on the Asian sub-continent by members of the pernicious cult of paedophilic mass murdering monster or simple farmers on some of the smaller islands of Indonesia and in places like Mindanao. The great minds of the past like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Hobbes and Hegel must be so sad as they watch the decline of academia on campuses throughout the world.
GreekEmpress says
+1
And shame on Jesuit priest Thomas Michel for whitewashing the jihad attack on the churches in Sri Lanka, that somehow it was “justified”. You’d think he would speak out on behalf of the poor murdered members of his own faith.
But no.
tim gallagher says
Oh, yes, “The case for pluralism should be relatively easy to make in an Islamic context” if you are a lying Muslim, very well practised in constantly lying and trying to pull the wool over non-Muslims’ eyes about Islam’s true nature, until Islam gets more powerful and bares its fangs and shows its true nature, which is the complete enemy of pluralism and tolerance for non-Muslims.
eduardo odraude says
Since Islam is an expansionist totalitarian system, it should come as no great surprise to us that such a system includes elaborately developed methods and styles of propaganda and camouflage to enable the smooth progress of infiltration and subversion backed also by jihadist threats hovering around every Muslim community. Many Muslims in the West may be uninterested in Islam’s totalitarian agenda, but also seem uninterested in doing much of anything public to resist the growth of that agenda via Islamic dawaganda. (Dawa = proselytizing for Islam) A key problem is that the religious leadership of Islam on the lowdown and quiet virtually all know and support, i think, Islam’s totalitarian agenda (though they wouldn’t think of it as totalitarian, of course). Islam’s leaders will always tend to support totalitarianism for the simple reason that Islam’s core texts (Qur’an, Hadith, Sira) are totalitarian. Those texts for example recognize no separation between religion and state. Muhammad, the prime exemplar, united religion and state in himself and his rule.
It is really quite strange, in a way, that large parts of the Left don’t seem to notice any red flags of this sort around Islam. I guess I was under a false impression in thinking the Left was particularly allergic to theocracy. And yet when theocracy stares them in the face, they don’t see it. Instead they point to conservative Christians and claim to see theocracy lurking in the wings there, ready to pounce at any moment. In fact, Christianity always at least tends, eventually, to establish a distinction between religion and state, because the central figure of the New Testament is reputed to have said such things as “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s,” and “My kingdom is not of this world.” The NT portrays Jesus yielding himself to Caesar, and the words Jesus says in doing so. Christians spreading the religion were meant to follow Christ’s example and yield earthly authority to Caesar, and insist only on the authority to speak truth to all, including to power. That we have a First Amendment in the US is only proximately based on the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment itself is based in significant part on Christians’ gradual articulation of two realms of authority. Sometimes popes dominated kings, and kings dominated popes, but even if the boundary between the two domains was thus often unclear and violated, yet there always remained at least a latent recognition of two realms in the Christian world. That’s why today the fears of Christian theocracy, especially at this late stage of history when the two realms’ distinction has become much clearer, is completely misconceived and in fact based on the thinnest of reeds of evidence blown out of all proportion to their actual significance in the affairs of the overwhelming majority of Christians, including evangelicals.
Larry A. Singleton says
THIS IS CAIR 2-20-19
CAIR is a U.S. outpost of international jihadism. It is an enemy propaganda organization posing as a Muslim civil rights group. It performs the same function as the Nazi-created German-American Bund in the years leading up to America’s entry into World War Two and the Communist Party USA during the Cold War. (CPUSA members were required to swear allegiance to Moscow.) Such groups propagandize on behalf of hostile foreign powers, winning some converts and neutralizing opposition. Matthew Vadum.
Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld, (CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood), That’s Conspiring to Islamize America by Gaubatz and Sperry.
Is CAIR a Terror Group? by Daniel Pipes (National Review Online)
http://www.danielpipes.org/15220/cair-terror-group#print
•”CAIR is a terrorist supporting front organization that is partially funded by terrorists”;
•”CAIR … is supported by terrorist supporting individuals, groups and countries”;
•”CAIR has proven links to, and was founded by, Islamic terrorists”; and
•”CAIR actively supports terrorists and terrorist supporting groups and nations.”
Getting to Know the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
http://www.danielpipes.org/biblio_cair.php (Assorted articles)
CAIR: A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUlfQItJyeo
CAIR: Islamists Fooling the Establishment by Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha (MEQ article)
meforum-org/916/cair-islamists-fooling-the-establishment#_ftnref60
CAIR’s silence on pastor’s apostasy death sentence is deafening” by Andrew G. Bostom (American Thinker)
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/10/cairs_silence_on_pastors_apostasy_death_sentence_is_deafening.html
Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner with CAIR by Andrew Harrod 10-18-15
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/10/guess-whos-not-coming-to-dinner-with-cair
JihadWatch director Robert Spencer has “heard of it happening many times before…that CAIR works to seal its events from all critical eyes.” As Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes has noted, CAIR closed its January “Stand with Prophet” event in Garland, Texas, to reporters from Fox News, the Washington Free Beacon, and other outlets. CAIR even threatened United West reporters who had purchased tickets in advance with arrest and imprisonment.
CAIR and the MSA appear to have been involved in this event. Both were named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land trial, which involved funneling money to the terror group Hamas. Both have demonstrable ties, documented and noted by the FBI, with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. See, for example, these links:
http://www.investigativeproject.org/2340/federal-judge-agrees-cair-tied-to-hamas
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2011/March/Muslim-Student-Group-a-Gateway-to-Jihad/
Muslim Brotherhood Front Slapped by Federal Judge by Bob Unruh 6-4-15 Orders CAIR to pay private citizen’s legal fees for targeting her with ‘harassing’ subpoenas
http://www.wnd.com/2015/06/muslim-brotherhood-front-slapped-by-federal-judge/
“CAIR’s ruthless attacks demonstrate that its objectives are dangerously at odds with the Constitution…CAIR employs egregious lawfare tactics to frighten honest citizens so as to prevent them from exercising their constitutional rights”
CAIR to Sue FBI for Death of Boston Bombing Suspect’s Friend
by Breitbart News 3-2-15
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/03/02/cair-to-sue-fbi-for-death-of-boston-bombing-suspects-friend/
The San Bernardino Killer’s Family Sure is a CAIR Clan: They’re being represented by the unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism by 12-3-15 Daniel Greenfield
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/261002/san-bernardino-killers-family-sure-cair-clan-daniel-greenfield
Shooting targets, GoPro packaging, hammer and ‘vise grips’ found in car of San Bernardino jihadi’s Mother by Pamella Geller 12-8-15
When the enemedia interviewed the family of Syed Farook, they were deferential and submissive to the accomplices of “unspeakable carnage” in the cause of Allah in San Bernardino.
Americans were brutally murdered at a Christmas party, and Chris Cuomo acted as if he was interviewing the Pope during a Q & A with the family attorneys. The media cows at the CAIR press conference with Farook family members lobbed softballs, despite the absurdity of many of the statements.
The mother lived in the bomb making factory — how is she still free? Or would arresting her be considered “islamophobic”?
CAIR Blames America for San Bernardio Massacre: The Return of the ‘Grievance’ Myth by Raymond Ibrahim 12 8-15
The CAIR Effect: See Something, Do Nothing by Michelle Malkin.
Meet the Farooks: The Modern Jihad Family: How did This Anything But Moderate Family Not Attract Any Law Enforcement Attention by Robert Spencer 12-9-15
Suspect Charged in ‘Anti-Muslim Hate Crime’ Touted by Hamas-Linked CAIR is Named…Mohamed by Robert Spencer (Joh Nolte) 12-7-15
San Bernardino jihad murderer’s mother active member of ICNA, a pro-Sharia, pro-caliphate group by Robert Spencer.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/12/san-bernardino-jihad-murderers-mother-active-member-of-icna-a-pro-sharia-pro-caliphate-group
11 of Canada’s highest-profile jihad terrorists tied to Muslim Students Association
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/02/11-of-canadas-highest-profile-jihad-terrorists-tied-to-muslim-students-association
Booklets
Muslim Brotherhood in America by Robert Spencer
Subversive Mosques: Why Barack Obama Won’t Declare War on Radical Islam by Pamella Geller and Robert Spencer.
Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future” by David Horowitz and Robert Spencer.
“That term [Islamophobia] is an anti-concept that has been deliberately originated to make discussion of the issue impossible. And it’s similar to the term, in another kind of would-be debate that in the mainstream they want to silence… similar to the notion which functions as an anti-concept “climate change denier.” And what that does, it’s a package deal meant to silence… meant to destroy the ability to think, which is part of what makes it an anti-concept.” Ayn Rand Institute senior fellow Onkar Ghate.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is also behind this. As well as the Islamic versions of the Hitler Youth, the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and the genocidal Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Read FrontPage Magazine, Jihad Watch, Gatestone Institute and Middle East Quarterly.
OLD GUY says
ISLAMIC PROPAGANDA being spoon fed to our youth. This should not be on our tax payor paid college campus.