Feisal Abdul Rauf

Two useful features today in the Wall Street Journal.  First, a symposium titled “What is Moderate Islam?“, in which six scholars and thought leaders explore the topic that represents the world’s best hope for peaceful coexistence between Islam and the West.

Second, “Letters from the Imam,” in which the man behind a controversial proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan pointedly refuses an opportunity to portray himself as a moderate in the nation’s largest newspaper.

You really should read the whole thing, but I know you won’t (I can tell from my traffic software when someone clicks a link in one of my posts), so here are highlights from the symposium.

Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s opposition leader:

Yet Muslims must do more than just talk about their great intellectual and cultural heritage. We must be at the forefront of those who reject violence and terrorism. And our activism must not end there. The tyrants and oppressive regimes that have been the real impediment to peace and progress in the Muslim world must hear our unanimous condemnation. The ball is in our court.

Former Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis:

For the moment, there does not seem to be much prospect of a moderate Islam in the Muslim world. This is partly because in the prevailing atmosphere the expression of moderate ideas can be dangerous—even life-threatening. Radical groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban, the likes of which in earlier times were at most minor and marginal, have acquired a powerful and even a dominant position.

But for Muslims who seek it, the roots are there, both in the theory and practice of their faith and in their early sacred history.

The Islamist author Ed Husain:

The Prophet Muhammad warned us against ghuluw, or extremism, in religion. The Quran reinforces the need for qist, or balance. For me, Islam at its essence is the middle way in all matters. This is normative Islam, adhered to by a billion normal Muslims across the globe.

Normative Islam is inherently pluralist. It is supported by 1,000 years of Muslim history in which religious freedom was cherished. The claim, made today by the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia, that they represent God’s will expressed through their version of oppressive Shariah law is a modern innovation.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, senior fellow at the indispensable Foundation for Defense of Democracies:

That is the essence of moderation in any faith: the willingness to exist peacefully, if not exuberantly, alongside nonbelievers who hold repellent views on many sacred subjects.

It is a dispensation that comes fairly easily to ordinary Muslims who have left their homelands to live among nonbelievers in Western democracies. It is harder for Muslims surrounded by their own kind, unaccustomed by politics and culture to giving up too much ground.

Tawfik Hamid, former member of the Islamic radical group Jamma Islamiya:

Moderate Islam must not be passive. It needs to actively reinterpret the violent parts of the religious text rather than simply cherry-picking the peaceful ones. Ignoring, rather than confronting or contextualizing, the violent texts leaves young Muslims vulnerable to such teachings at a later stage in their lives. …

Moderate Islam must be honest enough to admit that Islam has been used in a violent manner at several stages in history to seek domination over others. Insisting that all acts in Islamic history and all current Shariah teachings are peaceful is a form of deception that makes things worse by failing to acknowledge the existence of the problem.

And Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic Studies at American University:

Clearly, the use of the term moderate here is meant as a compliment. But the application of the term creates more problems than it solves. The term is heavy with value judgment, smacking of “good guy” versus “bad guy” categories. And it implies that while a minority of Muslims are moderate, the rest are not. …

[He proposes other categories.] The modernist is proud of Islam and yet able to live comfortably in, and contribute to, Western society. … The literalists believe that Muslim behavior must approximate that of the Prophet in seventh-century Arabia. Their belief that Islam is under attack forces many of them to adopt a defensive posture. And while not all literalists advocate violence, many do. Movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and the Taliban belong to this category.

I must say I have mixed feelings about the first paragraph I quoted from Professor Ahmed, immediately above.  (I am, however, confident he and I could discuss it without anybody’s throat getting cut.)  I’m OK with the fact that the term moderate “is heavy with value judgment, smacking of ‘good guy’ versus ‘bad guy’ categories.”  There are good guys and bad guys, and differentiating between them is an essential first step toward achieving peaceful coexistence between Islam and the West.

I accept the professor’s point, however, that the term can imply that moderate Muslims are a minority — which they most certainly are not (or else we’re all hosed).  But here the laws of large numbers come into play.  There are more than a billion Muslims on the planet.  Let’s say Ahmed’s “literalists” are confined to .01% (one hundredth of one percent) of all Muslims.  That implies more than 100,000 dangerous jihadis around the world.

Which brings us to Feisel Abdul Rauf, the man behind the “Ground Zero mosque.” (Yes, I know it’s not just a mosque, and I know it’s not “at” Ground Zero.  It’s at a site chosen for its proximity to Ground Zero.)  The Journal found a couple of letters to the editor from Rauf in the New York Times from the late 1970s, in which:

Imam Rauf seems to be saying that Muslims should understand Sadat’s olive branch … as a short-term respite leading to ultimate conquest.  To drive that point home, he added in the same letter that “In a true peace it is impossible that a purely Jewish state of Palestine can endure. . . . In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority.”

Two years later, the imam weighed in on the Iranian revolution. In a February 27, 1979 letter, in which he scores Americans for failing to apologize to Iran for past misdeeds, he wrote, “The revolution in Iran was inspired by the very principles of individual rights and freedom that Americans ardently believe in.”

At the time, Iran’s revolution hadn’t revealed all of its violent, messianic character. Thirty years later it has, yet Mr. Rauf’s views seem little changed. Following Iran’s sham presidential election last year and the crackdown that followed, the imam urged President Obama to “say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I certainly said lots of stupid things in the late 1970s. (I was in college.)  But the Journal offered the imam a golden opportunity to clarify his views and paint himself as a moderate:

We asked Imam Rauf if his views had changed since the 1970s. His complete response: “It is amusing that journalists are combing through letters-to-the-editor that I wrote more than 30 years ago, when I was a young man, for clues to my evolution. As I re-read those letters now, I see that they express the same concerns—a desire for peaceful solutions in Israel, and for a humane understanding of Iran—that I have maintained, and worked hard on, in the years since those letters were published.”

Contrast this dismissive brushoff with the thoughtful, conciliatory comments of Messrs. Ibrahim, Husain, Hamid and Ahmed above.  For a man who claims to want to build bridges between the faiths, Imam Rauf sure does seem contemptuous of the misgivings shared by 70 percent of Americans.  He also sounds like an apologist for Iran, the world’s foremost state instigator of terrorism.

Tagged with: Islam • Islamic Fascism • Muslim Heroes

As longtime chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank was one of the key architects of the housing bubble, and of the crisis that followed the burst. Not the sole architect, of course — the roots of the crisis stretch back to the Carter administration. (See “In Defense of Wall Street Greed” nearly two years ago.)

But Frank has a lot to answer for.  As quoted in a previous post, here’s how Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker describes it:

During the run up to the crisis, Barney Frank and others in Congress encouraged Freddie and Fannie to absorb most of the subprime mortgages. In 2008 they held over half of all mortgages, and almost all the subprimes. They have absorbed even a larger fraction of the relatively few mortgages written after 2008. Freddie and Fannie deserve a considerable share of the blame for the crisis, but they continue to have strong political support. I would like to see both of them eventually dissolved, but that is unlikely to happen.

It may not be as unlikely as it seemed when Becker wrote those words in July.  Barney Frank’s on board with the idea.  Lawrence Kudlow takes up the story:

For years, Frank was a staunch supporter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government housing agencies that played such an enormous role in the financial meltdown that thrust the economy into the Great Recession. But in a recent CNBC interview, Frank told me that he was ready to say goodbye to Fannie and Freddie.

“I hope by next year we’ll have abolished Fannie and Freddie,” he said. Remarkable. And he went on to say that “it was a great mistake to push lower-income people into housing they couldn’t afford and couldn’t really handle once they had it.” He then added, “I had been too sanguine about Fannie and Freddie.”

…

I think Chairman Frank watched these government behemoths descend into hell and then witnessed the financial catastrophe that ensued. And I think he has come to realize that the whole system of federal affordable-housing mandates that was central to the real-estate collapse — including the mandates on Fannie and Freddie and the myriad bad decisions made by private banks and other lenders in response to the government’s overreach — simply needs to be abolished.

Props to Barney Frank.  Let’s hope he can bring some of his fellow Democrats along with him.

Tagged with: Financial Meltdown

From Urban Infidel

The controversy over the bigger-than-a-mosque Islamic center proposed on a site chosen for its proximity to Ground Zero bears an unappealing resemblance to the abortion issue.

Lots of principled and meritorious arguments advanced on both sides.  A high ratio of heat to light. Fierce disagreements over terminology:  pro-choice or pro-abortion, mosque or community center, at Ground Zero or near it. A debate dominated by absolutist rhetoric, drowning out anybody seeking a middle ground. (My own position on abortion can be summed up by a headline on my blog: “Abortion Should Be Safe and Legal — But It Stops a Beating Heart.”)

Thinking of the current debate in the context of abortion gives me some sympathy for President Obama’s ham-handed attempt to have it both ways: He supports the mosque.  No, he just means it’s legal.  (In the category of things that feel like other things, Obama’s handling of the GZ mosque resembles the even more problematic Obama approach to Afghanistan: We’re surging… but only for a year.)

A friend and former ink-stained co-worker launched a new blog this week, focused thus far on the mosque controversy.  He and I come down on different sides of the argument, but I liked this passage:

The important thing is not one viewpoint triumphing over another. It’s restoring reasoned and reasonable conversations about stuff that really matters, and making sure that discourse douses the flamers who seek only to divide and exploit.

So in the interests of reasoned discourse, I want to acknowledge that religious freedom is one of the core, foundational values of this country, and Americans rightly have a visceral reaction to anything that smacks of religious intolerance.

But religious freedom is not the only thing at stake here. The analogy of the Pope asking the Carmelite nuns to move their convent out of Auschwitz is a good one — however good the sisters’ intentions were, their presence there was offensive to people who had survived a monstrous atrocity.

The controversy threatens to obscure the crucial distinction between Islam and Islamofascism.  In a lengthy essay at Pajamas Media titled “A Message to Conservatives: Is Islam Really our Enemy?”, Ron Radosh strongly makes the case that it is not:

Unlike those in the conservative movement who believe Islam is the enemy, I argue that there are real moderate Muslims, who need to be encouraged and supported in waging the fight within Islam against the uses of the Quran for radical purposes. These Muslims exist. We must support them, and not fall into the trap of backing imposters and charlatans who claim they are moderates, and who use our gullibility to pull the wool over our eyes, and who gain our monetary and political backing for what in reality are nefarious purposes dangerous to our national security.

But to view all Muslims as per se extremists is to give up this fight in advance, and to push real moderates into the hands of the extremists. If all Muslims are our enemy, we give credibility to the radical Islamofascists,  who claim that their view of the Quran is the only true one, and if one is a real Muslim, they must join Bin Laden and the other radicals in their holy Jihad against the West.

This could be read as a strong argument in favor of welcoming the GZ Mosque, but Radosh doesn’t take it there.  He does provide an excellent overview of the spectrum of conservative thinking on the matter — worthy and otherwise.  (Why oh why does Pamela Geller have to be one of the most prominent voices against the mosque?)

Both sides of the controversy cite the First Amendment — freedom of religion vs. freedom of speech — but appealing to the Constitution is missing the point.  Nobody — no serious person — is suggesting the government should forbid the project.  What I and millions of other Americans (including many moderate Muslims) want is for the developers to find a new site.

And that’s exactly what the developers will do, if they are truly serious about wanting to build bridges.  As James Taranto pointed out, “If the intent of the Ground Zero mosque is ‘to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together,’ it is already a failure on its own terms.”  Reasonable people can disagree about who to blame for that failure, but the fact that the project is divisive is indisputable.

Tagged with: Conservatism • Islam • Islamic Fascism

Operational discipline limited the display of the American flag while serving in Iraq — but these soldiers from the 4th Stryker Brigade have just crossed the border into Kuwait. Photo: Washington Post

Just over a month into the new Administration, I wrote:

President Obama today announced an Iraq withdrawal plan that George Bush would be proud to call his own. Actually, it IS Bush’s own.

Don’t be fooled by the lawyerly language in his pledge to complete “the responsible removal of our combat brigades from Iraq” by August 2010. He’s leaving up to 50,000 troops in place until the end of 2011, and I guarantee that they’ll have weapons and the capability of responding with more than battalion strength. I’m not sure how he’s defining “combat brigades,” but he must be dancing close to an outright lie — a brigade is only 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers, it looks to me like he’s leaving three divisions in place.

Thank God.

Today the 4th Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division left Iraq, marking the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Now begins Operation New Dawn, under which

… the United States will have six brigades in Iraq, by far its smallest footprint since the 2003 invasion. Those that remain are conventional combat brigades reconfigured slightly and rebranded “advise and assist brigades.” The primary mission of those units and the roughly 4,500 U.S. special operations forces that will stay behind will be to train Iraqi troops. Under a bilateral agreement, all U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011.

Even though the war isn’t over, this is a milestone worth celebrating.  As a testament to the effectiveness of Bush’s “surge” — which succeeded quickly enough to prevent Obama from surrendering — the 4th Stryker Brigade did not suffer a single combat casualty during the one-year tour that just ended.  On the brigade’s previous tour in 2007-2008, 37 brave soldiers paid the ultimate price.

In their honor, and in honor of all the troops who remain in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is from the Book of Common Prayer:

Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Father; to whom be dominion and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

Tagged with: Bush's Third Term • Iraq

Thread the needle time.

Like the moderate Muslims I quoted in my prior post, I’m opposed to the project that has become known as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”  As a blogger called milowent has pointed out, the project is not at Ground Zero, and it’s not a mosque.  I agree with those narrow statements of fact, but I draw different conclusions than milowent.

The Burlington Coat Factory site where the project is proposed is not “at” Ground Zero.  It’s more than two blocks away.  milowent has added labels to a 1997 satellite photo at his site, and it seems pretty clear that the new development would not be visible from Ground Zero.

But let’s not make too much of this.  The site is not within the footprint of the old World Trade Center, but it IS the site of a building that was ruined in the September 11 attacks.  A landing gear assembly from one of the planes crashed through the top two floors of the five-story building, which has been unused ever since.

milowent also points out that the proposed facility

is not really a “mosque” at all. It is meant to be a 13-story community center, like the YMCA (modeled after the 92nd St Y in Manhattan in fact), though it certainly will contain a decent sized worship/prayer space. But it will also have a restaurant, a pool, a basketball court, child-care center, and a 500-seat performing arts center.

Here’s where I part company with milowent — to my mind, the huge scale of the project makes it MORE objectionable than a simple mosque would be.  How many 13-story Islamic facilities are there in New York?  (Or in the country, for that matter?) The developers clearly intend for the site to be an unrivaled centerpiece of Islamic cultural and religious activity. Building such a facility to replace a building destroyed on 9/11 is a provocation, as the moderate Muslims I quoted understand.

I wish the developers would take Governor Paterson up on his offer to find a different location, but that doesn’t look likely.  So as Tigerhawk wrote the other day:

If the founders of the center own the land they ought to be able to build on it, and opponents should be perfectly free to demonstrate against it. Blocking the center by legal or political means troubles me more than letting it proceed with the understanding that many people will be offended by it.

The First Amendment covers both sides of this dispute — freedom of speech and freedom of religion.  Mayor Bloomberg’s snarling about how opponents “ought to be ashamed of themselves” is misguided and not helpful.

Enough with the serious stuff — this post needs some gratuitous sex.  milowent points out that New York Dolls, a strip club, is just a block away from the proposed Islamic center.  The implication is that it’s silly to think of the neighborhood as sacred ground.  Perhaps there would be a hue and cry to close New York Dolls if it had been 19 exotic dancers who highjacked those planes.

Also, I like Greg Gutfield’s plan to open a gay bar catering to Muslims right next to the project. Provocation is a two-way street.

When I first started hearing about it, the controversy over a proposed mosque near the gaping hole where the twin towers once stood seemed like an annoying distraction.  I wished the whole discussion would just go away.   I sympathized with the visceral opposition to a monument to Islam near where fanatical Muslims killed so many Americans.  But it’s too easy to caricature that opposition as religious intolerance.

Fortunately, moderate Muslims have come to the rescue, and have branded the plan as the provocation it is. Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah, writing in the Ottowa Citizen (hat tip to Andy McCarthy):

So what gives Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the “Cordoba Initiative” and his cohorts the misplaced idea that they will increase tolerance for Muslims by brazenly displaying their own intolerance in this case?

Do they not understand that building a mosque at Ground Zero is equivalent to permitting a Serbian Orthodox church near the killing fields of Srebrenica where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered? …

As Muslims we are dismayed that our co-religionists have such little consideration for their fellow citizens and wish to rub salt in their wounds and pretend they are applying a balm to sooth the pain.

Neda Bolourchi, a secular Muslim whose mother was on the plane that hit the North Tower, writing in the Washington Post (hat tip for my headline and the following item to John McCormack) :

Though I have nothing but contempt for the fanaticism that propelled the terrorists to carry out their murderous attacks on Sept. 11, I still have great respect for the faith. Yet, I worry that the construction of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center site would not promote tolerance or understanding; I fear it would become a symbol of victory for militant Muslims around the world.

And my go-to guy for Muslim moderation, M. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, who way back in May had a column in the New York Post that I missed at the time (hat tip to my research assistant, Mr. Google):

My first concern is whether the financing truly represents the local American Muslim community or comes with strings from foreign Islamists. But that is far from my last concern.

I am an American Muslim dedicated to defeating the ideology that fuels global Islamist terror — political Islam. And I don’t see such a “center” actually fighting terrorism or being a very “positive” addition near Ground Zero, no matter how well intentioned.

To put it bluntly, Ground Zero is the one place in America where Muslims should think less about teaching Islam and “our good side” and more about being American and fulfilling our responsibilities to confront the ideology of our enemies.

On reflection, I think it’s a good thing that this controversy is taking place.  It provides a forum for discussion of the delicate but essential task of distinguishing Islam from Islamic fascism.  Three cheers for all of the brave Muslims and former Muslims who are willing to risk participating in that discussion.

Tagged with: Islam • Islamic Fascism • Muslim Heroes

You’ll never see me use the term “War on Terror” outside of quotation marks.  Terror is not the enemy, it is one of the enemy’s tactics.

That part is simple.  Deciding  what to call the enemy is much more complicated.

I continue to resist the idea that Islam itself is the enemy, although others are willing to go there.  The term I’ve used most often is “Islamic fascism,” implying as it does a state-supported (or more precisely, supra-nationally-supported) tyranny.  I’m not fond of “Islamism,” a widespread term, although I accept it when others use it.  “Jihadism” has a certain appeal, in that it is unambiguously Islamic, but the clarity of the term gets muddied by the myth that Jihad means “inner struggle.”

Newt Gingrich has now stepped forward with an elegant and powerful solution to determining whether someone is an enemy.  Our enemy is anyone who seeks to impose sharia, the barbaric legal and social code spawned in seventh century Arabia.  (Hat tip: Andy McCarthy, who wrote the words quoted in my headline.)

Gingrich’s hour-long speech at the American Enterprise Institute can be found here.  I confess I have not yet watched it in its entirety — making this post somewhat risky, although I’m confident that McCarthy would not pull a Breitbart.   But I’ve read McCarthy’s NRO piece and watched the five-minute Gingrich highlights reel.  Between that and writing this blog post, here it is past noon on my first day on Cape Cod, and I’m blogging in my PJs while the rest of the household is at the beach.  Ah well… here’s McCarthy’s summation:

Debate over all of this is essential. The crucial point is that we must have the debate with eyes open. It is a debate about which Gingrich has put down impressive markers: The main front in the war is not Afghanistan or Iraq but the United States. The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly. There is no separating our national security and our economic prosperity — they are interdependent. And while the Middle East poses challenges of immense complexity, Gingrich contended that addressing two of them — Iran, the chief backer of violent jihad, and Saudi Arabia, the chief backer of stealth jihad — would go a long way toward improving our prospects on the rest.

Most significant, there is sharia. By pressing the issue, Newt Gingrich accomplishes two things. First, he gives us a metric for determining whether those who would presume to lead us will fight or surrender. Second, at long last, someone is empowering truly moderate Muslims — assuming they exist in the numbers we’re constantly assured of. Our allies are the Muslims who embrace our freedom culture — those for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Our enemies are those who want sharia to supplant American law and Western culture. When we call out the latter, and marginalize them, we may finally energize the former.

It’s that simple. Not easy, but simple.

Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan brings out the big guns in today’s Wall Street Journal, comparing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to the Great Communicator.

For anyone just joining us, Christie, the man Jersey-based blogger Tigerhawk has dubbed “Governor Awesome,” is working to close an $11 billion deficit in a $29 billion state budget.  He’s campaigning for his priorities in a refreshingly blunt manner, by talking to adults like adults and refusing to back down when confronted by powerful adversaries.

Noonan starts by recounting how Reagan threaded the needle with the John Birch Society:

A group of Birchers, surveying the field, said that of all those running his stands seemed most congenial, so they would support him. This set off Drudgelike sirens among journalists: Aha! Reagan unmasked as a radical! Why else would radicals support him? So they rushed to demand that he respond to this embarrassment.

Well, he said pleasantly, they said they support me, I didn’t say I support them.

Perfect.  He distances himself from the Birchers without sacrificing the Birchers’ votes.

Governor Awesome is trying to push back hard against the teachers unions — a core Democratic constituency — while minimizing the hostile reaction from individual teachers (and from parents who admire some of their kids’ teachers).  Noonan quotes Christie:

Teachers complain when they’re getting “4% and 5% salary increases a year in a 0% inflation world. They get free health benefits from the day they’re hired for their entire family until the day they die. They believe they are entitled to this shelter from the recession when the people who are paying for that shelter are the people who have been laid off, who’ve lost their homes, had their hours cut back. And all we ask them to do is freeze their salary for one year and pay 1.5% of their salary for their health benefits. . . . As much as I love teachers, everyone’s got to be a part of the sacrifice.”

Mr. Christie was direct, unadorned: You can’t tax your way out of a spending problem, you’ve got to stop spending. Governors have budgets for which they’re held accountable, so he had to move. But Mr. Christie’s way is also closer than most national Republicans have come—or Democrats will come—to satisfying the public desire that someone step forward, define the problem, apply common sense, devise a way through, do what’s needed.

He’s going to break through in a big way. The answer to our political problems lies in clarity, competence and courage, not a visit to crazy town. And he knows how to put out his hand. “As much as I love teachers.” That’s good.

Christie’s olive branch won’t win over any teachers-union activists, but it may help with fence-sitters or the Garden State’s 21st-Century “Reagan Democrats.”  Chris Christie, the Awesome Communicator.

In a riff on Nixon-goes-to-China, only a Democrat could get away with stating clearly and frankly the banal truth that sometimes white people suffer from racial discrimination in America.  Fortunately, there’s a prominent Democrat willing to do so:  Sen. James Webb of Virginia, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege.”  An excerpt, with emphasis added:

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all “people of color”—especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.—moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites. It has also lessened the focus on assisting African-Americans, who despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup.

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

Oddly, his clear-eyed column ends with a brief paragraph of sappy New Age drivel that reads like a badly executed new stanza of “Kumbaya.”  The summation is in the penultimate paragraph:

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

I’m not a huge Webb fan across the board. Despite his own honorable service as a warrior and later as Secretary of the Navy, he was a leading critic of the Iraq War who once childishly refused to shake President Bush’s hand, and these days he’s excessively focused on a counterproductive, “defined and understandable end point” in Afghanistan.  But in a Washington racial cauldron whipsawed by deceit and overreaction, Webb is a beacon of reason on race.

M. Zuhdi Jasser

It’s a shame that conservative arsonist Andrew Breitbart has torched his own credibility so thoroughly at the time one of his websites was preparing to publish an important message from my favorite Muslim-American patriot.

As a public service to anyone who doesn’t want to give Breitbart’s site any traffic, I’m posting an extensive excerpt here from M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and former officer in the United States Navy.  Jasser says of failed Time Square bomber Faisal Shahzad (emphasis added):

The Shahzads of the world do not go to sleep one night a normal citizen in corporate America working for the Affinion Group and wake up the next morning a traitorous jihadist adhering to a radical ideology. There is a process of indoctrination and the pathway is political Islam. …

The core of our American citizenship pledge and my officer’s pledge I took when I was in the U.S. Navy is to defend the U.S. against enemies foreign and domestic. Muslim leadership need to reform the ideas which feed into the development of traitors like Hasan and Shahzad and others who slide down the slippery slope of political Islam to become agents of the “Islamic state” over their allegiance to the U.S., the nation that gave them freedom. Simply placing road blocks along that slope as many who prefer political correctness over debate would do is not enough. The whole slope of political Islam needs to be ideologically defeated in real debate within the House of Islam.

The obligations of jihad in the 7^th century Arabian Peninsula under the Prophet Muhammad’s leadership are gone for all Muslims I know. We now only have a national obligation of citizenship to our nation – the United States– and there is and can be no other competing obligations. Muslim teachers need to make that repeatedly clear, with no qualifications about Muslims being in a majority or minority, or future Shahzads of the world will keep returning.

If Muslims apply the true meaning of jihad today that I know and learned from my family, they would start a ‘jihad against jihad’ and work to end the concept with regards to armed conflict, nation states, and the ummah. The real jihad in 2010 is within the House of Islam against the Islamists and those advocates of political Islam and its radical manifestations that have hijacked the spiritual path of Islam.

I was not aware of Jasser and his organization, the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, in late 2008 when I posted the following words:

There are some reprehensible passages in the Bible, but over the centuries most Christians have come to reject them. Christians stopped sanctioning the killing of non-believers because Christianity as a culture came to know that it was wrong, despite whatever Biblical support might be found. Christians in America cited Biblical support for slavery, and other Christians led the way in renouncing it, first through the abolition movement and later through the civil rights movement.

In the same way, Muslims bear the primary responsibility (not “blame”) for purging Islam of the evil done in its name. Perhaps Islam has been hijacked, as President Bush would have it. But if there is any broad-based, organized effort by moderate Muslims to overpower the “hijackers,” it has escaped my notice.

Shame on me — AIFD has been fighting the good fight since 2003, as I would have known if I had looked a little harder.  In my defense I’ll cite the unfortunate fact that Jasser and AIFD are not nearly as well known as they deserve to be — Wikipedia has a self-described “stub” of an entry for AIFD, and no entry for Jasser himself.

But Jasser is a Muslim Hero, and I’ll continue to look for opportunities to highlight his views.

Tagged with: Islam • Islamic Fascism • Muslim Heroes