Tag Archives: Islam

May 20 is “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”

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The suits at Comedy Central have aided and abetted terrorism by censoring an episode of South Park to remove all references to Mohammed. They followed in the courageous footsteps of the Yale University Press, which, before publishing a book about the Danish cartoon controversy last year, deleted the actual cartoons from the manuscript.

South Park is just a cartoon show, right?  What’s the big deal?  My hero, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, appeared on CNN to explain why it’s a big deal. An excerpt:

“The South Park episode wasn’t just funny… it also addressed an essential piece in the times that we are living.  There is one group of people, one religion that is claiming to be above criticism. … This is an assault on freedom of expression. And we have to defend it tooth and nail.”

She’s walked the walk, having lived under threat of death since she and Theo Van Gogh made the movie Submission, which got Van Gogh killed in 2004.  Now, in an effort to “water down the pool of targets,” blogger Dan Savage has published a declaration of May 20 as “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”  (Hat tip: Reason.com, via Mark Steyn.)

My drawing skills are nonexistent, but I figure the least I can do is republish the Mohammed turban-bomb drawing, above — the most iconic of the cartoons that touched off riots that killed more than 100 people in 2005.

I’m sensitive to the argument that nobody’s religion should be mocked.  But radical Muslims have made Islam a target by substituting violence for evangelism.  Ridicule is a non-violent way of fighting back.

Let’s let Ayaan have the last word:

“If the entertainment business were to take this on and just show how ridiculous this is, there’ll be too many people to threaten, and then I won’t need protection, and the gentlemen who made South Park also will not need protection.”

Brave Muslim Cleric Issues Fatwa Against Terrorism

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Three hearty cheers for Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri, a Pakistan-born Muslim scholar in London, who has issued a fatwa declaring that suicide bombing and other acts of terrorism are prohibited by Islam.

Pointing out that terrorists commit acts of self and mass murder with the firm conviction that they will be rewarded by God and that they are heaven bound, Dr.Qadri’s fatwa convincingly advances scriptural evidence to demonstrate that the perpetrators of suicide bombings are destined for hell, not heaven.

According to the scholar, modern terrorists justify their indiscriminate killings by claiming that Islamic scripture allows such campaigns in war. However, he opened new ground by citing Islamic sources which prohibit killing of women, children, elders, religious leaders, business people, non-combatants and even service personnel not engaged in aggression.

“Contrary to the mindset of the perpetrators of the 11th of September 2001 attacks in New York or the 7th July 2005 tube bombs in London, damaging enemy property or avenging a wrong done by another is strictly prohibited by sound Islamic scholarship,” Dr. Qadri told the audience.

I hope my new hero Dr. Qadri has taken security precautions.  There’s some debate over whether his fatwa is as “historic” as he claims, as well as how influential the fatwa will be, coming from a Sufi.  But as one Western academic said,

Those who are already hardliners will pay no attention at all. But “swing voters”— poorly educated and angry Muslims, who respect mainstream scholars, will probably take note.

From his lips to Allah’s ears.  The only hope for an enduring victory against radical Islam is for a different vision of Islam to take hold. (Hat tip: Glen, on Facebook)

Associated Press photo

Encouraging Signs of Al Qaeda’s Decline

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obl shirtsAfter bumming myself out yesterday with musings about a potential Israeli air strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, I was glad this morning to stumble onto more upbeat news from the global war against Islamic fascism.

The New York Times reported Saturday:

“Many students of terrorism believe that in important ways, Al Qaeda and its ideology of global jihad are in a pronounced decline — with its central leadership thrown off balance as operatives are increasingly picked off by missiles and manhunts and, more important, with its tactics discredited in public opinion across the Muslim world.

While stopping short of actually saying so, the article makes the case for staying the course in Afghanistan:

Even counterterrorism officials who agree that Al Qaeda is on the wane, for example, say the organization might well regroup if left unmolested in a lawless region in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Somalia.

And here’s the meat of the matter:

Nevertheless, some government officials do take quiet, if wary, satisfaction in two developments that they say underlie the broad belief that Al Qaeda is on a downhill slope. One is the success of military Special Operations units, the C.I.A. and allies in killing prominent terrorists.

…

In Pakistan, missile strikes from C.I.A. drone aircraft have taken a steady toll on Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies since the Bush administration accelerated these attacks last year, a policy reinforced by President Obama. A count of such strikes, compiled by the Center for American Progress in Washington, found a handful in 2006 and 2007, rising rapidly to 36 in 2008, and another 36 so far in 2009, nearly all in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

In addition to thinning the ranks of potential plotters, the constant threat of attack from the air makes it far harder for terrorists to move, communicate, and plan, counterterrorism officials say. And while the officials say they worry about a public backlash in response to the civilians killed during the air attacks, those officials also say the strikes may be frightening away potential recruits for terrorism.

The second trend is older and probably more critical. The celebration in many Muslim countries that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has given way to broad disillusionment with mass killing and the ideology behind it, according to a number of polls.

Between 2002 and 2009, the view that suicide bombings are “often or sometimes justified” has declined, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, from 43 percent to 12 percent in Jordan; from 26 percent to 13 percent in Indonesia; and from 33 percent to 5 percent in Pakistan (excluding some sparsely populated, embattled areas). Positive ratings for Osama bin Laden have fallen by half or more in most of the countries Pew polled.

The phenomenon of Islamic fascism is broader than just Al Qaeda, but it’s heartening to see the decline of support for Al Qaeda in Muslim countries.  I’ve long believed that the best  hope for a stable peace lies in an Islamic Reformation, parallel to what Martin Luther kicked off in Christianity with his 95 Theses in 1517.  I just hope that Islam can reform itself more quickly than Christianity did.  More than 130 years of religious violence passed between the 95 Theses and the Treaty of Westphalia.

(Photo of pro-Osama T-shirts in Islamabad in 2007 from AFP, via Gateway Pundit.)

Moderate Muslims Hold the Key to the War Against Islamic Fascism

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m-z-jasser-media-photo_010507For some time I’ve been meaning to highlight the work of M.  Zuhdi Jasser and the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.  As their website describes, “AIFD was formed as an unmistakable expression of American liberty and freedom in an attempt to take back the faith of Islam from the demagoguery of the Islamo-fascists.”  Dr. Jasser is a Wisconsin-born Muslim of Syrian extraction, and a practicing physician in Arizona.

In a letter to the Washington Times this week, Dr. Jasser calls out the White House for its use of dangerous euphemisms:

According to John Brennan, head of the White House’s homeland security office, the war on terrorism is over. From now on, the administration will never use terms like “jihadists” and “global war” because doing so, as Mr. Brennan said, “risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.” He insisted that the U.S. is at “war with al Qaeda” (“U.S. no longer at war with ‘terrorism’,” Page 1, Friday).

Could we be more blind? Acts of terror are rooted in the aspirations of Islamists to create an Islamic state and impose their version of Shariah law.

As a devout Muslim who, like many others across the world, is dedicated to fighting Islamism and its radical offshoots, I believe there is nothing more dangerous to our security in the long term than the leader of the free world remaining in categorical denial about the essence of this ever-so-real contest of ideas.

One of the first steps toward winning any war is correctly identifying the enemy.  The current enemy is not “terrorism,” any more than the enemy in World War II was the V-1 bomb.  And as Dr. Jasser goes on to point out, the enemy we face is broader than merely “al Qaeda.”

Some have argued that Islam itself is inherently incompatible with peace.  However, because of the very nature of Western Civilization, most of us are instinctively repelled by the idea that we are at war with “Islam.”

I prefer to believe that an Islamic Reformation — parallel to the wrenching changes Christianity experienced a few centuries ago — can rescue the world’s second-largest religion from its worst instincts.  Brave Muslims like Dr. Jasser are trying to lead the way.

Iran Revolt Vindicates Neoconservative Ideals — and the Iraq War

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iran-green-peace

(Welcome, GayPatriot readers)

Since he turned against the Iraq War that he once championed, Andrew Sullivan has taken to using the term “neocon” as a curse word.  “The neocon hope that Ahmadinejad keeps himself in power – barely disguised any more – seems to me premature,” Sullivan said a few days ago — while linking to a blog post that is more accurately summarized by its own headline: “The Bright Side of Ahmadinejad’s ‘Win'”.

So when I saw Sullivan’s headline this morning — “The Good Neocons” — I was prepared for sarcasm.  But he was praising the work of two writers, Michael J. Totten (who years ago rejected the neocon label) and Daniel Finkelstein, whose London Times article Sullivan then quoted at length.  The whole thing is worth reading, but it was a different passage that jumped out at me:

Now, there is something you need to know. I am a neocon. Given all that has happened over the past ten years, I am sure my PR consultant would advise me to drop this label. But I don’t employ a PR consultant. [KP note: please contact me if you’d like to discuss your PR needs.] So, stubbornly, I cling on to the designation. It declares my belief in two things – that in every country in the world, wherever it may be and whatever its traditions, the people yearn for liberty, for free expression and for democracy; and that the spread of liberty and democracy (not necessarily through the barrel of a gun) is the only real way to bring peace to the world. I believe that what we are seeing on the streets of Iran now is a vindication of these neoconservative ideas.

Hear hear, and I’ll take it a step further:  It is a vindication of the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq.

I sniped at Sullivan in my first Iran post for saying that Obama inspired the Iranian revolt by sweeping away the Bush years.   To me it seems self-evident that exactly the opposite is true.  If the Bush Administration had not planted democracies (albeit still troubled democracies) in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s inconceivable to me that so many Iranians would risk their lives and their freedom for an idealistic vision that did not yet exist in their neighborhood.  Just as it was inconceivable that Libya would renounce its nuclear ambitions in the absence of a credible threat.

In the long run, the only hope for victory over Islamic fascism is a Reformation within Islam.  As Jews and Christians have evolved beyond the most repugnant parts of their own scriptures, so too can Islam.   If an Islamic Reformation occurs, the democracies that President Bush helped install in the heart of the ancient Caliphate will play an important role.

And yes, I’m a neocon too.

(Photo: Mousavi1388)

My Kind of Dangerous Muslim Jihadi

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Mad props to Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, better known as Dr. Fadl, for attacking al-Qaeda from the jihadi perspective. (Hat tip: Cliff May)

Half an hour ago I had not heard of Dr. Fadl, but apparently he is an al-Qaeda co-founder. Remember that when al-Qaeda was founded, its primary mission was not to terrorize America, but rather to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Dr. Fadl doesn’t approve of the course Osama bin Laden has charted since 1988.

Dr. Fadl has a new book out, written from what apparently is his cushy cell in an Egyptian prison. Cliff May’s column today is worth reading in its entirety, but here’s my favorite passage, quoting Fadl:

“Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers,” he writes. “Was it not al-Qaeda that lit the fuse of sectarian civil war in Iraq, through
[the actions of al-Qaeda in Iraq commander] Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, who killed the Shi’ites en masse? . . . Can the mentality that caused the loss of an Islamic state that existed in reality, in the Taliban’s Afghanistan — can this mentality be expected to establish an Islamic state in Iraq — in reality, and not on the internet? And have the Islamic peoples become guinea pigs upon whom bin Laden and al-Zawahiri try out their pastime and sport of killing en masse?”

If America and the West are going to defeat Islamic fascism, one component of the struggle has to involve nurturing an alternate vision of Islam. That’s why al-Qaeda threw everything it had into the war in Iraq — a successful secular Islamic state is a much bigger threat to Islamic fascism than America itself could ever be.

Similarly, Dr. Fadl is arguably a more dangerous enemy for al-Qaeda than George Bush was. Fadl, a former leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, may not be a Boy Scout himself, but man, I’m liking him today.

The Beheading Victim Was Also Muslim

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Nearly a week after her husband allegedly cut off her head, Aasiya Zubair Hassan still smiles confidently into the camera for the high-resolution publicity photo available on the website of the TV station the couple started.

If you download the photo, you’ll discover that the filename is “Mo – Assiya – 3 – High.jpg”. It’s not clear whether “Assiya” is an alternative spelling that Aasiya would have accepted, or if it’s just one last indignity at the hand of someone working for her estranged husband, Muzzammil Hassan. That’s “Mo,” on the right.

The caption on the Bridges TV website reads:

“Aasiya Zubair (left), wife of Bridges TV CEO Mo Hassan (right) played an instrumental role in the creation of Bridges TV since she came up with the idea for the network.“

As Daniel Pipes, who has followed Bridges TV since its founding in 2004, notes:

Two sorts of public reactions to the murder are emerging: Spokesmen on behalf of Islamic organization emphasize that domestic violence happens in all communities and Muslims must pay it more attention, while women’s rights advocates focus on the Islamic element.

  • Mohamed Hagmagid Ali, vice-president of The Islamic Society of North America: “Domestic violence is a behavior that knows no boundaries of religion, race, ethnicity, or social status. Domestic violence occurs in every community. The Muslim community is not exempt from this issue. We, the Muslim community, need to take a strong stand against domestic violence. Unfortunately, some of us ignore such problems in our community, wanting to think that it does not occur among Muslims or we downgrade its seriousness.”
  • Marcia Pappas, New York State president of the National Organization for Women: “This was apparently a terroristic version of honor killing, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men. … Too many Muslim men are using their religious beliefs to justify violence against women.”

I’ve been critical in the past about what I saw as insufficient Muslim condemnation of terrorism, but I have no quarrel with the ISNA statement above. The spokesman calls for Muslims to condemn domestic violence and not to pretend it doesn’t happen in the Muslim community. I don’t blame him for emphasizing, correctly, that men in other cultures also kill their wives.

I’m late to this story, but it’s not going away soon. It’s coming out now that this was his third marriage, and he was violent with his previous wives as well. Phyllis Chesler, who after the murder apparently accelerated publication of her study “Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?” (she votes No), has called on bloggers and reporters to help advance the narrative.

In 2004, Hassan said the station was started because

“There should be a Muslim media so that Muslim children growing up in America grow up with the self confidence and high self esteem about their identity both as Americans and as Muslims.”

If “Mo” is in fact the killer, surely he must have known that the stereotypical manner of his crime would set that worthy cause back. At one time, Mo felt secure enough in his masculinity and his marriage and his culture to pose with his unveiled, lipsticked wife and credit her with the idea for the company he headed. It’s hard to reconcile that with what he allegedly did last week.

Britain Bows to Terrorism by Banning Geert Wilders

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Basmallah, 3 1/2, shares what she has been taught about Jews,
in the short film Fitna

Last week, Great Britain shamefully denied entry to Geert Wilders, an elected member of the Dutch parliament, who had been invited to a screening of his film Fitna in front of the British House of Lords. It reportedly was the first time that Britain had denied entry to a duly elected legislator from a fellow European Union country.

Why did Britain take this drastic action?

The meeting of Mr. Wilders and members of the British Parliament had originally been planned for 29 January, but was postponed. Lord Nazir Ahmed, a Muslim member of the House of Lords (Labour), had threatened to mobilize 10,000 Muslims to prevent Mr. Wilders from entering the British Parliament. Lord Ahmed boasted in the Pakistani press that the cancellation of Mr. Wilders’ visit was “a victory for the Muslim community.”

More precisely, it was a victory for Islamic extremism, which once again successfully uses the threat of violence to push around a major Western power.

I highly recommend watching Fitna, which is available online in English translation — although be warned that it contains gruesome images, many of which you have seen before. As described by National Review contributor (and former federal prosecutor) Andrew C. McCarthy:

Fitna runs about 15 minutes long. It depicts a phenomenon familiar to Britons who witnessed July 7 and Americans who lived through September 11: The faithful rendition of verses from the Koran, often recited by influential Islamic clerics, followed by acts of terrorism committed by Muslim militants who profess that they are simply putting those scriptures into action. To be sure, this is not the dominant interpretation among the world’s billion-plus Muslims, most of whom do not so much interpret their creed as ignore those parts that would otherwise trouble them. But to deny that Fitna reflects an intellectually consistent construction of Islam, adhered to by an energetic minority, is to deny reality.

Wilders leaves no doubt that he believes Islam itself is the problem, not just a small band of fanatics who have tried, as a recent president was known to say, to “hijack one of the world’s great religions.” Wilders ends the film with these words crawling up the screen:

For it is not up to me, but to Muslims themselves to tear out the hateful verses from the Quran.

Muslims want you to make way for Islam, but Islam does not make way for you.

The Government insists that you respect Islam, but Islam has no respect for you.

Islam wants to rule, submit, and seeks to destroy our western civilization.

In 1945, Nazism was defeated in Europe. In 1989, communism was defeated in Europe.

Now, the Islamic ideology has to be defeated.

Strong stuff, but as John O’Sullivan writes in the New York Post:

You may object that “Fitna” is one-sided or the Koranic quotations are wrenched from their context. If such criticisms have merit, surely the correct response is to debate with Wilders, not ban him.

Wilders is by no means above reproach, and he does the cause of free expression a disservice by calling for the Quran to be banned in the Netherlands. But his pending prosecution, under a hate-crimes law in the Netherlands that could send him to prison for up to two years, is an abomination in a nation that nominally values civil liberties.

Fitna is, in fact, filled with hate speech, and you’ll have no trouble spotting it in the film. It comes from the pages of the Quran and from the mouths of the Muslim extremists. There is plenty of room to argue that Wilders’ message is distasteful or overwrought, and Muslims and non-Muslims alike deserve every opportunity to make those arguments — peacefully. By prosecuting Wilders and declaring him persona non grata, the Netherlands and Britain are proving once again what Western nations have been demonstrating for years: terrorism works.

Mixed Signals in Obama’s Approach to Radical Islam

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“Respect and partnership” 30 years ago

I didn’t pay close attention to Obama’s first media interview as President yesterday, with with Al-Arabiya. The news snippet I saw led with:

President Barack Obama on Tuesday chose an Arabic satellite TV network for his first formal television interview as president, delivering a message to the Muslim world that “Americans are not your enemy.”

Sounds good, I thought. Same message President Bush started emphasizing six days after 9/11.

Today a former favorite professor, Fouad Ajami, offers a somewhat more troubling perspective in the Wall Street Journal [free link], noting that Obama said he wants to return to “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”

[Hm… 20 years ago… 1989… that would have been during the investigation into the December 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, for which a Libyan intelligence officer was convicted. 30 years ago would have been 1979… now why does that year stick in my mind? Oh yes, that was when militant Islamists declared war on America by taking hostages at our embassy in Tehran.]

But let Professor Ajami make his own points. Under President Bush:

America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress…

In this vein, the assertive diplomacy of George W. Bush had given heart to Muslims long in the grip of tyrannies.

Take that image of Saddam Hussein, flushed out of his spider hole some five years ago: Americans may have edited it out of their memory, but it shall endure for a long time in Arab consciousness. Rulers can be toppled and brought to account. No wonder the neighboring dictatorships bristled at the sight of that capture, and at his execution three years later.

The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the “parochial” man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor’s diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so.

Ajami currently is a professor at Johns Hopkins, but he previously taught at Princeton, where I had the good fortune to take his International Relations course during my freshman year, more than [cough] years ago. His latest book, The Foreigner’s Gift, occupies a place of honor on my bookshelf — it is a scholarly examination of the war in Iraq, which the Lebanon-born Ajami strongly supports as a just war.

The WSJ article has an unfortunate headline that Ajami undoubtedly did not write: “Obama Tells Arabia’s Despots They’re Safe — America’s Diplomacy of Freedom is Officially Over.” That vastly overstates the point the good professor makes in the text. I read the article as a caution to the new president to avoid giving up the progress that has been made toward establishing a model for Islamic democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Ajami says in the article:

This war was never a unilateral American war to be called off by an American calendar. The enemy, too, has a vote in how this struggle between American power and radical Islamism plays out in the years to come.

Radical Islam will not end its war against America anytime soon. It will be up to President Obama to ensure that we continue to fight back. He struck the right tone in his inaugural address: “for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” When the inevitable next crisis arises, I hope his actions will be guided by those words, rather than by a yearning for the idyllic days of “20 or 30 years ago.”

Eloquent Economic Commentary from Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali, my hero, sings the praises of open markets in a tightly edited, 6-minute video on the Templeton Foundation site, part of a series of discussions about “big questions” such as “Does the free market corrode moral character?”

English is at least her fourth language — she was born in Saudi Arabia, came of age in Kenya, won election to Parliament in Holland, then fled to the United States in the face of Islamic death threats — and yet the 39-year-old Ali provides one of the most powerful descriptions of the virtues of capitalism that I’ve heard anywhere. A remarkable person.