‘Terrorism Is Not Islamic’–Canadian Version

Andrew C. McCarthy reports on a new sharia-supporting manual produced by Islamists in Canada.  (“State Department Endorses Canadian Islamist Manual that Describes Jihad as 'Noble'”): 

At the Washington Free Beacon, Adam Kredo reports that the State Department has issued a tweet endorsing a manual that promotes sharia and admonishes investigators not to use terms like “jihad,” which it describes as “a noble concept” in Islam.

The manual, United Against Terrorism, is said by its sponsors – the Islamic Social Services Association (ISSA) and the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) – to combat the radicalization of young Muslims. Yet, after being consulted during the manual’s writing, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police rejected the final product due to its “adversarial tone.”

That’s putting it mildly. Upon reading the book, Toronto Star columnist Anthony Furey observes that it frowns on “liberal values,” forbidding such things as the intermingling of the sexes in civil society and the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim, while promoting the treatment of adultery and premarital sex as crimes for which “punishments are harsh.”

The manual admonishes that “Terrorism is not jihad. Jihad is a noble concept in Islam.” It further discourages Muslims from cooperating with law enforcement officials, even if the police are seeking information about Islamic radicals – the very “extremists” the manual ostensibly sets itself against. It also derides investigative measures designed to gather intelligence against terrorists.

Yet, the U.S. State Department lauded the manual yesterday, tweeting: “Canada: handbook to help parents understand extremists, combat recruitment [with a link to the manual.]”

As Mr. Kredo notes, the State Department’s approbation struck some Twitter users as curious. It should not have. The State Department, throughout the tenures of Secretaries Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, has been second only to the White House itself in championing the Muslim Brotherhood, whose promotion of sharia and project to forbid notice of the Islamic doctrinal roots of Islamic terrorism are amply reflected in the manual.

The airbrushing of jihad is also familiar. It is the same spin I discussed here in 2010 when then-White House counterterrorism czar (and now-CIA director) John Brennan claimed that we must not “describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’” because “jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam” that merely means “to purify oneself or one’s community.”

In point of fact, according to the authoritative sharia manual Reliance of the Traveller, which has been endorsed by scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo (the seat of Sunni scholarship since the tenth century) and by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (the Muslim Brotherhood’s think-tank), “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims.” As Answering Islam’s Yoel Natan has recounted, jihad is referred to in 164 verses of the Koran, almost exclusively in terms of combat.

Moreover, if – even as jihadists are rampaging – you want to indulge the Brennan/Obama administration fantasy that jihad has evolved, Brennan’s anodyne rendering of the concept is hopelessly flawed. I explained why in the 2010 column:

Jihad is, always and everywhere, the mission to implement, spread, or defend sharia, the Islamic legal code. It is not exclusively violent; an army doesn’t need to be violent if its enemies are willing to give ground. But jihad only “means to purify oneself or one’s community” in a very narrow sense. It is not the syrupy quest to become a better person but the command to become a better Muslim; it is not the smiley-face mission to “purify” one’s community of crime but the command to cleanse one’s community of non-Islamic influences.

The inextricable bond between jihad and sharia is also easily explained. In Muslim doctrine, sharia is deemed the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society. Islam’s designs are hegemonic: Even in its less threatening iterations, it is taken as a given that believers must call all of humanity to the faith. What separates the true moderates from the faux moderates and the terrorists are the lengths to which one is willing to go in carrying out that injunction. That it is an injunction, however, is not open to debate.

Our political leaders can continue to trivialize jihad as if it were some benign struggle to brush after every meal. They can continue to ignore the core tenets that make sharia antithetical to a free, self-determining society. But they can’t do that and do the only job we need them to do: protect our lives and our liberties.

Again, if the State Department, the administration, and the Beltway political class are going to keep looking at Islamists –i.e.,Islamic supremacists who promote sharia – as part of the counterterrorism solution rather than a big part of the anti-American, anti-Western liberalism problem, we are never going to get out of our own way.

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CAIR Goes to Washington

Daniel Pipes writes at NRO:

André Carson, Islamists’ Choice for the House of Representatives

In politics, the adage goes, follow the money. And so, data abound for contributions from trial lawyers, insurance brokers, and even optometrists.

But what about Islamists, those Muslims who seek to replace the Constitution with the Koran and apply Islamic law in its entirety and severity — who, in other words, seek not just to tweak the tax code but to change the nature of the United States?

Until now, their campaign contributions have been unknown. A new initiative of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch provides a first look at the dimensions of this lobby, using a sortable database. The Islamist Money in Politics (IMIP) project finds that, over the past 15 years, prominent figures associated with six leading American Islamist organizations have donated almost $700,000 to federal U.S. candidates.

Those six are the

• Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
• Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)
• Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)
• Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA)
• Muslim American Society (MAS)
• Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)

Associates of CAIR lead the way in dollar terms, making over $430,000 in campaign contributions to candidates for federal office. That’s a nice piece of change from a group named as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in America’s largest terror-financing case, in which the federal judge found “ample evidence” of CAIR’s links to Hamas.

Overall, Islamist money is relatively minor in the forthcoming 2014 congressional elections, but IMIP information has several benefits. It holds politicians accountable for accepting funds from a soiled source. It signals the Islamist lobby’s affections and intentions. And it tells voters who takes money from individuals linked to enemies of the United States and its allies.

In Indiana, Democratic representative André Carson has received almost $34,000 from Islamist sources for his congressional runs since 2008. In contrast, his Republican opponent this November, newcomer Catherine Ping, has received not a dime from them. That’s the same Carson who appeared at the 2012 annual ICNA–MAS convention, where he encouraged American schools to look “at the model we have in our madrassas, . . . where the foundation is the Qur’an.”

In Michigan’s hotly contested race for an open U.S. Senate seat, Islamist donors this cycle have donated $2,576 to Republican Terri Lynn Land, and over three times as much to Democrat Gary Peters ($8,200). We now know who the Islamists like best in Michigan.

This fits a larger pattern. In the 2013 and 2014 federal campaigns, Islamists gave Democrats $57,408 and only $3,326 to Republicans. That’s a ratio of 17 to 1.

Thanks to Islamist Money in Politics, the sun has begun to shine on this budding arena of Islamist influence. Future investigations will go beyond the six organizations and also look into state and local candidates, thereby exposing the ultimate in tainted political contributions.

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Peace Through Death

Rev. James V. Schall, S.J has taken the issue with ISIS head-on at Crisis Magazine.

The Islamic State and the broader jihadist movements throughout the world that agree with it are, I think, correct in their basic understanding of Islam. Plenty of evidence is found, both in the long history of early Muslim military expansion and in its theoretical interpretation of the Qur’an itself, to conclude that the Islamic State and its sympathizers have it basically right. The purpose of Islam, with the often violent means it can and does use to accomplish it, is to extend its rule, in the name of Allah, to all the world. The world cannot be at “peace” until it is all Muslim. The “terror” we see does not primarily arise from modern totalitarian theories, nationalism, or from anywhere else but what is considered, on objective evidence, to be a faithful reading of a mission assigned by Allah to the Islamic world, which has been itself largely procrastinating about fulfilling its assigned mission.

To look elsewhere for an explanation is simply not to see what the Islamic State and its friends are telling us about why they act as they do. The tendency among pragmatic Western thinkers, locked into their own narrow views, is to exclude any such motivation as an excuse of raw power. This view shows the intellectual shortcomings of Western leaders and the narrowness of much Western thought.

Jihadism, as it were, is a religious movement before it is anything else. Allah does grant violence a significant place. It is over the truth of this position, or better the inability to disprove it, that the real controversy lies. A recent essay in the American Thinker calculated that over the years of its expansion, from its beginning in the seventh and eighth centuries, some 250 million people have been killed in wars and persecutions caused by Islam. Nothing else in the history of the world, including the totalitarianisms of the last century, has been so lethal.

Read the rest here: “It’s Time to Take the Islamic State Seriously”.