Dearborn the Sharia-Free City

Last week Nevada candidate for U.S. Senate Sharron Angle caught some flak for remarking about Sharia in Dearborn. When a tape of the comments surfaced the media whooped with glee and went to work trying to make her look stupid. Angle is supported by the Tea Party and just might save America from any more of Harry Reid and his insufferable scolding. She must be stopped!

Her foo poo? Acknowledging that radical Islam has had an unhealthy influence in American cities and towns, including Dearborn.

Mayor Jack O’Reilly took issue with the way Angle said that Dearborn wasn’t under the Constitution (which isn’t what Angle said), and called her remarks “Shameful.” He appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 last Friday, to, as Said Deep said on his blog, “set the record straight.”

As for setting the record straight, all O’Reilly really did was scoff away the idea that there’s Sharia in Dearborn. Hell, Jack says “it isn’t even talked about in Dearborn.” While he was at it, he denied that there is much in the way of “hardly any Sharia anywhere in the Middle East, there’s only about three countries that still carry that out.” (Good luck finding that gem being blogged and denounced in the media).

O’Reilly obviously has a limited concept of Sharia to strictly a government system, such that if it doesn’t look like Saudi Arabia or Iran, then there’s no Sharia. The idea that it can be implemented in small doses doesn’t enter his head.

But the publicity had its effect: The Mayor has now officially declared Dearborn a Sharia-free zone. (Discussion question: If I’m a devout Muslim living in Dearborn, and I love Sharia law and try to practice it, am I offended right now? Discuss why not.)

O’Reilly next sent Sharron Angle a letter explaining that Muslims fought in the War of Independence, and offering to take her on a tour of the Rouge Plant. More accurately, he said he would “personally escort” her to “any venue she you choose to visit in our community.” Jack! You old dog! Maybe they could see the old La Shish, or drive by the old Al-Mabarrat Charitable Organization, both closed up for supporting Hezbollah -- both in obedience to Sharia. Or maybe the footbaths at UM-Dearborn). Then they could cruise Marshalls and ask one of the many chador-clad customers why she’s dressed that way -- what with there being no Sharia in Dearborn.

They shouldn’t miss dropping by the Islamic Center of America, to see what a Sharia-free Shia mosque looks like. Just make sure Sharron puts on a headscarf first before stepping foot inside.

In an interview with the Press and Guide Mayor O’Reilly says all these claims about creeping Sharia in Dearborn all have their source in “a group calling themselves the Acts 17 Apologetics. They are the first people who started claims of sharia law in Dearborn. In their own minds, they are experts on the Koran and the Bible, who think their interpretation is the correct one … they think Muslims should not be allowed to stay in the country unless they convert. You want to talk about unconstitutional? Nothing is less constitutional than that.”

I’ve never heard one scrap of evidence that Acts 17 stands for the proposition that unless Muslims convert they should be deported.

More important, many of us in this area were saying Sharia is spreading in Dearborn long before we ever heard of these missionaries. I’ve been blogging here since 2006. Debbie Schlussel has blogged about Dearborn much longer than that. The awareness amongst Dearborn residents of the threat of radical Islam was awakened, just as it was for the rest of the country, on September 11, 2001.

I think what we have here are two politicians responding to questions for which they weren’t prepared. In the Mayor’s case, he sounds as if he simply doesn’t know, and really doesn’t want to know, what’s going on with Islam in Dearborn. All he wants is to keep CAIR from his office door and his Arab constituents from being unhappy.

As to what Sharron Angle said, I think she was right. With all the knucklehead second-guessing of anything anyone says within range of YouTube or other media outlets, I’m a big proponent of not reading too much into incomplete, poorly worded statements that are, to say the least, ambiguous. I’m not sure what Angle meant by “militant terrorist situation.” But the context was an audience question referring to a TV broadcast about “Muslims wanting to take over the United States,” and “taking over a city in Michigan.” Her reference to Frankford, Texas was clearly in error, so I’d give her the benefit of the doubt that she had another community in mind and inadvertently referred to Frankford instead.

What she did say clearly was that the situation with militant terrorism, “isn’t a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it.” That happens to be my own view of it. And her declaration that American cities should be under Constitutional law, not Sharia law, is absolutely correct. That she said the problem was not widespread, but still a concern, ought to spare her being portrayed in the media as an hysteric. But could we really expect that kind of restraint from the media when reporting on conservative candidates?

O’Reilly’s denials, on the other hand, were made in what should have been the cold light of day. To a fault, he simply wants to focus elsewhere than on the controversies arising from Islam. His letter to Angle shows how much he’d rather mention “The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, which are visited each year by 1.5 million people from across the world”, and all “the automotive workers who were flocking to Detroit to earn the unheard of wage of $5 a day at the For Motor Co. Model ‘T’ Plant.”

We all haven’t forgotten that Mayor Jack sat on the story about the arrest of Houssein Zorkot for four days because he didn’t want us to connect terrorist activity up with September 11.

To say categorically there’s no Sharia in Dearborn is like saying categorically that there are no foreign cars in Dearborn, because Dearborn “has been the home of the Ford Motor Company since 1917!” The two facts can co-exist, and they do. Sharia can still be alive and well in Dearborn regardless of how many boys at Fordson High dress like gangbangers, or how many churches still have their doors open.

But the Mayor has no idea about any of this, does he?

Take It Up With Your Psychiatrist

I don’t care what anybody says about Rudy Giuliani. When it comes to fighting back against jihad, I still think he’s great. And he’s not afraid of exercising his free speech. From The Hill:

Giuliani questions NPR funding

BLUE BELL, Pa. — Rudy Giuliani defended former NPR analyst Juan Williams Friday, saying Williams was fired for simply explaining his feelings.

Juan Williams just expressed something that a lot of people feel, Giuliani told the crowd at a campaign rally for Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey. And he gets fired for it?

Earlier this week in an interview on Fox News, Williams said seeing passengers in Muslim garb on a plane makes him nervous. “Look Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country, Williams told Bill O'Reilly in an interview. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Shortly after the comments, NPR decided to sever its contract with Williams.

The resulting firestorm saw several Republican lawmakers calling on Congress to defund NPR.

Giuliani appeared to join that call Friday, calling into question NPR's funding.

“We put taxpayer money into that censorship program,” Giuliani said of NPR.Giuliani, who was mayor of New York during 9/11, reminded the crowd that on the evening of September 11, 2001, he warned New Yorkers not to single out Arab-Americans.

But the former mayor added that it is irresponsible to ignore the threat of Islamic extremists, noting he doesn't understand why anyone would be offended at that notion.

“I don't care who's offended by it,” Giuliani said. “And if you are offended by it, there's something wrong with you.”

PBS and CAIR Combat 'Defamation' of Islam

You shouldn’t miss this Big Government post on the relationship between public broadcasting and CAIR in combating “defamation” of Islam:

PBS Sends Senior Editor as Presenter to CAIR Conference on ‘Defaming Islam”

Posted by Christine Brim Oct 23rd 2010

The news about NPR firing Juan Williams is opening the eyes of many in the media and public to the extraordinary rules of censorship that CAIR, other Muslim Brotherhood groups, and the “Establishment Left” impose to restrict free speech. But it’s not just NPR that responds to CAIR’s political pressure which may in itself be a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. On October 9, 2010 – less than two weeks before NPR fired Williams on October 21 – the federally-funded sister agency Public Broadcasting System (PBS) sent Joel Schwartzberg, Senior Editor of PBS Interactive to be a presenter at the CAIR Leadership Conference preceding their 16th annual national banquet.

Here’s a copy of the 36 page CAIR program for the conference and banquet. . . Page 4 lists Schwartzberg in the 9:15 -10:45 a.m. session (Room B): “Becoming a Dynamic Public Speaker (Room B).” Page 6 provides Schwartzberg’s biography under the title “CAIR Leadership Conference Trainers 2010.”

There’s more. PBS sent Schwartzberg to train “CAIR Leadership” knowing that CAIR had advertised the conference for several weeks listing the #1 reason to attend as, “You’re tired of seeing Islam defamed and want to do something about it.” . . . [V]iew the entire saved pdf of the conference promotional web page.

To make this clear: PBS sent Schwartzberg to train “CAIR leadership” at a conference held specifically to “do something about” the alleged problem of “Islam defamed.” The use of the concept of “defamation” of Islam should be a red flag alert to Congressional funders of PBS: CAIR’s conference publicity followed the instructions of the Organization of the Islamic Conference to enforce Shariah blasphemy and defamation laws in the U.S. – in this case, with the support of publicly funded PBS staff.

The rest here.

If Renee Montagne Broadcasts in a Niqab, and No One Can See It, Does It Make a Sound?

It’s been a while since CAIR’s had a victory. But credit -- no, blame -- for the firing of Juan Williams by NPR has to go CAIR, at least in significant part. I know George Soros and Media Matters played their role. But out of all them it’s CAIR whose specific object is to halt all criticism of Islam in the United States.

They haven’t done it yet. And getting a figure as popular and as well-respected by both liberals and conservatives as Juan Williams fired is backfiring on CAIR. It’s already backfired on NPR, whose online “Contact us” function crashed beneath the hail of negative comments in response to the action.

On C-Span’s Washington Journal on Friday I noticed that among the liberal callers, who invariably express hatred for Fox News and abide by dhimmi rules when discussing Islam, no one thought firing Williams was the right thing to do.

But getting Williams fired shows CAIR still has a lot of power to intimidate.

CAIR and Ron Scott Want To Know: 'Where's Mike Nifong When We Need Him?'

The Detroit Free Press ran this last week:

Group slams U.S. report on imam's death
FREE PRESS STAFF

The Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality today called the Justice Department announcement Wednesday that there were no civil rights violations in the shooting death of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah “disingenuous and insincere.”

Ron Scott, the coalition’s lead spokesman, said the Justice Department released the statement clearing federal agents as acting appropriately in the Oct. 28 killing at the same time federal civil rights attorneys from Washington were meeting in Detroit with Abdullah’s family, Muslim and African-American leaders and the coalition.

“While we and members of the community were attempting to meet in good faith … they were already releasing a statement to the media that th actions of the law enforcement officers involved in the Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah killing were justified. This compromised any real sense of objectivity and consideration which may have emerged from our discussions,” Scott said in a prepared statement today.

“How can you discuss the sentiment of the community and its significance while a news release is presented which indicates that you have already made you’re your decision? This is disingenuous and insincere,” he said.

Investigating a possible civil rights violation is no different than investigating any other possible violation of law: the subject either violated the law or he didn’t. Investigative findings mustn’t go outside the facts of what happened, nor how the law defines a violation.

In other words, what the “community” feels about it all shouldn’t count for a damn thing.

Any society committed to the rule of law would recognize it as the worst possible injustice – far worse even than a sloppy investigation that overlooks actual evidence of guilt – to accuse an innocent person of wrongdoing just to satisfy some baying interest group’s appetite for raw meat.

Nothing in the response of CAIR or Ron Scott’s Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality has made any sense, but this response to the DOJ findings beats all. As he denounces the findings as “insincere” Scott asks the rhetorical question, “How can you discuss the sentiment of the community and its significance while a news release is presented which indicates that you have already made you’re your decision?” But unless the investigators’ decision about the facts was going to be weighted one way or the other based on community sentiment about what happened, there’s no reason at all not to make the decision and release it regardless of such sentiment.

Unless there’s a tacit understanding that the facts will take a back seat to mollycoddling a favored minority. (See Mike Nifong).

It’s not the job of the civil rights division to find out what makes X minority community ifeel mistreated and then dutifully find an example of X’s mistreatment to punish. Can Scott really be serious that the DOJ was supposed to let negotiations with Muslim leaders determine whether or not to charge federal agents with civil rights violations, regardless of what the evidence shows?

Their idea that “good faith” meetings between Justice Department officials and Muslim leaders to “discuss the sentiment of the community” could ever play any legitimate role in what is supposed to be a fact-finding investigation shows just how lacking in good faith these groups actually are.

A Horse Is a Horse, Except When He's an Undercover Fascist Tea Party Spy

(Mrs. Clancy and I went to see “Secretariat” this past Saturday night. We both liked it. But this isn’t a review. TRC).

Some folks are forever being accused of “Islamophobia.” Depending on who it is hurling the charge, “Islamophobia” can mean anything from criticizing Islam -- at all -- to drawing attention to the rising mountain of evidence that there are a very large number of Muslims on the planet in love with the idea of either reducing us to slavery or killing us.

What is never meant by the term “Islamophobia” is what, logically, should be meant, which is a strong irrational fear of something that poses little or no danger, in this case, Islam.

I’m no psychiatrist, but I’ll bet there are few case histories where an arachnophobic actually has video of 19 spiders knocking down two 100-story towers full of people or suicide-bombing a bus full of Jewish schoolkids.

That aside, there is something like a strong, irrational fear of Christians going around, and it’s getting worse. Time was it took a depiction of a babe in a manger or a cross to constitute an intimidating crossing of the line. Now people are going over the edge if a female movie lead wears a pearl necklace or a black character plays his role in the script without once keeping it real about how his brother was shot down by police in a case of racial mistaken identity.

As one example of this heightened paranoia, I point out last week’s review by Andrew O’Hehir of Salon of the new Disney film, “Secretariat”, "Secretariat": A gorgeous, creepy American myth. In his review O’Hehir believes he recognizes “a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse.”

Roger Ebert, the film reviewer at the Chicago Sun Times, found O’Hehir’s review so “bizarre”and “insane” he felt the need to write a response. O’Hehir’s review, writes Ebert, “resembles a fevered conspiracy theory”:

In this example , we do not find proof that Obama is a Muslim Communist born in Kenya. No, the news is worse than that. It involves Secretariat, a horse who up until now we innocently thought of as merely very fast. We learn the horse is a carrier not merely of Ron Turcotte's 130 pounds, but of Nazism, racism, Tea Party ideology and the dark side of Christianity.

Oh, and I forgot the Ku Klux Klan: “The movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose,” O'Hehir writes, “...as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.”

O’Hehir also finds it awful that “Secretariat” -- which is set in 1972-73 -- devotes insufficient screentime to the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings taking place at the same time. But that’s not really phobic, just an example of a liberal’s political filter at work. (“You could hardly pick a period in post-Civil War American history more plagued by chaos and division and general insanity (well, OK -- you could pick right now.”). When you view all reality through a lens of progressive values, no story is a “true” story unless it drags in meaningful references to race, gender (sic), homelessness, war, AIDS, and the environmental crisis. For that matter, I, too, also picked up on the way “Secretariat” failed to include any references to the wildly popular “Sonny & Cher” TV show.

Ebert, when he’s finished taking apart O’Hehir’s review, confesses “I have no theories about why it was written.”



Well, I have. O’Hehir had a phobic reaction to this film. He feels films like this are inviting audiences to believe in something, “believe in -- well, in something unspecified but probably pretty scary.” And the manifestation of his phobia is his genuine belief that “Secretariat” is a propaganda tool chockfull of subversive Christian themes and Tea-Party values.

Although the troubling racial subtext is more deeply buried here than in "The Blind Side" (where it's more like text, period), "Secretariat" actually goes much further, presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord. In the world of this movie, strong-willed and independent-minded women like Chenery are ladies first (she's like a classed-up version of Sarah Palin feminism), left-wing activism is an endearing cute phase your kids go through (until they learn the hard truth about inheritance taxes), and all right-thinking Americans are united in their adoration of a Nietzschean Überhorse, a hero so superhuman he isn't human at all. . . . Big Red himself is a big, handsome MacGuffin, symbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power.

Look, write this shit in college it only means you’re sucking up for a good grade; write this way in middle age and you have a seriously distorted point of view. I’m only surprised O’Hehir overlooked how Secretariat’s owner, Penny Chenery, played by Diane Lane, has a last name diabolically only a single letter away from that of The Devil Himself -- Bush-Chenery, anyone? -- now how’s that for subtext?

Ebert does a much more effective job of describing O’Hehir’s breakdown than I could do, except he keeps flashing his own liberal credentials, (“I am a liberal” . . . “a lifelong liberal”. . . .”an admirer of Darwin”. . .), and takes an unnecessary shot at Sarah Palin (who, like “Vietnam” and “Nixon”, is never mentioned in the film).

And you can count on it, it’s Palin who terrifies O’Hehir, and behind Palin, the Tea Party, and behind the Tea Party, Christianity, even in its most vestigial form as the erstwhile teacher of basic morals and manners to the secular culture. O’Hehir wants you to know it was Randall Wallace who directed this movie, “one of mainstream Hollywood's few prominent Christians, [who] has spoken openly about his faith and his desire to make movies that appeal to "people with middle-American values.”

Spoken openly about his faith? Go figure, it’s Hollyweird, right? Why not just French kiss Mel Gibson at the Oscars? (Oh, yeah, Gibson’s not welcome any more). Wallace’s shamelessly “out” Christian faith is why O’Hehir thinks “it's legitimate to wonder exactly what Christian-friendly and ‘middle-American’ inspirational values are being conveyed here, or whether they're just providing cover for some fairly ordinary right-wing ideology and xenophobia.”

O’Hehir even imagines that the film’s antagonist, “...the villainous, swarthy and vaguely terrorist-flavored Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Sham, Secretariat's archrival. (Even the horse's name is evil!”), was planted in the picture, probably to get middle Americans to oppose the Ground Zero mosque.

Ebert’s measured response is that the actor really does look like Pancho Martin. “And as for the hapless Sham, the horse with the evil name, for Christ's sake, O'Hehir, that was the horse's damn name.”

What we’re witnessing is nothing other than O’Hehir’s phobic reaction to Christianity, even if it’s a watered-down, harmless version of the faith as a source of homely virtues like perservence, loyalty, and family affection. We’re at the point now where if some critics so much as glimpse a “housewife” onscreen pouring her husband’s coffee, there’d better damn well be a reference to race riots or My Lai or a pair of mopey homosexuals nearby to provide balance and “context.”

Otherwise, it’s just middle-class xenophobia. Otherwise, you may as well just be reading to us out of the Bible.

Dingell's Overdue Retirement

It’s just possible that John Dingell may lose the seat that, between him and his father, John Sr., has been a Dingell family heirloom since the elder Dingell first won it in 1932. That means only Democrats, and only a certain flavor of Democrats, have been represented in this district for 78 years. Queen Victoria, arguably a more impressive ruler, reigned for a mere 64.

Dingell has most recently been feted in Washington as the grandfather of Obamacare. That's because he’s spent his life (shoot, he’s spent my life, as he’s been in Congress since I was born), trying to get a national health care plan through Congress. It takes a long time, Dingell explained to Paul W. Smith, to pass legislation “to control the people.”



Compared to some of Michigan’s other Democratic officeholders-for-life, Dingell has been less outspoken, showy, and outrageous. But now that Rob Steele is forcing him to actually run for the office he’s held by ancient Michigan custom for nearly six decades, a nasty side is coming out.

Never mind all that. It’s just wrong for a congressional district to be associated with one name since Prohibition.

'Ehr Kumt'

I learned about this Rosh Hashanah sermon, “Ehr Kumt,” given by Rabbi Shalom Lewis of Atlanta on The Michael Medved Show.

Rabbi Lewis is a self-described “dues-paying, card carrying member of the ACLU,” who voted against George W. Bush, and is still a registered Democrat. He was preaching to his primarily liberal congregation. But his urgent message is not one we usually hear from that quarter: “We are at war. We are at war with an enemy as savage, as voracious, as heartless as the Nazis but one wouldn't know it from our behavior.”

The sermon is quite lengthy, but I recommend following the link to get all of it.

But here are some highlights:

In WWII we won because we got it. We understood who the enemy was and we knew that the end had to be unconditional and absolute. We did not stumble around worrying about offending the Nazis. We did not measure every word so as not to upset our foe. We built planes and tanks and battleships and went to war to win‚ ... to rid the world of malevolence.

We are at war‚ yet too many stubbornly and foolishly don't put the pieces together and refuse to identify the evil doers. We are circumspect and disgracefully politically correct.

Let me mince no words in saying that from Fort Hood to Bali, from Times Square to London, from Madrid to Mumbai, from 9/11 to Gaza, the murderers, the barbarians are radical Islamists.To camouflage their identity is sedition. To excuse their deeds is contemptible. To mask their intentions is unconscionable.

And,

We must be diligent students of history and not sit in ash cloth at the waters of Babylon weeping. We cannot be hypnotized by eloquent-sounding rhetoric that soothes our heart but endangers our soul. We cannot be lulled into inaction for fear of offending the offenders. Radical Islam is the scourge and this must be cried out from every mountain top. From sea to shining sea, we must stand tall, prideful of our stunning decency and moral resilience. Immediately after 9/11 how many mosques were destroyed in America? None. After 9/11, how many Muslims were killed in America? None. After 9/11, how many anti-Muslim rallies were held in America? None. And yet, we apologize. We grovel. We beg forgiveness.

And,

If nothing else stirs us. If nothing else convinces us, let Bibi Aisha's mutilated face be the face of Islamic radicalism. Let her face shake up even the most complacent and naive among us. In the holy crusade against this ultimate evil, pictures of Bibi Aisha's disfigurement should be displayed on billboards, along every highway from Route 66 to the Autobahn, to the Transarabian Highway. Her picture should be posted on every lobby wall from Tokyo to Stockholm to Rio. On every network, at every commercial break, Bibi Aisha's face should appear with the caption - "Radical Islamic savages did this." And underneath - "This ad was approved by Hamas, by Hezbollah, by Taliban, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, by Islamic Jihad, by Fatah al Islam, by Magar Nodal Hassan, by Richard Reid, by Ahmanijad, by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, by Osama bin Laden, by Edward Said, by The Muslim Brotherhood, by Al Queda, by CAIR."

And,

Moral confusion is a deadly weakness and it has reached epic proportions in the West; from the Oval Office to the UN, from the BBC to Reuters to MSNBC, from the New York Times to Le Monde, from university campuses to British teachers unions, from the International Red Cross to Amnesty International, from Goldstone to Elvis Costello, from the Presbyterian Church to the Archbishop of Canterbury.There is a message sent and consequences when our president visits Turkey and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and not Israel.There is a message sent and consequences when free speech on campus is only for those championing Palestinian rights.

There is a message sent and consequences when the media deliberately doctors and edits film clips to demonize Israel.

There is a message sent and consequences when the UN blasts Israel relentlessly, effectively ignoring Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, North Korea, China and other noxious states.

There is a message sent and consequences when liberal churches are motivated by Liberation Theology, not historical accuracy.

There is a message sent and consequences when murderers and terrorists are defended by the obscenely transparent "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

Beware of Sheep in Wolves' Clothing

The Detroit Free Press on Tuesday published two editorials on the long-overdue release of the investigation that exonerates FBI agents in the shooting death of the radical Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah. Would it surprise you to learn that both opinion pieces call for further investigation, and question the use of government informants?

Jeff Gerritt wrote the blog version, and we expect he may have written the print version, too. Gerritt has been CAIR’s chief water carrier at the Free Press on the Abdullah case since about the time the imam’s rigor mortis started setting in. Now, when CAIR’s tattered battle flag has fallen in the campaign to transform Abdullah’s death into an FBI assassination, Gerritt has scooped it up again.

His blog article, (“Blazing big government? Don't forget Abdullah case”), is meant to needle the “Tea Party set,” whom he tongue-in-cheekily advises ought to be asking some hard questions about the government excess involved, like “how many millions of dollars did the feds spend on the Abdullah case, including two years of infiltrating the mosque with undercover informants?” We’ll see if Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin take the bait.

But what Gerritt really cares about is not government waste, but “the use of informants” by federal investigators. This is the real hobbyhorse Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR and the ISNA have been riding non-stop the past couple of years. As soon as President Obama, in his speech to the Turkish Parliament shortly after taking office, betrayed his weakness to the Islamic world, the Ikhwan in America, including the “American Muslim Alliance (AMA), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), Muslim American Society-Freedom Foundation (MAS-FF), Muslim Student Association-National (MSA-N), Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC),” issued a joint statement demanding an end, among other things, to “1. Infiltration of mosques and systematic manipulation of Muslim religious affairs, 2. Use of agents provocateurs to trap unsuspecting Muslim youth.”

Steve Emerson relates how:

This message was made crystal clear by Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - Los Angeles last year at an Anaheim, California mosque:

"We're here today to say our mosques are off limits. Our Koran is off limits. Our youth, who they [the FBI] try to radicalize, are off limits. Now is the time to tell them, 'We're not going to let this happen anymore.'" (“New Interactive Terror History Map”).

Michigan-CAIR’s Dawud Walid has been wearing out the same theme, using the media (like Jeff Gerritt) to describe “agent provocateurs who entice people into criminal activities.”

CAIR even got Congressman John Conyers in on the act, making him agree to call “for the DOJ to review the FBI’s current usage of confidential informants in houses of worship.”

Comically enough, CAIR’s Ayloush:

has claimed that the FBI is "paying convicted felons to 'infiltrate' mosques to radicalize Muslim youths and instigate talks about terrorism." In an interview with Southern California Public Radio, Ayloush said the FBI has been "hiring shady characters and individuals to try to instigate against the Muslim community. And instigate acts of violence to ruin the reputation of the Muslim community."

Abdullah was a convicted felon radicalizing Muslim youths and talking terrorist trash. The FBI sting that led to Abdullah’s death was about receiving stolen merchandise, which Abdullah told an informant would be good to sell at his mosque. Abdullah had previously been to prison for felonious assault and weapons violations, and he was no less violent or hateful after he got out. He vowed to his Muslim flock that “he would not go peacefully should law enforcement ever come to get him.” And we all know Abdullah, 53 at the time of his departure for Paradise, wasn’t a “Muslim youth.” So was he really enticed into that warehouse? It’s not as if the FBI offered him 72 brown-eyed virgins.

The point is, it would be hard to find a character any shadier than Abdullah. If he had been the one who turned informant against his crooked colleagues, you can bet Walid would be complaining that a guy with Abdullah’s criminal history was an agent provocateur. As it is he was widely praised as a martyr and a spiritual model for Muslims.

The Freep’s second editorial, (“Feds should review imam shooting”), criticizes the use of government informants, too. But instead of using the “government excess” gag it takes the position that the AG report, in spite of clearing the FBI agents of any wrongdoing, “does not close the book” on the matter. This regardless of the editorial’s own admission that the AG’s office did “a thorough and honest job.”

Well, if a thorough and honest investigation cleared the agents of wrongdoing, then the book ought to be closed, n’est-ce pas? But if you’re at all familiar with liberal ways, or for that matter with children wanting bedtime stories, or even with the 2000 presidential election, then you know how this works. Liberals never want the book to be closed, no matter how late it is, or no matter how many times you’ve read them Green Eggs and Ham. Because once the book is closed they’ll have to get under the covers and go to sleep. Read it again. Maybe it ends differently this time.

The Freep’s last-ditch hope for staying up past bedtime is to scoff that “Nothing short of a complete and independent investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will restore credibility to ongoing fact-finding.”

How can the Freep be unaware that the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ under President Obama is a political cesspool that has driven out all vestiges of either independence or integrity?

Oh, that’s right: because it wasn’t reported in the media.

Abdullah's Son Insists His Father Was No Threat

The late Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah’s son said on Friday that the Dearborn Police Department report about the incident of his father’s death “sounds a little suspicious to me.”

Bet you didn’t see that coming.

The DPD report reaches the same conclusions as the Michigan Attorney General’s report on the shooting that was finally released last week.

Abdullah’s son, Omar Regan, said Friday that his father was shot when he was not a threat. “Why would you send a dog to attack him if he was lying down on his stomach?” (“Shooting report mirrors state’s”).

The AG’s report states that, after failing to obey repeated commands by agents to lie down and show his hands, Abdullah lay down on his stomach, concealing a handgun beneath him. Agents then gave him repeated commands that if he refused to show his hands the dog would be deployed. It was later learned that the handgun Abdullah was concealing with his body was loaded with 17 rounds. He rolled over after the dog was set upon him, and fired three rounds.

At that point the agents who ended up returning fire were standing as close as five to twelve feet of where Abdullah was laying. Some or all of the rounds Abdullah fired, in the direction of the agents, mortally wounded the K-9. Any one of Abdullah’s rounds could have just as easily killed an agent.

He was a threat.

So We Don't Get French Benefits?

That one FedEx ad a few years(?) ago was alway good for a laugh.

In “Wrong,” a guy is chastised by his co-workers for being a source of misinformation. “Steely Dan is not one person,” berates one guy. “We get fringe benefits, not French benefits, it’s not the Leaning Tower of Pizza, and James Dean was an actor—Jimmy Dean makes sausages.” The guy is then told that he’s wrong by thinking that FedEx ground is too expensive. “So we don’t get French benefits?” he replies.

Speaking of French benefits, but much less funny, is a recent newspaper exchange between MI-CAIR’s Dawud Walid and Detroit News editor, Nolan Finley. Walid, ungrateful for the cozy chair by the hearth the Detroit News has prepared for him these days, wrote an angry letter responding to Nolan Finley’s plea of a couple weeks ago that Muslims try harder to obey the Sermon on the Mount. Both of them embrace the “fringe” defense of jihadist violence. Writes Walid:

Nolan Finley's column, "Islam must turn the other cheek," (Sept. 12), was contradictory and short sighted, to say the least.

Islam is not responsible for the "lunatic fringe" that is protesting our nation because of the now canceled Quran burning of Terry Jones. A fringe by definition anyway means outside of the majority mainstream.

American Muslims have overwhelmingly acted responsibly in the face of hatred spewed against us on cable television programs and radio talk shows and by bigots who desecrate our mosques and the Quran.

Walid fails to address the way Finley’s headline about Islam “turning the other cheek” clumsily confuses two utterly dissimilar religions. Not that I’m going to attempt a digression explaining how Christianity is the only faith that actually counsels “turning the other cheek.” I simply can’t bear labeling the Gospel with that insipid and empty prattle about a “religion of peace.” Christianity may bring peace, or it might bring the sword. Either way, it’s true. Anyhow, I think peacefulness as a religious attribute is overrated. As Mr. Beaver replied when asked if Narnia’s Lion ruler, Aslan, was safe: “Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”

When I complain that Islam isn’t a religion of peace, it’s not the violence I’m objecting to. I abhor it, but I understand it. When you worship a god with as many insecurities as Allah, and who keeps commanding you to be violent too if you want to make it to Paradise, violence is going to result. It’s not the logic of violence that bothers me, but the lying about the nature of Islam. As Robert Spencer has pointed out, if any nonMuslim dares deny that Islam is a religion of peace, “they rain down the charges of "Islamophobia," "hate," "bigotry" and the like. But when a Muslim says it, they utter nary a peep.”

Nolan Finley still believes that at the heart of Islam beats the sincere Christian message of overcoming evil with good. From, the sound of it, and like so many journalists, (among the worst of whom is Bill O’Reilly), Finley has absorbed the secularist myth that all religions share the same values and the same goals, i.e., that all religions, underneath, are some form of Christianity. Get this wrong, and all the other errors follow as a matter of course.

Accordingly, as Finley sees it, all Muslims need is to “grow up” and learn to accept “antagonism.” After all, didn’t Christ teach his disciples to “turn the other cheek?” Christ, Mohammed. Eh! Same difference. Regardless of Finley’s training in Christianity, he clearly is not a student of the Prophet if he imagines Allah’s spokesman had any intention of tolerating antagonism.

Finley at least started out on the right track when he probed the false “fringe” logic usually deployed to neutralize Islam's violence: “But the lunatic fringe is apparently wide enough to trigger an extreme overreaction from our nation's top offices to a silly little publicity stunt.” Then Finley dropped it. Too bad.

Because I think he was wrong about how wide that so-called “fringe” is. It’s a whole lot wider than just something that triggers overreaction from U.S. security officials. It’s wide enough to knock down the World Trade Center, draw us into two wars, enslave hundreds of millions of people, dominate the news cycle for going on a decade, keep every Western power on a permanent state of alert, and will soon offer the world the first atomic attack since 1945.

The problem with conceding CAIR and the rest of the world’s Islamist front men the false premise that supporters of violent jihadism are just a tiny fringe is that the whole argument about Islam falls right along with it. Consider how, after scapegoating 16,000-plus terrorist attacks onto an Islamic “lunatic fringe,” Walid can bypass that gorilla and get on the with the serious business of blaming the whole thing on “intolerance” and “bigotry” in the USA.

Don’t look now, but he’s just completely removed Islam from the whole discussion of the problem of Islamic violence. That’s why, in response to Finley’s condemnation of “a worldwide wave of bloodshed at the hands of offended radicals” in response to the Terry Jones kerfuffle, Walid can say that “Islam is not responsible for the ‘lunatic fringe’ that is protesting our nation.”

Obviously Islam is responsible. He may as well say the sun has nothing to do with sunburn. Even the most conservative estimates place worldwide support for violent jihad amongst the world’s Muslims at ten percent, which, as has been pointed out, of “1.4 billion Muslims is a lot of people.”

If you want to see a real fringe, a genuine insignificance of lunatic kooks, consider that Terry Jones’s church has only 50 members (and you can bet fewer than that active members). The recent vandalized mosques, and the Qu’ran burned in Lansing, were truly unrepresentative of anything like the American mainstream, and were almost certainly acts committed by individuals acting alone.

You can bet that the Lansing Qu’ran burner was not getting Internet guidance (and financing) from a well-funded and well-protected spiritual advisor in a foreign country (such as al-Awlaki) controlled by a government constituted along the same lunatic principles the arsonist happens to hold. There are no lunatic mosque-defacing graffiti artists who have like-minded counterparts ruling modern nations running three shifts to complete atomic bombs so they can destroy all the Jews in Israel.

Our lunatics may be deplorably ignorant, but they don’t control nuclear programs, Middle Eastern oil, or genocidal armies with long-range missiles.
Most important, when these minor intolerant outbursts take place in America, historically, no one dies. Yet Walid wants us to believe that American intolerance and bigotry, not that Muslim “lunatic fringe,” are the bigger threat on which we should focus.

There are fringes of 30 or 40 people, then there are fringes that form a crescent of 300 million around the eastern Mediterranean.

I can’t see why any thinking American goes along with the pretense that Islamic violence is the product of a small fringe of “hijackers” of a peaceful religion.

'What Would Mohammed Do?'

In his autobiographical, “Surprised by Joy,” C.S. Lewis described his momentous first meeting with the influential schoolmaster, Kirk (or “the Great Knock”). Kirk was a rationalist and an atheist, a rigorous logician. On his first encounter with Kirk while de-training in Surrey, the young Lewis, lost for anything better to discuss, off-handedly noted his surprise at the “wildness” of the Surrey countryside. Kirk promptly pounced on the description, wanting to know exactly what Lewis meant by the proposition, and upon what his expectations of the flora and fauna of Surrey had been based. Lewis was soon admitting it hadn’t been based on anything -- not “maps, or photographs or books” -- or anything else. Whereupon Lewis learned his first lesson on the hazards of baseless opinions.

“Do you not see, then,” concluded the Great Knock, “that your remark was meaningless? Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?”

A couple of recent incidents have revealed that Henry Payne, Detroit News editorial cartoonist and sometime commentator, has made friends with CAIR’s Dawud Walid. I don’t begrudge either man his friends, surely. It’s still a free country.

Wrote Payne on Friday:

A leading Detroit-area Muslim has condemned the threats against a Seattle Weekly cartoonist who has been forced into hiding for drawing Mohammed.

"This is unacceptable," says Dawud Walid, president of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islam Relations (CAIR). "We like to ask 'What would Mohammed do?', referring to the Muslim prophet's own pleading for tolerance when he was condemned for his point of view. (“Free speech thwarted in U.S. as cartoonist forced to hide”).

Here’s the thing: I’m no more going to buy that Walid believes in a Mohammed “pleading for tolerance when he was condemned for his point of view,” or that CAIR champions free speech, than I’m going to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Both the Qu-ran and Mohammed’s biographers have left no doubt that he exacted cruel, bloody revenge against those who criticized him, and inspired his followers to do the same.

It is a perennial CAIR propaganda point -- trotted out whenever Islam’s insatiable need for bloody revenge hits the news -- that the Prophet didn’t have an angry bone in his body. In this case it’s the insane calls for revenge against former Seattle Weekly cartoonist, Molly Norris, now in hiding, that has Walid painting Mohammed as an exemplar of Christian forbearance. A few years back CAIR national spokesman Ibrahim Hooper tried to deflect world Islam’s irrational rage over the Mohammed cartoons by telling the media, knowingly full well it was a lie, that the Prophet always responded to attacks on himself with kindness. (“Muhammad's Dead Poets Society — Peaceful Non-assassinations of Critics”).

Walid may well say that he and his brothers in the Ikhwan “like to ask ‘What would Mohammed do?,’” but the Ikhwan sure doesn’t like it when nonMuslims ask, because the answer isn’t very nice. CAIR is dedicated to slandering critics as Islamophobes and bigots in an attempt to shut them up. CAIR’s primary tactic is to silence criticism of Islam, whether it’s in the media, in law enforcement agencies, or even from terrified airline passengers who overhear Ikhwan agents staging a terrorist dry run.

Anyone from that organization taking a stand for free expression is prima facie proof of lying.

Henry Payne seems to have taken a liking to Walid: he believes he’s sincere, even patriotic (!). Consequently, Payne is giving Walid (and CAIR, naturally) credibility by puffing him in his columns.

Payne has a right to do that, if we’re speaking in terms of his right to associate with, or hold an opinion of, or speak, about, anyone or anything he pleases. Payne is, after all, an opinion journalist, and cartoonist. Nor, unlike Dawid Walid, do I have any doubts about Payne’s sincerity.

But he is sincerely misinformed. His opinions that Walid is a straight shooter, that CAIR is a benevolent civil rights organization, that Mohammed was a preacher of tolerance and free speech, are simply all wet.

He cannot have done his homework. Payne can start with finding out what CAIR really is, and what the Muslim Brotherhood has in mind, and what really happened to people who crossed Mohammed.

And until he has done so, as Old Knock would surely say to him, Payne really has no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject of what Mohammed or his followers would do.

Tonight on 'Anti-Climax Theater'

After 11 months we’ve finally reached a point in the Imam Abdullah case where we can say, “Enough, already.” (“Cox: No laws broken in fatal FBI shooting of imam”).

According to the Michigan Attorney General’s office, investigators are reporting “undisputed evidence that Mr. Abdullah resisted arrest and fired a gun first in the direction of the agents. Under Michigan law, law enforcement agents are justified in using deadly force in these types of situations, and therefore we found no crimes.”

We’ve recently criticized AG Mike Cox, who lacks personal credibility, over how long it’s taken him to make this report public. Regardless, Cox’s problems don’t necessarily cast his investigators in a poor light. This overdue report clarifies once and for all that “Abdullah making a series of decisions that resulted in the use of deadly force against him -- and ultimately his death. None of Abdullah’s follower who complied with the police commands were injured in any way.”

Right on cue, and determined to keep the story alive forever -- which is how long I reckon it would take for CAIR to restore its undeserved facade as a legitimate organization -- Dawud Walid began demanding the surveillance footage of the raid.

“Walid’s group also requested test results showing whether Abdullah fired a weapon and the caliber of bullets that struck the FBI dog to see if the bullets were fired by Abdullah or a law enforcement agent.” It’s interesting that the AG’s report includes a conversation with CAIR’s retained pathologist, who concluded that abrasions on Abdullah’s face could only be explained as dog bites -- based on his scientific reasoning: “what else could it be?” (Right, as if aliens can be ruled out just that easy).

Walid believes there’s still a chance to prove the FBI conducted a “targeted assassination” of their K-9 Freddy while they were busy assassinating Abdullah. Whatever that would prove. (The AG’s office reports that bullet fragments reovered from the K-9, Freddy, are consistent with Abdullah’s handgun, and not the rifles used by the FBI.)

So we say: Enough already.

Why don’t we all just let Abdullah deflower his 72 virgins with whatever he has left to do it with.

And let Freddy rest in peace.

Four Missionaries Acquitted in Dearborn

The four missionaries charged with “inciting a crowd” while evangelizing at the Dearborn Arab International Festival last June were acquitted on Friday. One of the four, Negeen Mayel, was found guilty of failing to follow a police officer’s order. (“4 missionaries acquitted of inciting crowd”).

I’m glad the four were acquitted of the incitement charge, which was pure nonsense from the get-go. I’m also glad Ms. Mayel was convicted of disobeying a police officer. When I listened to Negeen on the tape of her arrest using what I have to describe as an unbearable girl-victim stage voice (“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!”) I simply couldn’t find it in me to resent that poor cop for doing whatever it took to shut her up.

Don’t get me wrong. That kind of passive-aggressive wheedling, while clearly meant to be provocative, was hardly an incitement of a crowd, which is what the four were charged with. I support the cause of this acquittal because I support our cause of pushing back Shariah in Dearborn. I also support the First and Fourth Amendments, which tooka pretty bad beating with these arrests.

When this first happened, I was supportive of the missionaries. As things progressed, and I spent many tedious hours trying to make certain that these folks weren’t all the horrible things Jack O’Reilly said they were, I found myself liking the Acts 17 individuals less and less -- but not because I think they ever did anything that is against the law in Dearborn.

No matter: whether I find David Wood puffed up, or disapprove of the way Ms. Mayel exploits being itty-bitty enough for toting around in Paris Hilton’s handbag, the big facts about all this are impossible to miss.

First, these charges should have never been brought. This was a clear instance of the Dearborn executive authority being abused, (and the taxpayer’s money wasted on this hopeless trial), to prove to Dearborn’s Muslim leaders that in any public rumble that has gives an appearance of “Muslims against non-Muslims,” Dearborn government intends to outdo itself proving its prior commitment to take the Muslim side.

Second, Dearborn government, the mayor’s office and the police department, are badly compromised for the diligence at placating Muslim feelings -- real or imagine -- about all this. As Andrew McCarthy describes it, “Camouflaged as a crackdown on ‘disturbing the peace,’ [this] was transparently the enforcement of sharia’s prohibition against preaching religions other than Islam.”

O’Reilly was all in on the malicious prosecution of these four, including publishing a letter in which he pre-judged the criminal case and materially misrepresented what he had to know of the facts. O’Reilly had to know, and the police certainly did, that there was no “large crowd” gathered around the missionaries, or any “public danger.” While many may have reservations about the motives of Acts 17, there’s no doubt that both Chief Haddad and the mayor -- remember they are government officials, not private citizens -- falsely characterized events around the arrests as “incitement,” just so they could support the baseless charges they’d already laid against the four.

Even after the city lost this unnecessary trial on Friday, O’Reilly was still hurling unsupported claims against the acquitted defendants:

“It's really about a hatred of Muslims,” O’Reilly said. “That is what the whole heart of this is. ... Their idea is that there is no place for Muslims in America. They fail to understand the Constitution.”

I’ve got no idea what O’Reilly has in mind with that remark about the Constitution, because no one has suggested that any constitutional rights of Muslims were violated in this whole episode.

Unless, of course, it’s the constitutional right of hundreds of thousands of Muslims not to have to hear about Jesus Christ from four infidels.

Report: 'Shariah, the Threat to America'

From Family Security Matters:

Shariah, the Threat to America

September 15, 2010 - The Editor

A report (pdf) has just been published by the Center for Security Policy, which should be taken seriously by anyone with an interest in national security issues, and particularly those in government. The report has been written by “TEAM B”, a panel of 19 people, headed by Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin and Lieutenant General Harry Edward Soyster. From 2003 to 2007 Boykin was Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Soyster was a former Director of Defense Intelligence Agency and Commanding General at U.S. Intelligence and Security Command.

The 17 associates in the report include Maj. Stephen C. Coughlin (ret.), Andrew McCarthy , Ambassador Henry Cooper, Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons - US Navy (Ret.), former Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, John Guandolo—former Special Agent, Counter-Terrorism Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation, R. James Woolsey—former Director of Central Intelligence and others.

The 177-page report itself is entitled: “Shariah, The Threat to America, An exercise in competitive analysis.” You can download it here (pdf format).

The message is simple but strong. There may be some libertarian interpretations of sharia law, such as that practiced by the late Gus Dur, an Indonesian religious leader, where sharia is seen as a guide to personal conduct. That interpretation of sharia is rare, however, and more people and most Muslim nations respect the other end of the sharia spectrum. This shade of sharia is connected with Islamic supremacists (Islamists) who are directly opposed to all of the liberties and democracy that could only have grown in the Enlightenment and later. The Enlightenment values that inspired and informed the Founding Fathers to create America, which epitomises Western Democracy, are the antithesis of the extremist – Islamist – side of sharia.

Even Tony Blair, who had allowed his government’s policies to be dictated by Islamist followers of Maududi and the Muslim Brotherhood, recently stated that Radical Islam is the world’s greatest threat.

The Team B report states:

What cannot credibly be denied, however, is that:

a. shariah is firmly rooted in Islam’s doctrinal texts, and it is favored by influential Islamic commentators, institutions, and academic centers (for example, the faculty at al-Azhar University in Cairo, for centuries the seat of Sunni learning and jurisprudence);

b. shariah has been, for over a half-century, lavishly financed and propagated by Islamic regimes (particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran), through the offices of disciplined international organizations (particularly the Muslim Brotherhood); and

c. due to the fact that Islam lacks a central, universally recognized hierarchical authority (in contrast to, say, the Roman Catholic papacy), authentic Islamic moderates and reformers have an incredibly difficult task in endeavoring to delegitimize shariah in the community where it matters most: the world’s Muslims.

The report demands that genuine moderate Muslims and Islamic reformers must be encouraged, for without them, the hardline “Islamist” ideology will prevail.

Chapter 4 deals specifically with the Muslim Brotherhood, and other subsections of Chapter 5 deal with Hamas, al-Qaeda, Khomeinism, Hezbollah, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Tablighi Jamaat and Jamaat al-Fuqra.

For too long, governments in the West, including those in America, have taken on board a fictional version of Islam, a myth. This has allowed (p.17 of the report) individuals like Abdurahman Alamoudi to be an adviser at the White House, even though this Muslim Brotherhood member supported terrorist groups and was himself subsequently jailed for 23 years for terrorist offenses.

Alamoudi had claimed in 1996, at the time that he was nominating and vetting chaplains for the U.S. military and prisons, that: “either we do it now or we do it after a hundred years, but this country will become a Muslim country.”

Other people who have masqueraded as “moderates” and have had the ear of government in America have had the same attitudes. Omar Ahmad, founder of CAIR had stated in 1998 that:

“If you choose to live here [in America]… you have a responsibility to deliver the message of Islam. Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

You can read the rest here.

Hunting Season Opens for Hamas

Do peace talks mean it’s open season for Hamas to murder Jews?

Caroline Glick writes this for The Jerusalem Post:

AND THIS brings us back to Tuesday evening's highway massacre. Predictably, the Obama administration led the way in framing the terrorist violence as a bid by Hamas to derail the newest round of negotiations. For example, after meeting with Netanyahu Wednesday Obama said, "The tragedy that we saw yesterday where people were gunned down on the street by terrorists who are purposely trying to undermine these talks is an example of what we're up against."

The only party that rejected the administration's rationalization of the attack was Hamas, whose operatives reportedly carried it out. In an interview Thursday with the London-based Asharq al Awsat, Hamas leader Mahmoud A-Zahar said that the talks have nothing to do with the attack. As he put it, "The bid to link this operation to the negotiations is completely wrong. When people have the opportunity, the capability and the targets, they act."

The truth is probably found neither in A-Zahar's claim nor in Obama's assertion. In all likelihood, Hamas was testing the waters. Iran's Palestinian proxy wanted to know whether the regular rules for peace processes have kicked into gear yet. Those rules -- as the families of the hundreds of Israelis murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the peak years of peace processes will attest -- involve Israel giving free rein to terrorists to murder Jews during "peace talks."

Since Yitzhak Rabin first shook Yassir Arafat's hand on the White House lawn 17 years ago, successive prime ministers have opted to not to retaliate for murderous attacks when peace talks are in session. They have justified their willingness to give the likes of Hamas a free hand to murder by claiming that fighting back would be tantamount to allowing terrorists to hold the peace process hostage. Conducting counter-terror campaigns in the midst of negotiations, they have uniformly argued, would endanger the talks and so, Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad must all be given a carte blanche to murder.

Echoing these sentiments precisely, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin all reportedly objected to launching any response to Tuesday's attack. According to the media, the three closed ranks against Netanyahu who reportedly wished to attack Hamas targets in Gaza following the massacre.

Wednesday's roadside shooting attack, in which a man and his wife were wounded, was a clear indication that Hamas and its ilk received the message. Just as A-Zahar said, they are always looking for an opportunity. And in not responding to Tuesday's attack, Israel told them that for the duration of these negotiations, Hamas can again kill with impunity. (“The New Netanyahu?”).

Ground Zero Crater: Nine Years of Lies Have Only Made it Deeper

You’ve noticed how much news coverage is being devoted to stories about alarmed Muslims taken aback by the sudden outpouring of xenophobic anger because of the Ground Zero mosque. (All the more curious, as we’ve monitored CAIR’s regular declarations that Islamophobia reached Kristallnacht levels after 9/11 and more or less remained constant).

For instance, from the Detroit Free Press:

“This year, the commemoration [of 9/11] follows a stunning summer in which opposition to a planned Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site escalated into a national uproar over Islam, extremism and religious freedom.” (“9/11, Ground Zero mosque uproar put Muslims on alert”).

The New York Times:

“Now, many of those same Muslims say that all of those years of work are being rapidly undone by the fierce opposition to a Muslim cultural center near ground zero that has unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism.” (“American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?”)

From CAIR:

(CNSNews.com) – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is putting some of the blame on both the Tea Party and the Republican Party for what it sees as a growing tide of anti-Muslim anger. CAIR officials said the rise in “Islamophobia” stems from the controversy surrounding the Islamic center and mosque that Muslims plan to build a few blocks from Ground Zero. (“CAIR Director: 'Tea Party and Republican Party Have Given the Green Light for These People to Defame and Stereotype Muslims'”).

The misleading question planted in all these stories is, “Why, nine years after the 9/11 attacks, are Americans more mistrustful of Muslims than they were before?”

The misleading answer the reader is supposed to find, in one form or another, runs along these lines: Only because misinformation about Islam is being spread by extremists, Islamophobes, tea party supporters, the Republican party.

Buying it?

Not me. The narrative’s a phony. Skeptical questions about how Americans could still dare to think ill of Muslims nine years after 9/11 (it can only be explained by a mass sinking into bigotry and Islamophobia!), presumes that what happened on that date was a one-off crime that was no more the fault of Muslims than Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter murder rampage was the fault of The Beatles. “It was so long ago,” runs the script, “and besides, we were targeted, too.”

Never mind if Muslims were targeted, too. (Muslims weren’t targeted. It was a matter of indifference to bin Ladin who he killed accidentally alongside his infidel victims--hardly the same thing). Americans learned after 9/11 that the act of war committed on 9/11 only confirmed the declaration of war bin Ladin had made in 1996 against the United States on behalf of the Ummah.

At the time the September 11 attacks were called my generation’s Pearl Harbor -- the sudden blow that awakened a sleeping giant. But the comparison doesn’t go far. One difference is the way the other that started at Pearl Harbor was very publicly seen to end (thanks to the energetic focus of the sleeping giant), on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri in August 1945. Along with the war ended the final acts of Japanese belligerence against Americans. Healing between the two nations was possible because Japanese hostilities had ceased -- and because the Americans are not a grudge-carrying people. We can be accused of a lot of things, but having a long memory is NOT an American quality. I doubt anyone was asking in 1954 why Americans were still mad at the Japanese, and I know no one is asking it now.

But unlike what finally happened with Japan after Pearl Harbor, Americans have witnessed no final defeat, no surrender, no U.S.S. Missouri event to put to rest September 11. There has been no peace with Islam. The closest we’ve come have been off-key protestations of peace from a mismatched choir of: sincerely wrong non-Muslims, insincerely wrong leftists who share Islam’s lust for destroying Western values, and double-tongued cons like Ibrahim Hooper and Osama Siblani, who are flat out lying every time they talk about their religion.

If you have to ask how it is that, nine years after the Twin Towers fell, Americans still have a negative impression of Islam, consider this: From September 11, 2001 forward, we have fought two bloody wars against savage Islamist fighters, and we have witnessed, in no particular order or priority, the shoe-bomb attempt, the gruesome murders of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg, the mutilated corpses on the Fallujah bridge, the London and Madrid subway attacks, the murder of Theo van Gogh, the cartoon riots, the foiled British airliner attack, the Bombay massacres, the Fort Hood massacre, the foiled Fort Dix attack, massacres in Bali, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, suicide bombings so numerous they rise into the tens of thousands, the failed underwear bombing over Detroit, honor killings of daughters by their own fathers, the six imams suing U.S. Air, the president of Iran promising to destroy us with an atomic bomb, Hezbollah promising to destroy Israel and every Jew, and only last week Hamas murdering four Israeli civilians, one of them pregnant: every last one of these sons of bitches signing their work with an unmistakable profession that Allah is Great.

Most of us aren’t responding to 9/11 as explained by Rush Limbaugh. We’re responding to yesterday’s, or sometimes even today’s news crawls. We don’t need any “extremist” radio personalities to tell us what we can’t avoid seeing.

And the whole time all these things are going on we’ve got CAIR and an army of imams just daring us not to believe them over of our own lying, bigoted eyes.

Judea Pearl, father of the murdered Daniel, says he doesn’t buy the explanation that hostility to the Cordoba Center is Islamophobia, or the “product of a ‘rightwing’ smear campaign against one imam or another.

Americans are neither bigots nor gullible. . . .

If one accepts that the 19 fanatics who flew planes into the Twin Towers were merely self-proclaimed Muslims who, by their very act, proved themselves incapable of acting in the name of “true Islam,” then building a mosque at Ground Zero should evoke no emotion whatsoever; it should not be viewed differently than, say, building a church, a community center or a druid shrine.

A more realistic explanation is that most Americans do not buy the 19 fanatics story, but view the 9/11 assault as a product of an anti- American ideology that, for good and bad reasons, has found a fertile breeding ground in the hearts and minds of many Muslim youngsters who see their Muslim identity inextricably tied with this anti-American ideology.

THE GROUND Zero mosque is being equated with that ideology. Public objection to the mosque thus represents a vote of no confidence in mainstream American Muslim leadership which, on the one hand, refuses to acknowledge the alarming dimension that anti-Americanism has taken in their community and, paradoxically, blames America for its creation.

The American Muslim leadership has had nine years to build up trust by taking proactive steps against the spread of anti-American terror-breeding ideologies, here and abroad.

Evidently, however, a sizable segment of the American public is not convinced that this leadership is doing an effective job of confidence building.

In public, Muslim spokespersons praise America as the best country for Muslims to live and practice their faith. But in sermons, speeches, rallies, classrooms, conferences and books sold at those conferences, the narrative is often different. There, Noam Chomsky’s conspiracy theory is the dominant paradigm, and America’s foreign policy is one long chain of “crimes” against humanity, especially against Muslims.

Affirmation of these conspiratorial theories sends mixed messages to young Muslims, engendering anger and helplessness: America and Israel are the first to be blamed for Muslim failings, sufferings and violence.

Terrorist acts, whenever condemned, are immediately “contextually explicated” (to quote Tariq Ramadan); spiritual legitimizers of suicide bombings (e.g. Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar) are revered beyond criticism; Hamas and Hizbullah are permanently shielded from the label of “terrorist.”

Overall, the message that emerges from this discourse is implicit, but can hardly be missed: When Muslim grievance is at question, America is the culprit and violence is justified, if not obligatory. (“Undercurrents below the Ground Zero mosque”).

Zakat’s Outta the Bag

Now just why is it that every time Muslims in America undertake a public-relations blitz to spruce up the old image and get people’s minds off all that international jihad, Hamas is always right around the corner?

Take Islamic Relief USA, the outfit that is behind the national “Day of Dignity” that came to Detroit on Saturday. (“Muslims express faith by giving on Day of Dignity”).

I looked at IR-USA’s website, and within two clicks I found out they are a partner of Islamic Relief Worldwide, (and also that one of IRW’s 21 international field offices is in “Palestine”: “You can help Palestinians who face difficult times under the siege. Please go inside to know more about the bank accounts and how to donate and help poor people.”

Ordinary Gazans are certainly entitled to get charity from whoever is willing to send it. God knows Hamas isn’t going to give it to them. But then it turns out that IRW has a history of links to Al Qaeda, Chechen rebels, and, naturally, Hamas.

Israel designated Islamic Relief a Hamas front in 2006.

But don’t all charities have questionable ties when you get down to it? Well, maybe not.

Poll: Two-Thirds of New Yorkers Are Ignorant, Islamophobic, Right-Wing Extremists, or, Big Apple 'Refudiates' Cordoba Center

“I mean, the extent of the ignorance- where you parse Islamophobia versus ignorance of Islam, I'm not exactly sure. But there is tremendous ignorance of Islam as a religion.” Declaring that Christianity Judaism and Islam have great similarities, he derided, “And I think, you know, the American misconception about Islam is amazing.”
--Time Magazine Editor, Richard Stengel

Then hadn’t somebody ought to alert the New York Times? Oh, wait, someone did:

New York Poll Finds Wariness for Muslim Site

By MICHAEL BARBARO and MARJORIE CONNELLY

Two-thirds of New York City residents want a planned Muslim community center and mosque to be relocated to a less controversial site farther away from ground zero in Lower Manhattan, including many who describe themselves as supporters of the project, according to a New York Times poll.

The poll indicates that support for the 13-story complex, which organizers said would promote moderate Islam and interfaith dialogue, is tepid in its hometown.

Nearly nine years after the Sept. 11 attacks ignited a wave of anxiety about Muslims, many in the country’s biggest and arguably most cosmopolitan city still have an uneasy relationship with Islam. One-fifth of New Yorkers acknowledged animosity toward Muslims. Thirty-three percent said that compared with other American citizens, Muslims were more sympathetic to terrorists. And nearly 60 percent said people they know had negative feelings toward Muslims because of 9/11.

Over all, 50 percent of those surveyed oppose building the project two blocks north of the World Trade Center site, even though a majority believe that the developers have the right to do so. Thirty-five percent favor it.

Opposition is more intense in the boroughs outside Manhattan — for example, 54 percent in the Bronx — but it is even strong in Manhattan, considered a bastion of religious tolerance, where 41 percent are against it.

UPDATE. From CNS News:

(CNSNews.com) – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is putting some of the blame on both the Tea Party and the Republican Party for what it sees as a growing tide of anti-Muslim anger. CAIR officials said the rise in “Islamophobia” stems from the controversy surrounding the Islamic center and mosque that Muslims plan to build a few blocks from Ground Zero.

“We’ve seen a really strong uptick in Islamophobia recently – primarily sparked by the controversy over the Manhattan Islamic center,” Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s chief spokesman, told reporters at a press conference Wednesday. “We’ve seen hate vandalism at mosques in California; in Tennessee, we had an arson attack; at a mosque in Arlington, Texas, we had an arson attack; and something that wasn’t even reported nationwide, in May we had a bomb attack at a mosque in Jacksonville, Florida,” he said.
Hooper said the attacks could be driven by many factors: “The question is, why? Is it tied to the November elections? Is it tied to the rise of the Tea Party movement? Is it tied to the economy?” he asked. “I think it’s pretty clear that it’s been sparked…by these hate groups and their opposition to the Islamic community center in Manhattan.”

CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad was even more direct, saying that the Tea Party and the GOP have given the “green light” to a nationwide campaign to deny Muslims their civil rights and ultimately expel them from the United States. (“CAIR Director: 'Tea Party and Republican Party Have Given the Green Light for These People to Defame and Stereotype Muslims'”)

Speaking of Shibboleths

This is helpful. No sooner has Andy McCarthy suggested that refusal to condemn Hamas is a shibboleth for who should or shouldn’t lay claim to being a Muslim moderate, than Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative fails the test.

This was reported in Wednesday’s Weekly Standard:

Ground Zero Mosque Spokesman Refuses to Condemn Hamas Terrorist Attack Moderates?

BY Michael Goldfarb

On the eve of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Hamas gunmen murdered four Israeli civilians, including a pregnant woman. Even for those who see nuance in terrorist attacks, this one didn’t leave a lot of room for argument. The PA condemned the attack and, reportedly, picked up some 150 Hamas affiliates in the West Bank for questioning. The Obama administration condemned the attack in no uncertain terms. And even J Street, the home of moral equivalence in the U.S., offered a quick condemnation of this atrocity. But the “moderate” Muslims of the Ground Zero Mosque? They’re taking a pass.

There’s already been a lot of analysis of Imam Rauf’s position on Hamas – he’s against it, kind of, but unwilling to condemn the group as a terrorist organization. When asked point blank, this “moderate US cleric,” as State Department PJ Crowley likes to call him, punted: “The issue of terrorism is a very complex question…I will not allow anybody to put me in a position where I am seen by any party in the world as an adversary or as an enemy.”

Even if that party murders pregnant women on the eve of peace talks with the aim of continuing this conflict between Arabs and Jews? Apparently, yes.

Yesterday I looked at the Twitter feed for Park51 – the Ground Zero Mosque’s primary point of contact with the media and everyone else over the last few weeks – curious to see if they’d offered some statement on the brutal attack near Hebron. There was plenty of activity – the usual fare of baiting Republican candidates like Ilario Pantano, who’s expressed his concern about their bridge-building project, accusing Newt Gingrich of “being to the right” of Il Duce, a smug invitation to Sarah Palin to come and “visit the locals” – the kind of thing you’d expect from a 12-year-old with a diary at Daily Kos. But nothing on the attack in Israel.

So I asked the folks at Park51 – “I know @park51 is loathe to call Hamas a terrorist group....but as a gesture, maybe now would be a good time to say something?”

The group’s response:

"@thegoldfarb We have condemned terrorism and will continue to do so. We are an apolitical community center. Please allow us that respect."

You’ll note that they have not, and apparently will not, condemn this attack. And no one should allow them the respect of hiding behind a claim to be “apolitical.” At this point, this mosque is entirely a political statement, and a political provocation. All its staff does is engage in political incitement – there is no swimming pool or basketball court or interfaith dialogue, just a snarky, inappropriate, hyper-partisan Twitter feed. And a blanket refusal to condemn acts of terrorism against Israeli Jews.

Update: The Ground Zero mosque supporters seem to have responded, and seem again to be unwilling or unable to condemn the murder of a pregnant Israeli woman and other innocent Jews. Via Twitter: "We have and repeatedly condemn acts of terrorism. We are a Community Center. Please do not ask us to get involved in international affairs."

Hamas the Shibboleth

Andrew C. McCarthy deploys an effective analogy to cut through some of the gobbledygook mucking up the public debate over the mosque. (Or am I imagining that, as the Cordoba Center becomes more and more unpopular with Americans in the last week or two, the media is increasing its one-sided coverage of “Islamophobia” in America?) Put simply, support for Hamas is as good a test as any for unmasking Ikhwan members set about the Grand Jihad. From NRO:

Why They Can’t Condemn Hamas

August 28, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Rauf and his friends employ different methods, but they are on the same team.

Hamas is a shibboleth. If you want to know whether an ostensible Muslim “moderate” is really moderate, ask him if Hamas is a terrorist organization.

It is really not a hard question, even if Feisal Rauf can’t — or won’t — answer it. Rauf, the would-be imam of the controversial Ground Zero mosque, is also a stud in the State Department’s stable of ready-to-travel-on-your-dime “moderates.” That same State Department has branded Hamas a terrorist organization, and we can’t even get it to say that about the Taliban, the guys we’re fighting in the overseas contingency operation formerly known as the War on Terror.

During a WABC radio interview, Aaron Klein three times pressed Rauf to admit that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Rauf bobbed and weaved in classic Islamist style. “I’m not a politician,” he replied, as if only politicians trouble themselves over whether terrorists are terrorists. “I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.” Avoid the issues? You don’t say!

But it is not a complex question, no more complex than “Does Derek Jeter play for the Yankees?” It is a straightforward question that Islamists complicate with clever casuistry, carefully designed to ring all the right chimes for our opinion elites and their media pitchmen.

By all means, read the entire article here.