Our American Imam Wants You to Know, 'I Am Not an Iranian Agent'

Detroit-area residents who can’t find copies of the Arab American News, or who’ve had their satellite link to Al Jazeera cut off, need go no further than the Op Ed page of the Detroit News to get a view of current affairs from the pro-Iranian side of the street.

That’s where editorial page editor Nolan Finley has given the Islamic House of Wisdom’s Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi a regular column, under the title, “Faith and Policy.”

The Imam’s faith happens to be Shia Islam, of the Hezbollah-are-freedom-fighters strain. Being a Muslim, of course, should not foreclose the Imam having a voice in a free press. And Finley explains his decision to give Elahi a megaphone by noting

that Elahi is considered a moderate in Dearborn's Muslim community.

"Extreme from our point of view and extreme from mainstream America's point of view? Perhaps." Finley said. "Extreme for that community? I'm not sure. I think he has a very large following--in fact, I know he has a very large following in that community, and speaks for a very large segment of that community.”

I’ll say. All the more reason to pay close attention, eh?

As to his policies, Imam Elahi is a big believer that while everything about the American foreign policy of George W. Bush since 9/11 is “a moral tragedy, ”the recent Iranian- and Syrian-backed sacking of the Lebanese parliament is a success story, as he described it in June 3rd column. (“Bush's Middle East foreign policy creates moral tragedies”).

He’s also stated in his column that,

Regarding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent call to wipe Israel off the map . . .:

--"It is very clear that Mr. Ahmadinejad was not making an anti-Semitic statement."

--"The Iranian president's quip can best be understood in the context of the Declaration of Independence.”

--and, “Israel must stop instigating violent conflicts in the Muslim world."

Another Elahi column described Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin as a ‘Palestinian spiritual leader, (who) had a heart full of love for humanity.’ Yet another compared the Iranian constitution to that of the United States.

Imam Elahi, was at one time the spiritual leader of the Iranian navy. The self-evident benefits of an armed force having a spiritual leader can be seen in recent news about the Iranian navy, featuring stories about the navy threatening to attack and “explode” U.S. warships, (“Video of Iran ‘attack’ on three US warships released by Pentagon”), unlawfully taking British sailors hostage, (“Iranian Vessels Seize 15 British Navy Personnel in Iraqi Waters”), and how its Basiji Islamic Revolutionary Guard members brag that they’ve taken a suicide pledge. (“Iran navy in suicide attack pledge”):

“If necessary, we will use the element of martyrdom-seeking and we will become people of Ashura," Fars quoted Gen. Ali Fadavi as saying. Ashura refers to the day marking the death of Imam Hussein, Prophet Mohammed's grandson, who is revered by Shiite Muslims.

Whether or not all this misdirected belligerence is made wors or better by having “spiritual leaders” of the stripe of Imam Elahi, I’ll leave for the Imam Elahis of the world to explain.

After bucking up the Iranian sea dogs Imam Elahi came to the USA around 1991 on a 4-month visa. According to one source, that visa “enabled him to inspect American branches of Hizbullah (Tehran's network of agents) and to reinforce Tehran's influence on Shi'ite communities (in Dearborn)."

Now he’s an American citizen, which, if nothing else, grants him the right to use first-person pronouns when attacking the United States. Such as when he said in his Tuesday column,

“Our country, once a beacon of hope and freedom for the world, has squandered our prosperity to create conflicts and instigate civil wars among other nations by funding one group against another”; or, “Our nation deserves truthful and trustworthy leaders who have enough courage and commitment to turn the anti-American resentment around the world into respect and love.”

I guess I shouldn’t knock him for it. Most Democrats are born here and still reflexively refer to most Americans as “them.”

Anyway, Elahi’s nostalgia for a period of respect and love for America that he’s never been around for is truly inspiring. I get dewy-eyed thinking back on those carefree days when it was Jimmy Carter that Ahmadinejad and his scruffy cohorts were burning in effigy as they brutalized our embassy staff.

But although he denies being an Iranian agent, Imam Elahi seems to have a one-track mind when it comes to the policies he preaches. They always seem to be pointed at benefits to Iran--or Iran’s creature, Hezbollah.

For example, to undo the “moral tragedy” of the Bush foreign policy, Elahi thinks we need “to stop these wars, fix the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan and don't start yet another war in the Persian Gulf.”

But who’s to benefit from us “stopping” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? In other words, who's to benefit from our withdrawing and leaving both newly liberated nations to the depredations of their strongest neighbor--Iran. And who’s the only Persian Gulf nation in the region there’s even the remotest chance of us going to war with? Iran.

Elahi continues: “There is no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons.” For this, Elahi cites the much-maligned National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, which he says “confirmed that Iran's nuclear program has no military aspect -- it is not pursuing nuclear weapons.”

Except the NIE didn’t. Instead, all 16 American spy agencies that contributed to the report stated “that Tehran is likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.’” (“U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work”).

But Elahi is particularly adamant that Iran is not nuke-bound, and he wishes Bush would quit taking the cautious route, (as if world peace depended on it, or something), pointing out how “United Nations atomic watchdog chief, Mohamed El-Baradei, accused the Bush administration of adding ‘fuel to the fire’ with bellicose rhetoric.”

But if there’s no fire, how can you add fuel to it? Besides, “watchdog” El-Baredei, even as he faces daily lies and obfuscation from Iranian authorities, has never been willing to admit there’s an Iranian bomb program, and probably won’t until he’s falling through space onto Tel Aviv straddling one Slim-Pickens style.

Imam Elahi does spare some concern for the nation he has adopted, instead of the one he's not an agent for. He cares deeply that America “deserves truthful and trustworthy leaders who have enough courage and commitment to turn the anti-American resentment around the world into respect and love.”

His advice is that the “United States should get on the right side of the struggle and be part of the triumph of peace.” He’s short on specifics, but I think this translates this way: “Dump Israel, and let Iran have the bomb.”

Imam Elahi does think there’s a way we can still be friends with Israel, but we should imitate Jimmy Carter in showing how true friendship really works. “Honestly, the best friends of Israel are those who say it like it is. Former President Jimmy Carter called the Israeli policy toward Gaza ‘one of the greatest human rights crimes on earth.’”

(What do you bet it's been a while since Rosalynn asked Jimmy, "Does this dress make me look fat?")

Now we're all waiting for Jimmy to give Hamas some of the same depth of constructive criticism, and show them some true friendship.

Victory at WSU

Our friends at the Anti-Racist Blog are no longer online, at least for the moment. But last month marked a victory for them when the Wayne State University chapter of the Anti-Racist Action Network “officially decided” that they were ending their “Palestine solidarity campaign” at the Detroit campus, in the form of an anti-Israel divestment campaign. ("ARA Ends Divestment Campaign").

The ARA wanted "to stress that ARA was always an expression of an important strand of militancy both in the Arab and Muslim community and in the anti-imperialist and anti-racist social justice community." But no one at WSU gave a damn.

By contrast, our friends at the Anti-Racist Blog fought to expose the anti-Semitism and jihadist sympathies of the ARA Network.

The ARA Network describes itself on their website as an “international” group working “hard to ‘expose, oppose, and confront’ hate,” as well as fighting against all the usual isms, while at the same time standing courageously for “building a fun, diverse, liberated and explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic youth culture.” And, of course, they claim they’re against Nazis wherever they find them: “Whenever fascists are organizing or active in public, we're there. We don't believe in ignoring them or staying away from them. Never let the nazis have the street!”

Or at least, never let the Nazis have the whole street--or maybe share the street. Aw, heck, the truth is, the ideologically incoherent ARA Network is just hunky-dory with all kinds of thoroughly Nazi-compatible philosophies like Margaret Sanger’s genocide-through-abortion scheme, (and how exactly does abortion help Palestinians?), Jew-hatred, and the teachings and agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, the historical allies of the Third Reich.

As the local ARA blog admits, the high point of their “campaign” at WSU “was perhaps our confrontation of Daniel Pipes in October of last year,” which impressed few but those in the ARA choir. (“Don’t Know Much About History”).

Good riddance. And Congratulations to our friends at the Anti-Racist Blog!

CAIR Keeps Showing Up

Here are a couple more stories throwing light on CAIR’s strategy to spread Islamic teaching in places it really doesn't belong, namely, by pretending to be "correcting" misperceptions about Islam.

For instance, Andrew Whitehead at Anti-Cair writes about how, in the State of Washington, CAIR is raising objections to a course on Islam being taught to law-enforcement officers that might give them the wrong idea about Muslims being connected with terrorism. Writes Whitehead:

Some local Muslims are apparently concerned that the program, “The Threat of Islamic Jihadists to the World”, conducted by Miami-based Security Solutions International (SSI), may promote stereotypes and ethnic/religious profiling.

Unsurprisingly, the Washington State chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) must rise to the defense of Islamic terrorists by implying that the program will somehow cause law enforcement officers to respond inappropriately when they come into contact with Muslims.

Washington State chapter president Arsalan Bukhari apparently believes the program may link Islam to terrorism:

"Most police officers don't have a basic grounding in Islam, so before you teach them about Islam, how can you teach them about radical Islam?...it just makes you nervous because when a law-enforcement person pulls someone over, when they see a Muslim person or someone who appears Muslim to them — all this information they just learned kicks in."

Which is why, according to Seattle Times religion report, Janet Tu, “Bukhari believes the need for police training on issues of profiling and bias was highlighted by an incident last summer in which the FBI launched an international search for two men who took photos below deck on a Washington state ferry. The FBI announced earlier this month that the men were tourists, not terrorists.” (“Does course on Islam give law enforcers wrong idea?”).

(But, as Andrew Whitehead points out:

Bukhari failed to mention that the two men:

• Traveled on as many as six different ferries.
• Seemed inordinately interested in the operation of the vessel.
• Took photographs of the interior of the boats.
• Accessed areas tourists and commuters usually don’t.)

And then we have the Texas junior high school (public) where CAIR finagled a way to indoctrinate students during what was supposed to be a physical ed period. ("Texas children roped into Islamic training").

According to a bulletin released by the inter-racial, inter-denominational Houston Area Pastor Council, there was an “Islamic ‘presentation’ held at Friendswood Junior High last week which students were required to attend. The May 22 sessions were held during required-attendance Physical Education classes, led by two women’“wearing veils’ representing the Council on Arab-Islamic Relation (CAIR)”

Parents were given no notification of the sessions, nor given the opportunity to attend. The excuse given by the Principal for the 40-minute “'Islamic Awareness' presentation was 'to increase understanding of the Islamic culture in response to racially motivated comments that have been made to students on campus.'”

After hearing reports from students forced to attend the sessions, a mother, signing as “Concerned Parent,” sent an email to other parents, reporting what she had been told took place.

**It was 30-40 minute presentation by 2 Muslim women from CAIR (group in Houston) wearing veils.
**Principal Robin Lowe told the group that her sister, niece and nephew were Muslim (one reason I did not call her as I was not sure how she would respond).
**Topics shared...What is Islam?
**Adam, Noah, and Jesus are prophets
**There is one god, Allah
**Talked about the 5 pillars of Islam
**Talked about praying 5 times a day
**Showed how they pray - 5 stances
**What they wear
**Ramadan - fasting, spiritual time, festival at end, etc..
**Talked about famous Muslims

A few of the problems/questions I have with this:
**They were given full attention of our kids, during academic school time, to present their religious beliefs. This was not part of a world religions study, but presented in isolation.
**This was put right at the end of the school year...which will most likely prevent a Christian response. There was no parent notification of the program and the kids were not given the option of not attending. The kids did not even know they were having an assembly or what topic it pertained to until they entered the gym. In fact, just 2 days before did the coaches even find out their PE time would be used for this. Did this lack of notification violate policy?
**I was told this program was in response to some ethnic slurs against Muslim kids at the school. How does just presenting the religious beliefs address that? There are plenty of bullying -type public programs to address those type problems.
**If these "cultural presentations" are continued next year (which I'm hearing they will be), are we not opening Pandora's Box?
**I send my kids to school for academics....I teach them religion at home.

Friendswood Principal, Robin Lowe, responded with a letter to parents explaining that the sessions were part of the school district’s ongoing effort to teach students “the six pillars of character, one of which is respect.” It seems the school “had a few incidents of racially insensitive graffiti in the restrooms and other areas, as well as comments being made to students that are highly inappropriate.” (Can you imagine such a thing someone making highly inappropriate comments in a junior high school? What next? Kids hiding cigarettes in their backpacks???!)

In a classic example of now-that-the-horse-has-escaped barn-door locking, Principal Lowe reassured parents that she’ll do a better job next time:

Several questions have been raised regarding the Islamic Awareness presentation that occurred through our P.E. classes last Thursday, May 22, 2008. The purpose of the presentation was to increase understanding of the Islamic culture in response to racially motivated comments that have been made to students on campus. In hindsight, a note should have been sent home to parents indicating the purpose and content of the presentation in time for parents to contact me with questions or concerns or requests to exempt their child. This will be our practice in the future, should we ever have another presentation of a similar nature.

And, as Principal Lowe may have been tempted to add: "Have a safe summer, Go Mustangs, and remember: Alahu Akhbar!"

Context Is The Second Last Refuge of a Scoundrel (Who Happens to Find Patriotism Distasteful)

Fr. Pfleger has published a self-absolving explanation in the Chicago Sun-Times about his bad behavior of last Sunday.

Reading it, I can see that Fr. Pfleger doesn’t borrow only his preaching style from the likes of Rev. Wright, but his public apology talking points as well.

Father’s excuse is that he was taken out of context. Rather than seeing the compassionate, Martin-Luther-King inspired hero of justice and civil rights, we’re all getting the wrong idea about Fr. Pfleger based on a “a 1.5 minute 'YouTube' video” … stolen, apparently, “from a dramatization in a sermon that I felt was in the sacredness of a sanctuary, among people who know me”.

Was it only 1.5 minutes, Father? Because it seemed so much longer. (The main fun was actually 3:00 minutes).

Oh, by the way, if brief duration avoids moral liability, maybe we should we check the clock time on “nappy-headed ho”; or Trent Lott saying “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.” (For Lott’s ten-second tribute to a 100-year-old man, Barack Obama demanded that “The Republican Party … has to drive out Trent Lott.”

The "out of context" excuse Fr. Pfleger offers backfired on Jeremiah Wright, too. Within days, by means of reviews of his complete sermons, and his own statements to Bill Moyers, and what he had to say at the NAACP dinner, and then at the National Press Club, we all knew for certain that the damned foolishness he displayed in the out-takes ran pretty constant through all his many years as a religious charlatan.

Even without seeing the rest of Father Pfleger's Sunday "sermon," we have seen him allowing the Christ- and Jew-hating Farrakhan into the sanctuary at St. Sabina's so that he could kiss Farrakhan's ass and give Farrakhan a platform to patronize the Catholic congregation Fr. Pfleger is accountable for instructing. Fr. Pfleger also rebukes those of us as "liars from the pit of hell") who call attention to the depth of Farrakhan's anti-Semitism and bitter racism. If Farrakhan isn't a racist, NO one is. (Father also does one of the worst black-guy impersonations in the Midwest, but my confessor informs me that's only a venial sin).

We've also seen him tell his Bishop, whom we Catholics believe to be direct successors of the Apostles, that he wouldn't obey orders to accept transfer from his parish, saying, "You're going to have to have the balls to fire me."

Fr. Pfleger says one thing I agree with: “racism is an explosive and sensitive sin in our world and it is against the command to love, and against the God of love.”

It is indeed. And that means that you, Fr. Pfleger, shouldn’t be whipping up black folks, either. And for doing that, you ought to make an Act of Contrition for sinning against the command of love, and against the God of love.

We've written previously about the Muslim Student Association (MSA), and its influence on local campuses, especially the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The following article from FrontPage Magazine provides a further glimpse at the MSA's activities, this time at the University of California-Irvine.

Campus Support for the Terrorist Jihad

By Reut R. Cohen and Jonathan Constantine Movroydis

FrontPageMagazine.com Monday, May 05, 2008

The Muslim Student Association (MSA) maintains more than 150 chapters at colleges across the country, fronting as a cultural and religious organization. Realistically, however, the MSA is a radical political group that was initially founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the godfather of al-Qaeda and Hamas. The purpose of the MSA is to promote jihad in institutions of higher learning.

At the University of California- Irvine (UCI), the Muslim Student Union (MSU) is also a part of the Muslim Student Association and has openly supported terrorist groups. Presently the MSU aims to "build an environment that enhances good, discourages bad, and provides networks of resources, knowledge, people, and companionship to its members." The MSU offers "daily congregational prayers, daily free iftars … over eight weekly classes, a quarterly magazine Alkalima, coalition building with other clubs on campus, and a gateway to the larger Muslim community …" MSU also provides career advice and a study program to help Muslims at UCI.

Yet underneath this innocuous description it also becomes apparent that this organization preserves a seething hatred of Jews, Israel, and America. MSU activities constantly reveal support for violence, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. MSU members have made their positions clear: they support Hamas, they support "freedom fighting" and they have publicly declared that Zionists have no future and Israel will soon be wiped off the map. Members of this organization commonly wear green armbands to signal their allegiance to the terrorist group Hamas.

Earlier this month, a student coalition led a boycott against two Orange County, CA, movie theaters for their decision to hold a private screening and fund-raiser co-sponsored by CAIR (Council of American-Islamic Relations) and the UC Irvine Muslim Student Union. The featured film was the USA Versus Sami Al-Arian: (1) a hagiographic screening on the self-starved convicted terrorist. An indictment against the United States government on the egregious charge of false imprisonment, the film compares the Palestinian Islamic Jihad collaborator to a Socratic like figure jailed for his patriotic dissent and practice of his fundamental civil rights.

The evidence against Al-Arian was damning, alleging that Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida, was the head of the American wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The indictment against Al-Arian suggests that Al-Arian abused his position as a university professor to bring other members of his terrorist group into the United States "under the guise of academic conferences and meetings." (2)

Al-Arian purportedly also helped Palestinian Islamic Jihad members "receive cover as teachers or students" at USF and worked to further alliances with other groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

The event was first expected to be held at an Irvine theater owned by Starplex Cinemas, but as the story became viral on Friday, April 11, scores of readers called and emailed (3) (4) Starplex’s corporate office with their concerns, prompting special events coordinator Kristen Wheaton to cancel the screening and fundraiser on Monday, April 14.” (5)

In a phone call with Wheaton about her decision to cancel the event, her response was particularly noteworthy and further evidence of the deceptiveness with which extremist Muslim organizations operate. According to Wheaton, two female members of the Muslim community, Marya Bangee and Natania Abdelfattah, reserved the venue and misled the theater about the nature of the screening, describing it as a “college student film.” (6)

Moreover, despite CAIR officials charging Wheaton with allegations of breach of contract, the theater was never notified of the fact that CAIR co-sponsored the screening, or that the proceeds from ticket sales would be spent on Mr. Al-Arian’s legal defense. More specifically, in order to conceal their involvement from the theater, CAIR-LA’s Executive Director Hussam Ayloush directed Bangee and Abdelfattah to bill his personal credit card.

When CAIR decided to change the venue for the screening and fund-raiser to Edwards Woodbridge 5 in Irvine, they did so fearing that the community would inform the parent company Regal Cinemas about their motives. (7) (8) After calling a series of theaters in Irvine, we were able to procure and publicize the new location on Wednesday, April 16. (9)

Though Regal Cinemas received similar scores of protesting phone calls and emails, (10) the Tennessee-based Corporation ignored community concerns and decided to proceed with the screening and fundraiser. In a phone call with the theater manager about the ultimate decision to hold the event, she replied that people can use the theater for any desired purpose. Officials from the corporate office couldn’t be reached for comment.

Despite Regal’s disappointing decision, the fundraiser was sparsely attended and a dismal failure. Secretly moving the venue to a new and more expensive location on very short notice resulted in only a couple dozen regulars mainly from the Muslim community. (11)

Though CAIR is charging anti-Muslim bigotry and censorship against those who participated in the effort to boycott the screening for this fictitious hero, (12) only a government body possesses the unwarrantable power to levy the heavy handedness of law. This effort was an entirely civil and democratic effort grounded in the classical power of persuasion and the modern self-empowering influence of new media.

Accordingly, the decentralization of media has raised an unprecedented level of awareness and a civic virtue, essentially an army of readers promoting goodwill, with a discerning eye on behavior potentially destructive to the community.

In utilizing the new media’s unique ability to mobilize political action, this month’s grass-roots initiative allowed readers to voice their concerns and express to US businesses the right to vote with their money. Some have expressed their decision never to attend an Edward’s chain again. (13) Consequently, Edwards should realize that in supporting the legal defenses of convicted terrorists like Al-Arian, they better expect intense scrutiny.

ENDNOTES:

[1] Muslim Student Union Fundraising For Suspected Terrorist
[2] Guilty as Charged[3] Fundraising for Sami Al-Arian at UC Irvine[4] Michelle Malkin » UC Irvine Muslim group holds Al-Arian fund-raiser [5] Comment by Kristen Wheaton [6] CAIR's Duplicity In Focus - Al Arian Propaganda Film Screening Charade [7] USA vs. Al-Arian Screening: Updated Information[8] RE: USA vs. Al-Arian Screening: Updated Information
[9] New Venue for Al-Arian Fund-raiser
[10] CAIR and MSU Relocate Al-Arian Fundraiser[11] What if you had a Terror Fund-Raiser and Nobody Showed up?[12] CAIR: Calif. Theater Cancels Al-Arian Doc After Pressure From 'Anti-Muslim Bigots'
[13] Comment By Dennis P. Skea

Jihad, Old School

Andrew G. Bostom at FrontPage Magazine, has written a lengthy, in-depth article exploring the real roots of Islamic anitsemitism ("Jihad and Islamic Antisemitism").

No surprise, Bostom finds that Islamic antisemitism didn't originate after centuries of peaceful coexistence with Jews, as a justifiable response to the founding of modern Israel.

He describes how contemporary calumnies against Israel and the Jews are

part of a central antisemitic motif in the Koran which decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews (Koran 2:61/ reiterated at 3:112) for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah. It should be noted that Koran 3:112 is featured in the pre-amble to Hamas’ foundational Covenant. This central motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). Muhammad himself repeats this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (Sunan Abu Dawoud, Book 37, Number 4322), “He [Muhammad] then recited the verse [5:78]: ‘…curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of Mary’ ”. And the related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews—as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did in a January 2007 speech, citing Koran 5:64—of being “spreaders of war and corruption,” a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Bostom also takes a close look at the true meaning of "jihad," (“wag[ing] war, against unbelievers”), and that even America's first encounter with jihadism goes all the way back to her first days as a new nation:

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan [modern Libya] Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of jihad piracy—murder, enslavement (with ransoming for redemption), and expropriation of valuable commercial assets—emanating from the Barbary states (modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). During their discussions, they questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Thus an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power in the Middle East. Moreover, these jihad depredations targeting America antedated the earliest vestiges of the Zionist movement by a century, and the formal creation of Israel by 162 years—exploding the ahistorical canard that American support for the modern Jewish state is a prerequisite for jihadist attacks on the United States.

Read the rest of this worthwhile article here.

'Al Qaeda on the Run'

From Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:

Al Qaeda on the Run

May 31, 2008

A year ago in July, a National Intelligence Estimate warned that al Qaeda had "protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability," meaning it could be poised to strike America again. The political reaction was instantaneous and damning. "This clearly says al Qaeda is not beaten," said Michael Scheuer, the former CIA spook turned antiterror scold.
What a difference 10 months – and a surge – make.

CIA Director Michael Hayden painted a far more optimistic picture in an interview yesterday in the Washington Post. "On balance, we are doing pretty well," he said. "Near strategic defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al Qaeda globally – and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam."

What happened? To certain sophisticates, this is all al Qaeda's doing: By launching suicide attacks on Shiite and even Sunni targets, and ruling barbarically wherever they took control, the group has worn out its welcome in the Muslim world.

There's some truth in this. The Sunni Awakening in Iraq was in part a reaction by local clan leaders against al Qaeda's efforts to subjugate and brutalize them. The Arab world took note when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ordered the November 2005 bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan, in which nearly all of the victims were Sunni Arabs. Extremist Islamic parties took an electoral drubbing in Pakistan's elections earlier this year following a wave of suicide bombings, one of which murdered Benazir Bhutto.

It's also true that al Qaeda finds itself on the ideological backfoot, even in radical circles. As our Bret Stephens reported in March, Sayyed Imam, a founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once a mentor to Ayman al Zawahiri, has written an influential manifesto sternly denouncing his former comrades for their methods and theology. This was enough to prompt a 215-page rebuttal from Zawahiri, who seems to have time on his hands. Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic have recently written about similar jihadist defections.

But the U.S. offensives in Afghanistan and especially Iraq deserve most of the credit. The destruction of the Taliban denied al Qaeda one sanctuary, and the U.S. seems to have picked up the pace of Predator strikes in Pakistan – or at least their success rate. This has damaged al Qaeda's freedom of movement and command-and-control.

As for Iraq, Zawahiri himself last month repeated his claim that the country "is now the most important arena in which our Muslim nation is waging the battle against the forces of the Crusader-Zionist campaign." So it's all the more significant that on this crucial battleground, al Qaeda has been decimated by the surge of U.S. forces into Baghdad. The surge, in turn, gave confidence to the Sunni tribes that this was a fight they could win. For Zawahiri, losing the battles you say you need to win is not a way to collect new recruits.

General Hayden was careful to say the threat continues, and he warned specifically about those in Congress and the media who "[focus] less on the threat and more on the tactics the nation has chosen to deal with the threat." This refers to the political campaign to restrict wiretapping and aggressive interrogation, both of which the CIA director says have been crucial to gathering intelligence that has blocked further terrorist spectaculars that would have burnished al Qaeda's prestige.

One irony here is that Barack Obama is promising a rapid withdrawal from Iraq on grounds that we can't defeat al Qaeda unless we focus on Afghanistan. He opposed the Iraq surge on similar grounds. Yet it is the surge, and the destruction of al Qaeda in Iraq, that has helped to demoralize al Qaeda around the world. Nothing would more embolden Zawahiri now than a U.S. retreat from Iraq, which al Qaeda would see as the U.S. version of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.

It is far too soon to declare victory over al Qaeda. Still, Mr. Hayden's upbeat assessment is encouraging, and it suggests that President Bush's strategy of taking the battle to the terrorists is making America safer.

Obama: 'Change We Can Believe In Starts with Church'

From the New York Times:

Obama Quits His Church

By Jeff Zeleny

WASHINGTON – Senator Barack Obama is ending his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a congregation he has belonged to for about two decades and one that had become a lightning rod in his Democratic presidential bid.

Really, now, what else could Senator Obama do? He joined this church, I believe, because he wanted to punch his south Chicago ticket as proof he was a down black politician.

If only the steps he'd learned to dance along with Chicago's radical politico-clerico machine were the same he'd need to take to be a serious national figure, a unifier, and a credible presidential candidate. But, to paraphrase one of Barack's three spiritual advisors, Fr. Pfleger, Obama is telling himself:

"I’m BLACK. And this is mine. And I jus’ gotta get up. And step into the plate. And then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Father Pfleger!’ And he said: ‘Oh, damn!’ WHERE DID YOU COME FROM!?!?!"

Fr. Pfleger came from the same place Reverend Wright came from, and Louis Farrakhan, and Bill Ayers, and the rest. They came straight from the grab-basket of Obama's political past, each one of them lovingly selected for what they could do to help a slick, handsome, trans-racial Harvard grad get on the fast track to Destiny, with a starting place in south side Chicago.

But what works in city politics for trading off votes, graft, youth centers, and getting easy laughs from "community organized" congregations somehow doesn't translate to the weightier matters that the leader of the free world has to face. Obama is the living embodiment of the slogan about not needing enemies when you have friends like these. Could he have possibly selected a group better calculated to convince the nation he never met a loudmouthed, obstreperous, idiot he didn't like? (If I hear one more of these jokers say that Jeremiah Wright is one of the most brilliant biblical scholars in the world I'm going to vomit on my keyboard).

Obama's problem today is that he's going through a cycle that most of go through as young people, anywhere between young adulthood and middle age, when we come to a new view of things, and shed some of the foolish associations of the past, and the foolish ideas of our youth. We laugh at ourselves a bit: "I used to think that?! I said that?!" It's all part of growing up.

At least, in Obama's case, he's shedding the foolish associations, with the gentle prompting of the conservative press. And he's doing so at record speed. It's a healthy thing, by and large. Maybe he'll start shedding the foolish ideas soon, too. Everything in good time.

You just don't want somebody still going through that in the Oval Office.

Fordson Principal Pile Drives the First Amendment

“DEARBORN -- A veteran wrestling coach at Fordson High School lost his job amid concerns that his one-time assistant, who is a local minister and parent of a wrestler, attempts to convert local Muslim youths to Christianity.” (“Fordson High coach let go after parent tried to convert Muslims”).

Discussion questions:

(1.) In what year did the practice of personal evangelism by American Christians toward nonChristians lose its protection under the First Amendment?

(2.) In what year did the United States adopt as our public policy that public school personnel are subject to termination for extra-curricular associations with evangelistic Christians?

Let’s get one thing straight: the fired coach, Jerry Marszalek, was not fired for using his public-school coaching job to try to convert Muslims. He was fired because he was friends with a local minister who sees his mission as winning all people to Christianity. And Fordson’s Islamic principal, Imad Fadlallah, and the Muslim parents at Fordson, (also know, with very good reason, as “Hezbollah High,” ), simply don’t like that.

Is this such a big deal?

Then try to imagine you’re the employee. I mean, I happen to be friends with a local minister or two, and many lay Christians, who are extremely zealous, and vocal, about trying to win people to Christ--and they wouldn’t make exceptions about talking to Muslims. Does that mean that someday soon we'll be reading the headline, “Hapless paper-pusher let go after pal tried to convert Muslims”?

Well, you say, that may be, Clancy, but you don’t let your friends come in an evangelize your workplace, do you? No I don't, and neither did Marszalek. Nor did the Christian pastor, Trey Hancock, who says he never spoke about the Lord while at the school or on school activities. (None of the stories offer any facts to the contrary).

That’s why the Detroit News headline, “Fordson High coach let go after parent tried to convert Muslims” while technically accurate, at a first glance is completely misleading. It comes across as if the coach was using practice time to browbeat his captive wrestlers into giving up their 72 virgins in exchange for a starry crown.

But that’s nowhere near what happened. What really happened is that Fadlallah hated Hancock because he talked to Muslim kids about Jesus Christ--(and not even during school activities, and not on school grounds--but apparently where Allah could still see him). Fadlallah ordered Marszalek to fire Hancock as assistant coach, and then to ban him from all the wrestling matches, even though one of the team stars was Hancock’s own son. Marszalek did let Hancock go as coach--three years ago. (News reports actually say that Hancock baptized a Muslim kid three years ago, in 2005, and wasn’t even a Fordson student).

That Marszalek didn't do. So Fadlallah earlier this month told Marszalek “he was being let go because he had ignored his earlier directive to keep the pastor away from the team.” (“Coach's firing draws praise from Muslims”). Fadlallah didn’t want Hancock anywhere near Fordson’s Muslim wrestlers with his Jesus talk, because Sharia strictly forbids that.

The only thing wrong here is we Americans haven’t quite finished transferring over from the U.S. Constitution to Sharia. So while hundreds of Muslim parents at a board meeting may have praised Allah for Fadlallah’s act of jihad, the principal clearly violated both state and federal laws against discrimination based on religion.

It isn’t clear if Marszalek’s going to do anything about it legally, but I hope he does. Some people are trying to say Marszalek's contract didn't have to be renewed, and he was only an at-will employee. But at-will status still doesn't justify an illegal firing, which is what this is. Fadlallah told him he was letting him go for refusing to ban Hancock based on Hancock's Christianity.

If Marszalek doesn't take any legal action, this story won’t be around long, just like so many of the others. We’re too used to this kind of thing now.

Why do we accept this stuff as so matter-of-fact? Why are the news articles expressing shock at what Trey Hancock may have done, instead of what hundreds of Dearborn parents just did?

I think that ever since Desert Shield in 1991, when we first stationed a lot of American military personnel in the Middle East, we’ve been told and told again that we have to be careful of Muslim senisbilities. We had to get along with Saudis, Kuwaitis, Afghanis, and Iraqis, all Muslim nations completely unashamed of demanding we comply with their Islamic proscriptions of evangelism--no Bibles or even necklace crosses for US military guarding Saudi Arabia--and of course we went along with it.

Then there’ve been all those hundreds of hours watching Muslims riot around the globe because some Westerner insulted the Prophet or offended Islam. And nothing’s more insulting to the Prophet than converting a Muslim to Christianity! We Americans have been so conditioned to see applying Great Commission to Muslims as a religious crime we’re almost as offended when it happens as the imams are. (If you think I’m exaggerating, read this and notice the tone of shock: “Iraqis say Marines handed out Christian coins.” You’d think the Marine was handing children DVDs of the R. Kelly sex tape instead of telling these poor people that God loves them.)

It's become second nature to us that Muslims simply aren’t going to tolerate evangelism on their turf.

But even if that made any sense for us to feel that way, it still raises the whole question, is Fordson High School Muslim turf? Or is it a state-financed, Dearborn-taxpayer supported, American public school?

These news stories seem to take for granted that Fordson is indeed part of the Ummah. The Detroit News’s Muslim Affairs Correspondent, Gregg Krupa, describes Fordson High as “a predominantly Muslim school,” not even bothering with the distinction that Fordson is really a public school with a majority of students who are Muslim.

Still, if Fordson’s “predominantly Muslim” parents don’t want their impressionable kids exposed to Christianity, why not just let them fire their Christian staff out of deference to cultural sensitivity?

Well, it looks to me as if that’s what we’re doing.

But don’t forget that it’s still against the law to fire people in this country because you don’t like their religion. And we’ve been serious enough about that historically to reinforce that part of the Constitution by passing a Civil Rights Act banning religious discrimination in the workplace.

Not that those laws mean anything if no one’s going to see they’re enforced.

Oil and Waters Don't Mix

When the Congressional Black Caucus's Rep. Maxine Waters threatened an oil executive last week with nationalizing the oil industry, it wasn't only bloggers who got a kick out of it. Take a look at the faces of her co-committee members, Betty Sutton, D-OH, and Steve Cohen D-TN. Once Cohen realizes where Maxine is going, he leans back to exchange an amused look with somebody, probably on the Republican side. Rep. Sutton's trying not to laugh out loud, and her expression says: "Oh, God, can you believe she just said that!"

I guess even her colleagues have trouble taking "this liberal" seriously.

World Upside Down?

Now we can’t talk about the Kennedy assassinations?

I have to say I’m just not getting it about Hillary’s reference to Bobby Kennedy, even though she’s getting criticized for it from both left and right.

Here's what she said in an interview:

Asked if her continuing fight for the nomination against Senator Obama hurts the Democratic party, Sen. Hillary Clinton replied, "I don't. Because again, I've been around long enough. You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just don't understand it. You know, there's lots of speculation about why it is. "

Keith Olbermann, never hinged enough to now call unhinged, used Hillary’s foo poo as an opportunity to restate the ever-narrowing limits on free speech that we American’s are required to respect:

"The politics of this nation is steeped enough in blood, Senator Clinton, you cannot and must not invoke that imagery! Anywhere! At any time!"

Sounds reasonable. I know I’m always glad to update my Index of Forbidden Speech with the latest image, word, phrase, allusion, or historical event that I’m not allowed to use, Anywhere! At Any Time!

(Here in Detroit they had a very moving funeral for the n-word--never again anywhere! at any time!-- it was presided over by the embattled Mayor--except he dug up the term 2 months later when he needed it to throw around at his State of the City address.)

It's not only Obama's surrogates who are trying to turn Hillary's remark into a Big Deal. At Hot Air, they’re skeptical about Clinton’s defense that she was only referring to the historical fact that previous Democratic primaries have extended into June. If that's the case, they wonder, then “Why didn’t she use Teddy’s run at Jimmy Carter in 1980 instead?” (Here's one answer: maybe because no one remembers Teddy’s 1980 campaign, while all liberals recognize RFK in 1968 as an Icon).

Then Michelle Malkin says “Stick a fork in her. She may, at long last, be done.”

Chris Wallace told Terry McAullife on Sunday the remarks were “tasteless and ghoulish...even to use the word ‘assassination.’” Ghoulish? Even to use the word? Between the two, McAullife made more sense.

Which, of course, is The World Turned Upside Down!

No, I’m afraid I just don’t get this one.

I learned the hard way in chat room debates that once you have to start diagramming declarative sentences, all hope for rational discussion is gone. I also figured out that 90% of intellectual errors in this country are caused by poor reading comprehension.

Suffice it to say I’ve read Hillary’s statement several times, and watched the video, and I find no place that she ever “invoked” RFK’s assassination, (“mention” and “invoke” are not synonyms). Nor did I see where she either threatened Obama with assassination, nor expressed a hope that he be murdered.

Hell, I can’t even find where she said anything clumsy, stupid, or ghoulish. RFK was still in the California primary in June 1968, wasn’t he? (That is, until you-know-what happened. Or am I still allowed to say that?)

I just don’t see the offensiveness in this. But I admit I’m out of touch these days. Maybe this really was the most horrible thing anyone’s said, since, say, “God damn America.”

Apparently, a lot of us are willing to accept the Left’s extra-low threshold for imputing malevolent meaning into remarks that only tangentially touch upon a subject someone's willing to be hypersensitive about. Maybe conservatives are jumping on this too because they’ve got a version of the same derangement about Hillary the Left has had about George W. Bush the last 7 years: give us something, anything, and we'll use it to prove her diabolical pedigree.

But when did “assassination” become off limits? Who exactly is the victim group here? On whose behalf must Sharpton obtain an apology? The Kennedys?

Besides, liberals have been openly advocating Bush’s and Cheney's assassinations for years.

My complaint is that by granting to the Left, and through them the media, the power to impute malevolent meaning into neutral words, the heavier the control of free thought they can exercise. And controlling thought means a lot more to them than merely controlling free speech. You’ll never dare say what you don’t dare think.

When this power was granted to the Left in regards to race, they promptly used it to forbid white Americans from discussing race, even amongst themselves, except under the strict rules laid down by a civil-rights priesthood ordained, and carefully controlled, by the Left.

(And that's why we still can’t have a conversation about race, in spite of Obama’s ad hoc suggestion that we must have one: because a conversation is impossible when one side is forbidden to speak on the subject matter).

The Left has seized power in a similar way to limit thought about homosexuality, about abortion, and now, about the science fiction of global warming.

I have no interest in defending Hillary or her campaign. I see this as defending myself, and all the rest of us who still value what’s left of our right to free speech. And my right to not have any obstreperous son of a bitch telling me what I can and cannot say, Anywhere! At Any Time!

Memorial Day 2008

I was grateful to see this story in Friday's Detroit Free Press:

Iraq war veteran from Michigan describes blast that cost her a leg

BY CHRIS CHRISTOFF • FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF • May 23, 2008
LANSING --

"Ladies and gentlemen, freedom is not free."

With that, tearful Michigan National Guard veteran Sgt. Michelle Rudzitis ended an emotional address to the state Senate, in which she recounted losing her right leg to a roadside bomb in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 22, 2007.

Rudzitis, who turns 33 on Monday, which is also Memorial Day, was the keynote speaker for the Senate's annual Memorial Day service. She told of coming back to her Army base after a day off and a shopping spree. Her Humvee was the only vehicle in a convoy struck by a bomb that hurls a piece of molten copper through steel.

Two in the crew were killed and two were injured, including Rudzitis, whose right leg was severely damaged. Rudzitis, a former Farmington Hills resident who lives in Traverse City, said the Humvee's extra armor had been removed because it was to be refitted with new shielding.

Her description of the injuries -- her eyelashes were fused by the blast so she could not open her eyes, and she woke up in a hospital with her leg amputated -- brought many in the Senate chamber to tears.

A nine-year veteran of the National Guard, Rudzitis called her service the most important thing she'd ever done. She asked that families who spend Memorial Day gathering for barbecues "please, just take a moment and remember what this day means, and to remember all the servicemen and women who are no longer with us."

She said she spent more than seven months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., recuperating from the blast.


What's so refreshing about Sgt. Rudzitis's testimony is the way she describes her sacrifice and suffering as a triumph, instead of a tragedy--

"Rudzitis called her service the most important thing she'd ever done."

Let's hope that America on Memorial Day 2009 still deserves the likes of her.

Change Hamas Can Believe In

Comments from Jim Geraghty I saw on National Review Online:

Hamas' Ahmed Yousef: 'We like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win).'

Wow. All in all, if I were an American presidential candidate, I'd prefer to be denounced by Hamas. Not so for Barack Obama.

During an interview on WABC radio Sunday, top Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef said the terrorist group supports Obama’s foreign policy vision.

“We don’t mind–actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance,” Yousef said in response to a question about the group’s willingness to meet with either of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Audio here.

'Anatomy of Surrender'

The following excerpts are from a lenghty article in City Journal by Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. Bawer’s article is entitled, “An Anatomy of Surrender.” It's well worth reading in ins entirety.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission....


...The elite media regularly underreport fundamentalist Muslim misbehavior or obfuscate its true nature. After the knighting of Rushdie in 2007 unleashed yet another wave of international Islamist mayhem, Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any.” Or consider the riots that gripped immigrant suburbs in France in the autumn of 2005. These uprisings were largely assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim neighborhoods, and thus clearly jihadist in character. Yet weeks passed before many American press outlets mentioned them—and when they did, they de-emphasized the rioters’ Muslim identity (few cited the cries of “Allahu akbar,” for instance). Instead, they described the violence as an outburst of frustration over economic injustice.

When polls and studies of Muslims appear, the media often spin the results absurdly or drop them down the memory hole after a single news cycle. Journalists celebrated the results of a 2007 Pew poll showing that 80 percent of American Muslims aged 18 to 29 said that they opposed suicide bombing—even though the flip side, and the real story, was that a double-digit percentage of young American Muslims admitted that they supported it. u.s. muslims assimilated, opposed to extremism, the Washington Post rejoiced, echoing USA Today’s american muslims reject extremes. A 2006 Daily Telegraph survey showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain—yet British reporters often write as though only a minuscule minority embraced such views....

...After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash”—thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones. (These backlashes, of course, never materialize.) While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11. The Times described Armstrong’s hagiography of Mohammed as “a good place to start” learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito want to understand islam? start here.
Mainstream outlets have also served up anodyne portraits of fundamentalist Muslim life. Witness Andrea Elliott’s affectionate three-part profile of a Brooklyn imam, which appeared in the New York Times in March 2006. Elliott and the Times sought to portray Reda Shata as a heroic bridge builder between two cultures, leaving readers with the comforting belief that the growth of Islam in America was not only harmless but positive, even beautiful. Though it emerged in passing that Shata didn’t speak English, refused to shake women’s hands, wanted to forbid music, and supported Hamas and suicide bombing, Elliott did her best to downplay such unpleasant details; instead, she focused on sympathetic personal particulars. “Islam came to him softly, in the rhythms of his grandmother’s voice”; “Mr. Shata discovered love 15 years ago. . . . ‘She entered my heart,‘ said the imam.” Elliott’s saccharine piece won a Pulitzer Prize. When Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes pointed out that Shata was obviously an Islamist, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review dismissed Pipes as “right-wing” and insisted that Shata was “very moderate.”...

...Then there’s the art world. Postmodern artists who have always striven to shock and offend now maintain piously that Islam deserves “respect.” Museums and galleries have quietly taken down paintings that might upset Muslims and have put into storage manuscripts featuring images of Mohammed. London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery removed life-size nude dolls by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from a 2006 exhibit just before its opening; the official excuse was “space constraints,” but the curator admitted that the real reason was fear that the nudity might offend the gallery’s Muslim neighbors. Last November, after the cancellation of a show in The Hague of artworks depicting gay men in Mohammed masks, the artist, Sooreh Hera, charged the museum with giving in to Muslim threats. Tim Marlow of London’s White Cube Gallery notes that such self-censorship by artists and museums is now common, though “very few people have explicitly admitted” it. British artist Grayson Perry, whose work has mercilessly mocked Christianity, is one who has—and his reluctance isn’t about multicultural sensitivity. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,” he told the Times of London, “is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”...

...This spring, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, actually gave two cheers for sharia. He contrasted it favorably with English common law, and described “the Islamists’ aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law” as “bold and noble.”

With the press, the entertainment industry, and prominent liberal thinkers all refusing to defend basic Western liberties, it’s not surprising that our political leaders have been pusillanimous, too. After a tiny Oslo newspaper, Magazinet, reprinted the Danish cartoons in early 2006, jihadists burned Norwegian flags and set fire to Norway’s embassy in Syria. Instead of standing up to the vandals, Norwegian leaders turned on Magazinet’s editor, Vebjørn Selbekk, partially blaming him for the embassy burning and pressing him to apologize. He finally gave way at a government-sponsored press conference, groveling before an assemblage of imams whose leader publicly forgave him and placed him under his protection. On that terrible day, Selbekk later acknowledged, “Norway went a long way toward allowing freedom of speech to become the Islamists’ hostage.” As if that capitulation weren’t disgrace enough, an official Norwegian delegation then traveled to Qatar and implored Qaradawi—a defender of suicide bombers and the murder of Jewish children—to accept Selbekk’s apology. “To meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi under the present circumstances,” Norwegian-Iraqi writer Walid al-Kubaisi protested, was “tantamount to granting extreme Islamists . . . a right of joint consultation regarding how Norway should be governed.”....

...If you don’t find the dhimmification of politicians shocking, consider the degree to which law enforcement officers have yielded to Islamist pressure. Last year, when “Undercover Mosque,” an unusually frank exposé on Britain’s Channel 4, showed “moderate” Muslim preachers calling for the beating of wives and daughters and the murder of gays and apostates, police leaped into action—reporting the station to the government communications authority, Ofcom, for stirring up racial hatred. (Ofcom, to its credit, rejected the complaint.) The police reaction, as James Forsyth noted in the Spectator, “revealed a mindset that views the exposure of a problem as more of a problem than the problem itself.” Only days after the “Undercover Mosque” broadcast—in a colossal mark of indifference to the reality that it exposed—Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair announced plans to share antiterrorist intelligence with Muslim community leaders. These plans, fortunately, were later shelved...

...Even military leaders aren’t immune. In 2005, columnist Diana West noted that America’s Iraq commander, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, was educating his staff in Islam by giving them a reading list that “whitewashes jihad, dhimmitude and sharia law with the works of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito”; two years later, West noted the unwillingness of a counterinsurgency advisor, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, to mention jihad. In January 2008, the Pentagon fired Stephen Coughlin, its resident expert on sharia and jihad; reportedly, his acknowledgment that terrorism was motivated by jihad had antagonized an influential Muslim aide. “That Coughlin’s analyses would even be considered ‘controversial,’ ” wrote Andrew Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad, “is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global terrorism.” (Perhaps owing to public outcry, officials announced in February that Coughlin would not be dismissed after all, but instead moved to another Department of Defense position.)

Enough. We need to recognize that the cultural jihadists hate our freedoms because those freedoms defy sharia, which they’re determined to impose on us. So far, they have been far less successful at rolling back freedom of speech and other liberties in the U.S. than in Europe, thanks in no small part to the First Amendment. Yet America is proving increasingly susceptible to their pressures....

Would God Ever Damn the NAACP?

"We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

--Comments of Margaret Sanger, foundress of Planned Parenthood, in a 1939 memo entitled “Suggestions for the Negro Project.”

By now you've all heard (and heard, and heard) of pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He's the firebrand preacher whose controversial statements are explained by his being in the "prophetic tradition" of the black church, by his fearless commitment to bring God's Truth to the people even if it's unwelcome, and by his ministry to Speak Truth to Power. In fact, when he made his most contorversial peroration about singing "God Bless America" but "God damn America", he delivered it in the form of a religious injunction: "No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That's in the Bible, for killing innocent people."

It's in the Bible, see.

So it's funny that there are times when Rev. Wright, our "shining light," "prophet", our speaker of truth to power, our explainer of the mind of God on national and foreign policy, can display all the delicate distaste for difficult subjects and politesse of the most uptight Ladies Auxiliary Tea when it comes to one certain subject.

Last year he gave an interview to the German magazine, Der Spiegel, during which he was asked about the proper Christian attitude towards abortion:

SPIEGEL: Can you be a good Christian and be pro-choice?

Wright: Both. You can be a good Christian and be pro-life. You can be a good Christian and be pro-choice.

SPIEGEL: You mean it's a purely political question and faith has nothing to say about it?

Wright: First of all, we shouldn’t even be having this discussion. Neither one of us can get pregnant. But what a woman decides about her body and her God is her business. Women who are pro-life can be just a good a Christian as a woman who is pro-choice and vice versa. It gets to be a problem when I decide one position should be the law for everybody. In public life, we have to find a way to live together even though we disagree -- and some things we will never agree on.

Isn't he polite? This is hardly the kind of all-or-nothing warning from Jehovah we've all enjoyed watching Rev. Wright lay out when it comes to something like, oh, American support for Israel. Rev. Wright then followed up his explanation that God can go either way on abortion this way:

...In public life, we have to find a way to live together even though we disagree -- and some things we will never agree on. But we've got to leave this I'm-going-to-kill-you-because-you-don't-believe-what-I-believe attitude behind.

I agree completely! By all means let's not embrace an I'm-going-to-kill-you-because-you-don't-believe-what-I-believe attitude, or, at least we shouldn't embrace it--provided we hold such an attitude. But I don't think I do, or you do, either. Last I looked, that attitude was still more of an Islamic thing.

Yet isn't it interesting how Rev. Wright seems so at peace, so unprophetic, and so downright divinely blasé with embracing this attitude:

“I’m going to kill you because I don’t want to carry you in my womb any more.”

Rev. Wright's views on abortion are indeed relevant to the rest of what he has to say, if for no other reason than they make him out the worst sort of hypocritical Christian minister.

A case in point: when Bill Moyers gave Rev. Wright the chance to explain his “God damn America” sermon, Rev. Wright answered this way:

When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government -a particular government and not to God, that you're in serious trouble because governments fail people. And governments change. And governments lie. And those three points of the sermon. And that is the context in which I was illustrating how the governments biblically and the governments since biblical times, up to our time, changed, how they failed, and how they lie. And when we start talking about my government right or wrong, I don't think that goes. That is consistent with what the will of God says or the word of God says that governments don't say right or wrong. That governments that wanna kill innocents are not consistent with the will of God. And that you are made in the image of God, you're not made in the image of any particular government.

Odd. There's Rev. Wright's sensitivity again about the "killing of innocents." Seems to be a real thing with him. Nor should there be any confusion here that when Wright says “governments that wanna kill innocents," he’s not talking about Sudan, Hamas, or Iran: no, he's talking about that unrighteous "U.S. of KKK A."

The context of Rev. Wright's "God damn" sermon was its delivery the Sunday after 9/11. He was preaching on Psalm 137, a Psalm about Israelite exile in Babylon, and which concludes with a shocking verse aimed at Israel's oppressors: "Blessed are they who dash your baby's brains against a rock." Rev. Wright's point was that Israelite anger against their Babylonian captors had grown beyond resentment of the Babylonian military regime, and degenerated into a blind vengeance against even the enemy's innocent babies. Drawing a comparison with, in his view, America's anger after 9/11, Rev. Wright said to his congregation,

“And that my beloved is a dangerous place to be. Yet, that is where the people of faith are in 551 BC and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 AD. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks and we don't care who gets hurt in the process.”

Which might be a compelling spiritual insight, if it accurately stated the American mind, at that time or since. Unfortunately, just like his parishioner, Barack Obama, Rev. Wright’s view of America is skewed beyond recognition; he seems incapable of describing anything resembling either the American mind, nor American history, except in the most caustic and (yes, I'll say it), anti-American terms. For instance, he said this in another sermon:

America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. (“Obama and the Minister”).

(Betcha didn’t know America imprisoned Nelson Mandela, you miseducated rubes).

It's true enough that in the wake of 9/11 we did want revenge, and payback, and some of us wanted serious action on the matter of re-establishing our neglected national security--which isn't a sin, unless you're a liberal.

But the idea that we didn't care, or don't care now, who gets hurt in the process is a slander that Wright, and the Left, have repeated without accountability for 7 years.

The truth is that not even the most hysterically anti-war activist in America has any real idea of the extent of military power the United States could exert if we ever actually took the gloves off. The last time we fought with a complete will to win was in 1945, and even then our restraint in warmaking was a thing of wonder, especially when compared with the combat tactics and genocidal policies of the Axis and even the Soviets--Nagasaki and Hiroshima notwithstanding. (Or is it necessary to be reminded that we were at war with Japan when we dropped those bombs?)

But when it comes to Rev. Wright's view of it that right after 9/11 America had “moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents,” I have no idea who he's talking about. I've never harbored any hatred for unarmed innocents in Afghanistan or Iraq, and I’ve grieved at every report of deaths of innocent civilians as an incident to these two wars--wars that I supported, and still support.

As far as I'm concerned, if we could have destroyed the Taliban (no innocents, them), and Saddam's regime without killing their soldiers, I’d be all for it. If we had to kill their soldiers to accomplish the mission, I'd have no objection. If, in order to neutralize their mischief-making, (and to counter their military strategy of immersing and disguising their soldiers in the civilian population) we had to not only kill their fighters but risk the unintended deaths of innocent civilians, I see no moral wrong in that. In moral theology, intentionality is critical. Unintended deaths are not murder, even in war.

Moreover, if, after 9/11, we really had responded, as Rev. Wright so casually misinforms his listeners that we did, without a care for "who gets hurt in the process," you can be sure our situation in the Middle East would look quite different. For one, we wouldn’t be fighting from cave to cave in Afghanistan, and watching helplessly as al Qaeda laughs at us from us over the border in Pakistan. We wouldn't be doing that because there wouldn’t be any Afghanistan left, and we long since would have shown our contempt for Pakistan's sovereignty in favor of our own stated mission to find terrorists wherever they were hiding.

Nor would there be any quarrels about nation-building or who gets the oil money in Iraq. There wouldn't be anything to build with, as Iraq would be gone, and all Iraqis, guilty or innocent, dead.

Instead, American casualties are higher now because we fight our wars with more care for sparing the unarmed fellow villagers of the guys who are trying to kill us than we do for making the most enemy soldiers dead, regardless of consequences. We're so careful about not hurting any innocent civilians, that even enemy warriors, (and a lot of enemy civilians), can find shelter under that umbrella of caution--shelter they then exploit to kill more of our guys. The number of American dead the Left claims to be in such pain about is in part caused by decisions to place our own fighters in harm's way expressly to keep Iraqi casualties down. The left shows its gratiude for that by calling our soldiers, Nazis, terrorists, and baby-killers--which that last one, coming from them, is really rich.

America really is exceptional. Until we came along history had no examples of any nation fighting wars this way.

All of which leads me back to my real point. Rev. Wright is 100% pro-abortion. (And although it's obvious that Barack Obama's political views can't be ascribed to his pastor, it's still hugely significant that, after 20 years of Wright's preaching, and after crediting Rev. Wright with leading him "to Christ," Obama has the most radical pro-choice record in the Senate, and no moral qualms whatsoever about blocking legislation that would protect the lives of live babies already delivered who survived botched abortions).

Being a pro-choice Christian pastor isn't just a moral inconsistency. It disqualifies Rev. Wright, absolutely and forever, from ever holding any moral high ground on the treatment of “unarmed innocents.” (Nor, for that matter, does Rev. Wright have moral seriousness on the subject of justice to the poor, regardless of his church's record of social service work in inner-city Chicago. The poorest homeless man, single mother, or jobless ex-con has wealth and opportunities beyond imagination compared to a babe-in-the-womb whose mother has made up her mind to snuff it out. You can't get any poorer than that.)

American military doctrine since the last century has consistently employed restraint and aversion to anything approaching total war. Once we've made a decision for war, we are prepared to kill, and we will if we have to, but if we don’t have to, we won’t. That is our history. In just-war theory, this is called the proportional use of force, i.e., the least amount of focre necessary, and it's completely consistent with justice. (Pacifism is not consistent with justice; it can't be, since it must make peace with injustice, and never fight). The United States of America is history’s foremost example of the use of proportional force. Yes, innocent civilians die in every American war. But we work pretty hard to see that they don't. Americans die in the effort to see that they don't. Though the Left's bent reckoning always has them labeling all unintended civilian deaths "murder," or instances of American "terrorism," there is no moral basis for such charges.

It’s the intentionality thing again.

Whereas, in contrast, a decision to abort has no proportionality. Just as you can't be a little bit pregnant, you can't terminate a pregnancy by the least amount necessary. It's always going to go all the way. (Unless something goes wrong, in which case Barack Obama wants the law to tolerate finishing you off).

And in comparison to war, when it comes to intentionality abortion always lands on the wrong side of the ledger --because its object is not only a possibility, but a foregone conclusion. It isn’t motherhood by other means., as war may be diplomacy by other means. Abortion only ends one way: that is, with the enemy, and all his future offspring, annihilated, entirely.

There is no diplomacy, no negotiating with the “people we don’t like,” (like our unwanted unborn babies), no bridge programs. There are no fetuses writing supercilious think pieces analyzing their mother's motives and plaintively asking “Why do they hate us”? Neither Jimmy Carter nor Jesse Jackson has ever been known to embark on a peace mission between mother and child. Ramsey Clark never lends his expertise.

Instead, there’s only one doctor, one mother, and one corpse, or what would have been a corpse, except its usually in pieces, and literally, “unarmed,” having as likely as not experienced having its limbs torn off to effect 'justice" for its mother:

“In a D&E procedure, the physician inserts forceps into the uterus, grasps a part of the fetus, commonly an arm or a leg, and draws that part out of the uterus into the vagina. Using the traction created between the mouth of the cervix and the pull of the forceps, the physician dismembers the fetal part which has been brought into the vagina, and removes it from the woman's body. The rest of the fetus remains in the uterus while dismemberment occurs, and is often still living.”

Now, in fairness to Rev. Wright, he did criticize America from pulpit, and on the LORD's behalf, that “. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . .”

But he was talking about American support for Israel, not unborn babies.

He also condemned America, Elijah-like, because "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye." I don't know that we never batted an eye. But abortion destroyed 500,00 black babies in 2006 alone, and we're not even at war with blacks or babies. (Or are we?)

Last April, Dr. Alveda King, niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the NAACP (though not as keynote speaker), though her speech received small notice. ("MLK Niece Urges NAACP to Adopt Anti-Abortion Resolution"). She asked the civil rights group to adopt a resolution addressing the impact of abortion on the black community. Dr. King told the NAACP that, today, "there is no greater injustice facing black people than abortion.”

There's no indication the NAACP adopted the resolution nor, for that matter, has ever "batted an eye" over the tens of millions of black babies who never lived to enjoy Advancement.

Instead, this year they invited Rev. Wright to tell them what God wants them to do. Rev. Wright, the pro-choice advocate, and morally compromised pretender to champion of "unarmed innocents." He'll be addressing the NAACP in Detroit on Sunday night.

Our friends at Joshua's Trail are participating in a demonstration on Sunday at Cobo Hall, where the NAACP is holding its event, hoping to remind the group of their civil-rights roots. You may want to drop by between 3-6 pm.

'Jihadists! Have You Ever Thought About Working for the FBI?'

From The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

For the Record: Seriously, What is the FBI Doing?

IPT News
April 7, 2008

In February, we exposed the latest FBI (and CIA) outrage, advertising for recruits in a pro-terrorist, anti-American magazine, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) - (see: Looking Under a Rock: FBI and CIA Hit New Low in Recruitment Drive). Both of our top national security agencies had placed online advertisements on the webpage of a magazine that included a hagiography to a terrorist the FBI had worked almost a decade to investigate and prosecute, Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian.

Just over a month later, it is clear that the FBI has learned nothing. The agency is advertising for recruits in the Arab American News, another publication with a long history of support for terrorism, terrorists and terrorist organizations.

The current edition has an editorial titled, "Let our people go!," under an ad banner recruiting for the FBI (which also appears on the home page of the website), about accused Iraqi spy Muthanna al-Hanooti, which states:

Arab American political activist Muthanna al-Hanooti was arrested and jailed this week by federal officials upon arrival at Detroit Metropolitan Airport returning from a trip to the Middle East. The following day he was charged with two counts of conspiracy and three counts of lying to the FBI about working for agents with the Iraqi Intelligence Service under Saddam Hussein. (emphasis added)

The editorial goes on to state:

We see a man who worked tirelessly trying to prevent a catastrophe for his homeland and for his new country. We see a guy who, rather than pick up a gun and kill somebody to reach his political goals, chose to participate in the American political system because he believed in it. He believed justice would be served if only more people knew the real story of what was going on in Iraq.

So there you have it. The FBI is advertising for recruits in a publication which proclaims the innocence of an alleged Iraqi spy accused of lying …. to the FBI, and claims that being a paid intelligence asset of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime is participating "in the American political system."

Understanding the FBI's need for Arabic translators and Arabic speaking agents and analysts is one thing. Seeing the agency advertise for recruits in pro-terrorist publications – including one that discounts making false statements to the FBI! - is quite another. As we stated in February when it became known that the FBI and CIA were advertising in WRMEA, Congress needs to immediately investigate these agencies' recruiting techniques.