Militant Islam in America | "The Muslim population in this country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people—many times more numerous than the agents of Osama bin Ladin—who share with the suicide hijackers a hatred of the United States and the desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam. Although not responsible for the atrocities in September, they harbor designs for this country that warrant urgent and serious attention." - The Danger Within: Militant Islam in America - Daniel Pipes | Radical calls for nationwide Sharia law | Radical Imam Calls For The Death of ‘Draw Mohammed’ Contest Creator - YouTube | Lowry: Jihadi censorship comes to America | The Hidden Agenda of Islam Immigration into America | Islam in America | “You find that a lot of the converts going to the Islamic State are girls, girls with problems, girls who have been prostitutes, girls with psychological and behavioral issues, sometimes borderline personalities,” said Marion van San, a senior researcher on foreign fighters at an institute affiliated with Erasmus University in Rotterdam. “Then someone comes along and promises that Allah is going to give them a second chance.” Converts, experts say, also make easier targets. At least some tend to be lost souls searching for answers. For a minority of them, the radical ideology of the Islamic State is providing a heady sense of belonging, structure and a clear set of rules." - From hip-hop to jihad, how the Islamic State became a magnet for converts | "We believe that the Obama administration is actually planing to build communities within communities so that the new immigrants can take over the existing communities. An example of where this has already happened is Dearborn, MI... Are these refugees safe? Ninety percent of these refugees are Muslims. Are they tied to ISIS? We know that recently 400 people have been arrested or investigated because of potential connections to ISIS... President Obama is very sympathetic to Islam and shows great disdain toward Christians. He has done little to stop the slaughter and persecutions of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa. From his actions and statements we can only deduce that Obama has some malice toward Christians here in the US. What better way to dilute the Christian and Jewish elements of our nation than to bring in mass numbers of Muslims through this program?... This shows that there is not going to be any assimilation into the communities where these immigrants are being dumped. We have seen this same thing in Europe and now our government is doing the same thing. Islam has a specific doctrine of jihad which deals with immigration. It says that Muslims are encouraged from the example of Muhammad to migrate, not immigrate, in mass to non-Muslim communities and then populate by having lots of children. They are not allowed to assimilate into the culture. As they grow in numbers they demand more and more accommodation to Islamic ways. They demand that their Shariah law be implemented within the legal system of the host community... We need to understand that we are talking about legal immigration. The illegal immigration is just a smoke screen to keep our eyes off of this legal immigration of Muslims. The total of illegal immigrants coming into America annually is a couple of hundred thousands. The total legal immigrants is just over one million annually... We can certainly say that President Obama has done everything he can to live up to his promise to fundamentally transform America... The freedoms we enjoy in this nation will be lost if we allow this to continue." - The Hidden Agenda of Islam Immigration into America | INTELLIGENCE: Campus Conspiracies From China | Victory Day: Showing Strength at a Time of Weakness - STRATFOR
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In the aftermath of the violence on September 11, American politicians from George W. Bush on down have tripped over themselves to affirm that the vast majority of Muslims living in the United States are just ordinary people. Here is how the President put it during a visit to a mosque on September 17: "America counts millions of Muslims among our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads." Two days later, he added that "there are millions of good Americans who practice the Muslim faith who love their country as much as I love the country, who salute the flag as strongly as I salute the flag."
These soothing words, echoed and amplified by many columnists and editorial writers, were obviously appropriate at a moment of high national tension and amid reports of mounting bias against Muslims living in the United States. And it is certainly true that the number of militant Islamic operatives with plans to carry out terrorist attacks on the United States is statistically tiny. But the situation is more complex than the President would have it.
The Muslim population in this country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people—many times more numerous than the agents of Osama bin Ladin—who share with the suicide hijackers a hatred of the United States and the desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam. Although not responsible for the atrocities in September, they harbor designs for this country that warrant urgent and serious attention.
In June 1991, Siraj Wahaj, a black convert to Islam and the recipient of some of the American Muslim community's highest honors, had the privilege of becoming the first Muslim to deliver the daily prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives. On that occasion he recited from the Qur'an and appealed to the Almighty to guide American leaders "and grant them righteousness and wisdom."
A little over a year later, addressing an audience of New Jersey Muslims, the same Wahaj articulated a rather different vision from his mild and moderate invocation in the House. If only Muslims were more clever politically, he told his New Jersey listeners, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate. "If we were united and strong, we'd elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us." In 1995, Wahaj served as a character witness for Omar Abdel Rahman in the trial that found that blind sheikh guilty of conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. More alarming still, the U.S. attorney for New York listed Wahaj as one of the "unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators" in the sheikh's case.
The disparity between Wahaj's good citizenship in the House and his militant forecast of a Muslim takeover—not to mention his association with violent felons—is only one example of a larger pattern common to the American Muslim scene. Another example, about which I have written recently elsewhere, involves the American Muslims for Jerusalem, an organization whose official advocacy of "a Jerusalem that symbolizes religious tolerance and dialogue" contrasts markedly with the wild conspiracy-mongering and crude anti-Jewish rhetoric in which its spokesmen indulge at closed events.
1
At a minimum, then, anyone who would understand the real views of American Muslims must delve deeper than the surface of their public statements.
Doing so, one discovers that the ambition to take over the United States is hardly a new one. The first missionaries for militant Islam, or Islamism, who arrived here from abroad in the 1920's, unblushingly declared, "Our plan is, we are going to conquer America." The audacity of such statements hardly went unnoticed at the time, including by Christians who cherished their own missionizing hopes. As a 1922 newspaper commentary put it:
To the millions of American Christians who have so long looked eagerly forward to the time the cross shall be supreme in every land and the people of the whole world shall have become the followers of Christ, the plan to win this continent to the path of the "infidel Turk" will seem a thing unbelievable. But there is no doubt about its being pressed with all the fanatical zeal for which the Mohammedans are noted.
But it is in recent decades, as the Muslim population in the country has increased significantly in size, social standing, and influence, and as Islamism has made its presence widely felt on the international scene, that this "fanatical zeal" has truly come into its own. A catalyzing figure in the story is the late Ismail Al-Faruqi, a Palestinian immigrant who founded the International Institute of Islamic Thought and taught for many years at Temple University in Philadelphia. Rightly called "a pioneer in the development of Islamic studies in America," he was also the first contemporary theorist of a United States made Muslim. "Nothing could be greater," Al-Faruqi wrote in the early 1980's, "than this youthful, vigorous, and rich continent [of North America] turning away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of
Allahu Akbar
[God is great]."
Al-Faruqi's hopes are today widely shared among educated Muslim leaders. Zaid Shakir, formerly the Muslim chaplain at Yale University, has stated that Muslims
cannot
accept the legitimacy of the American secular system, which "is against the orders and ordainments of Allah." To the contrary, "The orientation of the Qur'an pushes us in the exact opposite direction." To Ahmad Nawfal, a leader of the Jordanian Muslim Brethren who speaks frequently at American Muslim rallies, the United States has "no thought, no values, and no ideals"; if militant Muslims "stand up, with the ideology that we possess, it will be very easy for us to preside over this world." Masudul Alam Choudhury, a Canadian professor of business, writes matter-of-factly and enthusiastically about the "Islamization agenda in North America."
For a fuller exposition of this outlook, one can do no better than to turn to a 1989 book by Shamim A. Siddiqi, an influential commentator on American Muslim issues. Cryptically titled
Methodology of Dawah Ilallah in American Perspective
(more idiomatically rendered as "The Need to Convert Americans to Islam"), this 168-page study, published in Brooklyn, remains largely unavailable to general readers (neither <a href="http://amazon.com" rel="nofollow">amazon.com</a> nor <a href="http://bookfinder.com" rel="nofollow">bookfinder.com</a> listed it over a period of months) but is widely posted on Islamist websites,
2
where it enjoys a faithful readership. In it, in prose that makes up in intensity and vividness for what it lacks in sophistication and polish, Siddiqi lays out both a detailed rationale and a concrete plan for Islamists to take over the United States and establish "Islamic rule" (
iqamat ad-din
).
Why America? In Siddiqi's judgment, the need to assume control here is even more pressing than the need to sustain the revolution of the mullahs in Iran or to destroy Israel, for doing so will have a much greater positive impact on the future of Islam. America is central not for the reasons one might expect—its large population, its wealth, or the cultural influence it wields around the world—but on three other grounds.
The first has to do with Washington's role as the premier enemy of Islamism (or, possibly, of Islam itself). In Siddiqi's colorful language, whenever and wherever Muslims have moved toward establishing an Islamic state, the "treacherous hands of the secular West are always there . . . to bring about [their] defeat." Nor are Muslim rulers of any help, for they are "all in the pockets of the Western powers." If, therefore, Islam is ever going to attain its rightful place of dominance in the world, the "ideology of Islam [must] prevail over the mental horizon of the American people." The entire future of the Muslim world, Siddiqi concludes, "depends on how soon the Muslims of America are able to build up their own indigenous movement."
Secondly, America is central because establishing Islamism here would signal its final triumph over its only rival, that bundle of Christianity and liberalism which constitutes contemporary Western civilization. (One cannot help noting the irony that Siddiqi's tract appeared in the same year, 1989, as Francis Fukuyama's famous article speculating that, with the collapse of Communism and the apparent triumph of liberal democracy, we had begun to approach the "end of history.") And thirdly, and still more grandly, the infusion of the United States with Islamism would make for so powerful a combination of material success and spiritual truth that the establishment of "God's Kingdom" on earth would no longer be "a distant dream."
But this dream will not happen by itself. To American Muslims, writes Siddiqi, falls the paramount responsibility of bringing Islam to power in their country; and to this goal, Muslims must devote "all of their energies, talents, and resources." For this is how they will be assessed on judgment day: "Every Muslim living in the West will stand in the witness box in the mightiest court of Allah . . . in
Akhirah
[the last day] and give evidence that he fulfilled his responsibility, . . . that he left no stone unturned to bring the message of the Qur'an to every nook and corner of the country."
How this desired end is to be achieved is a question on which opinions differ in Siddiqi's world. Basically, the disagreement centers on the role of violence.
As has been made irrefutably clear in recent weeks, there are indeed some, not just abroad but living among us, who see the United States as (in the phrase of Osama bin Ladin) an "enemy of Islam" that must be brought to its knees and destroyed. In its broad outlines, this judgment came to be solidified during the crisis over Iraq's seizure of Kuwait in the early 1990's, when militants like bin Ladin discerned a historic parallel between the presence of American troops on the soil of Saudi Arabia and the brutal Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's. In their dialectical view, as the
New Yorker
writer Mary Ann Weaver has explained, the United States, just like the Soviet Union before it, represented "an infidel occupation force propping up a corrupt, repressive, and un-Islamic government." And just as the Islamist
mujahideen
in Afghanistan had succeeded in defeating and driving out their occupiers, and thereby played a role in the collapse of the mighty Soviet Union itself, so Islamists might cause the collapse of the United States: one down, one to go, as it were.
To the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who after bin Laden is perhaps today's most notorious enemy of the United States, bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 was part and parcel of this revolutionary strategy to "conquer the land of the infidels" by force. The idea, as one of his followers put it, was to "bring down their highest buildings and the mighty constructions they are so proud of, in order thoroughly to demoralize them."
3
And this was a duty that Islamists saw as incumbent on all Muslims; having helped humiliate the Soviets in Afghanistan, they now, as one native-born American convert to Islam proclaimed in July 1989, must "complete the march of
jihad
until we reach America and liberate her."
But there are several problems with the approach of revolutionary violence, even from the perspective of those who share its goal. The most obvious has to do with its impact on American society. Although attacks like the 1993 bombing or the suicide massacres of September 11 are intended to demoralize the American people, prompt civil unrest, and weaken the country politically, what they do instead is to bring Americans together in patriotism and purpose. Those who mastermind them, in the meantime, are often caught: Abdel Rahman is sitting out a life sentence in a federal penitentiary, his campaign of violence stillborn, while Osama bin Ladin is the object of a massive manhunt to get him "dead or alive." Unlike in the very different case of the Soviet Union, it is very hard to see how the use of force will succeed in wearing down this country, much less lead to a change in government.
Besides, as a number of commentators have recently pointed out, in targeting all Americans the perpetrators of Islamic violence do not bother even to discriminate between non-Muslim and Muslim victims. According to preliminary estimates, several hundred Muslims died in the collapse of the World Trade Center. This is not exactly calculated to enlist the participation of most resident Muslims in a campaign of violent insurrection.
4
For all these reasons, the non-violent way would seem to have a brighter future, and it is in fact the approach adopted by most Islamists. Not only is it legal, but it allows its enthusiasts to adopt a seemingly benign view of the United States, a country they mean to rescue rather than to destroy, and it dictates a strategy of working with Americans rather than against them. As a teacher at an Islamic school in Jersey City, near New York, explains, the "short-term goal is to introduce Islam. In the long term, we must save American society." Step by step, writes a Pakistan-born professor of economics, by offering "an alternative model" to Americans, Muslims can transform what Ismail Al-Faruqi referred to as "the unfortunate realities of North America" into something acceptable in God's eyes.
Practically speaking, there are two main prongs to the non-violent strategy. The first involves radically increasing the number of American Muslims, a project that on the face of it would not seem very promising. Islam, after all, is still an exotic growth in the United States, its adherents representing just 1 to 2 percent of the population and with exceedingly dim prospects of becoming anything like a majority. Islamists are not so unrealistic as to think that these numbers can be substantially altered any time soon by large-scale immigration (which is politically unfeasible and might anyway provoke a backlash) or by normal rates of reproduction. Hence they focus most of their efforts on conversion.
They do so not only as a matter of expediency but on principle. For Islamists, converting Americans is the central purpose of Muslim existence in the United States, the only possible justification for Muslims to live in an infidel land. In the view of Shamim Siddiqi, there is no choice in the matter—American Muslims are "ordained by Allah" to help replace evil with good, and otherwise "have no right even to breathe." "Wherever you came from," adds Siraj Wahaj, "you came . . . for one reason—for one reason only—to establish Allah's
din
[faith]."
This imperative, relentlessly propagated by authoritative figures and promoted by leading Islamist organizations like the Muslim Student Association, has been widely adopted by Muslim Americans at large. Many attest to the sense of responsibility that flows from being an "ambassador for Islam," and are ever mindful of the cardinal importance of winning new adherents. And, given what they hold to be the truth of their message and the depravity of American culture, Islamists are optimistic about their chances of success. "A life of
taqwah
[piety] will immediately attract non-Muslims towards Islam," writes Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, an important Indian Islamist, in his "Message for Muslims in the West."
He has a point: the more readily the message of Islam is available, the more converts it is likely to win. In making headway in the United States, Islam has largely depended on hands-on contact and personal experience. According to one survey, over two-thirds of American converts to Islam were motivated by the influence of a Muslim friend or acquaintance.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
(1964), with its moving account of redemption through Islam, has had a wide impact on American blacks (and even some whites), causing a substantial number to convert. Similarly not to be discounted are the efforts of the various Muslim organizations in the United States, whose "attempts at educating the American public about Islam" may be responsible, according to one observer, for "Islam's increasing numbers."
But if increasing numbers are necessary, they are also not sufficient. After all, whole countries—Turkey, Egypt, Algeria—have overwhelmingly Muslim populations, but Islamism is suppressed by their governments. From an Islamist point of view, indeed, the situation in Turkey is far
worse
than in the United States, for it is a more grievous thing to reject the divine message as interpreted by Islamists than merely to be ignorant of it. Therefore, in addition to building up Muslim numbers, Islamists must prepare the United States for their own brand of ideology. This means doing everything possible toward creating an Islamist environment and applying Islamic law. Activities under this heading fall into various categories.
Promoting Islamic rituals and customs in the public square.
Islamists want secular authorities to permit students in public institutions, for example, to recite the
basmallah
(the formula "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate") in classroom exercises. They also want the right to broadcast over outdoor loudspeakers the five daily Islamic calls-to-prayer. Similarly, they have agitated for publicly maintained prayer facilities in such institutions as schools and airports.
Privileges for Islam.
Islamists seek public financial support for Islamic schools, mosques, and other institutions. They also lobby for special quotas for Muslim immigrants, try to compel corporations to make special allowances for Muslim employees, and demand the formal inclusion of Muslims in affirmative-action plans.
Restricting or disallowing what others may do.
Islamists want law-enforcement agencies to criminalize activities like drinking and gambling that are offensive to Islam. While seeking wide latitude for themselves, for instance when it comes to expressing disrespect for American national symbols, they would penalize expressions of disrespect for religious figures whom Islam deems holy, especially the prophet Muhammad; punish criticism of Islam, Islamism, or Islamists; and close down critical analysis of Islam.
Some of these aims have already been achieved. Others may seem relatively minor in and of themselves, implying no drastic alterations in existing American arrangements but rather only slight adjustments in our already expansive accommodation of social "diversity." Cumulatively, however, by whittling away at the existing order, they would change the country's whole way of life—making Islam a major public presence, ensuring that both the workplace and the educational system accommodate its dictates and strictures, adapting family customs to its code of conduct, winning it a privileged position in American life, and finally imposing its system of law. Steps along the way would include more radical and intrusive actions like prohibiting conversion
out
of Islam, criminalizing adultery, banning the consumption of pork, formalizing enhanced rights for Muslims at the expense of non-Muslims, and doing away with equality of the sexes.
A Muslim majority? Islamic law the law of the land? Even the most optimistic Islamists concede the task will not be easy. Just as Muhammad confronted die-hard opponents in pagan Mecca, writes Siddiqi, so pious Muslims in America will face opponents, led by the press cum media, the agents of capitalism, the champions of atheism (Godless creeds) and the [Christian] missionary zealots." Doing battle with them will demand focus, determination, and sacrifice.
And yet Siddiqi also thinks Muslims enjoy advantages undreamt of in Muhammad's day or in any other society than today's United States. For one thing, Americans are hungry for the Islamist message, which "pinpoints the shortcoming of capitalism, elaborates the fallacies of democracy, [and] exposes the devastating consequences of the liberal lifestyle." For another, the United States
permits
Islamists to pursue their political agenda in an entirely legal fashion and without ever challenging the existing order. Indeed, precisely because the Constitution guarantees complete government neutrality toward religion, the system can be used to further Islamist aims. Democratic means are at hand for developing an active and persistent lobby, cultivating politicians, and electing Muslim representatives. Nearly a million legal immigrants arrive in the country each year, plus many more through the long coastlines and porous land borders. The courts are an all-important resource, and have already proved their worth in winning concession after concession from American corporations and public authorities.
Even so, the road will not be completely smooth. A delicate point will be reached, in Siddiqi's mind, as society polarizes between Muslim and non-Muslim camps "in every walk of life." At that point, as the struggle between Truth and Error "acquires momentum and the tension increases along with it," the "Wrong Doers" are likely to take desperate steps to "eliminate the Islamic movement and its workers by force." But if Islamists tread cautiously to navigate this point, taking special care not to alienate the non-Muslim population, eventually there will follow what Siddiqi calls a general "Rush-to-Islam." It will then be only a matter of time before Muslims find themselves not just enfranchised but actually running the show.
How much time? Siddiqi sees Islamists in power in Washington before 2020. For Wahaj, implementation of the
shari'a
in the United States "appears to be approaching fast," and in contemplating what that means his language grows ecstatic:
I have a vision in America, Muslims owning property all over, Muslim businesses, factories, halal meat, supermarkets, all these buildings owned by Muslims. Can you see the vision, can you see the Newark International Airport and a John Kennedy Airport and LaGuardia having Muslim fleets of planes, Muslim pilots. Can you see our trucks rolling down the highways, Muslim names. Can you imagine walking down the streets of Teaneck, [New Jersey]: three Muslim high schools, five Muslim junior-high schools, fifteen public schools. Can you see the vision, can you see young women walking down the street of Newark, New Jersey, with long flowing hijab and long dresses. Can you see the vision of an area of no crime, controlled by the Muslims?
It hardly needs pointing out that this vision is, to say the least, farfetched, or that Islamists are deluding themselves if they think that today's newborns will be attending college in an Iranian-style United States. But neither is their effort altogether quixotic: their devotion, energy, and skill are not to be questioned, and the larger Muslim-American community for which they claim to speak is assuredly in a position, especially as its numbers grow, to affect our public life in decisive ways. Indeed, despite persistent complaints of bias against them—more voluminous than ever in the wake of the airplane hijackings on September 11—Muslim Americans have built an enviable record of socio-economic accomplishment in this country, have won wide public acceptance of their faith, and have managed to make it particularly difficult for anyone to criticize their religion or customs.
Whether and to what degree the community as a whole subscribes to the Islamist agenda are, of course, open questions. But what is not open to question is that, whatever the majority of Muslim Americans may believe, most of the
organized
Muslim community agrees with the Islamist goal—the goal, to say it once again, of building an Islamic state in America. To put it another way, the major Muslim organizations in this country are in the hands of extremists.
One who is not among them is Muhammad Hisham Kabbani of the relatively small Islamic Supreme Council of America. In Kabbani's reliable estimation, such "extremists" have "taken over 80 percent of the mosques" in the United States. And not just the mosques: schools, youth groups, community centers, political organizations, professional associations, and commercial enterprises also tend to share a militant outlook, hostile to the prevailing order in the United States and advocating its replacement with an Islamic one.
Not all these organizations and spokesmen are open about their aspirations, though some are: for example, the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Virginia, proclaims its academic purpose to be nothing less than "the Islamization of the humanities and the social sciences." But the best-known organizations—the ones whose members are invited to offer prayers and invocations before Congress or to attend White House functions, or whose representatives accompanied the President on his September 17 visit to a mosque—tend to hide their true colors behind arch-respectable goals. Thus, the American Muslim Council claims to work "toward the political empowerment of Muslims in America," the Council on American-Islamic Relations is "putting faith into action," and the Muslim Public Affairs Council seeks only to make American Muslims "an influential component in U.S. public affairs."
But as I have documented at greater length on other occasions,
5
much if not everything about the conduct of these organizations points to their essential agreement with the "conquer America" agenda, and from time to time their leaders—including Al-Faruqi and Shakir—have even said as much. As for Siraj Wahaj, he is a top figure in the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Alliance in North America, and the Muslim Arab Youth Association, and his views contaminate every single one of them. It is not accurate to say, as President Bush said of the Islamist leaders with whom he met on September 17, that they "love America as much as I do."
That a significant movement in this country aspires to erode its bedrock social and legal arrangements, including the separation of church and state, and has even developed a roadmap toward that end, poses a unique dilemma, especially at this moment. Every responsible public official, and every American of good faith, is bent on drawing a broad distinction between terrorists operating in the name of Islam and ordinary Muslim "moms and dads." It is a true and valid distinction, but it goes much too far, and if adhered to as a guideline for policy it will cripple the effort that must be undertaken to preserve our institutions.
What such an effort would look like is a subject unto itself, but at a minimum it would have to entail the vigilant application of social and political pressure to ensure that Islam is not accorded special status of any kind in this country, the active recruitment of moderate Muslims in the fight against Islamic extremism, a keener monitoring of Muslim organizations with documented links to Islamist activity, including the support of terrorism, and the immediate reform of immigration procedures to prevent a further influx of visitors or residents with any hint of Islamist ideology. Wherever that seditious and totalitarian ideology has gained a foothold in the world, it has wrought havoc, and some societies it has brought to their knees. The preservation of our existing order can no longer be taken for granted; it needs to be fought for.
1
"Islam's American Lobby,"
Jerusalem Post
, September 20, 2001.
2
Here are two: <a href="http://www.islambook.com/dawah.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.islambook.com/dawah.htm</a> and <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> www. halalco.com/dawah.html.
3
These words were found in a notebook kept by Sayyid Abd al-Aziz Nusayr, the Egyptian immigrant who assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane in a New York hotel in November 1990.
4
Upon hearing an immigrant Islamist speaker instruct an audience of Muslims that they were "obligated to desire, and when possible to participate in, the overthrow of any non-Islamic government—anywhere in the world—in order to replace it by an Islamic one," one American-born convert remembers protesting in dismay that this would involve people like himself in political treason. "Yes, that's true," was the lecturer's blithe response. (Jeffrey Lang,
Even Angels Ask: A Journey to Islam in America
, 1997.)
5
See, in
Commentary
, "Are Muslim Americans Victimized?" (November 2000), "How Elijah Muhammad Won" (June 2000), "‘How Dare You Defame Islam'" (November 1999), and "America's Muslims Against America's Jews" (May 1999).
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The terrorist assault on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7 may have been organized by al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. But the attack, along with another at a Paris kosher market days later, was carried out by French Muslims descended from recent waves of North African and West African immigration. Well before the attacks, which left 17 dead, the French were discussing the possibility that tensions with the country’s own Muslim community were leading France toward some kind of armed confrontation.
Consider Éric Zemmour, a slashing television debater and a gifted polemicist. His history of the collapse of France’s postwar political order, “Le suicide français,” was No. 1 on the best-seller lists for several weeks this fall. “Today, our elites think it’s France that needs to change to suit Islam, and not the other way around,” Mr. Zemmour said on a late-night talk show in October, “and I think that with this system, we’re headed toward civil war.”
More recently, Michel Houellebecq published “Submission,” a novel set in the near future. In it, the re-election of France’s current president, François Hollande, has drawn recruits to a shadowy group proclaiming its European identity. “Sooner or later, civil war between Muslims and the rest of the population is inevitable,” a sympathizer explains. “They draw the conclusion that the sooner this war begins, the better chance they’ll have of winning it.” Published, as it happened, on the morning of the attacks, Mr. Houellebecq’s novel replaced Mr. Zemmour’s at the top of the best-seller list, where it remains.
Two days after the Charlie Hebdo killings, there was a disturbing indication on Le Monde’s website of how French people were thinking. One item about the killing vastly outpaced all others in popularity. The reactions of Europe’s leaders was shared about 5,000 times, tales of Muslim schoolchildren with mixed feelings about 6,000, a detailed account of the Charlie Hebdo editorial meeting ended by the attack, 9,000. Topping them all, shared 28,000 times, was a story about reprisals: “Mosques become targets, French Muslims uneasy.” Those clicks are the sound of French fear that something larger may be under way.
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Marine Le Pen of France’s Front National acknowledges supporters on Nov. 30. Populist parties are rising across Europe as voters feel abandoned by the mainstream political class. Photo: Getty Images
France’s problem has elements of a military threat, a religious conflict and a violent civil-rights movement. It is not unique. Every country of Western Europe has a version. For a half-century, millions of immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived, lured by work, welfare, marriage and a refuge from war. There are about 20 million Muslims in Europe, with some 5 million of them in France, according to the demographer Michèle Tribalat. That amounts to roughly 8% of the population of France, compared with about 5% of both the U.K. and Germany.
Such a migration is not something that Europeans would have countenanced at any other moment in their generally xenophobic history, and the politicians who permitted it to happen were not lucky. The movement coincided with a collapse in European birthrates, which lent the immigration an unstoppable momentum, and with the rise of modern political Islam, which gave the diaspora a radical edge.
Why didn't French terror investigators follow alleged Paris attack gunman Chérif Kouachi more closely? WSJ's Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer. Photo: Reuters
Just why Europe has had such trouble can be partially understood by contrasting it with the U.S. Europe’s welfare states are more developed and, until recently, more open to noncitizens, so illegal or “underground” immigration has been low. But employment rates have been low, too. If Americans have traditionally considered immigrants the hardest-working segment of their population, Europeans have had the opposite stereotype. In the early 1970s, 2 million of the 3 million foreigners in Germany were in the labor force; by the turn of this century, 2 million of 7.5 million were.
Europe was not just disoriented by the trauma of World War II. It was also demoralized and paralyzed by the memory of Nazism and the continuing dismantling of colonialism. Leaders felt that they lacked the moral standing to address problems that were as plain as the noses on their faces—just as U.S. leaders ducked certain racial issues in the wake of desegregation.
Europeans drew the wrong lessons from the American civil-rights movement. In the U.S., there was race and there was immigration. They were separate matters that could (at least until recently) be disentangled by people of good faith. In Europe, the two problems have long been inseparable. Voters who worried about immigration were widely accused of racism, or later of “Islamophobia.”
In France, antiracism set itself squarely against freedom of speech. The passage of the 1990 Gayssot Law, which punished denial of the Holocaust, was a watershed. Activist lobbies sought to expand such protections by limiting discussion of a variety of historical events—the slave trade, colonialism, foreign genocides. This was backed up by institutional muscle. In the 1980s, President François Mitterrand’s Socialist party created a nongovernmental organization called SOS Racisme to rally minority voters and to hound those who worked against their interests.
Older bodies such as the communist-inspired Movement against Racism and for Friendship Among the Peoples made a specialty of threatening (and sometimes carrying out) lawsuits against European intellectuals for the slightest trespasses against political correctness: the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci for her post-9/11 lament “The Rage and the Pride,” the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut for doubting that the 2005 riots in France’s suburban ghettos were due to unemployment, the Russia scholar Hélène Carrère d’Encausse for speculating about the role of polygamy in the problems of West African immigrants.
Speech codes have done little to facilitate entry into the workforce for immigrants and their children or to reduce crime. But they have intimidated European voting publics, insulated politicians from criticism and turned certain crucial matters into taboos. Immigrant and ethnic issues have become tightly bound to the issue of building the multinational European Union, which has removed vast areas of policy from voter accountability. “Anti-European” sentiments continue to rise.
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A woman holds up a sign that says, ‘I am Charlie, I am Jewish, I am a Muslim, I am French’ during a rally in Paris on Jan. 11. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
So impressed were the Europeans with their own generosity that they failed to notice that the population of second- and third-generation immigrants was growing bigger, stronger, more unified and less inclined to take moral instruction. This is partly a demographic problem. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western Europe has had some of the lowest birthrates of any civilization on record. Without immigration, Europe’s population would fall by a hundred million by midcentury, according to U.N. estimates.
When mass immigration began, Europeans did not give much thought to the influence of Islam. In the 1960s, there might have been worries that a North African was, say, a Nasserite Arab nationalist, but not that he was a would-be jihadist. Too many Europeans forgot that people carry a long past within them—and that, even when they do not, they sometimes wish to. Materialistic, acquisitive, averse to God and family, Europe’s culture appeared cold, dead and unsatisfying to many Muslims. It failed to satisfy a lot of non-Muslims too, but until they ran out of borrowed money with the 2008 crash, they could avoid facing it squarely.
Europeans didn’t know enough about the cultural background of Muslims to browbeat them the same way they did the native-born. Muslims felt none of the historic guilt over fascism and colonialism that so affected non-Muslim Europeans. They had a freedom of political action that Europeans lacked.
As European politics grew duller and the stakes lower, many political romantics looked enviously at the aspirations of the Muslim poor, particularly regarding Palestine. You could see a hint of this last weekend in the BBC journalist who interrupted a mourning Frenchwoman, distraught about the targeting of Jews for murder at a kosher supermarket, to say that “the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands.”
In a world that prized “identity,” Muslim immigrants were aristocrats. Those who became radicalized developed the most monstrous kind of self-regard. A chilling moment in the most recent terrorist drama came when the TV network RTL phoned the kosher supermarket where the Malian-French hostage-taker, Amedy Coulibaly, was holding his victims at gunpoint. He refused to talk but hung up the phone carelessly. The newspaper Le Monde was able to publish a transcript of the strutting stupidity to which he then gave expression:
“They’re always trying to make you believe that Muslims are terrorists. Me, I’m born in France. If they hadn’t been attacked elsewhere, I wouldn’t be here…Think of the people who had Bashar al-Assad in Syria. They were torturing people…We didn’t intervene for years…Then bombers, coalition of 50,000 countries, all that…Why did they do that?”
The Muslim community is not to be confused with the terrorists it produces. But left to its own, it probably lacks the means, the inclination and the courage to stand up to the faction, however small, that supports terrorism. In 1995, there were riots among French Muslims after the arrest of Khalid Kelkal of Lyon, who had planted several bombs—in a train station, near a Jewish school, on a high-speed rail track. In 2012, when Mohamed Merah of Toulouse was killed by police after having gunned down soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish elementary-school children, his brother professed himself “proud,” and his father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit against the government.
ENLARGE
Populist parties like the U.K. Independence Party wind up, by voter demand, placing immigration and multiculturalism at the center of their concerns. Photo: PA Wire/Zuma Press
And when Charlie Hebdo printed a memorial cover this week that had a picture of its controversial cartoon character “Muhammad” on it, it was as if the attacks had never happened: Muslim community spokesmen, even moderate ones, issued dire warnings about the insult to them and their coreligionists. To many Muslims in France and the rest of Europe, the new drawings were evidence not that the terrorists had failed to kill a magazine but that the French had failed to heed a warning. Impressive though the post-attack memorial marches were, “the working classes and the North African and West African immigrant kids weren’t there,” as the president of France’s Young Socialists told the newspaper Le Temps.
It may seem harsh to criticize the French in their time of grief, but they are responding today with tools that have failed them in previous crises. They reflexively look at their own supposed bigotry as always, somehow, the ultimate cause of Islamist terrorism, and they limit their efforts to making minority communities feel more at home.
The mysterious riots of 2005 in France—which lasted for almost three weeks, during which the rioters made no claims and put forward no leaders—were chalked up to deprivation. The French media responded with an effort to hire more nonwhite news anchors and reporters, and the government promised to spend more in the suburbs. Now, after the murders in Paris, the contradictions continue to accumulate:
• On religion: Mr. Hollande has insisted that the attacks have “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, Prime Minister Manuel Valls speaks of “moderate Islam” and rails against “conservatism and obscurantism”—as if the violence had everything to do with Islam, and even with religious devotion in general.
• On spying: Some in the French government blame intelligence failures, since the secret services tracked the Charlie Hebdo killers Said and Chérif Kouachi until last summer. But government officials boast of about their principled unwillingness to legislate a “Patriot Act a la française”—even as they draw daily on intelligence gathered by the U.S.
• On religious hatred: Justice Minister Christiane Taubira has announced an all-out assault on “racism and anti-Semitism,” promising that those who attack others because of their religion will be fought “with rigor and resolve.” In theory, this sounds like a promise to protect Jewish shoppers from getting killed at their neighborhood grocery stores. In practice, it will mean placing limits on any inquiry into the inner dynamics of Muslim communities and may wind up increasing the terrorist threat rather than diminishing it.
What continues is the deafness of France’s government and mainstream parties to public opinion (and popular suffrage) on the issues of immigration and a multiethnic society. Mr. Hollande’s approval ratings have risen since the attacks, but they are still below 30%. In January 2013, according to the newsweekly L’Express, 74% of the French said that Islam “is not compatible with French society.” Though that number fell last year, it is almost certain to be higher now.
Voters all across Europe feel abandoned by the mainstream political class, which is why populist parties are everywhere on the rise. Whatever the biggest initial grievance of these parties—opposition to the European Union for the U.K. Independence Party, opposition to the euro for Alternative für Deutschland, corruption for Italy’s 5 Star Movement—all wind up, by voter demand, placing immigration and multiculturalism at the center of their concerns.
In France, it is the Front National, a party with antecedents on the far right, that has been the big beneficiary. In the last national election, for seats in the European Parliament, the FN, led by Marine Le Pen (daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen), topped the polls. But the ruling Socialists froze the Front National out of the recent national ceremonies of mourning, limiting participation in the Paris rally to those parties it deemed “republican.” This risks damaging the cause of republicanism more than the cause of Le Pen and her followers.
Acts of terrorism can occur without shaking a country to its core. These latest attacks, awful as they were, could be taken in stride if the majority in France felt itself secure. But it does not. Thanks to wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, thousands of young people who share the indignation of the Kouachis and Coulibaly are now battle-hardened and heavily armed.
France, like Europe more broadly, has been careless for decades. It has not recognized that free countries are for peoples strong enough to defend them. A willingness to join hands and to march in solidarity is a good first response to the awful events of early January. It will not be enough.
Mr. Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.”
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THE HAGUE — She was a redheaded rebel, the singer in the family, a trash-talking, tattooed 21-year-old wrapped up in a hip-hop dream of becoming Holland’s Eminem. Then Betsy found Allah.
After her sudden conversion to Islam last summer, Betsy — a name given by her family to protect her identity — began dressing in full Muslim robes. By January, the once-agnostic Dutch woman, raised in a home where the only sign of religion was a dusty Bible on a shelf, began defending homegrown terrorists. A feud with her father over her apparent radicalization prompted her to leave home — turning up days later, her parents and Dutch authorities now say, in Syria, where she would become the bride of an Islamic State fighter.
She also became part of a growing crisis in Europe, where a surging number of young people from non-Muslim homes are flocking to the Middle East to heed the call of violent jihad. It is happening, terror experts say, as converts emerge as some of the most dangerous and fanatical adherents to radical Islam — a fact driven home this week by Elton Simpson, a 30-year-old American convert who joined one other man in opening fire on a Garland, Tex., contest for cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.
“I don’t blame Islam,” said Betsy’s mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her daughter. “I blame the people who made her believe in a radical way of life.”
As the Islamic State’s recruiting efforts have grown, concern in the West has largely centered on Europe’s entrenched Muslim communities — communities that have spawned more than 4,000mostly young and socially isolated Muslims who have left to join Islamist militants fighting in Syria and Iraq. Once there, the new arrivals can transform into what intelligence officials call the most dangerous kind of radical: one with a Western passport.
Yet the Islamic State’s allure is hardly confined to traditional Muslim homes. In fact, as many as 1 in 6 Europeans joining the self-styled caliphate are converts to Islam from non-Muslim faiths including Christianity, as well as nonreligious backgrounds. In some countries, such as France, the ratio of converts among those leaving is significantly higher: about 1 in 4, according to European intelligence officials and terrorism experts.
The swell of converts happens as the Islamic State appears to be actively wooing them, using savvy social media outreach and recruitment drives. A number of female converts who have joined the Islamic State, for instance, have turned to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to encourage others to join. Increasingly, converts are being deployed in Islamic State propaganda aimed at the West, including videos for recruitment as well as for stirring fear.
In one video, for instance, Swedish convert Michael Nikolai Skramo — who grew up near Gothenburg and who European security officials believe moved with his wife and two children to Raqqa, Syria, in September — is shown calling, in Arabic and Swedish, for more Western fighters to join the Islamic State. “The door to jihad is standing there waiting for you,” he says. “It is the fastest way to paradise.”
Islamic State propaganda targets Westerners(1:21)
The Islamic State appears to be using social media to recruit new members. This footage from propaganda videos shows English speakers appealing to others to join them. (Storyful)
In another Islamic State video released last year, several fighters — including “Jihadi John,” identified by The Washington Post as Mohammed Emwazi — were shown cutting the throats of captured Syrian pilots. At least one of the killers has been identified as Maxime Hauchard, a French convert to Islam from Normandy. And last month, a high-quality video released by the group graphically depicts its ruthless deeds as Denis Cuspert, a German hip-hop artist known as Deso Dogg who converted in 2010 and later joined the Islamic State, delivers a rap-like chant portraying the path to jihad as a chance for empowerment, spiritual fulfillment, vengeance and adventure.
Simpson — who, along with 34-year-old Nadir Soofi, was killed after opening fire on a security guard at the Texas event — was an Illinois-born homegrown radical who converted at a young age. His attorney described him as extremely devout, and U.S. officials think he and Soofi may have been inspired by the Islamic State.
Simpson was suspected previously by authorities of attempting to fly overseas to wage violent jihad, telling an FBI informant in May 2009, “It’s time to go to Somalia, brother,” later adding, “We gonna make it to the battlefield. . . . It’s time to roll,” according to court records.
Converts “are the most vulnerable because they do not yet fully understand Islam,” said Jamal Ahjjaj, an imam at As-Soennah Mosque in The Hague, where Betsy’s parents say she occasionally worshiped. “When we have religious classes for converts, sometimes there are people — the wrong people — waiting outside the mosque to greet them.”
Who are the converts?
In the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, cases of converted extremists have cropped up on both sides of the Atlantic and include the likes of Adam Gadahn, an American who rose through the ranks of al-Qaeda, and John Walker Lindh, another American who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet the number of converts streaming to aid the Islamic State, experts say, is far greater than in any other modern conflict in the Islamic world.
For Europe, in particular, the broad appeal of the Islamic State is rapidly morphing the group’s message of violence into a dangerous social problem at home, increasing the risk of homegrown terror and the chance that lost youths become indoctrinated into a perilous, cultlike lifestyle.
The profiles of converts joining the Islamic State often mirror that of Betsy. The child of divorced parents, she dropped out of school by age 14, was busted for shoplifting by 16 and was struggling with a drug problem at one point.
Here in the Netherlands, more than a dozen of those who have left for the Islamic State came, like Betsy, from the single largest pool of converts: young women. For instance, at As-Soennah Mosque, the heated national debate in the Netherlands over Islamist extremism has fueled a mini-boom in converts. Last year had the highest number, 97, since the mosque opened in 1993. Most were ages 19 to 21, and more than 70 percent were women. Many of them, mosque officials said, were dealing with problems at home.
Latifa, a converted British Sunni Muslim, wears a fundamental and traditional style to cover her face in a presentation for western tourists during a part of the “Open Doors. Open Minds” program in Dubai. (Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press)
“You find that a lot of the converts going to the Islamic State are girls, girls with problems, girls who have been prostitutes, girls with psychological and behavioral issues, sometimes borderline personalities,” said Marion van San, a senior researcher on foreign fighters at an institute affiliated with Erasmus University in Rotterdam. “Then someone comes along and promises that Allah is going to give them a second chance.”
Converts, experts say, also make easier targets. At least some tend to be lost souls searching for answers. For a minority of them, the radical ideology of the Islamic State is providing a heady sense of belonging, structure and a clear set of rules.
‘This is the way, brother’
A 30-year-old former convert to Islam who asked that his name be withheld because he has received death threats for leaving the faith and is still on parole after serving a prison sentence in the Netherlands on terrorism charges cited his own spiritual and political journey as an example. His first contact with Islam came after his parents divorced when he was a teenager and he began socializing with devout Muslim friends in the immigrant neighborhood where his alcoholic father had relocated.
“I noticed they had all the answers,” he said. “They offered me what I was looking for.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, he followed a more radical path. He began surfing the Internet for information on the Taliban and found its absolutist worldview to be intoxicating. He began skipping school to read the Koran, spending more time studying the lives of “martyrs,” whose deaths in violent jihad had, he believed, paved their way to paradise. He left his moderate mosque for a more conservative one and quickly met a Dutch
Moroccan extremist in the Netherlands who would further radicalize him.
Moroccan extremist in the Netherlands who would further radicalize him.
Scores of hostages, including Westerners, have been killed by the Islamic State since 2014. Here are some of the major incidents where the Islamic State killed the hostages.
Soon he was on a plane to Pakistan to train in a terrorist camp. After his arrest and deportation to the Netherlands, he connected again with a group of homegrown radicals whom he had known before, some of whom were advocating domestic terrorist attacks akin to the 2004 killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Not knowing that his home was under police surveillance, the convert agreed to store a cache of hand grenades in an apartment. When the hideout was stormed, he threw a grenade at police. “I wanted to die in bullets and go to paradise,” he said.
But he was apprehended alive. And during 8years in prison, he began clearing his head of radical notions by, “of all things,” reading the works of Plato and by putting his faith in science and philosophy instead of religion. He emerged, he said, as if from a dream, shedding the hold that Islamist thought had over him.
Although he abandoned his adopted faith, his radicalization left a painful legacy in the form of his younger bother. The 30-year-old had helped to convert him years earlier, and, as the older brother sat in jail, the younger one maintained his associations with radicals, growing increasingly extreme. Three months ago, the 30-year-old said, his brother left the Netherlands for Syria to join the Islamic State.
“Dutch parents tend to be very liberal. They aren’t giving clear answers to what’s right and wrong, so some of us go looking for answers elsewhere,” the older brother said. “You don’t understand what it’s like when you meet someone who can set aside all your doubts and has convincing arguments and tells you, ‘This is the way, brother, and all you have to do is follow it.’ ”
Such transformations, like Betsy’s, can occur before parents understand what is happening.
‘Looking for something’
In the fall of 2013, a slightly awkward redhead with thick Poindexter glasses took the stage at “The Next MC” — a contest show like “American Idol” for aspiring hip-hop artists in the Netherlands. A YouTube video shows Betsy, with her long locks in cornrows and sporting a navy blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “b----,” rapping in Dutch to an insouciant crowd.
“You try to be tough, but you aren’t,” one of the judges tells her. “You are really a sweet girl.”
That was the Betsy her parents knew.
They divorced when she was still a child, so Betsy grew up between homes, initially living with her mother. After her mother suffered a serious illness, Betsy moved in with her father. By then, she was a teenager hanging with a tough crowd, experimenting with drugs and running afoul of the law. She got a tattoo on her middle finger — “C’est la vie” — to accentuate her point when flipping the bird.
Still, her father, Pete, 53, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used, said, “She had a softness about her.” And he sensed a change for the better brewing in 2013. She had sought out the old Bible he kept on a shelf. “She was looking for something, I don’t know what, but some kind of peace,” he said.
The precise timing of her leap from aspiring rapper to Islamic State bride is somewhat unclear. But in 2013, she started a relationship with a young Dutch Turkish man who, according to people familiar with the situation, had left for Syria in 2014 to join the Islamic State. That same year, a close friend of Betsy’s who had converted to Islam, began introducing her to the faith, Betsy’s parents said.
Betsy, said her mother, contacted another Dutch convert in 2014 who had left for Syria that year with a former boyfriend, whom she married. Betsy also began to attend special events with a small Muslim prayer group that was not sanctioned by the local mosque and that her parents think included radical voices that wooed their daughter into extremism.
In a religious ceremony late last year, she married a Syrian man but left him only days later, claiming he was “too soft” a Muslim.
Yet the timing of her departure, Betsy’s family thinks, appeared spontaneous — a choice born of anger following the blowup at home after she defended the Islamist shooters who went on a rampage in Paris. After the family had heard nothing from her for days, Betsy finally sent a text to her father.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Where do you think,” she replied, “in Syria.”
“No!!!” he texted back.
“Don’t pretend that you care,” she answered.
Her parents later found evidence on a computer that she had cashed in her savings and booked travel to Turkey. An arranged contact met her in Istanbul and took her by bus to the Syrian border, which she eventually crossed. Dutch authorities declined to comment on her case beyond confirming that they think she is still in Syria. She has told her parents that she is now the bride of a Dutch Moroccan national fighting for the Islamic State and that she spends most of her time learning Arabic and studying the Koran.
Her parents now live for her texts, which come once a week at best, apparently during rare times when she has an Internet connection. She has relocated from place to place, her parents said, because of bombing campaigns. A photo that she recently sent them shows her in a flowing blue niqab, in a room with a Middle Eastern-style wood-
burning oven. But something about her face seemed different, Pete said.
burning oven. But something about her face seemed different, Pete said.
“You can see there is no innocence left,” he said. “I look at that hard expression, and I cannot see my baby girl.”
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Anthony Faiola is The Post's Berlin bureau chief. Faiola joined the Post in 1994, since then reporting for the paper from six continents and serving as bureau chief in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, New York and London.
Souad Mekhennet, co-author of “The Eternal Nazi,” is a correspondent on the national security desk.
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The following is from Fortress of Faiths radio program on Islam, the Anti-Chirst Religion andrecommend listening to the broadcast here, or read the SHOW NOTES below.
Segment One | Muslim Colonization of America: Through The America’s Refugee Resettlement Program
Today we are going to talk about the hidden agenda in high places, including the White House, in our government, and in the United Nations, of bringing in Islamic refugees into our country. This agenda is being hidden from the local governments. Large groups of refugees are being dumped into various communities without sufficient notification ore input from those communities.
Shahram has been dealing with this in Idaho. There have been protests and the necessity of police intervention. The media has been at these events and does not seem interested in digging into the situation to find out what is causing the problem. There are plans to dump refugees in Idaho without consulting with local officials. In the Boise area alone there are plans to dump some 2,000 refugees.
We had a guest, Leo Hohmann, one of the editors of World News Daily, who has recently published some articles on how some cities are being secretly targeted for the dumping of refugees. Some inCongress are demanding to know why there is such an influx of Syrian refugees. Obama is demanding that we should welcome all refugees and illegal immigrants into our society.
Where can we be informed about who is coming, how many are coming, and where are they being dumped? Local officials need to have answers to these things.
We believe that the Obama administration is actually planing to build communities within communities so that the new immigrants can take over the existing communities. An example of where this has already happened is Dearborn, MI.
Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee responsible for the refugee resettlement program overseen by the State Department just sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry demanding answers to these questions. They are opening an office for refugees in the center of his district in Spartanburg, SC. This is happening by Obama's executive orders.
Another important question is who is paying for this? When the refugees come they can't work so who is paying for their housing, health care, education of their children, living expenses, etc. There is also the national security question. Are these refugees safe? Ninety percent of these refugees are Muslims. Are they tied to ISIS? We know that recently 400 people have been arrested or investigated because of potential connections to ISIS.
In the mist of all this you may ask if they are allowing Christian refugees to come to America. This is a valid question in the light of the fact that ISIS and other terrorist groups are massacring Christians by the thousands. Just this last week ISIS put out another video showing the shooting and beheading of Ethiopian Christians in Libya. They are being targeted simply because they are Christians. The answer to the question is that Christian refugees are not being brought into America.
As Christians we are commanded to speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.
Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. Proverbs 31:8-9
We are to plead the cause of the poor and needy. Who is more poor and needy that those who have been forced to flee their homes and leave everything behind because of their Christian faith? Most Christians in the West are silent on this subject. They keep shaking their heads and saying this is terrible and someone should do something about it, yet they do nothing themselves.
Franklin Graham said some things we will deal with later in this article. He said we should halt all Muslim immigration and take immediate military action to stop the genocide of Christians in the Middle East. Some will accuse him, and us, of war mongering. We are not talking about war mongering we are talking about saving lives, the lives of innocent Christians.
Rabbi Jonathan Cahn said the following before the United Nations:
In the days when coal miners were dying of black lung disease, an answer was found in the caged canary. The canary was brought deep into the mines. If it grew sick and died, it would be the sign and the alarm that the air inside the mine was toxic. What happened to the caged canary was a harbinger of danger.
The persecuted Christian is the caged canary of the modern world. The Christian is the first target of evil, and so the sign and the alarm of a toxic evil in the world and a growing danger. And if we don't deal with that evil when it targets others on distant shores, we will surely deal with it when it targets us on our own shores.
No civilization can call itself moral if it fails to defend its most defenseless against that which seeks to devour them. No nation can call itself good if it sits back and does nothing of effect as the forces of evil murder the innocent. And no people can call themselves "Christian" if they watch passively on the sidelines as those who share the name of Messiah are oppressed and killed for their faith.
If our faith consists of how comfortable and prosperous God can make us in this world, as we deafen our ears to the cries of those who are in this world neither comfortable nor prosperous, our brothers and sisters imprisoned and tortured for their faith, how can we bear the name "Christian?" On the Day of Judgment we will be asked, "Why did you do nothing to save them?" And what will our answer be?
He is absolutely right on this. We, as Christians, have failed to be the salt and light in this world.
Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy reward. Isaiah 58:6-8
This passage tells us that there are seven things we can do to be salt and light: Loose the bands of wickedness
Undo the heavy burdens
Let the oppressed go free
Break every yoke
Deal thy bread to the hungry
Tend to the poor
Cover the naked
Undo the heavy burdens
Let the oppressed go free
Break every yoke
Deal thy bread to the hungry
Tend to the poor
Cover the naked
When these things are done our light will break forth as the morning. We aught to be busy doing these things. If we don't we fail in our responsibilities as Christians.
The following is from Fortress of Faiths radio program on Islam, the Anti-Chirst Religion andrecommend listening to the broadcast here, or read the SHOW NOTES below.
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Segment Two | 190 Communities Targeted for Muslim Refugee Resettlement
Leo Hohmann has revealed a report of 190 communities that have been targeted for dumping Muslim refugees. He has written a number of articles on this subject. You can find them on World Net Daily.
Leo was led to investigate this situation by a cryptic email he received while doing research on the children from Central America crossing our southern border. The email said that as bad as the illegal immigration across our southern border is, he should do some research on the government's policy for bringing in Muslim refugees through legal immigration. .
The refugee program is done through a lot of religious and non-profit charities. You will notice this if you look at the report on the 190 communities mentioned above. These organizations receive federal funds and profit from the refugee situation.
Two things he discovered is that this is through the United Nations and through an executive order by President Obama. The communities represent about 100 US cities. There are nine non-governmental resettlement agencies that are funded by the government. From 70-90% of the funding for these agencies comes from government grants. These agencies are contracted by the government to resettle refugees and they in turn sub-contract non-profit groups like church organizations.
There are about 100,000 predominately Muslim immigrants coming into our country every year. About 30 to 40 thousand of these are refugees and are not coming in like normal immigrants who go through a process of verification. Those who are not refugees are coming in through employment based programs which give temporary work visas, student visas which allow them to stay for six years and can be renewed. They are coming mostly from Muslim countries.
The majority of the charities sponsoring these refugees are Christian or Jewish. These groups get a fee on a per-head basis. This means the more refugees they bring in, the greater their bottom line.
The local officials that are friendly toward this kind of immigration will usually be brought into the loop sooner than those who are not. Those who ask the hard questions like what is going to be the impact on our community and our school system will not be brought into the loop.
There are some grass roots organizations springing up to oppose this program. One example is in Spartanburg, SC. It sprung up as soon as the word got out that refugees were going to be dumped in their community without and consideration to the effect it would have. They are having a hard time getting answers to their questions.
This group in Spartanburg has Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee responsible for the refugee resettlement program, as their congressman. He can't even get the answers to questions on this program. The letter he sent to John Kerry had 17 questions and he has not yet received any response.
President Obama is very sympathetic to Islam and shows great disdain toward Christians. He has done little to stop the slaughter and persecutions of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa. From his actions and statements we can only deduce that Obama has some malice toward Christians here in the US. What better way to dilute the Christian and Jewish elements of our nation than to bring in mass numbers of Muslims through this program?
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Segment Three | Immigration Policies that Once Established, Will be Eternal
The motive for this administrations immigration program is stated by the co-chair of the task force, Obama’s domestic policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz. She said her focus is on making sure Obama’s historic immigration policies get “institutionalized” so they will live on long after she and her boss are gone from the White House.
Muñoz has a long history of Marxist activism and has fought continuously for open borders. She is in charge of the task-force created last November to grant amnesty to some 5 million illegal immigrants.
It seems that large groups of refugees are being sent to conservative congressional districts. For example thousands of Somali refugees were sent to Michelle Bachman's district in Minnesota. Louis Gomez's district in Texas has received a flood of Muslim immigrants. We have seen that they are now targeting Trey Gowdy's district in Spartanburg. Although we cannot prove this, it does seem like the logical deduction.
Susan Payne infiltrated a telephone conference call with more than a dozen members of Obama’s White House Task Force on New Americans hosted by Muñoz. The participants spoke of their plans to plant “seedlings” of immigrant populations into “receiving communities” that would be cultivated into fertile “soil.” The idea was that the seedlings would sprout and grow into communities within communities. This is “integration.” The soil, meaning the community, needed to be changed to accommodate the needs of the seedlings, rather than the other way around. Eventually, the mature seedlings would take over the host community.
This shows that there is not going to be any assimilation into the communities where these immigrants are being dumped. We have seen this same thing in Europe and now our government is doing the same thing.
Islam has a specific doctrine of jihad which deals with immigration. It says that Muslims are encouraged from the example of Muhammad to migrate, not immigrate, in mass to non-Muslim communities and then populate by having lots of children. They are not allowed to assimilate into the culture. As they grow in numbers they demand more and more accommodation to Islamic ways. They demand that their Shariah law be implemented within the legal system of the host community.
Now I want to look at the national security aspect of what the Obama administration is doing. One of the first questions we must ask about the Syrian refugees is, couldn't some of them be ISIS fighters?
In February one of the FBI's top investigators was called before a congressional committee on homeland security. The issue being discussed was Syrian refugees. The counter terrorism was Michael Stinebach and he gave a very sobering testimony. He said it was impossible to properly investigate the refugees coming from Syria because Syria is involved in a three and a half year civil war and it is a broken nation. It doesn't have reliable law enforcement records. It doesn't have intelligence records. Even if it did, American armed forces do not have boots on the ground in that country as we did when we set up the refugee program for Iraq.
In Iraq our military personnel were able to inspect the police and intelligence records of those who sought refugee status. Even with this there were some jihadists who were able to come in through this program. There were two men arrested in Kentucky for sending money and equipment to Al Quaeda who came here as Iraqi refugees. It has been much worse with the Somali refugee program. We have seen scores of Somali refugees who ended up sending money and equipment to terrorist groups in Somalia. We have also seen many Somalis leave he US to go fight for ISIS. The Somali refugee program predates the Obama administration. It has been going on for 25 years.
We need to understand that we are talking about legal immigration. The illegal immigration is just a smoke screen to keep our eyes off of this legal immigration of Muslims. The total of illegal immigrants coming into America annually is a couple of hundred thousands. The total legal immigrants is just over one million annually.
There is a great cost for what we are doing. The acknowledged cost for the refugee program is one billion dollars a year. Some experts say that this is vastly underestimated because it doesn't consider the contractors and sub-contrasters I mentioned earlier. It could be as high as 5 to 10 billion dollars per year.
These estimates don't include the costs on the local economies. Things like schools, decline in property values, and other things that come from these massive dumps of refugees into communities.
If you would like to schedule a meeting with Tom you can call him at 1-800-616-0082. No church is too big or too small.
Segment Four
There are many disturbing facts in what we are looking at today. The FBI says we cannot know who is coming in through this refugee program. Local officials, and even congress people can't get answers to their questions. The cost is staggering.
Although we the evidence is only circumstantial, we believe that this is part of a plan to transform America and turn it into an Islamic state.
I want to give you the link again to the 190 communities that have been targeted so far.http://www.wrapsnet.org/Portals/1/Affiliate Directory Posting/FY 2014 Affiliate Directory/21Nov14_Public Affiliate directory.pdf
Look at this list to see if your community is listed. If it is contact your local officials, your state representatives, and your congressmen and senators and start demanding transparency on this issue. We want to know who is coming into our communities. As citizens of this nation we have a right to know what is happening.
It is difficult to understand why a Marxist like Cecilia Muñoz is heading up such an important program. President Obama surrounds himself with every extremist left-wing radical he can find.
We can certainly say that President Obama has done everything he can to live up to his promise to fundamentally transform America. We only have the voters of America to blame for this situation. Some Christians did not vote in the last presidential election because they said they could not vote for a Mormon. When such a small portion of evangelical Christians vote they allow this agenda to be foisted on America.
Those who voted for Obama are socialists and you have no idea what you have done America. I get angry when I think about these things.
The freedoms we enjoy in this nation will be lost if we allow this to continue. The conservatives are not the only ones who will loose their freedoms, the liberals will actually loose more. Do you really think if Islam takes over this nation that the atheists, the gay rights people, and the environmentalists will not be destroyed by Islamic Shariah Law?
We know that God has allowed this situation. This is God's judgment on America for our turning our backs on Him. He made this nation great because we respected His precepts. Our only hope is that, as a nation, we turn back to Him.
Europe has tried to be a melting pot and allow Muslims to come in hoping they would integrate into their societies. It has not worked for them and it will not work for us. Franklin Graham has said we should halt Muslim immigration. I believe that we must severely limit it and investigate Muslim immigrants more throughly before allowing them to come. We must completely stop the refugee program until there can be more scrutiny and more transparency.
We all need to put pressure our congressmen to stop this influx of Muslim refugees. Congress is constitutionally charged with setting immigration policy, not the executive branch. The President has no constitutional authority to do what Obama is doing.
We are supposed to be a nation of laws. This is lawlessness and it must be stopped.
From Around the Web
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Absent the security, we might have had a Charlie Hebdo-style massacre on these shores, in Garland, Texas, no less, a suburb of Dallas. (The world would be a safer and better place if the forces of civilization everywhere were as well-prepared and well-armed as they are in Texas.)
That horrifying prospect didn't stop CNN from interrogating Geller the morning after the attack about her views of Islam and her decision to have as the keynote speaker for her event the anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders (who has to live under 24-hour protection). The implicit assumption was that Geller and her cohorts were as much of a problem as the fanatics who planned to censor them at the barrel of a gun.
Geller refers to her meeting as a free-speech event while her critics prefer to call it an anti-Islam event. They are really one and the same. In today's circumstances, criticism of Islam is at the vanguard of the fight for free speech, since it is susceptible to attack and intimidation by jihadists and calls for self-censorship by the politically correct.
"Yes, but ..." defenses of Geller don't cut it. She had a perfect right to do what she did, and it's a condemnation of her enemies — and confirmation of her basic point about radical Islam — that the act of drawing and talking elicited a violent response.
If cartoons of Muhammad may seem a low, petty form of speech, they are only the fault line in a deeper clash of civilizations. A swath of the Muslim world doesn't just want to ban depictions of Muhammad, but any speech critical of Islam.
There was much tsk-tsking after the Charlie Hebdo attack about how France had made itself vulnerable to domestic terrorism because it has failed to assimilate Muslim immigrants. The critique carried a whiff of self-congratulation about how much better the U.S. is as a melting pot, and so it is.
Yet two Phoenix roommates were still prepared to commit mass murder to keep people from drawing images they don't like. One of them, an American convert to Islam named Elton Simpson, had been convicted of lying to the FBI about discussions about traveling to Somalia allegedly to engage in terrorism. He evidently took inspiration from ISIS calls to attack the Garland, Texas, event, in another sign that the poisonous ideology of radical Islam knows no borders.
It will ever be thus until all of Islam accepts the premises of free society, as have other major world religions. The day there can be the Muslim equivalent of "The Book of Mormon" without the writers, actors and audience members fearing for their lives will be the day that Islam is reformed.
Then, and only then, will mockery of Islam by the likes of Pamela Geller and her ilk be a tasteless irrelevance, rather a statement from atop the ramparts of free speech.
Yes, there is such a thing as self-restraint and consideration of the sensibilities of others, but it shouldn't be the self-restraint of fear.
Pamela Geller is a bomb-thrower, but only a metaphorical, not a literal, one. That's the difference between her and her enemies — and between civilization and barbarism.
Read the whole story
· ·
Americans Have a Right to Insult Islam
National Review Online-May 5, 2015
Geller is an attention-hungry provocateur who will never be mistaken for Bernard Lewis, the venerable scholar of Islam. Her Texas gathering to ...
Published on May 8, 2015
A fascinating exchange took place Wednesday night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program as Anjem Choudary, a British Imam known for openly supporting the implementation of Sharia law in the West, told Pamela Geller that she should be tried in a Muslim court and killed for organising the ‘draw Mohammed’ contest in Garland, Texas.
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The Pentagon raised its protection from level Alpha to Bravo Friday for military bases across the country after FBI Director James Comey reported that ISIL is recruiting “hundreds, maybe thousands” of potential terrorists in the US. The Pentagon's action will affect all of its installations, said Air Force Lt. Col. Tom Crosson, a Pentagon spokesman. The heightened security level followed the foiled attack in Garland, Texas, involving two ISIL sympathizers, one of whom, Elton Simpson, was long known to the federal authorities.
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