What does that tell us when 82 percent of a certain group living in America, benefiting from America, protected by America, enjoying our laws in America, is not willing to fight with America, to defend America or the principles America stands for? It tells us that the majority of American Muslims would not support the United States of America in any war against any Arab nation for any reason, period.
When you bring up the sensitive issue of Muslim loyalty to the United States and the possibility of terrorists living among us, you are immediately countered by people who say these were a few trained terrorists, and they did not represent the views and beliefs of the majority of Muslims. This brings to mind the interview I watched on TV of one 9/11 hijacker’s landlord in Florida who stated: “They were such nice gentlemen. They kept to themselves, never caused a problem, always paid their rent on time.” If you had just tuned into the story you would think he was talking about two blue-eyed, American-as-apple-pie, Baptist guys from Tulsa.
These murderers were just your average nice neighbors who spent time in the United States cultivating a few friendships, going to school, getting together with occasional friends over dinner and coffee. You could have sat next to them in a movie theater, walked past them in the mall, or smiled at them at a traffic light. These were not some crazy criminals who just sneaked in through our borders only to quickly commit their terrorist act. Instead, they spent time blending into America’s fabric while preparing and planning for the right time to strike and die.
Let’s look at your average American Muslim, someone like Siraj Wahaj, the recipient of the American Muslim community’s highest honors. Mr. Wahaj had the privilege in June of 1991 of becoming the first Muslim to deliver a daily prayer before the U.S. House of Representatives. In his prayer he recited from the Koran and appealed to almighty God to guide America’s leaders “and grant them righteousness and wisdom."
The same Wahaj spoke to a Muslim audience a year later in New Jersey. This time Wahaj was singing a different tune to a different audience, and his words were far from his moderate ones in front of the U.S. House of Representatives. “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."7
If Wahaj is the example of the American Muslim community and the receiver of its highest honors, who needs enemies? If this is whom our government calls a “moderate” and invites to deliver a prayer before the House of Representatives, we have ignorant elected officials sitting in our capital running our country. Do you feel safer now knowing that not all Muslims are plane-flying, bomb-wearing, or car-driving terrorists? Talking about overthrowing our government and replacing it with an Islamic caliphate is terrorism of a different kind, but it is still terrorism. This is the more dangerous kind, the kind that circles you slowly, so that by the time you realize you are about to be killed, it’s already too late to do anything about it. Where is the outrage? Have we lost our sense of patriotism and loyalty to America? Do you consider this “moderation"? A highly respected, award-winning Muslim from the Islamic American community calling to overthrow the United States government?
Hold on to your seats, it gets better. This same man served in 1995 during the World Trade Center bombing trial as a character witness for Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman. No wonder he has such ideas. Wahaj was also listed by the U.S. attorney for New York as one of the “unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators” in the Abdul Rahman trial.8 And that is not the only scary part. What’s more frightening is that, after all this, our mindless, ignorant, oh so politically correct elected leaders still insist that Islam is a religion of peace and the majority of Muslims are moderate.
If you listen to what Muslims articulate, you’ll find Islam is exactly the opposite of what our leaders are saying. The visible Muslim leaders in this country who are appointed to positions of influence within Islamic communities tell us exactly what their intentions, desires, and aspirations are. Zaid Shakir is a former Muslim chaplain at Yale University. He argues that Muslims cannot accept the legitimacy of the existing American order, since it “is against the orders and ordainments of Allah. . . . [T]he orientation of the Koran,” he adds, “pushes us in the exact opposite direction."9 This guy is a chaplain at Yale University; this is the type of poison young American Muslims are exposed to. I have yet to hear anyone from the Muslim community condemn people like Shakir or set them straight, calling them liars who do not represent the voice of the Muslim majority in America. Their silence is not golden, it’s revealing.
When Steven Emerson produced his documentary Jihad in America in 1994, viewers could not believe what they were seeing. Emerson infiltrated Islamic cells across America with a video camera and documented young Muslims being recruited for holy war in Oklahoma and Kansas in America’s heartland. American Muslim leader Fayaz Azzam in Brooklyn was documented giving a speech and stating, “Blood must flow, there must be widows, orphans, hands and limbs must be severed and limbs and blood must be spread everywhere in order that Allah’s religion can stand on its feet."10 What Emerson documented was so shocking you would have thought our government would have declared a state of war and locked our borders immediately. But our inability to accept that these people were serious kept us from connecting the dots. Some people point to the 9/11 Commission’s report stating we lacked imagination. Maybe we lacked imagination for the attackers' modus operandi and the way they pulled it off. However, we knew the Islamists intended to attack America. I call it a bad case of political correctness when we can’t bring ourselves to examine critically what people say instead of comfortably shrugging it off and feeling good that it was just people exercising their freedom of speech here in wonderful America. If we keep this up much longer it won’t be so wonderful anymore; a few million of us will be dead. Emerson should be applauded for shedding light on a darkness that is spreading; Jihad in America should be required viewing for every citizen registered to vote.
When we have Muslim Americans advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government, when they are preaching in their mosques that Islam’s way is superior to America, when millions of Muslim Americans do not take to the streets to condemn such statements and to demonstrate against the very Islamic radical organizations that call for murder in the name of Islam, then Muslim Americans are guilty, and we need to take a stand.
With millions of lives at stake in our major cities, we can no longer afford to continue to give Islam the benefit of the doubt. We can no longer turn a blind eye to a supposed few “extremists” in our midst. We can no longer listen to our elected officials speak nonsense about an imaginary war called the war on terrorism. It should be a war on radical Islam. How long can we carry on this charade of stupidity and political correctness?
Muslims in this country need to prove their loyalty to America by their actions, and I am not talking about writing letters to America’s newspaper editors complaining about discrimination and being searched at airports. If they take the time to write about profiling, they can take the time to condemn what is causing them to be profiled and what is being done in the name of their supposedly hijacked religion. I have no doubt that moderate Muslims do exist. I actually know a couple. One of the most visible Muslim moderates in America today is Kamal Nawash, founder and president of the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism. Nawash repeatedly voices his concern to the press and colleagues, and he told me personally, “We’re going to have to clean our own house first. We’re trying to convince Muslims that we have a problem. We have a problem with extremism. Unless we address it, we can’t solve any other problem we have. The only way we are going to fight extremism is explore a modern and secular interpretation of Islam. An Islam that is democratic and peaceful and is compatible and respectful of other faiths an
d beliefs."
Nawash tried to organize a rally in Washington, D.C., for moderate Muslims to condemn terrorism and radical Islam. Nawash reached out not only to Muslim groups but also to Jews and Christians, including my organization, the American Congress for Truth, to help him put the rally together, and to attend to support him. I made it clear to him that while I was more than delighted to help him in any way I could to make the rally possible, including distributing posters to every local mosque and Islamic institution in my area, the demonstrators must be Muslims from the Muslim community. Americans did not need to see a rally of a thousand participants and only fifty of them being Muslims.
While over eighty Christian and Jewish organizations and sponsors lined up to help and participate, leaders of well-known and established Muslim groups in this country shunned the rally. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Muslim American Society declined to stand with him against extremism, radical Islam, and terrorism. They not only refused to participate, but were both irritated and defensive and began attacking Nawash. Moderate Muslims need to take a closer look at who and what groups they are supporting. CAIR forwarded all calls to Hussein Ibish, the former Communications Director at the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). In two rambling smear jobs posted on Muslim WakeUp.com, Ibish labeled Nawash’s Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism as “the ugly” among leading Muslim groups, and called Nawash’s invitation for other Muslim leaders to denounce radicalism a “crude ploy."11
The denial and disbelief that I sense in the politically correct crowd, particularly those who come from New York, where there is a big hole in the ground in lower Manhattan, sometimes makes me feel that they think a Muslim extremist is a mythical invention of Jews and Christians. We are fighting an enemy that doesn’t wear a uniform, an enemy that lives in our midst, an enemy that strives to die just to kill us. We are fighting an army in disguise. This army doesn’t work independently but is supported and protected by a community and a neighborhood. It is suicidal to label any Islamic community moderate, because it is this same community that protected, supported, and shielded the extremists and made their suicide operation possible. I know the Middle East, Middle Eastern culture, and how Middle Eastern communities are connected. The Muslim Arab community is not an American community on American soil. It is a minority community that just changed geography yet still practices Middle Eastern customs. Nothing can go on in a vacuum, because there is no vacuum. Everyone knows everything about everyone. Walk into any city in the USA and go straight to the Arab grocery store and ask about anyone in the Arab community, and he or she will know the person you are asking about and know details about them that will shock any American. The Islamic community in the United States knows a lot and has a lot of information to give to authorities about the numerous terrorist cells that exist inside our country. I challenge the Muslim American “moderates” to stand up and be counted. Prove me wrong, and take back and redeem your heritage as it was before Islam sidetracked Muslim countries from becoming one of the great civilizations of the world and became instead one of the most backward, barbaric, unproductive, and uneducated parts of the world. If we don’t wake up and challenge our Muslim community to take action against the terrorists within it, if we don’t believe in ourselves as Americans and in the standards we should hold every patriotic American to, we are going to pay a price for our shortsightedness.
We have been seeing and reading stories from around the world about Muslims who do not have loyalty to whatever country they have emigrated to. In France, Britain, Denmark, and here in the United States, Islamic extremists are declaring their loyalty foremost to Islam, not to their host nations. Just listen to world news on any network and hear about Muslims from different Western countries on different continents who have been arrested and convicted for having ties to jihadists and for supporting terrorist organizations and ideologies.
Let’s look at three recent examples, Denmark, Britain, and the U.S.
In Denmark a Muslim imam and Danish citizen, Imam Ahmad Abu Laban of the Islamic Belief Society, started a letter-writing campaign, went to Egypt and Syria, and riled up Muslim nations about the controversial Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. He even invented some phony over-the-top cartoons and passed them off as the product of the same newspaper. The result was an inflamed Islamic world, the burning of Danish embassies in Muslim countries, protests and deaths in the hundreds, a boycott by Iran and several members of the Arab League of Danish products, and suppression of free speech via intimidation that reached all the way to the U.S. And this from a Danish citizen who enjoyed the free speech and social welfare benefits given him as a citizen by that generous country.12
In London, Egyptian-born British citizen Imam Abu Masri al-Masri was at the center of the infamous Finsbury Park Mosque; undercover video led to his conviction by a British court on February 9,2006, for inciting hate and murder against Christians and Jews, while urging suicide terrorism on British Muslim citizens. The Finsbury Park Mosque— described by antiterrorist police chief Peter Clarke as a “honeypot for extremists"—was attended by both September 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui and failed “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and has been linked to several other suspected terrorists.13
Ahmed Abu Ali, a twenty-three-year-old U.S. citizen and honors grad from a local high school in suburban Fairfax, Virginia, was caught in Saudi Arabia, where he was in terrorist training, and deported to the U.S. and tried for his part in a purported al Qaeda plot to kill President Bush. He has been sentenced to thirty years in U.S. Federal Court.14
Or take the case of the Islamic Thinkers Society in Jackson Heights, New York. Demonstrating on a street corner in exercise of their “protected” speech rights, society members stomped on and tore the U.S. flag. Using bullhorns, they publicly laughed at Americans for being dummies while they used and abused our free speech rights to argue that our Constitution should be replaced with Sharia law overseen by a new caliphate. The Islamic Thinkers Society is considered an offshoot of Al-Muhajiroun, which has ties to al Qaeda.15
The ball is in the Muslims' court right now. They must control and turn in to the authorities the “extremists” in their midst, the scholars, the imams, the operatives who meet in the coffeehouses to sway recruits. It is not our duty to show how tolerant, open-minded, and loving we are toward a community that harbors people who want to kill us. The responsibility is theirs. Until we can be convinced that they have shaped up, we should watch them like a hawk. Every mosque, every imam, every Islamic charity that gives money or receives it from suspected terrorists, every madrassa in America funded by the Saudis, every Muslim working in every section of our government, even the janitor—all should be suspects. The louder CAIR shrieks, the more we should investigate. If they don’t like our scrutiny, they can stop being part of the problem and start becoming part of the solution.
14.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
GONE MAD
The term “political correctness” has evolved out of the Marxist and Freudian philosophies of the 1930s to become a tool for multicultural-ism, multisexualism, multitheism, and multi-anythingism. It was created to discourage bias and prejudiced thinking that discriminates against an individual or group. It has become society’s way of not offending anyone, whether it is an individual, a group, or a nation. In many instances, however, it is a simple, disarming way of ignoring or deflecting the truth about a situation. Today, the use of political correctness has become so abused that anyone who voices his or her opinion contrary to “politically correct think” is immediately tagged with some form of disparaging label, such as racist and bigot. This exploitation has gotten so out of control that this name-calling accusation is used as a simple and mindless means to manipulate academic, social, or political discussion. The result is a social paranoia which discourages free thought and expression. It’s like living in a totalitarian state in which you are afraid to say
what you think. Now who wants to suffer that? So people keep quiet. Their opinions are held captive to fear. How handy for the Islamo-fascists, the American-hating, Jew-killing, Israel-destroying, women-abusing, multireligious-intolerant Muslims. Oh! Excuse me. Did I say something not quite PC?
This social paranoia is similar to the attitude that developed in the late 1980s and 1990s, when people became so concerned about children’s self-esteem that failure could not be acknowledged or misbehavior corrected. “Now, let’s not hurt their feelings” was the standard approach. This degree of concern led to teachers giving passing grades for poor performance and youth sport activities where no one kept score. And what has been the fallout of all that psychobabble? High school kids who can’t read their diploma or make change for a dollar, internationally embarrassing scholastic performance scores, and young adults ill equipped to face the competitive lifestyle the world has to offer. They are left watching the television show The Apprentice, not competing to be an apprentice. America got itself into a mess by not upholding the high standards and expectations it once had, instead giving in to mediocrity; and we’re getting into a mess now with political correctness.
The radical Islamic movement has availed itself of the PC mentality to convince good-hearted people around the world that the Jews, Israel, and the “fascist government of the United States of America” are responsible for the ills of the Muslim people, and that their daily suffering is because of them. The PC crowds label anyone who disagrees with this notion a bigot. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the like have picked up on this phenomenon. Their adversarial attacks against America and Western powers have become scary and foolish. They have gone so far out of their way to protect the “rights of the underdog” that they are actually promoting dangerous radical Islamic views that may indirectly put you in peril. Anyone who disagrees with radical Islamic propaganda is being attacked in the media, on college campuses, and at rallies countering events that promote the Islamic cause.
Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America Page 27