If it is understood that the political aspect of Islam preceded the religious aspect, that might change. But that will happen only if a sufficient number of people are willing to go wherever the truth my take them.
The Real Lesson of Benghazi
The Obama administration is approaching full meltdown over the steady stream of revelations concerning its inaction and lies over the massacre of Ambassador Chris Stevens and other U.S. personnel in Libya. Obama and Biden are lining up against Hillary Clinton and the State Department, claiming that they weren’t told about Stevens’ requests for additional security. Meanwhile, administration officials are denying that they ever linked the attack on the consulate to the Muhammad video that has been blamed for worldwide Muslim riots, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. One fact, however, is as clear as it is little noted: the entire incident demonstrates the abject failure of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy, and its analysis of the jihad threat in general.
Speaking about the Libyan revolution in March 2011, Obama warmly praised the dawning in Libya of “the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny.” After providing military aid to the anti-Gaddafi rebels despite evidence of their al-Qaeda links, the administration–whether the call really came from the White House or the State Department or both–had every reason to ignore the request from Benghazi for more security, and to pretend that the whole thing was just a spontaneous uprising over a video, not the carefully planned September 11 jihad attack that it proved to be.
To have acknowledged what was really happening would have been to admit that the Allahu-akbaring mob besieging the Benghazi consulate was nothing remotely close to a responsible citizenry enjoying their rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and self-determination. It would have been to admit that the jihad against the United States would not be turned away from its goal by hearts-and-minds gestures, even if those gestures included the removal of a brutal dictator. The people of Benghazi were no more inclined to welcome the Americans as liberators–and Ambassador Stevens had attempted to play exactly that role, sneaking into Libya during the most difficult days of the uprising and doing everything he could to aid the rebels–than were the people of Iraq when Saddam Hussein was toppled.
The reason in both cases was the same: the rebels against both Saddam and Gaddafi were largely Islamic supremacists who wanted a Sharia state, disdained democracy, and considered the United States to be their enemy not primarily because of various aspects of its foreign policy, but because it is the world’s foremost infidel polity, against whom the mujahedin believe they have a sacred duty to wage war. The Qur’an and Islamic law direct Muslims to wage war against and subjugate the “People of the Book” (cf. Qur’an 9:29)–that is, primarily Jews and Christians–not if they behave badly by supporting Israel or Middle Eastern dictators, but simply because they are not Muslims.
But the White House and State Department not only do not acknowledge this fact–they have done all they can to deny and obfuscate it. The one cardinal proposition that accepted analysts must repeat is that the present conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims have absolutely nothing to do with Islam; indeed, Obama administration officials are expressly forbidden to link Islam with terrorism, as if Islamic terrorists weren’t busy linking the two on a daily basis. The errors of analysis and wrong decisions that cost lives all follow from this initial false premise.
About six months ago a State Department official contacted me privately and told me about State employees who had been assigned to study the life of Muhammad, with an eye toward putting together a positive portrayal of the prophet of Islam that would presumably win more Muslim hearts and minds by going out with the United States government’s seal of approval. The officials who began studying the earliest Muslim sources about Muhammad, however, were astonished as they came face-to-face not with a seventh-century Gandhi, but with a figure of war and rapine who appeared to justify the worst allegations of the “Islamophobes” that the Obama administration has so roundly excoriated. Needless to say, the puff piece on Muhammad did not appear.
This disconnect from reality was reminiscent of what is said about State during the Iranian Revolution: that while the Ayatollah Khomeini was bringing about the toppling of the shah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, only one of his books could be found anywhere in the State Department, and no one had read it. No one thought the rantings of an obscure fanatic who for years had been exiled to far-off France were important.
This was the willful blindness that killed Chris Stevens, and is the real scandal of Benghazi. The politically correct fantasies that characterize the Washington establishment’s views on Islam and jihad not only make for bad policy; they also kill. Clearly what happened in Benghazi was part of a coordinated, carefully planned series of jihad attacks–in all the controversy over what the White House knew and didn’t know, it has also been forgotten that jihadis stormed the U.S. embassy in Cairo on the same day. That raises the question: What did the Muslim Brotherhood know, and when did it know it? And the related question: Why is the Obama administration continuing to cultivate warm relations (and shower money upon) the Morsi regime in Egypt, without undertaking even the most cursory investigation into the possibility of its involvement in those attacks?
From the beginning of the “Arab Spring,” I said repeatedly that it was not a democracy movement as the Western press and the White House were claiming, but an Islamic supremacist takeover that would result in the creation of Sharia states far more hostile to the U.S. and Israel than the Arab nationalist regimes they were supplanting. This assessment was greeted with the usual scorn, but Benghazi shows who was right and who was wrong and how desperately the foreign policy establishment in Washington needs a very thorough housecleaning.
Ahmadinejad and Morsi Lay Out the Islamic Agenda
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mohammed Morsi, arguably the foremost exponents today of Sharia rule, both spoke at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, and their speeches together amounted to an Islamic supremacist wish list for the world.
The foremost item on their list, not surprisingly, was the destruction of Israel, although both knew better in the glare of international media than to state their aspirations quite so baldly.
Ahmadinejad drenched his address in Islamic piety, beginning with a traditional Islamic invocation: “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. All Praise Belongs to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, and May Peace and Blessings be upon the Greatest and Trustworthy Prophet and His Pure Progeny, His Chosen Companions, and upon all Divine Messengers. Oh, God, Hasten the Emergence of Your Chosen Beloved, Grant Him Good Health and Victory, Make us His Best Companions, and all those who attest to His Rightfulness.” And then: “I thank the Almighty God for having once more the chance to participate in this meeting. We have gathered here to ponder and work together for building a better life for the entire human community and for our nations.”
And how can we work together for building a better life? Ahmadinejad ticked off a list of things that he posited had interfered with international brotherhood and harmony, including “egoism, distrust, malicious behaviors, and dictatorships,” as well as the Dark Ages and the Crusades (although he didn’t mention the centuries of murderous jihad warfare all over the globe).
His list culminated with his principal bogeys, the chief things he believed interfered with global peace: “the occupation of Palestine and imposition of a fake government”; Saddam Hussein’s “invasion” of Iran; 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan; and a host of others. Among them, he complained about the supposed denial of “the right to criticize the hegemonic policies and actions of the world Zionism.” It was hard not to wonder at such moments in his speech what planet he was on, since the Palestinian jihadist propaganda machine has had such success in demonizing Israel in the world media; but of course a linchpin of that success has b
een to complain that the situation is exactly the opposite, and so that is what Ahmadinejad did in New York Wednesday.
In a speech that was heavy on Islamic proselytizing, after his survey of the world’s ills, Ahmadinejad asked: “Does anybody believe that continuation of the current order is capable of bringing happiness for human society?” And further: “Who is responsible for all these sufferings and failures?” He left that question unanswered at that point, although at another point he railed against the “uncivilized Zionists,” and he went on to delineate his prescription: “There is no doubt that the world is in need of a new order and a fresh way of thinking.” Foremost this would be “an order in which man is recognized as God’s Supreme Creature, enjoying material and spiritual qualities and possessing a pure and divine nature filled with a desire to seek justice and truth.” Consequently he called upon the nations to “place our trust in God Almighty and stand against the acquisitive minority”—in other words, to adopt Sharia and stand against Israel.
Morsi, for his part, was less subtle. “The first issue which the world must exert all its efforts in resolving,” he declared, “on the basis of justice and dignity, is the Palestinian cause.” He labeled it “shameful that the free world accepts, regardless of the justifications provided, that a member of the international community continues to deny the rights of a nation that has been longing for decades for independence.” About the many Israel peace offers and chances to establish a state that the Palestinian jihadists contemptuously cast aside he was, of course, silent, retailing Palestinian propaganda talking points as he called for “immediate and significant measures to put an end to colonization, settlement activities, and the alteration in the identity of Occupied Jerusalem.”
Morsi also added an additional item to Ahmadinejad’s laundry list for global harmony: the eradication of “Islamophobia.” “We must join hands,” he said ringingly, “in confronting these regressive ideas that hinder cooperation among us. We must act together in the face of extremism, discrimination, and incitement to hatred on the basis of religion or race… We have a responsibility in this international gathering to study how we can protect the world from instability and hatred.” How could this be done? Egypt, he said, “respects freedom of expression,” but only such expression that is “not used to incite hatred against anyone” and that is “not directed towards one specific religion or culture”—a freedom of expression that “tackles extremism and violence,” not the kind that “deepens ignorance and disregards others.” In other words, he was calling for international restrictions on speech that Muslims find objectionable.
Destruction of Israel and of the freedom of speech, both couched in high-flown terms that eluded most of the hearers and much of the international media. But the intentions of both of these Islamic supremacist presidents was clear. More’s the pity that there was no voice of freedom to stand up and defend free states, free speech and free people in terms just as clear. And because of that lack, Ahmadinejad and Morsi may well get what is on their wish list.
‘All-American Muslim’ Misleads on Islam
TLC’s much-ballyhooed All-American Muslim reality show makes its agenda clear in its opening sequences: shots of a hijabbed girl roller-skating, Muslims dancing at a wedding, an American flag waving proudly in the breeze, and newspaper clippings proclaiming “4 in 10 Americans ‘suspicious’ of Muslims,” “Outrage at Ground Zero ‘Mosque,’” and “Muslims Brace for Backlash.” The point of the show is to depict Muslims as ordinary folks just like you and me who are subjected to unjust suspicion.
And so we meet one zaftig girl who loves to have fun and go to clubs, and who is in the process of getting married. Another young woman, provocatively dressed by Muslim standards, is trying to open up a club of her own. A young hijab-wearing wife shares the joy of her pregnancy with her loving husband. They’re balancing the demands of faith and family with life’s daily pressures, just like most Americans. So why—the show implies—are non-Muslim Americans so mean to them?
Yet it is noteworthy that both the woman who is getting married and the one who is trying to open a club acknowledge that they are not all that religious. And that is the problem at the heart of All-American Muslim. The Muslims it depicts are for the most part undoubtedly harmless, completely uninterested in jihad and Islamic supremacism (although there is a notable undertone of something quite different here and there, such as when the career woman’s “friend and business partner Mahmoud” tells her, his voice full of quiet menace, that a Muslim woman is really better off tending to her family than opening a club).
But Americans aren’t suspicious of Muslims who are trying to get married, open clubs, and play football. Americans are suspicious of Muslims who are trying to blow up American buildings, subvert American freedoms, and assert the primacy of Islamic law over American law. The problem people have with Islam is not with every Muslim person. It is with Islam’s teachings of violence against and the subjugation of unbelievers. It is with the supremacist ideology and the fervent believers in those noxious doctrines of warfare and subjugation.
All-American Muslim addresses nothing of that supremacist ideology, although at times it makes an appearance despite the producers’ best efforts. The woman who is getting married is marrying a Roman Catholic, who converts to Islam in order to marry her. Her father insists on the conversion as a condition of the wedding, and at one point we are told in passing that while a Muslim man may marry a non-Muslim woman, a Muslim woman is not free to marry a non-Muslim man.
Left unanswered in the show is the question of what might have happened if the couple had decided to get married in the Roman Catholic Church, or to leave Islam at some later date. No doubt this non-observant woman’s Muslim relatives would have been less solicitous in that event. There are many women in the show who are wearing hijabs and many who are not, but we are not allowed to see what might happen if one of the hijab-wearing women decides to take it off. Such conflicts would not serve The Learning Channel’s agenda.
There is a spectrum of belief, knowledge and fervor among Muslims, just as there is among the believers in every religion: there are people who are very knowledgeable about its doctrines and serious about putting them into practice, and others who don’t know and don’t care about what their religion teaches but still identify themselves as members of it, and every gradation in between. It would never happen for obvious reasons, but All-American Muslim would be much more interesting if it tracked one of its secular, attractive nominal Muslims as he decided to get more serious about his faith, and ended up participating in jihad activity or Islamic supremacist efforts to demonize and marginalize those who resist that activity.
Such a show would be far more honest in its depiction of the causes of the trumped-up malady of “Islamophobia”—and of its remedies, for the best outcome would be a show in which the nascent jihadi was turned into the FBI by his patriotic and moderate coreligionists. But that is a show we will never see; instead all that All-American Muslim gives us is a denunciation of “Islamophobia” featuring Muslims who could never have conceivably inspired any suspicion of Islam in the first place. The show is a bait-and-switch.
‘Adulteress’ Slaughtered in Afghanistan
A video of a woman, Najiba, being shot dead in Afghanistan while a cheering crowd yells “Allahu akbar,” “Long live Islam,” and “Long live mujahideen” has provoked international outrage. Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, called the shooting “a barbaric attack on a defenceless woman and another stark reminder of the brutalities that were regularly committed under Taliban rule, and of the task ahead of us in advancing the rights of Afghan women and girls.” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “Such deplorable actions underline the vital need for better protection of the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.”
And so in the waning days of the West’s fruitless adventure in Afghanistan, at least two of our NATO allies have a new mission: protecting the rights of women and gir
ls in Afghanistan. The video itself makes clear that this will be an uphill battle; and in any case the fate of Afghan women and girls was sealed, at least as far as getting any help from the West was concerned, when the Western powers oversaw the adoption of a Constitution in Afghanistan that enshrined Islamic law as the highest law of the land.
But many Muslim spokesmen have denied that the murder of Najiba had anything to do with Islam or Sharia in the first place. Many have decried the fact that Najiba was executed for adultery when there doesn’t seem to have been any evidence presented. Maulavi Sidiqullah Fedayee, an Afghan Islamic scholar, explains: “Islam has very clear rules. These clear rules of Islam cannot be changed. Those who implement Shari’a simply on the basis of accusations do not have an adequate understanding of the rules of Islam….In a case of adultery, there must be four witnesses, and these witnesses must testify that they actually saw the woman and a man together engaged in sexual intercourse.”
Fedayee is correct: absent a confession (which, for all anyone knows, may have been obtained in Najiba’s case), Islamic law requires four male Muslim witnesses who actually saw the act of adultery in order to establish it. This odd stipulation is based on Qur’an 24:4 and 24:13, which in turn are based, according to Islamic tradition, on a notorious incident in Muhammad’s life: his favorite wife, Aisha, was accused of adultery and thus had to be put to death, whereupon Muhammad received a revelation requiring four witnesses. Aisha’s accusers didn’t have them, and so she was exonerated.
Also, according to Islamic law Najiba should have been stoned to death, not shot, if she was indeed guilty of adultery. That law is not in the Qur’an, but in one hadith the caliph Umar, one of Muhammad’s closest companions, maintained that it originally was, and was still Islamic law:
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