Since the fall of communism in Europe, political Islam (think Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Taliban, Al Qaeda) has emerged as the biggest threat to human rights around the world.
On his radio show Wednesday, Dennis Prager said: “Those who want an Islamic government… We have the moral duty to judge an Islamic government the way we’d change a democratic government or a communist government or a fascist government. Then it is not just in the realm of religious faith. Once you want to establish a state, a government with many laws, then I have to judge you.”
In which countries — Dennis Prager asks — has Islam increased in political power in the modern age and personal liberty grown with it? I can not think of one example.
When countries are governed by Sharia (such as Afghanistan under the Taliban), they become evil.
When countries are governed by religious law, they become evil.
I think that if Israel became governed by Torah it too would be evil.
When a country receives a substantial inflow of Muslim immigrants, does liberty increase in that country? Think about Holland, for example.
When was the last time you heard a suicide bomber or a hijacker was a Catholic, Jew or Buddhist?
Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post:
….however much violent terror reflects a distortion of the tenets of Islam, it is not only practiced by adherents of the religion but practiced in its name.
To ignore the religious nature of the terrorist threat is to succumb to politically correct delusion. To ignore the homegrown religious nature of the terrorist threat is to succumb even further.
As Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified last month before the House Committee on Homeland Security, “One of the most striking elements of today’s threat picture is that plots to attack America increasingly involve American residents and citizens.”
Napolitano wasn’t referring to right-wing militias or lone-wolf crazies. She was talking about “terrorist groups inspired by al-Qaeda ideology.” And, she pointed out, “This threat of homegrown violent extremism fundamentally changes who is most often in the best position to spot terrorist activity, investigate and respond.”
Or consider Holder himself, who told ABC’s Pierre Thomas in December that he is kept up at night worrying about homegrown terrorists. “The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens – raised here, born here, and who, for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born,” Holder said.
It is hard to imagine a stronger case for the topic of King’s hearings before the Homeland Security Committee.
…Yes, there are other sources of terrorism. Radical Islam is the biggest and most dangerous. And, yes, King is a flawed questioner. But the question he poses is an appropriate – and important – one.
By contrast with this moral clarity, please read this essay by Orthodox rabbi Yosef Kanefsky and Imam Jihad Turk:
We are both alarmed and disturbed by the fact that the American-Muslim community is now under official investigation, as House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) has opened hearings to investigate “the Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.”
The clerics writes: “Rep. King’s investigation brings with it great potential to plunge the entire Muslim-American community into the dark shadow of suspicion.”
It’s not the Peter King hearing that has plunged the Muslim-American community into “the dark shadow of suspicion.” It’s all the Muslim-Americans who are trying to murder innocent people without any pushback from their own Muslim-American community. When was the last time you saw Muslims marching to protest Islamic terror?
Almost all terrorism and hijackings since the 1970s have been done by Muslims.
If you hear that a cartoonist has had to go into hiding because of death threats, who do you think made those death threats? Buddhists? Bhai? Jews? Christians? Or Muslims?
The clerics write: “…the news story that Homeland Security is formally investigating the entirety of the Muslim-American community can only serve to reinforce people’s prejudices and fears.”
What news story? There’s no link or footnote of a particular news story that alleges what Kanefsky and Turk allege. What investigation? There is no Homeland Security investigation of the entirety of the Muslim-American community. Peter King does not run the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He only chairs a House panel on Homeland Security. He does not have the power to direct the department. The Obama administration does that.
The clerics write: “Muslim Americans are routinely the objects of suspicion and bias. Increasingly, Islamic women who cover their hair experience verbal harassment. Young people are bullied, are called “terrorist” and other hurtful names. Islamaphobia is an undeniable feature of American life. (Witness, for example the success of the author/lecturer Brigitte Gabriel, whose Islamaphobic message is epitomized in the title of her book “Because They Hate”.)”
I doubt these clerics even read Brigitte Gabriel‘s book which is clearly about those parts of the Islamic world that do hate non-Muslims and want to murder and subjugate them.
Hate crime statistic show that far more Jews are the objects of hate crimes than Muslims.
Hate crimes directed against Muslims remain relatively rare, notwithstanding the notoriety gained by incidents such as recent vandalism at the Madera Islamic Center.
Jews, lesbians, gay men and Caucasians, among others, are all more frequently the target of hate crimes, FBI records show. Reported anti-Muslim crimes have declined over recent years, though they still exceed what occurred prior to the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
Islamaphobia is an undeniable feature of American life? These clerics provide no statistic to back up their libel of the United States, a beautiful country that extends freedom and liberty to people of all religions and races, even to those who support destroying democracy and replacing it with Sharia law (at least a third of Muslims in the Western world according to numerous surveys).
The greatest moral threat in the world today is that part of the Islamic world that will murder non-Muslims to violently impose Sharia. Yes, this is a minority of Muslims, perhaps only the 10% who support folks such as Osama Bin Laden, but the other 90% of Muslims don’t count for much in this regard because they do so little to fight the jihadis in their midst. The majority of Germans did not vote for the Nazis in 1932 but they acquiesced to the Nazis taking power and starting a world war. The majority of Russians did not support Lenin in 1917 but they allowed his tiny group of Bolsheviks to take over the country and to support police states that murdered tens of millions of innocent people (with Russian support, Mao in China murdered about 75 million of his citizens).
The clerics Kanefsky and Turk write: “It is also easy to imagine that this calling out of the entire Islamic community for investigation will serve to reinforce the impression that young American Muslims already have, that they are perceived as unwelcome strangers here. This belief can have the effect of rendering them more vulnerable to the very extremist rhetoric that Rep. King is investigating, the rhetoric from which their parents and teachers are trying to immunize them.”
So Peter King’s hearings will likely make more American-Muslims terrorists? If such Muslims can be so easily led to terror, then what does that say about their community? On the basis of what the clerics write, we should have a dozen more such hearings because the threat is so huge.
I don’t agree with the clerics. I don’t think Muslims are so weak and stupid as to be led into terror by a congressman’s hearings on radical Islam in America.
On the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” Thursday, New York Times liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof said: “I am sure that at mosques around this country, especially in the more radical mosques, that this is going to be seen as one more evidence that people are picking on us.”
Dennis Prager: “We might upset radical mosques? The whole point is to identify radical mosques because they are producing radical Muslims who might kill us. We might get radical Muslims angry by holding hearings on radical Muslims?”
The clerics Kanefsky and Turk write: “Although Muslim and Jewish histories differ in many ways, it is nonetheless meaningful to invoke the experience of Jews as a community that has suffered the catastrophic consequences of collective suspicion, marginalization, and distrust. Jews have a unique perspective on being thrust into the general category of “mistrusted other” and bear a responsibility to at the very least refrain from jumping on the bandwagon when another community is being thus demonized.”
Are Muslims being demonized? As almost all terrorists since the 1970s have been Muslims, how can you say that Muslims are being demonized? Right now most of the Arab-Islamic world is bent on the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel and the genocide of millions of Israelis. This is the real evil in the world today, not these hearings by Peter King.
On his radio show Monday, Dennis Prager talked about the end of multi-culturalism. “Voters are starting to realize that you have to have shared values. The race of immigrants does not matter. It is the values of immigrants that matters.”
On Tuesday, Dennis said: “People don’t realize that you can lose your freedom. The biggest difference between the conservative and the liberal, the left and the right, is that the right understands how fragile goodness is. That is why the left is so at peace with profoundly transforming America and we’re not. It’s too dangerous.”
Marc Thierssen writes for the Washington Post:
In recent days, critics in this section have pounded Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) for holding hearings to examine radicalization in the American Muslim community. They’ve accused him of “providing fuel for bigots” and “stoking irrational fears.” Really? It is hardly irrational for the chairman House Committee on Homeland Security to examine radicalization in the American Muslim community when top leaders of all three al-Qaeda networks that now threaten the homeland today have roots in this community.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen born in Las Cruces, New Mexico…
Al-Shabab/al-Qaeda in East Africa. In the summer of 2008, the Somali terror group al-Shabab formally merged with al-Qaeda, and last year released a video showing its fighters chanting “Here we are O’ Osama. We are your soldiers O’ Osama” and pledging to carry out jihad for him across the world. The group’s military commander is an American citizen, Omar Hammami, also known as Abu Mansoor al-Amriki (“the American). Hammami grew up in Daphne, Ala., just outside of Mobile, and was raised by a Syrian Muslim father and a Southern Baptist mother…
Al-Qaeda Central. The current operational commander of al-Qaeda — the position held by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when he planned the Sept. 11 attacks — is an American citizen, Adnan Shukrijumah.According to the New York Times, Shukrijuma is a “Saudi-born naturalized American… [who] spent part of his youth in Brooklyn, went to college in Florida and has long been on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list.”CNN reported that he is “the eldest son of a Saudi Imam [who] came to America as a young child. They settled in Brooklyn, New York, where his father preached at a mosque. They lived at a nearby house before moving to Florida in the mid-’90s. His father, who is now dead, opened a small mosque near Fort Lauderdale.”
Bottom line: When three top leaders of the three most virulent al-Qaeda networks are American citizens, it is ridiculous to suggest that the chairman of the House committee responsible for homeland security is out of line to investigate the subject of radicalization in the American Muslim community. Rep. King is not “stoking irrational fears” or “providing fuel for bigots.” He is doing his job.
On Wednesday, Dennis Prager talked about this:
WASHINGTON (ABP) — A Baptist advocate for religious liberty and the separation of church and state said March 8 that House committee hearings scheduled later this week on radical Islam should be broadened to other faiths.
“The implied suggestion that terrorist threats to the American people result from one religious group is an insult to the millions of peaceful Muslim American citizens,” Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said in a telephone press conference.
Walker joined experts in law enforcement, civil rights and Muslim advocacy to criticize Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, for a hearing scheduled March 10 titled “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.”
Walker, an attorney who is also an ordained Baptist minister, said he knows a little about how it feels to be lumped with religious extremists. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a small independent Baptist congregation’s right to hold virulently anti-gay pickets near military funerals, Walker said he had to remind the media and friends that Baptists like Martin Luther King, Peter Gomes and Jimmy Carter were more representative of the denomination than Pastor Fred Phelps and mostly family members that comprise the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan.
Walker said the hearing’s narrow focus “will send a further message that Muslims present a greater threat of terrorism than other religions.”
“It would imply that the potential for terrorism from outside of Islam is not significant enough to merit a hearing,” he said. “Highlighting only one potential so-called breeding ground for terrorism ignores the reality that other sources of terrorism exist.”
“We recognize that religion is sometimes the impetus for acts of terrorism,” Walker said. “History is replete with examples of the atrocities that human beings have perpetrated in the name of their particular faith, be it Islam, Christianity or a host of others.”
But Walker said a general equating of terrorism with Islam is “both dangerous and disingenuous.”
“It is a ploy that plays on widespread misunderstanding of Islam, and it encourages the American people to view extremist outliers in Islam as representative of the entire faith,” he said.
He said the hearing would “set a troubling precedent that could lead to a diminution of everyone’s religious liberty.”
Dennis Prager: “Do you remember all the liberal reaction when Nidal Hassan, the psychiatrist in the Army, shot his fellow soldiers? It was one after another, how do we know that Islam had anything to do with this? Why are jumping to conclusions? The entire liberal world. Maybe he had a bad day? So what if he’s a Muslim? There are crazies in every religion and no religion.”
“These are the same people who jump to conclusions about the Tea Party. They’re racists. There’s no basis for saying that.
“Amazing statement — that it might lead us to believe that ‘Muslims present a greater threat of terrorism than other religions.’
“The Left does not believe what is true, they believe what they want to be true.”
Dennis Prager wrote Nov. 10, 2009 (five days after the shooting):
One reads and hears with increasing disbelief and anger that we don’t know the motive or motives of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army major who fired over 100 shots at his fellow American soldiers in order to murder and maim as many as possible. Hasan ended up allegedly murdering 13 people, but government and Army spokesmen and the mainstream media claim they just can’t figure out why he did this. They are, however, certain that it was not an act of terrorism.
Sunday’s New York Times “Week in Review” article about Nidal Hasan was titled “When Soldiers Snap.” The gist of the article was that Maj. Hasan had snapped — even though he had never been in combat. He snapped in advance. Just two sentences in the article were devoted to the possibility that his motives were in any way relatable to his Muslim faith.
As Chris Matthews put it, “it’s unclear if religion was a factor in this shooting.” To Matthews, not only was it unclear if Hasan’s Islamic faith was “the” factor, it was unclear if it was even “a” factor.
Likewise, on NPR, Tom Gjelten offered the novel explanation that Hasan, who has never been in combat, may have suffered from “pre-traumatic stress disorder” because he anticipated having traumatic distress. “Was he an example,” Gjelten seriously asked, “of these soldiers who are literally freaked out by what they are likely to face when they are deployed?”
And on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera, said, “I don’t know what motivates him … as far as I know … he’s a sociopath; he’s a criminal. He could have had a toothache and gone off because of that.”
The deaths and maiming at Fort Hood are heartbreaking and angering. But ultimately far more injurious to America than the act of evil that caused those deaths and injuries is the massive self-deception American society engages in out of fear of being called bigoted, racist or “Islamaphobic.”
Any American who is not prepared to lie to himself has reason to believe that Hasan’s religious views were prominent, if not exclusive, factors for why he slaughtered fellow American soldiers. The motives appear as clear as any could be.
Chuck Medley, Fort Hood’s director of Emergency Services, told Reuters that Hasan yelled “Allahu Akbar” — the Arabic incantation of “Allah is the greatest” yelled by Islamic terrorists before they slaughter people — just before the shooting,
Dr. Val Finnell told The Associated Press that he and other classmates participating in a 2007-2008 master’s program with Hasan at the Uniformed Services University had complained about his comments, including that the war on terror was “a war against Islam.”
Another classmate told the AP that he complained to five officers and two civilian faculty members at the university. He also wrote to Pentagon officials that fear in the military of being seen as politically incorrect prevented an “intellectually honest discussion of Islamic ideology” in the ranks.
Other classmates who participated in a 2007-2008 master’s program at a military college said they, too, had complained to superiors about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s anti-American views, which included his giving a presentation that justified suicide bombing and telling classmates that Islamic law trumped the U.S. Constitution.
And ABC News now reports that Hasan had attempted to contact al-Qaida.
It is a given that the vast majority of American Muslims are loyal Americans. But that’s not the only given.
It is equally a given that a certain percentage of Muslims in and outside of the military are Islamists who want Americans dead and America Muslim.
