TAKE BACK THE HILL Loretta Miller is a Constitutionist and part of the Constitution Party https://electlorettamillerforcongress.com/weclome
Showing posts with label Moderate Muslims. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Moderate Muslims. Show all posts
Monday, June 11, 2018
Monday, December 14, 2015
Teenage Girl Assaulted by Arabs After Identifying as Jewish
Sunday, December 13, 2015 | Israel Today Staff
A 15-year-old girl was brutally assaulted on Saturday evening simply because she dared to identify herself as being Jewish.
Those who read only the opening line above would be excused for believing this incident occurred in Europe. But the sad reality is that it happened in the Jewish state, in the northern city of Haifa.
The girl was reportedly walking not far from where she lives when two Arab girls believed to be around 18 years of age demanded to know if she was Jewish. When the girl answered in the affirmative, the two Arabs hurled glass bottles at her and beat her around the head, all while shouting curses at the Jews in general
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The teenage victim suffered a broken nose, numerous lacerations and bruises.
Commenters on an Israeli news forum noted that had the roles been reversed, had two Jews assaulted a teenage Arab girl, the incident would have made headline news around the globe.
The attack serves as yet another example that when the mainstream media does report on Jewish violence targeting Arabs, it is telling only half the story. The type violence periodicially highlighted by the media is suffered by Israeli Jews on an almost daily basis.
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/27956/Default.aspx
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
CAIR is attacking Jews again and Some Stupid Jews want Dialogue
CAIR is attacking Jews... And simple stupid Jews who think dialogue with terrorist who are sworn and commanded by the Koran and Mohammad to kill Jews and after the Jews are gone the Christians and Hindus and as well as atheists and agnostics who will be the first to go since they are the worst of the none believers,
This was sent to me in email and below this email is CAIRS answer to the Jewish (Zionist) problem. My Jewish Brothers and Sisters let us not forget Kablah , Hebron, and the Holacaust where thousands of Jews were slaughtered because they were not Muslims.
So what they say above is that the land is ours and Jews are guests and should go back to where they came from. I am an Egyptian Jew and the village where my Grandparents came from was burnt down. The Jews who lived there was murdered , kidnapped and rape. My family was lucky .. they had a wedding in another village and wasnt there for this demonstration of Islamic hatred. This was in the middle 1800 which was long before the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Now my question is if they come to America and live here Do Christian Americans and Jewish Americans have the right to ship them back to where they come from since this is OUR LAND and not theirs. Their solution is a Dead Jew! They ( Hitlers Muslims) helped Hitler kill Jews in Europe.
What you wont see on main stream Media .. Peaceful Muslims killing Jews ...
This was sent to me in email and below this email is CAIRS answer to the Jewish (Zionist) problem. My Jewish Brothers and Sisters let us not forget Kablah , Hebron, and the Holacaust where thousands of Jews were slaughtered because they were not Muslims.
So what they say above is that the land is ours and Jews are guests and should go back to where they came from. I am an Egyptian Jew and the village where my Grandparents came from was burnt down. The Jews who lived there was murdered , kidnapped and rape. My family was lucky .. they had a wedding in another village and wasnt there for this demonstration of Islamic hatred. This was in the middle 1800 which was long before the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Now my question is if they come to America and live here Do Christian Americans and Jewish Americans have the right to ship them back to where they come from since this is OUR LAND and not theirs. Their solution is a Dead Jew! They ( Hitlers Muslims) helped Hitler kill Jews in Europe.
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 Not interested aAmericans for Peace and Tolerance
Last Updated: August 3, 2015 |
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While purporting dedication to “promoting peaceful coexistence in an ethnically diverse America by educating the American public about the need for a moderate political leadership that supports tolerance and core American values in communities across the nation,” the Boston-based Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) is a hate group dedicated to undermining mainstream Muslim institutions and promoting Islamophobia within the media. The group and its members have consistently made defamatory, inaccurate, and misleading statements about Islam and Muslims, and receive financing from some of the most notorious Islamophobic organizations in the United States. The group has also targeted moderate Jews and those with views critical of Israeli policy toward Palestine.
APT has adopted a top-down strategy, focusing its attacks on those in positions of leadership and influence within the Boston Muslim community in order to prevent mainstream Muslim organizations from occupying a stable position of civic engagement. The group has repeatedly made unfounded and misleading allegations about members of the Boston Muslim community, especially the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) and Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC). They have taken out extensive advertising in local and national newspapers asserting ties between these organizations and designated terrorist groups, penned op-eds in numerous news outlets presenting Boston as a “hub” of extremism, and accused local mosques of serving as fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood and promoting “violent Jihad, hatred for America, and of Western civilization in general.” The group waged a successful harassment campaign against the Newton, MA public school system: in an effort to alter the schools’ curricula so as to remove texts about Islam, APT took out incendiary and factually misleading ads in major Boston-area newspapers such as the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Newton Tab, Jewish Advocate, and Boston Metro. Additionally, the group has attempted to smear those who encourage interfaith dialogue with Muslims, including respected Jewish community leaders such as Rabbi Eric Gurvis of Temple Shalom of Newton, MA. The ISB and ISBCC have publicly refuted each of these claims, identifying them as misleading and unsubstantiated attempts to tarnish their organizations, and a group of seventy Rabbinical community leaders together published a letter in The Jewish Advocate in 2011 calling upon APT’s President, Charles Jacobs, “to discontinue his destructive campaign against Boston’s Muslim community, which is based on innuendo, half-truths and unproven conspiracy theories.” Recently, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz publicly called the group’s claims “incredibly racist and unfair.”
APT’s publicly available financial records reveal a significant incentive for the group to engage in such hate-mongering: since 2009, APT has received nearly $2,000,000 in contributions. The group’s IRS Form 990 from 2013 indicates that it received $705,014 that year alone (up from $625,542 in 2012 and $319,760 in 2011), an enormous amount for a state-level nonprofit with just five registered employees, only one of whom, Charles Jacobs, collected a salary. The sources of this funding include some of the most prominent Islamophobic hate groups in the United States. The Alan and Hope Winters Family Foundation contributed $28,000 between 2010 and 2012, and the Middle East Forum provided $35,000 between 2009 and 2012. The former is described by the Center for American Progress as one of the top eight funders of Islamophobia in the US, donating to infamous anti-Muslim activists such as David Yerushalmi (the major promoter of nationwide “anti-Sharia” legislation) and Pamela Geller, who the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the anti-Muslim movement’s most visible and flamboyant figurehead” and whose group Stop the Islamization of America it lists as a hate group. Middle East Forum is one of the most prominent Islamophobic think tanks in America. The Forum is directed by Daniel Pipes, considered by many Muslims to be America’s leading Islamophobe: he is on record as being “encouraged” by growing bias against Muslim-Americans and claiming that ISIS is “100% Islamic,” among numerous other bigoted statements about immigrant and African-American Muslims. Americans for Peace and Tolerance’s financial support by these organizations not only demonstrates that their views are sufficiently aligned so as to attract such funding, but also displays a financial interest in promoting damaging narratives against Muslims and Islamic institutions.
The group is led by Charles Jacobs, who has a long history of founding polarizing and defamatory organizations in the Boston area. He previously directed The David Project and co-founded CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America). The former was profiled, along with Jacobs, in the CBS article “The Great Islamophobic Crusade,” which described in detail their efforts to block construction of the ISBCC on ideological grounds, as well as the group’s production of the film Columbia Unbecoming, which made unfounded accusations against Arab-American Columbia University faculty. The David Project has received over $250,000 since 2005 from organizations identified by the Islamophobia Network as promoting religiously motivated hatred against Muslims, and CAMERA has received over $2,000,000 in donations since 2001, including significant sums from groups dedicated to promoting anti-Islamic sentiments. The Anti-Defamation League has publicly repudiated Jacobs for his unfounded and “irresponsible” allegations that a public school building in Michigan was to be used as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, and his criticisms of the ADL for supposedly not taking the threat of Islamic extremism seriously. The ADL cited his “pattern” of making such accusations, “replete with distortions, inaccuracies, exaggerations, and hyperbolic attacks that shed more light than heat.”
Other prominent members of APT include Ahmed Subhy Mansour, who is controversial for his support of well-known Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, as well as his justification of former Congressman Tom Tancredo’s suggestion of bombing Mecca. Following Tancredo’s proposal that the US might propose bombing Islam’s holiest site as a deterrent against terrorist attacks, Mansour wrote that “an objective assessment of [Congressman] Tancredo’s statement must claim that any US official, concerned with the lives of his civilian countrymen, is likely to make such a remark as a way of deterring terrorists.” The US State Department has called Tancredo’s statement “insulting and offensive.” Mansour has served in leadership roles within numerous organizations that are supported financially by Islamophobic causes and foundations, including the Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP), which has received nearly $500,000 since 2005 from the Middle East Forum and the Donors Capital Fund, the latter of which has been documented as a major source of financial support for groups which oppose mainstream US Muslim organizations, having contributed over $27,000,000 to groups promoting Islamophobia. As noted above, the Middle East Forum is directed by Daniel Pipes, who has endorsed religious profiling of Muslims and stated that “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene... All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.” Mansour has expressed his support for Pipes, writing that “We Muslims need a thinker like Dr. Pipes, who can criticize the terrorist culture within Islam, just as I usually do.” William Sapers, an insurance executive, and Professor Dennis Hale of Boston College are also listed as Directors. The latter has published numerous articles in blogs and online opinion sites arguing that Muslims only feign indignation to insults against the Prophet Muhammed and their religion in order “to induce, in infidels, a habit of deference to Islam, the more public the deference the better;” publicly opposing the construction of the Park51 mosque in New York (calling it the “Ground Zero Mosque”); and claiming that “Palestinian Arabs only pretend that they want to be a people with their own nation. What Palestinian Arabs really want is depressingly clear: they want to destroy Israel and kill the Jews.”
Americans for Peace and Tolerance is the latest instantiation of a grouping of individuals with a long history of opposing religious plurality in the Boston area. Although its methods for doing so have evolved – from obstructing the construction and expansion of Muslim religious centers in the community to, once those institutions were established, attempting to erode public confidence in their leadership and capacity to engage in productive interfaith dialogue – its aims remain the same. The credibility of the group and its members, especially their espoused desire to “promot[e] peaceful coexistence in an ethnically diverse America,” is belied by their ongoing close association with some of the most virulently anti-Muslim groups currently operating in the United States, and they have a significant financial incentive to continue undermining the credibility of local Islamic institutions. Media outlets and political figures should be highly suspicious of their claims, which have been misleading or outright fabricated in the past.ny more?
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Sunday, June 8, 2014
CAIR's Anti-Memorial Day Tweets Anger American Muslims
CAIR's Anti-Memorial Day Tweets Anger American Muslims
Officials with the Council on American-Islamic Relations question whether to honor U.S. troops, angering American Muslims.
By Elad Benari
First Publish: 5/30/2014, 4:43 AM
A series of Memorial Day tweets made by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has angered a number of American Muslims.
According to the Clarion Project, the tweets by CAIR officials questioned whether to honor U.S. troops who gave their lives in wars they oppose.
CAIR officials frequently depict American soldiers as murderers, imperialists and abusers of Muslims.
One tweet by Zahra Billoo, the executive-director of CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, read that she “struggles with Memorial Day each year” and added, “How does one balance being pretty anti-war while honoring those who died in the military?”
She also quoted another CAIR official, Dawud Walid, the executive-director of CAIR’s Michigan chapter, as questioning whether they should honor American soldiers that died in “unjust” wars and occupations.
The Clarion Project noted that Billoo did, however, find one “soldier” she felt comfortably honoring. On May 26, she promoted an article from the anti-Semitic and anti-American Nation of Islam that asked for help for a “black liberation soldier” named Imam Jamil al-Amin.
Al-Amin was a member of the Black Panthers terrorist group and was convicted of murdering a police officer in 2000. He is also anti-American and has said that “if America doesn’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down,” and “I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.”
Not all Muslims, however, welcomed the tweets, and a backlash was sparked following a Clarion Project report on the topic.
The comments by CAIR officials prompted several Bosnian Muslims to thank U.S. soldiers for their sacrifices, with one explicitly saying that CAIR does not speak for them.
“Without the US, #Bosnia would by now be part of racist project of ‘Greater Serbia.’ #Muslims in #Bosnia are greateful [sic] to US! #thx,” read one tweet.
Another read, “THANK YOU American soldiers for opposing Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing and #genocide in #Bosnia and for bombing #Serbia.”
In addition, a number of Muslim human rights activists responded in statements to the Clarion Project.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, told the website, “The real truth that CAIR and their Islamist colleagues at the Organization of the Islamic Conference hypocritically ignore is that our American sons and daughters in the military have sacrificed more to liberate free-thinking Muslims from the shackles of real oppression in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq than any other nation, especially Muslim-majority countries.
“Our military is ground zero in the ideological conflict against Islamism. Islamist groups like CAIR cannot both claim that Muslims should be conscientious objectors against ‘occupation’ while also claiming they respect their service and patriotism,” added Jasser.
Dr. Ahmed Subhy Mansour, President of the International Quranic Center, said, “As an experienced Muslim thinker and scholar, I cannot help but notice the role the U.S. military plays in international developments worldwide, where the U.S. is the number one contributor of international aid. Moreover, the U.S. military’s humanitarian work is the most active in comparison to any other military in the world, providing medical services and food supplies in many conflict zones.
“Organizations like CAIR choose to overlook all of the above work of the U.S. military. The approach exemplifies radicals’ views of the world as two camps: Infidels (the West) and believers (Muslims). This contradicts the real Islamic teachings, as I clarify in this article,” he said.
Dr. Tawfik Hamid, former Islamist and Chair for the Study of Islamic Radicalism at the Potomac Institute, told Clarion Project, “As a Muslim, I would like to thank the U.S. troops for fighting Islamist radicals and terrorists since September 11. Our American soldiers who lost their lives in this war are true heroes who died to defend our nation and to save the world from the enemies of our civilization.”
Former FBI Counterterrorism expert John Guandolo revealed to Arutz Sheva in March that he has information showing CAIR is a front for the terrorist organization Hamas.
In 2008, CAIR was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist money laundering case in U.S. history – the trial of the Holy Land Foundation in which five HLF officials were convicted of funneling money to Hamas.
U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis ruled that, "The Government has produced ample evidence to establish the association" of CAIR to Hamas, upholding their designations as unindicted co-conspirators. In 2008, the FBI formally ended all contact with CAIR because of its ties to Hamas.
Individuals from CAIR visited the White House at least 20 times starting in 2009, according to a 2013 investigation by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).
In 2010 the organization gave a lifetime achievement award to Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent who resigned after she said in an interview that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Poland and Germany.
Friday, May 2, 2014
Get Ready For Islam With Hillary
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Tony Blair on the Islamist Threat
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Tony Blair delivered a major speech on April 23 entitled, "Why the Middle East Matters". In summary, he argued that the Middle East, far from being a "vast unfathomable mess" is deep in the throes of a multi-faceted struggle between a specific religious ideology on the one hand, and those who want to embrace the modern world on the other. Furthermore, the West, blinded up until now as to the religious nature of the conflict, must take sides: it should support those who stand on the side of open-minded pluralistic societies, and combat those who wish to create intolerant theocracies.
In his speech Blair makes a whole series of substantial points:
He states that a 'defining challenge of our time' is a religious ideology which he calls 'Islamist', although he is not comfortable with this label because he prefers to distance himself from any implication that this ideology can be equated with Islam itself. He worries that "you can appear to elide those who support the Islamist ideology with all Muslims."
He considers Islamism to be a global movement, whose diverse manifestations are produced by common ideological roots.
He rejects Western non-religious explanations for the problems caused by Islamist ideology, including the preference of "Western commentators" to attribute the manifestations of Islamism to "disparate" causes which have nothing to do with religion. Likewise he implies that the protracted conflict over Israel-Palestine is not the cause of this ideology, but rather the converse is the case: dealing with the wider impact of Islamist ideology could help solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
According to Blair, what distinguishes violent terrorists from seemingly non-violent Islamists – such as the Muslim Brotherhood – is simply "a difference of view as to how to achieve the goals of Islamism", so attempts to draw a distinction between political Islamist movements and radical terrorist groups are mistaken. Blair considers that the religious ideology of certain groups like the Brotherhood, which may appear to be law-abiding, "inevitably creates the soil" in which religio-political violence is nurtured.
He considers "Islamism" to be a major threat everywhere in the world, including increasingly within Western nations. The "challenge" of Islamism is "growing" and "spreading across the world" and it is "the biggest threat to global security of the early 21st Century."
Because of the seriousness of the threat of this religio-political ideology, Blair argues that the West should vigorously support just about anybody whose interests lie in opposing Islamists, from General Sisi in Egypt to President Putin in Russia. He finds it to be an absurd irony that Western governments form intimate alliances with nations whose educational and civic institutions promote this ideology: an obvious example of this would be the US – Saudi alliance.
In all this, one might be forgiven for thinking that Blair sounds a lot like Geert Wilders, except that, as he takes pains to emphasize, he emphatically rejects equating Islamism with Islam. Tony Blair and Geert Wilders agree that there is a serious religious ideological challenge facing the world, but they disagree on whether that challenge is Islam itself.My Blair's speech is aimed at people who do not wish to be thought of as anti-Musilm, but who need to be awakened to the religious nature of the Islamist challenge. He is keen to assure his intended audience that if they adopt his thesis they would not be guilty of conflating those who support radical Jihadi violence with all Muslims.
Islam and Islamism
Two key assumptions underpin Blair's dissociation of Islamism the religio-political ideology from Islam the religion. First, Blair presupposes that Islamism is not "the proper teaching of Islam". It may, he concedes, be "an interpretation", but it is a false one, a "perversion" of the religion, which "distorts and warps Islam's true message." He offers two arguments to support this theological insight.One is that there are pious Muslims who agree with him: "Many of those totally opposed to the Islamist ideology are absolutely devout Muslims."
This is a fallacious argument. It is akin to asserting that Catholic belief in the infallibility of the Pope cannot be Christian merely because there are absolutely devout protestant Christians who totally oppose this dogma. The fact that there are pious Muslims who reject Islamism is not a credible argument that Islamism is an invalid interpretation of Islam.
Blair's other argument in support of his belief that Islamism is a perversion of Islam is an allegation that Christians used to hold similarly abhorrent theologies: "There used to be such interpretations of Christianity which took us years to eradicate from our mainstream politics." This is a self-deprecating variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, in which another's argument is attacked by accusing them of hypocrisy. Here Blair rhetorically directs the ad hominem attack against himself and his culture. In essence, he is saying "It would hypocritical of us to regard Islamist ideology as genuinely Islamic, because (we) Christians used to support similarly pernicious theologies in the past (although we do not do so today)."
This logic is equally fallacious: observations about the history of Christian theology, valid or not, prove nothing about what is or is not a valid form of Islam.
Blair's second key assumption is a widely-held view about the root cause of "the challenge". The fundamental issue, he argues, is people of faith who believe they and only they are right and do not accept the validity of other views. Such people believe that "there is one proper religion and one proper view of it, and that this view should, exclusively, determine the nature of society and the political economy." "It is not about a competing view of how society or politics should be governed within a common space where you accept other views are equally valid. It is exclusivist in nature."
Hilary Clinton has expressed a very similar understanding of extremist religionists, who "define religion in such a way that if you do not believe what they want you to believe, then what you are doing is not practicing religion, because there is only one definition of religion."
Such views about religion may reflect the secularist Zeitgeist, but they offer a very weak explanation for the challenge of radical Islam. The problem is not that Islamists believe they and only they are right. The problem is all the rest of what they believe.Consider this: Tony Blair himself believes his goal is valid, true and worth fighting for, namely a tolerant, open, democratic society, and the Islamists' goal of a sharia society is invalid. He does believe that his view should determine the nature of society. Likewise many religious groups believe that they follow the one true religion, including the Catholic Church, which Tony Blair formally joined in 2007: Mother Theresa of Calcutta certainly did not consider alternative religious views equally valid to Catholic dogma. But none of this certainty of belief implies that Tony Blair or Catholics in general are disposed to become terrorists, cut hands off thieves or kill apostates.
Blair's argument manifests the paradox of tolerance. His vision of a good society is one in which people must respect the views of others as "equally valid". At the same time he argues that we should disallow and combat Islamism because it is "perverse". He is asking for Islamism not to be tolerated because it is intolerant. If Blair's explanation for Islamist nastiness is flawed, what then is the explanation? This takes us back to Islam itself. Does Blair's position on Islam hold water?
Blair's arguments for his positive view of Islam are weak. The validity of Islamism does not rest or fall on whether there are pious Muslims who accept or reject it, nor on whether Christians have advocating equally perverse theologies in the past. In the end, Islam as a religion – all mainstream Muslim scholars would agree – is based upon the teachings of the Sunna (the example and teaching of Muhammad) and the Koran. Islam's religious validity in the eyes of its followers stands and falls on how well it can be justified from those authorities.There are at least three respects in which Islamist ideologies claim strong support from Islam – that is, from the Koran and Muhammad.
One is the intolerance and violence in the Islamic canon. The Koran states "Kill them / the polytheists wherever you can find them (Sura 9:5, 2:191). Muhammad, according to Islamic tradition, said "I have been sent with a sword in my hand to command people to worship Allah and associate no partners with him. I command you to belittle and subjugate those who disobey me …" He also said to his followers in Medina, "Kill any Jew who falls into your power." Following in Muhammad's footsteps, one of Muhammad's most revered companions and successors as leader of the Muslim community, the Caliph Umar, called upon the armies of Islam to fight non-Muslims until they surrender or convert, saying "If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency."
It will not do, in the face of many such statements found in the Koran and the traditions of Muhammad, to throw one's hands up in the air and say there are also bad verses in the Bible. If Jesus Christ had said such things as Muhammad did, Christianity's political theology would look very different today and medieval Christian Holy War theology – developed initially in response to the Islamic jihad – would have come into being as part of the birth-pangs of the religion, just as the doctrine of the Islamic jihad did in the history of Islam.
Islamist apologists find it relatively easy to win young Muslims over to their cause precisely because they have strong arguments at their disposal from the Koran and Muhammad's example and teaching. Their threatening ideology is growing in influence because it is so readily supported by substantial religious foundations. Islamism may not be the only interpretation of Islam, but by any objective measure, it is open for Muslims to hold it, given what what is in their canon.
Blair makes a telling over-generalisation when he states that Islamist ideology is an export from the Middle East. Another important source has been the Indian sub-continent. Today Pakistanis today are among the most dynamic apologists for Islamism. Abul A'la Maududi, an Indian (later Pakistani) Islamic teacher and founder of Jamaat-e-Islami was writing powerful texts to radicalise Muslims more than 70 years ago – including his tract Jihad in Islam (first published in 1927). His works remain in widespread use as tools of radicalization by Islamist organisations. Maududi's theological vision was driven, not by Middle Eastern influences or Saudi petrodollars, but by his life-long study of the Koran and the example of Muhammad. The spiritual DNA of Maududi's Islamist theology was derived from the Islamic canon itself.
The second point to understand about Islamist ideologies is that the conflation of politics and religion, which is one of Blair's main objections to Islamism, has always been accepted as normative by the mainstream of Islamic theology. It is orthodox Islam. As Bernard Lewis pointed out, the separation of church and state has been derided by most Muslim thinkers since the origins of Islam: "Separation of church and state was derided in the past by Muslims when they said this is a Christian remedy for a Christian disease. It doesn't apply to us or to our world."
The third point about Islamist ideologies is that their vision of a closed society in which non-Muslims are second-class participants is in lock-step with the conservative mainstream of Islamic thought. Here again Bernard Lewis: "It is only very recently that some defenders of Islam began to assert that their society in the past accorded equal status to non-Muslims. No such claim is made by spokesmen for resurgent Islam, and historically there is no doubt that they are right. Traditional Islamic societies neither accorded such equality nor pretended that they were so doing. Indeed, in the old order, this would have been regarded not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. How could one accord the same treatment to those who follow the true faith and those who willfully reject it? This would be a theological as well as a logical absurdity." (The Jews of Islam, Princeton University Press, 1987, p.4).
Combatting Radical Islam
Tony Blair is right to call the world to engage with and reject radical Islamist ideology. This is a defining global challenge of our time. He is also correct to affirm that this ideology is religious. But he is profoundly mistaken to characterize it as un-Islamic. The fallacious arguments he puts forward for distinguishing Islam from Islamism are nothing but flimsy rhetoric. The hard evidence against separating Islamism from Islam is clear, the sentiments of some pious Muslims non-withstanding.
Islamism is a valid interpretation of Islam, not in the sense that it is the only 'correct' or 'true' one, but because its core tenets find ready and obvious support in the Islamic canon, and they align with core principles of 1400 years of Islamic theology. (To make this observation is not the same thing as saying that all pious Muslims are Islamists!)
Blair is right to call for the West to combat "radical Islam", but the reason why "radical" is a correct term to use for this ideology is that radical means "of the root," and Islamist ideas are deeply rooted in Islam itself. Islamism is a radical form of Islam. This explains why the radicalization project has been advancing with such force all over the world.
In order to combat radical Islamic views we do need to have a frank and open dialogue about the dynamics of radicalization. Blair is concerned about the damage being caused by denial about Islamism, but he indulges in his own form of blinkered thinking, which is just as unhelpful. He was right to identify Islamist ideology as the soil in which violent jihadi ideologies "inevitably" take root, but fails to identity mainstream Islam itself as the soil in which Islamism develops. In reality the Islamist movement is but the tip of the iceberg of the Islamic movement, a deeper and broader revival of Islam across the whole Muslim world.
When countering radical Islamic ideologies, Western leaders should refrain from putting themselves forward as experts on theology, who are somehow competent to rule on whether a particular interpretation of Islam is valid or "perverse". There is something ridiculous about secular politicians ruling on which manifestations of Islam are to be judged theologically correct. As Taliban Cleric Abu Qutada once said, "I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Quran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Quran?"
Ritual displays of respect for Islam should not be naively used as sugar to coat the pill of opposition to the objectionable beliefs and behaviour of some Muslims. Leaders need to be absolutely clear about what values they stand for, and insist on these values. They should not need to express a theological opinion about what is or is not valid Islam in order to challenge the anti-semitism of Palestinian school textbooks, the denial of basic religious rights to non-Muslim guest workers in Saudi Arabia, incitement against Christians in Egypt, the promotion of female genital mutilation in the name of Islam in the Maldives, or the UK practice of taking child brides.
In this post-secular world, our leaders need to "do God" with less naivety. They need to grasp that the inner pressure they feel to manifest respect for Islam whenever they object to some of its manifestations is itself a symptom of the ideology of dominance which powers the Islamist agenda. They should resist the pressure to mount an apology for Islam. The mullahs can do that.
Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992.
Related Topics: Islam, Islamic law (Shari'a), Moderate Muslims | Mark
http://www.meforum.org/3813/tony-blair-on-the-islamist-threat
http://www.meforum.org/3813/tony-blair-on-the-islamist-threat
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