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IF ISLAM IS SO PEACEFUL, WHY DO THEY HAVE TO KEEP REMINDING US? June 29, 2009 By Don Feder PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION(.pdf)
“Last week, four Southern Baptists were arrested for plotting to blow up St Patrick’s Cathedral. The men, who became born-again Christians in prison, wanted to kill and terrorize Catholics.”
If that was the opening paragraph in a newspaper story you were reading, your gut reaction would be – huh? Baptists don’t do things like that in the name of their faith. Neither do Catholics, Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons.
But when we read the headline in a May 21st New York Times’ story -- “4 Accused of Bombing Plot at Bronx Synagogues” -- it was ho-hum stuff.
It wasn’t exactly a revelation when The Times informed us, in the 9th paragraph, “They are all Muslims, a law enforcement official said” – just in case you thought the conspiracy involved Episcopalians, Rotarians or the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.
If you hear about a hijacking, suicide bombing, sniper attack or the beheading of a hostage anywhere in the world, your first reaction is: a Muslim did it. Why? Because 9 times out of 10 a Muslim did do it.
In the case of The Newburgh Four, here’s what we know:
If Islam is such a “religion of peace,” why do they have to keep reminding us? Nobody’s running around saying “Christianity is a religion of peace” or “Judaism is a religion of peace” – because neither proposition is in doubt.
Yet, George W. Bush felt compelled to regularly reassure us (especially after 9/11) that Islam was about as peaceful as a religion can get.
Speaking at a 2005 dinner marking the end of Ramadan, Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said Mohammedanism was “the religion of love and peace.” For Condi, being peaceful wasn’t enough. Islam had to be warm and cuddly too. “We in America know the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam,” Rice absurdly remarked. “We’ve seen it in many ways” --including in glorious Technicolor, in the video of the decapitation of Daniel Pearl.
President Obama boasts of his Muslim relations and his upbringing in Jakarta. In a speech to the Turkish parliament during his first trip abroad as president, Barack Hussein Obama assured the Muslin world that America “will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country.”
When was the last time a U.S. president conveyed deep appreciation for the Christian faith?
So, Islam is a religion of peace and love, as well as a benefactor of humanity. If this is intuitively obvious, why do they have to keep saying it? Perhaps because the vision of a compassionate Islam is so often obscured by explosions, flying body parts, collapsing skyscrapers, rolling heads, and rabid imams preaching hate the Jews, hate the Christians, hate America, hate the West, etc.
If Islam is so gentle and kindly, why does it have such appeal for the most savage and sadistic element in our society – those filled with resentment and rage, who like to hurt people (a lot)?
Question: Under what circumstances is an infidel most likely to convert to Islam: 1. While volunteering at a hospice or homeless shelter? 2. While working at a day-care center? 3.While planting flowers and singing Kumbaya at a peace rally? or 4. While incarcerated at a state or federal prison? What’s that? Someone told you, didn’t they?
Conversions behind bars are so common that Mitch Silber, chief NYPD intelligence analyst, says cops have a name for it “Prislam.” Chuck Colson of The Prison Fellowship Ministries was warning us of the coming jailhouse jihad almost a decade ago.
More than 2 million are imprisoned in the United States, of which an estimated 6% are members of the religion of rest-in-peace. Sometimes their real-world experience at hurting people (a lot) is put to good use as newly-minted Muslims.
Have you ever noticed how converts to a faith, or those with a newfound commitment to the religion of their birth, tend to be, well – nicer. Born-again Christians – including those who come from dysfunctional backgrounds – often exemplify the New Testament admonition to be “salt and light,” likewise committed Catholics and those who’ve moved from a secular Jewish identity to orthodoxy.
Islam is the exception.
By all accounts, John Walker Lindh, born into an upper-middle class family, was as normal as a child of broken home in Marin County, California can get. Then, at age 16, he converted to Islam and began calling himself Suleyman al-Faris.
In 1998, at age 17, John/Suleyman traveled to Yemen, to study Arabic so he could read the Koran in its original language. From there, the religion-of-peacenik went to Pakistan to study at a madrassa. The spring of 2001 found him at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.
When captured by U.S. forces in November 2001, Lindh was fighting for the blissful rule of the Taliban. Now, he’s serving a 20-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, and probably proselytizing the other inmates, when he isn’t studying his peace-manual.
Other converts to Islam, unlikely to be mistaken for Mister Rogers, include:
The apologists for Islam (Crescent-kissers) respond that these ex-cons and psychos are no more representative of Islam than Bernie Madoff is of Jewish financiers or Ted Haggard (former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who had a relationship with a gay hooker) is of Christian leaders.
This is a plausible argument, at first blush. But if the Johnny jihadists, snipers, and homicidal anti-Semites got Islam wrong, who gets it right?
How about the Muslim-American groups which, in a rare show of empathy, rushed to condemn the Newburgh Four, including the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American –Islamic Relations?
Putting aside the fact that each of these groups has questionable connections, other than paying lip-service, what are they actually doing to fight terrorism?
Robert Spencer, the editor of Jihad Watch, muses: “One might wonder why Muslim groups don’t become more proactive, and institute programs in mosques and Islamic schools in the West (as well as in the Islamic world) to teach Muslims why the views of Osama bin Laden et al are wrong, and how true Islam eschews violence against and hatred of unbelievers. Yet CAIR, ISNA, MPAC and the rest have never instituted or even called for such a program. They are ready with the condemnations after arrests or explosions, but why wait passively? Why not head off jihadist activity by Muslims”? This is a rhetorical question.
Who gets Islam right? How about a Palestinian religious figure who took the bold move of attending the Second Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace in 2008? Attendees vowed to “condemn any negative representation” of each others religions.
For Zaid Abu Alhaj that pledge lasted about a year. On April 3, 2009, he gave a sermon on Al-Aqsa TV which included the following prediction: “The time will come, by Allah’s will, when their property will be destroyed and their children will be exterminated, and no Jew or Zionist will be left on the face of the earth.”
Oh, fine, this crazy Palestinian cleric probably also doesn’t understand the religion he’s practiced his entire life either. How about Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al Sudais, who – as imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque -- holds the most prestigious Moslem pulpit in the world?
In a 2003 sermon, Al Sudais prayed that Allah would “terminate” the Jews, who he called “the scum of humanity, the rats of the world, prophet killers … pigs and monkeys,” also “evil,” “tyrannical,” ‘treacherous,” and part of a “continuum of deceit.”
Cairo’s Al-Azhar University is the Vatican of the Muslim world. Is it reasonable to suppose that Sheik Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, grand imam of Al-Azhar since 1996, knows a thing or two about Islam?
The Shriek tells us the Koran condemns Jews for “their own particular degenerate characteristics” including “corrupting” the words of Allah, “consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics, caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness.” But, there is hope. “All Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.”
You’d think the Muslim chaplain at Harvard could put a happy face on his faith.
According to the April 14 Harvard Crimson, in an e-mail response to a query from a Muslim student, Taha Abdul-Basser wrote that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment (for apostates)) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.” Thankfully, the Islamic world isn’t troubled by that darned hegemonic modern human rights discourse.
Harvard’s official chaplain later explained that he was merely expressing a position that “I do not hold … personally” -- but which contains “great wisdom” and which “one should not dismiss out of hand.”
What is the West’s response to the Rampaging Religion of Peace?
As Obama-appointed Director of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano doesn’t have time to watch the jailhouse jihadists. She’s too busy staking out pro-life demonstrations, NRA conventions and American Legion meetings. This is where the real danger to our national security lies, Nepalitano informed us in the DHS report “Rightwing Extremism: Radicalization and Recruitment,” issued on April 7.
Nepalitano’s counterpart in the United Kingdom, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, focuses on fighting evil Islamaphobes – witness her decision to ban the likes of Dutch parliamentarian and “Fitna” producer Geert Wilders and talk-show host Michael Savage from the shores of Albion.
So PC is she that Smith wants British officials to begin referring to Islamic terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” Not only are terrorists’ acts no reflection on Islam, they’re giving the religion of peace a bad name!
Smith knows Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. How? Muslims told her so. “As so many Muslims in the U.K. and across the world have pointed out, there is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting terror, pain and grief.” If I was a used-car salesman, I’d pray Smith would wander onto my lot.
In the U.K. each bombing and kill-the-infidels sermon becomes an indoctrination moment to assure the credulous that to call attention to slaughter committed in the name of Islam and condoned by the words of Islam (contained in the Koran), slanders Islam. Oh for the days when Labor governments only wanted to destroy Britain’s economy, not the nation itself.
Nepalitano prefers the designation “man-made disasters” to terrorism.
Obama is too busy fighting a war on capitalism and trying to close down Guantanamo (and mainstream the jihadists into the U.S. prison population) to pay much attention to an ideology backed by guns and bombs and bent on world domination.
The day is approaching when TV and radio broadcasts will be interrupted every 15 minutes with the message “Islam is – you betcha – a religion of peace.” Otherwise, we’re bound to forget.
(This commentary was originally posted at GrassTopsUSA.com on May 27, 2009.)
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MEMO TO NAPOLITANO: MAYBE YOU SHOULD STAKE OUT THE WHITE HOUSE Don Feder May 3 , 2009 PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION(.pdf)
In 1993, a terrorist cell detonated a 1,500-lb car bomb below New York’s World Trade Center (six dead, more than 1,000 wounded) The perps were:
In 2001, two hijacked planes were flown into the Twin Towers, an attack in which 3,000 Americans died. The killers were:
In 2002, the “Beltway sniper” and his confederate killed 10 people in the Washington, D.C.-area. The deadly duo were:
In 2007, five terrorists plotted to massacre soldiers at Ft. Dix. The would-be assassins were:
1, Disgruntled U.S. servicemen returning from Iraq 2. Students at Liberty University 3 Aides to Congressman Tom Tancredo 4. Muslim fanatics lusting for infidel blood and dedicated to jihad
Just a bit of background to help you appreciate the absurdity of The Department of Homeland Security’s Report – “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” released on April 7.
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has done herself proud.
While her president is busy closing Guantanamo, touting the joys of Islam, promising that the U.S. will never again defend itself without the express permission of the cheese-eaters and beer-drinkers, and considering prosecuting Bush officials who put national security ahead of an obsession with the civil rights of terrorists, Napolitano, who prefers the expression “man-made disasters” (like Obama’s budget?) to terrorism, has discerned the real clear and present danger – “threats from white supremacist and violent anti-government groups” recruiting individuals susceptible to their appeals.
The 9-page report, about as well-documented as Michelle Obama’s senior thesis, refers to unidentified “white supremacist and violent anti-government groups.” While admitting that their activities “have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry out violent attacks,” the report claims they are a potent threat to the republic.
The document alleges that these rightwing extremists are busy expanding their base, and – if you fall into one or more of the following groups -- you are ripe for recruitment. They include Americans who are:
Napolitano’s agency has cast a broad net.
A majority of Americans fall into one or more of these categories, including: the 73% who believe there’s a constitutional right to private gun ownership – among them 5 Supreme Court justices (2008, USA Today/Gallup Poll); the 61% who say they are fearful that they or a friend will lose their jobs due to U.S. companies moving overseas (2004 Gallup Poll); and the 79% who want to send the U.S. military to the border to stem the tide of illegal immigrants (2009, Rasmussen Poll).
Still, Napolitano’s Barney Fife Office of Intelligence and Analysis insists the real threat to America comes not from the 35 jihadist training camps in the U.S. (according to a 2006 Department of Justice report) and terrorism-friendly American mosques, but from Christians, conservatives, gun owners and right-to-lifers.
BTW, we’ve heard this before.
Angry lesbian Rosie O’Donnell on ABC’s “The View” (October, 2006), in response to a co-host’s comments that militant Islam poses a threat to free people everywhere, exploded, “Just a minute. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America, where we have separation of Church and State.” Wall Builders, which documents America’s Christian heritage, is probably plotting to hijack a plane as you read these words.
On MSNBC’s “Countdown” with Keith Olbermann, Janeane Garofalo called the million or so Americans who attended Tax Day Tea Parties – “a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks.” Garofalo: “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.” (The DHS report also warned that right-wing extremism would be fueled by resentment over “the historical election of an African American president and the prospect of policy changes.”) The media somehow missed all of the crosses burning at April 15 protests.
On MSNBC’s Hardball in March, host Christopher Matthews fretted that Obama’s recently confirmed choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Governor Kathleen Sebelius (who once threw a private party for a late-term abortionist), would end up the target of “the terrorism of anti-abortion people.” He later explained that he was talking about “verbal terrorism,” and not implying that the Family Research Council was going to plant a car-bomb in the governor’s vehicle.
It was a year ago this month that candidate Barack Obama told well-heeled Democrats at a San Francisco fundraiser (where normalcy is always suspect) that those in small-town America hard hit by job loss are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment.”
While the future president didn’t say exactly what these gun-toting bigots, religious fundamentalists and xenophobes would do to relieve their bitterness, Commissar of Homeland Security Napolitano has made it clear – join the army of racists and “right-wing extremists” plotting unspecified acts of violence against unnamed individuals.
This focus on potential terrorism from the ranks of law-abiding gun owners and immigration-control advocates is like looking for a serial killer at a librarians’ convention.
While Obama’s Inspector Clouseau is investigating the right, over the past 200 years, most political violence has come from the left – starting with the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, where enemies of the regime were guillotined, drowned, shot and clubbed to death. The Vendee was the model for the Holocaust.
From the Bolshevik Revolution to Stalin to Mao to the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, communists claimed at least 100 million victims in the 20th Century.
Properly understood, Nazism (National Socialism) was a phenomenon of the left which rejected tradition and Judeo-Christian morality in favor of a racial utopia. Instead of the “proletariat,” its collective centered on race. Until Hitler sent his armies rolling across the Russian border, the browns were comfortably allied with the reds.
In America, the left has had a near-monopoly on political violence, starting with the anarchist bombings that followed World War I. John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee who spent two years in the Soviet Union. Two other U.S. Presidents were assassinated by anarchists.
The urban riots that swept America in the 1960s were spurred on by radicals like H. Rap Brown. (“If America don’t come around, we gonna burn it down!”)
I can still recall student “protests” in Boston in the late ‘60s. Believe it or not, it wasn’t College Republicans who were throwing nail-studded golf balls at the cops. From violence at the 1969 Democratic National Convention to the Weathermen’s “Days of Rage” to the Weather Underground, which staged bank robberies and bombed government buildings, Sixties violence was almost exclusively a leftist phenomenon.
The Unibomber was an environmentalist whack-job – Al Gore with a chemistry kit. Those who stormed the streets of Minneapolis-St Paul during the 2008 GOP convention weren’t demanding lower taxes and less government, ditto the Luddites who rioted at the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle. Earth First and the Animal Liberation Front are unlikely to be mistaken for the RNC.
It’s leftist students who harass and, in some cases, physically assault conservative speakers on college campuses. The violence in the aftermath of passage of California’s Proposition 8, including attacks on churches, was the product of rage by homosexual militants.
Of course, there’s always Timothy McVeigh, leftwing poster boy for rightwing violence – who, with his partner Terry McNichols, caused 168 deaths in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building.
In defending her department’s Fearless Fosdick report, Napolitano confessed that the topic of right-wing extremism “struck a nerve (with her) as someone personally involved in the Timothy McVeigh prosecution.”
Federal investigators never followed the trail of evidence linking jihadists to this “man-made disaster.”
Nichols made several trips to the Philippines before the Oklahoma City bombing. According to Clinton counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, McVeigh’s accomplice was in Cebu at the same time as Ramzi Yousef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
In “Against All Enemies” (page 127), Clarke writes: “We know that Nichols’ bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned.”
Why is the left so susceptible to violence and the right largely immune from it?
We believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, they don’t – witness their efforts to save Bill Clinton, who was manifestly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors (including perjury). They believe in flaunting the law when it suits their purposes – ergo their support for illegal immigration and an activist judiciary that’s usurped legislative powers.
We believe in the First Amendment, they don’t. Besides the campus storm troopers practicing Marcusian repressive tolerance, Obama and his allies are determined to put conservative talk radio out of business by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine.
We love America, including the principles on which it was conceived: liberty, tolerance, equality before the law and Judeo-Christian morality. For them, the Founding Fathers are dead, white males and the American saga consists of slavery, Wounded Knee, lynchings, the exploitation of immigrant labor, World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyism, and “imperialism.”
We’re patriots.
From Jane Fonda (doing propaganda broadcasts for the North Vietnamese) to Sean Penn posing with a Saddam Hussein poster in Baghdad, to Ward Churchill and Columbia Professor Nicholas Di Genova, they make common cause with America’s enemies. Di Genova told a 2001 teach-in: “The only real heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military. Personally, I would like to see a million Mogadishus” -- in reference to the 1993 deaths of U.S. servicemen in Somalia.
We believe in the God who commanded “Thou shalt not kill.” They believe in evolutionary theory, moral relativism, embryonic stem –cell research, Jack Kevorkian and the judge who ordered the starvation/dehydration death of Terri Schiavo. .
In Turkey, the Community Organizer in Chief pledged “The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam” (never mind that Islam is at war with us) -- perhaps that’s because his administration was planning to declare war on the American people – including veterans, gun owners and pro-lifers.
The DHS report on “right-wing extremism” is just the opening salvo. Sent to police and sheriff’s departments across the land, it calls for domestic spying to gather information on this vast right-wing conspiracy –an operation euphemistically described as Washington “working with its state and local partners over the next several months” to collect information on extremist activity (everything to the right of John McCain).
Speaking of terrorist profiling, imagine a hypothetical individual whose friends included an unrepentant ex-terrorist who took pride in the fact that the group he led blew things up, in an attempt to overthrow the government.
Imagine further that this fringe figure was associated with a group involved in organized law-breaking, including harassment and trespass.
Then imagine that this “person of interest” spent 19 years listening to a lunatic pastor who preached anti-Americanism, made excuses for the 9/11 terrorists and concocted off-the-wall conspiracy theories (the government created the AIDS virus as an act of genocide). He also attended or helped organize the 1995 DC rally of another notorious demagogue who has consorted with America’s enemies and has called for our annihilation.
Our hypothetical terrorist-in-waiting isn’t the head of the Aryan Nation, the Michigan Militia or the Ku Klux Klan. He is President Barack Hussein Obama, whose extremist ties include Bill Ayers, ACORN, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright and Louis Farrakhan. If you see the president acting suspiciously in an airport, please advise law-enforcement personnel.
Instead of smearing Obama’s opponents, perhaps the Department of Homeland Security should be staking out the White House.
This commentary originally appeared on GrassTopsUSA.com
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