We have Islamic terrorism in the world today largely because of Wahhabi Islam out of Saudi Arabia and those other sects of Islam infected by Wahhabi Islam, including Khomeini's bastardized variant of Shia twelver Islam. But Wahhabi Islam, and now its variants, are as much a threat to the Saudi regime as they are to the rest of the world.
The Sauds were a warrior clan in 18th century Arabia. They made common cause with the Islamic spiritual leader Wahhab, that the Sauds would conquer under the moral authority of Wahhabism in return for Wahhabist support for their regime. The entire legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy rests on their appeasing and promoting of Wahhabism.
The Saudi wars of conquest were to go on for the next two centuries until, in 1932, Ibn Saud was able to claim much of the Arabian Peninsula as his own. Having finally achieved total control of an area with vast oil wealth, money and power soon corrupted much of the Saudi Royal family. The most notorious example of this corruption involved Crown Prince, later King, Fahd. As described by a BBC article in 2005:
For some, the most memorable image of Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud is as a young prince, emerging from a casino on the French Riviera in the early hours of the morning, an actress on each arm.
People remember him wearing an expensively cut Western suit and gazing out confidently, not in the least troubled by the wholly un-Islamic combination of drink, women and gambling.
This was not, of course, an aspect of the King's past which could be openly discussed in the Saudi media. But everyone knew the rumours.
There were stories of all night sessions at seedy clubs in Beirut, of affairs with belly dancers, and of the wife of a Lebanese businessman paid $100,000 a year to make herself available.
Then in 1969, Fahd was said to have lost $1,000,000 in a single dusk-to-dawn marathon of Scotch-fuelled gambling at the tables of a Monte Carlo nightclub.
Needless to say, many of the true believers in Wahhabism came to see the Saud clan, quite rightfully, as deeply corrupt. As to damage control in the wake of Crown Prince Fahd's actions, the Sauds didn't change their ways so much as become obsessive in controlling public exposure and scrutiny. Second, the Sauds attempted to reclaim their religious legitimacy by significantly enhancing support for the Wahhabi religion. This was when the Sauds started exporting Wahhabism around the world on an industrial scale and which continues to this day.
Unfortunately for the very wealthy Saud clan members, the vast majority of whom would much prefer reclining in the arms of a Western consort with a fine scotch to sitting in a Mosque, their lifestyle -- as well as their very pragmatic ties to the U.S. for self defense -- have made the Saudi clan the target for many of the Wahhabists outside of their control. As the David Ignatius wrote not long ago in the Washington Post, "Sunni and Shiite extremists, otherwise deadly adversaries, share a common dream of toppling the House of Saud."
So there you have it. The world's most vicious cycle, for the Sauds and the world. The Saudi clan must fully fund and support the Wahhabists to maintain their legitimacy. The Wahhabists they create want to destroy the Saudi clan because it is corrupt. The Saud's have every reason to help us, but they can't turn off the spigot that is the well spring of all Islamic terrorism today without destroying their regime. And if they do that, no Scotch, no prostitutes, only mosques. No, they'll ride this camel until it dies -- hoping against hope that we in the West can save them from their own Wahhabist terrorists. And the utter insanity of it all is that, even with all of that, it really is in our interests to cooperate with the Saudis.
Special thanks to the ever brilliant Andrea of Bookworm Room for inspiring and contributing to this post.
Try for a moment to imagine any scenario where a U.S. President has united Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in mutual accord? Try to imagine a scenario where Saudi Arabian newspaper columnists are penning their full throated support and hope for the success of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu? That is the stuff of which Nobel Peace Prize's are made. And Obama has accomplished it.
This is the concluding paragraph of an article penned by Dr. Ahmad Al-Faraj yesterday, appearing in the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah:
Since Obama is the godfather of the prefabricated revolutions in the Arab world, and since he is the ally of political Islam, [which is] the caring mother of [all] the terrorist organizations, and since he is working to sign an agreement with Iran that will come at the expense of the U.S.'s longtime allies in the Gulf, I am very glad of Netanyahu's firm stance and [his decision] to speak against the nuclear agreement at the American Congress despite the Obama administration's anger and fury. I believe that Netanyahu's conduct will serve our interests, the people of the Gulf, much more than the foolish behavior of one of the worst American presidents. Do you agree with me?
Obama, with his insane policy of trying to deal with the mad mullahs and bless off on their nuclear program has managed to do the impossible. If they give out Nobel Peace Prize's for wholly unintended consequences, Obama should be a shoe-in. And extra points to the Saudi columnist for recognizing Obama's place in the pantheon of U.S. Presidents.
The war of ideas is the war that matters in regards to Islam. That is the one we need to win or our children's children will still be fighting the radical Islamicists long after we are gone. As I have pointed out for at least a decade, and contrary to what Obama has continuously claimed, the Muslims we are fighting are not motivated by some anamolous interpretation of their religion. They are the true believers in Wahhabi Islam and the schools of Islam Wahhabism has infected. And if that is to end, then we must support reformers who would bring their religion from the 7th century into the 21st.
This today from Zaid Nabulsi, a lawyer writing in the Jordan Times [reprinted in full]:
Enough is enough. It is time to speak out.
“Islam is innocent” is an incomplete sentence. Introspection is needed, for, if we shy away from reality, the alternative will be more images like those we witnessed last Tuesday night, when brave Lt. Muath Al Kasasbeh was burnt to death in a cage.
The inconvenient truth that is overlooked or willfully ignored by apologists for the indefensible is the fact that Wahabism, the cult of mediaeval austerity founded by Ibn Abdul Wahab (1703-1792), has over the last half century been exported to every mosque and school throughout the Muslim world until it completely enveloped mainstream Sunni Islamic teachings.
Wahabism has entirely replaced, and become, Sunni Islam; the two cannot be told apart anymore.
Some Wahabist teachings, which have permeated the air we breathe in the Muslim world, are simply irreconcilable with decent human values, especially the ones that declare that every non-Wahabist is a disposable body whose bloodletting is unproblematic.
The escapism that mainstream Islam has nothing to do with those atrocities does not hold water anymore because Wahabism and Islam have become indistinguishable.
To understand the crisis of Muslims today, one has to remember that Wahabism exists in several textbooks containing the alleged sayings of the Prophet Mohammad, or books of “Hadith”, revered by so many.
What we must confront is the undeniable fact that it is from many stories found in these books that the unprecedented cruelty of groups such as the so-called Islamic State and Jabhat Al Nusra emanates.
The problem today has nothing to do with the original spirit of Prophet Mohammad’s message. Nor has it anything to do with the tumultuous history of Muslims over 14 centuries, parts of which were no doubt glorious and enlightened.
The catastrophe today is with the visible manifestation of Islam in the modern world, as demonstrated by the prevalent beliefs and practices of many people who call themselves Muslims.
This negative image of Muslims is not all just smoke and no fire. This is what those 120 Islamic scholars who sent a letter to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi last year could not fathom.
IS did not invent a new Islam. On the contrary, its followers are strict adherents of the same textbooks quoted in that long letter (bizarrely addressed to “Dr Ibrahim Awwad Al Badri”, Baghdadi’s real name, bestowing intellectual respectability upon this mass murderer, as if one were writing a letter to the mayor of Copenhagen).
In fact, the scholars’ letter was a misguided attempt to disinfect Wahabism, to cleanse it from itself, by claiming that IS simply misinterpreted texts that are otherwise compatible with human decency.
In that sense, the letter squabbled over the semantics of the alleged instructions by the Prophet to spread Islam by the sword, but it did not dare renounce the authenticity of those same sayings.
Instead, the scholars argued that IS has simply taken those instructions out of context, and so they addressed the devotees of Ibn Taymiyah (the mentor of Wahabism, 1263-1328) with counterarguments based on those same problematic Ibn Taymiyah texts that IS employed to justify its barbarity.
The truth of the matter is that, faced with the IS and Nusra atrocities, Muslims cannot afford to give Wahabism a facelift.
If we truly want to defend Islam, we need to perform a much more invasive surgery.
Take the Muslim Brotherhood as an example of the prevalence of the Wahabist teachings among Muslims today.
The Brotherhood is the virtual womb that incubated all the current jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda itself (Al Zawahiri hailed from the Egyptian MB offshoot that murdered president Anwar Sadat).
Yet, when Abu Musab Al Zarqawi was killed in 2006, the three most senior leaders of the MB in Jordan brazenly visited the condolence house in Zarqa and announced to the media that Zarqawi was a martyr in the eyes of God, despite Zarqawi having blown up three hotels in Amman the previous year, killing scores of Jordanians going about their lives or celebrating a peaceful wedding.
We need not go too far back.
More recently, former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, of the MB, committed much worse deeds than his Jordanian counterparts while he was briefly in office, using his pardon prerogatives to release the murderers who carried out the 1997 Luxor massacre of 62 elderly European tourists.
Not only that, Morsi even appointed the leader of that group as a governor of Luxor itself.
The MB in Jordan, despite their token condemnation of the immolation of Kasasbeh, still refuse to describe him as a martyr.
Some may counter that it is poverty and economics, not Wahabist doctrine, that explain why so many Muslims are supportive of such murderous trends. This simply defies the facts.
The orgy of decapitations in Syria over the last four years was promoted by very rich Sunni clerics such as Yusuf Al Qaradawi and Mohammad Al Uraifi, aided by the countless satellite stations openly calling for the murder of Alawites and Shiites, and financed by billions from extremely wealthy but hateful Muslims.
So, enough with the denials. It is time to raise the alarm. We have a problem!
It is not a coincidence that for over a decade we, Muslims, dominated the world record in mindless televised massacres.
There is obviously a propensity towards eliminating “the other”, imbedded deep within Wahabist ideology.
It is not only foolish to deny this fact, it is also dangerous, for we would be covering the cancerous tumour with a bandage.
What we cannot deny is that many of the Wahabist textbooks are the same operating manuals that Islamist butchers use to justify their savagery.
For example, very few people know that while Muath was being set on fire in that macabre video, the voiceover was a recitation of an Ibn Taymiyah fatwa deeming the incineration of unbelievers a legitimate act of jihad.
Ibn Taymiyah is not some obscure scholar on the fringe of Sunni Islam. In the Sunni world, he is universally venerated with the title “Sheikh of Islam”, elevating him to an almost infallible clerical status.
If we really want to defend Islam as a religion of mercy, if we really want to be believed when we proclaim the innocence of this religion, we need to do more than just repeat this meaningless mantra about us having nothing to do with IS.
We have to muster the courage to identify the specific texts that actually defame Islam, denounce them and permanently cleanse Islamic tradition of them.
Amen. This is what our nation's government should be giving its full throated support. Obama's claim that Islamic terrorism is separate and apart from Islam is not merely wholly at odds with reality, it works against people such as Mr. Nabulsi who would reform their religion in a war of ideas.
On March 12, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, declared that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.” The ruling came in response to a query from a Kuwaiti delegation over proposed legislation to prevent construction of churches in the emirate. The mufti based his decision on a story that on his deathbed, Muhammad declared, “There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula.” This passage has long been used to justify intolerance in the kingdom. Churches have always been banned in Saudi Arabia, and until recently Jews were not even allowed in the country. Those wishing to worship in the manner of their choosing must do so hidden away in private, and even then the morality police have been known to show up unexpectedly and halt proceedings.
This is not a small-time radical imam trying to stir up his followers with fiery hate speech. This was a considered, deliberate and specific ruling from one of the most important leaders in the Muslim world. It does not just create a religious obligation for those over whom the mufti has direct authority; it is also a signal to others in the Muslim world that destroying churches is not only permitted but mandatory.
The response to this outrage from the White House (and the MSM) has been utter silence. That is no surprise. Anyone who believes Obama is a practicing Christian (or a Muslim, for that matter) is deeply misguided. Obama is a secular leftie, and that makes him, like all on the left, an enemy of Christianity and Judaism. If you think I overstate, please see here. And it makes him a friend of Islam in as much as it too is an enemy of Christianity. But I think Obama goes beyond the natural leftie impulse in respect of Islam. As I wrote before:
[I]t seems apparent that [Obama's] time spent in Indonesia where he was living in a heavily Islamic environment has colored his views on Islam. He seems to have extrapolated from from what he observed of the benign form of Islam practiced in the Indonesia of his youth to the Islamic world as a whole. That is an incredibly naive error.
The Shafi'i school of Islam, practiced in Indonesia during Obama's stay there, is not the norm for the Islamic world. More and more the norm is Wahhabi-Salafi Islam, the far more militant, racist, misogynistic ideology at the heart of al Qaeda.
Do note that Wahhabi-Salafi is the state religion of Saudi Arabia and its Grand Mufti, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the would be destroyer of Churches.
At any rate, all of the above might explain Obama's unconscionable silence on the treatment of Christians in the Middle East. But that silence could have significant ramifications in the instant case. To continue from the Washington Times editorial:
The White House has placed international outreach to Muslims at the center of its foreign policy in an effort to promote the image of the United States as an Islam-friendly nation. This cannot come at the expense of standing up for the human rights and religious liberties of minority groups in the Middle East. The region is a crucial crossroads. Islamist radicals are leading the rising political tide against the authoritarian, secularist old order. They are testing the waters in their relationship with the outside world, looking for signals of how far they can go in imposing their radical vision of a Shariah-based theocracy. Ignoring provocative statements like the mufti’s sends a signal to these groups that they can engage in the same sort of bigotry and anti-Christian violence with no consequences.
Mr. Obama’s outreach campaign to the Muslim world has failed to generate the good will that he expected. In part, this was because he felt it was better to pander to prejudice than to command respect. When members of the Islamic establishment call for the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing, the leader of the free world must respond or risk legitimizing the oppression that follows. The United States should not bow to the extremist dictates of the grand mufti, no matter how desperate the White House is for him to like us.
Somehow, I think that the only thing we will hear from Obama is continued silence. This is, after all, the man who recently signed us up through the UN for the Islamic push to silence criticism of Islam.
Wahhabi / Salafi Islam and the many schools of Islam it influences are incompatible with modern civilization and are on a violent collision course with all who are not Wahhabi Muslims. Can this dominant strain of Islam be challenged and defeated in the battlefield of ideas? In short, can Islam evolve? That is an existential issue. My own personal belief is that it can but the task is daunting. As discussed in the post below, Pam Geller believes that it cannot and, further, that there are no Muslim reformers who have a "theological leg to stand on." She has previously attacked Dr. Zhudi Jasser, a Muslim reformer, to make her point, and she does so again today.
To understand the parameters of this existential issue, you must understand the depth of influence Wahhabi / Salafi influence is having world wide, as well as the nature of that influence. While I outlined much about that nature in the post below, these videos do an exceptional job of highlighting both the depth of influence and the toxic nature of Wahhabi Islam.
This first video discusses how madrassas in Britain are being used to plant the seeds of separatism and hatred for non-Muslims in Britain's youth.
Much of the rest of the special deals with how the teachers at British madrassas don't spare the rod. You can find them on Youtube here.
Separatism and a much broader look at Wahhabi/Salafi toxic dogma being spread by Saudi Arabia through Britain and other schools of Islam can be found in this 2008 Channel 4 undercover expose:
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Dr. Tawfiq Hamid is a Muslim reformer Ms. Geller seems to have missed when deciding that Islam is beyond evolution. Dr. Hamid is a Cairo born former terrorist who served under al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawhahiri. Eventually breaking with the group, Hamid issued the following warning:
Salafi indoctrination operates through written words and careful coaching. It is enormously seductive. It rapidly changed me into a jihadi. Salafi sacred texts exert a powerful influence on millions of Muslim followers throughout the world, and terrorism is only one symptom of the Salafi disease. Salafi doctrine, which is at the root of the West's confrontation with Islamism, poses an existential threat to us all - including Muslims.
Indeed, Salafism robs young Muslims of their soul, it turns Western communities against them, and it can end in civil war as Muslims attempt to implement shari'a in their host countries. A peaceful interpretation of Islam is possible, but the Salafi establishment is currently blocking moderate theological reform. The civilized world ought to recognize the immense danger that Salafi Islam poses; it must become informed, courageous and united if it is to protect both a generation of young Muslims and the rest of humanity from the disastrous consequences of this militant ideology.
Critically, Dr. Hamid believes that evolution of Islam into peaceful modernity is possible theologically, but that the salafi / wabbai establishment violently opposes any such effort:
It is unfortunate and disastrous that the theological underpinnings of Salafism are both powerful and prevalent in the approved, traditional Islamic books. These texts teach, moreover, that the Koran's later, more violent passages abrogate its earlier, peaceful ones. This concept, called nasikh wa-l-mansukh, has effectively diminished the influence of the peaceful verses.
When I discussed the implications of the violent passages with a few Sufi clergy, they suggested that one "should be good and peaceful to all mankind" and that "the understanding of the violent verses will be clarified on the day of judgment." These views were not based on rigorous Islamic eschatology, however, or on an objective analysis of the religious books.
They merely embodied a desired perception of Islam. My secular parents offered the same tolerant perspective, insisting that Islam is a religion of peace. But for me both responses were unsatisfactory because they suffered from the same problem - they were not theologically grounded. My difficulty was not resolved, and I continued to live with a complex dilemma.
My crisis of conscience was mostly internal, but I did share some of my doubts with my mother. On one occasion a fellow medical student named Abdul Latif Haseeb started a conversation with me about religion. We discussed whether it was right to kill apostates or stone women to death, as well as whether Muhammad could be considered a pedophile because he married the seven-year-old Aisha. We weighed the merits of declaring war on non-Muslims to spread Islam and agreed that it should be rejected because it is condoned only by supplemental Salafi books rather than by the Koran itself.
Haseeb belonged to a sect known as Koranist, which strictly adhered to the teachings of the Koran but rejected other writings. This opened my eyes. I was impressed that my new friend disagreed with many Salafi teachings. I also realized that Haseeb was not alone in his beliefs; his father and several mutual acquaintances shared the same ideas. They relied on new interpretations of the Koran and spurned the traditional Salafi textbooks.
They accepted and tolerated different views within Islam and, in most circumstances, had a peaceful analysis of the verses.
Haseeb invited me to join the sect, and I accepted his invitation in order to examine the Koranists' ideas more thoroughly. Though not without problems, the sect possessed at least some rigor and was more moderate than Salafism. It provided me with a protected sanctuary that allowed me to keep my identity as a Muslim while giving me the flexibility to reinterpret Koranic verses in a nonviolent way. The group counted among its members the liberal peace activist Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, whom I met on one occasion.
Mahmoud was later murdered in Sudan by exponents of Salafi doctrine for the crime of "apostasy" because his teaching clashed with theirs. I eventually built on the Koranists' ideas in developing a fresh understanding of the Koran that is compatible with the values of human rights and modernity.
By immersing myself in Salafi ideology, I was better able to judge the impact of its violent tenets on the minds of its followers. Among the more appalling notions it supports are the enslavement and rape of female war prisoners and the beating of women to discipline them. It permits polygamy and pedophilia. It refers to Jews as "pigs and monkeys" and exhorts believers to kill them before the end of days: Say: "Shall I tell you who, in the sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? Those [the Jews] whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into monkeys and pigs because they worshiped the powers of evil: these are yet worse in station, and farther astray from the right path [than the mockers]" (Koran 5:60). Homosexuals are to be killed as well; to cite one of many examples, on July 19, 2000, two gay teenagers were hanged in Iran for no other crime than being gay.
These doctrines are not taken out of context, as many apologists for Islamism argue: They are central to the faith and ethics of millions of Muslims, and are currently being taught as part of the standard curriculum in many Islamic educational systems in the Middle East as well in the West.
Moreover, there is no single approved Islamic textbook that contradicts or provides an alternative to the passages I have cited. It has thus become clear to me that Salafi ideology is what is largely responsible for the so-called "clash of civilizations." Consequently, I have chosen to combat Salafism by exposing it and by providing an alternative, peaceful and theologically rigorous interpretation of the Koran.
My reformist approach naturally challenges well-established Salafi tenets, and leads Muslims who follow Salafi Islam to reject me. Why? I have not altered the Koran itself. My system is simply one of inline commentary, in which dangerous passages are flagged and reinterpreted to be nonviolent. I have added these inline interpretations to key Koranic passages and examples of the commentary are freely and easily available.
For over 15 years I have tried to preach my views in mosques in the Middle East, as well as to my local community in the West, but have faced the unwavering hostility of most Salafi Muslims in both regions. Muslims who live in the West - who insist to outsiders that Islam is a "religion of peace" and who enjoy freedom of expression, which they demand from their Western hosts - have threatened me with murder and arson. I have had to choose between accepting violent Salafi views and being rejected by the overwhelming majority of my fellow Muslims.
Even though radical Islam began to reassert itself in the 1970s, it did not become widely pervasive until quite recently. In the early 1990s many people were intrigued by my ideas, and only a few militants threatened me with violence. One day, after I gave a peaceful Friday sermon, I walked home with a friend. To my surprise, several men ran up and threw stones at us from behind to intimidate me from returning and speaking in their mosques. As time has passed, this violent and threatening behavior has become more common: Dr. Wafa Sultan in the US, Abdul Fatah in Egypt and many others have received and continue to receive death threats. Recently, Dr. Nawal al-Sadawi, a liberal Muslim thinker and women's rights activist, was forced to flee Egypt because of her public statements. Dr. Rashad Khalifa was murdered in the United States after he published his own reinterpretation of the Koran which was less violent than was traditional.
In Egypt, Dr. Faraq Fuddah was shot to death after publishing condemnations of Jihadists. Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Najib Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck for writing his novel, Awlad Haretna, perceived by Salafists as blasphemous. The list goes on. . . .
What the juxtaposition of the videos and Dr. Hamid's quotes tell us is that there is a basis for seeking reform and evolution of Islam, but that it is a daunting task given the Wahhabi / Salafi influence on maddrassas and mosques world wide. That said, Pam Geller has continued her assault on Zhudi Jasser today in the American Thinker, in a piece entitled "Where Are All The Zhudi Jassers." Ms. Geller apparently needs to do a bit more research if she has missed Dr. Hamid and the people he mentions in the quote above. Indeed, it is clear that she knows of Dr. Hamid.
If Ms. Geller confined herself to Koranic arguments, that would be unobjectionable, and likely indeed to be helpful. If she thinks Jasser is whitewashing some aspects of Islam, then she does us all a service by making that particular argument. And it is notable that, at the conclusion of her post today, she concludes by saying:
I understand that everyone wants moderates or secular Muslims to be the silent majority, and Jasser gives them a much-needed face. But in order for Islam to reform itself, the truth about Islam must be made known by the civilized, and the genocidal, racist aspects of Islamic teaching must be rejected (like Nazism) and those who hold it forced under the weight of international pressure to reform.
I concur and, as my three readers can attest, I have been making that argument for years. This is an issue that cries out for free, open and very public debate. But when Geller continues to buttress her argument by delegitimizing Dr. Jasser as the face of all Muslim reformers, that is counterproductive at least, wholly repugnant at best. As I wrote below, either Islam evolves or war on a grand scale is inevitable. If we don't do all we can to assist the former, than we must be prepared for the latter.
Andrew McCarthy, writing at NRO, is effuse in his praise for Newt Gingrich's remarks concerning our war against "radical Islam" in both its militaristic and 'fifth column' forms. Gingrich, he says, is that exceedingly rare combination of a politician who both understands the nature of the threat and is willing to speak out about it honestly. This from Mr. McCarthy:
. . . Gingrich grasps that there is an enemy here and that it is a mortal threat to freedom. He knows that if we are to remain a free people, it is an enemy we must defeat. That enemy is Islamism, and its operatives — whether they come as terrorists or stealth saboteurs — are the purveyors of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system. . . .
The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.
Second, that outcome is the death of freedom. In Islamist ideology, sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society — for Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system. As the former speaker elaborated, sharia embodies principles and punishments that are abhorrent to Western values. Indeed, its foundational premise is anti-American, holding that we are not free people at liberty to govern ourselves irrespective of any theocratic code, that people are instead beholden to the Islamic state, which is divinely enjoined to impose Allah’s laws.
Sharia, moreover, is anti-equality. It subjugates women and brutally punishes transgressors, particularly homosexuals and apostates. While our law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, Gingrich observed that the brutality in sharia sanctions is not gratuitous, but intentional: It is meant to enforce Allah’s will by striking example.
On this last point, Gingrich offered a salient insight, one well worth internalizing in the Sun Tzu sense of knowing one’s enemy. Islamists, violent or not, have very good reasons for the wanting to destroy the West. Those reasons are not crazy or wanton — and they have nothing to do with Gitmo, Israel, cartoons, or any other excuse we conjure to explain the savagery away. Islamists devoutly believe, based on a well-founded interpretation of Islamic doctrine, that they have been commanded by Allah to kill, convert, or subdue all who do not adhere to sharia — because they regard Allah as their only master (“There is no God but Allah”). It is thus entirely rational (albeit frightening to us) that they accept the scriptural instruction that the very existence of those who resist sharia is offensive to Allah, and that a powerful example must be made of those resisters in order to induce the submission of all — “submission” being the meaning of Islam.
It makes no sense to dismiss our enemies as lunatics just because “secular socialist” elites, as Gingrich called them, cannot imagine a fervor that stems from religious devotion. We ought to respect our enemies, he said. Not “respect” in Obama-speak, which translates as “appease,” but in the sense of taking them seriously, understanding that they are absolutely determined to win, and realizing that they are implacable. There is no “moderate” sharia devotee, for sharia is not moderate. . . . Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated.
Victory, Gingrich said, will be very long in coming — longer, perhaps, than the nearly half-century it took to win the Cold War. . . .
Debate over all of this is essential. The crucial point is that we must have the debate with eyes open. It is a debate about which Gingrich has put down impressive markers: The main front in the war is not Afghanistan or Iraq but the United States. The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly. There is no separating our national security and our economic prosperity — they are interdependent. And while the Middle East poses challenges of immense complexity, Gingrich contended that addressing two of them — Iran, the chief backer of violent jihad, and Saudi Arabia, the chief backer of stealth jihad — would go a long way toward improving our prospects on the rest.
Most significant, there is sharia. By pressing the issue, Newt Gingrich accomplishes two things. First, he gives us a metric for determining whether those who would presume to lead us will fight or surrender. Second, at long last, someone is empowering truly moderate Muslims — assuming they exist in the numbers we’re constantly assured of. Our allies are the Muslims who embrace our freedom culture — those for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Our enemies are those who want sharia to supplant American law and Western culture. When we call out the latter, and marginalize them, we may finally energize the former. . . .
These are points that I have been making ad infinitum on this blog. For but one example, see National Security At The End Of Obama's First Year (its a long post - scroll half way through to get to the section on 'war of ideas'). The bottom line is that we have to engage in the war of ideas or the Islamist's war against the West will still be being fought by our grandchildren's grandchildren. Moreover, given the push of radicals for weapons of mass destruction, the far too widespread support for radicals throughout the Islamic world, and the continued push of Salafi Islam into the West on the back of Saudi petrodollars, the chances are very high that the war will likely become far more bloody and expensive as time goes on, as well as ever more threatening to the fundamental freedoms of Western civilization. This is a war that we could indeed lose if we fail to engage.
Step one in the war of ideas is to identify the enemy. We have to expose Wahhabi / Salafi Islam and shine a light on it in to engage the strongest force in any democracy - public opinion. Bush never did this. Obama is exponentially worse, pretending that there is no threat to the West originating out of Islam. It is not merely an incredibly dangerous falsehood, it is treasonous. Gingrich is the first major politician of either party to step up.
Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards has done two recent posts on this topic, both of which should be required reading. In Brilliance At Midnight, Dafydd notes that the threat from radical Islam to Western society is really two fold:
The take-away from the massive dumping of leaked U.S. military documents on WikiLeaks, documents related to the conduct and progress of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is this: The putative "rift" between Islamist terrorists on the one hand, and radical Islamists who "reject terrorism" (at specific times and places) on the other hand, has nothing to do with any ultimate goal of Islamism.
The rift reflects only a difference of opinion about the precise strategies and tactics for achieving that goal. Islamist victory conditions are the same in both groups: a pure, radical Islamism dominant across the globe, with sharia the final law in every country. . . .
Our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are involved in the physical war against this threat, but in the long run, it is the war of ideas that matters more. In Brilliance at Midnight - the Dawn, Dafydd flushes out the tools available to us to engage in the war of ideas:
. . . The most important task before launching into a war of ideas is to fully arm and equip our "soldiers" -- in this case, our soldiers comprise all Americans willing and able to defend Western values of individual liberty, property and Capitalism, freedom of speech and religion (not merely freedom of worship, as Obama would have it), actual rule of law, and governance by the consent of the governed. Bluntly, I mean educating the masses about the Grand Jihad, its goals, its methods, and the existential danger it poses. . . .
Do read both of his posts. We fail to engage in the war of ideas at our own existential peril.
Lastly, as to Gingrich himself, I wrote recently that I consider him the best candidate for President the Republicans could field in 2012. His above remarks on the threat we face from Islamism merely increase my conviction exponentially.
The single most oppressed class of people in our modern world are women living under the massively repressive hand of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. Women in Saudi Arabia cannot drive, they cannot inherit property, they cannot petition for divorce nor, in the event of a divorce, gain custody of children. Women in Saudi Arabia may be legally beaten by their husbands and any female who brings dishonor on their family - such as by being raped - may well be beaten or worse. In courts, a woman's testimony is by law given half the weight of a man. And God help a Saudi woman should she be found outside of her home without the escort of a male family member. The Saudi tool of oppression is often as not the Saudi religious police. Their most iconic act of repression occurred a few years ago when they forced several young girls back into a schoolhouse that was on fire. The girls, who had run from the building without their hijabs, paid for that sin with their lives.
Today, there are tremors of change in the Saudi desert. It would appear that at least one Saudi woman has, one, stones worthy of our own civil rights icon, Rosa Parks, two, poor choice in men, and three, apparently a very good straight right. This from the Jerusalem Post:
It was a scene Saudi women’s rights activists have dreamt of for years.
When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.
But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.
A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.
For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.
According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.
“To see resistance from a woman means a lot,” Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, a Saudi women’s rights activist, told The Media Line news agency. “People are fed up with these religious police, and now they have to pay the price for the humiliation they put people through for years and years. This is just the beginning and there will be more resistance.”
“The media and the Internet have given people a lot of power and the freedom to express their anger,” she said. “The Hai’a are like a militia, but now whenever they do something it’s all over the Internet. This gives them a horrible reputation and gives people power to react.”
This story says very little about Saudi men, whether it be the woman's escort or the religious policeman whose ass the budding Ms. Parks apparently whooped. Heh.
But this is apparently not the only change taking place in Saudi Arabia. The same JP article documents some small changes being made by the current King of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah. He took over the kingship with a reputation as a reformer and - possibly the least corrupt of the House of Saud. That said, change has come slowly indeed as the King rules Arabia not by fiat, but by consensus with other members of the House of Saud. Nonetheless, some small change has come:
The decision last year by Saudi King Abdullah to open the kingdom’s first co-educational institution, with no religious police on campus, led to a national crises for Saudi Arabia’s conservative religious authorities, with the new university becoming a cultural proxy war for whether or not women and men should be allowed to mix publicly.
A senior Saudi cleric publicly criticized the gender mixing at the university and was summarily fired by the king. . . .
Last month, . . . members of the religious police in the northern province of Tabuk were charged with assaulting a young woman as she attempted to visit her son, in a move that marked an unprecedented challenge to the religious police’s authority.
"There is some sort of change taking place," Nadya Khalife, the Middle East women’s rights researcher for Human Rights Watch, told The Media Line. "There is clearly a shifting mentality regarding to the male guardianship law and similar issues. More women are speaking out, there are changes within the government, there is a mixed university, the king was photographed with women, they want to allow women to work in the courts and there are changes within the justice ministry. So you can witness some kind of change unfolding but it’s not quite clear what’s happening and it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight."
In this most repressive of societies - the one that gave birth to the Wahhabi school of Islam that undergirds virtually all of Sunni terrorism - seeing a change to an even somewhat normalized society with equality for women would work a significant change. Let us hope that we are witnessing is a good first step - or uppercut, as the case may be.
Saudi Arabia, home to the Salafi / Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam, is possibly the most repressive regime on this earth. It is a nation ruled solely by a strict, medieval interpretation of Sharia law. It is a nation where "witches" are regularly executed and women who venture out of doors without a male family member as excort are subject to flogging. Indeed, it was only two years ago that the 19 year old "girl from Qatif" was taken by a group of men and brutally gang raped. At trial, she was found guilty with being out of her house without a male relative escort and sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes. The sentence was commuted by King Abdullah.
When King Abdullah ascended to the throne, many expected him to try liberalize his country. And today we hear that the person he has named to the position of head of the religious police has issued a fatwa so radical that it would be the equivalent of Obama tomorrow declaring a unilateral abrogation of the Fist Amendment. This from Memri:
A dispute has broken out in Saudi Arabia after a fatwa was issued by Ahmad Qasim Al-Ghamdi, director of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice for Mecca, permitting mixing of the genders.
Al-Ghamdi also said that there are hadiths proving that a woman can shake a man's hand.
This is the largest movement I have seen yet towards liberalization in Saudi Arabia. If allowed to stand, the fatwah would work a sea change in Saudi culture and law.
(A great music video from Cyrus Mafia on Iran's uprising, with some English subtitles / Hat Tip Michael Ledeen)
A summary of the current situation in and about Iran:
1. Mousavi called for a 3-day strike leading up to a major rally planned on Thursday, 9 July.
2. Khameini ordered another crackdown, with hundreds more arrests and orders to confiscate all satellite dishes. He also has ordered most businesses closed, apparently in an effort to prevent a wide scale general strike being portrayed as a show of support for Mousavi
3. Money is flooding out of Iran as Iran's rich read the writing on the wall
4. The Commander of the IRGC has publicly announced that they have taken over all internal security missions since the election
5. A major development two days ago was the decision of Iran's most influential clerical body to condemn the election and the repression of protesters. Christopher Hitchens speculates that the hands of Rafsanjani and Grand Ayatollah Sistani were behind the move. He further ponders whether the example of Iraqi democracy played a substantive role in the current Iranian discontent.
6. The utterly spineless and wrongheaded Obama regime has come out against any international sanctions against the bloody theocrats for their repression, reasoning that any sanctions "might backfire." Fortunately, Congress is acting independently of Obama.
7. Biden has greenlighted Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities and Saudi Arabia apparently will do its role to assist Israel. That said, this should not be Israel's burden to carry alone. Unfortunately, with Obama at the helm, it will be.
Update: 8. AmirTaheri writes on the likelihood that Khameini is likely to be far more brutal than the shah in attempting to put down the current unrest. He also writes on the fact that Ahmedinejad is now unwelcome in most parts of Iran. ________________________________________________________________
1. Mousavi, facing calls from supporters of Ahmedinejad for his arrest and punishment for treason, has called for a 3 day general strike leading up to a major planned protest on Thursday, "the 10th anniversary of a 1999 attack by pro-government militiamen on the dormitories of Tehran University that led to weeks of political unrest." Mousavi is not backing down. While some rumblings are being heard about arresting Mousavi, there can be little doubt that this ham-handed regime would already have done so if they were fully confident of their ability to weather the unrest.
2. According to Michael Ledeen, Khameini has ordered another round of arrests, as well as the confiscation of all satellite dishes:
The Iranian tyrant, Ali Khamenei, told his cluster of top advisers two days ago that it was time to totally shut down the protests, and he ordered that any and all demonstrators, regardless of their status, be arrested (although there is no longer room for new prisoners in Tehran’s jails; they are now using sports arenas as holding areas). He further ordered that all satellite dishes be taken down (good luck with that one; there are probably millions of them in Tehran alone). He ordered that the crackdown be done at night, to avoid all those annoying videos. By Sunday night, hundreds of new arrests had been made, including the regime’s favorite targets: students, intellectuals, and journalists.
His deadline: July 11th. He told his minions that if that were accomplished, the rest of the world would come crawling to him.
He may be right about most of the rest of the world, which has distinguished itself by its fecklessness, but he is certainly not right about his own people . . .
The regime was apparently so worried that the general strike would show massive support for Mousavi that they took the step of ordering the businesses and offices to close for three days. The Telegraph is reporting that most businesses in Tehran's Central Bazaar are closed, though there is no word coming out on the rest of the country.
3. File this one under "rats deserting a sinking ship." Underscoring the continuing seriousness of the unrest in Iran, the Telegraph is reporting on the mass movement of money out of the country:
Millions of pounds in private wealth has begun flooding out of Iran in the wake of mass demonstrations which have paralysed commercial life after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Fears of a new round of crippling sanctions are also thought to have fuelled the movement of money out of the country.
Western intelligence agencies have reported that prominent private businesses and wealthy families have moved tens of millions of dollars out of Iranian banks into overseas accounts. . . .
4. The IRGC is a corrupt organization whose leadership has a fully vested interest in seeing the theocracy propped up. The leadership of the IRGC is getting as rich from corruption, graft, and business interests as have many of the politicized members of Iran's clerical establishment. Thus it is no surprise to find that the IRGC is now running the internal security to brutally crush the protests. This from the LA Times:
The top leaders of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard publicly acknowledged they had taken over the nation's security during the post-election unrest and warned late Sunday, in a threat against a reformist wave led by Mir-HosseinMousavi, that there was no middle ground in the ongoing dispute over the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the elite military branch, said the guard's takeover of the nation's security had led to "a revival of the revolution."
. . . "Today, no one is impartial," Gen. YadollahJavani said at the Sunday news conference, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. "There are two currents -- those who defend and support the revolution and the establishment, and those who are trying to topple it."
The uniformed Revolutionary Guard leaders, joined by the turbaned cleric Ali Saedi, Khamenei'srepresentative, said they would play a more active role in defending the Islamic Republic's core values . . .
It should be noted that the basij, Iran's version of the Nazi brown-shirts, who have played a central and bloody role in repressing the protests, are under the command of the IRGC.
5. I blogged here on the recent major development of Iran's most respected clerical organization, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, who issued a statement that condemned the regime for their repression of the protests, called the regime illegitimate, and challenged the Guardian Council for certifying the election. Related to this, Abbas Milani has written an exceptional article at TNR giving the history of the split among Iran's clerics over the theocracy itself that we now see spilling out into the open.
Christopher Hitchens, writing at Slate, makes the point that the impetus for the Association'sstatement - a group that normally stays out of politics - was likely prompted by Mousavi's backer, Rafsanjani, and the most popular cleric in Iran, Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Hitchens goes on to ask a salient question:
Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about "the liberation of Iraq," he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran's regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a "let's pretend" election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.
I will be amazed if, once all is said and done, we find out that Iraq's model did not play a significant role in promoting the discontent of Iran's rank and file. I have been saying for years that the greatest single threat to Iran was a border with Iraq's secular, Shia dominated democracy - and indeed, that the two could not possibly coexist. But don't expect Hitchen's question to get asked by our MSM. Instead, we have the MSMregurgitating the Obama administration's laughable claim of credit for being a cause of the uprising, pointing to the Cairo Speech. That would be the speech wherein Obama signalled a retreat from promoting democracy in the Middle East. And it would be the speech that was not broadcast in Iran. The theocracy actually jammed the signal to prevent people from picking it up on satellite dishes.
6. As I posted here, Obama has come out against any international sanctions against the theocrats for their bloody repression because of concern that any sanctions "might backfire." As Robert Averichcogently points out on his blog, such a move could not be more counterproductive, nor more useless.
Fortunately, Congress is acting independently of Obama. McCain and Lieberman announced two weeks ago that they were sponsoring a bill to require the U.S. to assist with the communications into and out of Iraq - perhaps the most critical area where we can assist the nascent revolution in Iran. Unfortunately, that also tells us that if we are having to legislate such actions, Obama must have our covert operators sitting on their thumbs, doing nothing to assist the protests. That, if true, is an atrocity. But it would comport with Obama's simply mystifying continued push to hold talks with this illegitimate and brutal theocracy. The Telegraph also reports on more legislation in the U.S. pipeline:
. . . Republican congressman Mark Kirk has claimed there is growing support for a bill he is sponsoring which would strip American support for foreign companies supplying refined petroleum to Iran.
Iran is a large oil producer but decades of financial isolation means it must import petrol and other end products from abroad.
Reliance, the Indian operator, provides one-third of Iran's daily needs while also enjoying a massive trade loan from the US.
Another bill that would exclude companies involved in the trade from doing business in the US was put on hold earlier this year as a gesture from President Barack Obama to improve relations.
Iran's economic problems are severe. Their per capita GDP is only slightly over $3,100, inflation is running almost 25%, and their unemployment rate is well into double digits. These are not transitory conditions that just came about as a result of the global economic meltdown, but are the result of years of misrule by clerics and now Ahmedinejad. Real sanctions, particularly ones that attack the theocracy's dependence on foreign refined fuel products, could prove very effective in furthering unrest in Iran. But with Obama seeking to derail international sanctions over Iran's brutal repression, it is unlikely he would ever sign such bills.
I recommend that you take a look at how Obama has long approached such issues to evaluate their effectiveness. We learned today that Obama was highly critical of Reagan in 1983 for going ahead with the deployment of new nuclear missiles in the face of Soviet opposition and opposition in Germany - the so-called nuclear freeze movement. Obama was very much on the wrong side of history there, and if his policies were then in place, we might still be facing the Soviet Union. Let us hope Obama does not manage to throw a lifeline to our own modern "evil empire," Iran's bloody theocracy.
7. VP Biden has greenlighted Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, stating that Israel is a "sovereign nation" entitled to make its own decisions on security without U.S. interference. Given the current state of Iran, Israel would be foolish to pull the trigger yet. If they strike Iran, they may put back Iran's nuclear weapons program by a few years but unite a country on the verge of toppling. Conversely, if Iran's theocracy falls, the threat to Israel would likely vanish overnight.
That said, it is also being reported that Saudi Arabia has agreed to allow Israel to overfly Saudi airspace to attack Iran. It is now being denied, but I do not doubt that this is true. For all of the vile hatred Wahhabists preach against Israel and the Jews, the bottom line is that Israel is no threat to the House of Saud. Iran, however, is not only a religious enemy of the Wahhabis because they practice Shia'ism, but Iran also poses a major threat to the Sauds. Iran has long been reaching out to all Shia in the Middle East in an effort to expand their influence. The House of Saud rules over a substantial and strategically placed Shia minority. Anything that the Sauds and most of the other Sunni countries could do informally and covertly to assist Israel against Iran has probably already been considered and discussed.
To go one further, Daled Amos, blogging at Soccer Dad, ponders the question of whether it is time for there to be a Sunni-Israel alliance directed against Iran and what it would take to achieve such an alliance. I doubt that a formal alliance would ever coalesce until the Sword of Damocles visibly appears over the Arab Sunni world. But it is a sign of the times that such an issue is even being discussed with seriousness.
Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon was one issue that President Bush clearly wanted to deal with on his watch. It was only vociferous intervention led by Obama, Reid and Pelosi against even the threat of force, coupled with the release of a highly politicized NIE, that tied Bush's hands. Now Obama owns the Iranian problem and is responsible for countering the mad theocracy's rush for a nuclear arsenal that will threaten the U.S. every bit as much as Israel.
During his campaign, Obama said he would consider using force to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. That was then, this is now. In light of totality of Obama's approach to Iran, it is fair to assume that Biden's statement was, if not a public punting of the ball to Israel, then at least an acknowledgement that Israel is on its own in this.
The Obama administration has given us many things things already - a record debt, rising unemployment, a failing dollar to name but a few. What they haven't given us or the world is anything remotely approaching leadership. Apparently, that is now Israel's job. At least the House of Saud seems to recognize it.
8. Iranian columnist AmirTaheri has several recent articles on Iran. In "For Mousavi: Three Roads Ahead," Taheri points out that Khameini is no longer even making a pretense that Iran has a "republican" system of government and that Khameini will not shirk from using all of the violence necessary to stay in power:
Thanks to Mousavi’s decision to fight back, the current crisis has already produced at least one positive result. It has clarified the situation by exposing the composite noun Islamic Republic as an oxymoron. The space allocated to the "republic" has shrunk to its smallest since the start of the Khomeinist regime.
On Tuesday, the official Islamic News Agency (IRNA) published the text of a long sermon by the "Supreme Guide" in the province of Kurdistan and for the staff of the elite 27th Division, spelling out the nature of the regime.
This is what Khamenei says: "Islamic society is the society of the imamate. This means that the imam is at the head of the system. {The Imam is} a man who exercises power because the people follow him as their leader from their heart and because they have full faith in him."
Khamenei makes no mention of the presidency or any other organ of state because the system he is defending has a single, all-embracing institution: the imamate.
With pretensions about democracy and popular will gone, the current system in Iran is closer to models such as the imamate in Yemen and the "Islamic emirate" in Afghanistan under the Taliban, than to a republic in which Mousavi, or anybody else, could claim a mandate based on victory in an election.
Khamenei's sermon also contains a clear warning that the regime is prepared to provoke a bloodbath to maintain its hold on power. Khamenei says that had the Shah killed half a million people he would not have been overthrown.
He criticizes the Algerian Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS) for not having called the masses onto the streets and provoked a bloodbath by confronting the army. "Had they brought the crowds onto the streets there would have been an Islamic government in Algeria today," he says. "But they were afraid and showed weakness."
With admiration, the "Supreme Guide" recalls the massacre of one million Communists in Indonesia under General Suharto that he claims saved the system in that country.
A reluctant hero, Mousavi has succeeded in drawing the true battle lines in Iran's politics. Whether he wishes to be present on those lines, for how long, and with how much determination remains to be seen.
This throws into stark relief the paucity and imprudence of the Obama administration's decision to minimize sanctions against the regime. Khamieini is set on his path and beliefs. Nothing Obama could possibly do will light a fire in the regime that was unlit before. To the contrary, the best hope of limiting the repression against those braving it in a fight for democracy would be to significantly increase the external pressure on the regime, making the regime's already noticable faultlines into crumbling chasms. As is becoming a regular pattern, Obama is doing the polar opposite.
Taheri also writes in a seperate article, A Suddenly Most Unwelcome Guest, that Ahmedinejad has been cancelling most of his travel plans inside Iran because of the likelihood of his presence leading to mass protests. Ahmedinejad is, writes Taheri, a very diminished figure whose "legitimacy is challenged at all levels of Iranian society, including every segment of the Khomeinist establishment." I don't see this ending well for Ahmedinejad.
Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. That is the spirit we need today. People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and the heart and the soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive, but it's being challenged in many different ways.
Among some Muslims, there's a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of somebody else's faith. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld -- whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt. . .
President Barack Obama, Address in Cairo, 4 June 2009
President Obama sounded some of the correct notes - in particular his call for freedom of religion, but he fell far short of the type of honesty that is needed to address this problem. And indeed, praising Islam for its history of "tolerance" is akin to praising an alcoholic for his history of sobriety. Islam is, today, the antithesis of "tolerance," and was little better historically. Oh, and a note to our "student of history," via Barcepundit quoted at Soccer Dad: "[B]y the time the Spanish Inquisition was created in 1478, Cordoba has been reconquered from Islamic hands almost 150 years earlier, in 1236." Indeed, see Daled Amos's entire post at Soccer Dad for an in-depth discussion of just how much "tolerance" there was in Andalusia.
To be perfectly clear, the historical "tolerance" of Islam was never something we would recognize today as "tolerance." It did not involve "freedom of religion" as we see that concept. It tolerated non-Muslims as second class citizens, so called "dhimmis," subject to special laws and payment of the jizya - a protection tax payable by non-Muslims. It was more tolerant than medieval Europe of the day - but then again, Christians of the day had reason to be a bit testy with Muslims. It's easier to be magnanimous when you are the victor and are occupying conquered lands. Do recall that it was largely Christian lands that Islam was conquering as part of the greatest imperealistic expansion in history. It was an expansion that began about 700 A.D. and that continued by the sword all the way through 1683 and the Seige of Vienna. It saw Islam conquer all of North Africa, all of the Middle East, Turkey, and various parts of Europe, including areas in Spain and Italy.
There are several aspects of modern Islamic intolerance that are so outrageous that Obama's failure to mention them is nearly criminal. And indeed, topping the list is one with which Obama himself needs to be personally concerned. That is the dogma that it is a sin to convert from Islam and that a person who changes their religion from Islam is an apostate subject to punishment, up to and including death. It is a dogma followed by many of the sects of Islam. Whether or not Obama ever practiced Islam, his father did, and in most Middle Eastern countries, that would make Obama a Muslim at birth. The fact that Obama later chose to practice Christianity makes of him an apostate.
But that is hardly the only outrageous example of this "tolerance" Obama seems to find so laudable. Obama failed to note that the Wahhabi, Salafi, and Deobandi sects in particular interpret the Koran to mean that they can freely murder non-Muslims or enslave them and rape them. For specific references to these doctrines being taught in a Saudi school in Virginia, read the USCIFR report here.
And as to Indonesia about which Obama waxes so eloquently, it, like virtually all of the Islamic world, is being radicalized by a tsunami of wahhabi/salafi Islam being exported on the back of an endless supply of Saudi petrodollars. Obama may have memories of Christians practicing openly in Indonesia, but the reality of today is of "unauthorized" houses of Christian worship being attacked by Islamic radicals.
And then of course there is the attempt by the 57 members of OIC to foist blasphemy laws on the West, cutting off all freedom speech when it comes to Islam. If there is to be freedom of religion - and if Islam is to every actually to grow into "tolerance" - such laws must be absolutely opposed by the West. Obama apparently saw no reason to raise that as yet another example of "tolerance."
Indeed, for Obama to praise Islam for its "tolerance," while failing to acknowledge any of the above is to distort reality out of all recognition. And as always, the failure to face these truths means that they will continue unabated. Indeed, with the vast expansion of Wahhabi Islam, they will actually only grow.
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