Jihad & Counter-Terrorism Linkfest

All of the most interesting links on the world of jihadism and efforts to counter it below the fold
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The above cartoon unabashedly stolen from Always On Watch.

Always On Watch is blogging on a major attack by Muslims on a Christian school in Jakarta, Indonesia, injuring hundreds of students. The attack was spearheaded by the local imam and chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood Forum of Kampung Pulo Village, who in the past opposed the opening and continued existence of the Christian institute.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser ponders the significance of the resignation of Parvez Ahmed from CAIR's Board of Directors. What he observes is a change in tactics rather than any fundamental shift away from the goal of instituting political Islam in America.

Someone is killing the Syrian leadership running Hezbollah. A few months ago, uber terrorist and Hezbollah operations chief Imad Muginayah was assassinated in Damascus. Today its Syrian President Bashar Assad's top aide, adviser, and liaison officer to the Hizbullah, General Mohammed Suleiman. Anti-Mullah is blogging on news reports that he was shot and killed by an unidentified sniper in the Syrian port city of Tartous. This is a positive trend.

Atlas Shrugs covers the testimony of Steve Emerson before Congress on the thoroughly backwards State Dept. attempts to engage the Muslim community in the U.S. by going through organizations set up and funded by radical foreign elements. The meat of Mr. Emerson’s testimony:

"While the outreach to the Muslim community by the State Department "is an honorable and worthwhile pursuit, the State Department has conducted outreach to the wrong groups, sending a terrible message to moderate Muslims who are thoroughly disenfranchised by the funding, hosting and embracing of radical groups that purport to be opposed to terrorism and extremism."

As I have blogged on several occasions before, this is precisely the same mistake Britain is making.

CAIR is celebrating the dismissal of Michael Savage’s lawsuit over CAIR’s use of parts of his radio program to organize a boycott of his show’s sponsors. Given the serious implications of Savage’s lawsuit for the fair use doctrine and freedom of speech, I have to say that, in this one very unusual and discrete instance, CAIR was right. Meanwhile, the American wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the MAS, is supporting the insane decision by a judge to release Sami al Arian on bond.

There is an utter outrage in Pakistan. Kidnapping and rape of pre-teen Christian girls has been given the green light by Pakistan’s lower courts. Christians Under Attack has the story of two young Christian girls kidnapped by Muslims, "married," forced to convert to Islam. In a lawsuit by the children’s parents to force the return of their children, the lower court ruled that they are now Muslims and the rightful property of their "husbands." There is an update to this story at Gates of Vienna.

The Terror Wonk blogs on the ramifications of the CIA making public allegations, carried in the NYT, that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI, is actively involved in supporting the Taliban. The ISI has been a snakes den for decades.

Robert Spencer at Dhimmi Watch blogs on a Turkish soap opera about an Islamic man and wife who act as equal partners. It apparently has Saudi women enthralled and Saudi clerics up in arms.

The Wahhabi purists in al Qaeda are upset with King Abdullah for attempting to reach out to other faiths. Dinah Lord posts on the latest al Qaeda video calling for beheading the King.

Via Europe News, there is Diana West’s column on how serious the problem of radical Islam is in the UK and the utter failure of the chattering class to face the issue. Indeed, to the contrary, they are doing all they can to silence any attempt to raise or debate the issue. Among the many facts they are ignoring are items like this from an interview with Egyptian Islamic Preacher 'Amr Khaled: "Within 20 Years, Muslims Will Be Majority in Europe" And the Gathering Storm posts on how one small community in Britain that rejected plans for building a Mosque in their town are now having the decision taken away from them by the government.

Winds of Jihad has an eye opening post on how Muslims are turning areas of Germany into no-go zones for police and non-Muslims.

From Eye On The World: "The son of one of the most prominent Hamas MPs coverts to Christianity, calls Islam a religion of death, admires Israel and cautions that Islam will never allow Muslims to achieve a peace agreement with the Jews."

Michael Ledeen blogs at PJM on the interaction between "soft power" and brute force, making the important point that the determining factor of success in a counterinsurgency is who the populace believes is going to win the "brute force" end of things.

At Ironic Surrealism, a chilling video about the goals of jihadism in the words of their spiritual leaders.

Europe News reports that Denmark is 'liberalizing' its laws to allow for the possibility of greater immigration as the result of "cousin marriages" among the Muslim population.

From Islamist Watch, an article by David Rushin on Muslim intimidation and threats of violence against "apostates" in the West who convert from Islam.

At the Lebanese news outlet, Ya Libnan, an editorial on the prospects for the new Cabinet: "To expect Hezbollah to play a positive role in the creation of a Lebanese civil society is to believe in the supernatural and to suspend rationality in favour of miracles."

At LGF, the Turkish AKP party, having just survived a challenge to its constitutionality, has backed down on the issue of "allowing" females to wear headscarves as a sign of their faith in public buildings and universities.

From Marked Manner, Obama has been getting sizable campaign contributions from individuals in Rafah, GA. GA stands for Gaza, not Georgia.

Freedom of speech and radical Islam in all its manifestations are diametrically opposed. Thus it is no surprise when Muslims Against Sharia reports that Kuwait has now declared criticism of Islam on the internet to be a criminal offense.

Debbie at Right Truth has an exceptional update on uranium enrichment and other activities directed towards the imminent creation of a nuclear arsenal by the mad mullahs

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Will Turkey Lead A Revolution In Islam?

Turkey is proposing a far reaching revision and reinterpretation of the Hadith. This could mark a titanic event in the world of Islam which has come under increasing Salafization over the past decades. I have little trust in Turkey's pro-Islamic AKP government, but the scope of the proposed revision portends to far reaching and much needed.

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I harbor very significant doubts about Turkey's Islamic movement today. The pro-Islamic AKP party is blurring the line between Church and state secular, it shows the hallmarks of Salifization, and it was only a few weeks ago that AKP PM Erdogan was in Germany, exhorting Turkish expatriates not to integrate into German society. Everything that I see tells me that Turkey is, at the moment, a trojan horse and its entrance into the EU would spell the death knell for Europe.

Almost a year ago, I posted in a lengthy essay that what Islam most needed was to go through its periods of Reformation and Enlightenment. In tracing the problems of modern day Islam, I noted:

Turkey, home of Sufi Islam and the caliphate presiding over the majority of the Islamic world, came into World War I on the side of Germany and was ultimately defeated. Its Middle Eastern empire was divided up among the European counties. Attaturk took power in Turkey and divested Islam from politics, secularizing the country. This was, in essence, the first step towards a revolution in the Islamic world – the divorcing of religion from the nation state and limiting it to the private lives of Turkish citizens. Unfortunately, as time has gone on, Wahhabism has infected Turkey, and today we see the creep of [Salafi] Islamism into the state apparatus. Turkey has withdrawn from the precipice of a revolution to moderate and modernize Islam that its combination of secular government and classical Sufi Islam may have led.

Read the entire post.

Yet today there is a major surprise in the news that Turkey is planning what has the potential to be the first major reinterpretation of Islam since the gates of ijtihad were closed near a millenium ago. This is potentially momentous - and it is a direct challenge to the 7th century Wahhabi / Salafi interpretations of Islam being spread across the world with billions in Saudi petrodollars.

Before becoming too excited, we must of course wait to see the finished product and assess its impact. It is possible that this could be nothing more than a PR movement aimed at gaining entrance into the EU by allaying very real and reasonable fears of EU nations. Possibly, but even with that in mind, the scope of this proposed revision is promising indeed. This from the BBC:

Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.

The country's powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.

The Hadith is a collection of thousands of sayings reputed to come from the Prophet Muhammad.

As such, it is the principal guide for Muslims in interpreting the Koran and the source of the vast majority of Islamic law, or Sharia.

But the Turkish state has come to see the Hadith as having an often negative influence on a society it is in a hurry to modernise, and believes it responsible for obscuring the original values of Islam.

It says that a significant number of the sayings were never uttered by Muhammad, and even some that were need now to be reinterpreted.

Commentators say the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.

Its supporters say the spirit of logic and reason inherent in Islam at its foundation 1,400 years ago are being rediscovered. Some believe it could represent the beginning of a reformation in the religion.

Turkish officials have been reticent about the revision of the Hadith until now, aware of the controversy it is likely to cause among traditionalist Muslims, but they have spoken to the BBC about the project, and their ambitious aims for it.

The forensic examination of the Hadiths has taken place in Ankara University's School of Theology.

An adviser to the project, Felix Koerner, says some of the sayings - also known individually as "hadiths" - can be shown to have been invented hundreds of years after the Prophet Muhammad died, to serve the purposes of contemporary society.

"Unfortunately you can even justify through alleged hadiths, the Muslim - or pseudo-Muslim - practice of female genital mutilation," he says.

"You can find messages which say 'that is what the Prophet ordered us to do'. But you can show historically how they came into being, as influences from other cultures, that were then projected onto Islamic tradition."

The argument is that Islamic tradition has been gradually hijacked by various - often conservative - cultures, seeking to use the religion for various forms of social control.

Leaders of the Hadith project say successive generations have embellished the text, attributing their political aims to the Prophet Muhammad himself.

Turkey is intent on sweeping away that "cultural baggage" and returning to a form of Islam it claims accords with its original values and those of the Prophet.

But this is where the revolutionary nature of the work becomes apparent. Even some sayings accepted as being genuinely spoken by Muhammad have been altered and reinterpreted.

Prof Mehmet Gormez, a senior official in the Department of Religious Affairs and an expert on the Hadith, gives a telling example.

"There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband's permission and they are genuine.

"But this isn't a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet's time it simply wasn't safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons."

The project justifies such bold interference in the 1,400-year-old content of the Hadith by rigorous academic research.

Prof Gormez points out that in another speech, the Prophet said "he longed for the day when a woman might travel long distances alone".

So, he argues, it is clear what the Prophet's goal was.

Yet, until now, the ban has remained in the text, and helps to restrict the free movement of some Muslim women to this day.

. . . According to Fadi Hakura, an expert on Turkey from Chatham House in London, Turkey is doing nothing less than recreating Islam - changing it from a religion whose rules must be obeyed, to one designed to serve the needs of people in a modern secular democracy.

He says that to achieve it, the state is fashioning a new Islam.

"This is kind of akin to the Christian Reformation," he says.

. . . Significantly, the "Ankara School" of theologians working on the new Hadith have been using Western critical techniques and philosophy.

They have also taken an even bolder step - rejecting a long-established rule of Muslim scholars that later (and often more conservative) texts override earlier ones.

"You have to see them as a whole," says Fadi Hakura.

"You can't say, for example, that the verses of violence override the verses of peace. This is used a lot in the Middle East, this kind of ideology.

"I cannot impress enough how fundamental [this change] is."

Read the entire article.

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The Danger of Turkey

Turkey's Prime Minister spoke yesterday to a large crowd of Turkish ex-patriates in Germany and told them to resist assimilation into the West. Turkey is being slowly Islamicized and is no longer a secular nation.



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Political Islam - synonomous with Wahhabi Salafi Islam, is a threat to the West. And, as I have noted before, its corrosive effects can be seen ever more starkly influencing Islam throughout the world, including in Turkey. As Mark Steyn has written extensively, while Europe has thrown open its doors to Muslim migration, Salafi and Salafi influenced Muslim leaders promote seperatism and advocate the establishment of Sharia law and Muslim rule. Add Turkey's Prime Minister Erdogan to the list.

A crowd of 16,000 expatriate Turks cheered Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a vast indoor auditorium in Germany on Sunday as he told them to resist assimilation into the West.

The political rally by Germany's biggest ethnic minority upset German politicians, who objected to a major public event on German soil being advertised on posters in Turkish only.

Erdogan indirectly addressed those concerns, saying it was right for Turkish immigrants to learn German and other languages so they could integrate, but wrong to abandon their Turkish heritage and assimilate.

"Assimilation is a crime against humanity," he told the crowd. Many Turks had travelled from France, Belgium and the Netherlands to hear his hour-long address in the shiny venue, the Koelnarena.

"I can well understand that you are against assimilation," he said. "It is important to learn German, but your Turkish language should not be neglected."

He said ethnic Turks abroad should be more confident in standing up for their interests, and should win election as mayors and members of European national parliaments.

The prime minister called for a swift inquiry to find the causes of a fire a week ago that killed nine Turkish people in the German city of Ludwigshafen.

Erdogan was lionized by other speakers at the event, organized by the Union of European Turkish Democrats, a group that supports his moderate Islamist AKP party.

. . . Outside, bearded members of the audience spoke politely to an elderly woman protester, Vera Villinger, who wore a scarf in German colours and claimed Islam was taking over Germany.

Read the article. Under no circumstances should Turkey be granted full entrance into the EU - a move that would flood Europe with Muslims and put a stake into the last vesitges of Western culture, values and ideals. It would quite literally be opening the gates of Troy and dragging in the Trojan horse. That analogy is all the more ironic since Troy's probable location was in modern day Turkey.

(H/T Shield of Achilles)

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Trouble in Turkey

The Ottoman Turkish caliphate, based on the Sufi Islamic sect, established itself as the reigning force in the Islamic world after the Arab empires were decimated by the Mongol invasions in the 13th century. Before the start of WWI, the caliphate stretched over most of the Middle East and into Europe. After their defeat in WWI, the Ottoman empire was divided up by the European powers and, within Turkey itself, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ended the caliphate and established a strictly secular state.

At one point, it seemed that Turkey might lead a revolution in the Islamic world. Unfortunately, misrule by the secular parties coupled with the growing influence of Wahhabi / Salafi Islam exported from Saudi Arabia has ended that potential. Coupled with that influence has been the rise of the AKP, a political party defined by religion that took power in Turkish elections several years ago. Credit must be given to the AKP for liberalizing and making capitalistic reforms to Turkey's economy. But it ends there. See the articles here and here, discussing many aspects of Islamicization in Turkish society that appear straight out of the Wahhabi / Salafi playbook. Besides all of the issues, under the AKP, Islmaists are threatening the independence of the judiciary, and have tried to stop the appointment of secular generals in the military to key positions. They have also tried to take over the university system, tried to legalize the wearing of head scarves in government buildings and schools, and claim that Turkey's overriding national identity is its religion.

Now today, Stephen Kinzer weighs in on how this is effecting Turkish society:

The brilliant young pianist and composer Fazil Say has dazzled audiences in concert halls around the world. Yet he has set off a firestorm in his native Turkey by saying he wants to leave the country because he finds the drift of politics there repugnant.

"Our dream is dying a little in Turkey," Say told a German newspaper reporter. "Wives of our cabinet ministers wear head scarves. The Islamists have won. We're 30%, they're 70%. I'm thinking about where else I could live."

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan quickly rebuked him, saying that "an artist who is born here should stay here". The deputy leader of Erdogan's party, Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, was less concerned about Say's wish to move abroad. "I wouldn't cry if he did," Firat shrugged.

The sharp and often bitter debate over Say's comments reflects a growing concern within Turkey's intellectual elite. Some fear that their country, which has been militantly secular since it was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, is drifting toward a form of religious rule. Others see this as part of a larger problem: growing intolerance that springs from a surge in ultra-nationalist passion.

Erdogan's government is widely popular and likely to govern for years to come. That is good, because this regime draws its strength from the people's will. It is also disturbing. Turkey's old political system, in which weak and corrupt factions were kept in line by generals, has been replaced by one in which a single party dominates all branches of government and is also increasingly powerful in private business. Many citizens deeply mistrust the new ruling group. They fear that by catering to pious Muslims and to the steadily increasing pool of nationalist voters, it may in the end prove even less democratic than the old military-dominated system.
"Yagmurdan kacarken doluya tutulmak," they lament. We have escaped the rain only to be pelted by hail.

. . . Turkey has entered a period of unprecedented change. The new regime's central challenge is to democratise the country without releasing atavistic forces that will pull it away from the traditions that have brought it so much success.

As for Fazil Say, he has refused to back away from his comments, and insists that Turkish society is changing in dangerous ways. "The people and the press don't want to notice it," he said in a statement. "But an artist is someone who feels the danger of darkness." . . .

Read the article here. As an aside, there is no way that Turkey should be allowed into the EU unless and until it adopts complete religious freedom, including the right of people to freely convert from Islam.

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The Intersection of Islam, Government & Democracy

We’ve been treated to a bevy of articles recently discussing the intersection of Islam and politics in the Middle East, all of which raise some troubling questions with surprising answers. The threshold question is how do such parties perform in democratic elections?

Amir Taheri answers that question, and it would seem, throughout the Middle East, that their popularity is not strong:

. . . [I]n Jordan's latest general election, held last month, the radical Islamic Action Front (IAF) suffered a rout. The IAF's share of the votes fell to five per cent from almost 15 per cent in the elections four years ago. The group, linked with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, managed to keep only six of its 17 seats in the National Assembly (parliament.) Its independent allies won no seats.

. . . The Islamists' defeat in the Jordanian elections confirms a trend that started years ago. Conventional wisdom was that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and lack of progress in the Israel-Palestine conflict, provide radical Islamists with a springboard from which to seize power through elections.

. . . So far, no Islamist party has managed to win a majority of the popular vote in any of the Muslim countries where reasonably clean elections are held. If anything, the Islamist share of the votes has been declining across the board.
In Malaysia, the Islamists have never crossed beyond the 11 per cent share of the popular vote. In Indonesia, the various Islamist groups have never collected more than 17 per cent.

The Islamists' share of the popular vote in Bangladesh declined from an all-time high of 11 per cent in the 1980s to around seven per cent in the late 1990s.
In Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, won the 2006 general election with 44 per cent of the votes, far short of the "crushing wave of support" it had promised.

Even then, it was clear that at least some of those who run on a Hamas ticket did not share its radical Islamist ideology. Despite years of misrule and corruption, Fatah, Hamas' secularist rival, won 42 per cent of the popular vote.

In Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won two successive general elections, the latest in July 2007, with 44 per cent of the popular vote. Even then, AKP leaders go out of their way to insist that the party "has nothing to do with religion".

"We are a modern, conservative, European-style party," AKP leader and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan, likes to repeat at every opportunity. In last July's general election, the AKP lost 23 seats and, with it, its two-third majority in the Grand National Assembly (parliament).

AKP's success in Turkey inspired Moroccan Islamists to create a similar outfit called Party of Justice and Development (PDJ). The PDJ sought support from AKP "experts" to prepare for last September's general election in Morocco.
And, yet, when the votes were counted, the PJD collected just over 10 per cent of the popular vote to win 46 of the 325 seats.

Islamists have done no better in neighboring Algeria. In the latest general election, held in May 2007, the two Islamist parties, Movement for a Peaceful Society (HMS) and Algerian Awakening (An Nahda) won just over 12 per cent of the popular vote.

In Yemen, possibly one of the Arab states where the culture of democracy has struck the deepest roots, elections in the past 20 years have shown support for Islamists to stand at around 25 per cent of the popular vote. In the last general election in 2003, the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (Islah) won 22 per cent.

Kuwait is another Arab country where holding reasonably fair elections has become part of the culture. In the general election last year, a well-funded and sophisticated Islamist bloc collected 27 per cent of the votes and won 17 of the 50 seats in the National Assembly.

In Lebanon's last general election in 2005, the two Islamist parties, Hezbollah (Party of God) and Amal (Hope) collected 21 per cent of the popular vote to win 28 of the 128 seats in the parliament.

And, this despite massive financial and propaganda support from Iran and electoral pacts with a Christian political bloc led by the pro-Tehran ex-General Michel Aoun.
Afghanistan . . . [has] held a series of elections since the fall of the Taliban in Kabul . . . By all standards, these have been generally free and fair elections, and thus valid tests of the public mood. In Afghanistan, Islamist groups, including former members of the Taliban, have managed to win around 11 per cent of the popular vote on the average . . .

Read the entire article. Thus, it would seem that Islamist movements have only limited support throughout the Middle East where reasonably free elections have occurred.

One of the other interesting aspects of using religion to justify a political party is the backlash when such parties take power and do not deliver – as is often the case since you can’t eat a holy book, nor do sacred texts generate electricity of serve to make water potable. Thus, in Iraq as pointed out in this article here, and now in Pakistan, when religious parties had in fact taken political control of some of the provicial areas, their failure to perform as promised is not being excused by the electorate, irrespective of their religious credentials:

In 2002, Ibrar Hussein voted for an Islamic takeover.

Fed up both with Pakistan's military-led government and with the mainstream, secular opposition, Hussein decided that religious leaders should be given a chance to improve living conditions in this sprawling frontier city.

But five years after support from people like Hussein propelled the Islamic parties to power in the provincial government -- and to their strongest-ever showing nationally -- the 36-year-old shopkeeper is rethinking his choice.

"You can see the sanitation system here," Hussein said, pointing with disgust to a ditch in front of his shop where a stream of greenish-brown sludge trickled by. "People were asking for clean water, and they didn't get it. We were very hopeful. But the mullahs did nothing for us."

Hussein's disenchantment is just one reason why, with Pakistan on the eve of fresh parliamentary elections, the religious parties are struggling to appeal to voters.

On the surface, at least, they have many things going for them: Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, is deeply unpopular. So, too, are his backers in Washington. The leading opposition politicians have had their opportunities before, and failed. Overall, frustration in Pakistan is running high.

And yet the Islamic parties seem poorly positioned to benefit from that frustration. Beset by bitter internal divisions, they have failed to come up with a unified campaign strategy. Their candidates, meanwhile, have to answer for a dubious record in governing North-West Frontier Province, their traditional base of support. And out on the stump, they are finding that anti-American sentiments are not quite as raw as they once were. . .

Read the article here.

Thus, in terms of democracy, Islamists would seem to have a limited appeal that tends to degrade further when they are actually voted into office. But the danger of Islamist parties is that, at least some seek only one democratic vote - the one to ensconce them into power. Or as Bernard Lewis put it, "one man, one vote, one time." That is what happened in Iran when they voted in a government structure that included the unique Khomeini construct of the Supreme Guide. Time will tell whether that holds true in the Gaza strip, where Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, took total control in a coup some months ago.

On a final note, it is interesting to note that the imposition of a theocracy in Iran has had an effect beyond just the political realm. The theocracy is doing a tremendous job of secularizing a large portion of its youth who comprise over 70% of its population.

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