Missing The Salafi Forest & The War Of Ideas Through Pam Geller's Trees

Seth Leibsohn: I want to get to . . . the appropriateness . . . of [Pam Geller's "Draw Mohammed" contest] on Sunday even before the shooting began. . . .

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser: Well, I do think, the analogy I like to use is a drunk who's walking through the streets and has anger and violent tendencies. Then someone decides to go up and poke him in the eye and . . . where is the problem? The problem is in the drunk. Why is he drinking, why does he have a substance problem and why is he violent. And that's what I'm dedicated to. Now, was it smart to poke him in the eye? I guess yes. He's running fifty-six countries and a quarter of the world's population, and he's distributing in an organized fashion that toxin that I call political Islam through a draconian form of Shariah [law] that needs reform, I think it's relevant . . .

Russ Douthat said it the best, in the NYT of all places, in January when he wrote a piece on the "blasphemy we need." He wrote that, if a large enough group . . . is willing to kill you for saying something, then it is something that certainly needs to be said. . . .

The greatest blasphemy in Islam is denying God, and these people aren't killing atheist conventions. . . . If you go to the Supreme Court in [Washington, D.C.], there are busts of people who have contributed to Western law. There is a bust in the Supreme Court . . . of Mohammed - at our Supreme Court. No one is having a big deal out of that. So the issue is Islamo-nationalism. The criticism of the Prophet Mohammed through a caricature is like burning the Islamist flag, and that's why they get all enraged. It's nothing about major theological offense. Yes, we can't have images of the prophet because of fear of deification of Mohammed, but it's all about theo-politics and not about, necessarily, theology. . . .

Seth Leibsohn radio interview of Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, 5 May 2015.

. . . 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.

Tawfiq Hamid, Egyptian born physician, former terrorist and now author, 2008, Interview in the Jerusalem Post

Pam Geller's 'Draw Mohammed' contest does not raise a legitimate issue of freedom of speech. No one can contest that, under the First Amendment, she has a right to hold such a contest. That is a no brainer. The argument that has been raised by some on the left is that Geller's speech is likely to cause violence by those who are perpetually outraged. Anyone who knows the Supreme Court's First Amendment jurisprudence knows that such is not a legitimate ground to stop Ms. Geller's speech. What is really going on here is that our neo-Stalinist left would like to shut down any speech that they don't agree with or that in any way criticizes one of their victim's groups. Give them the finger and move on; their arguments are not worthy of anything more than ridicule.

Update: Megyn Kelly, Alan Dershowitz and others agree with my assessment of Constitutional law on this issue:



Everyone seems to be missing the far more important issue - that what is going on here is a "war of ideas" in Islam and our government has ceded that war to the enemy. Pam Geller's contest demonstrated it. Dr. Jasser explains what is actually happening -- that the Salafists' who demonstrate murderous outrage over the Draw Mohammed contest have no moral standing and their outrage is not theological in its nature, it is political. It is the murderous outrage that comes from Salafist Muslims bent on stopping any criticism of their toxic, triumphalist, and politicized interpretation of Islam and bent on preventing any reform, even as they spill blood by the tons around the world in an effort to impose a caliphate. Countering that requires engaging in the war of ideas.

There is little doubt that Obama has - and continues to - completely mishandle of our engagement in the Middle East. But even more harmful has been his utter retreat from any engagement in the war of ideas, to the point, one, of refusing to call Islamic terrorism by its name, and two, by excusing Islamic terrorism on the grounds of moral equivalence with the Crusades of near a millennium ago.

As I wrote in 2009 and as still very much applicable today:

The physical war on terror is necessary to stop the [threat] of immediate [attacks to our nation]. But it is in the war of ideas that the true battle lies, for if we do not stop the radicalization of Muslims, then the war on terror will never end. Ultimately, as Tom Friedman recently opined, this is a battle that must be fought within the four corners of Islam itself. But that said, we have an existential motivation to insure that the "good side" wins. This is made all the more critical because the good side, if you will, is not winning. The ideology at the heart of [ISIS,] al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups is very much still on the advance.

The threshold issue in the war of ideas is to identify who, as a group, constitutes “radicalized Muslims.” Islam, like Christianity, is subdivided into numerous different sects, many of which, such as Sufi for example, are peaceful and counsel coexistence. Individually, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world, most of whom would make good citizens, good friends, good neighbors and good family members in the West. Only a portion of them become “radicalized” whether as members of al Qaeda, [ISIS,] or some of the other radical Islamic groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, and Jamat-I-Islami to name but a few. Those who belong to these groups do in fact share a common thread – virtually all are adherents to the Salafi/Wahhabi school of Islam or a school, such as Deobandi, that has been heavily influenced in all relevant respects by Salafism.

There was a time when Salafism was confined to the back waters of Arabia. That changed when the tribe of Saud, in partnership with the tribe of Waahab, conquered Arabia in the 1930's. Within decades, the Sauds became incredibly wealthy on oil. Now, they spend billions annually exporting Salafi clerics, schools and textbooks to the four corners of the world. Consequently, Salafism is becoming the dominant form of Islam and is effecting every major school of Islam. As I wrote in a prior post:

According to official Saudi information, Saudi funds have been used to build and maintain over 1,500 mosques, 202 colleges, 210 Islamic Centers wholly or partly financed by Saudi Arabia, and almost 2,000 schools for educating Muslim children in non-Islamic countries in Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia. The North American Islamic Trust - a Wahhabi Salafi organization, owns between 50% and 80% of all mosques in North America. And Salafists are, in many cases, taking over existing Mosques throughout the world. Some very informative expamples include Belgium, Somalia, and Indonesia. And indeed, the Saudi Salafi Islam now exerts significant influence on our educational system, all the way from grade school to university. . . .

The West's premier orientalist, Professor Bernard Lewis - the man who coined the term "clash of civilizations" half a century ago and who predicted the rise of Islamic terrorism years prior to 9-11 - writes in his book "The Crisis of Islam" that the ideology of [Saudi Arabia's] Wahhabi / Salafi Islam is many times worse than that of the“KKK” in terms of bigotry and violence (p. 129). . . . The NYPD, in a 2007 report, “Radicalization In The West” documented Salafism as the common thread and motivating force behind terrorist attacks in the West. Zhudi Jasser, a Muslim reformist, writes on the dangers of Salafism and the efforts to engage it in the war of ideas here. The Center For Islamic Pluralism, a "a think tank that challenges the dominance of American Muslim life by militant Islamist groups," maintains a section on their website called "Wahhabi Watch." Perhaps the most cogent description of Salfism goes back a century, to the observations of Winston Churchill:

A large number of Bin Saud's followers belong to the Wahabi sect, a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relationship to orthodox Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times of [Europe's] religious wars.

The Wahhabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practice themselves they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahhabi villages for simply appearing in the streets.

It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette and, as for the crime of alcohol, the most energetic supporter of the temperance cause in this country falls far behind them. Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and blood-thirsty, in their own regions the Wahhabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have been, and still are, very dangerous to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Salafism has remained virtually unchanged since Churchill's observations. It was only a few years ago that the Saudi courts, applying Salafi Sharia law, ordered the victim of a brutal gang rape to suffer 200 lashes and six months in jail for being outside of her home without the escort of a male family member. To this day, hunting witches and breaking spells are the top duties of the Salafi religious police and, when witches are "caught," they are ritually slaughtered. In the Salafi culture of Saudi Arabia, it has been less than 20 years since the kingdom's senior cleric, the Grand Mufti issued a fatwah declaring "the earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment." And then there is the well known Salafi edict that anyone who converts from Islam is to be slaughtered.

As I pointed out in a post here, Islam, unlike Christianity, is a religion that has never gone through a Rennisance, a Reformation or a Period of Enlightenment. And while the mechanism - itjihad - exists that could lead to such an event, the reality is that Salafists are fighting any change to their interpretations of the Koran and Sunnah with every tool at their disposal, up to and including "slaughtering the takfirs." Moreover, they are using the UN to push for blasphemy laws that would shut down all criticism of Salafism in the Western world.

The vitriol, bigotry, and triumphalism of Salafism are taught to students in schools and madrassas across the world – including in American Islamic schools and Salafi prison ministries. Salafi Islam teaches that its adherents can freely murder non-Muslims or enslave them and rape them. Moreover, Salafists hold that challenging their existing Salafi Koranic interpretations are "redda (apostasy) punishable by death . . ." And indeed, for specific references to these doctrines being taught in a Saudi school in Virginia, read the USCIFR report here.

Salafism is the religion of [ISIS], the religion of [al Qaeda], the religion of all the 9-11 hijackers. That said, nothing that I write here is to suggest that all or a majority of Salafists should be stigmatized as radical. But the simple reality we ignore at our peril is that it is from the wellspring of Salafism that virtually all the radicalism of the Muslim world arises.

In the war of ideas, one of the most important steps that Obama could take would be to publicly shine a light on Salafism, both as the feeder for radical Islam and for the barbarity of some of its dogma. That would go very far to starting the type of discussion that could actually bring some semblance of evolution and peaceful change to Salafism. Ignoring Salafism - which, according to ex-CIA agent Bob Baer we have done ever since the 1970's when the Saudi's first began to buy influence in the American body politic - allows it to metastasize in the dark. And it is metastasizing at rapid speed today on the back of Saudi petrodollars. That is a recipe for disaster.

No one should be asking, as a result of Pam Geller's "Draw Mohammed" contest, whether anyone has a First Amendment right to criticize, in any way, shape or form, Saudi Arabia's Salafi Islam. They should be asking why our President is not engaging Islamists in the war of ideas and why he is ceding that ground to the Salafists. It is a mistake that our children and their progeny will be paying dearly for in the decades to come.

Update: Pat Condell discusses a related Mo-toon incident in the UK. It is an exceptional rant.

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Obama, 9-11-12 & The Collapse Of His Middle East Policy

Lots of posts and columns on the web today about the implosion of the Obama's "Cairo" doctrine, the Obama decision to use our tax dollars to fund an ad in Pakistan with Obama and Hillary attacking the "Innocence of Muslims" film trailer, and lastly, the implosion of the White House claims that the slaughter of our personnel in Benghazi was a spontaneous response to the film trailer.

Before addressing those points, let's note the elephant in the room. There is a huge scandal in this mix - the virtually non-existent security at our consulate in Benghazi on 9-11-12, site of previous attacks and a breeding ground for radicals. That lack of security was beyond negligent; it was criminally reckless. And that does not even begin to consider that no special precautions were taken on 9-11 to increase security there.

The person with the answers to this scandal is Hillary Clinton, which is I suspect why UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who would not even be in the loop on this issue, was offered up on all of the Sunday talk shows last Sunday to address it. She could prevaricate and obfuscate with at least some fall back claim to ignorance. Heads need to roll over this, and I strongly suspect that one of those heads is Hillary's.

The seminal critique of Obama's Middle East policy comes from Charles Krauthammer:

In the week following 9/11/12 something big happened: the collapse of the Cairo Doctrine, the centerpiece of President Obama’s foreign policy. It was to reset the very course of post-9/11 America, creating, after the (allegedly) brutal depredations of the Bush years, a profound rapprochement with the Islamic world.

On June 4, 2009, in Cairo, Obama promised “a new beginning” offering Muslims “mutual respect,” unsubtly implying previous disrespect. Curious, as over the previous 20 years, America had six times committed its military forces on behalf of oppressed Muslims, three times for reasons of pure humanitarianism (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo), where no U.S. interests were at stake.

But no matter. Obama had come to remonstrate and restrain the hyperpower that, by his telling, had lost its way after 9/11, creating Guantanamo, practicing torture, imposing its will with arrogance and presumption.

. . . his policies of accommodation and concession would consolidate the gains: an outstretched hand to Iran’s mullahs, a first-time presidential admission of the U.S. role in a 1953 coup, a studied and stunning turning away from the Green Revolution; withdrawal from Iraq with no residual presence or influence; a fixed timetable for leaving Afghanistan; returning our ambassador to Damascus (with kind words for Bashar Assad — “a reformer,” suggested the secretary of state); deliberately creating distance between the U.S. and Israel.

These measures would raise our standing in the region, restore affection and respect for the United States, and elicit new cooperation from Muslim lands.

It’s now three years since the Cairo speech. Look around. The Islamic world is convulsed with an explosion of anti-Americanism. From Tunisia to Lebanon, American schools, businesses, and diplomatic facilities set ablaze. A U.S. ambassador and three others murdered in Benghazi. The black flag of Salafism, of which al-Qaeda is a prominent element, raised over our embassies in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Sudan.

The administration, staggered and confused, blames it all on a 14-minute trailer for a film no one has seen and which may not even exist. What else can it say? . . .

Islamists rise across North Africa from Mali to Egypt. Iran repeatedly defies U.S. demands on nuclear enrichment, then, as a measure of its contempt for what America thinks, openly admits that its Revolutionary Guards are deployed in Syria. Russia, after arming Assad, warns America to stay out, while the secretary of state delivers vapid lectures about Assad “meeting” his international “obligations.” The Gulf States beg America to act on Iran; Obama strains mightily to restrain . . . Israel.

Sovereign U.S. territory is breached and U.S. interests are burned. And what is the official response? One administration denunciation after another — of a movie trailer! A request to Google to “review” the trailer’s presence on YouTube. And sheriff’s deputies’ midnight “voluntary interview” with the suspected filmmaker. This in the land of the First Amendment.

What else can Obama do? At their convention, Democrats endlessly congratulated themselves on their one foreign-policy success: killing Osama bin Laden. A week later, the Salafist flag flies over four American embassies, even as the mob chants, “Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.”

A foreign policy in epic collapse. . . .

Do read the entire column.

Islam is a tool of politics and power in the Middle East - a tool that has not matured from its founding in the 7th century. I made the point here that what goes on in Muslim countries should not be countenanced in the civilized world, a point Rhymes with Right also makes in a very insightful post, Is Speech Against Islam A Crime Against Humanity -- Or Is Islam Itself?

The problem with Obama's Middle East policy is that it is wholly premised on fundamental conceits about the nature of Islam as practiced in the Middle East. Islam there is not rational, peaceful, or susceptible to compromise. It is not civilized. It is not benign. That Obama still bitterly clings to these conceits is the only way to explain why he would allow our State Dept. to spend $70,000 on an ad buy in Pakistan apologizing for and denouncing the "Innocence of Muslims." It is as damaging to America as it is pathetic.



The hypocrisy of Islamist's calls to respect the prophet, even as the Muslim religion is premised on the most fundamental of blasphemies against Christianity, is mind-boggling to me. But in any event, the last thing we should be doing is silencing the criticism of Islam, let alone apologizing for it as a nation.

Our government stance must always be that people have the right to peacefully practice whatever faith they choose inside of our borders free of government sanction. But our Constitutional responsibilities end there. It does not require us to refrain from criticizing a religion mired in the 7th century, that causes bloodshed on a grand scale, that maintains itself by the sword, and that wishes to conquer by the sword. I do not know if Obama actually does not understand that, or whether he is too afraid of kicking the hornets' nest, or whether this is simply the natural result of a drift into anti-semitism and pro-Arab sympathies by those on the left generally.

Lastly, hats off to CBS News for their superb reporting on what actually happened and is happening in Benghazi relating to the deaths of our Ambassador and three other Americans. This from CBS News:



As summarized by Guy Benson at Town Hall:

Let's count the revelations embedded within this minute-and-a-half long clip:

(1) "The FBI still hasn't made it to the crime scene in Benghazi." More on this later, but the fact that the administration is treating our sacked consulate as a "crime" scene is telling. This was a terrorist attack. An act of war. . . . We've dispatched criminal investigators to look into it, but they still haven't even made it to ground zero yet? Nine days after the fact? Why?

(2) "Witnesses tell CBS News that there was never an anti-American protest outside of the consulate. Instead, they say it came under planned attack." As I wrote this morning, the administration is at last beginning to acknowledge the latter fact, but the former element is crucial, too. If there really were no protests outside the consulate before the ambush began -- as multiple news outlets are now reporting -- even the premise of the administration's fictional account is false. CBS says the facts on the ground are in "direct contradiction" to the White House's statements. The administration is still saying that the raid could have spun out from spontaneous protests that didn't even exist.

(3) "What's clear...is that the public won't get a detailed account of what happened until after the presidential election." This conclusion strongly reinforces several of my theories about the White House's foot-dragging and misdirection on the Benghazi raid. We have a murdered ambassador and sensitive intelligence missing, and the administration is in pure political CYA mode.

Nice Deb also has an excellent round-up on these topics.

Dr. Sanity has returned to the blogging world (thankfully) and has a particularly insightful post on the administrations decision to run an ad in Pakistan denouncing the "Innocence of Muslims" film trailer, The Obama Apology Tour Continues:

I regret to inform those that support the constant apologizing, that the increasingly violent Islamic response to appeasement, solicitation, and understanding has always been completely predictable from a psychological perspective. Bullies will always push the envelope of bad behavior when they think they can get away with it.

Here's a tip for the clueless Obama Administration and their supporters:

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LA Times Op-Ed: Applying A Reasonable Radical Muzzie Standard To The 1st Amendment

Update: Welcome Crusader Rabbit readers. Unless you want to read an exposition on U.S. law of freedom of speech, the parts you want to read are higihlighted in yellow.
_________________________

Writing in the LA Times, Sarah Chayes, like many on the left, is demanding that the producer of the "Innocence of Muslims" be tried for inciting the violence of 9-11-12. Leave aside for the moment that this argument is a pretext to take focus off of Obama's failed foreign policy, just as for the radical Islamists, the movie was itself a pretext for their violence directed at the U.S.

The roadblock to the left's call for prosecution is the First Amendment. But Ms. Chayes has an answer to that - stop applying the test of how a "reasonable person" would react to particular speech, and apply the test of how radical Muslims would react to the same speech. Ms. Chayes would give radical Islamists control over our right of free speech and insert a de facto "blasphemy" exception into our Constitutional law, one applicable only to Islam. This from Ms. Chayes in the LA Times:

In one of the most famous 1st Amendment cases in U.S. history, Schenck vs. United States, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. established that the right to free speech in the United States is not unlimited. "The most stringent protection," he wrote on behalf of a unanimous court, "would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

Holmes' test — that words are not protected if their nature and circumstances create a "clear and present danger" of harm — has since been tightened. But even under the more restrictive current standard, "Innocence of Muslims," the film whose video trailer indirectly led to the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens among others, is not, arguably, free speech protected under the U.S. Constitution and the values it enshrines . . .

The current standard for restricting speech — or punishing it after it has in fact caused violence — was laid out in the 1969 case Brandenburg vs. Ohio. Under the narrower guidelines, only speech that has the intent and the likelihood of inciting imminent violence or lawbreaking can be limited.

Likelihood is the easiest test. In Afghanistan, where I have lived for most of the past decade, frustrations at an abusive government and at the apparent role of international forces in propping it up have been growing for years. But those frustrations are often vented in religious, not political, terms, because religion is a more socially acceptable, and safer, rationale for public outcry. . . .

As a threshold matter, despite Ms. Chayes's obfuscations, the law applicable to the film in question is crystal clear and long settled. The Supreme Court held, in the 1952 case of Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson that the makers of a sacriligous film could not be prosecuted for their speech:

[T]he state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them which is sufficient to justify prior restraints upon the expression of those views. It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches, or motion pictures.

Ms. Chayes wholly ignores that case law to make her argument. But even then, and leaving aside whether the speech has any intrinsic "value," the Holmes test mentioned by Ms. Chayes is ultimately a test of how a reasonable person in OUR society would react in the circumstances, not how al Qaeda members living in Egypt would react. In America, a reasonable person does not react with violence, even when an artist displays a crucifix in a jar of urine, when Louis Farrakhan regularly denigrates Judaism, when Islam strips Christ of his divinity, or even when the Onion uses an obscene cartoon to make the point that reasonable people in our nation do not respond with violence to criticism of the basest sort against their religion.

Most importantly, there is a historical reason to treat Ms. Shayes's argument with utter derision. The questioning of religious dogma and customs were critical parts of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and such questioning was the entire basis for the Reformation. Those titanic events of Western History took all aspects of our civilization, including our religious practices, out of the Dark Ages and into modernity.

Without these titanic historical periods, we would still be living under the yoke of a Dark Ages interpretation of religion. Witches would be executed, as would blasphemers and heretics. Any criticism of religious dogma would be met with violence. Any who left our religion would be subject to murder. Corruption among the clerics would be beyond reproach. Religion, instead of being a faith, would be a central tool of political power and state control. Our civilization would be dysfunctional, not dynamic.  Our government would subject people of other religions to severe state discrimination. Modern science, sparked by the Enlightenment and the basis for all of the technological advances of Western civilization, would have been severely circumscribed. Wouldn't that be horrendous?

Well, take a look at Islam today as practiced in the Middle East, and that is what you will find - all those things and more in every country with a Muslim government. And as to science, do note that Saudi Arabia only put the flat earth theory behind them with the recent turn of the millenium. A fatwa issued by the Grand Mufti in 1993 instructed "the earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment."

The radical Muzzies  have never gone through a period of Enlightenment, a Renaissance or a Reformation.  And they never will if criticism of their religion, in any and every form, is silenced. That is the world to which Ms. Chayes would consign Muslims, and if not altered, it is a world that will inevitably lead to an existential clash with our own civilization.  Ms. Chayes's proposal is the precise opposite of what is needed, both for the Muslim world and our own.

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How Should We Respond To Charges Of Blasphemy Against Islam

Six months after declaring that all churches in the Arabian peninsula should be destroyed, Saudi Arabia’s top cleric called at the weekend for a global ban on insults targeting all religious “prophets and messengers,” a category that, from a Muslim perspective, includes Jesus Christ.

Leading Sunni Clerics Demand Global Ban on Insults to Islam, CNS News, 17 Sep. 2012

“We never insult any prophet — not Moses, not Jesus — so why can’t we demand that Muhammad be respected?” Mr. Ali, a 39-year-old textile worker said, holding up a handwritten sign in English that read “Shut Up America.”

Cultural Clash Fuels Muslims Angry at Online Video, NYT, 16 Sep. 2012

Allow me to respond to your contentions, Grand Mufti and Mr. Ali.

Your religion is unique in many ways - one of which is that adopts a false Christianity as part of its founding narrative. Islam claims that Jesus is a "prophet" of its religion while ignoring his teachings and denying his divinity. In the Dome of the Rock Mosque, built atop the most holy site in the Jewish faith, there is an inscription now 1,300 years old:

The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, is only an apostle of God, and his Word which he conveyed unto Mary, and a Spirit proceeding from him. Believe therefore in God and his apostles, and say not Three. It will be better for you. God is only one God. Far be it from his glory that he should have a son.

Now, that is blasphemy in its purest sense. It irks me, but I ignore it, thinking only that you are misguided. But if you and your fellow Muslims in the Middle East, on the other hand, are prepared to do violence because someone in the U.S. said something not nice about Mohammed - well, you can pack it where the sun doesn't shine. And if you act violently, expect an appropriate response in return, bearing in mind that our tolerance level for your infantile, hypocritical and outrageous acts is not infinite. At some point, your violence will beget a response of overwhelming force.

As to Jesus, while the Koran claims to adopt him as part of Islamic faith, yet the Koran adopts none of his teachings. Perhaps most importantly, Jesus commanded us to follow the Golden Rule. Mohammed acknowledged no Golden Rule. To the contrary:

Islam does not enjoin believers to do unto infidels as you would have infidels do unto you. On the contrary! Islam tells its followers to subdue infidels; to kill them; to, at best, reduce them to dhimmitude.

And as to the Dome of the Rock, let's talk about the detestable Muslim habit of attempting to wipe out symbols and buildings of other faiths - an act directed by the Koran, verse 018:021. The Dome of the Rock was built on the holiest Jewish site, the Temple Mount, 1,300 years ago. It wasn't until 800 years ago that Muslims justified this on the claim, apparently made out of thin air, that this was a site also intrinsically holy to Muslims because of Mohammed's night ride. Everywhere Islam conquered, they built mosques on top of the holy sites of Christianity, with Constantinople and Cordoba being the two most famous of thousands of examples. Unfortunately, this is not merely historical - it continues to this day, from destroying ancient historic Buhddist statues in Afghanistan to the destruction of Churches in Nigeria, Egypt the West Bank - and let's not forget Jordan's industrial scale destruction of Jewish holy sites after they captured the Jewish Quarter in Jerulsalem.

I could raise an entire litany of other examples. There is the Muslim world's glorification of the most animalistic, subhuman acts of terror directed against Jews and Christians. There is the Koran's direction that it is acceptable to rape and enslave non-Muslims. There is the officially sanctioned discrimination against Christians and the few Jews left in every country with an Islamic government. There is the murder of homosexuals and people accused of witchcraft, not to mention the grossly unequal, violent treatment of women.

I consider the vast majority of these things to be a blasphemy against my religion - and indeed, all of these things to be a blasphemy against humanity. Here is reality. Your nations have produced nothing to advance civilization in the past near millenium. Today, the Arab Middle East is a cesspool of poverty, corruption and dysfunction - and that is not the fault of the West, not the fault of the Crusades, not the fault of 'Western imperialism,' and not the fault of America, where if you want to practice your religion in peace, you are perfectly welcome to do so. It is the fault of Islam and an Islamic culture that is, in the words of Churchill, the most "retrograde force" on this earth.

The best thing that I and the world can do for you is to criticize your religion and demand that you reform it to the point that its believers comport with civilized behavior. The best thing that you can do is evolve your culture and religion.

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Prof. Ann Althouse on Free Speech Rights

In an addendum to a post that she wrote today, blogger and law professor Ann Althouse wrote a short and concise summary of Free Speech rights in the U.S., pointing in particular to a 1952 case in which the Supreme Court held that a state could not prosecute an individual for blashemy for producing a film with anti-Christian overtones.  This from Prof. Althouse, with a warning::

We're not that far from criminalizing blasphemy in the United States, though it seems obvious to educated Americans today that [blasphemy] laws are unconstitutional. Here's a quick summary of the history of blasphemy law in the U.S. And here's the 1952 case Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson where the Supreme Court struck down a New York law that banned showing "sacrilegious" movies. New York's highest court had interpreted the statute to mean "that no religion, as that word is understood by the ordinary, reasonable person, shall be treated with contempt, mockery, scorn and ridicule." The U.S. Supreme Court said:

[T]he state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them which is sufficient to justify prior restraints upon the expression of those views. It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches, or motion pictures.

My point is: it took a Supreme Court case as recently as 1952, to establish that principle in our country, with its rich free-speech tradition. Lawyers even saw fit at that time to argue that movies shouldn't get free-speech protection at all because "their production, distribution, and exhibition is a large-scale business conducted for private profit."

Oh, wait, the President of the United States today argues that corporations don't have free-speech rights, and many Americans, including highly educated lawyers, are saying the Constitution should be amended to delete those rights. 

Let's not be so quick to assume the man with the "Shut Up America" sign is thoroughly alien. The threats to free speech lie within. They always have.

Do visit her blog daily.  It is always interesting and insightful.

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Outrageous: Justice Dept. Publicly Fingers Key Figure Behind Anti-Muslim Film (Updated)

This is perhaps the single most outrageous act of the Obama administration and Eric Holder's Justice Dept. to date - and that is saying a lot.

Federal authorities have identified a southern California man once convicted of financial crimes as the key figure behind the anti-Muslim film that ignited mob violence against U.S. embassies across the Mideast, a U.S. law enforcement official said Thursday.

Attorney General Eric Holder said that Justice Department officials had opened a criminal investigation into the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other diplomats killed during an attack on the American mission in Benghazi. It was not immediately clear whether authorities were focusing on the California filmmaker as part of that probe.

The "key figure" had used an alias in making the film for his own personal security. The AP article quoted above goes on to provide the actual name of "key figure." I will not repeat it here.

To be clear, it doesn't matter WHO produced this film. It is not a crime. So what possible justification is there for the FBI to publicly identify the "key figure" behind this film? There is none. Our 1st Amendment absolutely forbids any legal action against this man. This is thuggery in its purest form - endangering the life of the person fingered and sending a message to anyone else in the U.S. who might want to make their feelings on Islam known but are too afraid to exercise their rights without anonymity because some Salafi nut job might behead them.

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Update: Instapundit has gone nuclear over this in a series of long posts and round-ups, opining that "Barack Obama should resign." See here, here, here and here. -------------

You want to know the true canard of the Obama administration. Its that this film trailer, available world wide on Youtube for two months, was anything other than a pretext for the Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood to organize violence against the U.S. on 9-11. What our government should be doing is naming those bastards, either as part of an arrest or as notification of their next of kin. Instead, we apologize to them for our freedom of speech and now publicly finger the "key figure" behind the movie.

The modern left has nothing but contempt for "free speech" - at least to the extent that it is speech with which they personally disagree. The left's support of Islam does not arise out of respect for religion, but out of a common cause to undermine the Christian foundations of our society. Does Holder and the left really want to play this game of making "blasphemy" a crime in the U.S.? The same people who denigrate Christianity at seemingly every available opportunity want to make "blasphemy" a crime? Does this mean we can prosecute the "key figure" behind "Religuous?"

Salafi Islam and Iran's own version of it, the veleyat-e-faqi, are not religions, they are cults. The "Allah" they worship is immoral and bloodthirsty, barbaric and pitiless, irrational and intent on the destruction of all things not Islamic. Unless Salafi Islam, and indeed, all of Arab culture goes through a "rennasaince" and "reformation," we are ultimately headed towards a genocidal conflict not of our choosing. The only other alternative is to mobilize public opinion on a massive scale by unapologetically shining a blinding spotlight on these cults - the ones' that believe it is fine to assassinate anyone who leaves their religion, or who disagrees with their interpretation of the Koran, or that murdering 3,000 innocent people on a single day eleven years ago was a good thing, and that the perpetrators are in heaven enjoying non-stop sex and wine. We can fight this with guns or the pressure of public opinion on a world wide scale. But we are going to fight it one way or the other. Eric Holder and Obama would have it be with guns.

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Update: ABC News is now reporting that the film maker might face jail time for his movie. The only "crime" here is that the Obama administration wants to deflect the reality of today's radicalized Middle East onto the film maker. This is the most blatant and grotesque violation of the First Amendment I can ever recall. It is Orwellian in its purest sense. And it really is a red line. If he spends a day in jail over this, this country needs not an election, but a revolution. -------------

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Obama Prostrates America Before The UN Human Rights Council

Before getting to the meat of this story, you need to understand that the UN Human Rights Council is a travesty of grotesque proportions. Indeed, it is the poster child for why the US needs to stop participating in the UN and create an alternative of free countries.

Under Bush, the U.S. refused to participate in this utter joke. But the Obama administration decided to embrace the council.

The UN Human Rights Council has become nothing more than a propaganda tool of Middle East dictatorships who dominate the 47-member body. The near sole focus of its condemnation has been, for years, Israel. (Indeed, on that note, I would recommend you visit Soccer Dad and read his entries for the infamous Goldstone Report.)

When not condemning Israel, the UN Human Rights Council condemns the U.S.. Its other major work has been to work towards a blasphemy law that would make criticism of Islam a violation of human rights. Could there possibly be a more wrong-headed and dangerous policy? The members of the Council include or have included such stalwart protectors of human rights as Iran, Pakistan, Libya, Cuba, and China.

This speech to the UN Human Rights Council by the Executive Director of UN Watch sums up most of what is wrong with the Human Rights Council:



And now, Obama has chosen not to merely join the UN Human Rights Council, but to prostrate our nation before this scurrilous body and claim that the US is a human rights abuser:

The Obama administration has told the United Nations that America's human rights record is less than perfect while stressing that the U.S. political system has built-in safeguards that promote improvements.

In its first-ever report to the U.N. Human Rights Council on conditions in the United States, the State Department said some minorities are still victims of discrimination. Despite progress in reforming past unfair policies and practices, the report said "work remains to meet our goal of ensuring equality before the law for all."

You can find the 27 page report here. Most of the report reads like an Obama campaign speech. That said, it includes, for example:

We are not satisfied with a situation where the unemployment rate for African Americans is 15.8%, for Hispanics 12.4%, and for whites 8.8%, as it was in February 2010. We are not satisfied that a person with disabilities is only one fourth as likely to be employed as a person without disabilities. We are not satisfied when fewer than half of African-American and Hispanic families own homes while three quarters of white families do. We are not satisfied that whites are twice as likely as Native Americans to have a college degree. The United States continues to address such disparities by working to ensure that equal opportunity is not only guaranteed in law but experienced in fact by all Americans.

Obviously the only reason for the disparity can be rampant discrimination. And thus, the only answer can be punitive race based social engineering. As an aside, if you don't understand why we are in the economic meltdown that we are today, it is staring you in the face.

At any rate, what will happen now with this report is described by ImpeachObama:

The national report is but the first step of the international government’s review process. On November 5, the United States will be examined by a troika of UN bureaucrats from France, Japan, and Cameroon (an oppressive nation which is a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference). This trio will consider three items: Obama’s self-flagellating report, reports written about America by UN tribunals or international governing bodies, and testimony from NGOs with a pronounced anti-American bias. It will also consider “voluntary pledges and commitments made by the State,” such as suspending an Arizona state law.

Then the French, Japanese, and Cameroon diplomats will draw up a plan of action for the United States to implement.

Nations are re-examined every four years. The Human Rights Council looks for voluntary compliance. However, its website asserts, “The Human Rights Council will decide on the measures it would need to take in case of persistent non-cooperation by a State with the” World Body.

We are the freest and "least racist" country on the face of this earth. And now Obama is subjecting our nation to review by one of the most corrupt bodies on the world stage. Would Obama have done anything differently if his explicit goal was to hurt the standing of the U.S. and play into the hands of the world's worst human rights abusers?

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Politicized Science

. . . The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. . . .

President Barack Obama, Memorandum, Subject: Scientific Integrity, 9 March 2009

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Obama strikes the highest of moral poses, yet scratch the surface and you will find no morality underneath. As has regularly been the case with Obama and the far left, the statists at the UN included, the gulf between words and deeds is a yawning chasm. In terms of politicized science, we have been treated over the past two months to:

- Obama's EPA making repeated claims that the science of global warming is "settled" and that regulation of CO2 is the only way to stave off disaster, yet suppressing its own internal study critical of the underlying science and that calls these conclusions into doubt. (H/T What Bubba Knows)

Update: This from CNET News:

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an independent review process inside a federal agency--and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels." . . .

(H/T Memorandum)

- Last week, Team Obama released a 196 page report, "Global Climate Change Impacts In The United States" that contains so many inaccuracies and false claims that, as one climate scientist has stated, it would "make Pravda blush." And indeed, one of the major scientists whose data is relied upon in the report, Roger Pielke Jr., has taken the authors to task for wholly misrepresenting his work.

- Several weeks ago, during the House Energy Committee's truncated hearings on cap and trade, Democrats trotted out Al Gore, yet shielded him from testifying alongside Lord Christopher Monckton. Gore, who has long explicitly advocated suppressing dissenting voices on global warming, regularly ducks debates on the topic. There is probably no greater measure of how politicized the science of global warming actually is than the fact that its foremost proponent is unwilling to engage in public debate on the topic.

- The UN International Panel On Climate Change, an organization notorious for its suppression of dissenting voices and for presenting twisted and sometimes outright false data, is preparing for the next round of talks in Copenhagen. A subcommittee on polar bears is meeting now to prepare their report for the conference - but absent is one of the leading polar bear experts, Dr. Mitchell Taylor. He was disinvited because he does not believe carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming. Further, his own findings are that "global warming" is not harming the polar bears, with their numbers at optimum or growing - a truly inconvenient truth that we will not hear at the Copenhagen Conference. (H/T Crusader Rabbit)

When it comes to politicization of science, Obama and the left are bathing in it. They are pushing it to promote the vast expansion of government into, as Speaker Pelosi said, "every aspect of our lives."

The problems of politicized science are obvious. One is that, if acted upon, it will result in the massive misallocation of resources. A person need look no further in that regard than the House vote on Friday to enact a massive carbon tax. The plan will have negligible impact on global temperatures yet will have a huge negative impact on our lives. If enacted, it will drive substantial resources away from productive areas of the economy while, as Doug Ross notes, providing the engine for massive social engineering. Another example has been the disastrous push into bio-fuels. That push has critically lessened world agricultural production and, last year, drove food prices rocketing upwards to a level from which they have not returned.

The second effect of politicized science is more subtle, but equally as destructive. It is that scientific theories and observations that do not fit the politicized paradigm get ignored.

One example of that concerns the growing problem of droughts. According to the global warming crowed, carbon dioxide is the culprit. This from Peter Schwerdtfeger, emeritus professor of meteorology at Flinders University, writing in the Australian:

. . . Two decades ago, I pored over the spectral properties of the infra-red radiation of [carbon dioxide], which is essential to plant life, and found that it was almost completely overshadowed by the radiative properties of water vapour, which is vital to all forms of life on earth.

Repeatedly in science we are reminded that happenings in nature can rarely be ascribed to a single phenomenon. For example, sea levels on our coasts are dependent on winds and astronomical forces as well as atmospheric pressure and, on a different time scale, the temperature profile of the ocean. Now, with complete abandon, a vociferous body of claimants is insisting that CO2 alone is the root of climatic evil. . . .

. . . I do not believe for one moment that undisciplined burning of fossil fuels is harmless, but the most awful consequence of the burning of carboniferous fuels is not the release of CO2 but the large-scale injection of minute particulate pollutants into the atmosphere.

Detailed studies led by internationally acclaimed cloud physicist Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have revealed that the minute water vapour droplets that form around some carbon particles are so small as to be almost incapable of being subsequently coalesced into larger precipitable drops. In short, the particulates prevent rainfall.

Rosenfeld's research group has shown that humans are changing the climate in a much more direct way than through the release of CO2. Rather, pollution is seriously inhibiting rain over mountains in semi-arid regions, a phenomenon with dire consequences for water resources in the Middle East and many other parts of the world, including China and Australia.

Rosenfeld is no snake-oil salesman. As an American Meteorological Society medallist, he has an internationally endorsed research record in cloud physics that no living Australian can claim to emulate. . . .

If Rosenfeld's scientific interpretations are correct, then southern Australia would greatly benefit from the application of his discoveries. At the very least, Rosenfeld's conclusions should be accorded appropriate evaluation and testing by an unprejudiced panel of peers.

Yet his work so far has been ignored in Australia because it does not fit in with the dominant paradigm that holds CO2 responsible for reduced rainfall in semi-arid regions. . . .

(H/T EU Referendum)

Yet a second example of this same evil could well prove the most disastrous of all. Those who fully embrace global warming are ignoring the signs of a cooling earth and actual cold-weather related drops in agricultural production. See here and here.

I had to laugh in March when Obama excoriated Bush for supposedly "politicizing science," particularly on the stem cell issue - an issue, as Charles Krauthammer pointed out, on which Bush had taken an ethical stand that had nothing to do with politicization. Nothing Bush did begins to compare with how Obama, the UN and the green left have politicized the science of global warming. Indeed, one would have to go back to the Catholic Church of medieval times to find anything comparable. They get away with it because a corrupt media utterly ignores their mammoth hypocrisy. Thus, as Dr. North at EU Referendum notes, the debate is rigged:

This is a broader point that deserves more attention, touching on an effect we see in defence and elsewhere. The media – as a collective – has its own narratives and as long as an utterance fits with those narratives, it is given an airing. That which goes against the grain is buried.

Currently, the media narrative on climate change is that global warming is real and represents a major threat to the planet and humankind. Similarly, all the woes in the military stem from "under-resourcing" and all problems in Afghanistan will be solved by more "boots on the ground". Thus is the debate rigged, through which means our decline into obscurity, poverty and impotence is managed.

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Obama's Cairo Address: Hiding From The Existential Problems Of The Muslim World

The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. . . .

President Barack Obama, Cairo Address, 4 June 2009

What we needed from the leader of the free world was honesty with both the Muslim world and with us. What we were treated to instead were apologetics and dissimulation about the existential problems facing the Muslim world. One, Obama needed to honestly identify the source of violence arising out of Islam. He did not. Two, there is a war raging for the heart and soul of Islam. It is a war between those who would see their religion evolve and those who wish to see it stay static in the tribal dogma of 7th century Arabia and the 12th century philosophy of ibn Tamiyah. Obama needed to acknowledge this war of ideas and he needed to show support for the reformers. He did neither.

Obama claimed that "violent extremists" from a "small minority" of Muslims are at the heart of violence arising out of the Islamic world. That is a gross distortion of the truth and an incredibly dangerous one - if one cannot identify the source of violence, then one cannot act to stop it.

The engines of Muslim violence are the dogma of Wahhabi/Salafi Islam and its variants, including Khomeinist Shia'ism:

Wahhabi / Salafi Islam, [has been] exported from Saudi Arabia to all four corners of the world with billions in petrodollars to become the dominant form of Islam in the West, [and is vying to replace all other forms of Sunni Islam in the Muslim world]. According to Dr. Tawfiq Hamid, a former Salafi terrorist and member of Ayman al Zawahiri’s Jamaah Islamiyah, their faith in the medieval dogma of Wahhabi / Salafi / Deobandi Islam is what drives their violence:

The goal of Salafi Islam is "complete Islamic dominance." Salafi dogma holds that the duty of every Muslim is to wage "jihad against non-Muslims and subdue them to Shari'a - the duty of every true Muslim . . . [It is] to engage in war against the infidels, the enemies of Allah.

And as Zuhdi Jasser explains, terrorism is far more than a mere anomaly as . . . [some are] suggesting:

[Citizens] need to understand that this is not a conflict against a tactic but rather a common ideology which utilizes a radical interpretation of Islam and is a natural off-shoot from political Islam.

NRO Interview of M. Zhudi Jasser

And then there is this warning from Tawfiq Hamdid, explaining why it is so important to identify the source of this evil, not just for the protection of the West, but equally for the protecton of Muslims:

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.

Tawfiq Hamid. See also my posts here, here and here. Obama's refusal to face this issue head on and speak the truth to the Muslim world has a three fold effect. One, it gives cover to Wahhabism to continue its growing march free from criticism of its vile tenets, among which include that is morally permissible, if not required, to slaughter non-Muslims and to appropriate their property. Two, it demonstrates a complete lack of support for those who fight against this scourge in the Muslim world. And three, it allows Muslims to deny responsiblity for their plight and their failure to reform their religion.

As to the war of ideas raging in Islam today, it is a war being waged by the extremely powerful and well funded Salafi/Wahhabi sects and the Khomeinist variant of Shia'ism against the other sects of Islam and against individuals committed to reform of their religion. Among their number are Zuhdi Jasser, Tawfiq Hamid, Ibn Warraq, Dr. Taj Hargey and the Center for Islamic Pluralism. They war for the heart and soul of Islam. It is a war whose outcome will be every bit as important for the future of the world as was the outcome of World War II. And to remain neutral in this war would be no different than if the U.S. had remained neutral in the European theatre of World War II, allowing Hitler to conquer all of Europe. Yet Obama, with his refusal to even acknowledge this issue in his Cairo address, has chosen precisely that path.

One of the most recent salvos in that war of ideas came from inside the United Nations. Wahhabists and Khomeinists have been agitating for years to impose blasphemey laws on the West. The result of such laws would be to make it inevitable that Salafi and Khomeinist Islam would triumph in the war of ideas. It would mean that these deeply dangerous ideologies would be able to spread through the West hidden from criticism by West's own criminal laws. In August, 2008, the "Human Rights Council at the United Nations . . . banned any criticism regarding Sharia Law and human rights in the Islamic World." And now, the OIC is pushing U.N. Resolution 62/154, on "Combating defamation of religions," through the U.N. that would, if effectuated, have the West in fact adopt such blasphemy laws.

This challenge to freedom of speech world wide could not be any more insidious nor dangerous, both to us and the entire Muslim world. Yet Obama did not so much as mention it in his speech.

Obama, instead of addressing any of these issues head on in his Cairo address, did nothing more than restate the Wahhabi and Khomeinist propaganda - that Western modernity is at odds with Islam and that a good portion of Islam's problems arise out of the "colonialism" of "the West."

What Obama did was a a trick out of Psychology 101. It is a technique that he uses often. He articulates the complaints of his audience without judgment. This is effective because it leaves the audience with the belief that Obama understands their complaint and empathizes with it. But the downside of that technique is that, if it is not followed by some clearly articulated honesty, it simply reinforces in the audience that their complaints are valid. It is a superb technique for psychologists, mediators, and politicians campaigning for office. It is a dangerous tool indeed for a person charged with the responsibilities of leadership.

And instead of following his restatement with honesty, Obama followed with a recounting of Islamic achievements. They were many, and they were invaluable. They also occurred a millenium ago. What Obama needed to drive home was the honest and brutal truth - something akin to the following:

There was a time when Europeans, seeking enlightenment and learning, studied at the feet of Islamic scholars. It is a time long past but not forgotten, at least by those who seek to restore their lost Empire at any and all costs. Since its Golden Age during the Moorish Empire a millennium ago, Islamic history has been in an steady tailspin that has led to a culture of victimhood and death fueled by religious hatred, sectarian violence, centuries of isolation from Western enlightenment, and an overwhelming almost mystical desire to restore past glories. Today, the Arab world is constituted by a series of twenty-two failed states bereft, for the most part, of progressive leaders and unable to produce one single manufactured product that can compete on world markets. Far from being an enlightened civilization, it has become a cultural backwater replete with massive poverty, repressive governments, vast illiteracy, medieval laws, rising Islamist anger and a Gross Domestic Product less than that of . . . Spain. [It should not be that way. It need not be that way.]

Read the entire article.

The problem could not be any clearer. Nor could the solution. I wrote precisely on this topic on March 31, 2007 in response to the OIC's initial attack on Western freedom of speech. I repost that essay here:
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The reason we face the problem of radical Islam today is that, in its entire history, Islam has seen no Renaissance, no Reformation, no Period of Enlightenment. These titanic events in Western history led to the development of secular values that came out of, but were separate from, the Judeo-Christian religion that birthed them. And these events gradually took religion from the sphere of a government imposition and moved it into the realm of the individual and local community.

The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment were each developed through the process of critical thought - the questioning and challenging of religious ideals and dogma. It was this critical thought that allowed the West to seperate the wheat -- the belief in God and universal concepts of moral behavior -- from the chaff of religion – dogma that restricted development in all aspects of society: political, artistic, scientific, philosophical. Thus, today do our universities turn out the finest scientists, the finest writers, the finest mathematicians and astronomers, while the universities in Saudi Arabia primarily turn out Wahhabi clerics. And it is why the West leads the world in science and the arts while the morals police in Saudi Arabia hunt down sorcerers and the Saudi courts apply Wahhabi Sharia law to order the flogging of victims of gang rape.

There are seeds from which a Muslim Enlightenment could yet occur. They would require criticism and debate to take root. Yet these seeds are under mortal threat today from the growth of Wahhabi / Salafi Islam.

The seeds which would allow for an Enlightenment lie in Islam's earliest history. Year 1 to Muslims begins with Hijra, Mohammed’s emigration to Medina in 622 A.D. When Mohammed died, Islam was still largely confined to Arabia. It is important to note that, before Mohammed died, he left his followers with a concept most clearly stated in a hadith - an authenticated saying of Mohammed. That hadith provides that the ummah – the community of Muslims – can “never agree on an error.” Complimenting this in the Koran, it says “People, you order what is right, forbid what is wrong, and you believe in God.” (3:110)

These concepts, taken together, allow for the evolution of Islam. And in another critical development following Mohammed’s death, as Islam progressed, there came the concept of ijtihad (see here and here). Ijtihad is the practice of reasoning from the texts, the hadiths, the sunna and the works of scholars to determine what Islam should mean, what it should approve and disapprove. If there will ever be a moderation of Islam, it will come from those concepts of the hadith and the Koran mentioned above, and from the practice of ijtihad.

The remainder of Islam's history tells us why these seeds of an Enlightenment never took root. Following Mohammed’s death, Islam spread at a pace never before or since duplicated. Its rapid expansion – by the sword – continued almost unchecked for the next several hundred years. Actually, in this regard, for any Muslim to criticize the West as imperialistic is irony of the highest order. The West are pikers compared to the Islamic caliphates. Within 130 years following the Hijra, Arabic Muslims had conquered the Middle East, Turkey, all of North Africa, and the better part of Spain, and they were fighting battles inside France.

Through about 1100 A.D., Islamic society, led by the Arabs, far outshone the West in learning and technology. It was a far more enlightened society than what was to be found in Europe at the time. Indeed, at the turn of the first millenium, the premier city in the world was not London, Paris or Rome, but Baghdad. But, along with this vast expansion powered by the belief in Islamic destiny came the desire to control the precise nature of Islam by the Caliphs. At the end of the tenth century, the “gates of ijtihad” were ordered closed by the Caliphs and the Muslim philosophers cooperated. The concept of free reasoning fell from grace in Islam. This closing of the gates of ijtihad is credited by many scholars as the cause of the stagnation of Islam in succeeding centuries.

But there was much worse on the horizon. In the late 12th century came invasion by the Turks, followed closely by Ghengis Khan and the Mongol horde in the thirteenth century. For the Arabs, this was a catastrophe of titanic proportions. They were overrun, and it was the Turks, practitioners of Sufi Islam, not the Arabs, who emerged as the leadership of Islam. And into this time of turmoil was born Ibn Taymiya, the man whose philosophy and writings would be the foundation for Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi Islam.

Taymiya started from the proposition that Islam was from God, and it was God’s intent that Islam should spread to the four corners of the earth. In this light, Taymiya saw the success of the Turk and Mongol conquers as a punishment from God because Arab Muslims had allowed Islam to be corrupted. His answer was to return to what he believed animated Islam at the time of Mohammed. He was puritanical and a literalist. The Islam he envisioned was one of absolute tenets – dogmatic and beyond questioning.

Fast forward to eighteenth century Arabia, where Ibn Wahhab was born. Wahhab embraced embraced the teachings of Taymiya and built upon them, arguing that any deviation therefrom was heretical and that the offender should be put to death. Wahhab promoted a triumphalist and imperialistic religion that saw anyone not in its membership as an enemy to be converted, conquered or killed. There has been little if any deviation from Wahhab's original dogma through to the modern day. Indeed, for example, one aspect of Wahhabi doctrine, taught in Saudi schools at least as recently as 2003, is that it is permissible to enslave “polytheists.” That comes from a Saudi textbook. If you are a Christian, by the way, you are a polytheist. Wahhabism is the soul of radical Islam. To go against any tenet of Wahhabi Islam is to conduct impermissible innovation and thus, to be labeled takfir, an unbeliever, – and subject to losing your head.

To continue with the chronology, Wahhab found his way to Najd, a backwater of Arabia controlled by tribe of the Sauds. Wahhab partnered with the Sauds and what followed, over the next two centuries, was an incredibly savage conquest of the Arabian peninsula by the House of Saud. And in each place they conquered, they imposed Wahhabi Islam.

Fast forward now to the 20th century. Two events of note occur. 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 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.

The second event of note was the triumph of Wahhabi Islam with the conquest of Arabia by the House of Saud. Indeed, even before the final conquest, Wahhabi Islam had already influenced – or infected, if you like – many of the other schools of Islam. Two prime examples are the Pakistani Deobandi school that today is the basis for the Taliban, as well Islam in Egypt, from whence arose the first truly modern radical Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.

But Wahhabi Islam only truly became an engine of conquest with the growth of the oil industry and the influx of billions of petrodollars into Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is spending these billions to spread its brand of Islam to the four corners of the world and to supplant the other schools of Islam. Other than oil, Saudi Arabia’s main exports are Wahhabi clerics, Wahhabi mosques, and Wahhabi schools to every corner of the world. Further, the petrodollars are used to fund the Middle East studies program at most major colleges in the Western World – whose teaching invariably cover, cover for, and cover up Wahhabi Islam – and to fund Wahhabi organizations such as CAIR that perform much the same function in Western society at large.

I do not know that Wahhabi Islam also influenced and radicalized Ayatollah Khoemeni. But, given that he took Iranian Shia Islam out of its historically nonpolitical role in Iran and thrust Shiaism, for the first time in history, into the political realm with the creation of Iran’s theocracy, I would suspect that it did. I would be absolutely amazed if some scholar did not eventually catalogue such an influence. (Update: See this from Francis Fukuyama in the WSJ making this connection)

To sum up, the whole of the Islamic world is endangered by the growth of Wahhabi Islam. And Wahhabi Islam holds it dogma to be beyond question – upon pain of censure or even death. If there is to be a moderation and modernization of Islam – a Reformation and Period of Enlightenment if you will – it will not will arise out of Wahhabi Islam without tremendous bloodshed.

Ultimately, in the world of ideas, it is only through questioning and critical reasoning that advancements occur. To put an Islamic face on that, it is only through the embrace of ijtihad and the concepts of Islam discussed earlier that there is any chance that Islam will finally see a great historical change to moderate and modernize from Wahhab’s vision of 7th century Islam into a form of Islam that can coexist with the rest of the world in the 21st century. And Western society has an obligation not to be coerced into silence, but to openly criticize what we find dangerous and wrong in Islam. If our voice is cowed, how can we expect the voice of would be moderates in the world of Islam to stand up - and withstand the inevitable Wahhabi onslaught to their existence. The cost to humanity and the world if Islam does not have its Reformation and Enlightenment will almost assuredly be apocalyptic.

Which brings us to today, and the United Nations Human Rights Organization. I have already posted that I believe the UN exists in an alternate Islamic universe. It finds fault with illegal acts or human rights violations only in Israel. See here and here. But we have now reached the final Islamic straw.

Friday, March 30, 2007, Islamic countries pushed through a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council demanding a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion. Lest there be any doubt about which religion they are concerned with, the only religion mentioned in the resolution is Islam. As stated in the minutes from the UN Human Rights Council meeting:

The Council expresses deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations; notes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions, and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities, in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001; urges States to take resolute action to prohibit the dissemination including through political institutions and organizations of racist and xenophobic ideas and material aimed at any religion or its followers that constitute incitement to racial and religious hatred, hostility or violence; also urges States to provide adequate protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions, to take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and their value systems and to complement legal systems with intellectual and moral strategies to combat religious hatred and intolerance; . . .

The UN is only doing the work of radical Wahhabi Islamists at this point. If there is ever to be a peaceful coexistence with Muslims, the West cannot gag itself as CAIR and the Islamists at UN would have us do. We can coexist with Muslims as long as they are not trying to kill us and impose their religion by coercion or by working fundamental changes to our Western secular values with ridiculous charges of Islamaphobia. Unfortunately, that is not the reality. Thus, it is their religion that needs to change. It needs to go through its Reformation, and there needs to be a period of Enlightenment. The clearest way to stop this transformation from ever occurring is to outlaw criticism of Islam. This would be putting a nail into the coffin of Western civilization, in addition to insuring the ultimate domination of the Wahhabi philosophy in Islam.

If this is what we can expect from UN as reformed, it needs to be defunded by the U.S. In the Senate hearings for his confirmation as the new U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad has argued against defunding the UN but has also stated that the UN faces a “mortal threat" if it fails to reform. There are no reforms on the horizon. It is time to allow the UN to subsist on Rials until it does.
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A truly brave man would have spoken honestly and would tried to use the bully pulpit to support reforms in Islam. Obama is not that person, and we are less safe for it.

Summary - Obama's Cairo Address: What We Needed, What We Got
Part 1 - Obama's Cairo Address: Hiding From The Existential Problems Of The Muslim World
Part 2 - Obama's Cairo Address: A Walk Back From Democracy & Iraq
Part 3 - Obama's Cairo Address: Obama Calls For Women's Rights While Glossing Over Discrimination & Violence
Part 4 - Obama's Cairo Address: Nukes, Iran & Weakness Writ Large
Part 5 - Obama's Cairo Address: Israel & Palestine – A Little Good, A Lot Of Outrageousness
Part 6 - Obama's Cairo Address: Islam's Tradition Of Religious Tolerance?
Part 7 - Obama's Cairo Address: The Dangerous Whitewashing Of History

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