More Dangerous Than Bombs: Jihad By Subversion

When we started Citizen Warrior back in 2001, I knew very little about jihad. I just wanted to do something about "terrorism." But I have come to see that terrorism is merely a tactic, and it doesn't make any sense to fight a tactic. That would be like trying to fight planes — deciding that planes were the enemy — after Pearl Harbor.

The actual problem we are facing is the principle of Islamic jihad, which is a fundamental principle of the Islamic faith. According to the Qur'an, it is the duty of every faithful Muslim to fight the unbelievers, and to try, through every means possible, to make all countries in the world follow Allah's law (Shari'a).

Jihad is the problem. Not terrorism. Jihadists use terrorism as one of their many tactics. Another tactic is subversion. And another is deceit. And these three tactics are being used from within democratic countries. The jihadists are using the tolerance and freedom within democracies to cultivate the circumstances that will allow them to ultimately overthrow the government, remove freedoms, and replace our laws with Shari'a.

The Mapping Sharia Project (MSP) has sent undercover agents into mosques in the United States to see what techniques they are using, and MSP then turns their evidence over to the FBI.

One of MSP's many discoveries is Imam Yusuf Estes. He's an American convert to Islam and works out of a mosque in the greater D.C. area. Estes also runs and contributes to many web sites. He is actively engaged in gaining Muslim converts and promoting violent jihad.

Estes gave the undercover agent a CD. One of the things on the CD was a 17-page manual in English called The Book of Jihad, which is essentially 17 pages of quotes of Muhammad and passages from the Qur'an, and then commentary on those passages, which makes it very clear that Muslims have a sacred duty to wage jihad, wherever they are (even within a non-Muslim country), and by whatever means they can, including arming themselves and training for war.

The MSP had this summary of their contact with Estes and their review of the literature Estes gave them:

Yusuf Estes is a Jihadist. He is actively engaged in dawa to convert as many Muslims and non-Muslims to the way of Jihad and the political ideology of Islamic hegemony, all of which is intended to lead to the destruction of the U.S. as a constitutional republic. Jihad incorporates necessarily the use of violence when circumstances permit. While Estes lectures in public like an enthusiastic, yet peaceful preacher, he quite effectively pursues his goal of global Jihad through the “quiet” teachings of the literature he promotes.

Below are some quotes from the Book of Jihad. While you read them, imagine a teenage American Muslim, say a young man, impressed with Estes, reading these passages:

1332. `Uqbah bin `Amir Al-Juhani (May Allah be pleased with him) reported: I heard the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) saying from the pulpit, "Prepare to meet them (the enemy) with as much strength as you can afford. Verily! Strength is in archery, strength is in archery, strength is in archery.'' [Muslim].

Commentary: In accordance with the conditions of his times, the Prophet (PBUH) ordained the Muslims to acquire every possible power and keep it ready for war. Elucidating his order on this point, he stated that by power he meant archery and then he repeated this word three times to stress its importance. He did it because the art of archery had fundamental importance in war at that time. In the present-day world, archery has lost its value as it has been replaced by other inventions like tanks, guns, missiles, atom bombs, etc. 

Similar is the case of devices which are used in air and naval war, and all these military wares have superb importance in modern warfare. In the present-day context, the injunction of the Noble Qur'an to acquire power means manufacturing and possession of all these devices. 

It is incumbent on the Muslims that they equip themselves with all this material and show no carelessness in this regard. In modern times, Muslims have badly neglected this field with the result that non-Muslims have more knowledge of modern warfare and by dint of that they are dominating the world and making a claim of their supremacy all over the world. 

Unless Muslims pursue the Qur'anic injunctions on this score and acquire greater or equal or at least similar measure and style of power, as is possessed by the non-Muslims, they will not be able to check the onslaught of their enemies, and to defeat them.
It is incumbent upon the Muslims to overpower the might and power of the infidels for the glorification of Islam.

1334. `Uqbah bin `Amir Al-Juhani (May Allah be pleased with him) reported: The Messenger of Allah (PBUH) said, "He who learnt archery and then neglected it, is not from us.'' (Or said,) "He has been guilty of disobedience (to Messenger of Allah).'' [Muslim].

Commentary: This Hadith also stresses the importance of the art of archery to the extent that if a Muslim forgets it after learning without a valid reason, he is excluded from the followers of the Prophet (PBUH). Now this exhortation applies with equal force to modern military weapons, and if the present-day Muslims lose their command in handling these weapons, they will be exposed to the consequences of which they have been warned in this Hadith, because their training in this field is essential for upholding the Word of Allah and defending the Muslims. If the Muslims lose proficiency in it after acquiring it, they will be guilty of neglecting a very important Islamic obligation.

1341. Abu Hurairah (May Allah be pleased with him) reported: The Messenger of Allah (PBUH) said, "He who dies without having fought in the Cause of Allah or without having thought of doing so, will die with one characteristic of hypocrisy in him.'' [Muslim].

Commentary: It is a different matter that one may not get a chance to take part in Jihad, but it would be a hypocritical attitude if one does not ever think that if an opportunity ever comes in his way, he will certainly go for Jihad in the way of Allah against the infidels. The reason to that is that, to stay back at home at the time of Jihad was a habit of the hypocrites. In the light of this, Imam Al-Qurtubi has stated the principle that if one is not capable of doing some virtuous deeds, he should then make a resolve that whenever he will be capable of it, he will do that deed, so that his intention takes the place of his act. He who neither performs a good deed nor aspires for it, has a hypocritical disposition. This is specially true of a Muslim who does not even aspire to take part in Jihad. Such a Muslim develops a resemblance with hypocrites.

1352. Abu Hurairah and Jabir (May Allah be pleased with them) reported: The Prophet (PBUH) said, "War is deception.'' [Al-Bukhari and Muslim].

Commentary: "Khad`ah'' means deception, i.e., employing a strategy which causes misunderstanding to the enemy, and one's real intent does not become evident to them. This is permissible in Islam in the state of war. The Ahadith mentioned in this chapter make the importance of Jihad and the reason for so much stress on it abundantly clear. These also show how great a crime it is to ignore it. It is very unfortunate indeed that present-day Muslims are guilty of renouncing Jihad in every part of the world. May Allah help us to overcome this negligence. 

Jihad can be fought in many ways. Already Muslims are trying to change the laws in Europe and Canada, and sometimes succeeding. They have a 20-year plan to overthrow the U.S. government. It seems hard to believe anything like that could happen. We think of political progress toward freedom going in only one direction, but even in our lifetimes, many reverses in the Muslim world have taken place.

Egypt used to be a democracy. Its freedoms have been steadily eroded by jihadists.

Lebanon was once a Christian nation; it is now controlled by jihadists.

Turkey was once the only secularized Islamic state, but it is now controlled by jihadists.

All these changes have occurred in the last thirty years. Jihadists are serious, dedicated people. They have all the time in the world, and they can't think of anything more important to do. It is entirely possible they could gain a foothold in democratic countries, even the one you live in, and they could make it very difficult to stop them encroaching on the freedoms of all of us.

But you're a citizen. You're not in the CIA. You're not in the military. You're not a politician. What can you do?

Here is a list of ways you can help: WhatYouCanDoAboutIslam.com. Most of these involve educating your fellow westerners. We cannot get a democratic consensus about what to do until a majority of the voters know what you know.

Introduce people you know to these ideas. Be as gentle as possible. This informaton is hard to stomach at first, and you don't want to close their minds by displaying too much intensity, causing them to believe you're a screwball conspiracy theorist. They will write you off. They won't listen to you and their minds will be closed to the information in the future. We can't afford too many of those kinds of mistakes. Err on the side of being too low-key rather than too intense.

Introduce small, bite-sized, easily-digestible pieces of information. I have several articles I recommend as introductory materials to share.

Just as a Muslim feels it is his duty to wage jihad, you should feel it is your duty as a person living in a free society, to protect and defend your society against an enemy working to undermine it. You can play an important part by helping to educate your fellow citizens. For the sake of us all, I hope you do.

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Are Jihadists Better Strategists Than Free Governments?

The following brief article was published in: The American Ideological Society.

2007: Strategic Thinking Needed
in Fighting Global Jihad
by Jeffrey Imm

The United States of America has some of the smartest leaders in government, military, and business in the world. Yet the American government has failed to collectively use this formidable brain-power 5+ years after the attack by Jihadists on the American homeland to develop a truly strategic plan to fight the global threat of Jihad and Islamist extremism. In one of the most complex wars in American history, rather than starting with holistic, big-picture thinking towards the challenges and prioritizing resources and actions accordingly, America has spent much of the past five years after 9/11 in reactive and bureaucratic churning.

Why has the United States government been so incapable of addressing this national blueprint and study group for addressing Jihadist and Islamist threat? There are multiple problems here:

1. Reactive, tactical thinking for quick-fix approaches to the Jihadist problem and achieving "homeland security". As virtually all of the government planning regarding the Jihadist problem has been a reaction to the 9/11 attacks, it is predictable that such thinking would be highly tactical, reactive, and focused on near-term protective and military measures. This was perhaps excusable or at least understandable 1 to 6 months after the 9/11 attacks. It is now 5+ years after 9/11 attacks, however, and this excuse has long since run its course. But the government approach towards addressing the Jihadist problem is no more robust or strategic than it was in the early months of 2002. The organizational approach to "homeland security" is based on such reactive thinking, and has developed a bureaucracy based on such organization. Yet there has been no determination as to what the term "homeland security" even means in a larger sense other than a reaction to the 9/11 attacks, and certainly not as a component in a larger government blueprint regarding Jihad and global Islamism. Thus, there is no "homeland security" for the economy, culture, demographics, and dozens of other war components vital for winning the long term war.

2. Believing that fighting "terrorism" itself is an end, when terrorism is only one tactic in a larger, global Jihadist strategy. Thus, we have a "War on Terror", and neither the true enemy nor the true threat is clearly identified. Furthermore, the focus on both military objectives and "counterterrorism" lack context within a well-defined war strategy and blueprint regarding Jihad and global Islamism, which has uses many other tactics other than terrorism to meet its objectives. While it is acknowledged that no terrorist attacks have taken place on the American homeland since 9/11, Jihadists have been and continue to use communications tactics, demographic tactics, political tactics, and economic tactics quite effectively against the USA and the rest of the world. We are hampered by the language which makes "counterterrorism" and "counterintelligence" sound unnecessarily robust, when we are really only addressing measures against a single tactic of war in both cases. We would not fight a military war with only anti-tank or anti-aircraft measures. Moreover, we would not fight any war solely on a military front. But in this war, the American government has thus far only prioritized military and counterterrorism activities.

3. Institutional failure in investigating what the Jihadist problem is and fully understanding it or developing a shared understanding that can be used for strategic planning. The American government seems to believe any serious investigation into Jihad and Islamism will be counterproductive to winning the hearts and minds of Moderate Muslims in fighting terrorism. This argument makes sense if America is only fighting "terrorists" and "terrorist activity". But the facts are that Jihadist terrorist activity is funded, supported, and based on larger Islamist organizations - ranging from educational centers to charities to political groups. Ignoring the basis for Jihadist terrorism leads to an endless pursuit of trying to cure symptoms without ever acknowledging or treating the source of the symptoms. America did not fear offending Germans in fighting Nazism or offending Russians in fighting Communism. Like past wars in fighting totalitarian ideologies, a thorough understanding is needed of these and a comprehensive, strategic war plan against every tactic is needed against such Jihad.

4. Mistaking the use of strategic assumptions in tactical approaches to issues as "strategic thinking" on the larger threat. For example, Michael Chertoff has frequently indicated that one of the strategic assumptions of DHS is to prevent a nuclear attack on American soil, with appropriate tactical emphasis on this. Such strategic assumptions in general tactics in an element of a war are not the same as an overall strategic thinking in fighting the larger war, and looking at all aspects of the war (economic, energy, communications, cultural, demographic, etc.). But this surface-level of strategic assumptions in both counterterrorism and in military engagements are as far as the American government is currently going. Situational strategic assumptions are not the same as a long-term, big-picture, war strategy. Objections to strategic thinking and planning are plentiful and well-rationalized. The multitude and rationalization for these objections, however, do not make them any less wrong. And it is precisely this lack of strategic thinking and planning that Jihadists are truly counting on. As Bin Laden has repeatedly stated, he hopes that America will bankrupt itself pursuing individual avenues of military conflict against Jihadists:

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah".

In 2007, it is time for the American government to step back, evaluate and identify the scope of the threat of global Jihad and Islamism, and wisely prioritize the best way to use our limited resources to fight this generational war. The fight against Jihad is a marathon, not a sprint, and America needs to fight smarter to win.

The original article by Jeffrey Imm was published on the Counterterrorism Blog:

2007: Strategic Thinking Needed in Fighting Global Jihad

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali Talks Frankly on How To Defeat Islamic Terrorism

In a long interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rogier van Bakel of Reason Magazine brought out her best with some excellent questions. Ali was raised as a Muslim in Somalia, and has since become an outspoken atheist who is now marked for death by Islamic fundamentalists. She is sharp and bold and straightforward. I am excerpting parts the article here. If you have the time, it will be worth it to read the whole article: "The Trouble Is The West."


Reason: Should we acknowledge that organized religion has sometimes sparked precisely the kinds of emancipation movements that could lift Islam into modern times? Slavery in the United States ended in part because of opposition by prominent church members and the communities they galvanized. The Polish Catholic Church helped defeat the Jaruzelski puppet regime. Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?

Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.

Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?

Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.
Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, “defeat Islam”?

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, “This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.” There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

Reason: Militarily?

Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed.

Reason: Are we really heading toward anything so ominous?

Hirsi Ali: I think that’s where we’re heading. We’re heading there because the West has been in denial for a long time. It did not respond to the signals that were smaller and easier to take care of. Now we have some choices to make. This is a dilemma: Western civilization is a celebration of life—everybody’s life, even your enemy’s life. So how can you be true to that morality and at the same time defend yourself against a very powerful enemy that seeks to destroy you?

Reason: George Bush, not the most conciliatory person in the world, has said on plenty of occasions that we are not at war with Islam.

Hirsi Ali: If the most powerful man in the West talks like that, then, without intending to, he’s making radical Muslims think they’ve already won. There is no moderate Islam. There are Muslims who are passive, who don’t all follow the rules of Islam, but there’s really only one Islam, defined as submission to the will of God. There’s nothing moderate about it.

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Hirsi Ali: We have to get serious about this. The Egyptian dictatorship would not allow many radical imams to preach in Cairo, but they’re free to preach in giant mosques in London. Why do we allow it?

Reason: You’re in favor of civil liberties, but applied selectively?

Hirsi Ali: No. Asking whether radical preachers ought to be allowed to operate is not hostile to the idea of civil liberties; it’s an attempt to save civil liberties. A nation like this one is based on civil liberties, and we shouldn’t allow any serious threat to them. So Muslim schools in the West, some of which are institutions of fascism that teach innocent kids that Jews are pigs and monkeys — I would say in order to preserve civil liberties, don’t allow such schools.
Reason: In Holland, you wanted to introduce a special permit system for Islamic schools, correct?

Hirsi Ali: I wanted to get rid of them. I wanted to have them all closed, but my party said it wouldn’t fly. Top people in the party privately expressed that they agreed with me, but said, “We won’t get a majority to do that,” so it never went anywhere.

Reason: Well, your proposal went against Article 23 of the Dutch Constitution, which guarantees that religious movements may teach children in religious schools and says the government must pay for this if minimum standards are met. So it couldn’t be done. Would you in fact advocate that again?

Hirsi Ali: Oh, yeah.

Reason: Here in the United States, you’d advocate the abolition of—

Hirsi Ali: All Muslim schools. Close them down. Yeah, that sounds absolutist. I think 10 years ago things were different, but now the jihadi genie is out of the bottle. I've been saying this in Australia and in the U.K. and so on, and I get exactly the same arguments: The Constitution doesn’t allow it. But we need to ask where these constitutions came from to start with — what’s the history of Article 23 in the Netherlands, for instance? There were no Muslim schools when the constitution was written. There were no jihadists. They had no idea.

Reason: Do you believe that the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights — documents from more than 200 ago — ought to change?

Hirsi Ali: They’re not infallible. These Western constitutions are products of the Enlightenment. They’re products of reason, and reason dictates that you can only progress when you can analyze the circumstances and act accordingly. So now that we live under different conditions, the threat is different. Constitutions can be adapted, and they are, sometimes. The American Constitution has been amended a number of times. With the Dutch Constitution, I think the latest adaptation was in 1989. Constitutions are not like the Koran — non-negotiable, never-changing.

Look, in a democracy, it’s like this: I suggest, “Let’s close Muslim schools.” You say, “No, we can’t do it.” The problem that I’m pointing out to you gets bigger and bigger. Then you say, “OK, let’s somehow discourage them,” and still the problem keeps on growing, and in another few years it gets so bad that I belatedly get what I wanted in the first place.

I respect that it needs to happen this way, but there’s a price for the fact that you and I didn’t share these insights earlier, and the longer we wait, the higher the price. In itself the whole process is not a bad thing. People and communities and societies learn through experience. The drawback is, in this case, that “let’s learn from experience” means other people’s lives will be taken.


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Reason: Samir Azouz, another young man in Holland convicted of terrorist plotting, attended a fundamentalist Muslim school in Amsterdam which is still open. He had maps of the Dutch parliament. He wanted to kill me and other politicians. He wanted to cause murder and mayhem congruent with the set of beliefs that he was taught in school using Dutch taxpayers’ money. Now go back in time a little. Isn’t it extremely cruel when you put yourself in the shoes of that little boy? He was just going to an officially recognized school in a multicultural society. Everyone approved — and now he’s being punished for it. He’s in jail.


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Reason: Having lived in the United States for about a year now, do you find that Muslims in the United States have by and large integrated better here than they have in Europe?

Hirsi Ali: Since I moved here, I’ve spent most of my time in airports, in airplanes, in waiting rooms, in hotels, doing promotion for Infidel all over the world, so the amount of time I’ve actually lived in the U.S. is very small. But yes, I have the impression that Muslims in the United States are far more integrated than Muslims in Europe. Of course, being assimilated doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t be a jihadist, but the likelihood of Muslims turning radical here seems lower than in Europe.

For one thing, America doesn’t really have a welfare system. Mohammed Bouyeri had all day long to plot the murder of Theo van Gogh. American Muslims have to get a job. What pushes people who come to America to assimilate is that it’s expected of them. And people are not mollycoddled by the government.

There’s a lot of white guilt in America, but it’s directed toward black Americans and native Indians, not toward Muslims and other immigrants. People come from China, Vietnam, and all kinds of Muslim countries. To the average American, they’re all fellow immigrants.

The white guilt in Germany and Holland and the U.K. is very different. It has to do with colonialism. It has to do with Dutch emigrants having spread apartheid in South Africa. It has to do with the Holocaust. So the mind-set toward immigrants in Europe is far more complex than here. Europeans are more reticent about saying no to immigrants.

And by and large, Muslim immigrants in Europe do not come with the intention to assimilate. They come with the intention to work, earn some money, and go back. That’s how the first wave of immigrants in the Netherlands was perceived: They would just come to work and then they’d go away. The newer generations that have followed are coming not so much to work and more to reap the benefits of the welfare state. Again, assimilation is not really on their minds.

Also, in order to get official status here in the U.S., you have to have an employer, so it’s the employable who are coming. The Arabs who live here came as businessmen, and a lot of them come from wealthy backgrounds. There are also large communities of Indian and Pakistani Muslims, who tend to be very liberal. Compare that to the Turks in Germany, who mostly come from the poor villages of Anatolia. Or compare it to the Moroccans in the Netherlands, who are for the most part Berbers with a similar socio-economic background. It’s a completely different set of people.

And finally, there’s the matter of borders. In America, Muslim immigrants typically pass through an airport, which means the Americans have a better way of controlling who comes in — a far cry from Europe’s open borders. Forty years ago, when Europe began talking about lifting borders between countries to facilitate the free traffic of goods and labor, they weren’t thinking about waves of immigrants. They thought of Europe as a place people left. America, on the other hand, has always been an immigration nation, with border controls that have been in place for a long time. I know the southern border is difficult to monitor, but for Arab Muslims and Pakistanis coming to America, it’s very hard to enter illegally.


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Reason: Tolerance is probably the most powerful word there is in the Netherlands. No other word encapsulates better what the Dutch believe really defines them. That makes it very easy for people to say that when they’re being criticized, they’re not being tolerated — and from there it’s only a small step to saying they’re being discriminated against or they’re the victims of Islamophobia or racism or what have you.

Hirsi Ali: We have to revert to the original meaning of the term tolerance. It meant you agreed to disagree without violence. It meant critical self-reflection. It meant not tolerating the intolerant. It also came to mean a very high level of personal freedom.

Then the Muslims arrived, and they hadn’t grown up with that understanding of tolerance. In short order, tolerance was now defined by multiculturalism, the idea that all cultures and religions are equal. Expectations were created among the Muslim population. They were told they could preserve their own culture, their own religion. The vocabulary was quickly established that if you criticize someone of color, you’re a racist, and if you criticize Islam, you’re an Islamophobe.

Reason: The international corollary to the word tolerance is probably respect. The alleged lack of respect has become a perennial sore spot in relations between the West and Islam. Salman Rushdie receiving a British knighthood supposedly signified such a lack of respect, as did the Danish cartoons last year, and many other things. Do you believe this is what Muslims genuinely crave—respect?

Hirsi Ali: It’s not about respect. It’s about power, and Islam is a political movement.

Reason: Uniquely so?

Hirsi Ali: Well, it hasn’t been tamed like Christianity. See, the Christian powers have accepted the separation of the worldly and the divine. We don’t interfere with their religion, and they don’t interfere with the state. That hasn’t happened in Islam.

But I don’t even think that the trouble is Islam. The trouble is the West, because in the West there’s this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway, and that what we are seeing now in Muslim countries is a craving for respect. Or it’s poverty, or it’s caused by colonization.

The Western mind-set — that if we respect them, they’re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away — is delusional. The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it’s only going to get bigger.

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Read the whole interview: The Trouble Is The West

Read a speech by Nonie Darwish, a woman who grew up as a Muslim in Gaza and Egypt.

Learn more about Islam: The Terrifying Brilliance of the Islamic Memeplex

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Salman Rushdie on Islamic Terrorism

In a long article in The Independent entitled Salman Rushdie: His Life, His Works, and His Religion, we get a semi-biography of Rushdie and all he has been through since the fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini. Rushdie's views of Islamic terrorism are insightful. It's an issue he has been immersed in much longer than the rest of us have even known there was an issue.

The following is a long quote from the article. The article is well worth reading in its entirety.

[Rushdie] fears that many people are willfully misunderstanding the new Islamist virus that has spread through this new world. "People have been so knocked off balance by what's going on that their normally well-functioning moral sense seems to have lost its footing." After 18 years in the Islamist cross-hairs, Rushdie wants — needs — people to understand that this new Islamic fundamentalism is not simply the lump sum of all the bad things the West has done to Muslims, reflected back at us.

At the time of the fatwa, Rushdie was widely known as a fierce and fearsome critic of US foreign policy, a man who condemned Israel's "monstrous" occupation of Palestinian lands, a man who damned Margaret Thatcher as " Mrs. Torture" and warned that "British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism." He risked his life traipsing through the jungles of Nicaragua to expose Ronald Reagan's illegal funding of a horde of neo-fascist guerrillas trying to topple the country's elected government.

It made no difference. He had questioned the Official Story of Islam, trying to open it up to the mixed, metaphorical dream-worlds of the modern metropolis — and for that, he had to be butchered. "It's one thing to criticize the way in which the American government is behaving, or the British government, and I have a lot of criticisms of that — in fact, nothing but criticisms," he says now. "But it's another thing to fail to see that an enemy actually exists and is extremely serious about what he wishes to do.

"If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of al-Qa'ida by one jot. It's not what they're after," he adds, his foot tapping against mine as he leans forward. "Yes, it's a recruiting tool, rhetorically. Many people see there's an injustice there, and it helps them to get people into the gang, but it's not what they want. What they want is to change the nature of human life on earth into the image of the Taliban. If you want the whole earth to look like Taliban Afghanistan, then you're on the same side as them. If you don't want that, you're not. They do not represent the quest for human justice. That, I think, is one of the great mistakes of the left."

Within this Talibanist morality, there is room for great slabs of delusion and hypocrisy. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie shows sparingly how the jihadi fighters of Afghanistan have sex with adolescent boys, and the next day chop to pieces men they have dubbed "homosexual." "One of the great untold stories of al-Qa'ida is that they are all these men who fuck little boys. They all have these disciples who they're ostensibly training in the way of the warrior, but they're also enjoying. For a while, then they go off — and they have their wives and families at home. It's like Classical Greece." Does he think Osama bin Laden has done it? "I wouldn't like to say," he says tactfully. "He's an Arab, he's not an Afghan. But Mullah Omar, he's another story..."

He senses soft racism in the refusal to see Islamic fundamentalists for what they are. When looking at the Christian fundamentalists of the United States, most people see an autonomous movement of superstitious madmen. But when they look at their Islamic equivalents, they assume they cannot mean what they say. "One of the things that's commonly said by Islamists is that it's acceptable to bomb a disco, because a disco is a place where people are behaving in a disgusting way. Go away and die — that's all bin Laden wants you to do. It's not just about Iraq, it's about ham sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you're not married to." He pauses. "It's about life."

It horrifies Rushdie that so many people in his natural political home — the left — don't get it. They seem to imagine that when people call for a novelist to be beheaded for blasphemy, they are really calling for a return to the 1967 borders, or an independent Kashmir, or an end to the occupation of Iraq. As he says this, I blurt out a repellent question: was there a small part of him on September 11 that felt almost relieved — that thought: " Now they'll understand"? He pauses, a long pause, the only one in this interview. Have I offended him? But he answers with the same contemplative calm as before. "It wasn't, actually. What an awful thing to think. But... but I remember after 9/11 that a lot of people did finally get it, and I remember thinking — it's a shame that 3,000 people had to die for something pretty obvious to get through people's heads."


III: The quiet American, and the art of slitting our own throats

Rushdie has looked down the barrel of Islamism, smelt its cordite, and survived. So he is perpetually being asked — how do we lift the collective fatwa on our transport systems, our nightclubs, our cities? How do we scrape meaning from his misery? "When people ask me how the West should adapt to Muslim sensitivities, I always say — the question is the wrong way round. The West should go on being itself. There is nothing wrong with the things that for hundreds of years have been acceptable — satire, irreverence, ridicule, even quite rude commentary — why the hell not?

"But you see it every day, this surrender," he says. He runs through a list of the theaters and galleries that have censored themselves in the face of religious fundamentalist protests. He mentions that the entire British media — from the BBC down — placed itself in purdah during the Muhammad cartoons episode. "What I fear most is that, when we look back in 25 years' time at this moment, what we will have seen is the surrender of the West, without a shot being fired. They'll say that in the name of tolerance and acceptance, we tied our own hands and slit our own throats. One of the things that have made me live my entire life in these countries is because I love the way people live here."

Rushdie sees surrender stamped on every one of the "faith schools" being constructed by Tony Blair. "To say the solution to the problems religion has caused is more religion... it's just crazy," he says. It will only reinforce the sealing off of Muslims from the world that is symbolized by the veil, which he sees as a hideous anti-feminist shroud, " a one-woman tent."

read the article in its entirety >>

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The Number of Attacks Add Up to an Invisible (or Ignored) Global War

On November 15th, 2007, FrontPage Magazine published an article by Patrick Poole about Glen Reinsford's tally of Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11. The article was entitled, "A Grim Milestone Ignored." We republish it here with permission.

The establishment media is seemingly obsessed with “grim milestones” in the War on Terror, as the Associated Press reminds us this past weekend. But in the next week those same establishment media outlets will probably stand mute when yet another “grim milestone” is reached – the10,000th attack by Islamic terrorists and militants since 9/11, which is responsible for approximately 60,000 dead and 90,000 injured.

The chronicler of this bloody tally is Glen Reinsford, editor of TheReligionofPeace.com, who began compiling and updating daily a detailed list of reported incidents of violence and terrorism around the world targeting non-Muslims and Muslims alike. Because of space limitations he only posts the past two months worth of attacks on his websites main page, though he has archived all of the incidents from past years (2001-2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007). He also maintains a banner graphic with the updated number of attacks, which people can post on their own websites.

When asked what prompted him to begin such a labor-intensive undertaking, Reinsford identifies the tepid response to Islamic terrorism by otherwise outspoken Muslim groups, with one organization particularly in mind:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). After 9/11, I kept an eye on them and was quite disgusted by their lack of moral perspective. They complain about issues that affect Muslims which are quite trivial, on average, compared to what is happening in the name of their religion. They do occasionally denounce terror in a general, somewhat ambiguous, sense but there is an obvious lack of passion. Their real interest is themselves.

Reviewing the list of recent incidents, it is surprising how many “smaller” attacks occur daily, which the establishment media pass with only a casual mention. While high profile attacks, like the one last week in Baghlan Province, Afghanistan that killed 75 and wounded at least 100 (many of them school children), receive plenty of attention, smaller incidents, such as the attack last week on a hotel in Baramulla, India that killed one, rarely register with the Western media.

Because Reinsford relies on the establishment media for his numbers, the true number of attacks and their victims are underreported:

In my case, I use published media reports from reputable sources on the Internet, such as the Associated Press. None of the information comes from rumor or word of mouth. Every bit of it can be verified through publicly-available sources. If anything, I undercount the attacks.

In his explanation of his methodology, he notes that he doesn’t include combat-related statistics, and acknowledges that the death toll may increase in the days and months following the attack as victims die from their injuries, which almost never get reported. The list also doesn’t account for the genocide in Darfur committed by the Islamist government in Sudan and their Janjaweed marauding militias, which the UN estimated last year had resulted in 400,000 dead and 2 million displaced.

With such seemingly incomprehensible carnage, I ask Reinsford if there were any particular incidents that stand out, and he identified three (qualifying that he could easily identify 15 more):

Nadimarg, India (3/23/03), dozens of Hindu villagers roused out of their beds and machine-gunned by Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) Islamists.

Beslan, Russia (9/3/04), some 350 people slaughtered by Islamic militants - half of them children.

Malatya, Turkey (4/18/07), three Christian Bible distributors are tied up, tortured for hours then gruesomely murdered by men who acted explicitly in the name of Islam.

For me, a September 2006 Washington Post article stands out concerning an attack targeting Shi’ite women and children stands out, when a Sunni suicide bomber detonated a kerosene fuel bomb filled with ball bearings (for added effect) ripped through a crowd waiting in line to buy fuel. The Post described the horrific scene:

The horrific blast sent women engulfed in flames screaming through the streets. Two preteen girls embraced each other as they burned to death, witnesses said. Later, wailing mourners thronged the scene of the blast, which was strewn with the shoes of victims and a woman's bloodied cloak, and voiced doubt that the reprisal violence would ever end.

While many Muslim organizations in the West expend considerable effort portraying themselves as victims of Western “Islamophobia”, very little is said by those groups about the fact that many of the countless victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslims themselves. There are certainly no public protests by organizations like CAIR in recognition of those Muslims murdered and maimed by Muslims, though they are quick to cite the number of civilians accidentally killed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (though Reinsford notes that while 225 Iraqis were killed in collateral damage incidents in 2006, there were 16,791 Iraqi civilians killed by Islamic terrorists that same year).

Reinsford says that the skewed perspective of ignoring the toll Islamic terrorism takes on Muslims stems from a failure by Muslim leaders to recognize the glaring problems that are resident in the heart of their own community:

Yes, most of the victims of Islamic terror are Muslim, yet there is very little outrage on the part of the Islamic world to terror, relative to, say, a Muhammad cartoon or an "insult to Islam" by a public figure. What does this tell us about the priorities of Islam? In fact, sympathies for terrorists run much higher than many people realize. Even those that do truly disagree with violence (and there are many) somehow avoid taking any sort of responsibility for ending it by convincing themselves that it has nothing to do with Islam. Obviously it has everything to do with Islam, and the unwillingness on the part of Muslims in the West to provide moral leadership against Islamic extremism will ensure that the terror continues for a long time.

With some of the biggest figures in the Islamic religious establishment preaching jihad beamed around the globe on Islamic satellite networks, and countless websites offering jihadist tracts, YouTube hosting a veritable smorgasbord of videos documenting terrorist incidents, and Internet forums dedicated to networking would-be jihadists and encouraging violence, it might be that Islamic extremists are a minority, but they clearly have dominated the conversation. And it is doubtful that the situation will change as long as that remains the case.

Fortunately, there are some Islamic leaders willing to speak out consistently and forcefully against Islamic extremism and the non-stop acts of terrorism, but the establishment media rarely gives them notice, let alone a hearing, preferring instead the cacophony of CAIR and those extremists who offer weak condemnations of terrorism, yet defending its justification and denying its true causes.

Meanwhile, the deadly toll continues to roll unnoticed by the establishment media. But Glen Reinsford is still there continuing his grim task keeping us all aware of how pervasive and unrelenting the problem of Islamic terrorism really is.

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Funding Islamic Terrorists

As we wrote about earlier, in The Wahhabi Invasion of America, the Saudi Wahhabis are making terrorism possible around the world. A terrorist must be supported by somebody. Otherwise, he would have to work for a living. Here is a short film (8 minutes) about one of the people exposing the underlying financial support for Islamic terrorism around the world.



Thank you to the good people at Muslims Against Sharia for introducing me to this film.

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Internet Jihad

According to the Qur'an, it is the duty of every faithful Muslim to fight until the whole world submits to Shari'a law, using whatever means they can. Below is a dispatch from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), who have translated a message from the Global Islamic Media Front. It instructs Muslims everywhere to conduct online "raids."

Using the Islamic principle of Tiqayya, a Muslim is allowed to deceive infidels if it is in the interest of Islam. The internet jihad is part of a 20-year plan to overthrow the U.S. government. Does that sound impossible? Egypt used to be a democracy. It is now in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Lebanon was once a Christian nation. It is now run by Islamic fundamentalists. Turkey was once one of the few secular democracies in the Islamic world. It is now run by Islamic fundamentalists. All these changes have occurred in the last 30 years.

There are millions of Islamic fundamentalists, and they are totally committed to their cause, and will use every means available. Meanwhile, most of us think it's impossible for it to happen to us, and go on about our lives. This is what the jihadists are counting on.

Here is the message MEMRI translated:

Special Dispatch Series - No. 1621

June 14, 2007

Global Islamic Media Front Instructs Islamists to Infiltrate Popular Non-Islamic Forums to Spread Pro-Islamic State Propaganda

Recently, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) announced a new comprehensive media campaign titled "The Battar Media Raid to Defend the Islamic State [of Iraq] (ISI)," [1] whose declared purpose is to repel the intensive campaign against the ISI by Arab and Western media agencies and to stop the increasing military campaign against the ISI by Sunni organizations in Iraq.

In a message titled "The Battar Media Raid: How to Participate? How to Help? What Is My Role?" the GIMF announces the beginning of the campaign and provides a detailed description of the campaign's goals and ways of accomplishing them, including infiltrating non-Islamic forums for the purpose of posting pro-ISI propaganda.

The following are excerpts from the announcement:

The Islamist Forum Must Be Like a Beehive During the Raid

"What we expect from you brothers and sisters is for the [Islamist] forum to be like beehives during the raid... [whereby] one person takes part in distributing [material]... another generates links... one person writes an article... while another writes a poem... People must feel and notice that the forums have changed radically during this blessed raid..."

The following are the details of the plan:

Designate a Special Space on the Forum for Raid Material

"First:...Those who supervise the [Islamist] forums have a significant role in this raid. We expect from you the following: a) to post the raid's slogan on the websites, forums, and blogs, as a way of expressing support for the raid; b) to designate a special space in the forums in which material related to the raid will be posted... so [that this material] will be easily recognized [by forum participants]. We request that this space be open to everyone, with registration not required; and c) to collaborate with GIMF in matters concerning suggestions and experience..."

Ban Anyone Who Slanders the Islamic State [of Iraq] From Disseminating Their Poison in the Forums

"Second, we expect the following from the forums' administrators: a) to take control of your forums and forbid anyone who slanders [the ISI] or [accuses it of causing] civil strife from disseminating his poison in your forums... [and] b) to prevent futile and useless discussions and responses... and to urge people to participate in the raid."

Post Raid Material on [Non-Islamic] Music, Youth, and Sports Forums

"Third, beloved [raid participants], the raid is dependent on you... The raid demands of you many things... such as expertise, especially in the following areas: seeking religious knowledge, montage, translation into any language, uploading material onto various types of websites, web design, graphic design, journal and publication design, and hacking and security. If you have expertise in any of these [fields], contact the GIMF representative on any of the forums. If, however, you do not possess this expertise... there are other matters you can [promote]: for example, posting matters related to the raid in most [jihad] forums... posting [material] in non-jihad forums, posting in non-Islamic forums such as music forums, youth forums, sports forums, and others. Anyone who undertakes to post the material must look into the [appropriate] manner of spreading [the material for each type of forum]... The way in which members of music forums address one another differs from the way members of jihad forum address one another."

Monitor Forum Members' Reactions to Your Posting

"You are not required to engage in blind copying and pasting here... [On the contrary,] you should select [carefully] the material... and the words... and the most important issue is to monitor forum members' reactions after you disseminate your material and to respond to them, turning for help to your comrades in the jihad forums if you find it difficult [to reply] to one of the reactions [from members of the non-Islamic forums]."

"[You should also offer] commentary to the various news agencies' websites... such as the Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya websites... Even if they do not publish your commentary... do not give up... Persist... in the attempt to place the name of the raid in every commentary..."

Participate in Live Shows on Satellite TV

"[Another way to assist the raid is by] participating in live shows on satellite TV... Anyone with a desire [to do so]... can contact, and participate in, any program discussing... the jihad in Iraq... He should be sure to mention... that he is a participant in the Battar Media Raid to Defend the Islamic State [of Iraq]... Of course, he should mention this fact immediately after going on the air... and not prior to that... [This way,] millions will hear the name of the raid...."

You Can Slip a CD Into Your Friend's Bag Without Him Noticing

"[People should also engage in] downloading various publications related to the raid and distributing them to others... If you are afraid that you will be exposed, you can [distribute the material] without people noticing... [For example,] you can slip a CD into your friend's bag without him noticing... you can drop it into a person's car while he is driving... you can place it in your neighbor's mailbox..."

Jihadists are committed, intelligent people with long-range strategies. We can beat them if we try. And you can play a crucial role. Read the top seven tasks a citizen can do to help.

If you'd like to read more about the underlying principles of jihad, and why it is so dangerous to the free world, start here: The Terrifying Brilliance of the Islamic Memeplex

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Women’s Rights and Political Islam, Part One — A Speech by Donna Hughes

The following is a speech given by Donna M. Hughes, Professor and Carlson Endowed Chairperson of the University of Rhode Island Women's Studies Program. Thank you to the URI College Republicans for organizing this week of awareness about a major threat to world peace and freedom. Thank you for inviting me to speak about how this global political movement threatens women’s freedom and rights. I’ll start out by addressing terms. There are a number of terms that are used to refer to the global political movement I want to talk about: Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic extremism, Islamo-Fascism, Islamism, and Radical Islam. I chose the term “political Islam,” a more neutral term, for the title of my talk, not because I think one can equivocate about this global threat, but to emphasize that we are talking about a political movement — a political movement based on selective interpretations of the Koran. I am not talking about all of Islam or all Muslims. Although as with any political movement, it is built on particular traditions, culture and views; otherwise the movement would have not appeal to the base from which the movement leaders want to draw their support. I am talking about a political movement with an ideology, goals, and methods for achieving their goals. The term Islamic fundamentalism seems to imply that we are talking about a conservative or traditional practice of Islam. When I use the term, I am referring, not to conservative or “fundamentalist” interpretation of Islam. I am referring to a political movement. The term Islamic Fascism clearly links the phenomenon that we are talking about to a political movement — fascism. Although the goals of radical Islam are not exactly like those of Mussolini’s fascist movement, it evokes an authoritarian political goal and differentiates the movement from a purely religion one. It does have a more harsh sound to it and it doesn’t roll of the tongue very easily. The term Islamic fascism was coined by moderate Algerian Muslims who were under attack by Muslim extremists who wanted to impose Islamic or Shari'a law in Algeria. Helie Lucas, the founder of Women Living Under Muslim Laws, explains that Islamo-fascism means the “political forces working under the cover of religion in order to gain political power and to impose a theocracy … over democracy.” Islamism is the word closest to what the advocates of this political movement use themselves. Islamism is not the same thing as Islam. Islamism, with an “ism” on the end connotes a political belief system, like feminism, communism, Nazism. And a supporter of Islamism, is an Islamist, as in feminist or communist. This term is by far the easiest to use, but I am hesitant to use it, 1) because it is easily confused with Islam or someone who observes the Islamic faith, and 2) I have Muslim, pro-women’s rights, pro-freedom supporters who consider themselves Islamists. They think that Islam is compatible with democracy. They support a type of political Islam that recognizes the rights and freedom of all people, and they are working to create such as state. I will use all these terms in my talk. The important thing to remember is that I’m talking about a political movement, not a whole religion or all Muslims. I’m talking about a political movement with a set of beliefs and political goals, practices that put those beliefs into action, and methods that impose their rule and belief system on others, whether they are willing or not. SOURCES I want to tell you how I came to understand the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to women, girls, and their rights. This occurred long before 9/11. In 1994 to 1996, I worked as a Lecturer at the University of Bradford in England. The city of Bradford has the largest population of Pakistanis outside of Pakistan. The loudest sound in the city was the call to prayers broadcast from the mosque on the edge of campus. I learned that after Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Religious Leader of Iran (i.e. religious dictator) issued a fatwa calling for the murder of British author Salman Rushdie, there were demonstrations in Bradford is support of the fatwa. Soon after I arrived in Bradford, a young Muslim woman was murdered. She was run down by a car driven by a family member as she was walking on the sidewalk to work. This was what is called an “honor killing,” in which women and girls are killed by family members for disobeying their fathers or for being too independent. She wanted freedom from an arranged marriage and rigid cultural constraints on her life as a woman. I joined an organization called Women Against Fundamentalism. It was formed by mostly Muslim women of Asian descent after the fatwa to murder Rushdie. Its goal was to oppose the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in England and its threat to women’s freedom. At the University of Bradford, I was in charge of a women’s studies major. We had several Asian women, as the Pakistani and Indian women were called, on the course. I soon learned that all of them were being pressured to drop out of school and accept arranged marriages. They were guilt-tripped, threatened, and sometimes beaten. I soon realized that staying enrolled at the university was the only thing that helped them maintain a moderate level of freedom and independence. If they dropped out, they would be forced into marriage. A couple of the women couldn’t resist the constant pressure. They came to my office and told me they were dropping out of school and accepting their family’s plans for them. They tried to put a good face on it. Some women were beaten by their families to force them out of school. I learned how common this was when I made inquiries on how we could help a frightened, exhausted young woman. The University maintained a set of rooms in the halls of residence for women who needed emergency shelter each semester. On a regular basis, I saw the political campaigns of the Islamists. Groups, such as Hizb ut-Tahir, which is now banned, had literature tables in the lobby of the building where I worked. I often stopped and picked up the pamphlets. I was particularly interested in what they said about women and women’s rights. Their goal was, and is, to unify all Muslim countries into one Islamic state ruled by Islamic or sharia law. They predicted that in the near future, they would take over the UK and turn it into an Islamic state. Their literature stated that they would advance women’s rights by protecting them from the kind of harassment and violence that western women are subjected to. Wearing the veil or hijab would protect them from sexual harassment and sexual assault. The political tracts stated that they respected women and would allow women to stay in the home and take care of their families where they would be protected by their fathers, brothers, and husbands. These were not presented as choices for women, but their roles and destinies under Islamic rule. I believe that people mean what they say and write about. I took the Islamists at their word. I showed the pamphlets to my colleagues, asking “Have you read these things? Do you know what they say they are going to do?” Two years ago, when the world learned that the suicide bombers on the London underground were from Leeds, a city just ten miles east of Bradford, I was not surprised, as some were, that the terrorists were homegrown. I had read their literature ten years before. In 1996, my education about Islamic fundamentalism expanded from the local level to the global when I met groups of Iranian exiles living in Europe, the U.S. and Canada. They were survivors of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, which brought to power the first modern theocracy, which means "rule by religious leaders." They (the Iranian exiles) had supported a liberal interpretation of Islam, freedom, democracy, and rights for women. Many of them had been arrested for opposing the rise of Islamic fundamentalists to power in Iran. Some had been tortured. Many of them had friends and relatives who were executed by the Iranian regime. For the past 11 years, I have continued to learn about Islamic fundamentalism from them and have supported their conferences for women’s rights, democracy, and freedom. I learned from them what happens to women when religious fascists — a term used by my Iranian friends — come to power. I have also learned about the fate of women under Islamic fundamentalism from groups like Women Living Under Muslim Laws and the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan. ISLAMIC FASCISTS, POLITICAL IDEOLOGY, AND PRACTICE When Islamic fascists put their political ideology into practice, they use methods we call terrorism — the systematic targeting of civilian populations using violent means. The first place they exert their power is on the local level. I like to say that terrorism begins at home. The first victims are usually women and girls. Islamic fundamentalist ideology rejects universal equality and rights as set out by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the basic principles and rights on which democracies are based. The Islamic fundamentalism ideology rejects liberalism, women’s rights, moderate and liberal interpretations and practices of Islam, and promotes discrimination against non-Muslim religious groups, particularly Jews. The political goal of Islamic fascists is to create a religious dictatorship, based on their version of Shari'a or religious-based law. They oppose democracy and the western concept of freedom, claiming that Western democracies and laws are man made, and only the laws of God or Shari'a laws are valid. According to Shari'a law, Jews and other non-Muslims, such as Christians and Hindus, can only have secondary status as citizens. There is no freedom of religion. For example, under Shari'a law, if a Muslim converts to another faith, he or she can be punished by death. Under Islamic fundamentalist ideology and law, men and women are not equal. Women are considered to be physically, emotionally, intellectually, and morally inferior to men. Under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, women were not permitted to go to school or to work or to leave the house unless accompanied by a male relative and had to wear a burqa — a bag-like garment that covers the whole body and has only a mesh opening to see out. In Iran, women are not permitted to run for president or be judges because they are not emotionally capable of making decisions. Women and girls are not permitted freedom of movement or freedom of dress. They are required to wear the covering chosen by the religious leaders. Women and girls are seen as morally weak and must be prevented from having contact with men who are not family members. Sexual misconduct, which can be an act as simple as a girl talking to or meeting a man from outside her family, is considered to be a violation of her family’s honor. The shame she has brought on the family can only be wiped out by killing her. This is the basis of “honor killings.” In Iran, there are official “crimes against chastity,” which includes things such as having a baby without being married. For violations of these laws, a woman or girl can be flogged or even hanged. The most torturous form of punishment in Iran is stoning to death. Currently, eight women are imprisoned, waiting to be stoned to death in Iran. This form killing is not found in the Koran, it is a barbaric form of killing used centuries ago and brought into modern times by Islamic fundamentalists. [Editor's note: While it is strictly true that stoning is not mentioned in the Koran, it is not prohibited, and it says in the Koran many times that Muhammad should be used as an example to imitate, and Muhammad endorsed stoning as a punishment.] Under Shari'a law, all public facilities, such as hospitals, classrooms, and buses, are segregated. These laws make women officially second class citizens without equal rights. A Muslim, Iranian woman coined a name for this system — gender apartheid. This kind of misogyny, or woman-hating, is at the heart of Islamic fascists’ control of a population. If you suppress 50 percent of the population, and systemically punish violators by public stonings, hangings, and whippings, you can terrorize an entire population.

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Women’s Rights and Political Islam, Part Two — A Speech by Donna Hughes

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IS CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM THE SAME AS ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM?

Frequently, when I speak about Islamic fundamentalism, someone suggests that Muslims may have Islamic fundamentalists, but the U.S. has Christian fundamentalists. The implication being that they are the same. This equivalency is flawed thinking.

The U.S. is a democracy that guarantees fundamental freedoms and rights. The Christian Right is a political movement of conservative Christians. They may have political and social views and goals that you may not agree with, but they operate within a democratic framework. To influence policy and laws, they use their rights as citizens to form advocacy organizations, lobby, and vote.

When adherents to these views resort to violence, such as the bombing of abortion clinics, it is treated as an act of violence, and the perpetrators are arrested and punished. And most leaders of Christian Right organizations condemn these acts of political violence.

I’ve never heard a Christian fundamentalist call for the takeover of the U.S. government by radical preachers or priests, or to have Christian or Biblical law replace the U.S. Constitution.

That’s the difference between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism: One respects democracy, fundamental rights and freedoms, and the democratic process, the other doesn’t, and its goal is to destroy democracy, freedom, and the democratic process.

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Women’s Rights and Political Islam, Part Three — A Speech by Donna Hughes

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read part two

MULTICULTURALISM VS. UNIVERSALISM

I want to talk about why this flawed equivalency between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism has become so popular and why it seems to have become so hard to differentiate between oppressive political systems and practices and democratic political systems and liberal practices.

Today, advocacy for multiculturalism has replaced support for universalism.

Universalism is based on universal principles of human rights, equality, freedom, and democracy, as laid out in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and before that the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Other democracies have their own constitutions and founding sets of documents.

Today, these visions and commitments to universal equality among people have become secondary to advocacy for multiculturalism.

Embedded in multicultural ideology is cultural relativism, the principle that all cultures are equal, must be respected, and cannot be criticized. Or if one does criticize another culture or religious practice, the speaker must immediately point out deficiencies in other cultures and religious practices, or at least those of his or her own, in this case, the U.S.

One cannot advocate for relative rights and freedoms without rejecting universal principles of freedom and rights. If you unconditionally accept and respect other cultural and religious practices, the first group that always loses is women. Most discriminatory attitudes and practices are based on culture, tradition, and religion. Women’s greatest hope for freedom and rights comes with the promotion of universal principles of freedom and rights; then women can claim their equality.

Today, I see students in class being fearful of discussing types of violence against women or the oppression of women. Although they may be horrified by honor killings or female genital mutilation, they feel they have to accept it because it’s someone else’s culture or religion.

They think it is unacceptable to advocate for other women’s freedom and rights because it might violate the others' cultures or religions, and that would be imposing their view on another culture or religion. While at first glance this may sound respectful, it translated into remaining silent and accepting some of the worst human rights violations against women.

Following acceptance of multiculturalism, they withdraw into isolationism. If we must respect all other cultures and religious practices, then there is nothing to do about violations of women’s rights around the world. They often oppose any efforts to improve the lives of women in other countries. They justify this isolationism by saying they have enough work on women’s issues here at home and they should concentrate on that.


WHAT DO MUSLIM WOMEN WANT?

Women join political movements. There are Muslim women who have joined the Islamic fundamentalists. There are women who voluntarily put on the hijab and support the oppression of other women.

There are probably some women who just want to be left in peace to live a quiet life.

But there are also women who want freedom and rights, who strongly reject Islamo-Fascism, and who have organized to oppose Islamic fundamentalism.

I believe we have a responsibility to differentiate between Islamic fascist and pro-democracy groups. I don’t believe there is a moral equivalency between them. I don’t believe it is disrespectful to judge other systems and practices and to condemn human rights violations and the oppression of women. I don’t believe it is "imperialistic" to support other women’s struggles for freedom and rights.

I believe that rights come with responsibilities. The people in this room are among the freest in the world. I believe we have a responsibility to not turn our privileged backs on other women. I believe we have a responsibility to use our freedom and rights to help others.

I believe we should be using our freedom of speech, our freedom of association, and our educations and access to communications technology to assist other women to achieve the same set of rights and standards of well-being.

You can start by learning more about the conditions for women under Shari'a law. You can research how Islamic fundamentalism is spreading and the impact that is having on women. You can research different Muslim women’s groups. You can find out how to get involved in supporting different organizations.

I’ll end with a quote from Maryam Rajavi, a leader of the opposition against the theocracy in Iran. In a text entitled The Price of Freedom, she says:

The Iranian woman is today engaged in the most serious, most difficult and most decisive battle of her destiny … Women are the prime victims of oppression under the clerical regime and they have the highest explosive potential against the regime. The survival of the clerical regime is also intertwined with the suppression of women. … [Women] are humiliated and tortured every day, only because they are women. Yet they have never surrendered. They use every opportunity to voice their protest against the clerical regime and stage demonstrations.

And further, to those who think that Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is intolerant, bigoted, and anti-Muslim, I will again return to The Price of Freedom by Maryam Rajavi as she describes the process of liberation of women from Islamic fundamentalism:

One must, first and foremost, confront such a mentality, particularly in light of the fact that this interpretation or reactionary spell has a historical precedent for women. It is said that the situation of women has always been like this and that she must be grateful to anyone who offers her compassion and mercy. Only when you rebel against this trap and understand the futility of this spell, the deadlock is broken, the road becomes clear, and you take the next steps. I do believe that a woman’s emancipation begins the moment she breaks this spell and believes that rebellion and resistance against tyranny are her inalienable rights. It is from this moment that no power in the world can prevent the liberation of a woman who has decided to be free.

Donna Hughes' speech (above) was originally published here: Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week Day 3

Read more about Islamic fundamentalism: The Terrifying Brilliance of the Islamic Memeplex

Read more about defeating terrorism through fighting for women's rights: Strengthen Women's Rights to Reduce Terrorism

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When You Talk to Your Friends About Jihad, Try to NOT Scare Them

A FRIEND of mine and I were waiting for an event to end, and we had about 20 minutes with nothing to do. With a smile on my face, I said, "I have an idea! Let's talk about Islamic jihad! She gave me a look that said, "Please let's talk about anything but that." I've talked to her about it before.

So I said, "I've been meaning to ask you, for research purposes, why don't you like talking about jihad?"

She said, "It creeps me out."

"You mean it's scary?" I asked.

"Yes," she reluctantly admitted, as if she was embarrassed to say so.

I said, "Well there is some good news. The majority of Muslims ignore the Qur'an's instructions to subjugate infidels. People are people, and in many places in the world, Muslims did not choose to be Muslims. Somewhere along the line, they lived in a place that was converted to Islam by whatever means, and now they are Muslims, but may have never read the Qur'an in their own language, don't really know what's in it, and don't follow most of the things prescribed in it.

"They are casual Muslims. They're just living their lives, going about their business, raising their families, and are not interested in taking over the world."

But at this point, I couldn't help myself. I said something scary: "Of course, the children of these Muslims are vulnerable to the fundamentalist Muslims who come into town (as they have done in many places) and start saying to the young men, 'Your parents are hypocrites. They say they are Muslims but they don't know what's in the Qur'an and they don't practice real Islam.' Young teenagers being what they are, are very open to this message, and already prone to seeing something wrong about their parents, and they are easily recruited to the jihad."

I then started talking about something a less scary, and we kept talking. But I'd gotten some good information in there, and she might see the news a little differently now, and maybe eventually she'll get a chance to vote on immigration laws or sedition laws, and she'll be more informed about what's at stake.

It's hard to talk about jihad without being scary, but it's something we should all work on. Our fellow infidels need to know about this stuff. It is ugly and unnerving, but there are many ways to make it more interesting and less upsetting.

Even though I didn't really mean it as a technique, when I asked my friend why she didn't like talking about jihad, she became more open to talking about it. I was at least acknowledging her feelings, and after we talked about it, we both knew each other a little better, and that makes it more comfortable to talk about anything, including jihad.

So that question could be used as a technique when you see someone's hesitancy about talking about jihad-related things. Ask the person why they don't like talking about it. This will give them a chance to relax and open up, and it'll give you some insight into what is going on in the minds of your fellow citizens.

If you have tried to talk to someone about jihad recently, we would love to hear about your experiences, good or bad (leave a comment on this post). One of the best things we can share with each other is what kinds of approaches we have tried that worked well, and what didn't work very well.

And if you haven't been talking to anybody about it, try the approach above, and then come back here and tell us about it. We can help each other get better at this. One of the great things about the internet is you can share your personal experience and it can help thousands.

Read more: How to Change Someone's Opinion

Read more: Know the Koran

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Muslims Are Still Going On Slave Raids In Africa? In the 21st Century?!

The following is an article by Stephen Brown called Slavery in Islamist Sudan. Reprinted with permission. IT WAS THE KIND of excitement that made children uneasy. Grownups were pointing toward the river. Others were arriving at a run. The bustling atmosphere in the market place of the peaceful African town of Nyamlell in the Dinka tribal area in the southern Sudan was changing. Worried adults could see what a seven-year-old Dinka boy, Francis Bok, who had gone to the market that fateful day with older village children to sell his mother’s eggs and peanuts, could not: “a storm of smoke” rising from a nearby village. Sellers frantically began to gather up their wares and hurry away with the buyers. The adults understood. They recognized the approaching signs of the dreaded scourge that most people believed had disappeared from the pages of African history long ago: a slave raid. It was 1986 and Bok was about to see his happy world of family and village shattered forever by a centuries-old, barbaric practice that has never died out: the violent capture and enslavement of black Africans by Arabs. “The Arab militias were told to kill the men and enslave the women and children,” said the now 28-year-old Bok, who was himself captured and enslaved that day, to an audience of 80 people at the University of Toronto recently where he had been invited to speak by the campus organization, Zionists at U. of T. Bok, who would spend the next ten years working as a child slave, then outlined for his college listeners in horrifying detail the savage hurricane of violence he next witnessed when the Arab slavers attacked. “I saw many people on the ground, shot…I saw people with their heads cut off with swords and shot in the head. People were lying on the ground like they just wanted to relax for a moment. I saw blood pouring like a small stream,” the 28-year-old Bok recounted in a voice that still quivers with emotion. Unknown to him at that time, Bok was also an innocent victim of the decades-long, savage civil war between Sudan’s Arab Muslim North and the country’s African Christian and animist South. Based in the capital, Khartoum, the North’s Islamist government, which also hosted Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, had promulgated sharia law in 1983 for the whole country in its quest to Arabize and Islamicize the non-Muslim South. Also as part of this goal, the Khartoum government armed Muslim militias and sent them in the 1980s and 1990s to wage jihad against the infidel southerners. However, the spears and hippopotamus shields of the South’s Dinka and Nuer tribes, the war’s main victims, were no match for the Kalashnikov-armed Muslims, who went on to kill two million southern Sudanese, displace another four million and take tens of thousands of slaves in a silent genocide. After the slave raid, Bok, a Christian, told the audience he was taken to the Muslim North to work for one of the Arab raiders’ families as a child slave for the next decade. During the pitiless trip north, the little Dinka boy witnessed the depth of racism, cruelty and religious hatred of his captors and their world towards black Africans when an Arab slaver cut off the leg of a Dinka girl who would not stop crying because she had seen her parents butchered in the market place. Upon his arrival at his master’s home, Bok was to experience himself this racial viciousness when he was immediately surrounded and beaten by the masters’ children who called him “abeed” (slave), an Arabic word also used for black Africans in general. And a slave Bok was in every sense of the word as he worked for his master without a day off and without payment for the next ten years, often laboring from four in the morning until after the family had gone to bed that night. “I was supposed to look after the goats; there were about two hundred goats,” Bok told listeners of his first days as a seven-year-old slave. “My master knew all the goats. He would ask: ‘Where is this goat? Where is that goat?’ If I answered: ‘I don’t know. He would beat me…He had a favorite stick to beat me. When I had done something wrong, even when I had done nothing wrong, he beat me.” Lonely and isolated, Bok said he was made to sleep in a shelter near the animals and was never allowed to talk to the Dinka slaves owned by other Arab families. The child slave even received a beating, Bok told the audience, when he asked his master one day why he calls him ‘abeed’ and why no one loves him. He was told never to ask that question again. The treatment Bok received from his master’s wife, however, was even worse. She would, he related, not allow her ‘abeed’ to look her directly in the face and would spit in his, often calling on her children to spit on the Dinka boy too. “That hurt,” said Bok. “I asked her why? She said: ‘You are my slave and this is my house.’ She would also grab a knife and say she would kill me like a chicken.” For ten long years, Bok told his listeners, he would lie awake at night and wonder who was going to come and free him from this hopeless, helpless life of a slave where he was told he was just an animal. Even his forcible conversion to Islam, outwardly in Bok’s case, did not bring any improvement in treatment. Only his faith in God, the Dinka slave stated, and his desire to see his parents again kept him going. “I hated the way they treated me and the way they treated the other slaves,” said Bok, recounting his humanity was never once recognized during all those years with the Arab family, his only value being the work he could do. This was hideously emphasized by a nightmarish incident that convinced Bok to take matters into his own hands and escape. On a visit with his master to his master’s friend, Bok said he was instructed to talk in the Dinka language to another boy-slave, who had had his leg cut off. “I asked him what happened,” Bok remembers. “He started crying and said he had refused to go to work for one day. He told his master he was sick and wasn’t going to work. His master told him he had to go to work. There was no excuse. The boy continued to argue with his master, so his master cut his leg off.” At age 14, Bok told a silent audience he was caught escaping twice and badly beaten, and nearly killed the second time. Waiting until he was 17 to make another attempt, Bok successfully made it to Khartoum with the help of a kindly Muslim truck driver who took him home and bought him a bus ticket. From Khartoum, the young Dinka made it to Cairo where he was eventually allowed to come to America as a United Nations refugee in 1999. Today, the former African slave is a proud American citizen. In 2000, sponsored by the American Anti-Slavery Group, Bok began speaking of his experiences to audiences across the United States, especially at schools and colleges, giving as his reason the fact he could not forget those Dinka slave boys he remembered seeing in the Sudan. In his anti-slavery advocacy, Bok became the first escaped slave to appear before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and has spoken to other politicians, including Colin Powell and George Bush, whom he and most Dinkas, he says, hold in high regard for his assistance to the southern Sudanese cause. The new African American, grateful to America for the second life it has granted him as well as for the opportunity to speak about his people, also wrote a highly engrossing book about his days as a boy slave, Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America, that should be required reading in every high school. About the only setback for Bok in America occurred when he discovered his father had been killed and his mother and sisters went missing in the same Muslim militia raid that saw him enslaved. His brother, however, was still alive and a member of the southern Sudanese, anti-government army. As for the Sudan today, Bok says the problem remains the same in that the government is still trying to impose sharia law on its non-Muslim citizens, whom, he says, will never accept it and the second-class status it confers on non-Muslims. Bok, who is not against independence for the African South Sudan, also says he did not believe in the 2005 peace treaty between the North and the South that ended the war. “It was a big deal for the Sudanese; but I didn’t even smile,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t the real thing. I don’t see it as a real peace. Why is it a peace when there is still a war (Darfur) in the country? They (the government) shifted the war to another region.” Bok says he plans to return next spring to the Sudan for the first time since his escape and would like to teach English to refugees in Darfur. Asked what he would say to his former master if he was standing in the same University of Toronto lecture room with him at that moment, the supposedly ‘half savage’ ex-slave said he would tell his former tormentor that he was “absolutely wrong” to do what he did and never to do it to another person. “I don’t want to do anything bad to him or to his wife who hit me,” he said. “The only thing I could do is point a finger at him and say: ‘This is the man who took my childhood away from me.’ Other than that, I forgive him.” Maybe most people don't see the role Islam is playing in most of the horrors and conflicts in the world because Islam is not identified in the news coverage of the events. We hear about a civil war in Sudan, but we are never told, "Muslims want everyone to submit to Islam or dhimmitude, and the Christians and Animists in the south refuse to submit." When covering the different civil wars and conflicts between nations, if the news agencies identified the religions or political ideologies of each side, it would quickly become clear that almost all of them are between Muslims and someone else. And in almost all of them, Muslims instigated the conflict but consider themselves merely "defending" Islam. What possible good does it do to say anything negative about Islam, even if it's true? Find out here.

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