Monday, August 30, 2010

NRA supports Democrats who support amnesty and gun control

 
Yeah, I know, every one says it - all the time: The NRA is a single issue organization that does not concern itself with anything other than protecting our Second Amendment rights. Damn the rest of the planks that hold the ship together, that 2nd Amendment plank will be secure all the way to bottom of the ocean after the ship falls apart and sinks. The NRA is so dedicated to focusing on gun rights it even wears blinders so it cannot see what else is going on around it. The NRA solicits money from its members to support its legislative programs and to help supposedly pro-gun politicians get elected. Supposedly is a broad word that requires you to have your eyes wide open to see the whole picture. Any candidate for Congress is required to swear allegiance to the political platform of his or her party and the national platform of the Democratic Party supports gun control. Here is the complete section from the National Platform of the Democratic Party on Firearms. While they begin by saying the recognize the right to bear arms they plainly call for "reasonable regulation" and "commonsense laws". That means Gun Control!
So what is the latest kick the NRA is using to raise money? Well, the flyer that came today raises a point about 595,000 criminal aliens who are in America today because our border security laws haven't been enforced. Just who is preventing those laws from being enforced? Its the Democrats who control Congress thanks in part to the 52 Democrats the NRA helped get elected in 2008. When the state of Arizona, out of desperation to put some form of border security in place, passed a law that simply gave a police officer the responsibility to check the citizenship of any person stopped for questioning in other matters it was the Democratic majority in Congress who loudly condemned the move. It is also those same Democrats who are pushing for an amnesty program to grant citizenship to every illegal immigrant presently on American soil - which also includes those 595,000 criminals. It is also those same Democrats who are desperately seeking votes from those same illegal immigrants who will be expected to show great appreciation for their newly found rights as an American citizen.


Saturday, August 28, 2010

I've told the NRA: Not one damn dime for a Democrat

Some people refuse to admit they have made a mistake. The National Rifle Association is one of them. I am another. Let me clear up the lesser of these two problems. For the last 42 years I have been a Life Member of the NRA and have frequently responded to their letters asking for donations to help them get pro-gun politicians elected. A few years ago I learned that some of that money I sent them was used to help some Democrats. Apparently, that included Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid from Nevada. Harry Reid along with most of the other Democrats the NRA helped have gone on to confirm numerous judges appointed to Federal and Supreme Courts. Only a slim majority of five conservative Justices remain on the Supreme Court and that is what recently upheld two very important Second Amendment cases. The last two new Justices confirmed by the Democrat majority in the Senate have been radical leftists who oppose every right of gun owners. 

In Nevada, Harry Reid is running against a very conservative Republican named Sharron Angle who happens to be a Life Member of the NRA. Due to a firestorm of protest against the NRA for the favorable publicity they have given to Harry Reid, the NRA has recently stated they will not endorse him for reelection in November. But what about Sharron Angle? According to FOX News, quoting Chris W. Cox, head of the NRA Political Victory Fund. "Cox stopped short of saying whether the group would support Reid's opponent, Republican Sharron Angle, or stay neutral in the race."

FOX News also reported: "The National Republican Senatorial Committee was quick to relay news of the NRA's decision. Meanwhile, Reid's campaign manager, Brandon Hall, noted that the NRA has donated to Reid's campaign and not to Angle's during the current election cycle. The group donated $4,950 to the Reid campaign, according to records maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics."

I resigned my Life Membership in the NRA on July 2nd. You can read my earlier posts on this subject. At the same time I became a Life Member of the Gun Owners of America, a group that believes that conservative principles are necessary to supporting the Second Amendment. The GOA has supported Sharron Angle's campaign just as I have so sending money to the NRA would appear to cancel out this effort. I won't support or belong to any group that pays homage to the Democratic Party which is  the most anti-gun political party in our nations history. The NRA seems to feel it does not have to be held accountable for the consequences of their Democratic endorsements. That is their biggest mistake.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Wayne LaPierre Standing Guard: His left hand doesn't know what his right hand is doing.

Apparently, the NRA doesn't have a procedure to remove a Life Member from its membership rolls while they are still alive. After I mailed them two formal letters telling the National Rifle Association why I did not want to be associated with their support for anti-gun Democrats they continue to mail me letters asking for contributions for their political campaigns. They also keep sending me the monthly magazine, American Rifleman. In the latest September issue NRA Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre's Standing Guard column he writes about two minority opinions issued by Supreme Court Justices. Justice Stephen Breyer who he quotes:
"...[T]he Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self-defense." and Justice John Paul Stevens who wrote a second dissenting opinion that American citizens don't even have a right to own guns. 

Wayne LaPierre goes on to say: "Those words in McDonald v. City of Chicago are at the core of a judicial activist attack on the Second Amendment, signed by four associate justices of the United States Supreme Court; John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor."

What Wayne LaPierre fails to recognize is how did these four liberal justices managed to get on the Supreme Court in the first place. They were confirmed by equally liberal members of the United States Senate. I don't know who voted to confirm the first three but I do know that Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by the members of the current Senate which is led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and that Senator Reid championed Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation. I also know that the NRA is having some kind of warped love affair with Senator Reid and has been gushing so many kind sentiments about him they seem to want him to get reelected in November.

This tells me that if the NRA is being truly honest in objecting to activist judges then maybe they shouldn't endorse those elected officials who go on to vote to confirm them. And they should not endorse any candidate who has voted to confirm any previous activist judge for any Federal Court position. Even if you believe that the NRA is a strict single issue organization and only concerns itself with Second Amendment issues then they must acknowledge the consequences of their helping some people get elected who go on to cast votes against their primary interest.

It is time for the likes of Wayne LaPierre and Chris W. Cox at the NRA Institute for Legislative Action and the NRA Political Victory Fund to wake up to the reality that you both are incapable of doing your jobs if your right hands don't know what your left hands are doing. Your brain is supposed to control both hands. Start putting it to work.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Divide and Conquer - How the Tea Party movement must avoid defeat.

Following a successful conspiratorial effort in 2007 among several hundred Left Wing journalists working in consort with a sympathetic news media to denounce and discredit the Republican Party, America went to the polls in November 2008 and elected its first Marxist/socialist president and gave him an overwhelming Democrat majority in both houses of Congress. With absolutely no checks and balances to hinder their efforts, these power-crazed Democrats immediately began to bankrupt the American economy and trash the Constitution of the United States. Somewhat slow to realize what was happening around them, the American people soon became a once sleeping giant now wide-awake and the Tea Party movement virtually exploded upon the American political scene in 2009.

Some background on the origin of the Tea Party

The Tea Party movement acquired its name from the original Boston Tea Party in 1773 that precipitated the first American Revolution with a protest against British taxes on the Colonists and led to the Declaration of Independence. Two excerpts from Wikipedia explain the first critical developments of the Tea Party.
"On January 19, 2009, stock-trader Graham Makohoniuk posted a casual invitation on the financial message board market-ticker.org to "Mail a tea bag to congress and to senate"."
"On February 19, 2009, in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC Business News editor Rick Santelli criticized the government plan to refinance mortgages, which had just been announced the day before. He said that those plans were, "promoting bad behavior," by, "subsidizing losers' mortgages." He suggested holding a tea party for traders to gather and dump the derivatives in the Chicago river on July 1. A number of the derivative traders around him cheered on his proposal, to the apparent amusement of the hosts in the studio. Video of Santelli's 'rant' went viral after it received a "red siren" headline on the news aggregation website, Drudge Report."
Protests against big government sprang up everywhere. The sleeping giant was now wide-awake. In their Hell-bent race to bankrupt and socialize America the Democrats rammed one piece of legislation after another through Congress such as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Federal Reserve Transparency Act and a series of health care reform bills. The highlight of the Tea Party movement culminated in the march on Washington, D.C. on September 12, 2009 in the Take Back America campaign and two million Americans from all over the country traveled at their own expense to be there.
Photo from the U.K. Daily Mail.

Ariel photo by University of Illinois
The effect of the Tea Party movement was astounding. Soon afterward, WorldNet Daily News, one of the most prominent conservative news sites on the Internet organized a Pink Slip campaign putting every member of Congress on notice that they will be fired if they support this socialist legislation. When the campaign ended over 10-million slips had been delivered to every elected member of Congress. The immediate result of the Pink Slips was that a growing number of liberal Democrats and a few equally liberal RINO's (Republicans In Name Only) began to announce they would not seek reelection in November 2010.
The Pink Slip campaign was organized by Joseph Farah, CEO and editor of WorldNet Daily News and any citizen can order a set of Pink Slips to be delivered to every member of Congress for $29.95. Click this link to place your order: http://superstore.wnd.com/store/item.asp?ITEM_ID=3251

Janet Porter, founder and president of Faith2Action and one of the organizers behind the "pink slips" campaign, was at a news conference today in Washington where U.S. Reps. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn.; Louie Gohmert, R-Texas; Steve King, R-Iowa; and Trent Franks, R-Ariz., hailed the effort as an innovative new vehicle for the American people to express themselves to members of Congress.
Along the way ex-Governor of Alaska and Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin began touring the country endorsing true conservative candidates in the name of the Tea Party movement. Initial results were the election of Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia followed by several primary wins in other states. Then the infighting began. One thing that conservatives share with liberals is they both hold strong opinions. While conservative opinions are more often right (no pun intended) than wrong and liberal opinions are more often wrong than right, the liberals hold a distinct advantage in having a monopoly on the means to broadcast their views to the general public. Not only do the liberals get their views seen, heard and read by the public they also have the ability to prevent contradictory views that would undermine their opinions ever getting the attention of the public. In other words, liberals are able to manage the news. While various polls suggest that the majority of Americans consider themselves to be conservative, a minority of liberals can make it appear that they have superior numbers.
The distinct advantage the conservatives have is in the blogosphere. While the liberals control the mainstream news media, the conservatives control the Internet.
There are several conservative news sources that I read every day and the strange thing about them is they all do not seem to like each other. I won't begin to mention who they are except to note the latest flap going on now between Ann Coulter, the conservative author, speaker and columnist and Joseph Farah,  CEO and editor of WorldNet Daily News. It seems that Mr. Farah is something of a puritanical blue-nose who takes a strong dislike to people of alternate lifestyles. Mr. Farah has organized a Taking Back America Conference to be held in Miami on Sept. 17th, and he did not like the fact that Ann Coulter accepted a speaking engagement before a group of Gay Republican conservatives so he dumped her off the list of speakers at his event. Here is how Ann Coulter defended herself as quoted from WorldNet Daily News:
"I speak at Harvard and I certainly don't endorse their views. I've spoken to Democratic groups and liberal Republican groups that loooove abortion. The main thing I do is speak on college campuses, which is about the equivalent of speaking at an al-Qaida conference. I'm sure I agree with GOProud more than I do with at least half of my college audiences. But in any event, giving a speech is not an endorsement of every position held by the people I'm speaking to. I was going to speak for you guys, I think you're nuts on the birther thing (though I like you otherwise!)."
I happen to agree with Ann Coulter. When it comes time for all patriotic Americans to stand side by side in the trenches I don't really care if the person next to me fighting our common enemy has a different view on who he or she should live with. As I pointed out to Mr. Farah in a letter to the editor, which they did not print:
What an interesting contradiction. First, Joseph Farah drops Ann Coulter from a Tea Party conference because she took a speaking engagement with a group of gay conservative Republicans. Now, WorldNet Daily is shilling a new book by executive vice president of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, in spite of the fact that the NRA endorsed and help get elected 52 Democrats in 2008 and is currently praising Democrat Senator Harry Reid instead of supporting Tea Party Republican Sharron Angle in Nevada.
In my world we call that hypocrisy, so Mr. Farah, in spite of your noble objectives, that makes you a hypocrite.
What we all need to do is put aside our petty differences and realize that the only way we can win our battle in November to take back our country is to work together to fight our common enemy. We must avoid at all costs the worst thing that could happen, that we become divided and fail. We have got the enemy on the run and cannot allow anything to distract us from the pursuit. We must avoid snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
And speaking about Ann Coulter's remark about Mr. Farah's "birther thing" here is another letter I wrote to WorldNet Daily News that they did publish on their web site:
So, according to your story, Obama is "enjoying" the eligibility dispute. I am more worried that he has a reason to be enjoying it and so should you. Obama is a crafty politician who is slipperier than greased Teflon. If Obama played chess he would be a Grand Master. While I am torn between wishing he would be convicted of treason and sentenced to life in a military prison run by returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans or deported back to Kenya, I am also very concerned that he has a trump card up his sleeve. He may well have foreseen mass disapproval for his Marxist/Socialist agenda that would sink him and his majority Democrats and planned ahead by creating his own controversy over his birth certificate. What better way to scuttle the entire right wing effort to retake Congress than for him to pull his October surprise and release all of those hidden documents and say to the voters, "See, I am a citizen. I told you so."

Saturday, August 21, 2010

To understand Muslim conflicts you can’t follow the game without a play list.

Why do Muslims kill other Muslims? Why do Muslims hate other Muslims almost as much as they hate Israel (and America)? Why do they sometimes sound like they disagree with one another? To begin to understand the conflict you need to go back almost 1400 years in time to the year 632, the year that the Islamic Prophet Muhammad died. But instead of this being a dry and boring lesson in ancient history, consider this: Do you really understand today the reason why one Muslim in America says something uncomplimentary about another Muslim? For instance, as Debbie Schlussel pointed out on her web site yesterday, when she explained why Rima Fakih, the Muslim who won the Miss USA contest touched on the Ground Zero Mosque controversy in NYC:
“But the 24-year-old says while she supports freedom of religion in America, the people behind the mosque should consider the feelings of the families who lost loved ones on 9/11.”

“It shouldn’t be so close to the World Trade Center. We should be more concerned with the tragedy than religion,” said Fakih.
As Debbie Schlussel explains it: “First of all, Fakih is a Shi’ite Muslim. The Ground Zero mosque is a Sunni mosque. Shi’ites and Sunnis hate each other. It’s what the very long Iran-Iraq war was all about. It’s why Dubai and other Gulf States expelled their Sunni populations. It’s why Yemen has Shi’ite terrorists fighting the Sunni government. Of course, she doesn’t want her Sunni enemies to have a mosque there. If it were a Shi’ite mosque, well, that’s another story.”
So there, it isn’t one Muslim against another Muslim, it is one Shi’ite Muslim against a Sunni Muslim. According to Wikipedia, my favorite source of on-line information, 70-75% of the world’s Muslim population are Sunni while only 15% are Shi’ite. It makes it easier to understand how the late (hanged by the neck) Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein, who was a member of the minority population of Shi’ites, ruled a country of Sunni Muslims with such brutal force and killed so many of his own people.

As Wikipedia tells it: The historic background of the Sunni–Shia split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632(AD), leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world which led to the Battle of Siffin. Sectarian violence persists to this day from Pakistan to Yemen and is the most common element of friction throughout the middle east. Sunnis hold that Abu Bakr was Muhammad's rightful successor and that the method of choosing or electing leaders (Shura) endorsed by the Qur'an is the consensus of the Ummah, (the Muslim community). Shī‘īs believe that Muhammad divinely ordained his cousin and son-in-law Ali (the father of his grandsons Hasan ibn Ali and Husayn ibn Ali) in accordance with the command of God to be the next Caliph, making ‘Alī and his direct descendants Muhammad's successors.
And they have been fighting over this for 1400 years. To put things in perspective, that’s twice as long as the Protestants have been fighting the Catholics in Northern Ireland but the death toll throughout the Muslim world is a million times worse.

Then, of course, there is Taqiyya – the command to lie to non-Muslims. You will never understand what is behind the rhetoric unless you know the rules of the game.
Muslims are allowed to deceive non-Muslims if it helps Islam. For non-Muslims this principle, called Taqiyya, is another surprising concept of Islam. While most other religions speak highly of truthfulness the Qur’an instructs Muslims to lie to non-Muslims about their beliefs and their political ambitions to protect and spread Islam. The practice of concealing one’s faith in dangerous circumstances originates in the Qur’an itself, which deems blameless those who disguise their beliefs in such cases. The practice of taqiyya in difficult circumstances is considered legitimate by Muslims of various persuasions. Sunni and Shi’i  commentators alike observe that Q 16:106 in particular refers to the case of ‘Ammar b. Yasir, who was forced to renounce his beliefs under physical duress and torture.
The practice of Taqiyya (also spelled Taqiyyah) is a big thing among Muslims. There is a whole Muslim web site devoted to explaining this to Muslims called Answering Ansar.
Taqiyyah proven from the Qur'an
It is an irrefutable fact that the use of Taqiyyah can be proved from both Qur'an and the sayings of Prophet Mohammed (S). All the prophets (A.S), the Imams (A.S) and others pious people have advised to perform Taqiyyah. Following are 'some' Ayahs from Qur'an to prove our case:

First verse
Anyone who after accepting faith in Allah utters unbelief except under compulsion his heart remaining firm in faith but such as open their breast to unbelief on them is Wrath from Allah and theirs will be a dreadful Penalty"
Surah An-Nahal, verse 16:106 transliteration by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Text confirmed on University of Southern California Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement web site.
The web site Answering-Ansar  is actually the authoritative reference used in Wikipedia to define Taqiyya. Muslims are sometimes accused of practicing Taqiyya in contemporary political debates such as the ongoing discussion about so-called moderate Muslims versus the fundamentalist Muslims and whether Islam is violent and radical by its very nature. So you can be sure that what you hear from the Muslims really isn't the truth if it doesn't advance the cause of Islam. You can also be certain that you won't hear the truth from our liberal mainstream news media. But the reason for that is related to another Arabic word, Dhimmitude. Dhimmitude is a neologism first found in French denoting an attitude of concession, surrender and appeasement towards Islamic demands. (I just love Wikipedia)
Here is a perfect example of Dhimmitude from Tom Kent, the deputy managing editor for standards and production at the Associated Press as reported by Andrew Breitbart at Big Journalism.
Associated Press Deputy Managing Editor for Standards and Production Tom Kent sent the following note to the staff about covering the New York City mosque story:
Aug. 19, 2010
Colleagues,
Here is some guidance on covering the NYC mosque story, with assists from Chad Roedemeier in the NYC bureau and Terry Hunt in Washington:
1. We should continue to avoid the phrase “ground zero mosque” or “mosque at ground zero” on all platforms. (We’ve very rarely used this wording, except in slugs, though we sometimes see other news sources using the term.) The site of the proposed Islamic center and mosque is not at ground zero, but two blocks away in a busy commercial area. We should continue to say it’s “near” ground zero, or two blocks away.
WE WILL CHANGE OUR SLUG ON THIS STORY LATER TODAY from “BC-Ground Zero Mosque” to “BC-NYC Mosque.”
In short headlines, some ways to refer to the project include:
_ mosque 2 blocks from WTC site
_ Muslim (or Islamic) center near WTC site
_ mosque near ground zero
_ mosque near WTC site
We can refer to the project as a mosque, or as a proposed Islamic center that includes a mosque.
It may be useful in some stories to note that Muslim prayer services have been held since 2009 in the building that the new project will replace. The proposal is to create a new, larger Islamic community center that would include a mosque, a swimming pool, gym, auditorium and other facilities.
2. Here is a succinct summary of President Obama’s position:
Obama has said he believes Muslims have the right to build an Islamic center in New York as a matter of religious freedom, though he’s also said he won’t take a position on whether they should actually build it.
For additional background, you’ll find below a Fact Check on the project that moved yesterday.
Tom
Thanks, Tom, for confirming what most Americans already suspected. You so-called professional journalists bend, warp and distort the news to suit your own preconceived, nefarious agenda. Just like the New York Times who's motto almost says: All the news that fits we print.

 

Thursday, August 19, 2010

And what about the mosques? Follow-up to my fear about Islam post.

    
My blog yesterday covered reasons why people should fear Muslims and Islam. Previous posts have explained why there is so much opposition to mosques in general which are springing up like weeds around the country. While opposition to local mosques have received scattered publicity, the planned mega-sized mosque 600 feet away from Ground Zero in New York City has garnered the attention of the entire nation. The mosque, from the viewpoint of Islamists, is a symbol of conquest. Historically, Islam has converted churches and synagogues into mosques in every country they conquered. Countries under complete Islamic Sharia rule do not even permit the existence of any other form of religious worship. I have even made a logical comparison between modern day mosques in America to the forts our government built during our western expansion. But some people still ask, why should mosques be opposed? If we had a truly impartial news media that explained all the facts, you would know that mosques in America have been used for recruitment and training of terrorists by radical Islamic clerics.
Take a look at the following map prepared by the Investigative Project on Terrorism that shows the location of mosques across America involved in known criminal terrorist activity.
There is an interactive version of this map found on this link: http://www.investigativeproject.org/maps/terrorism-map.php
Click on any of the place markers on this map to read the details. Then, on their web site, visit the Research section and read more news.

Just 100 miles north of here just outside Columbus, Ohio is the American Islamic Waqf Noor Islamic Cultural Center mosque in Dublin, Ohio which has been the location for numerous radical Muslim affairs. See the details in Central Ohioans Against Terrorism web site.

The only thing necessary to convert peace-loving Muslims into radical Muslims is for some Iman to remind them of their obligation to follow every command contained in the Qur'an.  And recent polls have shown that more than 25% of young Muslims in America see nothing wrong with terrorist activity. The majority of mosques in America have been financed by Saudi Arabia and those financial arrangements all contain conditions that those mosques will include Wahhabi textbook materials that condemn Western Culture and our form of government. According to the basic teachings of Islam, all governments must follow Islamic Sharia Law, the most barbaric, uncivilized form of rule.
Even so called moderate Islamic countries, such as Morocco, the place of my father's birth, follow strict Islamic Sharia law. The late King Hassan II of Morocco who died eleven years ago gave a revealing explanation of what all Muslims are expected to be. Following is a brief video of part of an interview with King Hassan II along with an English translation.
 

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Why do some people fear Muslims, Mosques and Islam?

Fear is a response to a perceived threat. It is a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific threat of danger {W]. Fear is based upon facts and the unknown. Following the attack on the United States by 19 radical Muslim terrorists on 9-11-2001, Muslims, mosques and Islam itself came under a cloud of suspicion that prompted many Americans to take a closer look at something that had already become part of their lives. What follows is a small glimpse of a few parts of this issue. There is literally enough information available on the Internet about this subject that could fill an entire library. The research I am including herein tells me that there is reason for great concern and it is something every American needs to become more familiar with. Here are some pertinent questions for Muslims and non-Muslims about Islam and how Muslims and former Muslims reveal their point of view. Several definitions used here have been extracted from topics on Islam found in Wikipedia identified by [W].
Q: Do you know what Islam is?
A: Islam is more than a religion, it is an entire political system that encompasses religious worship, cultural dictates, family law, legal and military obligations. Islamic law (Arabic: شريعة Šharīah) touches on virtually every aspect of life and society, encompassing everything from banking and warfare to welfare and the environment [W].
Q: Is Islam today any different than it was when the Prophet  Muhammad was alive?
A: No, it is not. Islam literally translates from the Arabic to mean “submission”. The Qur’an remains, today, unchanged from its original text written 1400 years ago. Muslims believe the Qur'an to be the perfect word of God, and as such it cannot contain any errors or contradictions, and must be perfectly compatible with science. Muslims believe it to be so perfect that readers must conclude it is of divine, rather than human, origin. It is so perfect only as revealed in the original Arabic [W]. It is repeated by rote by non-Arabic speaking people in words they often do not understand the meaning of. Muslims are not permitted the freedom to choose only those passages from the Qur’an they approve of and reject the rest.
Q: Is Islam practiced differently in other countries than it is in America?
A: The difference depends on the percentage of population of Muslims and non-Muslims. In England, which has a ratio of Muslims about twice that in America, there is widespread unrest where Muslims are making ever-increasing demands to have laws changed to conform to Islamic Sharia Law. Here are a few pictures taken outside the Parliament Building that illustrate this unrest.


Also, in American cities with sizable Muslim populations, such as Dearborn, Michigan, similar Muslim influence is occurring regarding Islamic Sharia Law.
Q: What is moderate Islam?
A:  Many former Muslims as well as Islamic scholars all agree there is no such thing as ‘Moderate’ Islam, there is only Islam.


Source: Former Muslims United
Exposing the Myth of Moderate Islam
by Ali Sina, FaithFreedom.org, March 14, 2010

I have always maintained that “moderate Muslim” is an oxymoron. We have two kinds of Muslims: Terrorist Muslims and ignorant Muslims. The former are those who know Islam well and live by its dictums. The latter have no clue about their religion and have an idealized image of Islam that has no bases in facts.
Source: Amil Imani
Moderate Islam Is No Islam
Amil Imani, 15 July 2007
Many people have asked me why I have put my life in harm’s way by tangling with Islam and why I do what I do. Born in a Muslim family and having witnessed first-hand the horrors and indignity that Islamofascism visits on people it subjugates, I have taken it upon myself to do my part in defeating this ideology of oppression, hate and violence. Islam is wrapped in deception as a spiritual dogma or religion and is more dangerous than Nazism, Communism and Fascism.

Nowadays we hear from the non-Muslim world about the moderate version of Islam and moderate Muslims. In my view, being a Muslim and not being radical is simply not possible. I never thought that it would be easy to reason with Muslims. They don't understand that freedom has a price. Freedom lets a person make choices and be up-front about it. And that's where I part with those who would prefer to be sheep and have sheepdogs hem them in.


Many non-Muslims are obviously very well-meaning with regard to Islam, but they are also extremely naïve and ignorant of the facts. They seem to think that Islam is just another religion of love and peace and Muslims should be given full freedom to practice their religion. Do they also believe that thieves, misogynists, rapists, child-molesters and any and all manner of practicing evils should be given complete carte blanche to carry on with what they value and believe? These well-meaning simpletons are just as deluded as the fanatic jihadists by refusing to acknowledge the fact that one cannot be a Muslim and not abide by the dictates of the Quran.
There is no such thing as moderate Islam. There is no such thing as secular Islam or a secular Muslim. How can you possibly secularize a shark or a snake? You can’t. It’s the nature of the beast. There are numerous sects within Islam. One and all are extremes and not in the least amenable to change. Keep in mind that Islam claims that it is the perfect eternal faith for mankind. Splits have occurred and will continue to occur in Islam. Yet, reformation has not happened in nearly 1400 years and is not going to happen. Islam is carved in granite, just the way it is. No change. Allah's book is sealed.

There are indeed some Muslims who are moderate in the way they practice their religion. These people, for the most part, are culturally Muslims. They don't practice Islam the way it is mandated. They pick and choose. Therefore, "moderate Islam," is no Islam at all. It is not possible. The only way to deal with the menace of real Islam, the Islamofascist varieties, is to fully dismantle it and relegate it to the confines of museums.


The Islamists have created fear not only in a non-Islamic world, but in the hearts and minds of those who consider themselves to be Muslims. The Islamists wage their war under the name of Islam. They receive immense direct and indirect support from the rank-and-file of ordinary Muslims. It is this support of moderate Muslims that keeps the Islamists alive. And it is the Islamists who are intent on showing no mercy to any and all who do not share their ideology, be they Muslims or not.

This is why there is truly no such thing as a “moderate” Muslim.  Moderate Muslims, or in other words “non-practicing Muslims”, are moderate by default only. Like millions of Iranians who were born into a faith they did not choose, a faith that was “inflicted” upon them by invaders of a foreign culture, a faith that forbids them to leave or revert to their pre-Islamic heritage and other Iranian religions, they remain Muslims in name only.
Source: Claremont Independent
In an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ex-Muslim, and activist for truth at Claremont College on 2-14-2009, Aditya Bindal, from the Claremont Independent asked about moderate Muslims:

Aditya Bindal: While we rarely see moderate Muslims speak out against the violence within Islam, they always seem to do that from a kind of relativism, cosmopolitanism and it almost seems to be saying that extremism is a problem, radicalism is a problem. They seem to fall into a kind of pacifism. As opposed to your principled stand that says Islam is violating fundamental human rights, why do you think the moderate Muslims go in this direction and how can we get them to see things your way?


Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I want to say this: there is no moderate Islam. So talking about the moderate Muslim doesn’t help in any way. You have Islam and you can practice it in varying degrees. You can say that this is someone who calls himself a Muslim but doesn’t practice at all and thinks like a Western person. This is what I did from 1992, when I went to Holland, until 2001. I called myself a Muslim, but lived the life of a liberal Dutch. I didn’t pray or fast. Compare this to the other extreme, where we find an individual struggling to obey all the rules of Islam. Those are the one’s we call fundamentalists, radicals, and extremists, and so on. In between, we have people you (sic> who) just pray, who fast only in the month of Ramadan, and people who become more political. So there’s no moderate Islam. There are practicing Muslims, there are non-practicing Muslims, and there are those who practice a little bit.
Source: Interview with Nonie Darwish, co-founder of Former Muslims United. “There Is No Such Thing as ‘Moderate’ Islam.” Continued Conversations with Nonie Darwish.
Nonie Darwish was born in Gaza when it was under Egyptian control and she grew up in Cairo. She is also the author of a previous book: Now They Call me Infidel. Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror. Nonie is no longer a practicing Muslim. No American can afford NOT to read this book. Sharia law, which governs every area of Muslim life, is now increasingly infiltrating the West. Europe may be lost, America is now under siege. With profound bravery, Darwish documents the history and nature of Sharia law which is invariably mis-represented and mis-understood, both by its followers and by “infidels.” In her words, “the non-Muslim world must have no illusions

Nonie Darwish:
“The term “moderate Muslim” was created in the West. In the Muslim world there is nothing called moderate or radical Muslims or moderate or radical mosques. You are either a Muslim or not. For the term “moderate” Muslim to be legitimate, we must have something called “moderate Islam” vs. “Islam.” What the West terms as Moderate Muslims are the good and peace loving Muslims who are not necessarily taking their religion very seriously and many of whom have never read a Sharia book.”

 “…. Muslims and non-Muslims have different rights in the Muslim State. There are many orders to mistreat, humiliate, subjugate and even kill non-Muslims. The only way for non-Muslims to protect themselves from Muslims is by accepting living in the Muslim state as second class citizens, obeying Islamic Sharia law, and never promoting or preaching their religion. Even slavery has never been abolished by Islam and Muslim law books are full of laws regulating the ownership and treatment of slaves. Sexual slavery for war captive women is allowed by Sharia and was practiced by the prophet Muhammad himself.”
Q: What is the Qur’an?
A: The Qur’an is a book containing 114 suras (chapters) with a combined total of 6,236 verses containing the preachings of the Prophet Muhammad. The chronologically earlier suras, revealed at Mecca, are primarily concerned with ethical and spiritual topics. The later Medinan suras mostly discuss social and moral issues relevant to the Muslim community. The Qur'an is more concerned with moral guidance than legal instruction, and is considered the "sourcebook of Islamic principles and values". Muslim jurists consult the hadith, or the written record of Prophet Muhammad's life, to both supplement the Qur'an and assist with its interpretation [W].
Example of Qur’an instruction to Muslims (University of Southern California - three translations)
[note: Believers = Muslims; Unbelievers = non-Muslims]
Surah 008.012
YUSUFALI: Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): "I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them."
PICKTHAL: When thy Lord inspired the angels, (saying): I am with you. So make those who believe stand firm. I will throw fear into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Then smite the necks and smite of them each finger.
SHAKIR: When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
Q: Who wrote the Qur’an?
A: The Qur’an was reportedly written down by Muhammad's companions while he was alive, between the years 610 and 632, during the last 22 years of his life. Muslims are told to believe that the verses of the Qur'an were revealed to Muhammad by God through the archangel Gabriel [W]. They were in fact solely pronouncements made by Muhammad to his followers during his lifetime. The earlier passages were meant to convince non-Muslims to convert to Islam and follow Muhammad and were laden with messages of peace. The later passages were dictates about war, conquest, torture and the slaughter of Jews and Christians who were described as unbelievers and the “followers of the book” (Bible).
Q: What is the Hadith?
A: Hadith are Muslim traditions relating to the Sunna  (words and deeds) of Muhammad. They are drawn from the writings of scholars writing between 844 and 874, more than 200 years after the death of Mohammed in 632. In general, for Muslims the hadith are second only to the Qur'an in importance, although some scholars put more emphasis on the perpetual adherence of Muslim nation to the traditions to give them credibility, and not solely on hadith. Most of our knowledge about the life of Muhammad comes from the hadith, many of which were biographies of Mohammed. Many Islamic practices (such as the Five Pillars of Islam) are drawn from the hadith [W].
Q; What is Sharia – Islamic Law?
A: Mainstream Islamic law does not distinguish between "matters of church" and "matters of state".  Islamic law covers all aspects of life, from matters of state, like governance and foreign relations, to issues of daily living. The Qur'an defines hudud  as the punishments for five specific crimes: unlawful intercourse, false accusation of unlawful intercourse, consumption of alcohol, theft, and highway robbery. The Qur'an and Sunnah also contain laws of inheritance, marriage, and restitution for injuries and murder, as well as rules for fasting, charity, and prayer [W].

Q: What is Islamism?
A: Islamism which means "Political Islam") is a set of ideologies holding that Islam is not only a religion but also a political system; that modern Muslims must return to their roots of their religion, and unite politically. Leading Islamist thinkers emphasized the enforcement of Sharia (Islamic law); of pan-Islamic political unity or caliphate. Pan-Islamism (اتّحاد الاسلام) is a political movement advocating the unity of Muslims under one Islamic state — often a Caliphate [W].
The concept of mujahideen volunteer Islamist fighters is closely related to pan-Islamic thought. Mujahideen may come from all over the Islamic world to assist in a conflict that they deem to be religiously important [W].

Islamism, as viewed by non-Muslims, is often considered to be Islamofascism.  The term Islamofascism is a neologism which draws an analogy between the ideological characteristics of specific Islamist movements from the turn of the twenty-first century on, and a broad range of European fascist movements of the early twentieth century, neofascist movements, or totalitarianism [W]
.

The public use of the term Islamofascism has also elicited a critical response from various Muslim groups. The terrorist funding front group CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) says that the use of the term "feeds the perception that the war on terror is actually a war on Islam".
CAIR was dealt a significant blow to its reputation in the United States after it was named an unindicted co-conspirator by U.S. prosecutors in a Hamas funding case in Dallas, Texas in 2007. The FBI no longer works with CAIR outside of criminal investigations due to its status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case [w]. In spite of this damaged reputation, the news media today continues to rely on CAIR spokesmen on all opinions regarding Islam or Muslims or mosques. There are several page entries to read on The Holy Land Terrorist Funding trial in the Dallas Morning News web site.

In April 2008, Associated Press reported that US federal agencies, including the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, were advised to stop using the term 'Islamo-fascism' in a fourteen-point memo issued by the Extremist Messaging Branch, a department of another federal body known as the National Counterterrorism Center. Aimed at improving the presentation of the "War on Terrorism" before Muslim audiences and the media, the memo states: "We are communicating with, not confronting, our audiences. Don't insult or confuse them with pejorative terms such as 'Islamo-fascism,' which are considered offensive by many Muslims."[W].
Q: Are all Muslims terrorists?
A: The following was written by a Muslim on May 20, 2001, 3½ months before 9-11 and found on an English/Arab web site www.Muhammadanism.org.
“Most Muslims are not terrorists. Many of them reject the actions of their Muslim brethren around the world. Unfortunately, since Islam teaches world domination, these moderate Muslims rarely raise their voices in protest. If Israelis bomb a Hezbollah camp in Lebanon, Muslims in Western countries will organize vocal demonstrations. Israel has never killed as many Muslims as Saddam Hussein has, but Muslims generally turn a blind eye to violent acts when it is Muslim on Muslim violence. But getting Muslims to condemn the terrorist actions of their brethren, say of those in Sudan, Egypt, Algeria, Afghanistan, or Iraq is like pulling teeth. While the Muslims world wide continually condemn Israel, few Muslims have ever raised their voices in protest over Saddam Hussein's genocidal war upon the Kurds. Why has Bin Laden failed to help the Kurds? Instead, reports on Bin Laden have shown that he has worked together with Saddam Hussein. Furthermore, why did the Muslim nations of Iran and Iraq oppose Western military action to stop the genocide of Muslim Kosovars?”

“Muslims condemn Western sanctions of Iraq. But, they forget that Western nations were their saviors when Iraq conquered Kuwait and made threats toward Saudi Arabia. These Muslim countries appealed to non-Muslim nations to free Muslim Kuwait from Muslim conquest and to halt Iraq’s military advance upon the land of Mecca and Medina. If Western countries were so evil, why did Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the land of Muhammad, have to appeal to the West to protect them from their own Muslim brethren? Why did non-Muslims have to stop the fighting between Muslim brethren and to protect the land of Mecca from Saddam Hussein, a Muslim despot? Was not Allah able to protect them? Even though all these events are historical facts, Muslims freely criticize Western involvement in the Middle East.”

“What does the future hold for Islam in Western countries? One thing I am certain of; it holds terrorism. I've studied Islamic viewpoints on the Western world, especially America. The majority of Muslims today view America as the last great wall that stops Islam. In their mind, America must be destroyed or brought down, by any means necessary. This is what motivated Sheik Rahman to blow up the New York towers. This is what motivates Muslims throughout America to speak of a day when America will fall to Islam's power. Make no mistake about it, Muslims have murdered Americans in America, and will continue to do so. It is not a question of "if", it is a question of "when."“
“Once again I say, most Muslims in America are not terrorists. Many of them are good people. But the seeds of terrorism are planted deep within the theology and psyche of Islam. This theology, when free to grow and blossom, will show itself in the actions of Muslims who are faithful to the example of Muhammad. And as was demonstrated in "Not Without My Daughter", who knows when a peaceful, liberal or moderate Muslim will turn to fundamentalism and embrace the violence of Islam?”

“Often there is a strange transformation in the viewpoint of some Muslims who seek to immigrate to a Western nation. At first, these Muslims complain to immigration officials about their native country and its lack of opportunities, human rights, religious liberties, and intellectual freedom. However, once they settle in a Western nation and enjoy its liberties, some turn against their host nation and begin to praise the virtue’s of an Islamic state. They seem to have forgotten their pleadings with immigration officials to accept their application. They would be upright, and certainly more honest, if they would strive for human and religious rights for the non-Muslim minorities who suffer under Islamic rule. And, if they truly believed that Islam is the answer, why didn't they seek asylum in Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, or Pakistan?”
Q: Are Muslims more loyal to Islam than to America?
A: The answer seems to be evenly split depending on where you look. The web site Muslims For America  has several stories on various aspects of this subject. Many Muslims who responded to them took opposite positions. Contradicting those mixed views was found in a survey done on an authoritative Muslim web site The Middle East Media Research Institute published on August 12, 2010.


The Board of Directors of the Middle East Media Research Institute, according to its web site consists of:
MEMRI’s Board of Advisors and Directors comprises a group of distinguished figures in government, media, law and academia.  Among them are former prime ministers; attorneys-general; justice ministers; leading legal and counterterrorism experts; and recipients of the most prestigious awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the United States Congressional Gold Medal.  This group also includes former United States government officials, such as the director of the CIA; Secretary of the Navy; Director of Operations with the FBI; Ambassadors to the United Nations, Iraq, the European Union, and Romania; Secretary of Education; Deputy Defense Secretary; and head presidential counsel.  Members of MEMRI's Board of Advisors are bipartisan and have honorably served Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
The question posed to its leading scholars encompassed whether a true Muslim could serve in the U.S. military putting them in a position of having to fight other Muslims in a Muslim country. The overall majority of opinions agreed that it would be a violation of Islamic Law for any Muslim to give aid to a government waging war against Muslims. Here are a few quotes from the respondents:
English-Language Fatwas Concerning Aiding or Joining the Military
Conflicting views regarding cooperation with the U.S. security forces, and the joining of these forces, can also be found in rulings issued on the Assembly's English-language website, in response to readers' questions. Following are excerpts from some of the rulings, in the original English:

Dr. Salah Al-Sawy, who was asked whether it is permissible to work as a teacher at a Canadian military college, answered: "There is nothing wrong with working as a civilian teacher in a military college in Canada, especially since Canada is not one of the many countries currently at war with the Ummah, as long as you always remember that you are a man with a cause, that you do not forget your role in telling people about the Prophet".
The Assembly's permanent fatwa committee was more cautious in responding to the following question: "Is it… permissible to join the U.S. Navy if you choose to be stationed in a non-Muslim country, like Japan or China?" In this case, the committee did not issue a ruling, but advised the enquirer to call "and speak directly to one of our scholars, because the answer requires more detail and information."

Another jurisprudent, Dr. Ma'in Khalid Al-Qudah, said it is permissible for a Muslim to serve in the U.S. military, providing he does not fight his coreligionists: "The only thing you must consider in this regard is to make sure not to be involved in fighting, harming, or even bothering Muslims at all. [Other than this], defending your country would be a noble job of which you could be proud."

The ruling given in response is ambivalent. On one hand, the committee states that a Muslim must not participate in "unjust battle," or to give assistance to an army waging such battles, thereby implying that joining the U.S. military at present is forbidden. On the other hand, the ruling states that it is permissible to assist all oppressed groups, whether Muslim or non-Muslim. As an example, he mentions that the Muslim ummah came out against Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait. This seems to imply that the fatwa committee does not rule out service in the U.S. armed forces altogether. The following are excerpts from the Fatwa:
{NOTE: A fatwā (Arabic: فتوى‎; plural fatāwā Arabic: فتاوى‎) in the Islamic faith is a religious opinion concerning Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar. [w]} Illustration of a written Fatwa:

Another question raised on the Middle East Media Research Institute was about whether a true Muslim could be part of any law enforcement agency in America.
Pros and Cons of Enlisting in U.S. Forces and Working for the Police
Khatem Al-Hajj, an Egyptian cleric residing in Minnesota, referred (the question) to a detailed 23-page document drawn up by Al-Hajj for the fifth annual convention of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America, which was held in Bahrain in November 2007. The document discussed the legitimacy of Muslims serving in the police forces of non-Muslim countries, particularly in the U.S.

Al-Hajj also presented the harmful aspects of Muslims on the police force in a Western country – the foremost of which could be Muslim policemen being obligated to "impose laws that are not the laws of Allah," in addition to the weakening of Muslims' faith, thus leading to sin, saying, "[The policeman] is likely to renounce many of his religious beliefs and fall prey to many sins, such as the ban on gender mixing," and more.

Al-Hajj then devotes four pages to the principle of rejecting jurisdiction that is not according to the laws of Allah – that is, man made laws that do not follow Islamic law (al-hukm bi-ghair ma anzal Allah). To this end, he reviews statements by Islamic jurists on the matter, including Abu Muhammad Ali Ibn Hazm, Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Kathir, Ahmad Shaker, Muhammad bin Ibrahim Aal Al-Sheikh, and Muhammad Amin Al-Shanqiti – all scholars generally affiliated with the stricter Sunni schools.

Al-Hajj qualifies the position that serving in the police force means subjugation to a system of man made laws, stating that if a Muslim policeman recognizes the supremacy of Islam, he is sinning but is not an apostate. Therefore, he says, the fundamental question is whether such service means subjugation to man-made laws, which is tantamount to a sin, or whether it is permitted as the lesser evil. 
The following are Al-Hajj's arguments for prohibiting Muslims from police work:

1.      Ostensibly, serving on the police force is forbidden, because police work is based on laws that are not the laws of Allah – that is to say, they are heretical: "The abovementioned evidence concerns the prohibition against jurisprudence which is not according to the religion of Allah, and concerns the heresy of anyone who engages in it, whether as judge or as litigant. A member of the police force who implements the laws of these [infidel, non-Muslim] rulers is necessarily enforcing a law which is not the law of Allah." Al-Hajj counters this, saying that these laws are divided into two categories: laws compatible with the goals of the shari'a, such as traffic or drug laws, and laws which contradict the shari'a, but which the policeman has no choice but to enforce. He said that not all policemen deal with enforcing the second kind of laws – on the contrary, a large number of policemen deal with enforcing laws that serve the public interest, in a way that is compatible with the spirit of Islam, like traffic cops, narcotics agents, etc.

2.      Serving on the police force also constitutes "aid to perpetrators of crimes and aggression. [Muslim] policemen [in Western countries] might participate in incriminating a Muslim who has been done an injustice." Al-Hajj notes that "the Muslim communities in the West often talk about cases filed arbitrarily against their members or their institutions," and adds that "most of those who seek [to join the police force] want the salary and the rank, and do not stand up for the truth or help the oppressed."  
3.      Police work involves espionage, but "shari'a forbids espionage as long as there is no [reasonable] suspicion... There should be no spying against anyone who has not been proven to be wicked. But [the authorities] spy on Muslims in those diasporas [in the West] because of the suspicion and the doubts that they have about those diasporas, and they bug the[ir] mosques, homes, cars, and phones."

4.      "The Sunna contains explicit bans on working as a policeman for an oppressive and corrupt regime." However, Al-Hajj qualifies this by saying that many Western countries do not have such a regime.


5.      A policeman is obliged to undergo violations of modesty, such as "licentious mixing between the sexes, seclusion with someone of the opposite sex, and the like."

Al-Hajj then discussed arguments for why Muslims should be allowed to engage in police work. He wrote that such permission is based on the principle of doing the least evil – that is, finding the golden mean between the ideal and reality, in accordance with which each Muslim deals with the reality in which he finds himself in a positive way and strives to change it to the Muslims' benefit.


Al-Hajj also raises the possibility that Muslims can be allowed to engage in police work despite the violations of shari'a that it entails, based on the principle of preventing worse outcomes for Islam and the Muslims. Beyond that, he presents two proofs permitting taking on positions for infidel governments from the Islamic tradition. The first of these is the story of Joseph, who worked for Pharaoh, and the second is the tradition about the Muslims who emigrated to Ethiopia in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, and fought in the army of the Ethiopian monarch against his enemies, even though he was not Muslim - an example also mentioned by the permanent members of the website's fatwa committee, as mentioned above. 
Al-Hajj's conclusions were:

1.      It is forbidden to work for the FBI or for U.S. security services because these harm Muslims; furthermore, working for these bodies involves spying on Muslims.
2.      It is permitted to work for bodies acting for the general good, such as agencies charged with fighting drugs, alcohol, guns, and the like, and it is also permitted to work for bodies that preserve public order.

3.      With regard to city and state police, Al-Hajj explains that there is some fear that a Muslim who works for these bodies could be forced to arrest a Muslim because of false complaints, and thus each situation must be examined individually and carefully by jurisprudents.

In sum, it can be understood from this document that Muslims are prohibited from joining the military – if it is forbidden to spy on Muslims for criminal and security reasons, it is all the moreso forbidden to enlist or aid active warfare against them.
In plain language, all of the above scholarly opinions seem to indicate that true Muslims are required to hold a higher allegiance to the authority of Islam than to the United States. The web site The Religion of Peace summarized the question: “Can Muslim citizens be loyal to a non-Muslim government? “ by saying: 
“Many Muslims are loyal to the non-Muslim countries in which they live, of course, but it is in spite of Islamic teaching. Unlike other faiths, Islam is not just a religion but a political system as well. The state is intended to be inseparable from religious rule. Islamic law, or Sharia, is complete and not designed to coexist with or be subordinate to other legal systems.

Muslims are not meant to be ruled by non-Muslims. The Qur'an is very clear that they are to resist unbelievers by any means until Islam establishes political supremacy.  This doesn't mean that everyone must be forced to become Muslim, but rather that everyone must submit to Muslim rule.” And followed it with numerous quotes from the Qur’an that support the argument.
My conclusion is there is justification for fear. Fear may sometimes be based on the unknown but for all of the available information there is little left for the imagination.

Monday, August 16, 2010

What the Enquirer story failed to mention about the Florence mosque

Yesterday, the Kentucky Enquirer printed another story about the growing opposition to the mosque planned for Cayton Rd. in Florence. The story contained almost no facts against this mosque plan so that means one of three  things: either the reporter is unaware of the facts or was not permitted to write about them or is already biased. Muslims have a word for non-Muslims who help them. They call them Dhimmis and the act of being duped by Muslims is called Dhimmitude. I'll save you the time and give you the Wikipedia definition. 
Dhimmitude is a neologism first found in French denoting an attitude of concession, surrender and appeasement towards Islamic demands.
The single theme that ran through the Enquirer story was the mention of a Federal law, The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. I have read hundred of stories about protests against mosques and have never heard anyone mention of this law so I looked it up. Wow! This law even has its own web site  http://www.rluipa.com/  and here is what it says about itself: " RLUIPA is a federal statute that was passed in 2000 to provide stronger protection for religious freedom in the land-use and prison contexts." Interesting that they make a connection between religious freedom and prisons. The very first piece this web site has is this story:
Jail agrees to stop censoring the Bible
Under pressure from civil rights organizations, Rappahannock Regional Jail officials stated they would stop censoring religious material in letters to inmates.
This will have to be explored further. Meanwhile, I read the text of The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act and found that it has no definition of what constitutes a religion. I was thinking that this law may have been written to address an earlier problem. What came to mind was the siege at the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 in Waco, Texas which resulted in the deaths of 83 people. Although the Branch Davidian's were a Protestant sect based on the Seventh-Day Adventists they caught the attention of the law for having a large weapons cache which resulted in a 50-day siege when the compound was surrounded by FBI, ATF and Texas National Guard when they tried to execute a search warrant. Any way you want to look at it, there is a strong possibility that the law quoted in the Enquirer story was not meant to apply to this issue.
To show how diversified the City of Florence is, the Enquirer goes on to mention that even The Church of Scientology has recently set up operations in an old ex-Baptist church. If any religion wants to set up a place for peaceful worship, no matter how bizarre their beliefs may be, even a religion created by a science-fiction writer like L. Ron Hubbard who thought the Earth was visited by aliens and they should be worshiped as gods should be allowed. But then you must also consider the negative aspects such as why has the Church of Scientology gotten such a bad reputation for criminal conduct. Read TIME magazine, The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power  written in 1991, or ABC News 20/20 Exposure of Scientology Cult: Transcript.  Google has loads of articles including the background on the criminal indictment in France and Germany. Read the BBC News in the U.K. and another article in TIME magazine, Germany's battle against Scientology.
But one thing stands out about mosques is that they are not just places for peaceful worship, they are the breeding ground for terrorists and so many within the United States have been investigated by the FBI. This is in part due to the fact that many mosques use radical clerics imported from Saudi Arabia along with Wahhabi textbooks brimming with hate. Don't take my word for it, read what they say about themselves.
UK Muslim Leader: Islam Not a Religion of Peace

March 3, 2010 - Erick Stakelbeck

CBN News traveled to London to talk with Anjem Choudary, a leading Muslim radical who says Islamic teachings are what shaped his pro-jihad message.

A Religion of Peace?

"You can't say that Islam is a religion of peace," Choudary told CBN News. "Because Islam does not mean peace. Islam means submission. So the Muslim is one who submits. There is a place for violence in Islam. There is a place for jihad in Islam."

Choudary is the leader of Islam4UK, a group recently banned in Britain under the country's counter-terrorism laws. He wants Islamic Sharia law to rule the United Kingdom and is working to make that dream a reality.

While Islamic radicals in the United States usually prefer to speak in more moderate tones while in public, masking their true agenda, Choudary has no such inhibitions.

He has praised the 9/11 hijackers and has called for the execution of Pope Benedict. He also stirred controversy recently when video emerged of him converting a 10-year-old British boy to Islam.

Openly Praising Jihad

Choudary told CBN News his group is a "non-violent political and ideological movement" that resides in the UK under "a covenant of security."

Yet he openly praises violent jihad.

"The Koran is full of, you know, jihad is the most talked about duty in the Koran other than tawhid -- belief," he said. "Nothing else is mentioned more than the topic of fighting."

Several former members of Choudary's group have been arrested on terrorism charges.

"A very significant amount of former al-Muhajiroun people were involved in terrorist plots against this country," London-based terrorism expert Peter Neumann said. "A number of people have actually gone to Afghanistan, joined the Taliban and died fighting for the Taliban."

Choudary refuses to condemn acts of terror including 9/11 and the July 7, 2005 London bombings, which killed 52 people.
Islam More than Religion  

CBN News asked Choudary for his thoughts on the 7/7 bombings on London's transport system, and whether he condemned them.

"For the people who carried it out, it was legitimate," he replied. "If you look at the will of the 7/7 bombers Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, they would be justified. And there are many verses from the Koran and many statements to say that's the Islamic argument. And that is a difficult Islamic argument to refute. And there are many scholars who support that argument as well."

Choudary says his group is merely following core Islamic teachings and that Islam is much more than a religion.

"This particular belief is more than just a religion," he declared. "It is not just a spiritual belief. It is, in fact, an ideology which you believe in and you struggle for and you are willing even to die for, because you believe in that: That is your whole life."

Choudary seems to relish being called Great Britain's "most hated man" and pledges to continue his rallies calling for the overthrow of the British system.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Erick Stakelbeck is a terrorism analyst for CBN News.
In their zeal to follow Islam Muslims promote Islamic Sharia Law and say this law takes precedence over domestic law. Sharia Law calls for the destruction of all governments that do not follow Sharia. We call this sedition and treason. Many areas in America that have large populations of Muslims are already replacing local law with Islamic Sharia Law. Areas as close by as Columbus, Ohio, where the American Islamic Waqf Noor Islamic Cultural Center mosque in Dublin, Ohio which has been the location for numerous radical Muslim affairs has been subject to FBI investigation. See Central Ohioans Against Terrorism web site. Or in Dearborn, Michigan where Christian Missionaries were arrested for handing out pamphlets on a public street outside an Arab festival.
On his 700 Club TV show, Pat Robertson claimed that Islam is “not a religion,” but “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination”:

ROBERTSON: That is the ultimate aim. And they talk about infidels and all this, but the truth is that’s what the game is. So you are dealing with not a religion. You’re dealing with a political system. And I think we should treat it as such and treat its adherences as such as we would members of the Communist Party or members of some fascist group.  Well, it’s a tragedy. Our hearts go out to the families who suffered. But those in the Army should be held on account for the fact they let this man loose.
Islam: not a religion?
posted by Richard Amesbury
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/07/28/islam-not-a-religion/

Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, is drawing criticism for remarks made earlier this month in which he appears to question whether Islam is a religion.

In a video clip recently made available online, Ramsey is asked during a campaign stop about his stand on “a threat invading our country from the Muslims.” After responding that he is “all about freedom of religion,” Ramsey adds, “You could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, or cult, whatever you want to call it.”
The University of Southern California, Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement has a searchable English language translation of the Qur'an. I searched for some of the words about hate, killing, mutilation and found within the text of this holy book literally hundreds of references. How then can anyone claim this to be a "religion of peace"? 
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, or AK) is one of Turkey's most popular pro-Islamic politicians. He is on record as saying: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..."
Stop the mosque in Florence, Kentucky.



   

Saturday, August 14, 2010

How much do Muslims really understand about Islam?

When I was young I went to church at a time when the Catholic Mass was entirely recited in Latin. I didn’t understand a word of it but learned to follow the exchanges between the priest and the altar boys by memory. The priest would say: “Dominus vobiscum” and we would reply, “Et cum spiritu tuo”. It was years later that I learned the meaning of these words: “The Lord be with you” “And with thy spirit”. The Mass was celebrated the same way throughout the world with the same Latin exchanges until the liberals in the church decided to change it into the local languages. The old Latin Mass had a very mystical appeal that made it a very special event and the change to local languages caused a great division among faithful Catholics. But that is another story.
I am mentioning this as a way of comparing it to how Muslims worship in a mosque by reciting verses from the Qur’an. They too recite everything in Arabic because that is the way it is written in their holy book. Even though many Muslims are not able to read the words, to enable accuracy the verses are recited in a melodic fashion similar to the way an English language song is sung in a foreign country. And like many Catholics years ago, very few Muslims understand the meaning of the words they have been taught to recite from memory because Arabic is a very difficult language to read, write and speak by people who are not Arabs.
To give you an understanding of just how difficult Arabic is, here is a detailed explanation of the Arabic alphabet taken from Wikipedia:
The Arabic alphabet has 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages, such as Persian, Ottoman, Urdu, Malay or Pashto, have additional letters, on which see below. There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms.

Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots (ijam) above or below their central part, called rasm. These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters transliterated as b and t have the same basic shape, but b has one dot below, ب‎, and t has two dots above, ت‎.
Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word directly connected to the adjacent letters. Unlike cursive writing based on the Latin alphabet, the standard Arabic style is to have a substantially different shape depending on whether it will be connecting with a preceding and/or a succeeding letter, thus all primary letters have conditional forms for their glyphs, depending on whether they are at the beginning, middle or end of a word, so they may exhibit four distinct forms (initial, medial, final or isolated). However, six letters have only isolated or final form, and so force the following letter (if any) to take an initial or isolated form, as if there were a word break.
Some letters look almost the same in all four forms, while others show considerable variation. Generally, the initial and middle forms look similar except that in some letters the middle form starts with a short horizontal line on the right to ensure that it will connect with its preceding letter. The final and isolated forms, are also similar in appearance but the final form will also have a horizontal stroke on the right and, for some letters, a loop or longer line on the left with which to finish the word with a subtle ornamental flourish. In addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures (special shapes), including lām-alif.
For compatibility with previous standards, all these forms can be encoded separately in Unicode; however, they can also be inferred from their joining context, using the same encoding. The following table shows this common encoding, in addition to the compatibility encodings for their normally contextual forms (Arabic texts should be encoded today using only the common encoding, but the rendering must then infer the joining types to determine the correct glyph forms, with or without ligation).
The transliteration given is the widespread DIN 31635 standard, with some common alternatives. See the article Romanization of Arabic for details and various other transliteration schemes.

Regarding pronunciation, the phonetic values given are those of the pronunciation of literary Arabic, the standard which is taught in universities. In practice, pronunciation may vary considerably between the different varieties of Arabic. For more details concerning the pronunciation of Arabic, consult the article Arabic phonology.

The names of the Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where they were meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language.

Six letters (أ,د,ذ,ر,ز,و) are not connected to the letter following them, therefore their initial form matches the isolated and their medial form matches the final.
This lengthy preamble is meant to illustrate a single point that will be taken with great contention by many Muslims. That point is that in reciting the numerous verses in the Qur’an calling for hatred and killing of unbelievers, which the Qur’an defines as everyone who is not a Muslim, many of the worshipers have no understanding of what they are saying. Whereas the Mass is filled with messages of love, the Qur’an is filled with messages of hate.
To perfectly illustrate this fact read the following article written by a Muslim who became disillusioned by the contradictions. Pay close attention to the second paragraph as it confirms everything I have said.
Should Almighty God Order Human Being to Kill Fellow Human?
by Syed Kamran Mirza, 24 January, 2005
In the theological dogmas of Islam there are plenty of unanswered questions to which most apologists play same old game of sidetracking and putting lame excuse to the “out of context”, or faulty Quranic translations. Among them, I like to discuss one question about which I have been asking/searching the truth for long time, but till today nobody could give me satisfactory answer.   This is the question of “killing/slaying” human being by another human being. Several years back when I read Holy Quran from beginning to end, I was totally dismayed when I found Allah telling/advocating to “kill” another human being by numerous Ayats.  I could not conceive this idea of insisting by Allah to kill somebody.  How come?  Question which bothered me most is why an omnipotent/almighty God will ask for killing human being—His own creation?  Who knows, may be this advice by Allah to “kill Kaffirs” is working as the main fuel/ingredients behind the very spirit of Islamic Jihad—helping create more and more Osama bin-Laden and other potential killer terrorists?
My father used to read Quran twice a day (after Fazr and before magreb) with so much devotion until his death.  One day I asked him if he (my father) understand what he was reciting with such a melody and devotions.  My father’s answer was negative. My father did not understand a single word of what he was reciting daily.  Now I can count how many thousands of times he uttered the word “killing”, of course, with sweet melody.   We can even count how many trillion trillion times this word of “killing” is being uttered by devout Muslims throughout the whole world.
Here is another Muslim view of Islam that very few Americans understand. Islam is all about conquest and the spread of mosques across America today is virtually identical to our own government building forts across the country as they expanded their territory.
By Ali Sina
“Islam is a religion of peace”. This is what our politically correct politicians keep telling us. But what is politically correct is not necessarily correct. The truth is that Islam is not a religion of peace. It is a religion of hate, of terror and of war. A thorough study of the Quran and Hadith reveal an Islam that is not being presented honestly by the Muslim propagandists and is not known to the majority of the people of the world including Muslim themselves. Islam, as it is taught in the Quran (Koran) and lived by Muhammad, as is reported in the Hadith (Biography and sayings of the Prophet) is a religion of Injustice, Intolerance, Cruelty, Absurdities, discrimination, Contradictions, and blind faith. Islam advocates killing the non-Muslims and abuses the human rights of minorities and women. Islam expanded mostly by Jihad (holy war) and forced its way by killing the non-believers. In Islam apostasy is the biggest crime punishable by death. Muhammad was a terrorist himself therefore terrorism cannot be separated from the true Islam. Islam means submission and it demands from its followers to submit their wills and thoughts to Muhammad and his imaginary Allah. Allah is a deity that despises reason, democracy, freedom of thought and freedom of expression.
Islam is also intolerant to every other religion in spite of what our politically correct liberal politicians and dimwitted clergy proclaim. Countries like Saudi Arabia, which happens to be financing 80% of the mosques in America, do not allow by law any churches or synagogues to be built there and even prosecute anyone for possessing a Bible or Torah or other religious object.
There is an organization called Former Muslims United that has brought together many notable former Muslims speaking out about the truth behind Islam. Among them are two very courageous women named Wafa Sultan and Nonie Darwish. Read their complete backgrounds here on the Former Muslims United web site.
Nonie Darwish is an American human rights activist, writer, public speaker and founder of Arabs For Israel. She is the author of the book Now they Call Me Infidel; Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror. Her second book is Cruel And Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. Her speech topics cover human rights, with emphasis on women’s rights and minority rights in the Middle East. Born in Egypt, Darwish is the daughter of an Egyptian Army lieutenant general, who, when assassinated by the Israeli army in 1956, was called a “shahid” by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, although Darwish blames “the Middle Eastern Islamic culture and the propaganda of hatred taught to children from birth” for the assassination. In 1978, she moved with her husband to the United States, and converted to Christianity there. After September 11, 2001 she has written on Islam-related topics.
Wafa Sultan is an author and well known critic of Islam. Sultan trained as a psychiatrist in Syria and is a US naturalized citizen.Sultan was born to an Alawi family in Baniyas, Syria. She emigrated to the United States in 1989, and is now a naturalized citizen. Sultan has become notable since the September 11, 2001 attacks for her participation in Middle East political debates, with Arabic essays that circulated widely and some television appearances on Al Jazeera and CNN. Wafa Sultan is the author of a new book, A God Who Hates. She invited scorn and received death threats from Muslims around the world when she appeared on Al-Jazeera as the first Arab Muslim woman who dared to challenge Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur’an, and Allah. At great risk to her life and her family, Sultan travels around the country trying to explain to Americans that Islam is Not a Religion.
Here is a very clear description of what America is up against written by noted columnist David Aikman in Perspectives on the One News Now web site.

Dr. David Aikman was a journalist with TIME Magazine for 23 years, and is now a professor of history at Patrick Henry College in Virginia. He has authored more than a dozen books, including "Jesus in Beijing" (Regnery, 2003), "Billy Graham: His Life and Influence" (Thomas Nelson, 2006) and "The Delusion of Disbelief" (Tyndale, 2008). His latest book, "The Mirage of Peace" (Regal), was released in September. Aikman is also the founder of Gegrapha, an international fellowship for Christians in the mainstream media.
Knowing your enemy
David Aikman - OneNewsNow Columnist - 7/30/2010 9:55:00

Virtually every major thinker who has written on the subject of war -- from Germany's Clausewitz to ancient China's Sun Tzu -- has agreed on one main dictum: "Know your enemy."  Understood in that thought is the concept of correctly naming your enemy.  Yet a strange thing has happened as the Obama administration has taken up the challenge of standing up to global terrorism that first fell upon President George W. Bush after the calamitous events of 9/11 in 2001.

Every American with a morsel of common sense has figured out that al-Qaeda and its global franchise of like-minded terrorists have been inspired by an Islam-based ideology that seeks -- in the name of a global Islamic caliphate -- to overthrow the U.S. and the West, democracy, and all the individual rights upon which America was founded.

Every new, turgid, and tedious propaganda blast by Osama bin Laden's number two, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri...every boastful threat by foreign terrorist groups or by recently apprehended Islamic terrorists in the U.S., makes it clear that terrorist acts plotted against Americans have been inspired by the Muslim call for jihad (which actually means "struggle" but is often translated as "holy war").  The Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, who had received training with the Taliban in Pakistan, described himself simply as a "Muslim soldier."  The prime suspect in last year's Fort Hood massacre of 13 Americans, Major Hasan, had ordered a business card that described him as SoA ("Soldier of Allah").  Hasan had been in email contact with American-born terrorist organizer Anwar al-Awlaki.

Now what were these fellows thinking of when they planned their dastardly deeds?  Was it Zen Buddhism, or Hindu mysticism?  I don't think so.  Like Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, they were carefully acting out Islamic ideas found in the Koran and in recent Islamic writings with the hope of spending eternity in the Muslim paradise surrounded by dark-eyed virgins.

There seem to be only about three Americans who doubt this:  President Obama, White House aide for counter-terrorism John Brennan, and Attorney General Eric Holder.  When Holder was asked in May at a congressional hearing by Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) whether Hasan, Shahzad, and Nigerian failed Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab might have been inspired by radical Islam, Holder repeatedly said that there had been "a variety" of factors.  He flatly refused to say "radical Islam" or any form of Islam had possibly been the ideological inspiration behind the actions of these individuals.

Brennan recently made remarks during a Washington speech in which he said flatly that the White House would not use the phrase "Islamic terrorism" or even refer to "jihadis."  He used the utterly specious argument that jihad can mean a spiritual struggle to combat one's sinful nature.  Yes, it can.  But the overwhelming consensus of students of Islamic history is that this interpretation of jihad refers to what Mohammed called "the greater jihad." (See related commentary) The Koran itself quite specifically calls on Muslims to fight "the lesser jihad," which is real fighting.  It says, in Surah 9:29: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection." 
There are, of course, Surahs (chapters) in the Koran which advocate peaceful relations with followers of Judaism and Christianity.  But these verses, "revealed" to Mohammed during the early period of his life, are "abrogated" (nullified) by the bloodthirsty verses from the later period.

It needs to be said that there are millions of Muslims who are not terrorists and who do not engage in any violent form of jihad.  But the vast majority of the world's terrorists since the 1990s have been Muslims, and all of them have been inspired by Muslim writers and thinkers who unquestionably justify violence on Islamic textual grounds against non-Muslims.  To be unwilling to name the terrorist acolytes of such thinkers as "Islamic terrorists" or "radical Muslims" is akin to refusing to describe Hitler's thugs during World War II as Nazis.  If they weren't Nazis, what were they -- misunderstood Berlin suburbanites who had been rejected by Harvard?  The frightening thing about Brennan's approach is that either he is lying about Islam, or he is classically ignorant of Islam and the history of its thought.

What about President Obama?  In Turkey in April 2009 he roundly declared that the U.S. did not consider itself a Christian nation even though many of its citizens were Christian.  He implied that Turkey also shared a sort of multicultural view of the Muslim faith -- similar to his view of American Christianity -- that is followed by the majority of its citizens.  That is almost certainly a grave misjudgment because Turkey's ruling political party, the AKP (the Justice and Development Party), is trying to move the country in a decidedly more Islamic direction.  Obama's understanding of Islam seems sentimental and emotional, based on his own early experiences of attending mosque with his step-father in Indonesia.  But to move from that position to one requiring American officials to avoid mentioning the very ideology that seeks to destroy American freedom is dangerously reckless.

If you don't recognize your enemy and refuse to name him, whom on earth are you pretending to fight?
Dr. Aikman is absolutely correct. If you don't recognize your enemy and refuse to name him, whom on earth are you pretending to fight?