ISLAM’S INVASION OF THE WESTERN WORLD – PART 4 (FINAL PART)

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0 ISLAM INVATION

In 2018, Robert Spencer published a remarkable book, called “The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.” In one of the chapters (chapter 10), he discussed the matter of how the Western world caved into Islam’s demands. In this series, we look at some highlights from this chapter.

THE WEST LOSES THE
WILL TO LIVE

The Islamic State

The Islamic State (commonly but erroneously known as ISIS, an acronym for its former and rejected name, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham [the Levant]) is best known for its audacious attempt from 2014 to 2017 to restore the caliphate. It declared its caliphate in the territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria on June 29, 2014, the same day it issued an explanatory document entitled “This is the Promise of Allah.”

The declaration asserted that the caliphate frees human beings from oppression and subjugation: it is meant “for the purpose of compelling the people to do what the Sharia (Allah’s law) requires of them concerning their interests in the hereafter and worldly life, which can only be achieved by carrying out the command of Allah, establishing His religion, and referring to His law for judgment.”

Before Islam, according to “This is the Promise of Allah,” the Arabs were weak and disunited; once they accepted Islam, Allah granted them unity and power… The God of this ummah (—the best of peoples—) yesterday is the same God of the ummah today, and the One who gave it victory yesterday is the One who will give it victory today.” Accordingly, “The time has come for those generations that were drowning in oceans of disgrace, being nursed on the milk of humiliation, and being ruled by the vilest of all people, after their long slumber in the darkness of neglect—the time has come for them to rise.” The “vilest of all people” is a Qur’anic epithet for the “unbelievers among the People of the Book”—that is, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians who do not become Muslims (98:6).

The Islamic State exhorted all Muslims to join in the caliphate and give it allegiance, as the Mahdi in Sudan and so many other Muslim revivalists had throughout Islamic history:

“So rush O Muslims and gather around your khalifah, so that you may return as you once were for ages, kings of the earth and knights of war.… By Allah, if you disbelieve in democracy, secularism, nationalism, as well as all the other garbage and ideas from the west, and rush to your religion and creed, then by Allah, you will own the earth, and the east and west will submit to you. This is the promise of Allah to you. This is the promise of Allah to you.”

Less than a week after declaring itself the caliphate, the Islamic State gave the world a look at the new caliphate, releasing a video on July 5, 2014, of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi speaking in the twelfth-century Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul.

He said that after the fall of the last caliphate, “the disbelievers were able to weaken and humiliate the Muslims, dominate them in every region, plunder their wealth and resources, and rob them of their rights.” They did this by “attacking and occupying their lands, placing their treacherous agents in power to rule the Muslims with an iron fist, and spreading dazzling and deceptive slogans such as: civilization, peace, co-existence, freedom, democracy, secularism, nationalism, and patriotism, among other false slogans. Those rulers continue striving to enslave the Muslims, pulling them away from their religion with those slogans.”

The warriors of jihad should not worry about the formidable military might of the infidels, because success would come through obedience to Allah, not by means of weapons:

“O soldiers of the Islamic State, do not be awestruck by the great numbers of your enemy, for Allah is with you. I do not fear for you the numbers of your opponents, nor do I fear your neediness and poverty, for Allah (the Exalted) has promised your Prophet (peace be upon him) that you will not be wiped out by famine, and your enemy will not himself conquer you and violate your land. Allah placed your provision under the shades of your spears.”

He called upon them also to “persevere in reciting the Quran with comprehension of its meanings and practice of its teachings. This is my advice to you. If you hold to it, you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills.”

 The Islamic State is Not Islamic

U.S. and Western European leaders immediately denied that the Islamic State had anything to do with Islam. “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion,” said Deputy State Department spokesperson Marie Harf in August 2014. “The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.” CIA director John Brennan said in March 2015: “They are terrorists, they’re criminals. Most—many—of them are psychopathic thugs, murderers who use a religious concept and masquerade and mask themselves in that religious construct. Let’s make it very clear that the people who carry out acts of terrorism—whether it be al-Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—are doing it because they believe it is consistent with what their view of Islam is. It is totally inconsistent with what the overwhelming majority of Muslims throughout the world [believe].” In September 2014, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius announced: “This is a terrorist group and not a state. I do not recommend using the term Islamic State because it blurs the lines between Islam, Muslims and Islamists.”

The Islamic State professed contempt and amusement over all this confusion and denial. In his September 21, 2014, address calling for jihad strikes in the U.S. and Europe, Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad Adnani ridiculed John Kerry (“that uncircumcised old geezer”) and Barack Obama for declaring that the Islamic State was not Islamic, as if they were Islamic authorities.

And indeed, everything the Islamic State did was clearly based on Islamic texts and teachings. Its public beheadings applied the Qur’an’s directive: “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks.” (47:4)

Similar calculations hold true regarding the Islamic State’s practice of kidnapping Yazidi and Christian women and pressing them into sex slavery. The Qur’an says straightforwardly that in addition to wives (“two or three or four”), Muslim men may enjoy the “captives of the right hand” (4:3, 4:24). These are specified as being women who have been seized as the spoils of war (33:50) and are to be used specifically for sexual purposes, as men are to “guard their private parts except from their wives or those their right hands possess.” (23:5–6).

If these women are already married, no problem. Islamic law directs that “when a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.”

On December 15, 2014, the Islamic State released a document entitled “Clarification [regarding] the Hudud”—that is, punishments Allah specifies in the Qur’an. Blasphemy against Islam was punishable by death. Adulterers were to be stoned to death; fornicators would be given one hundred lashes and exile. Sodomy (homosexuality) was also to be punished by death, as per Muhammad’s reported words: “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.”

The Islamic State’s rapid success was partly attributable to its fidelity to Islam and partly also to its financial backing, which came, predictably enough, in great part from Saudi Arabia. In August 2014, Hillary Clinton wrote to John Podesta, an adviser to President Barack Obama: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Isis] and other radical Sunni groups in the region. This effort will be enhanced by the stepped-up commitment in the [Kurdish Regional Government]. The Qataris and Saudis will be put in a position of balancing policy between their ongoing competition to dominate the Sunni world and the consequences of serious US pressure.”

But nothing was done.

At its height, the Islamic State controlled a territory larger than Great Britain and attracted thirty thousand foreign fighters from a hundred countries to travel to Iraq and Syria to join the caliphate. It gained the allegiance of other jihad groups in Libya, Nigeria, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Muslims took its apparent success as a sign of Allah’s favor: the caliphate had indeed returned.

It didn’t last long, however. When Donald Trump replaced Barack Obama as president of the United States, Iraqi forces and others began rolling up Islamic State strongholds, such that within a year of the beginning of the Trump presidency, the Islamic State had lost ninety-eight percent of its territory. The jihad threat posed by the Islamic State did not lessen, however, as those foreign fighters who survived returned to their home countries, often welcomed back by Western leaders who were convinced that kind treatment would compel them to turn away from jihad.

The Jihad Continues

In any case, the Islamic State was gone from Iraq and Syria, but the dream of the caliphate and the obligation to jihad remained, and other Muslims were quite willing, even eager, to take up arms in service of both.

The early twenty-first century saw a sharp rise in jihad massacres perpetrated all over the West by individuals or small groups of Muslims: in London, Manchester, Paris, Toulouse, Nice, Amsterdam, Madrid, Brussels, Berlin, Munich, Copenhagen, Malmö, Stockholm, Turku (in Finland), Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Beslan, among other places. Filmmaker Theo van Gogh was massacred on an Amsterdam street in 2004 for offending Islam; as mentioned previously, the cartoonists of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were murdered in Paris in January 2015 for the same offense. In July 2016, Islamic jihadists murdered a French priest, Father Jacques Hamel, at the altar of his church for the crime of being Christian.

After each one of these atrocities, the local and national authorities called for prayer vigils and vowed their resolve against the “terrorists” of unspecified ideology, but they did nothing to address the immigration and appeasement policies that had led to these attacks in the first place.

As crime rates skyrocketed and jihad terror attacks became an increasingly common feature of the landscape in Europe, authorities all over the West seemed more concerned with making sure their people did not think negatively about Islam than defending them against the jihad onslaught.

The End

The failure of today’s leadership and the international media to inform the public about what was really going on was an abdication of responsibility unparalleled in history, and one that rebuked the leaders throughout history who died to defend their people from the advancing jihad.

ISLAM’S INVASION OF THE WESTERN WORLD – PART 3

HEAVENLY REMNANT MINISTRIESLeave a comment

0 ISLAM INVATION

In 2018, Robert Spencer published a remarkable book, called “The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.” In one of the chapters (chapter 10), he discussed the matter of how the Western world caved into Islam’s demands. In this series, we look at some highlights from this chapter.

THE WEST LOSES THE
WILL TO LIVE

The Migrant Influx

After September 11, European nations began admitting tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants, such that by 2017, many European cities had majority-Muslim enclaves, and the Muslim population of Europe was in the millions and growing much more quickly than the non-Muslim population.

The influx picked up sharply in 2015. German chancellor Angela Merkel, keen to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Syria and the surrounding regions, opened Germany’s doors to hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants. Other Western European countries did as well. Yet while there was no doubt that some of the refugees were grateful for the hospitality they were being shown, others clearly weren’t. All of the Islamic jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in a series of jihad attacks in November 2015 were putative refugees who had recently been welcomed into Europe. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency admitted in July 2017 that hundreds of jihadis had entered the country among the refugees, and that twenty-four thousand jihadis were active in Germany.

Muslim migrants in Europe were also responsible for an appalling epidemic of rape, sexual assault, theft, petty crime, and looting. In the first half of 2016, migrants in Germany, who were overwhelmingly Muslim, committed 142,500 crimes, an average of 780 every day. This was a significant increase from 2015, during which migrants committed two hundred thousand crimes during the entire year.5

On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2015, Muslim migrants committed as many as two thousand mass rapes and sexual assaults in Cologne, Stockholm, and other major European cities. Such assaults weren’t limited to that day alone; Sweden was called the “rape capital of the world” because of the notorious activities of Muslim migrants.

In Sweden, Muslim migrants from Afghanistan were found in 2017 to be seventy-nine times more likely to commit rape and other sexual crimes than native Swedes. Migrants and refugees committed ninety-two percent of rapes in Sweden. Rapists in Sweden have come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Gambia, Iran, Palestine, Chile, and Kosovo, in that order. All the nations on that list except Chile and Eritrea are majority Muslim.

In the British town of Rotherham, Muslim gangs brutalized, sexually assaulted, and raped over fourteen hundred young British girls, while authorities remained extremely reluctant to say or do anything in response, for fear of being labeled racist.

Yet hardly anything was being said about this. In the summer of 2016, Krystyna Pawłowicz, a member of the Polish parliament, charged German authorities with attempting to “cover up the crimes of their Arab guests, or even shift the blame upon themselves.” There was also evidence that migrant crimes were being covered up in the Netherlands and Sweden as well.

These cover-ups apparently proceeded from a fear that non-Muslims would begin to have negative views of Islam; yet the sexual assaults did have to do with Islam. The Qur’an dictates that a Muslim man may have sexual relations with the “captives of the right hand,” that is, captured non-Muslim women (4:3; 4:24; 23:1–6; 33:50; 70:30). The Qur’an also says that women should veil themselves so that they may not be molested (33:59), with the implication being that if they are not veiled, they may indeed be molested.

The Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, on the forefront of resistance to the jihad for centuries, likewise abdicated early in the twenty-first century. Of course, the Church had not called a Crusade for centuries, and by September 11 no one would have expected it to do so. Not only were the Crusades by then a dim historical memory, ill-remembered and even less understood, among most Catholics, but schools all over the West that had adopted the name Crusaders during the twentieth century began shedding the label. Historical pride quickly gave way to historical shame.

Early in the twenty-first century, the Catholic Church went even farther, not only not sounding the alarm about the advancing jihad, but demonstrating that it had no historical memory of why the Crusades had been fought, as well as no awareness that this jihad, which had historically targeted the Church, was continuing and had found renewed energy. There were to be no reminders from the Catholic Church about how Islam had been set against Europe for fourteen hundred years and that mass Muslim migration into Europe might not be such a good idea.

However, Pope Benedict XVI did touch off a worldwide controversy in 2006 by quoting the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus’ words about Muhammad’s bringing nothing new but what was evil and inhumane. Benedict at least demonstrated that he was aware that Islam somehow posed a problem for Europe and the free world in general; after the Muslim riots and murders that followed his remarks, and fulmination from Egypt’s al-Azhar over his statements after a jihad mass murder attack in an Egyptian cathedral, Benedict fell silent.

His successor, Pope Francis, was anything but silent. In a November 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, he declared: “Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalisations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

Pope Francis was not just a defender of Islam and the Qur’an but of the Sharia death penalty for blasphemy: after Islamic jihadists in January 2015 murdered cartoonists from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Francis obliquely justified the murders by saying that “it is true that you must not react violently, but although we are good friends if [an aide] says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch, it’s normal. You can’t make a toy out of the religions of others. These people provoke and then [something can happen]. In freedom of expression there are limits.”

For the pope, it can thus be assumed, murdering people for violating Sharia blasphemy laws was “normal,” and it wasn’t terrorism anyway, for “Christian terrorism does not exist, Jewish terrorism does not exist, and Muslim terrorism does not exist. They do not exist,” as he said in a speech in February 2017 “There are fundamentalist and violent individuals in all peoples and religions—and with intolerant generalizations they become stronger because they feed on hate and xenophobia.”

In July 2017, Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar, thanked Pope Francis for his “defense of Islam against the accusation of violence and terrorism.” Then, in September 2017, the pope met in the Vatican with Dr. Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a group that has been linked to the financing of jihad terror.

During the meeting, Al-Issa thanked the pope for his “fair positions” on what he called the “false claims that link extremism and violence to Islam.” In other words, he thanked the Pope for dissembling about the motivating ideology of jihad terror, which his group had been accused of financing, and for defaming other religions in an effort to whitewash Islam.

In his message for the World Day of Peace on January 1, 2018, Pope Francis declared: “In a spirit of compassion, let us embrace all those fleeing from war and hunger, or forced by discrimination, persecution, poverty and environmental degradation to leave their homelands.” He warned: “Many destination countries have seen the spread of rhetoric decrying the risks posed to national security or the high cost of welcoming new arrivals, and thus demeaning the human dignity due to all as sons and daughters of God. Those who, for what may be political reasons, foment fear of migrants instead of building peace are sowing violence, racial discrimination and xenophobia, which are matters of great concern for all those concerned for the safety of every human being.”

Yet those security concerns were real. All of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees. This followed the Islamic State’s February 2015 boast that it would soon flood Europe with as many as five hundred thousand refugees. In September 2015, Elias Bou Saab, the Lebanese education minister, disclosed that there were twenty thousand jihadis among the refugees in camps in his country, waiting for the opportunity to go to Europe and North America. That same month, it was revealed that eighty percent of migrants who had come to Europe claiming to be fleeing the war in Syria were not really from Syria at all.

Why were they claiming to be Syrian and streaming into Europe, and the U.S. as well? An Islamic State operative gave the answer when he boasted in September 2015, shortly after the migrant influx began, that among the flood of refugees, four thousand Islamic State jihadis had already entered Europe. He explained their purpose: “It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.”5 These Muslims were going to Europe in the service of that caliphate: “They are going like refugees,” he said, but they were going with the plan of sowing blood and mayhem on European streets. As he told this to journalists, he smiled and said, “Just wait.”

But for Pope Francis, concern for all of this was simply “xenophobia.” “It is hypocritical,” he thundered in October 2016, “to call yourself a Christian and to chase away a refugee, or anyone who needs your help. Jesus taught us what it means to be a good Christian in the parable of the Good Samaritan.” He cited Scripture: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

The Islamic State, meanwhile, had its own scripture in mind. With marked ingratitude, in November 2017 it threatened “Christmas blood” at the Vatican and released an image of Pope Francis beheaded.

A year before that, the same group had explained that, contrary to Pope Francis’ fond imaginings, their struggle was all about Islam. Addressing the free world, the Islamic State declared in an article in its glossy online magazine Dabiq:

“We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah—whether you realize it or not—by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices.…

We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you [sic] Christian disbelief and paganism separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power.…

In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of your Lord and Creator.

We hate you for your crimes against Islam and wage war against you to punish you for your transgressions against our religion.

We hate you for your crimes against the Muslims; your drones and fighter jets bomb, kill, and maim our people around the world, and your puppets in the usurped lands of the Muslims oppress, torture, and wage war against anyone who calls to the truth.

We hate you for invading our lands and fight you to repel you and drive you out. As long as there is an inch of territory left for us to reclaim, jihad will continue to be a personal obligation on every single Muslim.…

What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list.

The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.”

Nonetheless, neither Pope Francis nor other Catholic leaders took any notice.

ISLAM’S INVASION OF THE WESTERN WORLD – PART 2

HEAVENLY REMNANT MINISTRIESLeave a comment

0 ISLAM INVATION

In 2018, Robert Spencer published a remarkable book, called “The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.” In one of the chapters (chapter 10), he discussed the matter of how the Western world caved into Islam’s demands. In this series, we look at some highlights from this chapter.

THE WEST LOSES THE
WILL TO LIVE

Obama in Cairo

It is no surprise that when President Barack Obama made his outreach speech to the Muslim world from Cairo on June 4, 2009, he included fulsome praise of Islam that played fast and loose with the historical record:

“As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam…, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story… American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, they have served in our government, they have stood for civil rights, they have started businesses, they have taught at our universities, they’ve excelled in our sports arenas, they’ve won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers—Thomas Jefferson—kept in his personal library…

So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

Where this executive duty to defend Islam appeared in the Constitution, he did not explain.

In September 2012 at the United Nations, in the wake of the jihad massacre of four Americans by al-Qaeda operatives in Benghazi in Libya, which key members of his administration falsely and repeatedly attributed to a spontaneous demonstration arising over a video criticizing Muhammad on YouTube, Obama went even farther, saying: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” The specter of the leader of the free world vowing to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws was not just rhetoric. The idea that Islam in America was beset by negative stereotypes that same year helped to defeat an attempt to investigate Muslim Brotherhood influence within the United States government.

Efforts to Investigate Infiltration

In 2012, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) tried to call attention to this influence, asking for an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood infiltration into the U.S. government. She accused the first Muslim member of Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) of having a “long record of being associated” with CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In response, Ellison accused Bachmann of religious bigotry. Yet he really did have a “long record of being associated” with Hamas-linked CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood. As long ago as 2006, Ellison’s closeness to CAIR’s cofounder and National Executive Director Nihad Awad was a matter of public record. Awad, who notoriously said in 1994 that he was “in support of the Hamas movement,” spoke at fundraisers for Ellison, raising considerable sums for his first congressional race. Ellison has appeared frequently at CAIR events since then.

Multiple statements made by federal prosecutors identify Awad as one of the attendees at a 1993 meeting of US Muslim Brotherhood Palestine Committee leaders in Philadelphia that was wiretapped by the FBI under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant. The topic of discussion during that 1993 meeting was how to help Hamas by working in the U.S. to help sabotage the Oslo Peace Accords. But none of that fazed Ellison. Nor has he ever expressed any concern over the fact that CAIR is also linked to the Muslim Brotherhood through its parent group, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP).

Ellison’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood were also more direct. In 2008, Ellison accepted 13,350 dollars from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. As we have seen, the Muslim American Society is the principal arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.

Egypt’s Rose El-Youssef magazine asserted in a December 2012 article that six highly placed Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators within the Obama Administration had transformed the United States “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The article said that “the six named people include: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference [OIC]; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.”75

And so the Egyptian article stood as vindication of Bachmann’s concerns, and showed that her request for an investigation to be opened of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infiltration was entirely reasonable and not a manifestation of “bigotry,” “racism,” or “McCarthyism”—contrary to the hysterical (and formulaic) claims of her leftist detractors. Bachmann’s concerns were justified, as the Muslim Brotherhood had indeed penetrated the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Gehad El-Haddad, a top Muslim Brotherhood official in Egypt, was for five years employed with the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation, of course, is not a government agency, but his involvement with it afforded El-Haddad access to a former president of the United States and his associates, including present and former government officials. In September 2013, Egypt’s military government arrested El-Haddad for his Muslim Brotherhood activities.

For all of the furor over Bachmann’s call for an investigation of Muslim Brotherhood influence in Washington, nothing caused as much controversy as her naming Huma Abedin, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest personal assistant and adviser. Abedin is an observant Muslim who lived in Saudi Arabia as a child; her brother Hassan works “as a fellow and partner with a number of Muslim Brotherhood members.” Her mother, Saleha Mahmoud Abedin, is a professor in Saudi Arabia and a member of the Brotherhood’s woman’s division, the Muslim Sisterhood.80 Her father, Syed Z. Abedin, was a professor in Saudi Arabia who founded the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs, an organization supported by the Muslim World League, a Brotherhood organization.81

Despite this evidence, there was no investigation. Yet, former U.S. prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy listed a great many strange collaborations between the State Department of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Muslim Brotherhood organizations, of which some including:

  • Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.
  • The State Department collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to Sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.
  • The State Department excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups, but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel—in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.
  • The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories, notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

During the Bush and Obama administrations, it became socially and politically unacceptable even to raise questions about Muslim Brotherhood influence, or to express any skepticism about the politically correct dogmas regarding Islam and jihad. For in Abedin’s case, it certainly was not that the evidence was lacking. It was that the political elites had forbidden any examination or discussion of it.

Stigmatizing Resistance to Jihad

The crowning victory in the effort to stigmatize resistance to jihad terror and Islamic supremacism came in February 2012, when the Obama administration purged more than a thousand documents and presentations from counterterror training materials for the FBI and other agencies. This material was discarded at the demand of Muslim groups, which had deemed it inaccurate (by their own account) or offensive to Muslims.

This triumph was several years in the making. The movement towards it began in earnest in August 2010, when a presentation on Islam and jihad was given to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. The far-left journalist Spencer Ackerman took the FBI to task for training material that spoke forthrightly and truthfully about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat. Ackerman reported that “the FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream’ [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.’

Unfortunately for Ackerman, there was considerable evidence that what this FBI training material asserted was true. Nonetheless, in the face of Ackerman’s reports, the FBI went into full retreat: in September 2011, it announced that it was dropping one of the programs that Ackerman had zeroed in on.

The Islamic supremacists didn’t rest on their laurels. On October 19, 2011, Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) took this campaign to the mainstream media, writing in the Los Angeles Times that “a disturbing string of training material used by the FBI and a U.S. attorney’s office came to light beginning in late July that reveals a deep anti-Muslim sentiment within the U.S. government.” Al-Marayati warned that “if this matter is not immediately addressed, it will undermine the relationship between law enforcement and the Muslim American community.”

The same day that al-Marayati’s op-ed was published, Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates, who had complained for years about supposed Muslim profiling and entrapment, wrote a letter to John Brennan, who was then the assistant to the president on national security for homeland security and counterterrorism. The letter was signed not just by Khera but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islamic groups in the United States: fifty-seven Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations, including many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including CAIR, ISNA, MAS, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Islamic Relief USA, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam,” and emphasized that they regarded this as an issue of the utmost importance: “The seriousness of this issue cannot be overstated, and we request that the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem, with a fair and transparent mechanism for input from the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, including civil rights lawyers, religious leaders, and law enforcement experts.”

This was needed because “while recent news reports have highlighted the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials, we have learned that this problem extends far beyond the FBI and has infected other government agencies, including the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Councils, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Army. Furthermore, by the FBI’s own admission, the use of bigoted and distorted materials in its trainings has not been an isolated occurrence. Since last year, reports have surfaced that the FBI, and other federal agencies, are using or supporting the use of biased trainers and materials in presentations to law enforcement officials.”

In a November 3, 2011, response to Khera, that was written on White House stationery, John O. Brennan, assistant to the president for Homeland Security accepted Khera’s criticisms without a murmur of protest and assured her of his readiness to comply.

Brennan assured Khera that all her demands would be met: “Your letter requests that ‘the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem,’ and we agree that this is necessary.” He then detailed the specific actions being undertaken to ensure this, including “collecting all training materials that contain cultural or religious content, including information related to Islam or Muslims.”93 This material wouldn’t just be “collected”; it would be purged of anything that Farhana Khera and others like her found offensive—that is, any honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists used Islamic teachings to justify violence.

Not only were numerous books and presentations that presented a perfectly accurate view of Islam and jihad purged, but Brennan was complying with demands from quarters that could hardly be considered authentically moderate. America was going to war against jihadists while forbidding itself to understand jihad.

Brennan also attempted to distance Islam and the concept of jihad from contemporary Islamic terrorism long before he told Farhana Khera that he would give her everything she wanted. On May 26, 2010, in an address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies he said: “Nor do we describe our enemies as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.” In a press release the next day, CAIR “expressed appreciation” for Brennan’s remarks.

Brennan was instrumental in the Obama administration’s recasting of the defense against terror as a localized struggle against al-Qaeda.

ISLAM’S INVASION OF THE WESTERN WORLD – PART 1

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0 ISLAM INVATION

In 2018, Robert Spencer published a remarkable book, called “The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.” In one of the chapters (chapter 10), he discussed the matter of how the Western world caved into Islam’s demands. In this series, we look at some highlights from this chapter.

“THE WEST LOSES THE
WILL TO LIVE”

ISLAM’S INVASION OF THE WESTERN WORLD – PART 1

SEPTEMBER 11

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda initiated a new phase of the jihad against the United States, and the free world in general, only to find that the traditional foes of the warriors of jihad were no longer interested in fighting.

On that day, al-Qaeda operatives hijacked jetliners and flew them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Passengers resisted on a fourth jet and managed to bring it down in rural Pennsylvania, far from its intended Washington target, which may have been the White House or the Capitol building. Nearly three thousand people were killed.

This was jihad, but it was markedly different from jihad attacks that the West had faced before. The free world was not facing a state that had declared jihad against it, but an international organization operating in the name of Islam. Yet this was not a “hijacking” of Islam either, as was widely claimed at the time; the underlying principles of jihad remained the same.

Osama bin Laden explained in a 2004 interview that al-Qaeda’s overall objective was to drain the United States economically, a shrewd jihad objective to bring down an enemy many times stronger than the jihad force: “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.… We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.”1 He further said, “So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future.”3

The war against the United States would only end with the submission of the United States to the warriors of jihad, as bin Laden stated succinctly: “The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.”

Other al-Qaeda plotters involved in planning the September 11 attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, issued a statement in 2009 that explicitly grounded their actions in Islamic religious terms: “Many thanks to God,” they wrote about the attacks, “for his kind gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to defend Islam and Muslims. Therefore, killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion. These actions are our offerings to God. In addition, it is the imposed reality on Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, in the land of the two holy sites [Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia], and in the rest of the world, where Muslims are suffering from your brutality, terrorism, killing of the innocent, and occupying their lands and their holy sites.”

Denial

On September 17, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush appeared at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., in the company of several prominent Muslim leaders, and said: ”These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that…. The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race.”

As Americans still searched the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center for the remains of their loved ones, President Bush cautioned Americans against thinking ill of Muslims, as if the 9/11 attacks had been perpetrated by Americans targeting Muslims:

“America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country… . And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect… Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.”

Political leaders all over the West echoed his words about Islam’s being a religion of peace, having nothing to do with terrorism. After September 11, this became a commonplace of the Western political discourse, rejected only by a small minority, who were quickly stigmatized as cranks.

The Saudi Involvement in 9 / 11

The best explanation why Bush turned so quickly after the September 11 attacks remains Saudi influence in Washington, including within his administration itself. For many years this involvement was concealed. The 28-page section of the 9/11 report detailing Saudi involvement in the September 11, 2001 jihad attacks was finally released in July 2016 (albeit with substantial portions redacted), and made it clear why one president who held hands with the Saudi king (George W. Bush) and another who bowed to him (Barack Obama) worked so hard for so many years to keep these pages secret. They confirmed that the 9/11 jihad murderers received significant help from people at the highest levels of the Saudi government.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States was Prince Bandar, about whom The New York Times later noted: “No foreign diplomat has been closer or had more access to President Bush, his family and his administration than the magnetic and fabulously wealthy Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia.”

Bassnan “spoke of Bin Laden ‘as if he were a god.’ He also stated to an FBI asset that he heard that the U.S. government had stopped approving visas for foreign students. He considered such measures to be insufficient as there are already enough Muslims in the United States to destroy the United States and make it “an Islamic state within ten to fifteen years.”

David D. Aufhauser, a former Treasury Department general counsel, told a Senate committee in June 2004 that estimates of how much money the Saudis had spent worldwide since the 1970s to promote Wahhabism (an Islamic doctrine and religious movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab) went “north of seventy-five billion dollars.” The money went to mosques, Islamic centers, Islamic schools, Islamic preachers, and the printing of hundreds of millions of copies of the Qur’an and other Islamic religious books.29

Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky noted in 2005: “The people now in control of teaching religion [to American Muslims] are extremists… Eighty percent of the infrastructure is controlled by these extremists.” Nor was this happening in the United States alone. In December 2015, German vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel declared: “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over. Wahhabi mosques all over the world are financed by Saudi Arabia. Many Islamists who are a threat to public safety come from these communities in Germany.”

Seven years after the September 11 attacks, a U.S. government cable noted: “Government and non-governmental sources claimed that financial support estimated at nearly 100 million USD annually was making its way to Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith clerics in the region from ‘missionary’ and ‘Islamic charitable’ organizations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ostensibly with the direct support of those governments.” The Deobandi was a Sunni revivalist movement found primarily in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh; the Ahl-e-Hadith was another revivalist movement based in India. As we have seen throughout Islamic history, revivalist movements quite frequently resort to jihad.

The following year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office noted: “While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority… Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide… “

But there was still no hint of a rift in the U.S.–Saudi alliance. It was a tough analytical problem because the United States, even as it faced a comprehensive jihad challenge, was politically and economically entangled with one of the chief financiers of the jihad.

And when there was a regime change in Washington and Donald Trump became president of the United States, he did the sword dance in Riyadh with Saudi royals.

The Iranian Involvement in 9/11

Less noted but no less significant is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s role in the September 11 attacks—also a subject of U.S. government cover-up attempts.

On December 22, 2011, U.S. District judge George B. Daniels ruled in Havlish, et al. v. bin Laden, et al., that Iran and Hizballah were liable for damages to be paid to relatives of the victims of the September 11, 2001, jihad attacks in New York and Washington, as both the Islamic Republic and its Lebanese proxy had actively aided al-Qaeda in planning and executing those attacks.

Daniels found that Iran and Hizballah had cooperated and collaborated with al-Qaeda before 9/11 and continued to do so after the attacks.

Former operative Abolghasem Mesbahi, a defector from Iran, testified that during the summer of 2001, he received messages from Iranian government officials regarding a plan for unconventional warfare against the U.S., entitled “Shaitan dar Atash” (“Satan in Flames”).

“Satan in Flames” was the elaborate plot to hijack three passenger jets, each packed full of people, and crash them into American landmarks: the World Trade Center, which jihadis took to be the center of American commerce; the Pentagon, the center of America’s military apparatus; and the White House.

A classified National Security Agency analysis referred to in the 9/11 Commission report reveals that eight to ten of the 9/11 hijackers traveled to Iran repeatedly in late 2000 and early 2001. The 9/11 Commission called for a U.S. government investigation into Iran’s role in 9/11, but none was ever undertaken.

The Ayatollah Khamenei knew about the plot. During the summer of 2001, he instructed Iranian agents to be careful to conceal their tracks and told them to communicate only with al-Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Imad Mughniyah of Hizballah.

Mughniyah was Iran’s key player in the 9/11 “Satan in Flames” plot. During the Havlish trial, former CIA agents Clare M. Lopez and Bruce D. Tefft submitted an affidavit stating that “Imad Mughniyah, the most notable and notorious world terrorist of his time, an agent of Iran and a senior operative of Hizballah, facilitated the international travel of certain 9/11 hijackers to and from Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, and perhaps various other locations for the purpose of executing the events of September 11, 2001.

The Obama-era CIA went to great pains to try to ensure that information about Iran’s role in 9/11 did not come out in the Havlish case.

Judge Daniels determined that Iran, Hizballah, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and other Iranian government departments, as well as the Ayatollah Khamenei himself and former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani were all directly implicated in Iranian efforts to aid al-Qaeda in its 9/11 plot.

Confirming all of this was the revelation in November 2017 of a document captured in the May 2, 2011, American raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan. It details a mutual agreement between al-Qaeda and the Islamic Republic of Iran to strike American interests in “Saudi Arabia and the Gulf”; the Iranians agreed to supply al-Qaeda “money, arms,” and “training in Hizbollah camps in Lebanon.”

 Infiltration

Standing with President Bush in the mosque in September 2001 was Abdurrahman Alamoudi, who was then one of the most prominent Muslim leaders in the United States. During the presidency of Bill Clinton, Alamoudi served as a State Department “goodwill ambassador” to Muslim lands. In June 2001, he attended a White House briefing on George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative program.

Even though it was universally taken for granted that Alamoudi was a “moderate,” he never bothered to conceal his true allegiances. In 1994 he declared his support for the jihad terror group Hamas. He claimed that “Hamas is not a terrorist group” and that it did “good work.”

At a rally in October 2000, he encouraged those in the crowd to show their support for Hamas and Hizballah. As the crowd cheered, Alamoudi shouted: “I have been labeled by the media in New York to be a supporter of Hamas. Anybody supports Hamas here?” As the crowd cheered, “Yes,” Alamoudi asked the same question again, and then added: “Hear that, Bill Clinton, we are all supporters of Hamas, Allahu akbar.” But even that did not raise any concern among those in Washington who were confident that he was a sterling and reliable “moderate Muslim.” And so, in January 2001, the year he was invited to the Bush White House, Alamoudi traveled to Beirut to attend a conference with leaders of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, and Islamic Jihad.

Then, in September 2003, Alamoudi was arrested in London’s Heathrow Airport while carrying three hundred and forty thousand dollars in cash—money that, as it turned out, he had received from Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi in order to finance an al-Qaeda plot to murder the Saudi crown prince, the future King Abdullah.58 Indicted on numerous charges, Alamoudi was found to have funneled over one million dollars to al-Qaeda; he pled guilty to being a senior al-Qaeda financier and was sentenced in October 2004 to twenty-three years in prison. In 2011, the Obama administration reduced Alamoudi’s sentence by six years, without making public its reasons for doing so.

So, as he proclaimed that Islam was a religion of peace that had no connection to the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush was standing in the company of a financier of the organization that was responsible for those attacks.

That denial made the American response to 9/11 curious and wrongheaded in numerous ways. The war went ahead in both Iraq and Afghanistan, both rather off the point if the United States really wanted to confront the sources of jihad activity worldwide. The invasion of Afghanistan made some sense, since the Taliban government was cooperating with al-Qaeda and allowing it to operate training camps on its soil. The invasion of Iraq, however, was based on allegations of cooperation between bin Laden and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein that were much more tenuous. Operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq became quagmires, immense drains on American personnel, money, and materiel, with little to no upside.

This may have been attributable to Muslim Brotherhood influence in the United States government. The Muslim Brotherhood spelled out its goals for the United States in an internal document seized by the FBI in 2005 in the Northern Virginia headquarters of an Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation. The Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Islamic charity in the United States, was shut down for sending charitable contributions to Hamas. The captured document was entitled, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”62

In it, Muslim Brotherhood members were told that the Brotherhood was working on presenting Islam as a “civilizational alternative” to non-Islamic forms of society and governance, and supporting “the global Islamic state wherever it is.” In working to establish that Islamic state, Muslim Brotherhood members in the United States: “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”64

The Muslim Brotherhood has been active in the United States for decades, and is the moving force behind virtually all of the mainstream Muslim organizations in America: the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), and many others.