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(Analyst's note: Absolutely must read.)
by Robert Spencer
Actually they're whining about a "backlash" -- something that has hardly ever materialized despite constant mainstream media focusing upon it after virtually every jihad arrest -- and claiming victim status.
1. Stop committing violent acts. When you hear Muslims plotting violent acts in your local mosque, call the police and FBI.
2. Confront those Muslims who justify violence and Islamic supremacism by reference to the Qur'an and Sunnah, and argue against the applicability of those passages to our age or any other age in the future.
3. Confront and report those Muslims who say violent or hateful things in private when they think no non-Muslims are around.
4. Begin comprehensive and transparently inspeactable programs in your mosques ans schools to teach against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism, and the virtues of the U.S. Constitutional principles of non-establishment of religion, equality of rights for all, and freedom of speech.
5. Actively work with Western law enforcement officials on long-range programs to identify and apprehend jihadists and root out the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism from within Western Muslim communities.
"Dallas-area Muslims fear backlash from arrests tied to terror plot," by Selwyn Crawford for The Dallas Morning News, October 19 (thanks to Peter):
In March 2009, five Muslims accused of helping plot the September 11 attacks, including the notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, wrote an "Islamic Response to the Government's Nine Accusations." In it they quote the Koran to justify their jihad war against the American Infidels. "In God's book," asserts the letter, "he ordered us to fight you everywhere we find you, even if you were inside the holiest of all holy cities, The Mosque in Mecca, and the holy city of Mecca, and even during sacred months. In God's book, verse 9 [actually verse 5], Al-Tawbah [the Koran's 9th chapter]: Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush."
Osama bin Laden's communiqués have also quoted the Koran copiously. In his 1996 "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," he quotes seven Koran verses: 3:145; 47:4-6; 2:154; 9:14; 47:19; 8:72; and the notorious "Verse of the Sword," 9:5.[i] Bin Laden began his October 6, 2002, letter to the American people with two Koran quotations, both of a martial bent: "Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory" (22:39) and "Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan" (4:76)."
In a sermon broadcast in 2003, bin Laden rejoiced in a Koranic exhortation to violence as being a means to establish the truth: "Praise be to Allah who revealed the verse of the Sword to his servant and messenger [the Islamic Prophet Muhammad], in order to establish truth and abolish falsehood." The "Verse of the Sword" is Koran 9:5: "Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful."
The idea that the Koran commands them to do violence to unbelievers runs from the very top of the international jihadist movement - Osama bin Laden - down to the rank and file. Overall, it is extremely rare - if not impossible - to find a jihadist who does not cite the Koran to justify his actions. Britain-based jihadist preacher, Abu Yahya, asserts simply, "It says in the Koran that we must try as much as we can to terrorise the enemy." And Pakistani jihad leader Beitullah Mehsud claims that "Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfill God's orders.
Only jihad can bring peace to the world." He specified that his jihad - struggle in Arabic - was an offensive military operation: "We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jazia." The "jazia," or jizya, is a tax that the Koran (9:29) specifies must be levied on Jews, Christians, and some other non-Muslim faiths as a sign of their subjugation under the Islamic social order.
One pro-Osama website put it this way: "The truth is that a Muslim who reads the Koran with devotion is determined to reach the battlefield in order to attain the reality of Jihad. It is solely for this reason that the Kufaar [unbelievers] conspire to keep the Muslims far away from understanding the Koran, knowing that Muslims who understand the Koran will not distance themselves from Jihad."
That is what al-Marayati would not have us notice. There are simply no Christians or Jews committing violence and justifying it with reference to Biblical texts. The situation in Islam is very different.
Memo to Dallas Muslims: want to make sure there is no backlash? Here are some easy steps.
1. Stop committing violent acts. When you hear Muslims plotting violent acts in your local mosque, call the police and FBI.
2. Confront those Muslims who justify violence and Islamic supremacism by reference to the Qur'an and Sunnah, and argue against the applicability of those passages to our age or any other age in the future.
3. Confront and report those Muslims who say violent or hateful things in private when they think no non-Muslims are around.
4. Begin comprehensive and transparently inspeactable programs in your mosques ans schools to teach against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism, and the virtues of the U.S. Constitutional principles of non-establishment of religion, equality of rights for all, and freedom of speech.
5. Actively work with Western law enforcement officials on long-range programs to identify and apprehend jihadists and root out the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism from within Western Muslim communities.
"Dallas-area Muslims fear backlash from arrests tied to terror plot," by Selwyn Crawford for The Dallas Morning News, October 19 (thanks to Peter):
North Texans were both angry and relieved last month when federal agents arrested a Jordanian teenager in a failed plot to blow up a Dallas skyscraper.
But for area Muslims, the arrest of 19-year-old Hosam "Sam" Smadi evoked yet another emotion - fear.
"Being a Muslim in America today is not easy," said Hadi Jawad, a longtime Dallas business owner and a volunteer at the Dallas Peace Center. "We feel under siege. There is open season on our faith. Muslims are painted with a broad brush."No, thy aren't. Mainstream media types are always quick to claim, even on the slimmest of evidence, that this or that terror attack has nothing to do with Islam, that Islam teaches peace, that all Muslims condemn, etc. But Jawad and other Muslims could do much more to stop this alleged broad-brush painting by opposing jihad activity more forthrightly and energetically, instead of simply whining about backlash when a jihadist is caught.
Jawad and other Muslims praise the work of law enforcement in arresting Smadi, as well as two other terrorism suspects in New York and Illinois. But because of all three suspects' Islamic faith, they say the arrests cast aspersions on Islam that hearken back to the atmosphere that existed immediately after 9/11.
Though most area Muslims are quick to say the mood of the country has not returned to that bitter level, most add that their lives here would be practically unbearable if any Muslim terrorist were to carry out another attack on American soil
"We have to work toward a common yardstick of justice, but we are just one catastrophic incident away from the post-9/11 atmosphere and even worse," said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington, a Muslim civil rights organization. "We have to accept the double standards, as bad as they are. That's just the fact, unfortunately."And MPAC has not helped. Just the opposite.
Muslims in North Texas say they don't know of any physical assaults on them of late, but that after any high-profile negative event involving Muslims - such as the arrest of Smadi - they face increased racial taunts and verbal harassment.
Poor dears! Poor fragile lambs! Christians in Egypt are being wantonly murdered, but Muslims in North Texas are being...called names!
Al-Marayati says suspicions about Muslims persist, in large part, because Americans - most of whom are Christian - either can't or won't make a distinction between the mainstream and fringe elements of Islam, while they discern that difference for others.
He says, for example, that when non-Muslims commit extreme acts, they are quickly dismissed as being crazy or weird or having some deep-seated emotional problem, and are not viewed as representative of an entire group of people.
But Muslim bad actors, he said, don't get the same treatment.
"When a Christian does something ... that's how it's reported, that they happen to be a Christian," Al-Marayati said. "But if it's a Muslim, it's as if it's the [Muslim] religion that's driving it."
Al-Marayati is setting up a familiar smokescreen, but for all its common usage it still doesn't make any sense. Why do people see the Muslim religion as driving terrorist acts? Because Muslims say so. Repeatedly. Just the other day we say Anwar al-Awlaki saying, "Whenever you see the word terrorism, replace it with the word jihad."
In March 2009, five Muslims accused of helping plot the September 11 attacks, including the notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, wrote an "Islamic Response to the Government's Nine Accusations." In it they quote the Koran to justify their jihad war against the American Infidels. "In God's book," asserts the letter, "he ordered us to fight you everywhere we find you, even if you were inside the holiest of all holy cities, The Mosque in Mecca, and the holy city of Mecca, and even during sacred months. In God's book, verse 9 [actually verse 5], Al-Tawbah [the Koran's 9th chapter]: Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush."
Osama bin Laden's communiqués have also quoted the Koran copiously. In his 1996 "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," he quotes seven Koran verses: 3:145; 47:4-6; 2:154; 9:14; 47:19; 8:72; and the notorious "Verse of the Sword," 9:5.[i] Bin Laden began his October 6, 2002, letter to the American people with two Koran quotations, both of a martial bent: "Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory" (22:39) and "Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan" (4:76)."
In a sermon broadcast in 2003, bin Laden rejoiced in a Koranic exhortation to violence as being a means to establish the truth: "Praise be to Allah who revealed the verse of the Sword to his servant and messenger [the Islamic Prophet Muhammad], in order to establish truth and abolish falsehood." The "Verse of the Sword" is Koran 9:5: "Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful."
The idea that the Koran commands them to do violence to unbelievers runs from the very top of the international jihadist movement - Osama bin Laden - down to the rank and file. Overall, it is extremely rare - if not impossible - to find a jihadist who does not cite the Koran to justify his actions. Britain-based jihadist preacher, Abu Yahya, asserts simply, "It says in the Koran that we must try as much as we can to terrorise the enemy." And Pakistani jihad leader Beitullah Mehsud claims that "Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfill God's orders.
Only jihad can bring peace to the world." He specified that his jihad - struggle in Arabic - was an offensive military operation: "We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jazia." The "jazia," or jizya, is a tax that the Koran (9:29) specifies must be levied on Jews, Christians, and some other non-Muslim faiths as a sign of their subjugation under the Islamic social order.
One pro-Osama website put it this way: "The truth is that a Muslim who reads the Koran with devotion is determined to reach the battlefield in order to attain the reality of Jihad. It is solely for this reason that the Kufaar [unbelievers] conspire to keep the Muslims far away from understanding the Koran, knowing that Muslims who understand the Koran will not distance themselves from Jihad."
That is what al-Marayati would not have us notice. There are simply no Christians or Jews committing violence and justifying it with reference to Biblical texts. The situation in Islam is very different.
Mohamed Elibiary, president of the Freedom and Justice Foundation, a Muslim interfaith organization in Plano, agrees.
"The average American thinks it must be the religion" that pushes Muslim extremists, Elibiary said. "There must be something about them. That sentiment has been there since 9/11, and it hasn't gone anywhere."Re the slick Elibiary, see here. Gee, Mohamed, where could people have gotten that "sentiment"?
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