MUST READ: HARVARD: AMERICA'S "HUB" FOR SHARIA?!?

Harvard: America’s “Hub” For Sharia?
by Andrew Bostom

Right on the heels of Harvard’s capitulation to Sharia mores at its Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center, the Harvard “academic” community indulged an ideologue with much grander aspirations for implementing Sharia, UCLA Professor of Law, Khaled Abou el Fadl.

My dear friend and colleague Hillel Stavis had the morbidly fascinating experience of witnessing this pseudo-academic fraud peddle his paltry wares March 5, 2008 at Harvard’s Divinity School, during a lecture entitled, non-sequitur, “Conceptualizing Islamic Theology: Sharia and Human Rights Doctrine”

Here are Hillel Stavis’ cogent first hand observations, in his own words:

Of all the evasions, obfuscations and diversions uttered by UCLA’s Professor of Law Khaled Abou el Fadl yesterday [ i.e., March 5, 2008] at the Harvard Divinity School, none was more revealing than his opening declaration that Sharia Law’s compatibility or incompatibility with human rights was wholly “vacuous” and “irrelevant”. None of the 60 or so, mostly Muslim attendees, seemed to have had a problem with this statement. The audience reaction, from both Mr. Fadl’s academic colleagues (among whom was Harvard’s Roy Mottahedeh, Gurney Professor of History, a specialist in Persian history) and students was more disturbing than the actual presentation.

Professor Mottahedeh lamented the fact that Muslims have spent too much time trying to reconcile Shari’ah with the UN Declaration of Human Rights, urging the world to supplement it with the Muslim version. Of course, the former is truly universal, the latter particularistic. And so, a Harvard tenured professor would essentially replace one with the other in a kind of perfecting process.

Nearly 5-years ago now, I warned that El Fadl’s much ballyhooed reputation as a reformer was completely unjustified. Specifically, I noted his pattern of uniformed or deliberately deceitful presentation:

Recently El Fadl elucidated his "construction" of the tolerant tradition in Islam as part of an essay collection. He focused this presentation, appropriately, on two of the most obvious challenges to any such construction, i.e. jihad, and the poll tax (jizya) levied on non-Muslims under Islamic rule. El Fadl's arguments regarding both jihad and the jizya in this essay merit close scrutiny, as these institutions are integrated into the corpus of the Shari'a, or sacred Islamic law. I believe his omissions of evidence in this essay, combined with an excessive reliance on sacralized, whitewashed historiography, refutes the prevailing notion that El Fadl is engaged in a sincere effort to instill fundamental change in Islam.

El Fadl states categorically: “..Islamic tradition does not have a notion of holy war. Jihad simply means to strive hard or struggle in pursuit of a just cause...Holy war (al-harb al-muqaddasah) is not an expression used by the Qur'anic text or Muslim theologians. In Islamic theology war is never holy; it is either justified or not...” This contention cannot be supported on either theological-juridical, or historical grounds, and in fact contradicts the conclusion of an earlier essay by El Fadl.

El Fadl's discussion of jihad is rendered meaningless by a blatant historical negationism of both Muslim and non-Muslim sources. In his analysis of the poll tax (jizya), he relies exclusively upon the sacralized early Muslim historiography of this institution. El Fadl thus attempts to uphold the "virtuous" aspects of the jizya, omitting any reference to the consistent, intentionally humiliating character of its application…El Fadl's presentation excludes discussion of how the jizya was viewed by classical Muslim jurists. There was in fact a basic consensus among the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence regarding the intimate relationship between the
institutions of jihad against the infidels, and jizya. El Fadl ignores these extensive writings, and instead asserts whimsically, "…there are various indicators that the poll tax is not a theologically mandated practice, but a functional solution that was adopted in response to a specific set of historical circumstances. Only an ahistorical reading of the text could conclude that it is an essential element in a divinely sanctioned program of subordinating the non-believer."

Another important aspect of the jizya that El Fadl ignores is the widely upheld, although not unanimous view of the classical schools of Islamic jurisprudence about the "humiliating" imposition and procurement of this tax. Here is a discussion of the ceremonial for collection of the jizya by the 13th century Shafi'i jurist an-Nawawi: "…The infidel who wishes to pay his poll tax must be treated with disdain by the collector: the collector remains seated and the infidel remains standing in front of him, his head bowed and his back bent. The infidel personally must place the money on the scales, while the collector holds him by the beard, and strikes him on both
cheeks…"

El Fadl also fails to discuss how the "contract of the jizyah", or "dhimma" encompassed other obligatory and recommended obligations for the conquered non-Muslim "dhimmi" peoples. Collectively, these "obligations" formed the discriminatory system of dhimmitude imposed upon non-Muslims- Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists- subjugated by jihad. Some of the more prominent features of the system of dhimmitude include: the prohibition of arms for the vanquished non-Muslims (dhimmis), and of church bells; the restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches and synagogues; the inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to overall taxation, and penal law; the refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts; the obligation for Jews and Christians to wear special clothes; and their overall humiliation and abasement.

And I concluded with this relevant assessment:

It should be abundantly clear that Professor El Fadl's disingenuous revisionism hardly qualifies as a sincere effort to promote a meaningful Islamic "Reformation". Intended or not, his whitewashed, "ahistorical" presentation is dangerous, and serves to justify alarming contemporary Muslim assessments of dhimmitude, and its appropriate application, even today! For example, Palestinian Authority (PA) Undersecretary for Awqaf [Religious Endowment], Sheik Yussef Salamah, representing the PA at a May 1999 "Inter-Cultural Conference," in Tehran, praised the 7th century system of Ahl Al-Dhimma (i.e, the system of dhimmitude), as the proper paradigm for relations between present day Muslims and Christians 58. Palestinian Authority employee, Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim Al-Madhi later reiterated these sentiments with regard to Jews during a Friday sermon broadcasted live on June 6, 2001 on PA TV, from the Sheik 'Ijlin Mosque in Gaza:"We welcome, as we did in the past, any Jew who wants to live in this land as a dhimmi, just as the Jews have lived in our countries, as dhimmis, and have earned appreciation, and some of them have even reached the positions of counselor or minister here and there. We welcome the Jews to live as dhimmis, but the rule in this land and in all the Muslim countries must be the rule of Allah."

One needs simply to contrast El Fadl's meager revisionist approach with the unequivocal statements of a Muslim academic such as Professor Bassam Tibi. Professor Tibi possesses the insight and courage to acknowledge that a meaningfully reformed Islam must embrace the pluralistic spirit of the Western Enlightenment:

“..In the context of religious tolerance-and I write this as a Muslim- there can be no place in Europe for Shari'a …Shari'a is at odds with the secular identity of Europe and is diametrically opposed to secular European constitutions formulated by the people… I hold out for the superiority of common sense over religious faith (i.e., absolute religious precepts); individual human rights (i.e., not collective human rights); secular democracy based on the separation of religion from politics; a universally accepted pluralism; and a mutually accepted secular tolerance. The acceptance of these values is the foundation of a civil society..”

Professor Tibi's comments underscore basic truths that apologists for the Shari'a such as El Fadl refuse to acknowledge. For example, the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam maintains that the Shari'a has primacy over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and includes the specific proclamation that God has made the umma (Islamic community) the best nation, whose role is to "guide" humanity. This statement captures the indelible influence of jihad ideology on the Shari'a, rendering sacred and permanent the notion of inequality between the community of Allah, and the infidels. Thus we can see clearly the differences between the Shari'a-inspired Cairo Declaration, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which does not refer to any religion or to the superiority of any group over another, while stressing the absolute equality of all human beings. Indeed a Senegalese jurist (and Muslim), Adama Dieng, (then serving as secretary-general to the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists), courageously declared in 1992 that the Cairo Declaration introduced an intolerable discrimination against non-Muslims and women.

Subsequently, Daniel Pipes elaborated on El Fadl’s so-called “anti-Wahhabism,” which is negated by his continued apologetics for jihad terrorism, and open espousal of the implementation of Sharia in non-Muslim societies, as a leading pseudo-academic, cultural jihadist. Pipes highlighted, for example the fact that Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917-96), an important 20th century Egyptian cleric, remains one of Abou El Fadl's chief intellectual influences. However, as I have noted, the “anti-Wahhabi” al-Ghazali, then an official of Al Azhar University, supported the July 1994 vigilante murder of secular Egyptian writer Farag Foda. Testifying on behalf of Farag Foda’s murderer, al-Ghazali stated, unabashedly, “A secularist represents a danger to society and the nation that must be eliminated. It is the duty of the government to kill him.”

...



Pertinent Links:

1) Harvard: America’s “Hub” For Sharia?

MUST READ: ISLAMIC JEW-HATRED IN EUROPE

Islamic Jew-Hatred in Europe
By Andrew G. Bostom

European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security, Franco Frattini, who is the European Union (EU) official responsible “for combating racism and Antisemitism in Europe,” as reported by The Jerusalem Post 2/2/08, has revealed that Muslims are responsible for fully half (50%) of the documented Antisemitic incidents on the European continent.

Demographic data from 2007 indicate that the total number of Europeans is 494.8 million; estimates of the number of Muslims in Europe range from 15-20 million, or some ~3.0—4.0% of the total European population. Thus, on a population percentage basis, Muslims in Europe account for roughly 24.0 to 32.3 times the number of Antisemitic incidents as their non-Muslim European counterparts.

These 2007/2008 data are in turn consistent with previous findings from 2006 on the excess prevalence of frank Antisemitism reported amongst European Muslims, published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution by Yale University biostatistician Dr. Edward H. Kaplan, and Dr. Charles A. Small of the Yale Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism. (“Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Antisemitism in Europe” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2006, Vol. 50, pp. 548-561.) Drs. Kaplan and Small examined the views of 5004 Europeans, roughly 500 individuals sampled from each of 10 European Union countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The authors’ main publicized results confirmed their (rather commonsensical) a priori hypothesis: anti-Israel sentiments strongly and independently predicted the likelihood that an individual was Antisemitic in a graded manner, i.e., the more anti-Israel (on a scale of zero to 4), the more a person was likely to be Antisemitic.

But a much more striking and relevant finding in light of the burgeoning Jew hatred now evident in Europe’s Muslim communities, received much less attention: in a controlled comparison to European Christians (as the “referent” group), European Muslims were nearly eightfold (i.e., 800%) more likely to be overtly Antisemitic. [emphasis added] (“Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Antisemitism in Europe,” p. 557 and Table 3, p. 558.)

Furthermore, in light of the Pew Global Attitudes Project data on Muslim attitudes toward Jews in Islamic countries, the Yale study likely underestimated the extent of Antisemitism amongst Europe’s Muslim communities, had more poorly educated, less acclimated European Muslims been sampled. Pew’s earlier international survey indicated (“The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other”, Pew Global Attitudes Project, June 22, 2006.),

In the Muslim world, attitudes toward Jews remain starkly negative, including
virtually unanimous unfavorable ratings of 98% in Jordan and 97% in Egypt.
Muslims living in Western countries have a more moderate view of Jews - still
more negative than positive, but not nearly by the lopsided margins that prevail
in Muslim countries.

Mr. Frattini mentioned these alarming new EU data on the disproportionate occurrence of overt Antisemitic acts by European Muslims in a conversation with Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs Isaac Herzog last week, during the Second European Union-Israel Seminar for Combating Racism and Antisemitism, in Jerusalem. Herzog, who coordinates at the cabinet level Israeli government activities in combating antisemitism, opined that it was “…not new that Frattini relates a large percentage of Antisemitic incidents to radical Islam [emphasis added], and it’s important to say, not Islam [emphasis added] as such.”

But Mr. Herzog’s conjectural distancing of Muslim antisemitism from “Islam,” wishfully attributing it to so-called “radical Islam,” defies volumes of doctrinal evidence from Islam’s foundational texts, and jurisprudence, more than a millennium of Islamic history, and endless commonplace, common sense observations, past and present.

For example, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page treatise documenting and rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra’il fi al-Qur’an wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Qur’an and the Traditions], originally published in the 1970s, and then re-issued in 1986/87:

[The] Qur’an describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate
characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by
putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously,
refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly
characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of
the Jews keep their word….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become
Muslims, the bad ones do not. (Qur’an 3:113)

Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, “carefully researched” views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope—the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, Sunnis representing some 85% of the world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on the Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs”, the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews, or “dialogue” with Jews (just below), make clear:

…anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious
claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from
Allah’s book [the Qur’an], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews…[I]
wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and
their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that
dissertation. [i.e., from above, in Banu Isra’il fi al-Qur’an wa al-Sunna]

Tantawi’s case illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, “normative” Jew hatred in the contemporary Muslim world. Arguably Islam’s leading mainstream cleric, Tantawi embodies how the living legacy of Muslim anti-Jewish hatred, and violence remains firmly rooted in mainstream, orthodox Islamic teachings, not some aberrant vision of “radical Islam.”

...



Pertinent Links:

1) Islamic Jew-Hatred in Europe

MUST READ: ISLAMOFASCISM? HITLER, MUHAMMAD, & ISLAM - - - PART ONE

Islamofascism? Hitler, Muhammad, and Islam
Part One of Two
by Andrew G. Bostom


Cliff May deserves credit for his recent National Review Online column “The New True Believers.” May dares to associate – however indirectly, and in the end, I am afraid, inadequately – those he terms, using layers of prophylactic rhetorical separation from orthodox Islam, either “militant jihadists,” or “Islamists,” and their movement as “militant Islamism,” – with Hitler, and his “movement,” i.e., Nazism.

May’s inchoate effort should be applauded for its attempted illustration of any possible ideological nexus between Hitler’s Nazism and Islam. But ultimately, the associations he makes – the “ability to nurse grievances and stoke ambitions,” Germans/Aryans as a master race, and the concordant supremacism of “militant Islamism,” and, invoking Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” generic “fanaticism” – ignore much more intimate, if uncomfortable to acknowledge, doctrinal and historical connections between ancient Islam and modern Nazism, upon which I will elaborate.

Diana West has summarized how the prevailing usage of the term “Islamofascism” obfuscates critically relevant truths:

“Islamofascism” is a made-up word that draws a politically correct curtain over
mainstream, traditional Islam, in effect shielding the religion and its tenets
from scrutiny when considering what drives our jihadist enemies – as they are
the first to declare.

My discussion introduces a doctrinally and historically relevant context if the currently much abused term “Islamofascism” is to be understood and employed appropriately, acknowledging the direct nexus between Islam, pre-modern despotism, and modern totalitarian ideologies.

...


Pertinent Links:

1) Islamofascism? Hitler, Muhammad, and Islam

MUST READ: ISLAMOFASCISM? HITLER, MUHAMMAD, & ISLAM - PART TWO OF TWO

Islamofascism? Hitler, Muhammad, and Islam
Part Two of Two
by Andrew G. Bostom

...

This recently declassified October 1957 U.S. intelligence report on von Leers’ writings and activities for Egypt and the Arab League independently confirms his complete adoption of the triumphalist Muslim worldview, desirous of nothing less than the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization by Jihad:

He [Dr. Omar Amin von Leers] is becoming more and more a religious zealot, even
to the extent of advocating an expansion of Islam in Europe in order to bring
about stronger unity through a common religion. This expansion he believes can
come not only from contact with the Arabs in the Near East and Africa but with
Islamic elements in the USSR. The results he envisions as the formation of a
political bloc against which neither East nor West could prevail.

Leers’ final vision of an Islamic supremacist hegemony – as formulated in the two decades after World War II – has had a profound influence on contemporary trends, now robust, from Morocco to Indonesia, and within Muslim communities living in Western, and other non-Muslim societies across the globe. All too prevalent today, numerous examples of this shared vision can be adduced, ranging from the activities and pronouncements of well-known jihad terror organizations (such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas), to the mainstream Organization of the Islamic Conference, and individuals, such as the profoundly influential Muslim cleric (“Spiritual adviser” to the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jazeera television personality, and head of the European Fatwa Council) Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the Mufti-Leers disciple, and Swiss convert to Islam, Ahmed Huber – a former manager of Al Taqwa financial institution, alleged to have laundered money for Osama bin Laden.

The extent to which Nazi convert to Islam Omar Amin von Leers’ ugly vision has been implemented over the past 50 years – his “successful” living legacy – supports a simple, profoundly disturbing conception articulated by writer Lawrence Auster. Oblivious to the firmly entrenched politically correct orthodoxy, Auster has termed Muhammad a “successful Hitler.” Auster argues that Muhammad, whom he also calls “one of the great geniuses of history,” conceived

… a highly flexible and therefore sustainable ideology and program of
subversion, conquest, and domination (as well as a sustainable way of life),
while Hitler's ideology and program had no internal brakes. It was pedal to the
metal, aiming at the instant and total destruction of other countries and of
Western civilization as a whole, and thus making it necessary for other
countries utterly to destroy Hitlerism

Whether or not one accepts this overall conception, a crucial aspect of Auster’s argument regarding Muhammad’s lingering pernicious influence – including upon mentally docile non-Muslims – is irrefragable:

…getting people, even fourteen centuries after his death, voluntarily to embrace
his program of self-abnegation, the willing surrender of their mind and
identity...

Pertinent Links:

1) Islamofascism? Hitler, Muhammad, and Islam

MUST READ: UNDER TURKISH RULE, PARTS 1 THRU 2

Under Turkish Rule, Part I
By Andrew G. Bostom

Summary

Ignorance about the plight of Jews under Turkish rule—past, including Ottoman Palestine, and present—is profound. In lieu of serious, critical examination one finds whitewashed apologetics concocted to promote dubious geo-political strategies—even the morally bankrupt denial of the Armenian genocide, as promoted, shamefully, by public intellectuals and major US Jewish organizations who abet the exploitation of their co-religionist Turkish Jews as dhmmi “lobbyists” for the government of Turkey. These strategies have “succeeded”, perversely, in further isolating Jews, while failing, abysmally, to alter a virulently Antisemitic Turkish religious (i.e., Islamic), and secular culture—the latter perhaps best exemplified by the wildly popular, and most expensive film ever made in Turkey, “Valley of the Wolves” (released February, 2006) which features an American Jewish doctor dismembering Iraqis brutally murdered by American soldiers in order to harvest their organs for Jewish markets. Prime Minister Erdogan not only failed to condemn the film, he justified its production and popularity.

The ruling AK (Adalet ve Kalkınma) Party’s resounding popular electoral victory July 22, 2007 over its closest “secularist” rival parties is further evidence of Turkey’s steady re-Islamization. Indeed this trend dates literally to the first election during which Turkish voters were offered any option other than one party rule under Ataturk’s CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Party)—in 1950, when Menderes’ Demokrat Party (DP) pursued a successful electoral strategy by pandering to an Islamic “re-awakening.” Upon election, the DP supported religious schools, and a mosque construction initiative; it also allowed Sufi orders to reappear, and many of their followers then actively supported DP candidates in elections. Already by 1952, Bernard Lewis warned, presciently, about the open re-emergence of Islam in Turkey with the 1950 ascent of Menderes’ DP just twelve years after Atatürk’s death.

Ataturk’s regime and the CHP-lead Republican governments of his successors manifested their own discriminatory attitudes towards non-Muslims, generally, including specific outbursts of antisemitic persecution—most notably the Thracian pogroms of July, 1934. But since 1950, both the Turkish press and Islamic literature have steadily increased their output of theological Islamic antisemitism—founded upon core anti-Jewish motifs in the Koran, hadith, and sira. This theologically-based anti-Jewish animus grew steadily in stridency, and during the 1970s through 1990s, was melded into anti-Zionist and anti-Israel invective by the burgeoning fundamentalist Islamic movement under Necmettin Erbakan—the former Turkish Prime Minister, and mentor of the current AK Party Prime Minister, Tayyip Recep Erdogan, whose own Islamic fundamentalist (see here, and here), and virulently Antisemitic leanings are well-documented. For example, in 1974, Erdogan, then serving as president of the Istanbul Youth Group of the Islamist National Salvation Party (founded by Erbakan), wrote, directed, and played the leading role in a theatrical play entitled Maskomya, staged throughout Turkey during the 1970s. Mas-Kom-Ya was a compound acronym for “Masons-Communists-Yahudi [Jews]”, and the play focused on the evil, conspiratorial nature of these three entities whose common denominator was Judaism.

The steady recrudescence of fundamentalist Islam in Turkey since 1950—epitomized by the overwhelming re-election of the AKP—does not bode well for either the dhimmified vestigial Jewish community of Turkey, or long term relations between Turkey and the Jewish State of Israel. But the plight of Turkey’s Jews and the other vestigial non-Muslim Turkish minorities reveals a more profound challenge which modern Turkey has failed to overcome since its origins under Ataturk in 1923—steering a truly progressive course between the Scylla of autocratic secular Kemalist nationalism (whose often racist theories are still being taught), and the Charybdis of a totalitarian, politicized Islam.

...


[and]



Under Turkish Rule, Part II
By Andrew G. Bostom

Jews in Modern (Republican) Turkey

Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) forged the modern Turkish nation and its political institutions in the disastrous aftermath of World War I, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Endeavoring to realize his vision of a modern secular state, and its new Turkish citizenry, Atatürk, 117

…closed religious schools, undermined the dervish orders, Latinized the alphabet to isolate Turks from their rich Ottoman heritage, and invented a new history and “new” language for the new Turkish citizen. Alongside the hat law (outlawing the fez and compelling the wearing of Western hats), legislation stipulated the Turkification of names, spoken language, and education of the ostensibly new citizen.

But the “Turkification” process—an enforced homogeneity—has helped render Turkey incapable of upholding one of the cardinal provisions of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. This treaty re-established Turkish sovereignty over almost all the territory comprising the contemporary Turkish Republic, and abolished the so-called “capitulations” which allowed European powers to intervene on behalf of non-Muslim (almost exclusively Christian) religious minorities in the former Ottoman Empire. 118 In return, Turkey was required to guarantee minority (and overall citizens’) rights consistent with modern, progressive standards. 119

...

MUST READ: U.K. TERROR PLOTS:JIHAD COMES HANDY IN 'HEALING'

UK Terror Plots: Jihad Comes Handy in 'Healing'
by Andrew G. Bostom

Canadian-born physician Sir William Osler, MD (1849-1919) revolutionized the teaching and training curricula of North American medical schools. Within 7-months of his death on December 29, 1919, Osler delivered a lecture entitled, "The Old Humanities and the New Science" celebrating the strong humanistic aspirations of modern medicine even in the face of the tragic carnage of World War I. He observed that,

The dynamo replaced the steam-engine, radiant energy revealed the hidden secrets
of matter, to the conquest of the earth was added the control of the air and the
mastery of the deep. Nor was it only an Age of Force. Never before had man done
so much for his brother, the victory over the powers of Nature meant also glorious victories of peace; pestilences were checked, the cry of the poor became articulate, and to help the life of the submerged half became a sacred duty of the other.

The fulminant recrudescence of jihadism during the latter half of the 20th century through the present, has been accompanied by a grotesque distortion of Osler's vision: a burgeoning cadre of Muslim physicians ― epitomized by those linked to the recent London and Glasgow terror plots ― lacking the most basic professional and personal ethics, have adopted a warped credo, albeit consistent with the doctrine of jihad war, which has been aptly characterized as "terror is healing".

Indeed, even the much-lionized "progressive" Muslim theologian Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, who was hanged (1985) as an "apostate" in a transparent act of political oppression by the Sudanese government, and recently hailed by journalist George Packer as the "anti-[Islamic fundamentalist Sayyid] Qutb", made the following hideous analogy between jihad war and the surgical instrument of healing, a physician's lancet/scalpel:

Islam used persuasion for thirteen years in propagating its clearly valid message...When the addressees failed to discharge properly the[ir] duties...the
Prophet was appointed as their guardian... once they embraced the new religion
[i.e., by coercion]...the sword was suspended... and [they] were penalized according to new laws. Hence the development of Islamic Shari'a law....


In justifying the use of the sword, we may describe it as a surgeon's lancet, and not a butcher's knife... We [the Muslims] have enacted fighting with the sword in order to curtail the freedom of those who abuse it, so the sword brings them to their senses, thereby allowing them to earn their freedom and benefit from their life [note: "freedom as perfect slavery to Allah", the Sufi notion of Ibn Arabi, perhaps?]


Suffering death by the sword in this life is really an aspect of suffering hell in the next life, since both are punishments for disbelief... for the disbelievers the law of war, and hardship of iron.

Seminal jihadist ideologue Abdallah Azzam, a Palestinian Muslim physician, and Osama bin Laden's primary mentor, represents the apotheosis of this modern jihad terrorist "healer" as murderer mentality. But Azzam is merely representative of an entire genre of like-minded Muslim physicians, as catalogued briefly by the indefatigable lawyer and investigative journalist Debbie Schlussel:

* Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri ― Al-Qaeda mastermind and number two man, reportedly a surgeon and/or psychiatrist;


* Dr. Mohammad Rabi Al-Zawahiri ― Ayman's father and a Muslim Brotherhood enthusiast, pharmacologist and professor at Ain Shams Medical School;


* Dr. "Abu Hafiza" ― Al-Qaeda master planner who was the brains and commander of the Moroccan cell that provided logistics for the 9/11 attacks, and he recruited Qaeda insurgents for battles in Fallujah, Moroccan psychiatrist;


* Dr. Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi ― Late HAMAS leader, pediatrician;


* Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zahar ― HAMAS co-founder and leader, surgeon and lecturer at the Islamic University in Gaza;


* Dr. Fathi Abd Al-Aziz Shiqaqi ― Late founder of Islamic Jihad and active in Fatah, physician;


* Drs. Laila Al-Marayati and Riad Abdelkarim ― Both work with and/or are top officials of KinderUSA (son of the Holy Land Foundation), which Al-Marayati voluntarily shutdown before the FBI did, as it was openly funding HAMAS "martyrs." Abdelkarim went to "Palestine" in May or so of 2002 with Dr. Dallel Mohammed (not an MD). They took monies collected at an April 2002 fundraiser and were caught by Israeli security handing over the funds to a HAMAS operative. They were detained in an Israeli jail, and a large orgy of publicity ensued. The two came back to the U.S. as Muslim "martyrs" used it to raise money for more.


* Dr. Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha ― a 26-year-old neurologist who was arrested and is in custody as a suspect in the attempted London bombings, foiled Friday. He was born in Saudi Arabia, is of Palestinian origin, and has a Jordanian passport. His 27-year-old wife, a medical assistant, was also arrested for the foiled
bombings;


* Dr. Bilal Talal Abdul Samad Abdulla ― an Iraqi from Baghdad who was also arrested and is in custody as a suspect in the attempted Glasgow International Airport bombing, foiled Saturday. He was reportedly in the keep that drove into the airport, and is suffering from third-degree burns;


* Dr. Mohammed Haneef ― an Indian Muslim arrested in Australia on Monday night in custody as a suspect in the attempted British terrorist bombing plots of last week; and the remainder of the eight London/Glasgow terror suspects

Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Ohio chapter board chair Dr. Mobin-Uddin in her deceitful and treacly apologetic, "Betrayal of Our Faith", ignored this ugly living legacy of Muslim physicians serving as leaders of murderous jihad terror organizations, and expressed "outrage" with those she maintains only "profess" to be Muslims. To support this latter dubious claim she trotted out a disingenuously redacted summary of Koran 5:32, which according to her, "equates saving one life with saving the lives of all of humanity."

The entire verse Koran 5:32, quoted in full context, with the intimately related verse, Koran 5:33, comprises a dire warning to Jews, admonishing them "Behave, or else".

(5:32) Therefore We prescribed for the Children of Israel that whoso slays a
soul not to retaliate for a soul slain, nor for corruption done in the land, shall be as if he had slain mankind altogether; and whoso gives life to a soul, shall be as if he has given life to mankind altogether. Our Messengers have already come to them with the clear signs; then many of them thereafter commit excesses in the earth. (5:33) This is the recompense of those who fight against God and His Messenger, and hasten about the earth, to do corruption there: they shall be slaughtered, or crucified, or their hands and feet shall alternately be struck off; or they shall be banished from the land. That is a degradation for them in this world; and in the world to come awaits them a mighty chastisement

Thus Koran 5:32/33, as Ibn Warraq has noted, do not abjure violence, instead they aggressively make clear that anyone opposing the Muslim prophet Muhammad will be killed, crucified, mutilated, or banished.

...



Pertinent Links:

1) UK Terror Plots: Jihad Comes Handy in 'Healing'

MUST READ: EURABIA: 'CONSPIRACY' OR POLICY?!?!?

Eurabia: 'Conspiracy' or Policy?
By Andrew G. Bostom

America must reckon with the reality of a long term project to create a Euro-Arab alliance based on far-reaching cultural integration measures. Yet some dismiss the warnings of those who speak of the dangers for America as the ravings of conspiracy theorists. Phillip Jenkins, in his recently released book God's Continent makes the following statement:

... the forces driving Muslim immigration were so overwhelming that there is no reason to imagine the conspiracy theory devised by Bat Ye'or and since popularized by Oriana Fallaci and others, which suggests that European elites collaborated with Arab states to create a Eurabian federation spanning the Mediterranean. Given the economic forces demanding labor and the political factors conditioning supply, it would be difficult to imagine any outcome much different from what actually occurred.

Sadly, and not so "incidentally", this reductio ad absurdum argument -- focused inappropriately on the secondary issue of immigration as if that were the sine qua non of "Eurabia", and imbued with a non-sequitur, defamatory charge of conspiracism -- reveals little more than Mr. Jenkin's own thoroughly inept research.

Despite its widespread usage, there is almost universal ignorance about the origins of the term "Eurabia". We'll get to that shortly. Here is a bit of historical context, to which Mr. Jenkins is completely oblivious, dating back to the early to mid-1970s, as characterized in meticulous (if dry and forbidding) detail in Bat Ye'or's seminal, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.

Born of the Arab League's October, 1973 defeat in their Yom Kippur war against Israel and the related oil embargo, The Euro-Arab Dialogue has created an alphabet soup of European Community, and later European Union-funded organizations charged with planning joint political, cultural, social, industrial, commercial, and technical-scientific projects.

This entity first met officially at a ministerial level on July 31, 1974, in Paris, to discuss the Dialogue's organization. In attendance were the Secretary General of the Arab League, the Kuwaiti Foreign Minister, the President of the European Community Commission, and the President of the European Community. As Bat Ye'or observes,

In the course of the meetings that followed, the European foreign ministers of the Nine [i.e., the original European Community member states] laid the foundations for their cooperation with the Arab countries, through an institutionalized structure linked to the highest authorities in each European Community country. This...made it possible to harmonize the European Community policy of trade and cooperation with the Arab League countries.

The Dialogue rapidly spawned a European Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation whose members represented a broad spectrum of European Community political groups. Biannual Euro-Arab Parliamentary meetings convened alternately in Europe and the Arab nations. Roughly 100 European and Arab members of their respective Parliaments attended, along with observers from the European Community/European Union Commission, the Arab League, and other international organizations. During an initial meeting in Damascus, September 14-17, 1974, the Arab delegates established their political preconditions for economic agreements with Western Europe, specifically demanding:

1. Israel's unconditional withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines
2. Arab sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem
3. Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) participation (lead by Yasser Arafat), in any negotiations
4. European Community pressure on the United States to detach it from Israel and bring its policies closer to those of the Arab states

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Pertinent Links:

1) Eurabia: 'Conspiracy' or Policy?

2) Andrew G. Bostom, M.D.

4) AmericanThinker.com

MUST READ: RADICAL ISLAM'S GOAL IS GLOBAL CONQUEST

Radical Islam’s Goal is Global Conquest
By Andrew G. Bostom

The largely failed (and/or thwarted) acts of jihad terrorism at the end of this past week in London and Glasgow show once again that the aim of the current Islamic crusade against the West is global in scope, is not about Iraq and is not a fringe development in Islam itself.
What Samuel Huntington aptly termed “Islam’s bloody borders” around the globe—flow from the timeless logic of jihad. Franz Rosenthal, the late (d. 2002) Yale University scholar of Islam, who, 50 years ago, translated Ibn Khaldun's classic Introduction To History, also wrote a seminal essay entitled “On Suicide in Islam” in 1946. Rosenthal’s research confirmed how Islam extolled “suicidal” martyrdom attacks:

While the Qur’anic attitude toward suicide remains uncertain, the great authorities of the hadith leave no doubt as to the official attitude of Islam. In their opinion suicide is an unlawful act....On the other hand, death as the result of “suicidal” missions and of the desire of martyrdom occurs not infrequently, since death is considered highly commendable according to Muslim religious concepts. (Emphasis added.) However, such cases are no[t] suicides in the proper sense of the term.

These orthodox Islamic views have been reiterated by Yusuf Al Qaradawi—“spiritual” leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, head of the European Fatwa Council, and immensely popular Al-Jazeera television personality, as well as Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam. Sheikh Qaradawi openly endorsed murderous Palestinian homicide bomber “martyrdom” operations against innocent Israeli citizens (all of whom are considered “combatants” who obstruct the “call to Islam”) during a fatwa council convened in the heart of Europe (in Stockholm, July, 2003). For the past decade, Sheikh Tantawi, who is the nearest equivalent to a Muslim Pope, has also confirmed the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews, characterizing these grisly attacks as

…the highest form of Jihad operations…the young people executing them have sold
Allah the most precious thing of all…every martyrdom operation against any Israeli, including children, women, and teenagers, is a legitimate act according to [Islamic] religious law, and an Islamic commandment, until the people of Palestine regain their land

On July 25, 2005, historian David Littman attempted to deliver a prepared text in the joint names of three international NGOs, but was prevented from doing so by the intervention of Islamic members of the United Nations Sub-Commission on Human Rights. Following repeated interruptions he was unable to complete his speech. Littman was simply trying to support the argument that those who issue fatwas to kill innocent people in the name of Islam are not real Muslims and should be treated as apostates. But as he noted, just before the 7/7/05 London bombings a major conference of 170 Muslim scholars from 40 countries meeting in Amman, Jordan gave an opinion in a Final Communiqué, dated July 6, 2005:

It is not possible to declare as apostates any group of Muslims who believes in Allah the Mighty and Sublime and His Messenger (may Peace and Blessings be upon him) and the pillars of faith, and respects the pillars of Islam and does not deny any necessary article of religion.

This unfortunate communiqué clearly provides immutable protection to authentic Islamic advocates of homicide bombing—like the “esteemed” clerics Yusuf Qaradawi and Al-Azhar Grand Imam Tantawi.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Radical Islam’s Goal is Global Conquest

2) FrontPageMag.com

3) Andrew G. Bostom, M.D.

MUST READ: MAINSTREAM CALIPHATE CONFESSIONS

Mainstream Caliphate Confessions
By Andrew G. Bostom

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Salient examples from within the past 25 years confirm the persistent absence of freedom of conscience in contemporary Islamic societies, in tragic conformity with a prevailing, unchanged mindset of the earliest Caliphates: the 1985 state-sponsored execution of Sudanese religious reformer Mahmoud Muhammad Taha for his alleged “apostasy”; the infamous 1989 “Salman Rushdie Affair”, which resulted in the issuance of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini condemning Rushdie to death; the July 1994 vigilante murder of secular Egyptian writer Farag Foda—supported by the prominent Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, an official of Al Azhar University, who testified on behalf of the murderer, “A secularist represents a danger to society and the nation that must be eliminated. It is the duty of the government to kill him.”; and the recent (March, 2006) tragic experience of Abdul Rahman, an unassuming Afghan Muslim convert to Christianity, forced to flee his native country to escape the murderous wrath of Muslim clerics and the masses they incited in “liberated”, post-Taliban Afghanistan. An even more alarming and utterly intolerable phenomenon was on display just this week in the United States when a Johnstown (western Pennsylvania) area imam Fouad El Bayly openly sanctioned the punishment by death of former Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali—born and raised a Muslim in Somalia—for her open avowal of secularism.

Ibn Warraq has observed aptly that the most fundamental conception of a Caliphate, “…the constant injunction to obey the Caliph—who is God’s Shadow on Earth”, is completely incompatible with the creation of a “rights-based individualist philosophy.” Warraq illustrates the supreme hostility to individual rights in the Islamic Caliphate, and Islam itself, through the writings of the iconic Muslim philosopher, jurist, and historian, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), and a contemporary Muslim thinker, A.K. Brohi, former Pakistani Minister of Law and Religious Affairs:

[Ibn Khaldun] All religious laws and practices and everything that the masses
are expected to do requires group feeling. Only with the help of group feeling
can a claim be successfully pressed,…Group feeling is necessary to the Muslim
community. Its existence enables (the community) to fulfill what God expects of
it.

[A.K. Brohi] Human duties and rights have been vigorously
defined and their orderly enforcement is the duty of the whole of organized
communities and the task is specifically entrusted to the law enforcement organs
of the state. The individual if necessary has to be sacrificed in order that
that the life of the organism be saved. Collectivity has a special sanctity
attached to it in Islam.

In contrast, Warraq notes, “Liberal democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom and attaches all possible value to each man or woman.” And he concludes,

Individualism is not a recognizable feature of Islam; instead the collective
will of the Muslim people is constantly emphasized. There is certainly no notion
of individual rights, which developed in the West, especially during the
eighteenth century.

Almost six decades ago (in 1950), G.H. Bousquet, a pre-eminent modern scholar of Islamic Law, put forth this unapologetic, pellucid formulation of the twofold totalitarian impulse in Islam:

Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to
impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed
Muhammadan law, by the principles of the fiqh, to regulate down to the smallest
details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual
believer....the study of Muhammadan law (dry and forbidding though it may appear
to those who confine themselves to the indispensable study of the fiqh) is of
great importance to the world today.

The openly expressed desire for the restoration of a Caliphate from two-thirds of an important Muslim sample of Arab and non-Arab Islamic nations, representative of Muslims worldwide, should serve as a chilling wake-up call to those still in denial about the existential threat posed by the living, uniquely Islamic institution of jihad.


Pertinent Links:

1) Mainstream Caliphate Confessions

MUST READ: AN APOLOGY FOR KORAN'S ANTI-SEMITISM?

An Apology for Koran's Anti-Semitism?
By Andrew G. Bostom

Two months after the mass murdering acts of jihad terrorism on 9/11/01, Dr. Walid Faitihi, director of “outreach” for the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), who still serves on the ISB Board of Directors, boasted that this carnage engendered two related “successes”—enhanced Muslim proselytization efforts, and damage to Christian-Jewish relations in the U.S.
Fitaihi crowed, “…the Muslim community in the U.S. in general, and in Boston in particular, has begun to trouble the Zionist lobby.” He continued triumphantly, quoting the Koran (3:112/ 2:61).

The words of the Koran on this matter are true: “They [the Jews] will be
humiliated wherever they are found, unless they are protected under a covenant
with Allah, or a covenant with another people. They [the Jews] have incurred
Allah's wrath and they have been afflicted with misery. That is because they
continuously rejected the Signs of Allah and were after slaying the Prophets
without just cause, and this resulted from their disobedience and their habit of
transgression.” The great Allah spoke words of truth. Their covenant with
America is the strongest possible in the U.S., but it is weaker than they think,
and one day their covenant with the [American] people will be cut off.

During a private meeting with some 25 lay and religious leaders convened at the Workmen’s Circle in Brookline, Massachusetts on April 6, 2007—nearly 5 ½ years later—Fitaihi was reported to have offered a belated apology for his November 11, 2001 remarks. The dubious sincerity of this putative act of contrition aside—it occurred as the ISB is embroiled in a bitter and debilitating legal dispute with members of the local Jewish community—did Fitaihi actually apologize for invoking Koran 3:112/2:61, and their virulently antisemitic contents?

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Pertinent Links:

1) An Apology for Koran's Anti-Semitism?

2) Andrew G. Bostom, MD

3) FrontPageMag (a temporary address, technical difficulties occurring at the original)