A_Jacks
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Is This a Religious War in America?
Diane Alden
Sept. 17, 2001
September 11, 2001, is the day America lost its innocence – again. The country that has taken in hundreds of millions of people over the last couple hundred years was violated and betrayed by its guests. On one ordinary September day the United States learned the hard way that not every culture is the same, nor does every religion harbor kind feelings and thoughts toward the rest of mankind, nor is every immigrant seeking a better life.
In our great diverse and multicultural nation we lost something that morning. It will most likely continue to be a loss that costs us dearly for a generation or more to come.
We also failed that fateful morning. We failed to maintain a prudent self-interest accompanied by a wise discernment. In fits of political correctness we blithely promoted unwise ideas about culture, religion and diversity. We gave up on the recognition that some ideas ARE better than others. To our eternal regret we forgot that some cultures and their attendant ideologies are based in evil and cruelty. Some religions do in this modern day and age espouse a blind and intolerant religious superiority that would figure in religions of the 1200s and not those of the 21st century.
It is beyond understanding that adherents of certain Islamist fundamental organizations offer no apologies, nor do they even feign passing feelings of guilt when their followers commit acts of religious warfare against innocents. Christianity is guilty of crimes as well, but by and large it has cleaned up its act the last couple hundred years. I can't think of many Italian Catholics looking to sock it to the Muslims in the largely Catholic country of Italy. You don't see suicide bombers in Egypt who are Southern Baptists. Yet in some sects of Islam it is the same old human story of man's inhumanity to man.
The men who commandeered four aircraft on September 11 did so in the name of a religious idea that has no basis but the evil one himself. Some say that America is evil and cruel as well, but these same people never have a problem taking advantage of the opportunities and freedoms that are offered nowhere else. Rather, they come here by the millions, leaving countries that do not have the economy or freedoms they find here in America, and that includes religious freedom. Whatever its faults, America, by and large, has welcomed these hordes with open arms and offered them a safe haven.
The Blame Game
If we are going to point fingers, America's federal police bureaucracy and spy agencies proved themselves to be asleep at the switch and have been for years. Federal police agencies are usually at war with each other. At Ruby Ridge and Waco they were at war with American citizens. Even now they seem more intent on infiltrating good old boy militia cells than doing the far harder work of infiltrating Al Qaida cells. These Islamist extremist cells number in the dozens in the United States. It is ironic that one of the American states that harbors more than a few is George Bush's home state of Texas. The rest of our imported evil doers and their groups are scattered but seem concentrated in Texas, Florida and, as it turns out, New Jersey.
Instead of talking about bombing Afghanistan or punishing Saddam Hussein, our government might first turn toward the Al Qaida groups in the U.S. Those groups and the villainous people in them no longer deserve our trust OR our hospitality. Osama bin Laden may be the weird guru for these monsters and he may be the moneybags, but without the cooperation of others in the U.S. these creatures could not have killed 5,000 people last Tuesday.
The question we should be asking is who in this country is responsible, who has aided and harbored these terrorists. Who has ignored them or been silent when they knew what these men might be involved in. Perhaps America should take the beam out of its own eye before we bomb Afghanistan or fight a major land war with the followers of Islam.
Middle Eastern expert Daniel Pipes explains a crucial point: "First it is necessary to understand that bin Laden's men are not just Muslims, they are Islamists. Islam (a religion) is not the problem, but Islamism (a totalitarian ideology) is. Islamism is not so much a distortion of Islam, but a radically new interpretation. It politicizes the religion, turning it into a blueprint for establishing a coerced utopia.
Most Muslims in the U.S. are peaceful and they deserve to live in peace and to not be molested by angry mobs of people. That is not the American or the Christian way. However, it is a fact that the 6 to 8 million Muslims are also having an impact on how we live in America. The growing influence of Muslims in the United States is reflected in a school district in New Jersey that has decided to recognize Islam's two major holidays, the Bergen (N. J.) Record reports. Leaders in the community, which neighbors New York City, say it's the first decision of its kind in the U.S. Paterson district schools will close next year on January 7 for Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha on March 17, a commemoration of the prophet Abraham's obedience to God in his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac.
One out of every five persons on the face of the earth is a Muslim. There are more Muslims than Methodists in the United States. Those are facts and not necessarily problems. But the conflict between Muslims, Arabs, Christians and Jews IS a problem. When religion mixes with terrorism, it is the world's problem. At the moment it is a particularly devastating problem for the United States.
Steve Emerson is an expert on Islamic terrorism. He and Brian Duffy wrote a book on the Lockerbie disaster and made a widely hailed PBS documentary titled "Jihad in America." Emerson has testified before Congress on Islamists in the U.S. and their convoluted network of cells and funding. He says: "If the battle against bin Laden is to be won, then it will require systematic effort to isolate and undermine the ideological underpinnings of militant Islamic ideology. The vast majority of Muslims worldwide do not support violence. They deserve leaders who will unequivocally condemn the extremist wing of militant Islamic ideology."
Emerson also advocates a sustained and comprehensive counterterrorist program – one that aims at drying up terrorist financing, taking away terrorist safe havens and denying terrorists religious legitimacy.
A recent study carried out by the State Department shows that there are at least 200 known terrorists, or agents of terrorist regimes and organizations, who have received student visas in the past decade to pursue undergraduate or graduate training.
Despite advanced computer systems employed by U.S. security, Islamists encounter no difficulty in entering the United States. Some terrorists enter using false identification, while others simply sneak in because they are not on any watch list.
Utesh Dhar of the Kashmir News Service reported:
The Clinton administration was guilty of legitimizing self-declared 'civil rights' and 'mainstream' Islamic organizations that in fact operate as propaganda and political arms of Islamic fundamentalist movements. Leaders of such groups have often been given audience with top officials. Twice Hillary Clinton hosted receptions for American Muslims at the end of the Ramadan. It was organized by Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). This council has consistently promoted the activities of HAMAS, Turkey's fundamentalist welfare party, the Muslim brotherhood, etc. Its officials have also repeatedly defended Hezbollah, while publicly insisting that they condemn terrorism. Thus known militants and supporters of Islamic extremism get invited to the White House through the courtesy of such American Muslim organizations as Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC).
About these organizations Steve Emerson writes, "MPAC and the ICSC hide behind a facade that disguises their extremist views, which they try to keep from becoming fused with the image they want to maintain as mainstream responsible leaders and moderate American Islamic groups." One of these groups is Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
I was perplexed to see CAIR's leader on Fox News over the weekend. He acted as if the organization was a "moderate" mainstream Islamic organization speaking for most Muslims in the United States. That is the problem. It is very likely that few people know or understand which of these groups are "moderate" and which are covers for something more sinister. Journalist Emerson was eviscerated in a polemic by CAIR that ripped him Apart, which may be seen on CAIR's website.
Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe related the campaign mounted by CAIR against Emerson, a campaign that ended Emerson's association with National Public Radio. Jacoby relates that Emerson became the "target of a brutal campaign of vilification and defamation." Emerson is an obvious target because he calls CAIR an offshoot of Hamas. (Hillary Clinton even met with CAIR officials in 1996.) In light of this, my question is what was CAIR's representative doing on Fox News as a representative for "moderate" Muslims?
Last year Evan Gahr of the Hudson Institute and Newsmax's Lawrence Auster connected the dots between the Clintons' involvement with questionable Islamist groups. Gahr stated in his report, "Early in the Clinton administration the American Muslim Council was welcomed into the White House with little or no criticism, let alone press attention. Mrs. Clinton even hosted receptions attended by the AMC and some like-minded groups."
Gahr continued, "The State Department even sent the pro-Hamas Alamoudi on overseas missions to promote religious tolerance. The current controversy, at least initially, has hardly brought increased scrutiny. Indeed, when Hillary's jilted donor paid homage to Hamas and Hezbollah at an October 28 rally in Washington, D.C., his comments went virtually unreported."
Furthermore, Gahr claims that "Arab-Americans and Islamic-Americans in the Hamas orbit invariably charge religious bigotry to impugn most anyone who questions their political endeavors."
Meanwhile, in his shocking report of November 6, 2000, NewsMax journalist Lawrence Auster reported that Clinton ally and financial supporter Abdurahman Alamoudi stated in one of his speeches, ""I think if we are outside this country, we can say oh, Allah, destroy America, but once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it. There is no way for Muslims to be violent in America, no way. We have other means to do it. You can be violent anywhere else but in America."
Muslim "moderates" always use the excuse that this is the way Muslims speak, using hyperbole and high-flying rhetoric to establish a point without really meaning it. Auster countered that: "But even as the so-called moderate Muslims deny that they have any connection with extremists, they always seem to defend those same extremists. ... Muslim radicals were shown meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, and a dozen other Middle American cities, spewing hatred of America and praising murder and terrorist acts. ..."
Auster rightly asks, "If the members of a certain group routinely engage in or approve of such bloodthirsty threatening language, how can they realistically be expected to be participants in a Western democratic society based on common allegiance to reason and the rule of law?"
Other Voices
In the Journal for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dr. Ely Karmon wrote that "critics in the Arab world blame anti-American terrorist attacks on America's support for Israel. But all you have to do is look at the strategy of Osama bin Laden and his followers. Osama bin Laden produced the famous 'International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Christians.' Throughout bin Ladin's public statements and declarations – beginning with his 'Declaration of War,' published in August 1996, through his interviews with various Islamic journals, CNN and ABC News, and the two fatwas [religious rulings] published in February 1998 in Afghanistan – runs one fundamental and predominant strategic goal: the expulsion of the American presence, military and civilian, from Saudi Arabia and the whole Gulf region."
Dr. Karmon concludes: "The long-term strategy to counter the threat presented by this kind of terrorism must take these facts into account. It should not, therefore, be influenced by the threat of future acts of terror, but by a clear and firm vision of the final goal to be achieved – the containment, if not the total eradication, of the phenomena."
In the U.S., militant Islamic movements raise tens of millions of dollars a year – much of it through tax-exempt charitable organizations. This is then funneled to overseas radical Islamist groups. U.S. laws prohibit such fundraising, but since the law does not name cover groups, it allows sufficient space to terrorist groups to operate their financial network.
Kashmiri journalist Uteesh Dahr states:
U.S.'s soft-pedaling has serious consequences in the legitimization and proliferation of the culture of violence among the growing number of militant supporters of radical Islamist outfits. By allowing free entry to the militant Islamist leaders, the U.S. government makes mockery of its own counter-terrorist policy. The 'lecture circuit' conducted by the radical groups is contributing to the radicalization of segments of the American Muslim community. Regular visits by foreign-based Islamist leaders have also facilitated the indoctrination and recruitment of new foot soldiers into the international terrorist network. The visits also provide a forum for fundraising, a key component of the terrorist infrastructure.
While Arab and Muslim groups are distancing themselves from the horror of September 11, prudence demands that the Arab and Muslim community be asked to recognize that the United States is a nation founded by Christians. Our country was not founded in a religious vacuum. The first men and women on our shores in the continental U.S. were Catholic missionaries in St. Augustine, Florida. The undeniable fact is that this country was settled by Christians. It was founded on English common law, which is based on the Bible – not the Koran. That fact may be unpleasant or politically incorrect, but it is nonetheless a fact. It is only recently that we have become a secular nation, but we are still basically Christian.
For the most part we try to live in peace with that which we do not understand, and that includes Muslim and Islamic religions, as well as Buddhism, Shintoism, pantheism, paganism, and all the others. We are a country where tolerance is the rule. Although at times we have betrayed that principle, we try to be tolerant. In most countries intolerance is the rule. Spend time in Saudi Arabia or in Mugabe's Zimbabwe or in East Timor to find out how true that is. While we are often considered intolerant, I cannot think of many places which have been as hospitable as the United States to disparate religious, ethnic and racial groups.
However, the cracks in the new relationship between Christian America and the more recent entry of followers of Mohammed must in all honesty be addressed. They must be faced with perhaps a recognition that the two religions must come to grips lest silent resentments and quiet hatreds and blame grow like a gangrenous wound. Arab Americans deserve our respect and consideration.
The murder over the weekend of the Sikh Indian man is unconscionable. But any extremists imported through stupid immigration policies during the last 35 years, of any ethnic or religious background, need to be carefully monitored. We don't need to furnish our enemies with money or support for their hatred of America, Christians or Jews. We certainly don't need a phalanx of Islamist fundamentalists who hate our guts. Prudence requires that we consider this as we decide to bomb a poor country like Afghanistan, which is already suffering extremely under the madmen of the Islamist Taliban.
The differences that must be addressed are many. Dr. Norman L. Geisler, theologian, teacher and the dean of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, recently co-authored a book with Abdul Saleeb entitled "Answering Islam: The Crescent in the Light of the Cross." In that book he states that "Muslims believe Christians have committed the unpardonable sin of attributing 'partners' to Allah – namely, belief in the Trinity. In Saudi Arabia they recently cut somebody's head off for blaspheming the prophet Muhammad, which, by definition, my co-author [Abdul Saleeb] and I do on practically every page of our new book."
Geisler Concludes: "Islam is a serious threat to Christianity. ... [T}he main thing in Islam is not fellowship with God, but service and allegiance to God. There is no fatherly concept of God at all. It's very different from the concept of God found in the Christian Bible. In Christianity, believers are adopted into God's family (Eph. 1:5) and can personally address God as Father (Rom. 8:15). It's a relationship of great intimacy. Not so in Islam."
In recent years, the Catholic Church has been apologizing all over the place for the Crusades against Islam. Yet if you look at the history of the Crusades, there was some justification and concern on the part of the Church and Christendom because its followers were being executed or forced to follow the new Islamic religion. Christianity lost out in large areas to Islam, and that continues today. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and the second fastest in the United States. Persecutions and horrors and intolerance took place on both sides during the Crusades, and the present tension between Islam and Christianity will not go away by averting our eyes.
It is very difficult for the Islamic world to accept the principle of religious liberty as we understand it in the West. In fact, last January John Paul II reminded the ambassadors to the Holy See that "there is a country [(Saudi Arabia, which he did not name] where possession of the Bible is a crime punishable by law." Cardinal Arin maintains that "n some Moslem countries, Catholics are not allowed to have a church, but there is a mosque in Rome. Religious liberty is an inalienable right."
Dubai and several other towns on the Arabian peninsula have recently allowed missionaries and a few churches to be built. But they are few in number, and the lack of tolerance toward Christianity in many Muslim countries is a fact. Persecutions of Christians and Jews continue around the world, but hardly anyone but their respective co-religionists care.
That Was Then – This Is NOW
Shortly before the fateful day in September, President Bush was talking about opening borders with Canada and Mexico. The thinking seemed to follow the same lines that gave us NAFTA – in other words, just let people come and go at will and have no borders. Most establishment conservative or business groups were praising the decision. The great North American union was in the offing.
I suspect it was more about economics and multinational business interests than some great cultural love fest of brotherhood and kumbaya feel-goodism. It was a marriage between kingdoms for treasure and free markets. The result would have been an absolute loss of value to the notion of American sovereignty. When one looks closely at NAFTA it has been great for multinational corporations but Jose Six Pack and his fellow blue-collar worker in the States has had very little good come out of it.
After September 11th, any economic benefit the business and financial community may have gained by opening the borders is kaput. The two Islamist Osama bin Laden groupies who slipped over the border from Nova Scotia into Maine ruined that notion for years to come and perhaps for good. The heart of the New York world of trade and business was ripped out by kamikaze planes killing over 5,000 people. In the end some airlines will fold and people will be in worse economic shape because our leaders were so naive and some of them just plain greedy, and our immigration polices are insane. The West seems to have a problem recognizing that elements of Islam want to see the West destroyed or converted.
Meanwhile, the FBI now says that the young men from the Middle East who committed the act of war had overstayed their visas. In one case the kamikaze pilot was a naturalized citizen. The latter are called "sleepers." The sleepers are located in most Western countries and seem to be concentrated in places like Germany and France.
Intelligence service Stratfor.com says they just fit into the communities around the country, sometimes for years: "The operational resources required to pull off this week's attacks indicate the existence of a much larger threat, a multi-national radical Islamic network with operatives and sympathizers all across the globe. Such a network likely connects a variety of Islamic radical and terrorist groups."
Islamic terrorist groups have been around long before Osama bin Laden became a focal point for extremist actions. One of the groups now following him was responsible for the death of Anwar Sadat in Egypt. Egypt's Mubarak cringes in his office because he fears the powerful and activist Islamists in his country. Many involved in the latest plot against America evolved from Egyptian Islamist groups. Many others were either Saudi citizens or held Saudi passports. Bin Laden is a Saudi, of Yemen heritage, and he acts as a lightning rod for disaffected young men. Many of these men are from oil-rich countries and good families. They are not all displaced Palestinian refugees.
Arab Americans and the Muslim communities in the U.S. plead for restraint toward Muslims in America. I agree we should show restraint – extreme politeness and restraint and tolerance. At the same time we should not be blind to the differences in cultures and religions. Some of those differences may not mean much to Christians, but among Islamists they are everything.
Furthermore, we must also recognize that in many Muslim countries Christians and Jews are not welcome. In fact, one of bin Laden's gripes and a main reason for the massacre in New York and Washington is that he does not like America fouling up the cultural or religious "purity" of the Holy Land and the Middle East.
No one wants this "war" we are going to be fighting. God forbid it should be religious. But the fact is it was begun by Islamists for religious reasons. That is something we cannot forget. If we do forget it, we will never understand the roots of hatred that go back a thousand years. Muslims, Islamists, are every bit as missionary as Christians are. That is one thing we can say about our Jewish brethren: They don't try to convert anyone on a grand scale. Mostly they want to be left alone. Could be that is the tack ALL religions and countries and ethnic groups should take for all times. Perhaps live and let live is the order of the day.
Please visit my website at www.aldenchronicles.com or write to me care of wulfric8@bellsouth.net.
***
Diane Alden is a research analyst with a background in political science and economics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Times as well as NewsMax.com, Enterstageright, American Partisan and many other online publications. She also does radio commentaries for Steve Myers' show on Liberty Works Monday and Friday mornings, and can be heard regularly on Mike Fleming, WREC in Memphis.
Diane Alden
Sept. 17, 2001
September 11, 2001, is the day America lost its innocence – again. The country that has taken in hundreds of millions of people over the last couple hundred years was violated and betrayed by its guests. On one ordinary September day the United States learned the hard way that not every culture is the same, nor does every religion harbor kind feelings and thoughts toward the rest of mankind, nor is every immigrant seeking a better life.
In our great diverse and multicultural nation we lost something that morning. It will most likely continue to be a loss that costs us dearly for a generation or more to come.
We also failed that fateful morning. We failed to maintain a prudent self-interest accompanied by a wise discernment. In fits of political correctness we blithely promoted unwise ideas about culture, religion and diversity. We gave up on the recognition that some ideas ARE better than others. To our eternal regret we forgot that some cultures and their attendant ideologies are based in evil and cruelty. Some religions do in this modern day and age espouse a blind and intolerant religious superiority that would figure in religions of the 1200s and not those of the 21st century.
It is beyond understanding that adherents of certain Islamist fundamental organizations offer no apologies, nor do they even feign passing feelings of guilt when their followers commit acts of religious warfare against innocents. Christianity is guilty of crimes as well, but by and large it has cleaned up its act the last couple hundred years. I can't think of many Italian Catholics looking to sock it to the Muslims in the largely Catholic country of Italy. You don't see suicide bombers in Egypt who are Southern Baptists. Yet in some sects of Islam it is the same old human story of man's inhumanity to man.
The men who commandeered four aircraft on September 11 did so in the name of a religious idea that has no basis but the evil one himself. Some say that America is evil and cruel as well, but these same people never have a problem taking advantage of the opportunities and freedoms that are offered nowhere else. Rather, they come here by the millions, leaving countries that do not have the economy or freedoms they find here in America, and that includes religious freedom. Whatever its faults, America, by and large, has welcomed these hordes with open arms and offered them a safe haven.
The Blame Game
If we are going to point fingers, America's federal police bureaucracy and spy agencies proved themselves to be asleep at the switch and have been for years. Federal police agencies are usually at war with each other. At Ruby Ridge and Waco they were at war with American citizens. Even now they seem more intent on infiltrating good old boy militia cells than doing the far harder work of infiltrating Al Qaida cells. These Islamist extremist cells number in the dozens in the United States. It is ironic that one of the American states that harbors more than a few is George Bush's home state of Texas. The rest of our imported evil doers and their groups are scattered but seem concentrated in Texas, Florida and, as it turns out, New Jersey.
Instead of talking about bombing Afghanistan or punishing Saddam Hussein, our government might first turn toward the Al Qaida groups in the U.S. Those groups and the villainous people in them no longer deserve our trust OR our hospitality. Osama bin Laden may be the weird guru for these monsters and he may be the moneybags, but without the cooperation of others in the U.S. these creatures could not have killed 5,000 people last Tuesday.
The question we should be asking is who in this country is responsible, who has aided and harbored these terrorists. Who has ignored them or been silent when they knew what these men might be involved in. Perhaps America should take the beam out of its own eye before we bomb Afghanistan or fight a major land war with the followers of Islam.
Middle Eastern expert Daniel Pipes explains a crucial point: "First it is necessary to understand that bin Laden's men are not just Muslims, they are Islamists. Islam (a religion) is not the problem, but Islamism (a totalitarian ideology) is. Islamism is not so much a distortion of Islam, but a radically new interpretation. It politicizes the religion, turning it into a blueprint for establishing a coerced utopia.
Most Muslims in the U.S. are peaceful and they deserve to live in peace and to not be molested by angry mobs of people. That is not the American or the Christian way. However, it is a fact that the 6 to 8 million Muslims are also having an impact on how we live in America. The growing influence of Muslims in the United States is reflected in a school district in New Jersey that has decided to recognize Islam's two major holidays, the Bergen (N. J.) Record reports. Leaders in the community, which neighbors New York City, say it's the first decision of its kind in the U.S. Paterson district schools will close next year on January 7 for Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha on March 17, a commemoration of the prophet Abraham's obedience to God in his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac.
One out of every five persons on the face of the earth is a Muslim. There are more Muslims than Methodists in the United States. Those are facts and not necessarily problems. But the conflict between Muslims, Arabs, Christians and Jews IS a problem. When religion mixes with terrorism, it is the world's problem. At the moment it is a particularly devastating problem for the United States.
Steve Emerson is an expert on Islamic terrorism. He and Brian Duffy wrote a book on the Lockerbie disaster and made a widely hailed PBS documentary titled "Jihad in America." Emerson has testified before Congress on Islamists in the U.S. and their convoluted network of cells and funding. He says: "If the battle against bin Laden is to be won, then it will require systematic effort to isolate and undermine the ideological underpinnings of militant Islamic ideology. The vast majority of Muslims worldwide do not support violence. They deserve leaders who will unequivocally condemn the extremist wing of militant Islamic ideology."
Emerson also advocates a sustained and comprehensive counterterrorist program – one that aims at drying up terrorist financing, taking away terrorist safe havens and denying terrorists religious legitimacy.
A recent study carried out by the State Department shows that there are at least 200 known terrorists, or agents of terrorist regimes and organizations, who have received student visas in the past decade to pursue undergraduate or graduate training.
Despite advanced computer systems employed by U.S. security, Islamists encounter no difficulty in entering the United States. Some terrorists enter using false identification, while others simply sneak in because they are not on any watch list.
Utesh Dhar of the Kashmir News Service reported:
The Clinton administration was guilty of legitimizing self-declared 'civil rights' and 'mainstream' Islamic organizations that in fact operate as propaganda and political arms of Islamic fundamentalist movements. Leaders of such groups have often been given audience with top officials. Twice Hillary Clinton hosted receptions for American Muslims at the end of the Ramadan. It was organized by Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). This council has consistently promoted the activities of HAMAS, Turkey's fundamentalist welfare party, the Muslim brotherhood, etc. Its officials have also repeatedly defended Hezbollah, while publicly insisting that they condemn terrorism. Thus known militants and supporters of Islamic extremism get invited to the White House through the courtesy of such American Muslim organizations as Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC).
About these organizations Steve Emerson writes, "MPAC and the ICSC hide behind a facade that disguises their extremist views, which they try to keep from becoming fused with the image they want to maintain as mainstream responsible leaders and moderate American Islamic groups." One of these groups is Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
I was perplexed to see CAIR's leader on Fox News over the weekend. He acted as if the organization was a "moderate" mainstream Islamic organization speaking for most Muslims in the United States. That is the problem. It is very likely that few people know or understand which of these groups are "moderate" and which are covers for something more sinister. Journalist Emerson was eviscerated in a polemic by CAIR that ripped him Apart, which may be seen on CAIR's website.
Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe related the campaign mounted by CAIR against Emerson, a campaign that ended Emerson's association with National Public Radio. Jacoby relates that Emerson became the "target of a brutal campaign of vilification and defamation." Emerson is an obvious target because he calls CAIR an offshoot of Hamas. (Hillary Clinton even met with CAIR officials in 1996.) In light of this, my question is what was CAIR's representative doing on Fox News as a representative for "moderate" Muslims?
Last year Evan Gahr of the Hudson Institute and Newsmax's Lawrence Auster connected the dots between the Clintons' involvement with questionable Islamist groups. Gahr stated in his report, "Early in the Clinton administration the American Muslim Council was welcomed into the White House with little or no criticism, let alone press attention. Mrs. Clinton even hosted receptions attended by the AMC and some like-minded groups."
Gahr continued, "The State Department even sent the pro-Hamas Alamoudi on overseas missions to promote religious tolerance. The current controversy, at least initially, has hardly brought increased scrutiny. Indeed, when Hillary's jilted donor paid homage to Hamas and Hezbollah at an October 28 rally in Washington, D.C., his comments went virtually unreported."
Furthermore, Gahr claims that "Arab-Americans and Islamic-Americans in the Hamas orbit invariably charge religious bigotry to impugn most anyone who questions their political endeavors."
Meanwhile, in his shocking report of November 6, 2000, NewsMax journalist Lawrence Auster reported that Clinton ally and financial supporter Abdurahman Alamoudi stated in one of his speeches, ""I think if we are outside this country, we can say oh, Allah, destroy America, but once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it. There is no way for Muslims to be violent in America, no way. We have other means to do it. You can be violent anywhere else but in America."
Muslim "moderates" always use the excuse that this is the way Muslims speak, using hyperbole and high-flying rhetoric to establish a point without really meaning it. Auster countered that: "But even as the so-called moderate Muslims deny that they have any connection with extremists, they always seem to defend those same extremists. ... Muslim radicals were shown meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, and a dozen other Middle American cities, spewing hatred of America and praising murder and terrorist acts. ..."
Auster rightly asks, "If the members of a certain group routinely engage in or approve of such bloodthirsty threatening language, how can they realistically be expected to be participants in a Western democratic society based on common allegiance to reason and the rule of law?"
Other Voices
In the Journal for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dr. Ely Karmon wrote that "critics in the Arab world blame anti-American terrorist attacks on America's support for Israel. But all you have to do is look at the strategy of Osama bin Laden and his followers. Osama bin Laden produced the famous 'International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Christians.' Throughout bin Ladin's public statements and declarations – beginning with his 'Declaration of War,' published in August 1996, through his interviews with various Islamic journals, CNN and ABC News, and the two fatwas [religious rulings] published in February 1998 in Afghanistan – runs one fundamental and predominant strategic goal: the expulsion of the American presence, military and civilian, from Saudi Arabia and the whole Gulf region."
Dr. Karmon concludes: "The long-term strategy to counter the threat presented by this kind of terrorism must take these facts into account. It should not, therefore, be influenced by the threat of future acts of terror, but by a clear and firm vision of the final goal to be achieved – the containment, if not the total eradication, of the phenomena."
In the U.S., militant Islamic movements raise tens of millions of dollars a year – much of it through tax-exempt charitable organizations. This is then funneled to overseas radical Islamist groups. U.S. laws prohibit such fundraising, but since the law does not name cover groups, it allows sufficient space to terrorist groups to operate their financial network.
Kashmiri journalist Uteesh Dahr states:
U.S.'s soft-pedaling has serious consequences in the legitimization and proliferation of the culture of violence among the growing number of militant supporters of radical Islamist outfits. By allowing free entry to the militant Islamist leaders, the U.S. government makes mockery of its own counter-terrorist policy. The 'lecture circuit' conducted by the radical groups is contributing to the radicalization of segments of the American Muslim community. Regular visits by foreign-based Islamist leaders have also facilitated the indoctrination and recruitment of new foot soldiers into the international terrorist network. The visits also provide a forum for fundraising, a key component of the terrorist infrastructure.
While Arab and Muslim groups are distancing themselves from the horror of September 11, prudence demands that the Arab and Muslim community be asked to recognize that the United States is a nation founded by Christians. Our country was not founded in a religious vacuum. The first men and women on our shores in the continental U.S. were Catholic missionaries in St. Augustine, Florida. The undeniable fact is that this country was settled by Christians. It was founded on English common law, which is based on the Bible – not the Koran. That fact may be unpleasant or politically incorrect, but it is nonetheless a fact. It is only recently that we have become a secular nation, but we are still basically Christian.
For the most part we try to live in peace with that which we do not understand, and that includes Muslim and Islamic religions, as well as Buddhism, Shintoism, pantheism, paganism, and all the others. We are a country where tolerance is the rule. Although at times we have betrayed that principle, we try to be tolerant. In most countries intolerance is the rule. Spend time in Saudi Arabia or in Mugabe's Zimbabwe or in East Timor to find out how true that is. While we are often considered intolerant, I cannot think of many places which have been as hospitable as the United States to disparate religious, ethnic and racial groups.
However, the cracks in the new relationship between Christian America and the more recent entry of followers of Mohammed must in all honesty be addressed. They must be faced with perhaps a recognition that the two religions must come to grips lest silent resentments and quiet hatreds and blame grow like a gangrenous wound. Arab Americans deserve our respect and consideration.
The murder over the weekend of the Sikh Indian man is unconscionable. But any extremists imported through stupid immigration policies during the last 35 years, of any ethnic or religious background, need to be carefully monitored. We don't need to furnish our enemies with money or support for their hatred of America, Christians or Jews. We certainly don't need a phalanx of Islamist fundamentalists who hate our guts. Prudence requires that we consider this as we decide to bomb a poor country like Afghanistan, which is already suffering extremely under the madmen of the Islamist Taliban.
The differences that must be addressed are many. Dr. Norman L. Geisler, theologian, teacher and the dean of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, recently co-authored a book with Abdul Saleeb entitled "Answering Islam: The Crescent in the Light of the Cross." In that book he states that "Muslims believe Christians have committed the unpardonable sin of attributing 'partners' to Allah – namely, belief in the Trinity. In Saudi Arabia they recently cut somebody's head off for blaspheming the prophet Muhammad, which, by definition, my co-author [Abdul Saleeb] and I do on practically every page of our new book."
Geisler Concludes: "Islam is a serious threat to Christianity. ... [T}he main thing in Islam is not fellowship with God, but service and allegiance to God. There is no fatherly concept of God at all. It's very different from the concept of God found in the Christian Bible. In Christianity, believers are adopted into God's family (Eph. 1:5) and can personally address God as Father (Rom. 8:15). It's a relationship of great intimacy. Not so in Islam."
In recent years, the Catholic Church has been apologizing all over the place for the Crusades against Islam. Yet if you look at the history of the Crusades, there was some justification and concern on the part of the Church and Christendom because its followers were being executed or forced to follow the new Islamic religion. Christianity lost out in large areas to Islam, and that continues today. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and the second fastest in the United States. Persecutions and horrors and intolerance took place on both sides during the Crusades, and the present tension between Islam and Christianity will not go away by averting our eyes.
It is very difficult for the Islamic world to accept the principle of religious liberty as we understand it in the West. In fact, last January John Paul II reminded the ambassadors to the Holy See that "there is a country [(Saudi Arabia, which he did not name] where possession of the Bible is a crime punishable by law." Cardinal Arin maintains that "n some Moslem countries, Catholics are not allowed to have a church, but there is a mosque in Rome. Religious liberty is an inalienable right."
Dubai and several other towns on the Arabian peninsula have recently allowed missionaries and a few churches to be built. But they are few in number, and the lack of tolerance toward Christianity in many Muslim countries is a fact. Persecutions of Christians and Jews continue around the world, but hardly anyone but their respective co-religionists care.
That Was Then – This Is NOW
Shortly before the fateful day in September, President Bush was talking about opening borders with Canada and Mexico. The thinking seemed to follow the same lines that gave us NAFTA – in other words, just let people come and go at will and have no borders. Most establishment conservative or business groups were praising the decision. The great North American union was in the offing.
I suspect it was more about economics and multinational business interests than some great cultural love fest of brotherhood and kumbaya feel-goodism. It was a marriage between kingdoms for treasure and free markets. The result would have been an absolute loss of value to the notion of American sovereignty. When one looks closely at NAFTA it has been great for multinational corporations but Jose Six Pack and his fellow blue-collar worker in the States has had very little good come out of it.
After September 11th, any economic benefit the business and financial community may have gained by opening the borders is kaput. The two Islamist Osama bin Laden groupies who slipped over the border from Nova Scotia into Maine ruined that notion for years to come and perhaps for good. The heart of the New York world of trade and business was ripped out by kamikaze planes killing over 5,000 people. In the end some airlines will fold and people will be in worse economic shape because our leaders were so naive and some of them just plain greedy, and our immigration polices are insane. The West seems to have a problem recognizing that elements of Islam want to see the West destroyed or converted.
Meanwhile, the FBI now says that the young men from the Middle East who committed the act of war had overstayed their visas. In one case the kamikaze pilot was a naturalized citizen. The latter are called "sleepers." The sleepers are located in most Western countries and seem to be concentrated in places like Germany and France.
Intelligence service Stratfor.com says they just fit into the communities around the country, sometimes for years: "The operational resources required to pull off this week's attacks indicate the existence of a much larger threat, a multi-national radical Islamic network with operatives and sympathizers all across the globe. Such a network likely connects a variety of Islamic radical and terrorist groups."
Islamic terrorist groups have been around long before Osama bin Laden became a focal point for extremist actions. One of the groups now following him was responsible for the death of Anwar Sadat in Egypt. Egypt's Mubarak cringes in his office because he fears the powerful and activist Islamists in his country. Many involved in the latest plot against America evolved from Egyptian Islamist groups. Many others were either Saudi citizens or held Saudi passports. Bin Laden is a Saudi, of Yemen heritage, and he acts as a lightning rod for disaffected young men. Many of these men are from oil-rich countries and good families. They are not all displaced Palestinian refugees.
Arab Americans and the Muslim communities in the U.S. plead for restraint toward Muslims in America. I agree we should show restraint – extreme politeness and restraint and tolerance. At the same time we should not be blind to the differences in cultures and religions. Some of those differences may not mean much to Christians, but among Islamists they are everything.
Furthermore, we must also recognize that in many Muslim countries Christians and Jews are not welcome. In fact, one of bin Laden's gripes and a main reason for the massacre in New York and Washington is that he does not like America fouling up the cultural or religious "purity" of the Holy Land and the Middle East.
No one wants this "war" we are going to be fighting. God forbid it should be religious. But the fact is it was begun by Islamists for religious reasons. That is something we cannot forget. If we do forget it, we will never understand the roots of hatred that go back a thousand years. Muslims, Islamists, are every bit as missionary as Christians are. That is one thing we can say about our Jewish brethren: They don't try to convert anyone on a grand scale. Mostly they want to be left alone. Could be that is the tack ALL religions and countries and ethnic groups should take for all times. Perhaps live and let live is the order of the day.
Please visit my website at www.aldenchronicles.com or write to me care of wulfric8@bellsouth.net.
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Diane Alden is a research analyst with a background in political science and economics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Times as well as NewsMax.com, Enterstageright, American Partisan and many other online publications. She also does radio commentaries for Steve Myers' show on Liberty Works Monday and Friday mornings, and can be heard regularly on Mike Fleming, WREC in Memphis.
