Category: Articles

Iran’s Final Solution: New Book Examines Mullahs’ Genocidal Intentions

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Pajamas Media | May 12, 2014

Iran'sFinalSolutionA review of Andrew Bostom’s Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Islamic Jihad and Shi’ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran.

Dr. Andrew Bostom closes the preface to his new volume, Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Islamic Jihad and Shi’ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran, with several rhetorical questions, answered encyclopedically in the chapters that follow.

At first glance, someone unfamiliar with the nature of the subject might recognize in them a resemblance to Jeopardy!, now in its 30th year. Jeopardy contestants must correctly identify the historical event, leader or trivia — in the form of a question. To a description, for example, of “totalitarian religious law dictating behavior in all aspects of life for persons of said faith,” a well-tutored college student might ask: “What is sharia?” Of a treaty signed in March 628 between a famous charismatic figure and military commander and a competing Arabian tribe, a brainy homemaker might respond: “What is the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah?”

However, few Westerners can actually provide these correct responses, an issue that puts Western society in grave jeopardy.

Only the near-universal ignorance on Islam could explain why the Western press corps and leaders of the so-called “P5 +1” nations — the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Iran — all naïvely lauded the late November 2013 news of an interim agreement to eliminate Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, and blindly accepted the notion that the deal would halt Iran’s future military goals.

Actually, the opposite happened. The P5 leaders, hopeful that a written agreement could put Iran’s nuclear ambitions to rest, were all-too-easily duped by Iran.

This reality marched to the fore on February 11, 2014, when Iranians massed in the streets of Tehran shouting “down with the U.S.” and “death to Israel” to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, during which Ayatollah Rehollah Khomeini reestablished the Iranian Shiite theocracy that the 20th century Pahlavi shahs had forestalled for an all-too-brief 54-year juncture (1925-1979).

As if to punctuate the madness of any attempt to reach agreement, current Iranian president Hassan Rouhani that day stated that the country’s nuclear program would continue “forever,” and that all Western sanctions to stop it had been “brutal, illegal, and wrong.”

Meanwhile, three Iranian military leaders simultaneously celebrated the milestone anniversary with “in your face” bellicosity. Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi, a senior military aide to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised that “Hezbollah forces of Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah” would counter any Israeli attempt to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program that would, just as the nuclear program is intended to do, destroy “the Zionist regime.” Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehquani proclaimed that the first Iranian ballistic missile test fire — including a long-range missile that could evade radar — provided a fitting response to “unfounded [U.S.] allegations.” And Iranian Navy Commander Admiral Habibollah Sayari confirmed that Iran had deployed warships toward U.S. Atlantic territorial waters, a message-laden move to alert “the arrogant powers that are present near our maritime borders” that Iran will “also have a powerful presence close to the American [maritime] borders.”

Half a dozen more comments in the following days emphasized that Iran never intends, even temporarily, to halt or slow its predominantly militaristic nuclear program. Chief Iranian “P5 + 1” negotiator Muhammad Javad Zarif stated — to directly rebut Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman – that Iran would not need the fortified, underground Fordow uranium enrichment center or its Arak plutonium heavy-water reactor, whose “non-negotiable” status warrants no discussion or talks. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi said Iran would not dismantle even one nuclear facility. In a February 17 Iranian TV address, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khameini stated it would be impossible to resolve the “nuclear issue” per “U.S. expectations,” and reminded viewers that Americans are Iran’s immutable enemies. Talks would lead “nowhere.”

Tragically, the gullibility of American leaders today mirrors that of U.S. policymakers in 1979. Bostom brilliantly juxtaposes the events.

In February 1979, he notes, the New York Times published an op-ed by Princeton international law professor Richard Falk entitled “Trusting Khomeini.” This is representative of the “parlous denial — born of willful doctrinal and historical negationism” that continues to shape U.S. policy on Iran today.

The late Islamologist Maxime Rodinson warned four decades ago of a broad academic campaign “to sanctify Islam and the contemporary ideologies of the Muslim world,” a dangerous mindset that subsequently came to infect U.S. and Western policymakers alike, whatever their political affiliation: left, right, or center. “Understanding [of Islam] has given way to apologetics, pure and simple,” Rodinson had warned. As if to prove it, a February 2014 Weekly Standard essay — while correctly dismissing both “wishful thinking built around Cold War analogies” and the notion that President Rouhani or his peers “are moderates” — simultaneously and illogically posited that these not-to-be-trusted immoderates “perverted Shia Islam with the state takeover of religion” in lieu of some “older quietist school” of Shiite Islam, with “many adherents.”

Clearly, however, we should no more trust Khamenei today than we should have trusted Rehollah Khomeini in 1979. Moreover, we should dispose at once of the fanciful notion that any otherwise unidentified form of Shiism represents a more mainstream and tolerant Islamic ethos. If anything, Cold War study should warn us against falling into such facile ideological traps.

As historian Robert Conquest observed in Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, the Soviet Union stood unmistakably committed to unappeasable conflict until the bitter end. Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko in 1975 perhaps best-described this revolutionary resolve: “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union subordinates all its theoretical and practical activity in the sphere of foreign relations to the task of strengthening the positions of socialism, and the interests of further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.” These facts registered with President Ronald Reagan, who in March 1983 observed communism’s “totalitarian darkness” at the National Association of Evangelicals, noting that its leaders “preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth.”

We need today, one concludes from Bostom’s frank discussion of current Iran policy, a leader or leaders with a similar clear-eyed view of the totalitarian concepts and philosophy underpinning both Shiite Islam and Iranian government thinking. Indeed, Bostom notes that Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers in 1947 had compared the “violently avowed” ideas of adherents to 20th century secular totalitarianism, namely communism, a fanatical fervor unseen since the advent of Islam. Chambers and Rodinson were not alone in their view, moreover. It was shared by a wide range of intellectuals, like atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, devout Catholic thinker G.K. Chesterton, French sociologist Jules Monnerot, and doyen of Islam Bernard Lewis, and also Pakistani Muslim thinker Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi, a disciple of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna.

To wit, Bostom devotes his book to answering questions ever more urgent with every passing day.

Readers come to learn that sharia, the Islamic body of law, derives primarily from the 7th century Koranic text attributed to Muhammed; and from his “traditions,” namely Muhammed’s sayings and deeds as recorded by his most trusted companions, noted in voluminous sacred texts known as the Haddith; and in his biography (Sira). Sharia remains critical not only within Iran but also relative to its foreign policy. Islamic law “exists to serve the interests of the Muslim community and Islam,” Ayatollah Khomeini stated on July 31, 1981. That same day, he moreover elaborated, so as “to save Muslim lives and for the sake of Islam’s survival it is obligatory to lie, it is obligatory to drink wine [if necessary].” (emphasis added in Bostom’s text)

The encouragement to lie, of course, becomes particularly relevant in recent Iranian history, given official Iranian references to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah — a 7th century agreement of Muhammed with the pagan Meccan Quraysh tribe so that the former could gain strength and ultimately defeat his enemies. In an interview that aired Dec. 11, 2013, former Iranian regime adviser Mohammad Sadeq al-Hosseini effectively admitted the much-heralded November agreement to be a sham. “This is the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah in Geneva, and it will be followed by a ‘conquest of Mecca’,” he said.

Generally speaking, Islamic jurists never recognize a treaty covering a period of more than 10 years, and often substantially less, for sharia has long since established that Muslims may use treaties merely to establish a temporary truce. In other words, no territory shall see permanent “peace” until Islamic law governs there completely. Permanent peace, from an Islamic perspective, is strictly a Western concept that, outside any Islamic realm, represents a total contradiction in terms.

Of course the book also discusses the Islamic institutions established under sharia, including the perennial institution of jihad that commands Muslims to relentlessly spread Islam, through all available means, until it subsumes all other faiths and beliefs and extinguishes all other cultures and ways of life.

Most useful are sacred texts Bostom provides, Islamic judicial statements and records of specific historical events, both current and long past, showing that enforcement of strict sharia is as critical to Shiite Islam now as it was throughout Islamic history and within all four schools of Sunni Islam.

Shiites regard the monumental 20-volume Koranic commentary of Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai (d. 1981), for example, as the most important 20th century interpretation. Tabatabai “represents that central and intellectually dominating class of Shi’ite ulama … who represent a more universal interpretation of the Shi’ite point of view,” according to philosopher and translator Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Yet this modern era master of sharia, esoteric Islamic sciences, and philosophy frequently excerpts and cites 10th and 11th century jurists, and like a hardened jihadist, espouses permanent war against all non-Muslims. Citing Koran chapter 8, verses 38 through 40, he explains:

It is obligatory to call them [non-Muslims] to the right path before the war. If they … reject it then there is no Master except Allah. … fighting is prescribed so that the religion be only for Allah.

In the same passage Tabatabai subsequently observes of the faith of Christians and Jews (“people of the Book”):

[It] is in reality disbelief as Allah says that they do not believe in Allah. … But Islam is content with their mere profession of monotheism. Fighting with them was ordained not to make them believe in monotheism but simply so that they might pay tribute to Muslims, thus raising the true creed above their creed and making Islam victorious over all religions.

Then there is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini Sistani (b. 1930), another “quietist reformist.” He was hailed in March 2005 by New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman as worthy of nomination for a Nobel peace prize, and was also commended by several conservative analysts. Yet the ostensibly peaceful Shiite cleric Sistani refused to meet with U.S. diplomat and civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer, overseer of reconstruction in post-war Iraq.

Such mainstream Shiite Islamic beliefs, held in the 20th century, reflect Shiite history too. But the questions raised here are in no way trivial. Until American policymakers and the public learn these facts and answer accordingly, with appropriate actions, the world exists in an increasingly dangerous game with deadly stakes of massive proportions. The clock is ticking, with the potential for a nuclear doomsday.


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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Diana West’s Insurgency of Facts

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Pajamas Media | Nov. 29, 2013

diana_west_american_betrayal_cover_big_6-12-13-1

According to historian M. Stanton Evans’ “Law of Inadequate Paranoia,” in effect, things are always worse than you think. This holds true especially of conventional history books on World War II and the Cold War, Evans said last Wednesday, upon introducing Diana West, recipient of the 2013 Center for Security Policy Mightier Pen Award for her remarkably courageous work American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on our Nation’s Character.

One gets a hint of major historical oversights, passed off as fact for decades, the moment one opens West’s American Betrayal. At the dawn of the modern age, in 1920, she notes, Bertrand Russell already warned of a “conspiracy of concealment” well underway, by Western visitors to the new Soviet Union anxious to project a civilized veneer onto what Ronald Reagan six decades later so much more aptly termed the evil empire.

“Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam,” Russell noted, as Ibn Warraq reminded us in Why I am Not a Muslim. Marxists and Islamists shared a sense of predestination and fatalism. Unlike the spiritual and mystical Christian and Buddhist doctrines, Russell noted, “Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world.”

West’s book proffers that these two parallel forces crept into the U.S. government, albeit in different periods, in much the same way. The author challenges readers to suspend their disbelief at the door, and wonder aloud, with her, “why?”

West attempted in American Betrayal to unravel a series of Big Lies, she told the rapt audience. She started in our own age, after 9/11, with the Big Lie that “Islam is a religion of peace” and worked backwards from there, to the 1940s, when Americans were sold several bills of goods on the Soviet empire. “Uncle Joe Stalin is a friend of democracy” and “the USSR has freedom of religion,” for starters.

But the lies began much earlier. West found herself in agreement with Robert Conquest’s identification of the first “Big Lie” as the early 1930s press deception that passed off the Ukraine Terror Famine, an intentional genocide against some six million Ukrainian peasant souls, as something much less deadly, much more benign than it was, something almost natural and of little consequence. Some 80 years ago this month, on the heels of that intended mass murder by starvation, West notes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union.

Bad as that was, worse occurred when, as the great Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky laments, the West failed to prosecute after the Soviet empire fell in 1991. That we did not is why Bukovsky insists that, actually, the West lost the Cold War.

Documents that Bukovsky recovered from the Soviet archives, he contends, largely explained Western inaction by virtue of the deep, extensive ideological collaboration they exposed between Western left-wing parties and the Soviets. Indeed, the same collaboration undoubtedly explained why the Soviets did not also go on trial at Nuremberg since, after all, Stalin fully collaborated in the September 1, 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland.

But there was, West notes, “no reckoning,” neither in 1945 nor in 1989. No one assumed responsibility for the lies, and no one assigned responsibility for them either. Instead, the lies only continued.

Communist regimes, of course including the U.S.S.R., murdered roughly 100 million souls, as documented in The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Courtois and Mark Kramer. But 24 years ago, weeks after the Berlin Wall fell and George H.W. Bush met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Malta, we continued to eschew any talk of bringing communism to justice as we had done Nazism in the late 1940s. The_Black_Book_of_Communism_front_cover

Upon reading her manuscript, Evans warned West that she would be attacked, as indeed she has been. The attacks, he noted, have been far worse than he had imagined. But West counters with what Evans called a “triple threat,” namely her intelligence, principle and fearlessness.

At the tenth reunification of German, Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders tied Western failure to condemn totalitarian communism to our equally inept handling of Islamic totalitarianism. “Communism and Nazism set out to change…our sense of good and evil,” wrote Alain Besançon in 1998. “And in this, they committed acts unknown in prior human experience.” West said Besançon comforted her, by providing a fulcrum for a problem that had previously looked intractable by virtue of its unwieldy size. Likewise, she drew strength from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s observation that Communism fully rejected morality, “good” and “evil,” convinced the world that these absolutes are relative, and left us with only “manipulation of each other.”

Today, that manipulation manifests itself via narratives, West observes. Facts—on Islam or Communism or infiltration of either—carry no greater weight than narrative, even (and especially) false narrative. Whatever narrative proves loudest wins, regardless how demonstrably false its points.

That may explain Obama’s latest coup, a “deal” ostensibly intended to halt Iranian nuclear weapons development that in fact appears likely to promote Iran’s goal of launching a nuclear electromagnetic-pulse attack to flatten the entire U.S. electrical grid, and its whole infrastructure as well. Iran has openly voiced these aims, and hidden behind by a spineless, morally relativist western press corps.

West’s book initiates what our mutual colleague Christine Brim calls “an insurgency of facts,” a small encyclopedic against Communist infiltration in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s that at least begins to explain how we got into the mess we find ourselves today.

The attacks on West give us all the more reason to learn everything between her book’s covers, not least to prevent the same historical tragedies from occurring again.


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

Sharia states, totalitarian to their core

2012 Electoral Guide for the Perplexed

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Pajamas Media | Oct. 26, 2012


Review: Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom, Prometheus, Oct. 16, 2012, 600 pp.

By Alyssa A. Lappen

In little more than two weeks, American voters must decide whether to reelect or boot the current White House occupant. Dr. Andrew Bostom’s monumental new work, Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism, could not have come at a more fateful hour. This brilliant scholarship, while designed as an overarching analysis, also conveniently provides a sort of detailed, 2012 Electoral Guide for the Perplexed. [1]

Among recent perplexities that demand voters’ consideration:

  • For weeks after the murderous 9/11, 11th anniversary attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, — U. S. president Barack Obama, rather than its jihadi perpetrators, blamed a crude and laughable internet parody aimed at the founder of Islam purported for inciting their actions. Incredibly, to a global audience during his Sept. 24 U.N. address, Obama six times reinforced that lie — again blaming the attack on the video.

  • Now Obama plans to authorize Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to announce a temporary nuclear crisis “solution.” Iran will swap a temporary halt in partial uranium enrichment for U.S. sanctions cuts, including some on Iran’s Central Bank, before the March arrival of Nowruz, the pre-Islamic Persian New Year. [2] The U.S. Treasury Dept. long ago designated Iran’s Central Bank for supporting terrorism. The massive inflation caused by sanctions have increasingly harmed Iranian nuclear ambitions. Obama’s blatant ploy to win reelection loosens the noose.

  • Obama banned terms that help define the current Islamic war on the West — “jihad,” “sharia,” “radical Islam,” “Islamic terrorism” and the like — and effectively outlawed study of Islamic doctrine at U.S. official and security agencies. During World War II and the Cold War, the U.S. did not provide Nazi sensitivity training or ban reading books on or by Karl Marx.

  • In June 2009, at the world’s leading Islamic university, Cairo’s Al Azhar, President Barack Obama praised Islam and blamed the West for virtually all the world’s problems.

  • Within two years, Obama repudiated longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak and embraced both Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Libyan rebels shortly afterward discovered to include al Qaeda elements. The resultant Arab spring has benefited only the Muslim Brotherhood totalitarian types.

  • The Obama embrace of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood evidently extends to the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Hamas fund raising arm in the U.S. In March 2010, the Obama Department of Justice dropped indictments against CAIR and its co-founder Omar Ahmad, among others, despite massive evidence of the kind that in Nov. 2008 convicted Holy Land Foundation and its officers on 108 terror financing and fraud charges.


    • Andrew Bostom’s latest book exposes the logic that possibly motivated these and many similar perplexities — in an engrossing and encyclopedic catalog of ideology and history of the naked totalitarianism of Islamic religious and political doctrines. The introduction alone establishes the diametric opposite embodied in Islamic law (sharia) to free Western social structure. It prohibits political freedoms as well as freedoms of conscience, faith and expression (both oral and written). In Islamdom, one expresses personal views at great risk. As applied throughout its history and expressed in internal jurisprudence, the creed Mohammed founded has suppressed and oppressed all with whom it interacted — especially non-Muslims.

    Indeed, jihadism and Islamic canon are intrinsically totalitarian. Neither concerns or governs only “believers.” Islamophilic obfuscation notwithstanding, many sharia attributes make the ostensibly “religious” legal code intractable, even now. By Muslim belief, according to seminal scholar Joseph Schacht (d. 1969), the “clear path to be followed” establishes divine, global Islamic order and is therefore

    not to be penetrated by the intelligence . . . i.e., man has to accept it without criticism…It comprises without restriction, as an infallible doctrine of duties the whole of the religious, political, social, domestic and private life of those who profess Islam, and the activities of the tolerated members of other faiths so far as they may not be detrimental to Islam. [emphasis added]

    In short, sharia statutes also govern the unique Islamic institution of jihad war—and relationships of Muslims to non-Muslims. The code requires Muslims to mount regular jihad attacks on unvanquished non-Muslims and to permanently, deliberately humiliate these “inferior” jihad survivors. Incorporation into Islamic polity subjects non-Muslims to sharia (pp. 110-112) and with it, statutes covering inheritance, requirements and prohibitions and draconian hadd penalties — including death (by stoning) for adultery, apostasy and highway robbery (whose victim was murdered); loss of hands and feet for simple robbery; loss of right hand for simple theft; 100 lashes for “fornication;” and 80 lashes for wine drinking. Tracing to individual Quran passages (including 45:18, 42:13, 42:21, and 5:48) and other Islamic sacred texts, primarily hadith (Mohammed’s reputed sayings and deeds), sharia is ultimately understood by Muslims as “the totality of Allah’s commandments relating to the activities of man,” Schacht notes. It embodies “the most characteristic phenomenon of Islamic thought [and] nucleus of Islam itself.”

    These facts are not an expression of hatred for Muslims. “I have nothing against the people,” said Geert Wilders in a March 2009 interview Bostom later cited — in this respect, undoubtedly speaking for all anti-jihad scholars and writers.

    “I don’t hate Muslims. But Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life — economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book — but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. [In] no country where Islam is dominant [do] you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state. Islam is totally contrary to our values.”

    Bostom shows in myriad ways how Islam cements “religion” to Mohammed’s crushing totalitarian 7th century creed. For openers, while the Arabic word “hurriyya” translates to “freedom” — it refers to “freedom as perfect slavery to Allah,” as prescribed by highly dogmatic sharia laws engineered by the same dictatorial chief (Mohammed said, by divine instructions delivered via the angel Gabriel). It means something diametrically opposite to the same word in English — study of which is now off limits for U.S. military and security officials.

    He draws largely from historical sources. Bostom cites 19th century academic William Gifford Palgrave, for example, who traversed Arabia’s then virtually unknown heart, disguised as a Muslim physician. Palgrave observed and studied Islam in situ, and describes its divine law (sharia) as “a pantheism of force,” with god acting as “a tremendously sympathizing autocrat,” very “jealous of his creatures,” delighted by making them all his complete slaves. 3 And he was hardly alone in deriving a negative assessment of Islam from primary experience and Islamic sources alike. As Bostom previously observed:

    “Repeatedly for 100 years, between the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, important scholars and intellectuals — for example, the historians Jacob Burckhardt, Waldemar Gurian, and Karl Wittfogel, philosopher Bertrand Russell, [modern analytical psychiatry founder] Carl Jung, Protestant theologian Karl Barth, sociologist Jules Monnerot…, [pre-eminent Islamic law scholar] G.H. Bousquet, and even the contemporary Western eminence grise on Islamic civilization, Bernard Lewis — have all referred to Islam as a despotic or totalitarian ideology.”

    Like Bostom’s two previous landmark studies on Islamic jihad and antisemitism (Legacy of Islamic Jihad: Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims and Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History), his third adds significantly to our knowledge base. Often, contemporary scholars contend that Islam grew hateful upon absorbing Nazi antisemitism in the 20th century. Yet, Bostom shows, even in the Nazi era, intellectual luminaries saw the truth as quite the opposite. Like “Islam of old,” Barth warned in 1939, National Socialism’s political experiment promised to those willing to participate; but when resisted, it could “only crush and kill.” Nazism, he wrote, was best understood as “a new Islam, its myth a new Allah and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet.”

    Muslim totalitarianism across the ages

    A host of important Muslims, across time, thought likewise. Totalitarian terror, for example, pervaded “heavenly,” peaceful Andalusia. Spain’s purportedly enlightened Ummayyad conquerors were notoriously brutal, observed historian Evariste Levi-Provencal (1894-1956). They established strict Malikite Sunni doctrine, championed “jealous orthodoxy” and “fiercely opposed innovations;” their totally “immobile doctrine suspected and condemned in advance for the slightest attempt at rational speculation.” (p. 368) In 1914, Miguel Asin Palacois saw Muslim Spain in the same light — as had Cordovan Muslim al-Kinani (d. 901), a student of “scholar of Spain par excellence” Ibn Habib (d. 853). When walking outdoors, al-Kinari noted, Jews were required to wear patches bearing the image of an ape, and Christians, patches picturing a pig. In about 1000, Muslim jurist Ahmed ibn Said ibn Hazm (of Hispanic Christian descent) reported that an infidel who did not pay his annual “head tax” (jizya) risked execution or sale into slavery — and put his entire coreligionist community at risk of losing their “protection.” Muslim rulers could impose the same penalties for “public outrage against the Islamic faith” — e.g. exposing a cross or wine jug. (pp. 368-375)

    In Granada, Jewish viziers appointed to protect their community were assassinated between 1056 and 1066. After the murders of Samuel ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph, a fiery anti-Jewish “ode” by Muslim jurist and poet Abu Ishaq filtered through Muslim Granada. Very possibly, the hateful “ode” incited the Muslim pogrom that then annihilated Granada’s entire Jewish population of up to 5,000 — as many or more than the number of Jewish people reportedly killed during the First Crusade’s pillage of the Rhineland some thirty years later. (pp. 176-177)

    Ottoman Turkey 400 years later similarly fostered totalitarian Islamic dogmas. Molla Khosrew (d. 1480) — celebrated writer, Hanafi jurist and cleric to Sultan Mehmed II — rested his jihad directives on them. Religious obligation (fard al-kifaya) requires jihad and one must “begin the fight against the enemy, even when he [the enemy] may not have taken the initiative to fight,” Khosrew instructs. Early on, he reasons, Mohammed allowed Muslims only self-defense, but later on,

    “he ordered them to take the initiative at certain times of the year, that is, at the end of the haram months, saying ‘Kill the infidels wherever you find them.” (Q: 9:5) He finally ordered fighting without limitation, at all times and in all places, saying “Fight those who do not believe in God and the Last Day.” (Q: 9:29) (p. 178)

    Fast forward 500 more years, to 1948, when English speaking Arab League Office member Aboul Saud described Islam to investigative journalist John Ray Carlson.

    “You might describe Mohammedanism as a religious form of State Socialism… The Quran gives the State the right to nationalize industry, distribute land, or expropriate the right to nationalize industry, distribute land or expropriate property. It grants the ruler of the state unlimited powers, so long as he does not go against the Quran. The Quran is our personal as well as our political constitution.” (p. 256)

    An interview with the late Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna led Carlson to conclude, average Egyptians “worshiped the use of force,” given that “terror was synonymous with power.” This also explained both the sensational rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the near universal popularity of Nazism in Egypt.

    Strict dogma survives and thrives

    The 1918 demise of the Ottoman empire and dissolution of the last Islamic Caliphate hardly assuaged Islamic totalitarianism. Rather, Muslim fervor rose to reestablish a new and stronger translational religious superstate — and with it rose individual and Islamic societal yearning for a totalitarian, sharia-based cultural regimen, including discriminatory governance of non-Muslims.

    A 1979 treatise on jihad warfare by Pakistani Brigadier S.K. Malik reflected the bedrock Islamic ideas as had others centuries before. Published in Lahore, the book was prefaced by former Pakistan advocate general Allah Buksh K. Brohi:

    “Islam views the world as though it were bipolarized in two opposing camps — Darul-Salam (Islam) facing Darul-Harb — the first one is submissive to the Lord in cooperating with God’s purpose … but the second one … is engaged in perpetuating defiance of the same Lord. Such a state of affairs which engages any one in rebellion against God’s will is termed as “Fitna” [which] refers us to misconduct on the part of a man who establishes his own norms and expects obedience from others, thereby usurping God’s authority—who alone is sovereign.” (p. 201)

    Hanafi judicial school founder Abu Hanifa (d. 767) designed the bifurcated Muslim world view, which others widely distributed too, including Muslim historian and Quranic commentator Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (d. 923), in the Book of Jihad. Al-Tabari includes Abu Hanafi (and followers’) extracts “affirming the impunity with which non-combatant ‘harbis’ — women, children, the elderly, the mentally or physically disabled — may be killed.” (p. 62)

    Countless famed Muslim jurists repeated these foundational doctrines through Muslim history, and still do, Bostom shows. In July 2003, “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader, Al-Jazeera TV personality and MB European Council for Fatwa and Research chief Yousef Qaradawi generally approved pillage and (certainly) as related to Israelis:

    “Islamic law [has determined] the blood and property of the people of Dar al-Harb [the Domain of Disbelief where the battle for domination of Islam should be waged] is not protected… in modern war, all of society, with all its classes and ethnic groups, is mobilized to participate in the war, to aid its continuation, and to provide it with material and human fuel required for it to assure the victory of the state fighting its enemies.” (p. 64)

    Alas, Muslim religious and political leaders don’t harbor these views in a vacuum. An alarming swath of the Muslim public also avidly supports them. In April, 2007, the University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org released startling results of interviews with 4,384 Muslims (1,000 Moroccans, 1,000 Egyptians, 1,243 Pakistanis and 1,141 Indonesians), run from Dec. 2006 to Feb. 2007. Nearly two thirds of the subjects (2,872) wanted “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate” (including nearly half of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims); 65.5% also agreed, “every Islamic country” should “require a strict application of Shari’a law.” [emphasis added] A Dec. 2010 Pew poll in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria documented similar strong support for legislating hadd punishments: 82% of Egyptians and Pakistanis wanted adulterers stoned, as did 70% in Jordan and 56% in Nigeria; 82% of Pakistanis, 77% of Egyptians, 65% of Nigerians and 58% of Jordanians supported whipping and amputation for theft. The vast majority of Muslims polled also supported execution of apostates (Jordan, 86%; Egypt, 84%; Pakistan, 76%; Nigeria, 51%).

    Such attitudes also apparently prevail among Western Muslims. A secret Dec. 2010 cable from the U.S. Embassy in London revealed alarming sentiments in a study of 600 British Muslim students: 40% want to replace British law with sharia and 32% support killing for Islam.

    The dangers of “Political Correctness”

    Bostom takes innumerable contemporary assurances of Islam’s beneficence — from Muslims, political figures, Islamophiles or vaunted Western scholars like Bernard Lewis — and cuts them to proper size.

    He garners considerable aid from stellar scholars, far less prone than Lewis to view Islam through rose-colored panes. One can generally confirm academic errors due to their susceptibility to rational argument, wrote German scholar Karl Binswanger in conclusion to a 1977 analysis of Ottoman imposition of Islamic law on non-Muslims. Not so, the “religious,” “dogmatic” Islamophilic domain, given a modern

    “attempt to present the moral aspect of an Islamic fact as ethically valuable (not value-neutral!!) even if historic (and any other) sense does not support such an interpretation.

    … [W]homever — consciously or not— downplays or misrepresents the morally negative aspects of the Dhimma [sharia “protection” designed to oppress non-Muslims] or even distorts it into its (moral) opposite, because he would otherwise have to partially revise his preconceived evaluation of Islamic culture, he is behaving like the Marxist “researcher” who simply demonizes every manifestation of “evil” feudalism, instead of, or without (even therefore) investigating the functional accomplishments of feudalism. The Marxist researcher” acts this way because there is no place for critical examination of his own position in his preconceived conception of the world and science. For him “scientific socialism” is a dogma,”

    into the like of which — an “obstinate ‘scientific Islamophilia’ — Orientalist studies by 1977 seriously risked descending. (p. 52) The litany of gross factual errors since floated by mainstream academics, media and politicians defies description in this already lengthy review.

    But that rose-tinted discourse of Islam has spread its tentacles far beyond academia — into politics and the press — and endangered the entire nation. Americans must turn elsewhere for their data, and quickly. Post haste purchases of this book may help recalibrate the national discussion on Nov. 6 — at the ballot box.

    To which end, we should perhaps return to Moses Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish author of the original three-volume Guide to the Perplexed. A physician by profession and theologian by avocation, the Ramban lived his entire life among Muslims, himself escaped numerous Islamic jihad depredations, and generally termed Mohammed the “Madman.”

    As a medical man, Maimonides taught doctors for all time to examine facts before treating. Interpret, but do not stray from reason. His lesson applies equally to everything, even politics. This book supplies a large dose of reason. It can help undecided voters, and perhaps even some “decided.” Post election, it can help radically shift U.S. policies that stand, perhaps intentionally now, totally blind to the ravages of jihad and sharia. Facts we can no longer ignore: Sharia opposes all basic American ideas — and states under its law are totalitarian to their core.

    __________________________________
    NOTES:

    1 The brilliant Jewish doctor, philosopher and sage, Moses Maimonides produced the original 12th century Guide to the Perplexed — a timeless and apolitical three volume treatise on Jewish law and philosophy relative to religion — during an unrivaled Islamic persecution of Spain’s Jewish people. Muslim-ruled Andalusia was never a calm or comfortable home for Jews, but the Berber Moravid successors to Spain’s Umayyad conquerors, opposed any “liberality and toleration” at all and were far “surpassed in cruelty and fanaticism” by the 1148 Almohades conquerors of Cordova. Yet, as translator M. Friedlander notes in his introducing his second, 1904 English edition, the “brilliant luminary” Maimonides emanated “rays of light and comfort,” and advised philosophically – and by personal example — that historical attempts to eliminate the Jewish faith had invariably failed, as would Islamic efforts contemporary to his time.

    2 Nowruz is the most important Zoroastrian holy day. While a vestige of pre-Islamic culture, this festival remains the most widely celebrated Iranian holiday. After the 1979 revolution, Shiite clerics attempted unsuccessfully to ban the holiday all together.

    3 William Gifford Palgrave, Personal Narrative of a Years Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63.


    All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
    All Rights Reserved.
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    Barack Obama Muslim Brotherhood Obfuscations

    In which a Congressional investigation is warranted.

    By Alyssa A. Lappen
    Family Security Matters | Jun. 27, 2012

    When U.S. President Barack H. Obama Sunday phoned to personally congratulate Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood president-elect, Mohammed Mursi, he confirmed his view that its Cairo-based revolution represents a genuine “transition to democracy.”

    To many, that statement also confirmed the naïve fantasy world Obama instituted in the White House. In contrast, clear-sighted congressmen, statesmen, Egyptian liberals and activists, Islamic history scholars and more than a few journalists realized from day one that the January 2011, Tahrir Square demonstrations would end with MB achievement of their 84-year dream — to reinstate sharia in Egypt — and that after gobbling the presidency they deceitfully claimed not to seek, the MB would launch an open phase in their perennial effort to impose universal Islamic law through a new global caliphate.

    Obama’s Sunday call, in reality, may have confirmed something far worse — his full devotion to revolution, in the classical sense — i.e. full-blown popular overthrow of government. The president long followed guiding socialist “lights,” like the late Saul Alinksy, and his childhood mentor and hardened communist Frank Marshall Davis, whom some now claim was Obama’s “real father.”

    Has Obama now confessed — or come as close as he will ever — that his true sympathies lie both with full-blown revolution, and the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic supremacists, not with U.S. interests at all?

    Perhaps. Given Obama administration efforts to squelch all investigations and prosecutions of Islamic radicals in the U.S., one must wonder.

    In spring and summer 2010, I inquired officially under the Freedom of Information Act regarding governmental agency connections to the North American Muslim Brotherhood. I approached most major government arms, including all U.S. Treasury Department units, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, State Department, and Federal Reserve Board. In every instance, I reviewed specific agency requirements for FOIA requests and submitted queries accordingly.

    Not one inquiry produced results, although plenty was to be had, even excluding items concerning national security. Most agencies claimed they had conducted the stipulated searches and could find no data. A few FOIA officers admitted they would withhold the requested data, and included with their responses instructions on how to appeal. I understood that only an army of attorneys could break the wall of silence.

    The FBI reply, in particular, one could most politely describe as an extreme non sequitur. I had specifically requested “existing documents” on FBI meetings from 1/1/2007 through July 2010 with specific North American MB organizations and individuals, all of whom I named. The U.S. Department of Justice had previously specified most of these groups, moreover, as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, as had the latter’s internal North American Muslim Brotherhood documents.

    I had further specified what I meant by “existing documents.”

    I requested data (for example) on FBI meetings with the Islamic Society of North America and its subsidiaries, whose North American Islamic Trust unit was named as an unindicted co-conspirator of the convicted Holy Land Foundation, along with the Council on American-Islamic Affairs. Chicago’s U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals had in a Dec. 2008 ruling, similarly stated that the American Muslim Society, whose FBI meeting data I also sought, was indistinguishable from the Muslim Brotherhood. Almost none of the groups denied having Muslim Brotherhood origins, MB members among their co-founders, and high regard for both the MB and its father, Hassan al-Banna. There should have been no confusion, as I carefully met FBI guidelines for FOIA requests and specifically asked for only “non-classified” data.

    Nevertheless, the reply from an FBI section chief disconnected entirely from the reality, as my FOIA had requested nothing even remotely resembling what he claimed.

    Given subsequent news, I concluded that the insulting and infuriating FBI non-response was intentionally so, as was the FBI’s failure to respond to my politic follow-up inquiry.

    In March 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice had dropped indictments against the Council of American-Islamic Relations, the American Hamas fundraising front planned at a 1993 Philadelphia meeting of Hamas officials with CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad and current CAIR executive director Nihad Awad, according to an explosive April 2011 Pajamas Media report by my colleague, investigative journalist Patrick Poole. (Shortly thereafter, I learned that the DOJ had rebuffed other FOIA requests on the North American Muslim Brotherhood that had followed mine.)

    Evidence of the 1993 Hamas meeting included a wiretapped Sept. 14, 1993 phone conversation — the day after Israeli Prime Minister Yirzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat met on the White House lawn. Omar Ahmad, then president of the (subsequently) designated terrorist Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), phoned HLF chief Shukri Abu-Baker (now serving 65 years for terror-funding) and Abdelhaleem al-Ashqar (who ran the Hamas-linked al Aqsa Educational Fund) — to plan a meeting some weeks later. In one breath, Al-Ashqar mentioned CAIR chief Awad, MB strategy writer [Mohammed] Akram and “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman, now serving life for conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center attack. The FBI also caught the subsequent meeting via wiretaps, FBI Agent Lara Burns testified at the HLF trial. Other FBI documents affirm that at the 1993 Philadelphia meeting, Ahmad stated all present are “Hamas members or sympathizers” and silently affirmed his allegiance to Hamas founder Ahmed Yasin.

    The Justice Department, in short, had more than enough evidence to indict CAIR, co-founder Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad. Instead, a March 31, 2010 memo, “Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad,” from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler, determined to drop the case, according to two DOJ sources with whom Poole spoke.

    Poole could not secure a copy of the DOJ legal memo. Even Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), vice chair of the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, can’t get one, despite an Apr. 27 request after Poole’s blockbuster report. Later, Congressional sources told Poole that Assistant Attorney General Kris had also dropped charges for money laundering, terrorist associations and tax evasion against another global MB front, the International Institute of Islamic Thought and SAAR Foundation/SAFA Group, whose Herndon, Va. suites federal agents raided in March 2002. Their interlinked officers, including Jamal Barzinji and Iraq-born Ahmad Totonji, who in 1963 co-founded the Muslim Students Association on global MB orders, all have long allied with the terror-funding group, as shown in FBI documents declassified in 2008. SAAR’s only possible purpose, says Senior U.S. Customs special officer David Kane, is to fund terror. Obama’s road blocks outraged the Texas U.S. Attorney and FBI men who expected prosecution to progress, Rep. Peter King reported.

    Rep. Gohmert blasted Attorney Gen. Eric Holder for giving a pass to these MB officers and groups, despite a “mountain of evidence” and warned that “at least one” would-be-suspect-but-for-Obama has crowed of its work at DOJ to “advise on the purge of counter-terrorism training materials.” Meanwhile, his committee has been waiting a year for undisclosed HLF documents locked up by DOJ. Gohmert confronted Holder on Thursday, June 21, as reported here Monday.

    Besides all that, in 2010 Obama’s FBI added Muslim “outreach” partners to include yet more Muslim Brotherhood figures, such as the Muslim Advocates, Muslim Public Affairs Council and All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAM). All of them, as well as other recent FBI Islamic “outreach” additions, are recognized MB groups. Interestingly, the Muslim Advocates in 2009 sued the FBI in federal court for mosque surveillance [a case they lost in Jan. 2012]. The FBI apparently rewarded them by letting MB organizations define the terms American law enforcement and military branches can use to discuss Muslims, even those who seek to defeat the West. Indeed, the very word “jihad” — which the Koran mentions 164 times, generally in terms of warfare or other means of conquest — has been banned.

    Administration excuses don’t cut it.

    For wise Americans, Obama’s absurd Sunday congratulations to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president-elect set off new alarm bells. Mursi swore to install oppressive sharia law and tie Egypt more closely to Iran, whose nuclear-weapon hungry mullahs Obama continues to appease and refuses to confront. Here is the U.S. President congratulating and promising to support Mursi, whose MB mobs in May fire-bombed the election headquarters of his opponent, retired air force general Ahmed Shafiq, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister.

    In stark contrast, the latter had vowed to protect Egyptians from Islamic forces wishing to drag them back to “the dark ages” — and halt the tidal wave of crime since Mubarak’s ouster. Naturally, Shafiq attracted much heavier election support than “analysts” had predicted, especially from Egypt’s justly terrified Coptic Christian minority. So on June 25 (surprise, surprise), MB minions charged Shafiq for graft during his 2002 through 2011 term as aviation minister. On June 26, Shafiq flew to Abu Dhabi. Speculation that Shafiq actually “fled” has virtually ignored the MB retribution he could expect.

    Unlike the MB case against Shafiq, a recent civil lawsuit challenging MB interests is much likelier to dead-end and endanger complainant Mohamed Moussa than to address his charges that Presidential Election Commission monitors favored Mursi, while the PEC also turned a blind eye to MB distribution of oil and sugar to buy Mursi votes before the June 16 and 17th runoff.

    So let’s ask again, and again, why does Obama champion the MB both at home and abroad? And when will Congress investigate?


    All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
    All Rights Reserved.
    Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

    Adopting Pro-Sharia Textbooks

    One of the most important strengths of a nation is its education. When U.S. school textbooks fail to deal honestly with Islam but instead present apologetics and propaganda, children are Islamists’ pawns.

    When states should step in.

    By Alyssa A. Lappen
    Family Security Matters | Jan. 12, 2012

    In August 2011, a Marietta, Ga. 7th grade teacher gave a three-page homework lesson from InspirEd Educators Inc. of Roswell, Ga. to students to help them discuss pros and cons of school uniforms. “Women in the West do not have the protection of the Sharia as we do,” declared a letter from a Saudi wife named Ahlima. “If our marriage has problems, my husband can take another wife rather than divorce me, and I would still be cared for.” She’s glad that Saudi women “have the Sharia.” When parents objected to the assignment’s pro-Islam stance, the school district changed the curriculum.

    In 2010, Act for America compiled research from former assistant education secretary Diane Ravitch, American Textbook Council and Textbook League on how 38 public school texts handled Islam; last month, Christian Action Network launched a national campaign warning of bias.

    While school assignments sugarcoat sharia, the doctrine requires “defense” of community and permits “payback” against perceived enemies like U.S. servicemen and all Israelis, according to influential Muslim Brotherhood jurist Yusuf Qaradawi. Thus a naturalized Kosovo man arrested in Florida Jan. 9 planned an attack to “die in the Islamic way.” The Council on Islamic American Relations (CAIR) has long warned members not to aid the FBI and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) agents seek more “hate crime” studies — but eliminations of solid counter terror strategies.

    Some 22 states and U.S. territories currently maintain central textbook “adoption” standards to either recommend or require specific textbooks for public schools. Textbook adoption originated during Reconstruction to ensure that the Civil War narrative included Confederate views in southern states. In the public free-for-all that ultimately developed, minorities apparently appropriated undue influence. Thus, texts often downplay European history but include material unrelated to the U.S. Some books, for example, tout Mali’s medieval Islamic ruler Mansa Musa and his 1324 trip (with thousands of slaves) to Mecca. But they provide no connection to U.S. history — as none exists.

    In the last two decades, sanitized Islamic history and dogma crept into broad use in U.S. public school books thanks largely to Shabbir Mansuri; to advantage Muslims, he maximized the minority role in textbook adoption (and falsely claimed to be a USC-educated chemical engineer). In 1990, he founded the Fountain Valley, Ca. Council on Islamic Education to promote Islam in textbooks and curricula, which he calls a “bloodless” revolution inside American junior high and high school classes. Mansuri derived the idea in 1988, after seeing a textbook disparage physical aspects of Muslim prayer, he says.

    Independent review agencies affirm that CIE—deceptively renamed in 2006 as Institute on Religion and Civic Values (IRCV)—powerfully influences U.S. textbooks via state standards it helped to write.

    Susan Douglass

    For advancing “change” in school standards and curricula, CIE can largely thank Muslim convert Susan Douglass, who for 10 years wrote CIE lesson plans, advisories, guidelines and pamphlets to soft peddle Islam in public schools. Central is the Teacher’s Guide to Religion in the Public Schools that this author exposed shortly after its 2003 publication, purportedly as an interfaith “First Amendment” plan.

    CIE bedfellows include North American Muslim Brotherhood affiliates. CIE shares MB goals, as its former chief Mohammed Akram outlined in a strategic May 1991 MB “Explanatory Memorandum.” Sound Vision Foundation pushes “dawa” (proselytizing) in public schools from MB offices in Bridgewater, Ill., for example. CIE joined efforts with Arab World and Islamic Resources Group (AWIRG), a.k.a. Dar al Islam or land of Islam—a remote N.M. non-profit founded in 1979 by the late Saudi King Khaled ibn Aziz. AWIRG had CIE help forming its speakers bureau and until a 2005 press inquiry, listed CIE as its “secondary schools” associate. CIE has old ties, too, to the extremist Islamic Networks Group, and collaborated extensively” with Ali al-Mazrui, an ex-trustee of an MB organization founded by incarcerated, Eritrean MB terrorist financier Abdurahman Alamoudi.

    While probably unaware of their carefully staged genesis, parents for years have vocally opposed such Islamic instructions in public schools and texts as:

    • In 2008, a Seminole County, Fl. school let Muslim women co-opt a “family dynamics‘” talk.
    • In Sept. 2010, a Wellesley, Ma. school “field trip” to a Saudi-funded Roxbury mosque taught kids how to pray like Muslims.
    • In early 2010, Minnesota’s ACLU sued St. Paul’s public k-8 Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy for breaching the ban against government religious advocacy.
    • Massachusetts schools adopted a Notebook by Abiquiu, N.M.’s Saudi-funded AWIRG. Pushed by Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies Center, it claims Muslim explorers discovered the New World and Native Americans had Muslim names. (In 2005, the center had received $20 million from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talaal, who later boasted he could control global TV news.)

    In Sept. 2010, the Texas Board of Education endured heavy criticism after issuing a textbook resolution asking publishers to fix the “pro-Islamic/anti-Christian half-truths, selective disinformation, and false stereotypes” that riddled textbooks. The board included four pages of notes to document “pejoratives” targeting Christians and “superlatives,” Muslims—e.g. brutal conquests of Christian lands were called “migrations” of “empire builders.” Books listed Crusaders’ massacres, but not the Muslim Tamerlane’s 1389 Delhi murder of 100,000 prisoners or his 1401 Baghdad massacre of 90,000 Muslims.

    Whether named CIE or IRCV, Islamic forces spent decades stealthily cultivating influence over our nation’s public schools and curricula through “minority” channels afforded by “textbook adoption.” Other “adoption state” authorities should perhaps now add teeth to their own Texas-like counter-efforts.
    ________________________________

    FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist, with a focus on the Middle East and Islam. A former Senior Fellow of the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008), she previously covered the economy, business and finance, as a Senior Editor at Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991); and an Associate Editor at Forbes (1978-1990).


    All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
    All Rights Reserved.
    Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

    Seeing real life sharia in action

    Calling it something else

    Review of: Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws are Choking Freedom Worldwide

    By: Paul Marshall and Nina Shea
    Publisher: Oxford University Press, 480 pp.
    ISBN: 0199812284

    By Alyssa A. Lappen
    Family Security Matters | Nov. 4, 2011

    “Apostasy is, in principle, subject to sharia hudud rules, which means that the punishment—death—is believed to be fixed by divine order and not subject to judicial discretion…,” write Paul Marshall and Nina Shea in chapter two of Silenced (p. 23), without further explanation.

    Silenced falls far short of the landmark study it might have been, had the authors honestly addressed foundational Islamic principles, history and texts that support offending modern codes, and stated the stupefyingly consistent and pervasive use of sharia laws throughout Muslim history. Specifically, hudud refer to Islamic behavioral limits thought divine since Mohammed established the creed.

    Sharia’s heavenly status and its stubborn exercise rest squarely on Koran (considered sacred and immutable) and sunnah, or “traditions.” The latter includes hadith and sira, Mohammed’s recorded speech and deeds; and his life (usually, the Ibn Ishaq biography).

    Apostasy—rejecting Islam—is but one offense to divinity. Adultery similarly requires capital punishment, and theft demands amputation.

    To assert that hudud are rarely enforced, or fearing them is “lunacy,” as do Sadiq Reza and other Islamic law professors, is sheer absurdity. But readers of Silenced will not learn here that the horrors the book describes represent unadulterated use of classical hudud and sharia laws, as always practiced.

    Three Muslim essayists

    In order “to show that such temporal punishments are not required by Islam,” the authors deliberately avoid discussing the history of apostasy and blasphemy laws and “systematic treatment in Islamic jurisprudence and theology” (p. 287). They leave that topic to “three noted Muslim scholars” whose essays they include.

    The Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) party provided the forward by the late Indonesian president, reputed Muslim reformer Abdurahman Wahid, aka Gus Dur (1940-2009).
    Wahid misleadingly casts the “original” meaning of apostasy (as named in the index), and its required punishment—death—as only

    “the legacy of historical circumstances and political calculations stretching back to…early …Islam, when apostasy generally coincided with desertion from the caliph’s army and/or rejection of his authority and thus constituted treason…. [E]mbedding (i.e. codification) of [its] harsh punishments…into Islamic law [is] a…byproduct of these circumstances, framed [by] human calculations and expediency, [not] the eternal dictate of Islam sharia on the issue….

    “The…development and use of the term sharia to refer to Islamic law often lead those unfamiliar with [it] to conflate man-made law with its revelatory inspiration, and…to elevate to Divine [status] products of human understanding, … necessarily conditioned by space and time.

    Wahid further attempts to distinguish sharia and its purported embodiment of “perennial values” from Islamic law. He says the latter resulted from “itjihad (interpretation),” depends on circumstance (al hukm yadur ma’a al’illah wujudan wa ‘adaman) and must be “continuously reviewed” to adapt and prevent Islamic law from obsolescence, rigidity and failing to connect with contemporary Muslim lives and sharia’s own “perennial values.” He thus claims that Islam’s greatest fiqh (jurisprudence) scholars, were “deeply grounded in tassawuf,” Islamic mysticism, and balanced “the letter of the law with the spirit” of accommodation to differing culture and practice across the Maghreb, Sahara, sub-Saharan Sahel region, southern Africa, Persia, Asia, the East Indies and the former Roman empire.

    Reformer or not, Wahid headed an Islamic party, co-founded in 1926 Java by his grandfathers, both members of its sharia council, which purveyed strict Islamic law, according to Dr. Andrew Bostom. It required that members follow one of four Sunni schools of (Islamic) law—of “Muhammad bin Idris As-Shafi, Imam Malik bin Anas, Imam Abu Hanifa or Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal—and to do everything beneficial to Islam.” Al-Shafi’i (d. 820) himself interpreted Koran 2:217 “to mean that the death penalty should be prescribed for apostates,” the scholar Ibn Warraq explains in Leaving Islam. [1]

    Moreover, all Sunni sharia schools had closed the “gates of itjihad,” freedom to interpret, 500 years ago. Lately, a few conservative Sunnis favor its reinstatement. Yet the Shi’a kept “benefits of ijtihad” alive, and witnessed no modern reforms, notes analyst and retired U.S. Army officer W. Patrick Lang. Iran maintains draconian sharia-based laws. Its current-day effects are detailed in chapter three.

    Unsuccessful reformists

    Ultimately, Wahid failed to improve Indonesia’s political landscape. Educated at Islamic schools, he joined NU at his grandfathers’ behest and took over in 1984, planning a secular “religious movement” to give social progress to all. He opposed Islamic supremacism. Muslims reacted violently. In 1998, as Suharto stoked anti-Chinese riots, Wahid sought calm to no avail. Hardline Muslims burned Chinese homes and shops, raped hundreds and killed at least 1,000—just as they had 100,000 ethnic Chinese in the mid-1960s. Wahid opposed East Timor’s secession, although before its 2002 independence, he apologized for Indonesia’s 1978 occupation and atrocities. Yet jihadis continued to attack Javanese and Maluku Christians (often with military aid), raided dozens of villages, forced thousands to convert and killed at least 5,000. Genocide has raised Indonesia’s Muslim population to nearly 90% of its total.

    The late Muslim reformer Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd (1943-2010) wrote “Renewing Quranic Studies in the Contemporary World.” Although director of the International Institute of Quranic Studies (IIQS), he was declared an apostate by Egypt’s Court of Cassation (its highest). He fled. His marriage was forcibly dissolved. He viewed Koran from an “objective historical perspective,” asked how it “was transmitted, propagated, codified, and ultimately canonized,” and sought “interpretive diversity.” He condemned blasphemy and apostasy laws projecting Koran as “eternal and uncreated,” and opposing modern concepts and life principles of freedom, justice, “human rights and dignity of man….”

    Indeed, apostasy and blasphemy laws embedded in 1400 years of Islamic jurisprudence prohibit such thoughts. In Sept. 1978, the fatwa council at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the closest Muslim equivalent to the Vatican, issued an official ruling on the case of an Egyptian emigre and convert to Christianity:

    “…This man has committed apostasy; he must be given a chance to repent and if he does not then he must be killed according to Shariah.

    “As far as his children are concerned, as long as they are children they are considered Muslim, but after they reach the age of puberty, then if they remain with Islam they are Muslim, but if they leave Islam and they do not repent they must be killed and Allah knows best.”[2]

    Finally, a chapter on reform of classical Muslim apostasy and blasphemy laws came from Maldives-native Abdullah Saeed, the Sultan of Oman Arab and Islamic studies professor at Australia’s University of Melbourne. He includes an internet fatwa by Muhammad Salah al-Munajjid on punishment of a murtadd, referencing the classical Bukhari hadith, “if someone changes his religion, kill him.” Like Wahid, Saeed insists on the socio-political genesis of apostasy’s prescribed punishment that specified those “in a state of war against Muslims.” It was more “akin to treason” than a simple matter of changing one’s belief. He also argues that “clear textual proofs that guarantee certainty of knowledge (‘ilm qat’i) were lacking in this debate.” If any, his second thought would most likely gain limited acceptance by Muslim jurists in 2011. Ordinary Muslims and non-Muslims in Islamic regions increasingly oppose classical apostasy laws and other religious restrictions, he writes, increasingly pressuring them to comply with human rights standards like the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Yet Saeed’s own homeland banned the 2004 book on apostasy, co-authored with his brother and former Maldives attorney general Hasaan Saeed, on which he based this chapter.

    How ready are Muslim jurists to change? The evidence suggests, not very.

    Harsh reality

    The hopes of Muslim reformers put them sharply at odds both with present-day reality and age-old Islamic conventions. Usefully, the book does catalog myriad effects of current legal codes for eight Muslim nations and regions, mostly penalties for allegedly criticizing or rejecting Islam. In Part II, chapters note dozens of cases that ended in execution, murder, or exile. Readers little aware of legal doctrines ruling Muslim nations, regions and groups likely will find their dire results quite shocking.

    Saudi Arabia, “perhaps the most repressively controlled Muslim country in the Sunni world,” often victimizes citizens and foreigners, alike. Not for over 300 years have North American courts routinely tried people for witchcraft. But sorcery charges often precede Saudi death sentences, as for Lebanese Shi’a TV psychic Ali Hussain Sibat after his May 2008 Medina pilgrimage. In prison for 30 months, he won (with foreign help), a new trial and alternative, deportation.

    But few escape. In Sept. 2011, Sudanese Abdul Hamid al-Fakki was beheaded for alleged “witchcraft and sorcery.” A sharia court in 2008 condemned an illiterate and ill Fawza Falih for allegedly causing a man’s impotence. In 2011 officials admitted she had choked on food and died in prison last year.

    Under the Saudi takfir principle (p. 30-31), Muslims may likewise accuse others of leaving Islam—and often do. Those letting men and women to mix at school or work are infidels. “Either he retracts or he must be killed,” said sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak in Feb. 2010. “He who casts doubt about their infidelity leaves no doubt about his own infidelity,” wrote Grand Mufti Bin Baz in a 2005 Saudi government brochure at its U.S. embassy, of an unnamed European cleric who had said “declaring Jews and Christians infidels is not allowed,” instantly making the cleric a murder target. Similar Saudi tracts denounce “innovative imams” as “heretics [whose] prayers are invalid.”

    Egypt also commonly alleges apostasy, despite contrary claims by sharia law professor Reza. “Islamic jurisprudence is the principle source of legislation,” Anwar el-Sadat added to constitution Article 2 in 1971 (p. 62). Thus Muslims often use the hisba doctrine to legally prosecute those considered “harmful to Islam,” chiefly against traditionally repressed religious minorities like Coptic Christians. In fact, penal code article 98 (f) criminalizes “ridiculing or insulting heavenly religions,” facilitating frequent charges of blasphemy and apostasy from Islam—the only faith to which Egypt applies the statute.

    In Jun. 1992, days after al-Azhar University clerics listed free thinker Farag Foda first among “helpers of evil,” two al-Jama’at al-Islamiyya members shot him dead. Foda sought to separate mosque and state. He exposed Islamic atrocities from first caliph Abu Bakr to the end of Abbasid Arab caliphate. And at Cairo’s Jan. 1992 book fair, he debated orthodox clerics whose fatwas he had mocked (including that against Salman Rushdie). At their trial, Muslim Brotherhood cleric Mohammed al-Ghazali defended Foda’s killers, noting that any Muslim could kill an apostate (p. 74).

    Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, instituted in 1980 under Zia al Haq, have also abetted minority persecution. State sharia courts value male non-Muslim testimonies at half that of Muslims, and of non-Muslim women, one fourth (p. 86). Hundreds of Christians have been prosecuted, far more proportionately than their two percent of the population. Believing Christians natural blasphemers, Muslims easily act on cues to attack, murder, and burn homes and churches. They target Hindus, Sufis and even Muslims, stoning men for alleged blasphemy, or for simply stating what a Westerner considers common sense.

    Conditions vary only slightly elsewhere in the Muslims world, and the authors supply a long list of atrocities committed against victims of blasphemy or apostasy accusations. Such charges and attacks occur almost as regularly as clockwork—precisely because they track classic sharia, a key point the authors omit.

    Apostasy goes global

    Part III reviews parallel efforts at the United Nations to globally bar “defamation of religion,” a thinly veiled attempt to shield Islam alone from criticism. The chief culprit is the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a Saudi-based and funded organization founded in 1969 (as the Organization of the Islamic Conference). Here again, the book focuses on modern, Western hate-speech statutes and the real-world effects of limits that resulted from worldwide OIC pressure—not the foundational sharia law upon which the OIC built its frighteningly successful campaign.

    The names and events that fill this 113-page section have also filled the pages of savvy online news magazines and channels for well over a decade now, and will be familiar to most who have paid more than glancing attention to the innumerable attacks on genuinely open-minded, free-thinking individuals of all persuasions. If nothing else, it is useful to have brief but well-documented studies of dozens of cases all in one place. Readers are reintroduced to Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie, whose Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was in 1993 shot three times but survived. Also reported: the unusual genesis of 12 cartoons of Mohammed published in late 2005 by Denmark’s Jyllands Posten and the global repercussions. After illustrators refused to sign their own work for Kare Bluitgen’s biography of Mohammed for children, editor Flemming Rose commissioned the cartoons in protest of self-censorship in a Western democracy. Within weeks, the newspaper required security protection.

    As I reported in Feb. 2006, Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb Ut Tahrir cleric Issam Amayra had the previous spring had incited Muslims in Denmark—from Jerusalem’s al Aqsa Mosque—to launch jihad there. [3] A jihad plot began months before Flemming Rose dreamed of commissioning Mohammed cartoons. Jyllands Posten merely supplied the excuse to trigger global riots. In Jan. 2006, trigger it, the OIC did. Violent “reaction” to the cartoons went viral after the paper refused to back down and Denmark’s prime minister refused to meet with Muslim ambassadors. A call by Muslim Brotherhood “spiritual leader” Yusuf Qaradawi for a U.N. Resolution against “affronts to prophets” set off thousands of Mideast “demonstrations,” Pakistani attacks on Christians and on and on. As recently as Jan. 2010, a Somali man attacked the home of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, then 74.

    Victims in the West

    In addition to additional Muslim reformers, the book covers several other cases of apostates, Christian converts and former Muslim critics, including the especially heroic Ibn Warraq and former Syrian physician Wafa Sultan (280-286), most of them fairly. It cannot go without comment, however, that the authors seriously insult Dr. Sultan: “She maintains that many verses in the Koran say that you must kill those who do not believe in Allah,” they write (p. 283). Or, Koran may not say it, she just thinks so.

    To set the record straight, Koran 2:217 states:

    “They ask thee concerning fighting in the Prohibited Month. Say: “Fighting therein is a grave (offense); but graver is it in the sight of God to prevent access to the path of God, to deny Him, to prevent access to the Sacred Mosque, and drive out its members.” Tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter. Nor will they cease fighting you until they turn you back from your faith if they can. And if any of you Turn back from their faith and die in unbelief, their works will bear no fruit in this life and in the Hereafter; they will be companions of the Fire and will abide therein.”

    If commentary by the founder of Sunni Islam’s Shafi school (cited above) insufficiently explains its classical meaning, consider the exegesis on 2:217 by 13th century Maliki jurist Qurtubi (d. 1273):

    “Scholars disagree about whether or not apostates are asked to repent. One group say they are asked to repent and, if they do, they are not killed. Some say they are given an hour and others a month. Others say they are asked to repent three times, and that is the view of Malik [founder of the Maliki school of Islamic Law]..It is also said they are killed without being asked to repent.”[4]

    Additionally, Islamic jurists routinely cite Koran 4:89, which states:

    “They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of God (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks;”

    Baydawi (d. 1316) writes on 4:89: “Whosoever turns his back from his belief [irtada], openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever ye find him, like any other infidel.” [5]

    The OIC role

    One hopes Silenced will spur readers to question the founding purpose of the OIC, which the authors do not detail. The Saudis established the it in 1969 to follow classical sharia and Muslim Brotherhood principles, and in 1973 created the Islamic Development Bank to advance the “Islamic way of life.” Its biggest project: the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which 57 members signed.

    Significantly, the preamble opens with the ummah‘s keen awareness of “the place of mankind in Islam as viceregent of Allah on Earth,” a clear reference to Koran 3:110 and expected Islamic supremacy:

    “Ye are the best of peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah. If only the People of the Book had faith, it were best for them: among them are some who have faith, but most of them are perverted transgressors.” [6]

    Not coincidentally, the OIC convened for the so-called Cairo declaration shortly after the Feb. 1989 fatwa of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, calling upon Muslims worldwide to track down U.K. citizen Salman Rushdie and execute him. Members agreed, the declaration would serve as their guide on “human rights.” These rights, its preamble specified, reaffirm the “civilizing and historical role of the Islamic ummah [nation]” divinely made “as the best community” to give “humanity a universal and well-balanced civilization” and to establish “harmony between” temporal and the afterlife and fulfill Muslim “expectations…to guide all humanity,” confused by conflicting beliefs and ideologies.

    The OIC Cairo declaration proposed to contribute to global assertion of “human rights, to protect man from exploitation and persecution, and to affirm his freedom and right to a dignified life,” but only in accordance with sharia. Briefly, it supports the opposite of “human rights” in the West: unequal rights.

    The OIC, then, functions chiefly as a rising barricade—dangerously invisible to Western leaders, journalists and educators—to cow and herd free-thinking Western democracies on every continent into ever-tightening iron-clad boundaries to guard Islam against free speech, which the authors understand, despite their seemingly wishful thinking.

    The book paints a global landscape, exposing a decades-long campaign to silence Islam’s internal and external critics via modern legal principles that clearly offend basic human rights. Example after example shows Muslims, through acts, expressing the belief that their creed, alone, is beyond criticism. Their actions suggest that many Muslims feel specially licensed to demand “cultural respect,” plus suppress infidels in their homelands, and everywhere else. Particularly those wanting equal human rights for all, even freedoms of faith and speech—free enough to criticize Muslim theology and Islam.

    Further examples continue to accumulate daily. In Iran, Christian pastor Yousef Nadarkhami, now 32, has lived precariously under a sword of Damocles since his 2009 arrest for apostasy—and converting from Islam at age 19. In 2010, he was convicted of apostasy and sentenced to death, though Iran now claims he was sentenced for rape. The mainstream press has remained largely silent over this outrage, albeit among many in Iran. Meanwhile in Paris, Islamic thugs bombed the office of satire magazine Charlie Hebdo(a Gallic version of Britain’s Private Eye) after its latest cover changed its name to Charia Hebdo and listed Mohammed as a “guest editor” to mock Tunisian and Libyan Islamic law. Yet Daily Beast (in the U.S.) headlined the satirical cover—not the bombing—as “shocking.” I’m choking.

    Sadly, however, Silenced does not address the most important fact: Egregious violations of basic human rights, heretofore, have stemmed directly from Islamic texts—the Koran, hadith and sira—not only “human interpretation” thereof. In the Koran itself (3:110) originated the claim that Muslims are the best of peoples, notes Australian writer Geoff Dickson. [6] Muslim jurist Ibn Kathir (1301–1373) in his tafsir (exegesis) explains the verse to mean:

    “You are the best of peoples ever raised up for mankind; you enjoin Al-Ma`ruf (all that Islam has ordained) and forbid Al-Munkar (all that Islam has forbidden), and you believe in Allah. And had the People of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) believed, it would have been better for them; among them are some who have faith, but most of them are Fasiqun (rebellious).”

    Theoretically anything is possible. So, theoretically, is Islamic reform. But the rest of humanity meanwhile deserves and needs the truth about Islamic expansionism and irredentism, including where and how those beliefs and practices originated.

    _____________________________________________
    NOTES:

    [1] “…But whoever of you recants and dies an unbeliever, his works shall come to nothing in this world and the next, and they are the companions of the fire forever.” As cited from Samuel Zwemmer, The Law of Apostasy in Islam, pp. 33-35, (see also http://radicaltruth.net/uploads/pubs/Zwemer—Law%20of%20Apostasy.pdf) in Ibn Warraq, ed., Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, (Amherst: Prometheus, 2003), pp. 17, 35. Verse 2:217:

    “They ask thee concerning fighting in the Prohibited Month. Say: “Fighting therein is a grave (offense); but graver is it in the sight of God to prevent access to the path of God, to deny Him, to prevent access to the Sacred Mosque, and drive out its members.” Tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter. Nor will they cease fighting you until they turn you back from your faith if they can. And if any of you Turn back from their faith and die in unbelief, their works will bear no fruit in this life and in the Hereafter; they will be companions of the Fire and will abide therein.”

    [2] Pamela Geller, “Exhibit A, the document: fatwa (death penalty) for apostasy,” Atlas Shrugs, Sept. 21, 2009, http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/09/rifqa-bary-death-threat-exhibit-a-the-document-fatwa-death-penalty-for-apostasy.html(first viewed 9/21/2009).

    [3] Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, director of Orient research Group in Toronto, Canada, translated Issam Amayra’a April 2005 sermon from the Arabic.

    [4] From Tafsir Al Qurtubi: Classical Commentary of the Holy Qur’an (Volume 1), translated by Aisha Bewley, p. 549, as cited by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom in his Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism, (Amherst: Prometheus, forthcoming).

    [5] From Samuel Zwemer, The Law of Apostasy in Islam, London, 1924/1925, p. 33, as cited by Bostom, in the forthcoming Sharia versus Freedom, id.

    [6] Koran 3:110, as translated by Yusuf Ali, Yet Another Quran Browser, http://qb.gomen.org/QuranBrowser/cgi/bin/retrieve.cgi?version=pickthall+yusufali+khan+shakir+sherali+khalifa+arberry+palmer+rodwell+sale+transliterated&layout=auto&searchstring=003:108-112 (last viewed 11/3/2011).


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