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:

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.

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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.

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?

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 2005, Scottsdale, Ar. schools shelved Across the Centuries, only to introduce more offensive Islamic propaganda in TCI’s History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond.

• In 2008, a Seminole County, Fl. school let Muslim women co-opt a “family dynamics‘” talk.

• A Houston middle school sent students to a class on Islam during a period reserved for phys ed.

• California parents have repeatedly rejected curricula and texts (including TCI’s History Alive) that sanitize Islam or teach its pillars.

• 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.
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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).