Islam

McCarthy: Islam—Facts or Dreams?

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 24, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series: In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace. Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false. One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law. I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding? Defendants do not have to testify at criminal trials, but they have a right to testify if they choose to—so I had to prepare for the possibility. Raised an Irish Catholic in the Bronx, I was not foolish enough to believe I could win an argument over Muslim theology with a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence. But I did think that if what we were saying as a government was true—that he was perverting Islam—then there must be two or three places where I could nail him by saying, “You told your followers X, but the doctrine clearly says Y.” So my colleagues and I pored over the Blind Sheikh’s many writings. And what we found was alarming: whenever he quoted the Koran or other sources of Islamic scripture, he quoted them accurately. Now, you might be able to argue that he took scripture out of context or gave an incomplete account of it. In my subsequent years of studying Islam, I’ve learned that this is not a particularly persuasive argument. But even if one concedes for the purposes of discussion that it’s a colorable claim, the inconvenient fact remains: Abdel Rahman was not lying about Islam. When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of Islam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up. When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, the scriptures backed him up. When he said Islam directed Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as their friends, the scriptures backed him up. You could counter that there are other ways of construing the scriptures. You could contend that these exhortations to violence and hatred should be “contextualized”—i.e., that they were only meant for their time and place in the seventh century. Again, I would caution that there are compelling arguments against this manner of interpreting Islamic scripture. The point, however, is that what you’d be arguing is an interpretation. The fact that there are multiple ways of construing Islam hardly makes the Blind Sheikh’s literal construction wrong. The blunt fact of the matter is that, in this contest of competing interpretations, it is the jihadists who seem to be making sense because they have the words of scripture on their side—it is the others who seem to be dancing on the head of a pin. For our present purposes, however, the fact is that the Blind Sheikh’s summons to jihad was rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting Islam—he was, if anything, shining a light on the need to reform it. Another point, obvious but inconvenient, is that Islam is not a religion of peace. There are ways of interpreting Islam that could make it something other than a call to war. But even these benign constructions do not make it a call to peace. Verses such as “Fight those who believe not in Allah,” and “Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war,” are not peaceful injunctions, no matter how one contextualizes. Another disturbing aspect of the trial against the Blind Sheikh and his fellow jihadists was the character witnesses who testified for the defense. Most of these people were moderate, peaceful Muslim Americans who would no more commit terrorist acts than the rest of us. But when questions about Islamic doctrine would come up—“What does jihad mean?” “What is sharia?” “How might sharia apply to a certain situation?”—these moderate, peaceful Muslims explained that they were not competent to say. In other words, for the answers, you’d have to turn to Islamic scholars like the Blind Sheikh. Now, understand: there was no doubt what the Blind Sheikh was on trial for. And there was no doubt that he was a terrorist—after all, he bragged about it. But that did not disqualify him, in the minds of these moderate, peaceful Muslims, from rendering authoritative opinions on the meaning of the core tenets of their religion. No one was saying that they would follow the Blind Sheikh into terrorism—but no one was discrediting his status either. Although this came as a revelation to me, it should not have. After all, it is not as if Western civilization had no experience dealing with Islamic supremacism—what today we call “Islamist” ideology, the belief that sharia must govern society. Winston Churchill, for one, had encountered it as a young man serving in the British army, both in the border region between modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the Sudan—places that are still cauldrons of Islamist terror. Ever the perceptive observer, Churchill wrote: ” How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. . . . Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.” Habitually, I distinguish between Islam and Muslims. It is objectively important to do so, but I also have a personal reason: when I began working on national security cases, the Muslims I first encountered were not terrorists. To the contrary, they were pro-American patriots who helped us infiltrate terror cells, disrupt mass-murder plots, and gather the evidence needed to convict jihadists. We have an obligation to our national security to understand our enemies; but we also have an obligation to our principles not to convict by association—not to confound our Islamist enemies with our Muslim allies and fellow citizens. Churchill appreciated this distinction. “Individual Moslems,” he stressed, “may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen.” The problem was not the people, he concluded. It was the doctrine. What about Islamic law? On this topic, it is useful to turn to Robert Jackson, a giant figure in American law and politics—FDR’s attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court, and chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. In 1955, Justice Jackson penned the foreword to a book called Law in the Middle East. Unlike today’s government officials, Justice Jackson thought sharia was a subject worthy of close study. And here is what he concluded: ” In any broad sense, Islamic law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge—all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire—reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western law.” Contrast this with the constitution that the U.S. government helped write for post-Taliban Afghanistan, which showed no awareness of the opposition of Islamic and Western law. That constitution contains soaring tropes about human rights, yet it makes Islam the state religion and sharia a principal source of law—and under it, Muslim converts to Christianity have been subjected to capital trials for apostasy. Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so. Even if this is not the only construction of Islam, it is absurd to claim—as President Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. In fact, it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. Last year, Americans were horrified by the beheadings of three Western journalists by ISIS. American and European politicians could not get to microphones fast enough to insist that these decapitations had nothing to do with Islam. Yet within the same time frame, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded eight people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia. Three weeks before Christmas, a jihadist couple—an American citizen, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and his Pakistani wife who had been welcomed into our country on a fiancée visa—carried out a jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. Our government, as with the case in Fort Hood—where a jihadist who had infiltrated the Army killed 13 innocents, mostly fellow soldiers—resisted calling the atrocity a “terrorist attack.” Why? Our investigators are good at what they do, and our top officials may be ideological, but they are not stupid. Why is it that they can’t say two plus two equals four when Islam is involved? The reason is simple: stubbornly unwilling to deal with the reality of Islam, our leaders have constructed an Islam of their very own. This triumph of willful blindness and political correctness over common sense was best illustrated by former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when she described terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” In other words, the savagery is not merely unrelated to Islam; it becomes, by dint of its being inconsistent with a “religion of peace,” contrary to Islam. This explains our government’s handwringing over “radicalization”: we are supposed to wonder why young Muslims spontaneously become violent radicals—as if there is no belief system involved. This is political correctness on steroids, and it has dangerous policy implications. Consider the inability of government officials to call a mass-murder attack by Muslims a terrorist attack unless and until the police uncover evidence proving that the mass murderers have some tie to a designated terrorist group, such as ISIS or al Qaeda. It is rare for such evidence to be uncovered early in an investigation—and as a matter of fact, such evidence often does not exist. Terrorist recruits already share the same ideology as these groups: the goal of imposing sharia. All they need in order to execute terrorist attacks is paramilitary training, which is readily available in more places than just Syria. The dangerous flipside to our government’s insistence on making up its own version of Islam is that anyone who is publicly associated with Islam must be deemed peaceful. This is how we fall into the trap of allowing the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamic supremacist organization, to infiltrate policy-making organs of the U.S. government, not to mention our schools, our prisons, and other institutions. The federal government, particularly under the Obama administration, acknowledges the Brotherhood as an Islamic organization—notwithstanding the ham-handed attempt by the intelligence community a few years back to rebrand it as “largely secular”—thereby giving it a clean bill of health. This despite the fact that Hamas is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, that the Brotherhood has a long history of terrorist violence, and that major Brotherhood figures have gone on to play leading roles in terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda. To quote Churchill again: “Facts are better than dreams.” In the real world, we must deal with the facts of Islamic supremacism, because its jihadist legions have every intention of dealing with us. But we can only defeat them if we resolve to see them for what they are.

Agreed!!  Attorney, and former federal prosecutor, Andrew C. McCarthy is the author of this outstanding speech he delivered to Hillsdale College in Michigan.  If you’ve not already done so, go to:  Hillsdale.edu  and sign up for your FREE subscription to Imprimis, the school’s newsletter.  Andrew absolutely nails it here with his dismissal of the ridiculous, and politically correct, notion that Islam is a ‘religion of peace.’  Those of us who have actually read the Koran, know better.  But, that’s the bs put out by Obama and other liberal Democrats (and sadly some Republicans).  It’s a lie…and Andrew cuts through the crap here.  Please consider this your “Read of the Day” here at The Daily Buzz.  If you read only one thing here today, then READ THIS!!  Then, pass it on to all of your friends and family members.

Turkey: Gulen ‘Islamic Cult’ May Be Coming to U.S. Military Bases

Charter schools that may soon be operating on military bases in the United States are linked to what the Turkish government describes as an Islamic cult run by Fethullah Gülen, a powerful cleric living in Pennsylvania. The allegations come from lawyer Robert R. Amsterdam, founder of international law firm Amsterdam and Partners LLP, writing at The Hill. As Amsterdam forthrightly discloses early in the piece, his firm has been “engaged by the Republic of Turkey – a key NATO ally in a hotbed region – to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the operations and geopolitical influence of the Gülen organization, which is behind the Coral Academy of Science and over 140 other public charter schools scattered across 26 American states.” This is a reference to the Muslim cleric Gülen, whom Amsterdam describes as “a reclusive but influential Imam living under self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania to avoid criminal prosecution in his native Turkey.” Gülen is a powerful and determined opponent of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Coral Academy of Science in Las Vegas is negotiating with the United States Air Force to open a charter school at Nellis Air Force Base this fall. Amsterdam says his firm’s investigation revealed that the Gülen organization “uses charter schools and affiliated businesses in the U.S. to misappropriate and launder state and federal education dollars, which the organization then uses for its own benefit to develop political power in this country and globally.” He also alleges that the organization abuses the H1-B visa program to import Turkish teachers into the United States, improbably claiming there are no qualified American teachers available for the positions, and then controls these Turkish educators by holding their visas hostage, even using the threat of deportation to force salary kickbacks from the teachers. Amsterdam says that contributions, both voluntary and coerced, from Gülen’s estimated six million followers around the world give his organization assets worth $20 billion to $50 billion. Amsterdam describes the schools’ secret agenda as trying to “instill Turkish culture and Gülenist ideology in our American students,” with an eye toward creating “a Gülenist following of high achievers, incubated in our local community schools across the country.” He says this agenda has been pursued by Gülenist schools in other countries and warns, “there is great peril in allowing it to flourish in this country,” noting that Gülen’s organization has been described by international authorities as a cross between a secretive political movement and a cult. There is little doubt that Gülen has great influence in Turkey and has been fighting a political war against the Erdogan government, with many Turkish news stories ultimately tracing back to Gülen, although the international press does not always mention him. For example, the Turkish government’s recent crackdown on several news agencies is part of the Erdogan-Gülen war, as Erdogan has accused them of having ties to Gülen. Zaman, for example, a formerly anti-Erdogan publication, was accused of having ties to Gulen before being seized and turned into a newspaper that now runs headlines like “Praise Heaped on Erdogan! The Most Courageous Leader.” “Erdogan accuses Gülen of conspiring to overthrow the government by building a network of supporters in the judiciary, police and media. Gülen denies the charges,” the UK Guardian reported in early March, echoing the accusations leveled by Amsterdam at The Hill. Amsterdam cites estimates that Gülen’s network of schools, and the followers they indoctrinated, ultimately gave him control over “more than half of the entire Turkish police force.” As the Guardian recalls, it was a corruption investigation in 2013 by “police and prosecutors seen as sympathetic to Gülen,” targeting Erdogan’s inner circle, that kicked off the feud between the former political allies. Gülen was in the Turkish headlines again on Thursday, as Hurriyet Daily News reports the Turkish General Staff denying that “some members of the military allegedly linked to the Fethullah Gülen movement were planning a coup d’état” while Erdogan is visiting the United States. The General Staff further accused media outlets floating such speculation of seeking to undermine the morale of the armed forces and said it would take legal action against them. Given that one of the outlets in question is Newsweek, the prospects of such legal action succeeding seem remote. One opposition party politician insisted that Turkey’s political system is too strong to suffer a coup and offered the rather circular argument that if Gülen’s operation — which he referred to as the “Fethullahist Terror Organization” or FETO — was strong enough to pull off a coup, they would not need one; in essence, they would be able to take over the government without the fireworks of attempting to overthrow the Turkish armed forces. The Gülen movement prefers to be known as “Hizmet,” and through its news portal on March 25, it published an editorial from Gülen strongly denouncing the Brussels terror attack. “Regardless of the perpetrators and their stated purposes, every terrorist attack is a murder and an attack on the sanctity of life itself, and deserves condemnation in the strongest terms. Neither a religion nor any human being with a conscience can condone such cruelty,” he wrote. “Those who carry out such attacks and who support the perpetrators are oblivious to the ethos of the religion that they proclaim, and inflict the biggest damage to the religion’s reputation in the world. Those who consciously perpetrate such acts have lost touch with their very humanity, and do not represent any religious identity.” Such sentiments are unlikely to alleviate the suspicions of Gülen’s critics, who charge that his influence is a national security threat. “In light of Gülen’s modus operandi elsewhere, the Department of Homeland Security should be asking itself why such a non-transparent, religion-based organization would seek to establish itself on our military bases, teaching the children of our service men and women,” Amsterdam concludes at The Hill.

How crazy is this?!?  I’ve spent some time at Nellis AFB in Vegas..  and I’m pretty sure military parents there would not want their kids being exposed to this..

Milo: ‘Why Are We Surprised Muslims Are Blowing Things Up? That’s What They Do’

Breitbart Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos joined Dave Rubin on the Rubin Report Tuesday after the Brussels terrorist attacks, during which he discussed the implications of importing millions of Muslims into the west, and the reason why Islam, not just radical Islam, is part of the problem. “This is sort of what liberalism has welcomed into Europe,” Yiannopoulos said. “This is the excuse making that’s being made for radical Islam that has prevented us from fighting this problem by people who lie about the source of these people and news stations who refuse to accept that these attacks have anything to do with Islam… this is preventing us from fixing the problem. This is preventing people from taking adequate security precautions, and looking after themselves.” “Europe now is welcoming in millions of people from alien cultures whilst the establishment refuses to accept that these people’s belief systems are just dramatically incompatible with our own, and the regular citizenry are being lied to and lied about constantly, all the time by the media on this stuff,” Yiannopoulos said on the topic of the Brussels attacks. “We have a population that is not able to protect itself, that is not adequately informed about the risks and dangers of radical Islam, and the problem in Europe is that this stuff is now happening everywhere,” he continued. “No one is safe, anywhere in Europe. It’s happened in Paris, it’s happened in London, it’s happened in Brussels, no one is safe from this stuff and what do our politicians leap to the airways to say? ‘I really want to make it clear that this has nothing to do with Islam’. Well it does. It does, and as a gay man I am terrified by the prospect of mass Muslim immigration into Europe. This is one of the reasons I spend so much time in America now, I don’t want to be there anymore.” “Why are we surprised that Muslims are blowing things up? That’s what they do,” Yiannopoulos claimed. “I don’t care about that, you know it’s horrific for the people who are on the receiving end of this terrorist stuff, but is anybody surprised that ISIS blew something up? No.” Rubin told Yiannopoulos that he was going to save him “a little bit of Internet hate” and reiterated that the conversation was about extremism, not about Muslim’s as a whole, clarifying that there was a distinction between peaceful Muslims and extremists. “You don’t need to do me that favour. No, I don’t care about the distinction,” Yiannopoulos countered. “It is not extremists. It is not radical Islamists. It is not the people that the security service are worried about that’s the problem, it is the silent majority of Muslims who do nothing in this situation, have no peace movement, have no resistance to their own extreme elements, just like the progressive left in the West. Is it eleven countries that you and I could be killed for who we are? That’s not ISIS, that is mainstream Muslim culture, and we are importing that stuff into Europe in millions.” “No, I don’t make a meaningful distinction between these things because I don’t care. I don’t see any reason to import these cultures into liberal Western democracies,” he continued. “I see no reason to do it whatsoever, and as Brigitte Gabriel once brilliantly said, ‘In any case, the peaceful majority are irrelevant.’ It is not the peaceful majority that blow up buildings, it is the extremists, and right now in the world all of this stuff is coming from one culture and one religion, and I don’t want it here.” Upon being asked about how to sort out the problem and what the world needs to do to face this issue, Yiannopoulos responded: “We don’t have to welcome 1.4 million of them into Germany. We don’t have to lie to people about what Islam is, and what Muslims believe, which the press and our politicians do all the time. We don’t have to intervene in their counties where it’s not necessary and we don’t need to, and I supported the Iraq war, but some of the other things we do in the Middle East are not necessary and just drum up this Western hatred.” “I mean look, the problem is not just radical Islam. The problem is Islam,” he argued. “There are structural problems with this religion that means it is incompatible with the modern free Western liberal democracy that we live in.”

Milo pretty much nails it!  Excellent!!   🙂

Starnes: British students told to write essay on their conversion to Islam

Gobsmacked! British moms and dads were fuming after a school instructed students to write an essay explaining why they had converted to Islam. Gemma Gough posted the assignment on Facebook – and said her child would not be completing the assignment. “This is not acceptable,” she wrote. ‘Kids are too impressionable and imagine if these letters got in the wrong hands in years to come.” The 12 and 13-year-old kids at Beaucamps High School in Guernsey were told to consider what it would be like to become a Muslim. They also had to write a letter to their loved ones explaining their decision to become a Muslim. Can you imagine when the students returned home? “Mummy, Mummy! I converted to Islam! Cheerio!” The controversial lesson was part of a creative writing exercise as part of a religious education lesson, The Daily Mail reports. The school pointed out that it was a make-believe scenario – and no child was actually forced to convert to the Islamic faith. Local residents were not convinced. “In this day and age when easily-led youngsters are being radicalized, it is a dangerous road to be taking,” wrote one observer on the Guernsey Press website. “Teach pupils about religion by all means but be very careful when you ask them to be Muslim,” another wrote. The school said they plan to expose the students to other religions – like Christianity and Judaism. But let’s be honest – do you really think they’re going to have the kids write about how Jesus Christ changed their lives? Brigette Gabriel, the founder of Act for America, told me what’s happening in Great Britain is already happening in American public schools. She discusses that subject in my most recent podcast. -Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is “God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values.” Follow Todd on Twitter@ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.

University of Iowa Gives Growing Muslim Student Population Prayer Space

The University of Iowa (UI) has dedicated two rooms of the Iowa Memorial Union as a prayer space for its growing Muslim student population, which is required to pray five times per day. “We’ve had students who have tried to find empty rooms, I’ve even heard of a student using a stairwell so we did think this was a very important and necessary thing to respond to,” Dean of Students Lyn Redington said, according to CBS2Iowa. “The University of Iowa is a global, international institution, but we want all of our students to feel welcomed.” “Normally when I’m on campus, I try to look for an empty room, which may be hard in the day with all these students or if I can’t find a room I’ll go to the top of a staircase and just pray there,” said Mohammed Ismail, a member of the Muslim Student Association (MSA). The UI MSA posted an announcement to Facebook about the opening of the prayer space which read, “For the first time, Muslim students at the University of Iowa have a safe place to pray on campus.” “The Muslim Students Association (MSA) of the United States and Canada was incorporated in January 1963, when members of the Muslim Brotherhood came together at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with the goal of ‘spreading Islam as students in North America,’” observes the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT). IPT continues: ” Islamic extremism is on the rise on college and university campuses across the United States. The spread of radical Islamism on campuses has proven to be an effective tool to garner support and gain legitimacy, exploiting the right of free association with academic institutions. International and domestic groups that advocate extremist or radical causes frequently host lectures and other events on campuses to shore up support and recruit members. Indeed, universities are a fertile field for radicals searching for the next generation of activists and sympathizers.” Muslim UI student Arham Pasha said he was accustomed to having a prayer room at his former school. “I really learned the value of having that space,” Pasha said. “Kind of made a sense of home for me, at the same time a sense of community. I’m hoping that this room takes on, both of these rooms, take on that same viewpoint and goal.” According to the news report, “Islam is all-inclusive,” and, thus the prayer rooms are “open to everyone.” “Islam is represented, not in its true form by many,” Pasha said. “We would want to kind of show the majority perspective and the only way that perspective comes is when questions are asked and answered without any boundaries.” “It’s not just for Muslims, it’s for the students at the University of Iowa and people who are interested in Islam,” Ismail added.

Wow…

Opinion: The failure of multiculturalism – National leaders are closing their eyes to Islam’s refusal to assimilate

Just as radar warns of approaching storms, so does the flood of migrants entering Europe warn us of a deluge yet to come, not only for Europeans, if they continue to allow unrestricted immigration, but for the United States. Reports that women in Cologne, Germany, have been groped and robbed by men described by authorities as having “a North African or Arabic” appearance should be warning enough, but there are other and more ominous warnings that suggest worse lies ahead, unless the problem receives immediate attention and action. And it’s not just Cologne. The Gatestone Institute, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank, is in possession of what it describes as a “leaked German intelligence document,” which says, “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law.” Last October, reports Gatestone, Andrew Parker, the director general of Britain’s Security Service, said that ” ‘the scale and tempo’ of the danger to the [United Kingdom] is now at a level he has not seen in his 32-year career. British police are monitoring over 3,000 homegrown Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks on the U.K..” On Wednesday, President Obama visited a Baltimore mosque. According to The Daily Caller, the mosque “has deep ties to extremist elements, including the Muslim Brotherhood.” That mosque is not alone, as a map on the paper’s website reveals. Explaining the president’s visit, White House spokesman Keith Maley said, “The president believes that one of our nation’s greatest strengths is our rich diversity.” I doubt terrorists believe that. I don’t believe that diversity, as practiced in America, exists in any country with a Muslim majority. Benedicte Bjornland, head of the Norwegian Police Security Service, recently warned against further Muslim immigration. When U.S. politicians suggest a similar approach, they are denounced as “bigots” and “Islamophobes,” but in Norway and Sweden, two of the most liberal nations in Europe that have welcomed Muslim immigrants, that charge will be difficult to make stick. What we are witnessing is the complete breakdown and failure of multiculturalism. Dictionary.com defines multiculturalism as “the preservation of different cultures or cultural identities within a unified society, as a state or nation.” That definition contains a glaring contradiction. A society cannot be unified if it preserves different cultures and cultural identities within itself. That’s why our national motto is translated “out of many, one.” To the multiculturalist it appears to be, “Out of one, many.” History demonstrates that no nation can long survive if it forgets why it exists. Our failure to inculcate American traditions, beliefs and history, even in the native born, not to mention immigrants, is rapidly destroying the country bequeathed to us by our forebearers. Leftists in Europe and the United States have promoted multiculturalism, believing that once Muslims experience our freedoms and dedication to equality they will want to be like us. It doesn’t appear to be working and anyone familiar with the Koran and its “kingdom of this world” instructions knows it likely won’t. European leaders, from Germany’s Angela Merkel, to Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, have deliberately closed their eyes to what they see unfolding in their countries, and in others. President Obama is doing the same thing with his trip to the Baltimore mosque. Our enemies see our weakness and failure to understand their objectives, which include destroying the West and establishing a worldwide caliphate. This is not top secret information. Not all Muslims are terrorists, to be sure, but large numbers of radical Islamists profess allegiance to the faith and they are more than willing to wreak havoc in pursuit of their goals. An ancient proverb reminds us: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

Indeed…  An outstanding op/ed by veteran columnist Cal Thomas.

Tancredo: Why Did Obama Tell Brazen Lies at the Baltimore Mosque?

That President Obama told a series of brazen lies about Islam in his December 3 Baltimore speech is being well documented by experts on Islam. Why he did it – and why the Left in America is defending those lies — is more important for patriots to understand. Obama chose as the venue for his praise of Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance the same Baltimore mosque that in 2012 was under FBI scrutiny because its former imam condoned suicide bombing and one of its members was arrested for plotting to bomb a federal building. Why did Obama feel a need to help “rehabilitate” the mosque reputation by selecting it as the site for his speech? The full text of Obama’s speech at the Baltimore mosque is available on the White House website and has been helpfully reprinted by the New York Times. Anyone who thinks my criticism of the speech is unwarranted is invited to read the full text and tell me where I have misrepresented his remarks. Of course, the speech had some platitudes about our nation’s history of tolerance and freedom of speech, and we all support the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of worship. But even in recounting America’s historic commitment to religious tolerance, Obama misrepresents the Founders’ views of Islam. Jefferson did indeed include “Mohammadans” – as Muslims were known in those times– as entitled to freedom of worship, but he included them for the purpose of making clear that even the most extreme, non-Christian religions were welcome in America. But in 1805, President Jefferson had a different encounter with Islam when he sent the U.S. Marines to fight the young nation’s first battle on foreign soil –against Muslims in Tunisia and Tripoli who were kidnapping American, French and British sailors and holding them for ransom. They were called the Barbary Pirates. But Obama’s gift for fabrication was not limited to mischaracterizing Islam’s place in American history. He also misquoted the Koran—more than once. Obama bizarrely invented a new translation of the word “Islam” itself, saying incorrectly that the word comes from the same root as the Muslim word for peace—salam, as in, “peace be with you.” In fact, in Arabic, the word “Islam” means “submission,” not peace, meaning submission to Allah and the teachings of his prophet, Mohammad. This is remarkably – and not accidentally—parallel to orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine as spelled out in the Communist Manifesto that true world peace is possible only with the worldwide victory of communism, which brings the “classless society” — the end of the presumed source of all conflict, private property and capitalism. To the disciples of the Prophet Mohammad, peace is possible only with the subjugation of all infidels. Obama also misquoted Islamic scripture in parts of his speech, even going so far as to suggest that Islamic teaching on killing is the same as the Christian, which is patently untrue. Several sections of the Koran and other sacred texts teach that infidels and “apostates” must be killed if they do not submit to Islam. Contrary to Obama, Islam has no equivalent to the Christian biblical teaching of the Golden Rule. Obama’s efforts to suggest a kindred spirit uniting Islam and Christianity is pure hogwash and can only be called propaganda. Similar lies and whitewashes of Islam have been chronicled by respected scholars of Islam like Robert Spencer. You can start with Spencer’s The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, and then read The Muslim Brotherhood in America. It is true that many Muslims – indeed, a majority of Muslims– do not follow the teachings of the Koran and the words of the Prophet Mohammad. There are indeed millions of “moderate Muslims” in the United States who do not support the goals of jihadists. But the important point is that those millions of “moderate” Muslims are moderate precisely because they are not devout and do not follow all of the teachings of the Koran. That is one of the truths tht Obama denies in his Baltimore speech. But it’s not enough to list the many lies in the Baltimore speech; that’s the easy part. The more important thing is to understand WHY Obama and the entire liberal-left establishment would want to lie about Islam. Why does the President of the United States distort and defend the ideological fountainhead of America’s number one enemy, radical Islam? Why does the Left and practically the entire media establishment continually mislead Americans about the true character of Islam? Why does Obama insist on saying “Islam must not be blamed for the actions of a few,” when legitimate polls reveal that from 15% to 30% of all Muslims sympathize with the goals of the jihadists? Why, Mr. President? The easy answer would be if Obama is a secret Muslim and so, psychologically, cannot admit the truth about his own chosen religion when so many of his brethren are engaged in murderous attacks on this country. That may be true, but since we cannot read Obama’s heart, we can’t know that for certain. Even if that were true, it would not explain the duplicity of millions of other Americans and Europeans who willingly put on blinders each morning, who knowingly and continuously spout lies about the “religion of peace.” The fundamental reason for the Orwellian passion for not only accepting the lie but actively promoting it is the commitment to the universal leftist maxim — blame the victim. To a leftist crusader for “social justice,” when a man walking down the street minding his own business is attacked, robbed and beaten to death by a gang of thugs, it was his own fault: he invited the attack by tolerating a society with inequality of wealth. In the same way, to devout Muslims, a woman walking alone without a male escort is inviting rape. This is not a tenet of “radical” Islam, it is a tent of orthodox Islam. In the same vein, to the Left, America is immutably and irredeemably so sinful and so guilty of so many historical wrongs that Islam is right to reject assimilation.

Former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) absolutely nails it here in this outstanding op/ed.  And, there is more!  To read the rest, click on the text above.  Please consider this today’s “Read of the Day.”  If you read anything here at The Daily Buzz today, then READ THIS!!  Then, pass it along to all your friends and family members.  It is critical that the bs put out by Obama, Hillary, and the dominantly liberal media about Islam is countered with the truth.  I’ve had the privilege of meeting, and talking with, Tom on several occasions.  It was Tom who introduced me to Samuel P. Huntington’s book “Clash of Civilizations,” among other great reads.  And, he is also spot on about Dr. Robert Spencer’s writings.  Another one of Dr. Spencer’s books we recommend is:  “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades.”  That’s an eye opener.  Thanks Tom!!  🙂

The Arab rape game – Muslim culture has its own practices antithetical to Western pluralism

Lobbing firecrackers into the crowd gathered in the square outside Cologne’s cathedral on New Year’s Eve, a thousand-strong violent flash mob of Middle Eastern and North African Muslim men then took their celebration to the next level, breaking into smaller groups and isolating German women to rob, grope, fondle and in two cases (so far), rape them. The 100 police officers on the scene were outnumbered 10 to one. In modern Western law enforcement protocol, it is unthinkable that the police would discharge firearms in order to protect their citizens. So the robberies and sexual violence continued as the overwhelmed police awaited reinforcements. The German government’s immediate reaction was to deny the extent of the violence and to admonish people not to conclude the mob was made up of Muslim migrants and refugees. For days, the media cooperated. But in the age of the Internet, cell phones and social media, the government no longer has a monopoly on information. When women came forward with the gritty details of the sexual assaults, the government looked all the worse for its deception. “They all looked at us like we were free meat at the supermarket, fair game,” one 26-year-old victim openly told the media. “They were exploring our bodies to see if the meat was still fresh.” Similar assaults took place in other German cities. In Norway, the government is sponsoring anti-rape seminars for immigrants, attempting to teach them that because a woman is not draped in a tent does not mean she is fair game for assault. Sweden, which has experienced a rising rate of rape coinciding with its expansive immigration and refugee policies, is now opening a rape crisis center for male victims. Many see this as also a consequence of those policies. And as a result of the New Year’s Eve sexual violence in Cologne and other European cities, our multicultural knowledge has been enhanced with new vocabulary words, “Taharrush Gamea,” an Arab rape game in which a mob of sexual predators breaks up into posses, which then surround women and repeatedly explore every orifice of their bodies and sometimes have forcible sexual intercourse with them. In 2011, “60 Minutes” journalist Lara Logan fell victim to this heinous phenomenon. While reporting on the much-vaunted Arab Spring from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Ms. Logan was stripped and gang raped by a mob of a dozen Egyptian men. Western societies speak glowingly of multiculturalism, confident that immigrants and refugees will integrate into the host culture while innocuously retaining colorful aspects of their own culture. The assumption that newcomers will naturally aspire to become part of the “superior” (Western) host culture is ethnocentric delusion. The reality is far more complicated. Muslims believe their culture and their Shariah law is superior. As Council on American Islamic Relations co-founder Omar Ahmad is reported to have said, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” It should be remembered that during the Korean War not a single Turkish prisoner of war succumbed to the Chinese Communists’ brainwashing experiments. Why? Because Turks believe their culture is superior and the Chinese culture is inferior. For a people grounded in such a fundamentally, radically different culture, Western civilization’s multicultural ideal is antithetical. That is a reality that both the immigration and refugee policies of Western Europe and the Obama administration fail to comprehend. But it is something that every American with an Internet connection can easily see streaming across his or her computer screen. People do not leave their culture at the water’s edge. If America follows Europe’s immigration policies, it will experience the tragic consequences of Europe’s cultural conflicts. Taharrush Gamea is only one of them. • Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and a distinguished fellow with the Haym Salomon Center.

Most Americans are understanding this danger and don’t want it imported here.  So, while Obama is going to a Baltimore Islamic mosque, grabbing his ankles, and saying how great Islam is, Donald Trump is tapping into the electorates desire to see a moratorium on immigration of Muslims from the middle east and northern Africa.  Americans don’t want to see this happen here in America.  Imagine that!

Obama Visits Baltimore Mosque: ‘Islam Has Always Been Part of America’

President Obama spoke warmly about Islam during his speech at a mosque today, highlighting the contributions that Muslims had made to the fabric of American society. “Islam has always been part of America,” he said, detailing the beginnings of the religion among African slaves brought to America. He also pointed out that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia statute for religious freedom that the “Mohammedan” should have his faith protected in the United States. Obama met with Muslim leaders during a visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore, before delivering a speech there. This is Obama’s first visit to a mosque as president – although George W. Bush also visited a mosque in New York City after the attacks of 9/11. During his speech, he praised the religion for being a religion of peace – not the hate preached by groups like ISIS. “The very word Islam comes from ‘Salam’ – peace,” he said. “The standard greeting is ‘As-Salaam-Alaikum’ – ‘Peace be upon you,’” he explained. “Like so many faiths, Islam is rooted in a commitment to compassion and mercy and justice and charity. “Whoever wants to enter paradise, the prophet Mohammad taught, let him treat people the way he would love to be treated,” he said as the audience applauded. “For Christians like myself, I’m assuming that sounds familiar,” he continued. Obama has frequently defended Muslim Americans – even meeting with leaders at private event at the White House last year. This is the biggest public display of support for the Muslim American community – cited by White House aides as a response to the anti-refugee and anti-Muslim rhetoric on the campaign trail from Republicans like Donald Trump. Obama reminded the audience that political opponents of Thomas Jefferson accused him of being a Muslim. “So I was not the first,” he said lightly as the audience laughed. “It’s true. Look it up. I’m in good company.” Obama pointed out that the founding fathers also supported the religion of Islam. “Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran,” he said.

So?  That means nothing, you moron.  I own a copy of, and have read in its entirety, the Koran.  But, I am NO Muslim, nor do I support it.  The fact that some of our founders had a copy of it just means they were classically educated men.  Good for them!  And, no, Islam has NOT “always been a part of America,” Obama.  America was around LONG before the slave trade from Africa started up.  Our country was founded as a Christian nation.  Hello..Pilgrims?  If you’re in the least bit unsure, pick up a copy of the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr.  You can get it on Amazon.com for like $10-15 in paperback.  As for Obama’s whole ankle-grabbing babbling about how “peaceful” Islam is..  Either he is knowingly, lying through his teeth, OR he’s never read the book.  So, he is either a fool or a liar.  I’ll go with option D; all of the above.

Mystery surrounds Muslim cleric in US mountain compound

The influential Muslim cleric lives quietly on a gated 26-acre compound in the Pocono Mountains, where he prays, works, meets admirers and watches from afar as terrorism accusations that have landed him on Turkey’s most-wanted list unfold in court. Rarely seen in public, Fethullah Gulen has long been one of Turkey’s most important scholars, with multitudes of followers in his native country and around the world. More recently, Turkey’s increasingly autocratic president, Recip Erdogan, has accused Gulen of plotting to overthrow the officially secular government from his Pennsylvania idyll some 5,000 miles away. Gulen’s supporters call the charge baseless and, so far, the U.S. has shown little inclination to send him back to Turkey to face a trial that began without him Jan. 6 and is expected to last several months. A second trial, involving accusations that his movement took part in espionage, opened Monday. If the reclusive leader worries about the possibility of deportation, he hasn’t shared it with confidants, they say. “He said that the United States has a long tradition of democracy and rule of law,” said Y. Alp Aslandogan, who sees Gulen about once a week as president of the New York-based Alliance for Shared Values, a group that promotes Gulen’s ideas. “They will see that these are politically oriented charges, and they will not allow Erdogan to spread his ambition into the United States.” Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment on Gulen’s case. Gulen’s followers run a loosely affiliated global network of charitable foundations, professional associations, businesses and other projects, including about 150 taxpayer-funded charter schools throughout the U.S. But details about Gulen’s personal life and his ties to those ventures have long been murky, giving rise to suspicions about his motives. Some of the U.S. schools have been investigated by the FBI amid allegations of financial mismanagement and visa fraud. One of the most explosive claims, leveled by a lawyer who is representing the Turkish government in a U.S. lawsuit against Gulen, is that the schools are importing Turkish teachers to identify impressionable students and indoctrinate them into Gulen’s movement, sometimes called Hizmet, Turkish for “service.” Nobody associated with the U.S. schools has been charged, and there has been no public outcry from parents or students about teachers promoting Islam, Gulen’s supporters say. In America, the schools are public and open to students of all faiths. “Try proselytizing evangelical Christians in the center of Texas. See what happens,” Aslandogan said. “Anybody who knows American society and climate today would know that’s a ridiculous claim.” In any event, he said, Gulen has nothing to do with the schools’ finances or operation. Trained as an imam, or prayer leader, Gulen gained notice in Turkey some 50 years ago, promoting a philosophy that blended a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue. Supporters started 1,000 schools in more than 100 countries. In Turkey, they have run universities, hospitals, charities, a bank and a large media empire with newspapers and radio and TV stations. But the extent of Gulen’s reach is shrouded in such mystery that Loyola University Maryland sociologist Joshua Hendrick, who has studied and written about him, estimates his following at anywhere from 500,000 to 4 million people. “I think deep down in the hearts of these people, they want to create a better world, a world of peace, a world of respect,” said University of Houston sociologist Helen Rose Ebaugh, who traveled the world studying the Gulen movement’s finances and aims. “I saw no indication they are after power or creating any kind of (Islamic) state.” In 2000, a year after traveling to the United States to seek medical treatment, Gulen was charged by Turkish authorities with leading an Islamist plot to overthrow the regime. He was acquitted after a trial in absentia. Now, after a public split with Erdogan, he is facing more trials. This time, the Turkish government contends Gulen has been running a parallel state by getting his followers into key police and court positions to instigate a 2013 corruption probe that targeted people close to Erdogan. Prosecutors also contend Gulen-affiliated police officers conspired against an Islamic group and used the group as justification to conduct illegal wiretaps. Erdogan’s government has branded the movement a “terror organization,” though it is not known to have committed any acts of violence. “The grain of truth, which we don’t deny, is that yes, there are some sympathizers in every government institution. But to claim that there is a parallel entity, or there is a mastermind or puppeteer, is simply an empty claim,” Aslandogan said. A continent away, Gulen, who is in his mid-70s, lives like a monk on the grounds of the Golden Generation Worship & Retreat Center, an Islamic retreat founded by Turkish-Americans. He spends hours a day in prayer and meditation and goes out rarely, mostly to see doctors for ailments that include heart disease and diabetes, according to Aslandogan. During a tour last week, an Associated Press reporter visited Gulen’s book-lined living quarters, where shelves hold jars filled with soil from various regions of Turkey. The reporter was unable to see the cleric. He was in another building on the compound and declined to be interviewed.

Interesting…  Definitely something to keep an eye on..