Wild Islamism on rise in Bangladesh

By: Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury Finally state minister for law, Advocate Qamrul Islam in Bangladesh made open statement expressing his government’s realization that some Islamists and radical clergies are trying to turn Bangladesh into another ‘Afghanistan’. He said, “Few 'fanatics' and 'religion-mongered' want to make the country 'an Afghanistan' by snatching away women rights”. The minister further said, a group of fanatic clergies are conspiring to destabilize the country. This statement came following an Islamist group's protest against the policy, which, they claimed, incorporates anti-Quranic provisions. Islamic Law Enforcement Committee chief Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini, also chairman Islami Oikya Jote, has threatened to enforce a countrywide shutdown on April 4, 2011 unless the 'anti-Quranic provisions' are not revoked. Since past couple of weeks, Islamists are on continuous protests in Bangladesh, which is led by pro-Taliban clergies like Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini and Moulana Rezaul Karim. Both the clergies are infamous for giving instigations to Jihad and anti-West as well as anti-Semitic activities. Islamists are gaining strength in Bangladesh for past few years, as none of the government ever showed sincere attitude in combating such elements fearing reaction from the large number of followers and supporters of radical clergies like Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini or Moulana Rezaul Karim. The rise of such forces that advocate theocratic religious universalism and the creation of an Islamic state did not happen overnight, of course. The interplay between religion and politics in Bangladesh has a long history, and religion has always been susceptible to politicization. The trend is not just pushed along by organized radical groups such as the Hizbut Tahrir, Hizbut Towhid and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami, Bangladesh [HuJI-B], which aim to replace the parliamentary democracy with an Islamic Sharia state. The leading political parties, many foreign-linked charities and non-governmental organizations, and the external environment are all playing a significant role in promoting religious radicalism. The two dominant political parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party [BNP] and the Bangladesh Awami League [AL], have both emphasized a religious identity at various points. Though the opposition AL has repeatedly accused BNP government, led by Begum Khalida Zia, of forging an unholy alliance with radical Islamic groups, even the AL, which once took pride in its secular identity, has accepted the importance of religion in Bangladesh. AL even formed alliance with Islamists during the general election in 1996, and even in the current government, it has formed alliance with Jatiyo Party, which is headed by former military dictator General Hussain Muhammed Ershad, whose political vision is very similar to those Islamist parties and fronts. The current ruling party, Bangladesh Awami League has readily adopted religious trappings and symbols for its political purposes. Its leaders, despite her strong secular legacy, have begun to carry prayer beads and wear a headscarf of Islamic cap. Public meetings have included Islamic religious proclamations to woo an electorate that is becoming increasingly comfortable with its Islamic identity. On the other hand, the BNP has always been drawn toward right-wing forces. During 2001-2006, the BNP government have witnessed increasing militant activities, including alleged targeted killings of opposition leaders, violence against religious minorities, and terrorist attacks against the personalities and institutions that oppose the creation of an Islamic state. Bangladesh also serves as a logistical hub for transnational extremist groups such as the Arakan Rohingya National Organization [ARNO] and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization [RSO]. These are Myanmar Muslims who claim to be fighting for an autonomous Muslim region in Myanmar's Arakan state. Terrorist groups based in Pakistan and parts of Kashmir, such as the HuJI and the Lashkar-e-Toiba, also managed to set up operational bases in Bangladesh, and a number of Jihadist terrorists entered India via Bangladesh. Attacks in Delhi, Bangalore and Varanasi have all revealed Bangladesh as an important link in the Islamic terrorist network of South Asia. The political parties and terrorist groups are aided by funds received from charities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait in their bid to spread the message of radical Islam to the masses. Despite an embargo on releasing its funds because of alleged terror links, the Kuwait-based Revival of Islamic Heritage Society [RIHS] was said to be using bank accounts to run official work without the Bangladeshi government's knowledge. The RIHS provided funds to several terrorist outfits. On the other hand, a huge segment of terror fund to Islamists is channelized through madrassas [Koranic schools]. Since madrassas are educational institutions within the country, they are under the purview of the country’s educational ministry. While almost all funding for these institutions comes from private donors in Saudi Arabia, there is no statute against their regulation by proper national authorities. Bangladesh has been a secular Muslim state since its independence from Pakistan and founding by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1971. While its short history has been full of military coup d’états, it has always returned to its roots as a secular democratic state. There are, however, troubling new signs of a shift towards a growing Islamism that could jeopardize the sanctity of secularism in the country.

Why ignore lessons from years ago?

by Salim Mansur

Into the ninth year since the menace of Islamism spilled out well beyond the borders of the Arab-Muslim world, the West and the U.S. in particular continue to be incoherent about how to respond.

To get a sense of this incoherence in dealing with Islamism effectively, we need to recall how the west, led by the U.S., dealt with a far greater existential challenge from the Bolshevik-Communist threat of the Soviet Union armed with nuclear might.

At the end of the war against Hitler's Germany, Europe lay in smouldering ruins, its population terrorized, broken and displaced. The war against Japan in Asia and the Pacific ended with A-bombs and complemented the devastation in Europe. The human toll of the war is estimated to have been more than 70 million dead.

The war that began with Hitler's army invading Poland ended with Stalin's army taking Berlin and dividing Europe in half. The spectre of Bolshevik-Communism that had loomed over Europe since 1917 became real in 1945 as the eastern half of the continent traded one form of totalitarian tyranny for another.

But for the generation of Americans, Canadians, Brits and others — now remembered rightly as the greatest generation — and their leaders, however exhausted by the ordeal of 1939-45, the task of holding the line against tyranny had to be met in defence of freedom, and it was met.

In March 1946, Winston Churchill, then out of office, travelled to Fulton, Mo., and U.S. president Harry Truman's home state. At Westminster College, Churchill gave his now famous "The Sinews of Peace" speech in which he warned Americans of the communist peril in Europe divided by an iron curtain.

Churchill understood the nature of totalitarian communism as he had of European fascism during the 1930s. Truman took Churchill's warning to heart and so did that generation of Americans.

The following year in July 1947, George Kennan, an American diplomat, published an essay titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs magazine. Kennan had studied Russia all his life, spoke the language and served in Moscow from 1944 to 1946 as the chief of U.S. mission.

Kennan had witnessed the brutal nature of Soviet ideology and watched the display of its expansionist ambitions. He provided the Truman administration with the intellectual foundation for what became the policy of containing the Soviet Union.

Years of European appeasement and American isolationism had brought a devastated world to the cliffhanger between freedom and tyranny in 1945.

Yet that generation rose to the occasion. It met the challenge of communism, implemented the containment policy, provided resources such as the Marshall Plan for the recovery of Europe, fielded armies in freedom's defence, helped end colonialism, founded the United Nations and laid the institutional framework for democracy and developmental assistance around the world.

Soviet Communism was contained and defeated. Chinese communists eventually became capitalist freeloaders. And almost without exception, people around the world came to want democracy, irrespective of how well or poorly they understood its workings.

In retrospect, it is remarkable — in contrast to the present western incoherence against Islamism — how quickly the greatest generation grasped the threat posed by Soviet Communism and responded with a coherent policy that prevailed.

CIP

Israel's Muslim Problem is Not Unique

The visit of Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borissov to Israel this week is a timely reminder that Israel's problems with Islam are not unique.
Like Israel, Bulgaria was ruled over by the Ottoman Empire, which exported their population to Bulgaria, oppressed the native Bulgarians, seized their lands and attempted to become the dominant majority. And when the Ottoman Empire lost control over Bulgaria, it left behind a huge Muslim population in Bulgaria.

The key difference between Bulgaria and Israel, is that Bulgaria since the 1870's forced much of its Turkic Muslim population to leave. As a result millions of Turkic Muslims left Bulgaria, leaving it a quieter place than neighboring Yugoslavia or Russia, or for that matter modern day France. Muslim clothing was banned, mosques were torn down and lands held by the Ottoman Muslim settlers were returned to native Bulgarians.

Today Bulgaria still has a troublesome Muslim minority of under a million, led by Ahmet Dogan, and backed by Turkish intelligence, which under Islamist PM Erdogan has branched out into promoting Jihad, much as Pakistan had. But despite Turkish attempts to intervene in Bulgaria, the country's Prime Minister, Boiko Borissov is a staunchly anti-Muslim leader, who has challenged Turkey's EU bid over its expulsion of Bulgarian in the 1920's.Bulgaria is an example and a warning not just to Israel, but to Europe, Russia, Australia, America and many other parts of the world as well.

Had Bulgaria not made life uncomfortable for Muslims, its fate in the 1990's would have probably resembled that of Yugoslavia, torn apart by foreign backed civil war and then carved up by Clinton and Albright. That same fate is now overtaking Israel and will overtake Europe as well.

That is because Israel's Muslim problem is not unique. Israel, like so many other lands, was overrun by Muslim conquerors who repressed the native Jewish population and settled their own population in its stead. The only unique thing about Israel's dilemma is that when the Ottoman Empire was defeated, Israel did not receive its freedom. Instead a British Mandate that was supposed to create a Jewish state, instead tried to create an Arab client state by expanding Arab immigration to Israel, while restricting Jewish immigration.

Had Israel received its freedom after WW1 when its Ottoman overlords departed, it would have never been overrun by Egyptian and Syrian Arabs who were magically transformed into "Palestinians" in the 70's at the behest of the KGB.

Nor would the Holocaust have claimed a fraction of the lives that it did, had Israel existed as an independent nation capable of taking in refugees, instead of having its ports shut to refugees by a British Empire more interested in appeasing Muslims and using them to establish client states under their control. And the worldwide Jihad and Oil for Terror are the aftereffects of British and American appeasement and coddling of Muslim desert sheiks then.

But the past is in the past. The challenge of the future is to learn from it. The long term effects of Muslim expansionism around the world has embedded Muslim minorities in countries across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Those minorities have always served as a local powder keg, which is now being lit with the help of Saudi petrodollars. Now a new wave of Islamic expansionism through immigration and Jihad is spreading even into regions that had never known the tyranny of Islam such as Australia, North and South America; as well as Europe where Islam had not succeeded in taking root before.

The toxic brew of religious supremacism and nationalist racism represented by Islamic expansionism is a threat to nearly every country in the world, whether they choose to admit it or not. And while Israel's troubles with Islam are more likely to become front page news, because its presence some 700 miles from Mecca is a perennial thumb in the eye of the Jihad-- it is also the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the world.

Islamism insures that Muslims cannot co-exist with non-Muslims except under a harsh dictatorship.

Which leaves free nations with a choice between tyranny and removing the Muslim minority within its borders. The absence of Islam within one's borders does not guarantee peace, but the presence of Islam insures that conflict will come sooner or later. The examples of that are unfortunately all too numerous across the globe, across entire hemispheres where blood is being spilled in the name of Islam.

From suicide bombings to honor killings, from Muslim insurgencies in the countryside to Islamist parties creeping in from within, from Sharia at the point of a sharpened knife to riots in the streets-- where there is Islamism, there can be no peace.

Israel's great mistake was its belief that it could co-exist with Muslims, and for its entire existence has bent over backward to accommodate them. From accepting the UN Partition Plan to sending troops to urge fleeing Arabs to return to Israel, to leaving the Temple Mount in Muslim hands, to the entire disastrous attempt to negotiate a peace with terror by agreeing to the creation of a terrorist state within its borders-- Israel's folly has been to seek peace with an ideology that uses the promise of peace as a lure to convince you to cut your own throat.

Where Islam exists in a nation, it will sooner or later either be suppressed or it will come to dominate. That is a scenario that every nation with a Muslim minority must understand and address, or it will become a Muslim nation with the native population reduced to an oppressed minority or butchered in the night. A totalitarian ideology cannot be made peace with. Either you will defeat it, or it will defeat you.

Sultan Knish

'Turning' Islamists

During the Cold War, Westerners consoled themselves in the belief that most people behind the Iron Curtain did not believe in Communism; they were simply entrapped by a morally bankrupt system driven by a moribund ideology.

It was not so much the allure of capitalism that ultimately won over the people of Eastern Europe; it was the failure of Communism.

What will it take to "turn" vast numbers of Muslims now enthralled with extremist Islam, and convince those uncommitted, not to follow the path of the Islamists?

Much depends on the outcome of the ongoing battle within Islamic civilization between those promoting jihad against the West and those who say Islam does not need to tear down the West in order to thrive.

Yesterday, this newspaper carried a Washington Post dispatch, "Jordan emerges as key CIA counterterrorism ally." The story by that paper's national security reporter revealed that a Jordanian agent working in tandem with American intelligence had been killed by the Islamist suicide bomber who struck a CIA base near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border last week.

It now transpires that the suicide bomber was a 36-year-old Jordanian physician named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi. He had been "turned" - or so it was thought - during a stint in a Jordanian prison for jihadi activities.

According to Al Jazeera, the medical-man-turned-suicide-bomber was in Afghanistan to trap another physician, Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of al-Qaida's two top leaders. Balawi had provided so much reliable information that he was trusted to enter the CIA post without being thoroughly searched.

The dead agent, Sharif Ali bin Zeid, was Balawi's handler. King Abdullah II participated in Zeid's funeral, raising the ire of Islamists within his kingdom.

This murky story of spycraft and betrayal serves as a metaphor for how the still-nameless war between freedom, moderation and enlightenment against the benighted forces of coercion, fanaticism and medievalism needs to be waged - by pushing Muslims to choose: the way of Balawi or the way of Zeid.

The most practical way to overcome the Islamists is for them to be defeated from within. After all, non-Islamists have a profound stake in the outcome.

YESTERDAY, President Barack Obama met with his top domestic and foreign national security advisers in the White House situation room. The agenda was two-fold: to unravel what went wrong, both on the systemic and personnel level, that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board Northwest Flight 253; and to take stock of the damage caused by what Balawi did at Forward Operating Base Chapman.

Along with Zeid, seven brave CIA agents, with a combined 100 years' of expertise, were lost. This betrayal, like previous acts of perfidy in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, underscored how dependent the West is on human intelligence provided by those who swim in a sea of anti-Western fanaticism.

Other lessons emerge. The Islamists must not be underestimated. They are getting good at counter-intelligence and disinformation. Israelis have seen this with Hizbullah.

Now Peter Baker of The New York Times has revealed that US intelligence was nearly fooled into thinking that Islamists from Somalia had infiltrated into the US in order to detonate bombs during Obama's inaugural address.

Fortunately, John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, deduced that a "poison pen" operation was afoot. One terror group was trying to get the US to take out its rivals. Pretty sophisticated stuff and illustrative of what the West is up against.

Another lesson is not to belittle suicide bombers as "sad guys with no self esteem," or risk being surprised by those like Balawi, who are harder to pigeonhole.

The doctor had once told an Islamist magazine: "I have had a predisposition for... jihad and martyrdom since I was little. If love of jihad enters a man's heart, it will not leave him, even if he wants to do so."

CLEARLY, some Islamists are irredeemable. But others are not. If the West recognizes the scale of the challenge and confronts it effectively, and if there are enough courageous men the caliber of Sharif Ali bin Zeid working to preserve Islam from within, we can be reasonably hopeful that the jihadis will one day find themselves relegated to the dustbin of history.

If...

JPost

How the West Rejuvenated Pan-Islamism and the Global Jihad

by Daniel Greenfield

The seeming suddenness with which Islamic terrorism went from a problem happening “out there” in the hinterlands to a problem happening across the street can be credited as much to the Islamists themselves, as to their enablers.

What the backwardness of the Muslim world and the collapse of its empires of conquered regions into colonies themselves, ruled over by European powers achieved to break down Pan-Islamism, seemingly for good, was swiftly undone.

And it was undone by the fact that virtually every major power in the 20th century fostered Pan-Islamism as a tool against its enemies.

Certainly the worst example of this phenomenon was the Cold War during which the US and the USSR helped create modern Islamic terrorism, by alternately training, arming and turning Muslim guerrillas and terrorists into weapons against each other.

While the USSR helped create the modern Middle Eastern terrorist, the US helped create the Asian Muslim terrorist.

And together, from the PLO to the Mujadeen, from Al Queda to the PFLP, from the Madrassas to the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, the beast grew and swelled to fill a vacuum that the end of the Cold War created.

And as the modern Muslim terrorist was created out of the Cold War, so were the two major arguments used by conservative and liberal Westerners for supporting or tolerating Islamic terrorism.

The Soviet Union crafted the core argument used by liberals who defend the sort of headchopping Islamist barbarians who would be happy enough to nail them to a wall simply for not having a beard, when it differentiated between “ancient” Pan-Islamism as a tool of religious repression and “modern” Pan-Islamism as a means by which oppressed people revolt against imperialist tyranny.

To understand just how far back this goes, consider this defense of Pan-Islamism by the Chairman of the Communist Party of Indonesia in 1922.

But now one must first understand what the word Pan-Islamism really means. Once, it had a historical significance and meant that Islam must conquer the whole world, sword in hand, and that this must take place under the leadership of the Caliph, and the Caliph must be of Arabian origin. About 400 years after the death of Mohammed the Muslims split into three great states and thus the Holy War lost its significance for the entire Muslim world…

So Pan-Islamism no longer has its original meaning, but now has in practice an entirely different meaning.

Today, Pan-Islamism signifies the national liberation struggle, because for the Muslims Islam is everything: not only religion, but also the state, the economy, food, and everything else. And so Pan-Islamism now means the brotherhood of all Muslim peoples, and the liberation struggle not only of the Arab but also of the Indian, the Javanese and all the oppressed Muslim peoples.

This brotherhood means the practical liberation struggle not only against Dutch but also against English, French and Italian capitalism, therefore against world capitalism as a whole. That is what Pan-Islamism now means in Indonesia among the oppressed colonial peoples, according to their secret propaganda – the liberation struggle against the different imperialist powers of the world.

This is a new task for us. Just as we want to support the national struggle, we also want to support the liberation struggle of the very combative, very active 250 million Muslims living under the imperialist powers. Therefore I ask once again: Should we support Pan-Islamism, in this sense?

The speech in question may date back to 1922 but its sentiments are very modern and commonplace among liberals in the West today. Their view is that Islamism is a people’s liberation struggle against Western imperialism and capitalism because it serves as a common bridge between Islam and the Left today in 2009, just as it did then in 1922.

This reinterpretation of Islamism as an expression of economic and political discontent today tends to be described under labels such as resistance to Globalization or to corrupt Western “puppet regimes”, but it is in fact a carbon copy of the Soviet approach to Pan-Islamism.

This ideological approach enables the left to co-opt Islam in the struggle against Western hegemony. Meanwhile Islamists have long since learned to put forward economic and political grievances in order to make common cause with the left.

Meanwhile on the right, the American approach to Islam, as exemplified by the Green Belt strategy or the current War on Terror (but not on Islam) is that Muslims were potentially valuable allies whose religion would help create common ground against Communism and other evils.

Disastrous incarnations of this approach included Carter’s backing for the Ayatollah Khomeni that resulted in the totalitarian Shiite Iran we know today and America’s longstanding with the Saudi royal family, which has exported Sunni terrorism almost as assiduously as its oil.

More at CFP

Bethlehem's exodus

The pilgrims will be there as midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity is again broadcast live around the world this Christmas Eve -- but the town of Bethlehem is fast losing its last few year-round Christian residents.

Christians are fleeing the town of Christ's birth, and the much-reported hardship that Israel inflicts on residents of the West Bank town has little to do with it.

It's the same reality across the Arab world: rising Islamism pushes non-Muslims away.

Islamists frown on real-estate ownership by non-Muslims -- Christian, Jew or anything else.

And though the secular Palestinian Authority still controls the West Bank, the clout of groups like Hamas is growing: Even in Bethlehem, where followers of history's most famous baby once thrived, Christians are ceding the land.

Yes, ever since the PA took control of the West Bank in the early '90s, its leaders have taken care to show the world an idealized picture of Muslim-Christian solidarity.

But it's a facade -- a way to score anti-Israeli political points.

That tradition continues: Monday, the Palestinian news agency Maan reported on Palestinian Christians "trapped" in Gaza as Israel refuses to let them travel to Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas with their brethren.

In fact, the Israelis decline to let people travel from Hamas-controlled Gaza for the simple reason that Hamas is still sponsoring suicide-bomb and other attacks on its civilians.

(It also threatens the secularists of Fatah, the ruling party in the West Bank.) Gaza residents can't go to Egypt, either (Cairo's even building a wall to keep them out), because Hamas and its parent, the Muslim Brotherhood, threaten the regime.

Back to the exodus: Fifty years ago, Christians made up 70 percent of Bethlehem's population; today, about 15 percent.

Indeed, the Christian population of the entire West Bank -- mostly Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic, with Copts, Russian Orthodox, Armenians and others -- is dwindling.

But, again, the story's the same in Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere in the Mideast. Practically the only place in the region where the Christian population is growing is in Israel.

In Bethlehem, Christians now feel besieged. Growing numbers of rural southern West Bankers from the Hebron area have moved north to Bethlehem in recent years. Many see the land as Waqf -- belonging to the Muslim nation. They increasingly buy or confiscate land -- and talk of laws to ban Christian landownership.

Seeing the trend, many Christians have decided to sell while they still can; real estate is leaving families that have owned it for generations.

Then, too, the Christians of the West Bank have traditionally been wealthier and better educated than the Muslims. When Jordan ruled the area from 1948 and 1967, Christians could get permits to travel abroad -- and emigration became part of the tradition.

Now, having relatives abroad means a chance to escape. There are frequent attacks on Christian cemeteries and churches; Christian-owned businesses are often defaced -- and government jobs have grown scarce for non-Muslims.

For all of the late Yasser Arafat's respectful talk about Christianity and its common purpose with Islam, the West Bank Christian population (not counting Jerusalem) dropped under his rule by nearly 30 percent, from 35,000 in 1997 to 25,000 in 2002. It's even lower now -- less than 8 percent of the population.

Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh wrote recently that, before Pope Benedict visited the Holy Land in May, a Christian merchant told him jokingly, "The next time a pope comes to visit . . . he will have to bring his own priest with him [to] pray in a church because most Christians would have left by then."

A researcher of Arab and Muslim affairs, Jonathan Dahoah Halevy, says Islamists think that "soft" Christians around the world wouldn't intervene on behalf of their brethren in places like Bethlehem. Benedict's visit seems to bear that out: He criticized Israeli policies while ignoring the crucial role Islamists play in chasing Christians out of town.

So there may or may not be room at the inn when you arrive at the little town of Bethlehem, but the innkeeper is unlikely to be a Christian.

NYPost

Islamism 2.0

by Daniel Pipes

To borrow a computer term, if Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Nidal Hasan represent Islamism 1.0, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (the prime minister of Turkey), Tariq Ramadan (a Swiss intellectual), and Keith Ellison (a U.S. congressman) represent Islamism 2.0.

The former kill more people but the latter pose a greater threat to Western civilization. The 1.0 version attacks those perceived as obstructing its goal of a society ruled by a global caliphate and totally regulated by the Shari'a (Islamic law). Islamism's original tactics, from totalitarian rule to mega-terrorism, encompass unlimited brutality.

Three thousand dead in one attack? Bin Laden's search for atomic weaponry suggests the murderous toll could be a hundred or even a thousand times larger.However, a review of the past three decades, since Islamism became a significant political force, finds that violence alone rarely works.

Survivors of terrorism rarely capitulate to radical Islam – not after the assassination of Anwar el-Sadat in Egypt in 1981, nor the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bombings of 2002, the Madrid bombing of 2004, the Amman bombing of 2005, or the terrorist campaigns in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Terrorism does physical damage and kills and intimidates but it rarely overturns the existing order. Imagine Islamists had caused the devastation of Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 tsunami – what could these have lastingly achieved?

Non-terrorist violence aimed at applying the Shari'a does hardly better. Revolution (meaning, a wide-scale social revolt) took Islamists to power in just one place at one time - Iran in 1978–79. Likewise, coup d'état (a military overthrow) carried them to power just once – Sudan in 1989. Same for civil war – Afghanistan in 1996.

If the violence of Islamism 1.0 rarely succeeds in forwarding the Shari'a, the Islamism 2.0 strategy of working through the system does better. Islamists, adept at winning public opinion, represent the main opposition force in Muslim-majority countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, and Kuwait. Islamists have enjoyed electoral success in Algeria in 1992, Bangladesh in 2001, Turkey in 2002, and Iraq in 2005.

Once in power, they can move the country toward Shari'a. As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faces the wrath of Iranian street demonstrators and bin Laden cowers in a cave, Erdoğan basks in public approval, remakes the Republic of Turkey, and offers an enticing model for Islamists worldwide.

Recognizing this pattern, Al-Qaeda's once-leading theorist has publicly repudiated terrorism and adopted political means. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (b. 1950, also known by the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl) was accused of helping assassinate Sadat. In 1988 he published a book that argued for perpetual, violent jihad against the West. With time, however, Sharif observed the inutility of violent attacks and instead advocated a strategy of infiltrating the state and influencing society.

In a recent book, he condemned the use of force against Muslims ("Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers") and even against non-Muslims (9/11 was counterproductive, for "what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy's buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?").

Sharif's evolution from theorist of terrorism to advocate of lawful transformation echoes a much broader shift; accordingly, as author Lawrence Wright notes, his defection poses a "terrible threat" to Al-Qaeda. Other once-violent Islamist organizations in Algeria, Egypt, and Syria have recognized the potential of lawful Islamism and largely renounced violence. One also sees a parallel shift in Western countries; Ramadan and Ellison represent a burgeoning trend.

(What one might call Islamism 1.5 – a combination of hard and soft means, of external and internal approaches – also works. It involves lawful Islamists softening up the enemy, then violent elements seizing power. The Hamas takeover of Gaza proved that such a combination can work: win elections in 2006, then stage a violent insurrection in 2007. Similar processes are possibly underway in Pakistan. The United Kingdom might be undergoing the opposite process, whereby violence creates a political opening.)

In conclusion, only Islamists, not fascists or communists, have gone well beyond crude force to win public support and develop a 2.0 version. Because this aspect of Islamism undermines traditional values and destroys freedoms, it may threaten civilized life even more than does 1.0's brutality.

Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Daniel Pipes

Poll: Do You Support or Oppose These Ideologies?

Communism
I lean to the Left	I am in the Middle	I lean to the Right
Support	Support	Support
Oppose	Oppose	Oppose
Don't Care	Don't Care	Don't Care

Christian Fundamentalism
I lean to the Left	I am in the Middle	I lean to the Right
Support	Support	Support
Oppose	Oppose	Oppose
Don't Care	Don't Care	Don't Care

Fascism / National Socialism
I lean to the Left	I am in the Middle	I lean to the Right
Support	Support	Support
Oppose	Oppose	Oppose
Don't Care	Don't Care	Don't Care

Islamism
I lean to the Left	I am in the Middle	I lean to the Right
Support	Support	Support
Oppose	Oppose	Oppose
Don't Care	Don't Care	Don't Care

Zionism
I lean to the Left	I am in the Middle	I lean to the Right
Support	Support	Support
Oppose	Oppose	Oppose
Don't Care	Don't Care	Don't Care

Islamism Must Carry a Price

Islamists are sworn to make war on the West, to drive out freedom and democracy, replacing them with the mandated tyranny of Islamic law.

They declare all laws and all nations that do not originate or abide by Islamic law to be invalid.

And they reserve the right to make war on them by any means necessary, from the political to the economic to the terroristic.

And yet it might surprise many people to realize that most Islamists are not haggard fanatics living off dried goat meat in caves.

Instead many of them are doctors and lawyers working in major American and European cities, they serve as advisors to Western politicians and write newspaper columns. Their organizations are treated with respect and given veto power over the policies of governments whose existence they reject.

And that in a nutshell is the trouble of it all. Because Islamism should carry a price, instead it only carries rewards.

Islamists in Europe and America do not actually have to be isolated hermits working out of a few ghettos. Instead they are able to gain all the benefits of the West, from advanced degrees to high paying jobs to political recognition, while maintaining their hatred for the West.

The results are inevitable. The investigation of a CERN physicist for contacts with Al Queda, and a Glasgow doctor and dentist attempt to carry out an airport car bombing.

These are not the alienated or disenfranchised immigrants, a description that the press routinely uses to try and turn the perpetrators into victims.

No, some are even European born. Rather what they are are Islamists who blended successful lives in the society of the infidels, with their own religious fanaticism. And they were able to do that because tolerance for Islam eliminated any barriers and obstacles to being both Islamists and middle class professionals.

The question is not a casual one, because in reality most terrorism stems from the sons of the middle and upper class.

The immigrants in the ghettos may riot, toss molotov cocktails at the police and rob and rape-- but it tends to be the university graduates who actually join up with international Muslim terrorist groups and begin planning attacks.

Traditionally the middle class has always provided the upper ranks of terrorist groups, and it is no different with Islamist terrorists.

Read more here,,,,

Source: Sultan Knish

H/T: gramfan

Muslims Against Sharia in the Media - September '09

9/28/09
Right Truth A Look At The Enemy
9/14/09
The Investigative Project State Department Website Panders To Radical Islamists
9/9/09
Poste de veille: Muslims Against Sharia (MASH) : Des musulmans anti-fascistes
9/5/09
On A Clear Day You Can See Forever...: Muslims Against Sharia: I get it. Do you?
OVO: Trevor Blake: Lubna Hussein
9/1/09
John Ward in Medway: Islamists - The Reality


August

L'islam est un incendie, par Amil Imani

L’incendie islamique, alimenté par les immenses revenus du pétrole, fait rage dans plusieurs régions du monde ; ailleurs, il couve ; ailleurs encore, il est prêt à s’allumer. Il faut absolument que les peuples libres du monde abandonnent toute illusion sur l’islam et éteignent ce feu une fois pour toutes. Le multiculturalisme, le « droit à la différence », est une tromperie pour naïfs généreux. L’islam, si divisé soit-il, est une monoculture sans compromis, la culture cruelle apportée il y a 1400 ans par Mahomet à un peuple primitif.

En vérité, la plupart des religions ont pour but d’atténuer les peurs des hommes. Elles s’appuient sur les peurs naturelles, dont beaucoup sont irrationnelles mais n’en sont pas moins naturelles. Ainsi, beaucoup de pratiques religieuses païennes étaient centrées sur le cycle des saisons et son lien aux récoltes. Pourquoi ? Parce que si la récolte était mauvaise, toute la civilisation pouvait périr, ou s’affaiblir au point de risquer d’être détruite par une tribu voisine. Ces populations ne comprenaient pas les bases scientifiques du climat, et ont ainsi bâti des croyances religieuses naturelles (mais irrationnelles) sur le climat et les récoltes. En ce sens, les religions étaient psychologiquement utiles et inévitables pour faire face aux conditions naturelles.

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Source: Amil Imani (Traduction par Poste de veille)

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How to overthrow a Country by overthrowing the Meaning of the Nouns

The Iconoclast
Tuesday, 8 September 2009

If One Resists Islamisation Then One Is A Fascist – By Definition!

There is a battle being waged, though one would not know it if one read only the mainstream press, for the hearts and minds of the British peoples. It is, at the moment, being waged principally between the English Defence League and United Against Fascism (suspected by many of being a recidivist Marxist organisation the real aim of which is the disruption of democracy). Currently the UAF gets a favourable press, as you would expect from the Western mainstream media, whereas there are desperate attempts made by that self-same media to link EDL to just about any extremist organisation which you might care to mention.

May I refer you to this idiotic, inflammatory and violent site. The UAF completely and wilfully misunderstands the concerns which many people have about Islam and its presence in the West. Let me quote to you, and deconstruct, some of its drivel which you can find on this page of its site:

Under the headline: ‘Defend Harrow Central Mosque against anti?Muslim bigots on Friday 11 September.’ is the following:

Racist bigots...

Since when are those who oppose Fascist beliefs or ideologies such as Islamic supremacism ‘racist’ or ‘bigoted’?

...including the English Defence League and "Stop the Islamisation of Europe" are planning on holding an anti-Muslim protest outside Harrow Central Mosque on the evening of Friday 11 September...

Read All here: http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/22881

H/T: http://www.libertiesalliance.org/2009/09/08/selected-reading-material/

Do they learn to bark and bray?!

A European Tale

Video: http://www.cbn.com/media/player/index.aspx?s=/vod/DHU13

H/T: IslamoScope.wordpress.com

Obstacles in Liberating Islam

September 3

by Wafa Sultan

As an Arab woman who suffered for three decades living under Islamic Sharia, it is clear to me that Islam’s political ideology and Sharia must be fought relentlessly by Western civilization to prevent its application in a free society.

However, I have found myself fighting on two fronts. The first front is against Islamists, a daunting fight indeed. But the other front is one shaped by too many uninformed individuals who like to view themselves as open minded “progressives”.

They seem to somehow claim superiority on compassion, on peace, on open-mindedness and on appreciation of other cultures. Regarding themselves as tolerant, free thinking individuals, they avoid questioning Muslims’ harmful intentions.

They restrict themselves to self-criticism, and make politically-correct excuses for Islamism. Regrettably, they show their indisputable acceptance of ‘others’ at the expense of the public’s responsibility to learn the truth about Islam’s detrimental tenets.

It is crucial for these so called “progressives” to realize that Islam is indeed based on an anti-liberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world.

They need to realize that Islamism oppose the liberal values they cherish. And equally important, they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and in the West, today.

For me, confronting those who adhere to multicultural relativism is a most painful battle. Their standpoint makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more challenging. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually suppresses and weakens my voice and that of others who are in this fight.

Simply put, too many individuals, and institutions stand in the way of overcoming Islamic political ideology. With their appeasing approach they obstruct the pressing effort to modernize Islam. When I first immigrated to the US, I learned to my dismay that Islam has been labeled by many as “a religion of peace.” But for me, as a Syrian who grew up in Islamic country, a set of beliefs that insists that women are wicked is an evil set of belief.

A pious ideology - - that obliges non Muslims to live as subjects under it as unequal - - is an immoral pious ideology. Regrettably, we frequently experience politically correct harsh responses to criticism of Islam by those who admonish liberated Muslims or Arabs.

Read more here,,,,

Source: Hudson NewYork

Muslims Against Sharia in the Media - August '09

8/30/09
Latter-day Saints Focusing on Jesus Christ: 2009: Suggestions for LDS Interactions with People in Middle East & their Descendants & Followers in U.S. & Orange County / Steve St.Clair
8/26/09
The Lobster Pot: Feminists are deafeningly silent about "honorcide"
8/24/09
Parhain maa: Shariaa vastustavat muslimit
8/10/09
My Doubts: Poll On Muslims Against Sharia
My Doubts: Featured Blog
8/2/09
Slant Right: Islam: Reform and Transform

July

Sympathy for America's Devils

For the past decade, the sight of Western liberals gathering in defense of terrorists seeking to impose a medieval patriarchal cult on the rest of the world by force seems incongruously odd. What is there about Islam that is so appealing to the erstwhile defenders of minorities, women and gays-- all of whom have next to no rights under Islam?

Looking over tomes by liberal authors that argue that Islam is truly feminist, progressive and shares all their basic values, the rational observer is forced to wonder, "Who exactly are they kidding?" The answer is a complicated one, but the problem is not as new as it seems.

The far left and the far left have a longstanding affinity for playing, "The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend", with America designated as the primary enemy, and everyone from the headmasters of the guillotine to Al Queda has emerged as their friends.

Before 9/11, the Taliban had a spokesman named Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, today studying in Yale on a student visa, making the rounds of Berkeley to explain that the detonation of the Buddhist statues, then the worst thing that the jolly gang of headchopping boys in black were known for at the time, was actually a protest against the world ignoring Afghanistan's poverty.

His audience cheered and laughed along with him, able now to relate to the Taliban, not as murderous butchers who throw acid in the faces of little girls-- but as activists against Third World poverty.

But long before Sayed slimed his way across California, a Japanese consulate employee named Hikida Yasuichi would strike up close ties with Black Harlem intellectuals in the 1930's, in pursuit of General Sato Kojiro's then bizarre fantasy of destroying America's Pacific Fleet, occupying Hawaii and then invading the mainland with an African-American army. While no such army ever materialized, Hikida Yasuichi succeeded in stirring up sympathy for Imperial Japan among black writers like W.E. Du Bois, who were otherwise fervent Communists, by convincing them that Japan was fighting for all the non-white races. Read more here..

Source: CFP

Muslims Against Sharia in the Media - July '09

7/28/09
Terre Haute News: Moderate Muslims rejecting Sharia
7/25/09
Kiosque Médias: « L’écosystème » permettant le crime d’honneur
7/23/09
My journey with AIDS:
Enough with the “honour killings”
7/14/09
The Brussels Journal: The Islamofascists are the Fascists, Not Geert Wilders
7/12/09
Roger Ivan Hart's Blog: The Flight 93 Memorial
7/10/09
NRC Handelsblad: Help Muslims escape the tyranny of sharia law
7/8/09
NRC Handelsblad: De sharia wordt in Nederland al volop toegepast

June

The Fog Is Not Lifting: New DVD Whitewashes IslamismA video being distributed to counter Obsession is nothing but Islamist propaganda.

By Sid Shahid

Last year, Islamist anger over the mass distribution of the DVD Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West was quite predictable. As is their modus operandi, the Islamist cry focused on victimology and attacking the messenger, while avoiding any real debate over the message of the DVD itself.

North Carolina proved to be particularly fertile ground for the validation of Islamist woes. One newspaper, the Greensboro News and Record, flatly refused to distribute the DVD, while another, the News and Observer, “allowed” the paid distribution of free speech but enclosed an editorial board op-ed, which served as an insert warning to readers.

But that wasn’t enough for Islamists. Some are now fighting back with their own DVD, entitled The Fog Is Lifting (Part 1): Islam in Brief, produced by an Egyptian nonprofit group, the Bridges Foundation. Some 20,000 copies of the DVD were distributed to three zip codes within Wake County, North Carolina. Bundled in an issue of the News and Observer, the DVD aims to “repair the image of Islam” and is allegedly designed to counteract the Obsession DVD distributed in the same paper in September of last year. While marketed to “explain” Islamic precepts and theology, it does so from only a single point of view. Islamist apologist Omid Safi, a professor of religion at UNC-Chapel Hill, described the DVD as follows:

It’s a full-throated defense of the tradition in which Islam is presented as the perfect egalitarian, scientific, pluralistic, modern religion that doesn’t have the flaws of all the other religions. … It remains to be seen if it will be seen as preaching to the choir, or if it will succeed in persuading people outside the Muslim community. Read more ...

Source: PJM

For Radical Islam, the End Begins

By Joshua Muravchik | June 27

Is history ending yet again?

Much as the hammers that leveled the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War, so might the protests rocking Iran signal the death of radical Islam and the challenges it poses to the West.

No, that doesn't mean we'll be removing the metal detectors from our airports anytime soon. Al-Qaeda and its ilk, even diminished in strength, will retain the ability to stage terrorist strikes. But the danger brought home on Sept. 11, 2001, was always greater than the possibility of murderous attacks. It was the threat that a hostile ideology might come to dominate large swaths of the Muslim world.

Not all versions of this ideology -- variously called Islamism or radical Islam -- are violent.

But at the core of even the peaceful ones, such as that espoused by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, is the idea that the Islamic world has been victimized by the West and must defend itself. Even before the United States invaded Iraq, stoking rage, polls in Muslim countries revealed support for Osama bin Laden and for al-Qaeda's aims, if not its methods. If such thinking were to triumph in major Muslim countries beyond Iran -- say, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- violent extremists would command vast new stores of personnel, explosives and funds.

This is precisely the nightmare scenario that is now receding.

Even if the Iranian regime succeeds in suppressing the protests and imposes the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by force of bullets, mass arrests and hired thugs, it will have forfeited its legitimacy, which has always rested on an element of consent as well as coercion. Most Iranians revered Ayatollah Khomeini, but when his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, declared the election results settled, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets, deriding his anointed candidate with chants of "Death to the dictator!"

"Even if they manage to hang on for a month or a couple of years, they've shed the blood of their people," says Egyptian publisher and columnist Hisham Kassem. "It's over."

Read more here,,,

Source: Washington Post