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Ruth King

Owning Their Future: The Joy of DECA, Part I By Jay Nordlinger

Editor’s Note: In our May 29 issue, we published a piece by Jay Nordlinger about DECA. The organization held its big international conference in late April. This week, Mr. Nordlinger expands his piece in his Impromptus.

Sixteen thousand high-school students have converged here in Anaheim, Calif. — but they’re not going to Disneyland. Well, some of them are. But mainly they’re here to participate in a giant career-development conference. The theme of this conference is “Own Your Future.” The participants, the high-schoolers, are walking around in blue blazers, which have a patch that says “DECA.”

What does “DECA” stand for? “It stands for truth, justice, and the American way,” says John Fistolera, an official with DECA. It’s a good quip. “We’re about free enterprise,” says Fistolera, “and free enterprise is the American way.”

For decades, DECA has been known as “DECA,” plain and simple. (The word is pronounced “Decka” — like the record label, Decca.) But, once upon a time, the letters stood for “Distributive Education Clubs of America.”

The term “distributive education” is now antique — even more antique than “voc-ed” (for “vocational education”). The preferred term now is “career education,” or “career and technical education.” I myself had never heard the term “distributive education” until a few years ago, when I was interviewing Harold Hamm.

He is the 13th and last child of cotton sharecroppers in Oklahoma — and the leading oilman in the United States. When he was in high school, in the early 1960s, he took part in a D.E. program. It meant that you got school credit for working. And the classes you took probably related to the work you were doing. Young Hamm was working at a truck stop. And he wrote a paper on oil exploration.

His D.E. teacher was a man named Jewell Ridge. The teacher meant a lot to Hamm, and to many other students, most of them poor. When Ridge died, Hamm delivered a eulogy at his funeral. Recounting all this to me, Hamm got tears in his eyes.

For the piece I wrote about Harold Hamm, go here. (Incidentally, he has devoted a lot of the money he has earned to providing educational opportunity to the poor.)

DECA was founded in 1946, when going to college was not de rigueur. Young people needed skills for the work world. They still do, of course. But college is a box that increasingly must be checked. Most DECA students are college-bound. Nonetheless, the organization still serves kids who aren’t.

Here in Anaheim, I meet a young man who is going straight to the Air Force. Another one is joining the family business, to learn the ropes.

DECA has 200,000 members in 3,500 high schools. The members, I should make clear, are students. And they pay dues, as members of organizations often do. The dues are $8 a year. If a student can’t afford this sum, he can work for it, for example in a DECA-run school store.

There is also a college division, though smaller: 15,000 members in 275 colleges and universities.

The Campus Speech Police Come to Fresno State On campuses across the country, the same illiberal attitude toward disagreeable speech is growing, and the broader public must take notice. By Jake Curtis

There is certainly no shortage of examples of progressive attempts to silence “unacceptable” political speech. From Charles Murray to Ann Coulter to David Horowitz, the Left has upped its game when it comes to censoring, and in some cases even silencing, its political opponents. Some Yale students have even gone so far as to “petition” for a repeal of the First Amendment in its entirety.

Nobody, however, has done more to reveal the true nature of modern progressives’ illiberalism than Fresno State professor Gregory Thatcher. Thanks to cell-phone video and a timely complaint filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, Thatcher’s utter contempt for contrary political thought was exposed after he directed students to scrub pro-life messages that had been scrawled on campus sidewalks by the Fresno State chapter of Students for Life. This sort of mentality is endemic in American academia — and increasingly in society at large.

A month prior to the incident, Students for Life e-mailed the appropriate authorities at the University, asking for permission to move forward with their “chalking” plans. Their request made clear that the plan would aim to convey “different facts about development in the womb” and “celebrat[e] pregnant and parenting students’ hard work as they pursued their education” with messages such as “Support Pregnant and Parenting Students,” “Pregnant on Campus Initiative,” and “Know Your Title IX Rights.” Ultimately, Fresno State’s Event Review Committee approved the request, just as it had approved many other similar requests in the past.

Pursuant to the approval, the students proceeded to chalk a sidewalk near Fresno State’s library on the morning of May 2. The messages included provocative statements such as “love them both,” “choose life,” “save the baby humans,” and “unborn lives matter.”

As seen in the video, after Students for Life chalked around three dozen of these hate-filled messages, students who admitted they had been deputized by Thatcher began scrubbing the sidewalk. Professor Thatcher then came rushing out to the pro-life students, demanding they put an end to the messages and directing them to an unidentified “free-speech area.” After the pro-life students informed him that they had received university approval for their activities, Thatcher himself began scrubbing, and told the students, “You had permission to put it down. . . . I have permission to get rid of it. . . . This is our part of free speech.” As if that weren’t enough, Thatcher concluded by emphasizing that “college campuses are not free-speech areas.”

Let that sink in for a moment: “College campuses are not free-speech areas.” If Thatcher’s right about that, it’s only because he and his progressive ilk have succeeded in perverting the sacred academic mission of free and open inquiry beyond recognition. Thankfully, they don’t seem to have thus succeeded at Fresno State, which in the wake of the incident reaffirmed its policy that “freedom of expression is allowed in all outdoor spaces on campus,” essentially throwing Thatcher under the bus.

On campuses across the country, the same illiberal attitude toward disagreeable speech is growing, and the broader public must take notice.

Ramadan in London The holy month returns with its sacred traditions. Bruce Bawer

Yet again it has returned, the sublime and hallowed month of Ramadan – a beautiful and particularly sacred period that was an original part of the magnificent revelation handed down by Allah to the Prophet himself (peace be upon him) in the Holy Quran. Indeed, it has been widely postulated by many of our holiest of men that the precious text of that sacred volume was revealed to the Prophet himself (even more peace be upon him) during the very first Ramadan.

Needless to say, this is an exceedingly special and sanctified period of the year, a period of grace and majesty as well as of prayer and charity – a time during which the eternally beloved people of Allah are encouraged to demonstrate the depth and strength of their faith by engaging in sawm, or fasting, from dawn until sunset, as well as by strictly avoiding the intake of food and beverages, the use of tobacco, and any kind of carnal activity, although the standard acts of incestuous intercourse with minors and, naturally, the brutal sexual violation of the wives and offspring of infidels can be safely pursued per usual. Furthermore, it is to be hoped that the faithful will manifest the great extent of their self-restraint during this period by scheduling such activities as female genital mutilation, wife-beating, and the theologically obligatory honor killing of wives, sisters, and daughters for the hours following sundown – that is to say, after the iftar, the solemn supper taken in the wake of the sinking of the sun below the horizon, and before the suhur, the consecrated common meal that is directed to take place just prior to the rising of the sun.

It is particularly vital that the people of God make a special effort during the holy month of Ramadan not to engage in any act of unkindness, injustice, or insensitivity directed at their fellow believers – although, of course, the tossing of homosexuals from the roofs of buildings, the remorseless stoning to death of rape victims, and the violent execution of apostates may proceed as usual, preferably during the hours of darkness. It it crucial, moreover, to underscore that Ramadan is a time during which the followers of the Prophet are enjoined to take part in even a more extensive and profound degree of spiritual reflection than is their usual practice during the remainder of the year: they are, for instance, called upon to recite the special Ramadan prayers, known as the Tarawih, during the nights of this dearest of months, and even, if they are capable of such an accomplishment, to read prayerfully through the entire Holy Quran from start to finish. All of this contemplative and devout activity, to be sure, should not be permitted to distract the children of Allah from such equally urgent and virtuous tasks as mowing down infidels with cars, trucks, and other vehicles, shooting deadly rockets into the heart of urban areas where civilian non-believers are wont to gather, and committing sundry acts of mass annihilation and bloodshed involving such handy implements as machetes and Kalashnikovs.

Run, Hide and Deny in London Islamic terrorism has no religion even when it’s shouting, “This is for Islam.” Daniel Greenfield

As Muslim terrorists rampaged around London, Met police debuted the new “Run, Hide and Tell” program. But instead some Londoners chose to stand and fight. They fought with pint glasses and barstools as the Muslim killers shouting, “This is for Allah” stabbed women in trendy eateries.

Some drivers tried to ram the killers. An unarmed police officer attacked the terrorists with a baton. An off-duty police officer tackled one of the Muslim terrorists. Both men were severely wounded.

Other unarmed police officers ran away.

Met counter-terrorism chief Mark Rowley sympathetically noted that, “If someone acts on instinct and perhaps decides to fight because they have no choice, we would never criticise them for that.”

It was kind of him not to criticize those Londoners who reacted with their base instincts and tried to fight the Muslim killers instead of running, hiding and telling, then reemerging for a vigil or a concert.

After the Manchester Arena attack, Rowley had urged, “Enjoy yourselves. We can’t let the terrorists win by dissuading us from going about our normal business.”

Going about our normal business has become the highest form of courage. Run, Hide and Deny.

Ariana Grande’s manager described her upcoming Manchester concert as representing, “courage, bravery and defiance in the face of fear”. “We’re going to go shopping’ – How defiant Londoners refused to bow to terrorists,” an article at The Independent boasts. Courage, bravery and defiance used to be found on the beaches of Normandy. Now they come from attending a concert or trying on a new blouse.

Londoners took Rowley’s advice. And then they found themselves running and hiding from Muslim killers. Video shows cringing diners lying on the floor of “London’s Coolest Bierkeller” as frantic Met police scream, “Get down”. In the Black & Blue Restaurant, the first “modern American steakhouse” in the city, some hid under the tables. Four friends jammed inside a toilet stall while the screams went on outside. A woman barricaded the door while other diners fled through the back.

Peter Smith Don’t Mention the Religion

“The religion is the problem; the scripture is the problem. We should do nothing to give it an ounce of credibility. Sharia law lovers, fundamentalist Imams, jihadis, terrorists and the Johnny-come-lately ISIS are mere symptoms.”

You’re more likely to be killed by a refrigerator than Islamic terror, proffers Lawrence Krauss, favoured guest of the ABC. What a joke! Extremism is the creeping lifeblood of The Prophet’s gospel. It crept on 9/11. It crept in Manchester. It crept in London. And it will creep again tomorrow.

Yet another barbaric Islamic terrorist attack in London so shortly after Manchester. Now following: praise to the first responders, more armed police on the streets, flowers and candles. As to effective action to counter the source of the problem; rest assured there will be none.

Shock and horror, British intelligence sources report that there are 23,000 Muslims with extremist tendencies living in the UK. Be really shocked. Anyone who thinks that this is not the tip of the iceberg has not kept up with surveys on the religio-medieval attitudes of Muslims living in the West.

We know that our elites have not kept up. They are locked in a bubble of denialism. They believe all religions to be intrinsically peaceful and that this most particularly applies to the Religion of Peace™. “A great religion,” they are also apt to call it. That’s right, a great religion of peace whose very scripture is regularly invoked by base murderers of men, women and children.

By extension, the Islamic nature of atrocity after atrocity is disguised for as long as is credulously possible. The insanity defence is trotted out if at all credible. To ask why insane Baptists don’t regularly go on killing sprees risks brings accusations of Islamophobia. “Islamophobia” is, in a word, mightier than the sword in hamstringing the enemy; to wit us.

When the obvious perpetrators can no longer be obfuscated, perfidious perspective takes over. This takes two forms.

One takes the form of claiming that Islamic terrorists kill more Muslims than they do non-Muslims. True or false, this is monumentally beside the point. Killing in the name of religion is killing in the name of religion, whether the victims are less-than-devout Muslims, Muslims of the ‘wrong’ sect, or ‘infidels’. It is no consolation to Christians facing beheading in the Middle East to know that ISIS is not solely singling them out.

A second is more invidious: we are told, with a straight face, that the chance of being killed by a variety of accidents involving mundane objects or natural causes is far higher than being killed by [Islamic unstated] terrorism. Presumably this is meant to make us shrug fatalistically when the next Allahu Akbar rings out and mutilated bodies are strewn about a street.

“You’re more likely to be killed by a refrigerator,” smugly proffers Lawrence Krauss, US cosmologist, professional atheist, global warmist, Trump-basher, and pop-over guest on the ABC. He was probably speaking hyperbolically, but that made his remark no less callously insensitive to victims of terrorism and their families. And, unfortunately, his resort to the length of odds to downplay maiming and killing is all too common among apologists for Islamic barbarism.

It isn’t necessary to say this among rational people, but insidiously those of unsound mind have got themselves a public platform. So, to be crystal; young girls at a concert having their bodies peppered with bolts and nails, people being mowed down with trucks, or blown up, or shot, or stabbed, or decapitated, is not remotely in the same ballpark as accidents or illnesses, however more frequently such accidents and illnesses take lives.

If you don’t get that, you are an idiot; and a particularly useful one. In other words, you are an apologist for the Religion of Peace™; which, with your help, is busying itself undermining Western civilisation.

And replacing it with what? With nothing good is the right answer. Speaking of Islam (“Mohammedanism”) Mr Churchill was unflattering to say the least. “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world,” he wrote in 1899, after listing its litany of defects. Was he prescient? Was he right?

Social Security Fraudster Cuts Ankle Monitor, Goes On the Run By Rick Moran

A lawyer who ran a $550 million Social Security disability fraud scheme cut off the ankle bracelet monitoring his movements and is now on the run, according to the FBI.

Eric C. Conn (yeah, that’s his real name) pleaded guilty last month to bilking the government out of a potential $550 million in Social Security disability benefits. He has left in dire straits hundreds of his clients who will now have to reapply for benefits.

This was no nickel-and-dime operation. Conn had a stable of dozens of doctors who made the false determinations of eligibility and had a Social Security law judge in his pocket to approve the cases.

Washington Times:

“I’m very concerned for Eric,” said Scott White, Mr. Conn’s lawyer, in a statement to The Washington Times. “It’s a defense attorney’s worst nightmare as not only has he placed himself at very real risk, but law enforcement and the public.”

“Its tragic because by accepting responsibility and being willing to testify he had the opportunity to restart his life,” Mr. White said. “Just very sad and we pray he snaps out of it and turns himself in. Its not too late to fix this if he does.”

Conn was expected to testify against Alfred B. Adkins, a psychologist who would rubber-stamp the disability application medical reports that Conn would then send to the administrative law judge, David B. Daugherty.

Daugherty pleaded guilty last month and is also awaiting sentencing.

Conn was well known throughout eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, where he called himself “Mr. Social Security” and promised an uncanny ability to win disability benefits for his clients. He even had a crew of “Conn Hotties” — young women he dispatched to community events in skin-tight T-shirts that advertised his law firm and its phone number, 1-800-232-HURT.

After the scheme was reported in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, Conn began to destroy documents detailing the fraud, and even had one of his law firm employees falsify a video to try to get a whistleblower fired by discrediting her, according to court documents.

Courts have ordered Mr. Conn and his law firm to pay more than $36 million in restitution, damages and penalties.

As Conn was indicted, fear spread through the Kentucky and West Virginia communities that had relied on him, as Social Security sent out notices canceling benefits. CONTINUE AT SITE

Counter-terror Lessons from America’s Civil War By David P. Goldman

The essay below first appeared a year ago in The Asia Times, under the headline, “Why the terrorists are winning the intelligence war.” There’s a tried and true American approach to suppressing terrorism, and it worked quite well during Gen. Sherman’s 1863 Kentucky campaign and Gen. Phil Sheridan’s subsequent reduction of the Shenandoah Valley. We don’t have to be particularly smart; we merely have to do some disgusting things. Sherman and Sheridan suppressed sniping at Union soldiers by Confederate civilians by burning the towns (just the towns, not the townsfolk) that sheltered them. In other words, they forced collective responsibility upon a hostile population, a doctrine that in peacetime is entirely repugnant, but that in wartime becomes unavoidable. By contrast, the peacetime procedure of turning petty criminals into police snitches has backfired terribly. No doubt we will learn that the perpetrators of tonight’s horror at London Bridge were known to police, like the Manchester Arena suicide bomber and most of the perpetrators of large-scale terrorist acts in Europe during the past several years. (Update: “At Least One London Bridge Terrorist Was a ‘Known Wolf'”) The remedy is time-tested and straightforward. We merely require the will to apply it.

Why the terrorists are winning the intelligence war

Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.

The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015.
The terrorists, in other words, are adding insult to injury. By deploying police snitches as suicide attackers, terrorists assert their moral superiority and power over western governments. The message may be lost on the western public, whose security agencies and media do their best to obscure it, but it is well understood among the core constituencies of the terrorist groups: the superiority of Islam turns around the depraved criminals whom the western police send to spy on us, and persuades them to become martyrs for the cause of Islam.

These attacks, in other words, are designed to impress the Muslim public as much as they are intended to horrify the western public. In so many words, the terrorists tell Muslims that western police agencies cannot protect them. If they cooperate with the police they will be found out and punished. The West fears the power of Islam: it evinces such fear by praising Islam as a religion of peace, by squelching dissent in the name of fighting supposed Islamophobia, and by offering concessions and apologies to Muslims. Ordinary Muslims live in fear of the terror networks, which have infiltrated their communities and proven their ability to turn the efforts of western security services against them. They are less likely to inform on prospective terrorists and more likely to aid them by inaction.

The terrorists, in short, are winning the intelligence war, because they have shaped the environment in which intelligence is gathered and traded. But that is how intelligence wars always proceed: spies switch sides and tell their stories because they want to be with the winner. ISIS and al-Qaeda look like winners in the eyes of western Muslim populations after humiliating the security services of the West.

As a result, western European Muslims fear the terrorists more than they fear the police. The West will remain vulnerable to mass terror attacks until the balance of fear shifts in the other direction.

The UK and Jihad By Rachel Ehrenfeld

As with the car and stabbing attacks on the Westminster Bridge on March 22, 2017, media reports on Saturday night highlighted the terrorists’ “new tactic” of using cars to mow down a large number of pedestrians, and knives to stab as many as they can. There is nothing new about this tactic. As with other forms of terrorism, the Palestinians used them first on Israeli civilians. Despite decades of advancing Palestinian terrorist tactics in Israel (suicide belts and vests, and car bombs with nails and screws, car mowing pedestrians, and stabbing, to name but a few), the political leadership of most Western nations seemed oblivious to the emerging patterns of Islamic terrorism. They failed to recognize their jihad against Israel for the deadly contagious disease they spread. This has been going on for decades.

Instead of pressuring the Palestinians to stop, Arab and Western nations have been rewarding the Palestinians who employ terrorists and fund their activities with billions of dollars while pressuring Israel for concessions. Incredibly, since the rise of global Islamic radicalism, the Palestinians have successfully managed to falsely argue that the creation of the state of Palestine, an Islamic terrorist state, would somehow influence other radical Islamic groups to give up their jihad. The Saudis and the Gulf States that have been funding the Palestinian jihadists know better, but are finding it difficult to change their longtime habits, they apparently encouraged President Trump to renege on his promise to recognize Jerusalem as the legitimate capital of Israel by relocating the American embassy to the city, while legitimizing the Palestinian leaderships that fund terrorism. (The Saudi agreement to purchase some $400 billion worth of U.S. weapons and technology has probably helped their appeal).

The Saturday night Islamic terrorist car and knives attack in East London should signal the end of multiculturalism in England. But don’t hold your breath.

For many decades, radical Islamist ideology was allowed to flourish in England, mostly under the guise of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli activities. Those, however, allowed the expansion of Islamic networks with Saudi and Gulf funding of mosques, madrassas, and Islamic centers and with Muslim Brotherhood political guiding laid down a global network. After the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks on America and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan supported by the United Kingdom and Canada, Islamic organizations in Britain, including the Palestinians, have increased their activities, raising money for future widows and orphans and expanded their base through the dawa.

Law enforcement officials privately voiced their concern but there was no political will to confront the problem. Not even after fifteen Islamic terrorist attacks beginning on July 7, 2005, on London’s transportation systems killing 52 and wounding many others.

The threat of Islamic takeover has been clear to many and mostly ignored by British politicians. A few, like Baroness Cox, protested the imposition of Sharia courts in England. In March 2014 she described the Islamic modus operandi: Sharia law, imported from theocracies like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, began to be used here in a strictly limited form, dealing mainly with narrow issues like Islamic financial contracts. But as the Muslim population has grown, and the pervasive creed of multiculturalism has become ever more powerful, so Sharia law has rapidly grown in influence within some communities. ‘There are now estimated to be no fewer than 85 Sharia courts across the country — from London and Manchester to Bradford and Nuneaton. They operate mainly from mosques, settling financial and family disputes according to [Islamic} religious principles.” The government of David Cameron, like that of Tony Blair before, paid little attention and refused to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been collecting funds for Hamas for decades.

DANIEL PIPES ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SIX DAY WAR JUNE 5, 1967

Israel’s military triumph over three enemy states in June 1967 is the most outstandingly successful war of all recorded history. The Six-Day War was also deeply consequential for the Middle East, establishing the permanence of the Jewish state, dealing a death-blow to pan-Arab nationalism, and (ironically) worsening Israel’s place in the world because of its occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Focusing on this last point: how did a spectacular battlefield victory translate into problems that still torment Israel today? Because it stuck Israelis in an unwanted role they cannot escape.

First, Israeli leftists and foreign do-gooders wrongly blame Israel’s government for not making sufficient efforts to leave the West Bank, as though greater efforts could have found a true peace partner. In this, critics ignore rejectionism, the attitude of refusing to accept anything Zionist that has dominated Palestinian politics for the past century. Its founding figure, Amin al-Husseini, collaborated with Hitler and even had a key role in formulating the Final Solution; recent manifestations include the “anti-normalization” and the boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movements. Rejectionism renders Israeli concessions useless, even counterproductive, because Palestinians respond to them with more hostility and violence.

Second, Israel faces a conundrum of geography and demography in the West Bank. While its strategists want to control the highlands, its nationalists want to build towns, and its religious want to possess Jewish holy sites, Israel’s continued ultimate rule over a West Bank population of 1.7 million mostly hostile Arabic-speaking, Muslim Palestinians takes an immense toll both domestically and internationally. Various schemes to keep the land and defang an enemy people – by integrating them, buying them off, dividing them, pushing them out, or finding another ruler for them – have all come to naught.

The Israelis vastly increased the size of Jerusalem (the lined area) on unifying it.

Third, the Israelis in 1967 took three unilateral steps in Jerusalem that created future time bombs: vastly expanding the city’s borders, annexing it, and offering Israeli citizenship to the city’s new Arab residents. In combination, these led to a long-term demographic and housing competition that Palestinians are winning, jeopardizing the Jewish nature of the Jews’ historic capital. Worse, 300,000 Arabs could at any time choose to take Israeli citizenship.

These problems raise the question: Had Israeli leaders in 1967 foreseen the current problems, what might they have done differently in the West Bank and Jerusalem? They could have:

Made the battle against rejectionism their highest priority through unremitting censorship of every aspect of life in the West Bank and Jerusalem, severe punishments for incitement, and an intense effort to imbue a more positive attitude toward Israel.
Invited back in the Jordanian authorities, rulers of the West Bank since 1949, to run that area’s (but not Jerusalem’s) internal affairs, leaving the Israel Defense Forces with only the burden to protect borders and Jewish populations.
Extended the borders of Jerusalem only to the Old City and to uninhabited areas.
Thought through the full ramifications of building Jewish towns on the West Bank.

Defeating Extremist Islam – A Western Imperative by Saied Shoaaib

The infiltration of this ideology is reminiscent of the spread of communism and should be defeated similarly — not with weapons, but by exposing its true nature and providing an alternative. The West first must abandon, however, the notion that radical Islam is an internal Muslim issue, any more than communism was a “Russian issue” that “the Russians” needed to solve.

In addition, the views of liberal Muslim scholars, who reject the whole premise of extremist, political Islam, should be supported and widely circulated.

Finally, imams in Western countries must be held to the same standard as members of other professions. They should be required to receive occupational licenses, based on criteria determined by the state, in conjunction with modern Muslims seeking a peaceful life and the ability to integrate into their societies without fear of repercussions at the hands of fundamentalists.

Many imams in the West — citizens of the United States, Canada and other countries — use their pulpits to promote practices that go against democratic values and ultimately lead to terrorism.

Some call on their flock to kill Jews, Christians and “infidel” Muslims who do not adhere either to the strictest interpretation of Islam. Others justify the marriage of grown men to nine-year-old girls. There are those, too, who defend the spousal “right” of husbands to rape their wives.

Contrary to some claims, the type of clerics who preach murder and sexual abuse in North American and European mosques do not suffer from poor socioeconomic conditions and are not mentally unbalanced. Rather, they are loyal followers of an interpretation of Islam that envisions the establishment of a worldwide caliphate governed by sharia law. They deeply believe that the only way to enter Allah’s paradise is to live by the letter of the Quran and the Hadith (the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammed).

It is from such imams, most of whom are graduates of renowned Islamic institutions in the Middle East and Asia, that Muslims in the West have been receiving guidance. Key among these institutions is Al-Azhar, a Cairo-based Sunni center for higher learning, attended by students from all over the world. Its curriculum includes extremist content, such as tenets that killing “apostates” is a Divine obligation; that it is a Muslim’s duty to humiliate female prisoners through sexual abuse; that adulterers should be stoned to death, and that Christians and Jews are the “enemy of God.”

Many imams in the West are graduates of Cairo’s Al-Azhar, a Sunni center for higher learning. Its curriculum includes extremist content, such as tenets that killing “apostates” is a Divine obligation; that it is a Muslim’s duty to humiliate female prisoners through sexual abuse; that adulterers should be stoned to death, and that Christians and Jews are the “enemy of God.” (Image source: Diego Delso/Wikimedia Commons)

Whenever confronted by critics in the West calling them to task for spreading such violent teachings, many imams respond by cloaking their real objectives, saying that the texts should be read in the context of the time that they were written, and by highlighting peaceful and tolerant Quranic verses. Other clerics — those who do not know how to tailor their rhetoric to Western ears — openly admit their religious ideology’s true intentions.