RUTHFULLY YOURS

“In Western countries, dawa aims both to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and to bring about more extreme views among existing Muslims. The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with strict sharia.” — Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her book, The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It.

The ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic state in the United States could hardly be much clearer. The pretense of caring for “diversity” and “inclusion” that ICNA displays on its public website cannot be characterized as anything other than an attempt at dissimulation, as is the stated goal of “establishing a place for Islam in America.”

If Western leadership is unable to fathom the danger posed by organizations such as Tablighi Jamaat, iERA and ICNA, and, according to critics, others such as CAIR and ISNA — let alone do something about it, instead of endlessly obsessing over “Islamophobia” — Qaradawi could be proven right.

While the West is preoccupied with fighting “hate speech”, “Islamophobia” and white supremacist groups, it appears more than willing to ignore the cultivation of Muslim hate speech and supremacist attitudes towards non-Muslims.

It is a cultivation that occurs especially in the process of dawa, the Muslim practice of Islamic outreach or proselytizing, the results of which seem to have been on show this week in a downtown New York terror attack. The terrorist, Sayfullo Saipov, originally from Uzbekistan, was apparently only radicalized after he moved to the United States. The mosque he attended in New Jersey had been under surveillance by the NYPD since 2005. A 2016 U.S.-commissioned report said Uzbek nationals were “most likely to radicalize while working as migrants abroad,” according to the U.S. State Department.

On the surface, dawa, or outreach — in person or online — appears to be a benign missionary activity, about converting non-Muslims. Legal in Western societies, it is allowed to proceed undisturbed by the media or government. Dawa generally attracts little attention, except when members of an outreach organization suddenly turn up in the headlines as full-fledged jihadists.

Politicians and the media in the West seem to prefer viewing Islam solely as a religion and not as a political system that, according to critics, seeks to impose its own laws and regulations, sharia, on the world.

According to the Somali-born Muslim dissident and author, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, however, in her recent book, The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It:

“The term ‘dawa’ refers to activities carried out by Islamists to win adherents and enlist them in a campaign to impose sharia law on all societies. Dawa is not the Islamic equivalent of religious proselytizing, although it is often disguised as such… [It] includes proselytization, but extends beyond that. In Western countries, dawa aims both to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and to bring about more extreme views among existing Muslims. The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with strict sharia.”

Glazov Gang: Halloween Horror – What “Allahu Akbar” Really Means.
What the establishment media doesn’t want you to know.

WATCH VIDEO: CLICK HERE.

There is not a Bible, Jewish or Christian, containing such incendiary commentary as populates page after page of ‘The Noble Qur’an’, which for four years has preached to the faithful in Canberra Airport’s prayer room. The ideology it promotes is violent jihad. It is a book to start a war.

The Saudis, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt recently cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and imposed sanctions, accusing the Qataris of supporting terrorism. The Saudis have demanded that Qatar close Al-Jazeera and cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Islamic State. Qatar’s long-standing and well-known support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which aims to unify Muslim nations under an Islamic caliphate and has networks of supporters across the Middle East, is now perceived as a serious threat its neighbours.

This is the pot calling the kettle black, for Saudi Arabia itself has a long record of exporting Islamic radicalism. Among its most notable exports are millions of Korans in translation, which, through commentary (mainly in footnotes) and accompanying materials, incite Muslims to wage violent jihad to establish an Islamic state.

Among the Saudis’ exported Korans is an English-language edition, The Noble Qur’an, which can be found in mosques, prayer rooms and meeting places around the world. Anyone who applies to the Saudi embassy in Canberra will be sent a copy gratis.

The Noble Qur’an can be found in the musallah or prayer room of Canberra’s airport. What is apparently the same edition, with “AIRPORT MUSALLAH” written in black marker pen on the page ends, has been sitting there for the past four years, ever since the new airport was built. The Noble Qur’an is also publicly available in other “multi-faith” spaces that have been springing up in institutions across Australia in recent years, in universities, hospitals and other public places.

Canberra airport’s Noble Qur’an was printed by the order of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who ruled from 2005 to 2015. It includes the Arabic text, and, side-by-side, the English translation by Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan. There is also an endorsement by Shaikh Abdul-Aziz ibn Baz, Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia from 1993 to 1999, and a foreword by Shaikh Salih ibn Abdul-Aziz al-Shaikh, the current Saudi Minister for Islamic Affairs. After the Koranic text there are a hundred pages or so of appendices, and under the text there are footnotes, which offer a commentary. There are also frequent interpolations in brackets to help clarify the meaning in translation.

Marked “not for sale”, vast numbers of The Noble Qur’an printed by the Saudis are exported around the world. The King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur’an in Medina has printed over one hundred million Korans in thirty-nine languages since it was established in 1985. The handsomely gilded Noble Qur’an is distributed as part of the Saudis’ global da’wa or effort to propagate Islam. It appears to target two kinds of readers.

First, The Noble Qur’an seeks to enlist Muslims in violent jihad against non-Muslims, to establish an Islamic caliphate. Second, it aims to engage with Christians. The longest essay in the appendices is an argument that Jesus was a prophet of Islam, and commentary throughout The Noble Qur’an—in the explanatory footnotes, the interpolations in brackets and the appendices—challenges and “corrects” Christian teachings.

Sometimes it is said that when people use verses from the Koran to justify violence, they have taken them out of context. This criticism cannot be applied to The Noble Qur’an, which follows a traditional Islamic method of interpreting the Koran in the light of Muhammad’s example and teachings, known as the Sunna. In keeping with this tradition, citations from the Sunna supply the great bulk of the explanatory footnotes.

On non-Muslims

The footnotes in The Noble Qur’an are repeatedly derogatory of non-Muslims.

For example, a note to Sura 10:19 (p. 272, fn1) quotes Muhammad to say that human beings are born Muslims, and are “converted” away from Islam by non-Muslim parents. For Jewish or Christian parents to raise their child in their own faith is like mutilating them:

Every child is born on al-Fitrah, but his parents convert him to Judaism or Christianity … An animal gives birth to a perfect baby animal. Do you find it mutilated?

The Arabic phrase al-fitrah refers to the doctrine that the innate state of human beings is to be a Muslim.

The Arabic text of the Koran calls non-Muslims unclean (Sura 9:28), using a derogatory word (najas). The footnote to this verse explains about non-Muslims that:

Their impurity is spiritual and physical: spiritual because they don’t believe in Allah’s Oneness and in his Prophet Muhammad … and physical, because they lack personal hygiene (filthy as regards urine, stools and [menstrual] blood). [p. 248, fn 2]

German authorities have justified their failure to inform the public about the scale of the problem by citing the privacy rights of the criminal offenders.

Experts have long warned that the practice of housing migrants from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in tight accommodations is the ideal breeding ground for violence.

“A maintenance man who worked in a refugee shelter reported ‘mafia-like’ conditions. Refugees were required to pay for access to the electrical sockets there.” — Der Tagesspiegel.

Violent crime, including murder, rape and physical assault, is running rampant in German asylum shelters, according to a leaked intelligence report. German authorities, who appear powerless to stem the rising tide of violence, have justified their failure to inform the public about the scale of the problem by citing the privacy rights of the criminal offenders.

The report, leaked to the newspaper Bild, was prepared for Markus Ulbig, the interior minister of Saxony, where more than 40,000 migrants are being housed in refugee shelters. According to the report, there were ten murders or attempted murders at Saxon migrant shelters in 2016, as well as 960 physical assaults, 671 cases of grievous bodily injury, seven rapes, 10 sexual assaults of children and 268 cases of drug trafficking. The report also cited hundreds of incidents of theft, coercion, arson, brawls and attacks on police officers.

The violence at Saxon migrant shelters continued during the first six months of 2017: there were more than 500 physical assaults, several homicides and hundreds of reported thefts.

Experts have long warned that the practice of housing migrants from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in tight accommodations is the ideal breeding ground for violence.

In Germany as a whole, around 40,000 crimes — nearly 150 each day — were reported in refugee shelters during the first nine months of 2016, according to another leaked report by the Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA). These crimes included 17,200 physical assaults, 6,500 thefts, 510 sexual assaults and 139 murders or attempted murders.

Observers say this is just the tip of the iceberg, as most crimes go unreported out of a fear of revenge. The BKA does not make public its data about migrant shelter criminality and there have been no additional leaks of such information. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that migrant-on-migrant crime is endemic across Germany.In Saxony-Anhalt, for instance, a parliamentary inquiry into a stabbing between Afghans at an asylum shelter in Bernburg revealed that migrants have assaulted other migrants at shelters across the state, including in Aschersleben, Ballenstedet, Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Burg, Dessau-Rosslau, Eckartsberg, Genthin, Haldensleben, Halle, Harbke, Kemberg, Leuna, Lutherstadt Eisleben, Magdeburg, Naumburg, Oranienbaum, Oschersleben, Salzwedel, Sangerhausen, Seegebiet Mansfelder Land, Stassfurt, Wanzleben, Weissenfels, Wolmirstedt, Zeitz and Zerbst. The stabbings involved migrants from Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Benin, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, India, Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Macedonia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Somalia, Syria, Turkey and Ukraine.

Given North Korea’s nuclear lunacy, what exactly are the rules, formal or implicit, about which nations may have nuclear weapons and which may not?

It is complicated.

In the free-for-all environment of the 1940s and 1950s, the original nuclear club included only those countries with the technological know-how, size, and money to build nukes. Those realities meant that up until the early 1960s, only Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States had nuclear capabilities.

Members of this small club did not worry that many other nations would make such weapons, because it seemed far too expensive and difficult for most.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States adhered to an unspoken rule that their losing Axis enemies of World War II — Germany, Italy, and Japan — should not have nuclear weapons. Despite their financial and scientific ability to obtain them, all three former Axis powers had too much recent historical baggage to be allowed weapons of mass destruction. That tacit agreement apparently still remains.

The Soviet Union and the United States also informally agreed during the Cold War that their own dependent allies that had the ability to go nuclear — including eastern-bloc nations, most Western European countries, Australia, and Canada — would not. Instead, they would depend on their superpower patrons for nuclear deterrence.

By the 1970s, realities had changed again. Large and/or scientifically sophisticated nations such as China (1964), Israel (1967), and India (1974) went nuclear. Often, such countries did so with the help of pro-Western or pro-Soviet patrons and sponsors. The rest of the world apparently shrugged, believing it was inevitable that such nations would obtain nuclear weapons.

The next round of expansion of the nuclear club, however, was far sloppier and more dangerous. Proliferation hinged on whether poorer and more unstable nations could get away with enriching uranium or acquiring plutonium in secret.

Some nations, such as Iraq and Syria, let on that they were developing nuclear weapons and were stopped by preemptive military strikes. Others, including South Africa, Ukraine, and Libya, were persuaded to halt their nuclear projects.

Pakistan was the rare rogue that managed to hide its nuclear enrichment, shocking the world by testing a bomb in 1998. Pakistan rightly assumed that once a nation proves its nuclear capability, it is deemed too dangerous to walk it back through disarmament.

Nonetheless, until the official nuclearization of North Korea in 2006, the nuclear club remained small (eight nations) and was thought to be manageable. Why?

First, those nuclear countries that were relatively transparent and democratic (Britain, France, India, Israel, and the United States) were deemed unlikely to start a nuclear war.

Second, the advanced but autocratic nuclear nations (China and Russia) were thought to have too much at stake in globalized trade and national prosperity ever to start a lose/lose nuclear war.

Third, any unstable rogue nuclear nation (Pakistan) was assumed to be deterred and held in check by a nearby nuclear rival (India).

The nuclear capability of dictatorial North Korea (and likely soon, theocratic Iran) poses novel dangers far beyond the simple arithmetic of “the more nuclear nations, the more likely a nuclear war.”

Neither North Korea nor Iran is democratic. Neither is a stable country.

President Trump once again has enraged the left by suggesting, with colorful language no less, that NFL players who kneel during the national anthem should be fired by their teams. Progressives criticized Trump’s lack of presidential decorum, racial insensitivity, and disrespect of the players’ First Amendment rights—and the head of the NFL defended the players and rebuked the President for his tweet demanding the players be fired. At the same time, declining attendance at NFL stadiums and lower ratings for televised games suggest that many Americans are unhappy with privileged athletes disrespecting the country’s flag.

Though anti-patriotism is having a cultural moment in the United States, disliking and disrespecting one’s own country is nothing new. The origins of modern anti-patriotism lie in the continuing influence of Marxism on Western culture.

Marxist and socialist political movements intrinsically disdain patriotism for several reasons. As a political theory that transcends nations and peoples, Marxism is the natural enemy of particular ethnic or national identities and loyalties. These attachments create a “false consciousness” that obscures the true engine of history: the ownership of the means of production and the permanent conflict between workers and bosses. Pride in the success and power of the British Empire, for example, distracted the ordinary worker from the oppression under which he suffered, and which forestalled the collective ownership of the economy, and the egalitarian utopia promised by Marxist theory.

The idea that patriotism camouflages the injustice of capitalism became increasingly widespread in England before World War I. In 1907, J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study influenced Vladimir Lenin’s 1916 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Hobson reduced Victorian imperialism to what he called “economic parasitism,” or the exploitation of the labor, resources, and markets of colonial peoples. War was the inevitable outcome of imperialism, as competing empires fought over control of foreign markets and resources. The belief that World War I was driven by capitalist bosses and fought for the sake of patriotism and nationalism reinforced this interpretation. Loss of faith in the empire created a loss of faith in England.

By the 1930s, such attitudes of “unwarranted self-abasement,” as Winston Churchill called them, were common among the British intelligentsia. The newspaper cartoonist David Low created Colonel Blimp, a caricature of the blustering, xenophobic, patriotic imperialist. The poet Wilfred Owen, who served in France during World War I and was killed a week before the armistice was signed, called patriotism “The Old Lie” in the most famous piece of literature to come out of the war, “Dulce et Decorum,” an ironic reference to the Roman poet Horace’s famous line, “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” The popular writer H. G. Wells protested against the “teaching of patriotic histories” that promote a “poisonous war-making tradition,” and novelist J. B. Priestly called patriotism “a mighty force, chiefly used for evil.”

The influential Bloomsbury group of writers, artists, and intellectuals were instrumental in propagating such attitudes and making them status symbols of intellectual sophistication. The draft-dodging Lytton Strachey attacked Victorian imperialist heroes like Florence Nightingale and General Charles “Chinese” Gordon in his 1917 book Eminent Victorians. In 1939, as England was facing down Nazism, the novelist E. M. Forster epitomized this fashionable set of attitudes when he said, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” (emphases in original). By 1941, anti-patriotism was so prevalent that socialist George Orwell wrote disapprovingly, “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.”

This animus against patriotism among the intellectual elite survived World War II, and became even more widespread in the postwar period. One factor was the left’s analysis of the war, which did not distinguish between the extreme ethno-nationalism of Nazism and fascism, and the liberal democratic nationalism that had destroyed those regimes. Patriotism thus became associated with Hitler and Mussolini, who exploited it in order to gain support. Nationalism was redefined as diseased patriotism, as in Charles de Gaulle’s statement, “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

Among leftists, patriotism has always been considered dangerous for another reason. Liberal democratic nations––especially the United States––were successful in achieving all of the social, economic, and political boons communism had promised but failed to deliver. As French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote in 1957, leftists have “a grudge against the United States mainly because the latter had succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency toward uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought up intellectual has been taught to despise.”

October 24th marked the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia. The rise of Communism gave birth to the world’s deadliest ideology – far worse than Nazism and Fascism, in terms of the number of people subjected to imprisonment, terror and death. Yet does the world associate Communism with evil commensurate with its history? I think not. In the Soviet Union alone, subtracting the number of Soviet soldiers and citizens killed in World II, an estimated twenty million were killed by Stalin. About forty-five million were killed in China by Mao Zedong. Between seven and ten million Ukrainians died during the Soviet-inspired “Holodomor,” in 1932-33. Approximately two million Cambodians – almost a third of the population – died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Millions were killed in North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, East Germany, Rumania, Bulgaria, Ethiopia and other places. Communism killed as many people as died in the two world wars of the last century. As Bruce Thornton, classicist and Hoover research fellow recently put it, its history is a “…road to utopia [that] runs over mountains of corpses.” Today, it is not Communism that concerns us, but its half-brother Socialism. Despite its failure in places like Venezuela and in Europe where unrestrained Muslim immigration has created segregated neighborhoods and increased government dependency, it has become popular in the U.S. among followers of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

During the month, elections were held in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, and a re-run, in Africa (Kenya). Elections in Austria and the Czech Republic moved both countries to the right, meaning people are still concerned about terrorism, immigration and economic growth. Sebastian Kurz will become, at age 31, Europe’s youngest leader, when he assumes the Chancellorship of Austria. In the Czech Republic, Andrei Babis, former finance minister, populist and billionaire businessman, won a “thumping” victory, as Prime Minister-designate. The Catalans declared independence, and Spain’s parliament granted Prime Minister Rajoy powers to enforce union. Catalonia has simmered a long time. In 2006, Madrid promised the region increased autonomy. Four years later – amidst recession and financial crisis – they reneged on that promise. This is a story of disillusionment with bureaucratic and distant administrative governments run by elites. While immigration was pivotal in Brexit, the bigger problem is politicians who are deaf to the people they represent and who are unaffected by the policies they promote. We are witnessing a backlash against hypocrisy, arrogance and authoritarianism, in Brussels, Madrid and other capitals.

In Japan, Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party won its third landslide victory. Abe, an ally of the U.S. and a friend of President Trump, is an advocate for more defense spending. He benefitted from North Korea’s militant rhetoric and an improved economy. In Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif returned as Prime Minister and as head of the Pakistan Muslim League two months after being disqualified on charges of corruption. In Argentina, President Mauricio Macri’s Republican Proposal Party increased its seats in both the legislature and the senate, while former president Christina Kirchner’s Justicialist Party lost seats. A re-run of August’s race in Kenya was won again by current president Uhuru Kenyatta.

U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces took back the Al-Omar oil fields – Syria’s most productive – from ISIS forces, fields that had been captured in 2014. Elsewhere, Islamic terrorists persisted in their work. Almost 400 people died in Somalia, when separate truck and car bombs exploded, the work of al-Shabaab militants. In Marseilles, two women were stabbed to death by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The assailant was shot dead. At least seventeen died in Cameroon, in two provinces bordering Nigeria. In all, over 700 people died during the month at the hands of Islamic extremists. Good news came toward the end of the month, when 32-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmon said his country would return to “moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world.” It should be remembered that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens.