“You’ve got to start shutting down the mosques that are … practicing sedition,” warned British politician Paul Weston during a session at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. “You’ve got to stop them speaking in Urdu. You’ve got to put spies in there to see what they’re saying.”
CPAC is a mainstream, Republican-allied political conference, and this year’s featured guests included House Speaker Paul Ryan and GOP presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
But the conference also included a number of speakers who fed attendees tales of Muslims conquering Europe, infiltrating our schools, and ending Western civilization as we know it.
It began with a plenary session featuring Iowa Republican congressman Steve King, along with leading Islamophobes Jim Hanson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
King warned of “radical Islamists in this country” entering the country illegally. He rattled off a list of Muslim-majority countries, claiming that we have “59,000 people from countries other than Mexico … illegally coming to this country. … They’re coming here to do harm.”
Hanson is the executive vice president of Frank Gaffney’s notoriously Islamophobic Center for Security Policy. He pointed to American Muslim organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Muslim Student Association chapters at universities, saying, “These guys have a plan. In their own words, they call it ‘civilization jihad.’”
Hanson said it’s “much tougher to see because they use our own freedoms and liberties against us to try and destroy our own culture from within. That’s where you see things like ‘be Muslim for a day at school,’ where they have school kids reciting a Muslim prayer that’s used for conversion to Islam. They slipped that one past a school board. Those are people who are sharing the same goals as ISIS, as al Qaeda, as Boko Haram.”
Ali, a fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard, has worked hard to reframe herself as a moderate reformer of Islam after previously comparing the religion to Nazism and calling for war on the faith itself. But she didn’t distance herself from Hanson’s likening of Muslim American schoolchildren and vicious terrorists. “I feel like literally everything has been said,” she started, complimenting her fellow panelists.
After Muhammad founded his religion in Mecca, he went to Medina and “developed a philosophy,” she said. “And that doctrine of Muhammad in Medina is the antithesis of the idea of America.”
Gaffney’s group also organized additional smaller panels afterward. At one titled “Countering the Global Jihad,” Hanson and Gaffney were joined by Weston and another far-right European thinker, Lars Hedegaard.
Weston and Hedegaard’s role was to convince attendees that Europe was being dominated by Muslim invaders and that if America did not act, it would be next.
“The English have taken on the teachings of the feminist groups and we no longer have enough children,” claimed Weston, whose claim to fame is being arrested at an anti-Muslim demonstration for blocking the steps of a public building and engaging in incitement, which the right-wing tabloid press later claimed was an arrest solely for quoting Winston Churchill. “The Islamic immigrants coming in are averaging four children per family.” He went on to claim that some families are producing 16 children because Muslim men may take up to four wives.
He claimed that Sweden was “literally a lost country,” and now the “rape capital of the world,” thanks to its policies allowing in Muslim migrants. (In 2009, about 5 percent of Swedes were identified as Muslims.)
Hedegaard, an anti-Muslim writer from Denmark, was shot at in an attempted assassination in 2013. The identity of the attacker remains unknown, but the country’s Muslim organizations immediately rallied to Hedegaard’s defense, arguing that his right to speech should not be impugned.
This show of solidarity apparently had little impact on his thinking. “Europe as we knew it is just a few years away from a complete breakdown,” he told the CPAC audience. The culprits are “millions of so-called refugees.” And he predicted “This will end in breakdown, this will end in warfare, this will end in bloodshed.”
Fear was the order of the day. One member of the audience, identifying himself as a resident of North Carolina, spoke of his fears of traveling with his family to Europe: “They always had a dream of going visiting the queen and London and all that kind of stuff. Not no more! It’s just not worth it for them to go through that and worry about that.”
Another audience member imagined warfare between Muslim migrants and the West: “I don’t think they’re going to totally roll over. And I don’t see, given our Second Amendment, I don’t see us rolling over.”
Shortly before the event, I asked Gaffney about his theory that Dearborn, Michigan, is a “no-go zone” for non-Muslims. Revealingly, Gaffney admitted that he has never even been to Dearborn. When I asked how a city with many bars is somehow off-limits for non-Muslims, Gaffney claimed I was interrupting him and cut off the interview.
CPAC 2016 is not a Donald Trump rally, or a David Duke convention. In fact, Trump is the only GOP presidential contender who didn’t attend. The sponsor list includes mainstream right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Examiner, the National Review, Log Cabin Republicans, Young America’s Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute.
Yet it featured speakers who were touting civilizational war against the planet’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Where are the moderate Republicans?
Top photo: Attendees casting votes in the CPAC 2016 Straw Poll.
Where were the moderate Republicans? Mostly not invited – this is the “Conservative” Republican shindig, attracting the folks who are farther to the right-wing than the moderates. If it’s at all mainstream, it’s because that side of the GOP has been trying to take power from the corporate wing, and because it doesn’t invite the crazier people from the really far right wing.
The problem is US$lavery. Try paying fairly for the mohameds oil for your pov? No mohamed-no oil? Why are these people leaving their millenial homes?
I feel it would be very instructive and illuminating to track and discover how the parasitic Frank Gaffney is ‘compensated’ for his ‘services’. Who are the parties that pay his salary? The Intercept is up to the task.
CPAC is not mainstream Republican. Ron Paul won the straw poll there multiple times.
Stopped at “deja vu all over again.”
Whoops, second line was meant for another article!
Zaid, above:
I, of course, wouldn’t have had the jerk arrested for quoting Churchill, nor would I have had Churchill arrested for the original writing:
And, I would have found it appropriate for someone who slapped Churchill or Weston silly for such arrogant and offensive stupidity to be charged with misdemeanor assault and battery. But I would have made a contribution to the defense fund and made sure the assailant’s family’s rent was paid if a custodial sentence were imposed.
Vile bastards, both of them.
The word ‘moderate’ and the word ‘republican’ cannot be brought together anymore. It is oxymoronic to even imply such a union!
Thanks for your contribution. Let me guess: you’re not a Republican and for some reason you wish no one else were either.
A little more background on Frank Gaffney would help readers understand the neoconservative agenda – a good source is his profile on rightweb. Some highlights – Frank Gaffney :
“. . . [His} views on U.S. foreign policy were shaped during the formative years of the neoconservative political faction in the early 1970s . . ”
“. . . was a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, a neocon-led letterhead group formed in 1997. . .”
“. . . is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), the hawkish anti-communist Cold War-era group that was revived after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to champion the war on terror. . .”
If you look at his background in the Reagan era, it was all about trying to block the nuclear test ban treaty and undermine the Reagan-Gorbachev armaments reductions talks, alongside other tweakers like Richard Perle and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Ed “Dr. Strangelove” Teller, along with backing “Star Wars” nuclear space warfare plans, all while howling about the mad fanatical communists who were infiltrating America and putting us all at risk – gosh, sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Just replace “communist” threat with “Islamist” threat, wind up his clockwork, and off he goes.
These kind of people don’t do real analysis, they just try to find threats and raise fear in order to justify their peculiarly rabid brand of foreign policy – incidentally, Richard Rhode’s book, Arsenals of Folly, does a great job of exposing their behaviors and practices during the Reagan years – these are people who, if ever in power, would literally be very likely to start a nuclear war.
One thing’s not in doubt, however – their ludicrous Middle Eastern foreign policy prescription, which was adopted by GW Bush, has been an epic disaster – their plan, recall, was to first invade Iraq (using lies about non-existent WMDs as an excuse), establish it as a puppet state, then move on to invasions of Syria and Iran, installing puppet regimes right across the Middle East and into Central Asia as well, so that all the region’s oil would be under American control – a wild-eyed neocolonial fantasy written by idiots in Washington who’d lived their whole lives in far-right ivory towers. When it all went sour, as began almost immediately after the Iraq invasion, they resorted to sadistic torture in an effort to crush the uprisings, while also presiding over grossly corrupt contracting scandals with their business partners, such as Halliburton, Kellogg Brown Root, etc.
It was one of the most epic foreign policy disaster-fails in American history, and instead of a stable Iraq under their control, they ended up by turning Iraq into a terrorist group breeding ground, from Al Qaeda in Iraq to the current Islamic State group (which was initially financed by Saudi Arabia as a proxy force to fight growing Iranian influence in Iraq, as well as to destabilize Syria).
Yes, radical Islamic terror is a threat, but saying that means all of Islam is a threat is like saying that the radical psychotic neoconservatives are a representative sample of all American politicians and bureaucrats – they’re just a fanatic minority, that’s all.
What’s a bit troubling, however, is how the U.S. government has continued to pursue their idiotic policies of regime change in the Middle East, while also ignoring the rampant abuses of our so-called “allies” in the region – whether it’s Saudi Arabia financing proxy terror groups and illegally using American cluster bombs to kill Yemeni civilians and chopping the heads off of political dissidents, or the apartheid state of Israel demolishing Palestinian villages while running a clandestine nuclear weapons program, or Egypt’s military dictatorship torturing people to death and crushing democracy, or Turkey shutting down newspapers while buying oil from ISIS (and also shipping them arms) – it’s pretty clear, the debacle has continued under Obama, and Hillary Clinton looks set to continue with the status quo if she gets in office.
Of course, getting back to Gaffney and the CSP, it’s pretty obvious that Cruz and Rubio, Koch Borthers sock puppets that they are, would go right back to the fanatical neoconservative plan of the past, insane as that may be. Trump, on the other hand, is interesting in that he has pointed out that our ‘relationships’ in the Middle East are highly un-profitable.
In reality, an entire revision of Middle Eastern foreign policy is needed – starting with the acceptance of the reality: the US has NO “allies” in the region, just “acquaintances” and we need to stop backing one country over the other – instead, the best bet would be to push for a diplomatic resolution of the regional conflicts, and institute an even-handed position on human rights abuses – i.e. stop giving Israel, Egypt, Turkey and the Saudis a pass on their behaviors (and force Israel to accept IAEA nuclear inspections, just as Iran did), and treat them the same way we do Syria and Iran.
Actually, you are looking at all of this ass backwards. Transnational terror supplies:
1. the pretext for pre-emptive regime change
2. the need for a permanent military presence throughout the Middle east and Asia.
3. the justification for the expansion of NATO
4. a need for an increase in the US defense budget every year.
5. a need for an ever expanding capacity to collect signal intelligence
6. the need for reconstruction loans and grants originating from the transnational capital class
7. an opportunity to build new oil and gas pipelines that reduce dependence on those that run through Russian friendly states (Iran, Syria etc)
8. an opportunity to build new oil and gas infrastructure to feed demand in emerging Asian markets
9. an opportunity to control and exploit natural resources in the region
10. an opportunity to inculcate target nations with a uniform set of “western” values that best facilitate the expansion of the global economy
11. the need for European and American expertise in modernizing their economies
12. the need to curtail civil liberties (especially those relating to political dissent) in the US, Canada, and across Europe
13. a never-ending supply of cheap foreign labor to European markets via forced immigration
to name just a few. The spread of Saudi-originated Sunni Wahhabism was consciously facilitated by the US state department throughout the Mideast, Europe, and Asia during 1980s and 1990s via the construction of hundreds of madrasses.
No, that’s too much grand mal conspiracy theory thinking for me. The spread of the insurgency throughout Iraq after the invasion, the fact that Iran became the main power broker in southern Iraq, the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq – none of that was part of the neocon plan. It was just massive blowback caused by their gross incompetence and imperial overreach.
It’s the same in Syria today – the efforts by the Obama Administration to destabilize the Syrian regime, in coordination with Britain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc., were not intended to create a massive flood of refugees into Europe, and while they were backing ISIS, ISIS was supposed to be a strictly anti-Assad proxy force – they weren’t supposed to launch terrorist attacks in Europe, Britain, or the United States – again, stupid regime change BS leading to unintended consequences and major blowback.
Go back further and you see it in Afghanistan – funneling money to radical Islamic Wahhabi groups who were ‘anti-Soviet’ so they must be ‘pro-western’, via the Pakistani ISI and Saudi Arabia (while not backing more moderate nationalist groups like the Northern Alliance), then abandoning the country in the 1990s, letting the Wahhabi Taliban overrun it, letting Osama bin Laden turn it into a training camp for global terror groups?
It wasn’t ‘all part of the plan’, it was just gross incompetence and mega-stupidty. Granted, the Bush Administration’s failure to act on all the warnings of terrorist hijackings received in summer 2001 is a bit suspicious – i.e. did they think a few terrorist hijackings within the United States might help them politically? – and the fall 2001 anthrax attacks might have been engineered by Cheney & friends, but the mega-conspiracy line about the rise of Islamic Wahhabi terrorism just isn’t believable.
Love your list– none of these came before america. America was there 1st cause and effect.
THE most GLOBAL disaster, not just ‘epic’ or ‘american’!
MSM sprinkles the American public with tender; and then at carefully chosen moments throws out the sparks — Trump: David Duke, KKK, Mussolini . . . and little fires begin to burn which Americans fall for time and again.
1) Merkel et alia have indeed made a serious ‘mistake’ opening Europe’s doors to vast numbers of non-Europeans seeking the free things of welfare states. Most of these people are not refugees. And they are not pro-Europeans.
2) Opposing this crazy plan is not being racist.
3) There is a significant difference between what Muhammad taught and what these Wahabi Sunnis believe. And there is a great difference between young men without much culture and education and their well educated country men and women who are civilized.
4) MSM’s primary task is not to help American citizens become well informed. It is propaganda that suits their owners, the corporations, whose goals are antithetical to those of most people.
5) Dumping a lot of people into the USA who will resist American society is a bad idea. Obama is doing this as much as possible for reasons kept to himself and his cohorts. There is also nothing at all humanitarian about allowing illegals from Latin America into the country. US policies in Latin America have harmed those nations for a long time which is why there is this push to go north. Very similar to what is happening between Europe and the Middle East. Karma.
6) As Newt Gingrich has pointed out Donald does not belong to the secret society that would control him. He might just wreck their game and assist Americans. He would oppose these draconian trade deals for example.
7) The one term Holocaust plays an enormous role in controlling weak minds as does the name Hitler. With a very sketchy knowledge of history people can be easily scared and misled which is something the MSM and various political figures indulge in. They want Americans scared. If you like being frightened then remain ignorant.
Yes, of all the candidates, Trump is the only one not going along with boilerplate status quo policy in the Middle East (which consists of claiming that Israel and Saudi Arabia are somehow our ‘allies’ who we need to support by destabilizing Syria and helping create a flood of refugees and terrorist groups – he sees no percentage in that game, and any rational person would agree.).
However, keep in mind that in a massive civil war like that in Syria, and with Europe having relatively open borders, and there being a whole industry of human smugglers in the region, who have numerous routes to get people into Europe – well, it’s not merely a matter of government policy.
Consider, for example, if massive civil war broke out in Mexico on the scale it has in Syria – a similar flood of refugees would try to escape north, right? So, encouraging the outbreak of a massive civil war in Mexico would be really stupid American foreign policy, wouldn’t it? Very bad for business, too – and I think Trump understands that end of the dynamic, he’s not just engaging in race-baiting behavior for political advantage.
People like Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, on the other hand, appear entirely under the control of their “foreign policy advisors” on the issue – the same idiots who created so many of the problems in the Middle East in the first place, a mindless Soviet-style bureaucracy that just keeps rolling on and on, disaster after disaster.
How can someone, knowing all this, vote for these establishment candidates who are more or less pledged to continue with the status quo? I can’t do it, I’m afraid. . . the only plausible scenario in which a vote for Clinton would make strategic sense, is if she was facing Rubio or Cruz, as the neocons are even worse than the neolibs . . . otherwise, nyet.
Very stupid policy, no doubt …. yet Mexico has indeed been at war, a bloody stupid War on Drugs that funds its cartels with $100 billion a year in U.S. money. And its people have been displaced by NAFTA subsidized corn, and by fear, and brought up in a pipeline, naco takes maquiladora, maquiladora takes migrant, migrant takes service employee … all ending at your state unemployment office. Which goes to show what? Wolves and sheep, wolves and sheep. And as stupid and brutal as Islam may be, we shouldn’t forget that you can witch the cruelty right out of Islam, or any lesser ore, distill it as a flavorless demonic essence and mix it into anything, even what passes for Christianity. When people have grown hopeless and angry, when the knife of Molech Allah comes into their hand, and they feel it sucking the innocent essence from a captive child as the pattern of malignant satisfaction whirls and gibbers about them, they are of no religion at all, and challenge all the angels to sing a song so sweet as the infant’s terrible cries.
SO WHAT!!! A bunch of self-identified conservative organizations attended a convention that was held specifically for self-identified conservatives. For Christ’s sake Zaid, conflating the views of CPAC guest speakers and the few attendees with whom you spoke says nothing but the fact that you are a lazy journalist. Stop trying to play to the liberal bias of your readers and provide them with something truly substantive to think about.
LIBERAL, adjective, LIBERTY, noun, LIBERATE, verb, PROUD! Hell yea!
I used to wonder how so many people across Europe came to vilify the Jews to the extent that they allowed the Jewish holocaust. I totally understand now. I hadn’t realised how much capacity people have for hate, ignorance and utter stupidity.
Shades of the 3rd Reich all over again. Oddly a story in The Independent(UK), mentions how ISIL studied Nazi tactics in mass killings. One can only imagine that the christian fundamentalists are no better than ISIL.
Some of us – many of us – give people, humans of all stripes, a bad name. Incalculable genocide and cruelty have been perpetuated in… wait for it… Jesus and/or God’s name. Often it ain’t for Jesus or God, but, in fact, for oil, drugs, other riches, territory or just insanity. So, bigot “Christians” not only appear in a bad light, they de facto act – and have acted – in very bad ways towards others, regardless of “religious” affiliation. Bad behavior is NOT the exclusive domain of any one person, religion or group of people; seemingly it afflicts many. Muslims and Islam are easy prey right about now, especially after 800-plus years of Crusades, World Wars I though an ongoing III, Inquisitions and the Holocaust… so, yet again, a new and easily identifiable target for phobia du jour, for tragically if you will, the Jews du jour, 2 and a half generations after the aforementioned holocaust – not that Jews were the only people that died – were murdered – by the millions. Religious wars do continue, perpetuated in large part by the U.S. and visited upon mostly the Middle East, lately, as a front for large oil and arms business concerns – with the fanning of flames of an ignorant hatred fueled – AND MANIPULATED – by Presidents, their administrations, corporate – and religious – donors and minions. What a shame any “leadership” or political group would work the strings of this kind of dark energy to their own short-term and material ends, out of fear or anger…”.. “Civilizational”.. War” might only sort of apply, if not as an oxymoron.
Some believe prayer works. Praying for hurt to be put on anyone begs the question of what kind of God works for whom – and why. Meanwhile, back on this, the blue planet, some of us pray for well-being, and the end of suffering for all beings. Voting for certain persons, if not the party with whom they’ve affiliated, might seem like a wish to the contrary. Here’s to your happiness…
Thanks, right back at you!
Those who PRAY are those who DO NOTHING to help!
I live in Dearborn and am not Muslim. These Islamaphobes are total idiots. In fact, the Dearborn Muslims are known to be really lax in their adherence to Islam by other Muslims. Obviously, not all of them, but Dearborn is hardly some scary place. I’d argue the influx of Muslims there have made it far more interesting with loads of great food.
More terrorism hysteria. Who’s paying these folks? It seems the beneficiaries of this are the military contractors, energy companies, and such. All of us on this earth are terribly impacted by such hate. If they can make up such stuff about Muslims, who’s next?
More proof that Trump is the true standard bearer of the Republican Party, which has not been the “party of Lincoln” since LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, causing future Trump supporters to go to the “party of Trump”.
What we will do is no longer give credence to their corporate media propaganda that diverts our attention towards a distant foe while distracting us from the more crucial and complicated issues that face our nation and humanity, which the self-serving elites want swept under the rug or addressed only via meaningless shallow soundbites. They mention crucial issues using quelling soundbites in order to be able to move deviously on to their true agendas established to satisfy their insatiable lust for greed, power and dominance.
We have lost 45 people since 9/11 to mostly home base Islamic terrorism, and for that we shred our Constitutional rights like grossly violating the right of our citizens to privacy and even giving up our right to Habeas Corpus; by allowing this we therefore eviscerate the essence of our democracy.
We must make them understand we do not buy it, no matter how often and how hard they lay the fear mongering on us we will not check our trunks, look in our back seats, or under our covers for a Muslim.
“… Islamic terrorism…”
————-
Some people calling themselves Muslims have committed terrorism.
There actions were/are not Islamic, that is, they are not according to the teachings of Islam as understood by an overwhelming majority of Muslims.
Point well made, Sufi Muslim. I, for one, am a mainline Protestant who does not identify with fundamentalist, extremist, religious zealots (particularly of the so-claimed Christian faith/religion). My position.
Sufi I totally agree and maybe the 45 terroirs actions were really something else.
During the same time period it was reported that there were 48 Fascist/Neo-Nazi home grown attacks.
The point I was trying to make was more like we lose about 48 people a year to lightning strikes, but we do not make it mandatory for everyone to stay indoors, so for 45 deaths why should we allow the throwing away of our Constitutional Rights?
I understand what you’re trying to say, but with all due respect, “No true Scotsman” isn’t a valid argument.
“‘No true Scotsman’ isn’t a valid argument.”
No, it isn’t. But Sufi’s argument isn’t that “no Muslim would commit terrorism.” Rather, she said:
“Their actions were/are not Islamic, that is, they are not according to the teachings of Islam as understood by an overwhelming majority of Muslims.”
And that is not a “No true Scotsman” fallacy; it is an assertion supported by the statements, actions, writings, polls, etc. of “the vast majority” of the world’s billion and a half (or so) Muslims and their teachers and leaders.
There are in fact those who call themselves Muslims and commit terrorism and carry out all kinds of atrocities.
But are their actions Islamic, that is, according to the teachings of Islam?
I, and many other Muslims, say no.
What do we base it on?
Islam’s primary source, the Quran, which sets Islam’s parameters.
But the Quran needs to be interpreted in light of itself, historical context, and the higher consciousness.
Are there Muslims who carry out bad actions and claim they are Islamic?
Yes.
But we know the mistakes they make in interpreting the sources of Islam.
It is noteworthy that with the history of Christian missionaries all over the globe spreading the Gospel, and forcing conversions, sometimes with unspeakable brutality, they would worry about Islam doing the same. It appears that only Atheists and Agnostics are prepared to allow people to make up their own minds without coercion of any kind when it comes to spiritual beliefs.
It appears that only Atheists and Agnostics are prepared to allow people to make up their own minds without coercion of any kind when it comes to spiritual beliefs. – Marvn Raps
What planet are you living on? And in which country do you reside?
How sickening to read that a well-known media/publisher mogul, *sexual predator* had his marriage blessed in a London church. :-P
Ra’men. But just like some commenters feel the burn of their irrational beliefs compels them to question your right to exist in order to “save” you, in all likelihood a world with no religion is no closer for the human race than intergalactic travel.
Hello,
Yeah I read with a horrific curiosity. And so no one has doubts of the quality of UK speakers and attendees. Egs. Paul Weston heads up the UK form of Pegida. And I believe is attached to the EDL (English Defence League), so you know…We’re talking a high calibre idiot.
Well, indeed I hear the discussion in particular when Hanson said it’s “much tougher to see because they use our own freedoms and liberties against us to try and destroy our own culture from within… ” Meaning them there folks are incideiously moving against us (white) folk and our civilisation etc. By using our freedoms against us, I suppose.
My comment on this is: adaption with the adaptation. It’s fair to expect a newly arrived bod fresh out of another culture to be a differing individual sporting say, a differing type of custom livery. So it’s upto us in the UK, EU and USA etc. to kindly and gently be patient enough and tolerate as we teach our ways and adapt to there’s. And I suppose, if there’s a problem there’s enough law in place to counter the idiocy of act which brings out those problems.
If Hanson is right, then really I’m supposing the free and unfettered practice of one’s religion in the USA is covered by the constitution there. So, what’s his beef!? It seems he is intolerant himself.
Leave it to us you CPAC guys…you lot stop spreading the hatred yourselves and we’ll insidiously spread peace, love and understanding eh!!
This is not a serious portrayal of beliefs at CPAC. It reads like the Onion to anyone who’s actually freedom-oriented and been like there. This piece is intended to make you gasp.
As a Christian, I do not believe in demonizing anyone including Muslims. I also support Muslim rights to practice your religion in peace with equal protection under the law. I will stand with you to ensure these inalienable Constitutional rights are not violated.
However, lambasting legitimate criticism and dismissing the concerns of your fellow Americans in light overwhelming empirical evidence of persistent Muslim violence (against each other and non-believers), as well as childlike over reaction to nearly everything tells us that you are not capable of mature dialogue.
Islamic media, textbooks, popular culture, religious leaders, and most of all THEOLOGY are replete with anti everything non-muslim, but we don’t react the way you do. When your imams in virtually every Muslim majority country call for the death of Christians and religious minorities, we don’t react the way you do. So, when you behave like children, you convince us we truly cannot have a mature conversation wih you especially when you resort to name calling and temper tantrums over legitimate ideological disagreements.
We know as well as you do that violence is just as much apart of Islamic theology as your claims of peace. When you deny this fact, and accuse us of misinterpreting the Koran when we have experts who agree with what we read, we feel you’re lying to us and not taking ownership of ALL of your religion.
So, please stop denying that Mohammed was violent and sinful, and perhaps then we can have an honest dialogue. His sinfulness, violence and offensive wars have been clearly documented in your most trusted texts. We have studied them critically for centuries now. You have no problems with us “interpreting” the “peaceful” Meccan “revelations” correctly, but yet you accuse us of complete ineptitude when it comes to the violent Medinan “revelations. This is self-serving, duplicitous, and deceptive on your part.
We really wish to have meaning dialogue and trusting relationships with you, but that cannot be possible until we know you are honest with us. To earn our trust we need to see and feel that you are honest with yourselves first by taking ownership of Mohammed’s revelations and actions during the Medinan period and everything else after the death of your prophet – all of it – the good, the bad and the ugly.
You know as well as we do that ISIS and their ilk have faithfully embraced the latter Medinan “revelations” and haddiths. Therefore, they are just as Muslim as you are for embracing just the other half. So, please be honest with yourselves before you try show us the “true” Islam.
Thank you and God bless.
There are many who do in fact demonize Islam and Muslims. You yourself have done it below.
They also treat Islam as if it is one monolithic religion and ALL Muslims think and act alike as robots. So they paint us all with the same brush.
There is a huge difference between demonization and fearmongering and legitimate concern and criticism in a sober, sincere, scholarly and respectful manner.
The non-Muslims have also been engaged in violence. The empirical evidence gathered over the last 300 years indicates that the non-Muslims have carried out a lot more violence (Colonial wars, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, e.g.) than the Muslims have.
But blaming each other is childish. Humans are capable of violence when they succumb to the lower consciousness whose qualities include selfishness, anger, vengeance, injustice, hatred, self-pride, arrogance, doing to others what one doesn’t want done unto one, lust for power and control, etc.
It isn’t exclusive to members of this or that faith or non-faith.
The overreaction is by a very tiny number of Muslims. Most Muslims just shrug their shoulders and move on. The media do not show the complete picture of Muslim responses to childish behavior by some to insult Islam.
Most Muslims are fully capable of any mature dialogue and are in fact engaged in it. There are a lot of Muslims trying to build bridges. There are even those who feel that the Truth lies in every religion and treat the non-Muslims lovingly.
This is a problem that exists in all cultures and religious and non-religious paths. They contain adherents that claim exclusive access and right to the Truth.
Yet, there are strains within Islam that are universalist and do not do any of what you have listed.
You are presenting a part of the overall picture while suppressing other parts.
You are also not pointing out the underlying reasons.
You have absolutely no empirical data to support that, and you present a very distorted view of the situation.
I have attended many sermons all over the world. I have never heard of any imam calling for the death of anyone. If some are, as you claim, their words and deeds can easily be judged by Islam’s primary source, the Quran, to determine if they are Islamic or not.
That said, there are in fact strains within Islam that are terrible, most of benign to fair to good, some are excellent.
Over generalization and stereotyping.
There are many, many Muslims who are engaged in mature conversation with the non-Muslims. That you won’t present that part of the overall picture tells us more about your own inner state than anything else.
Islamic theology is based on the Quran. And the Quran has clearly stated that killing a single person unjustly is equivalent to killing the entire humanity.
See this article by Juan Cole, “Top Ten Ways Islamic Law forbids Terrorism”, at http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/ten-ways-islamic-forbids-terrorism.html
The Quran speaks for itself. We are aware of how the Quran is misinterpreted by some Muslims as well as many non-Muslims who are hostile to Islam.
The way they misinterpret and misrepresent the Quran is by isolating its verses out of their textual and historical contexts.
Often, they only produce a part of the verse, completely ignoring the parts at the beginning of the verse and the verses preceding it.
For example, they’d show 9:5 partially as such: “kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush.” as if it’s a timeless and universal commandment to every Muslim, where in fact when read this partial verse in its entirety and in conjunction with the two preceding verses, as well as with 2:190-194, this verse relates to warfare already in progress with people who have become guilty of a breach of treaty obligations and of aggression.
So, this is just one of many, many examples of the gymnastics that your so-called “experts” do to distort the clear meanings of the Quran.
So, your starting position is that he (s) was a “violent and sinful” [man] and then you want to have “an honest dialgue” with the Muslims?
Wow!
No, they are not the “most trusted texts.” The most authentic and the oldest text is the Quran. Other sources are full of truths, half-truths and inaccuracies, and must be examined IN LIGHT OF the Quran, not the other way around.
This is the mistake many Muslims make, and this is the mistake many non-Muslims make.
Not necessarily.
The Medinan portions of the Quran were very much influenced by the Arab culture of the day and presented solutions to the problems of the day according to the cultural norms and appropriateness of that age.
The debate amongst the Muslims as to how to interpret and apply them in today’s world is ongoing.
Nevertheless, we are also aware how these verses are misinterpreted often by taking them out of their textual context. I have given one example above.
I doubt your sincerity because your starting position is that Muhammad (S) was a violent and sinful man.
How would you feel if a Muslim said to you that you were a sinful and deviant person going straight to hell and then told you that they wanted to have an “honest” dialogue with you?
You’d be foolish to believe them that they are sincere.
Many Muslims do just that, and are engaged in meaningful dialogues with the non-Muslims.
Many Muslims have written about the universality of the Truth. See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Martin Lings, William Chittick, etc.
Their activities are to achieve political objectives, and if they rely on the Quran to support their sinful and evil ways, they distort its meaning and ignore its clear words, by examining them out of textual and historical contexts.
Overwhelming majority of the Muslims have disavowed them, do not consider them Muslims and think of them as cancerous tumor within the world of Islam.
Bullshit!
And this is how you want to have a dialogue with us!
You completely ignore the Muslim voices against ISIL, blame us for being as Muslims as they are and then tell us that you want to have a dialogue with us!
The true Islam is what can be reasonably derived from its primary source, The Quran. To me, the true Islam is how it is practiced by many Sufis (not all, but many). Look up Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri, Shaykh Kabir Helminski, Rumi and ibn Arabi.
We are not interested in learning about that true Islam from you.
Many Muslims are engaged in dialogues with many non-Muslims, but how can one have a dialogue with someone who’d first throw dirt at you?
“…in light overwhelming empirical evidence of persistent Muslim violence (against each other and non-believers), as well as childlike over reaction to nearly everything tells us that you are not capable of mature dialogue.”
Precisely what the Segregationists of the US said about Black folks in the sixties. The wheel turns and another mouse is set up for slaughter…
Bullshit. Law-abiding Muslims shouldn’t have to take ownership for Islamic-inspired terrorism any more than you or I should take responsibility for the Crusades, colonialism, or Christian violence in Africa. Which is to say, of course they shouldn’t.
You’re assigning traits to people based on their social category, quite literally the definition of stereotyping. I’d be surprised if you knew any Muslims, though I’d probably be more concerned if you did.
Would help if the xians would stay home and leave the muslims alone. Xian is not true, you need to read it thoroughly and not believe the hearsay of the poergrabbibg mafia of forced conversions because it aint true. The messianic concept is simply an ideal of selfimprovement and optimism for ALL, no child killer god, please. Not good.
Uncle Daddy better done hurry up and take his kinfolk to buckingham palace and meet that nice queen lady right quick before her muslim conquerors make her wear a burkah. Because if there’s one thing queens love, it’s getting gawked at by hillbillies.
What’s next? Or continuing… Re-runs of knights with white shields and big red crosses? Crusades for the Millennium? Burning people at the stake? The Inquisition? Another thousand years of so-called Holy Wars?
This Intercept article shows contempt for free speech rights in its description of Paul Weston. No matter how noxious Paul Weston is, it can’t be right to sneer, as the Intercept reporter does, that Weston’s “claim to fame is being arrested at an anti-Muslim demonstration for blocking the steps of a public building and engaging in incitement”. Whenever police arrest someone for engaging in incitement, real free speech supporters defend the arrestee, no matter how harmful we think his views are — the core of the principle of free speech is that people must not be arrested for saying things that are believed to be harmful. I realize that some, like Glenn Greenwald, are fully aware of what the value of free speech entails, but it’s disappointing that lesser Intercept reporters take a view that’s much more friendly to oppression.
The reporter fails in other ways to carry out his journalistic duty. The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani writes that Paul Weston was arrested “at an anti-Muslim demonstration for blocking the steps of a public building and engaging in incitement”. A real journalist would have checked whether Weston’s “blocking the steps of a public building” really was obstructing the entrance. That’s easy to check — the Daily Mail posted a video that makes it easy to see that Weston was standing alone near the entrance in a way that wouldn’t have blocked people from walking past him, and the link that Zaid Jilani gives in the Intercept article mentions that a woman was able to come out of the building while he was talking without any obstruction. So police didn’t need to remove Weston to clear the entrance. But Jilani still presents Weston’s arrest “for blocking the steps of a public building” without telling readers about the holes in this charge. This is just the kind of ridiculous, unnecessary charge that’s often used when police arrest demonstrators and speakers due to a dislike for what’s being said. If the Intercept was standing up for the value of free speech, it would inform readers about the fact that there was no practical need to clear the entrance to the building, and that Weston was apparently arrested just for the content of what he said.
I realize Weston is no friend of free speech himself, but even so, that doesn’t justify speaking as if it’s legitimate to make arrests for “incitement” or for the other ridiculous “offenses” Weston was charged with. Classic free speech cases in the US show that if incitement is available as a charge, it will be used against those who are merely voicing unpopular opinions. And it’s significant that Weston was quoting Churchill — probably one reason that the police shut him down is that Weston was revealing the uncomfortable historical truth of Churchill’s anti-Muslim bias, which many English would prefer to forget. Basically, Weston’s case shows an unholy alliance between those who venerate Churchill and prefer to forget his anti-Muslim bias, and those who support Muslim rights and don’t want anyone reminding the public that a revered figure like Churchill took an opposing stance. I don’t think the strategy of arresting someone like Weston can, or should, suppress the historical fact of what Churchill thought. It’s better to let Churchill’s words be quoted and then make a decent response to them, instead of trying to use “incitement” as an excuse for suppressing history.
One of the key benefits of free speech is it gives people the opportunity to criticize bad ideas. Paul Weston has every right to share his bad ideas & Zaid Jilani every right to write about them critically. Mr. Jilani never suggests that Mr. Weston should be prevented from speaking.
Good point, Julie. Besides this article is primarily about people who share and/or incite Islamophobic points of view, is it not? (Not all Christians are fundamentalist extremists who bomb clinics, etc. :-| )
You missed what the Intercept’s Zaid Jilani actually did say about the police suppression of Paul Weston’s speech. As you say, Jilani’s article is critical of Weston in general, and we all agree that Jilani has a right to do that. But when Jilani mentions Weston’s arrest, he does so in a way that reveals a lot about how Jilani perceives the free speech issues involved.
Jilani mentions the arrest intending to make a negative point against Weston: he says Weston’s “claim to fame is being arrested at an anti-Muslim demonstration for blocking the steps of a public building and engaging in incitement”. Okay, I see that Jilani has a right to be critical of Weston, but why exactly does Jilani think that recounting the arrest like that makes a negative point about Weston? Jilani wasn’t a good enough journalist to get the facts completely right about Weston’s arrest, as I mentioned above, but Jilani’s comment also shows something about his own view of whether this kind of arrest is outrageous or acceptable. You and I both feel that “Paul Weston has every right to share his bad ideas” — but arresting someone in mid-speech for “engaging in incitement” is clearly violating that right. (Looking through a dozen articles on Weston’s arrest, I see no hint that he was actually telling passersby to attack Muslims, or that he was causing any clear danger to any specific Muslim individual.) So when the Intercept’s Zaid Jilani thinks that he can bolster his negative case against Weston by mentioning this unjust arrest, it indicates that Jilani doesn’t see the arrest as unjust. Think about it: if you’re portraying a person like Weston in critical terms, and you bring up an incident where this person was unjustly arrested in violation of his human right to free speech, you ought to realize that mentioning this will undermine your critical point and spark sympathy for the person who was unjustly arrested — unless you don’t even realize that people ought to be concerned about this kind of violation of free-speech rights. Jilani says Weston was arrested for “engaging in incitement” — a phrase that seems not to appear anywhere in the previously-published material on the arrest — and it seems likely that when Jilani came up with the phrase “engaging in incitement”, he did so from the perspective that “incitement” like Weston’s is tolerable grounds for arresting a speaker. The more the Intercept’s lesser reporters take the wrong side on arrests that violate free speech, the more they weaken their own right to be taken seriously.
Correction: Zaid Jilani is right about the charge of incitement — Weston was later “re-arrested” for “incitement of racial hatred”, which wasn’t the original charge. However, I stand by my points about Jilani’s lack of concern for the violation of free speech rights, and Jilani’s unprofessionally leaving the impression that Weston was preventing people from walking through the building entrance.
Needless to say, it’s a violation of human rights to charge someone with “incitement of racial hatred” just for making a prejudiced speech to passers-by, when no specific person was in danger and there was no reason to expect violence was imminent — but that’s what Weston was charged with, apparently. Weston mentions the charge himself in an interview here: http://gatesofvienna.net/2014/04/a-racially-aggravated-crime-under-section-4-of-the-public-order-act/
The government ended up not prosecuting Weston, though arresting him and holding him in jail over this was bad enough: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-27809890
And here’s the Daily Mail video I mentioned above:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2614834/Arrested-quoting-Winston-Churchill-European-election-candidate-accused-religious-racial-harassment-repeats-wartime-prime-ministers-words-Islam-campaign-speech.html
Sorry for my error about “incitement”, but it’s still clear this article doesn’t really understand the need to protect free speech.
“They always had a dream of going visiting the queen and London and all that kind of stuff. Not no more!…’’
So this self-absorbed resident of North Carolina thinks he’s more famous than the cycling mayor of London, Boris Johnson.
Com’on Intercept! I have been to CPAC and it does not at all resemble what is portrayed here. What kind of silly article is this? Seems like this is becoming a poor substitute for the Daily Kos, now that we are running out of Snowden material.
Um, the person writing this piece was obviously at the convention reporting on what was actually happening there. How can that possibly not resemble what is being portrayed?
From a biased lens, one can favorably pick and choose the most extreme. If you wished to report selectively, you could literally go to the same conference and report back that everyone you talked to was Muslim. The conference has many events and is very large. It’s not just one group of people in one room. There are stands, booths, probably a hundred sessions on different topics. This piece reports on a small aspect that was in no way the headline of the conference.
It is a huge convention. There are hundreds of events and groups there. If you are biased in your reporting, you can select specific sub-groups to report about. It would be possible to go and to come back reporting that you had spoken with no one but Muslims. The thrust of the story focuses on elements that are no where near the central emphasis of the convention.
And your nyet has nada to report! Gotit?
The clash of cultures is real. Islam is an idea that some people choose to take up and believe. So it is foolhardy for people with other ideas to let themselves be fooled into thinking it’s “wrong” to disagree with that idea, to speak out against it, and to encourage people who have it to change their mind.
That said, whoever confuses the clash of cultures with a battle by force is in danger of losing the battle. Islam has a history of persuasion by violence, and when non-Muslims foolishly make the debate a matter of violence or state power, they are putting themselves into the inferior position. Our strength comes when we allow people to say and think and pray how they want. When we do this it looks like we are retreating but we are luring the Muslims into a trap — a trap of thinking for themselves. When they think for themselves they will think twice about Islam.
By all means, let them rave, let them brag up the merits of barbaric eastern warlords. But … should some agent wander into a place that is open to the public, that’s not actually a crime. And if the reaction when people hear about what is being said is one of disapproval, that is not a crime. And even if immigration is limited, that is not a crime, except to the degree that having any immigration policy or the apparatus to be able to check who is who in a country at all is a crime, which surely it is, but an act of apparent military necessity.
The “pro-Islamic” and “anti-Islamic” perspectives we’re being told to choose from are both wrong and do not frame the debate. To choose the right perspective, we must establish ourselves first and foremost as being pro human rights, and this will lead us to oppose both Islam and anti-Islamic regulation.
Clash of civilizations can be easily avoided by raising our consciousness so that the self reflects the higher qualities I have listed here often.
This article does not say that it is wrong to disagree, but it does point out the huge exaggerations and outright lies that CPAC promotes.
Where are the moderate Republicans? This is specifically a “conservative” event. Why would a moderate Republican even attend? Do you expect any to actually be there? Crazy.
Make them wear a green crescent then gas them somewhere quiet in Greenpoint, NY. Then blame the Socialists and murder them, too…
Seig heil, Mr President!
No, it’s not.
The diversity in religious doctrines and practices reflect the Infinite Reality whose consciousness is known in infinite ways.
There are as many ways to the Reality as there are hearts.
All religions are radii on the same circle; they occupy different points on its curcumference, which reflects their outer realities, but merge at the center in their inner realities.
Where are the moderate Republicans? – Zaid Jilani
https://mobile.twitter.com/justinamash
26 Republicans who won’t back Trump as nominee
BY HALEY BRITZKY, LUKE BARR AND ANDREW DUNN
March 03, 2016 – 06:00 AM EST
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/271578-22-republicans-who-wont-back-trump-as-nominee
Where were the moderate Republicans? Mostly they weren’t invited – CPAC is the “Conservative” Republican shindig, for people who are farther to the right wing than the moderates.
Wow, really? How are they able to say things like this and still be recognised as politicians. Is this what people are like in USA?
Look within your own pulpits on friday nights and you’ll hear the same things.
If you are referring to the Friday’s congregations and the sermons delivered there, it takes place Friday early afternoons, not night.
This proves your lack of knowledge about Islam and its practices.
Moreover, millions of sermons are delivered every Friday, some are stupid, most are benign to fair to good to excellent.
Your generalization is incorrect.
“If a person wants to be the nominee of the party, there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.”
Paul Ryan, who I can only assume is cancelling his CPAC slot, right?
Stop trying to slander people as bigots. It gets old really quick and you end up isolating yourself as a little package of hatred. Oftentimes the people who run around shouting “Bigot!” Are in fact the most prejudiced.
“Moderate republicans” are now called what are called
“Progressive democrats.”
Please try to keep up to date.
Moderate republican = Hilary Clinton
Considering that only 4 of the members of the congressional
progressive caucus have endorsed Sanders while
well over half of the 68 caucus members have endorsed Clinton,
I would say my assessment is accurate.