CAIR Calls Anti-Terrorist a 'Crusader'...

Speaker warns of radical Islam — Muslim group rips terror expert's remarks
By Dan Meisler
DAILY PRESS & ARGUS

Terrorism expert Steven Emerson warned a luncheon audience in Genoa Township on Monday that militant Muslims are using "strategic deception" to enter the mainstream political debate in America and advance their terrorist agenda.

But his comments drew denials and denouncement from a local Muslim group.

Talking as a part of Cleary University's Livingston Economic Club Speaker Series, Emerson said groups with harmless-sounding names like the Benevolence International Foundation or the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, are really front groups for Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists.

"That's probably the most vexing problem we face," he said.

Speaking of CAIR, Emerson said the group was an "ideological front for terrorists and their apologists. They have defended, championed and rationalized" terrorism.

"If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. But it's treated as an innocent group," Emerson said.

He also said moderate Muslims need to step up and condemn terrorism, but they need more help from the government.

He said the government should also stop meeting with and legitimizing the front groups he criticized.

"We need to determine and establish a policy: We are not going to meet with groups that believe in violence as part of the way to carry out a political agenda," Emerson said.

He also took some questions from the audience at Genoa Woods Conference Center near Brighton. The first was on the war in Iraq, and whether it has helped or hurt the war on terror.

Emerson said that in the short term, the war has provided a rallying cry for jihadists, although they "never needed an excuse" to hate America.

In the long term, however, "I don't believe the war in Iraq provided any more of an external excuse for jihadists to attack us," he said.

Plus, he added, al-Qaida would quickly fill the vacuum if American troops were withdrawn too soon.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of CAIR, was not present at the speech but responded by blasting Emerson as having an anti-Islam agenda: "He has a crusader mentality. ... He's not an unbiased analyst."

"With all the scrutiny Muslim organizations have been under since 9/11, if there was even a shred of validity to the charges of Mr. Emerson, we would have been closed down a long time ago," Walid added.

He said Emerson's casting suspicion on mainstream Muslim groups "clearly increases Islamophobia."

Emerson was the latest speaker in Cleary University's Livingston Economic Club series that will include controversial conservative commentator and columnist Ann Coulter in October.

Walid criticized the university for not inviting anyone to debate Emerson's claims.

"We should have the opportunity also to present who the American Muslims are and what our organization truly is about," he said. "If it is interested in dialogue and academic discourse, it would bring in an opposing view. That's called being fair."

Audience members had a more positive reaction.

Photo by GILLIS BENEDICT/DAILY PRESS & ARGUS

Steven Emerson, expert on terrorism and national security, addresses the Livingston Economic Club on Monday at Genoa Woods Executive Conference and Banquet Center in Genoa Township.

Gayle Jacobs of the Michigan Homeland Security Consortium, a nonprofit group pushing the homeland security industry in Michigan, said she was surprised at Emerson's statement that the suspects in the alleged plot recently uncovered at Fort Dix in New Jersey had been in the country illegally for 23 years.

"That was really alarming," she said.

Howell Police Chief George Basar said he appreciated Emer-son's insight: "I hadn't heard it articulated quite the same way."

After his speech, Emerson said he has been called a racist in the past, but emphasized that he doesn't generalize about all Muslims.

"I don't assume anybody I meet is a terrorist," he said.

He put the blame on radical Muslims for blurring the distinction between mainstream and fundamentalist Islam. He said being suspicious of mainstream Muslim groups versus taking what they say at face value when he suspects they are actually radicals is "the lesser of two evils."

Cleary and the speaker series have been criticized for bringing in Coulter — her upcoming talk has drawn protests over her use of a slur against homosexuals and whether her invitation furthers the image of Livingston County as an intolerant place. But when Cleary President Tom Sullivan merely mentioned Coulter's name at Monday's lunch, the audience broke out into applause.

The Daily Press & Argus is a sponsor of the Economic Club series.

Contact Daily Press & Argus reporter Dan Meisler at (517) 552-2857 or at dmeisler@gannett.com.

Democrats Siding with CAIR Against Tipsters

One of the more insidious and sinister activities of the Council on American Islamic Relations is their threat to sue citizens who report suspicious behavior to the authorities.

And if House Homeland Security chairman Bennie Thompson gets his way we will have no protection against the legal wing of the global jihad: Bennie Thompson vs. terrorism tipsters.

We’ve all seen this phrase in block letters: “REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY,” followed by a 1-800 number. But if a House Democrat manages to kill a tipster-immunity measure under consideration in Congress this month, people who report suspicious behavior could be sued in civil court if the accused are not charged with a crime. November’s frightened U.S. Airways “John Doe” passengers in Minneapolis are already in the crosshairs.

The lawmaker in question is Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. He thinks that granting tipsters immunity amounts to racial and religious profiling. Yes, that’s the Democrats’ “homeland security” pointman in the House speaking.

For two months, Mr. Thompson has deployed the profiling argument against this measure, tucked into the House transportation-security bill. The good news is that a bipartisan House majority already passed it 304-121 seven weeks ago. But sadly, Mr. Thompson is expected to strip it from the bill. He is expected to be the lead House negotiator in the coming weeks when the bill reaches conference committee, and if he is, he will have considerable sway over the final product.

Mr. Thompson would stand alone among key homeland-security players, all of whom support immunity, if he blocks it. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate committee and ranking Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, both support it. So does Rep. Peter King, New York Republican, the ranking member in the House homeland-security committee.

How damaging it would be to leave tipsters on the hook; there could be few better ways to staunch the flow of information. Think of last week’s Fort Dix tipster and ask yourself whether you would report suspicious behavior in a similar position.

Fort Dix: The Backlash that Wasn't

By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 14, 2007

In the wake of the Fort Dix jihad plot arrests, the mainstream media featured numerous news articles focusing on the fears of other Muslims in America. Philadelphia’s CBS3 reported: “Muslims in the region are bracing themselves for a possible backlash in response to the terror plot arrests.” There was no shortage of Muslim spokesmen available to confirm these fears. “What we’re all afraid of is a new backlash,” said Hesham Mahmoud of the New Jersey chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. An official of the South Jersey Islamic Center, the spiritual home of several of the jihadist suspects, also expressed fears that they “are going to face a backlash.” A Muslim in New Jersey, Tajwar Roomi, expressed fear for her family: “My husband works for the state. My son, my daughter, they all work. I do get worried about them because some people are nice, [but] some people are not.” As far away as Iowa, the imam of Des Moines’ Islamic Center, Ibrahim Dremali, said: “Some are afraid backlash may be coming. People are becoming cautious again. I’ve told them they have to be careful.”

But none of the backlash reports included news of any actual backlash incidents, because four days after the arrests, there hadn’t been any. Richard Sparaco, the attorney for one of the accused jihad plotters, Serdar Tatar, came closest to actually reporting one. Sparaco said that the restaurant owned by Tatar’s father, Muslim Tatar, had suffered a sharp decline in business, and that someone kicked in his door and, according to New Jersey’s Star-Ledger, “shouted a racial slur.” Muslim Tatar, according to Sparaco, had also been threatened.

That was it, as far as backlash went. The contrast is stark: when cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad appeared in a Danish newspaper, there were international riots, in which several innocent people were killed; when Pope Benedict XVI repeated a medieval emperor’s negative characterization of Muhammad, there were again riots and killings. When a mentally impaired Christian in Nigeria tore a copy of the Qur’an, rampaging Muslims burned ten churches to the ground. But when six Muslims in America were arrested for plotting to kill as many American soldiers as possible, there have been no killings. No mob action. No riots. No mosques have been torched, and no Muslims have been beaten or (with the possible lone exception of Muslim Tatar) harassed.

Of this Americans can justly be proud. The paucity of backlash incidents after the Fort Dix arrests and other jihad terror arrests – as well as after 9/11 -- shows that Americans are still essentially decent people who generally do not victimize people on the basis of their identity or associations. Yet statistics cited by the Des Moines Register painted a very different picture: “a nationwide survey by the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations…counted 1,972 incidents of anti-Muslim bias in 2005, up from 1,522 in 2004. The 2005 figure, from the group’s most recent tally, represents the largest number reported to the council, also known as CAIR, in its 12-year history.”

So are Muslims really facing an increasing climate of hostility and harassment in the United States? Unlikely. Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha studied an earlier CAIR hate crimes report in 2005 and discovered that “of twenty ‘anti-Muslim hate crimes’ in 2004 that CAIR describes, at least six are invalid.” These included one incident of a bombing outside a mosque for which no police report exists, and which seems not to have taken place at all; one of an arson attack against a mosque that police had determined was a simple robbery, with no “hate” motive; and two incidents of Muslim store owners destroying their own stores.

Why would CAIR trump up hate crimes? Because victimhood is big business. The Department of Homeland Security recently unveiled a $24 million grant program for non-profit organizations who are deemed high-risk for a potential international terrorist attack” – and CAIR immediately issued an “Action Alert” urging American mosques to apply for money for surveillance and security systems. What’s more, if CAIR succeeds in its attempt to portray Muslims in America as innocent victims of “Islamophobic” persecution, they will have deflected attention away from the question of whether or not the Fort Dix Six and other jihadists learned to hate and betray America in American mosques. Thus American mosques, seen as victims rather than as possibly abettors of seditious activity, won’t face any scrutiny over what they are doing, and not doing, to halt the spread of the jihadist ideology of Islamic supremacism among Muslims in America.

CAIR’s Nihad Awad recently told a Muslim audience: “There were 196 cases reported by the Justice Department for Muslims in civil rights cases. There were over 1008 cases reported by the Jewish faith. We need to do a much better job not only in recognizing our civil rights but also in reporting it to the government. Which is very critical and very important.” Important for the victimhood game: winners receive torrents of money, favorable media coverage, and moral authority that must never be questioned. In this effort Awad can count on the help of the mainstream media, which continues in the wake of the Fort Dix arrests to report on Muslim fears of backlash, as if those fears in themselves constitute an indictment of American society.

It’s worthwhile in light of this to step back and consider some of the media reports we are not seeing. Amid the steady stream of backlash articles, there has not been even one article about Muslims pledging to redouble their efforts to teach against the jihad ideology in American mosques. While many have reaffirmed that Islam is a religion of peace and scolded authorities for linking Islam with militancy, no Muslims have explained how this peaceful religion keeps being so outrageously misunderstood by those who are often its most devout adherents, or what they propose to do to keep this from happening in the future. No reporters – consumed as they are with their search for backlash incidents -- are even asking questions like this.

And that makes it likely that the Fort Dix jihad plotters will not be the last Muslims in America to “misunderstand” their religion and think it enjoins them to commit acts of violence against unbelievers.

Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.

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Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.

US: University Says Printing Facts of Islam is Form of 'Harassment'

Factual Statements=Unprotected Harassment!? A Terrifying Precedent at Tufts

by Greg Lukianoff

May 11, 2007

Today, FIRE announced the decision by a disciplinary panel at Tufts to find the conservative student newspaper, The Primary Source, guilty of “harassment” for, among other things, publishing a satirical ad that listed less-than-flattering facts about Islam during Tufts’ Islamic Awareness Week. You can see the ad here, and Eugene Volokh has also published it with excellent commentary over at his blog, but, just to make sure people see the ad for themselves, I have reprinted the full text:

Islam

Arabic Translation: Submission

In the Spirit of Islamic Awareness Week, the SOURCE presents an itinerary to supplement the educational experience.

MONDAY: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” – The Koran, Sura 8:12

Author Salman Rushdie needed to go into hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeni declared a fatwa calling for his death for writing The Satanic Verses, which was declared “blasphemous against Islam.”

TUESDAY: Slavery was an integral part of Islamic culture. Since the 7^th century, 14 million African slaves were sold to Muslims compared to 10 or 11 million sold to the entire Western Hemisphere. As recently as 1878, 25,000 slaves were sold annually in Mecca and Medina. (National Review 2002)

The seven nations in the world that punish homosexuality with death all have fundamentalist Muslim governments.

WEDNESDAY: In Saudi Arabia, women make up 5% of the workforce, the smallest percentage of any nation worldwide. They are not allowed to operate a motor vehicle or go outside without proper covering of their body. (Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2001)

Most historians agree that Muhammed’s second wife Aisha was 9 years old when their marriage was consummated.

THURSDAY: “Not equal are those believers who sit and receive no hurt, and those who strive and fight in the cause of Allah with their goods and their persons. Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit. Unto all Hath Allah promised good: But those who strive and fight Hath He distinguished above those who sit by a special reward.” – The Koran, Sura 4:95

The Islamist guerrillas in Iraq are not only killing American soldiers fighting for freedom. They are also responsible for the vast majority of civilian casualties.

FRIDAY: Ibn Al-Ghazzali, the famous Islamic theologian, said, “The most satisfying and final word on the matter is that marriage is form of slavery. The woman is man’s slave and her duty therefore is absolute obedience to the husband in all that he asks of her person.”

Mohamed Hadfi, 31, tore out his 23-year-old wife Samira Bari’s eyes in their apartment in the southern French city of Nimes in July 2003 following a heated argument about her refusal to have sex with him. (Herald Sun)

If you are a peaceful Muslim who can explain or justify this astonishingly intolerant and inhuman behavior, we’d really like to hear from you! Please send all letters to tuftsprimarysource@gmail.com.

So does this paint Islam in a nice light? No. Is it one-sided? Yes, but that was kind of the point. The students were responding to what they thought was a one-sided and overly rosy depiction of Islam during Islamic Awareness week. But is it unprotected harassment!? One certainly hopes not, or else “harassment” just became a truly lethal threat to free speech—an “exception” that completely swallows the rule.

This is perhaps the most troubling and far-reaching aspect of this case. The Primary Source published a satirical ad filled with factual assertions and because this angered people it was ruled to be unprotected harassment. If what the complaining students wanted to say was that the TPS facts were wrong, then—while this still would not be harassment—that could have been an interesting debate. But instead, in sadly predictable fashion, the students plowed ahead with a harassment claim that, based on the hearing panel’s decision, appeared not even to raise the issue of whether or not the statements in the ad were true, but turned only on how they made people feel. A panel consisting of both faculty and students found the publication guilty in flagrant abuse of what harassment case law and regulations actually say, and demonstrating total ignorance of the principles of a free society. Even in libel law (one of the oldest exceptions to the rule of free speech is that you can be punished for defaming people) truth is rightfully an absolute defense. Here, the fact that TPS printed verifiable information—with citations—was apparently no defense, nor was the fact that the ad concerned contentious issues of dire global importance. Such an anemic conception of free speech should chill anyone who cares about basic rights and democracy itself.

I doubt that the Tufts disciplinary board thought through the full ramifications of their actions. If a Muslim student had published these same statements in an article calling for reform in Islam, would that be harassment? If Tufts wished to be at all consistent (a dubious bet here), it would be.

Since those students and faculty obviously did not think about the ramifications of this decision, we put it to you, President Bacow: do you think the publication of factual assertions should be a punishable offense if they hurt the wrong people’s feelings, regardless of whether or not they are true? I hope he will think hard on what the U.S. would look like if that was the law of the land. It’s not a country that most of us would recognize or even want to live in. We ask again for President Bacow to live up to the best principles of a liberal university in a free society and overturn this dangerous decision.

MuZZie Youth org at VTech more than happy to pray for fallen non - muzzies

OUTRAGE: VTech Muslims Upset Over Request to Pray for Non-Muslim Victims

By Debbie Schlussel

It's that tolerant "Religion of Peace" at it again.

Members of the mailing list for the student Muslim community at Virginia Tech are up in arms that one of their members dared ask them to pray to Allah for non-Muslim victims of the massacre.

Aafaq, a reformist Islamic website edited by Omran Salman of Bahrain, reports the following:

Debate on Virginia Tech Muslim Students' Association Mailing List Concerning Permissibility of Praying for Mercy for Non-Muslim Victims

The liberal Arabic-language website Aafaq reports that a Muslim student set off a debate when she sent an email to the mailing list of the Muslim Students' Association at Virginia Tech asking the students to pray that Allah have mercy on those killed and wounded in the shooting attack at the university.

According to Aafaq, the dean of student affairs at American International University, Abu Hamza Hijji, responded, writing that Allah the Most Merciful forbids praying for mercy for the non-Muslim dead, or even for the non-Muslim living, and that it is only permitted to pray that they be rightly guided [DS: convert to Islam]. He added that what happened was a sad occurrence, but that does not give Muslims the right to transgress the laws of Allah the Most Merciful.

Aafaq reported that a student named Chris, a recent convert, did not agree, and wrote that he usually does not intervene in this kind of discussion, but that this time he had to say "no." He added that his German teacher, who was wounded in the shooting, is a good man, and that he was praying that he would not die. He said that he would pray for him and for his family, whether they are Muslims or not, and would pray for all those who suffered from this calamity. He expressed the view that religion must bring people together, and not drive them apart, and that the brotherhood of humanity takes precedence over brotherhood of religion or of state.

According to Aafaq, Hijji answered Chris, saying that there is no problem with praying that non-Muslims be kept safe and not be killed, if there is hope that they might be guided [to the right path] [DS: conversion to Islam]; but one cannot pray for the non-Muslim dead, since there is no chance of their being guided. He said that the Prophet Muhammad had told the Muslim soldiers at the battle of Badr to not kill some of the nonbelievers, even though they were on the battlefield, as they had treated Muhammad well when he was in Mecca.

Hijji wrote that the students should ask Allah to save Chris' teacher (i.e. the German teacher) from death and turn his heart to the truth [DS: convert to Islam]. But he said at the same time that the Prophet did not pray for forgiveness for the non-Muslims, and in particular did not ask Allah to have mercy on them, even those whom the Prophet had wanted to be guided when they were alive. Once they died, the Prophet was not permitted to ask for mercy for them. Hijji added that the Prophet behaved this way on Allah's instructions.

Hijji wrote that the relative importance of brotherhood in humanity or religion needs to be evaluated according to Allah's laws, and not according to human reason. He added that he might seem to be a hard-hearted person, but that this is what people throughout the generations said about the prophets and messengers who came with God's message to guide others to the truth.

According to Aafaq, some students expressed their uneasiness with the discussion and asked to be taken off the mailing list, while others tried to justify the seemingly difficult matter.

Aafaq noted that at least one Muslim student, Waleed Shaalan, had been killed in the attacks.

Source: Aafaq.org, April 17, 2007

Thanks to my friend, Jan, for the tip.

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