DAR AL HARB-U.S.A.-WASHINGTON D.C.: FORCES OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAVE BEEN DEPLOYED TO HELP MOSLEMS SPREAD THEIR MESSAGE/DA'WA

The United States Government: Patron of Islam?
by Daniel Pipes and Mimi Stillman

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The earlier Western efforts to pander to Muslim sentiments came up short, as the Muslim leaders of Egypt fought Napoleon with all they had, while Mussolini failed to find the widespread Muslim support he had hoped to win. So too, the American effort will no doubt end in failure. It is nearly inconceivable that moderate Muslims will have any influence over their more radical coreligionists.

Practicalities aside, American officials would do well to ask whether their statements on Islam do not conflict with their government's basic principles. The United States has a message for the world, and that message is not Islam. The message, it hardly needs pointing out, is one of individualism, freedom, secularism, rule of law, democracy, and private property.

Finally, federal officials may not realize the implications of their scolding of Americans who are apprehensive about Islam, and their noisy espousal of that religion's virtues. Here, then, it is spelled out for them: In adopting a determinedly apologetic stance, they have made themselves an adjunct of the country's Islamic organizations. By dismissing any connection between Islam and terrorism, complaining about media distortions, and claiming that America needs Islam, they have turned the U.S. government into a discreet missionary for the faith.

Without anyone quite realizing it, the resources of the federal government have been deployed to help Muslims spread their message, and, in effect, their faith. If the "war on terror" is to have any larger purpose, it must be to free people from the yoke of politicized Islam. There can be no better place to begin than right at home.


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and also read the following in its entirety:


Allies of Jihad
The Common Strategies of Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini and Hitler
by Norman Berdichevsky

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The Naive European and American Patrons of Islam

With the exception of Hitler, whose consistent anti-Jewish ideology made him a natural ally of “selective jihad” and was therefore in a win-win situation, the European leaders, ministers, officials, and politicians who at one time or another thought that their country’s objectives in war or international relations could be advanced by some sort of alliance through encouraging the world’s Muslims to rise up in a “selective jihad” against other Western Christian nations, were abysmally ignorant of the genie they had let out of the bottle for whom all the infidels were ultimately to become their target. Napoleon derived no benefit whatsoever from his Egyptian adventure and wasted valuable resources and manpower. The Kaiser and Mussolini gained little of value by their proclamations as Protectors of Islam and rejected the potential friendship and alliance with Jewish forces that could have aided their cause immeasurably.

What is the relevance of this history for today? Al-Qaeda and its supporters and a multitude of other similar groups –Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hizbollah, etc. have taken responsibility for atrocious acts of murder and terror around the world in their campaign of global jihad. In an incisive article in the Middle East Quarterly in January 2002 by authors Daniel Pipes and Mimi Stillman, aptly entitled “The United States Government – Patron of Islam?”, documentation is made of repeated American governmental excuses that Islam is a “noble” religion, that there is NO clash of civilizations, and that a few extremists have “hijacked” Islam. The authors include every American President, Secretary of State, officials of the State Department and even former heads of the CIA for the last three administrations (i.e. both parties). Their motivation is easy to understand. They believe any criticism of the doctrine of jihad will be regarded as denigrating Islam.

The same “party line” rules in Great Britain and Western Europe where the conventional wisdom holds that there is no clash of civilizations and “jihad” is to be interpreted as some sort of spiritual struggle that every individual Muslim engages in to purify his soul. This is how jihad is interpreted by Muslim advocacy groups in the West such as The Council on American-Islamic relations (CAIR) whose goals are to “enhance understanding of Islam, promote justice and empower American Muslims.”

In an address to Congress and interview on NBC's "Dateline," Sept. 12, 2001, President Bush declared that …”the terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics.” Apart from the Saudi government, apparently under overwhelming pressure to respond to the fact that 19 of the 21 hijackers were Saudis, condemned the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Apart from this, no references were given as to who and where these "moderate Muslim clerics and scholars" are and what their standing is as recognized by Muslim institutions of learning or important positions sanctioned by governments anywhere in the Muslim world. There is certainly no such scholar or authority to match Al-Qaradawi. Since then, numerous and equally atrocious attacks in Jerusalem, Madrid, Bali, Algiers, Amman, Chechnya, Kashmir, India and Pakistan have not produced unequivocal public or highly visible condemnations of the Al-Qaeda concept of jihad by these many unnamed and unknown "moderate" clerics and scholars in any international forum. No internationally recognized Muslim scholar has condemned murderous suicidal attacks on Israeli civilians.

Pipes and Stillman correctly contend that the State Department has, in effect, become a “Patron” of Islam, yet if we are to learn anything at all from history, it is that the Islamic concept of jihad was unequivocally understood as “violent holy war” against the infidels and not subject to interpretation. It remains a political weapon that has been used quite similarly by the last Ottoman Caliph, the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs, Al-Qaeda and even rival extremist Sunni and Shi'ite clerics in Iraq today. It is still attractive to much extremist opinion in parts of the Arab world, Chechniya, the Sudan, Pakistan and even in Indonesia. Its attraction throughout the 20th century for those autocratic and dictatorial European leaders who sought to become “Protectors of Islam” and “borrow” it, was to exploit its violent and evil appeal for their own purposes.


Pertinent Links:

1) The United States Government: Patron of Islam?

2) Allies of Jihad