Lieberman: Omitting 'Islamic' Terrorism From Security Document Dishonest, 'Offensive'

FOXNews.com, April 11, 2010

Sen. Joe Lieberman slammed the Obama administration Sunday for stripping terms like "Islamic extremism" from a key national security document, calling the move dishonest, wrong-headed and disrespectful to the majority of Muslims who are not terrorists.

Sen. Joe Lieberman slammed the Obama administration Sunday for stripping terms like "Islamic extremism" from a key national security document, calling the move dishonest, wrong-headed and disrespectful to the majority of Muslims who are not terrorists.

The Connecticut independent revealed that he wrote a letter Friday to top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan urging the administration to "identify accurately the ideological source" of the threat against the United States. He wrote that failing to identify "violent Islamist extremism" as the enemy is "offensive."
The letter was written following reports that the administration was removing religious references from the U.S. National Security Strategy -- the document that had described the "ideological conflict" of the early 21st century as "the struggle against militant Islamic radicalism."

Lieberman told "Fox News Sunday" this isn't the first time the Obama administration has tried to tiptoe around referring to Islam in its security documents and that it's time to "blow the whistle" on the trend.

"This is not honest and, frankly, I think it's hurtful in our relations with the Muslim world," Lieberman said. "We're not in a war against Islam. It's a group of Islamist extremists who have taken the Muslim religion and made it into a political ideology, and I think if we're not clear about that, we disrespect the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are not extremists."

Lieberman, in his letter, noted that prior Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon documents also did not refer to "Islamist extremism." He expressed dismay that the administration's review of the Fort Hood shooting, in which alleged shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan was said to have had contact with a radical cleric beforehand, omitted the term.
"Unless we're honest about that, we're not going to be able to defeat this enemy," Lieberman told "Fox News Sunday." "It's absolutely Orwellian and counterproductive to the fight that we're fighting."

Theologian's "Jihad and Genocide" previewed by Christian media analyst

CAMERA.com's Christian Media Analyst, Dexter Van Zile, sat down to record some informal video notes for an upcoming review of noted Holocaust theologian Richard L. Rubenstein's book, "Jihad and Genocide".

 
 
Source:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP38bHFQiJ0


Informal comment by Dexter Van Zile:

I think the issue of the dhimma is of central importance to the current conflict. The dhimma is the treaty of protection offered to non-Muslims in Muslim ruled countries. In return for accepting their subject status, non-Muslims are allowed to maintain their religious identity. The underlying assumption is that Islam is supposed to be the dominant force in any society where it exists.

The notion of Jewish sovereignty, especially on land previously governed by Muslim rulers, is anathema to this understanding. It is an inversion of the way things are supposed to be.

The forces that contribute to the terrible treatment of religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East are the same forces that contribute to violence against non-Muslims outside the region by Islamists. 

Note:  We are referring here only to Radical or Revolutionary Islamism.  The average Muslim, even those who practice conservative traditional Islam, is not a Radical Islamist. As Prof. Barry Rubin puts it: "We should understand  [that]  Islamism is not [ and hasn't been] the only possible interpretation of Islam."   http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2010/01/radical-islamism-introductory-primer.html

Islamic Imperialism: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Middle East - Thomas O. Hecht

The Current Radical Islamist Challenge : Today, it is politically correct to say that Islam is a religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims want to live in peace. This may be true, but in light of worldwide Muslim terrorist acts in Bali, New York, the northern Chinese provinces, Mumbai, and Madrid, the reference to the religion of peace becomes questionable. Using such terms obfuscates the issue by causing a false optimism while diminishing the specter of the fanatics who rampage the globe in the name of Islam. The peaceful majority in Muslim lands is cowed into a non-existent force.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers No. 97, November 25, 2009

Dr. Thomas O. Hecht is the founder of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies and Chairman of its International Advisory Board.

A reformer of Islam, Dr. Tawfik Hamid advises: "Don't let your country surrender to terrorism."



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2wvqDfitLY

Bronx terrorists ‘wanted to commit jihad’
May 21, 2009

WASHINGTON (JTA) – The four men who planned to blow up two synagogues in the Bronx and shot down U.S. military planes said they "wanted to commit jihad," the New York Police Commissioner said.

James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen, all of Newburgh 60 miles north of New York, were arrested Wednesday night. Payen is a native of Haiti. All four of the men are Muslim, and three are recent converts to Islam, according to reports.

“They stated that they wanted to commit jihad,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Thursday morning during a news conference at the Riverdale Jewish Center. “More information about their motives I’m sure will be developed as the case progresses, but right now, they stated they wanted to make jihad. They were disturbed about what was happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that Muslims were being killed. They were making statements that Jews were killed in this attack and that would be all right — that sort of thing.”

Kelly said the men, who are scheduled to be arraigned Thursday morning in Federal District Court, were not acting on behalf of any terrorist organizations and described them as "petty criminals" with multiple arrests for minor crimes.

According to the U.S. attorney’s statement, an informant working with the FBI this month provided the four men with a disabled anti-aircraft missile launcher and disabled explosives. The men on Wednesday planted the fake explosives, which they believed to be real, in cars parked outside Riverdale Temple, a Reform synagogue, and the Riverdale Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue.

Last month, according to the statement and to the criminal complaint, the defendants photographed several synagogues and a Jewish community center in the Riverdale section of the Bronx as well as the Air National Guard Base at Newburgh.

Cromitie, who according to the complaint told the informant that his parents once lived in Afghanistan, allegedly expressed an interest in working with the Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist group, Jaish-e-Mohammed.

“While the weapons provided to the defendants by the cooperating witness were fake, the defendants thought they were absolutely real," said acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin said in the statement. "The defendants planned to strike military planes with surface-to-air guided missiles and to destroy a synagogue and a Jewish community center with C-4 plastic explosives.”

An older article (below), but one that is relevant again regarding the current trial of the Holy Land Foundation -- M. Finkelstein

Rod Dreher: What the Muslim Brotherhood means for the U.S.

Memo lays bare group's plans to destroy U.S. from within[The 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document captured by the FBI is archived (along with English translation) at http://www.nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/HLF/Akram_GeneralStrategicGoal.pdf]


11:17 AM CDT on Sunday, September 9, 2007

"Our strategy is this," President Bush said last month. "We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America."

He was talking about jihadists, of course. And Mr. Bush is behind the curve. The president apparently missed the smoking-gun 1991 document his own Justice Department introduced into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. The FBI captured it in a raid on a Muslim suspect's home in Virginia.

This "explanatory memorandum," as it's titled, outlines the "strategic goal" for the North American operation of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Here's the key paragraph:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.


The entire 18-page platform outlines a plan for the long haul. It prescribes the Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations, for the sake of unifying and educating the U.S. Muslim community – this to prepare it for the establishment of a global Islamic state governed by sharia.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory out of a bad Hollywood movie – but it's real. Husain Haqqani, head of Boston University's Center for International Relations and a former Islamic radical, confirms that the Brotherhood "has run most significant Muslim organizations in the U.S." as part of the plan outlined in the strategy paper.

The HLF trial is exposing for the first time how the international Muslim Brotherhood – whose Palestinian division is Hamas – operates as a self-conscious revolutionary vanguard in the United States. The court documents indicate that many leading Muslim-American organizations – including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim American Society – are an integral part of the Brotherhood's efforts to wage jihad against America by nonviolent means.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an affiliation of at least 70 Islamist organizations around the world, all tracing their heritage to the original cell, founded in Egypt in 1928. Its credo: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." Sayyid Qutb, hanged by the Egyptian government in 1966 as a revolutionary, remains its ideological godfather. His best-known work, Milestones, calls for Muslims to wage violent holy war until Islamic law governs the entire world.

According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune investigation, establishing the Brotherhood in the United States has been a 40-year project that has worked mostly underground – even beneath the notice of many Muslims. Richard Clarke, the former top U.S. national security official, told the Senate in 2003 that the Muslim Brotherhood is the common thread linking terrorist fundraising schemes in the United States – which likely explains why so many mainstream American Muslim organizations were named by the feds as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the HLF trial.

Is this just alarmist paranoia? Not at all.

This matters because high-profile organizations with roots explicitly in the Muslim Brotherhood have successfully established themselves in a paramount position to define Islam in America according to a radical politicized model. And they've done so without the American public having the slightest idea about their real agenda. Indeed, the Bush administration is unwittingly helping the Islamist cause by including their leaders in public events, thus conferring them legitimacy. On Labor Day weekend, the same Department of Justice that's presenting evidence of the ISNA's involvement with radical Islam at the Dallas trial sponsored a booth at – wait for it – ISNA's national convention in suburban Chicago.

Look, no rational person believes America is going to exchange the Constitution for a caliphate. Rational people aren't the point. As the London subway bombings showed, even a tiny cell of committed radicals can kill a lot of people. Mustafa Saied, an American Muslim who left the Brotherhood, told the Tribune that he worried about the radicalism the Brotherhood inculcated in its membership here. "With the extreme element," he said, "you never know when that ticking time bomb will go off."

As long as they commit no crimes, CAIR, ISNA and the other Brotherhood-related groups have the right to advocate for their beliefs. But they don't have the right to escape critical scrutiny, and they deserve informed opposition. Courageous Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy are sounding the alarm about radical Islam's stealth takeover of U.S. Muslim institutions. Why are the news media ignoring this? Fear of being called Islamophobic?

This has got to stop. Six years after 9/11, we're still asleep. Islamic radicals have declared war on us – and some are fighting here in what looks like a fifth column. Read their strategy document. It's there in black and white, for those with eyes to see.

Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist. E-mail him at rdreher@dallasnews.com.

The identification, in this article by the AP, of ultraconservative Islam with intolerance is a step forward.

A broader understanding of how "intolerant" Islam feeds jihadism should help Americans understand that (a) not every Muslim is intolerant, and (b) that sharp criticism of the growth and pervasiveness of jihadi Islam is not an attack on every Muslim, much less on every American Muslim. -- Mark Finkelstein

Ultraconservative Islam on rise in Mideast
Critics worry that Salafists will crowd out more tolerant version of Islam
The Associated Press Sat., Oct. 18, 2008 [excerpts]

CAIRO, Egypt - The Muslim call to prayer fills the halls of a Cairo computer shopping center, followed immediately by the click of locking doors as the young, bearded tech salesmen close up shop and line up in rows to pray together.
Business grinding to a halt for daily prayers is not unusual in conservative Saudi Arabia, but until recently it was rare in the Egyptian capital, especially in affluent commercial districts like Mohandiseen, where the mall is located.

But nearly the entire three-story mall is made up of computer stores run by Salafis, an ultraconservative Islamic movement that has grown dramatically across the Middle East in recent years.

The rise of Salafists has critics worried that their beliefs will crowd out the more liberal and tolerant version of Islam long practiced in some Middle East countries, particularly Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. They also warn that its doctrine is only a few shades away from that of violent groups like al-Qaida — that it effectively preaches, "Yes to jihad, just not now."

Extreme end
In the broad spectrum of Islamic thought, Salafism is on the extreme conservative end. Saudi Arabia's puritanical Wahhabi interpretation is considered the forerunner of modern Salafism.

Salafist groups are gaining in numbers and influence across the Middle East. In Jordan, a Salafist was chosen as head of the old-line opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood. In Kuwait, Salafists were elected to parliament and are leading the resistance to any change that would threaten traditional Islamic values.

The gains for Salafists are part of a trend of turning back to conservatism and religion after major political movements like Arab nationalism and Democratic reform failed to fulfill promises to improve the lives of average people. Egypt has been at the forefront of change in both directions, toward liberalization in the 1950s and '60s and back to conservatism more recently.

Its preachers often glorify martyrdom and jihad — or holy war — but always with the caveat that Muslims should not launch jihad until their leaders call for it. The idea is that the decision to overturn the political order is up to God, not the average citizen.

Contrasts with Islam
Critics warn that Salafis could easily slide into more violent, jihadist forms. In North Africa, some already have — the Algerian Salafi Group for Call and Combat has allied itself with al-Qaida and has been blamed for bombings and other attacks. Small pockets of Salafis in northern Lebanon and Gaza have also taken up weapons and formed jihadi-style groups.

"I am afraid that this Salafism may be transferred to be a Jihadi Salafism, especially with the current hard socio-economic conditions in Egypt," says Khalil El-Anani, a visiting scholar at Washington's Brookings Institution.

A dozen satellite TV channels — most Saudi-funded — are perhaps the most effective way Salafism has been spread. They feature conservative preachers, call-in advice shows and discussion programs on proper Islamic behavior.

Numerous Salafist mosques in Cairo are packed on Fridays, the day of weekly communal prayers. Outside downtown Cairo's Shaeriyah mosque, a bookstall featured dozens of cassettes by Mohammed Hasaan, a prolific conservative preacher who sermonizes on the necessity of jihad and the injustices inflicted on Muslims.

'Not a good thing'
Critics warn that the governments are playing with fire, saying Salafism creates an environment that breed extremism. Al-Qaida continues to try to draw Salafists into jihad, and the terror network's No. 2, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, praised Salafists in an Internet statement in April, urging them to take up arms.

"The Salafi line is not that jihad is not a good thing, it is just not a good thing right now," said Richard Gauvain, a lecturer in comparative religion at the American University in Cairo.

The Salafis' talk of eventual jihad focuses on fighting Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, not on overthrowing pro-U.S. Arab governments denounced by al-Qaida. Most Salafi clerics preach loyalty to their countries' rulers and some sharply denounce al-Qaida.

Egypt, with Saudi help, sought to rehabilitate jailed Islamic militants, in part by providing them with Salafi books. Critics say the regime of President Hosni Mubarak sees the Salafists as a counterbalance to the opposition Muslim Brotherhood.

Terrorism planned and implemented by Radical Islam

See articles below about Radical Islamic terrorism in Yemen and calls for jihad in North Africa.

There was a "terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy [in Yemen] last Wednesday," September 17, reports the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram.

"The extremist religious discourse was behind the recent violent attacks in Yemen including the last one against the US Embassy, says Ahmed Al-Sufee, director of the Yemeni Institute for Development of Democracy, a local NGO. "We should think of removing the sources of terrorism which are related to our system of education, mosques, schools and curriculums," Al-Sufee told the Weekly.

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Al-Qaeda calls for holy war in North Africa
afrol News, 23 September

Al-Qaeda's North Africa wing chief has urged all Muslims to join jihad (holy war) and slammed governments in the region where group has claimed frequent attacks, United States monitoring service said.

The group has also issued new threats against Western interests, including France, Spain and US States.

Threat comes close on heels of last week's deadly suicide-bomb attack on heavily fortified US embassy in Yemeni capital Sana'a, claimed by terrorist outfit Islamic Jihad in Yemen.

"Unite around holy war that is the only alternative power to apostate regimes that dominate over our lands," Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, leader of Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), said in an audio speech posted on Sunday on Islamist militant websites, said SITE Intelligence Group.

Mr Abdul Wadud blasted regimes in Mauritania, Algeria and other North African countries, charging that Mauritania has become a nest of foreign intelligence at its forefront Mossad, and has become a station of crusader colonial ambition," he said, according to a SITE transcript.

"History will continue to mention that this is first Arab country, outside of Tawq (Arab nations surrounding Israel) that recognised state of Israel and exchanged ambassadors with it," he said.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb has repeatedly claimed responsibility for deadly attacks in Algeria, including an increase of bombings in July and August, and also been blamed for an ambush on a Mauritanian patrol last week that killed 12 Mauritanians and found 11 soldiers and one civilian.