The “Islamist” penetration of America that we are doing nothing to prevent

Yousseff Ibrahim, a moderate or secular Muslim who writes regularly in the New York Sun, has a deeply alarming article on the “Islamist” penetration into America via media. I’ve copied the entire text below. Following the article, I ask mainstream conservatives how this “Islamist” penetration of America can be stopped.

THE ISLAMIST TROJAN HORSE
Youssef Ibrahim
September 20, 2007

“We’re fighting them there, so we don’t have to fight them here” has become a hymn for the American right and an abominable lie to the left. But drowned out by all the noise is the fact that “they” are here already, having landed a long time ago and gotten very busy indeed constructing the American wing of jihad.

Have you watched the Arabic Channel, also known as TAC, which serves the New York region? Probably not, as most New Yorkers neither understand nor speak Arabic. But if you are among the estimated 1 million viewers—legal and illegal, new and old Arabic-speaking immigrants to the tri-state area—who tune in daily to Channel 507 on Time Warner Cable, this is what you can get:

- A daily dose of Islamic jurisprudence from an Egyptian sheik, Amr Khaled, who comes direct from Cairo as TAC’s prime advocate of “peaceful jihad,” on how the duty of every Arab-American is to become first, second, and only a member of the Muslim Ummah.

- A nightly helping of Syria’s CNN-style digest of the world, sent fresh from a Damascus studio where the Iraq war is nothing but an American butchery of Arabs, and the Zionist regime in Jerusalem is just biding its time until it gets what it deserves.

- A sprinkling of Egyptian and Syrian soap operas (though TAC completely avoids footage of “Oriental” dancing and other “infidel” joys of life).

On its Web site, TAC says it is now 14 years old and serves the “Greater New York City Metropolitan area, including Jersey City, Bergen County, N.J., and Mt. Vernon, N.Y.” through cable and satellite transmission.

TAC’s ownership and funding are, to put it mildly, ambiguous. What is clear is that someone is funding this Islamist Trojan Horse already anchored inside the American fortress.

Another Islamist Trojan vehicle that was once quietly thriving in America—until it was shut down by presidential order in 2001—is the now infamous Holy Land Foundation, whose recent prosecution by the American government is in its final phase.

At the Holy Land Foundation’s trial in U.S. District Court in Dallas, the foundation and its many chapters stand accused of allegedly collecting some $57 million for radical Islamic causes and using the money as direct or indirect donations to the Palestinian Arab terrorist organization Hamas. Among other things, Holy Land is accused of allegedly organizing conferences and festivals with Hamas officials at which anti-Israel skits were performed as small children danced and waved flags. But the process was going on long before the Holy Land termination order and trial. It is naïve to not recognize the fusion between such militant proselytizing and the message spread by TAC.

Seemingly separate but unquestionably part of the same process of spreading militancy among immigrant Arab communities was the Debbie Almontaser episode of the Khalil Gibran School saga, in which what she saw as a benign use of the word “intifada” led to her being forced to quit as the school’s principal. Neither Ms. Almontaser’s project nor her unstated intention to create a Muslim school in Brooklyn under the guise of multiculturalism took place in a void. The common task among all these organizations and individuals is to instill the notion there are no Arab-Americans, only Muslim Americans.

What follows next, of course, is the “community’s” eventual embrace of jihad against the values and policies of the majority infidel. This is what has taken place in Britain among native British subjects of Muslim origin.

For those who do not understand Arabic, of course, there is the new Al-Jazeera in English, whose slick, transplanted British broadcasters and directors are dedicated to expanding the notion that America and Israel are always aggressive and morally wrong.

Al-Jazeera in English is accessible via the Internet and gains greater access every day to satellite dishes and bigger audiences, all of it sponsored by our ally, the government of the tiny emirate Qatar.

While American law enforcement is getting pretty good at spotting violence that emerges in the style of another paramilitary attack, a friend in the national security community in Washington told me that there “are no vehicles nor a body of laws” to stop or monitor that other kind of slow implantation.

Yaroslav Trofimov, a Wall Street Journal correspondent and the author of two impressive books, “Faith at War” and “The Siege of Mecca,” travels extensively across the Muslim world and has concluded, among other things: “Often, those with the most bloodthirsty ideas were the well-to-do and the privileged who have had some experience with the West, not the downtrodden and ignorant masses.”

Maybe Congress should find a way to legislate asking such well placed outfits as TAC, Holy Land, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations a question: Who, pray tell, are you working for, gentlemen?

end of Ibrahim article

In my view, the only way to stop the things described by Ibrahim is, at the least, to end all Muslim immigration into America and pass laws prohibiting the promotion of political Islam. Political Islam is, however, something of a euphemism, since Islam in practical terms is the sharia, and the sharia is an all encompassing, tyrannical code for social and political existence. Therefore, at a minimum, Islam itself must be outlawed or placed under constraints that would be tantamount to outlawing Islam.

Of course, the hard-line, anti-Islamist, mainstream conservatives will instantly dismiss what I’ve just said, even as they express great alarm at the growth of “Islamism” in America.

So let’s take the mainstream conservatives at their word. Short of my radical and unacceptable position, how, according to the mainstream conservatives, can the “Islamist” Trojan Horse detailed by Ibrahim be stopped?

Let’s start with his first and most disturbing example, the Arabic Channel’s daily broadcast of the sermons on Islamic jurisprudence (i.e., sharia law) by Egyptian sheik Amr Khaled in which he advocates “peaceful jihad,” and speaks of “how the duty of every Arab-American is to become first, second, and only a member of the Muslim Ummah.”

What, according to the mainstream conservatives, can be done about this?

Khaled is not promoting terrorism, he’s not telling people to break any laws, he’s not telling people to fight on the side of our enemies. He’s simply teaching about the sharia and telling Muslims to identify with the Muslim ummah and not with America.

There’s nothing illegal about that. All that Khaled is doing is preaching Islam.

Ibrahim makes the same point when he quotes a person in the national security community saying that there “are no vehicles nor a body of laws” to stop or monitor this slow implantation of sharia in America.

Thus the mainstream conservatives, who say that Islam is good and that only “Islamism” is the problem, have no way to oppose the spread of “Islamism” in America. All their warnings, all their calls to “war” against Islamism, are revealed as empty rhetoric.

What it comes down to is that we can only stop the spread of “Islamism” by restricting Islam itself.

And that means, at a minimum, the positions I’ve already outlined: the cessation of all Muslim immigration into the U.S., and the outlawing of the promotion of political Islam, which means outlawing the promotion of sharia, which means outlawing the promotion of Islam, which means outlawing Islam.

These measures are not possible within our existing political ideology and legal system.

Therefore we must change that ideology and legal system, as follows: We must say that our code of non-discrimination does not apply to Muslims, and that the First Amendment does not apply to Islam.

If anyone thinks I’m wrong, please tell me how we can stop the Islamist Trojan Horse by any means short of what I’ve just proposed.

A final note: I recommend to readers that when you see a mainstream conservative or anti-“Islamist” writer or Republican politician calling for “war against Islamism,” you send him an example of the “peaceful jihad” that is being spread in America (such as Ibrahim’s paragraph about Amr Khaled), and ask him what he would do to oppose this. If he replies that he doesn’t oppose it or that there is no basis for opposing it within our moral and legal system, then it’s clear that he doesn’t oppose jihadism and the spread of sharia law and the spread of a sharia-believing anti-American population in our country, and therefore that his claim to be defending America from Islamic extremism is a fraud.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 23, 2007 10:40 AM | Send