Muslim Mafia (20 page)

Apparently CAIR’s own guest speaker Shakir didn’t get the memo. Speaking before private Muslim audiences, the
imam
readily confesses that Islam is a uniquely militant religion that believes in taking an eye for an eye.

“We don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek philosophy” like the Christians, he says. “Allah has given us permission to fight them” so that the “word of Allah can be uppermost.”
⁵⁰
Brotherhood leader Totonji agrees: “In Islam, we do not believe in the formula, ‘If someone smacks you on the right cheek, turn to him the left.’ We believe that if someone smacks you on the right cheek, smack him on the right cheek.”
⁵¹

WHOPPER NUMBER
3
: CAIR also claims “Allah is the same God worshipped by Christians and Jews.” In fact, the group says, “Muslims love and revere Jesus.”
⁵²

Many Americans have fallen for this Allah-God fallacy, including former President Bush, who not long after 9/11 said of Muslims, “I believe we worship the same God.”

Some national polls show that as many as four out of five Americans agree that Muslims worship the same Almighty as Christians and Jews. It’s a popular myth cultivated by years of propaganda by CAIR and liberal interfaith groups promoting shared religious values and themes. And it’s nonsense on stilts.

Neither Christians nor Jews worship the same deity as Muslims, nor do Muslims worship the same God as the “People of the Book,” and this is apparent from even a cursory reading of their sacred texts. If Muslims honestly believed CAIR’s palaver about a common divinity, the first Muslim member of Congress would not have had reservations about taking his oath of office on the Bible. But Democratic Representative Keith Ellison, a close ally of CAIR, insisted on using the Quran instead.

A critical part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy to conquer America is establishing common ground between Islam and Christianity. As Sheik Qaradawi has said: “We will conquer America not by the sword but by
dawah
”—the mission to convert others to Islam.
⁵³

One of the tools the Brotherhood and CAIR use to blind Christian skeptics and convert easy marks—such as Hispanic immigrants—is to talk up Jesus and his mother Mary.

In fact, the book,
Jesus: Prophet of Islam
by Mohammed Ata-ur-Rehman and Muslim convert Ahmad Thomson, can be found among CAIR’s
dawah
training materials. CAIR also recently launched a $60,000 advertising campaign that claims on Florida buses that Jesus was a Muslim. The signs read: “ISLAM: The Way of Life of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.”

“Hispanics are increasingly interested in Islam,” CAIR boasts in its media guide, and they are “converting to Islam.” That’s because CAIR and groups like the Latino American Dawah Organization are targeting them for conversion. Knowing how much Latino Catholics revere Mary, they point out that Mary is mentioned more often in the Quran than the New Testament.

While true, the only reason the Muslim holy book cites Mary so many times is to brand Jesus a mere mortal in the Muslim mind. Christ is referred to exclusively in the text of the Quran as “Jesus, son of Mary,” and never “Jesus, son of God,” which would be blasphemous to Allah. If anything, the literary distinction points up how different the two faiths are, since Muslims don’t believe that Jesus is God. In fact, they believe professing such a thing is
shirk
—the worst of all sins.

Still, Latino Catholics in particular are impressed with the attention Mary seems to get in the Quran. The “phenomenon” of their rapid conversion to Islam, as CAIR calls it, is predicated on this artifice.

And it’s the same
dawah
trick used by bin Laden, who in a recently recorded message to America tried to draw Christians’ attention to the allegedly similar beliefs that they and Muslims share regarding Jesus and Mary.

But don’t be misled. Here are the facts:

But then CAIR knows this. It’s spelled out in a pamphlet titled, “Khilafa” (
Caliphate
) found tucked in files stored in CAIR’s executive offices. Under the heading, “World Wide Islamic Domination,” it says that “Islam will prevail over every religion” when “Jesus, son of Mary,” returns to slay the “false messiah” worshipped by the non-Muslims.
⁵⁴

Islamist doctrine also holds that all people were born Muslim, but due to the fault of their parents, most are not taught Islam. When they finally see the “truth,” they “revert” back to Islam.

In public, CAIR and Islamic leaders refer to new Muslims as converts—as opposed to “reverts,” which is the term they use in their private communications—because it would be a PR nightmare if they told Christians and Jews they were actually born Muslim. But make no mistake, this is what these Islamic supremacists believe.

Besides the Jesus-Mary stratagem, CAIR also uses the “Abrahamic faiths” pitch to entice non-Muslims to cross over to Islam. But it beards the truth as well.

CAIR argues that we are all children of Abraham; and since we share a common ancestry, we share a common God.

But CAIR knows full well that Arab Muslims believe they are descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael, while Jews and Christians believe they descended from Isaac—Abraham’s other son, who was favored by God in the story of the Bible.

Muslims also believe their deity told Abraham to sacrifice Ishmael, not Isaac, as a test of his faith. They even celebrate Abraham’s obedience—and Ishmael’s willingness to be sacrificed for the sake of Allah—each year by sacrificing livestock on Eid al-Adha. (In fact, the throats of hundreds of goats are slit in Muslim enclaves across America during their annual festival.)

This is no minor theological point. The Bible says God chose to establish his covenant with Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac, instead of Ishmael, the son of the slave girl Hagar. In fact, God banished Ishmael—described in the Bible as “a wild donkey of a man” whose “hand will be against everyone”—to the desert.

Here’s another fundamental difference: Unlike the God of the Bible, Allah does not recognize Jews as his chosen people.

WHOPPER NUMBER
2
: After 9/11, CAIR cited an explosion in anti-Islamic hate crimes in demanding more outreach with the FBI and special rights and protections for Muslims. “Unlike any other past crisis,” CAIR claimed, “the post-September 11 anti-Muslim backlash has been the most violent.”

But the latest Justice Department data on hate crimes reveal CAIR has been crying wolf. Not only are anti-Islamic hate crimes way down, but they’re a fraction of overall religious hate crimes. The overwhelming majority of such crimes target Jews, something CAIR and other Muslim groups don’t seem all that concerned about.

In 2007, a whopping 69 percent of religiously motivated attacks were on Jews, while just 8 percent targeted Muslims—even though the Jewish and Muslim populations are comparable in size. Catholics and Protestants, who together account for almost 9 percent of victims, are subject to as much abuse as Muslims in this country.

In the most recent year, anti-Islamic hate crimes totaled 115. While just one hate crime is one too many, that’s a 26 percent drop from 2006 and a 76 percent plunge from 2001. And the number is minuscule compared with the 969 offenses against Jews. For every attack on a Muslim in this country, there are nine against a Jew.
⁵⁵

The government data give lie to CAIR’s alarmist narrative of “Islamophobic” lynch mobs marching on mosques across America. In reality, Americans have been remarkably tolerant and respectful of Muslims and their institutions since 9/11.

It’s plain that CAIR, true to form, has been exaggerating the numbers and hyping tensions to advance its political agenda. Every year the pressure group releases a report citing thousands of alleged civil rights and physical abuses against Muslims, which largely are based on anecdotal reporting from members. Despite CAIR’s obvious bias (and proven record of dissembling), the PC-drunk media report its numbers unfiltered and without question.

But if you peel them back, you find that many of them are victimless crimes. For instance: