The Devil We Don't Know (18 page)

Obama also consistently used the words “holy Koran,” instead of simply “the Koran,” an expression that is not used by ordinary Muslims, except for Islamists who also consistently say, “Peace be upon him,” whenever the name Mohammed is mentioned. It is important to understand how President Obama's speech led many Muslims to believe certain misconceptions, such as the implication that U.S. law will not allow criticism of Islam and that America's policy of supporting Israel has weakened.

With his Cairo speech and other actions of Islamic appeasement, President Obama has set a new standard that future U.S. presidents might find difficult to follow. The next U.S. administration might find it hard to please the Muslim world after several of the pro-Islamic policies Obama has set. For instance, how will a future U.S. president be viewed by the Muslim world if he does not bow to the Saudi king, as Obama did? If the future president has a policy not to treat Muslims with kid gloves and begins to treat Muslim leaders like adults, will he or she be criticized as being hostile to Islam? If the next administration goes back to naming the threat
Islamic terrorism
, will the president be called Hitler by the media? Are we going to cheer when Islamists throw their shoes at our future U.S. president simply for not supporting radical Islam? Will Western media call conservative U.S. leaders who want to protect America racists and bigots for not accepting the Muslim Brotherhood as Obama has done? In view of what Obama is doing today, that is something to think about.

Another example of such appeasement is the deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, a practicing Muslim and the wife of former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is Jewish. Under Islamic law, it is a sinful act of apostasy for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim unless he converts to Islam, but Abedin has never been criticized for her marriage to a Jew by any Muslim entity, either in the United States or in Saudi Arabia, where her mother lives and works. This is very unusual, and perhaps she was given a pass and was forgiven by Muslim leaders for what is considered by Islam a major sin, because Arabs believe she is their person at the U.S. State Department.

Walid Shoebat, the author of
God's War on Terror
, has reported that Huma's mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, was named by Al-Jazeera and major Arab newspapers to be on a list of members of the Muslim Sisterhood, the female affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. Shoebat also reported that Huma's brother, Hassan Abedin, is a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS), and that he partners with a number of Muslim Brotherhood members on the board, including al Qaeda associate Omar Naseef and the notorious Muslim Brotherhood leader Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi; both have been listed as OCIS trustees. Naseef continues to serve as board chairman. Shoebat's article does not imply that Huma's brother has done anything wrong, but that he is active in the Islamic community in the United Kingdom. That being the case, it is hard to imagine why Muslims, who are very vocal about Muslim women when they sin, are suddenly silent about Huma's marriage to a highly visible Jewish man.
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The U.S. government has also allowed several shady Islamist characters to visit or move to the United States. The State Department has recently lifted the ban on Tariq Ramadan entering the country. Ramadan is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan Al Banna, and has ties to several Islamist groups. The powerful Turkish imam Fethullah Gulen was also able to enter the United States after escaping from Turkey, where he was indicted in 2000 for attempting to overthrow the secular Turkish government. Gulen believes in “the new world Islamic Order.” In one of his sermons, he said, “The philosophy of our service is that we open a house somewhere and, with the patience of a spider, we lay our web to wait for people to get caught in the web; and we teach those who do.”
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Gulen was also quoted in another sermon as saying, “You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers. . . . You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it.”
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While the U.S. government is busy doing “outreach” to, or appeasement of, the Muslim world that continues to terrorize us, it has neglected and ignored the feelings of many Americans, the victims of terror and the people whom government officials were elected to serve. The West's political vulnerability is compounded by its dependence on Middle Eastern oil and the petro-dollars in the hands of Islamic groups all over the United States, who use and abuse every opportunity called “outreach” that results from American naiveté.

This is probably the first time in U.S. history when there are clear indications that the U.S. government and media are mistreating the American people in favor of a foreign entity. American officials, on one hand, support the building of a mosque near Ground Zero, despite the fact that it is contrary to what most Americans want, while, on the other hand, they denounce the use of the expression “Islamic terrorism” because it will hurt the feelings of Muslims. Clearly, this can be perceived as discrimination against the majority of Americans.

President Obama and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg have humiliated and failed to appreciate the genuine feelings of many Americans. Some family members expressed their concern that calls for prayers, “Allahu Akbar,” will be heard from Ground Zero, which is the same cry the terrorists gave before slamming the airplanes into the Twin Towers. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf shamelessly called the mosque project “Cordoba” house, after the Islamic triumph in the Spanish city of Cordoba. Rauf and his ilk really think we are too stupid to figure out that he chose the word
Cordoba
to signify the triumph of Islamic jihad. He is an Islamist in sheep's clothing, calling himself “a man of peace” and grandiosely comparing himself to Mahatma Gandhi or President Anwar Sadat. It's a hollow expression, though, because we are all for peace. Rauf's deceit and double-talk were clear when his book was published in Malaysia with the title
A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa [Proselytizing] in the Heart of America Post 9/11
, while the same book was published in English under the title
What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America.

The sharia commandment for Muslims to lie, exaggerate, and slander has become second nature for Islamists such as Rauf. He and his wife and his supporters believe they can easily pull the rug out from under the feet of Americans, whom they think are too stupid to figure out who he really is.

The second vulnerability to Islam that the West faces is cultural. What void does Islam fill in the West? Why are some Western women and men embracing Islam?

When I first moved to the United States more than thirty years ago, two families on my street consisted of grandparents bringing up their grandchildren. This was quite unusual to me, and I was very curious to learn whether the parents were dead or disabled. When I discovered that the parents had been found to be unfit by the state, I was astounded. I had assumed that drug and alcohol addiction in the United States—the cause cited for these parents' unfitness—was mostly a juvenile problem, but to my surprise, it is widespread among adults, parents, and even grandparents. This reality in American society has produced many needy and vulnerable young people, a prime target group for Islamic proselytizing.

People with alcohol and drug dependencies gravitate to controlling ideologies and systems of government that do not require much personal choice and responsibility. They seek a totalitarian authority that gives them benefits simply for keeping out of the government's way and for being obedient citizens, as long as they do not rock the boat. This kind of government is found in totalitarian socialist and Islamic countries that seek zombies and not alert citizens. Islam fits the needs of such vulnerable people.

Some Western women feel alienated by the antimale feminist movement's promise they can have it all and don't need a man. In contrast, the Muslim man, dark and handsome, appeals to them like the prince on the white horse whom every young girl dreams of. He tells her he wants marriage, commitment, and for her to stay home and take care of the kids, while he works and handles the finances. Many segments of Western society have neglected women's hunger for a traditional family, and the promises of Muslim men suddenly sound very appealing to women who have a yearning for marriage and motherhood.

I have received many e-mails from American and European women who converted to Islam following a love affair with a Muslim man, only to fall out of love a couple of years later after they had a couple of kids. The story keeps repeating itself, but the lesson we must learn from this is that America needs to nurture the natural tendencies of male and female and give more respect to the traditional family. The right to have an untraditional lifestyle does not have to clash with the desires of many women. America must find the right balance between these conflicting views about lifestyle choices without intimidating or insulting anyone.

Although respect for Islam has been increasing in the United States, respect for Christianity and Judaism has been decreasing. American schools are inviting Muslim sheikhs and shady figures to teach Islam in high schools and colleges, while preventing Christian leaders from doing the same. Islam is taking full advantage of this multicultural vulnerability the United States has trapped itself in. We are creating a new generation of Americans who will have no respect for the culture, the religions, and the values that made America great, the country that many people cross oceans simply to live in. Americans should see the long lines of Muslims who are dying to move to the United States or any other Western country that will take them, to flee the tyranny of Islam.

Today's American culture has also been unfair to men. Just look at all of the silly commercials on TV ridiculing the role of the man in the family, as they show a smart, thin, sexy wife with her fat, sloppy husband. To fix a fault, America tends to go to the opposite extreme, instead of finding a happy medium. In the case of the man, America has rejected his masculinity, ridiculed him, feminized him, and even abused him—all for the purpose of counteracting centuries of discrimination against women.

Such an atmosphere produces vulnerable young American men who are looking for support for their male identity, and those are the people whom Islamists seek out. Islamic culture provides many channels for male friendship and bonding in fields beyond just sports. What appeals to Western men is that Islam tells them it is fine and even more advantageous to be male.

To avoid being sucked into the stagnant and oppressive culture of Islam, America must end its destructive fighting with itself. The ultimate solution for the United States is to find the right equilibrium to bring together the traditional and the untraditional, the religious and the nonreligious, to pick the good values out of the old and the new, and never to prop up one group in order to punish another. That is the only way to create harmony in a society—by elevating everyone.

There is nobility in cultures like that of the United States that promote respect for other cultures and strive to be fair to all minorities. No country in the world has accomplished that more than America has. Yet unfortunately, some influential segments of U.S. society take this to the extreme, at the expense of other vital segments of society. Multiculturalists want to see the United States as a bigger reflection of the United Nations building or the television series
Star Trek
, believing we can all live in perfect peace and harmony, while keeping our colorful, different exteriors, clothes, habits, and food. They believe we can always identify ourselves as members of a certain group, religion, or race, while rejecting assimilation into a common culture. That is exactly how America should be in their eyes. Otherwise, they believe it is racist and bigoted if it caters to the natural tendency of any culture to gravitate toward the comfort zone of a coherent homogeneous entity.

Yet the standard that multiculturalists set for the less-developed world is different. Less-developed nations get a pass. These cultures can be as ethnocentric, proud, nationalistic, and supremacist as they want. Multiculturalists have allowed themselves a paternalistic controlling position toward ethnically unique cultures. Just like their concern for whales, they feel that less-developed cultures must be preserved from the threat of extinction as endangered species. They love to visit remote primitive tribal cultures and make sure to take lots of photos of themselves with the indigenous inhabitants. Such primitive cultures are allowed to be as undiverse and unaccepting of the outside world as they want, because that simply adds to their charm.

The Muslim rejection of, and effort to prevent, assimilation into Western culture thus makes perfect sense to multiculturalists. Islam by its natural instincts seeks to rise to power, thus multiculturalism has served Islam well and continues to serve its Islamist agenda—unless the United States regains its sanity before it is too late.

I have a mental image of the goals of Islam in the West. Like Dracula, Islam seeks the submission of Western culture. It is slowly walking toward its new twenty-first-century victim; the victim is stepping toward Dracula in a hypnotic state and with a feeling of submission. It is tired of freedom and responsibility; it wants to embrace dependency on another. Where is the United States heading with its relationship with Islam? Will it end up like all of the great Middle Eastern civilizations that abandoned their innocence, growth, identities, languages, cultures, and values and submitted to the seduction of a clear-cut, black-or-white authoritarian state of submission? Will it accept a value system where the end justifies the means? Will the rebel bad-boy attraction of Islam win? I believe it is not too late and that we still have a chance to defeat all of these lures that Islam puts before us.