Where Does All This Anti-Muslim Bigotry Come From?

In an article by Robert Spencer about Senator Richard Durbin, who expressed his desire to hold hearings on the "rise in anti-Muslim bigotry," Spencer wrote:

"If Durbin really wants to know the cause of what “anti-Muslim bigotry” may actually exist, he need look no farther than Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer; Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and so many other jihad murderers and would-be murderers.

"If anyone in the United States today is suspicious of Muslims in general, it is because of those jihadis and others like them..."

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One Good Reason to Stop Muslim Immigration

In an article entitled Muslim Jihad in Christian Ethiopia: Lessons for the West, Raymond Ibrahim writes:

That Muslims are an otherwise peaceable minority group in Ethiopia, but in enclaves where they represent the majority, they attack their outnumbered Christian countrymen—giving them a tweaked version of Islam’s three choices to infidels—suggests that Muslim aggression and passivity are very much rooted in numbers: the more Muslims, the more potential for “assertive” behavior.

This has lessons for the West, especially Europe, which in recent years has seen an unprecedented influx of Muslim immigrants, reaching some 53 million, a number expected to “nearly double by 2015, while the non-Muslim will shrink by 3.5%,” due to higher Muslim birth rates. In short, it is a matter of time before Muslims account for significant numbers in Europe—perhaps not the majority, but, as the Ethiopian example establishes, a majority is not necessary for the winds of jihad to blow.

Help stop Muslim immigration. Sign the petition.

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The Standard Muslim Ultimatum

In an article entitled Muslim Jihad in Christian Ethiopia: Lessons for the West, Raymond Ibrahim quoted this news report:

The string of attacks comes on the heels of several reports of growing anti-Christian tension and violence around the country [Ethiopia] where Muslims make up roughly one-third of the total population, but more than 90 percent of the population in certain areas, 2007 Census data shows. One of those areas is Besheno where, on November 9, all the Christians in the city woke up to find notes on their doors warning them to convert to Islam, leave the city or face death.

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Israel's Status in the Arab World

An an interview with Bernard Lewis, he said:

There are increasing numbers of people in the Arab world who look with, I would even say, with wonderment at what they see in Israel, at the functioning of a free and open society. I read an article quite recently by a Palestinian Arab whom I will not endanger by naming, in which he said that “as things stand in the world at the present time, the best hope that an Arab has for his future is as a second class citizen of a Jewish state.” A rather extraordinary statement coming from an Arab spokesman. But if you think about it, he’s not far wrong. The alternative, being in an Arab state, is very much worse. They certainly do better as second class citizens of the Jewish state. There’s a growing realization of that. People would speak much more openly about that if it were safe to do so, which it obviously isn’t.

There are two things which I think are helpful towards a better understanding between the Arabs and Israel. One of them is the well-known one, of the perception of a greater danger, which I mentioned before. Sadat turned to Israel because he saw that Egypt was becoming a Russian colony. The same thing has happened again on a number of occasions. Now they see Israel as a barrier against the Iranian threat.

The other one, which is less easy to define but in the long run is probably more important, is [regarding Israel] as a model of democratic government. A model of a free and open society with rights for women — an increasingly important point, especially in the perception of women.

In both of these respects I think that there are some hopeful signs for the future.

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Melvin Bledsoe on the Radicalization of His Son

The following is from an ACT! for America email. This is the testimony of Melvin Bledsoe. He explains how his son (who Muslimized his name to Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad) become a dedicated orthodox Muslim, waging jihad against his fellow Americans, and how this transformation started right here in the heart of America: A Nashville, Tennessee mosque.

Committee on Homeland Security: US House of Representatives, Washington DC, March 10, 2011. Testimony of Melvin Bledsoe:

Thank you very much for allowing me to come here and tell the country what happened to my son. This hearing today is extremely important to begin the discussion about the issue of Islamic radicalization in America and my hope is that this Committee can somehow address this issue in a meaningful, productive way.

First, I would like to express my deepest sympathy to the family of Private William Long, and to the wounded soldier, Quinton Ezeagwula. I would like to talk about those complicit in Private Long’s murder – the Islamic radicals who programmed and trained my son Carlos to kill.

I want to tell the American people and the world what happened to my son. We sent him off to college at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee in the fall of 2003. Our dreams about his future ended up in a nightmare.

Carlos is my only son. He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. My wife and I operate a tour company in Memphis, Tennessee and Carlos started helping out with the family business at the age of eight. He loved talking to the traveling public; and he had a lot of fun interacting with the customers.

After graduating from high school, he wanted to get a degree in Business Administration. We thought perhaps he would come back to Memphis to run the business and give my wife and me early retirement.

After the fall of 2005 – his sophomore fall in Nashville –Carlos came home that Christmas for the holidays.

We were sitting around in the family room, Carlos’s only sister, Monica, her husband and I, having a normal conversation about life in general. But at a certain point, Carlos and his brother-in-law Terrell got into a heated conversation about the Muslim religion. Then and later, we felt like Carlos’s personality changed when we spoke about Islam. We thought maybe he had some Muslim friends in college and was offended by our comments.

The next time Carlos came home, we saw another side of him that we hadn't seen before. During the night, he took down all the pictures from the walls in the bedroom where he slept. He even took Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. picture off the wall. We asked Carlos: "What is going on with you?”

He replied that he is now a new convert to Islam and that everything he does from now on will be to honor Allah. We got very concerned: While he was growing up, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s picture had always hung on his bedroom wall; but now treated the picture as if Dr. King was nobody to him.

We asked Carlos not to take Dr. King's picture off the wall, but he took it off the wall anyway. This became a big concern to us. We went to visit him in Nashville because we wanted to learn more about what was really going on with Carlos.

We discovered that Carlos had dropped out of school, at the beginning of the 2005 fall semester. He was working a temporary job. He had gotten a dog while in college, and now we found out that he had turned the dog loose in the woods because he was told that Muslims consider dogs dirty creatures. I really couldn't understand how he could do that, because Carlos grew up with a dog in the house since he was five years old.

So my wife and I thought that there something or someone was getting in his head and changing the way he thinks. It had gotten to the point where he had no interest in coming home, even for the holidays.

All of this was part of brainwashing him, and changing his thinking a little bit at a time. He had a job in Nashville, together with some Muslims, who would tell him that according to Islamic law, his employer had to let him pray at certain times of the day, regardless of what was going on at the job. As a business owner, I told Carlos that it would be very difficult for an employer to do this for all of his employees.

As the next step on his process of radicalization, Carlos was convinced to change his name. He chose the name Abdulhakim Muhammad. At this point, his culture was no longer important to him, only the Islamic culture mattered.

Some Muslim leaders had taken advantage of my son. But he’s not the only one being taken advantage of: this is going on in Nashville and in many other cities in America.

In Nashville, Carlos was captured by people best described as hunters. He was manipulated and lied to. That’s how he made his way to Yemen. Carlos was hoping to go there for a chance to cross over to Saudi Arabia and visit Mecca, as he was taught all true Muslims must do at one time in their life. He was taught that he would get to walk on the ground where Prophet Muhammad walked be able to travel around the area. But these hunters had other plans for him. They set him up, telling him that he could teach English at a British School in Aden in South Yemen, This school turned out to be a front and Carlos ended up in a training camp run by terrorists.

Carlos’s joining in with Yemeni extremists was facilitated by their American counterparts in Nashville. We have since discovered that the former Imam of a Nashville mosque, the Al Farooq Mosque, wrote the recommendation letter Carlos needed for the school in Yemen. We also discovered that the school functions as an intake front for radicalizing and training Westerners for Jihad.

From what I understand, the FBI had been following Carlos since before he left Nashville and continued to do so after he came back from Yemen. When Carlos was arrested for overstaying his visa in October of 2008, he was interviewed by an FBI agent based in Nashville even before the U.S. Embassy was alerted about the arrest. According to the Embassy, the FBI was alarmed about what they learned from Carlos.

We wish they could have told us - his family – about what they learned. If we knew how serious his extremism had become, we could have put in every effort to prevent the tragedy in Arkansas from happening.

When my son was arrested in Yemen, my family cried out for help in bringing our son back to America from our Government. We got in touch with the U.S. Embassy and the State Department. We also asked for help from our U.S. Representative, Steve Cohen’s office, and from FBI Special Agent Greg Thomason, who had been tracking my son since Nashville.

After our son was finally released and brought home to us. No one said anything to us about what might have happened to him in Yemen or what they may have learned that so alarmed the FBI agent who interrogated Carlos while he was in the custody of Yemen’s Political Security Organization.

Carlos’s experience in Yemeni political jail was the final stage of his radicalization. He was in there with true evil-doers – hard-core Al Qaeda members who convinced him to get revenge on America.

Something is wrong with the Muslim leadership in Nashville. What happened to Carlos at those Nashville mosques isn’t normal. I have other family members who are Muslims, and they are modern, peaceful, law abiding people, who have been Muslim for many years and are not radicalized.

I also have several uncles and brothers in the military. Our family has fought for the United States in every war since the Civil War. I have nephews who are currently in Afghanistan, as I speak, fighting for democracy and freedom for all Americans.

It seems to me that the American people are sitting around and doing nothing about Islamic extremism, as if Carlos’s story and the other stories told at these hearings aren’t true. There is a big elephant in the room, but our society continues not to see it.

This wrong is caused by political correctness. You can even call it political fear - yes, fear. Fear of stepping on a special minority population’s toes, even as a segment of that population wants to stamp out America and everything we stand for.

I must say that we are losing American babies – our children are in danger. This country must stand up and do something about this problem. Yes, it’s my son’s tragic story you’re hearing about today, but tomorrow it could be your son or your daughter. It might be an African-American child that they went after in Nashville, but tomorrow their victim might have blonde hair and blue eyes. One thing is for sure, it will happen again.

We must stop these extremist invaders from raping the minds of American citizens on American soil. Here in America today, there are people with radical Islamic political views who are organizing with one goal in mind: to convert our citizens and to turn them against the non-believers. This is a big problem now in Nashville, on college campuses and in the nearby area. Nashville has become a hot bed for radical Islamic recruiting.

Carlos grew up a happy-go-lucky kid. He always had a big smile on his face, and loved to crack a joke or two. Everyone liked him. He loved to play team sports like basketball and football. He loved swimming, dancing, and listening to music.

Today we have two families that have been destroyed. This could have been prevented. I would like to see something change so that no other family in this great country of ours has to go through what our family is facing now.

GOD HELP US! GOD HELP US!

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One of the Days That Would Have Lived in Infamy That Never Happened

Because of information gathered during interrogations, the mastermind of 9/11 — Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) — was captured, and he, in turn, was interrogated. His questioning produced many intelligence reports. In an article about a new book, the author says:

In one of these reports, KSM describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994-1995 plan known as the “Bojinka plot” to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean.

Years later, an observant CIA officer notices that the activities of a cell being followed by British authorities appear to match KSM’s description of his plans for a Bojinka-style attack.

In an operation that involves unprecedented intelligence cooperation between our countries, British officials proceed to unravel the plot. On the night of Aug.9, 2006 they launch a series of raids in a northeast London suburb that lead to the arrest of two dozen al Qaeda terrorist suspects. They find a USB thumb-drive in the pocket of one of the men with security details for Heathrow airport, and information on seven trans-Atlantic flights that were scheduled to take off within hours of each other:

United Airlines Flight 931 to San Francisco departing at 2:15 p.m.;
Air Canada Flight 849 to Toronto departing at 3:00 p.m.;
Air Canada Flight 865 to Montreal departing at 3:15 p.m.;
United Airlines Flight 959 to Chicago departing at 3:40 p.m.;
United Airlines Flight 925 to Washington departing at 4:20 p.m.;
American Airlines Flight 131 to New York departing at 4:35 p.m; and
American Airlines Flight 91 to Chicago departing at 4:50 p.m.

They seize bomb-making equipment and hydrogen peroxide to make liquid explosives. And they find the chilling martyrdom videos the suicide bombers had prepared.

Today, if you asked an average person on the street what they know about the 2006 airlines plot, most would not be able to tell you much. Few Americans are aware of the fact that al Qaeda had planned to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with an attack of similar scope and magnitude.

And still fewer realize that the terrorists’ true intentions in this plot were uncovered thanks to critical information obtained through the interrogation of the man who conceived it: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

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Sharia is Here

The following is an excerpt from an article by Phyllis Chesler entitled, Forced Marriages in Our Own Backyard:

On February 22, 2011, Jessie Bender, a 13-year-old southern California girl, ran away from home. No, Jessie was not into “sex, drugs, or rock n’ roll.” On the contrary. Jessie was terrified that her American-born mother, Melissa, a convert to Islam, and her mother’s Pakistani boyfriend and acting stepfather Mohammed “Mo” Khan, had decided to send her to Pakistan to be married against her will. Had Jessie gone, her mother and “Mo” would have received $3000.00.

Europe is plagued by many more such cases of forced child marriage. According to the BBC, the police in South Wales have dealt with 49 cases of forced marriage in the past year (2010) alone.

Child marriage is opposed by the Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). It is a toothless document. The United Nations does not enforce individual rights over the objections of its member nation states.

Child marriage is an abomination. Think of the girls you know who are 10, 12, 14 years old. Can you imagine how a forced, arranged marriage to a much older stranger, probably one who believes it is his absolute right to rape and beat his wife, would psychologically cripple them for life, stunt all growth, demoralize them forevermore?

We should not want to consign young American girls, Muslim and non-Muslim, to such cruel fates.

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Crimes Against Women in Muslim Countries

Some horrifying crimes are routinely committed against women in many Muslim countries. These crimes include normalized daughter- and wife-battering, forced veiling, female genital mutilation, polygamy, purdah, (the segregation or sequestration of women), arranged marriage, child marriage, first cousin marriage, acid attacks, public stonings, hangings, and beheading, and the further victimization of rape victims who are jailed, tortured, and executed.

The above is quoted from an article entitled, A Feminist Duty.

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Sharia Law Has Come to America

In Tampa, Florida, a dispute arose over who controls the funds a mosque received in 2008 from an eminent domain proceeding. Former trustees of the mosque are claiming in court they have the right to the funds. Current mosque leaders are disputing that claim.

The current mosque leaders want the case decided according to secular, Florida civil law, and their attorney has been vigorously arguing the case accordingly. The former trustees of the mosque want the case decided according to sharia law.

Here’s the kicker.

The judge recently ruled “This case will proceed under Ecclesiastical Islamic law,” (Sharia law), “pursuant to the Qur’an.”

You can read the judge’s ruling here (it's a PDF document).

Now it’s not unusual for a dispute to arise within a religious institution and for a court to order a mediation or arbitration, in order to resolve this without the court having to render its own judgment.

But what makes this case unusual, and highly troubling, is that a group of Muslim leaders — the CURRENT mosque leaders — who do NOT want to be subject to Sharia law, are being compelled to do so by an American judge!

This is reminiscent of the 2009 New Jersey case, where a Muslim woman sought a restraining order, in civil court, against her Muslim husband, who was raping her several times a day. The judge denied the restraining order because, in his opinion, the husband did not commit a crime because he was following his Islamic beliefs.

In the New Jersey case, and now in this recent case in Tampa, Muslims found themselves being subjected to Sharia law against their will in America.

Last October, ACT! for America aired a radio ad across Oklahoma in support of the referendum preventing Oklahoma judges from using Sharia law in their decisions. The referendum won with 70% support.

The point we made then, which now bears repeating, is that such legislation protects non-Muslims AND Muslims alike from being subjected to Sharia law.

When someone claims that opposition to Sharia law in America is “anti-Muslim,” make sure you tell them about the New Jersey woman and the mosque leaders in Tampa.

The above article was a message from Act for America to its members.

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What Does "Freedom" Mean in Islamic Terms?

An an interview with Bernard Lewis, he said:

One has to understand not so much the differences between the [West and the Muslim world] as the differences in the political discourse. In the Western world, we talk all the time about freedom. In the Islamic world, freedom is not a political term. It’s a legal term: Freedom as opposed to slavery. This was a society in which slavery was an accepted institution existing all over the Muslim world. You were free if you were not a slave. It was entirely a legal and social term, with no political connotation whatsoever. You can see in the ongoing debate in Arabic and other languages the puzzlement with which the use of the term freedom was first perceived.

They just didn’t understand it. I mean, what does this have to do with politics or government? Eventually, they got the message. But it’s still alien to them. In Muslim terms, the aim of good government is justice.

The major contrast is not between freedom and tyranny, between freedom and servitude, but between justice and oppression. Or if you like, between justice and injustice. If one follows that particular discourse in the Arab and more generally the Muslim world, it would be more illuminating.

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The Muslim World is Behind Because of the Way it Treats its Women

An an interview with Bernard Lewis, he said:

The case has been made, and I think there is some force in it, that the main reason for the relative backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West is the treatment of women. As far as I know, it was first made by a Turkish writer called Namik Kemal in about 1880. At that time an agonizing debate had been going on for more than a century: What went wrong? Why did we fall behind the West?

He said, “The answer is very clear. We fell behind the West because of the way we treat our women. By the way we treat our women we deprive ourselves of the talents and services of half the population. And we submit the early education of the other half to ignorant and downtrodden mothers.”

It goes further than that. A child who grows up in a traditional Muslim household is accustomed to authoritarian, autocratic rule from the start. I think the position of women is of crucial importance.

That is why I am looking with great interest at Tunisia. Tunisia is the one Arab country that has really done something about women. In Tunisia there is compulsory education for girls, from primary school, right through. In Tunisia, women are to be found in the professions. There are doctors, lawyers, journalists, politicians and so on. Women play a significant part in public life in Tunisia. I think that is going to have an enormous impact. It’s already having this in Tunisia and you can see that in various ways. But this will certainly spread to other parts of the world.

Elsewhere, the question of women and the role of the women is of crucial importance for the future of the Muslim world in general.

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Exports From the Arab World

An an interview with Bernard Lewis, he said something remarkable:

"Remember that according to their own statistics, the total exports of the entire Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, one small European country."

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