Moral Equivalence

The definition of "moral equivalence," according to Answers.com: It is a term used in political debate, usually to characterize (in a negative way) the claim that there can be no moral or ethical hierarchy decided between two sides in a conflict, nor in the actions or tactics of the two sides.

I just watched The Kingdom. It's not a true story, but it's about a terrorist attack that occurs in a non-Muslim compound in Saudi Arabia, killing lots of people. I liked the movie until the very end, and I'll tell you why in a minute, but I have to set it up for you a little.

Jamie Foxx plays an FBI agent. Foxx and his team go to Saudi Arabia to solve the crime. At the end they successfully hunt down the mastermind terrorist and shoot him. As he is dying, he whispers something into a child's ear.

Earlier in the movie, when Foxx breaks the news to his team that their good friend was killed in the original terrorist attack, a woman on his team starts crying. Foxx whispers something in her ear and she stops crying.

At the end of the movie, you find out what the mastermind terrorist whispered to the kid and what Foxx whispers to the woman. They said the same thing: Don't worry, we're going to kill them all.

This was supposed to be some kind of moral point. Something like: Hate is the real problem. Otherwise, we're all the same. Or maybe, "People, don't you see? This is like the Hatfields and McCoys. It just goes on and on, one side taking revenge on the other, and them taking revenge for the revenge."

What the moviegoers probably don't recognize is something that you probably recognized immediately: They don't mean the same by the word "all."

Foxx meant, "We're going to kill the men who perpetrated this heinous crime. We're going to kill all the men who were involved in killing our friend."

The mastermind terrorist meant, "We're going to kill every last one of the filthy infidels of the world." Or at the very least, "We will kill every infidel who lives in Saudi Arabia."

Of course, this isn't the moral equivalence they were trying to portray. It wouldn't surprise me to find out this movie was funded with Saudi money.

Without that last scene, it would have been a great movie. With that last scene, it just makes it more of the confusing taqiyya and politically correct multicultural spew we've come to expect from Hollywood.

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Saudi Arabia's Funding of American Mosques

THE FOLLOWING are excerpts from an article entitled, Al Qaeda, Other Terror Groups Swim in Global Sea of Saudi-Funded Wahhabi Institutions:

Today, it has been estimated that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahhabi influence, described by both scholars and U.S. officials as a radical, violent philosophical platform used by terrorists and their supporters to justify violence against Christians, Jews and other "non-believers."

American officials have described as a Wahhabism, known as an intolerant, ascetic movement, was developed by theologian Mohammed ibn Abd Wahhab in the 18th century to purge what he saw as corrupting influences and return Islam to its original orthodoxy.

In 2006, Bernard Lewis, arguably the leading western scholar on Islam, called Wahhabism "the most radical, the most violent, the most extreme and fanatical version of Islam."

As to how much money Saudi officials have spent since the early 1970s to promote Wahhabism worldwide, David D. Aufhauser, a former Treasury Department general counsel, told a Senate committee in June 2004 that estimates went "north of $75 billion." The money financed the construction of thousands of mosques, schools and Islamic centers, the employment of at least 9,000 proselytizers and the printing of millions of books of religious instruction.

According to a major investigation by Washington Post reporter David B. Ottaway published on August 19, 2004, the Saudi government's Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Call and Guidance pays the salaries of 3,884 Wahhabi missionaries and preachers, who are six times as numerous as the 650 diplomats in Saudi Arabia's 77 embassies.

Saleh Sheik, a direct descendant of Ibn Abdul Wahab, leads the ministry - the most important Saudi institution for exporting Wahhabism.

Sheik estimated the Islamic affairs ministry's budget at $530 million annually and said it goes almost entirely to pay the salaries of the more than 50,000 people on the ministry payroll, Ottaway reported. That figure does not include the hundreds of millions of dollars in personal contributions made by King Fahd and other senior Saudi princes to the cause of propagating Islam at home and abroad, according to a Saudi analyst who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The real total spent annually spreading Islam is between $2 billion and $2.5 billion, he said.

Eighty percent of major mosques in America are under Saudi-Wahhabi influence, according to Stephen Schwartz, Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, an organization that "challenges the dominance of American Muslim life by militant Islamist groups" including control of property, buildings, training and appointment of imams, content of preaching, literature distributed in mosques and charitable solicitation.

Most of the Wahhabi mosques work closely with Saudi state funded organizations such as the Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Association for Muslim Youth (WAMY), institutions identified as participants in the funding of al Qaeda. The Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a main Wahhabi ideological institution in America with a well-documented network of support for radical Islam, has received at least $750,000 from the Saudi government and its officials, including a donation by the Islamic Development Bank, a Saudi government-controlled financial institution, to purchase their headquarters in Washington D.C.

According to Schwartz's testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on Thursday, June 26, 2003, the official Saudi government website stated in 2000, "In the United States, the Kingdom has contributed to the establishment of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C.; the Omer Bin Al-Khattab Mosque in western Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Islamic Center, and the Fresno Mosque in California; the Islamic Center in Denver, Colorado; the Islamic center in Harrison, New York; and the Islamic Center in Northern Virginia."

The Kingdom is also affiliated with the Bilal Islamic Primary and Secondary School and the King Fahd mosque, both in California, according to Nina Shea in her 2005 Freedom House Report "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques". Shea, an international human-rights lawyer, is the director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute. Additionally, the previously-mentioned official website of the Saudi Arabian government reported a donation of $4 million for the construction of a mosque complex in Los Angeles named for Ibn Taymiyyah, a historic Islamic figure whose works influenced Mohammed ibn Abd Wahhab. In his testimony, Schwartz estimated that the Saudis have spent a minimum of $324 million on Islamic institutions in America by 2003.

The Saudi influence in America is far from benign. "From Islamic centers to student associations, from relief organizations to bookstores, an ideology committed to the destruction of Western civilization is being offered as the only solution to the plight of the ummah [Islamic nation]," Epstein testified. The materials that the Kingdom has distributed to American schools and mosques in particular, have been proven to be pro-jihad, anti-Semitic, and anti-American. "In thousands of public school districts across the United States, without ever knowing it, taxpayers pay to disseminate pro-Islamic materials that are anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish… teaching programs funded by Saudi Arabia make their way into elementary and secondary school classrooms," a 2005 Jewish Telegraphic Agency staff report "What Your Kids are Learning about Israel, America and Islam," noted.

Saudi-Provided Texts Full of Hate

In the Freedom House report, materials found in mosques across America have been shown to be virulent and hate-filled. A book found in the King Fahd mosque, distributed by the Saudi embassy in Washington D.C., and published by the Saudi government, read: "Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law." A recurring theme is the idea that a peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims is impossible. A Saudi-government text for tenth-grade students entitled "Science of Tawheed", copies of which were obtained at the Al-Farouq Mosque in Houston, teaches that if a Muslim "thinks it is permissible to be under their [infidels] control, and he is pleased with the way they are, then there is no doubt that he is no longer a Muslim."

Democracy in particular is demonized in Wahhabi ideology. In one book published in Riyadh by the Al-Nahawi Printing House, collected by Freedom House from the Abu Bakr Mosque in San Diego, it is written, "Satan and his soldiers have found a home for themselves there… Democracy is in need of someone to save it from itself." In order to rectify the evils of democracy, the Wahhabi American mosques advocate for jihad and terror, teaching that, "[we] will pursue this evil force [modernist civilization] to its own lands, invade its Western heartland, and struggle to overcome it until all the world shouts by the name of the Prophet and the teachings of Islam spread throughout the world. Only then will Muslims achieve their fundamental goal, and there will be no more 'persecution' and all religion will be exclusively for Allah…" That quote comes from "To Be a Muslim", published by Saudi Arabia's International Islamic Publishing House and collected from the Al-Farouq Mosque in Houston.

The hate-filled materials distributed by "American mosques and…spread, sponsored or otherwise generated by Saudi Arabia…demonstrates the ongoing indoctrination of Muslims in the United States in the hostility and belligerence of Saudi Arabia's hard-line Wahhabi sect of Islam" Shea noted.

"The vision of Islam defeating and subjugating the west is a major element in the appeal of the jihadists, supported by the Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia, to their mostly-young followers around the world," Schwartz said in an interview.

The cases of American Islamist terrorists are "incidents that reflect the general tone in the Muslim community, and they have been here, and dominant, through the 1980s and 1990s," stated Schwartz. John Walker Lindh (a California native convicted of aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan), the Lackawanna Six (a group of six American citizens convicted of materially supporting al Qaeda), Iyman Faris (an American citizen born in Kashmir, discovered to be plotting an attack on the Brooklyn Bridge), Jose Padilla (a Brooklyn native known as the "dirty bomber" designated an "enemy combatant" by the Justice Department), Hassan Akbar (a Los Angeles native convicted of killing two fellow U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2003), and Adam Yahiye Gadahn (the American-born English-language spokesman for al-Qaeda), have revealed an unpleasant truth. As Schwartz said, "Jihadist ideology in American Islam was financed by Saudi Arabia…Wahhabi and related Pakistani and Muslim Brotherhood propaganda is the basis of it… The money comes from Saudi, the preachers from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and various Arab states, and the donations go to Hamas. That is life in institutional American Islam today," declared Schwartz.

In a speech by Mark Steyn, he said (when answering a question) Canadian Mounties did a survey of Canadian imams. It found 85 percent of the imams in Canadian mosques were "hardcore radical jihadists."

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The Islamization of the West

The Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamic organization in the world, stated in an internal document written in 1991 (seized in an FBI raid) that their mission in America was:

"...eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house..." Read more about that here.

The Muslim Brotherhood has established what appear to be legitimate, mainstream, moderate Muslim organizations (opulently funded with Saudi oil money) which have set themselves up as representatives of "the Muslim community" to approve or disapprove of what is in American textbooks, what is published in magazines, newspapers, and television news, and how Islam is portrayed in Hollywood movies. These organizations have been able to influence how the U.S. governmental security agencies think about and write about Islamic terrorism. They are successfully silencing criticism of Islam in the West. And in numerous other ways, believing Muslims are getting Islamic law applied in the West, and getting it applied more completely with each passing year.

Because the percentage of Muslims is much higher in Europe than in the United States, Europe is further along in the process of becoming "Islamized." It's hard to believe, but European laws are giving way to Islamic law. Muslim pressure continues to find cracks, and it works its way in. For example, all over Europe, the right to free speech is giving way to Sharia's limits on free speech (source 1 and source 2). Belgium, Germany and Britain offer benefits to polygamists' wives, even though polygamy is illegal there (source). Schools in Amsterdam don't mention farms because pigs are offensive to Muslims. "Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils. In France, school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire. The history of the Holocaust can in many cases no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity (source)."

France is allowing Muslims to rule parts of their country (source). Britain allows unfair treatment of Muslim women (source). Muslim doctors in Britain don't have to follow the same rules of cleanliness as everyone else (source). Britain knowingly tolerates sedition by Muslims (source). Britain allows over 80 Sharia courts to operate within their borders (source). In these and many, many other ways (source), the laws, values, and principles of Western civilization are giving way slowly but surely to unceasing Islamic pressure.

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The Worst Islamic Country in the World

And we thought the Soviet Union was repressive! The following are excerpts from an article by Forum 18, the organization in Norway that works to help people gain the right to believe and worship as they wish. The Maldives is the most extreme example of religious repression I have ever read about.

The Maldives is one of the few states — such as Saudi Arabia — that allows only one faith to be practiced publicly, and even insists that all citizens must be Muslims.

The Republic of the Maldives is a collection of 1,190 coral reef islands in the Indian Ocean, south west of Sri Lanka. Only 200 islands are inhabited, with 44 used exclusively as holiday resort islands. The Maldives has a population of about 300,000 citizens.

In the Maldives, citizens cannot practice any other religion than Islam, and they have to practice it in the way the government says.

Due to internal and external pressure to give their citizens freedom of religion, the Maldivian government instituted a reform. But here's how they reformed it: Okay, you can practice any religion you want, but if it's not Islam, you are no longer a citizen.

Maldivian non-Muslims and other Maldivians who do not want to practice their faith in the state approved way cannot practice their own faith. They cannot even pray the way they want. Kneeling down, folding hands or using religious symbols like crosses, candles, pictures or statues can lead to government action. Performing movements in the Namaadu (namaz or Islamic ritual prayer) differently to the state-approved way can also lead to arrest by the police.

Maldivians are not allowed to possess religious material — whether holy books, audio and video tapes, CDs and DVDs, pictures or artifacts — that is not approved by the government. Sometimes private houses and mosques are raided by police in their search for non state-approved religious material. When found, all such material is confiscated. Electronic media, radio broadcasts, the internet, and printed material are all censored by the government.

The luggage of Maldivians returning to the country is searched and all unauthorised religious material is confiscated. Foreign citizens arriving in the Maldives — whether as migrant workers or tourists — also have their luggage searched for "un-Islamic" materials. Small quantities of non-Muslim literature for personal use are generally permitted to foreign tourists.

Maldivians are also not allowed to discuss their faith with anyone. No-one is allowed to discuss religion without the explicit permission of the government. They do not even dare to discuss their beliefs with their spouses and children. The political intimidation of the public and the official denigration of religiously non-conformist people have led to widespread mistrust and fear. Children of people who are suspected of holding alternative religious convictions are sometimes interrogated by their teachers about their parents' opinions and convictions.

Constant intimidation and oppression leads people to act contrary to their own convictions and beliefs. Some people feel forced to perform Muslim ritual prayers (in the state-approved way) to avoid any possible suspicion. They also feel forced to teach their children according to the government's will instead of their own conviction. They are forced to observe the fast during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. After the first week of this year's Ramadan, which began in early September 2008, a Maldivian radio station announced that the police had already arrested 76 people for not fasting.

Maldivians are — justifiably — fearful that they will face severe consequences if they publicly and identifiably defend everyone's right to freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Because of this fear, Maldivians hope the international community will support their struggle. One step to do this is for states and human rights organizations to urge the Maldivian government to implement the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Asma Jahangir, in her report (A/HRC/4/21/Add.3).

When I read this last paragraph, I thought, "This is one of those situations where someone is going to have to fight and die for freedom." Probably it will be Maldivians. They have more at stake in the matter than anyone else.

We've seen many times that "international pressure" on Muslims has about as much impact as sticking our tongues out at them. What they need is not international pressure, but guns and walkie-talkies.

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