No Muslim ‘Radicals’

Those known as ‘radicals’ in West are simply the ones who adhere to Muslim faith.

By Dan Calic

For years we’ve heard Muslims commonly defined by a couple of different terms, “radical” or “moderate.”

Yet what exactly do these terms mean?

Dr. Wafa Sultan, born and raised in the Muslim culture of Syria, who now resides in the US, and is a strong advocate of women’s rights, recently provided some interesting insight on this topic during an interview. What immediately caught my attention was her comment that the term “radical” doesn’t exist in the Muslim world.

No “radicals?” What is she talking about?

“This is a term invented by the West,” according to Dr. Sultan. She also indicated those who suggest Islam has been “hijacked by radicals” were off base. Those whom the West calls “radicals” are quite simply the ones who are adherents to the faith.

Dr. Sultan explained that while there no “radicals” in the Muslim world, there are “moderates.” However, one needs to take note this has nothing to do with Islam itself.

“Islam is Islam,” she explained. A “moderate” Muslim is an individual who has made a personal choice not to be an adherent to the tenets of Islam. A typical way to describe such a person in the west is “secular.”

However, in the Muslim world a “secular” or “moderate” is considered a non-believer or infidel. Such people are routinely subjected to torture and according to Islamic law should be put to death. Islam is also the only religion that mandates the death of someone who decides to leave the faith.

While Dr. Sultan is saying individual Muslims who dilute their personal commitment to Islam, may be called “moderates,” we should not take that to mean Islam itself is moderate. That would be a critical mistake according to Dr. Sultan. And those typically referred to as “radicals” are not considered radical in the Muslim world itself.

A more accurate way to understand the terms from a Western point of view and Muslim point of view is as follows: “Moderate” translates to “infidel”; while “Radical” translates to adherent or believer. One cannot change the Koran for the sake of their individual convenience. It stands alone and obedience is required. In fact Islam means “submission.”

The views expressed by Dr. Sultan would present a challenge to Dr. Zhudi Jasser, President and Founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. Dr. Jasser considers himself to be “devout Muslim.” His organization is attempting to portray Muslims and Islam in a more palatable light. He offers a view of Muslims and Islam that starkly contrasts Dr. Sultan.

For example while speaking with him he told me “we all pray to the same God.” This statement would appear to fly in the face of what Islam itself says. For example the Muslim declaration of belief known as the Shahada says “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger.”

If as Dr. Jasser suggests we all pray to the same God, why doesn’t the Shahada say “there is no god but God?” The Shahada clearly suggests Allah is both distinctive and superior. Yet Dr. Jasser would have Jews, Christians and Muslims praying to the same God. However it doesn’t appear as though Jews and Christians are welcome in Islam according to the Koran, as these quotes indicate:

Allah stamped wretchedness upon the Jews because they killed the prophets and disbelieved Allah's revelations. 2:61

Allah turned the Sabbath-breaking Jews into apes. 2:65-66

Don't take Jews or Christians for friends. If you do, then Allah will consider you to be one of them. 5:51

Quotes such as these strongly suggest at least two points: Dr. Sultan appears to have an understanding of Islam in its truest sense, while Dr. Jasser, who does seem sincere, appears to try to place a square peg into a round hole.



Ynet News

Obama’s Iran Failure

Unlike Arab leaders, American president fails to understand scope of Iranian threat

by Shoula Romano Horing

For the last two years President Obama has been obsessing with “engaging” the Muslim world while ignoring the “moderates” in the Islamic countries who have been imploring the US to stop Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.

For two years President Obama and his administration have fabricated a mythical argument that progress on the Israeli–Palestinian issue through the stopping of settlement construction will help get the “moderate” Arab nations in the region like Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf State, Egypt and Jordan on board in stopping Iran.

But the confidential documents from US embassies made public on WikiLeaks reveal that those countries have already been on board, by hounding and begging the Obama administration to take military action, including airstrikes and the use of ground forces, against the Iranians

Moreover, while Obama was wasting time and personally orchestrating public confrontations with Israel over the settlement issue and the creation of a Palestinian state, it seems that Arab Sunni leaders, in private communications with US officials, did not even mention the settlements or the Palestinian issue as their main urgent concern. As one Middle East expert from Cairo told the Los Angeles Times, the official stance in the Middle East led by Arab Sunni states has always been” that it is Iran and not Israel that poses the main threat to the region.”

According to WikiLeaks, Saudi Arabian King Abdullah urged the US to attack ”evil” Iran, saying that “it is necessary to cut the head of the snake.” King Hamad of Bahrain was quoted in 2009 as saying ”the Iranian nuclear program must be terminated by whatever means necessary. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.” Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Zayed urged the US not to appease or engage Tehran, referring to it as an “existential threat” and stating that “Ahmadinejad is Hitler.”

Iran is not Soviet Union
It appears that Arab leaders agree with Prime Minster Netanyahu‘s assessment that Iran is the main threat to peace and stability in the Middle East and not the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and that economic sanctions may hurt Iran but military action is the only way to stop it.

It seems that Obama chooses to ignore the concerns about Iran from his friends, and feels compelled to occupy himself with sideshows like the Israeli-Palestinian issue and “settlements” because he does not understand the dangers of a nuclear armed Iran. Obama does not believe in a military solution because he believes it is possible to “contain” Iran as the US contained the Soviet Union. But he does not understand that contrary to the Communist leaders, Iranian leaders are not “rational “adversaries.

To understand Iran’s ambitions it is necessary to understand Iran’s religious ideology. The Iranian regime believes that the right religion for humanity is Islam and the right sect of Islam is Shiite and not Sunni. Iran’s ultimate aim is to establish global Islamic rule, a new Islamic empire, but this time under Shiite leadership.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated in the past his belief that amidst the chaos of a catastrophic war, the 12th Imam, the Mahdi, would make his prophesied Messianic return and establish new order where the whole world would convert to Shiite Islam. This belief lies at the heart of Iran’s ambition to spread its influence and acquire nuclear weapons and this is the reason such ambition is dangerous not only for Israel but for Sunni Arab countries, Europe and the world. Acquiring nuclear capability would give Iranian leadership even more room for reckless and aggressive foreign policy.

The Sunni Arabs understand the Iranian Shiite ambitions for regional hegemony and the threat to their survival, even though Obama does not. The Israeli government should stop participating in the sideshows of Obama and refuse any requests for a settlement freeze or negotiations over a future Palestinian state until the Iranian threat is eliminated.

Shoula Romano Horing is Israeli-born and raised. She is an attorney in Kansas City, Missouri and a national speaker; Her blog: www.shoularomanohoring.com

Ground Zero Mosque is the SECOND Mosque Being Built on a 9/11 Site

To our fellow 9/11 families and to all who are concerned about the Ground Zero mega-mosque in New York:

We want everyone to know that the Park Service is right now building an even larger Islamic victory mosque atop the Flight 93 crash site. Many of you were outraged in 2005 when the Crescent of Embrace design was unveiled to be a half-mile wide Islamic shaped crescent:

Left: 2005 publicity shot of the Crescent of Embrace design. Right: typical Islamic crescent and star, viewed from a similar angle.

Few people know that this giant crescent actually points to Mecca, or understand the religious significance of this orientation. A crescent that points the direction to Mecca is a very familiar construct in the Islamic world. Because Muslims face Mecca for prayer, every mosque is built around a Mecca direction indicator called a mihrab. The classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Here are the two most famous mihrabs in the world:

Left: the Mihrab of the Prophet, at the Prophet's mosque in Medina. Right: the mihrab of the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain.

Face into the crescent to face Mecca

As with the Medina and Cordoba mihrabs, a person facing into the Crescent of Embrace will be facing Mecca. In the image below, superimposed red lines show the orientation of the Flight 93 crescent. The green qibla circle is from an nline Mecca-direction calculator:

A person standing between the tips of the crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing almost exactly in "qibla" direction (the Muslim prayer direction). You can verify the qibla direction from Somerset PA using any number of on-line Mecca-direction calculators.

To be precise, the Crescent of Embrace points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± a tenth of a degree. The final construction drawings alter this orientation slightly, so that instead of pointing a little less than two degrees north of Mecca, the actual crescent will point less than three degrees south of Mecca. Such small deviations from Mecca are insignificant by Islamic standards, which developed over a period of more than a thousand years during which far flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca.

The Park Service does not call the Crescent of Embrace a crescent anymore. Now they call it Circle of Embrace, but the only actual change was to add an extra arc of trees (planted to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent) that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace. It is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing at Mecca.

This is the Park Service's official explanation for the design: the terrorist attacks are depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant crescent. A clearer depiction of Islamic victory is hard to imagine, so no one should be too surprised that the damned thing points to Mecca, and actually turns out to be a mosque.

Other mosque features:

Mosque design is based on a dozen typical mosque features, every one of which is realized in the Crescent/Circle design, all on the same epic scale as the half mile wide crescent-mihrab. Note, for instance, that the 93 foot tall minaret-like Tower of Voices is topped with another Islamic-shaped crescent, akin to the crescent-topped minarets seen in many Islamic countries:

An Islamic shaped crescent, soaring in the sky above the symbolic lives of the 40 heroes, which literally dangle down below. In Islam, there is only heaven and hell. Symbolic damnation?

The Flight 93 mosque needs to be stopped, along with the Islamic victory mosque at ground zero in Manhattan. May the fight against these two desecrations strengthen each other.

Sincerely,

Tom Burnett Senior
Loving father of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Junior

Contact information for the Flight 93 Memorial Project here:
Flight 93 National Memorial
109 W. Main St., Suite 104
Somerset, PA 15501
814.443.4557

If you would like to help stop the crescent mosque, please email Alec Rawls (alec@rawls.org) who is helping to coordinate opposition.

There is also an online petition that people can sign.

You Might Also Like to Read:

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No Mosque on the Ground Zero
Obama and the Mosque
Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf of Mosque at Ground Zero
Hamas: NYC Mosque Must Be Built
The Moderate Muslim Threat
On Whose Side is Obama?
Islamic Trojan Horse at Ground Zero
Build This Mosque or Face the Wrath of Radical Islamists
Imam Rauf on Israel's Destruction
Is Islam the Problem?
The Mosque of War




By: Atlas Shrugs

The Moderate Muslim Threat

NY mosque affair another sign moderate Muslims more dangerous than radicals.

By: Shaul Rosenfeld





Muslims should build mosques “everywhere,” Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar declared Tuesday as he addressed the plans to build a mosque near ground zero in New York. Most of his Muslim brethren, moderates and radicals alike, likely endorsed this sentiment. After all, when one of the pillars of Islam is its very dissemination, one should not wonder that even the “moderates” view ground zero as a suitable site for a mosque.

The fact that almost all global terror in recent years is carried out in the name of Islamic ideas being recited day and night at the finest mosques (both in the East and West,) and that almost 3,000 people were killed in New York in the name of these notions nine years ago should have elicited at least a hint of understanding for the feelings of the victims’ families on the part of Islamic moderates.

New York Governor David Patterson recently announced that Muslims refused his offer to find an alternate site for the new Islamic center. He may have forgotten for a moment that more than anything, the center and its name (The Cordoba House) are a symbol. Seemingly, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Sharif el-Gamal and their partners could have scored quite a few points in America’s public opinion (which in all polls shows firm objection to the center’s establishment) had they accepted Patterson’s proposal.

After all, these distinguished gentleman fully realize that the various shades of Islam, even without the center, do not enjoy an especially positive image in US public opinion, and that a gesture conceding only the site of the mosque, rather than the principle of building it, was virtually a win-win situation for them. Moreover, their willingness to change the location would have ended almost at once the ongoing media and public debate on the actions of 19 of their Islamic brethren nine years ago and the thousands of their victims.

If, as Rauf and Gamal argue, the center’s main purpose is to encourage tolerance and promote interfaith dialogue, while showing maximal sensitivity to the feelings of others, would it not be natural to show a little more than zero tolerance and consideration for other people’s feelings, instead of dismissing out of hand many families of September 11 victims who ask that the mosque be built somewhere else?

The trap of Islamic rhetoric
An important part of the answer to the above questions has to do with the long-term goals designated by many of Islam’s spiritual and ideological leaders, both in the past and at present, both in the West and East. These objectives prompt many Muslim immigrants in the West (unlike any other immigrant group on earth) to strictly refrain from integrating into their new home and adopt local customs, even when this does not require them to make any religious concession.

In Britain, France, and the US, the separatist and anti-Western voices coming out of the mosques have no parallel among any other immigrant group. Even the economic, educational, and social opportunities and temptations, which are immeasurably greater than what is available at their home countries, only prompt a minority of Muslim immigrants to veer off the path outlined by Imams and integrate into the citizenry of their new country.

Moreover, this separatism is not undertaken for noble aims of course, but rather, mostly in order to gain a cultural, social, religious, and political foothold in their new address. This has always been Islam’s way. We would do well to examine the refusal of mosque planners to compromise on its location, even at the price of boosting the grievances against them among Americans, through this prism.

Yet in order to ensure that their work bears fruit, the senior Imams within the “moderate” Muslim camp excel at uttering words that are pleasantly received in the West. These imams can always put their trust in a variety of enlightened Western intellectuals, as well as some useful idiots, which this time around include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city council members, with the trusted support of Barack Obama (before he embarked on his zigzags.)

And so, we again see a noble, wonderful partnership between “moderate Muslims” committed to doublespeak and Western intellectuals who remain loyal to double standards; meanwhile, naïve souls all around are deeply moved by any “moderate” Islamic statement.

In his recently published book Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman warns that the danger posed to the West by “moderate Muslims” is even greater than that posed by their radical brethren, mostly because too many people are happy to fall into the trap laid by moderate Islamic rhetoric, even when the conciliatory tone disappears the moment the target audiences changes to Muslims.

And so, for example, the Cordoba House is marketed to Westerners as a stronghold of tolerance, moderation, and interfaith dialogue. Yet in Islamic tradition, Cordoba is first and foremost a Christian Spanish city conquered by Muslims in 711, with many of its residents butchered or turned into slaves; a mosque built on the ruins of a church; and memories of the Almohads, the spiritual fathers of contemporary Islamic zealots.

The Almohads razed the town in the 12th Century and killed those who refused to convert to Islam, forcing Jews and Christians to either convert or go into exile. However, Feisal Abdul Rauf reserves this chapter in Cordoba’s history for his Muslims brethren only.


You Might Also Like to Read:

Ground Zero Mosque Articles
No Mosque on the Ground Zero
Obama and the Mosque
Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf of Mosque at Ground Zero
Hamas: NYC Mosque Must Be Built
Ground Zero Mosque is the SECOND Mosque Being Built on a 9/11 Site
On Whose Side is Obama?
Islamic Trojan Horse at Ground Zero
Build This Mosque or Face the Wrath of Radical Islamists
Imam Rauf on Israel's Destruction
Is Islam the Problem?
The Mosque of War