Saturday, January 28, 2017


WHY THE LEFT CAN’T UNDERSTAND ISLAM

Learning the truth about Islam would destroy the Left.

   
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
The left’s greatest intellectual error is its conviction that the world can be divided into a binary power struggle in which both sides agree on the nature of the struggle, but disagree on the outcome.
For leftists of a certain generation, it was class. Marx began the Communist Manifesto by laying out a primal class struggle throughout human history. For Marxists, everything in the world could be broken down to a class struggle with the wealthy oppressors on one side and the oppressed on the other.
It didn’t matter that this model didn’t fit a reality in which Communists leaders came from wealthy backgrounds and their opponents were just as likely to be poor peasants. To the left, everything is defined by the model. Reality is an inconvenience that is suppressed with gulags and firing squads.
Today the variable is identity politics. Everything must be intersectional. There are those who stand on the right side of history, in favor of abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration. Everyone who isn’t on board is a racist, even if they’re black or Latino, a sexist, even if they’re female, or a homophobe, even if they’re gay. Once again, reality doesn’t matter. The binary struggle is the model for everything.
The left believes that there is a binary struggle over the future of humanity with only two sides. It does not understand how the right actually thinks and it has no room for understanding equally compelling belief systems that operate outside this model.
That’s where Islam comes in. Or doesn’t.
The left has never been able to understand religion. It’s not so much secular or atheistic as it is consumed by a compelling belief system of its own which leaves no room for religious conviction.
It cannot understand anything in terms of what it is. It can only understand things in terms of itself. The left cannot understand religion on its own terms, only in terms of how the religion fits into the left.
Unable to understand religion, the left assigns it a place based on its alignment in the struggle. Is it a reactionary force that supports the existing order of a progressive force that opposes it? Is it working with the ruling classes or the oppressed? Is it on the side of the left or on the side of the right?
Islam is racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which has become the left’s closest Islamic ally, was politically influenced by Nazi Germany. Its leaders were outraged by the end of the Caliphate’s feudalism and maintain extensive business networks around the world. They incite riots against minorities and seek to establish a theocracy.
If there’s any Muslim organization that should be a textbook reactionary, fascist and fundamentalist group, it’s the Muslim Brotherhood. But instead the left cuddles up with the violent hate group. Why?
Because the Muslim Brotherhood in the West is aligned with their progressive causes. Therefore it can’t be reactionary. If the Brotherhood were aligned with conservatives, then it would be the enemy.
And so liberals don’t care what the Koran says. The Koran means nothing to them, just as the Bible means nothing to them. Religion is either on the side of social justice or it isn’t. Since Muslims are part of their glorious intersectional rainbow coalition, then Islam must be a good religion.
It’s that stupidly simple. And no amount of Koran quotes will change that.
There’s a strong element of cynicism here. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. But there’s also a deeper inability by the left to understand Islam and any ideology outside its worldview.
The left reacted to the rise of ISIS with frantic incoherence. They literally could not understand what made the Islamic State tick because it didn’t fit any of their political models. ISIS couldn’t exist, yet there was no way to deny that it existed. And so lefty pundits and politicians gibbered that they were nihilists who believed in nothing, even though no one blows themselves up because they believe in nothing.
Muslim terrorists don’t kill people because of Allah, the Koran or the Caliphate. It doesn’t fit the model. They kill, because like all Third World peoples victimized by colonialism, they are oppressed. A Muslim terrorist doesn’t kill Jews or Americans because the Koran commands the Believers to subjugate all non-Muslims. A Muslim migrant doesn’t sexually assault German women because the Koran allows him to.
These are all reactions to Western oppression. The Muslim oppressors are really the oppressed.
But the Islamic State killed other Muslims to establish a Caliphate ruled by Islamic law. The oppressed Muslims were suddenly acting like evil Western oppressors. And if Muslims could be oppressors, then the whole binary model the left had been using to explain the world comes tumbling down.
When the left comes up against inconsistencies in its binary model, it doesn’t revise the model, instead it tries to understand why people are behaving so irrationally that they don’t fit the model. Why don’t poor rural whites vote for the left? It must be talk radio and racism. How can there be conservative minorities? False consciousness. Also Thomas Sowell and Stacey Dash aren’t “really” minorities.
Islam and Muslims are fundamentally outside the left’s model. They are part of their own binary struggle between Islam and everything else. They have their own “right side of history”.
Islam and the left both claim to have “perfect” systems that can create a utopia… after a whole lot of killing. They are aligned with each other, yet unable to understand each other because their worldviews have no room for anything outside their perfect models. Leftists despise fundamentalists and Islamists despise atheists and yet here they are working together while ignoring what the other believes.
The left cannot process the idea that religion transcends politics. At best, leftists see religion as a subset of politics. And since Islam conforms to their political axis, it must be progressive. But to Muslims, politics is a subset of religion. Politics cannot transcend religion because it is an expression of religion.
Leftists do not understand religion and therefore they cannot understand Muslims. They see Islam as another religion to be brought into its sphere of influence to promote social justice to its followers. They cannot understand that Muslim clergy will not become preachers of social justice or that Muslims kill because they genuinely believe in Allah and a paradise for martyrs. These ideas are alien to them.
The alliance between Islam and the left brings together two narrow-minded worldviews. The left cannot recognize that Islam wants something other than gay marriage, abortion rights, a $15 minimum wage, Green Jobs and all the rest of its endless social justice agenda because that would put it on the same side as the Republicans and the rest of the right. And that clearly isn’t so either.
The left need not give up all of its beliefs to understand Islam. But it would have to abandon its binary thinking and recognize that there have been and are other struggles in the world than the one it defines. And this the left is unwilling to do because a binary struggle is what makes its worldview so encompassing. If its worldview doesn’t encompass the world, then it cannot demand absolute power.
The left cannot accept that its great struggle is really a disastrous sideshow in a larger civilizational conflict or that its agenda is not universal, but the product of a particular intellectual strain that has little application outside its own bubble. And so it will go on rejecting the truth about Islam, because learning the truth about Islam would not only destroy the alliance with Islam, but would also destroy the left.

Thursday, January 19, 2017



Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Islam in the city of brotherly loveBy Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor

Philadelphia is a city rich in cultural, religious, and racial diversity. Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Jews make up the majority of the city’s population, but the city also has a large Eastern Orthodox population and a growing Muslim community, as well.
There are more than 200,000 Muslims in Philadelphia. (At least 85% of them are African-American.) Mosques are plentiful: there are nine mosques in West Philadelphia alone. At a large mosque at 58th and Overbrook, the imam is Adbur-Razzaq Miller, a Jew, who once studied to be a rabbi. There are mosques in Germantown, and there’s a small mosque in Fishtown on Girard Avenue.

Muslims in Philadelphia do not present the problem that immigrant Muslim communities present in Europe, at least according to Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept—How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within. Bawer’s book has been praised in many quarters, but some dismiss it as anti-Muslim and incendiary.

I think Bawer’s book tells the truth, as unsettling as that may be.



Bawer’s thesis is this: In cities across western Europe—Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid and Stockholm—expanding Muslim enclaves are not assimilating into the larger culture but enforcing fundamentalist Islamist law, which has a history of oppressing and abusing women, vilifying Jews and homosexuals, and insisting on keeping customs such as honor killing and forced marriage. In the name of politically correct multiculturalism, Europe’s political elite have turned a blind eye to these abuses in order to pacify these radicals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoC-saTQDOs

The Muslim community in Philadelphia is quite different. There are no honor killings here, and gangs of immigrant Muslim youths do not attack Jews and gays, such as they do now in the big cities of Western Europe. Filmmakers like Theo Van Gogh, who made a film critical of Islam’s treatment of women, are not butchered in the street by radical religionists. Harmonious assimilation has pretty much made American Muslims part of the mainstream in Philadelphia. If immigrant Algerian or North African Muslim youths were to follow the example of their European counterparts, and attack or kill people they perceive to be sinners or infidels, they’d be placed in jail. In Europe the perpetrators of these crimes are often exonerated or given light sentences, because judges fear alienating radical fundamentalists. American courts have no such fears.



"The identification of nationality with ethnic identity; and then equation of membership in the society with an attachment to longstanding tribal traditions—all this is still part of the fabric of Europe, and it continues to make true, full, American-style integration next to impossible," Bawer writes.

In Europe, immigrant Muslim communities expect the European host country to eventually adopt their values, not the other way around.
In a recent poll of British Muslims, nearly 61% say they’d like to see Islamic courts make decisions on civil matters, such as divorce, custody, marriage, and inheritance. In other words, Muslims in Britain would be subject to a different set of rules than the rest of British citizenry.

That is not happening in Philadelphia or in the rest of America, although recently Muslim cabbies in Minneapolis wanted to discriminate against passengers who violate Islam’s prohibitions against alcohol. Drivers wanted the option of refusing service to passengers transporting liquor or entering the cab with alcohol on their breath. A proposed city ordinance, which would have installed color-coded lights on cab roofs indicating which cabs would not transport passengers carrying alcohol, was overwhelmingly defeated.

The people of Minneapolis obviously worried who might the cabbies refuse to transport next: women in "immodest" clothing, gays, Jews, Christians?

Philadelphia Muslims, as far as I can tell, are not in this league, although I suspect that many are more socially conservative than most Christians I know.



The Philadelphia Clergy Council, a Muslim organization, has adopted a hard stance of shunning Muslims who abuse their spouses (in the name of the Koran). The Council recommends that Muslims refrain from patronizing a shunned Muslim’s place of business or having anything to do with him socially.

In the U.S. (and Philadelphia especially), there are progressive Muslims, even out gay Muslims who belong to gay Muslim organizations like al-Fatiha.

I’m reminded of a gay Muslim friend who travels to Saudi Arabia four times a year and who tells me about the large secret gay population there. The penalty for consensual gay sexual relations in Saudi Arabia can range from 1,200 lashes to long-term imprisonment. When he goes to Saudi Arabia, that part of himself he keeps hidden, although once back in Philadelphia—a place where one is free to be gay, straight, bisexual, or even non-committal—he’s able to relax and count his blessings.
Thom Nickels can be reached at ThomNickels1@aol.com.
Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom
Literary Spotlight
By Thom Nickels, The Bulletin
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2009
2009 marks the eighth anniversary of September eleventh. While most Americans can recount where they were when the twin towers in New York went down, the passage of time--and the fact that there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 2001—has a tendency to lull many of us into a sense that everything is okay--for now.

 The men and women who had to jump from the upper floors of the towers to avoid being burned alive--the falling executives, their neckties whirling in the wind, the dozens of co-workers who jumped holding hands, the constant shocking "thump" sound of bodies hitting the ground so that the news media eventually had to "black out" the audio-- did not know what was happening to them. They may have known of a hit by a "random airplane" but they knew nothing of an organized terrorist attack. They went to their deaths unaware that this first major attack on American soil also had a side component: the slow buildup of a radical Islamic powerbase throughout Western Europe.





This buildup began in the 1970s when Europe agreed to trade crude oil with Arab countries in exchange for promises of unchecked immigration (Strasbourg Resolution 492, 1971). As Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci noted in her book, "The Rage and the Pride," after the agreement the streets of her native Florence were flooded with immigrants selling pencils and chewing gum. Likewise, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and the Netherlands also permitted free-for-all immigration of Muslims from Morocco, North Africa and the Middle East.  This was not immigration on a case by case basis, but a careless open door policy that led to the creation of radical Muslim enclaves in what had always been progressive, modern democracies. Unlike other immigrant groups, the new citizens avoided assimilation into the culture of the host country. In time they began to opt for Sharia-style Law within their own communities.

 Women who refused to wear the burka, went to the hairdresser's, or were discovered to be in adulterous relationships were (and are) judged according to Sharia Law, while the secular laws of the host nations are conveniently put aside.  Stoning and honor killings are common, as European politicians and government officials often turn a blind eye. Fallaci and author Bruce Bawer both contend that the "blind eye" in question is the result of an undue emphasis on political correctness and multiculturism.  
"Do Muslims stone adulteresses?" Bawer asks, playing the part of the multiculturist politician.  "Well, we execute murderers. Does Iran imprison, torture, and execute gays? Well, what about Guantanamo? Indeed, in recent years the politically correct response to every criticism of Islam could be summed up in those three words: 'What about Guantanamo?'—the point being that until the West itself is morally without blemish, no one has any right to criticize even the most heinous crimes against humanity by any non-Western individual, movement, group, or power."

Once more, Bawer writes that these "PC" progressive governments have turned its major cities into houses divided against themselves.





 "In those cities, all you had to do to travel from a modern, post-Enlightenment democracy to a strict patriarchy out of seventh century Arabia was to walk a few blocks," he states, adding that this transformation "went almost entirely unmentioned in the American and European media." The change, however, was first spotted in the Netherlands by Pim Fortuyn, author of "Against the Islamization of Our Culture," and a candidate for the Dutch parliament.  Fortuyn's contention was that fundamentalist Islam was irreconcilable with Western democracy. He warned his countrymen to rethink government subsidization of Muslim schools, mosques and community centers. For this he was called a fascist and compared to Hitler. Fortuyn was later murdered by an extremist who didn't like his views on immigration.

 Left wing progressives and the European media explained that Fortuyn had it coming because he criticized Islam. Similarly, filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had made a television film which featured a Muslim woman discussing how women were treated under Islam, was shot and killed (his throat slit) while riding a bicycle in downtown Amsterdam. Although van Gogh's film was just revealing a well known truth, Dutch politicians, in the name of multiculturism, "were inclined to deplore van Gogh's alleged 'insensitivity' to Muslim feelings."

Van Gogh's murder, Bawer says, "was proof not that Western Muslims needed to adjust to the realities of free speech but that Westerners needed to assimilate traditional Muslim limitations on speech."

Bawer, an American who moved to Norway to be with his partner, says that the PC multiculturist mindset has so infected American journalism that "a moderate Muslim now denotes someone who might not stone an adulteress to death himself, but who would defend to the death another Muslim's right to do so." He cites several examples of The New York Times refusing to review books that attempt to explain or criticize the slow transformation of Europe into Eurabia. In one instance, he cites a New York Times profile of a famous American Inman that went out of its way to be fluffy and soft. (The Inman, Sheik Reda Shata, believes in suicide bombers if they target Israeli soldiers; he also refuses to shake the hand of any woman and thinks that music should be forbidden if it 'encourages sexual desire').  "One could not easily imagine the Times running a profile of James Dobson or Pat Robertson that started out in quite this way," he writes, referring to the Times profile that was more PR fluff piece than objective journalism. "No reporter would try to get away with it; no editor would accept it; readers would flood the Times with outraged e-mails asking why the liberal Times was apparently trying to get them to warm up to a fundamentalist."





 Bawer believes that "The pretentious, abstraction-ridden multicultural rhetoric" in today's politically correct world of journalism "succeeds in whitewashing the execution of gays, apostates, adulterers, and rape victims, and in entirely removing from the picture of the Islamic world the victims of these abominations."

He gives examples of how the Egyptian-based organization, The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood, seeks "to conquer the West not through terrorism but 'through gradual and peaceful Islamization,'" the proof of that being the current state of Western Europe.




Not surprisingly, Bawer's book has been criticized as "shrill" and "over reactive" by much of PC press, though that seems far from the truth when the author lays out the frightening, verifiable facts.
Thom Nickels can be reached at ThomNickels1@aol.com.

Islam is a Political System (From The Bulletin)


Tom Trento, Director of the Florida Security Council, was in Philadelphia last year to showcase the film, “The Third Jihad,” and to share his thoughts on what he calls “the silent jihad in Philadelphia.”

Over two hundred people packed the main auditorium of the central branch of the Free Library to watch the controversial film that former presidential candidate Rudy Guliani calls “a wake-up call for America.” The Third Jihad exposes the destructive aims of radical Islam, including the subtle dangers of “peaceful” cultural jihad and its influences on western society.

Among the many people interviewed in the film were Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former member of the Dutch Parliament who made the film, Submission, with Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh was later killed by a Muslim radical for his portrayal [in Submission] of the treatment of women in Islamic societies. Ali, a former Muslim, escaped to the Netherlands to free herself from an arranged marriage in Somalia in 1992.
After the feature length film—a large part of which focuses on Western Europe’s growing radical Islamist populations that call for the institution of Sharia Law in these countries—Mr. Trento took the podium.



A power de-surge prevented the lights in the auditorium from switching on, so Mr. Trento was framed in shadows, as was the audience, symbolic, perhaps of the doomed nature of the subject at hand.

“Islam is a political system, primarily,” Mr. Trento said. “Serious analysts and Islamists say this also. There’s no separation of God and state in Islam. There’s no separation of mosque and state. If this is true, then the essence of its quality, Sharia, also called the pathway or Sharia law, begs the question: can this coexist with a Constitutional Democratic Republic? Is there a way to bring these two together?”

Mr. Trento’s answer is an unqualified no.

“We are talking about a clash of civilizations here,” he said, going on to quote CIA operative Claire Lopez, who also makes an appearance in the film: “We are in the battle for the essence of the United States of America.”

Mr. Trento, in fact, calls it “the epic battle of our lifetime” but insists that most Americans are asleep when it comes to the silent jihad happening all around them.

“You have a battle right here in Philadelphia,” he said. “In fact, on October 28, we are going to hold a 3 or 4 hour workshop on Jihad in Philadelphia and detail all of this in an evidentiary way. For instance, you have an individual in Philadelphia who made a lot of money in the Philadelphia Soul Sound. His name is Kenny Gamble, or Luqman Abdul-Haqq.”



Mr. Trento reminded the audience that Gamble became a Muslim in the 1970s after a personal crisis and then “used his money to build a lot of companies that are working to rebuild the inner city.”

“We are seeing this sort of thing all over the United States,” Mr. Trento said, “This is what is part of the stealth jihad.”

While quick to remind the audience that his desire was not to bash Muslims, Mr. Trento said that it was his intent to confront the ideology of Islam that desires to implement Sharia Law in place of the Constitution of the United States.
“If anyone wants to mess with the Constitution, they become an enemy of the United States. But the issue isn’t Muslims; it’s where you stand on Sharia Law. If you’re for Sharia Law, you’re an enemy of the United States.”

Sharia Law governs every aspect of private and public life of an individual, from how one eats, dresses, grooms, and worships.

“Kenny Gamble has an operation going on,” Mr. Trento said. “Now, when U.S. Intelligence starts to look at these guys—and they’ve been looking at them for a long time—they will see that a kind of organizational flow chart is being utilized the Islamic world by an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is the Costra Nostra of the Muslim world. So, when you look into this in Philadelphia, and you see the guys with black berets, the new Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, all these various Islamic organizations tie into Kenny Gamble, and they all sit on boards together.”

The next question Mr. Trento asks is: What is Kenny Gamble doing?

“If Kenny Gamble desires to save the inner city, we are with him 100%. If he desires to use Sharia Law and establish an enclave as he’s developing that is separate and distinct from the American Republic Democratic Constitutional system of government as is occurring in London, then he becomes someone that needs to be stopped.
“This is why Kenny Gamble is currently under a pretty intensive microscope,” Mr. Trento said.

An additional concern, Mr. Trento feels, are Kenny Gamble’s “young shock troops… boys anywhere from the age of five to 12. Called Jawala scouts, “these young troopers are the exact duplication of the Hammas model,” Mr. Tento explains. “The psychological impetus being that if you influence a kid when they are 7 years old, you have them for life.

Part of the plan, whenever poison is introduced anywhere, is to introduce it in a nice container of some sort,” Mr. Trento said. “The container right now is trying to rebuild the inner city. We’re going to give Mr. Gamble a chance to denounce Sharia for U.S. principles. Right now the effort is to clean up the neighborhood and grow young men and women in the Islamic faith. I do believe there are sincere Muslims who want to do that, but there are higher officials and they are working out a grand plan, and they are using non Sharia Muslims as useful idiots, as Karl Marx did, to help usher in hundreds of billions of state and federal dollars to protect the progress of low income housing and job finding programs. “

One audience member asked Mr. Trento’s opinion of the proposed Islamic Center two blocks from New York’s Ground Zero.

There’s a doctrine in the annals of the theology of Islam that allows it in wartime to deceive, to have a deceptive position,” Mr. Trento said. “It’s affirmed by the four schools of Islamist theology. It’s for real, folks. When we hear various Inman’s saying, ‘We’re building a building of love and compassion, so that Jews and Christians and everybody can get together, you can believe that if you want to. But it’s important in Islamic theology that once you conquer something or have a conquest of some sort, you claim the land, then you own it eternally, that’s why there will never, never, never be peace in Israel because the 1.3 billion Muslims believe that they own that land because they conquered it at one point.

“Tell your friends and family about this film, tell everyone,” Mr. Trento said. “We are fighting a theocratic political system that’s an irresistible force!”