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Apologists for Islam like to say that people fear what they don’t understand. But that’s not always true. The more that European Jews came to understand Nazism the more they rightly feared it. That seems also to be the case with Islam. The more you get to know the real thing, and not some whitewashed version of it, the more frightening it appears. It would be interesting to conduct a “knowledge of Islam” survey comparing those with a favorable view of Islam to those with an unfavorable view in order to see who really has the most accurate knowledge. My bet is that the unfavorably disposed would win by a big margin. The “Know-Nothings” of today are not those who fear Islam, but rather those who gullibly swallow assurances that Islamic leaders would like nothing better than to promote interfaith harmony.
Here are some items for them to chew on:
(*) A 2003 CIA report found that over a 30-year period the Saudis spent at least $2 billion a year to spread Islam. According to another estimate the amount to date is nearly one hundred billion. Much of that money goes to building mosques.
(*) In many Muslim countries civil authorities require that the text of the Friday sermon be pre-submitted for approval. The reason: Friday sermons have frequently incited rampages against non-Muslims or against minority Muslim sects.
(*) The Mapping Sharia in America Project conducted by the Center for Security Policy found that three out of four of the two hundred mosques they investigated supported anti-Western extremism. A prime example is the Dar Al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, which was long touted as a model of moderation until it was discovered that Major Nidal Hassan, the “underwear bomber,” the Times Square bomber, and two of the 9/11 terrorists had received mentoring either at the mosque or from its former imam, Anwar al-Awlaki.
(*) Mosques are frequently used as recruitment and training centers for terrorists. Police raids on numerous mosques in Europe have uncovered false papers, weapons, ammunition, and bomb making equipment.
(*) Islam is not just a religion, and a mosque is not just a place of prayer. According to a well-known Islamic poem:
The mosques are our barracks,
The domes our helmets,
The minarets our bayonets,
And the faithful our soldiers.
If you’ve ever wondered why the penalty for apostasy is death, it helps to realize that many Muslims think of Islam as an army, and they think of themselves as soldiers in Allah’s army. An apostate is like a soldier who deserts.
(*) Numerous Islamic scholars and leaders have expressed either publicly or privately a desire to overthrow Western Civilization. The Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for the United States reads in part as follows: “[Muslims] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western Civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house…so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious…” As the commercial for a new TV espionage series puts it, “Not every conspiracy is a theory.”
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Some have suggested that at the last minute Imam Rauf will bow to public opinion, and graciously agree to build the Ground Zero mosque elsewhere. If he did, it might turn a public relations disaster into a public relations coup. He would then be hailed by the media and the other usual suspects for his good faith gesture and his spirit of cooperation and compromise. Rauf will emerge as a true American, and the mosque protestors will have been deprived of their main argument. Muslims will have lost their victory mosque—at least temporarily—but they will have won a significant tactical advantage: the ability to build mosques all across America with little opposition. After such a “bridge-building” gesture, any further opposition to mosques will be portrayed as proof positive of mean-spirited bigotry.
Whether or not such a scenario plays out, the possibility that it might reveals the drawback of placing all your bets on the one issue of location. Nor is it wise to turn the moderation—or lack thereof—of a particular imam into the main issue. In both the Muslim world and in the West, moderate imams tend to lose their jobs with appalling regularity to radical imams. A “moderate” substitute for Imam Rauf at a relocated site might serve to satisfy many of the objections to the project, but the moderate man could easily be replaced once the furor dies down—or, alternatively, he could turn out to be not so moderate. To be sure, there is nothing moderate about Imam Rauf—a man whose main project is the advancement of Sharia law—and, to be sure, there is something very wrong about the proposed location for the Ground Zero mosque. But the main point of resistance to Islamization is and ought to be that there is something very wrong with Islam.
William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in FrontPage Magazine, First Things, Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Jihad Watch, World, and Investor’s Business Daily.
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