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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; William Kilpatrick</title>
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		<title>The Big Picture: ISIS in Context</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/william-kilpatrick/the-big-picture-isis-in-context/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-big-picture-isis-in-context</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2014 04:45:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[beheading videos]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Focusing in on that threat comes in two forms.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/isis-iraq.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240145" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/isis-iraq-450x215.jpg" alt="isis-iraq" width="306" height="146" /></a><strong>[To order William Kilpatrick’s new book, <em>Insecurity</em>, click <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insecurity-William-Kilpatrick-ebook/dp/B00KO8ZERC#reader_B00KO8ZERC">here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>It’s hard to keep up with the news about Islam. One week, the focus is on Boko Haram, then it shifts to Hamas, and then to ISIS.</p>
<p>Every once in a while, it helps to step back and take a look at the big picture—that is, the big picture in regard to the Islamic resurgence. Not that there aren’t other big threats on the horizon—such as Russia, China, and North Korea—but let’s confine ourselves here to the Islamic threat.</p>
<p>That threat comes in two forms: armed jihad and stealth jihad. Since armed jihad is more conspicuous, it gets most of our attention. It’s difficult not to notice the activities of Boko Haram in Nigeria or ISIS in Iraq, or the major terror attacks that occur once every year or so—the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the London bus and subway attack, the bombing of commuter trains in Madrid and Mumbai, and the mall massacre in Nairobi. In the back of our minds, we also know that Pakistan has nuclear weapons and that Iran will soon acquire them (although some American bishops assure us that Iran has no such intention).</p>
<p>The balance of military power still favors the West—although it’s no longer clear whether Turkey, which has the second largest military in NATO, will come down on the side of the West or on the side of the Islamists. But military power can be offset by asymmetrical warfare—in other words, the type of warfare that terrorists favor. A small team of terrorists can incinerate the World Trade Center or paralyze Madrid or Mumbai, and there’s not much that F-16s or nuclear submarines can do about it.</p>
<p>Which is where that other form of jihad comes in. Stealth jihad, which, as the name implies, is the less noticeable type, can create a base for armed jihadists to ply their trade. Stealth jihad, in essence, is an attempt to turn a culture in an Islamic direction by infiltrating and influencing key institutions such as schools, courts, churches, media, government, and the entertainment industry. The “Trojan Horse” plot for taking over 10 schools in Birmingham, England is one example of stealth jihad; the national security establishment’s purging of training materials that cast a critical eye on Islam is another.</p>
<p>But, in order to do the long march through the institutions, you have to have enough bodies to do the marching. Thus, many critics look upon Muslim immigration into non-Muslim societies as a form of stealth jihad. For example, in their <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Day-Trojan-Horse-Immigration/dp/0979492955/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1409096287&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=modern+day+trojan+horse%3A+the+islamic+doctrine+of+immigration">book</a> <em>Modern-Day Trojan Horse: The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration</em>, Sam Solomon and Elias Al-Maqdisi describe Muslim immigration as, well, a “modern-day Trojan Horse.” They’re not saying that every single Muslim immigrant wants to subvert your local school, but rather that mass migration and Islamic conquest have been linked ever since Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina and commenced the takeover of Arabia.</p>
<p>Many places in Europe have changed almost beyond recognition due to the combination of mass immigration and high Muslim birth rates. And the political makeup of Europe is also changing. Since Muslims in Europe and the UK tend to vote as a bloc, politicians have begun catering to them, thus magnifying their influence. It’s widely thought, for instance, that the victory margin for French President Francois Hollande—a strong proponent of Muslim immigration—was provided by Muslim voters.</p>
<p>It used to be that anyone who talked about the Islamization of Europe was dismissed as an “alarmist.” But plenty of Europeans are talking about it now&#8211; including European Muslims who proudly march with signs proclaiming their intention to dominate Europe. Social-network <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/27/tipping-points-and-beliefs/">researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute</a> have concluded that “when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakeable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.” France is already over 10 percent Muslim, and the majority of Frenchmen, like most Europeans, don’t seem to have any strong convictions about anything outside of an unshakeable belief in long vacations and early retirement.</p>
<p>In significant ways, stealth jihad paves the way for armed jihad. In its early stages, it can create localized environments where homegrown jihadists can grow and flourish. In its later stages? The ultimate aim of stealth jihad is to put the reins of power in the hands of Muslims. What if, as seems increasingly likely, France and England concede more and more political power to Islamists? Both countries are nuclear powers with advanced delivery systems. Given the rapid rate at which the old order of things is being turned upside down, it is not inconceivable that these weapons could someday fall into the hands of Islamic radicals.</p>
<p>As for the Muslim nations—those with nukes and those without—they too are rapidly changing. The reason that the West was so unprepared for the reappearance of traditional Islam as a world force is that, up until relatively recent times, most of the major Muslim nations were under the control of secular-minded strongmen who made a point of suppressing the full expression of Islam. The 1979 Iranian Revolution changed all that, and most of the Westernized secular strongmen were replaced over time by leaders who felt they need answer only to Allah. For example, Turkey, which for years was touted by Westerners as a model moderate Muslim society, is now run by a rabidly anti-Semitic, Muslim Brotherhood true believer who seems intent on making Turkey the world’s foremost Islamic power—as it was as recently as one hundred short years ago.</p>
<p>Where does this leave the United States? Most Americans, I would venture to guess, are of the opinion that it can’t happen here. While many are now willing to admit that jihadists can once again damage America through terrorist attacks, few can imagine the possibility of an Islamicized America.</p>
<p>Yet Islamization is occurring in Europe, and many of the same conditions that make it possible there make it possible here, as well. Stealth jihad is already a fact in America. Its influence can be seen in textbooks and on college campuses, in the media, and even in the movies. Moreover, there are numerous American activist groups—offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood—which are dedicated to stealth jihad. Although disguised as civil rights groups, these organizations would like nothing better than to see sharia become the law of the land. And their own litigators are as adept at lawfare as ISIS is at warfare.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, they meet with little resistance. That lack of pushback can be explained by considering one other factor in the overall mix—political correctness. Political correctness greases the skids for stealth jihad. It’s the “open sesame” password that allows the stealth jihadists in America to go just about anywhere they please. Right now, most Americans are more afraid of violating the rules of PC than they are of another 9/11 occurrence. They’re afraid, in other words, of being thought bigoted, racist, or—God forbid—Islamophobic. There’s little resistance to stealth jihad in America, because the few that do resist are reliably cast by the PC enforcers as anti-Muslim haters. Most people don’t want that to happen to them. So they don’t make a fuss when Muslims make demands. They go along to get along. As just one tiny example among hundreds of others, consider the <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/08/vermont-restaurant-ad-for-bacon-removed-after-muslim-claimed-it-offended-her">recent story</a> about a bistro in Winooski, Vermont, that removed a window sign advertising their delicious bacon because a Muslim woman claimed it was offensive.</p>
<p>That’s a fairly minor concession, but your nation’s really in trouble when Muslims complain about “insensitive” training materials used by the Department of Defense and the FBI, and the Department of Justice immediately complies by <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/21/obama-administration-pulls-references-to-islam-from-terror-training-materials-official-says/?print=1">ordering a purge of</a> all training manuals in all security agencies that contain even a hint of a link between terrorism and Islam. On the other hand, when <a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/the-triumph-of-nice">five Congressmen complained</a> that they had good evidence of Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the State Department and other government agencies, they were treated to a resounding rebuke by fellow legislators for having offended the Muslim community. Who needs ISIS when ISNA (the Islamic Society of North America) is allowed to vet military training manuals, or when Congress members who complain about such things risk being sent off to sensitivity training camp?</p>
<p>But wait a minute, you may be tempted to say, Europe’s slow-motion surrender can’t happen here because Europe’s birth rate imbalance and Muslim immigration problem don’t exist here. That’s true enough, but there is one other factor to consider—conversions. Right now, conversions to Islam by U.S. citizens remain on the low side. But remember that Muhammad also had a conversion problem. For the first twelve years of his ministry, he never had more than 100 followers. Then he moved to Medina, started raiding and looting, and the numbers kicked in. There seems to be a tipping point in the affairs of men which can result in a dramatic acceleration of conversions. Once a movement starts looking like the coming thing, more people will contemplate jumping on board.</p>
<p>We may be at one of those tipping points now. For the middle-aged and arthritic, it’s difficult to understand why thousands of recruits from all over the Western world are signing up with ISIS. But ISIS and similar groups do have a certain “cool” appeal to those of fighting age. Some Western analysts mistakenly believe that contact with Western pop culture will have a de-radicalizing effect on potential jihadists. But that’s not necessarily the case. Recall that Muhammad Atta and his crew partied it up at bars and strip clubs in the weeks before 9/11. Or consider that a British rapper is the main suspect in the Islamic State’s beheading of American journalist James Foley. It seems that the Islamic encounter with pop culture may turn out to be a case of “they came, they saw, they co-opted.” That’s because much of pop culture is already halfway there.</p>
<p>To youngsters brought up on gruesome video games and gangsta rap, YouTube videos of severed heads aren’t appalling, they’re “awesome.” Graduates of relativist pop culture don’t think in terms of right and wrong, they think in terms of cool and uncool. ISIS types are also very savvy exploiters of social media. “Like #ISIS in #Iraq” has become a popular hashtag. And the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2728624/How-democracy-treating-guys-ISIS-militants-social-media-encourage-Ferguson-protesters-embrace-Islamic-extremism.html"><em>Daily Mail</em></a> reports that “ISIS militants and their supporters are using social media to encourage protestors in Ferguson [Missouri] to embrace radical Islam and fight against the U.S. government.” Why should black Americans embrace Islam? Well, because <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/21/even-islamist-fighters-in-syria-and-iraq-are-obsessing-over-ferguson/">“Racism and discrimination are rampant”</a> in America and “In Islam there is no racism.” If the militants ever decide to hang up their bomb belts, they can always find work on Madison Avenue.</p>
<p>There is another disturbing possibility that needs to be taken into account when assessing the Islamic threat to America. In a <a href="http://allenbwest.com/2014/08/six-six-examples-obama-purposefully-enabling-islamist-cause/">recent column</a>, former U.S. representative and retired lieutenant colonel Allen West stated that Barack Obama “is an Islamist in his foreign policy perspectives and supports their cause.” West isn’t saying that Obama was born in Mombasa or that he wears a secret Muslim decoder ring, but that his policies suggest a deep sympathy with Islamist causes. West provides a list of particulars, including this eye-catching item: “The Obama administration has lifted longtime restrictions on Libyans attending flight schools in the United States and training here in nuclear science.” To which the obvious reply is “What could possibly go wrong?”</p>
<p>Here are two other items on West’s list:</p>
<ul>
<li>Returning sanction money, to the tune of billions of dollars, back to the theocratic regime led by Iran’s ayatollahs and allowing them to march on towards nuclear capability</li>
<li>Providing weapons of support to the Muslim Brotherhood-led Egyptian government—F-16s and M1A1 Abrams tanks—but not to the Egyptian government after the Islamist group has been removed.</li>
</ul>
<p>The second item also troubled Michele Bachmann and four other House members when they asked for an investigation two years ago into possible Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the government. They <a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/the-triumph-of-nice">expressed concern</a> that the Department of State had “taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.”</p>
<p>If not many Americans have taken notice of the administration’s Muslim Brotherhood bias, the Egyptians have. When then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Alexandria in July of 2012, her motorcade was pelted by tomato-throwing protestors who charged that Washington had helped the Muslim Brotherhood come to power. A year later, after the overthrow of the Brotherhood, demonstrators at a huge rally in Cairo roundly criticized Obama and U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson. A <a href="http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2013/07/not-everybody-would-like-to-agree-that.html">typical poster read</a>: “Obama, stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood fascist regime.” In December 2012, an <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/3869/egyptian-magazine-muslim-brotherhood-infiltrates">Egyptian magazine</a>, <em>Rose El-Youssef</em>, claimed that six American Islamic activists working within the Obama administration were Muslim Brotherhood operatives. And this past week, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/08/the-u-s-had-no-idea-egypt-and-the-u-a-e-were-going-to-bomb-libya">it was revealed</a> that the Egyptians had teamed up with the United Arab Emirates to bomb Islamist forces in Libya, but purposely neglected to tell the Obama administration of their plans. It doesn’t take a mind-reader to guess why. They obviously feared that the Americans might leak the operation to the enemy. The point is that Obama’s consistent pro-Muslim Brotherhood policies reveals a lot more about his sympathies than his occasional don’t-slander-the-Prophet type remarks.</p>
<p>Whether or not Obama is a secret Islamist (as claimed by <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/03/egyptian-newspapers-explosive-allegation-president-obama-is-a-secret-muslim-brotherhood-member/">another Egyptian newspaper</a>) is almost beside the point. Judged by his policies, he might as well be. And long before its romance with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the current administration had shown a distinct favoritism toward Muslim Brotherhood offshoot organizations such as ISNA and CAIR. So also did the Bush administration. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Islam-Atheism-Struggle-Soul/dp/158617696X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1405380125&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=Christianity%2C+Islam+and+Atheism">As I wrote</a> two years ago:</p>
<p>In Europe, the rise of Islam has been a slow, incremental process—the result of decades of immigration combined with high birthrates for Muslims and low birthrates for indigenous Europeans. In America, Muslim strategists may have found a way to shortcut the long process.</p>
<p>Thus far, stealth jihad has met with relatively little resistance in America. That’s not to say that we should ignore armed jihad. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, Iran is acquiring them, and Turkey has the eighth largest army in the world. ISIS, Hezbollah, and Hamas have well-equipped fighting forces and all are capable of carrying out terrorist operations far from their home bases. And the United States? The U.S. plans to shrink its Army to pre-World War II levels. One other factor to be considered when assessing the big picture is that the U.S. is drastically reducing the size and strength of its military. Just at the point when the rest of the world is arming to the teeth, the American solons think it’s safe to bid a farewell to arms.</p>
<p>When you put together all the pieces of the big picture puzzle, it begins to look like a decidedly grim picture.</p>
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		<title>Media Diversionary Tactics in Ferguson and Gaza</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/william-kilpatrick/media-diversionary-tactics-in-ferguson-and-gaza/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=media-diversionary-tactics-in-ferguson-and-gaza</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/william-kilpatrick/media-diversionary-tactics-in-ferguson-and-gaza/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2014 04:11:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[ISIS takes note.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/mk.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239956" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/mk.jpg" alt="mk" width="323" height="181" /></a><strong>[To order William Kilpatrick’s new book, <em>Insecurity</em>, click <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insecurity-William-Kilpatrick-ebook/dp/B00KO8ZERC#reader_B00KO8ZERC">here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>We hear a lot from the media about Israel’s disproportionate response to attacks from Hamas, but it may be time to focus on the media’s own disproportionate response to certain events.</p>
<p>Take the incident of the missing Malaysian airliner. Big story? Yes. But CNN’s decision to give it round-the-clock coverage for two solid months seems a little excessive, until you remember that there was an even bigger story unfolding around the same time—the Russian takeover of Crimea. The annexation of Crimea, the threat to the rest of Ukraine, and the possible re-ignition of the Cold War was a major historical event. It was also bad news for the Obama administration and its narrative that relations with Russia had been reset, tranquility had been established, and our military could be safely scaled back. It is in that context that CNN’s decision to refocus our attention to the possible whereabouts of the airliner should be understood.</p>
<p>The media’s current focus on the shooting of a black teenager by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri seems also designed to divert attention away from the big picture. The story provides an opportunity to shift the spotlight away from a number of other stories that reflect badly on the current administration—the failure of Obama’s Iraq policy, the inability to control the southern border, the IRS scandal, the President’s serial vacations, and the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. One might justifiably conclude that much of the media attention to Ferguson is fueled by ulterior motives.</p>
<p>By focusing on Ferguson, the media (with CNN once again playing a lead role) managed to blow it up into a much bigger story than it might otherwise have been. All that business about the IRS and the Mexican border suddenly faded from sight. And even though the coverage focused on the death of a young black American, it still managed to draw attention away from the major risk to young black Americans, in favor of a narrative which suggests that white racism is the root cause of black troubles. According to the established formula, America has never overcome the heritage of its “troubled racist past,” blacks are still the victims of unjust discrimination, and black youth live in constant fear of white police.</p>
<p>While that narrative was still valid in the fifties and sixties, it is now well past its expiration date. In Chicago this past weekend, seven people were killed and twenty-nine others wounded due to gun violence. All of the victims were black—most of them young. This is about par for a weekend in Chicago. And similar incidences of black-on-black violence occur every week in Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, and New York—not to mention St. Louis, which is right next door to Ferguson. Many of the most violent cities have black mayors, black city councilmen, and black police chiefs. That’s a bit inconvenient for the press because it doesn’t fit into the white racism narrative, but the media stick to their story nonetheless. Yet the causes of black violence have been extensively studied by sociologists and criminologists, and they have been telling us for decades that the root cause is the breakdown of the black family due to high rates of illegitimacy.</p>
<p>If the mainstream media people were as concerned as they profess to be about the lives of young blacks, we would see numerous TV specials about the black family crisis, and instead of sending platoons of reporters and cameramen to Ferguson, CNN would dispatch them to cover the daily mayhem in Chicago. But that would require revising and updating the narrative that has served the media so well, and that, apparently, is just too much trouble.</p>
<p>Not only is the narrative about white racism dishonest, it’s destructive. It encourages grievances, keeps racial tensions alive, and perpetuates violent behavior. In short, the media’s favored formula is a self-fulfilling prophecy that only serves to guarantee a more polarized society.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the media’s distortion of the Ferguson affair does serve one useful purpose. It alerts us to the possibility that other stories are being handled in the same unbalanced way. The biggest story in the world today is the resurgence of Islam. And by-and-large, that story is being managed in the same dishonest fashion.</p>
<p>Which brings us back to the point where we started—the media’s lopsided attention to Israel’s supposedly disproportionate response to Hamas. The similarities to the media’s handling of the Ferguson situation are hard to miss. Some of the same reporters who were embedded in Gaza are now embedded in Ferguson. The media’s concern over innocent civilians in Gaza has now shifted to an innocent teenager in Missouri. And just as the blame for the troubles in Gaza is assigned to the disproportionate Israeli response, the problems in Ferguson and elsewhere are blamed on disproportionate encounters between well-armed cops and unarmed youth. The narrative is also the same. According to the media’s one-size-fits-all explanation, both rockets fired from Gaza and projectiles hurled at Ferguson store windows are caused by poverty and institutional oppression.</p>
<p>Moreover, in both cases, the media is being played like a violin—in Missouri by professional race-baiters and grievance-mongers, in Gaza by Palestinian propagandists who seem more media-savvy than the media itself, and who are adept at staging fake atrocity photo-ops which they know will be obligingly transmitted to TV screens across the world. Just as riots in Missouri feed on media attention, so does violence in Palestine.</p>
<p>But why, exactly, is Palestine given so much attention?</p>
<p>The other, and most irresponsible, aspect of the media’s disproportionate coverage is that in both cases, the stories are used to keep the public’s eye off the larger picture. The larger story that is being kept off-stage in Ferguson is the breakdown of the black family. The larger story in the Israeli-Hamas conflict is that the root cause of the troubles is Islam itself. You might prefer to say that the trouble lies in a violent and anti-Semitic interpretation of Islam, but that interpretation is now widespread. As I <a href="http://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2014/08/09/when_christians_blame_israel.html">wrote recently</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Muslims are attacking non-Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Libya, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, and Thailand. There are no Jews to speak of in these places. So you can’t blame the violence on them. Given the propensity of Muslims to attack their neighbors, what are the chances that in the one place on earth where a Jewish government and an Islamist government are in conflict, it’s the Jews who are largely at fault?</p></blockquote>
<p>The media coverage of jihadist activities in most of the above-mentioned places is minimal. So also is the coverage of Muslim attacks on Jews in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, and Australia. Nor will you hear much about the rocks, bottles, bricks, and Molotov cocktails thrown during the numerous Muslim riots in the EU and UK.</p>
<p>Likewise, just as the media avoids telling the story of black-on-black violence, it rarely focuses on the fact that the vast majority of Muslim deaths worldwide are caused by other Muslims. To do so would undermine the established narrative that Islam is a religion of peace and justice.</p>
<p>Thus, the obsessive concentration on Israel and Hamas. And thus, when the media does attend to hard-to-ignore cases of Islamic jihad, they are forced to pretend that each occurrence is an unusual departure from true Islam. For example, reporters treat the atrocities committed by ISIS—the beheadings, the sex slavery, the forced conversions, the payment of the <em>jizya</em>—as though they were exotic new phenomena, when, in fact, they were all integral elements of Islamic expansion for more than twelve hundred years.</p>
<p>When you step back from the Israel-Hamas conflict to get a broader view, you notice that groups like Hamas, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, and Al-Shabaab not only have much in common with each other, they share in a common heritage and a common devotion to Islam. The media, however, is trapped in a narrative that says otherwise. Hence, the need to put the onus on Israel. The thought that the violence emanating from Gaza is part of a worldwide movement to re-establish a seventh-century theocracy is a thought they dare not entertain.</p>
<p>Americans, including many black Americans, are catching on to the game the media is playing with race relations in America. Let’s hope that they will soon catch on to the very similar game being played in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2728624/How-democracy-treating-guys-ISIS-militants-social-media-encourage-Ferguson-protesters-embrace-Islamic-extremism.html"><em>Daily Mail</em></a> reports that “ISIS militants and their supporters are using social media to encourage protesters in Ferguson to embrace radical Islam and fight against the U.S. government.” Ironically, the jihadist social media campaign to win over black Americans relies on the very same narrative pushed by the mainstream media. According to a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/21/even-islamist-fighters-in-syria-and-iraq-are-obsessing-over-ferguson/"><em>Washington Post</em></a> article, “One argument they’ve been making for years is that racism and discrimination are rampant in some parts of the West, and they’re hoping the Ferguson riots could help recruit black Americans.” According to one fan of the Islamic State interviewed for the piece, “In Islam there is no racism, and we think black people will wake up and follow the example of Malcolm X…” Some social media users put the matter more bluntly. One typical message reads: “Blacks in #Ferguson, there’s an alternative to this indignity: pick yourselves up with Islam, like #IS in #Iraq.”</p>
<p>Now that the media’s dishonest narrative has been picked up by ISIS and friends, it’s high time for them to reconsider the dangerous game they have been playing.</p>
<p><strong>William Kilpatrick is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Islam-Atheism-Struggle-Soul/dp/158617696X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1405380125&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=Christianity%2C+Islam+and+Atheism"><em>Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West</em></a>. His work is supported in part by the Shillman Foundation.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Gender Confusion Challenge to Army Recruitment</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jul 2014 04:46:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[appeal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boys]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fatherless]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S. Army]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Jihad's appeal to fatherless boys versus the fading appeal of the U.S. Army.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ISIS-leader.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236825" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ISIS-leader-450x270.jpg" alt="ISIS-leader" width="325" height="195" /></a>[<strong>To order William Kilpatrick&#8217;s new book <i>Insecurity</i>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insecurity-William-Kilpatrick-ebook/dp/B00KO8ZERC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1406014909&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Insecurity+william+kilpatrick">click here</a>].</strong></p>
<p><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/">CrisisMagazine.com.</a></strong></p>
<p>One thing that you can say for ISIS, the Middle-East terrorist army, is that it doesn’t have a recruitment problem. Young men are streaming to Syria and Iraq from all over the world to join the cause. And they come not just from the Muslim world, but also from England, France, Sweden, Australia, and the U.S.</p>
<div class="post_content">
<p>Perhaps hoping to put a dent in the appeal of ISIS, some Western newspapers have made much of the expensive stolen watch visible on the wrist of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during his first public appearance at the Grand Mosque in Mosul. According to several articles, this proved that al-Baghdadi was a hypocrite because such a show of stolen worldly possessions is contrary to the spiritual nature of Islam.</p>
<p>As usual, the mainstream media is all wrong about Islam. In <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/isis-caliph-of-all-muslims-wears-stolen-6000-watch/" target="_blank"><em>FrontPage Magazine</em></a>, Daniel Greenfield points out that “looting was the core of Muhammad’s conquests.” And it came with Allah’s seal of approval. Numerous passages in the Koran and in the biography of Muhammad attest to the legitimacy of booty as the proper reward of fighting. Islam has no trouble with looting, says Greenfield, because it is “innately a gang religion”:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The gang … finds meaning in the ethos of the fight and in the comradeship of fellow gang members. That is why jihad is so central to Islam … Jihad is the gang culture of Islam. Its bonding rituals are central to Islam, whose original elements derive mainly from the raids of Mohammed and his companions…</p>
<p>Young men don’t join gangs just for the booty, but also for the sense of brotherhood the gang confers, and, perhaps primarily, for proof of masculinity. Psychologists and sociologists have known for a long time that gangs are particularly appealing to fatherless boys because boys who lack the guidance of fathers are most likely to feel insecure about their masculine identity, and thus most likely to seek confirmation of it in the ultra-masculine activities of gangs. Social scientists were hardly the first to discover this basic fact of male psychology. From the earliest times, almost all societies developed special rites of initiation for males to assist them in the passage from boyhood to manhood, and to channel them away from anti-social activities.</p>
<p>When boys grow up in communities without the guidance of fathers and elders and without established rites of initiation and confirmation, they tend to create their own initiation groups and rituals of passage. This is why modern urban areas with high concentrations of fatherless boys are the places where gang formation is highest.</p>
<p>The epidemic of fatherless boys is a worldwide phenomenon and it spells more recruits for the Islamic jihad. The reason the jihad doesn’t have a recruitment problem is that it appeals to basic masculine psychology. It promises action, male bonding, legitimate looting, a cause to fight for, subservient females in this world, and dozens more in the next. It’s the reason Muslims have been extremely successful in recruiting prisoners to Islam both in Europe and America. As I noted in <em>Christianity, Islam, and Atheism</em>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">In the United States, roughly 80 percent of inmates who find faith during their incarceration choose Islam. Many of these men are in prison in the first place because they were attracted to the masculine world of gangs. Now they’re being offered the chance to join the biggest, most powerful “gang” in the world. We’re seeing the beginning of a trend in the West: fatherless boys joining gangs, then ending up in prison, then coming out of prison as converts to Islam and the jihad. (p. 169)</p>
<p>There seems to be no shortage of young men willing to join up with the warrior culture of Islamic jihad. How about our own warrior culture—the U.S. military? The military still produces warriors, but the military culture is changing in ways that may make it less attractive to potential future warriors. Traditionally, the military has served, among other things, as an initiation into manhood. Past Marine recruiting campaigns, for example, were built around themes such as “The Marines Make Men” or “A Few Good Men.”</p>
<p>Exactly what today’s young male recruit is being initiated into is a little more difficult to say. In 2011, Brigadier General Loretta Reynolds was <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/marine-brig-gen-le-reynolds-is-parris-islands-first-female-commander/2011/08/18/gIQA3LpqQJ_story.html" target="_blank">put in charge of Parris Island</a>, the base where approximately half of U.S. Marines receive their basic training. By all accounts, she’s a competent person. As a fellow officer put it, “take the female part out of it, she’s an outstanding officer.” Take the female part out of it? But how do you do that? As General Reynolds admitted in an interview, it’s confusing for some of the men who “stumble on occasion and address her as ‘sir’ instead of ‘ma’am.’” Well, yes, it can be a bit confusing when the person in charge of manhood training is a woman. It’s not a question of competency, it’s a question of gender roles. Perhaps the Marine Corps can get away with putting a woman behind the top desk at Parris Island, but how would it work if the drill sergeants were women? Boot camp is a process of maturation through challenge and identification. The drill instructor is the supervisor of a male initiation rite. If he’s doing his job right, he offers himself as a model of masculine excellence. But how can a woman be a model of masculinity and how can a man identify with her as such?</p>
<p>Confusion about gender seems to be the order of the day in the Army. When Private Bradley Manning was tried for his part in the WikiLeaks intelligence leak, his lawyers argued that the transgender soldier suffered from “gender identity confusion.” While the Army can survive one or two gender-confused soldiers, here and there, what happens when the top command itself is confused about matters of sex role, sexual identity, and sexual orientation? Here are some not untypical headlines:</p>
<ul>
<li>“Pentagon holds <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/26/pentagon-holds-first-gay-pride-event/?page=all" target="_blank">first-ever gay pride event</a>”</li>
<li>“Lesbian couple shares Navy’s <a href="http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/12/lesbian-couple-share-navys-first-kiss-homecoming-honors/1#.U739dbFzK5I" target="_blank">‘first kiss’</a> homecoming honors”</li>
<li>“<a href="http://www.stripes.com/news/army/soldiers-don-fake-belly-breasts-to-better-understand-pregnant-troops-exercise-concerns-1.168786" target="_blank">Soldiers don fake belly</a>, breasts to better understand pregnant troops’ concerns”</li>
<li>“The U.S. could have its <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/06/18/female_navy_seals_penatagon_unveils_plan_for_women_to_train_for_elite_forces.html" target="_blank">first female Navy SEALS</a> by 2016.”</li>
</ul>
<p>The matter becomes even more complicated when you add mission confusion to gender confusion. The main mission of the Army is to win wars, but it hasn’t been allowed to do that in quite a long while. Moreover, at one time it was thought a good idea to name your enemy and, for the sake of morale, you could even poke fun at him. Nowadays, enemies are identified only vaguely (as in “violent extremists”), and name-calling is not allowed. A manual for U.S. troops in Afghanistan cautions them to avoid “making derogatory comments about the Taliban.” The Army’s mission also has something to do with instilling a sense of the values you are fighting for. General Eisenhower spoke of the war against the Nazis as a “Crusade in Europe.” Woodrow Wilson said that our participation in World War I was to “make the world safe for democracy.” Now that the military has become a lifestyle laboratory, it’s a bit more difficult to discern the mission. Here’s a 2011 headline from the <em><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/26/nation/la-na-air-force-pagans-20111127" target="_blank">LA Times</a></em>:</p>
<ul>
<li>“Air Force Academy adapts to pagans, druids, witches, and wiccans: Officials say an $80,000 Stonehenge-like worship center underscores a commitment to embrace all religions”</li>
</ul>
<p>We may not think very highly of the ISIS soldiers, but at least they’re clear about their mission—fighting for the sake of Allah and the rewards that come of it. But what’s the mission of our troops? To make the world safe for wizardry? Affirmative action for transgender school teachers?</p>
<p>The administration and the Pentagon may deny it, but the feminization and gaying of the military, together with the blurring of the Army’s mission, is bound to have an effect on the attractiveness of the military for young men. It’s not a question of whether gays can fight or whether women make good warriors, it’s a question of what kind of culture is being created. Right now the U.S. military is in the process of creating the kind of culture that is a guaranteed turn-off for many potential enlistees. And it’s not as though they have an abundance of qualified candidates from which to choose. At a time when <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/recruits-ineligibility-tests-the-military-1403909945" target="_blank">71 percent of American youth</a> would fail to qualify for military service because of obesity, tattoos, prescription drug use, felony convictions, and educational level, the Pentagon can ill-afford to gamble that their unprecedented social experiments will work out for the best.</p>
<p>By all appearances, ISIS doesn’t face an obesity crisis among its pool of potential recruits. Men who, for religious reasons, are willing to fast till evening every day for the month of Ramadan are already used to the kind of sacrifices that the warrior life requires. Moreover, ISIS and other similar groups can count on the gender-confused West to churn out even more recruits for Islam. The breakdown of the idea that men have a special role to play as protectors and providers has led to a widespread collapse of the family. And that in turn has resulted in an epidemic of fatherless children.</p>
<p>There are armies of teens in the West who are looking for an army to join. It doesn’t have to be a real army. A gang will do—so long as it provides male bonding, a warrior ethos, and the “reputation” that goes along with gang membership.</p>
<p>If you’re a young man without a father around, you’ll be looking, naturally, for the biggest, toughest brotherhood on the block. Increasingly, that looks like militant Islam. It promises everything that a wannabe warrior could ask for, and it commands far more respect than your average street gang ever will.</p>
<p>Our own military should take note. When the armies of Islam are drawing young men from around the world to join the jihad, it might not be the best time for the U.S. Army to emphasize its feminine side.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: Pictured in the image above is ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wearing his much-discussed wrist watch. (Photo credit: Associated Press)</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Stealth Jihad Meets PC America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/william-kilpatrick/stealth-jihad-meets-pc-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stealth-jihad-meets-pc-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:50:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[insecurity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Political Correctness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[stealth jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[william kilpatrick]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234310</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The inner workings of the unholy alliance. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ty.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234316" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ty.gif" alt="ty" width="256" height="433" /></a><strong>[To order William Kilpatrick&#8217;s new book Insecurity, </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insecurity-William-Kilpatrick-ebook/dp/B00KO8ZERC#reader_B00KO8ZERC"><strong><em>click here.]</em></strong></a></p>
<p>My new book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insecurity-William-Kilpatrick-ebook/dp/B00KO8ZERC#reader_B00KO8ZERC"><em>Insecurity</em></a> is a comedy about political correctness run amok in the government and the military. But, as recent events show, there is a decidedly unfunny side to the world that political correctness is helping to create.</p>
<p>Up until recently, the colloquialism “heads will roll” referred to a threat to fire employees. Nowadays, however, that phrase is more likely to evoke its original literal meaning—as in the beheadings that have become a common feature of the daily news cycle. The streets of Mosul in Iraq are reportedly lined with the severed heads of police and soldiers—victims of the ISIS jihadists. A photo circulating on the web shows one of the recently released Taliban leaders in the days before his capture posing with his trophy collection of five lopped-off heads. Those who thought that decapitation went out with the French Revolution have come in for a rude awakening.</p>
<p>It’s disturbing to realize that such things can happen in this day and age, but we in America tend to console ourselves with the reassuring thought that, thank God, it can’t happen here. Or can it? Why shouldn’t it happen here? Or, to put it another way, “Who’s going to stop ‘em?”</p>
<p>The most obvious answer to that question—the one that will jump most readily to mind—is the Army. And certainly, the U.S. Army is more than a match for any invading force of Middle Eastern jihadists. But, although our army can repel armed jihad, it’s not very well-equipped to resist the other kind—namely, stealth jihad. And if the conquest of America ever comes—as Islamists say it will—it will come about through stealth jihad.</p>
<p>What is stealth jihad? It’s the incremental spread of Islamic law in a society by means of activism, propaganda and lawfare, and by the gradual co-option of schools, courts, and media. It’s the long march through the institutions that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci recommended to European communists. Leftists have already co-opted many of society’s institutions. What’s to prevent jihadists from doing the same?</p>
<p>Stealth jihad is much more difficult to detect and resist than the armed variety. It’s not the type of aggression the Army is trained to deal with. And, in fact, the Army has proven itself on several occasions to be an enabler of stealth jihad. Take the case of Major Stephen Coughlin. He was the Army’s top expert on Islamic law until he made the mistake of pointing out that Islamic law obliges Muslims to wage jihad. The Army didn’t cotton on to that idea and Coughlin was dismissed from his Pentagon job as an intelligence contractor. The official attitude was nicely captured by an admiral who, upon hearing Coughlin’s assessment, replied that he would first “have to check with my imam on that.”</p>
<p>You can see why the military has to contract out for its intelligence. Why would a high ranking officer have to consult his imam? Well, for reasons of political correctness, of course. It would be offensive not to bring the imam into the loop. For similar reasons, General Petraeus used to visit provincial leaders in Afghanistan dressed up as Lawrence of Arabia, and for similar reasons a manual for U.S. troops in the region directed them to avoid “making derogatory comments about the Taliban,” “any criticism of pedophilia,” or “anything related to Islam.”</p>
<p>Luckily for stealth jihadists, the resurgence of militant Islam happened to coincide with the emergence of political correctness. The long march through the institutions needn’t take that long when the institutions are putting out the multicultural welcome mat. Just as bacteria feeds on sugar, stealth jihad feeds on political correctness.</p>
<p>“Jihad” is not the kind of thing one mentions in polite society. And for having the temerity to bring up the subject in connection with Islam, Major Coughlin lost his army contract. Coincidentally, he was terminated at the behest of one Hesham Islam, a special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense. As the deputy secretary is rumored to have said, “I’ll have to check with my Islam on that.”</p>
<p>Islam? In the Pentagon? Well, never mind. Better not go there. Apparently Mr. Islam was in charge of outreach to the Muslim community. He outreached to the Islamic Society of North America and to other Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups and invited them to luncheons in the Pentagon. In this, he was carrying on a long tradition of Pentagon outreach. For example, shortly after 9/11, future terrorist leader Anwar al-Awlaki was invited to attend a luncheon at the Pentagon because the Secretary of the Army was anxious to diversify his dinners with some moderate members of the Muslim community.</p>
<p>At that time, the FBI was already aware that al-Awlaki was tied to the 9/11 hijackers, but apparently the Army was not (presumably their intelligence contractors were on vacation). This state of unawareness seems to have persisted for a long time. At about the same time that Major Coughlin’s superiors were checking with their imams, Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood, was checking with his own imam about the fine points of jihad, and whether or not killing U.S. soldiers would qualify one for martyr status.</p>
<p>Who was his imam? It was none other than the ubiquitous Imam Anwar al-Awlaki. The FBI knew about these communications between Hasan and al-Awlaki (there were eighteen in all), but decided that no action was necessary. Many of Hasan’s own colleagues in the Army thought of him, in the words of one, as “a ticking time bomb,” but they also took no action. Hasan’s stealth jihad was not particularly stealthy. In fact, he wore his jihadist sympathies on his sleeve, but the etiquette of political correctness required that his fellow officers look the other way lest they be accused of Islamophobia.</p>
<p>Who’s going to stop ‘em? As we can see, the Army isn’t particularly effective at spotting stealth jihad. And, although the FBI has a better record in this regard, it too is hampered by PC protocols. Who else, then, can we look to? The CIA? A couple of years ago a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/at-cia-a-convert-to-islam-leads-the-terrorism-hunt/2012/03/23/gIQA2mSqYS_story.html"><em>Washington Post</em> article</a> revealed, without naming names, that the then-current chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had converted to Islam six years before. The lengthy piece treats the conversion as a mere point of interest—the kind of minor detail that would not be of any real concern to the <em>Post’s </em>sophisticated readers. Although converts to Islam have a higher incidence of radical activity than the general Muslim population, the WaPo reporter gives no indication that anything could possibly go wrong. On the other hand, maybe it’s fortunate that somebody in the higher ranks of the CIA knows something about Islam, seeing that John Brennan, the CIA chief, seems to know so little. He has been in the habit of defining jihad as “a holy struggle…to purify oneself or one’s community.” If that’s so, then it must follow that a stealth jihadist is like a secret Santa who quietly goes around performing acts of purification without even waiting to be thanked.</p>
<p>If not the CIA, then maybe the police? The trouble is, the only police force with a highly effective counterterrorism program, the NYPD, recently bowed to pressure and shut down a major component of that program—its surveillance of certain mosques and Muslim student associations. The surveillance operation was deemed “offensive” by the Muslim community.</p>
<p>How about Congress? Congress is on guard, but not against stealth jihad. When, in the summer of 2012, five House members requested an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the government, they were scolded by fellow Congress members for being offensive and insensitive to the Muslim community. The five were particularly concerned that the Department of State had been taking actions that “have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, had close personal ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and the five thought someone should look into the matter.</p>
<p>Was there any merit to the concern over Abedin? We may never know. It was enough to know that the request was “ugly,” “vicious,” “hurtful,” “outrageous,” and “dangerous.” In short, the investigation was never conducted. House and senate members seemed more worried about the possibility that they could be accused of “McCarthyism” than the possibility that Islamists could be infiltrating the government. Judging by their reaction, “infiltration,” like “jihad,” was no longer a suitable topic for polite company.</p>
<p>To sum up, neither the Army, the FBI, the CIA, the police, nor Congress seem up to the task of resisting stealth jihad. That leaves…the president. At about the same time that the House five were making known their concerns about actions that “have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood,” the president was making plans to send F-16s and Abrams tanks to assist the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In the president’s mind, the real danger emanated not from the Muslim Brotherhood, but from “those who slander the Prophet of Islam.” Meanwhile, his Department of Justice was busy purging FBI training manuals of guidelines for spotting stealth jihadists. As DOJ spokesman Dwight Holton put it, “training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.” Henceforward, the Federal Bureau of Investigation would have to confine itself to inoffensive investigations.</p>
<p>When he was released from an American detention camp in Iraq in 2009, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is now the leader of the ISIS terrorists in Iraq, told his captors, “I’ll see you guys in New York.” Hint to Mr. Baghdadi: If anyone questions you when you come to New York to scout for targets, just tell them that their questions are deeply offensive to you and to the whole Muslim community. They’ll give you the keys to the city.</p>
<p>Heads should have rolled (in the metaphorical sense) a long time ago in the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the DOJ, and among the president’s foreign policy advisors. Because that never happened, heads are rolling (in the literal sense) all over the Muslim world. Because our leaders have chosen to put their heads in the ground regarding the nature of jihad, a lot more heads may soon be on the block.</p>
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		<title>Wise As Serpents?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/william-kilpatrick/wise-as-serpents/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=wise-as-serpents</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Mar 2013 04:48:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[robert spencer]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The cancellation of Robert Spencer's talk and Catholic naivete about Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/william-kilpatrick/wise-as-serpents/cardinals/" rel="attachment wp-att-180702"><img class=" wp-image-180702 alignleft" title="cardinals" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/cardinals.jpg" alt="" width="285" height="214" /></a>Catholic bishops in America and Europe may be setting themselves up for a new scandal—one of far greater proportions than the sex abuse scandals and one with potentially far more serious consequences. Like the sex scandals, this scandal also involves a cover-up, although a cover-up of a different kind. The new scandal also contains some ironies. In trying to avoid the kind of negative media attention that came with the last scandal, the bishops are inadvertently entangling themselves further in the building scandal. Another irony is that they needn’t worry about an adversary press attacking them for their handling of the new scandal because the mainstream media is thoroughly implicated in the same cover-up. Indeed, the media’s cover-up of the crisis is far more widespread and is often deliberate, whereas the “cover-up” by Catholic leaders is largely unintentional.</p>
<p>The scandal in regard to the bishops lies in their failure to accurately inform their flocks of the nature of Islam and, hence, of the dangers from Islam. The “cover-up” lies in minimizing the large gap that divides Islam from Christianity. Despite the massive persecution of Christians by Muslims acting in the name of Islam, the majority of the bishops seem intent on preserving the notion that Islam is our friend, a fellow religion with which we share much in common. The bishops have managed to convey the impression that our quarrels with Islam lie mostly in the past and that our minor differences can be worked out through dialogue so that we can work together for the common good.</p>
<p>Much of this Islam-friendly attitude can be traced back to two statements on the Church’s relationship with Muslims that were promulgated by the Second Vatican Council. <em>Lumen Gentium</em> states that the “plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst who are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.” The statement in <em>Nostra Aetate</em>, the Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, is slightly longer and adds a few more similarities between Catholics and Muslims, namely that both “revere” Jesus, “honor Mary,” and “value the moral life.” The statement ends by urging all to forget the quarrels of the past and to work “for mutual understanding.”</p>
<p>If these documents were understood as they were intended and within the context in which they were written, there might be less of a problem today. In the 1960s when the documents were composed, the Muslim world was far more moderate than it has been before or since and more open to Western ideas, and so a gesture of friendship seemed appropriate. Moreover, the Council Fathers were not attempting to lay out a definitive explication of Islam. For example, the task that the writers of <em>Nostra Aetate</em> set themselves was “to consider what men have in common and what draws them to friendship.” Accordingly, the declaration lists a handful of commonalities between Muslim beliefs and Christian beliefs. To list the differences would have been contrary to the spirit of the document.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, many Catholics have taken this tentative gesture of engagement toward Muslims to be the Church’s final word on the subject of Islam. But when one looks deeper into the matter, it becomes apparent that the Muslim understanding of God, Abraham, Jesus, Mary, and the moral life is quite different from the Catholic understanding. For example, the Koran curses Christians both for saying that Allah is one of three in a trinity, and also for claiming that Jesus is the Son of God. It also mistakenly assumes that, in Christian belief, Mary is one of the Trinity. On inspection, it is only in the broadest sense that one can speak of commonalities. Beneath the surface similarities runs a deep fault line—or, as Robert Spencer puts it in a forthcoming book, a “great chasm.”</p>
<p>Spencer’s treatment at the hands of the Diocese of Worcester provides some insights into the problems that the bishops are creating for themselves by not acknowledging the substantial differences between Islam and Christianity. Spencer, a Catholic and a leading authority on Islam, was invited to speak to a Catholic men’s conference in Worcester, Massachusetts, on March 16; however, when Muslim groups protested that Spencer was a “hatemonger,” Bishop Robert McManus withdrew the invitation. Moreover, he failed to respond to Spencer’s request for a meeting to answer the charges against him.</p>
<p>Spencer also says he has received several reports that part of the pressure applied to the diocese came from a <em>Boston Globe</em> reporter, Lisa Wangsness, who, says Spencer, was working behind the scenes to engineer a cancellation. Although the bishop denies having bowed to pressure, the <em>Boston</em><em> Globe</em>’s interest in the lecture may have weighed as heavily on his mind as the complaints from Muslim organizations. It was the <em>Boston Globe</em>, after all, that broke the sex abuse story in 2002. With the long shadow of that earlier scandal still looming, Catholic leaders in Massachusetts might understandably want to avoid the kind of media publicity that would ensue should they invite a “hatemonger” and “Islamophobe” to speak about Islam.</p>
<p>In a letter to the diocese defending his action, the bishop quotes the brief statement in <em>Lumen Gentium</em> which, he writes, “speaks about the special relationship that Christianity has for Islam.” He continues:</p>
<blockquote><p>As a result of such a theologically salient statement, the Catholic Church has engaged herself in inter-religious dialogue with Muslims. This dialogue has   produced a harvest of mutual respect, understanding, and cooperation throughout the world and here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.</p></blockquote>
<p>The Bishop then goes on to say that his decision to disinvite Spencer was based “solely on the concern that Mr. Spencer’s talk would impact negatively on the Church’s increasingly constructive dialogue with Muslims.” So, in sum, <em>Lumen Gentium</em> made possible a fruitful dialogue which Spencer’s appearance might undermine. But in light of the fact that persecution of Christians by Muslims has increased dramatically in the last decade—a decade in which dialogue with Muslims has multiplied—it is difficult to imagine just what this “harvest of mutual respect, understanding, and cooperation” might consist of. The bishop doesn’t say.</p>
<p>In deciding not to scandalize Muslims, however, the bishop may only end up scandalizing his own flock—or, at least, some of them. While not a member of the Worcester Diocese, Doctor Archietto Ashraf Ramelah is a member of the worldwide community of Christians and president of the Coptic human rights organization Voice of the Copts. He is familiar with Spencer’s work and he <em>is</em> scandalized at the cancellation. On hearing of the Worcester incident, he sent a letter to the pope voicing his concern. In his letter, he expresses his bewilderment at how often Catholic and Coptic Orthodox churches seemed “uninterested in offering us opportunities to speak out on the dangers of what lies behind the persecution of Christians and Jews.” He attributes the indifference to an unwillingness to hear any facts about Islam that conflict with the received narrative or that might jeopardize dialogue. And he pleads with the pope to take action to lift the curtain of silence that shelters Islam from honest examination.</p>
<p>According to a <em>Newsweek</em> story, about 200,000 Christian Copts were forced to flee their homes during the year of the “Arab Spring” in Egypt. For someone like Dr. Ramelah, the discrepancy between what Church leaders say about Islam and the reality in North Africa is painfully apparent. But even ordinary Catholics in ordinary places like Worcester are sooner or later going to come to the conclusion—if only from watching the streaming headlines at the bottom of their TV screens—that Islam is not a peaceful religion and that it is not at all like the Catholic faith. When the chasm that divides Islam and Christianity becomes more evident to these ordinary Catholics, the credibility of the Church may once again come into question. As I wrote in my recent book on the subject:</p>
<blockquote><p>As the threat from a resurgent Islam becomes more apparent, Catholics may well begin to feel that they have been misled on an issue vital to their security. The complaint against the Church will shift from “Why didn’t Church officials do more to protect children?” to “Why didn’t they tell us the rest of the story about Islam?”</p></blockquote>
<p>Scandal in the strict sense is an attitude or behavior which leads another into a grave offense. We usually think of it in terms of licentious behavior, but according to the <em>Catechism of the Catholic Church</em>, scandal can also be provoked by “fashion or opinion.” The Catechism notes that “Scandal is grave when given by those who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others.” In the wake of the abuse scandals in Massachusetts, many Catholics lost their faith, or, at least, stopped attending Mass. This occurred not only because of the scandalous behavior of some priests but also and primarily because these Catholics came to the conclusion that the Church was untrustworthy. The Church in Ireland experienced a similar fall-off. Eighty-two percent of Irish Catholics attended Mass weekly in 1981; by 2012 the figure was 35 percent. A good chunk of this decline had to do with the rapid secularization of Ireland in the last few decades, but the revelations of abuse cover-ups seem to have accelerated the trend.</p>
<p>As more Catholics become aware of the realities of Islamic teachings and practices, it will surely test their faith to hear the bishops persist in speaking of our “special relationship” with Islam. For many, this will be not merely a matter of anger but also of despair at the thought that Church leaders are enabling the spread of a system that has always subjugated Christians whenever it had the power to do so.</p>
<p>Indeed, the very dialogue which Bishop McManus sees as so promising may turn out to be simply one of many stepping stones that Muslim activists use to secure dominance in the West. Consider a recent series of Catholic-Muslim dialogues sponsored by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops’ dialogue partners were all prominent figures in Muslim activists groups with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and with other questionable associations. One of the bishops’ counterparts was Sayyid Syeed, the National Director for the Office of Interfaith and Community Alliances for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)—a group that was designated in 2008 as an unindicted co-conspirator in a massive terrorist funding case. One of the two keynote speakers was Jamal Badawi, also a member of ISNA, and a defender of suicide bombers, whom he has described as “martyrs.” The co-chair with Bishop Carlos Sevilla was Muzammil Siddiqi, a member of the Fiqh Council on North America, an organization which numbers among its original trustees one Abdurahman Alamoudi, who is now serving a twenty three-year sentence for financing an assassination attempt on the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Another of the bishops’ dialogue partners was Talat Sultan of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). In October, Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal announced that it would bring war crimes charges against Ashrafuzzam Khan, a formed president and secretary general of the ICNA.</p>
<p>So, on the one hand, the Bishop of Worcester deems Robert Spencer to be unfit to speak to Catholic men, but on the other hand, at the USCCB plenary session in Chicago, the bishops were “sharing stories, praying, and enjoying meals together” with representatives of organizations whose ties to radical groups have been established by U.S. courts. It may be that the representatives of these political activist groups are pursuing dialogue with Catholics because they sincerely desire that “harvest of mutual respect, understanding, and cooperation” that Bishop McManus speaks of. But another possibility should be considered, namely that the Muslims are using the dialogues primarily for legitimizing themselves and Islam. In other words, the dialogues provide a sort of cover for the Islamists. Muslim activists can plausibly point to their warm relations with the bishops as proof that they cannot be the agents of subversion that others say they are. Moreover, cultivating dialogue with Catholic leaders is a handy way of keeping the majority of Catholics off their guard. As long as prominent Catholic leaders are enthusiastic about their dialogues with Muslims, the average Catholic is likely to conclude that the Church is okay with Islam and that, therefore, there really isn’t any cause for worry.</p>
<p>Here we come back to the issue of scandal. If, because of the bishops’ stance on Islam, many Catholics are led to adopt an attitude of dangerous complacency in the face of a rising threat to their Church and their society, that would seem to qualify as a form of scandal. Other Catholics who are better informed about Islam will suffer a more immediate impact. The discrepancy between what Islam actually teaches and what some bishops seem to think it teaches will shake their confidence in the bishops and may even shake their faith. This will be particularly the case for Mid-Eastern and African Christians living in the West who are acutely aware of the persecution visited on Christians in the name of Allah. The Church’s Islamic outreach will also likely have an adverse effect on a group with which Catholics really do share much in common. Some evangelical leaders share the bishops’ penchant for endless dialogue, but on the whole, evangelical Christians are more savvy about Islam than the average Catholic. And the knowledge that some Catholic leaders are lending legitimacy to the Muslim Brotherhood is not going to sit well with them. The tendency to dismiss Catholicism as a throwback to the Middle Ages will grow rather than lessen. In other words, the bishop’s dalliance with Islam may have the unintended effect of disaffecting the very people with whom we have the best chance of forming an alliance against secularism—and, for that matter, against the spread of Islamic totalitarianism.</p>
<p>But what about <em>Lumen Gentium</em> and <em>Nostra Aetate</em>? Bishop McManus cites <em>Lumen Gentium</em> as justification for canceling Spencer’s talk, and the USCCB website repeatedly cites <em>Nostra Aetate</em> as justification for its dialogues with Muslims. As it happens, Spencer’s forthcoming book discusses both documents in detail and explains the many problems that result from an unconsidered interpretation of what they say. Take, for example, the problematic statement in <em>Lumen Gentium</em> affirming that “together with us they [Muslims] adore the one, merciful God.” Although there are some respects in which it can be said that we (Muslims and Catholics) worship the same God, in many other respects, as Spencer points out, the Koran’s depiction of God is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian understanding of God. Indeed, the capricious and despotic nature of God as portrayed in Islamic theology “casts the very goodness of God in doubt.” Similar problems arise when one tries to read too much into <em>Nostra Aetate</em>. For example, while it’s true that Muslims “revere” Jesus, it’s not at all clear that he is the same Jesus Christians revere. The Koran not only recasts Jesus as a Muslim prophet, it takes every opportunity to use him to deny the central claims of Christianity—the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. <em>Nostra Aetate</em> goes on to say that “they [Muslims] value the moral life.” But anyone familiar with the tenets of sharia law knows that many of the values espoused by Islam are completely at odds with Christian values. Among other things, sharia (which is based in large part on the example of Muhammad) allows for polygamy, child brides, easy divorce, honor killings, amputation for thieves, and the murder of apostates.</p>
<p>The Vatican II documents that deal with the beliefs of Muslims can be looked upon primarily as gestures of interreligious outreach or they can be looked upon as the Church’s definitive statement on the nature of Islam. But those who opt for the second reading are setting themselves up for a fall. Robert Spencer is not the only one who thinks that it may be time for a reappraisal of our relationship with Islam. In October on the eve of the 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, <em>L’Osservatore Romano</em> published an essay by Pope Benedict XVI reflecting on the council. In his essay, he praises <em>Nostra Aetate</em> for its openness to non-Christian religions but he also observes that a “weakness of this otherwise extraordinary text has gradually emerged. It speaks of religion solely in a positive way, and it disregards the sick and distorted forms or religion which, from the historical and theological viewpoints, are of far-reaching importance; for this reason the Christian faith, from the outset, adopted a critical stance towards religion, both internally and externally.” Benedict doesn’t identify these “sick and distorted” forms of religion, but in the context of other remarks in the essay, it seems likely he is referring to Islam or, at least, to some manifestations of Islam. He also suggests that it’s not wise to regard religion as always a positive thing. The Church must sometimes adopt “a critical stance toward religion.”</p>
<p>Could the pope be calling for a more balanced and critical approach to Islam now that we have a better perspective on Islam in action? And is it now time for the “weakness” in <em>Nostra Aetate</em> to be rectified? Christ instructed his apostles to be as “wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.” Judging by their benign view of Islam, many Catholics have mastered the “innocent as doves” part. It may be time for them to pay more attention to the “wise as serpents” side of the equation.  As the cardinals consider their choice for a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, they should take care that he is not innocent about Islam.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Christian Misunderstanders of Islam</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/christian-misunderstanders-of-islam/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=christian-misunderstanders-of-islam</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Nov 2010 04:21:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Will Christians dialogue themselves into dhimmitude?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Kreeft.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-75781" title="Kreeft" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Kreeft.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>Peter Kreeft is not exactly a household name, but Kreeft, a philosophy professor at Boston College, is well-known—and highly respected—in orthodox Catholic and Evangelical circles for his many books of Christian apologetics.  Kreeft typically employs a Socratic dialogue format featuring college-age and young adult characters who challenge each other on the issues of the day, as well as on issues of eternal importance.  As a consequence, his books are widely read on Christian college campuses.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, considering his wide appeal, Kreeft’s latest book is basically an apology for Islam.  <em>Between Allah and Jesus:  What Christians Can Learn from Muslims </em>is devoted to the proposition that the things that we (Muslims and Christians) have in common are more important than the things that separate us.  In fact, writes Kreeft in his Introduction, we have a lot to learn from Islam:  “…I also say that Islam has great and deep resources of morality and sanctity that should inspire us and shame us and prod us to admiration and imitation.”  Instead of fearing Islam, Kreeft says that Christians should join together with Muslims in an “ecumenical jihad” against our common enemies, sin and secularism.</p>
<p>Kreeft’s thesis is similar to the one put forward a few years ago by Dinesh D’Souza in <em>The Enemy at Home:  The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11</em>.  D’Souza argued that Muslims hate us for our decadence—and not just because of Britney and Eminem and rap music, but also because of illegitimacy, divorce, abortion and gay marriage.  Thus, more than anything else, it was American decadence that provoked the 9/11 attack.  D’Souza, like Kreeft, wants us to believe that traditional Americans and traditional Muslims are natural allies because both are religiously and socially conservative, and share many of the same values.  Both authors seem to think that the surest way to patch up relations with Islam is for Westerners to return to more wholesome habits.  Not surprisingly, Kreeft’s new book features a blurb by D’Souza on the front cover.</p>
<p>In <em>Between Allah and Jesus</em>, the strongest arguments for traditional morality are made by the Muslim student, Isa (the Arabic name for Jesus.)  In fact, throughout the entire dialogue Isa has all the best lines.  Isa is not only a defender of the sanctity of all human life, he is also a strong defender of the Jews (the six million who lost their lives to Hitler were “martyrs”), and a great respecter of women (“…all I’m doing is defending womanhood and motherhood and families”).  In his appreciation of feminine virtues Isa sometimes sounds more like a Victorian seminary student than a twenty first-century Muslim male.  Isa even makes the case that women in Muslim societies are happier and more contented than women in Western societies because “we let women be women,” whereas Western women are the victims of a sexual revolution which mainly benefits men.  One of Isa’s dialogue sparring partners, Libby (a liberated feminist), objects to all this with vehemence, but she is plainly no match for Isa.  She spouts feminist slogans; Isa is a master of logical argumentation.</p>
<p>Kreeft advises his readers that he “does not necessarily agree with everything said by Isa as a Muslim,” but his sympathies clearly lie with Isa.  For example, Fr. Heerema, who represents the orthodox Catholic position in the dialogues, usually finds himself in agreement with Isa.  Moreover the sentiments expressed by Isa are quite similar to those expressed by Kreeft in his Introduction:  for example, says Kreeft, one of the most important things Christians “should learn from Muslims or be reminded of by Muslims” is “the sacredness of the family and children.”</p>
<p>“Sacredness of the family?” In this and in other parts of his book, Kreeft seems to be inadvertently transposing Christian notions into Islam.  While there may be some highly spiritualized Sufi sect somewhere that looks at marriage and family in this light, this is not the picture of family life that emerges in the accounts of ex-Muslims such as Nonie Darwish, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Wafa Sultan.  Here’s Nonie Darwish on first seeing a church wedding in an old Hollywood movie:</p>
<p>“I was very touched by the holiness of the marriage vows, especially when the husband promised to love, honor, and cherish his one and only wife ‘till death do us part’…I now realize that my innocent mind was touched not only by the romance of the marriage vows but also by the way a Christian woman was honored and elevated by her husband and society…In sharp contrast, Muslim weddings are more about sex and money.  They do not convey the holy covenant of marriage.”</p>
<p>To illustrate the point, Darwish reproduces a standard Egyptian marriage contract complete with questions about the bride’s virginity status, the amount of the dowry, and three spaces for the husband to record the names and addresses of wife number one, wife number two, and wife number three.  To a Westerner overdosed on multiculturalism that last item might seem to be just another bright thread in the rich tapestry of diversity.  But how do such arrangements work out in an actual marriage?  Wafa Sultan recounts how her grandfather in Syria forced her grandmother to solicit a young woman to be his new bride.  And, to compound the humiliation, when the wedding took place she was forced to “welcome the bridal procession by dancing before it with a bowl of incense on her head.”  “After the wedding,” writes Sultan, “my grandmother was reduced to the status of a servant in her own home.  She served my grandfather, his wife, and the ten boys that wife would bear for him.”</p>
<p>Though individual Muslims may rise above the system, official mainstream Islam looks upon wives and children essentially as commodities—possessions for the father or husband to dispose of as he sees fit.  The result, according to ex-Muslims who are now free to talk about their experiences, is a tangle of family pathologies.  Significantly, many of the pathologies can be traced back to Muhammad himself who had eleven wives, and several slave girl concubines.  As is well known, Muhammad married a nine-year old; what is less well known is that one of his conquests was his own daughter-in-law.  Seeing Muhammad’s evident interest, the young step-son graciously or, perhaps, prudently, divorced his wife to clear the way for the marriage.  On another occasion, Muhammad “married” (took to bed) an attractive captive on the same day that his troops killed her husband, father, and brother in battle.</p>
<p>Yet Isa and Fr. Heerema keep referring to Muhammad as a man of “honor” and “compassion” and “a great moral reformer” who gave the Arab world “morality and peace and universal justice and mercy.”  It wasn’t the sword that sold Islam, says Isa; Islam “sold” because “it completed human nature by adding the tender part.”</p>
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		<title>One Nation Under Allah?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/one-nation-under-allah/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=one-nation-under-allah</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Oct 2010 04:04:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[All religions are equal, but aren't some religions more equal than others?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/onenat.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-74713" title="onenat" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/onenat.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="527" /></a></p>
<p>President Eisenhower famously observed that “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Now that we are beginning to see the consequences when Muslims act on their deeply felt faith, it’s time to revisit Eisenhower’s statement. The question is, can we still afford to take an “I don’t care what it is” attitude toward religion? In short, does the content of a religion matter? Or are we to assume that all religions share the same essential truths, as Eisenhower seemed to assume?</p>
<p>It’s ironic that the part of Eisenhower’s statement which evoked criticism in the early 1950’s would pass almost unnoticed today, while the part that seemed unremarkable then would be challenged in many quarters today. When Eisenhower said, “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith,” he was merely echoing a widespread belief. Even William O. Douglas, the most liberal member of the Supreme Court at the time, and not a particularly religious man, opined in a 1952 decision that “We are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Since then, however, we’ve grown accustomed to the notion that religion ought to have little or no influence on our government and institutions. More and more, religion is looked upon as something that should be confined to the private sphere. As a result, religion has been pushed steadily out of public life—one Christmas crèche, one school prayer, one court decision at a time. These days, most of our institutions, particularly the press, the courts, and the schools, seem to presume that secularism is the officially established belief.</p>
<p>Conversely, the part of Eisenhower’s statement that caused many to snicker in the 1950’s would strike most today as self-evidently true. Numerous priests, pastors, rabbis, and theologians took Eisenhower to task for adding, “and I don’t care what it is” to his endorsement of religion. Long before the threat of Islamization, thoughtful Americans realized that the content of a religion mattered very much. They protested that a vague “faith in faith” would not be enough to sustain our form of society in difficult times.</p>
<p>By contrast, after several decades of multicultural indoctrination we have now reached a pass where “I don’t care what it is” seems the height of enlightened wisdom. Our present society is so thoroughly invested in the doctrine of cultural equivalence that hardly anyone dares to publicly express a preference or partiality for one religion over another—except, of course, if the religion happens to be Islam. In that case the neutrality rule seems dispensable. For example, New   York’s city fathers granted almost immediate approval to the Ground Zero mosque project, but after nine years, the plan to rebuild St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, which was destroyed by the 9/11 blast, has met with nothing but opposition. But, apart from the occasional favoritism shown to Islam, the notion that all religions are equally OK suits us just fine.</p>
<p>Still, the introduction of Islam into the American equation forces us to look more closely than we ever have before at the church/state question. Is the state supposed to ignore religion, or should it encourage it? Are some religions more conducive than others to a healthy social order? Eisenhower’s famous statement provides a good starting point for framing some answers. “Ike” was right in saying our form of government doesn’t make sense without a religious foundation. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, has religion written all over it. No matter how you parse it, it’s difficult to read “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” “endowed by their Creator,” “appealing to the Divine Judge of the World,” and “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” as an endorsement of secularism. And the benefits of a religious foundation don’t end with the establishment of inalienable rights for individual citizens. Religion provides a service to the state, as well; a service that the state can’t perform for itself—at least, not very successfully. What is it? In brief, the sacred realm makes sense out of life. Religious faith imparts a conviction of ultimate meaning. And this, in turn, is good for the state because people with meaningful lives tend to be better behaved citizens.</p>
<p>“Ah, yes!” exclaims the half-educated leftist, “Religion—the opium of the people!” Not quite. Marx, who had a shallow understanding of religion, thought of religion as an escapist fantasy—an opium dream devised to keep people in a state of passivity. With their eyes focused on the next world, said Marx, believers wouldn’t work to change this one. But actual religious people aren’t like that. The more actively people practice their faith, the more likely they will be involved in trying to improve their community. That’s not just a theory, it’s been shown by a number of studies. Just as importantly, religious people feel a duty to improve themselves. Christians, for example, are supposed to try to conform their lives to Christ. The upshot is that people who take their religion seriously have strong incentives to practice virtue and avoid vice. All told, people who learn to govern themselves out of religious motives are better candidates for self-government than people who don’t practice self-restraint. This is what John Adams meant when he said “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”</p>
<p>Thus, a society that hopes to maintain a free and self-governing citizenry will want to do everything it can to encourage and foster religion. Just because the government shouldn’t be in the business of establishing a specific religion, doesn’t mean it should be neutral as between religion and irreligion. If, as Adams wrote, our Constitution would only work with a moral and religious people, then it makes sense for the state to do what it can to provide a favorable climate for religion—as it does, for example, by providing tax exempt status to churches. Joe Sobran once made the point that although the First Amendment right to a free press implies a right not to read, along with the right to read, no one ever suggests that the state should remain neutral as between reading and non-reading. Reading, like religion, has its dangers but, on the whole, literacy is good for the health of a society. Thus, for example, lessons in reading and writing are not optional for the elementary school set.</p>
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		<title>The Road to Sharia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/the-road-to-sharia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-road-to-sharia</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/the-road-to-sharia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Sep 2010 04:10:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=72071</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Digging deep into Imam Rauf's real intentions with the Ground Zero mosque. ]]></description>
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<p>Freedom of religion for Christians has been under attack for some time, but liberal opinion makers haven’t evinced much concern.  Indeed, judging by their non-reaction to the fining or jailing of Christian pastors in Canada and Europe who have spoken out against same-sex marriage, the opinion elites seem perfectly willing to sacrifice Christian religious freedom on the altar of gay rights.</p>
<p>But when it comes to the religious freedom of Muslims, it’s a different matter.  As a result of the Ground Zero mosque controversy, the liberal elites have suddenly become stout defenders of religious freedom.  Moreover, they seem to have taken an absolutist stance on its meaning.  Although the politicians and pundits who defend the mosque builders rail against extremists, they themselves have adopted an extremist interpretation of religious freedom—one which makes it equivalent to <em>carte blanche.</em></p>
<p>Like the highly prized “letters of transit” in <em>Casablanca</em>, the words “freedom of religion” now seem to confer unlimited authority.  “They cannot be rescinded, not even questioned,” says Signor Ugarte of the letters of transit.  Apparently, the same now holds true for religious freedom.  If you’re an Imam, all you have to do is show your First Amendment papers, and you can build your mosque wherever you like—no questions asked.</p>
<p>Yet, as most Americans realize, there are no unlimited rights in our society.  Try exercising your Second Amendment rights without getting the necessary permits and you could end up in jail.  Use your licensed gun in an irresponsible way, and your right will be abruptly taken away.  The same is true for freedom of speech.  Libel laws, obscenity laws, national security laws, even laws about “disturbing the peace” put limits on our freedom of speech.  Likewise, the free exercise of religion does not extend to suicide cults, or virgin sacrifice, or to church-sanctioned polygamy.</p>
<p>With all the current talk about safeguarding the right of Muslims to religious freedom, it’s instructive to note that U.S. law already prohibits the free exercise of Islam. If this comes as news to some, it’s because we tend to forget that Islam is not just a faith, but also an all encompassing political, legal, and moral system.  The embodiment of that system is called “Sharia law,” and the full practice of Islam requires compliance with it.  Muslims are bound by these laws because they are believed to be divine commandments.  The trouble is, dozens of shariah law provisions are violations of state and federal laws.  Here are some examples:</p>
<p>Under shariah law a Muslim girl can be contracted for marriage at any age.  The marriage can be consummated when she is eight or nine.  The laws of the United States frown upon such arrangements.</p>
<p>Under Sharia a man may marry up to four wives (simultaneously).  U.S. law prohibits the practice of polygamy.</p>
<p>Under Sharia law, a man can easily divorce his wife, but a woman cannot divorce her husband without his consent.  U.S. divorce courts don’t see things in quite the same way.</p>
<p>Sharia law:  Muslim women are forbidden from marrying a non-Muslim.</p>
<p>U.S. law:  In this, as in so many other respects, Islamic law is null and void.   American citizens are free to marry outside their religion.</p>
<p>Sharia law:  the testimony of a woman in court is worth half the value of a man’s testimony.</p>
<p>U.S. law:  “Tell it to the judge!”</p>
<p>Sharia law:  Muslim men have permission to beat their wives for disobedience.</p>
<p>U.S. law:  In U.S. law this Sharia provision is referred to as “domestic abuse  battery.”</p>
<p>Sharia law:  adultery is punishable by lashing and stoning to death.</p>
<p>U.S. law:  “Let he who throws the first stone be prepared for life behind bars.”</p>
<p>Sharia law:  homosexuality is punishable by death.</p>
<p>U.S. law: “Abdul, meet your cellmate, Butch.”</p>
<p>Sharia law:  thieves may be punished with amputation.</p>
<p>U.S. law:  the Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.”</p>
<p>Sharia law:  a Muslim who rejects Islam must be killed.</p>
<p>U.S. law:  under U.S. laws this form of Islamic justice is referred to as “first- degree murder.”</p>
<p>Sharia law:  non-Muslims are not equal to Muslims under the law.</p>
<p>U.S. law:  “all men are created equal.”</p>
<p>Sharia law:  Sharia law supersedes any system of man-made laws.</p>
<p>U.S. law:  Article VI. “This Constitution shall be…the supreme law of the land.”</p>
<p>And so on.  A side-by-side comparison of state and federal laws with Sharia laws reveals that in the U.S. the free exercise of Islam is, in many respects, already prohibited.  The only way to guarantee Muslims complete freedom to practice their religion would be to rewrite the Constitution and the U.S. Criminal Code to make them Sharia compliant.  In other word, free exercise of religion for Muslims would necessitate the abrogation of constitutional rights for U.S. citizens—including the right to freedom of religion.</p>
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		<title>To Build a Mosque</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/a-mosque%e2%80%99s-location/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-mosque%25e2%2580%2599s-location</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:10:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=70200</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the “they can build it anywhere else” argument may, in the long run, prove to be a serious strategic mistake.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/muslim.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-70201" title="muslim" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/muslim.gif" alt="" width="300" height="243" /></a></p>
<p>Opponents of the Ground Zero Mosque should think twice about basing their opposition to it solely on the provocative nature of the proposed site.  To say, “They can build it anywhere else” seems like a reasonable compromise, but in the long run it may prove to be a strategic mistake.  Once you say that your only objection to the building of a mosque is its location, you’ve given up the 99 other arguments that can and should be used to prevent the Islamization which regularly accompanies the introduction of a mosque into a community.</p>
<p>Each time a new mosque is proposed—whether it’s in Chicago or Atlanta or Pleasantville—its proponents will be quick to remind the opposition of the many previous assurances that the only objection to the New York City mosque was its location.  And, of course, local and national media will chime in with the same reminder—along with not-so-subtle suggestions that the <em>real</em> objection to mosques is and always has been nothing but a matter of pure bigotry.  Thus, “You can build it anywhere else” is a formula for insuring that future mosque construction in America will be all the more difficult to oppose.</p>
<p>“Location, location, location” may be the first three rules for buying a house, but you don’t want to bet the farm on the issue of location—the farm in this case being the jihad resistance movement. Unless you hone the other arguments for a Sharia-free America, you might end up confirming the liberal contention that there are no other arguments. As liberals see it, if you take away the location argument, the only other reason why people would oppose mosques is that they are hopelessly bigoted and ignorant. Thus, the liberal elites may be willing to concede that the people of New York have a point, but from their point of view the people of Pleasantville can have no case at all.</p>
<p>So it makes sense for those who are opposed to the Ground Zero mosque to lay out the full panoply of reasons for resisting the spread of Islam. Contrary to the liberal mantra about “bigoted ignorance” they are very good reasons. The views of the many Americans who oppose mosque proliferation are rooted in solid realities, while the views of the cultural elites are more often of the “This-is-what-we-have-always-believed-in-the-village” variety.</p>
<p>Why do Americans increasingly oppose mosques?  It’s because they correctly perceive Islam to be a hostile political and religious ideology.  For a long time after 9/11 the vast majority of Americans felt otherwise.  They accepted the explanation that a handful of extremists had hijacked a religion of peace.  But now they have their doubts.  What is causing them to change their minds?  Answer:  a ton of facts.  Unlike their “betters” in government and media, average Americans are able to adjust their views to accommodate new facts.  They certainly don’t rush to judgment, but, given enough evidence, they are eventually willing to bow to the evidence.  For many Americans the insistence on building a mosque at Ground Zero was the final straw—the last piece of evidence needed to come to a conclusion about the real nature of Islam.  The Ground Zero mosque is considered “inappropriate,” “insensitive,” “provocative,” “insulting,” and “obscene” by a majority because they have finally come to realize that the connection between the bombing of the twin towers and the teachings of Islam is not an accidental one.</p>
<p>In short, increasing numbers of Americans no longer accept the meme that Islam is a religion of peace.  The evidence to the contrary is now overwhelming.  It’s no longer a case of two plus two equals four.  At this point it’s more in the nature of two thousand plus two thousand equals four thousand.  At this point you can’t help but notice that 9/11 was not a one time aberration—not after the massacre of school children in Beslen, the Paris riots, the London tube bombing, the Bali bombing, the Madrid train bombing, the Mumbai hotel massacre, the Ft. Hood massacre, the attempted bombing over Detroit, and the Times Square bombing.  And each day brings more evidence.  The bombings of mosques, marketplaces and schools in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia are now so numerous that they are only brought to our attention when the death toll reaches into the dozens.  Altogether there have been 16,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11.  That’s enough for most people, but not, apparently, for the smart set. Another 16,000 attacks might convince them, but don’t count on it. It’s one thing to wait for the evidence to come in, it’s another to sit on your porch for nine years and watch a never-ending parade of evidence go marching by.  Fortunately, a growing number of Americans are coming to the realization that the evidence for Islam’s warlike nature is already in.</p>
<p>Americans are also awakening to the fact that, aside from the bombs and bullets, adherence to the teachings of Islam brings other forms of misery.  By now, all but the most obtuse know that in Muslim majority countries there is very little or no freedom of speech or freedom of religion.  And there is, decidedly, no freedom from fear. Along with accounts of the adventures of Tiger Woods and  Lindsay Lohan, one now sees occasional stories about the vicious persecution of Christians and other minorities in Muslim lands—in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and just about anywhere where Muslims have the power to enforce their will. Naturally enough, Americans are beginning to wonder what would happen if Islam increases its power here.</p>
<p>Moreover, many Americans have, to paraphrase the song, “just met a girl named Sharia,” and they don’t like the looks of her.  The post-9/11 message that Islam is a religion of love and justice was so widely accepted that it took a long time before people even knew about the existence of Sharia law, let alone about its harsh provisions.  Now that they do know, they can be forgiven if they’re not too anxious to have it introduced into their neighborhood.</p>
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		<title>Lambs to the Slaughter</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Aug 2010 04:01:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Will Christians dialogue themselves into dhimmitude?]]></description>
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<p>I used to scoff at writers such as Sam Harris, Kevin Phillips, and Chris Hedges when they warned that Christians were a major threat to American freedoms. Now, I’m not so sure. Of course, all their talk about Christians imposing a theocracy on America has about as much credibility as the “truther” theory that 9/11 was a U.S. government/Mossad conspiracy. But I wonder now if Christians, in their naivite and in their desire to be thought tolerant, aren’t inadvertently paving the way for an eventual <em>Islamic</em> theocracy.</p>
<p>It seems that quite a number of Christian churches are now involved in “outreach” programs with local mosques. The typical outreach is for a church to invite an Islamic leader to come in and explain Islam to the congregation. Naturally, the imams present Islam as a religion of peace and love. And naturally in their desire to appear loving and accepting, the Christians lap it up. The imams know how to press all the “tolerance,” “outreach,” and “respect” buttons, and the result is that the Christians end up thinking Islam is just another nice, brotherly religion like their own. As a result, they can probably be counted on not to oppose the building of a local mosque, or for that matter not to oppose <em>any</em> Muslim agenda or initiative. Islamic leaders have done a good job of framing their grievances as civil rights issues, and this, of course, has great appeal to the many Christians who see the pursuit of social justice as their main mission. Mentally, many Christians still live in the days of “We Shall Overcome” and lunch counter sit-ins. They think that in supporting and defending Islam they are like the Christians in the sixties who linked arms with civil rights marchers, and sang hymns together.</p>
<p>Lately, Muslim leaders have been taking advantage of the Christian disposition for outreach by offering outreach programs of their own. 20,000 Dialogues is a nationwide interfaith initiative that helps local level imams set up outreach programs, and provides films and speakers to facilitate the dialogue. The current offering is a film titled “Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Think.” The film is based on a study of Muslim attitudes conducted by John Esposito of Georgetown University’s Alwaleed Bin  Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and Dalia Mogahed, Director of the Gallup  Center for Muslim Studies. Like the study, the film massages the polling data to make it appear that Islam is a predominately peaceful religion.</p>
<p>One such outreach was conducted on July 24th at the Lamb of God Church in Fort Myers, Florida. The guest speaker was Imam Shaker Elsayed of the Falls   Church, Virginia mosque, “Dar Al Hijrah”—the same mosque where Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki mentored Major Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre. Elsayed himself is the former Secretary General of the Muslim American Society, an organization which has been described by Stephen Schwartz as a “major component” of the “Wahhabi Lobby.”</p>
<p>Aside from the dubious connections of the speaker and the dubious nature of the film, the most interesting aspect of the presentation was the response of the 400-member audience. With a few exceptions they liked it. And they didn’t like the attempt by some members of ACT for America and the Florida Security Council who were present to ask tough questions during the Q&amp;A session. Although Imam Elsayed portrayed Jesus in a way that should have been offensive to Christians, the audience was much more concerned with Muslim sensitivities. Their sympathies were obviously with the representatives of Islam, and against the critics of Islam.</p>
<p>The other interesting aspect of the presentation was the ability of Daniel Tutt, the young and articulate director of 20,000 Dialogues, to weave the critics’ attempt to tell the other side of the story into his own narrative of “building bridges” and “avoiding stereotypes.” Interviewed afterward by a TV reporter, Tutt said that the dissent “clearly emphasizes the need for more communications.” In other words, those who criticize Islam misunderstand it and need to be educated. And how is Islam to be understood? Answer: in a positive way. “We feel,” said Tutt, “that by reaching 20,000 dialogues we will help to create a measurable shift in the negative understanding that Americans have toward Muslims.” The whole premise of the “dialogues” endeavor is that an unfavorable opinion of Islam is an uneducated opinion. This also seems to be the opinion of the Reverend Walter Fohs, the pastor of the Lamb of God Church. According to the Fort Myers News-Press, “Much of the hype, fostered in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, may be caused by Christians’ lack of understanding of their own religion, said the Rev. Walter Fohs…” Fohs went on to say that there are more violent chapters in the Bible than in the Koran.</p>
<p>This moral equivalence argument sits well with many Christians because, like Americans in general, they have been nurtured on multicultural myths about the essential equality of different cultures and religions. So they are quite happy to nod in agreement when they are informed by the Islamic representative (or by their own pastor) that Islam is no more a threat than the synagogue down the street. For too many Christians, the essence of Christianity boils down to tolerance and non-judgmentalism. Moreover, Christianity in America has become so mixed up with therapy and pop psychology that, nowadays, the surest sign of election is feeling good about oneself. It is, of course, much easier to feel good about yourself if you can congratulate yourself on being tolerant, sensitive, and respectful of differences. It’s likely that many of the Christians who attend outreach presentations like the one at Lamb of God Church aren’t really interested in being educated about Islam. What they are really seeking is confirmation of their existing multicultural assumptions. So their sympathies will lie with those who tell them that it’s reasonable to keep dreaming dreams of interfaith harmony, and they will resist those who want to wake them from the dream.</p>
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		<title>Sharia in a First Amendment Society</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:05:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=67426</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Would the constitution framers have countenanced the erection of a statue of King George on the site of the Boston Massacre? ]]></description>
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<p>Steve Chapman, a columnist for the <em>Chicago Tribune</em>, has a piece in <em>Human Events</em> criticizing Sarah Palin for her opposition to building a mosque at Ground Zero.  His argument seems to be that in guaranteeing freedom of religion, the First Amendment guarantees that all religions be treated identically.  Therefore, argues Chapman, if you would allow evangelical Christians to build a church near Ground Zero, you must allow Muslims to build their mosque and community center—otherwise you are guilty of employing a double standard.</p>
<p>But the double standard only applies if you are dealing with two equivalent individuals or groups.  You’re not guilty of using a double standard if you give the keys to your car to your sixteen-year-old child but not to your six-year-old.  Likewise, if you support your own children but refuse to support your neighbor’s children, no one will accuse you of employing a double standard.  In both these examples the two groupings are similar in many ways (your children, your neighbor’s children) but are different in crucial ways.</p>
<p>One way to avoid the double standard in regard to Islam is simply to declare that Islam is a political ideology, not a religion, and therefore not protected by the freedom of religion clause.  For example, Geert Wilders has claimed that “Islam is not a religion” but a totalitarian ideology and therefore “the right to religious freedom should not apply to Islam.”  Moorthy Muthuswamy takes a similar tack in his book <em>Defeating Political Islam</em>.  Islam, he maintains, is basically a political ideology.  Likewise, Gregory Davis, the author of <em>Religion of Peace?  Islam’s War Against the World</em> argues that we need to reorient our thinking about Islam: “The first task of the West must be to reclassify Islam as a political system with religious aspects, rather than a religion with political aspects.”  “How do you solve a problem like Sharia?” asks Mark Steyn in a playful paraphrase of the Broadway song.  The simple answer is you reclassify Islam as a political organization.</p>
<p>But for hundreds of years Islam has been thought of as a religion—one of the world’s “great” religions according to most history books.  While it’s undoubtedly true that many Islamic leaders cynically use religion as a cover for political ambitions, it’s also certainly true that many Muslims feel that in practicing Islam they are being obedient to God’s commands.  For this and a number of other reasons it would be difficult to make a case that Islam is not in any sense a religion.</p>
<p>If Islam is treated as a religion and is therefore protected by the free exercise clause, what then?  The First Amendment has never been interpreted to give people the freedom to do whatever they want just as long as they do it in the name of religion.  In the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, Congress outlawed the Mormon practice of polygamy, and when the Mormons appealed the law, the Supreme Court upheld the ban.  The Congress did, in fact, prohibit the free exercise of one particular Mormon custom.  Congress would certainly also have the power to prohibit the free exercise of many Islamic customs, laws, and obligations that are in flagrant violation of federal laws.  Crimes such as polygamy, underage marriages, stoning and whippings, honor killings and the murder of apostates are covered by existing laws.  But there are other, more ambiguous areas where the free exercise of Islam might be curtailed for reasons of security.  Should the wearing of the burqa be banned?  Should mosques and Muslim schools be monitored for seditious activities?  Should Friday sermons be pre-approved by government officials?</p>
<p>There are two main problems here.  One problem is that there so many questionable aspects to Islamic teachings that mosques, madrassas and Islamic centers would require extensive, round-the-clock monitoring and supervision.  This, in turn, would generate innumerable protests and civil rights lawsuits, and, most probably, increased media sympathy for Islam. Handled the wrong way, a tough crackdown could backfire and end up helping rather than hindering the spread of Islam.</p>
<p>The other problem is that such an approach sets up a slippery slope for restricting the religious freedoms of Jews, Christians, Buddhists and others.  Any attempt to ban the burqa will elicit demands that nuns be forbidden to wear habits.  Likewise, it will be argued that if Muslims can’t wear distinctive garb, Christians shouldn’t be allowed to wear crosses, and Jews shouldn’t be allowed to display the Star of David.  And if you’re going to monitor mosques and madrassas for un-American activities, why not monitor churches, homeschools and Christian schools, as well?  Granting the government sweeping supervisory powers over Islam might provide it with just the leverage it needs to haul Pastor Jones off to jail the next time he says the wrong thing about gay marriage.</p>
<p>It shouldn’t work that way, of course:  people ought to be able to make distinctions.  It ought to be obvious that Christianity poses far less of a threat to our society than does Islam.  But thanks to thirty years of multicultural indoctrination, many Americans have succumbed to the notion that all groups no matter how different, must be treated the same.  Thus Steve Chapman observes that even if Islam were “inherently violent and totalitarian” it would still merit the full protection of the First Amendment.</p>
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		<title>An Invented Tale?</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:05:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=65139</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why is the Koran preoccupied with its own credibility?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/KORAN_.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-65140" title="KORAN_" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/KORAN_.gif" alt="" width="375" height="283" /></a></p>
<p>Every now and then you hear calls from critics of Islam for Islam to reform itself—for mosques and madrassas to teach against the Islamic doctrines that inspire terrorists. A dramatic example of this demand occurs in the film <em>Fitna </em>when Geert Wilders invites Muslims to tear the offending pages out of the Koran. In one scene you can hear the sound of tearing pages in the background.</p>
<p>If thy page offend thee, pluck it out? The only trouble with this sort of recommendation is that it assumes that there is enough positive material in the Koran and other foundational documents to form the basics for a reformation. But is there?</p>
<p>According to Moorthy Muthuswamy, an expert on political Islam, “61 percent of the Koran talks ill of unbelievers or calls for their violent conquest and subjugation, but only 2.6 percent talks about the overall good of humanity.” Hmmm. Seems as though that would amount to an awful lot of offending pages.</p>
<p>It’s a similar story when you turn to the s<em>ira</em>, the biographies of Muhammad. Take the earliest of these, the one written by Ibn Ishaq. Of the 130 short chapters which detail the life of Muhammad after his arrival in Medina, over 70 are about raids, battles, and assassinations or else they are about preparations for raids and battles, division of spoils, odes upon battles, names of those who fought, etc. According to a content analysis done by Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, at least 75% of the s<em>ira</em> is about jihad. These are inconvenient facts for those who hope Islam can be reformed. No matter how reform-minded you may be, it is difficult to come up with a symbolic interpretation of the Koran’s numerous calls to make war on unbelievers, since that was literally what Muhammad did.</p>
<p>So, rather than encourage Muslims to remove the violent and hateful parts of the Koran, it might make more sense to encourage them to renounce it <em>in</em> <em>toto</em>. The “good” parts of the Koran are so bound up with the “bad” parts that trying to separate them is an impossible task. Besides, there is no warrant in Islamic tradition for picking and choosing. Islamic authorities say that the Koran given to Muhammad is a replica of the original which is inscribed on “imperishable” tablets in heaven. And, just for the record, “imperishable” beats “set in stone” by a wide margin. Talking of reforming Islam by re-interpreting the Koran is like talking about reforming a marble statue. Some things don’t lend themselves to reformation.</p>
<p>Of course, asking Muslims to totally reconsider the Koran is no piece of cake, either. It’s a hard sell, to be sure. But then, none of the “soft” sell solutions appear to be working. Over the last decade or so we’ve tried:</p>
<ul>
<li>The      democracy solution (which has led to numerous Islamist victories at the      polls)</li>
<li>The      secular solution (the belief that Muslims would happily exchange burqas      for bikinis)</li>
<li>The assimilation solution (the belief that, given the chance, Muslims would prefer to blend into the multicultural soup)</li>
<li>The appeasement solution (once Muslims see that we’re willing to give them everything they ask for, they’ll be satisfied and will stop making demands)</li>
</ul>
<p>All these solutions assume that Muslims suffer from a sense of inferiority over their religion and culture. That may have been true fifty years ago when Islam appeared to be going nowhere, but now that Islam is on the move, the opposite is true. Muslims feel a sense of superiority about Islam. Faced with a choice between the best that the secular West has to offer, and the splendor and certainty of the Koran, they choose the Koran. Therefore, any adequate response to the threat from Islam has to be based not on shoring-up the self-esteem of believing Muslims but on breaking it down. The most direct way to do this is to shake their faith in the Koran as the revealed word of God.</p>
<p>You may counter that it’s nearly impossible to change deeply held beliefs, but, as I maintained in a previous piece, history demonstrates time and again that deeply held beliefs are not nearly as deeply held as they appear. What happened to the deeply held beliefs of the devotees of Zeus and Jupiter? What happened to the deeply held beliefs of the Millerites, Rappites, and Shakers? And, more recently, what happened to the deeply held beliefs of European Christians? It’s ironic that our society which is so committed to change, nevertheless insists on the unchangeability of other people’s beliefs. It’s one of the legacies of multiculturalism that we have come to believe that our own culture is infinitely malleable, while simultaneously believing that non-Western cultures are infinitely immutable. And since we think Muslim beliefs can never be changed, we never suggest that they ought to be changed.</p>
<p>It’s decidedly in the interest of non-Muslim societies to cast doubts on the Koran. Having said that, I disagree with the idea that simply exposing the violent or hateful messages of the Koran is enough to discredit it. Maybe God really does hate unbelievers. It’s much more to the point to raise doubts about the divine authorship of the Koran.</p>
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		<title>Questioning the Koran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/questioning-the-koran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=questioning-the-koran</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/questioning-the-koran/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:04:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=63830</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Time to take off the gloves?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/KORANjpg.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-64202" title="KORAN,jpg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/KORANjpg.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="267" /></a></p>
<p>At the Guantanamo Naval Base prison, American military personnel are required to wear gloves when touching the Koran. It’s the perfect metaphor for our official culture’s obsequious behavior toward Islam. Terrorists the world over cite the Koran as the motivation and justification for their terrorist acts, yet journalists and government officials reflexively jump to the Koran’s defense whenever it seems to be implicated in terror. Instead of thinking, “Hmm, let’s take a closer look at that book,” they assure us, on no evidence, that the terrorists have misunderstood the Koran.</p>
<p>Considering that large chunks of the world are sliding into the Islamic camp, it may be time to take off the gloves. We don’t have the luxury any longer of living by pre-9/11 niceties such as “we must respect religious differences”—a formula which has come to mean that we mustn’t even look into them. On the contrary, you respect differences by taking them seriously. And if the Koran is the motive force behind Islam’s militancy then the Koran deserves serious examination, not perfunctory gestures of esteem.</p>
<p>“Why bring religion into it?” you may ask. Well, because religion is what it’s all about. Sincere Muslims believe that God wants the whole world to be subject to Islam. They’re free to believe that, of course, but it would be very much in the interest of non-Muslims if they stopped believing it. If an unbeliever refuses to submit to Islam, Allah requires that his head be separated from his body. In light of this, it seems only reasonable that unbelievers should start thinking of ways to separate Muslims from their faith. We have a—shall we say,<em> vital</em>—interest in encouraging Muslims to reflect critically upon the facts of their faith. We can help them to do this, not by telling them we have deep respect for their religion, but by telling them we have deep misgivings about it.</p>
<p>So, the argument that the Koran is of divine origin, and therefore deserving of unquestioning obedience, ought to be challenged. And it ought to be challenged frequently and persuasively with the intention of forcing Muslims to at least entertain some doubts that God had anything to do with the composition of the Koran.</p>
<p>Let’s pass over the awkward fact that there were no witnesses to the revelation except Muhammad himself, and go on to look at what Muslim apologists say in defense of the Koran. The traditional belief is that the Koran, which was given to Muhammad in installments, is a perfect replica of a mother book which has existed eternally in heaven. According to apologists, the proof that God composed it is that it is a work of perfection, a literary masterpiece written in an inimitatable style. Thus, doubters are challenged to produce even one sura comparable to it (10:38). In a nutshell, only God could have said it so well.</p>
<p>Well, let’s see. Here is sura 81:20:</p>
<blockquote><p>I swear by the turning planets, and by the stars that rise and set; by the night, when it descends, and the first breath of morning: this is the word of a gracious and mighty messenger…</p></blockquote>
<p>That’s pretty good. So is sura 51:1:</p>
<blockquote><p>By the dust-scattering winds and the heavily-laden clouds; by the swiftly-gliding ships and by the angels who deal out blessings to mankind; that which you are promised shall be fulfilled…</p></blockquote>
<p>If the whole Koran were written to this level you might have the makings of a case for its divine authorship. But for the most part—at least for the Western reader—it falls short of other great literature. Much of it is tedious, repetitive, and didactic. While it’s true that a lot is lost in translation, how much could have been lost from: “Prophet, we have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave-girls whom God has given you as booty: the daughters of your paternal and maternal aunts who fled with you; and any believing woman who gives herself to the Prophet and whom the Prophet wishes to take in marriage.” (sura 33:50). No matter how skillfully translated there is not much literary punch in such passages.</p>
<p>Of course, many readers also find parts of the Bible to be tedious, repetitive, and didactic. But this is less of a problem for Christians since they don’t claim that the Bible is a word-for-word dictation from God. For Christians, the literary merit of scripture is not a crucial issue. Still, the Bible does have considerable literary merit. Many passages in the Old Testament soar above the Koran—the Psalms, the scene of the dry bones come to life described in Ezekiel (Eze. 37), the Lord answering Job out of the whirlwind (Job 38), the temptation scene in the Garden of Eden, the vivid prophecies of Isaiah. And there is nothing in the Koran to compare with the moving scenes in the Gospels. So, if you hold to the God-dictated-it school  of Koran defense, you have a problem. To put it bluntly, why can’t God write as well as human authors such as David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?—not to mention Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy.</p>
<p>Muslim apologists do have an answer to such quibbles. They say that you can only appreciate the true beauty of the Koran by reading it in Arabic. Okay, then, maybe when you read, “We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers” (2: 226) in the original Arabic it sounds like something out of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyan.” But there is another problem which goes beyond the sound and sense of words. Whether or not the Koran is lacking in stylistic perfection, it is certainly lacking in coherence. And you don’t have to speak high Arabic to notice it.</p>
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		<title>Jesus of Nazareth vs. Jesus of Neverland</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/jesus-of-nazareth-vs-jesus-of-neverland/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jesus-of-nazareth-vs-jesus-of-neverland</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:01:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The Koran’s unconvincing account of Jesus.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Jesus.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63060" title="Jesus" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Jesus.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="245" /></a></p>
<p>Critics of Islam tend to avoid the main question about Islam in favor of secondary questions. The main question is, “Did Muhammad actually receive a revelation from God?” The secondary questions are: “Is Islam a religion of peace?” “Is Islam compatible with modern values?” “Are women treated fairly under Sharia law?” And so on. These are useful questions to ask if you are trying to wake up your fellow citizens to the utterly alien nature of Islam, but they won’t carry much weight with a believing Muslim. Warlike religion? Incompatible with modern values? So what? If that’s the way God wants it, who are we to question his ways?</p>
<p>That’s why the main question needs to be raised. Did God deliver a message to Muhammad, or did Muhammad make it up? It’s a good bet that most Americans believe the latter but are too polite or too prudent to say so. We keep our thoughts on the matter to ourselves, not just out of fear of offending Muslims, but also because the cult of cultural relativism requires us to give lip service to the proposition that all religions are equally valid. Nevertheless, the question about the authenticity of Muhammad’s claim is still the heart of the matter. As long as Muslims believe that Muhammad received his marching orders from God, the threat of Islamic jihad will continue to grow. But take that away and you take away the rationale for Islam’s war against the world.</p>
<p>So it makes sense to lay out the case that Muhammad’s claims are highly improbable. One way to do this is to apply to Islam the same tests of critical reason and historical evidence that we apply to the Christian revelation. Over the centuries, both Christian critics and Christian scholars have subjected the Gospel revelations to a rigorous examination. While this had the effect of shaking up some people’s faith, it also had the effect of strengthening the rational/factual case for Christianity. But when this method of inquiry is applied to the Islamic revelation things fall apart.</p>
<p>For example, take the depiction of Jesus in the Koran and compare it to the depiction of Jesus in the Gospels. Since they flatly contradict each other on essential matters, normal curiosity invites the comparison. Which is the real Jesus? Or better, which of the two accounts seems to describe an actual historical figure?</p>
<p>Jesus is considered a great prophet by Muslims, but one has to wonder why, seeing as he has almost nothing to do or say in the pages of the Koran. He only speaks on six or seven occasions and then, very briefly, and primarily to deny that he ever claimed to be God. But then, the whole point of introducing Jesus into the Koran is to discredit the Christian claim that he is divine—a claim that, if true, invalidates Muhammad’s entire mission. Thus, whenever Jesus is mentioned in the Koran, it’s almost always for the purpose of whittling him down in size. For example, “He was but a mortal whom we favoured and made an example to the Israelites.” (43: 60).</p>
<p>The Jesus of the Koran appears mainly in the role of a counter to the Jesus of the Gospels, but “appears” is really too strong a word. This Jesus doesn’t attend weddings, or go fishing with his disciples, or gather children around him. He has practically no human interactions, and what he has to say is formulaic and repetitive. He is more like a disembodied voice than a person. And, to put it bluntly, he lacks personality. The Jesus of the New Testament is a recognizable human being; the Jesus of the Koran is more like a phantom. When did he carry out his ministry? There’s not a hint. Where did he live? Again, there’s no indication. Where was he born? Under a palm tree. That’s about as specific as it gets in the Koran. Next to the unanswered questions about the Jesus of the Koran, President Obama’s problems over establishing his birthplace seem minor by comparison. In short, Muhammad’s Jesus is a nebulous figure. He seems to exist neither in time nor space. On the one hand you have Jesus of Nazareth, and on the other, someone who can best be described as Jesus of Neverland.</p>
<p>One thing you find in the Gospels which you don’t find in the Koran is a solid geographical and historical context. If the story of Christ was set in some mythical location, long before the age of recorded history, it would be easier to pass it off as…well, a myth. But the story takes place not in some vague neverland but in places that can still be visited today—Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem. Christ doesn’t just go to some indeterminate wedding feast, he goes to the wedding feast at Cana; in his parable about the good Samaritan, he mentions a specific road, the one going from Jerusalem to Jericho. He converses with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in the town of Sychar. He cures one man at the pool of Siloam, and another at the pool with five porticos. Sidon Tyre, Capernaum, the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River, the Mount of Olives, the Praetorium, Herod’s court, Golgotha—there is a specificity and facticity that you won’t find in mythology.</p>
<p>…Or in the Koran. Take, for example, the differing accounts of the crucifixion. Here is what the Koran has to say: “They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but they thought they did.” (4:157). Well, that’s an interesting take on the crucifixion. Tell us more. Dan Brown has a similar theory about the crucifixion but at least he concocts a story to support it. But inquiring minds who hope to gain some further insight in the Koran will be disappointed. “They did not kill him…but they thought they did?” Why did they think that? And who were “they”? Answer: Muhammad didn’t seem to know who “they” were. Or, if he did know, he didn’t want his followers to know that there existed an entirely different and far more detailed story of the life of Christ than the one he presents. In the Koran account there are no chief priests, no Sadducees, no crowds, no Romans, no Pilate, no Herod, no Peter, James, and John, no Golgotha, no Garden of Gethsemane, no upper room, no Jerusalem, no Nazareth, no Galilee, no preaching in the temple, no sermon on the mount, no calming of the tempest, no last supper, no trial before the Sanhedrin. For that matter, there’s no historical context, no geography, no kind of setting at all. Someone once said of Los Angeles that “there’s no there there.” That’s the feeling you get when you encounter Jesus in the Koran.</p>
<p>The Jesus of the Koran really does exist in a neverland. Set against the Gospel story with all its vivid detail and close attention to persons and events, the Koranic account is vague and vapid in the extreme. And amazingly brief. If you omit the repetitions, the whole of what the Koran has to say about Jesus can be fit on about two or three pages of Bible text. And of that, about half is devoted to denying that he was God’s son.</p>
<p>You don’t have to be a Christian to see that the New Testament looks much more like a historical document than the Koran. It’s curious when you think about it. With all of his audacious claims to be equal with God, the Jesus of the Gospels is far more believable than the Jesus of the Koran. Not only is it difficult to believe in the few claims that are made for Muhammad’s Jesus, it’s difficult to believe in his existence. There’s just no convincing detail.</p>
<p>Which is more likely the true account of Jesus? On the one hand, you have the Koran’s sketchy version; on the other you have a highly detailed narrative with numerous references to historical facts and geographical locations. Which is more believable? An account composed in Arabia some six hundred years after the life of Jesus, or one composed by his contemporaries with the help of numerous witnesses who were on the spot?</p>
<p>Whatever you may think of the claims of Christ, it’s hard not to believe in his existence. As Dinesh D’Souza puts it in <em>What’s So Great about Christianity</em>, “Do you believe in the existence of Socrates? Alexander the Great? Julius Caesar? If historicity is established by written records in multiple copies that date originally from near contemporaneous sources, there is far more proof for Christ’s existence than for any of theirs.” Historical reliability? F.E. Peters in his book <em>Harvest of Hellinism</em> writes that “the works that make up the New Testament were the most frequently copied and widely circulated books of antiquity.” What does that mean? It means that the New Testament survives in some 5,656 partial and complete manuscripts that were copied by hand. And that’s in Greek alone. If you add in the Latin-vulgate and other early versions, there are more than 25,000 manuscript copies of the New Testament in existence. How does that compare with other early histories? Well, there are seven copies of Pliny the younger’s <em>Natural</em> <em>History</em>, twenty copies of the <em>Annals</em> of Tacitus, and ten copies of Caesar’s <em>Gallic Wars</em>. Score: Christianity, 25,000, Caesar, 10. When you render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s in manuscript terms, it doesn’t seem to amount to much.</p>
<p>It’s a little more difficult to check up on the authenticity of the other Jesus, however, since there is no record of anyone in the ancient world declaring himself <em>not</em> to be the Son of God, while simultaneously heralding the coming of a prophet named “Muhammad.” Muslim apologists insist that there is an original, long-lost version of the Gospel which corroborates the account of Jesus that appears in the Koran. Christians, they say, tampered with the original, and manufactured a corrupted version which turned Jesus into God, and left Muhammad out of the story—in effect, the Muslim equivalent of <em>the</em> <em>Da Vinci Code</em> theory. But it’s a general rule of scholarship that you have to work with the records you have, not the hypothetical ones. And in the record we have—the Koran—Jesus seems more like a mythological person than a real one. Subjecting him to the historical/critical method of inquiry would be akin to subjecting Perseus or Achilles to the historical/critical method.</p>
<p>In the Koran, Jesus’ longest monologue is delivered from the cradle when he is only a few days old. In view of the air of unreality surrounding him, it’s worth asking again why he is in the Koran at all, or why he is accorded the status of a great prophet. The answer is that in claiming him as a Muslim prophet, Muhammad is giving Jesus a demotion, not a promotion. John the Baptist said of Jesus, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Muhammad preferred it the other way around. For him to increase, it was necessary that Jesus decrease.</p>
<p>So, although Jesus is supposed to be a great prophet, he does not really come across that way in the Koran. He comes across more like a shadowy government witness at a show trial who has been given some statements to memorize. At one point he is actually interrogated by God:</p>
<p>Then God will say: &#8220;Jesus, son of Mary, did you ever say to mankind: &#8216;Worship me and my mother as gods besides God?’&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Glory be to You,&#8221; he will answer, &#8220;I could never have claimed what I have no right to. If I had ever said so, You would have surely known it…I told them only what you bade me.&#8221; (5:116-117)</p>
<p>Well, that settles it, then. You see, he never said it. Admits it himself.</p>
<p>Muhammad seems to have realized early on that if Christ is who Christians say he is—the Son of God and the fulfillment of all prophecy—then there is no need for another prophet and another revelation. In one sense, Muhammad’s handing of the Jesus problem is very clever: keep him in the narrative but demote him; and use him to rebut the Christians’ central beliefs. In another sense it was not so clever, because the stage-managed Jesus Muhammad presents is almost totally lacking in substance, and is clearly meant to be nothing more than a prop to the Prophet’s own claims. Christian scholars and Christian critics often talk about the search for the “historical Jesus.” Here’s a time-saving hint: don’t bother looking for him in the Koran.</p>
<p><strong>William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in <em>FrontPage Magazine, First Things, Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Jihad Watch, World</em>, and <em>Investor’s Business Daily.</em></strong></p>
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		<title>Losing Their Religion</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/losing-their-religion/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=losing-their-religion</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:35:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ali A. Allawi]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Mark Steyn]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why exactly are we treating Islamic theology like a protected species?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/losing.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-62553" title="losing" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/losing.jpg" alt="" width="446" height="315" /></a></p>
<p>Although many won’t admit it, we are in the midst of an ideological war with Islam. And since the advantage goes to the side that fully realizes they are at war, the West is losing. The propaganda war is going in favor of Islam precisely because the West doesn’t realize it is supposed to be fighting one. The ability of Islam to rally much of the world behind its hatred of Israel is a telling indication of who is winning the war of ideas. As for war aims, it’s not clear that there are any. Even those who see the danger clearly rarely talk in terms of victory; they talk mainly in terms of resisting cultural jihad. You know you’re in trouble when your ideological opponent is a primitive seventh-century belief system, and yet the best that your top strategists hope for is to put up a good resistance.</p>
<p>As the Dracula-like return of Communist ideology demonstrates, an ideological war needs to be fought to complete and total victory. The enemy ideology should be so thoroughly discredited that no one—not even its former staunchest defenders, not even the most doctrinaire college professor—will want to be associated with it. In regard to Islam, then, our aim should go beyond simply resisting jihad; it should be the defeat of Islam as an idea. But, aside from inflicting crushing military defeats on Islamic powers, how do you accomplish that?</p>
<p>One answer is that you do all you can to force Muslims to question their faith in Islam. As Mark Steyn observes, “there’s no market for a faith that has no faith in itself.” He was speaking, of course, of the more mushy versions of Western Christianity—the post-Christian Christians who seem anxious to dialogue themselves into dhimmitude. But there’s no reason the concept can’t be applied to Islam. Surely the average intelligent Muslim has occasional doubts about the founding revelations. And just as surely he keeps them to himself, not only because he fears his fellow Muslims, but also because the rest of the world seems to be going along with the pretense that he belongs to a great religion. It may be time for the rest of the world to drop the pretense.</p>
<p>If one of your opponents’ core beliefs is that you need to be subjugated, why wouldn’t you want to foster doubts in his mind? Jihadists commit jihad because they correctly perceive that their religion calls them to it. As long as they are kept secure in the illusion that their faith is unassailable, they will continue the jihad by whatever means seem most expedient. They won’t question their faith—and neither will the majority of Muslims—unless they get used to the fact that it can be questioned and criticized.</p>
<p>One man who has done a lot to shake up the faith of Muslims is Fr. Zakaria Botros, a Coptic priest who hosts a weekly Arabic language TV program watched by millions of Muslims around the world. Among other things, the engaging Fr. Botros forces his Muslim audience to confront unflattering facts about their prophet. He also talks to them about the Christian faith—something that most Muslims know very little about, beyond some simple caricatures. Apparently he is very successful at what he does. According to reports he is responsible for mass conversions to Christianity.</p>
<p>Does such questioning of Muhammad’s character provoke anger among Muslims? Well, yes, it does. The elderly Fr. Botros has been labeled Islam’s “Public Enemy #1,” and a reported $60 million bounty has been put on his head. But, according to a recent piece by Raymond Ibrahim, “the outrage appears to be subsiding.” Ibrahim contends that Life TV (the satellite station that carries Fr. Botros’ program) “has conditioned its Muslim viewers to accept that exposure and criticism of their prophet is here to stay.” The first time a Muslim hears the moral flaws of the Prophet exposed, he may well be angry at the exposure. But how about the third time? The tenth time? The twentieth time? What initially provokes anger might eventually provoke doubts about Muhammad’s claims.</p>
<p>There are those who think that such efforts are doomed to failure—that Islam is too deeply rooted in the Muslim world. But deeply held beliefs are not always as deeply rooted as they seem. Thirty-five years ago it would have been non-controversial to say that the Catholic faith was deeply rooted in Ireland, but if you said it today you would be going out on a limb. More to the point, Islam itself was less “deeply rooted” 60 years ago in the Middle  East than it is now. Consider this recollection by Ali A. Allawi, a former Iraqi cabinet minister:</p>
<blockquote><p>I was born into a mildly observant family in Iraq. At that time, the 1950’s, secularism was ascendant among the political, cultural, and intellectual elites of the Middle East. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Islam would lose whatever hold it still had on the Muslim world. Even that term—“Muslim world”—was unusual, as Muslims were more likely to identify themselves by their national, ethnic, or ideological affinities than by their religion.</p></blockquote>
<p>Deeply rooted? Perhaps you’ve seen that sequence of photos of the University of Cairo graduating classes for the English Department. The women of the Class of 1959 look like college students anywhere in the Western world circa 1959. They wear Western style skirts and dresses and no head covering. Ditto for the class of 1978. It could be the class of ’78 at the University  of Chicago. But by 1994 half the women are wearing hijabs. By 2004 almost all the women are wearing hijabs and ankle-length clothing. So, sometime in the 1990’s educated Muslims apparently began to take their faith more seriously. They appear to take it very seriously now. But how “deeply rooted” is twenty years?</p>
<p>Given that the penalty for leaving Islam—or even criticizing it—can be death, we may be mistaking deeply rooted fear for deeply rooted faith. Moreover, the fact that Islam prescribes such harsh penalties for doubters suggests that the faith itself is not intrinsically convincing. As the Ayatollah Khomeini once said, “People cannot be made obedient except with the sword.” Any religion that needs so many external incentives—swords behind you, and virgins in your future—cries out to be questioned. Unfortunately, instead of exploiting its theological weaknesses the West insists on chivalrously shielding Islam from the kind of scrutiny that the West reserves for its own institutions and traditions. And with good reason. Because it’s generally understood, though rarely said, that Muhammad’s claims would not meet the tests of critical reason and historical evidence that we apply to the Judeo-Christian revelation. The much revered sufi theologian al-Ghazali wrote, “The dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or his Prophet…” You can see why. Curiosity didn’t kill Christianity, but curiosity would almost certainly kill the Caliphate—or, in our times, the hope for a resurrected Caliphate. Obliged not to mention the Prophet? Given the threat Islam poses to the world and to Muslims themselves, it’s beginning to look as though the obligation runs the other way. The world needs to take a much closer look at the Prophet and his claims. The Prophet is Islam’s main prop. If he is discredited, Islam is discredited. Hence, the mighty efforts by the OIC to make it a crime to blaspheme a prophet.</p>
<p>The Prophet’s integrity is not the only thing in doubt. Theologically speaking, Islam is a house of cards. The whole faith rests on the belief that Muhammad actually received a revelation from God. But where’s the proof? Were there any witnesses to this revelation other than Muhammad? Why should we take his word for it? Why were there so many revelations of convenience that worked directly to Muhammad’s personal advantage? Are there really dozens of renewable virgins awaiting young warriors in paradise, or was this revelation simply a clever recruitment tool manufactured by Muhammad to provide an incentive for following him? And why is the Koran, despite its flashes of poetic brilliance, put together like a soviet-era automobile? As an exercise in composition the Koran would not pass muster in most freshmen writing courses. Why can’t God write as well as the average college student?</p>
<p>Ordinarily it’s not a good idea to go around questioning other people’s firmly held beliefs. But these are not ordinary times, and Islam is no ordinary religion. As any number of observes have noted, it’s partly a religion and partly a supremacist political ideology—although no one seems to be able to say exactly what percent is political ideology and what percent is religion. Is it 50/50 or 60/40 or 80/20? Is it legitimate to criticize the political part of it, but not the religious part? How do you tell where the politics leaves off and the religion begins? Or are they so bound together that they can’t be separated?</p>
<p>If you remember “Joe Palooka,” the old comic strip series about a decent but not-too-bright heavyweight boxer, you might remember that one of Joe’s craftier opponents once tattooed his rather expansive stomach with the word “Mother” inscribed within a large heart. His midsection was his weak spot, of course, but he knew he could count on Joe to avoid hitting him there, Joe being too much of a gentleman to do otherwise. In <em>On the Waterfront,</em> Marlon Brando’s character refers to the place where failed fighters go as “palookaville.” Currently, our whole culture is in danger of ending up in “palookaville” because there are large areas of Islam we decline to examine out of a sense of delicacy that would be excessive in a Victorian matron. Islamic strategists are counting on polite Westerners not to hit them in their soft spot.</p>
<p>Islamic strategists invoke the supremacist principles of the Koran in order to stir up aggression against the Muslim world, yet any criticism of Islam is met with cries of, “No fair! You are blaspheming a prophet and his religion.” So far, the shame-on-you-for-criticizing-a-religion strategy has worked very effectively. Fortunately, a few, like Fr. Botros, aren’t buying into the ruse. He has enough respect for Muslims as individuals to realize that their religion should not be put beyond discussion. Many Muslims, especially Muslim women, suffer a profound sense of desperation: the feeling of being trapped in a 1400-year-old nightmare, with no way out. It’s difficult to see any convincing argument for propping up the system that oppresses them. On the contrary, it seems almost a duty to undermine that system—political and religious—and call it into question at every turn.</p>
<p>In past ideological struggles we wisely sought ideological victory—the discrediting of the belief system that inspired our enemies. Because the driving force behind Islamic aggression is Islamic theology, it makes no sense to treat Islamic theology like a protected species. Rather, we should hope that Muslims lose faith in Islam just as Nazis lost faith in Nazism and Eastern-bloc Communists lost faith in communism.</p>
<p>Of course, it would be all the better if, like Fr. Botros, we had something to offer them in its place. Winston Churchill once said that Greer Garson, for her role in <em>Mrs. Miniver</em>, was worth six divisions in the war against Hitler. It seems safe to say that Fr. Botros, for his role in instilling doubts about Islam and giving Muslims something solid in its place, is worth at least a couple of Departments of Homeland Security.</p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
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		<title>When Secularism Is Not Enough</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:02:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Are we sure Islamic jihad can be resisted by reliance on Western secular values alone?]]></description>
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<p>Can Islamic jihad be resisted simply on the basis of Western secular values? Some readers of my posts on the role of Christianity in resisting Islam have objected that bringing Christianity into the debate only muddies the water. As one reader wrote, “the anti-jihad movement can better be served if blatant theocons stay away.”</p>
<p>A number of important individuals in what might loosely be called the resistance movement do seem to believe that secular values are sufficient to rally citizens to a defense of Western civilization. A good example of this belief is the 2006 manifesto, “Together, facing the new totalitarianism,” which was signed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Salman Rushdie, and others. The manifesto calls for “resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity, and secular values for all.” The document also speaks of “universal values,” “universal rights,” and “Enlightenment” with a capital “E.”</p>
<p>But how sturdy are Enlightenment values once they are cut off from their Christian roots? Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s own experience provides some perspective. In her autobiography, <em>Infidel, </em>she tells how, after escaping Somalia to the Netherlands, she fell in love with the thinkers of the Enlightenment. At the same time she became an atheist—rejecting not just Islam, but all religions (although she willingly admits that Jews and Christians have a more humane concept of God). Of Holland she wrote, “Society worked without reference to God, and it seemed to function perfectly.”</p>
<p>But the problem with substituting Enlightenment humanism for religion jumps out, if not from every page of <em>Infidel</em>, at least from many pages. On the one hand, Holland is “the peak of civilization,” and “no nation in the world is more deeply attached to freedom of expression than the Dutch.” On the other hand, her colleagues keep warning her to keep her thoughts to herself, and in the end, enlightened Holland forces her out of the Netherlands precisely for freely expressing her opinions about Muslim treatment of women. Ironically, Hirsi Ali’s next port of refuge was the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank which numbers quite a few traditionalist Christians among its scholars.</p>
<p>Others, such as Oriana Fallaci, Geert Wilders, and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff have discovered that “enlightened” but post-Christian Europe is not nearly as friendly to freedom of expression as one might expect to be the case in the birthplace of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an important civilizational advance, but of late it seems to have gone a bit wobbly. Why is that?</p>
<p>One possible answer is that the core Enlightenment values are inextricably tied to Christian values. This view has been put forward most forcefully on the Continent in recent years by Marcello Pera (former President of the Italian Senate, and an agnostic) and by Benedict XVI (not an agnostic). They have argued that the Enlightenment grew out of Christianity organically, as a tree grows from its roots. Cut off from its roots the tree dies.</p>
<p>In this view the rights of man are based on a belief in the importance of man. The belief that ordinary individuals have a value and dignity of their own apart from their membership in a tribe or a society has its origin in the Judeo-Christian declaration that man is made in the image of God. Thus, if you take away God, you take away the foundation of human importance. As Thomas Jefferson undoubtedly discovered while composing the <em>Declaration</em> <em>of</em> <em>Independence</em>, it’s a bit difficult to establish the case for human rights without reference to the Creator.  Purely secular societies can only assume human dignity and human rights as a given. We tend to forget that these concepts are now a given because they were given to the world by Christians. Before Christianity, the idea that all human beings are endowed with intrinsic value was not considered “self-evident,” it was considered ludicrous. Espousing human equality was a good way to get yourself laughed out of polite pagan society. Human dignity may seem self-evident to us now, but that is because the Christian moral view became internalized over the centuries. Gladiatorial combats and slavery didn’t go out of fashion because societies evolved but because people began to see one another in the light of the Christian revelation.</p>
<p>Of course, not everyone sees it that way. Some seem to think that Enlightenment humanism came out of nowhere, thanks to spontaneous advances in science, reason, and ethics. In this view, Enlightenment values can get along fine on their own without reference to God. But then you’re still faced with explaining how it is that these values have fallen on hard times precisely in those places that might legitimately be called post-Christian. Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion are defended much more vigorously in still-Christian America than in post-Christian France or Holland. For that matter, there’s more freedom of speech in Bible-belt America than in your average American university. With their speech codes and “hate speech” rules and their habit of disinviting “controversial” speakers, universities are among the least free institutions in society. And it’s no coincidence that most of them can be described as post-Christian, and in some cases, anti-Christian. There is also, of course, an increasingly anti-Semitic climate on American campuses.</p>
<p>What happened in the universities is essentially what happened in Europe. Both suffered a loss of faith (recall that many prestigious universities began as seminaries or denominational colleges), and in the process of losing their religion both became increasingly uninterested in cultivating or protecting genuine freedoms. Moreover, like post-Christian Europe, the post-Christian university has shown little ability to resist Islamization. Thanks to Saudi money and well-organized Muslim student associations, many universities are beginning to act like apologists for the Wahabbi faith.</p>
<p>Judging by the sorry records of the highly secularized European state and the highly secularized American university, it might not be a good idea to place all your bets on “secular values for all” as the main point of resistance to totalitarian Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves the gratitude of all for calling attention to the abuse of Muslim women, but she’s wrong to think that a rootless Enlightenment is going to bring them liberation. Likewise, we owe a lot to Ibn Warraq for his penetrating critique of Islam, but he’s mistaken to think that the universal values enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights would survive in the thoroughly secularized type of society he seems to favor. If these values are universal and self-evident, why is it that half the world doesn’t subscribe to them? Warraq seems not to have noticed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was composed for the most part by individuals who had grown up in Christian cultures, and had inherited a social conscience that had been formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition.</p>
<p>Two of the chief framers, Rene Cassin and Dr. Charles Malik, made no secret of the influence Christian and Jewish beliefs had on their thinking.  In a 1969 speech to the Decalogue Lawyer’s Society, Cassin, a Jew, outlined in detail how Jewish and Christian thought had paved the way for the Declaration.  It’s also telling that while drafting the final version of the Declaration he received advice and encouragement from Cardinal Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), then the Apostolic Nuncio in Paris. Malik, who later served as President of the UN General Assembly, was a Greek Orthodox philosopher and theologian from Lebanon and the author of numerous commentaries on the Bible and on the early Church Fathers. While making his arguments to the drafting committee he was in the habit of quoting from Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian. Jacques Maritain, the eminent Catholic philosopher was also actively involved in the work of the committee, as well as the UNESCO committee which laid the groundwork for the Declaration. Eleanor Roosevelt, the Chairperson of the drafting committee later observed that the Declaration reflected “the true spirit of Christianity.” In short, although the Declaration of Human Rights makes no mention of God, the fingerprints of a certain religious tradition are all over it.</p>
<p>Western culture—indeed the whole world—owes a lot to the Enlightenment, but it’s important to remember that at crucial historical junctures it was Christian activists working on Christian principles who did most of the heavy lifting. Christian Evangelicals were at the forefront of the movement to abolish the slave trade; the Civil Rights movement was galvanized by the Reverend Martin Luther King and other Christian leaders; the end of Communism in Eastern Europe was brought about in large part by the work of the Catholic Solidarity Movement, of Pope John Paul II, and of numerous priests and pastors in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other countries who kept alive the spirit of resistance.</p>
<p>At the risk of oversimplifying things, it might be useful to think in terms of two Enlightenments: the Enlightenment which remained nourished by the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Enlightenment which cut itself off from God. The former led to the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the abolition of slavery, and the Civil Rights movement. The latter led to the French Revolution, to the Reign of Terror, to the suppression of church by state, to Marx and Nietzsche, to Socialism, and Communism, and more recently to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of cultural relativism where human rights are looked upon as relative rather than universal.</p>
<p>It’s unlikely that a pure secularism—even a humanistic, enlightened secularism—can be the foundation for resisting an aggressive Islam. It’s precisely “enlightened” secularism that produced the spiritual and population vacuum in Europe which is now being filled by Islam. John Lennon invited us to imagine “no religion”… “nothing to kill or die for.” In Europe they don’t have to imagine anymore. Having lost their religion, many are discovering that post-Christian values may not, after all, be worth fighting and dying for—all the more so for those who are getting on in years, and are hoping the really bad things won’t happen in their lifetimes. The new motto for many middle –aged Europeans seems to be “Apres moi le dhimmitude.”</p>
<p>Which culture is more likely to protect human rights and freedoms against totalitarian movements? A thoroughly secular culture which has cut itself off from a transcendent reference point? Or a culture imbued with the Judeo-Christian belief that human beings possess an inalienable, God-given dignity? It’s one of those non-academic questions to which the wrong answer might prove fatal. And final exam time is fast approaching.</p>
<p><em>William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in </em><em>Front Page Magazine</em>, <em>First Things, Catholic World Report, the National Catholic Register, Jihad Watch, World</em>, and <em>Investor’s Business Daily.</em></p>
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		<title>The Warrior Code vs. The Da Vinci Code</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jun 2010 04:03:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Feminized Christianity meets alpha male Islam.]]></description>
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<p>We’ve grown accustomed to video images of ten-year-old boys in Palestinian training camps, dressed like mujahideen and wielding AK-47’s. Luckily, the West knows how to respond to such shows of aggressiveness. For instance, in the last few years “tag” and similar games have been banned from numerous school playgrounds in the U.K. and the U.S. on the grounds that they are “hazardous” and “inappropriate.” So there, take that, you little jihadist!</p>
<p>As it did in the seventh century, Islam is taking on the appearance of an unstoppable masculine force. But in the West the masculine spirit looks more like a ghost. In <em>The Suicide of Reason</em>, Lee Harris puts the matter in stark biological terms: “While we in the West are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless.”</p>
<p>Sounds like Harris is talking war, but in reality his book is more about cultural conflict than armed conflict. War isn’t necessary if the males of one culture can cow those of another culture into submission. Such intimidation might seem unlikely in the U.S. where the percentage of Muslims in the population is in the vicinity of one percent. Still, very small but determined minorities can sometimes impose their will on much larger majorities. For example, homosexuals make up only two to three percent of the population, yet gay activists have been highly successful in advancing the twin agendas of same-sex marriage and gays in the military. Likewise, thanks to CAIR and other activist groups, Muslims in this country have already begun to wield an outsize influence.</p>
<p>Then, too, there is the conversion factor. Conversions to Islam in the U.S. are hard to track, but as yet there seems to be no flood of conversions. On the other hand, during the first ten years of Muhammad’s ministry, Islam looked like an initial public offering that would go bust. Then, suddenly, Islam’s stock (in terms of conversions) went skyward and continued in that direction for centuries after. In short, conversion rates can accelerate dramatically. At certain tipping points in history, time seems to “speed up” and decades of change are compressed into years. Are we at such a tipping point now?</p>
<p>In line with Harris’ alpha male musings, the one place where conversions to Islam are exploding is in the U.S. prison system. Roughly 80 percent of inmates who find faith during their incarceration choose Islam. That works out to 30,000 conversions per year among federal prisoners. Many of the men are in prison in the first place because they were attracted to the masculine world of gangs. And since Islam is doing a better job of appealing to basic masculine psychology, it seems the logical choice. It’s not for nothing that the progenitor of all current jihadist groups is called “the Muslim Brotherhood.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Christianity, which ought to be the rival for the affections of wayward young men, seems to be undergoing a prolonged sexual-identity crisis. There is a serious problem in Christianity today, but it’s the exact opposite of the one the popular media focuses on. To read the papers and certain works of popular fiction you would think that the main problem with Christianity is that it’s too patriarchal: no women in the priesthood, no voice for women, no recognition of the divine feminine.</p>
<p>But the reality is a different matter. Look around you the next time you’re in church, and count the ratio of women to men. Normally, it’s about two-to-one in favor of the women. Moreover, women are much more involved in church activities. The Notre Dame Study of Parish Life showed that 80 to 85 percent of those involved in parish ministries or in teaching religion were women. As one writer put it, “the Roman Catholic Church has a rather rigid division of labor. The men have the priesthood, the women have everything else.” As for Protestants, all the mainline denominations have female priests or pastors, and the Episcopal Church even has a female Presiding Bishop (who prayed to “our mother Jesus” at her installation). About twenty-five percent of Episcopal priests are women, as are about twenty-nine percent of Presbyterian pastors. But this has failed to produce the miracle of renewal that Catholic advocates assure us will follow upon women’s ordination. Instead, mainline congregations have dwindled. As recently as 1960, mainline churches accounted for forty percent of American Protestants. Today it’s about twelve percent. If present trends continue, the mainline churches will end up with an all female clergy, preaching to mostly female congregations in the few remaining churches that haven’t been converted to mosques or condominiums.</p>
<p>Contrary to what liberal Christians think, the feminization of Christianity is not the solution to the problem, it is the problem. Christianity is unattractive to many, not because it is perceived as too masculine, but because it’s perceived as too feminine. Moreover, when you add the gospel of the divine feminine to the fact of lopsided church attendance, the problem only gets worse. <em>Da Vinci Code</em> theology is highly titillating, but it won’t bring the men flocking back to the churches. Men have enough trouble as it is with female spirituality and with sentimentalized hymns and sermons. To think that the notion of Jesus as the first feminist will sit well with them is sheer fantasy. Men are not inclined to take up their daily crosses to follow the androgynous one. If men can be persuaded that the picture of Jesus presented in <em>The Da Vinci Code</em> is the true one, that gives them one more reason to avoid church.</p>
<p>But many Christian leaders still don’t get it. As David Morrow points out in <em>Why Men Hate Going to Church</em>, many of the songs now sung in church “have the same breathless feel as top forty love songs.” In addition, women are now encouraged by some Christian pastors and writers to think of Jesus in frankly romantic terms. Naturally enough, such forms of piety tend to create psychological barriers for men. The idea of Christ as our brother challenges a man to become a better man, but the idea of Christ as boyfriend is challenging in a different sense.</p>
<p>A feminized Christianity may work to attract a certain type of man, but he’s probably not the man you want around when the local Imam starts practicing taqiyya on your congregation. When Islam, history’s most hyper-masculine religion, is experiencing a worldwide revival and is looking to recruit more young men to its ranks, it might not be the best time for the Church to emphasize its feminine side. So, Christians had better address the feminization and emasculation of Christianity in a serious way if they hope to counter the attractions of Islam. Churches that are long on sensitivity and short on manpower might want to lay in a supply of prayer rugs.</p>
<p>Of course, feminization is not just a problem for Christians, but also for the culture as a whole. If Islam is all about submission, Western culture, of late, seems to be all about submissiveness. Each day brings news of some abject accommodation to Islamic law or practices. The latest is the American Academy of Pediatrics’ decision (now apparently reversed) to sanction a less radical form of female genital cutting as a concession to Islamic cultural traditions.</p>
<p>It’s also telling that in Europe, where Christianity exerts much less influence, the submissiveness is more pronounced. So feminization and its attendant emasculation are not problems that are specific to Christianity. Nevertheless, because it’s a large part of American culture, the health of Christianity ought to be of concern to all. Our culture derives much of its strength from its Christian faith, but a Christianity without a strong masculine presence won’t be able to keep young men from defecting to the religion of guns n’ poses. There are a lot of young men in our world who are uncertain whether to follow the sign of the crescent moon or the sign of the cross, but it’s a good bet not many of them will be interested in following the “yield” sign which some contemporary Christians have taken as their emblem.</p>
<p><strong>William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in FrontPage Magazine, First Things, the National Catholic Register, Catholic World Report, World, Jihad Watch, and Investor’s Business Daily.</strong></p>
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		<title>Harry Potter and the Vanishing Jihad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/harry-potter-and-the-vanishing-jihad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=harry-potter-and-the-vanishing-jihad</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 May 2010 04:02:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[corridors of power]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Has J.K. Rowling sent us a coded message?]]></description>
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<p>The threat from Islam seems to be growing. For example, the last twelve months saw the largest number ever of attempted and successful terrorist attacks on American soil. Meanwhile, books such as Paul Sperry’s <em>Infiltration,</em> and Sperry and David Gaubatz’s <em>Muslim Mafia </em>warn that Muslim Brotherhood agents have penetrated deep into the corridors of power and influence.</p>
<p>Yet official America is still in denial. The words “jihad,” “Islam,” “Islamic terrorism” and just plain “terrorism” are off-limits in polite government and military circles. Attorney General Eric Holder couldn’t even bring himself to use the term “radical Islam” when questioned on the subject the other day. At the same time, the mainstream media continue to deny that Islamic beliefs are the main factor in terrorist attacks. Thus, several reporters portrayed Faisal Shazhad, the Times  Square bomber, as just another case of mortgage meltdown. Meanwhile, Comedy Central prudently decided that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Depicted will not be depicted. And amazingly, the people who point to the increasing threat from Islam are still written-off as “alarmists.” Sometimes, as in the cases of Mark Steyn, Geert Wilders, and others, the “alarmists” are hauled before courts and tribunals to answer for their alarmism.</p>
<p>Every once in a while, for sanity’s sake, you need to take a break from such grim reports. So today I’m recommending you pull yourself away from the bad news on the blog sites, and escape into the world of fantasy. Take a breather. Ease up on yourself. For example, you could immerse yourself for a few days in one of the “Harry Potter” series. Forget about the jihad. Instead, transport yourself to the magical world of Hogwarts.</p>
<p>You could, for instance, pick up book five of the series, <em>Harry Potter and the Order of the </em><em>Phoenix</em><em>. </em>It’s almost as long as <em>War and Peace</em>, so it will provide many hours of diversion. Moreover, it’s a well-written, cleverly plotted book with plenty of mystery, humor, sharply drawn characters, and inventive gadgets. As with the other books in the series, the plot revolves around the struggle between Harry and his nemesis, Voldemort—who is referred to throughout as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” Hah, hah! Clever literary device, that. You know we’re safely in the realm of fantasy when people can’t even bring themselves to name the threat which faces them.</p>
<p>The story starts out with Harry being summoned before a court hearing at the Ministry of Magic. The charge?—unauthorized use of his wand in Muggle territory. Harry used his wand to repel an attack by creatures now in the employ of Voldemort—in effect, a terrorist attack. But since no one at the Ministry of Magic will believe that Voldemort has returned, they insist that Harry has made up the story. The Ministry, in short, is in denial about the threat from Voldemort. It’s also in denial about the extent of the infiltration of the Ministry by Voldemort’s agents.</p>
<p>Harry is (just barely) acquitted of the charge against him, but he remains the target of a media smear campaign that portrays him as an alarmist. <em>The Daily Prophet,</em> the most influential of the Wizarding community’s newspapers, never misses a chance to discredit Harry for warning about non-existent dangers. At the same time, its editors repeatedly ignore or deny rumors about Voldemort’s re-emergence.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a climate of political correctness has settled over the school. The new headmistress, Professor Umbridge (in reality, a Ministry plant), teaches a course in “Defense against the Dark Arts” which effectively leaves her students defenseless. The newly revised course is purely theoretical and provides no actual practice of defensive spells. From now on, Professor Umbridge informs them, the class will learn about defensive skills “in a secure, risk-free way.” When Harry and Hermione complain that they will be left unprepared to deal with the dark forces, Professor Umbridge counters that they have nothing to fear: “…you have been informed that a certain Dark wizard is at large again. This is a lie…the Ministry of Magic guarantees that you are not in danger from any Dark wizard.”</p>
<p>Alas, as you can see, <em>Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix </em>isn’t going to provide much relief from jihad anxiety. Substitute Muhammad or Islam for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the Obama administration for the Ministry of Magic, Geert Wilders or Mark Steyn for Harry, and you’ve got the main story of our times—one that also involves re-emergent dark forces, stealth infiltrations, denial, and neutered school curriculums. For <em>The Daily Prophet</em> you could substitute <em>The New York Times</em> or the <em>Times</em> of London, and for Professor Umbridge you could substitute all those teachers and professors who, by whitewashing Islam, leave their students unprepared for the reality they will one day face.</p>
<p>Is J.K. Rowling’s fifth book actually a roman-a-clef?—that is, a novel describing real life under the cover of fiction. Is she sending us a hidden message in the style of <em>The Da Vinci Code</em>? Rowling lives in England, after all, and she must surely have noticed that cultural jihad is far advanced there. One report says that the Muslim population of England is growing at a ten times faster rate than the native population. And the growing population is becoming more aggressive. When Geert Wilders visited England after initially being banned by the UK government, some of the Muslim protesters called for his head—literally. In reply to this kind of belligerence, official England has responded more or less like Chamberlain at Munich. “Jihad” and “Islamic terrorism” were long ago dropped from the Establishment lexicon. The schools have deleted the Holocaust and the Crusades from the curriculum out of deference to Muslims. And the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, fittingly, looks like a wizard out of central casting) has resigned himself to the establishment of some forms of Sharia law.</p>
<p>Was Rowling making a veiled comment on the surrender of her society to Islam by a craven elite? It’s difficult to say, of course. Maybe she had something more conventional in mind—perhaps, the failure of the Establishment to warn sufficiently about the dangers of global warming. Or maybe the scene with Professor Umbridge was meant to allude to the failure of British schools to provide the kind of practical sex education that would prepare students to defend against sinister strains of STD’s.</p>
<p>But if she was alluding to the threat from Islam, you can see why it had to be veiled. <em>Wikipedia</em> informs us that the reasons an author might choose a roman-a-clef format include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Writing      about controversial topics and/or reporting inside information on scandals      without giving rise to charges of libel.</li>
<li>Avoiding      self-incrimination or incrimination of others that could be used as      evidence in civil, criminal or disciplinary proceedings.</li>
</ul>
<p>Good reasons to be careful what you say—especially in England where it is quite difficult to defend against libel charges, and where “hate crime” laws are often interpreted so as to make criticism of Islam a criminal matter.</p>
<p>Imagine if Ms. Rowling had written a short opinion piece expressing her fears about the stealth Islamization of England. You can bet that before you could say “Expecto Patronum” she’d be brought up, like Harry, before some court on charges of defamation or hate speech. Or better make that “unauthorized hate speech.” If you want to write something hateful about Jews or Christians or Geert Wilders, no one will bother you. But in today’s England, just as in Harry Potter’s parallel England, you really can be arrested for warning about a danger that no one wants to admit.</p>
<p>Young people, they say, are the hope of the future. But not if they don’t wake up and begin to understand the present. When the Potter books first appeared years ago, it was reported that librarians and teachers were delighted. Young people were reading again! Ah, yes, the joy of reading. But part of the enjoyment in reading certain stories lies in making the connections to real life. What if there is never any moment of recognition—never any point where one sees the connection between what one reads and the world one lives in?</p>
<p>Young people may delve into imaginative fiction, but they live in a very unimaginative world—one that more or less forbids them to make any connections other than the officially approved ones. You can read <em>The Crucible</em> and have class discussions about McCarthyism, just don’t talk about contemporary witch hunts conducted by the politically correct. You can read <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>, but just remember that it’s an allegory about the threat of atomic weapons, and the destruction of the environment. Professor Tolkien never meant to say that certain traditions and cultures were superior to other traditions and cultures.</p>
<p>There are some important lessons to be learned from <em>Harry Potter and</em> <em>the Order of the Phoenix</em>. And it would be nice to think that legions of young people are taking them to heart. But today’s youngsters (as well as the not so young) have been conditioned to believe what the Wizarding community has been conditioned to believe: that there is no danger, no dark forces mustering, no need to worry about deception and infiltration. And, although our leaders and teachers talk incessantly about “change,” they have somehow managed to convince us that nothing momentous or world changing could ever really happen in our times. Very few seem prepared to even imagine the kind of epic change that Islamization would bring. And very few are prepared for the kind of epic struggle that may be needed to halt it. So thanks to J.K. Rowling, whether she intended it or not, for reminding us that epic struggles sometime occur in real life as well as in fantasies.</p>
<p><strong>William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in <em>FrontPage Magazine, First Things, Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Jihad Watch, World</em>, and <em>Investor’s Business Daily.</em></strong></p>
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		<title>The Wrong Man</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/the-wrong-man/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-wrong-man</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 May 2010 04:06:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benedict]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Geert Wilders is on trial in the Netherlands, but who should the authorities really be prosecuting?]]></description>
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<p>It’s a standard plot device in thrillers and spy movies: the police arrest or detain the wrong man—in fact, the only man who can stop the real murderer or foil the spies. Think of <em>the Thirty Nine-Steps</em>, one of Hitchcock’s first masterpieces. Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) has information that could prevent an international ring of spies from securing vital military secrets. Do the police believe him? No, instead they aggressively pursue him across England and Scotland for a murder he didn’t commit.</p>
<p>The same formula is a staple in science fiction and monster movies. The authorities—police, military or CIA—detain the one person who has the code or the formula or the knowledge that will destroy the monster or prevent the aliens from conquering the planet. And, invariably, the authorities are portrayed as obtuse, unimaginative types, who can’t seem to grasp the big picture.</p>
<p>What brings such movies to mind is the recently hatched high-brow plan to arrest the Pope. In April, Geoffrey Robertson, a high-ranking United Nations jurist, called on the British government to detain Pope Benedict XVI when he visits England in September. Robertson wants the UK to send the pope to the International Criminal Court to be tried for “crimes against humanity.” Robertson is backed up by celebrity atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. According to <em>the London Times,</em> Dawkins and Hitchens have commissioned Robertson and Mark Stephens, a solicitor, to draw up a justification for legal action.</p>
<p>Let’s see…Islamic religious leaders in the UK and around the world are spewing hatred at Christians and Jews, and are calling for the destruction of Israel, the murder of homosexuals, the imposition of Sharia law in Europe, and the defeat of “the Great Satan” (the U.S.). Oh, and they want the right to marry twelve-year-olds—maybe as many as four per man. But according to the twisted logic of the West’s self-appointed virtue police, it’s time to lock up the Pope.</p>
<p>Not that the Pope is the one man who can save the world from domination by Islam. Rather, he is representative of the handful of men and women who fully realize the threat from Islam, and who, in a sense, possess the formula or special knowledge necessary to halt the imposition of an alien moral order on the West.</p>
<p>Before he became Pope, Benedict wrote a series of books and papers which explained why an alien culture (not just Islam, but primarily a rootless secularism) was taking over Europe. Europe, he said, had succumbed to a “dictatorship of relativism” which opened the door to values based only on fickle opinion, or else on brute force. The “formula” for saving the West which Benedict offered is the recognition of God-given rights that “belong to man <em>by nature</em>”—“values that cannot be modified.”</p>
<p>Likewise, in defending the Universal Declaration of Human Rights before the United Nations in 2008, the pope said that human rights should not yield to a “relativistic conception” whereby “their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks.” In case you’re wondering why the UN’s own Declaration of Human Rights has to be defended in the UN, consider that the largest voting block in the UN now is the 56-state strong Organization of the Islamic Conference. Many of the OIC member states are quite adamant in maintaining that Sharia law takes precedence over Western declarations of human rights. And from a multicultural/cultural relativism perspective, who can gainsay them? That’s why Benedict insists that the multicultural experiment won’t work if it’s cut off from its Western/Christian roots. It’s no accident that the Declaration was composed for the most part by people who had grown up in Christian cultures, and had inherited a social conscience that had been formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition. But what are the odds that today’s Islamic-friendly assembly of multiculturalists at the UN would be willing to approve the Declaration if it were put to the vote again?</p>
<p>Will the pope be arrested? Probably not—not this year, anyway. Others who won’t genuflect to the dictatorship of relativism haven’t been so lucky. Mark Steyn was hauled before three Canadian Human Rights courts on hate speech charges for simply observing that population trends would someday turn Europe into a branch of the Muslim world. Like Benedict, Steyn is also guilty of pointing out that a culture of relativism is essentially a suicidal culture. If the Steyn trials were a movie, the audience would be justified in thinking, “What thick-headed dunces. They’ve got the wrong man!” As more and more ordinary people are discovering, criticism of Islamic aggressiveness isn’t the problem, the problem is Islamic aggressiveness.</p>
<p>Or take the case of Geert Wilders. Wilders is on trial in the Netherlands for…you guessed it, “Islamophobia.” He’s also charged with the crime of calling for a halt to Islamic immigration—immigration which, according to Wilders, constitutes a threat to freedom and human rights. It’s another case of the wrong man. Wilders is one of the few European leaders who is calling attention to the real danger, and is trying to do something about it. Let’s conjure up a bit of B-movie dialogue:</p>
<p>Wilders. “I’m telling you it’s out there, and it’s getting closer! We have to alert   people before it’s too late!</p>
<p>Dutch cops. “Tell it to the judge, buster; we’re bringing you in for questioning.”</p>
<p>In Austria, meanwhile, criminal charges have been filed against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a self-described mother and feminist, and a leader of the anti-jihad group Citizens’ Movement Pax Europa. Her crimes?—the usual charges: hate speech, defamation of religion, and Islamophobia. Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff has been in the habit of saying threatening things such as “I want to preserve Europe,” and “…sharia cannot be reconciled with democratic principles and universal human rights.” This time it’s a case of the wrong woman. If her story were a film, the appropriate audience response would be: “Wake up you idiots! Don’t you see what’s happening?”</p>
<p>It would be possible to add several others to the list. For example, the late Oriana Fallaci had to flee Europe to avoid being tried on charges of defaming Islam. Before her death Fallaci expressed a strong affinity to Pope Benedict, and like Benedict she was a stout defender of human rights. The point is this: nowadays, when they “round up the usual suspects” (to borrow Captain Renault’s memorable phrase), the suspects turn out to be the leading defenders of Western civilization.</p>
<p>Of course, the pope hasn’t been arrested, the cases against Steyn were dropped, and the fate of Wilders and Sabaditsch-Wolff has yet to be determined. Still, if no one has actually been locked up, all of these people have been effectively tied up. It takes an enormous amount of time, energy and resources to defend oneself in court or to defend against a media blitz. Time is particularly of the essence in such situation. As every moviegoer understands, at such times there’s no time to waste. As the looming disaster draws nearer, you don’t want the ones who might avert it being tied up, either literally or figuratively.</p>
<p>One might counter that in the case of the plan to arrest Pope Benedict, there were real crimes and real cover-ups involving both priests and bishops. But the whole point of the Hitchens/Dawkins/Robertson initiative is not to punish the actual perpetrators, but to indict the whole Catholic Church, as some sort of global conspiracy of perverts directed by the pope. Thus, the pope is supposedly guilty of “obstructing justice on a global scale” (Hitchens), and the Catholic Church is a “truth-hating, child-raping institution” (Dawkins). Moreover, according to the <em>National Post,</em> one of the specific charges being assembled against the pope is “child sexual slavery.”</p>
<p>Anyone who has been closely following the abuse story knows that this is pretty much the reverse of the truth. From the point in 2001 when the sex abuse cases where transferred to his office, and he became fully aware of the extent of the abuse, Cardinal Ratzinger moved swiftly and decisively to clean up what he referred to as “the filth” in the Church. Once again, it’s a case of the wrong man. But in this case quite a bit of damage has already been done. According to a recent CBS News poll, forty percent of Catholics in America say that the abuse scandals have caused them to doubt the Vatican’s authority. The attacks on the pope have insured that the next time he warns about the dangers to the West, fewer will be listening.</p>
<p>I don’t know what part Hitchens, Dawkins and company think they are playing in the high-stakes drama that is now unfolding across the world, but it looks like they have stumbled into the role of the clueless authorities in the movies who can’t see the real danger. Probably the best movie analogy is the scene in <em>Dr. Strangelove</em> where Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn) is holding Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) at gunpoint. As you may recall, General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has gone bonkers, and ordered a wing of nuclear-armed B-52’s to attack Russia—an attack which will set off the Soviets’ world destroying “doomsday device.” Captain Mandrake is the only one who knows the secret code to recall the bombers, and thus save the world. But Colonel Guano doesn’t buy his story:</p>
<p>Mandrake. “Colonel! Colonel! I must know what you think has been going on here!”</p>
<p>Guano. “You know what I think?&#8230;I think you’re some kind of deviated prevert.  And I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were  organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts. Now move!”</p>
<p>Thanks to all the Bat Guanos of the world, and their inability to grasp the big picture, we are moving rapidly towards our own version of doomsday.</p>
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		<title>Christianity and Cultural Survival</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/christianity-and-cultural-survival/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=christianity-and-cultural-survival</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 May 2010 04:04:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[If a weakened Christianity invites an aggressive Islam, what is the prognosis for America? 
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				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/christ.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59476" title="christ" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/christ.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="274" /></a></p>
<p>The rise of Islam in Europe has been linked to a decline in Christianity and to a resulting loss of population. Does that mean that the U.S., a churchgoing nation with a healthy birth rate, is relatively immune to Islamization? Are we protected by our demographics?</p>
<p>Before answering that question, let’s review the situation in Europe. Church attendance in some European countries is down to five percent of the population. Polls in Denmark reveal that only nine percent of Danes say that religion is very important in their life. In Spain, 46 percent of Spaniards between the ages of 15 and 24 consider themselves atheists, and a poll of self-described Catholics in France found that 45 percent of them are unable to say what Easter celebrates. Meanwhile, in contrast to the empty Christian churches, the European mosques are overflowing.</p>
<p>The loss of faith seems to have brought with it a loss of cultural confidence. Increasingly, it is Muslims who dictate what can be published, what can be taught, and what can be said—even what works of art can be displayed. Now that the sign of the cross has been replaced by a relativistic shrug of the shoulders, the culture no longer seems worth defending. As Mark Steyn puts it, “You can’t help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world, Europe seems also to have lost faith in the seen one.”</p>
<p>There is also, of course, a direct link between loss of faith and loss of population. People who don’t believe they have anything meaningful to pass on to the next generation tend to stop generating—with the result that much of the next generation in Europe is being produced by people who are fond of naming their boys “Mohammed.” In a nutshell, the Islamic faithful were quick to fill the spiritual and population vacuums created by the decline of Christian faith.</p>
<p>If a weakened Christianity invites an aggressive Islam, what is the prognosis for America?  On the surface, Americans seem to have a strong Christian commitment. And on the surface America doesn’t seem to have a population problem.  But below the surface there are problems aplenty.</p>
<p>Here’s one indication of the problem: a recent study conducted by Georgetown shows that Catholic college students are less likely to pray and attend Mass after four years of exposure to a Catholic education. The study showed similar results for non-Catholic private religious colleges. Four years of education at Christian colleges and universities produced graduates who were less inclined to attend church, to pray, and to read scripture than they had been before college entrance.</p>
<p>The study is reinforced by several recent polls which reveal that America is less Christian than it once was. According to a <em>Newsweek</em> poll the percentage of self-identified Christians in the United   States has fallen from 86 percent of the population in 1990 to 76 percent today. In the same period the number of those who say they have no religion has nearly doubled from 8 to 15 percent. Among younger Americans, ages 18 to 29, a fourth classify themselves as agnostic, atheist, or of no religious faith.</p>
<p>How about that 76 percent that remain identified as Christians? Judging by the Georgetown study, you might not want to count on all of them, or even many of them, to stand shoulder to shoulder in resistance to cultural Islamization. In addition to cutting back on prayer, Bible reading, and church attendance, Christian students seem to acquire a more positive attitude toward activities—such as abortion and same-sex marriage—that were traditionally considered violations of the Christian moral code. Nowadays, the surest sign of your faith is a display of sensitivity to diversity. Education today—whether denominational or non-denominational—is mainly about learning the rules of relativism, and non-judgmentalism.  It seems safe to say that if they think about the matter much, students will tend to be non-judgmental about the Islamic faith, as well. Of course, a multicultural education more or less guarantees that people won’t give much thought to the matter because if all cultures, religions, and opinions are equal, what does it matter what people believe. Why bother to be better informed when you already know that all belief systems will turn out to be as innocuous and well-intentioned as your own?</p>
<p>This formation in relativism (which cuts across all age and class levels) also explains why the healthy American birth rate is not as healthy as it appears. Yes, it’s holding steady at the magic 2.1 replacement figure, but 41% of those births now occur out of wedlock. When applied to sexual morality the practice of non-judgmentalism produces tangible demographic results, and produces them in a relatively short period of time.  About 35 percent of white children are now born out of wedlock, as are 55 percent of Hispanic children, and 70 percent of black children.   And, as any cop, or school teacher, or single mother can attest, these trends quickly translate into trouble.  As they grow up, the boys in these fatherless families are particularly prone to school failure, delinquency, and gang activity. Sociologists say it has to do with the difficulty of establishing a masculine identity when there is no father in the home. Another way of putting it is that father absence tends to create an attraction to distorted masculine ideologies. Consider that the Nazi rise to power took advantage of the fact that a whole generation of German fathers had been lost in the First World War. Fatherless boys and young men growing up in the twenties and early thirties would have had a natural attraction to the exaggerated masculine ideology and trappings of the Nazi party.</p>
<p>Masculine identity, of course, is something that Islam specializes in. Sooner or later all these fatherless boys are going to notice that there’s a lot of hyper-masculine activity going on down at the local mosque. If you are going to join a gang, why not join the biggest, most powerful “gang” in the world. So, in the absence of traditional families, America’s respectable birth rate may only translate into more potential converts to Islam. Islamic activists, who are very savvy about such things, will no doubt devise ways to capitalize on rising illegitimacy rates—maybe something along the lines of:</p>
<blockquote><p>Send your boy to Shaheed Summer Camp. We’ll teach him discipline and give him a sense of purpose. Your boy will learn stealth infiltration, media intimidation, paramilitary maneuvers, and other exciting activities, all in a structured environment. Thanks to a generous donation from the Wahabbi Summer Camp Foundation we are able to offer free tuitions.</p></blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, many Christians seem to be caught up in a pre-9/11 time warp in which gender experimentation is still thought to be on the cutting edge of progress. Thus, at Catholic  Seattle University last year the first week of Lent was “Transgender Awareness Week” featuring a “Criss-Cross Day.” Cross-dressing exercises are also not uncommon in religious classes for Christian middle-schoolers. On a more mundane level, Christian children tend to get their religious education mainly from women—many of whom are still stuck in the tell-me-about-your-feelings method of pedagogy. In other words, the Christian churches aren’t offering much that might appeal to a boy in search of his manhood.</p>
<p>But that’s OK. Apparently there’s nothing to worry about out there, nothing that might require a little masculine assertiveness. Another finding of the Georgetown study was that students were much more likely to favor cuts in military spending as a result of their college education. Arms are for hugging, after all. In the world view of the modern multicultural Christian there are no enemies out there, only people who haven’t yet realized how much we respect their diversity.</p>
<p>It may be that 76 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians, but how many of those would be willing to take a stand against the Islamization of America? How many would even realize there is a threat? How many would understand that Islam requires the eventual subjugation of all other religions, and that resistance is therefore something of a Christian duty?</p>
<p>There are a lot of indications that the answer to both questions is “not many.” America has high rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and abortion. Popular entertainment is beginning to resemble the Roman circus, and sexual experimentation has become a national pastime. You would think that if the 76 percent were serious about their faith it would be reflected in the larger culture. Obviously, the numbers who are willing to resist the cultural tides must be fairly small. The question is, if American Christians can’t successfully resist abortion activists or the relatively small number of gay activists, and if they are unable to counter the steady sexualization of their children by the entertainment industry, how likely is it that they will be able to resist the efforts of dedicated and well-funded cultural jihadists—especially when those stealth jihadists know how to play on the typical American’s compulsive need to demonstrate his tolerance for differences?</p>
<p>In contrast to Europe, America has plenty of practicing Christians. It also has freer speech and a freer press. But not many of those Christians seem to feel a need to use their free speech rights to raise awareness about the threat from Islam. If Christian bookstores are any indication of their frame of mind, Christians seem more concerned about weight loss than loss of freedom. A remarkable number of Christian books are devoted to explaining God’s plan for you to shed your extra pounds—thus giving a whole new meaning to the term “Christianity Lite.” At the same time—once again, judging by the shelves full of books on the subject—God has plans for you to beef-up your finances, improve your marriage, and succeed in business. Islam, on the other hand, seems to be well down on the list of things that American Christians worry about.</p>
<p>I recently attended a seminar on the threat of cultural jihad sponsored by a large Jewish community center. The presentation contained some fairly scary information. Afterward, in the crowded foyer, I overheard a woman asking, of no one in particular, “Where are the Christians?” Answer: look for them on the treadmills in the gyms or in the diet aisles at Whole Foods. Well, not all of them, of course; a growing number of Christians and Christian leaders are waking up to the Islamic threat. Still, in regard to Islam, most Christians seem to be living in a comfortable dreamworld.</p>
<p><strong>William Kilpatrick’s articles on Islam have appeared in <em>Front Page Magazine, Jihad Watch, Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, World</em>, and <em>Investor’s Business Daily.</em></strong></p>
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