Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Fitzgerald: Countering Da'wa In American Prisons

FBI Director Robert Mueller was recently quoted saying that American prisons were "fertile ground for extremists." And a 2006 study, "Out of the Shadows," said that "tight-knit communities of Muslims in prison are ripe for radicalization, and could easily become terrorist cells." That study is three years old. Mueller's warning is not brand-new either. It is not only that already existing “tight-knit communities of Muslims in prison” are “ripe for radicalization, and could easily become terrorist cells.” It is also that there are numbers of people who, already alienated from society and already dangerous to it, find their solace not in a turn to Christianity, where the outcome is likely to be far different, but in an acceptance of Islam. For Muslim missionary activity goes on unmonitored and unchecked all because the Bureau of Prisons, and the FBI and the CIA and others whose duty it is to recognize and thwart dangers to this country, dangers to its legal and political institutions and physical dangers to its citizens, are afraid to recognize that what Islam inculcates in these prisoners gives them an ideological framework, a justification, for their hostility to the circumambient “Infidel” society. Islam offers them a view of the universe in which the central theme is Us and Them -- Muslims against all non-Muslims, with the duty of every Muslim to promote and protect only Islam, to be loyal only to fellow Muslims, to do whatever it takes to engage in the “Jihad” or “struggle” to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. And that “struggle” can, but need not where it is ineffective, include violence.

How big is the problem? According to a report in The Times, 30,000 to 40,000 prisoners, mostly black, convert to Islam every year. What has been done since the problem has been identified? What members of Congress, what people who are responsible for protecting us, have not only identified this problem, or part of it (as the authors of the 2006 study above did) but suggested ways for it to be dealt with? It is not enough to take at face value the claims of this or that Muslim chaplain who ostentatiously expresses his “horror” at, say, the just-publicized case of the four would-be Muslim terrorists, three of whom, apparently on their Spiritual Search, were easy prey for Muslim missionaries and became Muslims. That did not mean they had to do more than repeat the Profession of Faith, and one doubts that they knew a great deal about many aspects of Islam, including its ban on music and on most forms of artistic expression. And of course they would have had Islam presented to them as a vehicle for carrying their resentment against America or Amerikkka, rather than as a vehicle of Arab supremacism.

30,000 to 40,000 new recruits, in the main black prisoners (who in turn will help others similarly situated to accept Islam), to the Army of Islam, right smack in the middle of the United States. No need for green cards, no need to get past the (admittedly-porous) borders, no need to attempt to get in, because these new Recruits to the Army of Islam are already, you see, in like Flynn.

You may be one of those dreamy souls, like George Bush, who believes that “religion” is always and everywhere a Good Thing. Being Born Again saved him from alcoholism, saved him from being the family scapegrace, so what could be wrong with something called a “religion”? Or if you are embarrassed to exercise the distinguishing faculty that men possess, you may not want to look any further into Islam because, as one person heatedly told me the other day, “I don’t need to read the Qur’an, I don’t need to find out anything more” about Islam. A hopeless case, but not a unique or even a rare one. We have all been led to believe that people are naturally curious, that they have a deep desire to find things out. Is this true? When it comes to Islam, one discovers that the desire not to find things out is in many people far stronger than the desire to find them out. They don’t want to study, they don’t want to investigate, for fear, one suspects, of what they would discover, and then would somehow have to deal with -- and their limited worldview does not provide them with the means to adequately handle this new information.

And that is perhaps what happens among those who have been entrusted with protecting us. They don’t know how to handle the problem of prisons as Recruiting Outfits for Islam. They don’t dare discuss the national security implications. They believe that somehow the problem will “just have to take care of itself” or someone else will handle it, or something. This is not what we expect. This is not what we deserve. We should have, all over the government, people who understand the ideology of Islam, who follow, for example, very closely what is happening all over the countries of Western Europe, who recognize the futility of expecting “reforms” to Islam that might be accepted by the great mass of Muslims. (All the money flung at Bright Young Muslim Reformers by the Carnegie Foundation, year after year after year, is essentially based on a willful misunderstanding of Islam, in the case of Carnegie perhaps prompted by the dreamy childhood memories of Tabriz that Vartan Gregorian has so disastrously conflated with his understanding of Islam.) We need people in government who are soberly determined to counter, to check, the onward march of Islam, including the campaigns of Da’wa that are targeted to the economically and psychically marginal -- and prisons are full of the economically and psychically marginal.

Of course, if Islam is only a “religion” and not a Total Belief-System with a clear politics and politics, if it is not only a “religion” but a “religion of peace” of which non-Muslims have nothing to fear, then none of this will worry you. But what if, despite all attempts to shut you up and shut your mind down, you persist in taking in news from around the world, including the observable behavior of Muslims toward non-Muslims in both Muslim lands and in non-Muslim lands? What if then, to make matters worse, you dare to find out what is in the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira? And what if then, to make matters even worse, you read more and more in the legitimate Western scholarship (no venal espositos need apply) on Islam? And what if the more you study and the more you read and the more you observe, day after day after day, you cannot avoid becoming more convinced of the need to check those campaigns of Da’wa?

What can be done if so many in the Bureau of Prisons, the FBI, the CIA, the Congress, the Executive Branch, will not dare study the texts and tenets of Islam? What can be done if they willfully refuse to study the 1350-year history of Islamic conquest, and the diminishment of the various populations of non-Muslims -- Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others, under Muslim rule in formerly non-Muslim lands? What can be done?

Plenty. For in this country there are still powerful forces outside the government that can recognize the problem and provide their own faith-based, rather than fate-based, ameliorations. The Christian chaplains and missionaries may continue, as before, to offer what they offer to prisoners. But instead of relying on the message of Christianity (and any prisoner who becomes a devout Christian is a prisoner who is likely to be far less of a menace, or no menace at all), they must also work to immunize those most targeted by the missionaries of Islam. That means to go on the offensive, and to explain to prisoners a number of things that Muslim missionaries will have kept from them.

What are those things? First, it should be noted that Islam does not offer reconciliation, but rather offers a means to continue with one’s resentments, one’s hatreds, this time given a Muslim cast, with the enemy now consisting of Infidels, those ungrateful Kuffar who stand in the way of Islam’s rightful dominance.
But that is just the beginning. The Islamic ban on music, for example, is not a trivial matter. Think of all the music -- start with the irresistible gospel music that is part of the legacy of black America, and note that such music could never have been created, not for one minute, in a Muslim society. There is music in churches. There is no music in mosques, and the most fanatical Muslims are, right now, smashing stores that sell musical instruments, smashing radios that broadcast music, killing singers of Rai (a kind of folk music) in Algeria, and even wedding-singers in Afghanistan. Make that clear, and even give lists of all the different kinds of music, and singers, who would not for one minute be tolerated in Islam by those who take their Islam seriously. And add to that sculpture, and most kinds of painting. And mention, too, that word “slave” that comes so trippingly to Muslim tongues and minds. In Islam, the individual does not matter. In collectivist Islam, the individual is a “slave of Allah.”

What about Islam as a force for “social justice”? One often hears this said. Is it true? Is the distribution of wealth better in Muslim countries? Aren’t the fabulously rich Muslims disinclined to share their wealth -- wealth which they did nothing to earn, but ordinarily receive because they control the levers of power in the government, so that they either take a huge cut of the oil revenues that rightly belong to all the people of the country? Think of the Al-Saud, and the trillions they have appropriated to themselves, to their princes and princelings and princelettes. Think of the Al-Sabah in Kuwait, the Al-Thani in Qatar, the Al-thisses and thatses in the U.A.E. Then describe, for the sake of that Immunization Against Islam project, just how the poor are treated in those countries. Describe, for example, the life of the laborers from the subcontinent who live 20 to a room, and receive a few dollars a day, in Saudi Arabia and the sheikdoms. Describe how they have no rights, no legal appeal, and can be treated with impunity any way that their Saudi and other Arab masters wish to treat them. Describe, too, how the Saudi or Kuwaiti masters treat their domestic servants, females, mostly from Asia. Bring in those stories of the girls who sometimes, when their masters visit or live in London or Washington or Miami, manage to escape and tell their horrifying tales.

And do more. Emphasize, for black prisoners, the role of slavery in Islam, which is forever legitimized by the Qur’an and the Sunnah (the practices of the earliest Muslims, including Muhammad). Muhammad himself owned slaves. And slavery was never abolished by the efforts of Muslims, but done only under the pressure from outside, non-Muslim powers. It was the French who ended slavery in North Africa. It was the British who halted the African slave trade run by Arabs out of the Arabian Peninsula -- with the slave-holding pens in Pemba and Zanzibar that were once considered part of the domains of the then-Sultan of Muscat and Oman. The Arabs continued to lord it over black Africans in Pemba and Zanzibar right up to the mid-twentieth century, until a black African revolt against Arab masters gave Zanzibar and Pemba to what had been Tanganyika, and became Tanzania.

Make sure the history of the Arab slave trade in black Africa is known. Let prisoners who might otherwise respond to the siren song of the Muslims conducting Da’wa be given not so much theological arguments as arguments based on the historical, and continuing, mistreatment of blacks by Arabs. The Arab slave trade in Africa, for example, began much earlier, and ended much later, and caused far more deaths, millions more, than did the Atlantic Slave Trade. Use the information in “The Hideous Trade” by Hogedoorn, a study of the conduct, and mortality rates for the black Africans, in the Arab slave trade, which was primarily a trade in young black boys. The Arabs would seize them and then castrate them on the spot, using primitive instruments. Those who survived the initial operation would then be taken, by slave coffle and then dhow, to the slave markets of Islam -- Jiddah, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Constantinople. Hoogedoorn estimates that about 90% of those seized by the Arabs did not survive the to make it to those slave markets to be sold as eunuchs for the harems of well-off Muslims.

As part of that counter-Da’wa, make sure to include reports on the present-day enslavement of blacks, that continues, we know, in the Sudan (where Christian aid groups have managed to “buy the freedom” of some black slaves from their Arab masters), and in Mali. And we also know that Saudi Arabia formally, under Western pressure, abolished slavery only in 1962 (before the rise of OPEC, and the concomitant and quite unnecessary fear of offending the Saudis in any way). For this, why not involve the many black Sudanese -- the “Lost Boys” -- who are such attractive and convincing truth-tellers, and who now live in this country, and would no doubt be delighted to help prevent American blacks from falling for Muslim blandishments?
Enroll Colonel Ojukwu, the leader of the Christians who fought, as he put it in his Ohiara Declaration of 1969, against a "Jihad" being waged by Muslims, aided by outside Arabs, against them. Enroll Francis Bok and the "Lost Boys" of the Sudan, whose personal testimony about Arab Muslim mass-murders, and rapes, and looting, and enslavements, over many decades, against the inoffensive black African Christians and animists of the southern Sudan, cannot be denied. Enroll Tidiane N'Diaye, and other black African historians, whose names and works need to be far better known, and their works translated (if not originally in English) and distributed widely all over the United States and Great Britain and elsewhere, not only in Europe but, of course, in black Africa itself.

This can all be done. It relies only on a willingness to figure out what truths to tell, and how best to tell them. It does not obviate, nor get in the way of, Christian missionary activities that are based on a discussion of what Christianity teaches. But Christian missionaries also have to recognize that in order to win converts, they will have to recognize the malevolent competition of Islam, which if properly understood, should be seen as a vehicle for Arab supremacism. And though that Arab supremacism places the Arabs above all non-Arab Muslims, including Kurds, Berbers, and others, it is with special force, and a special racism, that Arabs lord it over black Africans, including those who are Muslim, as in Darfur.

Yes, don’t forget Darfur, either, and what it tells us about Muslim Arabs. For the entire Arab League has been running diplomatic interference for the Arabs committing genocide against black Africans in the southern Sudan, and among supposedly fellow Muslims in Darfur.

That’s a start. It doesn’t require the approval of the pusillanimous. It doesn’t require the government. It does require a recognition by those conducting Christian missionary activity that they must go on the offensive. And it does require support -- money -- made available by private groups, if the government remains so fearful, to pay black ministers, and chaplains, and others, for the creation of, and dissemination of, the relevant material. Let every black prisoner who is on or might be made to go on his Spiritual Search find out about Arab racism, the Arab slave trade in black Africa, the Arab pressure on black Africans, even the mass killing from the air of a million Ibos and other Christians by Egyptian (Arab Muslim) pilots during the Biafra War.

But first, it would be good if black ministers discussed this problem among themselves, and the need to recognize it, and to monitor the kinds of things that are said to get prisoners to be susceptible to campaigns of Da’wa. They are the best situated to identify the problem, and they are the only ones, one suspects, who can deal with it using the kind of materials mentioned here, at the very least to immunize more black prisoners against those campaigns of Da’wa. And once immunized, just possibly those prisoners will be more amenable to a quite different message, the message of Christianity, one which even the most convinced atheist should understand is a message to support, so that those who wish to find a way out of a dead-end will not view the universe through the picked-up prism of Islam. For in Islam one sees the Infidel -- and America is an Infidel land, with Infidel legal and political institutions and social arrangements -- as the permanent enemy. A prisoner who becomes a Muslim, even though he likely knows very little of Islam beyond the fact of what he has been told, and thinks he has no reason to disbelieve, has not had his disaffection cured, is not now ready for integration into society. He has merely been supplied with the ballast of a faith that supplies him with a Complete Explanation of the Universe. In the case of the four men just picked up because they had discovered Islam in prison, their Islam was un-nuanced and not worn down by time or custom. It was the pure thing, the thing undiluted and not on the rocks, and they were prepared to, were planning to, see Justice done by bombing synagogues and killing Jews and, in other attacks, to bring down a military plane and thus to kill soldiers “fighting Islam.” In other words, those who were once merely breakers of the law had become committed to committing what they now believed were not crimes, but rather part of the duty of a good Muslim. And every time such a mental transformation takes place, every time there is, among the already alienated and dangerous people whom prison pre-selects and then gathers as a literally captive audience for Muslims promoting Da’wa, the Call to Islam, another potential enemy is created within.

Let me end with one of the celebrated black African historians who has made the study of the Arabs and Africa his specialty. Here he is on youtube:

Le genocide voile -- the Hidden or Veiled Genocide -- appeared in 2008. This is not the only book on the subject, but it is a very good book, and the author, whom I saw recently on French television, being filmed in Africa, describes a subject that needs to be much better known -- starting with every black ministry, and every department of African or Afro-American Studies that wishes to tell the truth about black Africa, and the Arabs.

Alas, the author -- Tidiane N'Diaye -- speaks in French, and the tape has not been dubbed, or supplied with subtitles in English. But supplying translations of his works (and then distributing them in prisons), and similar works by other black Africans (including some Nigerian Christians), and even voice-overs in English for such things as this you-tube interview, is not beyond the wit, nor the pocket-book, of threatened Infidels, who need to start immunizing their own populations against Da’wa campaigns.

Go to it. Don’t let the Da’wa boys ride continued and dangerous roughshod over everyone else. There is one way to queer their pitch: identifying the likeliest points of purchase into the minds of those they target, and offering the truth, offering all kinds of home truths that have been neglected or not brought forth by Christian missionaries who have been too sweetly naïve in the limited nature of their own appeal. Muslim missionaries play on and exploit resentments and hatreds. Christians need not do that, but they do need to point out all the ways in which blacks have historically suffered, over many centuries, from Muslim and Arab oppression, and continue, in the Sudan and elsewhere, to do so today. Just the truth. And the truth shall make ye -- well, if not quite free, at least far less likely to willingly enslave yourself, mentally, to Islam, a vehicle for Arab supremacism.

Forget about our hopeless government. All those who care -- and you need not be a Christian conducting prison missionary activity to care -- should go to it.

Go to it. You have, after all, the truth on your side. And the Truth, in this case, Shall Certainly Make Ye Free.

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