Following yesterday’s dire but needed warning in essay format from Algeria, author William Kilpatrick expounds, via Islam’s Rise and the West’s Denial: Catholic World Report.
One thing that the West doesn’t grasp is that Islam is a political religion with political ambitions. Omar Ahmad, the co-founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations, has said that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith but to be dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” Numerous Islamic authorities have expressed similar sentiments. The supposedly moderate Imam Feisal Rauf, the initiator of the Ground Zero mosque project, wrote an article for the Huffington Post containing the observation, “What Muslims want is a judiciary (in the US) that ensures that the laws are not in conflict with the Qur`an and the Hadith.” What he means is that US law must be brought in line with Islamic sharia law. Since very many provisions of sharia law are considered criminal under US law, that would mean the overthrow of much of our legal code.
Many Catholics also fail to realize the political nature of Islam and imagine that a mosque, like a church, is simply a place of worship. But a mosque is more than that. Political and community issues are dealt with in a mosque, and calls to jihad are frequently issued in mosques. For example, many of the “Arab Spring” demonstrations were set in motion from mosques following the Friday sermons. Moreover, there are many instances of mosques being used for mentoring terrorists or for storing arms and explosives. According to a popular Muslim poem:
The mosques are our barracks,
the domes our helmets
the minarets our bayonets
And the faithful our soldiers
Many Muslims think of Islam not only as a religion but also as an army—an army with a mission of subjugation. That’s why the penalty for apostasy is death. Just as a deserter from an army in time of war may be punished with the death penalty, so also a deserter from the army of Islam.
The political nature of Islam ought to give pause to Catholics who think they can dialogue with Muslims in the same way they dialogue with Baptists or Jews. A recently concluded series of Catholic-Muslim dialogues sponsored by the USCCB highlights the problem. It turns out that the bishops’ dialogue partners are all members of Muslim activist groups with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. One of the counterparts, Sayyid Syeed, is a prominent figure in the Islamic Society of North America—a group that was designated as an unindicted co-conspirator in a massive terrorist funding scheme. One wonders if the bishops fully understand who they are dealing with.
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The recent revival of traditional, militant Islam is, in many respects, a reaction to that loss of faith. The new breed of Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood preachers are intent on recalling Muslims to the full practice of their faith—including the “forgotten obligation” of jihad.
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The attacks on Christianity are not rooted in a flaw in multiculturalism, but rather in the nature of multiculturalism. The multicultural creed is based on the fiction that all cultures, religions, and traditions are roughly equal. But there is no equivalence between the achievements of Western Christian civilization and Islamic civilization. In order to equalize them it’s necessary to pull down Christianity and the West while applying affirmative action whitewash to Islam. This, of course, leads to any number of bizarre double standards. For example, Mayor Tom Menino of Boston stated that the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain was not welcome in Boston because its president does not approve of gay marriage, while the same Mayor Menino has been very welcoming to Islamic groups that, in addition to wanting to abolish gay marriage, also want to abolish gays. Mayor Menino gave a speech at the ribbon-cutting ceremony of a very large mosque built by the Islamic Society of Boston. Not only that, he donated a $1.8 million parcel of municipal land to the project. One of the seven trustees of the Islamic Society of Boston is the world-renowned Imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who believes that gays should either be burned to death or thrown from a high place. So, in Boston, what’s sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the chicken fillet.
A more ominous development is that there now exists
a tacit alliance between radical secularists and radical Islam. The
most obvious example of this is the alliance between Islamic Iran and
leftist Venezuela, but there are many other examples. Leftist professors
regularly work with members of the Muslim Student Association (a Muslim
Brotherhood offshoot) toward furthering Islamic goals. The campaign
against the supposed hate crime of Islamophobia has been largely
engineered by the left. And the leftist Justice Department has done its
best to undercut the ability of law enforcement to investigate terrorist
activities. Muslims, for their part, quickly learned to employ the
methods pioneered by secular militants. Muslim activists groups
portrayed themselves as civil rights groups and labeled any resistance
to their agenda as hateful, bigoted, racist, and Islamophobic. At the
same time, these Muslim groups can rely on the secular media to portray
them in the best possible light.
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The US is on the same river as Europe, but not as
close to the falls. It appears, however, that it’s trying hard to catch
up. During the last three administrations, Muslim activists have worked
hard to gain positions of influence in the government, and with great
success. Muslim activist groups convinced the Department of Homeland
Security to delete words like “jihad,” “Islamist,” and “terrorist” from
their lexicon. In compliance with Muslim demands the Justice Department
ordered the military to delete from its training manuals any suggestion
that there is a connection between Islam and violence. And the State
Department played a major role in enabling the Muslim Brotherhood to
come to power in North Africa. Moreover, the State Department has been
working with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation for more than a
year toward the goal of establishing anti-blasphemy laws or something
akin to them. If the effort succeeds, criticism of Islam will then be a
crime—as it already in many European countries. Meanwhile, a steady flow
of Saudi money helps to ensure that college students learn only an
Islam-friendly version of history and current events.
At first glance it would appear that Islamization
is unlikely here because the Muslim population is small and, unlike
Europe, America is a churchgoing nation with a healthy birthrate. But
there is still reason for alarm.
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Islamization is not simply a numbers game. For an
analogy, consider that homosexuals make up only 2 to 3 percent of the
population, but have nevertheless exerted an outsize influence on public
policy and school curriculums. Of course, they have been able to do
this with the help of liberal elites in media, academia, the courts, and
the entertainment industry. But remember that Islamic activists have
the backing of the very same people.
Islamization won’t happen tomorrow in America, but
there is a distinct possibility that our children will grow up in an
America dominated by Islam. It’s not necessary to be a majority or
anywhere near a majority in order to dominate. Throughout history
Islamic warriors have managed to subdue populations much larger than
their own. If America is eventually subjugated, however, it won’t be the
result of armed jihad, but of cultural jihad—the steady incremental
advance of sharia law through agitation, propaganda, lawfare, political
activism, and infiltration of key governmental and educational
institutions. Many Muslim leaders have made it plain that they plan to
subjugate America under Islam. We should take them seriously.
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The first thing Christians need to do is inform
themselves about Islam. Christians, like secularists, tend to view Islam
through a multicultural lens and assume that Islam is like other
religions. But it is not. Islam is not a religion of peace, but a
religion of conquest that aims to subjugate non-Muslims. This isn’t just
a theory. Look at every nation where Muslims rule and you will find
that non-Muslims are assigned an inferior status. In studying Islam,
Christians will also find that the Jesus of the Koran is nothing at all
like the Jesus of the Gospels. In fact, he seems to have been introduced
into the Koran for the sole purpose of contradicting the Christian
belief in Jesus as the son of God. The Church also has an obligation to
more fully inform Catholics about Islam. The treatment of the subject in
Nostra Aetate andthe Catechism of the Catholic Church
are brief and inadequate. Catholics need to know a great deal more
about Islam and have to move beyond the simplistic assumption that
because God and Jesus and Mary are in the Koran, everything must be
okay.
As I said earlier, Christians must realize that
Islam is a political religion, and they need to be aware that religious
overtures on the part of Muslims are often nothing other than political
maneuvering. For example, Christians should avoid being pulled into
Islam’s anti-blasphemy/anti-defamation campaign, because the ultimate
goal of this campaign is to criminalize criticism of Islam. And, by the
way, simply to assert the divinity of Christ is a blasphemy of the
highest order according to the Koran.
Likewise, Christians should be careful about aligning themselves with
Islamic activist groups on religious freedom issues. When Muslim
leaders talk about freedom of religion, they mean freedom to practice
sharia—a legal, social, political, and theological system that is
inimical both to Christianity and the First Amendment. Muslim spokesmen
are quite willing to affirm their belief in religious freedom because
according to Islamic tradition there is only one religion—Islam. Under
Islamic law, all other religions are considered abrogated.Read the full interview at the link above.
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