creeping
Just like Obama and Clinton refused to name Boko Haram a terror organization. via Neil Munro at The Daily Caller.
U.S. Islamic leaders won’t try to formally excommunicate the Islamist
Boko Haram group unless they can meet with its leadership to debate the
religious legitimacy of its actions, a spokesman for a leading mosque
told The Daily Caller.
“There is a great reluctance to excommunicate someone by extension. …
It would be like convicting someone in absentia,” said Imam Johari
Abdul-Malik, the spokesman for the “Home of the Migrants” mosque, or Dar Al Hijrah mosque, in Falls Church Va. If crimes have been committed, the Nigerian government should punish the individuals, he added.
On May 7, Abdul Malik led a group of Muslim advocates at a press
conference at the National Press Club, where they denied that Islamic
strictures are shaping Boko Haram’s years-long campaign of killing and
kidnapping Christians.
“Islam is not the problem,” said Ahmed Bedier, a Florida-based
Islamic advocate. “We’re tired of people coming on television and asking
where does this ideology come from,” Bedier said. “Well, this ideology
comes from nowhere,” he insisted.
The Islamic leaders’ defensiveness was slammed by Rahil Raza, a Canadian Muslim who is working to modernize the faith.
Established Islamic leaders “have to look long and hard at the Sharia
[Islamic law] that Boko Haram is using … [because] it is an ideology of
violence,” said Raza, who is president of Muslims Facing Tomorrow,
a Canadian Islamic group. ”We’ve got to stop living in the past, stop
living in the 7th and 8th centuries and start living in the 21st
century,” she said.
At his May 7 event, Abdul-Malik urged Boko Haram to change its view
of Islam, even as he declined to challenge its religious claims. “Groups
like Boko Haram desire to take us back to a medieval … world where
kidnapping of women and girls and enslavement and rape are acceptable,”
he said.
“The world has changed … [and] in particular we are saying as modern day Muslims that we now reject all of these acts and that they are contrary to our faith,” he said.
However, Abdul-Malik didn’t promise any religious or political action
by U.S. Islamic groups. When pressed May 9 by TheDC to cite Islamic
texts that contradict Boko Haram’s Islamist arguments, Abdul-Malik
quickly ended the phone call.
The May 7 meeting highlighted the political and P.R. nightmare facing
U.S. Islamic groups as the mainstream media devotes hostile coverage to
the April kidnapping of roughly 276 unguarded girls — reportedly all of
whom were Christian — by the Nigerian-based Islamist group, informally
called Boko Haram.
But even some media outlets that have given sympathetic coverage to
the girls — plus White House and State Department officials —- have
repeatedly tried to downplay the Islamist ideology that powers Boko
Haram, and have instead suggested that the group’s members are merely rebels against corrupt government and poverty.
But those suggestions don’t explain why the group has killed thousands of Christian civilians, launched numerous bomb and suicide-bomb attacks against schools and churches, and has kidnapped more than 200 teenage girls for possible sale in slave markets.
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