Tag Archive for: AFDI

The trouble with ‘moderate Muslims’

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nonie darwish book coverAmerican Freedom Defense Initiative Geller Fellow Nonie Darwish explains the trouble with moderate Muslims:

President Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that 99.9 percent of Muslims are peace-loving and reject jihadist Islam. This is a common statement by many of the so-called “moderate Muslims” in my country of origin, Egypt. That statement is incorrect in many ways, and is designed to confuse Americans and save face of Muslims and their defenders.

It is hard to believe that President Obama believes what he says about Islam, because the day Osama bin Laden was killed was a day of mourning all over the Muslim world. When Obama realized that, he had bin Laden’s body buried at sea so the Muslim world could not erect a monument in Mecca for him.

So why is Obama so passionate about telling us how wonderful Islam is? What does he mean by defending Islam as moderate and peaceful?

It defies logic that only 0.1% percent of Muslims are causing all this never-ending worldwide havoc, and unspeakable mayhem, torture, burning and beheading of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. If they are only 0.1% of the Muslim population, how come the brutal Islamic legal system is unable to round the jihadists up and behead them in the infamous public squares of Saudi Arabia? How come moderate Muslims, the 99.9%, are unable to explain away their passivity with jihadists while those jihadists are brutalizing, honor killing and terrorizing apostates?

How many jihadists have been declared apostates by Saudi Arabia? How many were beheaded in the Saudi or Iranian public squares? Why has the “moderate” largest Islamic university in the world, Al Azhar, never issued a fatwa of death against ISIS fighters and anyone who joins ISIS? They issue fatwas of death on apostates and women who have sex outside of marriage all the time, so how come none against those jihadists who supposedly ruined Islam’s reputation and caused the world to fear Muslims?

How come President Obama did not demand just that from Al Azhar or from Saudi Arabia, to prove to the anxious American people that the 99.9% of Muslims are on our side?

Obama claims to have the support of a coalition of moderate Muslim governments to fight ISIS. But we see no Muslim armies moving to Syria to rid the world of the 0.1% Muslim jihadists in ISIS. In fact, the real reason why Muslim leaders are not waging war on ISIS, even though they are capable of doing so, is because at least half of the Muslim army will defect and join ISIS. Those nice moderate Muslim armies do not want to violate Sharia law and destroy the newly declared Caliphate, which is at the center of Islam’s religious goals.

There is no doubt that some Leftist Western leaders, who constantly defend Islam, also do not want to go down in history as the ones who destroyed the Caliphate. The war against ISIS is obviously a defensive one, but somehow Islamic history will eventually portray it as an invasion by the West, the same way Muslims today have twisted the mission of the Crusades to portray them as an aggression, when in fact they were a reaction to Islamic terrorism at the time.

If jihadists and terrorists were only 0.1%, we would not have the worldwide Islamic terrorism of today. The number of the criminal population in most societies, Western and non-Western, is certainly more than 0.1%, and most societies, especially in the West, are perfectly capable of controlling their criminal population, and are capable in creating law and order and safety and security for their own citizens.

How come the 0.1% of radical Muslims is capable of causing millions of Muslim refugees, and how come rich Arab countries are not taking care of them?

Survey after survey keeps confirming our fears that the majority of Muslims are for killing apostates. A majority supports Sharia and believes in jihad as a main requirement and obligation for Muslims. Muslim citizens keep electing Islamist groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to power. The majority of the commandments of Islamic holy books command Muslims to kill, terrorize, humiliate and subjugate non-Muslims. Over 64% of the Quran is obsessed with non-members of the religion.

Now let us examine the so-called “moderate” Muslims in the West, who keep accusing jihadists of being un-Islamic, and insist, “not in the name of my religion,” or “they do not speak for Islam.” But what they fail to tell America is that many of the so-called Muslim reformers in America are considered apostates throughout the Muslim world.

Even the eloquent and well-intentioned Dr. Zuhdi Jasser is considered an apostate in many parts of the Muslim world and the Arab media. I once saw an Arabic-language article written about him, Walid Phares, Walid Shoebat and me. The headline of the article says in Arabic: “Four Arab Americans were accused of leading a media campaign to promote hatred of Muslims in America.” The article stated that 42 million dollars were allocated to these four Arab Americans to promote this hatred. The article said it got this information from “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of The Islamophobia Network In America” — which is a Leftist propaganda piece defaming foes of terror.

Such an article is not unusual. The Arab media is full of similar articles, so as to encourage fatwas against the four people mentioned in the article and any other critics of Islam, simply because we speak the truth about Islam and express our love for America.

I have yet to see fatwas of death against jihadists in the Arab media or from Muslim political and religious leaders. It is clear where the heart of those who call themselves moderate Muslims is. It is not against jihadists, but against those who speak against jihad.

Moderate Muslims are confused people, and have been violently and harshly trained over centuries to never think for themselves. Moderate Muslims are suffering from a pathology that allows them to believe in two opposite ideas at the same time and feel perfectly comfortable with them. In their minds, there is no contradiction at all when they say: “Islam is a religion of peace,” and they have no problem with commandments in the Quran to kill and terrorize the infidels.

The confusion in the West about moderate vs. radical Islam is not by accident, but by design, because no one wants to do anything about it; not Western leaders, and not even the 99.9% of nice Muslims.

ABOUT NONIE DARWISH

AFDI Geller Fellow Nonie Darwish is the author “The Devil We Don’t Know” and president of “Former Muslims United,” a program of the American Freedom Defense Initiative.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on PamelaGeller.com. To stay on top of what’s really happening please follow Pamela on Twitter and like her on Facebook here.

New York Daily News: AFDI ad criticizing Hamas is “outrageous drivel” that “would offend many Muslims”

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It is no doubt guided by Society of Professional Journalists policy that requires journalists never to state or imply any link between Islam and terrorism, but for Leftist journalists (i.e., almost all of them) these days, it’s a kneejerk reaction: when they see an Islamic jihadist vowing blood and murder, they immediately frame it in their report in terms of Muslims being victimized. So when there is a jihad mass murder attack or foiled plot, we get the stories about Muslim communities fearing a “backlash” against innocent Muslims. And in this execrable New York Daily News editorial, the first and only reaction to the genocidal antisemitic statement from Hamas that is depicted in our ad is to note that “the message would offend many Muslims.”

The Daily News means they will be offended at Pamela Geller, of course, not at Hamas. Theyshould be offended at Hamas, if what we’re constantly told about the vast majority of Muslims being moderate, democratic, tolerant and pluralistic were true. They should see the ad and call upon Hamas and other Muslim groups to stop the jihad against Israel, drop the genocidal rhetoric, and teach against Islamic antisemitism in mosques and Islamic schools in the U.S. The Daily News should be calling upon them to do those things. Instead, it smears Pamela Geller as a “hatemonger” (in the photo caption) for pointing out that this genocidal antisemitic statement was made, and that nothing is being done about it.

More below.

“The First Amendment train: Despite Pamela Geller’s offensive nonsense, the MTA should continue to allow political ads on buses and subways,” New York Daily News, April 24, 2015:

After being forced by a court to run an inflammatory, anti-Muslim ad on the city’s buses and subways, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority aims to get out of the political advertising business.

Hamas is a Muslim group. It made the statement that “killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah” in a video that also said: “Repeat in the name of your Jihad: Death to Israel!” Our AFDI ad was meant to counter Hamas-linked CAIR’s cynical and deceptive campaign trying to fool Americans into thinking that jihad was romping through the daisies and blowing milk bubbles through a straw. The ad counters these comforting fictions with reality, making the point that for all too many Muslims, jihad is something more lethal. The implication is that Muslims and non-Muslims alike should be calling upon Hamas and other Muslim entities to drop this hateful rhetoric. Instead, the Daily News shoots the messenger, referring to the ad as “Pamela Geller’s hateful nonsense” and as an “inflammatory, anti-Muslim ad.”

With sympathy for the MTA’s tough spot, the agency is mistaken in trying to eliminate issue-oriented ads as a way to swat one annoying gadfly.

Pamela Geller makes a habit of throwing rhetorical bombs. She’s written books like “Stop the Islamization of America” and argued that President Obama is “consistently on the side of Islamic supremacist regimes.”

What, he isn’t? Where? When?

One of her latest proposed ads quotes a Palestinian TV station run by Hamas as stating that “Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to Allah,” alongside the image of a young man in a headscarf. “That’s his Jihad. What’s yours?”

Understanding that the message would offend many Muslims and arguing that it might even incite violence, the MTA rejected the campaign.

Why would the ad offend many Muslims? Because they condemn Hamas and its genocidal rhetoric, and back up their condemnation with real action to teach against these attitudes in Muslim communities? Where? When? Do they have a different idea of jihad and consider Hamas and its antisemitic jihad to be un-Islamic? Even if that were true, Hamas presents itself as Muslim group waging jihad in cause of Islam, and justifying its actions by referring to Islamic texts and teachings. Do Americans not need to know this? Does no one need to call attention to it or endeavor to counter it? Everything the ad says is true: Hamas made this statement, and did so in the context of jihad. Muslims who oppose this view of jihad and this hateful antisemitism should be siding with Pamela Geller and criticizing Hamas, not her. And the Daily News should be more concerned about the fact that there are Muslims who actually believe this than about the Muslims who claim to be so offended by it that they want it off the buses, but don’t lift a finger to counter these attitudes within Muslim communities.

And the idea that it “might even incite violence” is also nonsense. The ad ran in San Francisco and Chicago without incident. The MTA claimed it would incite violence but could not adduce even one example of its doing so. And the violence would be from Islamic jihadists who would presumably mistake it for a pro-jihad ad. You’d have to be quite dim to do that, but if someone did, the focus should be on protecting people from violence, not on curtailing speech in light of the possibility that violence could ensue — for once we do that, we enable any thug to shut down any speech he dislikes by threatening violence over it.

…It’s well and good, and constitutional, to ban ads that could reasonably incite violence — say, with mocking images of the Prophet Mohammed.

In this, the Daily News is essentially counseling surrender to the jihad. Instead of standing up against violent intimidation, the Daily News is saying, Give in to the bullies and thugs. They will kill us if we say something they dislike, so let’s not say anything they dislike. That is the coward’s way, the path of capitulation and submission. What ever happened to, I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it? Gone and forgotten. And so also, before too long, will be our freedom of speech, and with it our other freedoms.

Beyond that, viewpoints should be welcome. New Yorkers are big boys and girls. If swallowing some outrageous drivel is the cost of preserving other worthwhile advertising in one of the city’s most important gathering places, so be it. One hater shouldn’t spoil things for everyone else.

So it’s “outrageous drivel” now to call attention to Hamas’ genocidal rhetoric. Which only ensures that we will get more such rhetoric.

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