Friday, July 9, 2010

Re: Yes, we are at war with Islam. ...So why submit to a foe?

http://www.michigandaily.com/content/bush-us-not-war-islam

On Jul 8, 9:11 am, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>  http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.6644/pub_detail.asp
>
> July 3, 2010
> The Insidious Ground Zero Mosque
>
> Edward Cline<http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/authors/id.93/author_detail.asp>
>
> I will begin with a comparison between two buildings, because a question of
> property rights entered recent debates and disputations about the propriety
> of the Ground Zero mosque, the rightness or wrongness of opposing its
> construction, and the nature of Islam itself. This mosque, to be called
> "Cordoba House," is just a brief walk from Ground Zero in New York City. Its
> construction, to replace a private office building damaged on 9/11, has been
> approved by a city council. But, first allow me to discuss another building.
>
> Years ago Korean Sun Myung
> Moon<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,908807-2,00.html>,
> leader of the Unification Church, bought a defunct, former first-class hotel
> in Manhattan, the New
> Yorker<http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50812FD3458167493C1A...>,
> and turned it into a center for the propagation of his religion, and also as
> a dorm and office space for his local followers. Doubtless many readers
> remember the Moonies, converts who had to be "de-programmed" by their
> parents of the brainwashing these young adults had experienced in Moon's
> "madrassas."
>
> There were countless numbers of them all over the country, knocking on doors
> and spreading literature about the Unification Church. They were as annoying
> as Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, but as immune to reason as any Witness
> and Mormon traveling recruiter. And about as dangerous. They were squeaky
> clean, nicely dressed and well-behaved. One had the impression they were
> manufactured on an assembly line.
>
> But, when Moon bought the hotel, no one objected. It was private property. I
> am guessing that Moon got tax and zoning exemptions and the like from the
> city government because his was a religious organization, just as I am sure
> Faisal Abdul Rauf and his cohorts will get them for the Cordoba mosque, as
> well.
>
> It was inconceivable at the time that the Moonie elders were preaching
> anti-Americanism and Moonie jihad in the hotel. No one could imagine that
> they encouraged hate and called for conquest and replacing, with violence,
> if necessary, the Constitution of the United States with a Moonie Compact of
> Love and Peace. No one imagined that bombs and suicide vests were being
> assembled in the hotel basement, or that classes were being held on how to
> rig a vehicle to explode with the maximum number of casualties. Moonies who
> happened to live around town outside of the hotel were not regarded with
> suspicion by their neighbors or the authorities. No one contested Moon's
> right to turn the property into a center for his creed (which is an amalgam
> of pacifist tenets borrowed from other creeds, but especially the Christian).
>
> The idea that the Moonies were planning something awful and homicidal and
> destructive never occurred to anyone -- because no one had any reason to
> doubt the "benign" purposes of the hotel purchase. More often than not, Moon
> and his followers were the butt of jokes. (Try making a public joke about
> Islam, or Mohammad, or Allah today.) And, nothing happened. No car bombs
> exploded in Times Square, no massacres of commuters occurred in Grand
> Central Station. No planes were hijacked and flown into the Empire State
> Building.
>
> The Moonies have faded from memory. The Islamists, however, do not want us
> to forget Islam.
>
> Islam is not a Moonie religion. Moon's religion did not attempt to
> incorporate or integrate a political agenda with its theological agenda.
> Islam does. Moon did not declare war on America from South Korea. Islam's
> leading lights have, Shiite and Sunni, from all quarters where Islam reigns
> supreme. The religious and political elements of Islam are mutually
> supportive, complementary, and coextensive. They are based, in the Koran, on
> *action* -- by force or fraud or dissimulation -- with the sole object of
> conquest and anchoring Islam in the host, and soon-to-be vanquished country.
>
> Someone remarked to me: We are not at war with Islam. War is tanks and
> machine guns and going over the top. We cannot be at war with an ideology.
>
> Yes, we are at war with Islam. Just as we have been at war with Kant and his
> philosophical successors, and with John Dewey, and Marxism -- in short, with
> every anti-individual, anti-life, anti-rights, anti-mind philosophy. it is a
> war of ideas. "War" is not strictly a metaphor for the conflict that is
> raging right now under our noses. Islam is a body of ideas totalitarian in
> nature, designed to wipe out the individual and inculcate mindless obedience
> to irrational and arbitrary dictats spoken by an angel to a barbarian
> prophet. From a ghost. The "war" is a battle for men's minds.
>
> Reason seeks to enable men's minds. Islam seeks to cripple them. It is as
> simple as that.
>
> In this culture, it is irrelevant that neither President Bush nor President
> Obama (nor their immediate predecessors in the White House) ever declared
> "war" against Islam, or against states that sponsor terrorism. If by chance
> we declared war on Iran -- with full, but belated justification -- that
> would be perceived on the Muslim or Arab Street as a declaration of war on
> Islam. Fine, I would answer. Have it your way. You are a tribe of manqués
> and we are about to take down one of your kingpins. Send Allah your
> Imprecations to slay us. But do not take it out on your moral superiors if
> nothing happens.
>
> Many believe that opposing the Ground Zero mosque would be a violation of
> property rights. But where do property rights enter the picture? They do
> not, as least as far as mosque-building Muslims are concerned. Mosques are
> centers of indoctrination and propaganda, and of exhortations to wage war
> against the infidel -- us. Mosques are venues for spreading and entrenching
> Islam. They are field headquarters of conquest, and they have sprung up all
> over the country. The piety and good citizenship standing of the flocks of
> rank-and-file Muslims are irrelevant. They subscribe to the ideology, do not
> question it, and remain silent when their brethren blow up things and kill
> people. Their creed commands the silence, but it is still a matter of
> choice, of volition, and Muslims as a rule choose to remain silent. No man
> of reason should sympathize with them.
>
> Some have cited the 14th Amendment as an intrinsic good to be brought to the
> defense of the builders of the Ground Zero mosque, forgetting that, first,
> that Amendment has been violated countless ways by our own government, and
> second, that we are indeed at war with Islam and its advocates. To iterate:
> Just as we were at war with Nazism, another body of inimical ideas
> (Hitler<http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com/gallery/>was its
> Mohammed, and he sought the help of Muslims to exterminate Jews in
> Palestine), we are at war with Islam. Islam respects neither individual
> rights, nor property rights, nor capitalism. It is a holistic vehicle for
> conquest and subjugation of all who do not subscribe to it. Period.
>
> Faisal Rauf may look like a kindly, gentle cleric, but that is the soft,
> friendly face of Islam. The Koran permits falsehoods, deception, and lies --
> *taqiya* -- in the name of Islam and Allah. The Grand Mufti of
> Jerusalemlooked harmless and well-meaning, too. Think again.
>
> Rauf, the leading light of the Cordoba mosque, has said publicly that the
> Cordoba mosque is intended, among other things, to be a venue for
> "interfaith dialogue."
>
> However, Walid Shoebat<http://thelastcrusade.org/2010/05/27/ground-zero-mosque-â??our-goal-is-to-establish-shariahâ? />,
> former terrorist but now a dedicated anti-Islamist, notes that, as a rule,
> public pronouncements by prominent Muslim spokesmen are consciously intended
> to say one thing for Western consumption, but these same spokesmen reveal
> their thoughts in Arabic. Rauf is a prime example:
>
> For that we searched Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf's own words – in the Arabic and
> not what he says in English to the western media. It should shock every
> American to find out that Faisal Abdul Rauf stated to the popular Islamic
> media Hadiyul-Islam on May 26th, 2010 in an article by Sa'da Abdul Maksoud.
>
> In it he states that an Islamic state can be established regardless of the
> government being a kingdom or democracy. In another article titled *"I do
> not believe in religious dialogue"* should alarm the ardent skeptic on the
> mindset of the Islamic visionary who advocates establishing Islamic lobbies
> throughout the West.
>
> The defenders of the mosque forget, or have never grasped as a first-hand
> understanding, that as we live in a mixed economy, we are also living in a
> culture of mixed epistemologies and metaphysics. The 14th Amendment is only
> as powerful as the culture that values and respects it, it is only as good
> as the government that upholds it. So, how can one reconcile the "rights" of
> the exponents of a religion that denies rights, in a deteriorating political
> culture, in which individual rights are usurped daily everywhere one looks?
>
> An argument in defense of the Cordoba mosque, based on the 14th Amendment,
> is dependent on two conditions: that Islam is not an ideology inimical to
> freedom, bent on conquest and subjugation, and that we are not at war with
> it; and that our government, through the courts, is moved by an absolute
> fealty to reason, and so receptive to an argument based on the inviolability
> of property rights. Neither of these conditions exists today.
>
> Respecting the alleged rights of the mosque builders is not going to stall
> or reverse the statist trends of our own government. On the other hand,
> "violating" them is not going to accelerate our own government's "jihad"
> against reason and our freedoms. The Obama administration already has the
> pedal of power to the floor.
>
> It could be about "property rights" were trends reversed and we were on our
> way to a recognition of individual rights and the sanctity of the
> Constitution. If we were, Islamists would not bother trying to infiltrate
> and conquer us by stealth. But, that is not the trend. We are hurtling
> faster and faster in the direction of fascism. Upholding the "rights" of the
> mosque builders is pointless when neither our government nor Islam
> recognizes *individual* rights. Look at today's Supreme Court decision on
> guns and *Citizens United*. How do they jibe with its decision on Kelo and
> with its other decisions that nullify individual rights? The Supreme Court
> is an instance of our living in a culture of mixed moralities, mixed
> premises, mixed values. The irrational element in the culture is in the
> ascendant, despite the occasional semi-rational triumphs.
>
> I do not know any more how better to argue the case against the Ground Zero
> mosque, other than to refer people to Dr. Leonard Peikoff's
> podcast<http://www.peikoff.com/2010/06/28/what-do-you-think-of-the-plan-for-a...>on
> the issue.
>
> We are living in an unprecedented time, when this country is under attack by
> secular jihadists in the White House, and religious ones from Mecca and
> Medina, both sides demanding unquestioning obedience from Americans, and no
> one is doing much about it. This is the larger picture -- an aerial
> photograph of the battlefield, if you will -- that must be grasped. It is
> and it is not about "property rights."
>
> Abundant information exists on the means and ends of Islam, on Faisal Rauf's
> <http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2010/06/ground-zero-mosque-sponsor....>double-think
> and purposes, on the record of Islam's
> depredations<http://muhammadimages.com/mayhem/php>.
> Read Robert Spencer's<http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/war-peace/islamic-jihad/6018-Big-Is...>article,
> orAlyssa Lappen's<http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-ground-zero-mosque-developer-muslim-...>,
> or go to Steve Emerson's Investigative
> Project<http://www.investigativeproject.org/blog/2010/06/saudi-textbooks-cont...>
>  site. These articles<http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/war-peace/sept-11th/6016-Why-There-...>were
> picked at random from a mountain of information open to anyone willing
> to think.
>
> We are engaged in a literal war, both physical and ideological, a war that
> has exceeded the time such a war should have been waged. A paramount example
> of it is Afghanistan. We went into that country looking for the Taliban,
> Al-Quada, and bin Laden. Seven or eight years later, we are still there --
> building roads and hospitals and community centers and handing out candy and
> good will, now and then taking out a group of killers with a drone. In the
> meantime we are dealing with an unreliable and reluctant ally, Pakistan, and
> propping up Karzi's corrupt and "open-to-a-deal" government. Is this war a
> hallmark of rationality?
>
> There's no reconciliation possible between reason and faith, between reason
> and Islam. So, even though it may seem futile, I am opposed to the Ground
> Zero mosque, because of its symbolic power, because it is evidence of an
> invasion of this country by an alien philosophy inimical to my life and
> limb, because its backers are necessarily linked to terrorism and the jihad
> being waged against this county, and because I refuse to grant Islam any
> semblance of respect or advantage.
>
> We are not battling Moonies here, but killers and enslavers who wish to
> offer Americans the choice of becoming Muslim Moonies -- or dhimmitude or
> death.
>
> Again, no one should be deceived by the kindly, grandfatherly demeanor ofFaisal
> Rauf <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2514305/posts>. He is
> just a front man -- one of many such front men -- of a larger phenomenon. As
> a friend remarked to me in the middle of the battle, "Toohey was impeccably
> dressed and drank Cointreau." Rauf looks like he would not hurt a fly,
> either. But, think again. Think twice. Take his assurances for what they are
> worth -- nothing -- and use his image as the portrait of our enemy. That kindly
> face
> <http://www.examiner.com/x-41853-Homeland-Security-Examiner~y2010m6d25...>hides
> a mind that subscribes to a philosophy that attacked this country on 9/11
> and continues to attack it.
>
> *FamilySecurityMatters.org <http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/>
> **Contributing
> Editor **Edward
> Cline<http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/authors/id.93/author_detail.asp.>
> **is the author of a number of novels, and his essays, **books,
> reviews<http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.2749/pub_detail.asp>
> **, and other nonfiction have appeared in a number of high-profile
> periodicals.*

--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum

* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.

No comments:

Post a Comment