Under the guise of freedom of
religion, radical Islam, and Islam deserves to have a vigorous non radical
Islam, has hijacked the majority of mosques world wide including those in the USA as
incubators of their version of Islam. We
all suspected as much, but here and now we are presented with the hard numbers
and direct evidence.
The radical ideology of Islam as
cast is an outright avatar of the classical concept of the antichrist so feared
in traditional fundamentalist Christian prophetic literature. Worse, it can only be expunged properly by a
healthy liberal Islamic movement. This
is ultimately how Nazism and Communism was ultimately countered restoring a traditional
liberal neo Christian culture.
There is no attention at all to
spiritual values, or even proper humanist values in radical Islam. Thus the mentally vulnerable are refocused
into a believe system that rationalizes and excuses barbarism both internally
and toward non believers.
Freedom of religion does not
mean and has never meant the freedom to promote violence as a means to further
the objectives of the priesthood. This
has to be clearly spelt out and directly enforced at even the legal level
of the US
constitution. Any organization that
promotes violence must be suppressed in a free society as are the Nazis and yes
the Communists or for that matter any erstwhile liberation group. All are capable of putting their agenda up for
a vote and perhaps even trying it out rather than imposing by coercion.
Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques
Posted by Jamie Glazov on Jun 10th, 2011
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in
History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy.
He is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling, United in Hate:
The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror. His new book is Showdown With Evil.
He can be reached at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Yerushalmi, General Counsel
to the Center for Security Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based national security
think tank founded and headed by former Reagan administration official Frank
Gaffney. He is considered an expert on Islamic law and its intersection with
Islamic terrorism and national security. In this capacity, he has published
widely on the subject, including the principle critical scholarship on
sharia-compliant finance published in the Utah Law Review (2008, Issue 3). He has also
designed and co-authored (with Mordechai Kedar) a ground-breaking peer reviewed empirical investigationon
sharia-adherence and the promotion of violent, jihadist literature in U.S.
mosques published in the Middle East
Quarterly (Summer 2011).
FP: David Yerushalmi, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to talk to you today about your Mapping Sharia project.
Now that it is published as a fully peer-reviewed study in
the Middle East Quarterly,
what can you tell us about the findings?
Yerushalmi: Thank you, Jamie.
We began this study in 2007, with a careful and rigorous methodological
design. The purpose was to measure sharia-adherence (or Islamic legal
orthodoxy) among worshippers and their imams at U.S. mosques (i.e., the independent
variable) and to measure that against both the presence of violent and jihadist
literature and, more, the actual promotion of that literature by the imam
(i.e., the dependent variables). We took four years to conduct the study
because we need a large enough random sampling of mosques across the U.S. to be
able to say with some certainty that we can speak about U.S. mosques generally
and because we understood that we would need to confirm our data during a
subsequent survey so that we could be certain of the integrity of our results
and so we were not merely taking a one-time “snap shot” of these mosques.
After surveying 100 mosques randomly chosen across the U.S. ,
and after “auditing” our data, our results were troubling, to say the least.
First, of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as
severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating
violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all. Mosques that presented as Sharia adherent
were more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their
non-Sharia-adherent counterparts. In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam
recommended studying violence-positive texts. The leadership at Sharia-adherent
mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshipper study violence-positive
texts than leadership at non-Sharia-adherent mosques. Fifty-eight percent
of the mosques invited guest imams known to promote violentjihad. The
leadership of mosques that featured violence-positive literature was more
likely to invite guest imams who were known to promote violent jihad than
was the leadership of mosques that did not feature violence-positive literature
on mosque premises.
FP: Were the results of the study a surprise?
Yerushalmi: Not for us in this field. For example, Shaikh Hisham
Kabbani, a well-respected Sufi leader in the U.S., has reported to the
Department of State that his personal research (albeit not based upon a
rigorous empirical design) evidences that hard-core Salafists from the Wahhab
sect of Saudi Arabia have taken control and spread “extremism” in 80% of U.S.
mosques. (See here andhere.)
In addition to this anecdotal evidence, the very credible Freedom House
under the direction of Nina Shea conducted a serious survey of major mosques in
U.S.
urban environments and found Wahhabi-Saudi jihad literature literally
permeating these mosques. Again, while the study was of select mosques
and not a random survey, it suggested a major infiltration that supported
Kabbani’s reports.
Our findings that 81% of U.S. mosques contain this
literature, while troubling, would not be considered surprising. What is
surprising, was the degree to which the presence of this literature was
correlated with the imams actually promoting this jihad hate literature.
In other words, one might expect a mosque to have some of this material but as
reference literature, not as something the imams would actively promote.
What our study found was that mosques with this literature were not merely
repositories but incubators for the messaging of this material.
FP: Are the findings of your research consonant with surveys among
Muslims globally?
Yerushalmi: Yes, and again, this speaks to the fact that our
findings are not necessarily surprising. For example, the World Public
Opinion survey conducted out of the University
of Maryland found that
majorities or near-majorities in so-called “moderate” Muslim countries desire
an al Qaeda like strict sharia to be imposed, a Caliphate to replace national
sovereignty, and a rejection of Western values:
###
Following this survey, Pew conducted its own opinion research in 2010
among “moderate” Muslim countries and found that majorities favored sharia’s
criminal punishments including death for those who wish to engage in freedom of
worship by leaving Islam (i.e., apostasy).
###
These results clearly suggest that Muslims around the world take sharia
seriously and they know what it is and what it stands for.
FP: Based on these findings, what are some of the lessons for
counter-terrorist experts and professionals in the field, and indeed, for the
layman?
Yerushalmi: We should, all of us in this field, pay special
attention to the lessons learned from this study. First, researchers need
to get more serious about studies that examine the jihad “threat
doctrine.” All of the important research informs us that the jihadists
around the globe base their violence and terrorism on sharia and its doctrine
of jihad. Most label their jihad defensive and some offensive, some use
aggressive global violence to pursue their ends (i.e., al Qaeda), others a more
nuanced nation-by-nation strategy with a mix of political maneuvering with
violence and/or the threat of violence (i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood).
But, they all tell us that their driving doctrine is sharia and its call for a
global Caliphate order by Islamic law.
Unfortunately, many researchers shield themselves from this brute fact
out of a fear of being labeled an Islamophobe and the rest of the epithets
hurled by the Leftist and Muslim Brotherhood academic and political
machinery. In a word, P.C. rules in this field and that is never good for
scientific inquiry.
Second, experts and professionals in this field must extend the results
of this study by furthering the research to attempt to understand how sharia is
actually taught to young Muslims and what it says about citizenship in the
West.
Third, experts and professionals in the field must take their research
seriously. For example, the New York Police Department invested
tremendous resources in an ex post facto examination of the “radicalization”
process in the important study titled, “Radicalization in the West: the Homegrown Threat.”
This study found that mosques were one of the main incubators for jihad
recruitment. The study also found that one of the early indicators was
“Salaf” behavioral profiles. Unfortunately, what the authors did not
fully understand was that these “Salaf” behaviors were really
Sharia-adherence. In other words, the researchers saw the relevant facts
but had not actually studied the other research in the field that links Islamic
terrorism, at least doctrinally, to Sharia and the call for global and regional
jihad.
We hope this study provides an important link and serious step for
researchers and professionals alike to examine the role sharia plays as a
legal-political doctrine and system with a long historical pedigree in the
Islamic world and as the primary doctrinal and legal impetus for terrorism in
the name of Islam.
FP: David Yerushalmi, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
We encourage all of our readers to check out David Yerushalmi’s ground-breaking
co-authored investigation here.
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