Don’t go there, Mr. President

This morning, President George Bush will visit the Washington Islamic Center to mark its fiftieth anniversary – an important moment in Saudi Arabia’s effort to promote dawa in America: the inculcation of Islam in this country and the domination of the Muslim faith by the Saudis’ totalitarian Wahhabi cult.  The President’s visit is but the latest example of his Administration’s cluelessness with respect to the nature of the enemy we are confronting in this War for the Free World, and its repeated legitimation of that enemy’s organizational infrastructure and agents of influence here and abroad. 

The Saudis in America

Today’s visit will mark a return for Mr. Bush to the Saudi-financed Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue.  The first occurred on September 17, 2001, within a week of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  On that occasion, the President met with a number of those who, thanks largely to funding and other help from Saudi Arabia, have become self-appointed "leaders" of the Muslim community in America.  

[More]At the time, Mr. Bush parroted themes being promoted by his hosts at the Washington mosque: "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.  That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.  These terrorists don’t represent peace.  They represent evil and war."

In fact, Islam as practiced by the Wahhabis is not about "peace."  It is a political ideology that is perfectly prepared to use violent means to accomplish its ends of global Islamic rule.  

The Saudi Agenda: ‘Dissociation’ from the ‘Unbelievers’

The true face of the Saudi agenda was laid bare in January 2005 when the Center for Religious Freedom, at the time associated with Freedom House and currently housed at the Hudson Institute, published a report on hate literature distributed to mosques all over America by the embassy of Saudi Arabia and its agents.  One of several collected from the Washington Islamic Center, entitled Loyalty and Dissociation in Islam, had the following illuminating quotes:  

• "To be dissociated from the infidels is to hate them for their religion, to leave them, never to rely on them for support, not to admire them, to be on one’s guard against them, never to imitate them, and to always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law." 
• "Those who reside in the land of unbelief [i.e., non-Muslim societies] out of their own choice and desire to be with the people of that land, accepting the way they are regarding their faith, or giving compliments to them, or pleasing them by pointing out something wrong with the Muslims, they become unbelievers and enemies to Allah and his messenger."
• There is consensus on this matter, that whoever helps unbelievers against Muslims, regardless of what type of support he lends to them, he is an unbeliever himself."

According to the Center for Religious Freedom study, Loyalty and Dissociation in Islam was not only "published by the Ibn Taymiya Library in Riyadh."  It was "distributed by the King Fahd-supported Islamic Center of Washington, D.C."

Very Different Feelings

The last time Mr. Bush visited Washington’s Islamic Center, he felt moved to declare, "It is my honor to be meeting with leaders who feel just the same way I do.  They’re outraged, they’re sad.  They love America just as much as I do."

In fact, organizations like those whose leaders he met on that occasion typically have received money from, or are otherwise tied to, Saudi Arabia.  Groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the Islamic Free Market Institute (II) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) have, nonetheless, been afforded opportunities at such settings to: obtain legitimacy by meeting with the President and/or other senior officials; secure access to and influence with various U.S. government agencies; and achieve strategic penetrations by securing employment for their associates and/or the implicit, if not explicit, endorsement of their agendas.

Embracing the Brotherhood?

At the moment, the Bush Administration is reportedly poised greatly to compound this ominous behavior by formally embracing the entity behind much of the Islamist ideological infrastructure now operating in the West: the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).  The Brotherhood represents a classic totalitarian bait-and-switch.  By virtue of its avowed renunciation of violence, State Department bureaucrats, think tank denizens (e.g., the Nixon Center’s Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke, authors of "The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood" in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs) and some politicians (notably, Rep. Steny Hoyer who met last April with MB parliamentarians in Egypt) think the Brotherhood are people with whom we can do business against the "terrorists."

This is a wholly unwarranted leap of faith, taken at our extreme peril.  As Zeyno Baran pointed out in an article entitled "O Brotherhood, What Art Thou? Don’t Mistake Islamic Extremists for Moderates" in the April 23, 2007 edition of the Weekly Standard, the MB’s motto is: "Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."  So much for moderation.  So much for an authentic alternative – let alone an antidote – to the Saudis’ other variant of Islamofascism: Wahhabism.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere in Washington

Two other events suggest how successful the Muslim Brotherhood bait-and-switch is becoming:

First, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations/Council on Global Affairs unveiled yesterday at a Woodrow Wilson Center-sponsored event the report of what amounts to a Brotherhood-dominated Task Force on the Political and Civic Integration of Muslims-Americans.   Led by Farooq Kathwari, chairman of Ethan Allen Interiors Inc., and former Secretary of Labor and congresswoman, Lynn Martin, this group of thirty-two Muslim and non-Muslim "leaders" published a study that suggests that there is simply no connection between terror and tyranny, on the one hand, and Islam as practiced by the Saudis and other Islamofascists, on the other.  It is all a misperception.

More insidious is the fact that this transparent whitewash of Islamists in America makes no mention of the fact that many of the groups and individuals listed as reliable go-to sources on Muslim-related matters seek to apply Islamic law in America.  Strikingly, the word Shari’a – the Islamist religious code whose ruthlessly repressive nature has been the hallmark of Saudi, Iranian and Taliban mullahocracies – is entirely absent from the Task Force report.  In fact, "Islamic law" appears to have been mentioned just once, and in a way that can only be described as disinformation:

Muslim leaders and organizations can also underscore their commitment to the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, a bedrock principle of American democracy. Some Americans are concerned that some Muslims seek to undermine this principle by advocating the application of Islamic law in American society. It is important to reassure Americans that Muslim Americans do not aspire to this.

Second, the leaders of this Task Force, Mr. Kathwari and Secretary Martin, will be given an opportunity to provide such disinformation to the Congress when they testify this morning before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.  

Calibrating the American-Muslim ‘Leadership’

It behooves members of the Committee and, for that matter, President Bush to make the following points in their interactions with interlocutors who appear to be spokespeople and/or apologists for the Muslim Brotherhood, if not the Wahhabis.  To be considered – let alone treated as, "mainstream" – American Muslims must:

• Explicitly and without reservation reject the goals and actions of terrorist groups, not just generically but by name.  This would include such organizations as Hamas and Hezbollah and the legitimacy of suicide bombing.
• Support efforts by the United States government to detect, monitor and counteract domestic financing of terrorists, as opposed to the reflexive criticism to which they are routinely subjected by most of the Muslim-American "establishment."
• Embrace America as a pluralistic, democratic society in which the separation of church and state is a founding principle.
• Cease claims to the effect that there is an American "war against Islam," widespread "Islamophobia" and other assertions that encourage a sense of victimization and grievance among Muslims, here and abroad.
• Recognize that there are, in fact, grounds to describe "Islamic extremism" as a threat, that some Islamic mosques, madrassas and centers in this country and overseas have been sources of terrorist activity and that acknowledging these realities is neither a racist nor a bigoted act.
• Stop abetting or otherwise legitimating those who demonize Israel and depict it as a cancer that must be eradicated.
• Desist from the practice of discouraging their community not to cooperate with the FBI, and, instead, encourage them to cooperate fully with law enforcement authorities trying to keep us all safe.
• Reject the ideology and agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood – which is, after all, the antecedent of al Qaeda and Hamas – on the grounds that it embraces a form of totalitarian Islamist ideology that must be condemned, defeated and deligitimized.  

The Bottom Line

Should the President and the Congress insist upon such steps, a failure by American Muslims to adopt them will clarify the situation significantly.  The conclusion will be unmistakeable: Those who refuse to embrace these principles are part of the problem, not the solution, in this War for the Free World.  They must be eschewed hereafter in favor of dealings with truly moderate Muslims who are with us and against the Islamists in that struggle – be they of the Wahhabi or Muslim Brotherhood varieties.