Canadian Speeches February, 1997
Copyright 1997 Micromedia Limited
Canadian Business and Current Affairs
Canadian Speeches
February, 1997
BYLINE: Emerson, Steven
One afternoon in June 1994, several hundred
worshippers gathered at a mosque to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the
death of the Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic revolution in Iran.
Inside, the crowd sat on the carpeted floor facing two huge portraits --one of
Khomeini and the other of Sheik Abbas Musawi, an Iranian Hizbollah leader killed
by Israeli forces. One speaker spoke of the Jews who control the U.S. The imam
of the mosque, Sheik Mohammed al-Asi, spoke reverentially of the revolutionary
legacy left by Ayatollah Khomeini and of the need to confront the "Great Satan"
-- the term used by Iran to refer to the United States.
These topics were nothing new for Sheik al-Asi,
who has frequently talked about the evils of the Jews and Western civilization.
Another speaker, Ahmed Huber, a Swiss neo-Nazi Muslim, spoke about the "evils of
the Jews" in the same language used by the Nazis and Hitler, whom Huber has
defended as victims of "Zionist propaganda." This commemoration would not have
been unusual except for the fact that it took place in Potomac, Maryland, just a
few miles from the White House in Washington, DC.
Inside this mosque, there have been various
commemorations for the Islamic fighters who have attacked the United States,
Jews, Christians and moderate Muslims. The mosque's bookstore has featured
publications and children's books demonizing the West and Jews in hateful
propaganda rarely seen these days, let alone in the United States. It is a place
which has disseminated the original fatwa -- religious death sentence -- against
the writer Salman Rushdie. I suppose we shouldn't find this surprising since
Sheik al-Asi and his mosque are representatives of Hizbollah in the nation's
capital area.
As this example shows, militant Islam has
now relocated to the heart of the West. Radical Islamic groups, including Hamas,
Hizbollah, Islamic jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb al-Tahrir and others, have
established offices and headquarters here, created fund-raising apparatuses and
networks, set up propaganda and political centres, and in some cases, have even
established command and control centres to direct terrorist operations in the
Middle East. The process by which militant Islamic groups and communities have
moved into the United States -- and Canada, for that matter -- started about 15
years ago.
Today, I would like to show you a
subterranean world into which most of you, with few exceptions, hardly ever
venture. It is the world of militant Islamic extremism. Yes, most of us think we
know this world -- by the infamous terrorist acts we have seen on television
screens or on the front pages of newspapers. After all, who is not cognizant of
the decade and one half of car bombings, hostage takings, suicide attacks and
other forms of violent terrorist mayhem directed against Western and pro-Western
targets by terrorist groups originating in the Middle East? Yes, I'm sure we all
remember the images -- seared into our memories -- of the bombings of the
American Marine barracks, the kidnapping and killing of Western hostages, the
assassinations of moderate Muslims leaders, the World Trade Centre bombing in
New York, the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Centre killing 100 civilians, the
bombings in Paris, and the bombings against U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
Yet today, the reach of militant Islam is a
lot closer than the perceived safety of your televisions sets. Militant Islam
not only extends far beyond the borders of the Middle East, its infrastructure
is far larger and more sophisticated than the conventional framework of
terrorist cells and groups holed up in far away places. For today, the West is
facing a proliferating extremist movement, deliberately hiding under mainstream
religious protection in its own backyard. It is an extremist ideological
movement that is increasingly anchored in the heart of the West, yet whose
values and goals are totally antithetical to Western values of pluralism,
separation of church and state, and the unacceptability of terrorism and
violence to achieve political goals. I am referring to the world of militant
Islam -- an extremist force that claims to represent Islam the religion but in
reality no more represents Islam than the Ku Klux Klan represents Christianity.
For the overwhelming majority of Muslims believe in peace and freedom just as
much as you and I do.
But the reality, unclouded by political
correctness or an intellectual cowardice, is that today, militant Islam has
captured much of the established hierarchical leadership of Islamist
organizations in the United States and Canada, not to mention the Middle East.
Although these militants do not represent the views and interests of the vast
majority of Muslims, they have been increasingly successful in attempting to
seize the reins of political and informational power. As such, these extremists
have been able to inject virulent anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and anti-moderate
Muslim literature and dogma into the contemporary Muslim world. They have tarred
the great religion of Islam by falsely associating this peaceful faith with
doctrines of hate and violence. Most dangerously and problematically, they have
succeeded in sending a message of poisonous paranoia through various Islamist
publications, from which portions of the Muslim public gets information. And as
the arbiters of the message that goes out, these militants keep alive their
paranoid view that the West, the Jews, the media, and other "enemies" are
involved in a so-called conspiracy against Islam.
At the outset, I would like to state clearly
that, by way of defining the problem of extremism and terrorism, it is vital to
point out that militant Islam does not hold an exclusive monopoly on worldwide
political extremism or violence. In the United States, radical right-wing
militias carried out the ghastly terrorist attack in Oklahoma City. Christian
anti-abortionists have murdered doctors who perform abortions in the belief that
God has given them the right to take away human life. In England, the IRA has
carried out attacks against civilians. And in Israel, there are fanatical
right-wing terrorist Jews -- those that carried out or supported the
assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin or the massacre of innocent
Palestinians in a mosque in Hebron by a fanatical Jewish settler named Baruch
Goldstein. Those Jewish terrorists, respectively, are the mirror equivalent of
the radical fundamentalist groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
It also bears repeating that militant
Islamic fundamentalism is not synonymous with the Islamic religion. The vast
majority of the world's Muslims condone neither terror nor violence. Islam is a
fascinating, vibrant religion. It is the fastest growing religion in the world.
Its adherents around the world are interested in bettering their lives and
improving the opportunities and conditions for their families, like you and I.
Moreover, throughout its history, Islam has expressed itself in many forms --
from a pragmatic, tolerant and inward looking approach to a militant,
expansionist one. Islamic groups that claim to foster the pure fundamental
theological doctrine of Islam represent nothing more than a modern totalitarian
interpretation of Islamic theology.
As in other religions, only a small minority
of Muslims advocate militancy. Islam the religion is glorious and peaceful. In
the distorted way it is practiced by militants, radical Islamic fundamentalism
is a dangerous movement, fueled by intolerance, paranoia and hatred.
Yet in analyzing the reasons for the rise of
militant Islam within the larger world of Islam, perhaps it would be fruitful to
look at several theological differences between Islam and Christianity --
differences that do not make one religion better than the other but differences
that make us different. Whereas Christianity is primarily a religion of faith,
Islam is a religion of deeds, complete with a set of divine edicts (the Shari'ah)
which rule the life of the believer from cradle to grave. Westerners may see
only hardship in such a demanding faith. What they may fail to see is the
comfort it gives in life's hardships, by explaining every turn of fate with an
all-inclusive divine vision and prodding the believer ever onward with specific
instructions for daily conduct.
Because of Islam's sweeping impact on its
adherents, the slightest tremor in the religion's cohesion can impact upon
Islamic society as a whole. So when a battle rages within Islam, the world
community feels it. Militant Islamic fundamentalists seek to impose 7th and 9th
century Islamic doctrine (the earliest formative era) -- as revealed by Allah to
the prophet Mohammed -- upon contemporary life.
The rise of militant Islam in the West is a
logical outgrowth of the rise of militant Islam worldwide. During the past
decade and one half, radical Islamic fundamentalist movements have proliferated
beyond the regions and cities where they have been simmering since the 1940's
and 1950's. What's behind the extremist ideology of radical Islamic
fundamentalists?
In 20th century Islamic history, the failure
of Arab nationalism, corruption of Arab elites, and repression of authoritarian
regimes increasingly drove the masses to embrace Islam as a refuge and a source
of comfort. Because secularism had been imposed from above by illegitimate
authoritarian modern regimes, the public and intelligentsia overwhelmingly
rejected it. (In the West, the opposite occurred, as secularism became a mass
movement religion was rejected because it was identified with the ruling
elites.)
The final, and perhaps most important,
factor perpetuating the legitimacy of militant Islam has been the absence of a
religious "reformation" in Islam, unlike the experience of Catholicism and the
Protestant Church. One of the major problems faced by Muslim reformers, like
Sheik Mahmud Taha of the Sudan, is that their brand of moderate Islam has been
categorically rejected by leading traditional Islamic theologans. In 1985, at
the age of 87, Taha himself was executed for "apostasy."
The West is not prepared to meet this
threat. Modern democracies are justifiably unwilling to engage in the type of
conflict that characterized religious wars of previous ages. Failure to perceive
the nature of the conflict stems from the Western tendency to errantly apply a
Judeo-Christian frame of reference to Islam. Christianity and Judaism, in their
history, have undergone reformation, separating church from state and giving up
the use of violence in the name of God.
Islam, by contrast, has not yet undergone
the same historical evolution. In the contemporary world of militant Islam,
there is no separation between mosque and state, between the realms of the
sacred and the secular, or between religion and politics. Rather, they are all
one and the same. Which means, in practice, that the militant Islamic cleric is
also a political and military leader, and his mosque -- or any organization he
heads -- may serve as a venue for violent jihad activities. The noted
Palestinian author and now member of the Palestinian Parliament, Zaid Abu Amr,
has noted in his landmark study of Hamas and Islamic Jihad how the mosque was
the pivotal organizational centre for religion, politics and military strategy
for those respective radical organizations.
We in the West have a hard time accepting
the fact that the groups who come to the United States still harbor the same
ideological beliefs and adherence to the same radical, violent agenda they held
in the Middle East. In late October, 1995, a man named Ramadan Abdullah Shallah
declared in Damascus, Syria that he was the new head of Islamic Jihad. In his
maiden speech, he vowed to avenge the death of his predecessor, Fathi Shekaki,
who was assassinated on the island of Malta, presumably by Israeli agents.
Mr. Shallah had the unique credentials to
assume the post of one of the most violent terrorist groups in the world. Since
1991, Shallah had lived in the United States where he served as a professor at
the University of South Florida at Tampa and also directed a "research centre"-
affiliated with the University of South Florida-called the World Islamic Studies
Enterprise.
He worked closely with Sami Al-Arian,
another professor who was not only the corporate founder of Mr. Shallah's
research facility but also the head of a non-profit charitable organization
called the Islamic Concern Project. Together, both men secretly built and
operated a clandestine command-and-control headquarters for Islamic Jihad with
the unwitting blessing of the University of South Florida in Tampa and the U.S.
government, which had granted non-profit religious status to another branch of
the Islamic Jihad in Tampa.
From the safety of their Tampa offices, Mr.
Shallah and Mr. Al-Arian operated a terrorist organization, raising funds,
recruiting terrorists and bringing them into the country, devising terrorist
strategies, and actually directing specific terrorist attacks -- all the while
being invited to the U.S. military's intelligence headquarters at nearby McDlll
Air Force Base to give assessments on the Middle East.
Despite their innocent-sounding names, these
centres of academic inquiry and religious faith were operational fronts for one
of the most violent terrorist groups in the world. In the end, it was the
university -- despite a series of warning signs and clear evidence that both
Islamic groups were engaged in activities very different from what they claimed
-- which helped the militants gain the respectability and legitimacy they
needed.
Like the gendarme in the movie Casablanca
who professed "shock" at the discovery of gambling in the casino, various
university officials claimed they were "betrayed" by Mr. Shallah. But in fact,
the university's "mistake" was the result of a combination of willful
self-denial, extraordinary naivete, bordering on recklessness, and the efforts
of several USF professors who shilled for the militants. Contrary to university
claims that it had been unwittingly used by terrorists, university officials
systematically downplayed and ignored relevant evidence.
Today, Islamic terrorist groups are active
throughout the world, in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and North America.
Yes, the same groups that carry out the horrific bombings that you see from the
comfort of your television sets are here in your backyard, throughout Canada and
the United States. Top officials of both the FBI and CIA have stated publicly
that radical Islamic groups represent the number one international threat to
Western interests, and that these groups have established networks and
headquarters in the United States.
CIA Director John Deutch stated the
following just two months ago:
"The intelligence community has been
predicting growth in the lethality of international terrorism for some time. The
principal sources of the threat are radical Islamic fundamentalist groups... We
must anticipate new attempts against American citizens, against our troops and
facilities, both here and abroad."1
Earlier this year, John O'Neil, head of the
FBI's counter-terrorism program, stated that Islamic terrorism is "The greatest
threat coming to us domestically in the United States. ...What we've seen in the
United States is that almost every one of these groups has a presence in the
United States today."2
Although various Islamist leaders complain
that the Muslim reputation has been unfairly tarred by unfounded associations
with terrorism, listen to the words of a Kuwaiti writer, in al-Watan, June 22,
1995:
"The activities of Arab-Americans have not
made it easier for them to become assimilated in America. Their assimilation
became more difficult, especially after American cities were turned into
conflict centres used by Islamic movements and some Arab regimes for rallying
supporters and recruiting activists. These Islamic movements then proceeded to
establish various fundamentalist associations, leagues and organizations. All
this will inevitably be disastrous for Arabs and Muslims in the United States
and in the Arab and Islamic worlds as well."
"How can a Muslim, Arab-American be accepted
in American society when he hates his country, condemns its culture, and
declares its imminent demise? Is a Muslim, Arab-American expected to be a good
American and a good citizen of his country, or is he expected merely to be a
rebellious politician or a radical fundamentalist who uses his U.S. citizenship
as a shield and his U.S. material and political freedom as armor?"
"... The time has come for Arabs in the
United States to realize that it is dangerous to be driven by national and
religious fanaticism. The time has come for those Arabs to realize that
movements such as the ones they have in the United States would not be tolerated
in the Arab and Islamic countries themselves."
Yet surprisingly, as clearly as the
militants have articulated their agenda, the West still suffers from an
inability to recognize these movements for what they are. It is this blindness,
this naivete, political correctness -- call it what you will -- that is at the
core of a great deception now taking place.
A few weeks ago, The Toronto Star reported
the presence of a major international Islamic conference held here in Toronto.
The paper cited the appearance of leading Muslim intellectuals from around the
world at a closed-door conference called "Islam and the West: Towards Dialogue
and Understanding." The theme of the conference was that Muslims in North
America are wrongly associated with terrorism because of racism and stereotypes.
Ahmad Sakr, identified as president of a group called Foundation for Islamic
Knowledge, stated his frustration in the Star: "There are so many
misunderstandings... Muslims are Arabs. Muslims are terrorists. Muslims are
fundamentalists. Muslims are camel riders. Muslims do everything wrong." Sakr
decried this racism, prevalent in Western society, against the "most peaceful
people on the continent," claiming that people "write and say Muslims are
terrorists, [which] allows Christians and Jews to hate the Muslims."
Sakr's words were strong and the message
virtuous. Here was a Muslim leader reaching out for inter-religious
understanding. Unfortunately, The Toronto Star did not tell you the whole story
nor did it tell you the real beliefs of Mr. Sakr. In an earlier book Mr. Sakr
authored and published in the U.S. in 1982, called Islamic Fundamentalism, this
is what he had to say about the extermination of six million Jews at the hands
of the Nazis:
"The present generations of Europe and
America have forgotten that young Hitler became a casualty of Jewish Orthodoxy
and its monetary control of Germany. While the poor German Christians suffered,
the jewry amassed wealth for Zionism and exploited the poverty-ridden Gentile
women in Europe. They used all possible means to cause massive inflation and the
economic breakdown of Germany. Adolph Hitler's early impressions never
disappeared and he considered the Jews as traitors to the fatherland. When he
came to power, his immense hatred was directed toward the elimination of Jews
from Europe because he considered them as the filth of mankind."
Or consider how Mr. Sakr views the Hindu
religion. "Hinduism is probably the only religion out of all the major world
religions that proclaims hatred not only against mankind in general, but against
its own adherents. ...Hinduism is a pagan religion devoid of morality."
And listen to Mr. Sakr on Christianity: "It
appears, therefore, that the barbaric character of the Romans never disappeared,
and intolerance is a continuing phenomenon of the Western world in the name of
their religion, namely: Christianity. ...The Popes were instruments for shedding
blood in the name of Jesus... Christian dogmas are empty of the spirit of that
which is normal and natural."
The fact that Mr. Sakr harbors thoughts and
beliefs profoundly different than those he expressed to The Toronto Star
unfortunately is emblematic of a much larger phenomenon: the attempt by radical
Islamic fundamentalists to deliberately deceive Western audiences, often through
unsuspecting media, by transforming their extremist ideology into the
politically-correct veneer of self-victimization.
In his interview with The Toronto Star prior
to the commencement of the Islamic conference, Mr. Sakr explained the alleged
hostility of Jews and Christians toward Muslims as induced by racist linkages
drawn between Muslims and terrorists. The explanation played well in a society
conditioned to accept the legitimacy of "hate crime" accusations by minorities.
But to truly understand Mr. Sakr's core beliefs, all we have to do is read his
earlier writings before the advent of "hate crime" victimology in explaining the
hostility by Jews and Christians toward Muslims. "The non-believers (Christians
and Jews in particular) do not wish to lose or to give away their lust for
power, wealth and sex, and their rule over the under privileged," Mr. Sakr wrote
in his book Islamic Fundamentalism. "This makes them hostile towards Islam."
I dare say that Mr. Sakr is clearly aware,
like other extremists, that openly expressing contempt and revulsion for Jews
and Christians would not exactly be well received in Western society. So Mr.
Sakr simply inverted the moral equation: instead of the purveyor of racism, he
anointed himself the victim of racism, thus instinctively compelling our sense
of justice.
To be sure, there is plenty of racism in
Canada and the United States toward religious and ethnic minorities -- and this
includes Muslims who have been victimized by racists. But the agenda of Islamic
extremists like Mr. Sakr is not to eradicate racism, but to smear and tar those
willing to stand up and confront Islamic militants who falsely invent the charge
of racism. As Professor Khalid Duran, a noted Muslim authority on Islamic
movements, has observed, the real minority that Mr. Sakr seeks to protect is the
minority of Islamic extremists and terrorists, not the Muslim population at
large under whose umbrella he seeks false legitimacy.
The absurdity of Mr. Sakr's claim would be
laughable were it not for the tragic and dangerous consequences. The
"mainstream" groups that now dominate American Muslim organizational hierarchy
include the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Arab Youth Association,
the Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the
Islamic Association for Palestine, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee and the Council on American Islamic Relations. Whether we want to
recognize reality or not, the incontrovertible evidence shows that these groups
have championed the politics of international terrorist leaders and movements
while simultaneously pressing the "hate crime" button in American society to
intimidate critics of militant Islamic fundamentalism. The ADC has lauded the
violent Hizbollah as a legitimate "resistance" organization. The Muslim Arab
Youth Association sponsors talks by known terrorists calling for the death of
Jews. The Council on American Islamic Relations has championed the imprisoned
leader of Hamas as a "political prisoner" and contended that the convicted
leader of the World Trade Centre bombing was, according to The Washington Post,
the subject of "religious persecution." In the name of Muslim "civil rights,"
the Council on American Islamic Relations attacks journalists and reporters for
merely writing about militant Islam or for offering their interpretations of the
history of the Prophet Mohammed, which may differ from the versions propagated
by the militants. The Muslim Public Affairs Council not only applauds "Islamist
movements" -- i.e., radical Islamic fundamentalist groups -- but has championed
a known terrorist who drove his car into a crowd of Israeli civilians in an
effort to kill as many Jews as possible in Israel earlier this year. The Islamic
Circle of North America frequently lauds the most violent anti-Western terrorist
groups in the world today. The Islamic Society of North America so despises the
existence of the Jewish state of Israel that in 1996 -- nearly half a century
after the founding of the state -- it felt compelled to refer to Israel as the
"Zionist entity."
You in Canada are not immune to the presence
and growth of these groups. In fact, a leading international radical publication
is disseminated from Ontario. Nearly every week this publication, called the
Crescent, publishes racist and violent ideological tracts against the United
States, Christians, Jews and pro-Western Muslims. The Crescent repeatedly
publicizes the perfidy of Jews, the United States, the West and other enemies of
Islam. It repeatedly invokes the need to wage jihad (holy) war against the
infidels and, true to form, praises the dastardly acts of terrorism against
innocent civilians as a religious good deed and obligation of all Muslims.
With a worldwide reach, the Crescent is a
magazine that purports to represent the interests of Muslims but deliberately
subjects its readers to a virulent, paranoid view of the world, creating an
environment in which violent acts of terrorism become legitimate and acceptable.
Listen to the words of Sheik Mohammed al-Asi,
the Islamic religious cleric from Washington, DC whose mosque was the site of
the opening vignette I first recounted to you. The words in his column in the
October, 1996 issue of the Crescent, as you will now hear, could be taken
verbatim from the rantings of a world madman some 55 years ago.
"What the Jews refer to as 'anti-semitism'
does not happen out of the blue! When the masses turn their wrath against the
Jews it is not because the Jews are 'minding their own business.' It is rather
because the Jews literally own all the gentiles' businesses... Gentile kill
gentile, and the Jews sit comfortably in their executive suites and make a
killing out of it! After so much bloodshed, the gentiles finally realize that
the Jew thrives on regional and world wars so these gentiles turn their wrath
against the Jew."
Sheik al-Asi continues:
"The Jew has been at a low intensity but
sustained antagonization of the Germanic peoples. If a German publicly
articulates (and Germans have a penchant for speaking their mind) his brusque
and blunt opinion about the Jewish lobby, conspiracy or banking machinations he
is found guilty of some serious "hate crime"... German legalisms, after the
second world war, are custom-made to appease and accommodate the 'survivors of
the Holocaust.'"
Finally, Sheik al-Asi talks about the
attempts by Jewish groups to determine the amount of funds sequestered in Swiss
bank accounts from the days of Hitler:
"And as if the Jews have not received due
compensation from Germany and the troubled-conscience of the Christian murderers
of the second world war, now they have their golden-calf eyes set on Swiss
banks."
I wish that the Crescent's dissemination of
this genocidal hatred were an aberration, but it is not. Listen to the
Crescent's views on the conviction of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the
World Trade Centre bombing conspiracy:
"The conviction of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman
and nine other Muslims on trumped up charges of seditious conspiracy and
terrorism is no surprise... The purpose of the trial was to warn all Muslims in
the West that their activism in the cause of Islam would lead to a similar fate
that the U.S. would not tolerate even 'moderate' preaching of political Islam
not only in the West but anywhere in the world."
It would be one thing if the Crescent were
an exception in the West. Unfortunately, it is not. The same anti-Western and
anti-Semitic delusional paranoia is often replicated -- though not as
graphically -- in self-described Islamist publications throughout the United
States that reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of readers.
At an Islamic conference held recently in
the United States, listen to the words of the Voice of Islam, a publication
widely disseminated by the Islamic Institute of Minnesota, championing the cause
of Chechnya:
"Chechenia is Muslim land and used to be
part of the Islamic state. The Russlans seized it before the collapse of the
Ottoman state and annexed it to the Russian state."
"...The Muslim people of Chechenia resisted
this horrific onslaught, just as heroic believers would, and just like the
Mujahideen in the way of Allah would."
"...The main concern of the rulers is to
fight Islam, hinder its return to worldly life and to ruler ship, serve their
paymaster the kuffar and safeguard their interests and their grip on authority
by fighting those who carry the Islamic message, to the point where during their
summits and ministerial meetings, the top item of their working agenda is the
fighting of Islam and their conveyors, the blessing of the treacherous peace
with the Jews, and the work towards achieving a comprehensive and lasting peace,
as well as the normalization of their relations with the Jews."
That same type of paranoia has been spread
in the United States by the Council on American Islamic Relations and its head,
Nihad Awad, who was featured in the Islamic conference held here in Toronto last
month alongside Mr. Sakr. To the unsuspecting public, Mr. Awad's group -- the
Council on American Islamic Relations -- sounds about as innocent as you can
get.
In fact, as public documents and materials
show, and law enforcement officials confirm, this group is actually a propaganda
front for the militant terrorist group Hamas
and other militant Islamic extremists. Its
specializes in smearing critics of militant Islamic fundamentalism -- a concept
it claims does not exist -- as "anti-Islam."
Surely you, as a member of the public, have
the right to know this critical background, or that the organization's head
previously served as a senior official of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP),
a Dallas-based organization that has issued Hamas communiques taking credit for
bombings and terrorist attacks in Israel, produced terrorist training videos,
and disseminated numerous articles championing terrorist activities. In the
grandest deception of all, earlier this year the Clintons welcomed this group in
the White House under the facade of a "mainstream" Muslim group. Comparatively
speaking, CAIR is about as moderate as the Ku Klux Klan. Surely you as a member
of the public should know that Mr. Awad has stated openly -- on video, no
less-that he is "in favor of Hamas."
Proponents of radical Islam have discovered
that they can advance their cause by inverting their message, invoking the
politically correct charges to which Western society has become vulnerable:
human rights violations, racism, and denial of civil rights. In an egalitarian
culture appropriately sensitive to its historical and ongoing mistreatment of
minorities, the charge of discrimination has an intrinsically popular appeal.
But in the case of militant Islam in the West, the extremists have shrewdly
parlayed their minority status into that of being a victim of religious and
ethnic repression.
This deception is dangerous in a free
society whose protection depends upon -- indeed, requires -- the honest exchange
of ideas and information. The deception is dangerous because it chills free
speech and prevents society from learning about the dangers within. And it is
dangerous most of all because in the end, it is the overwhelming majority of
peace-seeking Muslims whose image is unfairly tarred by a fringe which hides
under the legitimacy of the majority.
The question for us today is whether we are
prepared -- or even able -- to recognize the existence, let alone the danger, of
militant Islam. Stripped of its veneer, the message of militant Islam is no
different than the language used by other extremist groups and leaders such as
the Ku Klux Klan or Louis Farrakhan. Yet while we instantly recognize the racism
of the latter groups, we have trouble recognizing the extremism of militant
Islam.
Indeed, with some exceptions, the extremist
language and action of indigenous white American terrorist groups and home-bred
racist leaders have become largely-but not entirely-recognized exactly for what
they are. We as a society have recognized the need to marginalize, ostracize,
and exclude these home-grown militant groups from the mainstream of political
thought. Of course, there is still much more to be done, as evidenced by the
ongoing violent conspiracies hatched by radical right-wing militias. But look at
how the Ku Klux Klan was finally defeated in the United States: it was not only
the work of law enforcement, but society's deligitimization of these groups. And
that, in large part, was brought about by exposing the militants' raw message of
hate and vitriol.
These groups, like radical Islamic groups,
built up their organizational movements under the protection of the freedoms
enshrined in our Constitution and our Western heritage of democracy and freedom
of speech. Radical groups-especially if they hide under the protection of
religious status-can operate freely as long as they don't violate the laws. In
democracies, nearly 99% of extremism is protected, rendering law enforcement
agencies powerless to stop these terrorist movements until after a violent act
occurs.
Still, I do not believe that we in the
United States or anyplace else in the West need to curtail our freedoms. The
main challenge and obligation is on our media to do what they have done best in
the past expose the radical and duplicitous undercurrents of society in keeping
with the media ethos of exposing wrongdoing and racist movements masquerading
falsely.
In recent years, we as a society have become
afflicted with an inability to decipher a message of militant Islam wrapped in
packaging that we ourselves helped manufacture. Changed under society's new
expansive view of multiculturalism which, carried to its logical extreme, sees
terrorist groups as simply part of the world's cultural rainbow. Changed by the
new rules of moral relativism and moral equivalency where radical movements
masquerading as oppressed movements -- particularly those outside the Western
tradition -- are uncritically accepted and afforded the same moral standing as
the very ethnic or political groups they seek to kill. Changed by the rules
legitimizing anti-Western movements as emancipating self-determination
movements. And finally, changed under a great intellectual hubris that pretends
it cannot be deceived by a simple chicanery.
The deception is evident in newspapers,
television, radio, universities, think tanks and even the most esteemed seats of
power.
Emboldened by the near total license given
to them by society, radical Islamic groups have increasingly used the great
religion of Islam for their own parochial purposes. For example, the Council on
American Islamic Relations has openly made the claim that merely citing the term
-- Islamic extremists --
remember, now, this is a group that
originated from Hamas propagandists -- is an attack on Islam, which in turn
leads to "hate." In what surely will go down as one of the great deceptions of
the last decade in American society, this organization has released reports --
relayed uncritically by the media -- alleging numerous "hate crimes" and
"violations of political rights" against Muslims. But in scrutinizing the
"evidence," however, something rather curious was discovered: many of the hate
crimes were found to fabricated, misrepresented, exaggerated, or without
external substantiation. Does society really want to expand its definition of
"religious persecution" -- as the Washington Post described the findings of the
Council -- to include the arrest of Musa Abu Marzuk, the Hamas chieftain, now
awaiting extradition to Israel, who is responsible for scores of murderous
terrorist attacks? Does society really want to legitimize a group that touts as
religious persecution the conviction of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the mastermind
of the World Trade Centre bombing and other conspiratorial acts so horrendous
that the sentencing judge declared that his planned acts of mass murder would
have killed more Americans on U.S. soil than any event since the U.S. Civil War
130 years ago?
In releasing their reports of "hate crimes,"
the militant groups must have been surprised as anyone when the media blindly
reported their conclusions without looking at the fine print. The New York Times
and the Associated Press, for example, respectively considered the premier
newspaper and wire service of record, published the equivalents of press
releases for the radical Muslim groups. For example, CAIR released a report in
September 1995 claiming the occurrence of scores of "hate crimes" following the
Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. But, upon closer inspection, it turns out
that many supposed hate crimes were either fabricated, exaggerated or highly
suspect due to the convenient impossibility of verifying them.
Now it must be stated, of course, that hate
crimes have indeed been committed against Muslims, as they have been against
other minorities, be they Sikhs, blacks, native Americans, Hispanics and Jews,
to name just a few. Yet as we acknowledge the existence of religious
persecution, we cannot at the same time allow groups that engage in religious
persecution to invert reality and hide under the same crime they are guilty of.
Similarly, we cannot give Louis Farrakhan a free ride merely because he claims
that blacks have been the victims of racism. Nor can we give a free ride to
Jewish terrorists like the assassin of Prime Minister Rabin, who claimed that
his action was designed to protect the Jewish people. To the extent the media
deliberately ignores the ulterior agenda of groups like the Council on American
Islamic Relations, they are only building a societal monster that will soon turn
on its master.
Other newspapers and respectable media
outlets, such as The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The
Washington Post, and The Boston Globe deserve special mention today. They have
not only disseminated demonstrably false information to the public, but have
gone one step further: they have falsely portrayed these militant Islamic groups
as moderate, withholding from the public the real record of these groups, their
source of funding, their ideological origins and the racism of their other
publications and statements.
As a journalist, I must confess to being
ashamed of the deliberate dishonesty of National Public Radio, which has
consistently disseminated false, self-censored and inaccurate information to the
public while simultaneously participating in one of this decade's greatest and
most dangerous deceptions. For the past three years, NPR has portrayed Hamas as
a wonderful social organization, has interviewed known Islamic militants and
misreported their backgrounds, has tried to re-interpret the concept of jihad as
a 1960's-style movement to clean up the environment, and has profiled radical
organizations as innocent civic groups similar to the Rotary Club. Having
participated in building up the credentials of violent radical Islamic
organizations, National Public Radio will ultimately discover that it only sowed
the seeds of its own disaster. The problem, of course, is that National Public
Radio's recklessness and deliberate falsehoods have implications beyond that
network. It has repercussions for other journalists and for the American public
at large. It is indeed quite strange to see journalists and media outlets, who
deemed the threats against Salman Rushdie horrific assaults on our freedoms,
come to the defense of organizations who have similarly tried to suppress free
speech.
Emboldened by their successes in having
their propaganda blindly parroted, militant Islamic groups proceeded to the next
logical step: intimidating and threatening journalists and writers whom they
deemed "enemies of Islam." For the first time ever, the North American continent
has experienced the application of the Rushdie Rules the attempt to suppress
Western free speech by smearing and tarring writers and journalists as "defaming
Islam" and "blasphemous" for merely writing critically aboutmilitant Islam.
In an act demonstrating that the U.S. would
never cave in to this type of threat, President Bill Clinton personally met with
Mr. Rushdie at the White House one year into his Administration. The Muslim
group that lead a bitter protest against President Clinton "for insulting more
than a billion Muslims" was the American Muslim Council its director, Abdul
Rahman Alamoudi, intimated in a television interview that Rushdie's book itself
was comparable in offense to the Holocaust. Four years later, this same group --
which has since become a champion of radical Islamic extremist groups -- was
warmly welcomed into the White House by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Militant Muslim groups are threatening
American-based writers on American soil for writing in American-based magazines
things that foreign-based extremists deem offensive. The past two years have
witnessed a quantum proliferation of this new chilling form of intimidation. For
example, both U.S. News and World Report and The New Republic magazines have
been subjected to fierce threats by militant Muslims led by the Council on
American Islamic Relations. The magazines' crime? They had "defamed Islam" by
publishing articles that were deemed blasphemous. "We demand that you
apologize," declared Mr. Awad of CAIR, as he stood outside U.S. News one day.
"You Jews are the scum of the earth," one letter writer wrote to The New
Republic, in a message that seemed somewhat moderate in comparison to others
received.
Three months ago, the editor of Current
Events, a subsidiary of the Weekly Reader -- a periodical distributed to young
kids across the United States -- was subjected to an unremitting stream of
attacks from Muslim groups around the world. His offense? Muslim groups claimed
that the magazine had "defamed Islam" by publishing an article discussing
terrorist acts against the United States which included the bombings of the
World Trade Centre and of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabla. Although the article also
discussed the Oklahoma city bombing, which was carried out by radical white
militias, the Muslim groups complained that the mere inclusion of attacks such
as the World Trade Centre bombing and those against our troops in Saudi Arabia
was "anti-Islam" and would induce "hate crimes" against Muslims.
This raw intimidation is nothing less than
an effort to rewrite history by threats of violence and intimidation. Yet this
is also more than just an effort to rewrite history it is an effort to impose by
threat the anti-democratic totalitarian values of militant Islam in the West.
Absent any effort to condemn this violation of our most precious freedom,
radical Muslim groups will continue to undermine our basic freedoms.
The Journal of the American Medical
Association -- a magazine that does not deal in any way with religion -- was
attacked this year by Muslim groups as "anti-Islam" because of an article about
victims of Hamas terrorism. In Dallas, Texas, two courageous reporters for The
Dallas Morning News were subjected to daily picket lines where they were
demonized and vilified in language that rendered them legitimate targets of
violent attack. The reporters' crime? The two -- Steve McGonnical and Gail
Reaves -- had authored an impeccably documented story revealing the vast
operations of the Hamas terrorist group in Dallas operating under cover names
and "charitable" designations. Even Hollywood studios -- for whom I usually have
no sympathy -- have been attacked for films that have featured radical Islamic
terrorist groups carrying out terrorism against the United States. Imagine that.
A radical Islamic terrorist group waging jihad against the United States. Oh,
those perfidious Hollywood studios. Where could they ever think of such a thing?
Yet, various American Muslim groups protested the film True Lies. Why? Because,
CAIR claimed, the name of the mythical group in the film had the word "jihad" in
it. Still another film, Executive Decision, was attacked because a protagonist
invoked the cry "Allahu Akbar" before carrying out a terrorist attack.
To quote the legendary gendarme in the movie
Casablanca, "I'm shocked!" A militant Islamic group using the word Jihad in its
title. And an extremist yelling "Allahu Akbar!" Will the West never cease its
cunning slander of terrorists?
Even more troubling are the inroads made by
the Islamic militants into venerable institutions, like the Council on Foreign
Relations. Oh, I know that the Council has a reputation for being a symbol of
established corporate America. But by presenting radical Islamic propaganda
masquerading as straightforward "analysis" or as legitimate "human rights
surveys," the Council on Foreign Relations has provided a prestigious platform
for extremists seeking to legitimize their aims. Although the Council says that
it "seeks to counter misperceptions" about Islam, in fact, with a few minor
exceptions, every article under the Muslim Politics Report has presented
"Islamist" perspectives in language soothing to Western ears. This includes
justifying the discrimination of women under the charge that Western standards
of human rights for females are culturally unacceptable to the Muslim world,
legitimizing militant Islamic terrorist groups as democratic political parties,
and intimidating critics of radical Islam.
As they say in television, let's go to the
videotape. In an article (Issue Number 2, Summer 1995) "analyzing" the attempted
assassination of Nobel Laureate Nagib Mahfouz, the writer, Hassan Hanafi, says,
"Nagib Mahfouz is a victim of terror and violence. The assailant is also a
victim of conservative, historical and unilateral version of Islamic tradition.
There are two victims, two threats [emphasis added]." Equating both Mahfouz and
his would-be assassin as "two victims" and further representing Mahfouz as
"threat" is, to say the least, mind-boggling. This was an act of abject
terrorism. Period. It was carried out by a terrorist group that intimidates and
kills intellectuals, secularists, writers, and actors in Egypt as part of their
campaign against all critics of their interpretation of Islam.
The real agenda of Mr. Hanafi was revealed a
few sentences later when he called for the "official recognition of the Islamic
trend as a socio-political periphery to the centre......"
Stripped away from its pseudo-academic
claptrap, the message is clear. Imagine, if you will, a respectable institution
publishing an article labeling the late Dr. Martin Luther King and his assassin
James Earl Ray as "two victims, two threats." Imagine calling the late Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his assassin Ylgal Amir "two victims, two threats."
Or imagine equating the Oklahoma bombers with the victims they killed and then
calling for the government to treat the extremist right-wing militia as no
different than the League of Women Voters.
Of course, it goes without saying that free
speech and academic freedom guarantee the right of all extremists, no matter how
odious, to be heard. There is nothing wrong with presenting the views of Hamas
or Sudanese strongman Hassan al-Turabi or even neo-Nazis or radical Jewish
fundamentalists who supported the killing of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. But
the open exchange of ideas requires first and foremost, honesty and truthfulness
in identifying the background and affiliation of those who present their
respective views. Extremists (or anyone else) should not be allowed or helped to
conceal their identity and disguise their message.
Surely, the Council or The New York Times
would deem it pertinent to identify David Duke as a past leader of the KKK if it
were to publish an article of his in which he identified himself only --
hypothetically speaking -- as "the head of the Council on Christian-American
Relations, a group dedicated to fighting bigotry."
The assault on our basic values by radical
Muslims will only continue unless and until the media does its job. Do we really
have to wait before a journalist or writer is killed until before the media
wakes up to the danger?
I personally have had to endure major
changes in how I live my life because of the threats against me. In November,
1994, in the first of a series of journalistic projects resulting from my
ongoing investigations, I served as the executive producer and correspondent for
a PBS documentary entitled Jihad in America. The film documented the hitherto
unknown infrastructure of radical Islamic networks on American soil, featuring
leaders of the most militant movements in the world today. In language clear and
unambiguous, in speeches not distorted for Western audiences, in secret
proceedings and conferences never intended to come to the light of day, and in
terrorist training camps, the hatred of jews, Christians and moderate Muslims
could not be mistaken. For the first time ever, the ulterior agenda of radical
Islamic groups -- many operating secretly -- had been exposed for the world to
see. The picture was both horrifying and frightening.
The reaction of numerous American Muslim
organizations was to condemn the film as an "attack on Islam." The equivalent
reaction would have been to condemn an expose of the extremism and racism of the
Ku Klux Klan as an attack on Christianity. Or an expose of the fanaticism of
right-wing Jewish fundamentalists as an attack on Judaism. Of course, such
hypothetical condemnations would be ludicrous.
Worse yet, various Islamic groups,
particularly those which have been embraced by the White House -- notably the
American Muslim Council and the Council on American Islamic Relations -- denied
that any of the terrorist groups profiled in the film were in fact terrorist. In
fact, in the mindset of a militant Muslim -- who does not accept the legitimacy
of moderate Islam -- my film did attack the totality of his world, a world
divided between Dar al-Islam -- the House of Peace, or that portion of the world
under Islamic Sha'aria rule, and Dar al-Harb -- the House of War, where Islam
does not reign and which must be taken over by the Islamic militants.
This is the bedrock doctrine of militant
Islam: any territory or, for that matter, any world political system operating
under non-Muslim sovereignty is considered an aggression against Islam. Indeed,
anything that stands in the way of the resurrection of doctrinal Islam is
perceived as part of the millennium-old conspiracy by the infidels to strike at
Islam. Like the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, or the creation of the State of
Israel, the broadcast of the film Jihad in America was presented as a
continuation of the Crusader attacks against Muslims. Indeed, I remember someone
pointing out the headline of a Chicago Muslim newspaper a month after the film
was broadcast: THE CRUSADES CO NTINUE -- JIHAD IN AMERICA AIRS ON PUBLIC
TELEVISION.
It bears repeating again and again that for
the vast majority of Muslims, the Islamic militants do not represent their
interests and that the majority of Muslims do not support in any way the
politics of the extremists. Nevertheless, to deny the existence of radical Islam
(as some Islamic groups have asserted recently in the United States) is
tantamount to equating militants and peace-seeking moderates as one and the
same. This fallacy, rather than protecting moderates from being tarred by the
extremist brush, only paints them further. For the militants, of course, the
deliberate blurring of the distinction between militant and moderate Islam
enables them to hide under the protection of mainstream Islam.
In the same manner, denial that a militant
White supremacist movement exists in the United States would be tantamount to
defending its existence. For the Muslim world, the stakes may be higher. The
battle for the heart and soul of Islam in recent years is really at the core of
a violence which continues to spiral out of control: as militant Islamic groups
attempt to impose the Sha'aria by force, destroy regimes they have deemed
heretical, or assassinate those who are considered enemies of their
interpretation of Islam, violence once contained within the Middle East has
proliferated throughout the world.
This can no longer be considered just a
Middle East problem. Nor is it a problem facing only the Jews. It is a problem
for the West and for mainstream Islam. It is an obligation of the West to
protect and strengthen moderate Muslims. The tragic irony, of course, is that
many Muslim immigrants came to the West to seek greater opportunities and
freedoms only to find themselves caught in the same violent vortex from which
they sought to escape.
As a society, we must recognize that however
strange and morally repugnant, many of the groups that come to the United States
turn around and hate us for the very freedoms they are exploiting. Still, it
does not mean that the media should stay away from exposing these radicals, let
alone participate in the dangerous charades they carry out.
Looking into the next century, it is all but
certain that militant Islam will increasingly focus its anger on the West -- for
its Western values, for its secularism and yes, we must admit, for the double
standards in which it treats authoritarian pro-Western Arab regimes and those
that are poised to be taken over by radical Muslim movements. Because unless and
until these radical Islamic movements -- which profess democracy only as a
tactic in permanently taking over genuinely demonstrate that they respect
pluralism -- I see no reason why Western governments are going to feel compelled
to enlarge the noose around their necks. Contrary to what some have called a
clash of civilization between Islam and the West, the clash is really between
moderate Islam and radical fundamentalist Islam.
THE SPEAKER
Steven Emerson is a terrorism analyst,
specializing in Middle East terrorism groups, now completing an investigative
book on the activities on American soil of radical Islamic groups and their ties
to affiliated organizations in the Midle East. Mr. Emerson has delivered
testimony on terrorist activity before the U.S. House International Relations
Committee as well as lectures before U.S. federal and local law enforcement
agencies and federal intelligence organizations concerning the modus operandi of
radical Islamic extremist groups. He is a frequent contributor to The New York
Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic and an award-winning
documentary journalist. He is the producer of Jihad In America, which has become
standard viewing for law enforcement and counter-terrorist professionals
throughout the United States.
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