Ben Weingarten

Reader. Writer. Thinker. Commentator. Truth Seeker.

Month: February 2015

“‘Moderate’ Muslims Are the Backbone of Jihad”: An Interview With a Top Sharia Lawyer from Iran

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China Expert Michael Pillsbury Reveals Beijing’s Long-Term Plan to Dominate America and the World

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10 Troubling Aspects of President Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Summit

The White House’s “Countering Violent Extremism” summit is barely underway, yet the message is already clear: the conference is politically correct — and far worse — a charade.

And that is a charitable interpretation.

Its sponsors are engaging in intentional obfuscation (e.g., saying “violent extremism” is the enemy), as well as peddling ineffective and ill-considered policy proposals (more community “empowerment”). The conference will effectively aid and abet America’s increasingly ascendant jihadist foes.

Reviewing the Obama administration’s summit preview, here are its 10 most disturbing aspects:

1. Contrary to its big government ethos, the Obama administration asserts that national security should be driven by the people, not the state.
Image source: BuzzFeed

(Image source: BuzzFeed)

According to the White House preview [emphasis mine]:

Really at the core of our approach is that the government does not have all the answers in combatting violent extremism. It is, at its core, a bottom-up approach. It puts communities with civic leaders, with religious authorities, with community power brokers, teachers, health providers, et cetera, in the driver’s seat. They know their citizens best. They are the first line of defense to prevent or counter radicalizing forces that can ultimately lead to violence. And so our approach is to really embrace and empower what local communities can do. So we’ve been working with our federal partners and our local partners to put in place this approach over the past couple of years.

Further:

Again, this is not about government, especially the federal government. The federal government doesn’t have all the answers. This is about building a comprehensive network to fight back against violent extremism. And we are explicitly recognizing the role that civil society plays, the private sector plays, and that families, et cetera, can play in countering violent extremism.

Who knew the Obama administration had so much respect for and faith in civil society?

Yet of course, this faith turns out to be dangerously misplaced as…

2. The groups the president wants to empower are those who may pose the biggest threat.

As Patrick Poole noted in an extensive report for TheBlaze:

In December 2011, the White House issued the “Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States” – the local partners, of course, being Islamic organizations, including those cited by the Justice Department as working to aid foreign terrorist organizations. All national security and law enforcement agencies on the federal, state and local level would now have to consult these groups and rely on “local partners” as a matter of policy. And as made clear in Salam al-Marayati’s Los Angeles Times op-ed, Islamic groups complaining about counter-terrorism policies or training would disrupt government efforts to “counter violent extremism” gave them an implicit veto over counter-terrorism policies. [Los Angels Times link added for context]

Why should we care about this 2011 report?

A senior Obama administration official noted in previewing the summit that the report details the very efforts the administration will be hawking during the three-day event.

Local partners such as the Council on American-Islam Relations — an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest Hamas funding trial in history — has advised members of the Muslim community not to work with the FBI, and religious leaders to lawyer up as opposed to working together with law enforcement when it comes to potential jihadists. On the eve of the summit, CAIR is reportedly calling for the Department of Justice to “protect those who act in good faith to prevent violent extremism by engaging with [Muslims] considering it in order to dissuade them.”

A partner of perhaps higher standing is the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), a group linked to numerous jihadis and jihadi-sympathizers, that is reportedly the primary liaison between the Muslim community and law enforcement in countering violent extremism. The Boston  program will be one of the three held up as a success story during the summit, despite the ISB’s Islamic supremacist efforts.

Looking to the heart of Muslim communities, according to the Mapping Sharia project, imams in over 80 percent of 100 randomly surveyed representative mosques in America recommended the study of violence-positive texts. The correlations with these texts are disturbing, as illustrated below:

Sharia Adherence Mosque Survey: Correlations between Sharia Adherence and Violent Dogma in U.S. Mosques (Image Source: http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/sharia-adherence-mosque-survey/html)

(Image Source: Sharia Adherence Mosque Survey: Correlations between Sharia Adherence and Violent Dogma in U.S. Mosques)

In Pew’s extensive 2011 report on Muslims in America, 21 percent of those polled indicated there was a great deal or fair amount of “support for extremism among Muslim American;” 19 percent did not indicate that “suicide bombing/other violence against civilians is justified to defend Islam from its enemies;” only 70 percent indicated that they viewed Al Qaeda “very unfavorably.”

As leaked Department of Homeland Security documents reveal, the second highest concentration of people designated as “known or suspected terrorists” by our government reside in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn’s population is 96,000, and it has the highest percentage of Arab-Americans of any city in the country.

In light of these figures, and the fact that jihadist groups worldwide claim they are at war with America, having committed over 25,000 attacks in the name of Allah since Sept. 11, 2011, one must ask, what exactly is the rationale behind leaving self-policing to Muslim communities when these are the very places from whence jihadists spring?

Such a policy of course is only baffling if you are of the belief that jihad is an Islamic tenet, and that Islamic supremacist ideology is what animates the vast majority of the world’s “violent extremists.”

But of course…

3. According to the administration there is no profile of a “violent extremist.”

Continue reading at TheBlaze…

Jay Cost’s Theory on How Our Republic Was Corrupted, and What We Can Do to Restore It

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Of Double Standards and Triple Homicides: Media Malpractice and the North Carolina Murders

On the night of Sept. 11, 2011, three men were brutally murdered in Waltham, Massachusetts — their throats slashed and bodies covered in marijuana.

Despite the gruesome nature of the crime, which one investigator described as “the worst bloodbath” he had ever seen, the national media would have never reported on this story, let alone identified the Jewish religion of at least two of the slain, had Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Muslim and close friend of the third victim, not carried out the Boston bombing.

In fact, in spite of Tsarnaev’s ties to the victims of these yet unsolved murders, to this day articles almost specifically de-emphasize the date of the crime, the fact that as the same investigator described it, the victims’ wounds were akin to those of “an Al-Qaeda training video,” and the religion of the slain.

Contrast this story with the horrific news that three Muslims were murdered execution style in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Suzanne Askar, right, rests her head on the shoulder of Safam Mahate, a student at North Carolina State University, as they stand next to Nida Allam, far left, during a vigil for three people who were killed at a condominium near UNC-Chapel Hill, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2015, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Craig Stephen Hicks appeared in court on charges of first-degree murder in the Tuesday deaths of Deah Shaddy Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. (AP Photo/The News & Observer, Al Drago)

Suzanne Askar, right, rests her head on the shoulder of Safam Mahate, a student at North Carolina State University, as they stand next to Nida Allam, far left, during a vigil for three people who were killed at a condominium near UNC-Chapel Hill, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2015, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Craig Stephen Hicks appeared in court on charges of first-degree murder in the Tuesday deaths of Deah Shaddy Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. (AP Photo/The News & Observer, Al Drago)

Unlike in the Waltham triple homicide, this story was explicitly reported as I just laid it out – a man killed three Muslims – a man, mind you, who many reports neglected to note is a militantly anti-religious atheist progressive.

In spite of the fact that stories ran across practically every major publication, with articles from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal referring to a triple murder of Muslims, social media exploded, with individuals appalled that the crime was somehow being ignored.

The #MuslimLivesMatter hashtag, adopted from the #blacklivesmatter hashtag created in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases went viral, signaling presumably that people believe atrocities are being carried out against Muslims en masse.

The juxtaposition of these two stories is instructive when it comes to today’s media.

While we might excuse the media in the case of the Waltham homicide for originally ignoring the date, nature of murder and religious identity of the victims, given their involvement with marijuana and law enforcement’s original public hypothesis that the murder was drug related, it is telling that these facts continue to be largely ignored in coverage of the murders.

Conversely, in the case of the Chapel Hill murders, religion was explicitly injected into the story from the start, leading many readers naturally to ascribe an anti-Muslim motive to the triple homicide. Meanwhile, local police believe the murders stemmed from an altercation over a parking space.

It is ironic that in the wake of President Barack Obama’s remarks about a “random” attack by a Muslim terrorist on a Kosher supermarket — note that the White House will not call it a jihadist attack on Jews — in the case of the victims in North Carolina, again from the start they were identified as Muslims. Randomness is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

Continue reading at TheBlaze…

Why the West is Losing to Islamic Supremacists

During a recent lecture on the nature of and threat posed by Iran, with whom President Barack Obama’s Chamberlainian negotiations continue apace, an existential question arose: Why does the West remain asleep regarding Islamic Supremacism and the doctrine on which it is based?

I posit that there are three main reasons, which also go a long way towards explaining why we are currently losing to the global jihad: (i) Progressive multiculturalism, moral relativism and materialism; (ii) Profound willful ignorance; and (iii) An inability to cope with the staggering implications of the threat we face.

Since the days of George W. Bush, we have heard the oft-repeated trope that Islam is a religion of peace, and moreover one of the world’s great religions, with the same ethics, values and principles as Judaism and Christianity.

Originally, the Western elite argued that those who killed in the name of Islam were merely misinterpreting and perverting the religion. These, one should note, were the relatively more clear-eyed ones. Others attributed genocidal jihadism to poverty, lack of education or global warming.

Now we have completely severed the jihadist head from the Islamic body (theo)politic, arguing that the barbarians who comprise Islamic State, or as the Obama administration obediently likes to say, Daesh, in spite of the first “I” standing for “Islamic,” are nihilists.

For a people steeped in progressivism for decades, this can be the only reasonable conclusion.

Islamic supremacism does not comport with the belief system of our elites, who assert that all peoples are the same, all religions consist of the same values and beliefs, and that material concerns trump all others, including spiritual or idealist ones.

For those who honestly believe such things — as opposed to the ones who spout platitudes out of political expediency and to gloss over threats they dishonestly claim to have already defeated – throwing up one’s arms and claiming that jihadism stems from an ideology of nothingness is the most coherent of an entirely incoherent set of answers. Even better is to declare that violent extremism is the enemy, so as to smear conservatives while they’re at it.

This pervasive misunderstanding of Islam reflects a profound ignorance, in that it neglects the fact that the Koran and hadith comprise a unique belief system fundamentally different from, and in fact antithetical to the historically Judeo-Christian West.

For those interested, there is a mass of literature from authors such as Dr. Andrew Bostom, Andrew McCarthy, Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq and Bat Ye’or who lay this out in concrete and copiously sourced terms.

Better yet, look to the texts and words of leading Islamic scholars such as Hassan Al Banna and Sayyid Qutb, prominent modern-day figures like Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Ayatollah Khameini, Hassan Nasrallah, and the content being taught at mosques right here in America.

If you would like to ignore the compendium of Islamic doctrine that calls for and compels Muslims to bring about a totalitarian world under which all submit to Allah’s rule, all one has to do is look at states whose governments are based in Shariah law to see Islam in practice.

Continue reading at TheBlaze…

Islam Scholar Dr. Andrew Bostom on Whether Islam is a Religion of Peace, Iran and Much More

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A Conversation With Cardinals Manager Mike Matheny on Youth Coaching, Faith and the “Cardinal Way”

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