Where Are the Moderate Muslims? PragerU

After every new Jihadist attack against the West, politicians reassure us that the atrocity does not represent the true nature of mainstream Islam. Of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, they constantly reassure us, the overwhelming majority are as law abiding as any members of any other monotheistic faith. Only a tiny fraction engage in terror. And Islam is a religion of peace. Furthermore, we are told, the great majority of Muslims hold moderate views. 

But what does that mean? How moderate are moderate Muslims? Given the threat of radical Islam, it would seem to be a fair question. Let me start to answer it by telling you something of my own story. 

I was raised in a middle class Muslim home in Cairo, Egypt. Growing up, I was told, among many other things, the following: That every day that passes on the Islamic nation without a caliphate is a sin. That the failures and miseries of the Muslim world started the moment we Muslims gave up conquests and wars against the infidels. That our prosperity depended on conquering new lands and converting new believers. That anyone who leaves the faith must die. And I also remember how my teachers and my mosque imams reacted to the news of 9/11 when it happened: joy.

My experience was typical, and there is data to prove it: According to the Pew Research Center, 88% of Muslims in Egypt, 62% in Pakistan, 86% in Jordan and 51% in Nigeria believe that any Muslim who choses to leave Islam should be put to death. Similar, if not identical, numbers are in favor of stoning people who commit adultery, severely punishing those who criticize Muhammad or Islam, and chopping off hands for theft.

All of these practices are a part of the penal code of Islamic law, which is known as Sharia. And 84% of Muslims in South Asia, 77% in Southeast Asia, 74% in the Middle East and North Africa and 64% in Sub-Saharan Africa support Sharia as the law of the land. Less drastic, yet significant, percentages are to be found even among Muslim communities in the West.

So, too, most of the world's Muslims believe that any acts of violence against Israel, including suicide bombers in buses and restaurants, are justified. Now, does any of this sound moderate to you? Yet if anyone raises these inconvenient truths here in the West, he is sure to be called an Islamophobe, a hater of Islam. Again, my own story is instructive. 

In February of 2015, I was yelled at, cursed at, and successfully prevented from speaking at Swarthmore College by students and others who did not agree to what I was saying. Some of them were Muslim women who fit the image of the unveiled, perfect English-speaking, moderate Muslim young woman. Other seeming “moderates” tried and failed to do the same during my speech at Temple University the next day. Some of them, sadly, were students of journalism.

For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/courses/polit...

The Mythical Moderate Muslim In Israel, a moderate Muslim is a dead Muslim, which is bad news for those who want us to believe that there is a peaceful solution to the continuing Arab war against Israel.

Primitive tribes offer sacrifices hoping to mollify whatever nonexistent beings they believe in. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman seems to belong to a very sophisticated tribe that, according to the recently retired Malaysian Prime Minister, rules the world by proxy. One would think Mr. Krugman should be above such crude superstitions. Nevertheless, in his column on October 21, he suggests that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld should fire General Boykin in order to mollify moderate Muslims.

General Boykin, the leading anti-terror expert at the Pentagon and a devout Christian, had openly and publicly, on several occasions, expressed his personal opinion of Islam, which happens to be rather low. Considering where the terror is coming from, this is far less surprising than Mr. Krugman's eagerness to sacrifice both General Boykin and the First Amendment in order to mollify moderate Muslims. I'd like to ask Mr. Krugman what gives him reason to believe that the beings he is trying to mollify actually exist.

The official, politically correct point of view says that Islam is just another monotheistic religion, not that different from Judaism or Christianity. If that is true, then moderate Muslims must exist, just like moderate members of other faiths. However, moderate members of other faiths do not require sacrificial mollification - that's basically how we tell moderates from extremists. Therefore, either moderate Muslims are mythical creatures, or we need substantially different criteria to identify them. That dilemma alone should make us suspicious as to whether Islam is "just another religion". Obviously, it is important that we determine how a moderate Muslim can be distinguished from a Muslim extremist.

Why not ask Muslims themselves? Irshad Manji, a young Canadian author, has published a book titled "The Trouble With Islam." Since we don't hear too many Muslim voices criticizing their religion, her book deserves our attention. This is what the author herself says on her promotional website
(http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/the_book_index.html):
"I appreciate that every faith has its share of literalists. Christians have their Evangelicals. Jews have the ultra-Orthodox. For God's sake, even Buddhists have fundamentalists. But what this book hammers home is that only in Islam the literalism is mainstream."
Apparently, the terms "literalism" and "fundamentalism" in the quotation above are used interchangeably, as synonyms of religious extremism. Unfortunately, the author fails to mention the most important difference between "literalists" in Islam and other religions. Evangelical Christians may believe that heaven is reserved for them alone. Ultra-Orthodox Jews may display intimate understanding of the murkiest places in the Talmud. I have no idea what extreme fundamentalist Buddhists do that sets them apart from their moderate coreligionists. What I do know however is that no religion except Islam pursues the idea of physical extermination of those who believe differently. The concept of holy war is unique to Islam. Jihad is the absolute monopoly of Muslims. There is no parallel to it in any other religion in the world (Yes, I have heard about Crusades, but Christianity does not mandate them, and do you know when the last Crusade ended?).
So, here we have it in plain English, as simple as A, B, C: 
A. According to the Koran, holy war against the infidels is a sacred duty of every Muslim. 
B. According to Ms. Manji, mainstream Muslims interpret Koran literally.
The conclusion is inevitable:
C. Mainstream Muslims perceive war against the infidels - meaning you and me - as their sacred duty.
Once you understand that, you don't need books to explain to you what exactly the trouble with Islam is. The trouble with Islam derives from the fact that mainstream Islam openly calls for murder of all infidels. That's why Islam is not "just another religion". That's what, in my view, allows to classify all its followers as extremist.
What then, besides our stubborn, groundless faith in the general goodness of our fellow human beings, leads us to believe that moderate Muslims are not just a figment of our imagination? How do they manifest themselves in the real world?

It would be utterly useless to look for them in Gaza, Judea, or Samaria. Unlike bin Laden, terrorists occupying Israeli lands do not live in caves. They live in small towns, villages, and crowded refugee camps where everyone knows everything about everyone else. They couldn't survive for a day without popular support. When someone gives them a reason to doubt the sincerity of his support, they label him a collaborator and murder him on the spot. Indeed, the PA-sponsored educational system guarantees that innocent children are indoctrinated in the most murderous variety of Islamic extremism - thereby losing their innocence - at the earliest possible age. Therefore, in Israel, a moderate Muslim is a dead Muslim, which is bad news for those who want us to believe that there is a peaceful solution to the continuing Arab war against Israel.

Let's look elsewhere. Afghanistan, liberated by the United States from the medieval tyranny of the Taliban is about to publish the draft of its first constitution. Their new constitution is going to be firmly based on Islamic principles. The country itself is soon to be renamed the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. We wouldn't call a Jew or a Christian who wanted his religion to become the basis of his country's constitution a moderate, would we? Here, in the United States, we value the separation of church from state so much that we launch court battles to remove the Ten Commandments and every reference to God from everything that is even remotely related to the government. If Islam is "just another religion", shouldn't the same criteria apply to Muslim countries? And if the same criteria do apply, we have to conclude that President Karzai installed in Afghanistan by the American military and unable to survive now or in the foreseeable future without the American military presence, is not a moderate Muslim, but an outright religious extremist. His "Very correct" remark to Mahadir's call for the extermination of Jews shows that he is a political extremist as well. Therefore, the only practical question regarding Afghanistan is why did the United States have to waste lives of its soldiers and tens of billions of dollars in order to replace one bunch of Muslim extremists with another? It might have been worthwhile had it improved our security at home, but, as we know, that didn't happen. Therefore, we have to conclude that the United States has once again won a battle but lost the war. The same will inevitably happen in Iraq.
The desperate search for moderate Muslims goes all around the world. It is especially urgent in Europe, whose face is being irreversibly altered by mass immigration from Islamic countries. Recently, the British government appealed to the growing British Muslim community to isolate extremists in their midst. It's not hard to predict the response. Actually, there will be no response, because everyone in any Muslim community is an extremist. Such is the nature of Islam, and the only thing that I find hard to comprehend is the self-imposed blindness of the British government. Apparently, such is the price of liberalism and political correctness. Bye-bye, Europe. We are next.
I don't think World War II could be won if the Allies, instead of eradicating Nazism, attempted to replace Nazi extremists with moderate Nazis. Actually, nobody was looking for moderate Nazis during World War II. But those were simpler, purer times. Today, the mythical moderate Muslim remains the focal point of the US foreign policy in the Middle East. The blind faith in his existence has already led the United States to many monumental failures, and many more are to be expected in the future. Meanwhile, the moderate Muslim, along with the Big Foot, the unicorn, and the Loch Ness monster, remains more elusive than a cure for cancer. There is at least a theoretical possibility that a cure for cancer can be found one day, unless of course Islam takes over and drags us all down into its own endless Dark Ages.

A Muslim Sheikh Remembers an Orthodox Settler Rabbi

By Anav Silverman

A year since the passing of peace activist and settler Rabbi Menachem Froman, his wife, Hadassah and close family friend, Sheikh Ibrahim Abu El-Hawa, a Palestinian Muslim, recently paid public tribute to the man who was well-known for his unique peace activities in the region.

Rabbi Froman served as the rabbi of the Tekoa community in the northern Judean hills. He was a leader in interfaith dialogue between Jewish settlers and Palestinians, while also successfully reaching out to Palestinian religious and political leaders. Rabbi Froman passed away from colon cancer on March 4, 2013 at age 68.

Since then his family has continued his legacy of fostering dialogue through religion and faith with Palestinians.

On Saturday night, March 8, Rabbi Froman’s wife and his son Shivi, led an evening filled with stories and prayers in the spirit of the late rabbi, together with Sheikh Ibrahim Abu El-Hawa - with an audience made up of family, friends and followers from across the Israeli political spectrum in Petah Tikva.

Sheikh Ibrahim Abu El-Hawa, known to Rabbi Froman’s family simply as Ibrahim, spent time remembering the Orthodox rabbi, educator, poet and a founder of the Gush Emunim movement, as a brother and friend.

“I have very deep feelings for Rabbi Froman and his family. He was a holy man and a brother to me. I attended the weddings of his children, and he attended the weddings of my children,” recounted Abu El-Hawa to Tazpit News Agency.

During the event, several of Rabbi Froman’s young grandchildren from Tekoa, with large knitted kippas and long side curls come over to say hello to Sheikh Ibrahim. They gave the elderly man a hug and asked him how he was doing. “What a family!” Abu El-Hawa later exclaimed with his ready smile.

Dressed in traditional white robes and a red keffiyeh, Abu El-Hawa at age 72, continues to spread the message of peace and hope. Fourteen years ago, he retired from his job as an engineer at the Israeli phone company to devote his time to “breaking fences between people - my real profession,” explains Abu El-Hawa.

“My father taught me to love everyone - Muslim, Hindu, Jew, Christian - he was the key to my understanding of the world.”

Abu El-Hawa’s father himself was a guard at the Russian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem for 50 years. The Abu El-Hawa family resides on the Mount of Olives and has been living there according to Sheikh Ibrahim for the past 1,300 years.

During the memorial tribute, Hadassah Froman told the audience that when her husband had to undergo surgery, Sheikh Ibrahim traveled to the Ein Karem hospital to be with them. “We would both sit outside the operation room - I would recite the Psalms while Ibrahim would read the Koran,” she said.

“God gave Rabbi Froman a special gift to spread love between people and I believe that is what he is doing right now - connecting souls together in Heaven,” Sheikh Ibrahim told Tazpit. “Someday I will help him.”

“We are all sons of Abraham, although we have two different mothers - Sarah and Hagar - we are still one,” stresses Abu El-Hawa. “Rabbi Froman was one of those special people who understood this - may his memory be forever be blessed.”

“With people like Sheikh Ibrahim, we can work towards peace,” said Alumah, one of the attendees of the event, who identifies herself with the political right. “He and Rabbi Froman are individuals who know how to bridge and not divide.”

Israel Matzav: Jordanian Sheikh: 'There's no such thing as Palestine'

Sheikh Ahmed Aladoan of Amman, a member of Jordan’s well-known Adwan tribe, posted on his Facebook page this week that Israel belongs to the Jews and that there's no such thing as 'Palestine.' He backed up his assertion with verses from the Koran. 

One of the Koranic verses provided states that Allah gave the Holy Land to the sons of Israel until the Day of Judgment (Surah Al-Ma’ida, verse 21), and the other (Surah Al-Shara’a, verse 59) says that the land was bequeathed to the Jews.

The sheikh turned to those who “distort the words of the Koran,” whom he labeled as liars, and questioned where they had even come up with the name “Palestine.” He insisted their claims to the Land of Israel were forfeit because “Allah is the protector of the Children of Israel.”

And if that wasn’t enough, the sheikh went on to turn the tables on the anti-Israel propaganda machine by accusing the Palestinians of killing children, the elderly and women, of using human shields, and of having not an ounce of mercy for even their own children.

The sheikh’s words caused a storm in the Arab media, and were picked up by the Israeli Embassy in Amman.

The Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi further explained the sheikh’s position, noting that he supports the notion that Jordan is Palestine, and insists that Arabs living both in Jordan and the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories would almost all love to be Israeli citizens.

The Adwan tribe issued a statement distancing itself from Sheikh Aladoan’s remarks. But the sheikh was not intimidated, and insisted he would continue to make his voice heard on these matters.

Last year, Sheikh Aladoan visited Israel and spent time with the chief rabbi of Tsfat (Safed), Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu. The sheikh informed Rabbi Eliyahu and his students that in the Koran, “there is no name ‘Palestine’ for this land, and therefore, the Arabs should not be fighting the Jews over control of this land.”

Read the whole thing. Now, if only he could get that message through to Obama and Kerry.

Boycott Google!

That new Google ad makes Muslims look like apolitical, normal human beings. Like all Zionists I am deeply horrified and offended.




Other than the music choice,  I have the following questions  about this ad:

1) Why does an old guy care so much about getting together with his childhood friend from eleventy-billion years ago? Maybe I'll understand when I'm ancient, but it seems more than a little oversentimental. (Especially, the maudlin "I miss Yosef so much" @2:14 which is there because the scriptwriter knows ordinary people don't mourn their childhood friends that way)

2) And why is the Muslim old guy sitting around a candy shop? I get that its his family business, but if they are well-off enough to afford the house shown later, and the two plane tickets to India, why is he spending his dottage taking up space behind the counter?

3) The Muslim grandkid looks young, healthy and secular -- another argument for the family's affluence, an affluence that would not compel him to sit around a store all day.

4) When he was a kid, he and his Hindu friend stole candy from that store. But, wait, don't they own the joint?

5) Imagine a Google ad that brings together a Jew and an Arab who were separated due to the Nakba. (The Palestinian exodus/expulsion is roughly equivalent to the population transfer that occurred after Partition) I can't imagine any Jew or Arab appreciating such an ad. We'd rightly ask, hey, what about the wars and terrorist attacks that happened afterwards? Relations between Pakistan and India following Partition were equally bad if not worse: Three wars, terrorist attacks on mosques and temples (that rarely make the front page of the times, btw) and so on. I have to wonder what the typical Pakistani and the typical Indian makes of this spot

ISRAEL MATZAV: Family of Arab honored for saving Jews rejects prize

The family of Mohamed Helmy, an Egyptian doctor who was honored posthumously by Yad VaShem recently for saving Jews during the Holocaust, has turned down the prize, saying that Israel is the one country by which Helmy did not want to be honored. 

The Egyptian doctor Mohamed Helmy was honored posthumously last month by Israel's Holocaust memorial for hiding Jews in Berlin during the Nazis' genocide, but a family member tracked down by The Associated Press this week in Cairo said her relatives wouldn't accept the award, one of Israel's most prestigious.

"If any other country offered to honor Helmy, we would have been happy with it," Mervat Hassan, the wife of Helmy's great-nephew, told The Associated Press during an interview at her home in Cairo this week.

Mohamed Helmy was an Egyptian doctor who lived in Berlin and hid several Jews during the Holocaust. Last month, he was honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as "Righteous Among the Nations" -- the highest honor given to a non-Jew for risking great personal dangers to rescue Jews from the Nazis' gas chambers.

...

Hassan said the family wasn't interested in the award from Israel because relations between Egypt and Israel remain hostile, despite a peace treaty signed more than three decades ago. But, she cautioned, "I respect Judaism as a religion and I respect Jews. Islam recognizes Judaism as a heavenly religion."

"Helmy was not picking a certain nationality, race or religion to help. He treated patients regardless of who they were," she said. 

Dressed in a veil, the 66-year-old woman from an upscale neighborhood of Cairo was pleased to talk about her husband's great-uncle. She and her husband, who did not want to give his name to the AP, say they visited Helmy regularly in Germany.

But this next paragraph is rich....

Helmy was born in 1901 in Khartoum, in what was then Egypt and is now Sudan, to an Egyptian father and a German mother. He came to Berlin in 1922 to study medicine and worked as a urologist until 1938, when Germany banned him from the public health system because he was not considered Aryan, said Martina Voigt, the German historian, who conducted research on Helmy.

The Arabs loved the Nazis, but at the end of the day, the Nazis had no use for the Arabs. 

JEWISH PRESS: Muslim Physician: Israel an Inspiration to Islamic World By: Rachel Avraham

Photo Credit: Qanta Ahmed

Qanta Ahmed is a Muslim physician, author, and British citizen. In a recent exclusive interview with United With Israel, she called Israel’s achievements in women’s and minority rights an inspiration to the Muslim world.

Qanta Ahmed is a physician, a Muslim of Pakistani origin, a British citizen and the author of “In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in Saudi Arabia.” Ahmed told United With Israel that she has traveled virtually everywhere in the Middle East, and has found no other country in the region with the same “level of freedom and integration.” Based on her experience, she acknowledges Israel as a special and unique country, a fact she believes no one should take for granted.

Ahmed recounts, “There was a very powerful sense of national identity in Israel, and in a certain way an acceptance of people wanting to be different. I found Israel extraordinarily liberating, for Muslim men and women.I met with Israeli Muslims…I visited the Beit Issi Shapiro Center in Kalansua, where Israeli Arab women were taking care of children with special needs. These women participated in the society, whether veiled or not. They had a role outside the household.”

Ahmed remarked that during her visit to the Technion, she was amazed by the various programs offered and the strong minority presence on the campus. She noted, “20 percent of the undergraduates at the Technion are Arab Muslims and seeing how they were thriving is very different from even the privileged women in Saudi Arabia. There is a different climate.I don’t feel in Israel that women are under siege or unequal or victims, but that is a strong feeling in the Muslim world. They aren’t fully empowered and they aren’t equal. I found Israel very refreshing. I did not find it in any way oppressive.”

Ahmed was also impressed that Israel provides a safe haven to the Ahmadi Muslim community, which is “persecuted across the Muslim world.” In contrast, the Ahmadi Muslim community in Haifa has “been thriving for the last 100 years.” They have their “own mosques, cemeteries funded by the Israeli government, and a school,” while in Pakistan “Ahmadi cemeteries are frequently desecrated, Ahmadis are barred from giving the Muslim call to prayer, and it is forbidden to call their holy places mosques.” Ahmed relates, “When I was visiting the minorities in Haifa, there were young men who recently converted [to Ahmadi Islam]…[and] some of them were Palestinians from the West Bank. They were excommunicated by their families in the West Bank for adopting their views and sought shelter in Haifa.” She acknowledged, “Israel is a guarantor of religious freedom. Religious freedom is an absolute human right under Israeli law, but not in the Palestinian Authority.”

Ahmed concluded, “The Muslim world needs Israel as an inspiration more than Israel needs the Muslim world’s acceptance. It is very bleak times, but Israel is extraordinarily hopeful…a hope I really experienced through the Israeli Muslims I met.”

Here's Stephen Colbert's hysterical take on the Iranian Presidential election.

JEWISH PRESS: Iran’s New “Moderate” President By: Asher Schwartz

Muslim Zionist, Christian Arab Explain Islamic Hatred of Israel A Zionist Muslim and a Christian Arab Reverend explain ‘anti-Zionism,’ call on moderate Muslim world to wake up.

Two Zionist, one a Pakistani Muslim and the other an Egyptian Christian Reverend, explained to Arutz Sheva why “anti-Zionist” has become the new code word for anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.
History shows that Muslim anti-Semitism predated the state of Israel, Zionist Muslim Kasim Hafeez said. However, he explained, it is now called anti-Zionism because the term has become acceptable in the Western world.

Israel "has become an excuse" for the problems in the Muslim world, he noted.

Both Hafeez and Reverend Majed El Shafie, human rights advocate and founder of One Free World International and a convert to Christianity, warned that moderate Muslims must stand up to extremist Islam.

“Radical Islam is a religious supremacist ideology,” Hafeez said.

If criticism of Muslim extremism is stifled, “then we’re going down a very dangerous path,” he warned.

Hafeez and Shafie also discussed the impact of Islam on Europe, persecution of ArabChristians, and Muslim reactions to their criticism.

YNET: Muslims combating anti-Semitism At Jerusalem conference, British-born Muslim compares KKK rallies in US to anti-Israel protests in London. 'During my visit I saw Israel wasn't some apartheid state,' he says

A small, but increasingly vocal number of Muslims are rejecting radical hate speech and combating anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. In the recent Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism held this week in Jerusalem, Palestinian Media Watch director, Itamar Marcus and Dr. Boaz Ganor organized a panel discussion with Muslim activists actively rejecting hate rhetoric.

Two of the panel speakers included Kasim Hafeez, a BritishMuslim who runs The Israel Campaign and Rev. Majed El Shafie, a human rights advocate originally from Egypt. Ahmad Mansour, a Palestinian living in Berlin, who is a policy advisor for the European Foundation for Democracy, was also scheduled to speak but was unable to attend.

  

"When people say that anti-Semitism exists in the Muslim world because of Israel, that is simply an excuse," says Kasim Hafeez, born in Britain to a Pakistani Muslim family.

"People here (in Israel) get Islamic anti-Semitism. In Europe, we deny it," Hafeez expounded.

"As a university student, I would attend radical anti-Israel rallies in Trafalgar Square. Here I am standing in London in the middle of a European capital - chanting 'death to Israel' and nothing was ever done."

He compares those rallies with the Ku Klux Klan. "An Al-Quds Day rally in London is equivalent to a KKK rally in the US," he stressed.

Hafeez told Tazpit News Agency that he began to change his thinking when he read A Case for Israel, by Alan Dershowitz.

Hafeez explains that he read the book in order to learn how to further deconstruct Zionist propaganda. "But I began to see that I could no longer support my convictions because I had no answers to the arguments that were made for Israel," he explains.

"I found that the radical Islamic doctrine that I grew up with and my own belief in violent jihad could no longer support the truth I once believed in."

Anti-Israel protest in London (Archive photo: Rona Zinman)

That realization prompted Hafeez to visit Israel. "I kind of hoped that the visit to Israel would be a negative experience, that it would enable me to go back to my former beliefs," he told Tazpit News Agency.

But the visit was eye-opening for Hafeez, who says he fell in love with Israel during his first trip. "It's hard not to support Israel," says the soft-spoken Hafeez, who recently participated in the Jerusalem Marathon. "I encountered Israelis who weren't anti-Arab, or anti-Islam and saw that this wasn't some apartheid state."

'Moderates must speak up.' Rev. Majed El Shafie (Photo: Anav Silverman, Tazpit)

However, coming out in support of Israel hasn't been easy. Hafeez has become isolated from his friends. "It's a lot of hassle – it really disrupts your life when you become vocal and open about your support for the Jewish state."

"What people don't understand, is that it doesn't matter if you bend over backwards for radical Islamists. If you are Jewish, they will hate you no matter what," Hafeez said.

Rev. Majed El Shafie, the founder of One Free World International (OFWI), a leading organization which advocates for religious minorities globally, echoed similar sentiments. A Muslim who converted to Christianity, he found political asylum in Canada and believes that the silence of moderate Muslims is more dangerous than the rise of extremists.

“They (moderate Muslims) must speak up,” says Rev. El Shafie. “Anti-Semitism is everyone’s problem. The moderate Muslims don’t understand that after the radical Muslims finish with the Christians, Bahai, and Jews, they will come after them. The minute we stop fighting for each other, we lose our humanity,” he added.

Rev. El Shafie believes that education is the solution to radicalization and is the only way to bring forth democracy in the Middle East. "The Arab Spring is a cold deadly winter. Whoever came up with the term 'Arab Spring' must have been a guy in a suit behind a desk who had no idea what was really going on."

"Today all these dictatorships that have been overthrown are filled with extremist governments. There is no separation of religion and state and no freedom of religion in the Middle East. Education must come before democracy"

As for Israel, Rev. El Shafie declares that there are two things that the Jewish state cannot be questioned for. "When Israel's right to exist and Israel's right to defend itself, come into question, a line has been crossed," he stated. "The new anti-Semitism today is to hate Israel."

FRONT PAGE MAG: My Name is Bosch and I’m a Recovered Muslim Posted By Bosch Fawstin

Author’s note: This was originally published in Dec. 2011 in Front Page Magazine and it was the most popular piece I’ve written until this piece of mine. I’m a cartoonist, so the only essays I write are ones that I cannot express in any other way but words, and here- in light of the latest Jihad attack in London, and the latest “Islam vs “Islamism”” debate going on- is what I think is my most comprehensive piece on Islam, Muslims & Jihad.

My name is Bosch and I’m a recovered Muslim.

That is, if Muslims don’t kill me for leaving Islam, which it requires them to do. That’s just one of the reasons I’ve been writing and drawing against Islam and its Jihad for a number of years now. But fortunately for us, Islam hasn’t been able to make every Muslim its slave, just as Nazism wasn’t able to turn every German into a Nazi. So there is Islam and there are Muslims. Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don’t aren’t.

But that doesn’t mean we should consider these reluctant Muslims allies against Jihad. I’ve been around Muslims my entire life and most of them truly don’t care about Islam. The problem I have with many of these essentially non-Muslim Muslims, especially in the middle of this war being waged on us by their more consistent co-religionists, is that they give the enemy cover. They force us to play a game of Muslim Roulette since we can’t tell which Muslim is going to blow himself up until he does. And their indifference about the evil being committed in the name of their religion is a big reason why their reputation is where it is.

So while I understand that most Muslims are not at war with us, they’ve proven in their silence and inaction against jihad that they’re not on our side either, and there’s nothing we can say or do to change that. We just have to finally accept it and stop expecting them to come around, while doing our best to kill those who are trying to kill us.

Another problem with Muslims who aren’t very Muslim is that they lead some among us to conclude that they must be practicing a more enlightened form of Islam. They’re not. They’re “practicing” life in non-Muslim countries, where they are free to live as they choose. But their “Islam” is not the Islam. There’s no separate ideology apart from Islam that’s being practiced by these Muslims in name only, there’s no such thing as “Western Islam”.

Non-observant Muslims are not our problem, but neither are they the solution to our problem. Our problem is Islam and its most consistent practitioners. There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it’s not because of Islam, it’s because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. The very rare Muslim who helps us against Jihad is acting against his religion, but that doesn’t stop some among us from thinking that his existence somehow means that he represents more than himself.

The only reason we’re talking about Islam is because it doesn’t mean peace. Islam wasn’t hijacked by a “small minority of extremists” on 9/11, it was hijacked by a very small minority of moderates whose embarrassment in being associated with such an immoderate religion leads them to engage in moderate truth telling about it, proving their irrelevance as allies.

In addition to these politically active moderates, when you see well-assimilated Muslims in the West, you’re not seeing Islam in action, you’re seeing individuals living up to the old adage, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. They’re essentially post-Islamic Muslims who have rejected Islamic values and have embraced Western ones. But since the process of their assimilation was implicit – as it happened naturally by their exposure to Western, i.e., pro-life, values – both Muslims and non-Muslims alike prefer to generously give Islam some credit for it. But a good Muslim, by our standards is a bad Muslim by Islamic standards. Objectively good human beings, who identify themselves as Muslim, give Islam a good face, one far better then it deserves. This only gives us a false impression about what it is we’re facing, with just another excuse not to face it. And this leads to our acceptance into our culture of stealth jihadists who have figured out how to say what we want to hear, while they scheme behind the scenes to further Islamize the West.

In the name of distinguishing the enemy from Muslims who mean us no harm, far too many Western commentators have avoided using the name “Islam” for the enemy’s ideology, and instead have decided to create their very own terms for the threat we’re facing, terms that are alien to the enemy. Terms such as:

Islamic Fundamentalism.

Islamic Extremism.

Totalitarian Islam.

Islamofascism.

Islamonazism.

Political Islam.

Bin Ladenism.

Radical Islam.

Militant Islam.

Islamism.

Jihadism.

We didn’t use terms such as “Radical Nazism”, “Extremist Shinto” and “Militant Communism” in the past. “Militant Islam”, Political Islam”, etc., are redundant terms. Our pretending otherwise has proven disastrous. Thousands of American lives, both civilian and military, have been sacrificed because of policies predicated on the myth that “Islam means peace.” We didn’t try to reform Shinto or Nazism during World War II; the major changes in those cultures took place only after we thoroughly de-militarized them.

And it’s no accident that Western analysts of Islam who are most informed about Islam are also most critical of it, while those least informed are least critical. But then there are those who, in their study of Islam, have become so enamored with their subject that, instead of sticking to what Islam is, they often write about what it isn’t, what they hope it might be. They seem preoccupied with doing their part to save Islam from those who have allegedly corrupted it.

The Muslim world is where the true meaning of Islam can be found in practice. Islam – not any alleged deviant form of it – means misogyny, censorship, anti-Semitism, homophobia, wife-beatings, beheadings, honor killings, pedophilia/“child marriages”, murdering infidels, etc. This is evil, and Islam sanctions every bit of it, but we’ve been told that we must respect “one of the world’s great religions” because it’s a religion. Following 9/11, the only thing George W. Bush knew about Islam was that it was a religion, and that apparently was a good enough reason for him to exonerate it as he did. And his advisor on Islam, David Forte, told Bush exactly what he wanted to hear, that “Nothing this evil could come from religion.” But 9/11 did come from a religion. Whatever else 9/11 was, it was an act of faith.

And Bush saying “Islam is peace” shortly after 9/11 gave the enemy a gift they couldn’t have foreseen. Here was the one man who was charged to defend America from their attack and here he was defending the very ideology that motivated the attackers. Honesty is the best policy in general, and when it comes to war, it’s a moral imperative to find out the truth, to tell the truth and to act on the truth, no matter what sacred cow is killed in the process. And so a big part of why nearly 3,000 victims of jihad on 9/11 haven’t been avenged is because of respect for religion, even for a religion that calls for our destruction.

Muslims who really care about Islam are part of an organized effort to spread Islam, and I sometimes refer to this collective effort by Muslims as “Organized Islam.” No matter the means involved, Muslims working towards a more Islamic world want the same thing the jihadists want. This organized effort includes Mosques, Muslim organizations, Muslim individuals writing books, blog posts, etc. And they all invariably engage in anti-Western, Anti-Israeli propaganda, at the very least.

I often hear that we should be working with the Muslim world. Working towards what? As Ayn Rand writes, “In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.” Any time we spend “working” with a culture that calls for our destruction, we are working towards our own destruction, consciously or not.

While it’s true that jihadists don’t represent most Muslims, they do represent Islam. But then why don’t most Muslims engage in jihad? Like in any culture, heroes are a small minority, and that goes for Islamic culture as well. The jihadists are Islam’s heroes; they are the ones most dedicated to following Allah’s commands and they’re celebrated in the Muslim world for it. They are also the only ones to whom Islam guarantees paradise. And their rarity was made even clearer when we learned that only the pilots of 9/11 knew it was a suicide mission. Our enemy knows that it’s tough to get even hardcore Muslims to sacrifice their lives for Islam, but they don’t want us to know that. Just as they don’t want us to know that behind their boast that they love death is the fact that they hate life.

And while Muslims who blow themselves up in order to kill non-Muslims are a small minority, Muslims who would explicitly condemn them are an even smaller minority. And while I think that Muslims are mere sheep to their Jihadist wolves, there are also too many Muslim cheerleaders for jihad. How many Muslims celebrated 9/11? Far too many. Even in my own lax Muslim upbringing in America, there was an omnipresent anti-Semitism and misogyny. Some members of my family admired Adolph Hitler, who I refer to as “Islam’s Favorite Infidel.” Regarding misogyny, the birth of a girl became a day of mourning for Muslim women in my family; they understood the suffering this girl would endure under Islam, even in America.

Though we say we’ve been at war for over ten years, we haven’t even begun to fight the war the way we should be fighting it. And those calling for a change within Islam during this war would be surprised at how much Islam can be changed through an honest war on our behalf. You can’t make a violent religion like Islam non-violent by argument, only by greater retaliatory force against state sponsors of jihad terrorism.

The future of Islam and the well-being of Muslims is said to be of importance to us. Post – 9/11, the defense of our culture, our values, our very lives has been optional, but our defense of Islam has been absolute. It began with Bush’s “Islam is peace” and it continues with Obama, who said in his Submission Speech in Egypt in 2009, in front of members of The Muslim Brotherhood, “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” If only he felt the same about America.

We can’t be both for Islam and for ourselves. This enemy is fully on their own side and fully against us and they’ve made themselves believe that they’re the good guys and that we’re the bad guys, and our actions have done nothing but turn their hatred of us into an ever-deepening contempt. Before we see the enemy for what it is, we need to see ourselves for what we are. Only then can we, with full moral conviction, make them pay for what they’ve done and move us towards victory.

Our problem is not “Islamophobia”, but Islamophilia. It is this uncritical, uninformed, absolute defense of Islam by Western elites after 9/11 that I refer to as Islamgate. It’s a scandal for the ages that few involved would ever admit to being part of.

I care about the truth. I care about Western Civilization. I care about myself, my loved ones and my friends. I care about Iife. And that’s why I don’t care about Islam.

Our altruistic concern for the future and well being of the Muslim world has come at the expense of American lives and treasure. We’ve placed the well being of “The Muslim World” above our own self-defense. We’ve placed today’s Big Lie, “Islam means peace”, above the truth we need to act on. We’ve placed the lives of Muslim civilians above the lives of our soldiers, placing them in absolutely unnecessary danger in order to protect innocent (or even guilty) civilians. Our Rules of Engagement might as well be renamed the Golden Rules of Engagement, as our soldiers have been forced to treat the enemy the way we’d like to be treated. And the enemy takes full advantage of that, as they do of all of the policies our morally vain politicians have concocted. We need to shift the focus onto our own well-being at the enemy’s expense for a change.

We’ve tried everything since 9/11 except real war. War is the answer to Jihad.

So who cares about Islam? Muslims, Jihadists, Islamophiles, Leftists who naturally side with anti-American ideologies, guilt-ridden fellow travelers who think America is usually in the wrong, and religionists who believe any religion is better than none. But since Leftists and Islamophiles usually know very little about Islam, who truly cares about Islam? Those who are at war with us.

In the end, I care about Islam and the Muslim world as much as the Muslim world cares about America and the West. This is war. We can’t be on both sides. I’m not rooting for Islam or the Muslim world.

I’m rooting for us.

HOLY HUMOUR - MUSLIM & JEWISH COMICS

YNET: Hebron Arabs meet with Jews to discuss co-existence - despite danger

YNet (Hebrew) reports on monthly meetings between yeshiva students in Efrat and Muslims from Hebron to discuss co-existence.

Ma'an translates:

“For a short hour, two completely different worlds would meet here. Young Palestinian men from Hebron and Jewish Yeshiva students from Efrat settlement have been involved in monthly meetings.

“However, to document these meetings was not an easy job as the participants at the beginning refused to let us take photos of them, and asked us blur their faces because revealing their identities may create serious problems within their societies,” the report said.

“The Palestinians have enough reasons to fear joining such meetings with settlers because such dialogue is illegal in the eyes of their society. If they are stigmatized as collaborators, they will be in real danger,” the report quoted chair of the Jewish organization of religious dialogue Yehuda Stolov as saying.

This is the sort of thing that should be celebrated by the so-called "progressive" Western liberals. 

Instead it will be ignored, or worse, condemned as "normalization" - a positive word that has become as toxic in certain circles as "Zionism" itself.

People who live together wanting to cooperate. How awful!

Video can be seen at the linked sites.

Turkish-Muslim TV Commentator Goes to Bat for Israel Despite the risks, Ozbudak believes that 'someone should speak up and say the truth, so others can follow.'

Ceylan Ozbudak

Ceylan Ozbudak is a Turkish TV commentator, peace activist, and supporter of the State of Israel. Ozbudak says she values the fact that

Israel has this democratic perspective which is very hard to find in the Middle East. There are minorities in the Knesset, which is hard to find in the Middle East. The democracy of Israel is something that we should all take an example from, as well as the religiousness. I am a religious person and respect religion.

According to Ozbudak, “People in the region look up to Israeli religiousness and this have set an example for other Muslims in the region.” Turkey, for example, has more mosques per capita than any other country in the world, even Saudi Arabia, and average Turks usually pray. Mosques are always full in Turkey. Thus, when the Jewish people value and respect their religion, it helps advance the cause of peace, for it helps Israel to fit into this very religious region of the world.

Ozbudak believes that Muslims around the world should recognize Israel’s right to exist:

According to Islam, Jews have the right to live in Israel until the day of resurrection, the end of the world. The Qur’an says, “Dwell in this land and when the promise of the End of Day comes to be fulfilled, we shall ensemble you there.”

Opposition to Radical Islam

She believes Hamas opposing Israel’s right to exist is merely one of many ways in which Hamas is behaving un-Islamically. Other manifestations include harming innocent people in violation of Islamic laws on armed conflict and engaging in offensive rather than defensive wars.  Ozbudak says that, “There is also no offensive war in Islam, only a defensive war. You cannot fire rockets at a place that is not fighting with you.”

Ozbudak is very much opposed to radical Islam. She claims,

They hate women, animals, art, science, every thing beautiful. What they are doing has nothing to do with Islam. It is a great danger to Islam.

Our Prophet had agreements with Jews and Christians, and they got along with them. The first Islamic country had Jews, Christians and Muslims living in peace. Caliph Umar invited the Jews back to Jerusalem. We learn Islam from these people. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have nothing to do with this.

Ozbudak, as an advocate for peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Jews, believes that the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East remains ideology. Thus, the ideology of hatred that permeates the Arab world needs to cease. She believes that the best way to diminish this hatred is to promote people to people interactions among the various peoples of the Middle East so that the peoples of the region can coexist with each other. In other words, peace should be built up from the bottom upwards.

Targeted by Terror

Unfortunately, Ozbudak and her group in Istanbul that supports peaceful coexistence within Israel have been targeted by radical Islamists for their beliefs. Evidently, al Qaeda had a list of targets within Istanbul. The first on the list was a synagogue, yet Muslim scholar Adnan Oktar, with whom Ozbudak is affiliated, was number two on the list.

Ozbudak believes this is because Oktar has been very outspoken in favor of peaceful coexistence with Israel. In fact, he and his friends have even held four conferences within Israel itself, as well as hosting members of the Israeli press and political leadership. Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau and Israeli Deputy Minister Ayoob Kara, among others, have appeared on his TV show.

Nevertheless, despite the risks, Ozbudak believes that “someone should speak up and say the truth, so others can follow.” In an era when radical Islam is on the upswing, it is refreshing to have a Turkish voice such as Ceylan Ozbudak supporting peaceful coexistence with Israel.