Tag Archives: Blasphemy/Slander

Silencing the Watchdogs of Religious Freedom: Durbin’s War on the USCIRF

We have been hearing a lot about the Muslim Brotherhood lately – and none of it is good news.  Get used to it.  With the Brotherhood’s ascendancy in the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and beyond, the world is going to be subjected to a crash course in Islamist supremacism – and what it means for the rest of us.

We were on notice even before the Egyptian elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and their allies secured upwards of sixty percent of the votes in that country’s new, post-Mubarak parliament – and the murderous violence towards Coptic Christians that preceded them.  A reminder came on December 7th when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed convictions ofleaders of the MB-associated Holy Land Foundation.  The earlier trial in 2008 did much to expose the totalitarian, supremacist nature and seditious objectives of that group, elsewhere and here in the United States.

Notably, evidence introduced (uncontested by the defense) in that case by federal prosecutors established that the Brotherhood has established myriad front organizations, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the North American IslamicTrust (NAIT), to pursue what it calls “civilization jihad.”  This is a stealthy form of holy war, designed to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within…by their hands [i.e., those of the infidels].”

The Obama administration has greatly facilitated the efforts of such organizations to penetrate and influence the government of the United States.  To cite but one example, on December 12-14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is convening a meeting with representatives of theBrotherhood’s multinational official counterpart, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).  As Phyllis Chesler points out in a brilliant essay published by PJMedia () entitled “The End of Religious Freedom,” the OIC’s stated purpose for this meeting is to counter: “media campaigns and fabrications made by some quarters in non-member states regarding the mistreatment of non-Muslim minorities and communities in the OIC member states under the slogans of religious freedoms and so on.”

Put simply, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and other adherents to the Islamist politico-military-legal doctrine of shariah seek to impose their practice of “blasphemy” laws worldwide.  Accordingly, they seek to suppress information that “offends Muslims” or otherwise puts them, their agenda or their behavior in a negative light – no matter how accurately.

In recent years, the U.S. government has increasingly conformed to what amount to  shariah blasphemy laws.  A singular exception has been the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).  Since its inception by act of Congress in 1998, the unpaid commissioners have rendered incalculably important servicemonitoring and reporting on threats to freedom of religion emanating from Islamist and other sources.

USCIRF has, for example, documented the plight of Copts in Egypt and Christians and Jews inother parts of the Middle East.  They have exposed how non-shariah-adherent Muslims and “apostates” from Islam have been raped, tortured and killed for deviating from what is deemed to be the true faith by Brotherhood, OIC and like-minded forces.

The Commission has also helped expose how Saudi government-supplied textbooks used, among other places, in American madrassas, extol violent jihadism and intolerance for people of other faiths.  Interestingly, such texts explain three different ways homosexuals can be executed in conformity with shariah’s treatment of their behavior as a capital offense.

Now that Team Obama has made promoting the radical lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender agenda whatMrs. Clinton calls a U.S. foreign policy priority,” one would think the administration would be grateful for the work the Religious Freedom Commission has done, among other things, to expose and demand changes in such Saudi textbooks.

To the contrary, the Obama administration has been working behind the scenes to do as its Islamist friends have demanded by shutting down the USCIRF.  It has enlisted for this purpose Senator Dick Durbin, the Senate’s Number 2 Democrat.  Sen. Durbin is not only perfectly placed to do the deed stealthily.  He has his own close associations with a number of the Brotherhood’s top fronts and operatives in his home state of Illinois, in Washington and elsewhere across the country.

As it happens, in addition to serving as the Majority Whip, Sen. Durbin is a member of both the Senate Foreign Relations and Appropriations Committees – the panels responsible for reauthorizing and funding the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.  He has used his leadership and committee positions to place what amount to secret “holds” on legislation that would extend the life of the commission.

Consequently, unless something changes before the current government funding bill expires, our nation’s sole official, independent and still-effective watchdog for religious liberty – and the most trusted and important American voice for those being denied it – will go out of business on December 16th.

The Majority Whip’s role in this stealthy jihad against an agency that still dares to speak thetruth to the Islamists’ power is all the more reprehensible since Senator Durbin frequently excoriates his colleagues’ use of secret holds.  In fact, he has cosponsored legislation to bar the practice.  Such rank hypocrisy simply adds to the venality of Sen. Durbin’s conduct in this matter.

So does the reported reason for the hold Senator Durbin has yet to acknowledge he is exercising against the USCIRF.  Evidently, he is trying to euchre members of the House of Representatives into earmarking funds for the federal government to purchase a state prison in Thompson, Illinois that his home state can no longer afford to operate.

When the idea of a federal takeover of this facility was first floated last year, it ran into strenuous opposition on both sides of Capitol Hill.  Not only was the deal deemed to be unaffordable at a time of yawning federal deficits.  It turned out that the Obama administration and its allies in Illinois’ Democratic machine in Washington and Springfield state had in mind another, even more outrageous motivation: the Thompson prison could serve as the place to relocate terrorists currently held offshore at Guantanamo Bay, allowing Gitmo’s closure.

In other words, Sen. Durbin is seeking to secure by stealth an earmark that would overturn existing legislation barring the relocation of such detainees inside the United States – and the real risk that they would, thereby, be granted constitutional rights, access to civilian U.S. courts and perhaps be set loose in our country by irresponsible federal judges.  How many more reasons do the American people need to oppose and condemn Dick Durbin’s shenanigans?

Voters in Illinois and elsewhere need to call out Senator Durbin’s contribution to the stealth jihad – both with his office and, in the case of other Senators’ constituents, those of their own representatives.  America needs to safeguard religious freedoms against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  To that end, we must strengthen, not garrote, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom – the one official entity still doing that vital mission.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Cynthia Farahat: Jihad and the War on Egypt’s Coptic Christians

Cynthia Farahat testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives. Reps. Frank Wolf and James McDermott presented "Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians."

Cynthia Farahat is an Egyptian political activist, writer and researcher. She co-founded the Liberal Egyptian Party (2006-2008) and served as a member of its political committee. In 2008-2009, she was program coordinator and program officer at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty in Cairo, a multi-national free market think tank. She was a founder of the Masr El-Om (Mother Egypt) Party and was a member of its political committee (2004-2006). 

Other witnesses included Kathy Fitzpatrick (Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State); Nina Shea (Director, Center for Religious Freedom, Hudson Institute); Dina Guirguis (Member, Egyptian American Rule of Law Association); Adel Guindy (President, Coptic Solidarity International); and Raymond Ibrahim (Middle East specialist and Associate fellow, Middle East Forum).

The following is Ms. Farahat’s testimony for the record and, below, is a transcript of her comments at the hearing.

Cynthia Farahat: Testimony before the Tom Lantos Commission, December 7 2011. Click here for a PDF of his testimony for the record.

 

 
 
 

 

TESTIMONY OF CYNTHIA FARAHAT

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Thank you Chairman Wolf and Chairman McGovern for organizing this important hearing. I am very pleased to have the honor of testifying in front of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission today about the current status of Copts in Egypt.

I am an activist and writer in Egypt, and have been involved in the political process for nearly a decade. I am a Copt. I addressed the crowd at last year’s protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and have participated in Coptic demonstrations in Maspero.

With my colleagues I helped found two political parties: first, the Masr El-Om (Mother Egypt) Party in 2004, and then the Liberal Egyptian Party in 2006. Both were dedicated to the values of secularism, human rights, capitalism, the rule of law, and rejection of pan-Arabism and Islamic imperialism. This platform was controversial with the Mubarek regime for many reasons, but the most important was the conscious rejection of the application of Islamic law and jurisprudence, shariah and fiqh, in the state’s affairs. The Liberal Egyptian Party was rebuffed by the regime and rejected as a legal entity twice in court, putting these important ideas outside legal discourse in the country. As a consequence of my activism, I have been living in fear and under constant threat and harassment, from the Mubarek regime and its subsequent military junta and from Salafist jihadists who were as threatened by classical liberalism and freedom as the rulers themselves.

The ideas I dedicated my life to promoting are articulated best in America’s founding documents, in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, and in the Enlightenment works that, in turn, inspired them. The regime’s opposition to these concepts-summed up in a word, liberty-also unlocks the reasons for the persecution of Copts.

The large and educated minority of Copts in Egypt is the biggest obstacle for Islamists to turn Egypt into another Iran or another Saudi Arabia. Through propaganda and acts of state violence the governing body of Egypt, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), has attempted to manufacture[1] a violent conflict between Coptic Christians and Muslims. With the full power of the state, media and the military at their disposal, however, any such "civil war" will be one-sided tragedy; it will be a massacre of Christians at the hands of the state, its vast paid militia and Salafis sympathetic to the cause.

At present, SCAF has imprisoned 12,000 civilians in military court for political crimes. Meanwhile, the regime has freed of hundreds of convicted terrorists from prison, like Col. Aboud al-Zomor,[2] the mastermind behind the Sadat assassination, and Badr Makhlouf,[3] the Emir of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya of Qena that was convicted with murdering tourists in a 1993 terrorist attack. This double standard sends a message that advocating for freedom and equality for Copts and other minorities in Egypt will have severe consequences.

 

MASPERO & THE WAR ON THE COPTS

In contrast to the terrorists released, among those imprisoned were liberal dissidents like Maikel Nabil Sanad, a Coptic blogger and political activist, and Alaa Abdel-Fattah, a secular Muslim pro-freedom blogger who was previously imprisoned by Mubarak’s regime in 2006. He has been our ally for years, and has written hundreds of posts on his blog to support freedom of speech and religion for Copts and Bahai’s.

As a secular Muslim, Abdel-Fattah was a more serious target of the regime. Under the dictates of shariah, he is considered a traitor and apostate from Islam, and the appropriate punishment is death. Abdel-Fattah was at the protests in Maspero on behalf of equality for Copts. Outrageously, he might be facing murder and terrorism charges-as the regime is trying to frame the massacre of dozens of Copts in Maspero on him.

Michael Mosad was, like myself, a liberal Coptic political and human rights activist. I knew him well. He was one of the people killed by the Egyptian military at Maspero on 9 October 2011. He was at the protest with his fiancé, Vivian, and the newly engaged couple was terrified. Suddenly, she said she did not feel Michael’s hand in hers. She then saw him caught in the wheels of a military vehicle that drove onto the pavement and ran him over. His skull was fractured and his legs were nearly severed from his body. As she sat next to him crying and calling for help, soldiers gathered around Michael, brutally beating and kicking his motionless body. Vivian threw her body over his to protect him. She begged them to stop, but military officers beat and cursed her; they called her an infidel, "Christian sons of dogs," and worse.

Nawar Negm, a Muslim political activist who was in the protest to support Copts said the peaceful protestors were being randomly shot at, and that organized mobs in civilian clothes started attacking Christians.[4] The mobs were backed by soldiers whom she saw checking the hands of protestors for crosses before brutally beating them, as many Egyptian Christians tattoo crosses on their hands.

Another Muslim photographer, Ali Khalid, who was at the site and was shot in the face said, "I have seen death with my own eyes, at the hands of the people who claim to be the protectors of the country."[5]

Bothayna Kamel, another courageous Muslim woman, and a prominent TV presenter and journalist in Egypt who was among the protestors, witnessed the horror herself. She said:

As the attack on the protest started I went to hide with a priest and Muslim and Christian protestors inside a nearby building where Al-Hurra TV station’s office is located. We hid inside the office, and I could hear the police and army soldiers attacking the building as they were screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ and dragging protestors inside the building. Don’t tell me these were Islamic organizations or Salafis; the military and police have the same bigoted minds. After they left the building and we felt it was safe to leave the office, we saw the blood of protesters who were beaten by soldiers screaming ‘Allahu Akbar,’ covering the floors and stairs of the building. To get out of the building safe, you had to tell the police and the army, ‘I’m a Muslim who believes in one God’-otherwise they attack you.[6]

This was happening as the military police attacked the Jan25 television station and terrified the broadcaster, who screamed hysterically on air as they confiscated the video footage that was shot of the protests[7]. Minutes later, an extremely gruesome video[8] of murdered Copts in the entrance of Jan25 station emerged on YouTube. Some of the protestors were dead; others were dying.

Even after the killings, the SCAF and its media machine was intent on flaring tensions. That evening, the regime’s state-run television incited Muslims to converge on Maspero and ‘defend’ the Egyptian army against the gathering of unarmed Christians: "The Egyptian army is under attack from Coptic protestors, and we urge the honorable citizens to go to Maspero and aid the army." [9]

In order to justify their war crime against the Copts, Egyptian officials later claimed [10]to CNN that Copts killed 12 army troops. This propaganda was also repeated by official state TV as the army was massacring Christians in the street. Not only didn’t he army not convict the criminals responsible for the murder and torture of Copts at Maspero, the Egyptian army held a press conference claiming their soldiers were not armed, and that the armored vehicle used to crush Copts beneath its treads was stolen by a protestor. In other words, the regime’s spin amounted to a theory in which Coptic protestors stole an armored vehicle, ran themselves over, and shot themselves. I’m sure the regime would also give credence to the farcical possibly floated by the Al-Fagr newspaper, blaming the massacre on Israelis.[11]

The Coptic Christians at Maspero were killed with live ammunition, and with weapons the military probably acquired through its average of $2 billion in annual military aid from the United States.[12]  A massive shipment of 21 tons of tear gas was just sent to Egypt from the US before the elections.[13]  These weapons are not used by the military against militant Islamists who are trying to subvert and destroy our country, institute shariah law, and inflame the broader Middle East; these weapons are used against the allies of the United States of America, the Copts and the secular moderate Muslims. 

Like the regime’s hostility toward classical liberalism, the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt is deeply embedded in the ideological foundation of the current military oligarchy, which shares history, doctrine and personalities with the Muslim Brotherhood. While the Muslim Brotherhood does not formally or organizationally rule Egypt, its ideas have ideologically controlled the country for nearly sixty years since the overthrow of the monarchy by the July 1952 coup d’état (euphemized as the "July Revolution").

The fear of Islamists seizing power in Egypt and the situation worsening for Copts and the whole region, assumes that the Muslim Brotherhood does not already wield power yet may be able to hijack the current political unrest. In fact, this situation already exists; both the Mubarak regime and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) have subtly colluded with Islamists against Copts for decades. The real question, then, is not whether the Muslim Brotherhood and other militant Islamic groups will seize power but whether it will continue to hold it, either directly or by proxy.

In 2005, Mubarak allowed eighty-eight Muslim Brotherhood members into parliament as a useful tool for scaring the Western governments into thinking that democracy in Egypt would inevitably bring the Islamists to power.

 

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD & THE EGYPTIAN REGIME[14]

Not only does the Egyptian constitution since 1971 make the shariah "the principal source of legislation,"[15] but the Free Officers (as the perpetrators of the 1952 putsch called themselves) were closely associated with both the Muslim Brotherhood’s military wing or "secret apparatus" (Nizam al-Khass) and the Young Egypt Society (Misr al-Fatat), a nationalist-fascist militia established in 1929 by religiously-educated lawyer Ahmad Hussein. Both Egyptian presidents hailing from the Free Officers-Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-1970) and Anwar Sadat (1970-1981)-received their early political schooling in the Young Egypt Society. The Young Egypt Society transformed into the National Islamic Party in 1940.

The Muslim Brotherhood spread its xenophobic and militant ideas through its magazine, al-Sarkh’a (Scream), which combined vicious attacks on Western democracy with praise for Fascism and Nazism and advocacy of the implementation of shariah rule. In a famous letter, Hussein invited Hitler "to convert to Islam." This outlook was shared by the Muslim Brotherhood’s publication, al-Nazir, which referred to the Nazi tyrant as "Hajj Hitler." The Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, was also an unabashed admirer of Hitler and Mussolini. As late as 1953, Anwar Sadat, whose pro-Nazi sympathies landed him in prison during World War II, wrote an "open letter"[16] to Hitler in a leading Egyptian newspaper. He applauded the genocidal tyrant, pronouncing that the leaders of the Axis Powers, "guided their peoples to unity, order, regeneration, power, and glory."

The Young Egypt Society’s attempted assassination in 1937 of Egypt’s democratically-elected liberal prime minister, Mustafa Nahhas, got the organization banned. In the 1940s, the officers took their radicalism a step further by collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood’s military wing. Some even joined the Brotherhood themselves; Nasser himself reportedly joined in 1944. In his memoirs, Khaled Mohieddin, a fellow Free Officer claimed that Banna had personally asked Nasser to join the Brotherhood, recounting how he and Nasser swore allegiance on a gun and a Qur’an.[17]

This background has continuing relevance because it forms the DNA of the regime that has ruled Egypt from 1952 to the present day; this military oligarchy has pursued means and goals that originated in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Young Egypt Society.

Moreover, the Young Egypt Society’s Islamic-socialist and fascistic ideas are very much alive and well today. In 1990, the party was reestablished and granted a license to work as a legal entity by Mubarak’s regime that has long been considered an ally of the west. This organization’s approval by the state could not be in starker contrast to the rejection of my own Liberal Egyptian Party and its pro-freedom platform.

Following Hassan al-Banna’s murder on February 12, 1949, by government agents in retaliation for the assassination of Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha a few weeks earlier, the military and civilian wings of the Muslim Brotherhood split. Nasser proceeded to form the Free Officers movement, which mounted the 1952 coup. In the coming decades, the military regime and the Brotherhood would maintain a strenuous relationship interrupted by occasional outbursts of violence and terrorism-notably a 1954 attempt by the Brotherhood on Nasser’s life-and repressive countermeasures by the regime including mass arrests and sporadic executions. But this should be understood not as a struggle between an autocratic, secular dictatorship and a would-be Islamist one but a struggle between two ideologically similar, if not identical, rival groups, hailing from the same source.

Indeed, the symbiotic relationship between the jihadist ideologues and the current regime continues, as it has from 1952. For example, the SCAF has revealed alarming extremism last summer when they publically consulted with Salafi jihadist Mohammed Hassan on how to deal with Copts instead of prosecuting their attackers. Hassan is known in Egypt for inciting Mujahedeen in Gaza to kill Israelis before killing themselves in suicide attacks.[18]

 

A WELL-EXECUTED DRAMA: USING THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AGAINST THE WEST

Given the shared history and entwined ideological affinities of the Muslim Brotherhood and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since 1952, it is hardly surprising that both Mubarak’s regime and the SCAF would persecute the Coptic community with religiously motivated enthusiasm. The world often wonders why secularists, liberals and Copts are unorganized in Egypt; this situation exists because we-not the Brotherhood-were under daily threats and state security surveillance, and our parties banned from politics. Meanwhile, the regime cynically empowers the Brotherhood and other Salafi jihadist groups against which it can play out a drama meant to both oppress moderate and liberal opposition internally, and to frighten western governments from the prospect of a peaceful transition of power to a civilian government.

This well-executed drama is not new, and its contours should be familiar to all Americans in two different contexts: the United States’ relationships with Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority. In both these cases, "moderate" leaders pose as allies, using the threat of a more radical replacement to coerce the US for support and funding. In both countries too, there exists a seamless spectrum of potential coercion-from "radical" to "moderate" to "ally"-that is based on political expediency rather than on ideology. And the constant refrain is the demand for more American money and support.

Broadly speaking, the template with which these nations play the US is based on the decades-long the myth of the secular Turkish military’s ability to maintain constitutional, secular and pro-west governance in that country amid threats from Islamist groups. The failure of the Turkish military to stem the tide of the slowly encroaching Islamism of the AKP owes to the fact that, over time, the sympathies of the military will invariably shift; there is no guarantee subsequent generations will feel the same commitment to secular rule that their predecessors had. In Egypt, the situation is even worse. As we have seen, the military regime since 1952 is ideologically committed to oppose secularism and is bound by shariah, specifically as it relates to the treatment of minorities or dhimmis.

There is overwhelming evidence that Egypt’s military is, at present, enacting this play at American expense. Last week, former Ambassador Marc Ginsburg reported that the SCAF has been directly funding the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts in the current parliamentary elections. As the regime receives billions in military aid and assistance from the United States, this collusion between so-called "allies" and the Muslim Brotherhood is a deeply cynical act, and one that betrays the true intentions of the regime. The thought that the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood is occurring, albeit indirectly, through the largess of the American taxpayer is shocking, and should cause a re-evaluation of these transfer payments.

As Ambassador Ginsburg also points out,

The military leadership has not only channeled financial support to the Islamists, it has also secretly collaborated with Salafists who have attacked Copts throughout Egypt in a show of support for more punitive discriminatory acts against Egypt’s Coptic minority to curry further favor with Salafists."[19]

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, three things must happen in order for the Coptic Christians to stand a chance of seeing their present human rights situation in Egypt improve significantly:

First, the United States should cease all American aid to Egypt until there is demonstrable, verifiable evidence that the Egyptian government is allowing non-Muslim religious minorities in Egypt to exercise the freedom of speech and religion without fear of intimidation or reprisal. 

Second, the Obama administration should explain and possibly reevaluate its vetting process for foreign national employees of or advisors to American embassies, particularly in Egypt, where Egyptian nationals loyal to the military regime have used their embassy positions to deny Coptic religious asylum requests to the United States. 

Third and finally, the United States must avoid legitimizing the joint effort by the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s ruling military regime to use "blasphemy" laws against non-Muslim minorities in Egypt, and therefore should decline to meet with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to discuss any agenda to apply "blasphemy" laws globally under the guise of confronting "Islamophobia."

TRANSCRIPT OF CYNTHIA FARAHAT’S TESTIMONY

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

DECEMBER 7, 2011

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It’s an honor to be able to testify today in front of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission about the status and plight of Copts in Egypt. I’m a Coptic classic liberal political activist. I’m also a writer and researcher in Egypt. I just came to the US last month. I’ve been involved in a political process for over a decade. And I’ve addressed the protestors in Tahrir Square and also I’ve been involved in Maspero protests. To be able to discuss the plight of Copts and why they are – why they are persecuted in Egypt, I would have to ask the question who are the current rulers of Egypt? Who are the Supreme Council of Armed Forces? What is their ideology and are there – are they are secular autocrats like they like to give the impression to Western governments? Or is it something else? What I claim here – and these are all historic facts – that the current military oligarchy originates from the Muslim Brotherhood organization. In 1952, the free officers perpetrated a coup detat against the Egyptian monarch. The free officers were the branch of the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood organization. They only split after the death and the assassination of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1949. Before that, they were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the first president of Egypt, the actual first president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and in ’44, he joined and swore allegiance to Hassan al-Banna on a Koran. This is the founding father.

This is according to Khaled Mohieddin, a fellow free officer and also previously a member of parliament in Egypt. This is according to his own biography. These are the founding fathers, almost ninety people that perpetrated the 1952 coup detat were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the reality of the basis of the current ideological foundation of the Egyptian army and the regime and the oligarchy that has had control for over six decades, sixty years of this, this is what we are having. And it was inevitable that shariah law becomes part of the constitution. In 1971, President Sadat introduced shariah law to the constitution and now I think it’s, qualifies to say that Egypt is a constitutional theocracy and it’s not a modern state. The consequences were that Copts are no longer, according to shariah law, identified or defined as citizen. I have an Egyptian passport, but I’m not a citizen. The concept of citizenship is a Western concept that does not apply to us in Egypt. I’m a woman and I’m a Copt. I’m a fourth-class citizen in Egypt. A first-class citizen in Egypt is the Sunni male, Muslim male. The second-class is the Sunni female. The third-class is the Coptic male. And fourth-class is the Coptic female.

And that’s why none of the people that committed crimes, none of the criminals that committed crimes against Copts were prosecuted in any way. Because it is against shariah law and that’s a fact. It’s not an opinion. To persecute someone for – a Muslim, for killing, raping, torturing, or vandalizing the property of a non-Muslim or a dhimmi. So this is our legal status. And this has been happening under the Mubarak’s so-called moderate regime, an ally of the West, and it’s now happening now. It was only inevitable that they take their radicalism a step further and start killing Copts in the street in front of TV cameras with live ammunition and running them over with armored military vehicles they probably got from the United States of America. One of my friends was in the protests. I was supposed to go there on the ninth with him. And with other people. What happened was my friend was there. Michael Mossad [PH], with his fiance, Vivian, and they were walking. And he felt, when he started – when the army started attacking Maspero and they saw them screaming, Allahu Akbar, like they are going on an Islamic fatwa and an invasion, they got scared and they decided to leave. But he called his family and he told them, I’m going to die tonight. And I want to – I want to say goodbye. Because I’m going to get killed tonight. That’s what happened to my friend. He got on the pavement and then they turned around to leave, but what happened was the armored vehicle got on the pavement to intentionally run him over and they did run him over and almost severed his legs from his body and crushed his skull. And as he – as Michael was lying there, breathless and dying, his fiance kept screaming for help, asking someone to come and help him, or – what happened was, the military started beating him up. They kept beating up his motionless body and beating her up and spitting on her and calling her an infidel and so much worse.

At the same time, while this was happening, I was watching Egyptian television where a military official would say, they would talk about the Copts and he would say, the Christian sons of dogs. We are, according to the state, the Christian sons of dogs. That’s how the state defines us. And this is the current ally of the United States of America. So that’s the situation and that’s what happened in Maspero. Bussein Akamel [PH], a moderate Muslim and secular Muslim TV personality and journalist in Egypt said that she was in Maspero and I also know her, she was there and as she got terrified of the attacks by the military, she went to hide inside the building of Alhurra TV channel. What happened was, she said the military started attacking the building while screaming Allahu Akbar, dragging Christians inside the building and beating them and torturing them. And then when she said the screams stopped and we felt we were safe to get out of the building, she said we were walking in blood of Copts and to get out of the building or safe, you had to say I’m a Muslim who believes in one Allah. That was a jihadist attack. This looks like a jihadist attack. It doesn’t look like military trying to protect or stabilize a situation. That was religiously inspired. After that, also Nawad Enigen [PH], she is a Muslim political activist and also a TV personality, she stated that she saw the military checking the hands of Copts for crosses before attacking and torturing them in the street. They kept around, checking the hands of protestors, because most Copts put crosses on their hands. And there are people in this room, there are Copts in this room with crosses in their hands who wouldn’t have passed this test of the military. It’s something that was also happening. This was the situation at Maspero and it was even so much worse. If I had more time, I could even write a book from the amount of testimonies and my personal friends and my losses. My personal loss that day.

What I would – I would like to add that right now, currently, the Egyptian regime, military regime, is transforming into a Pakistani model. We are now approaching another Pakistan in Egypt. It is going to be inevitable unless there are serious measures taken to dismantle the current status quo. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are now funding Salafi jihadists and the Muslim Brotherhood. And the US is now currently funding the military that has evidently funded the Muslim Brotherhood in the past elections. As former ambassador Marc Ginsberg states in his article last month, that he confirms evidence that the military is funding Salafi jihadists, the al-Qaeda style jihadists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Obviously, from money that might have come from the USA. And also they have brokered a deal with Salafi jihadists. Now to force the West – the equation is, they want to force their Western, so-called, allies to choose either between the military dictatorship or between the Islamists. That’s the equation. Although that’s not the reality of things. Tahrir Square was filled with moderate and was filled with secular Muslims. There are six million Sufis that are formally cooperating with Copts that could be better alternative instead of this vicious equation. Right now, the equation is, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood Salafi jihadists, Egyptian military and the US on one side. And now the Copts and seculars, moderate forces, moderate Muslims, are on the other. And I think the US has always been our ally and this is not part of the equation that they should be. When President Bush’s administration suggested that they might condition aid, our lives became immediately better in Egypt. It was like someone clicked on a button and the world looked totally and entirely and completely different. What happened was, Mubarak had to leverage, because that’s how America gets leverage. And by giving us more freedom. What we did was, we started co-founding secular political parties that called for – that were against Islamic imperialism and against theocracy and pro-free market and human rights. In this atmosphere, we were able to work. Because that’s how countries reform to better ideas and modern ideas. When secular Muslims and moderate Muslims and Copts are getting death threats, how are we going to spend – how are we going to spread our ideas? Not everyone can tolerate getting messages like the messages and the death threats I used to get. That’s not an atmosphere that was – that is open to spread ideas of reform and modernity. So that’s the current situation now.

 What we would like to ask and my condition – sorry – my conclusion of this is, America should look at the plight of Copts as a national security issue. We’re America. It’s not only a humanitarian crisis, but these are the true allies of the United States and true believers of the ideas and  – the beautiful ideas that this country stands for. These are the true allies. In conclusion, three things must happen in order for the Coptic Christians and moderate Muslims to stand a chance of seeing their present human rights situation in Egypt improve significantly. First, the United States should seize all American aid to Egypt until there is verifiable evidence that the Egyptian government is allowing non-Muslim religious minorities in Egypt to exercise the freedom of speech and religion without fear of intimidation. Second, president Obama’s administration should explain and possibly re – sorry, reevaluate its vetting process of foreign national employees or advisers of American embassies, particularly in Egypt where Egyptian nationals, loyal to the regime have used their embassy positions to make it hard for Copts to apply for religious asylum and requests to the United States from the American embassy in Cairo out of fear of being targeted by Egyptian state security. Third and finally, the United States might – must avoid legitimizing joint effort by the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s ruling military regime to use blasphemy law against non-Muslim minorities in Egypt and therefore should decline to meet with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation

[1] http://www.danielpipes.org/9388/copts-pay-the-price

[2] http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/7445/Egypt/Politics-Aboud-and-Tarek-ElZomor-amongst-released-prisoners.aspx

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Egypt

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo51tpAWg

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWuC3N9Vpvg

[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbo-IhyxODE

[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvPWB-ThuhI

[8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41PzqZ49kbE

[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7m08JJdxao

[10] http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/09/world/meast/egypt-protest-clashes/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

[11] http://www.elfagr.org/Detail.aspx?nwsId=68173&secid=1&vid=2

[12] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/29/us-egypt-usa-aid-idUSTRE70S0IN20110129

[13] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/egypt-dock-workers-protest-us-tear-gas-shipments-to-egypt/2011/11/30/gIQACr4gCO_blog.html

[14] A more in-depth treatment of the relationship between the Egyptian military regime and the Muslim Brotherhood can be found in "The Arab Upheaval: Egypt’s Islamist Shadow," Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2011. http://www.meforum.org/2887/arab-upheaval-egypt-islamist

[15] http://www.egypt.gov.eg/english/laws/constitution/chp_one/part_one.aspx

[16] Open letter from Anwar Sadat to Adolf Hitler, al-Musawwar (Cairo), Sept. 18, 1953.

[17] Khaled Mohieddin, Memories of a Revolution (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 1995), p. 45.

[18] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1odMl2_wBBs

[19] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amb-marc-ginsberg/unholy-alliance-egypts-mi_b_1109534.html

Rollback #9: Vienna, November 10-11: The next battle against Shariah at the OSCE

On 28 October the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) held a conference in Vienna on "confronting intolerance and discrimination against Muslims in public discourse."  Among the featured speakers was Special Adviser to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Secretary General Ömür Orhun.  The OIC has been persistent in its efforts to combat any free and open debate about Islam and Shariah.

Free speech advocate Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff represented Pax Europa at the conference insisting that:

…criticism of a religion, including Islam, must remain legitimate. This is echoed by the OSCE: "Criticisms of religious practices (just religious practices, not religions themselves?; BPE) are legitimate speech." We believe, however, that while Muslims are not a monolithic group, for those Muslims who accept Islam as an ideology, there are elements of Islamic law that are monolithic, in that all Muslims worldwide, whether they live in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, consider the Koran and the Hadith (authentic sayings of Mohammed) as the basis of their legal system. Certainly groups like the Muslim Brotherhood profess this! How are groups like Pax Europa to discuss such issues if not allowed to speak to the language and doctrines that define them?

Despite this the OSCE released a 72-page document entitled Guidelines for Educators on Countering Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims: Addressing Islamophobia through Education co-published by ODIHR, the Council of Europe and UNESCO.  It is interesting to note that UNESCO today recognized and admitted "Palestine" as a member state despite the governance of the annihilationist Islamic movement Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority which continues to incite violence against Jews in media and textbooks.

"The first of its kind, this document addresses the specific characteristics of intolerance against Muslims and provides practical guidance to educators on how to address this issue in the classroom," said Janez Lenari, Director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).

The OSCE is holding a similar meeting on November 10-11 in Vienna entitled "Prevention of Racism, Xenophobia and Hate Crimes through Educational and Awareness-Raising Initiatives."  Unfortunately due to the dominance at the OSCE of bad actors such as the Turkish organization Council for Justice, Equality and Peace (COJEP), these meetings focus inordinate attention on "Islamophobia" and essentially advocate for enforcing Shariah blasphemy codes on non-Muslim nation-states that infringe upon basic free speech rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Any non-governmental organization (NGO) can register, and your base of operations need not be Europe.  The OSCE describes itself as "the world’s largest regional security organization" whose membership includes "56 States from Europe, Central Asia and North America," including the United States.  We encourage all free-speech minded NGO’s to register here for the next conference starting on November 10.  The registration deadline is technically tomorrow, but the OSCE regularly allows late registration.

The Diplomacy of September

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman chronicled how a cascading series of seemingly minor developments led inexorably to World War I and the worst carnage known to man up to that time.  In the future, historians may point to the present diplomacy of September as the catalysts for the next horrific conflict now in the offing in the Middle East, and potentially beyond.

I am thinking specifically of three agenda items slated to take place in the United Nations or on the margins of its meetings in coming days:

The first is a portentous move by the Palestinians with the strong backing of the 57-member bloc now known as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).  The idea is to secure international recognition of Palestinian statehood by, if possible, the UN Security Council and – failing that, in the event of a U.S. veto – by the General Assembly. 

The true purpose of this gambit as the Wall Street Journal called it in an editorial on Monday could not be more invidious:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas offered a hint of his real ambition when he wrote, in the New York Times in May, that ‘Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only as a political one.  It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Criminal Court.’

That means not the usual feckless resolutions at the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, but travel bans and international arrest warrants for Israeli soldiers involved in the ‘occupation’ of a supposedly sovereign state. In other words, what Palestinians seek out of a U.N. vote isn’t an affirmation of their right to a state, but rather another tool in their perpetual campaign to harass, delegitimize and ultimately destroy Israel.

Secondly, the UN will shortly be hosting the third in a series of gabfests aimed at furthering this campaign – the so-called "Durban III" Conference.  It is absolutely predictable that, like its predecessors in Durban, South Africa in 2001 and in Geneva, Switzerland in 2009, this event will amount to an international anti-semitic and anti-Israel hate-fest.  One clue: The stated purpose of Durban III is to memorialize Durban I, which was so toxic towards the Jewish State and its friends that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell directed the U.S. delegation to walk out. 

The Durban trilogy serves to reinforce and legitimate the hostility towards Israel that will, when combined with the recognition – de facto if not dejure – of "Palestine" as a UN member state occupied by another member state, encourage military action to rectify this "injustice."

Third, it appears that meetings of OIC representatives with U.S. government officials – possibly including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – will occur in conjunction with the UN’s September follies.  The purpose will be to try to "bridge" differences between the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s 10-year campaign to prohibit expression that offends Muslims and the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Now, it is unclear how shariah blasphemy law can be squared with freedom of speech.  But, Mrs. Clinton seems to be pushing forward with the idea that, by focusing on the "consequences" of expression, one can find a basis for meeting the OIC’s demands for prohibiting and criminalizing of what some call "Islamophobic hate speech."

Lest anyone think that shariah blasphemy laws cannot come to the United States even if Hillary Clinton wants them to, consider the case of Fred Grandy.  Mr. Grandy, a former Member of Congress from Iowa and past president of the billion-dollar charity Goodwill Industries, was the host of the top-rated morning drive talk show in Washington, D.C.  Until, that is, he ran afoul of shariah activists who were "offended" by the reporting about that doctrine that he and his wife, Catherine (a.k.a. "Mrs. Fred") provided each week.

Not content with denying Mr. Grandy gainful employment, proponents of shariah have enlisted the leadership of the Democratic Party in Maryland’s legislature and Montgomery County to denounce publicly as a "divisive" figure and to object to him addressing a private meeting of Republicans in the Washington suburbs.  Such conduct by people who have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States is a scandal.  It should be strenuously denounced by their fellow Democrats, as well as by Americans of every other stripe.

The effect of the Clinton-OIC exercise, like the others at the UN this week, will be to reinforce the perception on the part of freedom’s Islamist enemies that the Israel, the West and the United States are in retreat and in decline.  By recognizing Palestine, excoriating Israel and restricting free expression will seen by such enemies for what they are: acts of submission.  And, according to the threat doctrine they call shariah, its adherents are required in the face of submissive behavior to redouble their efforts to make, in the words of the Koran, the infidels "feel subdued." 

When combined with the ascendancy throughout the Middle East and North Africa of Islamist organizations and regimes that make no secret of their determination to wipe Israel off the map, we stand at the precipice.  Tragically, the weapons with which the next war will be fought – an avoidable war brought on by the Diplomacy of September – will make the lethal Guns of August seem like pop-guns by comparison.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Where are we, ten years after 9/11?

So, where are we ten years after 9/11?  It is comforting that we have been blessed with a near-unbroken decade without further mass-casualty attacks since those that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.  Unfortunately, our government is pursuing policies that can only encourage those who aspire to do us harm to redouble their efforts.

Such an assessment was implicit in a critique of President Obama’s new counter-terrorism"strategy" delivered last week by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman.  The Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut described the President’s so-called  "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States" white paper as "ultimately a big disappointment":

The administration’s plan… suffers from several significant weaknesses. The first is that the administration still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name, violent Islamist extremism. We can find names that are comparable to that, but not the one that the administration continues to use which [is] ‘violent extremism.’ It is not just violent extremism. There are many forms of violent extremism. There’s white racist extremism, there’s been some eco-extremism, there’s been animal rights extremism. You can go on and on and on. There’s skinhead extremism, but we’re not in a global war with those.

Sen. Lieberman observed, "We’re in a global war that affects our homeland security with Islamist extremists. To call our enemy violent extremism is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning. The other term used sometimes is ‘Al-Qaida and its allies.’ Now, that’s better, but it still is too narrow."

The Homeland Security Committee chairman concluded:

It is vital to understand that we’re not just fighting an organization Al-Qaida, but we are up against a broader ideology, a politicized theology, quite separate from the religion of Islam that has fueled this war.  Success in the war will come consequently not when a single terrorist group or its affiliates are eliminated, but when broader set of ideas associated with it are rejected and discarded. The reluctance to identify our enemy as violent Islamist extremism makes it harder to mobilize effectively to fight this war of ideas.

As it happens, Sen. Lieberman is, like President Obama, right up to a point.  If we are properly to recognize the enemy we face, however, we must appreciate two facts the Senator misses, as well:  1) The threat from adherents to the "politicized ideology that has fueled this war" are also using non-violent – or, more accurately, pre-violent – techniques to wage it against us.  And 2) that ideology is actually not "separate from the religion of Islam."  Rather, this politico-military-legal doctrine known as shariah is derived from the sacred texts, interpretations, rulings and scholarly consensuses of Islam.  The reality that many Muslims around the world practice their faith without following the dictates of shariah simply means that some believe this code is separable from Islam.  But, it is surely not "separate" from it.

These errors are at the heart of the present danger ten years after 9/11 – namely, a failure to recognize that, in addition to "violent extremism" at the hands of Islamists, we confront what Professor Richard Landes of Boston University has characterized as those foes’ concerted efforts in the area of "cognitive warfare."  The author of a timely new book, "Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience," writes in a riveting essay published online at Tablet, that:

Cognitive warfare aims to paralyze the will of the enemy to resist attack, to maneuver that enemy into adopting vulnerable positions, and eventually to get him to give up in a conflict. In cognitive warfare, real violence (such as terror attacks) are adjuncts to the mental conflict, and the targets of such warfare are large audiences both among populations at home (recruitment and mobilization) and, still more significantly, among the enemy (paralysis)….

One the most important dimensions of their cognitive war is to get infidels, even without being conquered, tobehave according to the restrictions of Islam. Among the most important impositions we have seen of this phenomenon…is the absolute prohibition on criticizing Allah or his prophet [known as "shariah blasphemy" laws]. Thus, a major battlefield of the cognitive war between jihadis and the West concerns tolerance for criticism of the other.

 

Cognitive warfare, or what the Muslim Brotherhood calls "civilization jihad," is about creating the conditions under which so-called "non-violent" Islamists can achieve their ultimate objective – which is precisely the same as the one pursued by their violent co-religionists: imposing shariah worldwide and a Caliph to rule according to it.

So where are we ten years after shariah-adherent Islamists sought to destroy the centers of American economic, military and government power?  We remain dangerously exposed to similar sorts of violence from an enemy the President declines to name.  Worse yet, to the extent we fail to perceive the cognitive war being waged against us against by al Qaeda’s partners in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation – to say nothing of persisting in the Obama administration’s willingness to give ground in that war, notably by submitting our freedom of speech to shariah blasphemy laws – our Islamist foes will only be emboldened.

And that means aheightened likelihood of success in the violent attacks the shariah-adherent jihadists are sure to mount in the years to come.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Obama Killed Osama, And Then Ignored His Own Advice

John Nolte at Big Hollywood picked up something interesting from a Maureen Dowd column. The Obama administration, it seems, has granted an unusual amount of access to the team behind The Hurt Locker (writer Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow) for an upcoming campaign-season film about the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

As Nolte point out, the timing of the film’s release has not been missed at the White House. Look for Hollywood to be a willing participant in this elaborate Obama re-election commercial, which is intended to remind voters of an increasingly desperate president’s only shining hour.

In addition to the desperate obvious ‘October surprise’ quality of this stunt, the cynicism revealed by the White House’s active facilitation of this film is breathtaking. It tells us something important about the Obama White House, and its readiness to abandon its most dearly-held beliefs and even its worldview on the alter of political expediency.

On nearly every issue, the president and others from his administration (not to mention the media) lecture us on the need to be sensitive to the feelings and self-image of the Muslim world. This time, however, the White House believes a bounce in the final weeks before the conclusion of a tough re-election campaign is more important than (as the president himself put it, "spiking the football" by antagonistically) reminding the world who was responsible for Bin Laden’s death.

Regardless of the merits or failings of the Obama administration’s concern for the feelings of the Muslim world, cooperating with the filmmakers displays an inconsistency that should not go by unremarked upon. Sometimes this hypersensitivity, when translated into policy, is laughably unserious- like the re-tooling of NASA to "reach out to the Muslim world." After killing Bin Laden, Obama himself insisted America keep its celebrations subdued and decline to "spike the football," even going so far as to protect the dignity of the arch-terrorist’s corpse so as not to antagonize the ‘Arab street.’

More insidious, however, is the compromises the Obama administration is willing to make on issues of free expression when criticism of Islam comes into play. A lone man in Florida threatening to burn a koran was enough to to imperil American national security half a world away, both Obama and his chief general said. Obama’s State Department, too, is increasingly embracing the Shariah-adherent definitions of free speech promoted by the Organization of the Islamic Conference– which plans to enforce blasphemy of Islam. Of course, American free speech is circumscribed by the threat actual violence from a Muslim world even its biggest apologists implicitly concede is highly combustible.

If the delicate emotions of the Muslim world- manifested in the degree to which they’re ready to cause violence and mayhem worldwide- are enough to circumscribe the First Amendment of the Constitution, shouldn’t it also discourage a movie about killing a famous Muslim? But alas, not hurting the feelings of Muslims by showing ‘Crusader’ soldiers killing a Mujahid in cold blood (on Pakistan’s Islamic soil) is trumped by the importance of Obama’s reelection.

Last month, a Zogby poll revealed that the antipathy of much of the Muslim world to Barack Obama can be traced to the killing of Bin Laden. As Alana Goodman summarized the report at Commentary, "In all six countries surveyed – Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia – the majority of respondents said killing bin Laden made them "less favorable toward the U.S.’"

What could possibly "spike the football" any more than a flashy action film, blasted into the homes and theaters of that very same Muslim world, still smarting from Obama’s triumphant dispatch of the world’s most wanted terrorist?

All this fuss and trauma to the Muslim world can be averted with a little tweaking, by making Bin Laden into a villain designated as acceptable in Hollywood, a Serbian terrorist or a anti-government Tea Party type.

NYT Searches for the Leader of the Anti-Shariah Movement, Finds Me Instead

I was featured, complete with pictures (and online video), in a 2,000+ word New York Times article about the anti-sharia movement in this country, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliot, which appeared in the Times’ July 31 Sunday edition, front page, above the fold.  Impressive, no?  Unfortunately, Ms. Elliot exposed herself as biased and in denial, and has since given an interview to NPR in which she more openly evidences journalistic condescension, in addition to the bias one normally expects from the mainstream media.  The story was quite explicitly intended to link a national movement to a single individual, me, and then to suggest that this individual — again, me — was manipulative, hidden, and controversial.  This is evident from the title of the article: "The Man Behind the Anti-Sharia Movement."

The truth remains at a distance, and this analysis will suggest only a more objective telling of the facts.  I say "suggest" because I am the subject of the Times "profile," and as such I cannot realistically claim objectivity.  I will allow others more at a distance to weigh in.  One writer, Ben Shapiro, whom I don’t know, has already done that, and I must note my appreciation (see "In Defense of David Yerushalmi"). 

We begin at the beginning.  Ms. Elliot and I have traded emails on sharia and related matters for about 3 or 4 years.  We first "met" when she did a long profile of Dhaba (Debbie) Almontaser, the spearhead and one-time principal of New York City’s failed Arabic-centric public school called the Khalil Gibran International Academy.  (While KGIA’s doors remain open, everyone both within and without the school’s community of present and past teachers, administrators, students, parents, and early supporters admit it has failed as both an educational center and as a "multi-cultural" outreach.)

Ms. Elliot contacted me several months before the "anti-sharia movement" article was to run saying she wanted only background on the movement since she knew I was involved.  I conditioned my agreement to provide background on an explicit commitment from her that the article was not about me.  She agreed.  When we finally sat down for a three-hour lunch, it was evident at the end of the "background" discussion that Ms. Elliot was focusing too much on personalities, me especially, and not enough on the substantive arguments against sharia.  Every time I pressed her, though, she assured me that the story was "not about you." 

Well, that little bit of journalistic dishonesty we all know is part of the tradecraft.  Journalists will often deceive their subjects about the focus of an interview to get them to open up.  My colleagues and I understood this and discussed the risks of any interview with Ms. Elliot and the New York Times.  But we concluded those risks versus a major story by an acclaimed journalist, even a card-carrying member of the elite Manhattan progressive club like Ms. Elliot, were worth taking.  Why?  Because public policy work is as much about creating a serious discussion and framing it in some non-PC context as it is about suggesting actual legislation or new policies.

And, this goal was most certainly attained.  As Ms. Elliot points out in her story and in her interview with NPR, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy was, along with others in this effort, able to take a failed national security policy and policy discourse, which treated Islamic-inspired jihad as some kind of ultimate perversion of Islam lacking dogmatic and normative grounding, into a serious discussion of classical and still extant authoritative Islamic law — sharia — as the threat doctrine motivating jihadists from all over the globe.  Determining what doctrine drives your enemy, especially one that can explain both the recruitment capabilities of your enemy and how he is able to bridge cultural, language, and nationality differences, and even intra-religious sect animosities, to come together to fight the West as the common enemy is the second step to defeating the enemy.  The first step, of course, is being able to articulate who the enemy is beyond the intentionally vague nomenclature of "terrorist" or "extremist."

Moving beyond Ms. Elliot’s purposeful deception that she was not writing about me, we come to her writing style (we’ll deal with substance as a final matter).  Ms. Elliot treats her targets — me and the "anti-sharia movement" — more broadly in similar fashion.  She begins by describing the "movement" as a kind of simplified ignorance.  She accomplishes this by implicitly ridiculing a politician in Tennessee who, rather than dealing with the serious matters of the state’s unemployment, home foreclosures, and the like, is dealing with the problem of sharia as a threat to the U.S. and to Tennessee.

Everyone will of course recall, but not because Ms. Elliot mentions it, that Carlos Bledsoe was an African-American Christian living in Tennessee where he was converted and "radicalized" sufficiently to attack an army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, leaving one soldier dead and one injured.  And, many will recall, again not because Ms. Elliot mentions it, that it is the Obama administration’s attorney general, Eric Holder, who informs us that homegrown jihad terrorism inspired by the likes of Yemen-based Awlaki is "one of the things that keeps me up at night" because "[t]he threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens — raised here, born here and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born."

While Ms. Elliot will no doubt plead that her reporting was a "fair" and "objective" narration of facts, a "fair" and "objective" assessment belies this claim.  Beyond her not-so-veiled ridicule of the anti-sharia movement, she allows herself this bit of rather subjective "analysis" of the merits of the anti-sharia movement: "Yet, for all its fervor, the movement is arguably directed at a problem more imagined than real."  Of course any assertion of fact to support a policy can be "arguably" something else.  In this day and age, you can find "authoritative" voices to argue about anything (battling "experts" in courtrooms across the country demonstrate this point).

But, Ms. Elliot positioned the "arguably" irrational anti-sharia movement as fighting phantoms without bothering to actually articulate what the threat from sharia is, or "arguably" is.  That is, she set up a straw man.  Thus, she turns the sharia threat into a caricature of a Tennessee politician ignoring "real" problems for "imagined" ones and then attaches a "fervor" to all of us who understand sharia as the enemy’s common threat doctrine.  The word "fervor" of course is to lend a sense of faith-based, that is, not real, religiosity to the "anti-sharia movement." 

And, in typical journalistic "objective" fashion, throughout the article, Ms. Elliot sets up in opposition every caricature of the "anti-sharia movement" with a serious academic or "Muslim leader" who dismisses the caricature as an absurd argument, just as one might expect.  What is the point of a 2,000+ word article using this formulation if not simply to ridicule one side of the argument?

Ms. Elliot then wastes no time in allowing her readers to pinpoint the source of this religious "fervor."  As she writes: 

In fact, it is the product of an orchestrated drive that began five years ago in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the office of a little-known lawyer, David Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old Hasidic Jew with a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam. Despite his lack of formal training in Islamic law, Mr. Yerushalmi has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Shariah.

Ah, a Jew, fervently Hasidic no less, with a "history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam."  He is the Svengali behind this crazy movement.  Ms. Elliot buttresses the "controversial statements" by citing the Anti-Defamation League’s attack on me as "bigoted" and then takes a few of my statements, typically phrased as questions in long and involved essays, out of context to suggest to the reader that I am somehow sympathetic to the Founding Fathers’ embrace of a representative government based on equality that compelled inequality against blacks and women.  Progressive and left-wing hit-groups like the ADL take my critique of conservatives who bury this problem of our founding generation and turn it on its head to somehow "prove" my bigotry.  Or, this cadre of deep thinkers takes my criticism of a politically correct discourse which prevents us from speaking about racial issues seriously and pronounces that this makes me a "white supremacist." 

Again, anyone, including Ms. Elliot, knows that I have never written anything that remotely speaks in favor of bigotry or "white supremacist" nonsense.  Indeed, my professional career and my published works demonstrate my commitment to protecting constitutional liberties for all Americans.  But, Ms. Elliot dare not "analyze" my actual work and inform her readers, nor does she mention my pro bono work on behalf of African-Americans and Muslim Americans.  At best, she allows me to desperately deny such allegations of bigotry, knowing this will sound, well, desperate.  For goodness’ sake, even the Jewish ADL accuses this Hasidic Jew of bigotry.  What more evidence do you need?

It is not just the fact that Ms. Elliot could have stated in her own voice quite objectively that I have never written anything that calls for discrimination against blacks, women, or even Muslims qua Muslims.  It is not just that Ms. Elliot might have thought to mention that my "controversial" remarks are "controversial" only among far-left ideologues, progressives, and Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas front groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).  Instead, Ms. Elliot buttresses her characterization of my writings as "controversial" by citing to the ADL.  But, the ADL "report" on my "controversial" writings is no different from CAIR’s and the far left’s critique: take a few analytical questions out of context and pose them as absurd and bigoted statements and then conclude that David Yerushalmi is a dangerous bigot.  Indeed, the favorite of the progressive critique is to assert with confidence that I am a "white supremacist," a hard feat for any Jew, much less a Hasidic one contentedly married for more than 20 years to a "dark-skinned" Sephardic Jewess of Iranian descent.

And, as for the ADL, Ms. Elliot neglected to mention that most religiously or politically active Jews discount the ADL as little more than a bank account for Abe Foxman, its long-term leader, who has turned the once-respected institution into a progressive mouthpiece.  Indeed, Ms. Elliot, in citing to the ADL as my chief and most legitimate critic, forgot to mention that this "Anti-Defamation" League has actually been sued successfully for, what else, defamation, by a Colorado couple accused of, what else, bigotry.  It took this courageous couple a decade, and legal battles all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but they finally forced the ADL to pay the state’s largest defamation judgment — in excess of $10 million!  And, this is the credible group accusing me of bigotry. 

Finally, as noted at the outset, in Ms. Elliot’s effort to drum up even more hype around her article, she conducted a 15-minute on-air interview with NPR.  In that interview, Ms. Elliot, to her credit, honestly exposes her own bias.  The anti-sharia movement, she opines, fails to treat sharia honestly.  Sharia, Ms. Elliot tells us, at least as Muslim Americans understand it, has nothing to do with jihad or terrorism or extremism.  Yerushalmi and those like him have "failed" to take into account these nuances among Muslims.  Moreover, the anti-sharia crowd has "conflated" (yes, another favorite word of progressive elites) a radical interpretation of sharia with the mainstream entirely innocuous interpretation.

Little needs to be said here in response beyond the following.  It is Ms. Elliot who has failed to take into account nuance in the form of the nuance of the threat from sharia.  First, if Muslims in Muslim countries overwhelmingly support the imposition of sharia as law to govern an Islamic political order, and if Muslims in Muslim countries overwhelmingly support the imposition of sharia criminal law, such as capital punishment for apostasy and blasphemy, and even assuming Ms. Elliot is correct that Muslim Americans have somehow created a very different Islam from what their brethren in the Muslim world believe, how does she know or even assume that this distinction between American Islam and genuine Muslim Islam will continue?

And, how does Ms. Elliot discredit a peer-reviewed published research project by Prof. Mordechai Kedar of Bar Ilan University and me showing that 82 percent of U.S. mosques promote violent and jihad literature?  She writes: "The study … has drawn sharp rebuke from Muslim leaders, who question its premise and findings."  Who are these "Muslim leaders" and what are their exact criticisms?  We never learn.  Now, that is a fair and objective critique of a rigorous study that was peer-reviewed and approved for publication by two respected journals: Middle East Quarterly (already published) and Perspectives on Terrorism (soon to be published).

And, even more to Ms. Elliot’s substantive analysis of the sharia threat, if Muslim America and American policymakers are afraid to even talk about sharia as a threat, at least as it exists in the Muslim world, how can we know that the Muslim Brotherhood, Gulf oil-financed Salafists, and Iranian-backed mosques and madrassas in this country won’t soon make inroads by implanting the Muslim world’s understanding of sharia?

Ms. Elliot is silent on this point but certain that the anti-sharia movement is conducting a somewhat unsophisticated, crass, and un-nuanced discussion of sharia as a threat.  It should be enough, according to Ms. Elliot, to simply take the word of the Muslim Brotherhood, the apologists for sharia, and the progressives, all of whom are certain that Islamic terrorism and jihad have nothing to do with Islamic law and all to do with American excesses and immoral alliances in its foreign policy.  Now, that is a nuanced position!

 

David Yerushalmi is a litigator specializing in complex commercial matters and public policy.  He serves as general counsel to the Center for Security Policy.

The Tipping Point: Embracing the Muslim Brotherhood

The Obama administration chose the eve of the holiday marking our Nation’s birth to acknowledge publicly behavior in which it has long been stealthily engaged to the United States’ extreme detriment:  Its officials now admit that they are embracing the Muslim Brotherhood (MB or Ikhwan in Arabic).  That would be the same international Islamist organization that has the destruction of the United States, Israel and all other parts of the Free World as its explicit objective.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to downplay the momentousness of this major policy shift by portraying it during a stopover in Budapest as follows:  "The Obama administration is continuing the approach of limited contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood that have existed on and off for about five or six years."  In fact, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out in a characteristically brilliant, and scathing, dissection of this announcement, Team Obama’s official, open legitimation of the Brotherhood marks a dramatic break from the U.S. government’s historical refusal to deal formally with the Ikhwan.

To understand why the Obama administration’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood is so ominous, consider three insights into the organization’s nature and ambitions:

First, here’s the MB’s creed:  "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."  (Source: Husain Haqqani and Hillel Fradkin, "Islamist Parties: Going Back to the Origins.")

Second, here’s the Ikwhan‘s mission in America: 

"A kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, sabotaging its miserable house with their [i.e., Americans’] hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions." (Source: Muslim Brotherhood’s "Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goals of the Group," entered into evidence by the Department of Justice in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-finance trial. Archived at the NEFA Foundation.)               

Third, here are excerpts from the Muslim Brotherhood’s "phased plan" for accomplishing that mission:

Phase One: Discreet and secret establishment of leadership.

Phase Two: Phase of gradual appearance on the public scene and exercising and utilizing various public activities. It greatly succeeded in implementing this stage. It also succeeded in achieving a great deal of its important goals, such as infiltrating various sectors of the Government.     

Phase Three:  Escalation phase, prior to conflict and confrontation with the rulers, through utilizing mass media. Currently in progress.

Phase Four:  Open public confrontation with the Government through exercising the political pressure approach. It is aggressively implementing the above-mentioned approach. Training on the use of weapons domestically and overseas in anticipation of zero-hour. It has noticeable activities in this regard.

Phase Five:  Seizing power to establish their Islamic Nation under which all parties and Islamic groups are united. (Source: Undated Muslim Brotherhood Paper entitled, "Phases of the World Underground Movement Plan." Archived at Shariah: The Threat to America.)

In short, the Muslim Brotherhood is deadly serious about waging what it calls "civilization jihad" against the United States and other freedom-loving nations in order to secure their submission to the Islamic totalitarian political-military-legal doctrine called shariah.  The MB’s goal in this country is to replace our Constitution with theirs, namely the Koran.  And they regard this task as one commanded by none other than Allah.  (For more details on the nature, ambitions and modus operandi of the Ikhwan, see the Team B II Report, Shariah: The Threat to America).  To this end, as Andy McCarthy notes in the aforementioned essay, the MB’s senior official, Supreme Guide Muhammad Badi, has effectively declared war on the United States. 

Were there any doubt that legitimacy is what the Ikhwan is taking away from this gambit, consider this assessment from an expert in Islamic groups, Ammar Ali Hassan, cited by Associated Press:  "…The Brotherhood will likely try to float ‘conditions’ or ‘reservations’ on any dialogue to avoid a perception that it is allowing the U.S. to meddle in Egypt’s internal affairs. But in the end, the talks will give a boost to the group, he said, by easing worries some in the Brotherhood and the public have of a backlash if the Brotherhood becomes the dominant player in Egypt. ‘Now the Muslim Brotherhood will not have to worry [about] moving forward toward taking over power,’ Hassan said."         

Unfortunately, the U.S. government’s dangerous outreach to the Ikhwan is not confined to Egypt but is systematically practiced inside the United States, as well.  For example:

  • Muslim-American organizations identified in court by the U.S. government – and, in many cases, by the Muslim Brotherhood itself – as MB fronts are routinely cultivated by federal, state and local officials. Representatives of homeland security, Pentagon, intelligence and law enforcement agencies frequently meet with and attend functions sponsored by such groups.
  • MB-associated individuals are sent as our country’s "goodwill ambassadors" to foreign Muslim nations and communities. MB-favored initiatives to insinuate shariah into the United States – notably, the Ground Zero Mosque and shariah-compliant finance, conscientious objector status for Muslim servicemen and stifling of free speech in accordance with shariah "blasphemy" laws – are endorsed and/or enabled by official institutions.

A blind eye is turned to the presence across the country of shariah-adherent mosques that incubate jihadism. A peer-reviewed study published last month in Middle East Quarterly determined that 81% of a random sample of 100 mosques exhibited such qualities – constituting an infrastructure for recruitment, indoctrination and training consistent with the Brotherhood’s phased plan.

  • Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, individuals with family and other ties to the Muslim Brotherhood have actually given senior government positions. The most recent of these to come to light is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin (who also happens to be former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s wife).

It seems a safe bet that, as Team Obama legitimates Muslim Brotherhood organizations and groups overseas, it will feel ever less constrained about further empowering their counterparts in the United States.  If so, the MB will come to exercise even greater influence over what our government does and does not do about the threat posed by shariah, both abroad and here.

The absolutely predictable effect will be to undermine U.S. interests and allies in the Middle East and further catalyze the Brotherhood’s campaign to insinuate shariah in the United States and, ultimately, to supplant the Constitution with Islamic law.  Consequently, the Obama administration’s efforts to "engage" the Muslim Brotherhood are not just reckless.  They are wholly incompatible with the President’s oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" and the similar commitment made by his subordinates.

These officials’ now-open embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a geo-strategic tipping point, one that must catalyze an urgent national debate on this question:  Does such conduct violate their oath of office by endangering the Constitution they have undertaken to uphold?

At a minimum, such a debate would afford a much-needed opportunity to examine alternatives to the administration’s present course – as well as the real risks associated with that its intensifying pursuit.  For instance, one of the most astute American authorities on the Middle East in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, Dr. Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a posting at The American blog yesterday:

Rather than embrace the Brotherhood, the Obama administration should be seeking to ensure that the group cannot dominate Egypt. Most analysts agree that the Muslim Brotherhood is by far the best organized group in Egypt, but that it only enjoys perhaps 25 or 30 percent support. The secular opposition remains weak and fractured. If the Obama administration wishes to remain engaged in Egypt’s future and shape the best possible outcome for both U.S. national security and the Egyptian people, it should be pushing for electoral reform to change Egypt’s dysfunctional system to a proportional representation model in which the secular majority can form a coalition to check a Muslim Brotherhood minority for which true democracy is anathema.

The same goes for the enemy within.  Instead of relying upon – let alone hiring – Muslim Brotherhood operatives and associates, the United States government should be shutting down their fronts, shariah-adherent, jihad-incubating "community centers" and insidious influence operations in America.  By recognizing these enterprises for what they are, namely vehicles for fulfilling the seditious goals of the MB’s civilization jihad, they can and must be treated as prosecutable subversive enterprises, not protected religious ones under the U.S. Constitution.

Let the debate begin.

 

Something rotten in Denmark (and here)

Surprisingly, on net, last week was not a good one for the Free World.  Despite the signal accomplishment of liquidating Osama bin Laden, Western civilization suffered serious reverses on several fronts.

What these reverses all have in common is a deference to the doctrine our enemies’ call "shariah," in a manner they perceive to be acts of "submission." Such behavior is exceedingly dangerous, as it invites our foes to redouble their efforts to make us, in the words of the Koran, "feel subdued."

For instance, consider the aftermath of SEAL Team 6’s extraordinary take-down of bin Laden.  What ensued was nothing less than a debacle as President Obama’s political appointees kept changing their accounts of what had happened.  As one wag put it, "Osama bin Laden died and we got 72 versions." 

The subtext was of an administration effort desperately trying not to give offense to our adversaries.  Yet, they and our friends could only have felt reaffirmed in their already dim view of what passes for American leadership under Mr. Obama.

Then, there was the unctuous effort to dispose of bin Laden’s body in strict "conformance to Islamic practice."  The fastidious cleansing and wrapping of the body, the 40-minute ceremony and the burial at sea conjure up images of an America treating one of its most psychopathic enemies as a legitimate, even revered figure. Islam scholar Andrew Bostom raises the question whether such rites actually included shariah-conforming denunciations of Christians and Jews?  Either way, this exercise was a pathetic act of appeasement.

Next, the President announced that he had decided not to release the dead jihadist’s photo.  As with the handling of bin Laden’s burial, the justification given was concern that the picture’s dissemination would only inspire more violence against us and our forces overseas.  The truth of the matter is that the more we signal our fear of the violence of shariah-adherent Muslims, the more certain it is to be visited upon us.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday an appeals court in Denmark convicted one of Western civilization’s most courageous defenders – Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society.  His crime?  He gave offense to Muslims.  Yes, that’s right, a Danish judicial panel effectively enforced shariah blasphemy law.  In the process, the court violated one of the most cardinal pillars of freedom: the right to free speech. 

If allowed to stand, the ruling in the Hedegaard case will be used to abridge fundamental civil rights throughout Europe, and possibly far beyond. Yet, there has been remarkably little outcry about the defendant’s plight – most especially from journalists who have as much to lose as anybody. 

In this instance, as in the foregoing ones, the West is acting out of fear, lest our conduct become grounds for fresh violence.  This is an enduring legacy of, among other things, the manufactured outrage and mayhem over the Danish cartoons a few years back.  It gives ominous new meaning to the expression "Something is rotten in Denmark."

Unfortunately, our own judicial processes seem increasingly susceptible to Islamist intimidation, as well.  Recently, counter-terrorism expert Patrick Poole published at Pajamas Media excerpts from an interview with an anonymous source high in the Obama Justice Department.  These included an allegation that political appointees in that department had "quashed" a request by prosecutors to pursue individuals and organizations listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the nation’s largest terrorism financing trial: United States v. the Holy Land Foundation.

According to Poole’s insider, the problem was that the administration stood to be embarrassed if this prosecution went forward.  After all, the defendants associated with Muslim Brotherhood fronts like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) would assuredly have tried to use their close ties with government officials and agencies to avoid the convictions and punishments meted out to the first five Holy Land conspirators. 

The plot thickened last week.  Shortly before Attorney General Eric Holder was scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill, the prosecutor in the Holy Land case, U.S. Attorney Jim Jacks, told the Dallas Morning News that there was no political interference from "the Attorney General or the White House" leading to a decision not to prosecute CAIR.  This directly contradicts not only Patrick Poole’s source but also House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY), who insisted that both prosecutors and FBI agents involved in the case had told him they had "vehement objections" to the "declination to prosecute" memo that came out of Washington.

Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX), himself a former judge and chief justice in the Texas court system, pointedly challenged the Attorney General during the latter’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.  Rep. Gohmert noted that it is a matter of record that Mr. Jacks had filed compelling briefs at both the federal district and appellate levels – and was upheld by both courts – in his position that there were sufficient grounds to treat CAIR and others as co-conspirators with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.  The AG claimed unconvincingly to be unfamiliar with the particulars.

We need to stand up against shariah, not submit to it – at home or abroad.  We must demonstrate that we are, to use bin Laden’s term, the "stronger horse," by touting our victories and power, and not convey the opposite impression by obscuring or apologizing for them.  And we must see the paperwork that precipitated the declination to prosecute CAIR and its Muslim Brotherhood friends – and then get on with putting them out of business.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

New Study on Hate Crimes Debunks the Myth of a Growing Trend in Muslim Victimization

The Center for Security Policy today released a revised edition of their groundbreaking longitudinal study, Religious Bias Crimes 2000-2009: Muslim, Jewish and Christian Victims –  Debunking the Myth of a Growing Trend in Muslim Victimization, based on FBI statistics reported annually in the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The Center’s study contradicts the assertions that religious bias crimes against Muslims have increased, and that the alleged cause is widespread “Islamophobia” in America.  In fact, the study shows that religious bias crimes – also known as hate crimes – against Muslim Americans, measured by the categories of incidents, offenses or victims, have remained relatively low with a downward trend since 2001, and are significantly less than the numbers of bias crimes against Jewish victims.

The Center’s study also contradicts the assumption of increased hate crimes against Muslims which has been asserted by Senator Richard Durbin’s (D-IL) Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, and is the topic of hearings being held today.  Printed copies of the study were delivered to each member of the U.S. Senate early this morning.

According to the Center’s analysis, in 2009, Jewish victims of hate crimes outnumbered Muslim victims by more than 8 to 1 (1,132 Jewish victims to 132 Muslim victims). From 2000 through 2009, for every one hate crime incident against a Muslim, there were six hate crime incidents against Jewish victims (1,580 Muslim incidents versus 9,692 Jewish incidents).  Even in 2001 when religious bias crimes against Muslims increased briefly for a nine-week period, total anti-Muslim incidents, offenses and victims remained approximately half of the corresponding anti-Jewish totals.

The study provides hard data that disproves the counterfactual statements made by a small number of highly vocal Muslim lobbying groups, many linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as leftwing activists.   Citing these false assumptions concerning America’s alleged “Islamophobia” and a supposed rising trend in hate crimes against Muslim Americans, these organizations  argued against holding the March 10, 2011 House Committee on Homeland Security hearings on Muslim American radicalization, and have argued for today’s hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution.  The study shows that these arguments against the March 10 hearings, and for today’s March 29 hearings, are not based on facts but rather on a political agenda.

Frank Gaffney, President of Center for Security Policy remarked:

This report is important because it exposes a false belief perpetuated by a few vocal groups that religious bias crimes against Muslims are on the upswing.  The truth is quite the opposite.  These arguments, unsubstantiated by hard factual data, are corrosive to community relationships at every level of American society, and a potential threat to national security.

Note: This Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper is available as a PDF, or is reprinted below.

 

Religious Bias Crimes (2000-2009): Muslim, Christian & Jewish Victims – Debunking the Myth of a Growing Trend in Muslim Victimization

Clare M. Lopez, Roland Peer & Christine Brim

 

Introduction

Misperceptions about religious bias hate crimes in America are widespread.  This study is a longitudinal comparison of religious bias hate crimes, as reported by the FBI, from the pre-9/11 year of 2000 through 2009, the most recent year for which statistics were available.[1]  The assertion that religious bias hate crimes against one group in particular, Muslims in America, have proliferated in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001 has gained acceptance within media and government, thanks to a steady drumbeat of assertions to this effect from a small but vocal group of advocacy organizations.

Internationally, the most aggressive of these is the 57 member state Organization of the Islamic Conference, with its so-called “Islamophobia Observatory.” In the U.S., the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)[2] and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)[3] have taken the lead in issuing claims that discrimination and religious bias hate crimes against Muslims are increasing.[4]  These organizations have also asserted that “Islamophobia” and statements critical of Islam, Shariah law, or political Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood may be linked to the alleged rise in hate crimes.  Alternatively, counterterrorism expert Steve Emerson has suggested “In advancing the notion that government policy has resulted in an undeserved backlash against ordinary Muslims, CAIR seeks to muster opposition to the anti-terror laws it finds objectionable.”[5]

To inform this public debate about religious bias hate crimes in America, the Center for Security Policy analyzed data from 2000 through 2009 for three FBI-identified victim groups: Jews, Muslims, and Christians (a combined statistic for the purposes of this whitepaper, combining separate FBI data for Catholics and Protestants). The source of all the religion bias crimes information cited in the following report is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program,[6] which collects crime statistics on an annual basis and presents them online. Appendices B-T at the end of this report present those official FBI statistics in tables and charts showing the comparative incidence of religious hate crimes for Christians, Jews, and Muslims from 2000-2009.

The results may prove surprising to those who took CAIR or MPAC spokesmen at their word. For example, in 2009[7], in totals for a combined five categories of hate crime, from Simple Assault to Crimes Against Property, Jewish victims of hate crimes by religion outnumbered Muslim victims by more than 8 to 1 (1,132 Jewish victims to 132 Muslim victims). Nor is 2009 an anomalous year in terms of these numbers. Across the decade, from 2000 through 2009, Jewish victims of hate crimes by religion outnumbered their Christian and Muslim counterparts, with the exception of a nine-week period following the 9/11 terrorist acts for two categories of bias crimes: simple and aggravated assaults statistics.[8]   From 2000 through 2009, for every one hate crime incident against a Muslim, there were six hate crime incidents against Jewish victims (1,580 Muslim incidents versus 9,692 Jewish incidents).

The Center for Security Policy presents this study to inform the dialogue surrounding religious bias crimes in the U.S. and to provide a fact-based resource that analysts, researchers, and citizens can use for a reality check.

Prior Research

Although a number of European academics and institutes (particularly the British[9]) have produced studies on the general topic of “Islamophobia” in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, few Americans have tackled “hate crimes” from the objective perspective of a neutral academic and empirical study based on the available FBI statistics. Two studies are representative, though unlike our study, neither is a longitudinal study encompassing a ten-year period.

Jeffrey Kaplan, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh authored a report entitled, “Islamophobia in America?: September 11 and Islamophobic Hate Crime.”[10] Although this report does reference FBI hate crime statistics, it does so only for the period from 2000-2002, as Kaplan’s study focus is that period of time just after the September 11 attacks on the U.S. He concludes that “The intense phase of these attacks comprised approximately nine weeks, after which the number of hate crimes fell sharply” due, he writes, to national leadership from the U.S. president, decisive law enforcement intervention, grassroots outreach to Muslim communities across the country, and a “rapid dissolution of American moral certainty about the War on Terror.”

In other research, Steven George Salaita produced a study for the New Centennial Review in the Fall of 2006 which set out to “summarize the evolution of the Arab image in American media since Ronald Stockton’s seminal 1994 analysis, with emphasis on the role of 9/11, and advance the usage of the term anti-Arab racism as a more accurate replacement for the traditional descriptors Orientalism and Islamophobia in relation to the negative portrayal of Arabs in the United States.”[11] Unlike our study, the author approached the topic with a non-empirical framework.

Scholarly research in the area of hate crimes is increasingly a popular area for specialization, as witnessed by the Journal of Hate Studies, celebrating its 8th Volume in 2010.[12]  A useful short review of the field’s scope – though unfortunately not addressing a longitudinal analysis nor  the FBI data – can be found in Barbara Perry’s essay, “The more things change…post-9/11 trends in hate crime scholarship,” a summary of the various disciplines’ research addressing the issue of hate.[13]

Methodology and Findings

The “Religious Bias Crimes in America” study is a longitudinal look at the instances of religious bias crimes, also known as hate crimes, against Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the United States from 2000 to 2009. The use of the term “Hate Crime” is defined by the FBI in its 1996 Training Guide for Hate Crime Data Collection[14] as well as in its Uniform Crime Reporting Program,[15] which find their authorization in the April 23, 1990 “Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990.”[16] This legislation requires the U.S. Department of Justice to compile and publish an annual summary of data about crimes that “manifest prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.”  This study focuses on those hate crimes that clearly demonstrate prejudice based on bias against Christians (Catholics and Protestants combined), Jews and Muslims, as identified by the FBI.  Three other categories of religious bias crime for which the FBI collects statistics, but which were not included in this study because they are less specific for purposes of comparison are: anti-other religion, anti-multi-religious group, and anti-atheism-agnosticism.

The Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines define a bias crime:

A criminal offense committed against a person or property which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin; also known as Hate Crime.

Definitions of the various offenses against person and property are also provided in the Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines.[17]

Three broad categories of religious hate crimes are included in this study: incidents, offenses, and victims. A single incident may include more than one offense (for example, intimidation and robbery). An offense may have more than one victim.  A victim may be the target of more than one offense.  Data categories for offenses and victims are sub-divided between crimes against persons, and crimes against property. Each of these sub-categories is further broken down by specific types of crimes.  For example, crimes against persons include 1) murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, 2) forcible rape, 3) simple assault, 4) aggravated assault, 5) intimidation (by far the largest crimes against persons category), and 6) other.   Crimes against property include 1) robbery, 2) burglary, 3) larceny/theft, 4) motor vehicle theft, 5) arson, 6) destruction/damage/vandalism (by far the largest crimes against property category), and 7) other.  A third category, crimes against society, (at the same hierarchical level as crimes against persons, and crimes against property) presented only insignificant numbers for all three religions in the study (19 victims for all three religious groups from all ten years combined – see Appendix C, Table 2).

While there has been a slight variation through the years, anti-Jewish hate crimes have hovered around 70% of total anti-religious hate crime, while anti-Muslim violence has accounted for around 10%, and anti-Christian hate crime has totaled slightly less than 10%. Jewish and Muslim populations in America, as noted previously, each are estimated at 6 million persons (with an alternate estimate by Pew for the Muslim population). There was an increase in anti-Muslim violence in 2001 (exceeding both Jewish and Christian rates for simple and aggravated assault), which decreased to the 10% range in 2002, where it has remained (a temporary smaller spike was seen in 2006 against both Jewish and Muslim victims).  Even in the anomalous year of 2001, total anti-Muslim incidents, offenses, and number of victims were approximately half of the corresponding anti-Jewish totals (Muslim Incidents – 481, Victims – 546, Offenses – 554; Jewish Incidents – 1043, Victims – 1117, Offenses – 1196). That the terrorist attacks occurred relatively late in the year – in September of 2001 – suggests that the increase in anti-Muslim violence occurred over a period of a few weeks, or more specifically nine weeks as noted in Kaplan’s study. Looking at total numbers of victims over the 2000-2009 period, for every Muslim victim from 2000 to 2009, there have been over six (6.13) Jewish incidents of hate crimes.  As noted previously, in 2009 the ratio increased: for every Muslim victim, there were even more – over 8 – Jewish victims.

Most anti-religious hate crimes in the United States are not of a violent nature against persons. Aggregating anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Jewish hate crimes against persons and property from 2000 to 2009[18], demonstrates that 64% of total hate crimes are crimes against property, and of these, 92% are cases of destruction/damage/vandalism, and the majority of the remaining 8% are burglary and larceny/theft. There have been 38 robbery offenses, or 0.3% of total hate crimes and of these, 23 were anti-Jewish. The rate of arson is very small, accounting for slightly more than 1% of total crimes against property.

Of the remaining 36% of total cases that are crimes against persons, most (77%) are classified as intimidation. Virtually all of the other 23% are simple or aggravated assault. There were no rape cases and only one murder, of a Jewish victim. There was an increase in 2006 in anti-Muslim aggravated assault (24 offenses), compared to 22 anti-Jewish offenses, and in 2009 (11 vs. 9). There were no similar spikes in cases of simple assault, and in other years, anti-Jewish aggravated and simple assault cases are double that of anti-Muslim assault cases. While cases of anti-Jewish aggravated assault decreased between 2008 and 2009 from 25 to 9, anti-Jewish simple assault cases increased sharply from 58 to 82. When compared to the overall population of over 300 million people, anti-religious hate crimes are not highly prevalent in the United States for any religious group.  Bias-motivated crime is simply not that common for any religious group in the U.S.

Comparing the prevalence of anti-religious hate crimes by religion requires measuring the number of incidents against the overall population of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the United States. Self-identified Christians accounted in 2008 for 76% of the adult American population[19], or 173,402,000 persons, significantly higher than for Muslims or Jews, and therefore the relative prevalence of anti-Christian crimes is by far the lowest of the three. Muslim groups in the U.S. such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), with an interest in presenting the U.S. Muslim population as equivalent to the Jewish one, repeatedly have declared the number of Muslims in the U.S. to be about 6 million persons, ,[20]  Within the same range, Chicago Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, the 2010 Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions’ Board of Trustees Chairman, has cited 2001 estimates of 5.8 million and 6.7 million Muslims in America.[21] On February 3, 2011, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) similarly cited “the reality of 6 million Muslims.”[22] A lower estimate was published by the Pew Research Center in January 2011, when it put the Muslim population of the U.S. at 2.6 million.[23] The 2010 US Census estimates the Jewish population in the United States to be 6.5 million, or 2.1% of the total population in 2009, and this includes those who self-define as Jewish either by religion, ethnicity, or culture. [24] This broad definition thus can be seen as defining an upper boundary for the U.S. Jewish population, given that the FBI hate crime statistics define Judaism as a religion.

The Facts Contradict the Myths

These findings seem to contradict the popular perception that Muslims face more discrimination than Jews in the United States. For example, a Pew poll conducted in 2009 found that 58% of Americans believe there is “a lot of discrimination against” Muslims, opposed to 35% who thought the same for Jews. [25] FBI statistics do show a lower percentage of anti-Jewish hate crimes have identified offenders, which may contribute to the misperception that anti-Jewish hate crimes in the United States are not as prevalent as they really are.  Of total known offenders from the period of 2000 to 2009, 56% committed anti-Jewish hate crimes; the number rises to  67% when unknown offenders are included.

The process of local law enforcement data collection and categorization is inconsistent and both over-reporting and under-reporting may occur[26].   The goal of our analysis is to show the relative frequency of hate crimes, by religion and by type.

We have looked at primarily at some summary statistics for this report.  In addition, we include the tables here as appendices along with a selection of charts.  The spreadsheet data tables and charts are available for download in excel format at securefreedom.org.

Hate Crime Rhetoric

 Concerns about a backlash against Muslims in America arose in the aftermath of 9/11 and were given added impetus by books, studies, and other publications and statements by various organizations and Muslim leadership figures and groups. The November 2002 report by Human Rights Watch, “We Are Not the Enemy: Hate Crimes Against Arabs, Muslims, and Those Perceived to be Arab or Muslim after September 11″[27] is representative of the genre. Citing a “severe wave of backlash violence” involving “more than two thousand September 11-related backlash incidents” against Arabs and Muslims in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, the report claims such people were targeted “solely because they shared or were perceived as sharing the national background or religion of the hijackers and al-Qaeda members deemed responsible for attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”[28] Although the report goes on to claim that “comprehensive and reliable national statistics are not available,” this study cites the readily-available official FBI statistics that indeed do show a spike from 28 to 481 total hate crimes against Muslims between the years 2000 and 2001; however, according to the FBI figures, even that high mark is exceeded by a factor of two for the typical annual total of hate crimes against Jews in America.[29]

The January 6, 2010 report, “Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim Americans,” produced with funding from the Department of Justice, also cites an “increased anti-Muslim bias” in the years since the 9/11 attacks. This paper’s three authors, David Schanzer and Ebrahim Moosa of Duke University and Charles Kurzman from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assert that Muslim-Americans bear the brunt of government counterterrorism initiatives, some of which they consider discriminatory.[30]

Then there is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which styles itself an organization “that challenges stereotypes of Islam and Muslims” and a “Washington-based Islamic advocacy group” dedicated to challenging “anti-Muslim discrimination nationwide.”[31] The CAIR website includes an extensive section on “Islamophobia,”[32] a term reportedly coined by the Muslim Brotherhood front group, the International Islamic Institute of Thought (IIIT),[33] in an effort to find a concept useful in beating back critics of Islamic law (shariah) and jihad.[34]

CAIR traces the phenomenon of “Islamophobia” to writing by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s that posited a coming “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. CAIR claims that “when 9/11 happened,” those already prejudiced against Islam were influenced by “right wing outlets” and “pro-Israeli commentators such as Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson, Judith Miller, and Bernard Lewis” to amplify an atmosphere of “extreme prejudice, suspicion, and fear against Muslims.”[35] Deftly sidestepping the historical record of decades of international terror attacks perpetrated by Muslim jihadis well before 9/11[36], in addition to centuries of shariah-inspired jihad that preceded the current one[37], CAIR’s Islamophobia page cites a number of surveys conducted in the years following 2001 that indicate Americans believe Islam encourages violence, does not teach respect for the beliefs of non-Muslims, or that mosques ought to be monitored by U.S. law enforcement officials. Americans’ entirely rational concerns about jihadist attacks and the encroachment of shariah on American society are then described not only as the font of “discrimination, exclusion, and violence” against Muslims (without citing any official statistics to substantiate the accusation), but the naturally-to-be-expected source of Muslims’ own “disillusionment, social disorder, and….irrational violence.” [Emphasis added][38]

Slander, Blasphemy, and Insult to Islam in Shariah

It is imperative that western societies like ours understand the serious implications within Islamic law for accusations of insult to Islam, Islamic doctrine, or Muslims. Under shariah, the offense of slander is defined very differently than in U.S. law. According to the ‘Umdat al-Salik (or Reliance of the Traveller), a book of Islamic law that carries the imprimatur of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the global seat of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, Slander “means to mention anything concerning a person [a Muslim] that he would dislike…”[39]  Several pages later, a further explanation is provided: “A person should not speak of anything he notices about people besides that which benefits a Muslim to relate or prevents disobedience.”[40] Under Islamic law, truth is no defense against an accusation of slander and the offense is held to be a Hudud crime, one deserving the harshest punishment.

Even more serious than Slander under Islamic law is the offense of Blasphemy. The Muslim authorities hold Blasphemy to be insulting or abusing that which is held sacred in Islam. This can include anything from cursing Allah or the prophet Muhammad to irreverent behavior towards Islamic religious beliefs or customs. Even expressing opinions about Islam considered at variance with normative beliefs can be construed as blasphemy under this extremely subjective definition. Not only Muslims traditionally have been held accountable under the Islamic blasphemy laws, but also non-Muslims, especially dhimmis (conquered, subjugated People of the Book, i.e., Christians and Jews). “Reviling Muslims” or “Harming the Friends of Allah Most High” are considered serious sins, termed “Enormities”.[41]  Such offenses are described in Islamic law as those that entail either a threat of punishment in the hereafter, a prescribed Hadd punishment, or being accursed by Allah or the prophet Muhammad.[42]

Islamic laws on Blasphemy and Slander should not be considered outmoded or an irrelevant remnant of the 7th century: they remain very much in effect in modern times, as the following excerpt from the authoritative Malaysian scholar Mohammad Hashim Kamali’s 1997 essay, “Freedom of Expression in Islam“, makes clear:

“However, a general observation which should be made here is that in matters which pertain to the dogma of Islam, or those which are regulated by the direct authority of the Qur’an or Sunnah, criticism, either from Muslims or non-Muslims, will not be entertained, as personal or public opinion does not command authority in such matters. Islam is basically a religion of authority, and the values of good and evil, or rights and duties are not determined by reference to public opinion, or popular vote…” [Emphasis added][43]

It might be added that Dr. Kamali, who was a Professor of Islamic Law and Jurisprudence at the International Islamic University Malaysia and also Dean of the International Institute of Islamic Thought & Civilization (ISTAC) from 1985 – 2007, and is currently Chairman and CEO of the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies, Malaysia, is considered not only a leading international academic authority on Islam, but a “moderate Muslim.”  He was on the advisory group for Imam Feisal Rauf’s “Shariah Index Project” and is a listed expert at the purportedly moderate organization World Organization for Resource Development and Education (WORDE).[44]

The deadly intent of the shariah laws on Blasphemy and Slander repeatedly has been demonstrated in recent times: among examples which could be cited are the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, the 2004 murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and Anwar al-Awlaki’s 2010 fatwa against the Washington state journalist Molly Norris (who was forced into permanent hiding for jesting online about an “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day”). The consequences, therefore, of being accused by a Muslim of offending Islamic beliefs, customs, or laws should not be underestimated. The developing concept of “Islamophobia” obviously is heading in this direction.

Here is a final example. Given the centrality of this doctrine to Islam, the 21 February 2011 demand by CAIR for Fox News program host and former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, to apologize for “inaccurate and offensive” comments about Islam and to meet with Muslim leaders to discuss growing Islamophobia in American society”[45]  needs to be taken very seriously. CAIR’s leadership knows exactly what such an accusation implies under Islamic law; it is to be hoped that the Governor does, too.

There is one more aspect of the Islamic laws on Slander that needs to be mentioned in this regard. Our jihadi enemy does not want the non-Muslim infidel world (and especially our national security leadership) to understand the true character and intentions of those shariah adherents who are dedicated to “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”[46] Specifically, the enemy reserves the right to employ taqiyya (deceit and dissimulation) as well as the Islamic laws on obligatory lying[47] to keep such information from those whose knowledge of it could lead to effective defensive measures against shariah. Attempted enforcement of this legally sanctioned code of silence about the genuine nature and objectives of the jihadist enemy is one of the key usages of the Slander and Blasphemy laws in the west.[48]

“Islamophobia” and Defensive Jihad

To carry through the Islamic legal principles inherent in the Slander and Blasphemy laws to their logical end point, it is useful to refer to classical as well as modern pronouncements on the elements that Muslim scholars hold necessary to justify and declare defensive jihad. For, in fact, this justification is where accusations of “Islamophobia”, religious “hate crimes,” and insult to Islam plausibly lead.  In fact, in numerous cases, hate crime violence or intimidating threats of violence against persons and property in response to perceived “blasphemy” has been a response in the last decade in Muslim-majority countries, and also in Canada, Europe, and the U.S.  The examples in Muslim-majority countries are too numerous to list, but a sample of U.S. cases include the jihad threats against Molly Norris, creator of “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”, the South Park cartoon producers, and publications that republished the Danish “Muhammed Cartoons.”

Classical scholars of Islam, such as Al-Shaybani (8th-9th century disciple of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence and a jurist in his own right) and Ibn Rushd (12th century legal scholar known as Averroes in the West) have written extensively and assertively on the obligatory nature of offensive jihad according to shariah, simply for the purpose of establishing Islam in the world.[49] It was understood both explicitly and implicitly that defensive jihad was obligatory as well. Among the Qur’anic verses commonly cited as justification is the following:

“Fight them until there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s entirely.”  —  (Q 8:39)

Turning to the modern Islamic scholars, Louay Safi is a Muslim author and scholar who has served at the top ranks of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in the U.S. He formerly was the Executive Director of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)’s Leadership Development Center, Executive Director and Director of Research for the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), editor of the Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, and President of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS) (1999-2003). ISNA, IIIT, and the AMSS all appear on the Muslim Brotherhood’s own list of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.”[50] Safi currently serves as Common Word Fellow at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at GeorgetownUniversity. His credentials, in other words, would seem impeccable to speak to Islamic rulings on defensive warfare.

The slim 2001 paperback book, “Peace and the Limits of War,” was authored by Safi and published by the IIIT in response to the post-9/11 surge in public awareness of Islam and jihad. While Safi attempts to distance himself from the classical Islamic scholars on the topic of mandatory offensive jihad, he has no such compunctions when it comes to “War in defense of Muslim individuals and property.” He writes:

“When wrong is inflicted on a Muslim individual by a member, or members, of another political community….the Islamic state is obligated to make sure the individual, or his family, is compensated for his suffering, and that his rights are upheld…it suffices to say that the Islamic state should ensure that justice has been done to the wronged Muslim, even if that take a declaration of war…”[51]

Perceptions about the prevalence of hate crimes against Muslims matter, especially when considered in the context of Islamic law (shariah), which criminalizes insults to Islam as “slander” or even “blasphemy.”[52] A false belief, perpetuated by a few vocal groups, that deliberate religious bias crimes against Muslims are increasing regardless of the lack of support by hard factual data, is corrosive to community relationships at every level of American society, and a potential threat to First Amendment free speech rights and national security. Efforts at the international level, especially by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)[53], to define any questioning of Islamic doctrine as “hate speech” leading to “hate crimes”, such as  “Islamophobia” and as a “human rights violation” by way of official resolutions at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), directly create the premise for criminalization of free speech. Further, although non-binding at this time, such UNHRC resolutions conceivably could legitimize an eventual casus belli, by which an appropriate fatwa could declare justification for violent defensive jihad by the forces of Islam.  As recently as March 7 2011, James Zogby of the Arab American Institute, formerly with the Democratic National Committee, wrote of critics of the Shariah law and Islamic terrorism in America, that:

If these ‘professional bigots” have provided the grist, the mill itself was run by the vast network of rightwing talk radio and TV shows and websites and prominent preachers, who have combined to amplify the anti-Muslim message nationwide. Their efforts have done real damage. They have tormented descent [sic] public servants, created protests that have shuttered legitimate institutions, fomented hate crimes and produced fear in the Muslim community.[54]

Conclusions

This data presented in this study demonstrate that common perceptions about the incidence of “hate crimes” in America that are directed at individuals or groups on the grounds of religious identification often mistakenly ascribe the majority of such offenses to anti-Muslim sentiment. To the contrary, the 2000-2009 FBI crime statistics data used in this study indicate that the majority of U.S. “hate crimes” in fact are perpetrated against Jews. The spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes following 9-11 did not last longer than nine weeks according to prior research.  The most important conclusion may be that total religious bias crimes are few in a country of over 300 million persons.  In fact, the U.S. is a model as a tolerant country, with a significantly low (and in some cases falling) number of hate crimes, in which most Muslim Americans are fully integrated and accepted, as well as economically and socially successful, fellow citizens.

The persistence, scope, and sophistication of the campaign to portray Muslims in America inaccurately, as making up the majority of “hate crime” victims, points to an organized effort whose potential implications derive from Islamic law (shariah). Insult towards Islam, Islamic doctrine, and individual Muslims, especially by non-Muslim infidels, can carry serious penalties under Shariah law. Further, because the “crimes” of insult, slander, and blasphemy are so subjectively defined in shariah, the doorway is wide open for those with an agenda of victimology to lay a foundation that not inconceivably could lead ultimately to a declaration of “defensive jihad” against persons, property or the broader community.   “Homegrown” jihadist terrorism can find its motivation as part of the radicalization process in this heightened, and counter-factual, sense of victimization that justifies organized or “lone wolf” acts of jihad that are rationalized as defensive.

 

 

Charts & Data

Charts and data for this Occasional Paper are available in the PDF, or as Microsoft Excel files below:

 

[1] Center for Security Policy staff and interns contributed to the data entry, analysis, and verification.

[2] The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) presents itself as an Islamic advocacy group and America’s largest Muslim civil liberties advocacy organization. CAIR was included on the Department of Justice’s published list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding case of 2007-2008. Its Internet home page may be found at http://www.cair.com/Home.aspx . See CAIR’s reports on bias from 2007 (http://www.cair.com/Portals/0/pdf/2007-Civil-Rights-Report.pdf)
and 2008 (http://www.cair.com/Portals/0/pdf/civilrights2008.pdf ).

[3] The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) calls itself a “Public service agency working for the civil rights of American Muslims”. According to the counterterrorism think tank The Investigative Project, “MPAC’s public advocacy often involves defending accused terror financiers and opposing law enforcement efforts to root out terrorists and their enablers.  In nearly every case, MPAC has responded to investigations by the FBI and the U.S. Treasury Department with complaints that authorities have not proven their allegations, and variations on the constant themes that enforcement actions unfairly single out Muslim groups and ‘bear strong signs of politicization.’  At the same time, MPAC has been equally diligent in defending individual terrorists uncovered by federal investigations.” http://www.investigativeproject.org/profile/181,accessed February 28, 2011.

[4] “Behind CAIR’s Hate Crimes Report,” Daniel Skinner, The Weekly Standard, may 6, 2004, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/054aycfi.asp; “CAIR’s Hate Crime Nonsense,” Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha, May 18, 2005, http://www.danielpipes.org/2627/cairs-hate-crimes-nonsense; “Fudging the Numbers on Hate Crimes,” Mike Pesca, NPR, may 23, 2005, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4662915; all accessed February 28, 2011.

[5] “CAIR Pushes Phony Charges of Anti-Muslim Hysteria, Hate Crimes,” Investigative Project, April 4, 2008.  http://www.steveemerson.com/2008/04/cair-pushes-phony-charges-of accessed February 28, 2011.

[6] The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program and its annual Crime in the United States reports are described online at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr

[7] 2009 is the most recent year for which full data are available. See the FBI Hate Crime Statistics for 2009 at http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2009/victims.html, accessed 12 February 2011.

[8]  Simple Assaults by Victim by Religion for 2001 (Muslim 66, Jewish 45, Christian 3); Aggravated Assaults by Victim by Religion for 2001 (Muslim 27, Jewish 13, Christian 1)

[9] Neil Chakraborti, editor, Hate Crime: Concepts, policy, future directions, Willan Publishing, 2010.

[10] Kaplan, Jeffrey, “Islamophobia in America?: September 11 and Islamophobic Hate Crime,” Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Accessed 20 February 2011 at http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a737727150

[11] Salaita, Steven George, “Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism, and the Mythos of National Pride,” CR: The New Centennial Review, Michigan State University Press, Volume 6, Number 2, Fall 2006, pp. 245-266. Accessed online 21 February 2011 at http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/new_centennial_review/v006/6.2salaita.html

[12] Journal of Hate Studies, Volume 8 (No. 1), 2010, http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/issue/archive accessed February 28, 2011.  The Journal’s authors defend a wide spectrum of beliefs, ranging from a positive review for the anti-jihad movie “Obsession” (Vol 5, #1) to numerous articles from a more conventional perspedctive.

[13]Perry, Hate Crime: Concepts, Policy, Future Directions, p. 17

[14] Accessed online 21 February 2011 at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/trainguidedc99.pdf

[15] The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program and its annual Crime in the United States reports are described online at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr

[16] 28 U.S.C. § 534. See Appendix C for the full text of this legislation.

[17] Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines, p. 24, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/hcguidelinesdc99.pdf accessed February 28, 2011.

[18] This does not include the negligible number (19) of “crimes against society) from 2000-2009 for all three religious groups.

[19] “Self-described Religious Identification of Adult Population: 1990 – 2008,” U.S. Census, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0075.pdf, accessed February 28, 2011.

[20] Ihsan Bagby, Ph.D., Paul M. Perl, Ph.D., Bryan T. Froehle, Ph.D., The Mosque in America: A National Portrait, Council on American Islamic Relations, April 26, 2001, p.6: “Estimates of a total Muslim population of 6-7 million in America seem reasonable…”

[21] Abdul Malik Mujahid, “Muslims In America: Profile 2001,” Soundvision, http://www.soundvision.com/info/yearinreview/2001/profile.asp , accessed February 28, 2011.

[22] “Background Information on Radicalization Hearings,” Muslim Public Affairs Council, February 3, 2011.  http://www.mpac.org/programs/government-relations/background-information-on-radicalization-hearings.php# accessed February 28, 2011.

[23] The Future of the Global Muslim Population, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Jan. 27, 2011. http://pewforum.org/The-Future-of-the-Global-Muslim-Population.aspx. Accessed 7 March 2011 at http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1872/muslim-population-projections-worldwide-fast-growth.

[24] Table 77, Christian Church Adherents, 2000, and Jewish Population, 2009 – States. 2010 US Census. http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0077.pdf.

[25] Muslims Widely Seen as Facing Discrimination. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Sept. 9, 2009. http://pewforum.org/Muslim/Muslims-Widely-Seen-As-Facing-Discrimination.aspx.

[26] “FBI Report Notes Rise in Hate Crimes,” Deborah Tedford, NPR, November 23, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120715771 , accessed February 28, 2011.

[27] Available in PDF format and accessed 21 February 2011 at http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2002/11/14/we-are-not-enemy

[28] “We Are Not the Enemy: Hate Crimes Against Arabs, Muslims, and Those Perceived to be Arab or Muslim after September 11,” Human Rights Watch, NOVEMBER 2002 VOL. 14, NO. 6 (G) (p. 4).

[29] See Appendix D, “Hate Crime Trends: 2000-2007”

[30] Schanzer, David, Charles Kurzman, and Ebrahim Moosa, “Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans,” January 6, 2010. Accessed online 21 February 2011 at http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/229868.pdf

[31] The official CAIR website is at http://www.cair.com/Home.aspx. CAIR’s foundational organization, The International Association for Palestine, was included on a list of organizations called “our organizations and the organizations of our friends” in a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document called “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”

[32] “Islamophobia,” http://www.cair.com/Issues/Islamophobia/Islamophobia.aspx accessed February 28 2011.

[33] The website of the Herndon, Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) is at  http://www.iiit.org/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx  The IIIT, like CAIR, is on the Muslim Brotherhood list of its friends and organizations of friends; also like CAIR, the IIIT was included in a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the 2007-2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

[34] Muhammad, Abdur-Rahman, “Whether or not Ground Zero mosque is built, U.S. Muslims have access to the American dream,” The New York Daily News as cited by The Investigative Project on Terrorism, September 5, 2010. Accessed online 21 February 2010 at http://www.investigativeproject.org/2164/whether-or-not-ground-zero-mosque-is-built-us. Muhammad is a former member of the IIIT, whose by-line states that he “now works to combat Islamic extremism in the American Muslim community.”

[35] CAIR “Islamophobia” page; accessed 21 February 2011 at http://www.cair.com/Issues/Islamophobia/Islamophobia.aspx

[36] “List of Islamic Terror Attacks Against America Before 9/11,” http://factreal.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/list-of-islamic-attacks-against-america/ , accessed February 28, 2011.

[37] Andrew Bostom and Ibn Warraq, The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, Prometheus Books, 2008.

[38] “Islamophobia,” http://www.cair.com/Issues/Islamophobia/Islamophobia.aspx

[39] ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. Section r2.0: Slander (p. 730).

[40] Ibid, Section r3.0 (p. 741).

[41] Ibid, Section p50.0 (Hurting or Reviling Muslims) and p51.0 (Harming the Friends of Allah Most High) (pp. 686-688.

[42] Ibid, The Author’s Introduction, Section p0.0 (pp. 651-2).

[43] Kamali, Mohammad Hashim, “Freedom of Expression in Islam,” Islamic Text Society, 1997. From chapter IX. Freedom of Religion (Al-Hurriyyah al-Diniyyah). Accessed online 22 February 2011 at www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/…/freedom/kamali_freedom.doc      

[44] “Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Biographical Highlights,” http://worde.org/specialists/ProfessorMohammadHashimKamali.php accessed February 28, 2011.

[45] “Dissemblers At Council On American Islamic Relations – CAIR – Whip Up The Discredited Bogeyman Of Islamophobia,” PipelineNews.org, February 21, 2011. Accessed 22 February 2011 at http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=cair2212011102.htm

[46] “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” a 5/22/91 Muslim Brotherhood document entered into evidence in the 2007-2008 U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

[47] ‘Umdat al-Salik, Section r8.0, Lying (beginning on p. 744).

[48] “Shariah: The Threat to America,” Center for Security Policy, October 2010 (pp. 103-106).

[49] See “The Islamic Law of Nations: Shaybani’s Siyar” by Majid Khadduri and Ibn Rushd’s magnum opus, “Bidayat al-Mudtahid wa-Nihayat al-Muqtasid” for their authoritative treatments of jihad.

[50] “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” 1991. ISNA also appeared on the U.S. Department of Justice list of unindicted co-conspirators in the 2007-2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

[51] Safi, Louay M, “Peace and the Limits of War.” International Institute of Islamic Thought, Herndon, VA.

[52] See “Slander (Ghiba)” in Section r2.0 of the ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (pg. 730). For a thorough discussion of Slander and Blasphemy in Islamic law, see also the Center for Security Policy study, “Shariah: The Threat to America,” September 22, 2010. Available online at http://www.amazon.com/Shariah-America-Exercise-Competitive-Analysis/dp/098229476X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297556949&sr=1-1

[53] Organization of the Islamic Conference: http://www.oicun.org/9/20100727101615770.html

[54] “Islamophobia can create radicalization,” James Zogby, March 7, 2011, The Nation, http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Opinions/Columns/07-Mar-2011/Islamophobia-can-create-radicalisation/1  accessed March 8, 2011.