The hearings on radicalization in the American Muslim community, scheduled to begin on March 10, 2011, are past due. The reluctance to confront this disease affected American policy makers, monitoring organizations and the media, and judging by the wide spread dhimmi supported demonstrations, the revelations expected during the hearings could do little to stop the progression of the aggressive indoctrination to the radical Islamic agenda, recently dressed as “Islamic democracy, ” a contradiction in terms.
The principal Islamic text, the Quran, is riddled with edicts calling for violence to establish the supremacy Islam over all other religions. The threat posed by the rise of “political Islam” that calls for the establishment of Islamic state governed by Shari’a (Islamic law), was ignored by most Western and U.S. experts for decades. The Islamic agenda evolved and penetrated Muslim communities everywhere as well as Western educational institutions, political movements and economics with little or no objection. It seemed to have gained momentum after al- Qaeda’s successful attacks on the U.S. in 2001. A 2007 Pew survey found that more than 47% of Muslims in America “think of themselves first as Muslims,” not Americans, creating the prefect environment for Islamic radicalization.
Awareness of domestic radicalization has grown slowly, spurred on by news of an attack or attempted attack by American citizens and interests. Public discussions followed after Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Virginia-born psychiatrist massacred 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. Eyebrows were raised when Pennsylvania native Muslim convert Colleen La Rose, a.k.a. “Jihad Jane,” was arrested in 2009 for plotting to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks whose drawing of Muhammad she found offensive. The “Lackawanna Six” case involving Yemeni-Americans from upstate New York, who attended al Qaeda training camps in Kandahar before September 2001, received little public attention.
However, Fox News reported recently that data obtained from the Department of Justice shows that “there has been a “class-one” terrorism case — the highest designation for a terrorism case — involving a U.S. citizen every two weeks, on average, since January 2009.”
This information supports Rep. King’s efforts to expose the growing security threats posed by the pre-disposition of a large number of American Muslims to radical anti-American, anti- West indoctrination.
Generous Saudi funding played a major role in calling the tune of radicalization in mosques, Islamic schools, educational institutions and NGOs throughout the U.S. and elsewhere. Reza F. Safa, the author of Inside Islam, estimates that the Saudi Kingdom spent $87 billion to promote Wahabism worldwide from 1973 to the end of 2002, with an emphasis on spending in the West. Saudi funding has contributed wholly or in part to Islamic Centers in Los Angeles; San Francisco; Fresno; Chicago; New York; Washington; Tucson; Raleigh, N.C. and Toledo, Ohio. The Saudi-funded North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) reportedly holds the deed to about 80% of the mosques in the U.S.
Many dedicated investigators, have contributed extensively to exposing the radicalization of American Muslim mosques and organizations. Further evidence of major American Muslim organizations have been by the Justice Department identified as unindicted co-conspirators in several terrorist-financing trials, most recently the Hamas front, Holly-Land Foundation. Radical Muslim indoctrination and large scale conversion to Islam has been taking place undisturbed in American prisons.
Early on, the leaders of Islamic revivalism in the form of political Islam as planed by the Muslim Brotherhood understood that radical violence has its limitations.
The Hindu Muslim, philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) has been recognized by the Muslim Brotherhood as a “spiritual” leader who “discovered in Islam a power which united all people in “love,” morality and self-fulfillment.” Iqbal’s writing is popular among Taliban leaders, Islamists activists in Pakistan, and by Islamic revivalists posing as reformers, the world over. Malysia’s controversial opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, the poster of “moderate Muslim” and darling of influential Americans, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a good example.
Anwar, as other leaders Islamic parties advocates democracy, justice and peace “on the platform of Islam.” He often speaks of the “wholesale imitation of Western values and practices, ” and calls to replace them with Islam. Only Islam, he claims, “provides an ideological alternative to the dominant paradigm.” To enforce their massage and ensure their economic basis, Muslim Brotherhood affiliated revivalists such as Anwar, help concoct the fast growing Islamic banking. Lately, Anwar claims that to eradicate poverty and create wealth, the world should replace conventional Western economic principles and banking, with Islamic banking and economics, based on “maqasid al-shariah,” i.e., “the objectives of Islamic law.” The $1.5 trillion industry, fueled by petrodollars from escalating oil prices, has been accepted in the West and the U.S. despite its imposition of Islamic rule and its lack of transparency.
Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), a Muslim, who will be testifying, sees nothing wrong in any of this. He labeled the hearings a “McCarthyistic” witch-hunt.
This is a disconcerting reaction from the representative of a district in which the largest number of “homegrown” Islamic terrorists were arrested. More than 20 American Muslims, including two women from Minneapolis and Rochester were charged in August 2010, with providing “financial support and personnel, including themselves as fighters, both to a conspiracy to kill abroad and to the foreign terrorist organization al Shabaab.”
As long as the spread of radical Islam is conducted by non-violent means, the Obama Administration doesn’t seem to care. It should. Radical Islamic ideology contradicts the principle of freedom central to America’s Constitution. John Adams letter dated July 17, 1775, should remind us all that “a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
Congressman Peter King (R-NY) who initiated the hearing seems eager to protect our freedoms, and should be commended for taking the initiative to expose the Islamic threat, raising Americans awareness to the insidious threat posed to our freedoms by radical Islam.