“This is like patriotic Nazis coming over to America trying to form more branches of the German-American Bund,” said John Zmirak of the admission of millions of “orthodox Sunni Muslims” into America and the broader West.
Zmirak, senior editor of The Stream, made his comments on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with Breitbart News’s Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
A growing demographic cohort of “orthodox Sunni Muslims” in America and the broader West amounts to a growing fifth column, said Zmirak: “We’re not talking about people who are Islamic dissidents or Islamic reformers. The numbers of people who are coming to America, they’re orthodox Sunni Muslims who believe in destroying the state of Israel, who believe in conquering the Vatican, who talk about how the end of the world will kill all the Jews … that’s all in the Quran and the hadith and in Shariah.”
Hostility to Jews and Christians, noted Zmirak, are widespread pathologies among religious Muslims and connected to Islamic orthodoxy and doctrine: “The anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity in mainline Islam for people who take it seriously is quite shocking. Now, many, many American Muslims don’t take it very seriously. They are to Islam as Ted Kennedy was to the Catholic Church. That’s a good thing.”
Zmirak pointed to a hadith prophesying the killing of Jews in end times, including the anthropomorphism of trees to assist in such killings. The hadith reads: “You will fight against the Jews and you will kill them until even a stone would say: come here, O Muslim, there is a Jew, so kill him.”
Being a “good American,” concluded Zmirak, required Muslims to rejected Islamic orthodoxy: “I once hosted a debate with Robert Spencer on the one side and Peter Kreeft of Boston College on the other, and the topic was, ‘Is the only good Muslim a bad Muslim?’; and by that we meant, if you want to be a good American, a good Westerner, can you be a good a Muslim? And the answer is no, you really can’t.”
A broad correlation exists among Muslims between religiosity and sympathy for Islamic terrorism, said Mansour: “It’s the level of devoutness among Muslims that shows the level of danger. The more devout, it seems, that is the group that is more susceptible to all sorts of things like honor killings and all of that.”
The Islamic world had subverted an internal nascent renaissance of reason nearly a thousand years ago, said Zmirak, leading to the ascendance of irrational dogma:
I think Islam is particularly brittle because it rejects reason. It rejects the idea that God can be talked about rationally. If you call something a scientific law, in orthodox Islam that’s blasphemy because you are saying that God is bound by reason and by order and by predictability. Standard Islamic theology is that God doesn’t even have to keep his own promises, he could damn all the good people and save all the bad people because his will, his power, is the ultimate thing. That’s not what most Christians believe. We believe that God is bound to be reasonable because he is reason; that he’s bound to be good because he is good; that his goodness is, in some sense, analogous to our goodness.
Certain minority groups within the Islamic umbrella, noted Pollak, are far less likely to subscribe to anti-Western views or support Islamic terrorism and its ideology. He pointed to Ahmadiyya Muslims as an illustration of such a sect of “dissident Muslims.”
Pope Francis is “deceiving himself” over the nature of Islam and consequences of ongoing Islamic immigration to the West, wrote Zmirak in a Wednesday-published article. He quoted a document from Pope Francis framing Islam and Christianity as sharing meaningful doctrinal linkages while calling on Christians to “embrace” Muslim immigrants with “affection and respect.”
“Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence,” wrote Pope Francis. “The sacred writings of Islam have retained some Christian teachings,” he added.
“The shepherd of one billion Catholics keeps saying things about Islam that simply aren’t true,” wrote Zmirak in response to Pope Francis’s writings and statements about Islam and Muslims.
Many “religious leaders,” are presenting a false picture of Islam to their patrons, said Zmirak: “They knowingly do a selective reading through rose-colored glasses of Islam.”
Left-wing “Jewish leaders” similarly overlook ideological pathologies among certain Muslim cohorts, said Pollak, broadly framing Muslims as an oppressed class within a neo-Marxist framework:
We see this in the Jewish community also, particularly from an American point of view where many of the liberal Jewish leaders say that Donald Trump is doing terrible stuff to immigrants, and they think about the issue in terms of persecuted minorities. So in their minds, immigrants are a persecuted minority, therefore, they side with immigrants or Muslim groups who want to come here, and they’re overlooking the ideological framework that you’re talking about.
“Most American Catholics are just jaded with Pope Francis,” speculated Zmirak, pointing to popular American opposition to the status quo of illegal immigration within the homeland.
Broad calls for further acceptance of illegal immigration from the Catholic Church’s cardinals, said Zmirak, are motivated by a self-serving need to bolster church patronage: “[They] need to pack the pews with recent immigrants because we’re losing 40 percent of native-born Catholics. The only reason the Catholic Church is not shrinking … into nothingness is Latin American immigration.”
American Catholic bishops have “zero moral credibility” in addressing immigration given their financially vested interest in the preserving the status quo of both legal and illegal immigration, said Zmirak: “The Bishop’s charities are almost entirely funded, in some cases, by federal funds because they’re federal contractors serving immigrants. The U.S. bishops have zero moral credibility to speak about immigration because they rely on immigration just as much as the Democratic Party. Why is it a surprise that they are allied with the Democratic Party on the immigration issue?”
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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