The Growing Crisis of American Islam (From the No-$#!+-Sherlock department)

Tech Central Station ^ | May 11, 2004 | Stephen Schwartz

[quidnunc]

While the attention of most Americans, and much of the Islamic world, has been focused on the scandal of American soldiers' conduct at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, other events signal a deepening and dangerous crisis for American society and its relationship to Muslims who live within the borders of the U.S.

One such development is the detention on Thursday, May 6, of Brandon Mayfield, a 37-year old lawyer from Portland, Ore., as a possible material witness or "person of interest" in the conspiracy to perpetrate the horrific Madrid metro bombings of March 11.

Mayfield, who became a Muslim after marrying an Egyptian woman in 1989, now joins the list of "new Muslims" (a term Muslims consider preferable to "convert") who have become notorious to Americans since the thin, bedraggled John Walker Lindh, barely out of his teens, was pulled from the battlefield of Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan late in 2001. A soldier in the Taliban, Lindh shocked an America that never before knew such types even existed. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Then came José Padilla, a former gang member and petty criminal in his early 30s, and an associate of various Islamic extremists, held as a "dirty bomb" plotter, and therefore as an enemy combatant, for the past two years.

After him the case of the Portland Seven emerged, involving a terrorist cell in Oregon that included at least two "new Muslims." The group tried to get to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban in the wake of September 11, 2001. Jeffrey Leon Battle, 34, and Patrice Lumumba Ford, 32, were sentenced to 18 years each in February of this year for conspiracy to levy war against the U.S. Battle's ex-wife, October Martinique Lewis, 27, was previously sentenced to three years for providing financial support to the group.

-snip-

[jolie560]

Jihad within America is on the move---be alert.

[John Lenin]

Mayfield's biography includes other troubling items. As a law student at Washburn University, in Topeka, Kan., he helped organize a branch of the Muslim Student Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), which was set up by agents of Saudi Arabia's official Islamic clerical establishment to propagate the extremist doctrines of Wahhabism.

The Saudis are looking worse and worse.

[quantim]

While the attention of most Americans, and much of the Islamic world, has been focused on the scandal of American soldiers' conduct at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq,

This is a patentable lie.  Prove "most Americans" to me please, Mr. Author.

[cookcounty]

American Muslims are getting squeezed to the point where they will have to openly, vigorously, reject mainstream Middle Eastern Islam or be completely marginalized in American life. For most Americans, people like Ibrahim Hooper have so badly discredited themselves that they are little more that a boring joke.

[sheik yerbouty]

You must mean.."No shi'ite, Sherlock!"

[quidnunc]

cookcounty wrote: American Muslims are getting squeezed to the point where they will have to openly, vigorously, reject mainstream Middle Eastern Islam or be completely marginalized in American life. For most Americans, people like Ibrahim Hooper have so badly discredited themselves that they are little more that a boring joke.

I don't really think Muslims can do that without be labelled apostate, which is punishable by death.

[AlienCrossfirePlayer]

#7 "which is punishable by death. "

There will come a time when they have to choose. I hope that they have the courage and wisdom to reject the murder espoused by middle-eastern Muslims.

[LS]

Yes. This is the key. At some point, Mulims in America---if they are as "patriotic" as they claim---will have to enlist in numbers ABOVE that of other groups and be decorated on the battlefied just like the German-Americans in WW I and the Niseis in WW II.

At some point, this will have to show up in combat related situations.

[gobucks]

First, I wonder if any Muslim Freepers are out here in Freeperland ... though common sense of course indicates they would be as at home here as a lurking NY Times reporter.

Second - though this is somewhat off subject ... gay marriage. Make no mistake. The real trojan horse is now here in gay marriage. And once its legal, polygamy, the Jihadists formula for breeding destruction from within is legal.

[ought-six]

"Jihad within America is on the move---be alert."

Then it's time for a Crusade within America. These radical mohammedans must be stopped. The longer we turn a blind eye to this growing menace in our midst, the more innocent Americans will suffer. If our government doesn't take a stand, then We, the People, must do it.

[whereasandsoforth]

These being jailed is a good start. When are we going to open the prisons for the radical sympathizers in the house and the senate and the press and the entertainment industry and the universities?

It's thinking and talking about this- like my question here -that scares the fudge out of the left. That is why they scream and writhe about "rights" being taken away by measures like the Patriot Act.

The people I'm talking about know they are as guilty as the ones in this article that have been jailed. They are un-American and work just as hard to bring about the end of this nation as any jhadist. Lock'em up!

[valkyrieanne]

The Saudis are looking worse and worse.

Maybe we invaded the wrong country.

[valkyrieanne]

Writer Stephen Schwartz himself is a Muslim. Notice that his TCS biography doesn't include that; nowhere have I seen it mentioned when he publishes in magazines.

[robowombat]

If Schwartz indeed is a Muslim one can only wish there were many more like him. He certainly cuts his coreligionist no slack as witnessed by this April 26 article which puts the spotlight on Saudi involvement with the Iraq insurgency much more directly than any US official has:


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Saudo-Masochism Understood

By Stephen Schwartz Published 04/26/2004


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TCS






With the bombing of a Saudi police facility in Riyadh on April 21, certain people of influence -- American journalists and officials, as well as leaders of the desert kingdom -- are finally admitting the contradictions of the Wahhabi dominion. And because it has taken so long for so many of them to wake up to this reality, I am going to break two journalistic rules: I am going to write about my own feelings, and about a colleague.

I'll begin with the latter -- Neil MacFarquhar of The New York Times, for whom I have nothing but respect. On Friday, April 23, under the headline "Saudis Support a Jihad in Iraq, Not Back Home", Mr. MacFarquhar confirmed a number of charges that I have made continuously, in print and on TV and radio, over the past year. They include:



· that the Islamist clerical establishment in the kingdom, adhering to the ultra-extreme cult known as Wahhabism, have actively preached for jihad against the Coalition in Iraq -- as I repeatedly charged and documented;

· that the long Saudi border with Iraq is a serious problem, which Saudi officials now claim they are attempting to fix, by allegedly sealing it against the frequent movement of jihadist volunteers northward -- a measure I consistently demanded, to virtual silence;

· that the Saudi rulers have permitted ongoing incitement, inside the kingdom, to the murder of Coalition soldiers in Iraq, as a means of "trying to let off steam" -- which has been the centerpiece of my critique of the Saudi order;

· that when Saudis are killed fighting the Coalition in Iraq their families make their "martyrdom" known to everybody in the kingdom -- which I also documented at length.



With no offense meant, since I am sincere in my admiration of Mr. McFarquhar, his reportage on April 23 read as if it was recycled from any of a number of my articles.



However, there is a difference. Mr. McFarquhar echoes the arguments of Saudi officialdom and the extremists among the Saudi public who see a contradiction between jihad against the Coalition in Iraq and terrorism against the Saudi regime. The former is applauded by the Wahhabis; the latter elicits screams of rage.



But this duality embodies nothing more than the 250-year old hypocrisy pursued by the Wahhabi-Saudi ruling elites, who have always depended on the Christian powers to defend them -- first the British, then us, and the French -- while preaching the most exclusionary, violent, and intolerant form of Islam known in the religion's history.



The outrage of Saudi-Wahhabis when the fire and steel they have rained on New York, Madrid, Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, and Tashkent suddenly explodes on their own territory is certainly understandable. They have gotten away with mass murder for so long, and have enjoyed such exorbitant wealth at the same time, that it is naturally dismaying for them to be told that their long and successful exercise in fooling the West has ended.



But has it? The bombing on April 21 struck a minor police building comparable to a Department of Motor Vehicles in an American county. With thousands of Saudi princes and princesses pullulating across the globe, and with Saudi-controlled financial and religious institutions equally prominent from Morocco to Malaysia, why have so few been targeted by al-Qaida -- which especially since September 11, 2001, we have been told wants to overthrow the Saudi monarchy?



As I have also explained, time after time, Osama Bin Laden has never called for the fall of the Saudi royals; rather, he advocates the murder and expulsion of Westerners from the alleged "holy soil" of Riyadh (with its Victoria's Secret and other luxury stores) and Dhahran, where the oil is located. But when he discusses the ruling stratum, he asks for nothing more than a change in policies.



And his claims about Westerners trespassing on "holy soil" are bogus. No Muslim except deluded Saudis like Bin Laden considers the whole territory of the kingdom "holy soil." Mecca and Medina are, indeed, sacred to Muslims, but no U.S. troops ever went within hundreds of miles of them -- even though French paratroops were sent into the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 to suppress an ultra-Wahhabi revolt, and did so with machine-guns. I once astonished a Canadian newscaster by informing her that she was wrong to assert the Prophet Muhammad was born in Saudi Arabia. The entity by that name did not exist until 1932!



Mr. MacFarquhar's headline said it all -- for the Saudi-Wahhabis, murderous jihad is fine in Falluja, but a crime in the capital of the kingdom. But protests by Wahhabis that massacres in the name of faith are forbidden when the victims are Muslims also ring hollow, for of those slain in the latest -- only the latest -- Wahhabi assault on Iraq have been Kurdish Sunnis as well as many, many Shias. Of course, from the Wahhabi perspective, Shias are not really Muslims. Rather, Wahhabism teaches that Shia Islam is a deviant sect cooked up by a Jew! That is why the preposterous adventure by the upstart Moqtada ul-Sadr, in Iraq, is so reprehensible. Only the Coalition can protect the Shia shrines in Kerbala and Najaf from the Wahhabis, who killed hundreds in their precincts when they sacked them in the 19th century. For the Saudi hardliners, a modern, Shia-led Iraq on the road to democracy, however slow in its progress, is a nightmare; bullets and bombs in the name of Islam are only a problem when Wahhabis themselves might be among the collateral victims.



The majority of the Saudi royals continue to play a double game. Meanwhile, normal subjects of the kingdom yearn for rational reform, not for replacement of the Wahhabi clerics and their Saudi kin (literally -- they intermarry) by monsters even more extreme in their corruption and cruelty. Dissident Saudi subjects with whom I meet frequently, and who have bravely smuggled my book, The Two Faces of Islam, into the kingdom, also possess satellite dishes and have access to the internet. They know that Saudi Arabia is now surrounded by a crescent of countries, from Kuwait to Yemen, that although they are hardly model democracies, at least allow women to drive, unlike Saudi Arabia, and have taken other measures toward normality.



But Iraq is the place where the Saudo-masochism of the Western political leadership hurts the most. There our soldiers, men and women, and the gallant forces of the Coalition, have fallen and been injured in a combat largely directed from Saudi Arabia, just as those who died in Vietnam were victims of a strategy impelled first from China, and then from the former Soviet Union. We couldn't force Beijing and Moscow to stop their proxy war in Indochina, without risking nuclear war. But what stops us from demanding that the Wahhabis cease their proxy war in Iraq?



And now, to the truly personal point. For a year I have received a steady stream of vulgar insults on websites (not including TCS, may I say). These come not from Saudi subjects or other Muslims, but from ignorant Westerners, some of them academic experts, others mere Islamophobic ignoramuses, who accuse me of being obsessed with Wahhabism, of knowing nothing about "the problem" as they perceive it, and of ignoring the real threat in Iran, or Syria, or who knows where? But I have left the genuine evils of the regimes in Damascus and Tehran to the large armies of vigilant observers of those fever centers, who somehow forgot to notice the problem on Iraq's southern, as opposed to its western and eastern, borders. Those mainly concerned with Syria and Iran didn't need my extra voice.



From now on, I have an answer for those who accuse me of being obsessed with Wahhabism and the Saudis: "tell it to Neil MacFarquhar and The New York Times."



Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor. He last wrote for TCS about Globalizing Democracy.

[valkyrieanne]

I agree wholeheartedly. I read his conversion story on the Sufi Islamic website. Please don't think I'm putting him down for it - I just find it odd that he usually doesn't include this info., as I think it gives an additional dimension to his writing. As you say, he's worked tirelessly to expose Saudi complicity in all this horror. His writing is one reason I believe today that we didn't finish the job in October-December 2001 by going into Afghanistan alone - we needed to pay a little visit to Saudi Arabia too.

[John O]

Mayfield has yet to be charged with anything, and must be considered innocent until proven guilty.

He's a moslem. That means he's a terrorist. Anyone who's read the koran can see that clearly. They are commanded to fight against the unbeliever near to them.

As a terrorist he needs to be deported or (after being given a chance to get right with God) executed. Unfortunately we cannot trust a converted moslem as the koran commands them to lie to unbelievers if they can gain advantage by it.

But unfortunately, many ordinary Americans will find in these cases evidence that the whole religion of Islam, and anyone who accepts it, is a seditious enemy of the democratic order.

That's because anyone who accepts islam IS a seditious enemy of democratic order.

The war on terror will end when the last moslem dies.