American Border Secrets

Jewish World Review ^ | April 26, 2005 | Daniel Pipes

[jan in Colorado]

What steps should Western border agencies take to defend their homelands from harm by Islamists?

In the case of non-citizens, the answer is simple: Don't let Islamists in. Exclude not just potential terrorists but also anyone who supports the totalitarian goals of radical Islam. Just as civilized countries did not welcome fascists in the early 1940s (or communists a decade later), they need not welcome Islamists today.

But what about one's own citizens who cross the border? They could be leaving to fight for the Taliban or returning from a course on terrorism techniques. Or perhaps they studied with enemies of the West who incited them to sabotage or sedition. Clearly, the authorities should take steps to find out more about their activities, especially given the dangerous jihadi culture already in place in many Western countries, including Canada.

This question arose in late December 2004, after a three-day Islamist conference, "Reviving the Islamic Spirit," took place in Toronto. The event, boasting a host of high-profile Islamist speakers such as Bilal Philips, Zaid Shakir, Siraj Wahhaj, and Hamza Yusuf, alarmed the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), America's new border agency..

Excerpt... Read more at http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

[ariamne]

I agree, AAC's posts are reasoned, well written, and derive from the study of the Koran and other islamic sources; I am baffled as to why his posts engendered some of the hostility we saw here?

I am surprised at the level of personal attack, and how quickly it appeared in the thread. Many of us are not new to this particular battle (I fondly recall the border thread of December 04, I tip my hat to Jan in Colorado), but the tone here definitely resonates at a far more personal level, even without the smarmy contributions of smithy and the Michigan geek.

I am sincerely curious and would welcome a non-hostile response.

[ariamne]

Is the prevailing wind blowing from Vichy today? (to misquote from Casablanca) One would think so!

(you have freepmail)

[Fred Nerks]

Are you comparing this:


The Most-High has said [Qu'ran 2: 2341: 'They should wait four months,' and he has again said [47:37]: 'Do not show any cowardice, and do not at all invite the unbelievers to a peace when you have the upper-hand and may God be with you.'

To this:?

47:35] Therefore, you shall not waver and surrender in pursuit of peace, for you are guaranteed victory, and GOD is with you. He will never waste your efforts.


Quite the islamic scholar, aren't we? Makes me wonder why you would be so deeply concerned with the Constitition of the US.

[Gondring]

Your narrow POV evidently eliminates all else including humour.

Try taking a look at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1391330/posts?page=100#100 and ask AAC if he's found the word "hypocrite" in his dictionary yet.

[Gondring]

Go tell it to the UN.

Oh, that great peacekeeping body? </sarc>

Can't have it both ways...either the US and Australia are responsible for what happens in other countries like Iraq/Sudan, or not. If Iraq was done for more than our own national interests (e.g., WMD)--for helping Iraqis escape tyranny as is said now--then why are we not helping the Christians being persecuted in the Sudan?

I think we should push on that front more, saving people from actual militant Islam, rather than spending our resources harassing American citizens.

I note that there are still no explanations how fingerprinting lawful American citizens will help protect us more than preserving our free and open society would.

[Fred Nerks]

Ha! It wasn't islam I was laughing at, it was you! Btw, if you want to ask ACC something, don't send me, do it yourself. Now cheer up!

[Gondring]

I agree, Ari...I was taken aback by the hostility I found in the thread, even back in #26 ("This is not an unexpected knee-jerk response from one of the few people I've come into contact with who apparently has a "snooze" button for his brain"). But even when I tried to keep it light, I think I hit nerves. Admittedly I'm not the best comedian in the world, but I didn't think that the response fit my crime... and I realized it is a brave new world since December.

Then, I found that instead of staying on the topic of the thread, or answering why fingerprinting lawful American citizens is a good thing, we get 2400-word posts that have spurious claims (that have to be refuted, only to be excused as "I got it from PBS," etc...), demonstrating a lack of respect for other FReepers' time and efforts. I let my irritation creep into my responses.

Maybe I'm taking it too seriously, but even if I don't recall the evils of Stalin's rule, and (dare I say it) Hitler's rise to power, I have known those who survived them and have seen how easy it is that degraded protections can lead to injustice.

Do I think we are about to become 1940s Germany or USSR? No...but I do think that putting more information into the hands of Hillary and her ilk is not a Good Thing^TM. It chills me to think that supposed conservatives are leading the charge to encourage the government to invade privacy based on religion. Who do they think these powers can also be used against, if not lawful Jews and Christians or anyone else?!?

On top of all this, we get use of words like "muzzies"...as if the use of similarly hostile terms for Jews would be welcome.

Bottom line: Just as there are Christians who believe that abortion clinics should be bombed, there are Muslims who believe in terrorism; just as the vast majority of Christians believe there's NO justification for such behaviour, an unknown number of Muslims do not support terrorism. What do we call the ones who believe there is no support for intolerant violence in their Islamic religion, if not Moderate Muslims?

To any who feel anything I said has been a personal attack, I apologize; I mean to address debating techniques and claims.

Finally, I not only tip my hat, but give a deep bow, to Jan in Colorado for her post of this topic again. Without this thread, I wouldn't have gotten to know many of you, and the rhetoric here probably conceals the genuine affection I feel for my fellow FReepers... I just wish you'd all keep the Constitution strong!!!    ¬that was some humour...ok? <grin>

[Gondring]

ARGH! I forgot to ping again. Sorry, folks!

[Gondring]

Fair enough, FRiend.

[RS]

You've got me puzzled Fred, from the very next sentence in the article you quote the writer says

"The government of Sudan uses such local militias in its campaign to wipe out Christians and to secure their oil-rich lands in southern Sudan."

If he sees that this is has been trumped up as a religious war, why are you disputing him ?

[Fred Nerks]

Well, if it was the Christians driving the muslims out and committing packrapes and cutting off the breasts of muslim women I might have thought more deeply about it, but seeing it's the same old same old I just didn't think it was worth the bother...like you said, it's all about oil, nothing to do with islam. Pardon me while I throw up.

[RS]

Had to find something that maes some kind of sense -

Since you did not give a souce link for your post, and my source gives

[47:37] If He asked you for money, to the extent of creating a hardship for you, you might have become stingy, and your hidden evil might be exposed.

which is not even close
I looked to the nearest verse that seemed about the same, figuring it was a typo -

So - What was your source for post 308 ? Since now both the verses in your quote seem to be screwed.

[ArmyTeach]

...and after being investigated, they were released.

[RS]

"...and after being investigated, they were released."

The question is WHY they were being investigated, WHY and under what authority they were held after being identified as Citizens.

Since the border patrol has stated that steps have been taken to prevent this from happening again - it's fairly obvious that they border patrol officers had done something wrong.

[Fred Nerks]

What are we playing here? Is it Ask the Imam Time? OK. I'll play.

Dear Imam. RS provided me with a link to a site from which I cut and pasted some information. I used that information in a comment I made in response to a question. Now it seems the numbers don't tally, or the words aren't quite the same. What should I do? Tear my hair out? Both versions came from the same site. Now that doesn't mean the same source, we know that, because there are as many interpretations of the 'verses' in the koran as there are leaves on the trees in a forest. Entire 'universities' in the ME filled with 'scholars' do nothing but read and interprete the koran and the 62 volumnes of ahadith and the numerous gilded versions of the Life of the 'Prophet' and the Saudi's have spent some 60 billion dollars in recent decades endowing Chairs of Islamic Studies in Western Universities and filling islamic booskstores -free-with wahhabi literature but they still can't agree or get the numbers nor the interpretations to align with each other...so what am I to do?

Imam...Imam...are you there?

[RS]

OK - now I found it, the second link I gave you about 1/2 way down -

and I'm right the quotes are screwed -


Gee, I'm sure glad that I wasn't the one who did a cut'n'paste them into a post without checking them out first :-)

Just goes to prove my point about checking sources ...



Sorry Fred, I usually go through and check things before I post links.
How did they put that in Animal House... " You screwed up, you trusted me ! " :-)

[Fred Nerks]

Scholars Scrutinize the Koran's Origin:
http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/02/03/1bkk/04b.html
(Snip)

A return to the earliest Koran, Mr. Puin and others suggest, might lead to a more tolerant brand of Islam, as well as one that is more conscious of its close ties to both Judaism and Christianity.

"It is serious and exciting work," Ms. Crone said of Mr. Luxenberg's work. Jane McAuliffe, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University, has asked Mr. Luxenberg to contribute an essay to the Encyclopedia of the Koran, which she is editing.

Mr. Puin would love to see a "critical edition" of the Koran produced, one based on recent philological work, but, he says, "the word critical is misunderstood in the Islamic world — it is seen as criticizing or attacking the text."

Some Muslim authors have begun to publish skeptical, revisionist work on the Koran as well. Several new volumes of revisionist scholarship, The Origins of the Koran, and The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, have been edited by a former Muslim who writes under the pen name Ibn Warraq. Mr. Warraq, who heads a group called the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society, makes no bones about having a political agenda.
The actual reward in paradise: White raisins
"Biblical scholarship has made people less dogmatic, more open," he said, "and I hope that happens to Muslim society as well."

But many Muslims find the tone and claims of revisionism offensive. "I think the broader implications of some of the revisionist scholarship is to say that the Koran is not an authentic book, that it was fabricated 150 years later," says Ebrahim Moosa, a professor of religious studies at Duke University, as well as a Muslim cleric whose liberal theological leanings earned him the animosity of fundamentalists in South Africa, which he left after his house was firebombed.

Andrew Rippin, an Islamicist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, says that freedom of speech in the Islamic world is more likely to evolve from within the Islamic interpretative tradition than from outside attacks on it. Approaches to the Koran that are now branded as heretical — interpreting the text metaphorically rather than literally — were widely practiced in mainstream Islam a thousand years ago.

"When I teach the history of the interpretation it is eye-opening to students the amount of independent thought and diversity of interpretation that existed in the early centuries of Islam," Mr. Rippin says. "It was only in more recent centuries that there was a need for limiting interpretation."

[Fred Nerks]

"Can't have it both ways...either the US and Australia are responsible for what happens in other countries like Iraq/Sudan, or not. If Iraq was done for more than our own national interests (e.g., WMD)--for helping Iraqis escape tyranny as is said now--then why are we not helping the Christians being persecuted in the Sudan?"

You mean Australia and the US should go to war with islam to protect the Christians And the Animists
And the Buddhists
And the Hindu's
And the Sikh's
And the Jews
And the add to the list..................................?

[Fred Nerks]

"I note that there are still no explanations how fingerprinting lawful American citizens will help protect us more than preserving our free and open society would."

Hey, maybe that's how you preserve your free and open society, by checking people's ID at the border and at airports to make sure they are who they say they are?

[AmericanArchConservative]

>"Looks like the Sudan government is reving up the local fanatics to make a few bucks. Hard to tell if there would have been any "religious" problems there if there wasn't any oil money to be gotten."<

Hard to tell? My curiosity continues unabated as to how the obvious could again prove so elusive. What is it that suggests that their lust for wealth, their desire to impose Islam at swordpoint, and destroy any other religion or culture are all somehow unrelated, mutually exclusive goals, things which just came about by happenstance, rather than being integrated as parts of one large whole?

Why is it that the accounts of Islam's war efforts, conquests, and other infamies are so strikingly similar, whether the historical perspective is:

1) a survey of 700 years of Arab muslim aggression against India,

2) one of centuries of North African Moorish muslim brutalities against Spain, Portugal and parts of France,

3) or Ottoman Turkish muslim viciousness carried to the doorsteps of Vienna (part in a continuous series of efforts to subjugate Europe, beginning at or before their defeat in the 700's by Charles Martel's forces, culminating in Suleiman's assault in 1529, and resurfacing yet again in 1683 when Mustafa was turned back by Poles and Germans)

4) Arab muslim conquest of Egypt,

or 5) Arab muslim conquest of Persia's Sassanid empire in the mid seventh century, where warring Arab muslim dynasties subsequently ruled for over 200 years before Turkic muslims succeeded them.

6) the 1915 Ottoman Turkic muslim genocide of more than one million Armenian Christians, "The Turks summoned all the Armenians who were in the army, and had them killed, blaming them for their war troubles. Next, they rounded up the important men in society, the clergy, newspaper editors, and other tradesmen, and had them executed...The main way of annihilation in the Armenian genocide was the Turks forcing the Armenians to leave their homes. The Turks used deportation to do the killing. They forced the Armenians to march for a long way, and allowed Turks and Kurds to rape, abduct, kill, and steal from the many Armenians marching through the countryside. Many died of starvation, murder, and exposure. Those who finally made it to the forced destination, the desert, were put in camps and died or were killed."

(source:hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/comp/cw31genocideArmenianKurd.htm)


The list does go on. There is entirely too much evidence (from every religion, country, and culture that Islam has affected by its inherently warlike and intolerant spread) for one man to adequately research and present in a limited discussion format.

It couldn't be because those Islam-driven empires all derived their impetus from a common source...could it? That might offer some insight as to why the same actions are happening in the 20th and 21st century - gang raping and mutilation of non-muslim women (including Sudanese Christian, Pakistani, Filipina Catholics and Buddhists, Indian hindu...) beheading of "infidels", mass-murder and general mayhem all across the globe - that were occurring in Islam's wake in the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, tenth, eleventh, thirteenth, sixteenth centuries?

There appears, to the untrained eye of a reasonable man (or woman) a large degree of intractibility to this oppressive cult of greed, rape, and murder. Something not quite a religion, in a conventionally positive, spiritually transformative sense.

Sure they want to control oil-rich lands! If they gain and maintain control of such wealth, they will have the tools to insure that no people under their thumb ever gainsay the resources to rise up and take arms against them, shake free of their enslavement, and choose their religions,their government, their lives - for themselves.

Call me crazy if you must, but it makes sense to me, and I think maybe - just maybe - I'm seeing a sort of pattern of behavior begin to emerge...

A.A.C.