American Islamic Congress

American Islamic Congress ^ | February 22, 2003

[Cultural Jihad]

Former Ohio congressman John Kasich's "From the Heartland" segment tonight on FoxNews featured a guest, Zainab Al-Suwaij, the executive director of the American Islamic Congress. FoxNews' website says about this segment:

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A Muslim Makes the Case for War Against Saddam

John talks with Zainab Al-Suwaij is the executive director of the American Islamic Congress. Ms. Al-Suwaij joins us from Bosnia and explains what it was like to grow up in Iraq in the shadow of Saddam Hussein's reign of terror. She believes that this is a war that must be waged.

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Zainab made an interesting statement regarding the so-called "peace" marches, that there has been no such peace in Iraq for the past 15 years, because of widespread torture and oppression under Saddam.

From their website:

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Mission:

The American Islamic Congress (AIC) is a social organization that is dedicated to building interfaith and interethnic understanding. Our organization grew out of the ashes of September 11. The vicious terrorist attacks made many American Muslims realize that we had been silent for too long in the face of Muslim extremism. We believe American Muslims must take the lead in building tolerance and fostering a respect for human rights and social justice. We have a responsibility to help our country rebuild from this attack, and to our religion to reassert that we are moderate and peace-loving people.

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[BenR2]

where old, deep-seated hatreds based upon tribal justice as proselytized by TLBSHOW and Thorondir rule the day, and keep the people in poverty and despair.

/ / / /
Just WHO was flying those planes on 9/11? Guys with names like Todd and Thronodir? Or names like Muhammad and Abdullah?

[Cultural Jihad]

In that regard they all harbor the same illness and group-hatreds: Islamists who claim the crusaders are out to destroy Islam, and the slobs who claim all Muslims are out to murder Christians.

[Thorondir]

where they came from, where old, deep-seated hatreds based upon tribal justice as proselytized by ... Thorondir rule the day, and keep the people in poverty and despair.

Please explain this accusation, sir. I am intensely interested to see your support for the statement that I proselytize tribal justice. I have always respected you and found your posts both interesting and engaging. But this one seems like a gratuitous, bald-faced bearing of false witness. I'm waiting, sir.

[Cultural Jihad]

Fighting Islam's Ku Klux Klan

The Muslim world cannot forever attribute all its ills to the Great Satan, America, writes the Iraqi dissident, Kanan Makiya

War on Terrorism: Observer special

The globalisation debate

Sunday October 7, 2001
The Observer

The Arab and Muslim worlds suddenly find themselves facing a civilisational challenge such as they have not had to face since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For, in the years to come, the greatest price of the madness that was unleashed upon New York and Washington on 11 September will be borne by them and by all individuals of Arab or Muslim origin, wherever they might live in the world.

I am not talking about the next war in Afghanistan or greatly redoubled efforts to hunt down Muslim and Arab terrorists from Boston and Hamburg to Cairo and Karachi. The price I am talking about is not paid in blood or by being the victim of the kinds of humiliating slurs and racist attacks that are everywhere on the rise in the West. It is the much greater price brought about by continuing to wallow in the sense of one's own victimhood to the point of losing the essentially universal idea of human dignity and worth that is the only true measure of civility.

Arab and Muslim resentment at the West is grounded in many grievances, some legitimate, others less so. Without question, the West has blundered in its dealings with the Arab world. The United States has in recent years behaved unjustly towards the Palestinians. The Allied victory in the Gulf War of 1990-1991 was a lost opportunity to rectify this record, to show that the West, and the United States in particular, was capable of reaching out the hand of friendship and support to the peoples of the Arab world, to their democrats and civil libertarians, not merely to a host of tyrannical and unrepresentative regimes.

Like Germans after the First World War, Arabs felt they deserved a different lot after the Gulf War. They thought of themselves as having tried to change the ways they did politics in the past, and got nowhere. Palestinian living standards have actually declined since the Oslo accord in 1993, and Iraqi society (much less its polity and economy) is in a state of steady disintegration. So Arabs grew more resentful and angry at the West than at any other time in modern Arab history. This resentment can be felt everywhere; it has taken root in the most Westernised sections of the Arab population, among businessmen and students of science and engineering, and even among the sons of the mega-rich like Osama bin Laden.

However, grievances alone do not explain the apocalyptic act of fury that was unleashed upon New York and Washington. Arabs and Muslims need today to face up to the fact that their resentment at America has long since become unmoored from any rational underpinnings it might once have had; like the anti-Semitism of the interwar years, it is today steeped in deeply embedded conspiratorial patterns of thought rooted in profound ignorance of how a society and a polity like the United States, much less Israel, functions.

Attribution of all of the ills of one's own world to either the great Satan, America, or the little Satan, Israel, has been the driving force of Arab politics since 1967. As a powerful undercurrent of Arab culture and politics, it has been around much longer than that. After 1967, however, it became the legitimising cement upon which such murderous regimes as Saddam Hussein's Iraq were built.

From the hands of secular Arab nationalists, anti-Americanism was passed on to religious zealots. In 1979, it fused with anti-Shah sentiments to become the animating force of the Iranian revolution and, with that seminal event, major sections of the Islamic movement. Today, it has become a murderous brew of passions fuelled by paranoia and frustration.

In the five-page letter left in a suitcase in the car-park of Boston's airport, this passage, giving guidance to the hijackers in case they should meet resistance from a passenger, appears: 'If God grants any one of you a slaughter, you should perform it as an offering on behalf of your father and mother, for they are owed by you. Do not disagree among yourselves, but listen and obey. If you slaughter, you should plunder those you slaughter, for that is a sanctioned custom of the Prophet's, on the condition that you do not get occupied with the plunder so that you would leave what is more important, such as paying attention to the enemy, his treachery and attacks. That is because such action is very harmful [to the mission].'

This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. No concessions can be made to either mindset which have more in common with one another than they do with the religions they claim to represent.

To argue, as many Arabs and Muslims are doing today (and not a few liberal Western voices), that 'Americans should ask themselves why they are so hated in the world' is to make such a concession; it is to provide a justification, however unwittingly, for this kind of warped mindset. The thinking is the same as the 'linkage' dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990 in order to liberate Palestine. The difference being that if the argument was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now.

Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of being counterproductive. For every attempt to 'rationalise' or 'explain' the new anti-Americanism rampant in so much of the Muslim and Arab worlds bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of 11 September, which is to blur the lines that separate their sect of a few hundred people from hundreds of millions of peace-loving Muslims and Arabs.

But it is now up to Arabs and Muslims to draw the line that separates them from the Osama bin Ladens of this world just as it was up to Americans to excoriate, isolate, outlaw, imprison and eventually root out the members of the Klan from their midst. Mercifully, the very same Western leaders who are preparing for the coming 'War Against Terrorism' are trying hard, and genuinely, to say their efforts are not directed at Muslims and Arab or Muslim culture. Constantly, they are being seen with Muslim clerics and visiting mosques. That is all for the good.

But it is not enough to turn the tide of public opinion which will increasingly need and want to know who is 'the other' in this coming war. Terrorism is a tactic, after all, not a side. Usage of the word 'war', however understandable, was a strategic mistake by the American President. For like the wars on drugs or poverty it inculcates expectations at the risk of showing few results. The problem is deeper than bin Laden and his associates, and will not end with their demise. As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi beena, minna wa feena: 'The disease that is in us, is from us and within us.' Against this kind of enemy the West can do nothing. We have to do it ourselves.

Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today.

© Kanan Makiya. The author, who was born in Iraq, now teaches in the US. His books include Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World and the forthcoming The Rock.

http://www.observer.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,564700,00.html

[BenR2]

In that regard they all harbor the same illness and group-hatreds: Islamists who claim the crusaders are out to destroy Islam, and the slobs who claim all Muslims are out to murder Christians.

/ / / / / /
While I don't share your view, that seems to be a tenable position. (Personally, I will trade you 100 9/11 hijackers for ONE TLBShow or Thronodir. I would trust my wife with either one of them (and with you, too) -- but not with the Islamist (American or non-).

[Thorondir]

In that regard they all harbor the same illness and group-hatreds: Islamists who claim the crusaders are out to destroy Islam, and the slobs who claim all Muslims are out to murder Christians.

So now I am ill? Then, please, doctor, make your diagnosis clear for us laymen. And what group hatreds are you talking about? What group have I said I hate? When did I claim that ALL Muslims are out to murder Christians?

Put up or quit lying.

[justshe]

I think you overlooked: I abhor the violence we have experienced....So I repeated it here.

Now.....repeat after me.......

I refuse to use a broad-brush to damn ALL based on the behavior of a radical sect that has bastardized their religion in order advance their sick agenda.

There now....we KNEW you could do it!

[Thorondir]

Why do many of these iSLAModefenders have to resort to lying and slandering iSLAM's critics with baseless accusations? Do you think CJ will make an attempt to defend his false accusations, or will he just call his buddy again to defend him(the guy who repeatedly screeched that my mother is a whore over this same subject)?

What is WRONG with these guys?

[Mo1]

Now American Muslim women must respond in kind

Thanks for these article .. and I noticed she always says American Muslim and not Muslim-American

[Cultural Jihad]

Your condemnation of Islam is little different from the Islamists' condemnation of Christianity.

[BenR2]

Why do many of these iSLAModefenders have to resort to lying and slandering iSLAM's critics with baseless accusations? Do you think CJ will make an attempt to defend his false accusations, or will he just call his buddy again to defend him(the guy who repeatedly screeched that my mother is a whore over this same subject)?

What is WRONG with these guys?

/ / / /
I think, at some level, it is a SPIRITUAL issue. I believe your eyes (and mine) can "see" things to which they are honestly (and, sadly) blinded.

At a certain point, it is best to agree to disagree with them. I think both are sincere and decent people, but sincerely WRONG about the realities of Islam. (I'm sorry the one guy said those things about your Mother, though. That, I believe was uncalled for -- and, it is to be hoped -- a bit out of character for the man.)

These guys are lost causes. I've been warned (privately) to avoid arguments with CJ like this, on the grounds that it was a waste of time.

Don't waste your breath with these guys any more than you can stand to do it. (They may change their tune when a love one is killed by an Islamist!)

[nunya bidness]

It's my understanding that the attacks of 9-11 weren't in response to the Crusades rather the encroachment of the US in the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia. And when was the last time Christians massacred muslims on the scale of 9-11?

I would say that a healthy awareness of the current religion being used to murder the innocent is not Christian. And more specifically, this awareness could be called racism but it doesn't alleviate the fear or apprehension of Americans of any or no faith of the one group of people who have targeted them.

Your responses are less than honest and sound more like PC rhetoric. Unfortunately these days words can kill, in both omission and commission.

[Thorondir]

Now American Muslim women must respond in kind

I wonder why Muslim women in Muslim lands do not respond in kind? If it is only a tiny fringe of Muslims who have hijacked their peaceful religion to violence, then those women should have nothing to fear.

Things that make you go, "Hmmmmm..."

[BenR2]

I wonder why Muslim women in Muslim lands do not respond in kind? If it is only a tiny fringe of Muslims who have hijacked their peaceful religion to violence, then those women should have nothing to fear.

/ / / / /
Brings to mind the Taliban killing women for wearing high heels, or whatever.

[BenR2]

Meanwhile, God is going to have to judge me for making an IDOL out of FreeRepublic! (Only half-kidding.) I cannot BELIEVE how late it is. Got go.

Later, guys. Been fun.

[justshe]

"The word 'Allah' is only the Name of God.

Sometimes the Christians of the Middle East use that name for God, in Arabic. There is no reason why Muslims should object to "Allah bless America", as it means the same as "God bless America".

Normally Muslims in public talks, or while in conversation with Non-Muslims, may use the word, 'God' rather than 'Allah', to avoid being strange.

You can have as many slogans of this kind put up as you like, if this will help: Not only "Allah bless America", but also, "Jehovah bless America", "Bhagwan bless America", "Ishwar bless America", etc.

But as long as all these names stand for the one and only God, different names used by different peoples or religions do not have any particular significance, unless of course you believe that God will answer to prayers in a particular language only!

Thank you and Allah bless you!"

Professor Shahul Hameed

[Thorondir]

Your post explains nothing of your crude slander attacks and false accusations against me, sir. I have always found your posts to be intelligent, measured and engaging, except on this issue. But then, this is an emotional issue for all of us. I am willing to write off the ugliness you directed at me personally as just that, emotion, since, apparently, you are unable to substantiate your false accusations.

We just see things differently, I guess. I think it's unlikely that we will come to any sort of understanding.

Peace be with you, sir.

[RecentConvert]

Thank you! Thank you for making us remember and never forget.

[Thorondir]

Good night, sir. It's bedtime for me, too.

[Cultural Jihad]

It's my understanding that the attacks of 9-11 weren't in response to the Crusades rather the encroachment of the US in the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia.

I was using the rhetoric of bin Laden, who claims that the West are the "crusaders" out to destroy Islam. Undoubtedly no sane Westerner wants to carry water for bin Laden, but whenever anyone claims that Islam is the enemy, that is in fact what they are doing, for bin Laden wants to turn his jihad againt the U.S. into a clash of civilizations.