Tarek Fatah says that Islam is the only religion bent on the destruction of Western civiliization

Here is a picture of Hillary Clinton in Pakistan. She came close to being the President of the United States and had to settle for Secretary of State. I guess one should not be surprised to see her in a hijab since her boss went so far as to bow to the King of Saudi Arabia.

But what is the message to Islamists when an important non-Muslim dons Muslim approved head gear?

Give up?

That Islam is winning, so keep up the pressure. Do we really need the top people in the government of the United States to lend such a helping hand to that project?

I went to a lecture last evening in Toronto. The speaker was Tarek Fatah, who I have described in other postings on this blog as Canada’s leading Muslim reformer. Perhaps I am being a bit sexist with that remark since Irshad Manji is also well-known for her views on the reformation of Islam and is probably better known internationally than Fatah. So let’s just say he is one of Canada’s leading reformers.

He is quite entertaining because he is passionate about his subject and he pulls no punches. At one point he said, “Let’s face it, racism can be fun, and we have to work hard at not appearing to be racist.” Not many folks in our fair land would be brave enough to say that publicly.

Fatah was talking about the reason why he wrote his book, Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, published in 2008. He claims to have proved through his research that the notion of establishing a global Islamic state is a fable that has harmed Islam for more than 1,000 years and is a distortion of Mohammed’s message. He says he was trying to reach out to young Muslims who are swayed by Islamists into the folds of the radical Islamist movement.

Among the interesting tidbits he dropped in his lecture was the fact that every mosque in the Toronto area obtains sizeable funding from Saudi Arabia. I had not heard that before, although so many other mosques around the world are funded by that source it should not be surprising to find that ours are no exception.

He also pointed out that Pakistan is the only country in the world that was created exclusively for Muslims. That is an interesting argument to keep in mind when one hears the cries against the legitimacy of creating Israel as a homeland for the Jews.

Fatah supports the initiative of the Muslim Canadian Congress to petition the federal government to ban the burka and the niqab. He makes no bones about the fact that these garments are designed to marginalize women and have little to do with piety.

With a good deal of sarcasm he told of the post 9/11 visit by Canada’s top politicians to an Ottawa mosque to comfort Muslims in their hour of peril. One of the visitors was Alexa McDonough, who was then the leader of the federal NDP. The old, bearded Imam, who carried a walking stick, greeted them at the entrance and proceeded to rap her on her foot with it, and told her that her footwear was offensive as her toes were showing. He ordered her to go to the basement where all the women went. She complied.

Fatah says this is symbolic of what is wrong with our attitude to Islam (meaning non-Muslim attitudes). He said McDonough’s response ought to have been to slap the Imam in the face and lecture him on the perils of assaulting women.

He summarized the three great problems with Islam that need to be overcome: suppression of women, hostility to homosexuals and treatment of apostasy.

I would have added supremacy to that list.

Toronto's taqiyyameister

Imam Said Rageah delivered a sermon in Toronto recently and stirred a hornet's nest when it was analysed in The National Post. He was a addressing an inititative of the
Muslim Canadian Congress, an Islamic reform group, headquartered in Toronto, which has petitioned the federal government to outlaw the burka and the niqab.

Here is a passage from that sermon:

"We have to establish Islam [in Canada]. I wanna see Islam in every single corner of the city; I would like to see niqabis, and hijabis [women wearing face masks and head covering] everywhere in the city. I want to see ‘brothers' [Muslim men] in beards everywhere in the city. Because when they see more of us, they will have more respect for us. They will say, ‘look they are everywhere...we cannot go against them'."

During his sermon he referred to non-Muslims as "kuffars" and advised his congregants not to make common cause with them on the MCC's proposal, because allying themselves with non-Muslims violates Islamic principles or laws. As a result of the reaction he received, he posted this reply in the same newspaper. My comments follow the letter.

Imam Said Rageah responds
Posted: October 23, 2009, 11:30 PM by Ron Nurwisah
Islam
Oct 23rd, 2009 --5 Dhul Qa’dah, 1430

Dear Congregants and Visitors of Other Faiths,

Recently, there was a news article describing my sermon and my practice of Islam as one that seeks to incite hatred. Usually, seeking to answer agenda-driven critics would only serve to distract me from my work of proclaiming the Shahadah, applying what it means in my personal life and also attempting to teach others in a practical and appropriate manner in an environment where practicing Islam can sometimes be portrayed unfairly as a threat.

In my little corner of our beautiful city of Toronto, I sometimes sit back and contemplate the course of my life. I live in a multicultural melting pot with a personal reality that is unique and diverse in many ways. For example, my father-in-law and mother-in-law are Christians, with whom I have a very respectful and loving relationship. When I talk with them, I reflect and ponder on the nature of the lives of my children and their development. Our unique Canadian montage will allow them to live in a society, where in spite of the circumstances of their birth or their heritage, they will find their own footing in the Canadian mosaic. They will carve out their own Islamic identity, an identity that will be free from persecution and enslavement of thought.

As stated in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law. And among the fundamental principles which are the cornerstones of this society are the right to free speech, free thought, free expression and the ability to practice one’s own religious beliefs, all within reasonable, justifiable limits. I share and promote these values as they are also Islamic values.

I will be delivering a sermon today that will touch upon these issues and the recent controversies. What can be explored in 30 minutes cannot be easily compressed into a one-page statement, but let me try:

1. The expression “kuffar” is based on an operational definition, of what people do to hide something, like the truth about God (“Allah” in Arabic). In Arabic/Islamic terminology, it does not categorically refer to Christians and Jews, nor does it exclude Muslims.

2. Muslims are closer in belief and practice to observant Christians and Jews than they are to each other and Muslims respect each people as having received Revelation from the same God, and are correctly referred to as “People of the Book”.

3. Men and women in Islam are required to act and dress modestly. There are a range of interpretations, including hijab and niqab for women. The choice whether to veil, and the type of veil, should be entirely for each individual Muslim woman to make of her own free will.

4. Politics are shaped by public opinion and public opinion is shaped by the media. Rather than leaving ignorance to fill the vacuum, Muslims must fully engage in Canadian society with wisdom and the best of speech, to foster mutual respect and understanding and shape an even better country.

I invite you all to learn and share more about your faith and yourselves.

May God’s Peace and Blessings Be Upon Us All

Said Rageah

On the one hand he wants to portray himself as being a cosmopolitan citizen of Canada's leading cosmopolitan city. On the other, he professes ignorance that the word "Kuffar" would be considered derogatory by many in this community of which he claims to be a member. Well which is it?

If Muslims are closer to Christians and Jews than to each other, how does he explain the fact that there are virtually no Jews living in Middle Eastern countries where Islam prevails and the Christians that are there are migrating because of local hostility and lack of security and support from Muslim authorities. This alleged common God worship does not seem translate into peace and harmony amongst the religions of Abraham in the cradle of Islam.

Nobody in Canada who is not a Muslim would disagree that the manner of dress of an individual Muslim woman should be her choice. But there are Muslims who do not believe it is a free choice (the MCC) and there are suspicions that honour killings in the name of the religion have occurred here where Muslim women have chosen not to wear reliously-inspired culture-specific garments; e.g., Aqsa Parvez.

Why is this aspect of Islam never addressed by these religious guys? Instead, they spout back at us the principles by which we, not they, live, as if there is nothing more to be said on that subject.

Muslims must fully engage in Canadian society with wisdom and the best of speech, to foster mutual respect and understanding and shape an even better country.

Now that is a mouthful coming from a man who refers to other Canadians as Kuffars and avises his congregants to avoid making friends, allies or common cause with them because they are Kuffars.

He says he shares the Canadian principle of freedom of expression because this is an Islamic value. Since the bedrock of Islam is blind obedience to the word of God, how did freedom of expression get embedded in Islam?

Just this week we learned that U.S. authorities arrested two Muslim men who were plotting to kill the publisher of and one of the artists of the famous Danish cartoons. One of the men is a Canadian citizen from Toronto.

Perhaps the good Imam would spend some of his time in his 30 minute sermons explaining why Islam would frown on such people who believe killing to crush freedom of expression is an Islamic value.

In searching for information on this Imam, I turned up this website that identifies an Imam Said Regeah as a fundraiser for a charity that was later designated as terrorist support agency.

Tarek Fatah, Canada's leading reformist Muslim, also has some interesting things to say about this fellow's preachings.

What's this war for?

In a recent column by Tarek Fatah in The National Post, he says we have lost the war in Afghanistan, we should acknowledge defeat and we should bring home our troops now before any more of them are killed.

I don’t agree with him.

I normally have a lot of time for Fatah. He is one of a handful of Muslims who calls for the reform of the religion. For his efforts, he and his family have been threatened with death by other Muslims.

Fatah is the author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, a book that has been reasonably well-received by the public and was a runner-up in the 2009 Donner Prize for the best books on Canadian public policy. The book discredits the notion of a world-wide Caliphate from an historical perspective.

However, this column is the most defeatist I have ever read. If he had written this kind of thing in 1942 about the war with the Axis Powers, he probably would have been locked up for sedition.

Fatah says:

We have lost the war. The Islamist jihadis have won it. We must acknowledge defeat and bring our troops home.

In a war between those who desire death and those who treasure their RRSPs and IRAs, the outcome is predictable. Canadian soldiers are professional, but mission-less armies have never fared well on the battlefield. American soldiers, who enlist primarily with the objective of obtaining a college degree, will never be able to defeat their counterparts, who view their freshman year as starting in paradise on the banks of rivers of milk and honey surrounded by 72 virgins.

This is hyperbole, of course, because there are many Americans who did not enlist for a free ride into college, but to avenge 9/11 and to do what the American military exists to do; i.e., keep the country secure.

We are told that we are involved in an “asymmetrical” war and that different strategies and tactics need to be employed if we are to “win” it. Asymmetrical is just a fancy name for guerrilla warfare and guerilla wars have been won; the British in South Africa, Kenya and Malaya, as examples. The more recent one is the defeat of the Tamil Tigers by the government of Sri Lanka.

However, those conflicts were carried out in confined geographical territories, where the combatants on the other side did not have easy access to outside material support, or had little room to maneuver, and where the victorious party could effectively bottle them up in less and less defendable territory.

The problem with the war against radical Islam is that it recruits its “soldiers” from everywhere, including our own country, and it can supply them from a bottomless armory of small arms and explosives, available mainly through the helpful manufacturing and distribution by the very governments who send their armies to fight these zealots.

So, just as the military needs to think differently about how it combats non-state agents of a death cult, we, the people, need to consider redefining what we mean by defeat and victory. Sometimes a victory is merely keeping somebody at bay.

Did we experience a victory over the Soviet Union like we did over Germany and Japan? Clearly not. But we defeated it just the same. We contained its expansion and it eventually imploded.

That is how we need to think about victory with respect to radical Islam. Keep it off balance, bottle it up, interdict it wherever it appears, and discredit it at all times. As long as Islam lives, the death cult will never go away, but it can be contained and its harmful effects minimized.

I agree with Fatah that we should bring home the troops, but only when our commitment to Afghanistan ends in 2011. The Islamists will crow about it, but we accomplished what we set out to do which was to disrupt al Qaeda and chase away the Taliban government.

In the future, we should not set ourselves lofty goals of bringing democracy to these backwater Islamic states. We should just interfere enough to derail any emerging threats and then let them sort out their own messes. The strategy is containment and successful containment is a victory. Had we identified this goal early on, we would have withdrawn from Afghanistan long ago and not found ourselves in the current quagmire of endless warfare.

Israel employs such a strategy with its neighbours. It fights them when necessary, inflicts a military beating, without complete conquest, and then goes back to the status quo. It is instructive that Lebanon’s belligerent Nasrallah declared war on Israel in 2006 in support of Hamas’s dustup with the Jewish state and got such a bloody nose from that encounter that he stayed well away from its re-run in 2008.

Although I disagree with Fatah about claiming a defeat and running home now, I do agree with this sentiment.

In the U. S., a bumbling President who knows the threat of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood ideology very well still bends over backwards and welcomes the bearers of this doctrine into his inner circle.

Imagine fighting the U. S. S. R. without confronting the ideology of Stalinism. Could we have won? Not a chance. Today we are fighting Islamist jihad-ism, yet neither Obama nor the British PM nor Harper or Ignatieff dare utter one word against the ideology that attacked us all on 9/11. So what is this war for?

We have to have a clearer idea of the enemy we are fighting and who our real friends and allies are in the Islamic world.

Exactly!

Amen to Tarek Fatah who upbraids the Islamic apologists in today's National Post for their dishonesty in dealing with the problem of "honour killings".