Category Archives: History

Rauff Revs Up The Muslim Message

Christianity, History, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Religion

The official Right in this country did not tell it like it is: Feisal Abdul Rauf, Chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, and the man behind the mosque in lower Manhattan, was picked by the Bush administration to serve as the American emissary to Muslim countries. Did you know this? I was under the impression that the Imam was B. Hussein’s pick.

I find nothing outrageous about the Imam’s opinion, also mine, that America’s adventurous foreign policy is a necessary condition for Muslim aggression. But that’s not the entire story. Rauff would never admit that our meddling abroad is far from a sufficient condition for Muslim aggression.

However, when Abdul Rauf, in this clip, soothingly says that Islam and America are organically bound, and then proceeds to describe the American Founding Fathers, without mentioning their Christian background and beliefs, as non-parochial men of faith—then I get the creeps.

Rauf sees the three faiths as enmeshed and America’s history as intertwined with Islam and Muslims. At least so he says. Taqiyya, anyone?

This man would make a good snake charmer.

UPDATED: It Takes An Indian

History, IMMIGRATION, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Nationhood

To tell it like it is. An American Indian. This may be well-ploughed territory to readers of this space, but it can’t be said often enough. “America is not a nation of immigrants. America is a nation of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” writes David Yeagley at AltRight. “Everyone else is an immigrant. Even the early Celtic add-ons were not part of the foundations. The later Irish Catholic immigrants were most definitely not part of the foundations. The social order, that is, the government of the colonies, and that system which distilled into the Declaration of Independence, was created by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The Constitution of the United States of America is the work of Englishman who separated themselves, by war, from their home country.”

“Modern descendants of the Scots, the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Jews, etc., are first to declare that America is a nation of immigrants. This is their self-protection. Therefore this is their talking point when it comes to addressing the issue of immigration in general. But their mantra ‘America is a nation of immigrants’ only justifies their own presence here. The fact is, these people are all additions, not founders. All of the early immigrants, besides the Jews, have of course blended themselves into the founding sentiments. It was easier for the Scots than anyone else, because they were ‘British’ anyway.”

***
About left-liberal Jewish strategising, which is no different to the wimpy, lemming’s lunacy evinced by their WASP counterparts, THE BAD EAGLE says the following:

At this point, the argument that other non-WASP groups must be nurtured and honored by the Jew, in order for the Jew to protect himself from persecution, is a dangerous argument, and really ought to be dropped. It invites anti-Americanism. This in turn invites anti-Semitism

The argument is also self-defeating, as I observed in my 2003 “BLAME THE JEWS”:

“MacDonald’s assertion that Jews support open immigration policies so that they can bring about a more diverse society in order to diminish anti-Semitism and promote ‘Jewish ethnic interests’ must be questioned, especially in the post-September 11 world.”

Jews have little to gain by advocating for minority communities with which they haven’t much in common, culturally or socioeconomically, and who are likely to be hostile to them. How does promoting immigration from Muslim countries, for instance, benefit Jewish interests?
Jewish activism, if anything, is self-defeating as a group strategy. The community’s egalitarianism is thus more accurately seen as a function of liberal pathology, the same pathology so many Christian denominations exhibit – they all believe, mistakenly, that they are promoting ‘social justice.’
All in all, the paleoconservatives’ attempts to blame Jews for pervasive gentile madness, such as Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq, his lingering presence in Afghanistan, multiculturalism and ‘mass, non-traditional-immigration,’ is too silly to sustain, but, at the same time, a little sinister. (Next, MacDonald will hold Jews responsible for loading the Episcopal Church with homosexuals.)

[SNIP]

If you are interested, David interviewed me a while back, as part of a series of interviews with rightists about “Patriotism, Nationhood, and the American Indian.”

UPDATE (Aug. 15): From “Nation, State & Mass Immigration”:

“To say that America is a ‘nation of immigrants,’” writes commentator Lawrence Auster, “is to imply that there has never been an actual American people apart from immigration.”

It is to put America out of existence as a historically existing nation that immigrants and their children joined by coming here, a country with its own right to exist and to determine its own sovereign destiny—a right that includes the right to permit immigration or not. No patriot, no decent person who loves this country, as distinct from loving some whacked-out, anti-national, leftist idea of this country, would call it a ‘nation of immigrants.’

The people who established the American political order, described by Thomas Jefferson as “a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution … derived from natural right and natural reason,” were overwhelmingly British Christians. America’s Anglo-Saxon historical majority descends not from immigrants, but from English and Scots-Irish colonists. Over to Auster:

The immigrants of the late 19th and 20th centuries came to an American nation that had already been formed by those colonists and their descendants. Therefore to call America ‘a nation of immigrants’ is to suggest that America, prior to the late 19th-century wave of European immigration, was not America.”

‘Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege’

Affirmative Action, Education, History, Labor, Race, Racism

JAMES WEBB is a good guy. So I’ve said for some time—ever since my correspondence with him during the dark days of the Iraq war, when I was THE ONLY antiwar writer on WND, and was cursed and threatened daily for it. Webb, of course, opposed the war. We exchanged friendly emails, which he initiated pursuant to one of many anti-war-on-Iraq columns I had written.

Citing Pat Buchanan, this courageous man has now come out against “government programs to help all ‘people of color'” as “unfair.” Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Webb argues as follows:

“After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. [A point upon which I expand in my new book.] These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived. …

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all “people of color”—especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.—moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites.”

The clearest example of today’s misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South. …

At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that “fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery.”

The Civil War devastated the South, in human and economic terms. And from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II, the region was a ravaged place, affecting black and white alike.

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt created a national commission to study what he termed ‘the long and ironic history of the despoiling of this truly American section.’ At that time, most industries in the South were owned by companies outside the region. Of the South’s 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white). The illiteracy rate was five times that of the North-Central states and more than twice that of New England and the Middle Atlantic (despite the waves of European immigrants then flowing to those regions). The total endowments of all the colleges and universities in the South were less than the endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The average schoolchild in the South had $25 a year spent on his or her education, compared to $141 for children in New York.

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks’ average of 10.6 years”…

MORE.

UPDAED: Wahhabi Mosque At Ground Zero

BAB's A List, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Freedom of Religion, History, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad, Religion, The West, War

My guest today on BAB is Jihad scholar Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS. Dr. Bostom is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School, and a contributor to many publications.

The NYP piece informs about the background of the Muslims involved in erecting the Mega-Mosque at ground zero. Although I am not an historian, I do, however, believe Andrew’s Sharia-Shintoism analogy is utterly erroneous. I am unaware that the Japanese wished to enforce their faith on the world; or that they have the pedigree of bloody conquest in the name of the faith to match Islam’s. Of course, that depends how you view America’s incinerating antipathy toward the Japanese. (Most Americans love this particular mass murder.)

Be mindful too that, as I wrote in “Dhimmis At Ground Zero?,” “restricting acquisitive property rights in a free society should never be entertained, as much as I approve of actions wishing to peacefully prevent this religious monstrosity from replacing a statist one.” It is, moreover, worse than futile to “request kindness and consideration from those they regard as conquistadors.” That’s plain dhimmi.

As I see it, fans of the heroic Geert Wilders refuse to adopt his immigration restrictionism, and prefer to concentrate on tiresome, futile talk against the evils of honor killings and genital infibulation, which no one sanctions.

BEHIND THE MOSQUE
By ANDREW G. BOSTOM
New York Post

Imam Feisal Rauf, the central figure in the coterie planning a huge mosque just off Ground Zero, is a full-throated champion of the very same Muslim theologians and jurists identified in a landmark NYPD report as central to promoting the Islamic religious bigotry that fuels modern jihad terrorism. This fact alone should compel Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg to withdraw their support for the proposed mosque.

In August 2007, the NYPD released “Radicalization in the West — The Homegrown Threat.” This landmark 90-page report looked at the threat that had become apparent since 9/11, analyzing the roots of recent terror plots in the United States, from Lackawanna, NY, to Portland, Ore., to Fort Dix, NJ. The report noted that Saudi “Wahhabi” scholars feed the jihadist ideology, legitimizing an “extreme intolerance” toward non-Muslims, especially Jews, Christians and Hindus. In particular, the analysts noted that the “journey” of radicalization that produces homegrown jihadis often begins in a Wahhabi mosque.

The term “Wahhabi” refers to the 18th century founder of this austere Islamic tradition, Muhammad bin Abdul al-Wahhab, who claimed inspiration from 14th century jurist Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah. At least two of Imam Rauf’s books, a 2000 treatise on Islamic law and his 2004 “What’s Right with Islam,” laud the implementation of sharia — including within America — and the “rejuvenating” Islamic religious spirit of Ibn Taymiyyah and al-Wahhab.

He also lionizes as two ostensible “modernists” Jamal al-Dinal-Afghani (d. 1897), and his student Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905). In fact, both defended the Wahhabis, praised the salutary influence of Ibn Taymiyyah and promoted the pretense that sharia — despite its permanent advocacy of jihad and dehumanizing injunctions against non-Muslims and women — was somehow compatible with Western concepts of human rights, as in our own Bill of Rights.

In short, Feisal Rauf’s public image as a devotee of the “contemplative” Sufi school of Islam cannot change the fact that his writings directed at Muslims are full of praise for the most noxious and dangerous Muslim thinkers.

Indeed, even the classical Sufi master that Rauf extols, the 12th-century jurist Abu Hamed Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, issued opinions on jihad and the imposition of Islamic law on the vanquished non-Muslim populations that were as bellicose and bigoted as those of Ibn Taymiyyah.

Also relevant is the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow program run by the American Society for Muslim Advancement, an organization founded by Rauf and now run by his wife. Among the future leaders it has recognized are one of the co-authors of a “denunciation” of the NYPD report, a counter-report endorsed by all major Wahhabi-front organizations in America. Another “future leader” of interest to New Yorkers: Debbie Almontaser, the onetime head of the city’s Khalil Gibran Academy.

More revealing is the fact that Rauf himself has refused to sign a straightforward pledge to “repudiate the threat from authoritative sharia to the religious freedom and safety of former Muslims,” a pledge issued nine months ago by ex-Muslims under threat for their “apostasy.” That refusal is a tacit admission that Rauf believes that sharia trumps such fundamental Western principles as freedom of conscience.

Wahhabism — whether in the form promoted by Saudi money around the globe, or in the more openly nihilist brand embraced by terrorists — is a totalitarian ideology comparable to Nazism or, closer still, the “state Shintoism” of imperial Japan. We would never have allowed a Shinto shrine at the site of the Pearl Harbor carnage — especially one to serve as a recruiting station for Tokyo’s militarists while World War II was still on.

For the same reasons, we must say no to a Wahhabi mosque at Ground Zero.

Andrew G. Bostom is the author of “The Legacy of Jihad” and “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.”

UPDATE: In “Who’s paying for the ground zero Islamic center?” Rick Lazio raises similar concerns. Lazio, a super statist, has found a cause he can run on. I like the idea I’ve heard floated of “landmarking” the targeted “historic 150-year-old building that was seriously damaged by the landing gear of one of the hijacked jetliners that flew into the World Trade Center.”