Every week on Monday morning , the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher's Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week's question:
Should Islam In America Be Subject To Some Kind Of Regulation Or Control?
The Independent Sentinel: Mosques need to be under surveillance. Radical Islamic communities need to be under surveillance and banned if they are training commandos as reports indicate they are.
Instead of trying to ban the name, "Washington Redskins", they need to ban Shariah law. They should also ban Shariah finance.
We should stop immigration to this country from terrorist nations until we have a better handle on radical Islam. Radical Islam presents an existential threat to the United States.
The Razor: Absolutely not. We do not – and should not – regulate hate speech. Nazis are free to spout off their dreck, white supremacists theirs. Islamists should be allowed to do the same.
What we need to do is stop making excuses for Islam. I’m tired of being told what Islam isn’t by non-Muslims and shown what Islam is by Muslims like Hamas and ISIS. What other religion has caused as much havoc over the past 50 years? If a Christian sect started wrapping women in bags, banning non-believers from their holy sites, and made conversion out of their faith punishable by death there would be an outcry from the secular as well as religious communities the likes of which have never been seen. Yet Islam gets a free pass.
In the US the Westboro Baptist Church is held up as the epitome of Christian hate because of its protests against homosexuality, yet the WBC does not preach violence against non-believers. If WBC were an Islamic sect it would be considered moderate to liberal by outsiders because of its religious tolerance and treatment of women and minorities. It’s also ironic that WBC holds the same abhorrence of homosexuality that Islam does, but does not call for the murder of homosexuals as many Islamic clerics do.
Why is Islam treated differently than other religions? The reason is that the vast majority of Americans aren’t familiar with the religion. They have only a superficial knowledge of it gleaned from various media sources, and so fill in the blanks with their own experience of the Judeo-Christian religions. They assume that Islam is just like Christianity or Judaism. It even recognizes Jesus and Moses as prophets. This blend of naiveté and ignorance provides plenty of space for Muslims to portray Islam as progressive while it’s social order is based on 7th century Arabian tribes, and peaceful at the same time it works for the overthrow of any non-Islamic political or religious regime and the establishment of a worldwide caliphate.
The solution is not to regulate Islam: it’s to convince Americans and Europeans to confront reality and ask what Muslims are going to do to make their religion fit the modern world.
Simply Jews: I think any extremist outfit should be under control - if not under lock and key. Saying this, I still do nurture some hope that adherents of Islam are not extreme and violent en masse, and that only a relatively small cells of domination-thirsty individuals could be (as the should be) controlled. This, by the way, goes for any potentially subversive, violent and disruptive religious or ideological organization.
The real problem with nowadays Islamic population is that its members are very unwilling to separate themselves from and to isolate and expel the extremist elements. This creates an additional and almost insurmountable issue for FBI and other security organizations (all over the world, by the way) in their fight against the extremism.
It is educational to see that most of FBI successes in this direction, at least the published ones, are in the area of so called "entrapment", where a dupe, who may have never thought up by himself a violent act, is carefully led by his "handler" into a situation that eventually resolves itself in a widely trumpeted success in anti-terrorist activity.
I hope that by making more investment in quality humint - planting successfully trained agents on the ground in places like mosques, where much of potential extremists are grown and nurtured, by detecting and isolating the real culprits in the brain-washing, indoctrination and recruiting of suggestible youngsters - FBI will eventually able to get an upper hand.
JoshuaPundit: Well, it depends. Do we want it to control us,
as the Qu'ran mandates? There's no getting away from the fact that this is what Islam commands its followers to strive for, and what Mohammed ordered them to do.It remains an imperative to this day, and while many Muslims reject it, there are almost certainly more whom do not, especially overseas.
In order to answer the question at hand, we would need to decide what 'radical Islam' is as opposed to what we consider 'acceptable' or 'moderate' Islam, something I think is farcical for non-Muslims to try and figure out. The only guidelines, really, are
the legal and cultural norms we have for our own society and the degree to which Islam can conform to them, rather than the other way around.
Fortunately, as I've written in the past, we have those guidelines already in our Constitution and in applicable legal precedents.
As a matter of fact, every time religious practices in the past have clashed with those guidelines and precedents, our courts have ruled against the religion.
Islam, however, is not subjected to any of this.
We aren't applying those guidelines and precedents to Islam,quite simply, because there is huge money in it for a number of government officials and politicians, even extending to the White House. One merely needs to look at who funded a large part of the presidential libraries of Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who funds the Carter Peace Foundation that provides former President Jimmy Carter with a handsome stipend, the connections between the Bush Family, the Carlyle Fund the Saudis and several of the Emirates, and how President Clinton became a multimillionaire after he left office. And they are by no means the only ones. A look at which politicians and former functionaries (not to mention their family members) are the beneficiaries of lucrative business opportunities, six figure honorariums, legal retainers, speaking fees and 'consulting fees' from the likes of the Saudis and the UAE is absolutely astounding.
We need merely to take away the golden carrot and apply our laws and our Constitution, perhaps with a few perfectly legal and constitutional tweaks.
The Noisy Room :Yes. Here is why...
One of the founding principles of this country, one that was so important that it was enshrined in the First Amendment -- an Amendment without which the Constitution could not be ratified -- was the principle of religious freedom. More particularly, the freedom to practice a religion of one's own choosing, not one imposed by the State. It goes without saying that this includes a religion imposed by a non-State actor, such as a big, evil corporation. Islam turns this precept on its ear. Islam is a State as well as a religion. Islam has a legal and political arm. The acceptance of Islam into a society of diverse religions is similar to the acceptance of an invasive species of fish into the Great Lakes. The system by which Islam is propagated is one of simple, physical conquest - raw force. Providing a safe haven for a religion which is a State and a legal system, is immediately hostile to the concept of the free practice of religion, because a primary precept in Islam is that no other religion shall be tolerated. Consequently, Islam as it is practiced almost everywhere in the world negates the First Amendment. The irony is that if one buys the idea that freedom of religion means accepting Islam, one buys the idea that's okay for one religion to displace others and that somehow freedom of religion means allowing one of them to take over the world.
The analogy of invasive species is imperfect, but provides a model for projecting the outcome of allowing into your midst a hostile philosophy which feeds on your freedoms to destroy them.
So, therefore it would seem prudent to keep a watchful eye -- profiling if you prefer -- on areas where Islam has inserted itself, displacing other religions. It is part and parcel of Islamic doctrine that force, misrepresentation, lying and intimidation -- practices against which we have a whole system of laws -- are simply routine tools of the trade to propagate their beliefs. Consequently, Islam, regardless of its size, regardless of its age, regardless of its "stature" in the world... must be regarded with the same skepticism normally reserved for cults. It is a broken philosophy, one which runs completely against modern concepts of liberty and survival norms that are part of a thriving and moral society.
It must be strictly enforced that the nation's laws as they descend from the Constitution and the principles of its founding are held to be senior to any system of "religious law" practiced under the flag of religion. For example, a religious law that prescribes how one shall beat his wife is, in this country, automatically null and void. There are many other examples of religious law under Islam, too many to list here, which simply would never be accepted, practiced outside a religious framework. Essentially, assimilation into the culture of liberty that underpins this country is important to the adoption of new communities and where a community is seen to isolate itself from our culture, creating an island of not-really-America, hostile to the rest of America, that community must be constrained even ejected.
We seem to have people in positions of authority and power, who desperately seek to import Islam and its practitioners before our society catches on to the fraud and subterfuge to accomplish a coup from within, feeding on our freedoms to destroy them. Incidentally, the behavior of "feeding on your freedoms to destroy them," is something you'll recognize from a non-religious framework: the sociopathic individual who uses the social norms and laws of society as weapons against his victims.
In summary, profiling and background checks (especially for those being elected and appointed to positions of power) should be implemented thoroughly and extensively, despite how distasteful that measure is to a free people.
GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD : Trick question.
There are actually built in operational methodologies to regulate undesired and reinforce desired behavior. The Constitution and Bill of Rights.
As best understood, certain elements cannot accept the legitimacy of the American secular system, which "is against the orders and ordainments of Allah."
Perhaps the best piece out there on certain mindsets that need unbridled power to change America and make it more like any number of illiterate barbaric rat's nests in the 3rd world is by Shamim "Skippy" Siddiq. (
available here in PDF)
Cryptically titled Methodology of Dawah Ilallah in American Perspective (more idiomatically rendered as "The Need to Convert Americans to Islam"), this 168-page study, published in Brooklyn, remains largely unavailable to general readers . In it, in prose that makes up in intensity and vividness for what it lacks in sophistication and polish, Siddiqi lays out both a detailed rationale and a concrete plan for Islamists to take over the United States and establish "Islamic rule" (iqamat ad-din).
As America is burdened with secular sinfulness, "The orientation of the Qur'an pushes us in the exact opposite direction."The United States has "no thought, no values, and no ideals"; if Mohammedists "stand up, with the ideology that we possess, it will be very easy for us to preside over this USA."
Why America? In Siddiqi's judgment, the need to assume control here is even more pressing than the need to sustain the revolution of the mullahs in Iran or to destroy Israel, for doing so will have a much greater positive impact on the future of Islam. America is central not for the reasons one might expect—its large population, its wealth, or the cultural influence it wields around the world—but on three other grounds.
The first has to do with Washington's role as the premier enemy of Islamism (or, possibly, of Islam itself). In Siddiqi's colorful language, whenever and wherever Muslims have moved toward establishing an Islamic state, the "treacherous hands of the secular West are always there . . . to bring about [their] defeat." Nor are Muslim rulers of any help, for they are "all in the pockets of the Western powers." If, therefore, Islam is ever going to attain its rightful place of dominance in the world, the "ideology of Islam [must] prevail over the mental horizon of the American people." The entire future of the Muslim world, Siddiqi concludes, "depends on how soon the Muslims of America are able to build up their own indigenous movement."
Secondly, America is central because establishing Islamism here would signal its final triumph over its only rival, that bundle of Christianity and liberalism which constitutes contemporary Western civilization. (One cannot help noting the irony that Siddiqi's tract appeared in the same year, 1989, as Francis Fukuyama's famous article speculating that, with the collapse of Communism and the apparent triumph of liberal democracy, we had begun to approach the "end of history.")
And thirdly, and still more grandly, the infusion of the United States with Islamism would make for so powerful a combination of material success and spiritual truth that the establishment of "God's Kingdom" on earth would no longer be "a distant dream."
For Islamists, converting Americans is the central purpose of Muslim existence in the United States, the only possible justification for Muslims to live in an infidel land. In the view of Shamim Siddiqi, there is no choice in the matter—American Muslims are "ordained by Allah" to help replace evil with good, and otherwise "have no right even to breathe." "Wherever you came from, you came . . . for one reason—for one reason only—to establish Allah's din [faith]."
Siddiqi sees Islamists in power in Washington before 2020. Implementation of the shari'a in the United States "appears to be approaching fast," and in contemplating what that means his language grows ecstatic:
"I have a vision in America, Muslims owning property all over, Muslim businesses, factories, halal meat, supermarkets, all these buildings owned by Muslims. Can you see the vision, can you see the Newark International Airport and a John Kennedy Airport and LaGuardia having Muslim fleets of planes, Muslim pilots. Can you see our trucks rolling down the highways, Muslim names. Can you imagine walking down the streets of Teaneck, [New Jersey]: three Muslim high schools, five Muslim junior-high schools, fifteen public schools. Can you see the vision, can you see young women walking down the street of Newark, New Jersey, with long flowing hijab and long dresses. Can you see the vision of an area of no crime, controlled by the Muslims?"
Laura Rambeau Lee,
Right Reason : Regulation or controls will not solve the problem of radical Islam in America. We must rely on the Constitution and the First Amendment, which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...”
Everyone in this country must be able to freely exercise their religion. What Muslims need to understand is that their right to freely exercise does not allow them to impinge on others’ rights. The laws of the Constitution of the United States and state constitutions must always take precedence over foreign or religious laws. Individual rights must always be upheld.
What we are experiencing is
civilization jihad, and Muslims and pro-Muslim groups have learned how to use our laws and the left’s political correctness against us. They have become bullies, and our leaders have been caving in to their tactics.
United Voices for America celebrates Muslim Capitol Day in several states, and grooms promising Muslim high school students to attend universities and become involved in politics. They are growing their presence in local, state, and national politics in an attempt to subvert our laws to shari’ah.
At the local level, here in Tampa, we have experienced Florida CAIR director Hassan Shibley speaking to high school students in an AP History class without parents having been given prior knowledge or the option to opt out. I attended several school board meetings where concerned parents and grandparents expressed their objections. Most are associated with Tea Party groups and were of course labeled as racist, bigoted, and Islamophobic. The school board did nothing.
In 2009 we experienced the brutal beating and murder of Fatima Abdallah, an Israeli Palestinian woman, and whether it was an honor killing or domestic violence, the local police and medical examiner determined her death to be accidental; the result of a fall. One must ask oneself, if a woman can be beaten to death in America, in Tampa, Florida, and our police do not pursue justice, who among us is really safe?
Last year CAIR-Florida attempted to advertise on our county HART buses. Their “My Jihad” campaign wanted the buses to bear slogans such as:
“My Jihad is to stay fit despite my busy schedule. What’s yours?”
“My Jihad is to build friendships across the aisle. What’s yours?”
“My Jihad is to not judge people by their cover. What’s yours?”
The attempt to insert the word “jihad” into everyday slogans was deceitful, and after public outcry they pulled the advertising for a more “acceptable” advertising slogan:
“Embracing Diversity at Work, Defending Civil Rights in the Community”
The “Embracing Diversity” advertisement was approved by the board after the board counsel advised if they did not approve the ads they would most certainly face a First Amendment lawsuit.
All of these incidents demonstrate a lack of courage on the part of our elected officials. We need people with courage to stand up to the bullying and who are not afraid to call violence committed in the name Islam “terrorism.” We need our government to have the courage to acknowledge that the violence at Ft. Hood; the shooting of Marine recruiter Private William Long in June 2009 in Little Rock, Arkansas by Carlos Bledsoe, a young man radicalized through Muslim student organizations at Tennessee State University; the 2013 Boston bombing; and the recent beheading of 54 year old Colleen Hufford at her Oklahoma workplace; were all terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam.
Americans must realize that Islam is the second largest religion in twenty states in America, and that Muslims outnumber Jews in America today. We are seeing more women in hijabs and niqabs in our malls and shopping centers. Communities, schools, colleges and universities, police and government agencies at all levels, must understand the threat of civilization jihad. We have seen its consequences in Europe, and we are seeing its expansion in America.
We could and should expose those who preach extremist ideology and incite violence against America and Americans. Our government should be able to profile and root out those who seek to commit violence against Americans in the name of Islam or for any reason. The only thing that will stop radical Islam from growing in America is the courage of Americans to face these bullies and not bow down to their demands.
The Right Planet : Years ago I was in downtown Indianapolis with a friend of mine who was from Latvia. As we made our way toward the Circle, we were confronted with a huge police presence. There were cops everywhere. Rows of police cruisers lined each side of the street. I politely asked a police officer what was going on. He said there was a simultaneous KKK and Black Panther rally being held at the Circle that day. Obviously, the city thought it prudent to prepare for any mayhem that might ensue. Since my Latvian friend had not been in the States for very long, he was quite eager to see what all the fuss was about.
When we arrived at the Circle, there was a small group of around 30 blacks listening to the hate-filled rantings of Mmoja Ajabu, leader of the Indianapolis Black Panther Militia. On the other side of the Circle, I saw a man dressed in some sort of KKK garb spewing his hate-filled crap to a crowd of one. Obviously, there weren't too many people in Indy interested in listening to either the Black Panthers or the Ku Klux Klan. Although I have no use for the Black Panthers or the KKK, I still support their First Amendment rights. We have the right in this country to express our beliefs, regardless of how loathsome or vile those beliefs may be. On the flipside, the First Amendment does not give anyone the right to engage in violence or usurp the law.
Muslims are free to peaceably assemble and worship as they see fit in this country. That being said, there is one regulation or control I would support regarding Islam in America--no Sharia Law in this country, period. Allowing any group to implement their own form of jurisprudence outside the legal system we already have is akin to opening up Pandora's Box. If Muslims are allowed to practice their own set of laws, then why can't Christians and Jews have their own legal system? And I'm sure the Satanists would want their own set of laws--and on and on and on. As long as you obey the law, you can be whatever you want to be in America, even if I hate it.
The Glittering Eye : No. My feelings about the question are actually stronger but I'll leave it at that.
The five countries with the largest Muslim populations are Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Nigeria. Together they account for about half of all of the Muslims in the world. To the extent that we have problems with the Muslims in any of those countries it is largely due to hatred-preaching imams who are funded by rich Saudis or even by the Saudi government. I think the reasonable conclusion to draw from that is that we don't a have problem with Muslims but with a relatively small number of Saudis and we need to address that seriously.
Well there you have it.
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