Muslim Heretics Conference

This is how Islam ends

By Bradley Burston, Haaretz Correspondent

Tags: Burston, Berkeley Marines

This is how Islam ends.
It is Friday, the Muslim day of prayer. Two mentally disabled women are fitted with bomb belts. Their handlers hold the switches that will activate the remote controlled detonators affixed to the explosives.  One of the women is a familiar figure at the al-Ghazi pet bazaar, an open market in central Baghdad, where people come to buy and sell pigeons and other pets. The woman sells cream there in the mornings.

This Friday is an unusually beautiful morning. Clear skies after weeks of severe winter weather bring out large crowds, many out just for a stroll.
When her handler closes the switch, a horrifying blast rips through the market. The carnage in the blackened pools of blood strews and confuses human and animal remains. The woman, who may not have even known that she was wearing explosives, is one of 62 people killed in the smoke and the crushing shock wave and the fire and the shrapnel that are too fast to avoid.

This is how Islam ends. Twenty minutes later, a second switch is closed. The second woman, according to police a woman with Down Syndrome, has entered the bird market in New Baghdad, a mostly Shiite area in a southeastern section of the city. The explosion tears and chars her body to pieces and vapor. Thirty-six other people are dead. Another 56 are injured, many of them gravely maimed for life.

This is how Islam ends. This is the future according to Al Qaida. This is the real meaning of this World War III of our times: A war of Islamists against Islam itself.
In sheer numbers of attacks and tolls of innocent victims, the moral outrages being committed by Al Qaida have overwhelmingly targeted Muslims and Muslim shrines.
It is a war of the self-styled devout against an Islam whose core precepts are meant to foster peace, self-discipline, respect for women, protection of the innocent and unfortunate. It is a war to the death. And Al Qaida is not the only assailant.
During afternoon prayers the day before the Baghdad blasts, a Taliban member suicide bombs a mosque in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan. Six people are killed while praying.

In the current conflict, the practice of lethal re-interpretations of Islam may extend even to governments which are formal enemies of Al Qaida and the Taliban. The week before the suicide bombings, an Afghan court handed down a death sentence to journalist Perwiz Kambakhshm, 23, for mocking Islam and the Koran, and for distributing an article saying that Mohammed had ignore the rights of women.

Who will save Islam from the Islamists? It will not be those who, for reasons of their own, exploit the crimes of radical Muslims to smear Islam and its vast majority of decent, firmly non-violent adherents.
There is, of late, good reason to believe that it is Muslims, clear-thinking, lionhearted Muslims, who will save their religion from those who butcher in its name. Among the courageous moderates whose voices are increasingly heard in mainstream media are Nasser Weddady of the American Islamic Congress, writer and commentator Mona Eltahawy .

These are not Uncle Toms, they do not turn a blind eye to the moral failings of the West and Israel and their mistreatment of innocent Muslims while fighting radical Islam. But they understand what radical Islam is doing to a great and profoundly moral Islam.

Moreover, there are signs that there has been a change in the selective abhorrence of the Western hard left, its reflexive need to denounce all acts of allied powers and tolerate and/or ignore all war crimes, "honor" killings, and racist incitement committed in the name of Islam. Perhaps the obscene terrorism committed in the hearts of Western capitals, and against civilians in Israel and around the world explains the change, perhaps additional factors are at work, but the left appears to have grown a tad more circumspect in going through with boycott and divestiture proposals, and with expressing profound understanding for the wrongheaded actions of Islamic extremists while cataloguing without a hint of perspective every wrongdoing of the United States, Britain and Israel.
Of course, in all of God’s green globe, there is one spot that remains blithely impervious. It is the city of Berkeley, California, home to the best weather, the most marvelous views, and many of the most ostentatiously self-righteous politicians in the United States of America.

Last week, the Berkeley City Council voted to inform the U.S. Marine Corps that its recruiting station in the city’s downtown business district "is not welcome in the city, and if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders." They also voted to earmark parking spaces for and otherwise aid protesters who will hinder Marine recruiters from their work.

Well, they’ve sent their message. It is this: There is no double standard. We will continue to countenance acts of unconscionable violence against women, Muslims, Jews, and black people, as long as those who commit the violence are Muslims.
We will continue to believe - because it suits us - that the violence perpetrated by Muslims against Muslims is in its entirety a result of Western and Israeli occupation of Muslims. We will continue to live in a country - because it suits us, because it protects us, because it allows us to hate it in public - which, while acknowledging that it has made grave errors while attempting to defend itself, we have decided can get along without any defenders at all.

Many Muslims have woken up to the problem. A number of people in my beloved Berkeley clearly never will.

This is how Islam ends

Some 50 percent of anti-Semitic incidents on the European continent are connected to radical Islamic elements, according to a senior European Commission official.

A photo provided by police shows the words "Jew out" in German, smeared on a gravestone at a Jewish cemetery in Czestochowa, Poland, Monday.
Photo: AP

The figure comes from European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security Franco Frattini, who is responsible in the EU for combating racism and anti-Semitism in Europe. Frattini mentioned it in a conversation with Minister for Diaspora Affairs Isaac Herzog last week, and said it was based on European Union reports.

Frattini was in Israel last week for the Second European Union-Israel Seminar for Combating Racism and Anti-Semitism at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem.

Herzog, who is responsible for coordinating government activities in combating anti-Semitism at the cabinet level, told The Jerusalem Post that it was "not new that Frattini relates a large percentage of anti-Semitic incidents to radical Islam, and it’s important to say, not Islam as such."

According to Herzog, European governments are responding to this "aggressively," including educating Muslim imams throughout the continent on "European values, principles of democracy, the rights of women and the like."

Besides dealing with the radical Islamic source of a large part of anti-Semitic activity in Europe, European and international institutions are beginning to respond to anti-Semitic discourse through education, according to the minister.

EU official: Half of European anti-Semitism related to radical Islam (Jerusalem Post)

Let’s not forget the moderate Islamists
By Khalil Alanani
Commentary by
Monday, February 04, 2008

For more than three decades, fundamentalist religious organizations across the Arab world - such as the Islamic Group in Egypt, the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, and Al-Qaeda - have monopolized global attention. Meanwhile, moderate currents faced - and continue to face - difficulty expressing themselves at the international level, even though they represent the mainstream essence of Islam.

Now, violent waves of extremism have waned one after the other, as is evident from the receding popularity of such organizations, the disintegration of Al-Qaeda’s central command, and its transformation from a hierarchal system to a state of mind. It seems that the Arab public has meanwhile become more amenable to "centrist" political ideologies, which call for tolerance, moderation and communication with the "other."

This comes as a result of the suffering that Arab societies have witnessed due to the prevalence of extremist violence, and a wariness toward martyrdom overtures which inflict death and destruction upon innocent civilians. However, shifting this paradigm requires that moderate political Islamic groups be allowed the opportunity to participate in the political arena.

Moving away from traditional political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, centrist Islamic activists and parties have gradually established their political presence over the past 20 years. Examples include the Nahda (Awakening) Party in Tunisia, which was established in 1981, and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco - which combines the Popular Constitutional Democratic Movement established in 1967 with members of the more religious Moroccan Reform and Renewal Movement. Other centrist parties include the Jordanian Islamic Center Party, which was established in 2001, the Sudanese Middle Party, established in 2006, and the New Middle Party in Egypt, whose members have been struggling for the past 10 years to obtain a legal license for political activity.

There are several reasons to pay serious attention to the rising phenomenon of Islamic centrist parties. Such parties appear to exhibit an advanced level of "Islamic" political awareness that has been missing in the political arena since the emergence of the Arab nation-state over half a century ago. Such nuanced understanding of the relationship between Islam and politics has been sidelined largely by the strife between the state and extremist religious groups that have come into existence since the 1970s. These continuing clashes have hurt the chances for successful centrist Islamic political participation.

These centrist parties represent a departure from the traditional political currents of Islam - which range from the moderate all the way to the violent extremist - instead measuring their success on the basis of political efficiency. These parties have the ability to absorb the concepts of democracy and civil service, and deal with them independently of religion. Such parties believe Islam can provide a moral framework for political action by adhering to basic universal - and Islamic - values like justice, freedom, equality and citizenry. They respect, for instance, the concept of political plurality and do not oppose the emergence of secular or communist parties.

Furthermore, they realize the rights of all non-Muslim minorities. That they are labeled "Islamic" implies that they emanate from a value system, as does the liberal or social frame of reference. These parties have the ability to absorb the concepts of democracy and civil service in a manner that is consistent with the outlook of mainstream Islam, without falling prey to the restrictions of some narrower interpretations. For example, centrist parties reject any discrimination among citizens assuming public posts on the basis of gender, color, religion or ethnicity, whereas groups like the Muslim Brotherhood place restrictions on who might become the president in Egypt.

These imposed limitations for developing an effective political model have haunted political Islamic philosophy throughout the past century. Other more extremist parties are entrenched within the confines of their own religious rhetoric, unable to move beyond perceived restrictions, which inevitably leads to their political and intellectual inertness and reduces the likelihood of being successfully championed by civil society.

These parties also provide a prominent example of the nature of the relationship between the state and society. They do not, for instance, impose a specific type of governance, such as Islamic law, but leave society to select the appropriate model. With these principles, they have succeeded in resolving the historic dilemma of how to combine religion with politics in public life that has long plagued all Islamic political currents.

Islam assumes a central position in these centrist political parties, a pre-requisite for credibility with a mainstream audience and a safeguard against those who may attack them for turning away from religion. In its genuine commitment to both the principles of Islam and cultural identity on the one hand, and to meeting the challenge of modern political life on the other, centrist Islamic politics are the only credible way forward for many countries in the Arab world.

Khalil Al-Anani is a specialist in political Islamic affairs and author of "The Muslim

Brothers in Egypt: Old Age Struggling with Time" and "Political Islam: The Phenomenon and the Concept." He is also deputy editor-in-chief of the International Politics Journal published by the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with the Common Ground News Service.

Let’s not forget the moderate Islamists (By Khalil Alanani, The Daily Star Lebanon)