Muslim Heretics Conference

“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election.”

So reads a website closely associated with Al-Qaeda, according to Nick Kristof in his Sunday New York Times column.

It’s no surprise that Bin Laden and his henchman are watching the American election (any bets on the cable channel they prefer?). But their presidential pick probably raised some eyebrows. I spent a good part of my Sunday wondering why they chose McCain.

I dismissed the idea that Bin Laden actually wants the rendez-vous that McCain promises at the Gates of Hell. I think the terrorist is probably pretty scared of the old Navy fighter pilot in a mano-a-mano situation.

Joe Nye, a former Clinton Administration official, makes an important point in the article: “From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is good for recruiting.”

But I think Kristof hits the nail right on the head when he compares McCain’s position to other mistakes made in recent American history:

“During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam. In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of ‘Islamofascism’ elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests.”

Bin Laden has been an amazing failure in attracting Muslims to his call for an all-out war against the West. Almost no Muslims want that war, and even fewer are actually willing to fight in it.

So Al-Qaeda has gone to Plan B: create the illusion that more than a tiny handful of Muslims are engaged in this battle. That’s one of the reasons that Al-Qaeda chooses respectable members of a society - engineers, doctors - to carry out attacks.

But illusions are only successful when the audience gets duped. Too many McCain supporters have bought the Al-Qaeda line.

Consider the Clarion Fund, who sent 28 million copies of a Muslim-hating film called Obsession to households in swing states in a clear attempt to influence the election in favor of McCain. I’ve written elsewhere about how this film has made people afraid of their Muslim neighbors

But even more importantly, it makes all of us less secure. Because as our suspicions are cast upon our law-abiding Muslim neighbors, genuine terrorists might slip through.
If Al-Qaeda really thinks a McCain administration would both boost real recruiting AND help advertise the illusion that all Muslims are the enemy, it’s no wonder they are pulling for him.

Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that promotes interfaith cooperation. His blog, The Faith Divide, explores what drives faiths apart and what brings them together. more »

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Eboo Patel: Why Al-Qaeda is Endorsing McCain - On Faith at washingtonpost.com

The Endorsement From Hell

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: October 25, 2008

John McCain isn’t boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days ago:

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“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.

The endorsement left the McCain campaign sputtering, and noting helplessly that Hamas appears to prefer Barack Obama. Al Qaeda’s apparent enthusiasm for Mr. McCain is manifestly not reciprocated.

“The transcendent challenge of our time [is] the threat of radical Islamic terrorism,” Senator McCain said in a major foreign policy speech this year, adding, “Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House.”

That’s a widespread conservative belief. Mitt Romney compared the threat of militant Islam to that from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Some conservative groups even marked “Islamofascism Awareness Week” earlier this month.

Yet the endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

“From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting,” said Professor Nye, adding that Mr. McCain is far more likely to continue those policies.

An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.

During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.

In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of “Islamofascism” elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests. Perhaps the best example is one of the least-known failures in Bush administration foreign policy: Somalia.

Today, Somalia is the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, worse even than Darfur or Congo. The crisis has complex roots, and Somali warlords bear primary blame. But Bush administration paranoia about Islamic radicals contributed to the disaster.

Somalia has been in chaos for many years, but in 2006 an umbrella movement called the Islamic Courts Union seemed close to uniting the country. The movement included both moderates and extremists, but it constituted the best hope for putting Somalia together again. Somalis were ecstatic at the prospect of having a functional government again.

Bush administration officials, however, were aghast at the rise of an Islamist movement that they feared would be uncooperative in the war on terror. So they gave Ethiopia, a longtime rival in the region, the green light to invade, and Somalia’s best hope for peace collapsed.

“A movement that looked as if it might end this long national nightmare was derailed, in part because of American and Ethiopian actions,” said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College. As a result, Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism have surged, partly because Somalis blame Washington for the brutality of the Ethiopian occupiers.

“There’s a level of anti-Americanism in Somalia today like nothing I’ve seen over the last 20 years,” Professor Menkhaus said. “Somalis are furious with us for backing the Ethiopian intervention and occupation, provoking this huge humanitarian crisis.”

Patrick Duplat, an expert on Somalia at Refugees International, the Washington-based advocacy group, says that during his last visit to Somalia, earlier this year, a local mosque was calling for jihad against America — something he had never heard when he lived peacefully in Somalia during the rise of the Islamic Courts Union.

“The situation has dramatically taken a turn for the worse,” he said. “The U.S. chose a very confrontational route early on. Who knows what would have happened if the U.S. had reached out to moderates? But that might have averted the disaster we’re in today.”

The greatest catastrophe is the one endured by ordinary Somalis who now must watch their children starve. But America’s own strategic interests have also been gravely damaged.

The only winner has been Islamic militancy. That’s probably the core reason why Al Qaeda militants prefer a McCain presidency: four more years of blindness to nuance in the Muslim world would be a tragedy for Americans and virtually everyone else, but a boon for radical groups trying to recruit suicide bombers.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

Op-Ed Columnist - The Endorsement From Hell - NYTimes.com

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Muslim-born journalist baptized by Pope Benedict XVI at Easter asked the pope to tell his top aide for relations with Muslims that Islam is not an intrinsically good religion and that Islamic terrorism is not the result of a minority gone astray.
As the Vatican was preparing to host the first meeting of the Catholic-Muslim Forum Nov. 4-6, Magdi Allam, a longtime critic of the Muslim faith of his parents, issued an open letter to Pope Benedict that included criticism of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
In the letter, posted on his Web site Oct. 20, Allam said he wanted to tell the pope of his concern for “the serious religious and ethical straying that has infiltrated and spread within the heart of the church.”
He told the pope that it “is vital for the common good of the Catholic Church, the general interest of Christianity and of Western civilization itself” that the pope make a pronouncement in “a clear and binding way” on the question of whether Islam is a valid religion.
The Catholic Church’s dialogue with Islam is based on the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (”Nostra Aetate”), which urged esteem for Muslims because “they adore the one God,” strive to follow his will, recognize Jesus as a prophet, honor his mother, Mary, “value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.”
The council called on Catholics and Muslims “to work sincerely for mutual understanding” and for social justice, moral values, peace and freedom.
Allam told Pope Benedict he specifically objected to Cardinal Tauran telling a conference in August that Islam itself promotes peace but that “’some believers’ have ‘betrayed their faith,’” using it as a pretext for violence.
“The objective reality, I tell you with all sincerity and animated by a constructive intent, is exactly the opposite of what Cardinal Tauran imagines,” Allam told the pope. “Islamic extremism and terrorism are the mature fruit” of following “the sayings of the Quran and the thought and action of Mohammed.”
Allam said he was writing with the “deference of a sincere believer” in Christianity and as a “strenuous protagonist, witness and builder of Christian civilization.”
After Pope Benedict baptized Allam March 22 during the Easter Vigil and Allam used his newspaper column and interviews to condemn Islam, the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said that when the Catholic Church welcomes a new member it does not mean it accepts his opinions on every subject.
Baptism is a recognition that the person entering the church “has freely and sincerely accepted the Christian faith in its fundamental articles” as expressed in the creed, Father Lombardi had said.
“Of course, believers are free to maintain their own ideas on a vast range of questions and problems on which legitimate pluralism exists among Christians,” he said.

CNS STORY: Muslim convert to Catholicism tells pope Islam is not inherently good