Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Dawa, the ideology behind terrorism


Dawa, the ideology behind terrorism, is a broader threat

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book, “The Challenge of Dawa,” is an explicit attempt to persuade the Trump administration to adopt “a comprehensive anti-dawa strategy before it is too late.”
 
By:  TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Research fellow in journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
April 7, 2017 2:41 pm. ET Stanford, Calif.
The woman sitting opposite me, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit and a duck-egg-blue turtleneck, can’t go anywhere, at any time of day, without a bodyguard.  She is soft-spoken and irrepressibly sane, but also—in the eyes of those who would rather cut her throat than listen to what she says—the most dangerous foe of Islamist extremism in the Western world.  We are in a secure room at a sprawling university, but the queasiness in my chest takes a while to go away.  I’m talking to a woman with multiple fatwas on her head, someone who has a greater chance of meeting a violent end than anyone I’ve met (Salman Rushdie included).  And yet she’s wholly poised, spectacles pushed back to rest atop her head like a crown, dignified and smiling under siege. 
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, is Islam’s most eloquent apostate.  She has just published a slim book that seeks to add a new four-letter word—dawa—to the West’s vocabulary.  It describes the her book, “The Challenge of Dawa,” is an explicit attempt to persuade the Trump administration to adopt “a comprehensive anti-dawa strategy before it is too late,” ceaseless, world-wide ideological campaign waged by Islamists as a complement to jihad.  It is, she says, the greatest threat facing the West and “could well bring about the end of the European Union as we know it.”  America is far from immune, and Ms. Hirsi Ali has come a long way from the days when she—“then a bit of a hothead”—declared Islam to be incapable of reform, while also calling on Muslims to convert or abandon religion altogether.  That was a contentious decade ago. 
 
Today she believes that Islam can indeed be reformed, that it must be reformed, and that it can be reformed only by Muslims themselves—by those whom she calls “Mecca Muslims.”  These are the faithful who prefer the gentler version of Islam that she says was “originally promoted by Muhammad” before 622.  That was the year he migrated to Medina and the religion took a militant and unlovely ideological turn.
 
At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali—now a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where I also work—is urging the West to look at Islam with new eyes.  She says it must be viewed “not just as a religion, but also as a political ideology.”  To regard Islam merely as a faith, “as we would Christianity or Buddhism, is to run the risk of ignoring dawa, the activities carried out by Islamists to keep Muslims energized by a campaign to impose Shariah law on all societies—including countries of the West.” 
Dawa, Ms. Hirsi Ali explains, is “conducted right under our noses in Europe, and in America.  It aims to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and also to push existing Muslims in a more extreme direction.” The ultimate goal is “to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with Shariah.” It is a “never-ending process,” she says, and then checks herself:  “It ends when an Islamic utopia is achieved.  Shariah everywhere!”
Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the West has made a colossal mistake by its obsession with “terror” in the years since 9/11.  “In focusing only on acts of violence,” she says, “we’ve ignored the Islamist ideology underlying those acts.  By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam—or ‘Islamism’—and against those who spread that ideology in our midst, we’ve committed a blunder.” 
There is a knock on the door. I hear hushed voices outside, presumably her bodyguard telling someone to come back later.  To add to the mildly dramatic effect, a siren is audible somewhere in the distance, unusual for the serene Stanford campus.  Ms. Hirsi Ali is unfazed.  “What the Islamists call jihad,” she continues, “is what we call terrorism, and our preoccupation with it is, I think, a form of overconfidence. ‘Terrorism is the way of the weak,’ we tell ourselves, ‘and if we can just take out the leaders and bring down al Qaeda or ISIS, then surely the followers will stop their jihad.’ 
But we’re wrong.  Every time Western leaders take down a particular organization, you see a different one emerge, or the same one take on a different shape.  And that’s because we’ve been ignoring dawa.” 
Ms. Hirsi Ali wants us to get away from this game of jihadi Whack-A-Mole and confront “the enemy that is in plain sight—the activists, the Islamists, who have access to all the Western institutions of socialization.”  She chuckles here:  “That’s a horrible phrase . . . ‘institutions of socialization’ . . . but they’re there, in families, in schools, in universities, prisons, in the military as chaplains.  And we can’t allow them to pursue their aims unchecked.” 
America needs to be on full alert against political Islam because “its program is fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution”—with religious pluralism, the equality of men and women, and other fundamental rights, including the toleration of different sexual orientations.  “When we say the Islamists are homophobic,” she observes, “we don’t mean that they don’t like gay marriage.  We mean that they want gays put to death.”
Islam the religion, in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s view, is a Trojan horse that conceals Islamism the political movement.  Since dawa is, ostensibly, a religious missionary activity, its proponents “enjoy a much greater protection by the law in free societies than Marxists or fascists did in the past.” 
Ms. Hirsi Ali is not afraid to call these groups out.  Her book names five, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asserts—and in turn receives in the mainstream media—the status of a moderate Muslim organization.  But groups like CAIR, Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “take advantage of the focus on ‘inclusiveness’ by progressive political bodies in democratic societies, and then force these societies to bow to Islamist demands in the name of peaceful coexistence.”
Her strategy to fight dawa evokes several parallels with the Western historical experience of radical Marxism and the Cold War.  Islamism has the help of “useful idiots”—Lenin’s phrase—such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (a disgrace to America to be allowed to continue their hate filled agenda and diatribe), which has denounced Ms. Hirsi Ali as an “extremist.”  She sees that smear as a success for dawa:  “They go to people like the SPLC and say, ‘Can we partner with you, because we also want to talk about what you guys talk about, which is civil rights.  And Muslims are a minority, just like you.’  So, they play this victim card, and the SPLC swallows it.  And it’s not just them, it’s also the ACLU.  The Islamists are infiltrating all these institutions that were historic and fought for rights.  It’s a liberal blind spot.” 
Western liberals, she says, are also complicit in an Islamist cultural segregation.  She recalls a multiculturalist catchphrase from her years as a Somali refugee in Amsterdam in the early 1990s: “ ‘Integrate with your own identity,’ they used to tell us—Integratie met eigen identiteit.  Of course, that resulted in no integration at all.” 
 
Ms. Hirsi Ali wants the Trump administration — and the West more broadly—to counter the dawa brigade “just as we countered both the Red Army and the ideology of communism in the Cold War.”  She is alarmed by the ease with which, as she sees it, “the agents of dawa hide behind constitutional protections they themselves would dismantle were they in power.” 
She invokes Karl Popper, the great Austrian-British philosopher who wrote of “the paradox of tolerance.”  Her book quotes Popper writing in 1945:  “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
I ask Ms. Hirsi Ali what her solution might be, and she leans once more on Popper, who proposed a right not to tolerate the intolerant . “Congress must give the president—this year, because there’s no time to lose—the tools he needs to dismantle the infrastructure of dawa in the U.S.”  Dawa has become an existential menace to the West, she adds, because its practitioners are “working overtime to prevent the assimilation of Muslims into Western societies. It is assimilation versus dawa.  There is a notion of ‘cocooning,’ by which Islamists tell Muslim families to cocoon their children from Western society.  This can’t be allowed to happen.” 
Is Ms. Hirsi Ali proposing to give Washington enhanced powers to supervise parenting?  “Yes,” she says. “We want these children to be exposed to critical thinking, freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rights of women.”  She also suggests subjecting immigrants and refugees to ideological scrutiny, so as to deny entry, residence and naturalization to those “involved with, or supportive of, Islamism.” 
In effect, Ms. Hirsi Ali would modernize the “communism test” that still applies to those seeking naturalization.  “I had to answer questions when I applied for citizenship in 2013:  ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a communist?’  And I remember thinking, ‘God, that was the war back then.  We’re supposed to update this stuff!’  Potential immigrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh, for instance, should have to answer questions—‘Are you a member of the Jamat?’ and so on.  If they’re from the Middle East you ask them about the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘or any other similar group,’ so there’s no loophole.”
[Ed., She failed to mention that Muslims are told to lie to accomplish their purposes.  If they don't answer those questions truthfully, then nothing has been accomplished.  They are even told to pretend to be Christians as long as necessary to accomplish their purposes.  It would be wiser to prevent any Muslim from staying in the US for more than a few months.  They should also be prevented from owning any property in the US and from building any mosques in this country as the mosques serve as their training ground and where guns and military equipment are stored to do battle against us.]
Might critics deride this as 21st-century McCarthyism?  “That’s just a display of intellectual laziness,” Ms. Hirsi Ali replies.  “We’re dealing here with a lethal ideological movement and all we are using is surveillance and military means?  We have to grasp the gravity of dawa. Jihad is an extension of dawa. For some, in fact, it is dawa by other means.”
The U.S., she believes, is in a “much weaker position to combat the various forms of nonviolent extremism known as dawa because of the way that the courts have interpreted the First Amendment”—a situation where American exceptionalism turns into what she calls an “exceptional handicap.”  Convincing Americans of this may be the hardest part of Ms. Hirsi Ali’s campaign, and she knows it.  Yet she asks whether the judicial attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s—themselves a reaction to the excesses of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—might have left the U.S. ill-equipped to suppress threats from groups that act in the name of religion. 
I ask Ms. Hirsi Ali if there’s any one thing she would wish for.  “I would like to be present at a conversation between Popper and Muhammad,” she says.  “Popper wrote about open society and its enemies, and subjected everyone from Plato to Marx to his critical scrutiny.  I’d have liked him to subject Muhammad’s legacy to the same analysis. But he skipped Muhammad, alas.  He skipped Muhammad.”
Mr. Varadarajan is a research fellow in journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
 

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

All these beligerant and opposing muslims need to go to their own home countries and work out thier multiple issues there. After 7,000 years of wars, these mid-east countries will never agree on anything. Nomads who have invaded Europe and America and re-creating their old problems here.
She needs to act on her own. Trump has the right idea: America for Americans. Don't like the plan, take the next boat out. Its that simple. Anyone wanting to haggle with that proves they don't belong here.

archangel said...

THE GLOBAL ALLIANCE CRUSADE AGAINST ISLAM

It is time for a new crusade to be sure. This needs to be much bigger than a Christian crusade however. Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and indigenous tribes around the world must all ally against this common enemy and lethal threat. Islam has declared a Jihad against the entire earth and against all nations, religions and cultures. They have declared this from their own demonic mouths. Islam is now a fourth of the worlds land and population and they fully intend to finish the job. They have invaded Europe in a big way and are invading America as well. In 1970 there were 100,000 Arabs in America. Today there are 10,000,000. They are weaseling into our education, finance and government in every way. Every one of the thousands of Mosques is a Jihad fort of conquest. The Quran is much more than their Bible, it is their ideology constitution and law library of Sharia. They have no intention of blending in with the host cultures and peoples whatsoever. The Quran forbids this. Their own law book declares that we are to be either converted, submitted or killed off (murdered). They are not kidding either. This has been their way and agenda for one thousand four hundred years. Here get some education and have a little research adventure. https://search.aol.com/aol/video?q=usama++dakdoc&v_t=wscreen50-bb
This man, Usama Dakdok from Egypt will lay out the truth without reservation. He is a devout Christian whistleblower doing his best to warn the world of this virulent mortal danger to our lives and cultures. Maybe you can’t handle the horrible truth but we better because we are running out of time very fast.
In the previous papers I laid out the situation and some strategy for remedy. We need to purge our lands of these people for the most part. There are some of them who are blending well with us and want to enjoy a civilization with peace and harmony. Many have become Christians and fans of common law and democracy. But the rest, the Jihadists need to be expelled back to their homelands at Gods Speed. Everyone will do well to go online and educate themselves about this situation and I am sure most all of you will agree after that. Usama is a good place to start. If you love your children and wish for them to have a free and happy future and inherit the lands of our ancestors who entrusted them to our care, then take the first responsibility of stewardship and intercept and remedy this great danger that faces and threatens us all. Thank you and God bless you and yours. Live long and prosper, be fearless and free.
In peace and love
Anonymous
“We can forgive, we never forget, expect us”

archangel said...

HOW TO PROPERLY VET A MUSLIM

Oh there is a true way to do this believe me. We want to be absolutely sure that they desire to assimilate into civilized society and mean us no harm. Every nation has an absolute right and a duty to its citizens to demand this of any immigrant. First you demand that they reject the satanic death cult of Islam. Have a BBQ handy and have them soak the Quran in starter fluid and light a match to it. They keep dousing till it is ashes. Then spit upon the ashes. If they have a prayer rug then throw that in the fire as well.

Then treat them to a pork meal. A pork chop dinner or bacon and eggs with a rasher of bacon. Then they must pledge allegiance to the country and your flag. You might also demand that they can speak your language as well. Then lastly have a series of questions to see if they mean your country and society harm. Apply a lie detector to them as you ask the questions. After all this if they pass all these tests, I believe you could safely let them enter your land and society.

If this sounds drastic to some people then you need to research the horrible history of Islam and the death and destruction this evil cult has done to humanity for the last 1400 years; 270 million people slain by the sword. They have richly earned this drastic vetting. Otherwise you can rest assured they will release hell on your part of the earth. End of story.
ANONYMOUS
“We can forgive, we never forget, expect us.”

archangel said...

OUTLAW ISLAM

As part of the Global Crusade against Islam, outlawing this Satanic, demonic ideology is the only sane thing to do. Islam is not a religion, it is an anti religion against the true God and everything that is fine and beautiful. It is an ideology of ruthless rape, ravage, pillage and plunder of nations and peoples. The Quran declares this intension. To take over the world is the unholy mandate written in the Quran. Every Christian Muslim has declared this is true and know it all too well. These Islam papers are meant to inform and empower all peoples and nations as to just what needs to happen to save yourselves from this purely evil doctrine and intention. The people of Islam have declared war upon the world and against all peoples and religions. It is time to awaken from the “spell” they are casting on the world before it is too late.

The people on the left in Western countries are also committing national and social suicide as they see an opportunity to gain power through the alliance with Islam. They are guilty of treason against their countries and peoples and especially against their own children. This is a true war of the worlds. One world is for human beings and the other is for demons. It is time to choose sides people. May you choose….wisely.

ANONYMOUS
“We can forgive, we never forget, expect us.”


Anonymous said...

Islam is a government, like Communism, Socialism, etc. They hide behind a false flag of religion- which it is not a religion like any other on the planet. It should be treated as forecfully and without tolerance as we do communism.

Anonymous said...

It should be made law, that any islam terrrorist who harms or kills any person in the USA will be tried and executed and beheaded and buried wrapped in a pig's skin. That worked for the Brits during WW1. Same should apply now.