Merchant of Death
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Blood from Stones

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Why Geneive Abdo is Right and The Muslim Brotherhood Is Dangerous
Two disturbing writings receiving widespread circulation in recent day say a great deal about how many Muslims in the United States perceive themselves and why U.S. policy is so far, and dangerously off the mark in countering the threat of Islamists.

The first is a Washington Post op-ed" by Genieve Abdo, the keynote speaker at a recent CAIR conference. In the piece she lays out, more strongly and honestly than most of the CAIR leaders have dared to do, the true Islamist/CAIR agenda in the United States.

She essentially outlines the Muslim Brotherhood position against Islamic assimilation into the Western world and starkly states that Islamist really have no interest in such assimiliation.

"What all this means is that Western hopes for full integration by Muslims in the West are unlikely to be realized and that the future of the Islamic world will be much more Islamic than Western," she writes. This is true as long as she, CAIR and other Islamist groups continue to preach to the new generation that the more alienated one is from our culture the closer to Allah they really are.

The truth is, Abdo, CAIR and the other stalking horses for the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Salafists want to create an Islamic nation here. There is no middle ground. Chilling as Abdo's writing is, it is at least more honest than much of the "we just want to get along" paplum CAIR routinely puts out.

The second writing is in the recent article in Foreign Affairs by Robert Leiken and Steven Brookes, describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate force that embraces democracy.

The article completely misses what the _Ikhwan_ are, what they stand for and the multiple ties of many of its leaders to Islamist terrorism. It is a rather shocking piece that does a great disservice to the understanding of radical Islam, its origins and its supporters.

As Youssef Ibrahim, a true scholar of Islamic affairs noted in a response in the New York Sun, "Invariably, these reports reflect an eagerness to make a finding based on logic rather than on the facts at hand. In a twisted way, they are deeply condescending of Muslim terrorists who are declared acceptable just because some say they listen to classical music or read English literature, i.e., because they resemble some of their Westerninterlocutors."

Ibrahim writes, and I couldn't say it any better, so I will quote him: "Any true Middle East scholar will readily know (the Brotherhood) spawned the entire array of Muslim radical fundamentalist organizations operating today from the Philippines to the caves of Tora Bora. During a long history of mayhem, the Brotherhood leadership over decades has authorized, glorified, and praised jihad in its official literature. Not one of its leaders has ever renounced that violence. Indeed, in the Foreign Affairs essay, Mr. Leiken and his co-author assert that such violence is authorized but only in "countries and territories occupied by a foreign power."

"This designation included killing Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Israelis in the Levant up to now, and, although the question was not asked of any of the "brothers" interviewed, Americans in Iraq.

"There was no need to ask the question. One of the most eminent leaders of the Ikhwan movement, who appears weekly on Al-Jazeera's "Sharia and Life" program, is an Egyptian-born, Qatar-resident grand priest, Sheik Yusuf Al-Qardawi. He has specifically ruled that Americans in Iraq and Israelis everywhere should be targeted by suicide bombers, who will be considered martyrs and heroes. Sheik Qardawi was not interviewed for the article in question, even though he ranks among the top 10 leaders of the Ikhwan's International ruling councils."

Pretending the enemy is not the enemy is no way to come to terms with reality. One could reasonably conclude that one should talk to the Brotherhood based on what they really are, but not based on a completely ahistoric understanding of what they are or where they come from.

Sadly, this type of desire to Westernize and trivialize the Brotherhood and the _jihadist_ world in general has led to the hesitancy and inability to decide whether we are at war or not, and if so, with whom. And so we are losing.
POSTED BY DOUGLAS FARAH
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