What is Radical Islam?

WHAT IS RADICAL ISLAM?

by

Guy Rodgers, Executive Director

ACT! for America

There is no simple or singular way to define or describe “radical Islam.” One person hears the phrase and thinks “terrorism.” Others think “Islamofascism,” “jihad,” “Sharia law,” “Islamic fundamentalism,” “Islamism,” “political Islam,” a struggle against the “infidel,” or simply the “Muslim religion.” Others aren’t sure what to think.

Regardless of the name or adjective, radical Islam is a threat to our national security and our freedoms that must be taken more seriously than it has been to date.

For nearly three years I have immersed myself in a study of radical Islam, Islamic history, and Islamic doctrine. My doing so was not merely as an academic exercise, but, as a long-time political strategist, I set out to understand how our enemies think and why they do what they do, in order to effectively combat them.

What I have learned would stun the average American.

It is typical for people to view something they do not understand through the prism of their own experiences. Most Americans know very little about the history or doctrines of Islam. Thus, they tend to impose their own experiences on what they think a “religion” is or ought to be.

What they don’t understand is that Islam is very different from all other major religions of the world.

Where it is similar is the religious practices of devotion to deity and the obligation to a higher moral law. For instance, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all exhort worship, prayer and fasting.

It is not in these practices that Islam threatens the world. It is the ideology of “political Islam,” most frequently referred to as “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” and “Islamofascism” that is the source of the existential threat to the world.

It is this ideology, enunciated in the Qur’an and Hadith (sayings and traditions of Mohammed), the holy books of Islam, that sets Islam apart from other religions.

The ideology of radical Islam has two key elements.

1. It is a supremacist political ideology that advocates the advance of Islamic Sharia law and the imposition of such law on all people. It is totalitarian and imperialistic.

2. Jihad, or “striving,” is an obligation upon the Muslim “umma” (Muslim community of believers) as a central means of advancing and imposing Islamic Sharia law.

Qur’an 9:5 is one among many Qur’anic passages commonly cited as doctrinal justification for the waging of jihad and the advance of Sharia:

Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.

Here is what Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, one of the “fathers” of modern Islamism, had to say about Islam:

Islam is not a normal religion like the other religions in the world…Islam is a revolutionary faith that comes to destroy any government made by man…The goal of Islam is to rule the entire world and submit all of mankind to the faith of Islam. Any nation or power in this world that tries to get in the way of that goal, Islam will fight and destroy. In order for Islam to fulfill that goal, Islam can use every power available every way it can be used to bring worldwide revolution. This is jihad. (Jihad in Islam)

Do all Muslims agree with this? Of course not. The fact is most Muslims have never read the Qur’an in their own language, let alone the Hadith. Many who speak Arabic are illiterate and cannot read the Qur’an. Many others practice a more spiritual or cultural Islam. And there are many instances worldwide where Muslims are resisting the imposition of full-blown Sharia law by other Muslims.

In other words, as with any religious system, there are degrees of orthodoxy and devotion, as well as differences in interpretation and application, within Islam.

I recently finished reading Escaping Islam by Mano Bakh. Bakh was a high-ranking naval officer in the Iranian Navy prior to the Islamic revolution in 1979. Raised a Muslim, he recounts how his mother was devout while his father was more of a cultural Muslim.

As a third-year cadet at the Italian Naval Academy (a very prestigious assignment) he was given the assignment of educating the other cadets about Islam. To prepare, he gathered numerous books to obtain the information he needed, because he actually knew very little about Islam.

He writes that the more he learned, the more uncomfortable he became. After reading about the role of jihad and the violence it spawned during the early years of Islam, Bakh writes:

As I digested this information, I was stunned. I quietly closed my book, and contemplated what I had just learned. I felt a deep sadness and I was numb to my surroundings. My confusion knew no bounds as I wondered, “Did my kind and peaceful mother believe in this man [i.e., Mohammed]. How could she? How could I? (p. 73)

Surprising? Not really. How many people in America profess to be Christians yet have never read the Bible all the way through – or even parts of it? As in all religions, those who profess the Islamic faith range from the casual to the committed.

Having said this, the cold reality is that most of the world’s leading Muslim clerics, while they may phrase it differently, share Mawdudi’s exposition of the ultimate objective of what we call “radical Islam” and the means by which it is to be achieved. These leaders are serious students of the holy books of Islam as well as the five schools of Islamic jurisprudence (four Sunni, one Shi’a) that spell out the entirety of Sharia law.

They are likely familiar with these passages from the Hadith, which advocate jihad for all time:

The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: “…jihad will be performed continuously since the day Allah sent me as a prophet until the day the last member of my community will fight with the Antichrist.” (Sunan Abu Dawud Book 14, Number 2526: Narrated by Anas ibn Malik).

The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: “I am commanded to fight with men till they testify that there is no god but Allah, and that Mohammed is His servant and His Apostle…” (Sunan Abu Dawud Book 14, Number 2635: Narrated by Anas ibn Malik).

These leaders, their followers, and the many organizations they have spawned, are “driving the bus” of Islam. As was the case in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China, those zealously committed to their ideology set the agenda and the course for their nations. The same is occurring today within Islam on an international scale. It is not the moderates, or the spiritualists, or the cultural Muslims, who are setting the agenda. It is the Islamists.

They have hearkened back to the supremacist political ideology embedded in Islam’s holy books, practiced by Mohammed, the “rightly guided caliphs” who followed him, and the vast majority of the Islamic scholars who developed the five schools of Islamic jurisprudence in the early centuries following the death of Mohammed.

A study of the Qur’an and Hadith reveal hundreds of passages exhorting and commanding Muslims to wage jihad, take plunder and slaves, and impose Sharia law and the jizya (protection tax) on conquered peoples. This is the authority Islamists are citing for the growing militancy and radicalism we see among Muslims throughout the world.

The spreading of Islam by the sword, which by some estimates left 270 million dead and millions more enslaved over the past 14 centuries, is a historical fact that is sanitized from most public school and university textbooks. In the first few centuries after Mohammed, his example was emulated as the justification for jihad and conquest.

With the codification of Islamic Sharia law by the five schools of Islamic jurisprudence, the doctrine of jihad and the subjugation of non-Muslims to Islamic law became settled law that has been considered immutable ever since. A Muslim who questions this settled law is at best strongly criticized and at worst regarded as a heretic or an apostate.

Thus, when a moderate Muslim argues against the supremacist political ideology of Islamism and its devotion to Sharia law, Islamic leaders and scholars rebut his arguments by referencing the holy books of Islam and the Islamic schools of jurisprudence and their codification of Islamic law. It is thus unsurprising that very few Muslims are willing to take on the collective leadership of their religion.

The challenge for the West is, therefore, not merely the obliteration of Islamic terrorism. Terrorism is a means, not an end. The end is the imposition of Sharia law on all people, by whatever means necessary.

In other words, if America were to win the “War on Terror”, but lose the struggle against Sharia law, we still lose. This is because Sharia Islamic law as advanced by radical Islam is thoroughly incompatible with Western law as well as the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The imposition of Sharia law is nothing less than the imposition of theological totalitarianism that, among other things, suppresses free speech, eliminates freedom of religion, and oppresses women.

Not surprisingly, the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference have refused to sign this UN declaration. This should tell us something.

For instance, you will find this description of the role of women in marriage in the ancient Islamic legal text Fatawa-i-Alamgiri:

Marriage…subjects the wife to the power of restraint (by the husband) and on her it imposes submission to him when summoned to the couch and confers upon him the power of correction when she is disobedient or rebellious…

So what must the West in general, and America in particular, do to combat the threat of radical Islam?

I have concluded that, strategically, successfully resisting the advance of radical Islam will require us to do exactly what Osama bin Laden once said – show the world who the strong horse is.

In other words, we must resist the leadership, organizations and the militants who are committed to the ideology of political Islam, the waging of jihad (in all its forms, from violent to cultural), and the forced imposition of Sharia law. This will require more than fighting terrorism. On whatever front Islamists seek to advance this radical ideology, from the halls of academia to the courts of justice, we must resist and push back.

What’s more, we must be willing to unashamedly proclaim that the values of Western Civilization have, on balance, given the world its greatest opportunities for freedom, prosperity, and opportunity. It is the very self-loathing of Western Civilization, and the politically correct propensity to blame the West for all the ills of the world, that has enabled Islamism to gain such a foothold in Europe, the UK, Canada, and increasingly in America.

Organized resistance has stopped the advance of radical Islam in the past. Organized resistance can stop it again. Doing so is not only an imperative for the freedom and security of the West, it will be beneficial to Muslims everywhere who, for whatever reason, do not subscribe to the ideology of political Islam, the waging of jihad, and the imposition of Sharia law.

Americans must rise up and demand that our culture unshackle itself from the political correctness so clearly embodied in the Pentagon report on the Ft. Hood massacre, which did not make a single reference to “radical Islam,” “jihad,” or “Islamism” anywhere in the body of the report.

We must rise up and affirm that tolerance of an intolerant, supremacist political ideology is no more acceptable when the name was Nazism than when the name is Islamism. As Lee Harris notes so well in his book The Suicide of Reason, the tolerance of Islamist intolerance is not tolerance but cultural suicide.

This is why ACT! for America was founded by Brigitte Gabriel. This is why ACT! for America exists. This is its mission. All freedom-loving people, regardless of political party, ethnicity, color or creed, are invited to join us in this resistance to radical Islam.

Barack Obama has awakened a sleeping nation

Barack Obama has awakened a sleeping nation
Gary Hubbell
Aspen Times Weekly February 2010




Barack Obama is the best thing that has happened to America in the last 100 years. Truly, he is the savior of America 's future. He is the best thing ever.

Despite the fact that he has some of the lowest approval ratings among recent presidents, history will see Barack Obama as the source of America 's resurrection. Barack Obama has plunged the country into levels of debt that we could not have previously imagined; his efforts to nationalize health care have been met with fierce resistance nationwide; TARP bailouts and stimulus spending have shown little positive effect on the national economy; unemployment is unacceptably high and looks to remain that way for most of a decade; legacy entitlement programs have ballooned to unsustainable levels, and there is a seething anger in the populace.

That's why Barack Obama is such a good thing for America .

Obama is the symbol of a creeping liberalism that has infected our society like a cancer for the last 100 years. Just as Hitler is the face of fascism, Obama will go down in history as the face of unchecked liberalism. The cancer metastasized to the point where it could no longer be ignored.

Average Americans who have quietly gone about their lives, earning a paycheck, contributing to their favorite charities, going to high school football games on Friday night, spending their weekends at the beach or on hunting trips - they've gotten off the fence. They've woken up. There is a level of political activism in this country that we haven't seen since the American Revolution, and Barack Obama has been the catalyst that has sparked a restructuring of the American political and social consciousness.

Think of the crap we've slowly learned to tolerate over the past 50 years as liberalism sought to re-structure the America that was the symbol of freedom and liberty to all the people of the world. Immigration laws were ignored on the basis of compassion. Welfare policies encouraged irresponsibility, the fracturing of families, and a cycle of generations of dependency. Debt was regarded as a tonic to lubricate the economy. Our children left school having been taught that they are exceptional and special, while great numbers of them cannot perform basic functions of mathematics and literacy. Legislators decided that people could not be trusted to defend their own homes, and stripped citizens of their rights to own firearms. Productive members of society have been penalized with a heavy burden of taxes in order to support legions of do-nothings who loll around, reveling in their addictions, obesity, indolence, ignorance and "disabilities." Criminals have been arrested and re-arrested, coddled and set free to pillage the citizenry yet again. Lawyers routinely extort fortunes from doctors, contractors and business people with dubious torts.

We slowly learned to tolerate these outrages, shaking our heads in disbelief, and we went on with our lives.

But Barack Obama has ripped the lid off a seething cauldron of dissatisfaction and unrest.

A former Communist is given a paid government position in the White House as an advisor to the president. Auto companies are taken over by the government, and the auto workers' union - whose contracts are completely insupportable in any economic sense - is rewarded with a stake in the company. Government bails out Wall Street investment bankers and insurance companies, who pay their executives outrageous bonuses as thanks for the public support. Terrorists are read their Miranda rights and given free lawyers. And, despite overwhelming public disapproval, Barack Obama has pushed forward with a health care plan that would re-structure one-sixth of the American economy.

Literally millions of Americans have had enough. They're organizing, they're studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, they're reading history and case law, they're showing up at rallies and meetings, and a slew of conservative candidates are throwing their hats into the ring. Is there a revolution brewing? Yes, in the sense that there is a keen awareness that our priorities and sensibilities must be radically re-structured. Will it be a violent revolution? No. It will be done through the interpretation of the original document that has guided us for 220 years - the Constitution. Just as the pendulum swung to embrace political correctness and liberalism, there will be a backlash, a complete repudiation of a hundred years of nonsense. A hundred years from now, history will perceive the year 2010 as the time when America got back on the right track. And for that, we can thank Barack Hussein Obama.

Gary Hubbell is a hunter, rancher, and former hunting and fly-fishing guide. Gary works as a Colorado ranch real estate broker. He can be reached through his website, aspenranchrealestate.com

Report from Holland Will Give You Cold Chills (About Islam)

In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: 'Who lost Europe?'

Here is the speech of Geert Wilders, Chairman, Party for Freedom, the Netherlands, at the Four Seasons, New York, introducing an Alliance of Patriots and announcing the Facing Jihad Conference in Jerusalem.

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for inviting me.

I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe.

First I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I will say a few things about Islam. To close I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem.

The Europe you know is changing.

You have probably seen the landmarks. But in all of these cities, sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world. It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration.

All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It's the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. With mosques on many street corners. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighborhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.

There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.

Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam, Marseille and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighborhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities.

In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims.

Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear 'whore, whore'. Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin.

In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity.

In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves. Last week a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels, because he was drinking during the Ramadan.

Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.

A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe. San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.

Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim-immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favor of a worldwide caliphate. Muslims demand what they call 'respect'. And this is how we give them respect. We have Muslim official state holidays.

The Christian-Democratic attorney general is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey .

Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behavior, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus. I call the perpetrators 'settlers'. Because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies; they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.

Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighborhoods, their cities, their countries. Moreover, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored.

The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet. His behavior is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages - at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it is bad.

Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means 'submission'. Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for is sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.

Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam 'the most retrograde force in the world', and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel . First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.

This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam's territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia. Israel is simply in the way. The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.

The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel , they can get everything. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a 'right-wing extremists' or 'racists'. In my country, the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat. Yet there is a greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America - as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem .

Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe , American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe 's children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.

We have to take the necessary action now to stop this Islamic stupidity from destroying the free world that we know.

Please take the time to read and understand what is written here. Please send it to every free person that you know, it is so very important.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/wilders.asp

This is well worth the read and I hope you will, like me, send it on

Geert Wilders is a Dutch Member of Parliament.

Use of Change-Agents to Change Infallible Rules

Regarding our radical fundamentalist Islam problem with the Koran being "perfect." you mentioned that this will remain a problem until some way is found to make it not "infallible" to Islamists. I dunno how that can happen -- how can they fix the Islamic 'Trilogy when it is already perfect???

Lately I have been thinking about "change agents." Change agent -- what is that, one might ask? Well, let me explain via a play I watched several years back over in CA. The play was called "Sound of the Greasepaint and Smell of the Crowd," or something like that...

Anyway the play was about a game-master controlling a game-player. If the player began to win, the game master would change the rules. The game-player never had a chance. Nothing could be done. Nothing, that is until an external game-changer came into being who was able to over-ride the game-master and incorporate new rules that were fair and just for all. I saw this in action when I was chair of a department. The good ol' boys were in charge and there wasn't anything that I could do to change the situation. Until a game-changer came into play (an external administrator at the school).

Now, I bring this up because Jesus Christ can be viewed as a game-changer to change the old Mosaic laws from the Old-Testament, to Christ's new way of "love your enemy" in the New Testament. Perhaps a game-changer can come along for Islam and cause it to play by a modern set of rules that are fair and just for all, like other modern religions. Just a thought...

Good, Bad, or Moderate Muslims? The BIG Question.

Good, bad, or moderate Muslims -- that is the question. Differentiation between "good", "bad", and "moderate" Muslims is a delicate problem, especially when taqqiya (lying for Allah's sake) is involved. The big question -- how are non-Muslims to tell them apart? I like Bill Warner's approach in his book "Sharia Law for Non-Muslims, published by the Center for the Study of Political Islam. He notes that Islam is simply a religion of beliefs about Muslim's god, life and the afterlife and isn't a concern. What is a problem is the political aspects of Islam -- Sharia Law. It seems to me that Muslims who believe (either outright or hidden in their hearts) that Sharia must be imposed upon everyone are "dangerous" to our way of life and must be rejected. Jihadists tend to be in this group. On the other hand, those Muslims who reject Sharia and accept the laws of the land can be considered "moderate." I venture that Shireen Qudosi is a member of the latter group and should be supported. Lastly, a big problem is what to do about Muslims who don't profess anything, at least outwardly -- do they accept or reject Sharia? Perhaps we might classify them as "Muslims in name only." They may be in either group and must be watched to determine their true motivations.