Enemy Within the Gates

Just this week Muslim scholars in the U.S. issued a legal ruling or "fatwa" in the wake of the imminent presidency of Donald Trump, instructing followers about what they may expect and how they should respond to the shifting political environment. Imams in the nearly 3,100 mosques now operating inside the United States are being guided to instruct their congregations in anticipation of potential increased anti-Muslim sentiment and government policy to defend Muslim rights and maintain their obligations under Shariah law. This fatwa is about fitnah, an Arabic word meaning “test,” (fitnah equals Islamophobia) taking the form of oppression against Muslims in a country dominated by infidels.

They are laying the groundwork for an orchestrated coded response, without coming right out and saying it, that Muslims are not excused from observing Shariah law, regardless of policy changes, and are reminding followers they are obligated to keep practicing it. Where is this paramilitary declaration originating? At least 80 percent of the over 3000 mosques in this country have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical jihadist organization (not officially deemed a terrorist organization, yet) whose stated mission is to spread Shariah throughout the Western world. Right under our politically correct noses, mosques are producing jihadis who want to fight and kill infidels in the name of Allah, because that is what the mosques teach. The teachings come straight from the Quran and the life of Muhammad, Islam’s founder, as laid out in the hadiths, the most authoritative of Islamic texts. The hadiths can be found in the Hamas Covenant as well as in the first grade text books in Islamic schools. One of the most authoritative hadith scholars in all of Islam, Bukhari (Islamic scholars consider the hadith of Bukhari to rise to a level just below the Quran) quotes Muhammad as stating: “The hour of judgment will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. It will not come until the Jew hides behind rocks and trees. It will not come until the rocks or the trees say, ‘O Muslim! O servant of God! There is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.”

There is no flexibility in Islam; it is fixed and does not conform to change. There is absolutely no accommodation for assimilation into a host country's culture. The Muslim Brotherhood is already deeply entrenched in the U.S. and making a rallying cry for war with this fatwa. By the time the Trump administration reclassifies the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization Muslims will be prepared to respond. At the least, a flurry of potentially violent activism and lawsuits is on the way with increased allegations of hate crimes, hijab ripping, mosque defiling, and all the other things the Muslim community consistently complains about, because they see them as catalysts that reinforce this fatwa. Muslims may be expected to be increasingly hyper-sensitive to any perceived offense, expecting the new administration to be oppressive, expecting increased suffering for Muslims, in other words, Islamophobia will be perceived to increase, which is all fitnah is.

In a nation founded on religious liberty, despite our well-founded suspicions, it has become an automatic American knee-jerk reaction in the name of religious freedom to guard against any negative reaction to the proliferation of mosques in the U.S. During the last eight years, the Muslim influx has been welcomed and encouraged by an openly empathetic administration. While mosques are a religious sanctuary as well as community and education center for American Muslims they also serve as the breeding grounds for terrorists against the non-Muslim citizenry of the United States. Americans are increasingly becoming aware, as the incoming administration already is aware, that the practice of Shariah reaches well beyond religious practice, an overreach that cannot be tolerated in America, even within our liberal interpretation of religious freedom, because of the overriding Islamic objective for conversion and conquest. Because most of the mosques in America teach a strict interpretation of Shariah, we should be aware that someday soon, many more thousands of Muslims will wage war against the United States and its people just as they are taught.

We need to learn from the ongoing attacks - in Brussels, Paris, Boston, San Bernardino, Chattanooga, New York, Las Vegas, Ohio, Fort Hood, and most recently Fort Lauderdale. To do anything other than confront this problem head on would be unwise. There is absolutely no provision for compromise within Shariah law. The number of terror assaults is only going to increase, and it is not only because we have a bold new administration that aims to stop it. The largest obstacle to reigning in this unwanted element lurking behind the deceptive hijab of Islam may be our own liberal tolerance for political correctness, rooted in ignorance of who these invaders really are.

The Quran makes it difficult for non-Muslims to have sincere discussions with Shariah-compliant Muslims because of a theological rationalization for lying. Under Shariah, lying is not only permissible, but deemed a morally justified obligation for Muslims, which only further complicates efforts to understand the true nature of the threat – and to have confidence in those Muslims at home and abroad with whom we attempt to find common ground. Then there is taqiyya, a concept in Islamic law that translates as “deceit or dissimulation,” particularly towards infidels, permitting and encouraging precautionary dissimulation as a means for hiding true faith in times of persecution or deception when penetrating the enemy camp, according to the hadiths.

A quick history lesson is a poignant reminder that the children of Abraham do not all have the same outlook on life, and that the followers of Islam have always been and continue to be intransigent in their animosity toward their Judaeo-Christian brothers. The origin of Arabic animosity toward the West extends long before the time of the Crusades, and long before God revealed the contents of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad 1500 years ago. In the 23rd century B.C., nearly four thousand years ago, the ancient Mesopotamian ruler Sargon of Akkad built one of the world's great empires by conquering through force many of the lands in the Middle East for his kingdom, and thus became best known as the one responsible for creating the Arabic Empire. His approach to conquest by the sword forged an empire where struggle was the only way to survive. The idea of conflict that so permeated his empire has continued throughout the Middle East to this day, with much emphasis upon the idea of life as warfare.

Unlike other ideologies that evolved through the common mythology of Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, the Arabic path never learned about love as being the ultimate power of Creation. Arabic cultures have generally never learned how to express themselves in a positive way. Instead, the Arabic Empire and its descendants have sought power down through the ages through domination as the only way they could understand their relationship to Creation, clearly visible in the way women are treated under Shariah law. The Quran also grants Muslim men permission to use infidel women as sex slaves. The energy of the Middle East through many lifetimes has built up a volatility embodied by fear, negativity, domination, abuse, and all manner of disconnects toward Creation.

Until the paths of Judaeo-Christians and the Islamic-Arabic world come more into line with one another, there will not be peace. The inherent problem is that the belief systems of these two worldviews are fundamentally diametrically opposed. The actions of each side are no more than a collective reflection of its own belief system - one is based on love, the other on domination. There are plentiful exceptions within both cultures - there are adherents of violence in the West, just as there are practitioners of peaceful interaction among Muslims. The West, for its part, must learn to view Islam as a long-established way of life and a valuable system of meaning for large groups of people rather than only as a potential source of a radical, politicized worldview. The Muslim community, in turn, must begin to acknowledge and not be threatened by other points of view.

In Italy, imams are being enrolled into courses that teach them about Italy's constitution and its values of free speech, tolerance, and pluralism. It is a remedial start, but a beginning nonetheless, to create a better understanding of the West through education. It may take ongoing measures such as this to achieve balanced middle ground between the two cultures. The renaissance that Christianity has undergone to become more humanistic has yet to occur in the Islamic world at large. A social, political, and religious transformation among Arabic peoples to free themselves from the shackles they are bound by has yet to gain any traction. Until a time when conquest and domination are replaced by peace as the mission in the spread of Islam worldwide, we must understand we have an enemy within the gates.