In the dictionary under useful idiot --
Fools rush in .....cue Matthew Barry over at The Chicago Monitor, who is waging a war on the truth and advancing the campaign of deception of Muslim Brotherhood groups in America (whose stated goal is "eliminating and destroying Western cvilization from within").
His straw-man arguments are silly. I have no problem with peaceful Muslims, but I don't have to pat on the back every Muslim who doesn't want to kill me. There is a problem in Islam, with tens of thousands of people being slaughtered in the name of jihad. Why doesn't Barry take a pen to that?
Christianity "close to extinction" in Middle East because of Islam; why doesn't Barry take a pen to that?
There have been over 20,000 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11, each one with the imprimatur of a Muslim cleric; why doesn't Barry take a pen to that?
Why should a Hamas-linked group lying about the nature of jihad be "an unambiguous bit of good news"? Not even all CAIR officials believe this nonsense about jihad being making sure to exercise and helping little old ladies across the street: several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. And even if many Muslims do believe that jihad means brushing your teeth three times a day and dropping off the kids at school, so what? Their existence doesn't negate the existence of the jihadis who have perpetrated over 20,000 violent attacks since 9/11 in the name of jihad. If Hamas-CAIR really opposes those jihads, they should take out these ads in Cairo and Karachi and Kabul, not in the U.S."Pamela Geller’s jihad: Countering tolerance" Matthew Barry, Chicago Monitor
As the nation mourns the senseless violence in Connecticut and politicians in Washington bicker endlessly over the “fiscal cliff,” CAIR-Chicago’s #MyJihad campaign should have presented an unambiguous bit of good news to a country in sore need of it. Bus ads and Twitter posts promoting peace, tolerance, and understanding; who could possibly object?
"Borderline fraudulent"? The quotes in my ads are authentic. And unlike those in Hamas-CAIR's whitewashed ads, they tell the truth about what violent Muslims think about jihad. Americans need to know this, so that we can defend ourselves from it.The unsurprising answer is Pamela Geller and her friends at the poorly named American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI). Geller, never being one to allow a message of peace and tolerance to go unanswered, particularly one making waves as far away as Panama, Lebanon, and Portugal, is planning her own campaign to undermine #MyJihad by purchasing bus ads featuring quotes from such figures as Osama bin Laden designed to be indistinguishable from the legitimate ads. In addition to borderline fraudulent bus ads, she is also directing her followers to flood the #MyJihad hashtag with their own messages, which tend to feature substantially less tolerance and understanding that the legitimate ones.
A look at the counter-campaign’s website (at myjihad.us as opposed to the legitimate site at myjihad.org) offers insight into what exactly Geller is doing. For her the #MyJihad campaign is not promoting peace and tolerance at all but is instead a clever bit of propaganda designed by the “Islamic supremacists” at CAIR to tricking Americans into thinking that (gasp!) American Muslims are more concerned with self-improvement and understanding than waging holy war against infidels.
Hamas-CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood organization. As I noted above, the MB is dedicated in its own words to "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within." No amount of ads about "self-improvement" will change that; only honest acknowledgment and rejection of that goal, in deeds as well as in words, will. But Hamas-CAIR is even close to doing that. Instead, they've been consistent in opposing ever anti-terror measure ever adopted or even proposed. Their California chapter distributed posters telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI. A few smiley-face ads about jihad don't whitewash that record.
Her central thesis as to why she is so concerned about these bus ads can be found as well. She writes, “the Qur’an is unique among the sacred writings of the world in counseling its adherents to make war against unbelievers.”
A fascinating statement, which if followed to its logical conclusion shows that Geller must believe that “sacred texts” exclude such books as the Bible (“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”), the Torah (“But in the towns of these peoples whose land your God is giving you for your heritage, let no living thing be kept alive”) and the Bhajavad Ghita (“Forbid thyself to feebleness! it mars/Thy warrior-name! cast off the coward-fit!/Wake! Be thyself! Arise, Scourge of thy Foes!”).
Does Mathew Barry really believe that Jesus' statement and the Torah quote above are actual commands to Christians and Jews to make war against unbelievers because they are unbelievers? If so, then why aren't Christians and Jews doing this? Why is there not a single Christian sect or understanding of Judaism that contains a doctrine calling for warfare against unbelievers? But Barry anticipates this objection:
She would argue that such verses are cherry-picked and only command their readers “to make war against particular people only” as opposed to the generalized war against all nonbelievers all of the time that she sees the Quran as requiring (though she only discusses Christianity and Judaism. Hinduism is not mentioned, which is perhaps not overly surprising). From this she concludes, “this is why you do not see Jews or Christians slaughtering unbelievers and justifying their actions by quoting their Scriptures.”
Of course not. That has never occurred. Certainly not in Uganda, Lebanon, Israel, or Spain, at least. How impressive that a woman who is an apologist for Stalin and who has denied the genocide in Bosnia manages to still be such an expert on these matters.
Uganda: Barry's link leads to a story about the Lord's Resistance Army. In his 2007 book Religion of Peace?, Robert Spencer wrote: "Unlike the jihadists, who are operating according to the canons of defensive jihad as delineated by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, the LRA reflects the theological teaching of any Christian sect. It is backed by no clerics, and its teachings are not and cannot be founded upon the Bible. Even Christopher Hitchens, who has no love for Christianity, acknowledges that the LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, is 'obviously far away from the Christian "mainstream."' In fact, 'his paymasters and armorers are the cynical Muslims of the Sudanese regime, who use him to make trouble for the government of Uganda, which has in turn supported rebel groups in Sudan. In an apparent reward for this support, Kony at one stage began denouncing the keeping and feeding of pigs' – hardly orthodox Christian behavior."
Lebanon: Here Barry invokes the Sabra and Shatila massacre, carried out by Christian Phalangist militia. The article says they did it "as retaliation for the assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel." In other words, they weren't acting as believers massacring unbelievers. Nor were they quoting Scripture.
Israel: His next link goes to a story about the Stern Gang, and here again, Barry does not and cannot make any case that they killed anyone in response to some supposed Scriptural command to do so.
Spain: This link goes to a story about the Spanish Civil War. Apparently Barry thinks that because Franco was brutal and Roman Catholic, therefore Roman Catholicism is inherently brutal. This is a deep thinker we're dealing with here.
Then he follows with two smears of me. In the first he takes my noting a fact of history as approval of Stalinist forced deportations, and in the second he takes my quite justified skepticism for the work of a jihadist propaganda machine as "denial" of a "genocide." He doesn't bother to refute the facts I presented in either case. He doesn't have to. He's a leftist.
If one follows this reasoning to its endpoint, one can find Geller’s unspoken assumption: Christians and Jews are intelligent enough to contextualize belligerent quotes in their holy books. Muslims are not.
Barry is the one saying Muslims are not intelligent, not I. In reality, literalism is mainstream Islam, and they haven't contextualized belligerent quotes -- which is not the same thing as saying they cannot. If I really thought the latter, I wouldn't keep asking them to do so -- which even Barry admits that I say two paragraphs down:
What a pity that the AFDI will not put that on a bus. Chicagoans would gain such better insight into what the organization’s members truly believe.
Geller also outlines her solution to the problem. According to her blog, “honest moderate Muslims need to stand up against this and work for Islamic reform.”
Fair enough, yet when presented with exactly that in the form of the #MyJihad campaign, she rejects these efforts out of hand and does everything in her power to undermine them.
Pretending that jihad is not what innumerable Muslims obviously understand it to be, and what mainstream Islamic authorities teach that it is, is not reform. It is obfuscation.
Here in this paradox we find the real kernel of Geller’s thought. It doesn’t matter what Muslims do. It is the fact that they are doing it as Muslims that she is really objecting to. The objectives of #MyJihad don’t matter in the slightest. No matter what Muslims do, they are either proving her point or hiding their true nature from the unbelievers. It is a catch-22 of the most devious kind.
The great irony of all this is that the violent Islamic fringe that worries her so much is equally opposed to #MyJihad, albeit for different reasons. Hizb-ut Tahrir, for example, has also been made rather unhappy by the peaceful tone of the campaign. As Sheila Musaji aptly noted, “There are only two groups who equate jihad and terrorism – the Muslim extremists and the Islamophobes, and both of them are now attacking the My Jihad campaign.”
Musaji's proble, and Hamas-CAIR's, is that jihad as warfare against unbelievers is taught by all the sects and schools of jurisprudence within Islam. See Spencer on this here. Was the pioneering historical theorist Ibn Khaldun an "extremist" when he wrote that jihad was "a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” Islam, he said, is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.” Was Majid Khadduri, the 20th century Iraqi scholar of Islamic law, an extremist when he said that "jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state"?
Politics has been said to make strange bedfellows. It now appears lunacy does as well.The encouraging thing is that Geller and those like her are running scared. A successful #MyJihad campaign would undermine years of their hard work trying to convince Americans that Islamic bogeymen were lurking around every corner. The fact that they need to go to such lengths to discredit it is a sign that they are getting very worried.
“Jihad…tasks us with confronting our own weaknesses, voices, and shortcomings; it is about taking personal responsibility,” reads #MyJihad’s website. All qualities Geller could benefit from. Perhaps one could even say what she really needs is a jihad of her own.
This is pure projection. I'm running scared, now? And because of the #MyJihad campaign? Barry may not want to admit it to himself, but if anyone is running scared, it is Hamas-CAIR's Ahmed Rehab and the other taqiyya artists who started the #MyJihad campaign. Why? Because every day more Muslims murder non-Muslims in the name of jihad. And every time that happens, they're exposed for the liars that they are.
UPDATE: "Chicago Monitor" is a CAIR publication. Scroll to the bottom of the page. These low lives resort to new and deceitful means of brainwashing.
