Manifest Destiny is Alive and Well

Right now we lack the FDR, a Teddy Roosevelt or an Abraham Lincoln to lead the way. Perhaps Former Sen. Rick Santorum will be that new leader. The Associated Press reports that that Santorum said, “America belongs to God” and liberals and progressives are trying to change its divine footing.

Santorum, who is weighing a White House run, told a conservative conference Thursday that U.S. citizens are mere stewards of God’s gift. Santorum says he disagrees with critics of the United States who say the country is imperfect.

Will this be the new rallying call of the Tea Party?

Separation of Church and State

The divide between church and state is historic. It started with the First Amendment to the Constitution that starts by saying “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;…” That sentence has been understood by most people to mean that the government shall not be involved in religious affairs. Despite that understanding Christmas is a national holiday and the words “In God We Trust” appear on our currency.

The Associated Press reports that “Colorado Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck has questioned the separation of government and religion.” He is not the first candidate to question the separation. Christine O’Donnell, the Republican Senate candidate in Delaware made a similar statement in a debate just last week.

Both Buck and O’Donnell are referred to as Tea Party candidates. The Tea Party groups have been running on a theme of fiscal responsibility and have stayed away from social issues. This change in direction will put a new meaning to that group and may alienate many of its supporters.

Have the Know Nothings returned or is there another move afoot?

The Subversive Theology of Imam Rauf

This article was posted on the New Republic web site. It is written by Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia. The web site also provides comments that are for the most part intolerant. Gitlin’s next book, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel.

Still, despite this article re-locating the mosque in lower Manhattan is the right thing to do.

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The fervent mosque-haters have this much right: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Sufi leader of the Cordoba Initiative that plans to build an Islamic center on Park Place near the site of the World Trade Center, is subversive. But what he wants to subvert is not the United States of America. What he wants to subvert are dictatorships in Islamic nations.

Imam Rauf’s third book, published in 2005 but unavailable to me last week when I wrote about him and his earlier work, is called What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America. In these pages, Rauf proves just as Islamic as his detractors say. He is downright idealistic about Islam and hearty about its prospects. He has been scouting out America for a long time. And what is it that he finds here to gladden his Islamic soul? It’s right there on p. 176:

“…the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution.”

The imam goes on to say that these documents “express the Islamic ideal, which is itself but an expression of the Abrahamic ethic.” Yes, “the American Constitution and system of governance uphold the core principles of Islamic law.” And here’s a way of putting it that never tempted Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich: “The overarching American religion that all Americans live under is ‘Islamic’ in the sense that it is fully compliant with and expresses the Islamic Shariah.” In Rauf’s understanding, Sharia is predicated on religious pluralism, which is “a fundamental human right under Islamic law.”

In fact—don’t tell Sean Hannity—it’s too late to resist. Satan is well ensconced here. “America is substantively an ‘Islamic’ country, by which I mean a country whose systems remarkably embody the principles that Islamic law requires of a government.”

No wonder the Imam is at this moment lecturing in the Gulf States on the State Department’s dime, to discuss “Muslim life in America and religious tolerance,” according to the AP—a trip that Governor Tim Pawlenty, guzzling a lot of tea in a hurry, calls “disgusting.”

No wonder the Bush State Department made similar use of him to win hearts and minds. He’s promoting the American social and political system. He believes that “democracy and liberty, in a peculiarly American way, provide a manifestation of the Abrahamic ethic.” If Muslims outside America “recognize in the American form of governance a genuine substantive workable expression and model of their centuries-old longing for the kingdom of heaven on earth,” he continues, “they can formulate their understanding of an Islamic state along these lines.” In other words, he wants to Americanize the Muslim world in the way that counts—by promoting our political institutions. You can see what Republicans object to, though: He says nothing about promoting the filibuster or repealing the Fourteenth Amendment.

Imam Rauf’s revisionism extends so far as to trash most putatively Islamic states—since 656 C.E., that is, when “the Muslims succumbed to dynastic rule, a paradigm of governance that did not display Islamic religious values.” No wonder it’s been a rough 13+ centuries for Islam ever since. But the moment, he argues, is ripe for American Muslims, for “no contradiction exists between Islam’s theology and the longing of many Muslims for democratic values and equality of opportunity. … Islam’s theology and jurisprudence demand it.” That is, the American system is the answer to an Islamic prayer.

The book closes with an appendix containing a fatwa issued by five Muslim clerics on September 27, 2001, at the request of the most senior Muslim chaplain in the American armed forces. Ending his book with a fatwa! Yes! Cunningly, it’s a “Fatwa Permitting U. S. Muslim Military Personnel to Participate in Afghanistan War Effort.”

What’s Right with Islam, by the way, was published by HarperSanFrancisco, which last I looked is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Does he know what kind of poison bears his imprimatur?

Sharia Law Come to America!

A few weeks back, uniformed police in the heavily Muslim Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, arrested four Christian missionaries for the offense of handing out copies of the Gospel of St. John on a public street outside an Arab festival. (Can you even imagine uniformed cops interfering with (much less arresting) Islamic preachers who were handing out copies of the Koran inside a Christian festival (much less on a public street). The Christian missionaries were charged with disorderly conduct and their camera was seized. As the tape showed, there wasn’t anything disorderly about them and they were engaged in behavior that is absolutely legal under the U.S. Constitution. Proselytism of Christianity, however, is an offense against sharia — that’s what the police, in effect, were enforcing. See John Hinderaker’s report (with some video) at Powerline, here. The Detroit News confirmed this story.

Now comes this story out of New Jersey: A Muslim woman was raped by her Muslim husband (who was about to divorce her). However, a state judge refused to find that there had been a sexual assault or any kind of criminal sexual misconduct because, under sharia principles, a wife may not refuse her husband’s requests for sex. As the man told the crying woman, “This is according to our religion. You are my wife, I c[an] do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do.”

Robert Spencer has the story at Jihad Watch, along with some of the relevant Islamic scripture. (Robert tips his cap to Eugene Volokh). The judge reasoned as follows:

This court does not feel that, under the circumstances, that this defendant had a criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault or to sexually contact the plaintiff when he did. The court believes that he was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to, was something that was consistent with his practices and it was something that was not prohibited.

Thankfully, this ruling has been reversed by an appellate court, which has reaffirmed — at least for now — the principle that we are still ruled by American law:

As the judge recognized, the case thus presents a conflict between the criminal law and religious precepts. In resolving this conflict, the judge determined to except defendant from the operation of the State’s statutes as the result of his religious beliefs. In doing so, the judge was mistaken.

Expect to see lots more of this as long as sharia’s apologists inhabit high places.

ALAH AKBAR

About to be Stoned to Death

Ms. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is about to be stoned. That’s where they bury you up to your chest and hurl rocks at you until you die. The rocks can’t be too big. The stoning must be painful and be a show of force by the powers that be. The stoning of this 43-year-old mother of two has been ordered by a court in her native Iran, where the only legal code is Allah’s law, Sharia. It is the Islamic sentence for adultery, the crime to which Ashtiani confessed after serial beatings by her interrogators. Reported to be a total 99 lashes. She has been imprisoned for the last five years. A Newsweek story said Ashtiani could be buried up to her breasts and stoned to death as early as this coming weekend.

Of course human rights organizations around the world have condemed the planned stoning. The picture is not of her but conveys the message of what is about to happen in a country that holds views that are utterly different values than those of the Western world.

From the website Political Realities L. D Jackson writes the following: I would have to agree with P.J. Crowley and then ask a question. If Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is guilty of adultery, then why isn’t the man with whom she committed the act being stoned to death as well? It’s just a thought, but it appears that the woman bears the brunt of the responsibility in such cases. That’s something that goes beyond my thinking, because the last time I checked, it takes two people to tango.

This situation highlights a stark reality about the Islamic world. They are very strict about a lot of things, but especially about their women. I fail to see how the treatment of these women is anything less than abuse and it makes me wonder how anyone in their society could stand idly by and watch it happen.

Anti-Semites want the Extermination of Israel

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

The State of Israel was formally created by the United Nations in 1948. No doubt it was a consequence of WWII. Go to any holocaust museum and you will understand that this one small piece of the world (no bigger than the state of New Jersey) is the one place that Jews can call home. Jews of all colors and backgrounds are welcome here. That is the reason that this country must continue to exist.

With that history in mind please read the following article by Cliff May.

David

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Radical anti-Semites of the 21st century have a goal: the extermination of the Middle East’s Jewish state.

Israel is at war, and if Israel were to be defeated, much of the world would not shed wet tears. What would happen after such a defeat? No one can seriously doubt that Hamas has genocidal intentions.

Abdallah Jarbu, Hamas’s deputy minister of religion, recently asserted that Jews “want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but, in fact, they are foreign bacteria — a microbe unparalleled in the world.” Jarbu thien offered this prayer: “May He annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience.”

Jarbu is restating what Hamas’s Iranian sponsors have been saying for years. Kayhan, the newspaper that speaks for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, recently called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that must be excised from “the Islamic Middle East.” The goal, Kayhan added, must be Israel’s “total annihilation from the political geography of the region.”

Let’s stipulate that not all those who support the Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” would welcome a second Holocaust. But let’s acknowledge, too, that those who do not endorse genocide feel it unnecessary to distance themselves from those who do.

The American journalist Helen Thomas was videotaped last week saying that Israelis should return to “Germany and Poland.” What was shocking here was not Thomas’s anti-Semitism (long well known) but that she was echoing, with just a tad more subtlety, the message purportedly radioed last week from the flotilla’s Turkish flagship to the Israelis: “Shut up, go back to Auschwitz.”

Despite such evidence, most media have been reporting that those aboard the flotilla were on a “humanitarian mission,” attempting to deliver needed aid. Few have mentioned that Palestinians already are the largest per capita recipients of foreign aid in the world. Israel itself delivers as much as 15,000 tons of aid to Gazans every week. More comes from the U.S. and Europe via the United Nations, which has a massive relief operation in Gaza — to which the Turks have contributed but a pittance, as my colleague Claudia Rosett has pointed out.

A Washington Post reporter in Gaza last week noted that “grocery stores are stocked wall-to-wall with everything from fresh Israeli yogurts and hummus to Cocoa Puffs. Pharmacies look as well-supplied as a typical Rite Aid in the United States.”

The reporter added, however, that Gaza has become “a mini-welfare state.” That indicates that what is needed is not relief but development — not shiploads of free food but paying jobs. And that, in turn, requires investment in factories, businesses, and agriculture. Gaza lacks such investment because it is ruled by Hamas, which, again, is at war with Israel. Hamas leaders reject any and all steps that might lead to peace. Abdallah Jarbu has laid out the Hamas position clearly: “I condemn whoever believes in normalizing relations with [Israelis], whoever supports sitting down with them, and whoever believes that they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people.”

One of the flotilla’s organizers, Greta Berlin, a 68-year-old American with a background in theater and communications, was candid enough to acknowledge that the flotilla’s primary purpose was not to deliver aid but to stop Israel from inspecting cargo heading for Gaza. Israel does that in order to reduce the number of missiles, explosives, and other weapons Hamas receives. In other words, Berlin wants to increase Hamas’s ability to wage war against Israel — knowing that more Israelis and more Palestinians will be killed as a result. “War is peace,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. In 2010, war activists are peace activists. Actually, it’s worse: Even arms smugglers are peace activists — so long as they are smuggling arms to be used to murder Israelis.

Ah, but the root cause of this conflict is Israeli “occupation,” isn’t it? Except that the conflict began long before Egypt, Jordan, and Israel’s other Arab neighbors launched a war intended to wipe Israel off the map in 1967. That led to Israel taking Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan. Never in history had these “Palestinian territories” been ruled by Palestinian Arabs.

Five years ago, Israel withdrew from Gaza — every soldier and farmer, leaving behind only productive greenhouses, which Gazans soon destroyed. Had they not done so, Gazans could now be exporting food rather than importing missiles.

Note, too, that on the West Bank, where Israel’s security forces work quietly with those of the Palestinian Authority, the economy is booming. At 7 percent, its annual economic growth rate is among the highest in the world.

Do such facts matter? The fever of anti-Israelism seems to be rising too fast to be reduced by the cold compress of truth. Jew-hatred is increasingly acceptable, even fashionable, not just in the Middle East but in Europe and in some of America’s finer salons — and journals and blogs. And now, apparently, interest in a “final solution” — to borrow Hitler’s apt phrase — is emerging as well. Helen Thomas’s sudden retirement is unlikely to significantly slow that trend.

The quaint idea that, having learned the lessons of the Holocaust, civilized people would “never again” tolerate genocide has become a cruel joke — one repeated in Cambodia, Kurdistan, Rwanda, the Balkans, Darfur, and beyond.

Radical anti-Semites of the 20th century had a goal: the extermination of Europe’s Jews. Radical anti-Semites of the 21st century also have a goal: the extermination of the Middle East’s Jewish state. Opposing the former is so much less demanding than opposing the latter.

This article originally appeared on nationreviewonline.com

This article can also be read at: “http://www.aish.com/jw/me/96036939.html”

Author Biography:

Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

Follow-up on Murfreesboro Mosque

Candidate denounces Murfreesboro mosque proposal

By TRAVIS LOLLER

Jun 24, 8:21 PM (ET)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – A Tennessee Republican candidate for Congress says plans to build a mosque in a Nashville suburb pose a threat to her state’s moral and political foundation.

In a Thursday evening statement, 6th District candidate Lou Ann Zelenik said she stands with those who oppose building what she calls “an Islamic training center.” She says the center is not part of a religious movement, but a political one “designed to fracture the moral and political foundation of Middle Tennessee.”

“Until the American Muslim community find it in their hearts to separate themselves from their evil, radical counterparts, to condemn those who want to destroy our civilization and will fight against them, we are not obligated to open our society to any of them,” Zelenik says in the statement.

Many residents in the suburban Nashville community only became aware of the planned mosque and community center after it had been approved. An overflow crowd packed a Rutherford County Commission meeting last week to speak against it.

Some wore Christian- or patriotic-themed clothing and a pastor told commissioners they should understand the nature, funding and intent of any group in the community “under that general banner (of Islam).”

In response to the uproar, Murfreesboro Islamic leaders announced an open house to answer questions from neighbors. It is scheduled Saturday at their current mosque, which they say they have outgrown.

Campaign manager Jay Heine said Zelenik was not available for comment on Thursday. He would not answer questions about the statement other than to say the campaign stands behind it.

Zelenik, who calls herself a leader in the Middle Tennessee tea party movement, hopes to replace U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, who is retiring after 13 terms.

A representative for the mosque did not immediately return a call and e-mail seeking comment.