Thursday, March 15, 2007

When CAIR criticizes a Muslim

Post lifted from American Thinker. See original for links

When will a spokesman from CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) finally attack a foreign Muslim for not respecting American culture and democratic norms? Why, when the offending Muslim says that the Islamic faith needs to be reformed to purge out its violence, misogyny, and primitive tribalism, that's when.

A few days ago, one of America's great talk-show hosts, Glenn Beck, interviewed CAIR's Tampa boss, Ahmed Bedeir, alongside Dr. Tawfiq Hamid, a man who years ago was a jihadi in Egypt's Islamic Brotherhood, then freed himself from Islamofascist brainwashing and is now trying to encourage reform and freedom of thought within Islam. Well, what person with a brain and a soul could find fault with that? CAIR's Bedeir could. Watch here via YouTube

"You're coming to my town. I live in St. Petersburg, Florida, and nobody's engaging the Muslim leadership that's already organized. You're not from this country. When you come to a country and you want to have dialogue about Islam, guess what, you're gonna have to join and engage the Muslim community, because that is the community you're trying to reform."

Wow. Imagine if some patriotic pale-faced American deigned to tell an uppity Muslim migrant that "You're not from America. You're coming to my country. If you think you have something to add here, you have to dress like us, and you have to talk like us, and you have no right to criticize us in an open forum..." What do you think would happen? Every fax machine across the fruited plain would be spewing out CAIR's condemnations of this "xenophobia...insensitivity...hate speech...cultural chauvinism...islamophobia...[and hey, what the heck]...RACISM!!"

But CAIR's Ahmed Bedeir feels safe to go on the airwaves and tell an escapee from Islamic terror that he has no legitimacy because: "You're not from this country."

We old Cold Warriors recall that for decades the Kremlin used legal "front groups" (e.g., the "US Peace Council") here in the US to build up public support for The Cause, while Moscow actually called the shots. We also recall that those front groups reserved their most vicious attacks for those refugees from the belly of the beast, who possessed unusual inside knowledge of Communist strategy and the real conditions inside the Workers' Paradise. People like Vladimir Bukovsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Zdzislaw Rurarz, and Anatoly Sharansky.

Dr. Hamid is in good company, while CAIR walks in the disgraceful and disgraced footsteps of those who enjoyed the benefits of a free society while working overtime to destroy it.



Another vacant "racism" controversy in Britain

Those who condemn Tory MP Patrick Mercer confuse political incorrectness with something more serious. I myself had something to say on this matter on Tongue Tied. Post below lifted from "The Guardian" (!) -- which see for links

Poor Colonel Mercer, he is denounced as a racist, summarily dismissed from his front bench post and roundly abused on the BBC's Question Time by five of the dimmest panellists ever let into a TV studio. Be clear about this, Patrick Mercer is not a racist, nothing like a racist: rather he is the victim of a collective reflex in the political class, a reflex which has all the complexity of a tape recording and which speaks received standard opinion.

What the colonel was actually trying to do with his remarks about "fat bastards," "ginger-haired bastards" and "black bastards", was to ask for a sense of proportion, the very last thing routine political minds could hope to find. He was saying that the army is a rough-mouthed place, happily adjusted to top-of-the register adjectives without going to law. That is surely right. Indeed Mr Mercer is being slightly euphemistic. It would be less likely that the noun, around which the adjectives "fat," "ginger" or "black" usually gathered, would be anything so eirenic as "bastard." In the army, as at the football stadium, it would be "c*nt" or "wanker." A pity really that Mr Mercer didn't get himself hanged for the sheep of "c*nt" rather than the genteel lamb of "bastard." That is a word rapidly passing out of offensive use, as "bugger" has long been. "There's a canny bugger; have you got your milk money?" is standard parent-to-child usage between Jarrow and Ashington.

The reaction of the professional reactors to "black bastard", - not uttered second person vocative, merely remarked as natural rough soldier talk - is perfect Victorian middle class. It is Thomas Bowdler, cutting the dirty bits out of Shakespeare, it is old-lady-ish, prim, hands-over-ears, Frinton-on-Sea, unhand-me-sir niminy-pimmery of a very high order. It is also close to a sort of right-thinking McCarthyism. For "commie subversive," read "racist".

Mr Mercer told the truth: that hard words pass among men, likely to be blown apart fighting Mr Blair's futile wars, as being not very important. Soldiers, if they do not start grown-up, quickly become so, learning what matters, the point made with fierce eloquence by the black sergeant who ran to his colonel's defence. "I've talked with him eaten with him, shared the night sky with him, and I tell you he isn't a racist."

This is the perspective which the colonel, with a slightly clumsy choice of words, was commending to us. Another part of that perspective is real, foul-breathed, in-your-face racism. Try the Stephen Lawrence case which, for the record, the liberal media were slow to make trouble over. The trouble came, through his personal acquaintance with Neville Lawrence, from that highly prejudiced about most things, four square Tory and inspirational editor, Paul Dacre. It was the Daily Mail which to its eternal glory, did the screaming headlines where screaming headlines were absolutely needed. Racism lies among the other street killings, the monkey noises I heard at a Yorkshire football ground a week or two back. It was racism in capitals when an Israeli minister said of the Palestinians generally "they are lice."

There is too, a good deal of covert racism in the way ministers talk about and behave to the illegal immigrants whom they promise to give such a bad time. These are foreigners who, for having failed the target-let criteria of all-too fallible boards, are commonly treated like convicted criminals, incarcerated, abused, the door kicked-in at six in the morning before they are taken in handcuffs to the airport. These are foreigners we can really behave badly to, with the home secretary to guide us.

What really distinguishes racism from a touch of politically incorrect stocking is intent, what the law call "malice." Do the words complained of express hatred for someone or for a set of people? Do they seek, in the language of the libel law, to incite "hatred ridicule or contempt"? The point about Mr Mercer's reference to cries of "get a move on you black bastard," was that he was convinced that they didn't. It was rough boys' talk. But this useful nuance is clearly lost upon David Cameron, whose response on Thursday was the sort of flashy weakness which masquerades as strength. "Oh my God, the press will be after us. We mustn't step out of line, mustn't give offence mustn't reason a case through. Sack him at once. Won't that be super PR?"

When Ted Heath fired Enoch Powell in 1968, he went against the grain of half his party and against a far larger corpus of public anti-black feeling than exists now. He was giving a genuine lead and, for all Powell's wrong headed virtues, he was right to sack him. Heath was being brave. Cameron is being commonplace, limp, tide-borne, fashionable, not inclined to think when he can be seen to mimic action. He comes over as a slight unmeritable man slavering in the best Pavlovian fashion before jumping through all the received standard hoops. He is a politician not worth trying to be interested in.

I repeat the words of Mr Mercer's black sergeant. "I have worked for him, eaten with him, shared the night sky with him and he is not a racist." That's good enough for me, but clearly not for David Cameron. Mr Mercer is indeed not a racist, but out of cowardice and mediocrity of mind and spirit, David Cameron has sacked him. The thing speaks for itself.

Source



Australia: Hardline Muslim clerics urge tax cheating

Hardline Muslim clerics are encouraging their followers to cheat the tax system because they consider paying income tax contrary to Islamic law. Muslim leaders have warned that fundamentalist imams who put sharia law ahead of Australian law are also condoning welfare fraud and the cash economy as tax-evasion methods.

Sydney-based Islamic leader Fadi Rahman told The Australian that the extremist clerics who were preaching messages against paying income taxes were also staunchly opposed to Western ideologies, including the Australian way of life. He said he had heard hardline clerics at Friday sermons in Sydney highlight the importance of cheating the tax system. "I mean, just like how you've got clerics (with) extreme views who are telling the Muslims in the Western world to declare war against the very country that they live in and the very country that is paying for their day-to-day life, you'll find that these are the clerics who are telling them to dodge the tax system," said Mr Rahman, a youth leader and the president of the Independent Centre for Research Australia. "Tax, itself, is not allowed in Islam. So they (clerics) encourage them that if there's any way that you can dodge paying the tax, then you should do it."

The Australian understands that the clerics pushing for tax evasion espoused a fundamentalist form of Islam called Wahabbism. While sharia law does not require Muslims to pay taxes, it does require them to pay zakat (alms) towards charitable causes.

Prominent Islamic cleric Khalil Shami, who said he had heard of imams encouraging tax evasion but had no direct knowledge of it happening, warned spiritual leaders to abide by Australian laws, saying tax evasion was a form of "theft" that would serve only to undermine the government help given to the Muslim and mainstream communities. "They have to give the right advice to the people because we come to this country and we have to follow the law of this country," said the imam of Penshurst mosque, in Sydney's southwest. "Everything that the Government do, we have to support it, we have to stand behind it ... to help the land and to help the law of the land."

The fundamentalist Ahlus Sunnah Wal-Jamaah Association, which is headed by Australia's most radical cleric, Mohammed Omran, hit back at suggestions that its imams - including Abdul Salam Mohammed Zoud, who heads the group's Sydney branch - were among those calling on their flock to cheat on their taxes. "Of course we pay taxes and we go as far as to collecting money from our Muslim communities and donating it to organisations (such as the Royal Children's Hospital) to help," said the Wahabbi organisation's spokesman, Abu Yusuf. He said the authorities should deal with tax cheats "as they would with anyone else breaking the law".

Muslim community leader Keysar Trad, who worked at the tax office for 14 years, said he believed some Islamic fringe groups would include "cheating on taxes" as part of their teachings. "We know that some fringe groups within the community have some aberrant teachings," the president of the Islamic Friendship Association said. "If one of those fringe groups was giving a message that did not serve society as a whole ... such as cheating on taxes, I would not be surprised." Mr Trad said he was often told by "conservative" clerics to quit his former job at the tax office because they considered it contrary to sharia law.

Mr Rahman, who helps young Muslims turn away from radical Islam and steer clear of criminal activities, said hardline Muslim clerics were not fazed that their followers were "double-dipping" by working cash-in-hand to avoid paying tax and collecting social security benefits on the side. "While we work hard to pay our taxes, it's not fair on the rest of us," he said.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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