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Newsweek: “Stealth Jihad” is Paranoid Speak

By on August 13, 2010 in Loon Politics, Loon-at-large
  Robert Spencer popularized the term “Stealth Jihad,” and some in the Conservative wing such as Newt Gingrich have ran with it and are using it all the time. As has been exposed on Loonwatch and other sites, “Stealth Jihad” is paranoid speak and just another anti-Muslim conspiracy theory. Lisa Miller takes on this term in her recent article which no doubt will have Spencer, whose site is described as “a hyperventilating anti-terror blog,” in fits.

The Misinformants

By Lisa Miller Here is the latest semantic assault from the party that brought you “Islamo-facism” (circa 2005) and “Axis of Evil” (2002). The term “stealth jihad” is suddenly voguish among politically ambitious right wingers who see President Obama’s approach to terrorism as insufficient. If it sounds like a phrase from a military-fantasy summer blockbuster, that’s on purpose: in its cartoonish bad-guy foreignness, “stealth jihad” attempts to make the terrorist threat broader and thus more nefarious than it already is. The only thing scarier than an invisible, homicidal, suicidal enemy with a taste for world domination is one who’s sneaking up on you. In the words of former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich at a July speech at the American Enterprise Institute, “stealth jihad” is an effort “to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Sharia.” The term wasn’t Gingrich’s invention. It’s the title of a two-year-old book by Robert Spencer, whose hyperventilating antiterror blog, Jihad Watch, is cited and circulated widely on the far right. But the recent vicious debate over the proposed community center and mosque near Ground Zero gives Gingrich an excuse to use “stealth jihad” and its variants frequently—not just at the AEI but in an interview with this magazine. (In an essay on the conservative Web site Human Events, he referred instead to “creeping sharia.”) Gingrich’s like-minded peers have seized on the language, too. “Muslim Brotherhood operatives, like [Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the center’s founder and leader] are extremely skilled at obscuring … their true agenda,” said Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, on FOX’s Glenn Beck show. “It’s part of the stealth jihad.” ‘A Little Intolerant, But Good Reason To Be’ Protesters for and against the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero talk about their reasons for supporting or opposing the project. Words matter, and if you say them often enough and with enough authority, they start to sound true—even if they’re not. Abdul Rauf, for instance, has no affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood and is an “operative” (another nefarious word) only in the sense that running a small, progressive interfaith nonprofit is an “operation.” As for his “stealth jihad,” it’s virtually impossible to imagine how such an event would—logistically—occur. Would the construction of an Islamic prayer site near Ground Zero inevitably lead American women to wake up one morning and find themselves veiled and confined to their homes? “The term is ever-so-slightly goofy,” says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. The paranoia conveyed by “stealth jihad” brings to mind the anticommunist campaigns of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, Nunberg adds. Just as McCarthyites imagined a communist behind every lamppost, the word “stealth” conflates all Muslims with terrorists. In a stealth campaign you never know who your friends are. Also, simply put, foreign words freak people out. “Jihad” and “Sharia” reinforce the sense among Americans that Muslims in general have an unfathomable world view. During World War II, formerly obscure words like “hara-kiri” and “kamikaze,” which suggested the “warlike ferocity” of the Japanese, became common parlance, Nunberg says. “There was this sense of being confronted with this hostile, alien culture.” The Japanese were “literally demonized,” he says. Gingrich has already used the mosque debate to evoke many of America’s historic enemies, comparing Muslims indirectly with Nazis and communists and even the Japanese. “We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor,” he said on FOX recently. But that is not true. Fourteen percent of Hawaiians call themselves ethnically Japanese, according to the U.S. Census, and dozens of Japanese temples stand near Pearl Harbor—as they have for decades. One of them, the Buddhist Aiea Hongwanji Mission, is less than half a mile away. “You can see Pearl Harbor from the roof, maybe. We’re really close,” says Wade Yamamoto, the temple’s treasurer. The temple allows people “to practice their religion from back home,” he says. Gingrich, a historian, might take a lesson here. After the attacks of Dec. 7, 1941, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent—two thirds of them American citizens—were interned in camps in a shameful episode that later legislation called the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Last week, a New York City cab driver was stabbed for answering the question “Are you a Muslim?” in the affirmative. Our enemies are dangerous. Let’s be clear about who they are. With Johannah Cornblatt  

Pamela Geller Falsely Claims Imam Rauf Made Comment “Blaming Jews” for 9/11

By on August 12, 2010 in Loon Blogs

Plastic Pam or Catwoman?

Pamela Geller accused Imam Rauf of “blaming Jews for 9/11,” which is just more lies from her and her cronies. Media Matters exposes their lies.

Geller falsely claims Imam Rauf made comment blaming “the Jews” for 9-11

Pam Geller falsely claimed that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is heading an initiative to build an Islamic community center in Manhattan, once blamed “the Jews” for 9-11 and said, “If Americans only know it was the Jews’ fault, they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did.” But those comments have been widely attributed to Sheik Muhammed Gemeaha, a one-time imam at the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City who  reportedly made those inflammatory comments after resigning and returning to Egypt in 2001. Center officials roundly condemned the comments.

Geller accused Rauf of making the comments with the following headline:

rauf

But in a November 4, 2001, New York Times Magazine piece, Jonathan Rosen attributed the comments to Gemeaha: “Recently, I read an interview with Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha — who was not only the representative in the United States of the prominent Cairo center of Islamic learning, al-Azhar University, but also imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York City. The sheik, who until recently lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, explained that ‘only the Jews’ were capable of destroying the World Trade Center and added that ‘if it became known to the American people, they would have done to Jews what Hitler did.’ ” Gemeaha reportedly made his comments to the website www.lailatalqadr.com and translated excerpts were posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

As Rosen noted, by November 2001, Gemeaha no longer lived in New York City. The Times reported on October 23, 2001, that Gemeaha had “moved his family back to Cairo” and had “sent a letter of resignation to the mosque.” The Times further reported that members of the mosque’s board condemned his comments:

Neither The Times nor the sheik’s associates at the mosque in Manhattan were able to reach him in Cairo to ask him about the remarks attributed to him. But colleagues said that if he made the comments, they would be a dramatic turnaround for a Muslim leader who was a mainstay at interfaith events with New York’s rabbis and ministers.

”It does not represent at all the policy and the beliefs of the Islamic Cultural Center, nor what Imam Gemeaha was teaching the Islamic community during his three and a half years here,” said Mohammad Abdullah Abulhasan, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United Nations, who heads the mosque’s board. ”It really took me by surprise to see this.”

Rauf serves as a member of the Islamic Center’s board of trustees.

Geller has since updated her post. No longer directly attributing the comments to Rauf, Geller now excerpts the comments, attributes them to no one, and then purports to provide “more ugly dirt on radical Imam Rauf”:

rauf2

*Correction: I previously wrote that Gemeaha reportedly made the comments before resigning and returning to Egypt. I regret the error.

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    • Daniel

      What a lying trash bag site this is. You would be better titled Loons Watch.com

  • iSherif

    God bless President Barack Obama!

Robert Spencer Watch: Elena Kagan Ignorantly Promoting Shariah Law

By on August 5, 2010 in Feature, Loon Blogs

Robert Spencer next to his Perpetual Serf Pamela Geller

Robert Spencer contradicts himself once again. In a recent article in the Daily Caller, Spencer is quoted as saying,

“[Kagan] would knowingly and wittingly abet the advance of Sharia, but she wouldn’t do it understanding anything about Sharia. She would do it out of her ignorance.”

Yes, because the only one who understands Sharia is Robert Spencer.

What a convoluted way of saying what he really wants to say, “Kagan will ‘advance Shariah.’”

So will she “knowingly” or “ignorantly” advance Sharia?

Spencer attributes Kagan’s fondness for Sharia to naïveté and liberalism. “There is a general tendency on the part of political liberals in the United States today to take a benign view of Islam and Islamic law,” he said. “They are generally uninformed and share a hatred of the West and Western civilization.”

Essentially, if someone disagrees with Spencer they are cast as either “ignorant” or “taking a benign view of Islam and Islamic law.” This woman has devoted her whole life to the study of law, does he not think for a second that Kagan might know more about Islamic law than himself?

Spencer’s wild-eyed conspiracy theories are then exposed,
According to Spencer, Kagan will be a willing accomplice in the ongoing stealth jihad — or the institution of Sharia into non-Muslim societies via non-violent means, such as the courts and mainstreaming Islamic customs — currently underway against the West. “The goal of the jihad is to assert the primacy of Islamic law over non-Muslim society and over Muslim societies where it is not fully enforced, and that can take place either through violent or non-violent means and the goal is the same,” he said.
More of the same old conspiracies. On Spencer’s hate blog, he posted this article with the comment, “Ignorance and naivete, mixed in with the fashionable Leftist contempt for America.” Is he referring to the reporter or to Kagan? He doesn’t dispute anything the reporter wrote and instead finds it fit to criticize liberals as being “accomplices in the ongoing stealth jihad.”

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    • Art K

      I am absolutely amazed at how people are still struggling to dominate the world with their religion. I think, in this “Electronic Age” that people are learning how to articulate their feelings in a discrete manner. Yes, there are those that are young and ignorant that choose to exercise their “Right of Free Speech” as given to Americans through the Constitution. They fail to realize that it does not mean to go around and deliberately hurt others with your wicked and sharp tongue. People lapse into deep depression until they die once the verbal damage is done. You cannot undo the hurt once it is accepted by the hurt person. How do you punish the perpetrator for hurting his family, friend or some person on the street? You can’t punish him because of his ignorance of human kindness and care for his fellow man. At one point or another, we must all learn to put our egos aside and embrace one another as loving family members. I happen to have a vast education in “religion” and it does not mean a thing because many people use their religion to cause separation and rejection in our human society. This is a joke being played on us by us, the people aka human beings! The young people today that are rude and arrogant are the by-product of parents that were polite and never said what they felt in a constructive open way. It is too bad. It is my wish that all wars end. It is my wish that all arguments do not occur. It is my wish that all people, civilized or not, learn to reason and think about the impact they have on the life of this planet. We have the resources to care for this beautiful planet and many people beyond eight billion. But, we must first get greed and jealousy out of our lives once and for all. We all have gifts for one another and when given to the world, amazing feelings of love abound. I am happy to be a human. I am happy to know many people that are considerate and caring for others. Religion, Race, Culture and Political persuasion are not the pillars of a society that can survive beyond 2025. True love has the power to crush all pain. True love is the healer of this world and our hurt hearts. Killing is not the key to stopping hatred. It is the hatred in our hearts that must be crushed. Hatred is the achilles heel of a collapsing world. Let 2010 celebrate the rise of the intelligent minds of all human beings hungering for a more sustainable non-coercive society. Love to you all, Art K

    • Sam Seed

      “Adm_Akbar00 Says: August 5th, 2010 at 1:14 pm May Allah fart on Pamela Gellar’s sandwich”

      Please refrain from using foul attributes for Allah, it’s not funny or clever.

    • Abdul Fateh

      I don’t understand how Spencer is still taken seriously. This is a man who was a Catholic school teacher in the Bronx for a while, and now he’s some self-appointed expert on Sharia. He should stick to talking to underage girls about “spiritual virginity.” What a guy. He’s plenty dumb too, one shouldn’t throw bricks when in a glass house. The same goes for Pamela Geller-Oshry, the 52-year old harpy residing on East 56th St in Manhattan in her apartment paid for by her criminal ex-husband.

    • Terry

      Robert Spencer is plain and simple a sewage rat. The only reason this individual without any character is doing this is money. There’s still a lot of money to be made after 9/11 for those who want to smear Islam and arabs. It also fits well into the Zionist agenda of dehumanizing the Palestinians in order to grab more land illegally and ethnically cleanse Palestinians.

    • mindy1

      i may not agree with Kagan, but Spencer is starting to sound paranoid

    • What do these half-wits know about Shariah anyway? In Al Azhar University in Egypt, it takes at least 4 years to get a basic degree in Shariah Law studies (A couple of years longer if you want a Master’s degree). There is no way Spencer’s highly selective “research” is any match

      As for the Shrieking Harpy, before she figures out the difference between Al Azhar and Cairo University (No, Pamela, it was not Al Azhar Obama gave his speech at), she has no business being considered an expert about anything.

    • Justin

      Mwu ha ha ha! First the ground zero mosque, then overthrow the Consistution! It is all going according to plan… (sarcasm intended)

    • Adm_Akbar00

      May Allah fart on Pamela Gellar’s sandwich

    • KnowingTheTruth

      I’m starting to think that these two fools ether have brain damage or lying is the only way to make money to support their mansions. You know what it’s both.

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