More on the Freedom House report I blogged about just prior to this.
Robert Spencer writes a good piece in the great publication Human Events, called “Islam for Dummies Indeed”.
I can only imagine what the braintrust of the fringe left-wing NDP are reading these days in Canada, or the Liberals like Carolyn Parrish, et al. Or the media, with the possible exception of Fox News Channel and few others who like me seem to actually read a broad range of material.
In a remarkable example of truth in advertising, Lt. General John R. Vines, the new U.S. ground commander in Iraq, has included on a booklist for his senior staff officers the deathless classic Islam for Dummies—among other books that minimize or explain away any connection between Islam and violence. Unfortunately for the General, word of his reading list hadn’t been out long when Freedom House, a human rights group in Washington, released a report on Saudi hate literature in American mosques that made his list look Pollyannaish.
In a Baltimore Sun interview after Vines’ list was made public, the author of Islam for Dummies, a retired professor named Malcolm Clark, was asked if he agreed “with President Bush that Islam is a peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists?” He replied: “Generally, yes, but ‘hijacked by fanatics’ suggests the fault lies completely with that group. Western and American actions have created a climate … for that hijacking to occur.”
Clark is evidently unaware of the centuries of jihad warfare by Muslims before there even was an America—or perhaps he just got carried away in his zeal to exonerate Islam from any connection to 9/11, Beslan, and all the other recent attacks perpetrated by men who quoted the Qur’an and cited Islam’s doctrine of jihad to justify their actions. “Many Americans,” he lamented, “equate Islam and terrorism. That’s not historically true. Go back 20 years; the majority of terrorist acts against America happened in South America and came from a leftist ideology. Still, there’s a feeling that Muslim groups in the U.S. haven’t been forthcoming enough about condemning Islamic terrorism. In fact, all the major Islamic organizations in the U.S., such as the Islamic Society of North America [ISNA], unequivocally condemned the [9/11] attacks.”
ISNA did indeed condemn the attacks. But I wonder if Clark knows that the Senate Finance Committee in January 2004 included ISNA on a list of groups that “finance terrorism and perpetuate violence.” Does Clark know that ISNA has received Saudi money?
[…] …Muslims are teaching even in America that “until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments, every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful.”
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