Rome Getting It Wrong on Islam

I have previously written two posts (Part 1, Part 2) on "Rome Getting It Right on Islam", praising the shift in official Vatican policy regarding Islam from Pope John Paul II to Benedict XVI. Just when it looked like it was safe to loudly cheer Benedict's recent comments regarding Islam at a conference in Regensberg, Germany - comments that have rightly inflamed the Muslim world - it seems that what he has given on one hand, he has taken away with the other.

Daniel Pipes reports that in the wake of violence and condemnations in the Muslim world in response to Benedict's Regensburg address, the Roman Catholic pontiff has this past week acknowledged Islam's filial relationship to Christianity as a member of the Abrahamic faith. In his address to the Ambassadors to Rome from Muslim countries, Benedict reaffirmed the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate Declaration, which equates the Islamic Allah with the Christian God:

The Church looks upon Muslims with respect. They worship the one God living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to humanity and to whose decrees, even the hidden ones, they seek to submit themselves whole-heartedly, just as Abraham, to whom the Islamic faith readily relates itself, submitted to God.

Benedict went so far as to cite this conclusion as "the Magna Carta of the Muslim-Christian dialogue." This is clearly a step in the wrong direction, though he is following in the path of his predecessor, who said regarding Christians and Muslims while visiting Morocco in 1995, "we believe in the same God, the one God, the living God."

As we are engaged in the most recent phase combatting the 1400 year-long defense of the West against violent and aggressive Islamic imperialism, it is tempting to lose our nerve. In this case, Pope Benedict has lost his. The furor by Muslims over his recent comments has prompted him to retreat into the institutional complacency that has plagued the Roman Catholic Church for the past two hundred years. Benedict has shown signs of breaking this habit. He has made some bold steps to break with the policies of JPII in a short period of time. But this is a time for leadership, not safety.

Islam is not a step forward for monotheism, but is a retreat into paganism. This has been the unmistakable message of the Christian Church since the 7th Century. Benedict is in an unparalleled position to provide leadership the world by proclaiming Christian truth in the face of the Islamic threat to global civilization. He only squanders this opportunity by mau-mauing to the political correctness endemic to the Vatican diplomatic mandarins.

Al-Qaeda's 20-year Plan

For anyone that is interested in the war on terrorism, and article in last week's issue of The New Yorker is must reading. Lawrence Wright's, "The Master Plan," discusses the development of al-Qaeda's strategy since 9/11, gives an overview of their primary strategists, including Abu Musab al-Suri (who I wrote about here back in July, "The Architect of the New Global Jihad"), Abu Bakir Naji (author of The Management of Savagery, now available in a translation by William McCants at the Counter Terrorism Center at West Point), and a critical analysis by Jordanian author Fouad Hussein, who outlines al-Qaeda's 7-step 20-year plan in his book, Al-Zarqawi: al-Qaida's Second Generation. Hussein's book is based off a number of interviews with al-Qaeda leaders and his time in prison with Zarqawi.

The German daily Der Speigel covered Hussein's book last August. They summarized al-Qaeda's 20-year plan:

In seven phases the terror network hopes to establish an Islamic caliphate which the West will then be too weak to fight.

• The First Phase Known as "the awakening" -- this has already been carried out and was supposed to have lasted from 2000 to 2003, or more precisely from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington to the fall of Baghdad in 2003. The aim of the attacks of 9/11 was to provoke the US into declaring war on the Islamic world and thereby "awakening" Muslims. "The first phase was judged by the strategists and masterminds behind al-Qaida as very successful," writes Hussein. "The battle field was opened up and the Americans and their allies became a closer and easier target." The terrorist network is also reported as being satisfied that its message can now be heard "everywhere."
  
• The Second Phase "Opening Eyes" is, according to Hussein's definition, the period we are now in and should last until 2006. Hussein says the terrorists hope to make the western conspiracy aware of the "Islamic community." Hussein believes this is a phase in which al-Qaida wants an organization to develop into a movement. The network is banking on recruiting young men during this period. Iraq should become the center for all global operations, with an "army" set up there and bases established in other Arabic states.
• The Third Phase This is described as "Arising and Standing Up" and should last from 2007 to 2010. "There will be a focus on Syria," prophesies Hussein, based on what his sources told him. The fighting cadres are supposedly already prepared and some are in Iraq. Attacks on Turkey and -- even more explosive -- in Israel are predicted. Al-Qaida's masterminds hope that attacks on Israel will help the terrorist group become a recognized organization. The author also believes that countries neighboring Iraq, such as Jordan, are also in danger.
  
• The Fourth Phase Between 2010 and 2013, Hussein writes that al-Qaida will aim to bring about the collapse of the hated Arabic governments. The ultimate is that "the creeping loss of the regimes' power will lead to a steady growth in strength within al-Qaida." At the same time attacks will be carried out against oil suppliers and the US economy will be targeted using cyber terrorism.
  
• The Fifth Phase This will be the point at which an Islamic state, or caliphate, can be declared. The plan is that by this time, between 2013 and 2016, Western influence in the Islamic world will be so reduced and Israel weakened so much, that resistance will not be feared. Al-Qaida hopes that by then the Islamic state will be able to bring about a new world order.
  
• The Sixth Phase Hussein believes that from 2016 onwards there will a period of "total confrontation." As soon as the caliphate has been declared the "Islamic army" it will instigate the "fight between the believers and the non-believers" which has so often been predicted by Osama bin Laden.
  
• The Seventh Phase This final stage is described as "definitive victory." Hussein writes that in the terrorists' eyes, because the rest of the world will be so beaten down by the "one-and-a-half billion Muslims," the caliphate will undoubtedly succeed. This phase should be completed by 2020, although the war shouldn't last longer than two years.
  

Douglas Farah at Counterterrorism Blog asks, "Islamists Have a 20-year Plan: Do We?". According to Wright's New Yorker article, our policymakers have unwittingly played into al-Qaeda's strategy because they refuse to learn from the terrorists themselves:

Although American and European intelligence communities are aware of the jihadi texts, the work of these ideologues often reads like a playbook that U.S. policymakers have been slavishly, if inadvertently, following. “The data don’t get to the top, because the decision-makers are not looking for that kind of information,” a policy analyst who works closely with the American intelligence community told me. “They think they know better.”

It would be suicidal for us to ignore what al-Qaeda is willing to tell us directly. I'll have more on this issue in coming weeks, including some material never made public in English before. Stay tuned.

Hometown Jihad: Citizen Salah Sultan

My newest article, Hometown Jihad: Our Newest Citizen?, is headlining this morning at FrontPage Magazine. Follow the links to my previous articles on this topic, Hometown Jihad, the initial exposé published back in April, and Hometown Jihad: Blowback, which came out in late May.

The newest revelation is that Salah Sultan, the individual who has been the subject of these articles that lives here in my hometown of Hilliard, Ohio, is set to get his US citizenship within the next few weeks. This despite extensive connections and close relationships to terrorists, terror sympathizers, apologists and financiers. He is also the protégé of HAMAS spiritual leader Sheikh Yousef Qaradawi, who the Anti-Defamation League has characterized as the "Theologian of Terror".

For those who have asked me what can be done to prevent Salah Sultan from receiving US citizenship, my suggestion would be to contact Rep. Deborah Pryce , our local congressional representativewho is looking into the matter (be sure to be polite), and Ohio Senator Mike DeWine, who is in a tight race for re-election. Also be sure to contact your own Congressman and Senators. They are the only people who can apply the pressure to the idiots at the USCIS to put the kabosh on this deal.

I'll be sure to post any updates as I receive them.

Agence France Presse Pushes CAIR's Fake Hate Crime Numbers

UPDATE #1: It seems from information gleaned from Ms. Oberman's personal website that she is the sole reporter in AFP's Chicago Bureau. AFP's North American Regional Office is located in Washington DC.

UPDATE #2: Thanks to The American Thinker, Little Green Footballs, Miss Kelly and Solomonia for picking up this blog entry. Apologies if I missed anyone else.

UPDATE #3: A hearty Bonjour! to all of our friends joining us from France, Belgium and the Francophone world, courtesy of Bureau audiovisuel francophone.

UPDATE #4: I finally received a reply from Mira Oberman, the reporter who wrote the AFP article, who informed me that she had received the numbers directly from CAIR and that she wasn't aware of the statistics' dubious authenticity. I appreciate her response. But will the story be corrected? I'm not holding my breath.

I was catching up on the holiday weekend news by visiting Little Green Footballs a few hours ago and noticed an entry from Sunday, CAIR's 9/11 PR Push Continues. It references an article by Mira Oberman of Agence France Presse, "US Muslims plagued by discrimination after 9/11 attacks", that makes the following claim advanced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR):

CAIR has seen a steady increase in the number of complaints of harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment over the past five years. In 2004, complaints rose 49 percent to 1,522, of which 141 were reports of actual and potentially violent hate crimes.

These numbers are taken from CAIR's May 2005 report, Unequal Protection: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2005:

In 2004, CAIR processed a total of 1,522 incident reports of civil rights cases compared to 1,019 cases reported to CAIR in 2003. This constitutes a 49 percent increase in the reported cases of harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment from 2003 and marks the highest number of Muslim civil rights cases ever reported to CAIR in our eleven year history.

In addition, CAIR received 141 reports of actual and potential violent anti-Muslim hate crimes, a 52 percent increase from the 93 reports received in 2003. (p. 5)

Just one problem: a week after CAIR published the report, Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha revealed ("CAIR's Hate Crime Nonsense") that this report included "a pattern of sloppiness, exaggeration, and distortion", especially that it included incidents that CAIR reported as hate crimes when it was known that the "hate crimes" they cited were perpetrated by the Muslim "victims" themselves. In one case in McAllen, Texas included in the CAIR report, even the New York Times had debunked CAIR's "hate crime" claims seven months prior to the CAIR report's release. In another case reported by CAIR in May 2005 as a "hate crime", an Everett, Washington grocer had been charged with setting fire to his own store in August 2004 - a full eight months prior to CAIR's published report. The Seattle Times reported CAIR's "hate crime" as a hoax in August 2004 when the charges were filed against the owner.

If you read the CAIR report that's posted on their website today you will find that all references to these hate crime hoaxes have been scrubbed, but CAIR has never changed the 2004 statistics in the report to account for these fraudulent incidents. Those statistics remain completely unchanged since the original publication of the report, and these are the very same stats parroted by AFP in the article from this weekend.

CAIR was clearly aware enough of this problematic information to scrub any mention of these incidents from the current version of the report available on their website, but careless or deceptive enough not to change the statistics. Regardless, CAIR nowhere indicates that the report has been corrected. And they are still peddling this fraudulent information to their old media allies, who appear to take any information received from CAIR at face value.

How was I able to catch this fakery by CAIR and their useful idiots in the mainstream media? I mentioned the problems with CAIR's report last week in an article for The American Thinker, "Kafir-phobia: Americans as Violent Anti-Muslim Bigots". My American Thinker article concerned CAIR's promotion of yet another staged "hate crime" this past July in Xenia, Ohio where two Jordanian restaurant owners hired a former employee to vandalize their store and later were severely injured in a blast when one of the owners lighted a cigarette while standing in a pool of gasoline they had spread intending to set fire to the shop later that evening. As of this evening, CAIR still has an uncorrected post on their website, "Blast at Arab-American Restaurant 'Suspicious'", containing false information about this latest incident. As I mentioned in my American Thinker article, it was reported by the local news media, including the Cincinnati Enquirer, that the owners were themselves responsible for the blast a week before CAIR posted the erroneous information on their website.

But I'm still not finished. Remember those two faked hate crime incidents in McAllen, Texas and Everett, Washington I mentioned earlier? A CAIR press release and news brief continue to tout these faked hate crimes almost a year and a half after the Pipes/Chadha exposé was published.

This raises some serious questions:

• The most serious is that CAIR - the most prominent Islamic organization in the US today - is deliberately floating fraudulent information to the media despite CAIR's awareness that the information is bogus. That notwithstanding, they are still the darlings of the old media and inside-the-Beltway establishment elites and cited as a reliable source of information.
• Another concern is that the May 2005 CAIR report has been scrubbed to conceal this problematic information without any notation whatsoever that the report has been changed.
• In all likelihood, Mira Oberman at AFP was unwittingly duped by CAIR, who probably provided her with these stats (see UDPATE #4 above). But has she ever heard of FACTCHECKING or a Google search?
• When the CAIR report was debunked by Pipes and Chadha just a week after its release, none of the mainstream media who covered the report's release corrected their stories. I have emailed Ms. Oberman this evening and informed her of the bogus information included in her report. Will AFP correct it and note the fraud? We'll see...

It should be clear to any informed observer that CAIR consistently and deliberately purveys false and fraudulent information (as the numerous instances cited in this blog entry confirm). They are aided in their deception, wittingly or unwittingly, by their go-to people in the mainstream media, much like Ms. Oberman, who take CAIR's propaganda and run with it without the slightest reservation, disregarding a mountain of evidence that should scream "CAUTION! HANDLED BY CAIR!".

As Pipes and Chadha note at the end of their exposé of CAIR's report:

But why do journalists report the results of CAIR’s survey – as though it came from a source without a viewpoint bias, as though past studies had been reliable, as though its polls are scientific, as though it has not been party to threats against an American Muslim dissident, and as though it has not protected Osama bin Laden’s image, as though five of CAIR’s staff and board members have not already been associated with terrorism, and as though it is not named as a defendant in 9/11 terror lawsuit?

One wonders what it will take for old media to ignore CAIR’s unreliable research and instead start reporting the words of Steven Pomerantz, a former chief of the FBI's counterterrorism section, that CAIR's activities “effectively give aid to international terrorist groups.”

Those are excellent points to ponder...

Notes on Beethoven

"... there begins in my head the development in every direction ... the fundamental idea never deserts me - it rises before me - grows, I see and hear the picture in all its extent and dimensions stand before my mind like a cast ..."

- Beethoven on composing, to Louis Schlösser, 1822.

Over the past few days I have been viewing the 3-part BBC docu-drama broadcast in June 2005, Beethoven, presented by composer and conductor, Charles Hazlewood. To say that the series is worth the viewing would be an understatement, and to try to summarize it would be foolish. Watch it for yourself.

What impresses me about Beethoven is that his music is intensely personal. As Hazlewood shows, you can chart the progress of his music by what was going on in his life. Beethoven was an absolute egoist self-consumed with his art and his talent. This is hardly unique in the post-modern era where everyone is consumed with themselves and when contemporary art is rarely more than masturbating the artist's ego resulting in absolute drivel; but in his day, it was extraordinary when music was written strictly for patrons and discriminating audiences.

But Beethoven's music also reflects the spirit of his times. Since his life bridges the Enlightenment and the beginnings of Romanticism, it is hardly surprising to find his music both revolutionary and romantic. And he is self-conscious about integrating the philosophy of his day with his music, as seen in Movement 4 in Symphony No. 9, incorporating Schiller's "Ode to Joy" - the first time that choral had been matched with a symphony. As such, Beethoven is full of the contradictions of his day: he is democratic and a humanist, but can't stand people. His paradoxical sentimentality and overbearing fortitude are best expressed in his 5th and 6th Symphonies, which were composed at the same time. The 6th (Pastoral) is light, airy and somewhat nostalgic; whereas the 5th is nothing short of kick-you-in-the-balls brutality. How could I not love Beethoven?

There is much in his tumultuous biography that I can appreciate and identify with, as I am sure is true with many others: his constant financial struggles; his crass and rude behavior that was a defense mechanism to keep others away; his ill fortunes in the area of love; the broken relationships with his family; others taking advantage of his talent for their own purposes. The themes that Hazlewood identifies in Beethoven's music are tension and reconciliation, creativity out of chaos, and integration and creative freedom - all reflective of Beethoven's own experience.

And then there is his deafness. I have pondered as to why Providence would decide that one of the greatest musicians in history should go deaf. We will never know. It would be as if Shakespeare were unable to write. It is a seeming tragedy. But is it? What better testament to the fact that it was God's gift that inspired Beethoven than the faculty through which Beethoven's art was expressed and received by others was the very one denied to him. Who else but God could have allowed the music to dwell in him such that he never needed to hear the music, but just simply had to think it? Those are not talents that are self-developed. They must come with the package.

In contrast to Mozart who expressed his genius within the boundaries and confines of convention, stretching them in the process, Beethoven is about the business of destroying boundaries, breaking rules, shattering and rending worlds. In many respects, Beethoven is the point of no return for music in the West. After him, there was no way to go back and examining the classical age without carrying the baggage and perspective of Modernity. Beethoven is the prism through which we see his predecessors, whether we know it or not. He is much like Kant in philosophy.

As I have been watching the series, I have also been listening to Beethoven's symphonies (the Deutsche Grammaphone collection directed by Herbert von Karajan and played by the Berliner Philharmoniker), as well as several additional pieces. Beethoven's music is still a special challenge to musicians today - think of how difficult it was for the musicians in his own day. The technical demands on the pianist in his piano concertos (think No. 4) are stunning. And then there is the vast range of the music itself in his corpus. Amazing!

The series does an excellent job of demonstrating the meaning of Beethoven's music within the context of the life of the man. It is worth the viewing if you can get ahold of it. Paul Rhys (do the Brits not have vowels?) does as excellent job as Beethoven. Getting a handle on Beethoven's music, however, is not so easy. It has taken me more than a decade to begin to digest his music. The first place I started a number of years ago was a 2-disc set called "Beethoven: The Greatest Hits", which is still in print and available at most music stores. It is a pretty broad selection (including my favorite, the Moonlight Sonata), but most of the work would be familiar to the average listener. That collection is a good jumping-off point before diving into his symphonies, sonatas, concertos, etc. You can only eat the elephant one bite at a time, but the meal is worth the effort!

What's next on the viewing list? BBC's The Genius of Mozart, also presented by Hazlewood, and The Romantics, presented by Peter Ackroyd. The Beeb might be filled with moonbat Leftists, but they sure make good documentaries. Something Americans could learn from.