BEWARE of the ENEMY Within
The Non Muslim World Has Lost All Hope in Trying to Take the Muslims Away
from the Path of Islam by Using Methods from Outside the House of Islam.
Instead They are Trying to Deviate the Muslims By Using the SMUFFED (the
SICKularists, the MUTTerates, the FROGressives, the FOOLarists & the
DEFORMists) from Within the House of Islam Who Are Muslims by Name But Are
Trying to Implement the AGENDA of the Non Muslims. Recognizing the ENEMY WITHIN
is Not Always An EASY Task AB
Rand Report on Islam Revisited
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Al-Jazeerah, March 19, 2005
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2005%20Opinion%20Editorials/March/19o/Rand%20Report%20on%20Islam%20revisited%20By%20Abdus%20Sattar%20Ghazali.htm
March 18th marks the first anniversary of formal release of the Rand
Corporation report on Islam, entitled Civil Democratic Islam: Partners,
Resources, and Strategies.
The report has two fold agenda: 1. Try to create a version of Islam that
suits the post 9/11 western agenda. 2. Creating divisions in the Muslim society
at home and abroad.
The Rand Report recipe to achieve this objective is to encourage and promote
the so-called modernist Muslims and play one section of the society against
another to split the society. In another report released in December 2004, the
Rand Corporation elaborated on the second point and recommended playing the two
major Muslim sects Sunnis and Shiites against each other to achieve policy
objects.
We are not sure what impact the Rand report has on the 1.5 billion Muslims
living in independent Muslim countries as well as minorities in many other
countries.
However, we can see some reaction in the American Muslim community where the so
called progressive or modern Muslims are trying to benefit from the current
atmosphere of fear and siege caused by the arbitrary arrests, FBI interviews,
racial profiling, surveillance of their mosques, closing down of Islamic
charities and constant anti-Islam and anti-Muslim propaganda in the mainstream
media.
We are experiencing the re-emergence of Orientalism of the 19th century aimed
at forcing the Muslims living in US to abandon the basic tenets of Islam. This
neo-Orientalism is coming in the shape of such research documents as the Rand
Report which questions the authenticity of Islams holy scripture, the Quran.
Even a fake version of Quran is now available in print. It was distributed in a
private school in Kuwait.
At the same time, we see cropping up of some Muslim groups such as Free
Muslims Against Terrorism, Progressive Muslim Union of North America (PMUNA)
and Center for Islamic Pluralism which are not only challenging the basic
tenets of Islam but also challenging the established Muslim organizations.
Free Muslims Against Terrorism, established by Kamal Nawash who ran for
Virginia State Assembly in November 2003 as a Republican candidate. One can
well understand his political ambitions and hidden agenda of his organization.
Just one example, how it is working against the American Muslim groups. In
January this year the Executive Director of Free Muslims Against Terrorism,
wrote an e mail to Enver Masud of an Islamic website, Wisdom Foundation,
saying: We are very disappointed in your site and it should be taken down
. I
will recommend to our extremist watch committee that we place your site on our
list of extremist sites or sites that support terrorism. Here is the website
address of Wisdom Foundation where one can see what kind of message Enver Masud
has: www.twf.org
The Progressive Muslim Union of North America (PMUNA) was formed on November
15, 2004 by some professed moderates who embrace the simple proposition that
you are a Muslim if you say you are a Muslim -- for whatever reason or set of
reasons -- and that no one is entitled to question or undermine this identity.
The PMUNA is now forcing mainstream Muslim organizations to take positions on
even non-issues in order to put them at odds with their own community, and if
don't take a position they would be considered as the "bad or extremist"
Muslims. Sarah Eltantawi, one of its co-founders is demanding the major Muslim
groups and organizations to take position on a non-issue, i.e. if a woman can
lead Friday prayers. It is not an uncommon knowledge that the status of woman
in Islam is now being used by the West to defame Islam.
I demand to know where the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and the
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) stands on this issue. I demand to
know where the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) stands on this issue.
And KARAMAH, the American Sufi Muslim Association, Women in Islam, Azizah
Magazine, and other groups who speak for Muslims and Muslim women, Eltantawi
asks.
The PMUNA is not alone in working against the major American Muslim
organizations. The first goal of Center for Islamic Pluralism established by
Stephan Shwartz, a Muslim convert, is the removal of CAIR and ISNA from
monopoly status in representing Muslims to the American public because,
according to CIP, as long as they retain a major foothold at the highest
political level, no progress can be made for moderate American Islam. By the
way, Shwartz claims to be a Sufi Muslim and the Rand study recommends promotion
of Sufism in Islam for US policy objectives.
The Rand Report is silent on the reasons of discontentment in the Muslim
world. The report does not address any of the core issues that are central in
developing the perceptions of the Muslim world like; Palestine, Kashmir and
Chechnya issues and the exploitative political systems supported by the
American or European elites. No reference is made to the Wests support for
totalitarian secular Muslim regimes, Israels endless pogroms against the
Palestinians and ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Muslims in Eastern Europe
and Chechnya.
A number of recent studies have reaffirmed that the reason for anti-American
sentiments in the Muslim masses is because of American policies. Pentagon
advisory group, Defense Science Board, in its November 2004 report pointed out
that Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies.
American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated
the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for
the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.
To give a helping held in the daunting task of countering the anti-American
sentiments in the Muslim world some moderate Muslims established the American
Muslim Group on Policy Planning (AMGPP) on December 13, 2004. The AMGPP is
willing to play a very active role in helping improve US image and counter the
tide of extremism and anti-Americanism in the Muslim World, the AMGPP founder
explains. Now one may ask does this group supports Bush administrations policy
objects such as the occupation of Iraq, the war against Afghanistan, torture in
Guantanamo Bay, Baghram and Abu Ghraib and support of undemocratic Muslim
governments.
In this context, I would like to refer to a report Understanding Islamism
issued earlier this month by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group:
The failure to address the Palestinian question and, above all, the decision
to make war on Iraq and the even more extraordinary mishandling of the post-war
situation there have unquestionably motivated and encouraged jihadi activism
across the Muslim world.
According to the report (the quotation of which does not mean its
endorsement), Sunni political Islamism, is definitely modernist in most
essential respects, favoring non-violent over violent strategies, open to
dialogue and debate and interested in democratic ideas. The report adds: that
the West can encourage this evolution. But should it choose to do so, it will
need to drop or at least moderate its more activist and interventionist
impulses where Muslim countries are concerned, display greater respect for
their sovereignty, understand their ambition to renegotiate their relations
with it over a range of issues and come to terms with and take account of their
viewpoints on the most controversial questions in the current relationship,
notably the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq and the modalities of the "war
against terrorism" in general.
The report warned that if "moderate" is defined to mean "co-optable", it can
only really refer to groups and tendencies which fail to articulate the
frustrations and expectations of the mass of "ordinary decent Muslims", have
little or no purchase on their political reflexes and will prove unable to
promote either significant reform in Muslim countries or a substantive
modernization of their cultural and ideological outlook. Rather than reducing
the appeal of extremist currents, the patronizing of "moderates" in this sense
by Western governments risks reinforcing it, while undermining the modernist
tendency in Sunni Islamism to the benefit of fundamentalists and jihadis, the
International Crisis Group report concluded.
Returning to the Rand report, Civil Democratic Islam: partners, resources,
strategies, the suggestions of its author, Cheryl Benard, are nothing more than
a Machiavellian manifesto that seeks to enforce Western hegemony and cultural
imperialism through the policy of divide and rule. The type of Islam that
Benard espouses is a passive and weak Islam that can be easily penetrated and
hence reformulated to suit the Wests agenda.
The report may be seen as the latest in a long series of policy papers by the
embedded intellectuals dedicated to further the military and economic
objectives of the West as well as cultural onslaught on the Muslims.
In a briefing entitled Taking Saudi Out of Arabia - given on July 10, 2002
to a the Defense Policy Board, former RAND analyst Laurent Murawiec described
Saudi Arabia as the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous
opponent to US interests in the Middle East. He argued that Washington should
demand that Saudi Arabia stop supporting terrorism or face seizures of its
oil fields and its financial assets in the US. Murawiec urged a multi-stage
Grand strategy for the Middle East, beginning with Iraq as the tactical pivot,
continuing to Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot and finally to Egypt as the
prize.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American
Muslim Perspective www.amperspective.
AB [EMAIL PROTECTED]
First They Came for the EXTREMIST, FUNDAMENTALIST & MODERATE Muslims. And I
DIDNT Speak Out Because I Wasn't An Extremist, Fundamentalist or a Moderate
Muslim. Then FINALLY They Came for Me the NON-PRACTICING Muslim And NO Muslims
Were Left to Speak Out for ME.
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