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October 22, 2010

If Bill O'Reilly Had A Hammer

By Andrew G. Bostom
Perhaps Bill O'Reilly was clumsily attempting to mollify the over wrought "walk-out" reaction staged by The View's Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, or the less melodramatic, but equally harsh cultural-relativist scolding he received from host Barbara Walters, in response to his self-evident comments about Muslims having perpetrated the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism on 9/11/01.

Regardless, Mr. O'Reilly opined to guest Deepak Chopra this past Tuesday evening (10/19/10) on The O'Reilly Factor,

All Imam Rauf and his crew have to do is say "...we're going to dedicate this mosque-community center-to peace. And we are going to condemn what happened here on 9/11." [Then] I'll get a hammer and help them down there."

Notwithstanding O'Reilly's homespun hubris, his undeniably broad appeal makes this uninformed, naive proposition particularly dangerous. Indeed founding members of the 9/11 families who created The Coalition to Honor Ground Zero share my concerns. Why then are we alarmed?

"Imam Rauf has shown himself to be perfectly comfortable offering soothing words of peace in one forum, thinly-veiled threats in others," said Debra Burlingame, co-founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America.   "The Islamists with whom Rauf travels have perfected the art of deception.  I'd hate to see Mr. O'Reilly get suckered by this simply because he was embarrassed on daytime TV."  

By offering to wield a hammer on behalf of the Ground Zero Mosque project, Mr. O'Reilly reveals his basic ignorance of Feisal Rauf's expressed ideology, including the imam's Sharia (Islamic Law)-based conception of "peace" itself -- more accurately, a global Pax Islamica.

As reported by the New York Post's Tom Topoussis on June 19, Imam Rauf repeatedly declined to acknowledge, unequivocally, that Hamas is a terrorist organization, despite its formal designation as such by the US State Department, in these words:

Hamas terrorists, especially those in the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, have conducted many attacks, including large-scale suicide bombings, against Israeli civilian and military targets.

Asked by WABC radio interviewer Aaron Klein whether he agreed with the State Department's assessment, Imam Rauf stated, "Look, I'm not a politician. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question." When Klein persisted, asking Rauf again for his view on Hamas, the imam, now exasperated, still refused to agree openly with the State Department's apt designation.

Rauf's repeated refusal to acknowledge that Hamas is indeed a terrorist organization -- jihad terror being Hamas' specific abiding ideology -- is entirely consistent with his own documented lionization of well-known fundamentalist Muslim jurists such as Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), and the founder of modern Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab (d. 1792). Moreover, Rauf praises the contemporary cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi -- Spiritual Leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, immensely popular Al-Jazeera television savant on the Sharia, and in whose name the government of Qatar recently created the Al-Qaradawi Centre for Islamic Moderation -- as "...probably the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today." Qaradawi is an inveterate jihadist and Muslim Jew-hater, who has called for the destruction of Israel in a jihad genocide. He also sanctioned jihad martyrdom operations against American forces in Iraq, and more ominously, Qaradawi has made unabashed appeals for Muslims to wage a "jihad re-conquest" of Europe. His public fatwa on December 2, 2002 stated,

Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and a victor after being expelled from it twice - once from the south, from Andalusia, and a second time, from the east, when it knocked several times on the doors of Athens." Qaradawi's fatwa ruled, in addition, that Muslims should re-conquer, "...former Islamic colonies to Andalus[ia] (Spain), southern Italy, Sicily, the Balkans and the Mediterranean islands.

But perhaps most importantly, Rauf's continued close association with, and nurturing by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad also comports with the imam's  adamant refusal to acknowledge Hamas' ethos of jihad terror. Rauf's Malaysian mentor, Mahathir Muhammad, opined the following at the 2003 Putrajaya Islamic Summit:

To begin with, the governments of all the Muslim countries can close ranks and have a common stand...on Palestine... We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships... We may want to recreate the first century of the Hijrah, the way of life in those times, in order to practice what we think to be the true Islamic way of life 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategize and then to counter-attack. As Muslims, we must seek guidance from the Al-Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Surely the 23 years' struggle of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should do.

Pace Imam Rauf's steadfast refusal to affirm this truth, Hamas' spokespersons, ideologues, and most significantly its clearly articulated ideology in the foundational 1988 Hamas Covenant, Hamas is an unabashed Muslim jihad terrorist organization. The Hamas belief system is a toxic amalgam of, primarily, conspiratorial Islamic Jew-hatred, and jihadism, "updated" with Antisemitic European motifs from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Moreover, Hamas is expressly part of the international jihadist movement which seeks to impose Islamic Law globally and its spokespersons have consistently threatened the US, and the entire West,  not only Israel.

Imam Feisal Rauf abets Hamas' agenda -- global jihadism -- with his silence, and perhaps tacit consent.

But there is nothing "nuanced" about Imam Feisal Rauf's belief in the primacy of Sharia (Islamic Law) in society -- any society -- despite its permanent advocacy of jihad and dehumanizing injunctions on non-Muslims and women.

Rauf, in his 2004 "What's Right With Islam" -- released in Malaysia as, "A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Da'wah From the Heart of America Post-9/11," asserts that the US is in a state of  "readiness" for the Sharia:

...[T]he American political structure is Shariah compliant, for a state inhabited predominantly by Muslims neither defines nor makes it synonymous with an Islamic state.

And Rauf also charts how the US could evolve toward what is clearly his ultimate goal -- an Islamic State -- beginning with a parallel Sharia judiciary:

...[It] also would not be a violation of church-state separation to have a subsidiary entity within judiciary that employs religious jurists...to comment on the compliance of certain decisions...to provide guidance on how Shariah compliant these decisions are...It can become truly Islamic only by virtues of a conscious application of the sociopolitical tenets of Islam to the life of the national, and by an incorporation of those tenets in the basic constitution of the country.

However it is Rauf's earlier 1999 "Islam: A Sacred Law: What Every Muslim Should Know About Sharia" which makes unmistakably clear both the triumphal  basis for his pious Muslim desire to impose Islamic Law, and the far reaching effects of this application:

...God's role in the explicit philosophical construct of the law makes a big difference between the modus operandi of a righteous Muslim judge in a Muslim court and a righteous Western judge in a Western court. The judge who sits in judgment in an Islamic court sits in lieu of God as His worldly representative [khalifa] and is held responsible by God to His values. The Muslim judge explicitly ‘reports to God.' The judge who sits in a Western court is only explicitly responsible to the Constitution, the interpretations of a civil law and its rules...And since a Shariah is understood as a law with God at its center, it is not possible in principle to limit the Shariah to some aspects of human life and leave out others."...The Shariah thus covers every field of law -- public and private, national and international -- together with enormous amounts of material that Westerners would not regard as law at all, because the basis of the Sharl'ah is the worship of, and obedience to, God through good works and moral behavior. Following the Sacred Law thus defines the Muslim's belief in God.

Imam Feisal Rauf's lucidly expressed views can be summed up as follows: Sharia über alles!

Robert H. Jackson was the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, and an associate Supreme Court Justice, well-known for warning in a 1949 dissenting opinion (Terminiello v. Chicago) that if the Court did not "temper doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom,"  it risked morphing  "the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact." Fifty-six years ago, just before his passing in 1954, Justice Jackson wrote a brilliant foreword to an academic treatise on Islamic Law. His simple, pellucid words should serve as a warning for our era, rife with its dual scourges of ignorance and cultural relativism.

In any broad sense, Islamic Law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge -- all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire -- reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law [i.e., Islamic Law, Sharia] of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western Law.

Bill O'Reilly must educate himself about Feisal Abdul Rauf's clearly espoused views and goals. Simply put, Rauf's agenda -- to forge the US into a Sharia-based society -- is a profoundly anti-American agenda.
on "If Bill O'Reilly Had A Hammer"
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