Support Your Local Sharia

David R. Stokes
Sunday, August 02, 2009

It is pretty clear at this point that barring some kind of last minute reality check the Fairfax County (Virginia) Board of Supervisors will approve the Islamic Saudi Academy’s application for a special exemption this Monday, August 3rd. This will enable the Saudi-funded madrasa to expand and plant even deeper roots in America’s backyard, teaching in the anti-democratic traditions of wahhabism.

It will happen despite the fact that neighboring home owners associations are opposed, the land use and legal issues argue against the school and would have been a death knell to any other application, and the academy in question has on many occasions failed to honor previous county agreements, not to mention state law.

Oh, and the wise ones on the panel defiantly refuse to factor in the fact that the Saudi curriculum taught at ISA is filled with hateful things that most Americans would find repugnant – even dangerous. We’re not talking about mere religious ideas. What has been taught there in the past should have caused the powers that be to shut the place down years ago.

Interestingly, just a few days ago one of the academy’s past students – in fact, a former valedictorian and a young man voted “most likely to be martyred” (really) named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali – was resentenced to life in prison for plotting with al-Qaeda and trying to kill President George W. Bush. As the cool song says: “I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.” He graduated in 1999, bounced around for a bit and wound up in Saudi Arabia in 2002.

In his written confession, Abu Ali said: “It was decided that I would go [to the United States] and live a normal life [overtly] to keep attention away from me, marry a Christian woman, and at the same time I would prepare as best I could for operations.” If all this seems decidedly inconsistent for someone who practices a religion of virtue and peace, bear in mind that there is an Islamic doctrine called taqiyya. What it basically means is that deceit is a legitimate weapon when dealing with infidels (read: “We the People”).

Grasping the fact that our determined enemies will at times use monumental deceit to further their cause is imperative right now. The members of the Fairfax County panel seem oblivious to this. More than a quarter of a century ago the board of supervisors denied a similar application by a Christian school, citing traffic concerns. Of course, the traffic is much better now. Right.

“I cannot put the safety of the American citizenry at risk,” said U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, when he handed down Abu Ali’s sentence. Good call, your honor. Now, would you ever consider becoming a county supervisor?

Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, has written a book called, Reflections On The Revolution In Europe. In it he notes: “In the middle of the 20th century, there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe. At the turn of the 21st century, there were between 15 and 17 million.” Now in many major European cities the most common baby names Mohamed, Ayoub, Hamza, etc.

He suggests that these Muslims have not assimilated, but rather have formed “a parallel society.” And they are bringing anti-Semitism back big time.

“Imagine that the West,” Caldwell writes, “at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass inflow of immigrants from Communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported. Something similar is taking place now.”

And it’s not just happening over there.

The expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy may not seem to be that big of a deal to some and certainly the members of the board of supervisors see no threat in allowing them to get a better foothold. But such things are, in fact, part of a pattern of denial and outright stupidity on the part of people who should be intelligent enough to know better.

Convinced, though, of the liberal notion of “enlightened tolerance,” such political leaders are playing a dangerous game of mindless appeasement. There is a growing subculture in this country, a network of nefarious groups sharing a common theo-political vision for taking over everything. Operating under the aegis of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and so many others, they all say one thing, while doing another.

Ignore what they say; watch what they do.

Their unmistakable goal is the dominance of Sharia-law in this country – the world for that matter. In other words, they envision a political overthrow and remaking of everything we know, love, and hold dear as Americans. And they are using the Bill of Rights and opportunities created by a systemic decrease in vigilance to gain ground toward their objective.

I believe in the Christian faith. I therefore do not believe in the tenets of Islam. Nor am I into Buddhist doctrine. I do, though, believe in religious liberty and free speech. But what we are seeing is a case where religious liberty and free speech have become weapons in the hands of would-be terrorists and tyrants.

I will defend with all my heart the right of any Muslim to pray and live according to the precepts of that faith. I will also do all in my power to bear witness about Christianity in the free marketplace of ideas. But if anyone, in the name of religion, or under its cloak, seeks the overthrow of the very system that grants us those freedoms, that’s where the line is drawn.

Free speech ends with the cry of fire in a crowded theater. Religious freedom ends when there is deception en route to coercion that would ultimately lead to an end of liberty for all. And no municipality or government entity should deliberately ignore the toxicity of certain ideas that would undermine the Constitution.

What if the Ku Klux Klan wanted to put a school in Fairfax County? How about if Kim Jong-il decided to put a nice North Korean institution in our backyard – fully funded? I imagine such enterprises would not even get a hearing. Why then the Saudis? The wahhabism taught at the Islamic Saudi Academy should be every bit as objectionable to freedom-loving Americans as what some other enemy might espouse.

But some might ask: What about “moderate” Muslims? Well, as Bruce Bawer points out in his book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam – Sacrificing Freedom, “that while there are such things has moderate and liberal Christianity, there is no such thing as a moderate or liberal Islam. Yes, there are millions of good-hearted individuals who identify themselves as Muslims and who have no enmity in their hearts for their non-Muslim neighbors and coworkers. Some of these Muslims are religiously observant, some are not; but their moderation is not an attribute of the brand of Islam to which they officially subscribed but is, rather, a measure of their own individual character.”

In other words, their moderation comes not from a particular interpretation or variant, but rather “they have chosen to put a certain distance between their own religious thought and practice and the strict tenets of institutional Islam.”

Those of us in Fairfax who oppose the expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy will likely have to concede defeat this Monday. But in doing so we will long remember – at least until the next county election – where the supervisors stood on the issue. Stay tuned.

It appears that many liberal-minded types want us to be more like Europe and their views may be ascendant these days, but those who see European-socialistic-democracy as a model for our future should pay attention to how it is being threatened by an enemy within.

As Mr. Caldwell says in his new book about what is happening there, “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture (Europe’s) meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines (Islam’s) it is generally the former than changes to suit the latter.”