Anjuli Pandavar is a British atheist who was raised a Muslim in South Africa.

She was recently shut out of (misnamed!) Free Thought Blogs because, they say:

We have  been receiving complaints [about Anjuli Pandavar] from readers and other bloggers for months — and recent posts [by her] praising Fox News and blaming black Americans for racism were the final straw. … We are skeptics and critics of dogma and authoritarianism, and in addition, we recognize that the nonexistence of deities entails a greater commitment to human values, and in particular, an appreciation of human diversity and equality.”

Pompous nonsense! And dogmatic. And wrong. There is absolutely nothing about atheism that requires one to “appreciate” Lefty dogma about “diversity” and “equity”.

They go on:

We are for feminism, against racism [except when it is against Whites], for diversity, against inequity.

It’s a general sentiment, but if you can’t meet any of it, you don’t belong here. We’ve been agonizing over rejecting Anjuli Pandavar all summer long, and the consensus of the active members of the FtB community was that her continued presence was a betrayal of our principles.

You’ve gotta feel sorry for them. They went through agonies before kicking out a black woman for calling anti-White racism what it is.

Anjuli Pandavar writes cogently and incisively at Jihad Watch:

Thursday was 4 July 2019, the 832^nd anniversary of the Battle of Hattin, arguably the most symbolic, if not the most fateful, of Christian follies, when the stage was set for the Kingdom of Jerusalem to lose the very city that gave it its proud name, and for jihad to subdue Christian mediaeval backwardness under the yoke of Islamic pre-medieval backwardness. The Crusaders had taken the Cross and by virtue of that fact alone, most believed themselves invincible. Considerations of practicalities such as water, terrain or supply lines, or indeed, Salah ad-Din’s battle plans, were secondary at best, blasphemous at worst. The Crusaders had God, but they lost. It was inconceivable to them that Salah ad-Din, too, had God, and by virtue of that fact alone, the Muslims, too, believed themselves invincible. Relying on God in war is truly a gamble in which the odds are even.

Eight hundred and thirty-two years later, the unholy trinity of the Occident is secular: the god of political correctness; the god of multiculturalism; the god of diversity. Different gods purportedly wielded against the same jihad, except this time straining to subdue modern Judeo-Christian enlightenment under the same Islamic pre-mediaeval backwardness with which it confronted the Crusaders. On this year’s 4 July, we find ourselves in the midst of transition from the jihad of incessant victimhood, incessant taking of offence and incessant demands for special treatment, to the jihad of violent attacks and brutal enforcement of Shari’a by any Muslim, whether obviously “fighting in the way of Allah” or not. The voices that have been warning of this for so long now face more than just shrill denunciations for the blasphemies of “racism”, “fascism”, “intolerance” and “Islamophobia”, and for the heresy of being “far-right”. In chilling enactment of George Orwell’s 1984, they are being erased, and all levels of society are complicit in their erasure. Exactly how bad things have to get before such voices are taken seriously remains to be seen.

Gut-feel and all evidence of what jihad has managed to get away with in the West so far, strongly suggest that these voices of warning and truth will never be listened to. It seems that some of what were once Western societies will be defending Islam even as all manifestations of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and all other religions are destroyed, even as all democracy and all freedoms are obliterated, even as slavery is reinstated … , even as young white girls are shipped off en mass for sale in the Islamic heartlands, even as those who refuse dhimmitude and those who have left Islam are rounded up and publicly beheaded or crucified, even as married women see their husbands murdered before their eyes and are themselves dragged off to be raped, as per Muhammad’s excellent example, they will still be insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, is just like any other religion, and that Muslims are victims who have to be protected from “Islamophobia”.

And what of the God that the Enlightenment had relegated to a personal choice? I disagree with my Christian friends that we find ourselves in this worsening madness because “we have abandoned God”, and must return to him if we are to save ourselves from jihad. We owe our freedom, our equality and our democracy to our ousting God from his throne and lodging him instead in the hearts of those who will have him. God as free choice is the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment and one of the foundation stones of individual autonomy. Christian ideologues … seem not to realise that they argue directly against individual freedom when they seek to re-elevate God to a cosmic imperative. … Do not the perpetrators of jihad account for their own people’s troubles in exactly the same terms as Christian ideologues do? The ummah languishes in backwardness and misery in the face of infidel prowess, according to Qutb, Al-Banna, Maududi, Al-Qaradawi and others, precisely because Muslims have abandoned Islam and must return to it. Inter-religious squabbles over who has God and who hasn’t have always been the one-sided blindness on which religious exceptionalism, not to say arrogance, floundered. That way lies tragedy. … This is not the time for Christians to be stoking turf wars with atheists.

Just to be absolutely clear, I am an atheist … Not only that, I think religion erodes our innate sense of ethics, and that faith can diminish our humanity. But I also accept that belief is a central component of the way many people’s heads work. That, in and of itself, does not make them bad people. My head, though, does not work in that way. I could not function if there were something that I had to accept without question. The problem before us right now is Islam and I do not care if someone leaves Islam to become a Bible-basher or a Hari-Krishna chanter or an atheist. All I care about right now is that as many Muslims as possible leave Islam, that we support the victims of Islam, wherever they are in the world, and that we roll back jihad, by whatever means necessary. Muslims are already raping our daughters and we are already complicit in their deeds. The situation is dire.

We are helpless in face of the jihad onslaught because we have abandoned ourselves. We are no longer the human beings that the Enlightenment created.

We are not even the human beings who vowed to go on to the end, to fight in France, to fight on the seas and oceans, to fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, to defend our island, whatever the cost may be, to fight on the beaches, to fight on the landing grounds, to fight in the fields and in the streets, to fight in the hills; to never surrender. Where are those heroic people now? If they are still with us, it is perhaps the greatest tragedy that they will live to see that they have died for nothing.

We became complicit when we substituted political correctness and identity politics for our common human decency and respect for human life and human freedoms, as if what wasn’t broke needed fixing. We drank from the poisoned chalice of “groups” and “communities” having rights that supersede the rights of individuals and entitlements to protection over the protection of individuals. Britain’s Muslim rape gang crisis stems not solely from Islamic sanction of such behaviour and jihad insistence on it, but from those Muslims who would be inclined to rape finding themselves in the enabling environment created by multicultural Britain. It is both dishonest and dishonourable to refer to Muslim rape gangs as either “Asian” or “grooming gangs”. They are distinguished not by being “Asian” or even “Pakistani”. They are Muslim, and they rape because they are Muslim (anyone with a fully-functioning capacity for language will immediately recognise that this in no way implies anything about Muslims not involved in gang rape). … In 80s and 90s Britain, there was widespread fear of social workers who seized children from parents at the slightest sign of anything that could indicate child abuse. Now social workers aid and abet paedophilia. Then, the residents of entire council estates physically drove paedophiles from their houses. Now, they won’t touch them. Is that because the white paedophile rings of the 80s and 90s did not have a 1.6 billion-strong religion behind them? Is it because then, “racism” still meant “racism,” and those who knew they weren’t racist had no fear of those who would call them that?

It has been a small step from identity politics to so-called “oppressed and oppressor groups”, to “all whites are racist”, to the denial of Muslim women’s oppression, to infidels taking offence at critique of Islam, to our own schools indoctrinating our own children to favour an ideology intent on enslaving them, and of course, to denial of the Muslim rape gang crisis.

In London, the setting of 1984, on 4 July 2019, a trial opened in the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, otherwise known as “the Old Bailey”. It was no ordinary trail, but one in which the British state, by means foul and fouler, once more attempted to turn an innocent man into a criminal, after having failed several times before. A farce played out behind a noble injunction carved in stone over the heads of all who enter upon that august place: Defend the Children of the Poor and Punish the Wrongdoers. The man on trial was Tommy Robinson, and he was on trial for doing exactly that: defending the children of the poor and attempting to have the wrongdoers punished. Robinson, in his own naivete, still believes that the British state observes the rule of law, and fails to understand why mainstream journalists are happy to see the state abuse him. The wrongdoers, as it turned out, were not only the gangs of Muslim men who raped tens or hundreds of thousands of poor infidel girls up and down the land, but the many and varied arms of the state itself, who not only failed to punish the wrongdoers, but went out of their way to protect them and continue to protect them. The Ministry of Truth has shown that just because something is written in stone, doesn’t mean it’s true forever. Right before sending this essay off for publication, I learnt that Tommy Robinson had been “found guilty”. 

And now, in the ultimate ignominy, the pinnacle of our civilisational accomplishment, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is to be subjugated to the strictures of Shari’a, a barbaric seventh-century affront to humanity and decency, with the full support of many who would themselves be destroyed by such a folly. For folly it is to believe that self-righteous appeasement of Muslim powers can win over to coexistence and mutual respect adherents of an ideology that holds at its core the certainty of its own supremacy and a sacred, unshakeable hatred of all others, others whom it must, by divine order, kill, convert or subdue, and that employs the vilest and most deceitful of means to attain its end … This coup is taking place at the United Nations complex in New York, where, in the now non-existent shadow of the now non-existent twin towers, those who survived jihad’s greatest-ever single carnage to date and those who came after, do their best to celebrate The 4^th of July. On this day, 243 years ago, they declared their land the protector of the freedom and equality of all human beings, and that from that day forth, no god shall meddle in their affairs.

Doing jihad’s dirty work for it has become an infidel virtue. … By the time the future Antifa Youth gets around to reporting on, denouncing and killing their own parents, there’ll be no one left to listen to the warning voices, for a Dark Age will once again be upon us. All the social, moral and ethical gains so hard-won over the centuries will be abolished overnight, reducing civilisation to that of brutal seventh-century Arabia, a foretaste of which is the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Al-Qaida, Al-Shabaab, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and a spectacularly long list of others. It is most telling that, once brought into extensive contact with Western society and culture, especially at the height of colonialism, the Muslim middle classes, for whom the benefits were not only obvious but also accessible, adopted Western values and habits with some enthusiasm, there being no question in their minds about which was the superior culture. Many tried to do so without jettisoning Islam. Today they still recognise this, but must pretend not to, under pressure both from jihad, that insists that Islam is superior, and from the Western handmaidens of jihad, who insist that all cultures are good.

Ikhwan is the Arabic for brothers.

Jamiat al-Ikhwan al-muslimun means the Muslim Brotherhood.

The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is:

Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

The following quotation is from a letter to the editor of Noozhawk, Santa Barbara, by Donald Thorn. It is a useful timetable of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power with the help of the Obama administration. We came to it via Creeping Sharia which has coined the word “Ikhwanization” to sum up the process.

Today, Egypt has a Muslim Brotherhood hard-liner president (Mohammed Morsi), and there are more calls for the destruction of Israel. There are new fears that the regime will invite al-Qaeda back into Egypt and open up a front with Israel along the Sinai.

Who helped the Muslim Brotherhood gain control? [The State Department] and the White House helped train the Brotherhood during Egypt’s elections, selling out Israel and U.S. interests in the Mideast. Even more troubling is the untold story of how the Obama administration secretly helped bring Islamofascists to power.

Consider the timeline:

»1) 2009: Brotherhood spiritual leader Qaradawi writes President Barack Obama and argues terrorism is a direct response to U.S. foreign policy.

» 2) 2009: Obama travels to Cairo and apologizes to Muslims and invites the Muslim Brotherhood, but snubs Israel and Mubarak.

» 3) 2009: Obama appoints a Brotherhood-tied-Islamist, Rashad Hussain, as U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which supports Muslim Brotherhood.

» 4) 2010: State Department lifts visa ban on Tariq Ramadan … grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood founder.

» 5) 2010: Hussain and Ramadan meet at an American sponsored conference attended by U.S. and Brotherhood officials.

» 6) 2010: Hussain meets in Egypt with Brotherhood’s grand mufti.

» 7) 2010: Obama meets with Egypt’s foreign minister, Gheit, who claims Barack said he was a Muslim.

» 8) 2011: The Brotherhood’s supreme leader calls for jihad against the United States, and Qaradawi calls “days of rage” against Mubarak and pro-western Mideast regimes. Cairo erupts into violence.

» 9) 2011: Obama fails to back his ally, Mubarak, then sends intelligence czar Clapper to Capitol Hill to claim the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate and secular.

» 10) 2011: The Brotherhood wins control of Egyptian parliament, vows to tear up 30-year peace treaty with Israel and re-establishes ties with Hamas and Hezbollah.

» 11) 2011: Obama demands Israel relinquish land to Palestine …

» 12) 2011: State Department formalizes ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, letting diplomats deal directly with Brotherhood officials in Cairo.

» 13) 2012: Obama releases $1.5 billion in foreign aid to new Egyptian regime.

» 14) 2012, June: Morsi becomes Egypt’s president and vows to instate Shariah law, turning Egypt into an Islamic theocracy.

» 15) 2012, June:  A delegation of once-banned Brotherhood terrorists join a Muslim Brotherhood delegation at the White House, meeting with a national security official.

» 16) 2012, July: Obama invites Morsi to visit the White House in September.

What does all this mean? The Muslim Brotherhood’s didn’t just suddenly take over in the Mideast or Egypt. It was helped along by a U.S. president sympathetic to its interests, over those of Israel and the United States.

It certainly looks that way. It looks like there has been an Ikhwanization of the US administration.

How should the US deal with the Muslim Brotherhood?

Karl Schake of the (estimable) Hoover Institution writes:

There is little doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood is not going to be a comfortable partner for the United States. …

The Muslim Brotherhood operates with decentralized national branches in many countries (including the United States). The different branches, however, share core beliefs. They clearly seek to attain political power in order to foster wide-ranging social change. Make no mistake, the Brotherhood is not a status quo political party. It would institute Sharia law, deny women the political and social latitude of men, and, if history is a precedent, be hostile to non-Muslims. …

In Egypt, the influence of the Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda accounts for less of their appeal than their long-standing opposition to the Mubarak government. Egyptian politicians are keenly aware that while most Egyptians support an Islamic government, polling of public attitudes indicates Islam is not a priority for Egyptian voters — only 3 percent of respondents in recent polls considered Sharia law an important issue. Egyptians are overwhelmingly concerned about security, the economy, and justice.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is not Hamas or Hezbollah …

Note that Hamas, an actively terrorist organization, is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood …

…  at least not yet. It does not bring violence into the political sphere. It was not the motivating force in toppling Hosni Mubarak; in fact, its members were late to the revolution. But the Brotherhood capitalized on its decades of political organization and social activism to dominate the elections.

This should not have been surprising; the Brotherhood had a structural advantage over all of the other political parties just forming. But the sharp decline in support for Brotherhood candidates in Egypt’s June 2012 presidential elections suggested that voters were irritated at the Brotherhood’s ineffectualness in Parliament, concerned that it broke its promise not to run a candidate in the presidential elections, and worried about Islamist domination of Egypt’s politics.

Though Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi did win the election, the Egyptian voters expressed real concern about these issues during presidential polling. Exit polls suggest voters were even more distrustful of the military’s candidate, worried the secular candidate represented the Mubarak past. Voters also resented the military’s moves to usurp Parliament and the Constitution drafting process. For now, it looks like Egyptians are holding the Muslim Brotherhood accountable for their political actions, not just their ideological appeal. …

What they all agree on is that the US should continue providing Egypt with massive aid regardless of who is in power:

Even those political actors deeply suspicious of U.S. policies and resentful of our past actions want the United States to be a major participant in their countries’ transitions. … They want  American [economic] assistance — and they don’t have much sympathy for our current economic straits, given how much more dire are their own are. … They want us to actually care about their futures, not what they can do to advance our interests. …

But if what happens to them in no way serves US interests, why should the US care about them? There is something childish about such thinking.

The most worrisome thought dealing with Brotherhood and even Salafist politicians is not what will happen should they succeed, but what will happen should they fail. Moderate Muslims have been winning the argument over the past decade that al Qaeda’s nihilist vision isn’t the path. Restoration of the caliphate by any means is not the Islam most Muslims want. 

How can he possibly know that?

He is basing his conclusions on what diplomats said to each other when they met at Doha. How far are the communications of diplomats likely to reflect “what most Muslims want”?

He takes an optimistic view of what “the people” in the Arab world want, but issues a warning:

Elections in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya — even the glacially slow political change that the Gulf’s authoritarian governments are quietly experimenting with — demonstrate the people of the Arab world want accountable and transparent governments. They want institutions to constrain the power of rulers; they want grievances addressed; and they want the means by which to change their leaders if those leaders aren’t responsive to their concerns. The revolutions of the Arab spring have given citizens of those countries hope that political change can achieve those ends. If governments fail to produce that change, the al Qaeda narrative could again get traction in the disillusionment and despair that follows.

Is that something the US should fear? How much worse would al Qaeda be than the Muslim Brotherhood? How bad the Muslim Brotherhood will be, only time can show.

It is an interesting essay. Read it all here.