Citizens of the Western democracies are being forced to invest in their own defeat and subjugation by Islam.

How?

Sam Westrop, the director of Islamist Watch, a department of Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, is a leading authority on “extremist” Muslim organizations and individuals in the Western world. He is to be believed when he explains how American tax-payers’ money is funding Islamic terrorism. It’s a horrifying fact, and the funding urgently needs to be stopped.

He writes at the National Review:

Extremist movements disguise their activities as schools or charities. In Tuesday’s speech, President Trump denounced the flow of U.S. money to Pakistan while that nation harbors terrorists. South Asian Islamism is an enormous problem, and yet a great deal of the discussion in America surrounding Islamism focuses on the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood.

But the Muslim Brotherhood is far from the only Islamist network in the United States; it is simply the best known. Other Islamist movements also benefit from government ignorance about the diversity of Islam and Islamism across the globe.

The South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), for instance, has received millions from the U.S. taxpayer for its powerful network of charities and welfare services, which are designed to obtain external funding as well as legitimize JI as a representative voice of Muslims, in both America and South Asia. Although JI has its own ideologues, literature, and infrastructure, it is often described as the South Asian “cousin” of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qazi Ahmad Hussain, head of JI in Pakistan, has declared: “We consider ourselves as an integral part of the Brotherhood and the Islamic movement in Egypt. . . . Our nation is one.” JI’s history is bloody. During the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, JI fighters helped Pakistani forces massacre hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis seeking independence from Pakistan. Several JI leaders guilty of these war crimes fled to the West, where they helped establish JI organizations that operated as community leadership groups.

Two western JI leaders have since been sentenced to death in absentia for these killings by a UN-backed war-crimes tribunal.

A tribunal backed by the UN doing the right thing? Look out for pigs in the sky over Turtle Bay!

One of those convicted, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, served as a leading official of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a prominent American Muslim organization. Twice a year, ICNA jointly hosts a conference with the Muslim American Society (MAS), a leading Muslim Brotherhood institution. Unsurprisingly, these conferences are filled with extremist preachers. Ahmed Taha, an ICNA-MAS official who organized their conference in December, has republished posts on social media stating: “O Muslim, O servant of God. There is a Jew behind me, come kill him.”

Despite its long history of extremism, in 2016 ICNA received $1.3 million of taxpayers’ money as part of a grant awarded by the Department of Homeland Security.

ICNA is not the only JI organization in America. Nor is it the only JI group to have received taxpayer funds. Behind ICNA and other front groups around the world, JI operates an enormous network of registered charities and community organizations. One of the most prominent is the Rural Education and Development (READ) Foundation.

READ manages 374 schools in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Pakistani-controlled area of the Kashmir region, as well as in nearby Pakistani rural areas. These schools teach over 100,000 students. Although based in Pakistan, READ has offices in the United Kingdom and a network of representatives in the United States. ICNA and other U.S.-based JI groups describe READ as their “partner”. READ’s own JI links are clear: board member Mohammad Ayub also appears to serve as a leader of the JI branch in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

As Canadian journalist Sonya Fatah notes, READ is part of a “complex web of organizations” run by JI. These welfare and social-services agencies serve both to “gain converts in poor rural communities” and to “win votes”.  Within this web, READ’s “sister organizations” include the Al Khidmat Foundation and the Ghazali Education Trust, two other Pakistani charities focused on schools and education, which openly identify as JI institutions and also enjoy close partnerships with ICNA. In 2006, JI’s own website announced that Al Khidmat had given 6 million rupees ($100,000) to Hamas for their “just Jihad”.

How many Americans have any idea how deep, how wide, how intricate the web of Islamic subversion is in their own country and the world – let alone suspect that their own money is going towards its support? How many politicians know? Democrats might relish the fact if they knew it. Would Republicans be willing to do anything about it?

At least some of the multifarious groups have been recognized as terrorist organizations:

Officials from both the Al Khidmat Foundation and the Ghazali Education Trust work closely with Syed Salahuddin, the leader of Hizbul Mujahideen, JI’s paramilitary wing. Both Salahuddin and Hizbul Mujahideen have recently been designated as terrorists by the U.S. government.

But –

From 2013 to 2016, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development handed out over $2 million to READ.

If JI’s involvement with acts of genocide, its funding of Hamas, and its continued terrorist links are not enough to suggest these grants were a bad idea, there is also the question of what READ schools are actually teaching their students, subsidized by the American taxpayer.

There is no information publicly available about the textbooks or curricula used in these schools. We do not know what students are taught, and when we asked the State Department, they failed to respond. But a glance at the social-media pages operated by READ schools is not promising. Posts include a homage to Mumtaz Qadri, an Islamic extremist who, in 2011, murdered Punjab governor Salman Taseer in retribution for Taseer’s public support for a Pakistani Christian woman convicted of blasphemy. The READ Facebook post features a portrait of Mumtaz Qadri with a caption that states: “We are all in your debt, O messenger of Allah”.

Tax-payers subsidize the insults and abuse that their enemies hurl at them:

Other social-media postings include text denouncing the “American Secular Terrorists . . . dirty people” who “destroyed Iraq and killed 150,000 Iraqis” on the “instructions of Iran”. 

A number of READ schools have also published photos from school ceremonies in which young children wearing military uniforms and holding guns act out battles — reminiscent of similar events in the Gaza Strip under Hamas.

The U.S. government is not READ’s only publicly listed partner. It enjoys support from a number of Western governments, including grants of over $360,000 in 2012 and 2013 from the British government. …

In the West, READ does not bother to distance itself from hard-line clerics. Speakers at READ events have included Uthman Lateef, an overtly anti-Semitic preacher who has expressed support for convicted terrorists, and Sulaiman Gani, a prominent supporter of convicted al-Qaeda operative Aafia Siddiqui.

In April 2017, the British government’s regulator of charities investigated the READ Foundation after the Times reported it had hosted an event with Yasir Qadhi, an American Salafi preacher who has declared that the punishment for homosexuality is death.

Millions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money have been given to Jamaat-e-Islami organizations. …

The Trump administration is showing interest in addressing the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood. A recent review of the Countering Violent Extremism program divested MB groups of government patronage. Now it falls to the administration to understand that Islamism takes many other forms … The government must actively work to confront and defund them all. 

A poor, illiterate woman named Aasiya Noreen* worked in the fields to help support her family of five children, two of them her own and three of them her husband’s from a former marriage.

Aasiya was a Christian. A Catholic. Her  family were the only Christians in the small village where she lived some thirty miles outside Lahore, the capital of the Punjab in the Islamic state of Pakistan. The Christians of the region were an underclass, traditionally assigned to menial jobs.

One hot summer’s day in June, 2009, Aasiya was harvesting berries along with some Muslim women. They all became thirsty. The Muslim women sent Aasiya to fetch water from a well. Aasiya found a battered tin cup abandoned near the well, and had a drink from it  before refilling it and carrying it to her fellow workers. One of them accused her of drinking from the cup and so making it unclean. Christian lips should not contaminate a cup that Muslims drink from. All the Muslim women agreed on that.  

A dispute arose. Which was the one true religion? The Muslim women knew that Islam was the truth. Aasiya knew that Christianity was the truth. She dared to say (according to her own account), “Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of mankind. What did your Prophet Muhammed ever do to save mankind?”

The Muslim women were deeply offended. They went to their imam and told him that the Christian woman Aasiya Noreen had insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

The imam took action. He gathered together a number of good Muslims willing to defend the Prophet and the true faith of Islam, and led them to the house where Aasiya and her family lived. They set upon her and her husband and her children with righteous blows. The police arrived in time to save the Christian family from being beaten to death. The avenging mob agreed to spare them on condition that the police laid a charge of blasphemy against the woman. The police duly arrested her and put her in jail, where she waited to be brought to trial until November, 2012.

Aasiya told the court that the woman who accused her of blasphemy had a grudge against her, resulting from an old quarrel, and the accusation was made out of a desire for revenge. The judge did not accept her story as a defense. He also chose to overlook inconsistencies in the testimony of the witnesses against her. He decided that she was guilty of blasphemy and sentenced her to death. She was to be hanged for blaspheming against the Prophet Muhammad whose name is never mentioned by a Muslim without having peace wished upon him.

She was the first woman ever to be condemned to death in Pakistan for blasphemy – her crime being considered so heinous that even death was not sufficient punishment. She was also to pay a fine equivalent to $1,100. She and her family had never in all their lives possessed a sum approaching $1,100. Nor did they know of any way they could raise it.

When the verdict was pronounced, the crowd in the court rose to its feet, applauding and shouting “Yes, kill her! Kill her! Allahu Akbar!”. And yet more enthusiasts for justice, more celebrants of the glory of God, broke down the doors to swarm into the court, their furious, triumphant shouts swelling the chorus of “Allahu Akbar!”  The greatness of their merciful God could hardly have been more passionately attested.

Assiya’s husband, Ashiq Masih, appealed the verdict. He and Aasiya hoped that the High Court would at least suspend the sentence.

There was a man in a high position who was deeply moved by the fate of Aasiya and determined to do all he could for her. He was Salmaan Taseer, the governor of the Punjab. He persuaded the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, to come to her rescue. In December 2012, Taseer publicly announced that if the High Court did not suspend her sentence, the president would pardon her. And Zardari would have done so, but the Lahore High Court hastened to issue a stay order against a presidential pardon.

So Aasiya remained in prison in Lahore, in solitary confinement in an 8 by 10 foot windowless cell.

At first the governor would visit her, with his wife and daughter. But then the court ruled that only her husband and lawyer could see her.

On January 4, 2011, Salmaan Taseer was assassinated by one Mumtaz Qadri who resented the governor’s concern for the blasphemer. (He was hanged for the crime in February 2016.) 

The Minister of Minority Affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti – himself a Christian, and the only Christian member of the cabinet – was so disturbed by the case that he set about doing all he could to get the laws of blasphemy changed. He announced that he was prepared to die fighting for Aasiya Noreen’s release. He received many death threats, and on March 2,  2011, he was shot dead in his car near his home.

Many times Aasiya’s appeal was postponed. In October 2014, the High Court finally heard her case – and upheld her death sentence. Her husband then appealed to the President. But he was restrained from issuing a pardon, so her lawyers appealed to Pakistan’s Supreme Court. In July, 2015, the Supreme Court suspended her  death sentence “for the duration of the appeals process”.

Hundreds of Pakistanis have publicly protested against her being still alive. An imam offered $10,000 reward to anyone who would kill her, and apparently some 10 million citizens declared themselves ready and willing to do the noble deed. Assiya’s family have gone into hiding, and they fear for her safety and survival if she were to be released.

That is how the matter stands at present.

Aasiya Noreen is under sentence of death for taking a drink of water from an old cup on a hot day, and saying something she had been taught to believe, to some other women who had been taught that it was something that should not be believed and should not be said.

For a drink of water, for fantastic rumors about “Jesus” and “Muhammad”, lives ruined and lost.   

Aasiya Noreen

*Aasiya Noreen is usually called “Asia Bibi” in press reports. “Bibi” simply means “woman”.