In this video – issued April 5, 2020, by the Middle East Forum – the leading expert on “Islamism”, Sam Westrop, explains how the citizens of the West are paying with their taxes to be the victims of Islamic aggression.

And how the Left-biased media help the aggressors.

He describes the mistakes European and British governments have made in dealing with their Muslim populations. At the 14 minute mark he starts speaking of America, how US governments are making the same mistakes. His most shocking revelation is that “Islamists are getting more money under the Trump administration than under the Obama administration”.

That, of course, is The Swamp in action. If the revelation reaches the President, we expect and hope that government funding of radical Muslim groups will stop.

“Progressivism” – which is to say, Leftism – is a secular ideology, hostile to religion.

Doctrinaire and intolerant as it is, it can reasonably be classed as a religion itself – but essentially godless. (Which accounts for its superficial appeal to many atheists.)

Yet in recent years the Left has been in alliance with Islam. How can this be explained? How do the theoreticians of the Left condone it? How do the theologists of Islam excuse it?

In an important article for City Journal, republished in an expanded form for the Middle East Forum, Sam Westrop, Director of Islam Watch, discusses this weird phenomenon of political cognitive dissonance, examining it from the Muslim side of the illogical equation:

In 2018, the first two Muslim women elected to Congress – Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – did so with the help of both Islamist and progressivist bases. For years, critics have thought the collaboration between Islamist groups and sections of the Left to be a cautious, temporary ideological alliance. In fact, a growing section of American Islamism has sincerely embraced progressivist politics, despite its clear contradictions with theocratic ideals.

Writing recently in the New York Times, Cato Institute fellow Mustafa Akyol argues that America’s “Muslim community”, far from campaigning for theocracy (as claimed by “Islamophobes”), is in fact being swarmed by a powerful, welcome “creeping liberalism”.

Liberalism now embraced by Muslims in America?

On the face of it, it seems he has a point. Prominent Muslim voices lead Women’s Marches in cities across America and argue for “intersectional feminism”. Groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – just 10 years ago named by federal prosecutors as part of an enormous terror finance network – now spend a great deal of time publishing social media items about Black Lives Matter while also campaigning for “social justice”, prison reform and higher minimum wages. Leading Muslim clerics are to be found praising Malcolm X as “our prince”, and protesting Trump’s immigration plans at the southern border. And a few Muslim campaigners even express solidarity with transgender and “queer” activists, and publicly dream, as the prominent Islamist-linked activist Linda Sarsour puts it, of “a world free of anti-black racism, islamophobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, sexism, and misogyny.”

All of which would seem to be listed hypocritically. Is this a display of taqiyya – the lying that is permitted to Muslims if it benefits their faith? So merely a ruse, an expedient ploy?

If Sarsour is still a believing Muslim – and as she always appears in a hijab she surely wants us to know that she is – the hypocrisy is glaring. In Africa, blacks – even if they’re Muslims – are intensely despised by Arabs. Their anti-black racism  is enshrined in their language, the word for a black, “abd”, being also their word for a slave. “Islamophobia” – irrational fear of islam – does not exist, since fear of Islam is entirely rational. Islam, not America, is xenophonic. And Islam is doctrinally antisemitic. So homophobic is Islam, that Islamic law requires homosexuals to be killed. As women are subordinate – virtual slaves – in Islam, it is systemically misogynistic, quintessentially sexist. And its homophobia and sexism implies intolerance of “transphobia”. As for “ableism” and “ageism”, they are probably thrown in to accentuate how totally tolerant these deeply intolerant liars are.

Sam Westrop considers the question of Sarsour’s sincerity – at least in wanting to sing the same song as the Left. (Which is itself intensely hypocritical – for instance when it claims to be against antisemitism).

This is not, however, a broad creeping liberalism; it is, more specifically, a creeping progressivist narrative – and it is changing the face of American Islamism.

But is this genuine progressivism? Or is this just part of the perennial debate among Islamists living in the West: in the effort to advance a theocratic agenda using lawful means, to what extent should Islamists dilute their message to fit Western political narratives?

The conversion, or concession, of some American Muslims active in politics to the “progressivist narrative” is opposed by some outspoken imams. Do they represent only a minority opinion?

Standing against the march of progress, Akyol observes, is a minority group of “conservative” Muslim clerics. He quotes a few from extreme Salafi circles, but there is in fact a much broader array of contending ideas among America’s Sunni Muslims – and its Islamists – on the question of whether progressivist politics pose a threat or afford an opportunity.

Many of those who oppose the progressive trend are not bearded Wahhabis in Arab dress. Ismail Royer, for instance, is a former jihadist who claims to have moderated and now works for the multi-faith Religious Freedom Institute in D.C. Although he claims to regard Islam as a “vehicle for social justice”, he firmly rejects progressivism, and urges an Islamic alliance with conservative Christian movements – even writing pieces in Christian publications in support of the evangelical opposition to gay marriage.

Islamists will, however, find a limited supply of sympathy from American evangelicals.

Sections of the Left, meanwhile, have a long history of welcoming Islamist activists into their tent. But it is the very eagerness of the Left to co-opt American Islam that concerns certain leading Islamists.

Traditional, purist Salafi and Wahhabi clerics condemn those modernist Salafis trying to “westernise Islam” by appealing to progressivist impressions of Islam. The modernist Salafis use progressive rhetoric about Islamophobia and the Black Lives Matter movement, but also warn about the dangers of support for feminism and homosexuality within Muslim Students Associations, which are supported and funded by organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, the Muslim Student Associations (when taking a break from those intersectional solidarity marches) debate fractiously whether to “de-platform” either the “regressive” Salafi clerics, or those extra-progressive Muslims who seem just a little too committed to working with Jewish groups or advocating for gay rights.

There is no doubt that some of the more ascetic Islamists reject all ideological alliances. Some may engage in some barebones interfaith activities, but they do so while warning against accepting the “validity” of other religions and preaching that “Islam in the West is a resistance movement against totalitarian liberal ideology”. …

But there are many, especially within modernist Salafi networks, who have observed the growth of political activist Islamist movements in America, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat-e-Islami, and partly ascribe their success to the adoption of modish political trends. Much of the progressivist rhetoric that emanates from these modernist Salafis, however, is manifestly deceitful.

In their private sermons before Muslim audiences, modernist Salafi clerics rail against the evils of apostate ideologies. Yasir Qadhi, a leading cleric of the AlMaghrib Institute, for instance, denounces the theology of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (NOI) as heretical and “perverted’. In public, however, Qadhi’s clerical colleagues eulogize Malcom X – a progressivist darling — and praise NOI leader Louis Farrakhan as a great radical hero. This may be ideologically incoherent, but it is tactically shrewd.

Other duplicity is more plainly apparent. The Texas-based imam Omar Suleiman, for instance, has been an active voice in the protests against the Trump administration’s immigration. In March 2018, he was arrested at the Capitol after “civil disobedience” to demand “protection for young immigrant Dreamers”. And yet before a Muslim audience, Suleiman has warned young girls, without condemnation, that if they are “promiscuous” they may be killed by a family member.

Or look at Islamist media: Al Jazeera’s social media channel AJ+ broadcasts documentaries on transgender rights and the wickedness of misogyny, homophobia and other bigotries; while its Arabic parent station broadcasts sermons by Muslim Brotherhood clerics advocating the killing of gays, and offering husbands permission to beat their wives.

Some Islamists have sought to explain American Islamist institutions’ partial-embrace of progressivism as a response to “Islamophobia”. Shariq Siddiqui, an official of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), has written that “Islamophobia makes it difficult for ISNA and Muslim Americans to determine which positions are centered on their religious values and which positions are based on political necessity. … For example, in 2003, ISNA was opposed to gay marriages, but now ISNA is part of a coalition working in favor of gay marriage.”

Others have made it clear that non-Muslim progressivists are dispensable partners. As Counter Islamist Grid director Kyle Shideler recently discovered: newly-elected Virginia General Assembly Member Ibraheem Samirah (who was recently exposed as a virulent anti-Semite) has explicitly compared the Islamist alliance with progressivists to the decision of the Islamic prophet Muhammad “to form treaties with his enemies. He had to form alliances with people who weren’t necessarily believers of his message, who would later on become people who would be his enemies.” (Samirah also served as a senior campaign official for freshman Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.)

So expediency is indeed a motive for Muslims echoing progressive – and essentially un-Islamic – ideas. And imams are not comfortable with the tactic.

… [A]n increasing number of clerics and Muslim thinkers have begun to regret their forays into progressivist politics. Leading modernist Salafi clerics such as Yasir Qadhi now appear deeply shocked that Muslim students have moved from carefully taking advantage of progressivist trends to openly supporting “LGBTQ” campaigns on campuses.

They can accept going along with the progressive Left hypocritically, but not sincerely.

And indeed, at one end of the spectrum, there is a rising group of activists from Islamist circles who seem to believe in this fused progressivist-Islamist creed. Across America, branches of the Council on American-Islamic Relations are today staffed with young hijab-wearing graduates of Muslim Students Associations, who appear to have reconciled working for terror-linked extremists while also publishing transgender rights petitions on their social media accounts. …

Such as Linda Sarsour:

Sarsour is a harbinger of a broader trend. Whether American Islamist movements intended to embrace progressivism authentically or not, many Islamist groups are now so firmly entrenched in the progressive movement that a generation of young American Muslims is growing up convinced that the progressivist social justice and sexual identity narratives are intrinsic components of the Islamist agenda.

No wonder some traditional Islamists speak out so forcefully against “liberal ideology”, or caution against too tight an embrace of progressivist allies – their own radicalism is being supplanted.

American Islamists are conflicted. Some reject the embrace of left-wing politics entirely. Others clearly exploit progressivist organizations to advance their cause. And then there are some, a new generation of intersectional Islamists, who seem to have found a genuine way to advocate for, or warily justify, “queer”-friendly politics. It looks like the progressivist rhetoric of Islamist activists such as Sarsour, or politicians such as Ilhan Omar, is sincere – even if it seems patently confused and inconsistent to any rational observer.

This poses a new sort of threat. These intersectional Islamists – these theo-progressives – are part of a broader radical undertaking that has a much greater chance of imposing extremist ideas on American society than the Muslim Brotherhood or Wahhabis ever did.

On their side, the Progressives have made concessions to Islam to secure the alliance – by, for instance, refusing to censure its misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism. The international Left in general supports the Muslim demand that criticism of Islam be banned, and the UN is working on it. (See here and here.)  Finding fault with Islam must be deemed “hate speech”. To protect Islam from it, freedom of speech can be – must be – sacrificed. The American Left endorses the demand.

But there is no hypocrisy in that. The American Left is in any case unhappy with the First Amendment.

At least on this issue Progressivism and Islam are in genuine accord: freedom is not to be tolerated.

If we think our interests may only come first and we don’t care for others, it is a treason of our values, a betrayal of all moral values.”

So said Emmanuel Macron, who is (curiously) the president of France (at a gathering in Paris of heads of state to commemorate the centennial of Armistice Day).

The idea is confused. “Only” come first? How many can come first? And to put one’s own interests first does not exclude “caring for others”.

Macron was defending globalism – though he hesitated to call it that because, he admitted, globalism made many French citizens “nervous”.

He prefers to call it “internationalism”, and in defense of it he condemns nationalism. (Donald Trump – sitting near him at the time – proudly  calls himself a nationalist, and insists on putting  his own country’s interests first as his job absolutely requires him to do, so Macron’s speech was generally taken to be an attack on the US president.)

Because internationalism is in itself a good thing to Macron, he praised the League of Nations (!), the UN (!), and the EU(!). (But not empires.)

And he is passionately keen on every country in the world signing on to the Paris Agreement which would commit them all to saving the planet from burning up in, say, a hundred years’ time. For this they must  give up burning fossil fuels to provide their energy for light and heat, industry, business, transport and communication, and let the wind blow it to them instead. To maintain this utopian ideal over the entire globe, UN sponsors of the Agreement frankly admit that world government will be necessary.

The biggest of all possible international organizations that would be, and so the most desirable to internationalists like President Macron. (It’s too soon to aspire to a Federation of Galaxies. That will come when someone finds how to use wind or solar power for intergalactic travel.)

As well as the global warming alarmists, there’s another group aspiring to world government, not as a federation of nations or creeds, but under its own absolute power – Islam.

Islam does not put its own interests first, allowing others to pursue theirs with equal concentration; it wants to rule humankind all by itself.

To attain its end, it will use force whenever it can. For Islam, force is not a last but a first resort. It will use other, non-violent means, such as infiltration and indoctrination of infidel societies, only when force – outright hot war – is not likely to succeed. But force is never to be abandoned. Intermittently, small acts of violence to terrify enemy societies can, must, and do accompany the non-violent efforts.

The cry is often raised that it is because Christian values have been abandoned in the West that Islam has been able to spread in it, filling as it were a religious vacuum.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

While it is certainly true that Christianity as such has lost its hold over most people in the West – which is to say Western Europe and the countries of the New World, with the exception of a large group of Americans – Christian values are dominating the actions of Western leaders as strongly as ever they did.

Indeed, it is those very Christian values that are betraying the West to Islam.

President Macron speaks for all the globalist Western leaders when he says that to put one’s own country’s interests first is “a treason of our values, a betrayal of all moral values”.

The moral values that he means – that they all mean, including the self-confessed Communists in the EU government – are Christian values: self-denial, self-abasement, serving others before, or rather than, oneself.

Whether or not those are good values for individuals to live by is a matter of opinion. (We say they are not. We say that every one of us is his own, not other people’s, responsibility. Our “own” including our natural dependents.)

But the question here is whether those values ought to be the principles of a state.

It cannot be good for a state to be unselfish; it will fall to the enemy that covets it. It cannot be good for a state to be generous with money; the state has no funds of its own, it holds the money taken in taxes from its citizens in trust, and the obligation of a trustee is to be frugal.

Yet the aspirants to world government, the secular Leftist globalist rulers, are yielding their countries to Islam – in  the name of Christian values.

And the actual Christian leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, in the spirit of Christian selflessness, universal love, forgiveness of enemies, and willing martyrdom, are urging them to do so, bowing to a creed that preaches supremacy and vengefulness –  and the duty to despise Christians.

Christianity bowing to Islam? Yes, all the way down to the execution block. We are witnessing a willing martyrdom of an entire “faith”. Of what used to be called Christendom. (Though many individual Christians, particularly in America, will not comply.)

Andrew Jones writes at Jihad Watch, in the first article of “a series examining ‘Islamist’ influence and infiltration into the various branches of the UK establishment: Church, Monarchy, Military, Security Services, Police, Prison Service, Judiciary, Legislature, Civil Service, state media and banking/corporate interests”. (Read the whole of this article here.)

The UK’s state religion is the Church of England and as such is a centuries-old branch of the political establishment. Now largely bereft of political power, it nonetheless still exerts some soft-power in terms of moral influence in British public life. Headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the Church of England has a track record of interfaith dialogue with extremist Muslims.

A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, advocated the absorption of aspects of Sharia law into UK legislation. Some Muslim groups supported Williams in this, for instance, the Rochdale-based Ramadhan Foundation, an educational and welfare body. They said Williams’ advocacy was “testament to his attempts to understand Islam and promote tolerance and respect between our great faiths”. The same foundation has a history of making outlandish and delusional comments, including referring to Israel as “the new Hitler”. Williams also made the claim at a 2014 conference organized by the supposedly integrationist and progressive Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), that Islam is rejuvenating British values. …

As well-meaning liberals, Williams and Welby engage in interfaith dialogue aiming for a “draw” — they aim for the common ground of understanding among equals. However, Islamic supremacists enter such dialogue with the aim of “winning” — as religious exclusivists, it could not be otherwise, whether they are honest about it or not. Moreover, as Samuel Westrop has noted, “honorable activities do not only attract those with honorable intentions”, and the involvement of extremists poisons the entire interfaith exercise — extremists such as Inter Faith Network members, Jamiat Ulama e Britain (JUB), who are “directly affiliated” with Pakistani seminaries that have close ties to the Taliban. The error of the interfaith template is therefore similar to the equally misguided attempt to engage “Islamists” in the democratic process.  Islam, in the purist 7th century form, advocated by the Muslim Brotherhood and others, is a totalitarian theocratic system and therefore sees democracy as haram. For “Islamists”, engaging with the democratic process is only a means to the end of destroying it from within.

Welby has, in recent years, made numerous pointless attempts at dialogue with those for whom dialogue has a foregone, supremacist conclusion. In 2016, he welcomed Muhammad Naqib ur Rehman to Lambeth Palace to counter “the narrative of extremism and terrorism”, despite Rehman having openly praised acts of terror in Pakistan. In July 2018, Welby hosted the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Shaykh Dr. Ahmad al-Tayyeb, for the “Emerging Peacemakers Conference”. Given the conference title, it is grimly ironic that this is the same al-Tayyeb who in 2015 refused to condemn Islamic State [ISIS] as un-Islamic. Welby, in his capacity as an amateur scholar of Islam compared to al-Tayyeb, contradicted this a year later with his claim that ISIS had “nothing to do with Islam”. Al-Tayyeb also considers apostasy punishable by death and, as head of Al-Azhar, the world’s foremost Sunni university, is party to both incitement against Egypt’s much-persecuted Coptic Christian minority and the promulgation of Sunni jihadism’s ideological underpinning. …

Welby has done much work in the interfaith field with his “friend”, MCB Assistant Secretary General, Ibrahim Mogra. Although moderate in his public pronouncements, Mogra regularly re-tweets posts from the “extremist” advocacy group, Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), and, as a senior MCB member, is formally linked to many who have openly supported the likes of Bin Laden and Hamas. Furthermore, Mogra has promoted “Islamist” narratives within the British education system by writing a Teacher Handbook on Islam. The handbook includes justifications for amputation punishments, violent jihad, polygamy, slavery and — casting doubt on Mogra’s interfaith work — Islamic supremacist thinking.

It is therefore reasonable to conclude that Archbishop Welby is willingly blind to Islamic extremism and is actively covering for it, for instance, with the false-equivalency that “many faiths, not just Islam” have a problem with radicalisation. Moreover, Welby asserts that it is an irrational “fear of Muslims” among the public which is tearing British society apart, rather than Islamic extremism, which he downplays by warning against “hysteria”. Furthermore, he claimed the number of young Muslims travelling to Syria to fight for Islamic State and other jihadist groups was “extraordinarily small” — it was approximately 800 (including family members).

The UK now faces an ongoing severe terror threat from around 400 fighters who have returned, adding a combat-hardened core to the pool of up to 35,000 potential jihadists already in the country. For Welby, the public is not to believe its lying eyes that it is his interfaith partners who sow the ideological seeds which sprout into sectarian apartheid and acts of terror.

So the leaders of one of the largest Protestant denominations, Anglicanism, “cover” for Islam. In other words, they capitulate to it.

So do other Protestant churches, but they don’t all influence government policy as the Anglican leaders do in Britain.

The leader of the world’s Catholics, Pope Francis, courts Islam in the person of prominent Imams. (See here and here.)

Broadly, the Christian response to militant, advancing, conquering Islam is to yield to it, and to support governments that yield to it.

And almost all the secular rulers of the West (the most important exception being President Trump), are yielding to it. Because Christian values have soaked the spirit of the West for two thousand years, and every secular ideology the West has embraced, even and especially Communism, claim those values as their own: Put others – the group – before yourself. Put the foreigner before your own people. Give your countries to those who want them. Give them to Islam.

Blame yourselves when they slaughter and terrorize your citizens. Do not blame them.

But those who rule would rather you did not call this Christianity.

Call it anti-racism. Or globalism. Or internationalism.

It is no secret that the Obama administration sought to downplay the threat of Islamism, and even to co-opt some Islamist movements to promote its agenda. In its foreign policy, the administration expressed support for Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, while domestically, the White House invited Islamists to design the government’s Countering Violent Extremism program. It is difficult to argue that these efforts were the product of anything but great naïveté and political dogma. Is it possible that this combination extended to deliberately funding an al-Qaeda affiliate?

Sam Westrop, whose investigative research was used for the video, is the director of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

He writes (in part, but the whole article is well worth reading for more detail) at National Review:

The Middle East Forum has discovered that the Obama administration approved a grant of $200,000 of taxpayer money to an al-Qaeda affiliate in Sudan — a decade after the U.S. Treasury designated it as a terrorist-financing organization. More stunningly, government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization.

The story began in October 2004, when the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Khartoum-based Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), as a terror-financing organization. It did so because of ISRA’s links to Osama bin Laden and his organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), the precursor of al-Qaeda.

According to the U.S. Treasury, in 1997 ISRA established formal cooperation with MK. By 2000, ISRA had raised $5 million for bin Laden’s group. The Treasury Department notes that ISRA officials even sought to help “relocate [bin Laden] to secure safe harbor for him”. It further reports that ISRA raised funds in 2003 in Western Europe specifically earmarked for Hamas suicide bombings. …

Despite this well-documented history, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in July 2014 awarded $723,405 to World Vision Inc., an international evangelical charity, to “improve water, sanitation and hygiene and to increase food security in Sudan’s Blue Nile state.” Of these funds, $200,000 was to be directed to a sub-grantee: ISRA. …

Mark Smith, World Vision’s senior director of humanitarian and emergency affairs, wrote to USAID, stating that the Islamic Relief Agency “had performed excellent work” for World Vision in the past, and that “putting contractual relationships in limbo for such a long period is putting a significant strain” on World Vision’s relationship with the Sudanese regime. Smith also revealed that World Vision had submitted a notice to OFAC indicating its “intention to restart work with [ISRA] and to transact with [ISRA]” if OFAC did not respond within a week. …

Then, incredibly, on May 7, 2015 — after “close collaboration and consultations with the Department of State” — OFAC issued a license to a World Vision affiliate, World Vision International, authorizing “a one-time transfer of approximately $125,000 to ISRA,” of which “$115,000 was for services performed under the sub-award with USAID” and $10,000 was “for an unrelated funding arrangement between Irish Aid and World Vision.” …

Obama-administration officials knowingly approved the transfer of taxpayer dollars to an al-Qaeda affiliate, and not an obscure one but an enormous international network that was often in the headlines. …

Now we know that the [Obama] government deliberately chose to transfer at least $115,000 to ISRA after confirming that it was on the terror-designation list. In other words, an al-Qaeda front received taxpayers’ money with the apparent complicity of public officials. 

US Diplomacy explains: The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. Government that works closely with the State Department and receives overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary of State.

Obama’s State Department apparently shared his view that the US needed to be humbled and Islam exalted. Hence his government’s promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood followed by its even more outrageous submission to the demands of the Iranian theocracy. Both policies were enthusiastically implemented by former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. And no doubt there are “deep state” operatives still inside the Department who even now, with (Trump-loyal) Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, remain faithful to the Obama sentiment.

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. 

Sam Westrop, the best informed expert in both Britain and America on Islamic sects, their internecine strife, and the jihad, talks about terrorism by motor vehicle:

When will  Democrats start calling for van control?

Today, Monday, April 18, 2016, the Boston marathon is being run.

Recalling the bombings at the April 19, 2013 marathon in the way the atrocity needs to be recalled, here’s Sam Westrop writing at Breitbart:

As Boston prepares for the 2016 marathon, memorials have been organized across the city. Three years later, however, have the authorities really learned anything from the horrors of the bombings?

Judging by the support for Muslim Brotherhood institutions in Massachusetts offered by politicians, law enforcement, and journalists, it would seem not.

Three years ago, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lay wounded, hiding from police in the city of Watertown, a leafy suburb of Boston. On April 15, he and his brother, Tamerlan, had bombed the Boston marathon, murdering three and injuring hundreds. Over the next few days, Dzhokhar would kill MIT police officer Sean Collier, take a hostage, wound police officers in a firefight, and run over his dying brother.

By April 19, the injured Dzhokhar awaited his inevitable capture, bleeding in a Watertown backyard. As law enforcement closed in, Dzhokhar scribbled text on the walls of the boat where he hid.

For a terrorist who had just murdered in the name of Islam, some might expect his parting message to be a litany of Quranic verse. But the writings on the wall of the Watertown boat mostly comprised quotes from Islamist political tracts, written by the Islamist luminaries of the 20th century – Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami ideologues such as Sayid Qutb, Hassan Al Banna, Fathi Yakan, and Abul A’la Maududi.

Dzhokhar’s justification for his killings came from the writings of Islamist movements who today control American Islam – Islamist groups who have, on the last few decades, found favor with America’s political and media elite.

Radical mosques such as the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) remain a magnet for politicians, city officials, and journalists who want to express their love of American Muslims. Most recently, Boston Police Commissioner William Evans spoke at the mosque,declaring: “We’re all Muslims deep down. We all yearn for peace.”

This same mosque was founded by a prominent Al Qaeda operative; its trustees have included the included the Hitler-supporting spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood; and, just in October, the mosque hosted an event with two preachers who advocate that Muslim men can acquire sex slaves and should be allowed to beat their wives.

Over the past few decades, in fact, twelve congregants, supporters, staff and donors of the ISB have been imprisoned, deported, killed or are on the run – all in relation to terrorist activity. This list includes the Boston bombers, Al Qaeda operatives Tarek Mehanna and Aafia Siddqui; Lashkar-i-Taiba fundraiser Hafiz Masood; and the prominent Islamic State official, Ahmad Abousamra.

Most importantly, the ISB teaches the very texts that Dzhokhar scribbled across the Watertown boat. These teachings are of a Muslim Brotherhood educational program known as “Tarbiya”. The ideological link could not be clearer. Dzhokhar left written confirmation — blood and ink that explained his actions.

The authorities, however, refuse to consider what terrorists themselves proclaim. Because to accept that Islamist ideology lead to Islamist violence would be to acknowledge that the self-proclaimed guardians of American Islam pose a serious threat to the security of the United States. It would be to acknowledge that America has fundamentally misunderstood Islam itself.

Rather than tackle radical Islamism, however, law enforcement and politicians instead attend peace rallies, interfaith dialogue dinners, and other feel-good events with the Islamists themselves, who are adept at expressing peace and love by day and inciting hatred against Jews and the West at night.

In 2015, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz further illustrated this government delusion when, astoundingly, she said of the Boston bombings: “There was nothing about this crime that was Islam associated.”

When pressed on the Tsarnaev’s Islamic invocations, Ortiz went so far as to define herself what makes a real Muslim, stating that the Tsarnaev’s ideology was “a skewed view of the religion of Islam. That is not what Islam is all about”.

Government officials and Islamists currently share something in common: they both believe they have the better right to define “true Islam” than ordinary Muslims themselves.

So three years since the marathon bombings, Massachusetts officials have not just failed to understand the threat; they refuse to accept that ideology plays any part at all.

The distinct refusal to acknowledge the ideological underpinning is rarely found elsewhere. Can you imagine a government official responding to neo-Nazi violence by attending a brunch with the Ku Klux Klan? …

Such is the strength of the “Islam is Peace” mantra, that, for politicians and law enforcement, the radicalization process is not hard to understand, but it does seem difficult to accept. Unless law enforcement and government start to examine and counteract the ideological Islamist network that has imposed its rule over much of American Islam, there will only be more bombings, more shootings, and more stabbings.

When will they learn?

 

Watch out for the harm the well-meaning do!

Sam Westrop writes at Gatestone:

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has accepted an invitation to become chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR). The ECTR boasts an advisory board comprising a dozen European presidents and prime ministers. It describes itself as a non-governmental body that “fosters understanding and tolerance among peoples of various ethnic origin; educates on techniques of reconciliation; facilitates post-conflict social apprehensions; monitors chauvinistic behaviours, proposes protolerance initiatives and legal solutions”.

Behind all this jargon, Blair and the ECTR claim to promote religious belief and dialogue as a means to challenge hate speech and extremism. Writing in The Times, Blair and ECTR President Moshe Kantor state:

It is our firm belief that it is not religion or faith per se that causes or foments conflict. It is the abuse of religion, which then becomes a mask behind which those bent on death and destruction all too often hide. … The ECTR brings together parties and political leaders who have been at the heart of some of the world’s most difficult conflicts to foster dialogue. Our projects also tackle conflicts from the ground up — focusing on the root causes of intolerance, which are usually ignorance of other faiths and cultures — and so the ECTR takes its message to schools and universities around Europe to encourage tolerance and reconciliation.

The ECTR’s mission is explained in a document entitled A European Framework: National Statue for the Promotion of Tolerance.  This “framework” is currently being brought before parliaments all across Europe. For Blair and the ECTR, however, “tolerance” seems not to be freedom of expression, but an Orwellian standard of behaviour to be rigidly enforced and regulated by government.

“Tolerance,” the ECTR claims, is “respect for and acceptance of the expression, preservation and development of the distinct identity of a [religious, racial or cultural] group”.

Proponents of individual liberty, however, argue that true tolerance means tolerating views that we dislike. In a free society, there is no requirement to show “respect” for such views, merely to accept the right of free people to express them.

“There is no need,” the ECTR explains, “to be tolerant to the intolerant.” It seems that European “tolerance” means only tolerating a European agenda.

The notion of “group rights” is deemed to trump individual liberties. The ECTR calls for European countries to introduce a number of “criminal offences punishable as aggravated crimes”,  as part of a Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance.  These crimes would include:

(iii) Group libel…
(iv) Overt approval of a totalitarian ideology, xenophobia or anti-Semitism.
(v) Public approval or denial of the Holocaust.
(vi) Public approval or denial of any other act of genocide the existence of which has been determined by an international criminal court or tribunal.

These measures are staggering assaults on free speech.

Particularly damaging is the proposed criminal offense of “group libel” – the notion that defamatory statements about a group of people are actionable by individual members of that group.

Group libel has no basis under British law. In 1993, a British court ruled in Derbyshire CC v Times newspapers that governmental entities could not sue for libel because it would lead precisely to undemocratic restrictions on free speech. Group libel laws, such as the ECTR is proposing, would allow extremist religious and political movements to censor reporting and criticisms of their beliefs.

In Britain, Public Order Acts already criminalize incitement to violence. If, for example, a neo-Nazi activist advocates that Jews should be murdered on the streets of London, he would likely be prosecuted.

The ECTR, however, wants to go much farther. As an “aggravated crime”,  group libel, the ECTR’s framework explains, also means “defamatory comments… with a view to… slandering the group, [or] holding it to ridicule”.

Blair is repeating his old mistakes. In 2006, his government was condemned for its attempts to criminalize anyone who “intends…to stir up religious hatred or was reckless as to whether religious hatred would be stirred up”.

After losing a vote in parliament and after politicians, comedians and journalists forcefully argued that such proscriptions would censor honest criticism of religious groups, Blair was forced to accept amendments to the legislation.

To criminalize ridicule would be disastrous. In a free society, no one has the right not to be offended. As Conservative MP Dominic Grieve said in 2006, the proposals were an attempt to “appease” some minority groups.

Along with criminalizing – in the name of tolerance – views that the ECTR deems intolerable, Blair’s group also proposes Orwellian means of regulation to further its “tolerance” ideology. “The Government shall ensure,” the ECTR advocates, “that public broadcasting (television and radio) stations will devote a prescribed percentage of their programmes to promoting a climate of tolerance.”

In addition, government funded bodies will impose and enforce such tolerance, with the ECTR framework calling on governments to “establish a National Tolerance Monitoring Commission as an independent body — composed of eminent persons from outside the civil service — vested with the authority to promote tolerance.” A separate governmental body will also be set up to “supervise the implementation” of the Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance.

The ECTR also lobbies for “entrenching state funding for religious institutions into law”.

Once again, Blair seems unable to learn from his own follies. Under the Blair government, the authorities poured millions of pounds of funding into the pockets of religious groups, which the government believed would challenge extremism and terrorism. Publicly-funded groups, however, included Islamist organizations connected with terrorist movements.

The current Prime Minister, David Cameron, has since noted:

As evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by what some have called ‘non-violent extremists’, and they then took those radical beliefs to the next level by embracing violence. … Some organisations that seek to present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community are showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism. As others have observed, this is like turning to a right-wing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement.

Europe needs to divorce the state from oppressive interest groups; it should not do the opposite and embrace them further.

The ECTR’s proposals only serve to reinforce the dangerous flaws of multiculturalism policy. Under this system, people are classified as members of religious and cultural groups, not as individual citizens with individual rights. By defining individuals by the groups to which they belong, you deny individuals their own voice and rights of citizenship.

In a recent case before London’s High Court, a British judge ruled that an illegal immigrant who beat his own son should be forgiven because of the “cultural context”.  In other words, the law should protect only white children; the ruling implicitly condones the beating of minority children — all in the name of diversity and tolerance. Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equality Commission, described the decision as “the effective abandonment of the migrant family’s child on the altar of multiculturalism”. 

As an extension of multiculturalism policy, the ECTR’s proposed measures seek to protect the various groups by which European states classify their citizens. Such laws and regulation would further divide Europe into tribal groupings, composed of various religious, ethnic, cultural and political movements – all in competition with each other for government patronage and support.

By criminalizing our freedom to criticize religious movements, or even to express intolerant thoughts, and by offering legal protection to religious groups from ridicule or insult, Blair and the ECTR would destroy the most important tenet of individual liberty: freedom of expression.

A free society cannot proscribe toleration of the intolerant. Actual tolerance requires free citizens to tolerate views they dislike.

We should certainly not, as the ECTR advocates, be forced to “respect” views that the government declares suitable.

In a democracy, the law is designed to protect individuals against the agenda of oppressive interest groups. But Blair and the ECTR are proposing the very opposite. Under government-enforced “tolerance”, extremists would flourish, honest critics would be silenced, freedom of expression would be criminalized, and, in deference to religious and cultural “groups”, the individual would lose his right to be an individual. 

European governments cannot think of an effective way to deal with the jihadis in their midst.

Take the case of Sweden. We quote from an article in this month’s issue of Commentary by Annika Hernroth-Rothstein. It is titled A Local Story of Global Jihad:

Sweden has long functioned as a hub for international terrorism and has housed members of international terrorist organizations such as Hamas, the Armed Islamic Group, Al Shabaab, Egypt’s Gamaa al-Islamiyya, and the Islamic State. Because membership in foreign terrorist organizations is not illegal, these operatives have largely been left alone.

In some cases, the Swedish government has gone out of its way to help them. In 2002, Swedish jihadist Mehdi Mohammad Ghezali was captured in Afghanistan by American forces. Deemed an enemy combatant, he was incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay. Stockholm immediately launched a campaign to release Ghezali, and in 2004 he was let out. Five years later, he was arrested in Pakistan for collaborating with the Islamic State.

While other European countries have broadened their anti-terrorism policies in order to crack down on terrorist propaganda, Sweden has become a safe haven for websites and publishers that specialize in jihadist material. Additionally, Sweden is home to certain mosques that are funded by foreign countries and known to function as recruitment centers for terrorist organizations. On the island of Hisingen, for instance, the Gothenburg Mosque, in Sweden’s second-largest city, is financed by Saudi Arabia. The Islamic Center in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, is funded and owned by the World Islamic Call Society, an Islamist umbrella organization founded by Muammar Qaddafi. With 60,000 members, it’s the largest mosque in Scandinavia. And the Husby Islamic Center, in the Stockholm suburb, was funded by Qatar. The new mosque to be built in Rinkeby, a suburb of Stockholm, is a Qatari undertaking as well.

But Sweden’s most insidious enabling of jihad is achieved through its generous social-benefits system. According to the latest numbers from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, the average immigrant family in Sweden, consisting of two parents and two children, receives $3,135 per month in benefits. What’s more, these funds are exempt from the country’s standard 33 percent income tax. This may not seem like a lot of money compared with the gargantuan sums we often hear about in cases of international terror financing, but it’s more than enough to do great harm. The Swedish Security Service concluded that the money Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly [a suicide bomber who returned from the Middle east and blew himself up on a Stockholm street] and his wife were given in benefits and loans from the Swedish government was used to finance his trips abroad, where he received terrorist training. The family had no other source of income.

Abdaly, Ghezali, and the country’s approximately 200 other potential militants are manifestations of the larger problem of jihad in Europe. There is no shortage of nightmare stories to attest to this ballooning reality. British citizens who received al-Qaeda training in Afghanistan and Pakistan bombed the London subway in 2005. Mehdi Nemmouche, an ISIS member and French national, fought for jihad in Syria before opening fire on innocents at the Jewish Museum in Brussels this past May. The ISIS executioners who recently beheaded American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning delivered their crazed overtures to human slaughter in native British accents. …

Western leaders are now aggressively pursuing ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but while they chase the bad guys from the edge of town, they risk leaving the door to the house wide open. Above all, it must be remembered that the jihadists’ long-term goal is to strike the West. The war they fight has no borders; the caliphate they seek has no geographic limits.

Europe is slow to connect the dots when they form a discomfiting image. For Sweden, a country that prides itself on the progressive values of openness and inclusivity, the steps necessary to fight a counter-jihad at home are almost too painful to countenance. The Swedish measures now in place amount to a kind of counter-radicalization therapy. … Muslim extremism in faraway lands is a suitable topic for discussion, but addressing the jihadists among us is political kryptonite.

Yet such considerations are meaningless to the jihadists themselves. As Abdaly himself put it: “The Islamic State has lived up to its holy promise; we are here in Europe, and in Sweden. We are a reality, not a fantasy.” In Sweden, Europe’s third-largest contributor to the jihad, we’d do well to take our enemies at their word.

Britain is floundering in a fog of of misdiagnosis just as Sweden is.

We quote from a recent article at Stand for Peace by Sam Westrop:

On September 30, Theresa May, the British Home Secretary, gave a speech at the Conservative Party’s annual conference, in which she outlined the threat posed to Britain by terrorism from abroad and extremism at home.

After giving the customary assurance that the actions of ISIS have no basis in Islam and proffering a quote from the Quran, May boasted of the Government’s record fighting fundamentalism, promised new powers to fight extremist groups and declared her gritty determination to uphold “British values”.

This grandiose speech revealed ambition – albeit mostly May’s own. It did not, however, demonstrate any real progress. The Home Secretary’s effusions were example of a government that has only half-heartedly responded to the problem of extremist ideology. It is a government that likes to talk but fails to act.

The Home Secretary then announced a series of weak measures to be taken in dealing with “extremism” in the organized charities, the media, the internet, schools, prisons, universities.

Sam Westrop rightly concludes:

It appears that the Home Office urgently needs to define “extremism.” This definition should include the smiling Islamist who attends interfaith vigils during the day but propagates anti-Semitism and expresses support for Hamas at night.

Extremism is a dangerous animal, but presently it is being given both the carrot and the stick. As long as we allow the human face of Islamist extremism to subsist, and even flourish, we will continue to churn out radicalized Muslim youth who will choose the Kalashnikov over a university degree. No one claims that the answer to Islamist extremism is easy. The question of extremism, however, is remarkably simple. If only the government would understand.

And the US government, under the leadership of a devotedly pro-Islam president, is trying to pretend that holy warriors are simply breaking US domestic law and need to be tried in civil courts.

We quote from the Guardian:

Irek Hamidullin was arraigned on 12 counts, including providing material support to terrorists, trying to destroy US military aircraft and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. Half of the charges are punishable by up to life in prison. Attorney general Eric Holder chose not to seek the death penalty …

Hamidullin is the first military detainee from Afghanistan to be brought to the US for trial. His transfer represents the latest attempt by the Obama administration to show that it can use the criminal court system to deal with terror suspects – a move criticized by some Republican lawmakers who believe such cases should be handled by military tribunals.

US officials say Hamidullin is a Russian veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan who stayed in the country and joined the Taliban. He was captured in 2009 after an attack on Afghan border police and US soldiers in Khowst province. He had been held at the US Parwan detention facility at Bagram airfield before being brought to the US. … He became affiliated with the Taliban in 2001.

The indictment says Hamidullin commanded three groups of insurgents that attacked Afghan border police at Camp Leyza, one of six locations the Taliban had identified as possible targets. He directed insurgents armed with anti-aircraft machine guns to fire at US military helicopters responding to the attack, the indictment says, and later used a machine gun to shoot at US troops and Afghan border police assessing damage at the battle site.

Those are clearly acts of war. Hamidullin should be tried by a military tribunal.

What Western governments fail to understand is that their countries are not being subjected to “extremism”, or “terrorism”, but war. 

The jihad is indeed global. Jihad means Holy War. Sure, it must be fought in Europe as well as in the Middle East. But it must be recognized as a war everywhere. 

Even if European governments found a way to stop and punish jihadi violence in their own countries, the war would go on. At present they are all acting ineffectively. Instead of joyfully letting all Muslim citizens who want to go and fight with IS/ISIS/ISIL go, and refuse them re-entry, and deprive them of their citizenship (as Geert Wilders so rightly recommends), they try to persuade them not to go, and if they return they give them “therapy”, as if Islam were nothing but a nervous breakdown in a few gullible individuals.  

It is foolish and dangerous to go on calling every Muslim “holy” warrior a terrorist. It is even more foolish and self-deceiving to call IS/ISIS/ISIL a “terrorist organization”. They are one of the armies of Islam. 

Islam is an ideology of world conquest. It is fighting a war against the non-Muslim world. 

At the same time there are battles within Islam. Sunni versus Shia is a perpetual conflict. IS/ISIS/ISIL – the Islamic State – is Sunni. When Shia Iran becomes a nuclear power – which will be quite soon with Obama’s help – there will be a second Islamic force against the rest of the world, competing with the Islamic State for the victor’s crown.

Of course the Iranian force with its nuclear weapons will be a thousand times stronger than the Islamic State.

Even if  the US-led “coalition ” were to defeat the Islamic State, the war would not stop. It will be kept going  on the streets of Western cities in Sweden, Britain, France, Spain, America, until the nuclear bombs of Iran strike –  first Israel and then anywhere else they choose.

How should it be dealt with? At the very least the West should treat Islamic states as it did the Soviet Union. Our long war with the USSR was called a Cold War, but there were many places where it was hotly fought. Persons in the West who were loyal to the enemy ideology were tolerated for the most part if they did nothing actively to aid the enemy. When they acted to help the enemy at the expense of their own country, they were put to death – as the Rosenbergs were.

That is the precedent for the West to follow in dealing now with the equally abominable ideology and aggressive intent of Islam.

British banks, with enthusiastic encouragement from Prime Minister David Cameron, succumbed to the temptation to provide “sharia compliant” loans and generally cater to the demands of the enemy, Islam.

Now one bank, HSBC, has changed its corporate mind about dealing with at least some – perhaps the worst – of its Muslim clients.

This is from Gatestone by Sam Westrop. (Sam Westrop, Douglas Murray, and Melanie Phillips are the leading voices – among very few – who dare to speak out loud, clear, and often against the destructive encroachments of Islam on British law, institutions, and traditions.)

In late July, HSBC, a British multinational bank, closed the bank accounts of Anas Al-Tikriti, a prominent British Islamist activist, and his family. HSBC also closed down the bank accounts of the Cordoba Foundation, of which Tikriti is the Director, and the Finsbury Park Mosque.

In response to enquiries, the bank simply stated that to continue providing services would be outside the bank’s “risk appetite.”

This latest round of bank account closures has come as a surprise to counter-terrorism experts and much of the media, who note that the Cordoba Foundation and the Finsbury Park Mosque have enjoyed strong political support in the past.

Just a few weeks previously, HSBC also closed the accounts of the Ummah Welfare Trust, a leading British Islamist charity that has previously partnered with the Al Salah Islamic Association, described by the U.S. Treasury Department as “one of the largest and best-funded Hamas charitable organisations in the Palestinian territories.” Senior Hamas officials have confirmed that Al Salah is “identified with us”.

Anas Al-Tikriti, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain, had his bank account, along with that of his wife and two children, shut down by HSBC. Tikriti has been described as “one of the shrewdest UK-based Brotherhood activists … [who] has sought to persuade Western governments that they should fund Brotherhood groups as moderate alternatives to al-Qaeda”.

Tikriti is also a vocal supporter of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and he has regularly hosted a program on the Arab TV satellite station, Al-Hiwar, founded by Azzam Tamimi, Hamas’s “special envoy” to the UK. Tamimi, in 2004, told the BBC that he would become a suicide bomber if he “had the opportunity”, and described self-sacrifice for Palestine as “a noble cause”.

In an interview with the Muslim Brotherhood’s official website after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Tikriti affirmed “the right of the Iraqis to engage in legitimate resistance against foreign occupation”.  He also has stated that the decision by the Muslim Council of Britain to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day was a “principled stand”.

In response to HSBC’s closure of his bank account, Tikriti claimed that, “HSBC has targeted my family because of my activity in defence of Gaza against the barbaric aggression of the Zionists” and because of his efforts to “oppose the military coup in Egypt”.

While many would dispute Tikriti’s conclusions, his instincts might be right. The one thing that connects Tikriti with the Cordoba Foundation, the Finsbury Park Mosque and the Ummah Welfare Trust is evidence of their support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the designated terrorist group, Hamas.

The Cordoba Foundation, which Tikriti heads, has been described by Prime Minister David Cameron, as a “political front for the Muslim Brotherhood.” In 2009, Cordoba co-sponsored an event organized by Cageprisoners, a pro-jihadist group, which featured as a guest speaker Anwar Al-Awlaki, who later became a senior leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, before he was killed in a U.S. drone-strike in 2011.

The Cordoba Foundation also works closely with the Emirates Centre for Human Rights, whose website was originally registered to Tikriti’s wife, Malath Shakir, whose bank account was also shut down by HSBC. According to UAE media, the Emirates Centre for Human Rights is part of the global Muslim Brotherhood network.

For human rights! How they make a mockery of Western moral principles.

The most surprising organization to be shut out by HSBC, however, is the Finsbury Park Mosque. The loss of its bank accounts has sparked anger from leading British Muslims and sympathetic parliamentarians.

The Finsbury Park Mosque was once a much easier target for criticism. Ten years ago, the hook-handed Imam of the mosque, Abu Hamza –  recently found guilty of eleven terrorism charges after a five-week trial in New York — was arrested on terrorism charges.

We didn’t hear much about that from the media in the US, did we?

After his arrest, however, the British government, eager to rid the Finsbury Park Mosque of its pro-terror reputation, passed control of the institution to the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), one of the better-known Muslim Brotherhood fronts in the UK, and one with which Anas Al-Tikriti was once closely involved. Tikriti’s lobbying efforts for the government to embrace Muslim Brotherhood groups as “moderate” alternatives to more overtly terrorist organizations appeared to have paid off.

The government seemed oblivious, perhaps wilfully so, that the MAB’s founder, Kemal Helbawi, has proclaimed:

Oh honoured brothers, the Palestinian cause is not a struggle on borders or on land only. Rather, it is an absolute clash of civilisations: a satanic programme led by the Jews and those who support them and a divine programme carried by Hamas and the Islamic Movement in particular and the Islamic peoples in general.

We call it a clash of civilization with barbarism.

To run the Finsbury Park Mosque, the MAB appointed directors such as Mohammed Sawalha, a Hamas official described by a Brotherhood website as being “responsible for the political unit of the international Muslim Brotherhood in the UK.” Sawalha is also “said to have masterminded much of Hamas’s political and military strategy” out of London, as reported by the BBC.

In addition, the current Imam of Finsbury Park Mosque, Sheikh Rajab Zaki, was a key speaker at rallies in support of Mohamed Morsi, the former Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt.

Finsbury Park Mosque continues to promote the Muslim Brotherhood preacher, Jamal Badawi, who has described suicide bombers and Hamas terrorists as “freedom fighters” and “martyrs.” Badawi also advocatesthe right for men to beat their wives, if they show “disregard for [their] marital obligations.”

Badawi has also shared a platform with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, and he is a director of the International Association of Muslim Scholars, which, in 2004, issued a fatwa authorizing the murder of American troops in Iraq. In addition, during the U.S. terror-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation in 2007, Badawi was named as an unindicted co-conspirator.

Finsbury Park Mosque still enjoys strong support from the local Council and the Metropolitan Police, both of which have sponsored events at the mosque with the support of the World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a Saudi group that is a prolific publisher of anti-Jewish and anti-Shia material. WAMY is accused by a number of governments of funding terrorism.

Both the police and the local government body have provided several tens of thousands of pounds in grants to the mosque.

Likewise, the Ummah Welfare Trust has enjoyed the support of MPs; and the Cordoba Foundation has als0 received government funding through the Prevent scheme, a fund established by the previous Labour government to combat extremism.

Combat extremism by funding the extremists! What’s that if not insane?

As for Anas Al-Tikriti, in January 2014, he was invited by President Obama to the White House, as part of a delegation led by Iraqi politician Osama Al-Nujaifi, who leads the Mutahidoun bloc, a coalition of Iraqi political parties, the leading member body of which, according to Al Monitor, is the Islamic Party, the Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The biggest question now about HSBC’s actions is “why?” Some observers have suggested that the HSBC’s decision in 2012 to hire Stuart Levey, the former under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, might have something to do with it. Others have suggested the possibility that the British government’s review into the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Prime Minister is due to hear during the summer recess, might be already having some effect.

On the face of it, it seems unlikely that the government would pressure HSBC to shut down Muslim Brotherhood bank accounts while allowing the British police to fund and sponsor Finsbury Park Mosque, one of the Brotherhood’s most important institutions.

But the coalition government, much like the Labour government that preceded it, seems always to have embraced a contradictory approach in its efforts to confront British Islamism. The present government, for instance, managed to declare the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation a “Hizb ut-Tahrir front” and at the same time provide it with £70,000 of taxpayer monies.

In addition, after the announcement of the Muslim Brotherhood review in March 2014, the Foreign Office revealed that its advisory group on “freedom of religion” was to include a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Ramadan, as a board member.

Tariq Ramadan it is worth noting, is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna.

Regardless of these apparent contradictions, HSBC’s decision to close down these bank accounts is welcome. For far too long, Muslim Brotherhood groups in Britain have escaped censure in spite of their promotion of extremism and their connections to terrorism. Even if the government is dithering, at least the private sector is acting.

Without letting ourselves become too optimistic, we venture to hope that this action by HSBC night start a trend.