If past media coverage is any gauge, America is about to get a giant, mushy Hallmark card on behalf of Islam on Friday, September 25. That’s the day of the Islam on Capitol Hill rally, which organizers estimate will attract 50,000 Muslims to Washington, D.C.
Hassen Abdellah, president of Dar-ul-Islam, and a main organizer, told the Washington Post that the event was inspired by President Obama’s inaugural address and his speech in Cairo, Egypt in June. The latter was where Obama noted that Islam was “first revealed” in the Middle East, thus implying divine origin. He may have also inspired some Muslims when he told journalists in Turkey in April that America “is not a Christian nation.” The event’s Website proclaims in large block letters: Our Time Has Come.
It will be instructive to compare media coverage to the virtual blackout of the Sept. 12 rally of hundreds of thousands who gathered at the Capitol to protest high taxes, the proposed health care takeover and the rest of the Obama-Pelosi leftist agenda.
In another story that could get lost amid all the wet kisses to Islam, Christian teen runaway Rifqa Bary may learn on September 28 in a Florida courtroom whether she will be sent back to Ohio, where she fears becoming the victim of an “honor killing” for converting to Christianity.
Rifqa’s father, Mohamed Bary, claims that he will allow her to practice Christianity, while requiring her to live as a Muslim. He denied in court that he has threatened to kill her, but admitted that he nearly threw a laptop computer at her before corralling his temper.
The 17-year-old Rifqa fled in July to Orlando, where a church pastor’s family took her in. Given the spate of “honor killings” in Texas, Canada, and in Europe, Rifqa contends that even if her father doesn’t do it, someone else might.
According to Robert Spencer, author and founder of JihadWatch, Rifqa is in grave danger. He notes that the Qu’ran’s early verses, written by the Prophet Mohammed in Mecca when Islam was a minority religion, prescribe tolerance alongside “people of the Book,” that is, Jews and Christians. As Islam began its conquests, however, Mohammed wrote later verses that instruct Muslims to subdue everyone under Sharia Law and to kill apostates, people who convert from Islam to any other religion.
Spencer is one of more than a dozen experts featured in the investigative, two-part documentary Radical Islam on the March, airing this Sunday on the Coral Ridge Hour and on September 27. According to William J. Federer, author of What Every American Needs to Know About the Qu’ran, and who is also featured on the program, Sharia Law divides the world into two: the House of Islam, meaning “submission,” and the House of War, in which Jihad takes place. In other words, wherever Muslims do not rule is a battlefield, with tactics depending on the size of the Muslim population.
In Great Britain, for example, Sharia courts have already sprung up that claim independence from the British legal system. And invertebrate leaders such as the Anglican Church’s Archbishop of Canterbury have said that it might be time for England to incorporate parts of Sharia Law. That’s a bit like a lamb insisting it can ingest part of a hungry python. In Holland, parliamentarian Geert Wilders is under an Islamic fatwa death threat and has been charged by his government with a “hate crime” for producing the film Fitna, which chronicles Jihad violence around the world, accompanied by verses from the Qu’ran.
Moderate Muslims believe that Islam will eventually subdue the entire world, but that co-existence is possible in the meantime. Radical Islamists believe that the time for Islam’s total domination is now, and that the only sure path to Heaven with Allah is through martyrdom, thus violence is considered a good shortcut.
Rifqa Bary, who was raised Muslim, is painfully aware of the tenets of that aggressive faith. Earlier this week, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation announced that it had found “no credible evidence” that Rifqa is in danger if returned to her parents and their Muslim community.
But FBI veteran John D. Guandolo crunched the report and found it severely lacking. In “Florida Department of Law Enforcement earns an F,” an essay for the Center for Security Policy on September 16, Guandolo notes that the investigators seemed oblivious to realities. For example:
“It was noted that the Executive Director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) -Columbus (Ohio) and the Staff Attorney for CAIR were present during the interview of Mr. Bary by FDLE Investigators. Absent from the FDLE report was any mention that CAIR is a known Muslim Brotherhood entity and an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial - the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history - revealing HLF as a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood front in the United States. All defendants in this case were found guilty in November 2008 and are serving long prison terms.”
Ergun Caner, now president of Liberty Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, Va., who with his brother converted from Islam to Christianity and is now under a fatwah, told the Florida Baptist Witness, “Death for apostasy from Islam is firmly rooted in the most sacred Muslim texts. There is also a consensus by all four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, as well as Shi'ite jurists, that apostates from Islam must be put to death,” he said.
Can anyone blame Rifqa for fearing a return to a community rooted in a system of “law” that includes such texts?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member