Visitors to Washington D.C. today got to hear what residents in Hamtramck and Dearborn, Michigan, as well as areas of London, Amsterdam and other Western cities already endure five times a day: The sound of amplified Muslim prayers lifted to Allah.
This time, the prayers reverberated over America’s front lawn as some 2,000 Muslims gathered for the Jummah Prayer on Capitol Hill: A Day of Islamic Unity. Promoters had planned for 50,000 but came nowhere near that.
Hadn’t you heard about this? If not, it’s probably because the media have been tight lipped, the better not to embarrass the One in the White House. While some women in burkas were sighted in the crowd, there was no sign of Nancy Pelosi in a hijab, which she wore on her Middle East tour.
The purpose of Friday’s event, according to its Website, was to “manifest Islam’s majestic spiritual principles” in chants echoing “off the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and other great edifices that surround Capitol Hill.”
Well, they probably didn’t carry that far. These are not church bells, folks. This is the sound, however muted, of the world’s most aggressive religion rearing up and lyrically cooing its desire to master the world under Allah. Islam means, literally, Submission to Allah.
Author and Islam scholar Robert Spencer, who I saw at the rally, described the prayers, said in Arabic, as ultimately about Islamic superiority. While they may not sound threatening, the message they send to those who understand the language is that “our time has come.”
Another purpose for Friday’s prayer on the Mall was to show Muslims worldwide that Islam is on the advance in the U.S. Dubai-based Islamonline.com, which bills itself as “the leading and original Islamic portal on the Internet,” played up the prayer rally, giving it prominent homepage coverage.
Now, before you accuse me of lumping all Muslims in the same bowl, let me say that there are many nice, hardworking Muslims in America who mean no harm. In fact, many are here because they couldn’t stomach living under Sharia Law in the countries of their origin. They may believe that the world will someday be subdued under Islam, but America’s a fine place to be while waiting. Radical Muslims want to recruit moderate Muslims by convincing them that the day of Sharia is right around the corner, not in the distant future. Hence the more muscular approach at the Capitol. To understand why this is more than just a prayer rally, consider this:
The Prophet Mohammad divided the world into two areas: The world of Dar al-Islam, and the world of Dar al-Harb, or House of War. Everyone on Earth is therefore either a Muslim or an infidel who must convert or else. The Koran is quite clear about this.
In Muslim majority nations, such as Saudi Arabia, non-Muslims are regarded as Dhimmis, second-class people whose testimony in court is worth only a fraction of that of a Muslim and who must pay extra taxes. Forget equality under the law, and don’t even ask how they treat Dhimmi women.
Another event all but ignored by the press was a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday held by Former Muslims United, led by Nonie Darwish. She and other ex-Muslims warned that Rifqa Bary, the 17-year-old Ohio Christian convert who fled to Florida because she fears an “honor killing” is not alone. Darwish and many other experts are featured on the documentary Radical Islam on the March, which will be broadcast on The Coral Ridge Hour on Sunday, Sept. 27.
While the Muslim prayer rally sponsors insist their purpose was to show the world that America is a free land that welcomes Muslims, visitors to the Website can hear a loud Islamic greeting in Arabic. If Muslims are interested in being viewed as just another group of Americans, why the Arabic? Why not English? Not even all Muslims speak Arabic. The real message on the site is in large block letters: Our Time Has Come.
Muslims have been emboldened by President Obama’s election and apology tour and his frequent nods to Islam. Their pulses must have raced as he referred four times in Cairo on June 4 to the “Holy Koran,” while noting that the Middle East is where Islam “was first revealed.” They probably cheered when he became the first president in recent years not to host a Christian-sponsored National Day of Prayer event on May 7 at the White House but found time to preside over an Iftar dinner at the White House on Sept. 1 to mark the end of Ramadan.
Rightly or wrongly, many Muslims feel they have one of their own in the White House. Obama’s formative years were spent learning Islam. It’s not for nothing that the Bible declares, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6, KJV).
Along with Obama’s recent conduct, that might be why Moammar Gadhafi referred to Obama as “my son” in his 95-minute speech at the United Nations on Wednesday. It’s partly why Obama himself received a huge ovation as he came to the UN podium even before he took shots at Israel while gently chiding radical Muslims, and apologizing yet again for America.
A major organizer of the prayer rally is attorney Hassen Abdellah, president of the Dar-ul-Islam mosque in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Abdellah represented several terrorists, including: Mahmoud Abouhalima, who was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and is serving a life sentence in Florence, Colorado, and Mahamed el-Atriss, who was convicted of selling fake IDs to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers. On Oct. 25, 1993, New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein described Abdellah as “by far the most aggressively combative of the lawyers in the case.”
Abdellah says he “represents all kinds of people.” Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch says that’s a fair statement, but that Abdellah’s client list is “consistent” and “interesting.”
In 1993, Abdellah spoke on behalf of Nidal A. Ayyad to The New York Times:
“’You look at Ayyad,’ he said of one of the defendants. ‘He's an American. He can practice his religion and his way of life here. Why would he blow up the World Trade Center?’"
Nidal A. Ayyad is now in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado after being convicted of blowing up the garage of the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring 1,042.
Another major organizer of the prayer rally is Manhattan imam Sheihk Ahmed Dewidar, who says Muslims need to project a more moderate image in order to achieve their ultimate goals.
On June 9, 2005, during an interview translated by MEMR TV, short for the Middle East Research Institute Monitoring Project, he quoted another imam uncritically:
Dewidar: In 1995 I heard some sermons, saying that Muslims should march on the White House from some of the mosques.Another imam, Abdul Malik, is also an organizer. His Facebook site has an interesting lecture for young people. Here are some excerpts:Host: What do you mean by “march on the White House”?
Dewidar: One cleric said in his sermon: “We are going to the White House, so that Islam will be victorious, Allah willing, and the White House will become into the Muslim house.”
Dewidar then explained that Muslim ideas will be victorious if they lose their radical image.
I want you to hear me very clearly: we must remember as Muslims, we submit and we surrender to nothing and no one: not the government, not the police, not the FBI, not the CIA. We submit and we surrender Allah alone, nothing else. Nothing else….. It’s not gonna be easy and you don’t have time to waste believing that you’re young and that you can involve yourself in sport and play because when the enemies of truth drop the bombs on the world of Islam, their number one target, and the number one people that suffer the most, it is the children who suffer, it is the old, it is the women and that day they become widows and they poison the waters and the air, and the children upon, with cancers and other diseases … Democracy is not revelation, and democracy does not equal freedom, for in democracy...you have all of the vices that are against the spirit of truth; so no we don't want to democratize Islam, we want to Islamize democracy. That's what we want."
Indeed. As the ’60s hippies once said in a more conducive climate, “Peace, Man.”
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