Monday, July 10, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
If you are a Trump supporter, Linda Sarsour is a dream come
true: no matter how outrageous her views and statements are, the mainstream
media will always rush to defend this leader of the “resistance” by dutifully
echoing her self-serving claims that her critics are evil right-wingers
motivated by Islamophobia and other vile resentments. In the process, being
left-wing – let alone progressive – is redefined in ways that will be
unpalatable to many reasonable left-leaning people (like me!). While few who
identify as center-left might ever consider supporting Trump, the cult of Linda
Sarsour will surely help many understand why a lot of Americans used their vote
to express disgust with the liberal elites.
Sarsour’s latest achievement is making it somehow
“progressive” to call on Muslims to engage in “jihad” against Trump and his
administration. Calling for “jihad” these days is, as far as Sarsour’s
apologists are concerned, an entirely harmless thing – after all, Sarsour just
meant a “jihad” of political activism fueled by the perpetual outrage she so often
advocates…
But we should actually all agree with Sarsour and her fans
that the context matters, because tellingly, many of her defenders preferred
NOT to link to the video
that shows Sarsour’s relevant remarks in full. So let’s check out the truly
shocking context of her call for “jihad” during her keynote address at a
convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).
Early on in her speech (at around 3.45), Sarsour emphasized
her conviction that “we are on this earth to please Allah and only Allah.” She
repeated this theme towards the end of her speech (after 20.00):
“Our number one and top priority is
to protect and defend our community; it is not to assimilate and to please any
other people and authority. […] And our top priority, even higher than all
those [other] priorities, is to please Allah and only Allah.”
As Sarsour explained, she came to this insight thanks to her
greatly admired “mentor, motivator, encourager” Siraj Wahhaj (who was in the
audience). According to Wikipedia, Siraj Wahhaj is “an
African-American imam of Al-Taqwa mosque in Brooklyn, New York and the leader
of The Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA).” Born Jeffrey Kearse, Wahhaj
converted to Islam as a young man and joined the Nation of Islam, where it was
acceptable to voice his belief that “white people are devils.” He eventually
became a Sunni Muslim and “has made statements in support of Islamic laws over
liberal democracy.” He has endorsed sharia punishments such as stoning for
adultery and mutilation for theft and has expressed the view that “Islam is
better than democracy. Allah will cause his deen [Islam as a complete way of
life], Islam to prevail over every kind of system, and you know what? It will
happen.”
Given the admiration Sarsour professed to feel for Wahhaj
and the fact that she indicated he also admires her, it’s perhaps time to
wonder what exactly she means when she so often emphasizes that she is
“unapologetically Muslim”.
Unfortunately, the small part of her speech that her
defenders quote
as the relevant context for her call to wage “jihad” against Trump and his
administration is hardly reassuring given that Sarsour depicts the US as a
country where minorities suffer terrible oppression under the cruel rule of
“fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes.”
Sarsour was no doubt delighted when her defenders rushed
to post articles claiming that “the right freaked out” about her call for “jihad”
because “they don’t know what it means.” The problem with the argument
that Sarsour’s evil right-wing critics don’t know what “jihad” really means is
that it focuses on complex and contentious theological debates among Muslim
scholars while conveniently ignoring centuries of Muslim imperialism, starting
with Islam’s founder Muhammad, who has been politely described
as “Islam’s first great general and the leader of a successful insurgency.” Less
politely, Muhammad has been called a “warlord” – and
if you don’t like what Sam Harris has to say on the topic, you can turn to the
immensely influential “Global
Mufti” Yusuf Qaradawi, who once explained:
“Allah wanted Muhammad’s life to be
a model. For instance, if we examine the question of marriage, he who has one
wife can follow the Prophet Muhammed since most of the time Muhammad lived with
one woman; whoever has more than one wife can also [follow Muhammad’s example].
He who marries a virgin, he who marries a non-virgin… He who marries a young
woman, he who marries an old woman [all can follow Muhammad’s example]. …
Similarly, Allah has also made the prophet Muhammad into an epitome for
religious warriors [Mujahideen] since he ordered Muhammed to fight for
religion.”
And the very first time Muhammad fought a bloody “jihad” for
the religion he founded, he justified it with exactly the kind of threats that
US Muslims face according to Linda Sarsour. Sarsour’s speech was full of
alarming hints about the dangers threatening Muslims in America, where
“fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes [are] ruling in the White
House.” She issued an impassioned call for Muslim unity in the face of threats
from the “Islamophobia industry” (after 10.00) and even went so far as to
assert: “Unity is about survival for the Muslim community.” She also invoked
the scenario of “a potentially horrific time that could come if we as a
community are not united as one ummah as we are supposed to be.” Sarsour insisted
that Muslims were unprepared for “the potential chaos” that the Trump
administration might inflict on them and asserted that Trump was determined to
test how much US Muslims “can endure.”
It is also noteworthy that in the wake of the controversy
that erupted after her call for “jihad” against the Trump administration,
Sarsour tried to claim that
“the majority of Muslims” and “experts” would not misunderstand what she meant
when she encouraged “jihad”.
Unfortunately, this is a very shaky claim given that
throughout Islamic history, the kind of threats that US Muslims face according
to Sarsour have been used to justify “jihad” as understood by most of Sarsour’s
critics. It is no coincidence that “the 199
references to jihad in the most standard collection of hadith, Sahih
al-Bukhari, all assume that jihad means warfare.”
There seem to be very little reliable data on how “the
majority of Muslims” nowadays understand jihad. Gallup once asked the question
in a survey
conducted in 2002 and admitted rather reluctantly that “a significant minority”
of the responses “did include some reference to ‘sacrificing one’s life for the
sake of Islam/God/a just cause,’ or ‘fighting against the opponents of Islam’”
and that in some of the countries surveyed, responses like these even
constituted “the single most identifiable pattern.”
But there are a lot of reliable surveys showing that
hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world supported Al Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden and believe that “suicide bombing and other forms of violence
against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its
enemies.”
It is hardly encouraging that support for this kind of jihadi
terrorism dropped most dramatically in countries where Muslims learned the hard
way that they themselves could become targets when some of their fellow
Muslims feel they are not sufficiently pious.
Moreover, given that Sarsour often emphasizes her
Palestinian identity, it’s rather dismal to contemplate what kind of “jihad”
was popular among the majority of Palestinian Muslims in the first years after
9/11.
Last but not least, it seems doubtful that there is much
reason to cheer when it turns
out that “only” eight percent of American Muslims think that suicide
bombings targeting civilians in defense of Islam are often or at least sometimes
justified, while another five percent feel they are “rarely” justified. To be
sure, 81 percent of US Muslims told pollsters such acts of terrorism can never
be justified, but if Sarsour is right and there are about five million Muslim
Americans, the results from the cited 2013 survey would mean that 50.000 US
Muslims think suicide bombings of civilians in defense of Islam are often
justified; another 350.000 feel such acts of terrorism are sometimes justified,
while an additional 250.000 see them as rarely justified.
Furthermore, given Linda Sarsour’s frequent efforts to
mobilize young Muslims, the alarming results of a Pew
poll published ten years ago are particularly noteworthy:
“the survey finds that younger
Muslim Americans – those under age 30 – are both much more religiously
observant and more accepting of Islamic extremism than are older Muslim
Americans. Younger Muslim Americans report attending services at a mosque more
frequently than do older Muslims. And a greater percentage of younger Muslims
in the U.S. think of themselves first as Muslims, rather than primarily as
Americans (60% vs. 41% among Muslim Americans ages 30 and older). Moreover,
more than twice as many Muslim Americans under age 30 as older Muslims believe
that suicide bombings can be often or sometimes justified in the defense of Islam
(15% vs. 6%).”
Sarsour has worked as a Muslim community organizer for some
15 years, and as her rhetoric shows, she is encouraging the trend to more
religiosity and less assimilation while studiously avoiding any criticism of
the extremism that has been espoused by a not inconsiderable number of young US
Muslims. Instead, she advocates enthusiastically for a convicted murderous
terrorist like Rasmea Odeh and preaches perpetual outrage while calling for
“jihad” without acknowledging what jihadist have wrought just in the 21st
century.
Lee Smith put it best in a Tablet post:
“The reality is that the debate
over Islamic semantics has already been resolved—not in American newsrooms or
the partisan halls of US politics, but on the killing fields of the Middle
East. The people who are cutting each other’s heads off on both sides of the
sectarian divide across Syria and Iraq, crucifying civilians, making sex slaves
of women and children, and indulging in other inhuman depredations, have
justified the murder of their co-religionists and others according to the logic
of jihad. By all means, feel free to challenge that particular interpretation
of the word, but at least have the decency to acknowledge your intervention
comes in the context of nearly half a million dead.”
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