Author: Paul Sperry
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: August 7, 2006
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23695
Could you imagine the New York Times running
a saintly profile of a skinhead who said he hoped the U.S. would be a Nazi
country ruled by the Fourth Reich? Of course not. It would never happen. Nor
should it.
So why did the paper recently run a glowing
feature of a Muslim cleric who said he hopes the U.S. would be a Muslim country
ruled by Islamic law? The Times even ran it -- in the middle of a war on Islamic
terror -- on its front page.
"Every Muslim who is honest would say,
I would like to see America become a Muslim country," imam Zaid Shakir
admitted in the last paragraph of a long story that spent the preceding 2,862
words trying to convince us how progressive and moderate Shakir is.
Talk about burying the lead. If this is the new voice of moderate Muslims
in America, God help us (and I don't mean Allah).
Ironically, the story was titled, "American
Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground." Modern? Islamic law is based
on 1,400-year-old Bedouin justice that metes out beheadings, amputations and
stonings. It also sanctions polygamy, denies women basic rights and merges
mosque and state.
The Times also profiled Shakir's California
partner, Sheik Hamza Yusuf, also described as "hip" and popular
with Americanized Muslim students and converts. The pair tours college campuses
speaking to packed auditoriums.
These aren't your father's imams, the Times
says. They are "a new generation of imams who can reconcile Islam and
American culture" -- even as at least one of them hopes for the Islamization
of American culture.
"They say that Islam must be rescued
from extremists," the story said. "The two are challenging the influence
of Islam's more reactionary sects, like Wahhabism and Salafism, which has
been spread to American mosques and schools by clerics trained in Saudi Arabia."
Hmm. A check of Yusuf's bio reveals he himself
studied Islam in Medina, Saudi Arabia, a fact not mentioned in the piece.
That's not all that was left out.
Yusuf just two days before 9-11 made an ominous
prediction in a California speech that triggered an FBI investigation, according
to the Washington Post.
"This country is facing a terrible fate"
for occupying Muslim lands, Yusuf warned. "The reason for that is that
this country stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what
it did.
"And lest people forget that Europe suffered
two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands, Europe's countries were
devastated, they were completely destroyed," he added. "Their young
people were killed."
FBI agents paid the imam a visit to question
him about the incendiary remarks, according to the Post's account. When they
knocked on his door, his wife answered and told them he wasn't home. "He's
with the president" in Washington, she said.
The agents thought she was joking, but she
wasn't. Yusuf was one of many Muslim leaders invited by the White House to
meet and pray with President Bush in the weeks after 9-11. (He's the cleric
who convinced Bush to ditch "Infinite Justice" as the name for the
Afghan war since it might offend
Muslims.)
The rehabilitation of Yusuf's image was already
in progress, thanks to his Muslim friends in the administration such as Suhail
Khan. Now the Times is taking it to the next level, no doubt pleased with
Yusuf's political activism, which has included taking vanloads of Arabs to
antiwar protests outside the Republican National Convention. The paper is
willing to apologize for even Yusuf's past anti-Semitic remarks. In 1995,
for example, he called Judaism "a most racist religion."
"Both Mr. Shakir and Mr. Yusuf have a
history of anti-American rhetoric," the Times allowed, "but with
age, they have tempered their views."
The Times wants us to believe that these leopards
have matured and lost their radical spots. But are they really gone? Or did
they temporarily disappear as 9-11 brought more scrutiny?
Shakir, who still hopes to replace the U.S.
Constitution with the Quran, once praised the effectiveness of "armed
struggle" such as the one that brought the Taliban to power. A copy of
the pamphlet he wrote was found in the apartment of a suspect in the first
World Trade Center bombing.
Never mind all that, the Times says. The imams
are now just a couple of tweedy, goatee'd moderates "encouraging tolerance."
Uh-huh, that's certainly what they'd have us believe anyway.
