Set America Free Notes&Comments

Will we heed what Dr. Tawfik Hamid is risking his life to tell us? Read on:

[Dr. Tawfik Hamid] once was a member of Egypt’s Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Arabic for “the Islamic Group”), a banned terrorist organization. He was trained under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bearded jihadi who appears in Bin Laden’s videos, telling the world that Islamic violence will stop only once we all become Muslims.

He’s a disarmingly gentle and courteous man. But he’s determined to tell a complacent North America what he knows about fundamentalist Muslim imperialism.

“Yes, ‘imperialism,’ ” he tells me. “The deliberate and determined expansion of militant Islam and its attempt to triumph not only in the Islamic world but in Europe and North America. Pure ideology. Muslim terrorists kill and slaughter not because of what they experience but because of what they believe.”

Hamid drank in the message of Jihadism while at medical school in Cairo, and devoted himself to the cause. His group began meeting in a small room. Then a larger one. Then a Mosque reserved for followers of al-Zawahiri. By the time Hamid left the movement, its members were intimidating other students who were unsympathetic.

He is now 45 years old, and has had many years to reflect on why he was willing to die and kill for his religion. “The first thing you have to understand is that it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with poverty or lack of education,” he says. “I was from a middle-class family and my parents were not religious. Hardly anyone in the movement at university came from a background that was different from mine.

“I’ve heard this poverty nonsense time and time again from Western apologists for Islam, most of them not Muslim by the way. There are millions of passive supporters of terror who may be poor and needy but most of those who do the killing are wealthy, privileged, educated and free. If it were about poverty, ask yourself why it is middle-class Muslims — and never poor Christians — who become suicide bombers in Palestine.”

His analysis is fascinating. Muslim fundamentalists believe, he insists, that Saudi Arabia’s petroleum-based wealth is a divine gift, and that Saudi influence is sanctioned by Allah. Thus the extreme brand of Sunni Islam that spread from the Kingdom to the rest of the Islamic world is regarded not merely as one interpretation of the religion but the only genuine interpretation. The expansion of violent and regressive Islam, he continues, began in the late 1970s, and can be traced precisely to the growing financial clout of Saudi Arabia.

“We’re not talking about a fringe cult here,” he tells me. “Salafist [fundamentalist] Islam is the dominant version of the religion and is taught in almost every Islamic university in the world. It is puritanical, extreme and does, yes, mean that women can be beaten, apostates killed and Jews called pigs and monkeys.”

[...]

“Islam condemns extra-marital sex as well as masturbation, which is also taught in the Christian tradition. But Islam also tells of unlimited sexual ecstasy in paradise with beautiful virgins for the martyr who gives his life for the faith. Don’t for a moment underestimate this blinding passion or its influence on those who accept fundamentalism.”

A pause. “I know. I was one who accepted it.”

[...] “The sexual aspect is, of course, just one part of this. But I can tell you what it is not about. Not about Israel, not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. They are mere excuses. Algerian Muslim fundamentalists murdered 150,000 other Algerian Muslims, sometimes slitting the throats of children in front of their parents. Are you seriously telling me that this was because of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians or American foreign policy?”

He’s exasperated now, visibly angry at what he sees as a willful Western foolishness. “Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They’re slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can’t you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want.” (emphasis added)

Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: The Corner)

This weekend FOX is broadcasting a must see documentary titled Obsession about the threat radical Islam poses to the world.  The special will air Saturday night at 8 p.m. ET, and will be repeated Sunday at 1 a.m. ET, 5 a.m. ET, 4 p.m. ET and 10 p.m. ET.  We strongly encourage you to watch. The trailer can be viewed here.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that enough good men do nothing.”

UPDATE:
In case you missed it, you can watch it on YouTube in eight segments (hattip The Jawa Report)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

That is radical Islam. And this is who pays for it.

As if to emphasize Saudi solidarity with Australia’s most senior Islamic cleric, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilaly, who said that a woman who was raped should be jailed for life because it was her fault for leaving uncovered meat on the street, the German Press Agency DPA reports a Saudi court has “sentenced a gang rape victim to 90 lashes of the whip because she was alone in a car with a man to whom she was not married.” Words fail. ”The court heard that the victim and her friend were followed by the assailants to their car, kidnapped and taken to a remote farm, where the raping occurred. ” (hat tip LGF) We should point out that it is likely the only reason the assailants in this case were punished, is that the friend of the victim who witnessed the crime was male.  You see, a woman’s testimony is not highly valued in Islamic court.

This is not an unusual occurence – In Iran a teenage girl was sentenced to 100 lashes for allowing herself to be raped, and was lucky not to have been sentenced to death.

As a postscript, it is very curious indeed, and shameful to boot, that a Google News search turned up only two newspapers that bothered to print the Saudi story.

UPDATE:  Thank you to Andrew Sullivan for the reminder that today is the second year anniversary of the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist terrorist named Mohammad Bouyeri.  After shooting Van Gogh eight times, stabbing him five times, and slitting his throat, the murderer used one of the two knives he left in his body to pin a note to his chest which read in part:

I know for sure that you, Oh America will go under;

I know for sure that you, Oh Europe will go under;

I know for sure that you, Oh Holland, will go under;

I know for sure that you, Oh Hirsi Ali, will go under;

I know for sure that you, Oh unbelieving fundamentalist, will go under.

Hirsi Ali is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave Somali woman who wrote the film Submission which Van Gogh directed and for which he was murdered and she forced into hiding to protect her life. This film: