Part of the reason many Americans don’t appreciate the significance of Osama bin Laden’s declarations of war against the United States and the West is because they are completely oblivious to the in-roads radical Islam has made within the United States. Radical Islamists (i.e., Islamofascists, Wahhabis) understand that the conflict must take place on multiple fronts: militarily, economically, diplomatically and ideologically. Because they understand the complexity of the confrontation and the ability of the West to adapt to challenges – albeit lethargically – they employ multiple tactics in their aggressive pursuit of victory. The West’s addiction to sensationalism, epitomized by our limited attention to detail, unless it plays in the superficial 24-hour news cycle, facilitates the successful infiltration of radical ideology into Western society.

Much to the chagrin of the multicultural and the proponents of diversity, those who promote radical Islamist ideology thrive on the fact that the politically correct culture of the West – and the United States in particular – deems it inappropriate to question religious practices or teachings. With this politically correct “wall of separation” in place little if any scrutiny is given to the information disseminated within any given religious institution. This directly facilitates the ideological advancement of Wahhabism, the most radical and puritanical form of Islam, within the mosques of the United States.

To accurately understand the depth of infiltration of the Wahhabist ideology on American soil we need to examine the ideology and how it is advanced within the United States.

Wahhabism is a fiercely fundamentalist form of orthodox Sunni Islam. After a brief examination of its tenets it is clear that it is one of division, domination and hate.

Wahhabism originated circa 1703 and is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabists believe that any and all evolution of the Islamic faith after the 3rd century of the Muslim era – after 950 A.D. – was specious and must be expunged. Consequently, Wahhabism is the form of Islam that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri practice.

This radically fundamentalist dogma is fanatically bigoted, xenophobic and lends itself to serve as the catalyst for much of the Islamofascist aggression being perpetrated around the world. It is a wrathful doctrine that rejects the legitimacy of all religious philosophy but its own. Wahhabism condemns Christians, Jews and all other non-Muslims, as well as non-Wahhabi Muslims. Wahhabists believe it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews.

It stresses a worldview in which there exist two opposing realms that can never be reconciled — Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam, and Dar al-Har, or House of War, also referred to as Dar al-Kufr, House of the Infidel. When Muslims are in the Dar al-Har, they must behave as if they were operatives in a conflict who have been tasked with going behind enemy lines. The Wahhabist ideology permits Muslims to exist “behind enemy lines” for only a few reasons: to acquire knowledge, to make money to be later employed in the jihad against the infidels, or to proselytize the infidels in an effort to convert them to Islam.

Wahhabist doctrine specifically warns Muslims not to imitate, befriend or help “infidels” in any way. It instills hatred for United States because we are ruled by legislated constitutional law rather than by tyrannical Sharia law. Wahhabists are instructed by edict to, above all, work for the creation of an Islamic state where ever they may dwell.

It is because of the Wahhabist ideology’s cruel and unyielding fanaticism that we in the United States should be concerned with its prevalence within the mosques of our nation.

After the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 – an unprecedented action by the fundamentalists of the Shi’ite sect, the Saudi Arabian government responded by coming to terms with the fundamentalist Wahhabist movement of the Sunni sect. The Saudis, in return for a declaration of non-aggression, began to finance the construction of mosques in countries around the world. An estimated $45 billion has been spent by the Saudis to finance the building and operational costs of mosques and Islamic schools in foreign countries, including in North America.

Through the funding of mosques, Islamic Centers and their operations, Saudi Arabia is exporting the Wahhabist ideology. It is not unusual to find that the presiding cleric in any given mosque within the United States is a Wahhabist and that his teachings have been sanctioned and financed by the Saudi government and vetted by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Two of the more predominant mosques in the United States that have received funding from the Saudi government, and that adhere to the Wahhabist ideology, are the al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, New York, and the King Fahd mosque in Los Angeles, California. Both mosques welcomed a number of the hijackers who piloted the planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September 11th, 2001.

In 2005, Freedom House, a 501(c)(3) organization concerned with the mounting threats to peace and democracy, released a report titled, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques. This examination of a comprehensive sampling of mosques and Islamic Centers across America shows that literature available in an overwhelming number of them indicates deference for the Wahhabist ideology.

Among some of the edicts – or fatwas – issued through this literature:

▪ “[I]t is basic Islam to believe that everyone who does not embrace Islam is an unbeliever, and must be called an unbeliever, and that they are enemies to Allah, his Prophet and believers.”

▪ “[O]ur doctrine states that if you accept any religion other than Islam, like Judaism or Christianity, which are not acceptable, you become an unbeliever. If you do not repent, you are an apostate and you should be killed because you have denied the Koran.”

▪ “Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.”

▪ “Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel.”

▪ “Those who reside in the land of unbelief out of their own choice and desire to be with the people of that land, accepting the way they are regarding their faith, or giving compliments to them, or pleasing them by pointing out something wrong with the Muslims, they become unbelievers and enemies to Allah and his messenger.”

▪ “To be true Muslims, we must prepare and be ready for jihad in Allah’s way. It is the duty of the citizen and the government. The military education is glued to faith and its meaning, and the duty to follow it.”

With this ideology being taught in mosques across America, there is little reason for speculating as to why hatred exists for American principles, culture and ideology not only within the Islamic community, but among the societally disenfranchised and ideologically vulnerable in the United States who are being indoctrinated into this radical form of Islam.

This brings to the forefront a bothersome question. Why aren’t those of the American Fifth Column, who are predisposed to seeking out the haters among us, calling out the Wahhabist bigots who preach their hate in American mosques?

We in the West – and especially in the United States – must immediately seek out a greater understanding of not only the basic elements of the threat of radical Islam, but the extent to which it has already infiltrated our society. If we continue to remain ignorant of the facts surrounding this very real war against our way of life, we will lose our nation with nary a shot being fired.

Related Reading:Freedom House
http://www.freedomhouse.org

Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques
http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/45.pdf

Basics Project: Terrorism – Ideology
http://www.basicsproject.org/terrorism/ideology.htm#

Wahhabism

 

Basics Project: Understanding the Threat of Radical Islam
http://www.basicsproject.org/educational_cd_series.htm#

Understanding_the_Threat_of_Radical_Islam

Frank Salvato is the vice president and executive director of Basics Project a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(C)(3) research and education initiative. He also serves as the managing editor for The New Media Journal. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His organization, Basics Project, partnered in producing the first ever national symposium series addressing the root causes of radical Islamist terrorism with events taking place in Washington DC, Las Vegas, NV, Dearborn, MI and scheduled to take place in additional locations across the country. Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel and is the host of the NMJ Radio show broadcast global on NetTalkWorld global talk radio and broadcast live on BlogTalk Radio. He is a regular guest on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent Radio Network, syndicated on over 25 stations nationally and on The Captain’s America Radio Show catering to the US Armed Forces around the world, as well as an occasional guests on radio programs across the country. His opinion-editorials are syndicated nationally and he is occasionally quoted in The Federalist. Mr. Salvato is available for public speaking engagements. He can be contacted at newmediajournal@comcast.net

 

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The opinions expressed in this column represent those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, or philosophy of TheRealityCheck.org

The release of Bill Cosby’s new book “Come On, People:  On the Path from Victims to Victors,” has revived charges from progressive corners that he is just a big, rich “meany-pants” picking on the poor and down trodden.

Contrary to this critique, Cosby and those that agree with him are actually filled with Black pride.   It is precisely because we are a strong and irrepressible people that it is good to talk about what we can do to make things better. It is good to talk about the things we can do to improve the chances of children, to lower poverty rates, to increase our economic muscle … in short to empower ourselves. In this sense, Cosby’s words have more in common with Marcus Garvey’s command to rise “up you mighty race.  You can accomplish what you will” than they do denouncing the black underclass as being culturally inferior. 

High rates of out of wedlock births and the decline in marriage are real and provide a negative drag on our success – on our American success.  Oddly enough, those most strident in their criticism are the very same folks — ideologically speaking — largely to blame for the current state of affairs.  It was progressives and new liberals that in the late 1960’s and early 70’s proclaimed American cultural institutions and mores rife with the stain of racism thus rendering them illegitimate.  The counter culture revolution would not simply eradicate oppression but would dismantle all of American culture as well, rebuilding it from the ground up. Gone went traditional notions of sexual propriety. Gone went the idea of gender roles and traditional ideals of marriage and family. Gone also went the faith in man’s capacity to rule himself. Black authenticity was now defined by a cultural revolutionary defiance. Alas, the baby truly went out the window with the bath water. 

The progressive mantra has changed very little over time.  When individual behavior is criticized, they respond that the real culprit is white racism manifested in the entire American system.  Deconstruction remains the call.  What remains unclear is how the white racist power structure prevents one from engaging in responsible sexual and cultural behavior.  George Bush and Dick Cheney haven’t a thing to do with a man honoring his woman with marriage, raising his children from within the home or parents insisting on academic excellence.

Progressives would have us believe that men are powerless without experts trained in our finest universities working with government to deliver us from the evil of individualism. Cosby is the latest in a long line of folks that have maintained that our current trials are not due to systemic racism, but a culture that makes excuses for irresponsible behavior, thus absolving individuals from any culpability for their circumstances, and subsequently draining them of any power to change their lives. 

This is the inherent strength of Cosby’s message and the weakness of those that would shout him down.  Cosby is saying to people – the very people progressives claim to be protecting – that they have power, that the changes they seek begin with the choices they make. Indeed, Cosby points out that it is adherence to the traditional mores of family, faith and idealism that made us strong, that provided the soldiers of character and conscience that fought and won the civil rights battles of the 50’s and 60’s.  Moreover, these same values will provide the moral and cultural foundation for the warriors of the next generation.

During Cosby’s recent appearance on Meet the Press, he was clear: “No matter your economic status, no matter your age, no matter your race, no matter your gender, no matter your religion.  Many families in tight-knit communities are crumbling at an alarming rate.  We need to see this as a reality, not something to just talk about but to act on.” To imagine progress is possible without individual initiative is folly.  To believe cultural revolutionary defiance will lead to victory is to skip blindly down the garden path.

 

 

Joseph C. Phillips is the author of “He Talk Like A White Boy” available wherever books are sold.

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This author is a Staff Columnist for TheRealityCheck.org. The opinions expressed in this column represent those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, or philosophy of TheRealityCheck.org

It has to be more than an intellectual understanding. We must strive to live it.

 

Pastor Steve Treash’s sermon at Black Rock - Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was the last in a series on the practical application of Christian principles to family life.Those sermons’ messages can be summarized under the headings of:

Love of God: Families must have a spiritual passion for God and godly life. They must converse about God and with God. They must pray together.

“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ “(Mark 12:28-30)

Love for Other People: Jesus continued: “The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:31)

Christianity is a positive, not a negative and critical faith. Other people must see in us the positive effect of the Holy Spirit. A cold and critical manner is the opposite.

Within and outside the family we must be kind, loving, affectionate, and considerate of each other.

When Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John, chapter 4), he did not attack her religious beliefs, but led her gently to understand that salvation is through Him.

Desire to Please God: Especially within the family we must read God’s word, talk about it, and teach it to our children. Knowing the Bible is a main route to leading a life that pleases God. Our focus must not be on the sensual pleasures of the world, on what pleases us, but upon what pleases God.

“Teach me to do your will, for you are my God; may your good Spirit lead me on level ground.” (Psalms 143:10)

Readiness to Please God: Knowing intellectually what pleases God is not sufficient; we must act upon that knowledge. We must be obedient to God.

“Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13)

Above all, we must learn to listen for God’s directives in our lives and follow them.

“Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live!” (Hebrews 12:9)

Not only must we listen to, and obey, God. We must see to it that, in dealing with our children, we mean what we say and require our children to obey. Children who learn that they can with impunity ignore parents’ commands will grow up ignoring God.

Joyous Fullness: Experience the joy, the serenity, and comfort of living a life following God’s commands. In Jesus’s words:

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” (John 15:9-12)Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
 

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The opinions expressed in this column represent those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, or philosophy of TheRealityCheck.org

In my local newspaper, several editorial letters have been written expressing support for those on the Kimberly, Wisconsin Board of Education, who are also members of a local group, the Positive Youth Development Foundation.The accolades are in response to the foundation’s decision to financially sponsor a fashion program that encourages modesty in the dress of young women.

The group putting on the show has an interest in promoting religious values in culture. That association had the predictable effect of bringing out the usual social termites to examine carefully the relationship between the Board of Education and the aforementioned foundation.

We have had interlopers like Annie Gaylor, from the Christian suppression organization, the Madison, Wisconsin based Freedom From Religion Foundation, plying their specialty of First Amendment ambulance chasing.

The FFRF bills itself as a vanguard of religious freedom. Religious freedom for who? Such descriptions border on the perversion of language exceeding the imagination of 19^th century writer and logician Lewis Carroll, in his work Through the Looking Glass (words mean exactly what I want them to mean, nothing more, nothing less).

There have also been some recent editorial letters in the same paper advocating public policy that eschews any religious foundations, but instead favors some coupling of secular ethics with “reason.”

Ironically, this incident provides a perfect example of where that thinking leads us. We have meddling from the outside by inquisitors so bent to eradicate any whiff of religious affiliations, that they the could care less about the harmonious community ethic in Kimberly, Wisconsin, much less anywhere else. The blitzkrieg efforts to secularize every corridor of the American public, ultimately frustrates an attempt to teach young women the virtues of modest dress. Where is the “reason” in that end?

That is one case for my vehement opposition to secular humanism. If one points unfavorably to a checkered history of religious tyranny, it only seems that we have exchanged that blemish for an impending secular tyranny.

It is not hard to imagine a day where secularists protest saying, “You can attend your house of worship on the weekend and pray in your closet, so how can you complain about shrinking religious freedoms?”

One letter writer wondered how all this fuss had anything to do with the language of the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Why more people don’t point this out, is to me, the eighth wonder of the world.

In examining this issue, we must consider the contemporary legal foundations for justifying this sort of apparent distortion. The most important legal principle is the so-called “Lemon Test.”

The purpose of the Lemon test is to determine when a law has the effect of establishing religion. The test has served as the foundation for many of the Court’s post-1971 establishment clause rulings. As articulated by the late Chief Justice Burger, the test has three parts:

First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster “an excessive government entanglement with religion.

While I disagree that this formula is necessary, based on the historical understanding of what the First Amendment requires, it is still difficult to see how Kimberly’s Board of Education violated any of the three requirements.

It should be obvious that the school board has made no law or regulation. Neither is there any effort to balance the requirements of avoiding establishment with the Free Exercise clause.

A second problem is that the ambiguous phrase, “Wall of separation of church and state,” has been used as a proxy for what the First Amendment means. That phrase was lifted from the context of a private letter, written more than a decade after the Constitution was drafted.

The Late Chief Justice William Rehnquist offered his appraisal of that phrase in a 1985 dissenting opinion.

“But the greatest injury of the “wall” notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights… No amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true. The ‘wall of separation between church and State’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”
It must be noted that the whole posture of our Bill of Rights is to protect people from government tyranny, not to reserve the court system as a legal club to circumvent religious expression.

The anti-religion groups usually don’t win because of better legal arguments, but because they are never challenged. School administrators fear the cost of lawsuits, so they capitulate unnecessarily.

My personal advice is that school officials across the nation should become familiar with, and utilize, the services of religious freedom law associations, such as Liberty Counsel, the Alliance Defense Fund, and others who will defend them pro bono.

I have had positive personal experiences with some of these organizations.

 

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Robert E. Meyer is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. (www.thenma.org). The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

 

The opinions expressed in this column represent those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, or philosophy of TheRealityCheck.org

Collectivism in the Federal government since the 1930s New Deal is paralleled by the emergence in financial markets of giant, multi-national financial institutions. Both reflect the detached, numbers only, view of socialistic regulators who deal in large abstractions called “the economy” and “the workers.” As Stalin is reputed to have said, one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is just a statistic. Make it big enough, and it can be made to seem in the best interests of society.Stalin’s detachment applies to the process of pooling thousands of individual debts Ð home mortgage loans, automobile notes, etc.  into a single large debt package. Implicit is the idea that, even when a whole class of debt is highly risky, putting enough of them together will somehow mitigate the riskiness of any one of the components. Risks of default may be high in any one of the underlying pooled obligations, but aggregating enough of them into a single statistical vehicle presumably cancels the risk of individual components.

Macroeconomics is the Keynesian thesis that specific prices and wage rates don’t matter, that it is sufficient to look only at averages of prices and wages for the whole economy. And, in that picture, the ultimate determinant of employment and economic activity is Federal deficit spending, the perennial Democratic Party “solution” to every economic slowdown. Closely allied is the theory that the Federal Reserve can control inflation and the level of economic activity by fiddling with interest rates.

In contrast, traditional economics looks to the free market to readjust interest rates, prices and wages that have become too high in individual companies and segments of individual industries, fully aware that average wages and average prices are meaningless in re-establishing economic equilibrium. History repeatedly demonstrates that individual people and enterprises are far better at judging prices and wages than any elite group of economists or state-planners.

The 1920-21 recession was as severe as the start of the Depression in 1929-30. With little government interference, the 1920-21 recession was ended in less than a year via the historical processes of lowering wage rates and materials prices until businesses could again produce goods at a profit. It is to be noted that there were many thousands of different adjustments of prices and wages, varying from industry to industry and from company to company.

In baleful contrast, the macroeconomic approach of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt pressured businesses to keep wages up, with the result that production costs remained too high for businesses to resume profitable production. Unemployment remained in excess of 15% for ten years.

The appearance in 1936 of John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” made macroeconomic theory orthodoxy among the socialist intelligentsia in Franklin Roosevelt’s administrations. Since then, three generations of students have been taught that Keynesian macroeconomics is the appropriate analytical tool to understand the dynamics of our economy. Those students, since the 1980s, have transformed banking and investment analysis into a numbers-only abstraction of averages that disregards underlying risks in the individual transactions that now are rolled up into huge pools of securitized debt.

Bankers historically were schooled to judge first and foremost the personal character of their borrowers, then to determine whether the requested loans could reasonably be repaid from cash flow of the business. Banking and investment since the 1980s has been increasingly divorced from knowledge of the underlying assets and increasingly focused on law-of-large-numbers abstractions in which the underlying economic reality is out of sight.

In the commercial real estate field, for example, as recently as the 1970s, institutions financing office buildings, shopping centers, apartments, industrial warehouses, and hotels were staffed with people who had lived through one or more economic recessions, people who therefore were keenly aware of potential risks in property locations and property types. Prudential Insurance

Company, then the largest real estate lender, had more than 60 offices in every part of the country with loan officers who knew every detail of their territories and details of every investment.

By the early 1980s, hyperinflation created by President Johnson’s Great Society deluge of welfare entitlements spending had wrecked the balance sheets of S & Ls and insurance companies. S & L depositors withdrew their savings from 4.5% savings deposits, and insurance company policy holders borrowed full cash values of their policies at the contractual 5% rates, both groups reinvesting in short term money funds that were paying interest rates around 12% to 14% per annum.

This started the rapid agglomeration of financial institutions, changing S & Ls from local institutions that knew their territories into giant organizations lending nationwide. They were staffed mostly by young people in their 20s who had never lived through down markets. And those inexperienced lending officers were asked to lend in much larger individual deals, at a fast pace.

The same scenario was repeated in insurance companies, investment banks, and commercial banks.

Most of the young people taking jobs in those huge financial organizations were schooled in computer analysis and creation of abstract financing techniques, which meant that too many of them never left their offices and knew little or nothing about the underlying business or real estate projects they were financing.

The diffusion of the Keynesian macroeconomic mindset thus set the stage for recent unraveling of complex, computer-constructed investment vehicles in which it is impossible to determine the real economic bases of the millions of individual transactions comprising them.

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776

http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com

New Media Alliance Television.The opinions expressed in this column represent those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, or philosophy of TheRealityCheck.org