IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Gracen Intelligence UK Cambridge Meeting 4 February, 8:00 p.m.

Gracen Intelligence NYC Meeting, 27 February, will be chaired by Gracen Fellow Alastair Fellows and will feature Mohammad Chehabi on Iranian resistance and Morgaan Sinclair on Saudi prison conditions and the death penalty in Iran.


30 October 2008

Where is Obama’s “Hindu Outreach Advisor”? After All, He’s Got a Muslim One. Why?

by Morgaan Sinclair, for Gracen Intelligence

Where is Obama’s Hindu Outreach Advisor? How about his Jewish Outreach Advisor? How about his Native American Medicine Outreach Advisor? How about one for the Baha’i? the Jains? the Buddhists? the Sufis? the Ahmadiyya? the Christians?

What’s that, you say? Isn’t a Muslim advisor also a Sufi advisor?

No, not in this county. Obama’s Muslim Outreach Advisor has purely Wahhabi (conservative, if not radical, Sunni) connections, and they consider the peaceful and mystical Sufis apostates on whom there is a standing death sentence. They also openly attack and threaten the Ahmadiyya and the Baha’I, so they are, in fact, very quick to slap an “Infidel” label on any Muslim that doesn’t agree with them.

But Obama does have Muslim advisors to the exclusion of all other minority religious groups. Obviously, with Christians making up 78% of the American population, we’d have to concede they probably don’t need “outreach.” But have a look at the demographics of religious minorities in the United States (from the CIA’s The World Factbook):

Jewish: 1.6%
Buddhist: .7%
Muslim: .6%
All others, including Native American, Pacifica Islander, animists, etc.: 2.4%
Unaffiliated or No Religion: 16.1%

How many Muslims is that, exactly? Well, because it’s illegal to ask that on census records, there’s a good deal of guessing – and propaganda – going on. The ever-suspect unindicted co-conspirator in terrorist financing – CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, originally known as Hamas in the United States – gets almost all of its funding from Saudi sources. Muslims have fled this pariah in droves since 9/11, but CAIR still falsely touts itself as the premier Muslim “civil rights” organization in America. Its major thrust seems to be the hysterical screaming of “Discrimination!” and “Racism!” whenever pundits expose overt and covert jihadist activities in the United States. It is particularly fond of the harassment lawsuit tactic on the probably theory that they have more money, so they can outlast soothsayers in court. That’s true: They have grants from Saudi Prince Alwaleed (always in the list of the world’s 10 richest people) in excess of $50 million.

At any rate, CAIR’s propaganda says that nearly 7 million Americans are Muslims. The City University of New York, however, did a non-census religious survey, and they have placed the number at 1.1 million Muslim adults plus .7 million children, or 1.8 million. As of 2007, the CIA agrees: It’s 1.8 million including children, or .6% of the population.

All right. If one is going to have outreach programs for subgroups that claim to be misunderstood and beleaguered minorities, that’s fine. But do it for all, not just one group.
In fact, Muslims, who are not the most beleaguered of all the minority groups in America. Always the greatest victims of hate crimes are blacks. Of all hate crimes, violence against blacks tops the list with 51% or more.

But of religious hate crimes, it’s always the Jews getting kicked the hardest. According to the FBI’s hate crimes figures for 2007, there were 1,628 victims of anti-religious hate crime. Some 69.2% of them were Jews, attacked on an anti-Semitic basis. Only 8.7% of them were victims of anti-Islamic bias.

All hate crime is despicable, and any Muslim who is attacked on the basis of religious orientation should absolutely scream bloody murder. And call me up. I’ll scream bloody murder, too.

But that Obama has a Muslim Outreach Advisor but not a Jewish one, when Jews are overwhelmingly the most attacked religious group in America, or a Hindu one – given the fact that Hindus are on a demographic par with Muslims – is indication of political pandering, if not fear. It elevates American Muslims to the state of a privileged province of the American population landscape.

And more worrying still is the pool of radical Islamists from which he has chosen his “advisor.”

In fact, he’s had two, both bad apples:

• The first was Mazen Asbahi, whose radical Islamist connections were exposed by the Wall Street Journal, which discovered his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and imams involved in terrorist funding. The WSJ submitted a list of questions to the Obama’s campaign. But they didn’t get answers: Instead, Asbahi instantaneously resigned and was replaced by:

Minha Huseini, who then promptly met, on September 15th, in Virginia, with several Islamic organizations with ties to Hamas. Mazen Asbahi was also at the meeting. Then she had din-din with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, arguably the worst women’s right offender on the planet with the possible exception of the religious police in Saudi Arabia.

So, Obama is not choosing from the truly moderate Muslims in America – had he done so, he would have gone to the Sufis or the Shia’s, not to the very enclaves of Sunni radicalism that brought us 9/11.
And, as Amir Taheri pointed out earlier this week in Forbes, Obama, widely touted by the radical imams in Iran who claim his ascendency in the West heralds the coming of the 12th imam and the triumph of Islam all over the earth, is the worst news for the majority of Iranians – intensely pro-American – who fear his election and the impact that his pandering will have on their hopes for freedom.

It is no accident that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood have all endorsed Barack Obama. And even though an unsubstantiated allegation that Al Qaeda had endorsed McCain, such is only a use of reverse psychology. Al Qaeda tried to play it straight in endorsing John Kerry, and it backfired with Bush’s re-election. They learned. This time, if they did it at all, which any dispassionate observer must doubt, they used reverse psychology: If they tell us to vote for McCain, obviously we’ll think we should vote for Obama. Hopefully, America is now shaking off this mesmerism, this trick of light and mirrors.

The bottom line is that we have a Presidential candidate passing over the Muslims in America proffering real solutions and in deep with exactly the minority that is a problem for both Muslims and non-Muslims who cherish values of free speech, freedom of religion, and equal rights under the law. We have a Presidential candidate refusing to turn over his birth certificate and his records from Columbia and Harvard and Kenya. We have a Presidential candidate taking instructions from Muslims of the worst sort – Muslims NOT representative of the American Muslim community. And we have a Presidential candidate who makes comments at a Muslim rally, the video of which the Los Angeles Times will not release.

There is too much wrong here, too much hidden, too many vicious associations – from the violent Bill Ayers to the racist Jeremiah Wright to the terrorist-associated Muslim advisors -- to allow this man at the helm.


Obama: Fork over the Birth Certificate Right Now … or Get Out of the Race

Also, release ALL your records from Columbia, Harvard, and Kenya. And do it now. You have NO RIGHT to stand for election in this country if you are not willing to be honest with us about who you are, what you really believe, and where you were born. Somehow having your grandmother on tape saying quite definitively that you were born in a hospital in Mombassa has a great deal of gravitas. So either you prove that your grandmother is a liar, or you get out of the race. Because …

The only possible reason for your stonewalling is that you were born in Kenya. That being said, stand aside and let Hillary Clinton run.

Otherwise, you’re going to be found out AFTER the fact and cause the whole country an extreme crisis.

That’s it. World’s shortest article.



29 October 2008

Our Brothers Keepers? from Chesler Chronicles

by Phyllis Chesler

29 October 2008

~

Listen carefully to what they are telling us.

In their countries, if they speak out for women’s rights, they will be imprisoned for twenty years–something that just happened to a young male journalism student in Afghanistan. The Afghan mullahs have accused the judge of being “anti-Islam.” They wanted the young man, Parwez Kambakhsh, hung.

Those Muslim and Arab dissidents who live in exile in the West do not understand why their western counterparts refuse to respect the freedom they enjoy in their own western countries but, on the contrary, blame the West for the crimes of Egypt and Syria. Muslim tyrants usually imprison and torture their dissidents. In Iran, the country that once held Americans hostage for 444 days and which is now threatening to visit a nuclear holocaust upon Israel, peaceful student activists, feminists, and dissidents are arrested and, if they’re lucky, are not hung or shot but are “only” raped, flogged, put into solitary confinement and eventually released. Some souls flee and apply for political asylum in the West.

In 2006, the American State Department protested the horrendous treatment of Iranian student activists, especially that of Akbar Mohammadi who died in captivity.

In 2008, 22 year-old Hana Abdi was sentenced to five long years in prison. Her crime? Working on a campaign to gather one million signatures on behalf of Iranian women’s’ rights. In September of 2008, four Iranian women were sentenced to six months in jail for cyber-feminist activism. Their crime? Writing online articles on behalf of women’s’ rights in Iran.

Arab and Muslim intellectuals are forever asking me why progressives in the West do not stand against tyranny but instead seek to appease or make common cause with it. In a recent interview in the New York Times, formerly tortured Iranian student protestor Ahmad Batebi carefully said: “If people could stand up and have the right to challenge their government, and not be put down by the government, and know that they have the international community behind them, then they would change their government’s policy and behavior.” (Italics mine).

So, to our new American President I say: On your watch, will we stand with the tyrants or with the dissidents? Do we have a responsibility to advance the cause of liberty internationally—or have the American people decided that the cost of doing so is too high, that it is now time to take care of our own first? This is certainly a valid, although heartbreaking position.

But, Mr. New President: What if the forces of Al-Qaeda rush into Iraq, just as Iran and its proxy army Hezbollah de-stabilize the Middle East and openly take over Lebanon? What if our departure means that the Sunni- Shiia fratricide heats up even further and the Muslim Brotherhood openly takes over Egypt–just as Hamas took over Gaza: via the ballot? What if this means that more and more women will all be wearing the face-veil and put in purdah instead of entering the professions or leading dissident struggles? What if this means that more and more Christians will be persecuted, murdered, and forced to flee Muslim lands?

Alright, you say: What’s that got to do with us? Well, what if similar (or the same) forces of repression are already here in our own country and using our laws of tolerance to advance the cause of intolerance? What about the imposition of Sharia law right here in America–a possibility that my dear friend, the writer and dissident, Nonie Darwish, fears might happen? Her important new book on the subject, Cruel and Usual Punishment. The Terrifying Implications of Global Sharia Law will be out in early 2009.

Many Muslim women in the Muslim world are bravely speaking out against the veil and against other features of Islamic gender apartheid. Rania al-Baz was a successful television news announcer in Saudi Arabia. One day, in 2005, her husband, jealous of her success, beat her so badly she sustained thirteen face fractures and was in a coma for four days. Rania bravely published the photos of how she looked. This caused a sensation. It inspired the first study of domestic violence in The Kingdom. Rania required twelve operations to restore her facial appearance. Rania says: “In the end, I may lose my fight. But at least I did not accept the way things are.”

In 2007, in Afghanistan, within the same week, two female journalists, Zakia Zaki, head of a local radio station and, Sanga Amach, a 22-year-old news presenter with a private television station were shot dead for their criticism of warlords.

Activists are being censored, warned, arrested, and tortured. In 2007, the Egyptian government began a massive crackdown on journalists and human rights activists. They are paying a huge price for doing so.

Yet, right here in America, as Darwish points out, more and more young and educated Muslim-American women are proudly and aggressively veiling themselves as a way of supporting jihad, protesting alleged “Islamophobia,” and expressing solidarity with their religious community. They, too are cutting their dissident and trapped Muslim sisters and brothers loose.

Mr. New President: Are you prepared to join them?


From Chesler Chronicles, http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2008/10/29/our-brothers-keepers/
Chesler Chronicles offers a wealth of excellent writing on womens' issues, and we heartily recommend the site.


28 October 2008

Fighting for Muslim women's rights

Some of the world's leading Islamic feminists have been gathered in Barcelona for the third International Congress on Islamic Feminism, to discuss the issues women face in the Muslim world.

Some of the women taking part in the conference explained the problems in their home countries, and where they hoped to make progress.

ASMA BARLAS, Author, Pakistan

Religions always come into cultures, they don't come into abstract and pure spaces. Islam came into a very patriarchal, tribal and misogynistic culture. One of the deepest damages to Islam has been its reduction to "Arabisation".

Pakistani women protest
Islam is influenced by the culture of the country it enters

I'm not going to say that the Arabs are particularly misogynistic in a way that nobody else is, but I do think there are very particular traits and attitudes towards women that have crept into Islam.

I have a friend who has been studying the interface between what he calls the Persian models and the Arabist models of Islam in the subcontinent and surprise, surprise: the Arabist models are misogynistic, authoritarian, unitarian and the Persian models are much more plural and tolerant.

This is a fight on two fronts - on the one hand we are struggling against the kinds of oppression dominant in Muslim patriarch societies and, on the other, Western perceptions of Islam as necessarily monolithic, and confusing the ideals of Islam with the reality of Muslim lives.

If we read the Koran as a totality rather than pulling out random verses or half a line, that opens all kinds of possibilities for sexual equality.

RAFIAH AL-TALEI, journalist, Oman

Oman is relatively liberal, women are free to choose what to wear, and can choose their jobs and education. And the law does not require us to wear any particular form of clothing. But there are strong social and cultural factors - coming from the fact that we are in Arabia - that limit women.

Sharia is fair, but it is the wrong interpretations that are the problem. Male judges often don't understand the principal goals of sharia

As a journalist, it has not been hard for me to work among men, but it has been hard for some of my colleagues whose families told them this was not "appropriate" work for them.

The biggest difficulties are the social and cultural factors, and some aspects of law. For example, women who marry a foreigner cannot pass on their nationality to their children, whereas men in that situation can.

Religion is not an issue in our struggle, although there are problems with family law about divorce and marriage status. Omani laws are based on sharia law. Sharia is fair, but it is the wrong interpretations that are the problem. Male judges often don't understand the principal goals of sharia. We feel the law is fair, but ends up being unfair for women because of how judges interpret it.

Cultural and social factors often get mixed up with religion. Educated women can be more empowered and separate the two, but many don't dare challenge the conventions.


NORANI OTHMAN, Scholar-activist, Malaysia
I don't think it is any more difficult to be an Islamic feminist than a non-Muslim, or secular feminist.
A Muslim woman in Malaysia in a textiles shop
Asian Muslim states have very different traditions to Middle Eastern countries

Feminists in general have to face up to political and cultural obstacles, to achieve our objectives of women's rights. Even Western feminists have had a similar history - having to engage with certain religious beliefs not conducive to gender equality.

Perhaps the only distinctive difference peculiar to Muslim feminists is that we are caught in the cross-currents of modernisation and a changing society, due to a modern economy on the one hand and the global resurgence of political Islam on the other.

Political Islam wants to impose a world view about the gender order that is not consistent with the realities and the lived experiences of Muslim men and women in contemporary society.

Our detractors would hurl empty accusations at us - calling us Western, secular or anti-Islamic

There is a difference between South East Asian Muslim countries and the ones in the Middle East - culturally we are less patriarchal, we can always respond to our detractors by pointing out we don't have the cultural practices that they do.

Our detractors would hurl empty accusations at us - calling us Western, secular or anti-Islamic.

Our arguments are rooted within Islam - we want renewal and transformation within the Islamic framework. They don't like that.

We have a holistic approach, seeking gender equality within the Islamic framework, supported by constitutional guarantees. We see that these are not inconsistent with the message of the Koran, particularly during its formative stages. We have to understand the history and cultural context and extract the principle that will be applicable in modern times.

SITI MUSDAH MULIA, Academic, Indonesia

In my experience, I find that it is very difficult to make Indonesian Muslim women aware that politics is their right.

In Indonesian society, politics is always conceived as cruel and dirty, so not many women want to get involved, they think it is just for men.

According to the [radicalist] Islamic understanding, women should be confined to the home, and the domestic sphere alone
We try to make women understand that politics is one of our duties and rights and they can become involved without losing their femininity.

Personally, I'm non-partisan, I'm not linked to one political party because, in Indonesia, the political parties often discriminate against women.

I struggle from outside the political sphere to make it women-friendly, to reform political parties and the political system.

One day, I hope to be involved more directly, if the system becomes more women-friendly. We have passed a law about affirmative action and achieving 30% female representation, but we won't see if it is implemented until after 2009 elections. We are waiting.

In Indonesia, some groups support us, but some radical groups oppose what we are trying to achieve. They accuse me, accuse feminist Muslims, of being infidels, of wanting to damage Islamic affairs.

According to their Islamic understanding, women should be confined to the home, and the domestic sphere alone.

AMINA WADUD, Academic, United States

There are many more conversations going on today between different interpretations of Islam. Some interpretations are very narrow, some are more broad, principled, ethically-based.

Unless we have sufficient knowledge about Islam, we cannot bring about reform of Islam. I am not talking about re-interpretation, I am talking more about gender-inclusive interpretation.

Turkish woman protesting for headscarf
Islam and feminism are not mutually exclusive

We have a lot of information about men's interpretations of Islam, and of what it means to be a woman in Islam. We don't have equal amounts of information about what women say it means to be a good woman in Islam.

Now it's time for men to be active listeners, and after listening, to be active participants in bringing about reform.

There is a tendency to say that it is Islam that prohibits women from driving a car, for example, when women drive cars all over the world except in one country. So then you know it is not Islam. Islam has much more flexibility, but patriarchy tends to have the same objective, and that is to limit our ability to understand ourselves as Muslims.

I have always defined myself as pro-faith and pro-feminism.

I do not wish to sacrifice my faith for anybody's conception of feminism, nor do I sacrifice the struggle and actions for full equality of women, Muslim and non-Muslim women, for any religion. Islamic feminism is not an either/or, you can be Muslim and feminist and strive for women's rights and not call yourself a feminist.

FATIMA KHAFAJI, Consultant, Egypt

In Egypt, Islamic feminism is a way for women activists to reach a large number of ordinary women in the villages and in urban low-income areas, using a framework of Islam. So there would be a reference to Islam when talking about women's rights. Experience has shown that that is an easy way to get women to accept what you're saying.

Not many women get information about women's rights easily, so you have to counter what has been fed to them, to both men and women, from the strict, conventional, religious people who have more access to women.

They have their own idea of women's rights in Islam - that is, patriarchal, still limiting opportunities for women. But women have been receiving this concept for ages, through the radio, TV, mosques, so the challenge is how to give them another view, of enlightened Islam, that talks about changing gender roles. It's not an easy job.

Sexual harassment is happening because men think the control of women's bodies is a matter for them

Historically, in Egypt in the feminist movement, there have been both Muslim and Christian women. It has never been a problem. Unfortunately nowadays, it has become a problem. Religious discrimination has been dividing people very much. We have to think carefully about how to supersede the differences.

With family law, we're aiming to change the philosophy of the law itself. Traditional family law puts women down. I can see this whole notion of "women do not have control over their bodies" in so many laws, in the penal code and family law. For example, sexual harassment is happening because men think the control of women's bodies is a matter for them. Even the decision whether to have children is the decision of men. This whole notion has to be changed in a dramatic way if we are really going to talk about women's rights in Egypt.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7689897.stm




Using Reverse Psychology, Al Qaeda Endorses Obama

Morgaan Sinclair

First published in Blogger Network News at http://www.bloggernews.net/118331


It’s a bit shocking, really, that the Washington Post rushed to print an alleged endorsement of John McCain by Al Qaeda. Missing was any verification by authorities that it was penned by anyone in command of any of the brigade’s tawdry, misanthropic, holier-than-thou, spiritually moronic band of woman-beating, bombing and beheading throwbacks. One wonders what the motive of the Washington Post could have been to act (again) as the mouthpiece for terrorists without any fact-checking, a term that has apparently been erased from its editors’ lexicon.

Meanwhile, the purpose of these Al Qaeda poseurs in attempting to tamper with U.S. Presidential elections – given that they do not get a vote – represents several things:

1. The Memo. Just another little missive from your blood-lusting Islamofascist superiors that they are the ones to be in charge, lest you forget, so they expect you to follow their instructions. The veiled threat of violence will be legitimately assumed.

2. Egoistic Arrogance. Of course we must be interested in their opinion.

3. The use of the most transparent form of reverse psychology. What Al Qaeda wants – since it wants our destruction – must be what we don’t want. So if they say they want McCain, we will, like lemmings, rush to Obama. Or, they hope so.

Now, let’s flesh that out a little bit, as whether Americans get it or not, the media obviously doesn’t.

Did the headlines say, “Al Qaeda makes attempt to smear McCain with ‘endorsement’”? Nope, but they should have.

Did the headlines say, “Al Qaeda throws support behind Obama with phony McCain endorsement”? Nope, but they should have.

Did the headlines say, “Al Qaeda plays same game as last election with manipulative ‘endorsement’”? Nope, but they should have.

What every single headline said is: “Al Qaeda Endorses McCain.”

Of course Al Qaeda doesn’t endorse McCain. Al Qaeda – like Hizbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas – endorses Obama. And that is not because he is a Muslim, for he is not. He has belonged for 20 years to a virulently racist, anti-white Black Liberation Theology church in Chicago. He converted from Islam to Christianity before puberty, so imams have no authority to issue fatawa against him charging apostasy. Obama was registered as a Muslim at an Indonesian school. He does have Islamic training. But he is no longer a Muslim. Obama is radical Leftist, not radical Islamist. No, it’s none of that.

What thrills Islamofascists – a term coined by Matthias Ruthven and perhaps used as early as the 1970s by Olivier Roy – is that they are looking for a Presidential candidate whose thinking and policy they can infiltrate. And that man is Barack Obama. After all, the express wish of the Council on American-Islamic Relations – CAIR, an unindicted co-conspirator in terrorist financing, the group that used to called itself “Hamas in the United States” – is to see shari’a law implemented in America. ICNA and ISNA, both also unindicted co-conspirators in terrorist financing, have similarly gravitated to Obama, and in the case of ISNA it’s a real problem. These are the guys that made hay over the Headscarf Photo Flap – widely used to paint Muslims as victims in Obama’s campaign. Rep. Keith Ellison went after Obama, and he got everything he wanted and then some. Here’s how it went.

Two Muslim women in headscarves positioned themselves behind Obama at a photo shoot. One of them was a member of the deeply suspect MSA, about which volumes have been written in the last two years recounting their indoctrination to radical Islam of Muslim students by this largest Muslim campus organization. Also coming to light were accounts of Muslim women being forced into cover as a kind of religious testimony to the faith. Of course, Muslim men never put up with the inconvenience of wearing hot robes in the Dog Days of Summer to “testify for their faith.” No, it’s the women who have to do that. One woman recounts being called by the head of an MSA chapter, a man who then put his wife on the phone with the girl so the wife could scream at her for not complying with stated dress norms. This echoes, of course, the virulent Saudi Princess Haifa, wife of former Saudi Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan (who had the habit of strolling into Cabinet meetings uninvited, so powerful was he), who frequently called embassy wives together for verbally violent punishment soirees for the slightest infractions of dress or “morals.” Yeah, right. The tactic here is to have a woman discipline another woman at the behest of a male, who will then have to bear no responsibility for being the male chauvinist pig he is. Any questions?

Anyhow, these two Muslim women positioned themselves for an Obama photo shoot that I can promise you would have been distributed all over the Middle East as fund-raising poster for ISNA. Meanwhile, back in the United States, CAIR and other Muslim propaganda groups screamed “Discrimination!” (which it was not) and then “Racism!” Now that last one is interesting given that Islam is not a race: It is a lift from the Civil Rights Movement, where it was legitimate, but the propagandists are aware that Americans are very sensitive to accusations of racism and too afraid of appearing racist to fight it when they are smeared with the term. There should be a class action lawsuit brought against CAIR, ISNA, ICNA and every other group that uses this false epithet to silence everybody who doesn’t agree with them.

At any rate, it is with the Headscarf Flap that I really began to feel for Obama. He is not an anti-Muslim person. Far from it. And it is likely his staff would have had the same reaction to anybody brandishing a sign that read “Zionists for Obama” in Trajan font or somebody waving a massive crucifix with “Stop Abortion” carved on it. No sane Presidential candidate is going to allow his or her campaign to be appropriated for religious advertising. In this case it was a simple case of Islamic Billboarding, the presence of a headscarf to visually claim space to make a silent representation of a connection with or control of a political or social unit. OK, I confess to having invented the term. But that’s what it is in some cases.

How powerful is it? It makes it appear that Obama is Muslim, which most in the Muslim world already believe he is (and that will be a problem for him if he is elected), and it also makes it appear that MSA and ISNA and CAIR are very powerful in American politics in general and in Obama’s campaign in particular.

And the upshot is that Obama got creamed, in three specific ways.

First he was rapped for “racism” and the women in headscarves were quickly fashioned into victims of so-called Islamophobia by CAIR.

Second, he got Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, all over him publicly. But after a few weeks, Ellison and others had strong-armed Obama into total submission.

Third, part of that “submission” (there’s that word again) is that Obama has a new “Muslim advisor” who has radical connections thoroughly discussed in several articles in the last two weeks, the best of which is Daniel Pipes’ “Would Obama Pass a Security Clearance?” Answer: No.

So, faced with bad press and intimidation by the bad guys most likely to behead you if they don’t like you, what does Obama do? He fronts a headscarf in the form of Ingrid Mattson, president of the Wahhabi-founded and –funded ISNA – the self-same unindicted co-conspirator in terrorist financing named above! – for a precious little “Interfaith Moment” at the Democratic National Convention.

Watch this closely, for it is staggering indeed. In a country in which MOST Muslim women do NOT wear cover, Ingrid Mattson is one of the few high-ranking Muslim women who does. So what Muslim woman does Obama choose for his token? One of the many U.S. Muslim women who is moderate? No. Ingrid Mattson is a Saudi Wahhabi apologist and a radical.

And she’s for our consumption only. It’s worth asking: What would happen to Ingrid if she appeared on Saudi TV without a face veil? She’d be stoned to death. What would happen if she showed up at the Grand Mosque dressed as she was on American national TV? She would have been beaten to death on the streets by the religious police.

Ingrid Mattson, like Al Arabiya’s Nadia Bilbassy-Charters – who interviewed Laura Bush at the White House dressed in a skirt halfway up her thigh and appeared at the National Press Club in a skin-tight, white satin sheath with a hemline higher than that! – is one of the Spin Sisters, one of the women fronted by radical Islamist men to make them appear to be gender egalitarian when they are not. The Spin Sisters could care less what happens to the rest of the oppressed Muslim women of this world so long as they get theirs. Look at Mattson’s position? Fame. Power. A little more fame.

The headscarf means many things. Mostly it means ignorance of the fact that it was NEVER mandated by Muhammad and did not appear in Islamic culture until three centuries after the advent of Islam. Therefore many women who wear it do it because they think it is mandated and want to do the right thing. But in the West it is often holier-than-thou competition for men’s attention both with other Muslim women and with Western women they call “sluts” whether they have evidence for it or not. It is Islamic Billboarding at the behest of men. And overwhelmingly worldwide it is male oppression of the female that prevents men from having to experience any anxiety that one of “their” women will be found a tempting little plumb by some other man, and it is an act of criminalization of the female form as sexual organ from toes to crown. In Saudi Arabia, the abaya swamps women in billows of shapeless, hot, black fabric, leaving exposed only the hands and the eyes. Well, make that one eye. Last week Wahhabi imams in Saudi Arabia said that one eye must be covered, because two eyes are just too much of an evil trap for a man’s sexual purity. This is an apparent attempt to control those lurid glances at the market, where women are already under the control of a male chaperone! But I digress. The point is that while Muslim women in Iran endure torture in Evin Prison to escape this veiling oppression, it bothers Ingrid Mattson not at all to support oppression of Muslim women by sporting one herself in the name of faith.

Anyhow, here comes Ingrid Mattson in her head scarf – a payback from the alleged affront to the Muslim community for Obama’s refusal to have his campaign used for Islamic Billboarding. Ellison was pleased.

But look more closely. Who else appeared? A Christian priest and a Jewish rabbi. Where were the Hindus, whose numbers in the USA are larger than those of the Muslims, who claim they are over 6 million when likely the most accurate number is 1.3 million? Where are the Buddhists? Where are the Jains? Where are the Native American medicine men? Where are the Baha’i and Amadiyyah, whom the Sunnis punish and persecute worldwide with charges of apostasy? Where are the Orthodox? Where are the Taoists and the Confucians? Where are the Sufis, so vilified by the Wahhabis and the Taleban? Where are the New Agers, who in this country vastly outnumber the Muslims and are the fastest-growing spiritual orientation in American (no, you were mislead, it is not the Muslims)?

You will not find any of those faiths appearing with a radical-learning, Wahhabi-oriented, headscarf-flaunting Muslima Ingrid Mattson! Why? Because only the People of the book – Jews and Christians – are even marginally acceptable to these 7th-century-styled Muslims and all the rest are considered to be practitioners of illegitimate, if not Satanic, religions and faiths. Obama would not have made the mistake of including them when a Muslim speaks. He wouldn’t have dared. Especially since the entire purpose of this tawdry exercise was to front a headscarf in capitulation to invented Muslim grievance.

Is Obama a Muslim? No.
Is Obama pandering to a Muslim minority? Yes.
Is he accepting advisors who have radical links? Yes?
Is he a coward? Yes. And that is the problem with Obama: He is a coward.

Obama, despite his terrible associations, has only one real problem: He doesn’t know when he needs to stand up and refuse to cow to such pressures, and he doesn’t have the spine to do it when he does realize it.

So, does Al Qaeda really want McCain to win? Of course not. They want Obama to win, because if he does, the whole problem of establishing shari’a law for Muslims (read: women, since shari’a is most concerned with keeping control of women) gets a lot easier. And that’s just the first step. It’s Muslims first, then everybody else. And they’ll do it with non-Muslims by using the tactic that the free speech, free choice, and free women of this culture are an insult to their faith. Problematically, the vast majority of Muslims in America, moderates to the core, have caved to Saudi pressure for radical imams – Tabeban-trained in Pakistan or Wahhabi-trained in Saudi Arabia – to run American mosques. Now they run 80% of them, and the American Muslim community has not had the spine to correct the problem and doesn’t have it now.

But make no mistake: Al Qaeda endorsed Obama because they already know, by everything he has done and all he has not done, that he is the best bet for entering American power centers by the back door. And Americans should be highly suspect of a media that helped them run this little piece of reverse psychology on the American public.
And Americans should also realize that the evidence of Obama’s capitulation to what Stephen Schwartz calls “The Wahhabi Lobby” in the United States is incontrovertible and crystal clear: When a candidate for the Presidency of the United States fronts a headscarf worn by a radical in a pandering and obsequious attempt to prevent bad press, he is too spineless and self-serving to be President of the United States.