The
V.V.A.R.:
Leading the student revolt on campus against speech codes, political
correctness, multiculturalism, gender feminism, dormitory re-education, lying
about
Leonard
Magruder - Founder/President
Former
professor of psychology -
Director of Counseling and Research –
Academic
Advisor – Gathering of Eagles
Academic
Advisor – Veterans For Academic Freedom
“There is no omen true but this, to stand
and
be a bulwark to your fatherland.”
- Horace
A
TERRIBLE SILENCE
by Leonard Magruder
March
6, 2010
In our article, “Obama/Islam,” posted
on wmdterror.com on Aug.27, 2009, we wrote
at length on the repeated connection, in the best works we have on the crisis
of our times, between Islam, the religion, and terrorism, and how these
insights were being suppressed throughout the media and by our academics and
now even our government. A few months later we came across another lengthy
discussion of this phenomenon, mentioning essentially the same authors, by one
of our most astute thinkers, Diana West, in her book, “The Death of the Grown-Up.” In this
article we put these two discussions together to make the case for the
absurdity, that at a time when everyone is complaining about the failure to “connect
the dots,” the dots of Islam and terrorism are never connected.
From “Obama/Islam,”
Aug. 27, 2009:
In studying Islam
you learn to be alert to two groups in particular, Western scholars who want to
present Islam in the most inoffensive terms possible, and Muslim apologists,
who discovered “peaceful” jihad in the 19th century and have been emphasizing
it ever since as the normative expression of jihad—in defiance of all religious
and historical evidence to the contrary.
The books written
by, often Muslim converts, or present or former FBI or CIA analysts, or
counter-terrorism experts, are the ones you learn to rely on to be objective.
Here are some of
the authors whose names appear repeatedly in the rosters of symposiums and
conferences on terrorism, events always boycotted by media and by professors.
Some of these people have to remain in hiding because to death threats, as does
Geert Wilders of the Netherlands for producing “Fitna,” which documents in film the clear
connection between terrorism and the Koran:
Every one of these authors
document in their works the incitement to murder, the true “root cause” of
terrorism, in the verses of the Koran.
As Sam Harris wrote in “The
End of Faith“:
It is widely
claimed by ‘moderates’ that Islam is a ‘religion of peace.’ You need only to
read the Koran to see that this is untrue. The basic thrust of Islam is
undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates, and
conquer the world. There is no substitute for confronting the Koran itself. On
almost every page, the Koran instructs Muslims to despise non-believers.
We are at war with
Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our
political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously the
truth. It is not true that we are at war with an otherwise ‘peaceful religion’
that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision
of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.
This is the one fact that cannot be
mentioned on an American campus, where students are indoctrinated in a
multiculturalism which says that all religions are equal, meaning, of course,
that none of them are true, a sneaky, round-about way by secular humanists of
assaulting the Judeo-Christian tradition of the West.
In her speech, “Time to Take the Campus
Back,” at
It is time to take
the campus back so that the rights of free speech and academic freedom also
apply to those who tell the truth about Islam. Such rights also belong to those
of us who are pro-American and pro-Israel and not only to those who demonize
the West and glorify Islamist misogyny, death-cult terrorism, and Wahabi
fundamentalism. It is both extraordinary and tragic that one needs serious
security in order to be heard on campus, that one must run a gauntlet of hostility
for the right to teach. Goon-squad tactics of intimidation and disruption
should have absolutely no place in the free exchange of ideas... and it is
coming to us from the Left. Telling the truth about Islam is, apparently, “provocative.”
One risks everything for doing so. In my opinion, one risks even more for
failing to do so.
You risk everything.
As Newt Gingrich said in a speech in
I think that the
national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or
losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need
to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement…This is a very
sober topic, and I think it is a topic we need a national dialogue about, and
we need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we lose a city, which
could literally happen. We are now at war with a culture that wants, not to
take over our land, but to kill us.
What could that culture be, other than
Islam?
The noted Stanford scholar Victor David
Hanson gives us some idea of what needs to be done.
We should be clear
about a proper response now and inform the appropriate parties exactly of the
real damage they should expect...inform hostile countries of a big list of
their assets - military bases, power plants, communications, and assorted
infrastructure - that will be taken out in the aftermath of another attack…Honesty
and resoluteness now might just save lives later on, as the Middle East
realizes that it has a collective stake in preventing such a calamity.
Not long after sending this article out
we ran into the same observation about suppression of material in the writings
of Diana West, one of the most perceptive analysts we have on the subject of
Islam. In chapters 7, 8, and 9 of her book, “The Death of the Grown-Up,” she
has written the best exposé of Islam as the enemy that we have seen. And she sees
the same cover-up of information on this that we do:
Both the topic of
Islam...and the topic of Islamization - are verboten. Islam as a whole, as a historical
continuum, as the theology of what we know as terrorism, as a rationale for
dhimmi repression, is off the charts; out of bounds, really, and way beyond
acceptable discourse. The issues central to Islam’s incompatibility with
modernity are ignored according to an unspoken consensus, and thus, never
appear on the public agenda. What is left is a black hole.
When, in the shell-shocked wake of 9/11
President Bush began his historically inaccurate and theologically absurd “Islam
is peace” offensive —which to this day relies on a willful ignorance of the
jihad ideology that has driven Islamic history for thirteen centuries—no
voices of correction, no attempts at historical analysis, coalesced into a
school of thought that was admitted into the political mainstream, not even
among pro-war anti-PC conservatives.
But, there does exist
a formidable body of contemporary scholarship that bravely explicates the
history of jihad and its modern- day applications - a bibliography I was
relieved to find after 9/11 when the happy talk of a Karen Armstrong or a John
Esposito sounded out of sync with what was actually being heard on the news.
For over four decades Egyptian-born Bat
Ye’or has pioneered the study of dhimmitude, the non-Muslim experience under
Islam that follows jihad. The Pakistani-born scholar, Ibn Warraq, has, since
the Rushdie affair, compiled a wrenching record of “apostasy,” the fearfully
dangerous Muslim experience of leaving Islam. Daniel Pipes has long catalogued
the progress of jihad and Islamization of the West. In the years since 9/11,
Robert Spencer has produced several clear-eyed studies of Islam for both laymen
and experts, also establishing a Web site that tracks current events called jihadwatch.org. Andrew G. Boston, also
since 9/11, has compiled a scholarly compendium of writings on jihad that
offers many key texts and studies in English for the first time, including those
of Islamic commentators on the Koran (al-Baydawi, al-Tabgari, Suyuti ), the Sufi mystic al-Ghazali’s surprisingly
bellicose pronouncements on jihad war, and those of overlooked historians like
Clement Huart and Dmitar Angelov.
But such scholarship has been largely
relegated to the sidelines, scholarship all but ignored by elites for purposes
of public discussion and debate.
It’s enough to engender nostalgia for
the Cold War, mushroom clouds and all. From that epic struggle emerged an
indomitable anti-Communism movement, Cold Warriors who persevered and triumphed
by following a clear, rational line of academic analysis and astute polemic. By
glaring contrast, ex-Muslim intellectuals such as Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Wafa
Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Brigitte Gabriel, are held at arm’s length by our
most fervent warriors on terror, members of a post-PC generation that see in
their dreams of an Islamic “reform” the key to a strategy of avoiding
civilizational clash.
They seek to defend the West by
repelling or defeating “Islamic extremists,” but not the ideology contained
within mainstream Islam that seeks to establish a world caliphate ruled by
sharia. This is dream politic.
Warming to their policies of wishful
thinking, today’s Terror Warriors keep the apostates and critics of Islam out
in the cold, their copious knowledge of the dire perils of jihad unheeded,
unexplored, undebated.
This has helped enforce a terrible
silence on the urgent questions of our times.
Silence on crucial questions not only
denies answers, it denies us a fighting chance. You know the silence is
deafening when Abu Qatada, a notorious British imam says, “I am astonished by
President Bush when he claims that there is nothing in the Koran that justifies
jihad or violence in the name of Islam. Has he ever actually read the Koran?” (Note:
Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, the father of the Islamic revolution and godfather
of terrorism, the reason why the Parliament of Iran always opens a session with
“Death to
Islam makes it
incumbent on all adult males to prepare themselves for the conquest of other
countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.
Those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the
whole world. Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels
against war. Those who say this are witless. Islam says: Kill the
unbelievers... Islam says kill the non-Muslims, put them to the sword and
scatter their armies. There are hundreds of other Koranic psalms and hadiths,
sayings of the Prophet, urging Muslims to value war and to fight. So does all
that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit on
those foolish souls who make such a claim.
-Taheri, Amir. Holy
Terror, pgs. 226-227.)
West:
The resolute denial
of the relationship between Islam and jihad is perplexing, exhausting all
routine exercise of common sense. Indeed, these bizarre loops of logic take us
into a psychological realm of delusional thinking—patterns of thought at odds
with reality. We are taught to see our own behaviors as the cause of our being
abused. ‘Daddy doesn’t really want to hurt me. If I’m a better girl, he’ll
stop.’
Thus, we pretend
Islam isn’t a threat to Western liberty; it’s those awfu
“extremists.” Jihad isn’t a historic and theological tradition in Islam; it’s
those awful “extremists.”“ Shari’a isn’t a threat to freedom of expression and
sexual equality; it’s those awful “extremists.” Rather than confront the hard
truths of our times, we tell ourselves soothing tales, rather than act on the
logic of reality, we deny its implications.
Moderate Islam is coming! Moderate
Islam is coming!
We are afraid to do anything about our
fears, even name them. We have reached the point where we are even afraid of
logic. Because logic leads to discrimination, the “ability to make or perceive
distinctions, perception; discernment” (Obama: “all religions are going the
same place.”). If we revive our innate ability to make distinctions, suddenly
rub our eyes and see that the beliefs of Islam and the beliefs of the West are
at irreconcilable odds, the multicultural mirage of interchangeable diversity
and “universal values” necessarily vanishes, in its place arises an inevitable
hierarchy of discrimination. Not all religions are equal. Not all cultures are
equal. A painful, awkward awakening from the dream world of sunny universalism
and pale indecision into a stark reality of black and white, good and evil, win
or lose, do or die. We call our self-censorship the silence of respect; in
reality it is the silence of fear. We call it the silence of tolerance;
actually, it is the silence of cultural submission.
In vain then, Ibn Warraq wrote:
On the world stage,
should we really apologize for Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe? Mozart, Beethoven and Bach? Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh? Galileo, Copernicus, and
The West is the
source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the
rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the West that raised the
status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of inquiry,
expression and conscience.
No, the West needs
no lectures of the superior virtue of societies that keep their women in
subjugation, cut off their clitorises, stone them to death for alleged
adultery, throw acid on their faces, or deny the human rights of those they
consider to belong to lower castes.
The valiant Dutch
ex-parliamentarian and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains why the silence
is a problem. “You cannot liberalize Islam without criticizing the Prophet and
the Koran....You cannot redecorate a house without entering inside.”
But who among us has even gone up to
the door to ask whether jihad in all its modern manifestations—airplane
hijackings, skyscraper massacres, bus bombings, rioting over novels, rioting
over cartoons, car bombs, suicide bombs, pursuit of nuclear bombs—is not the
perversion of a noble faith, but rather a core institution? In denial there is
defeat.
(Well, we don’t mean to brag but we
have gone up to the door multiple times since our first article on Sept.21,
2003. See excerpts of these at v-v-a-r.org.
And what happened? The
There has never been a time when the
world did not know of the danger posed to liberty by the religion of Islam. It
is absolutely unbelievable how media and university have managed to erase this
knowledge from American consciousness. This is probably the most profound
betrayal in the history of mankind: A great nation, misled, disarmed, helpless,
before the greatest threat imaginable. Just so media and academia can continue
to cling to their left/liberal mythologies.
Wrote the great
The sword of Muhammad, and the Koran, are the most stubborn
enemies of Civilization,
Alexis de Tocqueville, famous 18th
century historian:
I studied the Koran
a great deal. I am convinced that by and large there have been few religions in
the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principle
cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world.
John Quincy Adams, early American
president:
Muhammad proclaimed
himself a messenger of Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an
extensive portion of the earth. He declared exterminating war as a part of his
religion, against all the rest of mankind. The essence of his religion is
violence and lust. As long as the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false
prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon
earth.
Winston Churchill, British Prime
Minister:
How dreadful are
the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its followers! Besides the fanatical
frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this
fearful fatalistic apathy. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its
grace and refinement, the next life of its dignity and sanctity. No more
backward force exists in this world.
In our time, Ibn Warraq, author of “Why
I Not a Muslim,” said:
Islam is a
totalitarian ideology that aims to control the religious, social, and political
life of mankind in all its aspects. And I mean Islam. I do not accept some
spurious distinction between Islam and Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘Islamic
terrorists.’ Their actions reflect the teachings of Islam, whether found in the
Koran, in the acts and teachings of the Prophet Mohammad, or in the Islamic
law, (Sharia) based on them.
The danger is made especially clear in
this statement by Amil Imani ,an Iranian born
American citizen and pro-democracy activist residing in the
Beliefs steer
people in life. Some beliefs are harmless, some are the motive force for good
and yet others are delusional, misguided, and even outright dangerous. Every
version of the belief called ‘Islam’ ranges from the delusional to the
dangerous. This delusion presently has in its stranglehold over a billion
humans, posing an existential threat to all non-Muslims. Islam is rooted in the
primitive tribal mentality of ‘We the righteous against heathens.’ To Islam, a
non-Muslim is a combatant against Allah and he is fair game to be subjugated
and killed. When a billion people adhere to this pathological belief and use it
as their marching order of life, the rest of humanity can ignore the threat
only at its peril.
The truth is,
there are Muslims wandering around everywhere, like Major Hasan
at
The world cannot live any longer with a
religion whose mission is to murder the rest of mankind, and now has access to
the weapons of mass destruction that can make it possible.
On the claim by academics and media
elites that terrorists are “misusing the Koran,” one of our most powerful
thinkers, Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch,
has written the definitive challenge to that claim. We urge all those who read
this article, especially the many
Eric Holder, The American Government, and the Diminishing of Public Trust
by Hugh Fitzgerald
A statement by Eric
Holder, Attorney General of the
“What we’ve seen in
the recent past, I think, is an indication of one of the things that we’re
going to have to be most concerned about in the future, this
self-radicalization of American citizens or people who reside in the
Could Eric Holder
tell us exactly in what ways—quoting from the texts of Islam—the jihadis are misinterpreting Islam? How is Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
misinterpreting Islam? How, for that matter, is Nasrallah
of Hizballah, or Meshaal of
Hamas, or the leaders or members of Lashkar-e-Toiba,
or Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Al Qaeda, along with
thousands of groups and millions of individuals, all of whom take what Islam
teaches very much to heart, “misinterpreting Islam”?
We are told this
over and over. We are never given a single bit of proof, not a single
interpolated or apocryphal passage, attributed to the Koran, Hadith, Sira.
We are never told even of a single Hadith, upon which
reliance has been put by Muslim terrorists, that they have improperly assigned
a higher rank of authenticity, according to the most respected muhaddithin, than it deserves. We are given not a single
shred of evidence, textual or otherwise, to support the idea that there has
been a “misinterpretation” of Islam.
Eric Holder can
keep repeating this stuff, and so can others, so can Barack Obama, for example,
until the cows come home. But the more those who presume to protect and
instruct us show that they expect us to be satisfied, and that they themselves
are apparently satisfied, with soothing banalities and assertions that are
easily shown to be baseless, they lose our trust. The very people they claim to
lead and to protect stop trusting them. We all know what we are looking for is
Muslim terrorists, committing acts of terrorism because of what Islam
inculcates—the duty of Jihad to remove all barriers to the spread and then the
dominance of Islam. They differ from other Muslims only in that they have
decided to both participate in Jihad directly rather than indirectly, through
financial, diplomatic, propagandistic, or moral support.
No one is asking
Eric Holder, or anyone else in the Administration, to take off a few months to
study at
More and more
people in Western Europe (and
And there is a
larger lesson, not for Holder alone, but for all those who talk about the “public
trust.” Let’s talk about something else: the public mistrust. When the public,
on issues of life and death, begins to recognize that it is not being talked to
straight by those who govern, and who claim that they govern because they know
best how to protect and how to instruct the citizenry, they lose faith in the
government. When the public sees that members of the governing class are not
telling the truth, but still worse, are actively misrepresenting the nature of
the threat and acting as apologists for Islam, the ideology whose promptings
explain Muslim terrorism and terrorists, they lose faith in the government.
They become worried, fearful, disheartened. We wonder why the words “Islam” and
“Muslim” are still not to be used, and why phrases, self-evidently unhelpful,
such as “violent extremists,” are used instead. “Extremists”
about what? Tell us. Stop making us try to guess or still worse, trying
to make us not guess, but to be satisfied with such empty formulations that
tell us nothing, that help us understand nothing.
Eric Holder can
keep telling us, if he wishes, that the people we must worry about are those
who “misinterpret Islam,” even though he offers not a shred of evidence, not a
single passage, to prove such “misinterpretation.” Barack Obama can keep
prating of “violent extremists,” but never telling us more about what those “violent
extremists” are “extremists” of. But when we hear these words, when we listen
to these solemn speeches, when we endure these misplaced security searches,
what happens is that our trust, our faith in our own government, goes down, and
down, and down.
And that is not
something that people in a mass democracy can, or should, be expected to endure
or, as quite a few in the current administration, appropriating Lincolnian
phrases whenever they can, long endure. Those whose most important tasks
include those of protecting and instructing us have to stop thinking they can
mislead their own citizens, 99% of whom are non-Muslim, in order to avoid
offending the 1% who are Muslim, or out of some ill-thought-out
Machiavellianism, to avoid offending Muslims in Dar al-Islam. So we tiptoe
timidly around so much, we avoid recognizing, much less discussing or still
less confronting, the Muslim threat to Europe, the historic heart of the West,
and we continue to allow ourselves to describe as “staunch allies” such
meretricious and sinister places as Saudi Arabia, fearful of giving offense to
those who night and day spend feverishly to spread Islam and ensure its dominance
even in our lands.
We have to stop
describing as part of “our values” what is merely a cripplingly
inhibiting fear of offending Muslims. We must let them know we know what
Islam inculcates and are now prepared to construct policies designed not to deal
not merely with this or that terrorist group, but with the Camp of Islam, with
all those who by identifying themselves as Muslims can reasonably be treated as
adherents of an ideology that we have every right to be alarmed about - the
ideology of Islam.”
This statement reminds us of what we
wrote in that article right before the election, “Obama/Islam--part
2.”
Usually the
American electorate accepts the outcome of a presidential race and moves on.
But this time, if Obama wins, as Americans increasingly see the truth about
Islam, and see that Obama’s ‘naivete’ (Romney) is
placing their lives at risk, there will be various and growing forms of
protest, Tensions over this will grow rapidly, especially as demoralization
grows in the armed forces, and media and academic attempts to shore up the
delusion grow more hysterical.
This is what the growing threat of a
nuclear attack, on a nation paralyzed by the delusions of its own government,
will do.
To help educate people on these issues,
please also include one or more of these videos in your next mailings:
For “Fitna”: http://www.break.com/usercontent/2008/4/Fitna-New-English-Version-485249.html.
For shocking FBI Interview: http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=video&video-id=2930
For Obama as apologist for Islam: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=tCAffMSWSzY#t=28terror.com.
For materials we recommend, films,
books, and online resources, to start an educational program on the pathologies
of Islam see the last paragraphs of “Obama/Islam
-part 2.”
In ending, we call upon Senator-elect
Scott Brown to raise in Congress as early as possible, this whole issue of the
relation between Islam, the religion, and terrorism.
v-v-a-r.org
wmdterror.com
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785-312-9303
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