Monday, June 13, 2005

Time Magazine Features Radical Muslim School in Illinois As a "Model"

In the same Time magazine issue that turns Christina Aguilera CDs into instruments of illegal torture, a second article and photo essay presents the Bridgeview, Illinois, Universal (Muslim) School as a model for other Muslims to follow.
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Girls' "uniforms" are worn 6th grade & up

What "Time" forgets to tell us is that the Bridgeview Mosque, which runs the school, has been, in recent years, increasingly influenced by the radical Wahabbi sect and funded with $125,000 from the Saudi government, $369,000 from the government of Kuwait and $135,000 from the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi monarchy also pays $2,000 of the Imam's salary each month. Hundreds of other American mosques have also been built, "staffed" and funded by the same sources.
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Students gather prayer once each day

The Bridgeview mosque, which has been critically featured in numerous articles and blog postings (such as here, here, here, here and here) over the past several years, has also raised money "in memory of" Palestinian suicide bombers. According to one source, "Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden's spiritual advisor, visited Bridgeview in the 1980s and brought at least three Bridgeview men to fight in Afghanistan."

According to Egyptian blogger The Big Pharaoh, Americans have been suckered by the MSM to believe that burkas, veils and complete separation of men from women is somehow normative in Muslim communities. Not so, he says.

Frankly speaking, I shouldn't be laughing really. I should be weeping because the Western mainstream media is telling the world that the only true faithful Muslims are those who wear the stupid cloth on their head (that was nonexistent 30 years ago) and separate boys and girls in schools. I should be weeping because Time magazine is showing us that only girls clad in black with no makeup on are the true Muslims who are struggling between their Islamic and their American identities. Meanwhile, those Muslims who disagree with the head veil, who think that Islam needs reform a la all major faiths, and who believe that we cannot live like our Muslim brethren did 1400 years ago are the "lesser Muslims" or the Muslims that are "out of the mainstream."
The wealthy, conservative and, yes, radical Muslims in the world, supported with money from Arab Muslim governments, are financing the spread of their version of Islam throughout Europe and the United States. Not every European or American Muslim is affiliated with these mosques and schools, of course, but many of them are. These are not folks who have any interest in pursuing the "American Dream." They have no interest in assimilating into American culture or society. Their interest is to set up Muslim communities/colonies which can operate autonomously under their own versions of sharia law, untouched and untainted by the "law of the land."

The Big Pharoah draws attention to the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in this expansion, entrenchment and consolidationon of conservative Islamic faith communities around the world. This "Brotherhood," founded in Egypt in 1926, has spawned Ayman Zawahiri (bin Laden's second-in-command), the assassins of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (who was convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up New York landmarks), the radical Palestinian group Hamas, and has been a close collaborator with both the Saudi Wahabbis and bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

Today there is a battle taking place for the soul of Islam...not only in the Middle East, Indonesia, South-East Asia and the Philippines....but also in Europe and North America. The brutality and single-mindedness of the financially powerful, radical Islamists have given them the upper hand in this conflict. Moderates are cowering in fear, even in the United States.

Somehow, in spite of this, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan must be won so that the rise of successful democracies in the the Arab Muslim world will encourage other moderate, democratically-inclined Muslims to boldly reclaim their faith from the radical proponentsts of death and devastation within the Muslim world.

The central hallmark of Islam since its founding by Muhammad has been its sense of unity. It is not easy for Muslims to view their faith as being rent by schism. Even Shiites and Sunnis make their respective hadj to Mecca where they offer praise to Allah with one voice.

The reality, however, is that in recent years the radical Islamists have been killing their so-called "brothers" in the faith without any hesitation or restraint. Sooner or later this will force the hand of the more moderate Muslim individuals and nations to face up to the danger and declare war on those who consider them to be no better than infidels themselves.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has already kick-started the coming Muslim world-wide civil war. Slowly but surely, the radicals and moderates are separating like an amoeba dividing into two nearly identical halves. One group will not tolerate the other and, sooner or later, the other half will be forced to respond.

The United States should not be so naive as to doubt that this civil war will, in part at least, take place on our own soil. Whether mosques and Muslim schools such as those in Bridgeview, Illinois, will be part of the problem or part of the solution has yet to be seen. Accordingly, at this point in "Time," it is both foolish and irresponsible to elevate any one mosque or school to the status of being a "model" for other Muslims in the United States to follow.

At the same time, however, it should be considered to be prudent for our government and our own citizenry (both Muslim and non-Muslim) to keep a very close and vigilantnt eye on who is funding what and what is being preached and taught in the mosques and Muslim schools in America.