Both the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and frontman for the Amazing Flying Imam's, Omar Shahin, have tried to obscure the facts behind their removal from US Airways Flight 300 by asserting their only crime was "flying while muslim". They contend their only "crime" was praying loudly in the waiting area prior to flight. But the account of a witness, who wants to known only as "Pauline" since finding out about Shahin's ties to Hamas, contradicts this account in an interview granted to Pajamas Media. In fact she said
she did not see or hear the imams pray at the gate (she was at dinner in a nearby airport eatery), but heard about the pre-flight prayers from other passengers hours later.
What disturbed her in the waiting room was something else
...the six imams were doing things far more suspicious than praying - an Arabic-speaking passenger heard them repeatedly invoke “bin Laden,” and “terrorism,”...
...she noticed one of the imams immediately. “He was pacing nervously, talking in Arabic,” she said.
She quickly noticed the others. “They didn’t look like holy men to me. They looked like guys heading out of town for a Vikings game.”
And, interestingly, they were not the only Muslims on board, and in contractiction to "the flying while Muslim" story-line,
Other Muslim passengers were left undisturbed and later joined in a round of applause for the U.S. Airways crew. “It wasn’t that they were Muslim. It was all of the suspicious things they did,” Pauline said.
But these are not the only contradictions. And some of the most interesting come from Mr Shahin his own self. Immediately after the incident, Shahin claimed they were removed from the plane in handcuffs.
"I never felt bad in my life like that," [Shahin] said. "I never. Six imams. Six leaders in this country. Six scholars in handcuffs. It's terrible."
Mr. Shahin says they were not led off the plane in handcuffs, as reported, nor were they kept in handcuffs during their five-hour detention, and they were not harassed by dogs.
And now they love the US Airways crew
"We love US Airways, and we want to fly with them," Mr. Shahin said.
Despite this love
The Council on American-Islamic Relations will pursue a lawsuit on the imams' behalf, Mr. Shahin said.
Oh yeah, and they will be demanding that the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport provide a separate room in which Muslims can pray
"We as Muslims, we are part of this country," said Abdulrehman Hersi, a Minneapolis imam. "You have to pray wherever you are. Our prayer ... we believe that we talk to our lord. It does not make harm to anyone."
But all of this is part of the two pronged strategy to both test airline security on the one hand, while creating a climate where people will think twice, or three times, before zcting against any Muslim of doing anything untoward: no matter how alarming their behavior. And the continued testing will let them know when they have succeeded.
Every effort will now be made to create the impression that Muslims are discriminated against. Towards that end, BDS (actually, RDS: Republican Deranged Syndrome) blogger Mushtaq Ali points to a talk radio show by conservative Jerry Klein wherein the host propogated a hoax on his listeners by suggesting
...that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band...
Klein's show followed a week of heated discussions on talk radio, including his own, and online forums over an incident on November 22 involving six Muslim clerics. They were handcuffed and taken off a US Airways flight after passengers reported "suspicious behavior" that included praying in the departure gate area.
See how this goes?
Yes, it is disturbing that many callers agreed with the suggestion, however, the fact reamins that there is little actual harrassment of Muslims in the US
of the 1,314 verified offenses motivated by religious bias, 68.5 percent were anti-Jewish.
Only 11.1 percent were anti-Islamic, despite claims of rampant anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S. by groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR].
And yet, Mushtaq Ali concludes
The truth is that the Right Wing Authoritarians have done this, George Bush, Newt Gingrich, and all the nut jobs on the religious right have turned us from the Land of the Free to the land of the crescent moon tattoo.
Even though there is no support of such a thing from any "right-wing" political leader and the conservative talk-show Jerry Klein excoriated those listeners who agreed with his phoney suggestion
At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax...
"I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland
"For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting.
"Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous."
Yet, this is precisely the impression that CAIR and the Islamists want to perpetrate. The information war they are waging is not just designed to get us to withdraw from the battlefield; it is not just designed to get us to abandon fledgling Democracies in the heart of the Islamic world; it is also to get us to drop our defenses at home.
That would be a serious mistake.
The ideology of the Jihaists allows no quarter. From the Militant Ideology Atlas Executive Report we read
1. Jihadis want unity of thought. They reject pluralism—the idea that no one has a monopoly on truth—and the political system that fosters it, democracy.
2. Jihadis will fight until every country in the Middle East is ruled only by Islamic law. Once they are in power, the punishments of the Qur’an (such as cutting off the hand of a thief) will be implemented immediately. Not even Saudi Arabia has it right; the Taliban state was the only state that was closest to their vision.
3. Jihadis contend that the violence they do to their own people, governments, and resources are 1) necessary, 2) religiously sanctioned, and 3) really the fault of the West, Israel, and apostate regimes.
4. The Jihadi cause is best served when the conflict with local and foreign governments is portrayed as a conflict between Islam and the West. Islam is under siege and only the Jihadis can lift it.
5. Countries in the Middle East are weak; they cannot remove tyrants or reform their societies without the help of outsiders. Jihad is the only source of internal empowerment and reform.
It is important to be informed as to what these people really think and what the intellectual underpinnings of their stuggle are. And the Militant Ideology Atlas is a great place to start.
These are not insane individuals.
But they are dedicated to assuring that Islam is the dominant religion on Earth
Jihadis want a totalitarian system of government in which no one is allowed to think for themselves. Not even the Saudi government is strict enough. Anyone who does not share their understanding of Islam will be declared an apostate and executed. If you want to know what a Jihadi state will look like, contemplate the Taliban—the only state in recent memory that Jihadis consider to have been legitimately Islamic.
So it goes
