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Nov. 6, 2009
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Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review July 2, 2007 / 16 Tamuz, 5767

Imam Bush strikes again

By Diana West


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If anyone wants to know why Muslims the world over tell pollsters the United States is at war with Islam, just read President Bush's speech at the Islamic Center of Washington, especially the part about American-style religious freedom — in the president's words, "what we wish for the world."


He began this way: "For those who seek a true understanding of our country, they need to look no farther than here."


No — not the mosque itself, but down the street it occupies. "This Muslim center sits quietly down the road from a synagogue, a Lutheran church, a Catholic parish, a Greek Orthodox chapel, a Buddhist temple — each with faithful followers who practice their deeply held beliefs and live side by side in peace," the president explained, standing in his Islamically observant stocking feet before a cool Muslim audience. "This is what freedom offers: societies where people can live and worship as they choose without intimidation, without suspicion, without a knock on the door from the secret police."


As one who has attended a bar mitzvah at that synagogue down the road, I have news for the president: Freedom, American-style, has changed. To enter, I passed an armed guard holding an automatic weapon manning the door. Armed guards like him man many such doors in many such cities. In fact, so common is it for religious worship to require armed protection today that we miss the implications: the degree to which freedom to worship without fear in America has been curtailed by the open-ended threat of Buddhist violence.


Whoops, sorry. I mean, curtailed by the open-ended threat of Greek Orthodox violence. Or was that Catholic or Lutheran violence?


No, the peril to the synagogue was and remains Islamic violence. The resulting diminution of freedom is a symptom of advancing dhimmitude — the diminished cultural condition of non-Muslims living in relation to Islam.


So, freedom of worship ain't what it used to be. But even in its terror-constrained state, the spread of American religious freedom actually threatens religiously unfree Islamic cultures, which, for example, consider "apostasy" — deciding not to be Muslim — a capital crime.


But that threat is only on paper. Where Americans actually become involved in the Islamic world, sharia (Islamic law) is protected, as shockingly attested by sharia's primacy in the American-fostered constitutions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority. The president doesn't seem to understand that. I don't think he even understands sharia, under which the primacy of Islam is absolute, while other religions are "tolerated" at the high cost of dhimmitude. Nearly six years after 9/11, nearly six years after first visiting the Islamic Center — and proclaiming "Islam is peace" — President Bush has learned nothing.


In fact, his peroration on freedom at the Islamic Center mainly underscored "America's respect for the Muslim faith here at home." Abroad, too. Even as he was asking Muslim leaders (again) "to denounce organizations that use the veneer of Islamic belief to support and fund violence," the president announced that the United States would send an envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a global Islamic support group.


"Our special envoy," the president said, "will listen to and learn from representatives from Muslim states and will share with them America's views and values."


What can the Free World learn from the Unfree World? Maybe something about the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted by the foreign ministers of the OIC in 1990. In dire contrast to the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Islamic document recognizes only human rights sanctioned by sharia — which, basically, leaves women and non-Muslims without much in terms of human rights.


Hmm. Might Bush — or anyone in our leadership, civilian or military — notice the unbridgeable cultural differences revealed by these disparate notions of human rights? Alas, probably not. Islam's still peace, according to the president. Those pesky "extremists" fighting jihad are not, he said, "the true face of Islam."


There Imam Bush goes again. "I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Quran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam," jailed Islamic scholar Abu Qatada said under similar circumstances almost six years ago. "Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Quran?"


No. He's just leader of the Free World — a Free World that has become less free and more dhimmified on his severely myopic watch.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.


JWR contributor Diana West is a columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.

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