Vijay Kumar calls it demographic conquest, others call it the quiet jihad or stealth jihad. Here, a reader named Avi, gives us one of the best descriptions I’ve seen lately of why this Greeley/Swift & Co/Somali issue is so critical and what it means in the larger scheme — planting Shariah in America. Sent as a comment to this post, I thought it was too important and well-written to bury there.
From Avi, The Muslim Brotherhoods Jihad in Minnesota
Jihad is the duty of all Muslims. Whether by force or by democratic means, jihad calls for the overthrow of secular governments and the imposition of Islamic rule and law, or sharia. In this future Islamic state other religions will, at best, be subjugated to Muslim dominance. This type of jihad succeeded in Iran and Somalia and is inching toward that same goal in numerous corners of the world including Iraq, Thailand, Pakistan, and Algeria, to name a few.
In the West, for the moment, this totalitarian vision of Islamic political and religious domination is unrealistic. Here, jihad puts on a more palpable and patient mask. Through a vast network of organizations and institutions, it slowly demands accommodation of Islamic law using democracy and religious freedom as its greatest allies. This stealth jihad is jihad nonetheless and in America it finds its most fertile ground in Minnesota.
Minnesota has the largest Somali community in the country, mostly refugees straight from camps in Kenya. In the past four years employers and institutions have encountered consistent demands for religious accommodation by Muslims. A few familiar examples will suffice.
The conflict with taxicab drivers at the Minneapolis Airport in 2006 received national attention. The drivers, Somali Muslims in the main, refused to take passengers carrying duty free alcohol or traveling with dogs. At a Target store in St. Louis Park, Somali cashiers refused to scan pork products and were “reassigned.” Minneapolis Community and Technical College installed wudu fountains in campus bathrooms for Muslims to ritually wash themselves before prayer.
More recently the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, a publicly funded K-8 Muslim charter school, has come under further investigation by the Minnesota Board of Education for its dubious practices of school-wide Friday prayers and after school Koran lessons. This spring a school official at TIZA attacked a local news reporter who showed up to interview officials, an act of jihad of the violent kind. This May five Somali women were fired from their jobs at a tortilla factory for refusing to comply with new uniform policy requiring them to wear pants. One employee claimed wearing pants would make her “feel naked.” They are filing a religious discrimination lawsuit against the company and are being represented by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization with its own dubious ties to terrorism.
These stories make the news and add up to an alarming trend. How many more employers automatically accommodate Muslim demands for fear of being labeled “racist” or “Islamophobic” if they don’t?
Reactions range from outrage to humor, but these demands have become all too common in Minnesota and should be taken seriously. Viewing them as acts of spontaneous religiosity or harmless calls for religious freedom misses the real goal behind this “peaceful” jihad. Rather, these incidents, along with female head covering, are signs of radical Islam’s penetration in Western Muslim communities.
Most Somalis came to Minnesota via Kenya where many were exposed to the ideas of the radical Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood. The radicalization of the community started there.
In her autobiography Infidel, Somali-born Muslim apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali tracks the efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood to radicalize the refugees in Nairobi. They gave talks, distributed religious tapes, established schools, all the while preaching jihad, radicalism and hatred of the West. Hirsi Ali herself became a member. She started wearing head covering and called for the death of Salman Rushdie. She later had to opportunity to personally apologize to him.
Somalis spread around the world, seeking asylum from a horrific civil war waging in their country. Most brought with them the radical Islamic message they heard from the Brotherhood in Nairobi. In Somalia itself radical Islam has enjoyed an even greater success. Today radicals rule the government and have imposed sharia complete with lapidation, flogging and decapitation.
The Brotherhood operates in Minnesota through the Muslim American Society housed, not coincidently, in the same building as TIZA. The group has been tied most convincingly to instigating the taxicab controversy at the airport. In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood has links with the Muslim Student Association with a branch at the University of Minnesota.
Founded in 1928 in Egypt, the Brotherhood has a massive organizational and financial infrastructure, fueled largely by Saudi oil wealth. There is scarcely a school, organization or mosque in Europe or the United States that is not directly or indirectly tied to the group.
The Brotherhood spells out its plan for the West clearly in Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase published in 1990 by the spiritual leader of the group Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The final goal, Qaradawi makes known, is to reestablish the Islamic caliphate in the West.
This pitch makes for a hard sell in Minnesota. The Brotherhood, therefore, has softened its tactics and rhetoric in recent decades playing down its political goals of Islamic world domination and carefully covering its links to terror and jihad. The group, however, never rules out violence to achieve its goal.
In its stead they advocate dawa, or dialogue, whereby its organizations act as legitimate religious institutions and the rightful representatives of Muslim communities.
They participate in interfaith events and give educational seminars on Islam and halfheartedly renounce terrorism, unless of course it is in Israel. Local and national governments see them as legitimate and turn to them as the community’s spokesmen, thereby ignoring truly moderate Muslim voices who are bullied into silence.
Minnesota has passed through the first stage of the Brotherhood’s blueprint as stated by Qaradawi: establishing schools, mosques and organizations. We are currently witnessing the next stage, acquiring sharia next to secular law for the Muslim community. In the final stage, when numbers are sufficient and the time is right, Islam will overthrow secular governments, by force or by democratic means, and supplant them with Islamic hegemony and law.
Minnesota’s famous liberalism and well-entrenched political correctness, with its fear to criticize, have given the Muslim Brotherhood its best opportunity to start jihad and establish sharia in America.
Ethnic diversity and religious pluralism make America great. But when a religious group of any kind makes demands which fly in the face of our well-established separation of church and state, it needs to be stopped. Religious fanatics of all stripes are never happy with one little concession. The Muslim Brotherhood makes its aim clear. If left unchecked, it can take over a community and a nation with breathtaking speed as it did in Somalia and is doing in Egypt.
Thus far this stealth jihad in Minnesota can’t stand up to the rule of law. But if recent history is any indicator, another demand for accommodation is just on the horizon. When it comes, it must be met with similar legal efforts and a barrage of criticism from people who believe in freedom. Just because there aren’t planes flying into buildings doesn’t mean it isn’t jihad.