Tuesday, February 4, 2014

U.S. Leadership Committed to Struggling "in the cause of Allah"?

Top Islamic Leader Calls on U.S. to Wage 'Jihad for Allah'

...In the recorded speech, Qaradawi-one of the most influential Islamic clerics in the world, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, author of over 100 books on Muslim doctrine, and head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars-sarcastically thanks the U.S. for supporting the "freedom fighters" in Syria, adding that "Allah willing, your [U.S.] aid will increase."
Then, while working himself up because the U.S is only providing weapons to the jihadis in Syria, as opposed to directly intervening, Qaradawi declares in frustration: "We want America to take a manly stand-a stand for Allah!"
...could it be that he unwittingly let out a "Freudian slip": namely, that he knows U.S. leadership, hand in hand with the global Islamist movement, is "taking a stand for Allah" throughout the Middle East in the context of "liberating" it. (As documented here, Muslim countries that the U.S. has invaded and "liberated"-Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and ongoing Syria-have all become much more radicalized and hostile to non-Muslims, chief among them Christians.)
Nor is it any secret that this administration does act on the calls of Qaradawi. As Clare Lopez summarizes for the Gatestone Institute:
[T]he current administration consistently and repeatedly appeared to respond eagerly to the calls for revolution from the Muslim Brotherhood's senior Islamic scholar, Yousef al-Qaradawi. When al-Qaradawi said that Mubarak had to go, the U.S. waited a whole three days before throwing America's key ally in the Middle East for over three decades under the bus. When al-Qaradawi called for Libyan rebels to kill Muammar Qaddafi (so the al-Qa'eda jihadis in his jails could get out and join the revolution), the U.S. led the Western military campaign that brought al-Qa'eda, the MB, and chaos to Libya. And when al-Qaradawi issued a call for jihad in Syria, in early June 2013, the U.S. quickly issued an invitation to Abdullah bin Bayyah (al-Qaradawi's vice president at the International Union of Muslim Scholars), who told an Al-Jazeera reporter that, "We demand Washington take a greater role in [Syria]." It took the U.S. less than one week after al-Qaradawi's fatwa to announce authorization of stepped-up military aid to the al-Qa'eda-and-Brotherhood-dominated Syrian rebels. The White House announcement came just a single day after bin Bayyah met with National Security and other senior administration officials.
The problem, then, is not that Qaradawi has in desperate senility confused the U.S. with the jihadis, but rather that he may know that prominent elements of U.S. leadership are committed to struggling "in the cause of Allah"-and so he unwittingly employed jihadi rhetoric to remind them of their duty.
Unfortunately, in today's surreal climate of U.S. politics, no interpretation is so absurd as to be implausible.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.