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Friday, January 20, 2006
A Muslim who becomes a naturalized American citizen is literally millions of times more likely to plot terrorist acts against his fellow citizens than a member of any other religious creed or political ideology (Islam is both). It is not possible to wage a meaningful “Global War on Terrorism” without considering the legal, moral, and pragmatic implications of this problem.
First, the facts. Muslims account for up to one percent of the population of the United States, in contrast to Western Europe where their share of the population is up to ten times greater. They like to pretend otherwise, and groups such as the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Student Association, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American Muslim Council (AMC), and the Harvard Islamic Society routinely assert that there are between 4.5 and 9 million Muslims in the United States. It is remarkable that these sources do not provide any empirically verifiable basis for their figures.
Impartial studies currently place the number of Muslims at between 2 and 3 million. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) polled more than 50,000 people in 2001 and found the total American Muslim population to be 1.8 million. The University of Chicago’s Tom W. Smith reached a similar figure:
The best, adjusted, survey-based estimates put the adult Muslim population in 2000 at 0.67 percent or 1,401,000, and the total Muslim population at 1,886,000. Even if high-side estimates based on local surveys, figures from mosques, and ancestry and immigration statistics are given more weight than the survey-based numbers, it is hard to accept estimates that Muslims are greater than 1 percent of the population (2,090,000 adults, or 2,814,000 total).
It is estimated that up to two-thirds of that group are foreign-born immigrants, and about one half are naturalized American citizens. In other words, about one-half of one percent of the country’s overall population are foreign-born Muslims who are now naturalized U.S. citizens.
As U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials are well aware (and some readily admit off-the-record), the attitudes of these people tend to change once their status in America is secure. As visa applicants or permanent residents they refrain from statements and acts that may make them excludable under current laws. But as soon as they gain citizenship, some among them are quick to rediscover the virtues of sharia and jihad. Examples abound:
• In June 2005 22-year-old Hamid Hayat was arrested in Lodi, CA, and admitted spending six months in 2003-2004 at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. He attended classes that included instructions on “how to kill Americans.” He and his father, Umer Hayat (47), are both naturalized U.S. citizens. They are in jail awaiting trial; both have been refused bail.
• In Falls Church, VA, Maher Amin Jaradat, was arrested on June 6, 2005, and pled guilty on July 14 to fraudulently procuring U.S. citizenship because he failed to disclose previous ties to militant groups.
• In May 2005 a naturalized U.S. citizen, Rafiq Sabir, was arrested in Florida and accused of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. Sabir is an Ivy League-educated medical doctor who lived in a gated community in Boca Raton. He pledged loyalty to al-Qaida and offered to treat injured or sick terrorists.
• In March 2004 two naturalized U.S. citizens, Ilyas Ali and Muhamed Abid Afridi, plead guilty to plotting to sell shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to al Qaeda. Ali had previously claimed he was an innocent victim of Attorney General John Ashcroft and his over-zealous Justice Department. “Nine-eleven, me and my wife cried,” he said. “We cried for three days.”
• Mukhtar al-Bakri, a naturalized citizen, and five U.S.-born youths from upstate New York were convicted in 2003 of aiding Al-Qaeda, training in terrorist camps, and plotting attacks on Americans.
• In October 2003, Iyman Faris (34), an Ohio truck driver and naturalized U.S. citizen, was sentenced to 20 years for providing material support to al Qaeda. He pleaded guilty to plotting to destroy Brooklyn Bridge by cutting its suspension cables. He became a U.S. citizen in 1999 and only months later, in 2000, he traveled from his native Pakistan to Afghanistan where he met bin Laden and other senior leaders who gave Faris his orders.
“We must never forget . . . that as Muslims, we are obligated to desire, and when possible to participate in, the overthrow of any non-Islamic government—anywhere in the world – in order to replace it by an Islamic one,” the speaker concluded his remarks. The venue was a mosque, not in Rawalpindi or Jeddah but in San Francisco. When a recent convert noted that if Muslims are obligated to overthrow the U.S. government then accepting Islam was tantamount to an act of political treason, the lecturer responded matter-of-factly, “Yes, that’s true.”
He was right both technically and substantively. A breach of allegiance to the United States by naturalized Muslims is not a rarity, it is an integral part of the Muslim-American experience. It is an inherent dilemma for many; it leads the serious few to give aid and comfort to the enemy. The problem will be solved only if and when Islamic activism is treated as grounds for the loss of acquired U.S. citizenship and deportation. The citizenship of any naturalized American who actively supports or preaches jihad, inequality of “infidels,” the establishment of the Shari’a law, etc., should be revoked, and that person promptly deported to the country of origin. Before defining “activism,” let us remember that a foreigner who becomes naturalized has to declare, on oath,
that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God. (In acknowledgement whereof I have hereunto affixed my signature.)
For a Muslim to declare all of the above in good faith, and especially that he accepts the Constitution of the United States as the source of his highest loyalty, is an act of brazen apostasy par excellence, and apostasy is punishable by death under the Islamic law. The sharia, to a Muslim, is not an addition to the “secular” legal code with which it coexists with “the Constitution and laws of the United States of America”; it is the only true code, the only basis of obligation. To be legitimate, all political power therefore must rest exclusively with those who enjoy Allah’s authority on the basis of his revealed will. In America that is not the case and its government is therefore illegitimate.
It is equally sacrilegious for a Muslim to swear to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” That vow, if it means anything substantial, means that he would be prepared to shoot a fellow Muslim, or denounce him to the authorities, in defense of his adopted homeland. That this is not how many if not most naturalized Muslims see it is a matter of record.
So how can a self-avowedly devout Muslim take the oath of American citizenship, and expect the rest of us to believe that it was done in good faith and not only in order to get that coveted passport? A devout Muslim can do it only if in taking the oath he is practicing taqiyya, the art of dissimulation that was inaugurated by Muhammad to help destabilize and undermine non-Muslim communities almost ripe for a touch of old-fashioned Jihad. Or else he may take it because he is not devout and may be confused, in other case if he is not a very good Muslim at all; but in that case there is the ever-present danger that at some point in the future he or his American-born offspring will rediscover their roots. The consequences of such awakening for the rest of us are invariably perilous.
The interior ministry of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg has introduced measures that seek to avert this danger. Potential German citizens will have to answer a 30-topic loyalty test dealing with marriage, sexuality, democracy, attitudes to other faiths, etc. The manual for the naturalization authorities insist that applicants for citizenship must concur with the “free, democratic, constitutional structure” of Germany. Personal interviews may last for hours and will be given to an estimated half of all applicants. The German scheme, while causing predictable expressions of shock and horror among the usual suspects, looks like a potentially useful first step that the United States should consider in reforming the entire naturalization process. The ultimate objective of the reform process, however, needs to address two key questions: why should a Muslim want to become a citizen of a secular, pluralist, non-Muslim state; and why should that state’s non-Muslim citizens want to have him accepted as one of them.
The answer is inseparable from the fact that a person’s Islamic faith and outlook are incompatible with the requirements of personal commitment, patriotic loyalty and unquestionable reliability that are implicit in the oath of citizenship, and absolutely essential in the military, law enforcement, intelligence services, and other related branches of government.
It is to be hoped that the acceptance of other proposed measures would lead to a swift and irreversible reduction in the burgeoning number of mosques and Islamic centers in the United States. The remnant would have to be registered with the Attorney General and subjected to all legal limitations and security supervision strictures that apply to other quasi-religious cults prone to violence.
Conditio sine qua non all along is to accept and declare that the First Amendment does not protect Jihadists. It is in the American tradition that nothing ought to protect those who advocate the overthrow of the United States Government by force and violence, and, at bottom, that is what the Jihadists are up to. Legal regulators need to grasp that Islam itself is a radical, revolutionary ideology, inherently seditious and inimical to American values and institutions.
No court in a democratic country should uphold the constitutionality of any measure targeted at a particular religion quia religion. But if the facts were known about what is going on in mosques, and what is the nature and goal of worldwide Jihad, the necessary legal regulation may be accomplished. The First Amendment protection to political speech should not extent to Sharia, period. We do not need new legal theories, or a different conception of the First Amendment; we need an educational campaign.
The dominant view in the academy and in the courts is that any thought or political idea ought to be protected, so the educator’s job is to convince legislators that we are dealing with a new phenomenon more dangerous even than anarchism, fascism or communism. As our Legal Affairs Editor Stephen Presser points out,
If that is ever done, then the precedents from 1903 or 1920 basically kick in, and the Jihadists get perceived not as exercisers of First Amendment rights, but as dangerous subversives. Anyone trying to do that will have to plunge into the thicket of what a religion actually is, however, and the Courts are notoriously unclear on that.
A radically new form of legal clarity on Islam's nature is needed before the acceptance of our proposals becomes reality.
On the bright side, the proposed measures are politically eminently feasible. In a study conducted a year ago to determine the public attitude to terrorism, a half of respondents polled nationally said they believe the U.S. government should curtail civil liberties for American citizens who are Muslim. It should be noted that they do so in spite of the efforts of an elite class that never tires of assuring us that we are dealing with the “religion of peace and tolerance!” When it comes to visa moratoriums for Muslim non-citizens, the picture is even more encouraging.
The deadlock on the Somme in 1916, or at Verdun a year later, could not be broken with the strategic ideas and modus operandi of Messrs. Haigh, Pétain, or Hindenburg. It could have been unlocked, however, had Lidell-Hart, de Gaulle, or Guderian held their ranks and positions. Winning a war demands “knowing the enemy and knowing oneself,” of course, but it also demands “thinking outside the box.” This old cliché is apt: the magnitude of the threat demands radical responses that fall outside the cognitive parameters of the elite class.
Acceptance of these proposals would represent the long overdue beginning of serious Western defense against Islamic terrorism. It would signify the recognition that we are in a life-or-death struggle. It is being waged, on the Islamic side, with the deep conviction that the West is on its last legs, spiritually, morally, and biologically. That view is reinforced by the evidence from history that a civilization that loses the urge for biological self-perpetuation is indeed in mortal peril. Even at this late stage a recovery is possible, however, and the suggested measures would herald that recovery.
This article is partly based on the final chapter of Dr. Trifkovic’s latest book, Defeating Jihad, which will be published by Regina Orthodox Press (Boston) on March 1, 2006.
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