Saturday, December 26, 2015

Why Hilaire Belloc Still Matters


December 23, 2015
George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton (1928)

Chatting with a British bishop who'd said the famous Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc sometimes came to his home when he was a child to visit his father, a friend, I asked the obvious question:
What was Belloc like?
The bishop didn't say a lot, but I do remember this: "...an old man in a rumpled, stained black suit." The image has stuck with me, as apparently it did with the bishop.
That would have been Belloc in the last years of his life. (He died in July, 1953, just short of turning 83.) He kept writing until near the end -- after all, he made his living like that -- social criticism plus history and biography of a polemical nature, vigorous and clear but scarcely unbiased.
But the language -- ah, the language. Here was Belloc's great gift. From beginning to end his writing was a model of simple, elegant English prose.
Lately I've been reading a pocket-sized Belloc book that I found on the shelf without even knowing it was there. Its title is Hills and the Sea, and it's a collection of short essays the author published in British popular periodicals early in the last century. First appearing in 1906, the volume was republished in 1913.
A point of interest in my copy is an inscription on the title page, written when the book was presented to someone as a gift: "For the precious moments just before repose, beauty and adventure here at hand in Belloc's unsurpassable prose."
And here, virtually at random, is a specimen of the writing that earned that effusion:
"There was no breeze in the air, and the little deep vessel swung slightly to the breathing of the sea. Her great mainsail and her balloon-jib came over lazily as she swung, and filled themselves with the cheating semblance of a wind. The boom creaked in the goose-neck, and at every roll the slack of the main sheet tautened with a kind of little thud which thrilled the deck behind me."
Do people still read Belloc?
As with many writers who write a lot, his output was a mixed bag. Undoubtedly, too, he holds no interest for those who imagine European history and European culture began in 1789 with the French Revolution. But for people with an appreciation of Europe's Christian roots, he matters.
Readers who wish to tackle Belloc a little at a time will find a helpful introduction in TheEssential Belloc, a St. Benedict's Press compilation edited by Fr. C.J. McCloskey, Scott Bloch, and Brian Robertson.
His unquestioned masterpiece remains The Path to Rome, a rambling account of a journey -- a pilgrimage, really -- that he made, largely on foot, in 1901 through the heart of the Old Continent to the Eternal City. What is the book about? The answer, you might say, is whatever pops into the writer's head. But on a deeper level its subject is no less than the Christian soul of Europe.
The ideological ideal of today's vision of a secularized Europe requires the creation of a uniform continental identity from which national identities and religious identity have been erased. By contrast, Belloc's writing is full of glimpses of the Europe that was -- Christendom -- presented in inimitable prose and well worth cherishing even now.
In the long run, history will declare the verdict among Christendom, a secularized European monolith, and an Islamicized entity now perhaps starting to emerge.
Russell Shaw was secretary for public affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops from 1969 to 1987. He is the author of many books, including American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America.

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - The Ties That Bind (Live on SNL)

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Meet Me in the City (Live on SNL)

Food fads: Make mine gluten-full


December 24, 2015
(iStock)
When the federal government’s 1980 “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” warned about the baleful effects of saturated fats, public interest activists joined the fight and managed to persuade major food companies to switch to the shiny new alternative: trans fats. Thirty-five years later, the Food and Drug Administration finally determined that trans fats are not just useless but unsafe, and ordered them removed from all foods. Oops.
So much for settled science. To tell the truth, I never paid much attention to the fat fights in the first place. From my days as a medical student (and prodigious consumer of junk food), I’ve seen so many solemnly proclaimed “findings” come and go that I decided long ago to ignore — and outlive — them all.
So far, I’m ahead. Never had an egg substitute in my life. I figured trans fats were just another fad waiting to be revoked and renounced. Moreover, if I was wrong, the green eggs and ham would take so long to kill me anyway that I was more likely to be hit by a bus first. Either way, win-win.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t advocate this kind of jaunty fatalism for everyone. This is a private affair. I do, however, preach skepticism. Remember that most venerable piece of received medical wisdom — 98.6 degrees as the average adult human temperature? In 1992, three researchers bothered to measure — and found that the conventional wisdom (based on an 1878 German study) was wrong. Normal is 98.2.
After that — 114 years of error — one is inclined to embrace Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” theory that in 200 years we’ll discover that smoking is good for you, fruits are not. I still love peaches, but I eat them for the taste — and the memories — not because they might add a month to my life (in the ICU when I’m 90).
I don’t mean to be cynical, just realistic. Take fish oil. For at least 10 years the National Institutes of Health has strongly recommended omega-3 fatty acids and fish oil for the prevention of cardiovascular disease.
I held out, trusting both my gastronomic prejudices (more turf than surf) and my faith that time ultimately undoes all of life’s vérités. I waited. My orneriness has not been fully vindicated — NIH still recommends dietary fish oil — but it does find omega-3 supplements to be useless.
Exhibit A for medical skepticism, however, remains vitamin C. When Linus Pauling, Nobel laureate in chemistry (not nutrition), began the vitamin-C megadose fad to fend off all manner of disease, the whole thing struck me as bizarre. Yes, you need some C to prevent scurvy if you’re seven months at sea with Capt. Cook and citrus is nowhere to be found. Otherwise, the megadose is a crock. Evolution is pretty clever. For 2 million years it made sure Homo erectus, neanderthalensis, sapiens, what have you, got his daily dose without having to visit a GNC store.
Sure enough, that fashion came and went. But there are always new windmills to be tilted at. The latest is gluten.
Now, if you suffer from celiac disease, you need a gluten-free diet. How many of us is that? Less than 1 percent. And yet supermarket shelves are groaning with products proclaiming their gluten-freedom. Sales are going through the roof.
Another crock. Turns out, according to a massive Australian study of 3,200 products, gluten-free is useless. “The foods can be significantly more expensive and are very trendy to eat,” says Jason Wu, the principal investigator. “But we discovered a negligible difference when looking at their overall nutrition.”
Told you so.
Why then am I not agitating to have this junk taken off the shelves? Because of my other obsession: placebos. For which I have an undying respect, acquired during my early years as a general-hospital psychiatrist. If you believe in the curative powers of something — often encouraged by the authority of your physician — a sugar pill or a glass of plain water can produce remarkable symptom relief. I’ve seen it. I’ve done it.
So I’d never mess with it. If a placebo can alleviate your pain, that’s better than opioids. If going gluten-free gives a spring to your step, why not? But please, let the civility go both ways. Let the virtuous Fitbit foodie, all omega-3’d and gluten-free, drop the self-congratulatory smugness. And I promise not to say it’s all in his head.
Live and let eat. Merry Christmas.

Just Asking about Islam and Terrorism


By Andrew C. McCarthy — December 26, 2015


ISIS

ISIS. (photo credit:ISLAMIC SOCIAL MEDIA)


Let me ask you a question.

Let’s say you are an authentically moderate Muslim. Perhaps you were born into Islam but have become secularist. Or perhaps you consider yourself a devout Muslim but interpret Islam in a way that rejects violent jihad, rejects the concept that religious and civic life are indivisible, and rejects the principle that sharia’s totalitarian societal framework and legal code must be imposed on the state. Let’s just take that as a given: You are no more inclined toward terrorism than any truly peaceful, moderate, pro-democratic non-Muslim.

So let me pop the question: Is there any insulting thing I could say, no matter how provocative, or any demeaning video I could show you, no matter how lurid, that could convince you to join ISIS?
Mind you, I am not asking whether, upon my insulting and provoking you, you would ever want to have anything to do with me again. I am asking whether there is anything that could be said or done by me, or, say, Donald Trump, or Nakoula Basseley Nakoula — the video producer (Innocence of Muslims) whom Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tried to blame for the Benghazi massacre — that could persuade you to throw up your hands and join the jihad? Is there anything so profoundly offensive to Islam that we could conjure up that would make a truly moderate, peaceful Muslim sign up for mass murder? Torching and beheading? Killing children? Participating in systematic rape as a weapon of war?

I didn’t think so.

Yet, understand, that is what Washington would have you believe. Whether it is Barack Obama sputtering on about how Guantanamo Bay drives jihadist recruitment, or Hillary Clinton obsessing over videos (the real one by Nakoula that she pretended caused terrorism in Libya, and the pretend ones about Donald Trump that she claims have Muslims lined up from Raqqa to Ramadi to join ISIS), you are to believe violent jihad is not something that Muslims do but that Americans incite.

And it’s not just Democrats who’d have you buy this bunkum. Think of the Arab Spring fairy tale — about Libya, Egypt, and, most recently, Syria — that Republicans have been telling for years, critiqued by yours truly in Spring Fever. It is still GOP gospel, glibly peddled by Marco Rubio just a couple of weeks ago at the 2016 presidential candidates’ debate. (Disclosure: I support Ted Cruz.)

The fairy tale goes something like this. There is a terrible dictator who so tormented his people that they rose up against him. These were noble people, overwhelmingly moderate, secular Muslims — adherents of a “religion of peace” (or, as Bush secretary of state Condi Rice put it, “a religion of peace and love”), who craved democracy. (CautionYou can call them “rebels,” but words like “Muslim Brotherhood” and “sharia” are not to be uttered — we’re trying to build a narrative here!) Sure, the noble people may have tolerated the occasional jihadist in their midst, but that could happen to even the most well-intentioned peaceful moderate, right? (The pervasive presence of jihadists who used Syria and Libya as gateways to jihad against Americans in Iraq is also not to be mentioned.)

Now let’s let bygones be bygones. No need to tarry over small details — like how the noble people installed anti-democratic Islamists who imposed a sharia constitution on Egypt after ousting their pro-American dictator; or how Libya became a jihadist playpen where Americans are murdered after the U.S. government sided with the noble people to oust the U.S.-supported dictator who had been giving us counterterrorism intelligence about jihadists in places like Benghazi.

Let’s just skip ahead to Syria. There, the noble people needed America’s help, but Barack Obama turned a deaf ear. (No need to get into Obama’s collusion with the Islamic-supremacist governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to arm and train the “rebels.”) This forfeited our golden opportunity to intervene actively and empower the bounty of moderate, secular, America-loving, democracy-craving Muslims (because that worked so well in Libya). But for Obama’s default, these moderate legions could simultaneously have toppled the dictator and purged the teeny-tiny number of jihadists who might have been skulking about. (Let’s not get into how there don’t seem to be enough of these moderates to man a soccer team, let alone a legion; or how weapons supplied to these “rebels” somehow keep ending up in the hands of the jihadists.Obama’s default, coupled with the ruthlessness of the dictator, created a leadership and territory void into which jihadists suddenly poured (apparently out of nowhere). Somehow, these spontaneously generating jihadists managed to entice recruits, vastly increasing in number and power (even though — you’ll have to trust us on this — the moderate, secular Muslims really want nothing to do with them).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how ISIS was born and al-Qaeda rose from the ashes.
You buying it? Me neither.

About 20 years ago, I prosecuted a dozen jihadists, led by the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, for waging a terrorist war against the United States — including the World Trade Center bombing and a plot to attack the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, as well as other New York City landmarks. The defendants were caught on tape building bombs, scheming to strike at American military sites, and planning attacks timed to achieve maximum infidel carnage.

At trial, the jihadists tried to tell the jury they were just moderate, peace-loving Muslims who had been provoked by American foreign policy, a perception of anti-Muslim bias, and videos of Muslims being persecuted in Bosnia. The Blind Sheikh insisted his incitements to jihad were simply a case of faithfully applying sharia principles, which, according to his lawyers, the First Amendment gave him the right to do.

So I asked the jury a simple question:

Is there any obnoxious, insulting, infuriating thing I could say to you, or show to you, that would convince you to join up with mass-murdering terrorists? To become a terrorist yourself?

Of course, a dozen commonsense New Yorkers did not need to be asked such a question. They laughed the defense out of the courtroom.

Alas, in the 20 years since, the defense they laughed out of the courtroom has become the bipartisan government policy of the United States.

Go figure.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.



Thursday, December 24, 2015

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Christmas (Baby please come home)

America’s hidden jihad


By Daniel Pipes
December 23, 2015

COURTESY NEW JERSEY STATE POLICE

Yusuf Ibrahim had been driving a Mercedes Benz owned by one of the dead men.


The police and press did an impressive job of sleuthing into the lives and motives of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the married couple who massacred 14 people on Dec. 2, in San Bernardino, California.

We know about their families, their studies and employment histories, their travels, their marriage, their statements, and their preparations for the assault. Most importantly, the cascade of background work means we know that the pair had jihadi intentions, meaning, they attacked in their role as pious Muslims spreading the message, law, and sovereignty of Islam.

We are all better off for knowing these facts, which have had a powerful impact on the body politic, making Americans far more concerned with jihadi violence than at any time since just after 9/11, as they should be. For example, in 2011, 53 percent told a pollster that terrorism was a critical issue; that number has now reached 75 percent.

But what about the case of Yusuf Ibrahim? In early 2013, when he was 27, this Egyptian-born Muslim lived in Jersey City, when he allegedly shot, then cut off the heads and hands and knocked the teeth out of two Coptic Christians, Hanny F. Tawadros and Amgad A. Konds, then buried them in Buena Vista Township, New Jersey.

He is charged with two counts each of murder, felony murder, kidnapping, robbery, desecration of human remains, and other crimes. In addition, he has pleaded guilty to a Dec. 22, 2011, carjacking and a Sep. 20, 2012, armed robbery, both in Jersey City (in the latter, he shot his victim in the foot), and early in 2015 he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for these later crimes.

The twin beheadings are spectacular, gruesome, and replete with jihadi (or in police parlance, "terrorist") elements. Historian Timothy Furnish explains that "ritual beheading has a long precedent in Islamic theology and history," making it a distinctly Muslim form of execution. A Muslim killing a non-Muslim fits the ageless pattern of Islamic supremacism. It also fits a tragic pattern of behavior in the United States in recent years.

Yet the police, politicians, the press, and professors (i.e., the Establishment) have shown not the slightest interest in the Islamic angle, treating the double beheadings and amputations as a routine local murder. Symptomatic of this, the police report about Ibrahim's arrest makes no mention of motivation; on the basis of this lack of mention, left-leaning Snopes.com (which describes itself as the "definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation") goes so far as to dismiss as "false" the allegation that the mainstream media "deliberately ignored" this incident. The wagons have been circled.

Almost three years after the event, we know next-to-nothing about Ibrahim, his motives, his possible connections to others, or his institutional affiliations. We also do not know the relationship of the accused attacker to his victims: Was he a criminal who fell out with his accomplices, a friend who had drunk too much, a would-be lover knocking off his rivals for the affections of a woman, a family member eliminating aspirants for an inheritance, a crazy man randomly shooting passers-by? Or was he perhaps a jihadi seeking to spread the message, law, and sovereignty of Islam?

I cannot answer those questions because the case lingers in total obscurity, popping up from time to time only in connection with some technical procedural matter (such as the amount of Ibrahim's bail or the admissibility of his confession) that sheds no light on the motives for his alleged crime.

Nor is the Ibrahim case unusual. I have compiled long lists of other potential instances of jihadi violence (herehere, and here) in which the Establishment has colluded to sweep the Islamic dimension under the rug, treating the perpetrators as common criminals whose biographies, motives, and connections are of no interest and therefore remain unknown.

This silence about possible jihad has the major consequence of lulling the American public (and its counterparts elsewhere in the West) into believing jihadi violence is far rarer than is the case. If the body politic understood the full extent of jihad in America, the alarm would be much greater; the percentage of those calling terrorism a critical issue would rise much higher than the current 75 percent. That, in turn, might push the Establishment finally to get serious about confronting jihad.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org@DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2015 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
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The Year Christmas Died


New York’s Fifth Avenue is a celebration of pretty much nothing—or worse.


By 
December 23, 2015

A ‘holiday’ window at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City.
A ‘holiday’ window at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City. PHOTO: MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

As we moved into December and what for some time has been called “the holiday season,” the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Tennessee issued a “best practices” directive for the campus to “ensure your holiday party is not a Christmas party in disguise.”
A Christmas party in disguise? Has it come to this?
Aghast state legislators got the directive rescinded, but the Christmas killers will get the last laugh. In fact, they’ve already won. This is the year Christmas died as a public event in the United States.
We know this after touring the historic heart of public Christmas—Fifth Avenue in New York City.
For generations, American families have come to New York in December to swaddle themselves in the glow and spirit of Christmas—shops, restaurants, brownstones, the evergreen trees along Park Avenue, bar mirrors and, most of all, Fifth Avenue’s department-store windows. You couldn’t escape it, and why would you want to?
A friend, an ardent atheist, would be inconsolable if he couldn’t sing Handel’s entire “Messiah” with 3,000 other revelers this month at Lincoln Center. Even if the only god you worship is yourself, December in New York has always been about the bustling good cheer flowing from the Christian holiday.
For many, December required a pilgrimage to Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor and Bergdorf Goodman. No matter the weather, people walked the mile from 38th Street to 59th Street and jammed sidewalks to see these stores’ joyful Christmas windows.
Stay home. This year Fifth Avenue in December is about . . . pretty much nothing, or worse.
To be sure, the magnificent Rockefeller Center Christmas tree still stands, and directly across on Fifth Avenue is St. Patrick’s Cathedral, its facade washed and hung with a big green wreath. But walk up or down the famous avenue this week and what you and your children will see is not merely Christmas scrubbed, but what one can only describe as the anti-Christmas.
Forget public Nativity scenes, as court fiat commanded us to do years ago. On Fifth Avenue this year you can’t even find dear old Santa Claus. Or his elves. Christmas past has become Christmas gone.
The scenes inside Saks Fifth Avenue’s many windows aren’t easy to describe. Saks calls it “The Winter Palace.” I would call it Prelude to an Orgy done in vampire white and amphetamine blue.
A luxuriating woman lies on a table, her legs in the air. Saks’ executives, who bear responsibility for this travesty, did have the good taste to confine to a side street the display of a passed-out man on his back (at least he’s wearing a tux), spilling his martini, beneath a moose head dripping with pearls. Adeste Gomorrah.
But you haven’t seen the anti-Christmas yet. It’s up at 59th Street in the “holiday” windows of Bergdorf Goodman. In place of anything Christmas, Bergdorf offers “The Frosty Taj Mahal,” a palm-reading fortune teller—and King Neptune, the pagan Roman god, seated with his concubine. (One Saks window features the Roman Colosseum, the historic site of Christian annihilation.)
I thought: Lord & Taylor! Surely the iconic Christmas windows on 38th Street won’t shelve St. Nick. They did. He’s gone, replaced by little bears and cupcakes, gingerbread men and Canada geese.
There is one holdout to the de-Santification of America: In Macy’s windows at Sixth Avenue and 34th Street—as in “Miracle on 34th Street”—the characters of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” frolic in Yuletide splendor.
The Christmas-less feeling along once-famous Fifth Avenue this year is similar to the loss one feels reading the last lines of “Casey at the Bat”—a shattering, historic strikeout.
The erasure of Christmas between the grinding stones of secular fanaticism will persist. Eventually the holiday will be forbidden, forgotten and filed away in attic boxes. But maybe God, in His usual mysterious way, is nudging us back toward the beginning.
Once the inevitable Federal Office of Diversity and Inclusion has joined with the commercial cynics at Saks and Bergdorf’s to suppress even Santa, what pretext will parents have to give gifts to their Christmas-cleansed children? Amazon Day?
In the post-Christmas era, the infant Jesus and Santa Claus will go back to the catacombs of early Christian life, where you won’t have to say happy holidays to anyone. Christmas as we know it will die off, and what will be left on December 25th will look a lot like Thanksgiving, but smaller.
Unless celebrating Christmas in America becomes a prosecutable crime, as it was in the Soviet Union, families will go to church in the morning to renew the beginnings of their faith and then spend the day at home listening to pirated copies of the carols and hymns on Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” album. For radical refuseniks, I recommend playing, at the highest possible volume, “The Bells of St. Mary’s” on Phil Spector’s “A Christmas Gift for You.”
As for Saks and the other Fifth-Avenue sellouts, I have two words this season. They aren’t Merry Christmas.
Write to henninger@wsj.com

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

The Real Enemy Is the ISIS Propaganda Machine — To Win, the U.S. Must Beat It

By Alex Berenson 
A cage of prisoners lowered into a pool and filmed underwater as they drown. An explosive wire detonated around the necks of kneeling men, splitting heads from bodies, the decapitations replayed in slow motion.  Prisoners locked in a car and incinerated by a rocket-propelled grenade, their screams audible as the vehicle burns. 
The Islamic State group always has new ideas for snuff movies.
But before the internet and social media, we rarely saw terrorist atrocities. Now, the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, forces its massacres and executions upon us. Even if we choose not to look, the links and embedded videos are everywhere, a sea of pixelated blood that broadcast religious barbarism. 
Yet our leaders, especially President Barack Obama, have underestimated the power of this relentless flow of violence to turn non-Muslims against Islam. The anger has risen for two years, and after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, it is boiling over.
Criticizing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for his proposal to ban Muslims from the United States is easy — and necessary. But this fury is not confined to one party, or one country. Two weeks ago, in France, the far-right National Front led all parties with 30% of the vote in regional elections.
ISIS knows what it is doing. Its propaganda strategy is two-pronged: Recruit Muslims and provoke the West. It is winning both ways. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were far deadlier than the recent shootings, but public response this time around has been far greater.
As a novelist who writes espionage thrillers featuring an American convert to Islam, I spend a lot of time thinking about the uses of narrative as well as the relationship between the West and Islam. At this point, the Islamic State group as a territory-holding organization exists mainly to spread propaganda.
ISIS sees itself that way. "Senior media operatives are treated as 'emirs' of equal rank to their military counterparts," the Washington Post reported after investigating the militant group's propaganda machine last month. "They are directly involved in decisions on strategy and territory." 
A defector told the Post, "The media people are more important than the soldiers." In 30 days this summer, the group produced 1,146 pieces of propaganda, including almost 100 videos, according to the Quilliam Foundation, a U.K.-based counter-extremism think tank.
The American response has been desultory. American intelligence officials told the Post that they are not even sure who controls propaganda for the Islamic State, an astonishing failure.
The United States needs to treat the ISIS propaganda machine as the formidable enemy that it is. Non-Muslim politicians should stop making doctrinal arguments about whether the Islamic State group is actually Islamic. John Kerry sounds worse than foolish when he calls its members "apostates." Only Muslims can choose to lead a reformation of their religion. Further, government efforts to parry the group on social media have so far been a losing effort. Moral appeals inevitably come off as weak or preachy, doing nothing to slow recruitment or tamp down anger at the group. 
Instead, the United States must try to attack the ISIS propaganda machine directly. The president must tell Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other Muslim nations that are quietly aiding the Islamic State group as a regional proxy that the group's provocations now represent a serious threat to Muslim/non-Muslim relations around the world. He should privately warn them that the group has the better end of this bargain in the strongest possible terms — and then publicly, if needed.
The United States must also recognize that keeping  from having a base to produce propaganda is by itself a legitimate reason for a military intervention. Just as jihadi training camps require substantial territory and cash, so too do sophisticated media teams. The Islamic State group has at least three dozen media offices worldwide but its media unit is based in its headquarters city of Raqqa, Syria — less than 50 miles from the Turkish border.
The president has ruled out an invasion or even limited ground intervention in Syria for now. But we can target propagandists in other ways. We need to focus NSA and CIA resources on the ISIS media division, learn more about how it operates, make its senior officers our top targets.  If we need to go so far as to flatly deny the internet to ISIS-held territory in Iraq and Syria, so be it.
The Islamic State group's real threat to the United States is not military-based: The group is no longer taking territory. But its effort to divide Muslims and the West is succeeding brilliantly. That's the fight the United States must win.
The "Pass the Mic" series showcases voices, perspectives and ideas that spark interesting conversations. 

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

As Muslim women, we actually ask you not to wear the ‘hijab’ in the name of interfaith solidarity

 


Asra Nomani talks to audience members in 2009 after Doha Debate in which she argued for the right of Muslim women to marry anyone they choose. (Photo courtesy of the Doha Debates)
Last week, three female religious leaders – a Jewish rabbi, an Episcopal vicar and a Unitarian reverend – and a male imam, or Muslim prayer leader, walked into the sacred space in front of the ornately-tiled minbar, or pulpit, at the Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City, Utah. The women were smiling widely, their hair covered with swaths of bright scarves, to support “Wear a Hijab” day.

The Salt Lake Tribune published a photo of fresh-faced teenage girls, who were not Muslim, in the audience at the mosque, their hair covered with long scarves. KSL TV later reported: “The hijab — or headscarf — is a symbol of modesty and dignity. When Muslim women wear headscarves, they are readily identified as followers of Islam.”
For us, as mainstream Muslim women, born in Egypt and India, the spectacle at the mosque was a painful reminder of the well-financed effort by conservative Muslims to dominate modern Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political Islam, called “Islamism,” enlisting well-intentioned interfaith do-gooders and the media into promoting the idea that “hijab” is a virtual “sixth pillar” of Islam, after the traditional “five pillars” of the shahada (or proclamation of faith), prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage.
We reject this interpretation that the “hijab” is merely a symbol of modesty and dignity adopted by faithful female followers of Islam.
This modern-day movement, codified by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan and the Islamic State, has erroneously made the Arabic word hijab synonymous with “headscarf.” This conflation of hijab with the secular word headscarf is misleading. “Hijab” literally means  “curtain” in Arabic. It also means “hiding,” ”obstructing” and “isolating” someone or something. It is never used in the Koran to mean headscarf.
In colloquial Arabic, the word for “headscarf” is tarha. In classical Arabic, “head” is al-ra’as and cover is gheta’a. No matter what formula you use, “hijab” never means headscarf.  The media must stop spreading this misleading interpretation.
Born in the 1960s into conservative but open-minded families (Hala in Egypt and Asra in India), we grew up without an edict that we had to cover our hair. But, starting in the 1980s, following the 1979 Iranian revolution of the minority Shia sect and the rise of well-funded Saudi clerics from the majority Sunni sect, we have been bullied in an attempt to get us  to cover our hair from men and boys. Women and girls, who are sometimes called “enforce-hers” and “Muslim mean girls,” take it a step further by even making fun of women whom they perceive as wearing the hijab inappropriately, referring to “hijabis” in skinny jeans as “ho-jabis,” using the indelicate term for “whores.”
But in interpretations from the 7th century to today, theologians, from the late Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi to UCLA’s Khaled Abou El Fadl, and Harvard’s Leila Ahmed, Egypt’s Zaki Badawi, Iraq’s Abdullah al Judai and Pakistan’s Javaid Ghamidi, have clearly established that Muslim women are not required to cover their hair.
Challenging the hijab
To us, the “hijab”is a symbol of an interpretation of Islam we reject that believes that women are a sexual distraction to men, who are weak, and thus must not be tempted by the sight of our hair. We don’t buy it. This ideology promotes a social attitude that absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.
The new Muslim Reform Movement, a global network of leaders, advocating for human rights, peace and secular governance, supports the right of Muslim women to wear – or not wear – the headscarf.
Unfortunately, the idea of “hijab” as a mandatory headscarf is promulgated by naïve efforts such as “World Hijab Day,” started in 2013 by Nazma Khan, the Bangladeshi American owner of a Brooklyn-based headscarf company, andAhlul Bayt, a Shia-proselytizing TV station, that the University of Calgary, in southwest Canada, promotes as a resource for its participation in “World Hijab Day.” The TV station argues that wearing a “hijab” is necessary for women to avoid “unwanted attention.” World Hijab Day, Ahlul Bayt and the University of Calgary didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In its “resources,” Ahluly Bayt includes a link to the notion that “the woman is awrah,” or forbidden, an idea that leads to the confinement, subordination, silencing and subjugation of women’s voices and presence in public society. It also includes an article, “The top 10 excuses of Muslim women who don’t wear hijab and their obvious weaknesses,” with the argument, “Get on the train of repentance, my sister, before it passes by your station.”
The rush to cover women’s hair has reached a fever pitch with ultraconservative Muslim websites and organizations pushing this interpretation, such as VirtualMosque.com and Al-Islam.org, which even published a feature, “Hijab Jokes,” mocking Muslim women who don’t cover their hair “Islamically.”
Last week, high school girls at Vernon Hills High School, outside Chicago, wore headscarves for an activity, “Walk a Mile in Her Hijab,” sponsored by the school’s conservative Muslim Students Association. It disturbed us to see the image of the girls in scarves.
Furthermore, Muslim special-interest groups are feeding articles about “Muslim women in hijab” under siege. Staff members at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has pressed legal and PR complaints against U.S. companies that have barred employees from wearing hijabs on the job, has even called their organization “the hijab legal defense fund.”
Today, in the 21st century, most mosques around the world, including in the United States, deny us, as Muslim women, our Islamic right to pray without a headscarf, discriminating against us by refusing us entry if we don’t cover our hair. Like the Catholic Church after the Vatican II reforms of 1965 removed a requirement that women enter churches with heads covers, mosques should become headscarf-optional, if they truly want to make their places of worship “women-friendly.”
Fortunately, we have those courageous enough to challenge these edicts. In early May 2014, an Iranian journalist, Masih Alinejad, started a brave new campaign, #MyStealthyFreedom, to protest laws requiring women to wear hijabs that Iran’s theocracy put in place after it won control in 1979. The campaign’s slogan: “The right for individual Iranian women to choose whether they want hijab.”
Important interpretations of the Koran
The mandate that women cover their hair relies on misinterpretations of Koranic verses.
In Arabic dictionaries, hijab refers to a “barrier,” not necessarily between men and women, but also between two men. Hijab appears in a Koranic verse (33:53), during the fifth year of the prophet Muhammad’s migration, or hijra, to Medina, when some wedding guests overstayed their welcome at the prophet’s home. It established some rules of etiquette for speaking to the wives of prophet Muhammad: “And when ye ask of them anything, ask it of them from behind a hijab. This is purer for your hearts and for their hearts.” Thus, hijab meant a partition.
The word hijab, or a derivative, appears only eight times in the Koran as an “obstacle” or “wall of separation” (7:46), a “curtain” (33:53), “hidden” (38:32), just a “wall of separation” (41:5, 42:52, 17:45), “hiding” (19:14) and “prevented” or “denied access to God” (83:15).
In the Koran, the word hijab never connotes any act of piety. Rather, it carries the negative connotation of being an actual or metaphorical obstacle separating the “non-believers” in a dark place, noting “our hearts are under hijab (41:5),” for example, a wall of separation between those in heaven and those in hell (7:46) or “Surely, they will be mahjaboon from seeing their Lord that day (83:15).” Mahjaboon is a derivate verb from hijab. The Saudi Koran translates it as “veiled.” Actually, in this usage, it means, “denied access.”
The most cited verse to defend the headscarf (33:59) states, “Oh, Prophet tell thy wives and thy daughters and the believer women to draw their jilbab close around them; this will be better so that they be recognized and not harmed and God is the most forgiving, most merciful.” According to Arabic dictionaries, jilbab means “long, overflowing gown” which was the traditional dress at the time. The verse does not instruct them to add a new garment but rather adjust an existing one. It also does not mean headscarf.
Disturbingly, the government of Saudi Arabia twists its translation of the verse to impose face veils on women, allowing them even to see with just “one eye.” The government’s translation reads: “O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks (veils) all over their bodies (i.e. screen themselves completely except the eyes or one eye to see the way). That will be better, that they should be known (as free respectable women) so as not to be annoyed, and God is most forgiving, most merciful.”
Looked at in context, Islamic historians say this verse was revealed in the city of Medina, where the prophet Muhammad fled to escape persecution in Mecca, and was revealed to protect women from rampant sexual aggression they faced on the streets of Medina, where men often sexually harassed women, particularly slaves. Today, we have criminal codes that make such crimes illegal; countries that don’t have such laws need to pass them, rather than punishing women for the violent acts of others.
Another verse (24:31) is also widely used to justify a headscarf, stating, “… and tell the believing women to lower their gaze and guard their chastity, and do not reveal their adornment except what is already shown; and draw their khemar over their neck. . . .”
In old Arabic poetry, the khemar was a fancy silk scarf worn by affluent women. It was fixed on the middle of the head and thrown over their back, as a means of seducing men and flaunting their wealth. This verse was revealed at a time, too, when women faced harassment when they used open-air toilets. The verse also instructs how to wear an existing traditional garment. It doesn’t impose a new one.
Reclaiming our religion
In 1919, Egyptian women marched on the streets demanding the right to vote; they took off their veils, imported as a cultural tradition from the Ottoman Empire, not a religious edict. The veil then became a relic of the past.
Later, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser said in a speech in the early 1960s that, when he sought reconciliation with members of the Muslim Brotherhood group for attempting to assassinate him in 1954, the Supreme Leader of the Brotherhood gave him a list of demands, including, “imposing hijab on Egyptian women.” The audience members didn’t understand what the word hijab meant. When Nasser explained that the Brotherhood wanted Egyptian women to wear a headscarf, the audience members burst out laughing.
As women who grew up in modern Muslim families with theologians, we are trying to reclaim our religion from the prongs of a strict interpretation. Like in our youth, we are witnessing attempts to make this strict ideology the one and only accepted face of Islam. We have seen what the resurgence of political Islam has done to our regions of origin and to our adoptive country.
As Americans, we believe in freedom of religion. But we need to clarify to those in universities, the media and discussion forums that in exploring the “hijab,” they are not exploring Islam, but rather the ideology of political Islam as practiced by the mullahs, or clerics, of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State.
In the name of “interfaith,” these well-intentioned Americans are getting duped by the agenda of Muslims who argue that a woman’s honor lies in her “chastity” and unwittingly pushing a platform to put a hijab on every woman.
Please do this instead: Do not wear a headscarf in “solidarity” with the ideology that most silences us, equating our bodies with “honor.” Stand with us instead with moral courage against the ideology of Islamism that demands we cover our hair.
Asra Q. Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and the author of “Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam.” She is a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement, a new initiative of Muslims and their allies, advocating peace, human rights and secular governance. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com. Hala Arafa is a retired journalist who worked for 25 years at the International Bureau of Broadcasting as a program review analyst. She was a news editor at the Arabic branch of the Voice of America.