In FrontPage this morning I discuss a common-sense call for monitoring mosques that has gone out not in the United States, of course, but in, of all places, Saudi Arabia:
It’s
happened again: venomous Islamophobes have called for the monitoring of
mosques. That’s right: racist bigots, seething with unaccountable
hatred for their fellow citizens who happen to be mosque-attending
Muslims, are calling for unconscionable restrictions upon Muslims”
religious freedom, and a cloud of suspicion to be cast upon the entire
Muslim community, as they have called for law enforcement authorities to
step up their monitoring of Muslim houses of worship.Here’s the story:
JEDDAH: A number of religious scholars and academics have
stressed the need for the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Call
and Guidance to beef up monitoring of places of worship. It followed the
recent report of a Riyadh mosque serving as a facade for manufacturing
explosives.That’s right: the call for the monitoring of mosques has gone out not
in the United States, and not from “Islamophobes” at all, but from
Muslims in Saudi Arabia. The call came after “the Interior Ministry said
in a statement on Sunday that it discovered explosive substances and
devices at a lean-to of a quiet mosque in Riyadh.”These “religious scholars and academics” have a valid point. After all, in recent years we have seen mosques used to preach hatred; to spread exhortations to terrorist activity; to house a bomb factory; to store weapons; to disseminate messages from bin Laden; to demand (in the U.S.) that non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions; to fire on American troops; to fire upon Indian troops; to train jihadists; and more.
American authorities have as much reason as Saudi authorities to be
concerned. Four separate studies all found that 80% of U.S. mosques were
teaching jihad, Islamic supremacism, and hatred and contempt for Jews
and Christians. There are no countervailing studies that challenge these
results. In 1998, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi leader,
visited 114 mosques in the United States. Then he gave testimony before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999, and asserted that 80% of American mosques taught the “extremist ideology.”Then there was the Center for Religious Freedom’s 2005 study, and the Mapping Sharia Project’s 2008 study.
Each independently showed that upwards of 80% of mosques in America
were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity
ultimately to impose Islamic rule.And in the summer of 2011 came another study showing that only 19% of mosques in U.S. don’t teach jihad violence and/or Islamic supremacism.
A random survey of 100 representative mosques in the U.S.
was conducted to measure the correlation between Sharia adherence and
dogma calling for violence against non-believers. Of the 100 mosques
surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence;
30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no
violent texts at all. Mosques that presented as Sharia adherent were
more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their
non-Sharia-adherent counterparts. In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam
recommended studying violence-positive texts. The leadership at
Sharia-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshiper
study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-Sharia-adherent
mosques. Fifty-eight percent of the mosques invited guest imams known to
promote violent jihad. The leadership of mosques that featured
violence-positive literature was more likely to invite guest imams who
were known to promote violent jihad than was the leadership of mosques
that did not feature violence-positive literature on mosque premises.That means that around 1,700 mosques in the U.S. are preaching hatred of infidels and justifying violence against them. As Pamela Geller asks: “You think there will never be any consequences of that?”