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CAIR Spreads Propaganda for Radical Saudis on Islam’s Holiest Day

Posted by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser Nov 17th 2010 at 10:13 am in Big Peace

Even Breitbart.com carried yesterday’s bizarrely ‘urgent’ press release from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which praised the leading Saudi cleric, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al Sheikh, on the most significant Muslim holiday of the year- Eid al-Adha (Holiday of the Sacrifice).

No previous single press release or statement by CAIR more clearly reveals its ideological ties and service to the Saudis, and their Wahhabi ideologues – and its willingness to use word games, deception and moral equivalence to avoid revealing its true objectives.

Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al Sheikh

First, let us look at the substance of CAIR’s release:

CAIR today welcomed an anti-terror statement by Saudi Arabia’s top religious leader made in a sermon at the peak of the Hajj, the most important event on Islam’s spiritual calendar. In his midday sermon Monday to millions of pilgrims gathered on the plain of Arafah, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al Sheikh called for religious moderation and said Islam prohibits terrorism, extremism and injustice.

CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said:

It is extremely significant that such a prominent Muslim leader would offer a clear statement condemning terrorism and religious extremism during the largest Islamic gathering in the world and on the most important day on Islam’s spiritual calendar. The importance of the Grand Mufti’s statement is made even more significant given the fact that it was delivered in the same spot as the last sermon offered by the Prophet Muhammad. This statement from Islam’s spiritual capital should put to rest once and for all the false claim that Muslim leaders do not condemn terrorism.

Awad urged Muslim leaders in America and worldwide to incorporate the Grand Mufti’s statement in Eid al-Adha prayers being offered Tuesday to mark the end of Hajj.

As a devout Muslim, I find any comparison by CAIR of the leading radical Saudi cleric, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al Sheikh, to the Prophet Muhammad to be deeply harmful to any attempt at true modern reforms. The Saudis have exploited the world’s Muslim populations with their billions in petrodollars that have given them the fuel to metastasize the cancers of their backward Wahhabi interpretations of Islam and dominate our communities. Many reformist, modern Muslims like me believe that if the Prophet was alive today, he would reject their backward, literalist interpretations for a more moral, humanitarian, modern westernized Islam. We are unable to have this debate because of the domination of the Saudi voice among Muslims in the west and globally.

The mere condemnation of terrorism in this CAIR promoted sermon means nothing – because the sermon is otherwise chock full of inflammatory Muslim supremacism (Islamism) and anti-Western hatred.

CAIR’s assertion that this should “put to rest once and for all the false claim that Muslims leaders do not condemn terrorism” demonstrates, once and for all, that CAIR is part of the Saudi propaganda machine. Further, it should rather actually ‘put to rest’ any doubts that CAIR is, in fact, part of the theo-political global Islamist movement in the West and in the United States, hatched and nurtured by Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist groups from the Middle East.

Most revealingly, CAIR ignores the rest of the Grand Mufti’s sermon. The full transcript cannot yet be found online, but a number of reports discuss the other topics of this sermon. First, the Chief Sheikh did make headlines by“rejecting terrorism as a deplorable crime” but actually went on to say that “the problem is not just terrorism, but also poverty, unemployment, and diseases stemming from global crises.” True to his Islamist and Wahhabist creed, he ignores any need for Muslim reform, modernization, or separation of mosque and state. The reference to“stemming global crises” is based on the same old, tired Islamist propaganda: blame the West for all Muslims’ problems.

During this sermon, the Grand Mufti also “condemned Western occupation of foreign lands,” and went on to say:

Islam forbids the occupation of a country, and the unlawful shedding of civilian blood, and the destruction of crops and cattle…the rights of people in Third World nations is not as it is in other countries, and it is unacceptable that nations occupy these lands and rape them of their riches.

To a genuine American Muslim, this sounds more like a testimony toward radicalization and militancy, rather than any supposedly clear promotion of moderation and condemnation of terrorism, as CAIR would have us believe. Therein, lies a major indicator that the Grand Mufti is anything but moderate. CAIR not only voices no disagreement with this toxic anti-western narrative, but they use this sermon’s few lines condemning terrorism as a statement to “put to rest the claim that Muslims do not condemn terrorism.” Any wonder we are making no headway against radical Islam with these kind of vacuous Islamist condemnations of the tactic of terrorism couched in an anti-western, anti-American narrative?

On the subject of violence, his duplicity is also revealed in another statement the Grand Mufti made in the sermon:

Violence cannot be cured with violence and neither can terrorism be cured with force, but by lifting injustices levied on oppressed peoples.

This is again hardly a morally-clear condemnation of terrorism. Rather, it is a demagogic moral equivalency of barbaric acts committed by Al Qaeda, Hamas, and other radical Islamists, which this radical sheikh insinuates are understandable by the acts of America and the West.

According to Geo News, the Grand Mufti also said in his sermon:

“God sent the last and final Prophet with the complete code of conduct (Shariah), which, is in complete harmony with human nature, owing to the fact that it caters to all natural and material needs.” He also added that, “the human inner being (nafs) drives man to do evil.”

CAIR voices no disagreement on their part with the Mufti, about his interpretation of shariah here or anywhere. In fact, CAIR is now also suing the state of Oklahoma to protect their fellow Islamists’ “right” to use that same shariah, without interference from the state. To the contrary, Oklahoma voters by 70 percent voted last week to prohibit shariah law from taking precedence over state or federal law. That would seem quite prescient, in light of an organization like CAIR that, this week, uses the Grand Mufti’s sermon – which elevates the most extreme, repressive form of shariah – which dictates all aspects of life and society – as an exemplar for moderation.

For example, CAIR apparently thought that Americans are unaware of, or would not remember that less than two years ago, this “moderate” Grand Mufti expressed his grand approval of marriage of adult men to 10 year old girls. In a lecture at the mosque of Imam Mohamed bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, he stated:

A girl becomes ready for marriage at 10 or 12 according to Islam and stressed that Islamic law is not by any means oppressive to women…Our mothers and grandmothers got married when they were barely 12. Good upbringing makes a girl ready to perform all marital duties at that age. (Al-Arabiya)

A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she’s too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her.” (CNN)

This “moderate” Grand Mufti also disgracefully rebuked women for attending a conference without a veil stating, “I severely condemn this matter and warn of grave consequences,” and told Muslims at the Green Lane (U.K.) mosque that, “Muslim children should be hit if they don’t pray: ‘When he is seven, tell him to go and pray, and start hitting them when they are 10.’”

The Grand Mufti is one of the leading Wahhabi purveyors of Muslim supremacism (Islamism) around the world. Whether or not he condemns violence and the tactic of terrorism is of little consequence. Clearly, he believes in the Islamic state, and the domination of shariah law in governments where Muslims are a majority. As Alex Alexiev has noted, “the Saudi funding program is the largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever mounted-dwarfing the Soviets’ propaganda efforts at the height of the cold War.”

In fact, the Saudi’s own so-called “de-radicalization campaign” (Al-Sakeenah) has been prominently critiqued. For example Col. Jonathan Figuel writes:

It seems that the Sakeenah campaign is convenient to be presented by the Saudis as an external non-governmental independent initiative, rather than a governmental led operation. From past experience and analysis of the Saudi’s double game policy and conduct, one can assume that the Saudis on one hand use the campaign for propaganda purposes encouraging its existence for internal real threats, while on the other hand the campaign can be presented to the international political and the public opinion for political benefits without any formal or direct responsibility to the global aspects of the their radicalization influence and actions…The Saudi de radicalization campaign to “dry out the sources of terrorism thoughts” as declared by the minister of Islamic Affairs, corroborates the fact that the campaign is totally aimed to deal with domestic security threats on Islamic Wahhabi doctrine.

We must not be fooled by the “condemnation” of terrorism by the Saudi Wahhabi clerics and their tribal protectors in the Saudi royals. In reality, this further reveals the dangerous synergy and propaganda role of American Islamist groups like CAIR for Saudi Wahhabi fundamentalists like the Grand Mufti. Their ‘double game’ is manifested from their pulpits at the Grand Mosque in Mecca and from the press releases of their advocates like CAIR in the United States.

CAIR’s rush to highlight the radical Saudi cleric’s “condemnation” of terrorism was clearly based on its expectation, not without merit, that most Americans would not research how immoderate this cleric really is. A brief review of that sermon – in context, and in view of the Grand Mufti’s ‘other’ prominent radical ideas – reveals a dangerous, influential Islamist who uses Wahhabi interpretations of Islam and shariah to impose misogyny, child marriage, child abuse, Muslim supremacy, and spread hate-filled anti-American propaganda.

Shamefully, CAIR chose Islam’s holiest day of the year to spread this type of propaganda. We, modern reform-minded American Muslims and non-Muslims alike, must unite and speak with one voice against it.