Three weeks ago, ACT! For Canada sent out a special
report on the National Council of Canadian Muslims (formerly CAIR-CAN) so you
would understand the make-up and the goals of this organization.
Below
is another special report prepared by PointdeBascule on Jamal Badawi. Not only
was he a major pillar of CAIR-Canada in the last decade, his importance and
influence is emphasized by the fact the he also headed, still leads and
currently influences the direction of many top Muslim Brotherhood organizations
in the United States and Canada. When Badawi was sharing his leadership
position at CAIR-Canada, he also was on the Board of Directors of other
organizations that funded or openly defended Hamas, a known terrorist
organization.
When
the organization changed its name to the National Council of Canadian Muslims,
Badawi’s name disappeared from its list of
administrators. No
formal notice seems to have been published to announce his departure.
Excerpt
from the report:
A 1991 internal Muslim
Brotherhood memorandum established (point 20) that Jamal Badawi is a leader of the
North American Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure. Badawi’s name also appears in
a 1992 Muslim
Brotherhood leadership phonebook. Both documents were produced for evidentiary purposes in the
2008 Holy Land Foundation trial that led to the conviction of all
those who were accused of terrorism financing.
The memorandum also encourages
Muslim Brotherhood supporters to destroy the Western civilization from within.
Jamal Badawi’s incitement to Muslim judges and civil servants not to apply
current legal provisions incompatible with sharia actively contributes to the
realization of this plan:
Point 4.4 of the 1991
memorandum The Ikhwan (Muslim
Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand
Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and
"sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the
believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over
all other religions.
This
report demonstrates that we need to pay attention to the non-violent aspect of
Jihad. Badawi explains how to use the legal system to further the
“civilizational” jihad by “sabotaging” from within the very institutions that
serves to protect our freedoms.
Please take the time to read this
in-depth report so that you will further
understand a different aspect of the
real story behind the NCCM.
Jamal Badawi – Main Sunni Muslim leader in Canada incites Muslim judges and civil servants not to apply current legal provisions that are opposed to sharia
Short profile of Jamal Badawi published in CAIR-CAN’s
2007 annual review
when he was a director of the organization.
From 2001 to 2013, Jamal Badawi has been a CAIR-CAN
director. When the organization changed its name to the National Council of
Canadian Muslims, Badawi’s name disappeared from its list of
administrators. No
formal notice seems to have been published to announce his departure.
In April 2012, then CSIS director, Richard
Fadden, stated that the main threat to Canada’s safety comes
from Sunni Islamist extremism. Mr. Fadden was referring to the terrorist
threat. Jamal Badawi’s incitement to Muslim judges to disregard their code of
ethics is a reminder that the Islamist threat is not limited to terrorism but
includes non-violent activities of infiltration carried out notably within
government agencies.
Badawi’s incitement to favor sharia over Canadian laws
is also aimed at Muslim civil servants who are authorized to enforce legal
provisions (police officers, Crown prosecutors, immigration officers, income
tax employees, school administrators, human rights Commissions members,
etc.)
SUMMARY
PART 1 – Jamal Badawi: “He [A Muslim] can use his
judicial discretion to achieve the greatest amount of justice as compared to a
non-Muslim or a person who does not believe in Shariah.”
PART 2 – A Muslim Brotherhood’s internal document
identifying Jamal Badawi as one of its leaders advocates “destroying the
Western civilization from within”
PART 3 – The alarm bell should ring at CSIS and
elsewhere when the main Sunni Muslim leader in the country quotes Ibn Taymiyya
to determine how Muslims should behave in Canada
PART 4 – Jean-François Revel about the vulnerability of Western democracies
against an internal enemy
PART 1 – Jamal Badawi: “He [A Muslim] can use his judicial discretion to achieve the greatest amount of justice as compared to a non-Muslim or a person who does not believe in Shariah.”
Jamal Badawi is the main Sunni Muslim leader in Canada
if we consider the number of organizations that he currently leads, has led and
influences in the country, as well as the positions that he occupies in major
international Muslim organizations. Badawi and the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual guide Youssef
Qaradawi are members of
the European Council for Fatwa and Research based in Dublin (Ireland), an
organization that strives to impose a parallel legal framework to Muslims
living in Europe.
During an interview whose date is not specified but
that was first archived by Web Archive in 2002, Badawi addresses the political
involvement of Muslims living in North America (Muslim
participation in North American politics). In this interview, Badawi encourages Muslims to
take part in the various facets of political life, including the administration
of justice, although many laws currently enforced are opposed to sharia, he
remarks.
Badawi even encourages Muslims to become judges in the
non-Muslim societies where they live. He quotes Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyya
(1263-1328) in order to justify his position. Although Ibn Taymiyya is
recognized as an ideologue of armed jihad, he nevertheless took into
consideration that, in certain circumstances, violent methods are not always
the most effective to further the implementation of sharia in a non-Muslim
environment. Like the Islamists today, in his time Ibn Taymiyya was able to
consider the situation on the ground and the weaknesses of his own side in
given circumstances. This is what led him to advocate that Muslims should
accept to become judges in non-Muslims societies in order to limit the scope of
non-Islamic laws.
In his interview, Jamal Badawi also alludes to the
leeway that a high-ranked civil servant had in pre-Islamic Egypt. The
implication is clear: Jamal Badawi encourages not only Muslim judges but also
Muslim civil servants operating in governments not ruled by sharia to take
advantage of their position for not applying provisions of laws that are
opposed to sharia. Police officers, Crown prosecutors, immigration
officers, income tax employees, school administrators, human rights Commissions
members, and others come to mind.
In recent years, Tarek Fatah and security expert David
Harris reported three cases of unacceptable behaviour by Muslim police officers
towards anti-Islamist Muslims. In a National Post article entitled Some death
threats don’t count,
Tarek Fatah reported that after he and Tahir Gora, another anti-sharia Muslim,
complained about death threats they were getting from Islamist websites, they
were interrogated by Muslim investigators who showed little interest despite
the mountain of evidence.
Tarek Fatah concluded that “The Toronto police, in
their wish to promote an image of diversity and outreach, have dedicated
themselves to serving and protecting the radical Islamist elements within our
city.”
In a chapter of a book
dedicated to the Islamist threat (pp. 219-220), David Harris reports the case of
Homa Arjomand. This anti-Khomeini activist living in Canada is originally from
Iran. She was once confronted by an Iranian-born Ontario police officer who
told her in Farsi that she was not allowed to demonstrate against the Iranian
regime. Although, she asked him to speak English so that the other people
accompanying her could eventually testify, he refused. Harris adds that Homa
Arjomand “is concerned about the security implications of this and about the
extent to which Islamists may have infiltrated Canadian police and security
agencies that limit their screening of police recruits largely to checking
criminal records.”
While this article is being published, Jamal Badawi’s
interview by Samana Siddiqui is still available on its original website SoundVision.com. It is also archived on Web Archive and Point de
Bascule.
According to her LinkedIN
profile, the interviewer
Samana Siddiqui graduated in journalism from Concordia University (Montreal) in
1996. In 1999, a woman with the same name was listed in the Quebec Registry of
Enterprises (File
3346439360) as an
administrator of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Montreal).
CAIR-Montreal was registered in January 1997, struck off the Registry in May
1999, replaced by CAIR-Ottawa, and by CAIR-CAN in 2000. Samana Siddiqui still
works for the Islamist organization Sound Vision but does it now from Chicago.
Here is the portion of the interview in which Jamal Badawi answers a question about
the opportuneness for Muslims to take part in the political process in
non-Muslim countries.
Samana Siddiqui’s question to Jamal Badawi
“So would you say there are some rules or some
boundaries perhaps in Islamic jurisprudence which could help us find an answer
to whether or not Muslims should participate in the political process in our
context of a non-Muslim society?”
“Particularly, I mean those Muslims who object to
participating, and scholars who object often argue that number one, not only is
it a non-Islamic state but this non-Islamic state often makes policies and
perpetrates policies against Muslims in other parts of the world. I think the
sanctions on Iraq, for instance, in the case of the United States, is a very
good example.”
“How can we reconcile, for example participating in
the political process of a state which is enforcing a deadly embargo on fellow
Muslims?”
Jamal Badawi’s answer
[…] “[T]here is no denial on the basis of the Quran
and Sunnah that one has to weigh the harms or benefits just like when the Quran
speaks about drinking or intoxication. Wa ith ma huma akbaru min naf ayma.
There is benefit, there is harm, but the harm is greater than the benefit.”
“So the idea of weighing harms and benefits of any
particular decision is a very legitimate rule of Shariah. To give a little bit
more detail on that: what happened when one thing has to take place, in other
words, you're given two choices. You have no third choice. One of them would
bring more harm. The other would be harmful but the harm would be less.”
“Obviously, the sensible rules of Shariah here is to
accept lesser harm to end a greater harm.”
[…] “One of the great scholars of Islam, actually many
give him the title of Shaikh ul Islam Ibn Taymiyya […], while some people might
consider him to be conservative on some issues, in fact he has been so
open-minded to the point that he gave a verdict when he was asked.”
“He said suppose the enemies of Islam invade Muslim
lands and rule according to their own law. In other words, they frustrate the
application of Shariah, and they're ruling according to their own secular
non-Islamic or maybe anti-Islamic type of laws. And then they go to a Muslim to
serve as a judge. Should he accept the position or not? I would not tell you
how Ibn Taymiyya answered that question, but I can tell you what some people
today might say. What do you think they would say?”
“They would say how come? If he accepts, he would be a
Kaffir. He would be outside of Islam. Why? Because he accepts to be the
implementor, as a judge, of a law other than the law of Allah, knowingly. He
should refuse.”
“But do you know what Ibn Taymiyya said? He said that
he should accept. Do you know the reason he gave?”
“He said, all right, under the circumstances, the
presence of a Muslim judge who fears Allah, even though he cannot control, of
course, the law, that's beyond his ability, but his presence in his position,
is more likely in comparative terms, to bring greater justice because you know
any judge can use his own judicial discretion. There is some area of
flexibility. He can use his judicial discretion to achieve the greatest amount
of justice as compared to a non-Muslim or a person who does not believe in
Shariah or does not fear Allah, he could be an oppressive judge following the
system fully and wholeheartedly, who would even bring greater harm to people.”
For Badawi and Ibn Taymiyya, “greater justice” means
more conformity to sharia,
and “an oppressive judge” is a judge who follows “fully and
wholeheartedly” a legal system incompatible with sharia.
After the appointment of the first Muslim judge in
Maryland (District Court), Nihad Awad, the Hamas-linked and
Washington-based Council on American Islamic Relations Executive
Director, stated that the “appointment shows that Muslims are
entering and having a positive impact on every level of American society.”
Considering Jamal Badawi’s statements on the way he
wishes Muslim judges to carry out their responsibilities in North America, and
considering the links between Awad and Badawi, it is legitimate to be on our
guard when one of them or their allies welcome the appointment of a Muslim
judge.
A fatwa written by Ibn Taymiyya entitled “The
permissibility [for a Muslim] of assuming public office in an unjust
[non-Muslim] state” has been added by Muslim Brotherhood spiritual guide
Youssef Qaradawi to his book Priorities
of the Islamic movement in the coming phase. This book details many principles behind the
gradualist approach adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood to penetrate the Western
societies where its members began to settle in the fifties.
PART 2 – A Muslim Brotherhood’s internal document identifying Jamal Badawi as one of its leaders advocates “destroying the Western civilization from within”
A 1991 internal Muslim Brotherhood memorandum
established (point 20) that Jamal Badawi is a leader of the North American
Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure. Badawi’s name also appears in a 1992 Muslim
Brotherhood leadership phonebook. Both documents were produced for evidentiary
purposes in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial that led to the conviction of all those who were
accused of terrorism financing.
The memorandum also encourages Muslim Brotherhood
supporters to destroy the Western civilization from within. Jamal Badawi’s
incitement to Muslim judges and civil servants not to apply current legal
provisions incompatible with sharia actively contributes to the realization of
this plan:
Point 4.4
of the 1991 memorandum The
Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a
kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from
within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the
hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made
victorious over all other religions.
Tariq Ramadan is another popular and influential
Muslim Brotherhood leader. In recent years, he referred to the same project of
Islamic conquest in front of supporters in the U.S. and Canada.
In 2011, in Dallas, he stated that “It should be us, with our understanding of
Islam, our principles, colonizing positively the United States of America.” In
December 2013, at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit in Toronto, he said that “We are not here to
be accepted. We are here to change the society.”
The arrival of Muslim judges and civil servants
committed to Jamal Badawi’s idea of preventing the application of laws contrary
to sharia constitutes an effective means to implement the project of conquest
and colonization described by the 1991 memorandum and Tariq Ramadan.
Like Jamal Badawi who spoke about Muslim judges, Tariq
Ramadan has also addressed the importance for Islamists to penetrate the legal
system of non-Muslim countries, such as Canada. In an interview
given to the Egyptian periodical Egypt Today in 2004, Ramadan described the Canadian legal
framework as “one of the most open in the world.” He suggested to Islamists to
capitalize on this feature to subtly and gradually introduce rules of sharia in
Canada. At the time, Tariq Ramadan strongly urged Islamists operating in Canada
not to openly mention their commitment for sharia: “The term shariah in itself
is laden with negative connotations in the Western mind,” said Ramadan. “There
is no need to stress that. […] For the time being this is
not how we want to be perceived,” he added.
In the same interview, Ramadan criticized the “lack
of creativity” of the Islamists who openly invoked sharia in the early
2000s when they demanded an Islamic arbitration of family conflicts amongst
Muslims in Ontario without foreseeing that their request would be met by a
strong opposition in Canada.
The recognition by Ontario’s authorities of sharia
principles in family law would have constituted a dangerous legal precedent. It
would have eventually affected all Canadian jurisdictions. Conscious of this
reality, Fatima Houda-Pepin, a member of the Quebec National Assembly,
presented a motion
condemning the introduction of sharia in family law in Ontario and had it unanimously adopted by Quebec
parliamentarians on May 26, 2005.
In 2004, Tariq Ramadan thus not condemn the Islamists’
project of introducing sharia law in Ontario. He criticized the open approach
without dissimulation that they adopted to do so. In 2013, in front the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit, Tariq Ramadan said that “jihad is
the way we implement sharia”. This definition has the advantage of including the
violent facet of jihad and its non-violent facet associated with infiltration.
PART 3 – The alarm bell should ring at CSIS and
elsewhere when the main Sunni Muslim leader in the country quotes Ibn Taymiyya
to determine how Muslims should behave in Canada
When he encourages Muslims to become judges in
non-Muslim countries, Jamal Badawi demonstrates his respect towards Ibn
Taymiyya by calling him a “Sheikh of Islam.” In recent years, other Muslim
leaders, such as Osama bin
Laden (p. 249) and
Youssef Qaradawi in his book Priorities have used the same title to show their respect.
IBN TAYMIYYA – AN HISTORICAL PRECEDENT TO MODERN
ISLAMISTS
Islamists and anti-Islamists alike acknowledge the
importance of Ibn Taymiyya as scholar. Daniel Pipes agrees with the idea that
today’s Islamists “didn't appear in a vacuum.” He presents Ibn Taymiyya,
who died almost seven hundred years ago, as an historical
precedent to modern Islamists.
ARMED JIHAD
Aside from his position on Muslims who should accept
to be appointed judges in non-Muslim societies in order to limit the reach of
non-Islamic laws, Ibn Taymiyya is mostly known as the ideologue par excellence
of armed jihad. A report
submitted by a group of experts to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in
2013 presents Ibn Taymiyya as the “author of the key jihadi text, The
Religious and Moral Doctrine of Jihad.” An English translation of this text
is available and large excerpts have been reproduced in an easily accessible
compendium of texts on jihad : Jihad
in Classical and Modern Islam by Rudolph Peters (Princeton,
Marcus Wiener, 2008).
In his text, Ibn Taymiyya refers to Koranic
verses 2:193 and 8:39 and stresses that “Whoever has heard the summons
of the Messenger (Muhammad) and has not responded to it, must be fought, until there is no persecution and the
religion is Allah's entirely."
Today, this principle is still being invoked by
Islamists to justify the imposition of sharia on non-Muslims.
In these circumstances, the invocation of Ibn Taymiyya
by Jamal Badawi, the most important Sunni Muslim leader in the country, to
determine how Muslims should behave in Canada should trigger an alarm bell in
Canada’s security agencies.
FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATIONS
Ibn Taymiyya also defended genital mutilations of
women as a method to reduce their sexual excitement. Sheema Khan, the founder
of the Islamist lobby CAIR-CAN (renamed the National Council of Canadian
Muslims in July 2013), mentioned this fact in an article published by the Globe and
Mail on April 21,
2010:
Ibn Taymiyya advocated female circumcision, ruling
that "its purpose is to reduce the woman's desire; if she is
uncircumcised, she becomes lustful and tends to long more for men."
Sheema Khan resigned (p. 11) her position as CAIR-CAN founding Chair
in 2005. CAIR-CAN’s annual reviews show that, from 2001 to 2005, Sheema Khan
and Jamal Badawi were together on the organization’s Board.
ASSASSINATION OF CHRISTIAN MONKS LIVING IN MUSLIM
TERRITORIES
Ibn Taymiyya also promoted the killing of Christian
monks who do not live secluded and maintain contacts with Muslims living in the
vicinity of their monasteries. In his fatwa, the “Sheikh of Islam” quoted
numerous Muslim scholars who lived before him and considered monks like “Imams
of unbelief” who are guilty of leading Muslims away from “the true religion.”
In 1996, European media gave a large coverage to the
killing of seven Roman Catholic Cistercian monks (known asTrappists) who were living in a monastery
in Tibhirine (Algeria).
Shortly after this dramatic event, an old fatwa written by Ibn Taymiyya was
translated from Arabic into French by a Belgian convert to Islam named Yahya
Michot who used the pseudonym of Nasreddin Lebatelier. His real identity was
established only later. At the time, Michot led an organization linked to the
Muslim Brotherhood in Belgium.
The French daily Le Monde described the translation of the fatwa and
Michot’s presentation as “a justification of the assassination of Christian
monks, an acquittal pure and simple of the assassins, those of the GIA
[Algerian Armed Islamic Group] or those who handle them, based on legal expert
Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), one of the Islamist literature’s favorite authors.”
At the same time, the British periodical The
Tablet (text – scan) reported that Lebatelier/Michot’s comment
established a connection between the Algerian
terrorist GIA group’s communiqué 43 justifying the murder of monks and Ibn
Taymiyya’s fatwa on the subject.
After his identity was revealed, Yahya Michot withdrew
from circulation copies of his booklet containing his own comments about the
kidnapping and the murder of Algeria’s monks that had been commented by Le
Monde and The Tablet. Later, Michot republished the French
translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwa without establishing a link with the 1996
murders of monks in Algeria this time.
In spite of his background, Yahya Michot is considered
a valid interlocutor by many Christian organizations involved in interfaith
dialogue. The St. Thomas University in Minnesota, for example, mentions his
participation, as well as Jamal Badawi’s, to interfaith
activities on its campus.
The naiveté of Christians involved in ecumenism or interfaith dialogue with
Muslim Brotherhood operatives and their supporters is without limits.
For the Muslim Brotherhood, interfaith dialogue has
always an ulterior purpose. In an interview
given to a Qatari newspaper,
MB spiritual guide Youssef Qaradawi stressed that “We only carry out dialogue
with them [Christians] in order to find common grounds that serve as a basis
for further action.”
In this interview and in his book Priorities, Qaradawi mentions four of these “further actions”
that justify interfaith dialogue with Christians:
1. Improving the image of Islam;
2. Converting Christians;
3. Rallying Christians against Israel;
4. Discouraging Christian leaders from supporting fellow
Christians involved in conflict with Muslims. Qaradawi mentioned specifically
Sudan and the Philippines.
Jamal
Badawi is a close
collaborator of Youssef
Qaradawi, notably at
the European Council for Fatwa and Research and Yahya Michot has endorsed
the book Priorities in which two of the above objectives are listed
as a “must-read […] for anyone interested in modern Islamic thought and
activism of the via media [the middle way]”. Youssef Qaradawi and
the Muslim Brotherhood describe their doctrine as one of “the middle way”
although it leads them to justify the assassination of apostates
from Islam and homosexuals, female
genital mutilations, to
describe Hitler as “Allah’s envoy who came to punish
the Jews for their corruption,” etc.
MENTOR OF SAUDIA ARABIA’S FOUNDER
Ibn Taymiyya was also the intellectual
guide of Muhammad ibn
Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792). An alliance between Wahhab and the Saud family led
to the establishment of Saudi Arabia. At the time, Muhammad ibn Saud
(1710-1765) provided the military means required to enforce the implementation
of Islamic principles promoted by Wahhab and, before him, by Ibn Taymiyya.
Today, Saudi Arabia propagates its Wahhabi doctrine by
funding mosques and schools in the non-Muslim world, by disseminating jihadi
literature, etc., as prescribed by Ibn Taymiyya. For a long time, Saudi Arabia
used the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) as a relay to radicalize Muslims
in Canada. On February 2, 2012, the Canada Revenue Agency revoked WAMY-Canada’s charitable status after it
discovered that it had funded an organization linked to Al-Qaeda. In the past,
WAMY transferred funds to the Dar al-Iman school in Montreal and to the Muslim
Association of Canada, the main Muslim Brotherhood front in Canada. This is
also WAMY that sponsored the launch of the Reviving
the Islamic Spirit conventions
that are organized in Toronto on an annual basis since 2003 and that feature speakers
linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. A list of
money transfers made
by WAMY to Canada-based Muslim organizations is available on Point de Bascule.
OTHER FACETS OF SHARIA ADDRESSED BY IBN TAYMIYYA
Many other aspects of sharia were studied and
commented by Ibn Taymiyya.
While Christians are being persecuted in the Muslim
world and their churches are being vandalized and sometimes demolished, Raymond
Ibrahim examined one of Ibn
Taymiyya’s fatwas that
is frequently used as a justification by today’s Islamists. Ibn Taymiyya
stressed that “Wherever Muslims live and have mosques, it is impermissible for
any sign of infidelity to be present, churches or otherwise.”
Andrew Bostom commented another of
Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwas that
states “If a male unbeliever is taken captive during warfare or otherwise, eg.,
as a result of a shipwreck, or because he has lost his way, or as a result of a
ruse, then the imam may do whatever he deems appropriate: killing him,
enslaving him, releasing him or setting him free for a ransom consisting in
either property or people. This is the view of most jurists and it is supported
by the Koran and the Sunna.”
Tarek Fatah wrote a message on
Twitter to draw the
attention on a fatwa by
Ibn Taymiyya advocating
the superiority of Arabs over other Muslims.
Another of Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwa rules that Alawites (a
Muslim minority to which current Syrian president Bashar al-Assad belongs) “are greater
infidels than Christians, Jews, and idolaters.” Over the centuries, this fatwa has frequently
been used as a justification by the Sunni majority to persecute its Alawite
minority.
PART 4 – Jean-François Revel
about the vulnerability of Western democracies against an internal enemy
In 1990, in a speech given in Algeria that was the
base for his book Priorities, the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual guide Youssef
Qaradawi encouraged Muslims living in the West to partially give up their
interest in applied sciences in order to get more expertise in fields that have
a more direct influence on public opinion, such as journalism, law, etc. Almost
twenty-five years later, numerous Islamist sympathisers operate in very
sensitive positions in the media, Western government agencies, etc. Jamal
Badawi’s incitement to Muslim judges and civil servants not to apply current
legal provisions that are opposed to sharia must be examined in this context.
At the beginning of the eighties, Jean-François Revel
dedicated his essay How democracies perish to describe the
threat posed by the USSR’s ideological and material penetration in the West.
Today, Islamists operating in the West present a threat similar in nature as
they try to channel the large Muslim immigration to further their totalitarian
program. These Islamists are also frequently subsidized by Western governments
who believe that, by doing so, they promote “the integration of new
immigrants.”
The first chapter of Revel’s book explains how the
openness of Western societies and their acceptance of a legitimate political
opposition make these societies vulnerable to those who wish to destroy them
from within.
Although they aimed at curbing the communist threat,
Revel’s remarks are still useful today to enlighten us on the characteristics
of democracies used by Islamists to advance their own totalitarian program.
“Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its
existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them. It awakens
only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, evident. By then, either there
is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has
become crushingly high.”
(…) “Paradoxically, democracy offers those seeking to
abolish it a unique opportunity to work against it legally. They can even
receive almost open support from the external enemy without its being seen as a
truly serious violation of the social contract.”
“The frontier is vague, the transition easy between
the status of loyal opponent wielding a privilege built into democratic
institutions and that of an adversary subverting those institutions. To
totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive; democracy treats
subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles.”
"What we end up with in what is conventionally
called Western society is a topsy-turvy situation in which those seeking to
destroy democracy appear to be fighting for legitimate aims, while its
defenders are pictured as repressive reactionaries."
Further reading
Point de Bascule: File Jamal
Badawi
Point de Bascule: File Youssef
Qaradawi
Point de Bascule (November 11, 2010): While the
movie Of men and gods is being released: How does Koranic
exegesis justify the murder of monks (En marge du
film Des hommes et des dieux : Comment l'exégèse coranique
justifie le meurtre des moines)
The news items, blogs, educational materials
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and news services, and radio and television, which we deem to be reliable.
However, we have undertaken no independent investigation to verify the accuracy
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