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July 2007 Stats for The Big Picture.
Laura Mansfield visited a local mosque in a small town in America. She looks American, but speaks Arabic. She heard violence against America preached in Arabic. Then the next session started, and she heard a message of peace and brotherhood preached to the next group, in English. It was a recruiting session:
It happened again this week. I came out of the office to find a flyer under my windshield wipers inviting me to a special informational presentation on God and family values, and how to bring them back to the forefront in America.
I’m a parent so the flyer caught my interest. But as an analyst for the Northeast Intelligence Network, my eyes were riveted to the address on the flyer: The session was being held at a nearby mosque.
Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided it would be a good time for some onsite investigations of the mosque. In order to not attract undue attention, I dressed conservatively, wearing a navy jumper with a long sleeve white blouse, and low heels. I debated whether or not to put on a hijab (head scarf) then decided not to – after all, I was going to “learn,” not to pretend I was a Muslim.
I checked the mosque schedule on the Web, and discovered there was going to be an Arabic language session an hour before. So I showed up an hour early. The imam met me at the door, and told me that the presentation didn’t start for an hour, and suggested I come back in an hour. Fortunately, I had anticipated this. I explained that since I had quite a bit of reading to do for a class I was taking. “Can I just sit here and read?”
He hesitated a moment, then agreed. I sat in the back of the room, with my book open, and made a mental note to remember to turn the pages every so often, as I listened to the speakers in Arabic.
She heard their real feelings about Americans:
As he expected, he was delayed – he thought it was very amusing that while several TSA personnel were scrutinizing his personal belongings that his classmate from Jordan was able to walk through security, along with his American girlfriend, without any problems whatsoever.
One of the men said, in Arabic: “Blonde Americans are good for something!” Another man advised him to be cautious, since there was an American woman in the room. The imam spoke up and told everyone I didn’t speak Arabic.
That’s a laugh riot.
She heard Muslims joke about pretending to be terrorists on a plane:
At that point, another student took the podium. His name was Khaled, and he began to recount his recent trip to New York City. Khaled and three of his companions had gone to New York for several days in January. He told of how uncomfortable his trip up to NYC had been. He felt like he was being watched, and thought he was the victim of racial profiling.
Khaled and his friends were pretty unhappy about it, and while in New York, they came up with a plan to “teach a lesson” to the passengers and crew. You can imagine the story Khaled told. He described how he and his friends whispered to each other on the flight, made simultaneous visits to the restroom, and generally tried to “spook” the other passengers. He laughed when he described how several women were in tears, and one man sitting near him was praying.
The imam encouraged the group to do more things like that:
The others in the room thought the story was quite amusing, judging from the laughter. The imam stood up and told the group that this was a kind of peaceful civil disobedience that should be encouraged, and commended Khaled and his friends for their efforts.
He pointed out that it was through this kind of civil disobedience that ethnic profiling would fail.
No, it’s through this kind of behavior that we’re going to figure out that we need serious immigration restrictions in this country on people from Islamofascist nations.
This group was also pleased that one of their friends had gone to Iraq to kill Muslims and Americans:
One of the other men, Ahmed from Kuwait, gave a brief account of his friend Eyad, who had finally gone to Iraq. Ahmed was in e-mail contact with Eyad, and hoped by the following week to be able to bring them more information about the state of the “mujahideen” in Iraq.
As the meeting drew to a close, the imam gave a brief speech calling for the protection of Allah on the mujahideen fighting for Islam throughout the world, and reminded everyone that it was their duty as Muslims to continue in the path of jihad, whether it was simple efforts like those of Khaled and his friends, or the actual physical fighting of men like Eyad.
Then that session broke up, Americans arrived, and the English-language session started.
[The woman leading the session] then began to discuss Islam, focusing on the commonalities it has with Christianity. The sales pitch had clearly begun. While in the previous section, the men had quoted over and over again sura from the Quran calling for violent jihad, the women’s session focused on the “gentler” side of Islam.
...It shows clearly that as much as we’d like to pretend it hasn’t, jihad has reached Small-Town, USA. This mosque isn’t in Washington, D.C., or New York City. This is a small mosque in a small town in the deep South.
And if it’s in this tiny little quiet southern town, it’s probably in your hometown, too.
Islamofascists are immigrating to America in large numbers with explicit intentions to do harm here, intentions which they are carrying out on a daily basis. Serious immigration restrictions on people from Islamofascist nations would be advisable.
(Hat Tip to Janet Levy.)
#2Thanks for the comment, Mavenette. I like your blog a lot, and I look forward to checking it often. I’m glad to hear that you left the mosque where at one point they were praying against Jews and Israel. What’s your take on the Freedom House Report? (I posted info about this here.) I’d be very interested in your thoughts on this.
The FH report is pretty focused, considering that it shoots point blank at the Saudis and doesn’t take a cheapshot at all Muslims. Many of the points in the report I know firsthand since I attended a Saudi school here in the US. I learned some pretty good Arabic there, but Islamic Studies was another story. Although most students didn’t take their IS classes seriously, most of the teachers in the department were Palestinians, so there was a lot of propaganda going on.
#4Amazing. How terrible that the Saudis run schools in the U.S. that teach people not to fit in, not to be successful, not to have good lives, and even to want to do harm to their fellow-citizens. I’m glad to hear that most of the students didn’t take that seriously.
Can you imagine any changes that would help more Muslims say publicly that they don’t support such things?
At my school we weren’t taught to hurt others, but unfortunately we were taught to hate. And my school is the only school in the US that’s officially run by the Saudis, but I’m sure there’s schools run by Saudi money. My school was pretty much secular except for the IS classes. The principal and most of the female students didn’t wear head scarves. Most of the teaching staff were in fact non-Muslim Americans. But nevertheless, it was a school run by Prince Bandar.
To answer your question, many Muslims in America are immigrants, and like any other immigrants they carry a lot of baggage. Some of that baggage is in opposition with American values. It’s a matter of time until that baggage is shed. I’m a third generation American, so I’m not emotionally caught up with what goes on overseas. I think the problem lies in that Muslims who came here to make money to send back home see themselves as guest workers and not as citizens. As a result, they don’t feel obligated to follow American customs. They delude themselves into believing that one day they’ll return to their countries, something not likely to happen. So they are very reluctant to abandon their third world mentality.
#6At my school we weren’t taught to hurt others, but unfortunately we were taught to hate.
Amazing. That is so much opposed to the American tradition. The Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your tired, your poor”—America welcomes others. It is ingratitude and betrayal for the Saudis to benefit from our kindess, and then teach children to hate us. I agree with the spirit of your comment on another post; these Saudi-funded schools in the U.S. should be shut down.
Don’t the Saudi parents feel that it’s harmful to the children to teach the children to be full of hatred? Don’t they know what we do—that hatred is painful to the one who harbors it, like a flame that burns up a tree?
Unfortunately, most Saudis don’t benefit from American kindness. Instead, they are abused and mistreated by the same ruling family that once received special treatment from the US govt. In the age of satellite tv and the Internet, there is no an excuse for their hatred when they have alternate sources for info other than the Crown Prince and the mosques. But you have to remember Saudis are not people who like to think; they want somebody else to do it for them. The somebody elses sadly tend to be radical imams.
#8I appreciate the insight you are providing into the minds of the Saudi people.
...you have to remember Saudis are not people who like to think; they want somebody else to do it for them.
This is something most Americans can’t imagine. Can you tell us a bit more on this subject?
I can’t speak for all Saudis since the only ones I interacted with were the daughters and wives of the diplomats. But from what I’ve observed is that the Saudi way of learning is memorizing whatever is in front of them. Thus, they are vulnerable to succumbing to radical Islam. Critical thinking and analytical skills are not usually part of the standard curriculum in many Arab countries. That’s why when the principal of my school would round up the girls who failed in Arabic grammer (which resembles the sentence analyses of French grammar and cannot be memorized) to her dismay they were mostly Saudis.
I noticed the same thing with their mothers when I would sit in some classes at the IIASA, the institute affliated with Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud University in Riyadh. These women knew how to host a party but when it came to hitting the books they were dumb. They would get by their classes by memorizing everything the sheikh gave them. They were a few exceptions, but they were usually a sheikh’s wife or missionary wannabees. But it wasn’t just the Saudis who were zombie students. A lot of the other Arab students expected the sheikhs to know the answers to all their questions. It was ludicrous to see these students ask a Saudi man fresh off the plane questions regarding the validity of voting, mortgages, and car loans.
This “lemming mentality” also exists in some mosques, especially those run by Muslim Brotherhood members. If the mosque’s MB leader lies, cheats, or steals, none of the other MB members would speak out against him even when his behavior is clearly un-Islamic and illegal. The MB in America doesn’t have the political aspirations of the MB overseas. They are more of a social cult that fills the social void many Muslim immigrants experience. It also rejects anyone who disagrees with them.
#10This is fantastic, Mavenette. I find your views to be very insightful. Most Americans probably can’t even imagine this kind of mentality.
In a previous comment in this thread you note that “At my school we weren’t taught to hurt others, but unfortunately we were taught to hate… Most of the teaching staff were in fact non-Muslim Americans. ”
I would like to follow up on this. What kinds of people were these, who were born in America but would teach this kind of thing to children?
The propaganda took place in the Islamic Studies and sometimes in the Arabic classes, so it was the Arab teachers who were the culprits. On the other hand, the American teachers, who taught us the local public school currriculum, were neutral. I actually felt sorry for them because many of the Saudi students were very disrespectful to them. In one instance, a student got a failing grade and accused his teacher of being a Jew. It was unofficial taboo for these teachers to discuss religion and if they did, the students would go clamoring to the IS department. There was definitely an “us vs. them” mentality among the students in regards to their non-Muslim teachers.
#12
#13This story is disturbing yet it is even more disturbing that our government is hamstrung with political correctness. If Muslims can establish their homes and families here and believe that they have a right to change our soceity… they will soon be comfortable demnanding their interests. I do not think that they understand that we are armed and have a breaking point where we can suspend Constitutional rights in order to clean house. It would be nice if our Government would act and spare us future violence.
DW
I don’t think it’s a matter of changing society, but a matter of not conforming to society’s standards. Some immigrant Muslims are living a double reality in which they are physically in America, but more significant, they are mentally overseas. So to protect the homeland, America needs to also clean house abroad by cutting foreign aid and distancing itself from countries that continue to harbor terrorists.
What LM discovered in that mosque is interesting considering that it’s post-9-11. I guess some Muslims only learn their lesson when they find DHS or FBI @ the door.
After 9-11, the mosque I used to go to removed a prayer against Jews and Israel in their Ramadan services. I personally found that inclusion disturbing since it incited hate during a sacred month and mixed prayer with Arab-Israeli politics. Of course this was an Arab dominated mosque.
There’s another mosque I go to that’s Indo-Pakistani majority. It’s quite a different story over there. Men and women pray in the same room. The leadership is second-generation American so there’s a concept of democracy when it comes to board of trustee elections. The Arab mosque i mentioned is notorious for perpetually postponing their elections and hides their constitution, so they can pick their own cronies for leadership positions.
The one problem I have with the Indo-Pakistani mosque is that immigrants can be very ethnically cliquish. Yes, they put their ethnicity before religion. So not being a SE Asian, I sometimes feel left out of the loop.